the augustan reprint society daniel defoe _a vindication of the press_ ( ) with an introduction by otho clinton williams publication number los angeles william andrews clark memorial library university of california _general editors_ h. richard archer, _clark memorial library_ richard c. boys, _university of michigan_ edward niles hooker, _university of california, los angeles_ john loftis, _university of california, los angeles_ _assistant editor_ w. earl britton, _university of michigan_ _advisory editors_ emmett l. avery, _state college of washington_ benjamin boyce, _duke university_ louis i. bredvold, _university of michigan_ cleanth brooks, _yale university_ james l. clifford, _columbia university_ arthur friedman, _university of chicago_ louis a. landa, _princeton university_ samuel h. monk, _university of minnesota_ ernest mossner, _university of texas_ james sutherland, _queen mary college, london_ h.t. swedenberg, jr., _university of california, los angeles_ introduction _a vindication of the press_ is one of defoe's most characteristic pamphlets and for this reason as well as for its rarity deserves reprinting. besides the new york public library copy, here reproduced, i know of but one copy, which is in the indiana university library. neither the bodleian nor the british museum has a copy. like many items in the defoe canon, this tract must be assigned to him on the basis of internal evidence; but this evidence, though circumstantial, is convincing. w.p. trent included _a vindication_ in his bibliography of defoe in the _chel_, and later bibliographers of defoe have followed him in accepting it. since the copy here reproduced was the one examined by professor trent, the following passage from his ms. notes is of interest: the tract was advertised, for "this day," in the _st. james evening post_, april - , . it is not included in the chief lists of defoe's writings, but it has been sold as his, and the only copy i have seen, one kindly loaned me by dr. j.e. spingarn, once belonged to some eighteenth century owner, who wrote defoe's name upon it. i was led by the advertisement mentioned above to seek the pamphlet, thinking it might be defoe's; but i failed to secure a sight of it until professor spingarn asked me whether in my opinion the ascription to defoe was warranted, and produced his copy. perhaps the most striking evidence for defoe's authorship of _a vindication_ is the extraordinary reference to his own natural parts and to the popularity of _the true-born englishman_ some seventeen years after that topical poem had appeared [pp. f.]. defoe was justly proud of this verse satire, one of his most successful works, and referred to it many times in later writings; it is hard to believe, however, that anyone but defoe would have praised it in such fulsome terms in . the general homeliness and facility of the style, together with characteristic phrases which occur in his other writings, indicate defoe's hand. likewise homely similitudes and comparisons, specific parallels with his known work, and characteristic treatment of matter familiar in his other works, all furnish evidence of his authorship of this pamphlet. just what motive caused defoe to write _a vindication of the press_ is not clear. unlike his earlier _an essay on the regulation of the press_ ( ), _a vindication_ does not seem to have been occasioned by a specific situation, and in it defoe is not alone concerned with freedom of the press, but writes on a more general and discursive level. his opening paragraph states that "the very great clamour against some late performances of authorship, and the unprecedented criticisms introduc'd" make such an essay as he writes "absolutely necessary." yet there is no clear indication of just what works occasion this necessity. the ironic reference to mr. dennis at the end of the first paragraph, taken together with the praise of mr. pope's translation of homer and the allusion to "the malicious and violent criticisms of a certain gentleman in its disfavour" [p. ], might suggest that defoe had in mind dennis' _remarks upon mr. pope's translation of homer_, but even the entire body of writings attacking pope's _homer_ would hardly seem sufficient to give point to this somewhat omnibus and unfocused essay. equally suggestive, perhaps, are defoe's references to the bangorian controversy and to bishop hoadley [pp. , ]. this controversy raged from to and produced a spate of pamphlets (to which defoe contributed), many of which were marked by heated argument and acrimony. defoe, with his liking for moderation, no doubt intended to make an oblique criticism of the license of many of the bangorian tracts. but these tracts are certainly not advanced as the prime occasion for _a vindication_. defoe points out in the first section of his essay how important is freedom of the press as the foundation of the "valuable liberties" of englishmen. i have been unable to find any reference to a specific threat of regulation of the press at this time that might have occasioned _a vindication_. nevertheless, it is possible that sentiment for control of the press, perhaps incited by the bangorian controversy, was felt in and may have been a contributing motive to the composition of this tract. whatever the immediate motives for writing it may have been, the variety of its contents suggests that defoe saw an opportunity to turn a penny, to express himself on a number of his pet subjects, and to defend his own position as a professional writer. _a vindication_ is made up of three clearly marked sections: in the first the author vindicates the usefulness of writing; in the second he discusses the usefulness--it would be more exact to say the harmfulness--of criticism; in the third he expatiates upon the qualifications of authors. one may admit at once the comparative worthlessness of the pamphlet as a contribution to criticism or critical theory. defoe's comments upon specific writers are thoroughly conventional and commonplace, as may be seen from a glance at his remarks about milton, chaucer, spenser, shakespeare, and others on p. . of more interest is his very high praise of dryden, "a man for learning and universal writing in poetry, perhaps the greatest that england has produc'd" [p. l ], and his comment upon the critical detraction from which he suffered. he compares pope, interestingly enough, with dryden, remarking that pope ("a person tho' inferior to mr. _dryden_, yet speaking impartially has few superiors in this age") also is persecuted by envy; and he has generous praise for that poet's translation of homer. one may note that defoe avoids the shortcomings of the critics whom he condemns for judging according to party. he distributes his praise indiscriminately between whig and tory writers. in short, his essay hardly does more than confirm the critical commonplaces of the time and attest to the catholicity of the author's taste. of particular interest for students of defoe is the paragraph [p. l] in which defoe defends the hack-writers who must write for subsistence. one should not expect their writings, which are necessarily numerous, to be as correct and finished as they might be. after comparing their pens to prostitutes because of their venality, he claims, in a half-ironic tone, for both authors and booksellers the liberty of writing and printing for either or both sides without ignominy. after all, they must write and print to live. such practice is certainly, he observes, no more unjust or disreputable than other ways of gaining wealth such as one finds in exchange-alley. this paragraph gains point when one remembers that defoe had served both whig and tory governments. in , as letters written to lord stanhope in that very year testify, he was engaged in the perhaps dubious business of masquerading as a tory, while actually in the service of the whig ministry, to take the "sting" out of the more violent tory periodicals; and he was much concerned with the danger of his ambiguous position. in december of he had been identified as a writer for _mist's weekly journal_, the leading tory paper, and was subjected to growing attacks in the whig press. one can hardly doubt that this paragraph is a thinly veiled defense of his own practice as a professional journalist. it is no surprise to find the author of _a vindication_, in discussing the qualifications of writers, advocating the importance of genius and "natural parts" above mere learning. he instances the author of _the true-born englishman_ and shakespeare, the former "characteriz'd as a person of little learning, but of prodigious natural parts" and the latter having "but a small share of literature." the further example of the literary achievements of the "fair sex," who had, of course, no university education, reminds one of defoe's championship elsewhere of women. the business of a writer is "to please and inform," and the general implication is that genius is more necessary to this end than learning. also characteristic of defoe is his emphasis upon the advantage to an author of conversation, "the aliment of genius, the life of all airy performances" [p. ]. likewise, his digression upon education [pp. f.], his charge that people of quality in england all too often neglect their children's education, his remarks upon the advantages of travel and the need of training in the vernacular, all will be familiar to readers of defoe. _a vindication of the press_ is chiefly important for the corroboration of our knowledge of daniel defoe. it presents nothing that is new, but it gives further evidence of his pride in authorship, of his rationalization of his actions as a professional journalist, and of his belief in the importance of a free press. many of his characteristic ideas are repeated with his usual consistency in point of view. although the critical comments in the essay are thoroughly conventional, they offer evidence of contemporary literary judgments and reveal defoe as a well-informed man of moderation and commonsense, though certainly not as a profound critic. in the catholicity of his tastes and interests defoe is far ahead of his puritan fellows, and his essay may be taken as one indication of the growing interest of the middle-classes for whom he wrote in the greater world of literature. as professor trent remarks in his ms. notes, "defoe rarely wrote a tract without introducing something worthy of attention and comment, and the present pamphlet is no exception to the rule." i should like to thank dr. henry c. hutchins for his generosity in making available to me professor trent's ms. notes on _a vindication_ and dr. john robert moore for his kindness, criticisms, and suggestions. otho clinton williams san jose state college vindication of the press: or, an essay on the _usefulness of writing_, on criticism, and the qualification of authors. wherein is shewn, that 'tis for the advantage of all governments to encourage writing; otherwise a nation would never be secure from the attempts of its most secret enemies; barbarous and prejudic'd criticisms on writings are detected, and criticism is justly stated. with an examination into what genius's and learning are necessary for an author in all manner of performances. _london_: printed for _t. warner_, at the _black-boy_ in pater-noster-row. mdccxviii. [price sixpence.] [illustration] a vindication of the press: or, an essay on the _usefulness of writing_, &c. the very great clamour against some late performances or authorship, and the unpresidented criticisms introduc'd, render a treatise on the usefulness of writing in general so absolutely necessary, that the author of this essay has not the least apprehensions of displeasure from the most inveterate, but on the contrary, doubts not an approbation, even of the great mr. _dennis_. for the usefulness of writing in the church, i shall trace back to the annals of our saviour and his apostles. had not writing been at that time in use, what obscurity might we reasonably have expected the whole world would have labour'd under at this day? when, notwithstanding the infidels possess such vast regions, and religion in its purity shines but in a small quarter of the globe. 'tis easy-to imagine, that without the new-testament every person of excellency in literature, and compleat in hypocrisy, either out of interest, or other worldly views, would have taken the liberty to deny the most sacred traditions, and to have impos'd upon the populace as many religions as they pleas'd, and that the ignorant multitude would easily acquiesce, as they do in _turkey_, and other distant parts of the world, which deny the divinity of our saviour. what fatal errors, schisms, and concomitant evils would have been introduc'd, must be apparent to all persons of the least penetration. the quakers might at this time possibly have been our national church, and our present happiness, with regard to those considerations, can no way be more lively and amply demonstrated than in taking a step at once from mr. _penn's_ conventicle to the cathedral church of st. _pauls_. the regularity and heavenly decorum of the latter, give an awe and transport to the audience at the same time they ornament religion; and the confusion of the former fully shews, that as it only serves to amuse a crowd of ignorant wretches, unless meerly with temporal views (sectarists generally calculating religion for their interests) so it gives a license to all manner of indecencies, and the congregations usually resort thither with the same regard as a rake of the town would do to mother _wybourn's_, or any publick place of diversion. whether it be not natural to have expected a confusion in the church, equal to that of the worst sectaries in the world, had not the use of waiting been early attain'd and practis'd, i appeal to the breast of every unprejudic'd reader; and if so, how infinitely happy are we by the use of our sacred writings, which clear up the cloud of ignorance and error, and give a sanction to our religion, besides the satisfaction we of the church of _england_ have in this felicitous contemplation, that our religion, since the reformation, strictly observ'd, is the nearest that of our saviour and his apostles of any profession of faith upon earth. 'tis owing to writing, that we enjoy the purest religion in the world, and exclusive of it, there would have been no possibility of transmitting down entirely those valuable maxims of _solomon_, and the sufferings of the righteous _job_, in the old testament; which are so extensive to all parts and stations of life, that as they are infinitely preferable to all other writings of the kind, so they afford the greatest comfort and repose in the vicisitudes incident to humane nature. how far theology is improv'd from those inestimable writings, i need not to enlarge, since it is highly conspicuous that they are the foundation of all divine literature; and how ignorant and imperfect we should have been without them, is no great difficulty to explain; and who can sufficiently admire the psalter of _david_, which fills the soul with rapture, and gives an anticipation of sublimest joys. besides the advantages of sacred writings in the cause of religion; 'tis chiefly owing to writing, that we have our most valuable liberties preserv'd; and 'tis observable, that the liberty of the press is no where restrain'd but in roman catholick countries, or kingdoms, or states exercising an absolute power. in the kingdom of _france_ writings relating to the church and state are prohibited upon the severest penalties, and the consequences of those laws are very obvious to all persons of discernment here; they serve to secure the subject in the utmost obscurity, and as it were effect an entire ignorance, whereby an exorbitant power is chearfully submitted to, and a perfect obedience paid to tyranny; and the ignorance and superstition of these people so powerfully prevail, that the greatest oppressor is commonly the most entirely belov'd, which i take to be sufficiently ently illustrated in the late _lewis_ the fourteenth, whose arbitrary government was so far from diminishing the affections of his subjects, that it highten'd their esteem for their grand monarch. but of late the populace of _france_ are not so perfectly enclouded with superstition, and if a young author can pretend to divine, i think it is easy to foresee that the papal power will in a very short space be considerably lessen'd if not in a great measure disregarded in that kingdom, by the intestine jarrs and discords of their parties for religion, and the desultory judgments of the most considerable prelates. the best support of an arbitrary power is undoubtedly ignorance, and this cannot be better cultivated than by an absolute denial of printing; the oppressions of the popularity cannot be thoroughly stated, or liberty in general propagated without the use of the press in some measure, and therefore the subjects must inevitably submit to such ordinances as an ambitious or ignorant monarch and his tyrannical council shall think fit to impose upon them, how arbitrary soever: and the hands of the patriots and men of eminence who should illuminate the age, and open the eyes of the deluded people are thereby tied up, and the infelicity of the populace so compleat that they are incapable of either seeing their approaching misery, or having a redress of present grievances. in _constantinople_ i think they have no such thing as printing allow'd on any account whatsoever; all their publick acts relating to the church and state are recorded in writing by expert amanuensis's, so very strict are the divan and great council of the sultan in prohibiting the publication of all manner of writings: they are very sensible had persons a common liberty of stating their own cases, they might influence the publick so far, that the yoke of tyranny must sink if not be rendred insupportable; and this is regarded in all kingdoms and countries upon earth govern'd by a despotick power. to what i have already offer'd in favour of the press, there may be exceptions taken by some persons in the world; and as it is my intentions to solve all objections that may be rais'd to what i advance, as i proceed, i think i cannot too early make known, that i am apprehensive the following observations may be made; _viz._ that a general license of the press is of such a fatal tendency, that it causes uneasinesses in the state, confusions in the church, and is destructive sometimes even to liberty, by putting the ruling powers upon making laws of severity, on a detection of ill designs against the state, otherwise never intended. in answer to which, i shall give the following particulars: in respect to uneasinesses in the state, it may not be amiss to premise, that it is esteem'd by men of penetration, no small wisdom in the present administration, to bestow preferments on the brightest and most enterprising authors of the age; but whether it be so much out of a regard to the service they are capable of to the state in their employs, as to their writing for the government, and to answer treasonable pamphlets, poison'd pens, _&c._ i do not take upon me to determine. i must confess, where a faction prevails, it gives a sensible monarch some pain to see disafection propagated by the press, without any manner of restraint; but then, on the other hand, such a ruler is thereby let into the secrets of the faction, he may with facility penetrate into their deepest intrigues, and be enabled to avert an impending storm. upon approach of a rebellion, he will be thoroughly sensible from what quarter his greatest danger is to be expected, whereby it will be entirely his own fault, if he be without a sufficient guard against it, which he could not be appriz'd of (with any certainty) without a general liberty of writing: and tho' slander must occasion a great deal of uneasiness to a crown'd head, the power of bestowing favours on friends only is no small satisfaction to the prince, and a sufficient punishment to his enemies. and it is my opinion, that the grand sultan, and other eastern potentates, would be in a great deal less danger of deposing, (a practice very frequent of late) if in some measure a liberty of writing was allow'd; for the eyes of the people would be open, as well for as against their prince, and their fearing a worse evil should succeed, might make them easy under a present oppression. as for confusion in the church, i look upon this to be the greatest objection that can be raised; but then it must be allow'd, that without writing the reformation (the glory of our religion) could never have been effected; and in respect to religious controversies, tho' i own they are seldom attended with good consequences, yet i must beg leave to observe, that as the age we now live in, is more bright and shining in substantial literature than any preceding century, so the generality of mankind are capable of judging with such an exactness as to avoid a bad; not but, i confess, i think many of the persons concern'd in the controversy lately on foot, with relation to the bishop of _bangor's_ sermon, preach'd before his majesty, deserve to be stigmatiz'd, as well for their indecent heat, as for the latitude taken with regard to the holy scriptures. and for the last objection, i never knew that writing was any ways destructive to liberty, unless it was in a pamphlet, [entitled king-killing no murder] which 'tis said occasion'd the death of _oliver cromwel_. these are the uses of writings in the church and the state, with answers to such objections as may be made against them, not to mention particularly in respect to the former, the writings of the fathers, and even of some heathen philosophers, such as _seneca_, &c. and besides the valuable performances of our most eminent divines in all ages, as dr. _taylor_, bishop _usher, tillotson, beveridge_ &c. and _the whole duty of man_, &c. in our private devotions. i now proceed to the uses in arts and sciences. how much posterity will be oblig'd to the great sir _isaac newton_ and doctor _flamstead_ for their mathematical writings, is more easy to imagine than the improvements which may be made from thence; there's a great deal of reason to believe, that if a future age produces a successor to sir _isaac_, (at present i take it, there's none in the world) that not only the longitude at sea will be discover'd, but the perpetual motion, so many ages sought after, found out. how much are the gentlemen of the law oblig'd to my lord _littleton's_ institutes and _coke's_ commentaries thereupon? writing in this profession is esteem'd so essential, that there's seldom a judge quits the stage of life, without a voluminous performance, as a legacy to the world, and there's rarely a term without some production of the press: the numbers of these writings are very much augmented by the various reports of cases from time to time made; and these seem to be entirely necessary by way of precedent, as a discreet and cautious justice will not take upon him to determine a cause of difficulty without the authority of a precedent. and in the practice of physick, are not the present professors infinitely obliged to the discoveries and recipes of _aristotle_, _galen_, &c? how much the world is oblig'd to the declamations of _tully_, _cicero_, for oratory; to the famous writings of _milton_ for the foundation of divine poetry; poetry in general is improv'd from the writings of _chaucer_, _spencer_, and others; dramatick entertainments perfected by _shakespear_; our language and poetry refin'd by _dryden_; the passions rais'd by _otway_; the inclination mov'd by _cowley_; and the world diverted by _hudibras_, (not to mention the perfections of mr. _addison_, and several others of this age) i leave to the determination of every impartial reader. 'tis by writing that arts and sciences are cultivated, navigation and commerce (by which alone wealth is attain'd) to the most distant parts of the world improv'd, geography compleated, the languages, customs and manners of foreign nations known; and there is scarce any one mechanick calling of note or signification, but treatises have been written upon, to transmit the valuable observations of ingenious artificers to the latest posterity. there might be innumerable instances given of the advantages of writings in all cases, but i shall satisfy my self with the particulars already advanc'd, and proceed to such objections, as i am apprehensive may be made relating to the writings last mentioned. first, it may be objected that the numerous writings tend more to confound the reader, than to inform him; to this i answer, that it is impossible there can be many writings produced, but there must be some valuable informations communicated, easy to be collected by a judicious reader; tho' there may be a great deal superfluous, and notwithstanding it is a considerable charge to purchase a useful library, (the greatest grievance) yet we had better be at that expence, than to have no books publish'd, and consequently no discoveries; the same reason may be given where books in the law, physick, &c. are imperfect in some part, and tend to the misleading persons; for of two evils the old maxim is, always chuse the least. the only objection that i do not take upon me to defend, is, that against lewd and obscene poetry in general; (for sometimes the very great wit may make it excuseable) which in my opinion will admit of but a slender apology in its defence. the use of writing is illustrated in the following lines, which conclude my first head of this essay. _by ancient writing knowledge is convey'd, of famous arts the best foundation laid; by these the cause of liberty remains, are nations free'd from arbitrary chains, from errors still our church is purified, the state maintained, with justice on its side._ i now advance to my second particular, _criticism_. the fatal criticism or damnation which the writings of some authors meet with thro' their obscurity, want of friends and interest in the world, &c. is very discouraging to the productions of literature: it is the greatest difficulty immaginable, for an obscure person to establish a reputation in any sort of writing; he's a long time in the same condition with _sisyphus_, rolling a heavy stone against an aspiring mount which perpetually descends again; it must be to his benign stars, some lucky subject suiting the humour of the times, more than the beauty of his performance, which he will be oblig'd for his rise: and in this age persons in general, are so estrang'd from bare merit, that an author destitute of patronage will be equally unsuccessful to a person without interest at court, (and you'll as rarely find the friendship of an _orestes_, as the chastity of _penelope_) when a man of fortune has no other task, than to give out a stupid performance to be of his own composing, and he's immediately respected as a celebrated writer: and if a man has the good fortune to hit the capricious humour of the age; after he has attained a reputation with the utmost difficulty, he's sure to meet with the severest treatment, from a herd of malicious and implacable scriblers. this was the case of the late mr. _dryden_, a man for learning and universal writing in poetry, perhaps the greatest that _england_ has produc'd; he was persecuted by envy, with the utmost inveteracy for many years in succession: and is the misfortune at this juncture of mr. _pope_, a person tho' inferior to mr. _dryden_, yet speaking impartially has few superiors in this age: from these considerations it is evident, (tho' it seems a paradox) that it is a reputation to be scandaliz'd, as a person in all cases of this nature is allow'd some merit, when envy attacks him, and the world might not be sensible of it in general, without a publick encounter in criticism; and many authors would be buried in oblivion were they not kept alive by clamours against their performances. the criticks in this age are arriv'd to that consummate pitch of ill-nature, that they'll by no means permit any person the favour to blunder but their mighty selves, and are in all respects, except the office of a critick, in some measure ill writers; i have known an unnatural brother of the quill causless condemn language in the writings of other persons, when his own has really been the meanest; to accuse others of inconsistency with the utmost vehemence, when his own works have not been without their Ã�ra's, and to find fault with every line in a poem, when he has been wholly at a loss to correct, or at least not capable of writing one single page of it. there are another sort of criticks, which are equally ill-natur'd to these i have mention'd, tho' in all other respects vastly inferior to them: they are such as no sooner hear of a performance compos'd by a juvenile author, or one not hitherto known in the way of writing he has undertaken; but immediately without reading a line give it a stamp of damnation; (not considering that the first performance of an author in any way of writing done carefully, is oftentimes the best) and if they had thoroughly perus'd it, they were no ways capable of judging of either the sense, language, or beauty of any one paragraph; and what is still worse, these ignorant slanderers of writings frequently take what other persons report for authority, who know as little, or perhaps are more ignorant than themselves, so little regard have they to the reputation of an author. and sometimes you'll find a pert _bookseller_ give himself the airs of judging a performance so far, as to condemn the correctness of what he knows nothing of these there's a pretender to authorship in the city, who rules the young fry of biblioples about the _royal-exchange_. but the _booksellers_ in general, (tho' they commonly judge of the goodness of writings, by the greatness of the sale,) are very sensible that their greatest security in respect to the performance of any work, is the qualification of the person that composes it, the confidence they can repose in him; his capacity, industry and veracity; and the author's reputation is so far concern'd in a performance, which he owns that the _bookseller_ will sooner rely upon that, than his own judgment. to descend still to a lower order of criticks, you'll find very few coffee-houses in this opulent city without an illiterate mechanick, commenting upon the most material occurrences, and judging the actions of the greatest councils in _europe_, and rarely a victualing house, but you meet with a _tinker, a cobler, or a porter_, criticizing upon the speeches of majesty, or the writings of the most celebrated men of the age. this is entirely owing to party, and there is such a contagion diffuses it self thro' the greatest part of the world at this time, that it is impossible for a man to acquire a universal character in writing, as it is inconsistent for him to engage in writings for both parties at one and the same time, (whatever he may do alternately) without which such a character is not attainable; and these contending parties carry things to that extremity, that they'll by no means allow the least merit in the most perfect author, who adheres to the opposite side; his performances will be generally unheeded, if not blasted, and frequently damn'd, as if, like _coelus_, he were capable of producing nothing but monsters; he shall be in all respects depress'd and debas'd, at the same time an illiterate scribler, an auspicious ideot of their own (with whose nonsense they are never sated) shall be extoll'd to the skies: herein, if a man has all the qualifications necessary in poetry, as an elegance of style, an excellency of wit, and a nobleness of thought; were master of the most surprizing turns, fine similies, and of universal learning, yet he shall be despis'd by the criticks, and rang'd amongst the damn'd writers of the times. the question first ask'd is, whether an author is a whig or a tory; if he be a whig, or that party which is in power, his praise is resounded, he's presently cried up for an excellent writer; if not, he's mark'd as a scoundrel, a perpetual gloom hangs over his head; if he was master of the sublime thoughts of _addison_, the easy flowing numbers of _pope_, the fine humour of _garth_, the beautiful language of _rowe_, the perfection of _prior_, the dialogue of _congreve_, and the pastoral of _phillips_, he must nevertheless submit to a mean character, if not expect the reputation of an illitterate. writings for the stage are of late so very much perverted by the violence of party, that the finest performance, without scandal, cannot be supported; _shakespear_ and _ben johnson_, were they, now living, would be wholly at a loss in the composure of a play suitable to the taste of the town; without a promiscuous heap of scurrility to expose a party, or, what is more detestable, perhaps a particular person, no play will succeed, and the most execrable language, in a comedy, produc'd at this time, shall be more applauded than the most beautiful turns in a _love for love_: such are the hardships a dramatick-poet has to struggle with, that either obscenity, party, or scandal must be his theme, and after he has performed his utmost in either of these ways, without a powerful interest, he'll have more difficulty in the bringing his play upon the theatre than in the writing, and sometimes never be able to accomplish it. these are the inconveniencies which writers for the stage labour under, besides 'tis observable, that an obsequious prolifick muse generally meets with a worse reception than a petulant inanimate author; and when a poet has finished his labours, so that he has brought his play upon the stage, the best performance has oftentimes the worst success, for which i need only instance mr. _congreve's way of the world_, a comedy esteem'd by most persons capable of judging, no way inferior to any of his other performances. a choice of actors, next to interest and popularity, is the greatest advantage to a new play: if a stage-poet has the misfortune not to have a sufficient influence over the managers of the theatres to make a nomination, his performance must very much suffer; and if he cannot entirely command his theatre, and season for bringing it on, it will be perfectly slaughter'd; and a certain theatre has lately acquir'd the name of a _slaughter-house_, but whether more for the stupidity of its poets than its actors, i do not pretend to determine; but certain it is, that acting is the life of all dramatick-performances. and tho' an indifferent play may appear tolerable, with good acting, it is impossible a bad one can afford any entertainment, when perform'd by an incompleat set of comedians. in respect to writings in general, there is an unaccountable caprice in abundance of persons, to condemn or commend a performance meerly by a name. the names of some writers will effectually recommend, without making an examination into the merit of the work; and the names of other persons, equally qualified for writing, and perhaps of greater learning than the former, shall be sufficient to damn it; and all this is owing either to some lucky accident of writing apposite to the humour of the town, (wherein an agreeable season and a proper subject are chiefly to be regarded) or to prejudice, but most commonly the former. it is a misfortune to authors both in prose and verse, who are reduc'd to a necessity of constant writing for a subsistence, that the numerous performances, publish'd by them, cannot possibly be so correct as they might be, could more time be afforded in the composure. by this means there is sometimes just room for criticism upon the best of their productions, and these gentlemen, notwithstanding it be never so contrary to their inclinations, are entirely oblig'd to prostrate their pens to the town, as ladies of pleasure do their bodies; tho' herein, in respect to party, it is to be observ'd, that a bookseller and an author may very well be allow'd occasionally to be of either party, or at least, that they should be permitted the liberty of writing and printing of either side for bread, free from ignominy; and as getting money is the chief business of the world, so these measures cannot by any means be esteem'd unjust or disreputable, with regard to the several ways of accumulating wealth, introduc'd in _exchange-alley_, and at the other end of the town. it is a common practice with some persons in the world, either to prefix the name of a _mecanas_ in the front of their performances, or to obtain recommendatory lines from some person of excellency in writing, as a protection against criticism; and there is nothing more frequent than to see a mean performance (especially if it be done by a man of figure) with this guard. 'tis true, the worst performances have the greatest occasion of these ramparts, but then the person who takes upon him to recommend, must have such an absolute authority and influence over the generality of mankind, as to silence all objections, or else it will have a contrary turn, by promoting a criticism as well upon the author as upon himself; for which reason it is very hazardous for a person in a middle station (tho' he have never so great a reputation in writing) to engage in the recommendation of the writings of others. the severe treatment which the brightest men of the age have met with from the criticks, is sufficient to deter all young gentlemen from entring the lists of writing; and was not the world in general more good-natur'd and favourable to youthful performances than the criticks, there would be no such thing as a succession of writings; whereas, by that means, and his present majesty's encouragement, literature is in a flourishing condition, and poetry seems to improve more at this time than it has done in any preceding reign, except that of king _charles_ ii. when there was a _rochester_, a _sidley_, a _buckingham_, &c. and (setting aside party) what the world may hope from a generous encouragement of polite writing, i take to be very conspicuous from mr. _pope's_ translation of _homer_, notwithstanding the malicious and violent criticisms of a certain gentleman in its disfavour. in the religious controversy of late depending, criticisms have been carried to that height, that some persons have pretended to fix false grammer on one of the most celebrated writers perhaps at this time in _europe_, but how justly, i leave to the determination of those who have perused the bishop's incomparable answer; but admitting his lordship had permitted an irregularity of grammer to pass unobser'd [typo for "unobserv'd"?], he is not the first of his sacred character that has done it, and small errors of this kind are easily looked over, where the nominative case is at a distance from the verb, or a performance is done in haste, the case of the bishop against so many powerful adversaries. besides, it is apparent and well known, that a certain person [_mr._ lessey, _now with the_ chevalier.] in the world, who has a very great reputation in writing, never regards the strict rules of grammer in any of his performances. it is a satisfaction to authors of tender date, to see their superiors thus roughly handled by the criticks; a young writer in divinity will not think his case desperate, when the shining _bangor_ has met with such malevolent treatment; neither must a youthful poet be uneasy at a severe criticism, when the great mr. _addison, rowe_ and _pope_ have been treated with the utmost scurrility. these men of eminence sitting easy with a load of calumny, is a sufficient consolation to inferiors under the most despicable usage, and there is this satisfactory reflection, that perhaps the most perfect work that ever was compos'd, if not so entirely correct, but there may be some room for criticism by a man of consummate learning; for there is nothing more common than to find a man, (if not wholly blind) over opiniated in respect to his own performances, and too exact in a scrutiny into the writings of others. the ill nature attending criticism i take to be greater now than in any age past; a man's defects in writing shall not only be expos'd, but all the personal infamy heap'd upon him that is possible; his descent and education shall be scandaliz'd, (as if a fine performance was the worse for the author's parentage) his good name villified, a history of the transactions of his whole life, and oftentimes a great deal more, shall be written, as if the were a candidate setting up in a burough for member of parliament, not an airy[?] or loose action shall be omitted, and neither the sacred gown, nor the greatest dignity shall be exempted; but there is this consideration which sways the sensible part of mankind, _viz._ a man of excellency in writing his being generally a person of more vivacity than the common herd, and consequently the more extraordinary actions in him are allowable; yet, nevertheless, i think it consistent with prudence for an author, when he has the good fortune to compose a piece, which he's assur'd will occasion envy and criticism, to write his own life at the same time with it, tho' it be a little extravagant and the method is unusual, to prevent an ill-natur'd doing thereof by the hand of another person. according to the old maxim, _get a reputation, and lye a bed,_ not to mention how many lye a bed before they can attain it, according to the humorous turn of the late ingenious mr. _farqubar_; but there's at this time a greater necessity for a man to be wakeful, when he has acquir'd a reputation, than at any time before; he'll find abundantly more difficulty attend the securing than the attaining of the greatest reputation; he'll meet with envy from every quarter; malice will pursue him in all his undertakings, and if he makes any manner of defence, he cannot commence it too soon, tho' it is not always prudential to shew an open resentment, even to the utmost ill treatment. if a man be so considerable as to be thought worthy of criticism, a luducrous reprimand is always preferable to a serious answer; returning scurrility with comic-satyr will gaul an ill-natur'd adversary beyond any treatment whatsoever; his spleen will encrease equal to any poison, his rage keep within no bounds, and at length his passion will not only destroy his own performance, but himself likewise: and this i take to be natural in our modern criticks. the business of these gentlemen is to set the ignorant part of mankind right, in correcting the errors of pretending authors, and exposing of impositions, whereby who has learning and merit, and who has not, may be so apparent, that the world may not misplace their favour; but unless they do it with more impartiality, temper and candour than of late, they may, with equal prospect of success, endeavour to turn the current of the thames, as to pervert the humour of this good-natur'd town. i presume to present them with these two verses: _the learned criticks learn not to be civil, in spite and malice personate the devil._ having now dispatch'd the two first subjects of my essay _(viz.)_ the usefulness of writing, and criticism, i come to my last head, the qualification of authors. i am not of the opinion of a great many persons in the world, that a poet is entirely born such, and that poetry is a particular gift of heaven, not but i confess there is a great deal in natural genius, which i shall mention hereafter: it is consistent with my reason, that any man having a share of learning, and acquainted with the methods of writing, may by an assiduous application, not only write good poetry, but make a tollerable figure in any sort of writings whatsoever; and herein i could give numerous instances of authors who have written all manner of ways with success. neither can i acquiesce in the common notion, that the person who begins most early in poetry always arrives to the greatest perfection; for, in my opinion, it is a matter of no great difficulty, for a person of any age, before his vivacity is too much abated, and fire exhausted, to commence a poet; the great mr. _dryden_ not beginning to write 'till he was above the age of ; and i doubt not but a great many persons have lost themselves for want of putting their genius's to the trial, and making particular writings their particular studies. their is no practice more frequent than for an author to misapply his genius; and there is nothing more common than for a man, after numerous trials in almost all sorts of authorship, to make that his favourite writing which he is least capable of performing; and too frequently authors use their genius's as parents do their children, place them to such businesses as make the most considerable figure in the world, without consulting their qualifications. there are many other faults equal to these, as where authors, through overmuch timerity, or too great opinion of their own performances, permit their writings to pass with egregious errors; and i take it to be equally pernicious for a man to be too diffident of his own performances, as it is to be presuming: there are likewise some gentlemen, who (by a lazy disposition, or through over much haste, an impatience in dispatch to gain an early reputation) commit blunders almost to their immediate ruin; but many of these errors are commonly excus'd in an author by a condescending printer, who is oblig'd to take the errata upon himself. in prose a slight examination of a performance may suffice, but in poetry it cannot be too often repeated; and in this way of writing, haste is attended with a fatal consequence. to compose your lines in perfect harmony, of easy flowing numbers, fine flights and similies, and at the same time retain a strong sense, which make poetry substantially beautiful, is a work of time, and requires the most sedate perusals: and though some persons think, giving poetry the character of easy lines to be a disgrace, it is rightly considered the greatest reputation and honour they can do it; the utmost difficulty attending this easy writing, and there are very few persons that can ever attain it. but to leave these general observations, i proceed to my point in hand, the qualification of authors; though i shall first take notice, that the business of every author is to please and inform his readers; but how difficult it is to please, through the prevalence of parties, envy and prejudice needs no illustration, and some persons in the world are so very perverse and obstinate, that they will not be inform'd by a person they entertain no good opinion of. for writing prose a man ought to have a tollerable foundation of learning, at least to be master of the latin tongue, to be a good historian, and to have a perfect knowledge of the world; and besides these qualifications, in poetry as i have before observ'd, a writer should be master of the most refin'd and beautiful language, surprizing turns, fine adapted similes, a sublimity of thought, and to be a person of universal learning: though i have often observ'd, both in prose and verse, that some persons of strong genius, well acquainted with the world, and but of little learning, have made a better figure in some kinds of writings, than persons of the most consummate literature, not bless'd with natural genius, and a knowledge of mankind. the preference of genius to learning, is sufficiently demonstrated in the writings of the author of the _true born english man_; (a poem that has sold beyond the best performance of any ancient or modern poet of the greatest excellency, and perhaps beyond any poetry ever printed in the _english_ language) this author is characteriz'd as a person of little learning, but of prodigious natural parts; and the immortal _shakespear_ had but a small share of literature: it is likewise worthy observation, that some of our most entertaining comedies, novels and romances have been written by the fair sex, who cannot be suppos'd to have learning in any degree equal to gentlemen of a university education. and in _north britain_ where literature shines amongst the persons of middle station, an ounce of natural parts, (speaking in a common way of comparison) is esteem'd of greater value, than a pound of learning. a person of learning without genius and knowledge of the world, is like an _architect's_ assistant, whose only business is to draw the draught or model of a pile of building; he's at a loss in the materials necessary for compleating the structure, tho' he can judge of its beauty when perfected; and may be compared to a man that has the theory in any art or science, but wants the practice. and a meer scholar is the most unacceptable companion upon earth: he is rude in his manners, unpolish'd in his literature, and generally ill-natur'd to the last degree; he's company for a very few persons, and pleasing to none; his pride exalts him in self-opinion beyond all mankind: and some of the sucking tribe of _levi_, think the gown and cassock alone, merit a respect due to the greatest personages, and that the broad hat with the rose should be ador'd, tho' it covers a thick and brainless skull. but these are a few only; there are great numbers of the clergy who deserve the utmost respect, and are justly paid more than they desire; and no person can have a greater regard for that sacred body than my self, as i was not only intended for a clergyman, but have several relations now in being of that venerable order; tho' i am oblig'd to take notice, that the authors of the gown in general, treat the world with greater insolence and incharity, than any lay-persons whatsoever. there's nothing more frequent, than to find the writings of many of our modern divines, not only stiff and harsh, but full of rancour, and to find an easy propensity and complaisance in the writings of the laity; a gentleman without the gown commonly writes with a genteel respect to the world, abundance of good temper and a condescension endearing; when a brawny priest, shall shew a great deal of ill-nature, give indecent reflections, and affrontive language, and oftentimes be dogmatical in all his performances. whether this be owing more to pride, than a want of an easy, free, and polite conversation, i do not take upon me to determine; but i believe it must be generally imputed to the former, as it cannot be suppos'd, that either of the universities, are at any time without a polite converse; tho' i take leave to observe, that there is a great deal of difference between a finish'd _oxonian_, and a sprightly senator. this is demonstrated in the speeches from time to time, made in the senate and the synod; the stile and composure of the one, is no way to be compar'd to the other, tho' the sense be equally strong; there's an elegancy and beauty of expression in the former, not to be met with in the latter, oratory no where to be exceeded, and an affluence of words not to be met with in any other speeches whatsoever; and i believe it must be generally allow'd that there is a very great difference in the common conversation, (particularly in point of manners) of the members of those august assemblies. a good conversation is the greatest advantage an author can possibly enjoy, by a variety of converse, a man is furnish'd with a perpetual variety of hints, and may acquire a greater knowledge on some subjects in the space of a few minutes, than he can attain by study, in a succession of weeks, (tho' i must allow study to be the only foundation for writing) 'twas owing to a good conversation, that those entertaining papers the _tatlers_ were publish'd by sir _richard steel_, the _examiner_ carried on by mr. _oldsworth_; and 'tis impossible a perfect good comedy can be written by any person, without a constant resort to the best conversation, whereby alone a man will be master of the best thoughts. in short, conversation is the aliment of the genius, the life of all airy performances, as learning is the soul; the various humours of mankind, upon all occasions, afford the most agreeable subjects for all sorts of writings, and i look upon any performance, tho' done by a person celebrated for writing, without the use of conversation, in some measure incompleat. if an author be enclin'd to write for reformation of manners, let him repair to st. _pauls_ or _westminster-abbey_, and observe the indecent behaviour of multitudes of persons, who make those sacred places assignations of vice; if you are enclin'd to lash the follies and vanities of the fair sex, retire to the tea table and the theatre; if your business be to compose a sermon, or you are engag'd in theological studies, resort to _child's_ coffee-house in st. _paul's_ church-yard; if you are desirous to depaint the cheat and the trickster, i recommend ye to the _royal-exchange_ and the court end of the town; and if you would write a poem in imitation of _rochester_, you need only go to the hundreds of _drury_, and you'll be sufficiently furnish'd with laudable themes. but converse at home falls infinitely short of conversation abroad, and the advantages attending travelling are so very great, that they are not to be express'd; this finishes education in the most effectual manner, and enables a man to speak and write on all occasions with a grace and perfection, no other way to be attain'd. the travels of a young gentleman have not only the effect of transplation of vegetables, in respect to the encrease of stature, but also the consequence of the most beautiful pruning. how much the gentlemen of _scotland_ owe their capacities to travelling, is very obvious, there being no person of quality in that kingdom but expends the greatest part of his fortune in other countries, to reap the benefit of it in personal accomplishments; and a greater commendation than this to the _scots_ is, the bestowing the best of literature upon all manner of youth educated amongst them. whilst the men of quality here very often neglect giving their children the common and necessary learning, and too frequently entrust their education with lazy, ignorant, and incogitant tutors, not to mention the supineness of schoolmasters in general throughout _england_; the _north-britains_ labour in this particular indefatigably, as they are very sensible that learning is the greatest honour of their country, and the ancient _britains_ come so near the _scots_, that amongst the common persons, in some parts of _wales_, you may meet with a ploughman that speaks tollerable latin, and a mason, like the famous _ben johnson_, with his _horace_ and a trowel. the want of a generous education is an irretrieveable misfortune, and the negligence of an inspector of the literature of youth ought to be unpardonable; how many persons of distinction have curs'd their aged parents for not bestowing on them a liberal education? and how many of the commonalty have regretted the mispending of the precious time of youth? a man arriv'd to maturity has the mortification of observing an inferior in circumstances superior in literature, and wants the satisfaction of giving a tollerable reason for any thing he says or does, or in any respect to judge of the excellency of others; and, in my opinion, a generous education, with a bare subsistence only, is to be preferr'd to the largest patrimony, and a want of learning. without education it is impossible to write or read any thing distinctly; without a frequent turning of the dictionary, no person can be compleat in the _english_ language, neither can he give words their proper accent and pronunciation, or be any ways master of elocution; and a man without learning, though he appears tollerable in conversation, (which i have known some persons do by a constant enjoyment of good company, and a strength of memory) is like an _empirick_, that takes things upon trust: and whenever he comes to exercise the pen, that the subject is uncommon, and study is requir'd, you'll find him oftentimes not capable of writing one single line of senfe, and scarcely one word of _english_. and, on the other hand, i have known some persons who could talk latin very fluently, who have us'd phrases and sentences perpetually in that language, in conversation, vulgar and deficient in the mother-tongue, and who have written most egregious nonsense; from whence it is evident, that writing is the only test of literature. i have a little deviated from my subject, in pursuing the rules and advantages of education, which i take to be of that universal good tendency, that they are acceptable in any performance whatsoever: i shall offer nothing farther, but conclude this essay with the following particulars; that besides the qualifications already mention'd, it is as necessary for a fine writer to be endued with modesty as for a beautiful lady; that good sense is of equal consequence to an author, as a good soil for the culture of the most noble plants; that a person writing a great deal on various subjects, should be as cautious in owning all his performances, as in revealing the secrets of his most intimate friend; and in respect to those gentlemen, who have made no scruple to prostitute their names, the following similie may be judg'd well adapted: _as musick soft, by constant use is forc'd grows harsh, and cloys, becomes at length the worst, the harmony amidst confusion lost: so finest pens, employ'd in writing still lose strength and beauty as the folio's fill._ _finis._ william andrews clark memorial library: university of california the augustan reprint society _general editors_ h. richard archer william andrews clark memorial library r.c. boys university of michigan e.n. hooker university of california, los angeles john loftis university of california, los angeles the society exists to make available inexpensive reprints (usually facsimile reproductions) of rare seventeenth and eighteenth century works. the editorial policy of the society continues unchanged. as in the past, the editors welcome suggestions concerning publications. all correspondence concerning subscriptions in the united states and canada should be addressed to the william andrews clark memorial library, west adams blvd., los angeles , california. correspondence concerning editorial matters may be addressed to any of the general editors. membership fee continues $ . per year. british and european subscribers should address b.h. blackwell, broad street, oxford, england. publications for the fifth year [ - ] _(at least six items, most of them from the following list, will be reprinted)_ frances reynolds (?): _an enquiry concerning the principles of taste, and of the origin of our ideas of beauty, &c._ ( ). introduction by james l. clifford. thomas baker: _the fine lady's airs_ ( ). introduction by john harrington smith. daniel defoe: _vindication of the press_ ( ). introduction by otho clinton williams. john evelyn: _an apologie for the royal party_ ( ); _a panegyric to charles the second_ ( ). introduction by geoffrey keynes. charles macklin: _man of the world_ ( ). introduction by dougald macmillan. _prefaces to fiction_. selected and with an introduction by benjamin boyce. thomas sprat: _poems._ sir william petty: _the advice of w.p. to mr. samuel hartlib for the advancement of some particular parts of learning_ ( ). thomas gray: _an elegy wrote in a country church yard_ ( ). (facsimile of first edition and of portions of gray's manuscripts of the poem). to the augustan reprint society _william andrews clark memorial library west adams boulevard los angeles , california_ _subscriber's name and address_ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ _as_ membership fee _i enclose for the years marked:_ the current year.......................... $ . [ ] the current & the th year................ . [ ] the current, rd & th year............... . [ ] the current, nd, rd & th year.......... . [ ] the current, st, nd, rd & th year..... . [ ] _(publications no. & are out of print)_ make check or money order payable to the regents of the university of california. note: _all income of the society is devoted to defraying cost of printing and mailing._ publications of the augustan reprint society first year ( - ) . richard blackmore's _essay upon wit_ ( ), and addison's _freeholder_ no. ( ). . samuel cobb's _of poetry_ and _discourse on criticism_ ( ). . _letter to a.h. esq.; concerning the stage_ ( ), and richard willis' _occasional paper no. ix_ ( ). (out of print) . _essay on wit_ ( ), together with characters by flecknoe, and joseph warton's _adventurer_ nos. and . (out of print) . samuel wesley's _epistle to a friend concerning poetry_ ( ) and _essay on heroic poetry_ ( ). . _representation of the impiety and immorality of the stage_ ( ) and _some thoughts concerning the stage_ ( ). second year ( - ) . john gay's _the present state of wit_ ( ); and a section on wit from _the english theophrastus_ ( ). . rapin's _de carmine pastorali_, translated by creech ( ). . t. hanmer's (?) _some remarks on the tragedy of hamlet_ ( ). . corbyn morris' _essay towards fixing the true standards of wit, etc._ ( ). . thomas purney's _discourse on the pastoral_ ( ). . essays on the stage, selected, with an introduction by joseph wood krutch. third year ( - ) . sir john falstaff (pseud.), _the theatre_ ( ). . edward moore's _the gamester_ ( ). . john oldmixon's _reflections on dr. swift's letter to barley_ ( ); and arthur mainwaring's _the british academy_ ( ). . nevil payne's _fatal jealousy_ ( ). . nicholas rowe's _some account of the life of mr. william shakespear_ ( ). . aaron hilt's preface to _the creation_; and thomas brereton's preface to _esther_. fourth year ( - ) . susanna centlivre's _the busie body_ ( ). . lewis theobald's _preface to the works of shakespeare_ ( ). . _critical remarks on sir charles gradison, clarissa, and pamela_ ( ). . samuel johnson's _the vanity of human wishes_ ( ) and two _rambler_ papers ( ). . john dryden's _his majesties declaration defended_ ( ). . pierre nicole's _an essay on true and apparent beauty in which from settled principles is rendered the grounds for choosing and rejecting epigrams_, translated by j.v. cunningham. testimony of the sonnets as to the authorship of the shakespearean plays and poems by jesse johnson g. p. putnam's sons new york and london the knickerbocker press copyright, g. p. putnam's sons entered at stationers' hall, london the knickerbocker press, new york dedicated to albert e. lamb partner and friend for twenty years of the royal line of loyal gentlemen contents introductory scope and effect of the discussion - chapter i the sonnets contain a message from their author; they portray his real emotions, and are to be read and interpreted literally - chapter ii they indicate that the friend or patron of the poet was a young man, and of about the age of shakespeare; and that their author was past middle life, and considerably older than shakespeare - chapter iii direct statements showing that the sonnets were not written by their accredited author--were not written by shakespeare - chapter iv the known facts of shakespeare's history reveal a character entirely inconsistent with, and radically different from, the revelations of the sonnets as to the character of their author - chapter v the general scope and effect of the sonnets inconsistent with the theory that they were written by shakespeare - chapter vi the results of the discussion summarized - introductory the shakespearean sonnets are not a single or connected work like an ordinary play or poem. their composition apparently extended over a considerable time, which may be fairly estimated as not less than four years. read literally they seem to portray thoughts, modes or experiences fairly assignable to such a period. though variable and sometimes light and airy in their movement, the greater portion appear to reveal deep and intense emotion, the welling and tumultous floods of the inner life of their great author. and their difficulty or mystery is, that they indicate circumstances, surroundings, experiences and regrets that we almost instinctively apprehend could not have been those of william shakespeare at the time they were written, when he must have been in the strength of early manhood, in the warmth and glow of recent and extraordinary advancement and success. it is this difficulty that apparently has caused many to believe that their literal meaning cannot be accepted, and that we must give to them, or to many of them, a secondary meaning, founded on affectations or conceits relating to different topics or persons, or that at least we should not allow that in them the poet is speaking of himself. others, like grant white, simply allow and state the difficulty and leave it without any suggestion of solution. before conceding, however, that the splendid poetry contained in the sonnets must be sundered or broken, or the apparent reality of its message doubted or denied, or that its message is mysterious or inexplicable--we should carefully inquire whether there is not some view or theory which will avoid the difficulties which have so baffled inquiry. i believe that there is such a view or theory, and that view is--that the sonnets were not written by shakespeare, but were written to him as the patron or friend of the poet; that while shakespeare may have been the author of some plays produced in his name at the theatre where he acted, or while he may have had a part in conceiving or framing the greater plays so produced, there was another, a great poet, whose dreamy and transforming genius wrought in and for them that which is imperishable, and so wrought although he was to have no part in their fame and perhaps but a small financial recompense; and that it is the loves, griefs, fears, forebodings and sorrows of the student and recluse, thus circumstanced and confined, that the sonnets portray. considering that the sonnets were so written, there is no need of any other than a literal and natural reading or interpretation. commencing in expressions of gratulation and implied flattery, as they proceed, they appear to have been written as the incidents, fears and griefs which they indicate from time to time came; and it may well be that they were written not for publication, but as vents or expressions of a surcharged heart. with such a view of the situation of the poet and of his patron, we may not only understand much that otherwise is inexplicable, but we may understand why so much and such resplendent poetry is lavished on incidents so bare, meagre, and commonplace, and why they present both poet and patron with frailties and faults naked and repellant; and we can the better palliate and forgive the weakness and subjection which the sonnets indicate on the part of their author. with such a reading the sonnets become a chronicle of the modes and feelings of their author, resembling in this respect the _in memoriam_ of tennyson; and their poetry becomes deeper and better, often equalling, if not surpassing in pathos and intensity anything in the greater shakespearean plays. such is the result or conclusion to which the discussion which follows is intended to lead. i shall not, however, ask the reader to accept any such conclusion or result merely because it removes difficulties or because it makes or rather leaves the poetry better; but i shall present--that the sonnets contain direct testimony, testimony not leading to surmise or conjecture, but testimony which would authorize a judgment in a court of law, that the sonnets were not written by shakespeare, and that they very strongly indicate that shakespeare was the friend or patron to whom so many of them are addressed. how such a conclusion from such testimony may be affected by arguments drawn from other sources i shall not discuss, contenting myself if into the main and larger controversy i have succeeded in introducing the effect and teaching of this, certainly, very valuable and important testimony. testimony of the sonnets as to the authorship of the shakespearean plays and poems chapter i of the character of the sonnets and their relation to the other works of the same author in these pages i propose an examination and study of the shakespearean sonnets, for the purpose of ascertaining what information may be derived from them as to the authorship of the shakespearean plays and poems. i am aware that any question or discussion as to their authorship is regarded with objection or impatience by very many. but to those not friendly to any such inquiry i would say, let us at least proceed so far as to learn precisely what the author of these great dramas says of himself and of his work in the only production in which he in any manner refers to or speaks of himself. certainly an inquiry confined to such limits is appropriate, at least is not disloyal. and if we study the characters of hamlet, juliet or rosalind, do we not owe it to the poet whose embodiments or creations they are, that we should study his character in the only one of his works in which his own surroundings and attachments, loves and fears, griefs and forebodings, appear to be at all indicated? from the homeric poems, mr. gladstone undertook to gather what they indicate as to the religion, morals and customs of the time; of the birthplace of the poet, and of the ethnology and migrations of the hellenic peoples. those poems were not written for any such purpose; they were for a people who, in the main, on all those subjects knew or believed as did their author. and it is both curious and instructive to note how much information as to that distant period mr. gladstone was able to gather from the circumstances, incidents, and implications of the homeric poetry. the value of such deductions no one can question. we may reject as myths the trojan war or the wanderings or personality of ulysses, but from these poems we certainly learn much of the method of warfare, navigation, agriculture, and of the social customs of those times. so reading these sonnets, we may perhaps not believe that the grief or love of the poet or the beauty of his friend was quite as great as the poetry indicates. but we may fairly take as correct what he says of his friend or of himself, as to their relations and companionship, the incidents and descriptions, which were but the framework on which he wove his poetic wreaths of affection, compliment, or regret. but before entering on this inquiry, it is quite relevant to ascertain what relation these sonnets bear to the shakespearean plays and poems. the works of shakespeare, as published, contain thirty-seven separate plays. most of them are of the highest order, and rank with the most consummate products of poetic genius. but criticism seems to have established, and critics seem to agree, that in the works accredited to him are plays of a lower order, which certainly are not from the same author as the remainder, and especially the greater plays. in this widely different and lower class, criticism seems to be agreed in placing the greater portion of _pericles_, _titus andronicus_, _timon of athens_, two parts of _henry vi._, and _henry viii._[ ] in addition to those, there are at least ten plays not now published as shakespeare's, that are conceded to be of a lower order and by a different author, but which, apart from internal evidence, can be almost as certainly shown to be his work as many of the greater of the recognized shakespearean plays. in the same high class of poetry as the greater of these dramas are the sonnets; and they are unmistakably, and i think concededly, the work of the author of those greater plays. it is of our poet, as the author of these greater dramas as well as of the sonnets, that we would seek to learn in the study of the sonnets. it is only in the sonnets that the poet speaks in the first person, or allows us any suggestion of himself. his dramas reveal to us the characters he has imagined and desires to portray; but they reveal nothing of the author. his two great poems are dramatic in substance and equally fail to give us any hint of their creator; but in the sonnets his own is the character whose thoughts and emotions are stated. there we come nearest to him; and there it would seem that we should be able to learn very much of him. perhaps we shall find that they do not present him at his best; it may be that they were intended only for the eye of the friend or patron to whom they are addressed. perhaps they reveal the raveled sleeve, the anxieties of a straitened life and of narrow means. certainly, while they reveal the wonderful fertility, resource, and fancy of the poet, they do not indicate that in outward semblance, surroundings or history their author was either fortunate or happy; and as we read them, sometimes we may feel that we are entering the poet's heart-home unbidden and unannounced. but if we have come there when it is all unswept and ungarnished, may we not the more certainly rely on what it indicates? before entering on the study of the sonnets we may inquire what, if anything, there is, distinctive of our great poet, the recognition of which may aid us in their interpretation. taine says that "the _creative_ power is the poet's greatest gift, and communicates an extraordinary significance to his words"; and further, that "he had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of an eye a complete character."[ ] the poet does not bring those characters to us by description, but he causes them to speak in words so true and apposite to the character he conceives that we seem to know the individuals from what they say and not from what the poet wrote or said. but the poet goes much farther, and in all his works presents surroundings and accessories, impalpable but certain, which fit the characters and their moods and actions. the picture of morning in _venus and adonis_ is apposite to the rich, sensuous and brilliant colorings of the queen of love; the reference in _romeo and juliet_ to the song of the nightingale "on yond' pomegranate tree" is but an incident to the soft, warm and love-inviting night; rosalind moves and talks to the quickstep of the forest; in _macbeth_ the incantation of the witches is but the outward expression of an overmastering fate, whose presence is felt throughout the play. let us then, in studying the sonnets, consider that they are from the same great master as the dramas. and we shall be thus prepared, where the meaning seems plain and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. and if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. we should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that they are imitations of petrarch, or that the genius of the poet, cribbed and confined by the fashion of the time, forgot to soar, and limped and waddled in the footsteps of the inconspicuous sonneteers of the elizabethan era. i would illustrate my meaning. sonnet cxxvi. is sometimes said to be an invocation to cupid.[ ] that seems to me to destroy all its grace and beauty. the first two lines of the sonnet, o thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power dost hold time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour-- are quite appropriate, if addressed to the god of love. but the lines succeeding are quite the reverse. in effect they say that you have not grown old because nature, idealized as an active personality, has temporarily vanquished time, but will soon obtain the full audit. if the sonnet is addressed to the god of love it reduces him to the limitations of mortality; if it is addressed to his friend, it indicates that, though but for a little while, nature has lifted him to an attribute of immortality. the latter interpretation makes the poet enlarge and glorify his subject; the former makes him belittle it, and bring the god of love to the audit of age and the ravage of wrinkles. this is the last sonnet of the first series; with the next begins the series relating to his mistress. reading it literally, considering it as addressed to his friend, it is sparkling and poetic, a final word, loving, admonitory, in perfect line and keeping with the central thought of all that came before. from this sonnet, interpreted as i indicate, i shall try to find assistance in this study. but if it is a mere poetical ascription to cupid, it, of course, tells us nothing except that its author was a poet. i should not, however, leave this subject without stating that the fanciful interpretation of these sonnets does not seem to be favored by more recent authors. i find no indication of such an interpretation in taine's _english literature_, or in grant white's edition of shakespeare. professor edward dowden, universally recognized as a fair and competent critic, says: "the natural sense, i am convinced, is the true one."[ ] hallam says: "no one can doubt that they express not only real but intense emotions of the heart."[ ] professor tyler, in a work relating to the sonnets, says: "the impress of reality is stamped on these sonnets with unmistakable clearness."[ ] mr. lee, while regarding some of these as mere fancies, obviously finds that many of them treated of facts.[ ] mr. dowden, in a work devoted to the sonnets, states very fully the views which have been expressed by different authors in relation to them. his quotations occupy sixty pages and, i think, clearly show that the weight of authority is decidedly in favor of allowing them their natural or primary meaning. there are one hundred and fifty-four of these sonnets. the last two are different in theme and effect from those which go before, and may perhaps not improperly be considered as mere exercises in poetizing. they have no connection with the others, and i would have no contention with those who regard them as suggested by petrarch, or as complaisant imitations of the vogue or fashion of that time. those two sonnets i leave out of this discussion, and would have what may be here said, understood as applying only to the one hundred and fifty-two remaining. these one hundred and fifty-two sonnets i will now insist have a common theme. most of them may be placed in groups which seem to be connected and somewhat interdependent. those groups may perhaps, in some cases, be placed in different orders, without seriously affecting the whole. to that extent they are disconnected. but in whatever order those groups are placed, through them runs the same theme--the relations of the poet to his friend or patron, and to his mistress, the mistress of his carnal love, who is introduced only because the poet fears that she has transferred her affections or favors to his friend, wounding and wronging him in his love or desire for each. it is easy to pick out many sonnets which may be read as disconnected and independent poetry. but very many more verses could be selected from _in memoriam_ that can be read independently of the remainder of that poem. and there are none of the sonnets, however they may read standing alone, that do not fit the mode and movement of those with which they stand connected. there is, i submit, no more reason for sundering sonnets of that class from the others, than there is for taking the soliloquy of hamlet from the play that bears his name. this statement of the theme and the connected character of the sonnets is not essential to the views i shall present. nevertheless, if it is accepted, if we are able to agree that they all are relevant and apposite to a common theme, it strengthens the proposition that we should seek for them a literal meaning and should reject any construction which would make any of their description or movement incongruous to any other part. of course we shall expect to find in them the enlargement or exaggeration of poetic license. but so doing we must recall the characteristics of their great author, who with all exaggeration preserves harmony and symmetry of parts, and harmony and correspondence in all settings and surroundings. with such views of what is fair and helpful in interpretation, i propose to proceed to a closer view of the first one hundred and fifty-two of what are known as the sonnets of shakespeare. footnotes: [ ] brandes's _william shakespeare, a critical study_. temple edition of shakespeare, introduction to plays above named. [ ] taine's _english literature_, pp. , . [ ] lee's _life of shakespeare_, p. . the sonnet is printed in full at p. . [ ] dowden, _shakespeare: his mind and art_, pp. , . [ ] hallam's _literature of europe_, vol. ii., chap. v. [ ] tyler, _shakespeare's sonnets_, p. . [ ] lee's _life of shakespeare_, pp. , , . chapter ii of the age of the writer of the sonnets adopting the views which fix the later period as the date of the sonnets, it seems practically certain that they were written as early as ,--though some of them may have been written as late as ,--and that a great portion were probably written as early as .[ ] shakespeare was born in . consequently they appear to have been written when he was about thirty or thirty-four, certainly not over thirty-seven years of age. _it will be the main purpose of this chapter to call attention to portions of the sonnets which seem to indicate that they were written by a man well past middle age,--perhaps fifty or sixty years old, and certainly not under forty years of age._ but before proceeding to the inquiry as to the age of the writer, i invite attention to what they indicate as to the age of the patron or friend to whom the first one hundred and twenty-six seem to have been written. in poetry as in perspective, there is much that is relative, and in the sonnets the age of the writer and that of his friend are so often contrasted, that if with reasonable certainty, and within reasonable limits, we are able to state the age of his friend, we shall be well advanced toward fixing the age of the writer. the first seventeen of these sonnets are important in this connection. they have a common theme: it is that his friend is so fair, so incomparable, that he owes it to the world, to the poet, whose words of praise otherwise will not be believed, that he shall marry and beget a son. the whole argument clearly implies that the writer deems such admonition necessary, because his friend has passed the age when marriage is most frequent, and is verging toward the period of life when marriage is less probable. his friend appears to the writer as making a famine where abundance lies; he tells him that he beguiles the world, unblesses some mother; that he is his mother's glass and calls back the april of her prime; asks him why he abuses the bounteous largess given him to give; calls him a profitless usurer; tells him that the hours that have made him fair will unfair him; that he should not let winter's rugged hand deface ere he has begotten a child, though it were a greater happiness should he beget ten. he asks if his failure to marry is because he might wet a widow's eye, and then in successive sonnets cries shame on his friend for being so improvident. he tells him that when he shall wane, change toward age, he should have a child to perpetuate his youth; and the thought again brings to the poet the vision of winter, summer's green borne on winter's bier, and he urges him that he should prepare against his coming end, by transmitting his semblance to another; that he should not let so fair a house fall to decay, but should uphold it against the stormy blasts of winter by begetting a son; seeing in his friend so much of beauty, he prognosticates that his friend's end is beauty's doom and date. noting that nothing in nature can hold its perfection long, he sees his friend, most rich in youth, but time debating with decay, striving to change his day to night, and urges him to make war upon the tyrant time by wedding a maiden who shall bear him living flowers more like him than any painted counterfeit. he tells him that could he adequately portray his beauty, the world would make him a liar, and then closes this theme by saying: but were some child of yours alive that time, you should live twice in it, and in my rhyme. any impression as to the age of the poet's friend which this brief synopsis of the first seventeen sonnets conveys, i think will be increased by reading the sonnets themselves. i have refrained from stating any portions of sonnets ii. and vii., desiring to present to the reader their exact words. sonnet vii. reads as follows: lo! in the orient when the gracious light lifts up his burning head, each under eye doth homage to his new-appearing sight, serving with looks his sacred majesty; and having _climb'd the steep-up heavenly hill, resembling strong youth in his middle age_, yet mortal looks adore his beauty still, attending on his golden pilgrimage; but when from highmost pitch, with weary car, like feeble age, he reeleth from the day, the eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are from his low tract, and look another way: _so thou, thyself out-going in thy noon, unlook'd on diest, unless thou get a son._ the poet sees his friend, as is the sun after it has climbed the morning steep and is journeying on the level heaven toward the zenith. certainly that must indicate that his friend was advanced toward the middle arch of life. sonnet ii. reads as follows: when _forty_ winters shall besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now, will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held: then, being ask'd where all thy beauty lies, where all the treasure of thy lusty days, to say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes, were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise. * * * * * this were to be new made when thou art old, and see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold. these lines indicate that his friend had not yet reached forty years. and equally do they indicate that in the mind of the poet the fortieth year was not in the ascending scale of life, but was at, or perhaps beyond, the "highmost pitch" toward which, in the seventh sonnet, he described his friend as approaching.[ ] taking these seventeen sonnets together, reading and re-reading them, can we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or toward a person under or much below thirty? they imply that the person addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote or far-off picture. besides, if his friend was below thirty years, while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet have used language implying that his marrying days were waning. to put it roughly, there would not be so much of the now-or-never thought running through the ornate verse in which the poet voices his appeal. as we read these seventeen sonnets, we may perhaps suspect that the desire that his friend shall marry is so strongly stated and presented, because it is a theme around which the poet can appropriately weave so much of compliment and expressions of admiration and affection. but if that be so, must we not still believe that the great dramatist could not have addressed them to his friend, unless in substance and in all their more delicate shades of meaning and of coloring they were appropriate to him? we may now pass from this first group to other sonnets which convey similar and, i submit, unmistakable intimations as to the age of the poet's friend or patron. sonnet c., especially when read with the one preceding, clearly indicates that it was written as a greeting or salutation after absence, and on the poet's return to his friend. in it he says: rise, resty muse, my love's sweet face survey, _if time have any wrinkle graven there; if any, be a satire to decay_, and make _time's spoils_ despised everywhere. give my love fame faster _than time wastes life_; so thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife. closely following, in sonnet civ., the poet says: to me, fair friend, _you never can be old_, for as you were when first your eye i eyed, such seems your beauty still. three winters cold,[ ] * * * * * in process of the seasons have i seen, * * * * * since first i saw you fresh, which yet are green. ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; so your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived[ ]: for fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred; ere you were born was beauty's summer dead. the thought is: your beauty may be passing; it may be that my eye that sees it not, is deceived. we should carefully note the words, "three winters cold," "since first i saw you fresh, which _yet_ are green." though they present no clear or sharp indication as to the age of his friend, yet i think that of them this may be fairly said: the word "green" is used as opposed to ripe or matured, and his friend's age is such that three years seem to the poet to have carried him a step toward maturity. and so reading these words, they harmonize with the expression of the poet's fear that his great love for his friend may have prevented him from seeing his beauty like a dial hand, steal from his figure. in sonnet lxx. the poet says of his friend: and thou present'st a pure unstained prime. thou hast pass'd by _the ambush of young days_, either not assail'd, or victor being charged. in sonnet lxxvii. the poet says: the wrinkles which thy glass will truly show of mouthed graves will give thee memory; thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know time's thievish progress to eternity. sonnet cxxvi. is as follows: o thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power dost _hold time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour_; who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st thy _lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st_; if nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, as thou goest onwards, _still_ will pluck thee back, she keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill may _time disgrace_ and wretched _minutes_ kill. yet fear her, o thou minion of her pleasure! she may _detain_, but not _still_ keep, her treasure: her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be, and her quietus is to render thee. this is the last sonnet which the poet addresses to his friend. except the last two, all that follow are of his mistress, and are of the same theme as sonnets xl., xli., and xlii., and, we may fairly infer, are of the same date. if so, sonnet cxxvi. is practically the very latest of the entire series, and we may deem it a leave-taking, perhaps not of his friend, but of the labor that had so long moved him. perhaps for that reason its words should be deemed more significant, and it should be read and considered more carefully.[ ] all its thoughts seem responsive to the central suggestion that his friend appears much younger than he is. to the poet he seems still a boy because he has so held the youth and freshness of boyhood that it is not inappropriate to say that he holds in his power the glass of time; nature has plucked him back to show her triumph over time, but she cannot continue to do so, but will require of him full audit for all his years. for what age do such expressions seem natural as words of compliment; and when first would it have pleased us to be told that we looked younger than we were, and to one that loved us, still seemed but as a boy? hardly much before thirty; till then we took but little account of years and would have preferred to be told that we seemed manlier rather than younger than we were. but on this let us further consult our poet. he tells us that at ten begins the age of the whining school-boy; at twenty of the lover, sighing like a furnace, and that of the soldier, a vocation of manhood, at thirty.[ ] to me it seems very clear that the rich poetic fancy of this sonnet would be greatly lessened by assuming it to be addressed to a person below twenty-five years of age, and if it came, as may hereafter appear, from a person of fifty years or over, its caressing compliments and admonition would seem quite appropriate for one who had reached the fourth age of life. the indication of the last four sonnets, to which i have referred, i submit, is in entire accord with that of the first group of seventeen. i would not, however, leave this branch of the discussion without indicating what i deem is the fair inference or result from it. i do not claim that the age of the poet's friend can be certainly stated from anything contained in the sonnets. it seems to me, however, that it mars the poetry and makes its notes seem inappropriate and discordant, to suppose that the poet had in mind a person below twenty-five years of age. to do so would make some, at least, of his terms of description inapt, subtract from the sparkle and force of his compliments, and cause his words of loving admonition and advice to appear ill-timed and inappropriate. certainly the sonnets indicate that his friend was on the morning side of life and below forty; and perhaps ten or twelve years below would best fit the verse. it may be, probably it is the fact, that a number of years, from four to seven, elapsed between the earliest and the latest of these sonnets; and that may explain why we are not able to find any more specific indications as to the age of his friend. there are also sonnets from which it has been inferred that the poet's friend was much younger than thirty, and possibly or probably below twenty years of age. a careful examination of these sonnets will, however, i think very clearly indicate that no such inference can be fairly drawn. in sonnet liv. the poet says: and so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, when that shall fade, my verse distills your truth. in sonnet xcvi. he says: some say, thy fault is youth, some wantonness; some say, thy grace is youth and gentle sport; similar expressions appear in sonnets ii., xv., xxxiii., and xli. in sonnet cxiv. he says: such cherubins as your sweet self resemble. sonnet cxxvi., containing the appellation, "my lovely boy," has been already quoted.[ ] in sonnet cviii. he says: what's in the brain, that ink may character, which hath not figured to thee my true spirit? what's new to speak, what new to register, that may express my love, or thy dear merit? nothing, _sweet boy_; but yet, like prayers divine, i must each day say o'er the very same; counting no old thing old, thou mine, i thine, even as when first i hallowed thy fair name. so that eternal love in love's fresh case _weighs not the dust and injury of age, nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, but makes antiquity for aye his page_; finding the _first_ conceit of love there bred, where _time_ and _outward form_ would show it dead. hardly could any argument for extreme youth be made from any of these lines, except as based on the term "boy." the term "youth" obviously has a broader significance, and by no strained construction, especially if coming from a man of advanced years, may be applied to persons on the morning side of life without any precise or clear reference to, or indication of, their age. we should therefore turn to the lines containing the appellation "boy" for whatever of force there is in the claim for the extreme youth of the poet's friend. doing so, the context in each case clearly indicates that no such inference can be fairly drawn. in the sonnet last quoted (cviii.), the poet, saying that there is nothing new to register of his love for his friend, and that he counts nothing old that is so used, then says that his eternal love weighs not the dust and injury of age, nor gives to necessary wrinkles place. hardly could he have said plainer that his loving appellation, "sweet boy," is made because he can allow neither his friend, nor his love for him, nor his own frequent recurring expressions of it, to grow old; the last two lines of the sonnet, referring to the indications of time and outward form, seem to be a continuance and enlargement of the same thought. so interpreting his verse it is fresh, sparkling, and complimentary; but deeming that the person addressed was sixteen or twenty years old, indeed a mere boy, at least half of the portion of the sonnet following the term "sweet boy" is inappropriate and useless. this sonnet, i think, might be cited as indicating that, except to the eye of love, that is in sober fact, the poet's friend was no longer a boy. sonnet cxxvi., is quoted at page , and discussed, and presented as clearly stating that his friend was termed a boy only because, as to him, time had been hindered and delayed. there is, however, a further consideration which i think should effectually dispose of any doubts that may remain on account of the use of the words "youth" or "boy." in the succeeding portions of this chapter i shall quote sonnets indicating, indeed saying, that the poet was on the sunset side of life--probably fifty years of age or older, and so at least twenty years older than is indicated of his friend, except in the sonnets now being considered. if the poet was fifty years of age or more, the terms here discussed are amply and fully satisfied without ascribing to them any definite indication as to the age of the person addressed. to a person of the age of fifty or sixty years, addressing a person young enough to be his son, especially if of a fair and youthful appearance, the expressions "boy" or "youth" come quite naturally and have no necessary significance beyond indicating the _relative_ age of the person so addressed.[ ] and especially is this so when the words are used in expressions of affection and of familiar or caressing endearment. with such aid as may be had from considering the age of his friend, we come to the more important inquiry: what was the age of the author of these sonnets,--what was the age of the poet of the shakespearean plays? i shall present that which indicates that he was probably fifty, perhaps sixty, certainly more than forty years of age at the time he wrote the sonnets. but if our great poet was forty,--probably if he was thirty-five years of age, when these sonnets were composed,--he was born before , before the birth date of william shakespeare. * * * * * the poet clearly indicates that he is older than his friend. in sonnet xxii. he says: _my glass shall not persuade me i am old_, so long as _youth and thou_ are of one date; but when in thee time's furrows i behold, then look i death my days should expiate. for all that beauty that doth cover thee is but the seemly raiment of my heart, which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me: how can i then be _elder_ than thou art? in sonnet lxxiii. he speaks directly of his own age or period of life, as follows: that _time of year_ thou mayst in me behold when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. in _me_ thou seest the _twilight_ of such day as _after sunset_ fadeth in the west; which by and by black night doth take away, death's second self, that seals up all in rest. in me _thou see'st the glowing of such fire, that on the ashes of his youth doth lie_, as the death-bed whereon it must expire, consumed with that which it was nourish'd by. this thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, to _love that well which thou must leave ere long_. the latter part of sonnet lxii. and sonnet lxiii. are as follows: but when my glass shows me myself indeed, _beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity_, mine own self-love quite contrary i read; self so self-loving were iniquity. 't is thee, myself, that for myself i praise, painting _my age with_ beauty of thy days. against my love shall be, _as i am now_, with time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn; _when hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow with lines and wrinkles_; when his youthful morn hath travell'd on to _age's steepy night_, and all those beauties whereof now he's king are vanishing or vanish'd out of sight, stealing away the treasure of his spring; for such a time do i now fortify against confounding age's cruel knife, that he shall never cut from memory my sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life: his beauty shall in these black lines be seen, and they shall live, and he in them still green. it should be noted that the poet is picturing no morning cloud or storm or eclipse; but his grief is that he has had his morning and his noon and that he is now at "age's steepy night" _because his sun has travelled so far in his life's course_. the sonnet seems to be the antithesis of sonnet vii., quoted at page . the metaphor is the same, comparing life to the daily journey of the sun. in each, the poet views the _steep_ of the journey, the earlier and the later hours of the day; and while he finds that his friend's age is represented by the sun passing from the "steep-up" hill to the zenith, with equal clearness and certainty he indicates that his age is represented by its last and declining course, that _he_ has "travelled on to _age's steepy night_." as clearly as words can say, the poet states that he is on the sunset side of life and indicates that he is well advanced toward its close. sonnet cxxxviii. is as follows: when my love swears that she is made of truth, i do believe her, _though i know she lies_, that she might think me some untutor'd youth, unlearned in the world's false subtleties. thus _vainly_ thinking that she thinks me young, _although she knows my days are past the best_, simply i credit her false-speaking tongue: on both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd. _but wherefore says she not she is unjust? and wherefore say not i that i am old?_ o, love's best habit is in seeming trust, and _age in love loves not to have years told_: therefore i lie with her and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flatter'd be. the poet is here speaking of his mistress, the mistress of his carnal love, who had in act her bed-vow broke (sonnet clii.). having stated that when she swears she is true he knows she lies, he adopts the conceit of asserting that he is not old, as an equivalent to her obvious falsehood in saying that she is not unjust. this is one of twenty-six sonnets relating to his mistress and her desertion of him for his friend. in sonnets xl., xli., and xlii. he complains to his friend of the same wrong. the fact that the poet found a subject for his verse in such an occurrence has been much commented on. poetic fancy would hardly have chosen such a theme, and these sonnets seem to be certainly based on an actual occurrence. and if so, certainly we may construe them very literally; and read literally they certainly appear to be an old man's lament at having been superseded by a younger though much loved rival. william shakespeare was a prosperous, a very successful man. in twenty years he accumulated property which made him a rich man,--yielding a yearly income of $ , equivalent to $ , dollars at the present time. he was an actor publicly accredited as a man of amorous gallantries[ ]; he married at eighteen, apparently in haste, and less than six months before the birth of a child.[ ] we know from legal records that he and his father before him had frequent lawsuits.[ ] while a uniform tradition represents him as comely, pleasing and attractive, equally does it represent him as a man of ready, aggressive and caustic wit, and rebellious and bitter against opposition.[ ] the lines on the slab over his grave are less supplicatory than mandatory against the removal of his bones to the adjacent charnel-house.[ ] his name, often written with a hyphen, indicates that he came of english fighting stock. when the sonnets were written he was in the full tide of success. it is not credible that such a man at thirty or thirty-five, of buoyant and abounding life, could have so bewailed the loss of a mistress. mr. lee says that the sonnets last quoted admit of no literal interpretation.[ ] in other words, as i understand, he concedes that a literal interpretation is destructive of what he assumes to be the fact as to the authorship of the shakespearean plays. by what right or rule of construction does he refuse them their literal reading? they indicate no hidden or double meaning, but seem direct though poetic statements of conditions and resulting reflections and feelings. and more than that, though appearing in separate groups, their indications as to age all harmonize, and are not in conflict with any other part or indication of the sonnets. mr. lee urges that these sonnets were mere affectations, conceits common to the poets of that day. that view will not bear investigation. he cites passages from poets of that time ascribing to themselves in youth the ills, the miseries, the wrinkles, the white hairs of age. but such is not the effect of what has been here quoted. the poet says that it is _his age_ that oppresses him, and brings him its ills and marks and ravages; and about as clearly as poetic description is capable of, indicates and says that he is on the sunset side of his day of life. i cannot at this instant quote, but i am impressed that in the plays of the great poet, the instances are frequent where sorrow or despair bring his youthful characters to picture their lot with the deprivations, the ills or forebodings of age. but in no such passages is language used which is at all equivalent to that here quoted. nowhere does he present such a travesty as to allow juliet to describe herself in good straight terms that would befit her grandmother; and there is nothing that the much-lamenting hamlet says which would lead an actor to play the part with the accessories of age and feebleness with which they represent polonius. having now called attention to these sonnets which give direct indications as to the age of the poet, i ask the reader to consider again those which i have quoted in relation to the age of his friend, and particularly sonnets ii. and vii. (pp. and ). if those sonnets came from a poet of the age and infirmities which a literal reading indicates, how forceful, strong, and poetic is their appeal. but if it is to be assumed that they were written by a man of thirty or thirty-five, strong, vigorous, aggressive, fortunate, and successful, the appeal seems out of harmony, and lacks that delicate adaptation of speech to surroundings which is characteristic of the author. * * * * * i would next call attention to portions of these sonnets which i do not present as of themselves having any clearly determinate weight as to the age of the poet, but which do have great significance from their correspondence in tone and effect with what has been already quoted. the poet repeatedly falls into meditations or fancies which seem more natural to a person on the descending than on the ascending side of life. in sonnets xxx. and xxxi. he says: when to the sessions of sweet silent thought i summon up _remembrance of things past_, i sigh the lack of many a thing i sought, and with old woes _new wail my dear time's waste:_ then can i drown an eye, unused to flow, for _precious friends hid in death's dateless night_, and weep afresh love's _long since_ cancell'd woe, and moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: then can i grieve at grievances foregone, and heavily from woe to woe tell o'er the sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, which i new pay, as if not paid before. * * * * * thy bosom is endeared with _all hearts_, which i _by lacking have supposed dead_; and there reigns love, and all love's loving parts, and all those _friends which i thought buried_. how many _a holy and obsequious tear_ hath dear, religious love stol'n from mine eye, as _interest of the dead_, which now appear but things removed that hidden in thee lie! thou art the grave _where buried love doth live_, hung with the _trophies of my lovers gone_, who all their parts of me to thee did give: that due of many now is thine alone: in sonnet lxxi. he says: no longer _mourn for me when i am dead_ than you shall hear the surly sullen bell give warning to the world _that i am fled_ from this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: nay, if you read this line, remember not the hand that writ it; for i love you so, that i in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, if thinking on me then should make you woe. in sonnet cxxii. he says: thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain * * * * * beyond all date, even to eternity: or, at the least, _so long as brain and heart_ have faculty by nature to subsist; till each to razed oblivion yield his part. in sonnet cxlvi. he says: poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, . . . these rebel powers that thee array, why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, painting thy outward walls so costly gay? why so large cost, having _so short_ a lease, dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? shall worms, inheritors of this excess, eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end? then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, and let that pine to aggravate thy store; buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; within be fed, without be rich no more: so shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, and death once dead, there's no more dying then. in sonnets lxvi. and lxxiv. appear further similar meditations. such thoughts and meditations do not seem to be those of the successful and prosperous man of thirty or thirty-five. the persuasive force of the sonnets which have been quoted or referred to in this chapter is much increased by reading or considering them together. to illustrate: four sonnets have been quoted containing direct statements by the poet that he was in the afternoon of life. it needs no argument to establish that this concurrence of statements made in different groups of sonnets and doubtless at different times has much more than four times the persuasive force of one such statement. and in like ratio do the other sonnets indicating the reflections and conditions of age, increase the weight of the statements in these four sonnets. taking them all together they seem to present the statements, conditions, and reflections of a man certainly past the noon of life,--past forty years of age, and so older than was shakespeare at the time of their composition. if this conclusion is correct, it does not aid, but about equally repels the claim that bacon was the author of the sonnets, or of the plays or poems produced by the same poet. bacon was born in , and was therefore but three years older than shakespeare. footnotes: [ ] lee's _life of shakespeare_, p. ; preface to sonnets, temple edition. [ ] in a note to page is the poet's familiar expression or statement of the seven ages of man. it clearly places the decade from forty to fifty as past the middle arch of life, and next to the age of the slippered pantaloon and shrunk shank; from thirty to forty he describes as the age of the soldier, and from twenty to thirty that of the lover. [ ] it is generally considered that the first of the shakespearean plays was produced in . if they were written by an unknown poet and brought out or published by shakespeare, the time between their first joint venture and the earlier date assumed for these sonnets, would be _three years_. [ ] the phrase "mine eye may be deceived," may also throw some light on another subject discussed in this chapter,--the age of the poet. such an expression would seem much more natural to a person above, than to a person below, forty years of age. [ ] see discussion of claim that this sonnet was addressed to cupid, pages , . [ ] _as you like it_, act ii., sc. vii.: "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. at first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. then the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school. and then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow. then a soldier, full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. and then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; and so he plays his part. the sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound. last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing." [ ] page , _supra_. [ ] in lee's _life of shakespeare_, p. , appear some statements so relevant to this discussion that i cannot forbear quoting them: "octavius cæsar at thirty-two is described by mark antony after the battle of actium as the 'boy cæsar' who 'wears the rose of youth' (_antony and cleopatra_, iii., ii., _seq._). spenser in his _astrophel_ apostrophizes sir philip sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as 'oh wretched boy' (l. ) and 'luckless boy' (l. )." i was at a public dinner given some years ago, at which general henry w. slocum and colonel fred grant were both speakers. in his remarks, the general, having stated that his friend the colonel spoke to him about being a candidate for an office, continued, "i said to him, 'why, fred, you are a mere boy,' and his answer to me was, 'why, general, i am as old as my father was when he took vicksburg.'" general grant was then forty years old. [ ] post., pp. - . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . [ ] post., pp. - . [ ] post., pp. - . [ ] post., p. . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, p. . chapter iii of the direct testimony of the sonnets as to who was not their author sonnets lv. and lxxxi. are as follows: not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; but _you_ shall shine more bright in these contents than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. when wasteful war shall statues overturn, and broils root out the work of masonry, nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn the living record of _your memory_. 'gainst death and all-oblivious enmity shall _you_ pace forth; your praise shall still find room even in the eyes of all posterity that wear this world out to the ending doom. so, till the judgment that yourself arise, _you_ live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. or i shall live your epitaph to make, or you survive when i in earth am rotten; from hence _your_ memory death cannot take, although in _me_ each part will be forgotten. _your_ name from hence immortal life shall have, though i, once gone, _to all the world must die_: the earth can yield _me_ but a common grave, when _you_ entombed in men's eyes shall lie. _your monument_ shall be _my gentle verse_, which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read; and tongues to be _your_ being shall rehearse, when all the breathers of this world are dead; _you_ still shall live--such virtue hath _my_ pen-- where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. in all the plays and poems of shakespeare, including these sonnets, there is no mention of any man or woman then living. the only mention of a person then living made by our poet, either in prose or verse, is in the dedication of the two poems to the earl of southampton. to shakespeare, to shakespeare alone, have the shakespearean poems and plays been a monument; and for him have they done precisely that which the poet says his "gentle verse" was to do for his friend; and they have not done so in any degree for any other. an anonymous writer in chambers's _edinburgh journal_, in august, , seems to have been one of the first to suggest the doubt as to the authorship of the shakespearean plays. his suggestion was that their real author was "some pale, wasted student ... with eyes of genius gleaming through despair" who found in shakespeare a purchaser, a publisher, a friend, and a patron. if that theory is correct, the man that penned those sonnets sleeps, as he said he would, in an unrecorded grave, while his publisher, friend and patron, precisely as he also said, has a place in the pantheon of the immortals. very many of these sonnets seem to be evolved from, or kindred to, the thought so sharply presented in sonnets lv. and lxxxi. i would refer the reader particularly to sonnets xxxviii., xlix., lxxi., lxxii, and lxxxviii. the last two lines of sonnet lxxi. are as follows: lest the _wise_ world should look into your moan, and mock you with me after i am gone. the first lines of sonnet lxxii. are as follows: o! lest the world should task you to recite what merit lived in me, that you should love after my death, dear love, forget me quite, for you in me can nothing worthy prove; unless you would devise some virtuous lie, to do more for me than mine own desert, and hang more praise upon deceased i than _niggard_ truth would _willingly_ impart: many of these sonnets, which otherwise seem entirely inexplicable, and which have for that reason been held to be imitations or strange and unnatural conceits, become true and genuine and much more poetic, if we conceive them to be written, not by the accredited author of the shakespearean dramas, but by the unnamed and unknown student whose connection with them was carefully concealed. i suggest that the reader test this statement by carefully reading the four sonnets last mentioned. the claim for a literal reading of sonnet lxxxi. is greatly strengthened by its context, by reading it with the group of sonnets of which it forms a part. sonnets lxxvii. to xc. all more or less relate to another poet, who, the author fears, has supplanted him in the affection, or it may be, in the patronage of his friend. that particularly appears in sonnet lxxxvi.: was it the proud full sail of his great verse, bound for the prize of all too precious you, that did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, making their tomb the womb wherein they grew? was it _his_ spirit, by spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? no, neither he, nor his compeers by night giving him aid, my verse astonished. he, nor that affable familiar ghost which nightly gulls him with intelligence, as victors, of my silence cannot boast; i was not sick of any fear from thence: but when your countenance fill'd up his line, then lack'd i matter; that enfeebled mine. that what is there stated as to another poet refers to an actual transaction, and is to be read literally, is recognized, i think, by all critics; and many have thought that the description contained in the sonnet quoted indicates chapman, who translated the _iliad_ about that time. it is in this group of sonnets, referring to another poet, that we find sonnet lxxxi. the thought of the entire group is complaint, perhaps jealousy, of a rival poet; and running through them all are allusions or statements which seem to have been intended to strengthen the ties between him and his friend,--to hold him if he meditated going, and to bring him back if he had already strayed. it was obviously for that purpose that sonnet lxxxi., one of the central sonnets of that group, was written; and, considered as written for that purpose, how apt and true its language appears! the poet, asserting that his verse is immortal, says to his friend, the immortality it confers is yours; "your name from hence immortal life shall have," but i shall have no share in that fame; "in me each part will be forgotten," and "earth can yield me but a common grave." though the sonnet is in the highest degree poetic, as a bare statement of fact it is perfectly apt and appropriate to that which was the obvious purpose of this group of sonnets. it is sometimes claimed that the author of the shakespearean plays was a lawyer. certainly he was a logician and a rhetorician. the clash of minds and of speech appearing in _julius_ _cæsar_, in _antony and cleopatra_, in _henry iv._, and in many other plays, shows a most wonderful facility for stating a case, for presenting an argument. let us then assume that the poet was simply stating his own case against a rival poet, presenting his own appeal,--and the verse at once has added dignity and passion, and we almost feel the poet's heart throb. of course the final question--whether or not the two sonnets printed at the head of this chapter were founded on the conditions and situations they state, and whether or not they express actual feelings and emotions--must be answered by each from a careful reading of the sonnets themselves. to me, however, their message of sadness, loneliness, and implied appeal seems as clear and certain as the portrayal of agony in the marble of laocoön. that sonnet lv., and perhaps in some degree sonnet lxxxi., are moulded after verses of ovid or horace, is often mentioned. and it is mentioned as though that somehow detracted from their meaning or force. that fact seems to me rather to reinforce that meaning. the words of ovid are translated as follows: now have i brought a work to an end which neither jove's fierce wrath, nor sword nor fire nor fretting age with all the force it hath, are able to abolish quite.[ ] the ode of horace has been translated as follows: a monument on stable base, more strong than brass, my name shall grace; than regal pyramids more high which storms and years unnumber'd shall defy. my nobler part shall swiftly rise above this earth, and claim the skies.[ ] agreeing that the poet had in mind the words of ovid and of horace and believed that his productions would outlast bronze or marble, we see that, so far following their thoughts, by a quick transition he says that not he, but his friend, is to have the immortality that his poetry will surely bring. while this comparison with the latin poems may not much aid an interpretation that seemed clear and certain without it, at least its sudden rending from their thought does not weaken, but strengthens the effect of the statement that the writer was to have no part in the immortality of his own poetry. it may be said that it is entirely improbable that the author of the greater of the shakespearean plays should have allowed their guerdon of fame and immortality to pass to and remain with another. but if we accept the results of the later criticism, we must then agree,--that there were at least three poets who wrought in and for the shakespearean plays, that two of the three consented that their work should go to the world as that of another, and that at least one of the two was a poet of distinctive excellence. at that time the publication and sale of books was very limited and the relative rights of publishers and authors were such that the author had but little or none of the pecuniary results. the theatre was the most promising and hence the most usual market for literary work, and it seems certain that poets and authors sold their literary productions to the managers of theatres, retaining no title or interest in them. however the poet of the shakespearean plays may have anticipated the verdict of posterity, the plays bear most abundant evidence that they were written to be acted, to entertain and please, and to bring patrons and profit to the theatres which were in the london of three hundred years ago. boucicault was the publisher and accredited author of one hundred and thirty plays. but no one would deem it improbable that in them is the work of another, or of many other dramatists. i submit that the argument from probabilities is without force against the clear and unambiguous statements of the sonnets quoted in this chapter. footnotes: [ ] _ovid's metamorphoses_, xv., - . [ ] horace, book iii., ode xxx. chapter iv of the character of shakespeare as related to the character of the author of the sonnets the sonnets certainly reveal their author in an attitude of appeal, more or less open and direct, for the love or favor of his friend. no fervor of compliment or protestation of affection allows him to forget or conceal this purpose. when, as is indicated by sonnets lxxvii. to xc., he feared that his friend was transferring his favor or patronage to another poet, his anxiety became acute, and in that group he compared not only his poetry, but his flattery and commendation with that of his rival. in sonnets xxxii. to xxxvii., portraying his grief at his friend's unkindness, he hastens to forgive; and, as already stated, in sonnets xl. to xliii. and cxxvii. to clii., chiding his friend for having accepted the love of his mistress, he crowns him with poetic garlands of compliment and adulation. smitten on one cheek, not only does he turn the other, but he bestows kisses and caresses on the hand that gave the blow. all we know of the character of shakespeare indicates that he was neither meek and complacent, nor quick and eager in forgiving; but that his character in those aspects was quite the reverse of the character of the author of the sonnets. mr. lee states the effect or result of the various traditions as to shakespeare's poaching experiences, and his resentment of the treatment he had received, as follows[ ]: 'and his [shakespeare's] sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits. a poaching adventure, according to a _credible_[ ] tradition, was the immediate cause of his long severance from his native place. "he had," wrote rowe in , "by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and among them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to sir thomas lucy of charlecote near stratford. for this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, _as he thought, somewhat too severely_; and, _in order to revenge_ that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, _yet it is said to have been so very bitter_ that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in warwickshire and shelter himself in london." the independent testimony of archdeacon davies, who was vicar of saperton, gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that shakespeare "was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from sir thomas lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement." the law of shakespeare's day ( eliz., cap. ) punished deer-stealers with three months' imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount of the damage done. the tradition has been challenged on the ground that the charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century. but sir thomas lucy was an extensive game-preserver, and owned at charlecote a warren in which a few harts or does doubtless found an occasional home. samuel ireland was informed in that shakespeare stole the deer, not from charlecote, but from fulbroke park, a few miles off, and ireland supplied in his _views on the warwickshire avon_, , an engraving of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of fulbroke, where he asserted that shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest. an adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as shakespeare's "deer-barn," but no portion of fulbroke park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was lucy's property in elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to sir walter scott in by the owner of charlecote, seems pure invention. the ballad which shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of charlecote, does not, as rowe acknowledged, survive. no authenticity can be allowed the worthless lines beginning, "a parliament member, a justice of peace," which were represented to be shakespeare's on the authority of an old man who lived near stratford and died in . but _such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on shakespearean drama. justice shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of the owner of charlecote._[ ] according to archdeacon davies of saperton, shakespeare's "_revenge_ was so great" that he caricatured lucy as "justice clodpate," who was (davies adds) represented on the stage as "a great man" and as bearing, in allusion to lucy's name, "three louses rampant for his arms." justice shallow, davies's "justice clodpate," came to birth in the second part of _henry iv._ ( ), and he is represented in the opening scene of the _merry wives of windsor_ as having come from gloucestershire to windsor to make a star-chamber matter of a poaching raid on his estate. the "three luces hauriant argent" were the arms borne by the charlecote lucys, and the dramatist's prolonged reference in this scene to the "dozen white luces" on justice shallow's "old coat" fully establishes shallow's identity with lucy. the poaching episode is best assigned to , but it may be questioned whether shakespeare, on fleeing from lucy's persecution, at once sought an asylum in london.' halliwell gives the following traditions of shakespeare's sharp encounters or exchanges of wit[ ]: mr. ben jonson and mr. wm. shakespeare being merry at a tavern, mr. jonson having begun this for his epitaph,-- here lies ben jonson, that was once one, he gives it to mr. shakespeare to make up, who presently writes, who while he lived was a slow thing and now being dead is nothing. another version is: here lies jonson, who was one's son he had a little hair on his chin, his name was benjamin! an amusing allusion to his personal appearance, as any one may see who will turn to ben's portrait. _jonson._ if but stage actors all the world displays where shall we find spectators of their plays? _shakespeare._ little or much of what we see we do; we are all both actors and spectators too. ten in the hundred lies here ingrav'd; 'tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved; if any man ask, who lies in this tomb? oh! oh! quoth the devil, 'tis my john-a-combe. who lies in this tomb? hough, quoth the devil, 'tis my son, john-combe. the tradition is that the subject of the last six lines having died, shakespeare then composed an epitaph as follows: howe'er he lived, judge not, john combe shall never be forgot, while poor hath memory, for he did gather to make the poor his issue; he their father, as record of his tilth and seed, did crown him, in his latter need. this is said to have been composed of a brother of john-a-combe: thin in beard, and thick in purse, never man beloved worse, he went to the grave with many a curse, the devil and he had both one nurse. a blacksmith is said to have accosted shakespeare with,-- now, mr. shakespeare, tell me, if you can, the difference between a youth and a young man? to which the poet immediately replied,-- thou son of fire, with thy face like a maple, the same difference as between a scalded and a coddled apple. an old tradition reports that being awakened after a prolonged carouse, and asked to renew the contest, he refused, saying, i have drunk with piping pebworth, dancing marston, haunted hillborough, and hungry grafton with dadging exhall, papist wixford beggarly broom, and drunken bidford. the lines inscribed on the slab above his grave, preventing the removal of his bones, according to the custom of that time, to the adjacent charnel-house, are as follows: good friend, for jesus' sake forbeare to dig the dust enclosed heare; bleste be the man that spare these stones, and curst be he that moves my bones.[ ] mr. lee gives a statement as to shakespeare's propensity to litigation as follows[ ]: 'as early as abraham sturley had suggested that shakespeare should purchase the tithes of stratford. seven years later, on july , , he bought for £ of ralph huband an unexpired term of thirty-one years of a ninety-two years' lease of a moiety of the tithes of stratford, old stratford, bishopton, and welcombe. the moiety was subject to a rent of £ to the corporation, who were the reversionary owners on the lease's expiration, and of £ to john barker, the heir of a former proprietor. the investment brought shakespeare, under the most favorable circumstances, no more than an annuity of £ ; and the refusal of persons who claimed an interest in the other moiety to acknowledge the full extent of their liability to the corporation led that body to demand from the poet payments justly due from others. after he joined with two interested persons, richard lane of awston, and thomas greene, the town clerk of stratford, in a suit in chancery to determine the exact responsibilities of all the tithe-owners, and in they presented a bill of complaint to lord chancellor ellesmere, with what result is unknown. his acquisition of a part ownership in the tithes was fruitful in legal embarrassments. _shakespeare inherited his father's love of litigation, and stood rigorously by his rights in all his business relations._ in march, , he recovered in london a debt of £ from one john clayton. in july, , in the local court at stratford, he sued one philip rogers, to whom he had supplied since the preceding march malt to the value of £ _s._ _d._, and had on june th lent _s._ in cash. rogers paid back _s._, and shakespeare sought the balance of the account, £ _s._ _d._ during and he was at law with another fellow-townsman, john addenbroke. on february , , shakespeare, who was apparently represented by his solicitor and kinsman, thomas greene, obtained judgment from a jury against addenbroke for the payment of £ and £ _s._ costs, but addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved barren. shakespeare avenged himself by proceeding against one thomas horneby, who had acted as the absconding debtor's bail.' the same author gives the following statement as to his reputation for _sportive adventure_[ ]: 'hamlet, othello, and lear were _rôles_ in which he [burbage] gained especial renown. but burbage and shakespeare were popularly credited with co-operation in less solemn enterprises. they were reputed to be companions in many _sportive_ adventures. the sole anecdote of shakespeare that is _positively known to have been recorded in his lifetime_ relates that burbage, when playing richard iii., agreed with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance; shakespeare, overhearing the conversation, anticipated the actor's visit and met burbage on his arrival with the quip that "william the conqueror was before richard the third." such gossip possibly deserves little more acceptance than the later story, in the same key, which credits shakespeare with the paternity of sir william d'avenant. the latter was baptized at oxford, on march , , as the son of john d'avenant, the landlord of the crown inn, where shakespeare lodged in his journeys to and from stratford. the story of shakespeare's parental relation to d'avenant was long current in oxford, and was at times complacently accepted by the reputed son. shakespeare is known to have been a welcome guest at john d'avenant's house, and another son, robert, boasted of the kindly notice which the poet took of him as a child. it is safer to adopt the less compromising version which makes shakespeare the godfather of the boy william instead of his father. _but the antiquity and persistence of the scandal belie the assumption that shakespeare was known to his contemporaries as a man of scrupulous virtue._' all the extracts i have here quoted are from writers who admit no question as to the authorship of the shakespearean plays. and there is nothing which they or any biography or tradition bring to us which presents any act or characteristic at all at variance with the indications of these quotations. and it is very remarkable how strong is the concurrence of indications, from the slab above his grave, from old, musty, and otherwise forgotten records of court proceedings, and from traditions, whether from the hamlet of his birth or the city where he wrought and succeeded. i have not quoted the lines which have been variously handed down as those which the young shakespeare affixed to the gate of the wealthy and powerful sir thomas lucy. their authenticity is doubtful.[ ] but that the boy shakespeare, weak and helpless for such a struggle, resented his treatment and answered back with the only weapon he had, risking and enduring being driven from his home and birthplace, and kept good the grudge in the days of his success, i think cannot be doubted. the records of court proceedings, the imprecation above his grave, both indicate a man of strong will and not unaccustomed to mastery. we may reject one or another of the retorts or sallies in verse, but we must, i think, agree, that the fact that they are brought to us by recorded and very old traditions, indicates a character or repute in accordance with their implication; and especially must this be so, when we find that they agree with the indications of other evidence not in any degree in question. these various indications support each other like the bundle of sticks which together could not be broken. from them i think we learn that shakespeare, however pleasant or attractive at times, was not a man yielding or complacent to opposition or injury; but that he was a man of fighting blood or instincts, quick in wit and repartee, apt and inclined for aggressive sally, ready to slash and lay about him in all encounters,--in short, a very mercutio in temperament, and in the lively and constant challenges of his life. i submit that the records we have of the life of william shakespeare concur in indicating a man who could not have written the sonnets under the circumstances and with the motives which they reveal. it should not be overlooked that at the time these sonnets were written, certainly as early as or , shakespeare was above pecuniary want, and had begun to make investments, and apparently regarded himself and was regarded as a wealthy man.[ ] footnotes: [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . [ ] the italics in this and all the following quotations are my own. [ ] as i have said elsewhere, i do not contend that shakespeare did not have a part and a large part in the production of the shakespearean plays. my insistence is only that he was not the transcendent genius to whom we owe their wonderful and unrivalled poetry. [ ] halliwell's _shakespeare_, pp. , , , - . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. , . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. , . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . [ ] the different versions of those lines are printed in the appendix. [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . chapter v of the general scope and effect of the sonnets as indicating their author as has been said before, the sonnets obviously have a common theme. they celebrate his friend, his beauty, his winning and lovable qualities, leading the poet to forgive and to continue to love, even when his friend has supplanted him in the favors of his mistress. they are replete with compliment and adulation. little side views or perspectives are introduced with a marvellous facility of invention; and yet in them all, even in the invocation to marry, in the jealousy of another poet, in the railing to or of his false mistress, is the face or thought of his friend, apparently his patron. no other poet, it seems to me, could have filled two thousand lines of poetry with thoughts to, of, or relating to one person of his own sex. who that person was critics have not agreed. but that he was a person who was somehow connected with the life-work of the poet seems beyond dispute. mr. lee, speaking of the purpose of the sonnets, at pages and , says: 'twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled "dedicatory" sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and without disguise to be a patron of the poet's verse (nos. xxiii., xxvi., xxxii., xxxvii., xxxviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lxxxvi., c., ci., ciii., cvi.). in one of these,--sonnet lxxviii.,--shakespeare asserted: so oft have i invoked thee for my muse and found such fair assistance in my verse as every alien pen hath got my use and _under thee their poesy disperse_. subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron's esteem. shakespeare's biographer is under an obligation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined so explicitly. the problem presented by the patron is simple. shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one. sing [sc. o muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem, and gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. - ). for to no other pass my verses tend than of your _graces and your gifts to tell_ (ciii. - ). the earl of southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of shakespeare that is known to biographical research. no contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank.' this quotation has been made because it is fair and accurate, because of the high authority of the book, but principally because it is the view of one who has no doubt that shakespeare was the author of the shakespearean plays. research and ingenuity have been taxed to ascertain who was the unnamed and mysterious friend at whose feet are laid so many poetic wreaths, woven by such a master. all discussion has assumed that this friend was a patron, who somehow greatly aided the poet, and to whom the poet felt himself greatly indebted. and so it was at once suggested that his friend was one of the nobility or peers of that age. the earl of southampton (to whom by name _venus and adonis_ and _lucrece_ were dedicated) has been very generally assumed to be the person intended. lord pembroke [william herbert] has also been presented as the unnamed friend. _i think the sonnets contain internal evidence that they were not addressed to either of these peers_, and were not addressed to any one of their class. it is very remarkable how narrow is the range of these sonnets,--how little they say, convey or indicate as to the person to whom they were addressed. from the first seventeen sonnets we infer that the poet understood that his friend was unmarried; a line in sonnet iii. perhaps indicates a peculiar pride in his mother, and that it pleased him to be told that he resembled her; from a line in sonnet xx., "a man in hue," etc., it has been inferred that his friend's beard or hair was auburn, and from sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. it has been inferred that his friend was familiarly called "will," or at any rate that his name was william. obviously he was in some way a patron or helper to our poet, and to another poet as well[ ]; he superseded the poet in the favors of his mistress; he was beautiful, attractive, genial, and sunny in disposition; that he was not infrequently responsive to lascivious love is indicated.[ ] we have already fully considered what the sonnets indicate as to his age. and now i put the inquiry: is there anything else as to the poet's friend that these two thousand lines of poetry state or indicate? with diligent search i can find in all those lines no other fact indicated or stated as to this mysterious friend or patron. in sonnet cxxiv. the poet says: if _my dear love were but_ the child of state, it might for fortune's bastard be unfather'd. from that it has been argued that his friend was of the nobility, a "child of state." reading those two lines, or reading the entire sonnet, it seems clear that if they contain any indication as to the station of his friend, the indication is rather against than in favor of his being of the nobility, "a child of state." i do not think, however, that the lines allow any clear or certain deduction either way, but have called attention to them because they are often cited on this point. in sonnet xiii. occurs the line, who lets so fair a _house_ fall to decay. the word "house" as there used has been interpreted as though used in the sense of the house of york, and so made an implication that his friend was of a lordly line. such a far-fetched and unusual interpretation should not be adopted unless clearly indicated. and the context clearly indicates that the phrase "so fair a house" is used as a metaphor for the poet's fair and beautiful body. if this inquiry were to be affected by far-drawn or even doubtful interpretations, i might quote from sonnet lxxxvi. there the poet, referring to his rival, says: but when your _countenance_ fill'd up his line. by merely limiting the word _countenance_ to its primary meaning, we may have the inference that his rival's verse was spoken or _acted_ by his friend, and so that his friend was an actor. i do not think, however, that either of the two lines last cited are entitled to any weight as argument, but they illustrate the distinction between lines or sonnets which may be the basis of surmise or conjecture, and those elsewhere cited, to which two different effects cannot be given without rending their words from their natural meaning. * * * * * the earl of southampton was born in . he bore an historic name; fields, forests, and castles were his and had come to him from his ancestors; all of england that was most beautiful or most attractive was in the circle in which he moved and to which his presence contributed. in he appeared in the lists at a tournament in honor of the queen; in and he joined in dangerous and successful naval and military expeditions; in he was married.[ ] is it conceivable that two thousand lines of adulatory poetry could have been written to and of him, and no hint appear of incidents like these? it is simply incredible. what is omitted rather than what is said clearly indicates that the life of the poet's friend presented no such incidents,--indeed no incidents which the poet chronicler of court and camp would interweave in his garlands of loving compliment. urging his friend to marry, the poet, comparing the harmony of music to a happy marriage, in sonnet viii. says: mark how one string, sweet husband to another, strikes each in each by mutual ordering; resembling sire and child and happy mother, who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing: whose speechless song, being many, seeming one, sings this to thee: "thou single wilt prove none." but is it not a little strange that the pen that drew rosalind and juliet should have gone no farther, when by a touch he could have filled it with suggestions of the fair, the stately and the titled maidens who were in the court life of that day, and whose names and faces and reputed characters must have been known to the poet, whatever his place or station in london? how would a tracing of a mother, nobly born, or of a lordly but deceased father, of some old castle, of some fair eminence, of some grand forest, or of ancestral oaks shading fair waters, have lightened the picture! and could the poet who gave us the magnificent pictures of english kings and queens, princes and lords--could that poet, writing to and of one of the fairest of the courtly circle of the reign of elizabeth, so withhold his pen that it gives no hint that his friend was in or of that circle, or any suggestion of his most happy and fortunate surroundings? surely, in painting so fully the beauties of his friend, the poet would have allowed to appear some hint of the beauty of light and color in which he moved. i have before me in the book of mr. lee, a copy of the picture of the earl of southampton painted in welbeck abbey. the dress is of the court; and the sword, the armor, the plume and rich drapery all indicate a member of the nobility. could our great poet in so many lines of extreme compliment and adulation have always omitted any reference to the insignia of rank which were almost a part of the young earl; and would he always have escaped all reference to coronet or sword, to lands or halls, or to any of the employments or sports, privileges or honors, then much more than now, distinctive of a peer of the realm? and all that is here said equally repels the inference that these sonnets were addressed to any person connected with the nobility. the claim that they were addressed to lord pembroke [william herbert] i think is exploded, if it ever had substance.[ ] lord pembroke did not come to london until and was then but eighteen years old. there is not a particle of evidence that he and shakespeare had any relations or intimacy whatever. while i regard the view that the sonnets were addressed to southampton as entirely untenable, it nevertheless has this basis,--two of the shakespearean poems were dedicated to southampton. at least we may say that, if they were addressed to any person of that class, there is a strong probability in his favor. and in order to consider that claim i would ask the reader to turn back to sonnet ii., page . that certainly is one of the very earliest of the sonnets, almost certainly written when shakespeare was not older than thirty and southampton not over twenty-one years of age. with these facts in mind, the assumption that those lines were addressed to the earl of southampton becomes altogether improbable. can we imagine a man of thirty, in the full glow of a vigorous and successful life, saying to a friend of twenty-one,--you should marry now, because when you are _forty years_ old (about twice your present age and ten years above my own) your beauty will have faded and your blood be cold? we should not so slander the author of the shakespearean plays. * * * * * the language of the sonnets implies a familiarity and equality of intercourse not consistent with the theory that they were addressed to a peer of england by a person in shakespeare's position.[ ] the dedication of _lucrece_, which apparently was written in , omits no reference to title, and envinces no disposition or privilege to ignore the rank or dignities of the earl. i will quote no particular sonnet on this point; but the impression which the entire series seems to me to convey, is that the poet was addressing a friend separated from him by no distinction of rank. sonnets xcvi. and xcvii. are instances of such familiarity of address and communication. * * * * * on the other hand, there is not a single indication which the sonnets contain as to the poet's friend which in any manner disagrees with what we know of shakespeare. it may be said that being married the invocation to marry could not have been addressed to him. but the test is,--how did he pass, how was he known in london, as married or unmarried? he is supposed to have come to london in , or when he was twenty-two years of age, and he was then married and had three children. he remained in london about twenty-five years, and there is no indication that any member of his family ever resided there or visited him, and the clear consensus of opinion seems to be that they did not.[ ] the indications that he had little love for his wife are regrettably clear.[ ] when the earlier sonnets were written he must have been living there about nine years, and must have had an income sufficient easily to have maintained his family in the city.[ ] that he led a life notoriously free as to women cannot be questioned. traditions elsewhere referred to so indicate[ ]; and whether the sonnets were written by or to him they equally so testify. under such circumstances his friends or acquaintances would not be led to presume that he was married, but would assume the contrary. they would have done or considered precisely as we do, classing our friends as married or unmarried, as their mode of life indicates. hence the invocation to marry is entirely consistent with the theory that the sonnets were addressed to shakespeare. when sonnet civ. was written, the poet had known his friend but three years[ ]; the sonnets referring to marriage are printed first, and very probably were written much earlier than sonnet civ., and perhaps when their acquaintance was first formed. the fact that the appeal ceases with the seventeenth sonnet, and that after that there is not even a hint of marrying, or of female excellence and beauty, perhaps indicates that the first seventeen sonnets had provoked a disclosure which restrained the poet from further reference to those subjects. * * * * * the starting point in this chapter is the fact stated by mr. lee, and i think conceded or assumed by all writers on these sonnets,--that they were written to some one intimately connected with the shakespearean plays, either as a patron or in some other manner. many, perhaps all, of the plays were produced, and in that way published, at the theatre where shakespeare acted. those of the higher class or order as well as those of the lower class were published as his. those most strenuous in supporting the claims of authorship for shakespeare, have, i think, generally conceded that the plays, as we now have them, reveal in various parts the work of more than one author. and from that it has been suggested that shakespeare must have had a fellow-worker,--a collaborator. lee's _shakespeare_, brandes's _critical study of shakespeare_, and the temple edition of shakespeare's works, are practically agreed on this fact in relation to _henry vi._, _henry viii._, _titus andronicus_, and some other plays. there must have been a very considerable degree of intercourse between the two persons who worked together even on a single one of these plays. and there are sonnets which at least suggest a degree and kind of intercourse and communication between the poet and his friend which such a relation would require. chiding his friend for absence in sonnets lvii. and lviii., the poet indicates such waiting and watching as would come to him had their relations been very intimate, and perhaps indicates that he and his friend lodged together. those sonnets are as follows: being your slave, what should i do but tend upon the _hours_ and times of your desire? i have no precious time at all to spend, nor _services_ to do, _till you require_. nor dare i chide the _world-without-end hour_ whilst i, my sovereign, _watch the clock for you_, nor think the bitterness of absence sour when you have bid your servant once adieu; nor dare i question with my jealous thought _where you may be_, or your affairs suppose, but, _like a sad slave, stay_ and think of nought save, _where you are how happy_ you make those. so true a fool is love that in your will, though you do anything, he thinks no ill. that god forbid that made me first your slave, i should _in thought control your times of pleasure_, or at your hand the account of _hours_ to crave, being your vassal, _bound to stay your leisure_! o, let me suffer, being at your beck, the imprison'd absence of your liberty; and patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check, without accusing you of injury. be where you list, your charter is so strong that _you yourself may privilege your time to what you will_; to you it doth belong yourself to pardon of self-doing crime. i am to _wait_, though waiting so be hell, not _blame your pleasure_, be it ill or well. i am not unaware that there are other sonnets which indicate that they lived apart, though it is of course quite possible that they lived apart at one time and together at another. but whether or not they at any time lodged together, these sonnets indicate that their lives were brought together by some common purpose, and that hours and seasons of communication and perhaps of kindred labor were frequent to them. our affections or friendships do not blossom in untilled fields; it is the comradeship of common effort, mutually helpful and beneficial, that more than often determines the impalpable garments and coverings of our lives. certainly we may believe that the two characters that fill these two thousand lines of poetry did not live and move so far apart as were the busy actor at a theatre and the courted and adventurous peer of england. if the friend to whom the sonnets were addressed was shakespeare, and if the author of the sonnets and of the accredited shakespearean plays was some "pale, wasted," and unknown student who sold his labors and his genius to another, we may perhaps see how they would have had frequent interviews and hours of labor, and how shakespeare might have had all the relations to the poet, which the sonnets imply of the poet's friend. but if shakespeare, then well advanced both to fame and fortune, was the poet it is very difficult to imagine any one person who could have borne to him all the relations which the sonnets indicate--patron or benefactor and familiar associate and companion; a rival and successor in the favors of his mistress, and a loved or at least cherished friend. while i present the view that some unknown student wrote, and shakespeare adopted and published, the shakespearean plays, i do not deny to shakespeare a part, perhaps a large part, in their production. as i have said, there are many plays attributed to shakespeare, some or the greater portions of which are distinctively of a lower class than the greater plays or the sonnets. the theory of collaboration affects at least six plays commonly classed as shakespearean, and perhaps others classed as doubtful plays. why is not the situation satisfied if we ascribe to shakespeare a capacity equal to the composition of _titus andronicus_? that is a play which seems to have been attractive from its plot and the character of its incidents. in it, however, there are but few lines that seem to be from the same author as the sonnets and the greater of the recognized shakespearean plays. the remainder of the play has no poetic merit which raises it far above the rustic poetry which is handed down by tradition as shakespeare's. and if we give the unknown student all credit for authorship of the finer poetry of the greater dramas, may we not still assume that shakespeare labored with him, assisting in moulding into form adapted to the stage the poetry that burst from his friend with volcanic force; or that he perhaps sometimes suggested the side lights and sudden transitions which appear so often,--for instance, in the grave scene in _hamlet_ or the nurse's part in _romeo and juliet_?[ ] and if some great unknown was the sole author and shakespeare was the publisher and was to take part in the representation of these plays, may we not still, however they lodged, find ample occasion for the waiting hours of the poet, which would be entirely unexplained if the person addressed was the earl of southampton or some other member of the nobility? such a view explains very much which is otherwise inexplicable. if into that series of publications came the genius of the unknown author of the sonnets, touching some of the plays like stray sunbeams, and as the work progressed absorbing and filling all their framework,--it must yet be assumed that he did not labor without recompense. and so we may believe that shakespeare from friend became patron, and that this employment, coming as the poet was passing to life's "steepy night," gave him the means and the leisure for those dreams of lovers, of captains and of kings, so visioned on his brain that he wrote of them as of persons real and living. so regarding the author of the sonnets, we appreciate his jealousy, when (as perhaps in _henry viii._) another and almost equal poet was employed, and may understand how he could blame his false mistress and yet forgive his friend. his poetry and the opportunity and leisure for its enjoyment was his real mistress, like the love of andromache for hector displacing and absorbing all other loves. * * * * * if the sonnets were written by shakespeare, who the friend and patron so intimately related to the poet and his work was, is a riddle still unsolved; but if they were written by some unknown poet, the obvious and reasonable inference is that they were addressed to shakespeare.[ ] it may be asked why i would leave anything as the work of shakespeare, if i deny to him the authorship of the greater plays. my answer is this: i believe he did not write the sonnets; and if the sonnets are the work of another, i think it fairly follows that the great dramas, considered as mere poetry, are so clearly in the same class as the sonnets, that we must ascribe the authorship of the greater shakespearean dramas to the same great unknown. when it is once agreed that any considerable portions of the plays credited to shakespeare are from different authors, almost the entire force of the argument resting on report or tradition is destroyed; because report or tradition is about equally satisfied and equally antagonized by ascribing to him the authorship of either section into which the admission of dual authorship concedes that they are divided. that shakespeare must have had a genius for dramatic work,--though not necessarily for poetry,--his success as a reputed dramatist and as a manager, all his history and traditions, very clearly indicate. and conceding him that, why is not the situation fully satisfied by considering that he was the lesser, or one of the lesser, rather than the greater of the collaborators; and that his knowledge of the stage and his talent for conceiving proper dramatic effects or situations, made his labors valuable to the greater poet, aiding him to give to his works a dramatic form and movement which many other great poets have entirely failed to attain. so considering, the shakespearean plays will in some degree still seem to us the work of the gentle shakespeare, although in large part the product of the older and more mature mind, the dreaming and loving recluse and student, who could say,-- _your name_ from hence immortal life shall have, though _i_, once gone, to all the world must die: the earth can yield _me_ but a common grave, when _you_ entombed in men's eyes shall lie. and so believing, may we not still go with reverent feet to that grave upon the avon? for there, as i conceive, sleeps he whose sunny graces won the undying love of the greatest of lovers and of poets, and whose assistance and support made possible the dreaming hours and days in which were delivered from his loving friend's overburdened brain the marvellous and matchless creations of the shakespearean anthology. footnotes: [ ] sonnets lxxviii., lxxix., lxxx., lxxxv., lxxxvi. [ ] sonnets xcv. and xcvi. [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, p. . [ ] it was not until or that a coat of arms was granted to john shakespeare, the father of william. that appears to have been granted on the application of the son, and to have been allowed, in part at least, because his wife, the mother of william, was the daughter of robert arden, gentleman. the grant gave the father the title of esquire and not of gentleman. lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, p. ; halliwell's _life of shakespeare_, p. ; grant white's _introductory life of shakespeare_, pp. , . [ ] lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - , , . [ ] halliwell's _shakespeare_, p. , lee's _shakespeare_, pp. - . [ ] see pp. - , _supra_. [ ] the portion of sonnet civ. relevant to this point is printed at page , _supra_. [ ] these plays contain names of places and persons, and allusions and references, which could hardly have been made had shakespeare been a stranger to their composition. in _as you like it_, the forest has his mother's family name, "arden"; the allusion to sir thomas lucy, has already been noticed. page , _supra_. [ ] while i speak of the poet of the sonnets and of the greater plays as unknown, i can but believe that the sonnets, when carefully studied in connection with contemporaneous history and chronicles, will yet afford an adequate clew to his identification. it occurs to me that a promising line of inquiry might be made on this assumption,--that the poet was born about twenty years before shakespeare and died soon after the production of the plays ceased, or when about sixty-five or seventy years of age; that he had reverses and disappointments, perhaps humiliations; that his name was william, and that he had written other works before he wrote the shakespearean plays. it is also possible, although i think not probable, that the initials, w. h., appearing in the introduction to these sonnets may refer to him. that he had produced earlier works, i think is shown by sonnet lxxvi. the first lines of that sonnet are as follows: "why is my verse so barren of new pride, so far from variation of quick change? why with the time do i not glance aside to new-found methods and to compounds strange? _why write i still all one, ever the same, and keep inventions in a noted weed, that every word doth almost tell my name_, showing their birth and where they did proceed?" chapter vi of the conclusions to be drawn from the sonnets the result of the preceding discussion, as it appears to me, is as follows: the sonnets were not written by shakespeare, but it is very probable that he was the friend or patron around whom their poetry moves and to whom most of them are addressed. reading the entire series with that theory in mind, very many difficulties of interpretation are entirely overcome. without this theory so many of the sonnets seem blind, or obviously false or inaccurate, that many have been led to the inference of conceits, affectations, imitations, or hidden meanings. adopting the theory here presented, there is neither reason nor excuse for giving to their words any other than their natural or ordinary meaning. i would not deny to shakespeare great talent. his success in and with theatres certainly forbids us to do so. that he had a bent or a talent for rhyming or for poetry, an early and persistent tradition and the inscription over his grave indicate. and otherwise there could hardly have been attributed to him so many plays beside those written by the author of the sonnets. assuming that the sonnets were not written by him, it would then seem clear that to shakespeare, working as an actor, adapter or perhaps author, came a very great poet, one who outclassed all the writers of that day, in some respects all other writers; and that it is the poetry of that great unknown which, flowing into shakespeare's work, comprises all, or nearly all of it which the world treasures or cares to remember. i would not dispute any claim made for shakespeare for dramatic as distinguished from poetic talent, for wit, or comely or captivating graces. the case is all with him there,--at least there is no evidence to the contrary. but i insist that the sonnets reveal another poet, and reveal that those great dramas, or at least that those portions of them which are in the same class or grade of poetry as the sonnets, were the work of that great unknown. appendix the different versions of the verses which shakespeare is alleged to have composed on sir thomas lucy are as follows: a parliamente member, a justice of peace, at home a poore scare-crow, at london an asse; if lowsie is lucy, as some volke miscalle it, then lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it: he thinkes himselfe greate, yet an asse in his state we allowe by his eares but with asses to mate. if lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it, sing lowsie lucy, whatever befalle it. sir thomas was too covetous to covet so much deer, when horns enough upon his head most plainly did appear. had not his worship one deer left? what then? he had a wife took pains enough to find him horns should last him during life. transcriber's notes: the following printing errors were corrected: "adronicus" corrected to "andronicus" (book page ). "th" corrected to "the" (footnote ). "of" corrected to "on" (footnote ). comma changed to period at the end of footnote . passages in italics indicated by underscore _italics_. otherwise, all printing is as appears in the original. additional spacing after some of the poetry and block quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as is in the original text. side lights by james runciman _with memoir by grant allen, and introduction by w.t. stead. edited by john f. runciman_ london t. fisher unwin paternoster square mdcccxciii contents. a note on the author. by grant allen an introductory word about the book. by w.t. stead i. letter-writers ii. on writing oneself out iii. the decline of literature iv. colour-blindness in literature v. the surfeit of books vi. people who are "down" vii. ill-assorted marriages viii. happy marriages ix. shrews x. are we wealthy xi. the values of labour xii. the hopeless poor xiii. waifs and strays xiv. stage-children xv. public and private morality: past and present xvi. "raising the level of amusements" xvii. a little sermon on failures xviii. "vanity of vanities" xix. gamblers xx. scoundrels xxi. quiet old towns xxii. the sea xxiii. sorrow xxiv. death xxv. journalism a note on the author. by grant allen. i knew james runciman but little, and that little for the most part in the way of business. but no one could know that ardent and eager soul at all, no matter how slightly, without admiring and respecting much that was powerful and vigorous in his strangely-compounded personality. his very look attracted. he had human weaknesses not a few, but all of the more genial and humane sort; for he was essentially and above everything a lovable man, a noble, interesting, and unique specimen of genuine, sincere, whole-hearted manhood. he was a northumbrian by birth, "and knew the northumbrian coast," says one of his north-country friends, "like his mother's face." his birthplace was at cresswell, a little village near morpeth, where he was born in august, , so that he was not quite thirty-nine when he finally wore himself out with his ceaseless exertions. he had a true north-country education, too, among the moors and cliffs, and there drank in to the full that love of nature, and especially of the sea, which forms so conspicuous a note in his later writings. heather and wave struck the keynotes. a son of the people, he went first, in his boyhood, to the village school at ellington; but on his eleventh birthday he was removed from the wild north to a new world at greenwich. there he spent two years in the naval school; and straightway began his first experiences of life on his own account as a pupil teacher at north shields ragged school, not far from his native hamlet. "a worse place of training for a youth," says a writer in _the schoolmaster_, "it would be hard to discover. the building was unsuitable, the children rough, and the neighbourhood vile--and the long tramp over the moors to cresswell and back at week ends was, perhaps, what enabled the young apprentice to preserve his health of mind and body. his education was very much in his own hands. he managed in a few weeks to study enough to pass his examinations with credit. the rest of his time was spent in reading everything which came in his way, so that when he entered borough-road in january, , he was not only almost at the top of the list, but he was the best informed man of his year. his fellow candidates remember even now his appearance during scholarship week. like david, he was ruddy of countenance, like saul he towered head and shoulders above the rest, and a mass of fair hair fell over his forehead. whene'er he took his walks abroad he wore a large soft hat, and a large soft scarf, and carried a stick that was large but not soft." to this graphic description i will add a second one. "he was a splendid all-round athlete," says another friend, who knew him at this time, in the british and foreign school society's london college. "six feet two or three in height, and with a fine muscular development, he could box, wrestle, fence, or row with all comers, and beat them with ridiculous ease. no one could have been made to believe that he would die, physically worn out, before he was forty. his intellectual mastery was as unquestioned as his physical superiority; he always topped the examination lists, to the chagrin of some of the lecturers, whom he teased sadly by protesting against injustice the moment it peeped out, by teaching all the good young men to smoke prodigiously, by scattering revolutionary verses about the college, and finally by collecting and burning in one grand bonfire every copy of an obnoxious text-book under which the students had long suffered." this was indeed the germ of the man as we all knew him long afterwards. runciman left the college to take up the mastership of a london board school in a low part of deptford; and here he soon gained an extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums in london. mr. thomas wright, the "journeyman engineer," has already told in print elsewhere the story of runciman's descent into the depths of deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off. from the children, his good influence extended to the parents; and it was an almost every-day occurrence for visitors from the slums to burst into the school to fetch the master to some coster who was "a-killin' his woman." the brawny young giant would dive into the courts where the police go in couples, clamber ricketty stairs, and "interview" the fighting pair. "his plan was to appeal to the manliness of the offender, and make him ashamed of himself; often such a visit ended in a loan, whereby the 'barrer' was replenished and the surly husband set to work; but if all efforts at peacemaking were useless, this new apostle had methods beyond the reach of the ordinary missionary--he would (the case deserving it) drop his mild, insinuating, persuasive tones, and not only threaten to pulp the incorrigible blackguard into a jelly, but proceed to do it." runciman, however, was much more in fibre than a mere schoolmaster. he worked hard at his classes by day; he worked equally hard by night at his own education, and at his first attempts at journalism. he matriculated at london university, and passed his first b.sc. examination. at one and the same time he was carrying on his own school, in the far east end, contributing largely to an educational paper, _the teacher_, and writing two or three pages a week in _vanity fair_, which he long sub-edited. his powers of work were enormous, and he systematically overtaxed them. it is not surprising that, under this strain and stress, even that magnificent physique showed signs of breaking down, like every other writer's. a long holiday on the mediterranean, and another at torquay, restored him happily to his wonted health; but he saw he must now choose between schoolmastering and journalism. to run the two abreast was too much, even for james runciman's gigantic powers. permanent work on _vanity fair_ being offered to him on his return, he decided to accept it; and thenceforth he plunged with all the strength and ardour of his fervid nature into his new profession. "it was during this period of insatiable greed for work," says the correspondent of a nottingham journal, "that i first knew him. you may wonder how he could possibly get through the tasks which he set himself. you would not wonder if you had seen him, when he was in the humour, tramp round the room and pour out a stream of talk on men and books which might have gone direct into print at a high marketable value. the london correspondent of a nottingham paper says that runciman was justly vain of the speed of his pen. that is true. he considered that a journalist ought to be able to dictate an article at the rate of words a minute to a shorthand writer. i doubt whether anybody can do that, but runciman certainly thought he could. he loved to settle a thing off on the instant with one huge effort. here is an authentic story that shows his method. it is a physical performance, but he tackled journalistic obstacles in the same spirit: "a parent, who fancied he had a grievance, burst furiously into the schoolroom one day, and startled its quietness with a string of oaths. 'that isn't how we talk here,' said runciman, in his quiet way. 'will you step into my room if you have anything to discuss?' another volley of oaths was the reply, and the unwary parent added that he wasn't going out, and nobody could put him out. runciman was not the man to allow such a challenge of his authority and prowess to be issued before his scholars and to go unanswered. without another word, he took the man by the coat-collar with one hand, by the most convenient part of his breeches with the other hand, carried him to the door, gave him a half-a-dozen admonitory shakings, and chucked him down outside. then he returned and made this cool entry in the school log-book: 'father of the boy ---- came into the school to-day, and was very disorderly. i carried him out and chastised him.'" it was while he was engaged on _vanity fair_ that i first met runciman--i should think somewhere about the year . he then edited (or sub-edited) for a short time that clever but abortive little journal, _london_, started by mr. w.e. henley, and contributed to by andrew lang, robert louis stevenson, edmund gosse, and half a dozen more of us. here we met not infrequently. i was immensely impressed by runciman's vigorous personality, and by his profound sympathy with the troubles and trials and poverty of the real people. he called himself a conservative, it is true, while i called myself a radical; but, except in name, i could not see much difference between our democratic tendencies. runciman appeared to me a most earnest and able thinker, full of north-country grit, and overflowing with energy. his later literary work is well known to the world. he contributed to the _st. james's gazette_ an admirable series of seafaring sketches, afterwards reprinted as "the romance of the north coast." he also wrote "special" articles for the _standard_ and the _pall mall_, as well as essays on social and educational topics for the _contemporary_ and the _fortnightly_. the humour and pathos of pupil-teaching were exquisitely brought out in his "school board idylls" and "schools and scholars"; his knowledge of the sea and his experience of fishermen supplied him with materials for "skippers and shellbacks" and for "past and present." he was always a lover of his kind, so his work has almost invariably a strong sympathetic note; and perhaps his best-known book, "a dream of the north sea," was written in support of the mission to fishermen. he produced but one novel, "grace balmaign's sweetheart"; but his latest work, "joints in our social armour," returned once more to that happier vein of picturesque description which sat most easily and naturally upon him. the essays which compose the present volume were contributed to the columns of the _family herald_. and this is their history:--for many years i had answered the correspondence and written the social essays in that excellent little journal--a piece of work on which i am not ashamed to say that i always look back with affectionate pleasure. several years since, however, i found myself compelled by health to winter abroad, and therefore unable to continue my weekly contributions. who could fill up the gap? who answer my dear old friends and questioners? the proprietor asked me to recommend a substitute. i bethought me instinctively at once of runciman. the work was, indeed, not an easy one for which to find a competent workman. it needed a writer sufficiently well educated to answer a wide range of questions on the most varied topics, yet sufficiently acquainted with the habits, ideas, and social codes of the lower middle class and the labouring people to throw himself readily into their point of view on endless matters of life and conduct. above all, it needed a man who could sympathise genuinely with the simplest of his fellows. the love troubles of housemaids, the perplexities as to etiquette, or as to practical life among shop-girls and footmen, must strike him, not as ludicrous, but as subjects for friendly advice and assistance. the fine-gentleman journalist would clearly have been useless for such a post as that. runciman was just cut out for it. i suggested the work to him, and he took to it kindly. the editor was delighted with the way he buckled up to his new task, and thanked me warmly afterwards for recommending so admirable and so gentle a workman. those who do not know the nature of the task may smile; but the man who answers the _family herald_ correspondence, stands in the position of confidant and father-confessor to tens of thousands of troubled and anxious souls among his fellow-countrymen, and still more his fellow-countrywomen. it is, indeed, a _sacerdoce_. the essays are usually contributed by the same person who answers the correspondence; and the collection of runciman's papers reprinted in this little volume will show that they have often no mean literary value. for many years, however, runciman had systematically overworked, and in other ways abused, his magnificent constitution. the seeds of consumption were gradually developed. but the crash came suddenly. early in the summer of , he broke down altogether. he was sent to a hydropathic establishment at matlock; but the doctors discovered he was already in a most critical condition, and four weeks later advised his wife to take him back to his own home at kingston. his splendid physique seemed to run down with a rush, and when a month was over, he died, on july --th, a victim to his own devouring energy--perhaps, too, to the hardships of a life of journalism. "this was a man," said his friendly biographer, whom i have already quoted. no sentence could more justly sum up the feeling of all who knew james runciman. "bare power and tenderness, and such sadly human weakness"--that is the verdict of one who well knew him. i cannot claim to have known him well myself; but it is an honour to be permitted to add a memorial stone to the lonely cairn of a fellow-worker for humanity. g.a. an introductory word about the book. by w.t. stead. james runciman was a remarkably gifted man who died just about the time when he ought to have been getting into harness for his life's work. he had in him, more than most men, the materials out of which an english zola might have been made. and as we badly need an english zola, and have very few men out of whom such a genius could be fashioned, i have not ceased to regret the death of the author of this volume. for zola is the supreme type in our day of the novelist-journalist, the man who begins by getting up his facts at first-hand with the care and the exhaustiveness of a first-rate journalist, and who then works them up with the dramatic and literary skill of a great novelist. charles reade was something of the kind in his day; but he has left no successor. james runciman might have been such an one, if he had lived. he had the tireless industry, the iron constitution, the journalist's keen eye for facts, the novelist's inexhaustible fund of human sympathy. he was a literary artist who could use his pen as a brush with brilliant effect, and he had an amazing facility in turning out "copy." he had lived to suffer, and felt all that he wrote. there was a marvellous range in his interests. he had read much, he improvised magnificently, and there was hardly anything that he could not have done if only--but, alas! it is idle mooning in the land of might-have-beens! the collected essays included in this volume were contributed by mr. runciman to the pages of _the family herald_. in the superfine circles of the sniffy, this fact is sufficient to condemn them unread. for of all fools the most incorrigible is surely the conventional critic who judges literary wares not by their intrinsic merit or demerit, but by the periodical in which they first saw the light. the same author may write in the same day two articles, putting his best work and thought into each, but if he sends one to _the saturday review_ and the other to _the family herald_, those who relish and admire his writing in-the former would regard it as little less than a _betise_ to suggest that the companion article in _the family herald_ could be anything but miserable commonplace, which no one with any reputation to lose in "literary circles" would venture to read. the same arrogance of ignorance is observable in the supercilious way in which many men speak of the articles appearing in other penny miscellanies of popular literature. they richly deserve the punishment which mr. runciman reminds us sir walter scott inflicted upon some blatant snobs who were praising coleridge's poetry in coleridge's presence. "one gentleman had been extravagantly extolling coleridge, until many present felt a little uncomfortable. scott said, 'well, i have lately read in a provincial paper some verses which i think better than most of their sort.' he then recited the lines 'fire, famine, and slaughter' which are now so famous. the eulogist of coleridge refused to allow the verses any merit. to scott he addressed a series of questions--'surely you must own that this is bad?' 'surely you cannot call this anything but poor?' at length coleridge quietly broke in, 'for heaven's sake, leave mr. scott alone! i wrote the poem'" (p. ). such lessons are more needed now than ever. only by stripes can the vulgar pseudo-cultured be taught their folly. the post of father-confessor and general director to the readers of _the family herald_ which mr. runciman filled in succession to mr. grant allen is one which any student of human nature might envy. there is no dissecting-room of the soul like the confessional, where the priest is quite impalpable and impersonal and the penitent secure in the privacy of an anonymous communication. the ordinary man and woman have just as much of the stuff of tragedy and comedy in their lives as the lord tomnoddy or lady fitzboodle, and as there are many more of them--thank heaven!--than the lords and ladies, the masses afford a far more fertile field for the psychological student of life and character than the classes. they are, besides, much less artificial. there are fewer apes and more men and women among people who don't pay income tax than among those who do. as director-general of the answers to correspondents column of _the family herald_ mr. runciman was brought into more vitalising touch with the broad and solid realities of the average life of the average human being, with all its wretched pettiness and its pathetic anxieties, its carking cares and its wild, irrational aspirations, than he would have been if he had spent his nights in dining out in mayfair and lounged all day in the clubs of pall mall. the essays which he contributed to _the family herald_ were therefore adjusted to the note which every week was sounded by his innumerable correspondents. he was in touch with his public. he did not write above their heads. his contributions were eminently readable, bright, sensible, and interesting. he always had something to say, and he said it, as was his wont, crisply, deftly, and well. and through the chinks and crevices of the smoothly written essay you catch every now and then glimpses of the northumbrian genius whose life burnt itself out at the early age of thirty-nine. for james runciman was anything but a smug, smooth, sermonical essayist. he was a berserker of the true northern breed, whose fiery soul glowed none the less fiercely because he wore a large soft hat instead of the viking's helmet and wielded a pen rather than sword or spear. like the war-horse in job, he smelled the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. his soul rejoiced in conflict, in the storm and the stress of the struggle both of nature and of man. it was born in his blood, and what was lacking at birth came to him in the north-easter which hurled the waves of the northern sea in unavailing fury against the northumbrian coast. he lived at a tension too great to be maintained without incessant stimulus. it was an existence like that of the heroes of valhalla, who recruited at night the energies dissipated in the battles of the day by quaffing bumpers of inexhaustible mead. in these essays we have the berserker in his milder moods, his savagery all laid aside, with but here and there a glint, as of sun-ray on harness, to remind us of the sinking in the glory and pride of his strength. the essays abound with traces of that consummate mastery of english which distinguished all his writings. he, better than any man of our time, could use such subtle magic of woven words as to make the green water of the ocean surge and boil into white foam on the printed page. as befitted a dweller on the north-east coast, he passionately loved the sea. the sea and the sky are the two exits by which dwellers in the slums of deptford and in north shields can escape from the inferno of life. he was a close observer of nature and of men. in his pictures of life in the depths he was a grim and uncompromising realist, who, however, was kept from pessimism by his faith in good women and his knowledge of worse men in the past than even "the squire" and the valet-keeping prize-fighters of our time. there was a sensible optimism about james runciman, conservative though he styled himself,--although there are probably few who would suspect that from such an essay as the bitter description of english life in "quiet old towns" or his lamentation over the unequal distribution of wealth. his sympathy with the suffering of the poor--of the real poor--was a constant passion, and he showed it quite as much by his somewhat carlylean denunciation of the reprobate as by his larger advocacy of measures that seemed to him best calculated to prevent the waste of child-life. more than anything else there is in these essays the oozing through of the bitter but kindly cynicism of a disillusionised man of the world. his essay, for instance, entitled "vanity of vanities," is full of the sense of vanity of human effort. and yet against the whole current of this tendency to despondency and despair, we have such an essay as "are we wealthy?" in which he declared the day of declamation has passed, but that all things are possible to organisation. "in many respects it is a good world, but it might be made better, nobler, finer in every quarter, if the poor would only recognise wise and silent leaders, and use the laws which men have made in order to repair the havoc which other men have also made." but he reverts to the note of sad and kindly cynicism as he contemplates this supreme ironic procession of life with the laughter of gods in the background, even although he hastens to remind us that much may be made of it if we are wise. these prose sermons by a tamed berserker remind us somewhat of a leopard in harness. but they are good sermons for all that, veritable _tours de force_ considering who is their author and how alien to him was the practice of preaching. his essay entitled "a little sermon on failures" might be read with profit in many a pulpit, and "vanity of vanities" would serve as an admirable discourse on ecclesiastes. they illustrate the manysidedness of their gifted author not less than his sympathetic treatment of distress and want in "men who are down." these fragments snatched from the mass of his literary output need no introduction from me. mr. grant allen has written with friendly appreciation of the man. i gladly join him in paying a tribute of posthumous respect and admiration to james runciman and his work. w.t.s. side lights. i. letter-writers. since old leisure died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence. dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited abandonment which we see in "pickwick," and the full geniality of his mind came out delightfully. the letter in which he describes a certain infant schoolboy who lost himself at the great exhibition is one of the funniest things in literature, but it is equalled in positive value by some of the more serious letters which the great man sent off in the intervals of his heavy labour. dickens could do nothing by halves, and thus, at times when he could have earned forty pounds a day by sheer literary work, he would spend hours in answering people whom he had never seen, and, what is more remarkable, these "task"-letters were marked by all the brilliant strength and spontaneity of his finest chapters. he was the last of the true correspondents, and we shall not soon look upon his like again. with all the contrivances for increasing our speed of communication, and for enabling us to cram more varied action into a single life, we have less and less time to spare for salutary human intercourse. the post-card symbolises the tendency of the modern mind. we have come to find out so many things which ought to be done that we make up our minds to do nothing whatever thoroughly; and the day may come when the news of a tragedy ruining a life or a triumph crowning a career will be conveyed by a sixpenny telegram. in the bad old days, when postage was dear and the means of conveyance slow, people who could afford to correspond at all sat down to begin a letter as though they were about to engage in some solemn rite. every patch of the paper was covered, and every word was weighed, so that the writer screwed the utmost possible value for his money out of the post-office. the letters written in the last century resembled the deliberate and lengthy communications of roman gentlemen like cicero: and there is little wonder that the good folk made the most of their paper and their time. we find godwin casually mentioning the fact that he paid twenty-one shillings and eightpence for the postage of a letter from shelley; readers of _the antiquary_ will remember that lovel paid twenty-five shillings postage for one epistle, besides half a guinea for the express rider. _certes_ a man had good need to drive a hard bargain with the post office in those pinching times! of course the "lower orders"--poor benighted souls--were not supposed to have any correspondence at all, and the game was kept up by gentlemen of fortune, by merchants, by eager and moneyed lovers, and by stray persons of literary tastes, who could manage to beg franks from members of parliament and other dignitaries. one gentleman, not of literary tastes, once franked a cow and sent her by post; but this kind of postal communication was happily rare. the best of the letter-writers felt themselves bound to give their friends good worth for their money, and thus we find the long chatty letters of the eighteenth century purely delightful. i do not care much for lord chesterfield's correspondence; he was eternally posing with an eye on the future--perhaps on the very immediate future. as johnson sternly said, "lord chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master might write," and he spoke the truth. fancy a man sending such stuff as this to a raw boy--"you will observe the manners of the people of the best fashion there; not that they are--it may be--the best manners in the world, but because they are the best manners of the place where you are, to which a man of sense always conforms. the nature of things is always and everywhere the same; but the modes of them vary more or less in every country, and an easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather the assuming of them at proper times and proper places, is what particularly constitutes a man of the world, and a well-bred man!" all true enough, but how shallow, and how ineffably conceited! here is another absurd fragment--"my dear boy, let us resume our reflections upon men, their character, their manners--in a word, our reflections upon the world." it is quite like mr. pecksniff's finest vein. there is not a touch of nature or vital truth in the chesterfield letters, and the most that can be said of them is that they are the work of a fairly clever man who was flattered until he lost all sense of his real size. if we take the whole bunch of finikin sermons and compare them with the one tremendous knock-down letter which johnson sent to the dandy earl, we can easily see who was the man of the pair. when we return to walpole, the case is different. horace never posed at all; he was a natural gentleman, and anything like want of simplicity was odious to him. the age lives in his charming letters; after going through them we feel as though we had been on familiar terms with that wicked, corrupt, outwardly delightful society that gambled and drank, and scandalised the grave spirits of the nation, in the days when george iii. was young. horace walpole was the letter-writer of letter-writers; his gossip carries the impress of truth with it; and, though he had no style, no brilliancy, no very superior ability, yet, by using his faculties in a natural way, he was able to supply material for two of the finest literary fragments of modern times. i take it that the most stirring and profoundly wise piece of modern history is carlyle's brief account of william pitt, given in the "life of frederick the great." once we have read it we feel as though the great commoner had stood before us for a while under a searching light; his figure is imprinted on the very nerves, and no man who has read carefully can ever shake off an impression that seems burnt into the fibre of the mind. this superlatively fine historic portrait was painted by carlyle solely from walpole's material--for we cannot reckon chance newspaper scraps as counting for much--and thus the gossip of strawberry hill conferred immortality on himself and on our own titanic statesman. but walpole's influence did not end there. whoever wants to read a very good and charming work should not miss seeing sir george trevelyan's "life of charles james fox." to praise this book is almost an impertinence. i content myself with saying that those who once taste its fascination go back to it again and again, and usually end by placing it with the books that are "the bosom friends" of men. now the grim scotchman lit up horace's letters with the lurid furnace-glow of his genius; sir george held the serene lamp of the scholar above the same letters, and lo, we have two pieces that can only die when the language dies! what a feat for a mere letter-writer to achieve! let ambitious correspondents take example by horace walpole, and learn that simplicity is the first, best--nay, the only--object to be aimed at by the letter-writer. we have forgotten the easy style of walpole; we do not any longer care much for johnson, though his letters are indeed models; we have no time for lovely whimsical elaborations like those of cowper or charles lamb; but still some of us--persons of inferior mind perhaps--do attempt to write letters. to these i have a word to say. so far as i can judge, after passing many, many hundreds and thousands of letters through my hands, the best correspondents nowadays are either those who have been educated to the finest point, and who therefore dare not be affected, or those who have no education at all. a little while ago i went through a terrific letter from a young man, who took up seventeen enormous double sheets of paper in trying to tell me something about himself. the handwriting was good, the air of educated assurance breathed from the style was quite impassive, and the total amount of six thousand eight hundred words was sufficient to say anything in reason. yet this voluminous writer managed to say nothing in particular excepting that he thought himself very like lord byron, that he was fond of courting, and that his own talents were supreme. now a simple honest narrative of youthful struggles would have held me attentive, but i found much difficulty in keeping a judicial mind on this enormous effusion. why? because the writer was a bad correspondent; he was so wrapped up in himself that he could not help fancying that every one else must be in the same humour, and thus he produced a dull, windy letter in spite of his tolerable smattering of education. on the other hand, i often study simple letters which err in the matter of spelling and grammar, but which are enthralling in interest. a domestic servant modestly tells her troubles and gives the truth about her life; every word burns with significance--and shakespeare himself could do no more than give music of style and grave coherence to the narrative. the servant writes well because she keeps clear of high-sounding phrases, and writes with entire sincerity. it is the sincerity that attracts the judicious reader, and it is only by sincerity that any letter-writer can please other human creatures. beauty of style counts for a great deal; i would not sacrifice the exquisite daintiness of epistolary style in lamb or coleridge or thackeray or macaulay for gold. but style is not everything, and the very best letter i ever read--the letter which stands first in my opinion as a model of what written communications should be--is without grammar or form or elegance. it is simply a document in which the writer suppresses himself, and conveys all the intelligence possible in a limited space. to all letter-writers i would say, "let your written words come direct from your own mind. the moment you try to reproduce any thought or any cadence of language which you have learned from books you become a bore, and no sane man can put up with you. but, if you resolve that the thought set down shall be yours and yours alone, that the turns of phrase shall be such as you would use in talking with your intimates, that each word shall be prompted by your own knowledge or your belief, then it does not matter a pin if you are ignorant of spelling, grammar, and all the graces; you will be a pleasing correspondent." look at the letters of lady sarah lennox, who afterwards became the mother of the brilliant napiers. this lady did not know how to put in a single stop, and her spelling is more wildly eccentric than words can describe, yet her letters are enthralling, and natural fire and fun actually seem to derive piquancy from the schoolgirlish errors. if you sit down to write with the intention of being impressive, you may not make a fool of yourself, but the chances are all in that direction; whereas, if you resolve with rigid determination to say something essential about some fact and to say it in your own way, you will produce a piece of valuable literature. of course there are times when dignity and gravity are necessary in correspondence, but even dignity cannot be divorced from simplicity. supposing that, by an evil chance, a person finds himself bound to inflict an epistolary rebuff on another, the rebuff entirely fails if a single affected word is inserted. the most perfect example of a courteous snub with which i am acquainted was sent by a master of measured and ornamental prose. gibbon, the historian, received a very lengthy and sarcastic letter from the famous doctor priestley, of birmingham. priestley blamed gibbon for his covert mode of attacking christianity, and observed that servetus was more to be admired for his courage as a martyr than for his services as a scientific discoverer. now gibbon knew by instinct that the historic style would at once become ludicrous if used to answer such a letter; so he deserted his ordinary majestic manner, and wrote thus-- "sir--as i do not pretend to judge of the sentiments or intentions of another, i shall not inquire how far you are inclined to suffer or inflict martyrdom. it only becomes me to say that the style and temper of your last letter have satisfied me of the propriety of declining all further correspondence, whether public or private, with such an adversary." a perfect sneer, a perfectly guarded and telling rebuff. but i do not care to speak about the literature of quarrels; my concern is mainly with those readers who have relatives scattered here and there, and who try to keep up communications with the said relatives. judging from the countless letters which i see, only a small percentage of people understand that the duty of a correspondent is to say something. as a general rule, it may be taken for granted that abstract reflections are a bore; and i am certain that an exiled englishman would be far more delighted with the letter of a child who told him about the farm or the cows, or the people in the street, or the marriages and christenings and engagements, than he would be with miles of sentiment from an adult, no matter how noble might be the language in which the sentiment was couched. partly, then, as a hint to the good folk who load the foreign-bound mails, partly as a hint to my own army of correspondents,[ ] i have given a fragment of the fruits of wide experience. remember that stately sir william temple is all but forgotten; chatty pepys is immortal. windy philip de commines is unread; montaigne is the delight of leisurely men all the world over. the mighty doctor robertson is crowned chief of bores; the despised boswell is likely to be the delight of ages to come. the lesson is--be simple, be natural, be truthful; and let style, grace, grammar, and everything else take care of themselves. i spoke just now of the best letter i have ever read, and i venture to give a piece of it-- [ ] written when mr. runciman answered correspondents of the _family herald_. "dear madam,--no doubt you and frank's friends have heard the sad fact of his death here, through his uncle or the lady who took his things. i will write you a few lines, as a casual friend that sat by his death-bed. your son, corporal frank h. ----, was wounded near fort fisher. the wound was in the left knee, pretty bad. on the th of april the leg was amputated a little above the knee; the operation was performed by dr. bliss, one of the best surgeons in the army--he did the whole operation himself. the bullet was found in the knee. i visited and sat by him frequently, as he was fond of having me. the last ten or twelve days of april i saw that his case was critical. the last week in april he was much of the time flighty, but always mild and gentle. he died st of may. frank, as far as i saw, had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing, &c. he had watchers most of the time--he was so good and well-behaved and affectionate. i myself liked him very much. i was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him and soothing him; and he liked to have me--liked to put his arm out and lay his hand on my knee--would keep it so a long while. towards the last he was more restless and flighty at night--often fancied himself with his regiment, by his talk sometimes seemed as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of--said, 'i never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.' at other times he would fancy himself talking, as it seemed, to children and such like--his relatives, i suppose--and giving them good advice--would talk to them a long while. all the time he was out of his head not one single bad word or idea escaped him. it was remarked that many a man's conversation in his senses was not half so good as frank's delirium. he seemed quite willing to die--he had become weak and had suffered a good deal, and was quite resigned, poor boy! i do not know his past life, but i feel as if it must have been good; at any rate, what i saw of him here under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, i can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed.... i thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for i loved the young man, though i but saw him immediately to lose him." the grammar here is all wrong, but observe the profound goodness of the writer; he hides nothing he knows that bereaved mother wants to know about her frank, her boy; and he tells her everything essential with rude and noble tenderness, just as though the woman's sorrowing eyes were on his face. it is a beautiful letter, bald as it is, and i commend the style to writers on all subjects, even though a schoolmaster could pick the syntax to pieces. ii. on writing oneself out. lord beaconsfield once compared his opponents on the treasury bench to a line of exhausted volcanoes. they had taken office when they were full of mighty aspirations; they had poured forth measures of all sorts with prodigal vigour; and at last they were reduced to wait, supine and helpless, for the inevitable swing of the political pendulum. a similar process of exhaustion goes on among literary men; and there are certain symptoms which cause expert persons to say, "ah, poor blank seems to have written himself out!" i have occasionally alluded to this most distressing topic, but i have never discussed it fully. the subject of brain-exhaustion has a very peculiar interest for the public as well as for the professional penman; half the slovenly prose which ordinary men use in their correspondence is due to the bad models set by written-out men, and the agonising exhibitions made by some thousands of public speakers in this devoted and long-suffering land are also due to the purblind weakness of the exhausted man. the wrought-out writer is not permitted to cease from work; he goes on droning out his fixed quantity of mortal dreariness day by day and week by week until his mind spins along a particular groove, and he probably repeats himself every day of his life without being aware that he is anything but brilliantly original. i am obliged to study many novels, and i know many most successful workers who at this present time are turning out the same fiction under varied names with monotonous regularity. they are not quite like an old hand whom i knew long ago, who used to promote the characters in novelettes of his own and turn them on to the market again and again; the effusions of this genius were not of sufficient importance to attract attention from folk with clear memories, and i believe that he escaped detection in a miraculous way. his untitled country gentleman became a baronet, the injured heroine was similarly moved up on the social scale, and the noble effort came forth with a fresh name, while the knowing old impostor chuckled in his garret and pouched his pittance. i believe the funny soul has passed away; but really there are many very pretentious persons who do little more than vary his methods unconsciously. poor james grant delighted many a schoolboy, and perhaps his best work was never quite so much appreciated as it ought to have been. "the black dragoons," "the queen's own," and "the romance of war" all contained good work, and many gallant lads delighted their hearts with them; i know that one youth at least learned "the black dragoons" by heart, and amused the people in a lonely farm-house by reciting whole chapters on winter nights, and i have some reason to believe that the book gave the boy a taste for literature which ended in his becoming a novelist. but, as grant went on with machine-like regularity, how curiously similar to each other his books became! narvaez cifuentes, in "the romance of war," is the type of all the villains; the young dragoons were all alike; the wooden heroines might have been chopped out by a literary carpenter from one model; the charges, the escapes, the perils of the hero never varied very much from volume to volume; and the fact was obvious that the brain had ceased to develop any strikingly original ideas and only the busy hand worked on. a very sarcastic personage once observed that "it is better for literary men to read a little occasionally." to outsiders the advice may seem like a piece of grotesque fun; but those who know much of literary work are well aware that a writer may very easily become possessed by a sick disgust of books which never leaves him. he will look at volumes of extracts, he will skim poetry, he will read eagerly for a few days or weeks in order to get up a subject; but the pure delight in literature for its own sake has left him, and he is as decidedly prosaic a tradesman as his own hosier. such a man soon joins the written-out division, and, unless he travels much or has a keenly humorous eye for the things about him, he runs a very good chance of becoming an intolerable bore. he forgets that the substance of his brain is constantly fading, and that he needs not only to replenish the physical substance of the organ by constant care, but to replenish all his dwindling stores of knowledge, ideas, and even of verbal resources. among the older authors there were some who offered melancholy spectacles of mental exhaustion; and the practised reader knows how to look for particular features in their work, just as he looks for wouvermans' white horse and beaumont's brown tree. these literary spinners forget the example of macaulay, who was quite contented if he turned out two foolscap pages as his actual completed task in mere writing for one day. he was never tired of laying in new stores, and he persistently refreshed his memory by running over books which he had read oftentimes before. the books and manuscripts which gibbon read in twenty years reached such an enormous number that, when he attempted to form a catalogue of them, he was compelled to give up the task in despair; he was constantly adding to the enormous reservoir of knowledge which he had at command, and thus his work never grew stale, and he was ready instantly with a hundred illustrative lights on any point which chanced to crop up either in conversation or in the course of his reading. the cheap and flashy writer is inclined to disdain the men who are thorough in their studies; but, while his work grows thin and poor, the judicious reader's becomes marked by more and more of richness and fulness. burke kept his vast accumulations of knowledge perfectly fresh; and i notice in him that, instead of growing more staid and commonplace in his style as he increased in years, he grew more vigorous, until he actually slid into the excess of gaudy redundancy. i am sorry that his prose ever became asiatic in its splendour; but even that fact shows how steadfast effort may prevent a man from writing away his originality and his freshness of manner. observe the sad results of an antagonistic proceeding for even the mightiest of brains. sir walter scott was building up his brain until he was forty years old; then we had the homeric strength of "marmion," the perfect art of the "antiquary," the unequalled romantic interest of "guy mannering," "rob roy," "ivanhoe," "quentin durward." the long years of steady production drained that most noble flood of knowledge and skill until we reached the obvious fatuity of "count robert" and the imbecilities of "castle dangerous." any half-dozen of such books as "redgauntlet," "the pirate," and "kenilworth" were sufficient to give a man the reputation of being great--and yet even that overwhelming opulence was at last worn down into mental poverty. poor scott never gave himself time to recover when once his descent of the last perilous slope had begun, and he suffered for his folly in not resting. in lord tennyson's case we see how wisdom may preserve a man's power. the poet who gave us "ulysses" so long ago, the poet who brought forth such a magnificent work as "maud," retained his power so fully that thirty years after "maud" he gave us "rizpah." this continued freshness, lasting nearly threescore years, is simply due to economy of physical and mental resource, which is far more important than any economy of money. charles dickens cannot be said to have been fairly written out at any time; but he was often perilously near that condition; only his power of throwing himself with eagerness into any scheme of relaxation saved him; and, but for the readings and the unhappy sittingbourne railway accident, he might be with us now full of years and honours. when he did suffer himself to be worked to a low ebb for a time, his writing was very bad. even in the flush of his youth, when he was persuaded to write "oliver twist" in a hurry, he fell far below his own standard. i have lately read the book after many years, and while i find nearly all the comic parts admirable, some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted and bad that i can hardly bring myself to believe that dickens touched them. an affectionate student of his books can almost always account for the bad patches in dickens by collating the novels with the letters and diary. much of the totally nauseating gush of the brothers cheeryble must have been turned out only by way of stop-gap; and there are passages in "little dorrit" which may have been done speedily enough by the author, but which no one of my acquaintance can reckon as bearable. dickens saw the danger of exhausting himself before he reached fifty-four years of age, and tried to repair damages inflicted by past excesses; but he was too late, and though "edwin drood" was quite in his best manner, he could not keep up the effort--and we lost him. as for the dismal hacks who sometimes call themselves journalists, i cannot grow angry with them; but they do test the patience of the most stolid of men. to call them writers--_écrivains_--would be worse than flattery; they are paper-stainers, and every fresh dribble of their incompetence shows how utterly written out they are. let them have a noble action to describe, or let them have a world-shaking event given them as subject for comment, the same deadly mechanical dulness marks the description and the article. look at an article by forbes or mcgahan or burleigh--an article wherein the words seem alive--and then run over a doleful production of some complacent hack, and the astounding range that divides the zenith of journalism from the nadir may at once be seen. the poor hack has all his little bundle of phrases tied up ready to his hand; but he has no brain left, and he cannot rearrange his verbal stock-in-trade in fresh and vivid combinations. the old, old sentences trickle out in the old, old way. our friends, "the breach than the observance," "the cynosure of all eyes," "the light fantastic toe," "beauty when unadorned," "the poor indian," and all the venerable army come out on parade. the weariful writer fills up his allotted space; but he does not give one single new idea, and we forget within a few minutes what the article pretended to say--in an hour we have forgotten even the name of the subject treated. as one looks around on the corps of writers now living, one feels inclined to ask the old stale question, "and pray what time do you give yourself for thinking?" the hurrying reporter or special correspondent needs only to describe in good prose the pictures that pass before his eye; but what is required of the man who stays at home and spins out his thoughts as the spider spins his thread? he must take means to preserve his own freshness, or he grows more and more unreadable with a rapidity which lands him at last among the helpless, hopeless dullards; if he persists in expending the last remnants of his ideas, he may at last be reduced to such extremities that he will be forced to fill up his allotted space by describing the interesting vagaries of his own liver. scores of written-out men pretend to instruct the public daily or weekly; the supply of rank commonplace is pumped up, but the public rush away to buy some cheap story which has signs of life in it. my impression is that it is not good for writers to consort too much with men of their own class; the slang of literature is detestable, and a man soon begins to use it at all seasons if he lives in the literary atmosphere. the actor who works in the theatre at night, and lives only among his peers during the day, ends by becoming a mummer even in private life; a teacher who does not systematically shake off the taint of the school is among the most tiresome of creatures; the man who hurries from race-meeting to race-meeting seems to lose the power of talking about anything save horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual fate of those who narrow their horizon. when a man once settles down as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching complete nullity. his power of emitting strings of grammatical sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful blankness--he is written out. the rush after money has latterly brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction into a condition which is truly lamentable; the very beauties which marked their early work have become garish and vulgarised, and, in running through the early chapters of a new novel, a reader of fair intelligence discovers that he could close the book and tell the story for himself. one artist cannot get away from sentimental merchant-seamen and lovely lady-passengers; another must always bring in an infant that is cast on shore near a primitive village; another must have for characters a roguish trainer of race-horses, an honest jockey, a dark villain who tampers with race-horses, and a dashing young man who is saved from ruin by betting on a race; another drags in a surprisingly lofty-minded damsel who grows up pure and noble amid the most repulsive surroundings; another can never forget the lost will; another depends on a mock-modest braggart who kills scores of people in a humorous way. the mould remains the same in each case, although there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out and moulded. all these forlorn folk are either verging toward the written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. like the great painters who work for manchester or new york millionaires, these novelists produce stuff which is only shoddy; they lower their high calling, and they prepare themselves to pass away into the ranks of the nameless millions whose works are ranged along miles of untouched shelves in the great public libraries. fame may not be greatly worth trying for; but at least a man may try to turn out the very best work of which he is capable. some of our brightest refuse to aim at the highest, and they land in the dim masses of the written-out. iii. the decline of literature. it may seem almost an impertinence to use such a word as "decline" in connection with literature at a date when every crossing-sweeper can read, when free libraries are multiplied, when a new novel is published every day all the year round, and when thousands and tens of thousands of books--scientific, historical, critical--are poured out from the presses. we have several weekly journals devoted almost entirely to the work of criticising the new volumes which appear, and the literary caste in society is both numerous and powerful. in the face of all this i assert that the true literary spirit is declining, and that the pure enthusiasm of other days is passing away. i emphatically deny that the actual literary artists in any line are inferior to the men of the past, and never cease to contemn the impudent talk of those who shake their heads and allude to the giants who are supposed to have lived in some unspecified era of our history. lord salisbury is greater than dean swift as a political writer; the author of "john inglesant" is a finer stylist than any man of the last two centuries; as a writer of prose no man known in the world's history can be compared to mr. ruskin; with messrs. froude, gardiner, lecky, trevelyan, bishop stubbs, and mr. freeman we can hold our own against the historian of any date; the late lord tennyson and mr. arnold have written poetry that must live. then in science we have a set of men who present the most momentous theories, the most profoundly thrilling facts in language which is lucid and attractive as that of a pretty fairy-tale. if we turn to our popular journals, we find learning, humour, consummate skill in style from writers who do not even sign their names. day by day the stream of wit, logic, artistic power flows on, and for all these literary wares there must be a steady sale; and yet i am constrained to declare that literature is declining. this may sound like juggling with words in the fashion approved by dr. johnson when he was in his whimsical humour; but i am serious, and my meaning will shortly appear. we have more readers and fewer students. the person known as "the general reader" is nowadays fond of literary dram-drinking--he wants small pleasant doses of a stimulant that will act swiftly on his nerves; and, if he can get nothing better, he will contentedly batten on the tiny paragraphs of detached gossip which form the main delight of many fairly intelligent people. books are cheap and easily procured, and the circulating library renders it almost unnecessary for any one to buy books at all. in myriads of houses in town or country the weekly or monthly box of books comes as regularly as the supplies of provisions; the contents are devoured, the dram-drinkers crave for further stimulant, and one book chases another out of memory. literature is as good as and better than ever it was in the fabulous palmy days, but it is not so precious now; and a great work, so far from being treated as a priceless possession and a companion, is regarded only as an item in the _menu_ furnished for a sort of literary debauch. a laborious historian spends ten years in studying an important period; he contrives to set forth his facts in a brilliant and exhilarating style, whereupon the word is passed that the history must be read. people meet, and the usual inquiries are exchanged--"have you read brown on the union of ?" "yes--skimmed it through last week. but have you seen thomson's attack on the apocrypha?" and so the two go on exchanging notes on their respective bundles of literary lumber, but without endeavouring to gain the least understanding of any author's meaning, and without tasting in the smallest degree any one of the ennobling properties of ripe thought or beautiful workmanship. the main thing is to be able to say that you have read a book. what you have got out of it is quite another thing with which no one is concerned; so that in some societies where the pretence of being "literary" is kept up the bewildered outsider feels as though he were listening to the discussion of a library catalogue at a sale. timid persons think that they would be looked on lightly if they failed to show an acquaintance with the name at least of any new work; and the consequences of this silly ambition would be very droll did we not know how much loose thought, sham culture, lowering deceit arise from it. a young man lately made a great success in literature. for his first book he gained nothing, but lost a good deal; for his second he obtained twenty pounds, after he had lost his eyesight for a time, owing to his toiling by night and day; his third work brought him fame and a fortune. he happened to be in a bookseller's shop when a lady entered and said, "what is the price of mr. blank's works?" "thirty shillings, madam." "oh, that is far too much! i have to dine with him to-night, and i wanted to skim the books. but he isn't worth thirty shillings!" twenty discourses could not exhaust the full significance of that little speech. the lady was typical of a class, and her mode of getting ready her table talk is the same which produces confusion, mean sciolism, and mental poverty among too many of those who set up as arbiters of taste. a somewhat cruel man of letters is said to have led on one of the shallow pretenders in a heartless way until the victim confidently affected knowledge of a plot, descriptions, and characters which had no existence. the trick was heartless and somewhat dishonest; but the mere fact that it could be played at all shows how far the game of literary racing has done harm. let us turn from the book-clubs, the libraries, and the swarming cheap editions of our own days, and hark back for about seventy-seven years. the great sheriff was then in the flush of his glorious manhood, and it is amazing to discover the national interest that was felt in his works as they came rapidly out. when "rokeby" appeared, only one copy reached cambridge, and the happy student who secured that was followed by an eager crowd demanding that the poem should be read aloud to them. when "marmion" was sent out to the peninsula, parties of officers were made up nightly in the lines of torres vedras to hear and revel in the new marvel. sir adam fergusson and his company of men were sheltered in a hollow at the battle of talavera. sir adam read the battle-scene from "marmion" aloud to pass away the time; and the reclining men cheered lustily, though at intervals the screech of the french shells sounded overhead. it may be said that the publication of a new work by dickens was a national event only a quarter of a century ago. true; but somehow even dickens was not regarded with that grave critical interest which private citizens of the previous generation bestowed on scott. the incomparable sir walter at that time was dwelling far away amid the swamps and grim hills and shaggy thickets of ashestiel. town-life was not for him, and he grudged the hours spent in musty law-courts. before dawn he went joyously to his work, and long before the household was astir he had made good progress. at noon he was free to lead the life of a country farmer and sportsman; the ponies were saddled, the greyhounds uncoupled, and a merry company set off across the hills. the talk was refined and gladsome, and visitors came back refreshed and improved to the cottage. and now comes the strange part of the story--this healthy retired sporting farmer was in correspondence with the greatest and cleverest men in the british isles, and the most masterly criticisms of literature were exchanged with a lavish freedom which seems impossible to us in the days of the post-card and the hurried gasping telegram. in our day there is absolutely no time for that leisurely conscientious study which was usual in the time when men bought their books and paid heavily for them. even mr. ruskin, in his retirement on the shores of coniston, cannot carry on that graceful and ineffably instructive correspondence which was so easy to southey, coleridge, and the others of that fine company who dwelt in the lake district. marvellous it is to observe the splendid quality of the literary criticisms which were sent to the great ones by men who had no intention of writing or selling a line. in studying the memoirs of the century we find that, long before the education movement began, there were scores of men and women who had no need to make literature a profession, but who were nevertheless skilled and cultured as the writers who worked for bread. who now talks of mr. morritt of rokeby? yet morritt carried on a voluminous correspondence with scott and the rest of that brilliant school. who ever thinks of george ellis? but ellis was the most learned of antiquaries, and devoid of the pedantry which so often makes antiquarian discourses repellent. his polished expositions have the charm that comes from a gentle soul and an exquisite intellect, while his criticism is so luminous and just that even mr. ruskin could hardly improve upon it. then there were mr. skene, joanna baillie--alas, poor forgotten joanna!--erskine, the shepherd, the duke of buccleuch, wilson, and so many more that we grow amazed to think that even scott was able to rear his head above them. all the school were alike in their love and enthusiasm for literature; and really they seemed to have had a better mode of living and thinking than have the smart gentlemen who think that earnest and conscientious study is only a heavy species of frivolity. and let it be marked that this wide-spread company of private citizens and public writers by no means formed a mutual admiration society, for they criticised each other sharply and wisely; and the criticism was taken in good part by all concerned. when ellis wrote a sort of treatise to scott in epistolary form, and complained of the poet's monotonous use of the eight-syllable line, scott replied with equanimity, and took as much pains to convince his friend as though he were discussing a thesis for some valuable prize. on one occasion a few of the really great men found themselves in the midst of a society where the practice of mutual admiration was beginning to creep in. the way in which two of the most eminent guests snubbed the mutual admirers was at once delightful and effective. one gentleman had been extravagantly extolling coleridge, until many present felt a little uncomfortable. scott said, "well, i have lately read in a provincial paper some verses which i think better than most of their sort." he then recited the lines "fire, famine, and slaughter" which are now so famous. the eulogist of coleridge refused to allow the verses any merit. to scott he addressed a series of questions--"surely you must own that this is bad?" "surely you cannot call this anything but poor?" at length coleridge quietly broke in, "for heaven's sake, leave mr. scott alone! i wrote the poem." this cruel blow put an end to mutual admiration in that quarter for some time. byron, southey, wordsworth, jeffrey--all in their several fashions--regarded literature as a serious pursuit, and they were followed by the "illustrious obscure" ones whose names are now sunk in the night. how the whirligig of time sweeps us through change after change! any of us can buy for shillings books which would have cost our predecessors pounds; we can have access to all the wit, poetry, and learning of our generation at a cost of three guineas a year. for little more than a shilling per week any reader who lives far away in the country can have relays of books sent him at the rate of fifteen volumes per relay. very satisfactory. most satisfactory too are the board-school libraries, from which a million children obtain the best and noblest of literature without money and without price. still there remains the fact that any man who sat down and wrote long letters on literary subjects would be looked upon as light-headed. we are too clever to be in earnest, and the expenditure of earnestness on such a subject as literature is regarded as evidence of pedantry or folly, or both. those men of former days knew their few books thoroughly and loved them wisely; we know our many books only in a smattering way, and we do not love them at all. when mr. mark pattison suggested that a well-to-do man reasonably expend per cent. of his income on books, he roused a burst of kindly laughter, and it was suggested that solitary confinement would do him a great deal of good. that was a fine trenchant mode of looking at the matter. when, in meditative hours, i compare the two generations of readers, i think that the mental health of the old school and the new school may be compared respectively with the bodily health of sober sturdy countrymen and effete satiated gourmands of the town. the countrymen has no great variety of good cheer, but he assimilates all that is best of his fare, and he grows powerful, calm, able to endure heavy tasks. the jaded creature of the clubs and the race-courses and the ball-room has swift incessant variety until all things pall upon him. in time he must begin with damaging stimulants before he can go on with the interesting pursuits of each day. every device is tried to tickle his dead palate; but the succession of dainties is of no avail, for the man cannot assimilate what is set before him, and he becomes soft of muscle, devoid of nerve--a weed of civilisation. are not the cases analogous to those of the sound reverent student and the weary _blasé_ skimmer of books? so, in sum, i say that, even if our enormous output of printed matter goes on increasing, and if the number of readers increases by millions, yet, so long as men read the thoughts of other men not to search for instruction and high pleasure, but to search for distraction and vain delirious excitement, then we are justified in talking of the decline of literature. far be it from me to say that people should neglect the study of men and women and devote themselves to the strained study of books alone. the mere bookman is always more or less a dolt; but the wise reader who learns from the living voice and visible actions of his fellow-creatures as well as from the dead printed pages is on the way to placidity and strength and true wisdom. thus much i will say--the flippant devourer of books can neither be wise nor strong nor useful; and it is his tribe who have discredited a pursuit which once was noble and of good report. iv. colour-blindness in literature. the singular phrase at the head of this essay came to me from a correspondent who wrote in great perplexity. this unhappy man was quite miserable because he found that his own views of the masterpieces of literature differed from those generally expressed; his modesty prevented him from setting himself up in opposition to the opinions of others, and he frankly asked, "is there anything answering to colour-blindness which may exist in the mind as regards literature?" the absurd but felicitous inquiry took my fancy greatly, and i resolved to examine the problem with care. in particular my perturbed friend alluded to certain movements in modern criticism. he cannot admire shelley, yet he finds shelley placed above byron and next to shakspere; he reads a political poem by a modern master, and discovers to his horror that he fails to understand what it is all about. moreover, this very free critic cannot abide browning and the later works of tennyson; nor can he admire mr. swinburne. this is dreadful; but worse remains behind. with grief and terror this penitent declares that he cannot tolerate "the pilgrim's progress" or "don quixote"; and he goes on to say, "how much of milton seems trash, also butler, very much of wordsworth, and all southey's epics!" then, with a wail of despair, he says, "these works have stood the test of time. am i colour-blind?" now this gentleman's state of mind is far more common than he supposes; only few people care to confess even to their bosom-friends that they do not accept public opinion--or rather the opinions of authority. the age has grown contemptible from cant, and traditions which are perhaps highly respectable in their place are thrust upon us in season and out of season. regarding matters of fact there is no room for differences of opinion when once the fact is established; and regarding problems in elementary morality we perceive the same surety. no one in his senses thinks of denying that america exists; no one would think of saying that it is wrong to do unto others as we would they should do unto us; but, when we come to questions of taste, we have to deal with subtleties so complex that we are forced to deny any one's right to dogmatise. if a man says, "i enjoy this book," that is well; but if he adds, "you are a fool if you do not enjoy it too," he is guilty of folly and impertinence. these dogmatists have given rise to much hypocrisy. by all means let them hold their opinions; but at the same time let them make no claims upon us. our beloved old friend doctor johnson had many views about literature which now appear to us cramped and strange, but we should examine his sayings with respect. when however it is found that the old man used to foam and bellow at persons who did not approve of his paradoxes, one is slightly inclined--in spite of reverence for his moral strength--to set him down as a nuisance, and to wonder how people managed to put up with him at times. in reading the conversations and essays of the moralist we constantly meet with passages which we should think over temperately were it not that we are informed by the critic or his biographer that only fools would venture to question johnson's wisdom and insight. take the famous article on milton. speaking of "lycidas," johnson coolly observes, "in this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. its form is that of a pastoral--easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are easily exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. he who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honour." now this is blunt, positive speech, and no one would mind it much if it were left alone by ignorant persons; but it is a trifle exasperating when johnson's authority is brought forward at second hand in order to convince us that a poem in which many people delight is disgusting. again, the dictator said that a passage in congreve's "morning bride" was finer than anything in shakspere. very good; let johnson's opinion stand so far as he is concerned, but let us also consider the passage-- "how reverend is the face of this tall pile, whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads to bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, by its own weight made steadfast and immovable, looking tranquillity! it strikes an awe and terror on my aching sight." this is the stuff which is called "noble" and "magnificent" and "impressive" by people who fail to see that johnson was merely amusing himself, as he often did, by upholding a fallacy. the lines from congreve are bald and utterly commonplace; they have no positive quality; and when some of us think of such gems as "when daisies pied and violets blue," or, "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," or even the description of the dover cliff, not to mention the thousands of other gems in shakspere's great dramas, we feel inclined to be angry when we are asked to admire congreve's stilted nonsense. there is much to be objected to in shakspere. i hold that a man who wrote such a dull play as "pericles" would nowadays be scouted; but the incomparable poet should not be belittled by even a momentary comparison with congreve. i can readily imagine a man of real good sense and cultured taste objecting to "the pilgrim's progress." why should he not? millions of people have read the book, but millions have not; and the fact that many of the best judges of style love bunyan offers no reason why the good tinker should be loved by everybody. as for "don quixote," a fine critic once remarked that he would choose that book if he were to be imprisoned for life, and if he were also allowed to choose one volume. doubtless this gentleman has thrust his dictum concerning the value of cervantes's work down the throats of many people who would have liked to contradict him. if his example were followed by critics universally, it would doubtless be hard to find in britain a man pretending to culture who durst assert that he did not care for "don quixote." in spite of this, the grave terror with which my correspondent regards his own inability to appreciate a famous book is more than funny. regarding browning i can only say that, although his worshippers are aggressive enough, one readily pardons any person who flies from his poems in disgust. a learned and enthusiastic editor actually gave "sordello" up in despair; and even the late dean church averred that he did not understand the poem, though he wrote lengthy studies on it. to my own knowledge there are men and women who do derive intense pleasure from browning, and they are quite right in expressing their feelings; but they are wrong in attempting to bully the general public into acquiescence. certain members of the public say, "your poet capers round us in a sort of war-dance; he flicks off our hats with some muddled paradox, he leaves a line unfinished and hurts us with a projecting conjunction. we want him to stop capering and grimacing, and then we shall tell him whether he is good-looking or not." i hold that the dissenters are right. people with the necessary metaphysical faculty may understand and passionately enjoy their browning, but only too many simple souls have inflicted miserable suffering on themselves by trying to unravel the meaning of verses at which they never should have looked. the fact is that we persistently neglect all true educational principles in our treatment of literature. young minds have to be directed; but in literature, as in mechanics, the tendency of the force is to move along the lines of least resistance. a dexterous tutor should watch carefully the slightest tendencies and endeavour to find out what kind of discipline his charge can best receive. as the mind gains power it is certain to exhibit particular aptitudes, and these must be fostered. in the case of a student who is self-taught the same method must be observed, and a clever reader will soon find out what is most likely to improve him. to my thinking some of the attempts made to force certain books on young folk are shocking and deplorable; for it must be remembered that in literature, as in the case of bodily nutriment, different foods are required at different times of life. i have known boys and girls who were forced to read "rasselas." now that allegorical production came from the mind of a mature, powerful, most melancholy man, and it is intended to show the barren vanity of human wishes. what an absurd thing to put in the hands of a buoyant youth! the parents however had heard that "rasselas" was a great and moral book, whereupon the children must be subjected to unavailing torture. it maybe said, "would not your hints tend to make people frivolous?" certainly not, if my hints are wisely used. let it be observed that i merely wish to do away with hypocritical conventions whereby timid men like my correspondent are subjected to extreme misery and a vast waste of intellectual power is inflicted on the world. suppose that some ridiculous guardian had taken up the modern notions about scientific culture, and had forced macaulay to read science alone; should we not have lost the essays and the history? that one consideration alone vividly illustrates my correspondent's quaint and pregnant inquiry. macaulay was "colour-blind" to science, and the most painful times in his happy life were the hours devoted at cambridge to mathematical and mechanical formulæ. the genuinely cultured person is the one who thinks nothing of fashion and yields to his natural bent as directed by his unerring instinct. a certain modern celebrity has told us how his early days were wasted; he was first of all forced to learn latin and greek, though his powers fitted him to be a scientific student, and he was next forced to impart his own fatal facility to others. thus his fame came to him late, and the most precious years of his life were thrown away. he was colour-blind to certain departments of literature which have gained a mighty reputation, yet he was obliged by sacred use and wont to act as though he relished things which he really abhorred. in a minor degree the same process of lavish waste is going on all around us. the most utterly incompetent persons of both sexes are those who, in obedience to convention, have tried to read everything that was sufficiently bepraised instead of choosing for themselves; in conversation they are objectionable bores, and it would puzzle the best of thinkers to discover their precise use in life. take it once and for all for granted that no human creature attains fruitful culture unless he learns his own powers and then resolves to apply them only in the directions where they tell best; without so much of self-knowledge he is no more a complete man than he would be were he deficient in self-reverence and self-control. he must dare to think for himself, or he will assuredly become a mediocrity, and probably more or less offensive. all his possible influence on his fellow-creatures must depart unless he thinks for himself; and he cannot think for himself unless he is released from insincerity--the insincerity imposed by usage. v. the surfeit of books. sir john lubbock once spoke to a company of working-men, and gave them some advice on the subject of reading. sir john is the very type of the modern cultured man; he has managed to learn something of everything. finance is of course his strong point; but he stands in the first rank of scientific workers; he is a profound political student; and his knowledge of literature would suffice to make a great reputation for any one who chose to stand before the world as a mere literary specialist alone. this consummate all-round scholar picked out one hundred books which he thought might be read with profit, and, after reciting his appalling list, he cheerfully remarked that any reader who got through the whole set might consider himself a well-read man. i most fervently agree with this opinion. if any student in the known world contrived to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest sir john's hundred works, he would be equipped at all points; but the trouble is that so few of us have time in the course of our brief pilgrimage to master even a dozen of the greatest books that the mind of man has put forth. moreover, if we could swallow the whole hundred prescribed by our gracious philosopher, we should really be very little the better after performing the feat. a sort of literary indigestion would ensue, and the mind of the learned sufferer would rest under a perpetual nightmare until charitable oblivion dulled the memory of the enormous mass of talk. sir john thinks we should read confucius, the hindoo religious poetry, some persian poetry, thucydides, tacitus, cicero, homer, virgil, a little--a very little--voltaire, molière, sheridan, locke, berkeley, george lewes, hume, shakspere, bunyan, spenser, pope, fielding, macaulay, marivaux--alas, is there any need to pursue the catalogue to the bitter end? need i mention gibbon, or froude, or lingard, or freeman, or the novelists? to my mind the terrific task shadowed forth by the genial orator was enough to scare the last remnant of resolution from the souls of his toil-worn audience. a man of leisure might skim the series of books recommended; but what about the striving citizens whose scanty leisure leaves hardly enough time for the bare recreation of the body? is it not a little cruel to tell them that such and such books are necessary to perfect culture, when we know all the while that, even if they went without sleep, they could hardly cover such an immense range of study? many men and women yearn after the higher mental life and are eager for guidance; but their yearnings are apt to be frozen into the stupor of despair if we raise before them a standard which is hopelessly unattainable by them. i should not dream of approving the saying of lord beaconsfield: "books are fatal; they are the curse of the human race. nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense." lord beaconsfield did not believe in the slap-dash words which he put into the mouth of mr. phoebus, nor did he believe that the greatness of the english aristocracy arises from the facts that "they don't read books, and they live in the open air." the great scoffer once read for twelve hours every day during an entire year, and his general knowledge of useful literature was quite remarkable. but, while rejecting epigrammatic fireworks, i am bound to say that the habit of reading has become harmful in many cases; it is a sort of intellectual dram-drinking, and it enervates the mind as alcohol enervates the body. if a man's function in life is to learn, then by all means let him be learned. when macaulay took the trouble to master thousands of rubbishy pamphlets, poems, plays, and fictions, in order that he might steep his mind in the atmosphere of a particular period in history, he was quite justified. the results of his research were boiled down into a few vivid emphatic pages, and we had the benefit of his labour. when carlyle spent thirteen mortal years in grubbing among musty german histories that nearly drove him mad with their dulness, the world reaped the fruit of his dreary toil, and we rejoiced in the witty, incomparable life of frederick ii. when poor emanuel deutsch gave up his brilliant life to the study of the obscurest chapters in the talmud, he did good service to the human race, for he placed before us in the most lucid way a summary of the entire learning of a wondrous people. it was good that these men should fulfil their function; it was right on their part to read widely, because reading was their trade. but there must be division of labour in the vast society of human beings, and any man who endeavours to neglect this principle, and who tries to fill two places in the social economy, does so at his peril. living cheek by jowl with us, there are hundreds and thousands of persons who are ruining their minds by a kind of literary debauch. they endeavour to follow on the footsteps of the specialists; they struggle to learn a little of everything, and they end by knowing nothing. they commit mental suicide: and, although no disgrace attaches to this species of self-murder, yet disgrace is not the only thing we have to fear in the course of our brief pilgrimage. we emerge from eternity, we plunge into eternity; we have but a brief space to poise ourselves in the light ere we drop into the gulf of doom, and our duty is to be miserly over every moment and every faculty that is vouchsafed to us. the essentials of thought and knowledge are contained in a very few books, and the most toilsome drudge who ever preached a sermon, drove a rivet, or swept a floor may become perfectly educated by exercising a wise self-restraint, by resolutely refusing to be guided by the ambitious advice of airy cultured persons, and by mastering a few good books to the last syllable. mr. ruskin is one of our greatest masters of english, and his supremacy as a thinker is sufficiently indicated by mazzini's phrase--"ruskin has the most analytic mind in europe." no truer word was ever spoken than this last, for, in spite of his dogmatic disposition, mr. ruskin does utter the very transcendencies of wisdom. now this glorious writer of english, this subtlest of thinkers, was rigidly kept to a very few books until he reached manhood. under the eye of his mother he went six times through the bible, and learned most of the book by heart. this in itself was a discipline of the most perfect kind, for the translators of the bible had command of the english tongue at the time when it was at its noblest. then mr. ruskin read pope again and again, thus unconsciously acquiring the art of expressing meaning with a complete economy of words. in the evening he heard the waverley novels read aloud until he knew the plot, the motive, the ultimate lesson of all those beautiful books. when he was fourteen years old, he read one or two second-rate novels over and over again; and even this was good training, in that it showed him the faults to be avoided. before his boyhood was over, he read his byron with minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression. byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was! his lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive. no wonder that the young ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master! now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge. what do they think of this narrow early training? the use and purport of it all are plain enough to us, for we see that the gentle student's intellect was kept clear of lumber; his thoughts were not battened down under mountains of other men's, and, when he wanted to fix an idea, he was not obliged to grope for it in a rubbish heap of second-hand notions. of course he read many other authors by slow degrees; but, until his manhood came, his range was restricted. the flawless perfection of his work is due mainly to his mother's sedulous insistence on perfection within strict bounds. again, and keeping still to authors, charles dickens knew very little about books. his keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of the world's forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber. he read fielding, smollett, gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of tennyson's poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of looking at things for himself without interposing the dimness that falls like a darkening shadow on a mind that is crammed with the conceptions of other folk. look at the practical men! nasmyth scarcely read at all; napoleon always spoke of literary persons as "ideologists;" stephenson was nineteen before he mastered his bible; mahomet was totally uneducated; gordon was content with the bible, "pilgrim's progress," and thomas à kempis; hugh miller became an admirable editor without having read twoscore books in his lifetime. go right through the names on the roll of history, and it will be found that in all walks of life the men who most influenced their generation despised superfluous knowledge. they learned thoroughly all that they thought it necessary to learn within a very limited compass; they learned, above all, to think; and they then were ready to speak or act without reference to any authority save their own intellect. if we turn to the great book-men, we find mostly a deplorable record of failure and futility. their lives were passed in making useless comments on the works of others. look at the one hundred and eighty volumes of the huge catalogue in which are inscribed the names of shakspere's commentators. most of these poor laborious creatures were learned in the extreme, and yet their work is humiliating to read, so gross is its pettiness, so foolish is its wire-drawn scholarship. over all the crowd of his interpreters the royal figure of the poet towers in grand unlearned simplicity. he knew plutarch, and he thought for himself; his commentators knew everything, and did not think at all. compare the supreme poet's ignorance with the other men's extravagant erudition! think of the men whom i may call book-eaters! dr. parr was a driveller; porson was a sort of learned pig who routed up truffles in the classic garden; poor buckle became, through stress of books, a shallow thinker; mezzofanti, with his sixty-four languages and dialects, was perilously like a fool; and more than one modern professor may be counted as nothing else but a vain, over-educated boor. another word, which may seem like heresy. i contend that the main object of reading--after a basis of solid culture has been acquired--is to gain amusement. no one was ever the worse for reading good novels, for human fortunes will always interest human beings. i would say keep clear of sir john lubbock's terrific library, and seek a little for pleasure. you have authoritative examples before you. prince bismarck, once the arbiter of the world, reads miss braddon and gaboriau; professor huxley, the greatest living biologist, reads novels wholesale; the grim moltke read french and english romances; macaulay used fairly to revel in the hundreds of stories that he read till he knew them by heart. with these and a hundred other examples before us, the humblest and most laborious in the community may without scruple read the harmless tales of fictitious joys and sorrows, after they have secured that narrow minute training which alone gives grasp and security to the intellect. vi. people who are "down" if any one happens to feel ashamed when he notices the far-off resemblances between the lower animals and man's august self, he will probably feel the most acute humiliation should he take an occasional walk through a great rookery, such as that in richmond park. the black cloud of birds sweeps round and round, casting a shadow as it goes; the air is full of a solemn bass music softened by distance, and the twirling fleets of strange creatures sail about in answer to obvious signals. they are an orderly community, subject to recognised law, and we might take them for the mildest and most amusing of all birds; but wait, and we shall see something fit to make us think. far off on the clear gray sky appears a wavering speck which rises and falls and sways from side to side in an extraordinary way. nearer and nearer the speck comes, until at last we find ourselves standing under a rook which flies with great difficulty. the poor rascal looks most disreputable, for his tail has evidently been shot away, and he is wounded. he drops on to a perch, but not before he has run the gauntlet of several lines of sharp eyes. the poor bird sits on his branch swinging weakly to and fro, humping up his shoulders in woebegone style. there is a rustle among the flock, a sharp exchange of caws, and one may almost imagine the questions and answers which pass. circumstances prevent us from knowing the rookish system of nomenclature; but we may suppose the wounded fellow to be called ishmael. caw number one says, "did you notice anything queer about ishmael as he passed?" "yes. why, he's got no tail!" "he'll be rather a disgrace to the family if he tries to go with us into sussex on tuesday." "frightful! he's been fooling about within range of some farming lout's gun. the lazy, useless wretch never did know the difference between a gun and a broom!" "serves him right! let's speak to the chief about him." the chief considers the matter solemnly and sorrowfully, and then may be understood to say, "sorry ishmael's in trouble, but we can't acknowledge him. there's an end of the matter. you surrey crow, take a dozen of our mates, and drive that ishmael away." the wounded bird knows his doom. he fumbles his way through the branches, and flies off zig-zag and low; but the flight soon mob him. they laugh at him, and one can positively tell that they are chattering in derision. presently one of them buffets him; and that is the signal for a general assault. quick as lightning, one of the black cowards makes a vicious drive with his iron beak, and flies off with a triumphant caw; another and another squawk at the wretch, and then stab him, until at last, like a draggled kite, ishmael sinks among the ferns and passes away, while the assassins fly back and tell how they settled the fool who could not keep the shot out of his carcass. if the observer sees this often, his disposition to moralise may become very importunate, for he sees an allegory of human life written in black specks on that sky that broods so softly, like a benediction, over the fair world. one may easily bring forward half a score of similar instances from the animal kingdom. a buffalo falls sick, and his companions soon gore and trample him to death; the herds of deer act in the same way; and even domestic cattle will ill-treat one of their number that seems ailing. the terrible "rogue" elephant is always one that has been driven from his herd; the injury rankles in him, and he ends by killing any weaker living creature that may cross his path. again, watch a poor crow that is blown out to sea. so long as his flight is strong and even, he is unmolested; but let him show signs of wavering, or, above all, let him try to catch up with a steamship that is going in the teeth of the wind, and the fierce gulls slay him at once. do we not observe something analogous taking place in the terrible crush of civilised human life? to thoughtful minds there is no surer sign of the progress that humanity is slowly making than the fact that among our race the weak are succoured. were it not for the sights of helpfulness and pity that we can always see, many of us would give way to despair, and think that man is indeed no more than a two-legged brute without feathers. the savage even now kills aged people without remorse, just as the sardinian islanders did in the ancient days; and there are certain tribes which think nothing of destroying an unfortunate being who may have grown weakly. among us, the merest lazar that crawls is sure of some succour if he can only contrive to let his evil case be known; and even the criminal, let him be never so vile, may always be taken up and aided by kindly friends for the bare trouble of asking. but there are still symptoms of the animal disposition to be seen, and only too many people conspire to show that human nature is much the same as it was in the days when job called in his agony for comfort and found none. wonderful and disquieting it is to see how the noblest of minds have been driven in all ages to mourn over the disposition of men to strike at the unfortunate! the book of job is the finest piece of literary work known to the world, and it is mainly taken up with a picture of the treatment which the arabian patriarch met with at the hands of his friends. people do not look for sarcasm in the bible, but the unconscious lofty sarcasm of job is so terrible, that it shows how a mighty intellect may be driven by bitter wrong into transcendencies of wrath and scorn. "ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." the old desert-prince will not succumb even in his worst extremity, and he lashes his tormentors with wild but strong bursts of withering satire. but job was down, and his cool friends went on imperturbably, probing his weakness, sneering at his excuses, and, i suspect, rejoicing not a little in his wild outbreaks of pain and despair. the book is one of the world's monuments, and it has been placed there to remind all people that dwell on earth of their own innate meanness; it has been placed before us as a lesson against cruelty, treachery, ingratitude. have we gone very far in the direction since job raged and mourned? those who look around them may answer the question in their own way. the world had not progressed much in shakspere's time, at any rate. like all of us, shakspere was able to look on the work of beautiful and kind souls--no one has ever spoken more nobly of the benefactions conferred on their brethren by the righteous; but that calm immortal soul had in it depths of awful scorn and anger, which bubbled up only a very few times. few people read "timon of athens"; and i do not blame the neglect, for it is a spirit-crushing play, and a man must be bold if he cares to look at it twice. but in it it is plain to me that shakspere lets us see a gleam from the boiling flood of scorn that raged far under his serene exterior. the words bite; the abandonment of the satirist is complete. he puts into the mouth of the man who is down a whole acrid and scurrilous philosophy of success and failure; and there is not a passage in swift which can equal for venom and emphasis the ferocious words of the athenian misanthrope. we know nothing of shakspere's mood while he was writing this cruel piece, but i should imagine he must have been ready to quit the world in a veritable ecstasy of wild passion and contempt. if we take away the literature of love and the literature of fear, we have but little left save the endless works that harp on one theme--the remorseless savagery of civilised men toward those who fail, or are supposed to fail, in life's grim warfare. "freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, that dost not bite so nigh as benefits forgot! though thou the waters warp, thy tooth is not so sharp as friend remembered not!" those lines are hackneyed until every poetaster can quote them or parody them at will; but very few readers consider that the bitter verse summarises a whole literature. from homer to tennyson the ugly tune has been played on all strings; and mankind have such a vivid perception of the truth uttered by the satirists, that they read the whole story with gusto whenever it is put into a fresh form--and each man thinks that he at least is not one of those for whom the poet's lash is meant. novel, essay, poem, play, and sermon--all recur with steady persistence to one ancient topic; and yet men try their best to bring themselves low, as they might if job, shakspere, congreve, and tennyson had never written at all, and as though no warnings were being actually enacted all round, as on a stage. sometimes i wonder whether the majority of men ever really try to conceive what it is to be down until their fate is upon them. i can hardly think it. it has been well said that all of us know we shall die, but none of us believe it. the idea of the dark plunge is unfamiliar to the healthy imagination; and the majority of our race go on as if the great change were only a fable devised by foolish poets to scare children. i believe that, if all men were vouchsafed a sudden comprehension of the real meaning of death, sin would cease. furthermore, i am persuaded that if every man could see in a flash the burning history of the one who is down, the whole of our reasonable population would take thought for the morrow--drink-shops would be closed, the dice-box would rattle no more, and the sight of a genuine idler would be unknown. not a few of us have seen tragedies enough in the course of our pilgrimage, and have learned to regard the doomed weaklings--the wreckage of civilisation, the folk who are down--with mingled compassion and dismay. i have found in such cases that the miserable mortals never knew to what they were coming; and the most notable feature in their attitude was the wild and almost tearful surprise with which they regarded the conduct of their friends. the pictures of these forlorn wastrels people a certain corner of the mind, and one can make the ragged brigade start out in lines of deadly and lurid fire at a moment's warning, until there is a whole inferno before one. but i shall speak no more at present of the degraded ones; i wish to gain a thought of pity for those who are blameless; and i want to stir up the blameless ones, who are generally ignorant creatures, so that they may exercise a little of the wisdom of the serpent in time. be it remembered that, although the ruined and blameless man is not subjected to such moral scorn as falls to the lot of the wastrel, the practical consequences of being down are much the same for him as for the victim of sloth or sin. he feels the pinch of physical misery, and, however lofty his spirit may be, it can never be lofty enough to relieve the gnawing pains of bodily privation. moreover, he will meet with persecution just as if he were a villain or a cheat, and that too from men who know that he is honest. the hard lawyer will pursue him as a stoat pursues a hare; and, if he asks for time or mercy, the iron answer will be, "we have nothing to do with your private affairs; business is business, and our client's interests must not suffer merely because you are a well-meaning man." even our dear walter scott, the soul of honour, one of the purest and brightest of all the spirits that make our joy, the gallant struggler--even that delight of the world was hounded to death by a firm of bill-discounters at the very time when he was breaking his gallant heart in the effort to retrieve disaster. no! the world is pitiful so far as its kindest hearts are concerned, but the army of commonplace people are all pitiless. see what follows when a man goes "down." suppose that he invests in bank shares. the directors are all men of substance, and most of them are even lights of religion; the leading spirit attends the same church as our investor, and he is a light of sanctity--so pure of heart is he, that he will not so much as look at monday's newspapers, because their production entailed sabbath labour. indeed, one wonders how such a man could bring himself to eat or sleep on sunday, because his food must be carried up for him, and, i presume, his bed must be made. all the directors are free in their gifts to churches and chapels--for that is part of a wise director's policy--and all of them live sumptuously. but surely our investor should guess that all this lavish expenditure must come out of somebody's pocket; and surely he has skill enough to analyse a balance-sheet! the good soul goes on trusting, until one fine morning he wakes up and finds that his means of subsistence are gone. then comes the bitter ordeal; his friends are grieved, the public are enraged, the sanctified men go to gaol, and the investor faces an altered world. his oldest friend says, "well, tom, it's a bitter bad business, and if a hundred is of any use to you, it is at your service; but you know, with my family," &c. the unhappy defrauded fellow finds it hard to get work of any sort; begins to show those pathetic signs of privation which are so easily read by the careful observer; hat, boots, coat, grow shabby; the knees seem to have a pathetic bend. friends are not unkind, but they have their own burdens to bear, and if he inflicts his company and his sorrows too much on any one of them, he is apt to receive a hint--probably from a woman--that his presence can be spared; so the downward road trends towards utter deprivation, and then to extinction. a young man may recover from almost any blow that does not affect his character; and this was strikingly proved in the case of that brilliant man of science, r.a. proctor, who was afterwards stricken out of life untimely. he lost his fortune in the crash of overend and gurney's company, and he immediately forgot his luxurious habits and turned to work with blithe courage. how he worked only those who knew him can tell, for no four men of merely ordinary power could have achieved such bewildering success as he did. but a man who is on the downward slope of life cannot fare like the lamented proctor; he must endure the pangs of neglect, until death comes and relieves him of the dire torture of being down. and the harmless widows who are suddenly robbed of their protector. ah, how some of them are made to suffer! little amelia sedley, in "vanity fair," has her sufferings and indignities painted by a master-hand, and there is not a line thickened or darkened overmuch. the miserable tale of the cheap lodgings, and the insults which the poor girl had flung at her because, in the passion of her love, she spent trifling sums on her boy--how actual it all seems! the widow who may have held her head high in her days of prosperity, soon receives lessons from women: they call it teaching her what is her proper place. those good and discreet ladies have a notion that their conduct is full of propriety and discretion and sound sense; but how they make their sisters suffer--ah, how they make the poor things suffer! i believe that, if any improvident man could see, in a keenly vivid dream, a vision of his wife's future after his death, he would stint himself of anything rather than run the risk of having to reflect on his death-bed that he had failed to do his best for those who loved him. women sometimes out of pure wantonness try to exasperate a man so that he falls into courses which bring his end swiftly. could those foolish ones only see their own fate when the doom of being down in the world came upon them, they would strain every nerve in their bodies so that their husband's life and powers of work might be spared to the last possible hour. what can the man do who is down? frankly, nothing, unless his strength holds. i advise such a one never to seek for help from any one but himself, and never to try for any of the employments which are supposed to be "easy." cool neglect, insulting compassion, lying promises, evasive and complimentary nothings--these will be his portion. if he cannot perform any skilled labour, let him run the risk of seeming degraded; and, if he has to push a trade in matches or flowers, let him rather do that than bear the more or less kindly flouts which meet the supplicant. to all who are young and strong i would say, "live to-day as though to-morrow you might be ruined--or dead." vii. ill-assorted marriages. the people who joke and talk lightly about marriage do not seem to have the faintest rational conception of the awful nature of the subject. awful it is; and, as serious men go through life, they become more and more impressed with the momentous results which depend on the choice made by a man or woman. a lad of nineteen lightly engages himself; he knows nothing of the gloom, the terror, the sordid horror of the fate that lies before him; and the unhappy girl is equally ignorant. in fourteen years the actual substance of that young fellow's very body is twice completely changed; he is a man utterly different from the boy who contracted the marriage; there is not a muscle or a thought in common between the boy and the man--yet the man takes all the consequences of the boy's act. supposing that the pair are well matched, life goes on happily enough for them; but, alas, if the man or the woman has to wake up and face the ghastly results of a mistake, then there is a tragedy of the direst order! let us suppose that the lad is cultured and ambitious, and that he is attracted at first by a rosy face or pretty figure only; supposing that he is thus early bound to a vulgar commonplace woman, the consequences when the woman happens to have a powerful will and an unscrupulous tongue are almost too dreadful to be pictured in words. let no young folk fancy that mind counts for nothing in marriage. a man must have congenial company, or he will fly to company that is uncongenial; he must have joy of some kind, or he will fall into despair. the company and the joy can best be supplied by the wife to the husband, and by the husband to the wife. if the woman is dull and trivial, then her husband soon begins to neglect her; if she is meek and submissive, the neglect does not rouse her, and there are no violent consequences; but it is awful to think of the poor creature who sits at home and dimly wonders in the depth of her simple soul what can have happened to change the man who loved her. she has no resources--she can only love; she is perhaps kindly enough--yet she is punished only because she and her lad made a blundering choice before their judgments were formed. but, if the woman is spirited and aggressive, then the lookers-on see part of a hideous game which might well frighten the bravest into celibacy. she is self-assertive, she desires--very rightly--to be first, and at the first symptom of a slight from her husband she begins the process of nagging. the man is refined, and the coarseness which he did not perceive before marriage strikes him like a venomed point now; he replies fiercely, and perhaps shows contempt; then the woman tries the effect of weeping. unhappily the tears are more exasperating than the scolding, and the quarrel ends by the man rushing from the house. then for the first time the pair find that they have to deal with the whole forces of society; in their rage they would gladly part and meet no more--or they think so--but inexorable society steps in and declares that the alliance is fixed until death or rascality looses it. for a little while the estrangement lasts, and then there is a reconciliation, after which all goes well for a time. but the shocking thing about the ill-assorted marriage is that the estrangements grow longer and longer and the quarrels ever more bitter. even children do but little to reconcile the jarring claims of man and wife, for they are a sign of the lasting shackle which each of the miserable beings wants to break. worst of all in the whole terrible affair is the fact that it matters not who gets the mastery--both are made more wretched. if the man has an indomitable will and conquers the woman, he becomes a morose and sarcastic tyrant, who makes her tremble at his scowl, while she becomes a beaten drudge who makes up for long spells of submission by shrill outbursts of casual defiance. if the woman gains the mastery, i honestly believe that the cause of strict morality is better served; but the sight of the man's gradual degradation is so sickening that most people prefer keeping out of the house where a henpecked individual lives. as time goes by, it matters not which wins in the odious contest: both undergo a subtle loss of self-respect. in an ordinary quarrel between men reason may possibly come in to some degree; but in a quarrel between man and wife reason is utterly excluded. the man becomes feminine, the woman grows masculine, and the effect of this change of nature is disgusting and ludicrous to an outsider, but serious in the extreme to the parties principally concerned. by degrees indifference and rage give way to sullen, secret hatred, which finds a vent usually in poisonous sarcasm. matters are not much better when the superiority is on the woman's side. it is delightful to see a husband who is proud of his wife's cleverness, and good-natured men are pleased by his innocent boasting. the most pleasant of households may be found in cases where a clever, good-humoured, dexterous woman rules over a sweet-tempered but somewhat stupid man. she respects his manhood, he adores her as a superior being, and they live a life of pure happiness. but, sad to say, the husband is not usually good-humouredly willing to acknowledge his partner's superiority, and in that case the girl's doom is a cruel one. she may marry a gross, stupid lout, who begins by yawning away his time in leisure hours, and ends by going out to meet companions of his own sort. by and by comes the time when the ruffian grows aggressive, and then the proud girl has to bear brutalities which rack her very soul. steadily the work of degradation goes on, and at last the brutal man becomes a capricious bully, while the refined lady sinks into a careless draggletail. i have traversed many lands and seen men and cities, and know that the cruel work which i have described goes on in too many quarters. the ill-assorted marriage is made more wretched by the occasional glimpses which the man and woman get of happy homes. the loveliest sight that can be watched on earth is the daily life of a well-matched couple. they need not be even in intellect, but each must have some quality which gives superiority; such people, even if they have to struggle hard, lead a life which is almost ideally happy. the great thing which gives happiness is mutual confidence, and, when we see man and wife exhibiting quiet and mutually respectful familiarity, we may be fairly certain that they are to be looked on as most fortunate in the world. by an exquisite natural law it happens that mentally a woman is the exact complement of the man who is her proper mate, and her intellect has qualities far finer and more subtle than the man's. among hard city men it is a common saying that no one would ever make a bad debt if he took his customer home to dinner first. that means that the wife would instantly measure the guest's character with that lightning-footed tact which women possess. no man ever yet was completely successful in life unless he took women's counsel in great affairs; and, when a man has a wife with whom he can consult, his chance is bettered a thousandfold. to see a household where love and unity reign drives ill-matched folk to madness. the man declares that his friend's wife makes the felicity; the woman praises the other husband; and the unhappy souls grow jealous together, and hate each other more cordially by reason of the joy which they have seen. all sorts of evil ends come to these wretched unions--in every workhouse, asylum, and prison the traces of the social catastrophe may be seen; and, even when the misery is hidden from general view, the tragedy is shocking to those who can peep behind the scenes and look at the bad play. a very wise man has said that "success is a constitutional trait." the phrase is a profound one. a man who is born with "constitutional" power of choosing the right mate is all but assured of success, and a woman has the same fortune; but, in addition to the power of choosing, both man and woman need training; and we cannot call a civilised being properly trained unless he has some idea of the way to set about his choice. the cases in which idleness, or pique, or dulness drives a man or woman to take alcohol are numerous and loathsome. women who start married life as bright, merry, hopeful creatures become mere degraded animals; and the odd thing about the matter is that the husband is always the last to see the turn that his affairs are taking. a woman's name may be in the mouths of scores of people before the party most concerned wakes up to a sense of his position and is faced by a picture of helpless and lost womanhood. if the man falls into the alcoholic death-trap, we have once more a spectacle of dull misery which may be indicated but which cannot be accurately described. the victim grows hateful--his symptoms have been scientifically described by one of the finest of modern physiologists--he is uncertain in mind, and vengeful and revengeful. his wife is obliged to live with him, under his rule and power, but she finds it hopeless to meet his wishes, desires, fancies, and fantasies, however much she may study and do her best to oblige, conciliate, and concede. to persons of this class everything must be conceded, and yet they are neither pacified nor satisfied; they cannot agree even with themselves, and their homes are, literally speaking, hells on earth. then we have the cases wherein a poetic and artistic spirit is allied to a gross and worldly soul of the lowest type. one of the most brilliant artists and poets of his generation was informed by his wife that she did not care for art and poetry and that sort of stuff. "it's all high-falutin' nonsense," remarked this gifted and confident dame; and the shock of surprise which thrilled her husband will be transmitted to generations of readers. hitherto we have dwelt upon mere brutalities; but those who know the world best know that the most acute forms of agony may be inflicted without any outward show of brutality being visible. a generous high-souled girl with a passion for truth and justice is often tied to a fellow whose "company" manners are polished, but who is at heart a cruel boor. he can stab her with a sneer which only she can understand; he can delicately hint to her that she is in subjection, and he can assume an air of cool triumph as he watches her writhe. i have often observed passages of domestic drama which looked very like comedy at first sight, but which were really quivering, torturing tragedy. it is strange that the jars of married life have been so constantly made the subject for joking. the attitude of the ordinary witling is well known; but even great men have made fun out of a subject which is the most momentous of all that can engage the attention of the children of men. in running through thackeray's works lately i was struck by the flippancy with which some of the most heartbreaking stories in literature are treated. thackeray was one of the sweetest and tenderest beings that ever lived, and no doubt his jocularity was assumed; but minor men take him seriously, and imitate him. look at the stories of frank berry, of rawdon crawley, of clive and rosie newcome, and of general baynes--they are sad indeed, but the tragic element in them is only shadowed forth by the great master. there is nothing droll in the history of mistaken marriages. at the very best each error leads to the ruin or deterioration of one soul, and that is no laughing matter. viii. happy marriages. although a strong modern school of writers care only to talk of misery and gloom and frustration, i retain a taste for joy and sweetness and kindliness. life has so many sharp crosses, so many inexplicable sorrows for us all, that i hold it good to snatch at every moment of gladness, and to keep my eyes on beautiful things whenever they can be seen. during the days when i was pondering the subject of tragic marriages, i read the letters of the great lord chatham. the mighty statesman was not distinguished as a letter-writer; like themistocles, he might have boasted that, though he was inapt where small accomplishments were concerned, he converted a small state into a great empire. john wilkes called our great man "the worst letter-writer of his age." yet to my mind the correspondence of chatham with his wife is among the most charming work that we know. here is one fragment which is delightful enough in its way. he had been out riding with his son william, who afterwards ruled england, becoming prime minister at an age when other lads are leaving the university. his elder son stayed at home to study, and this is the fashion in which chatham writes about his boys--"it is a delight to let william see nature in her free and wild compositions, and i tell myself, as we go, that the general mother is not ashamed of her child. the particular loved mother of our promising tribe has sent the sweetest and most encouraging of letters to the young vauban. his assiduous application to his profession did not allow him to accompany us in learning to defend the happy land we were enjoying. indeed, my life, the promise of our dear children does me more good than the purest of pure air." observe how this pompous and formal statement is framed so as to please the mother. the writer does not say much about himself; but he knows that his wife is longing to hear of her darlings, and he tells her the news in his high-flown manner. he was not often apart from the lady whom he loved so well; but i am glad that they were sometimes separated, since the separations give us the delicate and tender letters every phrase of which tells a long story of love and confidence and mutual pride. that unequalled man who had made england practically the mistress of the world, the man who gained for us canada and india, the man whom the king of prussia regarded as our strongest and noblest, could spend his time in writing pretty babble about a couple of youngsters in order to delight their mother. if he had gone to london, the people would have taken the horses out of his carriage, and dragged him to his destination. he was far more powerful than the king, and he was almost worshipped by every officer and man in the army and navy. excepting the duke of wellington, it is probable that no subject ever was the object of such fervent enthusiasm; and many men would have lived amidst the whirl of adulation. but chatham liked best to remain in the sweet quiet country; and the story of his life at lyme regis is in reality a beautiful poem. why did this imperial, overbearing, all-powerful man love to stay in retirement when all europe was waiting for his word? why did he spend days in sauntering in country lanes, and chatting during quiet evenings with one loved friend alone? that question goes to the root of my subject. chatham was happily married; when he was torn by bitter rage and disappointment, when his sovereign repulsed him, and when not even the passionate love of an entire nation availed to further the ends on which the titan had set his heart, he carried his sorrow with him, and drew comfort from the goodness of the sweet soul who was his true mate. it is a very sweet picture; and we see in history how the softening home influence finally converted the, awful, imposing, tyrannical chatham into a yielding, fascinating man. from the world's arbiter to the bricklayer's labourer, the same general law holds; the man who makes a happy marriage lives out his life at its best--he may fail in some things, but in the essential direction he is successful. the woman who makes a happy marriage may have trials and suffering to bear, but she also gains the best of life; and some of the purest and most joyous creatures i have known were women who had suffered in their day. when i think of some marriages whereof i know the full history, i am tempted to believe in human perfectibility; and at chance times there come to me vague dreams of a day when the majority of human beings will find life joyous and tranquil. what one wise and well-matched couple achieve in life may be achieved by others as the days go on. surely jarring and misery are not necessary in the great world of nations or in the little world of the family? confidence, generosity, and complete unselfishness on both sides are needed to make the life of a married pair serene and happy. i know that the demand is a heavy one; but, ah, when it is adequately met, is not the gain worth all the sacrifices a thousand times over? there may be petty and amusing differences of opinion, quiet banter, and an occasional grave conflict of judgment; but, so long as three central requirements--confidence, generosity, and unselfishness--are met, there can be no serious break in the procession of placid, happy days. i abhor the gushing talk sometimes heard about "married lovers;" the people who dignify life and honour the community are those who are lovers and something more. of course we can all feel sympathy with fanny kemble when she says that the poetry of "romeo and juliet" went into her blood as she spoke on the stage; but there is something needed beyond wild italian raptures before the ideal match is secured. some of us are almost glad that juliet passed away in swift fashion when the cup of life foamed most exquisitely at her lips. how would she have fared had that changeable firebrand romeo taken to wandering once more? it is a grievously flippant question to ask when the most glorious of all love-poems is in question; yet i ask it very seriously, and merely in a symbolic way. romeo is a shadow, the adored juliet is a shadow; but the two immortal shades represent for all time the mad lovers whose lives end in bitterness. i say again that only reasonable and calm love brings happy marriages. it is as true as any other law of nature that "he never loved who loved not at first sight;" but the frantic, dissolute man of genius who wrote that line did not care to go further and speak of matters which wise men of the world cannot disregard. the first blinding shock of the supreme passion comes in the course of nature; but wise people live through the unspeakable tumult of the soul, and use their reason after they have resisted and subdued into calm strength the fierce impulse which has wrecked so many human creatures. when writing on "ill-assorted marriages," i urged that men and women who are about to take the terribly momentous steps towards marriage must be guided by reason, and i repeat my adjuration here. when lord beaconsfield said, "i observe those of my friends who married for love--some of them beat their wives, and the remainder are divorced," he knew that he was uttering a piece of mockery which would have been blasphemous had it been set down in all seriousness. he meant to say that headlong marriages--marriages contracted in purblind passion--always end in misery. no marriage can bring a spark of happiness unless cool reason guides the choice of the contracting parties. a hot-headed stripling marries a handsome termagant--her brilliant face, her grace, and rude health attract him, and he does not quietly notice the ebullitions of her temper. she is divine to him; and, though she snarls at her younger brother, insults her mother, and to outsiders plainly exhibits all sorts of petty selfishness, yet the stripling rushes on to his fate; and at the end of a few miserable years he is either a broken and hen-pecked creature or a mean and ferocious squabbler. how different is the case of those who are not precipitate! take the case of the splendid cynic whose words we have quoted. with his usual sagacity, lord beaconsfield waited, watched, and finally succeeded in making an ideally happy marriage in circumstances which would have affrighted an ordinary person. all the world knows the story now. the brilliant young statesman dared not risk the imputation of fortune-hunting; but the lady knew his worth; she knew that she could aid him, and she frankly threw over all the traditions of her sex and of society and offered herself to him. no one in england who is interested in this matter can fail to know every detail of a bargain which makes one proud of one's species, for lord ronald gower has told us about the married life of the brilliant hebrew who mastered england. the two kindred souls were bound up in each other. the lady was not learned or clever, and indeed her husband said, "she was the best of creatures; but she never could tell which came first--the greeks or the romans." but she had something more than cleverness--she had the confidence, generosity, and unselfishness which i have set forth as the main conditions of happiness. i must repeat an old story; for it cannot too often be repeated. think of the woman who gathered all her resolution and uttered no sound, although the end of her finger was smashed by the closing of the carriage-door! mr. d'israeli was about to make a great speech; so his wife would not disturb him on his way to westminster, though flesh and bone of her finger were crushed. she fainted when the orator had gone to his task; but her fortitude did not forsake her until her beloved was out of danger of being perturbed. that one authentic story is worth a hundred dramatic tales of stagey heroism. and we must remember how the statesman repaid the simple devotion of his wife. all his spare time was passed in her company, and the quaint pair wandered in the woods like happy boy and girl. then, when the indomitable man had raised himself to be head of the state, and was offered a peerage, he declined; but he begged that his wife might be created countess in her own right. could anything be more graceful and courtly? "you are the superior," the first man in england seemed to say; "and i am content to rejoice in your honours without rivalling them." all the fanciful rhymes of the troubadours cannot furnish anything prettier than that. if we leave the beaconsfields and the chathams and come among less exalted folk, we find that the same laws regulate happy marriages. confidence, generosity, unselfishness--that is all. in this beautiful england of ours there are happy households which are almost numberless. the good folk do not care for fame or power; their happiness is rounded off and completed within their own walls, and they live as the lordly chatham lived when he was free from the ties of place and parliament. on summer days, when the quiet evening is closing, the wayfarer may obtain chance glimpses of such happy homes here and there. some are inhabited by wealthy men, some by poor workmen; but the essential happiness of both classes is arrived at in the same way. a young man wisely waits until his judgment is matured, and then proceeds to choose his mate; he does not blunder into heroic fooleries in the way of self-abnegation; for, if his choice is judicious, the lady will prevent him from hurting his own prospects. whether he be aristocrat or plebeian, he knows the worth of money, and he knows how to despise the foolish beings who talk of "dross" and "filthy lucre" and the rest. mere craving for money he despises; but he knows that the amount of "dross" in a man's possession roughly indicates his resources in the way of energy, ability, and self-control. when he marries, his wife is reasonably free from sordid cares. it may be that he has only seventy pounds in a building society, it may be that his cheque for fifty thousand pounds would be honoured; but the principle is the same. when the woman settles in her new home, she is free from sordid anxieties, and she can give the graces of her mind play. how beautiful some such households are! an old railway-guard once said to me--"ah, there's no talk like your own wife's when she understands you, and you sit one side of the fire, and she the other! it don't matter what kind of day you've had, she puts all right." the man was right--the most delightful conversation that can be held is between a rational man and woman who love each other, who understand each other, and who have sufficient worldly keenness to keep clear of lowering cares. a man rightly mated feels it an absolute delight to confide the innermost secrets of life to his wife; and the woman would feel almost criminal if she kept the pettiest of petty secrets from her partner. they are friends, gloriously mated, and all the glories of birth and state ever imagined cannot equal their simple but perfect joy. when the tired mechanic comes home at night and meets one whom he has wisely chosen, he forgets his sharp day of labour as soon as his overalls are off. no snappish word greets him; and he is incapable of being ill-natured with the kind soul whom he worships in his rough way. i have always found that the merriest and most profitable evenings were passed in houses where neither of the principal parties strove for mastery, and where the woman had the art of coaxing imperceptibly and discreetly. i reject the suggestion made by cynic men that no married pair can live without quarrelling. no married pair who were fools before marriage can avoid dissension; but, when man and wife make their choice wisely and cautiously, the notion of a quarrel is too horrible to dream of. ix. shrews. the greatest masters who ever made studies of the shrew in fiction or in history have never, after all, given us a strictly scientific definition of the creature. they let her exhibit herself in all her drollery or her hatefulness, but they act in somewhat lordly fashion by leaving us to frame our definition from the picturesque data which they supply. mrs. mackenzie, in "the newcomes," is repulsive to an awful degree, but the figure is as true as true can be, and most of us, no doubt, have seen the type in all its loathsomeness only too many times. mrs. mackenzie is a shrew of one sort, but we could not take her vile personality as the basis of a classification. mrs. raddle is one of that lower middle-class which dickens knew so well, still she is not hateful or vile, or anything but droll. i know how maddening that kind of woman can be in real life to those immediately about her, but onlookers find her purely funny; they never think of poor bob sawyer's cruel humiliation; they only laugh themselves helpless over the screeching little woman on the stairs, who humbles her wretched consort and routs the party with such consummate strategy. mrs. raddle and mrs. mackenzie are as far apart as two creatures may be; nevertheless they are veritable specimens of the british shrew, and it should be within the resources of civilisation to find a definition capable of fitting both of them. as for queen elizabeth--that splendid, false, able, cruel, and inexorable shrew--she requires the space of volumes to give even the shadow of her personality and powers. she has puzzled some of the wisest and most learned of men. she was truly royal, and wholly deceitful; self-controlled at times, and madly passionate at others; a lover of pure literature, and yet terribly free in her own writings; kind to her dependants, yet capable of aiming a violent blow at some courtier whom she had caressed a moment before the blow came; an icy virgin, and a confirmed and audacious flirt; a generous mistress, and an odious miser; a free giver to those near her, and a skinflint who let the sailors who saved her country lie rotting to death in the open streets of ramsgate because she could not find in her heart to give them either medical attendance or shelter. was there ever such another being known beneath the glimpses of the moon? some might call her superhuman; i am more inclined to regard her as inhuman, for her blending of characteristics is not like anything ever seen before or since among the children of men. she was a shrew--a magnificent, enigmatic shrew, who was perhaps the more fitted to rule a kingdom which was in a state of transition in that she was lacking in all sense of pity, shame, or remorse. she was the apotheosis of the shrew, and no one of the tribe can ever be like unto her again. carlyle's termagant of spain is a shadowy figure that flits through all the note-books on frederick, but we never get so near to her as we do to elizabeth, and she remains to us as a vast shape that gibbers and threatens and gesticulates in the realms of the dead. jael, the wife of heber the kenite, must have been a terrible shrew, and i should think that heber was not master in the house where sisera died. the calm deliberation, the preliminary coaxing, the quick, cool determination, and the final shrill exultation which was reflected in deborah's song all speak of the shrew. thackeray had a morbid delight in dwelling on the species, and we know that all of his portraits were taken from real life. if he really was intimate with all of the cruel figures that he draws, then i could pardon him for manifesting the most ferocious of cynicisms even if he had been a cynic--which he was not. the campaigner, mrs. clapp, the landlady in "vanity fair," mrs. baynes, and all the rest of the deplorable bevy rest like nightmares upon our memory. dickens always made the shrew laughable, so that we can hardly spare pity for the poor snagsbys and raddles and crupps, or any of her victims in that wonderful gallery; but thackeray's, trollope's, charles reade's, mrs. oliphant's, and even miss broughton's shrews are always odious, and they all seem to start from the page alive. but i am not minded to deal with the special instances of shrewism which have been pronounced enough to claim attention from powerful masters of fiction and history; i am rather interested in the swarms of totally commonplace shrews who live around us, and who do their very best--or worst--to make the earth a miserable place. i can laugh as heartily as anybody at dickens's "scolds" and female bullies; none the less however am i ready in all seriousness to reckon the shrew as an evil influence, as bad as some of the most subtle and malevolent scourges inflicted by physical nature. all of us have but a little span on earth, and we should be able to economise every minute, so as to extract the maximum of joy from existence; yet how many frail lives are embittered by the shrew! how many men, women, and children has she not forced to wish almost for death as a relief from morbid pain and keen humiliation! our social conditions tend to foster shrewish temperament, for we are gradually changing the subjection of woman to the enslavement of man; gentle chivalry is developing into maudlin self-advertising self-abnegation on the part of the males who favour the new movement. the sweet and equable lady remains the same in all ages; imogen and desdemona and rosalind and the roaring girl have their modern counterparts. the lady never takes advantage of the just homage bestowed on her; she never asserts herself; her good breeding is so absolute that she would not be uncontrolledly familiar with her nearest and dearest, and her thoughts are all for others. but the shrew must always be thrusting herself forward; her cankered nature turns kindness into poison; she resents a benefit conferred as though it were an insult; and yet, if she is not constantly noticed and made, at the least, the recipient of kindly offers, she contrives to cause every one within reach of her to feel the sting of her enraged vanity. when i think of some women who are to be met with in various quarters, from the "slum" to the drawing-room, i am driven to wonder--shocking as it may seem--that crimes of violence are not more frequent than they are. it is most melancholy to notice how well the shrew fares compared with some poor creatures of gentler nature. in the lower classes a meek, toil-worn, obliging woman is most foully ill-used by a vagabond of a husband in only too many cases; while a screaming selfish wretch who, in trying to madden her miserable husband, succeeds in maddening all within earshot, escapes unhurt, and continues to lead her odious life, setting a bad example to impressionable young girls, and perhaps corrupting a neighbourhood. england is the happy hunting-ground for the shrew at present; for in america the average social relation between the sexes has come to be so frank and even that a shrew would be as severely treated as a discourteous man. in england a sham sentiment reigns which gives license to the vilest of women without protecting the martyrs, who, in all conscience, need protection. the scoundrel who maltreats a woman receives far less punishment than is inflicted on a teacher who gives a young clerkenwell ruffian a stripe with a switch; while the howling shrew who spends a man's money in drink, empties his house, screeches at him by the hour together, is not censured at all--nay, the ordinary "gusher" would say that "the agonised woman vents the feelings of her overcharged heart." now let us glance at the various sorts of these awful scourges who dwell in our midst. it may be well to classify them at once, because, unless i mistake many symptoms, the stubborn english may shortly snuff out the sentimentalists who have raised up a plague among us. i may say as a preliminary that in my opinion a shrew may be fairly defined as "a female who takes advantage of the noblest impulses of men and the kindliest laws of nations in order that she may claim the social privileges of both sexes and vent her most wicked temper with freedom." first, consider the doleful shrew. this is a person not usually found among the classes which lack leisure; she is an exasperating and most entirely selfish woman, and she cannot very well invent her refinements of whining cruelty unless she has a little time on hand; her speciality is to moan incessantly over the ingratitude of people for whom she has done some trivial service; and, as she always moans by choice in presence of the person whom she has afflicted by her generosity, the result is merely distracting. if the victim says, "i allow that you have been very kind, and i am grateful," he commits an error in tactics, for the torturer is upon him at once. "oh, you do own it then, and yet see how you behave!"--and then the torrent flows on with swift persistence. if, on the contrary, the sufferer cries, "why on earth do you go on repeating what you have done? i owned your kindness once, and i do not intend to talk any more about it!" he is still more clearly delivered into the enemy's hands. he lays himself open to a charge of ingratitude, and the charge is pressed home with relentless fluency. then, as to the doleful one's influence on children--the general modern tendency is towards making children happy, but the doleful one is a survival from some bad type, and takes a secret malign delight in wantonly inflicting pain on the minds or bodies of the young. some dense people perhaps imagine that children cannot suffer mental agony; yet the merest mite may carry a whole tragedy in its innocent soul. we all know the wheedling ways of children; we know how they will coax little luxuries and privileges out of "papa" and "mamma," and most of us rather like to submit with simulated reluctance to the harmless extortion. if i had heard a certain tiny youth say, "papa, when i'm a big man, and you're a little boy, i shall ask you to have some jam," i should have failed entirely to smother my laughter. do you think the doleful one would have seen the fun of the remark if she had any power over the body or soul of that devoted child? nay. she would have whined about slyness, and cunning hints, and greediness, and the probabilities of utter ruin and disgrace overtaking underhand schemers, until that child would have been stunned, puzzled, deprived of self-respect, and rendered entirely wretched. long ago i heard of a doleful one who turned suddenly on a merry boy who was playing on the floor. "you're going straight to perdition!" observed the dolorous one; and the light went out of that boy's life for a time. a gladsome party of young folk may be instantly wrecked by the doleful shrew's entrance; and, if she cannot attract attention to herself amid a gathering even of sensible, cheerful adults, she will probably break up the evening by dint of a well-timed fit of spasms or something similar. dickens made mrs. gummidge very funny; but the gummidge of real life is not merely a limp, "lorn" creature--she is a woman who began by being unhealthily vain, and ends by being venomously malignant. i do not think that many people have passed through life very far without meeting with a specimen of the dolorous shrew, and i hope in all charity that the creature is not in the immediate circle of any one who reads this. in impassioned moments, when i have reckoned up all the misery caused by this species, i have been inclined to wish that every peculiarly malign specimen could be secured at the public expense in a safe asylum. the aggressive shrew is usually the wife of some phlegmatic man; she insults him at all hours and on all subjects, and she establishes complete domination over him until she happens to touch his conscience fairly, and then he probably crushes her by the sudden exertion of latent moral force. shall i talk of the drunken shrew? no--not that! my task is unlovely enough already, and i cannot inflict that last horror on those who will read this. thus much will i say--if ever you know a man tied to a creature whose cheeks are livid purple in the morning and flushed at night, a creature who speaks thick at night and is ready with a villainous word for the most courteous and gentle of all whom she may meet, pray for that man. the blue-blooded shrew is by no means uncommon. watch one of this kind yelling on a racecourse in tearful and foul-mouthed rage and you will have a few queer thoughts about human nature. then there is the ladylike shrew. ah, that being! what has she to answer for? she is neat, low-spoken, precise; she can purr like a cat, and she has the feline scratch always ready too. pity the governess, the servant, the poor flunkey whom she has at her mercy, for their bread is earned in bitterness. "my lady" does not raise her voice; she can give orders for the perpetration of the meanest of deeds without varying the silken flow of her acrid tongue; but she is bad--very bad; and i think that, if dante and swedenborg were at all near being true prophets, there would be a special quarter in regions dire for the lady-like shrew. * * * * * i must distinctly own that the genuine shrew endeavours to make life more or less unhappy for both sexes. usually we are apt to think of the shrew as resembling the village scolds who used to be promptly ducked in horse-ponds in the unregenerate days; but the scold was an individual who was usually chastised for making a dead-set at her husband alone. the real shrew is like the puff-adder or the whip-snake--she tries to bite impartially all round; and she is often able to bite in comparative silence, but with a most deadly effect. the vulgar shrieker is a deplorable source of mischief, but she cannot match the reticent stabber who is always ready, out of sheer wickedness, to thrust a venomed point into man, woman, or child. i shall give my readers an extreme instance towards which they may probably find it hard to extend belief. i am right however, and have fullest warrant for my statement. i learn on good authority, and with plenitude of proof, that trained nurses are rather too frequently subjected to the tender mercies of the shrew. nothing is more grateful to a cankered woman than the chance of humiliating some one who possesses superior gifts of any description, and a well-bred lady who has taken to the profession of nursing is excellent "game." thus i find that delicate young women of gentle nurture have been sent away to sleep in damp cellars at the back of great town-houses; they have had to stay their necessarily fastidious appetites with cold broken food--and this too after a weary vigil in the sick-room. greatest triumph of all, the nurses have been compelled to go as strangers to the servants' table and make friends as best they could. it is not easy to form any clear notion of a mind capable of devising such useless indignities, because the shrew ought to know that her conduct is contrasted with that of good and considerate people. the nurse bears with composure all that is imposed on her, but she despises the shabby woman, and she compares the behaviour of the acrid tyrant with that of the majority of warm-hearted and generous ladies who think nothing too good for their hired guests. i quote this extreme example just to show how far the shrew is ready to go, and i wish it were not all true. next let me deal with the mean shrew, who has one servant or more under her control. the records of the servants' aid societies will show plainly that there are women against whose names a significant mark must be put, and the reason is that they turn away one girl after another with incredible rapidity, or that despairing girls leave them after finding life unendurable. i know that there are insolent, sluttish, lazy, and incompetent servants, and i certainly wish to be fair toward the mistresses; but i also know that too many of the persons who send wild and whirling words to the newspapers belong without doubt to the class of mean shrews. whenever i see one of those periodical letters which tell of the writer's lifelong tribulation, i like to refresh my mind by repeating certain golden utterances of the man whom we regard as one of the wisest of living englishmen--"there is only one way to have good servants--that is, to be worthy of being well served. all nature and all humanity will serve a good master and rebel against an ignoble one. and there is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants, for they are their masters' shadows and distort their faults in a flattened mimicry. a wise nation will have philosophers in its servants'-hall, a knavish nation will have knaves there, and a kindly nation will have friends there. only let it be remembered that 'kindness' means, as with your child, not indulgence, but care." substitute "mistress" for "master" in this passage of john ruskin's, and we have a little lesson which the mean shrew might possibly take to heart--if she had any heart. what is the kind of "care" which the mean one bestows on her dependants? "that's my little woman a-giving it to 'tilda," pensively observed mr. snagsby; and i suspect that a very great many little women employ a trifle too much of their time in "giving it to 'tilda." that is the "care" which poor 'tilda gets. consider the kind of life which a girl leads when she comes for a time under the domination of the mean shrew. say that her father is a decent cottager; then she has probably been used to plain and sufficient food, dressed in rough country fashion, and she has at all events had a fairly warm place to sleep in. when she enters her situation, she finds herself placed in a bare chill garret; she has not a scrap of carpet on the floor, and very likely she is bitterly cold at nights. she is expected to be astir and alert from six in the morning until ten or later at night; she is required to show almost preternatural activity and intelligence, and she is not supposed to have any of the ordinary human being's desire for recreation or leisure. when her sunday out comes--ah, that sunday out, what a tragic farce it is!--she does not know exactly where to go. if she is near a park or heath, she may fall in with other girls and pass a little time in giggling and chattering; but of rational pleasure she knows nothing. then her home is the bare dismal kitchen, with the inevitable deal table, frowsy cloth, and rickety chairs. the walls of this interesting apartment are possibly decked with a few tradesmen's almanacs, whereon grace darling is depicted with magnificent bluish hair, pink cheeks, and fashionable dress; or his royal highness the prince of wales assumes a heroic attitude, and poses as a field-marshal of the most stern and lofty description. thus are 'tilda's æsthetic tastes developed. the mean shrew cannot give servants such expensive company as a cat; but the beetles are there, and a girl of powerful imagination may possibly come to regard them as eligible pets. then the food--the breakfast of weak tea and scanty bread; the mid-day meal of horrid scraps measured out with eager care to the due starvation limit; the tasteless, dreadful "tea" once more at six o'clock, and the bread and water for supper! and the incessant scold, scold, scold, the cunning inquiries after missing morsels of meat or potatoes, the exasperating orders! it is too depressing; and, when i see some of the virtuous letters from ill-used mistresses, i smile a little sardonically, and wish that the servants could air their eloquence in the columns of great newspapers. some time ago there was a case in which a perfectly rich shrew went away from home from saturday morning till monday night, leaving one shilling to provide all food for two young women. this person of course needed fresh servants every month, and was no doubt surprised at the ingratitude of the starvelings who perpetually left her. i call up memories of homes, refuges, emigration-agencies, and so forth, and do most sternly and bitterly blame the mean shrew for mischief which well-nigh passes credence. there is nothing more delightful than to watch the dexterous, healthy, cheerful maids in well-ordered households where the mistress is the mother; but there is very little of the mother about the mean shrew--she is rather more like the slave-driver. "stinted means," observes some tender apologist. what ineffable rubbish! if a woman is married to a man of limited means, does that give her any right to starve and bully a fellow-creature? how many brave women have done all necessary housework and despised ignoble "gentility"! no, i cannot quite accept the "stinted means" excuse; the fact is that the mean shrew is hard on her dependants solely because her nature is not good; and we need not beat about the bush any longer for reasons. a domestic servant under a wise, dignified, and kind mistress or housekeeper may live a healthy and happy life; the servant of the mean shrew does not live at all in any true sense of the word. no rational man can blame girls for preferring the freedom of shop or factory to the thraldom of certain kinds of domestic service. if we consider only the case of well-managed houses, then we may wonder why any girl should enter a factory; but, on the other hand, there is that dire vision of the mean shrew with gimlet eye and bitter tongue! what would the mean shrew have made of margaret catchpole, the suffolk girl who was transported about one hundred years ago? there is a problem. that girl's letters to her mistress are simply throbbing with passionate love and gratitude; and the phrases "my beloved mistress," "my dear, dear mistress," recur like sobs. margaret would have become a fiend under the mean shrew; but the holy influence of a good lady made a noble woman of her, and she became a pattern of goodness long after one rash but blameless freak was forgotten. all margaret's race now rise up and call her blessed, and her spirit must have rejoiced when she saw her brilliant descendant appearing in england two years ago as representative of a mighty colony. what shall i say about the literary shrew? let no one be mistaken--we have a good many of them, and we shall have more and more of them. there are kind and charming lady-novelists in plenty, and we all owe them fervent thanks for happy hours; there are deeply-cultured ladies who make the joy of placid english homes; there are hundreds on hundreds of honest literary workers who never set down an impure or ungentle line. i am grateful in reason to all these; but there is another sort of literary woman towards whom i pretend to feel no gratitude whatever, and that is the downright literary shrew, who usually writes, so to speak, in a scream, and whose sentences resemble bursting packets of pins and needles. she is what the americans would call "death on man," and she likes to emphasize her invectives by always printing "men" with a capital "m." she is however rigidly impartial in her distribution of abuse, and she finds out at frequent intervals that english women and girls are going year by year from bad to worse. that the earth does not hold a daintier, purer, more exquisitely lovable being than the well-educated, well-bred english girl, is an opinion held even by some very cynical males; but the literary shrew rattles out her libels, and, in order to show how very virtuous she is, she usually makes her articles unfit to be brought within the doors of any respectable house. not that she is ribald--she is merely so slangy, so audacious, and so bitter that no "prudent" man would let his daughters glance at a single article turned out by our emphatic shrew. as to men--well, those ignoble beings fare very badly at her hands. i do not know exactly what she wants to do with the poor things, but on paper and on the platform she insists that they shall practically give up their political power entirely, for women, being in an immense majority, would naturally outvote the inferior sex. sometimes, when the shrew is more than usually capricious and enraged with her own sex, she may magnanimously propose to disfranchise huge numbers of women; but, as a rule, she is bent on mastering the enemy--man. if you happen to remark that it would be rather awkward if a majority of women should happen to bring about a war in which myriads of men would destroy each other, we rather pity you; that argument always beats the shrew, and she resorts to the literary equivalent for hysterics. if the controversialist ventures to ask some questions about the share which women have had in bringing about the great wars known to history, he draws on himself more and more hysterical abuse. what a strange being is this! her life is one long squabble, she is the most reckless and violent of fighters, and yet she is always crying out that men are brutal and bloodthirsty, and that she and her sisters would introduce the elements of peace and goodwill to political relations. we may have a harmless laugh at the literary shrew so long as she confines herself to haphazard scribbling, because no one is forced to read; but it is no laughing matter when she transfers her literary powers to some public body, and inflicts essays on the members. her life on a school board may be summarised as consisting of a battle and a screech; she has the bliss of abusing individual men rudely--nay, even savagely--and she knows that chivalry prevents them from replying. but she is worst when she rises to read an essay; then the affrighted males flee away and rest in corners while the shrew denounces things in general. it is terrible. among the higher products of civilisation the literary shrew is about the most disconcerting, and, if any man wants to know what the most gloomy possible view of life is like, i advise him to attend some large board-meeting during a whole afternoon while the literary shrew gets through her series of fights and reads her inevitable essay. he will not come away much wiser perhaps, but he will be appreciably sadder. and so this long procession of shrews passes before us, scolding and gibbering and dispensing miseries. is there no way of appealing to reason so that they may be led to see that inflicting pain can never bring them anything but a low degree of pleasure? no human creature was ever made better or more useful by a shrew, for the very means by which the acrid woman tries to secure notice or power only serves to belittle her. take the case of a vulgar schoolmistress who is continually scolding. what happens in her school? she is mocked, hated, tricked, and despised; real discipline is non-existent; the bullied assistants go about their work without heart; and the whole organisation--or rather disorganisation--gradually crumbles, until a place which should be the home of order and happiness becomes an ugly nest of anarchy. but look at one of the lovely high schools which are now so common; read miss kingsley's most fervent and accurate description of the scholars, and observe how poorly the scolding teacher fares in the comparison. who ever heard of a girl being scolded or punished in a good modern high school? such a catastrophe is hardly conceivable, for one quiet look of reproach from a good teacher is quite sufficient to render the average girl inconsolable until forgiveness is granted. this illustrates my point--the shrew never succeeds in doing anything but intensifying the fault or evil which she pretends to remove. the shrew who shrieks at a drunkard only makes him dive further into the gulf in search of oblivion; the shrew who snaps constantly at a servant makes the girl dull, fierce, and probably wicked; the shrew who tortures a patient man ends by making him desperate and morose; the shrew who weeps continually out of spite, and hopes to earn pity or attention in that fashion, ends by being despised by men and women, abhorred by children, and left in the region of entire neglect. perhaps if public teachers could only show again and again that the shrew makes herself more unhappy, if possible, than she makes other people, then the selfish instinct which is dominant might answer to the appeal; but, though i make the suggestion i have no great hope of its being very fruitful. after all, i fear the odious individual whose existence and attributes we have discussed must be accepted as a scourge sent to punish us for past sins of the race. certainly women had a very bad time in days gone by--they were slaves; and at odd moments i am tempted to conclude that the slave instinct survives in some of them, and they take their revenge in true servile fashion. this line of thought would carry me back over more ages than i care to traverse; i am content with knowing that the shrews are in a minority, and that the majority of my countrywomen are sweet and benign. x. are we wealthy? among the working-classes shrewd men are now going about putting some very awkward questions which seem paradoxical at first sight, but which are quite understood by many intelligent men to whom they are addressed. the query "are we wealthy?" seems easy enough to answer; and of course a rapid and superficial observer gives an affirmative in reply. it seems so obvious! our income is a thousand millions per year; our railways and merchant fleets can hardly be valued without putting a strain on the imagination; and it seems as if the atmosphere were reeking with the very essence of riches. a millionaire gives nearly one thousand pounds for a puppy; he buys seventeen baby horses for about three thousand pounds apiece; he gives four thousand guineas for a foal, and bids twenty thousand pounds for one two-year-old filly; his house costs a million or thereabouts. minor plutocrats swarm among us, and they all exhibit their wealth with every available kind of ostentation; yet that obstinate question remains to be answered--"are we wealthy?" we may give the proletarians good advice and recommend them to employ no extreme talk and no extreme measures; but there is the new disposition, and we cannot get away from it. i take no side; the poor have my sympathy, but i endeavour to understand the rich, and also to face facts in a quiet way. supposing that a ball is being given that costs one thousand pounds, and that within sound of the carriages there are twenty seamstresses working who never in all their lives know what it is to have sufficient food--is not that a rather curious position? the seamstresses are the children of mighty britain, and it seems that their mother cannot give them sustenance. the excessive luxury of the ball shows that some one has wealth, but does it not also seem to show that some one has too much? the clever lecturers who talk to the populace now will not be content with the old-fashioned answer, and an awkward deadlock is growing more nearly imminent daily. suppose we take the case of the sporting-man again, and find that he pays three guineas per week for the training of each of his fifty racers, we certainly have a picture of lavish display; but, when we see, on the other hand, that nearly half the children in some london districts never know what it is to have breakfast before they go to school, we cannot help thinking of the palaces in which the horses are stabled and the exquisite quality of the animal's food. there is not a good horse that mother england does not care for, and there are half a million children who rarely can satisfy their hunger, and who are quartered in dens which would kill the horses in a week. these crude considerations are not-presented by us as being satisfactory statements in economics; but, when the smart mob orator says, "what kind of parent would keep horses in luxury and leave children to hunger?" "is this wealthy england?" his audience reply in a fashion of their own. reasoning does not avail against hunger and privation. i am forced to own that, for my part, the awful problem of poverty seems insoluble by any logical agent; but the man of the mob does not now care for logic than ever he did before, and he has advisers who state to him the problems of life and society with passionate rhetoric which eludes reason. the whole world hangs together, and chicago may be called a mere suburb of london. english people did not understand the true history of the genesis of poverty until the developments of society in america showed us with terrific rapidity the historical development of our own poverty. the fearful state of things in american cities was brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. to us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but america exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. in the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the rising of manufacturing centres came enormous new populations which were finally obliged to barter their labour for next to nothing--and thus we have the appalling and desolating spectacle of our slums. all that took place in america with the swiftness of a series of stage-scenes; so that men now living have watched the inception and growth of all the most harrowing forms of poverty and the vices arising from poverty. and now the cry is, "go back to the land--the land for the nation!" matters have reached a strange pass when such a political watchword should be chosen by thousands in grave and stolid england, and we shall be obliged to compromise in the end with those by whom the cry is raised. i believe that a compromise may be arranged in time, but the leaders of the poor will have to teach their followers wisdom, self-restraint, and even a little unselfishness, impossible as the teaching of that last may seem to be. we have begun a great labour war, in which battles are being lost and won by opposing sides around us every day. the fighting was very terrible at the beginning; but we shall be forced at last to adopt a system of truces, and then the question "are we wealthy?" may find its answer. at this moment, however much an optimist may point to our wealth, the logical opponent of established things can always point to the ghastly sights that seem to make the very name of wealth a cynical mockery. we have to take up a totally new method of meeting and dealing with the poor; and rich and poor alike must learn to think--which is an accomplishment not possessed by many of either class. in the early part of the century, when the ideas of the revolution were still very vital, there was hope that a time might come when wealth and power would be shared so as to secure genuine human existence to the whole population. then came the mad hopes that followed the reform bill, when grave parliamentary men wept and huzzaed like schoolboys on seeing that remarkable measure passed. people thought that the good days had at last come, and even the workers who were still left out in the cold fancied that in some vague way they were to receive benefits worth having. the history of human delusions is a very sad one, as sad almost as the history of human wickedness; and all those poor enthusiasts had a sad awakening, for they found that the barren fights of placemen would still go on, that the people would continue to be shorn, and that the condition of the poor was uncommonly likely to be worse than ever. the hour of hopefulness passed away, and there succeeded bitter years of savage despair. the unhappy chartists struggled hard; and there is something pathetic in thinking how good men were treated for preaching political commonplaces which are now deemed almost conservative. the wild time in which every crown in europe tottered was followed by another period of optimism; for the great religious revival had begun, and the church resumed her ancient power over the people, despite the shock given by newman's secession. then once again the query "are we wealthy?" was answered with enthusiasm; and even the poor were told that they were wealthy, for had they not the reversion of complete felicity to crown their entry into a future world? we must believe that there is some compensation for this life's ills, or else existence would become no longer bearable; but it was hard for people in general to think that everything was for the best on this earth. soon came the day of doubt and bitterness, which assailed eager philanthropists and mere ordinary people as well. the poor folk did not feel the effects of darwin's work, but those effects were terrible in certain quarters, for many precipitate thinkers became convinced that we must perish like the dumb beasts. wherefore came the question, "why should the poor go without their share of the good things of this world, since there is nothing for them in the next?" a very ugly query it is too, because, when the question of number arises, rash spirits may say, as it was said long ago, "are we not many, and are you not few?" i have not any fine theories, and i do not want to stir up enmities; and i therefore say to the instructors of the poor, "instead of egging your men on to warfare, why not teach them how to use the laws which they already have? no new laws are wanted; every rational and necessary reform may be achieved by dint of measures now on the statute-book--measures which seem to slumber as soon as the agitation raised in passing them has glorified a certain number of placemen." every year we have the outcry, to which we have so often alluded, about disgraceful dwellings; yet there is not a bad case in london or elsewhere which could not be cured if the law were quietly set in motion by men of business. as a matter of fact, a very great portion of the wealth of the country is now at the service of the poor; but they do not choose to take it--or, at any rate, they know nothing about it. look at the school board elections, and see how many exercise the right to vote. yet, if the majority elected their own school board, they could divert enough charities to educate our whole population, and they could do as they chose in their own schools. again, the local government act renders it possible for the populace to secure any public institutions that they may want, and in the main they can order their own social life to their liking. what is the use of incessant declamation? organisation would be a thousand times better. let quiet men who do not want mere self-advertisement tell the people what is their property and how to get it, and there will be no need of the outcry of one class against another. it is a bitter grief for all thinking men to observe the inequalities that continue to make life positively accursed in many quarters, and the sights of shame that abound ought to be seen no more; but rage can do nothing, while wise teaching can do everything. the population question must be dealt with by the people themselves; they must resolve to crush their masses no more into slums; they must choose for themselves a nobler and a purer life--and that can be accomplished by the laws which they may set in action at once. then they will be able to say, "england is wealthy, and we have our share." some excellent articles have been turned out by the brilliant professor of biology who inspects our fisheries for us. he has done rare service for the people in his own way--no one better, for he was one of the first who eagerly advocated the education of the masses; but i fear he is now becoming "disillusionised." he talked once about erecting a jacob's ladder from the gutter to the university; and he has found that the ladder--such as it is--has merely been used to connect the tradesman's shop and the artisan's dwelling with the exalted place of education. the poor gutter-child cannot climb the ladder; he is too hungry, too thin, too weak for the feat, and hence the professor's famous epigram has become one of the things at which scientific students of the human race smile sadly and kindly. and now the professor grows savage and so wildly conservative that we fear he may denounce magna charta next as a gross error. i know very well that all men are not equal, and the professor's keenest logic cannot make me see that point any more clearly than at present. but suppose that one fine day some awkward leader of the people says, "you tell us, professor, that we are wealthy, and that it is right that some men should be gorged while we are bitten with famine. if britain is so wealthy, how is it that eleven million acres of good agricultural land are now out of cultivation, while the people whom the land used to feed are crushed in the slums of the towns in the case of labourers, or gone beyond the sea in the case of the farmers?" i want to be impartial, but freely own that i should not like to answer that question, and i do not believe the professor could. the men who used to supply our fighting force are now becoming extinct. if they go into the town and pick up some kind of work, then the second generation are weaklings and a burden to us; while, if they go abroad, they are still removed from the mother of nations, who needs her sons of the soil, even though she may feel proud of the gallant new states which they are rearing. and, while rats and mice and obscure vermin are gradually taking possession of the land on which britons were bred, the signs of bursting wealth are thick among us. is a nation rich that cannot afford even to keep the kind of men who once defended her? to me the gradual return of the land to its primitive wildness is more than depressing. there are districts on the borders of hertford and essex which might make a sentimental traveller sit down and cry. it all seems strange; it looks so poverty-stricken, so filthy, so sordid, so like the site of a slum after all the houses have been levelled for a dozen years; and this in the midst of our england! i say nothing about land-laws and so forth, but i will say that those who fancy the towns can survive when the farms are deserted are much mistaken. "are we wealthy?" "yes," and "no." we are wealthy in the wrong places, and we are poor in the wrong places; and the combination will end in mischief unless we are very soon prepared to make an alteration in most of our ways of living. in many respects it is a good world; but it might be made better, nobler, finer in every quarter, if the poor would only recognise wise and silent leaders, and use the laws which men have made in order to repair the havoc which other men have also made. xi. the values of labour. only about a quarter-century ago unlearned men of ability would often sigh and say, "ah, if i was only a scholar!" admirers of a clever and illiterate workman often said, "why, if he was a scholar, he would make a fortune in business for himself!" women mourned the lack of learning in the same way, and i have heard good dames deplore the fact that they could not read. i pity most profoundly those on whom the light of knowledge has never shone kindly; and yet i have a comic sort of misgiving lest in a short time a common cry may be, "ah, if i was only not a scholar!" the matchless topsy-turvydom which has marked the passage of the last ten years, the tremendously accelerated velocity with which labour is moving towards emancipation from all control, have so confused things in general that an observer must stand back and get a new focus before he can allow his mind to dwell on the things that he sees. one day's issue of any good newspaper is enough to show what a revolution is upon us, for we merely need to run the eye down columns at random to pick out suggestive little scraps. at present we cannot get that "larger view" about which dr. w.b. carpenter used to talk; he was wont to study hundreds and thousands of soundings and measurements piecemeal, and the chaos of figures gradually took form until at length the doctor had in his mind a complete picture of enormous ocean depths. in somewhat the same way we can by slow degrees form a picture of a changed state of society, and we find that the faculties of body or mind which used to bring their possessor gain are now nearly worthless. in one column of a journal i find that a trained schoolmistress is required to take charge of a village school. the salary is sixteen pounds per annum; but, if the lady is fortunate enough to have a husband, work can be procured for him daily on the farm. this is just a little disconcerting. the teacher must see to the mental and moral training of fifty children; she must have spent at least seven years in learning before she was allowed to take charge of a school; then she remained two more years on probation, and all the time her expenses were not light. as the final reward of her exertions, she is offered six shillings per week, out of which she must dress neatly--for a slatternly schoolmistress would be a dreadful object--buy sufficient food, and hold her own in rural society! the reverend man who advertises this delectable situation must have a peculiar idea regarding the class into which an educated lady like the teacher whom he requires would likely to marry. an agricultural labourer may be an honest fellow enough, but, as the husband of an educated woman, he might be out of place; and i fancy that a schoolmistress whose husband pulled turnips and wore corduroys might not secure the maximum of deference from her scholars. in contrast to this grotesque advertisement i run down a list of cooks required, and i find that the average wage of the cook is not far from three times that of the teacher, while the domestic has her food provided for liberality. the village schoolmistress in the old days was never well paid; but then she was a private speculator; we never expected to see the specialised product of training and time reckoned at the same value as the old dame's, who was able to read and knit, but who could do little more. while we are comparing the wages of teachers and cooks, i may point out that the _chef_, whose training lasts seven years, earns, as we calculate, one hundred and thirty pounds per year more than the average english schoolmaster. this is perhaps as it should be, for the value of a good _chef_ is hardly to be reckoned in money; and yet the figures look funny when we first study them. and now we may turn to the wages of dustmen, who are, it must be admitted, a most estimable class of men and most useful. i find that the london dustman earns more than an assistant master under the salford school board, and, besides his wages, he picks up many trifles. the dustman may dwell with his family in two rooms at three-and-sixpence per week; his equipment consists of a slop, corduroys, and a sou'-wester hat, which are sufficient to last many a day with little washing. but the assistant, whose education alone cost the nation one hundred pounds cash down, not to speak of his own private expenditure, must live in a respectable locality, dress neatly, and keep clear of that ugly soul-killing worry which is inflicted by trouble about money. decidedly the dustman has the best of the bargain all round, for, to say the least, he does not need to labour very much harder than the professional man. this instance tends to throw a very sinister and significant flash on the way things are tending. again, some of the gangs of shipping federation men have full board and lodging, two changes of clothes free, beer and rum in moderate quantities, and thirty shillings per week. does anybody in england know a curate who has a salary like that? i do not think it would be possible to find one on the clergy list. no one grudges the labourers their extra food and high wages; i am only taking note of a significant social circumstance. the curate earns nothing until he is about three-and-twenty; if he goes through one of the older universities, his education costs, up to the time of his going out into the world, something very like two thousand pounds; yet, with all his mental equipment, such as it is, he cannot earn so much as a labourer of his own age. certainly the humbler classes had their day of bondage when the middleman bore heavily on them; they got clear by a mighty effort which dislocated commerce, but we hardly expected to find them claiming, and obtaining, payments higher than many made to the most refined products of the universities! it is the way of the world; we are bound for change, change, and yet more change; and no man may say how the cycles will widen. luxury has grown on us since the thousands of wealthy idlers who draw their money from trade began to make the stream of lavish expenditure turn into a series of rushing rapids. the flow of wasted wealth is no longer like the equable gliding of the full thames; it is like the long deadly flurry of the waters that bears toward niagara. these newly-enriched people cause the rise of the usual crop of parasites, and it is the study of the parasites which forces on the mind hundreds of reflections concerning the values of different kinds of labour. a little while ago, for example, an exquisitely comic paragraph was printed with all innocence in many journals. it appeared that two of the revived species of parasites known as professional pugilists were unable to dress properly before they began knocking each other about, "because their valets were not on the spot." i hope that the foul old days of the villainous "ring" may never be recalled by anything seen in our day, for there never were any "palmy days," though there were some ruffians who could not be bought. yet the worst things that happened in the bygone times were not so much fitted to make a man think solemnly as that one delicious phrase--"their valets were not on the spot." in the noble days, when england was so very merry, it often happened that a man who has been battered out of all resemblance to humanity was left to dress himself as best he could on a bleak marsh, and his chivalrous friends made the best of their way home, while the defeated gladiator was reckoned at a dog's value. now-a-days those sorely-entreated creatures would have their valets. in one department of industry assuredly the value of labour has altered. the very best of the brutal old school once fought desperately for four hours, though it was thought that he must be killed, and his reason was that, if he lost, he would have to beg his bread. now-a-days he would have a valet, a secretary, a manager, and a crowd of plutocratic admirers who would load him with money and luxuries. i was tickled to the verge of laughter by finding that one of these gentry was paid thirty pounds per night for exhibiting his skill, and my amusement was increased when it turned out that one of those who paid him thirty pounds strongly objected on learning that the hero appeared at two other places, from each of which he received the same sum. thus for thirty-six minutes of exertion per day the man was drawing five hundred and forty pounds per week. all these things appeared in the public prints; but no public writer took any serious notice of a symptom which is as significant as any ever observed in the history of mankind. it is almost awe-striking to contemplate these parasites, and think what their rank luxurious existence portends. here we see a man of vast wealth, whereof every pound was squeezed from the blood and toil of working-men; he passes his time now in the company of these fellows who have earned a reputation by pounding each other. the wealthy bully and his hangers-on are dangerous to the public peace; their language is too foul for even men of the world to endure it, and the whole crew lord it in utter contempt of law and decency. that is the kind of spectacle to be seen in our central city almost every night. consider a story which accidently came out a few weeks ago owing to legal proceedings and kept pleasure-seeking and scandalmongering london laughing for a while, and say whether any revelation ever gave us a picture of a more unspeakable society. a rich man, a., keeps a prizefighter, b., to "mind" him, as the quaint phrase goes. mr. a. is offended by another prizefighter, c., and he offers b. the sum of five hundred pounds if he will give c. a beating in public. b. goes to c., and says, "i will give you ten pounds if you will let me thrash you, and i won't hurt you much." c. gladly consents, so b. pockets four hundred and ninety pounds for himself, and the noble patron's revenge is satisfied. there is a true tale of rogues and a fool--a tale to make one brood and brood until the sense of fun passes into black melancholy. five hundred men worked for sixty hours per week before that money was earned--and think of the value received for the whole sum when it was spent! truly the parasite's exertions are lucrative to himself! as for the market-price of book-learning or clerkly skill, it is not worth so much as naming. the clerk was held to be a wondrous person in times when the "neck-verse" would save a man from the gallows; but "clerk" has far altered its meaning, and the modern being of that name is in sorrowful case. so contemptibly cheap are his poor services that he in person is not looked upon as a man, but rather as a lump of raw material which is at present on sale in a glutted market. all the walks of life wherein men proceed as though they belonged to the leisured class are becoming no fit places for self-respecting people. gradually the ornamental sort of workers are being displaced; the idle rich are too plentiful, but i question whether even the idle rich have done, so much harm as the genteel poor who are ashamed of labour. i do not like to see wages going downward, but there are exceptions, and i am almost disposed to feel glad that the searchers after "genteel" employment are now very much like the birds during a long frost. the enormous lounging class who earn nothing do not offer an agreeable subject for contemplation, and their parasites are horrible--there is no other word. yet we may gather a little consolation when we think that the tendency is to raise the earnings of those who do something or produce something. it is not good to know that a dustman makes more money than hundreds of hard-worked and well-educated men, for this is a grotesque state of things brought about by imbecile government officials. neither do i quite like to know that a lady whose education occupied nine years of her life is offered less wages than a good housemaid. but i do assuredly like to hear how the higher class of manual labourers flourish; they are the salt of the earth, and i rejoice that they are no longer held down and regarded as in some way inferior to men who do nothing for two hundred pounds a year, except try to look as if they had two thousand pounds. the quiet man who does the delicate work on the monster engines of a great ocean steamer is worthy of his hire, costly as his hire may be. on his eye, his judgment of materials, his nerve, and his dexterity of hand depend precious lives. for three thousand miles those vast masses of machinery must force a huge hull through huge seas; the mighty and shapely fabrics of metal must work with the ease of a child's toy locomotive, and they must bear a strain that is never relaxed though all the most tremendous forces of nature may threaten. what a charge for a man! his earnings could hardly be raised high enough if we consider the momentous nature of the duty he fulfils; he is an aristocrat of labour, and we do not know that there is not something grotesque in measuring and arguing over the money-payment made to him. then there are the specially skilled hands who in their monkish seclusion work at the instruments wherewith scientific wonders are wrought. the rewards of their toil would have seemed fabulous to such men as harrison the watchmaker; but they also form an aristocracy, and they win the aristocrat's guerdon without practising his idleness. the mathematician who makes the calculations for a machine is not so well paid as the man who finishes it; the observatory calculator who calculates the time of occulation for a planet cannot earn so much as the one who grinds a reflector. in all our life the same tendency is to be seen: the work of the hand outdoes in value the work of the brain. xii. the hopeless poor. by fits and starts the public wake up and own with much clamour that there is a great deal of poverty in our midst. while each new fit lasts the enthusiasm of good people is quite impressive in its intensity; all the old hackneyed signatures appear by scores in the newspapers, and "pro bono publico," "audi alteram partem," "x.y.z.," "paterfamilias," "an inquirer," have their theories quite pat and ready. picturesque writers pile horror on horror, and strive, with the delightful emulation of their class, to outdo each other; far-fetched accounts of oppression, robbery, injustice, are framed, and the more drastic reformers invariably conclude that "somebody" must be hanged. we never find out which "somebody" we should suspend from the dismal tree; but none the less the virtuous reformers go on claiming victims for the sacrifice, while, as each discoverer solemnly proclaims his bloodthirsty remedy, he looks round for applause, and seems to say, "did you ever hear of stern and audacious statesmanship like mine? was there ever such a practical man?" the farce is supremely funny in essentials, and yet i cannot laugh at it, for i know that the drolleries are played out amid sombre surroundings that should make the heart quake. while the hysterical newspaper people are venting abuse and coining theories, there are quiet workers in thousands who go on in uncomplaining steadfastness striving to remove a deadly shame from our civilisation, and smiling softly at the furious cries of folk who know so little and vociferate so much. after each whirlwind of sympathy has reached its full strength, there is generally a strong disposition among the sentimentalists to do something. no mere words for the genuine sentimentalist; he packs his sentimental self into a cab, he engages the services of a policeman, and he plunges into the nasty deeps of the city's misery. he treats each court and alley as a department of a menagerie, and he gazes with mild interest on the animals that he views. to the sentimentalist they are only animals; and he is kind to them as he would be to an ailing dog at home. if the sentimentalist's womenfolk go with him, the tour is made still more pleasing. the ladies shudder with terror as they trail their dainty skirts up noisome stairs; but their genteel cackle never ceases. "and you earn six shillings per week? how very surprising! and the landlord takes four shillings for your one room? how very mean! and you have--let me see--four from six leaves two--yes--you have two shillings a week to keep you and your three children? how charmingly shocking!" the honest poor go out to work; the wastrels stay at home and invent tales of woe; then, when the dusk falls on the foul court and all the sentimentalists have gone home to dinner, the woe-stricken tellers of harrowing tales creep out to the grimy little public-house at the top of the row; they spend the gifts of the sentimentalist; and, when the landlord draws out his brimming tills at midnight, he blesses the kind people who help to earn a snug income for him. i have seen forty-eight drunken people come out of a tavern between half-past eleven and half-past twelve in one night during the time when sentiment ran mad; there never were such roaring times for lazy and dissolute scoundrels; and nearly all the money given by the sentimentalists was spent in sowing crops of liver complaint or _delirium tremens_, and in filling the workhouses and the police-cells. then the fit of charity died out; the clergyman and the "sisters" went on as usual in their sacredly secret fashion until a new outburst came. it seems strange to talk of charity "raging"--it reminds us of mr. mantalini's savage lamb--but i can use no other word but "rage" to express these frantic gushes of affection for the poor. during one october month i carefully preserved and collated all the suggestions which were so liberally put forth in various london and provincial newspapers; and i observed that something like four hundred of these suggestions resolve themselves into a very few definite classes. the most sensible of these follow the lines laid down by charles dickens, and the writers say, "if you do not want the poor to behave like hogs, why do you house them like hogs? clear away the rookeries; buy up the sites; pay reasonable compensation to those now interested in the miserable buildings, and then erect decent dwellings." now i do not want to confuse my readers by taking first a bead-roll of proposals, and then a bead-roll of arguments for and against, so i shall deal with each reformer's idea in the order of its importance. before beginning, i must say that i differ from all the purveyors of the cheaper sort of sentiment; i differ from many ladies and gentlemen who talk about abstractions; and i differ most of all from the feather-brained persons who set up as authorities after they have paid flying visits in cabs to ugly neighbourhoods. when a specialist like miss octavia hill speaks, we hear her with respect; but miss hill is not a sentimentalist; she is a keen, cool woman who has put her emotions aside, and who has gone to work in the dark regions in a kind of napoleonic fashion. no fine phrases for her--nothing but fact, fact, fact. miss hill feels quite as keenly as the gushing persons; but she has regulated her feelings according to the environment in which her energies had to be exercised, and she has done more good than all the poetic creatures that ever raked up "cases" or made pretty phrases. i leave miss hill out of my reckoning, and i deal with the others. my conclusions may seem hard, and even cruel, but they are based on what i believe to be the best kindness, and they are supported by a somewhat varied experience. i shall waive the charge of cruelty in advance, and proceed to plain downright business. you want to clear away rookeries and erect decent dwellings in their place? good and beautiful! i sympathise with the intention, and i wish that it could be carried into effect instantly. unhappily reforms of that sort cannot by any means be arranged on the instant, and certainly they cannot be arranged so as to suit the case of the hopeless poor. shall i tell you, dear sentimentalist, that the hopeless brigade would not accept your kindness if they could? i shall stagger many people when i say that the hopeless division like the free abominable life of the rookery, and that any kind of restraint would only send them swarming off to some other centre from which they would have to be dislodged by degrees according to the means and the time of the authorities. hard, is it not? but it is true. certain kinds of cultured men like the life which they call "bohemian." the hopeless class like their peculiar bohemianism, and they like it with all the gusto and content of their cultured brethren. suppose you uproot a circle of rookeries. the inhabitants are scattered here and there, and they proceed to gain their living by means which may or may not be lawful. the decent law-abiding citizens who are turned out of house and home during the progress of reform suffer most. they are not inclined to become predatory animals; and, although they may have been used to live according to a very low human standard, they cannot all at once begin to live merely up to the standard of pigs. no writer dare tell in our english tongue the consequences of evicting the denizens of a genuine rookery for the purpose of substituting improvements; and i know only one french writer who would be bold enough to furnish cogent details to any civilised community. but, for argument's sake, let me suppose that your "rooks" are transferred from their nests to your model dwellings. i shall allow you to do all that philanthropy can dictate; i shall grant you the utmost powers that a government can bestow; and i shall give six months for your experiment. what will be found at the end of that time? alas, your fine model dwellings will be in worse condition than the wigwam that the apache and his squaw inhabit! let a colony of "rooks" take possession of a sound, well-fitted building, and it will be found that not even the most stringent daily visitation will prevent utter wreck from being wrought. the pipes needed for all sanitary purposes will be cut and sold; the handles of doors and the brass-work of taps will be cut away; every scrap of wood-work available for fire-wood will be stolen sooner or later, and the people will relapse steadily into a state of filth and recklessness to be paralleled only among australian and north american aborigines. which of the sentimentalists has ever travelled to america with a few hundreds of russian and polish jews, saxon peasants, and irish peasants from the west? that is the only experience capable of giving an idea of what happens when a fairly-fitted house is handed over to the tender mercies of a selection from the british "residuum." i shall be accused of talking the language of despair. i have never done that. i should like to see the time come when the poor may no more dwell in hovels like swine, and when a poverty-stricken inhabitant of london may not be brought up with ideas and habits coarser than those of a pig; i merely say that shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. they are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars for the use of ferrets. i grant that the condition of many london streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see how the desolation is caused. wanton, brutish destructiveness has been at work everywhere. the cistern which should supply a building cannot be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe have been chopped away and carried to a marine-store dealer; the landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes' trouble. the very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in contented, unspeakable squalor. no--something more is required than delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required than sighing sentimentalism, which looks at miserable effects without scrutinising causes. let the sentimentalist mark this. if you transplant a colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes fit for brutes and for brutes alone. bricks and mortar and whitewash will not change the nature of human vermin; phrases about beauty and duty and loveliness will not affect the maker of slums, any more than perfumes or pretty colours would affect the rats that squirm under the foundations of the city. does the sentimentalist imagine that the brick-and-mortar structures about which he wails were always centres of festering ugliness? if he has that fancy, let him take a glance at some of the quaint old houses of southwark. they were clean and beautiful in their day, but the healthy human plant can no longer flourish in them, and the weed creeps in, the crawling parasite befouls their walls, and the structures which were lovely when chaucer's pilgrims started from the "tabard" are abominable now. if english folk of gentle and cleanly breeding had lived on in those ancient places, they would have been wholesome and sound like many another house erected in days gone by; but the weed gradually took root, and now the ugliest dens in london are found in the places where knights and trim clerks and gracious dames once lived. in the face of all these things, how strangely unwise it is to fancy that ever the forlorn army can be saved by bricks and mortar! education? ah, there comes a pinch--and a very severe pinch it is! about five or six years since some of the most important thoroughfares in london, liverpool, and many great towns have been rendered totally impassable by the savage proceedings of gangs of young roughs. certain districts in liverpool could not be traversed after dark, and the reason was simply this--any man or woman of decent appearance was liable to be first of all surrounded by a carefully-picked company of blackguards; then came the clever trip-up from behind; then the victim was left to be robbed; and then the authorities wrung their hands and said that it was a pity, and that everything should be done. the liverpool youths went a little too far, and one peculiarly obnoxious set of rascals were sent to penal servitude, while the leader of a gang of murderers went to the gallows. but in london we have such sights every night as never were matched in the most turbulent italian cities at times when the hot southern blood was up; our great english capital can match venice, rome, palermo, turin, or milan in the matter of stabbing; and, for mere wanton cruelty and thievishness, i imagine that hackney road or gray's inn road may equal any thoroughfare of françois villon's paris. these turbulent london mobs that make night hideous are made up of youths who have tasted the full blessings of our educational system; they were mostly mere infants when the great measure was passed which was to regenerate all things, and yet the london of swift's time was not much worse than the southwark or hackney of our own day. i never for an instant dispute the general advance which our modern society has made, and i dislike the gruesome rubbish talked of the good old times; but i must nevertheless point out that "fancy" building and education are not the main factors which have aided in making us better and more seemly. the brutal rough remains, and the gangs of scamps who infest london in various spots are quite as bad as the beings whom hogarth drew. they have all been forced into the government schools; all of them have learned to read and write, and not one was suffered to leave school until he had reached the age of fourteen years or passed a moderately high standard according to the code. still, we have this monstrous army of the hopeless poor, and they are usually massed with the hopeful poor--the poor who attend the people's palaces, and institutes, and so forth. alas, the hopeless poor are not to be dismissed with a light phrase--they are not to be dealt with by mere pretty words! they are creatures who remain poor and villainous because they choose to be poor and villainous; so pity and nice theories will not cure them. the best of us yearn toward the good poor folk, and we find a healthful joy in aiding them; but we have a set of very different feelings towards the evil brigade. xiii. waifs and strays. when i talked[ ] of the hopeless poor and of degraded men, i had in my mind only the feeble or detestable adults who degrade our civilisation; but i have by no means forgotten the unhappy little souls who develop into wastrels unless they are taken away from hideous surroundings which cramp vitality, destroy all childish happiness, and turn into brutes poor young creatures who bear the human image. lately i heard one or two little stories which are amongst the most pathetic that ever came before me in the course of some small experience of life among the forsaken classes--or rather let me say, the classes that used to be forsaken. these little stories have prompted me to endeavour to deal carefully with a matter which has cost me many sad thoughts. [ ] essay xii. a stray child was rescued from the streets by a society which is extending its operations very rapidly, and the little creature was placed as a boarder with a cottager in the country. to the utter amazement of the good rustic folk, their queer little guest showed complete ignorance of the commonest plants and animals; she had never seen any pretty thing, and she was quite used to being hungry and to satisfying her appetite with scraps of garbage. when she first saw a daisy on the green, she gazed longingly, and then asked plaintively, "please, might i touch that?" when she was told that she might pluck a few daisies she was much delighted. after her first experiences in the botanising line she formally asked permission to pluck many wild flowers; but she always seemed to have a dread of transgressing against some dim law which had been hitherto represented to her mind by the man in blue who used to watch over her miserable alley. before she became accustomed to receiving food at regular intervals, she fairly touched the hearts of her foster-parents by one queer request. the housewife was washing some brussels sprouts, when the little stray said timidly, "please, may i eat a bit of that stalk?" of course the stringy mass was uneatable; but it turned out that the forlorn child had been very glad to worry at the stalks from the gutter as a dog does at an unclean bone. another little girl was taken from the den which she knew as home, after her parents had been sent to prison for treating her with unspeakable cruelty. the matron of the country home found that the child's body was scarred from neck to ankle in a fashion which no lapse of years could efface. the explanation of the disfigurement was very simple. "if i didn't bring in any money mother beat me first; and then, when father came in drunk, she tied my hands behind my back and told him to give me the buckle. then they strapped me on the bed and fastened my feet, and he whacked me with the buckle-end of his strap." it sounds very horrible, does it not? nevertheless, the facts remain that the wretched parents were caught in the act and convicted, and that the child must carry her scars to her grave. no one who has not seen these lost children can form an idea of their darkness and helplessness of mind. we all know the story of the south sea islanders, who said, "what a big pig!" when they first saw a horse; one little london savage quite equalled this by remarking, "what a little cow!" when she saw a tiny maltese terrier brought by a lady missionary. the child had some vague conception regarding a cow; but, like others of her class, her notions of size, form, and colour, were quite cloudy. another of these city phenomena did not know how to blow out a candle; and in many cases it is most difficult to persuade those newly reclaimed to go to bed without keeping their boots on. we cannot call such beings barbarians, because "barbarian" implies something wild, strong, and even noble; yet, to our shame, we must call them savages, and we must own that they are born and bred within easy gunshot distance of our centres of culture, enlightenment, and luxury. they swarm, do these children of suffering: and easy-going people have no idea of the density of the savagery amid which such scions of our noble english race are reared. a gentleman once offered sixpence to a little girl who appeared before him dressed in a single garment which seemed to have been roughly made from some sort of sacking. he expected to see her snatch at the coin with all the eagerness of the ordinary hardy street-arab; but she showed her jagged brown teeth, and said huskily, "no! big money!" a lady, divining with the rapid feminine instinct what was meant by the enigmatic muttering, explained, "she does not know the sixpence. she has had coppers to spend before." and so it turned out to be. perhaps comfortable, satisfied readers may be startled, or even offended, if i say that there are young creatures in our great cities who rarely see even the light of day, save when the beams are filtered through the reek of a court; and these same infants resemble the black fellows of western australia or the troglodytes of africa in general intelligence. i have little heart to speak of the parents who are answerable for such horrors of crass neglect and cruelty. by laying a set of dry police reports before any sensitive person i could make that person shudder without adding a word of rhetoric; for it would be seen that the popular picture of a fiend represents rather a mild and harmless entity if we compare it with the foul-souled human beings who dwell in our benighted places. what is to be done? it is best to grapple swiftly with an ugly question; and i do not hesitate to attack deliberately one of the most delicate puzzles that ever came before the world. wise emotionless men may say, and do say, "are you going to relieve male and female idlers and drunkards of all anxiety regarding their offspring? do you mean to discourage the honest but poverty-stricken parents who do their best for their children? what kind of world will you make for us all if you give your aid to the worst and neglect the good folk?" those are very awkward questions, and i can answer them only by a sort of expedient which must not be mistaken for intellectual conjuring; i drop ordinary logic and theories of probability and go at once to facts. at first sight it seems like rank folly for any man or body of men to take charge of a child which has been neglected by shameless parents; but, on the other hand, let us consider our own self-interest, and leave sentiment alone for a while. we cannot put the benighted starvelings into a lethal chamber and dispose of their brief lives in that fashion; we are bound to maintain them in some way or other--and the ratepayers of st. george's-in-the-east know to some trifling extent what that means. if the waifs grow up to be predatory animals, we must maintain them first of all in reformatories, and afterwards, at intervals during their lives, in prisons. if they grow up without shaking off the terrible mental darkness of their starveling childhood, we must provide for them in asylums. a thoroughly neglected waif costs this happy country something like fifteen pounds per year for the term of his natural life. very good. at this point some hard-headed person says, "what about the workhouses?" this brings us face to face with another astounding problem to solve which at all satisfactorily requires no little research and thought. i know that there are good workhouses; but i happen to know that there are also bad ones. in many a ship and fishing-vessel fine fellows may be met with who were sent out early from workhouse-schools and wrought their way onward until they became brave and useful seamen; there are also many industrious well-conducted girls who came originally from the great union schools. but, when i take another side of the picture, i am inclined to say very fervently, "anything rather than the workhouse system for children! anything short of complete neglect!" observe that in one of the overgrown schools the young folk are scarcely treated as human; their individuality--if they have any to begin with--is soon lost; they are known only by a number, and they are passed into the outer world like bundles of shot rubbish. there are seamen who have never cast off the peculiar workhouse taint--and no worse shipmates ever afflicted any capable and honourable soul: for these union weeds carry the vices of rob the grinder and noah claypole on to blue water, and show themselves to be hounds who would fawn or snarl, steal or talk saintliness, lie or sneak just as interest suited them. then the workhouse girls: i have said sharp words about cruel mistresses; but i frankly own that the average lady who is saddled with the average workhouse servant has some slight reasons for showing acerbity, though she has none for practising cruelty. how could anybody expect a girl to turn out well after the usual course of workhouse training? the life of the soul is too often quenched; the flame of life in the poor body is dim and low; and the mechanical morality, the dull, meaningless round of useless lessons, the habit of herding in unhealthy rooms with unhealthy companions, all tend to develop a creature which can be regarded only as one of nature's failures, if i may parody a phrase of the superlative beau brummel's. there is another and darker side to the workhouse question, but i shall skim it lightly. the women whose conversation the young girls hear are often wicked, and thus a dull, under-fed, inept child may have a great deal too much knowledge of evil. can we expect such a collection to contain a large percentage of seemly and useful children? is it a fact that the unions usually supply domestics worth keeping? ask the mistresses, and the answer will not be encouraging. no; the workhouse will not quite suffice. what we want to do is to take the waifs and strays into places where they may lead a natural and healthy life. get them clear of the horror of the slums, let them breathe pure air and learn pure and simple habits, and then, instead of odious and costly human weeds, we may have wholesome, useful fellow-citizens, who not only will cost us nothing, but who will be a distinct source of solid profit to the empire. the thing has been and is being done steadily by good men and women who defy prejudice and go to work in a vigorous practical way. the most miserable and apparently hopeless little creatures from the filthy purlieus of great towns become gradually bright and healthy and intelligent when they are taken to their natural home--the country--and cut adrift from the congested centres of population. the cost of their maintenance is at first a little over the workhouse figure; but then the article produced for the money is far and away superior to anything turned out by any workhouse. the rescued children are eagerly sought after in the colonies; and i am not aware of any case in which one of the young emigrants has expressed discontent. how much better it is to see these poor waifs changed into useful, profitable colonists than to have them sullenly, uselessly starving in the dens of london and liverpool and manchester! the work of rescuing and training the lost children has not been fully developed yet; but enough has been done to show that in a few years we shall have a large number of prosperous colonial farmers who will indirectly contribute to the wealth of mighty britain. had the trained emigrants never been snatched away from the verge of the pit, we should have been obliged to maintain them until their wretched lives ended with sordid deaths, and the very cost of their burial would have come from the pockets of pinched workers. i fancy that i have shown the advisability of neglecting strict economic canons in this instance. i abhor the pestilent beings who swarm in certain quarters, and i should never dream of removing any burden from their shoulders if i thought that it would only leave the rascals with more money to expend on brutish pleasures; but i desire to look far ahead, and i can see that, when the present generation of adult wastrels dies out, it will be a very good thing for all of us if there are few or none of the same stamp ready to take their places. by resolutely removing the children of vice and sorrow, we clear the road for a better race. let it be understood that i have a truly orthodox dread of "pauperisation," and i watch very jealously the doings of those who are anxious to feed all sorts and conditions of men; but pauperising men by maintaining them in laziness is very different from rearing useful subjects of the empire, whose trained labour is a source of profit and whose developed morality is a fund of security. we cannot take chinese methods of lessening the pressure of population, and we must at once decide on the wisest way of dealing with our waifs and strays; if we do not, then the chances are that they will deal unpleasantly with us. the locust, the lemming, the phylloxera, are all very insignificant creatures; but, when they act together in numbers, they can very soon devastate a district. the parable is not by any means inapt. xiv. stage-children. the modern legislator is a most terrible creature. when he is not engaged in obstructing public business, he must needs be meddling with other people's private affairs--and some of us want to know where he is going to stop. the legislator has decreed that no children who are less than ten years of age shall henceforth be allowed to perform on the stage. much of the talk which came from those who carried the measure was kindly and sensible; but some of the acrid party foisted mere misleading rubbish on the public. henceforth the infantile player will be seen no more. mr. crummles will wave a stern hand from the shades where the children of dreams dwell, and the phenomenon will be glad that she has passed from a prosaic earth. had the stern law-makers had their way thirty years ago, how many pretty sights should we have missed! little marie wilton would not have romped about the stage in her childish glee (she enjoyed the work from the first, and even liked playing in a draughty booth when the company of roaming "artists" could get no better accommodation). little ellen terry, too, would not have played in the castle scene in "king john," and crowds of worthy matrons would have missed having that "good cry" which they enjoy so keenly. we are happy who saw all the terrys, and marie the witty who charmed charles dickens, and all the pretty mites who did so delight us when mme. katti lanner marshalled them. does any reader wish to have a perfectly pleasant half-hour? let that reader get the number of "fors clavigera" which contains mr. ruskin's description of the children who performed in the drury lane pantomime. the kind critic was in ecstasies--as well he might be--and he talked with enthusiasm about the cleanliness, the grace, the perfectly happy discipline of the tiny folk. then, again, in "time and tide," the great writer gives us the following exquisite passage about a little dancer who especially pleased him--"she did it beautifully and simply, as a child ought to dance. she was not an infant prodigy; there was no evidence in the finish and strength of her motion that she had been put to continual torture during half of her eight or nine years. she did nothing more than any child--well taught, but painlessly--might do; she caricatured no older person, attempted no curious or fantastic skill; she was dressed decently, she moved decently, she looked and behaved innocently, and she danced her joyful dance with perfect grace, spirit, sweetness, and self-forgetfulness." how perfect! there is not much suggestion of torture or premature wickedness in all this; and i wish that the wise and good man's opinion might have been considered for a little while by some of the reformers. for my part, i venture to offer a few remarks about the whole matter; for there are several considerations which were neglected by the debaters on both sides during the discussion. first, then, i must solemnly say that i cannot advise any grown girl or young man to go upon the stage; and yet i see no harm in teaching little children to perform concerted movements in graceful ways. this sounds like a paradox; but it is not paradoxical at all to those who have studied the question from the inside. if a girl waits until she is eighteen before going on the stage, she has a good chance of being thrown into the company of women who do not dream of respecting her. if she enters a provincial travelling company, she has constant discomfort and constant danger; some of her companions are certain to be coarse--and a brutal actor whose professional vanity prevents him from understanding his own brutality is among the most horrible of living creatures. after a lady has made her mark as an actress, she can secure admirable lodging at good hotels; but a poor girl with a pound per week must put up with such squalor as only actors can fittingly describe. amid all this the girl is left to take care of herself--observe that point. a little child is taken care of; whereas the adolescent or adult must fight her way through a grimy and repulsive environment as best she can. there is not a man in the world who would dare to introduce himself informally to any lady who is employed under mr. w.s. gilbert's superintendence; but what can we say about the thousands who travel from town to town unguided save by the curt directions of the stage manager? let it be understood that when i speak of the theatre i have not in mind the beautiful refined places in central london where cultured people in the audience are entertained by cultured people on the stage; i am thinking grimly of the squalor, the degradation, the wretched hand-to-mouth existence of poor souls who work in the casual companies that spend the better part of their existence in railway carriages. not long ago a young actress who can now command two thousand pounds per year was obliged to remain dinnerless on christmas day because she could not afford to pay a shilling for a hamper which was sent her from home. her success in the lottery arrived by a strange chance; but how many bear all the poverty and trouble without even having one gleam of success in their miserable dangerous lives? there are theatres and theatres--there are managers and managers; but in some places the common conversation of the women is not edifying--and a good girl must insensibly lose her finer nature if she has to associate with such persons. in the case of the little children there are none, or few, at any rate, of the drawbacks. not one in fifty goes on the stage; the mites are engaged only at certain seasons; and their harvest-time enables poor people to obtain many little comforts and necessaries. further, there is one curious thing which may not be known to the highly particular sect--no manager, actor, or actress would use a profane or coarse word among the children; such an offender would be scouted by the roughest member of any company and condemned by the very stage-carpenters. i own that i have sometimes wished that a child here and there could be warm asleep on a chilly night, especially when the young creature was perilously suspended from a wire; but that is very nearly the furthest extent of my pity. so long as the youngsters are not required to perform dangerous or unnatural feats, they need no pity. instead of being inured to brutalities, they are actually taken away from brutality--for no man or woman would sully their minds. we have heard it said that the stage-children who return to school after their spell of pantomime corrupt the others. this is a gross and stupid falsehood which is calculated to injure a cause that has many good points. i earnestly sympathise with the well-meaning people who desire to succour the little ones; but i beseech them not to be led away by misstatements which are concocted for sensational purposes. so far from corrupting other children, the young actors invariably act as a good influence in a school. the experienced observer can almost make certain of picking out the boys and girls who have had a stage-training. they like to be smart and cleanly, their deportment and general manners are improved, and they are almost invariably superior in intelligence to the ordinary school-trained child. imagine mme. katti lanner having a corrupt influence! imagine those delightful beings who play "alice in wonderland" corrupting anybody or anything! i have always been struck by the pretty manners of the trained children--and the advance in refinement is especially noticeable among those who have been speaking or singing parts. the most pleasing set of youths that i ever met were the members of a comic-opera troupe. some of them, without an approach to freedom of manner, would converse with good sense on many topics, and their drill had been so extended as to include a knowledge of polite salutes. not one of the boys or girls would have been ill at ease in a drawing-room; and i found their educational standard quite up to that of any board school known to me. these nice little folk were certainly in no wise pallid or distraught; and, when they danced on the stage, the performance was a beautiful and delightful romp which suggested no idea of pain. to see the "prima donna" of the company trundling her hoop on a bright morning was as pretty a sight as one would care to see. the little lady was neither forward nor unhealthy, nor anything else that is objectionable--and it was plain that she enjoyed her life. is it in the least likely that any sane manager would ill-treat a little child that was required to be pleasing? one or two acrobats have been known to be stern with their apprentices; but the rudest circus-man would not venture to exhibit a pupil who looked unhappy. the rascally "arabs" who entrapped so many boys in years gone by were fiends who met with very appropriate retribution; but such villains are not common. i am always haunted by the argument about late hours--and give it every weight. as aforesaid, i used sometimes to wish that some wee creature could only be wrapped in a night-gown and sent to rest. but, for the benefit of those who cannot well imagine what the horrors of a city slum are like, let me describe the nightly scene in a typical city alley. it is cold in the pantomime season; but the folk in that alley have not much fire. joe, the costermonger, bill, the market-labourer, tom, the fish-porter, and the rest come home in a straggling way; and, if they can buy a pennyworth of coal, they boil the little kettle. then one of the children runs to the chandler's and gets a halfpennyworth of tea, a scrap of bread, and perhaps a penny slice of sausage. the men stint themselves in food and firing; but they always have a little to spare for gin and beer and tobacco. there is no light in the evil-smelling room; but there is a place at the corner of the alley where the gas is burning as cheerily as the foul wreaths of smoke will permit. the men go out and squat on barrels in the hideous bar; then they call for some liquor which may be warranted to take speedy effect; then they smoke, and try to forget. what is the little child to do? go to bed? why, it has no bed! if it were earning a little money, its parents might be able to provide a flock or straw bed with some sort of covering; but the poverty of these people is so gnawing and dire that very few lodgings contain anything which could possibly be pawned for twopence. usually the child seeks the streets; and in the dim and filthy haze he or she sports at large with other ragged companions. then the women--the match-box makers, trouser-makers, and such like--begin to troop in--and they gravitate towards the gin-shop. the darkness deepens; the bleared lamps blare in the dirty mist; the hoarse roar from the public-house comes forth accompanied by choking wafts of reek; the abominable tramps move towards the lodging-house and pollute the polluted air further with the foulness of their language; the drink mounts into unstable heads; and presently--especially on saturday nights--there are hoarse growls as from rough-throated beasts, shrill shrieks, and a running chorus of indescribable grossness. drunken men are quarrelling in the street, drunken women yell and stagger, and the hideous discord fills the night on all sides. no item of corruption is spared the children; and the vile hurly-burly ceases only at midnight. the children will always try to sneak through the swinging doors of the gin _inferno_ when the cold becomes too severe; and they will remain crouched like rats until some capricious guest sends them out with an oath and a kick. there is not one imaginable horror that does not become familiar to these children of despair--and they sometimes have a very good chance of seeing murder. when the last hour comes, and the father and mother return to their dusky den, the child crouches anywhere on the floor; undressing is not practised; and, if any sentimental person will first of all go into a common board school in a non-theatrical quarter on a wet afternoon, and if he will then drive on and pass through a few hundreds of the theatrical children, his "olfactories" will teach him a lesson which may make him think a good deal. now let me put a question or two in the name of common sense. we must balance good and evil; and, granting that the theatre has a tendency to make children light-minded, is it worse than the horror of the slums and the stench and darkness of the single room where a family herd together? the youngster who is engaged at the theatre can set off home at the very latest as soon as the harlequinade is over. very well; suppose it is late. would he or she be early if the night were spent in the alley? not at all! then the child from the theatre is bathed, fed, taught, clothed nicely, and it gives its parents a little money which procures food. some say the extra money goes for extra gin--and that may happen in some cases; but, at any rate, the child's earnings usually purchase a share of food as well as of drink; for the worst blackguard in the world dares not send a starveling to meet the stage-manager. in sum, then, making every possible allowance for the good intentions of those who wish to rescue children from the theatre, i am inclined to fear that they have been hasty. i am not without some knowledge of the various details of the subject; and i have tried to give my judgment as fairly as i could--for i also pity and love the children. xv. public and private morality: past and present. certain enterprising persons have contributed of late years to make english newspapers somewhat unpleasant reading, and mournful men are given to moaning over the growth of national corruption. so persistent have the mournful folk been, that many good simple people are in a state of grievous alarm, for they are persuaded that the nation is bound towards the pit of doom. when doleful men and women cry out concerning abstract evils, it is always best to meet them with hard facts, and i therefore propose to show that we ought really to be very grateful for the undoubted advance of the nation toward righteousness. hideous blots there are--ugly cankers amid our civilisation--but we grow better year by year, and the general movement is towards honesty, helpfulness, goodness, purity. whenever any croaker begins speaking about the golden age that is gone, i advise my readers to try a system of cross-examination. ask the sorrowful man to fix the precise period of the golden age, and pin him to direct and definite statements. was it when labourers in east anglia lived like hogs around the houses of their lords? was it when the starving and utterly wretched thousands marched on london under tyler and john ball? was it when the press-gangs kidnapped good citizens in broad daylight? was it when a score of burning ricks might be seen in a night by one observer? was it when imbecile rulers had set all the world against us--when the french threatened ireland, and the maddened, hunger-bitten sailors were in wild rebellion, and the funds were not considered as safe for investors? the croaker is always securely indefinite, and a strict, vigorous series of questions reduces him to rage and impotence. now let us go back, say, one hundred and twenty years, and let us see how the sovereign, the legislators, the aristocracy, and the people fared then; the facts may perchance be instructive. the king had resolved to be absolute, and his main energies were devoted to bribing parliament. with his own royal hand he was not ashamed to write, enclosing what he called "gold pills," which were to be used in corrupting his subjects. he was a most moral, industrious, cleanly man in private life; yet when the duke of grafton, his prime minister, appeared near the royal box of the theatre, accompanied by a woman of disreputable character, his majesty made no sign. he was satisfied if he could keep the mighty burke, the high-souled rockingham, the brilliant charles james fox, out of his counsels, and he did not care at all about the morals or the general behaviour of his ministers. about a quarter of a million was spent by the crown in buying votes and organising corruption, and king george iii. was never ashamed to appear before his parliament in the character of an insolvent debtor when he needed money to sap the morals of his people. a movement in the direction of purity began even in george iii.'s own lifetime; he was obliged to be cautious, and he ended by coming under the iron domination of william pitt. thus, instead of being remembered as the dangerous, obstinate, purblind man who made parliament a sink of foulness, and who lost america, he is mentioned as a comfortable simple gentleman of the farmer sort. before we can half understand the vast purification that has been wrought, we must study the history of the reign from to , and then we may feel happy as we compare our gentle, beneficent sovereign with the unscrupulous blunderer who fought the colonists and all but lost the empire. then consider the ministers who carried out the sovereign's behest. there was "jemmy twitcher," as lord sandwich was called. this man was so utterly bad, that in later life he never cared to conceal his infamies, because he knew that his character could not possibly be worse blackened. sandwich belonged to the unspeakable medmenham abbey set. the lovely ruin had been bought and renovated by a gang of rakes, who converted it into an abode of drunkenness and grossness; they defaced the sacred trees and the grey walls with inscriptions which the indignation of a purer age has caused to be removed; they carried on nightly revels which no historian could describe, and in their wicked buffoonery mocked the creator with burlesque religious rites. such an unholy place would be pulled down by the mob nowadays, and the gang of debauchees would figure in the police-court; but in those "good old times" the prime minister and the secretary to the admiralty were merry members of a crew that disgraced humanity. just six weeks after lord sandwich had joined the medmenham abbey gang, he put himself forward for election to the high stewardship of cambridge university. here was a pretty position! the man had been thus described by a poet-- "too infamous to have a friend, too bad for bad men to commend or good to name; beneath whose weight earth groans; who hath been spared by fate only to show on mercy's plan how far and long god bears with man"-- and this superb piece of truculence was received with applause by all that was upright and noble in england. this indescribable villain presented himself as worthy to preside over the place where the flower of english youth were educated. a pleasing example he offered to young and ardent souls! worst of all, he was elected. he adroitly gained the votes of country clergymen; he begged his friends to solicit the votes of their private chaplains; he dodged and manoeuvred until he gained his position. one voter came from a lunatic asylum, another was brought from the isle of man, others were bribed in lavish fashion--and sandwich presided over cambridge. the students rose in a body and walked out when he came among them; but that mattered little to the brazen fellow. to complete the ghastly comedy, it happened that four years later the chancellorship fell vacant, and the duke of grafton, who was only second to "jemmy twitcher" in wickedness, was chosen for the high office. now i ask plainly, "can the croakers declare that england was better under grafton and 'jemmy twitcher' than she now is?" it is nonsense! the crew of bacchanals and blackguards who then flaunted in high places would not now be tolerated for a day. i look on our governing class now,[ ] and i may safely declare that not more than one cabinet minister during the past twenty years has been regarded as otherwise than stainless in character. what is the meaning of this transformation? it means that good, pure women have gained their rightful influence, that men have grown purer, and that the elevation of the general body of society has been reflected in the character of the men chosen to rule. vice is all too powerful, and the dark corners of our cities are awful to see; but the worst of the "fast" men in modern england are not so bad as were the governors of a mighty empire when george iii. was king. [ ] . if we look at the society that diced and drank and squandered health and fortune in the times which we mention, we are more than ever struck with the advance made. it is a literal fact that the correspondence of the young men mainly refers to drink and gaming, the correspondence of the middle-aged men to gout. there were few of the educated classes who reached middle age, and a country squire was reckoned quite a remarkable person if he could still walk and ride when he attained to fifty years. the quiet, steady middle-class certainly lived more temperately; but the intemperance of the aristocracy was indescribable. the leader of the house of lords imbibed until six every morning, was carried to bed, and came down about two in the afternoon; two noblemen declared that they drank a gallon and a half of champagne and burgundy at one sitting; in some coffee-houses it was the custom, when the night's drinking ended, for the company to burn their wigs. some of horace walpole's letters prove plainly enough that great gentlemen conducted themselves occasionally very much as wild seamen would do in shadwell or the highway. what would be thought if lord salisbury reeled into the house in a totally drunken condition? the imagination cannot conceive the situation, and the fact that the very thought is laughable shows how much we have improved in essentials. in bygone days, a man who became a minister proceeded to secure his own fortune; then he provided for all his relatives, his hangers-on, his very jockeys and footmen. one lord held eight sinecure offices, and was besides colonel of two regiments. a chancellor of the exchequer cleared four hundred thousand on a new loan, and the bulk of this large sum remained in his own pocket, for he had but few associates to bribe. when patrols were set to guard the treasury at night, an epigram ran-- "from the night till the morning 'tis true all is right; but who will secure it from morning till night?" there was a perfect carnival of robbery and corruption, and the people paid for all. money gathered by public corruption was squandered in private debauchery, while a sullen and helpless nation looked on. think of the change! a minister now toils during seventeen hours per day, and receives less than a successful barrister. he must give up all the ordinary pleasures of life; and, in recompense for the sacrifice, he can claim but little patronage. by most of the men in office the work is undertaken on purely patriotic grounds; so that a duke with a quarter of a million per year is content to labour like an attorney's clerk. if we think about the ladies of the old days, we are more than ever driven to reflection. it is impossible to imagine a more insensate collection of gamblers than the women of horace walpole's society. well-bred harpies won and lost fortunes, and the vice became a raging pest. a young politician could not further his own prospects better than by letting some high-born dame win his money; if the youth won the lady's money, then a discreet forgetfulness of the debt was profitable to him. the rattle of dice and the shuffle of cards sounded wherever two or three fashionable persons were gathered together; men and women quarrelled, and society became a mere jumble of people who suspected and hated and thought to rob each other. it is horrible, even at this distance of time, to think of those rapacious beings who forgot literature, art, friendship, and family affection for the sake of high play. one weary, witty debauchee said, "play wastes time, health, money, and friendship;" yet he went on pitting his skill against that of unsexed women and polished rogues. the morality of the fair gamblers was more than loose. it was taken for granted in the whole set that every female member of it must inevitably be divorced, if the catastrophe had not occurred already; and one man asked walpole, "who's your proctor?" just as he would have asked, "who's your tailor?" an unspeakable society--a hollow, heartless, callous, wicked brood. compare that crew of furious money-grabbers with our modern gentlemen and ladies! we have our faults--crime and vice flourish; but, from the court down to the simplest middle-class society in our provincial towns, the spread of seemliness and purity is distinctly marked. some insatiable grumblers will have it that our girls and women are deteriorating, and we are informed that the taste for objectionable literature is keener than it used to be. it is a distinct libel. no one save a historian would now read the corrupting works of mrs. aphra behn; and yet it is a fact that those novels were read aloud among companies of ladies. a man winces now if he is obliged to turn to them; the girls in the "good old times" heard them with never a blush. wherever we turn we find the same steady advance. can any creature be more dainty, more sweet, more pure, than the ordinary english girl of our day? will any one bring evidence to show that the girls of the last century, or of any other, were superior to our own maidens? no evidence has been produced from literature, from journals, from family correspondence, and i am pretty certain that no evidence exists. practically speaking, the complaints of the decline of morality are merely uttered as a mode of showing the talker's own superiority. xvi. "raising the level of amusements." it is really most kind on the part of certain good people to reorganise the amusements of the people; but, as each reorganiser fancies himself to be the only man who has the right notion, it follows that matters are becoming more and more complicated. for example, to begin with literature, a simple person who has no taste for profundities likes to read the old sort of stories about love's pretty fever; the simple person wants to hear about the trials and crosses of true lovers, the defeat of villains--to enjoy the kindly finish where faith and virtue are rewarded, and where the unambitious imagination may picture the coming of a long life of homely toil and homely pleasure. perhaps the simple personage has a taste for dukes--i know of one young person aged thirteen who will not write a romance of her own without putting her hero at the very summit of the peerage--or wicked baronets, or marble halls. these tastes are by no means confined to women; sailors in far-away seas most persistently beguile their scanty leisure by studying tales of sentiment, and soldiers are, if possible, more eager than seamen for that sort of reading. the righteous organiser comes on the scene, and says, "we must not let these poor souls fritter away any portion of their lives on frivolities. let us give them less of light literature and more of the serious work which may lead them to strive toward higher things." the aggressively righteous individual has a most eccentric notion of what constitutes "light" literature; he never thinks that shakspere is decidedly "light," and i rather fancy that he would regard aristophanes as heavy. if one were to suggest, on his proposing to place the irving shakspere on the shelves of a free library, that the poet is often foolish, often a buffoon of a low type, often a mere quibbler, and often ribald, he might perhaps have a fit, or he might inquire if the speaker were mad--assuredly he would do something impressive; but he would not scruple to deliver an oration of the severest type if some sweet and innocent story of love and tenderness and old-fashioned sentiment were proposed. as for the lady who dislikes "light" literature, she is a subject for laughter among the gods. to see such an one present a sensible workman with a pamphlet entitled "who paid for the mangle?--or, maria's pennies," is to know what overpowering joy means. yet the severe and strait-laced censors are not perhaps so much of a nuisance as the sternly-cultured and emotional persons who "yearn" a great deal. the "yearnest" man or woman always has an ideal which is usually the vaguest thing in the cloudland of metaphysics. i fancy it means that one must always be hankering after something which one has not and keeping a look of sorrow when one's hankering is fruitless. the feeling of pity with which a "yearnest" one regards somebody who cares only for pleasant and simple or pathetic books is very creditable; but it weighs on the average human being. why on earth should a girl leave the tenderness of "the mill on the floss" and rise to "daniel deronda's" elevated but barren and abhorrent level? there are people capable of advising girls to read such a literary production as "robert elsmere"; and this advice reveals a capacity for cruelty worthy of an inquisitor. then we are bidden to leave the unpolished utterances of frank love and jealousy and fear and anger in order that we may enjoy the peculiar works of art which have come from america of late. in these enthralling fictions all the characters are so exceedingly refined that they can talk only by hints, and sometimes the hints are very long. but the explanations of the reasons for giving the said hints are still longer; and, when once the author starts off to tell why crespigny conyers of conyers magna, england, stumbled against the music-stool prepared for the reception of selina fogg, bones co., mass., one never knows whether the fifth, the twelfth, or the fortieth page of the explanation will bring him up. there is no doubt but that these things are refined in their way. the british peer and the beautiful american girl hint away freely through three volumes; and it is understood that they either go through the practical ceremony of getting married at the finish, or decline into the most delicately-finished melancholy that resignation, or more properly, renunciation can produce. yet the atmosphere in which they dwell is sickly to the sound soul. it is as if one were placed in an orchid house full of dainty and rare plants, and kept there until the quiet air and the light scents overpowered every faculty. in all the doings of these superfine americans and frenchmen and britons and italians there is something almost inhuman; the record of a strong speech, a blow, a kiss would be a relief, and one young and unorthodox person has been known to express an opinion to the effect that a naughty word would be quite luxurious. the lovers whom we love kiss when they meet or part, they talk plainly--unless the girls play the natural and delightful trick of being coy--and they behave in a manner which human beings understand. supposing that the duke uses a language which ordinary dukes do not affect save in moments of extreme emotion, it is not tiresome, and, at the worst, it satisfies a convention which has not done very much harm. now on what logical ground can we expect people who were nourished on a literature which is at all events hearty even when it chances to be stupid--on what grounds can the organisers of improvement expect an english man or woman to take a sudden fancy to the diaphanous ghosts of the new american fiction? i dislike out-of-the-way words, and so perhaps, instead of "diaphanous ghosts," i had better say "transparent wraiths," or "marionettes of superfine manufacture," or anything the reader likes that implies frailty and want of human resemblance. it all comes to the same thing; the individuals who recommend a change of literature as they might recommend a change of air do not know the constitutions of the patients for whom they prescribe. it has occurred to me that a delightful comedy scene might be witnessed if one of the badgered folk who are to be "raised" were to say on a sudden, "in the name of goodness, how do you know that my literature is not better than yours? why should i not raise you? when you tell me that these nicely-dressed ladies and gentlemen, who only half say anything they want to say and who never half do anything, are polished and delightful, and so on, i grant that they are so to you, and i do not try to upset your judgment. but your judgment and my taste are two very different things; and, when i use my taste, i find your heroes and heroines very consummate bores; so i shall keep to my own old favourites." who could blame the person who uttered those very awkward protests? the question to me is--who need most to be dealt with--those who are asked to learn some new thing, or those who have learned the new thing and show signs that they would be better if they could forget it? i should not have much hesitation in giving an answer. then, as to public amusements, we have to look quite as closely and distrustfully at the action of the reformers as we have at the action of the kind gentlefolk who are going to give us "daniel deronda" and the highly entertaining works of mr. william deans howells in place of the dear welcome stories that pass away the long hours. let it be understood that i do not wish to say one word likely to be construed into a jeer at real culture; but i must, as a matter of mercy, say something in defence of those who cannot understand or win emotions from such things as classical music or the "advanced" drama. pray, in pity's name, what is to be said against the commonplace man who hears an accomplished musician play beethoven, bach, or chopin in his--the commonplace one's--drawing-room, and who says in agony, "very fine! very deep! very profound--profound indeed, sir! full of breadth and symmetry and that sort of thing! now do you think we might vary that noble masterpiece with a waltz?" can we blame the poor fellow? wagner represents a noise to him, and the awful scorn and despair of the first movement in the "moonlight sonata" only lead him to say, "heavy play with that left hand. can't he go faster over the treble, or whatever they call it?" he wants intelligible musical ideas, and we have no right to begin "level-raising" with the unhappy and remonstrant man. the music halls in london are now under strict supervision, and some of them used to need it very much in days gone by. personally i should suppress the male comic singer who tries to win a laugh from degraded listeners by unseemly means, and i should not scruple to draft a short act ensuring imprisonment for such as he; but, so long as the entertainment remains inoffensive to the general good sense of the community, we need not weep greatly if it is sometimes just a trifle stupid. no one who does not know the inner life of the working-classes can imagine how restricted are their interests. moreover, i shall venture on making a somewhat startling statement which may surprise those who look on the surface of things as indicated in the newspapers. the working-classes of a certain grade cherish a certain convention regarding themselves, but they do not understand their own set at all. if they heard a real mechanic or labourer spouting sentiment in the shop or the club, they would silence him very summarily; but the stage working-man, the stage hawker, the stage tinker may utter any claptrap that he likes, and the audience try to believe that they might possibly have been able to talk in the same way but for circumstances. it is not at any time pleasant to see people going on under a delusion; but, supposing the delusion is no worse than that of the man who thinks himself handsome or witty or fascinating while he is really plain or silly or a bore, what can the mistake matter to anybody? we smile at the little vanity, and perhaps pride ourselves a little on our own remarkable superiority, and there the business may very well end. the men of the music hall live, as i have said, entirely in a dull convention; and, if a set of thorough artists were to portray them exactly, no one would be more surprised than the folk whose portraits were taken. the gentlemen who are resolved to regenerate the music-hall stage persist in not considering the audience; and yet, when all is said and done, the poor stupid audience should be considered a little. if we played browning's "strafford" for them, how much would they be "raised"? they would not laugh, they would not yawn; they would be stupefied, and a trifle insulted. give them a good silly swinging chorus about some subject connected with the tender affections, and let the refrain run to a waltz rhythm or to a striking drawl, and they are satisfied in mind and rejoice exceedingly. the finer class of people in the east-end of london seem to enjoy the very noblest and even the most abstruse of sacred music at the sunday concerts; but it will be long before the music-hall audiences are educated up even to the standard of those crowds who come off the whitechapel pavements to hear handel. we cannot hurry them: why try? their lives are very hard, and, when the brief gleam comes on the evening of evenings in the week, we should be content with ensuring them decency, safety, order, and let them enjoy their own entertainment in their own way. a thoroughly prosaic and logical preacher might say to those poor souls with perfect truth, "why do you waste time in coming here to see things which are done much better in the streets? you roar and cheer and stamp when you see a real cab-horse come across from the wings, and yet in an hour you might watch a hundred cabs pass you in the street and you would not cheer the least bit. you hear a costermonger on the stage say, 'give me my 'umble fireside, and let my good old missus 'and me my cup o' tea and my 'ard-earned bit o' bread, and all the dooks and lords in hengland ain't nothin' to me!'--you hear that, and you know quite well that no costermonger on this goodly earth ever talked in that way, and still you cheer. you like only what is unreal, and, when you are shown a character which is supposed in some mysterious way to resemble you, you are more than delighted, and you applaud a thing which is either a silly caricature or an utterly foolish libel." the poor and lowly personage thus hailed with cutting denunciation and logic might say, "please mind your own business. do you pay my sixpence for the gallery? no; i find it myself, and i come to have my bit of fun with my own money, in my own place, at my own price. i have enough of workshops and streets and what you call real things; so, when i come out to the play, i want them all unreal, and as unreal as possible. monday morning's time enough to go back to reality." as often as ever fussy reformers try to do more than ensure propriety in theatres, so often will they be beaten; and i am quite sure that, if any attempt is made to go too far, we may have on any day a repetition of the o.p. riots, which almost ended in the wrecking of the patent playhouses. let us be treated like grown beings, and not as if we were still in short baby-frocks. men resent many things, but they resent being made ridiculous more than all. the committees before which many theatrical managers were obliged to appear a few years since have done good in a few instances; but they have often played the most ridiculous pranks, and they have roused grave fears in minds unused to know fear of any kind. the peculiar prying questions, the successful attempts made to interfere with concerns which should not on any account be public property, the disposition to treat the people, whose mature wisdom is proclaimed from all political platforms, as little children, all combine to make the aspect of the general question not a little alarming. would it not be better then, in sum, to abstain from raising levels to such a mighty extent, and to strive after improving all the amusements on a less heroic scale? xvii. a little sermon on failures. if we study the history of men with patience, it becomes evident that no great work has ever been done in the world save by those who have met with bitter rebuffs and severe trials at the beginning of their career. it seems as though the ruling powers imposed an ordeal on every human being, in order to single out the strong and the worthy from the cowardly and worthless. the weakling who meets with trouble uplifts his voice in complaint and ceases to struggle against obstacles; the strong man or woman remains silent and strives on indomitably until success is achieved. it is strange to see how many complaining weaklings are living around us at this day, and how querulous and unjust are the outcries addressed to fate, fortune, and providence. we are the heirs of the ages; we know all about the brave souls that suffered and strove and conquered in days gone by, and yet many who possess this knowledge, and who have the gift of expression at its highest, spend their time in one long tiresome whimper. half the poetry of our time is rhythmic complaint; young men who have hardly had time to look round on the splendid panorama of life profess to crave for death, and young women who should be thinking only of work and love and brightness prefer to sink into languor. there is no curing a poet when once he takes to being mournful, for he hugs his own woe with positive pleasure, and all his musical pathos is simply self-pity. when napoleon said, "you must not fear death, my lads. defy him, and you drive him into the enemy's ranks!" he uttered a truth which applies in the moral world as on the battle-field. the sudden panic which causes battalions of troops to hesitate and break up in confusion is paralleled by the numbing despair which seems to seize on the forces of the soul at times. brave men gaze calmly on the trouble and think within themselves, "now is the hour of trial; it is needful to be strong and audacious;" weak men drop into hopeless lassitude, and the few who happen to be foolish as well as weak rid themselves of life. i dare say that hardly one of those who read these lines has escaped that one awful moment when effort appears vain, when life is one long ache, and when time is a creeping horror that seems to lag as if to torture the suffering heart. we need only turn to the vivid chapter of modern life to see the utter folly of "giving in." let us look at the life-history of a statesman who died some years ago in our country, after wielding supreme power and earning the homage of millions. when young benjamin d'israeli first entered society in london, he found that the proud aristocrats looked askance at him. he came of a despised race, he had no fortune, his modes of acting and speaking were strange to the cold, self-contained northerners among whom he cast his lot, and his chances looked far from promising. he waited and worked, but all things seemed to go wrong with him; he published a poem which was laughed at all over the country; he strove to enter parliament, and failed again and again; middle age crept on him, and the shadows of failure seemed to compass him round. in one terrible passage which he wrote in a flippant novel called "the young duke" he speaks about the woful fate of a man who feels himself full of strength and ability, and who is nevertheless compelled to live in obscurity. the bitter sadness of this startling page catches the reader by the throat, for it is a sudden revelation of a strong man's agony. at last the toiler obtained his chance, and rose to make his first speech in the house of commons. he was then long past thirty years of age; but he had the exuberance and daring of a boy. all the best judges in the commons admired the opening of the oration; but the coarser members were stimulated to laughter by the speaker's strange appearance. d'israeli had dressed himself in utter defiance of all conventions; he wore a dark green coat which came closely up to his chin, a gaudy vest festooned with chains, and glittering rings. his ringlets were combed in a heavy mass over his right shoulder; and it is said that he looked like some strange actor. the noise grew as he went on; his finest periods were lost amid howls of derision, and at last he raised his arms above his head, and shouted, "i sit down now; but the time will come when you will hear me!" a few good men consoled him; but most of his friends advised him to get away out of the country that his great failure might be forgotten. now here was cause for despair in all conscience; the brilliant man had failed disastrously in the very assembly which he had sworn to master, and the sound of mockery pursued him everywhere. his hopes seemed blighted; his future was dim, he was desperately and dangerously in debt, and he had broken down more completely than any speaker within living memory. take heart, all sufferers, when you hear what follows. for eleven long years the gallant orator steadily endeavoured to repair his early failure; he spoke frequently, asserted himself without caring for the jeers of his enemies, and finally he won the leadership of the house by dint of perseverance, tact, and intellect. we cannot tell how often his heart sank within him during those weary years; we know nothing of his forebodings; we only know that outwardly he always appeared alert, vigorous, strenuously hopeful. at last his name was known all over the world, and, after his death, a traveller who rode across asia minor was again and again questioned by the wild nomads--"is your great sheikh dead?" they asked. the rumour of our statesman's power had traversed the earth. men of all parties acknowledge the indomitable courage of this man who refused to resign the struggle even when the very fates seemed to have decreed his ruin. take a man of another stamp, and observe how he met the first blows of fortune. thomas carlyle had dwelt on a lonely moorland for six years. he came to london and employed himself with feverish energy on a book which he thought would win him bread, even if it did not gain him fame. writing was painful to him, and he never set down a sentence without severe labour. with infinite pains he sought out the history of the french revolution and obtained a clear picture of that tremendous event. piece by piece he put his first volume together and satisfied himself that he had done something which would live. he handed his precious manuscript to stuart mill, and mill's servant lit the fire with it. carlyle had exhausted his means, and his great work was really his only capital. like all men who write at high pressure, he was unable to recall anything that he had once set down, and, so far as his priceless volume went, his mind was a blank. years of toil were thrown away; time was fleeting, and the world was careless of the matchless historian. the first news of his loss stunned him, and, had he been a weak man, he would have collapsed under the blow. he saw nothing but bitter poverty for himself and his wife, and he had some thoughts of betaking himself to the far west; but he conquered his weakness, forgot his despair in labour, and doggedly re-wrote the masterpiece which raised him to instant fame and caused him to be regarded as one of the first men in britain. in the whole wide history of human trials i cannot recall a more shining instance of fortitude and triumphant victory over obstacles. let those who are cast down by some petty trouble think of the lonely, poverty-stricken student bending himself to his task after the very light of his life had been dimmed for a while. there is nothing like an array of instances for driving home an argument, so i mention the case of a man about whom much debate goes on even to this day. napoleon starved in the streets of paris; one by one he sold his books to buy bread; he was without light or fire on nights of iron frost, and his clothing was too scanty to keep out the cold. he arrived at that pass which induces some men to end all their woes by one swift plunge into the river; but he was not of the despairful stamp, and he stood his term of misery bravely until the light came for him. leave his splendid, chequered career of glory and crime out of reckoning, and remember only that he became emperor because he had courage to endure starvation; that lesson at least from his career can harm no one. choose the example of a woman, for variety's sake. george eliot was quite content to scrub furniture, make cheese and butter, and sweep carpets until she arrived at ripe womanhood. she felt her own extraordinary power; but she never repined at the prospect of spending her life in what is lightly called domestic drudgery. the shining ones oftenest walk in lowly places and utter no sound of mourning. she was nearing middle age before she had an opportunity of gaining that astonishing erudition which amazed professed students, and, had she not chanced to meet mr. spencer, our greatest philosopher, she would have lived and died unknown. she never questioned the decrees of the power that rules us all, and, when she suddenly took her place as one of the first living novelists, she accepted her fame and her wealth humbly and simply. till her last day she remembered her bitter years of frustration and failure, and the meanest of mortals had a share of her holy sympathy; she gained her unexampled conquest by resolutely treading down despair, and her brave story should cheer the many girls who find life bleak and joyless. george eliot was prepared to bear the worst that could befall her, and it was her frank and gentle acceptance of the facts of life that brought her joy in the end. we must also remember such people as arkwright, stephenson, thomas edwards the naturalist, and heine the poet. arkwright saw his best machinery smashed again and again; but his bull-dog courage brought him through his trouble, and he surmounted opposition that would have driven a weakling to exile and death. stephenson feared that he would never conquer the great morass at chat moss, and he knew that, if he failed, his reputation would perish. he never allowed himself to show a tremor, and he won. poor edwards toiled on, in spite of hunger, poverty, and chill despair; he received one knock-down blow after another with cheery gallantry, and old age had clutched him before his relief from grinding penury came; but nothing could daunt him, and he is now secure. heine lay for seven years in his "mattress grave;" he was torn from head to foot by the pangs of neuralgia; one of his eyes was closed, and at times the lid of the other had to be raised in order that he might see those who visited him. let those who have ever felt the aching of a single tooth imagine what it must have been to suffer the same kind of pain over the whole body. surely this poor tortured wretch might have been pardoned had he esteemed his life a failure! his spirit never flagged, and he wrote the brightest, lightest mockeries that ever were framed by the wit of man; his poems will be the delight of europe for years to come, and his memory can no more perish than that of shakspere. enough of examples; the main fact is that to men and women who refuse to accept failure all life is open, and there is something to hope for even up to the verge of the grave. when the sullen storm-cloud of misfortune lowers and life seems dim and dreary, that is the hour to summon up courage, and to look persistently beyond the bounds of the mournful present. why should we uplift our voices in pettish questioning? the blows that cut most cruelly are meant for our better discipline, and, if we steel every nerve against the onset of despair, the battle is half won even before we put forth a conscious effort. there never yet was a misfortune or an array of misfortunes, there never was an entanglement wound by malign chance from which a man could not escape by dint of his own unaided energy. by all means let us pity those who are sore beset amid the keen sorrows that haunt the world, look with tenderness on their pain, soothe them in their perplexities; but, before all things, incite them to struggle against the numbing influence of despondency. the early failures are the raw material of the finest successes; and the general who loses a battle, the mechanic who fails to find work, the writer who pines for the approach of tardy fame, the forsaken lover who looks out on a dark universe, and the servant who meets only censure and coldness, despite her attempts to fulfil her duty, all come under the same law. if they consent to drift away into the limbo of failures, they have only to resign themselves, and their existence will soon end in futility and disaster; but, if they refuse to cringe under the lash of circumstances, if they toil on as though a bright goal were immediately before them, the result is almost assured; and, even if they do succumb, they have the blessed knowledge that they have failed gallantly. half the misfortunes which crush the children of men into insignificance are more or less magnified by imagination, and the swollen bulk of trouble dwindles before an effort of the human will. read over the dismal record of a year's suicides, and you will find that in nine cases out of ten the causes which lead unhappy men and women to quench their own light of life are absolutely trivial to the sane and steadfast soul. let those who are heavy of heart when ill-fortune seems to have mastered them remember that our master is before all things just. he lays no burden that ought not to be borne on any one of his children, and those who give way to despair are guilty of sheer impiety. the same power that sends the affliction gives also the capability of endurance, and, if we refuse to exert that capability, we are sinful. when once the first inclination toward weakness and doubt is overcome, every effort becomes easier, and the sense of strength waxes keener day by day. who are the most serene and sympathetic of all people that even the most obscure among us meet? the men and women who have come through the valley of the shadow of tribulation. by a benign ordinance which is uniform in action, it so falls out that the conquerors derive enhanced pleasure from the memory of difficulties beaten down and sorrows vanquished. where then is the use of craven shrinking? let us rather welcome our early failures as we would welcome the health-giving rigour of some stern physician. think of the heroes and heroines who have conquered, and think joyfully also of those who have wrought out their strenuous day in seeming failure. there are four lines of poetry which every english-speaking man and woman should learn by heart, and i shall close this address with them. they were written on the memorial stone of certain italian martyrs-- "of all time's words, this is the noblest one that ever spoke to souls and left them blest; gladly we would have rested had we won freedom. we have lost, and very gladly rest." xviii. "vanity of vanities." those who have leisure to explore the history of the past, to peer into the dark backward and abysm of time, must of necessity become smitten with a kind of sad and kindly cynicism. when one has travelled over a wide tract of history, and when, above all, he has mused much on the minor matters which dignified historians neglect, he feels much inclined to say to those whom he sees struggling vainly after what they call fame, "why are you striving thus to make your voice heard amid the derisive silence of eternity? you are fretting and frowning, with your eyes fixed on your own petty fortunes, while all the gigantic ages mock you. day by day you give pain to your own mind and body; you hope against hope; you trust to be remembered, and you fancy that you may perchance hear what men will say of you when you are gone. all in vain. be satisfied with the love of those about you; if you can get but a dog to love you during your little life, cherish that portion of affection. work in your own petty sphere strenuously, bravely, but without thought of what men may say of you. perhaps you are agonised by the thought of powers that are hidden in you--powers that may never be known while you live. what matters it? so long as you have the love of a faithful few among those dear to you, all the fame that the earth can give counts for nothing. take that which is near to you, and value as naught the praises of a vague monstrous world through which you pass as a shadow. look at that squirrel who twirls and twirls in his cage. he wears his heart out in his ceaseless efforts at progression, and all the while his mocking prison whirls under him without letting him progress one inch. how much happier he would be if he stayed in his hutch and enjoyed his nuts! you are like the restless squirrel; you make a great show of movement and some noise, but you do not get forward at all. rest quietly when your necessary labour is done, and be sure that more than half the things men struggle for and fail to attain would not be worth the having even if the strugglers succeeded. do not waste one moment; do not neglect one duty, for a duty lost is the deadliest loss of all; snatch every rational pleasure that comes within your reach; earn all the love you can, for that is the most precious of all possessions, and leave the search for fame to those who are petty and vain." such a cold and chilling speech would be a very good medicine for uneasy vanity, but the best medicine of all is the contemplation of the history of men who have flourished and loomed large before their fellows, and who now have sunk into the night. how many mighty warriors have made the earth tremble, filling the mouths of men with words of fear or praise! they have passed away, and the only record of their lives is a chance carving on a stone, a brief line written by some curt historian. the glass of the years was brittle wherein they gazed for a span; the glass is broken and all is gone. in the wastes of asia we find mighty ruins that even now are like symbols of power--vast walls that impose on the imagination by their bulk, enormous statues, temples that seem to mock at time and destruction. the men who built those structures must have had supreme confidence in themselves, they must have possessed incalculable resources, they must have been masters of their world. where are they now? what were their names? they have sunk like a spent flame, and we have not even the mark on a stone to tell us how they lived or loved or struggled. far in that moaning desert lie the remains of a city so great that even the men who know the greatest of modern cities can hardly conceive the original appearance and dimensions of the tremendous pile. travellers from europe and america go there and stand speechless before works that dwarf all the efforts of modern men. the woman who ruled in that strong city was an imposing figure in her time, but she died in a petty roman villa as an exile, and palmyra, after her departure, soon perished from off the face of the earth. one pathetic little record enables us to guess what became of the population over whom the queen zenobia ruled. a stone was dug up on the northern border of england, and the inscription puzzled all the antiquarians until an oriental scholar found that the words were syriac. "barates of palmyra erects this stone to the memory of his wife, the catavallaunian woman who died aged thirty-three." that is a rude translation. poor barates was brought to britain, married a norfolk woman of the british race, and spent his life on the wild frontier. so the powerful queen passed away as a prisoner, her subjects were scattered over the earth, and her city, which was once renowned, is now haunted by lizard and antelope. alas for fame! alas for the stability of earthly things! the conquerors of zenobia fared but little better. how strong must those emperors have been whose very name kept the world in awe! if a man were proscribed by rome, he was as good as dead; no fastness could hide him, no place in the known world could give him refuge, and his fate was regarded as so inevitable that no one was foolhardy enough to try at staving off the evil day. how coolly and contemptuously the lordly proconsuls and magistrates regarded the early christians. pliny did not so much as deign to notice their existence, and pontius pilate, who had to deal with the first twelve, seems to have looked upon them as mere pestilent malefactors who created a disturbance. for many years those scornful roman lords mocked the new sectarians and refused to take them seriously. one scoffing magistrate asked the christians who came before him why they gave him the trouble to punish them. were there no ropes and precipices handy, he asked, for those who wished to commit suicide? those romans had great names in their day--names as great as the names of ellenborough and wellesley and gordon and dalhousie and bartle frere, yet one would be puzzled to write down a list of six of the omnipotent sub-emperors. they fought, they made laws, they ruled empires, they fancied themselves only a little less than the gods, and now not a man outside the circle of a dozen scholars knows or cares anything about them. the wise lawgivers, the dread administrators, the unconquerable soldiers have gone with the snows, and their very names seem to have been writ in water. if we come nearer our own time, we find it partly droll, partly pathetic to see how the bubble reputations have been pricked one by one. "who now reads bolingbroke?" asked burke. yes--who? the brilliant many-sided man who once held the fortunes of the empire in his hand, the specious philosopher, the unequalled orator is forgotten. how large he loomed while his career lasted! he was one of the men who ruled great england, and now he is away in the dark, and his books rot in the recesses of dusty libraries. where is the great mr. hayley? he was arbiter of taste in literature; he thought himself a very much greater man than blake, and an admiring public bowed down to him. probably few living men have ever read a poem of hayley's, and certainly we cannot advise anybody to try unless his nerve is good. go a little farther back, and consider the fate of the distinguished literary persons who were famous during the period which affected writers call the augustan era of our literature. the great poet who wrote-- "behold three thousand gentlemen at least, each safely mounted on his capering beast"-- what has become of that bard's inspired productions? they have gone the way of donne and cowley and waller and denham, and nobody cares very much. take even the great cham of literature, the good johnson. his fame is undying, but his works would not have saved his reputation in vigour during so many generations. to all intents and purposes his books are dead; the laboured writings which he turned out during his years of starvation are not looked into, and our most eminent modern novelist declares that, if he were snowed up in a remote inn with "bradshaw's railway guide" and the "rambler" as the only books within reach, he would assuredly not read the "rambler." perhaps hardly one hundred students know how admirably good johnson's preface to shakspere really is, and the "lives of the poets" are read only in fragmentary fashion. strange, is it not, that the man who made his reputation by literature, the man who dominated the literary world of his time with absolute sovereignty, should be saved from sinking out of human memory only by means of the record of his lighter talk which was kept by his faithful henchman? but for the wise pertinacity of poor boswell, the giant would have been forgotten even by the generation which immediately followed him. his gallant and strenuous efforts to gain fame really failed; his chance gossip and the amusing tale of his eccentricities kept his name alive. surely the irony of fate was never better shown. even this titan would have had only a bubble reputation but for the lucky accident which brought that obscure scotch laird to london. most piteous is the story of the poor souls who have sought to achieve their share of immortality by literature. go to our noble museum and look at the appalling expanse of books piled up yard upon yard to the ceiling of the immense dome. tons upon tons--pelion on ossa--of literature meet the eye and stun the imagination. every book was wrought out by eager labour of some hopeful mortal; joy, anguish, despair, mad ambition, placid assurance, wild conceit, proud courage once possessed the breasts of those myriad writers, according to their several dispositions. the piles rest in stately silence, and the reputations of the authors are entombed. as for the fighters who sought the bubble reputation even at the cannon's mouth, who recks of their fierce struggles, their bitter wounds, their brief success? who knows the leaders of the superb host that poured like a torrent from torres vedras to the pyrenees, and smote napoleon to the earth? who can name the leaders of the doomed host that crossed the beresina, and left their bones under the russian snows? high of heart the soldiers were when they set out on their wild pilgrimage under their terrible leader, but soon they were lying by thousands on the red field of borodino, and the sound of their moaning filled the night like the calling of some mighty ocean. and now they are utterly gone, and the reputation for which they strove avails nothing; they are mixed in the dim twilight story of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. critics say that our modern poetry is all sad; and so it is, save when the dainty muse of mr. austin dobson smiles upon us. the reason is not far to seek--we know so much, and the sense of the vanity of human effort is more keenly impressed upon us than ever it was on men of more careless and more ignorant ages. we see what toys men set store by, we see what shadows we are and what shadows we pursue, so there is no wonder that we are mournful. the sweetest of our poets, the most humorous of our many writers cannot keep the thought of death and futility away. his loveliest lyric begins-- "oh, fair maids maying in gardens green, through deep dells straying, what end hath been. two mays between of the flow'rs that shone and your own sweet queen? they are dead and gone." there is the burden--"dead and gone." another singer chants to us thus-- "merely a round of shadow shows shadow shapes that are born to die like a light that sinks, like a wind that goes, vanishing on to the by-and-by. life, sweet life, as she flutters nigh, 'minishing, failing night and day, cries with a loud and bitter cry, 'ev'rything passes, passes away.' * * * * * who has lived as long as he chose? who so confident as to defy time, the fellest of mortals' foes? joints in his armour who can spy? where's the foot will nor flinch nor fly? where's the heart that aspires the fray? his battle wager 'tis vain to try-- ev'rything passes, passes away." the age is diseased. why should men be mournful because what they call their aspirations--precious aspirations--are frustrated? they seek the bubble reputation, and they whimper when the bubble is burst; but how much better would it be to cleave to lowly duties, to do the thing that lies next to hand, to accept cheerfully the bounteous harvest of joys vouchsafed to the humble? since we all end alike--since the warrior, the statesman, the poet alike leave no name on earth save in the case of the few titans--what use is there in fretting ourselves into green-sickness simply because we cannot quite get our own way? to the wise man every moment of life may be made fruitful of rich pleasure, and the pleasure can be bought without heartache, without struggling painfully, without risking envy and uncharitableness. better the immediate love of children and of friends than the hazy respect of generations that must assuredly forget us soon, no matter how prominent we may seem to be for a time. i have read a sermon to my readers, but the sermon is not doleful; it is merely hard truth. life may be a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of gods in the background, but at any rate much may be made of it by those who refuse to seek the bubble reputation. xix. gamblers. the great english carnival of gamblers is over for a month or two; the bookmakers have retired to winter quarters after having waxed fat during the year on the money risked by arrant simpletons. the bookmaker's habits are peculiar; he cannot do without gambling, and he contrives to indulge himself all the year round in some way or other. when the newmarket houghton meeting is over, mr. bookmaker bethinks him of billiards, and he goes daily and nightly among interesting gatherings of his brotherhood. handicaps are arranged day by day and week by week, and the luxurious, loud, vulgar crew contrive to pass away the time pleasantly until the spring race meetings begin. but hundreds of the sporting gentry have souls above the british billiard-room, and for them a veritable paradise is ready. the mediterranean laps the beautiful shore at monte carlo and all along the exquisite eiviera--the palms and ferns are lovely--the air is soft and exhilarating, and the gambler pursues his pleasing pastime amid the sweetest spots on earth. from every country in the world the flights of restless gamblers come like strange flocks of migrant birds. the russian gentleman escapes from the desolate plains of his native land and luxuriates in the beautiful garden of europe; the queer inflections of the american's quiet drawl are heard everywhere as he strolls round the tables; roumanian boyards, parisian swindlers, austrian soldiers, hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young englishmen--all gather in a motley crowd; and the british bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. his very accent--strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low--gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits his delicate health in anticipation of the time when he will be able to howl once more in english betting-rings. but i am not so much concerned with the personality of the various sorts of gamblers, and i assuredly have no pity to spare for the gentry who lose their money. a great deal of good useful compassion is wasted on the victims who are fleeced in the gambling places. victims! what do they go to the rooms for? is it not to amuse themselves and to pass away time amid false exhilaration? is it not to gain money without working for it? the dupe has in him all the raw material of a scoundrel; and even when he blows his stupid brains out i cannot pity him so much as i pity the dogged labourer who toils on and starves until his time comes for going to the workhouse. i am rather more inclined to study the general manifestations of the gambling spirit. i have in my mind's eye vivid images of the faces, the figures, the gestures of hundreds of gamblers, and i might make an appalling picture-gallery if i chose; but such a nightmare in prose would not do much good to any one, and i prefer to proceed in a less exciting but more profitable manner. we please ourselves by calling to mind the days when "society" gambled openly and constantly; and we like to fancy that we are all very good and spotless now-a-days and free from the desire for unnatural excitement. well, i grant that most european societies in the last century were sufficiently hideous in many respects. the english aristocrat, male or female, cared only for cards, and no noble lady dreamed of remaining long in an assembly where _piquet_ and _écarté_ were not going on. the french seigneur gambled away an estate in an evening; the russian landowner staked a hundred serfs and their lives and fortunes on the turn of a card; little german princelings would play quite cheerfully for regiments of soldiers. the pictures which we are gradually getting from memoirs and letters are almost too grotesque for belief, and there is some little excuse for the hearty optimists who look back with complacency on the past, and thank their stars that they have escaped from the domain of evil. for my own part, when i see the mode of life now generally followed by most of our european aristocracies, i am quite ready to be grateful for a beneficent change, and i have again and again made light of the wailings of persons who persist in chattering about the good old times. but i am talking now about the spirit of the gambler; and i cannot say that the human propensity to gamble has in any way died out. its manifestations may in some respects be more decorous than they used to be; but the deep, masterful, subtle tendency is there, and its force is by no means diminished by the advance of a complicated civilisation. often and often i have mused quietly amid scenes where gamblers of various sorts were disporting themselves--in village inns where solemn yokels played shove-halfpenny with statesmanlike gravity; in sunny italian streets where lazy loungers played their queer guessing game with beans; in noisy racing-clubs where the tape clicks all day long; on crowded steamboats when tynesiders and cockneys yelled and cursed and shouted their offers as the slim skiffs stole over the water and the straining athletes bent to their work; on atlantic liners when hundreds of pounds depended on the result of the day's run; on the breezy heath where half a million gazers watched as the sleek derby horses thundered round. as i have gazed on these spectacles, i have been forced to let the mind wander into regions far away from the chatter of the gamesters. again and again i have been compelled to think with a kind of melancholy over the fact that man is not content until he is taken out of himself. our wondrous bodies, our miraculous power of looking before and after, our infinite capacities for enjoyment, are not enough for us, and the poor feeble human creature spends a great part of his life in trying to forget that he is himself. at the best, our days pass as in the dim swiftness of a dream. the young man suddenly thinks, "it is but yesterday that i was a child;" the middle-aged man finds the gray hairs streaking his head before he has realised that his youth is gone; the old man lives so completely in the past that he is taken only by a gentle shock of surprise when he finds that the end is upon him. swiftly, like some wild hunt of shadows, the generations fleet away--nothing stays their frantic speed; and to the true observer no fictitious flight of spirits on the brocken could be half so weird as the passage of one generation of the children of men. as we grow old, the appalling brevity of time impresses itself more and more on the consciousness of calm and thoughtful men; yet nine-tenths of our race spend the best part of their days in trying to make their ghostly sweeping flight from eternity to eternity seem more rapid than it really is. that hot and fevered youth who stands in the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. the gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he had an eternity before him. the youth and the dotard have alike succeeded in passing out of themselves, and their very souls will not return to the body until the delirious spell has ceased to act. all men alike seem to have, more or less, this craving for oblivion. long ago i remember seeing a company of farmers who had come to market in the prosperous times; they were among the wildest of their set, and they settled down to cards when business was done. day after day those bucolic gentlemen sat on; when one of them lay down on a settle to snatch a nap, his place was taken by another, and at the end of the week some of the original company were still in the parlour, having gambled furiously all the while without ever washing or undressing. time was non-existent for them, and their consciousness was exercised only in watching the faces of the cards and counting up points. but the dull-witted farmers were quite equalled by the polished scholar, the great orator, the brilliant wit, charles fox. it was nothing to fox if he sat for three days and three nights at a stretch over the board of green cloth. his fortune went; he might lose at the rate of ten thousand pounds in the twenty-four hours; but he had succeeded in forgetting himself, and his loss of time and fortune counted as nothing. the light, careless gipsy shares the disposition of the matchless orator and the dull farmer. you may see a gipsy enter the tossing-ring at a fair; he loses all his money, but he goes on staking everything he possesses, and, if the luck remains adverse, he will continue tossing until his pony, his cart, his lurcher-dog, his very clothes are all gone. the chinaman will play for his life; the red indian recklessly piles all he owns in the world upon the rough heap of goods which his tribe wager on the result of a pony race. look high, look low, and we see that the gamblers actually form the majority of the world's inhabitants; and we must go among the men of abstractions--the men who can achieve oblivion by dint of their own thinking power--before we find any class untouched by the strange taint. observe that venerable looking man who slowly paces about in one of the luxurious dwelling-places which are sacred to leisure; you may see his type at bath, buxton, leamington, scarborough, brighton, torquay, all places, indeed, whither flock the men whose life-work is done. that venerable gentleman has fulfilled his task in the world, his desires have been gratified so far as fortune would allow, and one would think that most pursuits of the competitive sort must have lost interest for him. yet he--even he--cannot get rid of the tendency to gamble; and he studies the financial news with the eagerness of a boy who follows the fortunes of quentin durward or d'artagnan or rebecca. if english railway shares fall, he is exultant or depressed, according to the operations of his broker; he may be roused into almost hysterical delight by a rise in "nitrates" or "chilians," or any of the thousands of securities in which stockbrokers deal. what is it to the old man if death smiles gently on him, and will soon touch his heart with ice? there is no past for him; he has forgotten the raptures of youth, the strength of manhood, the depression of failure, the gladness of success, and he drugs his soul into forgetfulness by dwelling on a gambler's chances. so long as the one doubtful boon of forgetfulness is secured, it seems to matter very little what may be the stake at disposal. the english racing-man picks out a promising colt or filly; he finds that he has a swift and good animal, and he resolves to bring off some vast gambling _coup_. patiently, cunningly, month after month, the steps in the plan are matured; the horse runs badly until the official handicappers think it is worthless, and the gambler at last finds that he has some great prize almost at his mercy. then with slow dexterity the horse is backed to win. if the owner shows any eagerness, his purpose is balked once and for all; he may have to employ half-a-dozen agents to bet for him, until at last he succeeds in wagering so much money that he will gain, say, one hundred thousand pounds by winning his race. the fluttering jackets come nearer and nearer to the judge's box; some of the jockeys are using their whips and riding desperately; the horse on which so much depends draws to the front; but the owner never moves a muscle. of course we have seen men shrieking themselves almost into apoplexy at the close of a race; but the hardened gambler is deadly cool. in the last stride the animal so carefully--and fraudulently--prepared is beaten by a matter of a few inches, and the chance of picking up a hundred thousand pounds is gone; but the owner remains impassive, and as soon as settling-day is over, he endeavours to forget the matter. i have seen an old man watching a race on which he had planned to win sixty thousand pounds; his horse was beaten in the last two strides, and the old gentleman never so much as stirred or spoke. no doubt he was really transported out of himself; but nothing in the world seemed capable of altering the composure of his wizened features. on the other hand, there is one man who is known to possess some four millions in cash, besides an immense property; this man never bets more than two pounds at a time, yet from his wild fits of excitement it might be supposed that his colossal wealth was at stake. so the whole army of the gamblers pass in their mad whirlwind march toward the region of night; they are delirious, they are creatures of contradictions--they are fiercely greedy, lavishly generous, wary in many things, reckless of life, ready to take any advantage, yet possessed by a diseased sense of honour. some of them think that a man is better and happier when he feels all his faculties working rather than when he goes off into blind transports of excitement or fear or doubt. i think that the man who is conscious to his very finger-tips is better than the wild creature whose senses are all blurred. i hold that the student or thinker who faces life with a calm and calculated desire for true knowledge is better off than the insensate being whose hours are passed in a sordid nightmare. but i see little chance of ever making men care little for the gambler's pleasure, and i humbly own to the existence of an ugly mystery which only adds yet another to the number of dark puzzles whereby we are surrounded. i observe that desperate efforts are made to put down gambling by law rather than by culture, religion, true and gentle morality. as well try to put down the passions of love and fear--as well try to interdict the beat of the pulses! we may deplore the gambler's existence as much as we like; but it is a fact, and we must accept it. xx. scoundrels. byron very often flung out profound truths in his easy, careless way, but the theatrical vein in his composition sometimes prompted him to say dashing things, not because he regarded them as true, but because he wanted to make people stare. speaking of one interesting and homicidal gentleman, the poet observes-- "he knew himself a villain, and he deemed the rest no better than the thing he seemed." now i take leave to say that the rawest of fifth-form lads never uttered a more school-boyish sentiment than that; and i wonder how a man of the world came to make such a blunder. byron had lived in the degraded london of the regency, when europe's rascality flocked towards st. james's as belated birds flock towards a light; and he should have known some villains if any one did. ephraim bond, the abominable moneylender and sportsman, was swaggering round town in byron's later days; crockford, that incarnate fiend, had his nets open; and ruined men--men ruined body and soul--left the gambling palace where the satanic spider sat spinning his webs. byron must have known crockford, and he had there a chance of studying a being who was indeed a villain, but who fancied himself to be a highly respectable person. from the time when "crocky" started money-lending in the back parlour of his little fish-shop up to his last ghastly appearance on earth, he was a cheat and a consummate rascal; and even after death his hideous corpse was made to serve a deception. he was engaged in a turf swindle, and it was necessary that he should be regarded as alive on the evening of the derby day; but he died in the morning, and, to deceive the betting-men, the lifeless carcass of the old robber was put upright in a club window, and a daring sharper caused the dead hand to wave as if in greeting to the shouting crowd--a fit end to a bad life. crockford's delusion was that his character was marked by honesty and general benevolence; and those who wished to please him pretended to accept his own comfortable theory. he regarded himself as a really good fellow, and in his own person he was a living confutation of byron's dashing paradox. then there was renton nicholson, a specimen of social vermin if ever there was one. this fellow earned a sordid livelihood by presiding over a club where men met nightly in orgies that stagger the power of belief. his huge figure and his raffish face were seen wherever rogues most did congregate; he showed young men "life"--and sometimes his work as cicerone led them to death; his style of conversation would nowadays lead to a speedy prosecution; he was always seen by the ringside when unhappy brutes met to pound each other, and his stock of evil stories entertained the interesting noblemen and gentlemen who patronised the manly british sport. i could not describe this man's baseness in adequate terms, nor could i so much as give an idea of his ordinary round of roguery without arousing some incredulity. this unspeakable creature was fond of describing himself as "jolly old renton," or "good old john bull nicholson"; he really fancied himself to be a good, genial fellow, and he appeared to fancy that the crowds who usually collected to hear his abominations were attracted by his _bonhomie_ and his estimable intellectual qualities. byron must have known this striking example of the scoundrel species, but he appears to have forgotten him when he propounded his theory of villainy. then there was pea-green haynes, who was also a fine sample of folly and rascality mingled. haynes regarded himself as the most injured man on earth; he never performed an unselfish action, it is true, and he flung away a fine patrimony on his own pleasures, yet he whined and held himself up as an example of suffering virtue. then there was the precious regent. what a creature! good men and bad men unite in saying that he was absolutely without a virtue; the shrewd, calculating greville described him in words that burn; the great duke, his chief subject, uses language of dry scorn--"the king could only act the part of a gentleman for ten minutes at a time"; and we find that the commonest satellites of the court despised the wicked fribble who wore the crown of england. faithless to women, faithless to men, a coward, a liar, a mean and grovelling cheat, george iv. nevertheless clung to a belief in his own virtues; and, if we study the account of his farcical progress through scotland, we find that he imagined himself to be a useful and genuinely kingly personage. no man, except, perhaps, philippe egalité, was ever so contemned and hated; and until his death he imagined himself to be a good man. in all that wild set who disgraced england and disgraced human nature in those gay days of byron's youth, i can discover only one thoroughly manly and estimable individual, and that was gentleman jackson, the boxer; yet, with such a marvellously wide range of villainy to study, byron never seems to have observed one ethical fact of the deepest importance--a villain never knows that he is villainous; if he did, he would cease to be a villain. perhaps byron's own peculiar disposition--his constitution--prevented him from understanding the undoubted truth which i have stated. like all other men, he possessed a dual nature; there was bad in him and good, and his force was such that the bad was very bad indeed, and the good was as powerful in its way as the evil. during the brief time that byron employed in behaving as a bad man, his conduct reached almost epic heights--or depths--of misdoing; but he never in his heart seemed to recognise the fact that he had been a bad man. at any rate, he was wrong; and the commonest knowledge of our wild world suffices to show any reasoning man the gravity of the error propounded in my quotation. as we study the history of the frivolous race of men, it sometimes seems hard to disbelieve the theory of descartes. the great frenchman held that man and other animals are automata; and, were it not that such a theory strikes at the root of morals, we might almost be tempted to accept it in moments of weakness, when the riddle of the unintelligible earth weighs heavily on the tired spirit. i find that every prominent scoundrel known to us pursued his work of sin with an absolute unconsciousness of all moral law until pain or death drew near; then the scoundrel cringed like a cur under the scourges of remorse. thackeray, in a fit of spasmodic courage, painted the archetypal scoundrel once and for all in "barry lyndon," and he practically said the last word on the subject; for no grave analysis, no reasoning, can ever improve on that immortal and most moving picture of a wicked man. observe the masterpiece. lyndon goes on with his narrative from one horror to another; he exposes his inmost soul with cool deliberation; and the author's art is so consummate that we never for a moment sympathise with the fiend who talks so mellifluously--the narrative of ill-doing unfolds itself with all the inevitable precision of an operation of nature, and we see the human soul at its worst. but thackeray did not make byron's mistake; and throughout the book the chevalier harps with deadly persistence on his own virtues. he does not exactly whine, but he lets you know that he regards himself as being very much wronged by the envious caprices of his fellow-men. his tongue is the tongue of a saint, and, even when he owns to any doubtful transaction, he takes care to let you know that he was actuated by the sweetest and purest motives. many people cannot read "barry lyndon" a second time; but those who are nervous should screw their courage to the sticking-place, and give grave attention to that awful moral lesson, for all of us have a little of barry in our composition. thackeray's sudden inspiration enabled him to plumb the deeps of the scoundrel nature, and he saw with the eye of genius that the very quality which makes a bad man dangerous is his belief in his own goodness. if you look at the appalling narrative of lyndon's life in this country, you see, with a shudder, that the man regards his cruelty to his wife, his villainy towards his step-son, as the inevitable outcome of stern virtue; he tells you things that make you long to stamp on the inanimate pages; for he rouses such a passion of wild scorn and wrath as we feel against no other artistic creation. yet all the while, like a low under-song, goes on his monotonous assertion of his own goodness and his own injuries. no sermon could teach more than that hateful book; if it is read aright, it will supply men or women with an armoury of warnings, and enable them to start away from the semblance of self-deception as they would from a rearing cobra when the hood is up, and the murderous head flattened ready to strike. thackeray worked on the same theme in his story of little stubbs. lyndon is the lucifer of rascals; stubbs--well, stubbs beggars the english vocabulary; he is too low, too mean for adjectives to describe him, and i could almost find it in my heart to wish that his portraiture had never been placed before the horrified eyes of men. yet this stubbs--a being who was drawn from life--has a profound belief in the rectitude of everything that he does. even when he tells us how he invited his gang of unspeakables home, to drink away his mother's substance, he takes credit to himself for his fine display of british hospitality. how thackeray contrived to live through the ordeal of composing those two books i cannot tell; he must have had a nerve of steel, with all his softness of heart and benevolence. at all events, he did live to complete his gruesome feat; and he has given us, in a vivid pictorial way, such a picture of scoundreldom as should serve as a beacon to all men. it may seem like a paradox; but i am inclined to think that our non-success in putting down actual crime and wickedness which do not come within range of the law arises from the fact that our jurists have not made a proper study of the criminal nature. grod made the cobra, the cruel wolverine, and the thrice-cruel tiger; we study the animals and deal with them adequately; but some of us do not study our human cobras and wolverines and tigers. i scarcely ever knew of a case of a convict who would not moan about his own injuries and his own innocence. even when these men, whose criminality is ingrained, are willing to own their guilt, they will always contrive to blame the world in general and society in particular. it is almost amusing to hear a desperate thief, who seems no more able to prevent himself from rushing on plunder than a greyhound can prevent itself from rushing on a hare, complaining that employers will not trust him. it is useless to say, "what can you expect?" the scoundrel persists in crying out against a hard world which drove him to be what he is. some ten years ago the arch-rascal among english thieves was living quietly in a london suburb; he used to solace himself with high-class music, and he was very fond of poetry. this dreadful creature was a curious compound of wild beast and artist. during the day he went about with an innocent air; and the very police who were destined to take him and hang him learned to greet him cordially as he passed them in his walks. they thought he was "a sort of high-class tradesman." now, when this cheery little man with the decent frock-coat and the clean respectable air was sauntering on the margin of the breezy heath or walking up by-streets with measured sobriety, he was really marking down the places which he intended to plunder. here his trained pony should stand; here he would make his entrance; that bedroom door should be fastened inside; this lock should be picked. the wild predatory beast drove the police to despair, for it seemed as if no human being could have performed the feats which came easy to the robber. the hard earning of good men went to the rascal's store; the cherished household gods, the valued keepsakes of innocent women were transferred callously to the melting-pot. he went coolly into bedrooms where the inmates were asleep; had any one awaked, there would have been murder, and the murderer would have decamped long before the door could be broken open. now my point is this--the wretch whom i have described never ceased to inveigh against the wrongs of society. two unhappy women served him faithfully and followed him like dogs; but he did not apply his theories in his treatment of them, for they were never without the marks of his brutality. in the very presence of his bruised and beaten slaves he talked of his own virtues, of social inequality, of the tyranny of the rich, and he held to his belief in his own innate goodness after he had committed depredations to the extent of thousands of pounds, and even after he was answerable for two murders. that man never knew himself a villain, and it was only when the rope was gradually closing round his neck that the keen sleuth-hound remorse found him out, and he had the grace to save an innocent man from a living death. this monstrous hypocrite was another typical scoundrel, and his like people every prison in the country. the scoundrels who are called great do not usually come under the gallows-tree, and their last dying speeches are somewhat rare; but we may be pretty certain, from the little we know, that each one of them fancies himself an estimable person. ivan of russia, the ferocious ruler, who had men torn to pieces before his eyes, the being who had forty thousand men, women, and children massacred in cold blood, regarded himself as the deputy of the supreme being. the mad capet, who fired the signal which started tho massacre of st. bartholomew, believed that he was fulfilling the demands of goodness and orthodoxy. the deadly inquisitors who roasted unhappy fellow mortals wholesale believed--or pretended to believe--that they were putting their victims through a benign ordeal. the heretic was a naughty child; roast him, and his sin was purged; while the frosty-blooded old men who murdered him looked to heaven and returned thanks for their own special allowance of virtue. conqueror and inquisitor, burglar and murderer, forger and wife-beater, brutal sea-captain and prowling thief--all the scoundrels go about their business with a full faith in their own blamelessness. i do not like to class them as automata, though the wise and genial mr. huxley would undoubtedly do so. what shall we do with them? is it fair that a wearied world and a toil-worn society should maintain them? my own idea is that sentiment, softness, regrets for severity should be banished, and we should say to the scoundrel, "attend, rascal! you say that you are wronged, and that you are driven to harm your fellow-creatures by the force of external circumstances; that may be so, but we have nothing to do with the matter. take notice that you shall eat bitter bread on earth, no matter how you may whine, when our just grip is on you; if you persist in practising scoundrelism, we shall make your lot harder and harder for you; and, if in the end we find that you will go on working evil, we shall treat you as a dangerous wild beast, and put you out of the world altogether." xxi. quiet old towns. a rather popular writer, who first came into notice by dint of naming a book of essays, "is life worth living?" gave us not long ago a very sweet description of an english country town; and he worked himself up to quite a moving pitch of rapture as he described the admirable social arrangements which may be perceived on a market-day. this enthusiast tells us how the members of the great county families drive in to do their shopping. the stately great horses paw and champ at their bits, the neat servants bustle about in deft attendance, and the shopkeeper, who has a feudal sort of feeling towards his betters, comes out to do proper homage. the great landowner brings his wealth into the high street or the market place, and the tradesmen raise their voices to bless him. we have all heard of institutions called "stores"; but still it is a pity to carp at a pretty picture drawn by a literary artist. i know that rebellious tradesmen in many of the shires use violent language as they describe the huge packing-cases which are deposited at various mansions by the railway vans. i know also that the regulation saddler who airs his apron at the door of his shop on market-days will inform the stranger that the gentry get saddles, harness, and everything else nowadays from the abominable "stores"; but i must not leave my artist, and shall let the saddler growl to himself for the present. the polished writer goes on to speak of the ruddy farmer who strolls round in elephantine fashion and hooks out sample-bags from his plethoric and prosperous pockets; the dealers drive a brisk trade, the small shopkeepers are encouraged by their neighbours from the country, and everything is extremely idyllic and pure and pretty and representative of england at her best. the old church rears its quaint height above the quainter houses that cluster near. in the churchyard the generations of natives sleep sound; one may trace some families back for hundreds of years, and thus perceive how firmly the love of the true townsman clings to his native place. perhaps a castle looms over the modest streets and squares--it is converted into a prison in all probability; but the sight of it brings memories of haughty nobles, or of untitled personages whose pride of race would put monarchs to the blush. the river flows sweetly past the sleepy lovely town, and sober citizens walk solemnly beside the rippling watery highway when the day's toil is over. on sunday, when the bells chime their invitation, all sorts and conditions of men meet in the dim romantic precincts of the ancient church, and there is much pleasant gossiping when morning and evening worship are ended. good old solid england is put before us in miniature when we glance at such of the community as choose to show themselves before the artistic observer, and, as we drive away along the sound level roads, we say--if we are very literary and enthusiastic--"happy little town! happy little nation!" now that is all very pretty; and yet the conscientious philosopher is bound to admit that there is another side--nay, several other sides--to the charming picture. i do not want any students of the modern french school to prove that rural life in small towns may be as base and horrible as the life of crowded cities--i do not want any minute analysis of degradation; but i may prick a windbag of conceit and do some little service if i try to show that the state of things in some scores of these delightful old places is base and corrupt enough to warm the heart of the most exacting cynic that ever thought evil of his fellow-creatures. let us go behind the scenes and see what the idyllic prospect looks like from the rear. we must proceed with great deliberation, and we must take our rustic society stratum by stratum. first, then, there are the idle men who have inherited or earned fortunes, and who like to settle in luxurious houses away from great centres of population. such men are always in great force on the skirts of quiet old towns, and they are much revered by the tradesmen. i cannot help thinking that the fate of the average "retired" man must be not a little dolorous, for i find that the typical member of that class conducts himself in much the same way no matter where he pitches his habitation in broad england. he is saved if he has a hobby; but, without a hobby, he is a very poor creature, and his ways of living on from day to day are the reverse of admirable. if such a revolutionary institution as a club has been established in the town, he may begin his morning's round there; or, in default of a club, there is the "select" room in the principal hotel. if he is catholic in his tastes and hungry for conversation, he may wander from one house of call to another, and he meets a large and well-chosen assortment of hucksters who come to bind bargains with the inevitable "drink"; he meets the gossip who knows all the secrets of the township, he meets flashy persons who have a manly thirst which requires perpetual assuagement. then he converses to his heart's content; and, alas, what conversation it is--what intellectual exertion is expended by these forlorn gossips in the morning round that takes up the time of many men in a quiet town! there is a little slander, a good deal of peeping out of windows, a little discussion of the financial prospects ascribed to various men in the neighbourhood, and an impartial examination of everybody's private affairs. the regular crew of gossips hold it as a duty to know and talk about the most minute details of each other's lives, and, when a man leaves any given room where the piquant chatter is going on, he is quite aware that he leaves his character behind him. the state of his banking account is guessed at, the disposition of his will is courageously foretold, the amounts which he paid to various shopkeepers are added up with reverence or scorn according to the amount--and the company revel in their mean babble until it is time to go to another place and pull the character and the financial accounts of somebody else to pieces. by luncheon time most of these useful beings are a little affected in complexion and speech by the trifling potations which wash down the scandal; but no one is intoxicated. to be seen mastered by "drink" in the morning would cause a man to lose caste; and, besides, if he said too much while his tongue was loose, he would not be believed when next he set down a savoury mess for the benefit of the company. through all the talk of these wretched entities, be it observed that money, money runs as a species of key-note; the men may be coarse and servile, but a shrewd eye can detect every sign of purse-pride. let a gentleman of some standing walk past a window where the grievous crew are wine-bibbing and blabbing, and some one will say, "carries hisself high enough, don't he? he ain't got a thousand to fly with. i bet a bottle on it! why, me, or jimmy there, or even old billy spinks, leaving out harry, and let alone the doctor--any one on us could buy him out twelve times over, and then have a bit of roast or biled for sunday's dinner!" this remark is received as a wise and trenchant tribute to the power of the assembly, and they have more "drink" by way of self-gratulation. those poor "retired" men, and "independent" men, often go deeper and deeper down the incline towards mental and moral degradation until they become surprisingly repulsive specimens of humanity. in all their dreary perambulations they rarely speak or hear an intelligent word; they are amazingly ignorant concerning their country's affairs, and their conceptions of politics are mostly limited to a broad general belief that some particular statesman ought to be hanged. as to the government of these quiet old places, there is much to be said that is depressing. while men prate about the decay of trade and the advance of poverty, how few people reflect on the snug fortunes which are amassed in out-of-the-way corners! we hear of jobbery in the metropolis, and jobbery in government departments, but i take it that the corporations of some little towns could give lessons in jobbery to any corrupt official that ever plundered his countrymen. some town councils may be very briefly and accurately described as nests of thieves. the thieves wear good clothes, go to church, and do not go to prison--at least, the cases of detection are rare--but they are thieves all the same. as a rule, no matter what a man's trade or profession may be, he contrives to gather profit pretty freely when once he joins the happy band who handle the community's purse. in some cases the robbery is so barefaced and open that the particulars might as well be painted on a monster board and hung up at the town cross; but tradesmen, workmen, and others who have their living to make in the town are terrorised, and they preserve a discreet silence in public however much they may speak evil of dignities in private. as a general rule, a show of decorum is kept up; yet i should think it hardly possible for the average vestry or council to meet without an interchange of winks among the members. john favours tommy's tender when tommy contracts to horse all the corporation's water-carts, dust-carts, and so forth; then tommy is friendly when john wants to sell his row of cottages to the municipality. if tommy employs two horses on a certain work and charges for twenty, then john and some other backers support the transaction. billy buys land to a heavy extent, and refuses to build on it; houses are risky property, and billy can wait. an astute company meet at william's house and take supper in luxurious roman style; then james casually suggests that the east end of the town is a disgrace to the council. until the block of houses in blank street is pulled down and a broad road is run straight to join the main street, the place will be the laughingstock of strangers. james is eloquent. how curious it is that the new road which is to redeem the town from shame must run right over billy's building plots, and how very remarkable it is to think that the corporation pays a swinging price for the precious land! billy looks more prosperous than ever; he sets up another horse, reduces rivals to silence by driving forth in a new victoria, and becomes more and more the familiar bosom friend of the bank manager. i might go on to give a score of examples showing how innocent rate-payers are fleeced by barefaced robbers, but the catalogue would be only wearisome. let any man of probity venture to force his way into one of these dens of thieves and see how he will fare! it is a comic thing that the gangs of jobbers consider that they have a prescriptive right to plunder at large, and their air of aggrieved virtue when they are challenged by a person whom they call an "interloper" is among the most droll and humiliating farces that may be seen in life. the whole crew will make a ferocious dead set at the intruder who threatens to pull their quarry away from them; he will be coughed down or interrupted by insulting noises, and he may esteem himself highly fortunate if he is not asked to step outside and engage in single combat. everything that mean malignity can do to balk him will be done, and, unless he is a very strong man physically and morally, the opposition will tire him out. there is usually one dominant family in such towns--for the possibility of making a heavy fortune by a brewery or tannery or factory in these quiet places is far greater than any outsider might fancy. the members of the ruling family and their henchmen arise in their might to crush the insolent upstart who wants to see accounts and vouchers: the chairman will rise and say, "let me tell mr. x. that me and my family were old established inhabitants in this ancient borough long before he came, and we'll be here long after he has gone bankrupt. we don't require no strangers: the people in this borough has always managed their own affairs, and by the help of providence they'll go on in the good old way in spite of any swell that comes a-sniffin' and a-smellin' and a-pryin' and a-askin' for accounts about this and that and the other; and i tell the gentleman plain, the sooner this council sees his back the better they'll be pleased; so, if he's not too thick in the skin, let him take a friendly hint and take himself off." a withering onslaught like this is received with tumultuous applause, and other speakers follow suit. it is seldom that a man has nerve enough to stand such brutality from his hoggish assailants, and the ring of jobbers are too often left to work their will unchecked. are such people fit for political power? ask the wretched rich man who indirectly buys the seat, and hear his record of dull misery if he is inclined to be confidential. he does not like to leave parliament, and yet he knows he is merely a mark for the licensed pickpocket; he is not regarded as a politician--he is a donor of sundry subscriptions, and nothing more. the men in manufacturing centres will return a poor politician and pay his expenses; but the people in some quiet towns have about as much sentiment or loyalty as they have knowledge; and they treat their member of parliament as a gentleman whose function it is to be bled, and bled copiously. a sorry sight it is! one very remarkable thing in these homes of quietness is the marvellous power possessed by drink-sellers. these gentry form the main links in a very tough chain, and they hang together with touching fidelity; their houses are turned into scandal-shops, and they prosper so long as they are ready to cringe with due self-abasement before the magistrates. no refined gentleman who keeps himself to his own class and refrains from meddling with politics could ever by any chance imagine the airs of broad-blown impudence which are sometimes assumed by ignorant and stupid boors who have been endowed with a license; and assuredly no one would guess the extent of their political power unless he had something to do with election business. the landlord of fiction hardly exists in the quiet towns; there is seldom a smiling, suave, and fawning boniface to be seen; the influential drink-seller is often an insolent familiar harpy who will speak of his own member of parliament as "old tom," and who airily ventures to call gentlemen by their surnames. the man is probably so benighted in mind that he knows nothing positive about the world he lives in; his manners are hideous, his familiarity is loathsome, his assumptions of manly independence are almost comic in their impudence; but he has his uses, and he can influence votes of several descriptions. thus he asserts himself in detestable fashion; and people who should know better submit to him. one electioneering campaign in a quiet town would give a salutary lesson to any politician who resolutely set himself to penetrate into the secret life of the society whose suffrages he sought; he would learn why it is that the agents of all the factions treat the drink-seller with deference. so the queer existence of the tranquil place moves on; petty scandal, petty thieving, petty jobbery, petty jealousy employ the energies of the beings who inhabit the "good old town"--the borough is always good and old--and a man with a soul who really tried to dwell in the moral atmosphere of the community would infallibly be asphyxiated. nowhere are appearances so deceptive; nowhere do the glamour of antiquity and the beauty of natural scenery draw the attention away from so vile a centre. i could excuse any man who became a pessimist after a long course of conversations in a sleepy old borough, for he would see that a mildew may attack the human intelligence, and that the manners of a puffy well-clad citizen may be worse than those of a zulu kaffir. the indescribable coarseness and rudeness of the social intercourse, the detestable forms of humour which obtain applause, the low distrust and trickery are quite sufficient to make a sensitive man want to hide himself away. if any one thinks i am too hard, he should try spending six whole weeks in any town which is called good and old; if he does not begin to agree with me about the end of the fifth week i am much in error. xxii. the sea. is there anything new to say about it? alas, have not all the poets done their uttermost; and how should a poor prose-writer fare when he enters a region where the monarchs of rhythm have proudly trodden? it is audacious; and yet i must say that our beloved poets seem somehow to fail in strict accuracy. tennyson wanders and gazes and thinks; he strikes out some immortal word of love or despair when the awful influence of the ocean touches his soul; and yet he is not the poet that we want. one or two of his phrases are pictorial and decisive--no one can better them--and the only fault which we find with them is that they are perhaps a little too exquisite. when he says, "and white sails flying on the yellow sea," he startles us; but his picture done in seven words is absolutely accurate. when he writes of "the scream of the maddened beach," he uses the pathetic fallacy; but his science is quite correct, for the swift whirling of myriads of pebbles does produce a clear shrill note as the backdraught streams from the shore. but, when he writes the glorious passion beginning, "is that enchanted moan only the swell of the long waves that roll-in yonder bay?" we feel the note of falsity at once--the swell does not moan, and the poet only wanted to lead up to the expression of a mysterious ecstasy of love. again, the most magnificent piece of word-weaving in english is an attempted description of the sea by a man whose command of a certain kind of verse is marvellous. here is the passage-- "the sea shone and shivered like spread wings of angels blown by the sun's breath before him, and a low sweet gale shook all the foam-flowers of thin snow as into rainfall of sea-roses, shed leaf by wild leaf in the green garden bed that tempests still and sea-winds turn and plough; for rosy and fiery round the running prow fluttered the flakes and feathers of the spray and bloomed like blossoms cast by god away to waste on the ardent water; the wan moon withered to westward as a face in swoon death-stricken by glad tidings; and the height throbbed and the centre quivered with delight and the deep quailed with passion as of love, till, like the heart of a new-mated dove, air, light, and wave seemed full of burning rest"-- and so on. superb, is it not? and yet that noble strain of music gives us no true picture of our dear, commonplace, terrible sea; it reminds us rather of some gaudy canvas painted for the theatre. the lines are glorious, the sense of movement and swing is conveyed, and yet--and yet it is not the sea. we fancy that only the prose-poets truly succeed; and the chief of them all--the matchless mr. clark russell--gets his most moving effects by portraying the commonplace aspects of the water in a way that reminds people of things which they noticed but failed to admire promptly. mr. russell's gospel is plain enough; he watches minutely, and there is not a flaw of wind or a cross-drift of spray that does not offer some new emotion to his quick and sensitive soul. i want all those who are now dwelling amid the shrewd sweetness of the sea-air to learn how to gain simple pleasure from gazing on the incessant changes that mark the face of the sea. the entertainment is so cheap, so fruitful of lovely thought, so exhilarating, that i can hardly keep my patience when i see those wretched men who carry a newspaper to the beach on a glad summer morning, and yawn in the face of the divine spectacle of wave and cloud and limpid sky. let no one think that i picture the sea as always gladsome. ah, no! i have seen too much of storm and stress for that. on one awful night long ago, i waited for hours watching waves that reared and thundered as if they would charge headlong through the streets of the town. the white crests nickered like flame, and below the crests the dreadful inky bulge of each monster rolled on like doom--like death. throughout the mad night of tempest the guns from many distressed vessels rang out, and i could see the violent sweep of the ships' lights as they were hurled in wild arcs from crest to crest. many and many a corpse lay out on those sands in the morning; the bold, bronzed men stared with awful glassy stare at the lowering sky; the little cabin-boy clasped his fragment of wreckage as though it had been a toy, and smiled--oh, so sweetly!--in spite of the cruel sand that filled his dead eyes. there was turmoil enough out at sea, for the steadily northerly drift was crossed by a violent roll from the east, and these two currents were complicated in their movement by a rush of water that came like a mill-race from the southward. imagine a great city tossed about by a monstrous earthquake that first dashes the streets against each other, and then flings up the ruins in vast rolls; that may give some idea of that memorable storm. one poor, pretty girl saw her husband gallantly trying to make the harbour. long, long had she waited for him, and day by day had she tried to track the vessel's course; the smart barque had gone round the horn, and escaped from the perils of the western ocean in dead winter, and now she was heaving convulsively as she strove to run into harbour at home. right and left the grey billows hit her, and we could see her keel sometimes when the wan light of the morning broke. the girl stared steadily, and her face was like that of a corpse. the barque swung southward, and with the speed of a railway engine rushed on to the stones; the pretty girl moaned, "oh me!--oh me!" she never saw her lad again until his battered body was in the dead-house of the pier. a commonplace red-haired woman was in a dreadful state of mind when she saw a large fishing-boat trying to run for the harbour. her husband and two sons were aboard, she said, so she had reasons for anxiety. the boat was pitched about like a cork; and presently one fearful sea fairly smashed her. the red-haired woman fell down upon the sand, and lay there moaning. assuredly i am not inclined to imitate the cockney frivolity of barry cornwall, who never went to sea in his life, but who nevertheless carolled the most absurdly joyous lays regarding the ocean, which made him ill even when he merely looked at it. no; the true sea-lover knows that there are terror and mystery and horror as well as joyousness in the varied moods of the treacherous, remorseless, magnificent ocean. those who read this may see the unspeakable beauty of the opaline and ruby tints that flame on the water when the sunset sinks behind the isle of thanet. the bay at westgate will shine like mother-of-pearl, and the glassy rollers at the horizon will be incarnardined. that is a splendid sight! then those who are in devon may pass sleepy days in gazing on a vivid piercing blue that is pure and brilliant as the blue of the bay of naples. in the lochs to the west of scotland the swarming tourists watch that riot of colour that marks the times of sunrise and sunset. all these spectacles of suave magnificence are imposing; but, for my own part, i love the grey water on the east coast, and i like the low level dunes where the bent grass gleams and the sea-wind comes whispering "forget!" all the gay days of the holiday-places, all the gorgeous sunsets, the imperial noondays, the solemn, glittering midnights are imposing, but the wise traveller learns to see the beauty of all the moods of the wild changing sea. observe the commonplace man's attitude on a grey cheerless day, when the sky hangs low and the rollers are leaden. "a beast of a day!" he remarks in his elegant fashion; and he goes and grumbles in the vile parlour of his lodging-house, where the stuffy odour of aged chairs and the acrid smell of clumsy cookery contend for mastery. yet outside on the moaning levels of the dim sea there are mysterious and ghostly sights that might move the heart of the veriest stockbroker if he would but force his mind to consider them. look at that dark tremulous stream that seems to flow over the sullen sea. it is but a cat's-paw of wind, and yet it looks like a river flowing in silence from some fairy region. the boats start out of the haze and glide away into dimness after having shown their phantom shadows for a few seconds; the cry of the gull rings weirdly; the simulated agony of the staunch bird's scream makes one somehow think of tortured souls; you think of dim strange years, you feel the dim strange weather, you remember the still strange land unvexed of sun or stars, "where lancelot rides clanking through the haze." ah, who dares talk of a commonplace or disagreeable sea? i used the phrase once, but i well know that the "commonplace" day offers sights of sober grandeur to the eyes of the wise man. happy those who have royal, serene days, lovely sunsets, quiet gloamings full of stars; happy also those who see but the enormous hurly-burly of mixed grey waves, and hear the harsh song of the wild wind that blows from the fields at night! autumn is a great time for the wild sea rovers who gather at cowes and southampton. the rover may always be recognised on shore--and, by-the-way, he stays ashore a good deal--for his nautical clothing is spick and span new, the rake of his glossy cap is unspeakably jaunty, and the dignity of his gesture when he scans the offing with a trusty telescope is without parallel in history. when the rover walks, you observe a slight roll which no doubt is acquired during long experience of tempestuous weather. the tailors and bootmakers gaze on the gallant rover with joy and admiration, for does he not carry the triumphs of their art on his person? he roughs it, does this bold sea-dog--none of your fine living for him! his saucy barque lies at her moorings amid the wild breakers of cowes or "the water," and he sleeps rocked in the cradle of the deep, when he is not tempted to sojourn in his frugal hotel. the hard life on the briny ocean suits him, and he leaves all luxuries to the swabs who stay on shore. if the water is not in a violent humour, the rover enjoys his humble breakfast about nine. he tries kidneys, bloaters, brawn, and other rude fare; he never uses a gold coffee-pot--humble silver suffices; and even the urn is made of cheap metal. at eleven the hardy fellow recruits his strength with a simple draught of champagne, for which he never pays more than twelve pounds a dozen, and then four stalwart seamen row him to the landing-place. he criticises the mighty ocean from the balcony of the club until the middle of the afternoon, and then he prepares for a desperate deed of daring. the rover goes to the landing-place and scans the gulf that yawns between him and his vessel. two hundred yards at least must be covered before the rover can bound on to the deck of his taut craft. two hundred yards! and there is a current that might almost sweep a tea-chest out to sea! but the rover's steady eye takes in the whole view, and his very nautical mind enables him to lay plans with wisdom. he looks sternly at his gig with the four stout oarsmen; his simple carpets are all right; his cushions, his pillows, his cigar-box, his silken rudder-lines are all as they should be. the rover takes his determination, and a dark look settles on his manly countenance. for one brief instant he thinks of all he leaves behind him; his dear home rises before his eyes, the voices of his loved ones thrill in his ear, and his bronzed hand is raised to dash away the tear that starts unbidden. but there must be no weakness. rovers have their feelings, but they must subdue them when two hundred yards have to be traversed over waves that are nearly two inches high. the rover steps into his boat, resolved to do or die. now or never! he puts one cushion behind his athletic back, he lights a regalia--so cool are genuine heroes in peril--and shoots away over the yeasty billows. for forty seconds the fierce struggle lasts; the bow of the boat is wetted to a height of four inches; but dauntlessness and skill conquer all difficulties, and in forty seconds and a half the unscathed rover stands on his quarter-deck. sometimes when the captain is in a good humour, the rover goes for a sail, and he takes as many as three ladies with him. this statement may be doubted, but only by those who do not know what british courage is really like. yes, the rover sometimes sails as much as ten miles in the course of one trip, and he may be as much as three hours away from his moorings. moreover, i have known a good-natured skipper who allowed the roving proprietor of a yacht to take as many as six trips in the course of a single season. observe the cheapness of this amusement, and reflect thankfully on the simplicity of taste which now distinguishes the wealthy rovers of the south coast. the yacht costs about two thousand pounds to begin with, and one thousand pounds per year is paid to keep her up. thus it seems that a rover may have six sails at the rate of one hundred and sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence per sail! so long as the breed of cowes rovers exists we need have no fears concerning our naval supremacy. indeed competent nautical men think that, if any band of enemies, no matter how ferocious they might be, happened to see a thorough-bred cowes rover equipped for his perilous afternoon voyage of two hundred yards, they would instantly lose heart and flee in terror. such is the majesty of a true seaman. i hope that all my readers may respect the rover when they see him. remember that his dinner rarely numbers more than six courses, and he cannot always ice his champagne owing to the commotion of the elements. if such privations do not win pity from judicious readers, then, alas, i have written in vain! those who read this will often be surrounded by strolling rovers. treat the reckless daring salts with respect, for they live hard and risk much. xxiii. sorrow. i have never been disposed to be niggard of cheerfulness; for it has always seemed to me that one of the duties of a writer is to supply solace in a world where, amid all the beauty, so many things seem to go wrong. but, while i would fain banish cankered melancholy, sour ill-humour, cynicism, and petty complaining, i have never sought to disturb those who are mastered for a time by the sacred sorrow which takes possession of the greatest and purest and gentlest souls at times. there have been great men who were joyous--and they bore their part very bravely on earth; but the greatest of all have gained their strength in sorrow's service. it matters not which of the kings amongst men we choose, we find that his kingship was only gained and kept after he had passed through the school of grief. it is a glad world for most of us--else indeed we might wish that one cataclysm would overwhelm us all; but our masters, those who teach us and guide us, have all been under the dominion of a nameless something which we can hardly call melancholy, but which is a kind of divine sad sister to melancholy. there is no discontent in the sorrow of the great ones; they are not querulous, and none of them ever sought to avenge their subdued grief on the persons of their fellow-creatures. the kings bear their burden with dignity; they love to see their human kindred light of heart; but they cannot be light-hearted in turn; for the burden and mystery of the world are ever with them, and their energy is all needed to help them in conquering pettiness of soul, so that by no weak example may they dishearten those who are weak. i am almost convinced that the man who composed the inscription on the emerald which is said to have reached tiberius must have seen the founder of our religion--or, at least, must have known some one who had seen him. "none hath seen him smile; but many have seen him weep." it is so like what we should have expected! the days of the joyous pagan gods were passing away, the shadows of tedium and of life-weariness were drooping over a world that was once filled with thoughtless merriment--and then came one who preached the gospel of sorrow. he preached that gospel, and a faithless world at first refused to hear him; but the divine depth of sorrow drew the highest of souls; and soon the world left the religion of pride and vainglory and pleasure to embrace the religion of pity. the sorrow of the weary king ecclesiast has never seemed to me altogether noble; it is piercing in its insight--and i understand how youths who are coming to manhood find in the awful chapters a savage contrast to the joys of existence. young men who have reached the strange time of discontent through which all of us pass are always profoundly affected by the preacher; and they are too apt to pervert the most poignant of his words; but men who have really thought and suffered can never help feeling that there is a species of ingratitude in all his splendid lamentations. why should the mighty king have bidden the youth to rejoice after so many awful words had been penned to show the end of all rejoicing? every pleasure on earth the king had enjoyed, and he had drained life's chalice so far down that he tasted the bitterness of the lees. but had he not savoured joy to the full? was there one gift showered by the lavish bounty of god which had not fallen on the chosen of fortune? we revere the intellect of the man who chastens our souls with his sombre discourse; but i could wish he had veiled his despair, and had told us of the ravishing delights which he had known. no; the preacher is great, but his sorrow is not the highest. i give my chief reverence to the men who let their sorrow pass into central fire that blazes into deeds; i revere the men and women who bear their yoke and utter never a word of complaint; on them sorrow falls like a pure soft snow that leaves no stain. of late, the nations of the world have been thrilled by the deeds of one humble man who embraced sorrow and let her claim him for the best part of his life. i cannot bear to think much of the tragedy of damien's life--and i shall not dream of endeavouring to find excuses, or of declaring that life an essentially happy one. the good father chose grief and clave to her as a bride; he chose the sights and sounds of grief as his surroundings and he wrought on silently under his fearful burden of holy sorrow until the release was given. he spoke no boastful words of contentment save when he thought of the rest that was coming for him; he gallantly accepted the crudest and foulest conditions of his dreadful environment, and he uttered no craving for sympathy, no wish for personal aid. if we think of that immortal priest's choice, we understand, perhaps for the first time, what the religion of sorrow truly means. on the lonely rock the meek, strong soul spent its forces; joy, friendly faces, laughter of sweet children, healthy and kindly companions--there were none of these. the sea moaned round with many voices, and the sky bent over the lonely disciple; the melancholy of the sea, the melancholy of the changeless sky, the monotony of silence, must all have weighed on his heart. in the daytime there were only sights whereat strong men might swoon away--pain, pain, pain all round, and every complication of horror; but the child of sorrow bore all. then came the sentence of death. for ten weary years the hero had to wait in loneliness while the destroyer slowly enfolded him in its arms. we pity the monster who dies a swift death after his life of wickedness has been forfeited; we are vexed if a criminal endures one minute of suffering; but the noble one on that sad isle watched his doom coming for ten years, and never flinched from his task during that harrowing time. it makes the heart grow chill, despite the pride we feel in our lost brother. the religion of sorrow has indeed conquered; and father damien has set the seal to its triumph. but around us there are others who have composedly accepted sorrow as their portion. we have, it may be, felt so much joy in living, we have been so pierced through and through in every nerve and every faculty of the mind with pure rapture during our pilgrimage, that we would fain let all dwellers on earth share the blessedness that we have known. it is not to be; the gospel of pity must needs claim some of its disciples wholly--and sorrow is their portion. perhaps under all their sadness there lurks a joy that passes all known to slighter souls--i hope so; i hope that they cannot be permitted to endure what dante endured. in the purlieus of our cities these resigned, resolute spirits expend their forces, and their unostentatious figures, passing from home to home where poor men lie, offer a lesson to the petty souls of some whose riches and worldly powers are by no means petty. ah, it is lovely to see those merciful sisters of the fallen or falling--good to see the men who help them! need we pity them? they would say "no"; but we must, for they live hard. a delicate lady quietly sets to work in a filthy tenement; her white hands raise up and cleanse the foulest of the poor little infants who swarm in the slums; she calmly performs menial offices for the basest and most ungrateful of the poor--and no one who has not lived among those degraded folk can tell what ingratitude is really like. day after day that lady toils; and the only word of thanks she receives is perhaps a whine from some woman who wishes to cajole her into bestowing some gift. these sisters of sorrow do not need thanks any more than they need pity; they frankly recognise the baseness of ill-reared human nature, and they go on trustfully in the hope that maybe things may grow slowly better. they meet death calmly; they hide their own sorrow, and even their pity is disciplined into usefulness. the men of the good company are the same. they have resigned all the lighter joys of earth, they are calm, and they let the unutterable sadness of the world spur them on only to quiet efforts after righteousness. think what it must be for a man to leave the warm encompassment of the cheerful day and pass composedly to a gloom which is relieved only by the inner light that shines from the soul! were not the hearts of the heroes pure, they must grow cynical as they looked on the evil mass of roguery, idleness, foulness, and cunning that seethes around them. but they have passed the portal beyond which peace is found; and the sorrow wherewith they gaze on their hapless fellow-men is tinctured neither by scorn nor weariness. if there is no reward for them, then we all of us have cause for bitter disappointment. but the forlorn hope of goodness never trouble themselves about rewards; they face the shadows of doom only as they face the squalor of their daily martyrdom. a certain philosopher said that he could not endure so sombre an existence because his nerves and sinews were frail and the pain would have mastered him; but he gladly owned that the enthusiasts had conquered his admiration and taken it for their permanent possession. the cool keen eye of the scoffer divined the strength of sorrow, and he admired the men whom he durst not imitate. there are others who pass through life enwrapped by the veil of a noble sorrow; and, when i see them, i am minded to wonder whether any one was ever the worse for encountering the touch of the chilly mistress whom most children of earth dread. when i think the matter over i become convinced that no one who has once felt a noble and gentle sorrow can ever become wholly bad; and i fancy that even the bad, when once a real sorrow has pierced them, have a chance of becoming good. so in strange ways the things that seem hard to bear steadily tend to make the world better. when the bell tolls and the brown earth gapes and the form of the loved one is passed from sight for ever, it is bitter--ah, how bitter! but the chastening touch of time takes away the bitterness, and there is left only an intense gentleness which seeks to soothe those who suffer; and the mother whose babe seemed to take her very heart away when it went into the darkness can pity the other bereaved ones; so that her soul is exalted through its grief. the poet is thought by some to have uttered a mere aimless whim in words when he said-- "to sorrow i bade good-morrow, and thought to leave her far away behind; but cheerly, cheerly, she loves me dearly-- she is so constant to me and so kind. i would deceive her, and so leave her; but, ah, she is so constant and so kind!" it sounds like a whim; but it is more than that to those who have been in the depths of grief; for they know that out of their affliction grew either a solemn scorn of worldly ills or a keen wish to be helpful to others. i have no desire to utter a paradox when i say that all the world holds of best has sprung from sorrow. shakspere smiles and is still. i love the smiles of his wiser years; but they would never have been so calmly content, so cheering with all their inscrutable depth, had not the man been weighed down with some dark sorrow before his soul was rescued and purified. i do not care for him when he is grinning and merry. he could play the buffoon when he willed--and a very unpleasant buffoon he was in his day; but sorrow claimed him, and he came forth purified to speak to us by prospero's lips. he had his struggle to compass resignation, he even seems to have felt himself degraded, and there is almost a weak complaint in that terrible sonnet, "no longer mourn for me when i am dead;" but his heart-strings held; he kept his dignity at the last, and he gave us the splendours of "the tempest." i have no manner of superstition about the great poet--indeed i feel sure that at one time of his life he was what we call a bad man, his self-reproaches hinting all too plainly at forms of wickedness, moral wickedness, which pass far beyond the ordinary vice which society condemns--but i am sure that he became as good as he was serene; and i like to trace the phases of his sorrow up to the time of his triumph. of late it has been the fashion to talk about byron's theatrical sorrow. one much-advertised critic went so far as to speak of "byron's vulgar selfishness." it might have been supposed that incontestable evidence had come before him; but a careful perusal of the documents will prove that, though byron was as selfish as most other men during his mad misguided youth, yet, after sorrow had blanched his noble head, he cast off all that was vile in him and emerged from the fire-discipline as the most helpful and utterly unselfish of men. his last calm gentle letter to the woman who drove him out of england is simply perfect in its dignified humility; and the poorest creature that ever snarled may see from that letter that grief had turned the wayward fierce poet into a gentle and forbearing man who had suffered so much that he could not find it in his heart to inflict suffering on his worst enemy. i call the byron of the abbey a bad man; the byron whose home became the home of pure charity--charity done in secret--was a good man. sorrow may appear repulsive and men bid her "avaunt!" yet out of sorrow all that is noblest and highest in poesy and art has arisen; and all that is noblest in life has been achieved by the sorrow-stricken. joy has given us much; and those who have once known what real earthly joy means should be content to pass unrepining to the shades; but sorrow's gifts are priceless, and no man can appraise their worth. even poor carlyle's sorrow, which was oftentimes aught but noble, if all tales be true, was sufficient to endow us with the most splendid of modern books. it is strange to see how that crabbed man with the passionately-loving heart keeps harping on the beneficence of sorrow. once he spoke of "sorrow's fire-whips"; but usually his strain is far, far different. he cleaves to the noble and sorrowful figures that crowd his sombre galleries; and i do not know that he ever gives more than a light and careless word of praise to any but his melancholy heroes. cromwell, abbot sampson, the bold ziethen, danton, mirabeau, mahomet, burns, "the great, melancholy johnson," and even napoleon and luther--all are sorrowful, all are beautiful. peace to them, and peace to the strong soul that made them all live again for the world! xxiv. death. the air of mystery which most of us assume when we speak about the great change that marks the bound of our mortal progress has engendered a kind of paralysing terror which makes ordinary people shudder at the notion of bodily extinction. we are glad enough to enjoy the beautiful things of life, we welcome the rapture of love, the delight of the sun, the promise of spring, the glory of strength; and yet forsooth we must needs tremble at the grand beneficent close which rounds off our earthly strivings and completes one stage in our everlasting progress. why should we not speak as frankly of death as we do of love and life? if men would only be content to let their minds play freely around all the facts that concern our entrance, our progress, our exit, then existence would be relieved from the presence of terror. the greeks were more rational than we are; they took the joys of life with serenity and gladness, and they accepted the mighty transformation with the same serenity. on their memorial-stones there is no note of mourning. a young man calmly bids adieu to his friends and prepares to pass with dignity from their presence; a gallant horseman exults in the knowledge that he once rejoiced in life--"great joy had i on earth, and now i that came from the earth return to the earth." such are the carvings and inscriptions that show the wise, brave spirit of the ancients. but we, with our civilisation, behave somewhat like those indian tribes who keep one mysterious word in their minds, and try to avoid mentioning it throughout their lives. even in familiar conversation it is amusing to hear the desperate attempts made to paraphrase the word which should come naturally to the lips of all steadfast mortals. "if anything should happen to me," says the timid citizen, when he means, "if i should die"; and it would be possible to collect a score more of roundabout phrases with which men try to cheat themselves. it is right that we should be in love with life, for that is the supreme gift; but it is wrong to think with abhorrence of the close of life, for the same being who gave us the thrilling rapture of consciousness bestows the boon of rest upon the temple of the soul. "he giveth his beloved sleep," and therein he proves his mighty tenderness. strange it is to see how inevitably men and women are drawn to think and speak of the great terror when they are forced to muse in solitude. we flirt with melancholy; we try all kinds of dismal coquetries to avoid dwelling on our inexorable and beneficent doom; yet, if we look over the written thoughts of men, we find that more has been said about death than even about love. the stone-cold comforter attracts the poets, and most of them, like keats, are half in love with easeful death. the word that causes a shudder when it is spoken in a drawing-room gives a sombre and satisfying pleasure when we dwell upon it in our hours of solitude. sometimes the poets are palpably guilty of hypocrisy, for they pretend to crave for the passage into the shades. that is unreal and unhealthy; the wise man neither longs for death nor dreads it, and the fool who begs for extinction before the omnipotent has willed that it should come is a mere silly blasphemer. but, though the men who put the thoughts of humanity into musical words are sometimes insincere, they are more often grave and consoling. i know of two supreme expressions of dread, and one of these was written by the wisest and calmest man that ever dwelt beneath the sun. marvellous it is to think that our most sane and contented poet should have condensed all the terror of our race into one long and awful sentence. perhaps shakspere was stricken with momentary pity for the cowardice of his fellows, and, out of pure compassion, gave their agony a voice. that may be; at any rate, the fragment of "measure for measure" in which the cry of loathing and fear is uttered stands as the most striking and unforgettable saying that ever was conceived in the brain of man. everybody knows the lines, yet we may once more touch our souls with solemnity by quoting them: "ay, but to die, and go we know not where; to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; this sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit to bathe in fiery floods, or to reside in thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; to be imprisoned in the viewless winds and blown with restless violence round about the pendent world; or to be worse than worst of those that lawless and incertain thoughts imagine howling!--'tis too horrible! the weariest and most loathed worldly life that age, ache, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death." there is no more to be said in that particular line of reflection; the speech is flawless in its gruesome power, and every piercing word seems to leap from a shuddering soul. the other utterance which is fit to be matched with shakspere's was written by charles lamb. "whatsoever thwarts or puts me out of my way brings death into my mind. all partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore. i have heard some profess an indifference to life. such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge, and speak of the grave as of some soft arms in which they may slumber as on a pillow. some have wooed death--but 'out upon thee,' i say, 'thou foul, ugly phantom! i detest, abhor, execrate thee, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper, to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! in no way can i be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy _privation_. those antidotes prescribed against the fear of thee are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself.'" poor charles's wild humour flickers over this page like lambent flame; yet he was serious at heart without a doubt, and his whirling words rouse an echo in many a breast to this day. but both shakspere and lamb had their higher moments. turn to "cymbeline," and observe the glorious triumph of the dirge which rings like the magnificent exultation of beethoven's funeral march-- "fear no more the heat o' the sun, nor the furious winter's rages; thou thy worldly task hast done, home art gone, and ta'en thy wages; golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust. fear no more the frown o' the great-- thou art past the tyrant's stroke; care no more to clothe and eat-- to thee the reed is as the oak; the sceptre, learning, physic, must all follow this, and come to dust." here in rhythmic form we have the thought of the mighty apostle--"o death, where is thy sting? o grave, where is thy victory?" shakspere was too intensely human to be absolved from mortal weakness; but, in the main, he took the one view which i should be glad to see cherished by all. his words sometimes make us pause, as we pause when the violet flashes of summer lightning fleet across the lowering dome of the sky; but, in the end, he always has his words of cheer, and we gather heart from reading the strongest and most perfect writer the earth has known. turn where we will, we find that all of our race--emperor, warrior, poet, clown, fair lady, innocent child--are given to dwelling on the same thought. it is our business to seek out those who have spoken with resignation and dauntlessness, and to leave aside all those who have only affectations of bravery or affectations of horror to give us. here is a beautiful word:-- "the ways of death are soothing and serene, and all the words of death are grave and sweet; approaching ever, soft of hands and feet, she beckons us, and strife and song have been. a summer night, descending cool and green and dark on daytime's dust and stress and heat, the ways of death are soothing and serene, and all the words of death are grave and sweet. o glad and sorrowful, with triumphant mien and hopeful fancies look upon and greet this last of all your lovers, and to meet her kiss mysterious all your spirit lean! the ways of death are soothing and serene!" even shakspere hardly bettered that! i should not like to see men begin to encourage the recklessness of the desperado, nor should i like to see women affect the brazen abandonment of the amazon. i only care to see our fellow-creatures rise above pettiness, so that they may accept all god's ordinances with unvarying gratitude. is it not pitiful to see a grown man trembling and waving his hand with angry disgust when the holy course of nature is spoken of with gravity and composed resolution? i have seen a stout, strong man who had amassed enormous wealth fly into pettish rage like a spoiled child when a friend spoke to him about the final disposal of his riches. like a silly girl, this powerful millionaire went into tremors when the inevitable was named in his ear, for he had imbibed all the cowardly conventions that tend to poison our existence. he died a hundred deaths in his time, and much of his life was passed in such misery as only cultivated poltroonery can breed. wicked wags knew that they could frighten him at any moment; they would greet him cordially, and then suddenly assume an air of deep concern. the poor plutocrat's face changed instantly, and he would ask, "what is the matter?" the joker then made answer, "you are a little flushed. you should rest." this was enough. the truant imagination of the unhappy butt went far afield in search of terrors; neither food, nor wine, nor the pleasures of the theatre could tempt him, and he remained in a state of limpness until the natural buoyancy of his spirits asserted itself. what a life! how much better would it have been for this rich man had he trained himself to preserve general gordon's composure, even if he had bought that composure at the price of his whole colossal fortune! riches were useless to him, the sun failed to cheer him, and his end was in truth a release from one incessant torture. turn from this hare-hearted citizen, and think of our hero, the pride of england, the flower of the human race--charles gordon. with his exquisite simplicity, gordon confesses in one of his letters that he used to feel frightened when he went under fire, for the superstitious dread of death had been grafted on his mind when he was young. but he learned the fear of god and lost all other fear; he accustomed himself to the idea of parting with the world and its hopes and labours, and in all the long series of letters which he sent home from the soudan during his period of rule we find him constantly speaking quietly, joyously about the event which carries horror to the hearts of weak men--"my master will lay me aside and use some other instrument when i have fulfilled his purpose. i have no fear of death, for i know i shall exchange much weariness for perfect peace." so spoke the hero, the just and faithful knight of god. he was simple, with the simplicity of a flawless diamond; he was reverent, he was faithful even to the end, and he was incredibly dauntless. why? because he had faced the last great problem with all the force of his noble manhood, and the thought of his translation to another world woke in his gallant soul images of beauty and holiness. why should the meanest and most unlearned of us all not strive to follow in the footsteps of the hero? millions on millions have passed away, and they now know all things; the cessation of human life is as common and natural as the drawing of our breath; why then should we invest a natural, blessed, beautiful event with murky lines of wrath and dread? the pitiful wretch who flaunts his braggart defiance before the eyes of men and shrieks his feeble contempt of the inevitable is worthy only of our quiet scorn; but the grateful soul that bows humbly to the stroke of fate and accepts death as thankfully as life is in all ways worthy of admiration and vivid respect. we are prone to talk of our "rights," and some of us have a very exalted idea of the range which those precious "rights" should cover. one of our poets goes so far as to inquire in an amiable way, "what have we done to thee, o death?" he insinuates that death is very unkind to ply the abhorred shears over such nice, harmless creatures as we are. let us, for manhood's sake, have done with puerility; let us recognise that our "rights" have no existence, and that we must perforce accept the burdens of life, labour, and death that are laid upon us. we can do no good by nourishing fears, by encouraging silly conventionalities, by shirking the bald facts of life; and we should gently, joyfully, trustfully look our fate in the face and fear nothing. life will never be the joyous pilgrimage that it ought to be until men have learned to crush their pride, their doubts, their terrors, and have also learned to regard the beautiful sleep as a holy and fitting reward only to be rightly enjoyed by those who live purely, righteously, hopefully in the sight of god and man. xxv. journalism. when the mystic midnight passes, the bustle of fleet street slackens; but on each side of the thoroughfare hundreds of workers with hand and brain are toiling with eager intensity. in tall buildings here and there the lights glitter on every floor, and throw their long shafts through the gloom; not much activity is plainly visible, and yet somehow the merest novice feels that there is a throb in the air, and that some mysterious forces are working around him. hurrying messengers dash by, stray cabs rush along with a low rumble and sharp clash of hoofs. but it is not in the street that the minds and bodies of men are obviously in action; go inside one of the mighty palatial offices, and you find yourself in the midst of such a hive of marvellous industry as the world has never seen before. on one journal as many as four hundred and fifty or five hundred men are all labouring for dear life; every one is at high pressure, from the silent leader-writer to the fussy swift-footed messenger. in that one building is concentrated a great estate, which yields a revenue that exceeds that of some principalities; it is a large nerve-centre, and myriads of fibres connect it with every part of the globe; or, say, it is like some miraculous eye, which sees in all directions and is indifferent to distance. go into one quiet, soft-carpeted room, and certain small glittering machines flash in the bright light. "click, click--click, click!"--long strips of tape are softly unwound and fall in slack twisted piles. one of those machines is printing off a long letter from berlin, another is registering news from vienna, and by a third news from paris comes as easily and rapidly as from shoreditch; subdued men take the tapes, expand and make fluent the curt, halting phrases of the foreign correspondents, and pass the messages swiftly away to the printers. from america, australia, india, china, the items of news pour in, and are scrutinised by severe sub-editors; and those experts calculate to a fraction of an inch what space can be judiciously spared for each item. if parliament is sitting, the relays of messengers arrive with batches of manuscript; and, when an important debate is proceeding, the steady influx of hundreds of scribbled sheets is enormous. a four hours' speech from such an orator as mr. gladstone or mr. chamberlain contains, say, thirty thousand words. imagine the area of paper covered by the reporters! but such a speech would rarely come in late at night, and the men can usually handle an important oration by an eminent speaker in a way that is leisurely by comparison. the slips are distributed with lightning rapidity; each man puts his little batch into type, the fragments are placed in their queer frame, and presently the readers are poring over the long, damp, and odorous proof-sheets. there is no very great hurry in the early part of the evening; but, as the small hours wear away, the strain is feverish in its poignancy. there is no noise, no confusion; each man knows his office, and fulfils it deftly. but such great issues are involved, that the nervousness of managers, printers, sub-editors--every one--may easily be understood. suppose that a very important division is to be taken in parliament; the minutes roll by, and the news is still delayed. some kind of comment must be made on the result of the debate, and an able, swift writer scrawls off his column of phrases with furious speed. then that article must be put into type; a model of the type must be taken on a sheet of papier-mâché, the melted metal must be poured into the paper mould, the resulting curved block must be clamped on to a cylinder of the waiting machine, and all this must be done with strict regard to the value of seconds. a delay of half a minute might prevent the manager from sending his piles of journals away by the early train, and that would be a calamity too fearful to be dreamed of. in one great newspaper-office ten machines are all set going together, and an eleventh is kept ready in case of accident. the ten whizzing cylinders print off the papers, and an impression of a quarter of a million is soon thrown out, folded, and piled ready for distribution. but imagine what a loss of one minute means! truly the agitation of the officials at an awkward pinch is singularly excusable, and many a hard word is levelled at pertinacious talkers who insist on thrusting themselves upon the house at a time when the country is waiting with wild eagerness for momentous tidings. the long line of carts waits in the street, the speedy ponies rattle off, and soon the immense building is all but still. comfortable people who have their journal punctually handed in at a convenient hour in the morning are apt to think lightly of the raging effort, the inconceivably complicated organisation, the colossal expense needed to produce that sheet which is flung away at the close of each day. a blunder of the most trivial kind might throw everything out of gear; but stern discipline and ubiquitous precaution render the blunder almost an impossibility. sometimes you may observe in a paper like the _times_ one column which bristles with typographical errors. all the slips are clustered in one place, and the reason is that the few minutes necessary for proper revision could not be spared. good workmen are set on at the last moment, and an attempt is made to set up the final scraps of matter with as few errors as possible; but little mistakes will creep in, and people who do not know the startling exigencies of the printer's trade are apt to express scornful wonder. very comic have been the errors made during the recent furious and prolonged debates, for the frantic conflicts in the house were extended far into the small hours. one excited orator, in closing a debate, dropped into poetry, and remarked that a certain catastrophe came "like a bolt from the blue"; a daily journal of vast circulation described the event as coming "like a bolt from the flue"--which was a very sad instance of bathos. the amazing thing is that such blunders should be so rare as to be memorable. what a strange population who toil thus at night for our pleasure and instruction, and who reverse the order of ordinary people's lives! they are worth knowing, these swift, dexterous, laborious people. first of all comes the great personage--the editor. in old days simple persons imagined the conductor of the _times_ perched upon a majestic throne, whence he hurled his bolts in the most light-hearted manner. we know better now; yet it must be owned that the editor of a great journal is a very important personage indeed. the true editor is born to his function; if he has not the gift, no amount of drilling will ever make him efficient. many of the outside public still picture the editor as wielding his pen valiantly, and stabbing enemies or heartening friends with his own hands. as a matter of fact, the editor's function is not to write; the best of the profession never touch a pen, excepting to write a brief note of instruction or to send a private letter. the editor is the brain of the journal; and, in the case of a daily paper, his business is not so much to instruct the public as to find out what the public want to say, and say it for them in the clearest and most forcible way possible. imagine a general commanding amid the din of a great battle. he must remember the number of his forces, the exact disposition of every battalion, the peculiar capabilities of his principal subordinates, and he must also note every yard of the ground. he hears that a battalion has been repulsed with heavy slaughter at a point one mile away, and the officer in command cannot repeat his assault without reinforcements. he must instantly decide as to whether the foiled battalion is merely to hold its ground or to advance once more. orderlies reach him from all points of the compass; he must note where the enemy's fire slackens or gains power; he must be ready to use the field-telegraph with unhesitating decision, for a minute's hesitation may lose the battle and ruin his force. in short, the general plays a vast game which makes the complications of chess seem simple. the editor, in his peaceful way, has to perform daily a mental feat almost equal in complexity to that of the warrior. public opinion usually has strong general tendencies; but there are hundreds of cross-currents, and the editor must allow for all. suppose that a public agitation is begun, and that a great national movement seems to be in progress; then the editor must be able to tell instinctively how far the movement is likely to be strong and lasting. if he errs seriously, and regards an agitation as trivial which is really momentous, then his journal receives a blow which may cripple its influence during months. one great paper was ruined some twenty years ago by a blunder, and about one hundred thousand pounds were deliberately thrown away through obstinate folly. the perfect editor, like the great general, seizes every clue that can guide him, and makes his final movement with alert decision. no wonder that the work of editing wears men out early. the great _times_ editor, mr. delane, went about much in society; he always appeared to be calm, untroubled, inscrutable, though the factions were warring fiercely and bitterness had reached its height. he scarcely ever missed his mark; and, when he strolled into his office late in the evening, his plan was ready for the morrow's battle. at five the next morning his well-known figure, wrapped in the queer long coat, was to be seen coming from the square; he might have destroyed a government, or altered a war policy, or ruined a statesman--all was one to him; and he went away ready to lay his plans for the next day's conflict. delane's power at one time was almost incalculable, and he gained it by unerringly finding out exactly what england wanted. england might be wrong or right--that was none of delane's business; he cared only to discover what his country wished for from day to day. an amazing function is that of an editor. then we have the leader-writer. the british public have decided that their newspaper shall furnish them daily with three or four little addresses on various topics of current interest; and these grave or gay sermons are composed by practised hands who must be ready to write on almost any subject under the sun at a minute's notice. in a certain class of old-fashioned literature the newspaper-writer is represented as a careless, dissipated bohemian, who lived with rackety inconsequence. that tribe of writers has long vanished from the face of the earth. the last of the sort that i remember was a miserable old man who haunted the british museum. no one knew where he lived; but his work, such as it was, usually went in with punctuality, and he drank the proceeds. he died in a stall of a low public-house, and was buried by the parish. no one but his editor and one or two cronies knew his real name, and he appeared to be utterly friendless. but the modern leader-writer must beware of strong liquors. usually he is a keen, reposeful man who has his brain cool at all hours. the immense drinking-bouts of old times could never be indulged in now; and indeed, if a journalist once begins to take stimulants as stimulants, his end is not far off. let us mention the kind of feats which must be performed. a powerful minister makes a speech after eleven o'clock at night; the leader-writer receives proof-sheets; he must grasp the whole scope of the speech in a flash, and then proceed with the mere mechanical work of writing. twelve hundred words will take about an hour and twenty minutes to set down, and then the ms. must be rushed piece by piece to the composing-room. again, supposing that news of some great disaster arrives late. an article must be swiftly done, and the writer must have a theory ready that will hold water. work like this needs a quick wit, a copious vocabulary, and an absolutely steady hand. moreover, the leader-writer must unhappily be invariably ready to write "nothings" so that they may look like "somethings." news is scarce, foreign nations show a culpable lack of desire to kill each other, no moving accident has occurred--and the paper must be filled. then the leader-writer must take some trivial subject and weave round it a web of graceful and amusing phrases. one brilliant scholar once wrote a most charming and learned article about pigs; and i have seen a column of grave nonsense spun out on the subject of an unhappy cat which fixed its head in a salmon-tin! this hurried writing on trifling matters brings on a certain looseness of style and thought; but the public will have it, and the demand creates the supply of a flimsy, pleasant, literary article. the best leaders are now written by fine scholars. in travelling over the country i have been amused by simple people who imagined that the articles in a journal were produced by one secret and utterly mysterious being. these good folk are mightily surprised on finding that the admired leaders are done by a troop of men who are not exactly commonplace, but who are not much wiser or better than their fellows. unwin brothers printers chilworth and london. (this file was made using scans of public domain works from the university of michigan digital libraries.) transcriber's note archaic and variable spelling has been preserved. minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. printer errors have been changed and are listed at the end of this book. the critics versus shakspere a brief for the defendant by francis a. smith the knickerbocker press new york copyright, by francis a. smith the critics _versus_ shakspere a brief for defendant. by francis a. smith, of counsel. many years ago, i was retained in the great case of the critics against shakspere, the most celebrated on the calendar of history during three centuries. unlike other cases, it has been repeatedly decided, and as often reopened and reheard before the most eminent judges, who have again and again non-suited the plaintiffs. appeals have availed nothing to reverse those decisions. new actions have been brought on the ground of newly discovered evidence; counsel have summed up the testimony from all lands, from whole libraries and literatures, and the great jury of mankind have uniformly rendered a verdict of no cause of action. ben jonson said that shakspere "wanted art"; the highest appellate court decided that "lear" was a greater work than euripides or sophocles ever produced. voltaire, the presiding justice in the court of french criticism, decided that shakspere was "votre bizarre sauvage;" the world has reversed his decision, and everywhere, except perhaps in france, the "henriade" is neglected for "hamlet." during the seventeenth century, english criticism sought to put beaumont and fletcher, massinger, otway, wycherly, congreve, cowley, dryden, and even the madman lee, above shakspere. denham in sings an obituary to the memory of the "immortal" cowley,-- "by shakspere's, jonson's, fletcher's lines, our stage's lustre rome's outshines. * * * * * old mother wit and nature gave shakspere and fletcher all they have; in spencer and in jonson, art of slower nature got the start. but both in him so equal are, none knows which bears the happiest share." one knows not which to admire most, the beauty of the poetry or the justice of the encomium. james shirly, whom shakspere has not yet been accused of imitating, said in that he had few friends, and tateham, an obscure versifier, in , that he was the "plebeian driller." philipps, the pupil of milton, refers to shakspere's "unfiled expressions, his rambling and undigested fancies, the laughter of the critical." dryden "regretted that shakspere did not know or rarely observed the aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "he is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, into bombast." thomas rymer, another disciple of the unities, in , declared "othello" to be a "bloody farce without salt or savor," and says that "in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is a lively expression, and ... more humanity, than many times in the tragical flights of shakspere." how much humanity may be shown in the neighing of a horse or the growling of a mastiff may be left to the impartial judgment of the jockey or the dog fancier, but the world has got beyond the criticism of rymer. in his view, "almost everything in shakspere's plays is so wretched that he is surprised how critics could condescend to honor so wretched a poet with critical discussions." john dennis and charles gildon, whose books are forgotten under the dust of more than two centuries, in and denied that shakspere's plays had any excellence, any wealth in profound sentences or truth to nature, any originality, force or beauty of diction; and placed him far below the ancients in all essential points,--in composition, invention, characterization. dennis says shakspere paid no heed to poetic justice ... "the good and bad perishing promiscuously in the best of his tragedies, so that there can be either none or very weak instruction in them." gildon sums up his opinion by the sententious remark that "his beauties are buried beneath a heap of ashes, isolated and fragmentary like the ruins of a temple, so that there is no harmony in them." against all this arraignment by the imitators of the french drama, we have that loving tribute of the great milton:-- "dear son of memory, great heir of fame, what need'st thou such weak witness of thy name. thou, in our wonder and astonishment, hast built thyself a live-long monument." pope could not resist the charm of his unacknowledged master. but pope praises dryden, denham, and waller,--never a word of commendation for shakspere: "he is not correct, not classic; he has almost as many defects as beauties; his dramas want plan, are defective and irregular in construction; he keeps the tragic and comic as little apart as he does the different epochs and nations in which the scenes of his plays are laid; the unity of action, of place, and of time is violated in every scene." the eighteenth century was notable for its corrections and remodellings, reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics. lord lansdowne degraded shylock into the clown of the play; it was "furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical masque, 'peleus and thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the jew," dining apart from the rest, drinks to his god, money. gildon mangled "measure for measure" and provided it with "musical entertainments." the duke of buckingham divided "julius cæsar" into two tragedies with choruses. worsdale reduced "the taming of the shrew" to a vaudeville, and lampe "trimmed 'a midsummer night's dream' into an opera." garrick adapted "romeo and juliet" to the stage of his time, by allowing juliet to awake before romeo had died of the poison, "the tempest" by furnishing it with songs, "the taming of the shrew" by cutting it down to a farce in three acts. even the great samuel johnson said that shakspere "sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose." ... "his plots are often so loosely formed that a very slight consideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design." "it may be observed that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. when he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labor to snatch the profit. he therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced and imperfectly represented." and so it may be said that in england, after shakspere's death, the drama was devoted to the imitators of ancient models, under the leadership of ben jonson, and later, beyond the middle of the seventeenth century, to the imitators of french taste, for the amusement of charles the second, "defender of the faith," and the correct nell gwynn. under the guidance of such imitators, from davenant to cibber, many of shakspere's plays were reconstructed for the stage, until _the tatler_ quotes lines from davenant's mangled version of "macbeth," and n. tate, in his edition of "lear" "revived with alterations, as acted at the duke's theatre," refers to the original play as "an old piece with which he had become acquainted through a friend." davenant and dryden in improved "the tempest"; davenant corrected the errors of "measure for measure" and "much ado" in ; sedley cut out the immorality from "antony" in ; shadwell, in the following year, reformed the character of "timon"; tate restored "lear" to his kingdom and cordelia to life, and even made "henry vi.," "richard ii.," and "coriolanus" conform to the rules of dramatic art which shakspere had so defiantly violated. durfey corrected the imperfect plot, characterization, and diction of "cymbeline," and administered just punishment to iachimo; and finally, betterton and cibber, in , added elegance to the wit of falstaff and refinement to the bloody cunning of richard. "all these versions," as ulrici says, "were essentially the same in character; as a rule, only such passages as were most effective on the stage were left unaltered, but in all cases the editors endeavored to expunge the supposed harshnesses of language and versification; powerful passages were tamed down and diluted, elegant passages embellished, tender passages made more tender; the comic scenes were provided with additional indelicacies, and it was further endeavored to make the aim of the action more correct by the removal of some supposed excrescences, or by the alteration of the scenic arrangement and the course of the action." yet, in spite of all these distortions of the great originals, in conformity with the taste of corrupt courts, the love and admiration of the english people for the dramas as shakspere wrote them was attested by more than twenty complete and critical editions of his works before the end of the eighteenth century; and the high estimate of his genius during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was never questioned until , when professor barrett wendell, in his "temper of the seventeenth century in english literature," discovered and revealed to the world that shakspere, except as a "phrase-maker" and except as the inventor of "historical fiction" in "henry iv." and "henry v.," was "the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early elizabethan dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set by others." it had taken nearly three centuries of time and the researches of countless scholars to make the discovery, and they had all failed except professor wendell. during shakspere's life and after his death, none of his contemporaries ever accused him of imitating "fashions set by others"; none of them, except the profligate greene, of "beautifying himself with others' feathers." edmund malone, by what may be called digital criticism, undertook to prove that shakspere, in the second and third parts of "henry vi.," stole lines from the "contention," originally written by another hand, remodelled lines, and added of his own; but even malone did not charge that shakspere imitated the author of the "contention"; his argument, if it had not been conclusively answered again and again, would prove that shakspere was "the most unblushing plagiarist that ever put pen to paper." but long before malone came lessing, who in led the successful attack upon the pseudo-classicism of the french dramatists, proved that the three unities were but the articles of an outworn creed, and in , that shakspere was something more than a successful playwright, more than the successful rival of marlowe and kyd and dekker and beaumont and fletcher, more than "the master of the revels to mankind," and led critical opinion to the conclusion that he was the foremost man of his time and of all time, with power to search the secrets of all hearts, to measure the abysses of all passion, to portray the weakness of all human foibles, to create characters who act and speak and are as much alive to us as the men and women we daily meet, to teach mankind the profoundest philosophy, the littleness of the great, the greatness of humility and truth, and to inculcate by immortal examples the highest and purest morality. and so england found at last the greatness of her greatest son in the "father of german literature," and the nineteenth century affirmed the judgment of lessing. among germans, it needs only to name wieland, herder, goethe, schiller, ulrici, and gervinus; among englishmen, coleridge, who said, "no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the shaksperean idiom"; and charles knight, who has exploded the traditions of rowe and stevens about the deer stealing, the wife desertion and the testamentary insult, and conclusively shown that "the theory of shakspere's first employment in repairing the plays of others is altogether untenable, supported only by a very narrow view of the great essentials of a dramatic work, and by verbal criticism which, when carefully examined, fails even in its own petty assumptions." but english criticism is not conclusive for us without the indorsement of american scholars. let me quote what emerson says:--"he is the father of german literature. now, literature, philosophy, and thought are shaksperean. his mind is the horizon beyond which we at present do not see. our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. he cannot step from his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspiration. he is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably. a good reader can, in a sort, nestle into plato's brain and think from thence, but not into shakspere's." and lowell has uttered what seemed the final estimate:--"those magnificent crystallizations of feeling and phrase, basaltic masses, molten and interfused by the primal fires of passion, are not to be reproduced by the slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody creation with artifice.... among the most alien races he is as solidly at home as a mountain seen from many sides by many lands, itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and domesticated in all imaginations." all this weight of opinion has not served to settle the question of the sovereignty of shakspere. it is hardly needful to mention the action brought by ignatius donnelly to prove that francis bacon was the author of work which excels the "novum organum," for that action was laughed out of court by judge, jury, and audience. it might as well be claimed that job wrote "hamlet"; for, whatever doubt may be raised as to his personal history, the folio of and the testimony of his contemporaries have shown as clearly that shakspere wrote the dramas bearing his name as that macaulay wrote a history of the revolution of . but here come barrett wendell, professor of english literature at harvard, and his pupil and disciple, ashley h. thorndike, assistant professor of english at the western reserve university, with a new case, or a new brief on the old one, maintaining, with laborious industry and mutual sympathy, that shakspere was only an elizabethan playwright, who found the london stage in possession of chronicle plays, and at once seized the opportunity of using and adapting their material in the histories of king john and the rest; that he learned the organ music of his blank verse from kit marlowe; that his tragedies are in the manner of kyd or some other forgotten failure; that his comedies are but adaptations from greene or boccaccio; that "cymbeline" is but an imitation of "philaster"; in short that, finding some style of drama made popular by some contemporary of more original power, he immediately imitated his style and plot, surpassed him in phrase-making, and so coined sterling money to build and decorate his house at stratford. if not the most formidable, this is the latest attack of the critics. it should seem from our brief review of former efforts, that this has been fully answered. but if apology is needful for further defence, let it be found in this, that when men of eminent position as the instructors of youth, whose word in these days of careless and superficial reading is likely to be taken as final, undertake to change the opinion of the civilized world as to the genius and character of its supreme mind, their assertions should be supported by something more substantial than references to each other as authority, more reliable than dramatic chronology, which they themselves admit to be uncertain, more tangible than the effort to count the lines of "henry viii." written by fletcher. the position of professor wendell can be most fairly stated in his own words. after a hasty review of the early drama, he says of shakspere:-- "the better one knows his surroundings, the more clearly one begins to perceive that his chief peculiarity, when compared with his contemporaries, was a somewhat sluggish avoidance of needless invention. when anyone else had done a popular thing, shakspere was pretty sure to imitate him and do it better. but he hardly ever did anything first. to his contemporaries he must have seemed deficient in originality, at least as compared with lilly, or marlowe, or ben jonson, or beaumont and fletcher. he was the most obviously imitative dramatist of all, following rather than leading superficial fashion." professor wendell proceeds to give what he is pleased to call examples of shakspere's "lack of superficial originality," whatever that may mean, and assumes that he "had certainly done years of work as a dramatic hack-writer" before the appearance of "venus and adonis." there is no proof, not even the doubtful authority of tradition, that he was ever a hack-writer, or ever revised or revamped the dramatic work of another. professor wendell asserts, upon the authority of mr. sidney lee, that shakspere came to london in ,--that is, when he was twenty-two. aubry, his oldest biographer, says in that "this william, being naturally inclined to poetry and acting, came to london, i guess about eighteen (i.e., in ), and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceeding well." "he began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, and his plays took well." the date is important, as will soon be seen. professor wendell proceeds:--"'love's labour's lost' is obviously in the manner of lilly. 'henry vi.,' certainly collaborative, is a chronicle history of the earlier kind. greene and peele were the chief makers of such plays until marlowe developed the type into his almost masterly 'edward ii.' 'titus andronicus' ... is a tragedy of blood much in the manner of kyd. 'the comedy of errors' adapts for popular presentation a familiar kind of latin comedy." we may differ with some of these assertions because dissent is supported by the highest authority, both german and english. ulrici says that "lilly's works in fact contain nothing but witty words; the actual wit of comic characters, situations, actions, and incidents is almost entirely wanting. accordingly, his wit is devoid of dramatic power, his conception of comedy still not distinct from the ludicrous, which is always attached to one object; he has no idea of a comic whole." "love's labour's lost" is assigned by the best authority to - , after the appearance of "pericles," "titus andronicus," the two parts of the "contention," "the comedy of errors," and "the two gentlemen of verona." professor wendell admits that in "the two gentlemen of verona" shakspere did work of his own. after that, it is not quite "obvious" that "love's labour's lost" is in the style of lilly, however clear to the critic may be its "tedious length." lilly wrote "endymion, or the man in the moon," first published in ; it is "one great and elaborate piece of flattery addressed to 'elizabeth cynthia'," that is, the queen; she instructs her ladies in morals and pythagoras in philosophy. "her kiss breaks the spell" which put endymion into his forty-years sleep, upon which, and upon his deliverance from which, "the action principally turns within the space of forty years." can any impartial reader trace this "manner of lilly" in "love's labour's lost"? lilly's "pleasant conceited comedy," called "mother bombie," appeared in , his "midas" in , and his "most excellent comedie of alexander, campaspe, and diogenes" in . "mother bombie" represents four servants, treated partly as english, partly as roman slaves, who deceive their respective masters in an "equally clumsy, unlikely, and un-motived manner." it is difficult to see how "love's labour's lost," produced in , could have imitated "mother bombie," produced in . "alexander and campaspe" is "taken from the well known story of the magnanimity and self-command with which alexander curbs his passionate love for his beautiful theban captive, and withdraws in favor of her lover apelles." the most important comic scenes afford diogenes the opportunity of emerging from his tub and silencing all comers by his cynical speeches. lilly's most ambitious work was his "euphues, the anatomy of wit, very pleasant for all gentlemen to read," "probably printed as early as ." long before shakspere's time, all "gentlemen" had read it, and it had introduced to the fashionable world a new language which nobody but the high-born could understand. if "love's labour's lost" is "in the manner of lilly," it is not so in professor wendell's sense, but only as it ridicules with unsparing satire lilly's conceits and puns. the statement that "henry vi." is "certainly collaborative" is unwarranted, because it has been successfully challenged and disproved by the eminent critics hermann ulrici and charles knight; it is supported only by the guesswork of clark, wright, halliwell and others who assume to find a divided authorship from assumed divergencies of style. the result shows the futility of the method. what shakspere is assumed not to have written is assigned to marlowe, greene, peele or lodge. if style cannot determine between them, what warrant is there for the conclusion that "henry vi." is "certainly collaborative"? the second and third parts of "henry vi." are the final form of "the first part of the contention between the houses of york and lancaster," and "the true tragedy of richard, duke of york." greene, in his savage attack upon shakspere, quotes a line which appears in the "third part" and also in "the true tragedy." his attack proves the sole authorship of both by the man he maligns, to whom chettle apologized within a year. the argument of knight has been before the critical world for many years, and its careful arrangement of facts and its logical conclusions from them, have well-nigh overcome the prejudices of english scholars who for many years after the appearance of malone's "dissertation" adopted his theory that the two parts of the "contention" contained nothing from shakspere's hand. but because american writers are constantly seeking reputation for learning by repeating malone's argument, it will be useful, in the interest of truth, to state knight's answer. he first takes up malone's assumption that the two parts of the "contention" were not written by the author of the "first part of henry vi.," and proves the identity of authorship by the intimate connection and unity of action and characterization, and by the identity of manner, making the three plays one integral whole. in the "first part of henry vi." and in the "first part of the contention," suffolk is the same man, margaret the same woman. in both plays, gloster and beaufort speak the same scorn and defiance in the same tongue. the garden scene, with its red and white roses, is the prologue to the "contention" and indissolubly links together the three parts of "henry vi." as one drama by the same hand. malone's first assumption was therefore without foundation. even collier only claims that "it is _plausibly conjectured_" that shakspere did not write the "first part of henry vi." but that it is an old play most likely written about . who did write it, was before knight and ulrici the theme of endless debate. hallam was "sometimes inclined to assign it to greene." gervinus in his "commentaries," took the same view, but subsequently changed it. knight has shown that the three parts of "henry vi." are "in the strictest sense" shakspere's own, and ulrici agrees with knight. it is worthy of note that the "first part" was acted thirteen times in the spring of by lord strange's men, under the title "henry vi." greene lived until the d of september in that year, and yet in his "groatsworth of wit" he made no claim that the "first part" was any portion of his "feathers." the next point made is that the two parts of the "contention" were written by the author of "richard iii." malone studiously avoided any comparison between them, and yet it is entirely clear that with the "first part of henry vi." they form one drama. "'richard iii.' stands at the end of the series as the avowed completion of a long tragic history. the scenes of that drama are as intimately blended with the scenes of the other dramas as the scenes that belong to the separate dramas are blended among themselves. its story not only naturally grows out of the previous story,--its characters are not only, wherever possible, the same characters as in the preceding dramas,--but it is even more palpably linked with them by constant retrospection to the events which they had exhibited." in "richard iii." margaret is still the same "she-wolf of france" as in the three previous plays. if shakspere wrote those terrible lines in "richard iii.," as all scholars admit,-- "from forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept a hell-hound, that doth hunt us all to death; that dog, that had his teeth before his eyes, to worry lambs, and lap their gentle blood; * * * * * o upright, just and true disposing god, how do i thank thee, that this carnal cur preys on the issue of his mother's body, * * * * * bear with me, i am hungry for revenge"-- if shakspere wrote those lines, he wrote those like them from the same lips, in the second part of the "contention"-- "or, where's that valiant crook-backed prodigy, dicky, your boy, that with his grumbling voice was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies? or, 'mongst the rest, where is your darling rutland? look, york, i dipped this napkin in the blood that valiant clifford, with his rapier's point, made issue from the bosom of thy boy." the two parts of the "contention" are admitted to be by the same hand. margaret, edward iv., elizabeth his queen, clarence and gloster appear in the "second part" and in "richard iii." and here, the unity of action and of characterization conclusively shows the common authorship, precisely as the same resemblance unites the first part of "henry vi." and the "contention." the "second part of the contention" ends thus:-- "and now what rests but that we spend the time with stately triumphs and mirthful comic shows, such as befit the pleasures of the court?" "richard iii." begins with a continuation of the triumphant strain:-- "now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments; our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, our dreadful marches to delightful measures." in "richard iii." are repeated references to events in the "second part"; to the murder of rutland by the "black-faced clifford"; to the crowning of york with paper, and the mocking offer of a "clout steeped in the faultless blood of pretty rutland." it must not be forgotten that these striking likenesses, references, unities, are not between "richard iii." and the portion of the "contention" assigned to shakspere, but between the unquestioned author of "richard" and that part of the "contention" assigned by malone and his disciples to somebody else, named only by conjecture. but the most striking identity of character in these three plays, showing conclusively the identity of authorship, appears in richard himself: knight justly and forcibly says: "it seems the most extraordinary marvel that the world, for more than half a century, should have consented to believe that the man who absolutely created that most wonderful character, in all its essential lineaments, in the 'second part of the contention,' was not the man who continued it in 'richard iii.'" to prove the point, it is only necessary to permit richard to describe himself. this picture is from the "contention":-- "i will go clad my body in gay garments, and lull myself within a lady's lap, and witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. oh monstrous man, to harbour such a thought! why, love did scorn me in my mother's womb; and, for i should not deal in her affairs, she did corrupt frail nature in the flesh, and plac'd an envious mountain on my back, where sits deformity to mock my body; to dry mine arm up like a wither'd shrimp; to make my legs of an unequal size. and am i then a man to be beloved? easier for me to compass twenty crowns. tut, i can smile, and murder when i smile; i cry content to that which grieves me most; i can add colours to the chameleon; and for a need change shapes with proteus, and set the aspiring cataline to school. can i do this, and cannot get the crown? tush, were it ten times higher, i'll pull it down." and here is the companion portrait from "richard iii.":-- "but i, that am not shap'd for sporting tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; i, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty, to strut before a wanton ambling nymph;-- i, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as i halt by them;-- why i, in this weak, piping time of peace, have no delight to pass away the time, unless to see my shadow in the sun, and descant on mine own deformity. and therefore, since i cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair, well-spoken days, i am determinèd to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasure of these days. plots have i laid, inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, to set my brother clarence and the king in deadly hate the one against the other; and, if king edward be as true and just as i am subtle, false and treacherous, this day should clarence closely be mew'd up." the pictures that hamlet showed his mother were not more unlike than these are like. but malone's examination was microscopic, and he used so powerful an instrument that he could not distinguish resemblance or difference beyond its field of vision. the result is that he counts among the lines mended by shakspere those that differ from those in the "contention" only by a particle or a conjunction. by this "capricious arithmetic," only six lines in the scenes with jack cade in the "second part of henry vi." are credited to shakspere, and we are asked to believe that the man who was to fix the price of bread at "seven half-penny loaves for a penny," to give the "three-hooped pot ten hoops," to "make it felony to drink small beer," was portrayed by marlowe, or greene, or peele, or lilly, or kyd, or nash, or somebody else still more completely forgotten. if, then, "henry vi." is "certainly collaborative," a "chronicle history of the earlier kind," as professor wendell expressly asserts, it ought to be shown for our certain instruction who was shakspere's collaborator in the three parts of that drama. this neither he nor any other critic has yet done. malone says it was greene or peele, but, in spite of the established fact that we have abundant remains of both, he cannot determine between them from style, or rhythm, or other peculiarities; collier "supposes" it was greene; dyce "conjectures" it was marlowe. on the contrary, it may be conclusively shown that shakspere is constantly quoting from the "first part of henry vi." and the "contention," as from himself,--adjectives, figures of speech, sentences, phrases. the cardinal in "henry vi." is called a "scarlet hypocrite," in "henry viii." a "scarlet sin." in one play the sentence "i am but shadow of myself" becomes in the other "i am the shadow of poor buckingham." "my book of memory" in "henry" is changed to "the table of my memory" in "hamlet." "who now is girded with a waist of iron" is repeated in "king john"--"that as a waist do girdle you about." more striking still is the close resemblance between the line in the "first part"--"'tis but the short'ning of my life one day" and the line in "henry v."--"heaven shorten harry's happy life one day." in the "first part of the contention" the character described "bears a duke's whole revenue on her back." in "henry viii." this is recalled by the line,--they "have broke their backs with laying manors on them"; and in "king john"--"bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs." in "macbeth" the sentence "infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets" is but a repetition of the line from the "contention" in which duke humphrey's assassin "whispers to his pillow as to him." "you have no children, devils," is the language of the "contention"; "he has no children" of "macbeth." "bring forth that fatal screech owl to our house, that nothing sung but blood and death" are the words of the "contention"; "out on you, owls, nothing but songs of death," of "richard iii." malone suppresses the obvious resemblance between these passages and others like them, and is guilty of the same uncritical conduct in disregarding the classical allusions in the "second and third parts of henry vi." which he admits were added by shakspere,--allusions as numerous and striking as those in the "first part." mr. richard grant white, after reviewing the argument of knight, reaches the conclusion that he "demolished malone's theory," and this conclusion is a sufficient answer to professor wendell's unsupported assertion that "henry vi." is "certainly collaborative." but professor wendell further says that "greene and peele were the chief makers of such plays until marlowe developed the type into his almost masterly 'edward ii.'" we are therefore asked to believe that shakspere, in the historical plays bearing his name, imitated them or one of them. examination of the record will best show whether this latest critic has discovered any evidence to support his new charge, that shakspere "was the most obviously imitative dramatist of all, following rather than leading superficial fashion." malone, in his "chronological order," says: "'the first part of king henry vi.,' which i imagine was formerly known by the name of the 'historical play of king henry vi.,' had, i suspect, been a very popular piece for _some_ years, before , and perhaps was first exhibited in or ." collier states "that it is merely the _old_ play on the early events of that reign, which was most likely written in ." knight concludes that "there can be no doubt that the composition of this play preceded that of the two parts of the 'contention.'" that these had been upon the stage before greene died in is proven beyond dispute by greene's savage attack, at that time shakspere was twenty-eight years old and for at least three years had been a shareholder in the blackfriars theatre, and, if mr. sidney lee is right, had been in london six years; if old aubry was better informed, he had been "acting exceeding well" and making "essays at dramatic poetry which took well" for ten years. the theory of "imitation" rests upon the assumption that shakspere did not begin to write for the stage before ; collier asserts, without the slightest support from known facts, and against the hostile testimony of greene, that he wrote the "tiger's heart lines" before september, , that "the 'history of henry vi.,' the 'first part of the whole contention,' and the 'true tragedy of richard, duke of york,' were all three in being before shakspere began to write for the stage"; and mr. hallam says, more cautiously, that "it seems probable that the old plays of the 'contention' ... were in great part by marlowe." and so, we find shakspere in london, from six to ten years connected with its principal theatre, but writing nothing for its stage, not even as a "hack-writer." we respectfully dissent from this conclusion because it lacks support either in fact or probability. the man who, from utter penury, had in won his way to a lucrative share in the theatre he made illustrious, and who wrote "romeo and juliet," which first appeared, according to ulrici's investigation, in , was more capable of writing, and more likely to have written, the three original pieces than greene or marlowe, to one of whom, or to some other writer, the authorship is assigned by mere conjecture, from a fancied but confused and indeterminate likeness of style or metre or classical quotation. marlowe was killed in a brawl with one francis archer, at deptford, on the first day of june, . the only dramas that can be certainly called his are the "two parts of tamburlaine," "the massacre of paris," "faustus," the "jew of malta" and "edward ii." his merits and his faults have been discussed by many scholars; his style is characterized as the "mighty line"; he is said by many to have invented and introduced blank verse as the vehicle of the drama, although "gorboduc," acted before the queen in and published in , gascogne's "jocasta," played in , and whetstone's "promos and cassandra," printed in , were wholly or partly in blank verse. but it is admitted by all editors and critics that marlowe's only historical plays are "the massacre" and "the almost masterly edward ii.," as professor wendell somewhat ambiguously calls it. the "massacre" ends with the death of henry iii. of france, who was assassinated on the st of august, ; "it cannot, therefore, have been written earlier than about ." whatever its true date, it is not claimed to bear any likeness to either part of the "contention." on the contrary, "it was a subject in which marlowe would naturally revel; for in the progress of the action, blood could be made to flow as freely as water." the resemblance is sought in his edward ii., which, as all the facts tend to show, was his latest work, written after the "massacre" and certainly not published in his lifetime. it was entered at stationer's hall in july, , a little more than a month after marlowe's death. but here stands the "contention" with a fixed date, proved to have been in existence "in or close upon the first half of the decade commencing in ," and the admission of all scholars that it preceded marlowe's "edward ii." if, therefore, marlowe wrote one or both parts of the "contention," the extravagant assumption must be made "that his mind was so thoroughly disciplined at the period when he produced 'tamburlaine,' 'faustus' and the 'jew of malta' that he was able to lay aside every element, whether of thought or expression, by which those plays are characterized, adopt essentially different principles for the dramatic conduct of a story, copy his characters from living and breathing models of actual men; come down from his pomp and extravagance of language, not to reject poetry, but to ally poetry with familiar and natural thoughts; and delineate crime not with the glaring and fantastic pencil that makes demons spout forth fire and blood ... but with a severe portraiture of men who walk in broad daylight upon the common earth, rendering the ordinary passions of their fellows,--pride, and envy, and ambition, and revenge,--most fearful, from their alliance with stupendous intellect and unconquerable energy. this was what marlowe must have done before he could have conducted a single sustained scene of either part of the 'contention'; before he could have depicted the fierce hatreds of beaufort and gloster, the never-subdued ambition of margaret and york, the patient suffering, amidst taunting friends and reviling enemies, of henry, and, above all, the courage, the activity, the tenacity, the self-possession, the intellectual supremacy and the passionless ferocity of richard." does it need more to show that marlowe was not the author of the "contention"? here is the proof, and it does not rest upon conjecture, or inference from disputed facts, but upon records that have survived the waste of three centuries. the "first part of the contention" was printed by thomas creed, for thomas millington, in ; "the true tragedy of richard," the old name of the "second part of the contention," by "p. s." for thomas millington, in . the title page gives the name of no author for either play, and it is claimed by eminent authority that both were piratical editions; but if marlowe was the unquestioned author, were not his friends and associates still living, three years after his death, to claim the honor of creating two dramas which immeasurably surpassed any other he ever wrote? if it be asked why shakspere's friends did not claim the authorship for him, it is answered that as soon as another edition appeared, they did. in , three years after his death, a new edition of these very plays appeared, with shakspere's full name on the title page, and enlarged by additions from the second and third parts of "henry vi." and this proof is further supported: in an entry in the stationer's registers under date of april , , appears the following remark:--"thom. pavier: by assignment from th. millington _salvo jure cujuscunque_: the first and second parts of 'henry vi.', two books." this entry refers to the two plays first published in and , the first of which is always called "the first part of the contention," and both of which in the edition of were under the title of "the whole contention between the two famous houses of lancaster and york," by the same th. pavier who had received them "by assignment" from the original publisher of the editions of and ,--_thomas millington_. _pavier_ knew in , and therefore put his name on the title page of his edition, that shakspere was the author of the two parts of the "contention," but instead of giving them the extended titles of the former editions, briefly and inaccurately designated them as "the first and second parts of henry vi." it results from these facts, that when malone was attempting to show that shakspere was imitating marlowe's "edward ii." in the lines-- "scorning that the lowly earth should drink his blood, mounts up to the air," and-- "frown'st thou thereat, aspiring lancaster?" he forgot the important and established truth that marlowe was imitating shakspere in the "contention." for two centuries, until malone's "dissertation," nobody had claimed that marlowe wrote any portion of the "contention"; for nearly two centuries, the "second and third parts of henry vi." had appeared as the sole work of shakspere, embodying act for act, scene for scene, event for event and character for character, the whole "contention," and nobody had claimed that he was not the sole author of both. we therefore respectfully submit that professor wendell has no warrant for his assertion that "to his contemporaries he must have seemed deficient in originality, as least as compared with lilly or marlowe." "henry vi." was not "collaborative." marlowe did not develop the type of chronicle history into his "almost masterly edward ii." but professor wendell further asserts that "greene and peele were the chief makers of such plays" before marlowe, and the implication is that shakspere, in his historical plays, "followed the superficial fashion" set by them. of greene's dramas, only two purport to have been his work,--"friar bacon and friar bungay" and "the scottish history of james the fourth." "orlando furioso," generally assigned to him, has no name on its title page; "alphonsus, king of aragon," is probably his, as it bears the initials "r. g."; "the looking glass for london and england" bears the joint names of lodge and greene; "the pleasant conceyted comedy of george-a-green, the pinner of wakefield," sometimes assigned to him, is of doubtful authorship. "friar bacon and friar bungay" is characterized by knight as "the old story of the brazen head. there is here, unquestionably, more facility in the versification, much less of what we may distinguish by the name of fustian, and some approach to simplicity and even playfulness. but whenever greene gets hold of a king, he invariably makes him talk in the right royal style which we have already seen; and our henry iii. does not condescend to discourse in a bit more simple english than the soldan of egypt or the king of nineveh." this play was first printed in . the old popular tradition of friar bacon and his magic arts is interwoven with the loves of prince edward and earl lacy. legend and love story have nothing in common, and their connection is merely accidental. the friar's design fails through the stupidity of his servant, but no explanation is given of the folly of entrusting such weighty matters to a fool. the love story turns upon the retirement from the amorous contest in favor of lacy, but no reason is assigned for the resulting trials of the successful party. there is no glimpse of history or of historical chronicle in the piece. of one thing we may be certain: with all his wonderful power, shakspere was incapable of imitating "the honorable historie of frier bacon and frier bongay." "james the fourth" appeared in print in under the title "the scottish historie of james the fourth, slaine at flodden, intermisted with a pleasant comedie &c." of this drama ulrici says that "greene, led astray perhaps by marlowe, ventured upon a task quite beyond him. he as yet obviously had no idea of the dignity of history, of an historical spirit, of an historical conception of the subject, or of an historical form of the drama. history with him resolves itself into a romance." this opinion is fully sustained by the play itself; james falls in love with ida, the daughter of the countess of arran, but in spite of his disloyalty, his queen is faithful. james repents for the very good reason that ida spurns him, but not until he has ordered the queen to be killed. the murder is unsuccessfully attempted, and after her partial recovery, she rushes between the armies, disarms the hostility of her father, the english king, and wins back her husband's love. the chief characters are oberon, king of fairies, and rohan, a "misanthropic recluse." rohan has this veracious "history" enacted before oberon, and so justifies himself for having withdrawn from a bad world. this is the "pleasant comedie" which is connected with the main action by slipper, rohan's son, who plays the part of clown. it is not strange that the impartial critic summed up the review with the remark that "the atmosphere of history was evidently too pure and cool for greene's taste." the play is a romance from beginning to end; it has no pretension to the character of an historical drama. mr. dyce says of it: "from what source our author derived the materials of this strange fiction i have not been able to discover; nor could mr. david laing of edinburg, who is so profoundly versed in the ancient literature of his country, point out to me any scottish chronicle or tract which might have afforded hints to the poet for its composition." the play originally called in "the chronicle history of alphonsus, king of aragon" is based upon a semi-historical foundation, and yet, as the highest authority has pronounced, greene "has erected such a romantic and fantastic structure upon this foundation, that it would be doing him an injustice to judge his work from the standpoint of an historical drama." it is plainly an imitation of "tamburlaine." alphonsus, singly and alone, conquers the crown of aragon and half the world in addition, accompanied by monotonous noise and blood. the ghost of mahomet is introduced as if to give variety to the scene, but fails utterly, and, nobody can guess why, refuses to give the required oracle, but finally, importuned by the attendant priests, gives a false one. even the marriage of alphonsus with iphigenia fails to enliven the style of the poet. but the machinery that moves the action is all wonderful and striking and quite un-historical. venus and the muses recite the prologue and act the dumb shows, representing at the beginning of each act a retrospection of the past and a forecast of the future. and venus herself, with the help of calliope, writes the play, "not with pen and ink, but with flesh and blood and living action." "this ... indicates the fundamental idea of the piece. wherever the all-powerful goddess of love and beauty herself plans the actions and destinies of mortals, there extraordinary things come to pass with playful readiness and grace." "the historie of orlando furioso," issued from the london press in , is a light production hastily sketched for a court festival, based upon the great romance of ariosto, "but the superstructure presents the most extravagant deviations from ariosto's plan. the pomposity of the diction is not amiss in the mouths of such stately personages as the emperor of africa, the soldan of egypt, the prince of mexico, the king of the isles and the mad orlando." it may not be amiss to quote an example: "discourteous woman, nature's fairest ill, the woe of man, that first created curse, base female sex, sprung from black ate's loins, proud, disdainful, cruel and unjust, whose words are shaded with enchanting wiles, worse than medusa mateth all our minds; and in their hearts sit shameless treachery, turning a truthless vile circumference! o, could my fury paint their furies forth! for hell's no hell, compared to their hearts, too simple devils to conceal their arts; born to be plagues unto the thoughts of men, brought for eternal pestilence to the world." it is difficult to think of shakspere "bombasting out a blank verse" like this. * * * * * the dramatic characters recite passages from the classic authors; the enchantress melissa gives a whole speech in latin hexameters; orlando bursts into italian rhymes to utter his rage against angelica,--"a want of taste," says the commentator, "which brings the already unsuccessful scene, the centre of the whole action, down to the sphere of the ridiculous." nobody has been able to determine how much of the "looking glass for london and england" was written by lodge, how much by greene. knight thinks the poetry should be assigned to greene. the whole piece is made up of an extraordinary mixture of kings of nineveh, crete, cicilia, and paphlagonia; of usurers, judges, lawyers, clowns, and ruffians; of angels, magi, sailors, lords, and "one clad in devil's attire." the prophet hosea presides over the whole performance, with the exception of the first and last scenes,--a silent, invisible observer of the characters, for the purpose of uttering an exhortation to the people at the end of each scene, that they should take warning from nineveh. there is a flash of lightning which kills two of the royal family, and then another which strikes the parasite, radagon. both admonitions are equally futile. at last an angel prays repeatedly, and in answer jonah is sent to preach repentance. his mission is successful, and at last jehovah himself descends in angelic form and proclaims mercy. it has been thought that the piece was written to silence the puritan zealots who claimed that the secular drama had demoralized the stage, and forgotten the purity of the moral and miracle plays; but it has never been suggested that this was a "chronicle history." "george-a-greene, the pinner of wakefield," is not generally credited to greene, but ulrici, from the style, assigns it to him. it makes no claim as an historical drama, but is based upon two popular legends and some events during the reign of king edward, without specifying which king of that name, and "without regard to chronological order or historical truth." such is a brief and fair summary of the works, whether authentic or doubtful, of robert greene. let us turn to those of peele, the friend of greene and marlowe. dyce assigns to him "the history of the two valiant knights, syr clyomon, knight of the golden shield, sonne of the king of denmark, and syr clamides the white knight," printed without the author's name in . the subject, a chivalrous romance, with dragons and sorcerers and lost princesses, is more a narrative in dialogue than a drama. it is full of long speeches without any real action. it resembles the "moralities": the clown is called "subtle shift," sometimes "vice." "rumour" and "providence" appear, the one to tell clyomon what has happened during his absence, the other to prevent clyomon's mistress "from committing rash and unnecessary suicide." the clown calls the piece a "pageant"; it cannot be called "a chronicle history." peele's "arraignment of paris, a pastorall" is a court drama in the style of lilly, intended to flatter the queen, "poor in action but all the richer in gallant phrases, provided with songs, one in italian, and with all kinds of love scenes between shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs and terrestrial gods"; the diction is interesting, because it shows revolt from the prevailing "euphuism," and therefore peele must be given the praise of first opposing lilly's affected style. the subject and action are as far removed from history as earth from heaven; paris is accused by juno and pallas before the assembled gods, for having pronounced an unjust sentence; he is released without punishment, but as the fair plaintiffs persist in their appeal, the decision is left to diana, who then awards the fatal apple, not to any of the three goddesses, but to the wise nymph eliza, who is as chaste as she is beautiful and powerful. juno, pallas, and venus of course agree to this decision and lay all their gifts at the feet of the queen. at the end, even the three fates appear, in order, in a latin chant, to deliver up the emblems of their power, and therewith the power itself, to the exalted nymph. "the old wife's tale, a pleasant conceited comedie," published in , is a dramatized old wife's story told to three erring fancies, frolic, antic and fantastic, quite in the style of a fairy tale, "always wavering in the peculiar twilight, between profound sense and nonsense, between childish play and matured humor." two brothers who have lost their sisters appear, and then an insolent giant, swaggering with a double-edged sword and attended by an enamored fool, and finally a knight-errant devoting his fortune to pay the stingy sexton for the burial of a victim of poverty; they are now hunting for the princess, the sisters, and the beloved lady, and to free them from the sorcerer; none of them succeed in the effort, except the knight, "and he only by the help of the ghost of the poor jack whose body he buried." "the battel of alcazar fought in barbarie" is attributed to peele and was published in , soon after marlowe's "tamburlaine," after which it is modelled and to which it expressly refers. the commentator says: "it is a mere battle piece, full of perpetual fighting and noise, of which the action almost exclusively consists." there is nothing to show that it had any connection with history or chronicle, or was anything better than a hurriedly written, spectacular drama. the "edward i." of peele bears this title: "the famous chronicle of king edward the first, surnamed edward longshanks, with his return from the holy land. also the life of llewellen rebell in wales. lastly, the sinking of queene elinor, who sunk at charing-crosse, and rose again at pottershith, now named queenshith." the title itself proves that it is not a "chronicle" but an unhistorical fiction. the events pass by in one straight, continuous line, the dramatic personages are characterized almost solely by their actions, the language is a mere sketch. the queen murders the lady mayoress, and on her death-bed confesses a double adultery; she commits perjury by denying the murder and calls upon heaven to sink her into the depths of the earth if she had spoken falsely. "that she 'sunk at charing-crosse' before it was erected to her memory, is a sufficiently remarkable circumstance in peele's play, but it is more remarkable that, assuming to be a 'famous chronicle,' and in one or two of the events following the chronicle, he has represented the queen altogether to be a fiend in female shape,--proud, adulterous, cruel, treacherous and bloody." the play contradicts the chronicle, and therefore cannot be called a chronicle history. hollinshed, the source of all shakspere's histories, says of queen eleanor: "she was a godly and modest princess, full of pity, and one that showed much favor to the english nation, ready to relieve every man's grief that sustained wrong, and to make those friends that were at discord, so far as in her lay." mr. hallam has characterized this violation of historical truth as a "hideous misrepresentation of the virtuous eleanor of castile.... the 'edward i.' of peele is a gross tissue of absurdity with some facility of language, but nothing truly good." nobody but professor wendell has ever even intimated that shakspere imitated it. it is hardly necessary to consider "the love of king david and fair bethsabe," published in , because, in the deliberate opinion of those who have studied the subject most deeply, it was not written till "romeo and juliet" was upon the stage in . in it there are distinct traces of shakspere's influence. "the love scenes, and the images and similes describing the charms of the beauty of nature, remind one of those incomparable pictures in 'romeo and juliet.'" in peele's other plays he has made but feeble attempts to depict love, beauty, or grace; in "king david" he has "depicted them with a remarkably high degree of success." these are all the works of peele which have come down to our time, and after this review of his and of greene's dramas, it does not seem that "greene and peele were the chief makers of such plays," that is, of "chronicle histories," before marlowe. the truth is, that all the supporters of malone's theory have taken malone's unsupported statement as indisputable fact; they have not sufficiently examined the works of greene and peele, but have assumed, as malone assumed, that greene's charge in his "groat's worth of wit" was conclusive proof that shakspere did not write the two parts of the "contention," and that greene, or one of the friends he addresses, was in fact the author. this assumption has again and again been shown to be without foundation. there was no point in greene's dying sarcasm if he merely quoted a line written by himself; if he quoted one written by shakspere, the whole argument of professor wendell, that "henry vi." was "certainly collaborative," that his early work was "hack-writing," that "he hardly ever did anything first," that "to his contemporaries he must have seemed deficient in originality," falls to the ground. having done what malone failed to do, and what professor wendell seems not to have done,--having reviewed at some length the works of shakspere's contemporaries to whom the older chronicle plays are attributed by malone,--we invoke, in support of the position we have taken, the opinion of mr. charles knight in his "essay on henry vi. and richard iii." "the dramatic works of greene, which were amongst the rarest treasures of the bibliographer, have been rendered accessible to the general reader by the valuable labors of mr. dyce. to those who are familiar with these works we will appeal, without hesitation, in saying that the character of greene's mind, and his habits of composition, rendered him utterly incapable of producing, not the two parts of the 'contention,' or one part, but a single sustained scene of either part. "and yet a belief has been long entertained in england, to which some wise and judicious still cling, that greene and peele either wrote the two parts of the 'contention' in conjunction; or that greene wrote one part and peele the other part; or that, at any rate, greene had some share in these dramas. this was the theory propagated by malone in his 'dissertation'; and it rests not upon the slightest examination of these writers, but solely on the far-famed passage in greene's posthumous pamphlet, the 'groat's worth of wit,' in which he points out shakspere as 'a crow beautified with our feathers.' the hypothesis seems to us to be little less than absurd.... he parodies a line from one of the productions of which he had been so plundered, to carry the point home, to leave no doubt as to the sting of his allusion. but, as has been most justly observed, the epigram would have wanted its sting if the line parodied had not been that of the very writer attacked." "titus andronicus" is a "tragedy of blood" written by shakspere, according to the highest authority, when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years of age. ben johnson says, in his "bartholomew fair" ( ), that it had been on the stage for twenty-five or thirty years. it was doubtless a very early work, but whether "much in the manner of kyd," as professor wendell asserts, can be best determined by reference to kyd's works. the claim has been made by other critics that "titus" was "collaborative," but professor wendell's is that it was an "imitation." "the tragedy of soliman and perseda," first printed in , is of doubtful authorship, but has sometimes been credited to kyd. "the piece still bears a striking resemblance to the old moral plays and thereby proves its relatively early origin. a chorus consisting of the allegorical figures love, happiness, and death opens the play and each separate act, and ends it with a controversy in which all the personified powers boast of their deeds and triumphs over the others, till at the end of the fifth act death remains the victor, and the whole concludes with a eulogy of queen elizabeth, the only mortal whom death does not venture to approach." "titus andronicus" will be searched in vain for "much" or little of this "manner of kyd." "the first part of jeronimo, with the warres of portugal and the life and death of don andrea," not published till , is not an authentic work of kyd, but is attributed to him by some because, judging from the subject, it belongs to "the spanish tragedy" and is regarded by henslowe as the first part of it. a. w. schlegel says that "both of these parts are full of absurdities, that the author had ventured upon describing the most forced situations and passions without being aware of his want of power, that especially the catastrophe of the second part, which is intended to surpass every conceivable horror, is introduced in a trivial manner, merely producing a ludicrous effect, and that the whole was like a child's drawings, wholly unmindful of the laws of proportion." ulrici maintains that "jeronimo" itself may be treated as a play in three parts connected only externally: first, the war between portugal and spain; second, the life and death of don andrea, and third the acts of jeronimo, who is, however, only a subordinate character. but whether the play be treated as a whole or as composed of substantially separate parts, its action and interest are centred in the story of the love of don andrea and bellimperia; lorenzo, her brother, persecutes both because he is jealous of andrea's success. andrea is finally killed; at his funeral, his ghost appears for no assigned reason, except to exchange greeting with his friend horatio. "revenge" and charon also appear, the one "to forbid andrea's ghost from divulging the secrets of hell, the other to accompany him back to the lower regions," and the learned critic adds that "this allegorical by-play is inserted so arbitrarily, so inappropriately and so unmeaningly, that it forms the best standpoint for judging the piece as regards its composition and poetical character. _in this respect its value is next to nothing._" if kyd wrote "jeronimo," of which there is no satisfactory proof, and if shakspere wrote "titus," "much in the manner of kyd," which we venture to think more doubtful than the authorship of "jeronimo," then shakspere's supposed imitation was much "better" than the original "popular thing." that kyd wrote "the spanish tragedy, containing the lamentable end of don horatio and bellimperia with the pitifull death of old hieronimo," first published in , is certified by heywood in his "apology for actors," and there is good authority for the opinion that it was acted as early as . we quote the summary of the plot: "it is not wanting in absurdities, for the play opens and is connected with 'jeronimo' by a conversation between andrea's ghost and 'revenge'; both remain continually on the stage as silent, invisible spectators, in order, at the end of every act, to add a few words, in which andrea laments over the delay in the revenge of his death upon the infanta belthazar, and 'revenge' admonishes him to be patient; at the end of the fifth act both return satisfied to the lower regions. then bellimperia suddenly falls in love with horatio, who now steps into andrea's place, and is persecuted by lorenzo, at first without any cause whatever, and is finally assassinated. by some means which remain perfectly unexplained and incomprehensible, lorenzo keeps old jeronimo from the court, so that he cannot bring forward his accusation against the murderers of his son. jeronimo is consequently seized with madness, which, however, suddenly turns into a well calculated and prudent action. the conclusion of the piece is a general massacre, in which jeronimo, after having killed lorenzo, bites off his own tongue, stabs the duke of castile, and then himself with a penknife." it can hardly seem strange that the critic should add: "this at once explains why no piece was more generally ridiculed by contemporary and younger poets, than "the spanish tragedy."" if shakspere imitated kyd in "titus," from such stuff as this, he was surely wise in his "sluggish avoidance of needless invention." we are tempted to suggest, however, that "the spanish tragedy" affords a rich and ample field to modern critics who are solicitous to save the life and work of "the gentle william" from the imputation of being "superhuman": is it not clear that "hamlet" was only an imitation of "the spanish tragedy"? did not hamlet have a friend whose name was horatio? was not hamlet, like jeronimo, "essentially mad," and did not his madness "turn into a well calculated and prudent action"? kyd was the undoubted author of another work, under the following title: "pompey the great, his fair cornelia's tragedie: effected by her father's and husband's downe-cast death and fortune, written in french by that excellent poet, r. garnier, and translated into english by thomas kyd." this translation was printed in . the play is thus summarized: it is "a piece which is constructed upon a misunderstood model of the ancients; it is altogether devoid of dramatic action, in reality merely lyrics and rhetoric in dialogue. the whole of the first act consists of one emphatic jeremiad by cicero, about the desperate condition of rome as it then was, its factiousness, its servility,--a jeremiad which is continued at the end of the act, by the chorus, in rhymed stanzas. in this tone it proceeds without a trace of action through the whole of the succeeding act, till maledictions and outbursts of grief on the part of cornelia conclude the piece at the same point at which it had commenced." it has never been claimed that "cornelia" was the model for "titus." "cornelia" and "the spanish tragedy" are the only dramas that can be certainly called kyd's. comparison between these, or either of the others doubtfully attributed to him, and "titus andronicus," shows beyond question that the only similarity between the most similar is that both are "tragedies of blood." there is no likeness of plot, characterization, action or diction. there is in "titus" none of kyd's "huffing, bragging, puft" language. a ghost concludes "jeronimo" whose "hopes have end in their effects" "when blood and sorrow finish my desires," "these were spectacles to please my soul." in "titus," even the satanic aaron, "in the whirlwind of passion," "acquires and begets a temperance" that "gives it smoothness." when tamora proposes crimes to her sons, that fiends would refuse to execute, lavinia does not shriek, nor rant, nor call upon the gods, but speaks what nobody but shakspere could have uttered,-- "o tamora! thou bear'st a woman's face." it is not necessary to consider the claim sometimes made, that kyd wrote an old "taming of the shrew" or an old "hamlet." "it is a mere arbitrary conjecture" that he was the author of either. there is therefore no proof that shakspere imitated kyd, and professor wendell's assertion that "titus andronicus" is "much" in his manner is utterly without support. "the comedy of errors" was unquestionably suggested by the "twins" of plautus. is it therefore an imitation? what is literary imitation? did dante imitate virgil because virgil's ghost was the guide through the "inferno"? did milton imitate dante in "paradise lost" because he describes the same scenes in different words? did he imitate the author of genesis because he reproduces the garden of eden in majestic poetry? "paradise lost" seems to professor wendell "almost superhuman," but when any suggestion of transcendent power is applied to shakspere, it assumes an "unnecessary miracle." shakspere, whom ten generations of great men have failed to imitate, is in the opinion of professor wendell but an imitator, because while, as he says, "he could not help wakening to life the stiffly conventional characters which he found, as little more than names, in the tales and the fictions he adapted for the stage," he wrote chronicle plays, comedies, romances, tragedies, after others had worked in the same fields. milton was born in . "that was the year," says professor wendell, "when shakspere probably came to the end of his tragic period, and, with the imitativeness which never forsook him, was about to follow the newly popular manner of beaumont and fletcher." but let us turn to professor wendell's opinion of milton and quote his language: "with milton, the case is wonderfully different. read scripture, if you will, and then turn to your 'paradise lost.' turn then to whatever poet you chance to love of greek antiquity or of roman. turn to dante himself.... then turn back to milton. different you will find him, no doubt, in the austere isolation of his masterful and deliberate puritanism and learning; but that difference does not make him irrevocably lesser. rather you will grow more and more to feel how wonderful his power proves. almost alone among poets, he could take the things for which he had need from the masters themselves, as confidently as any of the masters had taken such matters from lesser men; and he could so place these spoils of masterpieces in his own work that they seem as truly and as admirably part of it as they seemed of the other great works where he found them." "'paradise lost' transcends all traces of its lesser origins, until those lesser origins become a matter of mere curiosity." and so it appears that professer wendell applies one definition of the word "imitation" to shakspere, another to milton. if shakspere found chronicle plays in the theatre, and transformed them into the most vivid and truthful history ever written, "those lesser origins become a matter of mere curiosity," and the charge of imitation fails. if the "comedy of errors" is an "imitation" of plautus, "paradise lost" is an "imitation" of moses. if "paradise lost" is not an "imitation" but "something utterly apart," "something almost superhuman ... in its grand solitude"; if milton has "so placed the spoils of masterpieces in his own work that they seem truly and admirably a part of it," then "love's labour's lost" is not an "imitation" of lilly, nor "henry vi." of greene or peele or marlowe, nor "titus andronicus" of kyd. but this indictment against shakspere is made more definite in form, and may therefore be more conclusively answered. this is the charge as stated by professor wendell: "a young american scholar whose name has hardly yet crossed the atlantic,--professor ashley horace thorndike,--has lately made some studies in dramatic chronology which go far to confirm the unromantic conjecture that to the end shakspere remained imitative and little else. professor thorndike, for example, has shown with convincing probability that certain old plays concerning robin hood proved popular; a little later, shakspere produced the woods and outlaws of 'as you like it.' the question is one of pure chronology; and pure chronology has convinced me, for one, that the forest scenes of arden were written to fit available costumes and properties.... again, professor thorndike has shown that roman subjects grew popular, and tragedies of revenge such as marston's; a little later, shakspere wrote 'julius cæsar' and 'hamlet.' with much more elaboration professor thorndike has _virtually proved_ that the romances of beaumont and fletcher--different both in motive and in style from any popular plays which had preceded them--were conspicuously successful on the london stage before shakspere began to write romances. it seems likely, therefore, that 'cymbeline,' which less careful chronology had conjectured to be a model for beaumont and fletcher, was in fact imitated from models which they had made. in other words, professor thorndike has shown that one may account for all the changes in shakspere, after , by merely assuming that the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early elizabethan dramatists, remained to the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set by others." again, he says: "the likeness of their work to the romances of shakspere--in subject, in structure, in peculiarities of verse,--has been often remarked; and they have consequently been supposed to have begun by skilful superficial imitation of his spiritually ripest phase. the question is one of chronology not yet fixed in detail; but as i have told you already, the studies of my friend professor thorndike have virtually proved that several of their plays must have been in existence decidedly before the dates commonly assigned to 'cymbeline,' the 'tempest' or the 'winter's tale.' if he is right,--and i believe him so,--the relation commonly thought to have existed between them and shakspere is precisely reversed. shakspere was the imitator, not they; indeed, as we have seen, he was from the beginning an imitator, not an inventor. and here his imitations are not in all respects better than his models." here the grave accusation is distinctly made that shakspere imitated beaumont and fletcher, and to support it, reference is made to one man only, professor thorndike, his pupil and disciple. and so, in this new case, we have two judges, and the curious fact that the instructor refers to the student and the student to the instructor as the sole authority for the soundness of the decision. the "introduction" of professor thorndike to his "influence of beaumont and fletcher on shakspere" sufficiently shows the animus of his essay: he cites the libel of greene, and intimates that it is an accusation of plagiarism which we have rejected, but which "contains an element of truth worth keeping in mind"; he repeats in positive words the charge of professor wendell that shakspere began by "imitating or revamping the work of others"; that "titus andronicus" and "henry vi.," "so far as they are his, are certainly imitative of other plays of the time," and adds that "richard ii." and "richard iii." show the influence of marlowe's tragedies, and "love's labour's lost" of lilly's comedies. we have sufficiently answered as to "henry vi.," "titus andronicus," and "love's labour's lost." there is no proof offered as to the histories of the two richards. the assertion is made without authority or example, without even the application of the usual "verse-tests" by which authorship is so conveniently determined. having repeated the erroneous and unsupported statements of his master, professor thorndike announces that after these early "imitations" little attention has been given to shakspere's subsequent indebtedness to his contemporaries, for the reason that "to most students it has seemed absurd," while to him it is clear that "hamlet" and "lear" "contain traces of the 'tragedy of blood type'"; that "a closer adherence to current forms can be seen in the relation between the 'merchant of venice' and the 'jew of malta,'" "or in the many points of similarity between 'hamlet' and the ... tragedies dealing with the theme of blood revenge," and that "characters ... are often clearly developments of types familiar on the stage," "as for example, iago is a development of the conventional stage villain." he is certainly correct in saying that to most students these assumptions "seem absurd." let us examine them briefly, for the purpose of learning whether they deserve any more serious adjective. marlowe's "jew of malta" appeared about . as the author announces in the prologue, it is based upon machiavel's theory of life--pure selfishness. the jew makes war upon all the world, for the gratification of his passion for revenge; he poisons his daughter "and the entire nunnery in which she had taken refuge"; he kills, he betrays, he prepares a burning caldron for a whole garrison,--"tragedy such as this is simply revolting. the characters of barabas and of his servant, and the motives by which they are stimulated, are the mere coinage of extravagance; and the effect is as essentially undramatic as the personification is unreal." the conduct of the drama is in keeping with the character of this incomprehensible monster of vindictiveness; he is "without shame or fear, and bloodthirsty even to madness." his bad schemes are always successful; but the action proceeds without connection, the characters come and go without apparent cause; the three jews, the monks and nuns, the mother of don mathias "appear and disappear so unexpectedly, and are interwoven with the action in so entirely an external manner, that the defects of the composition are at once apparent." if this seems a good model for shakspere's shylock, it will seem impossible, when barabas shows us his own portrait: "as for myself, i walk abroad a-nights, and kill sick people groaning under walls; sometimes i go about and poison wells; and now and then, to cherish christian thieves i am content to lose some of my crowns; that i may, walking in my gallery, see 'em go pinion'd along by my door. being young, i studied physic, and began to practice first upon the italian; there i enriched the priest with burials, and always kept the sexton's arms in use, with digging graves and ringing dead men's knells; and after that was i an engineer, and in the wars 'twixt france and germany, under pretence of helping charles the fifth, slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. and after that was i an usurer, and with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, and tricks belonging unto brokery, i filled the jails with bankrupts in a year, and with young orphans planted hospitals, and every moon made some or other mad, and now and then one hung himself for grief, pinning upon his breast a long great scroll, how i with interest tormented him. but mark how i am bless'd for plaguing them; i have as much coin as will buy the town. but tell me now, how hast thou spent thy time?" and the servant answers in sympathetic lines: "faith, master, in setting christian villages on fire, chaining of eunuchs, binding galley slaves. one time i was an ostler in an inn, and in the night-time secretly would i steal to travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats; once at jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd, i strewed powder on the marble stones, and therewithal their knees would rankle so that i have laughed a-good to see the cripples go limping home to christendom on stilts." undoubtedly, the "groundlings" shouted with delight when this fiend was plunged into the boiling caldron which he had heated for others. barabas dies, "in the midst of his crimes, with blasphemy and cursing on his lips; everything is the same at the end as it was from the beginning." to the unlearned reader, there is no "relation" between this wild drama and the perfect art shown in shakspere's jew, who utters no curse when the gentle portia pronounces sentence, but retires with dignity from her court, because "he is not well." professor thorndike tells us that the "traces" of blood revenge in "hamlet" and "lear" have been frequently "remarked." what those traces are we are not informed, but he assures us that "they have not led to any careful investigation of shakspere's indebtedness to his contemporaries." that investigation was reserved for his research, and we hope to show how successfully he has performed his great task. meanwhile, we may be allowed to say that if "lear" contains any "trace" of the tragedy of blood, it is utterly undiscoverable to the ordinary reader, in the action, character or fate of the victims; and as for "hamlet," so far is he from any idea of blood revenge, that he doubts and disobeys the message from the other world, doubts indeed the existence of any other world, and dies at last not a bloody death, but by a foil "unbated and envenomed." if iago is but the development of the conventional stage villain, his origin and some of the missing links of his evolution ought to be shown; they have never been guessed, and no critic can produce a single member of his kindred. from such premises, professor thorndike concludes that "it is only natural to expect that the genius who brought many of these forms to their highest perfection should not have been so much an inventor as an adapter"; "we may naturally expect," he says, "that shakspere's transcendent plays owe a considerable debt to the less perfect but not less original efforts of his contemporaries." this "natural expectation" is not disappointed, in professor thorndike's opinion, by a comparison between some of beaumont and fletcher's plays and those he calls the "romances" of shakspere,--"cymbeline," "the tempest," and "winter's tale." the argument is circuitous, but must be carefully followed in order to estimate the validity and weight of the conclusion. in the first place, it is assumed as probable that shakspere and fletcher wrote "the two noble kinsmen," and that fletcher wrote part of "henry viii." it is admitted that this last assumption is "at odds with the weight of authority" and rests mainly, if not wholly, upon spedding's essay, in . the only additional suggestion is the new and original test, the so-called "em-them" test. a laborious table is made, purporting to show that in the part assigned to shakspere "them" is used seventeen times, "'em" only five; that in the part assigned to fletcher "them" is used but four times, "'em" fifty-seven. we are not told from what source this table was made, but "henry viii." was first published in the folio of . professor thorndike says that later editions have strictly followed it, and in knight's edition, which he certifies to be a reprint of the first folio, "'em" as a contraction for "them" occurs just once and no more. thus far, then, the new "test" seems to give us no satisfactory aid. it may be permitted an ordinary reader to wonder how any critic can persuade himself that fletcher wrote the speech of wolsey on his downfall, or the prophecy of cranmer at the christening of elizabeth. why is it not a permissible hypothesis that "henry viii." was written during the reign of the great queen, and subsequently revised by shakspere, after her death, and presented as a "new play," as wotten calls it? the only external evidence that shakspere wrote any portion of "the two noble kinsmen" is the quarto of . on the contrary, all the previous external evidence is against that guess, for it was left out of the first folio, and heminge & condell's positive knowledge is certainly of more weight than the opinion of professor thorndike's sole authority, mr. littledale. moreover, the play was not included among shakspere's works in the folio of , and did not appear among them until, with six other doubtful plays, the editions of and . in view of this proof, it is admitted that the question of collaboration is likely to remain forever unsettled, "because it does not admit of complete demonstration." nevertheless, collaboration is assumed, and the "em-them" test is applied to the text so as to credit lines to shakspere, to fletcher. german criticism has taken up the subject with minute care, and, we may assert with confidence, has settled beyond doubt that shakspere never wrote a single line of "the two noble kinsmen." and it may be added with equal certainty that if the citations from that play are correctly credited to fletcher, he never wrote a line of "henry viii." professor thorndike is not consistent with himself. on one page he calls his theory conjectural, on another, a "reasonable conclusion." the play itself ought to convince any fair mind that shakspere had no share in it, for it contains an obvious imitation of ophelia's madness in "hamlet," which in some points "is a direct plagiarism." but it was important for professor thorndike to show what he calls a "probability" that shakspere and fletcher collaborated, in order to establish his theory that fletcher "influenced" shakspere. with the vanishing of the "probability" the "influence" vanishes. the second step in the argument is a review of the chronology of the plays of beaumont and fletcher, among which only _seven_ are immediately important. "the woman hater," licensed th may, , published in quarto , as lately acted, again in , and assigned to beaumont and fletcher. its first representation is put by mr. fleay on april th, . professor thorndike conjectures that this play was produced in . "philaster," the most important in connection with our subject, was first published in . mr. fleay dates its composition in ; professor thorndike, in . the "four plays in one" he likewise assigns conjecturally to the same year. the fact is, it was first printed in the folio of , and no authority fixes the date of its production. "thiery and theodoret" was first published in , without giving the name of any author. the quarto of credits fletcher as the sole author; that of , beaumont and fletcher as the joint authors. fleay places the date about ; oliphant maintains that it was written about or , and afterwards revised in by fletcher and massinger; professor thorndike ventures the guess that it was written in . "the maid's tragedy" he places doubtfully in . it was first published in without naming its authors. the only evidence as to its date is that it was licensed october st, . "cupid's revenge" was acted at court in , and first published in . professor thorndike thinks it was an effort to repeat the success of "philaster," and therefore assigns it to or . "a king and no king" he puts without hesitation in the year , and this is supported by authority. professor thorndike remarks that this is the only play (of beaumont and fletcher), "acted before , the year of whose production is fixed." the only reason for referring to "the woman hater" is to fix the date of beaumont and fletcher's appearance. there is absolutely no proof that they were known to literature before that play was licensed by sir george buc on the th may, . yet professor thorndike, in spite of this, assigns "the woman's prize," first printed in , and first acted, so far as the record shows, november th, , to the year . it is to be noted that of the six other plays referred to by professor thorndike, and claimed to have been in existence before the end of , the dates of all except "a king and no king" are only conjecturally given. compared with these, the chronology of "cymbeline," "tempest" and "winter's tale" is reviewed. "cymbeline," according to dr. simon forman's diary, was acted between april th, , and may th, ; it must therefore have been written before the last named date. mr. fleay fixes the date in , malone in , and both chalmers and drake substantially agree with malone. ulrici assigns the date of composition to or . "the tempest," according to professor thorndike, cannot be dated earlier than october th, , nor later than , and was probably written and acted late in or early in . ulrici agrees with this. "the winter's tale," as appears by forman's diary, was acted may , . ulrici says: "it is now a matter of certainty that it must have been brought upon the stage between august, , and may, ." it has been suggested with some plausibility that this play was an early production by shakspere which he remodelled. a play called "a winternyght's pastime" is entered at stationer's hall as early as . professor thorndike fixes the date between january st and may th, and assumes that the drama is imitated from jonson's "masque of oberon." he suggests that as in the "masque" the chariot of oberon is drawn by two white bears, "perhaps here, as in the dance, costume and actor reappeared in the play, in the bear who chases antigonus." anything to show that shakspere imitated anybody. the argument is based upon this chronology and the alleged similarity between the enumerated dramas: the issue is made upon the respective dates of beaumont and fletcher's "philaster" and shakspere's "cymbeline." there is no claim that shakspere imitated beaumont and fletcher or was influenced by them, except in his three "romances," and of these, "cymbeline" is placed first. professor thorndike undertakes to prove that "philaster" was written before october th, , and this is his reasoning: "in the 'scourge of folly' by john davies of hertford, entered in the stationer's register october th, , occurs an epigram referring to this play." let us examine this statement first. on the next page he says: "the '_scourge of folly_' furnishes no further clue in regard to the date of the epigram." on page of the same essay, referring to another play, "don quixote," the statement is made that it was "entered s. r. and printed ." the entry was therefore in the nature of a "license to print." it is clear that in this instance the actual printing or publication was after the entry. the same rule must apply to other plays of the same period. the date of entry affords no proof whatever of the date of publication or of presentation. therefore the date of the entry of "the scourge of folly," october th, , as professor thorndike states, "affords no clue in regard to the date" of davies's "epigram." the "epigram" may have been written long after the entry in the stationer's register, and probably was, because it is not to be assumed that the "epigram" appeared in the entry of the play, and davies cannot be assumed to have had any knowledge of the existence of "philaster" until it appeared upon the stage, a date entirely uncertain. further, professor thorndike says: "there is no reason why 'philaster' may not have been produced before burbage took up the blackfriar's lease in . there is in fact no early limit that can be set for the date; the final limit is of course fixed by davies' epigram." of what value is the final limit "fixed by the epigram" when there is no proof of the date of that? what ground is there, beyond mere arbitrary assumption, for assigning "philaster" to ? that play was not printed till . mr. fleay, professor thorndike's constant authority, says it was written in , after "cymbeline" was upon the stage. there is absolutely no proof, therefore, that "philaster" was written before october th, , no proof when it was entered, licensed or first acted; and so it is clear, as professor thorndike says, that "the date, , adopted by dyce, leonhardt, and macaulay, is no more than a conjecture." on the other hand, as we have shown, the external evidence is conclusive that "cymbeline" was upon the bills before may th, , and therefore the argument that "philaster" preceded "cymbeline" finds no better support than the opinion of dyce, leonhardt, and macaulay. it is mere conjecture. professor thorndike expressly admits that of the six plays which are claimed as "romances," "a king and no king" "is the only one acted before the year of whose production is fixed," but he states without qualification that "winter's tale" and the "tempest" were not acted until after "philaster." as we have seen, "winter's tale" was acted may th, , and professor thorndike himself says that "'the tempest' was probably written and acted late in or early in "; "cupid's revenge" "was acted the sunday following new year's ; 'a king and no king' in december, ." these are the only two of the six of which the date of acting is given. nowhere does professor thorndike pretend to give any date whatever when "philaster" was acted; the only question discussed is as to the year of authorship, and that is left uncertain. the statement that "winter's tale" and "the tempest" were "not acted until after 'philaster'" is utterly without warrant or authority. if shakspere is to be adjudged the "imitator" of beaumont and fletcher, the judgment must rest upon facts or inference from facts, and not upon the unsupported opinion of professor wendell's pupil. professor thorndike in fact admits that "we cannot be certain about the date of 'cymbeline,'" but yet assumes that "philaster" preceded it, both in date of production and public appearance, and proceeds to draw a long parallel between the "romances" of beaumont and fletcher and those of shakspere, for the purpose of showing that the "romance" or the heroic "romance" was a new style of drama, "created" by beaumont and fletcher and probably adapted and improved by shakspere. whether there is any difference in definition between the "romance" and the "heroic romance" seems immaterial, since professor thorndike uses one term as synonymous with the other. he gives "the most noticeable characteristics of the romances": "a mixture of tragic and idyllic events, a series of highly improbable events, heroic and sentimental characters, foreign scenes, happy denouements." this definition is elaborated in connection with the "romances" of beaumont and fletcher: st. they took the plots from any source. nd. the plots are ingenious and improbable. rd. the plots lack realism. th. the plots deal with heroic persons and actions. th. the characters are not historical. th. the plays are located far off, for example, in milan, athens, messina, lisbon. th. the action has little to do with the real life of any historic period, but with "romance." th. the story is of sentimental love, as contrasted with gross, sensual passion. th. there is variety of emotional effect. th. there is always a happy denouement. all these elements of the definition are applied to "cymbeline," "the tempest" and "winter's tale," and it is maintained that none of shakspere's previous dramas present the same features. this is a convenient method of showing that beaumont and fletcher "created the romantic drama" and that shakspere was "influenced" in writing "cymbeline" by "philaster," but it is not criticism; it is rather an attempt to "create" a definition and apply it to "philaster," and then to deny its application to "midsummer night's dream," "much ado about nothing," "the merchant of venice," "twelfth night" or "measure for measure." why does professor wendell call the "two gentlemen of verona" a "romantic comedy," if beaumont and fletcher "created" the type which professor thorndike pronounces "romance"? he deliberately classifies "much ado" and "twelfth night" as "romantic comedies." is not "philaster" a "romantic comedy"? then, as "much ado" was probably written in , "twelfth night" in , when beaumont was twelve or thirteen and fletcher twenty-two or twenty-three, it seems quite "probable" that they were "influenced" in writing their "romances" by shakspere. if there is any fundamental difference between "romantic comedy" and "romance," what is it? this is a difficult question, which professor thorndike has attempted but failed to answer. he admits that "philaster" has some generic resemblance to "measure for measure," but says that "no one would think of finding close resemblance between it and anyone of the 'romances.'" if the resemblance is generic, does it matter whether it is "close"? if "measure for measure" falls within the laborious definition of a "romance," or of a "tragi-comedy," as both that play and "philaster" are called, why shouldn't we think of "measure for measure," produced in , four years before the wildest conjecture puts the date of "philaster," as the model upon which beaumont and fletcher built? "measure for measure" answers every detail of the definition: the plot is taken from "promos and cassandra"; it is ingenious and improbable, lacks realism, deals with heroic persons and actions, a sovereign duke and his rascal brother; the characters are not historical; the location is far off; the action has little to do with the real life of any historical period; the story involves sentimental love, as distinctly contrasted with sensual passion; there is variety of emotional effect; the denouement is happy. if therefore the definition of "romance" is correct, "measure for measure" is as much of that type as "philaster"; beaumont and fletcher did not "create" it, and there is no reason for supposing that shakspere imitated them in "cymbeline," "tempest," or "winter's tale." but certain traits of construction are named as peculiar to the six "romances" of beaumont and fletcher and those of shakspere, and it is sought to show that beaumont and fletcher set the fashion in these also. st. they did not observe the unities. nd. they disregarded the chronicle method. rd. they left out battles and armies. th. they presented a series of contrasted and interesting situations leading up to a startling climax. th. the by-plots assist the main action. th. there is the use of tragi-comedy. does any attentive reader of shakspere's comedies, whether called romantic or tragi-comic, or by whatever other name, need to be told that many of them contain all these traits? general review is impossible, but take "the merchant of venice" as an illustration: the unities are not observed. we think it is generally thought that shakspere was in the habit of disregarding them. the chronicle method is ignored. we are not aware that shakspere ever followed it except in writing historical plays. battles and armies are left out. this comedy, like others by the same cunning hand, presents a series of contrasted and interesting situations leading up to a startling climax. need we call to mind the rash contract of the merchant, and its almost tragic result, the game of the caskets, the trial and defeat of the clamorous shylock? the by-plot assists the main action, else why does jessica keep house for portia while she goes to play "a daniel come to judgment"? there is the use of tragi-comedy in the ruin of the merchant, in the whetting of the jew's knife for the heart of his assured victim. if these "traits" characterize the "romances" of beaumont and fletcher, they are possibly more likely to have been the "imitators," because "shylock" was created in or , some years before "philaster" was exhibited as a stage decoration. it is urged further that in the "romances" of beaumont and fletcher "the characters are not individuals, but types," and that those types are repeated until they became conventionalized. there is always a very bad and a very good woman, a very generous and noble man and one so bad as to seem a monster. there is the type of the "love-lorn maiden," of "the lily-livered" hero, of the faithful friend, of the poltroon. it is supposed by many that such types repeated in play after play do not mark the highest original power, but rather poverty of invention, weak and shadowy conception, indistinctness of coloring. professor thorndike, however, cannot too much commend this style, because it gives such wide scope for intense passion, startling situation, and successful stage effect, and proceeds to seek for similar types in shakspere's "romances" as further proof that he "imitated" "philaster." in his view, the characters show "surprising loss of individuality." imogen's character "fails to supply really individual traits"; "perdita and miranda have even less marks of individuality than imogen." they are like beaumont and fletcher's heroines who appear in the same stage costumes, wearing the same masks, differing only in stage postures and dialogue. more than this: professor thorndike would reduce the "creations" of viola and rosalynd to the conventional type of the "love-lorn" maiden, to mere adaptations for the stage, because they dressed in boy's clothes; of perdita, to an "imitation" of lady amelia in "palamon and arcyte" because she gathered flowers prettily and was commended by the queen. he makes the surprising statement that the three heroines in "cymbeline," the "tempest" and "winter's tale" have on the stage "few qualities to distinguish them from almost any of beaumont and fletcher's." it is difficult to discuss such generalizations with the temperance of criticism. they can be true only if professor thorndike's theory is correct,--that the delineation of character is solely for stage effect. there is another theory announced and recorded by shakspere himself, and illustrated in every drama he wrote,--that the sole end and aim of the stage itself and of the characters it represents, is "to hold the mirror up to nature," and therefore his characters are not "types"; they are men and women who were born, not manufactured; each is a separate, individual human being; each different from every other. we know them, for they have entered our houses, sat at our tables, talked with us, laughed and wept with us, made us shudder at crime and exult in the triumph of virtue. therefore, there is but one "lear": his madness was never imitated outside of bedlam; but one lady macbeth, and we have seen her walking in her awful dream. beaumont and fletcher in six romances delineate "love-lorn maidens," "conventionalized types," who differ little from each other, except that three of them "masquerade in boy's clothing" and three do not. they have "little individuality," "are utterly romantic," "utterly removed from life"; all are presented to produce novel situations leading up to a startling climax. imogen is not like miranda or perdita; neither is a "type" of the "love-lorn" maiden; all are living, acting individuals, differing from each other like those we know, resembling each other only as one beautiful and pure woman resembles another. professor thorndike, who is the advocate of beaumont and fletcher, may keep his personal opinion that imogen lacks "individual traits," but we respectfully decline to take his opinion as a critic that she is like arethusa in "philaster." for us and for all men and women, shakspere has _created_ the character of imogen, as of perdita and miranda, and her "individual traits" are clear enough, to those who have had the happiness of her acquaintance, to show that neither in feature or dress, neither in manners or morals, did she "imitate" any of the heroines of beaumont and fletcher. but even as a critic we must differ from professor thorndike; he accuses miranda of unpardonable indelicacy, and says she "proposed" to ferdinand! he gives her language from "tempest," and remarks with satisfaction that it sounds "very much like one of beaumont and fletcher's heroines," meaning of course arethusa, and so draws the obvious conclusion that shakspere in this remarkable instance clearly "imitated" the "creators" of the "heroic romantic drama." the difficulty with this statement first of all is, that it is not true: miranda does not "propose" to ferdinand; before her sweet confession of love, ferdinand had given all lovers the best form of proposal ever spoken, in this language: "i, beyond all limit of what else i' the world, do love, prize, honor you." arethusa does "propose" to philaster, and therefore her "proposal" does not "sound very much like" the proposal in "tempest," or, if it does, it tends strongly to show that beaumont and fletcher attempted an "imitation" from "the tempest." professor thorndike the critic has here been misled by his zeal as the partisan: isn't it just possible that the like zeal has misled him in the conclusion that "cymbeline" was an imitation of "philaster"? the second class of "types," as shown by the dramas of beaumont and fletcher, is the "evil woman"--evadne in the "maid's tragedy," bacha in "cupid's revenge," megra in "philaster," brunhalt in "thierry and theodoret" and arane in "a king and no king." professor thorndike says that "four of them brazenly confess adultery, and four attempt murder," and that "the resemblance ... is unmistakable ... and on the stage even more than in print" these characters "must have seemed to all intents identical." the only parallel to this in shakspere's "romances," as drawn by professor thorndike, is that the "wicked queen in 'cymbeline' is very like the wicked queens of beaumont and fletcher," and that "there are other characters ... who show resemblances to beaumont and fletcher's stock types." what the resemblances are we are not told, and we need not inquire until we learn which "type" is the original, which the "imitation." meanwhile, we may rest upon the fact that, so far as queens are concerned, there is no "stock type" in shakspere; they differ from each other as widely as hamlet's mother from imogen's mother-in-law. if any of them resemble beaumont and fletcher's queens, it is clear that beaumont and fletcher were the "imitators," not shakspere. further similarities are suggested between the "type" of the "faithful friend" as shown in five of beaumont and fletcher's "romances" and gonzalo in "tempest," camillo in "winter's tale," and pisanio in "cymbeline." the "lily-livered heroes" and the "poltroons" are left out of the laborious comparison, perhaps because none of either can be found in shakspere sufficiently like the original types in beaumont and fletcher. the examples of the "faithful friend" are not happy. for gonzalo sets prospero adrift in a crazy boat and camillo betrays one patron to save another. still following the assumption that "philaster" was earlier than "cymbeline," we find professor thorndike asserting that "cymbeline" "shows a puzzling decadence" in style, "an increase in the proportion of double endings," "a constant deliberate effort to conceal the metre"; "the verse constantly borders on prose"; "shakspere's structure in general is like fletcher's, particularly in the use of parentheses and contracted forms for 'it is,' 'he is,' 'i will.'" there is a "loss of mastery" in "cymbeline," "an apparently conscious and not quite successful struggle to overcome the difficulties of the new structure." an apologetic phrase that all this does not impute any "direct imitation" of fletcher does not redeem it from the imputation that shakspere was not content with copying fletcher's plot, characters, situations, but he deliberately departed, when "philaster" met his eye, from the methods he had used for more than twenty years, and carefully copied the mannerisms of a contemporary who, according to established chronology, had been known to the public hardly three years. the merits of the charge, whether of direct or indirect imitation, must be determined solely by the priority in date of the two plays. meanwhile, the critic's argument would have more force if he had told us how "cymbeline" shows a "puzzling decadence," how "the structure is like fletcher's," how the struggle to overcome the difficulty of its novelty appears. as the argument stands it reminds one of lowell's remark in relation to this style of criticism: "scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger tips were a sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise ... in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of being and consciousness, mock the plummet." professor thorndike takes the further point, in his review of the drama from to , that during that period "there are almost no romantic tragi-comedies"; that in fact, including "measure for measure," there are only five which offer the slightest generic resemblance to the heroic tragi-comedies like "philaster" and "winter's tale"; that when "philaster" appeared, there had been "no play for seven or eight years at all resembling it"; and draws the conclusion that shakspere, who had been writing "gloomy tragedies" for several years, suddenly left that style and wrote "cymbeline" in imitation of "philaster," because "philaster" had "filled the audience with surprise and delight." the uncomplimentary and uncritical remark is added that perhaps "timon" and "coriolanus" had not achieved great success on the stage--at any rate the success of "philaster" aroused his interest. "timon" is assigned by most critics to the last of shakspere's life, by many to the year . "cymbeline," as we have seen, was acted before may th, ; it is therefore difficult to understand, if the date assigned to "timon" is correct, how its failure could have "influenced" the production of "cymbeline." but professor thorndike's statement is incorrect. during the decade named, "measure for measure" was acted at court in ; his conjectural date of "philaster" is . as we have shown, "measure for measure" fully answers his definition of the "romance" or "heroic tragi-comedy," and he admits that it bears a generic resemblance to "philaster." his statement that for seven or eight years before "philaster" "no play had appeared at all resembling it" is therefore without support, and contradicts his own admission. he assumes much more, and to support his conclusion argues that "philaster" was perhaps produced before . the importance of the point justifies deliberate attention. against the opinion of most scholars, against the express statement of dryden, he assigns "pericles" to the year ; credits shakspere with the authorship of the "marina story;" admits that "the plot is ... like those of the romances, and particularly like that of the 'winter's tale,' in dealing with a long series of tragic events leading to a happy ending," but endeavors to escape the inevitable conclusion, by the statement, utterly inconsistent with his own chronology, that, "if the play was as late as , there is a possibility of beaumont and fletcher's influence just as in the romances." "pericles" contains a sentimental love story, the plot is like that of the "romances," the variety of the emotional effects is similar, and there is a contrast of tragic and idyllic elements. the play is founded upon a "romantic story." all this is admitted, but professor thorndike thinks the love story is not sufficiently prominent, the idyllic elements are not treated as in the romances, and marina is therefore not like any of the heroines of beaumont and fletcher, but, while "something like portia, more like isabella." and so "pericles" is distinguished from the romances because the "treatment" is "different," and finally, because professor thorndike is committed to the theory that beaumont and fletcher "created" a new type of drama, he asserts that "'pericles' is doubtless earlier than shakspere's romances, but there is no probability that it preceded all of beaumont and fletcher's." dryden in his prologue to davenant's "circe" says: "shakspere's own muse his pericles first bore," and the great weight of opinion is that it was a very early production. the "story of marina" is as romantic as "cymbeline," and is of the same "type" as "philaster," and therefore, if dryden is right, there is a strong probability that "pericles" preceded all of beaumont and fletcher's romances, and that in "cymbeline" shakspere did not imitate them. we come at last to the end of the argument. professor thorndike, premising that the historical portion of "cymbeline" and the exile of posthumous have no parallels in "philaster," institutes a detailed comparison between the plots, characters, and composition of the two plays, and shows that they are so strikingly similar as to justify the positive conclusion that "shakspere influenced beaumont and fletcher or that they influenced him." we may admit more than this: if "cymbeline" followed "philaster," he was not only influenced by them, he not only imitated them, he was a plagiarist; and no apologetic words that, upon the assumption stated, "cymbeline" did not owe a very large share of its total effect to "philaster," can make less the gravity of the charge, and if the assumption is groundless or even probably groundless, no excuse remains to the critic who makes it. let us see: after all his learned review of dramatic chronology, after all his statements conveying the assurance that "philaster" was the original "type" of the "romance," professor thorndike says in so many words, which for accuracy we quote: "some such statement of the influence of 'philaster' on 'cymbeline' could be adopted if we were certain of our chronology. but the evidence for the priority of 'philaster' is not conclusive, and its support cannot be confidently relied upon. leaving aside, then, the question of exact date, and only premising the fact that both plays were written at about the same time, we must face the questions,--which is more plausible, that shakspere influenced beaumont and fletcher or that they influenced him? which on its face is more likely to be the original, 'cymbeline' or 'philaster'?" if "cymbeline" was first written, then "philaster" becomes not an original but a copy, adaptation, imitation, plagiarism, if you will. the similarities remain the same, the argument is reversed. we have shown that the evidence is conclusive, in the opinion of the best critics, that "cymbeline" preceded "philaster." coleridge, ulrici, tieck and knight think that "this varied-woven romantic history had inspired the poet in his youth" to attempt its adaptation to the stage; that having had but a temporary appearance, shakspere long afterwards, near the end of his career, may have remodelled it, and malone, chalmers, and drake assign "cymbeline" with "macbeth" to or . our argument might be safely put upon this point alone. professor thorndike's is placed solely upon "plausibility" and "likelihood." to support it, he assumes again the certainty of "the priority of philaster"--which he had just admitted to be uncertain--in order to show "the nature of shakspere's indebtedness," and then concludes from "the nature of the indebtedness," and from the fact that "philaster" "was followed immediately by five romances of the same style in plot and characters" "which mark fletcher's work for the next twenty years," that "these facts create a strong presumption that 'philaster' was the original," "a strong presumption that 'cymbeline' was the copy," and finally ends the argument as it began, with these flattering words: "we may, indeed, safely assert that shakspere almost never invented dramatic types." and this is the argument which professor wendell thinks "virtually proves that several of their plays (beaumont and fletcher's romances) must have been in existence decidedly before 'cymbeline,' 'the tempest' or 'winter's tale,'" "that the relation commonly thought to have existed between them and shakspere is precisely reversed." let us answer both teacher and pupil. suppose, to follow the thorndike method, that "cymbeline" appeared before "philaster," that six romances by beaumont and fletcher followed in rapid succession, while only two by shakspere appeared, but differing essentially from each other and from "philaster." suppose that "cymbeline" upon its first night "filled the audience with surprise and delight," that beaumont and fletcher, perceiving "its dramatic and poetic excellence," copied in "philaster" a portion of its plot and attempted to copy some of its characters and situations. suppose their experiment with this copy took the crowd by storm--isn't it reasonable to suppose that they would repeat the profitable attempt as many times as the applause warranted? isn't that just what they did, repeating and imitating themselves over and over, until beaumont died? does the number of repetitions and imitations increase the "plausibility" or "likelihood" of the theory that "philaster" was the original of the type? if shakspere found his gain increasing by copying the fable, character, style, and denouement of "philaster," why did he not continue to copy in "the tempest" and "winter's tale," and why is it impossible for professor thorndike to deny originality to either of these plays, except by his careless error as to miranda's "proposal" and the reference to lady amelia gathering flowers at oxford in ? professor thorndike's argument comes to this and only this: if shakspere wrote "cymbeline" before beaumont and fletcher wrote "philaster," then shakspere was the "creator of the heroic romances." if the question of priority is doubtful, it is just as impossible to prove the "plausibility" or "likelihood" of priority as it is to prove the date. there is no proof, therefore, no presumption, strong or weak, that "cymbeline" was influenced by "philaster" or was a "copy" of it. but there is proof that beaumont and fletcher repeatedly and habitually imitated shakspere, and we cite it mostly from professor thorndike's essay. in "the two noble kinsmen" there is a "distinct imitation of the circumstances of ophelia's madness and death in hamlet." in "the woman hater," assigned conjecturally to or by professor thorndike, there are "several burlesque imitations of hamlet." in "the knight of the burning pestle" ( - ) there are burlesque imitations of passages in "henry iv." and in "romeo and juliet." in "philaster" occurs this line: "mark but the king, how pale he looks with fear," --a distinct parody of the similar line in "hamlet"; but it will be remarked that professor thorndike calls it an "echo," not an imitation. in "the woman's prize," improbably assigned to , the whole play is imitated from "the taming of the shrew,"--is in fact an attempted sequel to it, and professor thorndike wanders from chronology to indulge a sneer, by the remark that "the woman's prize" was "very well liked," the "taming of the shrew" only "liked." possibly that was because then, as now, some people preferred imitations. in "the woman's prize," there is also a burlesque on "hamlet" and a parody on "king lear." in "the triumph of death" these lines occur:-- "no, take him dead drunk now, without repentance, his lechery enseamed upon him," and professor thorndike says "it sounds like a bit from an old revenge play." it is a distinct imitation from "hamlet" where the king is seen at his prayers. in the "scornful lady" there is one certain and one possible slur at "hamlet." in "cupid's revenge" there is an imitation from "antony and cleopatra." in "philaster" arethusa imitates lear when he awakens from insanity to consciousness. upon the wendell-thorndike theory, we have a few undisputed facts bearing upon the "plausibility" of the conclusion that beaumont and fletcher "influenced" shakspere, the likelihood that "philaster" was the original, "cymbeline" the "copy." shakspere at the age of forty-six, long after he had portrayed the real insanity of lear, the simulated insanity of hamlet, the confessional dream of lady macbeth; long after he had "filled the audience with surprise and delight" by the romantic realities of hero and portia, of viola and rosalind; years after he had anticipated the heroic "romance" in the romantic adventures of marina; long after he had depicted the heroic triumph of isabella over the lustful angelo--this man, shakspere, condescended to imitate a youth of twenty-two, whose name was beaumont, to steal from him much of the plot, characters, action, and denouement of "philaster" and to make the theft more open and unblushing, presented "cymbeline" upon the same stage within a year of the original "type," and assigned the parts to the same actors who had won remarkable popular applause for the drama from which he had "cribbed" his imitation. and this imitation was not from friendly authors, but from those of a hostile school, who had during their whole career borrowed from his plots, parodied his phrases, and ridiculed his masterpieces by slurs and burlesques. we respectfully dissent from the assertion that these facts "create a strong presumption that 'philaster' was the original," "cymbeline" the "copy." on the contrary, it seems to us that they are utterly inconsistent with any such presumption, and with the whole theory and teaching of professors wendell and thorndike. that theory, as we have shown, is based upon the assumption that marlowe, or greene, or peele, or somebody else, wrote most of "henry vi"; the assumption that fletcher helped shakspere write "henry viii"; the assumption that shakspere assisted fletcher in the composition of "the two noble kinsmen"; the unsupported, the admitted conjecture that "philaster" was written before october th, ; the unwarranted assertion that beaumont and fletcher "created the romance" in spite of the admission that the date of creation depends upon the priority of "cymbeline" or "philaster," which is likewise admitted to be wholly uncertain; the suppression of the proof from "measure for measure" that, years before "philaster," shakspere, within the proposed definition, had produced a romantic tragi-comedy; the guess as to priority in favor of beaumont and fletcher, in spite of repeated imitations by them from previous plays of shakspere. and so the argument in support of the theory is a pyramid of _ifs_, supporting an apex that vanishes into the thin air of an invisible conclusion. to us, after all this latest effort to depose the sovereign of english literature from the throne where he has worn the crown for more than three centuries, and seat there a pretender, having no title, either by divine right or the suffrages of mankind, shakspere is the sovereign still. he needed and he sought no allies to win his realm; he imitated no fashions of other courts to maintain his own; he took good care that the records of his universal conquests should be kept,--written by his own hand, and fortunately preserved by his friends,--secure from the interpolations and imitations of his contemporaries and successors. much has been written of shakspere's impersonality, and we have been taught to think that his dramas are utterly silent as to his own experience. but now and then one finds in them a glimpse of it, as the lightning flash in the darkest night for an instant shows the heavens and the earth. that others attempted to imitate him is clear enough; that he imitated others, and least of all beaumont and fletcher, nobody can reasonably believe who reads his opinion of the imitator in "julius cæsar": "a barren spirited fellow; one that feeds on objects, arts, and imitations, which, out of use, and stal'd by other men, begin his fashion." matthew arnold's verdict has not been reversed. "_others abide our question. thou art free._ _we ask and ask--thou smilest and art still,_ _out-topping knowledge. for the loftiest hill,_ _who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,_ "_planting his stedfast footsteps in the sea,_ _making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,_ _spares but the cloudy border of his base_ _to the foil'd searching of mortality;_ "_and thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,_ _self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,_ _didst tread on earth unguess'd at.--better so!_ "_all pains the immortal spirit must endure,_ _all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,_ _find their sole speech in that victorious brow._" * * * * * transcriber's note the following changes have been made to the text: page : "a successful playright" changed to "a successful playwright". page : "'t is but the short'ning" changed to "'tis but the short'ning". page : "piece was writtin" changed to "piece was written". page : "two valiant kinghts" changed to "two valiant knights". page : "professer wendell applies" changed to "professor wendell applies". page : "german critcism has" changed to "german criticism has". page : "is n't it just" changed to "isn't it just". page : "throne where he was worn" changed to "throne where he has worn". note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) transcriber's note: [oe] represents the oe-ligature. the creators a comedy by may sinclair author of "the divine fire," "the helpmate," etc. with illustrations by arthur i. keller new york the century co. copyright, , , by the century co. published, october, [illustration: "to the book!" she said. "to nina lempriere's book! you can drink now, george."] list of illustrations "to the book!" she said. "to nina lempriere's book! you can drink now, george." "how any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said rose, musing. "why do you talk about my heart?" jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought. "and he," she said, "has still a chance if i fail you?" she had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to her to say. it was jinny who lay there, jinny, his wife. "ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!" "george," she said ... "i love you for defending him" she closed her eyes, "i'm quite happy" jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them. the creators i three times during dinner he had asked himself what, after all, was he there for? and at the end of it, as she rose, her eyes held him for the first time that evening, as if they said that he would see. she had put him as far from her as possible, at the foot of her table between two of the four preposterous celebrities whom she had asked him, george tanqueray, to meet. everything, except her eyes, had changed since he had last dined with jane holland, in the days when she was, if anything, more obscure than he. it was no longer she who presided at the feast, but her portrait by gisborne, r.a. he had given most of his attention to the portrait. gisborne, r.a., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not jane holland, but gisborne's limited idea of her. it was a sombre face, broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. a face with a straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. he had got all her features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight enough when her will was dominant. he had got her hair, the darkness and the mass of it. tanqueray, in his abominable way, had said that gisborne had put his best work into that, and when gisborne resented it he had told him that it was immortality enough for any one to have painted jane holland's hair. (this was in the days when gisborne was celebrated and tanqueray was not.) if jane had had the face that gisborne gave her she would never have had any charm for tanqueray. for what gisborne had tried to get was that oppressive effect of genius, heavily looming. not a hint had he caught of her high levity, of her look when the bright devil of comedy possessed her, not a flash of her fiery quality, of her eyes' sudden gold, and the ways of her delicate, her brilliant mouth, its fine, deliberate sweep, its darting tilt, like wings lifted for flight. when tanqueray wanted to annoy jane he told her that she looked like her portrait by gisborne, r.a. they were all going to the play together. but at the last moment, she, to tanqueray's amazement, threw them over. she was too tired, she said, to go. the celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. of course, if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. they didn't want to. they would sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with jane holland. they bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration. and jane holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and tanqueray looked at her. he wondered how on earth she was going to get rid of them. she did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for. her tired eyes helped her. then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him. "are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?" "i am certainly not going with them----" he paused, hesitating. "then--you'll stay?" for the first time in their intercourse she hesitated too. "but you're tired?" he said. "not now." she smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her appeal. that lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. he chose to put it down to the strange circumstance of her celebrity; and, though he hesitated, he stayed. to stay was, after all, the thing which at the moment he most wanted to do. and the thing which tanqueray most wanted to do at the moment that he invariably did. this temper of his had but one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy. that was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the first time in many weeks. she wondered how far he had seen through her. she had made the others go that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. of course she would not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. his genius justified her. six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. six weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him. there was her own genius, if it came to that. it had its rights. six weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping him. "i didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said. "if you had my mind, george, you'd want to change it." "what's wrong with your mind, jinny?" "it won't work." "ah, it's come to that, has it? i knew it would." she led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. jane lived alone. sometimes he had wondered how she liked it. there was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in kensington square. to make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at the foot. tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the place of everything it held. he had his own place there, the place of honour and affection. his portrait (a mere photograph) was on her writing-table. his "works"--five novels--were on a shelf by themselves at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them. for they had found each other before the world had found her. that was the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her charms, had held him until now. she had preserved the incomparable innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great nature, from what tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary taint." they both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right people." they confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility and impart the taint. there were points at which they both might have touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with its proletariat or its demi-monde. below these infernal circles they had discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the master, told her was "_the_ unclean thing." so that in nineteen hundred and two george tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on his tremendous height. but it looked as if jane holland were about to break her charm. "i hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, jinny?" "what hasn't?" "your pop--your celebrity." "don't talk about it. it's bad enough when they----" "_they_ needn't. i must. celebrity--you observe that i call it by no harsher name--celebrity is the beginning of the end. i don't want you to end that way." "i shan't. it's not as if i were intrigued by it. you don't know how i hate it sometimes." "you hate it, yet you're drawn." "by what? by my vanity?" "not by your vanity, though there is that." "by what, then?" "oh, jinny, you're a woman." "mayn't i be?" "no," he said brutally, "you mayn't." for a moment her eyes pleaded: "mayn't i be a woman?" but she was silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes. "because you've genius." "do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?" he laughed. "why not i?" "because it was you who told me not to keep back. you told me not to live alone. don't you remember?" he remembered. it was in the days when he first knew her. "i did. because you ran to the other extreme then. you were terrified of life." "because i was a woman. you told me to be a woman!" "because i was the only man you knew. how you remember things." "that comes of living alone. i've never really forgotten anything you ever said to me. it's where i score." "you had nobody but me to talk to then, if you remember." "no. nobody but you." "and it wasn't enough for you." "oh, wasn't it? when you were never the same person for a week together. it was like knowing fifteen or twenty men." he smiled. "i've always been the same man to you, jinny. haven't i?" "i'm not so sure," said she. "anyhow, you were safe with me." "from what?" "from being 'had.' but now you've begun knowing all sorts of people----" "is that why you've kept away from me?" he ignored her question. "awful people, implacable, insatiable, pernicious, destructive people. the trackers down, the hangers-on, the persecutors, the pursuers. did _i_ ever pursue you?" "no, george. i can't say you ever did. i can't see you pursuing any one." "_they_ will. and they'll have you at every turn." "no. i'm safe. you see, i don't care for any of them." "they'll 'have' you all the same. you lend yourself to being 'had.'" "do i?" she said it defiantly. "no. you never lend--you give yourself. to be eaten up. you let everybody prey on you. you'd be preyed on by me, if i let you." "oh--you----" "and yet," he said, "i wonder----" he paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes. "jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your books?" "where you get yours," she said. again he considered her. "come out of it," he said. "get away from these dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people." she smiled, recognizing them. "look at _me_," he said. "oh, you," she said again, with another intonation. "yes, me. i was born out of it." "and i--wasn't i born? look at _me_?" she turned to him, holding her head high. "i am looking at you. i've been looking at you all the evening--and i see a difference already." "what you see is the difference in my clothes. there is no difference in me." it was he who was different. she looked at him, trying to penetrate the secret of his difference. there was a restlessness about him, a fever and the brilliance fever brought. she looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. she knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full, pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. tanqueray's face, his features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind, suggesting things eager and in salient flight. they shared now in his difference, his excitement. his eyes as they looked at her had lost something of their old lucidity. they were more brilliant and yet somehow more obscure. then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven. he was out on the first mad hunt with love. love and he stalked the hills, questing the visionary maid. it was not she. his trouble was as yet vague and purely impersonal. she saw (it was her business) by every infallible sign and token that it was not she. she saw, too, that he was enraged with her for this reason, that it was not she. that showed that he was approaching headlong the point of danger; and she, if she were his friend, was bound to keep him back. he was not in love with her or with any one, but he was in that insane mood when honourable men marry, sometimes disastrously. any woman, even she, could draw him to her now by holding out her hand. and between them there came a terror, creeping like a beast of prey, dumb, and holding them dumb. she searched for words to dispel it, but no words came; her heart beat too quickly; he must hear it beat. that was not the signal he was waiting for, that beating of her heart. he tried to give himself the semblance and the sense of ease by walking about the room and examining the things in it. there were some that it had lacked before, signs that the young novelist had increased in material prosperity. yes. he had liked her better when she had worked harder and was as poor as he. they had come to look on poverty as their protection from the ruinous world. he now realized that it had also been their protection from each other. he was too poor to marry. he reflected with some bitterness that jane was not, now. she in her corner called him from his wanderings. she had made the coffee. he drank it where he stood, on the hearthrug, ignoring his old place on the sofa by her side. she brooded there, leaving her cup untasted. she had man[oe]uvred to keep him. and now she wished that she had let him go. "aren't you going to drink your coffee?" he said. "no. i shan't sleep if i do." "haven't you been sleeping?" "not very well." "that's why you're looking like your portrait. that man isn't such a silly ass as i thought he was." "i wish," she said, "you'd contrive to forget him, and it, and everything." "everything?" "you know what i mean. the horrid thing that's happened to me. my--my celebrity." she brought it out with a little shiver of revolt. he laughed. "but when you remind me of it every minute? when it's everlastingly, if i may say so, on the carpet?" her eyes followed his. it was evident that she had bought a new one. "it doesn't mean what you think it does. it isn't, it really isn't as bad as that----" "i was afraid." "you needn't be. i'm still living from hand to mouth, only rather larger mouthfuls." "why apologize?" "i can't help it. you make me feel like some horrid literary parvenu." "_i_ make you feel----?" "yes. you--you. you don't think me a parvenu, do you?" she pleaded. "you know what i think you." "i don't. i only know what you used to think me." "i think the same." "tell me--tell me." "i think, if you can hold yourself together for the next five years, you'll write a superb book, jinny. but it all depends on what you do with yourself in the next five years." he paused. "at the present moment there's hardly any one--of our generation, mind you--who counts except you and i." he paused again. "if you and i have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our families have cast us off." "mine hasn't yet." "it's only a question of time if you go on," said tanqueray. he had never seen jane's family. he knew vaguely that her father was the rector of a small parish in dorset, and that he had had two wives in such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so tanqueray said, was scandalously simultaneous. the rector, indeed, had married his first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake. he had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him from providing properly for jane. it was what tanqueray called the "consecrated immorality" of jane's father that had set jane free. tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. a man of action, of rash and inconsiderate action, he regarded tanqueray with a disapproval so warm and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than jane. "anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. and yet that's our temptation, yours and mine." again he paused. "if we were painters or musicians we should be safer. their art draws them by one divine sense. ours drags us by the heart and brain, by the very soul, into the thick of it. _the_ unpardonable sin is separating literature from life. you know that as well as i do." she did. she worked divinely, shaping unashamed the bodies and the souls of men. there was nothing in contemporary literature to compare with the serene, inspired audacity of jane holland. her genius seemed to have kept the transcendent innocence of the days before creation. tanqueray continued in his theme. talking like this allayed his excitement. "we're bound," he said, "to get mixed up with people. they're the stuff we work in. it's almost impossible to keep sinless and detached. we're being tempted all the time. people--people--people--we can't have enough of 'em; we can't keep off 'em. the thing is--to keep 'em off us. and jane, i _know_--they're getting at you." she did not deny it. they were. "and you haven't the--the nerve to stand up against it." "i have stood up against it." "you have. so have i. when we were both poor." "you want me to be poor?" "i don't want you to be a howling pauper like me, but, well, just pleasantly short of cash. there's nothing like that for keeping you out of it." "you want me to be thoroughly uncomfortable? deprived of everything that makes life amusing?" "thoroughly uncomfortable. deprived of everything that stands in the way of your genius." she felt a sudden pang of jealousy, a hatred of her genius, this thing that had been tacked on to her. he cared for it and could be tender to it, but not to her. "you're a cruel beast," she said, smiling through her pain. "my cruelty and my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the cruelty of art. the lord our god is a consuming fire. you must be prepared to be burnt." "it's all very well for you, george. i don't like being burnt." that roused him; it stirred the devil in him. "do you suppose _i_ like it? why, you--you don't know what burning _is_. it means standing by, on fire with thirst, and seeing other people drink themselves drunk." "you don't want to be drunk, george. any more than i do." "i do not, thank god. but it would be all the same if i did. i can't get a single thing i do want." "can't you? i should have thought you could have got most things you really wanted." "i could if i were a grocer or a draper. why, a hair-dresser has more mastery of the means of life." he was telling her, she knew, that he was too poor for the quest of the matchless lady; and through all his young and sombre rage of frustration there flashed forth his anger with her as the unfit. he began to tramp up and down the room again, by way of distraction from his mood. now and then his eyes turned to her with no thought in them, only that dark, unhappy fire. he was quiet now. he had caught sight of some sheets of manuscript lying on her desk. "what's this?" he said. "only the last thing i've written." "may i look?" "you may." he took it up and sat beside her, close beside her, and turned the leaves over with a nervous hand. he was not reading. there was no thought in his eyes. he looked at her again. she saw that he was at the mercy of his moment, and of hers. for it was her moment. there was a power that every woman had, if she cared to use it and knew how. there was a charm that had nothing to do with beauty, for it was present in the unbeautiful. these things had their life secret and apart from every other charm and every other power. his senses called to the unknown and unacknowledged sense in her. she knew that he could be hers if she answered to that call. she had only to kindle her flame, send out her signal. and she said to herself, "i can't. i can't take him like this. he isn't himself. it would be hateful of me." in that moment she had no fear. love held her back and burning honour that hardly knew itself from shame. it accused her of having man[oe]uvred for that moment. it said, "you can't let him come in like this and trap him." another voice in her whispered, "you fool. if you don't marry him some other woman will--in this mood of his." and honour cried, answering it, "let her. so long as it isn't i." she had a torturing sense of his presence. and with it her fear came back to her, and she rose suddenly to her feet, and stood apart from him. he flung the manuscript into the place she had left, and bowed forward, hiding his face in his hands. he rose too, and she knew that his moment had gone. she had let it go. then, with a foreboding of his departure, she tried to call him back to her, not in his way, but her own, the way of the heart. "do you know what i should like to do?" she said. "i should like to sweep it all away, and to get back to that little room, and for nobody to come near me but you, nobody to read me but you, nobody to talk about me but you. do you remember?" he did, but he was not going to talk about it. in the fierceness of his mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held immorality. "we were so happy then," she said. "why can't we be happy now?" "i've told you why." "yes, and i can't bear it. when i think of you----" he looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the physician who knew her malady. "don't think of me," he said. his eyes seemed to say, "that would be worst of all." and so he left her. ii he really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to think intensely and continuously of her. what he had admired in her so much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him alone and insisted on his letting her alone. this desire of tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an attitude as an instinct. his genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. it had no need of sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. for it worked with an incredible rapidity. it took at a touch and with a glance of the eye the thing it wanted. it was an eye that unstripped, a hand that plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness. his device was, "look and let go." he had never allowed himself to hold on or be held on to; for thus you were dragged down and swamped; you were stifled by the stuff you worked in. your senses, he maintained, were no good if you couldn't see a thing at the first glance and feel it with the first touch. vision and contact prolonged removed you so many degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use to you. he denied perversely that genius was two-sexed, or that it was even essentially a virile thing. the fruitful genius was feminine, rather, humble and passive in its attitude to life. it yearned perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. but no more. all that it wanted, all that it could deal with was the germ, the undeveloped thing; the growing and shaping and bringing forth must be its own. the live thing, the thing that kicked, was never produced in any other way. genius in a great realist was itself flesh and blood. it was only the little men that were the plagiarists of life; only the sterile imaginations that adopted the already born, and bargained with experience to do their work for them. and yet there was no more assiduous devotee of experience than george tanqueray. he repudiated with furious contempt any charge of inspiration. there was no such thing as inspiration. there was instinct, and there was eyesight. the rest was all infernal torment and labour in the sweat of your brow. all this tanqueray believed sincerely. it would have been hard to find a creature so subtle and at the same time so unsophisticated as he. for five years his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. men had penetrated it, among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. but as for their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk perceptibly from their advances. he condemned their manner as a shade too patronizing to his proud obscurity. and now, at two-and-thirty, of three women whom he really knew, he only really cared for one, jane holland. he had further escaped the social round by shifting his abode incessantly, flying from the town to the country, and from the country back to the town, driven from each haunt, he declared, by people, persistent, insufferable people. for the last week he had been what he called settled at hampstead. the charm of hampstead was that nobody whom he knew lived there. he had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too steep for traffic. he had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low hill, pure and sharp against the sky. at sunset the grass of his slope turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to purple. he looked at the sublime procession of his willows and reminded himself with ecstasy that there was not a soul in hampstead whom he knew. and that suburb appeared to him an enchanted place where at last he had found peace. he would stay there for ever, in those two rooms. here, on the morning after he had dined with jane holland, he sat down to write. and he wrote, but with a fury that destroyed more than it created. in those days tanqueray could never count upon his genius. the thing would stay with him peaceably for months at a time; but it never let him know the precise moment of its arrival or departure. at times it seemed the one certainty in an otherwise dubious world, at other times it was a creature of unmistakably feminine caprice. he courted it, and it avoided him. he let it go, and it came back to him, caressing and tormenting him, compelling his embrace. there were days when it pursued and captured him, and then it had wings that swept him divinely to its end. there were days when he had to go out and find it, and lure the winged thing back to him. once caught, it was unswerving in its operations. but tanqueray had no lower power he could fall back upon when his genius failed him. and apparently it had failed him now. in forty-eight hours he had accomplished nothing. at the end of the forty-ninth hour wasted, he drew his pen through what he had written and sank into a depth as yet unknown to him. his genius had before now appeared to him as an insane hallucination. but still he had cared for it supremely. now, the horrible thing was that he did not care. his genius was of all things that which interested him least. he was possessed by one trouble and by one want, the more devastating because it was aimless and obscure. that came of dining with jane holland. he was not in love with jane. on the contrary, he was very angry with her for wanting him to be in love with her when he could not be. and he was angry with himself for wanting to be in love with her when he could not be, when his heart (by which the psychologist meant his senses) was not in it. but wherever his heart was, his thoughts, when he let them go, were always running upon jane. they ran on her now. he conceived of her more than ever as the unfit. "she's too damnably clever," he kept saying to himself, "too damnably clever." and he took up her last book just to see again how damnably clever she was. in an instant he was at her feet. she wasn't clever when she wrote that. what a genius she had, what a burning, flashing, laughing genius. it matched his own; it rose to it, giving him flame for flame. almost as clear-eyed it was, and tenderer hearted. reading jane holland, tanqueray became depressed or exalted according to his mood. he was now depressed. but he could not leave her. in spirit he remained at her feet. he bowed himself in the dust. "i couldn't have done it," he said, "to save my life. i shall never do anything like that." he wrote and told her so. but he did not go to see her, as he would have done six weeks ago. and then he began wondering how she conceived these things if she did not feel them. "i don't believe," he said, "that she doesn't feel. she's like me." too like him to be altogether fit. so he found confusion in his judgment and mystery in his vision of her, while his heart made and unmade her image ten times a day. he went out and tramped the lanes and fields for miles beyond hampstead. he lay stretched out there on his green slopes, trying not to think about jane. for all this exercise fatigued him, and made it impossible for him to think of anything else. and when he got back into his room its solitude was intolerable. for ten days he had not spoken to any woman but his landlady. every morning, before he sat down to write, he had to struggle with his terror of mrs. eldred. it was growing on him like a nervous malady. an ordinary man would have said of mrs. eldred that she was rather a large woman. to tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. the appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. it fascinated and demoralized the imagination. tanqueray's imagination was sane when it was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things unexaggerated, unabridged. but the power went wild when he turned it out to play. it played with mrs. eldred's proportions till it became tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. he saw her figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed, rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. for though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. when it stood it quivered. worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed. he had gathered from mrs. eldred that her conversation (if you could call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. he braced himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he forgot himself so far as to implore her for god's sake not to talk to him. the large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to her, it would not be necessary for her to talk. he left everything. at the end of the week his peace was charged to him at a figure which surprised him by its moderation. still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill, frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. under the obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk, bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands. he was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. it startled him, because, being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could not have proceeded from mrs. eldred. it was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from things diminutive and young. it seemed to be trying to tell him that dinner was ready. he looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge. it was young, young almost to excess. he judged it to be about two- or three-and-twenty. at his approach it drew as close as possible to the sideboard. it had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of inimitable remoteness. he now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably feminine. he smiled, simply to reassure it. "how on earth did you get in without my hearing you?" "i was told to be very quiet, sir. and not to speak." "well, you have spoken, haven't you?" she, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth. "i had to," said she. soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how rose eldred first appeared to george tanqueray. he had asked her name, and her name, she said, was rose. if you reasoned about rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty, yet she was. nature had defied reason when she made her, working from some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have achieved perfection in the moulding of rose's body if rose had only grown two inches taller. not that the purest reason could think of rose as dumpy. her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. it was her face that baffled you. it had a round chin that was a shade too large for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. not a feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. all but her mouth, and that was perfect. a small mouth, with lips so soft, so full, that you could have called it round. it had pathetic corners, and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. from her mouth upwards it was as if rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as delicately blurred. only her chin was left clean and decided. and as nature, in making rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness, when it came to rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust largesse of vitality. rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she tried so hard to restrain it, coiling it tight at the back, and smoothing it sleek as a bird's wing above her brows. mouse-colored hair it was on the top, and shining gold at the temples and at the roots that curled away under the coil. she wore a brown skirt, and a green bodice with a linen collar, and a knot of brown ribbon at her throat. thus attired, for three days rose waited on him. for three days she never spoke a word except to tell him that a meal was ready. in three days he noticed a remarkable increase in his material comfort. there was about rose a shining cleanliness that imparted itself to everything she laid her hands on. (her hands were light in their touch and exquisitely gentle.) his writing-table was like a shrine that she tended. every polished surface of it shone, and every useful thing lay ready to his hand. not a paper out of its order, or a pen out of its place. the charm was that he never caught her at it. in all her ministrations rose was secret and silent and unseen. only every evening at nightfall he heard the street door open, and rose's voice calling into the darkness, sending out a cry that had the magic and rhythm of a song, "puss--puss--puss," she called; "minny--min--min--minny--puss--puss--puss." that was the hymn with which rose saluted the night. it ought to have irritated him, but it didn't. it was all he heard of her, till on the fourth evening she broke her admirable silence. she had just removed the tablecloth, shyly, from under the book he was reading. "it isn't good for you to read at meal-times, sir." "i know it isn't. but what are you to do if you've nobody to talk to?" a long silence. it seemed as if rose was positively thinking. "you should go out more, sir." "i don't like going out." silence again. rose had folded up the cloth and put it away in its drawer. yet she lingered. "would you like to see the little dogs, sir?" "little dogs? i didn't know there were any." "we keep them very quiet; but we've seven. we've a fox and a dandy" (rose grew breathless with excitement), "and an aberdeen, and two aberdeen pups, and two poms, a mole and a white. may they come up, sir?" "by all means let them come up." she ran down-stairs, and returned with the seven little dogs at her heels. tanqueray held out his hand invitingly. (he was fond of animals.) the fox and the dandy sniffed him suspiciously. the old aberdeen ran away from him backwards, showing her teeth. her two pups sat down in the doorway and yapped at him. rose tried not to laugh, while the poms ran round and round her skirts, panting with their ridiculous exertions. "that's prince--the mole--he's a pedigree dog. he doesn't belong to us. and this," said rose, darting under the table and picking up the white pom, "this is joey." the white pom leaped in her arms. he licked her face in a rapture of affection. "is joey a pedigree dog, too?" said tanqueray. "yes," said rose. she met his eyes without flinching. "so young a dog----" "no, sir, joey's not so very young." she was caressing the little thing tenderly, and tanqueray saw that there was something wrong with joey. joey was deplorably lean and puny, and his hair, which should have stood out till joey appeared three times the size he was, his hair, what hair he had, lay straight and limp along his little back. rose passed her hand over him the wrong way. "you should always brush a pom the wrong way, sir. it brings the hair on." "i'm afraid, rose, you've worn his hair away with stroking it." "oh no, sir. that's the peculiarity of joey's breed. joey's my dog, sir." "so i see." he saw it all. joey was an indubitable mongrel, but he was rose's dog, and she loved him, therefore joey's fault, his hairlessness, had become the peculiarity, not to say the superiority, of joey's breed. she read his thoughts. "we're taking great pains to bring it on before the tenth." "the tenth?" "the dog show, sir." (heavens above! she was going to show him!) "and do you think you'll bring it on before the tenth?" "oh yes, sir. you've only got to brush a pom's hair backwards and it comes." the little dogs clamoured to be gone. she stooped, stroking them, smoothing their ears back and gazing into their eyes, lost in her own tenderness, and unaware that she was watched. if rose had been skilled in the art of allurement she could not have done better than let him see how she loved all things that had life. "how any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said rose, musing. [illustration: "how any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said rose, musing] she moved slowly to the door, gathering up the puppies in her arms, and calling to the rest to follow her. "come along," she said, "and see what pussy's doing." he heard her voice going down-stairs saying, "puss--puss--pussy--min--min--min." when she appeared to him the next day, minny, the cat, was hanging by his claws on to her shoulder. "are you fond of cats, sir?" "i adore them." (he did.) "would you like to have minny, sir? he'll be nice company for you." "ought i to deprive you of his society?" "i don't mind, sir. i've got the little dogs." she looked at him softly. "and you've got nothing." "true, rose. i've got nothing." that evening, as he sat in his chair, with rose's cat curled up on his knee, he found himself thinking, preposterously thinking, about rose. he supposed she was mrs. eldred's daughter. he did not like to think of her as mrs. eldred's daughter. she was charming now; but he had a vision of her as she might be in twenty years' time, grown shapeless and immense, and wheezing as mrs. eldred wheezed. yet no; that was too horrible. you could not think of rose as--wheezing. people did not always take after their mothers. rose must have had a father. of course, eldred was her father; and eldred was a small man, lean and brown as a beetle; and he had never heard him wheeze. at dinner-time rose solved his doubt. "aunt says, sir, do you mind my waitin' on you?" "i do not mind it in the very least." "it's beginning to be a trouble to aunt now to get up-stairs." "i wouldn't dream of troubling your aunt." her aunt? mrs. eldred was not her mother. ah, but you could take after your aunt. he found that this question absorbed him more than was becoming. he determined to settle it. "are you going to stay here, then?" he asked, with guile. "yes, sir. i've come back to live with uncle." "have you always lived here?" "yes, sir. father left me to uncle when he died." "then, rose, mrs. eldred is not your aunt?" "oh no, sir," said rose eagerly. tanqueray felt a relief out of all proportion to its cause. he continued the innocent conversation. "and so you're going to look after me, are you?" "yes," said rose. he noticed that when she dropped the "sir," it was because her voice drew itself back with a little gasping breath. "and your aunt, you think, really won't be equal to it?" "well, sir, you see, she gets all of a flutter like, and then she w'eezes, and she knows that's irritating for you to hear." she paused. "and aunt was afraid that if you was irritated, sir, you'd go. nothin' could keep you." (how thoroughly they understood him!) "well, i'm not irritated any more. but it is unfortunate, isn't it, that she--er--wheezes?" he had tried before now to make rose laugh. he wanted to see how she did it. it would be a test. and he perceived that, somewhere behind her propriety, rose cherished a secret, iniquitous enjoyment of her aunt. an imp of merriment danced in rose's eyes, but the rest of her face was graver than ever. ("good," he thought; "she doesn't giggle.") "oh, mr. tanqueray, talk of w'eezin', you should hear aunt snore." "i have heard her. in my dreams." rose, abashed at her own outburst, remained silent for several minutes. then she spoke again. "do you think, sir, you could do without me on the tenth?" "no. i don't think i could possibly do without you." her face clouded. "not just for the tenth?" "why the tenth?" "the dog show, sir. and joey's in it." "i forgot." "miss kentish, the lady up-stairs, is going for her holiday on the tenth." he saw that she was endeavouring to suggest that if he couldn't do without her, he and he alone would be keeping her from the superb spectacle of the dog show with joey in it. "so you want me to go for a holiday, too. is that it?" "well, sir, if it's not inconvenient, and you don't really mind aunt----" "doesn't she want to see joey, too?" "not if you required her, sir." "i don't require her. i don't require anybody. i'm going away, like the lady up-stairs, for the tenth. i shall be away all day." "oh, thank you, sir." she glowed. "do you think, sir, joey'll get a prize?" "certainly, if you bring his hair on." "it's coming. i've put paraffin all over him. you'd laugh if you were to see joey now, sir." rose herself was absolutely serious. "no, rose, i should not laugh. i wouldn't hurt joey's feelings for the world." tanqueray had his face hidden under the table where he was setting a saucer of milk for minny, the cat. rose rejoiced in their communion. "he's quite fond of you, sir," she said. "of course he's fond of me," said tanqueray, emerging. "why shouldn't he be?" "well, minny doesn't take to everybody." "i am more than honoured that he should take to me." rose accepted that statement with incorruptible gravity. it was the fifth day, and she had not laughed yet. but on the seventh day he met her on the stairs going to her room. she carried a lilac gown over her arm and a large hat in her hand. she was smiling at the hat. he smiled at her. "a new gown for the rose show?" "the dog show, sir." she stood by to let him pass. "it's the same thing. i say, what a howling swell you'll be." at that rose laughed (at last he had made her). she ran up-stairs; and through a door ajar, he heard her singing in her own room. iii in tanqueray's memorandum-book for nineteen hundred and two there stands this note: "june th. rose show. remember to take a holiday." rose, he knew, was counting the days till the tenth. about a fortnight before the tenth, tanqueray was in bed, ill. he had caught a cold by walking furiously, and then lying out on the grass in the chill of the may evening. there was a chance, rose said, of its turning to influenza and bronchitis, and it did. he was so bad that mrs. eldred dragged herself up-stairs to look at him. "bed's the best place, sir, for you," she said. "so just you lie quiet 'ere, sir, and rose'll look after you. and if there's anything you fancy, sir, you tell rose, and i'll make it you." there was nothing that he fancied but to lie still there and look at rose when, in a spare hour, she sat by his window, sewing. bad as he was, he was not so far gone as to be ever oblivious of her presence. even at his worst, one night when he had had a touch of fever, he was aware of her wandering in and out of his room, hanging over him with a thermometer, and sitting by his bedside. when he flung the clothes off she was there to cover him; when his pillow grew hot she turned it; when he cried out with thirst she gave him a cool drink. in the morning she was pale and heavy-eyed; her hair was all unsleeked, and its round coils were flattened at the back. she had lain down on her bed, dressed, for five minutes at a time, but she had not closed her eyes or her ears all night. in a week he was well enough to enjoy being nursed. he was now exquisitely sensitive to the touch of her hands, and to the nearness of her breathing mouth as her face bent over him, tender, absorbed, and superlatively grave. what he liked best of all was to hold out his weak hands to be washed and dried by hers; that, and having his hair brushed. he could talk to her now without coughing. thus-- "i say, what a bother i am to you." rose had taken away the basin and towels, and was arranging his hair according to her own fancy. and rose's fancy was to part it very much on one side, and brush it back in a curl off his forehead. it gave him a faint resemblance to mr. robinson, the elegant young draper in the high street, whom she knew. "there's nothing i like so much," said she, "as tucking people up in bed and 'aving them lie there and nursing 'em. give me anybody ill, and anybody 'elpless, and me lookin' after 'em, and i'm happy." "and the longer i lie here, rose, the happier you'll be?" "yes. but i want you to get well, too, sir." "because you're so unselfish." "oh no. there isn't anybody selfisher than me." "i suppose," said tanqueray, "that's why i _don't_ get well." rose had a whole afternoon to spare that day. she spent it turning out his drawers and finding all the things there were to mend there. she was sitting by his bed when, looking up from her mending, she saw his eyes fixed on her. "i don't irritate you, sittin' here, do i, sir?" "irritate me? what do you think i'm made of?" rose meditated for the fraction of a second. "brains, sir," said she. "so you think you know a man of brains when you see him, do you?" "yes, sir." "what were you, rose, before you came here?" "i was nurse in a gentleman's family. i took care of the baby." "did you like taking care of the baby?" "yes." rose blushed profoundly and turned away. he wondered why. "i had a bad dream last night," said tanqueray. "i dreamt that your aunt got into this room and couldn't get out again. i'm afraid of your aunt." "i dare say, sir. aunt is so very 'uge." rose dropped her g's and, when deeply moved, her aitches; but he did not mind. if it had to be done, it couldn't be done more prettily. "rose, do you know when i'm delirious and when i'm not?" "yes, sir. you see, i take your temperature." "it must be up now to a hundred and eighty. you mustn't be alarmed at anything i say. i'm not responsible." "no, sir." she rose and gravely took his temperature. "aren't you afraid of my biting the bulb off, and the quicksilver flying down my throat, and running about inside me for ever and ever?" "no, sir." "you don't seem to be afraid of anything." "i'm not afraid of many things, and i would never be afraid of you, sir." "not if i went mad, rose? raving?" "no. not if you went mad. not if you was to strike me, i wouldn't." she paused. "not so long as i knew you was really mad, and didn't mean to hurt me." "i wouldn't hurt you for the world." he sighed deeply and closed his eyes. that evening, when she was giving him his medicine, he noticed that her eyelids were red and her eyes gleaming. "you've been crying. what's made you cry?" rose did not answer. "what is it?" "miss kentish keeps on callin' and callin' me. and she scolds me something awful when i don't come." "give my compliments to miss kentish, rose, and tell her she's a beast." "i _'ave_ told her that if it was she that was ill i'd nurse her just the same and be glad to do it." "you consider that equivalent to calling her a beast, do you?" rose said, "well----" it was a little word she used frequently. "well, i'm sorry you think i'm a beast." rose's face had a scared look. she could not follow him, and that frightened her. it is always terrifying to be left behind. so he spared her. "why would you be glad to nurse miss kentish?" "because," said rose, "i like taking care of people." "do you like taking care of me?" rose was silent again. she turned suddenly away. it was the second time she had done this, and again he wondered why. by the eighth day tanqueray was strong enough to wash his own hands and brush his own hair. on the ninth the doctor and rose agreed that he might sit up for an hour or two in his chair by the window. on the eleventh he came down-stairs for dinner. on the thirteenth rose had nothing more to do for him but to bring him his meals and give him his medicine, which he would otherwise have forgotten. at bed-time, therefore, he had two sovereigns ready for her in an envelope. rose refused obstinately to take them; to have anything to do with sovereigns. "no, sir, i couldn't," she reiterated. but when he pressed them on her she began to cry. and that left him wondering more. iv on the fourteenth day, tanqueray, completely recovered, went out for a walk. and the first thing he did when he got back was to look at his note-book to see what day of the month it was. it was the tenth, the tenth of june, the day of the dog show. and the memorandum stared him in the face: "rose show. remember to take a holiday." he looked in the paper. the show began at ten. and here he was at half-past one. and here was rose, in her old green and brown, bringing in his luncheon. "rose," he said severely, "why are you not at the rose show?" rose lowered her eyes. "i didn't want to go, sir." "how about the new gown?" (he remembered it.) "that don't matter. aunt's gone instead of me." "wearing it? she couldn't. get into it at once, and leave that confounded cloth alone and go. you've plenty of time." she repeated that she did not want to go, and went on laying the cloth. "why not?" said he. "i don't want to leave you, sir." "do you mean to say you've given up that dog show--with joey in it--for me?" "joey isn't in it; and i'd rather be here looking after you." "i won't be looked after. i insist on your going. do you hear?" "yes, sir, i hear you." "and you're going?" "no, sir." she meditated with her head a little on one side; a way she had. "i've got a headache, and--and--and i don't want to go and see them other dogs, sir." "oh, that's it, is it? a feeling for joey?" but by the turn of head he knew it wasn't. rose was lying, the little minx. "but you _must_ go somewhere. you _shall_ go somewhere. you shall go--i say, supposing you go for a drive with me?" "you mustn't take me for drives, sir." "mustn't i?" "i don't want you to give me drives--or--or anything." "i see. you are to do all sorts of things for me, and i'm not to be allowed to do anything for you." she placed his chair for him in silence, and as he seated himself he looked up into her face. "do you want to please me, rose?" her face was firm as she looked at him. it was as if she held him in check by the indomitable set of her chin, and the steady light of her eyes. (where should he be if rose were to let herself go?) her mouth trembled, it protested against these austerities and decisions. it told him dumbly that she did want, very much, to please him; but that she knew her place. did she? did she indeed know her place? did he know it? "you're right, rose. that isn't the way i ought to have put it. will you do me the honour of going for a drive with me?" she looked down, troubled and uncertain. "it can be done, rose," he said, answering her thoughts. "it can be done. the only thing is, would you like it?" "yes, sir, i would like it very much." "can you be ready by three o'clock?" at three she was ready. she wore the lilac gown she had bought for the show, and the hat. it had red roses in it. he did not like her gown. it was trimmed with coarse lace, and he could not bear to see her in anything that was not fine. "is anything wrong with my hair?" said rose. "no, nothing's wrong with your hair, but i think i like you better in the green and brown----" "that's only for every day." "then i shall like you better every day." "why do you like my green and brown dress?" he looked at her again and suddenly he knew why. "because you had it on when i first saw you. i say, would you mind awfully putting it on instead of that thing?" she did mind, awfully; but she went and put it on. and still there was something wrong with her. it was her hat. it did not go with the green and brown. but he felt that he would be a brute to ask her to take that off, too. they drove to hendon and back. they had tea at "jack straw's castle." (rose's face surrendered to that ecstasy.) and then they strolled over the west heath and found a hollow where rose sat down under a birch-tree and tanqueray stretched himself at her feet. "rose," he said suddenly, "do you know what a wood-nymph is?" "well," said rose, "i suppose it's some sort of a little animal." "yes, it's a little animal. a delightful little animal." "can you catch it and stroke it?" "no. if you tried it would run away. besides, you're not allowed to catch it, or to stroke it. the wood-nymph is very strictly preserved." rose smiled; for though she did not know what a wood-nymph was, she knew that mr. tanqueray was looking at her all the time. "the wood-nymphs always dress in green and brown." "like me?" "like you. only they don't wear boots" (rose hid her boots), "nor yet collars." "you wouldn't like to see me without a collar." "i'd like to see you without that hat." any difficulty in taking rose about with him would lie in rose's hat. he could not say what was wrong with it except that the roses in it were too red and gay for rose's gravity. "would you mind taking it off?" she took it off and put it in her lap. surrendered as she was, she could not disobey. the eternal spell was on her. tanqueray removed her hat gently and hid it behind him. he laid his hands in her lap. it was deep delight to touch her. she covered his hands with hers. that was all he asked of her and all she thought of giving. on all occasions which she was prepared for, rose was the soul of propriety and reserve. but this, the great occasion, had come upon her unaware, and nature had her will of her. through rose she sent out the sign and signal that he waited for. and rose became the vehicle of that love which nature fosters and protects; it was visible and tangible, in her eyes, and in her rosy face and in the naïf movements of her hands. sudden and swift and fierce his passion came upon him, but he only lay there at her feet, holding her hands, and gazing into her face, dumb, like any lover of her class. then rose lifted her hands from his and spoke. "what have you done with my hat?" in that moment he had turned and sat on it. deliberately, yet impulsively, and without a twinge of remorse, he had sat on it. but not so that rose could see him. "i haven't done anything _with_ it," said he, "i couldn't do anything with a hat like that." "you've 'idden it somewhere." he got up slowly, feigning a search, and produced what a minute ago had been rose's hat. it was an absurd thing of wire and net, rose's hat, and it had collapsed irreparably. "well, i declare, if you haven't gone and sat on it." "it looks as if i had. can you forgive me?" "well--if it was an accident." he looked down upon her tenderly. "no, rose, it was not an accident. i couldn't bear that hat." he put his hand on her arm and raised her to her feet. "and now," he said, "the only thing we can do is to go and get another one." they went slowly back, she shamefaced and bareheaded, he leading her by the arm till they found themselves in heath street outside a magnificent hat-shop. chance took him there, for rose, interrogated on the subject of hat-shops, was obstinately reticent. but here, in this temple, in its wonderful window, before a curtain, on a stage, like actors in a gay drama, he saw hats; black hats and white hats; green and blue and rose-coloured hats; hats of all shapes and sizes; airily perched; laid upon velvet; veiled and unveiled; befeathered and beflowered. hats of a beauty and a splendour before which rose had stood many a time in awful contemplation, and had hurried past with eyes averted, leaving behind her the impermissible dream. and now she had a thousand scruples about entering. he had hit, she said, on the most expensive shop in hampstead. miss kentish wouldn't think of buying a hat there. no, she wouldn't have it. he must please, please, mr. tanqueray, let her buy herself a plain straw and trim it. but he seized her by the arm and drew her in. and once in there was no more use resisting, it only made her look foolish. reality with its harsh conditions had vanished for a moment. it was like a funny dream to be there, in madame rodier's shop, with mr. tanqueray looking at her as she tried on innumerable hats, and madame herself, serving her, putting the hats on the right way, and turning her round and round so that mr. tanqueray could observe the effect from every side of her. madame talked all the time to mr. tanqueray and ignored rose. rose had a mortal longing for a rose-coloured hat, and madame wouldn't let her have it. madame, who understood mr. tanqueray's thoughts better than if he had expressed them, insisted on a plain black hat with a black feather. "that's madame's hat, sir," said madame. "we must keep her very simple." "we must," said tanqueray, with fervour. he thought he had never seen anything so enchanting in its simplicity as rose's face under the broad black brim with its sweeping feather. rose had to wear the hat going home. tanqueray carried the old one in a paper parcel. at the gate of the corner house he paused and looked at his watch. "we've half-an-hour yet before we need go in. i want to talk to you." he led her through the willows, and up the green slope opposite the house. there was a bench on the top, and he made her sit on it beside him. "i suppose," he said, "you think that when we go in i shall let you wait on me, and it'll be just the same as it was before?" "yes, sir. just the same." "it won't, rose, it can't. you may wait on me to-night, but i shall go away to-morrow." she turned her face to him, it was dumb with its trouble. "oh no--no, sir--don't go away." "i must. but before i go, i want to ask you if you'll be my wife----" the hands she held clasped in her lap gripped each other tight. her mouth was set. "i'm asking you now, rose. to be my wife. my wife," he repeated fiercely, as if he repelled with violence a contrary suggestion. "i can't be your wife, sir," she said. "why not?" "because," she said simply, "i'm not a lady." at that tanqueray cried, "ah," as if she had hurt him. "no, sir, i'm not, and you mustn't think of it." "i shall think of nothing else, and talk of nothing else, until you say yes." she shook her little head; and from the set of her chin he was aware of the extreme decision of her character. he refrained from any speech. his hand sought hers, for he remembered how, just now, she had unbent at the holding of her hand. but she drew it gently away. "no," said she. "i look at it sensible. i can see how it is. you've been ill, and you're upset, and you don't know what you're doin'--sir." "i do--madam." she smiled and drew back her smile as she had drawn back her head. she was all for withdrawal. tanqueray in his attempt had let go the parcel that he held. she seized it in a practical, business-like manner which had the perfect touch of finality. then she rose and went back to the house, and he followed her, still pleading, still protesting. but rose made herself more than ever deaf and dumb. when he held the gate open for her she saw her advantage, darted in, and vanished (his divinity!) down the area steps. she went up-stairs to her little garret, and there, first of all, she looked at herself in the glass. her face was strange to her under the black hat with its sweeping feather. she shook her head severely at the person in the glass. she made her take off the hat with the feather and put it by with that veneration which attends the disposal of a best hat. the other one, the one with the roses, she patted and pulled and caressed affectionately, till she had got it back into something of the shape it had been, to serve for second best. then she wished she had left it as it was. she loved them both, the new one because he had given it her, and the old one because he had sat on it. finally she smoothed her hair to an extreme sleekness, put on a clean apron and went down-stairs. in the evening she appeared to tanqueray, punctual and subservient, wearing the same air of reticence and distance with which she had waited on him first. he was to see, it seemed to say, that she was only little rose eldred, his servant, to whom it was not proper that he should speak. but he did speak. he put his back to the door she would have escaped by, and kept her prisoned there, utterly in his power. rose, thus besieged, delivered her ultimatum. "well," she said, "you take a year to think it over sensible." "a year?" "a year. and if you're in the same mind then as you are now, p'raps i won't say no." "a year? but in a year i may be dead." "you come to me," said rose, "if you're dyin'." "and you'll have me then?" he said savagely. "yes. i'll 'ave you then." but, though all night tanqueray by turns raged and languished, it was rose who, in the morning, looked about to die. not that he saw her. he never saw her all that day. and at evening he listened in vain for her call at the gate, her salutation to the night: "min--min--minny! puss--puss--puss!" for in the afternoon rose left the house, attended by her uncle, who carried by its cord her little trunk. in her going forth she wore a clean white linen gown. she wore, not the hat, nor yet the sad thing that tanqueray had sat on, but a little black bonnet, close as a cap, with a black velvet bow in the front, and black velvet strings tied beneath her chin. it was the dress she had worn when she was nurse in a gentleman's family. v late in the evening of that day, tanqueray, as he sat in miserable meditation, was surprised by the appearance of mrs. eldred. she held in her hand rose's hat, the hat he had given her, which she placed before him on the table. "you'll be good enough, sir," said mrs. eldred, "to take that back." "why should i take it back?" he replied, with that artificial gaiety which had been his habitual defence against the approaches of mrs. eldred. "because, it was all very well for you to offer rose wot you did, sir, and she'd no call to refuse it. but a 'at's different. there's meanin'," said mrs. eldred, "in a 'at." tanqueray looked at the hat. "meaning? if you knew all the meaning there is in that hat, mrs. eldred, you'd feel, as i do, that you knew _something_. half the poetry that's been written has less meaning in it than that hat. that hat fulfills all the requirements of poetry. it is simple--extremely simple--and sensuous and passionate. yes, passionate. it would be impossible to conceive a hat less afflicted with the literary taint. it stands, as i see it, for emotion reduced to its last and purest expression. in short, mrs. eldred, what that hat doesn't mean isn't worth meaning." "if you'd explain _your_ meaning, sir, i should be obliged." "i am explaining it. my meaning, mrs. eldred, is that rose wore that hat." "i know she did, sir, and she 'adn't ought to 'ave wore it. i'm only askin' _you_, sir, to be good enough to take it back." "take it back? but whatever should i do with it? i can't wear it. i might fall down and worship it, but--no, i couldn't wear it. it would be sacrilege." that took mrs. eldred's breath away, so that she sat down and wheezed. "does rose not know what that hat means?" he asked. "no, sir. i'll say that for her. she didn't think till i arst her." "then--i think--you'd perhaps better send rose to me." "sir?" "please send her to me. i want her." "and you may want her, sir. rose isn't here." "not here? where is she? i must see her." "rose is visitin' in the country, for her 'ealth." "her health? is she ill?" mrs. eldred executed a vast gesture that dismissed rose. "where is she?" he repeated. "i'll go down and see her." "you will not, sir. her uncle wouldn't hear of it." "but, by god! he shall hear of it." he rang the bell with fury. "it's no use your ringin', sir. eldred's out." "what have you done this for?" "to get the child out of harm's way, sir. we're not blamin' you, sir. we're blamin' 'er." "her? her?" "properly speakin', we're not blamin' anybody. we're no great ones for blamin', me and eldred. but, if you'll excuse my sayin' so, sir, there's a party would be glad of your rooms next month, a party takin' the 'ole 'ouse, and if you would be so good as to try and suit yourself elsewhere----though we don't want to put you to no inconvenience, sir." it was extraordinary, but the more mrs. eldred's meaning was offensive, the more her manner was polite. he reflected long afterwards that, really, a lady, in such difficult circumstances, could hardly have acquitted herself better. "oh, is that all? i'll go. but you'll give me rose's address." "you leave rose alone, sir. rose's address don't concern you." "rose's address concerns me a good deal more than my own, i can tell you. so you'd better give it me." "look 'ere, sir. are you actin' honest by that girl, or are you not?" "what the devil do you mean by asking me that?" his violence made her immense bulk tremble; but her soul stood firm. "i dessay you mean no 'arm, sir. but we can't 'ave you playin' with 'er. that's all." "playing with her? playing?" "yes, playin'. wot else is it? you know, sir, you ain't thinkin' of marryin' 'er." "that's just what i am thinking of." "you 'aven't told _'er_ that." "i _have_ told her. and, by heaven! i'll do it." "you mean that, sir?" "of course i mean it. what else should i mean?" she sat meditating, taking it in slowly. "you'll never make 'er 'appy, sir. nor she you." "she and i are the best judges of that." "'ave you spoke to 'er?" "yes. i told you i had." "not a word 'ave she said to _me_." "well, i dare say she wouldn't." "sir?" "she wouldn't have me." mrs. eldred's lower lip dropped, and she stared at tanqueray. "she wouldn't 'ave you? then, depend upon it, that's wot made 'er ill." "ill?" "yes, ill, sir. frettin', i suppose." "where's that address? give it me at once." "no, sir, i darsen't give it you. eldred'd never forgive me." "haven't i told you i'm going to marry her?" "i don't know, sir, as 'ow rose'll marry _you_. when she's set, she's set. and if you'll forgive my saying it, sir, rose is a good girl, but she's not in your class, sir, and it isn't suitable. and rose, i dessay, she's 'ad the sense to see it so." "she's got to see it as i see it. that address?" mrs. eldred rose heavily. she still trembled. "you'd best speak to her uncle. 'e'll give it you if 'e approves. and if 'e doesn't 'e won't." he stormed. but he was impotent before this monument of middle-class integrity. "when will eldred be back?" "we're expecting of 'im nine o'clock to-night." "mind you send him up as soon as he comes in." "very good, sir." she paused. "wot am i to do with that 'at?" he looked at her and at the hat. he laughed. "you can leave the hat with me." she moved slowly away. "stop!" he cried; "have you got such a thing as a band-box?" "i think i might 'ave, sir; if i could lay my 'and on it." "lay your hand on it, then, and bring it to me." she brought it. an enormous band-box, but brown, which was a good colour. he lowered the hat into it with care and shut the lid on it, reverently, as if he were committing some sacred emblem to its shrine. he sat at his writing-table, tried to work and accomplished nothing. his heart waited for the stroke of nine. at nine there came to his summons the little, lean, brown man, rose's uncle. eldred, who was a groom, was attired with excessive horsiness. he refused to come further into the room than its threshold, where he stood at attention, austerely servile, and respectfully despotic. the interview in all points resembled tanqueray's encounter with mrs. eldred; except that the little groom, who knew his world, was even more firmly persuaded that the gentleman was playing with his rose. "and we can't 'ave that, sir," said eldred. "you're not going to have it." "no, sir, we ain't," reiterated eldred. "we can't 'ave any such goin's on 'ere." "look here--don't be an idiot--it isn't your business, you know, to interfere." "not my business? when 'er father left 'er to me? i should like to know what is my business," said mr. eldred hotly. tanqueray saw that he would have to be patient with him. "yes, _i_ know. _that's_ all right. don't you see, eldred, i'm going to marry her." but his eagerness woke in eldred a ghastlier doubt. rose's uncle stood firmer than ever, not turning his head, but casting at tanqueray a small, sidelong glance of suspicion. "and _why_ do you want to marry her, sir? you tell me that." tanqueray saw. "because i want her. and it's the only way to get her. do you need me to tell you that?" the man reddened. "i beg your pardon, sir." "you beg _her_ pardon, you mean." eldred was silent. he had been hit hard, that time. then he spoke. "are you certain sure of your feelin's, sir?" "i'm certain of nothing in this world except my feelings." "because" (eldred was slow but steady and indomitable in coming to his point), "because we don't want 'er 'eart broke." "_you_'re breaking it, you fool, every minute you stand there. give me her address." in the end he gave it. down-stairs, in the kitchen, by the ashes of the raked-out fire, he discussed the situation with his wife. "did you tell him plain," said mrs. eldred, "that we'd 'ave no triflin'?" "i did." "did you tell 'im that if 'e was not certain sure 'e wanted 'er, there was a young man who did?" eldred said nothing to that question. he lit a pipe and began to smoke it. "did you tell 'im," his wife persisted, "about mr. robinson?" "no, i didn't, old girl." "well, if it 'ad bin me i should have said, 'mr. tanqueray, for all you've fam'ly on your side and that, we're not so awful anxious for rose to marry you. we'd rather 'ave a young man without fam'ly, in a good line o' business and steady risin'. and we know of such as would give 'is 'ead to 'ave 'er.' that's wot i should 'ave said." "i dessay you would. i didn't say it, because i don't want 'im to 'ave 'er. that i don't. and if 'e was wantin' to cry off, and i was to have named mr. robinson, that'd 'ave bin the very thing to 'ave stirred 'im up to gettin' 'er. that's wot men _is_, missis, and women, too, all of 'em i've ever set eyes on. dorgs wot'll leave the bone you give 'em, to fight for the bone wot another dorg 'e's got. wot do you say to that, mrs. smoker, old girl?" mrs. smoker, the aberdeen, pricked up her ears and smiled, with her eyes only, after the manner of her breed. "anyhow," said mrs. eldred, "you let 'im see as 'ow we wasn't any way snatchin' at 'im?" "i did, missis." vi mr. eldred, groom and dog fancier, profoundly musing upon human nature and illuminated by his study of the lower animals, had hit upon a truth. once let him know that another man desired to take rose away from him and mr. tanqueray would be ten times more desirous to have her. what mr. eldred did not see was the effect upon mr. tanqueray of rose's taking herself away, or he would not have connived at her departure. "out o' sight, out o' mind," said mr. eldred, arguing again from his experience of the lower animals. but with tanqueray, as with all creatures of powerful imagination, to be out of sight was to be perpetually in mind. all night, in this region of the mind, rose's image did battle with jane's image and overcame it. it was not only that jane's charm had no promise for his senses. she was unfit in more ways than one. jane was in love with him; yet her attitude implied resistance rather than surrender. rose's resistance, taking, as it did, the form of flight, was her confession of his power. jane held her ground; she stood erect. rose bowed before him like a flower shaken by the wind. he loved rose because she was small and sweet and subservient. jane troubled and tormented him. he revolted against the tyranny of jane. jane was not physically obtrusive, yet there were moments when her presence in a room oppressed him. she had further that disconcerting quality of all great personalities, the power to pursue and seize, a power so oblivious, so pure from all intention or desire, that there was no flattery in it for the pursued. it persisted when she was gone. neither time nor space removed her. he could not get away from jane. if he allowed himself to think of her he could not think of anything else. but he judged that rose's minute presence in his memory would not be disturbing to his other thoughts. his imagination could play tenderly round rose. jane's imagination challenged his. it stood, brandishing its flaming sword before the gates of any possible paradise. there was something in jane that matched him, and, matching, rang defiance to his supremacy. jane plucked the laurel and crowned herself. rose bowed her pretty head and let him crown her. laurel crowns, crowns of glory, for jane. the crown of roses for rose. he meant, of course, the wedding-wreath and the wedding-ring. his conversation with the eldreds had shown him that marriage had not entered into their humble contemplations; also that if there was no question of marriage, there could be no question of rose. he had known that in the beginning, he had known it from the uncompromising little rose herself. from the first flowering of his passion until now, he had seen marriage as the sole means to its inevitable end. tanqueray had his faults, but it was not in him to bring the creature he loved to suffering and dishonour. and the alternative, in rose's case, was not dishonour, but frustration, which meant suffering for them both. he would have to give rose up unless he married her. at the moment, and the moment's vision was enough for him, he saw no reason why he should not marry her. he wanted to obtain her at once and to keep her for ever. she was not a lady and she knew it; but she had a gentleness, a fineness of the heart which was the secret of her unpremeditated charm. without it rose might have been as pretty as she pleased, she would not have pleased tanqueray. he could withstand any manifestly unspiritual appeal, restrained by his own fineness and an invincible disdain. therefore, when the divine folly fell upon him, he was like a thing fresh from the last touch of the creator, every sense in him unworn and delicate and alert. and rose had come to him when the madness of the quest was on him, a madness so strong that it overcame his perception of her social lapses. it was impossible to be unaware of some of them, of certain phrases, of the sudden wild flight of her aspirates. but these things were entangled with her adorable gestures, with the soft ways of her mouth, with her look when she hung about him, nursing him; so that a sane judgment was impossible. it was palpable, too, that rose was not intellectual, that she was not even half-educated. but tanqueray positively disliked the society of intellectual, cultivated women; they were all insipid after jane. after jane, he did not need intellectual companionship in his wife. he would still have jane. and when he was tired of jane there would, no doubt, be others; and when he was tired of all of them, there was himself. what he did need in his wife was the obstinate, dumb devotion of a creature that had no life apart from him; a creature so small that in clinging it would hang no weight on his heart. and he had found it in rose. why should he not marry her? she was now, he had learned, staying with her former mistress at fleet, in hampshire. the next morning he took a suitable train down to fleet, and arrived, carrying the band-box, at the door of the house where rose was. he sat a long time in the hall of the house with the band-box on his knees. he did not mind waiting. people went in and out of the hall and looked at him; and he did not care. he gloried in the society of the sacred band-box. he enjoyed the spectacle of his own eccentricity. at last he was shown into a little room where rose came to him. she came from behind, from the garden, through the french window. she was at his side before he saw her. he felt her then, he felt her fear of him. he turned. "rose," he said, "i've brought you the moon in a band-box." "oh," said rose, and her cry had a thick, sobbing vibration in it. he put his arm on her shoulder and drew her out of sight and kissed her, and she was not afraid of him any more. "rose," he said, "have you thought it over?" "yes, i have. have you?" "i've thought of nothing else." "sensible?" "oh, lord, yes." "you've thought of how i haven't a penny and never shall have?" "yes." "and how i'm not clever, and how it isn't a bit as if i'd any head for studyin' and that?" "yes, rose." "have you thought of how i'm not a lady? not what you'd call a lady?" there was no answer to that, and so he kissed her. "and how you'd be if you was to marry some one who was a lady? have you thought of that?" "i have." "well then, it's this way. if you was a rich man i wouldn't marry you." she paused. "but you will, because i'm a poor one?" "yes." "thank god i'm poor." he drew her to him and she yielded, not wholly, but with a shrinking of her small body, and a soft, shy surrender of her lips. she was thinking, "if he married a lady he'd have to spend ten times on her what he need on me." all she said was, "there are things i can do for you that a lady couldn't." "oh--don't--don't!" he cried. that was the one way she hurt him. "what are you going to do with me now?" said she. "i'm going to take you for a walk. we can't stay here." "can you wait?" "i have waited." she ran away and stayed away for what seemed an interminable time. then somebody opened the door and handed rose in. somebody kissed her where she stood in the doorway, and laughed softly, and shut the door upon rose and tanqueray. rose stood there still. "do you know me?" said she, and laughed. somebody had transformed her, had made her slip her stiff white gown and dressed her in a muslin one with a belt that clipped her, showing her pretty waist. somebody had taught her how to wear a scarf about her shoulders; and somebody had taken off that odious linen collar and bared the white column of her neck. "_she_ made me put it on," said rose. "she said if i didn't, i couldn't wear the hat." somebody, rose's mistress, had been in rose's secret. she knew and understood his great poem of the hat. rose took it out of the band-box and put it on. impossible to say whether he liked her better with it or without it. he thought without; for she had parted her hair in the middle and braided it at the back. "do you like my hair?" said she. "why didn't you do it like that before?" "i don't know. i wanted to. but i didn't." "why not?" rose hid her face. "i thought," said she, "you'd notice, and think--and think i was after you." no. he could never say that she had been after him, that she had laid a lure. no huntress she. but she had found him, the hunted, run down and sick in his dark den. and she had stooped there in the darkness, and tended and comforted him. they set out. "_she_ said i was to tell you," said rose, "to be sure and take me through the pine-woods to the pond." how well that lady knew the setting that would adorn his rose; sunlight and shadow that made her glide fawn-like among the tall stems of the trees. through the pine-woods he took her, his white wood-nymph, and through the low lands covered with bog myrtle, fragrant under her feet. beyond the marsh they found a sunny hollow in the sand where the heath touched the pond. the brushwood sheltered them. side by side they sat and took their fill of joy in gazing at each other, absolutely dumb. it was tanqueray who broke that beautiful silence. he had obtained her. he had had his way and must have it to the end. he loved her; and the thing beyond all things that pleased him was to tease and torment the creatures that he loved. "rose," he said, "do you think i'm good-looking?" "no. not what you call good-looking." "how do you know what i call good-looking?" "well--_me_. don't you?" "you're a woman. give me your idea of a really handsome man." "well--do you know mr. robinson?" "no. i do not know mr. robinson." "yes, you do. he keeps the shop in the high street where you get your 'ankychiefs and collars. you bought a collar off of him the other day. he told me." "by jove, so i did. of course i know mr. robinson. what about him?" "well--_he's_ what i call a _handsome_ man." "oh." he paused. "would you love me more if i were as handsome as mr. robinson?" "no. not a bit more. i couldn't. i'd love you just the same if you were as ugly as poor uncle. there, what more do you want?" "what, indeed? rose, how much have you seen of mr. robinson?" "how much? well--i see him every time i go into his shop. and every sunday evening when i go to church. and sometimes he comes and has supper with us. 'e plays and 'e sings beautiful." "the devil he does! well, did he ever take you anywhere?" "once--he took me to madame tussaws; and once to the colonial exhibition; and once----" "you minx. that'll do. has he ever given you anything?" "he gave me joey." "i always knew there was something wrong about that dog." "and last christmas he gave me a scented sashy from the shop." "never--anything else?" "never anything else." she smiled subtly. "i wouldn't let 'im." "well, well. and i suppose you consider mr. robinson a better dressed man than i am?" "yes, he was always a beautiful dresser. he makes it what you might call 'is hobby." "of course mr. robinson wants you to marry him?" "yes. leastways he says so." "and i suppose your uncle and aunt want you to marry him?" "they were more for it than i was." "rose--he's got a bigger income than i have." "he never told me what his income is." "but you know?" "i dare say uncle does." "better dressed--decidedly more handsome----" "well--he _is_ that." "a bigger income. rose, do you want mr. robinson to be found dead in his shop--horribly dead--among the collars and the handkerchiefs--spoiling them, and--not--looking--handsome--any more?" "oh, mr. tanqueray!" "then don't talk about him." he turned his face to hers. she put up her hands and drew his head down into the hollow of her breasts that were warm with the sun on them. "rose," he said, "if you stroke my hair too much it'll come off, like joey's. would you love me if my hair came off?" she kissed his hair. "when did you begin to love me, rose?" "i don't know. i think it must have been when you were ill." "i see. when i was bowled over on my back and couldn't struggle. what _made_ you love me?" she was silent a long time, smiling softly to herself. "i think it was because--because--because you were so kind to joey." "so you thought i would be kind to you?" "i didn't--i didn't think at all. i just----" "so did i," said tanqueray. vii it had been arranged that rose was to be married from the house of her mistress, and that she was to remain there until her wedding-day. there were so many things to be seen to. there was the baby. you couldn't, rose said, play fast and loose with _him_. rose, at her own request, had come to take care of the baby for a month, and she was not going back on that, not if it was ever so. then there were all the things that her mistress, rose said, was going to learn her. so many things, things she was not to do, things she was not to say, things she was on no account to wear. rose, buying her trousseau, was not to be trusted alone for a minute. it had been put to rose, very gently by her mistress, very gravely by her master, whether she would really be happy if she married this eccentric young gentleman with the band-box. was it not possible that she might be happier with somebody rather less eccentric? and rose replied that she knew her own mind; that she couldn't be happy at all with anybody else, and that, if she could, she'd rather be unhappy with mr. tanqueray, eccentricity, band-box and all. whereas, if he was to be unhappy with _her_, now----but, when it came to that, they hadn't the heart to tell her that he might, and very probably would be. if rose knew her own mind, tanqueray knew his. the possibility of being unhappy with rose (he had considered it) was dim compared with the certainty that he was unhappy without her. to be deprived of the sight and sound of her for six days in the week, to go down to fleet, like the butcher, on a sunday, and find her rosy and bright-eyed with affection, with a little passion that grew like his own with delay, that grew in silence and in secret, making rose, every sunday, more admirably shy; to be with her for two hours, and then to be torn from her by a train he had to catch; all this kept tanqueray in an excitement incompatible with discreet reflection. rose would not name a day before the fourteenth of july, not if it was ever so. he adored that little phrase of desperate negation. he was in a state of mind to accept everything that rose did and said as adorable. rose had strange audacities, strange embarrassments. dumbness would come upon rose in moments which another woman, jane for instance, would have winged with happy words. she had a look that was anything but dumb, a look of innocent tenderness, which in another woman, jane again, would not have been allowed to rest upon him so long. he loved that look. in her very lapses, her gentle elision of the aitch, he found a foreign, an infantile, a pathetic charm. so the date of the wedding was fixed for the fourteenth. it was now the twelfth, and tanqueray had not yet announced his engagement. on the morning of the twelfth two letters came which made him aware of this omission. one was from young arnott nicholson, who wanted to know when, if ever, he was coming out to see him. the other was from jane's little friend, laura gunning, reminding him that the twelfth was jane's birthday. he had forgotten. yet there it stood in his memorandum-book, entered three months ago, lest by any possibility he should forget. how, in the future, was he going to manage about birthdays? for, whenever any of the three had a birthday, they all celebrated it together. last time it had been tanqueray's birthday, and they had made a day of it, winding up with supper in little laura's rooms. such a funny, innocent supper that began with maccaroni, and ended, he remembered, with bread and jam. before that, it had been laura's birthday, and tanqueray had taken them all to the play. but on jane's birthday (and on other days, _their_ days) it was their custom to take the train into the country, to tramp the great white roads, to loiter in the fields, to climb the hillsides and lie there, prone, with slackened limbs, utterly content with the world, with each other and themselves. as he thought of those days, their days, he had a sudden vision of his marriage-day as a dividing line, sundering him from them, their interests and their activities. he could not think of rose as making one of that company. laura now inquired innocently what his plans were for that day. would he meet them (she meant, would he meet her and jane holland) at marylebone, by the entrance, at eleven o'clock, and go with them somewhere into the country? would he? he thought about it for five minutes, and decided that on the whole he would rather go than not. he was restless in these days before his wedding. he could not stand the solitude of this house where rose had been and was not. and he wanted to see jane holland again and make it right with her. he was aware that in many ways he had made it wrong. he would have to tell her. he would have to tell nicholson. and nicholson, why, of course, nicholson would have to see him through. he must go to nicholson at once. nicholson lived at wendover. there was a train from marylebone about eleven. it was possible to combine a festival for jane with a descent upon nicky. by the entrance, at eleven, laura gunning waited for him, punctually observant of the hour. beyond, on the pavement before the station, he saw the tall figure of another woman. it was nina lempriere. she was not waiting--nina never waited--but striding impatiently up and down. he would have to reckon, then, with nina lempriere, too. he was glad that jane was with her. little laura, holding herself very straight, greeted him with her funny smile, a smile that was hardly more than a tremor of her white lips. laura gunning, at twenty-seven, had still in some of her moods the manner of a child. she was now like a seven-year-old made shy and serious by profound excitement. she was a very small woman and she had a small face, with diminutive features in excessively low relief, a face shadowless as a child's. everything about laura gunning was small and finished with an innocent perfection. she had a small and charming talent for short stories, little novels, perfect within the limits of their kind. tanqueray laid before her his wendover scheme. laura said he must ask jane. it was jane's birthday. jane, being asked, said, no, she didn't mind where they went, provided they went somewhere. she supposed there was a gate they could sit on, while tanqueray called on nicky. tanqueray said he thought he saw nicky letting her sit on a gate. considering that nicky had been pestering him for the last six months (he had) to bring her out to have tea with him on one of their days. "and we've never been," said he. jane let it pass. but nina lempriere, as tanqueray well knew, had a devil in her. nina's eyes had the trick of ignoring your position in the space they traversed, which made it the more disconcerting when they came back and fixed you with their curious, hooded stare. they were staring at tanqueray now. "where have you been?" said she. "we haven't heard of you for ages." "i've been ill." jane looked at him and said nothing. "ill? and you never told us?" said nina. "i was all right. i was well looked after." "who looked after you?" he did not answer her. for in that instant there rose before him the image of rose eldred, tender and desirable, and it kept him dumb. nina, whose devil was nothing if not persistent, repeated her question. he divined already in nina a secret, subtle hostility. "oh," he said abruptly. "i looked after myself." jane stared intently at a notice of the departure and arrival of trains. laura, aware of embarrassment somewhere, began to talk to him light-heartedly, in her fashion, and the moment passed. in the train, going down to wendover, laura talked to jane. nina did not talk. her queer eyes, when they looked at him, had a light in them of ironic devilry and suspicion. they left him speculating on the extent to which he was cutting himself off. this journey down to wendover was a stage in the process. he was going down to tell nicholson, to ask nicholson to see him through. how would jane take it? how would nina? how would laura? he had said to himself, light-heartedly, that his marriage would make no difference, that he should retain them, all three, as an intellectual seraglio. would this, after all, be possible? when they heard that he, george tanqueray, was marrying a servant in a lodging-house? aware now, vividly aware, of the thing he was doing, he asked himself why, if he was not in love with jane, he had not been in love with nina? nina had shown signs. yes, very unmistakably she had shown signs. he could recall a time when there had lurked a betraying tenderness about her ironic mouth; when her queer eyes, as they looked at him, took on a certain softness and surrender. it had not touched him. to his mind there had always been something a little murky about nina. it was the fault, no doubt, of her complexion. not but what nina had a certain beauty, a tempestuous, haggard, roman eagle kind of beauty. she looked the thing she was, a creature of high courage and prodigious energy. besides, she had a devil. without it, he doubted whether even her genius (he acknowledged, a little grudgingly, her genius) could have done all it did. it had entered into tanqueray's head (though not his heart) to be in love with jane. but never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to be in love with nina; though it was to nina that he looked when he wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. he could not conceive any man being in love with her, to the extent, that is to say, of trying to marry her. nina had the thing called temperament, more temperament and murkier than he altogether cared for; but, as for marrying, you might as well try to marry some bird of storm on the wing, or a flash of lightning on its career through heaven. nina--career and all--was pre-eminently unfit. she had shown, more than once, this ironic antagonism, as if she knew what he thought of her, and owed him a grudge. if not nina, why not laura? she was small and she was pretty and she was pathetic, and he liked women to be so. why was it that with all her feminine smallness and prettiness and pathos he had never cared for her? they were talking. "tired, laura?" jane asked. "only sleepy. papa had another dream last night." they laughed. so did laura, though her tragedy was there, the tragedy which had given her that indomitable face. laura lived under conditions which would have driven tanqueray mad. she had a father; she who, as jane said, could least of all of them afford a father. her father had had a sunstroke, and it had made him dream dreams. he would get up a dozen times in the night and wander in and out of laura's bedroom, and sit heavily on her bed and tell her his dreams, which terrified laura. "it wasn't funny, this time," said she. "it was one of his horrid ones." nobody laughed then. they were dumb with the pity and horror of it. laura's father, when he was awake, was the most innocent, most uninspired, most uncreative of old gentlemen; but in his dreams he had a perfect genius for the macabre. the dreams had been going on for about a year, and they were making laura ill. tanqueray knew it, and it made him sad. that was why he had not cared to care for laura. yet little laura, very prettily, very innocently, with an entire unconsciousness, had let him see where her heart was. and as prettily and innocently and unconsciously as he could, he had let her see that her heart was no concern of his, any more than nina's. and she had not cherished any resentment, she had not owed him any grudge. she had withdrawn herself, still prettily, still innocently, so that she seemed, with an absurd prettiness, to be making room for jane. he had even a vague recollection of himself as acquiescing in her withdrawal, on those grounds. it was almost as if there had been an understanding between him and laura, between jane and laura, between him and jane. they had behaved perfectly, all three. what made their perfection was that in all these withdrawals, acquiescences and understandings not one of them had given any outward sign. they had kept their spoken compact. they had left each other free. as for his mere marriage, he was certain with all of them to be understood. it was their business, as they had so often told each other, to understand. but he was not sure that he wanted to be understood with the lucidity, the depth, the prodigious thoroughness of which they were capable. he said to himself, "the blood of these women is in their brains." that was precisely what he had against them. viii it was a perfect day, jane's birthday, like a young june day, a day of the sun, of white distances and vivid foregrounds. wendover hill looked over arnott nicholson's white house and over his green garden, where, summer and winter through, there brooded a heavenly quiet, a perfect peace. it was strange and sad, said tanqueray, that a quiet and peace like that should be given to nicky--to write poems in. jane said it was sadder and stranger that verse so vile should flow from anything so charming, so perfect in its way as nicky. "do you think," said she, as they crowded on his doorstep, "do you think he'll be at home?" "rather. we shall find him in his library, among his books and his busts, seething in a froth of abominable manuscripts, and feeling himself immortal." arnott nicholson was at home, and he was in his library, with his books and his busts, and with gisborne's great portrait of jane holland (the original) above his chimney-piece. he was, as tanqueray had predicted, seething in his froth. their names came to him there--miss holland and mr. tanqueray. in a moment nicky was out of his library and into his drawing-room. he was a singularly attractive person, slender, distinguished, highly finished in black and white. he was dressed, not like a candidate for immortality, but in the pink of contemporary perfection. he was shyly, charmingly glad to see them. and delighted, of course, he said, to see miss lempriere and miss gunning. he insisted on their all staying to tea, to dinner, on their giving him, now that they had come, a day. he ordered whisky and soda and lemonade. he brought peaches and chocolates and cigarettes, and offered them diffidently, as things mortal and savouring of mortality. he went to and fro, carrying himself humbly yet with triumph, like one aware that he entertained immortal guests. he couldn't get over it, he said, their dropping in on him like this, with a divine precipitance, out of their blue. heavens! supposing he had been out! he stood there glowing at them, the most perfect thing in his perfect drawing-room. it was a room of old chintzes and old china, of fragile, distinguished furniture, of family portraits, of miniatures in medallions, and great bowls of roses everywhere. the whole house had a strange feminine atmosphere, a warm look as if a woman's hand had passed over it. yet it was nicky who was the soul of his house, a slender soul, three parts feminine. nicky was looking at jane as she stooped over the roses. "do you know," he said, "that you've come home? come and see yourself." he led the way into his library where her portrait looked down from its high place. "you bought it?" said she. "rather. gisborne painted it for me." "oh, nicky!" "it's your genius brooding over mine--i mean over me." he looked at her again. when he looked at you nicky's perfect clothes, his long chin, his nose that seemed all bridge, his fine little black moustache, nicky himself retreated into insignificance beneath his enormous, prominent black eyes. "i put you there," he said, "to inspire me." nicky's eyes gazed at you with a terrible solemnity whenever he talked about his inspiration. "do i?" she did. they had caught him in the high act of creation. he'd been at it since ten o'clock; sitting there, with the blood, he said, beating so furiously in his brain that if he'd gone on like that he'd have destroyed himself. his head was burning now. "we'll drag you, nicky, to the top of wendover hill, and air you thoroughly. you reek," said tanqueray. his idea always was that they took nicky out of doors to air him; he had so strongly the literary taint. nicky declared that he would have been willing to be dragged with them anywhere. only, as it happened, he had to be at home. he was expecting miss bickersteth. they knew miss bickersteth? they knew her. nicky, for purposes of his own, was in the habit of cultivating, assiduously, the right people; and miss bickersteth was eminently right. the lady, he said, might be upon them any minute. "in that case," said tanqueray, "we'll clear out." "_you_ clear out? but you're the very people he wants to see." "he?" hugh brodrick. miss bickersteth was bringing hugh brodrick. they smiled. miss bickersteth was always bringing somebody or being brought. brodrick was the right man to bring. he implored them to stay and meet brodrick. "who _is_ brodrick?" brodrick, said nicky, was a man to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be clung to and never to be let go. brodrick was on the "morning telegraph," and at the back of it, and everywhere about it. and the jews were at the back of brodrick. so much so that he was starting a monthly magazine--for the work of the great authors only. that was his, brodrick's, dream. he didn't know whether he could carry it through. nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. no, on the advertisements, brodrick told him. that was where he had the pull. he could work the "telegraph" agency for that. and he had the jews at the back of him. he was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave the popular magazines behind him. "he sounds too good to be true," said jane. "or is he," said tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?" "he isn't true, in your sense, at all. that's the beauty of him. he's a gorgeous dream. but a dream that can afford to pay for itself." "a dream with jews at its back," said tanqueray. "and he wants--he told me--to secure you first, miss holland. and mr. tanqueray. and he's sure to want miss lempriere and miss gunning. you'll all be in it. it's the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all days." in fact, nicky suggested that if the finger of providence was ever to be seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here. a bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. it was one of the perfections of nicky's house that it had no jarring noises in it. "that's he," said nicky solemnly. "excuse me." and he went out. he came back, all glowing and quivering, behind miss bickersteth and mr. hugh brodrick. miss bickersteth they all knew, said nicky. his voice was unsteady with his overmastering sense of great presences, of jane holland, of tanqueray, of brodrick. brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. one of those fair englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. but brodrick's face gained in its effect from the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes. they were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze, which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his interest. as he entered they were fixed on jane, turning straight to her in her corner. this directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. but nicky, as the fervent adorer of miss holland, had brought to the ceremony of introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate. it was wonderful how in spite of brodrick he got it all in. brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. yet what struck jane first in brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his positive timidity. there was something about him that appealed to her, pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor of the "morning telegraph." she would have said that he was new to any business of proprietorship. new with a newness that shone in his slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the very innocence, the openness of his approach. if it could be called an approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of brodrick toward jane. "do you often come over to wendover?" he said. "not very often." there was a pause, then brodrick said something again, but in so low a voice that jane had to ask him what he said. "only that it's an easy run down from marylebone." "it is--very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation with miss lempriere and miss gunning. it was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. he was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes. for nina and laura he had only a blank courtesy. yet he talked to them, he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at jane, and now at her portrait by gisborne. he seemed to be wondering quietly what she was doing there, in nicky's house. nicky, as became him, devoted himself to miss bickersteth. she was on the reviewing staff of the "morning telegraph," and very valuable to nicky. besides, he liked her. she interested him, amused, amazed him. as a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. she had sharpened her teeth on the "critique of pure reason" in her prodigious teens. yet she could toss off, for the "telegraph," paragraphs of an incomparable levity. in the country miss bickersteth was a blustering, full-blooded diana of the fields. in town she was intellect, energy and genial modernity made flesh. even tanqueray, who drew the line at the dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at miss bickersteth. there was something soothing in her large and florid presence. it had no ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the spot. you found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely, with a look of having grown there. nicky, concealed beside miss bickersteth in a corner, had begun by trying to make her talk about shelley (she had edited him). he hoped that thus he might be led on to talk about himself. to nicky the transition was a natural one. but miss bickersteth did not want to talk about shelley. shelley, she declared irreverently, was shop. she wanted to talk about people whom they knew, having reached the absolving age of forty, when you may say anything you please about anybody to an audience sufficiently discreet. and she had just seen jane and tanqueray going out together through the long window on to the lawn. "i suppose," said she, "if they liked, they could marry now." "now?" repeated poor nicky vaguely. "now that one of them has got an income." "i didn't think he was a marrying man." "no. and you wouldn't think, would you, she was a marrying woman?" "i--i don't know. i haven't thought about it. he _said_ he wasn't going to marry." "oh." two small eyes looked at him, two liquid, luminous spots in the pinkness of miss bickersteth's face. "it's got as far as that, has it? that shows he's been thinking of it." "i should have thought it showed he wasn't." miss bickersteth's mouth was decided in its set, and vague in its outline and its colouring. her smile now appeared as a mere quiver of her face. "how have you managed to preserve your beautiful innocence? do you always go about with your head among the stars?" "my head----?" he felt it. it was going round and round. "yes. is a poet not supposed ever to see anything under his exquisite nose?" "i am not," said nicky solemnly, "always a poet. and when a person tells me he isn't going to do a thing, i naturally think he isn't." "and i naturally think he is. whatever you think about george tanqueray, _he's_ sure to do the other thing." "come--if you can calculate on that." "you can't calculate on anything. least of all with george tanqueray. except that he'll never achieve anything that isn't a masterpiece. if it's a masterpiece of folly." "mind you," she added, "i don't say he will marry jane holland, and i don't say it would be a masterpiece of folly if he did." "what do you say?" "that if he ever cares for any woman enough to marry her, it will be jane." "i see," said nicky, after some reflection. "you think he's that sort?" "i think he's a genius. what more do you want?" "oh, _i_ don't want anything more," said nicky, plunging head-first into a desperate ambiguity. he emerged. "what i mean is, when we've got him, and when we've got her--creators----" he paused before the immensity of his vision of them. "what business have we----" "to go putting one and one together so as to make two?" "well--it doesn't seem quite reverent." "you think them gods, then, your creators?" "i think i--worship them." "ah, mr. nicholson, _you're_ adorable. and i'm atrocious." "i believe," said nicky, "tea is in the garden." "let us go into the garden," said miss bickersteth. and they went. tea was served in a green recess shut in from the lawn by high yew hedges. nicky at his tea-table was more charming than ever, surrounded by old silver and fine linen, making tea delicately, and pouring it into fragile cups and offering it, doing everything with an almost feminine dexterity and grace. after tea the group scattered and rearranged itself. in nicky's perfect garden, a garden of smooth grass plots and clipped yew-trees, of lupins and larkspurs, of roses that would have been riotous but for the restraining spirit of the place; in a green alley between lawn and orchard, mr. hugh brodrick found himself with miss holland, and alone. very quietly, very persistently, with eyes intent, he had watched for and secured this moment. "you don't know," he was saying, "how i've wanted to meet you, and how hard i've worked for it." "was it so hard?" "hard isn't the word for it. if you knew the things i've done----" he spoke in his low, even voice, saying eager and impulsive things without a sign of eagerness or impulse. "what things?" "mean things, base things. going on my knees to people i didn't know, grovelling for an introduction." "i'm sorry. it sounds awful." "it was. i've been on the point of meeting you a score of times, and there's always been some horrid fatality. either you'd gone when i arrived, or i had to go before you arrived. i believe i've seen you--once." "i don't remember." "at miss bickersteth's. you were coming out as i was going in." he looked at his watch. "and _now_ i ought to be catching a train." "don't catch it." "i shan't. for i've got to tell you how much i admire your work. i'm not going to ask how you do it, for i don't suppose you know yourself." "i don't." "i'm not even going to ask myself. i simply accept the miracle." "if it's miracles you want, look at george tanqueray." he said nothing. and now she thought of it, he had not looked at george tanqueray. he had looked at nobody but her. it was the look of a man who had never known a moment's uncertainty as to the thing he wanted. it was a look that stuck. "why aren't you at his feet?" she said. "because i'm not drawn--to my knees--by brutal strength and cold, diabolical lucidity." "oh," she cried, "you haven't read him." "i've read all of him. and i prefer you." "me? you've spoilt it all. if you can't admire him, what is the use of your admiring me?" "i see. you don't want me to admire you." he said it with no emphasis, no emotion, as if he were indifferent as to what she wanted. "no. i don't think i do." "you see," he said, "you have a heart." "oh, if people would only leave my heart alone!" "and tanqueray, i believe, has a devil." she turned on him. "give me george tanqueray's devil!" she paused, considering him. "why do you talk about my heart?" [illustration: "why do you talk about my heart?"] "because, if i may say so, it's what i like most in you." "anybody can like _that_." "can they?" "yes. for ten people who care for me there isn't one capable of caring for george tanqueray." "how very unfortunate for him." "unfortunate for me, you mean." he smiled. he was not in the least offended. it was as if her perverse shafts never penetrated his superb solidity. and yet he was not obtuse, not insensitive. he might fall, she judged, through pride, but not through vanity. "i admit," said he, "that he is our greatest living novelist." "then," said she, "you are forgiven." "and i may continue to adore your tenderness?" "you may adore anything--after that admission." he smiled again, like one satisfied, appeased. "what," he said presently, "is miss lempriere's work like? has she anything of your breadth, your solidity, your fire?" "there's more fire in nina lempriere's little finger than in my whole body." brodrick took out his pocket-book and made a note of nina. "and the little lady? what does she do?" "little things. charming, delicious, funny, pathetic things. everything she does is like herself." "i must put her down too." and he made another note of laura. they had turned on to the lawn. their host was visible, gathering great bunches of roses for his guests. "what a lovable person he is," said brodrick. "isn't he?" said jane. they faced the house, the little house roofed with moss, walled with roses, where, thought jane, poor nicky nested like the nightingale he wasn't and would never be. "i wonder," said brodrick, "how he gets the perfection, the peace, the finish of it, the little feminine touches, the flowers on the table----" "yes, mr. nicholson and his house always look as if they were expecting a lady." "but," said brodrick, "it's so pathetic, for the lady never comes." "perhaps if she did it wouldn't be so peaceful." "perhaps. but it must be sad for him--living alone like this." "i don't know. i live alone and i'm not sad." "you? you live alone?" "of course i do. so does mr. tanqueray." "tanqueray. he's a man, and it doesn't matter. but you, a woman----it's horrible." he was almost animated. "there's your friend, miss bickersteth. she lives alone." "miss bickersteth--is miss bickersteth." "there's nina lempriere." "the fiery lady?" he paused, meditating. "why do her people let her?" "she hasn't got any. her people are all dead." "how awful. and your small friend, miss gunning? don't say she lives alone, too." "she doesn't. she lives with her father. he's worse than a family----" "worse than a----?" he stared aghast. "worse than a family of seven children." "and that's a misfortune, is it?" he frowned. "yes, when you have to keep it--on nothing but what you earn by writing, and when it leaves you neither time nor space to write in." "i see. she oughtn't to have to do it." "but she has, and it's killing her. she'd be better if she lived alone." "well--i don't know anything about miss gunning. but for you----" "you don't know anything about me." "i do. i've seen you. and i stick to it. it's horrible." "what's horrible?" said miss bickersteth, as they approached. "ask mr. brodrick." but brodrick, thus appealed to, drifted away towards nicholson, murmuring something about that train he had to catch. "what have you done to agitate him?" said miss bickersteth. "you didn't throw cold water on his magazine, did you?" "i shouldn't have known he had a magazine." "what? didn't he mention it?" "not to me." "then something _is_ the matter with him." she added, after a thoughtful pause, "what did you think of him?" "there's no doubt he's a very amiable, benevolent man. the sort of man who wants everybody to marry because he's married himself." "but he isn't married." "well, he looks it. he looks as if he'd never been anything _but_ married all his life." "anyhow," said miss bickersteth, "that's safe. safer than not looking married when you are." "oh, he's safe enough," said jane. as she spoke she was aware of tanqueray standing at her side. ix the day was over, and they were going back. their host insisted on accompanying them to the station. they had given him a day, and every moment of it, he declared solemnly, was precious. they could hardly have spent it better than with nicky in his perfect house, his perfect garden. and nicky had been charming, with his humble ardour, his passion for a perfection that was not his. the day, miss holland intimated, was his, nicky's present, rather than theirs. he glowed. it had been glorious, anyhow, a perfect day. a day, nicky said, that made him feel immortal. he looked at jane holland and george tanqueray, and they tried not to smile. jane would have died rather than have hurt nicky's feelings. it was not in her to spoil his perfect day. all the same, it had been their secret jest that nicky _was_ immortal. he would never end, never by any possibility disappear. as he stuck now, he always would stick. he was going with them to the station. sensitive to the least quiver of a lip, the young man's mortal part was stung with an exquisite sense of the becoming. "if i feel it," said he, "what must _you_ feel?" "oh, we!" they cried, and broke loose from his solemn and detaining eyes. they walked on ahead, and nicholson was left behind with laura gunning and nina lempriere. he consented, patiently and politely, to be thus outstripped. after all, the marvellous thing was that he should find himself on that road at all with them. after all, he had had an hour alone with him, in his garden, and five-and-twenty minutes by his watch with her. it was enough if he could keep his divinities in sight, following the flutter of miss holland's veil. besides, she had asked him to talk to nina and look after laura. she was always asking him to be an angel, and look after somebody. being an angel seemed somehow his doom. but he was sorry for laura. they said she had cared for tanqueray; and he could well believe it. he could believe in any woman caring for him. he wondered how it had left her. a little defiant, he thought, but with a quiet, clear-eyed virginity. determined, too. nicholson had never seen so large an expression of determination on so small a face. he always liked talking to laura; but he shrank inexpressibly from approaching nina, the woman with unquiet eyes and nervous gestures, and a walk that suggested the sweep of a winged thing to its end. a glance at nina told him that wherever she was she could look after herself. morose, fearlessly disarrayed, and with it all a trifle haggard and forlorn, nina lempriere had the air of not belonging to them. she paused, she loitered, she swept tempestuously ahead, but none of her movements had the slightest reference to her companions. from time to time he glanced uncomfortably at nina. "leave her," said laura, "to herself." "do you think," he said, "she minds being left?" "not she. she likes it. you don't suppose she's thinking of _us_?" "dear me, no; but one likes to be polite." "she'd so much rather you were sincere." "i say, mayn't i be both?" "oh yes, but you couldn't always be with nina. she makes you feel sometimes as if it was no use your existing." "do you think," he said, "she'll stand beside jane holland?" "no. she may go farther." "go farther? how?" "she's got a better chance." "a better chance? i shouldn't have backed her chance against miss holland's." "it _is_ better. she doesn't get so mixed up with people. if she _were_ to----" he waited. "she'd go with a rush, in one piece, and either die or come out of it all right. whereas jane----" he waited breathlessly. "jane would be torn to tatters, inch by inch." nicholson felt a curious constriction across his chest. his throat dried as he spoke again. "what do you think would tear her most?" "oh, if she married." "i thought you meant that." "the thing is," said laura, "not to marry." she said it meditatively and without reference to herself; but he gathered that, if reference had been made, she would, with still more dogged a determination, have kept her view. he agreed with her, and pondered. tanqueray had once said the very same thing to him, in talking about jane. she ought not to marry. he, tanqueray, wasn't going to, not if he knew it. that was the view they all took. not to marry. he knew that they were under vows of poverty. were they pledged to chastity and obedience, too? obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? how wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. high, solitary priest and priestesses of a god diviner than desire. and she--he saw her more virgin, more perfect than they all. "you think too then," the blameless youth continued, "that if miss holland--married it would injure her career?" "injure it? there wouldn't be any career left to injure." was it really so? he recorded, silently, his own determination to remember that. it had for him, also, the consecration of a vow. a thought struck him. perhaps laura, perhaps tanqueray, had divined him and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a preposterous hope. he preferred, however, not to explain them or the situation or himself thus. he was, with all possible sublimity, renouncing jane. another thought struck him. it struck him hard, with the shock almost of blasphemy. it broke into speech. "not," he said, "if she were to marry him?" laura was silent, and he wondered. why not? after all it was natural. she matched him. the thing was inevitable, and it was fitting. so supremely fitting was it that he could not very well complain. he could give her up to george tanqueray. x jane holland and tanqueray had left the others some considerable way behind. it was possible, they agreed, to have too much of nicky, though he did adore them. the wide high road stood up before them, climbing the ridge, to drop down into wendover. a white road, between grass borders and hedgerows, their green powdered white with the dust of it. over all, the pallor of the first white hour of twilight. for a moment, a blessed pause in the traffic, they were alone; twilight and the road were theirs. the two bore themselves with a certain physical audacity, a swinging challenge to fatigue. he, in his well-knit youth, walked with the step of some fine, untamed animal. she, at his side, kept the wild pace he set with a smooth motion of her own. she carried, high and processionally, her trophy, flowers from their host's garden, wild parsley of her own gathering, and green fans of beech and oak. as she went, the branches swayed with the swinging of her body. a light wind woke on the hill and played with her. her long veil, grey-blue and transparent, falling from her head to her shoulders, flew and drifted about her, now clinging to her neck, her breasts, now fluttering itself free. he looked at her, and thought that if gisborne, r.a., hadn't been an idiot, he would have painted her, not sitting, but like that. protected by the charm of rose, there was no more terror for him in any charm of jane's. he could afford to show his approval, to admit that, even as a woman, she had points. he could afford, being extremely happy himself, to make jane happy too. so sheltered, so protected was he that it did not strike him that jane was utterly defenceless and exposed. "yes," he said, "it's been a day." "hasn't it?" she saw him sustained by some inward ecstasy. the coming joy, the joy of his wedding-day, was upon him; the light of it was in his eyes as he looked at her, the tenderness of it in his voice as he spoke to her again. "have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?" "oh more, far more." then, remembering how those other days had been indeed theirs and nobody else's, she added, "in spite of poor nicky." it was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her about rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. she had been manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. now he saw, not only that she was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. this was worse than anything he had yet imagined. it gave him his first definite feeling of treachery toward jane. her reference to nicky came like a reprieve. how was it, he said, that they were let in for him? or rather, why had they ever let him in? "it was you, jane, who did it." "no, george; it was you. you introduced him." he owned it. "i did it because i hoped you'd fall in love with him." she saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her. "that," said she, "would have been very bad for nicky." "yes. but it would have been very good for you." she had her moment of torment; then she recovered. "i thought," said she, "that was the one thing i was not to do." "you're not to do it seriously. but you couldn't fall in love with nicky seriously. could you? could anybody?" "why are you so unkind to nicky?" "because he's so ungovernably a man of letters." "he isn't. he only thinks he is." "he thinks he's shelley, because his father's a squire." "that saves him. no man of letters, if he tried all night, could think anything so deliciously absurd. don't you wish _you_ could feel like that!" he rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame. "to feel myself an immortal, a blessed god!" they played together, profanely, with the idea that nicky was after all divine. "such a tragic little god," said jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little god without a single apostle or a prophet--nobody," she wailed, "to spread the knowledge of him." "i say--_we_'ll build an altar on wendover, to nicky as the unknown god." "he won't like that, our calling him unknown." "let's call him the unapparent--the undeveloped. he is the undeveloped." "in one aspect. in another he's a finished poem, an incarnate lyric----" "an ode to immortality on legs----" "nicky hasn't any legs. he's a breath--a perpetual aspiration." "oh, at aspiring he beats shelley into apoplexy." "he stands for the imperishable illusion----" "the stupendous hope----" "and, after all, he adores _you_." "and nobody else does," said tanqueray. "that's nicky's achievement. he _does_ see what you are. it's his little claim to immortality. just think, george, when nicky dies and goes to heaven he'll turn up at the gates of the poets' paradise, and they'll let him in on the strength of that. the angel of the singing stars will come up to him and say, 'nicky, you sing abominably, but you can see. you saw george tanqueray when nobody else could. your sonnets and your ballads are forgiven you; and we've got a nice place for you, nicky, near keats and shelley.' because it wouldn't be heaven for nicky if he wasn't near them." "how about _them_, though?" "oh, up in heaven you won't see anything of nicky except his heart." "i suppose he'll be stuck somewhere near you, too. it won't be heaven for him if he isn't. the first thing he'll ask is, 'where's jane?'" "and then they'll break it to him very gently--'jane's in the other place, nicky, where mr. tanqueray is. we had to send her down, because if she wasn't there it wouldn't be hell for mr. tanqueray.'" "but why am _i_ down there?" "because you didn't see what nicky was." "if you don't take care, jinny, he'll 'have' you like the rest. you're laying up sorrow for yourself in the day when nicky publishes his poems." "it's you he'll turn to." "no. i'm not celebrated," said he grimly. "there, do you see the full horror of it?" "i do," she moaned. tanqueray's devil came back to him. "do you think he'll fall in love with laura?" "no, i don't." she said it coolly, though his gaze was upon her, and they were both of them aware of nicky's high infatuation. "why not?" he said lightly. "because nicky'll never be in love with any woman as she is; and nobody could be in love with laura as she isn't." she faced him in her courage. he might take it, if he liked, that she knew nicky was in love with her as she was not; that she knew tanqueray would never, like nicky, see her as she was not, to be in love with that. "oh, you're too subtle," he said. but he understood her subtlety. he must tell her about rose. before the others could come up with them he must tell her. and then he must tell nicky. "jane," he said, "will you forgive me for never coming to see you? i simply couldn't come." "i know, george, i know." "you don't. you don't know what i felt like." "perhaps not. and yet, i think, you might----" but what she thought he might have done she would not tell him. "at any rate," said he, "you'll let me come and see you now? often; i want to come often." he meant to tell her that his marriage was to make no difference. "come as often as you want. come as often as you used to." "was it so very often?" "not too often." "i say, those were glorious times we had. we'll have them again, jinny. there are things we've got to talk about. things we've got to do. why, we're hardly beginning." "do you remember saying, 'when you've made yourself an absolutely clear medium, then you can begin'?" "i remember." he was content now to join her in singing the duet of remembrance. she dismissed herself. "what have _you_ been doing?" "not much. it looks as if i couldn't do things without you." a look of heavenly happiness came upon her face, and passed. "that isn't so, george. there never was anybody less dependent on other people. that's why nothing has ever stopped you. nothing ever will. whereas--you're right about me. anything might stop me." "could _i_ stop you?" not for his life could he have told what made him ask her that question, whether an insane impulse, or a purely intellectual desire to complete his knowledge of her, to know how deep she had gone in and what his power was, whether he could, indeed, "stop" her. "you?" she said, and her voice had a long, profound and passionate vibration. he had not dreamed that such a tone could have been wrung from jane. her eyes met his. steady they were and deep, under their level brows; but in them, too, was that sudden, unexpected quality. something in her startled him with its intensity. her voice, her look, had made it impossible for him to tell her about rose. it was not the moment. "i didn't know she was like that," he thought. no, he had never known until now what jane was; never seen until now that the gods in giving her genius had given her one passion the more, to complicate her, to increase tenfold her interest and her charm. and, with the charm of rose upon him, he could not tell whether, if he had known, it would have made any difference. all he knew or cared to know was that he was going to marry rose the day after to-morrow. he would have to ask nicky to let him go back with him and stay the night. then he could tell him. and he could get out of telling jane. he liked teasing and tormenting her, but he did not want to stab her. still less did he want to stand by with the steel in his hand and see her bleed. he must get away from jane. xi on the morning after wendover jane woke, bright-eyed and flushed with dreams. last night a folding splendour had hung over her till she slept. it passed into her dreams, and joy woke her. she sat up and swung her slender limbs over the bedside, and was caught, agreeably, by her likeness in the long glass of the wardrobe. she went to it and stood there, looking at herself. for the last three months she had been afraid to face the woman in the glass. sometimes she had had to turn her head another way when she passed her. every day the woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more dreadfully like that portrait which george hated. she knew he couldn't stand her when she looked like that. looking like that, and george's inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they called her genius. and now she did not look like _that_ in the very least. she looked, to her amazement, like any other woman. nobody had ever said that jane was handsome. she hadn't one straight feature, except her eyebrows which were too straight. she wasn't pretty, either. there was something about her too large and dominating for that. she had that baffling and provoking modern beauty which secures its effect by some queerness, some vividness of accent, and triumphs by some ugliness subdued. it was part of her queerness that she had the square brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck that carried her head high. with a queerness amounting to perversity some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. and, queerer still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. and for the blood it took it had given her back fire. latterly, owing to tanqueray's behaviour, whenever jane looked in the glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had seen. she had felt herself cruelly despoiled, disinherited of the splendours and powers of her sex. and here she was, looking, as she modestly put it, like any other woman. any one of the unknown multitude whom lately, in prophetic agony, she had seen surrounding tanqueray; women dowered, not with the disastrous gift of genius, but with the secret charm and wonder of mere womanhood. one of these (she had always reckoned with the possibility), one of these conceivably might at any moment, and inevitably would when her moment came, secure and conquer tanqueray. she had been afraid, even in vision, to measure her power with theirs. but now, standing there in the long nightgown that made her so straight and tall, with arms raised, holding up the thick mass of her hair, her body bent a little backwards from the waist, showing it for the slender and supple thing it was, seeing herself so incredibly feminine and so alive, she defied any one to tell the difference. if any difference there were it was not in her body, neither was it in her face. that was the face which had looked at tanqueray last night; the face which he had called up to meet that strange excitement and that tenderness of his. her body was the body of a woman created in a day and a night by joy for its own wooing. this glorious person was a marvel to itself. it was so incomprehensibly, so superlatively happy. its eyes, its mouth, its hands and feet were happy. it was happy inside and out and all over. it had developed a perfectly preposterous capacity for enjoyment. it found pleasure in bathing itself, in dressing itself, in brushing its hair. and its very hair, when it had done with it, looked happy. it was at its happiest at ten o'clock, when jane sat down to write a letter to tanqueray. the letter had to be written. for yesterday nina lempriere had asked her to supper in her rooms on sunday, and she was to bring george tanqueray. if, said nina, she could get him. sunday was the seventeenth. this was wednesday, the thirteenth. she would hear from tanqueray to-night or to-morrow at the latest. and there would be only four days to get through till sunday. to-night and to-morrow went, and tanqueray did not write. jane's heart began to ache with an intolerable anxiety. it was on saturday night that the letter came. "dear jinny," it said. "it was nice of nina to ask me to supper. i'm sorry i can't come. i got married yesterday. "yrs., g. t. "p.s.--nicky saw me through." not a word about his wife. at first the omission did not strike her as significant. it was so like tanqueray, to fling you the bare body of a fact while he cherished the secret soul of it himself. he must have wondered how she would take it. she took it as she would have taken a telegram from a stranger, telling her that tanqueray was dead. she took it, as she would have taken the stranger's telegram, standing very stiff and very still. she faced, as it were, an invisible crowd of such strangers, ignorant of the intimacy of her loss, not recognizing her right to suffer, people whose presence constrained her to all the observances of decency. she crushed the note in her hand vindictively, as she would have crushed that telegram; she pushed it from her, hating the thing that had made her suffer. then she drew it to her again; she smoothed it; she examined it, as she might have examined the telegram, to verify the hour and the place of the decease, to establish the fact which seemed incredible. verification brought the first live pangs that stabbed her. she was aware of the existence of the woman. there had been a woman all the time. but she couldn't realize her. she only knew that she meant finality, separation. an hour passed. she went to bed. her footsteps and her movements in undressing were hushed and slow. she was still like some one who knows that there has been a death in the house and that the body lies in the next room. stretched in her bed, turning her face to the wall to hide herself, she had that sense of awful contact and of separation, of there being only a wall between the living and the dead. the best thing that could have happened to her would have been to lie awake all night, and let her heart and brain hammer as they would, till they hammered her to stupefaction. unfortunately, towards morning she fell into a sound sleep. she woke from it with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a brain intolerably acute. she saw now all the vivid, poignant things which last night she had overlooked. she realized the woman. she divined her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she portended. in the light of that woman (for she spread round her an unbearable illumination) jane saw transparently what _she_ had been to tanqueray. she had had no power and no splendour for him of her own. but she had been the reflection of the woman's splendour and her power. so much so that, when he looked at her as he had looked the other evening, he, george tanqueray, had grown tender as if in the presence of the other. he had suffered a sentimental, a sensuous hallucination, and had made her suffer. but never, never for a moment had he cared for her, or seen in her any power or splendour of her own. she wondered why he had not told her about that woman then. it had been just two days before he married her. perhaps it had been only his shyness, or, more likely, his perversity. but he had said nothing about her now. he had not said, as men say so fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each other and that he hoped they would be friends. it was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was the end. there were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in tanqueray. and if there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent honesty. his honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity. he was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for one moment that it was not the end. it was to mean, not only that tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer exist for tanqueray. in her attitude to him, there had always been, though tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness. she felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. tanqueray's wife must make an end of her and of everything. there was nothing, not the smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the wreck. a simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not theirs. there had been in it a disastrous though vague element of excess. she could not see it continuing in the face of tanqueray's wife. as for enlarging it so as to embrace tanqueray's wife as well as tanqueray, jane simply couldn't. there was something virile in her that forbade it. she could no more have taken tanqueray's wife into her heart than tanqueray, if their cases had been reversed, could have taken into his jane's husband. she might have expected tanqueray to meet her husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or to profess affection for him. so tanqueray would probably expect her to call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it would end there. it would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this friendship to which tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire. looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. she was certain that two months ago, on that evening in may after he had dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. she had been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. and she had let him go for a scruple finer than a hair. and yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. it might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. her failure (it was so pre-eminently _her_ failure) came of feeling and of understanding at every moment far too much. it came of having eyes at the back of your head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your body. it was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain, passion and insight in her running disastrously together. it came back to her that tanqueray had always regarded her with interest and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like other women. in his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of response. her heart, of course, he must have heard. it had positively screamed at him. but her heart was not what had concerned him at any moment. she remembered how she had said to him that night, "mayn't i be a woman?" and he had answered her brutally. what _had_ concerned him was her genius. if there had been twenty women in her he would have made her sacrifice them all to that. he had cared for it to the point of tenderness, of passion. she had scores of his letters in a drawer, there; love-letters written to her genius. she knew one of them, the last, by heart. it was written at hampstead. "jinny," it had said, "i'm on my knees, with my hat off, at your feet. i'm in the dust, jinny, kissing your feet. shivers of exquisite adoration are going up and down my spine. do you know what you've done to me, you unspeakably divine person? i've worn out the knees, the knees of my trousers; i've got dust in my hair, jinny, kissing your feet." that letter (there was a great deal more of it) had tided her over tanqueray's worst absence; it had carried her on, so to speak, to wendover. as she thought of it her heart was filled with hatred and jealousy of her genius. it was odd, but she had no jealousy and no hatred for tanqueray's wife. she hated and was jealous of her genius, not only because it had forced tanqueray to care for it, but because, being the thing that had made her different from other women, it had kept tanqueray from caring about her. and she had got to live alone with it. her solitude had become unbearable. the room was unbearable; it was so pervaded, so dominated by her genius and by tanqueray. most of all by tanqueray. there were things in it which he had given to her, things which she had given to him, as it were; a cup he drank out of, a tray he used for his cigar-ash; things which would remain vivid for ever with the illusion of his presence. she could not bear to see them about. she suffered in all ways, secretly, as if tanqueray were dead. a bell rang. it was four o'clock. somebody was calling. as to one preoccupied with a bereavement, it seemed to her incredible that anybody _could_ call so soon. she was then reminded that she had a large acquaintance who would be interested in seeing how she took it. she had got to meet all these people as if nothing had happened. she remembered now that she had promised caroline bickersteth to go to tea with her to-day. if she wanted to present an appearance of nothing having happened, she couldn't do better than go to caro's for tea. caro expected her and would draw conclusions from her absence. so might her caller if she declared herself not at home. it was nicky, come, he said, to know if she were going to miss bickersteth's, and if he might have the pleasure of taking her there. that was all he cared to go for, the pleasure of taking her. jane had never thought of nicky being there. he was a barrister and he had chambers, charming chambers, in the temple, where he gave little tea-parties and (less frequently) looked up little cases. but on sundays he was always a little poet down at wendover. they needn't start at once, he said, almost as if he knew that jane was dreading it. he sat and talked; he talked straight on end; talked, not literature, but humble, innocent banalities, so unlike nicky who cared for nothing that had not the literary taint. it was a sign of supreme embarrassment, the only one he gave. he did not mention tanqueray, and for a moment she wondered if he had heard. then she remembered. of course, it was nicky who had seen tanqueray through. nicky was crowning his unlikelihood by refraining from the slightest allusion to the event. he was, she saw with dreadful lucidity, afraid of hurting her. and yet, he was (in his exquisite delicacy) behaving as if nothing had happened. they were going together to miss bickersteth's as if nothing had happened. his manner suggested that they were moving together in a world where nothing could happen; a world of delightful and amicable superficialities. she was not to be afraid of him; he was, as it were, looking another way; he wasn't even aware of any depths. the sheer beauty and gentleness of him showed her that he had seen and understood thoroughly what depths there were. it was her certainty of nicky's vision that drove her to the supreme act of courage. "why aren't we talking," she said, "about george tanqueray?" nicky blushed in a violent distress. even so, in the house of mourning, he would have blushed at some sudden, unsoftened reference to the deceased. "i didn't know," he said, "whether he had told you." "why shouldn't he?" poor nicky, she had made him blunder, so upset was he by the spectacle of her desperate pluck. he really _was_ like a person calling after a bereavement. he had called on account of it, and yet it was the last thing he was going to talk about. he had come, not to condole, but to see if there was any way in which he could be of use. "well," said nicky, "he seemed to have kept it so carefully from all his friends----" "he told _you_----why, you were there, weren't you?" it was as if she had said, "you were there--you saw him die." "yes." nicky's face expressed a tender relief. if she could talk about it----"but it was only at the last minute." "i wonder," said she, "why he didn't tell us." "well, you know, i think it was because she--the lady----" he hesitated. he knew what would hurt most; and he shrank almost visibly from mentioning her. "yes--you've forgotten the lady." she smiled, and he took courage. "there it is. the lady, you see, isn't altogether a lady." "oh, nicky----" he did not look at her. he seemed to be a partaker in what he felt to be her suffering and tanqueray's shame. "has he known her long?" she said. "about two months." she was right then. it had been since that night. it had been her own doing. she had driven him to her. "since he went to hampstead then?" "yes." "who was she?" "his landlady's daughter, i think, or a niece. she waited on him and--she nursed him when he was ill." jane drew in her breath with an almost audible sound. nicky had sunk into his chair in his attitude of vicarious, shamefaced misery. it made her rally. "nicky," she said, "why do you look like that? i don't think it's nice of you to sit there, giving him away by making gloomy faces, in a chair. why shouldn't he marry his landlady's daughter if he likes? you ought to stand up for him and say she's charming. she is. she must be; or he wouldn't have done it." "he ought not to have done it." "but he has. it had to happen. nothing else could have happened." "you think so? it seems to me the most unpredestined, the most horribly, fantastically fortuitous occurrence." "it was what he wanted. wouldn't you have given him what he wanted?" "no," said nicky, "not if it wasn't good for him." "oh, nicky, how do you know what's good for him? you're not george tanqueray." "no. if i were i'd have----" he stopped. his passion, growing suddenly, recklessly, had brought him to the verge of the depth they were trying to avoid. "if you were," said she, with amazing gaiety, "you'd have married this lady who isn't a lady. and then where would you have been?" "where indeed?" said nicky bitterly. jane's face, so gay, became suddenly tragic. she looked away, staring steadily, dumbly, at something that she saw. then he knew that he had raised a vision of the abyss, and of tanqueray, their tanqueray, sinking in it. he must keep her from contemplating that, or she would betray herself, she would break down. he searched his heart for some consoling inspiration, and found none. it was his head which suggested that irrelevance was best. "_when_," said he, by way of being irrelevant, "are you going to give us another big book?" "i don't know," she said. "never, i think." he looked up. her eyes shone perilously over trembling pools of tears. he had not been irrelevant at all. "you don't _think_ anything of the sort," he said, with a sharp tenderness. "no. i feel it. there isn't another book in me. i'm done for, nicky." her tears were hanging now on the curve of her eyelashes. they shook and fell. she sat there silent, fronting the abyss. nicky was horrified and looked it. if that was how she took it---- "you've overworked yourself. that's all," he said presently. "yes. that's all." she rose. "nicky," she said, "it's half-past four. if we're going we must go." "are you sure you want to?" "of course i want to." she said it in a tone that for nicky pointed to another blunder. "i only thought," said he simply, "it might bore you." xii miss bickersteth's house was round the corner. so small a house that a front room and a back room thrown together hardly gave caro space enough for tea-parties. but as the back room formed a recess, what space she had was admirably adapted for the discreet arrangement of conversation in groups. its drawback was that persons in the recess remained unaware of those who entered by the door of the front room, until they were actually upon them. through that door, opened gently by the little servant, miss bickersteth, in the recess, was heard inquiring with some excitement, "can't either of you tell me who she is?" only nina and laura were with her. jane knew from their abrupt silence, as she entered, that they had been discussing george tanqueray's marriage. she gathered that they had only just begun. there was nothing for it but to invite them to go on, to behave in all things as if nothing had happened, or could happen to her. "please don't stop," she said, "it sounds exciting." "it is. but mr. nicholson disapproves of scandal," said caro, not without address. "he's been talking nothing else to me," said jane. "yes, but his scandal and our scandal----" "yours isn't in it with his. he's seen her." three faces turned to nicholson's, as if it held for them the reflection of his vision. miss bickersteth's face was flushed with embarrassment that struggled with curiosity; nina's was almost fierce in its sombre, haggard intensity; laura's, in its stillness, had an appealing anxiety, an innocent distress. it was shadowless and unashamed; it expressed a trouble that had in it no taint of self. nicky met them with an admirable air of light-heartedness. "don't look at me," he said. "i can't tell you anything." "but--you've seen her," said miss bickersteth, seating herself at her tea-table. "i've seen her, but i don't know her," he said stiffly. "she doesn't seem to have impressed him favourably," remarked miss bickersteth to the world in general. nicky brought tea to jane, who opened her eyes at him in deprecation of his alarming reticence. it was as if she had said, "oh, nicky--to please me--won't you say nice things about her?" he understood. "miss holland would like me to tell you that she is charming." "do you know her, jinny?" it was laura who spoke. "no, dear. but i know george tanqueray." "as for nicky," she went on, with high daring, "you mustn't mind what he says. he wouldn't think any mortal woman good enough for george." nicky's soul smiled all to itself invisibly as it admired her. "i see," said miss bickersteth. "the woman isn't good enough. i hope she's good." "oh--good. good as they make them." "he knows," said jane, "more than he lets out." she withdrew into the corner where little laura sat, while miss bickersteth put her witness under severe cross-examination. "is it," she said, "the masterpiece of folly?" "it looks like it. only, she is good." "good, but impossible." "im-possible." "do you mean--for him?" "i mean in herself. utterly impossible." "but inevitable?" "not in the least, to judge by what i saw." "then," said miss bickersteth, "how _did_ it happen?" "i don't know," said nicky, "how it happened." there was a long pause. miss bickersteth seemed almost to retire from ground that was becoming perilous. "you may as well tell them," said jane, "what you do know." "i have," said poor nicky. "you haven't told us who she is," said nina. "she is mrs. george tanqueray. she was, i believe, a very humble person. the daughter--no--i think he said the niece--of his landlord." "uneducated?" said miss bickersteth. "absolutely." "common?" he hesitated and jane prompted. "no, nicky." "don't tamper," said miss bickersteth, "with my witness. uncommon?" "not in the least." "any aitches?" "i decline," said nicky, "to answer any more questions." "never mind. you've told us quite enough. i'm disgusted with mr. tanqueray." "but why?" said jane imperturbably. "why? when one thinks of the women, the perfectly adorable women he might have married--if he'd only waited. and he goes and does this." "he knows his own business best," said jane. "a man's marriage is not his business." "what is it, then?" miss bickersteth was at a loss for once, and laura helped her. "it's his pleasure, isn't it?" "he'd no right to take his pleasure this way." jane raised her head. "he had. a perfect right." "to throw himself away? my dear--on a little servant-girl without an aitch in her?" "on anybody he pleases." "can you imagine george tanqueray," said nina, "throwing himself away on anybody?" "_i_ can--easily," said nicholson. "whatever he throws away," said nina, "it won't be himself." "my dear nina, look at him," said miss bickersteth. "he's done for himself--socially, at any rate." "not he. it's men like george tanqueray who can afford to do these things. do you suppose anybody who cares for him will care a rap whom he marries?" "i care," said nicky. "i care immensely." "you needn't. marriage is not--it really is not--the fearfully important thing you think it." nicholson looked at his boots, his perfect boots. "it's _the_ most important act of a man's life," he said. "an ordinary man's--a curate's--a grocer's. and for tanqueray--for any one who creates----" "for any one who creates," said nina, "nothing's important outside his blessed creation." "and this lady, i imagine," said miss bickersteth, "will be very much outside it." nicky raised his dark eyes and gazed upon them. "good heavens! but a man wants a woman to inspire him." "george doesn't," said jane. "you may trust him to inspire himself." "you may," said nina. "in six months it won't matter whether george is married or not. at least, not to george." she rose, turning on nicky as if something in his ineffectual presence maddened her. "do you suppose," she said, "that woman counts? no woman counts with men like george tanqueray." "she can hold you back," said nicky. "you think so? you haven't got a hundred horse-power genius pulling you along. when he's off, fifty women hanging on to him couldn't hold him back." she smiled. "you don't know him. the first time that wife of his gets in his way he'll shove her out of it. if she does it again he'll knock her down and trample her under his feet." her smile, more than ever ironic, lashed nicky's shocked recoil. "creators are a brutal crew, mr. nicholson. we're all the same. you needn't be sorry for us." she looked, over nicky's head as it were, at jane and laura. it was as if with a sweep of her stormy wing she gathered them, george tanqueray and jane and laura, into the spaces where they ran the superb course of the creators. the movement struck arnott nicholson aside into his place among the multitudes of the uncreative. who was he to judge george tanqueray? if _she_ arraigned him she had a right to. she was of his race, his kind. she could see through nicky as if he had been an innocent pane of glass. and at the moment nicky's soul with its chivalry and delicacy enraged her. caroline bickersteth enraged her, everybody enraged her except jane and little laura. she stood beside jane, who had risen and was about to say good-bye. caro would have kept them with her distressed, emphatic "_must_ you go?" she was expecting, she said, mr. brodrick. jane was not interested in mr. brodrick. she could not stay and did not, and, going, she took nina with her. laura would have followed, but miss bickersteth held her with a hand upon her arm. nicholson left them, though laura's eyes almost implored him not to go. "my dear," said miss bickersteth. "tell me. have you any idea how much she cares for him?" "she?" "jane." "you've no reason to suppose she cares." "do you think he cared in the very least for her?" "i think he may have--without knowing it." "my dear, there's nothing that man doesn't know. he knows, for instance, all about _us_." "us?" "you and i. we've both of us been there. and nina." "how _do_ you know?" "she was flagrant!" "flagrant?" "flagrant isn't the word for it. she was flamboyant, magnificent, superb!" "you forget she's my friend," said little laura. "she's mine. i'm not traducing her. look at george tanqueray. i defy any woman not to care for him. it's nothing to be ashamed of--like an infatuation for a stockbroker who has no use for you. it's--it's your apprenticeship at the hands of the master." xiii nina inhabited a third floor in a terrace off the strand, overlooking the river. you approached it by secret, tortuous ways that made you wonder. in a small backroom, for an unspeakable half-hour, the two women had sat over the table facing each other, with tanqueray's empty place between them. there had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial presence had struck them dumb. it was as if this were the final, consummate stroke of the diabolic master. it had been as impossible to talk about him as if he had been sitting there and had overheard them. they left him behind them in the other room, a room where there was no evidence of tanqueray's ever having been. the place was incontestably and inalterably nina's. there were things in it cared for by nina with a superstitious tenderness, portraits, miniatures, relics guarded, as it were, in shrines. and in their company were things that nina had worn out and done with; things overturned, crushed, flung from her in a fury of rejection; things on which nina had inflicted personal violence, provoked, you felt, by their too long and intimate association with her; signs everywhere of the pace at which she went through things. it was as if nina had torn off shreds, fringes, whole layers of herself and left them there. you inferred behind her a long, half-savage ancestry of the open air. there were antlers about and the skins of animals. a hunting-crop hung by the chimney-piece. foils, fishing-rods, golf-clubs staggered together in a corner. nina herself, long-limbed, tawny, aquiline, had the look of wild and nervous adolescence prisoned within walls. beyond this confusion and disorder, her windows opened wide to london, to the constellated fires, the grey enchantment and silence of the river. it was nina who began it. leaning back in a very low chair, with her legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in its ease, she talked. "jinny," she said, "have you any idea how it happened?" jane made a sound of negation that was almost inaudible, and wholly inarticulate. nina pondered. "i believe," she said presently, "you _do_ know." she paused on that a moment. "it needn't have happened," she said. "it wouldn't if you'd shown him that you cared." jane looked at her then. "i did show him," she said. "that's how it happened." "it couldn't. not that way." "it did. i waked him up. i made him restless, i made him want things. but there was nothing--nothing----" "you forget. i've seen him with you. what's more, i've seen him without you." "ah, but it wasn't _that_. not for a moment. it could never have been _that_." "you could have made it that. you could have made it anything you liked. jinny! if i'd been as sure of him as you were, i'd never have let him go. i'd have held on----" her hands' tense clutch on the arm of her chair showed how she would have held on. "you see," said jinny, "i was never sure of him." a silence fell between them. "you were in it," said nina, troubling the silence. "it must--it must have been something you did to him." "or something i didn't do." "yes. something you didn't do. you didn't know how." jane could have jumped at this sudden echo of her thought. "and _she_ did," said nina. she got up and leaned against the chimney-piece, looking down on jane. "poor jinny," she said. "how i hated you three years ago." jane remembered. it was just three years since nina had gone away without saying a word and hidden herself among the mountains where she was born. in her isolation she had conceived and brought forth her "tales of the marches." and a year ago she had come back to them, the nina whom they knew. "you can't hate me now," jane said. "i believe i would if you had been sure of him. but i don't hate you. i don't even hate her." "why should you?" "why should i? when i don't believe she's sure of him, either. she's called out the little temporary animal or the devil in him. that's what she's married. it won't last." "no, nina. nicky said she was good." "it's wonderful how good women manage these things." "not when they're absolutely simple." "how do you know she's simple?" "oh--because i'm not." "simplicity," said nina, "would only give her more rope." "nina--there's one thing nicky didn't tell us. he never let on that she was pretty. i suppose he thought that was more than we could bear." "how do you know she's pretty?" "that's how i see her. very pretty, very soft and tender. shy at first, and then very gently, very innocently letting herself go. and always rather sensuous and clinging." "poor idiot--she's done for if she clings. i'm not sorry for george, jinny; i'm sorry for the woman. he'll lay her flat on the floor and wipe his boots on her." jane shrank back. "nina," she said, "you loved him. and yet--you can tear him to pieces." "you think i'm a beast, do you?" "yes. when you tear him--and before people, too." she shrank a little further. nina was now sitting on the floor with her back against jane's knees. "it's all very well for you," she said. "he wanted to care for you. he only wanted me--to care. that's what he is. he makes you care, he makes you show it, he drives you on and on. he gives nothing; he takes nothing. but he lets you strip yourself bare; he lets you bring him the soul out of your body, and then he turns round and treats you as if you were his cast-off mistress." she laid her head back on jane's knee, so that jane saw her face foreshortened and, as it were, distorted. "if i had been--if i'd been like any other woman, good or bad, he'd have been different." jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought. [illustration: jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought] it was as if some inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. it was not incredible or inscrutable to itself. it was indeed splendidly unashamed. it gloried in itself and in its suffering. it lived on its own torture, violent and exalted; jane could hardly bear its nearness and its utterance. but she was sorry for it. she hated to see it suffer. it raised its head. "doesn't it look, jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can be saddled with? it's giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger one, to plague you. when we want a thing we can't sit still like a woman and wait till it comes to us, or doesn't come. we go after it like a man; and if we can't get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights when he isn't a coward or a fool. and because we fight we're done for. and then, when we're down, the woman in us turns and rends us. but if we got what we wanted we'd be just like any other woman. as long," she added, "as we wanted it." she got up and leaned against the chimney-piece looking down, rather like a man, on jane. "it's borne in on me," she said, "that the woman in us isn't meant to matter. she's simply the victim of the will-to-do-things. it puts the bit into our mouths and drives us the way we must go. it's like a whip laid across our shoulders whenever we turn aside." she paused in her vehemence. "jinny--have you ever reckoned with your beastly genius?" jane stirred in her corner. "i suppose," she said, "if it's any good i'll have to pay for it." "you'll have to pay for it with everything you've got and with everything you haven't got and might have had. with a genius like yours, jinny, there'll be no end to your paying. you may make up your mind to that." "i wonder," said jane, "how much george will have to pay?" "nothing. he'll make his wife pay. _you_'d have paid if he'd married you." "i wonder. nina--he was worth it. i'd have paid ten times over. so would you." "i have paid. i paid beforehand. which is a mistake." she looked down at her feet. they were fine and feminine, nina's feet, and exquisitely shod. she frowned at them as if they had offended her. "never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "never again. there must be no more george tanquerays. if i see one coming, i'll put a knife into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. i'll find out where it hurts most and keep it there. so that i mayn't forget. if i haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, i'll get you to do it for me. you'll only have to say 'george tanqueray.'" her murky face cleared suddenly. "look here," she said. "i _believe_, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. but i _know_ it means that for you and me." xiv august and september came. one by one the houses in kensington square had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned square. jane holland had stayed in london because it was abandoned. she found a certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves. they had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and jane's celebrity. for her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it, vanished when they went. she could go in and out of the square now, really hidden, guarding her secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure. not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do anything with it now that she had got it. she was no longer a creature that felt or thought, or did things. you could not call it thinking, this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. every morning she got up determined to get through the day without thinking of tanqueray. but when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the blank sheet. it seemed to say, "you'll never get rid of me that way." when she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite. and whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from her own reflection, saying to herself, "no wonder he didn't care for me, a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in kensington gardens." he drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning. so jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and round in her cage of kensington gardens. she did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. she had a sort of sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. so she hardened it. she hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never touched it, but against nicky and nina and laura. laura's face in august had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look. this face, the face of her friend, appeared to jane like something seen in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. but it had no power to touch her. she had hardened her heart against everybody she knew. at last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things pierced it with an unbearable pain. it was hard to the very babies in the gardens, where she walked. one day she came upon a little boy running along the broad walk. the little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a steam-engine, so he ran his small body into jane and upset it violently at her feet. and jane heard herself saying, "why don't you look where you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart. then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. they were the eyes that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. they held her so that she did not stoop and pick him up. he picked himself up and ran to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a steam-engine, and he couldn't stop. and jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. her thoughts came in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's wail. "i was a steam-engine and i couldn't stop. i mustn't care for george if it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to them. i'll stop thinking about george this minute--i was a steam-engine and i couldn't stop. no wonder he didn't care for me, a woman who could do a thing like that. i'll never, never think of him again--i wonder if he knew i was like that." the pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. she was aware of the world again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. it hurt her to see the beauty that came upon the gardens in september evenings, to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist. there had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that insupportable beauty and tenderness. on the last of these, the last of september, jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. she could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial and divinely still. she could not tell whether the stillness of the world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the world. she could not tell what had happened to her at all. she only knew that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw hambleby. up till this moment hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. and the idea of hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see him. she had given him up and forgotten all about him. he arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. she could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme distinctness and solidity. she saw him, all pink and blond and callow with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban, adolescent smile. she saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a blond and callow soul. she saw his girl, the girl he inevitably would have. she was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark flesh and blood of the girl. she saw it all; the innocence of hambleby; the marriage of hambleby; the torture and subsequent deterioration of hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible decency of hambleby. heavens, what a book he would be. hambleby! she was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so divinely shy. before she attempted, as tanqueray would have said, to deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were falling in love with him. she had never possessed so completely this virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of creation. she walked in it, restless but exultant. and when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she hadn't got to deal. hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so possessed by the furious impulse to be born. now as long as hambleby was there it was impossible for jane to think about tanqueray, and she calculated that hambleby would last about a year. for a year, then, she might look to have peace from tanqueray. but in three months, towards the end of january, one half of hambleby was done. it then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to tanqueray. instead of showing him to tanqueray she took him to nina lempriere and laura gunning. that was how jane came back to them. they sat till midnight over the fire in nina's room, three of them where there had once been four. "do you like him?" said jane. "rather!" it was nina who spoke first. she lay at all her length along the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary taint. "jinny," said laura, "he's divine. however did you think of him?" "i didn't have to think. i simply saw him. is there anything wrong with him?" "not a thing." if there had been a flaw in him laura would have found it. next to tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. there followed a discussion of technical points that left hambleby intact. then laura spoke again. "how george would have loved him." six months after, she still spoke of tanqueray gently, as if he were dead. nina broke their silence. "does anybody know what's become of tanks?" they did not answer. "doesn't that nicholson man know?" "nicky thinks he's somewhere down in sussex," said jane. "and where's she?" "wherever he is, i imagine." "i gave her six months, if you remember." "i wonder," said laura, "why he doesn't turn up." "probably," said nina, "because he doesn't want to." "he might write. it isn't like him not to." "no," said jane, "it isn't like him." she rose. "good-bye, i'm going." she went, with a pain in her heart and a sudden fog in her brain that blurred the splendour of hambleby. "perhaps," laura continued, "he thinks _we_ want to drop him. you know, if he has married a servant-girl it's what he would think." "if," said nina, "he thought about it at all." "he'd think about jinny." "if he'd thought about jinny he wouldn't have married a servant-girl." it was then that laura had her beautiful idea. she was always having them. "it _was_ jinny he thought about. he thought about nothing else. he gave jinny up for her own sake--for her career. you know what he thought about marrying." she was in love with her idea. it made george sublime, and preserved jinny's dignity. but nina did not think much of it, and said so. she sat contemplating laura a long time. "queer kiddy," she said, "very queer kiddy." it was her tribute to laura's moral beauty. "i say, infant," she said suddenly, "were you ever in love?" "why shouldn't i be? i'm human," said the infant. "i doubt it. you're such a calm kiddy. i'd like to know how it takes you." "it doesn't take me at all. i don't give it a chance." "it doesn't give _you_ a chance, when it comes, my child." "yes, it does. there's always," said the infant, speaking slowly, "just--one--chance. when you feel it coming." "you don't feel it coming." "i do. you asked me how it takes _me_. it takes me by stages. gradual, insidious stages. in the first stage i'm happy, because it feels nice. in the second i'm terrified. in the third i'm angry and i turn round and stamp. hard." "ridiculous baby. with _those_ feet?" "when those feet have done stamping there isn't much left to squirm, i can tell you." "let's look at them." laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity of her feet. "and they," said nina, "stamped on george tanqueray." "it wasn't half as difficult as it looks." "you're a wonderful kiddy, but you don't know what passion is, and you may thank your stars you don't." "i might know quite a lot," said laura, "if it wasn't for papa. papa's a perfect safeguard against passion. i know beforehand that as long as he's there, passion isn't any good. you see," she explained, "it's so simple. i wouldn't marry anybody who wouldn't live with papa. and nobody would marry me if he had to." "i see. is it very bad?" "pretty bad. he dreams and dreams _and_ dreams." "won't that ever be better?" laura shook her head. "it may be worse. there are things--that i'm afraid of." "what things, kiddy, what things?" "oh! i don't know----" "how on earth do you go on?" "i shut my eyes. and i sit tight. and i go." "poor kiddy. you give me a pain." "i'm quite happy. i'm working like ten horses to get things done while i can." she smiled indomitably. "i'm glad tanks didn't care for me. i couldn't have let him in for all these--horrors. as for his marrying--i didn't want you to have him because he wouldn't have been good for you, but i _did_ want jinny to." "and you don't mind--now?" "there are so many things to mind. it's one nail driving out another." "it's all the nails being hammered in at once, into your little coffin," said nina. she drew closer to her, she put her arms round her and kissed her. "oh, don't! _don't_ be sorry for me. i'm all right." she broke from nina's hand that still caressed her. "i am, really," she said. "i like jinny better than anybody in the world except you and tanks. and i like nina better than all the tankses that ever were." ("nice kiddy," nina whispered into laura's hair.) "and now tanks is married, he can't take you away from me." "nobody else can," said nina. "we've stuck together. and we'll stick." xv the creation of hambleby moved on in a procession of superb chapters. jane holland was once more certain of herself, as certain as she had been in the days when she had shared the splendid obscurity of george tanqueray. her celebrity, by removing her from tanqueray, had cut the ground from under her feet. so far from being uplifted by it, she had felt that there must be something wrong with her since she was celebrated and george tanqueray was not. it was tanqueray's belief in her that had kept her up. it consoled her with the thought that her celebrity was, after all, only a disgusting accident. for, through it all, in spite of the silliness of it, he did believe. he swore by her. he staked his own genius upon hers. as long as he believed in it she could not really doubt. but now for the first time since she was celebrated she believed in it herself. she no longer thought of tanqueray. or, if she did think of him, her thinking no longer roused in her the old perverse, passionate jealousy. she no longer hated her genius because he had cared for it. she even foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. but at the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake. she was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to create. she had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. it was subject to the law of the supersensible. to love anything more than this thing was to lose it. you had to come to it clean from all desire, naked of all possession. placable to the small, perishing affections, it abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. it could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for tanqueray. it rejoiced in taking tanqueray away from her. for the divine thing fed on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. it took toll of the blood and nerves and of the splendour of the passions. and to those who did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back immeasurable, immortal things. it rewarded supremely the supreme surrender. nina lempriere was right. virginity was the law, the indispensable condition. the quiet, inassailable knowledge of this truth had underlain tanqueray's most irritable utterances. tanqueray had meant that when he said, "the lord our god is a consuming fire." jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all that she had done since the idea of tanqueray possessed her. she could put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame. she had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life, and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of passion, to recover the perfection of the passionless hour. she had attained only the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken dream. she defied even tanqueray to tell the difference between the thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth whole. she had been wonderful, standing there before tanqueray, with her feet bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing amazing things. there was nothing amazing about hambleby or a whole population of hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator possessed by no power except the impulse to create. within the four walls of her room, and in the quiet square, nothing moved, nothing breathed but hambleby. his presence destroyed those poignant, almost tangible memories of tanqueray, those fragments of tanqueray that adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. she was no longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. she no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as she entered the place. away from it she found herself longing for its stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this incomparable peace. she had never known what peace was until now. if she had she would have been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. she had not allowed for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of the dreadful, clever little people. by november they had all come back. they had found her behind her barricades. they approached, some tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could defeat. one by one they came. first caro bickersteth, and caro once let in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. for caro believed in knowing the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. it was caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had streamed in, converging upon jane. and they were more terrible than they had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. they had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific verge, jane saw the heaving, hovering multitudes of the as yet unintroduced. by december she realized again that she was celebrated; by january that she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone. for last year, when it all began, she had had george tanqueray. tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. his greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their littleness. he had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity, so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was. and now, six months after george's marriage, it was borne in upon her with appalling certitude that george was necessary to her, and that he was not there. he had not even written to her since he married. then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony, he wrote. marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy. absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. it was on the day after new year's day, and if jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she would have written to _him_. but because she needed him, she could not bring herself to write. "my dear jinny," he wrote, "i haven't heard from you for centuries." (he must have expected, then, to hear.) "what's the matter? is it book?" and jane wrote back, "it is. will you look at it?" "nothing would please me better," said tanqueray by return. not a word about his wife. jane sent hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after. in two days a telegram followed. "coming to see you to-day at four. tanqueray." absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. her blood sang a song in her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of his coming. but when he was there, when he had flung himself into his old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug, of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart were still. "what's been the matter?" he said. "you look worn out." "i am worn out." "with book, jinny?" she smiled and shook her head. "no. with people, george. everlasting people. i have to work like ten horses, and when i think i've got a spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. look there. and there. and there." his eyes followed her wild gesture. innumerable little notes were stacked on jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts. invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on celebrity. tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene. "before i can write a line of hambleby," said jinny--"one little line--i've got to send answers to all that." "you don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of answering?" "if it could only end in dreaming." he groaned. "here have i been away from you, how long? six months, is it? only six months, jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you go and do the very things i told you not to. you're not to be trusted by yourself for a single minute. i told you what it would be like." "george dear, can't you do something? can't you save me?" "my dear jinny, i've tried my level best to save you. but you wouldn't _be_ saved." "ah," said she, "you don't know how i've hated it." "haven't you liked any of it." "no," she said slowly. "not any of it." "the praise, jinny, didn't you like the praise? weren't you just a little bit intoxicated?" "did i look intoxicated?" "no-no. you carried it fairly well." "just at first, perhaps, just at first it goes to your head a bit. then you get sick of it, and you don't want ever to have any more of it again. and all the time it makes you feel such a silly ass." "you were certainly not cut out for a celebrity." "but the awful thing is that when you've swallowed all the praise you can't get rid of the people. they come swarming and tearing and clutching at you, and bizzing in your ear when you want to be quiet. i feel as if i were being buried alive under awful avalanches of people." "i told you you would be." "if," she cried, "they'd only kill you outright. but they throttle you. you fight for breath. they let go and then they're at you again. they come telling you how wonderful you are and how they adore your work; and not one of them cares a rap about it. if they did they'd leave you alone to do it." "poor jinny," he murmured. "why am i marked out for this? why is it, george? why should they take me and leave you alone?" "it's your emotional quality that fetches them. but it's inconceivable how _you_'ve been fetched." "i wanted to see what the creatures were like. oh, george, that i should be so punished when i only wanted to see what they were like." "poor jinny. poor gregarious jinny." she shook her head. "it was so insidious. i can't think, i really can't think how it began." "it began with those two spluttering imbecilities you asked me to dine with." "oh no, poor things, they haven't hurt me. they've gone on to dine at other tables. they're in it, too. they're torn and devoured. they dine and are dined on." "but, my dear child, you must stop it." "if i could. if i could only break loose and get away." "get away. what keeps you?" "everything keeps me." "by everything you mean----?" "london. london does something to your brain. it jogs it and shakes it; and all the little ideas that had gone to sleep in their little cells get up and begin to dance as if they heard music. everything wakes them up, the streams of people, the eyes and the faces. it's you and nina and laura. it's ten thousand things. can't you understand, george?" "it's playing the devil with your nerves, jinny." "not when i go about in it alone. that's the secret." "it looks as if you were alone a lot, doesn't it?" he glanced significantly around him. "oh--that!" "yes," he said, "that. will you really let me save you?" "can you?" "i can, if i do it my own way." "i don't care how you do it." "good." he rose. "is there anything in those letters you mind my seeing?" "not a word." he sat down at her writing-table and stirred the litter with rapid, irritable hands. in two minutes he had gathered into a heap all the little notes of invitation. he then went round the room collecting the tickets and the cards and the telegrams. these he added to his heap. "what are you going to do?" she asked. "i am going," he said, "to destroy this hornets' nest you've raised about you." he took it up, carrying it gingerly, as if it stung, and dropped it on the fire. "george----" she cried, and sat looking at him as he stirred the pile to flame and beat down its ashes into the grate. she was paralyzed, fascinated by the bold splendour of his deed. "there," he said. "is there anything else i can do for you." "yes." she smiled. "you can tell me what i'm to say to my stepmother." "your stepmother?" "she wants to know if i'll have effy." "effy?" "my half-sister." "well?" "i think, george, i may have to have her." "have her? it's you who'll be had. don't i tell you you're always being had?" he looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd pathos of her face. he was the same george tanqueray that he had always been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited. "jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even the rudiments of a family, you're done for. and so is hambleby." she said nothing. "can you afford to have him done for?" "if it would help them, george." "you want to help them?" "of course i do." "but you can't help them without hambleby. it's he who goes out and rakes in the shekels, not you." "ye-es. i know he does." "apart from hambleby what are you? a simple idiot." jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this truth. "well," he said, "have you written to the lady?" "not yet." "then sit down and write to her now exactly what i tell you. it will be a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine." he stood over her and dictated the letter. it had a firmness of intention that no letter of jinny's to her people had hitherto expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of jinny's style. "i am going to post this myself," he said, "because i can't trust you for a minute." he ran out bareheaded and came back again. "you can't do without me," he said, "you can't do without me for a minute." he sat down in his old place, and began, always as if nothing had happened. "and now about hambleby. another day, jinny, and i should have been too late to save him." "but, george, it's awful. they'll never understand. they don't realize the deadly grind. they see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour." "tell them you don't move in scenes of leisured anything." "the scenes i do move in! i was so happy once, when i hadn't any money, when nobody but you knew anything about me." "were you really, jinny?" "yes. and before that, when i was quite alone. think of the hours, the days, the months i had to myself." "then the curse fell, and you became celeb----even then, with a little strength of mind, you might have saved yourself. do you think, if i became celebrated, i should give myself up to be devoured?" "if i could only not be celebrated," she said. "do you think i can ever creep back into my hole again and be obscure?" "yes, if you'll write a book that nobody but i can read." "why, isn't hambleby----?" "not he. he'll only make things worse for you. ten times worse." "how do you mean?" "he may make you popular." "is _that_ what you think of him?" "oh, i think a lot of him. so do you." he smiled his old teasing and tormenting smile. "are you sure you're not just a little bit in love with that little banker's clerk?" "i was never in love with a banker's clerk in my life. i've never even seen one except _in_ banks and tubes and places." "i don't care. it's the way you'll be had. it's the way you'll be had by hambleby if you don't look out. it's the way," he said, "that's absolutely forbidden to any artist. you've got to know hambleby outside and inside, as god almighty knows him." "well?" jinny's mind was working dangerously near certain personal matters. george himself seemed to be approaching the same borders. he plunged in an abyss of meditation and emerged. "you can't know people, you can't possibly hope to know them, if you once allow yourself to fall in love with them." "can't you?" she said quietly. "no, you can't. if god almighty had allowed himself to fall in love with you and me, jinny, he couldn't have made us all alive and kicking. you must be god almighty to hambleby or he won't kick." "doesn't he kick?" "oh, lord, yes. you haven't gone in deep enough to stop him. i'm only warning you against a possible danger. it's always a possible danger when i'm not there to look after you." he rose. "anything," he said, "is possible when i'm not there." she rose also. their hands and their eyes met. "that's it," she said, "you weren't there, and you won't be." "you're wrong," said he, "i've always been there when you wanted me." he turned to go and came back again. "if i don't like to see you celebrated, jinny, it's because i want to see you immortal." "you don't want to be alone in your immortality?" "no. i don't want to be alone--in my immortality." with that he left her. and he had not said a word about his wife. neither for that matter had jane. she wondered why she had not. "at any rate," she thought, "_i_ haven't hurt his immortality." xvi a week after his visit to jane holland, tanqueray was settled, as he called it, in rooms in bloomsbury. he had got all his books and things sent down from hampstead, to stay in bloomsbury for ever, because bloomsbury was cheap. it had not occurred to him to think what rose was to do with herself in bloomsbury or he with rose. he had brought her up out of the little village of sussex where they had lodged, in a farmhouse, ever since their marriage. rose had been happy down in sussex. and for the first few weeks tanqueray had been happy too. he was never tired of playing with rose, caressing rose, talking nonsense to rose, teasing and tormenting rose for ever. the more so as she provoked him by turning an imperturbable face to the attack. he liked to lie with his head in rose's lap, while rose's fingers played with his hair, stirring up new ideas to torment her with. he was content, for the first few weeks, to be what he had become, a sane and happy animal, mated with an animal, a dear little animal, superlatively happy and incorruptibly sane. he might have gone on like that for an interminable number of weeks but that the mere rest from all intellectual labour had a prodigiously recuperative effect. his genius, just because he had forgotten all about it, began with characteristic perversity to worry him again. it wouldn't let him alone. it made him more restless than rose had ever made him. it led him into ways that were so many subtle infidelities to rose. it tore him from rose and took him out with it for long tramps beyond the downs; wherever they went it was always too far for rose to go. he would try, basely, to get off without her seeing him, and managed it, for rose was so sensible that she never saw. then it made him begin a book. he wrote all morning in a room by himself. all afternoon he walked by himself. all evening he lay with his head in rose's lap, too tired even to tease her. but, because she had tanqueray's head to nurse in the evenings, rose had been happy down in sussex. she went about the farm and stroked all the animals. she borrowed the baby at the farm and nursed it half the day. and in the evening she nursed tanqueray's head. tanqueray's head was never bothered to think what rose was doing when she was not nursing it. then, because his book made him think of jane holland, he sat down one day and wrote that letter to jinny. he did not know that it was because of jinny that he had come back to live in bloomsbury. they had been a month in bloomsbury, in a house in torrington square. rose was sitting alone in the ground-floor room that looked straight on to the pavement. sitting with her hands before her waiting for tanqueray to come to lunch. tanqueray was up-stairs, two flights away, in his study, writing. she was afraid to go and tell him lunch was ready. she had gone up once that morning to see that he didn't let his fire out, and he hadn't liked it; so she waited. there was a dish of cutlets keeping hot for him on the hearth. presently he would come down, and she would have the pleasure of putting the cutlets on the table and seeing him eat them. it was about the only pleasure she could count on now. for to rose, as she sat there, the thought had come that for all she saw of her husband she might as well not be married to him. she had been better off at hampstead when she waited on him hand and foot; when she was doing things for him half the day; when, more often than not, he had a minute to spare for a word or a look that set her heart fairly dancing. she had agreed to their marriage chiefly because it would enable her to wait on him and nobody but him, to wait on him all day long. and he had said to her, first thing, as they dined together on their wedding-day, that he wasn't going to let his wife wait on him. that was why they lived in rooms (since he couldn't afford a house and servant), that she might be waited on. he had hated to see her working, he said; and now she wouldn't have to work. no, never again. and when she asked him if he liked to see her sitting with her hands before her, doing nothing, he said that was precisely what he did like. and it had been all very well so long as he had been there to see her. but now he wasn't ever there. it was worse than it was down in sussex. all morning he shut himself up in his study to write. after lunch he went up there again to smoke. then he would go out by himself, and he might or might not come in for dinner. all evening he shut himself up again and wrote. at midnight or after he would come to her, worn out, and sleep, lying like a dead man at her side. she was startled by the sound of the postman's knock and the flapping fall of a letter in the letter-box. it was for tanqueray, and she took it up to him and laid it beside him without a word. to speak would have been fatal. he had let his fire go out (she knew he would); so, while he was reading his letter, she knelt down by the hearth and made it up again. she went to work very softly, but he heard her. "what are you doing there?" he said. "i thought," said she, "i was as quiet as a mouse." "so you were. just about. a horrid little mouse that keeps scratching at the wainscot and creeping about the room and startling me." "do i startle you?" "you do. horribly." rose put down the poker without a sound. he had finished his letter and had not begun writing again. he was only looking at his letter. so rose remarked that lunch was ready. he put the letter into a drawer, and they went down. about half-way through lunch he spoke. "look here," he said, "you _must_ keep out of the room when i'm writing." "you're always writing now." yes. he was always writing now; because he did not want to talk to rose and it was the best way of keeping her out of the room. but as yet he did not know that was why, any more than he knew that he had come to live in london because he wanted to talk to jinny. the letter in his drawer up-stairs was from jinny, asking him if she might not come and see his wife. he was not sure that he wanted her to come and see his wife. why should she? "you'll 'urt your brain," his wife was saying, "if you keep on writ-writin', lettin' the best of the day go by before you put your foot out of doors. it would do you all the good in the world if you was to come sometimes for a walk with me----" it all went in at one ear and out of the other. so all morning, all afternoon, all evening, rose sat by herself in the room looking on the pavement. she had nothing to do in this house that didn't belong to them. when she had helped the little untidy servant to clear away the breakfast things; when she had dusted their sitting-room and bedroom; when she had gone out and completed her minute marketings, she had nothing to do. nothing to do for herself; worse than all, nothing to do for tanqueray. she would hunt in drawers for things of his to mend, going over his socks again and again in the hope of finding a hole in one of them. rose, who loved taking care of people, who was born in the world and fashioned by nature to that end, rose had nothing to take care of. you couldn't take care of tanqueray. sometimes she found herself wishing that he were ill. not dangerously ill, but ill enough to be put to bed and taken care of. not that rose was really aware of this cruel hope of hers. it came to her rather as a picture of tanqueray, lying in his sleeping-suit, adorably helpless, and she nursing him. her heart yearned to that vision. for she saw visions. from perpetual activities of hands and feet, from running up and down stairs, from sweeping and dusting, from the making of beds, the washing of clothes and china, she had passed to the life of sedentary contemplation. she was always thinking. sometimes she thought of nothing but tanqueray. sometimes she thought of aunt and uncle, of minnie and the seven little dogs. she could see them of a sunday evening, sitting in the basement parlour, aunt in her black cashmere with the gimp trimmings, uncle in his tight broadcloth with his pipe in his mouth, and mrs. smoker sleeping with her nose on the fender. mr. robinson would come in sometimes, dressed as mr. robinson could dress, and sit down at the little piano and sing in his beautiful voice, "'ark, 'ark, my soul," and "the church's one foundation," while joey howled at all his top notes, and the smoke came curling out of uncle's pipe, and rose sat very still dreaming of mr. tanqueray. (she could never hear "hark, hark, my soul," now, without thinking of tanqueray.) sometimes she thought of that other life, further back, in her mistress's house at fleet, all the innocent service and affection, the careful, exquisite tending of the delicious person of baby, her humble, dutiful intimacy with baby's mother. she would shut her eyes and feel baby's hands on her neck, and the wounding pressure of his body against her breasts. and then rose dreamed another dream. she no longer cared to sew now, but when tanqueray's mending was done, she would sit for hours with her hands before her, dreaming. he found her thus occupied one evening when he had come home after seeing jane. after seeing jane he was always rather more aware of his wife's existence than he had been, so that he was struck now by the strange dejection of her figure. he came to her and stood, leaning against the chimney-piece and looking down at her, as he had stood once and looked down at jane. "what is it?" he said. "it's nothing. i've a cold in me head." "cold in your head! you've been crying. there's a blob on your dress." (he kissed her.) "what are you crying about?" "i'm not cryin' about _anything_." "but--you're crying." it gave him pain to see rose crying. "if i am it's the first time i've done it." "are you quite sure?" "certain. i never _was_ one for cryin', nor for bein' seen cry. it's just--it's just sittin' here with me 'ands before me, havin' nothing to do." "i suppose there isn't very much for you to do." "i've done all there is and a great deal there isn't." "i say, shall we go to the play to-night?" she smiled with pleasure at his thought for her. then she shook her head. "it's not plays i want--it's work. i'd like to have me hands full. if we had a little house----" "oh no. no--no--no." he looked terrified. "it would come a lot cheaper. only a _little_ house, where i could do all the work." "i've told you before i won't let you." "with a girl," she pleaded, "to scrub. a little house up hampstead way." "i don't want to live up hampstead way." "if you mean uncle and aunt," she said, "they wouldn't think of intrudin'. we settled that, me and uncle. i'd be as happy as the day is long." "you're _not_? and the day is very long, is it?" he kissed her, first on her mouth and then on the lobe of the ear that was next to him. "kissin' 's all very well," said rose. "you never kissed me at hampstead, and you don't know how happy i was there. doin' things for you." "i don't want things done for me." "no. i wish you did." "and, rose, i don't want to be bothered with a house; to be tied to a house; to have anything to do with a house." "would it worry you?" "abominably. and think of the horrors of moving!" "i'd move you," said rose. "i couldn't. look here. it would kill that book. i must have peace. this is a beastly hole, i know, but there's peace in it. you don't know what that damned book _is_." she gave up the idea of a house; and seven months after her marriage, she fell into a melancholy. sometimes, now, on a fine afternoon, she would go out into the streets and look listlessly through shop-windows at hats and gowns and all the pretty things she would have thought it sin so much as to desire to wear. where rose lingered longest was outside those heavenly places where you saw far off a flutter of white in the windows, which turned out to be absurd, tiny, short-waisted frocks and diminutive under-garments, and little heartrending shoes; things of desire, things of impossible dream, to be approached with a sacred dumbness of the heart. the toy-shops, too, they carried her away in a flight; so that rose caught herself saying to herself, "some day, perhaps, i shall be here buying one of them fur animals, or that there noah's ark." then, p'raps, she said to her very inmost self, things might be different. sometimes she would go up to hampstead, ridin', as she phrased it, in a bus, to see her aunt and uncle and a friend she had, polly white. not often; for rose did not hold with gadding about when you had a husband; besides, she was afraid of aunt asking her, "wot's _'e_ doin'?" (by always referring to tanqueray as "'e," mrs. eldred evaded the problem of what she was expected to call the gentleman who had so singularly married her husband's niece.) most of all rose dreaded the question, "wen is 'e goin' to take a little 'ouse?" for in rose's world it is somewhat of a reflection on a married man if he is not a householder. and last time mrs. eldred's inquiries had taken a more terrible and searching form. "is 'e lookin' for anything to do besides 'is writin'?" rose had said then that no, he needn't, they'd got enough; an answer that brought mrs. eldred round to her point again. "then why doesn't 'e take a little 'ouse?" sometimes polly white came to tea in bloomsbury. very seldom, though, and only when tanqueray was not there. rose knew and polly knew that her friends had to keep away when her husband was about. as for _his_ friends, she had never caught a sight of them. then, all of a sudden, when rose had given up wondering whether things would ever be different, tanqueray, instead of going up-stairs as usual, sat down and lit a pipe as if he were going to spend the evening with her. rose did not know whether she would be allowed to talk. he seemed thoughtful, and rose knew better than to interrupt him when he was thinking. "rose," he said at last, apparently as the result of his meditation, "a friend of mine wants to call on you to-morrow." "to call on _me_?" "on you, certainly." "shall i have to see him?" "she, rose, she. yes; i think you'll have to see her." "i didn't know," said rose, "you had a friend." she meant what she would have called a lady friend. "i've dozens," said tanqueray, knowing what she meant. "you haven't told me this one's name yet." "her name is jane holland." it was rose who became thoughtful now. "'as she anything to do with the jane holland that's on those books of yours?" "she wrote 'em." "you didn't tell me you knew her." "didn't i?" "i suppose that's how you knew her." "yes. that's how i knew her." "what made 'er take to writin'? is she married?" "no." "i see," said rose, almost as if she really saw. "and wot shall i've to do?" "you'll write a pretty little note to her and ask her to tea." "oh dear!" "you needn't be afraid of her." "i'm not afraid; but goodness knows what i shall find to talk about." "you can talk about me." "i suppose i _shall_ 'ave to talk to her?" "well--yes. or--i can talk to her." rose became very thoughtful indeed. "wot's she like?" he considered. what _was_ jinny like? like nothing on earth that rose had ever seen. "i mean," said rose, "to look at." "i don't know that i can tell you what she's like." "is she like miss kentish? you remember miss kentish at hampstead?" he smiled. "not in the very least." rose looked depressed. "is she like mrs. 'enderson down at fleet?" "that's nearer. but she's not like mrs. henderson. she's--she's charming." "so's mrs. 'enderson." "it's another sort of charm. i don't even know whether you'd see it." "ah, _you_ should have seen mrs. 'enderson with baby. they was a perfect picture." "that's it. i can't see miss holland with baby. i can only see her by herself." "i wish," said rose, "she was married. because, if she 'ad been, there might be something----" "something?" "well--to talk about." it was his turn to say "i see." he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thus closing the sitting, and settled down to a long correspondence in arrears. at bed-time rose spoke again. "how old is she?" rose said. xvii the next day at four o'clock rose had on her best gown and was bright-eyed and pink. brighter-eyed and pinker than tanqueray had seen her for many weeks. she was excited, not so much by the prospect of seeing miss holland as by the beautiful vision of her tea-table. there was a cake with sugar icing on it, and bread and butter rolled as rose had seen it rolled at fleet. she had set out the tea-service that her aunt had given her for a wedding-present. the table cloth had a lace edge to it which gratified rose whenever she thought of it. tanqueray had on his nicest suit, and rose's gaze travelled up and down it, and paused in ecstasy at his necktie. "you do pay for dressin'," she said. "i do indeed," said tanqueray. rose got on very well at tea-time. it was marvellous how many things she found to say. the conversation really made itself. she had only to sit there and ask miss holland how she liked her tea, weak or strong, and if she took so much milk or a little drop more, and sugar, one lump or two lumps, and that sized lump or a little larger? she spun it out till george was ready to begin talking. and there came a beautiful and sacred silence while rose made tanqueray's tea and gave it him. after seven months it was still impossible for rose to hide her deep delight in waiting on him. more than once her eyes turned from jane to watch him in the wonderful and interesting acts of eating and drinking. for a moment jane suffered an abominable pang as she realized the things that were permissible to rose, the things that she could say to tanqueray, the things that she might do for him. at first she had looked away so that she might not see these tender approaches of rose to tanqueray. then she remembered that this was precisely what she had come out to see,--that she had got to realize rose. and thus, as she brought herself round to face it fairly, she caught in a flash rose's attitude and the secret of it. it was not a thing flung in her face to madden her, it had no bridal insolence about it, and none of the consecrated folly of the bride. it was a thing of pathos and of innocence, something between the uncontrollable tenderness, the divine infatuation of a mother, and the crude obsession of a girl uncertain of the man she has set her unhappy heart on; a thing, rose's attitude, stripped of all secrecy by its sadness. but there was nothing abject in it. it was strong; it was militant under its pathos and its renunciation. with such a look rose would have faced gates of death closing between her and tanqueray. so jane realized rose. and she said to herself, "what a good thing tanks never did care for me. it would be awful if i made her more uncertain of him." at this moment tanqueray said, "how's hambleby?" "he's not quite so well as he was," said jane. "i'm sorry to hear that," said tanqueray. "is anybody ill?" said rose. she was always interested in anybody who was ill. "only hambleby," said tanqueray. "who's he?" said rose. "the man jinny's in love with." rose was shocked at this violation of the holy privacies. she looked reprovingly at tanqueray. "is your tea as you like it?" she inquired, with tact, to make it more comfortable for jane. "i'm going to smoke," said tanqueray. "will you come to my den, jinny, and talk about hambleby?" rose looked as if positively she couldn't believe her ears. but it was at jane that she looked, not at tanqueray. "no," said jinny. "i don't want to talk about hambleby. i want to talk to your wife." "you mustn't mind what 'e says," said rose, when they were alone together. "'e sometimes says things to me that make me fair jump." "i didn't jump," said jane, "did i?" "no. you took it a deal better than i should have done." it was odd, but rose was ten times more at her ease since tanqueray's awful reference to hambleby. and she seemed happier, too. "you see," said jane, "there wasn't much to take. hambleby's only a man in a book i'm writing." "oh--only a man in a book." rose looked depressed. there was a silence which even jane found it difficult to break. then she had an inspiration. "i'm supposed to be in love with him because i can't think or talk about anything else." "that's just like mr. tanqueray," said rose. "only he isn't in love with the people in his books," said jane. "he must think a deal of 'em." "he says he doesn't." "well--'e's always thinkin' when he isn't writin'." there was trouble on rose's face. "miss 'olland--'ow many hours do _you_ sit at it?" "oh, it depends." "'e's sittin' all day sometimes, and 'arf the night. and my fear is," said rose, "'e'll injure 'is brain." "it will take a good deal to injure it. it's very tough. he'll leave off when he's tired." "he hasn't left off for months and months." her trouble deepened. "did 'e always work that 'ard?" "no," said jane. "i don't think he ever did." "then w'y," said rose, coming straight to her point, "is he doin' it now?" they looked at each other; and somehow jane knew why he was doing it. she wondered if rose knew; if she suspected. "he's doing it," she said, "because he _can_ do it. you've had a good effect on him." "do you think, do you really think it's _me_!" "i do indeed," said jane, with immense conviction. "and you think it doesn't hurt him?" "no. does him good. you should be glad when you see him writing." "if," said rose, "i _could_ see 'im. but i've bin settin' here thinkin'. i lie awake sometimes at night till i'm terrified wonderin' wot's 'appenin', and whether 'is brain won't give way with 'im drivin' it. you see, we 'ad a lodger once and 'e overworked 'is brain and 'ad to be sent orf quick to the asylum. that's wot's frightened me." "but i don't suppose the lodger's brain was a bit like mr. tanqueray's." "that's wot i keep sayin' to myself. people's brains is different. but there's been times when i could have taken that old book away from him and hidden it, thinkin' that might be for his good." "it wouldn't be for his good." "no," said rose, "i'm not that certain that it would. that's why i don't do it." she became pensive. "besides, it's 'is pleasure. why, it's all the pleasure he's got." she looked up at jane. her thoughts swam in her large eyes. "it's awful, isn't it," said she, "not knowin' wot really is for people's good?" "i'm afraid we must trust them to know best." "well," said rose, "i'll just let 'im alone. that's safest." jane rose. "you mustn't worry," said she. "i don't," said rose. "he hates worryin'." she looked up again into jane's face as one beholding the calm face of wisdom. "you've done me good," said she. jane stooped and kissed her. she kissed tanqueray's wife. "do you know," she said, "you are what i thought you would be." rose's eyes grew rounder. "and what's that?" "something very sweet and nice." rose's face was a soft mist of smiles and blushes. "fancy that," she said. "why did you let her go away without telling me?" said tanqueray, half-an-hour later. "i didn't think," said rose. "we got talking." "what did you talk about?" she would not tell. xviii she had known all the time that if she was not to go on thinking about george tanqueray she must see his wife. when she had once thoroughly realized his wife it would be easier to give him up to her. it was george who had tried to prevent her realizing rose. he, for his part, refused to be given up to rose or in any way identified with her. nina was right. his marriage had made no difference to george. but now that she realized rose, it made all the difference to jane. rose was realized so completely that she turned george out of the place he persisted in occupying in jane's mind. jane had not allowed herself to feel that there was anything to be sorry about in george's marriage. she was afraid of having to be sorry for george, because, in that case, there would be no end to her thinking about him. but if there was any sorrow in george's marriage it was not going to affect george. she would not have to be sorry about him. like nina, jane was sorry for the woman. that little figure strayed in and out of jane's mind without disturbing her renewed communion with hambleby. up till now she had contrived to keep the very existence of hambleby a secret from her publishers. but they had got wind of him somehow, and had written many times inquiring when he would be ready? as if she could tell, as if her object was to get him ready, and not rather to prolong the divine moments of his creation. she would have liked to have kept him with her in perpetual manuscript, for in this state he still seemed a part of herself. publicity of any sort was a profanation. when published he would be made to stand in shop windows coarsely labelled, offering himself for sale at four-and-six; he would go into the houses of people who couldn't possibly appreciate him, and would suffer unspeakable things at their hands. as the supreme indignity, he would be reviewed. and she, his creator, would be living on him, profiting by his degradation at percentages which made her blush. to be thinking of what hambleby would "fetch" was an outrage to his delicate perfection. but she had to think of it; and after all, when she had reckoned it up, he would not "fetch" so very much. she had failed to gather in one half of the golden harvest. the serial rights of hambleby lay rotting in the field. george used to manage all these dreadful things for her. for though george was not much cleverer than she he liked to think he was. it was his weakness to imagine that he had a head for business. and in the perversity of things he had really done better for her than he had ever done for himself. that was the irony of it; when, if she could, she would have taken her luck and shared it with him. anyhow, business without george had been very uninteresting; and therefore she had not attended to it. there had been opportunities as golden as you please, but she had not seized them. there had been glorious openings for hambleby, far-reaching prospects, noble vistas, if only he had been born six months sooner. and when george said that hambleby would be popular, he was, of course, only tormenting her. he never meant half of the unpleasant things he said. it was now april. hambleby waited only for the crowning chapter. the arrangements for his publication had been made, all but the date, which was left unsettled, in case at the last moment a new opening should be found. at four o'clock on an april afternoon jane was meditating on her affairs when the staircase bell rang somewhat imperiously. it sounded like somebody determined to get in. a month ago she would have taken no notice of it. now she was afraid not to open her door lest tanqueray should be there. it was not tanqueray. it was hugh brodrick. for a second she wondered at him, not taking him in. she had forgotten that brodrick existed. it was his eyes she recognized him by. they were fixed on her, smiling at her wonder. he stood on the little square of landing between the door and the foot of the staircase. "of course," he said. "you're just going out?" "no, do come in." "may i? i don't believe you know in the least who i am." "i do, really. i'm very glad to see you." he followed her up the stairs and into her sitting-room, the small white-painted sitting-room, with its three straight windows looking on the square. he went to one of the windows and looked out. "yes," he said, "there is a charm about it." he spoke as if his mind had been long occupied with this place she lived in; as if they had disputed together many times as to the attraction of kensington square, and he had been won over, at last, reluctantly, to her view. it all strengthened the impression he gave of being absorbed in her. he turned to her. "you like living here? all alone? cut off from everybody?" she remembered then how they had really discussed this question. "i like it very much indeed." "well----" (he said it sadly.) "do you write in this room? at that table?" "yes." he looked at the table as if he thought it all very interesting and very incomprehensible and very sad. he looked at the books on the shelf close to the table and read george tanqueray's name on them. he frowned slightly at the books and turned away. she sat down. he did not take the chair she indicated, but chose another where he could see her rather better. he was certainly a man who knew his own mind. "i've called," he said, "a great many times. but i've always missed you." "so at last you gave it up? like everybody else." "does it look as if i'd given it up?" she could not say it did. "no," he said. "i never give anything up. in that i'm not like everybody else." he wasn't, she reflected. and yet somehow he ought to have been. there was nothing so very remarkable about him. he smiled. "i believe," he said, "you thought i was the man come to tune the piano." "did i look as if i did?" "a little." "do i now?" she was beginning to like brodrick. "not so much. as it happens, i have come partly for the pleasure of seeing you and partly--to discuss, if you don't mind, some business." jane was aware of a certain relief. if it was that he came for---- "i don't know whether you've heard that i'm bringing out a magazine?" "oh yes. i remember you were bringing it out----" "i was thinking of bringing it out when i last met you. it may interest you, because it's to have nothing in it that isn't literature. i'm going in for novels, short stories, essays, poems. no politics." "won't that limit your circulation?" "of course it'll limit it. still, it's not easy to keep honest if you go in for politics." "i see. rather than not be honest you prefer to limit your circulation?" he blushed like a man detected in some meanness; the supreme meanness of vaunting his own honesty. "oh, well, i don't know about that. politics means my brother-in-law. if i keep them out i keep him out, and run the thing my own way. i dare say that's all there is in it." certainly she liked him. he struck her as powerful and determined. with his magazine, he had the air of charging, sublimely, at the head of the forlorn hope of literature. "it's taken me all this time to get the capital together. but i've got it." "yes. you would get it." he looked up gravely inquiring. "you strike me as being able to get things." he flushed with pleasure. "do i? i don't know. if i can get the authors i want i believe i can make the magazine one of the big things of the century." he said it quietly, as if inspired by caution rather than enthusiasm. "_they_'ll make it--if i can get them." "are they so difficult?" "the ones i want are. i don't want any but the best." she smiled. "it's all very well to smile; but this kind of magazine hasn't really been tried before. there's room for it." "oh, oceans of _room_." "and it will have all the room there is. now's its moment. all the good old magazines are dead." "and gone to heaven because they were so good." "because they were old. my magazine will be young." "there has been frightful mortality among the young." "i know the things you mean. they were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. my magazine will be really young. it's the young writers that i want. and there isn't one of them i want as much as you." she seemed to have hardly heard him. "have you asked mr. tanqueray?" "not yet. you're the first i've asked. the very first." "you should have asked him first." "i didn't want him first." "you should have wanted him. why" (she persisted), "did you come to me before him?" "because you're so much more valuable to me." "in what way?" "your name is better known." "it oughtn't to be. if it's names you want----" she gave him a string of them. "your name stands for more." "and mr. tanqueray's? does it not stand?" he hesitated. she insisted. "if mine does." "i am corrupt," said brodrick, "and mercenary and brutal." "i wish you weren't," said she, so earnestly that he laughed. "my dear miss holland, we cannot blink the fact that you have a name and he hasn't." "or that my name sells and his doesn't. is that it?" "not altogether. if i couldn't get you i'd try to get him." "would you? how do you know that you're going to get me?" he smiled. "i don't. i only know that i'm prepared, if i may say so, to pay for you." "oh," she said, "it isn't that." he smiled again at her horror. "i know it isn't that. still----" he named a round sum, a sum so perfect in its roundness that it took her breath away. with such a sum she could do all that she wanted for her sister effy at once, and secure herself against gross poverty for years. "it's more than we could give mr. tanqueray." "is it?" "much more." "that's what's so awful," she said. he noticed how she clenched her hands as she said it. "it's not my fault, is it?" "oh--i don't care whose fault it is!" "but you care?" "yes." she almost whispered it. he was struck by that sudden drop from vehemence to pathos. "he is a very great friend of yours?" "yes." "and--he's just married, isn't he?" "yes. and he isn't very well off. i don't think he could afford----" she said. he coloured painfully as if she had suspected him of a desire to traffic in tanqueray's poverty. "we should pay him very well," he said. "his book" (she pressed it on him), "is not arranged for." "and yours is?" "practically it is. the contract's drawn up, but the date's not settled." "if the date's not settled, surely i've still a chance?" "and he," she said, "has still a chance if--i fail you?" [illustration: "and he," she said, "has still a chance if--i fail you?"] "of course--if you _fail_ me." "and supposing that i hadn't got a book?" "but you have." "supposing?" "then i should fall back on mr. tanqueray." "fall back on him!--the date is settled." "but i thought----" "_i_'ve settled it." "oh. and it can't be unsettled?" "it can't--possibly." "why not?" she meditated. "because--it would spoil the chances of the book." "i see. the chances of the book." their eyes met in conflict. it was as if they were measuring each other's moral value. "i should make you a bigger offer, miss holland," he said; "only i believe you don't want that." "no. certainly i don't want that." he paused. "do you mind telling me if you've any other chance?" "none. not the ghost of one." "so that, but for this all-important question of the date, i might have had you?" "you might have had me." "i'm almost glad," he said, "to have lost you--that way." "which way?" said she. at that moment a servant of the house brought in tea. she announced that mr. nicholson was down-stairs and would like to see miss holland. "very well. you'll stay?" jane said to brodrick. he did. he was, jane reflected, the sort of man who stayed. "here's mr. brodrick," said she, as nicky entered. "he's going to make all our fortunes." "his own, too, i hope," said brodrick. but he looked sulky, as if he resented nicholson's coming in. "of course," he said, "they tell me the whole thing's a dream, a delusion, that it won't pay. but i know how to make it pay. the reason why magazines go smash is because they're owned by men with no business connections, no business organization, no business capacity. i couldn't do it if i hadn't the 'telegraph' at my back. practically i make the paper pay for the magazine." and he went into it, in his quick, quiet voice, expounding and expanding his scheme, laying it down fairly and squarely, with lucidity but no apparent ardour. it was nicky who was excited. jane could see cupidity in nicky's eyes as brodrick talked about his magazine. brodrick dwelt now on the commercial side of it which had no interest for nicky. yet nicky was excited. he wanted badly to get into brodrick's magazine, and brodrick wanted, brodrick was determined to keep him out. there was a brief struggle between nicky's decency and his desire; and then nicky's desire and brodrick's determination fairly skirmished together in the open. brodrick tried heavily to keep nicky off it. but nicky hovered airily, intangibly about it. he fanned it as with wings; when brodrick dropped it he picked it up, he sustained it, he kept it flying high. every movement intimated in nicky's most exquisite manner that if brodrick really meant it, if he had positively surrendered to the expensive dream, if he wanted, in short, to keep it up and keep it high, he couldn't be off letting nicky in. brodrick's shameless intention had been to out-stay nicky. and as long as nicky's approaches were so delicate as to provoke only delicate evasions, brodrick stayed. but in the end poor nicky turned desperate and put it to him point-blank. "was there, or was there not to be a place for poets in the magazine?" at that brodrick got up and went. "nicky," said jane, as the door closed on the retreating editor, "he came for my book, and i've made him take george tanqueray's instead." "i wish," said he, "you'd make him take my poems. but you can't. nobody can _make_ brodrick do anything he doesn't want to." "oh----" said jane, and dismissed brodrick. "it's ages since i've seen you." "i heard that you were immersed, and so i kept away." "that was very good of you," said she. it struck her when she had said it that perhaps it was not altogether what nicky would have liked her to say. "i _was_ immersed," she said, "in hambleby." "is he finished?" "all but. i'm waiting to put a crown upon his head." "were you by any chance making it--the crown?" "i haven't even begun to make it." "i shan't spoil him then if i stay?" "no. i doubt if anything could spoil him now." "you've got him so safe?" "so safe. and yet, nicky, there are moments when i can hardly bear to think of hambleby for fear he shouldn't be all right. it's almost as if he came too easily." "he couldn't. all my best things come," said nicky "--like _that_!" a furious sweep of nicky's arm simulated the onrush of his inspiration. "oh, nicky, how splendid it must be to be so certain." "it is," said nicky solemnly. after all, it argued some divine compensation somewhere that a thing so destitute should remain unaware of its destitution, that a creature so futile and diminutive should be sustained by this conviction of his greatness. for he _was_ certain. nothing could annihilate the illusion by which nicky lived. but it was enough to destroy all certainty in anybody else, and there were moments when the presence of nicky had this shattering effect on jane. she could not have faced him until hambleby was beyond his power to slay. but nicky, so far from enlarging on his certainty, meditated with his eyes fixed on the clock. "you don't dine, do you," he said suddenly, "till half-past seven?" "you'll stay, won't you?" "i think i mustn't, thanks. i only wanted to know how long i had." "you've really half-an-hour, if you _won't_ dine." "i say, you're not expecting anybody else?" "i didn't expect mr. brodrick. i've kept everybody out so long that they've left off coming." "i wonder," said he, still meditating, "if _i_'ve come too soon." she held her breath. nicky's voice was charged with a curious emotion. "i knew," he went on, "it wasn't any use my coming as long as you were immersed. i wouldn't for worlds do anything that could possibly injure your career." "oh--my career----" "the question is," he meditated, "would it?" "your coming, nicky?" "my not keeping away. i suppose i ought to be content to stand aside and watch it, your genius, when it's so tremendous. i've no right to get in its way----" "you don't--you don't." "i wouldn't. i always should be standing aside and watching. that," said nicky, "would be, you see, my attitude." "dear nicky," she murmured, "it's a beautiful attitude. it couldn't--your attitude--be anything but beautiful." "only, of course," he added, "i'd be there." "but you are. you are there. and it's delightful to have you." his face, which had turned very white, flushed, but not with pleasure. it quivered with some sombre and sultry wave of pain. "i meant," he said, "if i were always there." his eyes searched her. she would not look at him. "nobody," she said, "can be--always." "you wouldn't know it. you wouldn't see me--when you were immersed." "i'm afraid," she said, "i always am, i always shall be--immersed." "won't there be moments?" "oh, moments! very few." "i wouldn't care how few there were," he said. "i know there can't be many." she understood him. there was nothing on earth like nicky's delicacy. he was telling her that he would accept any terms, the very lowest; that he knew how tanqueray had impoverished her; that he could live on moments, the moments tanqueray had left. "there are none, nicky. none," she said. "i see this isn't one of them." "all the moments--when there are any--will be more or less like this. i'm sorry," she said. "so am i," said he. it was as if they were saying they were sorry he could not dine. so monstrous was nicky's capacity for illusion that he went away thinking he had given jane up for the sake of her career. and jane tried to think of nicky and be sorry for him. but she couldn't. she was immoderately happy. she had given up brodrick's magazine and brodrick's money for tanqueray's sake. tanks would have his chance. he would be able to take a house, and then that little wife of his wouldn't have to sit with her hands before her, fretting her heart away because of tanks. she was pleased, too, because she had made brodrick do what he hadn't meant and didn't want to do. but as she lay in bed that night, not thinking of brodrick, she saw suddenly brodrick's eyes fixed on her with a look in them which she had not regarded at the time; and she heard him saying, in that queer, quiet voice of his, "i'm almost glad to have lost you this way." "i wonder," she said to herself, "if he really spotted me." xix brodrick's house, moor grange, stood on the roehampton side of putney heath, just discernible between the silver and green of the birches. with its queer, red-tiled roofs, pitched at every possible slope, white, rough-cast, many-cornered walls, green storm-shutters, lattice windows of many sorts and sizes, brodrick's house had all the brilliant eccentricity of the twentieth century. but brodrick's garden was at least a hundred years older than his house. it had a beautiful green lawn with a lime-tree in the middle and a stone-flagged terrace at the back overlooking the north end of the heath. behind the house there was a kitchen garden that had survived modernity. brodrick's garden was kept very smooth and very straight, no impudent little flowers hanging out of their beds, no dissolute straggling of creepers upon walls. even the sweet-peas at the back were trained to a perfect order and propriety. and in brodrick's house propriety and order were carried to the point of superstition. nothing in that queer-cornered, modern exterior was ever out of place. no dust ever lay on floor or furniture. all the white-painted woodwork was exquisitely white. time there was measured by a silver-chiming clock that struck the quiet hours with an infallible regularity. and yet brodrick was not a tidy nor a punctual man. in his library the spirit of order contended against fearful odds. for brodrick lived in his library, the long, book-lined, up-stairs room that ran half the length of the house on the north side. but even there, violate as he would his own sanctuary, the indestructible propriety renewed itself by a diurnal miracle. he found books restored to their place, papers sorted, everything an editor could want lying ready to his hand. for the spirit of order rose punctually to perform its task. but in the drawing-room its struggles and its triumph were complete. it had been, so brodrick's sisters told him, a man's idea of a drawing-room. and now there were feminine touches, so incongruous and scattered that they seemed the work of a person establishing herself tentatively, almost furtively, by small inconspicuous advances and instalments. a little work-table stood beside the low settle in the corner by the fireplace. gay, shining chintz covered the ugly chairs. there were cushions here and there where a woman's back most needed them. books, too, classics in slender duo-decimo, bought for their cheapness, novels (from the circulating library), of the kind that brodrick never read. on the top of a writing-table, flagrantly feminine in its appointments, there stood, well in sight of the low chair, a photograph of brodrick which brodrick could not possibly have framed and put there. the woman who entered this room now had all the air of being its mistress; she moved in it so naturally and with such assurance, as in her sphere. you would have judged her occupied with some mysterious personal predilections with regard to drawing-rooms. she paused in her passage to reinstate some article dishonoured by the parlour-maid, to pat a cushion into shape and place a chair better to her liking. at each of these small fastidious operations she frowned like one who resents interference with the perfected system of her own arrangements. she sat down at the writing-table and took from a pigeonhole a sheaf of tradesmen's bills. these she checked and docketed conscientiously, after entering their totals in a book marked "household." from all these acts she seemed to draw some secret enjoyment and satisfaction. here she was evidently in a realm secure from the interference of the incompetent. with a key attached to her person she now unlocked the inmost shrine of the writing-table. a small squat heap of silver and of copper sat there like the god of the shrine. she took it in her hand and counted it and restored it to its consecrated seat. she then made a final entry: "cash in hand, thirty-five shillings." she sat smiling in tender contemplation of this legend. it stood for the savings of the last month, effected by her deft manipulation of the household. there was no suggestion of cupidity in her smile, nor any hint of economy adored and pursued for its own sake. she was gertrude collett, the lady who for three years had acted as brodrick's housekeeper, or, as she now preferred to call herself, his secretary. she had contrived, out of this poor material of his weekly bills, to fashion for herself a religion and an incorporeal romance. she raised her face to the photograph of brodrick, as if spiritually she rendered her account to him. and brodrick's face, from the ledge of the writing-table, looked over gertrude's head with an air of being unmoved by it all, with eyes intent on their own object. she, brodrick's secretary, might have been about five-and-thirty. she was fair with the fairness which is treacherous to women of her age, which suffers when they suffer. but gertrude's skin still held the colours of her youth as some strong fabric holds its dye. her face puzzled you; it was so broad across the cheek-bones that you would have judged it coarse; it narrowed suddenly in the jaws, pointing her chin to subtlety. her nose, broad also across the nostrils and bridge, showed a sharp edge in profile; it was alert, competent, inquisitive. but there was mystery again in the long-drawn, pale-rose lines of her mouth. a wide mouth with irregular lips, not coarse, but coarsely finished. its corners must once have drooped with pathos, but this tendency was overcome or corrected by the serene habit of her smile. it was not the face of a dreamer. yet at the moment you would have said she dreamed. her eyes, light coloured, slightly prominent, stared unsheltered under their pale lashes and insufficient brows. they were eyes that at first sight had no depths in them. yet they seemed to hold vapour. they dreamed. they showed her dream. she started as the silver-chiming clock struck the quarter. she went up-stairs to the room that was her own, and examined herself carefully in the looking-glass. then she did something to her hair. waved slightly and kept in place by small amber-coloured combs, gertrude's hair, though fragile, sustained the effect of her almost scandinavian fairness. next she changed her cotton blouse for an immaculate muslin one. as she drew down the blouse and smoothed it under the clipping belt, she showed a body flat in the back, sharp-breasted, curbed in the waist; the body of a thoroughly competent, serviceable person. her face now almost suggested prettiness, as she turned and turned its little tilted profile between two looking-glasses. at half-past three she was seated at her place in brodrick's library. a table was set apart for her and her type-writer on a corner by the window. the editor was at work at his own table in the centre of the room. he did not look up at her as she came in. his eyes were lowered, fixed on the proof he was reading. once, as he read, he shrugged his shoulders slightly, and once he sighed. then he called her to him. she rose and came, moving dreamily as if drawn, yet holding herself stiffly and aloof. he continued to gaze at the proof. "you sat up half the night to correct this, i suppose?" "have i done it very badly?" he did not tell her that she had, that he had spent the best part of his morning correcting her corrections. she was an inimitable housekeeper, and a really admirable secretary. but her weakness was that she desired to be considered admirable and inimitable in everything she undertook. it would distress her to know that this time she had not succeeded, and he did not like distressing people who were dependent on him. it used to be so easy, so mysteriously easy, to distress miss collett; but she had got over that; she was used to him now; she had settled down into the silent and serene performance of her duties. and she had brought to her secretarial work a silence and serenity that were invaluable to a man who detested argument and agitation. so, instead of insisting on her failure, he tried to diminish her disturbing sense of it; and when she inquired if she had done her work very badly, he smiled and said, no, she had done it much too well. "too well?" she flushed as she echoed him. "yes. you've corrected all mr. tanqueray's punctuation and nearly all his grammar." "but it's all wrong. look there--and there." "how do you know it's all wrong?" "but--it's so simple. there are rules." "yes. but mr. tanqueray's a great author, and great authors are born to break half the rules there are. what you and i have got to know is when they _may_ break them, and when they mayn't." a liquid film swam over gertrude's eyes, deepening their shallows. it was the first signal of distress. "it's all right," he said. "i wanted you to do it. i wanted to see what you could do." he considered her quietly. "it struck me you might perhaps prefer it to your other duties." "what made you think that?" "i didn't think. i only wondered. well----" the next half-hour was occupied with the morning's correspondence, till brodrick announced that they had no time for more. "it's only just past four," she said. "i know; but----is there anything for tea?" he spoke vaguely like a man in a dream. "what an opinion you have of my housekeeping," she said. "your housekeeping, miss collett, is perfection." she flushed with pleasure, so that he kept it up. "everything," he said, "runs on greased wheels. i don't know how you do it." "oh, it's easy enough to do." "and it doesn't matter if a lady comes to tea?" he took up a pencil and began to sharpen it. "is there," said miss collett, "a lady coming to tea?" "yes. and we'll have it in the garden. tea, i mean." "and who," said she, "is the lady?" "miss jane holland." brodrick did not look up. he was absorbed in his pencil. "another author?" "another author," said brodrick to his pencil. she smiled. the editor's attitude to authors was one of prolonged amusement. prodigious people, authors, in brodrick's opinion. more than once, by way of relieving his somewhat perfunctory communion with miss collett, he had discussed the eccentricity, the vanity, the inexhaustible absurdity of authors. so that it was permissible for her to smile. "you are not," he said, "expecting either of my sisters?" he said it in his most casual, most uninterested voice. and yet she detected an undertone of anxiety. he did not want his sisters to be there when miss holland came. she had spent three years in studying his inflections and his wants. "not specially to-day," she said. brodrick became manifestly entangled in the process of his thought. the thought itself was as yet obscure to her. she inquired, therefore, where miss holland was to be "shown in." was she a drawing-room author or a library author? in the perfect and unspoken conventions of brodrick's house the drawing-room was miss collett's place, and the library was his. tea in the drawing-room meant that he desired miss collett's society; tea in the library that he preferred his own. there were also rules for the reception of visitors. men were shown into the library and stayed there. great journalistic ladies like miss caroline bickersteth were shown into the drawing-room. little journalistic ladies with dubious manners, calling, as they did, solely on business, were treated as men and confined strictly to the library. brodrick's stare of surprise showed gertrude that she had blundered. he had a superstitious reverence for those authors who, like mr. tanqueray, were great. "my dear miss collett, do you know who she is? the drawing-room, of course, and all possible honour." she laughed. she had cultivated for brodrick's sake the art of laughter, and prided herself upon knowing the precise moments to be gay. "i see," she said. and yet she did not see. how could there be any honour if he did not want his sisters to be there? "that means the best tea-service and my best manners?" he didn't know, he said, that she had any but the best. how good they were she let him see when he presented miss holland on her arrival, her trailing, conspicuous arrival. gertrude had never given him occasion to feel that his guests could have a more efficient hostess than his secretary. she spoke of the pleasure it gave her to see miss holland, and of the honour that she felt, and of how she had heard of miss holland from mr. brodrick. there was no becoming thing that gertrude did not say. and all the time she was aware of brodrick's eyes fixed on miss holland with that curious lack of diffuseness in their vision. brodrick was carrying it off by explaining gertrude to miss holland. "miss collett," he said, "is a wonderful lady. she's always doing the most beautiful things, so quietly that you never knew they're done." "does anybody," said jane, "know how the really beautiful things are done?" "there's a really beautiful tea," said miss collett gaily, "in the garden. there are scones and the kind of cake you like." "you see," brodrick said, "how she spoils me, how i lie on roses." "you'd better come," said miss collett, "while the scones are still hot." "while," said jane, "the roses are still fresh." he held the door open for her, and on the threshold she turned to miss collett who followed her. "are you sure," said she, "that he's the horrid sybarite you think him?" "i am," said brodrick, "whatever miss collett thinks me. if it pleases her to think i'm a sybarite i've got to _be_ a sybarite." "i see. and when the rose-leaves are crumpled you bring them to miss collett, and she irons them out, and makes them all smooth again, so that you don't know they're the same rose-leaves?" "the rose-leaves never are crumpled." "except by some sudden, unconsidered movement of your own?" "my movements," said brodrick, "are never sudden and unconsidered." "what? never?" miss collett looked a little surprised at this light-handed treatment of the editor. and jane observed brodrick with a new interest as they sat there in the garden and miss collett poured out tea. "mr. brodrick," she said to herself, "is going to marry miss collett, though he doesn't know it." by the end of the afternoon it seemed to her an inevitable consummation, the marriage of mr. brodrick and miss collett. she could almost see it working, the predestined attraction of the eternally compatible, the incomparably fit. and when brodrick left off taking any notice of miss collett, and finally lured jane away into the library on the flimsiest pretence, she wondered what game he was up to. perhaps in his innocence he was blind to miss collett's adoration. he was not sure of miss collett. he was trying to draw her. jane, intensely interested, advanced from theory to theory of brodrick and miss collett while brodrick removed himself to the writing-table, and turned on her a mysterious back. "i want to show you something," he said. she went to him. in the bared centre of the writing-table he had placed a great pile of manuscript. he drew out his chair for her, so that she could sit down and look well at the wonder. her heart leaped to the handwriting and to george tanqueray's name on the title-page. "you've seen it?" he said. "no. mr. tanqueray never shows his work." from some lair in the back of the desk he swept forward a prodigious array of galley proofs. tanqueray's novel was in the first number of the "monthly review." "oh!" she cried, looking up at him. "i've pleased you?" he said. "you have pleased me very much." she rose and turned away, overcome as by some desired and unexpected joy. he followed her, making a cushioned place for her in the chair by the hearth, and seated himself opposite her. "i was very glad to do it," he said simply. "it will do you more good than hambleby," she said. "you know i did not think so," said he. and there was a pause between them. "mr. brodrick," she said presently, "do you really want a serial from me?" "do i want it!" "as much as you think you do?" "i always," said he, "want things as much as i think i do." she smiled, wondering whether he thought he wanted miss collett as much as he obviously did. "what?" he said. "are you going to let me have the next?" "i had thought of it. if you really do----" "have you had any other offers?" "yes; several. but----" "you must remember mine is only a new venture. and you may do better----" it was odd, but a curious uncertainty, a modesty had come upon him since she last met him. he had been then so absurd, so arrogant about his magazine. "i don't want to do better." "of course, if it's only a question of terms----" it was incredible, brodrick's depreciating himself to a mere question of terms. she flushed at this dreadful thought. "it isn't," she said. "oh! i didn't mean _that_." "you never mean that. which is why i must think of it for you. i can at least offer you higher terms." "but," she persisted, "i should hate to take them. i _want_ you to have the thing. that's to say i want _you_ to have it. you must not go paying me more for that." "i see," he said, "you want to make up." she looked at him. he was smiling complacently, in the fulness of his understanding of her. "my dear miss holland," he went on, "there must be no making up. nothing of that sort between you and me." "there isn't," she said. "what is there to make up for? for your not getting me?" he smiled again as if that idea amused him. "or," said she, "for my making you take mr. tanqueray?" "you didn't _make_ me," he said. "i took him to please you." "well," she said; "and you'll take me now, to please me." she rose. "i must say good-bye to miss collett. how nice," she said, "miss collett is." "isn't she?" said he. he saw her politely to the station. that evening he drank his coffee politely in the drawing-room with miss collett. "do you know," he said, "miss holland thinks you're nice." to his wonder miss collett did not look as if the information gave her any joy. "did she say so?" "yes. do you think _her_ nice?" "of course i do." "what," said he, "do you really think of her?" he was in the habit of asking miss collett what she thought of people. it interested him to know what women thought, especially what they thought of other women. it was in the spirit of their old discussions that she now replied. "you can see she is a great genius. they say geniuses are bad to live with. but i do not think she would be." he did not answer. he was considering very profoundly the question she had raised. which was precisely what miss collett meant that he should do. as the silver-chiming clock struck ten she rose and said good-night. she never allowed these sittings to be prolonged past ten. neither did brodrick. "and i am not to read any more proofs?" she said. "do you like reading them?" she smiled. "it's not because i like it. i simply wanted to save you." "you do save me most things." "i try," she said sweetly, "to save you all." he smiled now. "there are limits," he said, "even to your power of saving me. and to my capacity for being saved." the words were charged with a significance that brodrick himself was not aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for the utterance of a divination not his own. his secretary understood him better than he did himself. she had spent three years in understanding him. and now, for the first time in three years, her lucidity was painful. she could not contemplate serenely the thing she thought she had seen. therefore she drew a veil over it and refused to believe that it was there. "he did not mean anything," said gertrude to herself. "he is not the sort of man who means things." which was true. xx brodrick, living on putney heath, was surrounded by his family. it was only fifteen minutes' walk from his front door to his brother john's house in augustus road, wimbledon; only five minutes from his back door to henry's house in roehampton lane. you went by a narrow foot-track down the slope to get to henry. you crossed the heath by wimbledon common to get to john. if john and henry wanted to get to each other, they had to pass by brodrick's house. moor grange was a half-way house, the great meeting-place of all the brodricks. one fine warm sunday in mid-may, about four o'clock, all the brodricks except hugh were assembled on hugh's lawn. there was mr. john brodrick, the eldest brother, the head of the firm of brodrick and brodrick, electrical engineers. there was dr. henry brodrick, who came next to john. he had brought mrs. heron, their sister (mrs. heron lived with henry, because mr. heron had run away with the governess, to the unspeakable scandal of the brodricks). there was mrs. louis levine, who came next to mrs. heron. there was mrs. john brodrick, not to be separated from her husband, who, in a decorous dumbness and secrecy, adored her; and mr. louis levine, who owed his position among the brodricks to the very properly apparent devotion of his wife. and there were children about. eddy and winny heron, restless, irrepressible in their young teens, sprawled at their mother's feet and hung over her in attitudes of affection. one very small levine trotted to and fro on fat legs over the lawn. the other, too small to run, could be seen in the background, standing in gertrude collett's lap and trampling on her. the levines had come over from st. john's wood, packed tight in their commodious brand-new motor-car, the symbol of levine's prosperity. so that all brodrick's family were at putney this afternoon. they were sitting in the delicate shadow of the lime-tree. outside, the lawn was drenched with light, light that ran quivering into the little inlets and pools among the shadows. the cropped grass shone clear as emerald, and all the garden showed clear-cut and solid and stable in its propriety and order. still more distinct, more stable and more solid, more ineradicably fixed in order and propriety, were the four figures of the brodricks. sitting there, in a light that refused, in spite of the lime-tree, to lend itself to any mystery or enchantment, they maintained themselves in a positively formidable reality. all these brodricks had firm, thick-skinned faces in which lines came slowly, and were few but strong. faces, they were, of men who have lived in absolute sobriety and sanity, untorn by any temptation to live otherwise; faces of women to whom motherhood has brought the ultimate content. comfortably material persons, sitting in a deep peace, not to be rapt from it by any fantasy, nor beguiled by any dream, they paid only in a high morality their debt to the intangible. this afternoon, in spite of themselves, they were roused somewhat from the peace they sat in. they were expecting somebody. "i suppose, when she arrives, we shall all have to sit at the lady's feet," said mrs. levine. "_i_'ve no objection," said the doctor; "after what she's done." "it was pretty decent of her," said levine. he was dark, nervous and solemn-eyed, a lean man of his race, and handsome. sophy brodrick had not loved her husband when she married him. she adored him now, because of the beauty that had passed from him into her children. "i say, uncle louis, you _might_ tell me what she _did_ do," said eddy heron. "she got your uncle hughy out of a tight place, my boy." "i say, what's _he_ been doing?" mr. levine smiled inscrutably, while his wife shook her head at him. "he's been going it, has he? good old uncle hughy!" eddy's mother thought it would be nice if he and winny went down the heath road to meet uncle hughy and miss holland. whereupon eddy embraced his mother, being unable to agree with her. "you really believe," said mr. john brodrick, who seemed anxious to be sure of his facts before he committed himself, "you really believe that if it had not been for this lady he'd have had to give it up?" "well," said levine judicially, "she practically saved it. you see he _would_ start it with george tanqueray. and who cares about george tanqueray? that's what wrecked him. i told him at the time it was sheer lunacy, but he wouldn't listen to me. _why_" (levine spoke in a small excited voice with sudden high notes), "he hadn't subscriptions enough to float the thing for twenty-four hours. as soon as he gets miss holland they go up by leaps and bounds, and it's bin goin' steady ever since. how long it'll keep goin's another thing." "i understood hugh to say," said john, "that the arrangements involved some considerable sacrifice to the lady." "well, you see, he'd been a bit of an ass. he'd made her a ridiculous offer, an offer _we_ simply couldn't afford, and we had to tell her so." "and then," said sophy, "you might as well mention that she gave it him for what you _could_ afford." "she certainly let him have it very cheap." he ruminated. "uncommonly cheap--considering what her figure is." eddy wanted to know what miss holland's figure had to do with his uncle hughy. winny, round-eyed with wonder, inquired if it was beautiful, and was told that it was fairly beautiful, a tidy figure, a nice round figure, like her aunt sophy's. "that," said john, "was _very_ decent of her." "very," said the gentle lady, mrs. john. "it was splendid," said mrs. heron. the doctor meditated. "i wonder _why_ she did it," said the doctor. his brother-in-law explained. "oh, she thought she'd let him in for tanqueray." "let him _in_?" "don't you see," said mrs. heron, "it was her idea of honour." "a woman's idea of honour," said the doctor. "you needn't criticize it," said his sister sophy. "i don't," said the doctor. "i can tell you," said levine, "what with her idea of honour and hugh's idea of honour, the office had a pretty rough time of it till they got the business fixed." "with hugh's _ideas_," said john, "he's hardly likely to make this thing pay, is he? especially if he's going to bar politics." he said it importantly. by a manner, by wearing spectacles, and brushing his hair back in two semi-circles from his forehead, mr. john brodrick contrived to appear considerably more important than he was. "ah, he's made a mistake there," said the doctor. "that's what _i_ tell him." levine was more excited than ever. "i should think he might be allowed to do what he likes," said sophy. "after all, it's _his_ magazine." mr. levine's face remained supernaturally polite while it guarded his opinion that it wasn't his brother-in-law's magazine at all. they had disagreed about tanqueray. they had disagreed about everything connected with the magazine, from the make-up of the first number to the salary of the sub-editor. they had almost quarreled about what levine called "miss holland's price." and now, when his wife said that it was sunday--and if they were going to talk business all the afternoon--she was told that hugh's magazine wasn't business. it was hugh's game. (his dreadfully expensive, possibly ruinous game.) "then," she said, "you might let him play it. i'm sure he works hard enough on your horrid old 'telegraph.'" sophy invariably stood up for her family against her husband. but she would have stood up for her husband against all the world. "thank you, my pet." she stooped to the little three-year-old girl who trotted to and fro, offering to each of these mysteriously, deplorably preoccupied persons a flower without a stalk. it was at this moment that brodrick arrived from the station with miss holland. "is it a garden-party?" jane inquired. "no," said brodrick, "it's my family." she came on with him over the lawn. and the group rose to its feet; it broke up with little movements and murmurs, in a restrained, dignified expectancy. jane had the sense of being led towards some unaccountable triumph and acclamation. they closed round her, these unknown brodricks, inaudibly stirred, with some unspoken, incomprehensible emotion in the men's gaze and in the women's touch. the big boy and girl shared it as they came forward in their shyness, with affectionate faces and clumsy, abortive encounters of the hand. it was the whole brodrick family moved to its depths, feeling as one. it could only be so moved by the spectacle of integrity and honour and incorruptible loyalty to it. still moved, it was surrounding jane when a maid arrived with the tea-table, and the white cloth waved a signal to miss collett across the lawn. there was then a perceptible pause in the ovation as brodrick's secretary appeared. even across the lawn jane could discern trouble in miss collett's face. but miss collett's face was plastic in readjustments, and by the time she was fairly on the scene it had recaptured the habit of its smile. the smile, in greeting, covered and carried off the betraying reluctance of her hand. it implied that, if miss holland was to be set up in a high place and worshipped, miss collett was anxious to observe the appropriate ritual. having observed it, she took, with her quiet, inconspicuous assurance, the place that was her own. she gave but one sign of her trouble when dr. brodrick was heard congratulating their guest on the great serial which, said he, by "saving" the magazine, had "saved" his brother. then gertrude quivered slightly, and the blood flushed in her set face and passed as fierce heat passes through iron. while they were talking jane had opportunity to watch and wonder at the firm, consolidated society that was brodrick's family. these faces proclaimed by their resemblance the material link. mr. john brodrick was a more thick-set, an older, graver-lined, and grizzled hugh, a hugh who had lost his sombre fixity of gaze. dr. henry brodrick was a tall, attenuated john, with a slightly, ever so slightly receding chin. mrs. heron was hugh again made feminine and slender. she had hugh's features, refined and diminished. she had hugh's eyes, filled with some tragic sorrow of her own. her hair was white, every thread of it, though she could not have been more than forty-five. these likenesses were not so apparent at first sight in mrs. levine, the golden, full-blown flower of the brodricks. they had mixed so thoroughly and subtly that they merged in her smoothness and her roundness. and still the facial substance showed in the firm opacity of her skin, the racial soul asserted itself in her poised complacence and decision. "you don't know," she was saying, "how we're all sitting at your feet." "we are indeed," said mr. john brodrick. "very much so," said the doctor. "even little cissy," said hugh. for little cissy was bringing all her stalkless flowers to jane; smiling at her as if she alone possessed the secret of this play. brodrick watched, well-pleased, the silent traffic of their tendernesses. the others were talking about hambleby now. they had all read him. they had all enjoyed him. they all wanted more of him. "if we could only have had hambleby, miss holland," said levine. "it wasn't my fault that we didn't get him." jane remembered that this was the brother-in-law whom brodrick had wanted to keep out. he had the air of being persistently, permanently in. "of course it wasn't your fault," said she. levine then thought it necessary to say things about jane's celebrity till brodrick cut him short. "miss holland," he said, "doesn't like her celebrity. you needn't talk about it." john and henry looked graver than ever, and sophy made sweet eyes at jane. sophy's eyes--when they looked at you--were very sweet. it was through her eyes only that she apologized for her husband, whose own eyes were manifestly incapable of apologizing for anything. the brodricks seemed to tolerate their brother-in-law; and he seemed, more sublimely, to tolerate their tolerance. great efforts were now made to divert levine from the magazine. mr. john brodrick headed him off with motors and their makers; the doctor kept his half-resentful spirit moving briskly round the wimbledon golf-links; and hugh, with considerable dexterity, landed him securely on the fiscal question, where he might be relied upon to stay. but it was the baby who saw what was to be done if his parent was to be delivered from his own offensiveness. "oh, look!" cried winny. "look at baby. making such a ducky angel of himself." the baby, having sat down abruptly on the grass, was making a ducky angel of himself by wriggling along it, obliquely, as he sat. at the sight of him all the brodricks instantaneously lost their seriousness and sanity. he was captured and established as the centre of the group. and, in the great act of adoration of the baby, levine was once more united to his wife's family. his wife's family, like his wife, could forgive anything to louis levine because of the babies. it reserved its disapproval for mrs. john brodrick who had never had any; who had never done anything that was expected of her. mrs. john looked as if she had cried a great deal because of the things she had not done. she had small hazel eyes with inflamed lids, and a small high nose that was always rather red. she was well born, and she carried her low-browed, bird-like head among the brodricks with a solitary grace, and the motions of a dignified, distinguished bird. and now, in mute penitence and wistful worship, she prostrated herself before their divinity, the baby. and in the middle of it all, with amazing smiles and chuckles, the baby suddenly renounced his family and held out his arms to jane. and suddenly all the brodricks laughed. his mother laughed more than any of them. she took the baby, and set him at jane's feet; and he sat there, looking at jane, as at some object of extraordinary interest and wonder and fascination. and brodrick looked at both of them with something of the same naïf expression, and the doctor, the attenuated, meditative doctor, looked at all three, but especially at his brother. gertrude collett looked, now at brodrick and now at jane. brodrick did not see the doctor or gertrude either. it had just struck him that jane was not in the least like her portrait, _the_ portrait. he was thinking, as tanqueray had once thought, that gisborne, r. a., was an ass, and that if he could have her painted he would have her painted as she looked now. as he was trying to catch the look, gertrude came and said it was the baby's tea-time, and carried him away. and the look went from jane's face, and brodrick felt annoyed with gertrude because she had made it go. then mrs. john came up and tried very hard to talk to jane. she was nervously aware that conversation was expected of her as the wife of the head of the family, and that in this thing also she had failed him. she was further oppressed by miss holland's celebrity, and by the idea she had that miss holland must be always thinking of it and would not like to see it thus obscured by any other interest. and while mrs. john sat beside her, painfully and pensively endeavouring to converse, jane heard brodrick talking to mrs. levine. "where's gertrude gone?" he said. and mrs. levine answered, "she's indoors with the children." mrs. john was saying that miss holland must have known hambleby; and then again that no, that wasn't likely. that was what made it so wonderful that she should know. mrs. john could not have done it. she recounted sorrowfully the number of things she could not do. and through it all jane heard the others talking about gertrude. "gertrude looks very ill," said mrs. levine. "what's the matter with her?" "how should i know?" said brodrick. "ask henry." "miss collett," said the doctor solemnly, "has not consulted me." at this point mrs. heron delivered jane from mrs. john. she said she wanted miss holland to see the sweet-peas in the kitchen garden. and in the kitchen garden, among the sweet-peas, mrs. heron thanked jane on her own account for what she had done, while jane kept on saying that she had done nothing. all down the kitchen garden there was an alley of sweet-peas with a seat at the end of it, and there they sat while mrs. heron talked about her brother hugh who had been so good to her and to her children. this praise of brodrick mingled with the scent of the sweet-peas, so that jane could never again smell sweet-peas in a hot garden without hearing brodrick's praise. mrs. heron stopped abruptly, as if she could say no more, as if, indeed, she had said too much, as if she were not used to saying such things. "my brother thinks i may ask you to come and see me. will you? will you come some day and stay with me?" in spite of the voice that told her that she was being drawn, that this family of brodrick's was formidable, that she must be on her guard against all arms, stretched out to her, before she knew what she was doing jane had said, yes; she would be very glad. voices came to them then, and down the long alley between the sweet-peas she saw brodrick coming towards them with miss collett and winny heron; and jane was suddenly aware that it was getting late. it was cold, too. she shivered. miss collett offered a wrap. for a moment, in the hall of the house, jane was alone with brodrick's secretary. through the open door they could see brodrick standing on the lawn, talking to his sister. mrs. heron held him by one arm, winny dragged on the other. "those two seem devoted to mr. brodrick," said jane. "they ought to be," said miss collett, "with all he does for them. and they are. the brodricks are all like that." she looked hard at jane. "if you've done anything for them, they never forget it. they keep on paying back." jane smiled. "i imagine mr. hugh brodrick would be quite absurd about it." "oh, _he_----" gertrude raised her head. her eyes adored him. as if her pause were too profoundly revealing, she filled it up. "he'll always give more than he gets. it isn't for _you_ he gives, it's for himself. he likes giving. and when it comes to paying him back----." "that's where he has you?" "yes." and jane thought, "my dear lady, if you wouldn't treat him quite so like a god, he might have a chance to discover that he's mortal." she would have liked to have said that to miss collett. she would have liked to have taken brodrick to the seat at the end of the alley and have said to him, "it's all perfectly right. don't be an idiot and miss it. you can't do a better thing for yourself than marry her, and it's the only way, you know, you can pay her back. don't you see that you're cruel to her? that it's you that's making her ill? she can't look pretty when she's ill, but she'd be quite pretty if you made her happy." but all she said was, "he's like that, is he?" and she went out to where he waited for her. "have you _got_ to go?" he said. she said, yes, she was half expecting nina lempriere. "the fiery lady?" "yes." "you may as well stay. she won't be there," said brodrick. but jane did not stay. the whole family turned out on to the heath to see them go. at the end of the road they looked back and saw it there. sophy levine was holding up the baby to make him wave to jane. "why did you tell them?" she said reproachfully to brodrick. "because i wanted them to like you." "am i so disagreeable that they couldn't--without that?" "i wanted you," he said, "to like _them_." "i do like them." he glanced at her sidelong and softly. "tell me," she said. "what have they done to look so happy, and so perfectly at peace?" "that's it. they haven't done anything." "not to do things--that's the secret, is it?" "yes," he said, "i almost think it is." "i wonder," said she. xxi brodrick was right. nina was not there. at the moment when jane arrived, anxious and expectant, in kensington square, nina and tanqueray were sitting by the window of the room in adelphi terrace. they were both silent, both immobile in the same attitude, bowed forward, listening intently, the antagonistic pair made one in their enchantment, their absorption. a young man stood before tanqueray. he stood a little behind nina where she sat in the window-seat. one shoulder leaned beside her against the shutter. he was very tall, and as he stood there his voice, deep and rhythmic, flowed and vibrated above them, giving utterance to the thing that held them. nina could not see him where she sat. it was tanqueray who kept on looking at him with clear, contemplative eyes under brows no longer irritable. he was, tanqueray thought, rather extraordinary to look at. dressed in a loosely-fitting suit of all seasons, he held himself very straight from the waist, as if in defiance of the slackness of his build. his eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. he had the face of a celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. he had the wide mouth of a celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. his thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. his face showed a sunburn whitening. it had passed through strange climates. he had the look, this poet, of a man who had left some stupendous experience behind him; who had left many things behind him, to stride, star-gazing, on. his face revealed him as he chanted his poems. unbeautiful in detail, its effect as a whole was one of extraordinary beauty, as of some marvellously pure vessel for the spiritual fire. beside him, it struck tanqueray that nina showed more than ever a murky flame. the voice ceased, but the two remained silent for a moment. then tanqueray spoke one word, "splendid!" nina turned her head and looked up at the poet. his eyes were still following his vision. her voice recalled him. "owen," she said, "will you bring the rest? bring down all you've got." tanqueray saw as she spoke to him that there came again that betraying tenderness about her mouth; as she looked at him, her eyes lifted their hoods, revealing the sudden softness and surrender. and as tanqueray watched her he was aware that the queer eyes of the man were turned on him, rather than on nina. they looked through him, as if they saw with a lucidity even more unendurable than his, what was going on in tanqueray's soul. he said something inaudible to nina and went out of the room with a light, energetic stride. "how can you stand his eyes?" said tanqueray; "it's like being exposed to the everlasting stare of god." "it is, rather." "what's his name again?" "owen prothero." "what do you know about him." she told him what she knew. prothero was, as tanqueray saw, an unlicked celt. he had been, if tanqueray would believe it, in the indian medical service, and had flung it up before he got his pension. he had been to british central africa on a commission for investigating sleeping sickness; he spoke of it casually as if it were the sort of thing you naturally were on. he had volunteered as a surgeon in the boer war. and with it all he was what tanqueray saw. "and his address?" tanqueray inquired. "he lives here." "why shouldn't he?" he answered her challenging eyes. they shot light at him. "he is a great poet? i _was_ right?" "absolutely. he's great enough for anybody. how on earth did you get hold of him?" she was silent. she seemed to be listening for the sound of prothero's feet on the stair. he was soon with them, bringing his sheaf of manuscript. he had brought all he had got. the chanting began again and continued till the light failed. and as tanqueray listened the restless, irritable devilry passed from his face. salient, thrust forward toward prothero, it was the face of a winged creature in adoration, caught suddenly into heaven, breasting the flood of the supernal light. for tanqueray could be cruel in his contempt for all clevernesses and littlenesses, for all achievements that had the literary taint; but he was on his knees in a moment before the incorruptible divinities. he had the immortal's scent for immortality. when the chanting ceased they talked. tanqueray warned prothero of the horrors of premature renown. prothero declared that he had none. nobody knew his name. "good," said tanqueray. "celebrity's all very well at the end, when you've done the things you want to do. it's a bad beginning. it doesn't matter quite so much if you live in the country where nobody's likely to know you're celebrated till you're dead. but if you _will_ live in london, your only chance is to remain obscure." "there are in london at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand celebrated authors. there are, i imagine, about fifty distinct circles where they meet. fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each other. hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other. steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat----" "_don't_, george!" cried nina. "loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of each other. sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at each other's throats. how can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere? horrid used-up air that authors--beasts!--have breathed over and over and over again." "as if," said nina, "_we_ weren't authors." "my dear nina, nobody would think it of us. nobody would have thought it of jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated." "you'll be celebrated yourself some day." "i shall be dead," said he. "i shan't know anything about it." at this point prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he wanted to get work on a paper. he was not, he intimated, looking to his poems to keep him. on the contrary, he would have to keep them. tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were. he had no doubt about nina's poet. but there were poets and poets. there were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of immortality. and there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things most transitory. prothero was one of these. there was not much chance for him in his generation. his poems were too portentously inspired. they were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. he stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides and the courses of unknown worlds. on any reasonable calculation he could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. there was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. the form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. their harmonies, stupendous and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord. it was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still more absurd that he should think, or that nina should think, that tanqueray could get it for him. he didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. he just wrote things, things that he thought were adequately imbecile, and shot them into letter-boxes. as to what became of them, tanqueray had never seen anybody more unsolicitous, more reckless of the dark event. he went away with prothero's poems in his pocket. nina followed him and held him on the doorstep. "you do believe in him?" she said. "what's the good of _my_ believing in him? i can't help him. i can't help myself. he's got to wait, nina, like the rest of us. it won't hurt him." "it will. he can't wait, george. he's desperately poor. you must do something." "what can i do?" "there are things," she said, "that people always do." "i could offer him a five-pound note; but he wouldn't take it." "no. he wouldn't take it. you can do better than that. you can get him to meet that man of yours." "what man?" "that magazine man, brodrick." he laughed. "considering that i all but did for him and his magazine! brodrick's jane holland's man, not mine, you know. have you told jane about prothero?" "no." a faint flame leaped in her face and died. "you'd better," he said. "she can do anything with brodrick. she could even make him take a poem. why didn't you ask prothero to meet her?" "i haven't seen her for six months." "is that your fault or hers?" "neither." "he's had to wait, then, six months?" there was no escaping his diabolical lucidity. "go and see her at once," he went on, "and take prothero. that's more to the point, you know, than his seeing me. jinny is a powerful person, and then she has a way with her." again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture. "even laura can do more for him than i. she knows people on papers. take him to see laura." he was backing out of the doorway. "it was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. i promised him." her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves, was as a wild book for him to read. he was sorry for her torture. he lingered. "i'd go and speak to brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of me, and i can't blame him, poor devil." "it's no matter," she said. "i'll write to jane holland." "do. she'll get him work on brodrick's paper." he went away, meditating on nina and her medical, surgical poet. she would have to write to jinny now. but she wouldn't take him to see her. she was determined to keep him to herself. that was why none of them had seen anything of nina for six months. there was (he came back to it again) something very murky about nina. and nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. so amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. he would give a good deal to know what prothero thought of nina. prothero could have told him that he thought of nina as he thought of his own youth. he was of her mother's race and from her country of the marches. he knew more about nina than tanqueray had ever known. he knew the lemprieres, a family of untamed hereditary wildness. he knew nina as the survival of a hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. he knew that it had left her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves. it was of all things most improbable that he should be here in london, lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and nina lempriere. the improbability of it struck nina as she went to and fro in the inner room, preparing their supper. there had been no acquaintance between her and young prothero, the medical student. if their ways met it was only by accident, at long intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains. they used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own dream. that was fifteen years ago. in all that time she had not seen him. he had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. virgin from his wild places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid of. he had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. she had let him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. he would sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate. he had embraced poverty like a saint. he regarded it as the blessed state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. he was all right, he said. he had lived on rice in the jungle. he could live on rice at a pinch now. and he could publish his poems if he got work on the papers. on this point nina found him engagingly, innocently open to suggestion. she had suggested a series of articles on the problem of the east. he had written the articles, but in such a style and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them. it was possible that he would have a chance with brodrick who was braver than other editors. brodrick was his one chance. she would have suggested his meeting brodrick, but that the way to brodrick lay through jane holland. she remembered that the gods had thrust jane holland between her and george tanqueray; and she was determined that they should put no woman between her and owen prothero. she had taken possession of him and she meant to keep him to herself. the supreme, irresistible temptation was to keep him to herself. it dominated her desire to serve his interests. but she had not refused him when he owned, shyly, that he would like to see george tanqueray, the only living writer, he maintained, who had any passion for truth, any sweep, any clearness of vision. it was tanqueray, with that passion, that diabolical lucidity, that vision of his, who had made her realize the baseness of her secrecy. she had no right to keep owen to herself. he was too valuable. his innocence had given a sting to her remorse. he had remained so completely satisfied with what she had done for him, so wholly unaware of having been kept obscure when celebrity was possible. things came, he seemed to say, or they didn't come. if you were wise you waited. with his invincible patience he was waiting now, in her room up-stairs, standing before the bookcase with his back to the door. he stood absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was manifestly not reading. in this attitude he had an air of masterly indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. absorbed in some inward and invisible act, he was unaware of nina as she entered. she called him to the supper she had made ready for him. he swung round, returning as it were from an immense distance, and followed her. he was hungry, and she had a fierce maternal joy in seeing him eat. it was after supper that they talked, as they sat by the window in the outer room, looking at the river, a river of night, lamp-starred. nina began it. "owen," she said, "how did george tanqueray strike you?" he paused before he spoke. "i think," he said, "i never in my life saw anybody more on the look-out. it's terrible, that prowling genius, always ready to spring." "i know," she said, "he sees everything." "no, nina, he doesn't. he's a man whose genius has made away with one half of his capacity for seeing. that's his curse! if your eyes are incessantly looking out they lose the power of looking in." "and yet, he's the only really great psychologist we've got. he and jane holland." "yes, as they go, your psychologists. tanqueray sees so much inside other people that he can't see inside himself. what's worse, i shouldn't think he'd see far inside the people who really touch him. it comes of perpetually looking away." "you don't know him. how can you tell?" "because i never look away." "can you see what's going on inside _me_?" "sometimes. i don't always look." "can you help looking?" "of course you can." "you _may_ look. i don't think i mind your looking. why," she asked abruptly, "don't i mind?" her voice had an accent that betrayed her. "because there's nothing inside you that you're ashamed of." she reddened with shame; shame of the fierce, base instinct that had made her keep him to herself. she knew that nothing escaped him. he had the keen, comprehending eyes of the physician who knows the sad secrets of the body; and he had other eyes that saw inward, that held and drew to confession the terrified, reluctant soul. she had an insane longing to throw herself at his feet in confession. "yes," she said, "but there are _things_----and yet----" he stopped her. "nothing, nina, if you really knew yourself." "owen--it's not that. it's not because i don't know myself. it's because i know you. i know that, whatever there might be in me, whatever i did, however low i sank--if i could sink--your charity would be there to hold me up. and it wouldn't be your charity, either. i couldn't stand your charity. it wouldn't even be understanding. you don't understand me. it would be some knowledge of me that i couldn't have myself, that nobody but you could have. as if whatever you saw you'd say, 'that isn't really nina.'" "i should say, 'that's really nina, so it's all right.'" she paused, brooding on the possibilities he saw, that he was bound to see, if he saw anything. did he, she wondered, really see what was in her, her hidden shames and insanities, the course of the wild blood that he knew must flow from all the lemprieres to her? she lived, to be sure, the life of an ascetic and took it out in dreams. yet he must see how her savage, solitary passion clung to him, and would not let go. did he see, and yet did he not condemn her? "owen," she said suddenly, "do you mind seeing?" "sometimes i hate it. these aren't the things, you know, i want to see." she lowered her eyes. her nervous hand moved slowly to and fro along the window-sill, measuring her next words. "what--do you want--to see?" he rose to his feet and looked at her. at her, not through her, and she wondered, had he seen enough? it was as if he withdrew himself before some thought that stirred in her, menacing to peace. "i can't tell you," he said. "i can't talk about it." then she knew what he meant. he was thinking of his vision, his vision of god. he could not speak of it to her. she had never known him. this soul, with which her own claimed kindred, was hidden from her by all the veils of heaven. "i know," she said. "only tell me one thing. was that what you went out to india and central africa to see?" that drew him. "no. i went out not to see it. to get away from it. i meant to give things their chance. that's why i went in for medicine. i wasn't going to shirk. i wanted to be a man. not a long-haired, weedy thing in a soft hat." "was it any good?" "yes. i proved the unreality of things. i proved it up to the hilt. and i _did_n't shirk." "but you wanted to escape, all the time?" "i didn't escape. i couldn't. i couldn't catch cholera, or plague, _or_ sleeping sickness. i couldn't catch anything." "you tried?" "oh, yes, i gave _myself_ a chance. that was only fair. but it was no use. i couldn't even get frightened." "owen--some people would say you were morbid." "no, they wouldn't. they'd say i was mad. they _will_ say it when i've published those poems." "did you mind my showing them to george tanqueray?" "no. but it's no use. nobody knows my name." "may i show them to jane holland?" "show them to any one you like. it'll be no use either." "owen--does it never occur to you that any human being can be of use?" "no." he considered the point. "no, i can't say it ever does." he stood before her, wrapped in his dream, removed from her, utterly forgetful. she had her moment of pain in contemplating him. he saw it in her face, and as it were came back to her. "don't imagine," he said, "that i don't know what _you_'ve done. now that i do know you." she turned, almost in anger. "i've done nothing. you don't know me." she added, "i am going to write to jane holland." when he had left her she sat a long while by the window, brooding on the thing that had happened to her a second time. she had fallen in love; fallen with the fatality of the lemprieres, and with the fine precipitate sweep of her own genius. and she had let herself go, with the recklessness of a woman unaware of her genius for loving, with the superb innocence, too, of all spontaneous forces. owen's nature had disarmed her of all subterfuges, all ordinary defences of her sex. they were absurd in dealing with a creature so remote and disembodied. she knew that in his way, his remote and disembodied way, he cared for her. she knew that in whatever place he held her she was alone there. she was the only woman for whom as yet he had cared. his way was not tanqueray's way. it was a way that kept her safe. she had sworn that there were to be no more george tanquerays; and there were none. she had done with that. not but that she was afraid of owen. she had taken possession of him in fear, a secret, unallowed possession, a holding with hands invisible, intangible. for she had wisdom, the sad wisdom of the frustrate; it, and the insight of her genius, told her that owen would not endure a tie less spiritual than friendship. she knew george tanqueray's opinion of her. he was justified. but though she sacrificed so far to spirit, it was her flesh and blood that shrank from the possible communion of owen prothero and jane holland. for jinny, as tanqueray said, had a way with her; and she knew jinny's way. jinny would take owen prothero from her as she had taken george, not deliberately, not because she wanted to, but because she was jinny and had a way. besides, jane could do for him what she with her bare genius could not do, and that thought was insupportable to nina. yesterday she had been everything to him. tomorrow jane would be as much, or more. and there were other women. they would be as ready as she to take possession. they would claim his friendship, and more than she had claimed, as the reward of having recognized him. there was no reason why she should give owen up, and hand him over to them. and this was what she would do if she wrote that letter to jane holland. she rose, and went to her desk and wrote it. xxii jane answered at once. if nina would bring prothero to kensington on friday at four o'clock he would meet hugh brodrick. but prothero refused to be taken anywhere. he would not go hanging about women's drawing-rooms. it was the sort of thing, he said, that did you harm. he wanted to hold on to what he'd got. it was tricky; it came and went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up with women he was done for. of course he was profoundly grateful. nina assured jane that mr. prothero was profoundly grateful. but he was, she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. he was happy in an indian jungle or an african swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden him. she therefore proposed that tanqueray, who had the manuscript, should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. two or three people, not a horrid crowd. for the poems, she warned her fairly, were all about god; and nowadays people didn't care about god. owen prothero didn't seem to care much about anything else. it was bound, she said, to handicap him. jane consented. after all, the poems were the thing. for audience she proposed hugh brodrick, caro bickersteth, laura, and arnott nicholson. dear nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were very far from appreciating him. he knew a multitude of little men on papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about singing your praises everywhere. nicky himself, if strongly moved to it, might sing. nicky was a good idea, and there was laura who also wrote for the papers. the reading was fixed for friday at four o'clock. tanqueray, who detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for prothero's sake. his letter to jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. brodrick and the others had accepted the unique invitation, laura gunning provisionally. she would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things were going badly at the moment. laura, however, was the first to arrive. "who is this man of nina's?" said she. "i don't know, my dear. i never heard of him till the other day." she showed her nina's letter. laura's face was sullen. it indicated that things were going very badly indeed; that laura was at the end of her tether. "but why god?" was her profane comment. "because, i imagine, he believes in him." laura declared that it was more than she did. she preferred not to believe in him, after the things that had been done to papa. her arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of george tanqueray. nina appeared next. she was followed by hugh brodrick and by caro bickersteth. nicky came last of all. he greeted jane a little mournfully. it was impossible for nicky to banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt, impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here to be, as jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow prothero. he understood that they were all there to do something for prothero. brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. tanqueray, too, and miss bickersteth and miss gunning, and he. jane holland was always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him. there was brodrick's magazine that he had never got into. jane holland had only got to speak to brodrick, only got to say to him that arnott nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. it was a small thing and an easy thing for her to do. it was not so much that he wanted her to do things. he even now shrank, in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. for all his little palpitating ambition, nicky shrank. what hurt him was the unavoidable inference he drew. when a woman cares for a man she does not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and jane least of all women. he knew her. he knew what she had done for tanqueray because she cared. and now she was going to do things for owen prothero. nicky sat dejected in the sorrow of this thought. brodrick also was oppressed. he was thinking of his magazine. it had been saved by jane holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could also be ruined by her. he knew what he was there for. he could see, with the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that prothero was to be pressed on him. he was to take him up as he had taken up tanqueray. and from all that he had heard of prothero he very much doubted whether he could afford to take him up. it was becoming a serious problem what he could afford. levine was worrying him. levine was insisting on concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. he had threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial co-operation, and brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to do without levine. he might have to refuse to take prothero up, and he hated to refuse jane holland anything. as for laura, she continued in her sullenness, anticipating with resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul. and jane, who knew what passed in brodrick's mind, was downcast in her turn. she did not want brodrick to think that she was making use of him, that she was always trying to get at him. tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious tanqueray, had unrolled the manuscript. they grouped themselves for the reading, nina on a corner of the sofa; jane lying back in the other corner; laura looking at tanqueray over nina's shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her; nicholson and brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they could look at jane. it was to this audience that tanqueray first read young prothero's poems of the vision of god; to laura, who didn't believe in god; to jane, absorbed in her embarrassments; to nina, tortured by many passions; to hugh brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to caro bickersteth, dubious and critical; to nicky, struggling with the mean hope that prothero might not prove so very good. they heard of the haunting of the divine lover; of the soul's mortal terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul, of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of god. nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was dished by prothero. he maintained his attitude of extreme depression. his eyes, fixed on jane, were now startled out of their agony into a sudden wonder at prothero, now clouded again as nicky manifestly said to himself, "dished, dished, dished." he was dished by prothero, dished by tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his desire, sublimely renouncing. brodrick's head was bowed forward on his chest. his eyes, under his lowering brows, looked up at jane's, gathering from them her judgment of owen prothero. prothero's case defied all rule and precedent, and brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. now and then a gleam of comprehension, caught from jane, illuminated his face and troubled it. he showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp flame of the spirit. it was so that jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers for an inconsiderable moment. now and then, at a pause in the reader's voice, brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position. nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire. and laura, who did not believe in god, laura sat motionless, her small insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. over her face there passed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange softening of the small indomitable mouth. it was more than ever the face of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. but her eyes were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. they stared at tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw. she still sat so, while brodrick and nicholson, like men released, came forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his own. they did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had sunk into. everybody's nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating passage of the supersensual. the discussion that followed was spasmodic and curt. nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "he _is_ great," said poor nicky. "too great," said brodrick, "for the twentieth century." nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and jane remarked that it hadn't done badly since it had begun with him. laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she turned eastwards with nina. "does he really mind seeing people?" she said. "it depends," said nina. "he's seen george." "would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? i want to know him." nina's face drew back as if laura had struck her. its haggard, smitten look spoke as if nina had spoken. "what do you want to know him for?" it said. "he hasn't got to be seen," said nina herself savagely. she was overwrought. "he's got to be heard. you've heard him." "it's because i've heard him that i want to see him." nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. the small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen suffering, its despondency, its doubt. nina was stung by compassion. "do you want to see him very much?" she said. "i wouldn't ask you if i didn't." "all right. you shall. i'll make him come." xxiii within a fortnight of that reading prothero received a letter from george tanqueray. it briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the autumn, at their own and not prothero's expense. how the miracle had been worked he couldn't conceive, and tanqueray was careful to leave him unenlightened. it had been simply a stock instance of jinny's way. jinny, whose affairs were in tanqueray's hands, had been meditating an infidelity to messrs. molyneux, by whom tanqueray vehemently assured her she had been, and always would be, "had." they had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared to her suggestion that mr. prothero should be published. miss holland must, they urged, be aware that mr. prothero had been rejected by every other firm in london. they were sure that she realized the high danger of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their enthusiasm. the poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that mr. prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public that read poetry. still, they were giving mr. prothero his fractional opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve miss holland. they understood that miss holland was thinking of leaving them. they would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own sake, she would reconsider it. jane had reconsidered it and had remained. "you understand clearly, jinny," tanqueray had said, "that you're paying for prothero's poems?" to that jinny had replied, "it's what i wanted to do, and there wasn't any other way." owen prothero could no longer say that nobody knew his name. his innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made and unmade; but he had gathered from nina that her friends had created for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to incarnate by his presence among them. he said he wanted to preserve his innocence. tanqueray's retirement was not more superb or more indignant; tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but nobody met prothero anywhere. even jane holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had not met him. it was hard on jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this incomparable creator. but she respected the divine terror that kept nina's unlicked celt outside women's drawing-rooms. she understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than not, at tanqueray's rooms in torrington square. tanqueray's wife did not count. she was not the sort of woman prothero could be afraid of, and she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. jane remembered that it was a long time since she had seen tanqueray's wife. one afternoon, about five o'clock, she called in torrington square. she approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy little face of tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window. but rose was not at the window. the curtains were drawn across, obviously for the purpose of concealing rose. a brougham waited before the door. jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the house. there was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with mrs. tanqueray. she was going away when tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the doctor was. "don't go, jinny," he said. she searched his face. "oh, george, is anything the matter?" he raised his eyebrows. his moustache tilted with them, upwards. she recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from him. "oh, dear me, no," he said. "may i see her--afterwards?" "of course you may see her. but"--he smiled--"if you'll come up-stairs you'll see prothero." she followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high above rose and her movements and her troubles. he paused at the door. "he may thank his stars, jinny, that he came across nina instead of you." "you think i'd better keep clear of him?" "no. i think he'd better keep clear of you." "george, is he really there?" "yes, he's there all right. he's caught. he's trapped. he can't get away from you." "i won't," she said. "it's dishonourable." he laughed and they went in. the poet was sitting in tanqueray's low chair, facing them. he rose at some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct of savage flight. she herself would have turned and fled, but for the singularity of such precipitance. she was afraid before this shyness of the unlicked celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by the guile she judged dishonourable. tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the doctor. he must leave them, he said, to each other. they did not talk. they sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. it was intimate, rather, and vividly revealing. you would have said, coming upon them there, that they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it. it gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. her gaze was obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow now, where it had once been bronze. she saw that his soul had passed through strange climates. it was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. she caught herself secretly defining it. tuberculosis--that was it; that was the certain and inevitable thing. of course; anybody would have seen it. that she had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his singular physique. if it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion. when she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently nourished. his clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an incredible shabbiness. yet he carried them with an indomitable distinction. he had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made swift by hunger. her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. it also suggested the thing she at last said. "i'm distressed about mrs. tanqueray. i hope it's nothing serious." prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than tanqueray's had been. "too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. she isn't cut out for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint and----" she filled his blank, "and a martyr?" "what can you expect when a man mates like that?" "it's natural," she pleaded. "natural? it's one of the most unnatural marriages i've ever come across. it's a crime against nature for a man like tanqueray to have taken that poor little woman--who is nature pure and simple--and condemn her to----" she drew back visibly. "i know. he doesn't see it," she said. "he doesn't see anything. he doesn't even know she's there. how can he? his genius runs to flesh and blood, and he hasn't room for any more of it outside his own imagination. that's where you are with your great realists." she gazed at him, astonished, admiring. this visionary, this poet so estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on the fact. "you mean," she said, "a visionary would see more?" he shrugged his shoulders at her reference. "he would have more room," he said, "that would be all. he could at any rate afford to take more risks." they were silent again. "i believe," he said presently, "somebody's coming. i shall have to go." jane turned her head. the sounds he heard so distinctly were inaudible to her. they proved to be footsteps on the staircase, footsteps that could never have been rose's nor yet tanqueray's. they paused heavily at the door. some one was standing there, breathing. a large woman entered very slowly, and jane arrived, also slowly, at the conclusion that it must be mrs. eldred, george's wife's aunt. mrs. eldred acknowledged her presence and prothero's by a vague movement of respect. it was not till prothero had gone that she admitted that she would be glad to take a chair. she explained that she was rose's aunt, and that she had never been up them stairs before and found them tryin'. jane expressed sorrow for that fact and for rose's illness. mrs. eldred sighed an expository sigh. "she's frettin' an' she's worritin'. she's worritin' about 'im. it isn't natch'ral, that life 'e leads, and it's tellin' on 'er." "something's telling on her." mrs. eldred leaned forward and lowered her voice. "it's this way, miss. 'e isn't properly a 'usban' to 'er." "you shouldn't say that, mrs. eldred. he's very fond of her." "fond of 'er i dare say 'e may be. but 'e neglec's 'er." "you shouldn't say that, either." "well, miss, i can't 'elp sayin' it. wot else _is_ it, when 'e shuts 'imself up with 'is writin' all day long and 'alf the night, and she a-settin' and a-frettin'?" she looked round the room, apparently recognizing with resentment the scene of tanqueray's perpetual infidelity. "but," said jane, "he'd be away as much if he was in business." "'ef 'e was in business there'd be the evenin's to look forward to. and there'd be 'is saturdays and sundays. as it is, wot is there for her to look forward to?" "at any rate she knows he's there." "it's knowin' that 'e's there wot does it. it's not as if she 'ad a 'ouse to look after, or a little baby to take 'er mind orf of 'im." "no, it isn't." a sound of yapping came faintly up from the ground-floor. "that's joey," said mrs. eldred tearfully, "'er pom as she was so fond of. i've brought 'im. and i've brought minny too." "minny?" jane had not heard of minny. "the cat, miss. they'll keep 'er company. it's but right as she should 'ave them." jane assented warmly that it was but right. "it's not," mrs. eldred continued, "as if she came reg'lar, say once in a week, to see 'er uncle and me. she'll go to camden town and set with that poor old mr. gunning. give rose any one that's ill. but wot is that _but_ settin'? and now, you see, with settin' she's ill. it's all very well when you're brought up to it, but she isn't. rose'd be well if she 'ad a 'ouse and did the work in it. and 'e won't let 'er 'ave it. 'e won't 'ear of 'er workin', 'e says." "well, naturally, he wouldn't like to see his wife working." "then, miss, 'e should 'ave married a lady 'as wouldn't want to work. that's wot 'e should have done. we were always against it from the first, 'er uncle and me was. but they was set, bein' young-like." mrs. eldred's voice ceased suddenly as tanqueray entered. jane abstained from all observation of their greeting. she was aware of an unnatural suavity in tanqueray's manner. he carried it so far as to escort mrs. eldred all the way down to the ground-floor sitting-room where rose was. he returned with considerable impetus to jane. "well, jinny, so you've seen my aunt-in-law?" "i have," said jinny contumaciously, "and i like her." "what do you think? she's brought a dog on a chain and a beast of a cat in a basket." jinny abstained from sympathy, and tanqueray grew grave. "i wish i knew what was the matter with rose," he said. "she doesn't seem to get much better. the doctor swears it's only liver; but he's a silly ass." "tanks, there's nothing the matter really, except--the poor little bird wants to build its nest. it wants sticks and straws and feathers and things----" "do you mean i've got to go and find a beastly house?" "let her go and find it." "i would in a minute--only i'm so hard up." "of course you'll be hard up if you go on living in rooms like this." "that's what she says. but when she talks about a house she means that she'll do all the work in it." "why not?" said jane. "why not? i married her because i wasn't going to have her worked to death in that damned lodging-house of her uncle's." "you married her because you loved her," said jane quietly. "well--of course. and i'm not going to let my wife cook my dinner and make my bed and empty my slops. how can i?" "she'll die if you don't, george." "die?" "she'll get horribly ill. she's ill now because she can't run about and sweep and dust and cook dinners. she's dying for love of all the beautiful things you won't let her have--pots and pans and carpet-sweepers and besoms. you don't want her to die of an unhappy passion for a besom?" "i don't want to see her with a besom." jane pleaded. "she'd look so pretty with it, george. just think how pretty she'd look in a little house, playing with a carpet-sweeper." "on her knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor----" "you'd have a woman in to scrub." "carrying the coals?" "_you'd_ carry the coals, george." "by jove, i never thought of that. i suppose i could." he pondered. "you see," he said, "she wants to live at hampstead." "you can't cut her off from her own people." "i'm not cutting her off. she goes to see them." "she'll go to see them if you live at hampstead. if you live here they'll come and see you. for she'll be ill and they'll have to." tanqueray looked at her, not without admiration. "jinny, you're ten times cleverer than i." "in some things, tanks, i am. and so is that wife of yours." "she's--very sensible. i suppose it's sensible to be in love with a carpet-sweeper." she shook her head at him. "much more sensible than being in love with _you_." his eyes evaded her. she rose. "oh, tanks, you goose. can't you see that it's you she's in love with--and that's why she _must_ have a carpet-sweeper?" with that she left him. he followed her to the doorstep where he turned abruptly from her departure. rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just set a saucer of milk. with one hand she was loosening very gently from her shoulder the claws of minny, the cat, who clung to her breast, scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. her other hand restrained with a soft caressing movement joey's approaches to the saucer. joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient to her gesture. joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in rose's face as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and gravity. a slightly sallow tinge under its sudden bloom told how rose had suffered from the sedentary life. all this tanqueray saw as he entered. it held him on the threshold, unmoved by the rushing assault and lacerating bark of the little dog, who resented his intrusion. rose got up and came to him, lifting a frightened, pleading face. "oh, george," she said, "don't make me send them away. let me keep them." "i suppose you must keep them if you want them." "i never said i wanted them. aunt _would_ bring them. she thought they'd be something to occupy my mind, like." tanqueray smiled, in spite of his gentleness, at the absurd idea of rose having a mind. rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. she had not laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now. "the doctor--'e's fair pleased. 'e says i'll 'ave to go out walkin' now, for joey's sake." "poor joey." he stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous hind-legs, straining to lick his hand. "his hair doesn't come on, rose----" "it hasn't been brushed proper. you should brush a pom's 'air backwards----" "of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. he can bark all right, anyhow. there's nothing wrong with his lungs." "he won't bark at you no more, now he knows you." she leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. minny was not beautiful. "it's minny," she said. "you used to like minny." it struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child at her breast. she saw his look and smiled up at him. "i may keep him, too?" at that he kissed her. by the end of that evening tanqueray had not written a word. he could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. he wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him like this and destroyed his peace. it wasn't the idea of the house. the house was bad enough; the house indeed was abominable. it was rose. it was more than rose; it was everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and pressure of life. it was all very well for prothero to talk. his genius was safe, it was indestructible. it had the immunity of the transcendent. it worked, not in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. whatever prothero did it remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. prothero could afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. he, tanqueray, could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. to immerse himself was suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat. because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. for the same reason it was sufficient to itself. it fulfilled the functions, it enjoyed the excitements and the satisfactions of sense. it reproduced reality so infallibly, so solidly, so completely, that it took reality's place; it made him unconscious of his wife's existence and of the things that went on beneath him in the ground-floor sitting-room. yet he was not and had never been indifferent to life itself. he approached it, not with precaution or prejudice or any cold discretion, but with the supreme restraint of passion on guard against its own violence. if he had given himself to it, what a grip it would have had on him, what a terrible, destructive grip; if, say, he had found his mate; if he had married a woman, who, exulting in life, would have drawn him into it. rose had not drawn him in. she had done nothing assailing and destructive. she was, in some respects, the most admirable wife a man bent on solitude could have selected. the little thing had never got in his way. she was no longer disturbing to the intellect, nor agitating to the heart; and she satisfied, sufficiently, the infrequent craving of his senses. up till now he would hardly have known that he was married; it had been so easy to ignore her. but to-day she had been forced on his attention. the truth about rose had been presented to him very plainly and boldly by prothero, by the doctor, by mrs. eldred and by jane. it was the same naked truth that in his novels he himself presented with the utmost plainness and boldness to the british public. his genius knew no other law but truth to nature, trust in nature, unbroken fidelity to nature. and now it was nature that arraigned his genius for its frustration of her purposes in rose. his genius had made rose the victim of its own incessant, inextinguishable lust and impulse to create. eleven o'clock struck and he had not written a line. through his window he heard the front door open and rose's little feet on the pavement, and rose's voice calling into the darkness her old call, "puss--puss--puss. minny--min--min--minny. puss--puss--puss." he sighed. he had realized for the first time that he was married. xxiv nina kept her promise, although prothero protested that he saw no reason why he should be taken to see laura gunning. he was told that he need not be afraid of laura. she was too small, nina said, to do him any harm. refusing to go and see laura was like refusing to go and see a sick child. ultimately, with extreme unwillingness, he consented. laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in albert street, camden town, under desperate restrictions of time and space. for she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of laura's family was that it was always there. she spoke of it briefly as papa. it was four years now since mr. gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy; for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and now he was living, without knowing it, on what laura wrote. nobody but laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her diminutive talent to perfection. poverty was always putting temptation in her way. she knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. she knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. but they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them. and yet laura was cruel to her small genius. it was delicate, and she drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. she would turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. it had not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. but it was threatened. they were beginning, nina said, to wonder how long laura would hold out. it was not poverty that had wrecked her. she could bear that. poverty had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test, justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. she rejoiced in her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing. for there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, papa would not have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in camden town. it was may and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still more bare. it was furnished, laura's room, with an extreme austerity. there was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window. there was a cupboard and an easy-chair for mr. gunning on one side of the fireplace next the window. on the other, the dark side, was laura's writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. another book-shelf faced the fireplace. that was all. here, for three years, laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair. some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or spiritual squalor. ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret. prothero, coming into laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof, drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to cling. laura was at home. she was writing, snatching at the few golden moments of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the old man dozed by the fireside. from time to time she glanced at him, and then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching, an immovable, perpetual fear. prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy, childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat, slumbering, inert, the image of decay. he stood still for a moment before laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder. he took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the fragile thing. he knew what nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of her, that she couldn't do him any harm. he saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad; the body and the face of a white child. her almost rudimentary features cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood, their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. he saw all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it slept, under dark blue veils. her eyes made him forgive her forehead, the only thing about her which was not absurdly small. and of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it evoked in him. he saw that nina watched him and that she was aware of his fear. she was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own folly in bringing him to laura against his judgment and his will. she might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing, pathetic beauty of her type. for him, nina, watching with a fierce concentration, saw that she was virginity reduced to its last and most exquisite simplicity. they had said nothing to each other. laura, in the wonderful hour of his coming, could find nothing to say to him. he noticed that she and nina talked in low, rapid voices, as if they feared that at any moment the old man might awake. then laura arose and began to get tea ready, moving very softly in her fear. "you'd better let me cut the bread and butter," said prothero. laura let him. nina heard them talking over the bread and butter while laura made the tea. she saw that his eyes did not follow her about the room, but that they rested on her when she was not looking. "you were hard at work when we came," he was saying. laura denied it. "if i may say so, you look as if you'd been at it far too long." "no. i'm never at it long enough. the bother is getting back to where you were half-an-hour ago. it seems to take up most of the time." "then i oughtn't--ought i--to take up any of it?" "oh, please," said laura, "take it. _i_ can't do anything with it." she had the air of offering it to him like bread and butter on a plate. "time," she said, "is about all we've got here. at any rate there will be time for tea." she examined the cupboard. "it looks as if time were about all we were going to have for tea." she explored the ultimate depth of the cupboard. "i wonder if i could find some jam. do you like jam?" "i adore it." that was all they said. "need you," said nina to prothero, "spread the butter quite so thick?" even in her agony she wondered how much, at the rate he was spreading it, would be left for the kiddy's supper. "he shall spread it," said the kiddy superbly, "as thick as ever he likes." they called nina to the table. she ate and drank; but laura's tea scalded her; laura's bread and butter choked her; she sickened at it; and when she tried to talk her voice went dry in her throat. and in his chair by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to torpor, apart and unaware of them. when he waked they would have to go. "do you think," said laura, "i'd better wake papa?" that was a question which this decided little person had never been able to decide for herself. it was too momentous. "no," said nina, "i think you'd better not." it was then that mr. gunning waked himself, violently; starting and staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him dream dreams. laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. she knelt by him, and held his hands in hers and stroked them. "what is it, papa dear, have you had a little dream? poor darling," she said, "he has such horrid ones." mr. gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his dream, by appalling presences. he was a little man, with a weak, handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion. "what's all this? what's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. he smiled at it. he was almost wide awake now. "is it rose?" he said. "no, papa. it's nina." mr. gunning became dejected. if it had been rose she would have sat beside him and talked to him a little while. he was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen prothero; and the sight of prothero revived in him his one idea. his idea was that every man who saw laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from him. he was haunted by the fear of losing laura. he had lost everything he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in his idea. "what are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "you're not going to take her away? i won't have that. i won't have that." "isn't he funny?" said laura, unabashed. and from where she knelt, there on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed. she laughed lest prothero should feel uncomfortable. nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his long body, prothero rose too. nina could have sworn that almost he bowed his head over laura's hand. "may i come and see you again some day?" he said. and she said she would be very glad. that was all. outside in the little dull street he turned to nina. "it wasn't fair, nina; you didn't tell me i was going to have my heart wrung." "how could i know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?" he looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her. but she knew he saw. xxv three weeks passed. prothero had been four times to see miss gunning. he had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. it was then borne in on him that what he required was a pretext. calling late one evening he caught miss gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph for the papers while she talked to mr. gunning. his pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. he could not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs), but he could talk to mr. gunning. it was not so difficult as he would have at first supposed. he had already learnt the trick of it. you took a chair. you made a statement. any statement would do. you had only to say to mr. gunning, "isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you, with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for you to do it again; and you went on talking to miss gunning until he showed signs of restlessness. when you had done this several times running he would sink back in his chair appeased. but prothero had discovered that if you concentrated your attention on mr. gunning, if you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to sleep; and while he slept laura wrote. and while laura wrote, owen could keep on looking at her as much as he liked. from where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a side view of laura. he could see her head as it bent and turned over her work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of laura's head. from time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache. and laura said to herself, "he is rather ugly, but i like him." it was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing was the peace that in his presence settled on papa. once he had got over the first shock of his appearance, it soothed mr. gunning to see prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. it established him in the illusion of continued opulence, for mr. gunning was not aware of the things that had happened to him four years ago. but there had been lapses and vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. in the days of opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see laura. they were always the same people, miss holland and miss lempriere and mr. tanqueray. they did no positive violence to the illusion; in their way they ministered to it. they took their place among the company of brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with cold ceremony and a high and distant courtesy. they stayed for a short time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room, they existed only for each other and for laura. thus one half of his dream remained incomprehensible to mr. gunning. he did not really know these people. but he knew mr. prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour and smoked a pipe with him. he had known him intimately and for a long time. his figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and made it warm, tangible and complete. and because the vanished smokers, the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to laura, therefore mr. gunning's mind ceased to connect prothero with his formidable idea. laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to the idea. she waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. sooner or later it would come, and when it did come papa would ask mr. prothero his intentions, and mr. prothero, having of course no intentions, would go away and never have anything to do with them again. prothero had not yet asked himself his intentions or even wondered what he was there for, since, as it seemed, it was not to talk to laura. there had been opportunities, moments, pauses in the endless procession of paragraphs, when he had tried to draw laura out; but laura was not to be drawn. she had a perfect genius for retreating, vanishing from him backwards, keeping her innocent face towards him all the time, but backing, backing into her beloved obscurity. he felt that there were things behind her that forbade him to pursue. of the enchantment that had drawn her in the beginning, she had not said a word. when it came to that they were both silent, as by a secret understanding and consent. they were both aware of his genius as a thing that was and was not his, a thing perpetually present with them but incommunicable, the very heart of their silence. one evening, calling about nine o'clock, he found her alone. she told him that papa was very tired and had gone to bed. "it is very good of you," she said, "to come and sit with him." prothero smiled quietly. "may i sit with _you_ now?" "please do." they sat by the fireside, for even in mid-june the night was chilly. a few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. laura had raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father. papa, she explained, was not always as mr. prothero saw him now. his illness came from a sunstroke. he said, yes; he had seen cases like that in india. "then, do you think----" she paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional opinion. "do i think? what do i think?" "that he'll get better?" he was silent a long time. "no," he said. "but he need never be any worse. you mustn't be afraid." "i _am_ afraid. i'm afraid all the time." "what of?" "of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face it." "you've nerve enough for anything." "you don't know me. i'm an utter coward. i can't face things. especially the thing i'm afraid of." "what is it? tell me." he leaned nearer to her, and she almost whispered. "i'm afraid of his having a fit--epilepsy. he _might_ have it." "he might. but he won't. you mustn't think of it." "i'm always thinking of it. and the most--the most awful thing is that--i'm afraid of _seeing_ it." she bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to an unpardonable shame. "poor child. of course you are," said prothero. "we're all afraid of something. i'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood." "you?" "i." "oh--but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it." "wouldn't i?" "no. or you couldn't go and be a doctor. why," she asked suddenly, "did you?" "_because_ i was afraid of the sight of blood. you see, it was this way. my father was a country doctor--a surgeon. one day he sent me into his surgery. the butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek cut open. my father was sewing it up, and he wanted me--i was a boy about fifteen at the time--to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop the butcher while he sewed him up. what do you suppose i did?" "you fainted?--you were ill on the spot?" "no. i wasn't on the spot at all. i ran away." a slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for the vibration of some spiritual recoil. "what do you say to that?" "i don't say anything." "my father said i was a damned coward, and my mother said i was a hypocrite. i'd been reading the book of job, you see, when it happened." "they might have known," she said. "they might have known what?" "that you were different." "they did know it. after that, they never let it alone. they kept rubbing it into me all the time that i was different. as my father put it, i wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and i had to grow a skin or two if i wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. i'd got to prove that i _was_ a man--that i wasn't different after all." "well--you proved it." "if i did my father never knew it." "and your mother?" she said softly. "i believe she knew." "but wasn't she glad to know you were different?" "i never let her know, really, how different i was." "you kept it to yourself?" "it was the only way to keep it." "your genius?" "if you choose to call it that." "the thing," she said, "that made you different." "you see," he said, "they didn't understand that _that_ was where i was most a coward. i was always afraid of losing it. i am now." "you couldn't lose it." "i have lost it. it went altogether the time i was working for my medical. i got it back again out in india when i was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and i'd nothing to do but think. then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in bombay; and it went again." she was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it. "you see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting back to it again. then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. and nothing else matters. nothing else is." she knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant. "and the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to." "i see." obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. the thing he spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. and because, as he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. so he went down into life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. he knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he would be sure of it. he wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit surer than she was now. no; he was always sure of it. it was himself he was not sure of; himself that he put to the test. and it was himself that he had carried through it. he had lived face to face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them, he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. and he had come through it all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his soul and its exultant, processional vision of god. "the absurd thing is that after all i haven't grown a skin. i'm _still_ afraid of the sight of blood." "so i suppose _i_ shall go on being afraid." "probably. but you won't turn tail any more than i should. _you_ never ran away." "there are worse things than running away. all the things that go on inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries. things that come of never being alone. i have to sit up at night to be alone." "my child, you mustn't. it's simply criminal." "if i didn't," she said, "i should never get it in." he understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift. "i know it's criminal, with papa depending on me, and yet i do it. sometimes i'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own things; things, i mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in having done them." "to satisfy your instinct for perfection. god made you an artist." she sighed. "he's made me so many things besides. that's where the misery comes in." "and a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery didn't come in." she shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "misery's all very well for the big, tragic people like nina, who can make something out of it. why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?" "and if _you_'re being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection that you're not aware of----?" she shook her head again. "i'm certainly not aware of it. still, i can understand that. i mean i can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and trying things too big for it and their not coming off. but--look at papa." she held her hands out helplessly. the gesture smote his heart. "if papa had been one of its experiments--but he wasn't. it had got him all right at first. you've no idea how nice papa was. you've only to look at him now to see how nice he is. but he was clever. not very clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever enough. he used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. and he can't say them any more." she paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went. "and to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away--it doesn't look like an instinct for perfection, does it?" "the finest bits aren't thrown away. it's what you still have with you, what you see, that's being thrown away--broken up by some impatient, impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its instinct for perfection. do you see?" "i see that you're trying to make me happier about papa. it's awfully nice of you." "i'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body. to you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. to me it is simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual energies. we're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease. it probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies. it's a sign of their approaching freedom. especially those diseases which are most like death--the horrible diseases that tear down the body from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and leaving the viscera exuberant with life. and if you knew the mystery of the building up--why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful than you can conceive. but, if you really knew, that would be nothing to the secret--the mystery--the romance of dissolution." his phrase was luminous to her. it was a violent rent that opened up the darkness that wrapped her. "if you could see _through_ it you'd understand, you'd see that this body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium, transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside what we give." laura looked grave. "i can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that i understand." "think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the whole creation was present in the cell it started from. think how our body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts, infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable forces, and that we--_we_--unmake the work of millions of æons in a moment, that we charge it with _our_ will, _our_ instincts, _our_ memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ of us--so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when they scatter, is the seed of _our_ universe, flung heaven knows where." for a moment the clever imp looked out of laura's eyes. "do you know," she said, "it makes me feel as if i had millions and millions of intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and i can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or i. and i want to know how you know about it." a change passed over his face. it became suddenly still and incommunicable. "and the only thing i want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad." "what won't i tell you?" "what's become of the things that made papa so adorable?" "i've been trying to tell you. i've been trying to make you see." "i can only see that they've gone." "and i can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely than ever. too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them." "ah----" "and i should say the same of a still-born baby that i had never seen alive, or of a lunatic whom i had not once seen sane." "how do you know?" she reiterated. "i can't tell you." "you can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when i look at it." "i can't tell you anything," he said gently. "i can only talk to you like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go." she did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent. it was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech. "i'm glad i've seen you," she said at last. he ignored the valediction of her tone. "and when am i to see you again?" he said. this time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause. he asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted his preposterous pretext? up till now she had appeared to be taking him and his pretext simply, as they came. her silence, her pause had had no expectation in it. it evidently had not occurred to her that the deep could open up. that was how she had struck him, more and more, as never looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look forward. she regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that might turn upon her at any time and hurt her. he rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. he turned. "well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?" they were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she would keep him from ever entering again. "or," said he, "may i come again? soon?" "do," she said, "and bring nina with you." she set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from him into the darkness of the room. xxvi it was the twenty-seventh of june, laura's birthday. tanqueray had proposed that they should celebrate it by a day on wendover hill. for the kiddy's increasing pallor cried piteously for the open air. nina was to bring owen prothero; and jane, in prothero's interests, was to bring brodrick; and tanqueray, laura insisted, was to bring his wife. rose had counted the days, the very hours before laura's birthday. she had plenty to do for once on the morning of the twenty-seventh, making rock cakes and cutting sandwiches and packing them beautifully in a basket. over-night she had washed and ironed the white blouse she was to wear. the white blouse lay on her bed, wonderful as a thing seen in a happy dream. rose could hardly permit herself to believe that the dream would come true, and that tanqueray would really take her. it all depended on whether laura could get off. getting laura off was the difficulty they encountered every time she had a birthday. so uncertain was the event that nina and prothero called at the house in albert street before going on to the station. they found tanqueray, and rose in her white blouse, waiting outside on the pavement. they heard that jane holland was in there with laura, bringing pressure to bear on the obstinate kiddy who was bent on the renunciation of her day. jane's voice on the landing called to them to come up-stairs. without them it was impossible, she said, to get laura off. the whole house was helping, in a passionate publicity; for every one in it loved laura. mr. baxter, the landlord, was on the staircase, bringing laura's boots. the maid of all work was leaning out of the window on the landing, brushing laura's skirt. a tall girl was standing by the table in the sitting-room. she had a lean, hectic face, and prominent blue eyes under masses of light hair. she was addy ranger, the type-writer on the ground-floor, who had come up from her typewriting to see what she could do. she was sewing buttons on laura's blouse while jane brought pressure upon laura. "of course you're going," jane was saying. "it's not as if you had a birthday every day." for laura still sat at her writing-table, labouring over a paragraph, white lipped and heavy eyed. shuffling all over the room and round about her was mr. gunning. he was pouring out the trouble that had oppressed him for the last four years. "she won't stop scribbling. it's scribble--scribble--scribble all day long. if i didn't lie awake to stop her she'd be at it all night. i've caught her--in her nightgown. she'll get out of her bed to do it." "papa, dear, you know miss lempriere and mr. prothero?" his mind adjusted itself instantly to its vision of them. he bowed to each. he was the soul of courtesy and hospitality, and they were his guests; they had come to luncheon. "lolly, my dear, have you ordered luncheon?--you must tell mrs. baxter to give us a salmon mayonnaise, and a salad and lamb cutlets in aspic. and, lolly! tell her to put a bottle of champagne in ice." for in his blessed state, among the fragments of old splendours that still clung to him, mr. gunning had preserved indestructibly his sense of power to offer his friends a bottle of champagne on a suitable occasion, and every occasion now ranked with him as suitable. "yes, darling," said laura, and dashed down a line of her paragraph. he shuffled feebly toward the door. "i have to see to everything myself," he said. "that child there has no more idea how to order a luncheon than the cat. there should be," he reverted, "lamb cutlets in aspic. i must see to it myself." he wandered out of the room and in again, driven, by his dream. "oh," cried laura, "somebody else must have my birthday. _i_ can't have it. i must sit tight and finish my paragraph." "you'll spoil it if you do," said prothero. "besides spoiling everybody's day," said jane judiciously. that brought laura round. she reflected that, if she sat tight from ten that evening till two in the morning, she could save their day. but first she had to finish her paragraph and then to hide it and lock it up. then she put the pens and ink on a high shelf out of mr. gunning's reach. he had been known to make away with the materials of lolly's detestable occupation when he got the chance. he attributed to it that mysterious, irritating semblance of poverty in which they moved. he smiled at her, a happy, innocent smile. "_that's_ right, _that's_ right. put it away, my dear, put it away." "yes, papa," said laura. she took the blouse from addy ranger, and she and jane holland disappeared with it into a small inner room. from the voices that came to him prothero gathered that jane holland was "buttoning her up the back." "don't say," cried laura, "that it won't meet!" "meet? it'll go twice round you. you don't eat enough." silence. "it's no good," he heard jane holland say, "not eating. i've tried both." "i," said laura in a voice that penetrated, "over-eat. habitually." "i must go," said mr. gunning, "and find my hat and stick." his idea now was that laura was going to take him for a walk. addy ranger began to talk to prothero. he liked addy. she had an amusing face with a long nose and wide lips, restless and cynical. she confided to him the trouble of her life, the eternal difficulty of finding anywhere a permanent job. addy's dream was permanence. then they talked of laura. "do you know what _her_ dream is?" said addy. "to be able to afford wine, and chicken, and game and things--for him." "when you think of her work!" said nina. "it's charming; it's finished, to a point. how on earth does she do it?" "she sits up half the night to do it," said prothero; "when he isn't there." "and it's killing her," said addy, who had her back to the door. mr. gunning had come in again and he heard her. he gazed at them with a vague sweetness, not understanding what he heard. then laura ran in among them, in a tremendous hurry. she wasn't ready yet. it was a maddening, protracted agony, getting laura off. she had forgotten to lock the cupboard where the whisky was (a shilling's worth in a medicine bottle); and poor papa might find it. since he had had his sunstroke you couldn't trust him with anything, not even with a jam-pot. then addy, at laura's request, rushed out of the room to find laura's hat and her handkerchief and her gloves--not the ones with the holes in them. and then laura looked at her hands. "oh," she cried, "_look_ at my poor hands. i can't go like that. i _hate_ an inky woman." and she dashed out to wash the ink off. and then the gloves found by addy had all holes in them. and at that laura stamped her foot and said, "damn!" the odds against laura's getting off were frightful. but she was putting on her hat. she was really ready just as tanqueray's voice was heard calling on the stairs, "you must hurry up if you want to catch that train." and now they had to deal seriously with mr. gunning, who stood expectant, holding his hat and stick. "good-bye, papa dear," said she. "am i not to come, too?" said mr. gunning. "not to-day, dear." she was kissing him while jane and nina waited in the open doorway. their eyes signed to her to be brave and follow them. but laura lingered. prothero looked at laura, and mr. gunning looked at prothero. his terrible idea had come back to him at the sight of the young man, risen, and standing beside laura for departure. "are you going to take my little girl away from me?" he said. "poor little papa, of course he isn't. i'm going with jane, and nina. you know nina?" "and who," he cried, "is going to take me for my walk?" he had her there. she wavered. "addy's coming in to give you your tea. you like addy." (he bowed to miss ranger with a supreme courtesy.) "and i'll be back in time to see you in your little bed." she ran off. addy ranger took mr. gunning very tenderly by the arm and led him to the stairs to see her go. outside on the pavement tanqueray gave way to irritation. "if," said he, "it would only please heaven to take that old gentleman to itself." "it won't," said nina. "how she would hate us if she heard us," said jane. "there ought to be somebody to take care of 'im," said rose, moved to compassion. "'e might go off in a fit any day. she can't be easy when 'e's left." "he _must_ be left," said tanqueray with ferocity. "here she is," said jane. there she was; and there, too, was her family. for, at the sight of laura running down-stairs with prothero after her, mr. gunning broke loose from addy's arm and followed her, perilously followed her. addy was only just in time to draw him back from the hall door as prothero closed it. and then little laura, outside, heard a cry as of a thing trapped, and betrayed, and utterly abandoned. "i can't go," she cried. "he thinks i'm leaving him--that i'm never coming back. he always thinks it." "you know," said nina, "he never thinks anything for more than five minutes." "i know--but----" nina caught her by the shoulder. "you stupid kiddy, you must forget him when he isn't there." "but he _is_ there," said laura. "i can't leave him." between her eyes and prothero's there passed a look of eternal patience and despair. rose saw it. she saw how it was with them, and she saw what she could do. she turned back to the door. "you go," she said. "i'll stay with him." from the set of her little chin you saw that protest and argument were useless. "i can take care of him," she said. "i know how." and as she said it there came into her face a soft flame of joy. for tanqueray was looking at her, and smiling as he used to smile in the days when he adored her. he was thinking in this moment how adorable she was. "you may as well let her," he said. "she isn't happy if she can't take care of somebody." and, as they wondered at her, the door opened and closed again on rose and her white blouse. xxvii they found brodrick waiting for them at the station. imperturbable, on the platform, he seemed to be holding in leash the wendover train whose engines were throbbing for flight. prothero suffered, painfully, the inevitable introduction. tanqueray had told him that if he still wanted work on the papers brodrick was his man. brodrick had an idea. on the long hill-road going up from wendover station prothero, at tanqueray's suggestion, tried to make himself as civil as possible to miss holland. tentatively and with infinite precautions jane laid before him brodrick's idea. the war correspondent of the "morning telegraph" was coming home invalided from manchuria. she understood that his place would be offered to mr. prothero. would he care to take it? he did not answer. she merely laid the idea before him to look at. he must weigh, she said, the dangers and the risks. from the expression of his face she gathered that these were the last things he would weigh. and yet he hesitated. she looked at him. his eyes were following the movements of laura gunning where, well in front of them, the marvellous kiddy, in the first wildness of her release from paragraphs, darted and plunged and leaped into the hedges. jane allowed some moments to lapse before she spoke again. the war, she said, would not last for ever; and if he took this berth, it would lead almost certainly to a regular job on the "telegraph" at home. he saw all that, he said, and he was profoundly grateful. his eyes, as they turned to her, showed for a moment a film of tears. then they wandered from her. he asked if he might think it over and let her know. "when," she said, "can you let me know?" "i think," he said, "probably, before the end of the day." the day was drawing to its end when the group drifted and divided. brodrick, still imperturbable, took possession of jane, and prothero, with his long swinging stride, set off in pursuit of the darting laura. tanqueray, thus left behind with nina, watched him as he went. "he's off, nina. bolted." his eyes smiled at her, suave, deprecating, delighted eyes and recklessly observant. "so has jane," said nina, with her dangerous irony. apart from them and from their irony, prothero was at last alone with laura on the top of wendover hill. she had ceased to dart and to plunge. he found for her a hidden place on the green slope, under a tree, and there he stretched himself at her side. "do you know," he said, "this is the first time i've seen you out of doors." "so it is," said she in a strange, even voice. she drew off her gloves and held out the palms of her hands as if she were bathing them in the pure air. her face was turned from him and lifted; her nostrils widened; her lips parted; her small breasts heaved; she drank the air like water. to his eyes she was the white image of mortal thirst. "is it absolutely necessary for you to live in camden town?" he said. she sat up very straight and stared steadily in front of her, as if she faced, unafraid, the invincible necessity. "it is. absolutely." she explained that baxter, her landlord, had been an old servant of papa's, and that _the_ important thing was to be with people who would be nice to him and not mind, she said, his little ways. he sighed. "do you know what i should do with you if i could have my way? i should turn you into a green garden and keep you there from nine in the morning till nine at night. i should make you walk a mile with me twice a day--not too fast. all the rest of the time you should lie on a couch on a lawn, with a great rose-bush at your head and a bed of violets at your feet. i should bring you something nice to eat every two hours." "and how much work do you suppose i should get through?" "work? you wouldn't do _any_ work for a year at least--if i had my way." "it's a beautiful dream," said she. she closed her eyes, but whether to shut the dream out or to keep it in he could not say. "i don't want," she said presently, "to lie on a couch in a garden with roses at my head and violets at my feet, as if i were dead. you don't know how tre--_mend_--ously alive i am." "i know," he said, "how tremendously alive you'd be if i had my way--if you were happy." she was still sitting up, nursing her knees, and staring straight in front of her at nothing. "you don't know what it's like," she said; "the unbearable pathos of papa." "it's your pathos that's unbearable." "oh don't! don't be nice to me. i shall hate you if you're nice to me." she paused, staring. "i was unkind to him yesterday. i see how pathetic he is, and yet i'm unkind. i snap like a little devil. you don't know what a devil, what a detestable little devil i can be." she turned to him, sparing herself no pain in her confession. "i was cruel to him. it's horrible, like being cruel to a child." the horror of it was in her stare. "it's your nerves," he said; "it's because you're always frightened." he seemed to meditate before he spoke again. "how are you going on?" "you see how." "i do indeed. it's unbearable to think of your having to endure these things. and i have to stand by and see you at the end of your tether, hurt and frightened, and to know that i can do nothing for you. if i could have my way you would never be hurt or frightened any more." as he spoke something gave way in her. it felt like a sudden weakening and collapse of her will, drawing her heart with it. "but," he went on, "as i can't have my way, the next best thing is--to stand by you." she struggled as against physical faintness, struggled successfully. "since i can't take you out of it," he said, "i shall come and live in camden town too." "you couldn't live in camden town." "i can live anywhere i choose. i shouldn't _see_ camden town." "you couldn't," she insisted. "and if you could i wouldn't let you." "why not?" "be_cause_--it wouldn't do." he smiled. "it would be all right. i should get a room near you and look after your father." "it wouldn't do," she said again. "i couldn't let you." "i can do anything i choose. your little hands can't stop me." she looked at him gravely. "why do you choose it?" "because i can choose nothing else." "ah, why are you so good to me?" "be_cause_"--he mocked her absurd intonation. "don't tell me. it's because you _are_ good. you can't help it." "no; i can't help it." "but--" she objected, "i'm so horrid. i don't believe in god and i say damn when i'm angry." "i heard you." "you said yourself i wanted violets to sweeten me and hammers to soften me--you think i'm so bitter and so hard." "you know what i think of you. and you know," he said, "that i love you." "you mustn't," she whispered. "it's no good." he seemed not to have heard her. "and some day," he said, "i shall marry you. i'd marry you to-morrow if i'd enough money to buy a hat with." "it's no use loving me. you can't marry me." "i know i can't. but it makes no difference." "no difference?" "not to me." "if you could," she said, "i wouldn't let you. it would only be one misery more." "how do you know what it would be?" "i won't even let you love me. that's misery too." "you don't know what it is." "i do know, and i don't want any more of it. i've been hurt with it." with a low cry of pity and pain he took her in his arms and held her to him. she writhed and struggled in his clasp. "don't," she cried, "don't touch me. let me alone. i can't bear it." he turned her face to his to find the truth in her eyes. "and yet," he said, "you love me." "no, no. it's no use," she reiterated; "it's no use. i won't have it. i won't let you love me." "you can't stop me." "i can stop you torturing me!" she was freed from his arms now. she sat up. her small face was sullen and defiant in its expression of indomitable will. "of course," he said, "you can stop me touching you. but it makes no difference. i shall go on caring for you. it's no use struggling and crying against that." "i shall go on struggling." "go on as long as you like. it doesn't matter. i can wait." she rose. "come," she said. "it's time to be going back." he obeyed her. when they reached the rise on the station road they turned and waited for the others to come up with them. they looked back. their hill was on their left, to their right was the great plain, grey with mist. they stood silent, oppressed by their sense of a sad and sudden beauty. then with the others they swung down the road to the station. before the end of the day brodrick heard that his offer was accepted. xxviii it was tanqueray who took laura home that night. prothero parted from her at the station and walked southwards with nina lempriere. "why didn't you go with her?" she said. "i couldn't have let you walk home by yourself." "as if i wasn't always by myself." her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with its involuntary surrender. he edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. but the pace he set was terrific. "you've no idea, owen, how odd you look careering through the streets." "not odder than you, do i? _you_ ought to be swinging up a mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. that's how i used to see you." "do you remember?" "i remember the first time i ever saw you, fifteen years ago. i'd gone up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. i was beating my way up through the undergrowth when i came on you. you were above me, hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper ledge down on to the track. your hair--you had lots of hair, all tawny--some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over your eyes. they gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there were green lights in them. you dropped at my feet and dashed down the mountain. i had found my wild cat." "i remember. you frightened me. your eyes were so queer." "not queerer than yours, nina. yours had all the enchantment and all the terror of the mountains in them." "and yours--yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a human spirit lost in a dream. a beautiful and dreadful dream. i'd forgotten; and now i remember. you look like that now." "that's your fault, nina. you make me remember my old dreams." "owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? don't these walls press on you and hurt you?" they were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night. "not they," he said. "i've lost that sense. look there--you and i could go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would simply disappear." they had come into the lighted strand. a monstrous hotel rose before them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate framework for its piled and serried squares of light. it showed like a hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. the buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion. "your sense is a sense i haven't got," said she. "i lose it sometimes. but it always comes back." "isn't it--horrible?" "no," he said. "it isn't." they plunged down a steep side-street off the strand, and turned on to their terrace. he let her in with his latchkey and followed her up-stairs. he stopped at her landing. "may i come in?" he said. "or is it too late?" "it isn't late at all," said she. and he followed her into the room. he did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders against the chimney-piece. she knew that he had something to say to her that must be said instantly or not at all. and yet he kept silence. whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing. "you'd like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb and dangerous mood. he roused himself almost irritably. "thanks, no. don't bother about it." she left him and went into the inner room to make it. she was afraid of him; afraid of what she might have to hear. she had the sense of things approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time that bound them for her moment. it was as if she could spin it out by interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant acts. through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. you would have said that he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he wanted he would go. she saw him take her book, "tales of the marches," from its shelf and open it. she became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the gas-ring burning on the hearth. her thin sleeve swept the ring. she was stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on prothero, held by what they saw. the small blue jets of the ring flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. nina made no sound. prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth, motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame. he leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast, and beat out the fire with his hands. he dressed the burn and bandaged it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain from her pain. "why didn't you call out?" he said. "i didn't want you to know." "you'd have been burnt sooner?" he had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. she turned her head and her eyes met his. "i'd have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than hurt--your hands." his hands dropped from her shoulder. he thrust them into his pockets out of her sight. she followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of his recoil. "if you had a body like mine," she said, "you'd be glad to get rid of it on any terms." she wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to call back the words that had flung themselves upon him. "there's nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly. "no, owen, nothing; except that i'm tired of it." "the tiredness will pass. is that burn hurting you?" "not yet. i don't mind it." he stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. she saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor. she came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced her. "nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? if you hadn't written it, i should never have been here." "that's why, then, isn't it?" "i suppose so. you _had_ to write it, and i _had_ to come." "yes, owen," she said gently. "you brought me here," he said. "i can't understand it." "can't understand what?" "the fascination i had for you." he closed the book and laid it down. "you were my youth, nina." he held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn. she would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that forbade her to touch him. "my youth was dumb. it couldn't make itself immortal. you did that for it." "but the people of those tales are not a bit like you." "no. they _are_ me. they are what i was. your people are not people, they are not characters, they are incarnate passions." "so like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony. "you don't know me. you don't remember me. but i know and remember you. you asked me once how i knew. that's how. i've been where you were." he paused. "if my youth were here, nina, it would be at your feet. as it is, it rose out of its grave to salute you. it follows you now, sometimes, like an unhappy ghost." it was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him. then she remembered that, if she was his youth, laura was his manhood. she knew that none of these things were what he had come to say. he said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. he had got to go, he said, next week to manchuria. brodrick was sending him. she stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow. her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat. he turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. the door fell to between them. she groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. when her feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself down on it. she had no thought in her brain nor any sense of circumstance. it was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart. at midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched out, still and passive to the torture. every now and then tears cut their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. every now and then the burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily distress. the trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when owen laid his hands on her, had passed. she could have judged her pain to be wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all passion of flesh and blood. in the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated; eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. her body, that had carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. it was incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. she lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable, not to be measured by any clock or sun. it was there that her undoing was accomplished. yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. every day he came to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it. "this thing has got to heal," he said, "before i go." she saw his going now as her own deed. it was she, not brodrick, who was sending him to manchuria. it was she who had pushed him to the choice between poverty and that dangerous exile. it was all done six weeks ago when she handed him over to jane holland. she was aware that in his desperate decision brodrick counted for more than jane, and laura gunning for more than brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself; behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme. she asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? for she had had it. in his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual appeal. her passion for owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration, sublimely heedless of its end. there had been moments when she had felt that nothing could take owen from her. he was more profoundly part of her than if they had been joined by the material tie. she was bound to him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any one of them would kill her. she knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. but her experience of tanqueray was no help to her. separation from tanqueray had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality of passion that bore hatred in its blood. she had no illusion as to the nature of her feelings. tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the unhappy beast that lurked in her. that was all. owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. and this terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. each day it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. she told herself that she preferred a brutality like tanqueray's which would have made short work of her. as yet she had kept her head. she was on her guard, her grip to the throat of the beast. she was now at the end of owen's last day. he had come and gone. she had endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. her wound was inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. he had stood beside her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his service to her suffering. and as he handled the wound, he had praised her courage. "it'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. but when it hurts most it's healing." that night she did not sleep. neither did he. as she lay in bed she could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back, above hers. her wild beast woke and tore her. she was hardly aware of the sound of his feet overhead. it was indifferent to her as traffic in the street. the throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion. the beast was falling now upon laura's image and destroying it. it hated laura as it had once hated tanqueray. it hated her white face and virginal body and the pathos that had drawn owen to her. for the beast, though savage, was not blind. it discerned; it discriminated. in that other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon jane; it had known jane for its fellow, the victim of tanqueray's devilry. it had pursued tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it back. it could have lain low for ever at owen's feet and under the pity of his hands. it had no quarrel with spirit. but now that it saw laura's little body standing between it and owen, it broke out in the untamed, unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh. the sound of owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. she sat up and listened. it was not the first time that she had watched with him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. she had learned to know his mood by his footstep. she knew the swinging, rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow, lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her, like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering. it shook her now. she received and endured his trouble. she had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to owen's door, and knocked softly. she heard him stride to the door with the impetus of fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room. his mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. he stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut her in. "what is it, nina?" he was contemplating her with a certain sad perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or surprise. it was as if he had foreseen that she would do this. "you're ill," he said. "go down-stairs; i'll come to you." "i'm not ill and i'm not mad. please shut that door." he shut it. "won't you sit down?" she smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself. prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour. her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of the room. on his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. a drawer, pulled from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at her feet. with a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few new things bought yesterday for his journey. an overcoat lay on the bed beside her. he had not had anything like that before. she put out her hand and felt the stuff. "it ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly. he rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. her sobbing ceased suddenly. she looked up at him and was still, under his touch. "you don't want to go," she said. "why are you going?" "because i have to. it's the only thing, you see, there is to do." "if it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. if you die out there it will be my doing." "won't it be the proprietors of the 'morning telegraph' who'll be responsible--if i die?" "i set them on to you." "did you? i rather hoped they'd pitched on me because i was the best man for the job." "the best man--to die?" "war correspondents don't die. at least they don't set out with that intention." "you _will_ die," she said slowly; "because everything i care for does." "why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?" "i care--because they die." her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. having uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done. "why shouldn't i tell you that i care for you? what does it matter? that ends it." she rose. "i know," she said, "i've broken all the rules. a woman shouldn't come and tell a man she cares for him." "why not?" he said simply. "i tell you, i don't know why not. i only know that i'm so much more like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. why shouldn't i tell you? you know it--as god knows it." "i know it as a man knows it. i told you i'd been there." "owen--shall i ever be where you are now?" "i had to die first. i told you my youth was dead. that, nina, was what you cared for." it was not. yet she yearned for it--his youth that was made to love her, his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still. "no," she said, "it isn't only that." she paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau. with her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new suit he had flung in and crushed. her back was now towards him and the door he was about to open. "owen," she said, "since i'm breaking all the rules, why can't i go out, too, and look after you?" he shook his head. "it's not the place for women," he said. "women? haven't i told you that i'm like a man? i'm like you, owen, if it comes to that." he smiled. "if you were like me, you'd stay at home." "what should i stay for?" "to look after laura gunning. that's what you'd want to do, if you were--i. and," he said quietly, "it's what you're going to do." she rose to her feet and faced him, defying the will that he laid on her. [illustration: she had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to her to say] "how do you know? and why should i?" "because there's nothing else that you can do for me." she had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to her to say. xxix that was a solid, practical idea of brodrick's. all that he had heard of owen prothero connected him securely with foreign countries. by the fact that he had served in south africa, to say nothing of his years in the indian medical service, he was pointed out as the right man to send to the russian army in manchuria; add to this the gift of writing and your war correspondent was complete. it was further obvious that prothero could not possibly exist in england on his poems. at the same time brodrick was aware that he had reasons for desiring to get the long, ugly poet out of england as soon as possible. his length and his ugliness had not deterred jane holland from taking a considerable interest in him. brodrick's reasons made him feel extremely uncomfortable in offering such a dangerous post as war correspondent to young prothero. therefore when it came to prothero's accepting it, he did his best to withdraw the offer. it wasn't exactly an offer. he had merely mentioned it as a possible opening, a suggestion in the last resort. he pointed out to prothero the dangers and the risks, among them damage to his trade as a poet. poets were too precious. there were, he said, heaps of other men. but prothero had leaped at it; he had implored brodrick not to put another man in; and the more he leaped and implored the more brodrick tried to keep him off it. but you couldn't keep him off. he was mad, apparently, with the sheer lust of danger. he _would_ go. "if you do," brodrick had said finally, "you go at your own risk." and he had gone, leaving the editor profoundly uncomfortable. brodrick, in these days, found himself reiterating, "he _would_ go, he _would_ go." and all the time he felt that he had sent the poor long poet to his death, because of jane holland. he saw a great deal of jane holland in the weeks that followed prothero's departure. they had reached the first month of autumn, and jane was sitting out on the lawn in brodrick's garden. the slender, new-born body of prothero's poems lay in her lap. eddy heron stretched himself at her feet. winny hung over her shoulder. every now and then the child swept back her long hair that brushed jane's face, in the excitement of her efforts to see what, as she phrased it, mr. prothero had done. opposite them mrs. heron and gertrude collett sat quietly sewing. eddy, who loved to tease his mother, was talking about jane as if she wasn't there. "i say, mummy, don't you like her awfully?" "of course i like her," said mrs. heron, smiling at her son. "why do you like me?" said jane, whose vision of owen prothero was again obscured by winny's hair. "why do we like anybody?" said mrs. heron, with her inassailable reserve. "you can't get out of it that way, mum. you don't just go liking anybody. you like jolly few. we're an awful family for not liking people. aren't we, gee-gee?" "i didn't know it," said miss collett. "oh, but gee-gee's thinking of uncle hugh," said winny. miss collett's face stiffened. she _was_ thinking of him. "uncle hugh? why, he's worse than any of us. with women--ladies--anyhow." "eddy, dear!" said eddy's mother. "well, have you ever seen a lady uncle hugh could really stand--except miss holland?" gertrude bent so low over her work that her face was hidden. "i say! look at that kid. can't you take your hair out of miss holland's face? she doesn't want your horrid hair." "yes, i do," said jane. she was grateful for the veil of winny's hair. they had not arrived suddenly, the five of them, at this intimacy. it had developed during the last fortnight, which jane, fulfilling a promise, had spent with dr. brodrick and mrs. heron. jane had been ill, and brodrick had brought her to his brother's house to recover. dr. henry had been profoundly interested in her case. so had his sister, mrs. heron, and mr. john brodrick and mrs. john, and sophy levine and gertrude collett, and winny and eddy heron. since the day when they had first received her, the brodricks had established a regular cult of jane holland. it had become the prescribed event for jane to spend every possible sunday at putney heath with the editor of the "monthly review." her friendship with his family had advanced from sunday to sunday by slow, well-ordered steps. jane had no illusions as to its foundation. she knew that brodrick's family had begun by regarding her as part of brodrick's property, the most eligible, the most valuable part. it was interested in contemporary talent merely as a thing in which brodrick had a stake. it had hardly been aware of jane holland previous to her appearance in the "monthly review." after that it had been obliged to recognize her as a power propitious to the editor's ambition and his dream. for though his family regarded the editor of the "monthly review" as a dreamer, a fantastic dreamer, it was glad to think that a brodrick should have ambition, still more to think that it could afford a dream. they had always insisted upon that, there being no end to the things a brodrick could afford. they had identified jane holland with his dream and his ambition, and were glad again to think that he could afford her. as for her dreadful, her conspicuous celebrity, the uncomfortably staring fact that she was jane holland, jane was aware that it struck them chiefly as reflecting splendour upon brodrick. but she was aware that her unique merit, her supreme claim, was that she had done a great thing for brodrick. on that account, if she had been the most obscure, the most unremarkable jane holland, they would have felt it incumbent on them to cherish her. they had incurred a grave personal obligation, and could only meet it by that grave personal thing, friendship. how grave it was, jane, who had gone into it so lightly, was only just aware. this family had an immense capacity for disapproval; it was awful, as eddy had observed, for not liking people. it was bound, in its formidable integrity, to disapprove of her. she had felt that she had disarmed its criticism only by becoming ill and making it sorry for her. she had not been a week in dr. brodrick's house before she discovered that these kind people had been sorry for her all the time. they were sorry for her because she had to work hard, because she had no home and no family visible about her. they refused to regard nina and laura as a family, or the flat in kensington square as in any reasonable sense a home. jane could see that they were trying to make up to her for the things that she had missed. and in being sorry for jane holland they had lost sight of her celebrity. they had not referred to it since the day, three months ago, when she had first come to them, a brilliant, distracting alien. they were still a little perturbed by the brilliance and distraction, and it was as an alien that she moved among them still. it was as an alien (she could see it plainly) that they were really sorry for her. they seemed to agree with her in regarding her genius as a thing tacked on to her, a thing disastrous, undesirable. they were anxious to show her that its presence did not destroy for any of them her personal charm. they betrayed their opinion that her charm existed in spite rather than because of it. thus, by this shedding of her celebrity, jane in the houses of the brodricks had found peace. she was secure from all the destroyers, from the clever little people, from everything that carried with it the dreadful literary taint. brodrick's family was divinely innocent of the literary taint. the worst that could be said of brodrick was that he would have liked to have it; but, under his editorial surface, he was clean. it was in hugh brodrick's house, that the immunity, the peace was most profound. hugh was not gregarious. tanqueray could not have more abhorred the social round. he had come near it, he had told her, in his anxiety to know _her_, but his object attained, he had instantly dropped out of it. she knew where she was with him. in their long, subdued confidences he had given her the sense that she had become the dominant interest, the most important fact in his social life. and that, again, not because of her genius, but, he almost definitely intimated, because of some mystic moral quality in her. he did not intimate that he found her charming. jane had still serious doubts as to her charm, and brodrick's monstrous sincerity would have left her to perish of her doubt. she would not have had him different. it was because of _his_ moral quality, his sincerity, that she had liked him from the first. most certainly she liked him. if she had not liked him she would not have come out so often to roehampton and wimbledon and putney. she could not help but like him when he so liked her, and liked her, not for the things that she had done for literature, not for the things she had done for him, but for her own sake. that was what she had wanted, to be liked for her own sake, to be allowed to be a woman. unlike tanqueray, brodrick not only allowed her, he positively encouraged her to be a woman. evidently, in brodrick's opinion she was just like any other woman. he could see no difference between her and, well, gertrude collett. gertrude, jane was sure, stood to brodrick for all that was most essentially and admirably feminine. why he required so much of jane's presence when he could have gertrude collett's was more than jane could understand. she was still inclined to her conjecture that he was using her to draw miss collett, playing her off against miss collett, stinging miss collett to the desired frenzy by hanging that admirable woman upon tenter-hooks. that was why jane felt so safe with him; because, she argued, he couldn't do it if he had not felt safe with her. he was not in love with her. he was not even, like tanqueray, in love with her genius. if she had had the slightest doubt about his attitude, his behaviour on the day of her arrival had made it stand out sharp and clear. she had dined at moor grange, and caro bickersteth had been there. caro had insisted on dragging jane's genius from its temporary oblivion, and brodrick had turned silent and sulky, positively sulky then. and in that mood he had remained for the two weeks that she had stayed at roehampton. he had betrayed none of the concern so evidently felt for her by eddy and winny and gertrude collett and mrs. heron and the doctor. they had all contended with each other in taking care of her, in waiting on her hand and foot. but brodrick, after bringing her there; after, as she said, dumping her down, suddenly and heavily, on his family, brodrick had refused to compete; he had hung back; he had withdrawn himself from the scene, maintaining his singular sulkiness and silence. she forgave him, for of course he was disturbed about gertrude collett. if he wanted to marry gertrude, why on earth couldn't he marry her and have done with it? jane thought. in order to think better she had closed her eyes. when she opened them again she found brodrick seated in an opposite chair, quietly regarding her. she was alone with him. the others had all gone. "i wasn't asleep," said jane. "i didn't suppose you were," said brodrick; "if you were reading prothero." brodrick's conscience was beginning to hurt him rather badly. there were moments when he connected jane's illness with prothero's departure. he, therefore, by sending prothero away, was responsible for her illness. "if you want to read," he said, "i'll go." "i don't want to read. i want to talk." "about prothero?" "no, not about mr. prothero. about that serial----" "what serial?" "my serial. your serial," said she. brodrick said he wasn't going to talk shop on sunday. he wanted to forget that there were such things as serials. "i wish _i_ could forget," said she. she checked the impulse that was urging her to say, "you really ought to marry gertrude." "i wish you could," he retorted, with some bitterness. "how can i?" she replied placably, "when it was the foundation of our delightful friendship?" brodrick said it had nothing whatever to do with their friendship. "well," said jane, "if it wasn't that it was hambleby." at that brodrick frowned so formidably that jane could have cried out, "for goodness' sake go and marry her and leave off venting your bad temper upon me." "it had to be something," said she. "why shouldn't it be hambleby? by the way, george tanqueray was perfectly right. i was in love with him. i mean, of course, with hambleby." "you seem," said brodrick, "to be in love with him still, as far as i can make out." "that's why," said jane, "i can't help feeling that there's something wrong with him. george says you never really know the people you're in love with." there was a gleam of interest now in brodrick's face. he was evidently, jane thought, applying tanqueray's aphorism to gertrude. "it doesn't make any difference," he said. "i should have thought," said she, "it would have made _some_." "it doesn't. if anything, you know them rather better." "oh," said she, "it makes _that_ difference, does it?" again she thought of gertrude. "i wonder," she said pensively, "if you really know." "at any rate i know as much as tanqueray." "do i bore you with tanqueray?" he shrugged his shoulders. "you don't deny his genius?" "i don't deny anybody's genius," said brodrick furiously. jane looked at him. "i don't think it's nice of you," said she, "to talk that way to me when i've been so ill." "you've no right to be ill," said brodrick, with undiminished rancour. "i have," said jane. "a perfect right. i can be as ill as ever i please." she looked at him again and caught him smiling surreptitiously under his heavy gloom. "i mean," he said, "you needn't be. you wouldn't be if you didn't work so hard." she crumpled her eyelids like one who fails to see. "if i didn't what?" "work so hard." he really wanted to know whether it was that or prothero. first it had been tanqueray, and she had got over tanqueray. now he could only suppose that it was prothero. he would have to wait until she had got over prothero. "i like that," said she, "when it's your serial i'm working on." "do you mean to tell me," said brodrick, "that it's that?" "i was trying to tell you, but you wouldn't let me talk about it. not that i wanted to talk about it when the bare idea of it terrifies me. it's awful to have it hanging over me like this." "forget it. forget it," he said. "i can't. i'm afraid." "afraid of what?" "of not being able to finish it--of letting you down." he turned and looked at her intently. "that's why you've been killing yourself, is it?" she did not answer. "i didn't know. i didn't think," he said. "you should have told me." "it's my fault. i ought to have known. i ought never to have tried." "why did you?" his sulkiness, his ferocity, was gone now; he was gentleness itself. "because i wanted to please you." there was an inarticulate murmur from brodrick, a happy sound. "well," he said, "you shan't go on." "but what can we do?" "we'll do something. there are plenty of things that can be done." "but--there's the magazine." "i don't care," said the editor, "if the abominable thing goes smash." "what? you can contemplate it's going smash?" "i can't contemplate your being worried like this." "it's people that worry me," she said--"if i only could have peace!" she sketched for him as she had sketched for tanqueray the horrors brought on her by her celebrity. "that's london," he said, as tanqueray had said. "you should live out of it." "nothing comes to me in the country." he pondered a long time upon that saying. "you wouldn't call this country, would you?" he said at last. "oh dear me, no." "well--what would you think of putney or wimbledon as a compromise?" "there can't be any compromise." "why not? it's what we all have to come to." "not i. i can only write if i'm boxed up in my funny little square, with the ash-trees weeping away in the middle." "i don't wonder," said brodrick, "that they weep." "you think it's so terrible?" "quite terrible." she laughed. "do you remember how you came to see me there?" "yes. and how you took me for the man come to tune the piano." he smiled, remembering it. a bell rang, summoning them, and he took no notice. he smiled again; and suddenly a great shyness and a terror overcame her. "don't you really think," said he, "that this sort of thing is nicer?" "oh, incomparably nicer. but isn't it getting rather cold?" his face darkened. "do you want to go in?" "yes." they rose and went together into the house. in the hall, through the open door of the drawing-room, she could see the table laid for tea, and gertrude sitting at it by herself, waiting for them. his sister and the children had gone. somehow she knew that he had made them go. they would come back, he explained, with the carriage that was to take her to the station, and they would say good-bye to her before she went. he evaded the drawing-room door and led the way into his library; and she knew that he meant to have the last hour with her alone. she paused on the threshold. she knew that if she followed him she would never get away. "aren't we going," said she, "to have tea with miss collett?" "would you rather?" "much rather," said she. "very well, just as you like," he said stiffly. he was annoyed again. all through tea-time he sulked, while jane sustained a difficult conversation with miss collett. miss collett had lost much of her beautiful serenity. she was still a charming hostess, but there was a palpable effort about her charm. she looked as if she were beginning to suffer from the strain of brodrick in his present mood. what brodrick's mood was, or was beginning to be, jane could no longer profess to be unaware. while she talked thin talk to gertrude about the superiority of putney heath to wimbledon park, and of brodrick's house to the houses of the other brodricks, she was thinking, "this woman was happy in his house before i came. he would have been happy with her if i hadn't come. it would be kinder of me if i were to keep out of it, and let her have her chance." and when she had said good-bye to mrs. heron and the children, and found herself in the doctor's brougham, shut up all alone with brodrick, she said to herself that it was for the last time. when she let him take her back to kensington square, when she let him sit with her there for ten minutes in the half-darkness, she said to herself that it was for the last time. and when he rose suddenly, almost violently, for departure, she knew it was for the last time. "it was good of you," she said, "to bring me home." "do you call _this_ a home?" said brodrick. "why not? it's all i want." "is it?" he said savagely, and left her. he was intensely disagreeable; but that also, she told herself, was for the last time. as long as brodrick was there she could listen to the voice inside her, murmuring incessantly of last times, and ordering her to keep out of it and let the poor woman have her chance. but when he was gone another voice, that was there too, told her that she could not keep out of it. she was being drawn in again, into the toils of life. when it had seemed to her that she drew, she was being drawn. she was drawn by all the things that she had cut herself off from, by holding hands, and searching eyes, and unforgotten tendernesses. in the half-darkness of her room the faces she had been living with were all about her. she felt again the brushing of winny's hair over her cheek. she heard winny's mother saying that she liked her. she saw brodrick sitting opposite her, and the look with which he had watched her when he thought she was asleep. and when the inward admonitory voice reiterated, "don't be drawn," the other answered, "whether i'm out of it or in it the poor woman hasn't got a chance." xxx it had not occurred to gertrude that she had a chance. to have calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so consecrated was her attitude to brodrick and to all that was brodrick's. her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. she had it. what more, she said to herself, could a woman want? the peace she had folded round brodrick wrapped her too. in the quiet hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to disturb her beautiful serenity. it was by the cultivation of a beautiful serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to brodrick and her position in his house. in the beginning that position had been so fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance. three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to stay. she was a far removed, impoverished cousin of mrs. john brodrick's. hence her claim. they had stretched the point of cousinship to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every brodrick. he had not wanted her. he preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. but he was sorry for the impoverished lady and he had let her come. then his sister sophy had urged him to keep her on until he married. sophy meant until he married the lady she intended him to marry. he had not married that lady nor any other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. but he had kept gertrude on. he had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would try her. he regarded gertrude with the suspicion a brodrick invariably entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. but gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that she was, after all, his own idea. and when sophy levine triumphed, as a brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme, he said, yes, miss collett was all right, now that he had trained her. if he approved of miss collett it was because she was no longer recognizable as the miss collett they had so preposterously thrust on him. he could not have stood her if she had been. brodrick was right. gertrude was not the same woman. she did not even look the same. she had come to moor grange lean, scared, utterly pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. so starved of all delight and of all possession was gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where the telephone was now. there was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into that little north room, that brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in it. the drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself. by that time he no longer objected to gertrude's being all over the place. brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him. silently, almost furtively, gertrude made herself indispensable to him. she knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot to supply it. thus, watching the awful increase of brodrick's correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the coming of a secretary and had forestalled it. she had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of brodrick's house, and by making brodrick supremely comfortable she had managed to forestall that too. his secretary had become the companion that his housekeeper could not hope to be. hitherto he had kept gertrude collett out of his library as far as possible. now her intrusion had the consecration of business, and it was even permissible for gertrude to spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. brodrick invariably breakfasted alone. this habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out, had been a barrier to all intimacy. but now a large part of his work on the "monthly review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the editor had less time for dining out. and latterly he had taken to coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. she filled the place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of missing. it seemed to him that he had got used to gertrude. he could not think what life would be like without gertrude, any more than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more intimate relation. for none of them had ever suggested that he should marry gertrude. no brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his housekeeper. gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself. and yet she dreamed. but her dream was of continuance in the silent, veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. service to brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the perfect tie. it was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. she desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible, inassailable passion of service. whenever, in her dream, she touched the perilous edges of devotion, gertrude had pulled herself back. she had told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense; to save and save and save. that was really what it came to when she saved him from having to keep a secretary. for gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in brodrick. thus she had laboured at her own destruction. so preoccupied was she with the thought of brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated itself to him. he grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. if gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity, brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained indefinitely quiescent. but he had become the centre of a hundred influences, wandering spirits of gertrude's brain. irresistibly urging, intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for the dominion of jane holland. but gertrude was not aware of this. her state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for three years a secret to herself. she was before all things a sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and boundless capacity for illusion. she shuddered in the grip of mortal renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of brodrick. in her three years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in flesh and blood; and brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. his attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity. it was with the coming of jane holland that disturbance had begun; a trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it, the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. she thought, in her innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck her that her symptoms were aggravated by miss holland's presence and became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that brodrick and miss holland were off together somewhere, and alone. she sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. this unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing. she was not even aware that she disliked miss holland. what she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned miss holland. thus she found herself positively looking forward to miss holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was, and what she was doing when she was not there. it ended in wonder; for brodrick was the only person who could have informed her, and he had grown curiously reticent on the subject of jane holland. he would say that she was coming, or that she was not coming, on such or such a day. that was all. her coming on some day or the other was a thing that gertrude had now to take for granted. she tried to discuss it eagerly with brodrick; she dwelt on it with almost affectionate solicitude; you would have said that brodrick could not have desired it more than she did. in the last two weeks gertrude found something ominous in brodrick's silence and sulkiness. and on this sunday, the day of jane's departure, she was no longer able to ignore their significance. very soon he would come to her and tell her that he did not want her; that she must go; that she must make room for miss holland. that night, after brodrick had returned from taking jane holland home, his secretary came to him in the library. she found him standing by the writing-table, looking intently at something which he held in his hand, something which, as gertrude appeared to him, he thrust hastily into a drawer. "may i speak to you a moment?" she said. "certainly." he turned, patient and polite, prepared to deal, as he had dealt before, with some illusory embarrassment of gertrude's. "you are not pleased with me," she said, forcing the naked statement through hard lips straight drawn. "what makes you think so?" "your manner has been different." "then what you mean is that you are not pleased with my manner. my manner is unfortunate." he was almost oppressively patient and polite. "would it not be better," she said, "for me to go?" "certainly not. unless you want to." "i don't say that i want to. i say it might be better." still, with laborious, weary patience, he protested. he was entirely, absolutely satisfied. he had never dreamed of her going. the idea was preposterous, and it was her own idea, not his. she looked at him steadily, with eyes prepared to draw truth from him by torture. "and there is no reason?" she said. "you can think of no reason why it would be better for me to go?" he hesitated a perceptible instant before he answered her. "there is no reason," he said; and having said it, he left the room. he had paused to gather patience in exasperation. gertrude interpreted the pause as the impressive stop before the final, irrevocable decision; a decision favourable to her continuance. she was not appeased by it. her anxiety rather had taken shape, resolving itself into a dreadful suspicion as to the relations between brodrick and miss holland. he was not thinking of marrying miss holland. but there was something between them, something which by no means necessitated her own departure, which indeed rendered superfluous any change in the arrangements she had made so perfect. it was not likely that brodrick, at his age, should desire to change them. he might be in love with jane holland. he was wedded to order and tranquillity and peace. and she never would be. there was wild, queer blood in her. her writings proved her lawless, defiant, contemptuous of propriety. she had, no doubt, claimed the right of genius to make its own rules. gertrude's brain, which had been passive to the situation, now worked with uncontrolled activity. she found herself arguing it out. if it were so, whatever was, or had been, or would be between them, it was transitory. it would run its course and period, and she would remain, and he would return to her. she had only to wait and serve; to serve and wait. it seemed to her then that her passion rose above theirs, white with renunciation, a winged prayer, a bloodless, bodiless longing, subtler than desire, sounding a poignant spiritual cry. and all the time she knew that her suspicion was not justified. jane holland was honest; and as for him, she was not even sure that he cared for her. every instinct in her was now subdued to the craving to be sure, to know how far the two were going or had gone. whatever was between them, it was something that brodrick desired to conceal, to thrust out of her sight, as he had thrust the thing he had held in his hand. up-stairs overhead, she heard the door of his room opening and shutting. she saw the light from his windows lengthening on the gravel path outside. he was not coming back. she opened the drawer where she divined that it lurked hidden, the thing that was the sign and symbol of their secret. she found lying there, face downwards, a portrait of jane holland, a photograph of the painting by gisborne. she took it in her hand and looked at the queer, half-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully, stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. she had a sudden vision of their passion, jane's and brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment, triumphant, exultant and alive. she laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned from it. and for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain. xxxi now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. as she faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. she had had foreknowledge of it from the moment when jane holland came first into brodrick's house. she maintained her policy of silence. it helped her, as if she felt that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease to be. she would have been glad if brodrick's family could have remained unaware of the situation. but brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it. every brodrick, once he had passed the privileged years of his minority, knew that grave things were expected of him. it was expected of him, first of all, that he should marry; and that, not with the levity of infatuation, but soberly and seriously, for the good and for the preservation of the race of brodricks in its perfection. as it happened, in the present generation of brodricks, not one of them had done what was expected of them, except sophy. john had fallen in love with a fragile, distinguished lady, and had incontinently married her; and she had borne him no children. henry, who should have known better, had fallen in love with a lady so excessively fragile that she had died before he could marry her at all. and because of his love for her he had remained unmarried. frances had set her heart on a rascal who had left her for the governess. and now hugh, with his jane holland, bid fair to be similarly perverse. for every brodrick took, not delight, so much as a serious and sober satisfaction, in the thought that he disappointed expectation. each one believed himself the creature of a solitary and majestic law. his actions defied prediction. he felt it as an impertinence that anybody, even a brodrick, should presume to conjecture how a brodrick would, in any given circumstances, behave. he held it a special prerogative of brodricks, this capacity for accomplishing the unforeseen. nobody was surprised when the unforeseen happened; for this family made it a point of honour never to be surprised. the performances of other people, however astounding, however eccentric, appeared to a brodrick as the facilely calculable working of a law from which a brodrick was exempt. whatever another person did, it was always what some brodrick had expected him to do. even when frances's husband ran away with the governess and broke the heart frances had set on him, it was only what john and henry and sophy and hugh had known would happen if she married him. if it hadn't happened to a brodrick, they would hardly have blamed heron for his iniquity; it was so inherent in him and predestined. so, when it seemed likely that hugh would marry jane holland, the brodricks were careful to conceal from each other that they were unprepared for this event. they discussed it casually, and with less emotion than they had given to the wild project of the magazine. it was on a sunday evening at the john brodricks', shortly after jane had left putney. "it strikes me," said john who began it, "that one way or another hugh is seeing a great deal of miss holland." "my dear john, why shouldn't he?" said frances heron. "i'm not saying that he shouldn't. i'm saying that one way or another, he does." "he has to see her on business," said frances. "_does_ he see her on business?" inquired john. "he says he does," said frances. "of course," said the doctor, "he'd _say_ he did." "why," said sophy, "does he say anything at all? that's the suspicious circumstance, to my mind." "he's evidently aware," said the doctor, "that something wants explaining." "so it does," said sophy; "when hugh takes to seeing any woman more than once in five months." "but she's the last woman he'd think of," said frances. "it's the last woman a man thinks of that he generally ends by marrying," said john. "if he'd only think of her," said the doctor, "he'd be safe enough." "i know. it's his not thinking," said john; "it's his dashing into it with his eyes shut." "do you think," said frances, "we'd better open his eyes?" "if you do that," said levine, "he'll marry her to-morrow." "yes," said the doctor; "much better encourage him, give him his head." "and fling her at it?" suggested sophy. "well, certainly, if we don't want it to happen, we'd better assume that it will happen." "supposing," said frances presently, "it did happen--what then?" "my dear frances, it would be most undesirable," said john. "by all means," said levine, "let us take the worst for granted. then possibly he'll think better of it." the family, therefore, adopted its characteristic policy of assuming hugh's intentions to be obvious, of refusing to be surprised or even greatly interested. only the doctor, watching quietly, waited for his moment. it came the next evening when he dropped in to dine with hugh. he turned the conversation upon jane holland, upon her illness, upon its cause and her recovery. "i shouldn't be surprised," said he, "if some time or other she was to have a bad nervous break-down." hugh laughed. "my dear henry, you wouldn't be surprised if everybody had a bad nervous break-down. it's what you're always expecting them to have." henry said he _did_ expect it in women of miss holland's physique, who habitually over-drive their brains beyond the power of their body. he became excessively professional as he delivered himself on this head. it was his subject. he was permitted to enlarge upon it from time to time, and hugh was not in the least surprised at his entering on it now. it was what he had expected of henry, and he said so. henry looked steadily at his brother. "i have had her," said he, "under very close observation." "so have i," said hugh. "you forget that she is an exceptional woman." "on the contrary, i think her so very exceptional as to be quite abnormal. geniuses generally are." "i don't know. for a woman to live absolutely alone, as she does, and thrive on it, and turn out the work she does--it's a pretty fair test of sanity." "that she should have chosen to do so is itself abnormal." "it's not a joyous or a desirable life for her, if that's what you mean," said hugh. but that was not what the doctor meant, and he judged it discreet to drop the discussion at that point. and, as for several weeks he saw and heard no more of miss holland, he judged that hugh had begun to think, and that he had thought better of it. for the doctor knew what he was talking about. when a brodrick meant to marry, he did not lose his head about a woman, he married sanely, soberly and decorously, for the sake of children. it was so that their father had married. it was so that john--well, john had been a little unfortunate. it was so that he, the doctor---- he stopped short in his reflections, remembering how it was that he had remained unmarried. like every other brodrick he had reserved for himself the privilege of the unexpected line. xxxii every year, about the middle of august, brodrick's family dispersed for the summer holidays. every year, about the middle of september, its return was celebrated at a garden-party given by the levines. brodrick's brother-in-law lived with an extreme simplicity in one of those square white houses in st. john's wood, houses secluded behind high, mysterious walls, where you entered, as by secret, through a narrow door. the party had streamed through this door, over the flagged path and through the house, into the small, dark, green garden at the back, a garden that seemed to guard, like the house, its secret and its mystery. there, on this yearly festival, you were certain to find all the brodricks, packed rather tight among a crowd of levines and their collaterals from fitzjohn's avenue, a crowd of very dark, very large-eyed, very curly-haired persons, persons attired with sobriety, almost with austerity, by way of protest against the notorious excesses of their race. and with them there was always, on this occasion, a troop of little boys and girls, dark, solemn-eyed little boys and girls, with incredibly curly hair, and strange, unchildlike noses. moving restlessly among them, or grouped apart, you came upon friends of the brodricks and levines, and here and there a few journalists, conspicuously tired young men who toiled nocturnally on the "morning telegraph." this year it was understood that the party would be brilliant. the young men turned up in large numbers and endeavoured to look for the occasion a little less tired than they were. all the great writers on the "monthly review" had been invited and many of them came. caro bickersteth was there; she came early, and sophy levine, in a discreet aside, implored her to give her a hand with the authors. authors, sophy intimated, were too much for her, and there would be a lot of them. there was miss lempriere and miss gunning, and jane holland, of course---- "of course," said caro, twinkling. "and mr. tanqueray." at that name caro raised her eyebrows and remarked that sophy was a lucky lady to get him, for he never went anywhere. then caro became abstracted, wondering why george tanqueray was coming, and to this particular show. "will his wife be here?" she inquired. "dear me," said sophy, "i never asked her. you don't somehow think of him as married." "i doubt," said caro; "if he thinks so of himself. there never was a man who looked it less." most singularly unattached he looked, as he stood there, beside nina lempriere and laura gunning, drawn to them, but taking hardly more notice of them than of any brodrick or levine. he was watching jinny as she moved about in the party. she had arrived somewhat conspicuously, attended by brodrick, by winny heron and by eddy, with the two elder little levines clinging to her gown. jane was aware that nina and laura were observing her; she was aware of a shade of anxiety in their concentration. then she knew that tanqueray was there, too, that he was watching her, that his eyes never left her. he did not seek her out after their first greeting. he preferred to stand aside and watch her. he had arrived later and he was staying late. jane felt that it would become her not to stay. but brodrick would not let her go. he took possession of her. he paraded her as his possession under tanqueray's eyes; eyes that were fixed always upon jane, vigilantly, anxiously, as if he saw her caught in the toils. an hour passed. the party dwindled and dissolved around them. the strangers were gone. the hordes of levines had scattered to their houses in fitzjohn's avenue. the little levines had been gathered away by their nurses from the scene. only brodrick and his family remained, and jane with them, and tanqueray who kept on looking at the two while he talked vaguely to levine. brodrick's family was not less interested or less observant. it had accepted without surprise what it now recognized as inevitable. it could no longer hope that hugh would cease from his insane pursuit of jane holland, after making the thing thus public, flourishing his intentions in the face of his family. with a dexterity in man[oe]uvre, an audacity, an obstinacy that was all his own, hugh had resisted every attempt to separate him from miss holland. he only let go his hold when sophy levine, approaching with an admirable air of innocence in guile, announced that baby was being put to bed. she suggested that jane might like to see him in his--well, in his perfection. it was impossible, sophy maintained, for anybody not to desire above all things to see him. up-stairs in the nursery, winny and mrs. heron were worshipping baby as he lay on the nurse's lap, in his perfection, naked from his bath. sophy could not wait till he was given up to her. she seized him, in the impatience of maternal passion. she bent over him, hiding her face with his soft body. presently her eyes, sophy's beautiful, loving eyes, looked up at jane over the child's shoulder, and their gaze had guile as well as love in it. jane stood before it motionless, impassive, impenetrable. winny fell on her knees in a rapture. "oh, miss holland!" she cried. "don't you love him?" jane admitted that she rather liked him. "she's a wretch," said sophy. "baby duckums, she says she rather likes you." baby chuckled as if he appreciated the absurdity of jane's moderation. "oh, don't you want," said winny, "don't you want to kiss his little feet? wouldn't you love to have him for your very own?" "no, winny, i shouldn't know what to do with him." "wouldn't you?" said mrs. heron. "feel," said winny, "how soft he is. he's got teeny, teeny hairs, like down, golden down, just there, on his little back." jane stooped and stroked the golden down. and at the touch of the child's body, a fine pain ran from her finger-tips to her heart, and she drew back, as one who feels, for the first time, the touch of life, terrible and tender. "oh, jane," said sophy, "what are you made of?" "i wonder----" said mrs. heron. jane knew that the eyes of the two women were on her, searching her, and that sophy's eyes were not altogether kind. she continued in her impassivity, smiling a provoking and inscrutable smile. "she looks," said sophy, "as if she knew a great deal. and she doesn't know, baby dear, she doesn't know anything at all." "wait," said mrs. heron, "till she's got babies of her own. then she'll know." "i know now," said jane calmly. "not you," said sophy almost fiercely, as she carried the little thing away to his bed beside her own. winny and the nurse followed her. jane was alone with frances heron. "no woman," said frances, "knows anything till she's had a child." "oh, you married women!" "even a married woman. she doesn't know what her love for her husband is until she's held his child at her breast. and she may be as stupid as you please; but she knows more than you." "i know what she knows--i was born knowing. but if i were married, if i had children, i should know nothing, nothing any more." frances was silent. "they--they'd press up so close to me that i should see nothing--not even them." "don't you want them to press?" "it doesn't matter what i want. it's what i see. and they wouldn't let me see." "they'd make you feel," said frances. "feel? i should think they would. i should feel _them_, i should feel for them, i should feel nothing else besides." "but," persisted frances, "you would feel." "do you think i don't?" said jane. "well, there are some things--i don't see how you can--without experience." "experience? experience is no good--the experience you mean--if you're an artist. it spoils you. it ties you hand and foot. it perverts you, twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. i know women--artists--who have never got over their experience, women who'll never do anything again because of it." "then, my dear," said frances, "you would say that geniuses would do very much better not to marry?" her voice was sweet, but there was a light of sword-play in her eyes. "i do say it--if they're thinking of their genius." "would you say it to hugh?" the thrust flashed sharp and straight. "why not?" said jane, lightly parrying the thrust. sophy appeared again at that moment and said good-bye. they held her at parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable. their very embrace dismissed her and disapproved. tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. he was going to see her home, he said. he wanted to talk to her. they could walk through regent's park towards baker street. they had left the levines' some way behind them when he turned to her. "jinny," he said, "what are you doing in that galley?" "what are you doing in it yourself, george?" "i? i came to see you. i was told you would be there. you know, you _do_ let yourself in for people." "do i?" "you do. and these brodricks aren't your sort. no good can come of your being mixed up with them. why do you do these things?" he persisted. "they're kind to me," she pleaded. "kind? queer sort of kindness, when you're working yourself to death for that fellow and his magazine." "i'm not. he'll let me off any day. he said he'd rather his magazine smashed than i did." "and you believed him?" "i believed him." "then," said tanqueray, "it's more serious than i thought." his eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil. "do you like him, jinny?" he said. "do i like him? yes." "why do you like him?" "i think, perhaps, because he's good." "that's how he has you, is it?" he paused. "brodrick doesn't know you, jinny, as i know you." "that's it," she said. "i wonder if you do." "i think i do. better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself." he was silent for a little time. the sound of his slow feet on the gravel measured the moments of his thought. "jinny," he said at last, "i'm going to talk truth to you." again he paused. "because i don't think anybody else will." "there are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like mrs. levine and mrs. heron, that are not necessary to you. you have moments when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth living unless you get them. those moments are bound to come, because you're human. but they pass. they pass. especially if you don't attend to them. the real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need, the craving, the impulse to create hamblebys. it can't pass. you know that. what you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary, passing impulse for a permanent one. no woman will tell you that it's temporary. they'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do. because, jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly." he looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything. "it may be," he said. "it may be. but the chances are it isn't." "tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me." "that's just what i'm not. i'm tenderer to you than you are yourself." it was hard to take in, the idea of his tenderness to her. "think--think, before you're drawn in." "i am thinking," she said. tanqueray's voice insisted. "it's easy to get in; but it isn't so jolly easy to get out." "and if i don't want," she murmured, "to get out----?" he looked at her and smiled, reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw in her. "it's your confounded jinniness!" at last he had acknowledged it, her quality. he revolted against it, as a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood. "it'll always tug you one way and your genius another. i'm only asking you which is likely to be stronger?" "do i know, george? do _you_ know?" "i've told you," he said. "i think i do." xxxiii three weeks later, one afternoon in october, jane found herself going at a terrific pace through kensington gardens. brodrick had sent word that he would see her at five o'clock, and it wanted but a few minutes of that hour. when tanqueray sounded his warning, he did not measure the effect of the illumination that it wrought. the passion he divined in her had had a chance to sleep as long as it was kept in the dark. now it was wide awake, and superbly aware of itself and of its hour. after she had parted from him jane saw clearly how she had been drawn, and why. there was no doubt that the folly had come upon her; the folly that tanqueray told her she would think divine. she not only thought it divine, she felt it to be divine with a certainty that tanqueray himself could not take away from her. very swiftly the divine folly had come upon her. she could not say precisely at what moment, unless it were three weeks ago, when she had stood dumb before the wise women, smitten by a mortal pang, invaded by an inexplicable helplessness and tenderness. it was then that she had been caught in the toils of life, the snares of the folly. for all its swiftness, she must have had a premonition of it. that was why she had tried so desperately to build the house of life for brodrick and miss collett. she had laboured at the fantastic, monstrous fabrication, as if in that way only she could save herself. she had been afraid of it. she had fought it desperately. in the teeth of it she had sat down to write, to perfect a phrase, to finish a paragraph abandoned the night before; and she had found herself meditating on brodrick's moral beauty. she knew it for the divine folly by the way it dealt with her. it made her the victim of preposterous illusions. the entire district round about putney became for her a land of magic and of splendour. she could not see the word putney posted on a hoarding without a stirring of the spirit and a beating of the heart. when she closed her eyes she saw in a vision the green grass plots and sinuous gravel walks of brodrick's garden, she heard as in a vision the silver chiming of the clock, an unearthly clock, measuring immortal hours. the great wonder of this folly was that it took the place of the creative impulse. not only did it possess her to the exclusion of all other interests, but the rapture of it was marvellously akin to the creative ecstasy. it drove her now at a furious pace through the gardens and along the high street. it caused her to exult in the face of the great golden october sunset piled high in the west. it made her see brodrick everywhere. the gardens were a green paradise with the spirit of brodrick moving in them like a god. the high street was a golden road with brodrick at the end of it. the whole world built itself into a golden shrine for brodrick. he was coming to see her at five o'clock. he was not there, in her room, when she arrived. but he had been there so often that he pervaded and dominated the place, as tanqueray had once dominated and pervaded it. he had created such a habit, such a superstition of himself that his bodily presence was no longer necessary to its support. there was a chair by the fireplace, next the window. she could not see it now without seeing brodrick, without seeing a look he had, when, as he sat there silent, his eyes had held her, covered her, caressed her. there were times when he had the gestures and the manner of a man sitting by his own fireside, taking her and all that she signified for granted, establishing between them a communion in which the poignant, ultimate things were not said because they were so profoundly felt. she caught herself smiling now at the things she was going to say to him. her bell rang with the dreadful, startling noise that made her heart leap in her breast. he came in slowly like a man preoccupied with grave business of his own. and at the sight of him jane's heart, which had leaped so madly, dragged in her breast and drew the tide of her blood after it. he took her hand, but not with any eagerness. his face was more than ever sombre, as if with some inward darkness and concern. he turned from her and became interested in finding a suitable place for his hat. (jane noticed that it was a new one.) then he sat down and remained seated. he let her get up and cross the room and ring the bell for herself, so fixed was he in his dream. only, as her gown brushed him in her passing back, he was aware of it and shrank. she heard him draw in a hard breath, and when she looked at him again she saw the sweat standing on his forehead. "you've hurried," she said. "i haven't," said brodrick. "i never hurry." "of course not. you never do anything undignified." that was not one of the things that she had meant to say. "never," said brodrick, "if i can help it." and he wiped his forehead. jane caught herself smiling at brodrick's hat. she felt a sudden melting, enervating tenderness for brodrick's hat. the passion which, in the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for brodrick, she felt, ridiculously, for brodrick's hat. it was, of course, ridiculous, that she, jane holland, should feel a passion for a man's hat, a passion that brought her heart into her mouth, so that she could not say any of the things that she had thought of. brodrick's hat on an arm-chair beside him was shining in the firelight. on his uncomfortable seat brodrick lowered and darkened, an incarnate gloom. "how happy your hat looks," said jane, smiling at it again. "i'm glad it amuses you," said brodrick. jane made tea. he rose, wrapped in his dream, and took his cup from her. he sat down again, in his dream, and put his cup on the arm-chair and left it there as an offering to the hat. then, with an immense, sustained politeness, he began to talk. now that hambleby had become a classic; he supposed that her ambition was almost satisfied. it was so much so, jane said, that she was tired of hearing about hambleby. whereupon brodrick inquired with positively formidable politeness, how the new serial was getting on. "very well," said jane. "how's the 'monthly review'?" brodrick intimated that the state of the "monthly review" was prosperity itself, and he asked her if she had heard lately from mr. prothero? jane said that she had had a long letter from mr. prothero the other day, and she wished that a suitable appointment could be found for mr. prothero at home. brodrick replied, that, at the moment, he could not think of any appointment more suitable for mr. prothero than the one he had already got for him. then there was a silence, and when jane with competitive urbanity inquired after brodrick's sisters, brodrick's manner gave her to understand that she had touched on a subject by far too intimate and personal. and while she was wondering what she could say next brodrick took up his hat and said good-bye and went out hurriedly, he who never hurried. jane stood for a moment looking at the seat he had left and the place where his hat had been. and her heart drew its doors together and shut them against brodrick. she had heard the sound of him going down her stairs, and the click of the latch at the bottom, and the slamming of the front door; and then, under her windows, his feet on the pavement of the square. she went to the window, and stared at the weeping ash-trees in the garden and thought of how brodrick had said that it was no wonder that they wept. and at the memory of his voice she felt a little pricking, wounding pain under her eyelids, the birth-pang of unwilling tears. there were feet, hurrying feet on the pavement again, and again the bell cried out with its nervous electric scream. her staircase door was opened quickly and shut again, but jane heard nothing until brodrick stood still in the room and spoke her name. she turned, and he came forward, and she met him, holding her head high to keep back her tears. she came slowly, with shy feet and with fear in her eyes, and the desire of her heart on her lips, lifting them like wings. he took her two hands, surrendered to his, and raised and kissed them. for a moment they stood so, held together, without any movement or any speech. "jinny," he said thickly, and she looked down and saw her own tears, dreadful drops, rolling off brodrick's hands. "i'm sorry," she said. "i didn't mean to do that." her hands struggled in his, and for pity he let them go. "you can't be more surprised at me than i am myself," said she. "but i'm not surprised," said brodrick. "i never am." and still she doubted. "what did you come back for?" "this, of course." he had drawn her to the long seat by the fireplace. "why did you go away," she said, "and make me cry?" "because, for the first time in my life, i was uncertain." "of yourself?" doubt, dying hard, stabbed her. "i am never uncertain of myself," said brodrick. "of what, then?" "of you." "but you never told me." "i've been trying to tell you the whole time." yet even in his arms her doubt stirred. "what are you going to do now?" she whispered. "_you're_ going to marry me," he said. he had been certain of it the whole time. "i thought," she said an hour later, "that you were going to marry gertrude." "oh, so that was it, was it? you were afraid----" "i wasn't afraid. i knew it was the best thing you could do." "the best thing i could do? to marry gertrude?" "my dear--it would be far, far better than marrying me." "but i don't want," said he, "to marry gertrude." "of course, _she_ doesn't want to marry you." "i never supposed for a moment that she did." "all the same, i thought it was going to happen." "if it was going to happen," he said, "it would have happened long ago." she insisted. "it would have been nicer for you, dear, if it had." "and when i'd met you afterwards--you think _that_ would have been nicer--for all three of us?" his voice was low, shaken, surcharged and crushed with passion. but he could see things plainly. it was with the certainty, the terrible lucidity of passion that he saw himself. the vision was disastrous to all ideas of integrity, of propriety and honour; it destroyed the long tradition of the brodricks. but he saw true. jane's eyes were searching his while her mouth smiled at him. "and is it really," she said, "as bad as that?" "it always is as bad as that, when you're determined to get the thing you want. luckily for me i've only really wanted one thing." "one thing?" "you--or a woman like you. only there never was a woman like you." "i see. _that's_ why you care for me?" "does it matter why?" "not a bit. i only wondered." he looked at her almost as if he also wondered. then they were silent. jane was content to let her wonder die, but brodrick's mind was still groping in obscurity. at last he seemed to have got hold of something, and he spoke. "of course, there's your genius, jinny. if i don't say much about it, you mustn't think i don't care." "do you? there are moments when _i_ hate it." her face was set to the mood of hatred. "hugh dear, you're a brave man to marry it." "i wouldn't marry it, if i didn't think i could look after it." "you needn't bother. it can look after itself." she paused, looking down where her finger traced and traced again the pattern of the sofa-cover. "did you think i cared for it so frightfully?" she said. "i know you did." "i care for it still." she turned to him with her set face. "but i could kill it if it came between you and me." xxxiv jane had been married for three months, married with a completeness that even tanqueray had not foreseen. she herself had been unaware of her capacity for surrender. she rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. one by one there fell from her the things that had stood between her and the object of her adoration. for the forms of imagination had withdrawn themselves; once visible, audible, tangible, they became evasive, fugitive presences, discernible on some verge between creation and oblivion. this withdrawal had once been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing vision, to preserve it from destruction. now she contemplated its disappearance with a curious indifference. she had no desire to recover it. she remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life. that sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for hugh brodrick. and now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible, had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. her genius had ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no longer moved her. nothing moved her but brodrick; nothing mattered but brodrick; nothing had the full prestige of reality apart from him. her heart went out to the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful, adorable, and at the same time absurd. his overcoat hanging in the hall called on her for a caress. henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon, found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. his gloves, which had taken on the shape of brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked tenderly in passing. and this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered, red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the heath was drenched in the poignant, tender light of it. that house on the heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. it was not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. she marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and immortalities. she could not detect the work of her imagination in the production of this state. it was her senses that were so exquisitely acute. she suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. her state was bliss. she loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock. she had discovered that it struck the quarters. she said to herself how odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the quarters. she was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as gertrude collett. she had gone to gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. she had found out from gertrude what brodrick liked best for dinner. she had listened humbly while gertrude read to her and expounded the legend of the sacred books. she had stood like a child, breathless with attention, when gertrude unlocked the inner door of the writing-table and showed her the little squat god in his shrine. she played with this house of brodrick's like a child, making believe that she adored the little squat god and respected all the paraphernalia of his service. she knew that gertrude doubted her seriousness and sincerity in relation to the god. and all the time she was overcome by the pathos of gertrude who had been so serious and so sincere, who was leaving these things for ever. but though she was sorry for gertrude, her heart exulted and cried out in her, "do you think he cares for the little squat god? he cares for nothing in the world but me!" all would have been well if brodrick had not committed the grave error of asking to look at the books, just to see that she had got them all right. like gertrude he doubted. she brought them to him; presenting first the book marked "household." he turned from the beginning of this book to the end. the pages of gertrude's housekeeping looked like what they were, a perfect and simple system of accounts. jinny's pages looked like a wild, straggling lyric, flung off in a rapture and meticulously revised. brodrick smiled at it--at first. "at any rate," said she, "it shows how hard i've tried." for all answer he laid before her gertrude's flawless work. "is it any use trying to bring it up to gertrude's standard?" she said. "wouldn't it be better just to accept the fact that she was wonderful?" (he ignored the suggestion.) "i suppose you never realized till now how wonderful that woman was?" brodrick said gravely he would have to go into it to see. brodrick, going in deeper, became very grave. it seemed that each week jane's expenditure overlapped her allowance with appalling regularity. it was the only regularity she had. "have you any idea, jinny, how it goes?" she shook her head sadly. "if it's gone, it's gone. why should we _seek_ to know?" "just go into it with me," he said. she went into it and emerged with an idea. "it looks," said jinny, "as if i ate more than gertrude. do i?" still abstracted, he suggested the advisability of saving. "can it be done?" said jinny. "it can," said brodrick, "because gertrude did it." "must i do it?" "not if it bothers you. i was only saying it can be done." "and you'd like it?" "well--i should like to know where i am." "but--darling--it's _so_ much better not to." he sighed. so did jinny. "i can see," she said, "what i've done. i've crumpled _all_ the rose-leaves, and you'll never be able to lie on them any more." then she had another idea. "hugh! it's just occurred to me. talk of saving! i've been saving all the time like fury. i save you gertrude's salary." at this brodrick became angry, as jane might have seen, only she was too entirely taken up with her discovery to look at him. "here i have been working for months, trying how not to be extravagant, and thinking how incompetent i am and how much more advantageous it would have been for you to have married gertrude. and i come lots cheaper. i really do. wasn't it funny of us never to have thought of it before?" he was very angry, but he had to smile. then by way of correction he reminded her that the servants were getting rather slack. didn't she think it was about time to haul them up? she didn't. she didn't like the poor things to feel that they were driven. she liked to see happy faces all around her. "but they're so unpunctual--those faces," brodrick said. and while they _were_ on the subject there was the clock. the clock that gertrude always used to wind, that brodrick sometimes forgot to wind, but that jinny never by any chance wound at all. "i'm happier," said jane, "when it's not wound." "but why----" his face was one vast amazement. "because," she said, "it chimes. and it strikes the quarters." he had thought that was the great merit of his incomparable clock. she seemed incorrigible. then, miraculously, for two months all went well, really well. it was not for nothing that hambleby sold and was selling. the weekly deficit continued, appalling, palpable even to jane; but she made it up secretly. secretly, she seemed to save. but brodrick found that out and stopped it. jane was not allowed, and she knew it, to use her own income for the house or for anything else but herself and her people. it wasn't for that he had married her. besides, he objected to her method. it was too expensive. jane was disposed to argue the matter. "don't you see, dear, that it's the price of peace? peace is the most expensive thing on this earth--any stupid politician will tell you that. if you won't pay for peace, what will you pay for?" "my dear child, there used to be more peace and considerable less pay when miss collett did things." "yes. but she was wonderful." (her lips lifted at the corners. there was a flash of irony in her tone, this time.) "not half so wonderful as you," he said. "but--hugh--angel--as long as it's _me_ who pays----" "that's what i won't have--your paying." "it's for _my_ peace," she said. "it certainly isn't for mine," said brodrick. she considered him pensively. she knew that he didn't care a rap about the little squat god, but he abhorred untidiness--in other people. "poor darling--how uncomfy he is, with all his little rose-leaves crumpled under him. irritating him." she came and hung over him and stroked his hair till he smiled. "i told you at the time you ought to have married gertrude. what on earth possessed you to go and marry me?" he kissed her, just to show what possessed him. the question of finance was settled by his going into it again and finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough to cover it. and at the end of another two months she came to him in triumph. "look there," she said. "i've saved a halfpenny. it isn't much, but it shows that i _can_ save when i give my mind to it." he said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever. as before, he kissed her. he loved her, as men love a disastrous thing, desperately, because of her divine folly. in all these things her genius had no part. it was as if they had agreed to ignore it. but people were beginning to talk now of the event of nineteen-five, the appearance of hambleby's successor, said to be greater than hambleby. she was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. still, it hardly concerned her. this book was the work of some one unfamiliar, unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. so immense was the separation between jane holland and jane brodrick. she was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. she spoke of it to brodrick. they were sitting together, one night in june, under the lime-tree on the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness. "would you mind very much," she said, "if i never wrote anything again?" he turned to her. "what makes you think you can't write? (he too had a misgiving.) you've plenty of time. you've all day, in fact." "yes, all day long." "it's not as if i bothered you--i say, _they_ don't bother you, do they?" she understood him as referring to the frequent, the very frequent incursions of his family. "you mustn't let them. you must harden your heart." "it isn't they. it isn't anybody." "what is it then?" "only that everything's different. i'm different." he regarded her for a long time. she _was_ different. it was part of her queerness, this capacity she had for being different. he could see nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life. it was his miracle on her. he remained silent, brooding over it. in the stillness she could hear his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender. "it doesn't mean that you're not well, jinny?" he remembered that once or twice since he had known her it had meant that. she smiled. "oh no, not that." "it doesn't make you unhappy?" "no, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared." "you know it wasn't." she knew. she had always known it. they sat silent a long time. round and about them brodrick's garden slept, enchanted in darkness. phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his flowers dreamed on the lawn. an immense tenderness filled her for brodrick and all things that were his. at last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden towards the house. her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her. xxxv this sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in july. she was sitting out in the garden, watching brodrick as he went his slow and happy rounds. now and then he paused and straightened a border, or propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. he could not but be aware that since gertrude collett left there had been confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect. in these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of jane who watched him. the garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets following hot days; stillness of grass-plots flooded by flat light; stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light, divinely vivid. jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so radiant and intense. yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in kensington square. she saw herself sitting in her room. she was dressed in an old gown that she had worn two years ago, she saw distinctly the fashion and the colour of it, and the little ink-mark on the sleeve. she was writing, this solitary woman, with an extraordinary concentration and rapidity. jane found herself looking on, fascinated as by the performance of a stranger, admiring as she would have admired a stranger. the solitary woman knew nothing of hugh brodrick or of his house at putney, and cared less; she had a desire and a memory in which he had no part. that seemed to jane most curious. then suddenly she was aware that she, jane brodrick, and this woman, jane holland, were inseparably and indestructibly one. for a moment her memory and her desire merged with this woman's desire and memory, so that the house and the garden and the figure of her husband became strange to her and empty of all significance. as for her own presence in the extraordinary scene, she had no longer her vague, delicious wonder at its reality. what she felt was a shock of surprise, of spiritual dislocation. she was positively asking herself, "what am i doing here?" the wonder passed with a sense of shifting in her brain. but there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. in any settlement of affairs between jane holland and jane brodrick it would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other her account. it was she who was aware, already, of the imminent disaster, the irreparable loss. it was she who suffered when they talked about the genius of jane holland. for they were talking more than ever. in another week it would be upon her, the great event of nineteen-five. her frightful celebrity exposed her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed to own. she might have brazened it out somehow but for nina lempriere and her book. it appeared, nina's book, in these hours that tingled with expectation of the terrible event. in a majestic silence and secrecy it appeared. jane had heard tanqueray praise it. "thank heaven," he said, "there's one of us that's sinless. nina's genius can lay nothing to her charge." she saw it. nina's flame was pure. her hand had virginal strength. it had not always had it. her younger work, "tales of the marches," showed violence and torture in its strength. it was as if nina had torn her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to create. her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from tanqueray. but there had been a year between tanqueray and owen prothero. for one year nina had been immune from the divine folly. and in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. no wonder that the master praised her. and above the praise jane heard nina's voice proclaiming yet again that the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable virginity. and for her, also, was it not the law? according to her code and tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. she had conceived and brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because brodrick wanted a book and she wanted to please brodrick. such a desire was the mother of monstrous and unshapen things. in tanqueray's eyes it was hardly less impure than the commercial taint. its uncleanness lacked the element of venality; that was all that could be said. she had done violence to her genius. she had constrained the secret and incorruptible will. it had not suffered all at once. it was still tense with its own young impulse towards creation. in the beginning of the work it moved divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging. she could trace the stages of its dissolution. nothing that jane holland had yet achieved could compare with that beginning. in the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection; further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a frightful collapse of energy. she could put her finger on the place; there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of course, had leaped like mad before it died. it was at that point that she had got ill, and that brodrick had found her and had taken her away. after that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an unspeakable exhaustion. then, as if her genius defied the ultimate corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. she had finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly came upon her. the wonder was that she should have finished it at all. and tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. she had received money for simply committing this crime. she would receive money again for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. so much down on the awful day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work endured. there might be a great deal of money in it, as louis levine would say. more money than nina or george tanqueray had ever made. it was possible, it was more than possible, it was hideously probable that this time she would achieve popularity. it was just the sort of terrible, ironic thing that happened. if it did happen she would not be able to look george tanqueray in the face. the date of the event was fixed now, the fifteenth of july. it was like death. she had never thought of it as a personal experience so long as its hour remained far-off in time. but the terror of it was on her, now that the thing was imminent, that she could count the hours. the day came, the birthday, as brodrick called it, of the great book. he had told tanqueray long ago that it was the biggest thing she had done yet. he bore himself, this husband of jane's, with an air of triumphant paternity, as if (tanqueray reflected) he had had a hand in it. he had even sent tanqueray an early copy. tanqueray owned that the fellow was justified. he thought he could see very plainly brodrick's hand, his power over the infatuated jinny. by way of celebrating the fifteenth he had asked tanqueray to dinner. the levines were there and the john brodricks, dr. henry brodrick and mrs. heron. but for the presence of the novelist, the birthday dinner was indistinguishable, from any family festival of brodricks. solemn it was and ceremonial, yet intimate, relieved by the minute absurdities, the tender follies of people who were, as tanqueray owned, incomparably untainted. it was jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not married a man who had the taint. the marvel was how the editor had contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of his obscene profession. it argued an incorruptible natural soundness in the man. and only the supreme levity of innocence could have devised and accomplished this amazing celebration. it took, tanqueray said to himself, a mind like brodrick's to be unaware of jinny's tragedy, to be unaware of jinny. he himself was insupportably aware of her, as she sat, doomed and agonizing, in her chair at the head of brodrick's table. they had stuck him, of course, at her left, in the place of honour. unprofitable as he was, they acknowledged him as a great man. he was there on the ground and on the sanction of his greatness. nobody else, their manner had suggested, was great enough to be set beside jinny in her splendid hour. his stature was prized because it gave the measure of hers. he was there also to officiate. he was the high priest of the unspeakable ritual. he would be expected presently to say something, to perform the supreme and final act of consecration. and for the life of him he could not think of anything to say. the things he thought could not be said while he sat there, at brodrick's table. afterwards, perhaps, when he and she were alone, if she insisted. but she would not insist. far from it. she would not expect him to say anything. what touched him was her utter absence of any expectation, the candour with which she received his silence as her doom. the ceremony was growing more and more awful. champagne had been brought. they were going--he might have foreseen it--they were going to drink to the long life of the book. john brodrick rose first, then henry, then levine. they raised their glasses. jane's terrified eyes met theirs. "to the book!" they said. "to the book!" tanqueray found himself gazing in agony at his glass where the bubbles danced and glittered, calling him to the toast. for the life of him he could not rise. brodrick was drinking now, his eyes fixed upon his wife. and tanqueray, for the life of him, could not help looking at jane, to see how she would take it. she took it well. she faced the torture smiling, with a courage that was proof, if he had wanted proof, of her loyalty to brodrick. her smile trembled as it met brodrick's eyes across the table, and the tenderness of it went to tanqueray's heart. she held out her glass; and as she raised it she turned and looked full in tanqueray's face, and smiled again, steadily. "to the book!" she said. "to nina lempriere's book! you can drink now, george." he met her look. "here's to you. you immortal jinny." lucid and comprehending, over the tilted glass his eyes approved her, adored her. she flushed under the unveiled, deliberate gaze. "didn't i get you out of that nicely?" she said, an hour later, outside in the darkening garden, as she paced the terrace with him alone. the others, at brodrick's suggestion, had left them to their communion. brodrick's idea evidently was that the novelist would break silence only under cover of the night. "yes," he said. "it was like your sweetness." "you can't say," she continued, "that i'm not appreciated in my family." through the dark, as her face flashed towards him, he saw the little devil that sat laughing in her eyes. "you needn't be afraid to talk about it," she said. "and you needn't lie to me. i know it's a tragedy." he had never lied to her. it was not in him to fashion for her any tender lie. "it's worse than a tragedy. it's a sin, jinny. and that's what i would have saved you from. other people can sin and not suffer. you can't. there's your tragedy." she raised her head. "there shall be no more tragedies." he went on as if he had not heard her. "it wouldn't have mattered if it had been bad all through. but neither you nor i, jinny, have ever written, probably we never shall write, anything to compare with the beginning of that book. my god! to think that there were only six months--six months--between that beginning and that end." she smiled, saying to herself, "only six months. yes. but what months!" "you've killed a masterpiece," he said, "between you." "do you mean hugh?" she said. "what had he to do with it?" "he married you." "my crime was committed before he married me." "exactly." she was aware of the queer, nervous, upward jerk of his moustache, precluding the impermissible--"when you were in love with him." her face darkened as she turned to him. "let's talk about nina's book. george--there isn't anybody like her. and i knew, i knew she'd do it." "did you know that she did it before she saw prothero." "i know." "and that she's never written a line since?" "when she does it will be immense. because of him." "possibly. she hasn't married him." "after all, george, if it comes to that, you're married too." "yes. but i married a woman who can't do me any harm." "could anybody." she stood still there, on the terrace, fronting him with the scorn of her question. he did not answer her at first. his face changed and was silent as his thought. as they paced up and down again he spoke. "i don't mind, jinny; if you're happy; if you're really content." "you see that i am." her voice throbbed. he caught the pure, the virginal tremor, and knew it for the vibration of her soul. it stirred in him a subtle, unaccountable pang. she paused, brooding. "i shall be," she said, "even if i never do anything again." "nothing," he assured her, "can take from you the things you have done. look at hambleby. he's enough. after all, jinny, you might have died young and just left us that. we ought to be glad that, as it is, we've got so much of you." "so much----" almost he could have said she sighed. "nothing can touch hambleby or the genius that made him." "george--do you think it'll ever come back to me?" she stood still again. he was aware now, through her voice, of something tense, something perturbed and tormented in her soul. he rejoiced, for it was he who had stirred her; it was he who had made her feel. "of course," he said, "it'll come back. if you choose--if you let it. but you'll have to pay your price." she was silent. they talked of other things. presently the john brodricks, the levines and mrs. heron came out into the garden and said good-night, and tanqueray followed them and went. she found hugh closeted with henry in the library where invariably the doctor lingered. brodrick made a sign to his brother-in-law as she entered. "well," he said, "you've had your talk." "oh yes, we've had it." she lay back in her seat as if exhausted by hard physical exercise, supporting the limp length of her arms on the sides of the chair. the doctor, after a somewhat prolonged observation of her posture, remarked that she should make a point of going to bed at ten. brodrick pleaded the birthday of the book. and at the memory of the intolerable scene, and of tanqueray's presence in it, her agony broke out. "don't talk about it. i don't want ever to hear of it again." "what's he been saying to you?" said brodrick. "he'd no need to say anything. do you suppose i don't know? can't you see how awful it is for me?" brodrick raised the eyebrows of innocence amazed. "it's as if i'd brought something deformed and horrible into the world----" the doctor leaned forward, more than ever attentive. "and you _would_ go and drag it out, all of you, when i was sitting there in shame and misery. and before george tanqueray--how could you?" "my dear jinny----" brodrick was leaning forward too now, looking at her with affectionate concern. her brother-in-law rose and held out his hand. he detained hers for an appreciable moment, thoughtfully, professionally. "i think," he said, "really, you'd better go to bed." outside in the hall she could hear him talking to hugh. "it's physical, it's physical," he said. "it won't do to upset her. you must take great care." the doctor's voice grew mysterious, then inaudible, and she heard hugh saying he supposed that it was so; and henry murmured and mumbled himself away. outside their voices still retreated with their footsteps, down the garden path, and out at the terrace gate. hugh was seeing henry home. when he came back he found jane in the library, sitting up for him. she was excited and a little flushed. "so you've had _your_ talk, have you?" she said. "yes." he came to her and put his hands on her forehead. "look here. you ought to have gone to bed." she took his hand and drew him to her. "henry doesn't think i'm any good," she said. "henry's very fond of you." she shook her head. "to henry i'm nothing but a highly interesting neurotic. he watches me as if he were on the look-out for some abnormal manifestation, with that delightful air he has of never being surprised at anything, as if he could calculate the very moment." "my dear----" "i'm used to it. my people took me that way, too. only they hadn't a scientific turn of mind, like henry. they didn't think it interesting; and they haven't henry's angelic patience and forbearance. i was the only one of the family, don't you know, who wasn't quite sane; and yet--so unlike henry--they considered me rather more responsible than any of them. i couldn't get off anything on the grounds of my insanity." all the time, while thus tormenting him, she seemed profoundly occupied with the hand she held, caressing it with swift, nervous, tender touches. "after all," she said, "i haven't turned out so badly; even from henry's point of view, have i?" he laughed. "what is henry's point of view?" she looked up at him quickly. "you know, and i know that henry didn't want you to marry me." the uncaptured hand closed over hers, holding it tighter than she herself could hold. "no," she said. "i'm not the sort of woman henry _would_ want you to marry. to please henry----" "i didn't marry to please henry." "to please henry you should have married placable flesh and blood, very large and handsome, without a nerve in her body. the sort of woman who has any amount of large and handsome flesh-and-blood children, and lives to have them, thrives on them. that's henry's idea of the right woman." he admitted that it had once been his. he had seen his wife that was to be, placable, as jinny said, sane flesh and blood, the mother of perfect children. "and so, of course," said jinny, "you go and marry me." "of course," said brodrick. he said it in the voice she loved. "why didn't you marry her? _she_ wouldn't have bothered your life out." she paused. "on the other hand, she wouldn't have cared for you as i do. that sort of woman only cares for her children." "won't you care for them, jinny?" "not as i care for you," said jinny. and to his uttermost amazement she bowed her head over his hands and cried. xxxvi tanqueray's book was out. times and seasons mattered little in a case so hopeless. there was no rivalry between george tanqueray and his contemporaries; therefore, his publishers had not scrupled to produce him in the same month as jane holland. they handled any work of his with the apathy of despair. he himself had put from him all financial anxiety when he banked the modest sum, "on account," which was all that he could look for. the perturbing question for him was, not whether his sales would be small or great, but whether this time the greatness of his work would or would not be recognized. he did not suppose for a moment that it would be. _his_ tide would never turn. his first intimation that it was turning came from jane, in a pencil note enclosed with a newspaper cutting, his first favourable review. "poor george," she wrote, "you thought you could escape it. but it's coming--it's come. you needn't think you're going to be so very posthumous, after all." he marvelled that jinny should attach so much importance to the printed word. but jinny had foreseen those mighty lunar motions that control the tides. it looked really as if it had come, years before he had expected it, as if (as dear jinny put it) he would not have a chance of being posthumous. not only was he aware that this book of his was a masterpiece, but other people were aware. there was one man, even tanqueray admitted, who cared and knew, whose contemporary opinion carried the prestige of posterity; and he had placed him where he would be placed. and lesser men followed, praising him; some with the constrained and tortured utterances of critics compelled into eating their own words; some with the cold weight of a verdict delivered unwillingly under judicial pressure. and there were others, lesser still, men who had hated tanqueray. they postured now in attitudes of prudery and terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves victims of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity, the sanctity of english letters, constrained to an act of unholy propitiation. they would, if they could, have passed him by. it was caro bickersteth who said of tanqueray that he played upon the imaginations of his critics as he played upon women's hearts. and so it went on. one took off a conventional hat to mr. tanqueray's sincerity; and one complained of "mr. tanqueray's own somewhat undraped attitude toward the naked truth," observing that truth was not nearly so naked as "mr. tanqueray would have us think." another praised "his large undecorated splendour." they split him up into all his attributes and antitheses. they found wonder in his union of tenderness and brutality. they spoke of "the steady beat of his style," and his touch, "the delicate, velvet stroke of the hammer, driven by the purring dynamo." articles appeared ("the novels of george tanqueray;" "george tanqueray: an appreciation;" "george tanqueray: an apology and a protest"); with the result that his publishers reported a slight, a very slight improvement in his sales. besides this alien tribute there was caro bickersteth's large column in the "morning telegraph," and nicky's inspired eulogy in the "monthly review." for, somehow, by the eternal irony that pursued him, nicky's reviews of other people could get in all right, while his own poems never did and never would. and there was the letter that had preceded jinny's note, the letter that she wrote to him, as she said, "out of the abyss." it brought him to her feet, where he declared he would be glad to remain, whether jinny's feet were in or out of the abyss. rose revived a little under this praise of tanqueray. not that she said very much about it to him. she was too hurt by the way he thrust all his reviews into the waste-paper basket, without showing them to her. but she went and picked them out of the waste-paper basket when he wasn't looking, and pasted all the good ones into a book, and burnt all the bad ones in the kitchen fire. and she brought the reviews, and made her boast of him to aunt and uncle, and told them of the nice sum of money that his book had "fetched," this time. this was all he had been waiting for, she said, before he took a little house at hampstead. for he had taken it at last, that little house. it was one of a terrace of three that stood high above the suburb, close to the elm-tree walk overlooking the west heath. a diminutive brown-brick house, with jasmine climbing all over it, and a little square of glass laid like a mat in front of it, and a little garden of grass and flower-borders behind. inside, to be sure, there wasn't any drawing-room; for what did rose want with a drawing-room, she would like to know? but there was a beautiful study for tanqueray up-stairs, and a little dining-room and a kitchen for rose below. rose had sought counsel in her furnishing; with the result that tanqueray's study bore a remarkable resemblance to laura gunning's room in camden town, while rose's dining-room recalled vividly mrs. henderson's dining-room at fleet. though it was such a little house, there had been no difficulty about getting the furniture all in. the awful thing was moving tanqueray and his books. it was a struggle, a hostile invasion, and it happened on his birthday. and in the middle of it all, when the last packing-case was hardly emptied, and there wasn't a carpet laid down anywhere, tanqueray announced that he had asked some people to dine that night. "wot, a dinner-party?" said rose (she was trying not to cry). "no, not a party. only six." "six," said rose, "_is_ a dinner-party." "twenty-six might be." rose sat down and looked at him and said, "oh dear, oh dear." but she had begun to smooth her hair in a kind of anticipation. then tanqueray stooped and put his arm around her and kissed her and said it was his birthday. he always did ask people to dine on his birthday. there would only be the brodricks and nicky and nina lempriere and laura gunning--no, laura gunning couldn't come. that, with themselves, made six. "well----" said rose placidly. "i can take them to a restaurant if you'd rather. but i thought it would be so nice to have them in our own house. when it's my birthday." she smiled. she was taking it all in. in her eyes, for once, he was like a child, with his birthday and his party. how could she refuse him anything on his birthday? and all through the removal he had been so good. already she was measuring spaces with her eye. "it'll 'old six," she said--"squeezin'." she sat silent, contemplating in a vision the right sequence of the dinner. "there must be soup," she said, "an' fish, an' a hongtry an' a joint, an' a puddin' an' a sav'ry, an' dessert to follow." "oh lord, no. give 'em bread and cheese. they're none of 'em greedy." "i'll give you something better than that," said rose; "on your birthday--the idea!" dinner was to be at eight o'clock. the lateness of the hour enabled mr. and mrs. eldred to come up and give a hand with the waiting and the dishing-up. they had softened towards tanqueray since he had taken that little house. that he should give a dinner-party in it during the middle of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity. the dinner went off very well. rose was charming in a pink silk blouse with lace at her throat and wrists. her face too was pink with a flush of anxiety and excitement. as for george, she had never seen him look so handsome. she could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. he was enjoying his birthday like a child, and laughing--she had never heard him laugh like that in her life before. he laughed most at the very things she thought would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the dinner-plates from mr. nicholson's hands on to the floor at uncle's feet in the doorway, and uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. the dinner, too; she had been afraid that george wouldn't like all his friends to know she'd cooked it. but he told them all straight out, laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? and they all said that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that she had worried and trembled over. and though she had cooked the dinner, she hadn't got to wait. not one of the gentlemen would let her. rose became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came she felt that she could talk a little. for nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. his right ear, patient and attentive, leaned toward tanqueray's wife, while his left strained in agony to catch what tanqueray was saying. tanqueray was talking to jane. he had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded? "minded? after your letter? when a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me, and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think i hear the little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my legs?" rose at nicky's right was saying, "it's over small for a dinin'-room. but you should see 'is study." he bowed an ear that did not hear her. "nicky did me well," said tanqueray. "i told you all the time," said jane, "that nicky knew." "'e couldn't do anything without 'is study." "ah?" nicky returned to the little woman, all attention. "aren't you proud of him? isn't it splendid how he's brought them round? how they're all praising him?" "so they'd ought to," rose said. "'e's worked 'ard enough for it. the way 'e works! he'll sit think-thinkin' for hours, before 'e seems as if 'e could get fair hold of a word----" they had all stopped talking to tanqueray and were listening to tanqueray's wife. "then 'e'll start writin', slow-like; and 'e'll go over it again and again, a-scratchin' out and a-scratchin' out, till all 'is papers is a marsh of ink; and 'e'll 'ave to write all that over again. and the study and the care 'e gives to it you'd never think." nicky's ear leaned closer than ever, as if to shelter and protect her; and rose became aware that george's forehead was lowering upon her from the other end of the table and trying to scowl her into silence. after that rose talked no more. she sat wondering miserably what it was that she had done. it did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was her vivid revelation of his method. the dinner she was enjoying so much had suddenly become dreadful to her. her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over, when she was showing mrs. brodrick the house. her joy and her pride in it were dashed. over all the house there hung the shadow of george's awful scowl. it seemed to her that george's scowl must have had something to do with mrs. brodrick; that she must have shamed him in some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of him. a little too much, rose said to herself, seeing that she was a married woman. and for the first time there crept into rose's obscurely suffering soul, a fear and a jealousy of mrs. brodrick. jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause. it was not as if she had not known how george could make a woman suffer. her acutest sense of it came to her as they stood together in the bedroom that she had been called on to admire. rose's bedroom was a wonder of whiteness; so was the great smooth double bed; but the smoothest and the whitest thing in it was tanqueray's pillow where tanqueray's head had never lain. there was a tiny dressing-room beyond, and through the open door jane caught a sight of the low camp-bed where, night after night, tanqueray's genius flung its victim down to sleep off the orgy of the day's work. the dressing-room was a place where he could hide from rose by night as he hid from her by day. and rose, when they took the house, had been so proud of the dressing-room. jane, seeing these things, resolved to remove the fear and jealousy. she must let rose see that she was not dangerous; and she knew how. she began by asking rose when she was coming out to putney? and rose answered that she was busy and couldn't say for sure. "you won't be busy in august, will you? if you'll come then i'll show you a room you haven't seen, the prettiest room in the house." rose drew in her breath. her face had the soft flush in it that came when she was deeply moved. "i've got some of its dear little things all ready for it now," said jane. "you must see them." "i should dearly love to." "i never thought, rose, that i should have it." rose meditated. "they come," said she, "mostly to them that doesn't think." "there's only one thing, rose. i'm afraid. oh, i'm so dreadfully afraid." "i shouldn't be afraid," said rose, "if it was me." "it's because i've been so happy." "you'll be 'appier still when it's come. it'd make all the difference to me if i 'ad a child. but that's what i haven't and never shall have." "you don't know. you don't know." "yes. i do know." rose's mouth trembled. she glanced unaware at the pillow that lay so smooth beside her own. "i 'aven't let on to him how much i want it. i wouldn't" (rose steadied her mouth to get the words out). "not if it was ever so." "you darling," said jane, and kissed her, and at that rose burst into tears. "i oughtn't to be keeping you here," she said. and they left the bedroom. "aren't you coming in?" said jane. rose had turned away from her at tanqueray's door. "i can't," she whispered. "not with me eyes all swelled up like this." she went down-stairs to her little kitchen, where in the half-darkness she crouched down beside minny who, with humped shoulders and head that nodded to the fender, dozed before the fire. xxxvii laura gunning was writing a letter to tanqueray to congratulate him on his book and to explain why she had not come to his birthday party. it was simply impossible to get off now. papa, she said, couldn't be left for five minutes, not even with the morning paper. it was frightfully hard work getting all this into any intelligible form of words; getting it down at all was difficult. for the last hour she had been sitting there, starting and trembling at each rustle of the paper. mr. gunning could not settle down to reading now. he turned his paper over and over again in the vain search for distraction; he divided it into parts and became entangled in them; now he would cast them from him and trample them under his feet; and now they would be flapping about his head; he would be covered and utterly concealed in newspaper. it was a perpetual wind of newspaper, now high, now low; small, creeping sounds that rose to a crescendo; rushing, ripping, shrieking sounds of agitated newspaper, lacerating laura's nerves, and murderous to the rhythm of her prose. tears fell from laura's eyes as she wrote; they dropped, disfiguring her letter. her head ached. it was always aching now. and when she tried to write she felt as if she were weaving string out of the grey matter of her brain, with the thread breaking all the time. at four o'clock she rose wearily and began to get tea ready. nina was coming to tea that afternoon. it was something to look forward to, something that would stave off the pressure and the pain. her tether had stretched; it had given her inches; but this was the end of it. she did not see, herself, now, any more than nina or jane or tanqueray saw, how she was to go on. she did not know how, for instance, she was to face the terrible question of finance. for the last six months she had not written any paragraphs. even if papa had not made it impossible for her to write them, her head and all the ideas in it were giving out. she had lost her job. she was living precariously on translation, which could be done, she maintained, when you hadn't any head at all. she would get twenty pounds for it, and there would be forty, perhaps, for the book which she had been sitting up to write. she did not know where the money for next year was coming from; and there were the doctor and the chemist now to pay for poor papa. the doctor and the chemist had not cured him of his dreams. the dreams were incessant, and they were more horrid than they had ever been. she hadn't slept for fear of the opening of the door, and the sound of the slow feet shuffling to her bedside, and the face that took on more and more the likeness of the horrors that he dreamed. the dreams, she had gathered, were a very bad sign. she had been told that she must be on the look-out; she must not leave him. she knew what that meant. her fear might take shape any day or any night. last night she had moved her bed into his room. the doctor had looked grave when she told him what she had done. there should be, he said, an attendant for the night. to be on the look-out night and day were too much for any woman. she should husband her strength, for she would want it. she was in for a very long strain. for the old man's bodily health was marvellous. he might last like that for another ten years, and, with care, for longer. nina had been drawn apart into the inner room to receive this account of mr. gunning. she was shocked by the change she found in her little friend. the kiddy was very thin. her pretty, slender neck was wasted, and her childlike wrists were flattened to the bone. a sallow tint was staining her whiteness. her hair no longer waved in its low curves; it fell flat and limp from the parting. her eyes, strained, fixed in their fear, showed a rim of white. her mouth was set tight in defiance of her fear. nina noticed that there was a faint, sagging mark on either side of it. "kiddy," she said, "how _will_ you----?" "i don't know. my brain's all woolly and it won't think." laura closed her eyes; a way she had when she faced terror. "nina, it was horrible yesterday. i caught myself wishing----oh no, i don't; i didn't; i couldn't; it was something else, not me. it couldn't have been me, could it?" "no, kiddy, of course it couldn't." "i don't know. i feel sometimes as if i could be awful. yesterday, i did a cruel thing to him. i took his newspaper away from him." she stared, agonized, as if her words were being wrenched from her with each turn of a rack. "i hid it. and he cried, nina, he cried." her sad eyes fastened on nina's; they clung, straining at the hope they saw in nina's pity. "i can't think how i did it. i couldn't stand it, you know--the rustling." "kiddy," said nina, "you're going to pieces." laura shook her head. "oh no. if i could have peace; if i could only have peace, for three days." "you must have it. you must go away." "how can i go and leave him?" "tank's wife would come." "three days." it seemed as if she were considering it, as if her mind, drowning, snatched at that straw. she let it go. "no. it's no use going away. it would make no difference." she turned her face from nina. "in some ways," she said, "it's a good thing i've got papa to think of." nina was silent. she knew what laura meant. xxxviii they had preserved as by a compact a perpetual silence on the subject of owen prothero. but always, after seeing laura, nina had forced herself to write to him that he might know she had been true to her trust. to-night she wrote: "i have done all i can for you, or, if you like, for laura. she's at the breaking point. if you think there's anything you can do for her yourself you'd better do it and lose no time." she wrote brutally; for mixed with her jealousy there was a savage anger with owen as the cause of laura's suffering. she hated the kiddy, but she couldn't bear to see her suffer. there were two days yet before the mail went; but she posted her letter at once, while her nerve held out. the thing done, she sat up till midnight brooding over it. it had taken all her nerve. for she did not want prothero to come back, and that letter would bring him. bodily separation from owen had not killed her; it had become the very condition of her life; for there was a soul of soundness in her. her blood, so vehement in its course, had the saving impetus of recoil. she dreaded its dominion as the whipped slave dreads the lash. latterly she had detached herself even spiritually from owen. she remembered what she had been before, without him, and what, without him, she had possessed. her genius was a thing utterly removed from her, a thing that belonged to owen rather than to her, since he had said it was his youth. she thought of it tenderly, as of a thing done for and departed; for it was so that she had come to think of owen's youth. she was not like jane, she felt no hatred of it and no jealousy. it had not given her cause. it had not stood in her way. it had not struggled in her against her passion. if it had, she knew that she would have swept it aside and crushed it. it had lain always at the mercy of her passions; she had given it to her passions to destroy, foreseeing the destruction. but now she relented. she felt that she would save it if she could. it was in her hour of sanity and insight that she had said virginity was the law, the indispensable condition. virginity--she had always seen it, not as a fragile, frustrate thing, but as a joyous, triumphing energy, the cold, wild sister of mountain winds and leaping waters, subservient only to her genius, guarding the flame in its secret, unsurrendered heart. her genius was the genius of wild earth, an immortal of divinely pitiful virgin heart and healing hand; clear-eyed, swift-footed, a huntress of the woods and the mountains, a runner in the earth's green depths, in the secret, enchanted ways. to follow it was to know joy and deliverance and peace. it was the one thing that had not betrayed her. there had been moments, lately, when she had had almost the assurance of its ultimate return; when she had felt the stirring of the old impulse, the immortal instinct; when she longed for the rushing of her rivers, and the race of the wind on her mountains of the marches. it would come back, her power, if she were there, in the place where it was born; if she could get away from streets and houses and people; if she got away from laura. but laura was the one thing she could not get away from. she had to be faithful to her trust. it would be seven weeks, at the least, before owen could come back. her letter would take three weeks to reach him, and he would have to make arrangements. she wondered whether the kiddy could hold out so long. all night she was tormented by this fear, of the kiddy's not holding out, of her just missing it; of every week being one more nail hammered, as she had once said, into the kiddy's little coffin; and it was with a poignant premonition that she received a message from addy ranger in the morning. miss ranger was down-stairs; she had something to say to miss lempriere; she must see her. she couldn't come up; she hadn't a minute. addy stood outside on the doorstep. she was always in a violent hurry when on her way to fleet street, the scene for the time being of her job. but this morning her face showed signs of a profounder agitation. she made a rush at nina. "oh, miss lempriere, will you go to laura?" "is she ill?" "no. _he_ is. he's dying. he's in a fit. i think it's killing her." the blinds were down when nina reached the house in camden town. the fit--it was apoplexy, mrs. baxter informed her--had not been long. it had come on, mercifully, in his sleep. mercifully (mrs. baxter leant on it); but miss lempriere had better go up at once to miss gunning. nina went without a word. the bed had been drawn into the middle of the small back room. the body of the old man lay on it, covered with a sheet. his head was tilted a little, showing the prone arch of the peaked nose; the jaw was bound with a handkerchief. already the features were as they had been in the days before disease had touched them. death had constrained them to their primal sanity. death dominated them like a living soul. the death-bed and its burden filled the room. in the narrow space between it and the wall little laura went to and fro, to and fro, looking for a pair of white socks that were not there and never had been. she must find, she was saying, a pair of white socks, of clean white socks. they had told her that they were necessary. xxxix it was on the thirtieth of july that laura's father died. three weeks later laura was living in the room in adelphi terrace which had been owen prothero's. nina had taken her away from the house in camden town, where she had sat alone with her grief and remorse and the intolerable memory of her fear. they said that her mind would give way if she were left there. and now, secretly and in a night, her trouble had passed from her. lying there in owen's room, on his bed, held as in shelter by the walls that had held him, there had come to her a strange and intimate sense of his presence. more strangely and more intimately still, it assured her of her father's presence and continuance, of it being as owen had said. the wind from the river passed over her, lying there. it fell like an aura of immortality. after that night the return of her bodily health was rapid, a matter of three days; and they said of her that this marvellous recovery was due to the old man's death, to her release from the tension. late one afternoon she was sitting by herself at owen's window that looked out to the sky. outside the rain streamed in a grey mist to the streets and the river. at the sound of it her heart lifted with a sudden wildness and tremor. she started when nina opened the door and came to her, haggard and unsmiling. nina was telling her twice over to go down-stairs. there was somebody there who had come to see her. when she asked who it was, nina answered curtly that she, laura, knew. laura went down to nina's room, the room that looked over the river. prothero stood by the window with his back to the light. she gave a low sobbing cry of joy and fear, and stayed where she had entered; and he strode forward and took her in his arms. he held her for a long moment, bending to her, his lips pressed to hers, till she drew back her face suddenly and looked at him. "do you know? has nina told you?" "i knew three weeks ago." "did she wire?" "nobody wired." "why have you come, then?" "_you_ sent for me." "oh no, no. it wasn't i. i couldn't. how could you think i would?" "why couldn't you?" "it would have been," she said, "a dreadful thing to do." "that dreadful thing is what you did. i heard you all night--the night of the thirtieth; you were crying to me. and in the morning i saw you." "you saw me?" "i saw you in a little room that i've never seen you in. you were going up and down in it, with your hands held out, like this, in front of you. you were looking for something. and i knew that i had to come." "and you came," she said, "just for that?" "i came--just for that." an hour later he was alone for a moment with nina. she had come in with her hat and jacket on. "do you mind," she said, "if i go out? i've _got_ to go." there was nothing to be said. he knew the nature of her necessity, and she knew that he knew. she stood confronting him and his knowledge with a face that never flinched. his eyes protested, with that eternal tenderness of his that had been her undoing. she steadied her voice under it. "i want you to know, owen, that i sent for you." "it was like your goodness." she shrugged her thin shoulders. "there was nothing else," she said, "that i could do." that night, while prothero and laura sat together holding each other's hands, nina walked up and down outside on the embankment, in the rain. she had said that she was more like a man than a woman; and with her stride that gave her garments recklessly to the rain, with her impetuous poise, and hooded, hungry eyes, she had the look of some lean and vehement adolescent, driven there by his youth. the next day, very early, she went down into wales, a virgin to her mountains. she had done all she could. xl laura was staying at the brodricks. she was to stay, jane insisted on it, until she was married. she would have to stay for ever then, laura said. her marriage seemed so far-off, so unlikely, so impossible. for prothero had offended the powers that governed his material destiny, the editors and proprietors of the "morning telegraph." a man who, without a moment's notice, could fling up his appointment, an appointment, mind you, that he had obtained, not by any merit of his own, but through the grace and favour of an editor's wife, an appointment that he held precariously, almost on sufferance, by mercy extended to him day by day and hour by hour, what could he hope for from sane, responsible men like brodrick and levine? did he imagine that appointments hung on lamp-posts ready to his hand? or that they only waited for his appearance, to fall instantly upon his head? and that, if they did fall on his head, he could take them on and off like his hat? and did he think that he could play the fool with a paper like the "morning telegraph"? these questions brodrick asked of levine and levine of brodrick, before the unspeakably shocked, the unconditionally assenting faces of john and henry. all the brodricks disapproved of prothero and were annoyed with him for flinging up his appointment. jane pleaded that he had flung it up because he was fond of laura and wanted to marry her; and she was told that that was all the more reason why he should have stuck to it. they were annoyed with him for keeping laura hanging on when he knew he couldn't marry her; and they were annoyed with him for wanting to marry her at all. they admitted that it was very sad for laura; they liked laura; they approved of laura; she had done her duty by all the family she had, and had nearly died of it. and when jane suggested that all prothero wanted was to do the same, they replied that prothero had no business to think of having a family--they supposed that was what it would end in--a man who couldn't keep himself, much less a delicate wife and half-a-dozen children. there would be half-a-dozen; there always were in cases like prothero's. and at that jane smiled and said they would be darlings if they were at all like laura. they were annoyed with jane for her championship of prothero. they were immeasurably annoyed with her when she, and tanqueray, and arnott nicholson, and nina published his poems--a second volume--by subscription. they subscribed generously, and grew more resentful on the strength of it. jane pleaded, but brodrick was inexorable. the more she pleaded the more inexorable he was. this time he put his foot down, and put it (as jane bitterly remarked) on poor owen prothero's neck. it was a neck, a stiff and obstinate neck, that positively invited the foot of a stiff and obstinate man. jane hid these things from laura, who thought, poor innocent, that it was only her luck. marriage or no marriage, she was incredibly happy. she even persuaded herself it was as well that she couldn't be married if that was to make her happier. she distrusted happiness carried to such a preposterous pitch. she was sitting with jane one evening, by the october firelight, in the room where her friend lay quietly. "do you remember, jinny, how we were all in love with george, you and i and nina and poor old caro? caro said it was our apprenticeship to the master." jane remembered. "he was training us; i really think he was," said laura, still reminiscent. "can't you hear him saying, 'come on, come on, what the dickens does it matter if i do see you? it's got to be somebody and it had much better be me. i shan't snigger. but i'm going to make you squirm as much as you _can_ squirm. you've got to know what it feels like.' i think he was positively proud of us when we did come on. i can't imagine him taking any other view. and after all, you know, he didn't snigger." she pondered. "he's an abominable husband, but he's a glorious friend." jane assented. he was glorious and abominable. laura's face grew tender in meditation. she was no longer thinking of george tanqueray. "there's one awful fear i have with owen. i shan't be ready in time when he's all nicely disembodied and on his way to heaven. i see him stopped at some uninteresting station, and sitting there waiting--patiently waiting--for me to disembody myself and come on. it'll take me ages." "it always was difficult to get you off," jane murmured. "i know. and i shall feel as if i were keeping him back when he was trying to catch a train." "i imagine he's pretty sure of his train." "the truth is owen doesn't really wait. he's always in his train and out of it, so to speak." "and your disembodying yourself, darling, is only a question of time." "and time," said laura, "doesn't exist for owen." but time was beginning to exist for owen. he felt the pressure of the heavy days that divided him from laura. he revolted against this tyranny of time. and brodrick, the lord of time, remained inexorable for two months. long before they were ended, little laura, with a determination as inexorable as brodrick's, had left brodrick's house. to the great disgust and scandal of the brodricks she had gone back to her rooms in camden town, where prothero was living in the next house with only a wall between them. then (it was in the middle of october, when henry was telling them that jane must on no account be agitated) brodrick and jane nearly quarrelled about prothero. she said that he was cruel, and that if owen went into a consumption and laura died of hunger it would be all his fault. and when he tried to reason gently with her she went off into a violent fit of hysterics. the next day brodrick had a son born to him, a whole month before henry had expected anything of the kind. at first brodrick was more than ever enraged with prothero for tampering with other people's families like that. jane had to go very near to death before his will was broken. it broke, though, at the touch of her weak arms round his neck, at the sight of her tortured body, and at her voice, sounding from the doors of death and birth, imploring him to do something for owen prothero. jane had hardly had time to recover before prothero got work again on brodrick's paper. laura said they owed that to jinny's baby. they were married in november before jinny's baby could be christened. it was a rather sad and strange little wedding, in the parish church of camden town, with brodrick to give away the bride, and caro bickersteth for bridesmaid, and tanqueray for best man. nina was not there. she had sent laura a cheque for two hundred pounds two months ago--the half of her savings--and told her to go and marry owen with it at once, and she had torn it up in a fury when laura sent it back. she could do all that; but she could not go and see laura and owen getting married. the two had found a lodging in an old house in hampstead, not far from the consumption hospital. laura had objected to the hospital, but owen refused to recognize it as a thing of fear. he had fallen in love with the house. it topped a rise, at the end of the precipitous lane that curls out of the great modern high street. it stood back in its garden, its narrow, flat-eyed windows staring over the wall down the lane. laura wasn't sure that she quite liked it. "what are you looking at?" she said, as he paused before this house. "i'm looking at that," said prothero. he pointed to an old, disused iron gate, and to the design, curl within curl of slender, aspiring curves, that grew and branched and overflowed, in tendrils of almost tremulous grace, and in triple leaves, each less like a leaf than a three-tongued flame. insubstantial as lace-work against the green background of the garden, it hung rather than stood between its brick pillars, its edges fretted and fringed with rust, consumed in a delicate decay. a stout iron railing guarded this miracle of art and time. thus cut off from the uses of life, it gave to the place an air of almost unbearable mystery and isolation; it stirred the sense of mortality, of things that having passed through that doorway would not return. "that house looks and feels as if it had ghosts in it," she said. "so it has. not the ghosts of people who have died. the ghosts of people who have never been born. the people," he said, "who come through the iron gate." and as she looked at it again and at the untrodden grass behind it, she felt that this masterpiece of iron tortured into beauty was an appropriate symbol of their life. of owen's, rather than of hers. closed as it was to all corporeal creatures, there yet went through it presences, intelligences, the august procession of the dreams. it was flanked by a postern door, a little humble door in the wall of the garden. that was the door, laura said, through which her little humble dreams would go out into the world to make their living. "poor owen," she said, "it's the door _you'll_ have to go through." he smiled. "and the other," he said, "is the door i shall come back through when i'm gone." that was what she couldn't bear to think of, the necessity she laid on him of going, as it were, for ever through the postern door. he was after all such a supernatural, such a disembodied thing. he had at times the eyes of a young divinity innocent of creation, untouched by the shames and terrors of the apparent world. and she knew it was the desire they had for each other that had brought him back from his divine borders and that held him in her world. there were moments when she felt that he maintained his appearance there by an effort so intense that it must be torture. and he would have to work for her, doing dreadful things down in fleet street. every day she would see him go down the green walk, and out through the postern gate, into the alien and terrible places of the incarnate. she felt that she had brought mortality upon an immortal thing. she had bound this winged and radiant spirit with the weight of her sad star. but there came to her a wonderful day when he brought her home, through the little humble door in the wall of the garden; when, shut in their room, he took her to himself. he laid his hands on her shoulders, and she closed her eyes. he bowed his head over her and his breath was on her mouth and she gave her face to him. his hands trembled holding her, and she felt upon her their power and their passion. and she knew that it was not her body alone that he sought for and held, but the soul that was her womanhood. it stood before him, a new-born eve, naked and unafraid on the green plots of eden. it looked at him, and its eyes were tender with desire and pity. it was tremulous as a body inhabited by leaping light and flame. she knew that in them both the flame burned singly. xli she was aware how wonderful the thing was that had happened to her, how it stood solitary in the world. it was not so, she knew, with any of the others. it was not so with nina or with tanqueray. it was not so even with jane. jane had taken into her life an element of tumult and division. the lord her god (as tanqueray had once told her) was a consuming fire. married she served a double and divided flame. for laura and prothero the plots of eden lay green for ever inside the iron gate, and all heaven was held within the four walls of a room. they had established themselves, strictly speaking, in three rooms, two for work and one for sleep. from the standpoint of tangible requirements, three rooms on a silent upper floor was their idea of a perfect lodging. it was nina's, it had been tanqueray's and jane's. a house, laura declared, was all very well for a poet like poor nicky (what would poor nicky be without his house?); but jinny's house was a curse to her, and tanks did not regard his as an unmixed blessing, though she would have died rather than say so to tank's wife. tank's wife had her own theory of laura's attitude. laura was making (as she herself had once made) the best of a bad job. rose had the worst opinion of mr. prothero's job; the job that sent him into fleet street in all weathers and at all hours of the day and night, and was yet compatible with his hanging about at home, doing nothing, four days out of the seven. rose was very fond of laura and of prothero. she had always felt that they were interesting persons, persons who might any day be ill and require to be taken care of, who required a good deal of being taken care of, as it was. rose superintended their removal. rose, very earnestly and gravely, took laura's housekeeping in hand. to rose, laura's housekeeping was a childish thing. she enlightened its innocence and controlled its ardours and its indiscretions. spring chicken on a tuesday and a wednesday, and all thursday nothing but such stuff as rice and macaroni was, said rose, a flyin' outrageous to extremes. she taught them the secret of a breast of veal, stewed in rice (if rice they must have), and many another admirable and economical contrivance. rose, fertile in contrivances, came and went a great deal to the house with the iron gate. she, who had once felt that there was nothing in common between her and her husband's friends, was being gradually drawn to them. jane's baby had been the link with jane; mr. gunning had been the link with laura; she shared with laura and prothero the rare genius of devotion to a person. rose was shocked and bewildered by many of the little ways of the creators, but she understood _their_ way. they loved each other more than they loved anything they created. they loved each other as she loved tanqueray, but with a perfect comprehension. their happiness was ominously perfect. and as time went on rose shook her wise head over them. they had been married six months, and rose was beginning to think what a difference it would make if laura was to have a little baby, and she could come in sometimes and take care of it. but laura hadn't a little baby, and wasn't going, she said, to have a little baby. she didn't want one. laura was elated because she had had a book. she had thought she was never going to have another, and it was the best book she had ever had. perfection, within her limits, had come to her, now that she had left off thinking about it. she couldn't have believed that so many perfect things could come to her at once. for laura, in spite of her happiness, remained a sceptic at heart. she went cautiously, dreading the irony of the jealous gods. tanqueray had bullied his publishers into giving a decent price for laura's book. and, to the utter overthrow of laura's scepticism, the book went well. it had a levity and charm that provoked and captured and never held you for a minute too long. a demand rose for more of the same kind from the same author, and for her earlier books, the ones that she had got out of bed to write, and that didn't and wouldn't sell. for her husband's poems there had been no demand at all. he was not unknown, far from it. he fell conspicuously, illustriously, between the reviewers who reviled him, and the public who would have none of him. if they had only let him alone. but they didn't. there was no poet more pursued and persecuted than owen prothero. he trailed bleeding feet, like a scapegoat on all the high mountains. he brought reproach and ridicule on the friends who defended him, on jane holland, and on nina lempriere and tanqueray, which was what he minded most of all. he was beginning to wonder whether, at this rate, there would be any continued demand for his paragraphs, or for any of the work he did for the "morning telegraph." his editors were by no means satisfied. if only he could write columns and paragraphs as laura wrote them. but he couldn't really write them properly at all. and the dreadful irony of it was that when he ought to be writing paragraphs, poems would come; and that when he was writing poems he would have to leave off, as often as not, to finish a paragraph. laura said to herself that she was going to make an end of all that. her gift was so small that it couldn't in any way crown him; there was no room on his head for anything besides his own stupendous crown. but, if she couldn't put it on his head, her poor gift, she could lay it, she could spread it out at his feet, to make his way softer. he had praised it; he had said that in its minute way it was wonderful and beautiful; and to her the beauty and the wonder of it were that, though it was so small, it could actually make his gift greater. it could actually provide the difficult material conditions, sleep and proper food, an enormous leisure and a perfect peace. she was a little sore as she thought how she had struggled for years to get things for poor papa, and how he had had to do without them. and she consoled herself by thinking, after all, how pleased he would have been if he had known; and how fond he had been of owen, and how nice owen had always been to him. one evening she brought all the publishers' letters and the cheques, and laid them before owen as he sat in gloom. "it looks as if we were going to make lots of money." "we!" "yes, we; you and i. isn't it funny?" "i don't think it's funny at all," said owen. "it might be--a little funny, if i made it and not you." "darling--that would be funnier than anything." her laughter darted at him, sudden and sweet and shrill, and it cut him to the heart. his gravity was now portentous. "the beauty of it is," she persisted, defying all his gravity, "that, if i can go on, you won't have to make it. and i shall go on, i feel it; i feel myself going. i've got a dream, owen, such a beautiful dream. some day, instead of sitting there breaking your heart over those horrid paragraphs, instead of rushing down to fleet street in the rain and the sleet and the fog, you shall ramp up and down here, darling, making poems, and it won't matter if you wear the carpet out, if you wear ten carpets. you shall make poems all day long, and you--shall--never--write--another--paragraph again. you do them very badly." "you needn't remind me of that," said owen in his gloom. "but, surely, you don't want to do them _well_?" "you know what i want." "you talk as if you hadn't got it." she crouched down beside him and laid her face against his knee. "i don't think it's nice of you," she said, "not to be pleased when i'm pleased." his eyes lightened. his hand slid down to her and caressed her hair. "i _am_ pleased," he said. "that's what i wanted, to see you going strong, doing nothing but the work you love. all the same----" "well?" "can't you understand that i don't want to see my wife working for me?" she laughed again. "you're just like that silly old tanks. he couldn't bear to see his wife working when she wanted to; so he wouldn't let her work, and the poor little soul got ill with not having what she wanted. you didn't want me to get ill, did you?" "i wanted to take care of you--well or ill. i wanted to work for you all my life long." "and you wanted me to be happy?" "more than anything i wanted you to be happy." "but you didn't, and you don't want me to be happy--in my own way?" he rose and lifted her from the floor where she crouched, and held her so tight to him that he hurt her. "my little one," he murmured, "can't you understand it? can't you see it? you're so small--so small." xlii for six months jane concentrated all her passion on her little son. the brodricks, who had never been surprised at anything, owned that this was certainly not what they had expected. jane seemed created to confound their judgments and overthrow their expectations. neither frances heron nor sophy levine was ever possessed by the ecstasy and martyrdom of motherhood. they confessed as much. frances looked at sophy and said, "whoever would have thought that jinny----?" and sophy looked at frances and replied, "my dear, i didn't even think she could have had one. she's a marvel and a mystery." the baby was a link binding jane to her husband's family. she was a marvel and a mystery to them more than ever, but she was no longer an alien. the tie of the flesh was strong. she was hugh's wife, who had gone near to death for him, and had returned in triumph. she was glorified in their eyes by all the powers of life. the baby himself had an irresistible attraction for them. from john's house in augustus road, from henry's house in roehampton lane, from the house of the levines in st. john's wood, there was now an incessant converging upon brodrick's house. the women took an unwearying and unwandering interest in hugh's amazing son. (it was a girl they had expected.) first thing in the morning, or at noon, or in the early evening at his bed-time, john's wife, mabel, came with her red-eyed, sad-hearted worship. winny heron hung about him and jane for ever. jane discovered in sophy and in frances an undercurrent of positive affection that set from her child to her. john brodrick regarded her with solemn but tender approval, and henry (who might have owed her a grudge for upsetting his verdict), henry loved her even more than he approved. she had performed her part beyond all hope; she linked the generations; she was wedded and made one with the solidarity of the brodricks. jane with a baby was a mystery and a marvel to herself. she spent days in worshipping the small divinity of his person, and in the contemplation of his heartrending human attributes. she doubted if there were any delirium of the senses to compare with the touch of her hands upon his body, or of his fingers on her breast. she fretted herself to fever at his untimely weaning. she ached with longing for the work of his hands upon her, for the wonder of his eyes, opening at her for a moment, bright and small, over the white rim of her breast. in his presence there perished in her all consciousness of time. time was nothing to him. he laid his diminutive hands upon the hours and destroyed them for his play. you would have said that time was no more to jane than it was to the baby. for six months she watched with indifference the slaughter and ruin of the perfect hours. for six months she remained untormented by the desire to write. brodrick looked upon her as a woman made perfect, wholly satisfied and appeased. at the end of six months she was attacked by a mysterious restlessness and fatigue. brodrick, at henry's suggestion, took her to the seaside. they were away six weeks. she came back declaring herself strong. but there was something about her that henry did not like. she was if anything more restless; unnaturally (he said) abstracted when you spoke to her; hardly aware of you at times. john had noticed that, too, and had not liked it. they had all noticed it. they were afraid it must be worrying hugh. she seemed, sophy said, to be letting things go all round. frances thought she was not nearly so much taken up with the baby. when she mentioned it to henry he replied gravely that it was physical. it would pass. and yet it did not pass. the crisis came in may of nineteen-six, when the baby was seven months old. it all turned on the baby. every morning about nine o'clock, now that summer was come, you found him in the garden, in his perambulator, barefooted and bareheaded, taking the air before the sun had power. every morning his nurse brought him to his mother to be made much of; at nine when he went out, and at eleven when he came in, full of sleep. in and out he went through the french window of jane's study, which opened straight on to the garden. he was wheeled processionally up and down, up and down the gravel walk outside it, or had his divine seat under the lime-tree on the lawn. always he was within sight of jane's windows. one sunday morning (it was early, and he had not been out for five minutes, poor lamb) jane called to the nurse to take him away out of her sight. "take him away," she said. "take him down to the bottom of the garden, where i can't see him." brodrick heard her. he was standing on the gravel path, contemplating his son. it was his great merit that at these moments, and in the presence of other people, he betrayed no fatuous emotion. and now his face, fixed on the adorable infant, was destitute of all expression. at jane's cry it flushed heavily. the flush was the only sign he gave that he had heard her. without a word he turned and followed, thoughtfully, the windings of the exiled perambulator. from her place at the writing-table where she sat tormented, jane watched them go. ten minutes later brodrick appeared at the window. he was about to enter. "oh, no, no!" she cried. "_not_ you!" he entered. "jinny," he said gently, "what's the matter with you?" his voice made her weak and tender. "i want to write a book," she said. "such a pretty book." "it's that, is it?" he sighed and stood contemplating her in ponderous thought. jane took up some pens and played with them. "i can't write if you look at me like that," she said. "i won't look at you; but i'm going to talk to you." he sat down. she saw with terror his hostility to the thing she was about to do. "talking's no good," she said. "it's got to be done." "i don't see the necessity." "it's not one of those things that can be seen." "no. but look here----" he was very gentle and forbearing. "need you do it quite so soon?" "so soon? if i don't do it now, when _shall_ i do it?" he did not answer her. he sat looking at her hands in their nervous, restless play. her grave eyes, under their flattening brows, gazed thoughtfully at him. the corners of her mouth lifted a little with their wing-like, quivering motion. two moods were in her; one had its home in her brooding, tragic eyes, one in her mysterious, mocking lips. "it's no use, dear," she said. "you'll never turn me into that sort of woman." "what sort of woman?" "the sort of woman you like." he waited in silence for what she would say next. "it's not my fault, it's yours and henry's. you shouldn't have made me go away and get strong. the thing always comes back to me when i get strong. it's _me_, you see." "no, jinny, the whole point is that you're not strong. you're not fit for anything creative." at that she laughed. "you're not, really. why, how old is that child?" "six months. no--seven." "well, henry said it would take you a whole year to get over it." "_i_ thought i should never get over it. we were both wrong." "my child, it's palpable. you're nervy to the last degree. i never saw you so horribly restless." "not more so than when i first knew baby was coming." "well, quite as much." she gave him a little look that he did not understand. "quite as much," she said. "and you were patient with me then." he maintained a composure that invited her to observe how extremely patient he was now. "and do you remember--afterwards--before he came--how quiet i was and how contented? i wasn't a bit nervy, or restless, or--or troublesome." he smiled, remembering. "can't you see that anything creative--everything creative must be like that?" he became grave again, having failed to follow her. "presently, if this thing goes all right, i shall be quite, quite sane. that's the way it takes you just at first. then, when you feel it coming to life and shaping itself, you settle down into a peace." now he understood. "yes," he said, "and you pay for it after." "my dear, we pay for everything--after." she leaned back in her chair. the movement withdrew her a little from brodrick's unremitting gaze. "there are women--angels naturally--who become devils if they can't have children. i'm an angel--you know i'm an angel--but i shall be a devil if i can't have this. can't you see that it's just as natural and normal--for me?" "it's pretty evident," he said, "that you can't have both. you weren't built to stand the double strain----" "and you mean--you mean----" "i mean that it would be better for you if you could keep off it for a while. at any rate while the child's young." "but he'll be young, though, for ages. and if--if there are any more of him, there'll be no end to the keeping off." "you needn't think about that," he said. "it would be all very well," she said, "if it were simpler; if either you or i could deal with the thing, if we could just wring its neck and destroy it. i would if it would make you any happier, but i can't. it's stronger than i. i _can't_ keep off it." he pondered. he was trying, painfully, to understand the nature of this woman whom he thought he knew, whom, after all, it seemed, he did not know. "you used to understand," she said. "why can't you now?" why couldn't he? he had reckoned with her genius when he married her. he had honestly believed that he cared for it as he cared for her, that jinny was not to be thought of apart from her genius. he had found henry's opinion of it revolting, absurd, intolerable. and imperceptibly his attitude had changed. in spite of himself he was coming round to henry's view, regarding genius as a malady, a thing abnormal, disastrous, not of nature; or if normal and natural--for jinny--a thing altogether subordinate to jinny's functions as a wife and mother. there was no sane man who would not take that view, who would not feel that nature was supreme. and jinny had proved that left to nature, to her womanhood, she was sound and perfect. jinny's genius had had, as he put it, pretty well its fling. it was nature's turn. under all his arguments there lurked, unrecognized and unsuspected, the natural man's fear of the thing not of nature, of its dominion, coming between him and her, slackening, perhaps sundering the tie of flesh. through the tie of flesh, insensibly, he had come to look on jinny as his possession. "what would you do," he said, "if the little chap were to get ill?" she turned as if he had struck her. "ill? why couldn't you _tell_ me he was ill?" "but he isn't. i was only----" "does henry say he's ill?" "henry? oh lord, no." "you're lying. i'll go to him and see----" she made a rush for the window. he sprang after her and caught her. she struggled in his arms. "jinny, you little fool. there's nothing--nothing----he's bursting with health." "what did you mean, then?" "i meant--supposing he were ill----" "you meant to frighten me?" she sat down and he saw her fighting for her breath. he knelt beside her and took her in his arms, murmuring inarticulate things in his terror. at his touch she turned to him and kissed him. "hugh, dear," she said, "don't frighten me again. it's not necessary." all that week, and for many weeks, she busied herself with the child and with the house. it was as if she were trying, passionately, to make up for some brief disloyalty, some lapse of tenderness. then, all of a sudden she flagged; she was overcome by an intolerable fatigue and depression. brodrick was worried, but he kept his anxiety to himself. he was afraid now of doing or saying the wrong thing. one saturday evening jinny came to him in his study. she carried the dreadfully familiar pile of bills and tradesmen's books. "is it those horrible accounts?" he said. she was so sick, so white and harassed, so piteously humble, that he knew. she had got them all wrong again. "i did _try_ to keep them," she said. "don't try. leave the damned things alone." "i _have_ left them," she wailed. "and look at them." he looked. a child, he thought, could have kept them straight. they were absurdly simple. but out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile, elementary innocence, jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion, of intricate complexity. that was bad enough. but it was nothing to the disorder of what jinny called her own little affairs. there seemed at first to be no relation between jinny's proved takings and the sums that jinny was aware of as having passed into her hands. and then brodrick found the cheques at the back of a drawer, where they had lain for many months; forgotten, brodrick said, as if they had never been. "i'm dreadful," said jinny. "you are. what on earth did you do before you married me?" "george tanqueray helped me." he frowned. "well, you can leave it to me now," he said. "it takes it out of me more than all the books i ever wrote." that touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself. "if," said she, "we only had a housekeeper." "a housekeeper?" "it's a housekeeper you want." she put her face to his, brushing his cheek with a shy and fugitive caress. "you really ought," she said, "to have married gertrude." "you've told me that several times already." "_she_ wouldn't have plagued you night and day." he owned it. "isn't it rather a pity that she ever left?" "why, what else could the poor woman do?" "stay, of course." he had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked, have judged it unthinkable. "supposing," said jinny, "you asked her, very nicely, to come back--don't you think that would save us?" no; he never would have thought of it himself; but since she had put it that way, as saving them, saving jinny, that was to say; well, he owned, wouldn't it? "i say, but wouldn't you mind?" he said at last. "why should i?" said she. in the afternoon of the next day, which was a sunday, brodrick appeared at the house in augustus road. he asked to see miss collett, who was staying there with her cousin. she came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her. he laid the situation before her, curtly. "if you were to come back," he said, "it would solve all our problems." she reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything that brodrick said. did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful solution? it was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way that was not any other man's way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he cared. there was after all a tie. he desired, as she had desired, to preserve it in its purity and its perfection. putting all that aside, it remained certain that she was indispensable. there was a deepening in the grey shallows of her eyes; they darted such light as comes only from the deeps. her upper lip quivered with a movement that was between a tremor and a smile, subtler than either. "are you sure," she said, "that mrs. brodrick wouldn't mind?" "jinny? oh dear me, no. it was her idea." her face changed again. the light and flush of life withdrew. her sallowness returned. she had the fixed look of one who watches the perishing under her eyes of a beloved dream. "and you," she said, as if she read him, "are not quite sure whether you really want me?" "should i ask you if i didn't want you? my only doubt was whether you would care to come. will you?" he looked at her with his intent look. it bore some faint resemblance to the look he had for jane. her light rose. she met his gaze with a flame of the sacrificial fire. "i'll do whatever you want," she said. that was how gertrude came back to brodrick's house. "and now," jane wrote to sophy levine, "we're all happy." but sophy in her wisdom wondered. as soon as she heard of gertrude's installation she rushed over to putney at the highest speed of her motor-car. she found jane on the lawn, lying back in her long chair. an expression of great peace was on her face. she had been writing. some sheets of manuscript lay under the chair where she had thrust them out of sophy's sight. she had heard the imperious trump of the motor-car, sounding her doom as it swung on to the heath. sophy looked at her sister-in-law and said to herself that, really, henry did exaggerate. she could see nothing in the least abnormal about jane. jane, when you took her the right way, was just like anybody else. gertrude was out. she had gone over to roehampton to see frances. sophy judged the hour propitious. "it works," said jane in answer to her question; "it works beautifully. you don't know, sophy, what a hand that woman has. just go indoors and look about you. you can see it working." "i couldn't stand another woman's hand in my house," said sophy, "however beautifully it worked." "is it my house? in a sense it's hers. there's no doubt that she made it about as perfect as a house could be. it was like a beautiful machine that she had invented and kept going. nobody but gertrude could have kept it going like that. it was her thing and she loved it." sophy's face betrayed her demure understanding of gertrude's love. "gertrude," said jane, "couldn't do my work, and it's been demonstrated that i can't do hers. i don't believe in turning people out of their heaven-appointed places and setting them down to each other's jobs." "if you could convince me that gertrude's heaven-appointed place is in your husband's house----" "she's proved it." "he wasn't your husband then." "don't you see that his being my husband robs the situation of its charm, the vagueness that might have been its danger?" "jinny--it never answers--a double arrangement." "why not? why not a quadruple arrangement if necessary?" "that would be safe. it's the double thing that isn't. you've got to think of hugh." "poor darling, as if i didn't." "i mean--of him and her." "together? is that your----oh, i can't. it's unthinkable." "you might have thought of her, then." "i did. i did think of her." "my dear--you know what's the matter with her?" "that," said jane slowly, "is what i thought of. she might have been happy if it hadn't been for me." "that was out of the question," said sophy, with some asperity. "was it? well, anyhow, she's happy now." "jinny, you're beyond anything. do you mean to tell me that was what you did it for?" "partly. i had to have some one. but, yes, that's why i had gertrude." "well, if you did it for gertrude it was cruel kindness. encouraging her in her preposterous----" "don't, sophy. there couldn't be anything more innocent on earth." "oh, innocent, i dare say. but i've no patience with the folly of it." "i have. it might so easily have been me." "you? i don't see you making a fool of yourself." "i do. i can see myself making an eternal fool. _you_ wouldn't, sophy, you haven't got it in you. but i could cry when i look at gertrude. we oughtn't to be talking about it. it's awful of us. we've no right even to know." "my dear, when it's so apparent! what does hugh think of it?" "do you suppose i've given her away to him?" "i imagine he knows." "if he does, he wouldn't give her away to me." "i'm afraid, dear, she gave herself away." "don't you see that that makes it all the worse for her? it makes it horrible. think how she must have suffered before she _could_. the only chance for her now is to have her back, to face the thing, and let it take its poor innocent place, and make it beautiful for her, so that she can endure it and get all the happiness she can out of it. it's so little she can get, and i owe it to her. i made her suffer." sophy became thoughtful. "after all, jinny," she said, "you _are_ rather a dear. all the same, if gertrude wasn't a good woman----" "but she _is_ a good woman. that's why she's happy now." sophy arranged her motor-veil, very thoughtfully, over and around a smile. this conversation had thrown light on jinny, a light that to sophy's sense was beautiful but perilous, hardly of the earth. xliii down in the garden at roehampton, gertrude and frances heron were more tenderly and intimately discussing the same theme. frances was the only one of the brodricks with whom tenderness and intimacy were possible for one in gertrude's case. she was approachable through her sufferings, her profound affections, and the dependence of her position that subdued in her her racial pride. gertrude had confessed to a doubt as to whether she ought or ought not to have gone back. "i don't know," said frances, "that it was very wise." "perhaps not, from the world's point of view. if i had thought of _that_----" she stopped herself, aware that scandal had not been one of any possibilities contemplated by the brodricks. "_i_ was not thinking of it, i assure you," said frances. "i only wondered whether it were right." she elucidated her point. "for you, for your happiness, considering----" "i'm not thinking of my own happiness, or i couldn't do it. no, i couldn't do it. i was thinking"--her voice sank and vibrated, and rose, exulting, to the stress--"of _his_." frances looked at her with gentle, questioning eyes. hugh's happiness, no doubt, was the thing; but she wondered how gertrude's presence was to secure it. slowly, bit by bit, with many meditative pauses, many sinkings of her thought into the depths, as if she sounded at each point her own sincerity, gertrude made it out. "mrs. brodrick is very sweet and very charming, and i know they are devoted. still"--gertrude's pause was poignant--"still--she _is_ unusual." "well, yes," said frances. "and one sees that the situation is a little difficult." frances made no attempt to deny it. "it always is," said gertrude, "when the wife has an immense, absorbing interest apart. i can't help feeling that they've come, both of them, to a point--a turning point, where everything depends on saving her, as much as possible, all fret and worry. it's saving him. there are so many things she tries to do and can't do; and she puts them all on him." "she certainly does," said frances. "if i'm there to do them, it will at least prevent this continual friction and strain." "but you, my dear--you?" "it doesn't matter about me." she was pensive over it. "if i solve his problem----" "it will be very hard for you." "i can bear anything if he's happy." frances smiled sadly. she had had worse things than that to bear. "of course," she said, "if you know--if you're sure that you care--in that way----" "i didn't know until the other day, when i came back. it's only when you give up everything that you really know." frances was silent. if any woman knew, she knew. she had given up her husband to another woman. for his happiness she had given the woman her own name and her own place, when she might have shamed her by refusing the divorce he asked for. "it wouldn't have been right for me to come back," said gertrude, "if i hadn't been certain in my own heart that i can lift this feeling, and make it pure." her voice thickened slightly. "it _is_ pure. i think it always was. why should i be ashamed of it? if there's anything spiritual in me, it's _that_." frances was not the woman to warn her of possible delusion; to hint at the risk run by the passion that disdains and disowns its kindred to the flesh. she raised her eyes of tragedy, tender with unfallen tears. "my dear," she said, "you're a very noble woman." across the narrow heath-path, with a lifted head, with flame in her heart and in her eyes, gertrude made her way to brodrick's house. and once again, with immutable punctuality, the silver-chiming clock told out the hours; fair hours made perfect by the spirit of order moving in its round. it moved in the garden, and the lawn was clean and smooth; the roses rioted no longer; the borders and the paths were straight again. indoors, all things on which gertrude laid her hand slid sweetly and inaudibly into their place. the little squat god appeared again within his shrine; and a great peace came upon brodrick and on brodrick's house. it came upon jane. she sank into it and it closed over her, a marvellous, incredible peace. at the turning point when everything depended upon time, when time was all she wanted and was the one thing she could not get, suddenly time was made new and golden for her, it was given to her without measure, without break or stint. only once, and for a moment, gertrude collett intruded on her peace, looking in at jane's study window as she passed on soft feet through the garden. "are you happy _now_?" she said. xliv she moved with such soft feet, on so fine and light a wing that, but for the blessed effects of it, they were hardly aware of her presence in the house. owing to her consummate genius for self-effacement, brodrick remained peculiarly unaware. the bond of her secretaryship no longer held them. it had lapsed when brodrick married, and gertrude found herself superseded as the editor grew great. for more than a year brodrick's magazine had had a staff of its own, and its own office where miss addy ranger sat in gertrude's seat. addy no longer railed at the impermanence and mutability of things. having attained the extreme pitch of speed and competence, she was now established as brodrick's secretary for good. she owed her position to jane, a position from which, addy exultantly declared, not even earthquakes could remove her. you would have said nothing short of an earthquake could remove the "monthly review." it looked as if brodrick's magazine, for all its dangerous splendour, had come to stay, as if brodrick, by sheer fixity and the power he had of getting what he wanted, would yet force the world to accept his preposterous dream. he had gone straight on, deaf to his brother-in-law's warning and remonstrance; he had not checked for one moment the flight of his fantasy, nor changed by one nervous movement his high attitude. month after month, the appearance of the magazine was punctual, inalterable as the courses of the moon. bold as brodrick was, there was no vulgar audacity about his venture. the magazine was not hurled at people's heads; it was not thrust on them. it was barely offered. by the restraint and dignity of his advertisements the editor seemed to be saying to his public, "there it is. you take it or you leave it. in either case it is there; and it will remain there." and strangely, inconceivably, it did remain. in nineteen-six brodrick found himself planted with apparent security on the summit of his ambition. he had a unique position, a reputation for caring, caring with the candid purity of high passion, only for the best. he counted as a power unapproachable, implacable to mediocrity. authors believed in him, adored, feared, detested him, according to their quality. other editors admired him cautiously; they praised him to his face; in secret they judged him preposterous, but not absurd. they all prophesied his failure; they gave him a year, or at the most three years. some wondered that a man like brodrick, solid, if you like, but after all, well, of no more than ordinary brilliance, should have gone so far. it was said among them that jane holland was the power behind brodrick and his ordinary brilliance and his most extraordinary magazine. the imagination he displayed, the fine, the infallible discernment, the secret for the perfect thing, were hers, they could not by any possibility be brodrick's. caro bickersteth, who gathered these impressions in her continuous intercourse with the right people, met them with one invariable argument. if brodrick wasn't fine, if he wasn't perceptive, if he hadn't got the scent, caro challenged them, how on earth did he discern jane holland? his appreciation of her, caro informed one or two eminent critics, had considerably forestalled their own. he was the first to see; he always was the first. he had taken up george tanqueray when other editors wouldn't look at him, when he was absolutely unknown. and when caro was reminded that there, at any rate, jane holland had been notoriously behind brodrick's back, and that the editor was, notoriously again, in love with her, caro made her point triumphantly, maintaining that to be in love with jane holland required some subtlety, if it came to that; and pray how, if brodrick was devoid of it, did jane holland come to be in love with _him_? it was generous of caro, for even as sub-editor she was no longer brodrick's right hand. to the right and to the left of him, at his back and perpetually before him, all round about him she saw jane. the wonder was that she saw her happy. it was jane who observed to caro how admirably they all of them, she, addy ranger, gertrude, brodrick, and those two queer women, jane brodrick and jane holland, were settled down into their right places, with everything about them incomparably ordered and adjusted. jane marvelled at the concessions that had been made to her, at the extent to which things were being done for her. her hours were no longer confounded and consumed in supervising servants, interviewing tradespeople, and struggling with the demon of finance. they were all, jane's hours, serenely and equitably disposed. she gave her mornings to her work, a portion of the afternoon to her son, and her evenings to her husband. sometimes she sat up quite late with him, working on the magazine. brodrick and the baby between them divided the three hours which were hers before dinner. the social round had ceased for jane. brodrick had freed her from the destroyers, from the pressure of the dreadful, clever little people. she was hardly yet aware of the more formidable impact of his family. what impressed her was brodrick's serene acceptance of her friends, his authors. he was wonderful in his brilliant, undismayed enthusiasm, as he followed the reckless charge, the shining onset of the talents. he accepted even tanqueray's murderous, amazing ironies. if brodrick's lifted eyebrows confessed that tanqueray was amazing, they also intimated that brodrick remained perpetually unamazed. but, as an editor, he drew the line at arnott nicholson. it was the sensitive nicky who first perceived and pointed out a change in jane. she moved among them abstractedly, with mute, half alienated eyes. she seemed to have suffered some spiritual disintegration that was pain. she gave herself to them no longer whole, but piecemeal. at times she seemed to hold out empty, supplicating hands, palms outward, showing that she could give no more. there was, she seemed to say, no more left of her. only tanqueray knew how much was left; knew of her secret, imperishable resources, things that were hidden profoundly even from herself; so hidden that, even if she gave him nothing, it was always possible to him to help himself. to him she could not change. his creed had always been the unchangeableness, the indestructibility of jinny. still, he assented, smiling, when little laura confided to him that to see jane brodrick in brodrick's house, among brodricks, was not seeing jinny. there was too much brodrick. it would have been better, said laura, if she had married nicky. he agreed. there would never have been too much of nicky. but laura shook her head. "it isn't a question of proportion," she said. "it isn't that there's too much brodrick and too little jinny. it's simply that jinny isn't there." jane knew how she struck them. there was sadness for her, not in their reproaches, for they had none, but in their recognition of the things that were impossible. they had always known how it would be if she married, if she was surrounded by a family circle. there was no denying that she was surrounded, and that the circle was drawing rather tight. and she was planted there in the middle of it, more than ever under observation. she always had been; she had known it; only in the beginning it had not been quite so bad. allowances had been made for her in the days when she did her best, when she was seen by all of them valiantly struggling, deplorably handicapped; in the days when, as brodrick said, she was pathetic. for the brodricks as a family were chivalrous. even frances and sophy were chivalrous; and it had touched them, that dismal spectacle of jane doing her sad best. but now she was in the position of one to whom all things have been conceded. she was in for all the consequences of concession. everything had been done for her that could be done. she was more than ever on her honour, more than ever pledged to do her part. if she failed brodrick now at any point she was without excuse. every nerve in her vibrated to the touch of honour. around her things went with the rhythm of faultless mechanism. there was no murmur, no perceptible vibration at the heart of the machine. you could not put your finger on it and say that it was gertrude. yet you knew it. time itself and the awful punctuality of things were in gertrude's hand. you would have known it even if, every morning at the same hour, you had not come upon gertrude standing on a chair winding up the clock that jane invariably forgot to wind. you felt that by no possibility could gertrude forget to wind up anything. she herself was wound up every morning. she might have been a clock. she was wound up by brodrick; otherwise she was self-regulating, provided with a compensation balance, and so long as brodrick wound her, incapable of going wrong. jane envied her her secure and secret mechanism, her automatic rhythm, the delicate precision of her ways. compared with them her own performance was dangerous, fantastic, a dance on a tight-rope. she marvelled at her own preternatural poise. she was steady; they could never say she was not steady. and they could never say it was not difficult. she had so many balls to keep going. there was her novel; and there was brodrick, and the baby, and brodrick's family, and her own friends. she couldn't drop one of them. and at first there came on her an incredible, effortless dexterity. she was a fine juggler on her tight-rope, keeping in play her golden balls that multiplied till you could have sworn that she must miss one. and she never missed. she kept her head; she held it high; she fixed her eyes on the tossing balls, and simply trusted her feet not to swerve by a hair's-breadth. and she never swerved. but now she was beginning to feel the trembling of the perfect balance. it was as if, in that marvellous adjustment of relations, she had arrived at the pitch where perfection topples over. she moved with tense nerves on the edge of peril. how tense they were she hardly realized till tanqueray warned her. it was on friday, that one day of the week when brodrick was kept late at the office of the "morning telegraph." and it was august, two months after the coming of gertrude collett. tanqueray, calling to see jane, as he frequently did on a friday, about five o'clock in the afternoon, found her in her study, playing with the baby. she had the effrontery to hold the baby up, with his little naked legs kicking in tanqueray's face. at ten months old he was a really charming baby, and very like brodrick. "do you like him?" she said. he stepped back and considered her. she had put her little son down on the floor, where, by an absurd rising and falling motion of his rosy hips, he contrived to travel across the room towards the fireplace. tanqueray said that he liked the effect of him. "the general effect? it _is_ heartrending." "i mean his effect on you, jinny. he makes you look like some nice, furry animal in a wood." at that she snatched the child from his goal, the sharp curb of the hearthstone, and set him on her shoulder. her face was turned up to him, his hands were in her hair. mother and child they laughed together. and tanqueray looked at her, thinking how never before had he seen her just like that; never before with her body, tall for sheer slenderness, curved backwards, with her face so turned, and her mouth, fawn-like, tilting upwards, the lips half-mocking, half-maternal. it was jinny, shaped by the powers of life. "now," he said, "he makes you look like a young mænad; mad, jinny, drunk with life, and dangerous to life. what are you going to do with him?" at that moment gertrude collett appeared in the doorway. she returned tanqueray's greeting as if she hardly saw him. her face was set towards jane brodrick and the child. "i am going," said jane, "to give him to any one who wants him. i am going to give him to miss collett. there--you may keep him as long as you like." gertrude advanced, impassive, scarcely smiling. but as she took the child from jane, tanqueray saw how the fine lines of her lips tightened, relaxed, and tightened again, as if her tenderness were pain. she laid the little thing across her shoulder and went from them without a word. "he goes like a lamb," said jane. "a month ago he'd have howled the house down." "so that's how you've solved your problem?" said tanqueray, as he closed the door behind miss collett. "yes. isn't it simple?" "very. but you always were." from his corner of the fireside lounge, where he seated himself beside her, his eyes regarded her with a grave and dark lucidity. the devil in them was quiet for a time. "that's a wonderful woman, george," said she. "not half so wonderful as you," he murmured. (it was what brodrick had once said.) "she's been here exactly two months and--it's incredible--but i've begun another book. i'm almost half through." his eyes lightened. "so it's come back, jinny?" "you said it would." "yes. but i think i told you the condition. do you remember?" she lowered her eyes, remembering. "what was it you said?" "that you'd have to pay the price." "not yet. not yet. and perhaps, after all, i shan't have to. i mayn't be able to finish." "what makes you think so?" "because i've been so happy over it." of a sudden there died out of her face the fawn-like, woodland look, the maternal wildness, the red-blooded joy. she was the harassed and unquiet jinny whom he knew. it was so that her genius dealt with her. she had been swung high on a strong elastic, luminous wave; and now she was swept down into its trough. he comforted her as he had comforted her before. it was, he assured her, what he was there for. "we're all like that, jinny, we're all like that. it's no worse than i feel a dozen times over one infernal book. it's no more than what you've felt about everything you've ever done--even hambleby." "yes." she almost whispered it. "it _is_ worse." "how?" "well, i don't know whether it is that there isn't enough time--yet, or whether i've really not enough strength. don't tell anybody i said so. above all, don't tell henry." "i shouldn't dream of telling henry." "you see, sometimes i feel as if i was walking on a tight-rope of time, held for me, by somebody else, over an abyss; and that, if somebody else were suddenly to let go, there i should be--precipitated. and sometimes it's as if i were doing it all with one little, little brain-cell that might break any minute; or with one little tight nerve that might snap. it's the way laura used to feel. i never knew what it was like till now. poor little laura, don't you remember how frightened we always were?" he was frightened now. he suggested that she had better rest. he tried to force from her a promise that she would rest. he pointed out the absolute necessity of rest. "that's it. i'm afraid to rest. lest--later on--there shouldn't be any time at all." "why shouldn't there be?" "things," she said wildly and vaguely, "get hold of you. and yet, you'd have thought i'd cut myself loose from most." "cut yourself looser." "but--from what?" "your relations." "how can i. i wouldn't if i could." "your friends, then--nina, laura, prothero, nicky--me." "you? i can't do without you." he smiled. "no, jinny. i told you long ago you couldn't." he was moved, very strangely moved, by her admission. he had not had to help himself to that. she had given it to him, a gift from the unseen. "well," he said presently, "what are you going to do?" "oh--struggle along somehow." "i wouldn't struggle too hard." he meditated. "look here, our natural tendency, yours and mine, is to believe that it's people that do all the mischief, and not that the thing itself goes. we'll believe anything rather than that. but we've got to recognize that it's capricious. it comes and goes." "still, people do count. my brother-in-law, john brodrick, makes it go. whereas you, tanks, i own you make it come." "oh, i make it come, do i?" he wondered, "what does brodrick do?" his smile persisted, so that she divined his wonder. she turned from him ever so little, and he saw a sadness in her face, thus estranged and averted. he thought he knew the source of it and its secret. it also was a gift from the unseen. when he had left her she went up-stairs and cast herself upon the bed where her little son lay naked, and abandoned herself to her maternal passion. and gertrude stood there in the nursery, and watched her; and like tanqueray, she thought she knew. xlv there were moments when she longed to be as gertrude, a woman with one innocent, uncomplicated aim. she was no longer sorry for her. gertrude's passion was so sweetly and serenely mortal, and it was so manifestly appeased. she bore within her no tyrannous divinity. she knew nothing of the consuming and avenging will. jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. it went, it went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it, past all bounds. for the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. the garden, the house, brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of his flesh and blood, the child's adorable, diminutive body, they had no place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision. they became insubstantial, insignificant. the people of the vision were solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth; the light and the darkness and the weather knew them, and the grass was green under their feet. the things they touched were saturated with their presence. there was no sign of ardent life they had not. and not only was she surrounded by their visible bodies, but their souls possessed her; she became the soul of each one of them in turn. it was the intimacy, the spiritual warmth of the possession that gave her her first sense of separation, of infidelity to brodrick. the immaterial, consecrated places were invaded. it was as if she closed her heart to her husband and her child. the mood continued as long as the vision kept its grip. she came out of it unnerved and exhausted, and terrified at herself. bodily unfaithfulness seemed to her a lesser sin. brodrick was aware that she wandered. that was how he had always put it. he had reckoned long ago with her propensity to wander. it was the way of her genius; it was part of her queerness, of the dangerous charm that had attracted him. he understood that sort of thing. it was his own comparative queerness, his perversity, that had made him fly in the face of his family's tradition. no brodrick had ever married a woman who wandered, who conceivably would want to wander. and jinny wandered more than ever; more than he had ever made allowances for. and with each wandering she became increasingly difficult to find. still, hitherto he had had his certainty. her spirit might torment him with its disappearances; through her body, surrendered to his arms, he had had the assurance of ultimate possession. at night her genius had no power over her. sleeping, she had deliverance in dreams. his passion moved in her darkness, sounded her depths; through all their veils of sleep she was aware of him, and at a touch she turned to him. now it was he who had no power over her. one night, when he came to her, he found a creature that quivered at his touch and shrank from it, fatigued, averted; a creature pitifully supine, with arms too weary to enforce their own repulse. he took her in his arms and she gave a cry, little and low, like a child's whimper. it went to his heart and struck cold there. it was incredible that jinny should have given such a cry. he lay awake a long time. he wondered if she had ceased to care for him. he hardly dared own how it terrified him, this slackening of the physical tie. he got up early and dressed and went out into the garden. at six o'clock he came back into her room. she was asleep, and he sat and watched her. she lay with one arm thrown up above her pillow, as the trouble of her sleep had tossed her. her head was bowed upon her breast. [illustration: it was jinny who lay there, jinny, his wife] his watching face was lowered as he brooded over the marvel and the mystery of her. it was jinny who lay there, jinny, his wife, whose face had been so tender to him, whose body utterly tender, utterly compassionate. he tried to realize the marvel and mystery of her genius. he knew it to be an immortal thing, hidden behind the veil of mortal flesh that for the moment was so supremely dear to him. he wondered once whether she still cared for tanqueray. but the thought passed from him; it could not endure beside the memory of her tenderness. she woke and found his eyes fixed on her. they drew her from sleep, as they had so often drawn her from some dark corner where she had sat removed. she woke, as if at the urgence of a trouble that kept watch in her under her sleep. in a moment she was wide-eyed, alert; she gazed at him with a lucid comprehension of his state. she held out to him an arm drowsier than her thought. "i'm a brute to you," she said, "but i can't help it." she sat up and gathered together the strayed masses of her hair. "do you think," she said, "you could get me a cup of tea from the servant's breakfast?" he brought the tea, and as they drank together their mutual memories revived. "i have," said she, "the most awful recollection of having been a brute to you." "never mind, jinny," he said, and flushed with the sting of it. "i don't. that's the dreadful part of it. i can't feel sorry when i want to. i can't feel anything at all." she closed her eyes helplessly against his. "it isn't my fault. it isn't really me. it's it." he smiled at this reference to the dreadful power. "the horrible and brutal thing about it is that it stops you feeling. it would, you know." "would it? i shouldn't have thought it would have made _that_ difference." "that's just the difference it does make." he moved impatiently. "you don't know what you're talking about." "i wouldn't talk about it--only--it's much better that you should know what it is, than that you should think it's what it isn't." she looked at him. his forehead still displayed a lowering incredulity. "if you don't believe me, ask george tanqueray." "george tanqueray?" his nerves felt the shock of the thought that had come to him, just now when he watched her sleep. he had not expected to meet tanqueray again so soon and in the open. "how much do you think he cares for poor rose when he's in the state i'm in?" his face darkened as he considered her question. he knew all about poor rose's trouble, how her tender flesh and blood had been made to pay for tanqueray's outrageous genius. he and henry had discussed it. henry had his own theory of it. he offered it as one more instance of the physiological disabilities of genius. it was an extreme and curious instance, if you liked, tanqueray himself being curious and extreme. but it had not occurred to brodrick that henry's theory of tanqueray might be applied to jane. "what on earth do you know about george tanqueray?" he said. "how _could_ you know a thing like that?" "i know because i'm like him." "no, jinny, it's not the same thing. you're a woman." she smiled, remembering sadly how that was what george in a brutal moment had said she was not to be. it showed after all how well he knew her. "i'm more like george tanqueray," she said, "than i'm like gertrude collett." he frowned, wondering what gertrude collett had to do with it. "we're all the same," she said. "it takes us that way. you see, it tires us out." he sighed, but his face lightened. "if nothing's left of a big strong man like george tanqueray, how much do you suppose is left of me? it's perfectly simple--simpler than you thought. but it has to be." it was simpler than he had thought. he understood her to say that in its hour, by taking from her all passion, her genius was mindful of its own. "i see," he said; "it's simply physical exhaustion." she closed her eyes again. he saw and rose against it, insanely revolted by the sacrifice of jinny's womanhood. "it shows, jinny, that you _can't_ stand the strain. something will have to be done," he said. "oh, what?" her eyes opened on him in terror. his expression was utterly blank, utterly helpless. he really hadn't an idea. "i don't know, jinny." he suggested that she should stay in bed for breakfast. she stayed. down-stairs, over the breakfast-table, he presented to gertrude collett a face heavy with his suffering. he was soothed by gertrude's imperishable tact. she was glad to hear that mrs. brodrick had stayed in bed for breakfast. it would do her good. at dinner-time they learned that it had done her good. gertrude was glad again. she said that mrs. brodrick knew she had always wanted her to stay in bed for breakfast. she saw no reason why she should not stay in bed for breakfast every morning. henry was consulted. he said, "by all means. capital idea." in a week's time, staying in bed for breakfast had made such a difference to jane that gertrude was held once more to have solved the problem. brodrick even said that if jane always did what gertrude wanted she wouldn't go far wrong. the brodricks all knew that jane was staying in bed for breakfast. the news went the round of the family in three days. it travelled from henry to frances, from frances to mabel, from mabel to john, and from john to levine and sophy. they received it unsurprised, with melancholy comprehension, as if they had always known it. and they said it was very sad for hugh. gertrude said it was very sad for everybody. she said it to brodrick one sunday morning, looking at him across the table, where she sat in jane's place. at first he had not liked to see her there, but he was getting used to it. she soothed him with her stillness, her smile, and the soft deepening of her shallow eyes. "it's very sad, isn't it," said she, "without mrs. brodrick?" "very," he said. he wondered ironically, brutally, what gertrude would say if she really know how sad it was. there had been another night like that which had seemed to him the beginning of it all. "may i give you some more tea?" "no, thank you. i wonder," said he, "how long it's going to last." "i suppose," said he, "it must run its course." "you talk like my brother, as if it were an illness." "well--isn't it?" "how should i know? i haven't got it." he rose and went to the window that looked out on to the garden and the lawn and jane's seat under the lime-tree. he remembered how one summer, three years ago, before he married her, she had lain there recovering from the malady of her genius. a passion of revolt surged up in him. "i suppose, anyhow, it's incurable," he said, more to himself than to gertrude. she had risen from her place and followed him. "whatever it is," she said, "it's the thing we've got most to think of. it's the thing that means most to her." "to her?" he repeated vaguely. "to her," she insisted. "i didn't understand it at first; i can't say i understand it now; it's altogether beyond me. but i do say it's the great thing." "yes," he assented, "it's the great thing." "the thing" (she pressed it) "for which sacrifices must be made." then, lest he should think that she pressed it too hard, that she rubbed it into him, the fact that stung, the fact that his wife's genius was his dangerous rival, standing between them, separating them, slackening the tie; lest he should know how much she knew; lest he should consider her obtuse, as if she thought that he grudged his sacrifices, she faced him with her supreme sincerity. "you know that you are glad to make them." she smiled, clear-eyed, shining with her own inspiration. she was the woman who was there to serve him, who knew his need. she came to him in his hour of danger, in his dark, sensual hour, and held his light for him. she held him to himself high. he was so helpless that he turned to her as if she indeed knew. "do you think," he said, "it does mean most to her?" "you know best," she said, "what it means." it sank into him. and, as it sank, he said to himself that of course it was so; that he might have known it. gertrude left it sinking. he never for a moment suspected that she had rubbed it in. xlvi they were saying now that jane left her husband too much to gertrude collett, and that it was hard on hugh. they supposed, in their unastonished acceptance of the facts, that things would have to go on like this indefinitely. it was partly hugh's own fault. that was john brodrick's view of it. hugh had given her her head and she was off. and when jane was off (sophy declared) nothing could stop her. and yet she was stopped. suddenly, in the full fury of it, she stopped dead. she had given herself ten months. she had asked for ten months; not a day more. but she had not allowed for friction or disturbance from the outside. and the check--it was a clutch at the heart that brought her brain up staggering--came entirely from the outside, from the uttermost rim of her circle, from mabel brodrick. in january, the last but three of the ten months, mabel became ill. all autumn john brodrick's wife had grown slenderer and redder-eyed, her little high-nosed, distinguished face thinned and drooped, till she was more than ever like a delicate bird. jane heard from frances vague rumours of the source of mabel's malady. the powers of life had been cruel to the lady whom john brodrick had so indiscreetly married. it was incredible to all of them that poor mabel should have the power to stay jinny in her course. but it was so. mabel had became attached to jinny. she clung, she adhered; she drew her life through jinny. it was because she felt that jane understood, that she was the only one of them who really knew. it was, she all but intimated, because jane was not a brodrick. when she was with the others, mabel was reminded perpetually of her failure, of how horribly she had made john suffer. not that they ever said a word about it, but they made her feel it; whereas jinny had seen from the first that she suffered too; she recognized her perfect right to suffer. and when it all ended, as it was bound to end, in a bad illness, the only thing that did mabel any good was seeing jinny. that was in january (they put it all down to the cold of january); and every day until the middle of february when mabel was about again, jane tramped across the heath to augustus road, always in weather that did its worst for mabel, always in wind or frost or rain. she never missed a day. sometimes henry was with her. he made john's house the last point of his round that he might sit with mabel. he had never sat with her before; he had never paid very much attention to her. it was the change in henry that made jane alive to the change in mabel; for the long, lean, unhappy man, this man of obstinate distastes and disapprovals, had an extreme tenderness for all physical suffering. since mabel's illness he had dropped his disapproving attitude to jane. she could almost have believed that henry liked her. one day as they turned together into the deep avenue of augustus road, she saw kind grey eyes looking down at her from henry's height. "you're very good to poor mabel, jinny," he said. "i can't do much." "do what you can. we shan't have her with us very long." "henry----" "she doesn't know it. john doesn't know it. but i thought i'd tell you." "i'm glad you've told me." "it's a kindness," he went on, "to go and see her. it takes her mind off herself." "she doesn't complain." "no. she doesn't complain. but her mind turns in on itself. it preys on her. and of course it's terrible for john." she agreed. "of course, it's terrible--for john." but she was thinking how terrible it was for mabel. she wondered, did they say of her and of _her_ malady, how terrible it was for hugh? "this is a great interruption to your work," he said presently, with the peculiar solemnity he accorded to the obvious. her pace quickened. the frosty air stung her cheeks and the blood mounted there. "it won't hurt you," he said. "you're better when you're not working." "am i?" said she in a voice that irritated henry. xlvii in february the interruption ceased. mabel was better. she was well enough for john to take her to the riviera. jane was, as they said, "off" again. but not all at once; not without suffering, for the seventh time, the supreme agony of the creator--that going down into the void darkness, to recall the offended power, to endure the tortures that propitiate the revolted will. her book was finished in march and appeared in april. her terror of the published thing was softened to her by the great apathy and fatigue which now came upon her; a fatigue and an apathy in which henry recognized the beginning of the illness he had prophesied. he reminded her that he had prophesied it long ago; and he watched her, sad and unsurprised, but like the angel he invariably was in the presence of physical suffering. she was thus spared the ordeal of the birthday celebration. it was understood that she would give audience in her study to her friends, to arnott nicholson, to the protheros and tanqueray. instead of all going in at once, they were to take it in turns. she lay there on her couch, waiting for tanqueray to come and tell her whether this time it was life or death. nicky's turn came first. nicky was unspeakably moved at the sight of her. he bent over her hand and kissed it; and her fear misread his mood. "dear nicky," she said, "are you consoling me?" he stood solemnly before her, inspired, positively flaming with annunciation. "wait--wait," he said, "till you've seen him. i won't say a word." nicky had never made himself more beautiful; he had never yet, in all his high renouncing, so sunk, so hidden himself behind the splendour that was tanqueray. "and prothero" (he laid beauty upon beauty), "he'll tell you himself. he's on his knees." the moments passed. nicky in his beauty and his pain wandered outside in the garden, leaving her to prothero and laura. and in the drawing-room, where tanqueray waited for his turn, jane's family appraised her triumph. henry, to caro bickersteth in a corner, was not sure that he did not, on the whole, regret it. these books wrecked her nerves. she was, henry admitted, a great genius; but great genius, what was it, after all, but a great neurosis? not far from them louis levine, for john's benefit, calculated the possible proceeds of the new book. louis smiled his mobile smile as he caught the last words of henry's diagnosis. henry might say what he liked. neurosis, to that extent, was a valuable asset. he could do, louis said, with some of it himself. brodrick, as he surveyed with tanqueray the immensity of his wife's achievement, wondered whether, for all that, she had not paid too high a price. and sophy levine, who overheard him, whispered to frances that it was he, poor dear, who paid. tanqueray got up and left the room. he had heard through it all the signal that he waited for, the sound of the opening of jane's door. her eyes searched his at the very doorway. "is it all right, george?" she whispered. her hand, her thin hand, held his until he answered. "it's tremendous." "do you remember two years ago--when you wouldn't drink?" "i drank this time. i'm drunk, jinny, drunk as a lord." "i swore i'd make you drink, this time; if i died for it." she leaned back in the corner of her couch, looking at him. "thank heaven you've never lied to me; because now i know." "i wonder if you do. it's alive, jinny; it's organic; it's been conceived and born." he brought his chair close to the table that stood beside her couch, a barrier between them. "it's got what we're all praying for--that divine unity----" "i didn't think it could have it. _i_'m torn in pieces." "you? i knew you would be." "it wasn't the book." "what was it?" he said fiercely. "it was chiefly, i think, mabel brodrick's illness." "_whose_ illness?" "john's wife's. you don't know what it means." "i can see. you let that woman prey on you. she sucks your life. you're white; you're thin; you're ill, too." she shook her head. "only tired, george." "why do you do it? why do you do it, jinny?" he pleaded. "ah--i must." he rose and walked up and down the room; and each time as he turned to face her he burst out into speech. "what's brodrick doing?" she did not answer. he noticed that she never answered him when he spoke of brodrick now. he paid no heed to the warning of her face. "why does he let his beastly relations worry you? you didn't undertake to marry the whole lot of them." he turned from her with that, and she looked after him. the set of his shoulders was square with his defiance and his fury. he faced her again. "i suppose if _he_ was ill you'd have to look after him. i don't see that you're bound to look after his sisters-in-law. why can't the brodricks look after her?" "they do. but it's me she wants." he softened, looking down at her. but she did not see his look. "you think," said she, "that it's odd of her--the last thing anybody could want?" his face changed suddenly as the blood surged in it. he sat down, and stretched his arms across the table that was the barrier between them. his head leaned towards her with its salient thrust, its poise of impetus and forward flight. "if you knew," he said, "the things you say----" his hands made a sudden movement, as if they would have taken hers that lay nerveless and helpless, almost within their grasp. she drew her hands back. "it's nearly ten o'clock," she said. "do you want me to go?" she smiled. "no. only--they'll say, if i sit up, that that's what tires me." "and does it? do _i_ tire you?" "you never tire me." "at any rate i don't destroy you; i don't prey on you." "we all prey on each other. _i_ prey on you." "you? oh--jinny!" again there was a movement of his hands, checked, this time, by his own will. "five minutes past ten, george. they'll come and carry me out if i don't go." "who will?" "all of them, probably. they're all in there." "it's preposterous. they don't care what they do to you themselves; they bore you brutally; they tire you till you're sick; they hand you on to each other, to be worried and torn to pieces; and they drag you from anybody who does you good. they don't let you have five minutes' pleasure, jinny, or five minutes' peace. good lord, what a family!" "anyhow, it's _my_ family." "it isn't. you haven't got a family; you never had and you never will have. they don't belong to you, and you don't belong to any of them, and you know it----" she rose. "all the same, i'm going to them," she said. "and that reminds me, how's rose?" "perfectly well, i believe." "it's ages since i saw rose. tell her--tell her that i'm coming to see her." "when?" he said. "some day next week." "sunday?" he knew, and she knew that he knew, that sunday was brodrick's day. "no, monday. monday, about four." xlviii tanqueray was realizing more and more that he was married, and that his marriage had been made in that heaven where the spirit of creative comedy abides. in spite of the superb sincerity of his indifference, he found it increasingly difficult to ignore his wife. it had, in fact, become impossible now that people no longer ignored _him_. rose, as the wife of an obscurity, could very easily be kept obscure. but, by a peculiar irony, as tanqueray's genius became recognized, rose, though not exactly recognized in any social sense, undoubtedly tended to appear. tanqueray might dine "out" without her (he frequently did), but when it came to asking people back again she was bound to be in evidence. not that he allowed himself to tread the ruinous round. he still kept people at arm's length. only people were more agreeably disposed towards george tanqueray recognized than they had been towards george tanqueray obscure, and he in consequence was more agreeably disposed towards them. having made it clearly understood that he would not receive people, that he barred himself against all intrusions and approaches, occasionally, at the length of his arm, he did receive them. and they immediately became aware of rose. that did not matter, considering how little _they_ mattered. the nuisance of it was that he thus became aware of her himself. rose at the head of his table, so conspicuously and yet so fortuitously his wife, emphasizing her position by her struggles to sustain it, rose with her embarrassments and solecisms, with her lost innocence in the matter of her aspirates, agonized now by their terrified flight and by her own fluttering efforts at recapture, rose was not a person that anybody could ignore, least of all her husband. as long as she had remained a servant in his house he had been unaware of her, or aware of her only as a presence beneficent, invisible, inaudible. here again his celebrity, such as it was, had cursed him. the increase in tanqueray's income, by enabling them to keep a servant, had the effect of throwing rose adrift about the house. as the mistress of it, with a maid under her, she was not quite so invisible, nor yet so inaudible as she had been. it seemed to tanqueray that his acuter consciousness dated from the arrival of that maid. rose, too, had developed nerves. the maid irritated rose. she put her back up and rubbed her the wrong way in all the places where she was sorest. for rose's weakness was that she couldn't tolerate any competition in her own line. she couldn't, as she said, abide sitting still and seeing the work taken out of her hands, seeing another woman clean _her_ house, and cook _her_ husband's dinner, and she knowing that she could do both ten times as well herself. she appealed to tanqueray to know how he'd like it if she was to get a man in to write his books for him. she was always appealing to tanqueray. when george wanted to know what, after all, was wrong with susan, and declared that susan seemed to him a most superior young woman, rose said that was the worst of it. susan was much too superior for her. she could see well enough, she said, that susan knew that she was not a lady, and she could see that george knew that she knew. else why did he say that susan was superior? and sometimes george would be beside himself with fury and would roar, "damn susan!" and sometimes, but not often, he would be a torment and a tease. he would tell rose that he loved susan, that he adored susan, that he couldn't live without her. he might part with rose, but he couldn't possibly part with susan. susan was the symbol of his prosperity. without susan he would not feel celebrated any more. and sometimes rose would laugh; and sometimes, in moments of extreme depression, she would deplore the irony of the success that had saddled her with susan. and tanqueray cursed susan in his heart, as the cause of rose's increasing tendency to conversation. it was there that she encroached. she invaded more and more the guarded territory of silence. she annexed outlying pieces of tanqueray's sacred time, pursuing him with talk that it was intolerable to listen to. he blamed prothero and laura and jane for that, as well as susan. they were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the habit. and it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in. through her intercourse with jane and laura, rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. but for that, owing to tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have passed unnoticed. as it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful. once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury on tanqueray's part and on rose's a long period of dumbness. he was, he always had been, most aware of her after seeing jane brodrick. from every meeting with jane he came to her gloomy and depressed and irritable. and the meetings were growing more frequent. he saw jane now at less and less intervals. he couldn't go on without seeing her. a fortnight was about as long as he could stand it. he had a sense of just struggling through, somehow, in the days that passed between the night (it was a thursday) when he had dined at putney and monday afternoon when jane had promised that she would come to hampstead. on monday a telegram arrived for tanqueray. the brisk director of a great publishing firm in new york desired (at the last moment before his departure) an appointment with the novelist for that afternoon. the affair was of extreme importance. the american meant business. it would be madness not to see him, even though he should miss jinny. all morning tanqueray sulked because of that american. rose was cowed by his mood. at luncheon she prepared herself to sit dumb lest she should irritate him. she had soft movements that would have conciliated a worse ruffian than tanqueray in his mood. she rebuked the importunities of joey in asides so tender that they couldn't have irritated anybody. but tanqueray remained irritated. he couldn't eat his luncheon, and said so. and then rose said something, out loud. that wasn't her fault, she said. and tanqueray told her that he hadn't said it was. then, maddened by her thought, she (as she put it to herself afterwards) fair burst with it. "i wish i'd never set eyes on that susan!" said she. tanqueray at the moment was trying to make notes in his memorandum-book. he might be able to cut short that interview if he started with all his points clear. "oh--_hold_ your tongue," said tanqueray. "i _am_ 'oldin' it," said rose. he smiled at that in spite of himself. he was softened by its reminder of her submissive dumbness, by its implication that there were, after all, so many things she might have said and hadn't. having impressed upon her that she was on no account to let mrs. brodrick go till he came back, he rushed for his appointment. by rushing away from it, cutting it very short indeed, he contrived to be back again at half-past four. susan informed him that mrs. brodrick had come. she had arrived at four with the baby and the nurse. she was in there with the baby. "the baby?" sounds of laughter came from the dining-room, rendering it unnecessary for susan to repeat her statement. she smiled sidelong at the door, as much as to say she had put her master on to a good thing. he would appreciate what he found in there. in there he found jinny crouching on a footstool; facing her, rose knelt upon the floor. in the space between them, running incessantly to and fro on his unsteady feet, was brodrick's little son. when he got to jinny he flung his arms around her neck and kissed her twice, and then rose said, "oh, kiss poor rose"; and when he got to rose he flung his arms around her neck, too, and kissed her, once only. that was the distinction that he made. and as he ran he laughed, he laughed as if love were the biggest joke in all the world. tanqueray stood still in the doorway and watched, as he had stood once in the doorway of the house in bloomsbury, watching rose. now he was watching jinny. he thought he had never seen her look so divinely happy. he watched brodrick's son and thought distastefully that when brodrick was a baby he must have looked just like that. and the little brodrick ran to and fro, from jinny to rose and from rose to jinny, passionately, monotonously busy, with always the same rapturous embrace from brodrick's wife and always the same cry from tanqueray's, "kiss poor rose!" when jane turned to greet tanqueray, the baby clung to her gown. his mouth drooped as he realized that it was no longer possible to reach her face. identifying tanqueray as the cause of her remoteness, he stamped a baby foot at him; he distorted his features and set up a riotous howl. rose reiterated her sad cry as a charm to distract him. she pretended to cry too, because the baby wouldn't look at her. he wouldn't look at anybody till his mother took him in her arms and kissed him. then, with his round face still flushing under his tears, he smiled at tanqueray, a smile of superhuman forgiveness and reconciliation. rose gazed at them in a rapture. "well," said she, "how you can keep orf kissin' 'im----" "i can keep off kissing anything," said he. jane asked if he would ring for the nurse to take the baby. tanqueray was glad when he went. it had just dawned on him that he didn't like to see jinny with a baby; he didn't like to see her preoccupied with brodrick's son, adoring, positively adoring, and caressing brodrick's son. at the same time it struck him that it was a pity that rose had never had a baby; but he didn't carry the thought far enough to reflect that rose's baby would be his son. he wondered if he could persuade jinny to send the baby home and stay for dinner. he apologized for not having been there to receive her. jane replied that rose had entertained her. "you mean that you were entertaining rose?" "we were entertaining each other." "and now you've got to entertain me." she was going to when rose interrupted (her mind was still running on the baby). "if i was you," said she, "i shouldn't leave 'im much to that gertrude." "what?" (it was tanqueray who exclaimed.) "not to the angel in the house?" "i don't know about angels, but if it was me i wouldn't leave 'im, or she'll get a hold on 'im." "isn't he," said tanqueray, "a little young?" but rose was very serious. "it's when 'e's young she'll do the mischief." "my dear rose," said jane, "whatever do you think she'll do?" "she'll estrange 'im, if you don't take care." "she couldn't." "couldn't? she'll get a 'old before you know where you are." "but," said jane quietly, "i do know where i am." "not," rose insisted, "when you're away, writin'." tanqueray saw jane's face flush and whiten. he looked at rose. "you don't know what you're talking about," he said, with anger under his breath. jane seemed not to know that he was there. she addressed herself exclusively to rose. "what do you suppose happens when i'm--away?" "you forget." "never!" said jane. the passion of her inflection was lost on rose who brooded. "you forget," she repeated. "and she doesn't." involuntarily tanqueray looked at jane and jane at tanqueray. there were moments when his wife's penetration was terrible. rose was brooding so profoundly that she failed to see the passing of that look. "if it was me," she murmured in a thick voice, a voice soft as her dream, "if it was my child----" tanqueray's nerves gave way. "but it isn't." he positively roared at her. "and it never will be." rose shrank back as if he had struck her. jane's heart leaped to her help. "if it was," she said, "it would have the dearest, sweetest little mother." at that, at the sudden tenderness of it coming after tanqueray's blow, rose gave a half-audible moan and got up quickly and left the room. they heard her faltering steps up-stairs in the room above them. it was then that tanqueray asked jane if she would stay and dine with them. she could send a note to brodrick by the nurse. she stayed. she felt that if she did not tanqueray would bully rose. rose was glad she stayed. she was afraid to be left alone that evening with george. she was dumb before him, and her dumbness cut jane to the heart. jane tried to make her talk a little during dinner. they talked about the protheros when susan was in the room, and when she was out of it they talked about susan. this was not wise of jane, for it exasperated tanqueray. he wanted to talk to jane, and he wanted to be alone with her to talk. after dinner they went up to his study to look at some books he had bought. the best of selling your own books, he said, was that you could buy as many as you wanted of other people's. he had now got as many as he wanted. they were more than the room would hold. all that he could not get on to the shelves were stacked about the floor. he stood among them smiling. rose did not smile. the care of tanqueray's study was her religion. "how am i to get round them 'eaps to dust?" said she. "you don't get round them, and you don't dust," said tanqueray imperturbably. "then--them books'll breed a fever." "they will. but _you_ won't catch it." rose lingered, and he suggested that it would be as well if she went down-stairs and made the coffee. she needn't send it up till nine, he said. it was now five minutes past eight. she went obediently. "she knows she isn't allowed into this room," said tanqueray to jane. "you speak of her as if she was a dog," said she. she added that she would have to go at half-past eight. there was a train at nine that she positively must catch. he had to go down and ask rose to come back with the coffee soon. jane was glad that she had forced on him that act of humility. for the moments that she remained alone with him she wandered among his books. there were some that she would like to borrow. she talked about them deliberately while tanqueray maddened. he walked with her to the station. she turned on him as they dipped down the lane out of sight and hearing. "george," she said, "i'll never come and see you again if you bully that dear little wife of yours." "i?--bully her?" "yes. you bully her, you torture her, you terrify her till she doesn't know what she's doing." "i'm sorry, jinny." "sorry? of course you're sorry. she slaves for you from morning till night." "that's not my fault. i stopped her slaving and she got ill. why, it was you--_you_--who made me turn her on to it again." "of course i did. she loves slaving for you. she'd cut herself in little pieces. she'd cook herself--deliciously--and serve herself up for your dinner if she thought you'd fancy her." "you're right, jinny. i never ought to have married her." "i didn't say you never ought to have married her. i say you ought to be on your knees now you have married her. she's ten thousand times too good for you." "you're right, jinny. you always were right, you always will be damnably right." "and you always will be--oh dear me--so rude." he looked in her face like a whipped dog trying to reinstate himself in favour, as far as tanqueray could look like a whipped dog. "let me carry those books for you," he said. "you may carry the books, but i don't like you, tanks." his devil, the old devil that used to be in him, looked at her then. "you used to like me," he said. but jinny was beyond its torment. "of course i liked you. i liked you awfully. you were another person then." he said nothing to that. "forgive me, george," she said presently. "you see, i love your little wife." "i love you for loving her," he said. "you may go on loving me for that. but you needn't come any further with me. i know my way." "but i want to come with you." "and i, unfortunately, want to be alone." "you shall. i'll walk behind you--as many yards as you like behind you. i've got to carry the books." "bother the books. i'll carry them." "you'll do nothing of the sort." they walked together in silence till the station doors were in sight. he meant to go with her all the way to putney, carrying the books. "i wish," he said, "i knew what would really please you." "you do know," she said. a moment passed. tanqueray stopped his stride. "i'll go back and beg her pardon--_now_." she gave him her hand. he went back; and between them they forgot the books. though it was not yet ten the light was low in rose's bedroom. rose had gone to bed. he went up to her room. he raised the light a little, quietly, and stood by her bedside. she lay there, all huddled, her body rounded, her knees drawn up as if she had curled into herself in her misery. one arm was flung out on the bed-clothes, the hand hung cramped over a fold of blanket; sleep only had slackened its convulsive grip. her lips were parted, her soft face was relaxed, blurred, stained in scarlet patches. she had cried herself to sleep. and as he looked at her he remembered how happy she had been playing with jinny's baby; and how his brutal words had struck her in the hurt place where she was always tender. his heart smote him. he undressed quietly and lay down beside her. she stirred; and, finding him there, gave a little cry and put her arms about him. and then he asked her to forgive him, and she said there was nothing to forgive. she added with her seeming irrelevance, "you didn't go all the way to putney then?" she knew he had meant to go. she knew, too, that he had been sent back. xlix on her return jane went at once to brodrick in his study. the editor was gloomy and perturbed. he made no response to her regrets, nor yet to her excuse that tanqueray had kept her. presently, after some moments of heavy silence, she learned that her absence was not the cause of his gloom. he was worried about the magazine. levine was pestering him. when she reminded him that louis had nothing to do with it, that she thought he was going to be kept out, he replied that that was all very well in theory; you couldn't keep him out when he'd got those infernal jews behind him, and they were running the concern. you could buy him out, you could buy out the whole lot of them if you had the money; but, if you hadn't, where were you? it had been stipulated that the editor was to have a free hand; and up till now, as long as the thing had paid its way, his hand had been pretty free. but it wasn't paying; and levine was insisting that the free hand was the cause of the deficit. he did not tell her that levine's point was that they had not bargained for his wife's hand, which was considerably freer than his own. if they were prepared to run the magazine at a financial loss they were not prepared to run it for the exclusive benefit of his wife's friends; which, levine said, was about what it amounted to. that was what was bothering brodrick; for it was jane's hand, in its freedom, that had kept the standard of the magazine so high. it had helped him to realize his expensive dream. the trouble, this time, he told her, was a tale of nina lempriere's. jane gave an excited cry at this unexpected flashing forth of her friend's name. "what, nina? has she----?" brodrick answered, almost with anger, that she had. and levine had put his silly foot down. he had complained that the tale was gruesome (they had set it up; it was quite a short thing); nina's tales usually were gruesome; and nina's price was stiff. he didn't know about the price; perhaps it was a trifle stiff; you might even say it crackled; but the tale----! brodrick went on in the soft, even voice that was a sign with him of profound excitement--the tale was a corker. he didn't care if it _was_ gruesome. it was magnificent. "more so than her last?" jane murmured. "oh, miles more." he rummaged among his papers for the proofs. he'd be eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. he wished she'd look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be. she looked and admired his judgment. the tale was everything that he had said. nina had more than found herself. "of course," she said, "you'll publish it." "of course i shall. i'm not going to knuckle under to louis and his beastly jews--with a chance like that. i don't care if the price _is_ stiff. it's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once in a hundred years. it'll send up the standard. that's of course why he funks it." he pondered. "there's something queer about it. whenever that woman gets away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing like this." jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer. they gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard that nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in london. it was very queer, she thought, that nina had not told her she was coming. she called the next day at adelphi terrace. she found nina in her front room, at work on the proofs that brodrick had sent her. nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. she had not told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. that was yesterday. to-day what she wanted more than anything was to see jane. she hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done with her own. she had heard of it from tanqueray, and was afraid of it. jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. she could only save herself by keeping clear of her. "i should have thought," jane said, "you were safe enough--after that last." she had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments of her arrival. "safe, at any rate, from me." "you're the last person i shall ever be safe from. there you are, always just ahead of me. i'm exhausted if i look at you. you make me feel as if i never could keep up." "but why? there's no comparison between your pace and mine." "it's not your pace, jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me." "my handicap?" "well--a baby, a husband, and all those brodricks and levines. i've got to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart out of me." "if i did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you thought it?" nina said nothing. she was thinking that it must be pretty serious if jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it. "that's what i want to prove," said jane softly, "that there isn't any handicap. that's why i want to win." her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions. she had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to tanqueray, that tanqueray had forced her to say. she had made herself afraid of him. her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to hugh. she was not going to admit anything to nina, least of all that she found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying nothing but her genius. it was so horribly true (as nina had once said) that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into the course when she had swerved from it. it had happened every time, every time; so invariably as to prove that for nina virginity was the sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition. but the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own. she refused to be judged by anything but the result. it was absurd to talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art _was_ a handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of creation. you defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that. the flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest. "does it seem to you, then, that _i_'ve defeated my end?" nina pressed her point home implacably. jane strung herself to the pain of it. "not you." she paused for her stroke. "nor yet i." she rose with it. she wanted to get away from nina who seemed terrible to her at that moment. she shrank from meeting nina's eyes. nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy. it might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of jinny to pretend that she could live surrounded and hemmed in by brodricks and do what she had done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. nina could not suppose that jinny's god was less jealous than george tanqueray's or her own. and jinny must be perpetually offending him. she recognized the righteousness of the artist in jinny's plea to be judged only by the results. that, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. but she, nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. the largeness and the perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor jinny must have been torn in pieces. her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. she had not gone so far in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of jinny. that was how she measured her. it looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop jinny, any more than you could stop george tanqueray. jinny, if you came to think of it, had the superior impetus. george, after all, had carefully removed obstruction from his path. jinny had taken the risk, and had swept on, reckless, regardless. it was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should seem somehow, to diminish yours. as if she had not said herself that the idea of rivalry was absurd. nina knew it. her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. she had no vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. the great thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you acquiesced. and she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the splendid course. it marked her honourably; it was the sign and certificate of her fitness. she was aware also that, beyond the splendid course, there was no path for her. she would have been sure of herself there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. she had instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her swerve. what she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius. she was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. since there was nothing else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely now. her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of disaster. she had tried to forget the existence of jane's book, because tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision of her own. if the designs of destiny were clear, it was equally evident that her friends were bent on frustrating them. within five minutes after jane brodrick had removed her disturbing presence, nina received a telegram from owen prothero. he was coming to see her at five o'clock. it was now half-past four. this was what she had dreaded more than anything. her fear of it had kept her out of london for two years. owen had been considerate in notifying her of his coming. it suggested that it was open to her to escape if she did not want to see him, while it warned her not to miss him if she did. she debated the point for the half hour he had left her, and decided that she would see him. prothero arrived punctually to his hour. she found no change in his aspect or his manner. if he looked happy, he looked it in his own supersensual way. marriage had not abridged his immeasurable remoteness, nor touched his incorruptible refinement. he considered her with a medical eye, glad to see her bearing the signs of life lived freely and robustly in the open air. her mountains, he said, evidently agreed with her. she inquired after laura, and was told that she would not know her. the kiddy, he said, smiling, had grown up. she was almost plump; she had almost a colour. "she wants to see you," he said. "she told me i was to bring you back with me." ages passed before she answered. "i don't think, really, owen, that i can come." "why not?" he said. she would have told him that she was too busy, but for her knowledge that with owen lying was no good. she resented his asking her why not, when he knew perfectly well why. "why ever not," he repeated, "when we want you?" she smiled. "you seem determined to get everything you want." she had a good mind to tell him straight out, there and then, that he couldn't have everything he wanted, not with her, at any rate. he couldn't have it both ways. but you do not say these things; and if she could judge by the expression of his face what she had said had hit him hard enough. he sheltered himself behind a semblance of irrelevance. "laura is very fond of you." the significance of the statement lay in its implication that he was very fond of laura. taken that way it was fuel heaped on to nina's malignant fire. under it she smouldered darkly. "she's getting unhappy about you," he went on. "you don't want to make her unhappy, do you?" "did i ever want to make her unhappy?" she answered, with a flash. "and if it comes to that, why should it?" "the kiddy has a very tender conscience." she saw what he meant now. he was imploring her not to put it into laura's head that she had come between them. that would hurt laura. his wife was never to suspect that her friend had suffered. nina, he seemed secretly to intimate, was behaving in a manner likely to give rise to that suspicion. he must have been aware that she did it to save herself more suffering; but his point was that it didn't matter how much she suffered, provided they saved laura. there must be no flaw in that perfect happiness. "you mean," she said, "she won't understand it if i don't come?" "i'm afraid i mean she will understand it if you keep on not coming. but of course you'll come. you're coming with me now." it was the same voice that had told her three years ago that she was not coming with him, that she was going to stay and take care of laura, because that was all that she could do for him. and as she had stayed then she went with him now, and for the same reason. she felt, miserably, that her reluctance damned her; it proved her coarse, or at any rate not fine enough for the communion he had offered her, the fineness of which she had once accepted as the sanction of their fellowship. she must seem to him preposterous in her anxiety to break with him, to make an end of what had never been. all the same, what he was forcing on her now was the fact of separation. as they approached the house where he and laura lived she had an increasing sense of estrangement from him and of distance. he drew her attention to the iron gate that guarded their sanctuary, and the untrodden grass behind it. his dreams came in by that gate, and all other things by the postern door, which, he said, was the way he and she must go. nina paused by the gate. "it won't open, owen." "no. the best dreams come through the gates that never open." "it looks as if a good south wind would bring it down." "it will last my time," he said. l laura received her as if prothero were not there; as if he never had been, never would be there. she looked up from their embrace with a blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect assurance that they had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between them. it struck nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. laura was not suffering; she was not going to suffer. she had no consciousness or conscience in the matter. it was made clear to nina that she was too happy for that, too much in love with owen, too much aware that owen was in love with her, though their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their state. they evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to themselves and their affairs. they suggested charmingly that what excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of tanqueray, of jane, of nina. in her smiling protest that she no longer counted laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. she surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and benignly from her bliss. she was not so remote, she seemed to say, but that she remembered. she knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could be. nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. if nina cared for the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers. it seemed to nina's morbid sense that laura overdid it; that the two of them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. in every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove her on. nina was then aware that she hated laura. the hatred was not active in her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress. and laura remained unconscious. she took her presently up-stairs to her room, owen's room. it was all they had, she said. nina held her head very straight, trying hard not to see owen's coat that hung behind the door, or his big boots all in a row beside laura's little ones. her face in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. it demanded why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she _had_ stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand. but she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. she owed it a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. sun-burnt, coarsened a little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose, the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster. she accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. laura saw her doing it now. "i like your face," was her comment. "it's more than i do," said nina. "but i like my hands." she began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant subject. she could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. but they brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her wrist, reminding her of owen. she was aware of the beast in her blood that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent laura. at the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, laura, in her innocence, was babbling about owen. "he's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "he got fifteen pounds for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? look there!" she had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed for nina to admire. "he went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. he said he thought i should look nice in it. wasn't it clever of him to know? and who ever would have thought that he'd have cared?" nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when laura had gone shabby. "he cares so much," said laura, "that i have to put it on every evening." "put it on now," said nina. "shall i?" she was longing to. "no, i don't think i will." "you must," said nina. laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for nina to "fasten her up the back." nina had a vision of prothero standing over the little thing, his long deft hands trembling as he performed this office. the kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of owen and the wonderful gown. "conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it! how he knew one gown from another--how he knew the shops--what hand guided him--i can't think. it must have been his guardian angel." "or yours." "yes--when you think of the horrors he might have got." laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she was pulling up a fold of lace above her breasts. as she did this she looked at her own image in the glass and smiled softly, unaware. nina saw then that her breasts were slightly and delicately rounded; she recognized the work of life, shaping laura's womanhood; it was the last touch of the passion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its perfection. her own breasts heaved as the wild fang pierced them. then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. she looked at laura with prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with prothero's touch. there was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man, since it compelled her to take prothero's view of a little woman in a mouse-coloured velvet gown. the gown was fastened, and the kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. of a sudden she caught sight of nina's eyes in the glass regarding her sombrely. she turned and put up her face to nina's, and paused, wavering. she closed her eyes and felt nina's arms about her neck, and nina's hands touching her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. laura's nerves divined it. she opened her eyes and looked at nina. "ah," she cried, "try not to hate me." [illustration: "ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"] nina bowed her head. "poor kiddy, dear kiddy," she whispered. "how could i?" how could she? she couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of prothero. to-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self. she had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture. it was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. it still crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. it was an unhappy beast, but it was not cruel any more. it could have crawled to laura's feet and licked them. for the kiddy was such a little thing. it was impossible to feel hatred for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. life had been cruel enough to laura, before owen married her. if it came to suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to suffer more. nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to take owen from the kiddy, to make the kiddy suffer as she had suffered, could she have done it? could she have borne to be, really, such a beast as that? even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own torture and the kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? of course she couldn't. and since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even owen say that she was not so dreadful after all? she remembered then that, though he had seen through her, he had never at any time admitted that she was dreadful. he had spoken rather as if, seeing _through_ her, he had seen things she could not see, fine things which he declared to be the innermost truth of her. he must have known all the time that she would feel like that when she could bring herself to see laura. she saw through _him_ now. that was why he had insisted on her coming. it was as if he had said to her, "i'm not thinking so tremendously of her. what i mean is that it'll be all right for you if you'll trust yourself to me; if you'll only come." he seemed to say frankly, "that beast of yours is really dreadful. it must be a great affliction to have to carry it about with you. i'll show you how to get rid of it altogether. you've only got to see her, nina, in her heartrending innocence, wearing, if you would believe it, a mouse-coloured velvet gown." that night laura stood silent and thoughtful while prothero's hands fumbled gently over the many little hooks and fastenings of the gown. she let it slide with the soft fall of its velvet from her shoulders to her feet. "i wish," she said, "i hadn't put it on." he stooped and kissed her where the silk down of her hair sprang from her white neck. "does it think," he said, "that it crushed poor nina with its beauty?" she shook her head. she would not tell him what she thought. but the tears in her eyes betrayed her. li it was april in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds, and a stormy south-west wind. brodrick's garden was sweet with dense odours of earth and sunken rain, of young grass and wallflowers thick in the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. outside, among the birch-trees, there was a flashing of silver stems, a shaking of green veils, and a triumphing of bright grass over the blown dust of the suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the heath. brodrick was coming back. he had been away a fortnight, on his holiday. he was to have taken jane with him but at the last moment she had been kept at home by some ailment of the child's. they had been married more than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights and days. in all his letters brodrick had stated that he was enjoying himself immensely and could do with three months of it; and at the end of a fortnight he had sent jane a telegram to say that he was coming back. she was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. the spring made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white april evenings met her on her dorset moors. she knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable passion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half divines the secret of the soul. she felt again that keen stirring of the immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. at moments it was as if the veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy. it was so until she heard brodrick calling to her at the gate. and at his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a bride. up-stairs gertrude collett was dressing for dinner. she looked out at her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand. they were late for dinner, which was the reason, brodrick thought, why the angel of the dinner (as jane called her) looked annoyed. they were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised and elaborated for her diversion. gertrude was manifestly not diverted. she congratulated brodrick on his brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a little longer. brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer. he thought gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would do her good. she had better take one. "i wish you would," said jane. "we both," said brodrick, "wish you would." gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. she got on better without them. jane looked at brodrick. "i might have gone with you," she said. "after all, baby never did have convulsions." "i knew he wouldn't," said brodrick, and remembered that it was gertrude who had said he would. a pause in the dialogue robbed gertrude's next remark of any relevance it might have had. "we've seen," said she, "a good deal of mr. tanqueray." (another pause.) "i wonder how mrs. tanqueray gets on." "i imagine," said brodrick, "that she never did get on with him." "i meant--without him." "oh." he caused the conversation to flourish round another subject. in the drawing-room, where gertrude did not follow them all at once, jane turned to him. "hugh," she said, "was i unkind to her?" "unkind?" "well, was i kind enough?" "you are always kind," he said. "do you think so? do you really think so?" "don't talk about her, jinny, i've got other things to attend to." "what things?" he put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth. so drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible. "i'm tired of being made love to. i'm going," she said, "to fling off all maidenly reserve and make love to you." she put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity on his knees. "the devil gets into me when i have to talk to gertrude." she put her arm lightly and shyly about him. "do you mind?" she said. "no, jinny, i rather like it." her arms tightened ever so little. "it gives you, doesn't it, an agreeable sense of impropriety at your own fireside?" she did something to his hair which made him look unlike himself or any brodrick. "supposing," she said, "you repulse me? could you repulse me?" "no, jinny; i don't think i ever could." "what, not this outrageous hussy, flinging herself at your head, and rumpling your nice collar?" she let him go that she might look at him and see how he really took it. he drew her and held her close to him in arms that trembled violently, while her lips brushed his with skimming, fugitive kisses, and kisses that lingered a moment in their flight. "do you like the way i make love?" she said. "and do you like my gown and the way i do my hair?" his voice shook. "jinny, why aren't you always like this? why aren't you always adorable?" "i can't be anything--always. don't you adore me in my other moods?" "can you," said he, "adore a little devil when it teases?" "i never tease you when you're tired." "no, but i'm sometimes tired when you tease me. you are, darling, just a little bit exhausting for one man." "yes," said jinny complacently; "i can exhaust you. but you can never, never exhaust me. there's always more where i came from." "the trouble is, jinny, that i can't always make you out. i never know where i am with you." "but, my dear, think of having to live with a woman whom you _had_ made out. think of knowing exactly what she's going to do before she does it, and anticipating all her conversation!" "think," said he, "of living with a woman and never knowing precisely whether she's your wife or not your wife." "but it solves all the matrimonial problems--how to be the exemplary father of a family and yet to slip the noose and be a bachelor again--how to break the seventh commandment----" "jinny!" "the seventh commandment and yet be faithful to your marriage vows--how to obtain all the excitement of polygamy, all the relief of the divorce court without the bother and the scandal and the expense. why can't you look at it in that light?" "perhaps, jinny, because i'm not polygamous." "you never know what you are until you're tried. supposing you'd married gertrude--you'd have had gertrude, all there is of gertrude, always gertrude, and nothing but gertrude. could you have stood it?" "probably." "you couldn't. before you'd been married to gertrude six months you'd have gone, howling, to the devil. whereas with me you've got your devil at home." his smile admitted that there was truth in what she said. she had appealed to the adventurous and lawless spirit in him, the spirit that marked his difference from his family. she went on with her air of reasonableness and wisdom. "i am really, though you mayn't know it, the thing you need." he saw his advantage in her mood. "and _you_, jinny? don't you know that you're happiest like this?" "yes. i know it." "and that when you're working like ten horses you're in misery half the time?" "in torture." she agreed. "and don't you know that it makes little lines come, little lines of agony on your forehead, jinny, and purple patches under your dear eyes; and your mouth hardens." "i know," she moaned. "i know it does. and you don't love me when i look like that?" "i love you whatever you look like, and you know it. i love you even when you wander." "even? do you mind so very much--my wandering?" "sometimes, perhaps, a little." "you didn't mind at all before you married me." "i didn't realize it then." "didn't realize what?" "your genius, jinny, and the things it does to you." "but you did--you did--you knew all about it." "i knew what it meant to me." "what _did_ it mean--to you?" he appeared to plunge into deep memories before he answered her. "to me it was simply _the_ supreme intellectual interest. it was the strongest and the strangest intellectual influence i had ever felt. you'll never quite know what it meant to me." "and it means nothing now--you don't like it--my poor genius? and they used to say you were in love with it." "so i was, jinny, before i saw you." "you were in love enough to marry it." "i didn't marry it. it wouldn't marry me." "is that why you hate it? darling, you can't hate it as much as i do." "i don't hate it. but you can't expect me to love it as i love my wife." "but i'm not your wife. your wife wouldn't behave like this. would you like me better if i didn't?" he held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her. "if," she said, "i was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?" "jinny--if gertrude were to hear you!" she loosened his arms and sat up and listened. "i hear gertrude," she said. "darling, your hair's all any way. let me straighten it. it might be used in evidence against us." gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who suspects a vision of iniquity. she took her place on the other side of the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. a thin stream of conversation flowed from brodrick and from jane, and under it she divined, she felt the tide that drew them. she herself sat silent and smooth and cool. she sat like one removed from mortality's commotion. but it was as if she were listening to the blood that beat in brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end. at ten o'clock jane rose and held out her hand to gertrude. she was saying good-night. brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. presently he rose also and followed her with shining eyes. gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing. lii before long brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him the thing he most desired. he was appeased again with the hope of fatherhood. it tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the intolerable hours that levine was giving him in the office of the "monthly review." it softened for him the hard fact that he could no longer afford his expensive dream. the old, reckless, personal ambition, the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of race. he wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have more and more children like the solid little son they had called john henry brodrick. the child justified the double name. the blood of the brodricks ran in him pure. he flattered the racial and paternal pride. he grew more and more the image of what brodrick had been at his age. it was good to think that there would be more like him. brodrick's pride in beholding him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race there would be jane to reckon with. in december, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born. a son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? there could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. he did not require henry to tell him that. not that he could think of it just then. he could think of nothing but jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the dreadful open door. nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. jinny was hardly out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "monthly review." levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. the review was passing out of brodrick's hands. when it came to the point he realized how unwilling he was to let it go. he could only save it by buying levine out. and he couldn't do that. as the father of a family he had no business to risk more money on his unprofitable dream. it was impossible to conceal from jane the fact that he was worried. she saw it in his face. she lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. he had lost money over the review and now he was going to lose the review itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed editorship. it would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had been so attached to his dream. it would go to her heart, too. it was in his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them; they had always been happy together in his dream. it was his link with the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements that made for separation. she was determined that, whatever went, his dream should not go. she could not forget that it had been she who had all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted george tanqueray on an infatuated editor. she had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. it wasn't for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. and it wasn't for nothing that hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. he hadn't married her for that. and there they were, her earnings, diminished by some advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than sufficient to buy louis out. her genius, after all, was a valuable asset. she lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it. before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted louis in his office. levine was human. he always had been; and he was moved by the sight of his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this thing. he was not hard on her. he suffered himself to be bought out for a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his losses. he didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only wanted not to lose. he was glad to be quit of it. brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. but she divined under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for his own. she could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the glorious success of nineteen-three. the deed he thought so adorable when she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as impermissible in his wife. then, by its sheer extravagance, it was flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it was not. as for his family, it was clear that they condemned the transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. brodrick was not sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight. the year was thick with them. there was jane's collapse. jane, by a natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a book in. she had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with the first effort. there was not only jane; there was jane's child, so lamentably unlike a brodrick. the shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a darker down, revealing jane. not that anybody could have objected to jane's hair. but there was jane's delicacy. an alarming tendency to waste, and an incessant, violent, inveterate screaming proclaimed him her son, the heir of an unstable nervous system. jane's time and what strength she had were divided between her sick child and mabel brodrick. for in this dreadful year mabel had become worse. her malady had declared itself. there were rumours and hushed hints of a possible operation. henry was against it; he doubted whether she would survive the shock. it was not to be thought of at present; not as long as things, he said, remained quiescent. john brodrick, as he waited, had grown greyer; he was gentler also and less important, less visibly the unsurprised master of the expected. the lines on his face had multiplied and softened in an expression as of wonder why this unspeakable thing should have happened to him of all men and to his wife of all women. poor mabel who had never done anything---- that was the way they put it now among themselves, mabel's shortcoming. she had never done anything to deserve this misery. lying on her couch in the square, solid house in augustus road, wimbledon, mabel covered her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. in the family she was supreme by divine right of suffering. again, every day, jane trod the path over the heath to wimbledon. and sometimes henry found her at john's house and drove her back in his motor (he had a motor now). once, boxed up with him in the closed car (it was march and the wind was cold over the heath), she surprised him with a question. "henry, is it true that if mabel had had children she'd have been all right?" "yes," he said curtly, wondering what on earth had made her ask him that. "it's killing her then--not having them?" "that," he said, "and the desire to have them." "how cruel it is, how detestable--that she should have _this_----" "it's nature's revenge, jane, on herself." "and she was so sweet, she would have loved them----" the doctor brooded. he had a thing to say to her. "jinny, if you'd put it away--altogether--that writing of yours--you'd be a different woman." "different?" "you'd be happier. and, what's more, you'd be well, too. perfectly well." "this is not the advice i should give you," he went on, addressing her silence, "if you were an unmarried woman. i urge my unmarried patients to work--to use their brains all they can--and married ones, too, when they've no children. if poor mabel had done _something_ it would have been far better. but in your case it's disastrous." jane remained silent. she herself had a premonition of disaster. her restlessness was on her. her nerves and blood were troubled again by the ungovernable, tyrannous impulse of her power. it was not the year she should have chosen, but because she had no choice she was working through everything, secretly, in defiance of henry's orders. she wondered if he knew. he was looking at her keenly, as if he had at any rate a shrewd suspicion. "i hardly think," he said, "it's fair to hugh." henry was sure of his facts, and her silence made him surer. she _was_ at it again, and the question was how to stop her? the question was laid that night before the family committee. it met in the library at moor grange almost by brodrick's invitation. brodrick was worried. he had gone so far as to confess that he was worried about jane. she wanted to write another book, he said, and he didn't know whether she was fit. "of course she isn't fit," said the doctor. "it must be stopped. she must be made to give it up--altogether." brodrick inquired who was to make her? and was told that _he_ was. he must put his foot down. he should have put it down before. but brodrick, being a brodrick, took an unexpected line. "i don't know," he said slowly, "that we've any right to dictate to her. it's a big question, and i think she ought to be allowed to decide it for herself." "she isn't fit," said henry, "to decide anything for herself." brodrick sent a level look at him. "you talk," said he, "as if she wasn't responsible." "i should be very sorry to say who is and who isn't. responsibility is a question of degree. i say jane is not at the present moment in a state to decide." "it sounds," said brodrick, laughing in his bitterness, "very much as if you thought she wasn't sane. of course i know she'd put a cheque for a hundred pounds into a drawer and forget all about it. but it would be more proof of insanity in jinny if she remembered it was there." "it would indeed," said sophy. "we're not discussing jinny's talent for finance," said henry. "i suppose," said brodrick, "what we _are_ discussing is her genius?" "i'm not saying anything at all about her genius. we've every reason to recognize her genius and be proud of it. it's not a question of her mind. it's a question of a definite bodily condition, and as you can't separate mind from body" (he shrugged his shoulders), "well--there you are. i won't say don't let her work; it's better for her to use her brain than to let it rust. but let her use it in moderation. moder--ation. not those tremendous books that take it out of her." "are you sure they do take it out of her? tanqueray says she'll be ill if she doesn't write 'em." "tanqueray? what does he know about it?" "more than we do, i suspect. he says the normal, healthy thing for her is to write, to write tremendous books, and she'll suffer if we thwart her. he says we don't understand her." "does he suggest that _you_ don't understand her?" asked sophy. brodrick smiled. "i think he was referring more particularly to henry." henry tried to smile. "he's not a very good instance of his own theory. look at his wife." "that only proves that tanqueray's books aren't good for his wife. not that they aren't good for tanqueray. besides, prothero says the same thing." "prothero!" "he ought to know. he's a doctor." henry dismissed prothero with a gesture. "look here, hugh. it simply comes to this. either there must be no more books or there must be no more children. you can't have both." "there shall be no more children." "as you like it. i don't advise it. those books take it out of her more." he lowered his voice. "i consider her last book responsible for that child's delicacy." brodrick flinched visibly at that. "i don't care," the doctor went on, "what prothero and tanqueray say. they can't know. they don't see her. no more do you. you're out all day. i shouldn't know myself if gertrude collett hadn't told me." "oh--gertrude collett." "nobody more likely to know. she's on the spot, watching her from hour to hour." "what did she tell you?" "why--that she works up-stairs, in her room--for hours--when she's supposed to be lying down. she's doing it now probably." "gertrude knows that for a fact?" "a fact. and she knows it was done last year too, before the baby was born." "and _i_ know," said brodrick fiercely, "it was not." "have her in," said sophy, "and ask her." brodrick had her in and asked her. gertrude gave her evidence with a gentle air of surprise that there could be any doubt as to what mrs. brodrick had been up to--this year, at any rate. she flushed when brodrick confronted her with his certainty as to last year. she could not, in the face of brodrick's certainty, speak positively as to last year. she withdrew herself hastily, as from an unpleasant position, and was followed by sophy levine. "there's nothing for it," said henry, "but to tell her." "about the child?" "about the child." there was a terrible pause. "will you tell her," said brodrick, "or shall i?" "i'll tell her. i'll tell her now. but you must back me up." brodrick fetched jane. he had found her as gertrude had said. she was heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. but when she saw the look that passed between hugh and henry her face was one white fear. the two were about to arraign her. she took the chair that henry held for her. then he told her. and brodrick backed him up with silence and a face averted. it was not until henry had left them together that he spoke to her. "don't take it so hardly, jinny," he said. "it's not as if you knew." "i might have known," she answered. she was thinking, "george told me that i should have to pay--that there'd be no end to my paying." liii the brodricks--hugh--henry--all of them--stood justified. there was, indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. she could not say that they had let her off easily. she knew (and they had taken care that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing. that was it. they regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. it was a power in the highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. they refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. they judged it as they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or excess. you gave way to it or you did not give way. in jane the thing was monstrous. she had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin against the family, the race. and she had been warned often enough. they had always told her that she would have to pay for it. but now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the expected, they said no more. they assumed no airs of successful prophecy. they were sorry for her. they gathered about her when the day of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that she should have to pay. she knew that as long as she paid they would stand by her. more than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a sheltering and protecting wall. she was almost unaware how close they were to her. it seemed to her that she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. her sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living body of the child. her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. she traced her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and bloodless veins. there was an exaltation in her anguish. her tenderness, shot with pain, was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. she went surrendered and subdued to suffering; she embraced passionately her pain. it appeased her desire for expiation. they needn't have rubbed it into her so hard that it was her sin. if she could have doubted it there was the other child to prove it. john henry brodrick stood solid and sane, a brodrick of the brodricks, rosy and round with nourishment, not a nerve, henry said, in his composition, and the stomach of a young ostrich. it was in little hugh's little stomach and his nerves that the mischief lay. the screaming, henry told her, was a nervous system. it was awful that a baby should have nerves. henry hardly thought that she would rear him. he didn't rub that in, he was much too tender. he replied to her agonized questioning that, yes, it might be possible, with infinite precaution and incessant care. with incessant care and infinite precaution she tended him. she had him night and day. she washed and dressed him; she prepared his food and fed him with her own hands. it was with a pang, piercing her fatigue, that she gave him to the nurse to watch for the two hours in the afternoon when she slept. for she had bad nights with him because of the screaming. brodrick had had bad nights, too. it had got on his nerves, and his digestion suffered. jane made him sleep in a room at the other end of the house where he couldn't hear the screaming. he went unwillingly, and with a sense of cowardice and shame. he couldn't think how jinny could stand it with _her_ nerves. she stood it somehow, in her passion for the child. it was her heart, not her nerves, that his screams lacerated. beyond her heavy-eyed fatigue she showed no signs of strain. henry acknowledged in her that great quality of the nervous temperament, the power of rising high-strung to an emergency. he intimated that he rejoiced to see her on the right track, substituting for the unhealthy excesses of the brain the normal, wholesome life of motherhood. he was not sure now that he pitied her. he was sorrier, ten times sorrier, for his brother hugh. gertrude collett agreed with the doctor. she insisted that it was brodrick and not jane who suffered. gertrude was in a position to know. she hinted that nobody but she really did know. she saw more of him than any of his family. she saw more of him than jane. brodrick's suffering was gertrude's opportunity, the open, consecrated door where she entered soft-footed, angelic, with a barely perceptible motion of her ministrant wings. circumstances restored the old intimate relation. brodrick was worried about his digestion; he was afraid he was breaking up altogether, and gertrude's solicitude confirmed him in his fear. under its influence and gertrude's the editor spent less and less of his time in fleet street. he found, as he had found before, that a great part of his work could be done more comfortably at home. he found, too, that he required more than ever the co-operation of a secretary. the increased efficiency of addy ranger made her permanent and invaluable in fleet street. jane's preoccupation had removed her altogether from the affairs of the "monthly review." inevitably gertrude slid into her former place. she had more of brodrick now than she had ever had; she had more of the best of him. she was associated with his ambition and his dream. now that jane's hand was not there to support it, brodrick's dream had begun to sink a little, it was lowering itself almost to gertrude's reach. she could touch it on tiptoe, straining. she commiserated jane on her exclusion from the editor's adventures and excitements, his untiring pursuit of the young talents (his scent for them was not quite so infallible as it had been), his curious or glorious finds. jane smiled at her under her tired eyes. she was glad that he was not alone in his dream, that he had some one, if it was only gertrude. for, by an irony that no brodrick could possibly have foreseen, jane's child separated her from her husband more than her genius had ever done. her motherhood had the fierce ardour and concentration of the disastrous power. it was as if her genius had changed its channel and direction, and had its impulse bent on giving life to the half-living body. nothing else mattered. she could not have travelled farther from brodrick in her widest, wildest wanderings. the very hours conspired against them. jane had to sleep in the afternoon, to make up for bad nights. brodrick was apt to sleep in the evenings, after dinner, when jane revived a little and was free. the year passed and she triumphed. the little half-living body had quickened. the child, henry said, would live; he might even be fairly strong. his food nourished him. he was gaining weight and substance. jane was to be congratulated on her work which was nothing short of a miracle. _her_ work; _her_ miracle; henry admitted it was that. he had had to stand by and do nothing. he couldn't work miracles. but if jane had relaxed her care for a moment there was no miracle that could have saved the child. to jane it _was_ a miracle. it was as if her folding arms had been his antenatal hiding-place; as if she had brought him forth with anguish a second time. she would not have admitted that she loved him more than his brother. jacky was as good as gold; but he was good with gertrude and happy with gertrude. the baby was neither good nor happy with anybody but jane. between her and the little twice-born son there was an unbreakable tie. he attached himself to his mother with a painful, pitiful passion. out of her sight he languished. he had grown into her arms. every time he was taken from them it was a rending of flesh from tender flesh. his attachment grew with his strength, and she was more captured and more chained than ever. he "had" her, as tanqueray would have said, at every turn. frances and sophy, the wise maternal women, shook their heads in their wisdom; and jane smiled in hers. she was wiser than any of them. she had become pure womanhood, she said, like gertrude. she defied gertrude's womanhood to produce a superior purity. brodrick had accepted the fact without astonishment. the instinct of paternity was strong in him. once married to jane her genius had become of secondary importance. the important thing was that she was his wife; and even that was not so important as it had been. only last year he had told her, jesting, that he never knew whether she was his wife or not. he hardly knew now (they saw so little of each other); but he did know that she was the mother of his children. in the extremity of her anguish jane had not observed this change in brodrick's attitude. but now she had leisure to observe. what struck her first was the way gertrude collett had come out. it was in proportion as she herself had become sunk in her maternal functions that gertrude had emerged. she was amazed at the extent to which a soft-feathered angel, innocent, heaven knew, of the literary taint, could constitute herself a great editor's intellectual companion. but gertrude's intellect retained the quality of gertrude. in all its manifestations it was soothing and serene. and there was not too much of it--never any more than a tired and slightly deteriorated editor could stand. jane had observed (pitifully) the deterioration and the tiredness. a falling off in the high fineness of the "monthly review" showed that brodrick was losing his perfect, his infallible scent. the tiredness she judged to be the cause of the deterioration. presently, when she was free to take some of his work off his shoulders, he would revive. meanwhile she was glad that he could find refreshment in his increased communion with gertrude. she knew that he would sleep well after it. and so long as he could sleep---- she said to herself that she had done gertrude an injustice. she was wrong in supposing that if hugh had been married to their angel he would have tired of her, or that he would ever have had too much of her. you couldn't have too much of gertrude, for there was, after all, so very little to have. or else she measured herself discreetly, never giving him any more than he could stand. but gertrude's discretion could not disguise from jane the fact of her ascendency. she owed it to her very self-restraint, her amazing moderation. and, after all, what was it but the power, developed with opportunity, of doing for brodrick whatever it was that jane at the moment could not do? when jane shut her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if gertrude were not there, she found herself inquiring with dismay why, whatever would he do without her? what would she do herself? it was gertrude who kept them all together. she ran the house noiselessly on greased wheels, she smoothed all brodrick's rose-leaves as fast as jane crumpled them. without gertrude there would be no peace. before long jane had an opportunity of observing the fine height to which gertrude _could_ ascend. it was at a luncheon party that they gave, by way of celebrating jane's return to the social life. the herons were there, the young people, who had been asked without their mother, to celebrate winny's long skirts; they and the protheros and caro bickersteth. jane was not sure that she wanted them to come. she was afraid of any disturbance in the tranquil depths of her renunciation. laura said afterwards that she hardly knew how they had sat through that luncheon. it was not that jinny wasn't there and brodrick was. the awful thing was that both were so lamentably altered. brodrick was no longer the enthusiastic editor, gathering around him the brilliant circle of the talents; he was the absorbed, depressed and ponderous man of business. it was as if some spirit that had breathed on him, sustaining him, lightening his incipient heaviness, had been removed. jinny sat opposite him, a pale mater dolorosa. her face, even when she talked to you, had an intent, remote expression, as if through it all she were listening for her child's cry. she was silent for the most part, passive in prothero's hands. she sat unnoticed and effaced; only from time to time the young girl, winny heron, sent her a look from soft eyes that adored her. on the background of jane's silence and effacement nothing stood out except gertrude collett. prothero, who had his hostess on his right hand, had inquired as to the ultimate fate of the "monthly review." jane referred him to miss collett on his left. miss collett knew more about the review than she did. gertrude flushed through all her faded fairness at prothero's appeal. "don't you know," said she, "that it's in mr. brodrick's hands entirely now?" prothero did know. that was why he asked. he turned to jane again. he was afraid, he said, that the review, in brodrick's hands, would be too good to live. "_is_ it too good to live, gertrude?" said she. gertrude looked at brodrick as if she thought that _he_ was. "i don't think mr. brodrick will let it die," she said. "if he takes a thing up you can trust him to carry it through. he can fight for his own. he's a born fighter." down at her end of the table beside brodrick, laura listened. "it has been a bit of a struggle, i imagine, up till now," said prothero to jane. "up till now" (it was gertrude who answered) "his hands have been tied. but now it's absolutely his own thing. he has realized his dream." if she had seen prothero's eyes she would have been reminded that brodrick's dream had been realized for him by his wife. she saw nothing but brodrick. for gertrude the "monthly review" _was_ brodrick. she drew him for prothero's benefit as the champion of the lost cause of literature. she framed the portrait as it were in a golden laurel wreath. eddy heron cried, "hear, hear!" and "go it, gertrude!" and winny wanted to know if her uncle's ears weren't tingling. she was told that an editor's ears were past tingling. but he flushed slightly when gertrude crowned herself and him. they were all listening to her now. "i assure you," she was saying, "_we_ are not afraid." she was one with brodrick, his interests and his dream. she was congratulated (by jane) on her championship of the champion, and brodrick was heard murmuring something to the effect that nobody need be frightened; they were safe enough. it struck laura that brodrick looked singularly unsatisfied for a man who has realized his dream. "all the same," said prothero, "it was rash of you to take those poems i sent you." "dear owen," said jane, "do you think they'll sink him?" "as far as that goes," brodrick said, "we're going to have a novel of george tanqueray's. that'll show you what we can afford." "or what george can afford," said jane. it was the first spark she had emitted. but it consumed the heavy subject. "by the way," said caro bickersteth, "where _is_ george tanqueray?" laura said that he was somewhere in the country. he was always in the country now. "without his wife," said caro, and nobody contradicted her. she went on. "you great geniuses ought not to marry, any more than lunatics. the law ought to provide for it. genius, in either party, if you can establish the fact, should annul the contract, like--like any other crucial disability." "or," jane amended, "why not make the marriage of geniuses a criminal act, like suicide? you can always acquit them afterwards on the ground of temporary insanity." "how would you deal," said brodrick suddenly, "with mixed marriages?" "mixed----?" caro feigned bewilderment. "when a norm--an ordinary--person marries a genius? it's a racial difference." ("distinctly," caro murmured.) "and wouldn't it be hard to say which side the lunacy was on?" laura would have suspected him of a bitter personal intention had it not been so clear that jinny's genius was no longer in question, that her flame was quenched. it was caro who asked (in the drawing-room, afterwards) if they might see the children. gertrude went up-stairs to fetch them. eddy heron watched her softly retreating figure, and smiled and spoke. "i say, gee-gee's going strong, isn't she?" everybody affected not to hear him, and the youth went on smiling to his unappreciated self. gertrude appeared again presently, bringing the children. on the very threshold little hugh struggled in her arms and tried to hurl himself on his mother. his object attained, he turned his back on everybody and hung his head over jane's shoulder. but little john henry was admirably behaved. he wandered from guest to guest, shaking hands, in his solemn urbanity, with each. he looked already absurdly unastonished and important. he was not so much his father's son as the son of all the brodricks. as for little hugh, it was easy enough, prothero said, to see whose son _he_ was. and winny heron cried out in an ecstasy that he was going to be a genius, she was sure of it. "heaven forbid," said brodrick. everybody heard him. "oh, uncle hughy, if he was like jin-jin!" allurement and tender reproach mingled in winny's tone. she turned to jane with eyes that adored and loved and defended her. "i wish you'd have dozens of babies--darlings--like yourself." "and i wish," said eddy, "she'd have dozens of books like her last one." eddy was standing, very straight and tall, on his uncle's hearth. his chin, which was nothing if not determined, was thrust upwards and outwards over his irreproachable high collar. everybody looked at eddy as he spoke. "what i want to know is why she doesn't have them? what have you all been doing to her? what have _you_ been doing to her, uncle hughy?" he looked round on all of them with the challenge of his young eyes. "it's all very well, you know, but i agree with miss bickersteth. if you're a genius you've no business to marry--i mean nobody's any business to marry you." "mine," said caro suavely, "was a purely abstract proposition." but the terrible youth went on. "mine isn't. uncle hugh's done a good thing for himself, i know. but it would have been a jolly sight better thing for literature if he'd married gee-gee, or somebody like that." for there was nothing that young eddy did not permit himself to say. little hugh had begun to cry bitterly, as if he had understood that there had been some reflection on his mother. and from crying he went on to screaming, and gertrude carried him, struggling violently, from the room. the screams continued in the nursery overhead. jane sat for a moment in agony, listening, and then rushed up-stairs. gertrude appeared, serene and apologetic. "can't anything be done," brodrick said irritably, "to stop that screaming?" "it's stopped now," said winny. "you've only got to give him what he wants," said gertrude. "yes, and he knows he's only got to scream for it." gertrude's eyebrows, raised helplessly, were a note on the folly and infatuation of the child's mother. caro bickersteth and laura left, hopeless of jane's return to them. prothero stayed on, conferring with the editor. later, he found himself alone in the garden with jane. he asked then (what they were all longing to know) when she was going to give them another book? "never again, owen, never again." he reproached her. "ah--you don't know what it's been, this last year," she said. "george told me i should have to pay for it. so did nina. and you see how i've paid." his eyes questioned her. "through my child." he turned to her. his eyes were pitiful but incredulous. "owen--nina said there'd be no end to my paying. but there shall be an end to it. for a year it's been one long fight for his little life, and i've won; but he'll never be strong; never, i'm afraid, like other children. he'll always remind me----" "_remind_ you?" "yes. they say i'm responsible for him. it's the hard work i've done. it's my temperament--my nerves." "_your_ nerves?" "yes. i'm supposed to be hopelessly neurotic." "but you're not. your nerves are very highly-strung--they're bound to be, or they wouldn't respond as perfectly as they do--but they're the _soundest_ nerves i know. i should say you were sound all over." "_should_ you?" "certainly." "then" (she almost cried it) "why should he suffer?" "do you mean to say you don't know what's the matter with him?" "owen----" "he's a brodrick. he's got their nerves." "_their_ nerves? i didn't know they had any." "they've all got them except mrs. levine. it's the family trouble. weak nerves and weak stomachs." "but henry----" "_he_ has to take no end of care of himself." "how do you know?" "it's my business," he said, "to know." "i keep on forgetting that you're a doctor too." she meditated. "but sophy's children are all strong." "no, they're not. levine told me the other day that they were very anxious about one of them." "is it--the same thing that my child has?" "precisely the same." "and it comes," she said, "from them. and they never told me." "they must have thought you knew." "i didn't. they made me think it was my fault. they let me go through all that agony and terror. i can't forgive them." "they couldn't have known." "there was henry. he must have known. and yet he made me think it. he made me give up writing because of that." "you needn't think it any more. jacky gets his constitution from you, and it was you who saved the little one." "he made me think i'd killed him. it's just as well," she said, "that i should have thought it. if i hadn't i mightn't have fought so hard to make him live. i might have been tormented with another book. it was the only thing that could have stopped me." she paused. "perhaps--they knew that." "it's all right," she said presently. "after all, if there is anything wrong with the child, i'd rather hugh didn't think it came from him." she had now another fear. it made her very tender to brodrick when, coming to him in the drawing-room after their guests had departed, she found him communing earnestly with gertrude. a look passed between them as she entered. "well, what are you two putting your heads together about?" she said. gertrude's head drew back as if a charge had been brought against it. "well," said brodrick, "it was about the child. something must be done. you can't go on like this." she seated herself. her very silence implied that she was all attention. "it's bad for him and it's bad for you." "what's bad for him?" "the way you've given yourself up to him. there's no moderation about your methods." "if there had been," said she, "he wouldn't be alive now." "yes, yes, i know that. but he's all right now. he doesn't want that perpetual attention. it's ruining him. he thinks he's only got to scream loud enough for anything and he gets it. every time he screams you rush to him. it's preposterous." jane listened. "the fact is," said brodrick, bracing himself, "you have him too much with you." "i _must_ have him with me." "you mustn't," said brodrick, with his forced gentleness. "you think i'm bad for him?" he did not answer. "gertrude--do _you_ think i'm bad for him?" gertrude smiled. she did not answer any more than brodrick. "miss collett agrees with me," said brodrick. "she always does. what do i do to him?" "you excite him." "do i, gertrude?" gertrude's face seemed to be imploring brodrick to be pitiful, and not to rub it in. "do i?" "the child," said gertrude evasively, "is very sensitive." "and you create," brodrick said, "an atmosphere----" "a what?" "an atmosphere of perpetual agitation--of emotion----" "you mean my child is fond of me." "much too fond of you. it's playing the devil with him." "poor mite--at _his_ age! well--what do you propose?" "i propose that he should be with somebody who hasn't that effect, who can keep him quiet. miss collett very kindly offered----" "dear gertrude, you can't. you've got your hands full." "not so full that they can't hold a little more." gertrude said it with extreme sweetness. "can they hold hughy?" "they've held jacky," said brodrick, "for the last year. _he_ never gives any trouble." "he never feels it. poor baby has got nerves----" "well, my dear girl, isn't it all the more reason why he should be with somebody who hasn't got 'em?" "poor gertrude, she'll have more nerves than any of us if she has to look after the house, and the accounts, and jacky, and hughy, and _you_----" "she doesn't look after me," said brodrick stiffly, and left the room. jane turned to gertrude. "was that your idea, or his?" "how can any idea be mine," said gertrude, "if i always agree with mr. brodrick? as a matter of fact it was the doctor's." "yes. it was very like him." "he spoke to mr. brodrick yesterday. and i am glad he did." "why are you glad?" "because it was taken out of my hands. i don't want you to think that i interfere, that i put myself forward, that i suggested this arrangement about the children. if it's to be, you must understand distinctly that i and my ideas and my wishes have nothing to do with it. if i offered myself it was because i was compelled. mr. brodrick was at his wits' end." ("poor dear, _i_ drove him there," said jane.) "it's put me in a very difficult position. i have to appear to be taking everything on myself, to be thrusting myself in everywhere, whereas the truth is i can only keep on" (she closed her eyes, as one dizzied with the perilous path she trod) "by ignoring myself, putting myself altogether on one side." "do you hate it?" jane said softly. "no. it's the only way. but sometimes one is foolish--one looks for a little recognition and reward----" jane put her hands on the other woman's shoulders and gazed into her face. "we do recognize you," she said, "even if we don't reward you. how can we, when you've done so much?" "my reward would be--not to be misunderstood." "do i misunderstand you? does _he_?" "mr. brodrick? never." "i, then?" "you? i think you thought i wanted to come between you and the children." "i never thought you wanted to come between me and anything." her hands that held her dropped. "but you're right, gertrude. i'm a brute and you're an angel." she turned from her and left her there. liv she knew that she had dealt a wound, and she was sorry for it. it was awful to see gertrude going about the house in her flagrant secrecy. it was unbearable to jane, gertrude's soft-flaming, dedicated face, and that little evasive, sacred look of hers, as if she had her hand for ever on her heart, hiding her wound. it was a look that reminded jane, and was somehow, she felt, intended to remind her, that gertrude was pure spirit as well as pure womanhood in her too discernible emotion. was it not spiritual to serve as she served, to spend as she spent herself, so angelically, bearing the dreadful weight of brodrick's marriage--the consequences, so to speak, of that corporeal tie--on her winged shoulders? she could see that hugh looked at it in that light (as well he might) when one evening he spoke remorsefully of the amount they put on her. a month had passed since he had given the care of his children into gertrude's hands. she was up-stairs now superintending their disposal for the night. he and jane were alone in a half-hour before dinner, waiting for john and henry and the protheros to come and dine. the house was very still. brodrick could not have believed that it was possible, the perfection of the peace that had descended on them. he appealed to jane. she couldn't deny that it was peace. jane didn't deny it. she had nothing whatever to say against an arrangement that had turned out so entirely for the children's good. she kept her secret to herself. her secret was that she would have given all the peace and all the perfection for one scream of hughy's and the child's arms round her neck. "you wouldn't know," brodrick said, "that there was a child in the house." jane agreed. ah, yes, if _that_ was peace, they had it. well, wasn't it? after that infernal row he made? you couldn't say anything when the poor little chap was ill and couldn't help it, but you couldn't have let him cultivate screaming as a habit. it was wonderful the effect that woman had on him. he couldn't think how she did it. it was as if her mere presence in a room---- he thought that jane was going to admit that as she had admitted everything, but as he looked at her he saw that her mouth had lifted at its winged corners, and her eyes were darting their ominous light. "it's awful of me, i know," she said, "but her presence in a room--in the house, hugh--makes me feel as if _i_ could scream the roof off." (he glanced uneasily at her.) "she makes me want to _do_ things." "what things?" he inquired mildly. "the things i mustn't--to break loose--to kick over the traces----" "you don't surprise me." he smoothed his face to the expression proper to a person unsurprised, dealing imperturbably with what he had long ago foreseen. "sometimes i think that if gertrude were not so good, i might be more so. you're all so good," she said. "_you_ are so good, so very, very good." "i observe," said brodrick, "a few elementary rules, as you do yourself." "but i don't want," she said, "to observe them any more. i want to put my foot through all the rules." the front door bell rang as the chiming clock struck eight. "that's john," he said, "and henry." "did you ever put your foot through a rule? did john? did henry? fancy john setting out on an adventure with his hair brushed like that and his spectacles on----" they were announced. she rose to greet them. they waited. the clock with its soft silver insistence struck the quarter. it was awful, she said, to have to live with a clock that struck the quarter; and henry shook his head at her and said, "nerves, jinny, nerves." john looked at his watch. "i thought," said john, "you dined at eight." "so did i," said brodrick. he turned to jane. "your friend prothero does not observe the rule of punctuality." "if they won't turn up in time," said henry, "i should dine without them." they did dine ultimately. prothero turned up at a quarter to nine, entering with the joint. laura was not with him. laura couldn't, he said, "get off." he was innocent and unconscious of offence. they were not to bring back the soup or fish. roast mutton was enough for him. he expected he was a bit late. he had been detained by tanqueray. tanqueray had just come back. involuntarily brodrick looked at jane. prothero had to defend her from a reiterated charge of neurosis brought against her by henry, who observed with disapproval her rejection of roast mutton. over coffee and cigarettes prothero caught him up and whirled him in a fantastic flight around his favourite subject. there were cases, he declared, where disease was a higher sort of health. "take," he said, "a genius with a pronounced neurosis. his body may be a precious poor medium for all ordinary purposes. but he couldn't have a more delicate, more lyrical, more perfectly adjusted instrument for _his_ purposes than the nervous system you call diseased." when he had gone henry shook off the discomfort of him with a gesture. "i've no patience with him," he said. "he wouldn't expect you to have any," said jane. "but you've no idea of the patience he would have with _you_." she herself was conscious of a growing exasperation. "i've no use for him. a man who deliberately constructs his own scheme of the universe, in defiance," said henry, "of the facts." "owen couldn't construct a scheme of anything if he tried. either he sees that it's so, or he feels that it's so, or he knows that it's so, and there's nothing more to be said. it's not a bit of good arguing with him." "i shouldn't attempt to argue with him, any more than i should argue with a lunatic." "you consider him a lunatic, do you?" "i consider him a very bad neurotic." "if you can't have genius without neurosis," said jane, "give me neurosis. you needn't look at me like that, henry. i know you think i've got it." "my dear jane----" "you wouldn't call me your dear jane if you didn't." "we're wandering from the point. i think all i've ever said was that prothero may be as great a poet, and as neurotic as you please, but he's nothing of a physiologist, nor, i should imagine, of a physician." "there you're wrong. he did splendid work out in africa and india. he's got as good a record as you have in your own profession. it's no use your looking as if you wished he hadn't, for he has." "you mistake me. i am delighted to hear it. in that case, why doesn't he practise, instead of living on his wife?" "he doesn't live on her. his journalism pays for his keep--if we're going to be as vulgar as all that." jinny was in revolt. "i imagine all the same," said john, "that prothero's wife is considerably the better man." "she'd hate you if she knew you'd said so." "prothero's wife," said henry, "is a lady for whom i have the very highest admiration. but prothero is impossible. _im_--possible." jane left the room. lv it seemed to have struck everybody all at once that prothero was impossible. that conviction was growing more and more upon his publishers. his poems, they assured him, were no longer worth the paper they were written on. as for his job on the "morning telegraph," he was aware that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and precarious income. he owed everything to brodrick. he depended on brodrick. he knew what manner of men these brodricks were. inexhaustibly kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence, implacable to continuous idiocy. prothero they regarded as a continuous idiot. his impossibility appeared more flagrant in the face of laura's marvellous achievement. laura's luck persisted (she declared) because she couldn't bear it, because it was a fantastic refinement of torture to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while owen, withdrawn into the columns of the "morning telegraph," became increasingly obscure. it made her feel iniquitous, as if she had taken from him his high place and his praise. of course she knew that it was not _his_ place or _his_ praise that she had taken; degradation at the hands of her appraisers set him high. obscurity, since it meant secrecy, was what he had desired for himself, and what she ought to have desired for him. she knew the uses of unpopularity. it kept him perfect; sacred in a way, and uncontaminated. it preserved, perpetually, the clearness of his vision. his genius was cut loose from everything extraneous. it swung in ether, solitary and pure, a crystal world, not yet breathed upon. she would not have had it otherwise. it was through owen's obscurity that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. it made her the unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. she had never been one who could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. the presence of her fellow-worshippers had always checked her impulse to adore. it was as much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, nina or jane or tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt. as for the wretched money that he worried about, she wouldn't have liked him to have made it, if he could. an opulent poet was ridiculous, the perversion of the sublime. if one of them was to be made absurd by the possession of a large and comfortable income she preferred that it should be she. the size of laura's income, contrasted, as prothero persisted in contrasting it, with her own size, was excessively absurd. large and comfortable as it appeared to prothero, it was not yet so large nor was it so comfortable that laura could lie back and rest on it. she was heartrending, irritating, maddening to prothero in her refusals to lie back on it and rest. she toiled prodigiously, incessantly, indefatigably. she implored prothero to admit that if she was prodigious and incessant, she _was_ indefatigable, she never tired. there was nothing wonderful in what she did. she had caught the silly trick of it. it could be done, she assured him, standing on your head. she enjoyed doing it. the wonderful thing was that she should be paid for her enjoyment, instead of having to pay for it, like other people. he argued vainly that once you had achieved an income it was no longer necessary to set your teeth and go at it like that. and the more he argued the more laura laughed at him. "i can't help it," she said; "i've got the habit. you'll never break me of it, after all these years." for the kiddy, even in her affluence, was hounded and driven by the memory of her former poverty. she had no illusions. she had never had them; and there was nothing spectral about her fear. after all, looking at it sanely, it didn't amount to so very much, what she had made. and it wasn't really an income; it was only a little miserable capital. it had no stability. it might at any moment cease. she might have an illness, or owen might have one; he very probably would, considering the pace _he_ went at it. or the "morning telegraph" might throw him over. all sorts of things might happen. in her experience they generally did. of course, in a way owen was right. they didn't want all the money. but what he didn't see was that you had to make ten times more than you wanted, in order to secure, ultimately, an income. and then, in the first excitement of it, she had rather launched out. to begin with, she had bought the house, to keep out the other lodgers. they were always bringing coughs and colds about the place and giving them to owen. and she had had two rooms thrown into one so as to give owen's long legs space to ramp up and down in. the den he had chosen had been too small for him. he was better, she thought, since he had had his great room. the house justified itself. it was reassuring to know that whatever happened they would have a roof over their heads. but it could not be denied that she had been extravagant. and owen had been the least shade extravagant too. he had found a poet even more unpopular, more impecunious than himself, a youth with no balance, and no power to right himself when he toppled over; and he had given him a hundred pounds in one lump sum to set him on his legs again. and on the top of that he had routed out a tipsy medical student from a slum, and "advanced him," as the medical student put it, twenty pounds to go to america with. he had just come to her in her room where she sat toiling, and had confessed with a childlike, contrite innocence the things that he had done. "it was a sudden impulse," he said. "i yielded to it." "oh, owen dear, don't have another soon. these impulses are ruinous." he sat down, overburdened with his crime, a heartrending spectacle to laura. "well," she said, "i suppose it was worth it. it must have given you an exquisite pleasure." "it did. that's where the iniquity comes in. it gave me an exquisite pleasure at your expense." "_you_ give me an exquisite pleasure," she said, "in everything you do." her lips made a sign for him to come to her, and he came and knelt at her feet and took her hands in his. he bowed his head over them and kissed them. "do you know what you are?" she said. "you're a divine prodigal." "yes," he said, kissing her, "i'm a prodigal, a dissolute, good-for-noting wastrel. i adore you and your little holy hands; but i'm not the least use to you. you ink your blessed little fingers to the bone for me, and i take your earnings and fling them away--in--in----" he grew incoherent with kissing. "in one night's spiritual debauchery," said she. she was pleased with her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably pleased with him. but owen was not pleased in the very least. "that," said he, "is precisely what i do." he rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening eyes. he was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. he had struggled to support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and here he was, living on her, living on laura. the position was incredible, abominable, but it was his. she looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung away from his sunken waist. "oh," she cried, "what a little beast i am, to make you feel like that, when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your own savings that you flung. it _was_, dear," she insisted. "yes, and as i've flung them, i'll have to live on you for a year at least. it all comes back to that." "i wish _you_ wouldn't come back to it. can't you see, can't you see," she implored, "how, literally, i'm living on you?" "if you only did!" "but i do, i do. in the real things, the things that matter. i cling and suck like a vampire. why can't you have the courage of your opinions?" "my opinions? i haven't any. hence, no doubt, my lack of courage." "your convictions, then, whatever you call the things you _do_ have. you think, and _i_ think, that money doesn't matter. you won't even allow that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. well then, why make such a fuss about it? and what does it matter which of us earns it, or who spends it?" he seemed to be considering her point. then he put it violently from him. "that's the argument of all the humbugs, all the consecrated hypocrites that have ever been. all the lazy, long-haired, rickety freaks and loafers who go nourishing their damned spirituality at some woman's physical expense. the thing's indecent, it's unspeakable. those brodricks are perfectly right." laura raised her head. "they? what have they got to do with you and me?" "a good deal. they supply me with work, which they don't want me to do, in order to keep me from sponging on my wife. they are admirable men. they represent the sanity and decency of the world pronouncing judgment on the fact. no brodrick ever blinked a fact. when people ask the brodricks, what does that fellow prothero do? they shrug their shoulders and say, 'he has visions, and his wife pays for them.'" "but i don't. it's the public that pays for them. and your wife has a savage joy in making it pay. if it wasn't for that i should loathe my celebrity more than jinny ever loathed hers. it makes me feel sillier." "poor little thing," said prothero. "well--it's hard that _i_ should have to entertain imbeciles who wouldn't read _you_ if they were paid." he knew that that was the sting of it for her. "they're all right," he said. "it's your funny little humour that they like. i like it, too." but laura snapped her teeth and said, "damn! damn my humour! well--when they use it as a brickbat to hurl at your head." she quoted furiously, "'while her husband still sings to deaf ears, mrs. prothero has found the secret of capturing her public. she has made her way straight to its heart. and the heart of mrs. prothero's public is unmistakably in the right place.' oh--if mrs. prothero's public knew what mrs. prothero thinks of it. i give them what they want, do i? as if i gave it them because they want it. if they only knew why i give it, and how i'm fooling them all the time! how i make them pay--for _you_! just think, owen, of the splendid, the diabolical irony of it!" "so very small," he murmured, "and yet so fierce." "just think," she went on, "how i'm enjoying myself." "just think," said prothero, "how i am not." "then" (she returned it triumphantly), "you're paying for my enjoyment, which is what you want." the clock struck six. she went out of the room, and returned, bringing an overcoat which she said had grown miles too big for him. she warmed it at the fire and helped him on with it, and disappeared for a moment under its flapping wings, so large was that overcoat. all the way to fleet street, prothero, wrapped in his warm overcoat, meditated tenderly on his wife's humour. lvi nothing, tanqueray said, could be more pathetic than the kiddy spreading her diminutive skirts before prothero, to shelter that colossal figure. but the kiddy, ever since tanqueray had known her, had refused to be pathetic; she had clenched her small fists to repel the debilitating touch of sympathy. she was always breaking loose from the hands that tried to restrain her, always facing things in spite of her terror, always plunging, armoured, indomitable, into the thick of the fight. and she had always come through somehow, unconquered, with her wounds in front. the wounds he had divined rather than seen, ever since he, in their first deplorable encounter, had stuck a knife into her. she had turned that defeat, he remembered, into a brilliant personal triumph; she had forced him to admire her; she had worn over that mark, as it were, a gay and pretty gown. and now, again, tanqueray was obliged to abandon his vision of her pathos. the spectacle she presented inspired awe rather and amazement; though all that she called on you to observe, at the moment, was merely an insolent exhibition of a clever imp. the kiddy was minute, but her achievements were enormous; she was ridiculous, but she was sublime. she sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. she wrote one charming book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every appearance of immemorial ease. she flung them to her scrambling public with a side wink at her friends. "they don't know how i'm fooling them," was her reiterated comment on her own performances. tanqueray exulted over them. they all went to prothero's profit and his peace. it was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in her hilarious face. nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable levity. she would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "the irony of it, tanks, the delicious irony! it all goes down to his account." "he's got another ready for them," she announced one day. she always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs, hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. there was nothing like the pugnacity of the kiddy in these years of prothero's disaster. she came to tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she came secretly, while owen was in fleet street. her eyes blazed in a premature commencement of hostilities. she had come forth, tanqueray knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her courage on the dreadful eve. it was impossible to blink the danger. prothero could not possibly escape this time. he had gone, as tanqueray said, one better than his recent best. and laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. it looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together. financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this indiscretion. laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in london now who would take the risk of him. but as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they cared what was said about them. laura was inclined to be reticent, but tanqueray drew her out by congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up. "oh," she cried, "as if i didn't know what you think of it. me and my popularity!" "you don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful kiddy." she lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not care. "i think your popularity, _and_ you, my child, the most beautiful sight i've ever seen for many a long year." she shrugged her shoulders. "you may laugh at me," she said. "'e isn't laughin' at you," rose interjected. she was generally admitted to tanqueray's conferences with laura. she sat by the fire with her knees very wide apart, nursing minny. "he isn't, indeed," said tanqueray. "he thinks you a marvellous kiddy; and he bows his knee before your popularity. how you contrive to turn anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never will know." "dear me. i'm only dumping down earth for owen's roses." "that's what i mean. that's the miracle. every novel you write blossoms into a splendid poem." it was what she meant. she had never meant anything so much. it was the miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of divine transmutation, by which her work passed into owen's and became perfect. it passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. she touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage. "i'm glad you see it as i do," she said. she had not thought that he would see. "of course i see it." he sat silent a moment regarding his vision; smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and transmuted tanqueray. "what do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?" "i expect what always has happened, and worse." "so do i. i said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. there isn't a place for him anywhere in his own generation. he might just as well go on the stock exchange and try to float a company by singing to the brokers. it's a generation of brokers." "beasts!" "aunt's lodger is a broker," said rose. "old furniture--real--and pictures is _'is_ line." "aunt's lodger, i assure you, will be thoroughly well damned if he takes any stock in owen." "'e 'asn't seen mr. prothero," said rose, "and you'll frighten minny if you use such language." tanqueray ignored the interruption. "owen, you see, is dangerous. he regards the entire stock exchange as a bankrupt concern. the stock exchange resents the imputation and makes things dangerous for owen. if a man will insist on belonging to all the centuries that have been, and all the centuries that will be, he's bound to have a bad time in his own. you can't have it both ways." "i know. he knows it. we'd rather have it this way. i oughtn't to talk as if he minded, as if it could touch him where he is. it's me it hurts, not him." "it hurts me, too, kiddy. i can't stand it when i see the filthy curs rushing at him. they've got to be kicked into a corner. i'm prepared for them, this time." he rose and went to his desk and returned with an article in proof which he gave to her. "just look through that and see if it's any good." it was his vindication of owen prothero. "oh----" she drew in her breath. "how you _have_ fought for him." "i'm fighting for my own honour and glory, too." he drew her attention to a passage where he called upon heaven to forbid that he should appear to apologize for so great a man. he was only concerned with explaining why prothero was and would remain unacceptable to a generation of brokers; which was not so much a defence of prothero as an indictment of his generation. she would see how he had rubbed it in. she followed, panting a little in her excitement, the admirable points he made. there, where he showed that there was no reason why this celt should be an alien to the saxon race. because (her heart leaped as she followed) his genius had all the robust and virile qualities. he was not the creature of a creed, or a conviction, or a theory; neither was he a fantastic dreamer. he was a man of realities, the very type (tanqueray had rubbed that well in) that hard-headed englishmen adore, a surgeon, a physician, a traveller, a fighter among fighting men. he had never blinked a fact (laura smiled as she remembered how owen had said that that was what a brodrick never did); he had never shirked a danger. but (tanqueray, in a new paragraph, had plunged into the heart of his subject) on the top of it all he was a seer; a man who saw _through_ the things that other men see. and to say that he saw, that he saw through things, was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. to him the visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its eternity. he was in a position to judge. he had lived face to face and hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and divine transparency. it was simple and self-evident to him that the world of bodies was made so and not otherwise. it was also clear as daylight that the entire scheme of things existed solely to unfold and multiply and vary the everlasting-to-everlasting-world-without-end communion between god and the soul. to him this communion was a fact, a fact above all facts, the supremely and only interesting fact. it was so natural a thing that he sang about it as spontaneously as other poets sing about their love and their mistresses. so simple and so self-evident was it that he had called his latest and greatest poems "transparences." "it sounds," she said, "as if you saw what he sees." "i don't," said tanqueray. "i only see _him_." at that, all of a sudden, the clever imp broke down. "george," she said, "i love you--i don't care if rose _does_ hear--i love you for defending him." [illustration: "george," she said ... "i love you for defending him."] "love me for something else. he doesn't need defending." "not he! but all the same i love you." it was as if she had drawn aside a fold of her pretty garment and shown him, where the scar had been, a jewel, a pearl with fire in the white of it. lvii they were right. worse things were reserved for prothero than had happened to him yet. even caro bickersteth had turned. caro had done her best to appreciate competently this creator adored by creators. caro, nourished on her "critique of pure reason," was trying hard to hold the balance of justice in the "morning telegraph"; and according to caro there was a limit. she had edited shelley and she knew. she was frankly, as she said, unable to follow mr. prothero in his latest flight. there was a limit even to the imagination of the mystic, and to the poet's vision of the transcendent. there were, caro said, regions of ether too subtle to sustain even so imponderable a poet as mr. prothero. so there wasn't much chance, tanqueray remarked, of their sustaining caro. but the weight of caro's utterances increased, as they circulated, formidably, among the right people. all the little men on papers declared that there was a limit, and that prothero had passed it. it was barely a year since the publication of his last volume, and they were annoyed with prothero for daring to show his face again so soon in the absence of encouragement. it looked as if he didn't care whether they encouraged him or not. such an attitude in a person standing on his trial amounted to contempt of court. when his case came up for judgment in the papers, the jury were reminded that the question before them was whether mr. prothero, in issuing a volume, at three and six net, with the title of "transparences," and the sub-title of "poems," was or was not seeking to obtain money under false pretenses. and judgment in prothero's case was given thus: any writer who wilfully and deliberately takes for his subject a heap of theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet. he stands condemned in the interests of reality. laura knew it didn't matter what they said about him, but that last touch kindled her to flame. it even drew fire from owen. "if i gave them the reality they want," he cried; "if i brought them the dead body of god with the grave-clothes and worms about it, they'd call that poetry. i bring them the living body of god rejoicing in life, and they howl at me. what their own poets, their wordsworths and tennysons and brownings showed them in fits and flashes, i show them in one continuous ecstasy, and they can't stand it. they might complain, the beggars, if i'd given them a dramatic trilogy or an epic. but when i've let them off, laura, with a few songs!" they were alone in his big room. nina and tanqueray and jane had come and praised him, and laura had been very entertaining over prothero's reviews. but, when they had gone, she came and crouched on the floor beside him, as her way was, and leaned her face against his hand. prothero, with the hand that was not engaged with laura, turned over the pages of his poems. he was counting them, to prove the slenderness of his offence. "listen to this," he said. "they can't say it's _not_ a song." he read and she listened, while her hand clutched his, as if she held him against the onslaught of the world. her grip slackened as she surrendered to his voice. she lay back, as it were, and was carried on the strong wave of the rhythm. it was the questing song of the soul, the huntress, on the heavenly track; the song of the soul, the fowler, who draws after her the streaming worlds, as a net, to snare the wings of god. it was the song of her outcasting, of the fall from heaven that came of the too great rapture of the soul, of her wantoning in the joy of the supernal, who forgot god in possessing him. it was the song of birth, of the soul's plunging into darkness and fire, of the weaving round her of the fleshy veils, the veils of separation, the veils of illusion; the song of her withdrawal into her dim house, of her binding and scourging, and of her ceaseless breaking on the wheel of time, till she renews her passion and the desire of her return. it was the song of the angels of mortal life, sounding its secrets; angels of terror and pain, carding the mortal stuff, spinning it out, finer and yet more fine, till every nerve becomes vibrant, a singing lyre of god; angels of the passions and the agonies, moving in the blood, ministers of the flame that subtilizes flesh to a transparent vehicle of god; strong angels of disease and dissolution, undermining, pulling down the house of pain. he paused and she raised her head. "owen--that's what you once tried to make me see. do you remember?" "yes, and you said that i was intoxicated and that it was all very dim and disagreeable and sad." "i didn't understand it then," she said. "you don't understand it now. you feel it." "why didn't i feel it then? when you said it?" "i didn't say it. how could i? there's no other way of saying it but this. it isn't a theory or a creed; if it were it could be stated in a thousand different ways. it's the supreme personal experience, and this is the only form in which it could possibly be conveyed. these words were brought together from all eternity to say this thing." "i'm not sure that i'm convinced of the truth of it, even now. i only feel the passion of it. it's the passion of it, owen, that'll make it live." "the truth and the passion of it are the same thing," he said. he went on chanting. the music gathered and rose and broke over her in the last verse, in the song of consummation, of the soul's passion, jubilant, transcendent, where, of the veils of earth and heaven, the veils of separation and illusion, she weaves the veil of the last bridal, the fine veil of immortality. in the silence laura stirred at his side. she had possessed herself of his hand again and held it firmly, as if she were afraid that he might be taken from her in his ecstasy. she was thinking: he used that theme before, in the first poem of his i ever heard. he was mistaken. there was more than one way of saying the same thing. she reminded him of this earlier poem. surely, she said, it was the same thing, the same vision, the same ecstasy, or, if he liked, the same experience? he did not answer all at once; he seemed to be considering her objection, as if he owned that it might have weight. no, he said presently, it was not the same thing. each experience was solitary, unique, it had its own incommunicable quality. he rose and found the earlier poem, and brought it to her that she might see the difference. she shook her head; but she had to own that the difference was immense. it was the difference (so she made it out) between a vision that you were sure of, and a vision of which you were not so sure. and--yes--it was more than that; it was as if his genius had suffered incarnation, and its flame were intenser for having passed through flesh and blood. it was the incorruptible spirit that cried aloud; but there was no shrill tenuity in its cry. the thrill it gave her was unlike the shock that she remembered receiving from the poem of his youth, the shiver they had all felt, as at the passing by of the supersensual. her husband's genius commanded all the splendours, all the tumultuous energies of sense. his verse rose, and its wings shed the colours of flame, blue, purple, red, and gold that kindled into white; it dropped and ran, striking earth with untiring, impetuous feet, it slackened; and still it throbbed with the heat of a heart driving vehement blood. but, she insisted, it was the same vision. how could she forget it? did he suppose that she had forgotten the moment, four years ago, when tanqueray had read the poem to them, and it had flashed on her----? "oh yes," he said; "it flashed all right. it flashed on me. but it did no more. there was always the fear of losing it. the difference is that--now--there isn't any fear." she said, "ah, i remember how afraid you were." "i was afraid," he said, "of you." she rose and lifted her arms to him and laid her hand on his shoulders. he had to stoop to let her do it. so held, he couldn't hope to escape from her candid, searching eyes. "you aren't afraid of me now? i haven't made it go? you haven't lost it through me?" "you've made it stay." "have i? have i done that for you?" he drew in his breath with a sob of passion. "ah--the things you do!" "none of them matter except that," she said. she left him with that, turning on the threshold to add, "why bother, then, about the other stupid things?" it was as if she had said to him that since he owed that to her, a debt so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a fuss about the rest? how could he think of anything but that? didn't the one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly abject, at her feet? the only graceful act left him was to kneel down and kiss her feet. and that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. as for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and knew that she had made it. it was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference she had made. it had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and difficulty. the thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears. he now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. time after time it had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering batteries of the world. he had not really lost it when he had left off clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the danger. he could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. but it had the trick of coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. he saw now that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to stay. the times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and continuous possession. he saw that nothing had been fatal to it except his fear. he had tested it because of his fear. he had chosen his profession as the extreme test, because of his fear. he had given up his profession, again because of his fear, fear of success in it, fear of the world's way of rewarding heroism, the dreadful fear of promotion, of being caught and branded and tied down. he had thought that to be forced into a line, to be committed to medicine and surgery, was to burn the ships of god, to cut himself off for ever from his vision. looking back, he saw that his fear of the world had been nothing to his fear of women, of the half-spiritual, half-sensual snare. he had put away this fear, and stood the ultimate test. he had tied himself to a woman and bowed his neck for her to cling to. he would have judged this attitude perilous in the extreme, incompatible with vision, with seeing anything but two diminutive feet and the inches of earth they stood in. and it was only since he had done this dangerous thing and done it thoroughly, only since he had staked his soul to redeem his body, that his vision had become secure. it really stayed. he could turn from it, but it was always with him; he could hold and command it at his will. she was right. if he could take that from her, if he was in for it to that extent, why _did_ he bother about the other stupid things? and yet he bothered. all that autumn he worked harder than ever at his journalism. he seemed to gather to himself all the jobs that were going on the "morning telegraph." he went the round of the theatres on first nights, reporting for the "morning telegraph" on plays that were beneath the notice of its official dramatic critic. he reviewed poetry and _belles lettres_ for the "morning telegraph;" and he did a great deal of work for it down in fleet street with a paste-pot and a pair of scissors. prothero's genius had liberated itself for the time being in his last poem; it was detached from him; it wandered free, like a blessed spirit invisible, while prothero's brain agonized and journalized as laura said. there was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. he plunged from his heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. his spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he piled on the paragraphs and columns. he seemed, laura said, to take a pleasure in seeing how much he could pile on without extinguishing it. in december he caught cold coming out of a theatre on a night of north wind and sleet, and he was laid up for three weeks with bronchitis. and at night, that winter, when sounds of coughing came from the consumption hospital, they were answered through the open windows of the house with the iron gate. and laura at owen's side lay awake in her fear. lviii there was one thing that prothero, in his journalism, drew the line at. he would not, if they paid him more than they had ever paid him, more than they had ever dreamed of paying anybody, he would not review another poet's work. for some day, he said, nicky will bring out a volume of his poems, and in that day he will infallibly turn to me. if, in that day, i can lay my hand upon my heart and swear that i never review poetry, that i never have reviewed it and never shall, i can look nicky in his innocent face with a clean soul. but when nicky actually did it (in the spring of nineteen-nine) prothero applied to brodrick for a holiday. he wanted badly to get out of town. he could not--when it came to the agonizing point--he could not face nicky. at least that was the account of the matter which tanqueray gave to brodrick when the question of prothero's impossibility came up again at moor grange. brodrick was indignant at prothero's wanting a holiday, and a month's holiday. it was preposterous. but jane had implored him to let him have it. jinny would give a good deal, tanqueray imagined, to get out of town too. it was more terrible for her to face nicky than for any of them. tanqueray himself was hiding from him at that moment in brodrick's study. but jinny, with that superb and incomprehensible courage that women have, was facing him down there in the drawing-room. it was in the drawing-room, later on in the afternoon, that brodrick found his wife, shrunk into a corner of the sofa and mopping her face with a pocket-handkerchief. tanqueray had one knee on the sofa and one arm flung tenderly round jinny's shoulder. he met, smiling, the husband's standstill of imperturbable inquiry. "it's all right, brodrick," he said. "i've revived her. i've been talking to her like a father." he stood looking down at her, and commented-- "nicky brought a book of poems out and jinny cried." "it was th--th--the last straw," sobbed jinny. brodrick left them together, just to show how imperturbable he was. "george," she said, "it was horrible. poor nicky stood there where you are, waiting for me to say things. and i couldn't, i couldn't, and he saw it. he saw it and turned white----" "he _is_ white," said tanqueray. "he turned whiter. and he burst out into a dreadful perspiration. and then--oh, don't laugh--it was so awful--he took my hand and wrung it, and walked out of the room, very dignified and stiff." "my dear child, he only thought you were speechless with emotion." but jane was putting on her hat and coat which lay beside her. "let's get out somewhere," she said, "anywhere away from this intolerable scene. let's tear over the heath." she tore and he followed. gertrude saw them go. she turned midway between putney and wimbledon. "oh, how my heart aches for that poor lamb." "it needn't. the poor lamb's heart doesn't ache for itself." "it does. i stabbed it." "not you!" "but, george--they were dedicated to me. could my cup of agony be fuller?" "i admit it's full." "and how about nicky's?" "look here, jinny. if you or i or prothero had written those poems we should be drinking cups of agony. but there is _no_ cup of agony for nicky. he believes that those poems are immortal, and that none of us can rob them of their immortality." "but if he's slaughtered--and he will be--if they fall on him and tear him limb from limb, poor innocent lamb!" "he isn't innocent, your lamb. he deserves it. so he won't get it. it's only poets like prothero who are torn limb from limb." "i don't know. there are people who'd stick a knife into him as soon as look at him." "if there are he'll be happy. he'll believe that there's a plot against him to write him down. he'll believe that he's keats. he'll believe anything. you needn't be sorry for him. if only you or i had nicky's hope of immortality--if we only had the joy he has even now, in the horrible act of creation. why, he's never tired. he can go on for ever without turning a hair, whereas look at _our_ hair after a morning's work. think what it must be to feel that you never can be uninspired, never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. neither you nor i nor prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture nicky knows. we get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour." their wild pace slackened. "it's a dog's life, yours and mine, jinny. upon my soul, for mere sensation, if i could choose i'd rather be nicky." he paused. "and then--when you think of his supreme illusion----" "has he another?" "you know he has. if all of us could believe that when the woman we love refuses us she only does it because of her career----" "if he _did_ believe that----" "believe it? he believes now that she didn't even refuse him. he thinks he renounced her--for the sake of her career. it's quite possible he thinks she loves him; and really, considering her absurd behaviour----" "oh, i don't mind," she moaned, "he can believe anything he likes if it makes him happier." "he _is_ happy," said george tempestuously. "if i were to be born again, i'd pray to the high gods, the cruel gods, jinny, to make me mad--like nicky--to give me the gift of indestructible illusion. then, perhaps, i might know what it was to live." she had seen him once, and only once, in this mood, the night he had dined with her in kensington square six weeks before he married rose. "but you and i have been faithful to reality--true, as they say, to life. if the idiots who fling that phrase about only knew what it meant! you've been more faithful than i. you've taken such awful risks. you fling your heart down, jinny, every time." "do you never take risks? do you never fling your heart down?" he looked at her. "not your way. not unless i _know_ that i'll get what i want." "and haven't you got it?" "i've got most of it, but not all--yet." his tone might or might not imply that getting it was only a question of time. "i say, where are you going?" she was heading rapidly for augustus road. she wanted to get away from george. "not there," he protested, perceiving her intention. "i must." he followed her down the long road where the trees drooped darkly, and he stood with her by the gate. "how long will you be?" he said. "i can't say. half-an-hour--three-quarters--ever so long." he waited for an hour, walking up and down, up and down the long road under the trees. she reappeared as he was turning at the far end of it. he had to run to overtake her. her face had on it the agony of unborn tears. "what is it, jinny?" he said. "mabel brodrick." she hardly saw his gesture of exasperation. "oh, george, she suffers. it's terrible. there's to be an operation--to-morrow. i can think of nothing else." "oh, jinny, is there no one to take care of you? is there no one to keep you from that woman?" "oh don't--if you had seen her----" "i don't want to see her. i don't want _you_ to see her. you should never have anything to do with suffering. it hurts you. it kills you. you ought to be taken care of. you ought to be kept from the sight and sound of it." he gazed wildly round the heath. "if brodrick was any good he'd take you out of this damned place." "i wouldn't go. poor darling, she can't bear me out of her sight. i believe i've worn a path going and coming." they had left the beaten path. their way lay in a line drawn straight across the heath from brodrick's house. it was almost as if her feet had made it. "jinny's path," he said. they were silent, and he gathered up, as it were, the burden of their silence when he stopped and faced her with his question-- "how are you going on?" lix a year passed and half a year, and she had not found an answer to tanqueray's question. she had gone on somehow. he himself had made it easier for her by his frequent disappearances. he had found a place somewhere on dartmoor where he hid himself from the destroyers, from the dreadful little people, where he hid himself from rose. it helped her--not to have the question raised. now (they were in august of nineteen-ten) tanqueray was back again with his question. he had left her, about eleven o'clock in the evening, in her study, facing it. not but that he had provided her with a solution, a positive solution. "jinny," he had said, "why don't you do as i do? why don't you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?" it seemed so simple, tanqueray's solution, that at first she wondered why it had not occurred to her before. but as she looked back over the last three years she saw why. it could not have occurred to her as long as she had had the charge of her own children. she would not be entertaining it now if gertrude were not there, looking after them. and it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third child, had lived. she had wanted to have a little girl, just to show what she could do. she had said, "there shall be one happy woman in the world and she shall be my daughter." but the little girl had never lived at all. she had been brought forth dead in the night that followed mabel brodrick's death. jane had been with mabel when she died. that was in january six months ago. after that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay quiet and gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. she had been allowed to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being utterly unable to excite them. sometimes, when she was not well enough to have them very long, gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding gertrude's hands. every day brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room with gertrude, led by her hand. for six weeks brodrick had been left very much to gertrude. and gertrude's face in that time had flowered softly, as if she had entered herself into the peace she made. but in march jane was on her feet again. in april brodrick took her to the riviera, and her return (in may) was the return of that brilliant and distracting alien who had invaded brodrick's house seven years ago. jane having nothing to do but to recover had done it so completely that henry admitted that he would not have known her. to which she had rather ominously replied that she knew herself, only too well. even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that life was having its triumphant will of her. she had known all along, of course, that (as owen prothero had told her) she was sound through and through. her vitality was unconquerable. nothing could wreck her. even henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. lying quiet, she had been inclined to agree with henry that genius--her genius at any rate--was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more. whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. and to jane lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. she herself was simplified. she had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. whatever happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two sexes contending for the mastery. through it all, through all her dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously feminine. and lying quiet she was more than ever what george tanqueray had said she was not to be--a mere woman. therefore to jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she was to go on. but to jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous energy, the question was as insistent as tanqueray himself. her genius had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health, and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate and torture. it had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her low. it knew its hour and claimed her. she was close upon thirty-nine. it would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. it had been relentless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its maturity. the struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had never yet been torn. she would have to surrender, or at any rate to make terms with it. it was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and adjustments. tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only tolerable one. but it depended perilously upon hugh's consent. she went to him in his study where he sat peaceably smoking in the half-hour before bed-time. brodrick merely raised his eyebrows as she laid it before him--her monstrous proposal to go away--for three months. he asked her if three months was not rather a long time for a woman to leave her home and her children? "i know," she said, "but if i don't----" "well?" "i shall go to pieces." he looked at her critically, incredulously. "why can't you say at once what's wrong?" he said. "is there anything you want that you don't have here? is there any mortal thing that can be done that isn't done?" "not any mortal thing." "what is it then?" "hugh dear, did it never strike you that you are a very large family? and that when it comes down on me it's in the proportion of about seven to one?" "whoever _does_ come down on you?" "john," said she, "was with me for two hours yesterday." brodrick lent his ear as to a very genuine grievance. john, since his bereavement, was hardly ever out of the house. "and i suppose," he said, "he bored you?" "no, but he will call when i'm writing." "why on earth don't you send him away?" "i would, if mabel hadn't died. but how can you when he's unhappy? it would hurt him so. and yet, supposing you were to die, what would john say if i were to call on him at the works every day, and play with his dynamos to distract my mind, or sit with him in his office rumpling his hair, and dislocating his ideas till he didn't know the difference between a steam-roller and an internal combustion engine? that's more or less what john does to me. the only thing is to get away." however, it was for brodrick to decide, she said. and brodrick said he couldn't decide until he had thought it over. she was very soon aware that she had caused a scandal in her husband's family by her proposal to go away for three months. the scandal was not altogether unconnected with george tanqueray, since it was at his suggestion that she proposed to take this unprecedented step. if she had proposed to take it with him they could hardly have shown themselves more horrified. she knew how monstrous her conduct must appear to them. she could see it all so clearly from their point of view. that had always been after all her poor merit, that she could see things from other people's point of view. her vision indeed of them, of the way they took things, was apt to be so vivid, so engrossing that it left her with no point of view of her own. she carried into life itself and all its relations her virtue as an artist, that effacement of her observing self in favour of the thing observed. that, nina told her, was her danger. nina happened to be with her on the day when another family committee met and sat upon her case. they were sitting on it now, up-stairs with brodrick in his study. she knew infallibly what their judgment would be. just as she had seemed to them so long a creature of uncertain health, she must seem now inconstant, insincere, the incarnation of heartlessness, egotism and caprice. she said to herself that it was all very well for nina to talk. this insight was a curse. it was terrible to know what people were thinking, to feel what they were feeling. and they were seven to one, so that when she gave them pain she had to feel seven times the pain she gave. but after all they, her judges, could take care of themselves. this family, that was one consolidated affection, was like a wall, it would shelter and protect her so long as she was content to be sheltered and protected; if she dashed herself against it it would break her in pieces. and nina was saying, "can't you take it into your own hands? why should you let these people decide your fate for you?" "hugh will decide it," she said. "he's with them up-stairs now." "is he asking their advice?" "no, they're giving it him. that's my chance, nina." "your chance?" "my one chance. they'll put his back up and, if it's only to show them, he'll let me go." "do you mean to say, jinny, that if he didn't you wouldn't go?" "i don't even know that i'd go if he minded very much." "i wish to goodness george tanqueray was here. he might make you----" "what has he ever made me do?" "he might make you see it." "i do see it," said jane. she closed her eyes as one tired with much seeing. nina's presence hardly helped her. nina was even more profoundly disturbing than george tanqueray; she had even less of consolation to offer to one torn and divided, she herself being so supreme an instance of the glory of the single flame. the beauty and the wonder of it--in nina--was its purity. nina showed to what a pitch it had brought her, the high, undivided passion of her genius. under it every trace of nina's murkiness had vanished. she had lost that look of restless, haggard adolescence, that horrible intentness, as if her hand was always on the throat of her wild beast. you saw, of course, that she had suffered; but you saw too that her genius was appeased by her suffering. it was just, it was compassionate; it had rewarded her for every pang. jane found herself saying beautiful things about nina's genius. it was the flame, unmistakably the pure flame. if solitude, if virginity, if frustration could do that----she knew what it had cost nina, but it was worth it, seeing what she had gained. nina faced her with the eyes that had grown so curiously quiet. "ah, jinny," she said, "could _you_ have borne to pay my price?" she owned that she could not. up-stairs brodrick faced his family where it sat in judgment upon jane. "what does she complain of?" said john. "interruption," said hugh. "she says she never has any time to herself, with people constantly running in and out." "she doesn't mind," said sophy, "how much time she gives to the protheros and the rest of them. nina lempriere's with her now. she's been here three solid hours. as for george tanqueray----" john shook his head. "that's what i don't like, hugh, tanqueray's hanging about the house at all hours of the day and night. however you look at it, it's a most undesirable thing." "oh--tanqueray," said brodrick, "_he_'s all right." "he's anything but all right," said henry. "a fellow who notoriously neglects his wife." "well," said brodrick, "i don't neglect mine." "if you give her her head," said henry. he scowled at henry. "you know, hugh," said frances, "she really will be talked about." "she's being talked about now," said brodrick, "and i don't like it." "there's no use talking," said john sorrowfully, and he rose to go. they all rose then. two by two they went across the heath to john's house, sophy with henry and frances with john; and as they went they leaned to each other, talking continuously about hugh, and tanqueray, and jane. "if hugh gives in to her in this," said henry, "he'll always have to give in." "i could understand it," said sophy, "if she had too much to do in the house." "it's not," said frances, "as if there was any struggle to make ends meet. she has everything she wants." "children----" said john. "it's preposterous," said henry. when nina had gone brodrick came to jane. "well," he said, "do you still want to go away for three months?" "it's not that i want to, but i must." "if you must," he said, "of course you may. i dare say it will be a very good thing for you." "shall you mind, hugh?" "oh dear me, no. i shall be very comfortable here with gertrude." "and gertrude," she murmured, "will be very comfortable here with you." that evening, about nine o'clock, the parlour-maid announced to brodrick in his study that miss winny and mr. eddy had called. they were in the dining-room. when brodrick asked if mrs. brodrick was with them he was told that the young gentlemen had said expressly that it was mr. brodrick whom they wished to see. brodrick desired that they should be brought to him. they were going away, to stay somewhere with a school-fellow of winny's, and he supposed that they had looked in to say good-bye. as they entered something told him, as he had not been told before, that his young niece and nephew had grown up. it was not winny's ripening form and trailing gown, it was not the golden down on eddy's upper lip; it was not altogether that the outline of their faces had lost the engaging and tender indecision of its youth. it was their unmistakable air of inward assurance and maturity. after the usual greetings (brodrick was aware of a growing restraint in this particular) eddy, at the first opening, made for his point--_their_ point, rather. his uncle had inquired with urbane irony at what hour the family was to be bereaved of their society, and how long it would have to languish---- they were going, eddy said, at ten in the morning, and a jolly good thing too. they weren't coming back, either, any sooner than they could help. they--well, they couldn't "stick it" at home just now. they'd had (winny interpolated) a row with uncle henry, a gorgeous row (the colour of it was in winny's face). brodrick showed no sign of surprise, not so much as a raised eyebrow. he asked in quiet tones what it was all about? eddy, standing up before his uncle and looking very tall and manly, gazed down his waistcoat at his boots. "it was about jin-jin," winny said. (eddy could almost have sworn that his uncle suffered a slight shock.) "we can't stick it, you know, the way they're going on about her. the fact is," said the tall youth, "we told uncle henry that, and he didn't like it." "you did, did you?" "yes. i know you'll say it isn't our business, but you see----" "you see" (winny explained), "we're so awfully fond of her." brodrick knew that he ought to tell the young rascals that their being fond of her didn't make it any more their business. but he couldn't. "what did you say to your uncle henry?" he really wanted to know. "oh, we said it was all humbug about jinny being neurotic. he's neurotic himself and so he thinks everybody else is. he's got it regularly on the brain." (if, brodrick thought, henry could have heard him!) "you can't think," said winny, "how he bores us with it." "i said he couldn't wonder if she _was_ neurotic, when you think what she's got to stand. the boresomeness----" he left the idea to its own immensity. "of what?" said brodrick. "well, for one thing, you know, of living everlastingly with gertrude." brodrick said, "gertrude doesn't bore anybody." "she doesn't bore _you_, uncle hugh, of course, because you're a man." (winny said that.) "then," said eddy, "there's _us_. you know, we're an awful family for a woman like jinny to have married into. there isn't one of us fit to black her boots. and i believe uncle henry thinks she wasn't made for anything except to bring more of us into the world." brodrick's face displayed a fine flush. "_you_'re all right, uncle hugh." brodrick lowered his eyelids in modest acceptance of this tribute. "i keep forgetting you're one of them, because you married her." "what else did you say to him?" eddy became excited. "oh--i got in one before we left--i landed him neatly. i asked him why on earth--if he thought she was neurotic--he let her shut herself up for a whole year with that screaming kid, when any fat nurse would have done the job as well? and why he let her break her neck, running round after aunt mabel? i had him there." "what did your uncle say to that?" (brodrick's voice was rather faint.) "he didn't say anything. he couldn't--oh--well, he _did_ say my impertinence was unendurable. and i said _his_ was, when you think what jinny is." he meditated on it. he had become, suddenly, a grave and reverent youth. "we really came," winny said, "to know whether jinny _is_ going away?" "she is going away," said brodrick, "for three months." he rose and held out the hand of parting. to his surprise winny kissed him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "and _if_--she has to stay a year?" "she shall stay," brodrick said. lx she went down to devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from chagford, on the edge of dartmoor. tanqueray had rooms there which were his and nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as long as she cared to stay. she would be safe there, he said. nobody would find her. certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the place. the farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut off from chagford by a hill. the lane dipped abruptly from the hillside; it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. the white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light through its high ring of ash-trees. below it the lane went headlong to the hill-bottom. it was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west. the doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. you came straight into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. a stairway led up from it into the bedroom overhead. this living-room had a door that opened into a passage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair. by the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table, at which, the woman of the farm had told her, mr. tanqueray wrote. both windows looked on to the lane. that was the beauty of it, tanqueray had said. there would be nothing to distract her. you couldn't trust jinny on the open moor. for the first week jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was assailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. as one who has undergone a surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the severed flesh. she was haunted by brodrick's face as she had seen it from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as the train carried her away. and the children, their faces and their soft forms and their voices haunted her. she did no work that week. then the country claimed her. dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild earth and wild skies. she tried to write and could not. something older and more powerful than her genius had her. she suffered a resurgence of her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its joy in them and knew its joy again. it was on the moors that earth had most kinship and communion with the sky. it took the storms of heaven. its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. on the moors it was an endless passing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance. and she had her own kinship and communion with them. she remembered these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on the face of the immemorial granite. a million memories and instincts met in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the sweet earth of the south-west. tanqueray was right. she was not to be trusted on the open moors. she was out of doors all day. and out of doors the idea that had driven her forth withdrew itself. its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond her grasp. she was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration and futility. if this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself, tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at all. it would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again. there was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. she got as far as looking up the trains to waterloo. then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not to go. it told her to wait, to trust to nature's way, and to nature's wisdom in bringing back her youth. nature's way was to weave over again the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the impact of other lives. nature's wisdom was to make her simple and strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more virgin to the world. in short, nature's beneficent intention was to restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of nature's plan. and all the time good news of brodrick and the children reached her every other day. punctually, every other day gertrude collett wrote, assuring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay. brodrick wrote (at rather longer intervals) saying how happy the children were, and how entirely comfortable he was with gertrude. his letters contained little besides praise of gertrude. there was no reason, he reiterated, why she should not stay. she stayed, and in her fifth week she received the reward of her staying. walking back to the farm late one evening, the moors veiled from her passion by the half-darkness, her idea came back to her. it came, not yet with the vividness of flesh and blood, but like a ghost. it had ghostly hands and feet, and like a ghost it walked the road with her. but through its presence she felt in herself again that nascent ecstasy which foretold, infallibly, the onset of the incredible act and labour of creation. when she reached the farm she found george tanqueray sitting in the porch. the lamp-light through the open door revealed him. "whatever brought you here?" she said. "what always brings me." she understood him to mean that he also had been driven forth, and was in subjection to the idea. "have you come to turn me out?" she said. "no, jinny." he explained that he was staying in the village, at the three crowns. he had arrived that evening and had walked over. he followed her into the deep kitchen. at the supper-table his place had been laid for him already. he had ordered it so. he looked at her, smiling an apology. "is it all right?" he said. "perfectly all right, george." they talked all evening and far into the night. she parted from him at the gate of the lane under the ash-trees. under the ash-trees her idea showed in its immense and luminous perfection. it trembled into life. it drew her, palpitating, into the lamp-light of the room. she had found what she had come for. that was the effect he always had on her. lxi brodrick had been alone in the first fortnight that followed jane's extraordinary departure. instead of settling down to be comfortable with gertrude, he had packed her off to the seaside with the children and their nurse. he had often wondered what he should do without gertrude. now he knew. he knew by incontrovertible experiment that he could not do without her at all. everything, even the silver-chiming clock, went wrong in her absence. if, before that fortnight, brodrick had been asked suddenly with what feelings he regarded gertrude collett, he would have replied that he was unaware of regarding the lady with any feelings, or indeed of regarding her intimately at all. and he would have told the simple truth; for brodrick was of all men the most profoundly unaware. of course, there was gratitude. he had always been aware of that. but in that fortnight his gratitude took on immense proportions, it became a monstrous and indestructible indebtedness. he would have said that such a feeling, so far from making him comfortable with gertrude, would have made him very uncomfortable, much more uncomfortable than he cared to be. but curiously it was not so. in his renewed intercourse with gertrude he found a vague, exquisite satisfaction. the idea of not paying gertrude back in any way would have been intolerable; but what he felt now was so very like affection that it counted as in some measure a return. it was as if he had settled it in his own mind that he could now meet the innocent demands which the angelic woman seemed to make. goodness knew it wasn't much to ask, a little attention, a little display of the feeling so very like affection, after all that she had done. it pleased him now when he came, mooning drearily, into the drawing-room, to find gertrude in possession. he was almost always tired now, and he was glad to lie back in an easy-chair and have his tea handed to him by gertrude. he looked forward, in fancy, to the children's hour that followed tea-time, and he had made a great point at first of having them to himself. but as a matter of fact, being almost always tired, he enjoyed their society far more sincerely when gertrude was there to keep them in order. that was her gift. she had been the genius of order ever since she had come into his house--good gracious, was it ten years ago? her gift made her the most admirable secretary an editor could have. but she was more than that now. she was a perfect companion to a physically fatigued and intellectually slightly deteriorated man. he owned to the deterioration. jane had once told him that his intellect was a "lazy, powerful beast." it seemed to him now, humbly regarding it, that the beast was and always had been much more lazy than powerful. it required constant stimulus to keep it going. his young ambition and his young passion for jane holland had converged to whip it up. it flagged with the dying down of passion and ambition. things latterly had come a bit too late. his dream had been realized too late. and he hadn't realized it, either. jane had realized it for him. no sooner had he got his wonderful magazine into his own hands than he found out how little he cared about it. he had become more and more absorbed in its external and financial aspects. he showed more and more as the man of business, the slightly hustled and harassed father of a family. he had put off intellectual things. his deterioration weighed on him when he thought of jane. but gertrude's gentleness stood between him and any acute perception of his state. sometimes when they sat together over her fire, lit in the september evenings, there would be long silences. gertrude never broke a silence. she was conscious of it; she, as it were, held it--he could almost feel her holding it--tenderly, as if she loved it; she handled it gently as if she were afraid that it would break. she gave him so much sense of her presence and no more. she kept before him, humbly, veiled from his vision, the fact that she was there to serve him. sometimes a curious shyness would come on her. it was not the poignant shyness of her youth which brodrick had once found so distressing. it conveyed no fear and no embarrassment, only (so he made it out) the quietest, subtlest hint of possible flight. its physical sign was the pale, suffused flame in gertrude's face, and that web of air across her eyes. there was a sort of charm about it. sometimes, coming upon gertrude alone and unaware of him, he would find her sad. he said to himself then that she had no great cause for gaiety. it was a pretty heavy burden for her, this shouldering of another woman's responsibilities. he thought that jane had sometimes been a little hard on her. he supposed that was her (jane's) feminine way. the question was whether he himself might not have been kinder; whether there wasn't anything that he might yet do to make life sweeter to her. he was, in fact, profoundly sorry for gertrude, more profoundly sorry than he had been ten years ago, when she had come to him, and he had kept her, though he didn't want her, because he was sorry for her. well, he wanted her enough now in all conscience. then the horrible thought would occur to him: supposing gertrude were to go? it was not conceivable, her going. for, above all her gifts, gertrude was an incomparable mother to those unfortunate children (since jane's departure brodrick had begun to think definitely of his children as unfortunate). it was distinctly pleasurable the feeling with which he watched her ways in gathering them to her side and leading them softly from the room when "daddy was busy," or when "poor daddy was so tired." more than once he found himself looking out of his study window at her quiet play with the little boys in the garden. solemn little boys they were; and sometimes he wondered whether little jacky were not _too_ solemn, too preternaturally quiet for four and a half, and rather too fond of holding gertrude's hand. he remembered how the little beggar used to romp and laugh when jinny----and remembering he would turn abruptly from the window with a sore heart and a set face. three weeks passed thus. there was a perceptible increase in gertrude's shyness and sadness. one evening after dinner she came to him in his study. he rose and drew forward a chair for her. she glanced at his writing-table and at the long proof-sheets that hung from it, streaming. "i mustn't," she said. "you're busy." "well--not so busy as all that. what is it?" "i've been thinking that it would perhaps be better if i were to leave." "to leave? what's put that into your head?" she did not answer. she appeared to him dumb with distress. "have the children been too much for you?" "poor little darlings--no." "little monkeys. send them to me if you can't manage them." "it isn't that. it is--i don't think it's right for me to stay." "not _right_?" "on the children's account, i mean." he looked at her and a shade, a tremor, of uneasiness passed over his face. "i say," he said, "you don't think they're unhappy?" (she smiled). "--without their mother?" he jerked it out with a visible effort. "no. if they were i shouldn't be so uneasy." "come, you don't want them to be unhappy, do you?" "no. i don't want anybody to be unhappy. that's why i think i'd better go." "on their account?" he repeated, hopelessly adrift. "theirs, and their mother's." "but it's on their account--and--their mother's--that we want you." "i know; but it isn't fair to them or to--mrs. brodrick that they should be so dependent on me." "but--they're babies." "not quite--now. it isn't right that i should be taking their mother's place, that they should look to me for everything." "but," he broke in irritably, "they don't. why should they?" "they do. they must. you see, it's because i'm on the spot." "i see." he hid his frowning forehead with one hand. "i know," she continued, "it can't be helped. it isn't anybody's fault. it's--it's inevitable." "yes. for the present it's--inevitable." they both paused on that word. "i suppose," he said, "you're really afraid that they'll get too fond of you?" "yes." "they're very fond of their mother, aren't they?" "yes--if she were always here." "of course, it does make your position a little difficult. still, we don't want them to fret for her--we don't want them not to be fond of you. besides, if you went, what on earth would they do without you?" "they must learn to do without me. they would have some one else." "yes, and they'll be fond of _her_." "not in the same way. i think perhaps i've given myself too much to them. there's something unusual, something tragic in the way they cling to me. i know it's bad for them. i try to check it, and i can't. and i've no right to let it go on. nobody has a right except their mother." "well, it's awfully nice of you to feel like that about it. but as you say, i don't see how it's to be helped. i think you're taking an exaggerated view--conscientiously exaggerated. they're too young, you know, to be very tragic." she smiled as through tears. "i don't think you'll save tragedy by going. besides, what should i do?" "you?" "yes. you don't appear to have thought of me." "don't i?" she smiled again, as if at some secret, none too happy, of her own. "if i had not thought of you i should never have come here a second time. if i had not thought of you i should not have thought of going." "did you think i wanted you to go?" "i--was not quite sure." he laughed. "are you sure now?" she looked at him again. "i _do_ help you by staying?" he was overwhelmed by his indebtedness. "most certainly you do. i must have been very ungracious if you haven't realized how indispensable you are." "if you're sure of that--i'll stay." "good." he held out his hand and detained hers for a moment. "are you sure you don't want to leave us? i'm not asking too much of you?" she withdrew her hand. "you have never asked too much." thus gertrude uncovered the knees of the gods. lxii four days in every week jane had a letter from gertrude and once a week a letter from brodrick. she was thus continually assured that all was well and that brodrick was very comfortable with gertrude. she was justified in staying on, since her genius had come back to her, divinely placable, divinely propitiated and appeased. she knew that in a measure she owed this supreme reconciliation to george tanqueray. her genius was virile. he could not give it anything, nor could it have taken anything he gave. he was passive to her vision and humble, on his knees, as he always had been, before a kindred immortality. what he did for her was to see her idea as she saw it, but so that through his eyes she saw steadily and continuously its power and perfection. she was aware that in the last five years she had grown dependent on him for that. for five years he had lifted her out of the abyss when she had found herself falling. through all the surgings and tossings that had beset her he had kept her from sinking into the trough of the wave. never once had he let go his hold till he had seen her riding gaily on the luminous crest. his presence filled her with a deep and strong excitement. for two years, in their long separations, she had found that her craving for it was at times unbearable. she knew that when her flame died down and she was in terror of extinction, she had only to send for him to have her fear taken from her. she had only to pick up a book of his, to read a sentence of his, and she would feel herself afire again. everything about him, his voice, his look, the touch of his hand, had this penetrating, life-giving quality. three weeks passed and tanqueray was still staying in his inn at chagford. in the mornings they worked, he on his book and she on hers. she saw him every afternoon or evening. sometimes they took long walks together over the moors. sometimes they wandered in the deep lanes. sometimes, in rainy weather, they sat indoors, talking. in the last five years tanqueray (who never used to show his work) had brought all his manuscripts for her to read. he brought them now. sometimes she read to him what she had written. sometimes he read to her. sometimes he left his manuscript with her and took hers away with him. they discussed every doubtful point together, they advised each other and consulted. sometimes they talked of other things. she was aware that the flame he kindled leaned to him, drawn by his flame. she kept it high. she wanted him to see how divine it was, and how between him and her there could be no question of passion that was not incorruptible, a fiery intellectual thing. but every day tanqueray walked up from the village to the farm. she looked on his coming as the settled, natural thing. brodrick continued to assure her that the children were happy without her, and that he was very comfortable with gertrude; and tanqueray reiterated that it was all right, all perfectly right. one day he arrived earlier than usual, about eleven o'clock. he proposed that they should walk together over the moor to post bridge, lunch at the inn there and walk back. distance was nothing to them. they set out down the lane. there had been wind at dawn. southwards, over the hills, the clouds were piled up to the high sun in a riot and glory of light and storm. the hills were dusk under their shadow. the two swung up the long slopes at a steady pace, rejoicing in the strong movement of their limbs. it was thus that they used to set out together long ago, on their "days," over the hills of buckinghamshire and hertfordshire. jane remarked that her state now was almost equal to that great freedom. and they talked of brodrick. "there aren't many husbands," she said, "who would let their wives go off like this for months at a time." "not many. he has his merits." "when you think of the life i lead him at home it takes heaps off his merit. the kindest thing i can do to him is to go away and stay away. george, you don't know how i've tormented the poor darling." "i can imagine." "he was an angel to bear it." she became pensive at the recollection. "sometimes i wonder whether i ought, really, to have married. you told me that i oughtn't." "when?" "six years ago." "well--i'm inclined to say so still. only, the unpardonable sin in a great artist--isn't so much marrying as marrying the wrong person." "he isn't the wrong person for me. but i'm afraid i'm the wrong person for him." "it comes to the same thing." "not altogether." she pondered. "no doubt god had some wise purpose when he made hugh marry me. i can see the wise purpose in owen's marrying laura, and the wise purpose in his not marrying nina; but when it comes to poor, innocent hugh tying himself up for ever and ever with a woman like me----" "don't put it on god. his purpose was wise enough." "what was it?" "why--obviously--that i should have married you, that hugh should have married gertrude, and that some reputable young draper should have married rose." "poor little rose!" "poor little rose would have been happy with her draper; gertrude would have been happy with brodrick; you--no, i, would have been divinely happy with you." she laughed. "oh, would you!" "_that_ was the heaven-appointed scheme. and there we were, all five of us, bent on frustrating the divine will--i beg gertrude's pardon--gertrude's will was entirely in accord." "it sounds delightfully simple, but i doubt if it would have worked out so. we've all got as much of each other as we want." "that's what we haven't got. very large, important pieces of each of us have been taken and given to the wrong person. look at you--look at me." she looked at him. "my dear, the largest and most important part of you is kept well out of the reach of rose's little fingers. you and i have quite as much of each other as is good for us. if _we_ were to tear each other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us." thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning. their pace slackened. they had begun to think. she had always been a little hard on him about rose, tanqueray thought. it was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous egoism. surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. a reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. there never was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound an instinct of self-preservation. such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. by the very ease with which it assimilated all food of earth and heaven, it starved them at the roots. it was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to him. it was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds. his cruelty (for it _was_ cruelty from the poor parasite's point of view) was like nature's, unconscious and impersonal. it was not his fault, therefore, if rose's arms, try as she would, could never hold him. it was not that he was indifferent to rose or to her suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as a man should deal. it was that the voice of implacably wise, and indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he accepted it as his own. incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. and it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved almost complete oblivion of her. but jane--jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature as he. her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. and she gave as superbly as she received. there was nothing in the least parasitic about jane. she had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven. she could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride. he had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. she sprang to it and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his arm. she kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting. watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given to it the beauty that it had lacked. she was more feminine than ever. she had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from disaster. (he had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.) they lunched at post bridge, at the little inn that tanqueray knew. they drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to merivale and back. they stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of the return. it was evening when they reached the last moor that lay between them and the farm lane. the long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. a veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. to their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold. jane was afraid of her thoughts and tanqueray's. she talked incessantly. she looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the green grass ran like water. "i love your voice," he said, "but i wish you'd look at me when you're talking." "if i did," she said, "i couldn't talk." the truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw everything must see. a silence fell on them. it lasted till they topped the rise. then tanqueray spoke. "yes. a precious hash we've all made of it. you and i and brodrick and poor nina. could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?" "not all of us. not owen. he didn't go far wrong when he married laura." "because the beast's clairvoyant. and love only made him more so; while it makes us poor devils blind as bats." "there's a dear little bat just gone by us. he's so happy." "ah--you should see him trying to fly by daylight." silence and the lucid twilight held them close. "jinny--do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from wendover?" she did not answer him. "jinny--we're there again and where we were then. we've slipped everything between. positively, i can't remember now what came between." it was her state, also. she could have owned it. only that to her it was strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time and circumstance, all that had come between. it was part of their vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made. "we must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said. "don't let's talk about it any more." "it's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. that turns it to poison." "yes." "and haven't we always told the truth to each other?" "not in the beginning. if we only had----" "we didn't know it then." "_i_ knew it," she said. "why didn't you tell me, then?" "you know what you'd have thought of me if i had." "you shouldn't have cared what i thought. you should have risked it." "risked it?" "risked it." "but i risked losing you altogether. what did _you_ risk?" he was silent. "why do you blame me? it was your fault, your choice." "was it really mine? was it i who went wrong?" "yes," she said. "in the beginning. you knew i cared for you." "if you'd let me see it." "oh, you saw it. i didn't tell you in as many words. but i let you see it. _that_ was where i went wrong." "yes, yes." he assented, for it was truth's hour. "you should have made me _feel_ it." "how could i?" "that was it. you couldn't." "i couldn't when i knew you'd seen it." "how did you know?" "oh--_you_ took good care of that." "was i a brute? was i a brute to you, jinny?" she smiled. "not as men go. you couldn't help it. there was no deceiving me." "why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?" "why indeed?" "it's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the unhappy man." "still--there it is. we can't get over it." "_you_ could have got over it. it wasn't made for you." "it was made for all women. and for one who has been wrecked by it there are millions who have been saved. it was made for me more than any of them." "if you prefer other women's conventions to your own happiness." "would it have been happiness to have given my heart and my soul to somebody who had no use for them and showed it?" "you insist that i showed it?" "you showed me plainly that it wasn't my heart and my soul you wanted." "there you're wrong. there was a moment--if you'd only known it." "i did know." "what did you know?" "i knew there was some power i had, if i had known how to use it." "and didn't you?" "i don't know. you see, i didn't try." "you know how to use it now, i can tell you, with a vengeance." "no. it isn't the same power, i think." "at any rate you knew that it was touch and go with me? that if _you_'d chosen you might have done anything with me?" "i knew that any other woman could have done the same." "then why not you?" "i? i didn't want to hold you that way. i had some decency. i loved my poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage." "good god! so _that_ was your view of it? i was sacrificed to your invincible ignorance." "oh no, to my knowledge. or shall we say to an honourable scruple?" "honourable?" "yes. the whole honour of women lies in that." "i hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last." they had reached the lane leading to their farm. its depth held them closer than the twilight held. the trees guarded them. every green branch roofed a hollow deep with haze. "if you were a cold woman i could understand it." "_i_ couldn't. it's because i was anything but cold." "i know. you were afraid then." "yes. i was mortally afraid." above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. a dim green field opened out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. it seemed to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near. "george," she said, "you know women as god knows them; why didn't you know me? can't you see what i was afraid of? what we're all afraid of? what we're eternally trying to escape from? the thing that hunts us down, that turns again and rends us." "you thought you saw that in me?" "i don't see it now." "not now," he whispered. they had come to the porch of the farmhouse. the door stood open. the lamp-light drew them in. he closed the door behind them. she stood facing him as one who waits. "not now," he said aloud. he glanced round. the house and all about it was still. "if we could always be here, jinny----" she turned from him, afraid. "why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms. he pressed back her head with one hand. his face sought hers, the face she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed. it leaned now, swift to its desire. it covered her face. its lips were pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in their drinking, after their long thirst. she pushed it from her with her two hands and cried out, "rose, little rose!" she struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep stairs. a door opened and shut. he heard her feet go slowly on the floor of her room above him. they reached the bed. she seemed to sink there. lxiii that night she knew that she must leave dartmoor, and go somewhere where george tanqueray could not follow her and find her. she was mortally afraid of him. he had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer. in spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day into somerset, to a place on exmoor that she knew. she would leave very early in the morning before tanqueray could come to her. she lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held her. at daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. when she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. her fear was there also and she faced it. she was down too late for any train that could take her away before noon, and tanqueray might come now at any time. she was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the window-sill. in her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. one was from gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual that all was well. the other was from her brother-in-law, henry. it was very brief. henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to benefit by the air of dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an overcoat. she had not heard it. she read gertrude's letter again to make sure. among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that gertrude had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. she had broken her pledge. they kept things from her, then. heaven only knew what they had kept. she read henry's letter again. there were no details, but her mind supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he _had_ written. there rose before her instantly a vision of hugh lying in his bed ill. he had a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. he was in for gastritis, at the least, if it was not pneumonia. she saw with intolerable vividness a long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill, down to their remotest consequences. her imagination never missed one. and instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. it was as if it owned that it was beaten. she had no more fear of it. and she had no more fear of george tanqueray. nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round brodrick in his bed. this vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the calamities that had actually been. it was worse through its significance and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of nina's, "with you--there'll be no end to your paying." her heart cried out to powers discerned as implacable, "anything but that! anything but that!" she had missed the first possible train to waterloo, but there was another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home early in the evening. she packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm people to the village for a fly. then she paced the room, maddening over the hours that she had still to spare. once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, hugh was not so very ill. if he had been henry would have told her. he would have suggested the propriety of her return. and henry's brief reference to dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return. but her fear remained with her. it made her forget all about george tanqueray. it was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that recalled to her her certainty that he would come. and he was there in the doorway before her mind had time to adjust itself to his appearance. she fell on him with hugh's illness as if it were a weapon and she would have slain him with it. he stood back and denied the fact she hurled at him. as evidence supporting his denial, he produced his recent correspondence with the editor. he had heard from him that morning, and he was all right then. jinny was being "had," he said. he had not come there to talk about brodrick, or to think about him. he was not going to let jinny think about him either. he had come early because he wanted to find her with all the dreams of the night about her, before her passion (he was sure of it) could be overtaken by the mood of the cool morning. jinny had begun to pack her manuscript (she had forgotten it till now) in the leather case it travelled in. she had a hat with a long veil on. tanqueray's gaze took in all this and other more unmistakable signs of her departure. "what do you think you're doing?" he said. "i'm going back." "why?" "haven't i told you?" positively he had forgotten brodrick. he began all over again and continued, tenderly, patiently, with all his cold, ascendant, dispassionate lucidity, till he had convinced her that her fear was folly. she was grateful to him for that. "all the same," she said, "i'm going. i wasn't going to stay here in any case." "you were going?" "yes." "and do you suppose i'm going to let you go? after last night?" "after--last--night--i _must_ go. and i must go back." "no. remember what you said to me last night. we know ourselves and we know each other now as god knows us. we're not afraid of ourselves or of each other any more." "no," she said. "i am not afraid." "well--you've had the courage to get so far, why haven't you the courage to go on?" "you think i'm a coward still?" "a coward." he paused. "i beg your pardon. i forgot that you had the courage to go back." her face hardened as they looked at each other. "i believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. you stand there staring at me and you don't care a damn." "as far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care." "are you always going to bring that up against me? i suppose you'll remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two children." "we do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said. "jinny--_that_ ought never to have happened. you should have left that to the other women." "why, george, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember." "you _are_----" "yes, i know i am. you've just said so." "my god. i don't care what you are." he came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not touching hers, but very close. his eyes searched her. she stood rigid in her supernatural self-possession. "jinny, you knew. you knew all the time i cared." "i thought i knew. i did know you cared in a way. but not in this way. this--this is different." she was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her--as by fire. "it isn't different," he said gravely. "jinny--if i only wanted you for myself--but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. if you didn't suffer----" "i'm not suffering." "you are. every nerve's in torture. haven't i seen you? you're ill with it now, with the bare idea of going back. i want to take you out of all that." "no, no. it isn't that. i want to go." "you don't. you don't want to own that you're beaten." "no. it's simpler than that. i don't care for you, george, not--not as you want me to." he smiled. "how do you think i want you to?" "well--you know." "i know that i care so much that it doesn't matter how you care, or whether you care or not, so long as i can put a stop to that brutality." "there isn't any brutality. i've got everything a woman can want." "you've got everything any other woman can want." she closed her eyes. "i'm quite happy." [illustration: she closed her eyes. "i'm quite happy."] "for heaven's sake be honest. what is the use of lying, to me of all people? don't i know how happy you are?" "but i am--i am, george. it's only this horrid, devilish thing that's been tacked on to me----" "that beautiful, divine thing that god made part of you, the thing that you should have loved and made sacrifices to--if there were to have been sacrifices--the thing you've outraged and frustrated, and done your best to destroy, in your blind, senseless lust for what you call happiness. you've no right to make it suffer." "they say suffering's the best thing that can happen to it." "not its suffering. _your_ suffering is--the pain that makes you alive, that stings and urges and keeps you going--going till you drop. to feel the pull of the bit when you swerve on the road--its road--to have the lash laid about your shoulders when you jib--that's good. you women need the lash more than we because you're more given to swerving and jibbing. look at nina. _she_ was lashed into it if any woman ever was." "she isn't the only one, george." "i hope she isn't. god is good to the great artists sometimes, and he was good to her." "do you suppose laura thinks so?" "laura's not a great artist." "and do you suppose owen was thinking of nina's genius when he married laura instead of her?" "i don't think that owen was thinking at all. it's not the thinkers who are tools in the hands of destiny, dear child." his gaze fell on the manuscript she was packing. "jinny, you know--you've always known that you can't do anything without me." "it seems as if i couldn't," she admitted. "well--be honest with me." she looked at her watch. "there's not much time for me to be honest in, but i'll try." she sat down. she meditated a moment, making it out. "you're right. i can't do much without you. i'm not perfectly alive when you're not there. and i can't get away from you--as i can get away from hugh. i believe i remember every single thing you ever said to me. i'm always wanting to talk to you. i don't want--always--to talk to hugh. but--i think more of him." it seemed to her that it was only now that she really made it out. her fear had been no test, it threw no light on her, and it had passed. it was only now, with tanqueray's passionately logical issue facing her, that she knew herself aright. "there's another thing. i can't be sorry for you. i know i'm hurting you, and i don't seem to care a bit. you can't make me sorry for you. but i'm sorry for hugh all the time." "god forbid that you should be sorry for me, then." "god does forbid it. it's not that hugh _makes_ me sorry for him; he never lets me know; but i do know. when his little finger aches i know it, and i ache all over--i think it's aching a bit now; that's what makes me want to go back to him." "i see--pity," said the psychologist. "no. not pity. it's simply that i know he needs me more than you do. that's why i need him more than i need you." "pity," he reiterated, with a more insistent stress. "no." "never mind what it is, if it's something that you haven't got for me." "it is something that i haven't got for you. there isn't time," she said, "to go into all that." as she spoke he heard wheels grinding the stones in the upper lane, the shriek of the brake grinding the wheel, and the shuffling of men's feet on the flagged yard outside. he shut the door and faced her, making his last stand. "you know what you're going back to." "i know." "to suffer," he said, "and to cause suffering--to one--two--three--innocent people." "no. things will be different." "they won't. _we_ shall be the same." she shook her head a little helplessly. "at any rate," he said, "_you_ won't be different." "if i could--if i only could be----" "but you can't. you know you can't." "i can--if i give it up--once for all." "what? your divine genius?" "whatever it is. when i've killed that part of me i shall be all right. i mean--_they_'ll be all right." "you can't kill it. you can starve it, drug it, paralyze it, but you can't kill it. it's stronger than you. you'll go through hell--i know it, i've been there--you'll be like a drunkard trying to break himself of the drink habit." "yes. but some day i shall break myself, or be broken; and there'll be peace." "_will_ there!" "there'll be something." she rose. the wheels sounded nearer, and stopped. the gate of the farmyard opened. the feet of the men were at the door. lxiv whatever tanqueray thought of brodrick's chill, it and the fear it inspired in gertrude had been grave enough to keep him in the house. for three days (the last of september) he had not been in fleet street, in his office. there was agitation there, and agitation in the mind of the editor and of his secretary. tanqueray's serial was running its devastating course through the magazine, and the last instalment of the manuscript was overdue (tanqueray was always a little late with his instalments). brodrick was worried, and gertrude, at work with him in his study, tried to soothe him. they telephoned to the office for the manuscript. the manuscript was not there. the clerk suggested that it was probably still with the type-writer, miss ranger. they telephoned to miss ranger, who replied that the manuscript had been typed and sent to the author three weeks ago for revision. brodrick sent a messenger to tanqueray's house for the manuscript. he returned towards evening with a message that mrs. tanqueray was out, mr. tanqueray was in the country and the servant did not know his address. they telegraphed to addy ranger's rooms for his address. the reply came, "post office, okehampton, devon." brodrick repeated it with satisfaction as he wrote it down: "post office, okehampton, devon." gertrude was silent. "he's got friends somewhere in devonshire," brodrick said. "at the post office?" she murmured. "of course--if they're motoring." gertrude was again silent (she achieved her effects mainly by silences). "we'd better send the wire there," said brodrick. they sent it there first thing in the morning. before noon a message came from mrs. tanqueray: "address, 'the manor, wilbury, wilts.' have sent your message there." admirable mrs. tanqueray! "we've sent _our_ wire to the wrong address," said brodrick. "it's the right one, i fancy, if miss ranger has it." "mrs. tanqueray's got the wrong one, then?" they looked at each other. gertrude's face was smooth and still, but her eyes searched him, asking what his thoughts were. they sent a wire to wilbury. three days passed. no answer to their wires and no manuscript. "he's left okehampton, i suppose," said brodrick. "or has he left wilbury?" "we'll send another wire there, to make sure." she wrote out the form obediently. then she spoke again. "of course he's at okehampton." her voice had an accent of joyous certainty. "why 'of course'?" "because he went to wilbury first. mrs. tanqueray said she sent our message there--the one we sent three days ago. so he's left wilbury and he's staying in okehampton." "it looks like it." "and yet--you'd have thought he'd have let his wife know if he was staying." "he probably isn't." "he must be. the manuscript went there." "let's hope so, then we may get it to-morrow." it was as if he desired to impress upon her that the manuscript was the important thing. it came as he had anticipated the next day. miss ranger sent it up by special messenger. "good!" said brodrick. he undid the parcel hurriedly. the inner cover was addressed to miss ranger in tanqueray's handwriting. it bore the post-mark, chagford. "he's been at chagford all the time!" said gertrude. (she had picked up the wrapper which brodrick had thrown upon the floor.) silence. "t-t-t. it would have saved a day," she said, "if he'd sent this direct to you instead of to miss ranger. why couldn't he when he knew we were so rushed?" "why, indeed?" he thought. "there must have been more corrections," he said. "she can't have typed them in the time," said gertrude. she was examining the inner cover. "besides, she has sent it on unopened." "excellent miss ranger!" he said it with a certain levity. but even as he said it his brain accepted the inference she forced on it. if tanqueray had not sent his manuscript to camden town for corrections, he had sent it there for another reason. the parcel was registered. there was no letter inside it. brodrick's hand trembled as he turned over the pages of the manuscript. gertrude's eyes were fixed upon its trembling. a few savage ink-scratches in tanqueray's handwriting told where miss ranger had blundered; otherwise the manuscript was clean. tanqueray had at last satisfied his passion for perfection. all this brodrick's brain took in while his eyes, feverish and intent, searched the blank spaces of the manuscript. he knew what he was looking for. it would be there, on the wide margin left for her, that he would find the evidence that his wife and tanqueray were together. he knew the signs of her. not a manuscript of tanqueray's, not one of his last great books, but bore them, the queer, delicate, nervous pencil-markings that tanqueray, with all his furious erasures, left untouched. sometimes (brodrick had noticed) he would enclose them in a sort of holy circle of red ink, to show that they were not for incorporation in the text. but it was not in him to destroy a word that she had written. but he could find no trace of her. he merely made out some humble queryings of miss ranger, automatically erased. the manuscript was in three parts. as he laid down each, gertrude put forth a quiet hand and drew it to herself. he was too much preoccupied to notice how minutely and with what intent and passionate anxiety she examined it. he was arranging the manuscript in order. gertrude was absorbed in part three. he had reached out for it when he remembered that the original draft of part two had contained a passage as to which he had endeavoured to exercise an ancient editorial right. he looked to see whether tanqueray had removed it. he had not. the passage stood, naked and immense, tremendous as some monument of primeval nature, alone in literature, simple, superb, immortal; irremovable by any prayer. brodrick looked at it now with a clearer vision. he acknowledged its grandeur and bowed his head to the power that was tanqueray. had he not been first to recognize it? it was as if his suspicion of the man urged him to a larger justice towards the writer. he turned to gertrude. "there are no alterations to be made, thank heaven----" "how about this?" she slid the manuscript under his arm; her finger pointed to the margin. he saw nothing. "what?" he spoke with some irritation. "this." she turned up the lamp so that the light fell full upon the page. he bent closer. on the margin, so blurred as to be almost indecipherable, he saw his wife's sign, a square of delicate script. to a careless reader it might have seemed to have been written with a light pencil and to have been meant to stand. examined closely it revealed the firm strokes of a heavy lead obliterated with india-rubber. gertrude's finger slid away and left him free to turn the pages. there were several of these marks in the same handwriting, each one deliberately erased. the manuscript had been in his wife's hand within the last three days; for three days certainly tanqueray had been in chagford, and for three weeks for all brodrick knew. there was no reason why he should not be there, no reason why they should not be together. then why these pitiable attempts at concealment, at the covering of the tracks? and yet, after all, they had not covered them. they had only betrayed the fact that they had tried. had they? and which of them? tanqueray in the matter of obliteration would at any rate have been aware of the utter inadequacy of india-rubber. to dash at a thing like india-rubber was more the sudden, futile inspiration of a woman made frantic by her terror of detection. it was clear that jane had not wanted him to know that tanqueray was at chagford. she had not told him. why had she not told him? she knew of the plight they were in at the office, of the hue and cry after the unappearing manuscript. so his brain worked, with a savage independence. he seemed to himself two men, a man with a brain that worked, following a lucid argument to an obscure conclusion, and a man who looked on and watched its working without attaching the least importance to it. it was as if _this_ man knew all the time what the other did not know. he had his own light, his own secret. he had never thought about it before (his secret), still less had he talked about it. thinking about it was a kind of profanity; talking would have been inconceivable sacrilege. it was self-evident as the existence of god to the soul that loves him; a secret only in that it was profounder than appearances, in that it stood by the denial of appearances, so that, if appearances were against it, what of that? he was thinking about it now, obscurely, without images, barely with words, as if it had been indeed a thing occult and metaphysical. thinking about it--that meant, of course, that he had for a moment doubted it? it was coming back to him now, clothed with the mortal pathos of its imperfection. she was dearer to him--unspeakably dearer, for his doubt. the man with the brain approached slowly and unwillingly the conclusion that now emerged, monstrous and abominable, from the obscurity. if that be so, he said, she is deliberately deceiving me. and he who watched, he with the illuminating, incommunicable secret, smiled as he watched, in scorn and pity. scorn of the slow and ugly movements of the intellect, and pity for a creature so mean as to employ them. in the silence that he kept he had not heard the deep breathing of the woman at his side. now he was aware of it and her. he was positively relieved when the servant announced mrs. levine. there was a look on sophy's face that brodrick knew, a look of importance and of competence, a look it always had when sophy was about to deal with a situation. gertrude's silent disappearance marked her sense of a situation to be dealt with. brodrick rose heavily to greet his sister. there was a certain consolation in her presence, since it had relieved him of gertrude's. sophy, by way of prelude, inquired about brodrick and the children and the house, then paused to attack her theme. "when's jane coming back?" said she. "i don't know," said brodrick. "she's been away two months." "seven weeks," said brodrick. "isn't it about time she _did_ come back?" "she's the best judge of that," said brodrick. sophy's face was extraordinarily clear-eyed and candid as it turned on him. "george tanqueray's at chagford." "how do you know?" (he really wondered.) "miss ranger let it out to louis this morning." "let it out? why on earth should she keep it in?" "oh well, i don't suppose _she_ sees anything in it." "no more do i," said brodrick. "you never saw anything," said sophy. "i don't say there's anything to see--all the same----" she paused. "well?" he was all attention and politeness. "all the same i should insist on her coming back." he was silent, as though he were considering it. "or better still, go down and fetch her." "i shall do nothing of the sort." "well, if you think it's wise to give her her head to that extent--a woman with jane's temperament----" "what do you know about her temperament?" sophy shifted her ground. "i know, and you know the effect he has on her, and the influence; and if you leave her to him--if you leave them to themselves, down there--for weeks like that--you'll have nobody but yourself to thank if----" he cut her short. "i have nobody but myself to thank. she shall please herself about coming back. it she didn't come--i couldn't blame her." sophy was speechless. of all the attitudes that any brodrick could take she had not expected this. "we have made things too hard for her----" he said. "we?" "you and i--all of us. we've not seen what was in her." sophy repressed her opinion that they very probably would see now. as there was no use arguing with him in his present mood (she could see _that_), she left him. brodrick heard her motor hooting down roehampton lane. she was going to dine at henry's. presently all the family would be in possession of the situation, of jane's conduct and his attitude. and there was gertrude collett. he understood now that she suspected. gertrude had come back into her place. he picked up some papers and took them to the safe which stood in another corner of the room behind his writing-table. he wanted to get away from gertrude, to be alone with his secret and concealed, without betraying his desire for solitude, for concealment. he knelt down by the safe and busied himself there quite a long time. he said to himself, "it couldn't happen. she was always honest with me. but if it did i couldn't wonder. the wonder is why she married me." he rose to his feet, saying to himself again, "it couldn't happen." with that slight readjusting movement the two men in him became one, so that when the reasoning man reached slowly his conclusion he formulated it thus: "it couldn't happen. if it did, it wouldn't happen this way. he" (even to himself he could not say "they") "would have managed better, or worse." at last his intellect, the lazy, powerful beast, was roused and dealt masterfully with the situation. he had to pass the fireplace to get back to his seat, which gertrude guarded. as he passed he caught sight of his own face in the glass over the chimney-piece, a face with inflamed eyes and a forehead frowning and overcast, and cheeks flushed with shame. gertrude, looking up at him from the manuscript she brooded over, instinctively made way for him to pass. it was she who spoke first. her finger was on the pencil-marks again. "then that," said she, pointing, "that is not to stand?" "of course it isn't." he answered coldly. "it wasn't meant to. it's rubbed out." he looked at her for the first time with dislike. he did not suspect her as the source of abominable suggestion. he was only thinking that if it hadn't been for her he wouldn't have seen any of these things. she shrank before his look. "does he think i wanted him to see it?" she said to herself. already she was clean in her own eyes. already she had persuaded herself that she had not wanted that. and in the same breath of thought she asked herself, "what _did_ he see?" she smiled as she answered his cold answer. "i thought it was rubbed out, but i couldn't be quite sure." they were so absorbed that they did not hear the door open. [illustration: jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them] jane stood in the doorway quietly regarding them. lxv there were people who knew for a fact that jane holland (mrs. hugh brodrick) had run away with george tanqueray. the rumour ran through the literary circles shunned by tanqueray and jane. the theory of her guilt was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. not one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her tripping. but now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving for complete vision of the celebrated lady. it reduced considerably her baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable, irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up. there was george tanqueray, too, who had kept it up even longer and more successfully. at last they had been caught, the two so insolent in their swift evasion of pursuit. their fall, so to speak, enabled the hunter to come up with them. people who had complained that they could never meet them, who had wanted to meet them solely that they might talk about them afterwards, who had never been able to talk about them at all, had now abundant material for conversation. the rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over london in five days. it started in kensington, ran thence all the way to chelsea, skipped to bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into belgravia and mayfair. in three weeks the tale of george tanqueray and jane holland (mrs. hugh brodrick) had invaded hampstead and the southwestern suburbs. it was only confirmed by the contemptuous silence and curt denials of their friends, arnott nicholson, caro bickersteth, nina lempriere and the protheros. in brodrick's family it sank down deep, below the level of permissible discussion. but it revealed itself presently in an awful external upheaval, utterly unforeseen, and in a still more unforeseen subsidence. there was first of all a split between mrs. heron and the doctor. the behaviour of eddy and winny, especially of eddy, had got on the doctor's nerves (he had confessed, in a moment of intense provocation, to having them). eddy one evening had attacked violently the impermissible topic, defending jin-jin (in the presence of his younger sister) from the unspeakable charge current in their suburb, taxing his uncle with a monstrous credence of the impossible, and trying to prove to him that it _was_ impossible. for the sake of the peace so beloved by brodricks it was settled that frances and her children should live with poor dear john in the big house in augustus road. brodrick then suggested that gertrude collett might with advantage keep house for henry. this arrangement covered the dreadful rupture, the intolerable situation at moor grange. gertrude had contributed nothing to the support of the rumour beyond an intimation that the rupture (between her and the brodricks) _was_ dreadful and the situation intolerable. the intimation, as conveyed by gertrude, was delicate and subtle to a degree. all that she would admit in words was a certain lack of spiritual sympathy between her and mrs. brodrick. it was felt in brodrick's family that, concerning jane and tanqueray, gertrude collett knew considerably more than she cared to say. and through it all brodrick guarded his secret. the rumour had not yet touched him whom it most affected. it never would touch him, so securely the secret he guarded guarded him. and though it had reached hampstead the rumour had not reached rose. rose had her hands full for once with the protheros, helping mrs. prothero to look after _him_. for owen was ill, dreadfully and definitely ill, with an illness you could put a name to. dr. brodrick was attending him. owen had consulted him casually the year before, and the doctor had then discovered a bell-sound in his left lung. now he came regularly once or twice a week all the way from putney in his motor-car. rose had positively envied laura, who had a husband who could be ill, who could be tucked up in bed and taken care of. it was rose who helped laura to make prothero's big room look for all the world like the ward of a hospital. dr. brodrick had wanted to take him away to a sanatorium, but prothero had refused flatly to be taken anywhere. the traveller was tired of travelling. he loved with passion this place where he had found peace, where his wandering genius had made its sanctuary and its home. his repugnance was so violent and invincible that the doctor had agreed with laura that it would do more harm than good to insist on his removal. she must do as best she could, with (he suggested) the assistance of a trained nurse. laura had very soon let him know what she could do. she had winced visibly when she heard of the trained nurse. it would be anguish to her to see another woman beside owen's bed and her hands touching him; but she said she supposed she could bear even that if it would save him, if it were absolutely necessary. was it? the doctor had admitted that it was not so, if she insisted--absolutely--for the present; but it was advisable if she wished to save herself. laura had smiled then, very quietly. in twenty-four hours she showed him the great room, bare and clean as the ward of a hospital (rose was on her knees on the floor, bees-waxing it). the long rows of bookcases were gone, so were the pictures. he couldn't put his finger on a single small unnecessary thing. laura, cool and clean in a linen gown, defied him to find a chink where a germ could lodge. prothero inquired gaily, if they couldn't make a good fight there, where could they make it? henry, although used to these combats, was singularly affected as he looked upon the scene, stripped as it was for the last struggle. what moved him most was the sight of laura's little bed, set under the north window, and separated from her husband's by the long empty space between, through which the winds of heaven rushed freely. it showed him what the little thing was capable of, day and night, night and day, the undying, indomitable devotion. that was the stuff a man wanted in his wife. he thought of his brother hugh. why on earth, if he had to marry one of them, hadn't he married _her_? he was moved too and troubled by the presence there of tanqueray's poor little wife. whatever view truth compelled you to take of jane's and tanqueray's relations, tanqueray's wife had, from first to last, been cruelly wronged by both of them. tanqueray's wife was so absorbed in the fight they were making as to be apparently indifferent to her wrongs, and they judged that the legend of jane holland and george tanqueray had not reached her. it had not. and yet she knew it, she had known it all the time--that they had been together. she had known it ever since, in the innocent days before the rumour, she had heard dr. brodrick telling mrs. prothero that his sister-in-law had gone down to chagford for three months. chagford was where he was always staying. and in the days of innocence addy ranger had let out that it was chagford where he was now. she had given rose his address, post office, chagford. he had been there all the time when rose had supposed him to be in wiltshire and was sending all his letters there. she did not hear of mrs. brodrick's return until a week or two after that event; for, in the days no longer of innocence, his sister-in-law was a sore subject with the doctor. and when rose did hear it finally from laura, by that time she had heard that tanqueray was coming back too. he had written to her to say so. that was on a saturday. he was not coming until tuesday. rose had two days in which to consider what line she meant to take. that she meant to take a line was already clear to rose. perfectly clear, although her decision was arrived at through nights of misery so profound that it made most things obscure. it was clear that they could not go on as they had been doing. _he_ might (nothing seemed to matter to him), but she couldn't; and she wouldn't, not (so she put it) if it was ever so. they had been miserable. not that it mattered so very much whether she was miserable or no. but that was it; she had ended by making him miserable too. it took some making; for he wasn't one to feel things much; he had always gone his own way as if nothing mattered. by his beginning to feel things (as she called it) now, she measured the effect she must have had on him. it was all because she wasn't educated proper, because she wasn't a lady. he ought to have married a lady. he ought (she could see it now) to have married some one like mrs. brodrick, who could understand his talk, and enter into what he did. there was mr. and mrs. prothero now. they were happy. there wasn't a thing he could say or do or think but what she understood it. why, she'd understand, time and again, without his saying anything. that came of being educated. it came (poor rose was driven back to it at every turn) of being a lady. she might have known how it would be. and in a way she had known it from the first. that was why she'd been against it, and why uncle and aunt and her master and mistress down at fleet had been against it too. but there--she loved him. lady or no lady, she loved him. as for his going away with mrs. brodrick, she "looked at it sensible." she understood. she saw the excuses that could be made for him. she couldn't understand _her_; she couldn't find one excuse for _her_ behaviour, a married woman, leaving her husband--such a good man, and her children--her little helpless children, and going off for weeks together with a married man, let him be who he might be. still, if it hadn't been her, it might have been somebody else, somebody much worse. it might have been that miss lempriere. if _she_'d had a hold on him, _she_'d not have let him go. for deep-bedded in rose's obscure misery was the conviction that jane brodrick had let him go. her theory of jane's guilt had not gone much farther than the charge of deserting her little helpless children. it was as if rose's imagination could not conceive of guilt beyond that monstrous crime. and jane had gone back to her husband and children, after all. if it had been miss lempriere she would have been bound to have stuck, she having nothing, so to speak, to go back to. the question was, what was george coming back to? if it was to her, rose, he must know pretty well what. he must know, she kept repeating to herself; he must know. her line, the sensible line that she had been so long considering, was somehow to surprise and defeat his miserable foreknowledge. by sunday morning she had decided on her line. nothing would turn her. she did not intend to ask anybody's advice, nor to take it were it offered. the line itself required the co-operation and, in a measure, the consent of aunt and uncle; and on the practical head they were consulted. she managed that on sunday afternoon. then she remembered that she would have to tell mr. and mrs. prothero. it was on sunday evening that she told them. she told them, very shortly and simply, that she had made up her mind to separate from tanqueray and live with her uncle. "uncle'll be glad to 'ave me," she said. she explained. "_he_'ll think more of me if he's not with me." prothero admitted that it might be likely. "it's not," she said, "as if i was afraid of 'is taking up with another woman--serious." (they wondered had she heard?) "i can trust him with mrs. brodrick." (they thought it strange that she should not consider mrs. brodrick serious. they said nothing, and in a moment rose explained.) "she's like all these writin' people. _i_ know 'em." "yes," said prothero. "we're a poor lot, aren't we?" (it was a mercy that she didn't take it seriously.) "oh you--you're different." she had always had a very clear perception of his freedom from the literary taint. "but mrs. brodrick now--she doesn't care for 'im. she's not likely to. she'll never care for anybody but herself." "what makes you think so?" "well--a woman who could walk off like that and leave 'er little children--to say nothing of 'er husband----" "isn't it," said prothero, "what you're proposing to do yourself?" "i 'aven't got any little children. she's leavin' 'er 'usband to get away from' im, to please 'erself. i'm leavin' mine to bring 'im to me." she paused, pensive. "oh, no, i'm not afraid of mrs. brodrick. she 'asn't got a 'eart." "no?" "not wot _i_ should call a 'eart." "perhaps not," said laura. "i used to hate her when she came about the place. leastways i tried to hate her, and i couldn't." she meditated in their silence. "if it's got to be anybody it'd best be 'er. she's given 'im all she's got to give, and he sees 'ow much it is. 'e goes to 'er, i know, and 'e'll keep on going; and she--she'll 'old 'im orf and on--i can see 'er doin' of it, and i don't care. as long as she 'olds' im she keeps other women orf of 'im." their silence marvelled at her. "time and again i've cried my eyes out, and _that_'s no good. i've got," said rose, "to look at it sensible. she's really keepin' 'im for me." down-stairs, alone with laura, she revealed herself more fully. "i dare say 'e won't ever ask me to come back," she said. "but once i've gone out of the house for good and all, 'e'll come to me now and again. he's bound to. you see, _she_'s no good to him. and maybe, if i was to 'ave a child--i might----" she sighed, but in her eyes there kindled a dim hope, shining through tears. "wot i shall miss is--workin' for 'im." her mouth trembled. her tears fell. lxvi between seven and eight o'clock on tuesday evening, tanqueray, in an execrable temper, returned to his home. the little house had an air of bright expectancy, not to say of festival; it was so intensely, so unusually illuminated. each window, with its drawn blind, was a golden square in the ivy-darkened wall. tanqueray let himself in noiselessly with his latchkey. he took up the pile of letters that waited for him on the hat-stand in the hall, and turned into the dining-room. it smiled at him brilliantly with all its lights. so did the table, laid for dinner; the very forks and spoons smiled, twinkling and limping in irrepressible welcome. a fire burned ostentatiously in the hearth-place. it sent out at him eager, loquacious tongues of flame, to draw him to the insufferable endearments of the hearth. he was aware now that what he was most afraid of in this horrible coming back was his wife's insupportable affection. he turned the lights down a little lower. all his movements were noiseless. he was afraid that rose would hear him and would come running down. he went up-stairs, treading quietly. he meant to take his letters to his study and read them there. he might even answer some of them. anything to stave off the moment when he must meet rose. the door of her bedroom was wide open. the light flared so high that he judged that rose was in there and about to appear. he swung himself swiftly and dexterously round the angle of the stair-rail, and so reached his own door. she must have heard him go in, but there was no answering movement from her room. with a closed door behind him he sat down and looked over his letters. bills, proofs from the "monthly review," a letter from laura that saddened him (he had not realized that prothero was so ill). last of all, at the bottom of the pile, a little note from rose. she had got it all into five lines. five lines, rather straggling, rather shapeless lines that told him with a surprising brevity that his wife had decided on an informal separation, for his good. no resentment, no reproach, no passion and no postscript. he went down-stairs by no means noiselessly. in the hall, as he was putting on his hat, susan came to him. she gave him a queer look. dinner was ready, she said. the mistress had ordered the dinner that he liked. (irrepressibly, insistently, thick with intolerable reminiscence, the savour of it streamed through the kitchen door.) the mistress had cooked it herself, susan said. the mistress had told susan that she was to be sure and make him very comfortable, and to remember what he liked for dinner. susan's manner was a little shy and a little important, it suggested the inauguration of a new rule, a new order, a life in which rose was not and never would be. tanqueray took no notice whatever of susan as he strode out of the house. the lights were dim in the corner house by the heath, opposite the willows. still, standing on the upper ground of the heath, he could see across the road through the window of his old sitting-room, and there, in his old chair by the fireside he made out a solitary seated figure that looked like rose. he came out from under the willows and made for the front door. he pushed past the little maid who opened it and strode into the room. rose turned. there was a slight stir and hesitation, then a greeting, very formal and polite on both sides, and with joey all the time leaping and panting and licking tanqueray's hands. joey's demonstration was ignored as much too emotional for the occasion. a remark from rose about the weather. inquiries from tanqueray as to the health of mr. and mrs. eldred. further inquiries as to the health of rose. silence. "may i turn the light up?" (from tanqueray.) "i'd rather you let it be?" (from rose.) he let it be. "rose" (very suddenly from tanqueray), "do you remember mr. robinson?" (no response.) "rose, why are you sitting in this room?" "because i like it." "why do you like it?" (no response; only a furtive movement of rose's hand towards her pocket-handkerchief. a sudden movement of tanqueray's, restrained, so that he appeared to have knelt on the hearthrug to caress the little dog. a long and silent stroking of joey's back. demonstration of ineffable affection from joey.) "his hair never _has_ come on, has it? do you know" (very gravely), "i'm afraid it never will." (a faint quiver of rose's mouth which might or might not have been a smile.) "rose, why did you marry me? wouldn't any other hairless little dog have done as well?" (a deep sigh from rose.) tanqueray was now standing up and looking down at her in his way. "rose, do you remember how i came to you at fleet, and brought you the moon in a band-box?" she answered him with a sudden and convulsive sob. he knelt beside her. he hesitated for a moment. "rose--i've brought you the band-box without the moon. will you have it?" she got up with a wild movement of escape. something rolled from her lap and fell between them. she made a dash towards the object. but tanqueray had picked it up. it was a pair of tanqueray's gloves, neatly folded. "what were you doing with those gloves?" he said. "i was mendin' them," said she. half-an-hour later rose and tanqueray were walking up the east heath road towards their little house. rose carried tanqueray's gloves, and tanqueray carried minny, the cat, in a basket. as they went they talked about owen prothero. and tanqueray thanked god that, after all, there was something they _could_ talk about. lxvii dr. brodrick had declared for the seventh time that prothero was impossible. his disease was advancing. both lungs were attacked now. there was, as he perfectly well knew, consolidation at the apex of the left lung; the upper lobe had retracted, leaving his heart partially uncovered, and he knew it; you could detect also a distinct systolic murmur; and nobody could be more aware than prothero of the gravity of these signs. up till now, he, brodrick, had been making a record case of him. the man had a fine constitution (he gave him credit for that); he had pluck; there was resistance, pugnacity in every nerve. he had one chance, a fighting chance. his life might be prolonged for years, if he would only rest. and there he was, with all that terrible knowledge in him, sitting up in bed, driving that infernal pen of his as if his life depended on _that_. scribbling verses, he was, working himself into such a state of excitement that his temperature had risen. he displayed, brodrick said, an increasing nervous instability. when brodrick told him that (if he wanted to know) his inspiration was hollow, had been hollow for months, and that he would recognize that as one of the worst symptoms in his case, prothero said that his critics had always told him that. the worst symptom in his case, _he_ declared, was that he couldn't laugh without coughing. when brodrick said that it wasn't a laughing matter, he laughed till he spat blood and frightened himself. for he had (brodrick had noticed it) a morbid horror of the sight of blood. you had to inject morphia after every hæmorrhage, to subdue that awful agitation. all this the doctor recounted to laura, alone with her in her forlorn little drawing-room down-stairs. he unveiled for her intelligence the whole pathology of the case. it brought him back to what he had started with, prothero's impossibility. "what does he do for it?" he repeated. "he knows the consequences as well as i do." laura said she didn't think that owen ever had considered consequences. "but he _must_ consider them. what's a set of verses compared with his health?" laura answered quietly, "owen would say what was his health compared with a set of verses? if he knew they'd be the greatest poem of his life." "his life? my dear child----" the pause was terrible. "i wish," he said, "we could get him out of this." "he doesn't want to go. you said yourself it wasn't the great thing." he admitted it. the great thing, he reiterated, was rest. it was his one chance. he explained carefully again how good a chance it was. he dwelt on the things prothero might yet do if he gave himself a chance. and when he had done talking laura remarked that it was all very well, but he was reckoning without owen's genius. "genius?" he shrugged his shoulders. he smiled (as if they weren't always reckoning with it at putney!). "what is it? for medicine it's simply and solely an abnormal activity of the brain. and it must stop." he stood over her impressively, marking his words with clenched fist on open palm. "he must choose between his genius and his life." she winced. "i don't believe he _can_ choose," she murmured. "it _is_ his life." he straightened himself to his enormous height, in dignified recoil from her contradiction. "i have known many men of genius," he said. "his genius is different," said she. he hadn't the heart to say what he had always said, that prothero's genius was and always had been most peculiarly a disease; but he did not shrink from telling her that at the present crisis it was death. for he was angry now. he could not help being moved by professional animus, the fury of a man who has brought his difficult, dangerous work to the pitch of unexpected triumph, and sees it taken from his hands and destroyed for a perversity, an incomprehensible caprice. he was still more deeply stirred by his compassion, his affection for the protheros. secretly, he was very fond of owen, though the poet _was_ impossible; he was even more fond of little laura. he did not want to see her made a widow because prothero refused to control his vice. for the literary habit, indulged in to that extent, amounted to a vice. the doctor had no patience with it. a man was not, after all, a slave to his unwholesome inspiration (it had dawned on him by this time that prothero had made a joke about it). prothero could stop it if he liked. "i've told him plainly," he said, "that what it means to him is death. if you want to keep him, you must stop it." "how can i?" she moaned. "don't encourage him. don't let him talk about it. don't let his mind dwell on it. turn the conversation. take his pens and paper from him and don't let him see them again till he is well." when the doctor left her she went up-stairs to owen. he was still sitting up writing, dashing down lines with a speed that told her what race he ran. "owen," she said, "you know. he told you----" he waved her away with a gesture that would have been violent if it could. she tried to take his pen and paper from him, and he laid his thin hands out over the sheets. the sweat stood in big drops between the veins of his hands; it streamed from his forehead. "wait just a little longer, till you're well," she pleaded. "for god's sake, darling," he whispered hoarsely, "leave me, go away." she went. in her own room her work stood unfinished on the table where she had left it, months ago. she pushed it away in anger. she hated the sight of it. she sat watching the clock for the moments when she would have to go to him with his medicine. she thought how right they had been after all. nina and jane and tanqueray, when they spoke of the cruelty of genius. it had no mercy and no pity. it had taken its toll from all of them. it was taking its toll from owen now, to the last drop of his blood, to the last torturing breath. his life was nothing to it. she went to him silently every hour to give him food or medicine or to take his temperature. she recorded on her chart heat mounting to fever, and a pulse staggering in its awful haste. he was submissive as long as she was silent, but at a word his thin hand waved in its agonized gesture. once he kissed her hands that gave him his drink. "poor little thing," he said, "it's so frightened--always was. never mind--it'll soon be over--only--don't come again" (he had to whisper it), "if you don't mind--till i ring." she sat listening then for his bell. rose came and stayed with her a little while. she wanted to know what the doctor had said to-day. "he says he must choose between his genius and his life. and it's i who have to choose. if he goes on he'll kill himself. if i stop him i shall kill him. what am i to do?" rose had her own opinion of the dilemma, and no great opinion of the doctor. "do nothin'," she said, and pondered on it. "look at it sensible. you may depend upon it 'e's found somethin' 'e's got to do. 'e's set 'is 'eart on finishin' it. don't you cross 'im. i don't believe in crossin' them when they're set." "and if he dies, rose? if he dies?" "'e dies 'is way--not yours." it was the wisdom of renunciation and repression; but laura felt that it was right. her hour struck and she went up to owen. he was lying back now with his eyes closed and his lips parted. because of its peace his face was like the face of the dead. but his lips were hot under hers and his cheek was fire to her touch. she put her finger on his pulse and he opened his eyes and smiled at her. "it's finished," he said. "you can take it away now." she gathered up the loose sheets and laid them in a drawer in his desk. the poem once finished he was indifferent to its disposal. his eyes followed her, they rested on her without noting her movements. they drew her as she came towards him again. "forgive me," he said. "it was too strong for me." "never again," she murmured. "promise me, never again till you're well." "never again." he smiled as he answered. dr. brodrick, calling late that night, was informed by laura of the extent to which he had been disobeyed. he thundered at her and threatened, a brodrick beside himself with fury. "do you suppose," she said, "it isn't awful for me to have to stand by and see it, and do nothing? what can i do?" he looked down at her. the little thing had a will of her own; she was indeed, for her size, preposterously over-charged with will. never had he seen a small creature so indomitably determined. he put it to her. she had a will; why couldn't she use it? "his will is stronger than mine," she said. "and his genius is stronger than his will." "you overrate the importance of it. what does it matter if he never writes another line?" it seemed to her that he charged him with futility, that he echoed--and in this hour!--the voice of the world that tried to make futile everything he did. "it doesn't matter to you," she said. "you never understood his genius; you never cared about it." "do you mean to tell me that you--_you_ care about it more than you care about him? upon my word, i don't know what you women are made of." "what could i do?" she said. "i had to use my own judgment." "you had not. you had to use mine." he paused impressively. "it's no use, my child, fighting against the facts." to henry laura was a little angry child, crying over the bitter dose of life. he had got to make her take it. he towered over her, a brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact. it was a spirit that revolted her. she stood her ground and defied it in its insufferable tyranny. she thought of how these men, these brodricks, behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven poor jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. as for owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged him by the facts. if it came to that she could fight the doctor with his own weapons. if he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all the facts. "_this_ isn't what's killing him," she said. "it's all the other things, the things he was made to do. going out to manchuria--that began it. he ought never to have been sent there. then--five years on that abominable paper. think how he slaved on it. you don't know what it was to him. to have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile weather; to have to work whether he was fit to work or not." he looked down at her very quietly and kindly. it was when people were really outrageous that a brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience and forbearance. "you say he had to do all these things. is that the fact?" "no," said laura, passionately, "it's the truth." "what do you mean by that?" "i mean it's what it amounted to. they--they drove him to it with their everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining." "i should not have thought he was a man to be much affected by adverse criticism." "you don't know," she retorted, "how he was affected. you can't judge. anyhow, he stuck to it up to the very last--the very last," she cried. "my dear mrs. prothero, nobody wanted him to----" "he did it, though. he did it because he was not what you all thought him." "we thought him splendid. my brother was saying only the other day he had never seen such pluck." "well, then, it's his pluck--his splendour that he's dying of." "and you hold us, his friends, responsible for that?" "i don't hold you responsible for anything." she was trembling on the edge of tears. "come, come," he said gently, "you misunderstand. you've been doing too much. you're overstrained." she smiled. that was so like them. they were sane when they got hold of one stupid fact and flung it at your head. but you were overstrained when you retaliated. when you had made a sober selection from the facts, such a selection as constituted a truth, and presented it to them, you were more overstrained than ever. they couldn't stand the truth. "i don't hold _you_ responsible for his perversity," said the poor doctor. "you talked as if you did." "you misunderstood me," he said sadly. "i only asked you to do what you could." "i have done what i could." he ordered her some bromide then, for her nerves. that evening prothero was so much better that he declared himself well. the wind had changed to the south. she had prayed for a warm wind; and, as it swept through the great room, she flung off her fur-lined coat and tried to persuade herself that the weather was in owen's favour. at midnight the warm wind swelled to a gale. down at the end of the garden the iron gate cried under the menace and torture of its grip. the sound and the rush of it filled prothero with exultation. neither he nor laura slept. she had moved her bed close up against his, and they lay side by side. the room was a passage for the wind; it whirled down it like a mad thing, precipitating itself towards the mouth of the night, where the wide north window sucked it. on the floor and the long walls the very darkness moved. the pale yellow disc that the guarded nightlight threw upon the ceiling swayed incessantly at the driving of the wind. the twilight of the white beds trembled. outside the gust staggered and drew back; it plunged forward again, with its charge of impetus, and hurled itself against the gate. there was a shriek of torn iron, a crash, and the long sweeping, rending cry of live branches wrenched from their hold, lacerated and crushed, trailing and clinging in their fall. owen dragged himself up on his pillows. laura's arm was round him. "it's nothing," she said, "only the gate. it was bound to go." "the gate?" it seemed to her touch that he drew himself together. "i said i'd come back--through it----" he whispered. "i shall--come back"--his voice gathered a sudden, terrible, hoarse vibration--"over it--treading it down." at that he coughed and turned from her, hiding his face. the handkerchief she took from him was soaked in blood. he shuddered and shrank back, overcome by the inveterate, ungovernable horror. he lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word should bring back the thing he loathed. laura sat up and watched him. towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. the air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. once the wind was so quiet that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. she counted seven strokes. it grew warmer and warmer out there. owen was very cold. laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the doctor. she was gone about five minutes. and prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over his dead body. lxviii laura prothero was sitting with jane in the garden at wendover one day in that spring. it was a day of sudden warmth and stillness that brought back vividly to both of them the hour of owen's death. they were touched by the beauty and the peace of this place where nicky lived his perfect little life. they had just agreed that it was nicky's life, nicky's character, that had given to his garden its lucent, exquisite tranquillity. you associated that quality so indivisibly with nicky that it was as if he flowered there, he came up every spring, flaming purely, in the crocuses on the lawn. every spring nicky and a book of poems appeared with the crocuses; the poems as nicky made them, but nicky heaven-born, in an immortal innocence and charm. it was incredible, they said, how heaven sheltered and protected nicky. he, with his infallible instinct for the perfect thing, had left them together, alone in the little green chamber on the lawn, shut in by its walls of yew. he was glad that he had this heavenly peace to give them for a moment. he passed before them now and then, pacing the green paths of the lawn with nina. "no, jinny, i am _not_ going on any more," laura said, returning to the subject of that intimate communion to which they had been left. "you see, it ended as a sort of joke, his and mine--nobody else saw the point of it. why should i keep it up?" "wouldn't he have liked you to keep it up?" "he would have liked me to please myself--to be happy. how can i be happy going on--giving myself to the people who rejected _him_? i'm not going to keep _that_ up." "what will you do?" laura said that she would have enough to do, editing his poems and his memoirs. jane had not realized the memoirs. they were, laura told her, mainly a record of his life as a physician and a surgeon, a record so simple that it only unconsciously revealed the man he was. george tanqueray had insisted on her publishing this first. "i hated doing it for some things," she said. "it looks too like a concession to this detestable british public. but i can't rest, jinny, till we've made him known. they'll see that he didn't shirk, that he could beat the practical men--the men they worship--at their own game, that he did something for the empire. then they'll accept the rest. there's an awful irony in it, but i'm convinced that's the way his immortality will come." "it'll come anyway," said jane. "it'll come soonest this way. they'll believe in him to-morrow, because of the things he did with his hands. his hands were wonderful. ah, jinny, how could i ever want to write again?" "what will you _do_, dear child? how will you live?" "i'll live as he did." she said it fiercely. "i'll live by journalism. it doesn't matter how i live." "there are so many things," she said, "that don't matter, after all." nicky and nina passed. "do you think," said he, "she's happy?" "who? jane? or laura?" "you can't think of laura," said nicky, gravely, "without _him_." "that's it. she isn't without him. she never will be. he has given her his certainty." "of immortality?" nicky's tone was tentative. "of the thing he saw. that _is_ immortality. of course she's happy." "but i was thinking," nicky said, "of jane." [illustration: cover art] the bible in its making the most wonderful book in the world by mildred duff and noel hope companion volume to '_where moses went to school,_' '_when moses learnt to rule,_' '_esther the queen,_' _'daniel the prophet,' and_ '_hezekiah the king._' illustrated by noel hope with sketches of the original monuments and stone pictures marshall brothers, ltd., publishers, london, edinburgh & new york _uniform with this volume_ price one shilling where moses went to school where moses learnt to rule esther the queen daniel the prophet hezekiah the king _all fully illustrated_ marshall brothers, ltd., publishers, london, edinburgh & new york foreword one great universal law runs through the realm of nature. our saviour gave it in a sentence: 'first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.' it is with the desire to show that the same law rules in another of god's creations--the bible--that this little volume has been prepared. the bible has as literally 'grown' as has an oak tree; and probably there is no more likeness between the bible as we know it to-day and its earliest beginning, than we find between the mighty tree, and the acorn from which it sprang. the subject is so vast that we have not attempted anything beyond the briefest outline. our purpose has been merely to give some idea of the origin of the bible books, up to the measure of our present light upon the subject, and also to show the purpose for which they were written. but if our readers, by seeing something of the wonder and glory of the holy scriptures, are able to catch a glimpse of the creator's mind behind the whole, our work will not have been in vain. mildred duff. contents chap. i. a living book ii. the secret of its greatness iii. moses and his writings iv. the history books v. the scattering of the people vi. the attack on the scriptures vii. two famous versions of the scriptures viii. the bible in the days of jesus christ ix. the destruction of jerusalem x. the beginning of the new testament xi. how the gospels came to be written xii. some other writers of the new testament xiii. the first bible pictures the bible in its making chapter i a living book [illustration: (drop cap t) symbol of "asshur", the principal assyrian idol.] there is only one book that never grows old. for thousands of years men have been writing books. most books are forgotten soon after they are written; a few of the best and wisest are remembered for a time. but all at last grow old; new discoveries are made; new ideas arise; the old books are out of date; their usefulness is at an end. students are the only people who still care to read them. the nations to which the authors of these first books belonged have passed away, the languages in which they were written are 'dead'--that is, they have ceased to be used in daily life in any part of the world. broken bits and torn fragments of some of the early books may be seen in the glass cases of museums. learned men pore over the fragments, and try to piece them together, to find out their meaning once again; but no one else cares much whether they mean anything or not. for the books are dead. they cannot touch the heart of any human being; they have nothing to do with the busy world of living men and women any more. now, our bible was first written in these ancient languages: is it, therefore, to be classed among the 'dead' books of the world? no, indeed. the fact alone that the word of god can be read to-day in living languages proves clearly that it is no dead book; and when we remember that last year , , new copies of the bible were sent into the busy working world for men and women by one society alone, we see how truly 'alive' it must be. nations may pass, languages die, the whole world may change, yet the bible will live on. why is this? because in the bible alone, of all the books seen on this earth, there is found a message for every man, woman, or child who has ever lived or will live while the world lasts: it is the message of god's salvation through his son jesus christ. the message is for all; for the cleverest white man, the most ignorant savage; for the black man of africa, the yellow man of china, the tawny little man who lives among the icefields of the arctic circle. it does not matter who the person is, nor where he lives; a living force exists in the bible that will help every human being who acts upon its words to become one of god's true sons and soldiers. no human wisdom can explain this. the bible tells us about christ. before christ came all teaching led up to him. he is the only safe guide for our daily life. through his death alone we have hope for the future. from the first page to the last the bible speaks of christ. this is the secret of its wondrous power. '_these are the words which i spake unto you, while i was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me._' (luke xxiv. .) although we speak of the bible as one book, because it tells one world-wide story, yet this one book is made up of many books--of a whole library of books in fact. [illustration: broken bits of clay books in the cuneiform language, belonging to the time when moses wrote the first words of genesis] go into a library, look at the well-stocked shelves. here is a volume of history, here a book of beautiful poetry, here a life of a great and noble warrior. this book was written only last year, this one appeared many years before you were born. just so is it with the books of the bible. for more than a thousand years god was calling the best and wisest men of the jewish nation to write for his book. some of the authors were rich and learned; many were humble and poor. kings wrote for it; a shepherd-boy; a captive lad who had been carried away as a slave into a strange land; a great leader; a humble fruit-gatherer; a hated tax-collector; a tent-maker; many poor fishermen. god found work for them all. there are sixty-six books in the bible, written by at least forty different authors. books on history; collections of sacred songs; lives of good men and women; stirring appeals to the sinful. god chose the men best fitted to write each part. he called them to his work; he spoke to their hearts; he put his spirit into their minds. in these days those who read god's word often forget what old, old writings the first books in the bible are, and how everything has changed since they were written. seeing the words so clearly printed on fine white paper, readers do not stop to think that they have come down to us from the days when the greatest nations in the world wrote their best books on lumps of clay, or on rough, brittle paper made from brown reeds. so these bible readers grow impatient, and because they cannot understand everything all at once, some are even foolish enough to give up reading the old testament altogether. but the things that are hard to understand are only hard because we are still so ignorant. whenever any new discovery about the ancient times has been made it has always shown us how exactly true the bible is. some years ago, just at the time when the doubts and carpings were at their worst, when those people who did not trust god even declared that many of the cities and kings mentioned in the old testament had never existed at all, a wonderful thing happened. god allowed the old cities themselves to be brought to light once more. deep under the earth they were found, with their beautiful palaces, libraries full of books, and long picture-galleries, lined from end to end with stone and marble slabs, on which were cut portraits of the very kings whose existence the people were beginning to doubt! this is how it happened. 'the bible does not describe things as they really were,' said some people. 'in old testament times, for instance, the nations were very rough and ignorant; as for moses--who is supposed to have written the first books of the bible--it is most doubtful whether he ever learned to read and write at all.' 'but moses was brought up in egypt, and the egyptians were very learned; the bible says so,' answered others. 'the man who wrote those words in the bible may have made a mistake. it is true that the ruins of old egyptian temples and palaces are covered with strange figures and signs; but who can say now whether they mean anything or not?' those who trusted in god's word could not answer these questions; but just at this time god allowed the first great discovery to be made; for the moment had at last come when all thoughtful men and women needed to be able to settle these questions for themselves. in the year a french officer who was in egypt with napoleon's army discovered the rosetta stone. you may see this stone in the british museum. it is a great block of black marble. on the smooth side, cut deeply in the stone, are a number of lines of ancient writing. many stones covered with ancient writing had been found before, but this one is different from all the rest. the lines at the top of the stone are in the strange old egyptian picture-writing, which learned men have agreed to call 'hieroglyphic'; that is, 'writing in pictures.' this was a very special kind of writing in ancient egypt, and generally kept for important occasions. the lines in the middle give the same words, but in the ordinary handwriting used for correspondence in ancient egypt; and last of all is found a translation of the egyptian words written in ancient greek. this old kind of greek is not spoken in daily life by any people to-day, but many learned men can read and write it with ease; so that, you see, by the help of the greek translation, the rosetta stone became a key for discovering the meaning of both kinds of ancient egyptian letters. thus, by the help of the rosetta stone, and after years of patient labour, the long-dead language could be read once more. egypt--the land into which joseph was sold, where the israelites became a nation, and moses was born and educated! how great a joy to read the words carved on temple walls, or in palace halls; and to find with each word read how exactly the egypt of ancient days is described in the bible! the dress the people wore, the food they ate, the way they spoke to their kings, the description of their funerals, the very name of their famous river, and the words they used to describe the plants, insects, and cattle of egypt--all these are found in the bible and are proofs of the care with which moses wrote of the land of his birth. but other nations besides the egyptians are mentioned in the bible; and about them also grave doubts arose. almost all the old testament prophets cried out against the wickedness of assyria and babylon, and foretold the awful punishment which god would bring upon them for their pride and cruelty, unless they repented. they did not repent; destruction came upon them; their very names were forgotten, and their cities as utterly lost to the world as though they had never existed. 'nineveh, babylon? there _were_ such cities once, perhaps; but as for the kings of whom the bible speaks--sennacherib, who came up against jerusalem, and was driven back through the prayers of god's servants, isaiah and king hezekiah ( kings xviii. ); nebuchadnezzar, who carried daniel away into babylon; ahasuerus, who reigned "_from india even unto ethiopia_" (esther)--well, if they ever lived at all, they were certainly not the kind of kings spoken of in the old testament. but it all happened so long ago that we cannot expect to understand much about it now.' [illustration: egyptian scribes at work. (a) cases for holding writing materials. notice spare pen placed behind the clerk's ear] so the questioners settled the matter in their own minds; but god had the answer to their questions all ready for them. he put into the hearts of some brave men the idea of going out to the desolate plains, '_empty and void, and waste_' (nahum ii. ), the plains that had once been the rich empires of assyria and babylon, and there to search patiently for some trace of the splendid cities of old. very wonderful is the story of how these searchers found them. nineveh had been lying buried under huge mounds of rubbish for more than two thousand years. now, just at the time when her testimony was needed, the ruined halls of her majestic palaces were once more brought to the light of day. what had been the names of these grim kings of old, whose stern-faced figures were sculptured on the walls? could any among them be the fierce assyrian kings mentioned in the bible? if only the strange wedge-shaped letters that covered every vacant space on the stone slabs could be read, what a message from the past they would reveal. once again clever men set to work and persevered until the strange letters were deciphered, and the palace-walls gave up their secrets. here was king sennacherib; here tiglath-pileser ( kings xv. ); here esarhaddon ( kings xix. ). oh, how wonderful to look at the old-time portraits which had been drawn from the men themselves! 'well, although the egyptians and assyrians prove to have been great nations in the time of moses, they had no communication with each other except in war time; they spoke different languages, wrote in altogether different styles, and had very different ideas about everything. nations kept to themselves in those days. what the bible says of their intercourse must be wrong.' this all the clever people were quite sure about, but once again god showed them their mistake. twenty-five years ago an egyptian peasant woman was walking among the ruins of an ancient egyptian city--a city built before the time of moses. bright yellow sand had drifted over the broken columns and painted pavements of what had once been the palace of a great king. but the peasant woman did not care for that. was there anything hidden in the sand that she could sell? this was all her thought. suddenly her foot struck against something hard in the sand. she looked down. could it be a stone? no, it was not a stone, but a queer oblong lump, or tablet of clay, hardened into a brick, and covered with strange marks that looked like writing. she wondered at it, for with all her findings in the ruins she had never come upon anything like this before. she showed the tablet to her friends, and they dug down deep in the sand, and found whole sackfuls of baked clay tablets. but when the dealer in curiosities saw the lumps of baked clay he shook his head, and would give very little money for them. after a while some of the bricks were taken to paris and london. 'these tablets could _not_ have been found in egypt,' decided the learned professors; 'they are either imitations, or they were found somewhere else. these are clay letters, and must have been written in assyria or babylonia. no egyptian could have understood a word of them.' yet the tablets had been found in egypt, and had been read by the king of egypt's scribes, for the peasant woman, had all unknowingly discovered what remained of the foreign office belonging to the old egyptian nation, and thus we see that the egyptians of moses' time could read and write foreign languages as easily as we can to-day read and write french or german! chapter ii the secret of its greatness [illustration: (drop cap g) the great pyramid] god always chooses the right kind of people to do his work. not only so, he always gives to those whom he chooses just the sort of life which will best prepare them for the work he will one day call them to do. that is why god put it into the heart of pharaoh's daughter to bring up moses as her own son in the egyptian palace. the most important part of moses' training was that his heart should be right with god, and therefore he was allowed to remain with his hebrew parents during his early years. there he learned to love and serve the one true god. without that knowledge no education can make a man or woman fit to be a blessing to the world. but after this god gave him another training. the man who should be called to write the first words of god's book would need a very special education. most likely some of the children of israel could read and write, for we know there were plenty of books and good schools in moses' time, but they certainly did not make such good scholars as the egyptians. '_and the child grew and she (his mother) brought him unto pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son._' (exodus ii. .) in those few words the bible shows us the egyptian side of moses' education. and a very thorough education it must have been, for the egyptians were the most highly cultured people in the world in those days, and we know that '_moses was learned in all the wisdom of the egyptians._' (acts vii. .) the egypt of moses' time was very different from the egypt of to-day. among all the great nations it held the first place; for the people of egypt were more clever, and rich; their gardens more beautiful, their cornfields and orchards more fruitful than those of the dwellers in any other land. again, of all the peoples in the world the egyptians were looked upon at that time as the most religious. from one end to another the land was full of temples, many of them so huge in size, and so magnificent with carvings and paintings, that even their poor ruins--the great columns shattered or fallen, the enormous walls tottering and broken--are still the wonder of the world. every great city had its schools and colleges. clever men devoted their whole lives to teaching in these colleges and to writing learned books, just as they do in the cities of europe and america to-day. these men were called 'scribes,' that is, 'writers.' moses, a boy brought up in the royal palace, would have the best and most learned scribes for his teachers. a fragment of an old egyptian book describing the duties of a lad in the scribes' school has been found. it tells how the schoolmaster wakes the boys very early in the morning. 'the books are already in the hands of thy companions,' he cries; 'put on thy garments, call for thy sandals.' if the lad does not make haste he is severely punished; if he is not attentive in school the master speaks to him very seriously indeed. 'let thy mouth read the book in thy hand, and take advice from those who know more than thou dost!' he has to write many copies, and as he gets he learns to compose business letters to his master; before he is fourteen he is most likely a clerk in a government office, and must continue his studies at the same time. the letters and copies of a schoolboy who lived three thousand years ago have been discovered. how many bad marks did his teacher give him, do you think, when he had to correct that carelessly written capital? [illustration: schoolboy's copy from ancient egypt. notice the teacher's corrections] so great a respect had the egyptians for writing that they used to say, 'the great god thoth invented letters; no human being could have given anything so wonderful and useful to the world.' arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, drawing, an egyptian lad was supposed to study all these, and as we have seen, those lads who were trained for work in the foreign office had to learn other languages as well; they had also to read and write 'cuneiform'--the name given to the strange wedge-shaped letters of assyria and babylonia. all the letters from the people of canaan to the egyptian king and his foreign office were written in cuneiform. chinese is supposed to be the most difficult language to learn in our day; but the ancient cuneiform was certainly quite as complicated as chinese. the cuneiform had no real alphabet, only 'signs.' there were five hundred simple signs, and nearly as many compound signs, so that the student had to begin with a thousand different signs to memorize. yes, boys had their troubles even in those days. now, as moses grew older and learned more, he must often have felt very thoughtful and sad. so many books, so many ideas, so many stories of cruel gods and evil spirits--where was the truth to be found? no one seemed to remember the one true god, the god of his fathers, abraham, isaac, and jacob. very likely a babylonian book written in cuneiform, and pretending to describe the creation of the world, and the story of the ark and the great flood found its way into egypt. many copies of this book existed in moses' day; part of a later copy was found a short time ago in the ruins of the library of a great assyrian king, and is now to be seen in the british museum. a strange book it is. the words were not written, remember, but pricked down on a large flat tablet of clay. if moses read such a book as this, it must have troubled and puzzled him very much. for it is a heathen book, in which the beautiful clear story of the creation of the world is all darkened and spoilt. the babylonian who wrote the book, and the assyrians who copied it, were all descended from noah, and therefore some dim remembrance of god's dealings with the world still lingered in their hearts; but as the time passed they had grown farther from the truth. that is why the oldest copies of these books are always the best; the heathen had not had time to separate themselves so completely from god. 'in the old, old days,' they said, 'there were not so many gods as there are now'; and some of the most learned heathen even believed that in the beginning there was but one god. 'afterwards many others sprang up,' they declared. '_in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth._' (genesis i. .) oh, how far the nations had wandered already from the greatest, deepest truth which the world can know! how sad to think that horrible nightmare stories of evil spirits and cruel gods should have come between men's souls and the loving father and creator of all! yes; it was time, indeed, that the first words of the bible should be written, and that a stream of pure truth should begin to flow through the world. but moses had much to do for god before he could write one word of his part of the bible. we know how his life of learning and splendour came to a sudden end; he fled from egypt, and became a shepherd in the land of midian; and there in midian god called him to the great work of leading the children of israel out of egypt towards the promised land. terrible troubles had come upon god's people in the land of goshen.[ ] for the most selfish and cruel pharaoh who ever reigned over egypt had determined to treat the people who had come to live in egypt, at the invitation of a former pharaoh, just as though they were captives taken in battle. many of the old ruins in egypt are covered with writings describing his cruelties. he killed all who rebelled against him, and condemned whole nations to wear out their lives by working for him in the gold mines, or granite quarries, or by making endless stores of bricks; he cared for no man's life if only he could be called the richest king in the world. '_and they built for pharaoh treasure cities, pithom and raamses,_' (exodus i. ) that is, store-cities. in egypt many store-cities were needed because corn was more plentiful there than in any other country. 'pithom--where was pithom?' so people were asking a few years ago, and because there was no answer to that question they began to doubt. had there ever been such a city? but in the year the earth gave up another of its secrets--the ruins of pithom were found, buried deep in the dust; and the remains of great store-houses built of rough bricks, mixed with chopped straw (exodus v.) and stamped with the name of the cruel pharaoh (ramesis the second) were laid bare once more.[ ] what a pity some readers had not waited a little longer before doubting the truth of the bible! '_and the lord said unto moses, write thou these words._' (exodus xxxiv. .) so it was at last that god called moses to begin the great work of writing the bible, just as he had called him to lead the people out of egypt; just as by his spirit he calls men and women to do his work to-day. how did moses write the first words of the bible? what kind of letters and what language did he use? these are great questions. we know at least that he could have his choice between two or three different kinds of letters and materials. perhaps he wrote the first words of the bible on rolls of papyrus paper with a soft reed pen, in the manner of the egyptian scribes. hundreds of these rolls have been found in egypt: poems, histories, novels, hymns to the egyptian gods; and some of these writings are at least as old as the time of moses. the egyptian climate is so fine and dry, and the egyptians stored the rolls so carefully in the tombs of their kings, that the fragile papyrus--that is, reed-paper--has not rotted away, as would have been the case in any other country. certainly in after years the jews used the same shaped books as the egyptians. indeed, the jews' bible--that is, the old testament--was still called '_a roll of a book_' in the days of jeremiah. (jeremiah xxxvi. .) or perhaps moses wrote on tablets of clay like those used by the great empires of babylon and assyria, and by the people of canaan. clay was cheap enough; all one had to do was to mould moist clay into a smooth tablet, and then to prick words on it with a metal pen. the prophet jeremiah mentions this kind of book also. (jeremiah xvii. .) most likely, however, moses wrote on parchment made from the skins of sheep and goats. the children of israel kept large flocks, and could supply him with as many skins as he wanted. and in what language did he write? perhaps even the very first words were written in hebrew; we know that in later times the prophets and historians of the jews wrote in hebrew. but we must remember that languages alter as years pass on. the hebrew of moses' time could only have been an ancient kind of hebrew, very different from the hebrew of to-day. does this surprise you? why, you and i could hardly read one word of the english written in england even a thousand years ago! about the middle of the last century a german missionary found a large carved stone in that part of palestine which used to be called moab. this wonderful stone, which is black and shaped something like a tombstone, is covered with writing. it is called 'the moabite stone,' and was set up by mesha, king of moab. ( kings iii. .) the writing on it is neither egyptian nor cuneiform, but a very ancient kind of hebrew. [illustration: first words of kin mesha's writing on the moabite stone. moses most likely used letters like these] of course, this does not take us back actually to the days of moses, but still it is so old that moses may well have used the same kind of writing. we have seen that most nations in those old times had their books, and we know that each nation had always one book that it valued more than the rest. this was the book that told the people about their religion, and the gods in whom they believed. in most of these books some grains of truth were found. all the nations of the world are but one great family, you know, and even the most ignorant people were not without some knowledge. the heathen nations of moses' time therefore remembered dimly some of god's dealings with the world; they were so blinded by their heathen worship, that no atom of fresh light could reach them, and little by little they drifted further into the darkness. but, though tiny fragments of truth are to be found in their books, not one word is to be traced in any book of the most precious truth of all until god revealed it to his servant moses. this makes our bible so wonderful and different from all other books: it is a revelation--that is, something which comes to us from god and which we could never have known without his help. from first to last the bible is written to teach us about christ. throughout the whole of the old testament christ is referred to as the coming saviour, or messiah, which you know, is the hebrew word for christ. christ is to bruise the serpent's head. (genesis iii. .) in him all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. (genesis xxii. .) he is the star that shall come out of jacob. (numbers xxiv. .) when the lamb of the passover was killed, and the people taught they could only escape from death through the sprinkled blood, this was a type or picture of salvation through the blood of jesus. when at last the saviour came, the jews rejected him and would not accept him as the messiah. then he said to them: '_had ye believed moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me._' (john v. .) [ ] the egyptians spelt 'goshen' 'kosem.' an old writing says, 'the country is not cultivated, but left as a pasture for cattle because of the stranger.' [ ] some of these bricks are in the british museum. chapter iii moses and his writings [illustration: (drop cap w) clay letter tablet of moses' time.] we now begin to understand a little of the very beginning of god's book--of the times in which it was written, the materials used by its first author, and the different kinds of writing from which he had to choose; but we must go a step farther. how much did moses know about the history of his forefathers, abraham and jacob, and of all the old nations and kings mentioned in genesis, before god called him to the great work of writing his part of the bible? we believe that he knew a great deal about them all. most thoughtful young people like to read right through their bibles, and perhaps you have been perplexed to find that many parts of the old testament are both puzzling and dry. of what use, then, can these chapters be? you have perhaps asked yourself. is it not all god's book? but you must not let this trouble you. every passage, every verse has its special place and object. not a line of god's book could be taken away without serious loss to the whole. 'what, all those long lists of the queer names of people we never hear of again?' asks some one. 'why, i dread those chapters. i once had to read genesis x. aloud, and i shall never forget it!' those who feel like this will be surprised to know that many of the most learned men of our own days are giving much time and thought to the careful and patient study of this very list of names; and the more carefully they study it, the fuller and wider does the subject become. '_babel, and erech, and accad, and calneh, in the land of shinar._' (genesis x. .) the ruins of all these great cities and kingdoms have now been found. they were old before moses was born; indeed, they were so old that their names were only to be found in ancient books; even the very language spoken by some of these nations had been forgotten by all save the learned scribes of babylonia and assyria. and yet we find these names accurately given in genesis; had they been missing from its pages, the bible would give us no true idea of the beginnings of history. remember this when next you are tempted to feel impatient at the awkward syllables. again, in genesis xiv. we read the names of the kings who governed nine nations in the time of abraham, and of how they fought together '_four kings with five_' (verse ) three hundred years before moses was born. until a very few years ago the bible was the only book that told us about these ancient kings and kingdoms. and people said, 'the man who wrote that chapter did not really know anything; he just collected a pack of old stories that had been repeated over and over again with so many exaggerations and alterations that at last there was scarcely a word of truth left in them.' since this foolish conclusion was arrived at many new discoveries have been made, the broken fragments of old tablets have been pieced together and read, and the names of all the nine kings brought to light once more. certain it is that moses, with the help of the writings which we now know must have existed in his time, would have but little difficulty in writing those parts of genesis which tell us the history of some of the most ancient nations of the world. for when god gives a man some work to do, he always helps him to do it. to those who really trust him, and have patience to work on, the help they need always comes, the difficult path is made smooth. this has been the experience of god's servants in all times. [illustration: portrait and writing of amraphel, king of shinar, in abraham's time] many letters and books belonging to the reign of '_amraphel_[ ] _king of shinar_' (genesis xiv. ) have lately been found. he was one of the wisest heathen kings who ever lived, and the writings of his times are very interesting, because they bring us quite back to the days of abraham. amraphel kept written records describing the splendid temples he built, and a great embankment which he made to keep the river tigris from flooding his people's cornfields; but the wisest thing he did was to collect and write out a long list of all the laws by which he governed the land of shinar. thus he worked in very much the same kind of way for shinar that our own king alfred did, thousands of years later, for england. this list of laws was found in . they are engraved on a great block of black marble, and are so numerous that they would fill pages of our bible. they are wise and just as far as they go. there is a great deal about buying and selling in them, and the lawful way of conducting different kinds of business; but they are wholly different from those wonderful commandments which god gave to the children of israel three hundred years later. for shinar's laws were the heathen laws of a heathen king; in them there is no word of god; no word even of the heathen gods in which amraphel believed. '_thou shalt love the lord thy god ... and thy neighbour as thyself._' (luke x. .) in these words jesus christ gives to us the true meaning of the commandments which moses wrote down in our bible. again, until quite lately many people were certain that there could never have been a king like melchizedek, the king of salem, who came and blessed abraham, and of whom we read in genesis xiv. and also in hebrews vii. but among the letters found in the foreign office of the king of egypt, is one from the king of salem. not from melchizedek, but from another king of salem, who describes himself in these words: '_i was set in my place neither by father nor mother, but by the mighty king_'--meaning 'by god.' read what is said about melchizedek in hebrews vii. these words show us that all the kings of salem believed that they owed everything to god. this is why abraham honoured melchizedek so highly. '_salem_--that is, peace. '_jeru-salem_' means city of peace. so, as we see from these ancient letters, jerusalem was called the city of peace even in the days of abraham. all these old records and many more moses must surely have seen; the cities of canaan were as full of books as were those of egypt and babylonia, for the name '_kirjath-sepher_' (joshua xv. ) means 'city of books.' thus, as year by year new discoveries are made, we realize more clearly the kind of preparation which moses had for his great work, and the sources from which he gathered much of his information. yet no single word of the bible is copied from the heathen writings. no; just as a man who decides to give his whole life to god to-day uses, in the lord's service, the knowledge he gained before he was converted; so, after god called moses to his great work, all the learning and wide knowledge he had gathered during his life were dedicated to the service of god, and used by his holy spirit. we do not know--we are nowhere told--whether moses wrote every word of the 'books of the law.' the jews believed that every letter, every tiniest dot was his. it may well have been so, as we have seen. but, again, he may very likely have had helpers and editors; that is, people who arranged and copied his original writings. but the children of israel always called the first five books of the bible 'the torah'; that is, 'the law'; and they looked upon these as their most precious possession, something quite above and apart from every other writing--jehovah's direct words and commandments to his people. at last the life-work of moses was done, and joshua took his place, called by god to lead the people forward. but the new leader found himself at once in a very different position. when moses brought the children of israel out of egypt they were without a bible. but in joshua's days the light had begun to shine, the river of the knowledge of god to flow, and god was able, therefore, to say to his servant joshua: '_this book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shall meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shall make thy way prosperous, and then thou shall have good success._' (joshua i. .) we are not told who was called by god to write the book of joshua; we think that joshua wrote at least a part of it himself, but we all know that it describes how the israelites came at last into the promised land, and drove out the wicked idol-worshippers. buried deep in the earth the remains of many old canaanite cities have been found. those of lachish, the great amorite city, are specially interesting. we know how the children of israel dreaded the amorite cities. '_great and walled up to heaven_' (deuteronomy i. ), as the people said. yet, in spite of their great strength, joshua took them one by one, overthrew them, and afterwards built the jewish towns upon their ruins. this was the custom of conquerors with all these ancient cities, as the excavators find to-day. now, in the remains of lachish we can see its whole history. three distinct cities have been found, one below the other. deepest down of all, full sixty feet underground, are the enormous walls of the amorite city; great masses of rough brick forming huge walls at least twenty-eight feet wide. no wonder the children of israel, felt doubtful of victory! above the amorite walls are the scattered fragments of rough mud-huts and cattle shelters. the israelites had no time to build anything better until canaan was conquered. above these again stand the ruined walls of a later jewish city, lachish, as it was in the days of solomon and the jewish kings. a fair city it must have been, built of white stone, the capitals of some of the columns carved to resemble a ram's horn, perhaps to remind the people of the horns of the altar in the tabernacle. but the walls of the jewish lachish have none of the massive strength of the ancient amorite city. had we space we might pause over many of the other ancient canaanitish cities, for the subject is of absorbing interest, but perhaps we may return to it in a later volume. joshua, like all god's true servants past and present, made full use of the precious book, and, '_there was not a word of all that moses commanded, which joshua read not before all the congregation of israel, with the women, and the little ones, and the strangers._' (joshua viii. .) before he died he spoke to the people very sorrowfully about their sins. many of them, in spite of god's commandments and his favour and love, had begun to serve the false gods of canaan. the people repented at the old leader's earnest words, and they cried, '_the lord our god will we serve, and his voice will we obey._' (joshua xxiv. .) joshua made them promise to be steadfast. '_and joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of god._' (verse .) from this we see that joshua wrote a part, at least, of the book that is called by his name. people have often thought it strange that the children of israel should again and again break god's clear command, '_thou shall have no other gods before me._' (exodus xx. .) how could they have been so foolish as to care for false gods when the living god had done so much for them? it is the old story. a man who has once given way to drunkenness is not safe unless he puts strong drink out of his life for ever. if he even touches it he is liable to fall back again into its power. so it was with the children of israel. the worship of false gods had been the terrible sin of their wilderness wanderings, and now to serve the gods of canaan became their strongest temptation. the temples were so strange, so beautiful, the gods themselves so mysterious, and then all was so easy, so pleasant! no stern self-denial was needed; there were no difficult laws to keep; no holiness was asked for. drinking, feasting, and all kinds of self-indulgence were part of the worship of baal, and those who served ashtaroth, the goddess of beauty, might spend their whole lives in wicked and degrading pleasures. [illustration: ancient figure of ashtaroth, the wicked idol-goddess of canaan] the backsliders of israel found it only too easy to give up the struggle for right, and to sink down into the horrible wickedness of the heathen tribes around them. many people to-day are asking how a god of love and mercy could bid the israelites utterly to destroy the cities of canaan, and to kill their inhabitants, but the more we discover of these ancient tribes, the more hopelessly depraved do we find them to have been. for centuries god had been waiting in patience; the warning he had given to them through sodom's swift destruction had been unheeded; now at last the cup of their iniquity was full (genesis xv. ) and the israelites were to be his means of ridding the world of this plague spot. in the book of judges we see how each time his people disobeyed his command and copied the sins they were called to sweep away, god punished them by letting their merciless neighbours rule over them, till they loathed the bondage and turned once more to the living god. had israel absorbed the vices of these nations instead of destroying them, try to think what the world would have lost! the one channel through which god was giving his book to man would have become so choked and polluted with vice that in its turn it also would have become a source of infection and not of health. [ ] this king's name is also spelt hammurabi. chapter iv the history books [illustration: (drop cap t) assyrian idol-god] thus little by little the book of god grew, and the people he had chosen to be its guardians took their place among the nations. a small place it was from one point of view! a narrow strip of land, but unique in its position as one of the highways of the world, on which a few tribes were banded together. all around great empires watched them with eager eyes; the powerful kings of assyria, egypt, and babylonia, the learned greeks, and, in later times, the warlike romans. how small and unimportant the israelites appeared to the world then! yet we know that in reality they were greater than any people the world had ever seen. god's words have been fulfilled; through the children of israel all the nations of the world are blessed. the old empires have crumbled into dust; the great conquerors of ancient days are forgotten; few people to-day remember the names of the wise men of greece and rome, but our lives and thoughts are daily influenced by the thoughts, words, and deeds of the jews of old. abraham, jacob, moses, samuel, david, elijah--their very names are nearer and dearer to us than those of the heroes of our own land. when queen victoria was asked the secret of england's greatness, she held up a bible. their sacred book was all that the jews possessed. their whole greatness was wrapped up in it. as the heathen truly said, they were 'the people of the book.' and now let us glance at the history books of the bible. the first and second books of samuel have been put together from several other records. most likely samuel himself did part of the work. in shiloh, where he was educated, the old documents were kept, and samuel, the gifted lad, who so early gave his heart to god, was in every way fitted to write the story of the lord's chosen people during his own life-time. the bible mentions several other histories that were written in these days besides those which we know. '_now the acts of david the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of samuel the seer, and in the book of nathan the prophet, and in the book of gad the seer._' (these last have disappeared.) ( chronicles xxix. .) stores of books were being gathered. when, for instance, saul was chosen king, samuel '_wrote in a book and laid it up before the lord._' ( samuel x. .) these books were most likely written on a rough kind of parchment, made from the skins of goats, sewn together, and rolled up into thick rolls. the books of samuel are very precious to us, for in them we read nearly all we know of the history of david the shepherd-king. some of david's own writings are found in these books, but for most of them we have to turn to the book of the psalms, which was the manual of the temple choir, and became the national collection of sacred poems. these psalms were composed by different authors, and at different times, chiefly for use in the temple, but the collection was founded by david, and he contributed many of its most beautiful hymns. david's boyhood was spent among the rugged hills and valleys of bethlehem. as we read his psalms we feel that the writer has passed long hours alone with god, and the beautiful things which god has made. let us watch him for a moment. it is evening, and the young lad is alone on the hills, keeping his father's sheep. the sun is sinking, and all the earth is bathed in golden light. even the sullen surface of the dead sea reflects the glory, and the hills of moab glow as though on fire. 'god is the creator of all this beauty,' thinks david. 'yes, bright as is that golden sky, his glory is _above the heavens_.' (psalm viii. .) now the sun has quite gone; night's dark curtain draws across the world, the rosy glow fades from the hills. one by one the great white stars shine out, and presently the moon rises. the young lad raises his face, and gazes upward. '_when i consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained_' (psalm viii. ) he murmurs; 'how great is this mighty god, how far beyond all the thoughts and ways of men! _what is man, that thou art mindful of him?_' (verse .) but god loves us even though we are lower than the angels. he has crowned us with glory and honour. he has given all his beautiful world, and all the wonderful things he has made, into our hands. '_o lord_ (verse ) _our lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth._' (verse .) in psalm xxix. david gives a word picture of a thunderstorm. he describes the furious blast, the crashing thunder, the vivid lightning. many times as a young lad he had watched the black storm-clouds gather over the hills and valleys of bethlehem. he had no fear of the tempest. god's voice was in the wind; god's voice divided the lightning-flashes; god's voice shook the wilderness. yes, god would make his people strong, even as the storm was strong. and when the storm had passed, and the sun shone out once more over the quiet hills, how clearly the words rose in david's mind, '_the lord will bless his people with peace!_' (verse .) solomon, david's son, was the wisest king of ancient times. he wrote many books, but only small fragments of them are found in the bible; a few psalms, solomon's song, and a collection proverbs. [illustration: sennacherib, king of assyria. from the assyrian picture of the taking of lachish. ( kings xviii.)] for much of solomon's wisdom was of the earthly sort. he stood first among all the learned men of his day. he would now be called a 'scientific' man. but all science which is limited to mere human wisdom grows quickly out of date. the cleverest men of to-day will be thought very ignorant in a few years. whereas david's writings live. his love for god, and his faith in god, made him able to write those words of trust and hope and praise which are as sweet and fresh to-day as when they were written, and which go right home to our hearts. how many cold hearts have not david's psalms warmed into life, how many wounded spirits have they not comforted! there is not a grief or anxiety in our lives to-day that could not be met and softened by the words of the jewish writer of long ago. yes, the work done for god and inspired by his spirit never grows old. and now, as we open the books of the kings, the great empires of the days of old, of assyria, babylonia, egypt, persia, seem to start into vivid life once more. how strong they were--how terrible! what defence had the little kingdom of judah against such overwhelming power, such mighty armies, such merciless rulers? she had the best defence of all--god's holy promises chronicled in his book. while her people loved and served their god they would be safe. but, alas! they soon forgot to read and obey his book, and neither loved nor served him any more. then came sorrow and trouble exactly as moses had foretold. cities were sacked, and many hundreds of people led away into slavery; yet, until the days of hezekiah, no one tried to understand the reason for all this. king hezekiah understood and trembled; he prayed earnestly that god would pardon the nation's sin, and when the book of the law was lying forgotten in the temple he had it brought out and read before him. ( chronicles xxxiv. - .) under his direction the proverbs of solomon were collected and copied (proverbs xxv. i), and the psalms of david sung in the temple once again. the wonderful story of the king of assyria's campaign against jerusalem, followed shortly after by the defence of the holy city by god himself in answer to hezekiah's prayer, can be read at length in the story of 'hezekiah the king.'[ ] although sennacherib of assyria was one of the mightiest rulers the world has ever seen, he was utterly discomfited when he set his power against the will of god. the books of kings and chronicles give us, as it were, the history of a nation from god's point of view. the writers' names are not even known. but in these books we are shown clearly that god rules over the nations, and is working his purpose out through his chosen instruments, year by year. it is in vain for a man to strive against god, or for a nation to hope for prosperity while it forsakes the law of the lord. no other history has ever attempted to show us the deep truths and perfect order which lie behind apparent confusion in the story of a nation. with the history books of the bible, the books of the prophets are closely interwoven. throughout kings and chronicles we catch many glimpses of the prophets and of their noble efforts to keep alive god's words in the hearts of the people; but in the writings of the prophets themselves we may read the actual messages which god's messengers proclaimed in order to stir up their hearers in times of national distress or heart-backsliding. god's indignation against hypocrites and oppressors is declared in words that cannot be passed over; but ever as the clouds of trouble gather more thickly over his people is the hope of a coming saviour more clearly put before them. for a real understanding of the prophets' books it is necessary to know something of the circumstances under which each man lived and wrote. amos and hosea, for instance, warned their people of the approach of sargon of assyria unless they repented and turned again to the law of the lord. as they did not repent the prophets' warning came true, and sargon invaded and destroyed the kingdom of israel. but nahum brings comfort, for he tells the suffering kingdoms of judah and israel that the kings of assyria shall so disappear that in the years to come the very place where they dwelt shall be forgotten, while judah shall keep the lord's feasts for ever. (nahum i. .) the bible tells of many of god's acts which seem very wonderful to us. we call these acts 'miracles,' because we cannot explain them, nor how they happened. now the writings of isaiah, jeremiah, ezekiel, and the rest of the prophets are also miracles, for although these men wrote at widely different times, and hundreds of years before the birth of christ, yet their books all speak of him. the light of god's spirit shone into their hearts so that they foresaw and foretold the coming of the saviour king. terrible troubles would overwhelm the jews; but, even though the wall of jerusalem should be broken down, the city laid waste, and the inhabitants led away captive, god's words were sure. he would visit his people at last. he would redeem them from their sins. the troubles came, the prophets' eyes streamed with tears, and their hearts were torn with grief as they saw their land wasted by the heathen. yet they did not despair. the dark night of sorrow would wear away at last, god's people should be brought back, jerusalem rebuilt; her king would come, the sun of righteousness arise, '_and his name shall be called wonderful, counsellor, the mighty god, the everlasting father, the prince of peace._' (isaiah ix. .) [ ] a companion volume to this book. chapter v the scattering of the people [illustration: (drop cap a) the fish-god of assyria and babylonia] at last the full punishment for their many sins fell upon god's chosen people. the words of warning written in the fifth book of moses had told them plainly that if they turned aside and worshipped the wicked idol-gods of canaan, the lord would take their country from them and drive them out into strange lands. yet again and again they had yielded to temptation. and now the day of reckoning had come. nebuchadnezzar, the great king of babylon, sent his armies into the holy land. no nation at this time could resist nebuchadnezzar; even the fierce assyrians had to bow before him, for he was one of the most powerful kings the world has ever seen. yet even nebuchadnezzar was but an instrument in the hands of god, as daniel recognized when he said: '_thou, o king, art a king of kings: for the god of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory._' (daniel ii. .) this thought had been daniel's comfort and stay, though he had been carried into the great heathen land far from jerusalem, his beloved and holy city. but to those jews who had no trust in god to uphold them, the sorrow was almost greater than they could bear. for nebuchadnezzar broke down the wall of jerusalem, and led many thousands of her people away to be his slaves in babylon. 'we have taken their treasure of gold and silver; we have laid their city wall in ruins; their temple is bare and deserted; their gardens of lilies and spices are choked with weeds; their fields are unsown; their vineyards untended; the best men and women of the land are serving us in babylon. now, at last, there is an end of this proud jewish nation, for all that they most valued is in our hands.' so said the heathen babylonians, mocking the poor captives. how little they dreamt that the jews' most precious possession was with them still! more valued than jewels or gold, sweeter than the milk and honey of their own land, was the book of the law--the book which told them all they knew of god. indeed, not until the people were forced to live in a heathen city did they really learn to understand how great a treasure their nation possessed in the written words of god. but in babylon, with its huge heathen temples blazing with jewels and gold, its scores of cunning idol-priests, who deceived the people by pretending to tell fortunes and make charms, and its countless images, here, at last, god's chosen people began to see the greatness of the gift with which the lord had blessed them, when he gave them the words which have now become the first books of our bible. nebuchadnezzar might break down the wall of their city, he could not break down the spiritual wall which god himself had built round his people. scattered through many lands, forced to serve heathen masters as they were, the book of god's law was a living gift which bound the jewish people together. as we have seen, the psalms were written by different writers, and one of the later psalms, the th, gives us a vivid picture of those sad days: '_by the rivers of babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered zion._' (verse .) babylon was famous for its great rivers; and the poor captives watched the flowing water, and the great wind-swept beds of reeds and giant rushes. '_we hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof._' (verse .) [illustration: 'led away captive.'--assyrian picture of the inhabitants from a conquered city being led away into slavery] but their babylonian masters had heard of the sweet psalms of the lord's people. 'sing to us,' they said; 'sing us a merry song. _sing us one of the songs of zion._' (verse .) 'sing to these cruel heathen who have wasted our country, and carried us away into slavery! sing one of the holy songs of israel, the songs which king david wrote, that they may laugh and mock at us! _how shall we sing the lord's song in a strange land?_' (verse .) no, they could not sing; their hearts were breaking with grief. never, never could they forget the holy city. ruined, desolate as it lay, jerusalem was still to them the place most loved in all the world. and yet, even in far-off heathen babylon the lord called men to add to his book. the book of daniel has troubled many people greatly. it was not history at all, some critics said, but a mere collection of myths and legends. but year by year, as fresh discoveries are made, we see ever more clearly that it would have been better to trust the old bible words after all. 'there never was a ruler over babylon named belshazzar' so these people said; 'the last babylonian king was nabonides.' a few years ago, however, belshazzar's name was found on an old cuneiform tablet. nabonides had been crowned king, but he seldom took any part in the affairs of the empire. all that he left to his eldest son, belshazzar, who seems to have acted as king in his father's stead. almost daily further discoveries are being made, all proving the accuracy of daniel's writings. what is probably the floor of the very dining-hall in which the hand-writing appeared has recently been uncovered. cyrus,[ ] of whom ezra speaks in the first chapter of his book, was a very different king from nebuchadnezzar. nebuchadnezzar loved to pull down and destroy nations; but the great wish of cyrus was to build up and restore. the cuneiform writings of the old babylonian and assyrian kings consist mostly of long lists of the nations they led away into slavery and the towns they burnt with fire; but the inscriptions made by cyrus, the persian king, speak of the people he sent back to their homes. 'all their people i collected, and restored their habitations.'[ ] and among these people, as the bible tells us, were the jews of jerusalem. many and great were the difficulties before them; but led, during the reign of artaxerxes, by ezra and nehemiah, they faced their troubles bravely, until at last the wall of jerusalem was rebuilt, and the city restored to something of its old beauty. what a time of joy and triumph! hardly could the jews believe that they were in their own dear city once again. psalm cxxvi. describes this wonderful day. '_when the lord turned again the captivity of zion, we were like them that dream. then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, the lord hath done great things for them._' (verses , .) 'we have sinned against the lord, we have been untrue to our promises; but never again will we neglect his book, nor forget his law.' '_and all the people gathered themselves together as one man...; and they spake unto ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of moses, which the lord had commanded to israel._' (nehemiah viii. .) a solemn day that was, as we read in the book of nehemiah, a day of real returning to the lord. picture them standing there, those men and women and little children of jerusalem; their faces would be worn with toil and hardship. on a raised platform of wood stood ezra ready with the rolls of the books of the law, and beside him were the interpreters. for the people had been so long in a strange land that scarcely any of them could speak hebrew; that is, the old hebrew language in which king david wrote. if the law of god was to be impressed afresh on the nation's heart that day, the scribes, the writers and the teachers must translate it into the language of their heathen conquerors. '_so they read in the book of the law of god distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading._' (nehemiah viii. .) since those days of ezra, the bible has been translated into nearly every known language. it is most interesting, therefore, to read in the bible itself about what was most likely the very first translation of all--and this not a _written_ translation, remember. now when the people heard the words of god's book they were very sad; for now at last they understood how deeply they had sinned against him. they had been proud of their bible, and had rightly felt it to be a great treasure; but now they saw that the words of the bible must be shown forth in the lives of those who believe. to honour god's book is not enough; we must obey it. the jewish people did not again learn to speak the old language of their nation. yet all the copies of the books of the law, and the books of the prophets, the psalms, and those writings which tell of the history of the lord's people--that is, the whole of the old testament--were still written in the ancient tongue. so it came to pass, after a while, that the bible could only be read by the learned people; for the words in which the law of god was given had become a 'dead language'--that is, a language that had ceased to be used in daily life at all. before the death of ezra and nehemiah, or else very soon after, the scribes of jerusalem--that is, the writers and teachers--began to devote themselves almost entirely to the studying and copying of the bible. a young lad of those days who became a pupil in the school of the scribes at jerusalem would have to begin by learning the old testament almost by heart. to read an old hebrew writing correctly was almost impossible, unless you had heard it read two or three times, and knew pretty well what was coming. for the ancient hebrew alphabet consisted entirely of consonants; there were actually _no_ vowels! the little dots you see in the specimen of hebrew given on this page are called 'vowel-points,' and are a guide to the sound of the word; but in the old, old days of which we are speaking, these dots had not been invented. the reader had nothing but consonants before him, and was obliged to guess the rest. just think of it! suppose we followed this rule in english, and you came to the word, 'tp,' you would be puzzled indeed to know whether tap, tip, or top was meant! but the jewish scribes had wonderful memories. a teacher would read a long passage from the psalms to his pupil, and very soon the lad would be able to repeat the whole correctly, the consonant words just refreshing his memory. [illustration: the first line of the bible in hebrew] this would not always be as difficult as you might suppose. for instance, you can read this easily enough: 'th lrd s m shphrd shll nt wnt.' indeed, to this day the hebrew of the sacred books in the jewish synagogues is all written without vowel-points. at this time it was that the jews became really the 'people of the book,' and that a special society was formed to guard and copy the bible. how wonderfully this work was done! never have the words of any other book been so lovingly cared for. we have called the bible the oldest book in the world; we have seen that it tells about nations and people who were almost forgotten before the days of abraham. it seems strange, therefore, that the most ancient copy of the old testament scriptures, written in hebrew and in the possession of the jews to-day, carries us back only to the time of our saxon kings.[ ] this is because the jews' custom is reverently to destroy every copy of the books of the old testament--that is, of their bible--as soon as it becomes worn with use, or blurred with the kisses of its readers. 'this is a living book,' they say; 'it should look new. god's word can never grow old.' so, year by year, they make new copies directly the old are worn out, and this they have done for long ages. and so careful have they been in making the copies, that although all was written by hand, there has practically been no alteration in the words for more than two thousand years. god had indeed well chosen the guardians of his book. let us try to picture to ourselves a young scribe of those old, old days, with his dark hair and big, serious eyes, and dressed in his white robe. he has been very patient and industrious for many months past, working early and late; now, at last, he is to be allowed to copy one of the sacred books. 'my son,' his old teacher has said, 'take heed how thou doest thy work; drop not nor add one letter, lest thou becomest the destruction of the world.' 'oh, may the lord keep my attention fixed, may he hold my hand that it shake not!' so, with a prayer on his lips, the young scribe begins his work. and it is through such patient, careful work as his that the older part of our bible has come down to us from the half-forgotten ages of the past. [ ] cyrus became king of persia b.c., conquered babylon , died b.c. [ ] cuneiform writing made by order of cyrus. [ ] the codex babylonicus, the earliest known jewish manuscript, dates from the year a.d. . chapter vi the attack on the scriptures [illustration: (drop cap b) a greek warrior] but troubled times came again to jerusalem. the great empires of babylon and assyria had passed away for ever, exactly as the prophets of israel had foretold; but new powers had arisen in the world, and the great nations fought together so constantly that all the smaller countries, and with them the kingdom of judah, changed hands very often. at last alexander the great managed to make himself master of all the countries of the then-known world. alexander was an even greater conqueror than nebuchadnezzar had been. he did not treat the jews unkindly; he neither interfered with their religion nor took treasure from their temple. yet while alexander did god's people no outward injury, his influence and example led them astray. for alexander was a greek, and the greeks, although at this time the cleverest people in the whole world, were a heathen nation, and as such did many foolish and wicked things. alexander himself offered sacrifice to venus, jupiter, and bacchus (the pretended god of wine and strong drink[ ]), and to many other gods of man's invention. never again would god's chosen people willingly worship false gods; their troubles had cured them once for all of that sin. but although they knew the greek religion to be untrue, they began greatly to admire the greeks themselves, and to take their opinion about many things. 'who can build like these greeks?' they will have said. 'who can carve such beautiful statues, or paint such beautiful pictures? every one knows that their poetry is the finest in the world, and that their books are the wisest and pleasantest to read; and then, how well they train their young people! the lads of greece are the strongest wrestlers and the swiftest runners in the world!' all this was quite true; but the jews forgot that mere cleverness does not make a man or woman good, and that the fear of god is the beginning of all true wisdom. many people forget this even to-day. so the jews began to give their children greek names, and to send them to greek schools, and, what was worse, they put greek books into their hands instead of the bible. slowly but surely this unholy 'leaven' entered the people's life, and influenced their thoughts. but, in spite of all, many jewish men and women remained faithful to god; they kept his laws, and read in his book daily, looking always for the coming saviour, the messiah, who would rule and redeem his people. as the years passed the fashion for greek ideas and ways grew stronger in jerusalem, until at last even the high priest himself[ ] began to encourage the people to neglect the services and sacrifices of the temple, that they might go to heathen sports and games. the greeks were very fond of foot-races and wrestling-matches, and they held large athletic meetings two or three times a year; but no one who believed in god should have gone near those meetings, for the grecian games were always held in honour of some heathen god or goddess. [illustration: fig. .--coin of alexander the great, with portrait of himself and figure of jupiter, the false god he worshipped. fig. .--coin of antiochus, the wicked king. portrait of himself, and figure of venus, one of the false gods he tried to force the jews to believe in] when alexander died he left his vast empire to be divided among his generals, just as napoleon did centuries later with his conquests. the descendant of one of these generals was named antiochus, and he began to reign over syria, which included the country of judah, a hundred and seventy years before the birth of christ. he was known as antiochus iv, and was a selfish and cruel ruler. although indifferent to his own heathen religion, he set himself to destroy all other forms of faith. 'i am king; all my subjects shall think as i do,' he said. he was told that the jews believed in only one god, but he cried with a scornful laugh, 'yes, but i will soon alter that!' before this there had been trouble between antiochus and the people of jerusalem, and he thought to himself, 'i must break down their old ideas and force them to disobey the laws of moses, as they call them; above all, i must utterly destroy their book. the book of their law once gone, they will be easy enough to manage.' so he sent one of his generals to jerusalem, and bade him take an army of soldiers and 'speak peaceable words unto them; but all this was deceit.'[ ] the orders of antiochus were obeyed; the jews suspected nothing, and the soldiers kept quiet until the sabbath day. but while the jews were at prayer, and unable to defend themselves, the treacherous greeks 'fell suddenly upon the city, and smote it very sore, and destroyed much people of israel.' then these wicked men built a strong castle on the hill of zion, so overlooking the entrance to the temple that no one could come in or go out without the knowledge and consent of the governor of the castle. but this was only the beginning of sorrows. soon the dreadful orders of the heathen king were cried through the streets of jerusalem: 'it is the will of antiochus the king that all the people throughout his whole empire shall worship the same gods as himself, and shall declare that his religion alone is true. death to all those who disobey.' the jews looked at one another in utter dismay, for they knew well that antiochus had power to keep his word. 'no more burnt offerings may be made to the god of the jews in the temple. i forbid the keeping of the sabbath. the jews' law declares the flesh of swine to be unclean. i command that on the altar of the jewish god, in his temple at jerusalem, a sow be offered in honour of my god jupiter. the priests themselves shall be forced to eat of it. 'as for the books of their law, destroy them utterly; let not a word remain in the whole land. publish this order against the book; and if, after my will has been declared, any man is found to have a copy in his possession, let him be put to death.' horrible as it seems, all these wicked commands were carried out. a sow was slaughtered on the altar, and an image of jupiter set up in god's holy temple. more cruel than all, the book of the law was torn and trodden underfoot. throughout jerusalem and all the cities of palestine bands of soldiers went everywhere searching for copies of the scriptures. torn to fragments, burnt with fire, often, alas! drenched with the life-blood of those who loved them, now, indeed, the books of the bible were in terrible danger, for the most powerful king of the fierce heathen world was fighting directly against them! '_o god, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid jerusalem on heaps.... the blood of thy servants have they shed like water round about jerusalem; and there was none to bury them._' (psalm lxxix.) so the cry went up from those faithful hearts who still dared to serve the true god. the altar--the temple itself--was now defiled, made 'unclean'; the book of the law had been torn to fragments; but his people could still cry to the lord, and he heard. they did not obey the wicked heathen king; and the stories of their courage thrill our hearts as we read them, for they show us what those saints of old suffered rather than deny their god. '_they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy)._' (hebrews xi. , .) it was of these times especially that the writer of hebrews was thinking when he penned those words. seven young men, the sons of one woman, were with their mother brought before the king's officer--or, as some say, before the king himself--for refusing to break the laws of god. they were cruelly beaten, but one of them cried: 'what wouldst thou ask of us? we are ready to die, rather than to transgress the laws of our fathers!' the torturers thereupon seized the brave fellow, and so cruelly tormented him that he died, his mother and brothers being forced to look on. but though their faces grew pale as death, and they quivered with anguish to see their loved one suffer, they gazed steadfastly at each other. 'the lord looketh upon us, the lord god hath comfort in us,' they said. then the second son was taken, and before he died he cried with a loud voice, looking his heathen judge full in the face: 'thou, like a fury, takest us out of this present life, but the king of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto life everlasting!' but when it came to the turn of the youngest son even the heathen judge was anxious to spare him, and he promised the lad honour and great riches if he would but turn from his faith. but the youth stepped out before them all, his boyish face as brave as a man's and his boyish voice as steady. 'whom wait ye for?' he asked. 'i will obey the commandments of the law that was given unto our fathers by moses; but thou shalt not escape the hands of god. 'we suffer for our sins, but our pain is short. see, i offer up my body and life for the laws of my fathers, beseeching god to be merciful to my nation, and that thou at last mayest confess that he alone is god!' last of all, after her sons, the mother died as well.[ ] [illustration: the jews of antiochus' times covered their houses and tombs with heathen greek ornaments that they might be 'in the fashion.' here is the cornice of one of them, decorated in exactly the same way as the greek idol-temples] but the saints of god did not die in vain; their victories over pain and death fired the hearts that had grown so cold, and awakened the careless into active life. those who had forsaken the religion of their fathers returned by hundreds to god, confessing their sins, and pleading for pardon. so the very fierceness of the trial proved a blessing, and the days of torture were followed by a revival of faith in god, and devotion to his service. now there was an old priest named mattathias who, with his four sons, had never listened to the cunning temptations of the heathen greeks. all his life he had served god with his whole heart, and had brought up his sons to follow in his steps. when mattathias and his sons heard what was being done at jerusalem, they clothed themselves in sackcloth and wept, praying, and fasting continually, beseeching god to forgive his people, and to put away their sins. in a little while the king's officers came to the heathen altar at modin, the town where the old priest lived. 'sacrifice to jupiter, our master's god!' they said. 'sacrifice, as all jews shall be forced to do, or die!' but the old man looked the greek straight in the face. 'though all the nations in the world obey the king, yet will i and my sons walk in the covenant of our fathers. god forbid that we should forsake his law.' as he spoke a backsliding jew stepped up to the altar to sacrifice. the old priest's eyes flashed fire, and in an instant he had struck him down, and the greek officer with him. quivering with indignation mattathias then turned to the startled people: 'whosoever loves god, let him follow me!' and he turned and fled swiftly through the streets of the city. many followed him at once. others joined him later in the strong camp he formed in the mountains, until at last he was at the head of an army. wonderful it is to read how, little by little, this army of god's people drove the heathen from the cities of judah; how they overturned the heathen altars, and cast down the images of the false gods; and how, at last, they came to jerusalem, cleansed the temple, and purified the golden altar from the stains of heathen sacrifices. then, tenderly and reverently, they gathered together all that was left of the copies of their scriptures, weeping as they saw the poor fragments, blackened with fire, stained with blood, and scrawled all over with the horrible figures of heathen gods. as to-day we read in the clean white pages of our bible, let us remember this scene and of the time when those torn and blood-stained fragments were all that remained to the world. but, thank god, when all the pieces had been collected together, there was plenty of material from which to make fresh copies; and no sooner had peace been restored to the city than the scribes set to work, with eager, loving care. the book had become doubly precious now! its written words were indeed sacred, for the blood of martyrs had fallen upon them, and men and women, and little children, too, had chosen to die by hundreds rather than to deny them. [ ] with all his cleverness, alexander, while still quite young, drank himself to death. [ ] in the days of joshua, who bought the office of high priest under the reign of antiochus, so many priests took part in the games that the regularity of the temple services suffered. [ ] from 'maccabees,' an old jewish history, which is sometimes bound up with our bible. [ ] this is taken from 'maccabees.' chapter vii two famous versions of the scriptures [illustration: (drop cap b) samaritan book of the law] by the blue waters of the mediterranean sea, on the coast of egypt, lies alexandria, a busy and prosperous city of to-day. you remember the great conqueror, alexander, and how nation after nation had been forced to submit to him, until all the then-known world owned him for its emperor? he built this city, and called it after his own name. about a hundred years before the days of antiochus (of whom we read in our last chapter) a company of jews were living in alexandria, then a rich and beautiful city, with its stately palaces and temples of white marble, its beautiful gardens, and groves of graceful palm-trees. after the death of alexander, the greek kings of egypt delighted to live in the new city, and in the old greek books we can yet read of the splendid processions and festivals held in its streets year by year. at this time alexandria drew all the merchants of the world to her markets; and her harbour was constantly filled with ships laden with silver, amber, and copper; while caravans were arriving daily, bringing jewels and rich silks from china, india, and the cities of the far east. the jews of alexandria were not treated as foreigners, but as good subjects and citizens, by the greek rulers of egypt, and therefore as the years passed they grew rich and honoured in their beautiful home. their children, however, seldom if ever heard hebrew spoken; for all the jews of alexandria, for convenience' sake, spoke greek like their neighbours. but, although these jews lived in a heathen city where they read nothing but greek books, and heard greek spoken all day long, they did not forget their god. they longed as earnestly as ever to hear about him, and to read in his book; but what was to be done? only a few of the elder jews could read hebrew, and their children could not understand one word of the language. must the little ones, therefore, grow up in ignorance of the word of god? this was impossible. here in the heathen city of alexandria the scriptures would be the only safeguard of jewish boys and girls. 'if the language of our children is greek, then the bible must be translated into greek, so that they all can understand it.' so said these jewish parents. this was a wonderful proof of the bible's living power. the jews had changed their language and their country. thousands of the cleverest books ever written were within their reach--for alexandria had at this time the largest library in the world--yet all this made no difference; without the written word of god, they could not exist. some writers say that ptolemy philadelphus, the king of egypt of that time, having heard the jews speak of their book, and wishing to have a copy of it to place in his great library, sent all the way to jerusalem for seventy learned scribes who should translate the book into greek. now, however, it is believed that the jews of alexandria did the work entirely themselves, although their greek bible is still called the 'septuagint'--that is, 'the scriptures of the seventy'--in memory of the old tradition. [illustration: fragment of the 'septuagint'--the old testament in ancient greek, the first written translation of the bible ever made] gradually, as the years passed, the greek language spread to other nations, until at last it became, as we have seen, the leading language of the world. even to-day, as you know, this old greek tongue is taught in many of our schools and colleges, and those who can read it tell us that there is no language so beautiful; none with words so sweet to the ear, nor in which such deep thoughts can be expressed. thus we see how god used the learning of the heathen greeks to make his book known to the world! for hundreds of years the bible had been a book for the people of israel alone; but now, as the time drew near when the son of god himself should come to the world--that the world by him might be saved--the scriptures, which had since the days of moses spoken of his coming, were sent out to the nations by god himself in order to prepare the way. the jews of old divided all dwellers on the earth into two classes: the jews--that is, themselves; the gentiles--that is, all the other nations. but now the wall of separation was to be broken down, and the words of the prophet isaiah were to be fulfilled, '_the gentiles shall come to thy light._' (isaiah ix. .) now that god's holy word had been translated into greek, the one language which every man of those days wished to learn, the message could ring through all the gentile cities: 'a king, a saviour, is coming; be ready to meet him!' so the scriptures went forth, north, south, east, and west, and we think they reached to that far eastern city in which those three wise men lived who afterwards travelled to bethlehem, seeking the messiah, and saying, '_where is he that is born king of the jews?_' (matthew ii. .) the bible had indeed taken a strong leap forward now! for long centuries it had been like a tiny stream flowing through a dry land, and reaching only a few people. now it had become as a river of truth, ever growing deeper and wider, guided by god in all its wanderings across the earth. the bible was now no longer locked up in a language which was already half-forgotten. with this greek translation its world-wide work had begun! but while the greek translation of the hebrew scriptures was becoming an open door through which the people of many lands could draw nearer to god, a second witness to the truth of god's book was hidden away in samaria. for the samaritans had their own copies of the books of the law, and kept them closely shut up among their own people for hundreds of years. it is impossible now to give the actual date when the samaritans began to use a different copy of the scriptures from the jews. the israelitish city of samaria was captured by sargon, king of assyria, in b.c.; but although he carried away the most important inhabitants captive, a great number of the poorer people remained on the land, and when sargon filled the country with new and heathen settlers, so many marriages took place between the two races that the children of israel lost their old name and were known to the jews of judah as 'samaritans.' yet the samaritans still clung to the jews' religion, and the separation did not probably become complete until nehemiah expelled all those jews from jerusalem who had married heathen wives. (nehemiah xiii. - .) now josephus, the jewish historian, tells us that among these exiles was a man named manasseh, a grandson of the high priest, and that, indignant at being cast out, he fled to samaria. here he determined to set up a separate worship of jehovah, and, having obtained permission from the king of persia to erect a temple, he built a holy place on mount gerizim, which became the centre of a new form of religion. it is thought that manasseh had carried away a copy of the books of the law from jerusalem, and by means of certain alterations in the words he made it appear that god had chosen mount gerizim in samaria for the site of his house, instead of mount moriah in jerusalem. now at this time all the jews still wrote in the ancient style, forming their letters as we see them on the moabite stone; but not long afterwards they adopted the square letters of hebrew writing such as are still in use to-day. the samaritans, however, in their hatred of everything jewish, refused to follow their example. the jews had cut them off, and they would take nothing from the jews; they would keep to the old style of letters; they would not allow a single word of the books of the prophets or the psalms or history books to have a place among their sacred writings. the jews accepted these books as inspired; therefore the samaritans rejected them. thus jewish pride and samaritan littleness raised a terrible barrier between the two nations, which grew more hopeless every year. [illustration: the samaritan book of the law at nablous] yet these hidden samaritan documents, falsified as they had been, have had a work to do for god's word within comparatively recent times. for in the year a.d., just as some people were beginning to attack the bible, and to declare that they could find no evidence that the old testament was so ancient after all, the world was suddenly startled to hear of a great discovery--an ancient copy of the law had been found in syria. other copies soon afterwards came to light: the world had rediscovered the samaritan bible! at nablous, in samaria, known in old testament times as shechem, a traveller was allowed to look at the oldest samaritan copy of the altered books of the law. its queer letter signs are traced on parchment rolls, which are said to have been formed from the skins of rams offered in sacrifice. they are kept in a silver cylinder, covered with crimson satin, heavily embroidered with gold. but out of this discovery a new difficulty arose. some of the critics decided that this was the original copy written by moses, and therefore more correct than the jewish scriptures. they would have done better to wait, and to have trusted the bible a little more. true, the discovery was of great importance, for these documents proved beyond all doubt that the book of the law dated back to a time when the ancient form of letters were still in use, and so they bore a strong witness to the great age of the first five books of our bible. but learned scholars were soon able to prove that the oldest samaritan copy was probably not older than the tenth or eleventh century of our era, and that the form of the letters was so ancient merely because the samaritans refused to imitate the improved jewish writing. a hundred years ago, for instance, books with long 's's' were printed in england; but the old form of letter was tiresome to read, and is now entirely out of date. now the samaritans had not only refused to accept the new and improved form of letters--they had rejected as well all the fresh light and inspiration which god was continually giving to his people through the holy prophets. according to the samaritans, moses was the only true prophet. thus they cut themselves adrift from further light, and little by little the nations had dwindled away. yet because so many of the samaritans in the time of christ were faithful to the measure of light they had, and kept alive in their hearts the hope of a coming messiah, god made for them a wonderful way of escape. every bible reader knows and loves that beautiful scene by the well of sychar, in samaria, where the saviour began by asking a woman for water to drink, and ended by explaining to her some of the deepest truths of god's kingdom. we understand now why the woman was so surprised that a jew should condescend to speak to her, and why the jews would have '_no dealings with the samaritans_.' as we have seen, a great barrier divided her from all ordinary jewish teachers--she had been taught to believe in an altered bible. not merely a different translation, remember, for the bible should be the same in every language, but a book of the law in which some of the words had been changed and the original meaning destroyed. so the woman said to our lord, '_our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship._' (john iv. .) the saviour had not said so, but she felt sure that he, as a jew, would certainly contradict the old traditions of his countrymen. but the lord jesus christ had come to show the world that it was no longer a question of this mountain or that. such matters had been but a shadow of the good things to come. '_god is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth._' (john iv. .) with these words jesus, the messiah, for whom both jews and samaritans were waiting, threw down the barrier of ages, and united the two nations in a spiritual worship. chapter viii the bible in the days of jesus christ [illustration: (drop cap s) reading from a roll--old roman painting] slowly but surely, as time went on, god was adding to his book, until about four hundred years before the birth of jesus christ the old testament scriptures, in their present shape, were completed. many questions have been asked as to how the canon of the old testament was formed--that is, how and when did the jews first begin to understand that the books of the old testament were inspired by god. about the first five books--the books of the law--there had never been any question. from the very earliest times those books, so wonderfully given to the people, had been the strength and stay of the children of israel. but many books had been written in the days of the old jewish kings, and also after the return of the people from babylon: some of these were very beautiful and helpful. how were the sacred scriptures first divided from the other jewish writings? we do not know. some have thought that ezra the scribe, with the assistance of a council of elders, fixed the canon of hebrew scripture; others have supposed nehemiah to have undertaken the work; but most likely it was a gradual process, directed by god himself, who inspired his servants to carry out his will. the christian bible is composed of two parts, the old and the new testament; but the jews divided their scriptures--our old testament--into three parts, and they certainly looked upon some books as far more sacred than others. the 'torah'--that is, the law--included, as we have seen, the first five books of the bible. from the very earliest days the torah was reverenced as containing the commandments and promises of god. the second division consisted of the 'prophets,' these being subdivided into the 'former prophets' (four volumes)--joshua, judges, samuel, kings--and the 'latter prophets' (three volumes)--isaiah, jeremiah, ezekiel--and the twelve minor prophets (which were included in one book). next in order of sanctity came the third division, the 'writings,' and these again were subdivided into three groups: the poetical books of the psalms, proverbs, and job; the 'rolls' or 'readings' (seven volumes)--solomon's song, ruth, lamentations, ecclesiastes, esther, daniel, and one volume containing ezra and nehemiah; and, lastly, in a separate book, chronicles. thus the whole scriptures were contained in twenty-four books. indeed, not until the greek translation was made were the books grouped in the order in which we have them now, and at the same time their number was increased to thirty-nine by taking the writings of each of the prophets separately, and treating ezra and nehemiah as different books. and now god, who has spoken in times past by many different ways and voices, spoke at last to the nations by his son, '_by whom also he made the worlds_.' (hebrews i. .) let us think for a little while of what was being done with the scriptures in the days when the lord jesus learnt to read their words at his mother's knee; words which from first to last told of himself. we have seen that no people could possibly honour the actual letters of the scripture more highly than did the jews. the care they took to keep the words exactly as they had been handed down to them was infinite; and god, who knows all things, knew that a time would come when the pure hebrew words of the old bible would be eagerly sought for, and treasured by all who truly honour his book. therefore, although the eyes of the learned jewish scribes were so blinded, that they did not recognize their king and saviour when he came, yet god blessed all that was true in their work, and it is from the hebrew copies which they made of the books of the old testament, and not from the 'septuagint,' or greek translation, that the old testament of our bible has come to us to-day. yet, sad to say, while so careful to preserve the words of the scriptures, the scribes and pharisees forgot its spirit, the very purpose for which the bible had been given them. a man might know by memory every letter of the bible, but unless the spirit of god were in his heart, helping him to act out in his life the words he repeats with his lips, all his knowledge of the bible would only lie as a dead-weight upon his soul. '_the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life._' ( corinthians iii. .) so wrote the apostle paul, who had, as we know, been educated by the scribes and pharisees, and when he wrote those words he was recalling his own experience. thus, as year by year the learned jews thought more of the letters of their bible, they saw less of its spirit; worse still, they began to add to the teaching of the books of the law. not that they ventured to put other words between those of the bible, or to alter it as the samaritans had done; but they invented long explanations of almost every verse, and declared that these explanations must be followed as absolutely as the words of the bible itself. for instance, a learned jewish teacher wrote an explanation of moses' command about obeying the levites. (deuteronomy xvii. .) moses had said that the people were to do what the levites told them respecting the law of god, neither turning _'to the right hand, nor to the left._' the jewish teachers declared what moses really meant was that if a teacher of the law told you that your left hand was your right you must believe him! [illustration: plan of a synagogue . model of the ark which was carried before the children of israel. . stand for the reader. . women's gallery. . entrance] in this way, while professing to explain god's word, the scribes and teachers were confusing the simple people who wanted to obey this holy law. the saviour saw this, and he fearlessly rebuked the teachers of the law, grieved beyond words that those to whom god had entrusted his book should make '_the word of god of none effect through your tradition._' (mark vii. .) his own way of using the scriptures was very different. from his mother he had first learned to repeat texts from the old testament, and with her he had gone to the synagogue, sabbath by sabbath, to hear the books of the law and the prophets read. as he grew older he would have been sent to school and taught to read and recite the scriptures, and long before he began himself to teach the people he had so absorbed the spirit of the old testament that his very thoughts seem to have been given in scripture words. perhaps you have wondered why the names of some of the prophets and heroes of the old testament are spelt so differently when mentioned in the new--'elias' instead of 'elijah,' 'noe' instead of 'noah,' and so on. this is because the writers of the new testament quoted from the greek translation of the bible instead of from the hebrew. names change a little, you know, when translated into other languages. for instance, our name of mary becomes 'marie' in french, and 'maria' in italian, and yet it is all the while the same name. some people think that this, the septuagint, or first greek translation, was the special translation of the bible which the saviour used. many of the quotations which he gave from the old testament appear to have been from this translation, although some seem taken directly from the hebrew, and others again from an aramaic version which has disappeared. christ himself no doubt taught the people in the aramaic tongue, which was a mixed language, and came into use after the jews' return from babylon. aramaic is called 'chaldee' in the book of daniel. but while our saviour constantly quoted from the old testament, he never used its words without definite purpose. the sword of the spirit in his hands was either turned against the evil one, or brought directly to bear with overwhelming force on some mistaken teaching which had blinded the people to the true meaning of the word of god. the direct and yet simple way in which he reached the point, and once and for all swept away the difficulty, amazed and confounded the learned jews. an instance of this is found in his wonderful answer to the sadducees, who disbelieved in the resurrection. '_as touching the resurrection of the dead,_' he said, '_have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by god, saying, i am the god of abraham, and the god of isaac, and the god of jacob?_' (matthew xxii. , .) his hearers, of course, had heard these words quoted from childhood, but not till the saviour explained their full significance--'_god is not the god of the dead, but of the living_'--did they realize that in the first recorded words spoken by god to moses lay a proof of the resurrection and of life after death. let us take a look at the first time in which christ publicly read and explained the scriptures. it is the sabbath, and the synagogue of nazareth is full of people, serious and attentive, for they have met together to hear the word of god. now one stands up to read. the sacred roll is in his hand; the roll of the book of the prophet isaiah. listen:-- '_the spirit of the lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,_ '_to preach the acceptable year of the lord._' (luke iv. , .) he closes the book and sits down. from the dim ages of the past those words had been read; in the long, long ages to come they will yet be read, until the world shall cease to exist, and time itself be known no more. but never before and never again could there be so heart-searching or sacred a reading as this, when the son of god read from his father's book in the simple village meeting in galilee. and yet his listeners did not understand the reading. even after his explanation of the words they fell upon deaf ears and raised only anger and surprise. it was then that the first attempt was made to destroy him. (verse .) to his own apostles, enlightened as they were, the message of the old testament was sealed until after the saviour's resurrection, when he '_opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures._' (luke xxiv. .) then only did the wonderful truth dawn upon them that in coming to earth, in suffering, rising from the dead, and ascending to heaven, their master had not destroyed the scriptures, but had fulfilled them. (matthew v. .) chapter ix the destruction of jerusalem [illustration: (drop cap g) ruins of a synagogue] god had given to his people a book foretelling the coming of the christ--or messiah, as the word is written in hebrew--so that they might be prepared and ready for his appearance. yet when he came they did not receive him. they were looking for an earthly king, and the beautiful words spoken by the ancient prophets had no meaning to them. when jesus christ was born in bethlehem, the jews were under the iron rule of the roman empire, of which they formed a part, for although the jewish family of the herods reigned over judea, they only held their throne under the roman emperor. this the jews could not endure. they longed to be a free and independent nation once again. 'when our messiah comes he will be a great warrior,' they said. 'he will utterly destroy all our enemies. he will make jerusalem the greatest and richest city in the whole earth; all other nations will bow down before us, acknowledging that the jews alone are the chosen people of god.' thus they were expecting a messiah who would begin his work by killing all the roman soldiers in palestine. had jesus of nazareth been willing to become their earthly king and to lead the nation against the romans, the jews would probably have followed him to a man. (john vi. .) but he saw that, even from a human standpoint, the nation could not be helped in this way, and that the jews would only rebel against the romans to their destruction. instead of widening the breach between them and their conquerors, the saviour sought to heal it. he called out the faith and gratitude of the roman centurion, and his answer to the jewish leaders, '_render to caesar the things that are caesar's_ (mark xii. ) showed them the right attitude in which to regard the roman rule. when, therefore, he was brought at last before pilate, the roman government had no quarrel with him. '_thine own nation ... hath delivered thee unto me,_' said pilate who would have released his prisoner, had not the jews prevented it. '_if thou let this man go, thou art not caesar's friend,_' they cried, thus compelling pilate, at the risk of being reported as a traitor to his emperor, to crucify jesus of nazareth, and to free barabbas. but in choosing the rebel, barabbas (mark xv. ) as their hero, the nation started on their downward road, as the story of the forty years which followed the saviour's crucifixion clearly shows. for the jews were determined at all costs to throw off the roman yoke, and the history of those years is one long list of terrible risings and massacres, while cities were ruined, villages wrapped in flames, and men, women and children perished with hunger. yet the keener the suffering, the more desperate the jews became. their whole souls were possessed with a wild and mad passion for revenge. the saviour had warned his hearers most earnestly against following false christs. '_then if any man shall say unto you, lo, here is christ, or there; believe it not._' (matthew xxiv. .) yet no sooner did a daring rebel or murderer gather a band of robbers around him, and begin to kill and plunder, than multitudes of jews cried, 'the christ, or messiah has come; now we shall have vengeance on our enemies!' they were fighting against god now, and against the book which he had given them. all peace-loving people who could possibly do so left the country. [illustration: the precious golden candlestick, from the temple at jerusalem, carried by the roman conquerors through the streets of rome--from the broken roman carving still to be seen in rome to-day] at last, in a.d., all the jews in jerusalem rose in a body against their roman governors. they surrounded the great tower of antonia where the roman soldiers were quartered, and cried out to the garrison within that their lives should be spared if they would lay down their weapons. the roman soldiers hesitated, but the jews promised most faithfully to keep their word. the romans believed them, and opened their gates; but no sooner were they in the power of the jewish mob than they were fallen upon and murdered to the last man! as they died the roman soldiers, whom not even death could terrify, lifted up their hands to heaven, as though calling upon god to witness that the jews had broken their solemn oath. the roman emperor could not overlook such rebellion and treachery, and he sent a great army against jerusalem. the jews shut the gates of their city, and so began the awful siege of jerusalem. '_and when ye shall see jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh._' (luke xxi. .) forty years before, jesus christ himself had spoken these words, and now there began for jerusalem days filled with horror and woe, '_such as was not from the beginning of the creation which god created unto this time._' (mark xiii. .) the story of these days has been written for us by a wise jew named josephus. he was a prisoner in the roman camp during the siege of jerusalem, and he watched with dismay the great battering-rams and war engines crashing through the walls of the holy city. his ears rang with the cries of rage and despair which broke from the jews within, as one by one their defences fell, and the end drew near! then food failed in the city; men fought like demons in the streets for a tiny loaf of barley-bread; so frantic were the people with hunger that mothers even snatched the bread from their own children's mouths! 'look over the walls, o people of jerusalem; the roman soldiers are crucifying all the prisoners they have taken, and the line of crosses is as long as our city is wide!' hard, merciless as was the roman general, even he grew sick with horror at last, and he sent his jewish prisoner, josephus, to the jews, promising them their lives if they would give up the city. but a furious madness had possessed the people, and they refused to yield. josephus pleaded in vain. he was not a christian, but he could see plainly enough that god was no longer with his people. 'ah, my countrymen,' he cried, 'we did nothing without god in the past, but now you are fighting against him. had god judged you worthy of freedom, he would have punished the romans as he did the assyrians long ago. god is fled out of your holy place, and stands on the side of those against whom you fight!'[ ] it is strange and wonderful to read these words in the old history. even a jew who had no faith in jesus christ could see plainly that the ancient power and glory of his nation had gone. at last the end came. the first wall fell, then the second and the third, until the roman soldiers, now as mad as the jews themselves, burst into the holy city, hewing down the defenceless people at every step. and so they came to the temple--that beautiful temple of white marble and gold, which still glittered like a hill of snow in the morning sunshine, or sparkled as though wrapped in flame when the sunbeams struck full on its golden roof. then redder flames than ever the sunshine made leapt above the golden roof; pillars fell, beams crumbled to ashes, while round the altar of sacrifice the people of jerusalem lay heaped together, slain in such numbers in the holy place that their blood flowed down the broad marble steps in a heavy crimson stream. and the golden candlestick and the book of the law were carried away in triumph into heathen rome. alas for the holy city, over which the saviour of the world had stood and wept forty years before, knowing the suffering that lay before her! 'these jews are dangerous. we must not allow them to rebuild their city, or to become a separate people again. as a nation they must cease to exist.' so the roman conquerors of jerusalem agreed; and from that day onward the jewish people have had no country of their own. they have, indeed, been '_led away captive into all nations_' (luke xxi. ) exactly as the lord foretold. there is scarcely a country in the world where jews may not be found, but jerusalem lies still in the hands of strangers, and is the property of the turkish nation. the jews were now no longer a nation. they had become merely a body of people led by their rabbis, or teachers of the law; but they were still 'the people of the book,' for even after frequent rebellions had so angered the romans that they passed a law forbidding a jew to enter the partially re-built city of jerusalem under pain of death, they allowed the jewish teachers to continue the synagogue services in other parts of palestine, and to teach in their colleges. the most famous jewish college of these days was at tiberius, on the shores of the 'sea of galilee,' over whose clear depths the lord jesus christ had sailed so often, and beside whose shores he had done so many wonderful deeds of love and mercy. a great and beautiful college it was, with broad terraced gardens, where the students paced to and fro, their whole hearts and souls absorbed in their work. the temple copy of the book of the law was now in the palace of the heathen emperor in rome, but many less precious copies were left to them. so all day long they studied and copied the old hebrew bible. as we have seen, the jewish scribes had not been content with taking the word of god just as it stood; they had begun, even in our lord's day, to invent explanations of many parts of the old books which quite altered their true meaning. after the fall of jerusalem the learned jews, shut away in their colleges and striving to forget their sorrows, began to write down the scripture explanations, and to add to them so greatly that it became more difficult to recall the comments on the bible than it was to remember the bible itself. [illustration: medal made by titus, the conqueror of jerusalem. the words, ivdaea capta, mean 'captive judea.' the woman weeping under a palm-tree stands for the city of jerusalem] these explanations, all collected together, are called 'the talmud.' now the learned jews grew so fond of their talmud, that they declared a man to be a blockhead if he knew only the scriptures and not the talmud explanation. 'the law of moses is like salt, but the talmud is balmy spice,' they would say. yet although they heeded so little the true meaning of god's book, they guarded its _words_ more and more carefully; and the rules for copying any portion of the holy books were strict indeed. 'my son,' an old teacher would say to his pupil, 'before you copy a single word you must wash your body all over, and clothe yourself in full jewish dress, preparing your mind with solemn thoughts. the parchment you write upon must be made from the skins of "clean" animals only--that is clean according to the law of moses. 'the ink you write with must be of a pure black, made only from a mixture of soot, charcoal, and honey. though you know the whole book of the law by heart, you must not write a single word from memory, but raise your eyes to your copy, and pronounce the word aloud before trusting it to your pen. before writing any of the names of god you must wash your pen: before writing his most sacred name you must wash your whole body. if, after your copy has itself been examined, three corrections have to be made, that copy must be destroyed.' not satisfied with all these directions, the master taught his scholar to count the _letters_ of every book. one of the letters in leviticus xi. is the _middle letter_ of all the five books of moses, a word in chapter x. is the middle of all the words, and a verse in chapter viii. is the very centre of all the verses. the letter 'a'--that is the hebrew letter which stands for 'a'--occurs , times; the letter 'b' , , and so on. not only this, but every scribe was required to know from memory exactly how many letters of each kind there should be in his sheet before he began to write. every sheet of parchment must contain an equal number of lines, and the breadth of each column had to be thirty letters wide. there are eleven verses in the book of the law beginning and ending with 'n,' there are forty verses in which 'lo' is read three times--and so on, and so on. how tedious and meaningless such information appears! of what value were all these details? to spend all his days in learning such things as these could have no influence on a man's character, nor make him a power for good in the world. not for this purpose had god revealed his will to man. some years ago in the coffin of an egyptian mummy, a little jar of wheat was found. for thousands of years it had lain there, shut up in the dark, while out in the fields the corn which had been sown had grown up and been reaped every year, and men and women had been fed. but this jar of corn was useless, because it had been prevented from doing the work in the world for which it was created. just so was it with the hebrew copies of god's word. locked up in a dead language, kept close, away from the world, they were like the jar of wheat which could not grow. but meanwhile god's book was growing in the wide fields beyond. while the jews were keeping safe the _letters_ of the old testament, the new testament was beginning to do its mighty work in the great heathen cities of the world. [ ] josephus: 'wars,' books v. and vi. chapter x the beginning of the new testament [illustration: (drop cap t) coin of thessalonica] turn to the list of books given in the beginning of your new testament. you will see that first come the four gospels, or glimpses of the saviour's life given by four different writers. then follows the acts of the apostles, and, lastly, after the twenty-one epistles, the volume ends with the revelation. now this is not the order in which the books were written--they are only arranged like this for our convenience. the first words of the new testament were written, not as we should have supposed by one of the twelve apostles, or by some one who had loved and followed the lord jesus christ when he was upon earth. they are written by a pharisee who had been one of christ's bitterest enemies. though saul had, as far as we know, never seen the saviour on earth, what he had heard of his work and teaching made him feel that in stamping out all the followers of the so-called messiah, he would be doing god service. but we remember how the saviour himself appeared to saul on his way to damascus, and how his heart was changed, and his eyes were opened. we can scarcely imagine the transformation which came over his mind. together with all the other learned jews he had considered jesus of nazareth to be an impostor, and to blaspheme the words of god's holy book when he applied them to himself. now saul the pharisee understood that he and his countrymen, not jesus of nazareth, were at fault. as he read the old prophesies he understood their true meaning, '_and straightway he preached christ in the synagogues, that he is the son of god._' (acts ix. .) then the full tide of jewish anger turned upon him. that he should join the followers of the despised nazarene and forsake the sacred traditions of the law made all the jews scattered through the then-known world into his bitterest enemies. paul, as he was afterwards called, loved his countrymen with a passionate love. he would gladly have died for them,[ ] and that he should be unable to show them what was so clear to himself, was certainly the greatest sorrow and disappointment of his life. but though he was unable to help his countrymen, as a nation, god made him the most successful missionary-traveller the world has ever known, and to him was given the privilege of writing a large part of the new testament. before we think about his writings, however, let us look at the condition of the great heathen cities of the world at the time when he lived. in the year a.d. , that is, twenty years after our saviour's death upon the cross, the emperor nero, who is still remembered as one of the worst men who ever lived, began to reign in rome. for many years the roman emperors had been masters of all the then-known nations, and for awhile they had ruled justly; but ever as the roman empire increased in power and riches, the roman rulers grew more haughty and selfish, until at last they cared for nothing but their own pleasures, and spent their days in drinking and feasting, wasting enormous sums in senseless extravagance, while thousands of their subjects starved. a dreadful city rome must have been in those days, though to look at she was beautiful indeed. a city of marble palaces, of fair white statues and green gardens; of huge public baths and theatres. on one side stood an enormous building, with a round space in the centre, and tiers of seats rising one above another like a circus. this was an amphitheatre, where shows and performances were given. there were no sham combats in a roman circus; no mere pretence of being wounded. men fought with men in stern reality; worse still, men were made to fight with wild beasts. lions and tigers, and fierce bulls tore and gored men to death, while the audience leaned back in their comfortable seats, watching the horrible scenes intently. every rich man in rome at the time of which we write owned hundreds of slaves, who were the absolute property of their owners. a slave-girl who arranged her mistress's hair badly was burnt with a hot iron. if a slave-boy broke a costly vase his master might whip him to death, or have him thrown into a tank full of ravenous fish. there was no limit to the master's power. although millions of people had scarcely a rag to cover them, or a crust to eat, the rich people flung their gold away on useless trifles. indeed, a kind of competition existed among them as to who could waste his money the most foolishly. 'nightingales sing more sweetly than any other bird,' thought one of these. 'i have it. i'll order a dish of nightingales' tongues for my feast next week; that will be something rare and expensive indeed!' all his friends were charmed with the new idea, and nightingales' tongues became quite the fashion. but all the time, in this mighty city, so black with sin, so red with cruelty, the pure white light of the gospel of christ had begun to shine. 'gospel' means good news. the story of jesus was blessed news indeed, for the suffering, hopeless people. as yet all unnoticed by the rulers of the heathen world, the little band of christians was ever increasing. [illustration: thessalonica: now called salonica. it was to the christians of this town that paul wrote his first epistle] from jerusalem the good news had spread to rome and to numbers of other heathen cities. the apostle paul had preached and gained little groups of converts in thessalonica and philippi and other strongholds of evil, and in the year when nero became emperor of rome, the first words of the new testament were written. it happened in this way: st. paul was in greece, carrying on the war for christ in the very centre of the idol-worshippers. most of the roman ideas of the false gods had come from greece. in athens and corinth the most beautiful buildings were heathen temples, and not a house in the whole land was without its images. paul had preached at athens and corinth, but in the very midst of his difficult work he heard that the little band of faithful followers he had left behind in the city of thessalonica were in great trouble. they had no books to help them except the old testament, written in greek. although they had tried hard to remember his words, many things still perplexed them. besides, the jews living in the city were their bitterest enemies, and had so stirred up the people against them, that they were in constant danger of losing their lives. would not their great leader tell them what they ought to believe, and how they ought to live? paul loved these thessalonians, and longed to go to them. but he could not leave his work in corinth. what then was he to do? he could write a long letter to them, bidding them to '_stand fast in the lord_.' ( thessalonians iii. .) to remember that god had called them '_unto holiness_.' ( thessalonians iv. .) paul did not need to remind them to love one another, for that god himself had taught them. (verse .) he told them, too, not to sorrow hopelessly for those who had died for christ, for when christ returns, as he surely will, those who have loved him shall rise first to meet him, and so be with him for evermore. '_wherefore, comfort one another with these words._' (verse .) we can imagine how eagerly the thessalonian converts listened to the letter. we see, too, that the first christian document ever written contained the full gospel message, and that the heathen had already '_turned to god from idols to serve the living and true god; and to wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come._' ( thessalonians i. , .) a few months later the thessalonians were once more in great perplexity. 'what are we to believe?' they had asked. 'paul tells us plainly that christ will return to the earth. how can we settle down to our ordinary work with such a wonderful hope before us?' from the answer which the apostle sent to their questions--which we call to-day the second epistle to the thessalonians--we can see clearly how troubled they must have been. in order to understand their position we must remember that the words and acts of the lord jesus christ had not as yet been written down, and all that the thessalonians knew about him was from paul's preaching and teaching. they could not turn to their bibles as you can when you long to know just what the saviour would have you do. so paul wrote to them again, explaining that they must wait in patience, quietly doing their daily work, and earning their own bread, as he and his companions had done whilst living in thessalonica. ( thessalonians iii. .) most of st. paul's epistles--that is, his letters--were written in this way because of some special need or danger. the converts in corinth, galatia, or ephesus, were in difficulty, or in danger of losing their faith in christ, and paul, ever watchful, but unable to go to them at the moment, wrote the message of comfort and warning which god had put into his heart. at last there came a time when paul could visit his converts no more. the roman rulers were as yet not angry with the followers of christ. they simply despised them, and thought the jews very foolish to trouble about a pack of low, ignorant people. 'they are mostly slaves or such like whose opinions are worth nothing. why do they not let them alone as we do?' said the proud romans. but at last so bitter had the jews become against paul, and so violent were their attacks on him, that the roman government was obliged to interfere. paul was arrested in jerusalem and imprisoned in caesarea. here he remained for many months, until, at last, finding he would get no justice from the roman governor, he demanded to be taken to rome itself to the judgment seat of the emperor. two or three years before this he had written a most wonderful letter to the roman christians. '_to all that be in rome, beloved of god, called to be saints,_' his letter was addressed. he told them how he prayed for them, and how he longed to see them '_making request, if by any means now at length i might have a prosperous journey by the will of god to come unto you._' (romans i. .) his prayer was answered, but he came as a prisoner in the year of our lord . yet paul was not put in prison when he arrived in rome. he was allowed to see his friends, and even to hire a lodging of his own, though day and night he had to be chained to a roman soldier. the soldiers were changed when their watch expired, but never for one instant could the apostle go free. many of these roman soldiers were hard and proud, believing in nothing at all, not even in their own idol gods; but after a while, won by paul's words and life, the soldiers learned to believe also, and became his converts. for the first year of his imprisonment paul wrote little, but he spoke and thought much; as the second year drew on he sent letters to many of those he so longed to see again which are as precious to us as they were to those old-time christians. among these are the epistles to the galatians, the ephesians, the philippians, the colossians, and a touching little appeal to philemon concerning a runaway slave who had become one of paul's converts at rome. we are almost certain that the apostle was released for a time so that he was enabled to revisit many of his converts, as he so earnestly desired to do. [illustration: the old roman road, down which st. paul travelled into rome, as it appears to-day] then he was once more taken prisoner and brought again to rome, where nero's wickedness had become repulsive even to the romans themselves, cruel and hardened though they were. to timothy, who was to him as a son, paul the prisoner wrote a farewell letter, just when he was to be brought before nero the second time. '_i have fought a good fight, i have finished my course, i have kept the faith._' ( timothy iv. .) so he wrote, and before he closed his letter he begged timothy to make a special effort to come to him, and to bring with him '_the books, but especially the parchments._' (verse .) these 'books' would most likely be the first copies of two or three of the books of the new testament, just the very beginnings. perhaps the life of jesus christ, written by mark, and a letter or two of peter's; fragile, reed-paper rolls, which would tear and crack unless they were handled with the greatest care. these would be written just like the ordinary books of the time, for as yet no one dreamt that they would one day be bound up with the 'parchments,' and so form the christians' bible. for by the 'parchments' paul almost certainly meant the old testament written in greek. he needed these very 'specially.' he had time to think and study now; and the old, old books of the law and the prophets spoke from the first page to the last of his beloved master, jesus christ. did he live to receive the parchments? we do not know. how did he die? the bible does not tell us. but about the date st. paul wrote the last of his words that have come down to us, a fierce time of trial swept like a storm over the little christian colony in rome. in his mad wickedness, the emperor nero set fire to his own city so that he might watch the blaze. half rome was burnt, and then he grew alarmed, for the people were furiously angry at losing their homes. so he looked round for some one on whom to throw the blame. in an evil hour he thought of the christians. 'the christians plotted to destroy my city--death to them! drag them from their houses, burn them, throw them to wild beasts!' the order went forth, the excited people were only too ready to obey, and so the lord's faithful followers were put to death by hundreds. nero prided himself on inventing the most horrible tortures for them. on one dreadful night he even caused a number of living men and women to be wrapped in cloths soaked in pitch, tied to the top of long poles, and then set on fire. this horrible deed was carried out in nero's own beautiful gardens, which were thus all lighted up with the glare of the flames. but nothing could shake the faith and courage of these saints and warriors. '_as it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long._' (romans viii. .) but they feared none of these things; they were faithful unto death, and the lord has given them a crown of life. (revelation ii. .) [ ] romans ix. . chapter xi how the gospels came to be written [illustration: (drop cap b) early christian lamp] but how did the story of the saviour's life on earth come to be written? we have seen that many years passed before any one thought of writing it down at all. the men and women who had really seen him, who had listened to his voice, looked into his face, and who knew that he had conquered death and sin for evermore, could not sit down to write, for their hearts were all on fire to speak. but as the years passed, the number of those who had seen christ grew less, and the need of a written gospel became ever greater. precious words would be forgotten, precious facts passed over, unless they were collected together and put down in black and white. some of those, therefore, who had seen and heard christ began to write down all they remembered of his life. they had no thought, as yet, of a new testament being added to their bible; the old testament scriptures were still the 'bible'[ ] to them. these early christians, as we remember, did not read the bible in the original hebrew, but in its greek translation. they loved it and searched its pages eagerly, as they realized that all its words spoke of christ! but about the time that st. paul was imprisoned at rome we think that the gospel according to st. mark was written. most of you know that mark was a young jew who began his work for god by travelling with paul and barnabas (acts xii. ), but who left them when the work grew dangerous. (acts xiii. .) paul was so grieved at his failure, that for a while he refused to trust him again; but barnabas, who believed in his repentance, gave him another trial. (acts xv. - .) that mark proved himself even to paul we find from the apostle's last epistle to timothy, when he writes: '_take mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry._' ( timothy iv. .) before that time, however, mark had lived and worked for many years with the apostle peter, who in his letter written from babylon speaks of him as '_marcus my son_.' ( peter v. .) now a christian writer, named papias, who lived about sixty years after this time, tells us that mark wrote his gospel story from what peter had told him about christ; so we think this gospel writing is really the apostle peter's account of our lord's life on earth. very likely, as mark journeyed with the apostle from place to place, and heard him tell and retell the wonderful story of his master's life on earth, the thought came into the young man's mind, 'why not write down what peter says, so that his words shall not be forgotten?' and so fresh and vivid are the words of mark's gospel, so full of little natural touches, that most people agree that old papias must have been right. the very things st. peter would have noticed are mentioned by mark. matthew, the writer of the gospel which comes the first in our new testament, was a levite; that is, he belonged to the tribe of levi, and this tribe was specially chosen in the time of moses to learn the law and serve god in his temple. matthew, therefore, was very learned in the books of the law, and in the writings of the old prophets. as you all know, the lord jesus chose matthew to be one of his special companions; and as matthew followed his master day by day, he saw more and more clearly how all the old prophecies which he knew so well pointed to the coming of christ. [illustration: a fragment of papyrus-paper with ancient writing] so, when the holy spirit called matthew to write what he knew of the lord's life on earth, those ancient prophecies, and the wonderful way in which they had come true, were still in his thoughts. this is why we find in the gospel according to matthew more quotations from the old testament than in the writings of any of the other evangelists. 'see, my book has always spoken of the coming of my son.' this is the wonderful message which god gave to the world through matthew's knowledge of the old testament scriptures. years passed, and those who had seen christ in his earthly life had nearly all died, while gentile christians everywhere were asking eagerly for the written story of his life. twenty years after matthew's gospel was written, god called a greek scholar, named luke, to write what was to be a most important part of our bible. the jews of old hated and despised the gentiles; we have seen how bitterly they persecuted paul because he declared that god had sent him to preach to the heathen nations; think, therefore, how impossible it would have seemed to a jew of this time, that a gentile could, at god's bidding, write two books which should become even more precious and sacred than the books of the law, which the jews rightly prized as the greatest treasure of their nation! those who work in heathen lands to-day tell us that the gospel of st. luke is always the favourite book of the converts, and that if they can only afford to buy one gospel they always ask for that of luke. this is because the whole work is written from the gentile point of view--it is the world's history of christ. st. luke wrote his gospel as an historian, and in dedicating his work to theophilus[ ] in a kind of preface, he followed the greek custom. '_many,_' he says, '_have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us_' (luke i. ), but their records have disappeared, while that of luke remains. he was a physician, as we know (colossians iv. ), and besides being highly educated and gifted, he took infinite pains with his work. he collected all the information he could both from books and eye-witnesses--either from the saviour's mother herself, or from some of her relations--and to him we owe many of the most beautiful and touching facts of our lord's life on earth. written last of all, we have the good news--that is, gospel, told by st. john. when the saviour ascended into heaven, john was still a young man, but he lived to be older than all the other apostles. by the time that st. john wrote his gospel, jerusalem had been destroyed and her inhabitants slain or scattered. he was able, therefore, to mention details, and give the actual names of people and places, which, if told earlier, might have endangered the lives of those of whom he wrote. many instances of this will be found by those who read carefully. he alone mentions the name of the apostle who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, and the story of the raising of lazarus is given only by st. john as though it would have been dangerous to record it earlier. so filled with love was the apostle john that before he died his spirit became altogether one with christ's spirit, and the sayings of jesus, which he had only half understood whilst his master had walked this earth, grew quite clear to him, so that he remembered them distinctly. therefore, that others might understand also, god's spirit called john, when he was an old man, to write out those precious words of jesus christ's which were always echoing in his heart, and which the other writers had not known, or had forgotten. it is in john's gospel that we learn most about the love of christ. matthew, mark, luke, and john--let us thank god for them all. [ ] the name 'bible' is derived from the greek word 'byblus,' i.e. 'papyrus,' the paper reed on which the new testament was written. [ ] the name 'theophilus' means 'god's friend.' most people believe that he was a notable convert of those days, though unknown to history. chapter xii some other writers of the new testament [illustration: (drop cap l) ancient engraving of man reading scroll] let us now look at the rest of the books which make up the new testament. in the days when paul preached at athens, the old capital of greece, much of the ancient splendour and power of the greek people had passed away, for the romans had conquered their country, and they were no longer a free nation. yet, although the greeks had been forced to yield to rome, their conquerors knew that the grecian scholars and artists were far better educated and more highly gifted than themselves, and greek statues and writings had therefore become the fashion throughout the roman empire. indeed, many of the greek sculptors and authors are remembered and admired to this day. homer, the greatest greek poet, who lived about a thousand years b.c., is still world famous. homer's best-known poem[ ] is about a terrible war which took place between the greeks and the trojans. its words are noble, and its descriptions very clever, but although all must admire the beauty of the lines, the poem produces a dismal and depressing effect. the picture it gives of the old heathen religion is terrible, for homer described the 'gods' and 'goddesses' in whom he believed as being far more cruel and unjust than the worst men and women of his time. according to his ideas, jupiter, diana, apollo, mars, and the rest came down to earth and took part in the battle. in vain did the great hero, hector, fight his bravest; in vain did he sacrifice himself, and strive to make up for the wrong-doing of his brother; he failed utterly, for homer tells us that he was hated by some of the 'gods' for no fault of his own, and so they doomed him to destruction, and guided the hand of the man who slew him. how little those clever greeks had been able to discover of the mercy and justice of god! but although the men of this great nation knew nothing of our wise and loving heavenly father, he knew and loved them every one, and as we have seen, he called a greek christian author to help him in the wonderful work of writing the bible. in addition to the story of our saviour's life this greek author, st. luke, also wrote a book about a war--a war that was to become world-wide--the war against sin and the devil, and the name of this second book is the '_acts of the apostles_.' in all this wonderful bible of ours there is no book more wonderful than the 'book of the acts.' have you ever stopped to think what a terrible gap there would be in the history of god's dealings with the world had the 'acts' never been written? the apostle paul's life would be almost a blank. stephen's victorious death would be all unknown to us. above all, the story of our saviour's ascension into heaven, and the marvellous fulfilment of his promises in the gift of the holy spirit at pentecost, would have been left untold. the book of the acts stands alone. there are four gospels--written from four different points of view, but of the four writers, luke, the greek, was the only one who wrote a sequel and showed the results which our saviour's life, and death, and resurrection produced at once in the world. the marvellous accuracy of st. luke and his keen observation become every year more striking as fresh discoveries in the lands of which he wrote show how true he is in the tiniest detail; while his modesty is equally remarkable, for only by carefully noticing when he says 'we' and when 'they' can we discover when he shared st. paul's dangers and trials. [illustration: very ancient fragment of a papyrus roll, with portions of three psalms written in greek] '_only luke is with me_' ( timothy iv. ) wrote the apostle from his roman prison. the beloved physician was faithful to his great leader to the last. how did luke write, and what did his two books look like when he had finished them? he wrote on papyrus--that is, on reed paper, using an ink like black paint, and a reed pen. as far as we know no portions of the bible-books of this date are left in the world, but in the beginning of the year a large number of very ancient fragments of bible-books were discovered in upper egypt, and with these was part of a translation of luke's book of the acts--just shreds and tatters of fragile papyrus paper, the remains of what is up till now the oldest copy of the new testament in the world. amongst the ancient manuscripts kept in the british museum are old old copies of homer's war poems, and here also are stored the precious fragments of the chronicles of that other great greek writer--st. luke. homer's book belongs to the forgotten past, for the heathen religion of greece is to-day as though it had never been. but the writings of st. luke are as full of blessing and power as ever, and the war he wrote about grows more wonderful every day. for christ, the son of god, came down from heaven not to fight _against_ men as the false gods of the old greeks were supposed to have done, but to fight and conquer _for_ men, to lift up the fallen, and to win for the victors a crown of deathless glory. the apostle peter, in contrast to st. luke, was only a fisherman when the lord bade him leave his boat and his nets to preach and teach the gospel. his ideas were very limited when jesus christ first came into his life, and he knew little or nothing of the various branches of knowledge which had become a second nature to the greek scholar; but the fisherman was to receive his education in a very different fashion from luke, for his teacher was the lord jesus christ himself. how impossible it would have seemed to peter, in the days when he washed his nets by the lake of galilee, that his writings should ever form a part of the scriptures--god's book, which he had learned from his childhood to love and reverence! yet with god all things are possible. not only did the apostle peter write a part of the bible, but that short book known as the 'first epistle of peter,' is one of the most frequently mentioned by all the earliest christian writers--those authors and teachers who had seen the apostles, and had heard from their lips the story of the saviour's life on earth. thus it is that peter's contribution to our bible has become one of the strongest witnesses to the truth of the words written down in the gospels. there is no possibility of a mistake; the man who wrote this epistle could have been none other than the apostle peter who had been with the lord from the beginning of his public work. and it is very beautiful to trace throughout peter's writings the echoes of the great facts which he had seen, and which to the end of his days formed the background of all his thoughts. christ had given him his name 'peter' or 'cephas,' that is, a rock or stone, and so he wrote of his master as the great corner-stone of god's spiritual house, in which each one of christ's people are living stones, ( peter ii. - .) the saviour had once told peter that he must forgive his brother although he was wronged by him on seventy-times seven occasions, and in peter's epistle we read, '_above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins_.' ( peter iv. .) 'charity' should have been translated 'love.' then the lord had warned peter that satan had desired to have him, and he--remembering that solemn fact in his own life--tried to put his readers on their guard against the great enemy, '_because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour._' ( peter v. .) most touching of all are the words he wrote: '_for what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with god ... because christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example._' ( peter ii. , .) the man who had seen the lord jesus christ suffer patiently could never forget. '_feed the flock of god which is among you.... and when the chief shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory._' ( peter v. , .) his master's last command by the lake of galilee to feed his flock was so deeply impressed on peter's mind that it coloured all his thoughts to the last day of his life. (john xxi.) this epistle of st. peter was written, we believe, to comfort god's people under the heavy trial of paul's second imprisonment. cruelty and persecution were doing their worst, but god was above all. '_beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you ... but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of christ's sufferings._' ( peter iv. , .) two short, but very beautiful, epistles are believed to have been written by two of the lord's brethren, st. james and st. jude. eusebius, the first christian historian--born a.d., died --tells us that james was a nazarite. this means that he had taken the old jewish vow of special purity; he ate no meat, drank no wine, and wore nothing but white linen garments. this vow is often mentioned in the old testament. james had not believed that jesus christ was the saviour of the world until after his resurrection, when the lord appeared to him. '_after that, he was seen of james._' ( corinthians xv. .) this set his doubts at rest for ever, and st. james too was called to write a part of god's book. of st. jude, author of the epistle of that name, scarcely anything is known, but from matthew xiii. and mark vi. we learn that he was one of the lord's brethren, and, like his brother, james, did not believe that jesus christ was the messiah until after the resurrection. this jude must not be confused with the apostle jude. these writers of the new testament as they took their reed pens in their hands, and spread out their rolls of whitey-brown papyrus-paper, were not like moses. true, they knew that the holy spirit was bidding them write, but that their written words should ever be used by god to form a part of the bible would have seemed impossible to them all. [illustration: part of an ancient coptic tombstone--in british museum] the last and by far the latest writer of god's book was st. john, the beloved disciple. long after most of the other apostles were dead, he still lived on, speaking and writing of his master, and to the apostle john the lord jesus christ entrusted the record of many of his most beautiful and comforting words, and of the deepest and most spiritual teaching in the whole bible. three of the shortest and yet most beautiful books of the bible are the three epistles which bear john's name. they are supposed to have been written from ephesus, in john's latter days, and every sentence in them seems to breathe forth the peace, love, and wisdom of a very old man who has lived close to christ for many years. it may well be then that these calm and loving letters were the last of all the bible words to be written. now the 'revelation,' though placed at the end of our bible, was not the last book to be written. it was probably composed whilst nero, the wicked emperor, was torturing and burning the followers of christ. st. john's heart must have been ready to break with distress, but the holy spirit comforted him, and lifted his thoughts right up to heaven, showing him in a vision the end of all these things. among the fragments of the oldest bibles in the world recently discovered, the book of revelation takes a prominent place. some of these were probably written about the year a.d. let us remember when we look on the faded pages lying in the british museum that when their discoloured lines were fresh and clean, men were still living who had seen the early martyrs die. [ ] the iliad. chapter xiii the first bible pictures [illustration: (drop cap t) roman scourge] those boys and girls who love their bibles are fond of bible pictures. even tiny children delight to see a picture of jesus christ holding the little ones in his arms; and how sad children feel when they are shown a painting or engraving of the saviour led away to die! we have learnt much now of the bible, and of how the old and new testaments were written, but who first thought of making pictures from the bible? we shall see. a few miles from the city of rome, deep, deep underground, are those wonderful networks of galleries and chambers called 'the catacombs.' 'catacomb' means 'scooped out.' miles and miles of passages are there, some low and narrow, others wide and lofty; they cross and re-cross each other, like the streets of a town, and all are scooped out of the solid earth. on either side of every gallery are almost endless rows of spaces hollowed out in the walls, one above another like the berths on board ship. for the most part they are open and empty, but a few are still closed. above some of them words are faintly traced on stone slabs; a man or woman's name perhaps, oftener still the latin words, '_in pace_'--that is, 'in peace.' for all this great underground city is in reality one huge cemetery: the quiet resting-place where the first christians of heathen rome buried their dead, where the martyred bodies so cruelly tortured by nero were laid at last. in pace, in peace. how wonderful to read the names of those who loved christ and suffered for his sake so long, long ago! their very names speak to us of the courage and joy which, in spite of torture, christ had brought into their lives. [illustration: two empty tombs in the catacombs, the lower one showing part of the covering slab with a rough carving of the martyrs' palm of victory] 'rest,' 'constancy,' 'god's will.' many names have meanings like these. sometimes a simple picture of a victor's crown or martyr's palm-branch is placed beside them; sometimes a few words are added. latin is a dead language now, but in those days it was the everyday language of rome, so most of these inscriptions are in latin. some of them are sorrowful, for the mourners grieve to think that the loved one will open his eyes on earth no more; but in all the hope of eternal life is sure and certain. our beloved mother, our little child, our dear brother is with christ; the parting is only for a time. yonder, in our beautiful heavenly home, we shall meet once more. how different from the words carved over heathen tombs! we know what these were like, for not very far away is a heathen catacomb. '_valeria dormit in pace._' valeria sleeps in peace. so the christian woman was laid to rest. 'i lift up my hands against god, who snatched me away.' we can still read these despairing, rebellious words on a heathen tomb. 'spare your tears, dear husband and daughter, and believe that it is forbidden to weep for one who lives in god.' how beautiful to know that we shall one day meet the woman in heaven of whom these words are written! now, about the time of nero's cruel persecution, the christians of rome began to use the catacombs for meetings and services. their heathen tormentors had a horror of death, and therefore among the quiet dead the christians were safe for a while. so they met deep underground in the dim galleries, their little oil-lamps twinkling like stars, and there they listened to the word of god, and prayed and sang together. many touching stories are told of these days; and of the meetings held underground in these catacombs, where the living were surrounded by the bodies of the martyred dead. now, these first christians loved the bible with all their hearts, and just as you like to see hanging in your room the picture of the good shepherd with the little lamb, so they began to long for pictures from their bible. every heathen roman had his house decorated with pictures and carvings from his pagan religion, but it was in the dim underground galleries that the first bible pictures appeared. some of the subjects were taken from the old testament, some from the new. only bible pictures interested the first christians. noah and the ark was a very favourite subject. 'noah was safe in the ark,' they said, 'although thousands perished. so will god keep safe all those who trust in him.' there are many pictures of jonah and the whale, and one of the three children in the burning fiery furnace, for this had special messages for the martyrs as we can well understand. [illustration: one of the first pictures ever made of 'christ, the good shepherd.' found in the catacombs, the first christian cemetery] another very touching picture is of the raising of lazarus. the artist who carved this had once been a heathen; perhaps in former days he had made and sold idols, but now all his life and talents were consecrated to god. and here carved in stone, is the good shepherd, christ bearing the lost lamb on his shoulder, just as he does in the picture you love so well at home; christ, the good shepherd of your life, just as surely as he was the saviour and friend of these men and women who fell asleep so long ago! here is a picture of jesus feeding the five thousand with the loaves and fishes; in this carving he is changing the water into wine; here, carved on a small panel, let into a tomb, is a roman soldier crowning our lord in mockery; and here is pilate washing his hands in the vain hope that he could wash away his responsibility. now, there is one very wonderful thing about all these pictures: although so many martyrs lie buried here, nearly all the pictures and inscriptions are cheerful! the heathen roman writers tell a great deal about the dreadful sufferings of the christians, but there is very little said about it on the tombs of the martyrs themselves. in peace; they are at peace: the torture, the shame is over for ever; the life of love and joy and victory is all before them. how thoroughly these first christians knew their bible! how they loved to picture its scenes. had all the writings of the new testament been lost, we should have known the most important events of our lord's life on earth from these faded paintings and worn carvings alone. love, joy, peace; the love of christ from which nothing can separate us; the joy which even the fires of martyrdom cannot quench; the peace which the world does not give, and cannot take away. this is the message which these first bible pictures bring to us all. for to the early martyrs the bible was what god intends it should be to us--a living power, a divine voice, a constant source of strength and inspiration on the heavenward journey. stories for intelligent children a really delightful series, charmingly bound and illustrated price s. each. cloth boards by mildred duff and noel hope over , already in circulation bible stories! who does not love bible stories? even the words themselves bring back memories of past years, when, as children, we listened to stirring tales of those men and women of old whose names are so familiar, and of whom we were then first taught. crude in style perhaps many of the stories were, but none the less interesting. perhaps there were things we could not quite understand, and knowledge had not sufficiently advanced to explain, but we accepted them all. now great progress has been made in research; modern discoveries in egypt supply the details which were lacking, and the old stories can be told again in a new style, in the light of fuller knowledge, with added interest, and with a force which previously had been impossible. how wonderful the result? our bibles become dearer to us than ever before; we need have no fear of being asked the reason of our belief; what we merely accepted before is now proved for us. let us take, for example, the story of moses. in this, modern discovery has done splendid service, supplying just those details most needed, as though his sayings and doings had been preserved for our reading. 'where moses went to school' is a fascinating title. to be obtained from marshall brothers, ltd., paternoster row, e.c., or north bank street, edinburgh. the campfield press, st. albans [transcriber's note: mrs. hungerford (margaret wolfe hamilton) ( ?- ) "the story of my first novel" (from the ladies' home journal vol. vii no philadelphia july p. )] the duchess "the story of my first novel" my first novel! alas! for that first story of mine--the raven i sent out of my ark and never see again! unlike the proverbial curse, it did _not_ come home to roost, it stayed where i had sent it. the only thing i ever heard of it again was a polite letter from the editor in whose office it lay, telling me i could have it back if i enclosed stamps for the amount of twopence halfpenny, otherwise he should feel it his unpleasant duty to "consign it to the waste-paper basket." i was only sixteen then, and it is a very long time ago; but i have always hated the words "waste-paper" ever since. i don't remember that i was either angry or indignant, but i _do_ remember that i was both sad and sorry. at all events, i never sent that two-pence half-penny, so i conclude my first ms. went to light the fire of that heartless editor. so much comfort i may have bestowed on him, but he left me comfortless; and yet who can say what good he may not have done me? paths made too smooth leave the feet unprepared for rougher roads. to step always in the primrose ways is death to the higher desires. yet oh, for the hours i spent over that poor rejected story, beautifying it (as i fondly, if erroneously, believed), adding a word here, a sentiment there! so conscientiously-minded was i, that even the headings of the chapters were scraps of poetry (so called) done all by myself. well, never mind. i was very young then, and as they say upon the stage, i "meant well." for a long twelvemonth after that i never dreamed of putting pen to paper. i had given myself up, as it were. i was the most modest of children, and fully decided within myself that a man so clever, as a real live editor must needs be, could not have been mistaken. he had seen and judged, and practically told me that writing was not my forte. yet the inevitable hour came round once more. once again an idea caught me, held me, _persuaded_ me that i could put it into words. i struggled with it this time, but it was too strong for me, that early exhilarating certainty that there was "something in me," as people say, was once more mine, and seizing my pen, i sat down and wrote, wrote, wrote, until the idea was an object formed. with closed doors i wrote at stolen moments. i had not forgotten the quips and cranks uttered at my expense by my brother and sister on the refusal of that last-first manuscript. to them it had been a fund of joy. in fear and trembling i wrote this second effusion, finished it, wept over it (it was the most lachrymose of tales), and finally under cover of night induced the house maid to carry it to the post. to that first unsympathetic editor i sent it (which argues a distinct lack of malice in my disposition), and oh, joy! it was actually accepted. i have written many a thing since, but i doubt if i have ever known again the unadulterated delight that was mine when my first insignificant check was held within my hands. ===================================================================== [transcriber's note: mrs. hungerford (margaret wolfe hamilton) ( ?- ) "how a novel is written" (from the ladies' home journal vol. vii no philadelphia january p. )] the duchess "how a novel is written" the characters in my novels, you ask how i conceive them? once the plot is rescued from the misty depths of the mind, the characters come and range themselves readily enough. a scene, we will say, suggests itself--a garden, a flower show, a ball-room, what you will--and two people in it. a _young_ man and woman for choice. they are _always_ young with me, for that matter, for what, under the heaven we are promised, is so altogether perfect as youth! if any one of you, dear readers, is as bad a sleeper as i am, you will understand how thoughts swarm at midnight. busy, bustling, stinging bees, they forbid the needed rest, and, thronging the idle brain, compel attention. here in the silent hours the ghosts called characters walk, smiling, bowing, nodding, pirouetting, going like marionettes through all their paces. at night i have had my gayest thoughts, at night my saddest. all things seem open then to that giant, imagination. here, lying in the dark, with as yet no glimmer of the coming dawn, no faintest light to show where the closed curtains join, too indolent to rise and light the lamp, too sleepy to put one's foot out of the well-warmed bed, praying fruitlessly for that sleep that will not come--it is at such moments as theses that my mind lays hold of the novel now in hand, and works away at it with a vigor, against which the natural desire for sleep hopelessly makes battle. just born this novel may be, or half completed; however it is, off goes my brain at a tangent. scene follows scene, one touching the other; the character unconsciously falls into shape; the villain takes a rudy hue; the hero dons a white robe; as for the heroine, who shall say what dyes from olympia are not hers? a conversation suggests itself, an act thrusts itself into notice. lightest of skeletons all these must necessarily be, yet they make up eventually the big whole, and from the brain wanderings of one wakeful night three of four chapters are created for the next morning's work. as for the work itself, mine is perhaps strangely done, for often i have written the last chapter first, and founded my whole story on the one episode that it contained. +----------------------------------------------------+ |transcriber's note | | | |minor punctuation errors have been corrected without| |notice. the author's spelling has been maintained. | +----------------------------------------------------+ if you don't write fiction by charles phelps cushing [illustration] new york robert m. mcbride & company copyright, , by robert m. mcbride & co. _printed in the united states of america_ published. june, to cousin ann who "doesn't write fiction," but who is ambitious to market magazine articles, this little book is affectionately dedicated. if it can save her some tribulations along the road that leads to acceptances, the author will feel that his labors have been well enough repaid. the author thanks the editors of _the bookman_, _outing_ and the _kansas city star_ for granting permission to reprint certain passages that here appear in revised form. c. p. c. preface the publisher assures me that no one but a book reviewer ever reads prefaces, so i seize upon the opportunity to have a tête-à-tête with my critics. gentlemen, my cards are face up on the table. i have declared to the publisher that nearly every american who knows how to read longs to find his way into print, and should appreciate some of the dearly bought hints herein contained upon practical journalism. and, as i kept my face straight when i said it, he may have taken me seriously. perhaps he thinks he has a best seller. but this is just between ourselves. as he never reads prefaces, he won't suspect unless you tell him. my own view of the matter is that harold bell wright need not fear me, but that the editors of the baseball rule book may be forced to double their annual appropriation for advertising in the literary sections. as the sport of free lance scribbling has a great deal in common with fishing, the author of this little book may be forgiven for suggesting that in intention it is something like izaak walton's "compleat angler," in that it attempts to combine practical helpfulness with a narrative of mild adventures. for what the book contains besides advice, i make no apologies, for it is set down neither in embarrassment nor in pride. many readers there must be who would like nothing better than to dip into chapters from just such a life as mine. witness how edward fitzgerald, half author of the "rubaiyat," sighed to read more lives of obscure persons, and that arthur christopher benson, from his "college window," repeats the wish and adds: "the worst of it is that people often are so modest; they think that their own experience is so dull, so unromantic, so uninteresting. it is an entire mistake. if the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work, love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document." but, you may protest, by what right do the experiences of a magazine free lance pass as "adventures"? then, again, i shall have to introduce expert testimony: "the literary life," says no less an authority than h. g. wells, "is one of the modern forms of adventure." and this holds as true for the least of scribblers as it does for great authors. while the writer whose work excites wide interest is seeing the world and meeting, as mr. wells lists them, "philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great," you may behold journalism's small fry courageously sallying forth to hunt editorial lions with little butterfly nets. the sport requires a firm jaw and demands that the adventurer keep all his wits about him. any novice who doubts me may have a try at it himself and see! but first he had better read this "compleat free lancer." its practical hints may save him--or should i say _her_?--many a needless disappointment. c. p. c. contents chapter page preface v i. about noses and jaws ii. how to prepare a manuscript iii. how to take photographs iv. finding a market v. a beginner's first adventures vi. in new york's "fleet street" vii. something to sell viii. what the editor wants ix. and if you do-- x. forever at the crossroads if you don't write fiction chapter i about noses and jaws a foxhound scents the trail of his game and tracks it straight to a killing. a lapdog lacks this capability. in the same way, there are breeds of would-be writers who never can acquire a "nose for news," and others who, from the first day that they set foot in editorial rooms, are hot on the trail that leads to billboard headlines on the front page of a newspaper or acceptances from the big magazines. many writers who are hopelessly clumsy with words draw fat pay checks because they have a faculty for smelling out interesting facts. in the larger cities there are reporters with keen noses for news who never write a line from one year's end to another, but do all of their work by word of mouth over the telephone. to the beginner such facts as these seem to indicate that any one can win in journalism who has the proper kind of nose. this conclusion is only a half-truth, but it is good for the novice to learn--and as soon as possible--that the first requisite toward "landing" in the newspapers and magazines is to know a "story" when he sees one. in the slang of the newspaper shop a "story" means non-fiction. it may be an interview. it may be an account of a fire. it may be a page of descriptive writing for the sunday magazine section. it may be merely a piece of "human interest." as my own experience in journalism covers barely fifteen years, the writer would not be bold enough to attempt to define a "story" further than to state that it is something in which an editor hopes his public will be interested at the time the paper or magazine appears upon the newsstands. to-morrow morning or next month the same readers might not feel the slightest interest in the same type of contribution. timeliness of some sort is important, yet a "story" may have little to do with what in the narrower sense is usually thought of as "news"--such as this morning's happenings in the stock markets or the courts, or the fire in main street. the news interest in this restricted sense may dangle from a frayed thread. the timeliness of the contribution may be vague and general. we may not be able to do more than sense it. this is one reason why men of academic minds, who love exact definitions, never feel quite at ease when they attempt to deal with the principles of journalism. we practical men, who earn a living as writers, feel no more at ease than the college professors when we attempt to deal with these principles. when we are cub reporters we are likely to conceive the notion that a "story" is anything startling enough, far enough removed from the normal, to catch public attention by its appeal to curiosity. later, we perceive that this explains only half of the case. the other half may baffle us to the end. instance the fact that a great many manuscripts sell to newspapers and magazines upon the merits of that mysterious element in writing known as "human interest." if a reward were offered for an identification of "human interest" no jury could agree upon the prize-winning description. a human interest story sometimes slips past the trained nose of a reporter of twenty years' experience and is picked up by a cub. it is something you tell by the scent. this scent for the trail of a "story" may be sharpened by proper training, and one of the best places for a beginner to acquire such training--and earn his living in the meantime--is in a newspaper office. yet nothing could be further from the present writer's intention than to advise all beginners in journalism to apply for jobs as reporters. some of the most successful magazine contributors in america have never set foot inside of a newspaper plant except to pay a subscription to the paper or to insert a want ad for a chauffeur or a butler. if you have nose sense for what the public is eager to read, newspaper experience can teach you nothing worth while unless it is a deeper knowledge of human nature. as a reporter you will view from behind the scenes what the people of an american community are like and catch some fleeting glimpses of the more unusual happenings in their lives. you may, or may not, emerge from this experience a better writer than you were when you went in. your style may become simpler and more forceful by newspaper training. or it may become tawdry, sloppy and inane. "newspapers," observed charles lamb, "always excite curiosity. no one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." that was true a hundred years ago, and appears to be just as true to-day. fortunately, the men who write the news get more out of the work than do their readers. the reporter usually can set down only a fraction of the interesting facts that he picks up about a "story." his work may be eternally disappointing to the public, but it is rarely half so dull to the man who does the writing. no life into which the average modern can dip is so rich in interest for the first year or two as that of the reporter working upon general assignments. a fling at hobo life, ten voyages at sea and more than two years of army life (a year and a half of this time spent in trekking all over the shattered landscape of france) do not shake my conviction that the adventurer most to be envied in our times is the cub reporter enjoying the first thrills and glamors of breaking into print. there is a scent in the air, which, though it be only ink and paper, makes the cub's blood course faster the minute he steps into the office corridor; and as he mounts the stairs to the local room the throbbing of the presses makes him wonder if this is not literally the "heart of the city." he makes his rounds of undertakers' shops, courtrooms, army and navy recruiting offices, railway stations, jails, markets, clubs, police and fire headquarters. he is sent to picnics and scenes of murders. he is one of the greenest of novices in literary adventure, but, quite like an h. g. wells, he meets in his community "philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great." he is underpaid and overworked. he has no time to give his writings literary finish; and, in the end, unless he develops either into a specialist or an executive, he may wear himself out in hard service and be cast upon the scrap heap. at first, the life is rich and varied. then, after a while, the reporter finds his interest growing jaded. the same kind of assignment card keeps cropping up for him, day after day. he perceives that he is in a rut. he tells himself: "i've written that same story half a dozen times before." then is the time for him to settle himself to do some serious thinking about his future. does he have it in him to become an executive? or does he discover a special taste, worth cultivating, for finance, or sport, or editorial writing? if so, he has something like a future in the newspaper office. but if what he really longs to do is to contribute to the magazines or to write books, he is at the parting of the ways. he should seize now upon every opportunity to discover topics of wide interest, and in his spare time he should attempt to write articles on these topics and ship them off to market. he has laid the first solid foundation of successful freelancing, for if he has been able to survive as long as six months in the competition of the local room he has a nose for what constitutes a "story." the next thing he has to learn is that an article for a magazine differs chiefly from a newspaper story in that the magazine must make a wider appeal--to a national rather than to a local interest. the successful magazine writer is simply a reporter who knows what the general public likes to read, and who has learned when and where and how to market what he produces. timeliness is as important as ever, so he must look to his tenses. the magazine article will not appear until from ten days to six months or more after it is accepted. some of our magazines begin making up their christmas numbers in july, so he must learn to sweat to the tinkle of sleigh bells. i wonder how many hundreds of ambitious newspaper reporters are at this very minute urging themselves to extra effort after hours and on their precious holidays and sundays to test their luck in the magazine markets? the number must be considerable if my experience as a member of the editorial staff of a big national magazine allows me to make a surmise. i have read through bushels of manuscripts that had the ear marks of the newspaper office all over them. they were typed on the cheap kind of "copy paper" that is used only in "city rooms." the first sheet rarely had a title, for the newspaper reporter's habit is to leave headline writing to a "copy reader." ink and dust had filled in such letters as "a" and "e" and "o." most of the manuscripts were done with characteristic newspaper office haste, and gave indication somewhere in the text that the author had not the faintest notion of how far in advance of the date line the magazine had to make up its table of contents. many of these novices showed a promise in skill that might give some uneasy moments to our most prosperous magazine headliners. if only there were firm jaws back of the promise! these men had the nose for journalistic success, but that alone will not carry them far unless it is backed with a fighting jaw. i look back sometimes to cub days and name over the reporters who at that time showed the greatest ability. three of the most brilliant are still drudging along in the old shop on general assignments, for little more money than they made ten years ago. one did a book of real merit and the effort he expended upon it overcame him with ennui. another made the mistake of supposing that he could pin john barleycorn's shoulders to the mat. another had no initiative. he is dying in his tracks. who now are rated as successes on the roll call of those cub reporter days? not our geniuses, but a dozen fellows who had the most determination and perseverance. the men who won were the men who tried, and tried again and then kept on trying. mr. dooley was quite right about opportunity: "opporchunity knocks at every man's dure wanst. on some men's dures it hammers till it breaks down the dure and goes in an' wakes him up if he's asleep, an' aftherward it works fur him as a night watchman. on other men's dures it knocks an' runs away; an' on the dures of other men it knocks, an' whin they come out it hits thim over the head with an ax. but eviry wan has an opporchunity. so yez had better kape your eye skinned an' nab it before it shlips by an' is lost forevir." the names on a big magazine's table of contents represent many varieties of the vicissitudes of fortune, but the prevailing type is not a lucky genius, one for whom opporchunity is working as a night watchman. the type is a firm-jawed plugger. his nose is keen for "good stories," his eye equally alert to dodge the ax or to nab opporchunity's fleeting coat-tails. chapter ii how to prepare a manuscript if you have a real "story" up your sleeve and know how to word it in passable english, the next thing to learn is the way to prepare a manuscript in professional form for marketing. in the non-fiction writer's workshop only two machines are essential to efficiency and economy. the first of these, and absolutely indispensable, is a typewriter. the sooner you learn to type your manuscripts, the better for your future and your pocketbook. it is folly to submit contributions in handwriting to a busy editor who has to read through a bushel of manuscripts a day. the more legible the manuscript, the better are your chances to win a fair reading. i will go further, and declare that a manuscript which has all the earmarks of being by a professional is not only more carefully read, but also is likely to be treated with more consideration when a decision is to be made upon its value to the publisher in dollars and cents. put yourself in the editor's place and you will quickly enough grasp the psychology of this. the editor knows that no professional submits manuscripts in handwriting, that no professional writes upon both sides of the sheet, and that no professional omits to enclose an addressed stamped envelope in which to return the manuscript to its author if it proves unavailable for the magazine's use. why brand yourself as a novice even before the manuscript reader has seen your first sentence? remember you are competing for editorial attention against a whole bushel of other manuscripts. the girl who opens the magazine's mail may be tempted to cast your contribution into the rejection basket on general principles, if you are foolish enough to get away to such a poor start. what an ignominious end to your literary adventure is this--and all because you were careless, or didn't know any better! the writer who really means business will not neglect in any detail the psychology of making his manuscript invite a thorough reading. it may be bad form to accept a dinner invitation in typewriting, but it is infinitely worse form to fail to typewrite an invitation to editorial eyes to buy your manuscript. good form also dictates that the first page of your contribution should bear in the upper left hand corner of the sheet your name, upon the first line; the street address, on the second; the town and state, on the third. in the upper right hand corner should be set down an estimate of the number of words contained in the manuscript. leave a blank down to the middle of the page. there, in capitals, write the title of the article; then drop down a few lines and type your pen name (if you use one) or whatever version of your signature that you wish to have appear above the article when it comes out in print. drop down a few more lines before you begin with the text, and indent about an inch for the beginning of each paragraph. here is a model for your guidance: frank h. jones, about front st., words oswego, ohio camping on indian creek by frank henry jones it took us two minutes by the clock to pack everything we needed--and more, for the camper-out always takes twice as much junk as he can use. all that was left to do after that etc., there are sound reasons for all this. the first is that, likely enough, your title may not altogether suit the editor, and he will require some of the white space in the upper part of the page for a revised version. also, he will need some space upon which to pencil his directions to the printers about how to set the type. double space your lines. if you leave no room between lines, you make it extremely difficult for the editor to write in any corrections in the text. moreover, a solid mass of single-spaced typewriting is much harder to read than material that is double-spaced. use good white paper, of ordinary letter size, eight by eleven inches, and leave a margin of about an inch on either side of the text and at both top and bottom. number each page. don't write your "copy" with a ribbon which is too worn to be bright; and, while you are about it, clean up those letters on the typebars that have a tendency to fill up with ink and dust. you may have noticed, for example, that "a," "e," "o," "s," "m," and "w" are not always clear-cut upon the page. you are doing all this to make the reading of your contribution as easy a task as possible from the purely physical side. you are simply using a little common sense in the process of addressing yourself to the favorable attention of a force of extremely busy persons who are paid to "wade through" a formidable stack of mail. if you have an overpowering distaste for doing your own typewriting, you may hire a typist to turn your handwritten "copy" into something easier to read. this procedure, however, may prove to be rather too costly for a beginner's purse. it is the part of wisdom to learn to operate a machine yourself. at first the task may seem rather a tough one, but even after so short a time as a month of practice you are likely to be surprised at the progress you will make. before long you will be able to write much faster upon a machine than with a pencil or a pen. the danger then lies in a temptation to haste and carelessness. this is one reason why many fastidious magazine writers always do the first draft of an article in longhand and turn to the typewriter only when they are ready to set down the final version. temperament and habit should decide the matter. nearly any one can learn to compose newspaper "copy" at the keyboard, but not so many of us dare attempt to do magazine articles at the same high rate of speed. particularly does this hold true of the first page of a magazine manuscript. the opening paragraph of such a manuscript is likely to make a much more exacting demand upon the writer's skill than the "lead" of a newspaper "story." all that the newspaper usually demands is that the reporter cram the gist of his facts into the first few sentences. the magazine insists that the first paragraph of a manuscript not only catch attention but also sound the keynote of many words to follow, for the "punch" of the magazine story is more often near the end of the article than the beginning. though the technique of newspaper and magazine writing may differ on this matter of the "lead," do not make the mistake of supposing that the magazine introduction need not be just as chock full of interest as the opening of a newspaper "story." you are no longer under any compulsion, when you write for the magazines, to cram the meat of the story into the first sentence, but one thing you must do--you must rouse the reader to sit up and listen. you can well afford to spend any amount of effort upon that opening paragraph. write your lead a dozen times, a hundred times, if necessary, until you make it rivet the attention. chapter iii how to take photographs after he has bought or rented a typewriter, the would-be free lance in the non-fiction field has his workshop only half equipped. one more machine is an urgent necessity. get a camera. few of our modern american newspapers and magazines are published without pictures; so anybody ought to be able to perceive how absurd it is to submit an unillustrated manuscript to an illustrated periodical. good photographs have won a market for many a manuscript that scarcely would have been given a reading if it had arrived without interesting pictures; and many a well-written article has been reluctantly returned by the editor because no photographs were available to illustrate it. there is only one way to dodge this issue. just as you can hire a typist to put your manuscript into legible form, you can pay a professional photographer to accompany you wherever you go and take the illustrations for your text. but the same vital objection holds here as in the case of the professional typist--the costs will cut heavily into your profits. with a little practice you can learn to do the work yourself. after that, you can operate at a small fraction of the expense of hiring a professional. your work soon enough will be of as high a quality as anything that the average commercial photographer can produce, and, better yet, it will not have any flat and stale commercial flavor about it. nothing is more static and banal than the composition that the ordinary professional will produce if you fail to prevent him from having his own way. ten to one, all the lower half of the picture will be empty foreground, and not a living creature will appear in the entire field of vision. it cost the present writer upward of $ to discover this fact. then he bought a thirty dollar postcard kodak and a five dollar tripod and told the whole tribe of professionals to go to blazes. the only time since then that he has ever had to hire commercial aid was when he had to have heavy flashlights made of large rooms. so save yourself money now, instead of eventually. even if thirty dollars takes your last nickel, don't hesitate. for a beginning, if you are inexperienced in photography, rent a cheap machine with which to practice--a simple "snapshot box" with no adjustments on it will do while you are picking up the first inklings of how to compose a picture and of how much light is required for different classes of subjects. after you have practiced with this for a while, go out and buy a folding kodak. if you have the journalistic eye for what is picturesque and newsy the camera will quickly return per cent. upon the investment. the one great difficulty for the beginner in photography is that he does not know how to "time" the exposure of a picture. the books on photography are all too technical. they discuss chemicals and printing papers and all the finer shadings of processes carried on in laboratories under a ruby light. but what the novice longs to know is simply how to _take_ pictures--what exposure to allow for a portrait, what for a street scene, what for a panorama. he usually fails to give the portrait enough light, and he gives the panorama too much. he is willing to allow a professional finisher to do his developing and printing. what the beginner wants to read is a chapter on exposure. as an operator, he is seeking for a _rule of how_ and some examples of its application. if you lack a simple working theory, here is one now, in primer terms: the closer the object which you wish to photograph is to your lens, the _more_ light it requires; the farther away it is, the _less_ light it requires. this may sound somewhat unreasonable, but that is how a camera works. a portrait head, or anything else that must be brought to within a few feet of the lens, requires the greatest width of shutter aperture (or, what comes to the same thing, the longest exposure); and a far-away mountain peak or a cloud requires the smallest aperture (or the shortest exposure). to understand thoroughly what this means, take off the back of your kodak and have a look at how the wheels go round. set the pointer of the time dial on the face of your camera at "t" (it means "time exposure") and then press the bulb (or push the lever) which opens the shutter. looking through the back of your camera, make the light come through the largest width of the lens. you can do this by pushing the other pointer on the face of your kodak to the extreme left of its scale--the lowest number indicated. on a kodak with a "u. s." scale this number is " ." you will see now that the light is coming through a hole nearly an inch in diameter. if it were a bright day you could take portrait heads outdoors through this sized aperture with an exposure of one twenty-fifth of a second. using this same amount of time, the size of the shutter aperture should be reduced to a mere pin hole of light to make a proper exposure for far-away mountain tops, clouds, or boats in the open sea. suppose we make our problem as simple as possible by leaving the timer at one twenty-fifth of a second for all classes of subjects. we will vary only the size of the hole through which the light is to enter. for a close-up, a portrait head, we operate with the light coming through the full width of the lens. now push to the right one notch the pointer which reduces the size of the hole. this makes the light come through a smaller diameter, which on a "u. s." scale will be marked " ." only half as much light is coming through now as before. this is the stop at which to take full length figures and many other views in which the foreground is unusually prominent. buildings which are not light in color should also be taken with this stop. in general, it is for heavy foregrounds. push the pointer on to " ." if your scale is "u. s." you will notice that this is midway between the largest and the smallest stops. it is the happy medium stop at which, on bright days, you can properly expose for the great majority of your subjects, those hundreds of scenes not close enough to the lens to be classified as "heavy foregrounds" nor yet far enough away to be panoramas. buildings which are light in color and sunny street scenes fall into this division of exposures. when in doubt, take it at one twenty-fifth of a second with stop " ." you can't miss it far, one way or another. push the pointer on to " " and the object to be photographed ought to be at some distance away. this is the stop for the open road and the sunlit fields--anything between an "average view" and a "panorama." at " " the scale is set for the most distant of land views, beach scenes and boats in the middle distance off-shore. you will learn by costly overexposures that water views require much less light than landscapes. photographers have an axiom that "water is as bright as the sky itself." so at " ," which is proper exposure for the most distant of land panoramas, you begin to take waterscapes. that tiniest pin hole of a stop, at the extreme right of the scale, is never to be used except for such subjects as the open sea and snowcapped mountain tops. there you have the theory. apply it with common sense and you will meet with few failures. you scarcely need to be cautioned that if an object is dark in color it will require proportionately more exposure than the same object if it is white. through various weathers and seasons, experience will keep teaching you how to adapt the rule to changing conditions of light. certain handbooks and exposure meters will be of service while you are learning the classifications of subjects. you have been told how the rule works. press the "t" bulb again to click your shutter shut and prepare to set out on a picture taking excursion. set the time scale at one twenty-fifth of a second, and leave it there. load up a film. replace the back of the camera. take along a tripod. don't forget that tripod! with that you insure yourself against getting your composition askew, or losing a good picture on account of a shaky hand. suppose the expedition is gunning somewhere in the backwoods. down the stony winding road saunters one of the natives in a two-piece suit. overalls and a hickory shirt constitute his entire outfit. he grows a beard to save himself the labor of shaving. his leathery feet scarcely feel the sharp stones of the highway. here is a picture worth preserving, for the "cracker" type is becoming a rarity, almost extinct. set your pointer at " " and take his full length. if you wish a close-up of his head, set the pointer at " ." a little farther and the road plunges into a shady valley. under the trees ahead is a log cabin, dappled with the sunlight and the shade of dancing leaves. use your judgment about whether such a scene requires " " or " ." if in doubt, use " ," for the danger here is that you may under-expose. in a clearing where the shade of the trees has little effect, stands an old water power mill. it is simply an "average view," and you can safely snap it with a " " stop. the friendly razorback hogs under the mail hack make a picture with a heavy foreground. they fall into the " " classification--half in shade, half in sunlight. the road leads us at last to a river. an old-fashioned ferry boat is making a crossing in midstream. from the hilltop where we first survey it the scene is a landscape, distant view, and can be taken with a " ." but when you get down to the water's edge and shoot across the shining river, beware of overexposure. stop down another notch. do you see now how the theory works? give it a fair trial and you will agree that taking pictures--the mere _taking_, with no bothering your head about developing, printing, toning and the like--is a matter no more baffling than the simple art of learning to punch the letters on the keyboard of a typewriter. keep at it, never neglecting an opportunity to practice. keep experimenting, until you can fare forth in any sort of weather and know that you will be able to bring back something printable upon your film or plate. if the day is not bright, shove your timer over to one-tenth of a second, or to one-fifth. certain experts in photography will bitterly deride this advice to keep the time set at one twenty-fifth of a second and to vary nothing but the size of the lens aperture. they will point out--and be quite right about it--that the smaller the aperture the sharper the image, and that a more professional method of procedure is to vary the timing so as to take all pictures with small stops. to which i can only answer that this is all well enough for the trained photographer and that in these days of my semi-professionalism i practice that same sort of thing myself. but in the beginning i was duly grateful to the man who gave me the golden maxim of "the closer the object, the larger the stop; the more distant the object, the smaller the stop"--a piece of advice which enabled a novice, with only one simple adjustment to worry about, to take a passably sharp, properly exposed picture. so i pass the word along to you for whatever it may be worth. chapter iv finding a market a nose for news, some perseverance, a typewriter and a camera have thus far been listed as the equipment most essential to success for a writer of non-fiction who sets out to trade in the periodical market as a free lance. rather brief mention has been made of the matter of literary style. this is not because the writer of this book lacks reverence for literary craftsmanship. it is simply because, with the facts staring him in the face, he must set down his conviction that a polished style is not a matter of tremendous importance to the average editor of the average american periodical. journalists so clumsy that, in the graphic phrase of a short grass poet, "they seem to write with their feet," sell manuscripts with clock-like regularity to first-class markets. the magazines, like the newspapers, employ "re-write men" to take crude manuscripts to pieces, rebuild them and give them a presentable polish. the matter of prime importance to most of our american editors is an article's content in the way of vital facts and "human interest." upon the matter of style the typical editor appears to take matthew arnold's words quite literally: "people think that i can teach them style. what stuff it all is! have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. that is the only secret of style." no embittered collector of rejection slips will believe me when i declare that the demand for worth-while articles always exceeds the supply in american magazine markets. none the less it is true, as every editor knows to his constant sorrow. the appetite of our hundreds of periodicals for real "stories" never has been satisfied. the menu has to be filled out with a regrettable proportion of bran and _ersatz_. the fact that a manuscript lacks all charm of style will not blast its chances of acceptance if the "story" is all there and is typed into a presentable appearance and illustrated with interesting photographs. a good style will enhance the manuscript's value, but want of verbal skill rarely will prove a fatal blemish. not so long as there are "re-write men" around the shop! it is not a lack of artistry that administers the most numerous defeats to the novice free lance. it is a lack of market judgment. when he has completed his manuscript he sits down and hopefully mails it out to the first market that strikes his fancy. he shoots into the dark, trusting to luck. a huge army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan of battle. they would know better than to try to market crates of eggs to a shoe store, but they see nothing equally absurd in shipping a popular science article to the _atlantic monthly_ or an "uplift" essay to the _smart set_. they paper their walls with rejection slips, fill up a trunk with returned manuscripts and pose before their sympathetic friends as martyrs. many of these defeated writers have nose-sense for what is of national interest. they write well, and they take the necessary pains to make their manuscripts presentable in appearance. if they only knew enough to offer their contributions to suitable markets, they soon would be scoring successes. what they can't get into their heads is that the names in an index of periodicals represent needs as widely varied as the names in a city directory. take, for example, five of our leading weeklies: _the saturday evening post_, _collier's_, _leslie's_, _the outlook_ and _the independent_. they all use articles of more or less timeliness, but beyond this one similarity they are no more alike in character than an american, an irishman, an englishman, a welshman and a scot. your burning hot news "story" which _the saturday evening post_ turned down may have been rejected because the huge circulation of the _post_ necessitates that its "copy" go to press six or seven weeks before it appears upon the newsstands. you should have tried _the independent_, which makes a specialty of getting hot stuff into circulation before it has time to cool. your interview with a big man of wall street which was returned by _the outlook_ might find a warm welcome at _leslie's_. a character sketch of the democratic candidate for president might not please _leslie's_ in the least, but would fetch a good price from _collier's_. your article on the prairie poets might be rejected by three other weeklies, but prove quite acceptable to _the outlook_. when you have completed a manuscript, forget the inspiration that went into its writing and give cold and sober second thought to this matter of marketing. _the outlook_ might have bought the article that _collier's_ rejected. _collier's_ might have bought the one that _the outlook_ rejected. every experienced writer will tell you that this sort of thing happens every day. don't snort in disdain because the editor of _the ladies' home journal_ rejects a contribution on economics. maybe the lady's husband would like it. so try it on _the world's work_, or _leslie's_ or _system_. it might win you a place of honor, with your name blazoned on the cover. too many discouraged novices believe that the bromide of the rejection slip--"rejection implies no lack of merit"--is simply a piece of sarcasm. it is nothing of the sort. in tens of thousands of instances it is a solemn fact. don't sulk and berate the editors who return your manuscript, but carefully read the contribution again, trying to forget for the moment that it is one of your own precious "brain children." cold-bloodedly size it up as something to sell. then you may perceive that you have been trying to market a crate of eggs at a shoe store. eggs are none the less precious on that account. try again--applying this time to a grocer. if he doesn't buy, it will be because he already has all the eggs on hand that he needs. in that event, look up the addresses of some more grocers. the same common sense principles apply in selling manuscripts to the magazines and newspapers as in marketing any other kind of produce. the top prices go to the fellow who delivers his goods fresh and in good order to buyers who stand in need of his particular sort of staple. composing a manuscript may be art, but selling it is business. naturally, it requires practice to become expert in picking topics of wide enough appeal to interest the public which reads magazines of national circulation. every beginner, except an inspired genius, is likely to be oppressed with a sense of hopelessness when he is making his first desperate attempts to "break in." the writer can testify feelingly on this point from his own experience. kansas city was then my base of operations, and it seemed as if i never possibly could find anything in that far inland locality worthy of nation-wide attention. everything i wrote bounced back with a printed rejection slip. at last, however, i discovered a "story" that appeared to be of undeniable national appeal. missouri, for the first time in thirty-six years, had elected a republican governor. i decided that the surest market for this would be a magazine dealing with personality sketches. if a magazine of that type would not buy the "story," i was willing to own myself whipped. on the afternoon when we were all sure that herbert hadley had won, i begged a big lithographed portrait of the governor-elect from a cigar store man who had displayed it prominently in his front window. there was no time, then, to search for a photograph. a thrill of conviction pervaded me that at last my fingers were on a "story" that no magazine editor, however much he might hate to recognize the worth of new authors, could afford to reject. the newspaper office files of clippings gave me all the information necessary for a brief biography; the lithograph should serve for an illustration. by midnight that irresistible wedge for entering the magazines was in the mails.... sure enough, the editors of _human life_ bought it. and, by some miracle of speed in magazine making never explained to this day, they printed it in their next month's issue. the moral of this was obvious--that in the proper market a real "story," even though it be somewhat hastily written, will receive a sincere welcome. the week after this irresistible wedge appeared in print i threw up my job as a reporter and dived off of the springboard into free lancing. a small bank account gave me assurance that there was no immediate peril of starving, and i wisely kept a connection with the local newspaper. in case disaster overtook me, i knew where i could find a job again. chapter v a beginner's first adventures what happened to me in making a beginning as a free lance producer of non-fiction might happen to any one else of an equal amount of inexperience. my home town had no professional magazine writer to whom i could turn for advice; and though i devoured scores of books about writing, they were chiefly concerned either with the newspaper business or with the technique of fiction, and they all failed to get down to brass tacks about my own pressing problem, which was how to write and sell magazine articles. i was not seeking any more abc advice about newspaper "stories," nor did i feel the least urge toward producing fiction. i thirsted to find out how to prepare and market a manuscript to _the saturday evening post_ or _collier's_, but the books in the public library were all about the short story and the novel, sunday "features," the evolution of the printing press or the adventures of a sob sister on an afternoon daily. so i had to go out and get my education as a magazine writer in a school of tough experiences. a few of these experiences are here recorded, in the hope that some of the lessons that were enforced upon me may be of help to other beginners. the immediate results of my plunge into free lancing were: january--not one cent. february--$ . . seven dollars of this was for the magazine article. no other magazine acceptances had followed the wedge. i had not yet caught the national viewpoint, nor had i picked up much practical information about the magazine markets. by march it was becoming painfully evident that a fledgling free lance should, if he is wise, depend for a while upon a local newspaper for the larger part of his income. in a school of hard knocks i learned to sell "stories" of purely local interest to the kansas city market, topics of state-wide interest to the st. louis sunday editors, and contributions whose appeal was as wide as the gulf of mexico to newspapers in chicago and new york. also i learned that if the free lance hopes to make any of these markets take a lively interest in him, he will introduce his manuscripts with interesting photographs. i rented a little black cube of a camera for twenty-five cents a day. it had a universal focus and nothing to bother about in the way of adjustments. to operate it you peeked into the range finder, then threw a lever. its lens was so slow that no pictures could be taken with it except in bright sunlight. i wrote about motor cars, willow farms, celebrities, freaks of nature in the city parks, catfish and junk heaps--anything of which i could snap interesting photographs and find enough text to "carry" the picture. march saw me earn $ . by doing assignments for the city editor in the mornings and "stories" at space rates in the afternoons for the sunday section. at night i plugged away at manuscripts hopefully intended for national periodicals. but not until late in september did i "land" in a big magazine. then--the thrill that comes once in a lifetime--i sold an article to _collier's_. it required tremendous energy to keep up such a pace, but there was sweet comfort in the thought that, technically at least, i was now my own boss. gradually, i broke away from assignment work until i was free to write what i liked and to go where i pleased. from finding material in the city, i adventured into some of the near-by towns in missouri and kansas, and soon was arguing a theory that in every small town the local correspondents of big city newspapers are constantly overlooking pay streaks of good "feature stories." usually i would start out with twenty-five dollars and keep moving until i went broke. a railway journey no longer meant, as in reportorial days, a banquet in the dining-car and a chair on the observation platform, charged up on an expense account. often enough i slept in a day coach, my head pillowed on a kodak wrapped in a sweater vest. the elevation was just right for a pillow; and at the same time the traveler was insured against theft of his most precious possession, a brand new folding camera of post card size. for the little snapshot box soon showed its weakness in an emergency and had to be replaced with a better machine which had an adjustable diaphragm, a timing apparatus, a focusing scale and a front like an accordion. one afternoon it had happened that while two hundred miles from a city and twenty from the nearest railroad, the snapshot box had been useless baggage for two hours, while an anxious free lance sat perched on the crest of an ozark mountain studying an overcast sky and praying for some sunlight. at last the sun blazed out for half a minute and the lever clicked in exultation. this experience enforced a lesson: "learn to take any sort of picture, indoors or out, on land or water, in any sort of weather." after i got the new machine, with a tripod to insure stability and consequent sharpness of outline, a piece of lemon-colored glass for cloud photography and another extra lens for portrait work, i began snapping at anything that held out even the faintest promise of allowing me to clear expenses in the course of acquiring needed experience. i photographed the neighbors' children, houses offered for sale, downtown street scenes and any number of x-marks-the-spot-of-the-accident. when a cyclone cut a swath through one of our suburbs, i rushed half-a-dozen photographs to _leslie's_, feeling again some of the same thrilling sort of confidence that had accompanied the first irresistible wedge. back came three dollars for a single print. rather a proud day, that! never before had one of my prints sold for more than fifty cents. there were evenings after that when i meditated giving the writing game good-by in favor of photography; and many a time since then the old temptation has recurred. the wonder of catching lovely scenery in a box and of watching film and print reproduce it in black and white keeps ever fresh and fascinating to me, gratifying an instinct for composition in one whose fingers are too clumsy to attempt to draw or paint. in those early days of my adventures in photography an editor came very near the literal truth when he sarcastically observed: "young man, life to you seems to be just one long undeveloped film." parallel with improvement in skill as a photographer, i developed a working plan to insure more profitable excursions afield. my interested friends among editors and reporters gladly gave me hints about possible out-of-town sources of "stories," and i studied the news columns, even to the fine type of the missouri and kansas state notes, with all the avidity of an aged hobo devouring a newspaper in the public library. for every possibility i made out a card index memorandum, as-- kanapolis, kas. geographical center of the country. once proposed as the capital of the nation--and of the state of kansas. now a whistling station and a rock salt plant. for each memorandum i stuck a pin in the state maps pasted on the wall of my workshop. when there were several pins in any neighborhood, i would sling my kodak over my shoulder, the carrying case strapped to the tripod-top, like a tramp with a bundle at the end of a stick. and then away, with an extra pair of socks and a harmonica for baggage. besides the material that i felt certain of finding through advance information, luck always could be trusted to turn up some additional "stories." the quickest way to find out what there was to write about in a town was simply to walk into the local newspaper office, introduce myself and ask for some tips about possible "features." i cannot recall that any one ever refused me, or ever failed to think of something worth while. i do not know yet whether what i discovered then is a business or not, but i made a living out of it. whereas reporting on a salary had begun to be something of a grind, the less profitable roamings of a free lance furnished a life that had color and everlasting freshness. sometimes, trusting in the little gods of the improvident, i was lured into the backwoods of the ozarks by such a name as "mountain home," which caught my fancy on the map; and with no definite "stories" in mind i would go sauntering from nowhere-in-particular in northern arkansas to someplace else in southern missouri, snapping pictures by the roadside and scribbling a few necessary notes. one of those excursions, which cost $ . , has brought a return, to date, of more than $ , which of course does not include the worth of a five days' lark with a young irishman who went on the trip as a novel form of summer vacation. he found all the novelty he could have hoped for. after some truly lyric passages of life in arkansas, when we felt positively homesick about leaving one town to go on to another, we reached a railroad-less county in missouri infested with fleas; and to secure a discount on the stage fare on the thirty-five-mile drive from gainsville to west plains (we _had_ to have a discount to save enough to buy something to eat that night) we played the harmonica for our driver's amusement until we gasped like fish. his soul was touched either by the melody or by pity, and he left us enough small change to provide a supper of cheese and crackers. some happenings that must sound much more worth while in the ears of the mundane have followed, but those first days of free lancing seem to me to be among the choicest in a journalistic adventurer's experience. encounters with a variety of celebrities since then have proved no whit more thrilling than the discovery that our host, jerry south of mountain home, was lieutenant-governor of arkansas; and though i have roamed in five nations, no food that i ever have tasted so nearly approaches that of the gods as the strawberry shortcake we ate in bergman. even in the crass matter of profits, i found the small town richer in easily harvestable "stories" than the biggest city in the world. a few years later i spent a week in london, but i picked up less there to write about than i found in sabetha, kansas, in a single afternoon. sabetha furnished: half of the material for a motor car article. (when automobiles were still a novelty to the rural population.) this sold to _leslie's_. an article on gasoline-propelled railway coaches, for _the illustrated world_. a short contribution on scientific municipal management of public utilities in a small town, for _collier's_. a character sketch about a local philanthropic money lender, for _leslie's_ and the kansas city _star_. an account of the kansas amish, a sect something like the tolstoys, for kansas city, st. louis and new york newspapers. short sunday specials about a $ , hospital and a thoroughly modern kansas farm house for kansas city and st. louis sunday sections. the profits of these excursions were not always immediate, and until after i had worked many weeks at the trade there were periods of serious financial embarrassment. to cite profitable trips too early is to get ahead of my story, but the time is none the less propitious to remark that a country town or a small city certainly is as good a place for the free lance to operate (once he knows a "story" when he sees it) as is new york or chicago, boston, new orleans or san francisco. i often wonder if i would not have been better off financially if i had kept on working from a kansas city headquarters instead of emigrating to the east. i might have gone on this way for a long time, in contentment, for my profits were steadily mounting and my markets extending. but one day my wanderings extended as far as chicago, and there i ran across an old friend of student days. he had been the cartoonist of the college magazine when i was its editor. he wore, drooping from one corner of his face, a rah-rah bulldog pipe; an enormous portfolio full of enormities of drawing was under one arm, and, dangling at the end of the other, was one of the tiniest satchels that ever concealed a nightgown. in answer to questions about what he was doing with himself, he confessed that he was not making out any better than most other newly graduated students of art. i argued that if chicago did not treat him considerately, he ought to head for new york, where real genius, more than likely, would be more quickly appreciated. also, if this was to his liking, i would invite myself to go along with him. we went. now sing, o muse, the slaughter! chapter vi in new york's "fleet street" the inexperienced free lance who attempts to invade new york, as we did, with no magazine reputation and no friends at court among the experts of the periodical market, may be assured that he will receive a surprising amount of courtesy. but this courtesy is likely to be administered to help soften the blows of a series of disappointments. anybody but a genius or one of fortune's darlings may expect that new york, which has a deep and natural distrust of strangers, will require that the newcomer earn his bread in blood-sweat until he has established a reputation for producing the goods. dear old simple-hearted father knickerbocker has been gold-bricked so often that a breezy, friendly manner puts him immediately on his guard. most of the editors with whom you will have to deal are home folks, like yourself, from oskaloosa and richmond and santa barbara and quincy. few are native-born new yorkers, and scarcely any of them go around with their noses in the air in an "upstage eastern manner." most of them are graduates of the newspaper school, and remnants of newspaper cynicism occasionally appear in their outspoken philosophy. but be not deceived by this, for even in the newspaper office the half-baked cub who is getting his first glimpses of woman's frailties and man's weak will is the only cynic who means all he says. all reporters who are worth their salt mellow with the years; and editors who amount to much usually are ex-reporters trained to their jobs by long experience. the biggest editors and the ones with the biggest hearts have the biggest jobs. most of the snubs you will receive will come from little men in little jobs, trying to impress you with a "front." the biggest editors of the lot are plain home folks whom you would not hesitate to invite to a dinner in a farmhouse kitchen. what you ought to know when you invade new york without much capital and no reputation to speak of is that you are making a great mistake to move there so early, and that most of the editors to whom you address yourself know you are making a mistake but are too soft-hearted to tell you so. like most other over-optimistic free lances, we invaded new york with an expeditionary force which was in a woeful state of unpreparedness. in a street of brownstone fronts in mid-town manhattan, a hurdy-gurdy strummed a welcome to us in the golden november sunlight, and a canary in a gilt cage twittered ecstatically from an open window. this moment is worthy of mention because it was the happiest that was granted to us for a number of months thereafter. we rented a small furnished room, top floor rear, and went out for a stroll on broadway, looking the city over with the appraising eyes of conquerors. we were joyously confident. one reason why we thought we would do well here was that the latter months of the period preceding our supposedly triumphal entry had seen me arrive at the point of earning almost as much money at free lancing as i could have made as a reporter. meantime, i had thrilled to see my name affixed to contributions in _collier's_, _leslie's_, _outlook_ and _outing_, not to mention a few lesser magazines. i thought i knew a "story" when i saw one. i knew how to take photographs and prepare a manuscript for marketing, and new york newspapers and magazines had been treating me handsomely. what we did not realize was that while the new york markets were hospitable enough to western material, they required no further assistance in reporting the activities of manhattan island. we had moved away from our gold mine. our home and workshop now was a cubbyhole so small that every piece of furniture in the place was in close proximity to something else. my battered desk was jam against my roommate's drawing table, and his chair backed against a bed. then, except for a narrow aisle to the door, there was a chair which touched another bed, which touched a trunk; the trunk touched ends with a washstand, which was jam against a false mantel pasted onto the wall, and the mantel was in juxtaposition with a bureau which poked me in the back. the window looked south, and adjacent buildings allowed it to have sunlight for almost half an hour a day. yet it would have been a cheerful enough place if our mail had not been so depressing. everything we sent out came right back with a bounce, sometimes on the same day that we posted it. with indefatigable zeal we wrote feature "stories" about big topics in america's biggest city and furnished illustrations for the text. but the manuscripts did not sell. for two bitter months we kept at it before we discovered what was wrong. you may wonder how we could have been so blind. but there was no one to tell us what to do. we had to find out by experience. in november our income was $ . , all of it echoes from the past for material written in the west. "how that crowd in the old office would laugh at us when we trailed back home, defeated!" that was the thought which was at once a nightmare and a goad to further desperate effort. day after day the art department and the kodak and i explored new york's highways and centers of interest. the place was ripe with barrels and barrels of good "feature stories," and i knew it; and the markets were not unfriendly, for by mail i had sold to them before. but now we could not "land." on christmas day there was a dismal storm. our purses were almost flat, and my box from home failed to arrive. to get up an appetite for dinner that night we went for a walk in a joy killing blizzard. i wanted to die and planned to do so. the only reason i did not jump off of a pier was the providential intervention of several stiff cocktails. (i am theoretically a prohibitionist, but grateful to the enemy for having saved my life.) the black cloud that shut out all sunlight was our measly total for december--$ . . one glimmer of hope remained in a growing suspicion that perhaps some of the "stories" we had submitted had seen print shortly before we arrived. possibly some other free lances--i would now estimate the number as somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand--had gone over the island of manhattan with a fine tooth comb? i began haunting the side streets to seek out the most hidden possibilities, and ended in triumph one afternoon in a little uptown bird store. for two hours the young woman who was the proprietor of the store submitted to a searching interview, and i emerged with enough material for a full page spread. then, taking no chances of being turned down because the contribution was too long, i condensed the "story" into a column. the manuscript went to the sunday editor of the new york _sun_, with a letter pleading that "just this once" he grant me the special favor of a note to explain why he would not be able to use what i had to offer. "well enough written," he scribbled on the rejection slip, "but miss virginia has been done too many times before." with that a great light dawned. further investigation discovered that we had run into the same difficulty on numerous other occasions. we newcomers had no notion of how thoroughly and often the city had been pillaged for news. we could not tell old stuff from new. manhattan island is, indeed, the most perilous place in all america for the green and friendless free lance to attempt to earn a living. there is a wonderful abundance of "stories," but nearly all of them that the eye of the beginner can detect have been marketed before. any other island but manhattan! when dog days came around, i took a vacation on bois blanc in the straits of mackinac, and found more salable "stories" along its thinly populated shores than manhattan had been able to furnish in three months. everything i touched on bois blanc was new, and all my own. anything on manhattan is everybody's. but to return to our troubles in new york. the only hope i could see was to create a line of writing all our own. this determination resulted in a highly specialized type of "feature" for which we found a market in the morning new york _world_. it combined novelty with the utmost essence of timeliness. for example, precluding any possibility of being anticipated on the opening of coney island's summer season, we wrote early in february: "if reports from unveracious employees of coney island are to be trusted, the summer season of is going to bring forth thrilling novelties for the air and the earth and the tunnels beneath the earth." we listed then the biplane hat glide (women were wearing enormous hats that season) and motor ten pins--get in a motor car and run down dummies which count respectively, a child, ten points; a blind man, five; a newsboy, one. then the shontshover. we explained the shontshover in detail because it was supposed to have a particularly strong appeal to the millions who ride in the subway: "new york's good-natured enjoyment of its inadequate subway service is responsible for the third novelty of the season. in honor of a gentleman who once took a ride in one of his own subway cars during the rush hour, the device has been named the 'shontshover' (from 'shonts' and 'shover'). it is the sublimation of a subway car, a cross between a cartridge and a sardine can. the passengers are packed into the shell with a hydraulic ram, then at high speed are shot through a pneumatic tube against a stone wall. because of the great number of passengers the shontshover can carry in a day, the admission price to the tube is to be only twenty-five cents." we suggested on other occasions that new churches should have floors with an angle of forty-five degrees, on account of the prevailing fashion of large hats among women; that city hall employees were outwitting mayor gaynor's time clock by paying the night watchman to punch it for them at sunrise, and that beauty had become a bar to a job as waitress in numerous new york restaurants. (o shades of george washington, forgive us that one, at least!) these squibs did nobody any harm, and did us on the average, the good of the price of a week's room rent. we never meant them to be taken seriously or ever supposed that any one in the world would swallow them whole. but among our readers was a square-headed german; and one of the most absurd of our imaginings turned out, as a result, to be a physical possibility. "ever since it was announced, a few days ago, that hazing in a modified modernized form is to be permitted at west point," we related, "a reporter for the _world_ has been busily interviewing people of all ages and interests to find the latest ideas on the subject.... some small boys in van cortlandt park yesterday afternoon, diabolo experts, suggested 'plebe diabolo.' it is simply diabolo for grown-ups. a rope takes the place of the customary string and a first year man is used for a spool. any one can see at a glance what a great improvement this would be over the old-fashioned stunt of tossing the plebe in a blanket." a few months later i picked up a copy of the _scientific american_ and chortled to read the account of a german acrobat who was playing in vaudeville as the "human diabolo." but this sort of thing was merely temporizing, and we finally had to abandon it for subjects more substantial. by a slow and harrowing process we learned our specialties and made a few helpful friends in new york's fleet street. the fittest among the many manuscripts turned out by our copy mill survived to teach us that the surest way into print is to write about things closest to personal knowledge--simple and homely themes close to the grass roots. we turned again to middle western topics and the magazines opened their doors to us. we plugged away for six months and cleared a profit large enough to pay off all our debts and leave a little margin. then we felt that we could look the west in the face again, and go home, if we liked, without a consciousness of utter defeat. for though we had not won, neither had we lost. our books struck a balance. when the wanderlust began calling again in may, i sat many an evening in the window of our little room, gazing down into the backyard cat arena or up at the moon, and dragging away at a missouri corncob pipe in a happy revery. some of my manuscript titles of editorial paragraphs contributed to _collier's_ trace what happened next: longings at the window. packing up. a mood of moving day. from cab to taxi. outdoor sleeping quarters. shortcake. which is to say that it was sweet to see the home folks again, to eat fried chicken and honest homemade strawberry shortcake and to slumber on a sleeping porch. our forces had beat a strategic retreat, but the morale was not gone. our determination was firm to assault new york again at the first favorable opportunity. meanwhile, we had learned a thing or two. chapter vii something to sell six months back home, toiling like a galley slave, furnished requisite funds for another fling at new york. if ever a writer _burned_ with zeal, this one did. mississippi valley summers often approach the torrid; this one was a record breaker; and i never shall forget how often that summer, after a hard day's work as a reporter, i stripped to the waist like a stoker and scribbled and typed until my eyes and fingers ached. it was wise--and foolish. wise, because it furnished the capital with which every free lance ought to be well supplied before he attempts to operate from a new york headquarters. foolish, because it took all joy of life out of my manuscripts while the session of strenuousness lasted and left me wavering at the end almost on the verge of a physical breakdown. nights, sundays and holidays i plugged and slogged, nor did i relent even when vacation time came round. i sojourned to the michigan pine woods, but took along my typewriter and kept it singing half of every day. the new year found me in new york again, alone this time and installed in a comfortable two-room suite instead of an attic. a reassuring bank account bolstered up my courage while the work was getting under way. this time i made a go of it; and such ups and downs as have followed in the ten years succeeding have not been much more dramatic than the mild adventures that befall the everyday business man. "danger is past and now troubles begin." that phrase of gambetta's aptly describes the situation of the average free lance when, after the first desperate struggles, he has managed to gain a reasonable assurance of independence. confidence comes with experience, and when you no longer have any grave fears about your ability to make a living at the trade, your mind turns from elementary problems to the less distracting task of finding out how to make your discovered degree of talent count for all that it may be worth. after trying your hand at a variety of subjects, you will find your forte. but take your time about it. every adventure in composition teaches you something new about yourself, your art and the markets wherein you gain your daily bread. the way to learn to write--the only way--is by writing, and you never will know what you might do unless you dare and try. both as a matter of expediency and of getting as much fun out of the work as possible, it is well in the beginning to be versatile. eventually, the free lance faces two choices: he may become a specialist and put in the remainder of his life writing solely about railroads, or about finance, or about the drama. or he may, as robert louis stevenson did, turn his hand as the mood moves him, to fiction, verse, fables, biography, criticism, drama or journalism--a little of everything. for my own part, i have always had something akin to pity for the fellow who is bound hand and foot to one interest. let the fame and the greater profits of specialization go hang; "an able bodied writin' man" can best possess his soul if he does not harness pegasus to plow forever in one cabbage patch. like the ozark mountain farmer who also ran a country store, a saw mill, a deer park, a sorghum mill, a threshing machine and preached in the meetin' house on sunday mornings, i have turned my pen to any honest piece of writing that appealed strongly enough to my fancy--travel, popular science, humor, light verse, editorials, essays, interviews, personality sketches and captions for photographs. genius takes a short cut to the highroad. but waste not your sympathy on the rest of us, for the byways have their own charm. while one is finding his footing in the free lance fields, he had best not hold himself above doing any kind of journalistic work that turns an honest dollar. for he becomes richer not only by the dollar, but also by the acquaintances he makes and the valuable experience he gains in turning that dollar. there was a time--and not so long ago--when, if the writer called at the waiting room of the leslie-judge company, the girl at the desk would try to guess whether he had a drawing to show to the art editor, a frivolous manuscript for _judge_ or a serious article for _leslie's_. at the doubleday, page plant the uncertainty was about whether the caller sought the editor of _world's work_, _country life_, the _red cross magazine_ or _short stories_--he had, at various times, contributed to all of these publications. smile, if you like, but there is no better way to discover what you can do best than to try your 'prentice hand at a great variety of topics and mediums. the post-graduate course of every school of journalism is a roped arena where you wrestle, catch as catch can, for the honors bestowed by experience. this experience, painfully acquired, should be backed up by an elementary knowledge of salesmanship. super-sensitive souls there are who shudder at the mere mention of the word; and why this is so is not difficult to understand--their minds are poisoned with sentimental misapprehensions. get rid of those misapprehensions just as swiftly as you can. if you have something to sell, be it hardware or a manuscript, common sense should dictate that you learn a little about how to sell it. expert interviewers prepare themselves both for their topic and their man before they go into a confab--a practice which should be followed to some extent by every writer who sets out to interview an editor about a manuscript. what you have to offer should be prepared to suit the needs of the editor to whom the contribution is addressed. so you should study your magazine just as carefully as you do the subject about which you are writing. in your interview with the editor or in the letter which takes the place of an interview, state briefly whatever should be useful to his enlightenment. that is all. there you have the first principles of what is meant by "an elementary knowledge of salesmanship." if you don't know what you are talking about or anything about the possible needs of the man to whom you are talking, how can you expect to interest him in any commodity under heaven? say nothing that you don't believe--he won't believe it, either. never fool him. if you do, you may sell him once, but never again. there is no dark art to salesmanship; it is simply a matter of delivering the goods in a manner dictated by courtesy, sincerity, common sense and common honesty. be yourself without pose, and don't forget that the editor--whether you believe it or not--is just as "human" as you are, and quick to respond to the best that there is in you. shake off the delusion that you need to play the "good fellow" to him, like the old-fashioned type of drummer in a small town. simply and sincerely and straight from the shoulder--also briefly, because he is a busy man--state your case, leave your literary goods for inspection and go your way. he will judge you and your manuscript on merits; if he does not, he will not long continue to be an editor. the two greatest curses of his existence (i speak from experience) are the poses and the incurable loquaciousness of some of his callers and correspondents. don't attempt to spring any correspondence school salesmanship on a real editor. learn what real salesmanship is, from a real salesman--who may sell bacon, or steel or motor cars instead of manuscripts. he lives down your street, perhaps. have a talk with him. he will tell you of the profits in a square deal and in knowing your business, and what can be accomplished by a little faith. if you are temperamentally unfit to sell your own writings, get a competent literary agent to do the job for you. but don't too quickly despair, for after all, there is nothing particularly subtle about salesmanship. sincerity, however crude, usually carries conviction. if you know a "story" when you see it, if you write it right and type it in professional form and give it the needed illustrations; then if you offer it in a common sense manner to a suitable market, you can be trusted to handle your own products as successfully as the best salesman in america--as successfully as charles schwab himself. for, above all, remember this: the editor is just as eager to buy good stuff as you are to sell it. nothing is simpler than to make a sale in the literary market if you have what the editor wants. chapter viii what the editor wants suppose you were the manager of an immense forum, a stadium like the one in san diego, california, where with the aid of a glass cage and an electrical device increasing the intensity of the human voice, it is possible to reach the ears of a world's record audience of , persons. what sort of themes would you favor when candidates for a place on your speaking program asked you what they ought to discuss? "the style of walter pater?" "the fourth dimension?" "florentine art of the fourteenth century?" not likely! you would insist upon simple and homely themes, of the widest possible appeal. a parallel case is that of the editor of a magazine of general circulation. he manages a forum so much larger than the famous stadium at san diego that the imagination is put to a strain to picture it. on the generally accepted assumption that each sold copy of a popular magazine eventually reaches an average of five persons, there is one forum in the magazine world of america which every week assembles a throng of ten million or more assorted citizens, gathered from everywhere, coast to coast, men and women, young and old, every walk of life. a dozen other periodicals address at least half that number, and the humblest of the widely known magazines reaches a quarter of a million--five times as many persons as jammed their way into the san diego stadium one time to hear a speech by the president of the united states. put yourself into the shoes of the manager of one of these forums, and try to understand some of his difficulties. a dozen times a day the editor of a popular periodical is besieged by contributors to make some sort of answer to the question: "what kind of material are you seeking?" what else can he reply, in a general way, but "something of wide appeal, to interest our wide circle of readers"? there are times, of course, when he can speak specifically and with assurance, if all he happens to require at the moment to give proper balance to his table of contents is one or two manuscripts of a definite type. then he may be able to say, off-hand: "an adventure novelette of twenty thousand words," or, "an article on the high cost of shoe leather, three thousand five hundred words." but this is a happy situation which is not at all typical. ordinarily, he stands in constant need of half a dozen varieties of material; but to describe them all in detail to every caller would take more time than he could possibly afford to spare. he cannot stop to explain to every applicant that among what robert louis stevenson described as "the real deficiencies of social intercourse" is the fact that while two's company three's a crowd; that with each addition to this crowd the topics of conversation must broaden in appeal, seeking the greatest common divisor of interests; and that a corollary is the unfortunate fact that the larger the crowd the fewer and more elemental must become the subjects that are possible for discussion. every editor knows that a lack of judgment in selecting themes of broad enough appeal to interest a nation-wide public is one of the novice scribbler's most common failings. it is due chiefly to a lack of imagination on the part of the would-be contributor, who appears to be incapable of projecting himself into the editorial viewpoint. i can testify from my own experience that a single day's work as an editor, wading through a bushel of mail, taught me more about how to make a selection of subjects than six months of shooting in the dark as a free lance. every editor knows that nine out of ten of the unsolicited manuscripts which he will find piled upon his desk for reading to-morrow morning will prove to be wholly unfitted for the uses of his magazine. the man outside the sanctum fails utterly to understand the editor's dilemma. this is the situation which has produced the "staff writer," and has brought down upon the editor the protests of his more discriminating readers against "standardized fiction" and against sundry uninspired articles produced to measure by faithful hacks. the editor defends his course in printing this sort of material upon the ground that a magazine made up wholly of unsolicited material would be a horrid mélange, far more distressing to the consumer than the present type of popular periodical which is so largely made to order. all editors read unsolicited material hopefully and eagerly. many an editor gives this duty half of his working day and part of his evenings and sundays. all of the reward of a discoverer is his if he can herald a new worth-while writer. moreover, the interest of economy bids him be faithful in the task, for the novice does not demand the high rates of the renowned professional. yet even on the largest of our magazines, where the stream of contributions is enormous, the most diligent search is not fruitful of much material that is worth while. the big magazines have to order most of their material in advance, like so much sausage or silk; and much of the contents is planned for many months ahead. scarcely any dependence can be placed upon the luck of what drifts into the office in the mails. inevitably, the magazines must have large recourse to "big names," not because of inbred snobbishness on the part of the editors but because the "big name," besides carrying advertising value, is more likely than a little one to stand for material with a "big" theme, handled by a writer of experience. a surer touch in selecting and handling topics of nation-wide appeal is what counts most heavily in favor of the writer with an established reputation. often enough it is not his vastly superior craftsmanship. i know of several famous magazine writers who never in their lives have got their material into print in the form in which it originally was submitted. they are what the trade calls "go-getters." they deliver the "story" as best they can, and a more skillful stylist completes the job. success in marketing non-fiction to popular magazines appears to hinge largely upon the quality of the thinking the writer does before he sets pen to paper. a classic anecdote of new york's fleet street may illustrate the point: the publisher of a national weekly was hiring a newspaper man as editor. "is this a writing job?" the applicant inquired. "no!" growled the publisher, "a thinkin' job!" the writer of non-fiction is in the same boat with the editor who buys his articles; he calls himself a writer, but primarily he is up against a thinking job. the actual writing of his material is secondary to good judgment in selecting what is known as a "compelling" theme. if he can produce a "real story" and get it onto paper in some sort of intelligent fashion, what remains to be done in the way of craftsmanship can be handled inside the magazine office by a "re-write man." make sure, first of all, that what you have to say is something that ought to interest the large audience to which you address it. nobody with a grain of common sense would attempt to discuss "the style of walter pater" to fifty thousand restless and croupy auditors in the vast san diego stadium, but the average free lance sees nothing of equal absurdity about attempting to cram an essay on pater down the throats of a miscellaneous crowd in a stadium which is from a hundred to two hundred times as large--the forum into which throng the thousands who read one of our large popular magazines. much as we may regret to acknowledge it, there is no way to get around the fact that the larger and more general the circulation of a periodical, the more universal must be the appeal of the material printed and the fewer the mainstays of interest, until in a magazine with a circulation of more than a million copies the chief classifications of non-fiction material required can easily be counted upon the fingers. the editor of such a publication necessarily is limited to handling rather elemental topics; so it is not to be wondered at when we hear that the largest publication of them all makes its mainstays two such universally interesting and world-old themes as business and "the way of a man with a maid." examine any popular magazine which has a circulation of general readers, speaking to a forum of anywhere from a quarter of a million to ten million assorted readers, and you will find that the non-fiction material which it is most eager to buy may easily be classified into half a dozen types of articles, all concerned with the ruling passions of the average american, as: . his job. . his hearthstone. . his politics. . his recreations. . his health. . happenings of national interest. examine a few of these types of contributions to arrive at a clearer understanding of why they are so justly popular. your average american is, first of all, keenly interested in his job. it is much more to him, usually, than just a way to make a living. it fascinates him like a game, and you often hear him describe it as a "game." what, then, is more natural than that he should eagerly read articles of practical helpfulness concerned with his activities in office or store, factory or farm? the largest of our popular magazines never appear without something which touches this sort of interest, stimulating the man of affairs to strive after further successes and advancement in his chosen occupation. many specialized business and trade publications and more than a score of skillfully edited farm magazines thrive upon developing this class of themes to the exclusion of all other material. a second vital interest is the hearthstone--suggesting such undying topics as love and the landlord, marriage and divorce, the training of children, the household budget, the high cost of living, those compelling themes which have built up the women's magazines into institutions of giant stature and tremendous power. politics is another field of almost universal interest, broadening every day now that women have the ballot and now that our vision is no longer limited to the homeland horizon, but finds itself searching eagerly onward into international relationships. once we were content, as a national body politic, to discuss candidates for the presidency or what our stand should be upon currency and the tariff. to-day we are also gravely concerned to know what is to become of russia and germany, or how the political and social unrest in france and italy and england will affect the peace of the world. as a fourth point, your average american these days is quick to respond to anything worth while concerning his recreations. as a consequence, much space is reserved in the big magazines for articles on society, travel, the theater and the movies, motor cars, country life, outings, and such popular sports as golf, baseball and tennis. every one of these topics, besides being dealt with in the general magazines, has its own special mouthpiece. health always has been a subject constantly on the tip of everybody's tongue, but never before has so much been printed about the more important phases of it than appears in the popular magazines of to-day. knowledge of the common sense rules of diet, exercise, ventilation and the like are becoming public possession--thanks largely to the magazines and the newspaper syndicates. a sixth mainstay of the magazines is in the presentation of articles dealing with happenings of national interest or personalities prominent in the day's news. this task grows increasingly difficult as the newspapers tighten their grip upon the public's attention and as the news pictorials of the moving picture screen gain in popular esteem by improved technical skill and more intelligent editing. the magazine of large circulation must go to press so long before the newspapers and the films that much perishable news must be thrown out, even though it is of nation wide appeal. the magazines are coming to find their greatest usefulness in the news field in gathering up the loose ends of scattered paragraphs which the daily newspapers have no time to weave together into a pattern. in the magazine the patchwork of daily journalism is assembled into more meaningful designs. local news is sifted of its provincialism to become matter of national concern. topics which you rapidly skimmed in the afternoon newspaper three or four weeks ago are re-discussed in the weekly or monthly magazines in a way which often makes you feel that here, for the first time, they become of personal import. the purpose of the suggestions sketched above is not to supply canned topics to ready writers, but to set ambitious scribblers to the task of doing some thinking for themselves. instead of shiftlessly tossing the whole burden of responsibility for choice of topics to a hard driven editor, and whining, "please give me an idea!", search around on your own initiative for a theme worth presenting to the attention of a throng of widely assorted listeners--for a "story" that ought to appeal to america's multitudes. if your topic is big enough for a big audience, your chances are prime to get a hearing for it. dig up the necessary facts, the "human interest" and the national significance of the case. then, rest assured, that "story" is what the editor wants. chapter ix and if you do-- something in the misty sunshine this morning made you restless. vague longings, born of springtime mystery, stirred your blood, quickened the imagination. roads that never were, and mayhap never will be, beckoned you with their sinuous curves and graceful shade trees toward velvety fields beyond the city's skyline. the sweet fragrance of blossoming orchards tingled in your nostrils and thrilled you with wanderlust. haunting melodies quavered in your ears. your old briar pipe never tasted so sweet before. adventure never seemed so imminent. a golden day. what will you do with it? you could write to-day, but if you did, you know you could support no patience for prosy facts, statistics and photographs. whatever urge you feel appears to be toward verse or fiction. well, why not? try it! you never know what you might do in writing until you dare. verse is largely its own reward. fiction, when it turns out successfully, fetches a double reward. it pays both in personal satisfaction, as a form of creative art, and also as a marketable commodity, which always is in great demand, and which can be cashed in to meet house rent and grocers' bills. it is not within the scope of this little book--nor of its author's abilities--to attempt a discussion of fiction methods. too many other writers, better qualified to speak, have dealt with fiction in scores of worth while volumes. too many successful story tellers have related their experiences and treated, with authority, of the short story, the novelette and the long novel. the purpose here can be only to urge that an attempt to write fiction is a logical step ahead for any scribbler who has won a moderate degree of success in selling newspaper copy and magazine articles. the eye that can perceive the dramatic and put it into non-fiction, the heart that knows human interest, the understanding that can tell a symbol, the artist-instinct that can catch characteristic colors, scents and sounds, all should aid a skilled writer of articles to turn his energies, with some hope of achievement, toward producing fiction. the hand that can fashion a really vivid article holds out promise of being able to compose a convincing short story, if grit and ambition help push the pen. the temptation to dogmatize here is strong, for the witness can testify that he has seen enviable success crown many a fiction writer who, apparently, possessed small native talent for story telling, and who won his laurels through sheer pluck and persistence. one of these pluggers declares he blesses the rejection slip because it "eliminates so many quitters." but of course it would be absurd to believe that any one with unlimited courage and elbow grease could win at fiction, lacking all aptitude for it. just as there are photographers who can snap pictures for twenty years without producing a single happy composition (except by accident), and reporters who never develop a "nose for news," there are story writers who can master all the mechanics of tale-telling, through sheer drudgery, and yet continually fail to catch fiction's spark of life. they fail, and shall always fail. yet it is better to have strived and failed, than never to have tried at all. why? for the good of their artists' consciences, in the first place. and, in the second, because no writer can earnestly struggle with words without learning something about them to his trade advantage. a confession may be in order: your deponent testifies freely, knowing that anything he may say may be used against him, that for years he has been a tireless producer of unsuccessful fiction, yet he views his series of rebuffs in this medium calmly and even somewhat humorously. for, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. it stimulates the torpid imagination. it quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the picturesque and the dramatic. it is a groping toward art. "art," writes one who knows, "is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so noble, that no phrases can fitly characterize her, no service can be wholly worthy of her." perhaps such art as goes into the average magazine article is not likely to merit much high-sounding praise. in our familiar shop talk we are prone to laugh about it. but even the most commercial-minded of our brotherhood cherishes deep in his heart a craftsman's pride in work well done. so your deponent testifies in his own defense that his copybook exercises in fiction, half of which end in the wastebasket, seem well worth the pains that they cost, so long as they help keep alive in his non-fiction bread-winners a hankering after (if not a flavor of) literary art. and now must he apologize further for using a word upon which writers in these confessedly commercial days appear to have set a _taboo_? then a passage from "the study of literature" (arlo bates) may serve for the apology: "life is full of disappointment, and pain, and bitterness, and that sense of futility in which all of these evils are summed up; and yet were there no other alleviation, he who knows and truly loves literature finds here a sufficient reason to be glad he lives. science may show a man how to live; art makes living worth his while. existence to-day without literature would be a failure and a despair; and if we cannot satisfactorily define our art, we at least are aware how it enriches and ennobles the life of every human being who comes within the sphere of its gracious influence." so, we repeat: for the good of the artist's self-respect as well as for his craftsmanship it is worth while to attempt fiction. if only as a tonic! if only to jog himself out of a rut of habit! if he succeeds with fiction he has bright hopes of winning much larger financial rewards for his labor than he is likely to gain by writing articles. non-fiction rarely brings in more than one return upon the investment, but a good short story or novel may fetch several. first, his yarn sells to the magazine. then it may be re-sold ("second serial rights") to the newspapers. finally, it may fetch the largest cash return of all by being marketed to a motion picture corporation as the plot for a scenario. in some instances even this does not exhaust all the possibilities, for if british magazines and bookmen are interested in the tale, the "english rights" of publication may add another payment to the total. not all of the features of this picture, however, should be painted in rose-colors. a disconcerting and persistent rumor has it that what once was a by-product of fiction--the sale of "movie rights"--is now threatening to run off with the entire production. the side show, we are warned, is shaping the policy of the main tent. which is to say that novelists and magazine fiction writers are accused of becoming more concerned about how their stories will film than about how the manuscripts will grade as pieces of literature. to get a yarn into print is still worth while because this enhances its value in the eyes of the producers of motion pictures. but the author's real goal is "no longer good writing, so much as remunerative picture possibilities." we set this down not because we believe it true of the majority of our brother craftsmen, but because evidences of such influences are undeniably present, and do not appear to have done the art of writing fiction any appreciable benefit. if your trade is non-fiction, and you turn to fiction to improve your art rather than your bank account, good counsel will admonish you not to aim at any other mark than the best that you can produce in the way of literary art. for there lies the deepest satisfaction a writer can ever secure--"art makes living worth his while." chapter x forever at the crossroads keep studying. keep experimenting. set yourself harder tasks. never be content with what you have accomplished. match yourself against the men who can outplay you, not against the men you already excel. keep attempting something that baffles you. discontent is your friend more often than your enemy. from the moment that he is graduated out of the cub reporter class, every writer who is worth his salt is forever at the crossroads, perplexed about the next turn. nowhere is smugness of mind more deadly than in journalism. to progress you must forever scale more difficult ascents. the bruises of rebuffs and the wounds of injured vanity will heal quickly enough if you keep busy. defeated or undefeated, the writer who always is trying to master something more difficult than the work he used to do preserves his self-respect and the respect of his worth-while neighbors. the fellow with the canker at his heart is not the battler but the envious shirker who is too "proud" to risk a fall. swallow what you suppose to be your pride; it really is a false sense of dignity. make a simple beginning in the university of experience by learning with experiments what constitutes a "story" and by drudging with pencil and typewriter to put that "story" into professional manuscript form. get the right pictures for it; then ship it off to market. if the first choice of markets rejects you, try the second, the third, fourth, fifth and sixth--even unto the ninety-and-ninth. few beginners have even a dim notion of the great variety of markets that exist for free lance contributions. there are countless trade publications, newspaper syndicates, class journals, "house organs," and magazines devoted to highly specialized interests. nearly all of these publications are eager to buy matter of interest to their particular circles of readers. every business, every profession, every trade, every hobby has its mouthpiece. remember this when you are a beginner and the "big magazines" of general circulation are rejecting your manuscripts with a clock-like regularity which drives you almost to despair. try your 'prentice hand on contributions to the smaller publications. that is the surest way to "learn while you earn" in free lancing. these humble markets need not cause you to sneer--particularly if you happen to be a humble beginner. every laboratory experiment in manuscript writing and marketing, though it be only a description of a shop window for a dry goods trade paper, or an interview with a boss plumber for the _gas fitter's gazette_, will furnish you with experience in your own trade, and set you ahead a step on the long road that leads to the most desirable acceptances. the one thing to watch zealously is your own development, to make sure that you do not too soon content yourself with achievements beneath your capabilities. start with the little magazines, but keep attempting to attain the more difficult goals. meanwhile, you need not apologize to any one for the nature of your work, so long as it is honest reporting and all as well written as you know how to make it. stevenson, one of the most conscientious of literary artists, declared in a "letter to a young gentleman who proposes to embrace the career of art," that "the first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way," and this is one of your confessed purposes while you are serving this kind of journalistic apprenticeship. until he arrives, the novice must, indeed, unless he be exceptionally gifted, "pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. and if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than talent--character. or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist from art, and follow some more manly way of life." in short, so long as you _keep moving_ toward something worth attaining, there is nothing to worry about but how to keep from relapsing into smugness or idleness. the besetting temptation of the free lance is to pamper himself. he is his own boss, can sleep as late as he likes, go where he pleases and quit work when the temptation seizes him. as a result, he usually babies himself and turns out much less work than he might safely attempt without in the least endangering his health. when he finds out later how assiduously some of the best known of our authors keep at their desks he becomes a little ashamed of himself. though they may not work, on the average, as long hours as the business man, they toil far harder, and usually with few of the interruptions and relaxations from the job that the business man is allowed. four or five hours of intense application a day stands for a great deal more expenditure of energy and thought than eight or nine hours broken up with periods when one's feet are literally or metaphorically on the desk and genial conversation is flowing. most of the men and women who make a living out of free lancing earn every blessed cent of it; and the amount upon which they pay an income tax is, as a rule, proportioned rather justly to the amount of concentrated labor that they pour into the hopper of the copy mill. you who happen to have seen a successful free lance knock off work in mid-afternoon to play tennis, or to skim away toward the country club in his new motor car are too likely to exclaim that "his is the existence!" forgetting, of course, the lonesome hours of more or less baffling effort that he spent that day upon a manuscript before he locked up his workshop. and the years he spent in drudgery, the bales of rejection slips he collected, the times that he had to pawn his watch and stick pin to buy a dinner or to pay the rent of a hall bedroom. young gentlemen who propose to embrace the career of art might be shocked to learn--though it would be all for their own good--that a great many writers who are generally regarded with envy for their "luck" take the pains to follow the market notes in the authors' league _bulletin_, the _bookman_ and the _editor magazine_ with all the care of a contractor studying the latest news of building operations. not only do these writers read the trade papers of their calling; they also, with considerable care, study the magazines to which they sell--or hope to sell--manuscripts. they do not nearly so often as the novice make the _faux pas_ of offering an editor exactly the same sort of material that he already has printed in a recent or a current issue. they follow the new books. they keep card indexes on their unmarketed manuscripts, and toil on as much irksome office routine as a stock broker. a surprisingly large number of the "arrived" do not even hold themselves above keeping note books, or producing, chiefly for the beneficial exercise of it, essays, journals, descriptions, verse and fiction not meant to be offered for sale--solely copybook exercises, produced for self-improvement or to gratify an impulse toward non-commercial art. for instances i can name a fiction writer who turns often to the essay form, but never publishes this type of writing, and an editorial writer who, for the "fun of it" and the good he believes it does his style, composes every year a great deal of verse. a group of six michigan writers publish their own magazine, a typewritten publication with a circulation of six. these men are not content with their present achievements. they regard themselves always as students who must everlastingly keep trying more difficult tasks to insure a steady progress toward an unattainable goal. "most of the studyin'," abe martin once observed, "is done after a feller gets out of college," and these gray-haired exemplars are--as all of us ought to be--still learning to write, and forever at the crossroads. * * * * * finis * * * * * http://www.archive.org/details/authorsprintingp sauniala transcriber's note obvious typographical errors have been corrected. a list of corrections is found at the end of the text. a number of words were inconsistently spelled or hyphenated. a list of these words is found at the end of the text. an asterism, which is not available in the character set used for this book is indicated by "*.*". the author's printing and publishing assistant. the author's printing and publishing assistant comprising explanations of the process of printing preparation and calculation of manuscripts choice of paper, type, binding, illustrations, publishing, advertising, &c. with an exemplification and description of the typographical marks used in the correction of the press london saunders and otley, conduit street . w. blatch, printer, grove place, brompton. the object of this little work is to afford such a view of the technical details of printing and publishing as shall enable authors to form their own judgment on all subjects connected with the publication of their productions. the want of such a little manual has been repeatedly suggested to the publishers by the frequent enquiries of authors, and they trust that the information here given will prove satisfactory. conduit street, _march_ , . contents. page. process of printing, origin and progress of printing, stereotype printing, copper plate printing, engraving on wood, preparation and calculation of manuscript, choice of paper, paper making, choice of type, correcting the press, typographical marks, illustrative engravings, choice of binding, publishing and advertising, the author's printing and publishing assistant. as it is very desirable that authors, and those who may have to give directions to the printer, should be acquainted with the manner in which printing is performed, it may be proper, in commencing this little work, to give in the first place a brief outline of the process of printing. the printing office is divided into two branches; the one entitled the _composing_, the other the _press_ department. the composing-room is furnished with a number of what are called _cases_,[ -*] properly fitted up, which are placed before the compositor. the compositor then places the manuscript[ -+] before him, and taking a small iron frame, or measure, adapted to the purpose, fixes it by a screw to the width which the page he is to set up is intended to be, and commences the putting it into type, in the following manner. supposing the first words of the manuscript to be "the city of london," he first selects the capital letter t, then the lower-case letter h, and then e, each from their respective compartments; after this he takes what is called a space,[ -++] which is used to separate the words from each other; and thus proceeds until he comes to a stop, which he selects in like manner, and places next to the last letter of the last word. when the frame he holds is filled, he removes the type thus set into a larger, first to form pages, and afterwards, when assembled together, to form sheets. the number of pages in each sheet is determined by the size in which the work is to be printed:--if in folio, four pages; if in quarto, eight pages; if in octavo, sixteen; if in duodecimo, twenty-four, &c. when a sufficient number of pages have been set to form a sheet, they are what is called _imposed_,[ -*] and the _forme_ is removed to the press-room, where the first impression, technically called the first proof, is taken off. this proof is then transferred to the reading room, where it is carefully compared with the original by two persons, one reading the manuscript, and the other the proof-sheet, marking as he goes on any errors which may have occurred in the setting. this first proof is then given back to the compositor, who has the forme again laid on the stone, and having, as it is called, unlocked it,[ -*] proceeds to make such corrections as by the marks on the proof he is directed to. when the type has been made to correspond with the manuscript, the first corrected proof is struck off, and transmitted to the author. should the author not have occasion to make many alterations, he may not think it necessary to require a second proof; in that case he writes the word "press" upon it, and having been again carefully read in the office, it is then printed off: but should it be otherwise, he writes the word "revise" upon it, and it is again, when corrected, transmitted to him; and this as often as he may think necessary, until he adds the word "press," which is the order for printing off the entire number of copies of which the edition is to consist. thus, sheet by sheet,[ -*] the printing is proceeded with: and as soon as one sheet has been printed off, the type used in that sheet is distributed,[ -+] to be employed in setting up the subsequent parts of the work. from what has been said, it will be seen that the principal expense in printing a work is the setting of the type, arising from the fact that the many thousand[ -++] letters, spaces, points, &c. of which it is composed have each to be selected, assembled, and again distributed _singly_; in doing which the greatest attention and accuracy are necessary. for the information of authors not accustomed to printing, it may be proper to state that the printing of the body of a work is always first in order; the title, preface, contents, &c. being uniformly deferred till the completion.[ -*] the process of printing off a work is thus conducted. the quantity of paper for printing the number of sheets required is first laid open. it is then in successive portions of six or eight sheets dipped into a cistern of clear water, and laid one upon the other; when the whole has been thus immersed, a board of the proper size is placed on the top, and some heavy weights are added; thus the whole becomes properly imbued with moisture, and is fit for working. without this, the paper would neither sink into the interstices, nor receive the ink; besides which, it would be very liable to injure the type. when therefore the paper has been thus prepared, it is laid on a stand adjoining the press, and the process of printing commences. over the surface of the type a roller[ -*] charged with printing ink is passed; the sheet is laid on a frame which falls exactly on the forme; it is then shut down, rolled under the bed of the press, the screw is turned which causes the weight to descend, the impression is given, and another turn of the hand delivers the sheet printed. it is not surprising that so powerful an engine as the press should have attracted the combined attention of the learned and ingenious. gentlemen have devoted much of their time to it. among these may be mentioned horace walpole, who printed several of his favorite works at his seat, strawberry hill; sir egerton brydges, at lee priory; and the late earl stanhope, at his family mansion, chevening, kent. to no one, probably, is the present advanced stage of printing more indebted than to the last-named nobleman. with a natural talent for mechanical invention which no difficulty could subdue, he applied his enlightened mind with persevering ardour to a variety of useful objects, especially to the improvement of printing. the result was not only the production of the most complete printing press then known, together with a variety of collateral improvements, but the increasing, if not originating, that impulse which has since carried this important branch of art so near to perfection. to those who are accustomed to printing, and who are aware how much its beauty depends on what is called the press-work, to produce which long practice and great manual dexterity are necessary, it might have appeared impossible that any machine could have been invented to perform such an operation with any degree of precision and success; yet this the continued labour of mechanical ingenuity has accomplished. the steam printing press is perhaps one of the most complete specimens of the perfection of mechanical contrivance ever afforded. to this the public are in a great degree indebted for that early and rapid communication of intelligence which is now brought down almost to the hour of the morning on which it is circulated. the times newspaper, which was the first to adopt this astonishing invention, is still printed by it with a rapidity which is scarcely conceivable.[ -*] an inspection of it cannot fail to gratify every intelligent observer. its use has now become very general. the steam press, however, is chiefly applicable where large numbers, or great speed are required; for ordinary works, and fine printing, the hand press is still preferred, and probably ever will be. in a work like the present, it may not perhaps be deemed uninteresting to take a brief view of the origin and progress of printing. there appears to be no reason to doubt that, from a very remote period in the history of the world, devices were used for the purpose of transmitting to after times the records of important events, but these are for the most part more a matter of curiosity than of positive information. of the origin of printing as now practised, the rev. archdeacon coxe gives the following account in his history of the house of austria:--"it took its rise about the middle of the fifteenth century, and in the course of a few years reached that height of improvement which is scarcely surpassed even in the present times. the invention was at first rude and simple, consisting of whole pages carved on blocks of wood,[ -*] and only impressed on one side of the leaf: the next step was the formation of moveable types in wood, and they were afterwards cut in metal, and finally rendered more durable, regular, and elegant, by being cast, or founded. "the consequence of this happy and simple discovery was a rapid series of improvements in every art and science, and a general diffusion of knowledge among all orders of society. hitherto the tedious, uncertain, and expensive mode of multiplying books by the hand of the copyist, had principally confined the treasures of learning to monasteries,[ -*] or to persons of rank and fortune. yet, even with all the advantages of wealth, libraries were extremely scarce and scanty; and principally consisted of books of devotion and superstition, legends, or the sophistical disquisitions of the schoolmen. an acquaintance with the latin classics was a rare qualification, and the greek language was almost unknown in europe; but the art of printing had scarcely become general before it gave a new impulse to genius and a new spirit to inquiry. a singular concurrence of circumstances contributed to multiply the beneficial effects derived from this invention, among which the most considerable were the protection afforded to literature and the arts by the states of italy, and the diffusion of greek learning by the literati who sought an asylum in europe after the capture of constantinople. "a controversy has arisen concerning the first discoverer of the art of printing, between the three towns of haerlem, mentz, and strasburg, each, from a natural partiality, attributing it to their own countryman. the dispute, however, has turned rather on words than facts; and seems to have arisen from the different definitions of the word "printing." if we estimate the discovery from the invention of the principle, the honour is unquestionably due to laurence coster, a native of haerlem, who first found out the method of impressing characters on paper, by means of carved blocks of wood. if moveable types be considered as a criterion, the merit of the discovery is due to john gutenberg, of mentz; and schoeffer, in conjunction with faust, was the first who founded types of metal."--_coxe_, vol. i. p. . vo. although some attempts have been made to support a different statement, it is pretty generally admitted that william caxton, who had lived abroad and learned the art there, was the person who introduced printing into england; in this stowe, leland, and others agree, that "in the almonry at westminster, the abbot of westminster erected the first press for book-printing that ever was in england, about the year ; and where wm. caxton, citizen and mercer, who first brought it into england, first practised it." the first work printed in england was "the recueil of the historeys of troye," of which caxton thus speaks:--"thus end i this book, &c., and for as moche as in wrytyng of the same my penne is worn, myne hande wery, and myne eyen dimmed, with overmoche lokyng on the whit paper--and that age crepeth on me dayly--and also because i have promised to dyverce gentilmen and to my frendes to adresse to them as hastely as i myght this said book, therefore i have practysed and learned at my grete charge and dispense to ordayne this sayd book in prynte after the manner and forme as ye may here see, and is not wreten with penne and ynke, as other bokes ben, to thende that every man may have them att ones; for all the books of this storye named the recule of the historyes of troyes thus emprynted as ye here see were begonne in oon day and also finished in oon day," &c. in another place he enumerates the works he had printed thus:--"when i had accomplished dyvers workys and historyes translated out of frenshe into englyshe, at the requeste of certayn lords, ladyes, and gentylmen, as the recule of the historyes of troye, the boke of chesse, the historye of jason, the historye of the mirrour of the world, i have submysed myself to translate into english, the legende of sayntes, called legenda aurea in latyn--and wylyam erle of arondel desyred me--and promysed to take a resonyble quantyte of them--sente to me a worshipful gentylman--promising that my sayd lord should during my lyf give and grant to me a yearly fee, that is to note a bucke in sommer, and a doo in wynter," &c. it appears that caxton continued his employment at westminster, with considerable success, until his death, which occurred in . he seems to have been extensively patronised, and to have been a person of great moral worth. he is supposed to have lived to beyond the age of eighty. wynkyn de worde, who was an assistant, and afterwards succeeded caxton, was a foreigner, born in the dukedom of lorrain. he made great improvements, especially in the form of his types. most of his books now remaining, were printed in fleet street, in st. bride's parish, at the sign of the sun. he died in . richard pynson, who had been brought up under caxton, set up a press at temple bar, and was the first who obtained the patent of king's printer; he died in . after this, printing was practised very generally, not only in london, but in many other places, especially oxford and cambridge, both which universities obtained the exclusive right, which they still retain, of printing all bibles and prayer books; that is, with the exception of the person holding the patent of king's printer, who also has this right. the principle of moveable types having been once introduced, little room was left for improvement, beyond the slight variations in the form of the letters, which, as a matter of taste, would always be liable to fluctuate: a comparison of works, printed at different periods, will exemplify this. an experiment was made some years since, in logographic, or word printing; the words of most frequent occurrence being cast together, instead of setting them up in single letters; but it does not appear to have succeeded, or to have been generally adopted, though a volume, at least, was printed on this plan, which the publishers of this little work happen to have in their possession. in the improvement of the printing press, and the manufacture of printing ink, a larger sphere was opened, inasmuch as to the advancement of these, printing must be ever indebted for its degrees of excellence. printing ink is a sort of black varnish, the making of which is still a secret in the hands of the manufacturers, so far as its finer qualities are concerned. its requisites are, that it should have a sufficient, and not too great a degree of tenacity; that it should produce a perfectly black impression, and that it should dry quickly: in proportion as the ink is deficient in these qualities, it will be liable to injure the paper, or produce specks, to surround the printing with a yellow hue, from the too great preponderance of the oily ingredients; or to soil the paper during the subsequent processes. the excellence of the printing of baskerville was chiefly attributable to his discoveries in the art of ink making. the late mr. bulmer, also, who printed some of the most splendid works of the last half century, was very successful in his experiments. the manufacture is now in the hands of several persons, who are eminent in this art, and who have made it a distinct branch of business. stereotype printing, which is a modern improvement, is a mode of rendering a work permanent in type, in the following manner. when the type has been accurately corrected, the pages of type are properly arranged for the purpose, when a cast is taken of them in a plaster cement, which becomes hard when dry: into this mould melted type metal is poured, and thus a perfect counterpart of the type is produced of each page, in one solid plate. this mode was brought into notice by the late lord stanhope. the first attempt to render a work thus permanent, and which appears to have been adopted solely with the view of preventing error, was made by a printer at leyden, about a hundred years since. he produced a quarto bible, printed from solid pages, but these were rendered solid by soldering together the backs of the types. the present mode is, of course, a great improvement on this; as instead of incurring the heavy expense of so large a quantity of moveable type, the same result is produced, and the type from which the cast is taken remains uninjured, to be used again and again, for the same, or any other purpose. stereotype printing is thus a very valuable process, for works not liable to alteration, as bibles, school books, and other works of which large numbers are required, as it would be impossible to keep the moveable types standing for such works, without a very great outlay of capital.[ -*] another mode of printing, is that called lithographic printing, or printing from stone. this is also a recent invention. it was brought into england about twenty years since. invented by m. senefelder, of munich. it is founded on the principles of chemical affinity. a writing or drawing is made on stone, with an ink prepared with a sort of unctuous ingredient--to this is applied another ink of a contrary quality; the ink with which the writing or drawing is made, remains on the stone, while that with which the printing is performed, separates from it, and is thus transferred to the paper. this method has been brought to very great perfection; so much so, as to produce prints from drawings possessing nearly all the beauty and delicacy of copperplate or steel engravings. it is also very useful in multiplying fac-similes, as it admits of printing from the hand-writing itself, when written with ink prepared for the purpose. at munich, paris, and st. petersburgh, this mode of printing has been adopted in the government offices. all resolutions, edicts, orders, &c., agreed to at the cabinet meetings, are written down on paper, by the secretary, with chemical ink, and in the space of an hour, an ample supply of copies is obtained. for circulars, and in general, all such orders of government as must be rapidly distributed, an invention like this is of the utmost consequence, and it is probable that eventually it will be universally employed. in time of war it would prove of the greatest use for the general staff of the army, completely supplying the want of a field printing-office, and especially as it admits of greater despatch and secresy. the commanding officer might write his orders with his own hand, and in his presence a number of impressions might be taken by a person who could neither write nor read. in mercantile transactions, it is very generally employed where a quick and accurate multiplication of price lists, letters, and accounts, is of the utmost importance. copper-plate printing. copper, or steel-plate engravings, are printed by a different process. the copper, or steel-plate press, is formed of two rollers, one placed over the other, with only a sufficient space between to allow a board to pass, when a strong force is applied. the plate is then laid on a small fire adapted to the purpose, so as to heat it sufficiently to liquify the ink, and cause it to diffuse itself over every part of the engraving. it is then made perfectly clean, so as to leave no soil on the paper, except from the parts indented. it is then laid on the board, the paper spread upon it, and a soft cloth being added, the roller is turned by a cross lever, when the print, with all its varied tints, is immediately produced. engravings on wood. engravings on wood, are usually printed with the letter press, for which they are peculiarly adapted. the next subject which claims attention is the preparation of the manuscript. when a manuscript intended for the press has been written hastily, has many erasures and interlineations, or is otherwise to any extent rendered partially, or perhaps in some cases wholly illegible, the consequence will be, that if given into the hands of the printer in that state, the printing will be retarded, the expense of printing increased, and much additional trouble occasioned to the author, in correcting those errors, (should he discover them,) which a clearly written manuscript would have entirely prevented. in such cases it would be decidedly preferable, indeed it has been found a saving both in time and expense, to have the whole fairly copied. in so doing there would besides be this additional advantage,--that the manuscript might be again finally revised by the author[ -*] previously to its being put into the printer's hands; every correction which can be made in the manuscript being a measure strongly to be recommended in every view.[ -*] there is another point of which authors are frequently not aware--the desirableness of their manuscripts being written on one side only. the convenience of this is, that any remarks, notes, interlineations or directions to the printer, may be inserted on the opposite blank pages; and also that in the process of printing, it may, if needful for speed or otherwise, be divided at any given point, without danger of mistake or confusion. in all cases it is desirable that manuscripts intended for the press should be written as much as possible, with a tolerable degree of uniformity, each page containing about the same number of lines, and each line about the same number of words. this is certainly not essential, but it will generally be very convenient, as it will at once enable the author to judge of the probable extent of his work, and the printer or publisher, when the manuscript is completed, to decide on the quantity. to write on ruled paper is perhaps the most effectual mode of accomplishing this. another point to be attended to is, that manuscripts should always be paged. this will not only shew the quantity either in whole, or in part, without the trouble of counting, but will prevent mistake should any portion be misplaced. when a manuscript, therefore, is about to be written or copied for the press, it would be desirable to have prepared, a quarto book, ruled, with a narrow margin, and lines across, and to have it paged beforehand, on the right hand page only, on which page only the manuscript should be written. it is not, however, essential that these points should be regarded, should circumstances not permit. in such cases, if legibility can be secured, other obstacles may be surmounted: there will always, however, be considerable difficulty in calculating an irregularly written manuscript. should a manuscript be closely written, and insertions be necessary, it will be preferable not to interline them, but write them on a separate paper, numbering each, and referring them to the pages, and on the pages to the paper. when a manuscript is about to be sent to the press, it should be finally and carefully read over by the author, who should mark any directions he may wish attended to in the printing, and with his pen make any words plain which may happen to be obscure, by doing which, he will frequently prevent those errors of the press which often change the sense of a passage, and are liable to escape detection. when the manuscript has thus been prepared, the next step will be the choice of paper, that is, to determine on the size of the work. this is a question which will generally be decided by what is customary. if a work of fiction, the size will be what is called post vo. if historical or scientific, demy vo. if poetry, foolscap, post, or demy vo. as may be preferred. there are, however, a variety of other sizes, regulated by the number of leaves into which the sheet may be folded, as well as by the size of the paper adopted, which may be more readily seen than described. the size and qualities of paper, are of every variety. paper making. the manufacture of paper, as now used, is not an art of very ancient date, probably not earlier than the thirteenth century; but of its origin nothing is certainly known. various substances were in ancient times employed for writing, as skins, ivory, lead, &c. in egypt, from a very remote period, the inner films pressed together of the papyrus or biblos, a sort of flag, or bulrush, growing in the marshes there. from whence the word paper is derived. paper is made from rags, the best from linen rags; thus rendering that which had become useless, an article of universal importance, and permanent value. without this indispensable material, printing would have been deprived of its chief auxiliary; but with it, and by the present improved system of manufacture, the productions of the press, and of the paper mill, can be carried to any extent. the process of paper making is thus conducted. the rags are first washed; then ground in the mill with water, so as to form a pulp; this pulp is then conveyed to a vat, furnished with a mould of fine wire cloth, which takes up a sufficient quantity to form the sheet, which, when the water has drained from it, is laid on a pile, and pressed so as to discharge the remaining moisture: it is then hung up to dry, after which, unless it has been sized in the vat, which is the case with some kinds, it is dipped into a tub of fine size; and when again dried and pressed, is fit for use. one of the greatest modern improvements in paper making, is bleaching the rags. this enables the paper-maker to produce the finest paper from any kind of rags. he has only, therefore, to find such materials as will make a paper of a strong texture, and a fine even surface, and by the bleaching process he can produce whatever shade of colour he may desire. a good supply of clear water is of the greatest importance in paper making. on this account, paper mills are built on clear streams. by the recent improvements in machinery, paper can now be made with almost any required degree of rapidity. the next consideration to the size of the paper, will be the choice of type. type is cast of almost every conceivable variety. the sizes most in use for books, are english, pica, small pica, long primer, bourgeois, brevier, nonpareil. the following are specimens of these various sizes:-- (_english._) [illustration: speaking of the art of printing, the late earl stanhope observed, "i participate in the encomiums bestowed by all former eulogists on this transcendant art, which may justly be considered as the nurse and preserver of every species of knowledge; and while i look] (_pica._) [illustration: into history for an examination of the benefit which mankind has already derived from it, i feel equal, or even still more pleasure in anticipating that which it is yet capable of effecting, when by being perfectly unfettered all over the globe, it will give rise to, and promote a system of universal education, and] (_small pica._) [illustration: when as a certain consequence of that education, all societies will direct their strenuous efforts towards bringing into complete operation, that divine morality which has for its basis this simple, but sublime maxim--do unto another that which you would wish another should do unto you. printing, from its commencement, has always had some opponents, actuated from selfish interest, who, in many] (_long primer._) [illustration: cases, possessed such influence over their fellow-men, as to corrupt their judgments and decisions, whenever the question of its advantages or disadvantages to mankind, came to be agitated. the monks in particular, were its inveterate opposers; the great majority of them acting upon the spirit of an avowal made by the vicar of croydon, in a sermon preached by him at st. paul's cross, when he declared, "we must root out printing, or printing will root out us." happily this superior art withstood their] (_bourgeois._) [illustration: hostility, and it became the main engine by which their artifices, invented to keep the people in ignorance and superstition, were detected and punished. though much good has already resulted from the use of printing, yet much of what it is capable of still remains to be accomplished; for its utmost utility is not to be looked for while there remains any restraint] (_brevier._) [illustration: upon its practice throughout the world. the real philanthropist and philosopher, cannot but view with regret the state of persecution under which printing labours in most of the catholic countries in europe, wherein it still remains subject to the control of bigotted ecclesiastics, who feel, as being still applicable to themselves, all the force of the declaration of the vicar of croydon. if at the present day they are not so bold as to attempt to annihilate it entirely, yet they watch over the productions of the press, with such a] (_nonpareil._) [illustration: scrutinizing eye, and impose such shackles upon it, as not to permit any thing to be printed, but what has a tendency to uphold the iniquitous system of continuing the people in ignorance: even in england it cannot be disavowed that printing has many and powerful opponents, who attack it under various pretences; sometimes upon pretended allegations of danger to the state, sometimes upon general allegations of injuring society by its licentiousness; and there are some persons, even, so unblushing as to declare their aversion to printing, upon the ground that it is dangerous to give a too extended education to the lower classes of the people."] it will be well to familiarize the eye with these different sizes of type, which may easily be done by a little practice, as it will greatly facilitate the understanding of the various technical details connected with the press. next to the size of the type, the size of the page will have to be decided upon. though both these points are in a great degree regulated by custom, they are yet in practice sufficiently open to variation, to meet the case of each particular work. thus by the size of the type, and number of lines, a work may be either expanded, or compressed, as may be desired. pica is the type usually employed in printing works of history, biography, travels, &c., in the demy octavo size; small pica, in novels, romances, &c., in the post octavo size; and long primer, poetry, in the foolscap octavo size. to take for an example, the novel, or romance size. the ordinary page employed in works of this kind, contains twenty-two lines, each line containing, on an average, eight words. three hundred such pages are considered the proper quantity for an ordinary size volume. if a manuscript, therefore, should contain about two hundred pages, each page containing about thirty-three lines of eight words, it would occupy about three hundred pages in print. should the manuscript, however, contain but one hundred and eighty such pages, then in order to form three hundred printed pages, each page would have to consist of but twenty, instead of twenty-two lines. on the above principle, it will not be difficult for an author to form a tolerably correct idea of the extent of a work--that is, sufficiently so for all general purposes; and the comparison may be extended to any work of any kind thus--having first selected a work in print, which it is desired that in manuscript should resemble, the number of words in a line, and of lines in a page of each, being ascertained, if the disparity between them shall be in any specific ratio, as in the instance above, a page of manuscript being equal to a page and a half of print, the result will be immediately apparent; but should it be otherwise, a different process may be necessary: should the manuscript contain but twenty-five, instead of thirty lines, then the most direct mode of calculation would be to take the three lines per page, by which the manuscript would exceed the print, and multiply the manuscript pages by three--this would give six hundred; these six hundred lines divided by twenty-two, the number of lines in the printed page, give twenty-seven and a fraction; the whole would therefore, on this supposition, make about two hundred and twenty-seven printed pages, of twenty-two lines each. there are, however, other circumstances which may affect such calculations--as the breaks in chapters, paragraphs, conversations, &c., where the work may have been written in manuscript continuously. these points would, where desired, be best ascertained by having a number of pages set up, and by then comparing them in the aggregate with the manuscript. the next point in order, will be correcting the press; and this should invariably, when possible, be done by the author; no one can so thoroughly enter into the train of thought and expression, and to no one could the disturbance of either prove so annoying: where this cannot be done, and the task must be deputed, the manuscript should, in all cases, be considered the authority, and no departure be made from it, except as may have been directed, or in extreme cases. corrections of the press should be marked clearly; and this can never be done so satisfactorily, both to the corrector and printer, as by employing those typographical marks, which, from having been universally adopted, are, in consequence, understood by all persons connected with the press.--the following pages will exemplify these: first, the proof corrected; secondly, the proof revised. _proof corrected._ [illustration: this page is a specimen of lithographic printing. the impression from the type being first taken on paper, in lithographic ink, the corrections then added with the pen, and the whole transferred to the stone from which the page is printed.] _proof revised._ [illustration: in all the more celebrated nations of the ancient world, we find established those twin elements of belief, by which religion harmonizes and directs the social relations of life, viz. a faith in a future state, and in the providence of superior powers, who, surveying as judges the affairs of earth, punish the wicked, and reward the good. it has been plausibly conjectured, that the fables of elysium, the slow cocytus, and the gloomy hades, were either invented or allegorized from the names of egyptian places. diodorus assures us that by the vast catacombs of egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead--were the temple and stream, both called cocytus, the _foul_ canal of acheron, and the elysian plains; and according to the same equivocal authority, the body of the dead was wafted across the waters by a pilot, termed charon in the egyptian tongue. but previous to the embarkation, appointed judges on the margin of the acheron listened to whatever accusations were preferred by the living against the deceased; and if convinced of his mis-deeds, deprived him of the rights of sepulture.--_athens, by sir lytton bulwer_, vol. i. p. .] _explanation of the typographical marks._ no. , is used to correct a _wrong letter_, drawing a line down through it, and placing the right letter before a corresponding stroke in the margin; _a wrong word_ is corrected by drawing a line across it, as in no. , and writing the proper word in the margin. _where any thing has been omitted_, or is wished to be inserted, a caret is marked at the place where it is to come in, and the word or words written in the margin, putting underneath an answering caret. _where a space is wanting between two words or letters_ that are intended to be separated, a parallel line must be drawn where the separation ought to be, and the mark no. placed opposite in the margin. also _where words or letters should join_, but are separated, the circumflex no. , must be placed under the separation, and the same mark be made in the margin. _when letters or words are set double_, and are required to be taken out, a line is drawn through the superfluous word or letter, and the mark no. , which is the letter _d_, an abbreviation of _dele_ (_expunge or erase_) must be placed in the margin. _a turned letter_, or one placed the wrong way upward, is noticed by making a dash under it, and placing the mark no. , in the margin. _where a black mark_ is seen in any part of the line, which is occasioned by a space standing up, it is noticed by making a dash under it, and placing the mark, no. , in the margin. _where two words are transposed_, the word placed wrong, should be encircled, and the mark , (_tr._ an abridgement of transpose,) be placed in the margin; but where several words are to be transposed, that which is intended to come first should have the figure placed over it, that second , and so on, the mark (_tr._) being also placed opposite in the margin. _where a new paragraph is required_, a crotchet should be made at the place where the new paragraph should begin, and a similar mark (no. .) be placed in the margin. where a new paragraph should not have been made, a line should be drawn from the last word of the previous paragraph, and in the margin should be written, _no break_. _where several lines or words are to be introduced_, they should be written at the bottom of the page, and at the place where they are to come in, a caret should be made, from which a line should be drawn to the first word of the passage to be inserted. if a word, or words, are required to be in capitals, small capitals or italic, such word or words should be underlined--for capitals with three lines; for small capitals, with two; for italic, with one; writing opposite in the margin, _caps._, _small caps._, or _ital._ if they should be required to be altered back, a line should be drawn under the italic, and the word _roman_, and under the capitals or small capitals, and the words _lower-case_, written in the margin. _where words have been erroneously struck out_, or are otherwise wished to remain, dots should be placed under them, and the word _stet_ (_let it stand or remain_) written in the margin. _where the punctuation requires to be altered_, the semicolon, colon, or period, should be marked and encircled in the margin, a line being drawn at the word at which either is to be placed, as in no. .-- describes the manner in which the hyphen and ellipsis line are marked; and , that in which the apostrophe, inverted comma, the star, and other references, and superior letters, and figures, are marked for insertion. notes, if added, should have the word _note_, with a star, and a corresponding star at the word to which they are referred. _where letters or lines are altered_, they are noticed by drawing lines before and after them, as in no. . a little practice will soon render the use of these marks familiar. it has been before observed, that correcting the press, so far as the printers are concerned, is an extremely troublesome, and to them, the most unpleasant part of their business. it occupies much more time than could be supposed, and consequently occasions an expense which the mere alteration of a few words in a page would perhaps scarcely be thought sufficient to justify. but when it is considered that every alteration disturbs the whole adjoining mass of type, and may do so to the end of the page, or several pages, it will be less difficult to perceive the reason of the well ascertained fact, that printers always greatly prefer being employed in the setting, rather than in the correcting department of their office. it is not uncommon for authors, unaware of these circumstances, to deliver their manuscript for the press, in a very unfinished state; and in some instances, as if they actually considered that they could not satisfactorily correct their work, until they saw it in print--an error which it would probably only require them to combat to overcome: it should, however, in all such cases, be distinctly understood, that the expenses of correcting will, if considerable, unavoidably enhance that of the printing, and this in a ratio that would very naturally surprise those unacquainted with the subject. all errors which are not in the manuscript, are considered as errors of the press; the correction of which devolves on the printer. indeed, no proof should be submitted to the author, until these have been made: a careful reader in the printing office will also sometimes draw the author's attention to some word or sentence, which appears to be susceptible of improvement, and which might otherwise have passed unnoticed; this is, however, not always done, unless requested. in correcting a proof, for the reasons already given, as few alterations as possible should be made; when these are, however, unavoidable, it would be advisable to observe this rule, namely--always if possible, to insert in a line or page, as much as is taken out, or vice versâ; this is in a great majority of instances very practicable; and the advantage of it is, that it will avoid what is technically called _overrunning_. this will, perhaps, be best explained by referring to the corrected proof (p. ) in the rd line of which, it will be seen that the word _for_ is marked out, and the word _of_ inserted in its stead; which, it will be perceived by the opposite revised page, has occasioned no alteration beyond the line; but at line there is an insertion marked without an omission; which would have rendered it necessary to carry as many lines as were inserted to the next page, if the page had been previously filled up in the usual way. this is called _overrunning_, and often requires that each subsequent page should be altered to the end of a chapter, or if the work is continuous, to the end of all that has at that time been set in type. there is also another point to be observed; which is, that where revises are considered necessary, as few as possible should be required, each revise requiring the repetition of the process already described in striking off a proof, and which will not only occasion additional expense, but will also frequently cause considerable delay in the progress of the work. generally speaking, if the corrections are clearly marked, and not very numerous, the final revision may be safely entrusted to the care of a skilful printer. if any error should escape the notice of the author, or corrector, and be printed off, it may be corrected by re-printing the leaf in which it occurs, which is called a cancel. this is, however, seldom necessary, when the error is clearly typographical. it is frequently a convenience to the author to have two proofs of each sheet, one to be returned corrected, the other to be retained for reference. it is not, perhaps, generally known, that works printed in london may be corrected by authors residing at any distance, the proof sheets passing and re-passing through the post office at single postage, provided they are not cut, and that the direction is written _upon_ the sheet. an envelope would occasion double postage. it is usual also to add the words "proof sheet" in the corner. the various kinds of illustrative engravings have already been slightly referred to. they are of three kinds: engravings on steel,[ -*] or copper; lithographic drawings, or prints from stone; and engravings on wood. the first two are printed independently of the work; the latter in connection with it; either incorporated with the text, or otherwise, as may be desired. each of these modes may be employed with advantage, where embellishment is intended, or information beyond that which description is adapted to convey. coloured engravings are also frequently employed in such cases. next to the printing a work, is the choice of binding. until a very recent period, binding was of two kinds only--that in paper and that in leather. the former, called boarding, being used for books when first published, or when purchased for use in that state; the latter for books when read, or intended to form a permanent part of a library. binding in leather has been carried to very great perfection; and, according to the skill employed, is susceptible of the most varied and tasteful embellishment. the titles of books in boards are affixed by printed labels--those of such as are bound in leather in letters worked in gold. these latter are produced by laying a leaf of gold on the leather, and stamping each letter singly, a process requiring great skill and labour. recently a new mode has been introduced, called cloth binding. this is done by covering the book with cloth; and, by means of a strong pressure, stamping it with some ornamental device engraved for the purpose, and which is called embossing. there is in this new method also another improvement--that of lettering the back in gold at one operation, which is thus effected:--instead of the mode employed in leather binding, of impressing each letter singly on the gold, the whole of the lettering is cut on a solid piece of brass, and in this form impressed on the back at once. this is not only a great saving in time and labour, but admits also of much tasteful ornament in emblematical and other fanciful devices, which produce a very pleasing effect at a comparatively trifling cost. this latter process, now very generally adopted, and of which the binding of this little work, presents a specimen, is applicable to almost all works of science, history, biography, travels, &c., and not only gives to them a very superior appearance when first published, but also, from their close imitation of leather binding, renders them fit to be placed at once in the library. this mode of binding does not, however, possess much durability, as it differs only in the exterior from the former boarding--still, until a book is bound in leather, it certainly forms a very agreeable substitute. cloth binding, general as its use has become, has not, however, been adopted for novels, which are still usually published in boards. for annuals, and other embellished works, as well as many of those of a smaller size, this mode has been justly and generally preferred. publishing and advertising. publishing, though the last step in order, is undoubtedly one of the first in importance to most works issuing from the press. there may perhaps be some few exceptions, but, generally, their success must in a great degree be influenced by the mode and means adopted for their publication. not that it can be supposed that all works can alike succeed; but that many fail in obtaining that degree of attention which they might otherwise have received owing to some circumstances attending the means adopted in the final step of publication. london is undoubtedly the great emporium for literary works, as for almost every other species of production. even printers in the country are so well aware of this, that they rarely fail to obtain the co-operation of a london publisher in bringing out any works in which they may venture to engage; though works thus published labour under the disadvantage naturally arising from their not being entirely under the management of the london publisher. there are other reasons which render london[ -*] the peculiar, and it might be said almost the exclusive channel for publication. in it all the branches of the periodical press are conducted; daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, the various avenues to the public, not only in this vast city, but in every part of the empire, and of the world, are here open, and consequently all the vehicles for announcements, advertisements, and criticisms, are here only accessible. add to this that from london every species of literary production is constantly despatched to every part of the empire and of the world, and it will then be seen how small a probability there can be that any work not published in london can obtain even the most moderate share of general attention. london publishers are of two classes: those who reside at the west end of the town, and who confine their attention to publishing only; and those who reside in the city, and who are also engaged in wholesale bookselling. wholesale booksellers generally devote their especial attention to the supply of the retail trade both in town and country. some make no further arrangements for publishing than simply to supply, when applied for, such works as their country correspondents, who are printers, may have transmitted to them for that purpose; while others are publishers to a considerable extent of what are called standard works--works on education, science, &c., and such as are in regular and constant demand. to these, therefore, the attention of the city booksellers is very generally directed; while that of the publishers at the west end of the town is almost entirely devoted to what may be called the literature of the day--works of amusement and light reading, travels, memoirs, novels, tales, poems, and other productions of a similar character. this distinction of the two classes of publishers arises therefore, in the first place, from the nature of their avocations, and in the second from their peculiar locality; the one having their establishments in the centre of resort, for those who are engaged in trade and business; the other in that of fashion and amusement; so that there is not only a convenience but propriety in the arrangement that custom has established, that works of what may be called current literature should be published at the west end of the town, while those more immediately connected with the business of life should appear in the city. it is generally understood that the name of an established publisher operates not only as a recommendation to those works to which it is prefixed, but also tends to make them known through extensive connexions already formed. it also tends to associate them with other popular works issuing from the same establishment. there are three modes of publishing--that in which a work is published entirely for, and at the expense of the author, who thus retains the property of the work; that in which the publisher takes all or part of the risk, and divides the profit; and that in which the publisher purchases the copyright, and thus secures to himself the entire proceeds. the first of these is the basis on which many first productions are published; the second, where a certain demand can be calculated upon; and the third, where an author has become so popular as to ensure an extensive circulation. the first step that should be taken by an author intending to produce a work should be to take the opinion of an experienced publisher, by doing which not only much unnecessary trouble may be spared, but frequently much unavailable labour and even expense. it is not at all uncommon for authors, in the course of their reading, to become so impressed with some favourite subject as to conclude that it must prove of the same interest to others, and under this impression proceed to bestow considerable labour upon it. had they, however, taken the course here recommended, they would probably have learned either that there was already some very similar work, or that the production proposed would not, from some cause known perhaps only to the publisher, be at all likely to meet with the success anticipated. these are circumstances of constant occurrence, which the publishers of this little work have had frequent opportunities of knowing. generally speaking, publishers are the most competent advisers on all subjects connected with their peculiar avocations, having constantly before them the best means of judging, and being naturally interested in the success of the works in which they engage. authors cannot therefore adopt a more judicious course than to commit the entire management of their productions to their care. many authors, after having written their works, consign them to oblivion, from publishers declining, often in consequence of their own peculiar engagements, to undertake their publication. this may be avoided by the plan now adopted of _publishing for authors_, and which is more particularly referred to in a subsequent page. advertising, as an essential part of publication, should never be lost sight of; but it is a measure which should be judiciously regulated and cautiously pursued, or a large amount of expense may be incurred to very little purpose. another point to be attended to, is the placing in the proper channels copies for review. this is a very advisable measure, as without it many of the works issuing from the press would not be likely to meet the eye of those engaged in the announcement of new works. where authors may desire to print only a limited number of copies for the use of their friends, this may easily be accomplished without the least personal inconvenience, through the intervention of the publishers. should further information on any of the foregoing subjects be desired, the publishers will have great pleasure in affording it on application personally, or by letter. footnotes: [footnote -*: shallow frames of wood, divided into as many compartments as there are letters, capital, small capital, and ordinary (called _lower-case_), together with italic, and the different stops, marks, and other points employed for reference, quotations, &c.] [footnote -+: technically called copy.] [footnote -++: a blank piece of type metal, or one without a letter, of which there are various kinds; used also to separate the lines from each other, according as the pages may be; whether _full_, having the lines close together, or _light_, with a greater distance between them.] [footnote -*: this is done by placing the several pages at proper distances on a large stone, fixed on a strongly constructed table; each page being surrounded by blocks of wood prepared for the purpose, and when firmly wedged together in an iron frame are ready for the press, and are then called a _forme_.] [footnote -*: driven back the wedges by which the type is compressed and held firmly together within the iron frame, in order to allow of his separating any part of the pages which may be necessary.] [footnote -*: it is desirable to observe this, as it has sometimes been supposed that the proof-sheets of an entire work may be furnished at once. this it will be seen could not be, in a work of any extent; as the quantity of type required for each sheet renders it necessary that the type should be liberated as speedily as convenient, in order to facilitate the progress and completion of the printing.] [footnote -+: taken asunder, and every letter, space, point, &c. restored to its allotted compartment in the type case.] [footnote -++: the cost of setting the type is regulated by the thousand, which will explain why a full page or a smaller type is more expensive than a light or a larger.] [footnote -*: from the labour required in setting the type, it will be easily conceived that printing must necessarily be a rather slow process: it is so generally, three or four sheets per week being usually considered tolerably good speed, allowing for the unavoidable impediments occasioned by the transmitting and correcting of proofs, &c. on urgent occasions, however, much greater progress may be made, which is accomplished by dividing the manuscript among a greater number of hands. the publishers of this little work have had a volume printed in the astonishingly short space of three days. it was a work by sir lytton bulwer, and the effort was rendered necessary in consequence of the arrangements made for the foreign editions. nearly one hundred workmen were employed in effecting it.] [footnote -*: the roller is a modern improvement. formerly, the inking process was performed with two large balls, filled with wool, and covered with a sort of parchment. the roller is a great improvement, diffusing the ink more equally and producing a much greater uniformity of colour (as it is called) in the printing.] [footnote -*: the newspaper press affords a remarkable instance of the surprising effect of combined and persevering effort. few persons, perhaps, among those who are accustomed to receive the daily papers, are aware of the vast amount of cost and labour constantly employed in their production. to take for an instance the times newspaper. to accumulate the various articles of intelligence which are there collected, persons are constantly and assiduously employed in all directions, both at home and abroad. for the foreign department, gentlemen, men of education and address, especially fitted for their office, resident in the various foreign capitals, and who regularly transmit (when necessary, by express) the earliest accounts of important occurrences, so effectually indeed as sometimes even to precede the government couriers; so that during the late war, events of the highest importance were first promulgated through the columns of this paper.--for the daily occurrences of the metropolis and its environs, others, devoted to this particular office. for the political circles, the courts of law, police offices, accidents, offences, &c., others;--and for the two houses of parliament, expert and expeditious short-hand writers; all of whom are continually engaged in transmitting their various reports to the office with the most persevering activity, to be there arranged, condensed, and fitted to their respective columns, by the sub-editors and those employed in what is called making up the paper; while the editor's attention is more especially engaged in watching the progress of events, and in furnishing on the moment those remarks which are to be found in what is called the leading article. thus the whole is in one day communicated, arranged, and printed; and by the same evening's post transmitted to the most distant parts of the empire; a result which may well strike those who enter into the contemplation of the vast expenditure of effort and capital which are constantly employed for the purpose, with astonishment. in the completion of their steam printing press alone, the proprietors are said to have expended upwards of sixty thousand pounds. the daily sale of the paper is understood to be about ten thousand copies; and these, by means of the steam press, are printed off in the almost incredibly short space of about two hours and a half.] [footnote -*: something like this is the plan originally invented and still practised in china. the work intended to be printed is transcribed by a careful writer upon thin transparent paper. the engraver glues this with its face downwards upon a smooth tablet of pear or apple tree, or some other hard wood; and then with gravers and other instruments, he cuts the wood away in all those parts upon which he finds nothing traced, thus leaving the transcribed characters embossed and ready for printing. in this manner he prepares as many blocks as there are written pages. in printing they do not as in europe use a press; the delicate nature of their paper would not admit of it; when once, however, their blocks are engraved, the paper is cut, and the ink is ready, one man, says du halde, with his brush, can without fatigue print ten thousand sheets in a day. the block is inked with one brush, and with another the paper is rubbed down upon it so as to take the impression. in this way the printer can travel with his ink and his blocks, and from place to place take off as many copies as he may find occasion for. according to chinese chronology, this art was discovered in china about fifty years before the christian era. it seems to be especially adapted to their language, in which are employed such a vast variety of characters.] [footnote -*: "before the invention of this divine art, mankind were absorbed in the grossest ignorance, and oppressed under the most abject despotism of tyranny. the clergy, who before this era held the key of all the learning in europe, were themselves ignorant, proud, presumptuous, arrogant, and artful; their devices were soon detected through the invention of typography. many of them, as it may naturally be imagined, were very averse to the progress of this invention, as well as the _brief-men_, or writers, who lived by their manuscripts for the laity. they went so far as to attribute this blessed invention to the devil, and some of them warned their hearers from using such diabolical books."--_lemoine._] [footnote -*: mr. lodge's peerage is perhaps the only instance in which a whole work, of that magnitude, has been kept standing in type. this has been done for two reasons; first, because of the great expense of setting the type afresh for each edition; and secondly, that by being thus kept standing, it may be rendered constantly and uniformly correct, a point of the greatest importance in a work containing so large a mass of family history, the value of which so much depends on the accuracy of names and dates.] [footnote -*: the rev. dr. macknight, who translated anew the apostolic epistles, is said to have copied over with his own hand that laborious and valuable work five times, previously to his committing it to the press.] [footnote -*: the publishers of this little work have frequently had works committed to their care for publication, on which the charge for correcting has almost equalled that of the setting of the type, occasioned in a great degree by a want of attention to the points above referred to.] [footnote -*: engraving on steel is a modern and highly important improvement. previously, elaborate engravings on copper would lose their delicate tints after printing a few hundred copies, but from steel many thousand impressions may be taken without the slightest perceptible difference between the first and the last. to this is chiefly attributable the present very moderate price of beautifully embellished works, the use of steel instead of copper rendering it no longer necessary to re-engrave the plates.] [footnote -*: this is of course not to be understood as applying to edinburgh and dublin, both of which have their respective local circles, though for their english circulation they depend chiefly on london.] publication of works for authors. having been for many years engaged in conducting an extensive publishing business comprising the productions of the most popular writers, the publishers of this little work beg leave respectfully to state that they have, in consequence of repeated applications, now devoted a branch of their establishment to conducting the publication of works for authors, securing to them the direction and controul, as well as the entire proceeds and property of their publications. estimates of the cost of large or small editions, including paper, printing, &c., will be given on application personally, or by letter addressed to messrs. saunders and otley, publishers, conduit street, hanover square, london. published by messrs. saunders and otley. conduit street, hanover square, london, on the first of every month. the metropolitan magazine, a monthly journal of literature, science, & the fine arts. the metropolitan was commenced in , edited by thomas campbell, esq., author of "the pleasures of hope;" afterwards assisted by thomas moore, esq., author of "lalla rookh," &c.; and subsequently by captain marryat, r.n., author of "newton forster," "the king's own," "peter simple," &c. in its pages have appeared all the popular novels of captain marryat, as well as many productions of the first writers of the day, among whom may be mentioned james montgomery, esq., author of "the world before the flood," whose valuable "lectures on general literature" are to be found in its pages only. tales by captain chamier, articles in prose and verse by thomas campbell, esq., and thomas moore, esq., papers by sir charles and lady morgan, ugo foscolo, lady clarke, the author of the "kuzzilbash," william sotheby, esq., and a great number of other distinguished writers, comprising a vast variety of original articles, critical notices, reviews, papers on the fine arts, literature, the drama, &c. &c. the whole forming an interesting miscellany, as well as a valuable permanent record of the progress of literature and science, throughout the entire period from its first publication, under the auspices of its distinguished editor. no effort is spared to perpetuate the high character which the metropolitan has attained, both at home and abroad, for its original papers; while its review department will continue to receive that attention which has hitherto rendered its criticisms so impartial and satisfactory. orders for the metropolitan may be forwarded through any of the booksellers or newsmen of the united kingdom, or for the continent or colonies through the agents at the post office. all communications are requested to be addressed (post free) to the editor at the publishers. popular works, by distinguished writers. published by messrs saunders and otley, conduit street, hanover square, london. works by sir lytton bulwer, bart., m.p. i. in one vol. royal vo. the pilgrims of the rhine. beautifully illustrated with engravings, by the first artists. "this is in all respects a most superb book; the literary contents, which are of the highest order, being fully equalled by the splendour of the pictorial embellishments."--_news._ ii. in two vols. post vo. the student. a series of essays. "great as is both the power and beauty of the author's former works, we know none that mark the creative thinker, more than the present production. its pages are full of new lights and happy illustrations."--_literary gazette._ iii. in three vols. post. vo. rienzi, the last of the tribunes. "it required a master genius to trace the career of such a spirit as rienzi's."--_athenæum._ "it is the author's as yet greatest work."--_new monthly._ iv. in vo. letter to a late cabinet minister on the present crisis. to which is added a letter from lord brougham to the author. thirteenth edition. v. in vo. the duchesse de la valliere. a drama, in five acts. vi. in two vols. vo. athens--its rise and fall. with views of the arts, literature, and social life of the athenian people. "years of labor have not been mis-spent in the research and consideration of the subject, and the style is worthy of the best names in this elevated department of our national literature."--_literary gazette._ vii. in three vols. post vo. ernest maltravers. "a splendid work, bearing the impress of genius stamped on every page."--_monthly review._ viii. in three vols. post vo. alice; or the mysteries. "the most popular of all the author's popular novels."--_chronicle._ ix. in octavo. the lady of lyons, or love and pride. a play. in five acts. eighth edition. works by captain marryat, r.n. x. in three vols. post vo. newton foster; or the merchant service. xi. in three vols. post vo. the king's own. xii. in three vols. post vo. peter simple. xiii. in three vols. post vo. jacob faithful. xiv. in three vols. post. vo. the pacha of many tales. xv. in three vols. post vo. japhet in search of a father. xvi. in three vols. post vo. mr. midshipman easy. *.* most of the above popular works were first published in _the metropolitan_, edited by captain marryat. they have since passed through several editions. works by mrs. jameson. xvii. in two vols. post. vo. memoirs of female sovereigns. xviii. in two vols. post. vo. characteristics of women. with upwards of fifty illustrative etchings, by the author. new and revised edition. "a beautiful and touching commentary on the heart and mind of woman."--_literary gazette._ "two truly delightful volumes, the most charming of all the works of a charming writer."--_blackwood._ xix. in three vols. post vo. visits and sketches at home and abroad. xx. in three vols. post vo. winter studies and summer rambles in canada. "we cordially recommend to all lovers of amusing anecdote these lively, elegant and most feminine volumes."--_post._ works by miss martineau. xxi. in three vols. post vo. society in america. "this book will sustain the great reputation of miss martineau, both as a sound scientific observer on questions of moral and political philosophy, and as a writer of first-rate descriptive powers."--_examiner._ xxii. in three vols. post vo. retrospect of western travels. "this work of miss martineau's is even more interesting than her former admirable productions on america. her descriptions are perfectly delightful."--_london and westminster review._ xxiii. mrs. hemans' life, and letters. in two vols. post vo. memorials of mrs. hemans. with selections from her private correspondence, by h. f. chorley, esq. illustrated with a beautifully engraved portrait, and a view of her house. works by the author of "random recollections of the lords and commons." xxiv. in one vol. post vo. random recollections of the house of commons. fifth edition. revised. "a work more extensively circulated and read than any that has appeared for years."--_sun._ xxv. in two vols. post vo. the great metropolis. first series. xxvi. in two vols. post vo. the great metropolis. second series. "a work of extraordinary and peculiar research."--_monthly repository._ xxvii. in two vols. post vo. travels in town. "the reader is almost sure to gain from this author's various productions such an amount of useful information as it would be scarcely possible for him to gather in the same compass elsewhere."--_metropolitan._ travels, biography, memoirs, &c. xxxiii. in to. with portraits, fac-similes, &c. memoirs of the great lord burghley. with his state papers, and private letters, from the original manuscripts. by the rev. dr. nares, regius professor of divinity in the university of oxford. xxix. in three vols., vo. with portrait memoirs, correspondence, and manuscripts of general la fayette. published by his family. xxx. in one vol. vo. memoirs of prince lucien buonaparte. written by himself. xxxi. in one vol. vo. with portrait. memoirs of lord herbert of cherbury. written by himself. xxxii. in one vol. vo. with portrait. memoirs of sir kennelme digby. written by himself. xxxiii. in one vol. vo. with portrait. memoirs of lord liverpool. with a view of his administration. xxxiv. in two vols. vo. with coloured plates. records of travels in the east. by adolphus slade, esq. xxxv. in two vols. post vo. with coloured plates. travels in alexandria, damascus, and jerusalem. by dr. hogg. xxxvi. in two vols. vo. with coloured plates. travels to constantinople and greece. by charles macfarlane, esq. xxxvii. in two vols. post vo. with coloured plates. excursions in the mediterranean. by sir grenville temple, bart. xxxviii. in two vols. post vo. with engravings, traits and traditions of portugal. by miss pardoe. xxxix. in two vols. vo. with coloured plates. madrid and its vicinity. by an english officer. xl. in two vols. vo. coloured plates. turkey, greece, and malta. by adolphus slade, esq. xli. in two vols. post vo. coloured plates, algiers and tunis. by sir grenville temple, bart. xlii. in two vols. vo. with engravings, and large maps. the topography of rome and its vicinity. by sir william gell. xliii. in two vols. vo. with engravings. france in its last revolution. by lady morgan. xliv. in two vols. vo. with portrait. literary remains of the late william hazlitt. with remarks on his genius by mr. serjeant talfourd, and sir lytton bulwer, bart. history, philosophy, &c. xlv. in two vols. with maps. vo. third edition. democracy in america. by alexis de tocqueville. "the very best work on the subject we have ever met with."--_blackwood._ xlvi. in two vols. vo. lectures on the philosophy of history. by frederic von schlegel. translated by j. h. robertson, esq. with life of the author. xlvii. in one vol. vo. civilization. by the hon. augustus moreton, m.p. xlviii. in one vol. vo. the educational institutions of germany. by g. p. r. james, esq. author of memoirs of louis xiv. &c. xlix. in one vol. vo. vindication of the english constitution. by b. d'israeli, esq. l. in two vols. post vo. with engravings. the naval officer's manual. by captain glascock. r.n. li. in two vols. post vo. the poetry of life. by miss stickney. lii. in two vols. post vo. pericles and aspasia. by walter savage landor, esq. liii. in to. with twelve original etchings. the ancient ballad of chevy chase. illustrated by john franklin, esq. liv. in three vols. post. vo. inklings of adventure. by n. p. willis, esq. lv. in two vols. post vo. imaginary biography. by sir egerton bridges, bart. lvi. in two vols. post vo. dramatic scenes. by lady morgan. lvii. in one vol. post vo. citation and trial of shakspeare for deer stealing. by walter savage landor, esq. lviii. in two vols. post vo. the infirmities of genius. by dr. madden. lix. in two vols. post vo. holy breathings. a series of morning and evening prayers. by lady charlotte bury. lx. in vo. with many plates. floral emblems. by henry phillips. lxi. in one vol., silk, gilt, coloured plates. the language of flowers. sixth edition, revised by the editor of the "forget me not." lxii. in one vol., silk, gilt, coloured plates. the book of flowers. by mrs. hale. lxiii. in one vol. silk, gilt, coloured plates. the language of birds. by mrs. spratt. lxiv. in to. with original plates. retzsch's fancies. with remarks, by mrs. jameson. lxv. in one vol. fourth edition, with illustrations, adventures of a gentleman in search of a horse. by sir george stephen. lxvi. in one vol. vo. with the arms of the peers beautifully engraved, and incorporated with the text. the peerage of the british empire. from the personal communications of the nobility. by edmund lodge, esq. norroy king of arms. lxvii. in one vol. second edition. the management of bees. with a description of the lady's safety hive. with forty illustrations. by samuel bagster, esq. lxviii. in one vol. vo. uniform with the peerage. the genealogy of the peerage. containing the ancestral history of the british nobility. by edmund lodge, esq. norroy king of arms. lxix. in one large vol. vo. remarks and evidence on the factory system. by charles wing, esq. surgeon to the royal infirmary for children. lxx. in one vol. post vo. sartor resartus. the life and opinions of herr teufelsdröck. by thomas carlyle, esq. lxxi. in three vols. vo. histoire de la revolution de en angleterre. per f. a. j. mazuri, inspecteur général des etudes. popular novels. lxxii. in three vols. post vo. third edition. almacks; a novel. "these volumes present perhaps the best picture of the gayest fashionable life that has ever issued from the press."--_literary gazette._ lxxiii. in three vols. post vo. alla giornata. or, to the day. a tale of italy. by lady charlotte bury. lxxiv. in three vols. post vo. tales of the munster festivals. by the author of "the rivals." lxxv. in two vols, post vo. the journal of an exile. by t. a. boswell, esq. lxxvi. in three vols. post vo. the english in italy. lxxvii. in three vols. post vo. the aylmers. by thomas haynes bayley, esq. lxxiii. in three vols. post vo. the english in france. by the author of "the english in italy." lxxix. in three vols. post vo. recollections of a pedestrian. by the author of "the journal of an exile." lxxx. in three vols. post vo. tales of continental life. by the author of "the english in italy." lxxxi. in two vols. foolscap vo. the zenana; or a newab's leisure hours. by the author of pandurang huri. lxxxii. in two vols. post vo. two old men's tales. lxxxiii. in three vols. post vo. conti the discarded. by the author of "tales of a sea-port town." lxxxiv. in three vols. post vo. my aunt pontypool. lxxxv. in three vols. post vo. tales of the woods and fields. by the author of "two old men's tales." lxxxvi. in three vols. post vo. the collegians. by the author of "tales of the munster festivals." lxxxvii. in three vols. post vo. the lady annabetta. by the author of "constance." lxxxviii. in one vol. post vo. country stories. by miss mitford, author of "our village." lxxxix. in three vols. post vo. the two friends. by the countess of blessington. xc. in three vols. post vo. the desultory man. by g. p. r. james, esq. author of "richelieu," &c. xci. in two vols. post vo. the state prisoner. by miss boyle. xcii. in three vols. post vo. the wife and woman's reward. by the hon. mrs. norton. xciii. in three vols. post vo. anne grey. edited by the author of "granby." xciv. in three vols. post vo. tales of my neighbourhood. by the author of "the collegians." xcv. in three vols. post vo. the pilgrims of walsingham. by miss strickland. xcvi. in three vols. post vo. the mayor of windgap. by "the o'hara family." xcvii. in three vols. post vo. the puritan's grave. by the rev. pitt scargill. xcviii. in three vols. post vo. chances and changes. by the author of "six weeks on the loire." xcix. in three vols. post vo. the hamiltons. by the author of "mothers and daughters." c. in three vols. post vo. the exile of palestine. by j. carne, esq. author of "letters from the holy land." ci. in three vols. post vo. hungarian tales. by mrs. c. gore. cii. in three vols. post vo. the mardens and the daventrys. by miss pardoe. ciii. in three vols. post vo. the wondrous tale of alroy. by the author of "vivian grey." civ. in three vols. post vo. country houses. cv. in three vols. post vo. the rivals. by the author of "the collegians." cvi. in three vols. post vo. the armenians. by charles mac farlane, esq. cvii. in three vols. post vo. first love. cviii. in three vols. post vo. polish tales. by mrs. c. gore. cix. in three vols. post vo. the invasion. by the author of "the collegians." cx. in three vols. post vo. the bit o' writin'. by "the o'hara family." cxi. in three vols. post vo. warner arundell; or, memoirs of a creole. by d. l. joseph, esq. cxii. in three vols. post vo. the victims of society. by the countess of blessington. cxiii. in three vols. post vo. falkner. by mrs. shelley. cxiv. in two vols. post vo. tales of the southern counties. cxv. in three vols. post vo. the lost evidence. by miss burdon. cxvi. in three vols. post vo. misrepresentation. cxvii. in three vols. post vo. henry acton; and other tales. by the hon. mrs. sayers. cxviii. in three vols. post. vo. hussars, guards, and infantry. by major r. hort. cxix. in three vols. post vo. agnes de mansfeldt. by t. c. grattan, esq. cxx. in three vols. post vo. fitzherbert. by the author of "the bride of sienna." cxxi. in three vols. post vo. mortimer delmar. by the author of "conrad blessington." cxxii. in three vols. post vo. janet; or a glance at human nature. by the author of "misrepresentation." poetry. cxxiii. in two large vols. with upwards of engravings, by the first artists. the book of gems. containing memoirs and specimens of the poets, from chaucer to cowper. by s. c. hall, esq. "this is in all respects so beautiful a book that it would be scarcely possible to suggest an improvement. its contents are not for a year nor for an age, but for all time."--_examiner._ cxxiv. in eight vols. with fine engravings, by the findens, from original drawings. the life and works of cowper. including his private correspondence. by the rev. t. grimshawe. cxxv. in one vol. foolscap vo. new edition. the messiah. by the rev. r. montgomery. cxxvi. in one vol. vo. italy; with historical and classical notes, by j. e. reade, esq. cxxvii. in one vol. foolscap. melanie; and other poems. by n. p. willis, esq. cxxviii. in one vol. foolscap vo. with portrait. the vow of the peacock. by miss landon. cxxix. in one vol. foolscap vo. the songs of the alhambra. by miss smith. cxxx. in vo. the star of seville. by mrs. butler; late miss kemble. cxxxi. in foolscap vo. tranquil hours. by mrs. e. thomas. cxxxii. in one vol. vo. hours at naples; and other poems. by lady e. stuart wortley. cxxxiii. in one vol. foolscap. vo. satan; a poem. by the rev. r. montgomery. new edition. cxxxiv. in one vol. foolscap vo. gazella; or rilcar the wanderer. a poetical romance. by f. worsley, esq. cxxxv. the seraphim; and other poems. by miss barrett. cxxxvi. in one vol. vo. impressions of italy. by lady e. stuart wortley. cxxxvii. in one vol. vo. the deluge. a drama in twelve scenes. by j. e. reade, esq., author of "italy," and "cain the wanderer." cxxxviii. in vo. richelieu; or the conspiracy. a play, in five acts. by the author of "the lady of lyons," "eugene aram," &c. pamphlets. the cabinets compared; or an enquiry into the late and present administrations. the rights of the church of england vindicated. examination of recent works on church reform. the crisis examined. by d'israeli the younger. reply to a pamphlet entitled "what has the duke of wellington gained by the dissolution?" how long will they last? a letter from a retired member of parliament. defects in election committees, with a plan for improving them. what was the object of the reform bill? remarks on the foreign relations of england. by montague gore, esq. an appeal against the tamworth address. speech of sir robert peel, on retiring from office. the reform of the reform bill. by wm. ewart, esq. observations on public affairs, by a whig of the old school. the time to speak; or, what do the people say? a letter to the quarterly review on the course and probable termination of the niger. the reform bill proved to be an error. lord eldon's speech in the house of lords on catholic emancipation. an apology for the ballot. a letter to sir r. h. inglis, by a member of the university of oxford. a letter to lord palmerston on british relations with china. the church of england's defence against her real enemies and pretended reformers. open voting better than ballot. on the disturbances in canada. by montague gore, esq. letters of a conservative. by walter savage landor, esq. considerations on the state of the nation. letter on the wellington and nelson memorials. london: w. blatch, printer, grove place, brompton. * * * * * * transcriber's note the following typographical errors have been corrected. page error toc* origin and progress of printing, changed to origin and progress of printing, toc stereotype printing, changed to stereotype printing, toc engraving on wood, changed to engraving on wood, toc paper making, changed to paper making, toc illustrative engravings, changed to illustrative engravings, toc choice of binding, changed to choice of binding, toc publishing and advertising, changed to publishing and advertising, choice of paper. changed to choice of paper, fn. -+ point, &c changed to point, &c. fn. -* expence changed to expense ad xlii the topograpay changed to topography ad lxviii the geneaology changed to genealogy ad lxxxviii "our village. changed to "our village." ad xc "richlieu," changed to richelieu ad xcviii the loire. changed to the loire." ad cxxvi j. e reade changed to j. e. reade pamphlets section dissolution? changed to dissolution?" *toc is table of contents the following words were inconsistently spelled or hyphenated. post. vo. / post vo. literature and life--the man of letters as a man of business by william dean howells bibliographical perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. he owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance. for my own part, if i am to identify myself with the writer who is here on his defence, i have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me literature and what seemed to me life. if i did not find life in what professed to be literature, i disabled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, i am never quite sure of life unless i find literature in it. unless the thing seen reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it pleasingly to the imagination, i do not much care for it; but if it will do this, i do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. instantly i love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as many ones else as i can get to look or listen. if the thing is something read, rather than seen, i am not anxious about the matter: if it is like life, i know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. there can be no offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends. out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about literature and life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which is which. but i do not wish to part them, and in their union i have found, since i learned my letters, a joy in them both which i hope will last till i forget my letters. "so was it when my life began; so is it, now i am a man; so be it when i shall grow old." it is the rainbow in the sky for me; and i have seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it. sometimes i can make others see it, sometimes not; but i always like to try, and if i fail i harbor no worse thought of them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with glasses which would at least have helped their vision. as to the where and when of the different papers, in which i suppose their bibliography properly lies, i need not be very exact. "the man of letters as a man of business" was written in a hotel at lakewood in the may of or , and pretty promptly printed in scribner's magazine; "confessions of a summer colonist" was done at york harbor in the fall of for the atlantic monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement, long before motors and almost before private carriages; "american literary centres," "american literature in exile," "puritanism in american fiction," "politics of american authors," were, with three or four other papers, the endeavors of the american correspondent of the london times's literary supplement, to enlighten the british understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago, and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete actuality in the year . most of the studies and sketches are from an extinct department of "life and letters" which i invented for harper's weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth century. notable among these is the "last days in a dutch hotel," which was written at paris in ; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps because i liked holland so much; others, which more or less personally recognize effects of sojourn in new york or excursions into new england, are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer- memoried reader as papers from the "editor's easy chair" in harper's monthly; "wild flowers of the asphalt" is the review of an ever- delightful book which i printed in harper's bazar; "the editor's relations with the young contributor" was my endeavor in youth's companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners. so it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well- meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. the group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. from the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though i am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, i am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running brooks outside. w. d. howells. literature and life the man of letters as a man of business i think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception, and that, when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society should provide him with work and warrant him a living. i do not think any man ought to live by an art. a man's art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. there is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. most of all, the artist himself feels this. he puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as business; but he knows very well that there is something false and vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money. he can, of course, say that the priest takes money for reading the marriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and for saying the last office for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that is and must be. he can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true. he is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares. without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues. all the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with its inward vision. many will make believe otherwise, but i would rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write of literature as business i am tempted to begin by saying that business is the opprobrium of literature. i. literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the arts. it cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves as the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is the mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all. it cannot awaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to express precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it says nothing, and is nothing. so that when a poet has put his heart, much or little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor has modelled a statue to order. these are artists less articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. it does not change the nature of the case to say that tennyson and longfellow and emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. they submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of hucksters because they are imposed upon poets. if it will serve to make my meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like the loss of a wife or child. he pours out his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of sacred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundred dollars for the right of bringing his verse to their notice. it is perfectly true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it is perfectly true that it was sold for them. the poet must use his emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no other means; society does not propose to pay his bills for him. yet, and at the end of the ends, the unsophisticated witness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, finds it shabby. somehow he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness of things, the poet's song would have been given to the world, and the poet would have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man should be who does the duty that every man owes it. the instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as lord byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as count tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience. but byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach his readers; and the countess tolstoy collects the copyright which her husband foregoes; so that these two eminent instances of protest against business in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis. i know of no others; but there may be many that i am culpably ignorant of. still, i doubt if there are enough to affect the fact that literature is business as well as art, and almost as soon. at present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us, and i feel quite sure that in writing of the man of letters as a man of business i shall attract far more readers than i should in writing of him as an artist. besides, as an artist he has been done a great deal already; and a commercial state like ours has really more concern in him as a business man. perhaps it may sometime be different; i do not believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long way off. ii. in the mean time i confidently appeal to the reader's imagination with the fact that there are several men of letters among us who are such good men of business that they can command a hundred dollars a thousand words for all they write. it is easy to write a thousand words a day, and, supposing one of these authors to work steadily, it can be seen that his net earnings during the year would come to some such sum as the president of the united states gets for doing far less work of a much more perishable sort. if the man of letters were wholly a business man, this is what would happen; he would make his forty or fifty thousand dollars a year, and be able to consort with bank presidents, and railroad officials, and rich tradesmen, and other flowers of our plutocracy on equal terms. but, unfortunately, from a business point of view, he is also an artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight the public disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly. "no rose blooms right along," as the english boys at oxford made an american collegian say in a theme which they imagined for him in his national parlance; and the man of letters, as an artist, is apt to have times and seasons when he cannot blossom. very often it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow between novels or stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when the suggestions of the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays or articles desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold herself, or shall respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which he might sell indeed, but which it would not be good business for him to put on the market. but supposing him to be a very diligent and continuous worker, and so happy as to have fallen on a theme that delights him and bears him along, he may please himself so ill with the result of his labors that he can do nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a day's work, a week's work, a month's work. i know one man of letters who wrote to-day and tore up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer. but even if part of the mistaken work may be saved, because it is good work out of place, and not intrinsically bad, the task of reconstruction wants almost as much time as the production; and then, when all seems done, comes the anxious and endless process of revision. these drawbacks reduce the earning capacity of what i may call the high-cost man of letters in such measure that an author whose name is known everywhere, and whose reputation is commensurate with the boundaries of his country, if it does not transcend them, shall have the income, say, of a rising young physician, known to a few people in a subordinate city. in view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence of a nation of business men like ours, i do not know that i can establish the man of letters in the popular esteem as very much of a business man, after all. he must still have a low rank among practical people; and he will be regarded by the great mass of americans as perhaps a little off, a little funny, a little soft! perhaps not; and yet i would rather not have a consensus of public opinion on the question; i think i am more comfortable without it. iii. there is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the business side, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and, so far from having been protected by our laws, it was exposed for ninety years after the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of stolen goods. it is true that we now have the international copyright law at last, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but literary property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust statutes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors and punish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon any other kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he can. this may be right enough in itself; but i think, then, that all property should be defended by civil suit, and should become public after forty-two years of private tenure. the constitution guarantees us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literary industry. so long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the best business talent to go into literature, and the man of letters must keep his present low grade among business men. as i have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing at all. i may say that it is only since the civil war that literature has become a business with us. before that time we had authors, and very good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but i do not remember any of them who lived by literature except edgar a. poe, perhaps; and we all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans. they were either men of fortune, or they were editors or professors, with salaries or incomes apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with public offices; one need not go over their names or classify them. some of them must have made money by their books, but i question whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his books brought him. no one could do that now, unless he wrote a book that we could not recognize as a work of literature. but many authors live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writings to the magazines. they do not live so nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other professions when they begin to make themselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and social splendor. perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the synagogue; it is certain they do not get them. still, they do very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes that would seem riches to the great mass of worthy americans who work with their hands for a living--when they can get the work. their incomes are mainly from serial publication in the different magazines; and the prosperity of the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a class, was wholly unknown among us before the civil war. it is not only the famous or fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the much larger number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors, and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of acceptable work. these are the sort who do not get reprinted from the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted, and then their serial work in its completed form appeals to the readers who say they do not read serials. the multitude of these is not great, and if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a much more imbittered man than he now generally is. but he understands perfectly well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the return from that he may count as so much money found in the road--a few hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most, unless he is the author of an historical romance. iv i doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are absolutely as great as they were earlier in the century, in any of the english-speaking countries; relatively they are nothing like as great. scott had forty thousand dollars for 'woodstock,' which was not a very large novel, and was by no means one of his best; and forty thousand dollars then had at least the purchasing power of sixty thousand now. moore had three thousand guineas for 'lalla rookh,' but what publisher would be rash enough to pay fifteen thousand dollars for the masterpiece of a minor poet now? the book, except in very rare instances, makes nothing like the return to the author that the magazine makes, and there are few leading authors who find their account in that form of publication. those who do, those who sell the most widely in book form, are often not at all desired by editors; with difficulty they get a serial accepted by any principal magazine. on the other hand, there are authors whose books, compared with those of the popular favorites, do not sell, and yet they are eagerly sought for by editors; they are paid the highest prices, and nothing that they offer is refused. these are literary artists; and it ought to be plain from what i am saying that in belles-lettres, at least, most of the best literature now first sees the light in the magazines, and most of the second-best appears first in book form. the old-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not reading magazine fiction or magazine poetry make a great mistake, and simply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best. of course, this is true mainly, if not merely, of belles-lettres; history, science, politics, metaphysics, in spite of the many excellent articles and papers in these sorts upon what used to be called various emergent occasions, are still to be found at their best in books. the most monumental example of literature, at once light and good, which has first reached the public in book form is in the different publications of mark twain; but mr. clemens has of late turned to the magazines too, and now takes their mint-mark before he passes into general circulation. all this may change again, but at present the magazines--we have no longer any reviews form the most direct approach to that part of our reading public which likes the highest things in literary art. their readers, if we may judge from the quality of the literature they get, are more refined than the book readers in our community; and their taste has no doubt been cultivated by that of the disciplined and experienced editors. so far as i have known these, they are men of aesthetic conscience and of generous sympathy. they have their preferences in the different kinds, and they have their theory of what kind will be most acceptable to their readers; but they exercise their selective function with the wish to give them the best things they can. i do not know one of them--and it has been, my good fortune to know them nearly all--who would print a wholly inferior thing for the sake of an inferior class of readers, though they may sometimes decline a good thing because for one reason or another, they believe it would not be liked. still, even this does not often happen; they would rather chance the good thing they doubted of than underrate their readers' judgment. the young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine has achieved a double success, first, with the editor, and then with the best reading public. many factitious and fallacious literary reputations have been made through books, but very few have been made through the magazines, which are not only the best means of living, but of outliving, with the author; they are both bread and fame to him. if i insist a little upon the high office which this modern form of publication fulfils in the literary world, it is because i am impatient of the antiquated and ignorant prejudice which classes the magazines as ephemeral. they are ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not ephemeral, and what is best in them awaits its resurrection in the book, which, as the first form, is so often a lasting death. an interesting proof of the value of the magazine to literature is the fact that a good novel will often have wider acceptance as a book from having been a magazine serial. v. under the 'regime' of the great literary periodicals the prosperity of literary men would be much greater than it actually is if the magazines were altogether literary. but they are not, and this is one reason why literature is still the hungriest of the professions. two-thirds of the magazines are made up of material which, however excellent, is without literary quality. very probably this is because even the highest class of readers, who are the magazine readers, have small love of pure literature, which seems to have been growing less and less in all classes. i say seems, because there are really no means of ascertaining the fact, and it may be that the editors are mistaken in making their periodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, economics, and the timely topics which i will call contemporanics. but, however that may be, their efforts in this direction have narrowed the field of literary industry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity kindled by the unexampled prosperity of their periodicals. they pay very well indeed for literature; they pay from five or six dollars a thousand words for the work of the unknown writer to a hundred and fifty dollars a thousand words for that of the most famous, or the most popular, if there is a difference between fame and popularity; but they do not, altogether, want enough literature to justify the best business talent in devoting itself to belles-lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or humorous sketches of travel, or light essays; business talent can do far better in dry goods, groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and the like. i do not think there is any danger of a ruinous competition from it in the field which, though narrow, seems so rich to us poor fellows, whose business talent is small, at the best. the most of the material contributed to the magazines is the subject of agreement between the editor and the author; it is either suggested by the author or is the fruit of some suggestion from the editor; in any case the price is stipulated beforehand, and it is no longer the custom for a well-known contributor to leave the payment to the justice or the generosity of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, nor ever a wise thing. usually, the price is so much a thousand words, a truly odious method of computing literary value, and one well calculated to make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling his art at all. it is as if a painter sold his picture at so much a square inch, or a sculptor bargained away a group of statuary by the pound. but it is a custom that you cannot always successfully quarrel with, and most writers gladly consent to it, if only the price a thousand words is large enough. the sale to the editor means the sale of the serial rights only, but if the publisher of the magazine is also a publisher of books, the republication of the material is supposed to be his right, unless there is an understanding to the contrary; the terms for this are another affair. formerly something more could be got for the author by the simultaneous appearance of his work in an english magazine; but now the great american magazines, which pay far higher prices than any others in the world, have a circulation in england so much exceeding that of any english periodical that the simultaneous publication can no longer be arranged for from this side, though i believe it is still done here from the other side. vi. i think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to the magazines. i am not sure that the case is in every way improved for young authors. the magazines all maintain a staff for the careful examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use is very small; one of the greatest of them, i know, does not use fifty in the course of a year. the new writer, then, must be very good to be accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed. the pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one, two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. if the young writer has not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in the courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the book is his immediate hope. how slight a hope the book is i have tried to hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse still, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; i do not mean success with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which does not personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it. i will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book which the young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind, such as most young men and women write; and i will suppose that it has found a publisher. it is human nature, as competition has deformed human nature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks, and he possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own expense, and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing it. if not that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or if this will not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not, do it (he is commonly only too glad to do any thing he can), then the publisher offers him ten per cent. of the retail price after the first thousand copies have been sold. but if he fully believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself. the book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher is not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred copies. whether the author has as much reason to be pleased is a question, but if the book does not sell more he has only himself to blame, and had better pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty-five dollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, and try to find work somewhere at five dollars a week. the publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the author, and until a book has sold two thousand copies the division is fair enough. after that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have been defrayed and the book goes on advertising itself; there is merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be met, and the arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher. the author has no right to complain of this, in the case of his first book, which he is only too grateful to get accepted at all. if it succeeds, he has himself to blame for making the same arrangement for his second or third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which is practically the same thing. it will be business for the publisher to take advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault; but i do not say that he will always do so; i believe he will very often not do so. at one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the author's gains by subscription publication, and one very well-known american author prospered fabulously in that way. the percentage offered by the subscription houses was only about half as much as that paid by the trade, but the sales were so much greater that the author could very well afford to take it. where the book-dealer sold ten, the book-agent sold a hundred; or at least he did so in the case of mark twain's books; and we all thought it reasonable he could do so with ours. such of us as made experiment of him, however, found the facts illogical. no book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except mr. clemens's books, and i think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were. this sort of readers, or buyers, were so used to getting something worthless for their money that they would not spend it for artistic fiction, or, indeed, for any fiction at all except mr. clemens's, which they probably supposed bad. some good books of travel had a measurable success through the book-agents, but not at all the success that had been hoped for; and i believe now the subscription trade again publishes only compilations, or such works as owe more to the skill of the editor than the art of the writer. mr. clemens himself no longer offers his books to the public in that way. it is not common, i think, in this country, to publish on the half- profits system, but it is very common in england, where, owing probably to the moisture in the air, which lends a fairy outline to every prospect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring. one of my own early books was published there on these terms, which i accepted with the insensate joy of the young author in getting any terms from a publisher. the book sold, sold every copy of the small first edition, and in due time the publisher's statement came. i did not think my half of the profits was very great, but it seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost had been charged up against my poor book, and that frail venture had been made to pay the expenses of composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies. the wonder ought to have been that there was anything at all coming to me, but i was young and greedy then, and i really thought there ought to have been more. i was disappointed, but i made the best of it, of course, and took the account to the junior partner of the house which employed me, and said that i should like to draw on him for the sum due me from the london publishers. he said, certainly; but after a glance at the account he smiled and said he supposed i knew how much the sum was? i answered, yes; it was eleven pounds nine shillings, was not it? but i owned at the same time that i never was good at figures, and that i found english money peculiarly baffling. he laughed now, and said, it was eleven shillings and ninepence. in fact, after all those charges for composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies, there was a most ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent. commission on sales, which reduced my half from pounds to shillings, and handsomely increased the publisher's half in proportion. i do not now dispute the justice of the charge. it was not the fault of the half- profits system; it was the fault of the glad young author who did not distinctly inform himself of its mysterious nature in agreeing to it, and had only to reproach himself if he was finally disappointed. but there is always something disappointing in the accounts of publishers, which i fancy is because authors are strangely constituted, rather than because publishers are so. i will confess that i have such inordinate expectations of the sale of my books, which i hope i think modestly of, that the sales reported to me never seem great enough. the copyright due me, no matter how handsome it is, appears deplorably mean, and i feel impoverished for several days after i get it. but, then, i ought to add that my balance in the bank is always much less than i have supposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come back to me, have the air of having been in a conspiracy to betray me. no, we literary men must learn, no matter how we boast ourselves in business, that the distress we feel from our publisher's accounts is simply idiopathic; and i for one wish to bear my witness to the constant good faith and uprightness of publishers. it is supposed that because they have the affair altogether in their hands they are apt to take advantage in it; but this does not follow, and as a matter of fact they have the affair no more in their own hands than any other business man you have an open account with. there is nothing to prevent you from looking at their books, except your own innermost belief and fear that their books are correct, and that your literature has brought you so little because it has sold so little. the author is not to blame for his superficial delusion to the contrary, especially if he has written a book that has set every one talking, because it is of a vital interest. it may be of a vital interest, without being at all the kind of book people want to buy; it may be the kind of book that they are content to know at second hand; there are such fatal books; but hearing so much, and reading so much about it, the author cannot help hoping that it has sold much more than the publisher says. the publisher is undoubtedly honest, however, and the author had better put away the comforting question of his integrity. the english writers seem largely to suspect their publishers; but i believe that american authors, when not flown with flattering reviews, as largely trust theirs. of course there are rogues in every walk of life. i will not say that i ever personally met them in the flowery paths of literature, but i have heard of other people meeting them there, just as i have heard of people seeing ghosts, and i have to believe in both the rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses. i suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked publishers, but, in the case of our books that do not sell, i am afraid that it is the graceless and inappreciative public which is far more to blame than the wickedest of the publishers. it is true that publishers will drive a hard bargain when they can, or when they must; but there is nothing to hinder an author from driving a hard bargain, too, when he can, or when he must; and it is to be said of the publisher that he is always more willing to abide by the bargain when it is made than the author is; perhaps because he has the best of it. but he has not always the best of it; i have known publishers too generous to take advantage of the innocence of authors; and i fancy that if publishers had to do with any race less diffident than authors, they would have won a repute for unselfishness that they do now now enjoy. it is certain that in the long period when we flew the black flag of piracy there were many among our corsairs on the high seas of literature who paid a fair price for the stranger craft they seized; still oftener they removed the cargo and released their capture with several weeks' provision; and although there was undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat-cutting and scuttling, still i feel sure that there was less of it than there would have been in any other line of business released to the unrestricted plunder of the neighbor. there was for a long time even a comity among these amiable buccaneers, who agreed not to interfere with each other, and so were enabled to pay over to their victims some portion of the profit from their stolen goods. of all business men publishers are probably the most faithful and honorable, and are only surpassed in virtue when men of letters turn business men. vii. publishers have their little theories, their little superstitions, and their blind faith in the great god chance which we all worship. these things lead them into temptation and adversity, but they seem to do fairly well as business men, even in their own behalf. they do not make above the usual ninety-five per cent. of failures, and more publishers than authors get rich. some theories or superstitions publishers and authors share together. one of these is that it is best to keep your books all in the hands of one publisher if you can, because then he can give them more attention and sell more of them. but my own experience is that when my books were in the hands of three publishers they sold quite as well as when one had them; and a fellow-author whom i approached in question of this venerable belief laughed at it. this bold heretic held that it was best to give each new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man put all his energies into pushing it; but if you had them all together, the publisher rested in a vain security that one book would sell another, and that the fresh venture would revive the public interest in the stale ones. i never knew this to happen; and i must class it with the superstitions of the trade. it may be so in other and more constant countries, but in our fickle republic each last book has to fight its own way to public favor, much as if it had no sort of literary lineage. of course this is stating it rather largely, and the truth will be found inside rather than outside of my statement; but there is at least truth enough in it to give the young author pause. while one is preparing to sell his basket of glass, he may as well ask himself whether it is better to part with all to one dealer or not; and if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginary customer who asks the favor of taking the entire stock, that will be his fault, and not the fault of the customer. however, the most important question of all with the man of letters as a man of business is what kind of book will sell the best of itself, because, at the end of the ends, a book sells itself or does not sell at all; kissing, after long ages of reasoning and a great deal of culture, still goes by favor, and though innumerable generations of horses have been led to the water, not one horse has yet been made to drink. with the best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a book into acceptance. advertising will not avail, and reviewing is notoriously futile. if the book does not strike the popular fancy, or deal with some universal interest, which need by no means be a profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten in vain. the book may be one of the best and wisest books in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it the readers of it, and, worse yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit. the secret of this, like most other secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the awful keeping of fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some lucky chance. to plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor, is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the unworthiest; and i can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man of business, counsel the young author to do it. the best that you can do is to write the book that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as much heart and soul as you have about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to reach the heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. that, and that alone, is good business for a man of letters. the man of letters must make up his mind that in the united states the fate of a book is in the hands of the women. it is the women with us who have the most leisure, and they read the most books. they are far better educated, for the most part, than our men, and their tastes, if not their minds, are more cultivated. our men read the newspapers, but our women read the books; the more refined among them read the magazines. if they do not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them, and it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is no appeal from them. to go from them to the men would be going from a higher to a lower court, which would be honestly surprised and bewildered, if the thing were possible. as i say, the author of light literature, and often the author of solid literature, must resign himself to obscurity unless the ladies choose to recognize him. yet it would be impossible to forecast their favor for this kind or that. who could prophesy it for another, who guess it for himself? we must strive blindly for it, and hope somehow that our best will also be our prettiest; but we must remember at the same time that it is not the ladies' man who is the favorite of the ladies. there are, of course, a few, a very few, of our greatest authors who have striven forward to the first place in our valhalla without the help of the largest reading-class among us; but i should say that these were chiefly the humorists, for whom women are said nowhere to have any warm liking, and who have generally with us come up through the newspapers, and have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers. they have become literary men, as it were, without the newspaper readers' knowing it; but those who have approached literature from another direction have won fame in it chiefly by grace of the women, who first read them; and then made their husbands and fathers read them. perhaps, then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for a serious author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim at the countenance of the men. except as a humorist he certainly never will get it, for your american, when he is not making money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it. viii i hope that i have not been hinting that the author who approaches literature through journalism is not as fine and high a literary man as the author who comes directly to it, or through some other avenue; i have not the least notion of condemning myself by any such judgment. but i think it is pretty certain that fewer and fewer authors are turning from journalism to literature, though the 'entente cordiale' between the two professions seems as great as ever. i fancy, though i may be as mistaken in this as i am in a good many other things, that most journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. when an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would willingly see pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise brought to grief and shame. they are apt to gird at him for his unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this if they proposed any way for him to live without them; as i have allowed at the outset, the gains are unhallowed. apparently it is unseemly for two or three authors to be making half as much by their pens as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the ten thousand dollars jones gets for his novel and the five pounds milton got for his epic. i have always thought milton was paid too little, but i will own that he ought not to have been paid at all, if it comes to that. again i say that no man ought to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist's living otherwise and continuing an artist. the literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the newspaper man, generally speaking. i have often thought with amazement of the kindness shown by the press to our whole unworthy craft, and of the help so lavishly and freely given to rising and even risen authors. to put it coarsely, brutally, i do not suppose that any other business receives so much gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. it is, enormous, the space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism, socialism, catholicism, and sandemanianism. i have sometimes doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the editors gave them, but i have always said this under my breath, and i have thankfully taken my share of the common bounty. a curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity seems to have very little to do with an author's popularity, though ever so much with his notoriety. some of those strange subterranean fellows who never come to the surface in the newspapers, except for a contemptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly have their horses and yachts and country seats, while immodest merit is left to get about on foot and look up summer-board at the cheaper hotels. that is probably right, or it would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like millionairism and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether the newspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their actual generosity to literary men, can really help one much to fortune, however much they help one to fame. such a question is almost too dreadful, and, though i have asked it, i will not attempt to answer it. i would much rather consider the question whether, if the newspapers can make an author, they can also unmake him, and i feel pretty safe in saying that i do not think they can. the afreet, once out of the bottle, can never be coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the newspapers have made cannot be unmade by the newspapers. perhaps he could if they would let him alone; but the art of letting alone the creature of your favor, when he has forfeited your favor, is yet in its infancy with the newspapers. they consign him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the land, and they keep visiting him there with an uproar which attracts more and more notice to him. an author who has long enjoyed their favor suddenly and rather mysteriously loses it, through his opinions on certain matters of literary taste, say. for the space of five or six years he is denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought to convince him there is something wrong. if he thinks it is his censors, he clings to his opinions with an abiding constancy, while ridicule, obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation, and personal detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of fiction, and that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of tolstoy, tourgunief, zola, hardy, and james is unworthy a moment's comparison with the school of rider haggard. all this ought certainly to unmake the author in question, but this is not really the effect. slowly but surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without relinquishing one of his wicked opinions, or in any wise showing himself repentant, remains apparently whole; and he even returns in a measure to the old kindness--not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, but certainly to as much of it as he merits. i would not have the young author, from this imaginary case; believe that it is well either to court or to defy the good opinion of the press. in fact, it will not only be better taste, but it will be better business, for him to keep it altogether out of his mind. there is only one whom he can safely try to please, and that is himself. if he does this he will very probably please other people; but if he does not please himself he may be sure that he will not please them; the book which he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. still, i would not have him attach too little consequence to the influence of the press. i should say, let him take the celebrity it gives him gratefully but not too seriously; let him reflect that he is often the necessity rather than the ideal of the paragrapher, and that the notoriety the journalists bestow upon him is not the measure of their acquaintance with his work, far less his meaning. they are good fellows, those hard-pushed, poor fellows of the press, but the very conditions of their censure, friendly or unfriendly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal than knowledge in it. ix. there are some sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but now apparently no longer desired by magazine editors, who ought to know what their readers desire. among these is the travel sketch, to me a very agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline. there are some reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and a possible surfeit. travel itself has become so universal that everybody, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has no longer the charm of strangeness. we do not think the old world either so romantic or so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an instinctive perception of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to our sentiment or our humor with sketches of outlandish people and places. of course, this can hold true only in a general way; the thing is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly. when one thinks of the long line of american writers who have greatly pleased in this sort, and who even got their first fame in it, one must grieve to see it obsolescent. irving, curtis, bayard taylor, herman melville, ross browne, warner, ik marvell, longfellow, lowell, story, mr. james, mr. aldrich, mr. hay, mrs. hunt, mr. c. w. stoddard, mark twain, and many others whose names will not come to me at the moment, have in their several ways richly contributed to our pleasure in it; but i cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with an editor in a sketch of travel or a study of foreign manners and customs; his work would have to be of the most signal importance and brilliancy to overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had been done already; and i believe that a publisher, if offered a book of such things, would look at it askance and plead the well-known quiet of the trade. still, i may be mistaken. i am rather more confident about the decline of another literary species --namely, the light essay. we have essays enough and to spare of certain soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and deal with conditions; but the kind that i mean, the slightly humorous, gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once did. i do not know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his readers' frame, or whether they do not offer themselves, but i seldom find them in the magazines. i certainly do not believe that if any one were now to write essays such as warner's backlog studies, an editor would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them. nobody seems to write the sort that colonel higginson formerly contributed to the periodicals, or such as emerson wrote. without a great name behind it, i am afraid that a volume of essays would find few buyers, even after the essays had made a public in the magazines. there are, of course, instances to the contrary, but they are not so many or so striking as to make me think that the essay could be offered as a good opening for business talent. i suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better paid in the magazines than it is now. i must say, too, that i think the quality of the minor poetry of our day is better than that of twenty-five or thirty years ago. i could name half a score of young poets whose work from time to time gives me great pleasure, by the reality of its feeling and the delicate perfection of its art, but i will not name them, for fear of passing over half a score of others equally meritorious. we have certainly no reason to be discouraged, whatever reason the poets themselves have to be so, and i do not think that even in the short story our younger writers are doing better work than they are doing in the slighter forms of verse. yet the notion of inviting business talent into this field would be as preposterous as that of asking it to devote itself to the essay. what book of verse by a recent poet, if we except some such peculiarly gifted poet as mr. whitcomb riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak of any profit to the author? of course, it would be rather more offensive and ridiculous that it should do so than that any other form of literary art should do so; and yet there is no more provision in our economic system for the support of the poet apart from his poems than there is for the support of the novelist apart from his novel. one could not make any more money by writing poetry than by writing history, but it is a curious fact that while the historians have usually been rich men, and able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have usually been poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their devotion to a calling which is so seldom an election. to be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set up poet than to set up historian. there is no outlay for copying documents, or visiting libraries, or buying books. in fact, except as historian, the man of letters, in whatever walk, has not only none of the expenses of other men of business, but none of the expenses of other artists. he has no such outlay to make for materials, or models, or studio rent as the painter or the sculptor has, and his income, such as it is, is immediate. if he strikes the fancy of the editor with the first thing he offers, as he very well may, it is as well with him as with other men after long years of apprenticeship. although he will always be the better for an apprenticeship, and the longer apprenticeship the better, he may practically need none at all. such are the strange conditions of his acceptance with the public, that he may please better without it than with it. an author's first book is too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but a painter or a sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can give himself. x. in view of this fact it becomes again very hard to establish the author's status in the business world, and at moments i have grave question whether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist. there is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any other sort of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some measure of preparation. a young writer may produce a brilliant and very perfect romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel of manners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the outset. for this work he needs experience and observation, not so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters will all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and character with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire only through his own heart. a man remains in a measure strange to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources of novelty in his work will be within himself; he can continue to give it freshness in no other way than by knowing himself better and better. but a young writer and an untrained writer has not yet begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other men. the world around him remains a secret as well as the world within him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience of joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time. until he is well on towards forty, he will hardly have assimilated the materials of a great novel, although he may have amassed them. the novelist, then, is a man of letters who is like a man of business in the necessity of preparation for his calling, though he does not pay store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, as the phrase is. he alone among men of letters may look forward to that sort of continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligence in other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade, and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world. it is not a very high standing, i think, and i have expressed the belief that it does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of business. still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man who gets a hundred dollars a thousand words or whose book sells five hundred thousand copies or less. that is a fact appreciable to business, and the man of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably feel that his place in our civilization, though he may owe it to the women who form the great mass of his readers, has something of the character of a vested interest in the eyes of men. there is, indeed, as yet no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to injure him in his business. a critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may damage him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has no recourse but to write better books, or worse. the law will do nothing for him, and a boycott of his books might be preached with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on the question of industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism. still the market for his wares is steadier than the market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better. the historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way. as for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. the reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but i fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without crowding one another; i should rather like to see them doing it. another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best writers of fiction, who are most in demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in book form. i think they earn their money, but if i did not think all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they get, i should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who did not. the difficulty about payment, as i have hinted, is that literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective value, if i may so express it. a poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political economy, may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing whatever to another. it may be precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood of the same reader. how, then, is it to be priced, and how is it to be fairly marketed? all people must be fed, and all people must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them. but there is no such positive and obvious necessity, i am sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. the sort of fiction which corresponds in literature to the circus and the variety theatre in the show-business seems essential to the spiritual health of the masses, but the most cultivated of the classes can get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel. this is a great pity, and i should be-very willing that readers might feel something like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but apparently they never do. their dumb and passive need is apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in the form of weariness of this author or that. the publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate touch. sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself that his readers are sick of smith, and are pining for jones; even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is by no means safe in cutting down smith's price and putting up jones's. with the best will in the world to pay justly, he cannot. smith, who has been boring his readers to death for a year, may write tomorrow a thing that will please them so much that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something so uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in the magazine. the only thing that gives either writer positive value is his acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to month wholly uncertain. authors are largely matters of fashion, like this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown. last spring the dresses were all made with lace berthas, and smith was read; this year the butterfly capes are worn, and jones is the favorite author. who shall forecast the fall and winter modes? xi. in this inquiry it is always the author rather than the publisher, always the contributor rather than the editor, whom i am concerned for. i study the difficulties of the publisher and editor only because they involve the author and the contributor; if they did not, i will not say with how hard a heart i should turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizing the business conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, not the purveyors of it. after all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of letters ever am business man? i suppose that, strictly speaking, he never is, except in those rare instances where, through need or choice, he is the publisher as well as the author of his books. then he puts something on the market and tries to sell it there, and is a man of business. but otherwise he is an artist merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage-workers who are paid for the labor they have put into the thing done or the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it. the quality of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a working-man, and is under the rule that governs the working-man's life. if he is sick or sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy, and will not, then he earns nothing. he cannot delegate his business to a clerk or a manager; it will not go on while he is sleeping. the wage he can command depends strictly upon his skill and diligence. i myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; i am glad and proud to be of those who eat their bread in the sweat of their own brows, and not the sweat of other men's brows; i think my bread is the sweeter for it. in the mean time, i have no blame for business men; they are no more of the condition of things than we working-men are; they did no more to cause it or create it; but i would rather be in my place than in theirs, and i wish that i could make all my fellow-artists realize that economically they are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers. it ought to be our glory that we produce something, that we bring into the world something that was not choately there before; that at least we fashion or shape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie that binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling chain, but as a mystic bond also uniting us to him who works hitherto and evermore. i know very well that to the vast multitude of our fellow-working-men we artists are the shadows of names, or not even the shadows. i like to look the facts in the face, for though their lineaments are often terrible, yet there is light nowhere else; and i will not pretend, in this light, that the masses care any more for us than we care for the masses, or so much. nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of the classes. except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and then they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their spiritual dulness with some artistic presence, the attempt is always a failure that bruises and abashes. in so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms his art. we all know that ghastly type; it is more absurd even than the figure which is really of the world, which was born and bred in it, and conceives of nothing outside of it, or above it. in the social world, as well as in the business world, the artist is anomalous, in the actual conditions, and he is perhaps a little ridiculous. yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and i think that he will do well to regard himself as in a transition state. he is really of the masses, but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know him; as yet the common people do not hear him gladly or hear him at all. he is apparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen to him; he often amuses them very much; but he is not quite at ease among them; whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not of their kind. perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot consort with. the prospect is not brilliant for any artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the flesh the accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct has been divinely planted in the human soul. pg editor's bookmarks: artist has seasons, as trees, when he cannot blossom book that they are content to know at second hand business to take advantage of his necessity competition has deformed human nature conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets fate of a book is in the hands of the women god of chance leads them into temptation and adversity historian, who is a kind of inferior realist i do not think any man ought to live by an art if he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading impropriety if not indecency promises literary success literature beautiful only through the intelligence literature has no objective value literature is business as well as art man is strange to himself as long as he lives men read the newspapers, but our women read the books more zeal than knowledge in it most journalists would have been literary men if they could never quite sure of life unless i find literature in it no man ought to live by any art no rose blooms right along our huckstering civilization public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best results of art should be free to all reviewers reward is in the serial and not in the book-- th century rogues in every walk of life there is small love of pure literature two branches of the novelist's trade: novelist and historian warner's backlog studies work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money the celebrity by winston churchill volume . chapter ix that evening i lighted a cigar and went down to sit on the outermost pile of the asquith dock to commune with myself. to say that i was disappointed in miss thorn would be to set a mild value on my feelings. i was angry, even aggressive, over her defence of the celebrity. i had gone over to mohair that day with a hope that some good reason was at the bottom of her tolerance for him, and had come back without any hope. she not only tolerated him, but, wonderful to be said, plainly liked him. had she not praised him, and defended him, and become indignant when i spoke my mind about him? and i would have taken my oath, two weeks before, that nothing short of hypnotic influence could have changed her. by her own confession she had come to asquith with her eyes opened, and, what was more, seen another girl wrecked on the same reef. farrar followed me out presently, and i had an impulse to submit the problem as it stood to him. but it was a long story, and i did not believe that if he were in my boots he would have consulted me. again, i sometimes thought farrar yearned for confidences, though it was impossible for him to confide. and he wore an inviting air to-night. then, as everybody knows, there is that about twilight and an after-dinner cigar which leads to communication. they are excellent solvents. my friend seated himself on the pile next to mine, and said, "it strikes me you have been behaving rather queer lately, crocker." this was clearly an invitation from farrar, and i melted. "i admit," said i, "that i am a good deal perplexed over the contradictions of the human mind." "oh, is that all?" he replied dryly. "i supposed it was worse. narrower, i mean. didn't know you ever bothered yourself with abstract philosophy." "see here, farrar," said i, "what is your opinion of miss thorn?" he stopped kicking his feet against the pile and looked up. "miss thorn?" "yes, miss thorn," i repeated with emphasis. i knew he had in mind that abominable twaddle about the canoe excursions. "why, to tell the truth," said he, "i never had any opinion of miss thorn." "you mean you never formed any, i suppose," i returned with some tartness. "yes, that is it. how darned precise you are getting, crocker! one would think you were going to write a rhetoric. what put miss thorn into your head?" "i have been coaching beside her this afternoon." "oh!" said farrar. "do you remember the night she came," i asked, "and we sat with her on the florentine porch, and charles wrexell recognized her and came up?" "yes," he replied with awakened interest, "and i meant to ask you about that." "miss thorn had met him in the east. and i gathered from what she told me that he has followed her out here." "shouldn't wonder," said farrar. "don't much blame him, do you? is that what troubles you?" he asked, in surprise. "not precisely," i answered vaguely; "but from what she has said then and since, she made it pretty clear that she hadn't any use for him; saw through him, you know." "pity her if she didn't. but what did she say?" i repeated the conversations i had had with miss thorn, without revealing mr. allen's identity with the celebrated author. "that is rather severe," he assented. "he decamped for mohair, as you know, and since that time she has gone back on every word of it. she is with him morning and evening, and, to crown all, stood up for him through thick and thin to-day, and praised him. what do you think of that?" "what i should have expected in a woman," said he, nonchalantly. "they aren't all alike," i retorted. he shook out his pipe, and getting down from his high seat laid his hand on my knee. "i thought so once, old fellow," he whispered, and went off down the dock. this was the nearest farrar ever came to a confidence. i have now to chronicle a curious friendship which had its beginning at this time. the friendships of the other sex are quickly made, and sometimes as quickly dissolved. this one interested me more than i care to own. the next morning judge short, looking somewhat dejected after the overnight conference he had had with his wife, was innocently and somewhat ostentatiously engaged in tossing quoits with me in front of the inn, when miss thorn drove up in a basket cart. she gave me a bow which proved that she bore no ill-will for that which i had said about her hero. then miss trevor appeared, and away they went together. this was the commencement. soon the acquaintance became an intimacy, and their lives a series of visits to each other. although this new state of affairs did not seem to decrease the number of miss thorn's 'tete-a-tetes' with the celebrity, it put a stop to the canoe expeditions i had been in the habit of taking with miss trevor, which i thought just as well under the circumstances. more than once miss thorn partook of the inn fare at our table, and when this happened i would make my escape before the coffee. for such was the nature of my feelings regarding the celebrity that i could not bring myself into cordial relations with one who professed to admire him. i realize how ridiculous such a sentiment must appear, but it existed nevertheless, and most strongly. i tried hard to throw miss thorn out of my thoughts, and very nearly succeeded. i took to spending more and more of my time at the county-seat, where i remained for days at a stretch, inventing business when there was none. and in the meanwhile i lost all respect for myself as a sensible man, and cursed the day the celebrity came into the state. it seemed strange that this acquaintance of my early days should have come back into my life, transformed, to make it more or less miserable. the county-seat being several miles inland, and lying in the midst of hills, could get intolerably hot in september. at last i was driven out in spite of myself, and i arrived at asquith cross and dusty. as simpson was brushing me off, miss trevor came up the path looking cool and pretty in a summer gown, and her face expressed sympathy. i have never denied that sympathy was a good thing. "oh, mr. crocker," she cried, "i am so glad you are back again! we have missed you dreadfully. and you look tired, poor man, quite worn out. it is a shame you have to go over to that hot place to work." i agreed with her. "and i never have any one to take me canoeing any more." "let's go now," i suggested, "before dinner." so we went. it was a keen pleasure to be on the lake again after the sultry court-rooms and offices, and the wind and exercise quickly brought back my appetite and spirits. i paddled hither and thither, stopping now and then to lie under the pines at the mouth of some stream, while miss trevor talked. she was almost a child in her eagerness to amuse me with the happenings since my departure. this was always her manner with me, in curious contrast to her habit of fencing and playing with words when in company. presently she burst out: "mr. crocker, why is it that you avoid miss thorn? i was talking of you to her only to-day, and she says you go miles out of your way to get out of speaking to her; that you seemed to like her quite well at first. she couldn't understand the change." "did she say that?" i exclaimed. "indeed, she did; and i have noticed it, too. i saw you leave before coffee more than once when she was here. i don't believe you know what a fine girl she is." "why, then, does she accept and return the attentions of the celebrity?" i inquired, with a touch of acidity. "she knows what he is as well, if not better, than you or i. i own i can't understand it," i said, the subject getting ahead of me. "i believe she is in love with him." miss trevor began to laugh; quietly at first, and, as her merriment increased, heartily. "shouldn't we be getting back?" i asked, looking at my watch. "it lacks but half an hour of dinner." "please don't be angry, mr. crocker," she pleaded. "i really couldn't help laughing." "i was unaware i had said anything funny, miss trevor," i replied. "of course you didn't," she said more soberly; "that is, you didn't intend to. but the very notion of miss thorn in love with the celebrity is funny." "evidence is stronger than argument," said i. "and now she has even convicted herself." i started to paddle homeward, rather furiously, and my companion said nothing until we came in sight of the inn. as the canoe glided into the smooth surface behind the breakwater, she broke the silence. "i heard you went fishing the other day," said she. "yes." "and the judge told me about a big bass you hooked, and how you played him longer than was necessary for the mere fun of the thing." "yes." "perhaps you will find in the feeling that prompted you to do that a clue to the character of our sex." chapter x mr. cooke had had a sloop yacht built at far harbor, the completion of which had been delayed, and which was but just delivered. she was, painted white, with brass fittings, and under her stern, in big, black letters, was the word maria, intended as a surprise and delicate conjugal compliment to mrs. cooke. the maria had a cabin, which was finished in hard wood and yellow plush, and accommodations for keeping things cold. this last mr. cooke had insisted upon. the skipper mr. cooke had hired at far harbor was a god-fearing man with a luke warm interest in his new billet and employer, and had only been prevailed upon to take charge of the yacht for the month after the offer of an emolument equal to half a year's sea pay of an ensign in the navy. his son and helper was to receive a sum proportionally exorbitant. this worthy man sighted mohair on a sunday morning, and at nine o'clock dropped his anchor with a salute which caused mr. cooke to say unpleasant things in his sleep. after making things ship-shape and hoisting the jack, both father and son rowed ashore to the little church at asquith. now the butler at mohair was a servant who had learned, from long experience, to anticipate every wish and whim of his master, and from the moment he descried the white sails of the yacht out of the windows of the butler's pantry his duty was clear as daylight. such was the comprehension and despatch with which he gave his commands that the captain returned from divine worship to find the maria in profane hands, her immaculate deck littered with straw and sawdust, and covered to the coamings with bottles and cases. this decided the captain, he packed his kit in high dudgeon, and took the first train back to far harbor, leaving the yacht to her fate. this sudden and inconsiderate departure was a severe blow to mr. cooke' who was so constituted that he cared but little about anything until there was danger of not getting it. my client had planned a trip to bear island for the following tuesday, which was to last a week, the party to bring tents with them and rough it, with the maria as headquarters. it was out of the question to send to far harbor for another skipper, if, indeed, one could be found at that late period. and as luck would have it, six of mr. cooke's ten guests had left but a day or so since, and among them had been the only yacht-owner. none of the four that remained could do more than haul aft and belay a sheet. but the celebrity, who chanced along as mr. cooke was ruefully gazing at the graceful lines of the maria from the wharf and cursing the fate that kept him ashore with a stiff wind blowing, proposed a way out of the difficulty. he, the celebrity, would gladly sail the maria over to bear island provided another man could be found to relieve him occasionally at the wheel, and the like. he had noticed that farrar was a capable hand in a boat, and suggested that he be sent for. this suggestion mr. cooke thought so well of that he hurried over to asquith to consult farrar at once, and incidentally to consult me. we can hardly be blamed for receiving his overtures with a moderate enthusiasm. in fact, we were of one mind not to go when the subject was first broached. but my client had a persuasive way about him that was irresistible, and the mere mention of the favors he had conferred upon both of us at different periods of our lives was sufficient. we consented. thus it came to pass that tuesday morning found the party assembled on the wharf at mohair, the four and the celebrity, as well as mr. cooke, having produced yachting suits from their inexhaustible wardrobes. mr. trevor and his daughter, mrs. cooke and miss thorn, and farrar and myself completed the party. we were to adhere strictly to primeval principles: the ladies were not permitted a maid, while the celebrity was forced to leave his manservant, and mr. cooke his chef. i had, however, thrust into my pocket the minneapolis papers, which had been handed me by the clerk on their arrival at the inn, which happened just as i was leaving. 'quod bene notandum!' thereby hangs a tale! for the northern lakes the day was rather dead: a little wind lay in the southeast, scarcely enough to break the water, with the sky an intense blue. but the maria was hardly cast and under way before it became painfully apparent that the celebrity was much better fitted to lead a cotillon than to sail a boat. he gave his orders, nevertheless, in a firm, seamanlike fashion, though with no great pertinence, and thus managed to establish the confidence of mr. cooke. farrar, after setting things to rights, joined mrs. cooke and me over the cabin. "how about hoisting the spinnaker, mate?" the celebrity shouted after him. farrar did not deign to answer: his eye was on the wind. and the boom, which had been acting uneasily, finally decided to gybe, and swept majestically over, carrying two of the four in front of it, and all but dropped them into the water. "a common occurrence in a light breeze," we heard the celebrity reassure mr. cooke and miss thorn. "the maria has vindicated her sex," remarked farrar. we laughed. "why don't you sail, mr. farrar?" asked mrs. cooke. "he can't do any harm in this breeze," farrar replied; "it isn't strong enough to get anywhere with." he was right. the boom gybed twenty times that morning, and the celebrity offered an equal number of apologies. mr. cooke and the four vanished, and from the uproarious laughter which arose from the cabin transoms i judged they were telling stories. while miss thorn spent the time profitably in learning how to conn a yacht. at one, when we had luncheon, mohair was still in the distance. at two it began to cloud over, the wind fell flat, and an ominous black bank came up from the south. without more ado, farrar, calling on me to give him a hand, eased down the halliards and began to close reef the mainsail. "hold on," said the celebrity, "who told you to do that?" "i am very sure you didn't," farrar returned, as he hauled out a reef earing. here a few drops of rain on the deck warned the ladies to retire to the cabin. "take the helm until i get my mackintosh, will you, farrar?" said the celebrity, "and be careful what you do." farrar took the helm and hauled in the sheet, while the celebrity, mr. cooke, and the guests donned their rain-clothes. the water ahead was now like blue velvet, and the rain pelting. the maria was heeling to the squall by the time the celebrity appeared at the cabin door, enveloped in an ample waterproof, a rubber cover on his yachting cap. a fool despises a danger he has never experienced, and our author, with a remark about a spanking breeze, made a motion to take the wheel. but farrar, the flannel of his shirt clinging to the muscular outline of his shoulders, gave him a push which sent him sprawling against the lee refrigerator. well miss thorn was not there to see. "you will have to answer for this," he cried, as he scrambled to his feet and clutched the weather wash-board with one hand, while he shook the other in farrar's face. "crocker," said farrar to me, coolly, "keep that idiot out of the way for a while, or we'll all be drowned. tie him up, if necessary." i was relieved from this somewhat unpleasant task. mr. cooke, with his back to the rain, sat an amused witness to the mutiny, as blissfully ignorant as the celebrity of the character of a lake squall. "i appeal to you, as the owner of this yacht, mr. cooke," the celebrity shouted, "whether, as the person delegated by you to take charge of it, i am to suffer indignity and insult. i have sailed larger yachts than this time and again on the coast, at--" here he swallowed a portion of a wave and was mercifully prevented from being specific. but mr. cooke was looking a trifle bewildered. it was hardly possible for him to cling to the refrigerator, much less quell a mutiny. one who has sailed the lakes well knows how rapidly they can be lashed to fury by a storm, and the wind was now spinning the tops of the waves into a blinding spray. although the maria proved a stiff boat and a seaworthy, she was not altogether without motion; and the set expression on farrar's face would have told me, had i not known it, that our situation at that moment was no joke. repeatedly, as she was held up to it, a precocious roller would sweep from bow to stern, until we without coats were wet and shivering. the close and crowded cabin of a small yacht is not an attractive place in rough weather; and one by one the four emerged and distributed themselves about the deck, wherever they could obtain a hold. some of them began to act peculiarly. upon mr. cooke's unwillingness or inability to interfere in his behalf, the celebrity had assumed an aggrieved demeanor, but soon the motion of the maria became more and more pronounced, and the difficulty of maintaining his decorum likewise increased. the ruddy color left his face, which grew pale with effort. i will do him the justice to say that the effort was heroic: he whistled popular airs, and snatches of the grand opera; he relieved mr. cooke of his glasses (of which mr. cooke had neglected to relieve himself), and scanned the sea line busily. but the inevitable deferred is frequently more violent than the inevitable taken gracefully, and the confusion which at length overtook the celebrity was utter as his humiliation was complete. we laid him beside mr. cooke in the cockpit. the rain presently ceased, and the wind hauled, as is often the case, to the northwest, which began to clear, while bear island rose from the northern horizon. both farrar and i were surprised to see miss trevor come out; she hooked back the cabin doors and surveyed the prostrate forms with amusement. we asked her about those inside. "mrs. cooke has really been very ill," she said, "and miss thorn is doing all she can for her. my father and i were more fortunate. but you will both catch your deaths," she exclaimed, noticing our condition. "tell me where i can find your coats." i suppose it is natural for a man to enjoy being looked after in this way; it was certainly a new sensation to farrar and myself. we assured her we were drying out and did not need the coats, but nevertheless she went back into the cabin and found them. "miss thorn says you should both be whipped," she remarked. when we had put on our coats miss trevor sat down and began to talk. "i once heard of a man," she began complacently, "a man that was buried alive, and who contrived to dig himself up and then read his own epitaph. it did not please him, but he was wise and amended his life. i have often thought how much it might help some people if they could read their own epitaphs." farrar was very quick at this sort of thing; and now that the steering had become easier was only too glad to join her in worrying the celebrity. but he, if he were conscious, gave no sign of it. "they ought to be buried so that they could not dig themselves up," he said. "the epitaphs would only strengthen their belief that they had lived in an unappreciative age." "one i happen to have in mind, however, lives in an appreciative age. most appreciative." "and women are often epitaph-makers." "you are hard on the sex, mr. farrar," she answered, "but perhaps justly so. and yet there are some women i know of who would not write an epitaph to his taste." farrar looked at her curiously. "i beg your pardon," he said. "do not imagine i am touchy on the subject," she replied quickly; "some of us are fortunate enough to have had our eyes opened." i thought the celebrity stirred uneasily. "have you read the sybarites?" she asked. farrar was puzzled. "no," said he sententiously, "and i don't want to." "i know the average man thinks it a disgrace to have read it. and you may not believe me when i say that it is a strong story of its kind, with a strong moral. there are men who might read that book and be a great deal better for it. and, if they took the moral to heart, it would prove every bit as effectual as their own epitaphs." he was not quite sure of her drift, but he perceived that she was still making fun of mr. allen. "and the moral?" he inquired. "well," she said, "the best i can do is to give you a synopsis of the story, and then you can judge of its fitness. the hero is called victor desmond. he is a young man of a sterling though undeveloped character, who has been hampered by an indulgent parent with a large fortune. desmond is a butterfly, and sips life after the approved manner of his kind,--now from bohemian glass, now from vessels of gold and silver. he chats with stage lights in their dressing-rooms, and attends a ball in the bowery or a supper at sherry's with a ready versatility. the book, apart from its intention, really gives the middle classes an excellent idea of what is called 'high-life.' "it is some time before desmond discovers that he possesses the gift of paris,--a deliberation proving his lack of conceit,--that wherever he goes he unwittingly breaks a heart, and sometimes two or three. this discovery is naturally so painful that he comes home to his chambers and throws himself on a lounge before his fire in a fit of self-deprecation, and reflects on a misspent and foolish life. this, mind you, is where his character starts to develop. and he makes a heroic resolve, not to cut off his nose or to grow a beard, nor get married, but henceforth to live a life of usefulness and seclusion, which was certainly considerate. and furthermore, if by any accident he ever again involved the affections of another girl he would marry her, be she as ugly as sin or as poor as poverty. then the heroine comes in. her name is rosamond, which sounds well and may be euphoniously coupled with desmond; and, with the single exception of a boarding-school girl, she is the only young woman he ever thought of twice. in order to save her and himself he goes away, but the temptation to write to her overpowers him, and of course she answers his letter. this brings on a correspondence. his letters take the form of confessions, and are the fruits of much philosophical reflection. 'inconstancy in woman,' he says, because of the present social conditions, is often pardonable. in a man, nothing is more despicable.' this is his cardinal principle, and he sticks to it nobly. for, though he tires of rosamond, who is quite attractive, however, he marries her and lives a life of self-denial. there are men who might take that story to heart." i was amused that she should give the passage quoted by the celebrity himself. her double meaning was, naturally, lost on farrar, but he enjoyed the thing hugely, nevertheless, as more or less applicable to mr. allen. i made sure that gentleman was sensible of what was being said, though he scarcely moved a muscle. and miss trevor, with a mirthful glance at me that was not without a tinge of triumph, jumped lightly to the deck and went in to see the invalids. we were now working up into the lee of the island, whose tall pines stood clean and black against the red glow of the evening sky. mr. cooke began to give evidences of life, and finally got up and overhauled one of the ice-chests for a restorative. farrar put into the little cove, where we dropped anchor, and soon had the chief sufferers ashore; and a delicate supper, in the preparation of which miss thorn showed her ability as a cook, soon restored them. for my part, i much preferred miss thorn's dishes to those of the mohair chef, and so did farrar. and the four, surprising as it may seem, made themselves generally useful about the camp in pitching the tents under farrar's supervision. but the celebrity remained apart and silent. chapter xi our first, night in the bear island camp passed without incident, and we all slept profoundly, tired out by the labors of the day before. after breakfast, the four set out to explore, with trout-rods and shot-guns. bear island is, with the exception of the cove into which we had put, as nearly round as an island can be, and perhaps three miles in diameter. it has two clear brooks which, owing to the comparative inaccessibility of the place, still contain trout and grayling, though there are few spots where a fly can be cast on account of the dense underbrush. the woods contain partridge, or ruffed grouse, and other game in smaller quantities. i believe my client entertained some notion of establishing a preserve here. the insults which had been heaped upon the celebrity on the yacht seemed to have raised rather than lowered him in miss thorn's esteem, for these two ensconced themselves among the pines above the camp with an edition de luxe of one of his works which she had brought along. they were soon absorbed in one of those famous short stories of his with the ending left open to discussion. mr. cooke was indisposed. he had not yet recovered from the shaking up his system had sustained, and he took to a canvas easy chair he had brought with him and placed a decanter of scotch and a tumbler of ice at his side. the efficacy of this remedy was assured. and he demanded the bunch of newspapers he spied protruding from my pocket. the rest of us were engaged in various occupations: mr. trevor relating experiences of steamboat days on the ohio to mrs. cooke; miss trevor buried in a serial in the century; and farrar and i taking an inventory of fishing-tackle, when we were startled by aloud and profane ejaculation. mr. cooke had hastily put down his glass and was staring at the newspaper before him with eyes as large as after-dinner coffee-cups. "come here," he shouted over at us. "come here, crocker," he repeated, seeing we were slow to move. "for god's sake, come here!" in obedience to this emphatic summons i crossed the stream and drew near to mr. cooke, who was busily pouring out another glass of whiskey to tide him over this strange excitement. but, as mr. cooke was easily excited and on such occasions always drank whiskey to quiet his nerves, i thought nothing of it. he was sitting bolt upright and held out the paper to me with a shaking hand, while he pointed to some headlines on the first page. and this is what i read: treasurer takes a trip. charles wrexell allen, of the miles standish bicycle company, gets off with , dollars. detectives baffled. the absconder a back bay social leader. half way down the column was a picture of mr. allen, a cut made from a photograph, and, allowing for the crudities of newspaper reproduction, it was a striking likeness of the celebrity. underneath was a short description. mr. allen was five feet eleven (the celebrity's height), had a straight nose, square chin, dark hair and eyes, broad shoulders, was dressed elaborately; in brief, tallied in every particular with the celebrity with the exception of the slight scar which allen was thought to have on his forehead. the situation and all its ludicrous possibilities came over me with a jump. it was too good to be true. had mr. charles wrexell allen arrived at asquith and created a sensation with the man who stole his name i should have been amply satisfied. but that mr. allen had been obliging enough to abscond with a large sum of money was beyond dreaming! i glanced at the rest of it: a history of the well-established company followed, with all that mr. allen had done for it. the picture, by the way, had been obtained from the st. paul agent of the bicycle. after doing due credit to the treasurer's abilities as a hustler there followed a summary of his character, hitherto without reproach; but his tastes were expensive ones. mr. allen's tendency to extravagance had been noticed by the members of the miles standish company, and some of the older directors had on occasions remonstrated with him. but he had been too valuable a man to let go, and it seems as treasurer he was trusted implicitly. he was said to have more clothes than any man in boston. i am used to thinking quickly, and by the time i had read this i had an idea. "what in hell do you make of that, crocker?" cried my client, eyeing me closely and repeating the question again and again, as was his wont when agitated. "it is certainly plain enough," i replied, "but i should like to talk to you before you decide to hand him over to the authorities." i thought i knew mr. cooke, and i was not mistaken. "authorities!" he roared. "damn the authorities! there's my yacht, and there's the canadian border." and he pointed to the north. the others were pressing around us by this time, and had caught the significant words which mr. cooke had uttered. i imagine that if my client had stopped to think twice, which of course is a preposterous condition, he would have confided his discovery only to farrar and to me. it was now out of the question to keep it from the rest of the party, and mr. trevor got the headlines over my shoulder. i handed him the sheet. "read it, mr. trevor," said mrs. cooke. mr. trevor, in a somewhat unsteady voice, read the headlines and began the column, and they followed breathless with astonishment and agitation. once or twice the senator paused to frown upon the celebrity with a terrible sternness, thus directing all other eyes to him. his demeanor was a study in itself. it may be surmised, from what i have said of him, that there was a strain of the actor in his composition; and i am prepared to make an affidavit that, secure in the knowledge that he had witnesses present to attest his identity, he hugely enjoyed the sensation he was creating. that he looked forward with a profound pleasure to the stir which the disclosure that he was the author of the sybarites would make. his face wore a beatific smile. as mr. trevor continued, his voice became firmer and his manner more majestic. it was a task distinctly to his taste, and one might have thought he was reading the sentence of a hastings. i was standing next to his daughter. the look of astonishment, perhaps of horror, which i had seen on her face when her father first began to read had now faded into something akin to wickedness. did she wink? i can't say, never before having had a young woman wink at me. but the next moment her vinaigrette was rolling down the bank towards the brook, and i was after it. i heard her close behind me. she must have read my intentions by a kind of mental telepathy. "are you going to do it?" she whispered. "of course," i answered. "to miss such a chance would be a downright sin." there was a little awe in her laugh. "miss thorn is the only obstacle," i added, "and mr. cooke is our hope. i think he will go by me." "don't let miss thorn worry you," she said as we climbed back. "what do you mean?" i demanded. but she only shook her head. we were at the top again, and mr. trevor was reading an appended despatch from buffalo, stating that mr. allen had been recognized there, in the latter part of june, walking up and down the platform of the station, in a smoking-jacket, and that he had climbed on the chicago limited as it pulled out. this may have caused the celebrity to feel a trifle uncomfortable. "ha!" exclaimed mr. trevor, as he put down the paper. "mr. cooke, do you happen to have any handcuffs on the maria?" but my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. then he approached the celebrity. "don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "don't let it worry you. you're my guest, and i'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "fenelon," said mrs. cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "you're a clever one, allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." the celebrity laughed confidently. "cooke," he replied, "i appreciate your generosity,--i really do. i know no offence is meant. the mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." in mr. cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler i ever saw." the celebrity laughed again. then he surveyed the circle. "my friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, i assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. you have no doubt remarked that i have my peculiarities. we all have. "i flatter thyself i am not entirely unknown. and the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame i have achieved had become such that some months ago i began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. i determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. the possibility of being recognized at asquith did not occur to me. fortunately i was. and a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. i suppose that now," he added impressively, "i shall have to tell you who i am." he paused until these words should have gained their full effect. then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and miss thorn had been reading. "you may have heard, mrs. cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." mrs. cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "yes," she said, "i have. and you claim to be he?" "ask my friend crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "i should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." they turned to me. "i am afraid i cannot," i said with what soberness i could. "what!" says he with a start. "what! you deny me?" miss trevor had her tongue in her cheek. i bowed. "i am powerless to speak, mr. allen," i replied. during this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. i well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of mr. allen's innocence. to his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. it was perfectly possible. he shoved the glass of scotch towards the celebrity, with a smile. "take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. what's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" and he pointed to the paper. "besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." the celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "this is an infamous charge, and you know it, crocker," he cried. "if you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. this isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "my dear sir," i said, "i have charged you with nothing whatever." he turned his back on me in complete disgust. and he came face to face with miss trevor. "miss trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "you forget, mr. allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that i have given you my promise not to reveal what i know." the celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. but miss thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "this is ridiculous, mr. crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "i agree with you most heartily, miss thorn," i replied. "nonsense!" exclaimed miss thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "nonsense or not, marian," mr. cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. the police are already on the scent, i'll bet my hat." "fenelon!" mrs. cooke remonstrated. "and do you mean to say in soberness, uncle fenelon, that you believe the author of the sybarites to be a defaulter?" said miss thorn. "it is indeed hard to believe mr. allen a criminal," mr. trevor broke in for the first time. "i think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." mr. cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "what action do you mean?" he demanded. "well," replied mr. trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "i have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if i know it. i'm not that kind." who shall criticise mr. cooke's code of morality? "fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. no embezzlers up to the present. marian," she continued, turning to miss thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. do you know whether this gentleman is charles wrexell allen, or whether he is the author? in short, do you know who he is?" the celebrity lighted a cigarette. miss thorn said indignantly, "upon my word, aunt maria, i thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. he has been a guest at your house, and i am astonished that you should doubt his word." mrs. cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "you must remember, marian," she said gently, "that i know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. nor does any one at asquith, except perhaps miss trevor, by her own confession. and you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." upon this miss thorn became more indignant still, and mrs. cooke went on "gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. they are usually proud of their own. mr. allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. and, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. i ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? that he is a well-known author? it's an absurdity. i was not born yesterday, my dear." "it is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied miss thorn, warmly. "extraordinary? of course it's extraordinary. and too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." mrs. cooke looked grave. "marian, you forget yourself," she said. "oh, i am tired of it, aunt maria," cried miss thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." she did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. and i was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. a few words from her, such as i supposed she would have spoken, had set the celebrity right with all except mr. cooke. to me it was a clear proof that the celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. the silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from miss trevor. she was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "and, mr. allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." he appeared to forget that i was the district attorney. the celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. he was inclined to take miss thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "tell me, mr. trevor," said he, "why i should sit before you as a tribunal? why i should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? my respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that i am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that i should be an embezzler, and why i decline to lower myself by an explanation." mr. trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "it is not a matter for refusal, mr. trevor. it is simply that i cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "i am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? let me tell you that the president of the united states himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. what in halifax do i care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? i'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." suddenly the full significance of the celebrity's tactics struck mr. cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of mr. trevor's coattails. "hold on, old man," said he; "allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? it's out of consideration for us." mr. trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at mr. cooke. "do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? that you intend to assist him to escape from justice? i insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." mr. trevor turned to mrs. cooke, as if relying on her support. "fenelon," said she, "i have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and i shall not begin now. all i ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." these words from mrs. cooke had much more weight with my client than mr. trevor's blustering demands. "maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "mr. allen is my guest, and a gentleman. when a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." the force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "pshaw, fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. why is it you wish to get mr. allen over the border, then?" a question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "why, my dear," answered my client, "i wish to save mr. allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought east in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. let him take a shooting trip to the great northwest until the real criminal is caught." "well, fenelon," replied mrs. cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. i wash my hands of it." but mr. trevor, who was both a self-made man and a western politician, was far from being satisfied. he turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the ohio state senate. "mr. crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "mr. trevor," said i, "i will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." he wheeled on farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. but at this point the four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. they had five small fish between them which they wanted miss thorn to cook. chapter xii the four received mr. cooke's plan for the celebrity's escape to canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the bear island trip a complete success. the celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. he was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the four would have denied him as an author, for i am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. my client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. we sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. mrs. cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while miss trevor and i had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. at the other end of the cloth were mr. cooke and the four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. his behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from mr. trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. mr. allen was laughing and joking airily with mr. cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. he did not care particularly to go to canada, he said. why should he, when he was innocent? but, if mr. cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the canadian side. afterwards i perceived miss thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. i stood on the brink above, secure, as i thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "mr. crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" i was decidedly embarrassed. her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though i had not been shunning her for weeks past. "if such a thing is possible," i replied. "do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" i was doubtful. but i procured the cloth from miss trevor and returned. there was an air about miss thorn that was new to me. "what an uncompromising man you are, mr. crocker," she said to me. "once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. now it seems that i have given you offence in some way. is it not so?" "you magnify my importance," i said. "no temporizing, mr. crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. i like you too well to quarrel with you." there was no resisting such a command, and i threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "i thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "you and mr. farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "i confess i thought so, too. but you expressed opinions then that i shared. you have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." she paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "i suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "many a time," i returned, warming; "but if i ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the celebrity." "does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "the deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "that is all very well in cases of doubt. but here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. i threw pebbles into the brook, and wished i had held my tongue. "what evidence?" inquired she. "well," said i, "i must finish, i suppose. i had a notion you knew of what i inferred. first, let me say that i have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "impossible." something in her tone made me look up. "very good, then," i answered. "i, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. and that is how your celebrity treated miss trevor." "but miss trevor has recovered, i believe," said miss thorn. i began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "happily, yes," i assented. "thanks to an excellent physician." a smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. i remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. and a suspicion entered my soul. "at any rate," i said, with a laugh, "the celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. he may go back to new york in custody." "i thought you incapable of resentment, mr. crocker. how mean of you to deny him!" "it can do no harm," i answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. i wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." the color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "i am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. before i could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. it was mr. cooke. his descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. mr. cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an asquith cat-boat." i followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. i raised the glasses. "yes," i said, "the scimitar." "that's what farrar said," cried he. "and what about it?" i asked. "what about it?" he ejaculated. "why, it's a detective come for allen. i knew sure as hell if they got as far as asquith they wouldn't stop there. and that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" i replied that it was. he seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "what are you going to do?" i cried, shaking myself loose. "we've got to get on the maria and run for it," he panted. "there is no time to be lost." he had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. and he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for i hastened after him. "but you can't begin to get the maria out before they will be in here," i shouted. he stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "is that so?" "yes, of course," said i, "they will be here in ten minutes." the celebrity stood in the midst of the excited four. his hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. this unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the four. was the celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? he was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. mr. cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the celebrity by the hand. "something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the maria out." farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. the celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "cooke," said he, "i'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. but let things be. i'll come out of it all right." "never," cried cooke, looking proudly around the four as some highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "i'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "a damned sight," echoed the four in unison. "i insist, cooke," said the celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping mr. cooke's purple necktie, "i insist that you drop this business. i repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that i am as innocent of this crime as a baby." mr. cooke paid no attention to this speech. his face became radiant. "didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" one man slapped his knee. "the very place," he cried. "i fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "it's big enough to hold twenty of allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "hustle him off, quick," said mr. cooke. the mandate was obeyed as literally as though robin hood himself had given it. the celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. the commotion had brought mr. trevor to the spot. he caught sight of the celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. he intercepted mr. cooke on his way to the beach. "what have you done with mr. allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "good god," said mr. cooke, whose contempt for mr. trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if i were the governor of the state. what the devil could i do with him?" "i will have no evasion," replied mr. trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "you are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. i have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and i give you my word i will do all in my power to frustrate it." mr. cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. here was a complication he had not looked for. the scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. mr. cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, mr. trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "you were carried away by your generosity, mr. cooke. i was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." mr. cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. i did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if i had. the senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. the two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. mr. cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom i recognized as the big boatman from asquith, familiarly known as captain jay. he owned the scimitar and several smaller boats. the captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between mr. cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. mr. cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. a pool served the office of refrigerator, and mr. cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. farrar and i responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. my client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with mr. drew. you all know the captain." had i not suspected mr. drew's profession, i think i should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. he had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. he was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. his suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "congress" boots. in short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of far harbor and beaverton. he might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. and he had chosen just the get-up i should have picked for detective work in that region. he had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. but his long whiskers troubled me especially. i kept wondering if they were real. "the captain is sailing mr. drew over to far harbor," explained mr. cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." mr. drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. the necessary bottles having been produced, mr. cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "welcome to our party, old man," said he. mr. drew drained his glass and complimented mr. cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. whereupon he seated himself between mr. drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. his only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. the captain had the advantage, three to one, and i made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. at the end of the hour captain jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. he sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which mr. cooke never failed to encore to the echo. my client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. he plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. mr. cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. when a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. mr. drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. mr. cooke made no secret of his admiration for mr. drew, and there were just two things about him that mr. cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. but it appeared that these were the only things that mr. drew was really touchy about. i noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. he was continually saying: "i think i'll grow some like that, old man," or "have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. and finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, mr. cooke reached out and playfully grabbed hold of the one near him. the detective drew back. "mr. cooke," said he, with dignity, "i'll have to ask you to let my whiskers alone." "certainly, old man," replied my client, anything but abashed. "you'll pardon me, but they seemed too good to be true. i congratulate you on them." i was amused as well as alarmed at this piece of boldness, but the incident passed off without any disagreeable results, except, perhaps, a slight nervousness noticeable in the detective; and this soon disappeared. as the sun grew low, the celebrity's conductors straggled in with fishing-rods and told of an afternoon's sport, and we left the captain peacefully but sonorously slumbering on the bank. "crocker," said my client to me, afterwards, "they didn't feel like the real, home-grown article. but aren't they damned handsome?" chapter xiii after supper, captain jay was rowed out and put to bed in his own bunk on the scimitar. then we heaped together a huge pile of the driftwood on the beach and raised a blazing beacon, the red light of which i doubt not could be seen from the mainland. the men made prongs from the soft wood, while miss thorn produced from the stores some large tins of marshmallows. the memory of that evening lingers with me yet. the fire colored everything. the waves dashed in ruby foam at our feet, and even the tall, frowning pines at our backs were softened; the sting was gone out of the keen night wind from the north. i found a place beside the gray cape i had seen for the first time the night of the cotillon. i no longer felt any great dislike for miss thorn, let it be known. resentment was easier when the distance between mohair and asquith separated us,--impossible on a yachting excursion. but why should i be justifying myself? mr. cooke and the four, in addition to other accomplishments, possessed excellent voices, and mr. drew sang a bass which added much to the melody. one of the four played a banjo. it is only justice to mr. drew to say that he seemed less like a detective than any man i have ever met. he told a good story and was quick at repartee, and after a while the music, by tacit consent, was abandoned for the sake of hearing him talk. he related how he had worked up the lake, point by point, from beaverton to asquith, and lightened his narrative with snappy accounts of the different boatmen he had run across and of the different predicaments into which he had fallen. his sketches were so vivid that mr. cooke forgot to wink at me after a while and sat spellbound, while i marvelled at the imaginative faculty he displayed. he had us in roars of laughter. his stories were far from incredible, and he looked less like a liar than a detective. he showed, too, an accurate and astonishing knowledge of the lake which could hardly have been acquired in any other way than the long-shore trip he had described. not once did he hint of a special purpose which had brought him to the island, and it was growing late. the fire died down upon the stones, and the thought of the celebrity, alone in a dark cave in the middle of the island, began to prey upon me. i was not designed for a practical joker, and i take it that pity is a part of every self-respecting man's composition. in the cool of the night season the ludicrous side of the matter did not appeal to me quite as strongly as in the glare of day. a joke should never be pushed to cruelty. it was in vain that i argued i had no direct hand in the concealing of him; i felt my responsibility quite as heavy upon me. perhaps bears still remained in these woods. and if a bear should devour the author of the sybarites, would the world ever forgive me? could i ever repay the debt to the young women of these united states? to speak truth, i expected every moment to see him appear. why, in the name of all his works, did he stay there? nothing worse could befall him than to go to far harbor with drew, where our words concerning his identity would be taken. and what an advertisement this would be for the great author. the sybarites, now selling by thousands, would increase its sales to ten thousands. ah, there was the rub. the clue to his remaining in the cave was this very kink in the celebrity's character. there was nothing bohemian in that character; it yearned after the eminently respectable. its very eccentricities were within the limits of good form. the celebrity shunned the biscuits and beer of the literary clubs, and his books were bound for the boudoir. to have it proclaimed in the sensational journals that the hands of this choice being had been locked for grand larceny was a thought too horrible to entertain. his very manservant would have cried aloud against it. better a hundred nights in a cave than one such experience! miss trevor's behavior that evening was so unrestful as to lead me to believe that she, too, was going through qualms of sympathy for the victim. as we were breaking up for the evening she pulled my sleeve. "don't you think we have carried our joke a little too far, mr. crocker?" she whispered uneasily. "i can't bear to think of him in that terrible place." "it will do him a world of good," i replied, assuming a gayety i did not feel. it is not pleasant to reflect that some day one's own folly might place one in alike situation. and the night was dismally cool and windy, now that the fire had gone out. miss trevor began to philosophize. "such practical pleasantries as this," she said, "are like infernal machines: they often blow up the people that start them. and they are next to impossible to steer." "perhaps it is just as well not to assume we are the instruments of providence," i said. here we ran into miss thorn, who was carrying a lantern. "i have been searching everywhere for you two mischief-makers," said she. "you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. heaven only knows how this little experiment will end. here is aunt maria, usually serene, on the verge of hysterics: she says he shouldn't stay in that damp cave another minute. here is your father, irene, organizing relief parties and walking the floor of his tent like a madman. and here is uncle fenelon insane over the idea of getting the poor, innocent man into canada. and here is a detective saddled upon us, perhaps for days, and uncle fenelon has gotten his boatman drunk. you ought to be ashamed of yourselves," she repeated. miss trevor laughed, in spite of the gravity of these things, and so did i. "oh, come, marian," said she, "it isn't as bad as all that. and you talk as if you hadn't anything to be reproached for. your own defence of the celebrity wasn't as strong as it might have been." by the light of the lantern i saw miss thorn cast one meaning look at miss trevor. "what are you going to do about it?" asked miss thorn, addressing me. "think of that unhappy man, without a bed, without blankets, without even a tooth-brush." "he hasn't been wholly off my mind," i answered truthfully. "but there isn't anything we can do to-night, with that beastly detective to notice it." "then you must go very early to-morrow morning, before the detective gets up." i couldn't help smiling at the notion of getting up before a detective. "i am only too willing," i said. "it must be by four o'clock," miss thorn went on energetically, "and we must have a guide we can trust. arrange it with one of uncle fenelon's friends." "we?" i repeated. "you certainly don't imagine that i am going to be left behind?" said miss thorn. i made haste to invite for the expedition one of the four, who was quite willing to go; and we got together all the bodily comforts we could think of and put them in a hamper, the fraction not forgetting to add a few bottles from mr. cooke's immersed bar. long after the camp had gone to bed, i lay on the pine-needles above the brook, shielded from the wind by a break in the slope, and thought of the strange happenings of that day. presently the waning moon climbed reluctantly from the waters, and the stream became mottled, black and white, the trees tall blurs. the lake rose and fell with a mighty rhythm, and the little brook hurried madly over the stones to join it. one thought chased another from my brain. at such times, when one's consciousness of outer things is dormant, an earthquake might continue for some minutes without one realizing it. i did not observe, though i might have seen from where i lay, the flap of one of the tents drawn back and two figures emerge. they came and stood on the bank above, under the tree which sheltered me. and i experienced a curious phenomenon. i heard, and understood, and remembered the first part of the conversation which passed between them, and did not know it. "i am sorry to disturb you," said one. "not at all," said the other, whose tone, i thought afterwards, betokened surprise, and no great cheerfulness. "but i have had no other opportunity to speak with you." "no," said the other, rather uneasily. suddenly my senses were alert, and i knew that mr. trevor had pulled the detective out of bed. the senator had no doubt anticipated an easier time, and he now began feeling for an opening. more than once he cleared his throat to commence, while mr. drew pulled his scant clothing closer about him, his whiskers playing in the breeze. "in cincinnati, mr. drew," said mr. trevor, at length, "i am a known, if not an influential, citizen; and i have served my state for three terms in its senate." "i have visited your city, mr. trevor," answered mr. drew, his teeth chattering audibly, "and i know you by reputation." "then, sir," mr. trevor continued, with a flourish which appeared absolutely grotesque in his attenuated costume, "it must be clear to you that i cannot give my consent to a flagrant attempt by an unscrupulous person to violate the laws of this country." "your feelings are to be respected, sir." mr. trevor cleared his throat again. "discretion is always to be observed, mr. drew. and i, who have been in the public service, know the full value of it." mr. trevor leaned forward, at the same time glancing anxiously up at the tree, for fear, perhaps, that mr. cooke might be concealed therein. he said in a stage whisper: "a criminal is concealed on this island." drew started perceptibly. "yes," said mr. trevor, with a glance of triumph at having produced an impression on a detective, "i thought it my duty to inform you. he has been hidden by the followers of the unscrupulous person i referred to, in a cave, i believe. i repeat, sir, as a man of unimpeachable standing, i considered it my duty to tell you." "you have my sincere thanks, mr. trevor," said drew, holding out his hand, "and i shall act on the suggestion." mr. trevor clasped the hand of the detective, and they returned quietly to their respective tents. and in course of time i followed them, wondering how this incident might affect our morning's expedition. chapter xiv my first thought on rising was to look for the detective. the touch of the coming day was on the lake, and i made out the two boats dimly, riding on the dead swell and tugging idly at their chains. the detective had been assigned to a tent which was occupied by mr. cooke and the four, and they were sleeping soundly at my entrance. but drew's blankets were empty. i hurried to the beach, but the scimitar's boat was still drawn up there near the maria's tender, proving that he was still on the island. outside of the ladies' tent i came upon miss thorn, stowing a large basket. i told her that we had taken that precaution the night before. "what did you put in?" she demanded. i enumerated the articles as best i could. and when i had finished, she said, "and i am filling this with the things you have forgotten." i lost no time in telling her what i had overheard the night before, and that the detective was gone from his tent. she stopped her packing and looked at me in concern. "he is probably watching us," she said. "do you think we had better go?" i thought it could do no harm. "if we are followed," said i, "all we have to do is to turn back." miss trevor came out as i spoke, and our conductor appeared, bending under the hamper. i shouldered some blankets and the basket, and we started. we followed a rough path, evidently cut by a camping party in some past season, but now overgrown. the fraction marched ahead, and i formed the rear guard. several times it seemed to me as though someone were pushing after us, and more than once we halted. i put down the basket and went back to reconnoitre. once i believed i saw a figure flitting in the gray light, but i set it down to my imagination. finally we reached a brook, sneaking along beneath the underbrush as though fearing to show itself, and we followed its course. branches lashed our faces and brambles tore our clothes. and then, as the sunlight was filtering through and turning the brook from blue to crystal, we came upon the celebrity. he was seated in a little open space on the bank, apparently careless of capture. he did not even rise at our approach. his face showed the effect of a sleepless night, and wore an expression inimical to all mankind. the conductor threw his bundle on the bank and laid his hand on the celebrity's shoulder. "halloa, old man!" said he, cheerily. "you must have had a hard night of it. but we couldn't make you any sooner, because that hawk of an officer had his eye on us." the celebrity shook himself free. and in place of the gratitude for which the fraction had looked, and which he had every reason to expect, he got something different. "this outrage has gone far enough," said the celebrity, with a terrible calmness. the fraction was a man of the world. "come, come, old chap!" he said soothingly, "don't cut up. we'll make things a little more homelike here." and he pulled a bottle from the depths of the hamper. "this will brace you up." he picked up the hamper and disappeared into the place of retention, while the celebrity threw the bottle into the brush. and just then (may i be forgiven if i am imaginative!) i heard a human laugh come from that direction. in the casting of that bottle the celebrity had given vent to some of the feelings he had been collecting overnight, and it must have carried about thirty yards. i dived after it like a retriever puppy for a stone; but the bottle was gone! perhaps i could say more, but it doesn't do to believe in yourself too thoroughly when you get up early. i had nothing to say when i returned. "you here, crocker?" said the author, fixing his eye on me. "deuced kind of you to get up so early and carry a basket so far for me." "it has been a real pleasure, i assure you," i protested. and it had. there was a silent space while the two young ladies regarded him, softened by his haggard and dishevelled aspect, and perplexed by his attitude. nothing, i believe, appeals to a woman so much as this very lack of bodily care. and the rogue knew it! "how long is this little game of yours to continue,--this bull-baiting?" he inquired. "how long am i to be made a butt of for the amusement of a lot of imbeciles?" miss thorn crossed over and seated herself on the ground beside him. "you must be sensible," she said, in a tone that she might have used to a spoiled child. "i know it is difficult after the night you have had. but you have always been willing to listen to reason." a pang of something went through me when i saw them together. "reason," said the celebrity, raising his head. "reason, yes. but where is the reason in all this? because a man who happens to be my double commits a crime, is it right that i, whose reputation is without a mark, should be made to suffer? and why have i been made a fool of by two people whom i had every cause to suppose my friends?" "you will have to ask them," replied miss thorn, with a glance at us. "they are mischief-makers, i'll admit; but they are not malicious. see what they have done this morning! and how could they have foreseen that a detective was on his way to the island?" "crocker might have known it," said he, melting. "he's so cursed smart!" "and think," miss thorn continued, quick to follow up an advantage, "think what would have happened if they hadn't denied you. this horrid man would have gone off with you to asquith or somewhere else, with handcuffs on your wrists; for it isn't a detective's place to take evidence, mr. crocker says. perhaps we should all have had to go to epsom! and i couldn't bear to see you in handcuffs, you know." "don't you think we had better leave them alone?" i said to miss trevor. she smiled and shook her head. "you are blind as a bat, mr. crocker," she said. the celebrity had weighed miss thorn's words and was listening passively now while she talked. there may be talents which she did not possess; i will not pretend to say. but i know there are many professions she might have chosen had she not been a woman. she would have made a name for herself at the bar; as a public speaker she would have excelled. and had i not been so long accustomed to picking holes in arguments i am sure i should not have perceived the fallacies of this she was making for the benefit of the celebrity. he surely did not. it is strange how a man can turn under such influence from one feeling to another. the celebrity lost his resentment; apprehension took its place. he became more and more nervous; questioned me from time to time on the law; wished to know whether he would be called upon for testimony at allen's trial; whether there was any penalty attached to the taking of another man's name; precisely what drew would do with him if captured; and the tail of his eye was on the thicket as he made this inquiry. it may be surmised that i took an exquisite delight in quenching this new-born thirst for knowledge. and finally we all went into the cave. miss thorn unpacked the things we had brought, while i surveyed the cavern. it was in the solid rock, some ten feet high and irregular in shape, and perfectly dry. it was a marvel to me how cosy she made it. one of the maria's lanterns was placed in a niche, and the celebrity's silver toilet-set laid out on a ledge of the rock, which answered perfectly for a dressing-table. miss thorn had not forgotten a small mirror. and as a last office, set a dainty breakfast on a linen napkin on the rock, heating the coffee in a chafing-dish. "there!" she exclaimed, surveying her labors, "i hope you will be more comfortable." he had already taken the precaution to brush his hair and pull himself together. his thanks, such as they were, he gave to miss thorn. it is true that she had done more than any one else. "good-bye, old boy!" said the fraction. "we'll come back when we get the chance, and don't let that hundred thousand keep you awake." the fraction and i covered up the mouth of the cave with brush. he became confidential. "lucky dog, allen!" he said. "they'll never get him away from cooke. and he can have any girl he wants for the asking. by george! i believe miss thorn will elope with him if he ever reaches canada." i only mention this as a sample of the fraction's point of view. i confess the remark annoyed me at the time. miss thorn lingered in the cave for a minute after miss trevor came out. then we retraced our way down the brook, which was dancing now in the sunlight. miss trevor stopped now and then to rest, in reality to laugh. i do not know what the fraction thought of such heartless conduct. he and i were constantly on the alert for mr. drew, but we sighted the camp without having encountered him. it was half-past six, and we had trusted to slip in unnoticed by any one. but, as we emerged from the trees, the bustling scene which greeted our eyes filled us with astonishment. two of the tents were down, and the third in a collapsed condition, while confusion reigned supreme. and in the midst of it all stood mr. cooke, an animated central figure pedestalled on a stump, giving emphatic directions in a voice of authority. he spied us from his elevated position before we had crossed the brook. "here they come, maria," he shouted. we climbed to the top of the slope, and were there confronted by mrs. cooke and mr. trevor, with mr. cooke close behind them. "where the devil is allen?" my client demanded excitedly of the fraction. "allen?" repeated that gentleman, "why, we made him comfortable and left him, of course. we had sense enough not to bring him here to be pulled." "but, you damfool," cried mr. cooke, slightly forgetting himself, "drew has escaped." "escaped?" "yes, escaped," said mr. cooke, as though our conductor were personally responsible; "he got away this morning. before we know it, we'll have the whole police force of far harbor out here to jug the lot of us." the fraction, being deficient for the moment in language proper to express his appreciation of this new development, simply volunteered to return for the celebrity, and left in a great hurry. "irene," said mr. trevor, "can it be possible that you have stolen away for the express purpose of visiting this criminal?" "if he is a criminal, father, it is no reason that he should starve." "it is no reason," cried her father, hotly, "why a young girl who has been brought up as you have, should throw every lady-like instinct to the winds. there are men enough in this camp to keep him from starving. i will not have my daughter's name connected with that of a defaulter. irene, you have set the seal of disgrace upon a name which i have labored for a lifetime to make one of the proudest in the land. and it was my fond hope that i possessed a daughter who--" during this speech my anger had been steadily rising.. but it was mrs. cooke who interrupted him. "mr. trevor," said she, "perhaps you are not aware that while you are insulting your daughter, you are also insulting my niece. it may be well for you to know that miss trevor still has my respect as a woman and my admiration as a lady. and, since she has been so misjudged by her father, she has my deepest sympathy. but i wish to beg of you, if you have anything of this nature to say to her, you will take her feelings into consideration as well as ours." miss trevor gave her one expressive look of gratitude. the senator was effectually silenced. he had come, by some inexplicable inference, to believe that mrs. cooke, while subservient to the despotic will of her husband, had been miraculously saved from depravity, and had set her face against this last monumental act of outlawry. [transcriber's note: mrs. hungerford (margaret wolfe hamilton) ( ?- ) "how i write my novels" (from mrs hungerford's _an anxious moment_ pp. - )] to sit down in cold blood and deliberately set to cudgel one's brains with a view to dragging from them a plot wherewith to make a book is (i have been told) the habit of some writers, and those of no small reputation. happy people! what powers of concentration must be theirs! what a belief in themselves--that most desirable of all beliefs, that sweet propeller toward the temple of fame. have faith in yourself, and all me, will have faith in you. but as for me, i have to lie awake o'nights longing and hoping for inspirations that oft-times are slow to come. but when they do come, what a delight! all at once, in a flash, as it were, the whole story lies open before me--a delicate diorama, vague here and there, but with a beginning and an end--clear as crystal. i can never tell when these inspirations may be coming; sometimes in the dark watches of the night; sometimes when driving through the crisp, sweet air; sometimes a word in a crowded drawing-room, a thought rising from the book in hand, sends them with a rush to the surface, where they are seized and brought to land, and carried home in triumph. after that the 'dressing' of them is simple enough. but just in the beginning it was not so simple. alas! for that first story of mine--the raven i sent you of my ark and never saw again. unlike the proverbial curse, it did not come home to roost; it stayed where i had sent it. the only thing i ever heard of it again was a polite letter from the editor in whose office it lay, telling me i could have it back if i enclosed stamps to the amount of twopence halfpenny, otherwise he should feel it his unpleasant duty to 'consign it to the waste-paper basket'. i was only sixteen then, and it is a very long time ago; but i have always hated the words 'waste paper' ever since. i don't remember that i was either angry or indignant, but i _do_ remember that i was both sad and sorry. at all events, i never sent that miserable twopence halfpenny, so i conclude my first manuscript went to light the fire of that heartless editor. so much comfort i may have bestowed on him, but he left me comfortless; and yet who can say what good he may not have done me? paths made too smooth leave the feet unprepared for rougher roads. to step always in the primrose way is death to the higher desires. yet oh, for the hours i spent over that poor rejected story, beautifying it (as i fondly, if erroneously, believed), adding a word here, a sentiment there! so conscientiously minded was i, that even the headings of the chapters were scraps of poetry (so called) done all by myself. well, never mind. i was very young then, and, as they say upon the stage, i 'meant well'. for a long twelvemonth after that i never dreamed of putting pen to paper. i had given myself up, as it were. i was the most modest of children, and fully decided within myself that a man so clever as a real live editor must needs be could not have been mistaken. he had seen and judged, and practically told me that writing was not my forte. yet the inevitable hour came round once more. once again an idea caught me, held me, _persuaded_ me that i could put it into words. i struggled with it this time, but it was too strong for me; and that early exhilarating certainty that there was 'something in me', as people say, was once more mine, and seizing my pen, i sat down and wrote, wrote, wrote, until the idea was an object formed. with closed doors i wrote at stolen moments. i had not forgotten the quips and cranks uttered at my expense by my brother and sister on the refusal of that last-first manuscript. to them it had been a fund of joy. in fear and trembling i wrote this second effusion, finished it, wept over it (it was the most lachrymose of tales), and finally, under cover of night, induced the housemaid to carry it to the post. to that first unsympathetic editor i sent it (which argues a distant lack of malice in my disposition), and oh, joy! it was actually accepted. i have written many a thing since, but i doubt if i have ever known again the unadulterated delight that was mine when my first insignificant cheque was held within my hands. as for my characters: you ask how i conceive them. once the plot is rescued from the misty depths of the mind, the characters come and range themselves readily enough. a scene, we will say, suggests itself--a garden, a flower-show, a ball-room, what you will--and two people in it. a young man and woman for choice. they are always young with me, for that matter, for what under the heaven we are promised is so altogether perfect as youth! oh, that we could all be young for ever and for ever; that time, 'that treads more soft than e'er did midnight thief', could be abruptly slain by some great conqueror, and we poor human beings let loose, defiant of its thralls! but no such conqueror comes, and time flies swiftly as of yore, and drags us headlong, whether we will or not, to the unattractive grave. if any one of you, dear readers, is as bad a sleeper as i am, you will understand how thoughts swarm at midnight. busy, bustling, stinging bees, they forbid the needed rest, and, thronging the idle brain, compel attention. here in the silent hours the ghosts called characters walk slowly, smiling, bowing, nodding, pirouetting, going like marionettes through all their paces. at night, i have had my gayest thoughts; at night, my saddest. all things seem open then to that giant, imagination. here, lying in the dark, with as yet no glimmer of the coming dawn, no faintest light to show where the closed curtains join, too indolent to rise and light the lamp, too sleepy to put one's foot out of the well-warmed bed, praying fruitlessly for that sleep that will not come--it is at such moments as these that my mind lays hold of the novel now in hand, and works away at it with a vigour, against which the natural desire for sleep hopelessly makes battle. just born this novel may be, or half completed; however it is, off goes one's brain at a tangent. scene follows scene, one touching the other; the characters unconsciously fall into shape; the villain takes a ruddy hue; the hero dons a white robe; as for the heroine, who shall say what dyes from olympia are not hers? a conversation suggests itself, an act thrusts itself into notice. lightest of skeletons all these must necessarily be, yet they make up eventually the big whole, and from the brain wanderings of one wakeful night three of four chapters are created for the next morning's work. as for the work itself, mine is, perhaps, strangely done, for often i have written the last chapter first, and founded my whole story on the one episode that it contained. as a rule, too, i never give more time to my writing than two hours out of every day. but i write quickly, and have my notes before me, and i can do a great deal in a short time. not that i give these two hours systematically; when the idle vein is in full flow i fling aside the pen and rush gladly into the open air, seeking high and low for the children, who (delightful thought) will be sure to help me toward that state of frivolity to which the sunshine outside has tempted me to aspire. to _force_ the mind is, in my opinion, bad business. what comes spontaneously is of untold value. it is always fresh, always the best of which the writer may be capable. these unsolicited outbursts of the mind are as the wild sprays sent heavenward at times by a calm and slumbering ocean--a promise of the power that reigns in the now quiet breast. thus dreams are of value; and to dreams (those most spontaneous and unsought of all things) i owe much." how to write special feature articles a handbook for reporters, correspondents and free-lance writers who desire to contribute to popular magazines and magazine sections of newspapers by willard grosvenor bleyer, ph.d. _author of "newspaper writing and editing," and "types of news writing"; director of the course in journalism in the university of wisconsin_ boston, new york, chicago, san francisco houghton mifflin company the riverside press cambridge the riverside press cambridge, massachusetts printed in the u.s.a. preface this book is the result of twelve years' experience in teaching university students to write special feature articles for newspapers and popular magazines. by applying the methods outlined in the following pages, young men and women have been able to prepare articles that have been accepted by many newspaper and magazine editors. the success that these students have achieved leads the author to believe that others who desire to write special articles may be aided by the suggestions given in this book. although innumerable books on short-story writing have been published, no attempt has hitherto been made to discuss in detail the writing of special feature articles. in the absence of any generally accepted method of approach to the subject, it has been necessary to work out a systematic classification of the various types of articles and of the different kinds of titles, beginnings, and similar details, as well as to supply names by which to identify them. a careful analysis of current practice in the writing of special feature stories and popular magazine articles is the basis of the methods presented. in this analysis an effort has been made to show the application of the principles of composition to the writing of articles. examples taken from representative newspapers and magazines are freely used to illustrate the methods discussed. to encourage students to analyze typical articles, the second part of the book is devoted to a collection of newspaper and magazine articles of various types, with an outline for the analysis of them. particular emphasis is placed on methods of popularizing such knowledge as is not available to the general reader. this has been done in the belief that it is important for the average person to know of the progress that is being made in every field of human endeavor, in order that he may, if possible, apply the results to his own affairs. the problem, therefore, is to show aspiring writers how to present discoveries, inventions, new methods, and every significant advance in knowledge, in an accurate and attractive form. to train students to write articles for newspapers and popular magazines may, perhaps, be regarded by some college instructors in composition as an undertaking scarcely worth their while. they would doubtless prefer to encourage their students to write what is commonly called "literature." the fact remains, nevertheless, that the average undergraduate cannot write anything that approximates literature, whereas experience has shown that many students can write acceptable popular articles. moreover, since the overwhelming majority of americans read only newspapers and magazines, it is by no means an unimportant task for our universities to train writers to supply the steady demand for well-written articles. the late walter hines page, founder of the _world's work_ and former editor of the _atlantic monthly_, presented the whole situation effectively in an article on "the writer and the university," when he wrote: the journeymen writers write almost all that almost all americans read. this is a fact that we love to fool ourselves about. we talk about "literature" and we talk about "hack writers," implying that the reading that we do is of literature. the truth all the while is, we read little else than the writing of the hacks--living hacks, that is, men and women who write for pay. we may hug the notion that our life and thought are not really affected by current literature, that we read the living writers only for utilitarian reasons, and that our real intellectual life is fed by the great dead writers. but hugging this delusion does not change the fact that the intellectual life even of most educated persons, and certainly of the mass of the population, is fed chiefly by the writers of our own time.... every editor of a magazine, every editor of an earnest and worthy newspaper, every publisher of books, has dozens or hundreds of important tasks for which he cannot find capable men; tasks that require scholarship, knowledge of science, or of politics, or of industry, or of literature, along with experience in writing accurately in the language of the people. special feature stories and popular magazine articles constitute a type of writing particularly adapted to the ability of the novice, who has developed some facility in writing, but who may not have sufficient maturity or talent to undertake successful short-story writing or other distinctly literary work. most special articles cannot be regarded as literature. nevertheless, they afford the young writer an opportunity to develop whatever ability he possesses. such writing teaches him four things that are invaluable to any one who aspires to do literary work. it trains him to observe what is going on about him, to select what will interest the average reader, to organize material effectively, and to present it attractively. if this book helps the inexperienced writer, whether he is in or out of college, to acquire these four essential qualifications for success, it will have accomplished its purpose. for permission to reprint complete articles, the author is indebted to the editors of the _boston herald_, the _christian science monitor_, the _boston evening transcript_, the _new york evening post_, the _detroit news_, the _milwaukee journal_, the _kansas city star_, the _new york sun_, the _providence journal_, the _ohio state journal_, the _new york world_, the _saturday evening post_, the _independent_, the _country gentleman_, the _outlook_, _mcclure's magazine_, _everybody's magazine_, the _delineator_, the _pictorial review_, _munsey's magazine_, the _american magazine_, _system_, _farm and fireside_, the _woman's home companion_, the _designer_, and the newspaper enterprise association. the author is also under obligation to the many newspapers and magazines from which excerpts, titles, and other material have been quoted. at every stage in the preparation of this book the author has had the advantage of the coöperation and assistance of his wife, alice haskell bleyer. _university of wisconsin madison, august, _ contents part i i. the field for special articles ii. preparation for special feature writing iii. finding subjects and material iv. appeal and purpose v. types of articles vi. writing the article vii. how to begin viii. style ix. titles and headlines x. preparing and selling the manuscript xi. photographs and other illustrations part ii an outline for the analysis of special feature articles teach children love of art through story-telling (_boston herald_) where girls learn to wield spade and hoe (_christian science monitor_) boys in search of jobs (_boston transcript_) girls and a camp (_new york evening post_) your porter (_saturday evening post_) the gentle art of blowing bottles (_independent_) the neighborhood playhouse (_new york world_) the singular story of the mosquito man (_new york evening post_) a county service station (_country gentleman_) guarding a city's water supply (_detroit news_) the occupation and exercise cure (_outlook_) the brennan mono-rail car (_mcclure's magazine_) a new political wedge (_everybody's magazine_) the job lady (_delineator_) mark twain's first sweetheart (_kansas city star_) four men of humble birth hold world destiny in their hands (_milwaukee journal_) the confessions of a college professor's wife (_saturday evening post_) a paradise for a penny (_boston transcript_) wanted: a home assistant (_pictorial review_) six years of tea rooms (_new york sun_) by parcel post (_country gentleman_) sales without salesmanship (_saturday evening post_) the accident that gave us wood-pulp paper (_munsey's magazine_) centennial of the first steamship to cross the atlantic (_providence journal_) searching for the lost atlantis (_syndicate sunday magazine section_) index how to write special feature articles part i chapter i the field for special articles origin of special articles. the rise of popular magazines and of magazine sections of daily newspapers during the last thirty years has resulted in a type of writing known as the "special feature article." such articles, presenting interesting and timely subjects in popular form, are designed to attract a class of readers that were not reached by the older literary periodicals. editors of newspapers and magazines a generation ago began to realize that there was no lack of interest on the part of the general public in scientific discoveries and inventions, in significant political and social movements, in important persons and events. magazine articles on these themes, however, had usually been written by specialists who, as a rule, did not attempt to appeal to the "man in the street," but were satisfied to reach a limited circle of well-educated readers. to create a larger magazine-reading public, editors undertook to develop a popular form and style that would furnish information as attractively as possible. the perennial appeal of fiction gave them a suggestion for the popularization of facts. the methods of the short story, of the drama, and even of the melodrama, applied to the presentation of general information, provided a means for catching the attention of the casual reader. daily newspapers had already discovered the advantage of giving the day's news in a form that could be read rapidly with the maximum degree of interest by the average man and woman. certain so-called sensational papers had gone a step further in these attempts to give added attractiveness to news and had emphasized its melodramatic aspects. other papers had seen the value of the "human interest" phases of the day's happenings. it was not surprising, therefore, that sunday editors of newspapers should undertake to apply to special articles the same methods that had proved successful in the treatment of news. the product of these efforts at popularization was the special feature article, with its story-like form, its touches of description, its "human interest," its dramatic situations, its character portrayal--all effectively used to furnish information and entertainment for that rapid reader, the "average american." definition of a special article. a special feature article may be defined as a detailed presentation of facts in an interesting form adapted to rapid reading, for the purpose of entertaining or informing the average person. it usually deals with ( ) recent news that is of sufficient importance to warrant elaboration; ( ) timely or seasonal topics not directly connected with news; or ( ) subjects of general interest that have no immediate connection with current events. although frequently concerned with news, the special feature article is more than a mere news story. it aims to supplement the bare facts of the news report by giving more detailed information regarding the persons, places, and circumstances that appear in the news columns. news must be published as fast as it develops, with only enough explanatory material to make it intelligible. the special article, written with the perspective afforded by an interval of a few days or weeks, fills in the bare outlines of the hurried news sketch with the life and color that make the picture complete. the special feature article must not be confused with the type of news story called the "feature," or "human interest," story. the latter undertakes to present minor incidents of the day's news in an entertaining form. like the important news story, it is published immediately after the incident occurs. its purpose is to appeal to newspaper readers by bringing out the humorous and pathetic phases of events that have little real news value. it exemplifies, therefore, merely one distinctive form of news report. the special feature article differs from the older type of magazine article, not so much in subject as in form and style. the most marked difference lies in the fact that it supplements the recognized methods of literary and scientific exposition with the more striking devices of narrative, descriptive, and dramatic writing. scope of feature articles. the range of subjects for special articles is as wide as human knowledge and experience. any theme is suitable that can be made interesting to a considerable number of persons. a given topic may make either a local or a general appeal. if interest in it is likely to be limited to persons in the immediate vicinity of the place with which the subject is connected, the article is best adapted to publication in a local newspaper. if the theme is one that appeals to a larger public, the article is adapted to a periodical of general circulation. often local material has interest for persons in many other communities, and hence is suitable either for newspapers or for magazines. some subjects have a peculiar appeal to persons engaged in a particular occupation or devoted to a particular avocation or amusement. special articles on these subjects of limited appeal are adapted to agricultural, trade, or other class publications, particularly to such of these periodicals as present their material in a popular rather than a technical manner. the newspaper field. because of their number and their local character, daily newspapers afford a ready medium for the publication of special articles, or "special feature stories," as they are generally called in newspaper offices. some newspapers publish these articles from day to day on the editorial page or in other parts of the paper. many more papers have magazine sections on saturday or sunday made up largely of such "stories." some of these special sections closely resemble regular magazines in form, cover, and general make-up. the articles published in newspapers come from three sources: ( ) syndicates that furnish a number of newspapers in different cities with special articles, illustrations, and other matter, for simultaneous publication; ( ) members of the newspaper's staff; that is, reporters, correspondents, editors, or special writers employed for the purpose; ( ) so-called "free-lance" writers, professional or amateur, who submit their "stories" to the editor of the magazine section. reporters, correspondents, and other regular members of the staff may be assigned to write special feature stories, or may prepare such stories on their own initiative for submission to the editor of the magazine section. in many offices regular members of the staff are paid for special feature stories in addition to their salaries, especially when the subjects are not assigned to them and when the stories are prepared in the writer's own leisure time. other papers expect their regular staff members to furnish the paper with whatever articles they may write, as a part of the work covered by their salary. if a paper has one or more special feature writers on its staff, it may pay them a fixed salary or may employ them "on space"; that is, pay them at a fixed "space rate" for the number of columns that an article fills when printed. newspaper correspondents, who are usually paid at space rates for news stories, may add to their monthly "string," or amount of space, by submitting special feature articles in addition to news. they may also submit articles to other papers that do not compete with their own paper. ordinarily a newspaper expects a correspondent to give it the opportunity of printing any special feature stories that he may write. free-lance writers, who are not regularly employed by newspapers or magazines as staff members, submit articles for the editor's consideration and are paid at space rates. sometimes a free lance will outline an article in a letter or in personal conference with an editor in order to get his approval before writing it, but, unless the editor knows the writer's work, he is not likely to promise to accept the completed article. to the writer there is an obvious advantage in knowing that the subject as he outlines it is or is not an acceptable one. if an editor likes the work of a free lance, he may suggest subjects for articles, or may even ask him to prepare an article on a given subject. freelance writers, by selling their work at space rates, can often make more money than they would receive as regular members of a newspaper staff. for the amateur the newspaper offers an excellent field. first, in every city of any size there is at least one daily newspaper, and almost all these papers publish special feature stories. second, feature articles on local topics, the material for which is right at the amateur's hand, are sought by most newspapers. third, newspaper editors are generally less critical of form and style than are magazine editors. with some practice an inexperienced writer may acquire sufficient skill to prepare an acceptable special feature story for publication in a local paper, and even if he is paid little or nothing for it, he will gain experience from seeing his work in print. the space rate paid for feature articles is usually proportionate to the size of the city in which the newspaper is published. in small cities papers seldom pay more than $ a column; in larger places the rate is about $ a column; in still larger ones, $ ; and in the largest, from $ to $ . in general the column rate for special feature stories is the same as that paid for news stories. what newspapers want. since timeliness is the keynote of the newspaper, current topics, either growing out of the news of the week or anticipating coming events, furnish the subjects for most special feature stories. the news columns from day to day provide room for only concise announcements of such news as a scientific discovery, an invention, the death of an interesting person, a report on social or industrial conditions, proposed legislation, the razing of a landmark, or the dedication of a new building. such news often arouses the reader's curiosity to know more of the persons, places, and circumstances mentioned. in an effort to satisfy this curiosity, editors of magazine sections print special feature stories based on news. by anticipating approaching events, an editor is able to supply articles that are timely for a particular issue of his paper. two classes of subjects that he usually looks forward to in this way are: first, those concerned with local, state, and national anniversaries; and second, those growing out of seasonal occasions, such as holidays, vacations, the opening of schools and colleges, moving days, commencements, the opening of hunting and fishing seasons. the general policy of a newspaper with regard to special feature stories is the same as its policy concerning news. both are determined by the character of its circulation. a paper that is read largely by business and professional men provides news and special articles that satisfy such readers. a paper that aims to reach the so-called masses naturally selects news and features that will appeal to them. if a newspaper has a considerable circulation outside the city where it is published, the editors, in framing their policy, cannot afford to overlook their suburban and rural readers. the character of its readers, in a word, determines the character of a paper's special feature stories. the newspaper is primarily local in character. a city, a state, or at most a comparatively small section of the whole country, is its particular field. besides the news of its locality, it must, of course, give significant news of the world at large. so, too, in addition to local feature articles, it should furnish special feature stories of a broader scope. this distinctively local character of newspapers differentiates them from magazines of national circulation in the matter of acceptable subjects for special articles. the frequency of publication of newspapers, as well as their ephemeral character, leads, in many instances, to the choice of comparatively trivial topics for some articles. merely to give readers entertaining matter with which to occupy their leisure at the end of a day's work or on sunday, some papers print special feature stories on topics of little or no importance, often written in a light vein. articles with no more serious purpose than that of helping readers to while away a few spare moments are obviously better adapted to newspapers, which are read rapidly and immediately cast aside, than to periodicals. the sensationalism that characterizes the policy of some newspapers affects alike their news columns and their magazine sections. gossip, scandal, and crime lend themselves to melodramatic treatment as readily in special feature articles as in news stories. on the other hand, the relatively few magazines that undertake to attract readers by sensationalism, usually do so by means of short stories and serials rather than by special articles. all newspapers, in short, use special feature stories on local topics, some papers print trivial ones, and others "play up" sensational material; whereas practically no magazine publishes articles of these types. sunday magazine sections. the character and scope of special articles for the sunday magazine section of newspapers have been well summarized by two well-known editors of such sections. mr. john o'hara cosgrove, editor of the _new york sunday world magazine_, and formerly editor of _everybody's magazine_, gives this as his conception of the ideal sunday magazine section: the real function of the sunday magazine, to my thinking, is to present the color and romance of the news, the most authoritative opinions on the issues and events of the day, and to chronicle promptly the developments of science as applied to daily life. in the grind of human intercourse all manner of curious, heroic, delightful things turn up, and for the most part, are dismissed in a passing note. behind every such episode are human beings and a story, and these, if fairly and artfully explained, are the very stuff of romance. into every great city men are drifting daily from the strange and remote places of the world where they have survived perilous hazards and seen rare spectacles. such adventures are the treasure troves of the skilful reporter. the cross currents and reactions that lead up to any explosion of greed or passion that we call crime are often worth following, not only for their plots, but as proofs of the pain and terror of transgression. brave deeds or heroic resistances are all too seldom presented in full length in the news, and generously portrayed prove the nobility inherent in every-day life. the broad domain of the sunday magazine editor covers all that may be rare and curious or novel in the arts and sciences, in music and verse, in religion and the occult, on the stage and in sport. achievements and controversies are ever culminating in these diverse fields, and the men and women actors therein make admirable subjects for his pages. provided the editor has at his disposal skilled writers who have the fine arts of vivid and simple exposition and of the brief personal sketch, there is nothing of human interest that may not be presented. the ideal sunday magazine, as mr. frederick boyd stevenson, sunday editor of the _brooklyn eagle_, sees it, he describes thus: the new sunday magazine of the newspaper bids fair to be a crisp, sensible review and critique of the live world. it has developed a special line of writers who have learned that a character sketch and interview of a man makes you "see" the man face to face and talk with him yourself. if he has done anything that gives him a place in the news of to-day, he is presented to you. you know the man. it seems to me that the leading feature of the sunday magazine should be the biggest topic that will be before the public on the sunday that the newspaper is printed. it should be written by one who thoroughly knows his subject, who is forceful in style and fluent in words, who can make a picture that his readers can see, and seeing, realize. so every other feature of the sunday magazine should have points of human interest, either by contact with the news of the day or with men and women who are doing something besides getting divorces and creating scandals. i firmly believe that the coming sunday magazine will contain articles of information without being dull or encyclopædic, articles of adventure that are real and timely, articles of scientific discoveries that are authentic, interviews with men and women who have messages, and interpretations of news and analyses of every-day themes, together with sketches, poems, and essays that are not tedious, but have a reason for being printed. the magazine field. the great majority of magazines differ from all newspapers in one important respect--extent of circulation. popular magazines have a nation-wide distribution. it is only among agricultural and trade journals that we find a distinctly sectional circulation. some of these publications serve subscribers in only one state or section, and others issue separate state or sectional editions. the best basis of differentiation among magazines, then, is not the extent of circulation but the class of readers appealed to, regardless of the part of the country in which the readers live. the popular general magazine, monthly or weekly, aims to attract readers of all classes in all parts of the united states. how magazines get material. magazine articles come from ( ) regular members of the magazine's staff, ( ) professional or amateur free-lance writers, ( ) specialists who write as an avocation, and ( ) readers of the periodical who send in material based on their own experience. the so-called "staff system" of magazine editing, in accordance with which practically all the articles are prepared by writers regularly employed by the publication, has been adopted by a few general magazines and by a number of class periodicals. the staff is recruited from writers and editors on newspapers and other magazines. its members often perform various editorial duties in addition to writing articles. publications edited in this way buy few if any articles from outsiders. magazines that do not follow the staff system depend largely or entirely on contributors. every editor daily receives many manuscripts submitted by writers on their own initiative. from these he selects the material best adapted to his publication. experienced writers often submit an outline of an article to a magazine editor for his approval before preparing the material for publication. free-lance writers of reputation may be asked by magazine editors to prepare articles on given subjects. in addition to material obtained in these ways, articles may be secured from specialists who write as an avocation. an editor generally decides on the subject that he thinks will interest his readers at a given time and then selects the authority best fitted to treat it in a popular way. to induce well-known men to prepare such articles, an editor generally offers them more than he normally pays. a periodical may encourage its readers to send in short articles giving their own experiences and explaining how to do something in which they have become skilled. these personal experience articles have a reality and "human interest" that make them eminently readable. to obtain them magazines sometimes offer prizes for the best, reserving the privilege of publishing acceptable articles that do not win an award. aspiring writers should take advantage of these prize contests as a possible means of getting both publication and money for their work. opportunities for unknown writers. the belief is common among novices that because they are unknown their work is likely to receive little or no consideration from editors. as a matter of fact, in the majority of newspaper and magazine offices all unsolicited manuscripts are considered strictly on their merits. the unknown writer has as good a chance as anybody of having his manuscript accepted, provided that his work has merit comparable with that of more experienced writers. with the exception of certain newspapers that depend entirely on syndicates for their special features, and of a few popular magazines that have the staff system or that desire only the work of well-known writers, every publication welcomes special articles and short stories by novices. moreover, editors take pride in the fact that from time to time they "discover" writers whose work later proves popular. they not infrequently tell how they accepted a short story, an article, or some verse by an author of whom they had never before heard, because they were impressed with the quality of it, and how the verdict of their readers confirmed their own judgment. the relatively small number of amateurs who undertake special articles, compared with the hundreds of thousands who try their hand at short stories, makes the opportunities for special feature writers all the greater. then, too, the number of professional writers of special articles is comparatively small. this is particularly true of writers who are able effectively to popularize scientific and technical material, as well as of those who can present in popular form the results of social and economic investigations. it is not too much to say, therefore, that any writer who is willing ( ) to study the interests and the needs of newspaper and magazine readers, ( ) to gather carefully the material for his articles, and ( ) to present it accurately and attractively, may be sure that his work will receive the fullest consideration in almost every newspaper and magazine office in the country, and will be accepted whenever it is found to merit publication. women as feature writers. since the essential qualifications just enumerated are not limited to men, women are quite as well fitted to write special feature and magazine articles as are their brothers in the craft. in fact, woman's quicker sympathies and readier emotional response to many phases of life give her a distinct advantage. her insight into the lives of others, and her intuitive understanding of them, especially fit her to write good "human interest" articles. both the delicacy of touch and the chatty, personal tone that characterize the work of many young women, are well suited to numerous topics. in some fields, such as cooking, sewing, teaching, the care of children, and household management, woman's greater knowledge and understanding of conditions furnish her with topics that are vital to other women and often not uninteresting to men. the entry of women into occupations hitherto open only to men is bringing new experiences to many women, and is furnishing women writers with additional fields from which to draw subjects and material. ever since the beginning of popular magazines and of special feature writing for newspapers, women writers have proved their ability, but at no time have the opportunities for them been greater than at present. chapter ii preparation for special feature writing qualifications for feature writing. to attain success as a writer of special feature articles a person must possess at least four qualifications: ( ) ability to find subjects that will interest the average man and woman, and to see the picturesque, romantic, and significant phases of these subjects; ( ) a sympathetic understanding of the lives and interests of the persons about whom and for whom he writes; ( ) thoroughness and accuracy in gathering material; ( ) skill to portray and to explain clearly, accurately, and attractively. the much vaunted sense of news values commonly called a "nose for news," whether innate or acquired, is a prime requisite. like the newspaper reporter, the writer of special articles must be able to recognize what at a given moment will interest the average reader. like the reporter, also, he must know how much it will interest him. an alert, responsive attitude of mind toward everything that is going on in the world, and especially in that part of the world immediately around him, will reveal a host of subjects. by reading newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as by intercourse with persons of various classes, a writer keeps in contact with what people are thinking and talking about, in the world at large and in his own community. in this way he finds subjects and also learns how to connect his subjects with events and movements of interest the country over. not only should he be quick to recognize a good subject; he must be able to see the attractive and significant aspects of it. he must understand which of its phases touch most closely the life and the interests of the average person for whom he is writing. he must look at things from "the other fellow's" point of view. a sympathetic insight into the lives of his readers is necessary for every writer who hopes to quicken his subject with vital interest. the alert mental attitude that constantly focuses the writer's attention on the men and women around him has been called "human curiosity," which arnold bennett says "counts among the highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of human conduct." the importance of curiosity and of a keen sense of wonder has been emphasized as follows by mr. john m. siddall, editor of the _american magazine_, who directed his advice to college students interested in the opportunities afforded by writing as a profession: a journalist or writer must have consuming curiosity about other human beings--the most intense interest in their doings and motives and thoughts. it comes pretty near being the truth to say that a great journalist is a super-gossip--not about trivial things but about important things. unless a man has a ceaseless desire to learn what is going on in the heads of others, he won't be much of a journalist--for how can you write about others unless you know about others? in journalism men are needed who have a natural sense of wonder.... you must wonder at man's achievements, at man's stupidity, at his honesty, crookedness, courage, cowardice--at everything that is remarkable about him wherever and whenever it appears. if you haven't this sense of wonder, you will never write a novel or become a great reporter, because you simply won't see anything to write about. men will be doing amazing things under your very eyes--and you won't even know it. ability to investigate a subject thoroughly, and to gather material accurately, is absolutely necessary for any writer who aims to do acceptable work. careless, inaccurate writers are the bane of the magazine editor's life. whenever mistakes appear in an article, readers are sure to write to the editor calling his attention to them. moreover, the discovery of incorrect statements impairs the confidence of readers in the magazine. if there is reason to doubt the correctness of any data in an article, the editor takes pains to check over the facts carefully before publication. he is not inclined to accept work a second time from a writer who has once proved unreliable. to interpret correctly the essential significance of data is as important as to record them accurately. readers want to know the meaning of facts and figures, and it is the writer's mission to bring out this meaning. a sympathetic understanding of the persons who figure in his article is essential, not only to portray them accurately, but to give his story the necessary "human interest." to observe accurately, to feel keenly, and to interpret sympathetically and correctly whatever he undertakes to write about, should be a writer's constant aim. ability to write well enough to make the average person see as clearly, feel as keenly, and understand as well as he does himself the persons and things that he is portraying and explaining, is obviously the _sine qua non_ of success. ease, fluency, and originality of diction, either natural or acquired, the writer must possess if his work is to have distinction. training for feature writing. the ideal preparation for a writer of special articles would include a four-year college course, at least a year's work as a newspaper reporter, and practical experience in some other occupation or profession in which the writer intends to specialize in his writing. although not all persons who desire to do special feature work will be able to prepare themselves in this way, most of them can obtain some part of this preliminary training. a college course, although not absolutely essential for success, is generally recognized to be of great value as a preparation for writing. college training aims to develop the student's ability to observe accurately, to think logically, and to express his ideas clearly and effectively--all of which is vital to good special feature writing. in addition, such a course gives a student a knowledge of many subjects that he will find useful for his articles. a liberal education furnishes a background that is invaluable for all kinds of literary work. universities also offer excellent opportunities for specialization. intensive study in some one field of knowledge, such as agriculture, banking and finance, home economics, public health, social service, government and politics, or one of the physical sciences, makes it possible for a writer to specialize in his articles. in choosing a department in which to do special work in college, a student may be guided by his own tastes and interests, or he may select some field in which there is considerable demand for well trained writers. the man or woman with a specialty has a superior equipment for writing. with the development of courses in journalism in many colleges and universities has come the opportunity to obtain instruction and practice, not only in the writing of special feature and magazine articles, but also in newspaper reporting, editing, and short story writing. to write constantly under guidance and criticism, such as it is impossible to secure in newspaper and magazine offices, will develop whatever ability a student possesses. experience as a newspaper reporter supplements college training in journalism and is the best substitute for college work generally available to persons who cannot go to college. for any one who aspires to write, reporting has several distinct advantages and some dangers. the requirement that news be printed at the earliest possible moment teaches newspaper workers to collect facts and opinions quickly and to write them up rapidly under pressure. newspaper work also develops a writer's appreciation of what constitutes news and what determines news values; that is, it helps him to recognize at once, not only what interests the average reader, but how much it interests him. then, too, in the course of his round of news gathering a reporter sees more of human life under a variety of circumstances than do workers in any other occupation. such experience not only supplies him with an abundance of material, but gives him a better understanding and a more sympathetic appreciation of the life of all classes. to get the most out of his reporting, a writer must guard against two dangers. one is the temptation to be satisfied with superficial work hastily done. the necessity of writing rapidly under pressure and of constantly handling similar material, encourages neglect of the niceties of structure and of style. in the rush of rapid writing, the importance of care in the choice of words and in the arrangement of phrases and clauses is easily forgotten. even though well-edited newspapers insist on the highest possible degree of accuracy in presenting news, the exigencies of newspaper publishing often make it impossible to verify facts or to attain absolute accuracy. consequently a reporter may drop into the habit of being satisfied with less thorough methods of collecting and presenting his material than are demanded by the higher standards of magazine writing. the second danger is that he may unconsciously permit a more or less cynical attitude to replace the healthy, optimistic outlook with which he began his work. with the seamy side of life constantly before him, he may find that his faith in human nature is being undermined. if, however, he loses his idealism, he cannot hope to give his articles that sincerity, hopefulness, and constructive spirit demanded by the average reader, who, on the whole, retains his belief that truth and righteousness prevail. of the relation of newspaper reporting to the writing of magazine articles and to magazine editing, mr. howard wheeler, editor of everybody's magazine, has said: it is the trained newspaper men that the big periodical publishers are reaching out for. the man who has been through the newspaper mill seems to have a distinct edge on the man who enters the field without any newspaper training. the nose for news, the ability to select and play up leads, the feel of what is of immediate public interest is just as important in magazine work as in newspaper work. fundamentally the purpose of a magazine article is the same as the purpose of a newspaper story--to tell a tale, to tell it directly, convincingly, and interestingly. practical experience in the field of his specialty is of advantage in familiarizing a writer with the actual conditions about which he is preparing himself to write. to engage for some time in farming, railroading, household management, or any other occupation, equips a person to write more intelligently about it. such practical experience either supplements college training in a special field, or serves as the best substitute for such specialized education. what editors want. all the requirements for success in special feature writing may be reduced to the trite dictum that editors want what they believe their readers want. although a commonplace, it expresses a point of view that aspiring writers are apt to forget. from a purely commercial standpoint, editors are middlemen who buy from producers what they believe they can sell to their customers. unless an editor satisfies his readers with his articles, they will cease to buy his publication. if his literary wares are not what his readers want, he finds on the newsstands unsold piles of his publication, just as a grocer finds on his shelves faded packages of an unpopular breakfast food. both editor and grocer undertake to buy from the producers what will have a ready sale and will satisfy their customers. the writer, then, as the producer, must furnish wares that will attract and satisfy the readers of the periodical to which he desires to sell his product. it is the ultimate consumer, not merely the editor, that he must keep in mind in selecting his material and in writing his article. "will the reader like this?" is the question that he must ask himself at every stage of his work. unless he can convince himself that the average person who reads the periodical to which he proposes to submit his article will like what he is writing, he cannot hope to sell it to the editor. understanding the reader. instead of thinking of readers as a more or less indefinite mass, the writer will find it advantageous to picture to himself real persons who may be taken as typical readers. it is very easy for an author to think that what interests him and his immediate circle will appeal equally to people in general. to write successfully, however, for the sunday magazine of a newspaper, it is necessary to keep in mind the butcher, the baker, and--if not the candlestick-maker, at least the stenographer and the department store clerk--as well as the doctor, lawyer, merchant, and chief. what is true of the sunday newspaper is true of the popular magazine. the most successful publisher in this country attributes the success of his periodical to the fact that he kept before his mind's eye, as a type, a family of his acquaintance in a middle-western town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, and shaped the policy of his publication to meet the needs and interests of all its members. an editor who desired to reach such a family would be immeasurably helped in selecting his material by trying constantly to judge from their point of view whatever passed through his hands. it is equally true that a writer desiring to gain admittance to that magazine, or to others making the same appeal, would greatly profit by visualizing as vividly as possible a similar family. every successful writer, consciously or unconsciously, thus pictures his readers to himself. if, for example, an author is preparing an article for an agricultural journal, he must have in his mind's eye an average farmer and this farmer's family. not only must he see them in their surroundings; he must try to see life from their point of view. the attitude of the typical city man toward the farm and country life is very different from that of the countryman. lack of sympathy and insight is a fatal defect in many an article intended by the writer for farm readers. whatever the publication to which an author desires to contribute, he should consider first, last, and all the time, its readers--their surroundings, their education, their income, their ambitions, their amusements, their prejudices--in short, he must see them as they really are. the necessity of understanding the reader and his point of view has been well brought out by mr. john m. siddall, editor of the _american magazine_, in the following excerpt from an editorial in that periodical: the man who refuses to use his imagination to enable him to look at things from the other fellow's point of view simply cannot exercise wide influence. he cannot reach people. underneath it, somehow, lies a great law, the law of service. you can't expect to attract people unless you do something for them. the business man who has something to sell must have something useful to sell, and he must talk about it from the point of view of the people to whom he wants to sell his goods. in the same way, the journalist, the preacher, and the politician must look at things from the point of view of those they would reach. they must feel the needs of others and then reach out and meet those needs. they can never have a large following unless they give something. the same law runs into the human relation. how we abhor the man who talks only about himself--the man who never inquires about _our_ troubles, _our_ problems; the man who never puts himself in _our_ place, but unimaginatively and unsympathetically goes on and on, egotistically hammering away on the only subject that interests him--namely _himself_. studying newspapers and magazines. since every successful publication may be assumed to be satisfying its readers to a considerable degree, the best way to determine what kind of readers it has, and what they are interested in, is to study the contents carefully. no writer should send an article to a publication before he has examined critically several of its latest issues. in fact, no writer should prepare an article before deciding to just what periodical he wishes to submit it. the more familiar he is with the periodical the better are his chances of having his contribution accepted. in analyzing a newspaper or magazine in order to determine the type of reader to which it appeals, the writer should consider the character of the subjects in its recent issues, and the point of view from which these subjects are presented. every successful periodical has a distinct individuality, which may be regarded as an expression of the editor's idea of what his readers expect of his publication. to become a successful contributor to a periodical, a writer must catch the spirit that pervades its fiction and its editorials, as well as its special articles. in his effort to determine the kind of topics preferred by a given publication, a writer may at first glance decide that timeliness is the one element that dominates their choice, but a closer examination of the articles in one or more issues will reveal a more specific basis of selection. thus, one sunday paper will be found to contain articles on the latest political, sociological, and literary topics, while another deals almost exclusively with society leaders, actors and actresses, and other men and women whose recent experiences or adventures have brought them into prominence. it is of even greater value to find out by careful reading of the entire contents of several numbers of a periodical, the exact point of view from which the material is treated. every editor aims to present the contents of his publication in the way that will make the strongest appeal to his readers. this point of view it is the writer's business to discover and adopt. analysis of special articles. an inexperienced writer who desires to submit special feature stories to newspapers should begin by analyzing thoroughly the stories of this type in the daily papers published in his own section of the country. usually in the saturday or sunday issues he will find typical articles on topics connected with the city and with the state or states in which the paper circulates. the advantage of beginning his study of newspaper stories with those published in papers near his home lies in the fact that he is familiar with the interests of the readers of these papers and can readily understand their point of view. by noting the subjects, the point of view, the form, the style, the length, and the illustrations, he will soon discover what these papers want, or rather, what the readers of these papers want. the "outline for the analysis of special articles" in part ii will indicate the points to keep in mind in studying these articles. in order to get a broader knowledge of the scope and character of special feature stories, a writer may well extend his studies to the magazine sections of the leading papers of the country. from the work of the most experienced and original of the feature writers, which is generally to be found in these metropolitan papers, the novice will derive no little inspiration as well as a valuable knowledge of technique. the methods suggested for analyzing special feature stories in newspapers are applicable also to the study of magazine articles. magazines afford a better opportunity than do newspapers for an analysis of the different types of articles discussed in chapter v. since magazine articles are usually signed, it is possible to seek out and study the work of various successful authors in order to determine wherein lies the effectiveness of their writing. beginning with the popular weekly and monthly magazines, a writer may well extend his study to those periodicals that appeal to particular classes, such as women's magazines, agricultural journals, and trade publications. ideals in feature writing. after thoughtful analysis of special articles in all kinds of newspapers and magazines, the young writer with a critical sense developed by reading english literature may come to feel that much of the writing in periodicals falls far short of the standards of excellence established by the best authors. because he finds that the average uncritical reader not only accepts commonplace work but is apparently attracted by meretricious devices in writing, he may conclude that high literary standards are not essential to popular success. the temptation undoubtedly is great both for editors and writers to supply articles that are no better than the average reader demands, especially in such ephemeral publications as newspapers and popular magazines. nevertheless, the writer who yields to this temptation is sure to produce only mediocre work. if he is satisfied to write articles that will be characterized merely as "acceptable," he will never attain distinction. the special feature writer owes it both to himself and to his readers to do the best work of which he is capable. it is his privilege not only to inform and to entertain the public, but to create better taste and a keener appreciation of good writing. that readers do not demand better writing in their newspapers and magazines does not mean that they are unappreciative of good work. nor do originality and precision in style necessarily "go over the heads" of the average person. whenever writers and editors give the public something no better than it is willing to accept, they neglect a great opportunity to aid in the development of better literary taste, particularly on the part of the public whose reading is largely confined to newspapers and periodicals. because of the commercial value of satisfying his readers, an editor occasionally assumes that he must give all of them whatever some of them crave. "we are only giving the public what it wants," is his excuse for printing fiction and articles that are obviously demoralizing in their effect. a heterogeneous public inevitably includes a considerable number of individuals who are attracted by a suggestive treatment of morbid phases of life. to cater to the low desires of some readers, on the ground of "giving the public what it wants," will always be regarded by self-respecting editors and authors as indefensible. the writer's opportunity to influence the mental, moral, and æsthetic ideals of hundreds of thousands of readers is much greater than he often realizes. when he considers the extent to which most men and women are unconsciously guided in their ideas and aspirations by what they read in newspapers and magazines, he cannot fail to appreciate his responsibility. grasping the full significance of his special feature writing, he will no longer be content to write just well enough to sell his product, but will determine to devote his effort to producing articles that are the best of which he is capable. chapter iii finding subjects and material sources of subjects. "what shall i write about?" is the first question that inexperienced writers ask their literary advisers. "if you haven't anything to write about, why write at all?" might be an easy answer. most persons, as a matter of fact, have plenty to write about but do not realize it. not lack of subjects, but inability to recognize the possibilities of what lies at hand, is their real difficulty. the best method of finding subjects is to look at every person, every event, every experience--in short, at everything--with a view to seeing whether or not it has possibilities for a special feature article. even in the apparently prosaic round of everyday life will be found a variety of themes. a circular letter from a business firm announcing a new policy, a classified advertisement in a newspaper, the complaint of a scrub-woman, a new variety of fruit in the grocer's window, an increase in the price of laundry work, a hurried luncheon at a cafeteria--any of the hundred and one daily experiences may suggest a "live" topic for an article. "every foot of ground is five feet deep with subjects; all you have to do is to scratch the surface for one," declared the editor of a popular magazine who is also a successful writer of special articles. this statement may be taken as literally true. within the narrow confines of one's house and yard, for instance, are many topics. a year's experience with the family budget, a home-made device, an attempt to solve the servant problem, a method of making pin-money, a practical means of economizing in household management, are forms of personal experience that may be made interesting to newspaper and magazine readers. a garden on a city lot, a poultry house in a back yard, a novel form of garage, a new use for a gasoline engine, a labor-saving device on the farm, may afford equally good topics. one's own experience, always a rich field, may be supplemented by experiences of neighbors and friends. a second source of subjects is the daily newspaper. local news will give the writer clues that he can follow up by visiting the places mentioned, interviewing the persons concerned, and gathering other relevant material. when news comes from a distance, he can write to the persons most likely to have the desired information. in neither case can he be sure, until he has investigated, that an item of news will prove to contain sufficient available material for an article. many pieces of news, however, are worth running down carefully, for the day's events are rich in possibilities. pieces of news as diverse as the following may suggest excellent subjects for special articles: the death of an interesting person, the sale of a building that has historic associations, the meeting of an uncommon group or organization, the approach of the anniversary of an event, the election or appointment of a person to a position, an unusual occupation, an odd accident, an auction, a proposed municipal improvement, the arrival of a well-known person, an official report, a legal decision, an epidemic, the arrest of a noted criminal, the passing of an old custom, the publication of the city directory, a railroad accident, a marked change in fashion in dress. a third source of both subjects and material is the report of special studies in some field, the form of the report ranging from a paper read at a meeting to a treatise in several volumes. these reports of experiments, surveys, investigations, and other forms of research, are to be found in printed bulletins, monographs, proceedings of organizations, scientific periodicals, and new books. government publications--federal, state, and local--giving results of investigative work done by bureaus, commissions, and committees, are public documents that may usually be had free of charge. technical and scientific periodicals and printed proceedings of important organizations are generally available at public libraries. as mr. waldemar kaempffert, editor of _popular science monthly,_ has said: there is hardly a paper read before the royal institution or the french academy or our american engineering and chemical societies that cannot be made dramatically interesting from a human standpoint and that does not chronicle real news. "if you want to publish something where it will never be read," a wit has observed, "print it in an official document." government reports are filled with valuable information that remains quite unknown to the average reader unless newspapers and magazines unearth it and present it in popular form. the popularization of the contents of all kinds of scientific and technical publications affords great opportunities for the writer who can present such subjects effectively. in addressing students of journalism on "science and journalism," dr. edwin e. slosson, literary editor of the _independent_, who was formerly a professor of chemistry, has said: the most radical ideas of our day are not apt to be found in the popular newspaper or in queer little insurrectionary, heretical and propaganda sheets that we occasionally see, but in the technical journals and proceedings of learned societies. the real revolutions are hatched in the laboratory and study. the papers read before the annual meetings of the scientific societies, and for the most part unnoticed by the press, contain more dynamite than was ever discovered in any anarchist's shop. political revolutions merely change the form of government or the name of the party in power. scientific revolutions really turn the world over, and it never settles back into its former position. * * * * * the beauty and meaning of scientific discoveries can be revealed to the general reader if there is an intermediary who can understand equally the language of the laboratory and of the street. the modern journalist knows that anything can be made interesting to anybody, if he takes pains enough with the writing of it. it is not necessary, either, to pervert scientific truths in the process of translation into the vernacular. the facts are sensational enough without any picturesque exaggeration. * * * * * the field is not an unprofitable one even in the mercenary sense. to higher motives the task of popularizing science makes a still stronger appeal. ignorance is the source of most of our ills. ignorant we must always be of much that we need to know, but there is no excuse for remaining ignorant of what somebody on earth knows or has known. rich treasure lies hidden in what president gilman called "the bibliothecal cairn" of scientific monographs which piles up about a university. the journalist might well exchange the muckrake for the pick and dig it out. nothing could accelerate human progress more than to reduce the time between the discovery of a new truth and its application to the needs of mankind.... it is regarded as a great journalistic achievement when the time of transmission of a cablegram is shortened. but how much more important it is to gain a few years in learning what the men who are in advance of their age are doing than to gain a few seconds in learning what the people of europe are doing? this lag in intellectual progress ... is something which it is the especial duty of the journalist to remove. he likes to score a beat of a few hours. very well, if he will turn his attention to science, he can often score a beat of ten years. the three main sources, therefore, of subjects and material for special feature and magazine articles are ( ) personal observation and experience, ( ) newspapers, ( ) scientific and technical publications and official reports. personal observation. how a writer may discover subjects for newspaper feature articles in the course of his daily routine by being alive to the possibilities around him can best be shown by concrete examples. a "community sing" in a public park gave a woman writer a good subject for a special article published in the _philadelphia north american_. in the publication of a city directory was found a timely subject for an article on the task of getting out the annual directory in a large city; the story was printed in a sunday issue of the _boston herald_. a glimpse of some children dressed like arctic explorers in an outdoor school in kansas city was evidently the origin of a special feature story on that institution, which was published in the _kansas city star_. a woman standing guard one evening over a partially completed school building in seattle suggested a special feature in the _seattle post intelligencer_ on the unusual occupation of night "watchman" for a woman. while making a purchase in a drug store, a writer overheard a clerk make a request for a deposit from a woman who desired to have a prescription filled, an incident which led him to write a special feature for the _new york times_ on this method of discouraging persons from adding to the drug store's "morgue" of unclaimed prescriptions. from a visit to the children's museum in brooklyn was developed a feature article for the _new york herald_, and from a story-telling hour at the boston museum of fine arts was evolved a feature story for the _boston herald_ on the telling of stories as a means of interesting children in pictures. magazine articles also may originate in the writer's observation of what is going on about him. the specific instances given below, like those already mentioned, will indicate to the inexperienced writer where to look for inspiration. a newspaper reporter who covered the criminal courts compiled the various methods of burglars and sneak thieves in gaining entrance to houses and apartments, as he heard them related in trials, and wrote a helpful article for _good housekeeping_ on how to protect one's house against robbery. the exhibition of a novel type of rack for curing seed corn gave a writer a subject for an article on this "corn tree," which was published in the _illustrated world_. during a short stop at a farm while on an automobile trip, a woman writer noticed a concrete storage cellar for vegetables, and from an interview with the farmer obtained enough material for an article, which she sold to a farm journal. while a woman writer was making a purchase in a plumber's shop, the plumber was called to the telephone. on returning to his customer, he remarked that the call was from a woman on a farm five miles from town, who could easily have made the slight repairs herself if she had known a little about the water-supply system on her farm. from the material which the writer obtained from the plumber, she wrote an article for an agricultural paper on how plumber's bills can be avoided. a display of canned goods in a grocer's window, with special prices for dozen and case lots, suggested an article, afterwards published in the _merchants trade journal_, on this grocer's method of fighting mail-order competition. personal experience. what we actually do ourselves, as well as what we see others do, may be turned to good use in writing articles. personal experiences not only afford good subjects and plenty of material but are more easily handled than most other subjects, because, being very real and vital to the writer, they can the more readily be made real and vital to the reader. many inexperienced writers overlook the possibilities of what they themselves have done and are doing. to gain experience and impressions for their articles, special writers on newspapers even assume temporarily the roles of persons whose lives and experiences they desire to portray. one chicago paper featured every sunday for many weeks articles by a reporter who, in order to get material, did a variety of things just for one day, from playing in a strolling street band to impersonating a convict in the state penitentiary. thirty years ago, when women first entered the newspaper field as special feature writers, they were sometimes sent out on "freak" assignments for special features, such as feigning injury or insanity in order to gain entrance to hospitals in the guise of patients. recently one woman writer posed as an applicant for a position as moving-picture actress; another applied for a place as housemaid; a third donned overalls and sorted scrap-iron all day in the yard of a factory; and still another accompanied a store detective on his rounds in order to discover the methods of shop-lifting with which department stores have to contend. it is not necessary, however, to go so far afield to obtain personal experiences, as is shown by the following newspaper and magazine articles based on what the writers found in the course of their everyday pursuits. the results obtained from cultivating a quarter-acre lot in the residence district of a city of , population were told by a writer in the _country gentleman_. a woman's experience with bees was related in _good housekeeping_ under the title, "what i did with bees." experience in screening a large porch on his house furnished a writer with the necessary information for a practical story in _popular mechanics_. some tests that he made on the power of automobiles gave a young engineer the suggestion for an article on the term "horse power" as applied to motor-cars; the article was published in the _illustrated world_. "building a business on confidence" was the title of a personal experience article published in _system_. the evils of tenant farming, as illustrated by the experiences of a farmer's wife in moving during the very early spring, were vividly depicted in an article in _farm and fireside_. the diary of an automobile trip from chicago to buffalo was embodied in an article by a woman writer, which she sold to the _woman's home companion_. both usual and unusual means employed to earn their college expenses have served as subjects for many special articles written by undergraduates and graduates. innumerable articles of the "how-to-do-something" type are accepted every year from inexperienced writers by publications that print such useful information. results of experiments in solving various problems of household management are so constantly in demand by women's magazines and women's departments in newspapers, that housewives who like to write find a ready market for articles based on their own experience. confession articles. one particular type of personal experience article that enjoys great popularity is the so-called "confession story." told in the first person, often anonymously, a well-written confession article is one of the most effective forms in which to present facts and experiences. personal experiences of others, as well as the writer's own, may be given in confession form if the writer is able to secure sufficiently detailed information from some one else to make the story probable. a few examples will illustrate the kind of subjects that have been presented successfully in the confession form. some criticisms of a typical college and of college life were given anonymously in the _outlook_ under the title, "the confessions of an undergraduate." "the story of a summer hotel waitress," published in the _independent_, and characterized by the editor as "a frank exposure of real life below stairs in the average summer hotel," told how a student in a normal school tried to earn her school expenses by serving as a waitress during the summer vacation. in _farm and fireside_ was published "the confession of a timber buyer," an article exposing the methods employed by some unscrupulous lumber companies in buying timber from farmers. "how i cured myself of being too sensitive," with the sub-title, "the autobiography of a young business man who nearly went to smash through jealousy," was the subject of a confession article in the _american magazine_. an exposure of the impositions practiced by an itinerant quack was made in a series of three confession articles, in sunday issues of the _kansas city star_, written by a young man whom the doctor had employed to drive him through the country districts. to secure confession features from readers, magazines have offered prizes for the best short articles on such topics as, "the best thing experience has taught me," "how i overcame my greatest fault," "the day of my great temptation," "what will power did for me." subjects from the day's news. in his search for subjects a writer will find numberless clues in newspapers. since the first information concerning all new things is usually given to the world through the columns of the daily press, these columns are scanned carefully by writers in search of suggestions. any part of the paper, from the "want ads" to the death notices or the real estate transfers, may be the starting point of a special article. the diversity of topics suggested by newspapers is shown by the following examples. the death of a well-known clown in new york was followed by a special feature story about him in the sunday magazine section of a chicago paper. a newspaper report of the discovery in wisconsin of a method of eliminating printing ink from pulp made from old newspapers, so that white print paper might be produced from it, led a young writer to send for information to the discoverer of the process, and with these additional details he wrote an article that was published in the _boston transcript._ a news story about a clever swindler in boston, who obtained possession of negotiable securities by means of a forged certified check, was made the basis of a special feature story in the _providence journal_ on the precautions to be taken against losses from forged checks. news of the energetic manner in which a new jersey sheriff handled a strike suggested a personality sketch of him that appeared in the _american magazine_. the publication, in a newspaper, of some results of a survey of rural school conditions in a middle western state, led to two articles on why the little red schoolhouse fails, one of which was published in the _country gentleman_, and the other in the _independent_. from a brief news item about the success of a farmer's widow and her daughter, in taking summer boarders in their old farmhouse, was developed a practical article telling how to secure and provide for these boarders on the ordinary farm. the article appeared in _farm and fireside_. official documents. bulletins and reports of government officials are a mine for both subjects and material. for new developments in agriculture one may consult the bulletins of the united states department of agriculture and those of state agricultural experiment stations. reports on new and better methods of preparing food, and other phases of home economics, are also printed in these bulletins. state industrial commissions publish reports that furnish valuable material on industrial accidents, working-men's insurance, sanitary conditions in factories, and the health of workers. child welfare is treated in reports of federal, state, and city child-welfare boards. the reports of the interstate commerce commission, like those of state railroad commissions, contain interesting material on various phases of transportation. state and federal census reports often furnish good subjects and material. in short, nearly every official report of any kind may be a fruitful source of ideas for special articles. the few examples given below suggest various possibilities for the use of these sources. investigations made by a commission of american medical experts constituting the committee on resuscitation from mine gases, under the direction of the u.s. bureau of mines, supplied a writer in the _boston transcript_ with material for a special feature story on the dangers involved in the use of the pulmotor. a practical bulletin, prepared by the home economics department of a state university, on the best arrangement of a kitchen to save needless steps, was used for articles in a number of farm journals. from a bulletin of the u.s. department of agriculture a writer prepared an article on "the most successful farmer in the united states" and what he did with twenty acres, for the department of "interesting people" in the _american magazine_. the results of a municipal survey of springfield, illinois, as set forth in official reports, were the basis of an article in the _outlook_ on "what is a survey?" reports of a similar survey at lawrence, kansas, were used for a special feature story in the _kansas city star_. "are you a good or a poor penman?" was the title of an article in _popular science monthly_ based on a chart prepared by the russell sage foundation in connection with some of its educational investigations. the _new york evening post_ published an interesting special article on the "life tables" that had been prepared by the division of vital statistics of the bureau of the census, to show the expectation of life at all ages in the six states from which vital statistics were obtained. a special feature story on how panama hats are woven, as printed in the _ohio state journal_, was based entirely on a report of the united states consul general at guayaquil, ecuador. scientific and technical publications. almost every science and every art has its own special periodicals, from which can be gleaned a large number of subjects and much valuable material that needs only to be popularized to be made attractive to the average reader. the printed proceedings of scientific and technical societies, including the papers read at their meetings, as well as monographs and books, are also valuable. how such publications may be utilized is illustrated by the articles given below. the report of a special committee of an association of electrical engineers, given at its convention in philadelphia, furnished a writer with material for an article on "farming by electricity," that was published in the sunday edition of the _springfield republican_. studies of the cause of hunger, made by prof. a.j. carlson of the university of chicago and published in a volume entitled "the control of hunger in health and disease," furnished the subject for an article in the _illustrated world._ earlier results of the same investigation were given in the sunday magazine of one of the chicago papers. from the _journal of heredity_ was gleaned material for an article entitled "what chance has the poor child?" it was printed in _every week_. "golfer's foot, one of our newest diseases," was the subject of a special feature in the _new york times_, that was based on an article in the _medical record_. that the canals on mars may be only an optical illusion was demonstrated in an article in the sunday magazine of the _new york times_, by means of material obtained from a report of the section for the observation of mars, a division of the british astronomical association. anticipating timely subjects. by looking forward for weeks or even months, as editors of sunday newspapers and of magazines are constantly doing, a writer can select subjects and gather material for articles that will be particularly appropriate at a given time. holidays, seasonal events, and anniversaries may thus be anticipated, and special articles may be sent to editors some time in advance of the occasion that makes them timely. not infrequently it is desirable to begin collecting material a year before the intended time of publication. an article on fire prevention, for instance, is appropriate for the month of october just before the day set aside for calling attention to fires caused by carelessness. months in advance, a writer might begin collecting news stories of dangerous fires resulting from carelessness; and from the annual report of the state fire marshal issued in july, he could secure statistics on the causes of fires and the extent of the losses. to secure material for an article on the christmas presents that children might make at a cost of twenty-five cents or less, a woman writer jotted down after one christmas all the information that she could get from her friends; and from these notes she wrote the article early in the following summer. it was published in the november number of a magazine, at a time when children were beginning to think about making christmas presents. articles on ways and means of earning college expenses are particularly appropriate for publication in the summer or early fall, when young men and women are preparing to go to college, but if in such an article a student writer intends to describe experiences other than his own, he may well begin gathering material from his fellow students some months before. anniversaries of various events, such as important discoveries and inventions, the death or birth of a personage, and significant historical occasions, may also be anticipated. the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the first railroad train in kansas city was commemorated in a special feature story in the _kansas city star_, published the day before the anniversary. the day following the fifty-sixth anniversary of the discovery of petroleum in pennsylvania, the _new york times_ printed in its sunday magazine section a special article on the man who first found oil there. the centenary of the launching of the first steam-propelled ship to cross the atlantic, was commemorated by an article in the sunday edition of the _providence journal_. _munsey's magazine_ printed an article on the semi-centennial of the discovery of the process of making paper from wood pulp. by looking over tables giving dates of significant events, writers will find what anniversaries are approaching; or they may glean such information from news stories describing preparations made for celebrating these anniversaries. keeping lists of subjects. every writer who is on the lookout for subjects and sources of material should keep a notebook constantly at hand. subjects suggested by everyday experiences, by newspaper and magazine reading, and by a careful study of special articles in all kinds of publications, are likely to be forgotten unless they are recorded at once. a small notebook that can be carried in the pocket or in a woman's hand-bag is most convenient. besides topics for articles, the titles of books, reports, bulletins, and other publications mentioned in conversation or in newspapers, should be jotted down as possible sources of material. facts and figures from publications may be copied for future use. good titles and interesting methods of treatment that a writer observes in the work of others may prove helpful in suggesting titles and methods for his own articles. separate sections of even a small notebook may conveniently be set aside for all of these various points. filing material. the writer who makes methodical preparation for his work generally has some system of filing good material so that it will be at hand when he wants it. one excellent filing device that is both inexpensive and capable of indefinite expansion consists of a number of stout manilla envelopes, large enough to hold newspaper clippings, printed reports, magazine articles, and photographs. in each envelope is kept the material pertaining to one subject in which the writer is interested, the character of the subject-matter being indicated on one side of the envelope, so that, as the envelopes stand on end, their contents can readily be determined. if a writer has many of these envelopes, a one-drawer filing case will serve to keep them in good order. by constantly gathering material from newspapers, magazines, and printed reports, he will soon find that he has collected a considerable amount of information on which to base his articles. chapter iv appeal and purpose analyzing the subject. when from many available subjects a writer is about to choose one, he should pause to consider its possibilities before beginning to write. it is not enough to say, "this is a good subject; i believe that i can write an article on it." he needs to look at the topic from every angle. he ought to ask himself, "how widespread is the interest in my subject? how much will it appeal to the average individual? what phases of it are likely to have the greatest interest for the greatest number of persons?" to answer these questions he must review the basic sources of pleasure and satisfaction. what interests readers. to interest readers is obviously the prime object in all popular writing. the basis of interest in the news story, the special feature article, and the short story is essentially the same. whatever the average person likes to hear and see, whatever gives him pleasure and satisfaction, is what he wants to read about. in order to test all phases of a given subject from this point of view, a writer needs to keep in mind the fundamental sources of satisfaction. subjects and phases of subjects that attract readers may, for convenience, be divided into the following classes, which, however, are not mutually exclusive: ( ) timely topics, ( ) unique, novel, and extraordinary persons, things, and events, ( ) mysteries, ( ) romance, ( ) adventure, ( ) contests for supremacy, ( ) children, ( ) animals, ( ) hobbies and amusements, ( ) familiar persons, places, and objects, ( ) prominent persons, places, and objects, ( ) matters involving the life, property, and welfare of others, ( ) matters that affect the reader's own success and well-being. timeliness. though not absolutely essential, timeliness is a valuable attribute of any subject. readers like to feel that they are getting the latest facts and the newest ideas, in special feature articles as well as in the news. a subject need not be discarded, however, because it does not make a timely appeal. it may have interest in other respects sufficiently great to compensate for its lack of timeliness. many topics that at first glance seem quite unrelated to current activities are found on closer examination to have some aspects that may be brought into connection with timely interests. to a writer keenly alive to everything that is going on in the world, most subjects will be found to have some bearing on what is uppermost in men's minds. emphasis on that point of contact with current ideas will give to the article the desired timeliness. novelty. when a person, object, or circumstance is unique, it arouses an unusual degree of interest. the first person to accomplish something out of the ordinary, the first event of its kind, the first of anything, arrests attention. closely associated with the unique is the extraordinary, the curious. if not absolutely the only one of its kind, a thing may still be sufficiently unusual to excite an uncommon degree of interest. novelty has a perennial charm. careful study of a subject is often necessary to reveal the novel and extraordinary phase of it that can best be emphasized. mysteries. the fascination for the human mind of whatever baffles it is so well known that it scarcely needs elaboration. mysteries, whether real or fictitious, pique curiosity. even the scholar and the practical man of affairs find relaxation in the mystery of the detective story. real life often furnishes events sufficiently mysterious to make a special feature story that rivals fiction. unexplained crimes and accidents; strange psychical phenomena, such as ghosts, presentiments, spiritism, and telepathy; baffling problems of the scientist and the inventor--all have elements of mystery that fascinate the average reader. romance. the romance of real life is quite as interesting as that of fiction. as all the world loves a lover, almost all the world loves a love story. the course of true love may run smooth or it may not; in either case there is the romantic appeal. to find the romantic element in a topic is to discover a perennial source of attraction for all classes of readers. adventure. few in number are the persons who will not gladly escape from humdrum routine by losing themselves in an exciting tale of adventure. the thrilling exploits in real life of the engineer, the explorer, the soldier of fortune, the pioneer in any field, hold us spellbound. even more commonplace experiences are not without an element of the adventurous, for life itself is a great adventure. many special feature stories in narrative form have much the same interest that is created by the fictitious tale of adventure. contests for supremacy. man has never lost his primitive love of a good fight. civilization may change the form of the contest, but fighting to win, whether in love or politics, business or sport, still has a strong hold on all of us. strikes, attempted monopolies, political revolutions, elections, championship games, diplomacy, poverty, are but a few of the struggles that give zest to life. to portray dramatically in a special article the clash and conflict in everyday affairs is to make a well-nigh universal appeal. children. because we live in and for our children, everything that concerns them comes close to our hearts. a child in a photo-drama or in a news story is sure to win sympathy and admiration. the special feature writer cannot afford to neglect so vital a source of interest. practical articles on the care and the education of children also have especial value for women readers. animals. wild or tame, at large or in captivity, animals attract us either for their almost human intelligence or for their distinctively animal traits. there are few persons who do not like horses, dogs, cats, and other pets, and fewer still who can pass by the animal cages at the circus or the "zoo." hunting, trapping, and fishing are vocations for some men, and sport for many more. the business of breeding horses and cattle, and the care of live stock and poultry on the farm, must not be overlooked in the search for subjects. the technical aspects of these topics will interest readers of farm journals; the more popular phases of them make a wide general appeal. hobbies and amusements. pastimes and avocations may be counted good subjects. moving pictures, theaters, music, baseball, golf, automobiles, amateur photography, and a host of hobbies and recreations have enough enthusiastic devotees to insure wide reading for special feature stories about them. the familiar. persons whom we know, places that we constantly see, experiences that we have had again and again, often seem commonplace enough, even when familiarity has not bred contempt; but when they appear unexpectedly on the stage or in print, we greet them with the cordiality bestowed on the proverbial long-lost friend. local news interests readers because it concerns people and places immediately around them. every newspaper man understands the desirability of increasing the attractiveness of a news event that happens elsewhere by rinding "local ends," or by giving it "a local turn." for special feature stories in newspapers, local phases are no less important. but whether the article is to be published in a newspaper or a magazine, familiar persons and things should be "played up" prominently. the prominent. many persons, places, and objects that we have never seen are frequently as real to us as are those that we see daily. this is because their names and their pictures have greeted us again and again in print. it is thus that prominent men and women become familiar to us. because of their importance we like to read about them. if a special feature article in any of its phases concerns what is prominent, greater attractiveness can be given to it by "playing up" this point, be it the president of the united states or a well-known circus clown, fifth avenue or the bowery, the capitol at washington or coney island, the twentieth century limited or a ford. life and welfare of others. sympathy with our fellow beings and an instinctive recognition of our common humanity are inherent in most men and women. nowhere is this more strikingly shown than in the quick and generous response that comes in answer to every call for aid for those in distress. so, too, we like to know how others feel and think. we like to get behind the veil with which every one attempts to conceal his innermost thoughts and feelings. our interest in the lives and the welfare of others finds expression in various ways, ranging from social service and self-sacrificing devotion to gossip and secret confidences. these extremes and all that lies between them abound in that "human interest" upon which all editors insist. this widespread interest in others affords to the writer of special articles one of his greatest opportunities, not only for preparing interesting stories, but for arousing readers to support many a good cause. to create sympathy for the unfortunate, to encourage active social service, to point the way to political reform, to show the advantages of better industrial conditions, to explain better business methods--all these are but a few of the helpful, constructive appeals that he may make effectively. he may create this interest and stir his readers to action by either one of two methods: by exposing existing evils, or by showing what has been done to improve bad conditions. the exposure of evils in politics, business, and society constituted the "muck-raking" to which several of the popular monthly magazines owe their rise. this crusading, "searchlight" type of journalism has been largely superseded by the constructive, "sunlight" type. to explain how reforms have been accomplished, or are being brought about, is construed by the best of the present-day journals to be their special mission. personal success and happiness. every one is vitally concerned about his own prosperity and happiness. to make a success of life, no matter by what criterion we may measure that success, is our one all-powerful motive. happiness, as the goal that we hope to reach by our success, and health, as a prime requisite for its attainment, are also of great importance to every one of us. how to make or save more money, how to do our work more easily, how to maintain our physical well-being, how to improve ourselves mentally and morally, how to enjoy life more fully--that is what we all want to know. to the writer who will show us how to be "healthy, wealthy, and wise," we will give our undivided attention. business and professional interests naturally occupy the larger part of men's thoughts, while home-making is the chief work of most women. although women are entering many fields hitherto monopolized by men, the home remains woman's peculiar sphere. the purchase and preparation of food, the buying and making of clothing, the management of servants, the care of children--these are the vital concerns of most women. they realize, however, that conditions outside the home have a direct bearing on home-making; and each year they are taking a more active part in civic affairs. matters of public health, pure food legislation, the milk and the water supply, the garbage collection, the character of places of amusement, the public schools, determine, in no small degree, the success and happiness of the home-maker. since the dominant interests of men and women alike are their business and their home, the special writer should undertake to connect his subject as closely as possible with these interests. to show, for example, how the tariff, taxes, public utility rates, price-fixing, legislation, and similar matters affect the business and home affairs of the average reader, is to give to these political and economic problems an interest for both men and women far in excess of that resulting from a more general treatment of them. the surest way to get the reader's attention is to bring the subject home to him personally. of the importance of presenting a subject in such a manner that the reader is led to see its application to himself and his own affairs, mr. john m. siddall, editor of the _american magazine_, has said: every human being likes to see himself in reading matter--just as he likes to see himself in a mirror. the reason so much reading matter is unpopular and never attracts a wide reading public lies in the fact that the reader sees nothing in it for himself. take an article, we'll say, entitled "the financial system of canada." it looks dull, doesn't it? it looks dull because you can't quite see where it affects you. now take an article entitled "why it is easier to get rich in canada than in the united states." that's different! your interest is aroused. you wonder wherein the canadian has an advantage over you. you look into the article to find out whether you can't get an idea from it. yet the two articles may be basically alike, differing only in treatment. one bores you and the other interests you. one bores you because it seems remote. the other interests you because the writer has had the skill to translate his facts and ideas into terms that are personal to you. the minute you become personal in this world you become interesting. combining appeals. when the analysis of a topic shows that it possesses more than one of these appeals, the writer may heighten the attractiveness of his story by developing several of the possibilities, simultaneously or successively. the chance discovery by a prominent physician of a simple preventive of infantile paralysis, for instance, would combine at least four of the elements of interest enumerated above. if such a combination of appeals can be made at the very beginning of the article, it is sure to command attention. definiteness of purpose. in view of the multiplicity of possible appeals, a writer may be misled into undertaking to do too many diverse things in a single article. a subject often has so many different aspects of great interest that it is difficult to resist the temptation to use all of them. if a writer yields to this temptation, the result may be a diffuse, aimless article that, however interesting in many details, fails to make a definite impression. to avoid this danger, the writer must decide just what his purpose is to be. he must ask himself, "what is my aim in writing this article?" and, "what do i expect to accomplish?" only in this way will he clarify in his mind his reason for writing on the proposed topic and the object to be attained. with a definitely formulated aim before him, he can decide just what material he needs. an objective point to be reached will give his article direction and will help him to stick to his subject. furthermore, by getting his aim clearly in mind, he will have the means of determining, when the story is completed, whether or not he has accomplished what he set out to do. in selecting material, in developing the article, and in testing the completed product, therefore, it is important to have a definitely formulated purpose. three general aims. every special article should accomplish one of three general aims: it should ( ) entertain, or ( ) inform, or ( ) give practical guidance. the same subject and the same material may sometimes be so treated as to accomplish any one of these three purposes. if the writer's aim is merely to help readers pass a leisure hour pleasantly, he will "play up" those aspects of a topic that will afford entertainment and little or nothing else. if he desires to supply information that will add to the reader's stock of knowledge, he will present his facts in a manner calculated to make his readers remember what he has told them. if he proposes to give information that can be applied by readers to their own activities, he must include those details that are necessary to any one who desires to make practical use of the information. when, for example, a writer is about to prepare an article, based on experience, about keeping bees on a small suburban place, he will find that he may write his story in any one of three ways. the difficulties experienced by the amateur bee-keeper in trying to handle bees in a small garden could be treated humorously with no other purpose than to amuse. or the keeping of bees under such circumstances might be described as an interesting example of enterprise on the part of a city man living in the suburbs. or, in order to show other men and women similarly situated just how to keep bees, the writer might explain exactly what any person would need to know to attain success in such a venture. just as the purpose of these articles would vary, so the material and the point of view would differ. entertaining articles. to furnish wholesome entertainment is a perfectly legitimate end in special feature writing. there is no reason why the humor, the pathos, the romance, the adventure, and mystery in life should not be presented in special feature stories for our entertainment and amusement, just as they are presented for the same purpose in the short story, the drama, and the photo-play. many readers find special feature stories with real persons, real places, and real circumstances, more entertaining than fiction. a writer with the ability to see the comedies and the tragedies in the events constantly happening about him, or frequently reported in the press, will never lack for subjects and material. wholesome entertainment. the effect of entertaining stories on the ideas and ideals of readers ought not to be overlooked. according to the best journalistic standards, nothing should be printed that will exert a demoralizing or unwholesome influence. constructive journalism goes a step further when it insists that everything shall tend to be helpful and constructive. this practice applies alike to news stories and to special articles. these standards do not necessarily exclude news and special feature stories that deal with crime, scandal, and similar topics; but they do demand that the treatment of such subjects shall not be suggestive or offensive. to portray violators of the criminal or moral codes as heroes worthy of emulation; to gratify some readers' taste for the morbid; to satisfy other readers by exploiting sex--all are alike foreign to the purpose of respectable journalism. no self-respecting writer will lend the aid of his pen to such work, and no self-respecting editor will publish it. to deter persons from committing similar crimes and follies should be the only purpose in writing on such topics. the thoughtful writer, therefore, must guard against the temptation to surround wrong-doers with the glamour of heroic or romantic adventure, and, by sentimental treatment, to create sympathy for the undeserving culprit. violations of law and of the conventions of society ought to be shown to be wrong, even when the wrong-doer is deserving of some sympathy. this need not be done by moralizing and editorializing. a much better way is to emphasize, as the results of wrong-doing, not only legal punishment and social ostracism, but the pangs of a guilty conscience, and the disgrace to the culprit and his family. a cynical or flippant treatment of serious subjects gives many readers a false and distorted view of life. humor does not depend on ridicule or satire. the fads and foibles of humanity can be good-naturedly exposed in humorous articles that have no sting. although many topics may very properly be treated lightly, others demand a serious, dignified style. the men and women whom a writer puts into his articles are not puppets, but real persons, with feelings not unlike his own. to drag them and their personal affairs from the privacy to which they are entitled, and to give them undesired and needless publicity, for the sake of affording entertainment to others, often subjects them to great humiliation and suffering. the fact that a man, woman, or child has figured in the day's news does not necessarily mean that a writer is entitled to exploit such a person's private affairs. he must discriminate between what the public is entitled to know and what an individual has a right to keep private. innocent wives, sweethearts, or children are not necessarily legitimate material for his article because their husband, lover, or father has appeared in the news. the golden rule is the best guide for a writer in such cases. lack of consideration for the rights of others is the mark neither of a good writer nor of a true gentleman. clean, wholesome special feature stories that present interesting phases of life accurately, and that show due consideration for the rights of the persons portrayed, are quite as entertaining as are any others. informative articles. since many persons confine their reading largely to newspapers and magazines, they derive most of their information and ideas from these sources. even persons who read new books rely to some extent on special articles for the latest information about current topics. although most readers look to periodicals primarily for new, timely facts, they are also interested to find there biographical and historical material that is not directly connected with current events. every special feature writer has a great opportunity to furnish a large circle of readers with interesting and significant information. in analyzing subjects it is necessary to discriminate between significant and trivial facts. some topics when studied will be found to contain little of real consequence, even though a readable article might be developed from the material. other themes will reveal aspects that are both trivial and significant. when a writer undertakes to choose between the two, he should ask himself, "are the facts worth remembering?" and, "will they furnish food for thought?" in clarifying his purpose by such tests, he will decide not only what kind of information he desires to impart, but what material he must select, and from what point of view he should present it. articles of practical guidance. the third general purpose that a writer may have is to give his readers sufficiently explicit information to enable them to do for themselves what has been done by others. because all persons want to know how to be more successful, they read these "how-to-do-something" articles with avidity. all of us welcome practical suggestions, tactfully given, that can be applied to our own activities. whatever any one has done successfully may be so presented that others can learn how to do it with equal success. special feature articles furnish the best means of giving this practical guidance. in preparing a "how-to-do-something" article, a writer needs to consider the class of readers for which it is intended. a special feature story, for example, on how to reduce the cost of milk might be presented from any one of three points of view: that of the producer, that of the distributor, or that of the consumer. to be practical for dairy farmers, as producers of milk, the article would have to point out possible economies in keeping cows and handling milk on the farm. to be helpful to milk-dealers, as distributors, it would concern itself with methods of lowering the cost of selling and delivering milk in the city. to assist housewives, as consumers, the article would have to show how to economize in using milk in the home. an informative article for the general reader might take up all these phases of the subject, but an article intended to give practical guidance should consider the needs of only one of these three classes of persons. in many constructive articles of practical guidance, the writer's purpose is so successfully concealed that it may at first escape the notice of the average reader. by relating in detail, for example, how an actual enterprise was carried out, a writer may be able to give his readers, without their realizing it, all the information they need to accomplish a similar undertaking. when he analyzes such articles, the student should not be misled into thinking that the writer did not have the definite purpose of imparting practical information. if the same material can be developed into an article of interesting information or into one of practical guidance, it is desirable to do the latter and, if necessary, to disguise the purpose. statement of purpose. in order to define his purpose clearly and to keep it constantly before him, a writer will do well to put down on paper his exact aim in a single sentence. if, for example, he desired to write a constructive article about an americanization pageant held in his home city on the fourth of july, he might write out the statement of his aim thus: "i desire to show how the americanization of aliens may be encouraged in small industrial centers of from to , inhabitants, by describing how the last fourth of july americanization pageant was organized and carried out in a typical pennsylvania industrial town of ." such a statement will assist a writer in selecting his material, in sticking to his subject, and in keeping to one point of view. without this clearly formulated aim before him, it is easy for him to dwell too long on some phase of the subject in which he is particularly interested or on which he has the most material, to the neglect of other phases that are essential to the accomplishment of his purpose. or, failing to get his aim clearly in mind, he may jump from one aspect of the subject to another, without accomplishing anything in particular. many a newspaper and magazine article leaves a confused, hazy impression on the minds of readers because the writer failed to have a definite objective. chapter v types of articles methods of treatment. after choosing a subject and formulating his purpose, a writer is ready to consider methods of treatment. again it is desirable to survey all the possibilities in order to choose the one method best adapted to his subject and his purpose. his chief consideration should be the class of readers that he desires to reach. some topics, he will find, may be treated with about equal success in any one of several ways, while others lend themselves to only one or two forms of presentation. by thinking through the various possible ways of working out his subject, he will be able to decide which meets his needs most satisfactorily. exposition by narration and description. the commonest method of developing a special feature article is that which combines narration and description with exposition. the reason for this combination is not far to seek. the average person is not attracted by pure exposition. he is attracted by fiction. hence the narrative and descriptive devices of fiction are employed advantageously to supplement expository methods. narratives and descriptions also have the advantage of being concrete and vivid. the rapid reader can grasp a concrete story or a word picture. he cannot so readily comprehend a more general explanation unaccompanied by specific examples and graphic pictures of persons, places, and objects. narration and description are used effectively for the concrete examples and the specific instances by which we illustrate general ideas. the best way, for example, to make clear the operation of a state system of health insurance is to relate how it has operated in the case of one or more persons affected. in explaining a new piece of machinery the writer may well describe it in operation, to enable readers to visualize it and follow its motions. since the reader's interest will be roused the more quickly if he is given tangible, concrete details that he can grasp, the examples are usually put first, to be followed by the more general explanation. sometimes several examples are given before the explanatory matter is offered. whole articles are often made up of specific examples and generalizations presented alternately. to explain the effects of a new anæsthetic, for example, mr. burton j. hendrick in an article in _mcclure's magazine_, pictured the scene in the operating-room of a hospital where it was being given to a patient, showed just how it was administered, and presented the results as a spectator saw them. the beginning of the article on stovaine, the new anæsthetic, illustrating this method of exposition, follows: a few months ago, a small six-year-old boy was wheeled into the operating theater at the hospital for ruptured and crippled children, in new york city. he was one of the several thousand children of the tenements who annually find their way into this great philanthropic institution, suffering from what, to the lay mind, seems a hopelessly incurable injury or malformation. this particular patient had a crippled and paralyzed leg, and to restore its usefulness, it was necessary to cut deeply into the heel, stretch the "achilles tendon," and make other changes which, without the usual anesthetic, would involve excruciating suffering. according to the attendant nurses, the child belonged to the "noisy" class; that is, he was extremely sensitive to pain, screamed at the approach of the surgeon, and could be examined only when forcibly held down. as the child came into the operating-room he presented an extremely pathetic figure--small, naked, thin, with a closely cropped head of black hair, and a face pinched and blanched with fear. surrounded by a fair-sized army of big, muscular surgeons and white-clothed nurses, and a gallery filled with a hundred or more of the leading medical men of the metropolis, he certainly seemed a helpless speck of humanity with all the unknown forces of science and modern life arrayed against him. under ordinary conditions he would have been etherized in an adjoining chamber and brought into the operating-room entirely unconscious. this cripple, however, had been selected as a favorable subject for an interesting experiment in modern surgery, for he was to undergo an extremely torturous operation in a state of full consciousness. among the assembled surgeons was a large-framed, black moustached and black-haired, quick-moving, gypsy-like rumanian--professor thomas jonnesco, dean of the medical department of the university of bucharest, and one of the leading men of his profession in europe. dr. jonnesco, who had landed in new york only two days before, had come to the united states with a definite scientific purpose. this was to show american surgeons that the most difficult operations could be performed without pain, without loss of consciousness, and without the use of the familiar anesthetics, ether or chloroform. dr. jonnesco's reputation in itself assured him the fullest opportunity of demonstrating his method in new york, and this six-year-old boy had been selected as an excellent test subject. under the gentle assurances of the nurses that "no one was going to hurt" him, the boy assumed a sitting posture on the operating-table, with his feet dangling over the edge. then, at the request of dr. jonnesco, he bent his head forward until it almost touched his breast. this threw the child's back into the desired position--that of the typical bicycle "scorcher,"--making each particular vertebra stand out sharply under the tight drawn skin. dr. jonnesco quickly ran his finger along the protuberances, and finally selected the space between the twelfth dorsal and the first lumbar vertebræ--in other words, the space just above the small of the back. he then took an ordinary hypodermic needle, and slowly pushed it through the skin and tissues until it entered the small opening between the lower and upper vertebræ, not stopping until it reached the open space just this side of the spinal cord. as the needle pierced the flesh, the little patient gave a sharp cry--the only sign of discomfiture displayed during the entire operation. when the hollow needle reached its destination, a few drops of a colorless liquid spurted out--the famous cerebro-spinal fluid, the substance which, like a water-jacket, envelops the brain and the spinal cord. into this same place dr. jonnesco now introduced an ordinary surgical syringe, which he had previously filled with a pale yellowish liquid--the much-famed stovaine,--and slowly emptied its contents into the region that immediately surrounds the spinal cord. for a few minutes the child retained his sitting posture as if nothing extraordinary had happened. dr. jonnesco patted him on the back and said a few pleasant words in french, while the nurses and assistants chatted amiably in english. "how do you feel now?" the attending surgeon asked, after the lapse of three or four minutes. "all right," replied the boy animatedly, "'cept that my legs feel like they was going to sleep." the nurses now laid the patient down upon his back, throwing a handkerchief over his eyes, so that he could not himself witness the subsequent proceedings. there was, naturally, much holding of breath as dr. virgil p. gibney, the operating surgeon, raised his knife and quickly made a deep incision in the heel of this perfectly conscious patient. from the child, however, there was not the slightest evidence of sensation. "didn't you feel anything, my boy?" asked dr. gibney, pausing. "no, i don't feel nothin'," came the response from under the handkerchief. an operation lasting nearly half an hour ensued. the deepest tissues were cut, the tendons were stretched, the incision was sewed up, all apparently without the patient's knowledge. some types of articles, although expository in purpose, are entirely narrative and descriptive in form. by relating his own experiences in a confession story, for example, a writer may be able to show very clearly and interestingly the dangers of speculations in stocks with but small capital. personality sketches are almost always narrative and descriptive. many of the devices of the short story will be found useful in articles. not only is truth stranger than fiction, but facts may be so presented as to be even more interesting than fiction. conversation, character-drawing, suspense, and other methods familiar to the writer of short stories may be used effectively in special articles. their application to particular types of articles is shown in the following pages. special types of articles. although there is no generally recognized classification of special feature articles, several distinct types may be noted, such as ( ) the interview, ( ) the personal experience story, ( ) the confession article, ( ) the "how-to-do-something" article, ( ) the personality sketch, ( ) the narrative in the third person. these classes, it is evident, are not mutually exclusive, but may for convenience be treated separately. the interview. since the material for many articles is obtained by means of an interview, it is often convenient to put the major part, if not the whole, of the story in interview form. such an article may consist entirely of direct quotation with a limited amount of explanatory material concerning the person interviewed; or it may be made up partly of direct quotation and partly of indirect quotation, combined with the necessary explanation. for greater variety it is advisable to alternate direct and indirect quotations. a description of the person interviewed and of his surroundings, by way of introduction, gives the reader a distinct impression of the individual under characteristic conditions. or some striking utterance of his may be "played up" at the beginning, to be followed by a picture of him and his surroundings. interviews on the same topic with two or more persons may be combined in a single article. the interview has several obvious advantages. first, the spoken word, quoted _verbatim_, gives life to the story. the person interviewed seems to be talking to each reader individually. the description of him in his surroundings helps the reader to see him as he talks. second, events, explanations, and opinions given in the words of one who speaks with authority, have greater weight than do the assertions of an unknown writer. third, the interview is equally effective whether the writer's purpose is to inform, to entertain, or to furnish practical guidance. romance and adventure, humor and pathos, may well be handled in interview form. discoveries, inventions, new processes, unusual methods, new projects, and marked success of any kind may be explained to advantage in the words of those responsible for these undertakings. in obtaining material for an interview story, a writer should bear in mind a number of points regarding interviewing in general. first, in advance of meeting the person to be interviewed, he should plan the series of questions by which he hopes to elicit the desired information. "what would my readers ask this person if they had a chance to talk to him about this subject?" he must ask himself. that is, his questions should be those that readers would like to have answered. since it is the answers, however, and not the questions, that will interest readers, the questions in the completed article should be subordinated as much as possible. sometimes they may be skillfully embodied in the replies; again they may be implied merely, or entirely omitted. in studying an interview article, one can generally infer what questions the interviewer used. second, he must cultivate his memory so that he can recall a person's exact words without taking notes. most men talk more freely and easily when they are not reminded of the fact that what they are saying is to be printed. in interviewing, therefore, it is desirable to keep pencil and paper out of sight. third, immediately after leaving the person whom he has interviewed, the writer should jot down facts, figures, striking statements, and anything else that he might forget. examples of the interview article. as a timely special feature story for arbor day, a washington correspondent used the following interview with an expert as a means of giving readers practical advice on tree-planting: arbor day advice washington, april .--three spadefuls of rich, pulverized earth will do more to make a young tree grow than a -minute arbor day address by the president of the school board and a patriotic anthem by the senior class, according to dr. furman l. mulford, tree expert for the department of agriculture. not that dr. mulford would abbreviate the ceremonies attendant upon arbor day planting, but he thinks that they do not mean much unless the roots planted receive proper and constant care. for what the fourth of july is to the war and navy departments, and what labor day is to the department of labor, arbor day is to the department of agriculture. while the forestry bureau has concerned itself primarily with trees from the standpoint of the timber supply, dr. mulford has been making a study of trees best adapted for streets and cities generally. and nobody is more interested than he in what arbor day signifies or how trees should be chosen and reared. "we need trees most where our population is the thickest, and some trees, like some people, are not adapted to such a life," said dr. mulford. "for street or school yard planting one of the first considerations is a hardy tree, that can find nourishment under brick pavements or granite sidewalks. it must be one that branches high from the ground and ought to be native to the country and climate. america has the prettiest native trees and shrubs in the world and it is true patriotism to recognize them. "for southern states one of the prettiest and best of shade trees is the laurel oak, and there will be thousands of them planted this spring. it is almost an evergreen and is a quick growing tree. the willow oak is another. "a little farther north the red oak is one of the most desirable, and in many places the swamp maple grows well, though this latter tree does not thrive well in crowded cities. "nothing, however, is prettier than the american elm when it reaches the majesty of its maturity and i do not believe it will ever cease to be a favorite. one thing against it, though, is the 'elm beetle,' a pest which is spreading and which will kill some of our most beautiful trees unless spraying is consistently practised. china berry trees, abundant in the south, and box elders, native to a score of states, are quick growing, but they reach maturity too soon and begin to go to pieces." "what is the reason that so many arbor day trees die?" dr. mulford was asked. "usually lack of protection, and often lack of care in planting," was the answer. "when the new tree begins to put out tender rootlets a child brushing against it or 'inspecting' it too closely will break them off and it dies. or stock will nip off the new leaves and shoots and the result is the same. a frame around the tree would prevent this. "then, often wild trees are too big when transplanted. such trees have usually only a few long roots and so much of these are lost in transplanting that the large trunk cannot be nourished by the remainder. with nursery trees the larger they are the better it is, for they have a lot of small roots that do not have to be cut off. "fruit trees are seldom so successful as shade trees, either along a street or road or in a yard. in the first place their branches are too low and unless carefully pruned their shape is irregular. then they are subject to so many pests that unless constant care is given them they will not bear a hatful of fruit a season. "on the other hand, nut trees are usually hardy and add much to the landscape. pecan, chestnut, walnut and shaggy bark hickory are some of the more popular varieties." the first arbor day was observed in nebraska, which has fewer natural trees than any other state. this was in , and kansas was the second to observe the day, falling into line in . incidentally kansas ranks next to nebraska in dearth of trees. the arbor day idea originated with j. sterling morton, a nebraskan who was appointed secretary of agriculture by cleveland. now every state in the union recognizes the day and new york, pennsylvania, new jersey, minnesota, iowa, illinois, wisconsin and others have gotten out extensive arbor day booklets giving information concerning trees and birds; most of them even contain appropriate songs and poems for arbor day programs. how an interview combined with a description of a person may serve to create sympathy for her and for the cause that she represents is shown in the following article, which was published anonymously in the sunday magazine section of the _ohio state journal_. it was illustrated with two half-tone portraits, one of the young woman in indian costume, the other showing her in street dress. just like pocahontas of years ago "_oh, east is east and west is west, and never the two shall meet_." but they may send messengers. hark to the words of "one-who-does-things-well." "i carry a message from my people to the government at washington," says princess galilolie, youngest daughter of john ross, hereditary king of the "forest indians," the cherokees of oklahoma. "we have been a nation without hope. the land that was promised us by solemn treaty, 'so long as the grass should grow and the waters run,' has been taken from us. it was barren and wild when we received it seventy years ago. now it is rich with oil and cultivation, and the whites coveted our possessions. since it was thrown open to settlers no cherokee holds sovereign rights as before, when it was his nation. we are outnumbered. i have come as a voice from my people to speak to the people of the eastern states and to those at washington--most of all, if i am permitted to do so, to lay our wrongs before the president's wife, in whose veins glows the blood of the indian." only nineteen is this indian princess--this twentieth century pocahontas--who travels far to the seats of the mighty for her race. she is a tall, slim, stately girl from the foothills of the ozarks, from tahlequah, former capital of the cherokee nation. she says she is proud of every drop of indian blood that flows in her veins. but her skin is fair as old ivory and she is a college girl--a girl of the times to her finger-tips. "when an indian goes through college and returns to his or her people," she says with a smile, "they say, 'back to the blanket!' we have few blankets among the cherokees in tahlequah. i am the youngest of nine children, and we are all of us college graduates, as my father was before us." he is john ross d, chief of the cherokee nation, of mingled scotch and indian blood, in descent from "cooweeskowee," john ross i., the rugged old indian king who held out against andrew jackson back in for the ancient rights of the five nations to their lands along the southern atlantic states. she sat back on the broad window seat in the sunlight. beyond the window lay a bird's-eye view of new york housetops, the white man's permanent tepee. some spring birds alighted on a nearby telephone wire, sending out twittering mating cries to each other. "they make me want to go home," she said with a swift, expressive gesture. "but i will stay until the answer comes to us. do you know what they have called me, the old men and women who are wise--the full-bloods? galilolie--'one-who-does-things-well.' with us, when a name is given it is one with a meaning, something the child must grow to in fulfillment. so i feel i must not fail them now." "you see," she went on, lifting her chin, "it is we young half-bloods who must carry the strength and honor of our people to the world so it may understand us. all our lives we have been told tales by the old men--how our people were driven from their homes by the government, how gen. winfield scott's soldiers came down into our quiet villages and ordered the indians to go forth leaving everything behind them. my great-grandfather, the old king cooweeskowee, with his wife and children, paused at the first hilltop to look back at his home, and already the whites were moving into it. the house is still standing at rossville, ga. do you know what the old people tell us children when we wish we could go back there?" her eyes are half closed, her lips compressed as she says slowly, thrillingly: "they tell us it is easy to find the way over that 'trail of tears,' that through the wilderness it is blazed with the gravestones of those who were too weak to march. "that was seventy years ago, in . the government promised to pay amply for all it took from us, our homes and lands, cattle--even furniture. a treaty was made solemnly between the indians and the united states that oklahoma should be theirs 'as long as the grass should grow and the waters run.' "that meant perpetuity to us, don't you see?" she makes her points with a directness and simplicity that should disarm even the diplomatic suavity of uncle sam when he meets her in washington. "year after year the cherokees waited for the government to pay. and at last, three years ago, it came to us--$ . to each indian, seventy-eight years after the removal from georgia had taken place. "oil was discovered after the indians had taken the wilderness lands in oklahoma and reclaimed them. it was as if god, in reparation for the wrongs inflicted by whites, had given us the riches of the earth. my people grew rich from their wells, but a way was found to bind their wealth so they could not use it. it was said the indians were not fit to handle their own money." she lifts eyebrows and shoulders, her hands clasped before her tightly, as if in silent resentment of their impotence to help. "these are the things i want to tell; first our wrongs and then our colonization plan, for which we hope so much if the government will grant it. we are outnumbered since the land was opened up and a mass of 'sooners,' as we call them--squatters, claimers, settlers--swarmed in over our borders. the government again offered to pay us for the land they took back--the land that was to be ours in perpetuity 'while the grass grew and the waters ran.' we were told to file our claims with the whites. some of us did, but eight hundred of the full-bloods went back forty miles into the foothills under the leadership of red bird smith. they refuse to sell or to accept the government money for their valuable oil lands. to appease justice, the government allotted them lands anyway, in their absence, and paid the money for their old property into the banks, where it lies untouched. red bird and his 'night hawks' refuse to barter over a broken treaty. "ah, but i have gone up alone to the old men there." her voice softens. "they will talk to me because i am my father's daughter. my indian name means 'one-who-does-things-well.' so if i go to them they tell me their heart longings, what they ask for the cherokee. "and i shall put the message, if i can, before our president's wife. perhaps she will help." the personal experience article. a writer's own experiences, given under his name, under a pseudonym, or in anonymous form, can easily be made interesting to others. told in the first person, such stories are realistic and convincing. the pronoun "i" liberally sprinkled through the story, as it must be, gives to it a personal, intimate character that most readers like. conversation and description of persons, places, and objects may be included to advantage in these personal narratives. the possibilities of the personal experience story are as great as are those of the interview. besides serving as a vehicle for the writer's own experiences, it may be employed to give experiences of others. if, for example, a person interviewed objects to having his name used, it is possible to present the material obtained by the interview in the form of a personal experience story. in that case the article would have to be published without the writer's name, since the personal experiences that it records are not his own. permission to present material in a personal experience story should always be obtained from the individual whose experiences the writer intends to use. articles designed to give practical guidance, to show readers how to do something, are particularly effective when written in the first person. if these "how-to-do-something" articles are to be most useful to readers, the conditions under which the personal experience was obtained must be fairly typical. personal experience articles of this type are very popular in women's magazines, agricultural journals, and publications that appeal to business men. examples of the personal experience story. the opportunities for service offered to women by small daily newspapers are set forth in the story below, by means of the personal experiences of one woman. the article was published in the _woman's home companion_, and was illustrated by a half-tone reproduction of a wash drawing of a young woman seated at her desk in a newspaper office. "they call me the 'hen editor'" the story of a small-town newspaper woman by sadie l. mossler "what do you stay buried in this burg for? why, look how you drudge! and what do you get out of it? new york or some other big city is the place for you. there's where you can become famous instead of being a newspaper woman in a one-horse town." a big city newspaper man was talking. he was in our town on an assignment, and he was idling away spare time in our office. before i could answer, the door opened and a small girl came to my desk. "say," she said, "mama told me to come in here and thank you for that piece you put in the paper about us. you ought to see the eatin's folks has brought us! heaps an' heaps! and ma's got a job scrubbin' three stores." the story to which she referred was one that i had written about a family left fatherless, a mother and three small children in real poverty. i had written a plain appeal to the home people, with the usual results. "that," i said, "is one reason that i am staying here. maybe it isn't fame in big letters signed to an article, but it's another kind." his face wore a queer expression; but before he could retort another caller appeared, a well-dressed woman. "what do you mean," she declared, "by putting it in the paper that i served light refreshments at my party?" "wasn't it so?" i meekly inquired. "no!" she thundered. "i served ice cream, cake and coffee, and that makes two courses. see that it is right next time, or we'll stop the paper." here my visitor laughed. "i suppose that's another reason for your staying here. when we write anything about a person we don't have to see them again and hear about it." "but," i replied, "that's the very reason i cling to the small town. i want to see the people about whom i am writing, and live with them. that's what brings the rewards in our business. it's the personal side that makes it worth while, the real living of a newspaper instead of merely writing to fill its columns." in many small towns women have not heretofore been overly welcome on the staff of the local paper, for the small town is essentially conservative and suspicious of change. this war, however, is changing all that, and many a woman with newspaper ambitions will now have her chance at home. for ten years i have been what may be classified as a small town newspaper woman, serving in every capacity from society reporter to city and managing editor. during this time i have been tempted many times to go to fields where national fame and a larger salary awaited those who won. but it was that latter part that held me back, that and one other factor: "those who won," and "what do they get out of it more than i?" it is generally conceded that for one woman who succeeds in the metropolitan newspaper field about ten fail before the vicissitudes of city life, the orders of managing editors, and the merciless grind of the big city's working world. and with those who succeed, what have they more than i? they sign their names to articles; they receive big salaries; they are famous--as such fame goes. why is a signed name to an article necessary, when everyone knows when the paper comes out that i wrote the article? what does national fame mean compared with the fact that the local laws of the "society for the prevention of cruelty to animals" were not being enforced and that i wrote stories that remedied this condition? i began newspaper life as society reporter of a daily paper in a middle-western town of ten thousand inhabitants. that is, i supposed i was going to be society reporter, but before very long i found myself doing police assignments, sport, editing telegraph, and whatever the occasion demanded. i suppose that the beginnings of everyone's business life always remain vivid memories. the first morning i reported for work at seven o'clock. naturally, no one was in the front office, as the news department of a small-town newspaper office is sometimes called. i was embarrassed and nervous, and sat anxiously awaiting the arrival of the city editor. in five minutes he gave me sufficient instructions to last a year, but the only one i remember was, "ask all the questions you can think of, and don't let anyone bluff you out of a story." my first duty, and one that i performed every morning for several years, was to "make" an early morning train connecting with a large city, forty miles away. it was no easy task to approach strangers and ask their names and destination; but it was all good experience, and it taught me how to approach people and to ask personal questions without being rude. during my service as society reporter i learned much, so much that i am convinced there is no work in the smaller towns better suited to women. any girl who is bright and quick, who knows the ethics of being a lady, can hold this position and make better money at it than by teaching or clerking. each trade, they say, has its tricks, and being a society reporter is no exception. in towns of from one thousand to two thousand inhabitants, the news that mrs. x. is going to give a party spreads rapidly by that system of wireless telegraphy that excels the marconi--neighborhood gossip. but in the larger towns it is not so easy. in "our town," whenever there is a party the ice cream is ordered from a certain confectioner. daily he permitted us to see his order book. if mrs. jones ordered a quart of ice cream we knew that she was only having a treat for the family. if it were two quarts or more, it was a party, and if it was ice cream in molds, we knew a big formal function was on foot. society reporting is a fertile field, and for a long time i had been thinking that society columns were too dull. my ideal of a newspaper is that every department should be edited so that everyone would read all the paper. i knew that men rarely read the social column. one day a man said to me that he always called his wife his better judgment instead of his better half. that appealed to me as printable, but where to put it in the paper? why not in my own department? i did so. that night when the paper came out everyone clamored to know who the man was, for i had merely written, "a man in town calls his wife his better judgment instead of his better half." then i decided to make the society department a reflection of our daily life and sayings. in order to get these in i used the initials of my title, "s.r." i never used names, but i always managed to identify my persons. as one might expect, i brought down a storm about my head. many persons took the hints for themselves when they were not so intended, and there were some amusing results. for instance, when i said in the paper that "a certain man in a down-town store has perfect manners," the next day twelve men thanked me, and i received four boxes of candy as expressions of gratitude. there were no complaints about the society column being dull after this; everyone read it and laughed at it, and it was quoted in many exchanges. of course, i was careful to hurt no one's feelings, but i did occasionally have a little good-natured fun at the expense of people who wouldn't mind it. little personal paragraphs of this sort must never be malicious or mean--if the paper is to keep its friends. of all my newspaper experience i like best to dwell on the society reporting; but if i were to advance i knew that i must take on more responsibility, so i became city editor of another paper. i was virtually managing editor, for the editor and owner was a politician and was away much of the time. it was then that i began to realize the responsibility of my position, to grapple with the problem of dealing fairly both with my employer and the public. the daily life with its varying incidents, the big civic issues, the stories to be handled, the rights of the advertisers to be considered, the adjusting of the news to the business department--all these were brought before me with a powerful clarity. when a woman starts on a city paper she knows that there are linotypes, presses and other machinery. often she has seen them work; but her knowledge of "how" they work is generally vague. it was on my third day as city editor that i realized my woeful ignorance of the newspaper business from the mechanical viewpoint. i had just arrived at the office when the foreman came to my desk. "say," he said, "we didn't get any stuff set last night. power was off. better come out and pick out the plate you want to fill with." what he meant by the power being off i could understand, and perforce i went out to select the plate. he handed me long slabs of plate matter to read. later i learned that printed copies of the plate are sent for selection, but in my ignorance i took up the slabs and tried to read the type. to my astonishment it was all backward, and i found myself wondering if it were a chinese feature story. finally i threw myself on his mercy and told him to select what he chose. as i left the composing-room i heard him say to one of the printers: "that's what comes of the boss hiring a hen editor." shortly after noon a linotype operator came to me with his hands full of copy. "if you want any of this dope in the paper," he said, "you'll have to grab off a paragraph here and there. my machine's got a bad squirt, and it'll take an hour or more to fix it." greek, all greek! a squirt! i was too busy "grabbing off" paragraphs to investigate; but then and there i resolved to penetrate all these mysteries. i found the linotype operator eager to show me how his machine works, and the foreman was glad to take me around and instruct me in his department and also in the pressroom. i have had trouble with printers since; but in the end they had to admit that the "hen editor" knew what she was talking about. there is a great cry now for woman's advancement. if the women are hunting equality as their goal let them not seek out the crowded, hostile cities, but remain in the smaller places where their work can stand out distinctly. a trite phrase expresses it that a newspaper is the "voice of the people." what better than that a woman should set the tune for that voice? equality with men! i sit at my desk looking out over the familiar home scene. a smell of fresh ink comes to me, and a paper just off the press is slapped down on my desk. "look!" says the foreman. "we got out some paper today, didn't we?" "_we_!" how's that for equality? he has been twenty years at his trade and i only ten, yet he includes me. when i am tempted to feel that my field is limited, my tools crude, and my work unhonored and unsung, i recall a quotation i read many years ago, and i will place it here at the end of the "hen editor's" uneventful story. back before my mind floats that phrase, "buried in this burg." if a person has ability, will not the world learn it? "if a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or sing a more glorious song than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." that a personal experience story may be utilized to show readers how to do something is demonstrated in the following article taken from _the designer_. it was illustrated by a half-tone made from a wash drawing of one corner of the burlap room. a bedroom in burlap the most satisfactory room in our bungalow by katherine van dorn our burlap room is the show room of our bungalow. visitors are guided through the living-room, the bedroom, the sleeping-porch and kitchen, and allowed to express their delight and satisfaction while we wait with bated breath for the grand surprise to be given them. then, when they have concluded, we say: "but you should see our burlap room!" then we lead the way up the stairs to the attic and again stand and wait. we know what is coming, and, as we revel in the expressions of admiration evoked, we again declaim with enormous pride: "we made it all ourselves!" there is a solid satisfaction in making a room, especially for an amateur who hardly expects to undertake room-making as a profession. we regard our room as an original creation produced by our own genius, not likely to be duplicated in our personal experience. it grew in this wise: when we came to the bungalow last spring the family numbered three instead of the two of the year before. now number three, a healthy and bouncing young woman, necessitated a "sleeping-in" maid if her parents were ever to be able to detach themselves from her person. we had never had a sleeping-in maid at the bungalow before and the problem of where to put her was a serious one. we well knew that no self-respecting servant would condescend to sleep in an attic, although the attic was cool, airy and comfortable. we rather thought, too, that the maid might despise us if we gave her the bedroom and took up our quarters under the rafters. it would be an easy enough matter for carpenters and plasterers to put a room in the attic, but we lacked the money necessary for such a venture. and so we puzzled. at first we thought of curtains, but the high winds which visit us made curtains impracticable. then we thought of tacking the curtains top and bottom, and from this the idea evolved. the carpenter whom we consulted proved to be amenable to suggestion and agreed to put us up a framework in a day. we helped. we outlined the room on the floor. this took two strips of wood about one and a half by two inches. the other two sides of the room were formed by the wall of the attic and by the meeting place of the roof and floor--that is, there was in reality no fourth wall; the room simply ended where floor and roof met. two strips were nailed to the rafters in positions similar to those on the floor, and then an upright strip was inserted and nailed fast at intervals of every three feet. this distance was decided by the fact that curtain materials usually come a yard wide. for a door we used a discarded screen-door, which, having been denuded of the bits of wire clinging to it, answered the purpose very well. the door completed the skeleton. we used a beautiful soft blue burlap. tacking on proved a more difficult matter than we had anticipated, owing to the fact that our carpenter had used cypress for the framework. we stretched the material taut and then tacked it fast with sharp-pointed, large-headed brass tacks, and while inserting these we measured carefully the distances between the tacks in order to keep this trimming uniform. the two walls supplied by the framework were quickly covered, but the rough wall of the attic necessitated some cutting, as we had to tack the burlap to the uprights and these had not been placed with yard-wide material in view. above the screen-door frame was a hiatus of space running up into the peak. the carpenter had thoughtfully run two strips up to the roof and this enabled us to fill in by cutting and turning in the cloth. a corresponding space above the window received similar treatment. then we covered the inner surface of the screen door and we had a room. but we were far from satisfied. the room looked bare and crude. we bought a can of dark-oak stain and gave the floor a coat and this improved matters so much that we stained the wood visible on the door frame and about the window. having finished this, we saw the need of doing something for the ceiling. the ceiling was merely the inner surface of the roof. the builders had made it of boards of varying sizes, the rafters were rough and splintery and there were myriads of nails sticking through everywhere. it looked a hopeless task. but we bought more stain and went to work. before beginning we covered our precious blue walls with newspapers, donned our oldest clothes and spread papers well over the floor. it was well that we did. the staining was not difficult work but the nails made it splashy and we were pretty well spotted when we finished. but when we did finish we felt compensated. the nails had become invisible. the dull blue walls with their bright brass trimming, the soft brown floor and the stained, raftered roof made the room the most attractive in the house. we could not rest, although the hour was late and we were both tired, until we had furnished it. we put in a couple of small rugs, a brass bed, and a white bureau. we hung two pictures securely upon the uprights of the skeleton. we added a couple of chairs and a rack for clothing, put up a white madras curtain at the window, and regarded the effect with the utmost satisfaction. the room answered the purpose exactly. the burlap was thick enough to act as a screen. it was possible to see movement through it, but not form. it insured privacy and still permitted the air to pass through for ventilation. as a finishing touch we screwed a knob on the outside of the door, put a brass hook on the inside and went downstairs to count the cost. as a quick and inexpensive method of adding to the number of rooms in one's house, the making of a burlap room is without an equal. the idea is not patented, and we who deem ourselves its creators, are only too happy to send it on, in the hope that it may be of service to some other puzzled householder who is wondering where to put an added family member. the confession story. closely akin to the personal experience article is the so-called "confession story." usually published anonymously, confession stories may reveal more personal and intimate experiences than a writer would ordinarily care to give in a signed article. needless to say, most readers are keenly interested in such revelations, even though they are made anonymously. like personal experience stories, they are told in the first person with a liberal use of the pronoun "i." a writer need not confine himself to his own experiences for confession stories; he may obtain valuable material for them from others. not infrequently his name is attached to these articles accompanied by the statement that the confession was "transcribed," "taken down," or "recorded" by the writer. conditions of life in classes of society with which the reader is not familiar may be brought home to him through the medium of the confession story. it may be made the means of arousing interest in questions about which the average reader cares little. the average man or woman, for example, is probably little concerned with the problem of the poorly paid college professor, but hundreds of thousands doubtless read with interest the leading article in an issue of the _saturday evening post_ entitled, "the pressure on the professor." this was a confession story, which did not give the author's own experiences but appeared as "transcribed by walter e. weyl." this article was obviously written with the purpose, skillfully concealed, of calling attention to the hard lot of the underpaid professor. constructive criticism of existing conditions may be successfully embodied in the form of a confession article that describes the evils as they have been experienced by one individual. if the article is to be entirely effective and just, the experience of the one person described must be fairly typical of that of others in the same situation. in order to show that these experiences are characteristic, the writer may find it advantageous to introduce facts and figures tending to prove that his own case is not an isolated example. in the confession article mentioned above, "the pressure on the professor," the assistant professor who makes the confession, in order to demonstrate that his own case is typical, cites statistics collected by a colleague at stanford university giving the financial status of assistant professors in various american universities. confessions that show how faults and personal difficulties have been overcome prove helpful to readers laboring under similar troubles. here again, what is related should be typical rather than exceptional. examples of the confession story. that an intimate account of the financial difficulties of a young couple as told by the wife, may not only make an interesting story but may serve as a warning to others, is shown in the confession story below. signed "f.b.," and illustrated with a pen and ink sketch of the couple at work over their accounts, it was printed in _every week_, a popular illustrated periodical formerly published by the crowell publishing company, new york. the things we learned to do without we were married within a month of our commencement, after three years of courtship at a big middle west university. looking back, it seems to me that rich, tumultuous college life of ours was wholly pagan. all about us was the free-handed atmosphere of "easy money," and in our "crowd" a tacit implication that a good time was one of the primary necessities of life. such were our ideas when we married on a salary of one hundred dollars a month. we took letters of introduction to some of the "smart" people in a suburb near chicago, and they proved so delightfully cordial that we settled down among them without stopping to consider the discrepancies between their ways and our income. we were put up at a small country club--a simple affair enough, comparatively speaking--that demanded six weeks' salary in initial dues and much more in actual subsequent expense. "everybody" went out for saturday golf and stayed for dinner and dancing. by fall there was in working operation a dinner club of the "younger married set," as our local column in the city papers called us; an afternoon bridge club; and a small theater club that went into town every fortnight for dinner and a show. costly little amusements, but hardly more than were due charming young people of our opportunities and tastes. i think that was our attitude, although we did not admit it. in september we rented a "smart" little apartment. we had planned to furnish it by means of several generous checks which were family contributions to our array of wedding gifts. what we did was to buy the furniture on the instalment plan, agreeing to pay twenty dollars a month till the bill was settled, and we put the furniture money into running expenses. it was the beginning of a custom. they gave most generously, that older generation. visiting us, max's mother would slip a bill into my always empty purse when we went shopping; or mine would drop a gold piece into my top bureau drawer for me to find after she had gone. and there were always checks for birthdays. everything went into running expenses; yet, in spite of it, our expenses ran quite away. max said i was "too valuable a woman to put into the kitchen," so we hired a maid, good-humoredly giving her _carte blanche_ on the grocery and meat market. our bills, for all our dining out, were enormous. there were clothes, too. max delighted in silk socks and tailored shirts, and he ordered his monogramed cigarettes by the thousand. my own taste ran to expensive little hats. it is hardly necessary to recount the details. we had our first tremendous quarrel at the end of six months, when, in spite of our furniture money and our birthday checks, we found ourselves two hundred and fifty dollars in debt. but as we cooled we decided that there was nothing we could do without; we could only be "more careful." every month we reached that same conclusion. there was nothing we could do without. at the end of the year on a $ salary we were $ behind; eight months later, after our first baby came, we were over a thousand--and by that time, it seemed, permanently estranged. i actually was carrying out a threat of separation and stripping the apartment, one morning, when max came back from town and sat down to discuss matters with me. a curious labyrinthine discussion it was, winding from recriminations and flat admissions that our marriage was a failure and our love was dead, to the most poignant memories of our engagement days. but its central point was max's detached insistence that we make marriage over into a purely utilitarian affair. "man needs the decencies of a home," he said over and over. "it doesn't do a fellow any good with a firm like mine to have them know he can't manage his affairs. and my firm is the kind of firm i want to work for. this next year is important; and if i spend it dragging through a nasty divorce business, knowing that everybody knows, i'll be about thirty per cent efficient. i'm willing to admit that marriage--even a frost like ours--is useful. will you?" i had to. my choice rested between going home, where there were two younger sisters, or leaving the baby somewhere and striking out for myself. "it seems to me," said max, taking out his pencil, "that if two reasonably clever people can put their best brain power and eight hours a day into a home, it might amount to something sometime. the thing resolves itself into a choice between the things we can do without and the things we can't. we'll list them. we can't do without three meals and a roof; but there must be something." "you can certainly give up silk socks and cigarettes," i said; and, surprisingly, on this old sore point between us max agreed. "you can give up silk stockings, then," he said, and put them down. silk socks and silk stockings! out of all possible economies, they were the only things that we could think of. finally-- "we could make baby an excuse," i said, "and never get out to the club till very late--after dinner--and stay just for the dancing. and we could get out of the dinner club and the theater bunch. only, we ought to have some fun." "you can go to matinées, and tell me about them, so we can talk intelligently. we'll say we can't leave the kid nights--" "we can buy magazines and read up on plays. we'll talk well enough if we do that, and people won't know we haven't been. put down: 'magazines for plays.'" he did it quite seriously. do we seem very amusing to you? so anxious lest we should betray our economies--so impressed with our social "position" and what people might think! it is funny enough to me, looking back; but it was bitter business then. i set myself to playing the devoted and absorbed young mother. but it was a long, long time before it became the sweetest of realities. i cried the first time i refused a bridge game to "stay with baby"; and i carried a sore heart those long spring afternoons when i pushed his carriage conspicuously up and down the avenue while the other women motored past me out for tea at the club. yet those long walks were the best thing that ever happened to me. i had time to think, for one thing; and i gained splendid health, losing the superfluous flesh i was beginning to carry, and the headaches that usually came after days of lunching and bridge and dining. i fell into the habit, too, of going around by the market, merely to have an objective, and buying the day's supplies. the first month of that habit my bills showed a decrease of $ . . i shall always remember that sum, because it is certainly the biggest i have ever seen. i began to ask the prices of things; and i made my first faint effort at applying our game of substitution to the food problem, a thing which to me is still one of the most fascinating factors in housekeeping. one afternoon in late summer, i found a delightful little bungalow in process of building, on a side street not so _very_ far from the proper avenue. i investigated idly, and found that the rent was thirty dollars less than we were paying. yet even then i hesitated. it was max who had the courage to decide. "the only thing we are doing without is the address," he said, "and that isn't a loss that looks like $ to me." all that fall and winter we kept doggedly at our game of substitution. max bought a ready-made tuxedo, and i ripped out the label and sewed in one from a good tailor. i carried half a dozen dresses from the dyer's to a woman who evolved three very decent gowns; and then i toted them home in a box with a marking calculated to impress any chance acquaintance. we were so ashamed of our attempts at thrift that they came hard. often enough we quarreled after we had been caught in some sudden temptation that set us back a pretty penny, and we were inevitably bored and cross when we refused some gayety for economy's sake. we resolutely decided to read aloud the evenings the others went to the theater club; and as resolutely we substituted a stiff game of chess for the bridge that we could not afford. but we had to learn to like them both. occasionally we entertained at very small, very informal dinners, "on account of the baby"; and definitely discarded the wines that added the "smartness" demanded at formal affairs. people came to those dinners in their second or third best: but they stayed late, and laughed hilariously to the last second of their stay. in the spring we celebrated max's second respectable rise in salary by dropping out of the country club. we could do without it by that time. at first we thought it necessary to substitute a determined tramp for the sunday morning golf game; but we presently gave that up. we were becoming garden enthusiasts. and as a substitution for most of the pleasure cravings of life, gardening is to be highly recommended. discontent has a curious little trick of flowing out of the earthy end of a hoe. later that summer i found that a maid was one of the things i could do without, making the discovery in an interregnum not of my original choosing. a charwoman came in for the heavier work, and i took over the cooking. almost immediately, in spite of my inexperience, the bills dropped. i could not cook rich pastries and fancy desserts, and fell back on simple salads and fruit instead. i dipped into the household magazines, followed on into technical articles on efficiency, substituted labor-savers wherever i could, and started my first muddled set of accounts. at the beginning of the new year i tried my prentice hand on a budget; and that was the year that we emerged from debt and began to save. that was six very short years ago. when, with three babies, the bungalow became a trifle small, we built a little country house and moved farther out. several people whom we liked best among that first "exclusive younger set" have moved out too, and formed the nucleus of a neighborhood group that has wonderful times on incomes no one of which touches $ a year. ours is not as much as that yet; but it is enough to leave a wide and comfortable margin all around our wants. max has given up his pipe for cigarettes (unmonogramed), and patronizes a good tailor for business reasons. but in everything else our substitutions stand: gardening for golf; picnics for roadhouse dinners; simple food, simple clothing, simple hospitality, books, a fire, and a game of chess on winter nights. we don't even talk about economies any more. we like them. but--every christmas there comes to me via the christmas tree a box of stockings, and for max a box of socks--heavy silk. there never is any card in either box; but i think we'll probably get them till we die. the following short confession, signed "mrs. m.f.e.," was awarded the first prize by the _american magazine_ in a contest for articles on "the best thing experience has taught me": forty years bartered for what? a tiny bit of wisdom, but as vital as protoplasm. i know, for i bartered forty precious years of wifehood and motherhood to learn it. during the years of my childhood and girlhood, our family passed from wealth to poverty. my father and only brother were killed in battle during the civil war; our slaves were freed; our plantations melted from my mother's white hands during the reconstruction days; our big town house was sold for taxes. when i married, my only dowry was a fierce pride and an overwhelming ambition to get back our material prosperity. my husband was making a "good living." he was kind, easy-going, with a rare capacity for enjoying life and he loved his wife with that chivalrous, unquestioning, "the queen-can-do-no-wrong" type of love. but even in our days of courting i answered his ardent love-making with, "and we will work and save and buy back the big house; then we will--" etc., etc. and he? ah, alone at sixty, i can still hear echoing down the years his big tender laugh, as he'd say, "oh, what a de-ah, ambitious little sweetheart i have!" he owned a home, a little cottage with a rose garden at one side of it--surely, with love, enough for any bride. but i--i saw only the ancestral mansion up the street, the big old house that had passed out of the hands of our family. i would have no honeymoon trip; i wanted the money instead. john kissed each of my palms before he put the money into them. my fingers closed greedily over the bills; it was the nest egg, the beginning. next i had him dismiss his bookkeeper and give me the place. i didn't go to his store--southern ladies didn't do that in those days--but i kept the books at home, and i wrote all the business letters. so it happened when john came home at night, tired from his day's work at the store, i had no time for diversions, for love-making, no hours to walk in the rose garden by his side--no, we must talk business. i can see john now on many a hot night--and summer _is_ hot in the gulf states--dripping with perspiration as he dictated his letters to me, while i, my aching head near the big hot lamp, wrote on and on with hurried, nervous fingers. outside there would be the evening breeze from the gulf, the moonlight, the breath of the roses, all the romance of the southern night--but not for us! the children came--four, in quick succession. but so fixed were my eyes on the goal of success, i scarcely realized the mystery of motherhood. oh, i loved them! i loved john, too. i would willingly have laid down my life for him or for any one of the children. and i intended _sometime_ to stop and enjoy john and the children. oh, yes, i was going really to _live_ after we had bought back the big house, and had done so and so! in the meanwhile, i held my breath and worked. "i'll be so glad," i remember saying one day to a friend, "when all my children are old enough to be off at school all day!" think of that! glad when the best years of our lives together were passed! the day came when the last little fellow trudged off to school and i no longer had a baby to hamper me. we were living now in the big old home. we had bought it back and paid for it. i no longer did john's bookkeeping for him--he paid a man a hundred dollars a month to do that--but i still kept my hand on the business. then suddenly one day--john died. _died_ in what should have been the prime and vigor of his life. i worked harder than ever then, not from necessity, but because in the first few years after john left i was _afraid_ to stop and think. so the years hurried by! one by one the children grew up and entered more or less successful careers of their own.... i don't feel that i know them so very well. and now that the time of life has come when i must stop and think, i ask myself: "what did you do with the wonderful gifts life laid in your lap--the love of a good man, domestic happiness, the chance to know intimately four little souls?" and being honest i have to answer: "i bartered life's great gifts for life's pitiful extras--for pride, for show!" if my experience were unique it would not be worth publishing, but it is only too common. think of the wives who exchange the best years of their lives, their husband's comfort, his peace of mind, if not to buy back the family mansion, then for a higher social position; sometimes it is merely for--clothes! it is to you women who still have the opportunity to "walk with john in the garden" that i give my dearly bought bit of experience. stop holding your breath until you get this or that; stop reaching out blindly for to-morrow's prize; _live_ to-day! the "how-to-do-something" article. articles the primary purpose of which is to give directions for doing something in a particular way, are always in demand. the simplest type is the recipe or formula containing a few directions for combining ingredients. more elaborate processes naturally demand more complex directions and require longer articles. in the simpler types the directions are given in the imperative form; that is, the reader is told to "take" this thing and that, and to "mix" it with something else. although such recipe directions are clear, they are not particularly interesting. many readers, especially those of agricultural journals, are tired of being told to do this and that in order to get better results. they are inclined to suspect the writer of giving directions on the basis of untried theory rather than on that of successful practice. there is an advantage, therefore, in getting away from formal advice and directions and in describing actual processes as they have been carried on successfully. articles intended to give practical guidance are most interesting when cast in the form of an interview, a personal experience, or a narrative. in an interview article, a person may indirectly give directions to others by describing in his own words the methods that he has used to accomplish the desired results. or the writer, by telling his own experiences in doing something, may give readers directions in an interesting form. whatever method he adopts, the writer must keep in mind the questions that his readers would be likely to ask if he were explaining the method or process to them in person. to one who is thoroughly familiar with a method the whole process is so clear that he forgets how necessary it is to describe every step to readers unfamiliar with it. the omission of a single point may make it impossible for the reader to understand or to follow the directions. although a writer need not insult the intelligence of his readers by telling them what they already know, he may well assume that they need to be reminded tactfully of many things that they may have known but have possibly forgotten. two practical guidance articles. a method of filing office records, as explained apparently by the man who devised it, is well set forth in the following combination of the personal experience and the "how-to-do-something" types of articles. it appeared in _system_ with a half-tone reproduction of a photograph showing a man looking over records in a drawer of the desk at which he is seated. who'll do john's work? by m. c. hobart "it's a quarter after and schuyler hasn't showed up," telephoned beggs, one of our foremen, last tuesday morning. "i've put fanning on his machine, but that won't help much unless i can get somebody to work at fanning's bench. got anybody you can let me have for to-day?" i didn't know offhand. but i told beggs i'd call him back. ten minutes later a young lathe operator reported to beggs. he was able to run fanning's machine while the latter temporarily filled the shoes of the absent schuyler. scarcely a week passes that does not bring a similar call to our employment office. while our plant, as plants go, is not large, we always have a number of men working with us who are fitted by experience and adaptability to do other work than that which they are hired to do. such men are invaluable to know about, especially when an operator stays away for a day or perhaps a week and the shop is full of orders. once it was a problem to find the right man immediately. a few additions to our employment records made it possible to keep track of each man's complete qualifications. the employment records i keep in my desk in the deep drawer. they are filed alphabetically by name. when we hire a man we write his name and the job he is to fill on the outside of a by manila envelope. into this envelope we put his application, his references, and other papers. his application tells us what kinds of work he can do and has done in other shops. there are different kinds of work to be done in our shops, from gear cutting to running errands. i have listed these operations, alphabetically, on a cardboard the exact length of the employment record envelope, inches. when a man tells me in his application that he not only can operate a drill press, for which he is hired, but has also worked at grinding, i fit my cardboard list to the top of the employment record envelope and punch two notches along the top directly opposite the words "drill press" and "grinding" on my list. then i file away the envelope. i rest secure now in my knowledge that i have not buried a potential grinder in a drill press operator, or that i do not have to carry his double qualifications in my mind. i know that if beggs should suddenly telephone me some morning that his grinder is absent--sick, or fishing, perhaps--i need only take my cardboard list and, starting at a, run it down my file until i come to the envelope of the drill press operator. i am stopped there automatically by the second notch on the envelope which corresponds in position to the word "grinder" on my list. and there is every likelihood that, with the necessary explanation to the man's own foreman, beggs will get his grinder for the day. from the following article, printed in _farm and fireside_ city and country readers alike may glean much practical information concerning ways and means of making a comfortable living from a small farm. it was illustrated by four half-tone reproductions of photographs showing ( ) the house, ( ) the woman at her desk with a typewriter before her, ( ) the woman in her dining-room about to serve a meal from a labor-saving service wagon, and ( ) the woman in the poultry yard with a basket of eggs. ten acres and a living she was young, popular, and had been reared in the city. everybody laughed when she decided to farm--but that was four years ago by alice mary kimball when she decided to be a farmer everybody laughed. she was young, popular, unusually fond of frocks and fun. she had been reared in the city. she didn't know a jersey from a hereford, or a wyandotte from a plymouth rock. "you'll be back in six months," her friends said. four years have passed. mrs. charles s. tupper still is "buried" in the country. moreover, she is supplying eggs, chickens, honey, and home-canned goods to those of her former associates who are willing to pay for quality. "farming," said mrs. tupper, "is the ideal vocation for the woman who feels the modern desire for a job and the need of marriage and a home. "i never wanted a job so keenly as when i found myself in a small city apartment without enough to do to keep me busy. after i'd swept and dusted and prepared meals for two, i had hours of time on my hands. the corner bakeshop, the laundry, and modern conveniences had thrust upon me more leisure than i could use. mr. tupper is a young engineer whose work takes him to various parts of the southwest. in his absence i felt strongly the need of filling up my idle hours in some interesting, useful way. "i didn't quite like the idea of spending all my spare time on cards, calling, women's clubs, and social pleasures. i longed to be a real partner to my husband and to share in making the family income as well as spending it. "we had a few thousand saved for a home, and were trying to decide where to build. one day it flashed upon me: 'why invest in city property? why not a little farm? then we'll have a home; i'll have a job, and can make our living.'" the idea materialized into a modern bungalow on a -acre farm in westdale, missouri, an hour's drive from kansas city. mr. tupper's salary furnished working capital for the enterprise and mrs. tupper has found congenial work as farmer-in-chief. poultry, bees, and a vegetable garden are mrs. tupper's specialities. her side lines are a pig and a registered jersey cow. she looks after the poultry, works in garden and apiary, and milks the cow herself. she employs very little help. "it wasn't difficult to get a start in learning to farm," mrs. tupper explained. "i visited farms and studied the methods of farmers and their wives. i asked lots of questions. "i didn't have any old fogyisms to unlearn, and i didn't acquire any. i went straight to the agricultural college and the state poultry experiment station for instructions. while i was living in the country supervising the building of the bungalow, i read and digested every bulletin i could get. i'm still studying bulletins. i subscribe for several farm papers and a bee journal. "of course, i learned a great deal from the practical experience of the people about me, but i checked up everything to the rules and directions of government and state agricultural experts, which may be had for the price of a postage stamp. i tried to take orders intelligently. i ignored old rules for poultry and bee-keeping." mrs. tupper's chickens are hatched in incubators, hovered in a coal-heated brooder house, fed according to experiment-station directions, and reared in poultry houses built from experiment-station designs. from the first they have been practically free from lice and disease. she gets winter eggs. even in zero weather and at times when feed is most costly, her spring pullets more than pay their way. "bees responded as readily to proper treatment," she said. "my second season i harvested $ worth of comb honey from twenty working swarms. and i was stung not a half-dozen times at that." some of mrs. tupper's neighbors were inclined to joke at first at her appetite for bulletins, her belief in experts, and her rigid insistence on pure-bred stock and poultry. they admit now that her faith has been justified. if mrs. tupper had trod in the well-worn neighborhood ruts, she would have marketed her produce by the country-store-commission-man-retailer-consumer route; but again she did not. from the first she planned to plug the leakage of farm profits in middlemen's commissions. when she had anything to sell, she put on a good-looking tailored suit, a becoming hat, smart shoes and gloves, and went to the city to talk to ultimate consumers. the consciousness of being dressed appropriately--not expensively or ornately--is a valuable aid to the farm saleswoman, mrs. tupper thinks. "if a salesman comes to me shabbily dressed or flashily dressed, i can't give him a fair hearing," she said. "i may let him talk on, but i decide against him the instant i look at him. so i reasoned that a trim, pleasing appearance would be as valuable an asset to me as to the men who sell pickles, insurance, or gilt-edged bonds. it would mean a favorable first impression and open the way to show samples and make a sales talk. "if i tried to interview a prospective customer handicapped by the consciousness that my skirt hung badly or that my shoes were shabby, not only would i be timid and ill at ease, but my appearance would suggest to the city buyer the very slipshodness and lack of reliability he fears in buying direct from the farm. "i go strong on attractive samples. it would be useless to try for fancy prices if i brought honey to town in mean-looking cases or rusty cans. a slight drip down the side of a package might not be proof positive of poor quality, but it would frighten away a careful buyer. likewise, i do not illustrate my egg sales talks with a sample dozen of odd sizes and shapes. it is needless to add that goods delivered to customers must be of the same quality and appearance as the samples, and that one must keep one's promises to the dot. a little well-directed enterprise will land a customer, but only good service can hold him." when the current wholesale price of honey was $ a case, mrs. tupper's comb honey has been in demand at from to cents a pound. she disposes of every pound to private customers and to one grocery store which caters to "fancy" trade. she sells eggs from her anconas at from to cents more a dozen than the country store is paying its patrons who bring in eggs and "take them out in trade." mrs. tupper figured that if a trademark has advertising pull for a manufacturing concern, it would help the farm business. she christened her acres "graceland farm," and this name is stamped on everything that leaves her place. she had cards printed bearing the name of the farm, its telephone number, and its products. graceland farm is also emphasized on letter heads. "prompt attention to correspondence is an easy method of advertising a farm business," she suggested. "a typewritten letter on letterhead stationery, mailed promptly, creates a pleasant impression on the man who has written to inquire the price of a setting of eggs or a trio of chickens. "suppose i delayed a week and wrote the reply with pen and ink, or, worse, with a pencil on ruled tablet paper. i'd stand a good chance of losing a customer, wouldn't i? if i didn't miss an order outright, i should certainly leave a suggestion of inefficiency and carelessness which could only be charged to the debit side of the business." she has found that a $ typewriter and a letter file have helped greatly to create the good-will which is as essential to the farmer business woman as to the woman who runs a millinery shop or an insurance office. mrs. tupper has encouraged automobile trade. her apiary is within sight of the road, and a "honey for sale" sign brings many a customer. many of her city patrons have the habit of driving to the farm and returning with a hamper laden with eggs, honey, butter, or canned stuff from the vegetable garden. the garden last summer supplied material for more than cans of vegetables. the neighbors smile at her zeal for fairs and poultry shows. "it isn't fun altogether; it's business," she tells them. it was cold, disagreeable work, for instance, to prepare an exhibit for the heart of america poultry show at kansas city last fall; but mrs. tupper felt repaid. she won first prize on hen, first and second on pullet, and fourth on cockerel. then she exhibited at the st. joseph, missouri, poultry show with even better success. "these prizes will add to the value of every chicken i have, and to all my poultry products. they give me another advertising point," she said. "the shows gave me a fine opportunity to meet possible customers and to make friends for my business. i was on the job for days. i met scores of people and distributed hundreds of cards. i learned a lot, too, in talks with judges and experienced breeders." the tupper bungalow is neat and attractive. in spite of her duties in the poultry house and apiary, mrs. tupper serves appetizing meals. she finds time for church work and neighborhood calls, and gives every thursday to the red cross. the housework is speeded up with such conveniences as hot and cold water in kitchen and bathroom, and steam heat. the kitchen is an efficient little workshop lined by cupboards and shelves. mrs. tupper can sit before her kitchen cabinet and prepare a meal without moving about for ingredients and utensils. a service wagon saves steps between kitchen and dining-room. the floors of the bungalow are of hard wood. they are waxed a few times each year, and a little work each morning with dust mop and carpet sweeper keeps them in good order. the washing is sent out. "i couldn't earn an income from the farm if i had a farmhouse without modern improvements," mrs. tupper declared. "reducing drudgery to a minimum is only plain business sense. laundry work, scrubbing, and dishwashing have a low economic value. such unskilled labor eats up the time and strength one needs for the more profitable and interesting tasks of farm management, accounting and correspondence, advertising and marketing." the personality sketch. we all like to read about prominent and successful people. we want to know more about the men and women who figure in the day's news, and even about interesting persons whose success has not been great enough to be heralded in the press. what appeals to us most about these individuals is, not mere biographical facts such as appear in _who's who_, but the more intimate details of character and personality that give us the key to their success. we want to see them as living men and women. it is the writer's problem to present them so vividly that we shall feel as if we had actually met them face to face. the purpose of the personality sketch may be ( ) to give interesting information concerning either prominent or little known persons, ( ) to furnish readers inspiration that may bear fruit in their own lives, ( ) to give practical guidance by showing how one individual has accomplished a certain thing. whether the aim is to afford food for thought, inspiration to action, or guidance in practical matters, the treatment is essentially the same. the recognized methods of describing characters in fiction may be used to advantage in portraying real persons. these are ( ) using general descriptive terms, ( ) describing personal appearance, ( ) telling of characteristic actions, ( ) quoting their words, ( ) giving biographical facts, ( ) citing opinions of others about them, ( ) showing how others react to them. by a judicious combination of several of these methods, a writer can make his readers visualize the person, hear him speak, watch him in characteristic actions, and understand his past life, as well as realize what others think of him and how they act toward him. material for a personality sketch may be obtained in one of three ways: ( ) from a more or less intimate acquaintance with the person to be described; ( ) from an interview with the person, supplemented by conversation with others about him; ( ) from printed sketches of him combined with information secured from others. it is easier to write personality sketches about men and women whom we know well than it is about those whom we have never met, or with whom we have had only a short interview. inexperienced writers should not attempt to prepare sketches of persons whom they know but slightly. in a single interview a writer who is observant, and who is a keen judge of human nature, may be able to get an impression sufficiently strong to serve as the basis of a satisfactory article, especially if the material obtained in the interview is supplemented by printed sketches and by conversations with others. personality sketches sometimes include long interviews giving the person's opinions on the subject on which he is an authority. in such articles the sketch usually precedes the interview. examples of the personality sketch. the first of the following sketches appeared, with a half-tone portrait, in the department of "interesting people" in the _american magazine_; the second was sent out by the newspaper enterprise association, cleveland, ohio, which supplies several hundred daily newspapers with special features. ( ) "tommy"--who enjoys straightening out things by sampson raphaelson six years ago a young bulgarian immigrant, dreamy-eyed and shabby, came to the university of illinois seeking an education. he inquired his way of a group of underclassmen and they pointed out to him a large red building on the campus. "go there," they said gayly, "and ask for tommy." he did, and when he was admitted to the presence of thomas arkle clark, dean of men, and addressed him in his broken english as "mis-terr tommy," the dean did not smile. although mr. clark had just finished persuading an irascible father to allow his reprobate sophomore son to stay at college, and although he was facing the problem of advising an impetuous senior how to break an engagement with a girl he no longer loved, he adapted himself to the needs and the temperament of the foreigner instantly, sympathetically, and efficiently. in five minutes the bulgarian had a job, knew what courses in english he ought to take, and was filled with a glow of hope, inspiration, and security which only a genius in the art of graciousness and understanding like "tommy arkle," as he is amiably called by every student and alumnus of illinois, can bestow. this is a typical incident in the extremely busy, richly human daily routine of the man who created the office of dean of men in american universities. slender, short, well-dressed, his gray hair smartly parted, with kindly, clever, humorous blue eyes and a smile that is an ecstasy of friendliness, "tommy" sits behind his big desk in the administration building from eight to five every day and handles all of the very real troubles and problems of the four thousand-odd men students at the university of illinois. he averages one hundred callers a day, in addition to answering a heavy mail and attendance upon various committee, board, and council meetings. he is known all over the country as an authority on fraternities and their influence, and a power for making that influence constantly better and finer. in business, farmer, and school circles in the middle west mr. clark is famous for his whimsical, inspiring speeches. his quick, shaft-like humor, his keen, devastating sarcasm, and his rare, resilient sympathy have made him a personality beloved particularly by young persons. they still tell the story on the campus of an ingenuous youngster who walked into the dean's office one fall, set his suitcase on the floor, and drawing two one-dollar bills and a fifty-cent piece from his pocket, laid the money on the big desk, saying: "that's all the money i have. i've come to work my way through. will you help me to get a job?" in a flash "tommy" noted the boy's eager, imaginative brown eyes, his wide, compact lips and strong jaw. reaching over, he took the two bills and pocketed them, leaving the half-dollar. "the traditional great men," said the dean, "started their university careers with only fifty cents. i don't want you to be handicapped, so i'll keep this two dollars. you can get work at ---- green street waiting on table for your meals, and the landlady at ---- chalmers street wants a student to fire her furnace in exchange for room rent." the boy earned his way successfully for several months. then suddenly he was taken sick. an operation was necessary. mr. clark wired for a chicago specialist and paid all expenses out of his own pocket. the student recovered, and two years after he was graduated sent "tommy" a letter enclosing a check for five hundred dollars. "to redeem my two dollars which you have in trust," the letter said, "and please use the money as a medical fund for sick students who need, but cannot afford, chicago specialists." the dean has an abnormal memory for names and faces. every year he makes a "rogues' gallery"--the photographs of all incoming freshmen are taken and filed away. and many an humble, unknown freshman has been exalted by the "hello, darby," or "good morning, boschenstein"--or whatever his name happened to be--with which the dean greeted him. mr. clark once revealed to me the secret of his life. fifteen years ago he was professor of english and had strong literary ambitions, with no little promise. there came the offer of the office of dean of men. he had to choose between writing about peoples lives or living those lives with people. and he chose, with the result that at all times of the day and night it's "tommy this, and tommy that"; an accident case may need him at two a.m. in the hospital, or a crowd of roystering students may necessitate his missing a night's sleep in order to argue an irate sheriff into the conviction that they are not robbers and murderers. he has been known to spend many evenings in the rooms of lonesome students who "need a friend." "tommy arkle" is one of the middle west's finest contributions to the modern ideal of human service. ( ) two new machine guns are invented for the u.s. army by the "edison of firearms" by harry b. hunt hartford, conn., nov. .--"well, old j.m. has done it again." that is the chief topic of conversation these days in the big shops of hartford, new haven and bridgeport, where the bulk of the rifles, pistols and machine guns for uncle sam's army is being turned out. for in these towns to say that "old j.m. has done it again" is the simplest and most direct way of stating that john m. browning has invented a new kind of firearm. this time, however, "old j.m." has done it twice. he has invented not one, but two new guns. both have been accepted by the united states government, contracts for immense numbers of each have been signed, and work of production is being pushed night and day. the new weapons will be put into the field against germany at the earliest possible day. who is john browning? you never heard of him? well, browning is the father of rapid-fire and automatic firearms. his is the brain behind practically every basic small firearm invention in the past years. he has been to the development of firearms what edison has been to electricity. "unquestionably the greatest inventor of firearms in the world," is the unanimous verdict of the gun experts of the colt, remington and winchester plants, whose business it is to study and criticise every development in firearms. but if browning is our greatest gun inventor, he is the most "gun-shy" genius in the country when it comes to publicity. he would rather face a machine gun than a reporter. a few years ago a paper in his home state--utah--published a little story about his success as an inventor, and the story was copied by the hartford courant. "i'd rather have paid $ , cash than have had that stuff printed," browning says. friends, however, who believe that the world should know something about this firearms wizard, furnish the following sidelights on his career: browning comes from an old-stock mormon family of ogden, utah. as a young man he was a great hunter, going off into the woods for a month or six weeks at a time, with only his gun for company. he was only when he worked out his ideas for a gun carrying a magazine full of cartridges, which could be fired rapidly in succession. he pounded out the parts for his first rapid-fire gun with hammer and cold chisel. since that time, pump and "trombone" shotguns, automatic pistols, rapid-fire rifles produced by the biggest firearms manufacturers in the country have been browning's products. the united states army pistol is a browning invention. a browning pistol manufactured by the fabrique nationale of belgium was made the standard equipment for the armies of belgium, russia, spain, italy and serbia. on completion of the one-millionth pistol by the fabrique nationale, king albert of belgium knighted the modest inventor, so he is now, officially, "sir" john browning. browning is tall, slender, slightly stooped, , bald except for a rim of gray hair, and wears a closely clipped gray moustache. his face is marked by a network of fine lines. although browning will not talk of himself or of his career as an inventor, he can't help talking when the conversation is turned on guns. "i always think of a gun as something that is made primarily to shoot," he says. "the best gun is the simplest gun. when you begin loading a gun up with a lot of fancy contraptions and 'safety devices,' you are only inviting trouble. you complicate the mechanism and make that many more places for dirt and grit to clog the action. "you can make a gun so 'safe' that it won't shoot." of browning's new guns it is not, of course, permissible to give any details. one, however, is a light rapid-fire gun, weighing only pounds, which can be fired from the shoulder like the ordinary rifle. each magazine carries rounds and the empty magazine can be detached and another substituted by pressing a button. the heavier gun is a belt-fed machine, capable of firing shots a minute. although it is water-cooled, it weighs, water jacket and all, only pounds. for airplane work, where the firing is in bursts and the speed of the machine helps cool the gun, the jacket is discarded and the gun weighs only pounds. both guns are counted upon as valuable additions to the equipment of our overseas forces. the narrative in the third person. although the interview, the personal experience article, and the confession story are largely narrative, they are always told in the first person, whereas the term "narrative article" as used in this classification is applied only to a narrative in the third person. in this respect it is more like the short story. as in the short story so in the narrative article, description of persons, places, and objects involved serves to heighten the effect. narrative methods may be employed to present any group of facts that can be arranged in chronological order. a process, for example, may be explained by showing a man or a number of men engaged in the work involved, and by giving each step in the process as though it were an incident in a story. the story of an invention or a discovery may be told from the inception of the idea to its realization. a political situation may be explained by relating the events that led up to it. the workings of some institution, such as an employment office or a juvenile court, may be made clear by telling just what takes place in it on a typical occasion. historical and biographical material can best be presented in narrative form. suspense, rapid action, exciting adventure, vivid description, conversation, and all the other devices of the short story may be introduced into narrative articles to increase the interest and strengthen the impression. whenever, therefore, material can be given a narrative form it is very desirable to do so. a writer, however, must guard against exaggeration and the use of fictitious details. examples of the narrative article. how narration with descriptive touches and conversation may be effectively used to explain a new institution like the community kitchen, or the methods of recruiting employed in the army, is shown in the two articles below. the first was taken from the _new york world_, and the second from the _outlook_. ( ) now the public kitchen by marie coolidge rask the community kitchen menu +--------------------------------------------------+ | vegetable soup pint, ¢ | | beef stew half pint, ¢ | | baked beans half pint, ¢ | | two frankfurters, one potato and cup full of | | boiled cabbage all for ¢ | | rice pudding, ¢. stewed peaches ¢ | | coffee or cocoa with milk half pint, ¢ | +--------------------------------------------------+ "my mother wants three cents' worth of vegetable soup." "and mine wants enough beef stew for three of us." two battered tin pails were handed up by small, grimy fingers. two eager little faces were upturned toward the top of the bright green counter which loomed before them. two pairs of roguish eyes smiled back at the woman who reached over the counter and took the pails. "the beef stew will be twelve cents," she said. "it is four cents for each half pint, you know." "i know," answered the youth. "my mother says when she has to buy the meat and all and cook it and put a quarter in the gas meter, it's cheaper to get it here. my father got his breakfast here, too, and it only cost him five cents." "and was he pleased?" asked the woman, carefully lowering the filled pail to the outstretched little hand. "you bet," chuckled the lad, as he turned and followed the little procession down the length of the room and out through the door on the opposite side. the woman was mrs. william k. vanderbilt, jr. the boy was the son of a 'longshoreman living on "death avenue," in close proximity to the newly established people's kitchen, situated on the southeast corner of tenth avenue and west twenty-seventh street, new york. so it is here at last--the much talked of, long hoped for, community kitchen. within three days after its doors had been opened to the public more than , persons had availed themselves of its benefits. within three years, it is promised, the community kitchen will have become national in character. its possibilities for development are limitless. way was blazed for the pioneer kitchen by edward f. brown, executive secretary of the new york school lunch committee. the active power behind the cauldrons of soup, cabbage and frankfurters, beans and rice pudding is vested in mrs. james a. burden, jr., and mrs. william k. vanderbilt, jr. the evolution of the community kitchen is going to be of interest to every housewife and to every wage earner in all classes of society. first of all, let it be distinctly understood that the kitchen as inaugurated is not a charity. it is social and philanthropic in character, and it will ultimately reduce the cost of living by almost per cent. this much has been demonstrated already to the extent that the tenth avenue kitchen has not only paid expenses, but has so overrun its confines that plans are in preparation for the establishment of other and larger kitchens in rapid succession. the object is to give to the purchaser the maximum quantity of highest grade food, properly cooked, at minimum cost. this cost includes rent, light, heat, power, interest on investment, depreciation, cost of food materials, labor and supervision. the principle is that of barter and sale on an equitable business basis. the project as now formulated is to establish for immediate use a small group of public kitchens having one central depot. this depot will be in constant operation throughout the twenty-four hours. here the food will be prepared and distributed to the smaller kitchens where, by means of steam tables, it can be kept hot and dispensed. the character of the food to be supplied each district will be chosen with regard to what the population is accustomed to, that which is simple and wholesome, which contains bulk, can be prepared at minimum cost, can be conveniently dispensed and easily carried away. opposite a large school building, in a small room that had been at one time a saloon, the kitchen of the century was fitted up and formally opened to the public. three long green tables with green painted benches beside them encircle the room on two sides. their use was manifest the second day after the kitchen was opened. at o'clock in the morning, from various tenement homes near by, sturdy 'longshoremen and laborers might have been seen plodding silently from their respective homes, careful not to disturb their wives and families, and heading straight for the new kitchen on the corner. from trains running along "death avenue" came blackened trainmen after their night's work. they, too, stopped at the corner kitchen. by the time the attendant arrived to unlock the doors forty men were in line waiting for breakfast. ten minutes later the three tables were fully occupied. "bread, cereal and coffee for five cents!" exclaimed one of the men, pushing the empty tray from him, after draining the last drop of coffee in his mug. "this kitchen's all right." noon came. the children from the school building trooped in. "my mamma works in a factory," said one. "i used to get some cakes at a bakery at noontime. gee! there's raisins in this rice puddin', ain't there?" he carried the saucerful of pudding over to the table. "only three cents," he whispered to the little girl beside him. "you better get some, too. that'll leave you two cents for a cup of cocoa." "ain't it a cinch!" exclaimed the little girl. behind the counter the women who had made these things possible smiled happily and dished out pudding, beans and soup with generous impartiality. the daughter of mrs. vanderbilt appeared. "i'm hungry, mother," she cried. "i'll pay for my lunch." "you'll have to serve yourself," was the rejoinder of the busy woman with the tin pail in her hand. "there's a tray at the end of the counter--but don't get in the way." so rich and poor lunched together. "oh, but i'm tired!" exclaimed a woman, who, satchel in hand, entered, late in the afternoon, "it's hard to go home and cook after canvassing all day. will you mind if i eat supper here?" then the women and children poured in with pails and dishes and pans. "we're getting used to it now," said one. "it's just like a store, you know, and it saves us a lot of work--" "and expense! my land!" cried another. "why, my man has only been working half time, and the pennies count when you've got children to feed and clothe. when i go to work by the day it's little that's cooked at home. now--" she presented a dish as the line moved along. "beef stew for four," she ordered, "and coffee in this pitcher, here." ( ) gathering in the raw recruit by kingsley moses men wanted for the united states army a tall, gaunt farmer boy with a very dirty face and huge gnarled hands stood open-mouthed before the brilliant poster displayed before the small-town recruiting office. in his rather dull mind he pictured himself as he would look, straight and dignified, in the khaki uniform, perhaps even with the three stripes of the sergeant on his arm. "fifteen dollars a month," he thought to himself, "and board and clothes and lodgings and doctor's bills. why, that's more than i'm gettin' now on the farm! i'd see the world; i might even get to learn a regular trade." he scratched his chin thoughtfully. "well, i ain't gettin' nowhere now, that's sure," he concluded, and slowly climbed the stairs. this boy had not come to his decision in a moment. his untrained but thoroughly honest mind worked slowly. he had been pondering the opportunities of army life for many weeks. the idea had come to him by chance, he thought. over a month ago he had been plowing the lower forty of old man huggins's farm. the road to the mountains lay along one side of the field, and as the boy turned and started to plow his furrow toward the road he noticed that a motor cycle had stopped just beyond the fence. "broke down," the boy commented to himself, as he saw the tan-clad rider dismounting. over the mule's huge back he watched as he drew nearer. "why, the rider was in uniform; he must be a soldier!" sure enough, when the fence was reached the boy saw that the stranger was dressed in the regulation khaki of uncle sam, with the u.s. in block letters at the vent of the collar and two stripes on the left sleeve. "broke down?" the boy queried, dropping his plow-handles. the corporal grunted and continued to potter with the machine. "you in the army?" the boy continued, leaning on the fence. "you bet!" assented the soldier. then, looking up and taking in the big, raw-boned physique of the youngster, "ever think of joinin'?" "can't say's i did." "got any friends in the army?" "nope." "fine life." the motor cycle was attracting little of the recruiting officer's attention now, for he was a recruiting officer, and engaged in one of the most practical phases of his work. "them soldiers have a pretty easy life, don't they?" evidently the boy was becoming interested. the recruiting officer laid down his tools, pulled out a pipe, and sat down comfortably under a small sycamore tree at the roadside. "not so very easy," he replied, "but interesting and exciting." he paused for a minute to scrutinize the prospective recruit more closely. to his experienced eye the boy appeared desirable. slouchy, dirty, and lazy-looking, perhaps; but there were nevertheless good muscles and a strong body under those ragged overalls. the corporal launched into his story. for twenty minutes the boy listened open-mouthed to the stories of post life, where baseball, football, and boxing divided the time with drilling; of mess-halls where a fellow could eat all he wanted to, free; of good-fellowship and fraternal pride in the organization; of the pleasant evenings in the amusement rooms in quarters. and then of the life of the big world, of which the boy had only dreamed; of the western plains, of texas, the snowy ridges of the great rockies, new york, chicago, san francisco, the philippines, hawaii, the strange glamour of the tropics, the great wildernesses of the frozen north. "it seems 'most like as i'd like to join," was the timid venture. "what's your name?" "steve bishop." "all right, steve, come in and see me the next time you're in town," said the corporal, rising. "we'll talk it over." and, mounting his motor cycle, he was gone down the road in a whirl of red dust. nor did the farmer boy think to wonder at the sudden recovery of the apparently stalled machine. "missionary work," explains the corporal. "we never beg 'em to join; but we do sort of give 'em the idea. like joinin' the masons, you know," he winked, giving me the grip. so it happened that steve bishop mounted the stairs that day, resolved to join the army if they would take him. in the small, bare, but immaculately clean room at the head of the stairs he found his friend the corporal banging away at a typewriter. "how are you, steve? glad to see you," was the welcome. "sit down a minute, and we'll talk." the soldier finished his page, lit his pipe again, and leisurely swung round in his chair. "think you'll like to soldier with us?" he said. unconsciously the boy appreciated the compliment; it was flattering to be considered on a basis of equality with this clean-cut, rugged man of the wide world. "i reckon so," he replied, almost timidly. "well, how old are you, steve?" "twenty-one." the corporal nodded approval. that was all right, then; no tedious formality of securing signed permission from parent or guardian was necessary. then began a string of personal questions as to previous employment, education, details of physical condition, moral record (for the army will have no ex-jailbirds), etc., and finally the question, "why do you want to join?" "they don't know why i ask that," says the corporal, "but i have a mighty good reason. from the way a boy answers i can decide which branch of the service he ought to be connected with. if he wants to be a soldier just for travel and adventure, i advise the infantry or the cavalry; but if he seriously wants to learn and study, i recommend him to the coast artillery or the engineers." then comes the physical examination, a vigorous but not exacting course of sprouts designed to find out if the applicant is capable of violent exertion and to discover any minor weaknesses; an examination of eyes, ears, teeth, and nose; and, finally, a cursory scrutiny for functional disorders. "i'll take you, steve," the corporal finally says. "in about a week we'll send you to the barracks." "but what am i goin' to do till then? i ain't got a cent." "don't worry about that. you'll eat and sleep at mrs. barrows's,"--naming a good, clean boarding-house in the town, the owner of which has a yearly contract with the government to take care of just such embryo recruits; "in the daytime you can hang around town, and the police won't bother you if you behave yourself. if they call you for loafin' tell them you're waitin' to get into the army." in a week the district recruiting officer, a young lieutenant, drops in on his regular circuit. the men who have been accepted by the non-commissioned officer are put through their paces again, and so expert is the corporal in judging good material that none of steve's group of eight are rejected. "all right," says the corporal when the lieutenant has gone; "here's your tickets to the training station at columbus, ohio, and twenty-eight cents apiece for coffee on the way. in these boxes you'll find four big, healthy lunches for each one of you. that'll keep you until you get to columbus." one of the new recruits is given charge of the form ticket issued by the railway expressly for the government; is told that when meal-time comes he can get off the train with the others and for fifty cents buy a big pail of hot coffee for the bunch at the station lunch-room. then the corporal takes them all down to the train, tells them briefly but plainly what is expected in the way of conduct from a soldier, and winds up with the admonition: "and, boys, remember this first of all; the first duty of a soldier is this: do what you're told to do, do it without question, and _do it quick_. good-bye." in twenty-four hours steve and his companions are at the training station, have taken the oath of allegiance, and are safely and well on their way to full membership in the family of uncle sam. chapter vi writing the article value of a plan. just as a builder would hesitate to erect a house without a carefully worked-out plan, so a writer should be loath to begin an article before he has outlined it fully. in planning a building, an architect considers how large a house his client desires, how many rooms he must provide, how the space available may best be apportioned among the rooms, and what relation the rooms are to bear to one another. in outlining an article, likewise, a writer needs to determine how long it must be, what material it should include, how much space should be devoted to each part, and how the parts should be arranged. time spent in thus planning an article is time well spent. outlining the subject fully involves thinking out the article from beginning to end. the value of each item of the material gathered must be carefully weighed; its relation to the whole subject and to every part must be considered. the arrangement of the parts is of even greater importance, because much of the effectiveness of the presentation will depend upon a logical development of the thought. in the last analysis, good writing means clear thinking, and at no stage in the preparation of an article is clear thinking more necessary than in the planning of it. amateurs sometimes insist that it is easier to write without an outline than with one. it undoubtedly does take less time to dash off a special feature story than it does to think out all of the details and then write it. in nine cases out of ten, however, when a writer attempts to work out an article as he goes along, trusting that his ideas will arrange themselves, the result is far from a clear, logical, well-organized presentation of his subject. the common disinclination to make an outline is usually based on the difficulty that most persons experience in deliberately thinking about a subject in all its various aspects, and in getting down in logical order the results of such thought. unwillingness to outline a subject generally means unwillingness to think. the length of an article. the length of an article is determined by two considerations: the scope of the subject, and the policy of the publication for which it is intended. a large subject cannot be adequately treated in a brief space, nor can an important theme be disposed of satisfactorily in a few hundred words. the length of an article, in general, should be proportionate to the size and the importance of the subject. the deciding factor, however, in fixing the length of an article is the policy of the periodical for which it is designed. one popular publication may print articles from to words, while another fixes the limit at words. it would be quite as bad judgment to prepare a -word article for the former, as it would be to send one of words to the latter. periodicals also fix certain limits for articles to be printed in particular departments. one monthly magazine, for instance, has a department of personality sketches which range from to words in length, while the other articles in this periodical contain from to words. the practice of printing a column or two of reading matter on most of the advertising pages influences the length of articles in many magazines. to obtain an attractive make-up, the editors allow only a page or two of each special article, short story, or serial to appear in the first part of the magazine, relegating the remainder to the advertising pages. articles must, therefore, be long enough to fill a page or two in the first part of the periodical and several columns on the pages of advertising. some magazines use short articles, or "fillers," to furnish the necessary reading matter on these advertising pages. newspapers of the usual size, with from to words in a column, have greater flexibility than magazines in the matter of make-up, and can, therefore, use special feature stories of various lengths. the arrangement of advertisements, even in the magazine sections, does not affect the length of articles. the only way to determine exactly the requirements of different newspapers and magazines is to count the words in typical articles in various departments. selection and proportion. after deciding on the length of his article, the writer should consider what main points he will be able to develop in the allotted space. his choice will be guided by his purpose in writing the article. "is this point essential to the accomplishment of my aim?" is the test he should apply. whatever is non-essential must be abandoned, no matter how attractive it may be. having determined upon the essential topics, he next proceeds to estimate their relative value for the development of his theme, so that he may give to each one the space and the prominence that are proportionate to its importance. arrangement of material. the order in which to present the main topics requires thoughtful study. a logical development of a subject by which the reader is led, step by step, from the first sentence to the last in the easiest and most natural way, is the ideal arrangement. an article should march right along from beginning to end, without digressing or marking time. the straight line, in writing as in drawing, is the shortest distance between two points. in narration the natural order is chronological. to arouse immediate interest, however, a writer may at times deviate from this order by beginning with a striking incident and then going back to relate the events that led up to it. this method of beginning _in medias res_ is a device well recognized in fiction. in exposition the normal order is to proceed from the known to the unknown, to dovetail the new facts into those already familiar to the reader. when a writer desires by his article to create certain convictions in the minds of his readers, he should consider the arrangement best calculated to lead them to form such conclusions. the most telling effects are produced, not by stating his own conclusions as strongly as possible, but rather by skillfully inducing his readers to reach those conclusions by what they regard as their own mental processes. that is, if readers think that the convictions which they have reached are their own, and were not forced upon them, their interest in these ideas is likely to be much deeper and more lasting. it is best, therefore, to understate conclusions or to omit them entirely. in all such cases the writer's aim in arranging his material should be to direct his readers' train of thought so that, after they have finished the last sentence, they will inevitably form the desired conclusion. with the main topics arranged in the best possible order, the writer selects from his available material such details as he needs to amplify each point. examples, incidents, statistics, and other particulars he jots down under each of the chief heads. the arrangement of these details, in relation both to the central purpose and to each other, requires some consideration, for each detail must have its logical place in the series. having thus ordered his material according to a systematic plan, he has before him a good working outline to guide him in writing. planning a typical article. the process of gathering, evaluating, and organizing material may best be shown by a concrete example. the publication in a new york paper of a news story to the effect that the first commencement exercises were about to be held in the only factory school ever conducted in the city, suggested to a special feature writer the possibility of preparing an article on the work of the school. to obtain the necessary material, he decided to attend the exercises and to interview both the principal of the school and the head of the factory. in thinking over the subject beforehand, he jotted down these points upon which to secure data: ( ) the origin and the purpose of the school; ( ) its relation to the work of the factory; ( ) the methods of instruction; ( ) the kind of pupils and the results accomplished for them; ( ) the cost of the school; ( ) its relation to the public school system. at the close of the graduation exercises, he secured the desired interviews with the teacher in charge and with the head of the firm, copied typical examples from the exhibition of the pupils' written work, and jotted down notes on the decoration and furnishing of the schoolroom. since the commencement exercises had been reported in the newspapers, he decided to refer to them only incidentally in his story. after considering the significance of the work of the school and what there was about it that would appeal to different classes of readers, he decided to write his story for the magazine section of the new york newspaper that he believed was most generally read by business men who operated factories similar to the one described. his purpose he formulated thus: "i intend to show how illiterate immigrant girls can be transformed quickly into intelligent, efficient american citizens by means of instruction in a factory school; this i wish to do by explaining what has been accomplished in this direction by one new york factory." he hoped that his article would lead readers to encourage the establishment of similar schools as a means of americanizing alien girls. the expository type of article containing concrete examples, description, and interviews he concluded to adopt as the form best suited to his subject. the average length of the special feature stories, in the magazine section of the paper to which he intended to submit the article, proved to be about words. in order to accomplish his purpose in an article of this length, he selected five main topics to develop: ( ) the reasons that led the firm to establish the school; ( ) the results obtained; ( ) the methods of instruction; ( ) the cost of the school; ( ) the schoolroom and its equipment. "what part of my material will make the strongest appeal to the readers of this newspaper?" was the question he asked himself, in order to select the best point with which to begin his article. the feature that would attract the most attention, he believed, was the striking results obtained by the school in a comparatively short time. in reviewing the several types of beginnings to determine which would best suit the presentation of these remarkable results, he found two possibilities: first, the summary lead with a striking statement for the first sentence; and second, a concrete example of the results as shown by one of the pupils. he found, however, that he did not have sufficient data concerning any one girl to enable him to tell the story of her transformation as an effective concrete case. he determined, therefore, to use a striking statement as the feature of a summary lead. from his interview with the head of the firm, and from a formal statement of the purpose of the school printed on the commencement program, he obtained the reasons why the school had been established. these he decided to give _verbatim_ in direct quotation form. to show most interestingly the results of the teaching, he picked out four of the six written exercises that he had copied from those exhibited on the walls of the schoolroom. the first of these dealt with american history, the second with thrift and business methods, and the third with personal hygiene. for the fourth he selected the work of a woman of forty whose struggles to get into the school and to learn to write the teacher had described to him. figures on the cost of the school he had secured from the head of the firm according to his preliminary plan. these covered the expense both to the employers and to the city. his description of the schoolroom he could base on his own observation, supplemented by the teacher's explanations. for his conclusion he determined to summarize the results of this experiment in education as the firm stated them on the commencement program, and to give his own impression of the success of the school. thus he sought to give final reinforcement to the favorable impression of the school that he wished his article to create, with the aim of leading readers to reach the conclusion that such schools should be encouraged as invaluable aids to the americanization of alien girls. outlining the article. having selected the main topics and having decided in a general way how he intended to develop each one, he then fixed upon the best order in which to present them. after his introduction giving the striking results of the school in a summary lead, it seemed logical to explain the firm's purpose in undertaking this unusual enterprise. he accordingly jotted down for his second topic, "purpose in establishing the school," with the two sub-topics, "firm's statement on program" and "head of firm's statement in interview." the methods of-instruction by which the remarkable success was attained, impressed him as the next important point. his readers, having learned the results and the purpose of the school, would naturally want to know by what methods these girls had been transformed in so short a time. as his third topic, therefore, he put down, "methods of instruction." for his fourth division he had to choose between ( ) the results as shown by the pupils' written work, ( ) the cost of the school, and ( ) the schoolroom and its equipment. from the point of view of logical order either the results or the schoolroom might have been taken up next, but, as all the explanations of the methods of instruction were quoted directly in the words of the teacher, and as the pupils' exercises were to be given _verbatim_, he thought it best to place his own description of the schoolroom between these two quoted parts. greater variety, he foresaw, would result from such an arrangement. "the schoolroom," then, became the fourth topic. since the pupils' work which he planned to reproduce had been exhibited on the walls of the schoolroom, the transition from the description of the room to the exhibits on the walls was an easy and logical one. by this process of elimination, the cost of the school became the sixth division, to be followed by the summary conclusion. he then proceeded to fill in the details needed to develop each of these main topics, always keeping his general purpose in mind. the result of this organization of material was the following outline: i. summary lead . striking results--time required . commencement--when and where held . graduates--number, nationality, certificates . school--when and where established . example to other firms ii. purpose of school . firm's statement on commencement program . head of firm's statement in interview iii. methods of instruction . practical education . letter writing--geography, postal regulations, correspondence . arithmetic--money, expense accounts, reports of work . civics--history, biography, holidays, citizenship, patriotism . personal hygiene--cleanliness, physical culture, first aid, food . cotton goods--growing cotton, spinning, shipping . means of communication--telephone, directory, map of city, routes of travel, telephone book . study outside of classroom iv. the schoolroom . location--floor space, windows . decorations--flowers, motto, photograph of miss jessie wilson . furnishings--piano, phonograph . library--reading to the girls, _the promised land_, mary antin, library cards v. results shown by pupils' work . italian's theme and her remarkable progress . russian's essay on saving . polish girl's exercise about picture . woman of forty and her work vi. cost of school . expense to firm . cost to board of education--salaries and supplies . entire cost per pupil . returns to firm outweigh cost, says employer vii. summary conclusion . results quoted from program . impression made by girls receiving diplomas the completed article. since the establishment of a school in a factory was the novel feature of the enterprise, he worked out a title based on this idea, with a sub-title presenting the striking results accomplished by the school. the completed article follows, with a brief analysis of the methods used in developing the outline. taking the school to the factory how alien girls are being changed into intelligent american workers by instruction during working hours in from twenty to thirty-five weeks i. summary lead an illiterate immigrant girl can be . striking results transformed into an intelligent, efficient striking statement american citizen, in this city, in two sentence to without interfering with the daily work avoid unwieldy sentence. by which she earns her living. only forty-five minutes a day in a factory schoolroom is required to accomplish such striking results. this has just been demonstrated at . commencement the first commencement of the only timeliness brought school conducted in a new york factory. out immediately after the classes have been held on striking statement one of the upper floors of the white goods factory of d. e. sicher & co., west st street, where the graduation address has local exercises were held last thursday interest evening. forty girls--italians, poles, russians, . graduates hungarians, austrians among note concrete details the number--received the first "certificates of literacy" ever issued by the board of education. twenty weeks striking results ago many of these young women could emphasized by device not speak english; many of them had of contrast never been to school a day in their lives. every one present on thursday impression on audience night felt that this was indeed a commencement of remarkable for these girls. results it is due to the instruction of miss teacher's name has florence meyers, formerly a public local interest school teacher, that the girls can now speak english, write good letters, make out money-orders, cash checks, and send telegrams. they have also been additional concrete taught the principles of our government, details of striking the importance of personal hygiene, results and the processes by which cotton goods used in their work are manufactured. the school was organized this year . school at the suggestion of dudley e. sicher, head of the firm, in coöperation with the board of education, and has been under the supervision of miss lizzie e. principal and school rector, public school no. , manhattan. have local interest. what has been accomplished in this . example to other factory, which is the largest white firms goods muslin underwear plant in the veiled suggestion to world, will doubtless serve as an example readers to be followed by other firms. its purpose the firm expresses in ii. purpose of school these words: "to hasten assimilation . firm's statement necessary to national unity, to promote industrial betterment, by reducing statement in general the friction caused by failure to comprehend terms directions, and to decrease the waste and loss of wage incidental to the illiterate worker." "when a girl understands english . head of firm's statement and has been taught american business and factory methods," says mr. sicher, "she doesn't hesitate and statement in concrete blunder; she understands what she is terms told and she does it. "intelligent employees do much better work than illiterate ones, and since we can afford to pay them better wages, they are much more contented. from a business point of view, the school is a good investment." the instruction that has accomplished iii. methods of instruction such remarkable results has been eminently practical. "there . practical education was no time to spend in teaching the girls anything but the most necessary teacher's statement things," explains miss meyers, "for i of her problem could have each one of them for only forty-five minutes a day, and there was much to be done in that time. "here was a girl, for example, who problem concretely could hardly say 'good morning.' shown here was another who had never written a word in her life, either in english or in any other language. the problem was how to give each of them what she most needed in the short time allotted statement of general every day. this essentially plan practical training i organized under several subjects, each of which was broadly inclusive. "when i undertook to teach letter . letter writing writing, it meant teaching the english language, as well as writing and spelling. it meant teaching the geography of the country, the postal regulations, and the forms of business and personal correspondence. "in teaching arithmetic, i use money . arithmetic and show them how to make change by means of addition, subtraction, and division. i also ask them to keep personal expense accounts and to make out reports of the work that they do. "civics included american history, . civics the lives of our statesmen--for these girls are so eager to be true americans that they want to know about our great men--the origin of legal holidays, the merits of our system of government, the meaning of citizenship, and the essence of patriotism. "hygiene is another important . personal hygiene subject. american standards of living, personal cleanliness, and sanitary regulations have to be emphasized. to aid in counteracting the effects of long hours at the sewing machines, we have physical culture exercises. instruction in first aid measures is also given so that they will know what to do in case of an accident. the nutritive value of different foods in relation to their cost is discussed to enable them to maintain their health by a proper diet. "as these young women are engaged . cotton goods in making muslin underwear, it seemed desirable for them to know where cotton grows, how it is spun, where the mills are and how it is shipped to new york. after they understand the various processes through which the material goes before it reaches them, they take much more interest in their work, as a part of the manufacture of cotton goods into clothing." the use of the telephone, the telegraph, . means of communication the subway, surface lines, and railways is another subject of instruction. a dummy 'phone, telegraph method of presentation blanks, the city directory, maps with in this paragraph routes of rapid transit lines, and the changed for telephone book, are some of the practical variety laboratory apparatus and textbooks that are employed. "we encourage them to learn for . study outside of themselves outside of school hours classroom many of the necessary things that we have not time for in the classroom," says the teacher. to reach the schoolroom in which iv. the schoolroom this work has been carried on, you take . location the elevator to the last floor but one of note effect of using the factory building. there you find "you" only a portion of the floor space cleared for tables and chairs. it is a clean, airy room with big windows opening on the street, made gay with boxes of flowers. flags of many nations about the . decorations room appropriately represent the many nationalities among the pupils. on note character of one wall hangs a card with the legend: decorations selected four things come not back: the spoken word the sped arrow the past life the neglected opportunity. a photograph of miss jessie wilson, now mrs. francis b. sayre, occupies the space between the two windows. the picture was presented to the girls by miss wilson herself, just before she this shows enterprising was married, when a party of them with spirit on the miss meyers went to washington to part of teacher, girls, give her a white petticoat they had and firm made themselves, as a wedding present. after miss wilson had shown them through the white house and they had seen her wedding presents, she gave them this signed photograph. a piano and a phonograph at one . furnishings end of the room make it possible for the girls to enjoy dancing during the noon hours on three days of the week, and to have musicals on other occasions. shelves filled with books line the . library walls of a smaller office room opening off the schoolroom. on two days of the week during the noon hour, the teacher read aloud to the girls until they were able to read for themselves. then they were permitted to take books home with them. besides this, they have been encouraged to use the public libraries, after being shown how to make out applications for library cards. "one girl is reading 'the promised concrete example land,' by mary antin," miss meyers has "human interest," tells you, "and thinks it is a wonderful as related in book. she was so much interested in the teacher's own it that i asked her to tell the others words about it. although a little shy at first, she soon forgot herself in her eagerness to relate miss antin's experiences. she told the story with such dramatic effect that she quite carried away her classmates. if we had done no more than to teach this girl to read a book that meant so much to her, i believe our school would have justified its existence." mary antin herself accepted the is this paragraph girls' invitation to attend the graduation out of logical order? exercises, and made a short address. the pupils' written work was exhibited v. results shown by on the walls of the room on the occasion pupils' work of the exercises, and showed conclusively the proficiency that they have attained. the greatest progress made by any . italian's theme and of the pupils was probably that of an progress italian girl. before coming to this country, she had attended school and example of greatest besides this she had been teaching her progress is put father at night whatever she had first learned during the day. her short essay on her adopted country read: this country is the united states note use of narrow of america. it is the land of freedom measure without and liberty, because the people quotation marks for govern themselves. all citizens love examples quoted their country, because they know that this freedom was earned by men who gave their lives for it. the united states is in north america. north america is one of the greatest divisions of the earth. north america was discovered on october , , by christopher columbus. the fact that columbus, one of her is this comment by countrymen, had discovered the country the writer effective? in which she and her father had found a new life, doubtless appealed to her keen imagination. that a russian girl appreciated the . russian's essay on lessons she had received in the value of saving opening a dime-savings account, is indicated by this composition: i must save money out of my earnings to put in the bank. i know that money is safe in the bank. to deposit means to put money in the bank. cashing a cheque means changing a cheque for money. how practical lessons in personal hygiene . polish girl's essay may be emphasized in connection with the teaching of composition was illustrated in an essay of a polish girl written under a picture of a woman combing her hair: she wished to comb her hair. she takes the comb in her hand. she combs her hair. she wishes to brush her hair. she takes the brush in her hand. she brushes her hair. she combs and brushes her hair every morning. she washes her hair often with soap and water. the pathetic eagerness of one woman . woman of forty of forty to learn to read and write was and her work told by miss meyers in connection with one of the pieces of work exhibited. "she was an old woman; at least she "human interest" seems to me to be over fifty, although appeal heightened she gave her age as only forty," explained by quoting teacher the teacher. "she couldn't _verbatim_ read or even write her name. despite her age, she begged for a long time to be permitted to enter the school, but there were so many young girls who desired to learn that they were given the preference. she pleaded so hard that finally i asked to have her admitted on trial." "it was hard work to teach her," progress in penmanship continued miss meyers as she pointed could not be to some of the woman's writing. the shown by quoting first attempts were large, irregular exercise letters that sprawled over the sheet like the work of a child when it begins to write. after twenty weeks of struggle, her work took on a form that, although still crude, was creditable for one who had never written until she was over forty. "her joy at her success was great enough to repay me many times over for my efforts to teach her," remarked miss meyers. the exact cost to the firm of conducting vi. cost of school the school, including the wages . expense to firm paid for the time spent by the girls in the classroom, has been itemized by mr. sicher for the year just closed, as follows: floor space $ . short table of figures rent, light, and heat . is comprehensible janitor . and not uninteresting wages at ¢ an hr., girls . ------- total cost, girls $ . total cost per girl . the board of education, for its part . cost to board of of the school, paid out $ for the education teacher's salary and for supplies. this was an expense of $ . for each pupil. the entire cost for educating each . entire cost per pupil one of the forty girl workers, therefore, was only $ . . that this money has been well spent . returns outweigh is the opinion of the employer, for the cost school work increases the efficiency in the factory sufficiently to make up for the time taken out of working hours. "i would rather have these girls in head of firm's statement my employ whom i can afford to pay given to convince from ten to twenty dollars a week," readers declares mr. sicher, "than many more whom i have to pay low wages simply because they aren't worth higher ones. from a business point of view, it saves space and space is money." that the result has been what the vii. summary conclusion firm had anticipated in establishing the school is shown by the following . results quoted from statement which was made on the commencement program program: "it is the present belief of the firm that the workers note appeal of who have been thus trained have "efficiency" to gained from to per cent in efficiency." practical readers how much the girls themselves have . impression given gained more vital to them even than by girls efficiency was very evident to everyone note patriotic appeal who looked into their faces as they received in closing the certificates that recognize phrase, which was them as "literate american citizens." a happy choice. another article on the same subject. this commencement at the factory school furnished another writer, nixola greeley smith, with material for a special feature story which was sent out by a syndicate, the newspaper enterprise association, for publication in several hundred newspapers. her story contains only words and is thus less than one fifth the length of the other article. the author centers the interest in one of the pupils, and shows the value of the school in terms of this girl's experience. the girl's own account of what the school has meant to her makes a strong "human interest" appeal. by thus developing one concrete example effectively, the author is able to arouse more interest in the results of the school than she would have done if in the same space she had attempted to give a greater number of facts about it. unlike the longer article, her story probably would not suggest to the reader the possibility of undertaking a similar enterprise, because it does not give enough details about the organization and methods of the school to show how the idea could be applied elsewhere. the beginning of the shorter story was doubtless suggested by the presence at the exercises of mary antin, the author of "the promised land," who addressed the girls. the first sentence of it piques our curiosity to know how "the promised land" has kept its promise, and the story proceeds to tell us. the article, with an analysis of its main points, follows: wonderful america! thinks little austrian who graduates from factory school "the promised land" has kept its i. story of rebecca promise to rebecca meyer! meyer eight months ago an illiterate austrian . striking statement immigrant girl, unable to speak or beginning write english, went to work in a new note effective use of york garment factory. device of contrast to-day, speaking and writing fluently the language of her adopted country, second and third proficient in other studies, she paragraphs show proudly cherishes the first "certificate striking results in of literacy" issued by a factory--a one concrete case. factory which has paid her for going to school during working hours! it was rebecca meyer who received . commencement this first certificate, at the graduation note that rebecca exercises held on the top floor of the is the central figure big women's wear factory of d.e. sicher & co. it was rebecca meyer who delivered the address of welcome to the members of the board of education, the members of the firm, her fellow employees, and all the others gathered at these exercises--the first of dash used to set off their kind ever held in any commercial unique element establishment, anywhere! "isn't it wonderful!" she said. . rebecca's statement "when i came from austria, i hoped slightly unidiomatic to find work. that was all. how i english is suggestive should learn to speak the english language, i did not know. it might take me years, i thought. that i should go to school every day, while i worked--who could dream of such a thing? it could not be in any other country except america." dudley e. sicher, head of the firm, ii. story of the school in whose workrooms a regularly organized . origin of school class of the new york public note method of schools has held its sessions all winter, introducing head of firm stood smiling in the background. mr. sicher is president of the cotton goods manufacturers' association. it was he who conceived the idea, about a year ago, of increasing the efficiency of his women employees by giving them an education free of cost, during working hours. "one of the first and most noticeable . results of school results of the factory school has statement of head been a marked decrease in the friction of firm and the waste of time caused by the inability of employees to comprehend directions. a girl who understands english, and has been enabled thereby to school herself in factory methods and conditions, doesn't hesitate and blunder; she understands, and does. and what then? why, higher pay." no wonder rebecca meyer is grateful iii. conclusion for the minutes a day in which rebecca again made button-sewing has given place to study--no the central figure wonder she thinks america must appeal to reader's be the wonderland of all the world! pride in his country. articles composed of units. the study of the two special feature stories on the factory school shows how articles of this type are built up out of a number of units, such as examples, incidents, and statistics. a similar study of the other types of articles exemplified in chapter v will show that they also are made up of various kinds of units. again, if we turn to the types of beginnings illustrated in chapter vii, we shall find that they, too, are units, which in some cases might have been used in the body of the article instead of as an introduction. since, then, every division of a subject may be regarded as a unit that is complete in itself whatever its position in the article, each of the several kinds of units may be studied separately. for this purpose we may discuss five common types of units: ( ) examples, ( ) incidents, ( ) statistics, ( ) scientific and technical processes, and ( ) recipes and directions. methods of developing units. in order to present these units most effectively, and to vary the form of presentation when occasion demands, a writer needs to be familiar with the different methods of developing each one of these types. four common methods of handling material within these units are: ( ) exposition, narration, or description in the writer's own words; ( ) dialogue; ( ) the interview; ( ) direct or indirect quotation. statistics and recipes may also be given in tabular form. when a unit may be developed with equal effectiveness by any one of several methods, a writer should choose the one that gives variety to his article. if, for example, the units just before and after the one under consideration are to be in direct quotation, he should avoid any form that involves quoted matter. examples. in all types of articles the concrete example is the commonest and most natural means of explaining a general idea. to most readers, for instance, the legal provisions of an old age pension law would be neither comprehensible nor interesting, but a story showing how a particular old man had been benefited by the law would appeal to practically every one. that is, to explain the operation and advantages of such a law, we give, as one unit, the concrete example of this old man. actual examples are preferable to hypothetical ones, but the latter may occasionally be used when real cases are not available. imaginary instances may be introduced by such phrases as, "if, for example," or "suppose, for instance, that." to explain why companies that insure persons against loss of their jewelry are compelled to investigate carefully every claim filed with them, a writer in the _buffalo news_ gave several cases in which individuals supposed that they were entitled to payment for losses although subsequent investigation showed that they had not actually sustained any loss. one of these cases, that given below, he decided to relate in his own words, without conversation or quotation, although he might have quoted part of the affidavit, or might have given the dialogue between the detective and the woman who had lost the pin. no doubt he regarded the facts themselves, together with the suspense as to the outcome of the search, as sufficiently interesting to render unnecessary any other device for creating interest. another woman of equal wealth and equally undoubted honesty lost a horseshoe diamond pin. she and her maid looked everywhere, as they thought, but failed to find it. so she made her "proof of loss" in affidavit form and asked the surety company with which she carried the policy on all her jewelry to replace the article. she said in her affidavit that she had worn the pin in a restaurant a few nights before and had lost it that night, either in the restaurant or on her way there or back. the restaurant management had searched for it, the restaurant help had been questioned closely, the automobile used that night had been gone over carefully, and the woman's home had been ransacked. particular attention had been given to the gown worn by the woman on that occasion; every inch of it had been examined with the idea that the pin, falling from its proper place, had caught in the folds. the surety company assigned one of its detectives to look for the pin. from surface indications the loss had the appearance of a theft--an "inside job." the company, however, asked that its detective be allowed to search the woman's house itself. the request was granted readily. the detective then inquired for the various gowns which the woman had worn for dress occasions within the preceding several weeks. this line of investigation the owner of the pin considered a waste of time, since she remembered distinctly wearing the pin to the restaurant on that particular night, and her husband also remembered seeing it that night and put his memory in affidavit form. but the detective persisted and with the help of a maid examined carefully those other gowns. in the ruffle at the bottom of one of them, worn for the last time at least a week before the visit to the restaurant, she found the pin. the woman and her husband simply had been mistaken--honestly mistaken. she hadn't worn the pin to the restaurant, and her husband hadn't seen it that night. the error was unintentional, but it came very near costing the surety company a large sum of money. the benefits of a newly established clinic for animals were demonstrated in a special feature article in the _new york times_ by the selection of several animal patients as typical cases. probably the one given below did not seem to the writer to be sufficiently striking if only the bare facts were given, and so he undertook to create sympathy by describing the poor, whimpering little dog and the distress of the two young women. by arousing the sympathies of the readers, he was better able to impress them with the benefits of the clinic. the other day daisy, a little fox terrier, was one of the patients. she was a pretty little thing, three months old, with a silky coat and big, pathetic eyes. she was escorted to the clinic by two hatless young women, in shawls, and three children. the children waited outside in the reception room, standing in a line, grinning self-consciously, while the women followed daisy into the examination room. there she was gently muzzled with a piece of bandage, and the doctor examined her. there was something the matter with one hind leg, and the poor little animal whimpered pitifully, as dogs do, while the doctor searched for a broken bone. it was too much for one of the women. she left the room, and, standing outside the door, put her fingers in her ears, while the tears rolled down her cheeks. "well, i wouldn't cry for a dog," said a workman, putting in some s.p.c.a. receiving boxes, with a grin, while the three children--and children are always more or less little savages--grinned sympathetically. but it was a very real sorrow for daisy's mistress. there was no reason for alarm; it was only a sprain, caused by her mistress' catching the animal by the leg when she was giving her a bath. her friends were told to take her home, bathe the leg with warm water, and keep her as quiet as possible. her mistress, still with a troubled face, wrapped her carefully in the black shawl she was wearing, so that only the puppy's little white head and big, soft eyes peeped out, and the small procession moved away. in a special feature story designed to show how much more intelligently the first woman judge in this country could deal with cases of delinquent girls in the juvenile court than could the ordinary police court judge, a writer selected several cases that she had disposed of in her characteristic way. the first case, which follows, he decided could best be reported _verbatim_, as by that method he could show most clearly the kindly attitude of the judge in dealing with even the least appreciative of girls. the first case brought in the other day was that of a girl of , who hated her home and persisted in running away, sometimes to a married sister, and sometimes to a friend. she was accompanied by her mother and older sister, both with determined lower jaws and faces as hard as flint. she swaggered into the room in an impudent way to conceal the fact that her bravado was leaving her. "ella," said miss bartelme, looking up from her desk, "why didn't you tell me the truth when you came in here the other day? you did not tell me where you had been. don't you understand that it is much easier for me to help you if you speak the truth right away?" ella hung her head and said nothing. the older sister scowled at the girl and muttered something to the mother. "no," refused the mother, on being questioned. "we don't want nothing more to do with her." "humph," snorted ella, "you needn't think i want to come back. i don't want nothing more to do with you, either." miss bartelme often lets the family fight things out among themselves; for in this way, far more than by definite questioning, she learns the attitude of the girl and the family toward each other, and indirectly arrives at most of the actual facts of the case. "how would you like to go into a good home where some one would love you and care for you?" asked the judge. "i don't want nobody to love me." "why, ella, wouldn't you like to have a kind friend, somebody you could confide in and go walking with and who would be interested in you?" "i don't want no friends. i just want to be left alone." "well, ella," said the judge, patiently, ignoring her sullenness, "i think we shall send you back to park ridge for a while. but if you ever change your mind about wanting friends let us know, because we'll be here and shall feel the same way as we do now about it." to explain to readers of the _kansas city star_ how a bloodhound runs down a criminal, a special feature writer asked them to imagine that a crime had been committed at a particular corner in that city and that a bloodhound had been brought to track the criminal; then he told them what would happen if the crime were committed, first, when the streets were deserted, or second, when they were crowded. in other words, he gave two imaginary instances to illustrate the manner in which bloodhounds are able to follow a trail. obviously these two hypothetical cases are sufficiently plausible and typical to explain the idea. if a bloodhound is brought to the scene of the crime within a reasonable length of time after it has been committed, and the dog has been properly trained, he will unfailingly run down the criminal, provided, of course, that thousands of feet have not tramped over the ground. if, for instance, a crime were committed at twelfth and walnut streets at o'clock in the morning, when few persons are on the street, a well-trained bloodhound would take the trail of the criminal at daybreak and stick to it with a grim determination that appears to be uncanny, and he would follow the trail as swiftly as if the hunted man had left his shadow all along the route. but let the crime be committed at noon when the section is alive with humanity and remain undiscovered until after dark, then the bloodhound is put at a disadvantage and his wonderful powers would fail him, no doubt. incidents. narrative articles, such as personal experience stories, confessions, and narratives in the third person, consist almost entirely of incidents. dialogue and description are very frequently employed in relating incidents, even when the greater part of the incident is told in the writer's own words. the incidents given as examples of narrative beginnings on pages - are sufficient to illustrate the various methods of developing incidents as units. statistics. to make statistical facts comprehensible and interesting is usually a difficult problem for the inexperienced writer. masses of figures generally mean very little to the average reader. unless the significance of statistics can be quickly grasped, they are almost valueless as a means of explanation. one method of simplifying them is to translate them into terms with which the average reader is familiar. this may often be done by reducing large figures to smaller ones. instead of saying, for example, that a press prints , newspapers an hour, we may say that it prints papers a second, or a minute. to most persons , papers an hour means little more than a large number, but papers and one second are figures sufficiently small to be understood at a glance. statistics sometimes appear less formidable if they are incorporated in an interview or in a conversation. in undertaking to explain the advantages of a coöperative community store, a writer was confronted with the problem of handling a considerable number of figures. the first excerpt below shows how he managed to distribute them through several paragraphs, thus avoiding any awkward massing of figures. in order to present a number of comparative prices, he used the concrete case, given below, of an investigator making a series of purchases at the store. ( ) here's the way the manager of the community store started. he demonstrated to his neighbors by actual figures that they were paying anywhere from $ to $ a week more for their groceries and supplies than they needed to. this represented the middlemen's profits. he then proposed that if a hundred families would pay him regularly cents a week, he would undertake to supply them with garden truck, provisions and meats at wholesale prices. to clinch the demonstration he showed that an average family would save this -cent weekly fee in a few days' purchases. * * * * * there is no difference in appearance between the community store and any other provision store. there is no difference in the way you buy your food. the only difference is that you pay cents a week on a certain day each week and buy food anywhere from to per cent less than at the commercial, non-coöperative retail stores. ( ) the other day an investigator from the department of agriculture went to the washington community store to make an experiment. he paid his -cent weekly membership fee and made some purchases. he bought a -cent carton of oatmeal for cents; a -cent loaf of bread for cents; one-half peck of string beans for cents, instead of for cents, the price in the non-coöperative stores; three pounds of veal for cents instead of cents; a half dozen oranges for cents instead of the usual price of from to cents. his total purchases amounted to $ . , and the estimated saving was cents--within cent of the entire weekly fee. since to the average newspaper reader it would not mean much to say that the cost of the public schools amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year, a special feature writer calculated the relation of the school appropriation to the total municipal expenditure and then presented the results as fractions of a dollar, thus: of every dollar that each taxpayer in this city paid to the city treasurer last year, cents was spent on the public schools. this means that nearly one-half of all the taxes were expended on giving boys and girls an education. of that same dollar only cents went to maintain the police department, cents to keep up the fire department, and cents for general expenses of the city offices. out of the cents used for school purposes, over one-half, or cents, was paid as salaries to teachers and principals. only cents went for operation, maintenance, and similar expenses. how statistics may be effectively embodied in an interview is demonstrated by the following excerpt from a special feature story on a workmen's compensation law administered by a state industrial board: judge j.b. vaughn, who is at the head of the board, estimates that the system of settling compensation by means of a commission instead of by the regular courts has saved the state $ , , a year since its inception in . "under the usual court proceedings," he says, "each case of an injured workman versus his employer costs from $ to $ . under the workings of the industrial board the average cost is no more than $ . "in three and one-half years , cases have come before us. nine out of every ten have been adjusted by our eight picked arbitrators, who tour the state, visiting promptly each scene of an accident and adjusting the compensation as quickly as possible. the tenth case, which requires a lengthier or more painstaking hearing, is brought to the board. "seven million dollars has been in this time ordered to be paid to injured men and their families. of this no charge of any sort has been entered against the workers or their beneficiaries. the costs are taken care of by the state. fully per cent of all the cases are settled within the board, which means that only per cent are carried further into the higher courts for settlement." processes. to make scientific and technical processes sufficiently simple to appeal to the layman, is another problem for the writer of popular articles. a narrative-descriptive presentation that enables the reader to visualize and follow the process, step by step, as though it were taking place before his eyes, is usually the best means of making it both understandable and interesting. in a special feature story on methods of exterminating mosquitoes, a writer in the _detroit news_ undertook to trace the life history of a mosquito. in order to popularize these scientific details, he describes a "baby mosquito" in a concrete, informal manner, and, as he tells the story of its life, suggests or points out specifically its likeness to a human being. the baby mosquito is a regular little water bug. you call him a "wiggler" when you see him swimming about in a puddle. his head is wide and flat and his eyes are set well out at the sides, while in front of them he has a pair of cute little horns or feelers. while the baby mosquito is brought up in the water, he is an air-breather and comes to the top to breathe as do frogs and musk-rats and many other water creatures of a higher order. like most babies the mosquito larva believes that his mission is to eat as much as he can and grow up very fast. this he does, and if the weather is warm and the food abundant, he soon outgrows his skin. he proceeds to grow a new skin underneath the old one, and when he finds himself protected, he bursts out of his old clothes and comes out in a spring suit. this molting process occurs several times within a week or two, but the last time he takes on another form. he is then called a pupa, and is in a strange transition period during which he does not eat. he now slowly takes on the form of a true mosquito within his pupal skin or shell. after two or three days, or perhaps five or six, if conditions are not altogether favorable, he feels a great longing within him to rise to something higher. his tiny shell is floating upon the water with his now winged body closely packed within. the skin begins to split along the back and the true baby mosquito starts to work himself out. it is a strenuous task for him and consumes many minutes. at last he appears and sits dazed and exhausted, floating on his old skin as on a little boat, and slowly working his new wings in the sunlight, as if to try them out before essaying flight. it is a moment of great peril. a passing ripple may swamp his tiny craft and shipwreck him to become the prey of any passing fish or vagrant frog. a swallow sweeping close to the water's surface may gobble him down. some ruthless city employe may have flooded the surface of the pond with kerosene, the merest touch of which means death to a mosquito. escaping all of the thousand and one accidents that may befall, he soon rises and hums away seeking whom he may devour. a mechanical process, that of handling milk at a model dairy farm, was effectively presented by constance d. leupp in an article entitled, "the fight for clean milk," printed in the _outlook_. by leading "you," the reader, to the spot, as it were, by picturing in detail what "you" would see there, and then by following in story form the course of the milk from one place to another, she succeeded in making the process clear and interesting. here at five in the afternoon you may see long lines of sleek, well-groomed cows standing in their cement-floored, perfectly drained sheds. the walls and ceilings are spotless from constant applications of whitewash, ventilation is scientifically arranged, doors and windows are screened against the flies. here the white-clad, smooth-shaven milkers do their work with scrubbed and manicured hands. you will note that all these men are studiously low-voiced and gentle in movement; for a cow, notwithstanding her outward placidity, is the most sensitive creature on earth, and there is an old superstition that if you speak roughly to your cow she will earn no money for you that day. as each pail is filled it is carried directly into the milk-house; not into the bottling-room, for in that sterilized sanctum nobody except the bottler is admitted, but into the room above, where the pails are emptied into the strainer of a huge receptacle. from the base of this receptacle it flows over the radiator in the bottling-room, which reduces it at once to the required temperature, thence into the mechanical bottler. the white-clad attendant places a tray containing several dozen empty bottles underneath, presses a lever, and, presto! they are full and not a drop spilled. he caps the bottles with another twist of the lever, sprays the whole with a hose, picks up the load and pushes it through the horizontal dumb-waiter, where another attendant receives it in the packing-room. the second man clamps a metal cover over the pasteboard caps and packs the bottles in ice. less than half an hour is consumed in the milking of each cow, the straining, chilling, bottling, and storing of her product. practical guidance units. to give in an attractive form complete and accurate directions for doing something in a certain way, is another difficult problem for the inexperienced writer. for interest and variety, conversation, interviews and other forms of direct quotation, as well as informal narrative, may be employed. various practical methods of saving fuel in cooking were given by a writer in _successful farming_, in what purported to be an account of a meeting of a farm woman's club at which the problem was discussed. by the device of allowing the members of the club to relate their experiences, she was able to offer a large number of suggestions. two units selected from different portions of the article illustrate this method: "i save dollars by cooking in my furnace," added a practical worker. "potatoes bake nicely when laid on the ledge, and beans, stews, roasts, bread--in fact the whole food list--may be cooked there. but one must be careful not to have too hot a fire. i burned several things before i learned that even a few red coals in the fire-pot will be sufficient for practically everything. and then it does blacken the pans! but i've solved that difficulty by bending a piece of tin and setting it between the fire and the cooking vessel. this prevents burning, too, if the fire should be hot. another plan is to set the vessel in an old preserving kettle. if this outer kettle does not leak, it may be filled with water, which not only aids in the cooking process but also prevents burning. for broiling or toasting, a large corn popper is just the thing." * * * * * "my chief saving," confided the member who believes in preparedness, "consists in cooking things in quantities, especially the things that require long cooking, like baked beans or soup. i never think of cooking less than two days' supply of beans, and as for soup, that is made up in quantity sufficient to last a week. if i have no ice, reheating it each day during warm weather prevents spoiling. most vegetables are not harmed by a second cooking, and, besides the saving in fuel it entails, it's mighty comforting to know that you have your dinner already prepared for the next day, or several days before for that matter. in cold weather, or if you have ice, it will not be necessary to introduce monotony into your meals in order to save fuel, for one can wait a day or two before serving the extra quantity. sauces, either for vegetables, meats or puddings, may just as well be made for more than one occasion, altho if milk is used in their preparation, care must be taken that they are kept perfectly cold, as ptomaines develop rapidly in such foods. other things that it pays to cook in large portions are chocolate syrup for making cocoa, caramel for flavoring, and apple sauce." by using a conversation between a hostess and her guest, another writer in the same farm journal succeeded in giving in a novel way some directions for preparing celery. "your escalloped corn is delicious. where did you get your recipe?" mrs. field smiled across the dining table at her guest. "out of my head, i suppose, for i never saw it in print. i just followed the regulation method of a layer of corn, then seasoning, and repeat, only i cut into small pieces a stalk or two of celery with each layer of corn." "celery and corn--a new combination, but it's a good one. i'm so glad to learn of it; but isn't it tedious to cut the celery into such small bits?" "not at all, with my kitchen scissors. i just slash the stalk into several lengthwise strips, then cut them crosswise all at once into very small pieces." "you always have such helpful ideas about new and easy ways to do your work. and economical, too. why, celery for a dish like this could be the outer stalks or pieces too small to be used fresh on the table." "that's the idea, exactly. i use such celery in soups and stews of all kinds; it adds such a delicious flavor. it is especially good in poultry stuffings and meat loaf. then there is creamed celery, of course, to which i sometimes add a half cup of almonds for variety. and i use it in salads, too. not a bit of celery is wasted around here. even the leaves may be dried out in the oven, and crumbled up to flavor soups or other dishes." "that's fine! celery is so high this season, and much of it is not quite nice enough for the table, unless cooked." a number of new uses for adhesive plaster were suggested by a writer in the _new york tribune_, who, in the excerpt below, employs effectively the device of the direct appeal to the reader. aside from surgical "first aid" and the countless uses to which this useful material may be put, there are a great number of household uses for adhesive plaster. if your pumps are too large and slip at the heel, just put a strip across the back and they will stay in place nicely. when your rubbers begin to break repair them on the inside with plaster cut to fit. if the children lose their rubbers at school, write their names with black ink on strips of the clinging material and put these strips inside the top of the rubber at the back. in the same way labels can be made for bottles and cans. they are easy to put on and to take off. if the garden hose, the rubber tube of your bath spray, or your hot water bag shows a crack or a small break, mend it with adhesive. a cracked handle of a broom, carpet sweeper, or umbrella can be repaired with this first aid to the injured. in the same way the handles of golf sticks, baseball bats, flagstaffs and whips may be given a new lease on life. if your sheet music is torn or the window shade needs repairing, or there is a cracked pane of glass in the barn or in a rear window, apply a strip or patch of suitable size. in an article in the _philadelphia ledger_ on "what can i do to earn money?" mary hamilton talbot gave several examples of methods of earning money, in one of which she incorporated practical directions, thus: a resourceful girl who loved to be out-of-doors found her opportunity in a bed of mint and aromatic herbs. she sends bunches of the mint neatly prepared to various hotels and cafés several times a week by parcel post, but it is in the over-supply that she works out best her original ideas. among the novelties she makes is a candied mint that sells quickly. here is her formula: cut bits of mint, leaving three or four small leaves on the branch; wash well; dry and lay in rows on a broad, level surface. thoroughly dissolve one pound of loaf sugar, boil until it threads and set from the fire. while it is still at the boiling point plunge in the bits of mint singly with great care. remove them from the fondant with a fork and straighten the leaves neatly with a hatpin or like instrument. if a second plunging is necessary, allow the first coating to become thoroughly crystalized before dipping them again. lay the sweets on oiled paper until thoroughly dry. with careful handling these mints will preserve their natural aroma, taste, and shape, and will keep for any length of time if sealed from the air. they show to best advantage in glass. the sweet-smelling herbs of this girl's garden she dries and sells to the fancy goods trade, and they are used for filling cushions, pillows, and perfume bags. the seasoning herbs she dries, pulverizes, and puts in small glasses, nicely labeled, which sell for cents each, and reliable grocers are glad to have them for their fastidious customers. chapter vii how to begin importance of the beginning. the value of a good beginning for a news story, a special feature article, or a short story results from the way in which most persons read newspapers and magazines. in glancing through current publications, the average reader is attracted chiefly by headlines or titles, illustrations, and authors' names. if any one of these interests him, he pauses a moment or two over the beginning "to see what it is all about." the first paragraphs usually determine whether or not he goes any further. a single copy of a newspaper or magazine offers so much reading matter that the casual reader, if disappointed in the introduction to one article or short story, has plenty of others to choose from. but if the opening sentences hold his attention, he reads on. "well begun is half done" is a saying that applies with peculiar fitness to special feature articles. structure of the beginning. to accomplish its purpose an introduction must be both a unit in itself and an integral part of the article. the beginning, whether a single paragraph in form, or a single paragraph in essence, although actually broken up into two or more short paragraphs, should produce on the mind of the reader a unified impression. the conversation, the incident, the example, or the summary of which it consists, should be complete in itself. unless, on the other hand, the introduction is an organic part of the article, it fails of its purpose. the beginning must present some vital phase of the subject; it should not be merely something attractive attached to the article to catch the reader's notice. in his effort to make the beginning attractive, an inexperienced writer is inclined to linger over it until it becomes disproportionately long. its length, however, should be proportionate to the importance of that phase of the subject which it presents. as a vital part of the article, the introduction must be so skillfully connected with what follows that a reader is not conscious of the transition. close coherence between the beginning and the body of the article is essential. the four faults, therefore, to be guarded against in writing the beginning are: ( ) the inclusion of diverse details not carefully coordinated to produce a single unified impression; ( ) the development of the introduction to a disproportionate length; ( ) failure to make the beginning a vital part of the article itself; ( ) lack of close connection or of skillful transition between the introduction and the body of the article. types of beginnings. because of the importance of the introduction, the writer should familiarize himself with the different kinds of beginnings, and should study them from the point of view of their suitability for various types of articles. the seven distinct types of beginnings are: ( ) summary; ( ) narrative; ( ) description; ( ) striking statement; ( ) quotation; ( ) question; ( ) direct address. combinations of two or more of these methods are not infrequent. summary beginnings. the general adoption by newspapers of the summary beginning, or "lead," for news stories has accustomed the average reader to finding most of the essential facts of a piece of news grouped together in the first paragraph. the lead, by telling the reader the nature of the event, the persons and things concerned, the time, the place, the cause, and the result, answers his questions, what? who? when? where? why? how? not only are the important facts summarized in such a beginning, but the most striking detail is usually "played up" in the first group of words of the initial sentence where it catches the eye at once. thus the reader is given both the main facts and the most significant feature of the subject. unquestionably this news story lead, when skillfully worked out, has distinct advantages alike for the news report and for the special article. summary beginnings ( ) (_kansas city star_) a fresh air palace ready a palace of sunshine, a glass house of fresh air, will be the christmas offering of kansas city to the fight against tuberculosis, the "great white plague." ten miles from the business district of the city, overlooking a horizon miles away over valley and hill, stands the finest tuberculosis hospital in the united states. the newly completed institution, although not the largest hospital of the kind, is the best equipped and finest appointed. it is symbolic of sunshine and pure air, the cure for the disease. ( ) (_new york world_) stopping the cost of living leaks by marie coolidge rask after ten weeks' instruction in domestic economy at a new york high school, a girl of thirteen has been the means of reducing the expenditure in a family of seven to the extent of five dollars a week. the girl is anna scheiring, american born, of austrian ancestry, living with her parents and brothers and sisters in a five-room apartment at no. east one hundred and fifty-eighth street, where her father, joseph scheiring is superintendent of the building. the same economic practices applied by little anna scheiring are at the present time being worked out in two thousand other new york homes whose daughters are pupils in the washington irving high school. ( ) (_the outlook_) the fight for clean milk by constance d. leupp two million quarts of milk are shipped into new york every day. one hundred thousand of those who drink it are babies. the milk comes from forty-four thousand dairy farms scattered through new york, new jersey, connecticut, massachusetts, pennsylvania, vermont, and even ohio. a large proportion of the two million quarts travels thirty-six hours before it lands on the front doorstep of the consumer. the situation in new york is duplicated in a less acute degree in every city in the united states. narrative beginnings. to begin a special feature article in the narrative form is to give it a story-like character that at once arouses interest. it is impossible in many instances to know from the introduction whether what follows is to be a short story or a special article. an element of suspense may even be injected into the narrative introduction to stimulate the reader's curiosity, and descriptive touches may be added to heighten the vividness. if the whole article is in narrative form, as is the case in a personal experience or confession story, the introduction is only the first part of a continuous story, and as such gives the necessary information about the person involved. narrative beginnings that consist of concrete examples and specific instances are popular for expository articles. sometimes several instances are related in the introduction before the writer proceeds to generalize from them. the advantage of this inductive method of explanation grows out of the fact that, after a general idea has been illustrated by an example or two, most persons can grasp it with much less effort and with much greater interest than when such exemplification follows the generalization. other narrative introductions consist of an anecdote, an incident, or an important event connected with the subject of the article. since conversation is an excellent means of enlivening a narrative, dialogue is often used in the introduction to special articles, whether for relating an incident, giving a specific instance, or beginning a personal experience story. narrative beginnings ( ) (_the outlook_) booker t. washington by emmett j. scott and lyman beecher stowe it came about that in the year , in macon county, alabama, a certain ex-confederate colonel conceived the idea that if he could secure the negro vote he could beat his rival and win the seat he coveted in the state legislature. accordingly the colonel went to the leading negro in the town of tuskegee and asked him what he could do to secure the negro vote, for negroes then voted in alabama without restriction. this man, lewis adams by name, himself an ex-slave, promptly replied that what his race most wanted was education, and what they most needed was industrial education, and that if he (the colonel) would agree to work for the passage of a bill appropriating money for the maintenance of an industrial school for negroes, he, adams, would help to get for him the negro vote and the election. this bargain between an ex-slaveholder and an ex-slave was made and faithfully observed on both sides, with the result that the following year the legislature of alabama appropriated $ , a year for the establishment of a normal and industrial school for negroes in the town of tuskegee. on the recommendation of general armstrong, of hampton institute, a young colored man, booker t. washington, a recent graduate of and teacher at the institute, was called from there to take charge of this landless, buildingless, teacherless, and studentless institution of learning. ( ) (_leslie's weekly_) millionaires made by war by homer croy a tall, gaunt, barefooted missouri hill-billy stood beside his rattly, dish-wheeled wagon waiting to see the mighty proprietor of the saw mill who guessed only too well that the hill-billy had something he wanted to swap for lumber. "what can i do for you?" the hillman shifted his weight uneasily. "i 'low i got somethun of powerful lot of interest to yuh." reaching over the side of the wagon he placed his rough hand tenderly on a black lump. "i guess yuh know what it is." the saw mill proprietor glanced at it depreciatingly and turned toward the mill. "it's lead, pardner, pure lead, and i know where it come from. i could take you right to the spot--ef i wanted to." the mill proprietor hooked a row of fingers under the rough stone and tried to lift it. but he could not budge it. "it does seem to have lead in it. what was you calc'lating askin' for showin' me where you found it?" the farmer from the foothills cut his eyes down to crafty slits. "i was 'lowing just tother day as how a house pattern would come in handy. ef you'll saw me out one i'll take you to the spot." and so the deal was consummated, the hill-billy gleefully driving away, joyous over having got a fine house pattern worth $ for merely showing a fellow where you could pick up a few hunks of lead. that was forty-five years ago and it was thus that the great joplin lead and zinc district was made known to the world. ( ) (_munsey's magazine_) frank a. scott, chairman of the war industries board by theodore tiller one day in the year a twelve-year-old boy, who had to leave school and make his own way in the world on account of his father's death, applied for a job in a railroad freight-office in cleveland, ohio. "i'm afraid you won't do," said the chief. "we need a boy, but you're not tall enough to reach the letter-press." "well, couldn't i stand on a box?" suggested the young seeker of employment. that day a box was added to the equipment of the freight-office and the name of frank a. scott to the payroll. ( ) (_new york times_) new yorker invents new explosive and gives it to the united states nine young men recently rowed to the middle of the hudson river with a wooden box to which wires were attached, lying in the bottom of the boat. they sank the box in deep water very cautiously, and then rowed slowly back to land, holding one end of the wire. presently a column of water feet through and feet high shot into the air, followed by a deafening detonation, which tore dead branches from trees. the nine young men were congratulating one man of the group on the explosion when an irate farmer ran up, yelling that every window in his farmhouse, nearly a mile away, had been shattered. the party of young men didn't apologize then; they gathered about the one who was being congratulated and recongratulated him. the farmer did not know until later that the force which broke his windows and sent the huge column of water into the air was the war department's newest, safest, and most powerful explosive; that the young men composed the dynamite squad of the engineer corps of the new york national guard; and that the man they were congratulating was lieut. harold chase woodward, the inventor of the explosive. ( ) (_system_) why the employees run our business a business of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers--how it succeeds. by edward a. filene "i know i am right. leave it to any fair-minded person to decide." "good enough," i replied; "you name one, i will name another, and let them select a third." she agreed; we selected the umpires and they decided against the store! it had come about in this way. the store rule had been that cashiers paid for shortages in their accounts as--in our view--a penalty for carelessness; we did not care about the money. this girl had been short in an account; the amount had been deducted from her pay, and, not being afraid to speak out, she complained: "if i am over in my accounts, it is a mistake; but if i am short, am i a thief? why should i pay back the money? why can't a mistake be made in either direction?" this arbitration--although it had caused a decision against us--seemed such a satisfactory way of ending disputes that we continued the practice in an informal way. out of it grew the present arbitration board, which is the corner-stone of the relation between our store and the employees, because it affords the machinery for getting what employees are above all else interested in--a square deal. descriptive beginnings. just as description of characters or of scene and setting is one method of beginning short stories and novels, so also it constitutes a form of introduction for an article. in both cases the aim is to create immediate interest by vivid portrayal of definite persons and places. the concrete word picture, like the concrete instance in a narrative beginning, makes a quick and strong appeal. an element of suspense or mystery may be introduced into the description, if a person, a place, or an object is described without being identified by name until the end of the portrayal. the possibilities of description are not limited to sights alone; sounds, odors and other sense impressions, as well as emotions, may be described. frequently several different impressions are combined. to stir the reader's feelings by a strong emotional description is obviously a good method of beginning. a descriptive beginning, to be clear to the rapid reader, should be suggestive rather than detailed. the average person can easily visualize a picture that is sketched in a few suggestive words, whereas he is likely to be confused by a mass of details. picture-making words and those imitative of sounds, as well as figures of speech, may be used to advantage in descriptive beginnings. for the description of feelings, words with a rich emotional connotation are important. descriptive beginnings ( ) (_munsey's magazine_) our highest court by horace towner "the honorable the supreme court of the united states!" nearly every week-day during the winter months, exactly at noon, these warning words, intoned in a resonant and solemn voice, may be heard by the visitor who chances to pass the doors of the supreme court chamber in the capitol of the united states. the visitor sees that others are entering those august portals, and so he, too, makes bold to step softly inside. if he has not waited too long, he finds himself within the chamber in time to see nine justices of our highest court, clad in long, black robes, file slowly into the room from an antechamber at the left. every one within the room has arisen, and all stand respectfully at attention while the justices take their places. then the voice of the court crier is heard again: "_oyez, oyez, oyez_! all persons having business with the supreme court of the united states are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the court is now sitting." then, after a slight pause: "god save the united states and this honorable court!" the justices seat themselves; the attorneys at the bar and visitors do likewise. the supreme court of the united states, generally held to be the most powerful tribunal on earth, is in session. ( ) (_collier's weekly_) james whitcomb brougher, a preacher to the procession by peter clark macfarlane imagine the hippodrome--the largest playhouse of new york and of the new world! imagine it filled with people from foot-lights to the last row in the topmost gallery--orchestra, dress circle, and balconies--a huge uprising, semicircular bowl, lined with human beings. imagine it thus, and then strip the stage; take away the indians and the soldiers, the elephants and the camels; take away the careening stage coaches and the thundering hoofs of horses, and all the strange conglomeration of dramatic activities with which these inventive stage managers are accustomed to panoply their productions. instead of all this, people the stage with a chorus choir in white smocks, and in front of the choir put a lean, upstanding, shock-headed preacher; but leave the audience--a regular hippodrome audience on the biggest saturday night. imagine all of this, i say, and what you have is not the hippodrome, not the greatest play in the new world, nor any playhouse at all, but the temple baptist church of los angeles, california, with james whitcomb brougher, d.d., in the pulpit. ( ) (_the independent_) the little red schoolhouse a "fake" what the country schoolhouse really is, and why by edna m. hill the schoolhouse squats dour and silent in its acre of weeds. a little to the rear stand two wretched outbuildings. upon its gray clapboarded sides, window blinds hang loose and window sashes sag away from their frames. groaning upon one hinge the vestibule door turns away from lopsided steps, while a broken drain pipe sways perilously from the east corner of the roof. within and beyond the vestibule is the schoolroom, a monotony of grimy walls and smoky ceiling. cross lights from the six windows shine upon rows of desks of varying sizes and in varying stages of destruction. a kitchen table faces the door. squarely in the middle of the rough pine floor stands a jacketed stove. a much torn dictionary and a dented water pail stand side by side on the shelf below the one blackboard. and this is the "little red schoolhouse" to which i looked forward so eagerly during the summer--nothing but a tumbledown shack set in the heart of a prosperous farming district. ( ) (_new york tribune_) the one woman official at plattsburg by elene foster the tramp, tramp of feet on a hard road; long lines of khaki figures moving over the browning grass of the parade ground; rows of faces, keen and alert, with that look in the eyes that one sees in lepage's jeanne d'arc; the click, click of bullets from the distant rifle range blended with a chorus of deep voices near at hand singing "over there"; a clear, blue sky, crisp autumn air and the sparkling waters of lake champlain--that's plattsburg. ( ) (_good housekeeping_) new england mill slaves by mary alden hopkins in the pale light of an early winter morning, while a flat, white moon awaited the dawn and wind-driven clouds flung faint scudding shadows across the snow, two little girls, cloaked, shawled, hooded out of all recognition, plodded heavily along a vermont mountain road. each carried a dangling dinner pail. the road was lonely. once they passed a farmhouse, asleep save for a yellow light in a chamber. somewhere a cock crowed. a dog barked in the faint distance. where the road ascended the mountain--a narrow cut between dark, pointed firs and swaying white-limbed birches--the way was slushy with melting snow. the littler girl, half dozing along the accustomed way, slipped and slid into puddles. at the top of the mountain the two children shrank back into their mufflers, before the sweep of the wet, chill wind; but the mill was in sight--beyond the slope of bleak pastures outlined with stone walls--sunk deep in the valley beside a rapid mountain stream, a dim bulk already glimmering with points of light. toward this the two little workwomen slopped along on squashy feet. they were spinners. one was fifteen. she had worked three years. the other was fourteen. she had worked two years. the terse record of the national child labor committee lies before me, unsentimental, bare of comment: "they both get up at four fifteen a.m. and after breakfast start for the mill, arriving there in time not to be late, at six. their home is two and one-half miles from the mill. each earns three dollars a week--so they cannot afford to ride. the road is rough, and it is over the mountains." ( ) (_providence journal_) how to sing the national songs to interpret the text successfully the singer must memorize, visualize, rhythmize, and emphasize by john g. archer the weary eye of the toastmaster looks apologetically down long rows of tables as he says with a sorry-but-it-must-be-done air, "we will now sing 'the star spangled banner'"; the orchestra starts, the diners reach frantically for their menus and each, according to his musical inheritance and patriotic fervor, plunges into the unknown with a resolute determination to be in on the death of the sad rite. some are wrecked among the dizzy altitudes, others persevere through uncharted shoals, all make some kind of a noisy noise, and lo, it is accomplished; and intense relief sits enthroned on every dewy brow. in the crowded church, the minister announces the "battle hymn of the republic," and the organist, armed with plenary powers, crashes into the giddy old tune, dragging the congregation resistingly along at a hurdy gurdy pace till all semblance of text or meaning is irretrievably lost. happy are they when the refrain, "glory, glory, hallelujah," provides a temporary respite from the shredded syllables and scrambled periods, and one may light, as it were, and catch up with himself and the organist. at the close of an outdoor public meeting the chairman, with fatuous ineptitude, shouts that everybody will sing three verses of "america." granting that the tune is pitched comfortably, the first verse marches with vigor and certitude, but not for long; dismay soon smites the crowd in sections as the individual consciousness backs and fills amid half learned lines. the trick of catching hopefully at a neighbor's phrase usually serves to defeat itself, as it unmasks the ignorance of said neighbor, and the tune ends in a sort of polyglot mouthing which is not at all flattering to the denizens of an enlightened community. these glimpses are not a whit over-drawn, and it is safe to say that they mirror practically every corner of our land to-day. why is it, then, that the people make such a sorry exhibition of themselves when they attempt to sing the patriotic songs of our country? is it the tunes or the words or we ourselves? beginning with a striking statement. when the thought expressed in the first sentence of an article is sufficiently unusual, or is presented in a sufficiently striking form, it at once commands attention. by stimulating interest and curiosity, it leads the average person to read on until he is satisfied. a striking statement of this sort may serve as the first sentence of one of the other types of beginning, such as the narrative or the descriptive introduction, the quotation, the question, or the direct address. but it may also be used entirely alone. since great size is impressive, a statement of the magnitude of something is usually striking. numerical figures are often used in the opening sentences to produce the impression of enormous size. if these figures are so large that the mind cannot grasp them, it is well, by means of comparisons, to translate them into terms of the reader's own experience. there is always danger of overwhelming and confusing a person with statistics that in the mass mean little or nothing to him. to declare in the first sentence that something is the first or the only one of its kind immediately arrests attention, because of the universal interest in the unique. an unusual prediction is another form of striking statement. to be told at the beginning of an article of some remarkable thing that the future holds in store for him or for his descendants, fascinates the average person as much as does the fortune-teller's prophecy. there is danger of exaggeration, however, in making predictions. when writers magnify the importance of their subject by assuring us that what they are explaining will "revolutionize" our ideas and practices, we are inclined to discount these exaggerated and trite forms of prophecy. a striking figure of speech--an unusual metaphor, for example--may often be used in the beginning of an article to arouse curiosity. as the comparison in a metaphor is implied rather than expressed, the points of likeness may not immediately be evident to the reader and thus the figurative statement piques his curiosity. a comparison in the form of a simile, or in that of a parable or allegory, may serve as a striking introduction. a paradox, as a self-contradictory statement, arrests the attention in the initial sentence of an article. although not always easy to frame, and hence not so often employed as it might be, a paradoxical expression is an excellent device for a writer to keep in mind when some phase of his theme lends itself to such a striking beginning. besides these readily classified forms of unusual statements, any novel, extraordinary expression that is not too bizarre may be employed. the chief danger to guard against is that of making sensational, exaggerated, or false statements, merely to catch the reader's notice. striking statement beginnings ( ) (_illustrated world_) fire writes a heart's record by h.g. hunting a human heart, writing its own record with an actual finger of flame, is the startling spectacle that has recently been witnessed by scientists. it sounds fanciful, doesn't it? but it is literally a fact that the automatic recording of the heart's action by means of tracings from the point of a tiny blaze appears to have been made a practicable method of determining the condition of the heart, more reliable than any other test that can be applied. ( ) (_boston transcript_) taking hospitals to the emergency by f.w. coburn taking the hospital to the emergency instead of the emergency to the hospital is the underlying idea of the bay state's newest medical unit--one which was installed in three hours on the top of corey hill, and which in much less than half that time may tomorrow or the next day be en route post haste for peru, plymouth, or pawtucketville. ( ) (_kansas city star_) must your home burn? autumn is the season of burning homes. furnaces and stoves will soon be lighted. they have been unused all summer and rubbish may have been piled near them or the flues may have rusted and slipped out of place unobserved in the long period of disuse. persons start their fires in a sudden cold snap. they don't take time to investigate. then the fire department has work to do. ( ) (_new york times_) only public school for children with poor eyes there was opened down hester street way last week the only public school in the world for children with defective eyes. bad eyesight has been urged for years as a cause of backwardness and incorrigibility in school children. now the public school authorities plan, for the first time, not only to teach children whose eyes are defective, but to cure them as well. ( ) (_the outlook_) diseased teeth and bad health by matthias nicoll, jr. the complete disappearance of teeth from the human mouth is the condition towards which the most highly cultivated classes of humanity are drifting. we have already gone far on a course that leads to the coming of a toothless age in future generations. only by immediate adoption of the most active and widespread measures of prevention can the human tooth be saved from the fate that has befallen the leg of the whale. ( ) (_harper's weekly_) the span of life by walter e. weyl you who begin this sentence may not live to read its close. there is a chance, one in three or four billions, that you will die in a second, by the tick of the watch. the chair upon which you sit may collapse, the car in which you ride may collide, your heart may suddenly cease. or you may survive the sentence and the article, and live twenty, fifty, eighty years longer. no one knows the span of your life, and yet the insurance man is willing to bet upon it. what is life insurance but the bet of an unknown number of yearly premiums against the payment of the policy? * * * * the length of your individual life is a guess, but the insurance company bets on a sure thing, on the average death rate. ( ) (_the outlook_) "americans first" by gregory mason every third man you meet in detroit was born in a foreign country. and three out of every four persons there were either born abroad or born here of foreign-born parents. in short, in detroit, only every fourth person you meet was born in this country of american parents. such is the make-up of the town which has been called "the most american city in the united states." ( ) (_kansas city star_) a kansas town feels its own pulse lawrence, kas., was not ill. most of its citizens did not even think it was ailing, but there were some anxious souls who wondered if the rosy exterior were not the mockery of an internal fever. they called in physicians, and after seven months spent in making their diagnosis, they have prescribed for lawrence, and the town is alarmed to the point of taking their medicine. that is the medical way of saying that lawrence has just completed the most thorough municipal survey ever undertaken by a town of its size, and in so doing has found out that it is afflicted with a lot of ills that all cities are heir to. lawrence, however, with kansas progressiveness, proposes to cure these ills. prof. f.w. blackmar, head of the department of sociology at the university of kansas, and incidentally a sort of city doctor, was the first "physician" consulted. he called his assistant, prof. b.w. burgess, and rev. william a. powell in consultation, and about one hundred and fifty club women were taken into the case. then they got busy. that was april . this month they completed the examination, set up an exhibit to illustrate what they had to report, and read the prescription. ( ) (_popular science monthly_) breaking the chain that binds us to earth by charles nevers holmes man is chained to this earth, his planet home. his chain is invisible, but the ball is always to be seen--the earth itself. the chain itself is apparently without weight, while the chain's ball weighs about , , , , , , , tons! ( ) (_associated sunday magazine_) in tune when out of tune by john warren how many persons who own pianos and play them can explain why a piano cannot be said to be in tune unless it is actually out of tune? ( ) (_railroad man's magazine_) making steel rails by charles frederick carter to make steel rails, take pounds of iron ore, pound of coke, ½ pound of limestone, and ½ pounds of air for each pound of iron to be produced. mix and melt, cast in molds, and roll to shape while hot. serve cold. rail-making certainly does seem to be easy when stated in its simplest terms; it also seems attractive from a business standpoint. ( ) (_leslie's weekly_) what electricity means to you one cent's worth of electricity at ten cents per kilowatt-hour will operate: sixteen candle-power mazda lamp for five hours six pound flatiron minutes radiant toaster long enough to produce ten slices of toast sewing machine for two hours fan inches in diameter for two hours percolator long enough to make five cups of coffee heating pad from two to four hours domestic buffer for ¼ hours chafing dish minutes radiant grill for minutes curling iron once a day for two weeks luminous watt radiator for minutes hardly as old as a grown man, the electrical industry--including railways, telephones and telegraphs--has already invested $ , , , in the business of america. its utility companies alone pay uncle sam $ , , every year for taxes--seven out of every ten use it in some form every day. it is unmistakably the most vital factor to-day in america's prosperity. its resources are boundless. as secretary of the interior lane expresses it, there is enough hydro-electric energy running to waste to equal the daily labor of , , , men or times our adult population. beginning with a quotation. words enclosed in quotation marks or set off in some distinctive form such as verse, an advertisement, a letter, a menu, or a sign, immediately catch the eye at the beginning of an article. every conceivable source may be drawn on for quotations, provided, of course, that what is quoted has close connection with the subject. if the quotation expresses an extraordinary idea, it possesses an additional source of interest. verse quotations may be taken from a well-known poem, a popular song, a nursery rhyme, or even doggerel verse. sometimes a whole poem or song prefaces an article. when the verse is printed in smaller type than the article, it need not be enclosed in quotation marks. in his typewritten manuscript a writer may indicate this difference in size of type by single-spacing the lines of the quotation. prose quotations may be taken from a speech or an interview, or from printed material such as a book, report, or bulletin. the more significant the quoted statement, the more effective will be the introduction. when the quotation consists of several sentences or of one long sentence, it may comprise the first paragraph, to be followed in the second paragraph by the necessary explanation. popular sayings, slogans, or current phrases are not always enclosed in quotation marks, but are often set off in a separate paragraph as a striking form of beginning. the most conspicuous quotation beginnings are reproductions of newspaper clippings, advertisements, price lists, menus, telegrams, invitations, or parts of legal documents. these are not infrequently reproduced as nearly as possible in the original form and may be enclosed in a frame, or "box." quotation beginnings ( ) (_new york evening post_) "dignified and stately" being an account of some high and low jinks practiced about this time on college class days by eva elise vom baur _our sorrows are forgotten, and our cares are flown away, while we go marching through princeton_. singing these words, 'round and 'round the campus they marched, drums beating time which no one observed, band clashing with band, in tune with nothing but the dominant note--the joy of reunion. a motley lot of men they are--sailors and traction engineers, pierrots, soldiers, and even vestal virgins--for the june commencement is college carnival time. then hundreds upon thousands of men, east, west, north and south, drop their work and their worries, and leaving families and creditors at home, slip away to their respective alma maters, "just to be boys again" for a day and a night or two. ( ) (_harper's monthly_) the party of the third part by walter e. weyl "the quarrel," opined sir lucius o'trigger, "is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it." something like this was once the attitude of the swaggering youth of britain and ireland, who quarreled "genteelly" and fought out their bloody duels "in peace and quietness." something like this, also, after the jump of a century, was the attitude of employers and trade-unions all over the world toward industrial disputes. words were wasted breath; the time to strike or to lock out your employees was when you were ready and your opponent was not. if you won, so much the better; if you lost--at any rate, it was your own business. outsiders were not presumed to interfere. "faith!" exclaimed sir lucius, "that same interruption in affairs of this nature shows very great ill-breeding." ( ) (_mcclure's magazine_) riding on bubbles by waldemar kaempffert "and the prince sped away with his princess in a magic chariot, the wheels of which were four bubbles of air." suppose you had read that in an andersen or a grimm fairy tale in the days when you firmly believed that cinderella went to a ball in a state coach which had once been a pumpkin; you would have accepted the magic chariot and its four bubbles of air without question. what a pity it is that we have lost the credulity and the wonder of childhood! we have our automobiles--over two and a half million of them--but they have ceased to be magic chariots to us. and as for their tires, they are mere "shoes" and "tubes"--anything but the bubbles of air that they are. in the whole mechanism of modern transportation there is nothing so paradoxical, nothing so daring in conception as these same bubbles of air which we call tires. ( ) (_good housekeeping_) geraldine farrar's advice to aspiring singers interview by john corbin "when did i first decide to be an opera singer?" miss farrar smiled. "let me see. at least as early as the age of eight. this is how i remember. at school i used to get good marks in most of my studies, but in arithmetic my mark was about sixty. that made me unhappy. but once when i was eight, i distinctly remember, i reflected that it didn't really matter because i was going to be an opera singer. how long before that i had decided on my career i can't say." ( ) (_the delineator_) how to start a cafeteria by agnes athol "if john could only get a satisfactory lunch for a reasonable amount of money!" sighs the wife of john in every sizable city in the united states, where work and home are far apart. "he hates sandwiches, anyway, and has no suitable place to eat them; and somehow he doesn't feel that he does good work on a cold box lunch. but those clattery quick-lunch places which are all he has time for, or can afford, don't have appetizing cooking or surroundings, and all my forethought and planning over our good home meals may be counteracted by his miserable lunch. i believe half the explanation of the 'tired business man' lies in the kind of lunches he eats." twenty-five cents a day is probably the outside limit of what the great majority of men spend on their luncheons. some cannot spend over fifteen. what a man needs and so seldom gets for that sum is good, wholesome, appetizing food, quickly served. he wants to eat in a place which is quiet and not too bare and ugly. he wants to buy real food and not table decorations. he is willing to dispense with elaborate service and its accompanying tip, if he can get more food of better quality. the cafeteria lunch-room provides a solution for the mid-day lunch problem and, when wisely located and well run, the answer to many a competent woman or girl who is asking: "what shall i do to earn a living?" ( ) (_newspaper enterprise association_) americanization of america is planned by e.c. rodgers washington, d.c.--america americanized! that's the goal of the naturalization bureau of the united states department of labor, as expressed by raymond p. crist, deputy commissioner, in charge of the americanization program. ( ) (_tractor and gas engine review_) fire insurance that doesn't insure by a.b. brown "this entire policy, unless otherwise provided by agreement endorsed hereon, or added hereto, shall be void if the interest of the insured be other than unconditional and sole ownership." if any farmer anywhere in the united states will look up the fire insurance policy on his farm building, and will read it carefully, in nine cases out of ten, he will find tucked away somewhere therein a clause exactly like the one quoted above, or practically in the same words. beginning with a question. every question is like a riddle; we are never satisfied until we know the answer. so a question put to us at the beginning of an article piques our curiosity, and we are not content until we find out how the writer answers it. instead of a single question, several may be asked in succession. these questions may deal with different phases of the subject or may repeat the first question in other words. it is frequently desirable to break up a long question into a number of short ones to enable the rapid reader to grasp the idea more easily. greater prominence may be gained for each question by giving it a separate paragraph. rhetorical questions, although the equivalent of affirmative or negative statements, nevertheless retain enough of their interrogative effect to be used advantageously for the beginning of an article. that the appeal may be brought home to each reader personally, the pronoun "you," or "yours," is often embodied in the question, and sometimes readers are addressed by some designation such as "mr. average reader," "mrs. voter," "you, high school boys and girls." the indirect question naturally lacks the force of the direct one, but it may be employed when a less striking form of beginning is desired. the direct question, "do you know why the sky is blue?" loses much of its force when changed into the indirect form, "few people know why the sky is blue"; still it possesses enough of the riddle element to stimulate thought. several indirect questions may be included in the initial sentence of an article. question beginnings ( ) (_kansas city star_) tracing the drouth to its lair what becomes of the rainfall in the plains states? this region is the veritable bread basket of our country; but in spite of the fact that we have an average rainfall of about thirty-six inches, lack of moisture, more frequently than any other condition, becomes a limiting factor in crop production. measured in terms of wheat production, a -inch rainfall, if properly distributed through the growing season and utilized only by the crop growing land, is sufficient for the production of ninety bushels of wheat an acre. the question as to what becomes of the rainfall, therefore, is of considerable interest in this great agricultural center of north america, where we do well if we average twenty-five bushels to the acre. ( ) (_new york evening sun_) we waste one-quarter of our food if a family of five using twenty-five bushels of potatoes a year at $ a bushel, lose per cent on a bushel by paring, how much has the family thrown into the garbage can during the year? answer, $ . applying this conservative estimate of dietitians to other foods, the average family might save at least $ a year on its table. ( ) (_new york times)_ farm wizard achieves agricultural wonders by robert g. skerrett can a farm be operated like a factory? can fickle nature be offset and crops be brought to maturity upon schedule time? these are questions that a farmer near bridgeton, n.j., has answered in the most practical manner imaginable. ( ) (_san francisco call_) does it pay the state to educate pretty girls for teachers? by katherine atkinson does it pay the state to educate its teachers? do normal school and university graduates continue teaching long enough to make adequate return for the money invested in their training? ( ) (_newspaper feature service_) how hunger is now measured and photographed just what hunger is, why all living creatures suffer this feeling and what the difference is between hunger and appetite have always been three questions that puzzled scientists. not until dr. a.j. carlson devised a method of ascertaining exactly the nature of hunger by measuring and comparing the degrees of this sensation, have investigators along this line of scientific research been able to reach any definite conclusion. ( ) (_the outlook_) grow old along with me by charles henry lerrigo are you interested in adding fifteen years to your life? perhaps you are one of those sound strong persons absolutely assured of perfect health. very well. two thousand young persons, mostly men, average age thirty, employees of commercial houses and banks in new york city, were given a medical examination in a recent period of six months; , of them were positive of getting a perfect bill of health. here are the findings: sixty-three were absolutely sound. the remaining , all suffered from some defect, great or small, which was capable of improvement. ( ) (_country gentleman_) simple accounts for farm business by morton o. cooper is your farm making money or losing it? what department is showing a profit? what one is piling up a loss? do you know? not one farmer in ten does know and it is all because not one in ten has any accounts apart from his bankbook so he can tell at the end of the year whether he has kept the farm or the farm has kept him. ( ) (_the outlook_) an enforced vacation by a city dweller have you, my amiable male reader, felt secretly annoyed when your friends--probably your wife and certainly your physician--have suggested that you cut your daily diet of havanas in two, feeling that your intimate acquaintance with yourself constituted you a better judge of such matters than they? have you felt that your physician's advice to spend at least three-quarters of an hour at lunch was good advice for somebody else, but that you had neither time nor inclination for it? have you felt that you would _like_ to take a month's vacation, but with so many "irons in the fire" things would go to smash if you did? do you know what it is to lie awake at night and plan your campaign for the following day? then _you_ are getting ready for an enforced vacation. ( ) (_leslie's weekly_) taking the starch out of the march by gerald mygatt don't most of us--that is, those of us who are unfamiliar with army life and with things military in general--don't most of us picture marching troops as swinging down a road in perfect step, left arms moving in unison, rifles held smartly at the right shoulder, head and eyes straight to the front (with never so much as a forehead wrinkled to dislodge a mosquito or a fly), and with the band of the fife-and-drum corps playing gaily at the head of the column? of course we do. because that's the way we see them on parade. a march is a far different thing. a march is simply the means of getting so many men from one place to another in the quickest time and in the best possible condition. and it may astonish one to be told that marching is the principal occupation of troops in the field--that it is one of the hardest things for troops to learn to do properly, and that it is one of the chief causes of loss. addressing the reader directly. a direct personal appeal makes a good opening for an article. the writer seems to be talking to each reader individually instead of merely writing for thousands. this form of address may seem to hark back to the days of the "gentle reader," but its appeal is perennial. to the pronoun "you" may be added the designation of the particular class of readers addressed, such as "you, mothers," or "you, mr. salaried man." the imperative verb is perhaps the strongest form of direct address. there is danger of overdoing the "do-this-and-don't-do-that" style, particularly in articles of practical guidance, but that need not deter a writer from using the imperative beginning occasionally. direct address beginnings ( ) (_new york times_) small chance for draft dodgers if doctors know their business a word with you, mr. would-be-slacker. if you 're thinking of trying to dodge the selective draft by pretending physical disability when you get before the local exemption board, here's a bit of advice: don't. since you are mr. would-be-slacker there is no use preaching patriotism to you. but here is something that will influence you: if you try to dodge the draft and are caught, there is a heavy penalty, both fine and imprisonment; and you're almost sure to get caught. ( ) (_american magazine_) the general manager of cowbell "holler" by bruce barton you would never in the world find cowbell "holler" alone, so i will tell you how to get there. you come over the big hill pike until you reach west pinnacle. it was from the peak of west pinnacle that daniel boone first looked out over the blue grass region of kentucky. you follow the pike around the base of the pinnacle, and there you are, right in the heart of cowbell "holler," and only two pastures and a creek away from miss adelia fox's rural social settlement--the first of its kind, so far as i know, in america. ( ) (_chicago tribune_) the road to retail success by benjamin h. jefferson you all know the retail druggist who has worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day all his life, and now, as an old man, is forced to discharge his only clerk. you all know the grocer who has changed from one store to another and another, and who finally turns up as a collector for your milkman. you all know the hard working milliner and, perhaps, have followed her career until she was lost to sight amid sickness and distress. you all have friends among stationers and newsdealers. you have seen them labor day in and day out, from early morning until late at night; and have observed with sorrow the small fruits of their many years of toil. why did they fail? ( ) (_illustrated sunday magazine_) the man who put the "pep" in printing look at your watch. how long is a second? gone as you look at the tiny hand, isn't it? yet within that one second it is possible to print, cut, fold and stack sixteen and two-thirds newspapers! watch the second hand make one revolution--a minute. within that minute it is possible to print, cut, fold and stack in neat piles one thousand big newspapers! to do that is putting "pep" in printing, and henry a. wise wood is the man who did it. chapter viii style style defined. style, or the manner in which ideas and emotions are expressed, is as important in special feature writing as it is in any other kind of literary work. a writer may select an excellent subject, may formulate a definite purpose, and may choose the type of article best suited to his needs, but if he is unable to express his thoughts effectively, his article will be a failure. style is not to be regarded as mere ornament added to ordinary forms of expression. it is not an incidental element, but rather the fundamental part of all literary composition, the means by which a writer transfers what is in his own mind to the minds of his readers. it is a vehicle for conveying ideas and emotions. the more easily, accurately, and completely the reader gets the author's thoughts and feelings, the better is the style. the style of an article needs to be adapted both to the readers and to the subject. an article for a boys' magazine would be written in a style different from that of a story on the same subject intended for a sunday newspaper. the style appropriate to an entertaining story on odd superstitions of business men would be unsuitable for a popular exposition of wireless telephony. in a word, the style of a special article demands as careful consideration as does its subject, purpose, and structure. since it may be assumed that any one who aspires to write for newspapers and magazines has a general knowledge of the principles of composition and of the elements and qualities of style, only such points of style as are important in special feature writing will be discussed in this chapter. the elements of style are: ( ) words, ( ) figures of speech, ( ) sentences, and ( ) paragraphs. the kinds of words, figures, sentences, and paragraphs used, and the way in which they are combined, determine the style. words. in the choice of words for popular articles, three points are important: ( ) only such words may be used as are familiar to the average person, ( ) concrete terms make a much more definite impression than general ones, and ( ) words that carry with them associated ideas and feelings are more effective than words that lack such intellectual and emotional connotation. the rapid reader cannot stop to refer to the dictionary for words that he does not know. although the special feature writer is limited to terms familiar to the average reader, he need not confine himself to commonplace, colloquial diction; most readers know the meaning of many more words than they themselves use in everyday conversation. in treating technical topics, it is often necessary to employ some unfamiliar terms, but these may readily be explained the first time they appear. whenever the writer is in doubt as to whether or not his readers will understand a certain term, the safest course is to explain it or to substitute one that is sure to be understood. since most persons grasp concrete ideas more quickly than abstract ones, specific words should be given the preference in popular articles. to create concrete images must be the writer's constant aim. instead of a general term like "walk," for example, he should select a specific, picture-making word such as hurry, dash, run, race, amble, stroll, stride, shuffle, shamble, limp, strut, stalk. for the word "horse" he may substitute a definite term like sorrel, bay, percheron, nag, charger, steed, broncho, or pony. in narrative and descriptive writing particularly, it is necessary to use words that make pictures and that reproduce sounds and other sense impressions. in the effort to make his diction specific, however, the writer must guard against bizarre effects and an excessive use of adjectives and adverbs. verbs, quite as much as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, produce clear, vivid images when skillfully handled. some words carry with them associated ideas and emotions, while others do not. the feelings and ideas thus associated with words constitute their emotional and intellectual connotation, as distinct from their logical meaning, or denotation. the word "home," for example, denotes simply one's place of residence, but it connotes all the thoughts and feelings associated with one's own house and family circle. such a word is said to have a rich emotional connotation because it arouses strong feeling. it also has a rich intellectual connotation since it calls up many associated images. words and phrases that are peculiar to the bible or to the church service carry with them mental images and emotions connected with religious worship. in a personality sketch of a spiritual leader, for example, such words and phrases would be particularly effective to create the atmosphere with which such a man might very appropriately be invested. since homely, colloquial expressions have entirely different associations, they would be entirely out of keeping with the tone of such a sketch, unless the religious leader were an unconventional revivalist. a single word with the wrong connotation may seriously affect the tone of a paragraph. on the other hand, words and phrases rich in appropriate suggestion heighten immeasurably the effectiveness of an article. the value of concrete words is shown in the following paragraphs taken from a newspaper article describing a gas attack: there was a faint green vapor, which swayed and hung under the lee of the raised parapet two hundred yards away. it increased in volume, and at last rose high enough to be caught by the wind. it strayed out in tattered yellowish streamers toward the english lines, half dissipating itself in twenty yards, until the steady outpour of the green smoke gave it reinforcement and it made headway. then, creeping forward from tuft to tuft, and preceded by an acrid and parching whiff, the curling and tumbling vapor reached the english lines in a wall twenty feet high. as the grayish cloud drifted over the parapet, there was a stifled call from some dozen men who had carelessly let their protectors drop. the gas was terrible. a breath of it was like a wolf at the throat, like hot ashes in the windpipe. the yellowish waves of gas became more greenish in color as fresh volumes poured out continually from the squat iron cylinders which had now been raised and placed outside the trenches by the germans. the translucent flood flowed over the parapet, linking at once on the inner side and forming vague, gauzy pools and backwaters, in which men stood knee deep while the lighter gas was blown in their faces over the parapet. faults in diction. since newspaper reporters and correspondents are called upon day after day to write on similar events and to write at top speed, they are prone to use the same words over and over again, without making much of an effort to "find the one noun that best expresses the idea, the one verb needed to give it life, and the one adjective to qualify it." this tendency to use trite, general, "woolly" words instead of fresh, concrete ones is not infrequently seen in special feature stories written by newspaper workers. every writer who aims to give to his articles some distinction in style should guard against the danger of writing what has aptly been termed "jargon." "to write jargon," says sir arthur quiller-couch in his book, "on the art of writing," "is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms. so long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men's summarized concepts of things, to concrete ones which lie as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand. if your language be jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. where your mind should go straight, it will dodge; the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent. for the style is the man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also." figures of speech. to most persons the term "figure of speech" suggests such figures as metonymy and synecdoche, which they once learned to define, but never thought of using voluntarily in their own writing. figures of speech are too often regarded as ornaments suited only to poetry or poetical prose. with these popular notions in mind, a writer for newspapers and magazines may quite naturally conclude that figurative expressions have little or no practical value in his work. figures of speech, however, are great aids, not only to clearness and conciseness, but to the vividness of an article. they assist the reader to grasp ideas quickly and they stimulate his imagination and his emotions. association of ideas is the principle underlying figurative expressions. by a figure of speech a writer shows his readers the relation between a new idea and one already familiar to them. an unfamiliar object, for example, is likened to a familiar one, directly, as in the simile, or by implication, as in the metaphor. as the object brought into relation with the new idea is more familiar and more concrete, the effect of the figure is to simplify the subject that is being explained, and to make it more easy of comprehension. a figure of speech makes both for conciseness and for economy of mental effort on the part of the reader. to say in a personality sketch, for example, that the person looks "like lincoln" is the simplest, most concise way of creating a mental picture. or to describe a smoothly running electric motor as "purring," instantly makes the reader hear the sound. scores of words may be saved, and clearer, more vivid impressions may be given, by the judicious use of figures of speech. as the familiar, concrete objects introduced in figures frequently have associated emotions, figurative expressions often make an emotional appeal. again, to say that a person looks "like lincoln" not only creates a mental picture but awakes the feelings generally associated with lincoln. the result is that readers are inclined to feel toward the person so described as they feel toward lincoln. even in practical articles, figurative diction may not be amiss. in explaining a method of splitting old kitchen boilers in order to make watering troughs, a writer in a farm journal happily described a cold chisel as "turning out a narrow shaving of steel and rolling it away much as the mold-board of a plow turns the furrow." the stimulating effect of a paragraph abounding in figurative expressions is well illustrated by the following passage taken from a newspaper personality sketch of a popular pulpit orator: his mind is all daylight. there are no subtle half-tones, or sensitive reserves, or significant shadows of silence, no landscape fading through purple mists to a romantic distance. all is clear, obvious, emphatic. there is little atmosphere and a lack of that humor that softens the contours of controversy. his thought is simple and direct and makes its appeal, not to culture, but to the primitive emotions. * * * * his strenuousness is a battle-cry to the crowd. he keeps his passion white hot; his body works like a windmill in a hurricane; his eyes flash lightnings; he seizes the enemy, as it were, by the throat, pommels him with breathless blows, and throws him aside a miserable wreck. sentences. for rapid reading the prime requisite of a good sentence is that its grammatical structure shall be evident; in other words, that the reader shall be able at a glance to see the relation of its parts. involved sentences that require a second perusal before they yield their meaning, are clearly not adapted to the newspaper or magazine. short sentences and those of medium length are, as a rule, more easily grasped than long ones, but for rapid reading the structure of the sentence, rather than its length, is the chief consideration. absolute clearness is of paramount importance. in hurried reading the eye is caught by the first group of words at the beginning of a sentence. these words make more of an impression on the reader's mind than do those in the middle or at the end of the sentence. in all journalistic writing, therefore, the position of greatest emphasis is the beginning. it is there that the most significant idea should be placed. such an arrangement does not mean that the sentence need trail off loosely in a series of phrases and clauses. firmness of structure can and should be maintained even though the strongest emphasis is at the beginning. in revising his article a writer often finds that he may greatly increase the effectiveness of his sentences by so rearranging the parts as to bring the important ideas close to the beginning. length of the sentence. sentences may be classified according to length as ( ) short, containing words or less; ( ) medium, from to words; and ( ) long, words or more. each of these types of sentence has its own peculiar advantages. the short sentence, because it is easily apprehended, is more emphatic than a longer one. used in combination with medium and long sentences it gains prominence by contrast. it makes an emphatic beginning and a strong conclusion for a paragraph. as the last sentence of an article it is a good "snapper." in contrast with longer statements, it also serves as a convenient transition sentence. the sentence of medium length lends itself readily to the expression of the average thought; but when used continuously it gives to the style a monotony of rhythm that soon becomes tiresome. the long sentence is convenient for grouping details that are closely connected. in contrast with the rapid, emphatic short sentence, it moves slowly and deliberately, and so is well adapted to the expression of dignified and impressive thoughts. to prevent monotony, variety of sentence length is desirable. writers who unconsciously tend to use sentences of about the same length and of the same construction, need to beware of this uniformity. the skillful use of single short sentences, of series of short sentences, of medium, and of long sentences, to give variety, to express thoughts effectively, and to produce harmony between the movement of the style and the ideas advanced, is well illustrated in the selection below. it is the beginning of a personality sketch of william ii, the former german emperor, published in the london _daily news_ before the world war, and written by mr. a.g. gardiner, the editor of that paper. when i think of the kaiser i think of a bright may morning at potsdam. it is the spring parade, and across from where we are gathered under the windows of the old palace the household troops are drawn up on the great parade ground, their helmets and banners and lances all astir in the jolly sunshine. officers gallop hither and thither shouting commands. regiments form and reform. swords flash out and flash back again. a noble background of trees frames the gay picture with cool green foliage. there is a sudden stillness. the closely serried ranks are rigid and moveless. the shouts of command are silenced. "the kaiser." he comes slowly up the parade ground on his white charger, helmet and eagle flashing in the sunshine, sitting his horse as if he lived in the saddle, his face turned to his men as he passes by. "morgen, meine kinder." his salutation rings out at intervals in the clear morning air. and back from the ranks in chorus comes the response: "morgen, majestät." and as he rides on, master of a million men, the most powerful figure in europe, reviewing his troops on the peaceful parade ground at potsdam, one wonders whether the day will ever come when he will ride down those ranks on another errand, and when that cheerful response of the soldiers will have in it the ancient ring of doom--"te morituri salutamus." for answer, let us look at this challenging figure on the white charger. what is he? what has he done? by the three short sentences in the first paragraph beginning "officers gallop," the author depicts the rapid movement of the soldiers. by the next three short sentences in the same paragraph beginning, "there is a sudden stillness," he produces an impression of suspense. to picture the kaiser coming up "slowly," he uses a long, leisurely sentence. the salutations "ring out" in short, crisp sentences. the more serious, impressive thought of the possibility of war finds fitting expression in the long, -word sentence, ending with the sonorous--"ring of doom," "te morituri salutamus." the transition between the introduction and the body of the sketch is accomplished by the last paragraph consisting of three short sentences, in marked contrast with the climactic effect with which the description closed. paragraphs. the paragraph is a device that aids a writer to convey to readers his thoughts combined in the same groups in which they are arranged in his own mind. since a small group of thoughts is more easily grasped than a large one, paragraphs in journalistic writing are usually considerably shorter than those of ordinary english prose. in the narrow newspaper column, there is room for only five or six words to a line. a paragraph of words, which is the average length of the literary paragraph, fills between forty and fifty lines of a newspaper column. such paragraphs seem heavy and uninviting. moreover, the casual reader cannot readily comprehend and combine the various thoughts in so large a group of sentences. although there is no standard column width for magazines, the number of words in a line does not usually exceed eight. a paragraph of words that occupies eight-word lines seems less attractive than one of half that length. the normal paragraph in journalistic writing seldom exceeds words and not infrequently is much shorter. as such a paragraph contains not more than four or five sentences, the general reading public has little difficulty in comprehending it. the beginning of the paragraph, like the beginning of the sentence, is the part that catches the eye. significant ideas that need to be impressed upon the mind of the reader belong at the beginning. if his attention is arrested and held by the first group of words, he is likely to read on. if the beginning does not attract him, he skips down the column to the next paragraph, glancing merely at enough words in the paragraph that he skips to "get the drift of it." an emphatic beginning for a paragraph will insure attention for its contents. revision. it is seldom that the first draft of an article cannot be improved by a careful revision. in going over his work, word by word and sentence by sentence, the writer will generally find many opportunities to increase the effectiveness of the structure and the style. such revision, moreover, need not destroy the ease and naturalness of expression. to improve the diction of his article, the writer should eliminate ( ) superfluous words, ( ) trite phrases, ( ) general, colorless words, ( ) terms unfamiliar to the average reader, unless they are explained, ( ) words with a connotation inappropriate to the context, ( ) hackneyed and mixed metaphors. the effectiveness of the expression may often be strengthened by the addition of specific, picture-making, imitative, and connotative words, as well as of figures of speech that clarify the ideas and stimulate the imagination. sentences may frequently be improved ( ) by making their grammatical structure more evident, ( ) by breaking up long, loose sentences into shorter ones, ( ) by using short sentences for emphasis, ( ) by varying the sentence length, ( ) by transferring important ideas to the beginning of the sentence. every paragraph should be tested to determine whether or not it is a unified, coherent group of thoughts, containing not more than words, with important ideas effectively massed at the beginning. finally, revision should eliminate all errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. every minute spent in improving an article adds greatly to its chances of being accepted. chapter ix titles and headlines importance of head and title. headlines or titles, illustrations, and names of authors are the three things that first catch the eye of the reader as he turns over the pages of a newspaper or magazine. when the writer's name is unknown to him, only the illustrations and the heading remain to attract his attention. the "attention-getting" value of the headline is fully appreciated not only by newspaper and magazine editors but by writers of advertisements. just as the striking heads on the front page of a newspaper increase its sales, so, also, attractive titles on the cover of a magazine lead people to buy it, and so, too, a good headline in an advertisement arouses interest in what the advertiser is trying to sell. a good title adds greatly to the attractiveness of an article. in the first place, the title is the one thing that catches the eye of the editor or manuscript reader, as he glances over the copy, and if the title is good, he carries over this favorable impression to the first page or two of the article itself. to secure such favorable consideration for a manuscript among the hundreds that are examined in editorial offices, is no slight advantage. in the second place, what is true of the editor and the manuscript is equally true of the reader and the printed article. no writer can afford to neglect his titles. variety in form and style. because newspapers and magazines differ in the size and the "make-up" of their pages, there is considerable variety in the style of headlines and titles given to special feature articles. some magazine sections of newspapers have the full-size page of the regular edition; others have pages only half as large. some newspapers use large eight-column display heads on their special articles, while others confine their headlines for feature stories to a column or two. some papers regularly employ sub-titles in their magazine sections, corresponding to the "lines," "banks," and "decks" in their news headlines. this variety in newspapers is matched by that in magazines. despite these differences, however, there are a few general principles that apply to all kinds of titles and headlines for special feature articles. characteristics of a good title. to accomplish their purpose most effectively titles should be ( ) attractive, ( ) accurate, ( ) concise, and ( ) concrete. the attractiveness of a title is measured by its power to arrest attention and to lead to a reading of the article. as a statement of the subject, the title makes essentially the same appeal that the subject itself does; that is, it may interest the reader because the idea it expresses has timeliness, novelty, elements of mystery or romance, human interest, relation to the reader's life and success, or connection with familiar or prominent persons or things. not only the idea expressed, but the way in which it is expressed, may catch the eye. by a figurative, paradoxical, or interrogative form, the title may pique curiosity. by alliteration, balance, or rhyme, it may please the ear. it permits the reader to taste, in order to whet his appetite. it creates desires that only the article can satisfy. in an effort to make his titles attractive, a writer must beware of sensationalism and exaggeration. the lurid news headline on the front page of sensational papers has its counterpart in the equally sensational title in the sunday magazine section. all that has been said concerning unwholesome subject-matter for special feature stories applies to sensational titles. so, too, exaggerated, misleading headlines on news and advertisements are matched by exaggerated, misleading titles on special articles. to state more than the facts warrant, to promise more than can be given, to arouse expectations that cannot be satisfied--all are departures from truth and honesty. accuracy in titles involves, not merely avoidance of exaggerated and misleading statement, but complete harmony in tone and spirit between title and article. when the story is familiar and colloquial in style, the title should reflect that informality. when the article makes a serious appeal, the title should be dignified. a good title, in a word, is true to the spirit as well as to the letter. conciseness in titles is imposed on the writer by the physical limitations of type and page. because the width of the column and of the page is fixed, and because type is not made of rubber, a headline must be built to fit the place it is to fill. although in framing titles for articles it is not always necessary to conform to the strict requirements as to letters and spaces that limit the building of news headlines, it is nevertheless important to keep within bounds. a study of a large number of titles will show that they seldom contain more than three or four important words with the necessary connectives and particles. short words, moreover, are preferred to long ones. by analyzing the titles in the publication to which he plans to send his article, a writer can frame his title to meet its typographical requirements. the reader's limited power of rapid comprehension is another reason for brevity. a short title consisting of a small group of words yields its meaning at a glance. unless the reader catches the idea in the title quickly, he is likely to pass on to something else. here again short words have an advantage over long ones. concreteness in titles makes for rapid comprehension and interest. clean-cut mental images are called up by specific words; vague ones usually result from general, abstract terms. clear mental pictures are more interesting than vague impressions. sub-titles. sub-titles are often used to supplement and amplify the titles. they are the counterparts of the "decks" and "banks" in news headlines. their purpose is to give additional information, to arouse greater interest, and to assist in carrying the reader over, as it were, to the beginning of the article. since sub-titles follow immediately after the title, any repetition of important words is usually avoided. it is desirable to maintain the same tone in both title and sub-title. occasionally the two together make a continuous statement. the length of the sub-title is generally about twice that of the title; that is, the average sub-title consists of from ten to twelve words, including articles and connectives. the articles, "a," "an," and "the," are not as consistently excluded from sub-titles as they are from newspaper headlines. some types of titles. attempts to classify all kinds of headlines and titles involve difficulties similar to those already encountered in the effort to classify all types of beginnings. nevertheless, a separation of titles into fairly distinct, if not mutually exclusive, groups may prove helpful to inexperienced writers. the following are the nine most distinctive types of titles: ( ) label; ( ) "how" and "why" statement; ( ) striking statement, including figure of speech, paradox, and expression of great magnitude; ( ) quotation and paraphrase of quotation; ( ) question; ( ) direct address, particularly in imperative form; ( ) alliteration; ( ) rhyme; ( ) balance. the label title is a simple, direct statement of the subject. it has only as much interest and attractiveness as the subject itself possesses. such titles are the following: ( ) raising guinea pigs for a living one missouri man finds a ready market for all he can sell ( ) human nature as seen by a pullman porter ( ) the financial side of football ( ) confessions of an undergraduate ( ) bee-keeping on shares ( ) a community wood-chopping day ( ) what a woman on the farm thinks of price fixing the "how-to-do-something" article may be given a "how" title that indicates the character of the contents; for example: ( ) how i found health in the dentist's chair ( ) how to store your car in winter ( ) how a farmer's wife made $ extra ( ) how to succeed as a writer woman who "knew she could write" tells how she began and finally got on the right road the "how" title may also be used for an article that explains some phenomenon or process. examples of such titles are these: ( ) how a nettle stings ( ) how ripe olives are made ( ) how the freight car gets home articles that undertake to give causes and reasons are appropriately given "why" titles like the following: ( ) why caviar costs so much ( ) why i like a round barn ( ) why the coal supply is short a title may attract attention because of the striking character of the idea it expresses; for example: ( ) wanted: $ , men ( ) bushels of corn per acre ( ) fire writes a heart's record ( ) the psychology of second helpings the paradoxical form of title piques curiosity by seeming to make a self-contradictory statement, as, for example, the following: ( ) ships of stone seaworthy concrete vessels an accomplished fact ( ) christian pagans ( ) a telescope that points downward ( ) seeing with your ears ( ) making sailors without ships ( ) how to be at home while traveling ( ) canal-boats that climb hills a striking figure of speech in a title stimulates the reader's imagination and arouses his interest; for example: ( ) pulling the river's teeth ( ) the old house with two faces ( ) the honey-bee savings bank ( ) riding on bubbles ( ) the romance of nitrogen a familiar quotation may be used for the title and may stand alone, but often a sub-title is desirable to show the application of the quotation to the subject, thus: ( ) the shot heard 'round the world america's first victory in france ( ) "all wool and a yard wide" what "all wool" really means and why shoddy is necessary ( ) the servant in the house and why she won't stay in the house a well-known quotation or common saying may be paraphrased in a novel way to attract attention; for example: ( ) forward! the tractor brigade ( ) it's lo, the rich indian ( ) learning by undoing ( ) the guileless spider and the wily fly entomology modifies our ideas of the famous parlor since every question is like a riddle, a title in question form naturally leads the reader to seek the answer in the article itself. the directness of appeal may be heightened by addressing the question to the reader with "you," "your," or by presenting it from the reader's point of view with the use of "i," "we," or "ours." the sub-title may be another question or an affirmation, but should not attempt to answer the question. the following are typical question titles and sub-titles: ( ) what is a fair price for milk? ( ) how much heat is there in your coal? ( ) who's the best boss? would you rather work for a man or for a machine? ( ) "she sank by the bow"--but why? ( ) how shall we keep warm this winter? ( ) does deep plowing pay? what some recent tests have demonstrated ( ) shall i start a canning business? the reader may be addressed in an imperative form of title, as well as in a question, as the following titles show: ( ) blame the sun spots solar upheavals that make mischief on the earth ( ) eat sharks and tan their skins ( ) hoe! hoe! for uncle sam ( ) don't jump out of bed give your subconscious self a chance to awake gradually ( ) raise fish on your farm ( ) better stop! look! and listen! the attractiveness of titles may be heightened by such combinations of sounds as alliteration and rhyme, or by rhythm such as is produced by balanced elements. the following examples illustrate the use of alliteration, rhyme, and balance: ( ) the lure of the latch ( ) the diminishing dollar ( ) tracing telephone troubles ( ) boy culture and agriculture ( ) a little bill against billboards ( ) every campus a camp ( ) labor-lighteners and home-brighteners ( ) the artillery mill at old fort sill how uncle sam is training his field artillery officers ( ) scholars vs. dollars ( ) war on pests when the spray gun's away, crop enemies play ( ) more heat and less coal ( ) grain alcohol from green garbage how to frame a title. the application of the general principles governing titles may best be shown by means of an article for which a title is desired. a writer, for example, has prepared a popular article on soil analysis as a means of determining what chemical elements different kinds of farm land need to be most productive. a simple label title like "the value of soil analysis," obviously would not attract the average person, and probably would interest only the more enterprising of farmers. the analysis of soil not unnaturally suggests the diagnosis of human disease; and the remedying of worn-out, run-down farm land by applying such chemicals as phosphorus and lime, is analogous to the physician's prescription of tonics for a run-down, anæmic person. these ideas may readily be worked out as the following titles show: ( ) prescribing for run-down land what the soil doctor is doing to improve our farms ( ) the soil doctor and his tonics prescribing remedies for worn-out farm land ( ) diagnosing ills of the soil science offers remedies for depleted farms other figurative titles like the following may be developed without much effort from the ideas that soil "gets tired," "wears out," and "needs to be fed": ( ) when farm land gets tired scientists find causes of exhausted fields ( ) fields won't wear out if the warnings of soil experts are heeded ( ) balanced rations for the soil why the feeding of farm land is necessary for good crops chapter x preparing and selling the manuscript importance of good manuscript. after an article has been carefully revised, it is ready to be copied in the form in which it will be submitted to editors. because hundreds of contributions are examined every day in editorial offices of large publications, manuscripts should be submitted in such form that their merits can be ascertained as easily and as quickly as possible. a neatly and carefully prepared manuscript is likely to receive more favorable consideration than a badly typed one. the impression produced by the external appearance of a manuscript as it comes to an editor's table is comparable to that made by the personal appearance of an applicant for a position as he enters an office seeking employment. in copying his article, therefore, a writer should keep in mind the impression that it will make in the editorial office. form for manuscripts. editors expect all manuscripts to be submitted in typewritten form. every person who aspires to write for publication should learn to use a typewriter. until he has learned to type his work accurately, he must have a good typist copy it for him. a good typewriter with clean type and a fresh, black, non-copying ribbon produces the best results. the following elementary directions apply to the preparation of all manuscripts: ( ) write on only one side of the paper; ( ) allow a margin of about three quarters of an inch on all sides of the page; ( ) double space the lines in order to leave room for changes, sub-heads, and other editing. unruled white bond paper of good quality in standard letter size, ½ by inches, is the most satisfactory. a high grade of paper not only gives the manuscript a good appearance but stands more handling and saves the recopying of returned manuscripts. a carbon copy should be made of every manuscript so that, if the original copy goes astray in the mail or in an editorial office, the writer's work will not have been in vain. the carbon copy can also be used later for comparison with the printed article. such a comparison will show the writer the amount and character of the editing that was deemed necessary to adapt the material to the publication in which it appears. a cover sheet of the same paper is a convenient device. it not only gives the editorial reader some information in regard to the article, but it protects the manuscript itself. frequently, for purposes of record, manuscripts are stamped or marked in editorial offices, but if a cover page is attached, the manuscript itself is not defaced. when an article is returned, the writer needs to recopy only the cover page before starting the manuscript on its next journey. the form for such a cover page is given on page . the upper half of the first page of the manuscript should be left blank, so that the editor may write a new title and sub-title if he is not satisfied with those supplied by the author. the title, the sub-title, and the author's name should be repeated at the beginning of the article in the middle of the first page, even though they have been given on the cover page. at the left-hand side, close to the top of each page after the first, should be placed the writer's last name followed by a dash and the title of the article, thus: milton--confessions of a freshman. the pages should be numbered in the upper right-hand corner. by these simple means the danger of losing a page in the editorial offices is reduced to a minimum. to be paid for at usual written for the outlook rates, or to be returned with the ten ( ) cents in stamps enclosed, to arthur w. milton, wilson street, des moines, iowa. confessions of a freshman why i was dropped from college at the end of my first year by arthur w. milton (note. this article is based on the writer's own experience in a large middle western state university, and the statistics have been obtained from the registrars of four state universities. it contains , words.) four ( ) photographs are enclosed, as follows: . how i decorated my room . i spent hours learning to play my ukelele . when i made the freshman team . cramming for my final exams typographical style. every newspaper and magazine has its own distinct typographical style in capitalization, abbreviation, punctuation, hyphenation, and the use of numerical figures. some newspapers and periodicals have a style book giving rules for the preparation and editing of copy. a careful reading of several issues of a publication will show a writer the salient features of its typographical style. it is less important, however, to conform to the typographical peculiarities of any one publication than it is to follow consistently the commonly accepted rules of capitalization, punctuation, abbreviation, and "unreformed" spelling. printers prefer to have each page end with a complete sentence. at the close of the article it is well to put the end mark (#). when a special feature story for newspaper publication must be prepared so hastily that there is no time to copy the first draft, it may be desirable to revise the manuscript by using the marks commonly employed in editing copy. these are as follows: american three short lines under a letter or a = word indicate that it is to be set in - capital letters; thus, american. new york times two short lines under a letter or a = = = word indicate that it is to be set in - - - small capital letters; thus, new york times. sine qua non one line under a word or words indicates ---- --- --- that it is to be set in italics; thus, _sine qua non_. he is a /sophomore an oblique line drawn from right to left through a capital letter indicates that it is to be set in lower case; thus, he is a sophomore. ____ _____ there are | | in a |bu.| a circle around numerical figures or ---- ----- abbreviations indicates that they are to be spelled out; thus, there are ten in a bushel. ___________ _______ |professor| a.b.smith is |sixty|. a circle around words or figures ----------- ------- spelled out indicates that they are to be abbreviated or that numerical figures are to be used; thus, prof. a.b. smith is . not a it is complimentry to him a caret is placed at the point in the ^ ^ line where the letters or words written above the line are to be inserted; thus, it is not complimentary to him. __________ ______ to |carefullyxstudy| a line encircling two or more words ---------- ------ like an elongated figure " " indicates that the words are to be transposed; thus, to study carefully. to[=()]morrow half circles connecting words or letters indicate that they are to be brought together; thus, tomorrow. all/right a vertical line between parts of a word shows that the parts are to be separated; thus, all right. u s per cent. bonds a small cross or a period in a circle x x may be used to show that a period is to be used; thus, u.s. per cent. bonds. ")yes, ')love laughs at lock- quotation marks are often enclosed smiths(', you know(", he replied. in half circles to indicate whether they are beginning or end marks. ¶"how old are you?" he asked. the paragraph mark (¶) or the _|"sixteen", she said. sign [_|] may be used to call attention to the beginning of a new paragraph. mailing manuscripts. since manuscripts are written matter, they must be sent sealed as first-class mail at letter rates of postage. for the return of rejected articles stamps may be attached to the cover page by means of a clip, or a self-addressed envelope with stamps affixed may be enclosed. the writer's name and address should always be given on the envelope in which the manuscript is sent to the publishers. the envelope containing the article should be addressed to the "editor" of a magazine or to the "sunday editor" of a newspaper, as nothing is gained by addressing him or her by name. if a writer knows an editor personally or has had correspondence with him in regard to a particular article, it may be desirable to send the manuscript to him personally. an accompanying letter is not necessary, for the cover page of the manuscript gives the editor and his assistants all the information that they need. articles consisting of only a few pages may be folded twice and mailed in a long envelope; bulkier manuscripts should be folded once and sent in a manila manuscript envelope. photographs of sizes up to x inches may be placed in a manuscript that is folded once, with a single piece of stout cardboard for protection. when larger photographs, up to x inches, accompany the article, the manuscript must be sent unfolded, with two pieces of cardboard to protect the pictures. manuscripts should never be rolled. how manuscripts are handled. in order to handle hundreds of manuscripts as expeditiously as possible, most large editorial offices have worked out systems that, though differing slightly, are essentially the same. when a manuscript is received, a record is made of it on a card or in a book, with the name and address of the author, the title and character of the contribution, and the time of its receipt. the same data are entered on a blank that is attached to the manuscript by a clip. on this blank are left spaces for comments by each of the editorial assistants who read and pass upon the article. after these records have been made, the manuscript is given to the first editorial reader. he can determine by glancing at the first page or two whether or not the article is worth further consideration. of the thousands of contributions of all kinds submitted, a considerable proportion are not in the least adapted to the periodical to which they have been sent. the first reader, accordingly, is scarcely more than a skilled sorter who separates the possible from the impossible. all manuscripts that are clearly unacceptable are turned over to a clerk to be returned with a rejection slip. when an article appears to have merit, the first reader looks over it a second time and adds a brief comment, which he signs with his initials. the manuscript is then read and commented on by other editorial readers before it reaches the assistant editor. the best of the contributions are submitted to the editor for a final decision. by such a system every meritorious contribution is considered carefully by several critics before it is finally accepted or rejected. moreover, the editor and the assistant editor have before them the comments of several readers with which to compare their own impressions. in newspaper offices manuscripts are usually sorted by the assistant sunday editor, or assistant magazine editor, and are finally accepted or rejected by the sunday or magazine editor. rejected manuscripts. in rejecting contributions, editorial offices follow various methods. the commonest one is to send the author a printed slip expressing regret that the manuscript is not acceptable and encouraging him to submit something else. some ingenious editors have prepared a number of form letters to explain to contributors the various reasons why their manuscripts are unacceptable. the editorial assistant who rejects an unsuitable article indicates by number which of these form letters is to be sent to the author. a few editors send a personal letter to every contributor. sometimes an editor in rejecting a contribution will suggest some publication to which it might be acceptable. if a manuscript has merit but is not entirely satisfactory, he may suggest that it be revised and submitted to him again. keeping a manuscript record. every writer who intends to carry on his work in a systematic manner should keep a manuscript record, to assist him in marketing his articles to the best advantage. either a book or a card index may be used. the purpose of such a record is to show ( ) the length of time required by various publications to make a decision on contributions; ( ) the rate and the time of payment of each periodical; ( ) the present whereabouts of his manuscript and the periodicals to which it has already been submitted. it is important for a writer to know how soon he may expect a decision on his contributions. if he has prepared an article that depends on timeliness for its interest, he cannot afford to send it to an editor who normally takes three or four weeks to make a decision. another publication to which his article is equally well adapted, he may find from his manuscript record, accepts or rejects contributions within a week or ten days. naturally he will send his timely article to the publication that makes the quickest decision. if that publication rejects it, he will still have time enough to try it elsewhere. his experience with different editors, as recorded in his manuscript record, often assists him materially in placing his work to the best advantage. the rate and the time of payment for contributions are also worth recording. when an article is equally well suited to two or more periodicals, a writer will naturally be inclined to send it first to the publication that pays the highest price and that pays on acceptance. a manuscript record also indicates where each one of a writer's articles is at a given moment, and by what publications it has been rejected. for such data he cannot afford to trust his memory. a writer may purchase a manuscript record book or may prepare his own book or card index. at the top of each page or card is placed the title of the article, followed by the number of words that it contains, the number of illustrations that accompany it, and the date on which it was completed. on the lines under the title are written in turn the names of the periodicals to which the manuscript is submitted, with ( ) the dates on which it was submitted and returned or rejected; ( ) the rate and the time of payment; and ( ) any remarks that may prove helpful. a convenient form for such a page or card is shown on the next page: ___________________________________________________________________________ |confessions of a freshman. , words. photos. written, jan. , .| |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | |sent |returned|accepted|paid |amount|remarks | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| |the outlook | / / | / / | | | | | |the independent | / / | / / | | | | | |the kansas city star| / / | | / / | / / |$ . |$ a col.| | | | | | | | | |____________________|________|________|________|________|______|_________| accepted manuscripts. contributions accepted for publication are paid for at the time of their acceptance, at the time of their publication, or at some fixed date in the month following their acceptance or publication. nearly all well-established periodicals pay for articles when they are accepted. some publications do not pay until the article is printed, a method obviously less satisfactory to a writer than prompt payment, since he may have to wait a year or more for his money. newspapers pay either on acceptance or before the tenth day of the month following publication. the latter arrangement grows out of the practice of paying correspondents between the first and the tenth of each month for the work of the preceding month. after a manuscript has been accepted, a writer usually has no further responsibility concerning it. some magazines submit galley proofs to the author for correction and for any changes that he cares to make. it is desirable to make as few alterations as possible to avoid the delay and expense of resetting the type. corrected proofs should be returned promptly. unless specific stipulations are made to the contrary by the author, an article on being accepted by a periodical becomes its property and cannot be republished without its consent. usually an editor will grant an author permission to reprint an article in book or pamphlet form. by copyrighting each issue, as most magazines and some newspapers do, the publishers establish fully their rights to an author's work. syndicating articles. by sending copies of his articles to a number of newspapers for simultaneous publication, a writer of special feature stories for newspapers may add to his earnings. this method is known as syndicating. it is made possible by the fact that the circulation of newspapers is largely local. since, for example, chicago papers are not read in new york, or minneapolis papers in st. louis, these papers may well publish the same articles on the same day. organized newspaper syndicates furnish many papers with reading matter of all kinds. the same article must not, however, be sent to more than one magazine, but a single subject may be used for two entirely different articles intended for two magazines. if two articles are written on the same subject, different pictures should be secured, so that it will not be necessary to send copies of the same illustrations to two magazines. agricultural journals with a distinctly sectional circulation do not object to using syndicated articles, provided that the journals to which the article is sent do not circulate in the same territory. if a writer desires to syndicate his work, he must conform to several requirements. first, he must make as many good copies as he intends to send out and must secure separate sets of photographs to accompany each one. second, he must indicate clearly on each copy the fact that he is syndicating the article and that he is sending it to only one paper in a city. a special feature story, for instance, sent to the _kansas city star_ for publication in its sunday edition, he would mark, "exclusive for kansas city. release for publication, sunday, january ." third, he must send out the copies sufficiently far in advance of the release date to enable all of the papers to arrange for the publication of the article on that day. for papers with magazine sections that are made up a week or more before the day of publication, articles should be in the office of the editor at least two weeks before the release date. for papers that make up their sunday issues only a few days in advance, articles need be submitted only a week before the publication day. selling articles to syndicates. the syndicates that supply newspapers with various kinds of material, including special feature stories, are operated on the same principle that governs the syndicating of articles by the writer himself. that is, they furnish their features to a number of different papers for simultaneous publication. since, however, they sell the same material to many papers, they can afford to do so at a comparatively low price and still make a fair profit. to protect their literary property, they often copyright their features, and a line of print announcing this fact is often the only indication in a newspaper that the matter was furnished by a syndicate. among the best-known newspaper syndicates are the newspaper enterprise association, cleveland, ohio; the mcclure newspaper syndicate, new york; and the newspaper feature service, new york. a number of large newspapers, like the _new york evening post_, the _philadelphia ledger_, and the _new york tribune_, syndicate their popular features to papers in other cities. a writer may submit his special feature stories to one of the newspaper syndicates just as he would send it to a newspaper or magazine. these organizations usually pay well for acceptable manuscripts. it is not as easy, however, to discover the needs and general policy of each syndicate as it is those of papers and magazines, because frequently there is no means of identifying their articles when they are printed in newspapers. chapter xi photographs and other illustrations value of illustrations. the perfecting of photo-engraving processes for making illustrations has been one of the most important factors in the development of popular magazines and of magazine sections of newspapers, for good pictures have contributed largely to their success. with the advent of the half-tone process a generation ago, and with the more recent application of the rotogravure process to periodical publications, comparatively cheap and rapid methods of illustration were provided. newspapers and magazines have made extensive use of both these processes. the chief value of illustrations for special articles lies in the fact that they present graphically what would require hundreds of words to describe. ideas expressed in pictures can be grasped much more readily than ideas expressed in words. as an aid to rapid reading illustrations are unexcelled. in fact, so effective are pictures as a means of conveying facts that whole sections of magazines and sunday newspapers are given over to them exclusively. illustrations constitute a particularly valuable adjunct to special articles. good reproductions of photographs printed in connection with the articles assist readers to visualize and to understand what a writer is undertaking to explain. so fully do editors realize the great attractiveness of illustrations, that they will buy articles accompanied by satisfactory photographs more readily than they will those without illustrations. excellent photographs will sometimes sell mediocre articles, and meritorious articles may even be rejected because they lack good illustrations. in preparing his special feature stories, a writer will do well to consider carefully the number and character of the illustrations necessary to give his work the strongest possible appeal. securing photographs. inexperienced writers are often at a loss to know how to secure good photographs. professional photographers will, as a rule, produce the best results, but amateur writers often hesitate to incur the expense involved, especially when they feel uncertain about selling their articles. if prints can be obtained from negatives that photographers have taken for other purposes, the cost is so small that a writer can afford to risk the expenditure. money spent for good photographs is usually money well spent. every writer of special articles should become adept in the use of a camera. with a little study and practice, any one can take photographs that will reproduce well for illustrations. one advantage to a writer of operating his own camera is that he can take pictures on the spur of the moment when he happens to see just what he needs. unconventional pictures caught at the right instant often make the best illustrations. the charges for developing films and for making prints and enlargements are now so reasonable that a writer need not master these technicalities in order to use a camera of his own. if he has time and interest, however, he may secure the desired results more nearly by developing and printing his own pictures. satisfactory pictures can be obtained with almost any camera, but one with a high-grade lens and shutter is the best for all kinds of work. a pocket camera so equipped is very convenient. if a writer can afford to make a somewhat larger initial investment, he will do well to buy a camera of the so-called "reflex" type. despite its greater weight and bulk, as compared with pocket cameras, it has the advantage of showing the picture full size, right side up, on the top of the camera, until the very moment that the button is pressed. these reflex cameras are equipped with the fastest types of lens and shutter, and thus are particularly well adapted to poorly lighted and rapidly moving objects. a tripod should be used whenever possible. a hastily taken snap shot often proves unsatisfactory, whereas, if the camera had rested on a tripod, and if a slightly longer exposure had been given, a good negative would doubtless have resulted. requirements for photographs. all photographs intended for reproduction by the half-tone or the rotogravure process should conform to certain requirements. first: the standard size of photographic prints to be used for illustrations is x inches, but two smaller sizes, x and ½ x ½, as well as larger sizes such as ½ x ½ and x , are also acceptable. professional photographers generally make their negatives for illustrations in the sizes, x , ½ x ½, and x . if a writer uses a pocket camera taking pictures smaller than post-card size ( ½ x ½), he must have his negatives enlarged to one of the above standard sizes. second: photographic prints for illustrations should have a glossy surface; that is, they should be what is known as "gloss prints." prints on rough paper seldom reproduce satisfactorily; they usually result in "muddy" illustrations. prints may be mounted or unmounted; unmounted ones cost less and require less postage, but are more easily broken in handling. third: objects in the photograph should be clear and well defined; this requires a sharp negative. for newspaper illustrations it is desirable to have prints with a stronger contrast between the dark and the light parts of the picture than is necessary for the finer half-tones and rotogravures used in magazines. fourth: photographs must have life and action. pictures of inanimate objects in which neither persons nor animals appear, seem "dead" and unattractive to the average reader. it is necessary, therefore, to have at least one person in every photograph. informal, unconventional pictures in which the subjects seem to have been "caught" unawares, are far better than those that appear to have been posed. good snap-shots of persons in characteristic surroundings are always preferable to cabinet photographs. "action pictures" are what all editors and all readers want. fifth: pictures must "tell the story"; that is, they should illustrate the phase of the subject that they are designed to make clear. unless a photograph has illustrative value it fails to accomplish the purpose for which it is intended. captions for illustrations. on the back of a photograph intended for reproduction the author should write or type a brief explanation of what it represents. if he is skillful in phrasing this explanation, or "caption," as it is called, the editor will probably use all or part of it just as it stands. if his caption is unsatisfactory, the editor will have to write one based on the writer's explanation. a clever caption adds much to the attractiveness of an illustration. a caption should not be a mere label, but, like a photograph, should have life and action. it either should contain a verb of action or should imply one. in this and other respects, it is not unlike the newspaper headline. instead, for example, of the label title, "a large gold dredge in alaska," a photograph was given the caption, "digs out a fortune daily." a picture of a young woman feeding chickens in a backyard poultry run that accompanied an article entitled "did you ever think of a meat garden?" was given the caption "fresh eggs and chicken dinners reward her labor." to illustrate an article on the danger of the pet cat as a carrier of disease germs, a photograph of a child playing with a cat was used with the caption, "how epidemics start." a portrait of a housewife who uses a number of labor-saving devices in her home bore the legend, "she is reducing housekeeping to a science." "a smoking chimney is a bad sign" was the caption under a photograph of a chimney pouring out smoke, which was used to illustrate an article on how to save coal. longer captions describing in detail the subject illustrated by the photograph, are not uncommon; in fact, as more and more pictures are being used, there is a growing tendency to place a short statement, or "overline," above the illustration and to add to the amount of descriptive matter in the caption below it. this is doubtless due to two causes: the increasing use of illustrations unaccompanied by any text except the caption, and the effort to attract the casual reader by giving him a taste, as it were, of what the article contains. drawings for illustrations. diagrams, working drawings, floor plans, maps, or pen-and-ink sketches are necessary to illustrate some articles. articles of practical guidance often need diagrams. trade papers like to have their articles illustrated with reproductions of record sheets and blanks designed to develop greater efficiency in office or store management. if a writer has a little skill in drawing, he may prepare in rough form the material that he considers desirable for illustration, leaving to the artists employed by the publication the work of making drawings suitable for reproduction. a writer who has had training in pen-and-ink drawing may prepare his own illustrations. such drawings should be made on bristol board with black drawing ink, and should be drawn two or three times as large as they are intended to appear when printed. if record sheets are to be used for illustration, the ruling should be done with black drawing ink, and the figures and other data should be written in with the same kind of ink. typewriting on blanks intended for reproduction should be done with a fresh record black ribbon. captions are necessary on the back of drawings as well as on photographs. mailing photographs and drawings. it is best to mail flat all photographs and drawings up to x in size, in the envelope with the manuscript, protecting them with pieces of stout cardboard. only very large photographs or long, narrow panoramic ones should be rolled and mailed in a heavy cardboard tube, separate from the manuscript. the writer's name and address, as well as the title of the article to be illustrated, should be written on the back of every photograph and drawing. as photographs and drawings are not ordinarily returned when they are used with an article that is accepted, writers should not promise to return such material to the persons from whom they secure it. copies can almost always be made from the originals when persons furnishing writers with photographs and drawings desire to have the originals kept in good condition. part ii an outline for the analysis of special feature articles i. sources of material . what appears to have suggested the subject to the writer? . how much of the article was based on his personal experience? . how much of it was based on his personal observations? . was any of the material obtained from newspapers or periodicals? . what portions of the article were evidently obtained by interviews? . what reports, documents, technical periodicals, and books of reference were used as sources in preparing the article? . does the article suggest to you some sources from which you might obtain material for your own articles? ii. interest and appeal . is there any evidence that the article was timely when it was published? . is the article of general or of local interest? . does it seem to be particularly well adapted to the readers of the publication in which it was printed? why? . what, for the average reader, is the source of interest in the article? . does it have more than one appeal? . is the subject so presented that the average reader is led to see its application to himself and to his own affairs? . could an article on the same subject, or on a similar one, be written for a newspaper in your section of the country? . what possible subjects does the article suggest to you? iii. purpose . did the writer aim to entertain, to inform, or to give practical guidance? . does the writer seem to have had a definitely formulated purpose? . how would you state this apparent purpose in one sentence? . is the purpose a worthy one? . did the writer accomplish his purpose? . does the article contain any material that seems unnecessary to the accomplishment of the purpose? iv. type of article . to which type does this article conform? . is there any other type better adapted to the subject and material? . how far did the character of the subject determine the methods of treatment? . what other methods might have been used to advantage in presenting this subject? . is the article predominantly narrative, descriptive, or expository? . to what extent are narration and description used for expository purposes? . are concrete examples and specific instances employed effectively? . by what means are the narrative passages made interesting? . do the descriptive parts of the article portray the impressions vividly? v. structure . what main topics are taken up in the article? . could any parts of the article be omitted without serious loss? . could the parts be rearranged with gain in clearness, interest, or progress? . does the article march on steadily from beginning to end? . is the material so arranged that the average reader will reach the conclusion that the writer intended to have him reach? . is there variety in the methods of presentation? . is the length of the article proportionate to the subject? . what type of beginning is used? . is the type of beginning well adapted to the subject and the material? . would the beginning attract the attention and hold the interest of the average reader? . is the beginning an integral part of the article? . is the length of the beginning proportionate to the length of the whole article? . is the beginning skillfully connected with the body of the article? vi. style . is the article easy to read? why? . is the diction literary or colloquial, specific or general, original or trite, connotative or denotative? . are figures of speech used effectively? . do the sentences yield their meaning easily when read rapidly? . is there variety in sentence length and structure? . are important ideas placed at the beginning of sentences? . are the paragraphs long or short? . are they well-organized units? . do the paragraphs begin with important ideas? . is there variety in paragraph beginnings? . is the tone well suited to the subject? . do the words, figures of speech, sentences, and paragraphs in this article suggest to you possible means of improving your own style? vii. titles and headlines . is the title attractive, accurate, concise, and concrete? . to what type does it conform? . what is the character of the sub-title, and what relation does it bear to the title? (_boston herald_) teach children love of art through story-telling "----and so," ended the story, "st. george slew the dragon." a great sigh, long drawn and sibilant, which for the last five minutes had been swelling little thoraxes, burst out and filled the space of the lecture hall at the museum of fine arts. "o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!" said little girls. "aw-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w, gosh!" said little boys. "say, mis' cronan, there wasn't no real dragon, was they?" a shock-headed youngster pushed his way to the platform where mrs. mary c. cronan, professional story teller, stood smiling and wistfully looked up at her. "they wasn't no really dragon, was they?" "'course they was a dragon! whadd'ye think the man wanted to paint the picture for if there wasn't a dragon? certn'y there was a dragon. i leave it to mis' cronan if there wasn't." steering a narrow course between fiction and truth, mrs. cronan told her class that she thought there certainly must have been a dragon or the picture wouldn't have been painted. it was at one of the regular morning story hours at the museum of fine arts, a department opened three years ago at the museum by mrs. cronan and mrs. laura scales, a department which has become so popular that now hundreds of children a week are entertained, children from the public playgrounds and from the settlement houses. on this particular day it was children from the bickford street playground under the guidance of two teachers from the lucretia crocker school, miss roche and miss hayes, who had, in some mysterious manner, convoyed these atoms to the museum by car without mishap and who apparently did not dread the necessity of getting them back again, although to the uninitiated it appeared a task beside which grasping a comet by the tail was a pleasant afternoon's amusement. for the most part the story of st. george and the dragon was a new thing to these children. they might stand for st. george, although his costume was a little out of the regular form at jamaica plain, but the dragon was another thing. "i don't believe it," insisted an -year-old. "i seen every animal in the zoo in the park and i don't see any of them things." but the wistful little boy kept insisting that there must be such an animal or mrs. cronan wouldn't say so. "that is the way they nearly always take it at first," said mrs. cronan. "nearly all of these children are here for the first time. later they will bring their fathers and mothers on sunday and you might hear them explaining the pictures upstairs as if they were the docents of the museum. "the object of the story hour is to familiarize the children with as many as possible of the pictures of the museum and to get them into the way of coming here of themselves. when they go away they are given cards bearing a reproduction of the picture about which the story of the day has been told, and on these cards is always an invitation to them to bring their families to the museum on saturday and sunday, when there is no entrance fee." the idea of the story hour was broached several years ago and at first it was taken up as an experiment. stereopticon slides were made of several of the more famous pictures in the museum, and mrs. cronan, who was at the time achieving a well earned success at the public library, was asked to take charge of the story telling. the plan became a success at once. later mrs. scales was called in to take afternoon classes, and now more than children go to the museum each week during july and august and hear stories told entertainingly that fix in their minds the best pictures of the world. following the stories they are taken through the halls of the museum and are given short talks on some art subject. one day it may be some interesting thing on thibetan amulets, or on tapestries or on some picture, stuart's washington or turner's slave ship, or a colorful canvas of claude monet. it is hoped that the movement may result in greater familiarity with and love for the museum, for it is intended by the officials that these children shall come to love the museum and to care for the collection and not to think of it, as many do, as a cold, unresponsive building containing dark mysteries, or haughty officials, or an atmosphere of "highbrow" iciness. "i believe," says mrs. cronan, "that our little talks are doing just this thing. and although some of them, of course, can't get the idea quite all at once, most of these children will have a soft spot hereafter for donatello's st. george." at least some of them were not forgetting it, for as they filed out the wistful little boy was still talking about it. "ya," he said to the scoffer, "you mightn't a seen him at the zoo. that's all right, but you never went over to the 'quarium. probably they got one over there. gee! i wish i could see a dragon. what color are they?" but the smallest boy of all, who had hold of miss hayes's hand and who had been an interested listener to all this, branched out mentally into other and further fields. "aw," said he, "i know a feller what's got a ginny pig wit' yeller spots on 'im and he--" and they all trailed out the door. * * * * * (_christian science monitor_) one illustration, a half-tone reproduction of a photograph showing the interior of the greenhouse with girls at work. where girls learn to wield spade and hoe to go to school in a potato patch; to say one's lessons to a farmer; to study in an orchard and do laboratory work in a greenhouse--this is the pleasant lot of the modern girl who goes to a school of horticulture instead of going to college, or perhaps after going to college. if ever there was a vocation that seemed specially adapted to many women, gardening would at first glance be the one. from the time of "mistress mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?" down to the busy city woman who to-day takes her recreation by digging in her flowerbeds, gardens have seemed a natural habitat for womankind, and garden activities have belonged to her by right. in various parts of the country there have now been established schools where young women may learn the ways of trees and shrubs, vegetables and flowers, and may do experimental work among the growing things themselves. some of these schools are merely adjuncts of the state agricultural colleges, with more or less limited courses of instruction; but, just out of philadelphia, there is a school, to which women only are admitted, that is located on a real farm, and covers a wide range of outdoor study. one begins to feel the homely charm of the place the moment instructions are given as to how to reach it. "out the old lime-kiln road," you are told. and out the old lime-kiln road you go, until you come to a farm which spells the perfection of care in every clump of trees and every row of vegetables. some girls in broad-brimmed hats are working in the strawberry bed--if you go in strawberry time--and farther on a group of women have gathered, with an overalled instructor, under an apple tree the needs of which are being studied. under some sedate shade trees, you are led to an old pennsylvania stone farmhouse--the administration building, if you please. beyond are the barns, poultry houses, nurseries and greenhouses, and a cottage which is used as a dormitory for the girls--as unlike the usual dormitory as the school is unlike the usual school. a bee colony has its own little white village near by. then the director, a trained woman landscape gardener, tells you all that this school of horticulture has accomplished since its founding five years ago. "women are naturally fitted for gardening, and for some years past there have been many calls for women to be teachers in school gardens, planners of private gardens, or landscape gardeners in institutions for women. very few women, however, have had the practical training to enable them to fill such positions, and five years ago there was little opportunity for them to obtain such training. at that time a number of women in and about philadelphia, who realized the need for thorough teaching in all the branches of horticulture, not merely in theory but in practice, organized this school. the course is planned to equip women with the practical knowledge that will enable them to manage private and commercial gardens, greenhouses or orchards. some women wish to learn how to care for their own well-loved gardens; some young girls study with the idea of establishing their own greenhouses and raising flowers as a means of livelihood; still others want to go in for fruit farming, and even for poultry raising or bee culture. "in other countries, schools of gardening for women are holding a recognized place in the educational world. in england, belgium, germany, italy, denmark and russia, such institutions have long passed the experimental stage; graduates from their schools are managing large estates or holding responsible positions as directors of public or private gardens, as managers of commercial greenhouses, or as consulting horticulturists and lecturers. in this country there is a growing demand for supervisors of home and school gardens, for work on plantations and model farms, and for landscape gardeners. such positions command large salaries, and the comparatively few women available for them are almost certain to attain success." already one of the graduates has issued a modest brown circular stating that she is equipped to supply ideas for gardens and personally to plant them; to expend limited sums of money to the best advantage for beauty and service; to take entire charge of gardens and orchards for the season and personally to supervise gardens during the owners' absence; to spray ornamental trees and shrubs, and prune them; and to care for indoor plants and window boxes. "she is making a success of it, too. she has all she can do," comments one of the women directors, who is standing by. a smiling strawberry student, who is passing, readily tells all that going to a garden school means. "each one of us has her own small plot of ground for which she is responsible. we have to plant it, care for it, and be marked on it. we all have special care of certain parts of the greenhouse, too, and each has a part of the nursery, the orchard and the vineyard. even the work that is too heavy for us we have to study about, so that we can direct helpers when the time comes. we have to understand every detail of it all. we have to keep a daily record of our work. this is the way to learn how long it takes for different seeds to germinate, and thus we watch the development of the fruits and flowers and vegetables. you see, the attendance at the school is limited to a small number; so each one of us receives a great deal of individual attention and help. "we learn simple carpentry, as part of the course, so that we shall be able to make window boxes, flats, cold frames and other articles that we need. we could even make a greenhouse, if we had to. we are taught the care and raising of poultry, we learn bee culture, and we have a course in landscape gardening. there is a course in canning and preserving, too, so that our fruits and berries can be disposed of in that way, if we should not be able to sell them outright, when we have the gardens of our own that we are all looking forward to." in the cozy cottage that serves as a dormitory, there is a large classroom, where the lectures in botany, entomology, soils and horticultural chemistry are given. there is a staff of instructors, all from well-known universities, and a master farmer to impart the practical everyday process of managing fields and orchards. special lectures are given frequently by experts in various subjects. in the cottage is a big, homelike living-room, where the girls read and sing and dance in the evening. each girl takes care of her own bedroom. the costumes worn by these garden students are durable, appropriate and most becoming. the school colors are the woodsy ones of brown and green, and the working garb is carried out in these colors. brown khaki or corduroy skirts, eight inches from the ground, with two large pockets, are worn under soft green smocks smocked in brown. the sweaters are brown or green, and there is a soft hat for winter and a large shade hat for summer. heavy working gloves and boots are provided, and a large apron with pockets goes with the outfit. all in all, you feel sure, as you go back down the "old lime-kiln road," that the motto of the school will be fulfilled in the life of each of its students: "so enter that daily thou mayst become more thoughtful and more learned. so depart that daily thou mayst become more useful to thyself and to all mankind." * * * * * (_boston transcript_) boys in search of jobs by raymond g. fuller one morning lately, if you had stood on kneeland street in sight of the entrance of the state free employment office, you would have seen a long line of boys--a hundred of them--waiting for the doors to open. they were of all sorts of racial extraction and of ages ranging through most of the teens. some you would have called ragamuffins, street urchins, but some were too well washed, combed and laundered for such a designation. some were eagerly waiting, some anxiously, some indifferently. some wore sober faces; some were standing soldierly stiff; but others were bubbling over with the spirits of their age, gossiping, shouting, indulging in colt-play. when they came out, some hustled away to prospective employers and others loitered in the street. disappointment was written all over some of them, from face to feet; on others the inscription was, "i don't care." two hundred boys applied for "jobs" at the employment office that day. half the number were looking for summer positions. others were of the vast army of boys who quit school for keeps at the eighth or ninth grade or thereabouts. several weeks before school closed the office had more than enough boy "jobs" to go around. with the coming of vacation time the ratio was reversed. the boy applicants were a hundred or two hundred daily. for the two hundred on the day mentioned there were fifty places. says mr. deady, who has charge of the department for male minors: "ranging from fourteen to nineteen years of age, of all nationalities and beliefs, fresh from the influence of questionable home environment, boisterous and brimful of animation, without ideas and thoughtless to a marked degree--this is the picture of the ordinary boy who is in search of employment. he is without a care and his only thought, if he has one, is to obtain as high a wage as possible. it is safe to say that of the thousands of boys who apply annually at the employment office, two-thirds are between sixteen and eighteen years of age. before going further, we can safely say that twenty per cent of the youngest lads have left school only a few weeks before applying for work. approximately sixty per cent have not completed a course in the elementary grammar schools." the boy of foreign parentage seems to be more in earnest, more ambitious, than the american boy (not to quibble over the definition of the adjective "american"). walter l. sears, superintendent of the office in kneeland street, tells this story: an american youngster came in. "gotta job?" he asked. "yes, here is one"--referring to the card records--"in a printing office; four dollars a week." "'taint enough money. got anything else?" "here's a place in a grocery store--six dollars a week." "what time d'ye have to get to work in the morning?" "seven o'clock." "got anything else?" "here's something--errand boy--six a week, mornings at eight." "saturday afternoons off?" "nothing is said about it." "w-ell-l, maybe i'll drop around and look at it." american independence! an italian boy came in, looking for work. he was told of the printing office job. "all right. i'll take it." for what it is worth, it may be set down that a large proportion of the boy applicants carefully scrutinize the dollar sign when they talk wages. moreover, they are not unacquainted with that phrase concocted by those higher up, "the high cost of living." the compulsion of the thing, or the appeal of the phrase--which? the youthful unemployed, those who seek employment, would cast a good-sized vote in favor of "shoffer." a youngster comes to mr. sears. he wants to be a "shoffer." "why do you want to be a chauffeur?" "i don't know." "haven't you any reasons at all?" "no, sir." "isn't it because you have many times seen the man at the wheel rounding a corner in an automobile at a . clip and sailing down the boulevard at sixty miles an hour?" the boy's eyes light up with the picture. "isn't that it?" and the boy's eyes light up with discovery. "yes, i guess so." "well, have you ever seen the chauffeur at night, after being out all day with the car? overalls on, sleeves rolled up, face streaming with perspiration? repairing the mechanism, polishing the brass? tired to death?" "no, sir." the boy applicants seldom have any clear idea of the ultimate prospects in any line of work they may have in mind--as to the salary limit for the most expert, or the opportunities for promotion and the securing of an independent position. many of them have no preconceived idea even of what they want to do, to say nothing of what they ought to do. here is an instance. "i want a position," says a boy. "what kind of a position?" "i don't know." "haven't you ever thought about it?" "no." "haven't you ever talked it over at home or at school?" "no." "would you like to be a machinist?" "i don't know." "would you like to be a plumber?" "i don't know." similar questions, with similar answers, continue. finally: "would you like to be a doctor?" "i don't know--is that a good position?" sometimes a boy is accompanied to the office by his father. "my son is a natural-born electrician," the father boasts. "what has he done to show that?" "why, he's wired the whole house from top to bottom." it is found by further questions that the lad has installed a push-bell button at the front door and another at the back door. he had bought dry batteries, wire and buttons at a hardware store in a box containing full directions. it is nevertheless hard to convince the father that the boy may not be a natural-born electrician, after all. in frequent cases the father has not considered the limitations and opportunities in the occupation which he chooses for his son. mr. deady has this to say on the subject of the father's relation to the boy's "job": "the average boy while seeking employment in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is unaccompanied by either parent. such a condition is deplorable. it not only shows a lack of interest in the boy's welfare on the part of the parents, but also places the youthful applicant in an unfair position. oftentimes, owing to inexperience, a boy accepts a position without inquiring into the details and nature of the same. his main thought is the amount of the wage to be received. consequently there is but one obvious result. the hours are excessive, the work is beyond the boy's strength or is hazardous, and finally the lad withdraws without notice. it is this general apathy on the part of the parents of a boy, combined with over-zealousness on the part of an ordinary employer to secure boy labor for a mere trifle, that accounts for the instability of juvenile labor." the coming of vacation invariably brings a great influx of boys to the state employment office, some looking for summer work, others for permanent employment. most of them show lack of intelligent constructive thought on the matter in hand. few of them have had any counsel, or any valuable counsel from their parents or others. to mr. sears and his assistants--and they have become very proficient at it--is left the task of vocational guidance, within such limitations as those of time and equipment. what can be done to get the boy and his sponsors to thinking intelligently about the question of an occupation for the boy, with proper regard to their mutual fitness? superintendent sears has some suggestions to offer. in his opinion the subject of occupational choice should be debated thoroughly in the public schools. he favors the introduction of some plan embodying this idea in the upper grades of the grammar school, under conditions that would give each boy an opportunity to talk, and that would encourage him to consult his parents and teachers. the debates might be held monthly, and preparation should be required. experts or successful men in various occupations might be called in to address the pupils and furnish authoritative information. the questions debated should involve the advisability of learning a trade and the choice of a trade, and the same considerations with respect to the professions, the mercantile pursuits, and so on. the pupils should be allowed to vote on the merits of each question debated. by such a method, thinks mr. sears, the boys would gain the valuable training which debating gives, would devote considerable thought to the question of their future employment, would acquire much information, and would get their parents more interested in the matter than many of them are. * * * * * (_new york evening post_) girls and a camp now it is that many coveys of students are headed toward lake and mountain--just how it pays with the sudden plunge into a muggy heat, more suggestive of july than of the rare june weather of poets, there has begun the exodus of summer camp folk, those men and women who add to the slender salary of the teaching profession the additional income made by running camps for boys and girls during the long vacation. they stretch, these camps, in rapidly extending area from canada through maine and northern new england, into the adirondacks and the alleghenies, and then across toward the northwest and the rockies. it is quite safe to assert that there is not a private school of importance that does not take under its protection and support at least one such institution, while large numbers of teachers either own camps or assist in their management as instructors. one group, unmistakably the advance guard of a girls' camp, assembled at the grand central station on wednesday. there were two alert, dignified women, evidently the co-principals; a younger woman, who, at least so the tired suburban shopper decided, was probably the athletic instructor; two neat colored women, and a small girl of twelve, on tiptoe with excitement, talking volubly about the fun she would have when they got to the lake and when all the other girls arrived. her excited chatter also revealed the fact that father and mother had just sailed for europe, and, while she thought of them with regret, there was only pleasure in prospect as she started northward. there was much baggage to be attended to, and consultation over express and freight bills, with interesting references to tents, canoes, and tennis nets. success is an excellent testimonial, and there is no longer any need to point out the advantages of such camps for boys and girls. they fill a real place for the delicate, the lazy, or the backward, who must needs do extra work to keep up with their school grade, for those who otherwise would be condemned to hotel life, or for the children whose parents, because of circumstances, are compelled to spend the summer in cities. even the most jealously anxious of mothers are among the converts to the movement. as one said the other day of her only son, "yes, david will go to mr. d.'s camp again this summer. it will be his third year. i thought the first time that i simply could not part with him. i pictured him drowned or ill from poor food or severe colds. indeed, there wasn't a single terror i didn't imagine. but he enjoyed it so, and came home so well and happy, that i've never worried since." from the child's point of view, summer camps are a blessing, and, as such, they have come to stay. but there are those who doubt their benefits, even the financial ones, for the teachers, who mortgage their vacations to conduct them. unfortunately, as every one knows, almost every teacher has to mortgage her spare time in one way or another in order to make a more than bare living. call the roll of those whom you may know, and you will be surprised--no, scarcely surprised; merely interested--to find that nine-tenths of them do some additional work. it may be extra tutoring, hack writing, translating, the editing of school texts or the writing of text-books, taking agencies for this, that, or the other commodity, conducting travel parties, lecturing at educational institutes, running women's clubs, or organizing nature classes. some outside vocation is necessary if the teacher is to enjoy the advantages her training makes almost imperative, or the comforts her tired, nervous organism demands. so, as one philosopher was heard to remark, it is perhaps best to run a summer camp, since in the doing of it there is at least the advantage of being in the open and of leading a wholesomely sane existence. two good friends and fellow-teachers who have conducted a camp in northern maine for the last five years have been extremely frank in setting forth their experiences for the benefit of those who are standing on the brink of a similar venture. and their story is worth while, because from every point of view they have been successful. any pessimistic touches in their narrative cannot be laid at the door of failure. indeed, in their first year they cleared expenses, and that is rare; and their clientèle has steadily increased until now they have a camp of forty or more girls, at the very topmost of camp prices. again, as there were two of them and they are both versatile, they have needed little assistance; the mother of one has been house mother and general camp counsellor. with all this as optimistic preamble, let us hear their story. perhaps their first doubt arises with regard to the wear and tear of camp life upon those most directly responsible for its conduct. "for years we even refused to consider it," said the senior partner, "although urged by friends and would-be patrons, because we realized the unwisdom of working the year around and living continuously with school girls--but the inevitable happened. our income did not keep pace with our expenses, and it was start a camp or do something less agreeable. just at the psychological moment one of our insistent friends found the right spot, we concluded negotiations, and, behold, we are camp proprietors, not altogether sure, in our most uncompromisingly frank moments, that we have done the best thing." that a girls' camp is a far more difficult proposition than one for boys is evident on the face of it. mother may shed tears over parting with johnny, but, after all, he's a boy, and sooner or later must depend upon himself. but sister sue is another matter. can she trust any one else to watch over her in the matter of flannels and dry stockings? do these well-meaning but spinster teachers know the symptoms of tonsilitis, the first signs of a bilious attack, or the peculiarities of a spoiled girl's diet? and will not sue lose, possibly, some of the gentle manners and dainty ways inculcated at home, by close contact with divers other ways and manners? she is inclined to be skeptical, is mother. "and so," acknowledged the senior partner, "the first summer we were deluged by visits long and short from anxious ladies who could not believe on hearsay evidence that we knew how to care for their delicate daughters. they not only came, but they stayed, and as the nearest hotel was distant many devious miles of mountain road, we were forced to put them up; finally the maids had to sleep in the old barn, and we were camping on cots in the hall of the farmhouse which is our headquarters. naturally we had to be polite, for we were under the necessity of making a good impression that first year, but it was most distracting, for while they stayed they were unconsciously but selfishly demanding a little more than a fair share of time and attention for their daughters." and, indeed, all this maternal anxiety is not entirely misplaced. sue is a good deal harder to take care of than johnny. she needs a few more comforts, although camp life aims at eliminating all but the essentials of simple living. her clothes, even at a minimum, are more elaborate, which increases the difficulty of laundering, always a problem in camping. she is infinitely more dependent upon her elders for direction in the veriest a b c's of daily existence. "even the matter of tying a hair-ribbon or cleaning a pair of white canvas shoes is a mountain to a good many of my girls," said the successful camp counsellor. homesickness is "a malady most incident to maids." boys may suffer from it, but they suffer alone. if tears are shed they are shed in secret, lest the other fellows find it out. except in the case of the very little chaps, the masters are not disturbed. but girls have no such reserves; and the teachers in charge of twenty-five strange girls, many in the throes of this really distressing ailment, are not to be envied. "frankly speaking," went on the confession, "there isn't a moment of the day when we can dismiss them from our thoughts. are they swimming in charge of the director of athletics, a most capable girl, one of us must be there, too, because, should anything happen, we, and not she, are directly responsible. when the lesson hour is on, we not only teach, but must see that each girl's work is adapted to her needs, as they come from a dozen different schools. there are disputes to settle, plans for outings and entertainments to be made, games to direct, letters to the home folks to be superintended, or half the girls would never write at all, to say nothing of the marketing and housekeeping, and our own business correspondence, that has to be tucked into the siesta hour after luncheon. indeed, in the nine weeks of camp last summer i never once had an hour that i could call my very own." "and that is only the day's anxiety," sighed her colleague reflectively. "my specialty is prowling about at night to see that everybody is properly covered. not a girl among them would have sense enough to get up and close windows in case of rain, so i sleep with one ear pricked for the first patter on the roof. occasionally there are two or three who walk in their sleep, and i'm on pins and needles lest harm come to them, so i make my rounds to see that they're safe. oh, it is a peacefully placid existence, i assure you, having charge of forty darling daughters. some of them have done nothing for themselves in their entire lives, and what a splendid place camp is for such girls. but while they're learning we must be looking out for their sins of omission, such, for instance, as throwing a soaking wet bathing suit upon a bed instead of hanging it upon the line." these are some of the few worries that attach to the care of sensitive and delicately brought up girls that the boys' camp never knows. but if the financial return is adequate there will naturally be some compensation for all these pinpricks. here again the senior partner is inclined to hem and haw. "given a popular head of camp," says she, "who has been fortunate enough to secure a desirable site and a paying clientèle, and she will certainly not lose money. her summer will be paid for. however, that is not enough to reward her for the additional work and worry. camp work does not confine itself to the nine weeks of residence. there are the hours and days spent in planning and purchasing equipment, the getting out of circulars, the correspondence entailed and the subsequent keeping in touch with patrons." her own venture has so far paid its own way, and after the first year has left a neat margin of profit. but this profit, because of expansion, has immediately been invested in new equipment. this year, for example, there has been erected a bungalow for general living purposes. a dozen new tents and four canoes were bought, and two dirt tennis courts made. then each year there must be a general replenishing of dishes, table and bed linen, athletic goods, and furniture. the garden has been so enlarged that the semi-occasional man-of-all-work has been replaced by a permanent gardener. naturally, such extension does mean ultimate profit, and, given a few more years of continued prosperity, the summer will yield a goodly additional income. but the teacher who undertakes a camp with the idea that such money is easily made, is mistaken. one successful woman has cleared large sums, so large, indeed, that she has about decided to sever her direct connection with the private school where she has taught for years, and trust to her camp for a living. she has been so fortunate, it is but fair to explain, because her camp is upon a government reserve tract in canada, and she has had to make no large investment in land; nor does she pay taxes. desirable locations are harder to find nowadays and much more expensive to purchase. a fortunate pioneer in the movement bought seven acres, with five hundred feet of lake frontage, for three hundred dollars six years ago. that same land is worth ten times as much to-day. and the kind of woman who should attempt the summer camp for girls as a means of additional income? first of all, the one who really loves outdoor life, who can find in woods and water compensation for the wear and tear of summering with schoolgirls. again, she who can minimize the petty worries of existence to the vanishing point. and, last of all, she who has business acumen. for what does it profit a tired teacher if she fill her camp list and have no margin of profit for her weeks of hard labor? * * * * * _(saturday evening post)_ two half-tone reproductions of wash-drawings by a staff artist. your porter by edward hungerford he stands there at the door of his car, dusky, grinning, immaculate--awaiting your pleasure. he steps forward as you near him and, with a quick, intuitive movement born of long experience and careful training, inquires: "what space you got, guv'nor?" "lower five," you reply. "are you full-up, george?" "jus' toler'bul, guv'nor." he has your grips, is already slipping down the aisle toward section five. and, after he has stowed the big one under the facing bench and placed the smaller one by your side, he asks again: "shake out a pillow for you, guv'nor?" that "guv'nor," though not a part of his official training, is a part of his unofficial--his subtlety, if you please. another passenger might be the "kunnel"; still another, the "jedge." but there can be no other guv'nor save you on this car and trip. and george, of the pullmans, is going to watch over you this night as a mother hen might watch over her solitary chick. the car is well filled and he is going to have a hard night of it; but he is going to take good care of you. he tells you so; and, before you are off the car, you are going to have good reason to believe it. before we consider the sable-skinned george of to-day, give a passing thought to the pullman itself. the first george of the pullmans--george m. pullman--was a shrewd-headed carpenter who migrated from a western new york village out into illinois more than half a century ago and gave birth to the idea of railroad luxury at half a cent a mile. there had been sleeping cars before pullman built the pioneer, as he called his maiden effort. there was a night car, equipped with rough bunks for the comfort of passengers, on the cumberland valley railroad along about . other early railroads had made similar experiments, but they were all makeshifts and crude. pullman set out to build a sleeping car that would combine a degree of comfort with a degree of luxury. the pioneer, viewed in the eyes of , was really a luxurious car. it was as wide as the sleeping car of to-day and nearly as high; in fact, so high and so wide was it that there were no railroads on which it might run, and when pullman pleaded with the old-time railroad officers to widen the clearances, so as to permit the pioneer to run over their lines, they laughed at him. "it is ridiculous, mr. pullman," they told him smilingly in refusal. "people are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours." then suddenly they ceased smiling. all america ceased smiling. morse's telegraph was sobering an exultant land by telling how its great magistrate lay dead within the white house, at washington. and men were demanding a funeral car, dignified and handsome enough to carry the body of abraham lincoln from washington to springfield. suddenly somebody thought of the pioneer, which rested, a virtual prisoner, in a railroad yard not far from chicago. the pioneer was quickly released. there was no hesitation now about making clearances for her. almost in the passing of a night, station platforms and other obstructions were being cut away, and the first of all the pullman cars made a triumphant though melancholy journey to new york, to washington, and back again to illinois. abraham lincoln, in the hour of death--fifty years ago this blossoming spring of --had given birth to the pullman idea. the other day, while one of the brisk federal commissions down at washington was extending consideration to the pullman porter and his wage, it called to the witness stand the executive head of the pullman company. and the man who answered the call was robert t. lincoln, the son of abraham lincoln. when pullman built the pioneer he designated it a, little dreaming that eventually he might build enough cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet. to-day the pullman company has more than six thousand cars in constant use. it operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the railroads of the united states and canada, with a goodly sprinkling of routes south into mexico. on an average night sixty thousand persons--a community equal in size to johnstown, pennsylvania, or south bend, indiana--sleep within its cars. and one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its service. a railroad in the south, with a large passenger traffic in the winter, or a railroad in the north, with conditions reversed and travel running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly afford to place the investment in sleeping and parlor cars to meet its high-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long, dull months. the pullman company, by moving its extra cars backward and forward over the face of the land in regiments and in battalions, keeps them all earning money. it meets unusual traffic demands with all the resources of its great fleet of traveling hotels. last summer, when the knights templars held their convention in denver, it sent four hundred and fifty extra cars out to the capital of colorado. and this year it is bending its resources toward finding sufficient cars to meet the demands for the long overland trek to the expositions on the pacific coast. the transition from the pioneer to the steel sleeping car of today was not accomplished in a single step. a man does not have to be so very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the pullman was called a palace ear and did its enterprising best to justify that title. it was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste. disfigured by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush curtains--head-bumping, dust-catching, useless--it was a decorative orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of humor. suddenly the pullman company awoke to the absurdity of it all. more than ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building. it separated the two. it began to throw out the grilles and the other knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use of the steel car. recently it has done much more. it has banished all but the very simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are absolutely necessary to the operation of the car. it has studied and it has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world. our foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their institutions. * * * * * this, however, is not the story of the pullman car. it is the story of that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it. it is the story of george the porter--the six thousand georges standing to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the waiting cars. and george is worthy of a passing thought. he was born in the day when the negro servant was the pride of america--when the black man stood at your elbow in the dining rooms of the greatest of our hotels; when a colored butler was the joy of the finest of the homes along fifth avenue or round rittenhouse square. transplanted, he quickly became an american institution. and there is many a man who avers that never elsewhere has there been such a servant as a good negro servant. fashions change, and in the transplanting of other social ideas the black man has been shoved aside. it is only in the pullman service that he retains his old-time pride and prestige. that company to-day might almost be fairly called his salvation, despite the vexing questions of the wages and tips of the sleeping-car porters that have recently come to the fore. yet it is almost equally true that the black man has been the salvation of the sleeping-car service. experiments have been made in using others. one or two of the canadian roads, which operate their own sleeping cars, have placed white men as porters; down in the southwest the inevitable mexicano has been placed in the familiar blue uniform. none of them has been satisfactory; and, indeed, it is not every negro who is capable of taking charge of a sleeping car. the pullman company passes by the west indians--the type so familiar to every man who has ridden many times in the elevators of the apartment houses of upper new york. it prefers to recruit its porters from certain of the states of the old south--georgia and the carolinas. it almost limits its choice to certain counties within those states. it shows a decided preference for the sons of its employees; in fact, it might almost be said that to-day there are black boys growing up down there in the cotton country who have come into the world with the hope and expectation of being made pullman car porters. the company that operates those cars prefers to discriminate--and it does discriminate. that is its first step toward service--the careful selection of the human factor. the next step lies in the proper training of that factor; and as soon as a young man enters the service of the pullmans he goes to school--in some one of the large railroad centers that act as hubs for that system. sometimes the school is held in one of the division offices, but more often it goes forward in the familiar aisle of a sleeping car, sidetracked for the purpose. its curriculum is unusual but it is valuable. one moment it considers the best methods to "swat the fly"--to drive him from the vehicle in which he is an unwelcome passenger; the next moment the class is being shown the proper handling of the linen closet, the proper methods of folding and putting away clean linen and blankets, the correct way of stacking in the laundry bags the dirty and discarded bedding. the porter is taught that a sheet once unfolded cannot be used again. though it may be really spotless, yet technically it is dirty; and it must make a round trip to the laundry before it can reenter the service. all these things are taught the sophomore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the pullman company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline. so the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details. they teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a passenger, for instance. noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden. the porter must gently shake the curtains or the bedding from without. when the would-be porter is through in this schoolroom his education goes forward out on the line. under the direction of one of the grizzled autocrats he first comes in contact with actual patrons--comes to know their personalities and their peculiarities. also, he comes to know the full meaning of that overused and abused word--service. after all, here is the full measure of the job. he is a servant. he must realize that. and as a servant he must perfect himself. he must rise to the countless opportunities that will come to him each night he is on the run. he must do better--he must anticipate them. take such a man as eugene roundtree, who has been running a smoking car on one of the limited trains between new york and boston for two decades--save for that brief transcendent hour when charles s. mellen saw himself destined to become transportation overlord of new england and appropriated roundtree for a personal servant and porter of his private car. roundtree is a negro of the very finest type. he is a man who commands respect and dignity--and receives it. and roundtree, as porter of the pullman smoker on the merchants' limited, has learned to anticipate. he knows at least five hundred of the big bankers and business men of both new york and boston--though he knows the boston crowd best. he knows the men who belong to the somerset and the algonquin clubs--the men who are boston enough to pronounce peabody "pebbuddy." and they know him. some of them have a habit of dropping in at the new haven ticket offices and demanding: "is eugene running up on the merchants' to-night?" "it isn't just knowing them and being able to call them by their names," he will tell you if you can catch him in one of his rarely idle moments. "i've got to remember what they smoke and what they drink. when mr. blank tells me he wants a cigar it's my job to remember what he smokes and to put it before him. i don't ask him what he wants. i anticipate." and by anticipating roundtree approaches a sort of _n_th degree of service and receives one of the "fattest" of all the pullman runs. george sylvester is another man of the roundtree type--only his run trends to the west from new york instead of to the east, which means that he has a somewhat different type of patron with which to deal. sylvester is a porter on the twentieth century limited; and, like roundtree, he is a colored man of far more than ordinary force and character. he had opportunity to show both on a winter night, when his train was stopped and a drunken man--a man who was making life hideous for other passengers on sylvester's car--was taken from the train. the fact that the man was a powerful politician, a man who raved the direst threats when arrested, made the porter's job the more difficult. the pullman company, in this instance alone, had good cause to remember sylvester's force and courage--and consummate tact--just as it has good cause in many such episodes to be thankful for the cool-headedness of its black man in a blue uniform who stands in immediate control of its property. sylvester prefers to forget that episode. he likes to think of the nice part of the century's runs--the passengers who are quiet, and kind, and thoughtful, and remembering. they are a sort whom it is a pleasure for a porter to serve. they are the people who make an excess-fare train a "fat run." there are other fat runs, of course: the overland, the olympian, the congressional--and of general henry forrest, of the congressional, more in a moment--fat trains that follow the route of the century. it was on one of these, coming east from cleveland on a snowy night in february last, that a resourceful porter had full use for his store of tact; for there is, in the community that has begun to stamp sixth city on its shirts and its shoe tabs, a bank president who--to put the matter lightly--is a particular traveler. more than one black man, rising high in porter service, has had his vanity come to grief when this crotchety personage has come on his car. and the man himself was one of those who are marked up and down the pullman trails. an unwritten code was being transmitted between the black brethren of the sleeping cars as to his whims and peculiarities. it was well that every brother in service in the cleveland district should know the code. when mr. x entered his drawing-room--he never rides elsewhere in the car--shades were to be drawn, a pillow beaten and ready by the window, and matches on the window sill. x would never ask for these things; but god help the poor porter who forgot them! so you yourself can imagine the emotions of whittlesey warren, porter of the car thanatopsis, bound east on number six on the snowy february night when x came through the portals of that scarabic antique, the union depot at cleveland, a redcap with his grips in the wake. warren recognized his man. the code took good care as to that. he followed the banker down the aisle, tucked away the bags, pulled down the shades, fixed the pillow and placed the matches on the window sill. the banker merely grunted approval, lighted a big black cigar and went into the smoker, while warren gave some passing attention to the other patrons of his car. it was passing attention at the best; for after a time the little bell annunciator began to sing merrily and persistently at him--and invariably its commanding needle pointed to d.r. and on the drawing-room whittlesey warren danced a constant attention. "here, you nigger!" x shouted at the first response. "how many times have i got to tell all of you to put the head of my bed toward the engine?" whittlesey warren looked at the bed. he knew the make-up of the train. the code had been met. the banker's pillows were toward the locomotive. but his job was not to argue and dispute. he merely said: "yas-suh. scuse me!" and he remade the bed while x lit a stogy and went back to the smoker. that was at erie--erie, and the snow was falling more briskly than at cleveland. slowing into dunkirk, the banker returned and glanced through the car window. he could see by the snow against the street lamps that the train was apparently running in the opposite direction. his chubby finger went against the push button. whittlesey warren appeared at the door. the language that followed cannot be reproduced in the saturday evening post. suffice it to say that the porter remembered who he was and what he was, and merely remade the bed. the banker bit off the end of another cigar and retired once again to the club car. when he returned, the train was backing into the buffalo station. at that unfortunate moment he raised his car shade--and porter whittlesey warren again reversed the bed, to the accompaniment of the most violent abuse that had ever been heaped on his defenseless head. yet not once did he complain--he remembered that a servant a servant always is. and in the morning x must have remembered; for a folded bill went into warren's palm--a bill of a denomination large enough to buy that fancy vest which hung in a haberdasher's shop over on san juan hill. if you have been asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as x, of cleveland--thank heaven for that!--though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege of indulging those peculiarities. despite the rigid discipline of the pullman company the porter's leeway is a very considerable one. his instructions are never to say "against the rules!" but rather "i do not know what can be done about it"--and then to make a quick reference to the pullman conductor, who is his arbiter and his court of last resort. his own initiative, however, is not small. two newspaper men in new york know that. they had gone over to boston for a week-end, had separated momentarily at its end, to meet at the last of the afternoon trains for gotham. a had the joint finances and tickets for the trip; but b, hurrying through the traffic tangle of south station, just ninety seconds before the moment of departure, knew that he would find him already in the big pullman observation car. he was not asked to show his ticket at the train gate. boston, with the fine spirit of the tea party still flowing in its blue veins, has always resented that as a sort of railroad impertinence. b did not find a. he did not really search for him until back bay was passed and the train was on the first leg of its journey, with the next stop at providence. then it was that a was not to be found. then b realized that his side partner had missed the train. he dropped into a corner and searched his own pockets. a battered quarter and three pennies came to view--and the fare from boston to providence is ninety cents! then it was that the initiative of a well-trained pullman porter came into play. he had stood over the distressed b while he was making an inventory of his resources. "done los' something, boss?" said the autocrat of the car. b told the black man his story in a quick, straightforward manner; and the black man looked into his eyes. b returned the glance. perhaps he saw in that honest ebony face something of the expression of the faithful servants of wartime who refused to leave their masters even after utter ruin had come upon them. the porter drew forth a fat roll of bills. "ah guess dat, ef you-all'll give meh yo' business cyard, ah'll be able to fee-nance yo' trip dis time." to initiative the black man was adding intuition. he had studied his man. he was forever using his countless opportunities to study men. it was not so much of a gamble as one might suppose. a pretty well-known editor was saved from a mighty embarrassing time; and some other people have been saved from similarly embarrassing situations through the intuition and the resources of the pullman porter. the conductor--both of the train and of the sleeping-car service--is not permitted to exercise such initiative or intuition; but the porter can do and frequently does things of this very sort. his recompense for them, however, is hardly to be classed as a tip. the tip is the nub of the whole situation. almost since the very day when the pioneer began to blaze the trail of luxury over the railroads of the land, and the autocrat of the pullman car created his servile but entirely honorable calling, it has been a mooted point. recently a great federal commission has blazed the strong light of publicity on it. robert t. lincoln, son of the emancipator, and, as we have already said, the head and front of the pullman company, sat in a witness chair at washington and answered some pretty pointed questions as to the division of the porter's income between the company and the passenger who employed him. wages, it appeared, are twenty-seven dollars and a half a month for the first fifteen years of the porter's service, increasing thereafter to thirty dollars a month, slightly augmented by bonuses for good records. the porter also receives his uniforms free after ten years of service, and in some cases of long service his pay may reach forty-two dollars a month. the rest of his income is in the form of tips. and mr. lincoln testified that during the past year the total of these tips, to the best knowledge and belief of his company, had exceeded two million three hundred thousand dollars. the pullman company is not an eleemosynary institution. though it has made distinct advances in the establishment of pension funds and death benefits, it is hardly to be classed as a philanthropy. it is a large organization; and it generally is what it chooses to consider itself. sometimes it avers that it is a transportation company, at other times it prefers to regard itself as a hotel organization; but at all times it is a business proposition. it is not in business for its health. its dividend record is proof of that. all of which is a preface to the statement that the pullman company, like any other large user of labor, regulates its wage scale by supply and demand. if it can find enough of the colored brethren competent and willing and anxious to man its cars at twenty-seven dollars and a half a month--with the fair gamble of two or three or four times that amount to come in the form of tips--it is hardly apt to pay more. no wonder, then, the tip forms the nub of the situation. to-day all america tips. you tip the chauffeur in the taxi, the redcap in the station, the barber, the bootblack, the manicure, the boy or girl who holds your coat for you in the barber's shop or hotel. in the modern hotel tipping becomes a vast and complex thing--waiters, doormen, hat boys, chambermaids, bell boys, porters--the list seems almost unending. the system may be abominable, but it has certainly fastened itself on us--sternly and securely. and it may be said for the pullman car that there, at least, the tip comes to a single servitor--the black autocrat who smiles genially no matter how suspiciously he may, at heart, view the quarter you have placed within his palm. a quarter seems to be the standard pullman tip--for one person, each night he may be on the car. some men give more; some men--alas for poor george!--less. a quarter is not only average but fairly standard. it is given a certain official status by the auditing officers of many large railroads and industrial corporations, who recognize it as a chargeable item in the expense accounts of their men on the road. a man with a fat run--lower berths all occupied, with at least a smattering of riders in the uppers, night after night--ought to be able easily to put aside a hundred and fifty dollars a month as his income from this item. there are hundreds of porters who are doing this very thing; and there are at least dozens of porters who own real estate, automobiles, and other such material evidences of prosperity. a tip is not necessarily a humiliation, either to the giver or to the taker. on the contrary, it is a token of meritorious service. and the smart porter is going to take good care that he gives such service. but how about the porter who is not so smart--the man who has the lean run? as every butcher and every transportation man knows, there is lean with the fat. and it does the lean man little good to know that his fat brother is preparing to buy a secondhand automobile. on the contrary, it creates an anarchist--or at least a socialist--down under that black skin. here is lemuel--cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality. lemuel runs on a "differential" between new york, chicago and st. louis. every passenger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials--as the roads that take longer hours, and so are permitted to charge a slightly lower through fare between those cities, are called--have had a hard time of it in recent years. it is the excess-fare trains, the highest-priced carriers--which charge you a premium of a dollar for every hour they save in placing you in the terminal--that are the crowded trains. and the differentials have had increasing difficulty getting through passengers. it seems that in this day and land a man who goes from new york to chicago or st. louis is generally so well paid as to make it worth dollars to him to save hours in the journey. it is modern efficiency showing itself in railroad-passenger travel. but the differentials, having local territory to serve, as well as on account of some other reasons, must maintain a sleeping-car service--even at a loss. there is little or no loss to the pullman company--you may be sure of that! the railroad pays it a mileage fee for hauling a half or three-quarter empty car over its own line--in addition to permitting the pullman system to take all the revenue from the car; but lemuel sees his end of the business as a dead loss. he leaves new york at two-thirty o'clock on monday afternoon, having reported at his car nearly three hours before so as to make sure that it is properly stocked and cleaned for its long trip. he is due at st. louis at ten-fifteen on tuesday evening--though it will be nearly two hours later before he has checked the contents of the car and slipped off to the bunking quarters maintained there by his company. on wednesday evening at seven o'clock he starts east and is due in new york about dawn on friday morning. he cleans up his car and himself, and gets to his little home on the west side of manhattan island sometime before noon; but by noon on saturday he must be back at his car, making sure that it is fit and ready by two-thirty o'clock--the moment the conductor's arm falls--and they are headed west again. this time the destination is chicago, which is not reached until about six o'clock sunday night. he bunks that night in the windy city and then spends thirty-two hours going back again to new york. he sees his home one more night; then he is off to st. louis again--started on a fresh round of his eternal schedule. talk of tips to lemuel! his face lengthens. you may not believe it, white man, but lemuel made fifty-three cents in tips on the last trip from new york to chicago. you can understand the man who gave him the columbian antique; but lemuel believes there can be no future too warm for that skinny man who gave him the three pennies! he thinks the gentleman might at least have come across with a subway ticket. it is all legal tender to him. all that saves this porter's bacon is the fact that he is in charge of the car--for some three hundred miles of its eastbound run he is acting as sleeping-car conductor, for which consolidated job he draws down a proportionate share of forty-two dollars a month. this is a small sop, however, to lemuel. he turns and tells you how, on the last trip, he came all the way from st. louis to new york--two nights on the road--without ever a "make-down," as he calls preparing a berth. no wonder then that he has difficulty in making fifty dollars a month, with his miserable tips on the lean run. nor is that all. though lemuel is permitted three hours' sleep--on the bunk in the washroom on the long runs--from midnight to three o'clock in the morning, there may come other times when his head begins to nod. and those are sure to be the times when some lynx-eyed inspector comes slipping aboard. biff! bang! pullman discipline is strict. something has happened to lemuel's pay envelope, and his coffee-colored wife in west twenty-ninth street will not be able to get those gray spats until they are clean gone out of style. what can be done for lemuel? he must bide his time and constantly make himself a better servant--a better porter, if you please. it will not go unnoticed. the pullman system has a method for noticing those very things--inconsequential in themselves but all going to raise the standard of its service. then some fine day something will happen. a big sleeping-car autocrat, in the smugness and false security of a fat run, is going to err. he is going to step on the feet of some important citizen--perhaps a railroad director--and the important citizen is going to make a fuss. after which lemuel, hard-schooled in adversity, in faithfulness and in courtesy, will be asked in the passing of a night to change places with the old autocrat. and the old autocrat, riding in the poverty of a lean run, will have plenty of opportunity to count the telegraph poles and reflect on the mutability of men and things. the pullman company denies that this is part of its system; but it does happen--time and time and time again. george, or lemuel, or alexander--whatever the name may be--has no easy job. if you do not believe that, go upstairs some hot summer night to the rear bedroom--that little room under the blazing tin roof which you reserve for your relatives--and make up the bed fifteen or twenty times, carefully unmaking it between times and placing the clothes away in a regular position. let your family nag at you and criticize you during each moment of the job--while somebody plays an obbligato on the electric bell and places shoes and leather grips underneath your feet. imagine the house is bumping and rocking--and keep a smiling face and a courteous tongue throughout all of it! or do this on a bitter night in midwinter; and between every two or three makings of the bed in the overheated room slip out of a linen coat and into a fairly thin serge one and go and stand outside the door from three to ten minutes in the snow and cold. in some ways this is one of the hardest parts of george's job. racially the negro is peculiarly sensitive to pneumonia and other pulmonary diseases; yet the rules of a porter's job require that at stopping stations he must be outside of the car--no matter what the hour or condition of the climate--smiling and ready to say: "what space you got, guv'nor?" however, the porter's job, like nearly every other job, has its glories as well as its hardships--triumphs that can be told and retold for many a day to fascinated colored audiences; because there are special trains--filled with pursy and prosperous bankers from hartford and rochester and terre haute--making the trip from coast to coast and back again, and never forgetting the porter at the last hour of the last day. there are many men in the pullman service like roger pryor, who has ridden with every recent president of the land and enjoyed his confidence and respect. and then there is general henry forrest, of the congressional limited, for twenty-four years in charge of one of its broiler cars, who stops not at presidents but enjoys the acquaintance of senators and ambassadors almost without number. the general comes to know these dignitaries by their feet. when he is standing at the door of his train under the pennsylvania terminal, in new york, he recognizes the feet as they come poking down the long stairs from the concourse. and he can make his smile senatorial or ambassadorial--a long time in advance. once forrest journeyed in a private car to san francisco, caring for a certain big man. he took good care of the certain big man--that was part of his job. he took extra good care of the certain big man--that was his opportunity. and when the certain big man reached the golden gate he told henry forrest that he had understood and appreciated the countless attentions. the black face of the porter wrinkled into smiles. he dared to venture an observation. "ah thank you, jedge!" said he. "an' ef it wouldn't be trespassin' ah'd lak to say dat when yo' comes home you's gwine to be president of dese united states." the certain big man shook his head negatively; but he was flattered nevertheless. he leaned over and spoke to henry forrest. "if ever i am president," said he, "i will make you a general." and so it came to pass that on the blizzardy dakota-made day when william howard taft was inaugurated president of these united states there was a parade--a parade in which many men rode in panoply and pride; but none was prouder there than he who, mounted on a magnificent bay horse, headed the philippine band. a promise was being kept. the bay horse started three times to bolt from the line of march, and this was probably because its rider was better used to the pompeian-red broiler car than to a pompeian-red bay mare. but these were mere trifles. despite them--partly because of them perhaps--the younger brethren at the terminals were no longer to address the veteran from the congressional merely as mr. forrest. he was general forrest now--a title he bears proudly and which he will carry with him all the long years of his life. what becomes of the older porters? sometimes, when the rush of the fast trains, the broken nights, the exposure and the hard, hard work begin to be too much for even sturdy afric frames, they go to the "super" and beg for the "sick man's run"--a leisurely sixty or a hundred miles a day on a parlor car, perhaps on a side line where travel is light and the parlor car is a sort of sentimental frippery; probably one of the old wooden cars: the alicia, or the lucille, or the celeste, still vain in bay windows and grilles, and abundant in carvings. for a sentimental frippery may be given a feminine name and may bear her years gracefully--even though she does creak in all her hundred joints when the track is the least bit uneven. as to the sick man's tips, the gratuity is no less a matter of keen interest and doubt at sixty than it is at twenty-six. and though there is a smile under that clean mat of kinky white hair, it is not all habit--some of it is still anticipation. but quarters and half dollars do not come so easily to the old man in the parlor car as to his younger brother on the sleepers, or those elect who have the smokers on the fat runs. to the old men come dimes instead--some of them miserable affairs bearing on their worn faces the faint presentments of the ruler on the north side of lake erie and hardly redeemable in baltimore or cincinnati. yet even these are hardly to be scorned--when one is sixty. after the sick man's job? perhaps a sandy farm on a carolina hillside, where an old man may sit and nod in the warm sun, and dream of the days when steel cars were new--perhaps of the days when the platform-vestibule first went bounding over the rails--may dream and nod; and then, in his waking moments, stir the pickaninnies to the glories of a career on a fast train and a fat run. for if it is true that any white boy has the potential opportunity of becoming president of the united states, it is equally true that any black boy may become the autocrat of the pullman car. * * * * * _(the independent)_ the gentle art of blowing bottles and the story of how sand is melted into glass by f. gregory hartswick remedies for our manifold ills; the refreshment that our infant lips craved; coolness in time of heat; yes--even tho july st has come and gone--drafts to assuage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years--all these things come in bottles. from the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. and as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. we assume vaguely that it is blown--ever since we saw the bohemian glass blowers at the world's fair we have known that glass is blown into whatever shape fancy may dictate--but that is as far as our knowledge of its manufacture extends. as a matter of fact the production of bottles in bulk is one of the most important features of the glass industry of this country today. the manufacture of window glass fades into insignficance before the hugeness of the bottle-making business; and even the advent of prohibition, while it lessens materially the demand for glass containers of liquids, does not do so in such degree as to warrant very active uneasiness on the part of the proprietors of bottle factories. the process of manufacture of the humble bottle is a surprizingly involved one. it includes the transportation and preparation of raw material, the reduction of the material to a proper state of workability, and the shaping of the material according to design, before the bottle is ready to go forth on its mission. the basic material of which all glass is made is, of course, sand. not the brown sand of the river-bed, the well remembered "sandy bottom" of the swimmin' hole of our childhood, but the finest of white sand from the prehistoric ocean-beds of our country. this sand is brought to the factory and there mixed by experts with coloring matter and a flux to aid the melting. on the tint of the finished product depends the sort of coloring agent used. for clear white glass, called flint glass, no color is added. the mixing of a copper salt with the sand gives a greenish tinge to the glass; amber glass is obtained by the addition of an iron compound; and a little cobalt in the mixture gives the finished bottle the clear blue tone that used to greet the waking eye as it searched the room for something to allay that morning's morning feeling. the flux used is old glass--bits of shattered bottles, scraps from the floor of the factory. this broken glass is called "cullet," and is carefully swept into piles and kept in bins for use in the furnaces. the sand, coloring matter, and cullet, when mixed in the proper proportions, form what is called in bottle-makers' talk the "batch" or "dope." this batch is put into a specially constructed furnace--a brick box about thirty feet long by fifteen wide, and seven feet high at the crown of the arched roof. this furnace is made of the best refractory blocks to withstand the fierce heat necessary to bring the batch to a molten state. the heat is supplied by various fuels--producer-gas is the most common, tho oil is sometimes used. the gas is forced into the furnace and mixed with air at its inception; when the mixture is ignited the flame rolls down across the batch, and the burnt gases pass out of the furnace on the other side. the gases at their exit pass thru a brick grating or "checkerboard," which takes up much of the heat; about every half hour, by an arrangement of valves, the inlet of the gas becomes the outlet, and vice versa, so that the heat taken up by the checkerboard is used instead of being dissipated, and as little of the heat of combustion is lost as is possible. the batch is put into the furnace from the rear; as it liquefies it flows to the front, where it is drawn off thru small openings and blown into shape. the temperature in the furnace averages about degrees fahrenheit; it is lowest at the rear, where the batch is fed in, and graduates to its highest point just behind the openings thru which the glass is drawn off. this temperature is measured by special instruments called thermal couples--two metals joined and placed in the heat of the flame. the heat sets up an electric current in the joined metals, and this current is read on a galvanometer graduated to read degrees fahrenheit instead of volts, so that the temperature may be read direct. all furnaces for the melting of sand for glass are essentially the same in construction and principle. the radical differences in bottle manufacturing appear in the methods used in drawing off the glass and blowing it into shape. glass is blown by three methods: hand-blowing, semi-automatic blowing, and automatic blowing. the first used was the hand method, and tho the introduction of machines is rapidly making the old way a back number, there are still factories where the old-time glass blower reigns supreme. one of the great centers of the bottle industry in the united states is down in the southern end of new jersey. good sand is dug there--new jersey was part of the bed of the atlantic before it literally rose to its present state status--and naturally the factories cluster about the source of supply of material. within a radius of thirty miles the investigator may see bottles turned out by all three methods. the hand-blowing, while it is the slowest and most expensive means of making bottles, is by far the most picturesque. imagine a long, low, dark building--dark as far as daylight is concerned, but weirdly lit by orange and scarlet flashes from the great furnaces that crouch in its shelter. at the front of each of these squatting monsters, men, silhouetted against the fierce glow from the doors, move about like puppets on wires--any noise they may make is drowned in the mastering roar of the fire. a worker thrusts a long blowpipe (in glassworkers' terminology a wand) into the molten mass in the furnace and twirls it rapidly. the end of the wand, armed with a ball of refractory clay, collects a ball of semi-liquid glass; the worker must estimate the amount of glass to be withdrawn for the particular size of the bottle that is to be made. this ball of glowing material is withdrawn from the furnace; the worker rolls it on a sloping moldboard, shaping it to a cylinder, and passes the wand to the blower who is standing ready to receive it. the blower drops the cylinder of glass into a mold, which is held open for its reception by yet another man; the mold snaps shut; the blower applies his mouth to the end of the blowpipe; a quick puff, accompanied by the drawing away of the wand, blows the glass to shape in the mold and leaves a thin bubble of glass protruding above. the mold is opened; the shaped bottle, still faintly glowing, is withdrawn with a pair of asbestos-lined pincers, and passed to a man who chips off the bubble on a rough strip of steel, after which he gives the bottle to one who sits guarding a tiny furnace in which oil sprayed under pressure roars and flares. the rough neck of the bottle goes into the flame; the raw edges left when the bubble was chipped off are smoothed away by the heat; the neck undergoes a final polishing and shaping twirl in the jaws of a steel instrument, and the bottle is laid on a little shelf to be carried away. it is shaped, but not finished. the glass must not be cooled too quickly, lest it be brittle. it must be annealed--cooled slowly--in order to withstand the rough usage to which it is to be subjected. the annealing process takes place in a long, brick tunnel, heated at one end, and gradually cooling to atmospheric temperature at the other. the bottles are placed on a moving platform, which slowly carries them from the heated end to the cool end. the process takes about thirty hours. at the cool end of the annealing furnace the bottle is met by the packers and is made ready for shipment. these annealing furnaces are called "lehrs" or "leers"--either spelling is correct--and the most searching inquiry failed to discover the reason for the name. they have always been called that, and probably always will be. in the hand-blowing process six men are needed to make one bottle. there must be a gatherer to draw the glass from the furnace; a blower; a man to handle the mold; a man to chip off the bubble left by the blower; a shaper to finish the neck of the bottle; and a carrier-off to take the completed bottles to the lehr. usually the gatherer is also the blower, in which case two men are used, one blowing while the other gathers for his turn; but on one platform i saw the somewhat unusual sight of one man doing all the blowing while another gathered for him. the pair used two wands, so that their production was the same as tho two men were gathering and blowing. this particular blower was making quart bottles, and he was well qualified for the job. he weighed, at a conservative estimate, two hundred and fifty pounds, and when he blew something had to happen. i arrived at his place of labor just as the shifts were being changed--a glass-furnace is worked continuously, in three eight-hour shifts--and as the little whistle blew to announce the end of his day's toil the giant grabbed the last wand, dropped it into the waiting mold, and blew a mighty blast. a bubble of glass sprang from the mouth of the mold, swelled to two feet in diameter, and burst with a bang, filling the air with shimmering flakes of glass, light enough to be wafted like motes. when the shining shower had settled and i had opened my eyes--it would not be pleasant to get an eyeful of those beautiful scraps--the huge blower was diminishing in perspective toward his dinner, and the furnace door was, for the moment, without its usual hustling congregation of workers. i made bold to investigate the platform. close to me glared the mouth of the furnace, with masses of silver threads depending from it like the beard of some fiery gulleted ogre--the strings of glass left by the withdrawal of the wand. the heat three feet away was enough to make sand melt and run like water, but i was not unpleasantly warm. this was because i stood at the focus of three tin pipes, thru which streams of cold air, fan-impelled, beat upon me. without this cooling agent it would be impossible for men to work so close to the heat of the molten glass. later, in the cool offices of the company, where the roar of the furnaces penetrated only as a dull undertone, and electric fans whizzed away the heat of the summer afternoon, i learned more of the technique of the bottle industry. each shape demanded by the trade requires a special mold, made of cast iron and cut according to the design submitted. there are, of course, standard shapes for standard bottles; these are alluded to (reversing the usual practise of metonymy) by using thing contained for container, as "ginger ales," "olives," "mustards," "sodas" and (low be it spoken) "beers." but when a firm places an order for bottles of a particular shape, or ones with lettering in relief on the glass, special molds must be made; and after the lot is finished the molds are useless till another order for that particular design comes in. a few standard molds are made so that plates with lettering can be inserted for customers who want trademarks or firm names on their bottles; but the great majority of the lettered bottles have their own molds, made especially for them and unable to be used for any other lot. all bottles are blown in molds; it is in the handling of the molten glass and the actual blowing that machinery has come to take the place of men in the glass industry. the first type of machine to be developed was for blowing the bottle and finishing it, thus doing away with three of the six men formerly employed in making one bottle. in appearance the bottle-blowing machine is merely two circular platforms, revolving in the same horizontal plane, each carrying five molds. one of the platforms revolves close to the furnace door, and as each mold comes around it automatically opens and the gatherer draws from the furnace enough glass for the bottle which is being made at the time, and places it in the mold. the mold closes, and the platform turns on, bringing around another mold to the gatherer. meanwhile a nozzle has snapped down over the first mold, shaping the neck of the bottle, and beginning the blowing. as the mold comes to a point diametrically opposite the furnace door it opens again, and a handler takes the blank, as the bottle is called at this stage, and places it in a mold on the second revolving platform. this mold closes and compressed air blows out the bottle as the platform revolves. as the mold comes around to the handler again it opens and the handler takes out the finished bottle, replacing it with a new blank drawn from the mold on the first platform. this operation necessitates only three men--a gatherer, a handler, and a carrier-off. it is also much faster than the old method--an average of about forty bottles per minute as against barely twenty. a newer development of this machine does away with the gatherer. a long rod of refractory clay is given a churning movement in the mouth of the furnace, forcing the molten glass thru a tube. as enough glass for one bottle appears at the mouth of the tube a knife cuts the mass and the blob of glass falls into a trough which conveys it to the blank mold. by an ingenious device the same trough is made to feed three or four machines at one time. as many as fifty bottles a minute can be turned out by this combination blowing machine and feeder. but the apotheosis of bottle-making is to be seen in another factory in the south jersey district. here it is the boast of the superintendents that from the time the sand goes out of the freight cars in which it is brought to the plant till the finished bottle is taken by the packer, no human hand touches the product; and their statement is amply confirmed by a trip thru the plant. the sand, coloring matter and cullet are in separate bins; an electrical conveyor takes enough of each for a batch to a mixing machine; from there the batch goes on a long belt to the furnace. at the front of the furnace, instead of doors or mouths, is a revolving pan, kept level full with the molten glass. outside the furnace revolves a huge machine with ten arms, each of which carries its own mold and blowpipe. as each arm passes over the pan in the furnace the proper amount of glass is sucked into the mold by vacuum; the bottle is blown and shaped in the course of one revolution, and the mold, opening, drops the finished bottle into a rack which carries it to the lehr on a belt. it passes thru the lehr to the packers; and as each rack is emptied of its bottles the packers place it again on the belt, which carries it up to the machine, where it collects its cargo of hot bottles and conducts it again thru the lehr. the entire plant--mixing, feeding, actually making the bottles, delivery to the lehr, and packing--is synchronized exactly. men unload the cars of sand--men pack the bottles. the intermediate period is entirely mechanical. the plant itself is as well lighted and ventilated as a department store, and except in the immediate vicinity of the furnace there is no heat felt above the daily temperature. the machines average well over a bottle a second, and by an exceedingly clever arrangement of electrical recording appliances an accurate record of the output of each machine, as well as the temperatures of the furnaces and lehrs, is kept in the offices of the company. the entire equipment is of the most modern, from the boilers and motors in the power-plant and producer-gas-plant to the packing platforms. in addition, the plant boasts a complete machine shop where all the molds are made and the machines repaired. it is a far cry from human lung-power to the super-efficient machinery of the new plants; but it is the logical progress of human events, applying to every product of man's hands, from battleships to--bottles. * * * * * special feature articles (_new york world_) one illustration, a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of the exterior of the theater. the neighborhood playhouse a gift to the east side--how the settlement work of misses irene and alice lewisohn has culminated at last in a real theatre--its attractions and educational value the piece is the biblical "jephthah's daughter," adapted from the book of judges. the hero, "a mighty man of valor," has conquered the enemies of his people. there is great rejoicing over his victory, for the tribe of israel has been at its weakest. but now comes payment of the price of conquest. the leader of the victorious host promised to yield to god as a burnt sacrifice "whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me when i return from battle." and his daughter came forth. in the last act, the girl herself, young and beautiful, advances toward the altar on which fagots have been piled high. in her hand is the lighted torch which is to kindle her own death fire. the chorus chants old hebraic melodies. even the audience joins in the singing. the play takes on the aspect of an ancient religious ceremonial. old men and women are in tears, moved by the sad history of their race, forgetful of the horror of human sacrifice in the intensity of their religious fervor. such is the artistry of the piece; such the perfection of its production. yet this is no professional performance, but the work of amateurs. it is the opening night of the new community theatre of new york's densely populated east side. at no. grand street it stands, far away from broadway's theatrical district--a low-lying, little georgian building. it is but three stories high, built of light red brick, and finished with white marble. all around garish millinery shops display their showy goods. peddlers with pushcarts lit by flickering flames, vie with each other in their array of gaudy neckties and bargain shirtwaists. blazing electric signs herald the thrills of movie shows. and, salient by the force of extreme contrast, a plain little white posterboard makes its influence felt. it is lit by two iron lanterns, and reads simply, "the neighborhood playhouse." the misses irene and alice lewisohn of no. fifth avenue have built this theatre. it is their gift to the neighborhood, and symbolizes the culmination of a work which they have shared with the neighborhood's people. eight years ago the henry street settlement started its scheme of festivals and pantomimes, portraying through the medium of color, song, and dance such vague ideas as "impressions of spring." it was the boys and girls of the settlement who performed in these pantomimes. it was they who made the costumes, painted the necessary scenery, sang and danced. and both daughters of the late leonard lewisohn were always interested and active in promoting this work. out of it, in due time, there developed, quite naturally, a dramatic club. plays were given in the settlement gymnasium--full-grown pieces like "the silver box," by john galsworthy, and inspiring dramas like "the shepherd," a plea for russian revolutionists, by an american author, miss olive tilford dargan. such was the emotional response of the neighborhood to this drama that four performances had to be given at clinton hall; and as a result a substantial sum of money was forwarded to "the friends of russian freedom." then, in , came the famous pageant, which roused the entire district to a consciousness of itself--its history, its dignity and also its possibilities. that portion of the east side which surrounds the henry street settlement has seen many an invasion since the days when the dutch first ousted the indians. english, quakers, scotch have come and gone, leaving traces more or less distinct. the irish have given place to the italians, who have been replaced by the russians. in the pageant of all these settlers were represented by artistically clad groups who paraded the streets singing and dancing. no hall could have held the audience which thronged to see this performance; no host of matinée worshippers could have rivalled it in fervor of appreciation. when the misses lewisohn, then, built their new playhouse in grand street, it was not with the intention of rousing, but rather of satisfying, an artistic demand among the people of the neighborhood. and in the new home are to be continued all the varied activities of which the henry street settlement festival and dramatic clubs were but the centre. it is to be a genuine community enterprise in which each boy and girl will have a share. miss alice lewisohn herself thus expresses its many-sided work: "the costume designers and makers, fashioners of jewelry, painters and composers, musicians and seamstresses, as well as actors and directors, will contribute their share in varying degree. "putting aside for a moment the higher and artistic development which such work must bring, there is the craftsman side, too, which has practical value. the young men will become familiar with all the handiwork of the theatre, the construction and handling of scenery, the electrical equipment and its varied uses. it will be conceded, i think, that in this respect the community playhouse is really a college of instruction in the craft of the stage." it is a college with a very efficient and well-trained staff of professors. mrs. sarah cowell le moyne, already well known as a teacher of elocution and acting, will be one of its members. miss grace griswold, an experienced co-worker of the late augustine daly, will act as manager. the pupils of this novel school are to have amusement as well as work. the third floor has been planned to meet many more requirements than are usually considered in a theatre. across the front runs a large rehearsal room, large enough to make a fine dance hall when occasion demands. here, too, is a kitchenette which will be used to serve refreshments when social gatherings are in progress or when an over-long rehearsal tires out the cast. in warm weather the flat-tiled roof will be used as a playground. it will be the scene, too, of many open air performances. the neighborhood playhouse has been open only a few weeks. already it is in full swing. on the nights when the regular players do not appear the programme consists of motion pictures and music. there is a charming informality and ease about these entertainments; there is also genuine art, and a whole-hearted appreciation on the part of the neighborhood's people. * * * * * (_new york evening post_) the singular story of the mosquito man by helen bullitt lowry "now you just hold up a minute"--the bungalow-owner waved an indignant hand at the man in the little car chug-chugging over the bumpy road. "now i just want to tell you," he protested, "that a mosquito got into my room last night and bit me, and i want you to know that this has happened three times this week. i want it to stop." the man in the car had jumped out, and was turning an animated, and aggressive, but not at all provoked, face on the complainer. "are you certain your drains are not stopped up?" he asked. "oh, those drains are all right. it's that damp hollow over in miss k's woods that's making the trouble." "i'll go there immediately," said the aggressive one. "she promised me she would fill that place this week." "all right, then," answered the placated bungalow-owner, "i thought you'd fix it up if you found out about it. i certainly wouldn't have bought around darien if you had not cleared this place of mosquitoes." the aggressive one plunged into the connecticut woods and began his search for possible mosquito-breeding spots. he was the "mosquito man," the self-appointed guardian of the connecticut coast from stamford to westport. he was not born a mosquito man at all--in fact, he did not become one until he was forty years old and had retired from business because he had made enough money to rest and "enjoy life." but he did not rest, and did not get enjoyment, for the mosquitoes had likewise leased his place on the sound and were making good their title. came then big fat mosquitoes from the swamp. came mosquitoes from the salt marshes. some lighted on the owner's nose and some looked for his ankles, and found them. three days of this sort of rest made him decide to move away. then, because he was aggressive, he became the mosquito man. the idea occurred to him when he had gone over to a distant island and was watching the building of houses. "this place," he said to the head carpenter, "is going to be a little heaven." "more like a little other place," growled the head carpenter. "here they've dug out the centre of the island and carted it to the beach to make hills for the houses to be built on. one good rain will fill their little heaven with mosquitoes. why don't the people around here drain their country?" that night the mosquito man telephoned to a drainage expert in new york and demanded that he come out the next day. "i don't like to work on sunday," the expert objected. "it is absolutely essential that you come at once," he was told. "can you take the first train?" the first train and the expert arrived in darien at : . before the day was over a contract had been drawn up to the purport that the expert would drain the salt marshes between stamford and south norwalk for $ , . the mosquito man now began to talk mosquitoes to every one who would listen and to many who did not want to listen. "that bug," the old settlers called him at the time--for old settlers are very settled in their ways. the young women at the country club, whenever they saw him coming, made bets as to whether he would talk mosquitoes--and he always did. every property-owner in the township was asked for a subscription, and some gave generously and some gave niggardly and some did not give at all. the subscriptions were voluntary, for no one could be forced to remove a mosquito-breeding nuisance from his property. this was in , and only in has a mosquito law been passed in connecticut. the mosquito man was forced to use "indirect influence," which does not expedite matters. a subscription of $ , came from the big land corporation of the neighborhood, after the "indirect influence" had rather forcibly expressed itself. "i want $ , from you," said the mosquito man to the representative of the president--the president was in south america. the representative laughed, so the mosquito man spent several days explaining to him why property is more valuable when it is not infested with pests. but every time that the $ , was mentioned, the representative could not restrain the smile. "well," the mosquito man said, at last, "i will make the drainage on your property anyway, and it will cost me $ , . if you want it left you will have to pay me every cent of the $ , , not just the $ , that i am asking now. otherwise i shall fill up my ditches and let you enjoy your mosquitoes." the representative did not laugh at this, but cabled the president in south america. as the president had just been at panama, and had seen the mosquito extermination work, the $ , subscription came back by return cable. the darien board of health also was a spot against which in direct influence was knocking, for it was a rich board of health with $ at its disposal--and the mosquito man wanted that appropriation to flaunt in the faces of the old settlers. "god sent mosquitoes," objected one member of the board of health, "and it is going in the face of providence to try to get rid of them." all in all, the money was raised. some whom he asked for $ gave $ , and some whom he asked for $ gave $ , and some millionaires did not give at all--but a sail-maker is still telling proudly of how he gave $ , and "i haven't regretted a cent of it since." the draining now commenced, and the expert and the mosquito man were of the same stripe. the work was completed in six weeks. just about this time people stopped calling the mosquito man "a bug," and the members of the country club even tried to make him talk mosquitoes to them, while the sail-maker felt sure that his $ had done the whole job. hammocks were swung out in the yards--and a hammock hung outside of the screens is the barometer of the mosquito condition. the mosquito man was feeling very satisfied the night he went to a dance at the country club. but the east wind blew in the mosquitoes from the norwalk marshes. "it was the most embarrassing experience i have ever had," said the mosquito man. "i sat right behind a big fat lady whose dress was very low and i watched the mosquitoes bite her; her whole back was covered with red lumps. that night i telegraphed to the man who had done the draining and he telegraphed back that all of norwalk township must be drained." norwalk proved to be a much severer task than darien. in darien the mosquito man had found only indifference and prejudice; in norwalk he met active opposition. property owners and city councils seem to be afraid that the value of property will be brought down if any sanitation scandal is advertised. it really appeared to be simpler and better business to ignore the fact. to do away with this opposition, the mosquito man handled his campaign in a popular manner. the cooperation of the newspapers was gained and every day he published articles on the mosquito question; some of the articles were educational and others were facetious--while one came out that brought the property owners crying "murder" about his ears. this was the article in which he gave the statistics of norwalk's health rate in comparison with other connecticut towns. the smallest subscriptions were encouraged, for, after a man has given a dollar to a cause, that cause is his. many a child was received with a welcoming smile when he brought to the campaign offices a ten-cent donation. true, ten-cent donations were not suggested to adult contributors, and the mosquito man did much to induce the well-to-do citizens to subscribe according to their means. he still tells with relish of the club of women which took up a collection, after his talk, and presented him with two dollars, in small change. "the women, though, were my greatest help," he adds; "i found that the women are as a rule better citizens than the men and are glad to be organized to fight the mosquito and fly menace. of course, i found some uneducated ones that owned a piece of property a foot square, and were afraid that i would walk off with it in my pocket if i came to look it over--but, as for the educated women, i could not have managed my campaign without them." a large contributor to the fund was the monastery at kaiser island. for years this had been a summer resort for the monks, who filled the dormitories in the old days before the mosquitoes took the island. only one priest was there when the mosquito man visited the place to ask for a subscription. "very few come any more," said the priest. "it is because of the mosquitoes." "will you contribute $ to get rid of them?" asked the mosquito man. briefly, the mosquito man offered to repay the $ himself if he did not exterminate the mosquitoes. the mosquitoes went; the monks came back to kaiser island. yet, in spite of the occasional generous giver, the $ , was never quite raised, and the mosquito man himself had to make up the deficit. the citizens of norwalk, for instance, contributed only $ . this all happened three years ago, and now not a child in the twelve miles but can tell you all about mosquitoes and how a community can avoid having them. the mosquito man is appreciated now, and the community understands what he has done for them and what he is still doing--for the contract merely drained the salt marshes, doing away with the salt-water mosquitoes. there were still the fresh-water mosquitoes, and there was still much work for some one to do. that some one has been the mosquito man. during the three years, he has made it his business to drain every inland marsh within his territory, to turn over every tub which may collect water, to let the plug out of every old boat which is breeding mosquitoes, and to convince every ancestor-encumbered autocrat that his inherited woods can breed mosquitoes just as disastrously as do the tin cans of the hungarian immigrant down the road. the mosquito man has an assistant, paid by the towns of darien and norwalk--and together they traverse the country. "it was difficult finding a man who would go into mud to the waist when need was," said the mosquito man, "but i finally found a good man with the proper scorn of public opinion on the clothes question, and with a properly trained wife who cleaned without scolding." you can find traces of the two men any place you go in the woods of darien or norwalk. in a ferned dell where you are quite sure that yours is the first human presence, you come upon a ditch, as clean and smooth as a knife--or you find new grass in a place which you remember as a swamp. perhaps you may even be lucky enough to come on the two workers themselves, digging with their pick and spade--for all summer long the mosquito man is working eight hours a day at his self-appointed task. you might even find him in new york some off-day--and you will know him, for surely he will be telling some rebellious apartment-house owner that the tank on his roof is unscreened. for they do say that he carries his activities into any part of the world where he may chance to be; they do say that, when he was in italy not so very long ago, he went out to investigate the mosquitoes which had disturbed his rest the night before. "now you must oil your swamp," said he to the innkeeper. that night there was no salad for dinner, for the innkeeper had obeyed the order to the best of his ability. he had poured all of his best olive oil on the mosquito marsh. * * * * * _(country gentleman)_ five half-tone illustrations, with the following captions: . "a traction ditcher at work digging trench for tile." . "ditch dug with dynamite through woods." . "apple packing house and cold storage at ransomville." . "nelson r. peet, county agent and manager of the niagara county farm bureau, new york." . "part of the crowd listening to the speakers." a county service station where new york farmers get help in their fruit growing and marketing problems by d. h. williams you've got to look into the family closet of a county and study its skeletons before you can decide whether that county's farming business is mostly on paper or on concrete. you've got to know whether it standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many methods as there are producers. as a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the gears of a county's economic machinery to the end of cutting out power losses, niagara county, new york, stands in a distinct class by itself. here is an area of square miles, with lake ontario spraying its northern line. a network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates. forty-eight hours to chicago's markets, the same distance to new york's; three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county itself--lockport, niagara falls and north tonawanda--operating with a wealth of cheap electric power generated at niagara falls--these are some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which is self-evident. beginning with the southern plain section, niagara's agriculture changes in type from general hay and grain farming to a more intense fruit-growing industry as the northern plain section is approached, until within the zone of lake ontario's tempering influence the fruit industry almost excludes all other types of farming. there is hardly a more favored fruit section in the country than the northern half of niagara county. apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, cherries, quinces make up the county's horticultural catalogue. the latest available figures rank niagara county first among the counties of new york in the number of fruit trees; second in the total number of bushels of fruit produced; first in the quantity of peaches, pears, plums and prunes, quinces and cherries; third in the number of bushels of apples. yet there are things about the county which no statistics will ever show, such things, for instance, as the condition of the orchards, the market value of the fruit, the earning capacity of the land as a whole--in other words, the bedrock rating of the county. you have to get at these things by a different avenue of approach. a rather close auditing during of the accounts of some eighty-seven typical good farms in perhaps the best section of niagara county brought out the fact that labor incomes from these farms, on the whole, could not be classed as strictly giltedge. one diagnosis made by a niagara county investigator is recorded in these words: "though niagara county has many of the best fruit farms in new york state, there are numbers of orchards that have been abandoned to the ravages of insects and disease. there is also a tendency toward extensive rather than intensive fruit growing, which has resulted in many large plantings being made. "niagara county does not need more orchards, but rather cultivation and spraying of the present orchards; it does not need to produce more fruit, but rather to insure better grading and marketing of the present production." this observation is dated , one year after leading farmers and business men of the county, convinced that all was not so well with them as the lifeless census figures would have one believe, made the move to set up and operate for the county a farm bureau. new york is the national hotbed of farm-bureau enthusiasm and propaganda. almost six years to the day after the inauguration of this bureau, i went into niagara county. and before i left i was able to sketch a rather vivid mental picture of what a farm bureau really can do for a county, be the raw material with which it must work good, bad or indifferent. up in the office of the niagara county farm bureau at lockport i waited some two hours for an interview with its manager, nelson r. peet. that wait was an eye-opener. three women clerks and stenographers and the assistant manager occupied this room. the clerks were trying to typewrite, answer the continuous ringing of the phone, respond to buzzer summons from manager peet's private office and talk with a stream of visitors, all at the same time. i spent two whole days and half a night in these offices and not once save at night was there a let-up in this sort of thing. it was business all the time; the business of service! niagara county farmers are using the bureau. nelson peet, manager, is a spectacled human magneto. his speech and his movements fairly crackle with energy; his enthusiasm is as communicable as a jump spark. a young man in years, yet mature in the knowledge of men and the psychology of service, he never wastes a minute dilating upon the philosophy of farm management; but he has worked twenty hours a day to see that niagara county farmers got all the labor they needed during rush seasons. this man has been with the bureau three years. when he came to it the bureau had a paid-up membership of . in march this year, when i was in niagara county, the membership stood at , and was increasing daily. it led by a good margin, i was told, the fifty-five new york county farm bureaus. these, in , had a total membership of , . more than half the farmers in niagara county are members of the niagara bureau. when peet first took charge there were two broad courses open to him. he might have planned a program of paternalistic propaganda in behalf of the farmers of the county. such a program calls for a tremendous amount of talking and writing about coöperation and community interests, better economics and better social conditions, but too often results in the propagandist doing the "coing," while the "operating" is left to somebody else. the other course was to find out what the farms and farmers in the county needed most and then set to work with little ado to get those things. peet chose the latter course. and in so doing he has staged one of the best demonstrations in rural america. he has shown that a farm bureau can be made into a county service station and actually become the hub of the county's agricultural activities. with the aid of state-college men, one of peet's foremost lines of bureau work has been that of taking inventories of the farming business of niagara county. for four years these records have been taken on some typical farms. group meetings are regularly held at the homes of the bureau's community committeemen. here, with the records they have been keeping, the farmers assemble. here they work out their own labor incomes and compare notes with their neighbors. the farm bureau helps the men make these business analyses--it does not do the work for them. now the farmers ask for the blank forms and are themselves as enthusiastic over farm-management records as the men who specialize in such. these figures serve the bureau as an index to the county's progress. more than once peet has referred to them and discovered where leaks could be plugged. for example, these records showed an average labor income of $ a farm for the four years ending . "this fact," mr. peet explained, "we put to work as the reason for doing something to benefit the fruit industry. what could be done? the answer in other highly specialized fruit sections seems to have been central packing houses. we held a meeting, inviting one very influential fruit grower from each loading station in the county. we showed charts of the farm-management records. it didn't take long for the meeting to go on record as favoring the central-packing-house plan. "later meetings were held in each community, the farm-management charts were again shown, and at every loading station the meetings went on record as favoring central packing houses. to make a long story short, sites and methods of financing these houses were worked out. there were already two old central packing houses in operation. they took on new life. five new ones have been formed. all were incorporated and federated into a central parent association, which owns the brand adopted and makes the rules and regulations under which the fruit is packed. "from the very beginning the proposition has been pushed not as a means of beating the selling game by selling coöperatively, but as a means of securing the confidence of the consuming public, which must ultimately result in a wider distribution and better prices. in fact, the matter of selling has not been fostered from the farm-bureau office. we have concerned ourselves solely with uniform grading and central packing. we believed from the start that the selling of properly graded and packed fruit will take care of itself, and this stand has been justified. "each association makes its own arrangements for selling, and in every case has secured better prices than the growers who sold under the old system. the most satisfactory feature of this work centers round the fact that the best and most influential growers are heart and soul behind the proposition. the personnel of coöperative movements, i believe, is the main feature." when i visited niagara county the seven central packing associations were doing a splendid business, handling about $ , , worth of apples between them. only two of the associations were more than one year old. many of the associations were dickering for additional space for packing and for extensions for their refrigerator service. other communities in niagara and in other counties were writing in for details of the plan, to the end of getting the same thing started in their sections. and inquiries were coming in from states outside of new york. even with the best of selling methods, no commodity will bring a profit to the producer unless the greater portion of it is eligible to the a- class. too many seconds or culls will throw any orchard venture on the rocks of bankruptcy. it came to manager peet's attention early in that the farm bureau had a golden opportunity to put on another service, which alone, if it worked out in practice as well as it did on paper, would justify the existence of the bureau. he noticed that though orchardists were following spraying schedules--the best they could find--some had splendid results in controlling apple scab and other pests, but others got results ranging between indifferent and poor. this seemed paradoxical, in view of the fact that one man who followed the same spraying schedule as his neighbor would have more scabby apples than the other. at that time l.f. strickland, orchard inspector for the state department of agriculture, had paid particular attention to a limited number of apple orchards in niagara county with a view to controlling scab by spraying. he discovered that, though the average spraying calendar is all right, climatic conditions in different parts of the same county often upset these standard calculations, so that a difference of one day or even a few hours in time of spraying often meant the difference between success and failure. in other words, it was necessary to study all contributing factors, watch the orchards unremittingly and then decide on the exact day or even hour when conditions were right for a successful spray treatment. he found that one must strike the _times between times_ to get the optimum of results. so mr. strickland, in conjunction with his regular work, kept an eagle eye on a few orchards and would notify the owners when it seemed the moment for spraying had come. it worked out that those favored orchardists had magnificent yields of a- fruit; others in the same sections, following the rather flexible spraying calendars, didn't do nearly so well. all this set manager peet to thinking. "strickland hasn't got an automobile and has lots of other work to do," he reasoned; "but why, if he had a car and could give all the time necessary to such work, couldn't the same results be had in orchards all over the county? why can't this farm bureau put on a spraying service?" he put the idea up to the executive committee of the bureau. the idea was good, they agreed, but it would cost at least $ to try it out the first year. the bureau didn't have the available funds. "tell you what," they finally said: "if you want to get out and rustle up new members at one dollar each to pay for this thing, we'll authorize it." peet was telling me about it. "here the bureau had been working for four years with a paid-up membership of about ," he said, "and if i believed in my idea i had to get more by spring. it was february eighth when the committee gave me this decision. well, i did it in time to start the ball that spring!" he got the new members because he had a service to sell them. arrangements were made whereby the county was divided into six zones, varying in soil and topographic conditions. criterion orchards were selected in each zone. the inspector, with the aid of daily telegraphic weather reports and through constant inspection of the criterion orchards, decided when the hour struck for the most effective spraying of these orchards. in the meantime manager peet and the inspector had worked out a code system for spraying instructions and put this into the hands of the growers in the six zones. when it came time to spray, the telephones from headquarters in lockport were put to work and the code message sent to certain orchardists; these in turn repeated the instructions to a number of other orchardists agreed upon, until every member had received the message. the scheme has worked. the first year there were members who took this service; the second year-- --there were ; this year there are . it is paying for itself many times over. one central packing house with nine grower members reports that eight of the members used the spraying service and that none of these had more than five per cent of their fruit to cull out. the ninth member sprayed, but not through the service. he culled forty-five per cent of his crop. there are scores of similar instances. seeing how quickly he could get the support of the niagara farmers for any move which had practice and not theory to recommend it, manager peet next began to agitate for an improvement in city-marketing conditions in lockport. up to august, , the system--if system it might be called--of distributing farm produce for lockport's consumption consisted of sporadic visits by producers to the city with produce to be sold at prices largely controlled by the local grocerymen. likewise retail prices to consumers were chiefly regulated by the same standard. a grower might drive into lockport with quarts of strawberries. he would stop at a grocery and offer them. "no," the grocer would say, "i don't want any. say, how much do you want for them anyhow?" "ten cents a quart." "too high; i'll give you six." whereupon the man would drive on to see the next grocer. but the man who offered six cents might go straight to his phone, call up the rest of the trade and inform it that there were quarts of strawberries on the streets for which he had offered six cents against ten asked. the result would be that the farmer would get no better offer than six cents. so manager peet joined hands with the lockport board of commerce and went at the job of righting this condition. he proposed a city market for farmers. the nearest approach to a market was a shelter for teams which the local food dealers had rented. to farmers in the vicinity of lockport manager peet wrote letters, calling their attention to these conditions and offering the city-market idea as a remedy. and he used publicity among lockport's population of consumers, showing them the economy of such a move. the farmers held a get-together meeting, decided on a location for a market in lockport, decided on market days and market hours. after this the farm bureau got the city's common council to pass an ordinance prohibiting the huckstering of farm produce on the streets during market hours; also an ordinance setting the market hours, marking off a street section which should be used as a market stand, and putting the superintendent of streets in charge. that was all. not a cent of appropriation asked for. the market opened august , , with fifty farm wagons in place. before the summer was over it was common to find more than at their stands. the local war-garden supervisor acted as inspector. he looked over the produce, advised the farmers how to pack and display it, and used every energy in the direction of popularizing the market among producers and consumers alike. between manager peet and the inspector a scheme was worked out whereby every thursday was bargain day in market. they would get a certain number of farmers to agree to pack and offer for sale on those days a limited number of baskets of their finest tomatoes, say. or it might be corn. in the case of tomatoes the bargain price would be ten cents for baskets which that day were selling regularly for eighteen to twenty-five cents. to each of these baskets--no farmer was asked to sacrifice more than ten--was attached a green tag noting that it was a bargain. each bargain day was advertised in advance among lockport consumers. thursday mornings would see an early rush to the market. the bargains would be cleaned out and then business at normal prices would continue at a brisker rate than usual. the first year of its operation this market was held on fifty-one days. during this period rigs sold out their produce for a total of $ , . this simple move has resulted in stabilizing prices in lockport and has encouraged the bringing in of farm produce. prices automatically regulate themselves. if they begin to get too low in lockport, the supply in sight is immediately reduced through action by the producers in shipping the stuff to niagara falls or buffalo by motor trucks. the distribution of lockport's milk supply, as happens in hundreds of cities, has been attended by considerable waste and expense as a result of duplication of delivery routes, breakage of bottles and uneconomic schedules. the first night i was in lockport, manager peet was holding a meeting of the milk producers supplying the city for the purpose of settling this inequity once and for all. a little agitation had been carried on ahead of this meeting, but only a little. peet had a plan. "it's all wrong to plan for a municipally owned central distributing system," he was explaining to me the next morning; "these are too likely to get mixed up in politics. so last night we just about clinched our arrangement for having our city distributing system owned by the producers themselves. in the past we have had eight distributors with fifteen wagons handling the milk supplied from fifty dairy farms. there has been a big loss in time and money as a result of this competition. "the farm bureau got the producers together on the plan of securing options on these distributors' interests, and last night we just about wound up all the preliminaries. we already have our limited liability corporation papers. we're incorporating under the membership corporation law. our organization comes under the amendment to the sherman antitrust law, you know, following closely the california law under which the california fruit growers' associations operate. "we figure that we will need between $ , and $ , for the purchase of buildings, wagons, equipment and good-will now in the hands of the distributors. at first we thought it would be a good plan to have every member of the association subscribe to the amount proportioned by the number of cows he keeps or the amount of milk he has for sale. but for several reasons this wouldn't work. so we hit on the scheme of having each man subscribe to the amount he personally is able to finance. "we already have $ , subscribed in sums between set limits of $ and $ . we're issuing five-year certificates of indebtedness bearing six per cent interest. our producers will have about $ worth of milk a month to distribute. we plan to deduct five per cent every month from these milk checks to pay off the certificates. then later we'll create a new set of certificates and redistribute these in proportion to the amounts of milk produced on the members' farms." manager peet and the producers are making it perfectly plain to lockport consumers that this is no move contemplating price control. in fact, they expect to sell milk for a cent a quart under the old price. the farm-labor shortage which antedated our entrance into the war became a national menace about the time our selective draft began to operate. new york farmers were as hard hit as any other farmers, particularly in the fruit sections, where a tremendous labor supply falls suddenly due at harvest time. niagara county came in for its full share of this trouble and the niagara county farm bureau went its length to meet the emergency. in western new york produced the biggest crop of peaches in its history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine. there were nearly cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the ground. peet anticipated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a veritable county labor department. he was promised a good number of high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to be cleared through a central office in buffalo. manager peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in forty-two camps strategically located. the camps were to accommodate thirty boys each. the farmers had asked peet for hands. he applied for boys and had every reason to expect these. but at the critical moment something went wrong in buffalo headquarters and of the asked for he got only ! "i was in buffalo at the time the news was broken," manager peet was saying to me, "and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!" here was a nice kettle of fish! the fruit was ripening on the trees, and the phones in the bureau offices were ringing their plating off with calls from frantic farmers. peet didn't jump off a buffalo dock; he jumped out of his coat and into the fray. he got a federal department of labor man to help him. they plastered appeals for help all over western new york--on the walls of post offices, railroad stations, on boarding houses. they worked on long-distance phones, the telegraph, the mails. they hired trucks and brought city men and boys and women and girls from cities to work in the orchards over week-ends. labor, attracted by the flaring posters, drifted into the bureau's offices in lockport and immediately was assigned to farms; and hundreds of laborers whom peet never saw also came. by working seven days a week and often without meals and with cat naps for sleep the bureau cleared laborers through its office, to say nothing of the loads brought overland by motor truck and which never came near the office. business houses in the towns closed down and sent their help to the orchards. lockport's organization of "live wires"--lawyers, doctors, bankers--went out and worked in the orchards. "well," was peet's comment, "we saved the crop, that's all!" last year the bureau placed men and four women on farms in niagara county. in addition, soldiers were secured on two-day furloughs from fort niagara to help harvest the fruit crops. "we did this," said manager peet, "mainly by starting early and keeping persistently at it with the war department, in order to cut the red tape." this fall there will go into effect in new york state an amendment to its drainage law which is going to do more properly to drain the state than all the steam diggers that could have been crowded on its acres under former conditions. this action came out of niagara county, through the farm bureau. to realize the importance of drainage in this county one must remember that it lies in two levels broken by the ridge which forms the locks at lockport, the falls at niagara falls, and which extends across the county from east to west. in each plateau the land is very level, there being but few places in the county having a difference in elevation of twenty feet within a radius of a mile. good drainage is very necessary and in the past has been very hard to secure. "practically no man can secure adequate drainage without being concerned in the drainage of his neighbor's land," said mr. peet. "if the neighbor objects the situation is complicated. and our drainage laws have been woefully inadequate to handle these problems." but recently the farm bureau put it up to a conference of county agents of new york to get the "state leader" to appoint a state committee to work this thing out and persuade the state legislature to make the necessary amendments to the drainage law. the plan went through, and one of the laws passed compels an objecting property owner to open drains which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors. this law goes into effect next fall. farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under the county-commissioner plan. but the records on file in the county clerk's office are in bad shape. the farm bureau has taken it upon itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a minute's notice, and as a result has drawn up petitions to the supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches. cooperating with the new york state food commission, the farm bureau had a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer. peet placed his assistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as a result of lack of supervision. it has dug over rods of ditch for tile on twenty-eight farms. for four years niagara county farmers had not made expenses in growing tomatoes for the canneries. the farm bureau called a meeting of some fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production. the average cost for was found to be $ an acre; the estimated cost for was $ an acre. the average crop was set at six tons to the acre. a joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts before the canners. the result was that the growers got $ a ton for their crops in . these are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers by the niagara bureau. here are some of its "lesser" activities: taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the county and completing the job in one week. effecting an interchange of livestock and seed. distributing bushels of seed corn among farmers, twenty-two tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering bees. indorsing applications for military furloughs. assisting in organizing liberty loan campaigns, especially the third. assisting in the delivery of twenty carloads of feed, fertilizer, farm machinery and barrels, which had been delayed. holding twelve demonstration meetings, attended by farmers. conducting two tractor schools, attended by farmers. arranging eight farmers' institutes, attended by farmers. organizing a federal farm loan association which has loaned $ , to nineteen farmers. the bureau keeps its members posted on what is going on in the county and what the bureau is doing through the medium of a well-edited monthly "news" of eight pages. the best feature of the handling of this publication is that it costs neither bureau nor members a cent. the advertisements from local supply dealers pay for it, and two pages of ads in each issue settles the bill. the bureau's books show that last year it spent five dollars in serving each member. the membership fee is only one dollar. the difference comes from federal, state and county appropriations. the success of this bureau comes from having at the head of it the right man with the right view of what a farm bureau should do. manager peet sees to it that the organization works with the local chamber of commerce--the one in lockport has members--which antedates the farm bureau and which always has supported the bureau. peet's policy has been to keep the bureau not only before the farmers but before the city people as well. the "live-wire" committee of the lockport chamber, composed of lawyers, doctors, bankers, merchants, and the like, has made manager peet an _ex-officio_ member. the niagara falls and tonawanda chambers of commerce get together with the lockport chamber and the farm bureau and talk over problems of inter-county importance. these conferences have worked out a unified plan for road development, for instance. the niagara farm bureau helped the niagara falls city administration to secure the services of a federal market inspector. in this way all rivalry between different sections and towns in niagara county is freed of friction. about the only criticism i heard against the farm bureau of niagara county was that peet was the wrong man. the farmers want a man who will _stay_ manager. but some of the best members hinted that peet will not stay because he's just a bit too efficient. they seem to fear that some business corporation is going to get him away. and when you look over the record of his work as organizer and executive, you must admit there's something in this. * * * * * _(detroit news)_ four half-tone illustrations: . the settling basin at the water works. . interior of the tunnel through which the water is pumped. . where detroit's water comes from. . water rushing into the settling basin. guarding a city's water supply how the city chemist watches for the appearance of deadly bacilli; water made pure by chemicals by henry j. richmond "colon." the city chemist spoke the one significant word as he set down the test tube into which he had been gazing intently. the next morning the front page of all the city papers displayed the warning, "citizens should boil the drinking water." every morning, as the first task of the day, the city chemist uncorks a curious little crooked tube containing a few spoonsful of very ordinary bouillon, akin to that which you might grab at the quick lunch, but which has been treated by the admixture of a chemical. this tube begins in a bulb which holds the fluid and terminates in an upturned crook sealed at the end. into this interesting little piece of apparatus, the chemist pours a small quantity of the city drinking water, and he then puts the whole into an incubator where it is kept at a temperature favorable to the reactions which are expected if the water is contaminated. after a sufficient time the tube is inspected. to the untrained eye nothing appears. the bouillon still remains in the little bulb apparently unchanged. its color and clearness have not been affected. but the chemist notices that it does not stand so high in the closed end of the tube as it did when placed in the incubator. the observation seems trivial, but to the man of science it is significant. what has happened? the water contained some minute organisms which when acted upon by the chemical in the tube have set up a fermentation. gradually, one by one in the little bulb, bubbles of gas have formed and risen to the surface of the liquid in the closed upper end of the tube. as this gas was liberated, it took the place of the liquid in the tube, and the liquid was forced downward until there was quite a large space, apparently vacant but really filled with gas. it was this phenomenon that had attracted the attention of the chemist. what did it mean? it was the evidence that the water which was being furnished to the city for half a million people to drink contained some living organism. now that, in itself, was enough to make an official of the health department begin to take an interest. it was not, however, in itself a danger signal. not all bacterial life is a menace to health, the chemist will tell you. indeed, humanity has come to live on very peaceable terms with several thousand varieties of bacteria and to be really at enmity with but a score or more. without the beneficent work of a certain class of bacteria the world would not be habitable. this comes about through a very interesting, though rather repulsive condition--the necessity of getting rid of the dead to make room for the living. what would be the result if no provision had been made for the disintegration of the bodies of all the men and animals that have inhabited the earth since the beginning? such a situation is inconceivable. but very wisely providence has provided that myriads and myriads of tiny creatures are ever at work breaking up worn-out and dead animal matter and reducing it to its original elements. these elements are taken up by plant life, elaborated into living vegetable growth and made fit again for the nourishment of animal life, thus completing the marvelous cycle. and so we must not get the notion that all bacteria are our mortal foes. we could not live without them, and our earth, without their humble services, would no longer be habitable. neither need we fear the presence of bacterial life in our drinking water. drinking water always contains bacteria. we, ourselves, even when in the best of health, are the hosts of millions upon millions of them, and it is fair to suppose that they serve some useful purpose. at any rate, it has never been demonstrated that they do us any harm under normal conditions. and so, the chemist was not alarmed when he discovered that the formation of gas in his crooked tube gave indication of bacteria in the drinking water. he must ascertain what type of bacteria he had entrapped. to this end, he analyzed the gas, and when he determined that the fermentation was due to the presence of colon bacilli in the water, he sent out his warning. not that the colon bacilli are a menace to health. the body of every human being in the world is infested with millions of them. but the presence of colon bacilli in drinking water is an indication of the presence of a really dangerous thing--sewage. thus, when the city chemist turned from his test tube with the exclamation, "colon!" he did not fear the thing that he saw, but the thing that he knew might accompany it. there has been much discussion of late of the possibility that the great lakes cities may suffer a water famine. the rapid increase of population along the borders of these great seas, it has been said, might render the water unfit for use. this fear is based upon the assumption that we shall always continue the present very foolish practice of dumping our sewage into the source of our water supply. the time may come when we shall know better how to protect the public health and at the same time husband the public resources. but even at that, the city chemist says that he hardly expects to see the time when the present intake for water near the head of belle isle will not be both safe and adequate. no doubt he makes this statement because he has confidence that the purification of water is both simple and safe. there are two principal methods. the first, and most expensive, is nature's own--the filter. the application of this method is comparatively simple though it involves considerable expense. the trick was learned from the hillside spring which, welling up through strata of sand and gravel, comes out pure and clear and sparkling. to make spring water out of lake water, therefore, it is merely necessary to excavate a considerable area to the desired depth and lead into it the pipes connected with the wells from which water is to be pumped. then the pit is filled with successive layers of crushed stone graduated in fineness to the size of gravel and then covered with a deep layer of fine sand. this area is then flooded with the water to be filtered, which slowly percolates and comes out clear and pure. the best results in purification of contaminated water supplies have probably been attained in this way; that is, as measured by the improvement of health and the general reduction of the death rate from those diseases caused by the use of contaminated water. but when the alarm was given this spring by the city chemist there was no time to excavate and build an extensive filtering plant. the dreaded typhoid was already making its appearance and babies were dying. something had to be done at once. if some afternoon you take a stroll through gladwin park your attention may be attracted to a little white building at the lower end of the settling basin. it is merely a temporary structure yet it is serving a very important purpose. approach the open door and your nostrils will be greeted by a pungent odor that may make you catch your breath. the workmen, too, you will notice, do not stay long within doors, but take refuge in a little shelter booth outside. strewn about here and there are traces of a white, powdery substance which seems to have been tracked down from a platform erected on the roof. this is hypochlorite of lime, the substance used for sterilizing the city drinking water. this is so powerful a disinfectant that it destroys all bacteria in water even in an extremely dilute solution. the method of applying it is interesting. the city water comes in from the river through a great tunnel about feet in diameter. the little chlorinating plant is situated on the line of this tunnel so that the solution is readily introduced into the water before it reaches the pool called a settling basin. the hypochlorite reaches the plant in iron cylinders containing pounds. these are carried up to the roof and poured into the first mixing tank through a hopper fixed for the purpose. there are within the building four of these mixing tanks. in the first, up near the roof, a very strong solution is first made. this is drawn off into a second tank with a greater admixture of water and thence passes into the third and fourth. from the last it is forced out into the main tunnel by a pipe and mingles with the great flood that is pouring constantly into the wells beneath pumping engines. and this is the strength of the chemical: five pounds of it mingled with one million gallons of water is sufficient to render the water fit for drinking purposes. nearly per cent of the bacteria in the water is destroyed by this weak solution. the water is tasteless and odorless. indeed, probably very few of the citizens of detroit who are using the city water all the time, know that the treatment is being applied. but the chemist continues his tests every morning. every morning the little crooked tubes are brought out and filled and carefully watched to ascertain if the telltale gas develops which is an index of "death in the cup." thus is the city's water supply guarded. no more important work can devolve on the board of health. before science had learned to recognize the tiny enemies which infest drinking water, typhoid and kindred diseases were regarded as a visitation of divine providence for the sins of a people. we now know that a rise in the death rate from these diseases is to be laid rather to the sins of omission on the part of the board of health and the public works department. * * * * * _(the outlook)_ the occupation and exercise cure by frank marshall white the nerve specialist leaned back in his chair behind the great mahogany desk in his consulting-room and studied the features of the capitalist as that important factor in commerce and industry explained the symptoms that had become alarming enough to drive him, against his will, to seek medical assistance. the patient was under fifty years of age, though the deep lines in his face, with his whitening hair--consequences of the assiduity with which he had devoted himself to the accumulation of his millions and his position in the directory of directors--made him appear ten years older. an examination had shown that he had no organic disease of any kind, but he told the physician that he was suffering from what he called "inward trembling," with palpitation of the heart, poor sleep, occasional dizziness, pain in the back of the neck, difficulty in concentrating his attention, and, most of all, from various apprehensions, such as that of being about to fall, of losing his mind, of sudden death--he was afraid to be alone, and was continually tired, worried, and harassed. "you present merely the ordinary signs of neurasthenia," said the specialist. "these symptoms are distressing, but not at all serious or dangerous. you have been thinking a great deal too much about yourself and your feelings. you watch with morbid interest the perverted sensations that arise in various parts of your body. you grow apprehensive about the palpitation of your heart, which is not at all diseased, but which flutters a little from time to time because the great nerve of the heart is tired, like the other great nerves and nerve-centers of your body. you grow apprehensive over the analogous tremor which you describe as 'inward trembling,' and which you often feel all through your trunk and sometimes in your knees, hands, and face, particularly about the eyes and mouth and in the fingers." the capitalist had started at the mention of the word neurasthenia, and had seemed much relieved when the physician had declared that the symptoms were not dangerous. "i had been under the impression that neurasthenia was practically an incurable disease," he said. "however, you have described my sensations exactly." "one hundred per centum of cases of neurasthenia are curable," responded the specialist. "neurasthenia is not, as is usually supposed, an equally diffused general exhaustion of the nervous system. in my opinion, it is rather an unequally distributed multiple fatigue. certain more vulnerable portions of the nervous system are affected, while the remainder is normal. in the brain we have an overworked area which, irritated, gives rise to an apprehension or imperative idea. by concentration of energy in some other region of the brain, by using the normal portions, we give this affected part an opportunity to rest and recuperate. new occupations are therefore substituted for the old habitual one. a change of interests gives the tired centers rest." "i have heard the 'rest cure' advocated in cases like mine," suggested the capitalist. "in the treatment of neurasthenia we must take the whole man into consideration," said the physician. "we must stimulate nutrition, feed well the tired and exhausted organism, and, above all, provide some sort of rest and distraction for the mind. the mind needs feeding as well as the body. the rest cure is a kind of passive, relaxing, sedative treatment. the field is allowed to lie fallow, and often to grow up with weeds, trusting to time to rest and enrich it. the 'exercise and occupation cure,' on the other hand, is an active, stimulating, and tonic prescription. you place yourself in the hands of a physician who must direct the treatment. he will lay out a scheme with a judicious admixture of exercise which will improve your general health, soothe your nervous system, induce good appetite and sleep, and of occupation which will keep your mind from morbid self-contemplation. one of the best means to this end is manual occupation--drawing, designing, carpentry, metal-work, leather-work, weaving, basket-making, bookbinding, clay-modeling, and the like--for in all these things the hands are kept busy, requiring concentration of attention, while new interests of an artistic and æsthetic nature are aroused. the outdoor exercise, taken for a part of each day, if of the right sort, also distracts by taking the attention and creating interest." the capitalist had called upon the specialist braced for a possible sentence of death, prepared at the least to be informed that he was suffering from a progressive mental malady. now, while a tremendous weight was lifted from his mind with the information that he might anticipate a complete return to health, the idea of devoting his trained intelligence, accustomed to cope with great problems of trade and finance, to such trivialities as basket-making or modeling in clay appeared preposterous. nevertheless, when the physician told him of a resort near at hand, established for the treatment of cases just such as his, where he might be under continuous medical supervision, without confinement indoors or being deprived of any of the comforts or luxuries of life, he decided to put himself in the other's hands unreservedly. the specialist informed him that the length of time required for his cure would depend largely upon himself. he might, for instance, even keep in touch with his office and have matters of import referred to him while he was recuperating his mental and physical strength, but such a course would inevitably retard his recovery, and possibly prevent it. to get the best results from the treatment he ought to leave every business interest behind him, he was told. the fee that the capitalist paid the specialist made his advice so valuable that the other followed it absolutely. the next evening saw the patient in the home of the "occupation and exercise cure." he arrived just in time to sit down to dinner with a score of other patients, not one of whom showed any outward sign of illness, though all were taking the cure for some form of nervous trouble. there were no cases of insanity among them, however, none being admitted to the institution under any circumstances. the dinner was simple and abundant, and the conversation at the tables of a lively and cheerful nature. as everybody went to bed by ten o'clock--almost every one considerably before that hour, in fact--the newcomer did likewise, he having secured a suite with a bath in the main building. somewhat to the surprise of the capitalist, who was accustomed to be made much of wherever he happened to be, no more attention was paid to him than to any other guest of the establishment, a condition of affairs that happened to please him. he was told on retiring that breakfast would be served in the dining-room from : to : in the morning, but that, if he preferred to remain in his room, it would be brought to him there at nine o'clock. the capitalist had a bad night, and was up to breakfast early. after he had concluded that repast the medical superintendent showed him about the place, but did not encourage him to talk about his symptoms. the grounds of the "occupation and exercise cure" comprised a farm of forty acres located among the hills of northern westchester county in the croton watershed, with large shade trees, lawns, flower gardens, and an inexhaustible supply of pure spring water from a well three hundred feet deep in solid rock. the main building, situated on a knoll adjacent to a grove of evergreen trees, contained a great solarium, which was the favorite sitting-room of the patients, and the dining-room was also finished with two sides of glass, both apartments capable of being thrown open in warm weather, and having the advantage of all the sun there was in winter. in this building were also the medical offices, with a clinical laboratory and hydro- and electro-therapeutic equipment, and accommodations for from twelve to fifteen guests. two bungalows under the trees of the apple orchard close at hand, one containing two separate suites with baths, and the other two living-rooms with hall and bath-room, were ideal places for quiet and repose. situated at the entrance to the grounds was a club-house, with a big sitting-room and an open fireplace; it also contained a solarium, billiard-room, bowling alleys, a squash court, a greenhouse for winter floriculture, and the arts and crafts shops, with seven living-rooms. every living-room in the main building, the club-house, and the bungalows was connected with the medical office by telephone, so that in case of need patients might immediately secure the services of a physician at any hour of the day or night. the arts and crafts shops being the basic principle of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist was introduced to an efficient and businesslike young woman, the instructress, who explained to him the nature of the avocations in which he might choose to interest himself. here he found his fellow-patients busily and apparently congenially employed. in one of the shops a recent alumnus of one of the leading universities, who had undergone a nervous breakdown after graduation, was patiently hammering a sheet of brass with a view to converting it into a lampshade; a matron of nearly sixty, who had previously spent eight years in sanatoriums, practically bedridden, was setting type in the printing office with greater activity than she had known before for two decades; two girls, one sixteen and the other twelve, the latter inclined to hysteria and the former once subject to acute nervous attacks, taking the cure in charge of trained nurses, were chattering gayly over a loom in the construction of a silk rug; a prominent business man from a western city, like the new york capitalist broken down from overwork, was earnestly modeling in clay what he hoped might eventually become a jardiniere; one of last season's debutantes among the fashionables, who had been leading a life of too strenuous gayety that had told on her nerves, was constructing a stamped leather portfolio with entire absorption; and half a dozen others, mostly young women, were engaged at wood-carving, bookbinding, block-printing, tapestry weaving, or basket-making, each one of them under treatment for some nervous derangement. the new patient decided to try his hand at basket-making; and, although he figured out that it would take him about four days to turn out a product that might sell for ten cents, he was soon so much interested in mastering the manual details of the craft that he was disinclined to put the work aside when the medical superintendent suggested a horseback ride. when, at the advice of the specialist, the capitalist had decided to try the occupation and exercise cure, he did so with little faith that it would restore him to health, though he felt that there was perhaps a slight chance that it might help him. the remedy seemed to him too simple to overcome a disease that was paralyzing his energies. to his great surprise, he began to improve at once; and though for the first week he got little sleep, and his dizziness, with the pain in the back of his neck and his apprehensions, continued to recur for weeks, they did so at always increasing intervals. he learned bookbinding, and sent to his library for some favorite volumes, and put them into new dress; he made elaborate waste-paper baskets, and beat brass into ornamental desk-trays, which he proudly presented to his friends in the city as specimens of his skill. work with him, as with the others of the patients, was continually varied by recreation. in the summer months there were lawn-tennis, golf, croquet, canoeing, rowing, fishing, riding, and driving. in winter, such outdoor sports as skating, tobogganing, coasting, skeeing, snowshoeing, and lacrosse were varied by billiards, bowling, squash, the medicine ball, and basket and tether ball. the capitalist was astonished to discover that he could take an interest in games. the specialist, who called upon his patient at intervals, told him that a point of great importance in the cure was that exercise that is _enjoyed_ is almost twice as effective in the good accomplished as exercise which is a mere mechanical routine of movements made as a matter of duty. the net result was that, after four months of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist returned to new york sound in mind and body, and feeling younger than he had before in years. complete cures were effected in the cases of the other patients also, which is the less remarkable when the circumstance is taken into consideration that only patients capable of entire recovery are recommended to take the treatment. of course the institution that has been described is only for the well-to-do, and physicians are endeavoring to bring the "occupation and exercise cure" within the reach of the poor, and to interest philanthropists in the establishment of "colony sanatoriums," such as already exist in different parts of europe, for those suffering from functional nervous disorders who are without means. contrary to the general opinion, neurasthenia, particularly among women, is not confined to the moneyed and leisure class; but, owing to the fact that women have taken up the work of men in offices and trades as well as in many of the professions, working-women are continually breaking down under nervous strain, and many, under present conditions, have little chance for recovery, because they cannot afford the proper treatment. as a speaker at the last annual meeting of the american medical association declared, "idiots and epileptics and lunatics are many; but all together they are less numerous than the victims of nervousness--the people afflicted with lesser grades of psychasthenic and neurasthenic inadequacy, who become devoted epicures of their own emotions, and who claim a large share of the attention of every general practitioner and of every specialist." scientists declare that this premature collapse of nerve force is increasing to such an extent as to become a positive menace to the general welfare. the struggle for existence among the conditions of modern life, especially among those found in the large centers of industrial and scientific activity, and the steady, persistent work, with its attendant sorrows, deprivations, and over-anxiety for success, are among the most prolific causes--causes which are the results of conditions from which, for the large mass of people, according to a leading new york alienist, there has been no possibility of escape. "especially here in america are people forced into surroundings for which they have never been fitted," the alienist asserts, "and especially here are premature demands made upon their nervous systems before they are mature and properly qualified. the lack of proper training deprives many of the workers, in all branches, of the best protection against functional nervous diseases which any person can have, namely, a well-trained nervous system. this struggle for existence by the congenital neuropath or the educationally unfit forces many to the use, and then to the abuse, of stimulants and excitants, and herein we have another important exciting cause. this early and excessive use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco is especially deleterious in its action upon the nervous system of those very ones who are most prone to go to excess in their use. "therefore, predisposition, aided by the storm and stress of active competition and abetted by the use of stimulants, must be looked upon as the main cause for the premature collapse of nerve force which we call neurasthenia; so it will be found that the majority of neurasthenics are between twenty-five and fifty years of age, and that their occupations are those which are attended by worry, undue excitement, uncertainty, excessive wear and tear, and thus we find mentally active persons more easily affected than those whose occupation is solely physical. authors, actors, school-teachers, governesses, telegraph and telephone operators, are among those most frequently affected, and the increase of neurasthenia among women dates from the modern era which has opened to them new channels of work and has admitted them more generally into the so-called learned professions. but whatever may be the occupation in which persons have broken down, it is never the occupation alone which has been the cause. "this cannot be too often repeated. the emotional fitness or unfitness of an individual for his occupation is of the utmost importance as a causative factor, and overwork alone, without any emotional cause and without any errors in mode of life, will never act to produce such a collapse. it is therefore not astonishing that this class of functional nervous diseases is not confined to the wealthy, and that the rich and the poor are indiscriminately affected. but certain causes are of greater influence in the one class, while different ones obtain in the other. poverty in itself, with its limitations of proper rest and recuperation, is a very positive cause. years of neurological dispensary work among the poor have convinced me that nervousness, neurasthenia, hysteria, etc., are quite as prevalent among the indigent as among the well-to-do." physicians agree that the prime requisite in the treatment of these disorders is the removal of the patient from his or her habitual surroundings, where recognition of the existence of actual disease is generally wanting, where the constant admonitions of well-meaning friends to "brace up" and to "exert your will power" force the sick man or woman to bodily and mental over-exertion, and where the worries about a livelihood are always dominant. such a change alone, however, the experts say, will help but few, for it is being recognized more and more that these functional diseases of the nervous system can receive satisfactory treatment only in institutions, where constant attention may be had, with expert supervision and trained attendants. the "occupation and exercise cure" is applicable also to epilepsy, and is the therapeutic principle of the craig colony for epileptics at sonyea, in livingston county, supported by the state, and that institution furnishes a general model for the "colony sanatoriums" suggested for indigent patients suffering from functional nervous disorders. the craig colony was the idea of dr. frederick peterson, professor of psychiatry at columbia university, and former president of the new york state commission of lunacy and of the new york neurological society, which he based upon the epileptic colony at beilefeld, germany, that was founded in . the craig colony was founded in , and there are now being cared for within its confines more than thirteen hundred patients, who have turned out this year agricultural products, with bricks, soap, and brooms, to the value of $ , . the colony is named after the late oscar craig, of rochester, who, with william p. letchworth, of buffalo, purchased the two-thousand-acre tract of land on which it is situated from the shaker colony at sonyea and presented it to the state, dr. peterson devoting several months of each year for nine years to getting the institution into working order. the first patients were housed in the old shaker buildings, which were well constructed and fairly well arranged for the purpose, but as additional applications for admission have been made new buildings have been erected. to-day there are eighty buildings in the colony, but a thousand patients are waiting for admission, eight hundred of whom are in new york city. epilepsy, the "falling sickness," is a most difficult malady to treat even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat it anywhere else. an epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable burden to its other members, as well as to himself. the temperamental effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with having injured them while they have been unconscious during an attack. then, too, living at home, they are often dangerous to younger members of a family, and they are fault-finding, exacting, and irritable generally. the seizures frequently come on without warning, and the patient drops where he stands, often injuring himself severely. the last annual report of the craig colony records more than four hundred injuries within the year to patients during seizures which required a surgeon's attention, the injuries varying from severe bruises to fractures of the skull. the object of the craig colony is to remove the burden of the epileptic in the family from the home without subjecting the patient to the hardship of confinement with the insane. "very few epileptics suffer permanent insanity in any form except dementia," says the medical superintendent of the colony. "acute mania and maniac depressive insanity not infrequently appear as a 'post-convulsive' condition, that generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days. rarely the state may persist a month. melancholia is extremely infrequent. delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing, systematized in character, are almost never encountered in epilepsy." only from six to fifteen per cent of epileptics are curable, and hence the work of the craig colony is largely palliative of the sufferings of the patients. each individual case is studied with the utmost care, however, and patients are given their choice of available occupations. the colony is not a custodial institution. there are no bars on the windows, no walls or high fences about the farm. the patients are housed in cottages, men and women in separate buildings some distance apart, about thirty to each cottage. in charge of each of these families are a man and his wife, who utilize the services of some of the patients in the performance of household work, while the others have their duties outside. kindness to the unfortunates under their care is impressed upon every employee of the colony, and an iron-bound rule forbids them to strike a patient even in case of assault. besides the agricultural work in the craig colony, and that in the soap and broom factories and the brick-yard, the patients are taught blacksmithing, carpentry, dressmaking, tailoring, painting, plumbing, shoemaking, laundrying, and sloyd work. it is insisted on that all patients physically capable shall find employment as a therapeutic measure. the records show that on sundays and holidays and on rainy days, when there is a minimum of physical activity among the patients, their seizures double and sometimes treble in number. few of the patients know how to perform any kind of labor when they enter the colony, but many of them learn rapidly. it has been repeatedly demonstrated that boys from eighteen to twenty years of age can spend two years in the sloyd shop and leave it fully qualified as cabinet-makers, and capable of earning a journeyman's wages. there are about two hundred children in the colony of epileptics at sonyea, more than half of whom are girls. as children subject to epileptic seizures are not received in the public schools of the state, the only opportunity for any education among these afflicted little ones whose parents are unable to teach them themselves or provide private tutors for them is in the schools of the colony. some of the children are comparatively bright scholars, while the attempt to teach others seems a hopeless task. for instance, it took one girl ninety days to learn to lay three sticks in the form of a letter a. every effort is made to encourage recreation among the patients in the craig colony, both children and adults. the men have a club of members, with billiards, chess, checkers, cards, and magazines and newspapers. the boys have their baseball and football, and play match games among themselves or with visiting teams. the women and girls play croquet, tennis, and other outdoor games. there is a band composed of patients that gives a concert once a week, and there are theatricals and dancing, with occasional lectures by visiting celebrities. as the colony, with the medical staff, nurses, and other employees, has a population of , , there is always an audience for any visiting attraction. the maintenance of the colony is costing the state $ , the present year. since the founding of the craig colony similar institutions have been established in massachusetts, texas, michigan, ohio, new jersey, pennsylvania, illinois, and kansas, and other states are preparing to follow their example. there are other private sanatoriums throughout the country similar to the one in westchester county, where the nervous or neurasthenic patient who is well-to-do may obtain relaxation and supervision, but there is no place at all to-day where the man or woman suffering from curable nervous disorders who is without means can go for treatment. * * * * * _(mcclure's magazine)_ five illustrations: two wash drawings by andré castaigne showing mono-rail trains in the future, five half-tone reproductions of photographs of the car on its trial trip, and one pen-and-ink diagram of the gyroscopes. the brennan mono-rail car by perceval gibbon it was november , --a day that will surely have its place in history beside that other day, eighty-five years ago, when george stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between stockton and darlington. in the great square of the brennan torpedo factory at gillingham, where the fighting-tops of battleships in the adjacent dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. switches linked it up with other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the stone and iron factory sheds. the strange thing about it was that it was single--just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable "made" ground of the place. and there was brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from the nore, his voice plaintive and irish, discoursing, at slow length, of revolutions per minute, of "precession," and the like. the journalists from london, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and shivered in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an epoch in the history of transportation and civilization, till-- "now, gentlemen," said brennan, and led the way across the circle of track. and then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds, there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before. it was painted the businesslike slatyblue gray of the war department. it was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving machine-parts. it ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one behind another; and it traveled with the level, flexible equilibrium of a ship moving across a dock. it swung over the sharp curves without faltering, crossed the switch, and floated--floated is the only word for the serene and equable quality of its movement--round and round the quarter-mile circle. a workman boarded it as it passed him, and sat on the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. it was wonderful beyond words to see. it seemed to abolish the very principle of gravitation; it contradicted calmly one's most familiar instincts. every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious machine at its work--a sense of being in the presence of a living and conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the dexterity, of a man. there was a moment, while watching brennan's car, when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality in the makeshift track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly suggestive of consciousness. it was an illustration of that troublous theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the co-relation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere. the car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and halted to take us aboard. there were about forty of us, yet it took up our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. the young engineer threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. the movement was as "sweet" and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a car running on a double track. we passed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. men on lighters and a working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine with its load. then back again, three times round the circle, and in and out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait. as we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against the centrifugal pull. she needs no banking of the track to keep her on the rail. a line of rails to travel on, and ground that will carry her weight--she asks no more. with these and a clear road ahead, she is to abolish distance and revise the world's schedules of time. "a hundred and twenty miles an hour," i hear brennan saying, in that sad voice of his; "or maybe two hundred. that's a detail." in the back of the cab were broad unglazed windows, through which one could watch the tangle of machinery. dynamos are bolted to the floor, purring under their shields like comfortable cats; abaft of them a twenty-horse-power wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for everything. and above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of the machine. to them she owes her equilibrium. of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. but a wheel revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. it is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally. the apparatus that holds brennan's car upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. it is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to the minute. now, the effect of gyroscopic action is to resist any impulse that tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves. this resistance can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly in the beautiful little gyroscopes of brass and steel that are sold for the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies. such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising resistance. this resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and the speed at which it moves, till, with brennan's gyroscopes of three quarters of a ton each, whirling in a vacuum at three thousand revolutions per minute, it would need a weight that would crush the car into the ground to throw them from their upright plane. readers of mcclure's magazine were made familiar with the working of brennan's gyroscope by mr. cleveland moffett's article in the issue of december, . the occasion of that article was the exhibition of brennan's model mono-rail car before the royal society and in the grounds of his residence at gillingham. for a clear understanding of the first full-sized car, it may be well to recapitulate a few of the characteristics of the gyroscope. when brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars would remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track at the first curve. the gyroscope governed their direction as well as their equilibrium. it was the first check in the evolution of the perfect machine. it was over ten years before he found the answer to the problem--ten years of making experimental machines and scrapping them, of filing useless patents, of doubt and persistence. but the answer was found--in the spinning top. a spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal friction. brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a top. he enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at each side of the car he built stout brackets reaching forth a few inches below each end of the axle. the result is not difficult to deduce. when the car came to a curve, the centrifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that was on the inside of the curve swung up and the bracket touched the axle of the gyroscope. forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket; all the weight of it and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side of the car, holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. the thing was done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. it only remained to fit a double gyroscope, with the wheels revolving in opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail car was evolved. through the window in the back of the cab i was able to watch them at then; work--not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved here and there. above them were the glass oilcups, with the opal-green engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. lubrication is a vital part of the machine. let that fail, and the axles, grinding and red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife goes through butter. it is a thing that has been foreseen by the inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that would instantly warn the engineer. "but," says brennan, "if one broke down, the other gyroscope would hold her up--till ye could run her to a siding, anyway." "but supposing the electric apparatus failed?" suggests a reporter--with visions of headlines, perhaps. "supposing the motor driving the gyroscopes broke down; what then?" "they'd run for a couple of days, with the momentum they've got," answers the inventor. "and for two or three hours, that 'ud keep her upright by itself." on the short track at gillingham there are no gradients to show what the car can do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is positive. she will run up a slope as steep as one in six, he says. there is no reason to doubt him; the five-foot model that he used to exhibit could climb much steeper inclines, run along a rope stretched six feet above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to and fro. it would do all these things while carrying a man; and, for my part, i am willing to take brennan's word. louis brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. he has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had george stephenson. he is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. he is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his irish voice. there is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five. as a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet. the technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately. all his life he has been concerned with machines. he is the inventor of the brennan steerable torpedo, whose adoption by the admiralty made him rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that went to the making of the mono-rail car. he has a touch of the rich man's complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humor and his single-hearted pride in his life work. it is characteristic, i think, of his honesty of purpose and of the genius that is his driving force that hitherto he has concerned himself with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial aspects of his contrivance. he has had help in money and men from the british government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his disposal; and the governments of india and--of all places--kashmir have granted him subsidies. railroad men from all parts of the world have seen his model; but he has not been ardent in the hunt for customers. perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail car should be its own salesman; but, in the meantime, it is not amiss that a great inventor should stand aloof from commerce. but, for all the cheerful matter-of-factness of the man, he, too, has seen visions. there are times when he talks of the future as he hopes it will be, as he means it to be, when "transportation is civilization." men are to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents at two hundred miles an hour--from new york to san francisco between dawn and dawn. travel will no longer be uncomfortable. these cars, equipped like a hotel, will sweep along with the motion of an ice-yacht. they will not jolt over uneven places, or strain to mount the track at curves; in each one, the weariless gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium. trustful kashmir will advance from its remoteness to a place accessible from anywhere. streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush with the ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires. automobiles will run on two wheels like a bicycle. it is to be a mono-rail world, soothed and assured by the drone of gyroscopes. by that time the patient ingenuity of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run the gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it feasible to use a smaller wheel. it is a dream based on good, solid reasoning, backed by a great inventor's careful calculations; h.g. wells has given a picture of it in the last of his stories of the future. practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently warm welcome. they have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern rhodesia, and on through central africa to its terminus at cairo. just such land as this helped to inspire brennan. he was a boy when he first saw the endless plains of australia, and out of that experience grew his first speculations about the future of railway travel. such lands make positive and clear demands, if ever they are to be exploited for their full value to humanity. they need railways quickly laid and cheaply constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and gradients; and, finally, fast travel. it is not difficult to see how valuable the mono-rail would have been in such an emergency as the last sudan war, when the army dragged a line of railway with it down toward omdurman. petrol-driven cars to replace the expensive steam locomotives, easy rapid transit instead of the laborious crawl through the stifling desert heat--a complete railway installation, swiftly and cheaply called into being, instead of a costly and cumbersome makeshift. the car went back to her garage, or engine-shed, or stable, or whatever the railway man of the future shall decide to call it. struts were pulled into position to hold her up, the motors were switched off, and the gyroscopes were left to run themselves down in forty-eight hours or so. when the mono-rail comes into general use, explained brennan, there will be docks for the cars, with low brick walls built to slide under the platforms and take their weight. while his guests assembled in a store-shed to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, he produced a big flat book, sumptuously bound, and told us how his patents were being infringed on in germany. on that same day there was an exhibition of a mono-rail car on the brennan principle taking place at the zoölogical gardens in berlin; the book was its catalogue. it was full of imaginative pictures of trains fifty years hence, and thereto was appended sanguine letter-press. while there sounded in our ears the hum of the gyroscopes from the car housed in the rear, i translated one paragraph for him. it was to the effect that one brennan, an englishman, had conducted experiments with gyroscopes ten years ago, but the matter had gone no further. "there, now," said brennan. * * * * * (_everybody's magazine_) a new political wedge the way st. louis women drove a nine-hour day into the law by inis h. weed it was the evening before the state primaries--a sweltering first of august night in the tenement district of st. louis, where the factory people eat their suppers and have their beds. men in shirt-sleeves and women with babies sat on the steps for a breath of air, and the streets were a noisy welter of children. two of the most enthusiastic girls in the women's trade union league stopped before the group silhouetted in the gaslight at no. and handed the men in the group this card: republican voters ----------------- it is the women and children that are the victims of manufacturers and manufacturers associations and it is the working woman and child that demands your protection at the primaries, tuesday, august nd scratch ------- e.j. troy secretary st. louis manufacturers association and run by them on the republican ticket for the legislature in the st district comprising wards , , , , and . precincts of the th ward. precincts , , of the rd ward. precincts , of the th ward. precincts , , , , , of the th ward. precincts , , of the th ward "so yez would be afther havin' me scratch misther troy?" mike ryan ran his fingers through his stubby crop with a puzzled air. "oi'm always fur plazin' the loidies, but misther troy, he's a frind o' mine. shure, he shmokes a grand cigar, an' he shakes yer hand that hearty." so mike belonged to the long, long glad-hand line. well, _personal_ arguments were necessary in his case then. that was the way the girls sized up mike ryan. "but this ticket has something to do with your oldest girl." "with briddie?" "it sure does, mr. ryan. didn't i hear your wife tellin' what with the hard times an' all, you'd be puttin' briddie in the mill this winter as soon as ever she's turned fourteen? wouldn't you rather they worked her nine hours a day instead o' ten--such a soft little kid with such a lot o' growin' to do? there's a lot of us goin' to fight for a nine-hour bill for the women and children this winter, an' do you think a manufacturers' representative, like troy, is goin' to help us? look at his record! see how he's fought the employees' interests in the legislature! that's a part of his job! _he_ won't vote for no nine-hour bill!" and the two girls went on to the next tenement. they were only two of the hundreds of trade union girls who were "doing" the first electoral district (about one-third of st. louis) on the eve of the primaries. they were thorough. they had the whole district organized on the block system, and they went over each block house by house. _a new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women to secure justice through the ballot-box?_ how have st. louis women attained this clear vision that their industrial future is bound up in politics? it is a three years' story. let us go back a little. st. louis is essentially a conservative city. first, it was an old french town; then a southern town; then a german tradesman's town. with such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative. in addition, st. louis was crippled in the war between the states. she lost her market. this made her slow. in the 'eighties, this old french-southern-german city began to recover from the ruin of her southern trade. little by little she took heart, for the great southwest was being settled. there was a new field in which to build up trade. to-day st. louis is _the_ great wholesale and jobbing depot, _the_ manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the southwest. since , great fortunes have been amassed--most of them, indeed, in the past ten years. there has been a rapid growth of industry. the old southern city has become a soft-coal factory center. a pall of smoke hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound. in the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer, carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of traveling salesmen in the southwest territory--and in the south, too, for st. louis is winning back some of her old-time trade. and the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. the men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "yes, st. louis is a grand old business town. solid! no mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. new plants starting every month and the old ones growing. then, when we get our deep waterway, that's going to be another big shove toward prosperity. "nice town to live in, too! look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings. never was anything like our world's fair in the history of men--never! look at our parks, too. when we get 'em linked together with speedways, where'll you find anything prettier?" thus the money-makers in this heavy german town. but what about the employees--the clerks and the factory workers? have they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" have they found it a "nice" town to live in? no, to each count. for the people at the bottom of the ladder--for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter--st. louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than new york city rents. a town whose slums, says lee frankel, are the worst in the country. a town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in new york city); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living. the average wage of the shoe-workers in the east is $ per year. in st. louis it is $ if work is steady--and rents are higher than in new york city. it must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of shoe-workers earn, less than $ , for full-time work. the same is true of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department stores. somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder. the government of missouri and st. louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes. business opportunity has depended much on _pliable state and municipal laws_. how the interests fought to keep them pliable; how st. louis and missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all know. we know, too, the period of political reform. people thought the killing trouble in missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the optimists' faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and referendum as panacea, was white and shining. _they did not see that the underlying problem is industrial_. after the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of beating the game. the only essential difference is that their methods to-day are less raw and crude. they play a more gentlemanly game; but the people are still robbed of their rights. thus it came to pass that when the cheerful optimist went to the cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare. meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own account, not singly but in groups and packs. as yet, although a deal of snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has lacked great organizers in st. louis. it has remained for the working women of st. louis to make the industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to bend the political bow for their protection. the women's trade union league, whose real general is cynthelia isgrig knefler, the most dynamic woman in st. louis, received its first impetus only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young irish girl, hannah hennessy, who died at thanksgiving, , a victim of exhausting work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the working girls of her city. hannah hennessy was sent by the garment workers' union to the national labor convention of at norfolk, virginia. there she glimpsed for the first time the inevitable great world march of women following industry as machinery takes it out of the home and into the shop--saw these women, blind, unorganized, helpless to cope with the conditions offered by organized capital. the vision fired this irish girl to a pitch of enthusiasm peculiar to the celtic temperament. back she came to st. louis with the spirit of the crusaders, her vision "the eight-hour day, the living wage to guard the home." for the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the company furnishes medical attendance free. to undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of st. louis women would require not only vision but time and energy. hannah's return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day. vision she had, but training, time, energy--no! it was at this point that she met cynthelia isgrig knefler, a leisure-class young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the unevenness of the human struggle. cynthelia knefler was groping her way through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary shops. then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin for the great southwest. both women possessed fire and eloquence. hannah's special contribution was first-hand experience; mrs. knefler's the knowledge of economic conditions necessary to an understanding of our complicated labor problems. wise, sane, conservative, mrs. knefler not only helped hannah to organize branch after branch of the women's trade union league in the different industries, but set out at once to train strong, intelligent leaders. she stimulated them to a critical study of labor laws with the evolution of industry for background. night after night for two years mrs. knefler and hannah were out organizing groups of girls. mrs. knefler's friends finally stopped remonstrating with her. hannah, utterly self-forgetful despite ten hours a day in the mills, hurled herself into the new work. evening after evening her mother protested anxiously, but hannah, heedless of her own interest, would eat her supper and hurry across the city to help groups of new girls--american, russian, roumanian--a confused mass, to find themselves and pull together. one june morning in the papers announced that the manufacturers' association and the business men's league had decided on e.j. troy as their candidate to the state legislature for the first district. his candidacy was also backed by the republican machine. the papers went on to say that e.j. troy was one of "our ablest and most popular fellow townsmen," that he had grown up in his district, had a host of friends, and might be expected to carry the primaries by a big majority. that evening at the weekly dinner of the officers of the women's trade union league at the settlement, mrs. knefler hurried in: "girls, have you seen the morning papers? do you know that we've got e.j. troy to contend with again?" at the same moment in dashed hannah hennessy by another door, calling out, "girls, they're goin' to put troy on the carpet again!" to both speeches came half a dozen excited replies that that's just what they were talking about! over the potatoes and meat and bread-pudding the situation was discussed in detail. "yes, 'twas him, all right, that thought up most of those tricky moves when we was tryin' to get our nine-hour bill before," reflected a wiry, quick-motioned girl during a second's pause. "don't it just make you boil," began another, "when you think how he riled 'em up at every four corners in missouri! he had every old country storekeeper standin' on end about that nine-hour bill. he had 'em puttin' on their specs and callin' to mother to come and listen to this information the manufacturers had sent him:--how the labor unions was tryin' to get a nine-hour bill for women passed; how it would keep their youngest girl, bessie, from helping in the store when the farmers drove in of a saturday night; and how it was a blow at american freedom." "e.j. troy's got to be squenched at the primaries," said a third, quietly and decisively. "but how?" asked a more timid officer. bing! mrs. knefler got into action. there never was a woman for whom a difficult situation offered a more bracing tonic quality. the business meeting that followed fairly bristled with plans. the girls' first move was to go before the central labor body and ask them to indorse their objections to e.j. troy. definite action beyond indorsement the girls did not ask or expect. this much they got. one day a little later, when mrs. knefler's campaign was beginning to take form, a representative of e.j. troy called mrs. knefler on the telephone. the voice was bland, smooth, and very friendly. wouldn't she--that is--ah--er--wouldn't her organization confer with mr. e.j. troy? he felt sure they would come to a pleasant and mutually helpful understanding. mrs. knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it would be quite useless; that the stand of the league was taken on mr. troy's previous record and on the "interests" he represented; that while they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public servant they must oppose him. all this in mrs. knefler's suavest fashion. she feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession. that's why she is such a formidable antagonist. it was the last week in june--they had just a month before the primaries in which to rouse public opinion. the newspapers must help, of course. mrs. knefler went to the editors. they were polite, they admitted the justice of her stand, but they were evasive. mrs. knefler opened her paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a single word about the danger to the working woman's interests. what could the papers do? weren't they in the hands of the "big cinch," as a certain combination of business men in st. louis is known? naturally they refused to print a line. you never step on your own toe, do you, or hit yourself in the face--if you can help it? one must admit that things looked bad for the league. how were girls who raced at machines all day, who had neither money nor the voice of the press, to rouse this sluggish, corrupt city to the menace of sending to the legislature men like e.j. troy, pledged body and soul to the manufacturers? how could they waken the public to woman's bitter necessity for shorter hours? the case looked hopeless, but mrs. knefler merely set her teeth, and got busy--decidedly busy. she planned a campaign that no other st. louis woman in her class would have had the courage to tackle. mrs. knefler is a member of the club that is the st. louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." they have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture. as a group their consciousness of the city's industrial problems is still nebulous. the high light in which mrs. knefler's work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few--only a few--rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold plunge in the suffrage pool. in such an atmosphere cynthelia knefler planned and carried out the biggest, the most modern and strategic campaign for the working woman ever waged outside a suffrage state. it was done simply because her heart was filled with the need of the thousands of helpless, unorganized girls for protection from the greed of organized capital. there are moments when love gives vision and raises us head and shoulders above our group. so it was with cynthelia knefler, brought up in this conservative city, educated in a prunes-and-prisms girls' school, steeped in the southern idea that no "lady" would ever let her picture or her opinions get into the newspapers, and that making public speeches was quite unthinkable! the press was silent, but at least mrs. knefler could speak to the labor unions. she and two other women appealed to every labor union in st. louis with a speech against e.j. troy. they fought him--not as a man, but as a representative of the "big interests." mrs. knefler made seventy-six speeches in that one month before the primaries. that meant hurrying from hall to hall on hot summer nights and making two speeches, and sometimes three and four, while her friends were wearing white muslin and sitting on the gallery, to get the cool of the evening. mrs. knefler's mind was working like a trip-hammer that month; seeking ways and means for rousing the busy, unthinking, conglomerate mass of people to the real issue. money in the league was scarce. there are no rich members. but out of their wages and out of raffles and entertainments the league had a small reserve. part of this they used to print sixty thousand cards. so that when you went in to get a shave your glance was caught, as the barber turned your head, by this red ticket "scratch e.j. troy." when you stopped in for a loaf of bread, a red ticket behind the glass of the case advised you to "scratch e.j. troy." when you went in for a drink, there leaped into sight dozens of little red tickets: "scratch e.j. troy." there are always some men, though, who are moved only by the big, noisy things of life. only schneider's band sounds like music to them; only "twenty buckets of blood, or dead man's gulch" appeals to them as literature; and the only speaker is the man who rips out old glory and defies forked lightning. in a political campaign the little red ticket is lost on that kind of man. mrs. knefler understood this. so one hot july day huge posters in high, wood-block letters screamed from billboards and the walls of saloons and barber shops and labor halls: "union men and friends, scratch e.j. troy." all this printing and bill-posting was expensive for working girls. they came back at the central labor body again. "your sympathy is great, but your funds are better," they said. "you've tackled too big a job," the labor leaders told the girls, with a benevolent air. "he's the candy around this town--e.j. troy is. it would take a mint of money to beat e.j. troy." however, the central body instructed the legislative committee of five to give the girls every help, and they did good service. but the central body didn't instruct the committee to go down very far into the treasury. july was wearing on. the league hurled itself upon the press once more. surely after so much speech-making and bill-posting the editors would accord them some recognition merely as news. silence--absolute silence in the next day's papers, and the next. how did they accomplish the next move? that is one of the secrets. their money was gone, the silence of the press had crushed them with an overwhelming sense of helplessness, but nevertheless they turned the trick. they reached the upper and middle class readers of the south side district, troy's district, which the papers were determined to keep as much in ignorance as possible. all one night, silent, swift-moving men whipped the paste across the billboards of that section and slapped on huge posters, so that when papa smith and young mr. jones and banker green came out of their comfortable houses next morning on their way to business, they neglected their papers to find out why they should "scratch e.j. troy." the day of the primaries was almost come. now to reach the dull fellows who hadn't seen the cards and the huge posters, who use their eyes only to avoid obstacles. one night, as the factory whistles blew the signal of dismissal, the men in the lines of operators who filed out of shop and mills found themselves mechanically taking and examining this ticket handed them by league girls, who had gone off their job a bit early and had their wages docked in order to work for the larger good. the committee of the central body was now openly active in their behalf. men as well as women were passing out the tickets. then came the eve of the election. busy pairs of girls who had already done ten hours' work were going over e.j. troy's district, with its sections of rich and poor and well-to-do. throbbing feet that had carried the body's weight ten hot, fatiguing hours hurried up and down the blocks, climbed flight after flight of stairs, and stood at door after door. "say, kid, ain't it the limit that a woman can't vote on her own business?" said one girl too another after they had finished the one hundred and forty-fifth family and tried to explain their stake in the election to a bigoted "head of the house." on the morning of the primaries mrs. schurz, as she took the coffee off the stove, remonstrated with her oldest daughter, minna. "vat, minna, you ain't goin' to stay out of de mill today and lose your pay? "yes, i be, _mutter_," retorted minna, with a tightening of the lips and a light in her eyre. "i'm goin' to the polls to hand out cards to the voters. i'm goin'. i don't care if i lose my job even." "oh, minna, dat is bad, and me wid four _kinder_ to eat de food. where is de _fleisch_ and de _brot_ widout your wages?" mrs. schurz's heavy face wore the anxious despondence so common to the mothers of the poor. the girl hesitated, then tightened her lips once more. "i've got to take the risk, _mutter_. it'll come out right--it's got to. do you want the rest of the children workin' ten hours a day too? look at me! i ain't got no looks any more. i'm too dead tired to go out of a saturday night. i can't give nobody a good time any more. i guess there won't be no weddin' bells for mine--ever. but the kids"--pointing to the inside bedroom, where the younger girls were still asleep--"the kids is a-goin' to keep their looks." so at six o'clock minna joined the relays of working girls who--many of them, like minna, at personal risk and sacrifice--handed out cards all day to each man who entered. thus the men were reminded at the last moment of the working woman's stake in the election. "scratch e.j. troy" was before their eyes as they crossed their tickets. every moment of the day there were alert girls to make this final quiet appeal for justice. they were serious, dignified. there was no jeering, no mirth on the part of the men at the novelty of this campaign--nothing to make any woman self-conscious. the girls were quiet enough outwardly, but the inner drama was keyed high. had all their speech-making, placarding, bill-posting and the canvassing of factories, blocks, and primaries--had all their little savings, their risk and personal sacrifice accomplished anything? that was what the girls asked themselves. the thermometer of their hope rose and fell with the rumors of the day. the fathers of the central labor body patted them on the head benevolently and tried to ease their fall, if they were to fall, by saying that anyway it would be something to make troy run third on his ticket. seven o'clock, and the girls were leaving the primaries in twos and threes, tired but excitedly discussing the situation. between hope and despondency the comment varied on the streets, at the supper-tables, and in the eager, waiting groups of girls on tenement steps and stairs. at last came the authentic returns. e.j. troy ran _ , votes behind his ticket. with a silent press and practically no money, the working women had defeated one of the most popular men in st. louis._ a man pledged to the interests of labor legislation won his place. that made the outlook better for the women's nine-hour bill, and thousands of working girls tumbled into bed, tired, but with new hope. every newspaper in st. louis failed to comment on the victory. the slaves who sit at the editorial desk said they couldn't--they weren't "let." _so the most hopeful feature in st. louis politics has never been commented on by the american press._ as for hannah hennessy--she had been too ill to share in the active work of the campaign, but her influence was everywhere--a vital force, a continual inspiration. week by week her cheeks grew thinner, her cough more rasping. but after the campaign against troy was over, she turned with the same intensity of interest to the national convention of the american federation of labor which was to meet there in november. for a year she had been making plans, eager to make this convention a landmark in the history of women's labor. but in november she was in bed by the little grate fire in the family sitting-room. and when convention week came with its meetings a scant three blocks from her home, she could be there in spirit only; she waited restlessly for the girls to slip in after the daily sessions and live them over again for her. on thanksgiving day, between the exhausting strain of high-tension work and the zeal of the young reformer, her beautiful life and brilliant fire were burned out. the committee for the prevention of tuberculosis added her case to their statistics, and the league girls bore her into the lighted church. in the winter of - the leaders of all the labor and social forces of st. louis, all the organizations for various forms of uplift, united under an able secretary and began their custom of lunching together once a week to discuss the pending social legislation. they played a good game. first, there was the educational effect of their previous legislative campaign to build on. then there was all the economy and impetus gained from consolidation. they knew the rules of the game better, too. their plans were more carefully laid and executed. with a more wary and sophisticated eye on the manufacturers' association and a finger in the buttonhole of every legislator, the socially awake of st. louis have secured _more humane child labor legislation, and the nine-hour day for women and children with no exception in favor of shop-keepers_. knowing the sickening fate of industrial legislation in certain other states when tried before judges whose social vision is fifty years behind the times, the winners of this new bill began to wait tensely enough for its testing. so far, however, the women's nine-hour law has not been contested. it has also been exceptionally well enforced, considering that there are only four factory inspectors for all the myriad shops and mills of this manufacturing city of the southwest, and only seven factory inspectors for the whole state of missouri. meanwhile st. louis's new political wedge, the women's trade union league, continues to be a perfectly good political wedge. when there is legislation wanted, all kinds of organizations invariably call upon this league of the working women, whose purpose is a wider social justice. st. louis is another american city where the working women are discovering that they can do things if they only think so. * * * * * (_the delineator_) illustrated by two pen-and-ink sketches made by a staff artist. the job lady gives the young wage-earner a fair working chance by mary e. titzel the jones school, the oldest public school building in chicago, is at harrison street and plymouth court. when it was new, it was surrounded by "brown-stone fronts," and boys and girls who to-day are among the city's most influential citizens learned their a-b-c's within its walls. now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the "loop" crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house. but in the jones school, the process of making influential citizens is still going on. for there the "job lady" has her office, her sanctum. job lady is a generic term that includes miss anne davis, director of the bureau of vocational supervision, and her four assistants. the bureau--which is the newest department of chicago's school system--is really an employment agency, but one that is different from any other employment agency in the united states. it is concerned solely with a much-neglected class of wage-earners--children from fourteen to sixteen years of age; and its chief purpose is, not to find positions for its "patrons," but to keep them in school. it was founded as a result of the discovery that there were not nearly enough jobs in chicago to go around among the twelve or fifteen thousand children under sixteen years of age who left school each year to go to work; also that, though a statute of the state required a child either to work or to go to school, there were about twenty-three thousand youngsters in the city who were doing neither. the law had made no provision for keeping track of the children once they had left school. no one knew what had become of them. so miss davis, acting as special investigator for the school of civics and philanthropy and the chicago women's club, set to work to find out. she discovered--and she can show you statistics to prove it--that "bummin'" around, looking aimlessly for work, brought many a boy and girl, unable to withstand the temptations of the street, into the juvenile court. and she found, as other statistics bear witness, that the fate of the children who found jobs was scarcely better than that of their idle brothers and sisters. undirected, they took the first positions that offered, with the result that most of them were engaged in "blind-alley" occupations, unskilled industries that offered little, if any, chance for advancement and that gave no training for the future. the pay was poor; it averaged two dollars a week. working conditions were frequently unhealthful. moral influences of shop and factory and office were often bad. for the most part, the industries that employed children were seasonal; and many boys and girls were forced into long periods of inactivity between positions. this state of affairs, combined with a natural tendency to vary the monotony of life by shifting, on the slightest pretext, from one job to another, was making of many children that bane of modern industry, the "casual" laborer. the bureau--started informally in the course of initial investigations and kept alive through the grace of the women's club, until the board of education was ready to adopt it--has been able to do much in amelioration of the lot of the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old worker. but no statistics it can produce are as telling as the sight of the bureau in operation. sit with your eyes and ears open, in a corner of the office in the jones school and you will make the acquaintance of one of the humanest employment agencies in the world; also you will learn more about such grave subjects as the needs of our educational system and the underlying causes of poverty than you can learn out of fat treatises in a year. "why do you want to leave school?" that is the first question the job lady asks of each new applicant who comes to the bureau for work. perhaps the child has heard that question before; for in those schools from which the greatest numbers of children go out at the age of fourteen, miss davis and her assistants hold office hours and interview each boy or girl who shows signs of restlessness. they give informal talks to the pupils of the sixth and seventh grades about the opportunities open to boys and girls under sixteen; they discuss the special training offered by the schools and show the advisability of remaining in school as long as possible; they try to find an opportunity of talking over the future with each member of the graduating class. but even when the way has been paved for it, the question, "why do you want to leave school?" brings to light the most trivial of reasons. in very few cases is it economic necessity that drives a child to work. "i ain't int'rusted," explained one boy to miss davis. "i jest sits." the job lady is often able to convince even the sitters that school is, after all, the best place for boys and girls under sixteen. she persuaded between twenty-five and thirty per cent. of the children that applied at the bureau last year to return to school. sometimes all she had to do was to give the child a plain statement of the facts in the case--of the poor work and poor pay and lack of opportunity in the industries open to the fourteen-year-old worker. often she found it necessary only to explain what the school had to offer. one boy was sent to miss davis by a teacher who had advised him to go to work, although he had just completed the seventh grade, because he had "too much energy" for school! he was a bright boy--one capable of making something of himself, if the two important, formative years that must pass before he was sixteen were not wasted; so he was transferred from his school to one where vocational work was part of the curriculum--where he could find an outlet for his superfluous energy in working with his hands. now he is doing high-school work creditably; and he has stopped talking about leaving school. but it isn't always the whim of the child that prompts him to cut short his education. sometimes he is driven into the industrial world by the ignorance or greed of his parents. miss davis tells of one little girl who was sacrificed to the great god labor because the four dollars she brought home weekly helped to pay the instalments on a piano, and of a boy who was taken from eighth grade just before graduation because his father had bought some property and needed a little extra money. frequently boys and girls are put to work because of the impression that schools have nothing of practical value to offer. still, even the most miserly and most stubborn and most ignorant of parents can sometimes be made to see the wisdom of keeping a child in school until he is sixteen. they are won to the job lady's point of view by a statement of the increased opportunity open to the child who is sixteen. or they are brought to see that the schools are for _all_ children, and that work, on the contrary, is very bad for some children. but often all the job lady's efforts fail. the child is incurably sick of school, the parent remains obdurate. or, perhaps, there is a very real need of what little the son or daughter can earn. often some one can be found who will donate books, or a scholarship ranging from car-fare to a few dollars a week. over four hundred dollars is being given out in scholarships each month, and every scholarship shows good returns. but often no scholarship is forthcoming; and there is nothing for the job lady to do but find a position for the small applicant. then begins the often difficult process of fitting the child to some available job. the process starts, really, with fitting the job to the child, and that is as it should be. the job lady always tries to place the boys and girls that come to her office where there will be some chance for them to learn something. but jobs with a "future" are few for the fourteen-year-old worker. the trades will not receive apprentices under the age of sixteen; business houses and the higher-grade factories won't bother with youngsters, because they are too unreliable; as one man put it, with unconscious irony, too "childish." so the job lady must be content to send the boys out as office and errand boys or to find employment for the girls in binderies and novelty shops. but she investigates every position before a child is sent to fill it; and if it is found to be not up to standard in wages or working conditions, it is crossed off the bureau's list. the job lady has established a minimum wage of four dollars a week. no children go out from the bureau to work for less than that sum, excepting those who are placed in the part-time schools of some printing establishments, or in dressmaking shops, where they will be learning a useful trade. this informal minimum-wage law results in a raising of the standard of payment in a shop. in such manner, the bureau makes over many a job to fit the worker. but the fitting process works both ways. the job lady knows that it is discouraging, often demoralizing, for a child to be turned away, just because he is not the "right person" for a place. so she tries to make sure that he _is_ the right person. that she succeeds very often, the employers who have learned to rely on the bureau will testify. "if you haven't a boy for me now," one man said to miss davis, "i'll wait until you get one. it will save time in the end, for you always send just the boy i want." the secret of finding the right boy lies, first of all, in discovering what he wants to do; and, next, in judging whether or not he can do it. very often, he has not the least idea of what he wants to do. he has learned many things in school, but little or nothing of the industrial world in which he must live. to many boys and girls, especially to those from the poorest families, an "office job" is the acme of desire. it means to them, pitifully enough, a respectability they have never been quite able to encompass. as a result, perhaps, of our slow-changing educational ideals, they scorn the trades. into the trades, however, miss davis finds it possible to steer many a boy who is obviously unfitted for the career of lawyer, bank clerk, or, vaguely, "business man." and she is able to place others in the coveted office jobs, with their time-honored requirement: "only the neat, honest, intelligent boy need apply." often, given the honesty and intelligence, she must manufacture a child to fit the description. sometimes all that is necessary is a hint about soap and water and a clean collar. sometimes the big cupboard in her office must yield up a half-worn suit or a pair of shoes that some luckier boy has outgrown. occasionally, hers is the delicate task of suggesting to a prematurely sophisticated little girl that some employers have an unreasonable prejudice against rouge and earrings; or that even the poorest people can wash their underwear. manners frequently come in for attention. when the boys or girls are placed, the bureau, unlike most employment agencies, does not wash its hands of them. its work has only begun. each child is asked to report concerning his progress from time to time; and if he does not show up, a vocational supervisor keeps track of him by visits to home or office, or by letters, written quarterly. the job lady is able to observe by this method, whether or not the work is suitable for the child, or whether it offers him the best available chance; and she is often able to check the habit of "shifting" in its incipient stages. she is continually arbitrating and making adjustments, always ready to listen to childish woes and to allay them when she can. not long ago, i went to a conference on vocational guidance. there i heard, from the mouths of various men, what hope the work being done by the bureau held for the future. one showed how it had infused new blood into the veins of an anemic educational system, how it was making the schools a more efficient preparation for life--the life of factory and shop and office--than they ever had been before. another man pointed out that the bureau, through the schools, would strike at one of the deep roots of poverty--incompetency. more people are poor for lack of proper equipment to earn a living and proper direction in choosing a vocation, he said, than for any other one reason. a third man saw in the vocational bureau a means of keeping a control over employing interests. "you treat our children well, and you pay them well," the schools of the future, he declared, would be able to say to the employer, as the bureau was already saying, "or we won't permit our children to work for you." a fourth had a vision of what the bureau and the new education it heralded could do toward educating the men and women of the future to a knowledge of their rights as workers. and then there came a man with a plea. "all of these things," he said, "the bureau can accomplish--must accomplish. but let us not forget, in our pursuance of great ends, that it is the essential _humanness_ of the bureau that has made it what it is." here was the final, immeasurable measure of its success. it counts, of course, that the job lady helps along big causes, drives at the roots of big ills; but, somehow it counts more that an anxious-faced youngster i saw at the bureau should have brought his woes to her. his employer had given him a problem to solve--and he couldn't do it. he was afraid he'd lose his job. he had never been to the bureau before, but "a boy you got a job for said you'd help me out," he explained--and he was sent off happy, the problem solved. it counts too, that tillie, who had once found work through the bureau, but was now keeping house for her father, should turn to the bureau for aid. her father had been sick and couldn't afford to buy her anything new to wear. "my dress is so clumsy," she wrote, "that the boys laugh at me when i go out in the street." she was confident that the job lady would help her--and her confidence was not misplaced. it counts that the jameses and henrys and johns and marys and sadies come, brimming over with joy, to tell the job lady of a "raise" or of a bit of approbation from an employer. all the funny, grateful, pathetic letters that pour in count unspeakably! to hundreds of boys and girls and parents the job lady has proved a friend. there has been no nonsense about the matter. she has not sentimentalized over her work; she has not made it smack of charity. indeed, there is no charity about it. the boys and girls and parents who come to the job lady are, for the most part, just average boys and girls and parents, as little paupers as millionaires. they are the people who are generally lost sight of in a democracy, where one must usually be well-to-do enough to, buy assistance, or poor enough to accept it as alms, if he is to have any aid at all in solving the problems of life. it is a great thing for the schools, through the bureau, to give to these average men and women and children practical aid in adjusting their lives to the conditions under which they live and work, and to do it with a sympathy and an understanding--a humanness that warms the soul. * * * * * _(kansas city star)_ two illustrations with the captions: . "tom sawyer and becky thatcher," an illustration in the "adventures of tom sawyer" (harpers), which met the author's approval. . mrs. laura frazer, the original "becky thatcher," pouring tea at mark twain's boyhood home in hannibal, mo., on the anniversary of the author's birth. mark twain's first sweetheart, becky thatcher, tells of their childhood courtship to mrs. laura frazer of hannibal, mo., mark twain's immortal "adventures of tom sawyer" is a rosary, and the book's plot is the cord of fiction on which beads of truth are strung. in the sunset of her life she tells them over, and if here and there among the roseate chaplet is a bead gray in coloring, time has softened the hues of all so they blend exquisitely. this bead recalls a happy afternoon on the broad mississippi with the boys and girls of seventy years ago; the next brings up a picture of a schoolroom where a score of little heads bob over their books and slates, and a third visualizes a wonderful picnic excursion to the woods with a feast of fried chicken and pie and cake. for mrs. frazer is the original of becky thatcher, the childhood sweetheart of tom sawyer, and the original of tom sawyer, of course, was mark twain himself. "yes, i was the becky thatcher of mr. clemens's book," mrs. frazer said the other day, as she sat in the big second floor front parlor of the old time mansion in hannibal, which is now the home for the friendless. mrs. frazer is the matron of the home. "of course i suspected it when i first read the 'adventures of tom sawyer,'" she went on. "there were so many incidents which i recalled as happening to sam clemens and myself that i felt he had drawn a picture of his memory of me in the character of judge thatcher's little daughter. but i never confided my belief to anyone. i felt that it would be a presumption to take the honor to myself. "there were other women who had no such scruples--some of them right here in hannibal--and they attempted to gain a little reflected notoriety by asserting that they were the prototypes of the character. when albert bigelow paine, mr. clemens's biographer, gathered the material for his life of the author, he found no fewer than twenty-five women, in missouri and elsewhere, each of whom declared she was becky thatcher, but he settled the controversy for all time on mr. clemens's authority when the biography was published. in it you will find that becky thatcher was laura hawkins, which was my maiden name. "we were boy and girl sweethearts, sam clemens and i," mrs. frazer said with a gentle little laugh. she is elderly, of course, since it was seventy years ago that her friendship with mark twain began, and her hair is gray. but her heart is young, and she finds in her work of mothering the twenty-five boys and girls in her charge the secret of defying age. on this particular afternoon she wore black and white striped silk, the effect of which was a soft gray to match her hair, and her placid face was lighted with smiles of reminiscence. "children are wholly unartificial, you know," she explained. "they do not learn to conceal their feelings until they begin to grow up. the courtship of childhood, therefore, is a matter of preference and of comradeship. i liked sam better than the other boys, and he liked me better than the other girls, and that was all there was to it." if you had seen this lady of old missouri as she told of her childhood romance you would have recalled instinctively mark twain's description: a lovely little blue eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes. * * * he worshipped this new angel with furtive eye until he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration. and you would have found it easy to conceive that this refined, gentle countenance once was apple cheeked and rosy, that the serene gray eyes once sparkled as blue as the father of waters on a sunny day and that the frosted hair was as golden as the sunshine. "i must have been or years old when we moved to hannibal," mrs. frazer said. "my father had owned a big mill and a store and a plantation worked by many negro slaves further inland, but he found the task of managing all too heavy for him, and so he bought a home in hannibal and was preparing to move to it when he died. my mother left the mill and the plantation in the hands of my grown brothers--i was one of ten children, by the way--and came to hannibal. our house stood at the corner of hill and main streets, and just a few doors west, on hill street, lived the clemens family. "i think i must have liked sam clemens the very first time i saw him. he was different from the other boys. i didn't know then, of course, what it was that made him different, but afterward, when my knowledge of the world and its people grew, i realized that it was his natural refinement. he played hookey from school, he cared nothing at all for his books and he was guilty of all sorts of mischievous pranks, just as tom sawyer is in the book, but i never heard a coarse word from him in all our childhood acquaintance. "hannibal was a little town which hugged the steamboat landing in those days. if you will go down through the old part of the city now you will find it much as it was when i was a child, for the quaint old weatherbeaten buildings still stand, proving how thoroughly the pioneers did their work. we went to school, we had picnics, we explored the big cave--they call it the mark twain cave now, you know." "were you lost in the cave, as tom sawyer and becky thatcher were?" mrs. frazer was asked. "no; that is a part of the fiction of the book," she answered. "as a matter of fact, some older persons always went with us. usually my older sister and sam clemens's older sister, who were great friends, were along to see that we didn't get lost among the winding passages where our candles lighted up the great stalagmites and stalactites, and where water was dripping from the stone roof overhead, just as mr. clemens has described it." and then she proceeded to divorce the memory of mark twain from "the little red schoolhouse" forever. "in those days we had only private schools," mrs. frazer said. "if there were public schools i never heard of them. the first school i went to was taught by mr. cross, who had canvassed the town and obtained perhaps twenty-five private pupils at a stated price for the tuition of each. i do not know how much mr. cross charged, but when i was older i remember that a young woman teacher opened a school after getting twenty-five pupils at $ each for the year's tuition. i shall never forget that mr. cross did not belie his name, however, or that sam clemens wrote a bit of doggerel about him." she quoted it this way: cross by name and cross by nature, cross hopped out of an irish potato. "the schoolhouse was a -story frame building with a gallery across the entire front," she resumed. "after a year together in that school sam and i went to the school taught by mrs. horr. it was then he used to write notes to me and bring apples to school and put them on my desk. and once, as a punishment for some prank, he had to sit with the girls and occupied a vacant seat by me. he didn't seem to mind the penalty at all," mrs. frazer added with another laugh, "so i don't know whether it was effective as a punishment or not. "we hadn't reached the dancing age then, but we went to many 'play parties' together and romped through 'going to jerusalem,' 'king william was king george's son' and 'green grow the rushes--o.' "judge clemens, sam's father, died and left the family in straitened circumstances, and sam's schooling ended there. he began work in the printing office to help out, and when he was or he left hannibal to go to work in st. louis. he never returned to live, but he visited here often in the years that followed." mrs. frazer's own story formed the next chapter of her narrative. a young physician, doctor frazer of madisonville, which was a little inland village in ralls county, adjoining, came often to hannibal and courted pretty laura hawkins. when she was they were married and went to live in the new house doctor frazer had built for his bride at madisonville. there they reared two sons until they required better school facilities, when they went to rensselaer, also in ralls county, but nearer hannibal. they lived in rensselaer until doctor frazer's death, when the mother and younger son moved to the general canby farm. this son's marriage led to mrs. frazer's return to hannibal twenty-two years ago. she was offered the position of matron at the home for the friendless, and for twenty-two years she has managed it. the boys and girls who have gone out from it in nearly every case have become useful men and women as a result of her guidance at the critical period of their life, for the girls remain in the home until they are and the boys until they are . the old mansion which houses the score or more of children always there is to be abandoned in the spring for a new and modern building, a gift from a wealthy citizen to the private charity which has conducted the institution so long without aid from city, county or state. it was given to mrs. frazer and mark twain to renew their youthful friendship after a lapse of half a century. in mrs. frazer made a trip east, accepting an invitation to visit albert bigelow paine at redding, conn. mr. paine had visited hannibal two years before in a search for material for his biography of mark twain and had made mrs. frazer's acquaintance then. he mentioned the approaching visit to the great humorist and mark twain promptly sat down and wrote mrs. frazer that she must be a guest also at stormfield, his redding estate. so it came about that the one-time little laura hawkins found herself lifting the knocker at the beautiful country home of mark twain in the connecticut hills. "the door was opened by clara clemens, mr. clemens's daughter," mrs. frazer said, "and she threw her arms about me and cried: 'i know you, for i've seen your picture, and father has told me about you. you are becky thatcher, and i'm happy to see you.' "and that," mrs. frazer said, "was the first time i really knew i was the original of the character, although i had suspected it for thirty years. clara clemens, you know, even then was a famous contralto, and ossip gabrilowitsch, whose wife she is now, was 'waiting' on her at the time. "it was a wonderful visit," she went on. "mr. clemens took me over stormfield. it must have been a tract of three hundred acres. we went through the fields, which were not fields at all, since they were not cultivated, and across a rustic bridge over a little rushing brook which boiled and bubbled among the rocks in the bed of a great ravine, and we sat down under a rustic arbor and talked of the old days in hannibal when he was a little boy and i a little girl, before he went out into the world to win fame and before i lived my own happy married life. mr. clemens had that rare faculty of loyalty to his friends which made the lapse of fifty years merely an interim. it was as if the half century had rolled away and we were there looking on the boy and girl we had been. "mr. clemens had won worldwide fame; he had been a welcome guest in the palaces of old world rulers and lionized in the great cities of his own country. he had been made a doctor of literature by the university of oxford, the highest honor of the greatest university in the world, and yet there at stormfield to me he seemed to be sam clemens of old hannibal, rather than the foremost man in the american world of letters. "that, i believe, is my most treasured memory of sam clemens," mrs. frazer ended. "i love to think of him as the curly-headed, rollicking, clean minded little boy i played with as a child, but i like better still to think of him as he was in his last days, when all that fame and fortune had showered on him did not, even momentarily, make him waver in his loyalty to the friends of his youth." in hannibal stands the quaint little -story house flush with the sidewalk which samuel langhorne clemens's father built in , after he had moved to the old river town from florida, mo., where the great story teller was born. restored, it houses many reminders of the author and is maintained as a memorial to mark twain. there, november , the eighty-second anniversary of the birth of clemens, the people of hannibal and persons from many cities widely scattered over america will go to pay tribute to his memory. and there they will see becky thatcher in the flesh, silkengowned, gray-haired and grown old, but becky thatcher just the same, seated in a chair which once was mark twain's and pouring tea at a table on which the author once wrote. and if the aroma of the cup she hands out to each visitor doesn't waft before his mind a vision of a curly-headed boy and a little girl with golden long-tails at play on the wharf of old hannibal while the ancient packets ply up and down the rolling blue mississippi, there is nothing whatever in the white magic of association. * * * * * (_milwaukee journal_) four men of humble birth hold world destiny in their hands by william g. shepherd washington--out of a dingy law office in virginia, out of a cobbler's shop in wales, out of a village doctor's office in france and from a farm on the island of sicily came the four men who, in the grand old palace at versailles, will soon put the quietus on the divine right of kings. in , three days after christmas, a boy named thomas was born in the plain home of a presbyterian parson in staunton, va. when this boy was years old, there was born in palermo, on the island of sicily, , miles away, a black-eyed sicilian boy. into the town of palermo, on that july day, came garibaldi, in triumph, and the farmer-folk parents of the boy, in honor of the occasion, named their son victor, after the new italian king, whom garibaldi had helped to seat. three years later still, when thomas was playing the games of -year-old boys down in virginia, and when victor, at , spent most of his time romping on the little farm in sicily, there was born in the heart of the foggy, grimy town of manchester, in england, a boy named david. his home was the ugliest of the homes of all the three. it was of red brick, two stories high, with small windows, facing a busy stone sidewalk. its rooms were small and little adorned, and not much hope of greatness could ever have sprung from that dingy place. there was one other boy to make up the quartet. his name was george. he was a young medical student in paris twenty-two years old when david was born in england. he thought all governments ought to be republics, and, by the time he was , he came over to the united states to study the american republic, and, if possible, to make a living over here as a doctor. he had been born in a little village in france, in a doctor's household. while george was in new york, almost starving for lack of patients, and later, while he taught french in a girls' school in stamford, conn., little thomas, down in virginia, at the age of years, had buckled down to his studies, with the hope of being a lawyer; victor, at , was studying in a school in far-away palermo, and david, at , fatherless by this time, was getting ready for life in the home of his uncle, a village shoemaker, in a little town of wales. the only city-born boy of the four, he was taken by fate, when his father died, to the simplicity of village life and saved, perhaps, from the sidewalks. the years whirled on. george married an american girl and went back to france, to write and teach and doctor. thomas went to a university to study law. david, seven years younger, spent his evenings and spare time in his uncle's shoe shop or in the village blacksmith shop, listening to his elders talk over the affairs of the world. victor, with law as his vision, crossed the famous old straits of messina from his island home and went to naples to study in the law school there. in the ' s things began to happen. down in virginia, thomas was admitted to the bar. in old wales, david, who, by this time, had learned to speak english, was admitted to practice law in , and, in , the black-eyed, hot-blooded sicilian victor received the documents that entitled him to practice at the italian bar. george, in france, by this time had dropped medicine. bolshevism had arisen there in the form of the commune, and he had fought it so desperately that he had been sentenced to death. he hated kings, and he also hated the autocracy of the mob. he fled from paris. soon they will sit at a peace table together, the first peace table in all human history from which divine-right kings are barred. the future and the welfare of the world lie in their four pairs of hands. their full names are: georges clemenceau, premier of france; david lloyd george, prime minister of england; victor emanuel orlando, premier of italy, and thomas woodrow wilson, president of the united states. * * * * * _(saturday evening post)_ three half-tone reproductions of wash-drawings by a staff artist. the confessions of a college professor's wife a college professor--as may be proved by any number of novels and plays--is a quaint, pedantic person, with spectacles and a beard, but without any passions--except for books. he takes delight in large fat words, but is utterly indifferent to such things as clothes and women--except the dowdy one he married when too young to know better.... it is always so interesting to see ourselves as authors see us. even more entertaining to us, however, is the shockingly inconsistent attitude toward academic life maintained by practical people who know all about real life--meaning the making and spending of money. one evening soon after i became a college professor's wife i enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sitting next to one of america's safest and sanest business men at a dinner party given in his honor by one of the trustees of the university. when he began to inform me, with that interesting air of originality which often accompanies the platitudes of our best citizens, that college professors were "mere visionary idealists--all academic theories; no practical knowledge of the world"--and so on, as usual--i made bold to interrupt: "why, in the name of common sense, then, do you send your own sons to them to be prepared for it! is such a policy safe? is it sane? is it practical?" and i am afraid i laughed in the great man's face. he only blinked and said "humph!" in a thoroughly businesslike manner; but throughout the rest of the evening he viewed me askance, as though i had become a dangerous theorist too--by marriage. so i turned my back on him and wondered why such a large and brilliant dinner was given for such a dull and uninteresting philistine! this shows, by the way, how young and ignorant i was. the mystery was explained next day, when it was intimated to me that i had made what is sometimes called, even in refined college circles, a break. young professors' wives were not expected to trifle with visitors of such eminent solvency; but i had frequently heard the materialistic tendencies of the age condemned in public, and had not been warned in private that we were all supposed to do our best to work this materialist for a million, with which to keep up the fight against materialism. in the cloistered seclusion of our universities, dedicated to high ideals, more deference is shown to the masters of high finance than to the masters of other arts--let me add not because mammon is worshiped, but because he is needed for building cloisters. the search for truth would be far more congenial than the search for wealth; but, so long as our old-fashioned institutions remain, like old-fashioned females, dependent for their very existence on the bounty of personal favor, devious methods must be employed for coaxing and wheedling money out of those who control it--and therefore the truth. i was a slender bride and had a fresh, becoming trousseau. he was a heavy-jowled banker and had many millions. i was supposed to ply what feminine arts i could command for the highly moral purpose of obtaining his dollars, to be used in destroying his ideals. well, that was the first and last time i was ever so employed. despite the conscientious flattery of the others he gruntingly refused to give a penny. and--who knows--perhaps i was in part responsible for the loss of a million! a dreadful preface to my career as a college professor's wife. however, before pursuing my personal confessions, i must not overlook the most common and comic characteristic of the college professor we all know and love in fiction. i refer to his picturesque absent-mindedness. i had almost forgotten that; possibly i have become absent-minded by marriage too! is not the dear old fellow always absent-minded on the stage? invariably and most deliriously! just how he manages to remain on the faculty when absent-minded is never explained on the program; and it often perplexes us who are behind the scenes. i tell my husband that, in our case, i, as the dowdy and devoted wife, am supposed to interrupt his dreams--they always have dreams--remove his untidy dressing gown--they always wear dressing gowns--and dispatch him to the classroom with a kiss and a coat; but how about that great and growing proportion of his colleagues who, for reasons to be stated, are wifeless and presumably helpless? being only a woman, i cannot explain how bachelors retain their positions; but i shall venture to assert that no business in the world--not even the army and navy--is conducted on a more ruthless and inexorable schedule than the business of teaching. my two brothers drift into their office at any time between nine and ten in the morning and yet control a fairly successful commercial enterprise; whereas, if my husband arrived at his eight-o'clock classroom only one minute late there would be no class there to teach. for it is an unwritten law among our engaging young friends the undergraduates that when the "prof" is not on hand before the bell stops ringing they can "cut"--thus avoiding what they were sent to college for and achieving one of the pleasantest triumphs of a university course. my confessions! dear me! what have i, a college professor's wife, to confess? at least three things: --that i love my husband so well that i wish i had never married him. --that i have been such a good wife that he does not know he ought never to have had one. --that if i had to do it all over again i would do the same thing all over again! this is indeed a confession, though whether it be of weakness of will or strength of faith you may decide if you read the rest. the first time i saw the man who became my husband was at the casino in newport. and what was a poor professor doing at newport? he was not a professor--he was a prince; a proud prince of the most royal realm of sport. carl, as some of you might recall if that were his real name, had been the intercollegiate tennis champion a few years before, and now, with the kings of the court, had come to try his luck in the annual national tournament. he lasted until the finals this time and then was put out. that was as high as he ever got in the game. alas for the romance of love at first sight! he paid not the slightest attention to me, though he sat beside me for ten minutes; for, despite his defeat, he was as enthusiastically absorbed in the runner-up and the dashing defender of the title as--well, as the splendid sportsman i have since found him to be in disappointments far more grim. as for me, i fear i hardly noticed him either, except to remark that he was very good-looking; for this was my first visit to newport--the last too--and the pageantry of wealth and fashion was bewilderingly interesting to me. i was quite young then. i am older now. but such unintellectual exhibitions might, i fancy, still interest me--a shocking confession for a college professor's wife! i did not see carl again for two years, and then it was in another kind of pageant, amid pomp and circumstance of such a different sort; and, instead of white flannel trousers, he now wore a black silk gown. it had large flowing sleeves and a hood of loud colors hanging down behind; and he was blandly marching along in the academic procession at the inaugural ceremonies of the new president of the university. i wonder why it is that when the stronger sex wishes to appear particularly dignified and impressive, as on the bench or in the pulpit, it likes to don female attire! no matter whether suffragists or antis--they all do it. now some of these paraders seemed as embarrassed by their skirts as the weaker sex would be without them; but the way carl wore his new honors and his new doctor's hood attracted my attention and held it. he seemed quite aware of the ridiculous aspect of an awkward squad of pedagogues paraded like chorus girls before an audience invited to watch the display; but, also, he actually enjoyed the comedy of it--and that is a distinction when you are an actor in the comedy! his quietly derisive strut altogether fascinated me. "hurrah! aren't we fine!" he seemed to say. as the long, self-conscious procession passed where i sat, smiling and unnoticed, he suddenly looked up. his veiled twinkle happened to meet my gaze. it passed over me, instantly returned and rested on ray eyes for almost a second. such a wonderful second for little me!... not a gleam of recollection. he had quite forgotten that our names had once been pronounced to each other; but in that flashing instant he recognized, as i did, that we two knew each other better than anyone else in the whole assemblage. the nicest smile in the world said as plainly as words, and all for me alone: "hurrah! you see it too!" then, with that deliciously derisive strut, he passed on, while something within me said: "there he is!--at last! he is the one for you!" and i glowed and was glad. carl informed me afterward that he had a similar sensation, and that all through the long platitudinous exercises my face was a great solace to him. "whenever they became particularly tiresome," he said, "i looked at you--and bore up." i was not unaware that he was observing me; nor was i surprised when, at the end of the exhausting ordeal, he broke through the crowd--with oh, such dear impetuosity!--and asked my uncle to present him, while i, trembling at his approach, looked in the other direction, for i felt the crimson in my cheeks--i who had been out three seasons! then i turned and raised my eyes to his, and he, too, colored deeply as he took my hand. we saw no comedy in what followed. there was plenty of comedy, only we were too romantic to see it. at the time it seemed entirely tragic to me that my people, though of the sort classified as cultured and refined, deploring the materialistic tendency of the age, violently objected to my caring for this wonderful being, who brilliantly embodied all they admired in baccalaureate sermons and extolled in sunday-school. it was not despite but because of that very thing that they opposed the match! if only he had not so ably curbed his materialistic tendencies they would have been delighted with this well-bred young man, for his was an even older family than ours, meaning one having money long enough to breed contempt for making it. instead of a fortune, however, merely a tradition of _noblesse oblige_ had come down to him, like an unwieldy heirloom. he had waved aside a promising opening in his cousin's bond-house on leaving college and invested five important years, as well as his small patrimony, in hard work at the leading universities abroad in order to secure a thorough working capital for the worst-paid profession in the world. "if there were only some future in the teaching business!" as one of my elder brothers said; "but i've looked into the proposition. why, even a full professor seldom gets more than four thousand--in most cases less. and it will be years before your young man is a full professor." "i can wait," i said. "but a girl like you could never stand that kind of life. you aren't fitted for it. you weren't brought up to be a poor man's wife." "plenty of tune to learn while waiting," i returned gayly enough, but heartsick at the thought of the long wait. carl, however, quite agreed with my brothers and wanted impetuously to start afresh in pursuit of the career in wall street he had forsworn, willing and eager--the darling!--to throw away ambition, change his inherited tastes, abandon his cultivated talents, and forget the five years he had "squandered in riotous learning," as he put it! however, i was not willing--for his sake. he would regret it later. they always do. besides, like carl, i had certain unuttered ideals about serving the world in those days. we still have. only now we better understand the world. make no mistake about this. men are just as noble as they used to be. plenty of them are willing to sacrifice themselves--but not us. that is why so few of the sort most needed go in for teaching and preaching in these so-called materialistic days. what was the actual, material result of my lover's having taken seriously the advice ladled out to him by college presidents and other evil companions of his innocent youth, who had besought him not to seek material gain? at the time we found each other he was twenty-seven years of age and had just begun his career--an instructor in the economics department, with a thousand-dollar salary. that is not why he was called an economist; but can you blame my brothers for doing their best to break the engagement?... i do not--now. it was not their fault if carl actually practiced what they merely preached. should carl be blamed? no; for he seriously intended never to marry at all--until he met me. should i be blamed? possibly; but i did my best to break the engagement too--and incidentally both our hearts--by going abroad and staying abroad until carl--bless him!--came over after me. i am not blaming anybody. i am merely telling why so few men in university work, or, for that matter, in most of the professions nowadays, can support wives until after the natural mating time is past. by that time their true mates have usually wed other men--men who can support them--not the men they really love, but the men they tell themselves they love! for, if marriage is woman's only true career, it is hardly true to one's family or oneself not to follow it before it is too late--especially when denied training for any other--even though she may be equally lacking in practical training for the only career open to her. this sounds like a confession of personal failure due to the typical unpreparedness for marriage of the modern american girl. i do not think anyone could call our marriage a personal failure, though socially it may be. during the long period of our engagement i became almost as well prepared for my lifework as carl was for his. instead of just waiting in sweet, sighing idleness i took courses in domestic science, studied dietetics, mastered double-entry and learned to sew. i also began reading up on economics. the latter amused the family, for they thought the higher education of women quite unwomanly and had refused to let me go to college. it amused carl too, until i convinced him that i was really interested in the subject, not just in him; then he began sending me boxes of books instead of boxes of candy, which made the family laugh and call me strong-minded. i did not care what they called me. i was too busy making up for the time and money wasted on my disadvantageous advantages, which may have made me more attractive to men, but had not fitted me to be the wife of any man, rich or poor. all that my accomplishments and those of my sisters actually accomplished, as i see it now, was to kill my dear father; for, though he made a large income as a lawyer, he had an even larger family and died a poor man, like so many prominent members of the bar. i shall not dwell on the ordeal of a long engagement. it is often made to sound romantic in fiction, but in realistic life such an unnatural relationship is a refined atrocity--often an injurious one--except to pseudo-human beings so unreal and unromantic that they should never be married or engaged at all. i nearly died; and as for carl--well, unrequited affection may be good for some men, but requited affection in such circumstances cannot be good for any man--if you grant that marriage is! a high-strung, ambitious fellow like carl needed no incentive to make him work hard or to keep him out of mischief, any more than he needed a prize to make him do his best at tennis or keep him from cheating in the score. what an ignoble view of these matters most good people accept! in point of fact he had been able to do more work and to play better tennis before receiving this long handicap--in short, would have been in a position to marry sooner if he had not been engaged to marry! this may sound strange, but that is merely because the truth is so seldom told about anything that concerns the most important relationship in life. nevertheless, despite what he was pleased to call his inspiration, he won his assistant professorship at an earlier age than the average, and we were married on fifteen hundred a year. oh, what a happy year! i am bound to say the family were very nice about it. everyone was nice about it. and when we came back from our wedding journey the other professors' wives overwhelmed me with kindness and with calls--and with teas and dinners and receptions in our honor. carl had been a very popular bachelor and his friends were pleased to treat me quite as if i were worthy of him. this was generous, but disquieting. i was afraid they would soon see through me and pity poor carl. i had supposed, like most outsiders, that the women of a university town would be dreadfully intellectual and modern--and i was rather in awe of them at first, being aware of my own magnificent limitations; but, for the most part, these charming new friends of mine, especially the wealthier members of the set i was thrown with, seemed guilelessly ignorant in respect of the interesting period of civilization in which they happened to live--almost as ignorant as i was and as most "nice people" are everywhere. books sufficiently old, art sufficiently classic, views sufficiently venerable to be respectable--these interested them, as did foreign travel and modern languages; but ideas that were modern could not be nice because they were new, though they might be nice in time--after they became stale. college culture, i soon discovered, does not care about what is happening to the world, but what used to happen to it. "you see, my dear," carl explained, with that quiet, casual manner so puzzling to pious devotees of "cultureine"--and even to me at first, though i adored and soon adopted it! "--universities don't lead thought--they follow it. in europe institutions of learning may be--indeed, they frequently are--hotbeds of radicalism; in america our colleges are merely featherbeds for conservatism to die in respectably." then he added: "but what could you expect? you see, we are still intellectually _nouveaux_ over here, and therefore self-consciously correct and imitative, like the _nouveaux riches_. so long as you have a broad _a_ you need never worry about a narrow mind." as for the men, i had pictured the privilege of sitting at their feet and learning many interesting things about the universe. perhaps they were too tired to have their feet encumbered by ignorant young women; for when i ventured to ask questions about their subject their answer was--not always--but in so many cases a solemn owllike "yes-and-no" that i soon learned my place. they did not expect or want a woman to know anything and preferred light banter and persiflage. i like that, too, when it is well done; but i was accustomed to men who did it better. i preferred the society of their wives. i do not expect any member of the complacent sex to believe this statement--unless i add that the men did not fancy my society, which would not be strictly true; but, even if not so intellectual as i had feared, the women of our town were far more charming than i had hoped, and when you cannot have both cleverness and kindness the latter makes a more agreeable atmosphere for a permanent home. i still consider them the loveliest women in the world. in short my only regret about being married was that we had wasted so much of the glory of youth apart. youth is the time for love, but not for marriage! some of our friends among the instructors marry on a thousand a year, even in these days of the high cost of living; and i should have been so willing to live as certain of them do--renting lodgings from a respectable artisan's wife and doing my own cooking on her stove after she had done hers. carl gave me no encouragement, however! perhaps it was just as well; for when first engaged i did not know how to cook, though i was a good dancer and could play liszt's polonaise in e flat with but few mistakes. as it turned out we began our wedded life quite luxuriously. we had a whole house to ourselves--and sometimes even a maid! in those days there were no flats in our town and certain small but shrewd local capitalists had built rows of tiny frame dwellings which they leased to assistant professors, assistant plumbers, and other respectable people of the same financial status, at rates which enabled them--the owners, not the tenants--to support charity and religion. they were all alike--i refer to the houses now, not to all landlords necessarily--with a steep stoop in front and a drying yard for monday mornings in the rear, the kind you see on the factory edges of great cities--except that ours were cleaner and were occupied by nicer people. one of our next-door neighbors was a rising young butcher with his bride and the house on the other side of us was occupied by a postman, his progeny, and the piercing notes of his whistle--presumably a cast-off one--on which all of his numerous children, irrespective of sex or age, were ambitiously learning their father's calling, as was made clear through the thin dividing wall, which supplied visual privacy but did not prevent our knowing when they took their baths or in what terms they objected to doing so. it became a matter of interesting speculation to us what willie would say the next saturday night; and if we had quarreled they, in turn, could have--and would have--told what it was all about. "not every economist," carl remarked whimsically, "can learn at first hand how the proletariat lives." i, too, was learning at first hand much about my own profession. my original research in domestic science was sound in theory, but i soon discovered that my dietetic program was too expensive in practice. instead of good cuts of beef i had to select second or third quality from the rising young butcher, who, by the way, has since risen to the dignity of a touring car. instead of poultry we had pork, for this was before pork also rose. my courses in bookkeeping, however, proved quite practical; and i may say that i was a good purchasing agent and general manager from the beginning of our partnership, instead of becoming one later through bitter experience, like so many young wives brought up to be ladies, not general houseworkers. frequently i had a maid, commonly called along our row the "gurrul"--and quite frequently i had none; for we could afford only young beginners, who, as soon as i had trained them well, left me for other mistresses who could afford to pay them well. "oh, we should not accuse the poor creatures of ingratitude," i told carl one day. "not every economist can learn at first hand the law of supply and demand." if, however, as my fashionable aunt in town remarked, we were picturesquely impecunious--which, to that soft lady, probably meant that, we had to worry along without motor cars--we were just as desperately happy as we were poor; for we had each other at least. every other deprivation seemed comparatively easy or amusing. nor were we the only ones who had each other--and therefore poverty. scholarship meant sacrifice, but all agreed that it was the ideal life. to be sure, some members of the faculty--or their wives--had independent means and could better afford the ideal life. they were considered noble for choosing it. some of the alumni who attended the great games and the graduating exercises were enormously wealthy, and gave the interest of their incomes--sometimes a whole handful of bonds at a time--to the support of the ideal life. was there any law compelling them to give their money to their alma mater? no--just as there was none compelling men like carl to give their lives and sacrifice their wives. these men of wealth made even greater sacrifices. they could have kept in comfort a dozen wives apiece--modest ones--on what they voluntarily preferred to turn over to the dear old college. professors, being impractical and visionary, cannot always see these things in their true proportions. we, moreover, in return for our interest in education, did we not shamelessly accept monthly checks from the university treasurer's office? it was quite materialistic in us. whereas these disinterested donors, instead of receiving checks, gave them, which is more blessed. and were they not checks of a denomination far larger than those we selfishly cashed for ourselves? invariably. therefore our princely benefactors were regarded not only as nobler but as the nobility. indeed, the social stratification of my new home, where the excellent principles of high thinking and plain living were highly recommended for all who could not reverse the precept, struck me, a neophyte, as for all the world like that of a cathedral town in england, except that these visiting patrons of religion and learning were treated with a reverence and respect found only in america. surely it must have amused them, had they not been so used to it; for they were quite the simplest, kindest, sweetest overrich people i had ever met in my own country--and they often took pains to tell us broad-mindedly that there were better things than money. their tactful attempts to hide their awful affluence were quite appealing--occasionally rather comic. like similarly conscious efforts to cover evident indigence, it was so palpable and so unnecessary. "there, there!" i always wanted to say--until i, too, became accustomed to it. "it's all right. you can't help it." it was dear of them all the same, however, and i would not seem ungrateful for their kind consideration. after all, how different from the purse-proud arrogance of wealth seen in our best--selling--fiction, though seldom elsewhere. for the most part they were true gentlefolk, with the low voices and simple manners of several generations of breeding; and i liked them, for the most part, very much--especially certain old friends of our parents, who, i learned later, were willing to show their true friendship in more ways than carl and i could permit. one is frequently informed that the great compensation for underpaying the college professor is in the leisure to live--_otium cum dignitate_ as returning old grads call it when they can remember their latin, though as most of them cannot they call it a snap. carl, by the way, happened to be the secretary of his class, and his popularity with dear old classmates became a nuisance in our tiny home. i remember one well-known bachelor of arts who answered to the name of spud, a rather vulgar little man. comfortably seated in carl's study one morning, with a cigar in his mouth, spud began: "my, what a snap! a couple of hours' work a day and three solid months' vacation! why, just see, here you are loafing early in the morning! you ought to come up to the city! humph! i'd show you what real work means." now my husband had been writing until two o'clock the night before, so that he had not yet made preparation for his next hour. it was so early indeed that i had not yet made the beds. besides, i had heard all about our snap before and it was getting on my nerves. "carl would enjoy nothing better than seeing you work," i put in when the dear classmate finished; "but unfortunately he cannot spare the time." spud saw the point and left; but carl, instead of giving me the thanks i deserved, gave me the first scolding of our married life! now isn't that just like a husband? of course it can be proved by the annual catalogue that the average member of the faculty has only about twelve or fourteen hours of classroom work a week--the worst-paid instructor more; the highest-paid professor less. what a university teacher gives to his students in the classroom, however, is or ought to be but a rendering of what he acquires outside, as when my distinguished father tried one of his well-prepared cases in court. every new class, moreover, is a different proposition, as i once heard my brother say of his customers. that is where the art of teaching comes in and where carl excelled. he could make even the "dismal science," as carlyle called economics, interesting, as was proved by the large numbers of men who elected his courses, despite the fact that he made them work hard to pass. nor does this take into account original research and the writing of books like carl's scholarly work on the history of property, on which he had been slaving for three solid summers and hundreds of nights during termtime; not to speak of attending committee meetings constantly, and the furnace even more constantly. the latter, like making beds, is not mentioned in the official catalogue. i suppose such details would not become one's dignity. as in every other occupation, some members of the faculty do as little work as the law requires; but most of them are an extremely busy lot, even though they may, when it suits their schedule better, take exercise in the morning instead of the afternoon--an astonishing state of affairs that always scandalizes the so-called tired business man. as for carl, i was seeing so little of him except at mealtimes that i became rather piqued at first, being a bride. i felt sure he did not love me any more! "do you really think you have a right to devote so much time to outside work?" i asked one evening when i was washing the dishes and he was starting off for the university library to write on his great book.--it was the indirect womanly method of saying: "oh, please devote just a little more time to me!"--"you ought to rest and be fresh for your classroom work," i added. being a man he did not see it. "the way to advance in the teaching profession," he answered, with his veiled twinkle, "is to neglect it. it doesn't matter how poorly you teach, so long as you write dull books for other professors to read. that's why it is called scholarship--because you slight your scholars." "oh, i'm sick of all this talk about scholarship!" i cried. "what does it mean anyway?" "scholarship, my dear," said carl, "means finding out all there is to know about something nobody else cares about, and then telling it in such a way that nobody else can find out. if you are understood you are popular; if you are popular you are no scholar. and if you're no scholar, how can you become a full professor? now, my child, it is all clear to you." and, dismissing me and the subject with a good-night kiss, he brushed his last year's hat and hurried off, taking the latchkey. so much for _otium_. "but where does the dignity come in?" i asked carl one day when he was sharpening his lawnmower and thus neglecting his lawn tennis; for, like a freshman, i still had much to learn about quaint old college customs. "why, in being called p'fessor by the tradesmen," said carl. "also in renting a doctor's hood for academic pee-rades at three dollars a pee-rade, instead of buying a new hat for the rest of the year. great thing--dignity!" he chuckled and began to cut the grass furiously, reminding me of a thoroughbred hunter i once saw harnessed to a plow. "p'fessors of pugilism and dancing," he went on gravely, "haven't a bit more dignity than we have. they merely have more money. just think! there isn't a butcher or grocer in this town who doesn't doff his hat to me when he whizzes by in his motor--even those whose bills i haven't paid. it's great to have dignity. i don't believe there's another place in the world where he who rides makes obeisance to him who walks. much better than getting as high wages as a trustee's chauffeur! a salary is so much more dignified than wages." he stopped to mop his brow, looking perfectly dignified. "and yet," he added, egged on by my laughter, for i always loved his quiet irony--it was never directed at individuals, but at the ideas and traditions they blandly and blindly followed-- "and yet carping critics of the greatest nation on earth try to make out that art and intellectuality are not properly recognized in the states. pessimists! look at our picture galleries, filled with old masters from abroad! think how that helps american artists! look at our colleges, crowded with buildings more costly than oxford's! think how that encourages american teachers! simply because an occasional foreign professor gets higher pay--bah! there are better things than money. for example, this!" and he bent to his mower again, with much the same derisively dignified strut as on that memorable day long ago when i came and saw and was conquered by it--only then he wore black silk sleeves and now white shirtsleeves. and so much for dignity. i soon saw that if i were to be a help and not a hindrance to the man i loved i should have to depart from what i had been carefully trained to regard as woman's only true sphere. do not be alarmed! i had no thought of leaving home or husband. it is simply that the home, in the industrial sense, is leaving the house--seventy-five per cent of it social scientists say, has gone already--so that nowadays a wife must go out after it or else find some new-fashioned productive substitute if she really intends to be an old-fashioned helpmate to her husband. it was not a feminist theory but a financial condition that confronted us. my done-over trousseau would not last forever, nor would carl's present intellectual wardrobe, which was becoming threadbare. travel abroad and foreign study are just as necessary for an american scholar as foreign buying is for an american dealer in trousseaus. i thought of many plans; but in a college town a woman's opportunities are so limited. we are not paid enough to be ladies, though we are required to dress and act like them--do not forget that point. and yet, when willing to stop being a lady, what could one do? finally i thought of dropping entirely out of the social, religious and charitable activities of the town, investing in a typewriter and subscribing to a correspondence-school course in stenography. i could at least help carl prepare his lectures and relieve him of the burden of letter writing, thus giving him more time for book reviewing and other potboiling jobs, which were not only delaying his own book but making him burn the candle at both ends in the strenuous effort to make both ends meet. i knew carl would object, but i had not expected such an outburst of profane rage as followed my announcement. the poor boy was dreadfully tired, and for months, like the thoroughbred he was, he had repressed his true feelings under a quiet, quizzical smile. "my heavens! what next?" he cried, jumping up and pacing the floor. "haven't you already given up everything you were accustomed to--every innocent pleasure you deserve--every wholesome diversion you actually need in this god-forsaken, monotonous hole? haven't i already dragged you down--you, a lovely, fine-grained, highly evolved woman--down to the position of a servant in my house? and now, on top of all this--no, by god! i won't have it! i tell you i won't have it!" it may be a shocking confession, but i loved him for that wicked oath. he looked so splendid--all fire and furious determination, as when he used to rush up to the net in the deciding game of a tennis match, cool and quick as lightning. "you are right, carl dear," i said, kissing his profane lips; for i had learned long since never to argue with him. "i am too good to be a mere household drudge. it's an economic waste of superior ability. that's why i am going to be your secretary and save you time and money enough to get and keep a competent maid." "but i tell you--" "i know, dear; but what are we going to do about it? we can't go on this way. they've got us down--are we going to let them keep us down? look into the future! look at poor old professor culberson. look at half of the older members of the faculty! they have ceased to grow; their usefulness is over; they are all gone to seed--because they hadn't the courage or the cash to develop anything but their characters!" carl looked thoughtful. he had gained an idea for his book and, like a true scholar, forgot for the moment our personal situation. "really, you know," he mused, "does it pay society to reward its individuals in inverse ratio to their usefulness?" he took out his pocket notebook and wrote: "society itself suffers for rewarding that low order of cunning called business sense with the ultimate control of all other useful talents." he closed his notebook and smiled. "and yet they call the present economic order safe and sane! and all of us who throw the searchlight of truth on it--dangerous theorists! can you beat it?" "well," i rejoined, not being a scholar, "there's nothing dangerous about my theory. instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer--far safer and saner than the usual order. men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives." though it was merely to make a poor joke out of a not objectionable necessity, my plan, as it turned out, was far wiser than i realized. first, i surreptitiously card-catalogued the notes and references for carl's "epoch-making book," as one of the sweet, vague wives of the faculty always called her husband's volumes, which she never read. then i learned to take down his lectures, to look up data in the library, to verify quotations, and even lent a hand in the book reviewing. soon i began to feel more than a mere consumer's interest--a producer's interest--in carl's work. and then a wonderful thing happened: my husband began to see--just in time, i believe--that a wife could be more than a passive and more or less desirable appendage to a man's life--an active and intelligent partner in it. and he looked at me with a new and wondering respect, which was rather amusing, but very dear. he had made the astonishing discovery that his wife had a mind! years of piano practice had helped to make my fingers nimble for the typewriter, and for this advantage i was duly grateful to the family's old-fashioned ideals, though i fear they did not appreciate my gratitude. once, when visiting them during the holidays, i was laughingly boasting, before some guests invited to meet me at luncheon, about my part in the writing of carl's history of property, which had been dedicated to me and was now making a sensation in the economic world, though our guests in the social world had never heard of it. suddenly i saw a curious, uncomfortable look come over the faces of the family. then i stopped and remembered that nowadays wives--nice wives, that is--are not supposed to be helpmates to their husbands except in name; quite as spinsters no longer spin. they can help him spend. at that they are truly better halves, but to help him earn is not nice. to our guests it could mean only one thing--namely, that my husband could not afford a secretary. well, he could not. what of it? for a moment i had the disquieting sensation of having paraded my poverty--a form of vulgarity that carl and i detest as heartily as a display of wealth. the family considerately informed me afterward, however, that they thought me brave to sacrifice myself so cheerfully. dear me! i was not being brave. i was not being cheerful. i was being happy. there is no sacrifice in working for the man you love. and if you can do it with him--why, i conceitedly thought it quite a distinction. few women have the ability or enterprise to attain it! one of my sisters who, like me, had failed to "marry well" valeted for her husband; but somehow that seemed to be all right. for my part i never could see why it is more womanly to do menial work for a man than intellectual work with him. i have done both and ought to know.... can it be merely because the one is done strictly in the home or because no one can see you do it? or is it merely because it is unskilled labor? it is all right for the superior sex to do skilled labor, but a true womanly woman must do only unskilled labor, and a fine lady none at all--so clothed as to prevent it and so displayed as to prove it, thus advertising to the world that the man who pays for her can also pay for secretaries and all sorts of expensive things. is that the old idea? if so i am afraid most college professors' wives should give up the old-fashioned expensive pose of ladyhood and join the new womanhood! well, as it turned out, we were enabled to spend our sabbatical year abroad--just in time to give carl a new lease of life mentally and me physically; for both of us were on the verge of breaking down before we left. such a wonderful year! revisiting his old haunts; attending lectures together in the german and french universities; working side by side in the great libraries; and meeting the great men of his profession at dinner! then, between whiles, we had the best art and music thrown in! ah, those are the only real luxuries we miss and long for! indeed, to us, they are not really luxuries. beauty is a necessity to some persons, like exercise; though others can get along perfectly well without it and, therefore, wonder why we cannot too. carl's book had already been discovered over there--that is perhaps the only reason it was discovered later over here--and every one was so kind about it. we felt quite important and used to wink at each other across the table. "our" book, carl always called it, like a dear. his work was my work now--his ambitions, my ambitions; not just emotionally or inspirationally, but intellectually, collaboratively. and that made our emotional interest in each other the keener and more satisfying. we had fallen completely in love with each other. for the first time we two were really one. previously we had been merely pronounced so by a clergyman who read it out of a book. oh, the glory of loving some one more than oneself! and oh, the blessedness of toiling together for something greater and more important than either! that is what makes it possible for the other thing to endure--not merely for a few mad, glad years, followed by drab duty and dull regret, but for a happy lifetime of useful vigor. that, and not leisure or dignity, is the great compensation for the professorial life. what a joy it was to me during that rosy-sweet early period of our union to watch carl, like a proud mother, as he grew and exfoliated--like a plant that has been kept in a cellar and now in congenial soil and sunshine is showing at last its full potentialities. through me my boy was attaining the full stature of a man; and i, his proud mate, was jealously glad that even his dear dead mother could not have brought that to pass. his wit became less caustic; his manner more genial. people who once irritated now interested him. some who used to fear him now liked him. and as for the undergraduates who had hero-worshiped this former tennis champion, they now shyly turned to him for counsel and advice. he was more of a man of the world than most of his colleagues and treated the boys as though they were men of the world too--for instance, he never referred to them as boys. "i wouldn't be a damned fool if i were you," i once overheard him say to a certain young man who was suffering from an attack of what carl called misdirected energy. more than one he took in hand this way; and, though i used to call it--to tease him--his man-to-man manner, i saw that it was effective. i, too, grew fond of these frank, ingenuous youths. we used to have them at our house when we could spare an evening--often when we could not. none of this work, it may be mentioned, is referred to in the annual catalogue or provided for in the annual budget; and yet it is often the most vital and lasting service a teacher renders his students--especially when their silly parents provide them with more pocket money than the professor's entire income for the support of himself, his family, his scholarship and his dignity. "your husband is not a professor," one of them confided shyly to me--"he's a human being!" after the success of our book we were called to another college--a full professorship at three thousand a year! carl loved his alma mater with a passion i sometimes failed to understand; but he could not afford to remain faithful to her forever on vague promises of future favor. he went to the president and said so plainly, hating the indignity of it and loathing the whole system that made such methods necessary. the president would gladly have raised all the salaries if he had had the means. he could not meet the competitor's price, but he begged carl to stay, offering the full title--meaning empty--of professor and a minimum wage of twenty-five hundred dollars, with the promise of full pay when the funds could be raised. now we had demonstrated that, even on the faculty of an eastern college, two persons could live on fifteen hundred. therefore, with twenty-five hundred, we could not only exist but work efficiently. so we did not have to go. * * * * * i look back on those days as the happiest period of our life together. that is why i have lingered over them. congenial work, bright prospects, perfect health, the affection of friends, the respect of rivals--what more could any woman want for her husband or herself? only one thing. and now that, too, was to be ours! however, with children came trouble, for which--bless their little hearts!--they are not responsible. were we? i wonder! had we a right to have children? had we a right not to have children? it has been estimated by a member of the mathematical department that, at the present salary rate, each of the college professors of america is entitled to just two-fifths of a child. does this pay? should only the financially fit be allowed to survive--to reproduce their species? should or should not those who may be fittest physically, intellectually and morally also be entitled to the privilege and responsibility of taking their natural part in determining the character of america's future generations, for the evolution of the race and the glory of god? i wonder! * * * * * (_boston transcript_) a paradise for a penny maddened by the catalogues of peace-time, one lover of gardens yet managed to build a little eden, and tells how he did it for a song by walter prichard eaton war-time economy (which is a much pleasanter and doubtless a more patriotically approved phrase than war-time poverty) is not without its compensations, even to the gardener. at first i did not think so. confronted by a vast array of new and empty borders and rock steps and natural-laid stone, flanking a wall fountain, and other features of a new garden ambitiously planned before the president was so inconsiderate as to declare war without consulting me, and confronted, too, by an empty purse--pardon me, i mean by the voluntarily imposed necessity for economy--i sat me down amid my catalogues, like niobe amid her children, and wept. (maybe it wasn't amid her children niobe wept, but for them; anyhow i remember her as a symbol of lachrymosity.) dear, alluring, immoral catalogues, sweet sirens for a man's undoing! how you sang to me of sedums, and whispered of peonies and irises--yea, even of german irises! how you spoke in soft, seductive accents of wonderful lilacs, and exquisite spireas, and sweet syringas, murmurous with bees! how you told of tulips and narcissuses, and a thousand lovely things for beds and borders and rock work--at so much a dozen, so very much a dozen, and a dozen so very few! i did not resort to cotton in my ears, but to tears and profanity. then two things happened. i got a letter from a boston architect who had passed by and seen my unfinished place; and i took a walk up a back road where the massachusetts highway commissioners hadn't sent a gang of workmen through to "improve" it. the architect said, "keep your place simple. it cries for it. that's always the hardest thing to do--but the best." and the back-country roadside said, "look at me; i didn't come from any catalogue; no nursery grew me; i'm really and truly 'perfectly hardy'; i didn't cost a cent--and can you beat me at any price? i'm a hundred per cent american, too." i looked, and i admitted, with a blush of shame for ever doubting, that i certainly could not beat it. but, i suddenly realized, i could steal it! i have been stealing it ever since, and having an enormously enjoyable time in the bargain. of course, stealing is a relative term, like anything else connected with morality. what would be stealing in the immediate neighborhood of a city is not even what the old south county oyster fisherman once described as "jest pilferin' 'round," out here on the edges of the wilderness. i go out with the trailer hitched to the back of my ford, half a mile in any direction, and i pass roadsides where, if there are any farmer owners of the fields on the other side of the fence, these owners are only too glad to have a few of the massed, invading plants or bushes thinned out. but far more often there is not even a fence, or if there is, it has heavy woods or a swamp or a wild pasture beyond it. i could go after plants every day for six months and nobody would ever detect where i took them. my only rule--self-imposed--is never to take a single specimen, or even one of a small group, and always to take where thinning is useful, and where the land or the roadside is wild and neglected, and no human being can possibly be injured. most often, indeed, i simply go up the mountain along, or into, my own woods. i am not going to attempt any botanical or cultural description of what i am now attempting. that will have to wait, anyhow, till i know a little more about it myself! but i want to indicate, in a general way, some of the effects which are perfectly possible, i believe, here in a massachusetts garden, without importing a single plant, or even sowing a seed or purchasing any stock from a nursery. take the matter of asters, for instance. hitherto my garden, up here in the mountains where the frosts come early and we cannot have anemone, japonica, or chrysanthemums, has generally been a melancholy spectacle after the middle of september. yet it is just at this time that our roadsides and woodland borders are the most beautiful. the answer isn't alone asters, but very largely. and nothing, i have discovered, is much easier to transplant than a new england aster, the showiest of the family. within the confines of my own farm or its bordering woods are at least seven varieties of asters, and there are more within half a mile. they range in color from the deepest purple and lilac, through shades of blue, to white, and vary in height from the six feet my new englands have attained in rich garden soil, to one foot. moreover, by a little care, they can be so massed and alternated in a long border (such a border i have), as to pass in under heavy shade and out again into full sun, from a damp place to a dry place, and yet all be blooming at their best. with what other flower can you do that? and what other flower, at whatever price per dozen, will give you such abundance of beauty without a fear of frosts? i recently dug up a load of asters in bud, on a rainy day, and already they are in full bloom in their new garden places, without so much as a wilted leaf. adjoining my farm is an abandoned marble quarry. in that quarry, or, rather, in the rank grass bordering it, grow thousands of solidago rigida, the big, flat-topped goldenrod. this is the only station for it in berkshire county. as the ledges from this quarry come over into my pastures, and doubtless the goldenrod would have come too, had it not been for the sheep, what could be more fitting than for me to make this glorious yellow flower a part of my garden scheme? surely if anything belongs in my peculiar soil and landscape it does. it transplants easily, and under cultivation reaches a large size and holds its bloom a long time. massed with the asters it is superb, and i get it by going through the bars with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. but a garden of goldenrod and asters would be somewhat dull from may to mid-august, and somewhat monotonous thereafter. i have no intention, of course, of barring out from my garden the stock perennials, and, indeed, i have already salvaged from my old place or grown from seed the indispensable phloxes, foxgloves, larkspur, hollyhocks, sweet william, climbing roses, platycodons and the like. but let me merely mention a few of the wild things i have brought in from the immediate neighborhood, and see if they do not promise, when naturally planted where the borders wind under trees, or grouped to the grass in front of asters, ferns, goldenrod and the shrubs i shall mention later, a kind of beauty and interest not to be secured by the usual garden methods. there are painted trilliums, yellow and pink lady's slippers, orchis spectabilis, hepaticas, bloodroot, violets, jack-in-the-pulpit, masses of baneberries, solomon's seal, true and false; smooth false foxglove, five-flowered and closed gentians, meadow lilies (canadensis) and wood lilies (philadelphicum), the former especially being here so common that i can go out and dig up the bulbs by the score, taking only one or two from any one spot. these are but a few of the flowers, blooming from early spring to late fall, in the borders, and i have forgotten to mention the little bunch berries from my own woods as an edging plant. let me turn now for a moment to the hedge and shrubbery screen which must intervene between my west border and the highway, and which is the crux of the garden. the hedge is already started with hemlocks from the mountain side, put in last spring. i must admit nursery in-grown evergreens are easier to handle, and make a better and quicker growth. but i am out now to see how far i can get with absolutely native material. between the hedge and the border, where at first i dreamed of lilacs and the like, i now visualize as filling up with the kind of growth which lines our roads, and which is no less beautiful and much more fitting. from my own woods will come in spring (the only safe time to move them) masses of mountain laurel and azalea. from my own pasture fence-line will come red osier, dogwood, with its white blooms, its blue berries, its winter stem-coloring, and elderberry. from my own woods have already come several four-foot maple-leaved vibernums, which, though moved in june, throve and have made a fine new growth. there will be, also, a shadbush or two and certainly some hobble bushes, with here and there a young pine and small, slender canoe birch. here and there will be a clump of flowering raspberry. i shall not scorn spireas, and i must have at least one big white syringa to scent the twilight; but the great mass of my screen will be exactly what nature would plant there if she were left alone--minus the choke cherries. you always have to exercise a little supervision over nature! a feature of my garden is to be rock work and a little, thin stream of a brooklet flowing away from a wall fountain. i read in my catalogues of marvellous alpine plants, and i dreamed of irises by my brook. i shall have some of both too. why not? the war has got to end one of these days. but meanwhile, why be too down-hearted? on the cliffs above my pasture are masses of moss, holding, as a pincushion holds a breastpin, little early saxifrage plants. from the crannies frail hair bells dangle forth. there are clumps of purple cliffbrase and other tiny, exquisite ferns. on a gravel bank beside the state road are thousands of viper's bugloss plants; on a ledge nearby is an entire nursery of sedum acre (the small yellow stone crop). columbines grow like a weed in my mowing, and so do quaker ladies, which, in england, are highly esteemed in the rock garden. the greens committee at the nearby golf club will certainly let me dig up some of the gay pinks which are a pest in one of the high, gravelly bunkers. and these are only a fraction of the native material available for my rock work and bank. many of them are already in and thriving. as for the little brook, any pond edge or brookside nearby has arrowheads, forget-me-nots, cardinal flowers, blue flag, clumps of beautiful grasses, monkey flowers, jewel-weed and the like. there are cowslips, too, and blue vervain, and white violets. if i want a clump of something tall, joe-pye-weed is not to be disdained. no, i do not anticipate any trouble about my brookside. it will not look at all as i thought a year ago it was going to look. it will not look like an illustration in some "garden beautiful" magazine. it will look like--like a brook! i am tremendously excited now at the prospect of seeing it look like a brook, a little, lazy, trickling yankee brook. if i ever let it look like anything else, i believe i shall deserve to have my spring dry up. probably i shall have moments of, for me, comparative affluence in the years to come, when i shall once more listen to the siren song of catalogues, and order japanese irises, darwin tulips, hybrid lilacs, and so on. but by that time, i feel sure, my native plants and shrubs will have got such a start, and made such a luxuriant, natural tangle, that they will assimilate the aliens and teach them their proper place in a new england garden. at any rate, till the war is over, i am per cent berkshire county! * * * * * wanted: a home assistant (_pictorial review_) one illustration made by a staff artist, with the caption, "the new home assistant is trained for her work." wanted: a home assistant business hours and wages are helping women to solve the servant problem by louise f. nellis wanted: a home assistant--eight hours a day; six days a week. sleep and eat at home. pay, twelve dollars a week. whenever this notice appears in the help wanted column of a city newspaper, fifty to one hundred answers are received in the first twenty-four hours! "why," we hear some one say, "that seems impossible! when i advertised for a maid at forty dollars a month with board and lodging provided, not a soul answered. why are so many responses received to the other advertisement?" let us look more closely at the first notice. wanted: a home assistant! how pleasant and dignified it sounds; nothing about a general houseworker or maid or servant, just home assistant! we can almost draw a picture of the kind of young woman who might be called by such a title. she comes, quiet, dignified, and interested in our home and its problems. she may have been in an office but has never really liked office work and has always longed for home surroundings and home duties. i remember one case i was told of--a little stenographer. she had gladly assumed her new duties as home assistant, and had wept on the first christmas day with the family because it was the only christmas she had spent in years in a home atmosphere. or perhaps the applicant for the new kind of work in the home may have been employed in a department store and found the continuous standing on her feet too wearing. she welcomes the frequent change of occupation in her new position. or she may be married with a little home of her own, but with the desire to add to the family income. we call these home assistants, miss smith or mrs. jones, and they preserve their own individuality and self-respect. "well, i would call my housemaid anything if i could only get one," says one young married woman. "there must be more to this new plan than calling them home assistants and addressing them as miss." let us read further in the advertisement: "eight hours a day; six days a week." one full day and one half day off each week, making a total of forty-four hours weekly which is the standard working week in most industrial occupations. at least two free sundays a month should be given and a convenient week-day substituted for the other two sundays. if saturday is not the best half day to give, another afternoon may be arranged with the home assistant. "impossible," i can hear mrs. reader say, "i couldn't get along with eight hours' work a day, forty-four hours a week." no! well, possibly you have had to get along without any maid at all, or you may have had some one in your kitchen who is incompetent and slovenly, whom you dare not discharge for fear you can not replace her. would you rather not have a good interested worker for eight hours a day than none at all? during that time the home assistant works steadily and specialization is done away with. she is there to do your work and she does whatever may be called for. if she is asked to take care of the baby for a few hours, she does it willingly, as part of her duties; or if she is called upon to do some ironing left in the basket, she assumes that it is part of her work, and doesn't say, "no, madam, i wasn't hired to do that," at the same time putting on her hat and leaving as under the old system. the new plan seems expensive? "twelve dollars a week is more than i have paid my domestic helper," mrs. reader says. but consider this more carefully. you pay from thirty-five to fifty dollars a month with all the worker's food and lodging provided. this is at the rate of eight to eleven dollars a week for wages. food and room cost at least five dollars a week, and most estimates are higher. the old type of houseworker has cost us more than we have realized. the new system compares favorably in expense with the old. "i am perfectly certain it wouldn't be practical not to feed my helper," mrs. reader says. under the old system of a twelve to fourteen-hour working day, it would not be feasible, but if she is on the eight-hour basis, the worker can bring a box-luncheon with her, or she can go outside to a restaurant just as she would if she were in an office or factory. the time spent in eating is not included in her day's work. think of the relief to the house-keeper who can order what her family likes to eat without having to say, "oh, i can't have that; mary wouldn't eat it you know." "i can't afford a home assistant or a maid at the present wages," some one says. "but i do wish i had some one who could get and serve dinner every night. i am so tired by evening that cooking is the last straw." try looking for a home assistant for four hours a day to relieve you of just this work. you would have to pay about a dollar a day or six dollars a week for such service and it would be worth it. how does the home assistant plan work in households where two or more helpers are kept? the more complicated homes run several shifts of workers, coming in at different hours and covering every need of the day. one woman i talked to told me that she studied out her problem in this way! she did every bit of the work in her house for a while in order to find out how long each job took. she found, for instance, that it took twenty-five minutes to clean one bathroom, ten minutes to brush down and dust a flight of stairs, thirty minutes to do the dinner dishes, and so on through all the work. she made out a time-card which showed that twenty-two hours of work a day was needed for her home. she knew how much money she could spend and she proceeded to divide the work and money among several assistants coming in on different shifts. her household now runs like clockwork. one of the splendid things about this new system is its great flexibility and the fact that it can be adapted to any household. thoughtful and intelligent planning such as this woman gave to her problems is necessary for the greatest success of the plan. the old haphazard methods must go. the housekeeper who has been in the habit of coming into her kitchen about half past five and saying, "oh, mary, what can we have for dinner? i have just come back from down-town; i did expect to be home sooner," will not get the most out of her home assistant. work must be scheduled and planned ahead, the home must be run on business methods if the system is to succeed. i heard this explained to a group of women not long ago. after the talk, one of them said, "well, in business houses and factories there is a foreman who runs the shop and oversees the workers. it wouldn't work in homes because we haven't any foreman." she had entirely overlooked her job as forewoman of her own establishment! "suppose i have company for dinner and the home assistant isn't through her work when her eight hours are up, what happens?" some one asks. all overtime work is paid for at the rate of one and one-half times the hourly rate. if you are paying your assistant twelve dollars for a forty-four-hour week, you are giving her twenty-eight cents an hour. one and one half times this amounts to forty-two cents an hour, which she receives for extra work just as she would in the business world. "will these girls from offices and stores do their work well? they have had no training for housework unless they have happened to do some in their own homes," some one wisely remarks. the lack of systematic preparation has always been one of the troubles with our domestic helpers. it is true that the new type of girl trained in business to be punctual and alert, and to use her mind, adapts herself very quickly to her work, but the trained worker in any field has an advantage. with this in mind the central branch of the young women's christian association in new york city has started a training-school for home assistants. the course provides demonstrations on the preparation of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and talks on the following: house-cleaning, laundry, care of children, shopping, planning work, deportment, efficiency, and duty to employer. this course gives a girl a general knowledge of her duties and what is even more important she acquires the right mental attitude toward her work. the girls are given an examination and those who successfully pass it are given a certificate and placed as trained home assistants at fifteen dollars a week. the national association would like to see these training-schools turning out this type of worker for the homes all over the country. this is a constructive piece of work for women to undertake. housewives' leagues have interested themselves in this in various centers, and the y.w.c.a. will help wherever it can. there are always home economics graduates in every town who could help give the course, and there are excellent housekeepers who excel in some branch who could give a talk or two. the course would be worth a great deal in results to any community. the united states employment bureaus are also taking a hand in this, and, with the coöperation of the high schools, are placing girls as trained assistants on the new basis. i have talked with many women who are not only using this plan to-day but have been for several years. it has been more than six years ago since mrs. helene barker's book "wanted a young woman to do housework" was published. this gave the working plan to the idea. women in boston, providence, new york, cleveland, and in many other cities have become so enthusiastic over their success in running their homes with the home assistants that a number are giving their time to lecturing and talking to groups of women about it. let me give two concrete illustrations of the practical application of housework on a business basis. mrs. a. lives in a small city in the middle west. her household consists of herself, her husband, and her twelve year old son. she had had the usual string of impossible maids or none at all until she tried the new system. through a girls' club in a factory in the city, she secured a young woman to work for her at factory hours and wages. her assistant came at seven-thirty in the morning. by having the breakfast cereal prepared the night before, breakfast could be served promptly at eight, a plan which was necessary in order that the boy get to school on time. each morning's work was written out and hung up in the kitchen so that the assistant wasted no time in waiting to know what she had to do. lunch was at twelve-fifteen, and at one o'clock the home assistant went home. she came back on regular duty at five-thirty to prepare and serve the dinner. except for times when there were guests for dinner she was through her work by eight. when she worked overtime, there was the extra pay to compensate. mrs. a. paid her thirteen dollars a week and felt that she saved money by the new plan. the assistant was off duty every other sunday, and on alternate weeks was given all day tuesday off instead of sunday. tuesday was the day the heavy washing was done and the laundress was there to help with any work which mrs. a. did not feel equal to doing. even though there are times in the day when she is alone, mrs. a. says she would not go back to the old system for anything. mrs. b. lives in a city apartment. there are four grown people in the family. she formerly kept two maids, a cook-laundress, and a waitress-chambermaid. she often had a great deal of trouble finding a cook who would do the washing. as her apartment had only one maid's room, she had to give one of the guestrooms to the second maid. she paid these girls forty dollars apiece and provided them with room and board. her apartment cost her one hundred and fifteen dollars a month for seven rooms, two of which were occupied by maids. mrs. b. decided to put her household on the new business basis last fall. she moved into a five-room apartment which cost her ninety dollars, but she had larger rooms and a newer building with more up-to-date improvements than she had had before. she saved twenty-five dollars a month on rent plus eighty dollars wages and about thirty dollars on her former maids' food. all together she had one hundred and thirty-five dollars which could be used for home assistants. this is the way the money was spent: a laundress once a week................................ $ . home assistant, on duty from . a.m. to p.m........ . home assistant, on duty from m. to p.m............ . _____ week...............................................$ . on this schedule the work was done better than ever before. there was no longer any grievance about the washing. mrs. b. had some one continuously on duty. the morning assistant was allowed a half hour at noon to eat her luncheon which she brought with her. as mrs. b. entertained a great deal, especially at luncheon, she arranged to have the schedule of the two assistants overlap at this time of day. the morning worker, it will be noted, was employed for only six hours. the afternoon worker was a trained assistant and, therefore, received fifteen dollars a week. she had an hour off, between three-thirty and four-thirty and was on duty again in time to serve tea or afternoon refreshments. if there were a number of extra people for dinner, the assistant was expected to stay until nine and there was never any complaining about too much company. mrs. b. has a better apartment and saves money every month besides! * * * * * (_new york sun_) six years of tea rooms business career of a woman college graduate "for the last three years i have cleared $ , a year on my tea rooms," declared a young woman who six years ago was graduated with distinction at one of the leading colleges of the country. "i attained my twenty-third birthday a month after i received my diploma. on that day i took stock of the capital with which i was to step into the world and earn my own living. my stock taking showed perfect health, my college education and $ , my share of my father's estate after the expenses of my college course had been paid. "in spite of the protests of many of my friends i decided to become a business woman instead of entering one of the professions. i believed that a well conducted tea room in a college town where there was nothing of the kind would pay well, and i proceeded to open a place. "after renting a suitable room i invested $ in furnishings. besides having a paid announcement in the college and town papers i had a thousand leaflets printed and distributed. "though i couldn't afford music i did have my rooms decorated profusely with flowers on the afternoon of my opening. as it was early in the autumn the flowers were inexpensive and made a brave show. my only assistant was a young irish woman whom i had engaged for one month as waitress, with the understanding that if my venture succeeded i would engage her permanently. "we paid expenses that first afternoon, and by the end of the week the business had increased to such an extent that i might have engaged a second waitress had not so many of my friends persisted in shaking their heads and saying the novelty would soon wear off. during the second week my little irish girl and i had so much to do that on several occasions our college boy patrons felt themselves constrained to offer their services as waiters, while more than one of the young professors after a long wait left the room with the remark that they would go elsewhere. "of course it was well enough to laugh as we all knew there was no 'elsewhere,' but when i recalled how ready people are to crowd into a field that has proved successful, i determined no longer to heed the shaking heads of my friends. the third week found me not only with a second assistant but with a card posted in a conspicuous place announcing that at the beginning of the next week i would enlarge my quarters in such a way as to accommodate more than twice as many guests. "having proved to my own satisfaction that my venture was and would be successful, i didn't hesitate to go into debt to the extent of $ . this was not only to repair and freshen up the new room but also to equip it with more expensive furnishing than i had felt myself justified in buying for the first. "knowing how every little thing that happens is talked about in a college town, i was sure the difference in the furnishings of the rooms would prove a good advertisement. i counted on it to draw custom, but not just in the way it did. "before i realized just what was happening i was receiving letters from college boys who, after proclaiming themselves among my very first customers, demanded to know why they were discriminated against. i had noticed that everybody appeared to prefer the new room and that on several occasions when persons telephoning for reservations had been unable to get the promise of a table in there, they had said they would wait and come at another time. what i had not noticed was that only men coming alone or with other men, and girls coming with other girls, would accept seats in the first room. "i learned from the letters of 'my very first patrons' that no gentleman would take a girl to have tea in a second class tea room. they were not only hitting at the cheaper furnishings of my first room but also at the waiter whom i had employed, because i felt the need of a man's help in doing heavy work. the girl in her fresh apron and cap was more attractive than the man, and because he happened to serve in the first room he also was second class. "no, i couldn't afford to buy new furniture for that room, so i did the only thing i could think of. i mixed the furniture in such a way as to make the two rooms look practically alike. i hired another girl and relegated the man to the kitchen except in case of emergency. "although my custom fell off in summer to a bare sprinkling of guests afternoons and evenings and to almost no one at lunch, i kept the same number of employees and had them put up preserves, jams, syrups, and pickles for use the coming season. i knew it would not only be an economical plan but also a great drawing card, especially with certain of the professors, to be able to say that everything served was made on the place and under my own supervision. "my second winter proved so successful that i determined to buy a home for my business so that i might have things exactly as i wished. i was able to pay the first instalment, $ , , on the purchase price and still have enough in bank to make alterations and buy the necessary furnishings. "the move was made during the summer, and when i opened up in the autumn i had such crowds afternoons and evenings that i had to put extra tables in the halls until i could get a room on the second floor ready. at present i have two entire floors and often have so many waiting that it is next to impossible to pass through the entrance hall. "three summers ago i opened a second tea room at a seashore resort on the new england coast. i heard of the place through a classmate whose family owned a cottage down there. she described it as deadly dull, because there was nothing to do but bathe and boat unless you were the happy possessor of an automobile or a horse. "i was so much interested in her description of the place that i went down one warm day in april and looked things over. i found a stretch of about three miles of beach lined with well appearing and handsome cottages and not a single place of amusement. the village behind the beach is a lovely old place, with twenty or more handsome old homes surrounded by grand trees. there are two or three small stores, a post office, two liveries and the railroad station half a mile away. "before i left that afternoon i had paid the first month's rent on the best of the only two cottages to be rented on the beach. of course it needed considerable fixing up and that had to be done at my own expense, but as i was getting it at a rental of $ for the season i was not worried at the outlay. the cottages told me enough of the character of the people who summered on that beach to make me sure that i would get good interest on all the money spent. "immediately after commencement i shut up my college tea rooms, leaving only the kitchen and storeroom open and in charge of an experienced woman with instructions to get more help when putting up preserves and pickles made it necessary. then i moved. "the two first days on the beach my tea room didn't have a visitor. people strolled by and stared at the sign, but nobody came in to try my tea. the third day i had a call from my landlord, who informed me that he had been misled into letting me have his cottage, and offering to return the amount paid for the first month's rent, he very politely requested me to move out. "after considerable talking i discovered that the cottagers didn't like the way my waitresses dressed. they were too stylish and my rooms appeared from the outside to be so brilliantly lighted that they thought i intended to sell liquor. "i didn't accept the offered rent, neither did i agree to move out, but i did assure my landlord that i would go the very day anything really objectionable happened on my premises. i told him of my success in the college town and then invited him to bring his family the following afternoon to try my tea. "well, they came, they saw, and i conquered. that evening all the tables on my piazza were filled and there was a slight sprinkling indoors. a few days later the classmate who had told me of the place came down for the summer and my troubles were at an end. "the secret of my success is hard work and catering to the taste of my patrons. had i opened either a cheap or a showy place in the college town, i would not have gained the good will of the faculty or the patronage of the best class of students. if my prices had been too high or the refreshments served not up to the notch, the result would not have been so satisfactory. "knowing one college town pretty well, i knew just about what was needed in the student's life; that is, an attractive looking place, eminently respectable, where you can take your best girl and get good things to eat well served at a reasonable cost. "the needs of the beach were pretty much the same. people can't stay in the water all the time, neither can they spin around the country or go to an unlighted village at night in their carriages and automobiles. my tea room offers a recreation, without being a dissipation. "another point about which many people question me is the effect of my being a business woman on my social standing. i haven't noticed any slights. i receive many more invitations than it is possible for me to accept. i go with the same set of girls that i did while i was in college. "two of my classmates are lawyers, more than one is a doctor, and three have gone on the stage. i know that my earnings are far more than any of theirs, and i am sure they do not enjoy their business any more than i do. if i had to begin again i would do exactly as i have done, with one exception--i would lay out the whole of my $ in furnishing that first tea room instead of keeping $ as a nest egg in bank." * * * * * (_country gentleman_) two illustrations: . half-tone reproducing photograph of dressed chickens with the caption, "there is this rule you must observe: pick your chickens clean." . reproduction in type of shipping label. by parcel post one man's way of serving the direct-to-consumer market by a. l. sarran if you live within a hundred and fifty miles of a city, if you possess ordinary common sense and have the ability to write a readable and understandable letter, you may, from september to april of each year, when other farmers and their wives are consuming instead of producing, earn from fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars net profit each month. you may do this by fattening and dressing chickens for city folks, and by supplying regularly fresh country sausage, hams, lard and eggs. this is not an idle theory. last september i began with one customer; today--this was written the end of march--i have nearly customers to whom i am supplying farm products by parcel post. instead of selling my chickens to the huckster or to the local poultry house for twelve cents a pound, i am selling them to the consumer in the city for twenty cents a pound, live weight, plus the cost of boxing and postage. not only that, i am buying chickens from my neighbors at a premium of one to two cents over the huckster's prices, "milk feeding" them, and selling them to my city customers at a profit of six to seven cents a pound. i buy young hogs from my neighbors at market prices and make them into extra good country sausage that nets me twenty-five cents a pound in the city, and into hams for which i get twenty-five cents a pound, delivered. the only pork product on which i do not make an excellent profit is lard. i get fifteen cents a pound for it, delivered to the city customer, and it costs me almost that much to render and pack it. at this writing storekeepers and egg buyers in my county are paying the farmer seventeen cents for his eggs. i am getting twenty-five cents a dozen for eggs in thirty-dozen eases and twenty-nine cents a dozen in two-dozen boxes. my prices to the city man are based upon the water street, chicago, quotation for "firsts," which, at this writing, is nineteen cents. if this price goes up i go up; if it goes down i go down. i got my customers by newspaper advertising--almost exclusively. it is a comforting belief that one satisfied customer will get you another, and that that customer will get you another, and so on, but it has not so worked out in my experience. out of all my customers less than twelve have become customers through the influence of friends. my experience has taught me another thing: that direct advertising does not pay. by direct advertising i mean the mailing of letters and circulars to a list of names in the hope of selling something to persons whose names are on that list. i tried it three times--once to a list of names i bought from a dealer in such lists; once to a list that i myself compiled from the society columns of two chicago dailies; and once to a classified list that i secured from a directory. the results in these cases were about the same. the net cost of each new customer that i secured by circulars and letters was $ . . the net cost of each new customer that i secured by newspaper advertising was fifty-four cents. not every city newspaper will get such results. in my case i selected that paper in chicago which in my judgment went into the greatest number of prosperous homes, and whose pages were kept clean of quack and swindling advertisements. i used only the sunday issues, because i believe the sunday issues are most thoroughly read. the farmer will want to use, and properly so, the classified columns of the paper for his advertising. but he should patronize only that paper whose columns provide a classification especially for farm and food products. i spent twelve dollars for advertising in one clean chicago daily with a good circulation, and got three orders. the trouble was that my advertisement went into a column headed "business personals," along with a lot of manicure and massage advertising. he on the farm who proposes to compete with the shipper, commission man and retailer for the city man's trade should devote his efforts to producing food of a better quality than the city man is accustomed to get via the shipper-commission-man-retailer route. wherefore i proposed to give the city man the fattest, tenderest, juiciest, cleanest, freshest chicken he could get--and charge him a profitable price in so doing. when i wrote my advertisements i did not stint myself for space. an advertisement that tells no reason why the reader should buy from the advertiser is, in my opinion, a poor advertisement. therefore, i told my story in full to the readers of the sunday paper, although it cost me six cents a word to do it. here is a sample of my advertising: i send young, milk-fed chickens, ready for the cook, direct to you from the farm. these chickens are fattened in wire-bottomed, sanitary coops, thus insuring absolute cleanliness, on a ration of meal, middlings and milk. the chicken you get from me is fresh; it is killed after your order is received; is dressed, drawn, cooled out for hours in dry air, wrapped in waxed paper and delivered to you on the morning of the third day after your order is mailed; it is fat, tender and sweet. the ordinary chicken that is fattened on unspeakable filth in the farmer's barnyard, and finds its way to your table via the huckster-shipper-commission-man-retailer route cannot compare with one of mine. send me your check--no stamps--for $ . and i will send you a five-pound--live-weight--roasting chicken for a sample. if it does not please you i'll give your money back. add cents to that check and i'll mail you in a separate box a two-pound package of the most delicious fresh-ground sausage meat you ever ate. made from the selected meats of young hogs only; not highly seasoned. these sausage cakes make a breakfast fit for a president. money back if you don't like them. a. l. sarran. notice that i told why the reader should buy one of my chickens rather than a chicken of whose antecedents he knew nothing. that it paid to spend six cents a word to tell him so is proved by the fact that this particular advertisement brought me, in four days, twenty-three orders, each accompanied by a check. i repeated my advertisements in sunday issues, stopping only when i had as many customers as i could take care of. getting a customer and keeping him are two different propositions. a customer's first order is sent because of the representation made in the advertisement that he read. his second and his subsequent orders depend upon how you satisfy him and continue to satisfy him. my rule is to select, weigh, dress, draw, handle, wrap and box the chicken with the same scrupulous care that i would exercise if the customer were actually present and watching me. i have another rule: the customer is always right. if he complains i satisfy him, immediately and cheerfully. it is better to lose a chicken than to lose a customer. i am now about to make a statement with which many of my readers will not agree. it is more than true; it is so important that the success of a mail-order business in dressed chickens depends upon a realization of it. it is this: _a majority of farmers and their wives do not know what constitutes a fat chicken._ i make this statement because of the experience i have had with country folks in buying their chickens for my feeding coops. if they really consider to be fat the chickens which they have assured me were fat, then they do not know fat chickens. a chicken can be fat to a degree without being so fat as he can or should be made for the purpose of marketing. there is a flavor about a well-fattened, milk-fed chicken that no other chicken has. every interstice of his flesh is juicy and oily. no part of him is tough, stringy muscle, as is the case if he is "farm-fattened" while being allowed to range where he will. if you think your chicken is a fat one, pick it up and rub the ball of your thumb across its backbone about an inch behind the base of the wings. if the backbone is felt clearly and distinctly the chicken is not fat. i fatten my chickens in coops the floors of which are made of heavy wire having one-inch mesh; underneath the wire is a droppings pan, which is emptied every day. my coops are built in tiers and long sections. i have ninety of them, each one accommodating nine chickens. i have enough portable feeding coops with wire bottoms and droppings pans underneath to enable me to feed, in all, about one thousand chickens at one time. chickens should be fed from ten to fourteen days in the coops. i give no feed whatever to the chicken the first day he is in the coop, but i keep a supply of sour milk in the trough for him. i feed my chickens three times a day. at seven a.m. i give them a fairly thick batter of meal, middlings or oat flour, about half and half, and sour milk. i feed them only what they will clean up in the course of half an hour. at noon i feed them again only what they will clean up in half an hour. this feed is the same as the morning feed except that it is thinner. about four o'clock i give them a trough full of the same feed, but so thick it will barely pour out from the bucket into the trough. the next morning the troughs are emptied--if anything remains in them--into the big kettle where the feed is mixed for the morning feeding. the idea is this: more fat and flesh are made at night than in the daytime; therefore see that no chicken goes to bed with an empty crop. about the eighth to tenth day force the feeding--see to it that the chicken gets all it will eat three times a day. by keeping an accurate account of the costs of meal, milk, and so on, i find that i can put a pound of fat on a coop-fed chicken for seven cents. when one considers that this same pound brings twenty cents, and that milk feeding in coops raises the per pound value of the chicken from twelve to twenty cents, one must admit that feeding chickens is more profitable than feeding cattle. do not feed your chicken anything for twenty-four hours before killing it. do not worry about loss in weight. the only weight it will lose will be the weight of the feed in its crop and gizzard, and the offal in its intestines--and you are going to lose that anyway when you dress and draw it. if you will keep the bird off feed for twenty-four hours you will find that it will draw much more easily and cleanly. hang the chicken up by the feet and kill it by bleeding it away back in the mouth. let it bleed to death. grasp the chicken's head in your left hand, the back of its head against the palm of your hand. do not hold it by the neck, but grasp it by the bony part of its head and jaws. reach into the throat with a three-inch, narrow, sharp knife and cut toward the top and front of the head. you will sever the big cross vein that connects the two "jugular" veins in the neck, and the blood will pour out of the mouth. if you know how to dry-pick you will not need to be told anything by me; if you do not know it will do you no good to have me tell you, because i do not believe a person can learn to dry-pick chickens by following printed instructions. at any rate, i could not. i never learned until i hired a professional picker to come out from town to teach me. so far as i can judge, it makes no difference to the consumer in the city whether the chicken is scalded or dry-picked. there is this to be said for the scalded chicken--that it is a more cleanly picked chicken than the dry-picked one. the pin feathers are more easily removed when the chicken is scalded. on the other hand, there are those feed-specializing, accurate-to-the-ten-thousandth-part-of-an-inch experts, who say that the dry-picked chicken keeps better than the scalded one. if the weather is warmer than, say, seventy-five degrees, it might; under that, there is no difference. i do the most of my selling in chicago, and my place is a hundred and fifty miles south of that city; if a scalded chicken will keep when i am selling it that far away it will keep for almost anyone, because none of you is going to sell many chickens at any point more than a hundred and fifty miles from your place. there is this caution to be observed in scalding a chicken: do not have the water too hot. i had trouble on this score, and as a result my chickens were dark and did not present an appetizing appearance. finally i bought a candy thermometer--one that registered up to degrees. by experimenting i found that degrees was the point at which a chicken scalded to pick the easiest, but that a chicken scalded at degrees presented a better appearance after being picked and cooled. whichever method you use, observe this rule: pick your chicken clean. after my chicken has cooled out enough so the flesh will cut easily, i draw it. i chop off the head close up, draw back the skin of the neck a couple of inches, and then cut off the neck. the flap of skin thus left serves to cover the bloody and unsightly stub of the neck. next i open up the chicken from behind and below the vent and pull out the gizzard--if the chicken has been kept off feed for twenty-four hours the empty crop will come with it--intestines and liver. i remove the gall bladder from the liver, open and clean the gizzard, and replace it and the liver in the chicken. then i cut a slit across the chicken just back of the keel of the breast bone. i cut the feet off at the knee joint and slip the drumstick through this slit. then i lay the chicken up to cool out overnight. the next morning it may be wrapped and boxed, and is then ready for mailing. wrapping and boxing must not be slighted. the clean, sanitary appearance of the chicken when it is unpacked in the kitchen of your customer goes a long way toward prejudicing that customer in your favor. i buy thirty pounds of waxed paper, twenty-four by thirty-six inches, and have the paper house cut it in two. this gives me sheets, each eighteen by twenty-four inches, for the price of a ream of the full size--at this time about five dollars, or a half cent a sheet. each chicken is wrapped in one sheet of this waxed paper, and is then packed in a corrugated paper box made especially for sending chickens by parcel post. i buy three sizes of these boxes. one size, which costs me four cents each, will hold one four-pound chicken when dressed and drawn. the next size, costing five cents each, will hold two very small chickens, or one large chicken. the third size, costing six cents each, will hold two large chickens, three medium-sized ones, or four small ones. do not use makeshifts, such as old shoe boxes. in the first place, your shipment is not properly protected by such a box; in the second place, your postmaster is likely to refuse to accept it for mailing, as he would be justified in doing; and in the third place, your customer receives his chicken in a box that has been used for he wonders what, and has been in he wonders what places. it is for this reason that i never ask a customer to return a box to me. i do not want to use a box a second time. if i were a city man, getting my chickens by mail, i should want them sent to me in a brand-new box, made for the special purpose of sending chickens by mail--and i'd want them in no other box. then i'd feel sure of them. the cost of shipping by parcel post is low. i live ten miles from my county seat, and the postage required to send a five-pound, live-weight chicken, dressed and boxed, from my place to town is eight cents. the postage required to send that same five-pound chicken from here to chicago, one hundred and fifty miles, is eight cents. the express company charges twenty-six cents for the same service, and does not deliver so quickly. but parcel-post delivery was not always so admirably done in chicago. when i began shipping up there last september it was no uncommon thing for my packages to be so delayed that many chickens would spoil. i recall the "straw that broke the camel's back." i mailed twenty-six chickens one day--and in due course i received thirteen letters, each advising me of the same mournful event. the chicken had spoiled because of delay in delivery. my wife wanted to quit. i didn't. i made good the losses to the customers and prepared a label, a copy of which i forwarded to the third assistant postmaster general at washington, asking his permission to use it, and telling him of the vexatious and expensive delays in delivering my packages in chicago. in due time i received the desired permission, and ordered the labels printed. the scheme worked. every time a package was not delivered on schedule time the customer notified me, and i made complaint to the postmaster at chicago. gradually the service improved until now i have no trouble at all. if i were to ship two packages today to the same address in chicago, sending one by parcel post and the other by express, i believe the parcel-post package would be delivered first. at any rate, it has been done for me. the weakness in the parcel-post delivery lies in the fact that perishable products--such as dressed chickens--cannot be handled in warm weather. i think that if the post office department would cut some of its red tape and permit the shipment of air-tight packages in air-tight conveyors this particular problem could be solved. you will, of course, have more or less correspondence with your customers. by all means use your own letterheads, but do not let your printer embellish them with cuts of roosters, chickens, pigs, or the like. not that we are ashamed of them; far be it from such. you do not, however, need to have a sheet of paper littered up with pictures of imaginary animals in order to convince your customer that you are selling the meats of that animal. i like a plainly printed letterhead that carries my name, my address and my business. that's all. by all means keep books on your farm-to-table venture, if you undertake it. set down on one side of the page what you pay for boxes, labels, postage, and so on, including what you pay yourself for chickens at your huckster's prices. on the other side of the page set down what your city customer pays you. add up the pages, do a simple sum in subtraction, and you will know just how much you have made. if i kept only twenty-five hens i should sell my eggs and my chickens direct to the city consumer. when the farmer learns to sell direct instead of letting the huckster, the poultry house, the commission man, the dresser and the retailer stand between him and the consumer, then poultry raising will become really profitable. there are too many folks who sell their eggs and "take it out in trade." * * * * _(saturday evening post)_ one large illustration, a wash drawing, made by a staff artist. sales without salesmanship by james h. collins "say, you're a funny salesman!" exclaimed the business man. "here i make up my own mind that i need two motor trucks and decide to buy 'em from your company. then i send for a salesman. you come down and spend a week looking into my horse delivery, and now you tell me to keep my horses. what kind of a salesman do you call yourself anyway?" "what made you think you needed motor trucks?" was the counterquestion of the serious, thick-spectacled young chap. "everyone else seems to be turning to gasoline delivery. i want to be up to date." "your delivery problem lies outside the gasoline field," said the salesman. "your drivers make an average of ninety stops each trip. they climb stairs and wait for receipts. their rigs are standing at the curb more than half the time. nothing in gasoline equipment can compete with the horse and wagon under such conditions. if you had loads of several tons to be kept moving steadily i'd be glad to sell you two trucks." "suppose i wanted to buy them anyway?" "we could not accept your order." "but you'd make your commission and the company its profit." "yes; but you'd make a loss, and within a year your experience would react unfavorably upon us." so no sale was effected. facts learned during his investigation of this business man's delivery problem led the salesman to make suggestions that eliminated waste and increased the effectiveness of his horse rigs. about a year later, however, this business man sent for the salesman again. he contemplated motorized hauling for another company of which he was the president. after two days' study the salesman reported that motor trucks were practicable and that he needed about five of them. "all right--fill out the contract," directed the business man. "don't you want to know how these trucks are going to make you money?" asked the salesman. "no; if you say i need five trucks, then i know that's just what i need!" a new kind of salesmanship is being developed in many lines of business--and particularly in the rebuilding of sales organizations made necessary by the ending of the war and return to peace production. "study your goods," was the salesman's axiom yesterday. "study your customer's problem," is the viewpoint to-day; and it is transforming the salesman and sales methods. indeed, the word salesman tends to disappear under this new viewpoint, for the organization which was once charged largely with disposing of goods may now be so intimately involved in technical studies of the customers' problems that selling is a secondary part of its work. the sales department is being renamed, and known as the advisory department or the research staff; while the salesman himself becomes a technical counsel or engineering adviser. camouflage? no; simply better expression of broader functions. as a salesman, probably he gave much attention to the approach and argument with which he gained his customer's attention and confidence. but, with his new viewpoint and method of attack, perhaps the first step is asking permission to study the customer's transportation needs, or accounting routine, or power plant--or whatever section of the latter's business is involved. the experience of the thick-spectacled motor-truck salesman was typical. originally he sold passenger cars. then came the war, with factory facilities centered on munitions and motor trucks. there being no more passenger cars to sell, they switched him over into the motor-truck section. there he floundered for a while, trying to develop sales arguments along the old lines. but the old arguments did not seem to fit, somehow. it might have been possible to demonstrate the superior construction of his motor truck; but competitors would meet point with point, and customers were not interested in technicalities anyway. he tried service as an argument; but that was largely a promise of what motor trucks would do for people after they bought them, and competitors could always promise just as much, and a little more. company reputation? his company had a fine one--but motor-truck purchasers wanted to know the cost of moving freight. price? no argument at all, because only one other concern made motor trucks calling for so great an initial investment. so thick-specs, being naturally serious and solid, began to dig into motor trucks from the standpoint of the customer. he got permission to investigate delivery outfits in many lines. selling a five-ton motor truck to many a business man was often equivalent to letting johnny play with a loaded machine gun. such a vehicle combined the potentiality of moving from fifty to seventy-five tons of freight daily, according to routing and the number of hours employed; but it involved a daily expense of twenty-five dollars. the purchaser could lose money in two ways at swift ratios, and perhaps unsuspectingly: he might not use his full hauling capacity each day or would use it only half the year, during his busy season. or he might underestimate costs by overlooking such items as interest and depreciation. thick-specs' first actual sale was not a motor truck at all, but a motorcycle, made by another company. within three months, however, this motorcycle added two big trucks to a fleet of one dozen operated by a wholesale firm. that concern had good trucks, and kept them in a well-equipped garage, where maintenance was good. but at least once daily there would be a road breakdown. usually this is a minor matter, but it ties up the truck while its puzzled driver tries to locate the trouble. when a motorcycle was bought for the garage, drivers were forbidden to tamper with machinery on the road--they telephoned in to the superintendent. by answering each call on his own motorcycle--about an hour daily--the repairman kept equipment in such good shape that valuable extra service was secured from the fleet each day. the salesman-adviser did not originate this scheme himself, but discovered it in another concern's motor-truck organization; in fact, this is the advantage the salesman-adviser enjoys--acquaintance with a wide range of methods and the knack of carrying a good wrinkle from one business to another. he brings the outside point of view; and, because modern business runs toward narrow specialization, the outside point of view is pretty nearly always welcome, provided it is honest and sensible. in another case he had to dig and invent to meet a peculiar situation. there was a coal company working under a handicap in household deliveries. where a residence stood back from the sidewalk coal had often to be carried from the motor truck in baskets. this kept the truck waiting nearly an hour. a motor truck's time is worth several dollars hourly. if the coal could have been dumped on the sidewalk and carried in later, releasing the truck, that would have saved expense and made more deliveries possible. a city ordinance prohibited dumping coal on the sidewalk except by permit. coal men had never tried to have that ordinance changed. but the salesman-adviser went straight to the city authorities and, by figures showing the expense and waste involved, secured a modification, so that his customer, the coal company, got a blanket permit for dumping coal and gave bonds as an assurance against abuse of the privilege. then a little old last year's runabout was bought and followed the coal trucks with a crew to carry the coal indoors, clearing sidewalks quickly. this salesman-adviser's philosophy was as simple as it was sound. confidence is the big factor in selling, he reasoned. your customer will have confidence in you if he feels that you are square and also knows what you are talking about. by diligent study of gasoline hauling problems in various lines of business he gained practical knowledge and after that had only to apply his knowledge from the customer's side of the problem. "put it another way," he said: "suppose you had a factory and expected to run it only one year. there would not be time to get returns on a costly machine showing economies over a five-year period; but if you intended to run your factory on a five-year basis, then that machine might be highly profitable. "in sales work it was just the same; if you were selling for this year's profit alone, you'd close every sale regardless of your customer's welfare. let the purchaser beware! but if you meant to sell on the five-year basis, then confidence is the big investment, and the most profitable sale very often one you refuse to make for immediate results." he had a fine following when the draft reached him; and during the eight months he spent in an army uniform he utilized his knowledge of gasoline transportation as an expert in uncle sam's motor service. upon being discharged he returned to his job and his customers, and to-day the concern with which he is connected is taking steps to put all its motor-truck salesmen on this advisory basis. war shot its sales force to pieces--the army and the navy reached out for men and tied up production facilities; so there was nothing to sell. but war also gave a clean slate for planning a new sales force. as old salesmen return and new men are taken on for sales instruction, this concern trains them--not with the old sales manual, by standard approach and systematic sales argument, but by sending them out into the field to study gasoline hauling problems. they secure permission to investigate trucking methods of contractors, department stores, wholesale merchants, coal dealers, truck owners hauling interstate freight, mills, factories and other lines of business. they investigate the kinds and quantities of stuff to be moved, the territory and roads covered, the drivers, the garage facilities. they ride behind typical loads and check up running time, delays, breakdowns, gasoline and oil consumption. engineering teaches people to think in curves. this youngster had to make a curve of the grocer's trucking before he could visualize it himself. his curve included factors like increase in stuff that had been hauled during the past three years and additions to the motor equipment. when you have a healthy curve showing any business activity, the logical thing to do, after bringing it right down to date, is to let it run out into the future at its own angle. this was done with the grocery curve, and its future extension indicated that not more than three months later the grocery house would need about four more five-ton motor trucks. closer investigation of facts behind the curve revealed an unusual growth in sugar hauling, due to the increase in supply and removal of consumer war restrictions. and that grocery concern bought additional trucks for sugar within two months. with the insight made possible by such a curve a salesman might safely have ordered the trucks without his customer's knowledge and driven them up to his door the day the curve showed they were needed. "here are the trucks you wanted to haul that sugar." "good work! drive 'em in!" what has been found to be sound sales policy in the motor truck business applies to many other lines. yesterday the salesman of technical apparatus sought the customer with a catalogue and a smile--and a large ignorance of the technical problems. to-day that kind of selling is under suspicion, because purchasers of technical equipment have been led to buy on superficial selling points and left to work out for themselves complex technicalities that belong to the manufacturer of the equipment. in the west during recent years a large number of pumps of a certain type have been sold for irrigating purposes. purchasers bought from the catalogue-and-smile type of salesman, hooked their pumps up to a power plant--and found that they lifted only about half the number of gallons a minute promised in the catalogue. manufacturers honestly believed those pumps would do the work indicated in their ratings. they had not allowed for variations in capacity where pumps were installed under many different conditions and run by different men. the situation called for investigation at the customer's end; when it was discovered that these pumps ought to be rated with an allowance for loss of capacity a half to two-thirds of the power, due to friction and lost power. it might have been dangerous for the salesman to show up again in an irrigation district where a lot of his pumps were "acting up," armed only with his catalogue and smile. but when an engineer appeared from the pump company to help customers out of their difficulties, he won confidence immediately and made additional sales because people felt that he knew what he was talking about. the superintendent of a big machinery concern found that his expense for cutting oils was constantly rising. salesmen had followed salesmen, recommending magic brands of the stuff; yet each new barrel of oil seemed to do less work than the last--and cost more in dollars. one day a new kind of visitor showed up and sent in the card of a large oil company. he was not a salesman, but an investigator of oil problems. the superintendent took him through the plant. he studied the work being done by screw-cutting machines, lathes and other equipment operated with cutting oil. where salesmen had recommended brands without technical knowledge of either the work to be done or the composition of the oil, this stranger wrote specifications that cut down the percentage of costly lard oil used on some work; and he eliminated it altogether on others. moreover, he pointed out sheer losses of oil by picking up a handful of metal cuttings from a box, letting them drip, measuring the oil that accumulated and recommending a simple device for reclaiming that oil before the waste metal was sold. this new viewpoint in selling is developing in so many lines that to enumerate them would be to make a national directory of business concerns manufacturing milling machinery, office devices, manufacturing and structural materials, equipment for the farm and the mine. people who purchase such products have been accustomed to meeting two different representatives of manufacturers: first, the salesman skilled in selling, but deficient in technical knowledge. "this chap is here to see how much he can get out of me," said the prospective consumer to himself; and he was on his guard to see that the visitor got as little as possible, either in the way of orders or information. the other representative came from the mechanical department to see how present equipment was running, or perhaps to "shoot trouble." he was long on technical knowledge, but probably dumb when it came to salesmanship. "this fellow is here to help me out of my troubles," said the customer. "i'll see how much i can get out of him." presently manufacturers of equipment woke up to the fact that their mechanical men--inspectors and trouble shooters--had a basis of confidence which the salesman pure and simple was rapidly losing. moreover, the technical man gained a knowledge of the customer's requirements that furnished the best foundation for selling new equipment. the salesman discovered the technical man and went to him for tips on new equipment needed by customers whose plants he had visited. the technical man also discovered the salesman, for it was plain enough that equipment well sold--skillfully adjusted to the customer's needs--gave the least margin for trouble shooting. so there has been a meeting of minds; and to-day the salesman studies the technicalities, and the technical man is learning salesmanship, and their boss is standing behind them both with a new policy. this is the policy of performance, not promises--service before sales. under that policy the very terms salesmanship and sales department are beginning to disappear, to be replaced by new nomenclature, which more accurately indicates what a manufacturer's representative can do for the customer, and gives him access to the latter on the basis of confidence and good will. * * * * * _(munsey's magazine)_ the accident that gave us wood-pulp paper how a mighty modern industry owed its beginning to gottfried keller and a wasp by parke f. hanley on the day when president wilson was inaugurated to his second term, this country had its fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of wood-pulp. were it not for a series of lucky chances that developed into opportunity, this wood-pulp anniversary might have remained for our children's children. have you ever given thought to the accidentalism of many great discoveries? the element of haphazard is generally combined with a series of coincidences. looking back over the developments that led to gigantic contributions to our civilization, one cannot fail to be struck by the coordination of events. apparently there always has been a conspiracy of natural forces to compel men of thought and resourcefulness to add another asset to progress. your earliest school readers have been full of these--for instance, watt and his steam-kettle, franklin and his kite. now the youngsters are reading that the wrights derived a fundamental principle of aviation--the warping-tip--from the flight of crows. with the awe comes a disquieting thought. how far back should we be were it not for these fortuitous circumstances? among all the great things that have been given to the world in the last three-quarters of a century, few measure beside the wood-pulp industry. with its related trades and sciences, it is comprised within the ten great activities of mankind. in manufacture and distribution, it employs an army matching in size the russian battle hordes. its figures of investment and production are comparable to the debts of the great war. yet it remained for a wasp and gottfried keller to bring us out of the era of rag paper. together, they saved us from a retardation of universal thought. therefore, let us consider the agents. first, the wasp. she was one of a family of several hundreds, born in the hartz mountains in the year . when death claimed most of her relatives at the end of the season allotted as the life of a wasp, this survivor, a queen wasp, became the foundress of a family of her own. she built her nest of selected wood-fibers, softened them to a pulp with her saliva, and kneaded them into cells for her larvæ. her family came forth in due course, and their young wings bore them out into the world. the nest, having served its purpose, was abandoned to the sun and the rain. maeterlinck, who attributes emotions to plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect. she would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of gravitation to sir isaac newton. as to keller, he was a simple german, by trade a paper-maker and by avocation a scientist of sorts. one day in --and this marks the beginning of the accidents--returning home from his mill, he trod upon the abandoned nest. had not the tiny dwelling been deserted, he probably would have cherished nothing but bitter reflections about the irascibility of wasps. as it was, he stooped to see the ruin he had wrought. the crushed nest lay soft in his hand, soft and pliable, and yet tough in texture. it was as soft as his own rag-made paper. it was not paper, and yet it was very much like paper. crumbling it in his fingers, he decided that its material was wood-pulp. keller was puzzled to know how so minute a creature had welded wood into a paperlike nest. his state of mind passed to interest, thence to speculation, and finally to investigation. he carried his problem and its possibilities to his friend, heinrich voelter, a master mechanic. together they began experiments. they decided to emulate the wasp. they would have to granulate the wood as she had done. the insect had apparently used spruce; they used spruce under an ordinary grindstone. hot water served as a substitute for the wasp's salivary juices. their first attempts gave them a pulp astonishingly similar to that resulting from the choicest rags. they carried the pulp through to manufacture, with a small proportion of rags added--and they had paper. it was good paper, paper that had strength. they found that it possessed an unlooked-for advantage in its quick absorption of printing-ink. have you followed the chain of accidents, coincidences, and fortunate circumstances? suppose the wasp had not left her nest in keller's path. what if he had been in haste, or had been driven off by the queen's yellow-jacketed soldiers? what if he had no curiosity, if he had not been a paper-maker, if he had not enjoyed acquaintance with voelter? wood-pulp might never have been found. leaving gottfried keller and voelter in their hour of success, we find, sixteen years afterward, two other germans, albrecht and rudolf pagenstecher, brothers, in the export trade in new york. they were pioneering in another field. they were shipping petroleum to europe for those rising young business men, john d. and william rockefeller. they were seeking commodities for import when their cousin, alberto pagenstecher, arrived from the fatherland with an interesting bit of news. "a few weeks ago, in a paper-mill in the hartz, i found them using a new process," he said. "they are making paper out of wood. it serves. germany is printing its newspapers on wood-pulp paper." to his cousins it seemed preposterous that wood could be so converted, but alberto was convincing. he showed them voelter's patent grants and pictures of the grinders. the pagenstechers went to germany, and when they returned they brought two of the grinders--crude affairs devised for the simple purpose of pressing wood upon a stone. they also brought with them several german mechanics. a printer in new york, named strang, had already secured the united states rights of the new process. he was engaged in the manufacture of calendered paper, and, therefore, had no occasion to use wood-pulp; so he was willing to surrender the patents in exchange for a small interest. the pagenstechers wanted water-power for their grinders, and they located their first mill beside stockbridge bowl, in curtisville, now interlaken, massachusetts. on an outlay of eleven thousand dollars their mill was built and their machinery installed. two or three trials, with cotton waste added to the ground wood, gave them their paper. their first product was completed on the th of march, . it was a matter of greater difficulty to dispose of the stock. the trade fought against the innovation. finally wellington smith, of the near-by town of lee, massachusetts, was persuaded to try it. rag-paper had been selling at twenty-four cents a pound. smith's mill still exhibits the first invoice with the pagenstechers, which shows the purchase of wood-paper at eleven cents. the paper was hauled to lee in the dead of night, for smith's subordinates wished to spare him from the laughter of his fellow millmen. it was sold, and proved successful, and the pagenstechers were rushed with orders. they built a second mill in luzeme, new york, but abandoned it soon afterward for the greater water-power to be obtained at palmer's falls, where now stands the second largest mill in the united states. manufacturers tumbled over themselves to get the benefit of the new process. the originators in this country held the patent rights until , letting them out on royalties until that time. with each new plant the price of paper fell, until at one period it sold at one and a half cents a pound. trial had proved that spruce was the only suitable wood for the pulp. until rags were combined in about one-quarter proportion. then it was found that other coniferous woods might be used to replace the rags, after being submitted to what is called the sulfite process. in this treatment small cubes of wood, placed in a vat, have their resinous properties extracted, and the wood is disintegrated. a combination of ground and sulfite wood makes the paper now used for news-print. as has been told, the primary advantage of the wood-pulp paper was its immediate absorption of ink. this made possible much greater speed in printing, and led in turn to the development of the great modern newspaper and magazine presses, fed by huge rolls of paper, which they print on both sides simultaneously. these wonderful machines have now reached the double-octuple stage--monsters capable of turning out no less than five thousand eight-page newspapers in a single minute, or three hundred thousand in an hour. with the evolution from the flat-bed to the web or rotary presses there came further development in typesetting-machines--the linotype, the monotype, and others. with paper and presses brought to such simplification, newspapers have sprouted in every town, almost every village, and the total number of american periodicals is counted by tens of thousands. there are magazines that have a circulation of more than a million copies weekly. the leading daily newspapers in new york print anywhere from one hundred thousand copies to four times as many, and they can put extra editions on the streets at fifteen-minute intervals. the aggregate circulation of daily newspapers in the united states is close to forty million copies. weekly newspapers and periodicals reach fifty millions, and monthly publications mount almost to one hundred millions; and all this would be impossible without wood-pulp paper. the annual production of wood-pulp in the united states and canada is estimated by albrecht pagenstecher, the survivor of the innovators, to be worth nearly five hundred millions of dollars. take into consideration the hundreds of thousands employed in the mills, the men who cut and bring in the raw product, the countless number in the printing, publishing, and distributing trades. then hark back to the accident that put the wasp's nest under the toe of gottfried keller! * * * * * (_providence journal_) one zinc-etching illustration reproducing an old wood-cut of the ship, with the caption, "the savannah, first steamship that crossed the ocean." centennial of the first steamship to cross the atlantic ( -column head) one hundred years ago this week there was launched at new york the ship savannah, which may be called the father of the scores of steamers that are now carrying our soldiers and supplies from the new world to the old world. the savannah was the first ship equipped with steam power to cross the atlantic ocean. it made the trip in days, using both sails and engine, and the arrival of the strange craft at liverpool was the cause of unusual stir among our english cousins. like every step from the beaten path the idea of steam travel between the new world and the old world was looked upon with much scepticism and it was not until about years later that regular, or nearly regular, steamer service was established. the launching of the savannah took place on aug. , . it was not accompanied by the ceremony that is accorded many of the boats upon similar occasions to-day. as a matter of fact, it is probable that only a few persons knew that the craft was intended for a transatlantic trip. the keel of the boat was laid with the idea of building a sailing ship, and the craft was practically completed before capt. moses rogers, the originator of the venture, induced scarborough & isaacs, ship merchants of savannah, to buy her and fit her with a steam engine for service between savannah and liverpool. the ship, which was built by francis fickett, was feet long, feet broad and feet deep. it had three masts which, of course, were of far greater importance in making progress toward its destination than was the steam engine. capt. rogers had gained a reputation for great courage and skill in sailing. he had already had the honor of navigating the sea with a steamer, taking the new jersey from new york to the chesapeake in , a voyage which was then thought to be one of great danger for such a vessel. it was natural, then, that he was especially ambitious to go down in history as the first master of a steam ship to cross the ocean. as soon as the vessel had been purchased by the savannah ship merchants, the work of installing the engine was begun. this was built by stephen vail of speedwell, n.j., and the boiler by david dod of elizabeth, n. j. the paddle-wheels were made of iron and were "detachable," so that the sections could be removed and laid on the deck. this was done when it was desired to proceed under canvas exclusively and was also a precaution in rough weather. in short, the savannah was an auxiliary steamer, a combination of steam and sail that later became well known in shipping. this is much like the early development of the gasoline marine engine, which was an auxiliary to the sail, a combination that is still used. capt. rogers took the boat from new york to savannah in eight days and hours, using steam on this trip for ½ hours. on may , , under capt. rogers, the savannah set sail from her home port for liverpool and made the trip in days. as long as the trip took, the voyage was considerably shorter than the average for the sailing ship in , and this reduction in time was accomplished in spite of the fact that the savannah ran into much unfavorable weather. capt. rogers used steam on of the days and doubtless would have resorted to engine power more of the time except for the fact that at one stage of the voyage the fuel was exhausted. it was natural that the arrival of the steamer in english waters should not have been looked upon with any great favor by the englishmen. in addition to the jeers of the sceptical, the presence of vessels was accompanied by suspicion on the part of the naval authorities, and the merchants were not favorably impressed. when the savannah approached the english coast with her single stack giving forth volumes of dense black smoke, it was thought by those on shore that she was a ship on fire, and british men-of-war and revenue cutters set out to aid her. when the truth was known, consternation reigned among the english officers. they were astonished at the way the craft steamed away from them after they had rushed to assist what they thought was a ship in distress. the reception of the savannah at liverpool was not particularly cordial. some of the newspapers even suggested that "this steam operation may, in some manner, be connected with the ambitious views of the united states." a close watch was kept on the boat while she lay in british waters, and her departure was welcome. in the second volume of "memoranda of a residence at the court of st. james," richard rush, then american minister in london, includes a complete log of the savannah. dispatch no. from minister rush reports the arrival of the ship and the comment that was caused by its presence as follows: london, july , . sir--on the th of last month arrived at liverpool from the united states the steamship savannah, capt. rogers, being the first vessel of that description that ever crossed the sea, and having excited equal admiration and astonishment as she entered port under the power of her steam. she is a fine ship of tons burden and exhibits in her construction, no less than she has done in her navigation across the atlantic, a signal trophy of american enterprise and skill upon the ocean. i learn from capt. rogers, who has come to london and been with me, that she worked with great ease and safety on the voyage, and used her steam full days. her engine acts horizontally and is equal to a horsepower. her wheels, which are of iron, are on the sides, and removable at pleasure. the fuel laid in was bushels of coal, which got exhausted on her entrance into the irish channel. the captain assures me that the weather in general was extremely unfavorable, or he would have made a much shorter passage; besides that, he was five days delayed in the channel for want of coal. i have the honor to be, etc., richard rush. to have made the first voyage across the atlantic ocean under steam was a great accomplishment and brought no little credit to capt. rogers and the united states. pioneers in many ventures, the american people had added another honor to their record. and this was even more of a credit because in those early days skilled workmen were comparatively few on these shores and the machine shops had not reached a stage of efficiency that came a short time later. there were, of course, in men who had developed into mechanics and there were shops of some account, as the steamboat for short trips had been in existence for some years. but the whole enterprise of planning a steam voyage in which the boat should be headed due east was characteristic of the boldness and bravery of the americans. the savannah did not return to the states directly from england. it steamed from liverpool to st. petersburg and brought forth further comment from the old world. she proved that the marine steam engine and side-wheels were practicable for deep-sea navigation. the idea of transatlantic travel under steam had been born and it was only necessary to develop the idea to "shorten the distance" between the two continents. this pioneer voyage, however, was then looked upon more as a novelty than as the inception of a new method of long-distance travel. the trip had failed to demonstrate that steam was an entirely adequate substitute for the mast and sail in regular service. since the savannah was primarily a sailing vessel, the loss of steam power by the crippling of the engine would not be serious, as she could continue on her way with paddle-wheels removed and under full sail. it was years later that the idea of employing vessels propelled by steam in trade between the united states and england came under the serious consideration of merchants and ship builders. in the interval the marine boiler and the engines had been improved until they had passed the stage of experiment, and coasting voyages had become common on both sides of the atlantic. the beginning of real transatlantic steam voyages was made by the sirius and the great western. the latter boat had been built especially for trips across the ocean and the former was taken from the cork and london line. the sirius started from liverpool on april , , and the great western four days later. they arrived in new york within hours of each other, the sirius at p.m. on april and the great western at o'clock the following afternoon. neither of the vessels carried much sail. these boats gave more or less irregular service until withdrawn because of their failure to pay expenses. in the cunard company was formed and the paddle steamers britannia, arcadia, columbia, and caledonia were put into service. from that time on the steamer developed with great rapidity, the value of which was never more demonstrated than at the present time. it will always be remembered, however, that this capt. rogers with his crude little savannah was the man whose bold enterprise gave birth to the idea of transatlantic travel under steam. * * * * * (a syndicate sunday magazine section of the _harrisburg patriot_) searching for the lost atlantis by grosvenor a. parker not so long ago a stubby tramp steamer nosed its way down the english channel and out into the atlantic. her rusty black bow sturdily shouldered the seas aside or shoved through them with an insistence that brought an angry hail of spray on deck. the tramp cared little for this protest of the sea or for the threats of more hostile resistance. through the rainbow kicked up by her forefoot there glimmered and beckoned a mirage of wealthy cities sunk fathoms deep and tenanted only by strange sea creatures. for the tramp and her crew there was a stranger goal than was ever sought by an argosy of legend. the lost cities of atlantis and all the wealth that they contain was the port awaiting the searchers under the rim of the western ocean. it's no wild-goose chase that had started thus unromantically. the men who hope to gain fame and fortune by this search are sure of their ground and they have all the most modern mechanical and electrical aids for their quest. on the decks of their ship two submarine boats are cradled in heavy timbers. one of them is of the usual type, but the other looks like a strange fantasy of another jules verne. a great electric eye peers cyclops-wise over the bow and reaching ahead of the blunt nose are huge crab-like claws delicate enough to pick up a gold piece and strong enough to tear a wall apart. these under-water craft are only a part of the equipment that bernard meeker, a young englishman, has provided to help him in his search for the lost city. there are divers' uniforms specially strengthened to resist the great pressure under which the men must work. huge electric lamps like searchlights to be lowered into the ocean depths and give light to the workers are stacked close beside powerful generators in the ship's hold. in the chart room there are rolls of strange maps plotting out the ocean floor, and on a shelf by itself rests the tangible evidence that this search means gold. it is a little bowl of strange design which was brought up by a diver from the bottom of the caribbean. when this bowl first came to light it was supposed to be part of loot from a sunken spanish galleon, but antiquarians could find nothing in the art of the orient, or africa, or of peru and mexico to bear out this theory. even the gold of which it was made was an alloy of a different type from anything on record. it was this that gave meeker his first idea that there was a city under the sea. he found out the exact spot from which the divers had recovered the bowl, and compared the reckonings with all the ancient charts which spoke of the location of fabled atlantis. in one old book he located the lost city as being close to the spot where the divers had been, and with this as a foundation for his theories he asked other questions of the men who had explored that hidden country. their tale only confirmed his belief. "the floor of the sea is covered with unusual coral formation," one of them told him, "but it was the queerest coral i ever saw. it looked more like stone walls and there was a pointed sort of arch which was different from any coral arch i had ever seen." that was enough to take meeker to the caribbean to see for himself. he won't tell what he found, beyond the fact that he satisfied himself that the "coral" was really stone walls pierced by arched doors and windows. meeker kept all his plans secret and might have sailed away on his treasure hunt without making any stir if he had not been careless enough to name one of his submarines "atlantis." he had given out that he was sailing for yucatan to search for evidence of prehistoric civilization. it is true that the shores of yucatan are covered with the remnants of great cities but the word "atlantis" awoke suspicion. questions followed and meeker had to admit the bare facts of his secret. "only half a dozen men know the supposed location of atlantis," he said, just before sailing, "and we don't intend to let any others into the secret. those who have furnished the money for the expedition have done so in the hope of solving the mystery of the lost continent, and without thought for the profit. the divers and the other men of the crew have the wildest dreams of finding hoarded wealth. it is not at all impossible that their dreams will come true, and that they will be richly rewarded. at any rate they deserve it, for the work will be dangerous. "our plans are simple enough. with the submarine of the usual type we will first explore that part of the sea bottom which our charts cover. this vessel has in its conning tower a powerful searchlight which will reveal at least the upper portions of any buildings that may be there. for work in greater depths we will have to depend on the 'atlantis' with its special equipment of ballast tanks and its hatch-ways for the divers. "you see, we do not plan to lower the divers from the steamer or from a raft. instead they will step directly out on the sea floor from a door in the submarine which opens out of an air chamber. in this the diver can be closed and the air pressure increased until it is high enough to keep out the water. all that he has to do then is to open the door and step out, trailing behind him a much shorter air hose and life line than would hamper him if he worked from the surface. the air hose is armored with steel links so that there will be no danger of an inquisitive shark chopping it in two." previous to the diver's exploration the claws of the "atlantis" will search out the more promising places in the ruins. these claws work on a joint operated electrically, and on the tip of each is a sensitive electrical apparatus which sets off a signal in the conning tower of the submarine. crawling over the bottom like a strange monster, the claws will also help to avoid collisions with walls when the depths of the water veils the power of the searchlight. there is, in addition, a small electric crane on the nose of the submarine so that heavy objects can be borne to the surface. meeker does not expect to gain much in the way of heavy relics of the lost city, for certain parts of the sea bottom are so covered with ooze that he believes it only possible to clear it away through suction hose long enough to make quick observation possible. the subaqueous lights which will help this work are powerful tungsten lamps enclosed in a steel shell with a heavy prismatic lens at the bottom. these lamps are connected to the power plant on the steamer by armored cables and will develop , candle power each. the generating station on the parent ship of the expedition, as the rusty tramp is known, is as extensive as those on a first class liner or a dreadnought. little of the power will go for the benefit of the steamer though. its purpose is to furnish the light for the swinging tungstens and to charge the great storage batteries of the submarines. these batteries run the many motors on which depends the success of the work. if it were not for electricity, the searchers would be handicapped. as it is they call to their aid all the strong magic of modern days. index "accident that gave us wood-pulp paper, the," adventure as a source of interest, . agricultural journals, , , ; articles in, , , , , , , ; examples of articles in, , , ; excerpts from, , , aims in feature writing, alliteration in titles, amateur writers, opportunities for, , _american magazine_, articles from, , ; excerpt from, amusements as a source of interest, analysis of articles on factory school, , analysis of special articles, ; outline for, animals as a source of interest, appeals, kinds of, ; combinations of, "arbor day advice," arrangement of material, balance in titles, "bedroom in burlap, a," beginnings, ; structure of, ; types of, _boston herald_, article from, _boston transcript_, articles from, , ; excerpt from, "boys in search of jobs," "brennan mono-rail car," browning, john m., personality sketch of, "by parcel post," camera, use of, for illustrations, captions for illustrations, "centennial of first steamship to cross the atlantic," _chicago tribune_, excerpt from, children as a source of interest, _christian science monitor_, article from, clark, thomas arkle, personality sketch of, class publications, , , college training for writing, _collier's weekly_, excerpt from, collins, james h., article by, confession articles, , ; examples of, "confessions of a college professor's wife," contests for supremacy as a source of interest, correspondents as feature writers, cosgrove, john o'hara, on sunday magazine sections, "county service station, a," _country gentleman_, articles from, , ; excerpt from, cover page for manuscripts, ; form for, crime, presentation of, curiosity as a qualification for writers, definition of special feature article, _delineator_, article from, ; excerpt from, descriptive beginnings, _designer_, article from, _detroit news_, article from, ; excerpt from, diction, direct address beginnings, direct address titles, drawings for illustrations, ; mailing of, eaton, walter prichard, article by; editorial readers, editors, point of view of, entertainment as purpose of articles, ; wholesome, ethics of feature writing, , _everybody's magazine_, article from, _every week_, article from, examples, methods of presenting, exposition by narration and description, factory school, articles on, , , familiar things as a source of interest, _farm and fireside_, article from, farm journals, , , , ; articles in, , , , , , ; examples of articles in, , , ; excerpts from, , , figures of speech, as element of style, ; in beginnings, ; in titles, filing material, "forty years bartered for what?" 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examples of, personal experience articles, ; examples of, personal experience as a source of subjects, personal observation as a source of subjects, personal success as a source of interest, _philadelphia public ledger_, excerpt from, photographs, value of, ; securing, ; requirements for, ; sizes of, ; captions for, ; mailing of, _pictorial review_, article from, planning an article, , _popular science monthly_, excerpt from, practical guidance articles, , ; examples of, practical guidance units, processes, methods of presenting, prominence as a source of interest, _providence journal_, article from, ; excerpt from, purpose, definiteness of, ; statement of, qualifications for feature writing, question beginnings, question titles, quiller-couch, sir arthur, on jargon, quotation beginnings, quotation titles, _railroad man's magazine_, excerpt from, readers, editorial, readers, point of view of, , recipes, methods of presenting, reporters as feature writers, , revision of articles, rhyme in titles, romance as a source of interest, "sales without salesmanship," _san francisco call_, excerpt from, _saturday evening post_, articles from, , , scandal, presentation of, scientific publications as a source of subjects and material, , "searching for the lost atlantis," sentences, structure of, ; 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types of, ; methods of framing, "tommy--who enjoys straightening out things," _tractor and gas engine review_, excerpt from, trade journals, , ; articles in, ; article from, ; excerpts from, , training for feature writing, types of beginnings, types of special articles, types of titles, typographical style, units in articles, "wanted: a home assistant," weed, inis h., article by, welfare of other persons as a source of interest, wheeler, howard, on newspaper men as magazine writers, "where girls learn to wield spade and hoe," white, frank marshall, article by, "who'll do john's work?" _woman's home companion_, article from, women as feature writers, "wonderful america! thinks little austrian," words, choice of, writers, opportunities for amateur, , "your porter," english for college courses expository writing by mervin j. curl. gives freshmen and sophomores something to write about, and helps them in their writing. sentences and thinking by norman foerster, university of north carolina, and j.m. stedman, jr., emory university. a practice book in sentence-making for college freshmen. a handbook of oral reading by lee emerson bassett, leland stanford junior university. especial emphasis is placed on the relation of thought and speech, technical vocal exercises being subordinated to a study of the principles underlying the expression of ideas. illustrative selections of both poetry and prose are freely employed. argumentation and debating (_revised edition_) by william t. foster, reed college. the point of view throughout is that of the student rather than that of the teacher. the rhetorical principles of narration by carroll lewis maxcy, williams college. a clear and thorough analysis of the three elements of narrative writing, viz.: setting, character, and plot. representative narratives edited by carroll lewis maxcy. this compilation contains twenty-two complete selections of various types of narrative composition. the study and practice of writing english by gerhard r. lomer, ph.d., and margaret ashmun. a textbook for use in college freshman courses. how to write special feature articles by willard g. bleyer, university of wisconsin. a textbook for classes in journalism and in advanced english composition. newspaper writing and editing by willard g. bleyer. this fully meets the requirements of courses in journalism as given in our colleges and universities, and at the same time appeals to practical newspaper men. types of news writing by willard g. bleyer. over two hundred typical stories taken from representative american newspapers are here presented in a form convenient for college classes in journalism. houghton mifflin company for college literature courses history and criticism botta--handbook of universal literature. grumbine -- stories from browning. hinchman and gummere -- lives of great english writers from chaucer to browning. matthews -- a study of versification. maynadier -- the arthur of the english poets. perry -- a study of prose fiction. perry -- a study of poetry. root -- the poetry of chaucer. simonds --a student's history of english literature. simonds -- a student's history of american literature. baker -- dramatic technique. brooke -- the tudor drama. matthews -- a study of the drama. schelling -- a history of the elizabethan drama. vols. anthologies poetry holt -- leading english poets from chaucer to browning. neilson and webster -- the chief british poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. page -- the chief american poets. weston -- the chief middle english poets. prose alden -- readings in english prose of the eighteenth century. alden -- readings in english prose of the nineteenth century. part i; part ii; complete. foerster -- the chief american prose writers. the drama dickinson -- chief contemporary dramatists, first series. dickinson -- chief contemporary dramatists, second series. matthews -- chief european dramatists. neilson -- the chief elizabethan dramatists (except shakespeare) to the close of the theatres. houghton mifflin company transcribed from the leadenhall press ltd. edition by david price, email ccx @coventry.ac.uk novel notes to big-hearted, big-souled, big-bodied friend conan doyle prologue years ago, when i was very small, we lived in a great house in a long, straight, brown-coloured street, in the east end of london. it was a noisy, crowded street in the daytime; but a silent, lonesome street at night, when the gas-lights, few and far between, partook of the character of lighthouses rather than of illuminants, and the tramp, tramp of the policeman on his long beat seemed to be ever drawing nearer, or fading away, except for brief moments when the footsteps ceased, as he paused to rattle a door or window, or to flash his lantern into some dark passage leading down towards the river. the house had many advantages, so my father would explain to friends who expressed surprise at his choosing such a residence, and among these was included in my own small morbid mind the circumstance that its back windows commanded an uninterrupted view of an ancient and much-peopled churchyard. often of a night would i steal from between the sheets, and climbing upon the high oak chest that stood before my bedroom window, sit peering down fearfully upon the aged gray tombstones far below, wondering whether the shadows that crept among them might not be ghosts--soiled ghosts that had lost their natural whiteness by long exposure to the city's smoke, and had grown dingy, like the snow that sometimes lay there. i persuaded myself that they were ghosts, and came, at length, to have quite a friendly feeling for them. i wondered what they thought when they saw the fading letters of their own names upon the stones, whether they remembered themselves and wished they were alive again, or whether they were happier as they were. but that seemed a still sadder idea. one night, as i sat there watching, i felt a hand upon my shoulder. i was not frightened, because it was a soft, gentle hand that i well knew, so i merely laid my cheek against it. "what's mumma's naughty boy doing out of bed? shall i beat him?" and the other hand was laid against my other cheek, and i could feel the soft curls mingling with my own. "only looking at the ghosts, ma," i answered. "there's such a lot of 'em down there." then i added, musingly, "i wonder what it feels like to be a ghost." my mother said nothing, but took me up in her arms, and carried me back to bed, and then, sitting down beside me, and holding my hand in hers--there was not so very much difference in the size--began to sing in that low, caressing voice of hers that always made me feel, for the time being, that i wanted to be a good boy, a song she often used to sing to me, and that i have never heard any one else sing since, and should not care to. but while she sang, something fell on my hand that caused me to sit up and insist on examining her eyes. she laughed; rather a strange, broken little laugh, i thought, and said it was nothing, and told me to lie still and go to sleep. so i wriggled down again and shut my eyes tight, but i could not understand what had made her cry. poor little mother, she had a notion, founded evidently upon inborn belief rather than upon observation, that all children were angels, and that, in consequence, an altogether exceptional demand existed for them in a certain other place, where there are more openings for angels, rendering their retention in this world difficult and undependable. my talk about ghosts must have made that foolishly fond heart ache with a vague dread that night, and for many a night onward, i fear. for some time after this i would often look up to find my mother's eyes fixed upon me. especially closely did she watch me at feeding times, and on these occasions, as the meal progressed, her face would acquire an expression of satisfaction and relief. once, during dinner, i heard her whisper to my father (for children are not quite so deaf as their elders think), "he seems to eat all right." "eat!" replied my father in the same penetrating undertone; "if he dies of anything, it will be of eating." so my little mother grew less troubled, and, as the days went by, saw reason to think that my brother angels might consent to do without me for yet a while longer; and i, putting away the child with his ghostly fancies, became, in course of time, a grown-up person, and ceased to believe in ghosts, together with many other things that, perhaps, it were better for a man if he did believe in. but the memory of that dingy graveyard, and of the shadows that dwelt therein, came back to me very vividly the other day, for it seemed to me as though i were a ghost myself, gliding through the silent streets where once i had passed swiftly, full of life. diving into a long unopened drawer, i had, by chance, drawn forth a dusty volume of manuscript, labelled upon its torn brown paper cover, novel notes. the scent of dead days clung to its dogs'-eared pages; and, as it lay open before me, my memory wandered back to the summer evenings--not so very long ago, perhaps, if one but adds up the years, but a long, long while ago if one measures time by feeling--when four friends had sat together making it, who would never sit together any more. with each crumpled leaf i turned, the uncomfortable conviction that i was only a ghost, grew stronger. the handwriting was my own, but the words were the words of a stranger, so that as i read i wondered to myself, saying: did i ever think this? did i really hope that? did i plan to do this? did i resolve to be such? does life, then, look so to the eyes of a young man? not knowing whether to smile or sigh. the book was a compilation, half diary, half memoranda. in it lay the record of many musings, of many talks, and out of it--selecting what seemed suitable, adding, altering, and arranging--i have shaped the chapters that hereafter follow. that i have a right to do so i have fully satisfied my own conscience, an exceptionally fussy one. of the four joint authors, he whom i call "macshaughnassy" has laid aside his title to all things beyond six feet of sun-scorched ground in the african veldt; while from him i have designated "brown" i have borrowed but little, and that little i may fairly claim to have made my own by reason of the artistic merit with which i have embellished it. indeed, in thus taking a few of his bald ideas and shaping them into readable form, am i not doing him a kindness, and thereby returning good for evil? for has he not, slipping from the high ambition of his youth, sunk ever downward step by step, until he has become a critic, and, therefore, my natural enemy? does he not, in the columns of a certain journal of large pretension but small circulation, call me "'arry" (without an "h," the satirical rogue), and is not his contempt for the english-speaking people based chiefly upon the fact that some of them read my books? but in the days of bloomsbury lodgings and first-night pits we thought each other clever. from "jephson" i hold a letter, dated from a station deep in the heart of the queensland bush. "_do what you like with it, dear boy_," the letter runs, "_so long as you keep me out of it. thanks for your complimentary regrets, but i cannot share them. i was never fitted for a literary career. lucky for me, i found it out in time. some poor devils don't. (i'm not getting at you, old man. we read all your stuff, and like it very much. time hangs a bit heavy, you know, here, in the winter, and we are glad of almost anything.) this life suits me better. i love to feel my horse between my thighs, and the sun upon my skin. and there are the youngsters growing up about us, and the hands to look after, and the stock. i daresay it seems a very commonplace unintellectual life to you, but it satisfies my nature more than the writing of books could ever do. besides, there are too many authors as it is. the world is so busy reading and writing, it has no time left for thinking. you'll tell me, of course, that books are thought, but that is only the jargon of the press. you come out here, old man, and sit as i do sometimes for days and nights together alone with the dumb cattle on an upheaved island of earth, as it were, jutting out into the deep sky, and you will know that they are not. what a man thinks--really thinks--goes down into him and grows in silence. what a man writes in books are the thoughts that he wishes to be thought to think_." poor jephson! he promised so well at one time. but he always had strange notions. chapter i when, on returning home one evening, after a pipe party at my friend jephson's, i informed my wife that i was going to write a novel, she expressed herself as pleased with the idea. she said she had often wondered i had never thought of doing so before. "look," she added, "how silly all the novels are nowadays; i'm sure you could write one." (ethelbertha intended to be complimentary, i am convinced; but there is a looseness about her mode of expression which, at times, renders her meaning obscure.) when, however, i told her that my friend jephson was going to collaborate with me, she remarked, "oh," in a doubtful tone; and when i further went on to explain to her that selkirk brown and derrick macshaughnassy were also going to assist, she replied, "oh," in a tone which contained no trace of doubtfulness whatever, and from which it was clear that her interest in the matter, as a practical scheme, had entirely evaporated. i fancy that the fact of my three collaborators being all bachelors diminished somewhat our chances of success, in ethelbertha's mind. against bachelors, as a class, she entertains a strong prejudice. a man's not having sense enough to want to marry, or, having that, not having wit enough to do it, argues to her thinking either weakness of intellect or natural depravity, the former rendering its victim unable, and the latter unfit, ever to become a really useful novelist. i tried to make her understand the peculiar advantages our plan possessed. "you see," i explained, "in the usual commonplace novel we only get, as a matter of fact, one person's ideas. now, in this novel, there will be four clever men all working together. the public will thus be enabled to obtain the thoughts and opinions of the whole four of us, at the price usually asked for merely one author's views. if the british reader knows his own business, he will order this book early, to avoid disappointment. such an opportunity may not occur again for years." ethelbertha agreed that this was probable. "besides," i continued, my enthusiasm waxing stronger the more i reflected upon the matter, "this work is going to be a genuine bargain in another way also. we are not going to put our mere everyday ideas into it. we are going to crowd into this one novel all the wit and wisdom that the whole four of us possess, if the book will hold it. we shall not write another novel after this one. indeed, we shall not be able to; we shall have nothing more to write. this work will partake of the nature of an intellectual clearance sale. we are going to put into this novel simply all we know." ethelbertha shut her lips, and said something inside; and then remarked aloud that she supposed it would be a one volume affair. i felt hurt at the implied sneer. i pointed out to her that there already existed a numerous body of specially-trained men employed to do nothing else but make disagreeable observations upon authors and their works--a duty that, so far as i could judge, they seemed capable of performing without any amateur assistance whatever. and i hinted that, by his own fireside, a literary man looked to breathe a more sympathetic atmosphere. ethelbertha replied that of course i knew what she meant. she said that she was not thinking of me, and that jephson was, no doubt, sensible enough (jephson is engaged), but she did not see the object of bringing half the parish into it. (nobody suggested bringing "half the parish" into it. ethelbertha will talk so wildly.) to suppose that brown and macshaughnassy could be of any use whatever, she considered absurd. what could a couple of raw bachelors know about life and human nature? as regarded macshaughnassy in particular, she was of opinion that if we only wanted out of him all that _he_ knew, and could keep him to the subject, we ought to be able to get that into about a page. my wife's present estimate of macshaughnassy's knowledge is the result of reaction. the first time she ever saw him, she and he got on wonderfully well together; and when i returned to the drawing-room, after seeing him down to the gate, her first words were, "what a wonderful man that mr. macshaughnassy is. he seems to know so much about everything." that describes macshaughnassy exactly. he does seem to know a tremendous lot. he is possessed of more information than any man i ever came across. occasionally, it is correct information; but, speaking broadly, it is remarkable for its marvellous unreliability. where he gets it from is a secret that nobody has ever yet been able to fathom. ethelbertha was very young when we started housekeeping. (our first butcher very nearly lost her custom, i remember, once and for ever by calling her "missie," and giving her a message to take back to her mother. she arrived home in tears. she said that perhaps she wasn't fit to be anybody's wife, but she did not see why she should be told so by the tradespeople.) she was naturally somewhat inexperienced in domestic affairs, and, feeling this keenly, was grateful to any one who would give her useful hints and advice. when macshaughnassy came along he seemed, in her eyes, a sort of glorified mrs. beeton. he knew everything wanted to be known inside a house, from the scientific method of peeling a potato to the cure of spasms in cats, and ethelbertha would sit at his feet, figuratively speaking, and gain enough information in one evening to make the house unlivable in for a month. he told her how fires ought to be laid. he said that the way fires were usually laid in this country was contrary to all the laws of nature, and he showed her how the thing was done in crim tartary, or some such place, where the science of laying fires is alone properly understood. he proved to her that an immense saving in time and labour, to say nothing of coals, could be effected by the adoption of the crim tartary system; and he taught it to her then and there, and she went straight downstairs and explained it to the girl. amenda, our then "general," was an extremely stolid young person, and, in some respects, a model servant. she never argued. she never seemed to have any notions of her own whatever. she accepted our ideas without comment, and carried them out with such pedantic precision and such evident absence of all feeling of responsibility concerning the result as to surround our home legislation with quite a military atmosphere. on the present occasion she stood quietly by while the macshaughnassy method of fire-laying was expounded to her. when ethelbertha had finished she simply said:-- "you want me to lay the fires like that?" "yes, amenda, we'll always have the fires laid like that in future, if you please." "all right, mum," replied amenda, with perfect unconcern, and there the matter ended, for that evening. on coming downstairs the next morning we found the breakfast table spread very nicely, but there was no breakfast. we waited. ten minutes went by--a quarter of an hour--twenty minutes. then ethelbertha rang the bell. in response amenda presented herself, calm and respectful. "do you know that the proper time for breakfast is half-past eight, amenda?" "yes'm." "and do you know that it's now nearly nine?" "yes'm." "well, isn't breakfast ready?" "no, mum." "will it _ever_ be ready?" "well, mum," replied amenda, in a tone of genial frankness, "to tell you the truth, i don't think it ever will." "what's the reason? won't the fire light?" "oh yes, it lights all right." "well, then, why can't you cook the breakfast?" "because before you can turn yourself round it goes out again." amenda never volunteered statements. she answered the question put to her and then stopped dead. i called downstairs to her on one occasion, before i understood her peculiarities, to ask her if she knew the time. she replied, "yes, sir," and disappeared into the back kitchen. at the end of thirty seconds or so, i called down again. "i asked you, amenda," i said reproachfully, "to tell me the time about ten minutes ago." "oh, did you?" she called back pleasantly. "i beg your pardon. i thought you asked me if i knew it--it's half-past four." ethelbertha inquired--to return to our fire--if she had tried lighting it again. "oh yes, mum," answered the girl. "i've tried four times." then she added cheerfully, "i'll try again if you like, mum." amenda was the most willing servant we ever paid wages to. ethelbertha said she would step down and light the fire herself, and told amenda to follow her and watch how she did it. i felt interested in the experiment, and followed also. ethelbertha tucked up her frock and set to work. amenda and i stood around and looked on. at the end of half an hour ethelbertha retired from the contest, hot, dirty, and a trifle irritable. the fireplace retained the same cold, cynical expression with which it had greeted our entrance. then i tried. i honestly tried my best. i was eager and anxious to succeed. for one reason, i wanted my breakfast. for another, i wanted to be able to say that i had done this thing. it seemed to me that for any human being to light a fire, laid as that fire was laid, would be a feat to be proud of. to light a fire even under ordinary circumstances is not too easy a task: to do so, handicapped by macshaughnassy's rules, would, i felt, be an achievement pleasant to look back upon. my idea, had i succeeded, would have been to go round the neighbourhood and brag about it. however, i did not succeed. i lit various other things, including the kitchen carpet and the cat, who would come sniffing about, but the materials within the stove appeared to be fire-proof. ethelbertha and i sat down, one each side of our cheerless hearth, and looked at one another, and thought of macshaughnassy, until amenda chimed in on our despair with one of those practical suggestions of hers that she occasionally threw out for us to accept or not, as we chose. "maybe," said she, "i'd better light it in the old way just for to-day." "do, amenda," said ethelbertha, rising. and then she added, "i think we'll always have them lighted in the old way, amenda, if you please." another time he showed us how to make coffee--according to the arabian method. arabia must be a very untidy country if they made coffee often over there. he dirtied two saucepans, three jugs, one tablecloth, one nutmeg-grater, one hearthrug, three cups, and himself. this made coffee for two--what would have been necessary in the case of a party, one dares not think. that we did not like the coffee when made, macshaughnassy attributed to our debased taste--the result of long indulgence in an inferior article. he drank both cups himself, and afterwards went home in a cab. he had an aunt in those days, i remember, a mysterious old lady, who lived in some secluded retreat from where she wrought incalculable mischief upon macshaughnassy's friends. what he did not know--the one or two things that he was _not_ an authority upon--this aunt of his knew. "no," he would say with engaging candour--"no, that is a thing i cannot advise you about myself. but," he would add, "i'll tell you what i'll do. i'll write to my aunt and ask her." and a day or two afterwards he would call again, bringing his aunt's advice with him; and, if you were young and inexperienced, or a natural born fool, you might possibly follow it. she sent us a recipe on one occasion, through macshaughnassy, for the extermination of blackbeetles. we occupied a very picturesque old house; but, as with most picturesque old houses, its advantages were chiefly external. there were many holes and cracks and crevices within its creaking framework. frogs, who had lost their way and taken the wrong turning, would suddenly discover themselves in the middle of our dining- room, apparently quite as much to their own surprise and annoyance as to ours. a numerous company of rats and mice, remarkably fond of physical exercise, had fitted the place up as a gymnasium for themselves; and our kitchen, after ten o'clock, was turned into a blackbeetles' club. they came up through the floor and out through the walls, and gambolled there in their light-hearted, reckless way till daylight. the rats and mice amenda did not object to. she said she liked to watch them. but against the blackbeetles she was prejudiced. therefore, when my wife informed her that macshaughnassy's aunt had given us an infallible recipe for their annihilation, she rejoiced. we purchased the materials, manufactured the mixture, and put it about. the beetles came and ate it. they seemed to like it. they finished it all up, and were evidently vexed that there was not more. but they did not die. we told these facts to macshaughnassy. he smiled, a very grim smile, and said in a low tone, full of meaning, "let them eat!" it appeared that this was one of those slow, insidious poisons. it did not kill the beetle off immediately, but it undermined his constitution. day by day he would sink and droop without being able to tell what was the matter with himself, until one morning we should enter the kitchen to find him lying cold and very still. so we made more stuff and laid it round each night, and the blackbeetles from all about the parish swarmed to it. each night they came in greater quantities. they fetched up all their friends and relations. strange beetles--beetles from other families, with no claim on us whatever--got to hear about the thing, and came in hordes, and tried to rob our blackbeetles of it. by the end of a week we had lured into our kitchen every beetle that wasn't lame for miles round. macshaughnassy said it was a good thing. we should clear the suburb at one swoop. the beetles had now been eating this poison steadily for ten days, and he said that the end could not be far off. i was glad to hear it, because i was beginning to find this unlimited hospitality expensive. it was a dear poison that we were giving them, and they were hearty eaters. we went downstairs to see how they were getting on. macshaughnassy thought they seemed queer, and was of opinion that they were breaking up. speaking for myself, i can only say that a healthier-looking lot of beetles i never wish to see. one, it is true, did die that very evening. he was detected in the act of trying to make off with an unfairly large portion of the poison, and three or four of the others set upon him savagely and killed him. but he was the only one, so far as i could ever discover, to whom macshaughnassy's recipe proved fatal. as for the others, they grew fat and sleek upon it. some of them, indeed, began to acquire quite a figure. we lessened their numbers eventually by the help of some common oil-shop stuff. but such vast numbers, attracted by macshaughnassy's poison, had settled in the house, that to finally exterminate them now was hopeless. i have not heard of macshaughnassy's aunt lately. possibly, one of macshaughnassy's bosom friends has found out her address and has gone down and murdered her. if so, i should like to thank him. i tried a little while ago to cure macshaughnassy of his fatal passion for advice-giving, by repeating to him a very sad story that was told to me by a gentleman i met in an american railway car. i was travelling from buffalo to new york, and, during the day, it suddenly occurred to me that i might make the journey more interesting by leaving the cars at albany and completing the distance by water. but i did not know how the boats ran, and i had no guide-book with me. i glanced about for some one to question. a mild-looking, elderly gentleman sat by the next window reading a book, the cover of which was familiar to me. i deemed him to be intelligent, and approached him. "i beg your pardon for interrupting you," i said, sitting down opposite to him, "but could you give me any information about the boats between albany and new york?" "well," he answered, looking up with a pleasant smile, "there are three lines of boats altogether. there is the heggarty line, but they only go as far as catskill. then there are the poughkeepsie boats, which go every other day. or there is what we call the canal boat." "oh," i said. "well now, which would you advise me to--" he jumped to his feet with a cry, and stood glaring down at me with a gleam in his eyes which was positively murderous. "you villain!" he hissed in low tones of concentrated fury, "so that's your game, is it? i'll give you something that you'll want advice about," and he whipped out a six-chambered revolver. i felt hurt. i also felt that if the interview were prolonged i might feel even more hurt. so i left him without a word, and drifted over to the other end of the car, where i took up a position between a stout lady and the door. i was still musing upon the incident, when, looking up, i observed my elderly friend making towards me. i rose and laid my hand upon the door- knob. he should not find me unprepared. he smiled, reassuringly, however, and held out his hand. "i've been thinking," he said, "that maybe i was a little rude just now. i should like, if you will let me, to explain. i think, when you have heard my story, you will understand, and forgive me." there was that about him which made me trust him. we found a quiet corner in the smoking-car. i had a "whiskey sour," and he prescribed for himself a strange thing of his own invention. then we lighted our cigars, and he talked. "thirty years ago," said he, "i was a young man with a healthy belief in myself, and a desire to do good to others. i did not imagine myself a genius. i did not even consider myself exceptionally brilliant or talented. but it did seem to me, and the more i noted the doings of my fellow-men and women, the more assured did i become of it, that i possessed plain, practical common sense to an unusual and remarkable degree. conscious of this, i wrote a little book, which i entitled _how to be happy, wealthy, and wise_, and published it at my own expense. i did not seek for profit. i merely wished to be useful. "the book did not make the stir that i had anticipated. some two or three hundred copies went off, and then the sale practically ceased. "i confess that at first i was disappointed. but after a while, i reflected that, if people would not take my advice, it was more their loss than mine, and i dismissed the matter from my mind. "one morning, about a twelvemonth afterwards, i was sitting in my study, when the servant entered to say that there was a man downstairs who wanted very much to see me. "i gave instructions that he should be sent up, and up accordingly he came. "he was a common man, but he had an open, intelligent countenance, and his manner was most respectful. i motioned him to be seated. he selected a chair, and sat down on the extreme edge of it. "'i hope you'll pard'n this intrusion, sir,' he began, speaking deliberately, and twirling his hat the while; 'but i've come more'n two hundred miles to see you, sir.' "i expressed myself as pleased, and he continued: 'they tell me, sir, as you're the gentleman as wrote that little book, _how to be happy, wealthy, and wise_." he enumerated the three items slowly, dwelling lovingly on each. i admitted the fact. "'ah, that's a wonderful book, sir,' he went on. 'i ain't one of them as has got brains of their own--not to speak of--but i know enough to know them as has; and when i read that little book, i says to myself, josiah hackett (that's my name, sir), when you're in doubt don't you get addling that thick head o' yours, as will only tell you all wrong; you go to the gentleman as wrote that little book and ask him for his advice. he is a kind-hearted gentleman, as any one can tell, and he'll give it you; and _when_ you've got it, you go straight ahead, full steam, and don't you stop for nothing, 'cause he'll know what's best for you, same as he knows what's best for everybody. that's what i says, sir; and that's what i'm here for.' "he paused, and wiped his brow with a green cotton handkerchief. i prayed him to proceed. "it appeared that the worthy fellow wanted to marry, but could not make up his mind _whom_ he wanted to marry. he had his eye--so he expressed it--upon two young women, and they, he had reason to believe, regarded him in return with more than usual favour. his difficulty was to decide which of the two--both of them excellent and deserving young persons--would make him the best wife. the one, juliana, the only daughter of a retired sea-captain, he described as a winsome lassie. the other, hannah, was an older and altogether more womanly girl. she was the eldest of a large family. her father, he said, was a god-fearing man, and was doing well in the timber trade. he asked me which of them i should advise him to marry. "i was flattered. what man in my position would not have been? this josiah hackett had come from afar to hear my wisdom. he was willing--nay, anxious--to entrust his whole life's happiness to my discretion. that he was wise in so doing, i entertained no doubt. the choice of a wife i had always held to be a matter needing a calm, unbiassed judgment, such as no lover could possibly bring to bear upon the subject. in such a case, i should not have hesitated to offer advice to the wisest of men. to this poor, simple-minded fellow, i felt it would be cruel to refuse it. "he handed me photographs of both the young persons under consideration. i jotted down on the back of each such particulars as i deemed would assist me in estimating their respective fitness for the vacancy in question, and promised to carefully consider the problem, and write him in a day or two. "his gratitude was touching. 'don't you trouble to write no letters, sir,' he said; 'you just stick down "julia" or "hannah" on a bit of paper, and put it in an envelope. i shall know what it means, and that's the one as i shall marry.' "then he gripped me by the hand and left me. "i gave a good deal of thought to the selection of josiah's wife. i wanted him to be happy. "juliana was certainly very pretty. there was a lurking playfulness about the corners of juliana's mouth which conjured up the sound of rippling laughter. had i acted on impulse, i should have clasped juliana in josiah's arms. "but, i reflected, more sterling qualities than mere playfulness and prettiness are needed for a wife. hannah, though not so charming, clearly possessed both energy and sense--qualities highly necessary to a poor man's wife. hannah's father was a pious man, and was 'doing well'--a thrifty, saving man, no doubt. he would have instilled into her lessons of economy and virtue; and, later on, she might possibly come in for a little something. she was the eldest of a large family. she was sure to have had to help her mother a good deal. she would be experienced in household matters, and would understand the bringing up of children. "julia's father, on the other hand, was a retired sea-captain. seafaring folk are generally loose sort of fish. he had probably been in the habit of going about the house, using language and expressing views, the hearing of which could not but have exercised an injurious effect upon the formation of a growing girl's character. juliana was his only child. only children generally make bad men and women. they are allowed to have their own way too much. the pretty daughter of a retired sea-captain would be certain to be spoilt. "josiah, i had also to remember, was a man evidently of weak character. he would need management. now, there was something about hannah's eye that eminently suggested management. "at the end of two days my mind was made up. i wrote 'hannah' on a slip of paper, and posted it. "a fortnight afterwards i received a letter from josiah. he thanked me for my advice, but added, incidentally, that he wished i could have made it julia. however, he said, he felt sure i knew best, and by the time i received the letter he and hannah would be one. "that letter worried me. i began to wonder if, after all, i had chosen the right girl. suppose hannah was not all i thought her! what a terrible thing it would be for josiah. what data, sufficient to reason upon, had i possessed? how did i know that hannah was not a lazy, ill- tempered girl, a continual thorn in the side of her poor, overworked mother, and a perpetual blister to her younger brothers and sisters? how did i know she had been well brought up? her father might be a precious old fraud: most seemingly pious men are. she may have learned from him only hypocrisy. "then also, how did i know that juliana's merry childishness would not ripen into sweet, cheerful womanliness? her father, for all i knew to the contrary, might be the model of what a retired sea-captain should be; with possibly a snug little sum safely invested somewhere. and juliana was his only child. what reason had i for rejecting this fair young creature's love for josiah? "i took her photo from my desk. i seemed to detect a reproachful look in the big eyes. i saw before me the scene in the little far-away home when the first tidings of josiah's marriage fell like a cruel stone into the hitherto placid waters of her life. i saw her kneeling by her father's chair, while the white-haired, bronzed old man gently stroked the golden head, shaking with silent sobs against his breast. my remorse was almost more than i could bear. "i put her aside and took up hannah--my chosen one. she seemed to be regarding me with a smile of heartless triumph. there began to take possession of me a feeling of positive dislike to hannah. "i fought against the feeling. i told myself it was prejudice. but the more i reasoned against it the stronger it became. i could tell that, as the days went by, it would grow from dislike to loathing, from loathing to hate. and this was the woman i had deliberately selected as a life companion for josiah! "for weeks i knew no peace of mind. every letter that arrived i dreaded to open, fearing it might be from josiah. at every knock i started up, and looked about for a hiding-place. every time i came across the heading, 'domestic tragedy,' in the newspapers, i broke into a cold perspiration. i expected to read that josiah and hannah had murdered each other, and died cursing me. "as the time went by, however, and i heard nothing, my fears began to assuage, and my belief in my own intuitive good judgment to return. maybe, i had done a good thing for josiah and hannah, and they were blessing me. three years passed peacefully away, and i was beginning to forget the existence of the hacketts. "then he came again. i returned home from business one evening to find him waiting for me in the hall. the moment i saw him i knew that my worst fears had fallen short of the truth. i motioned him to follow me to my study. he did so, and seated himself in the identical chair on which he had sat three years ago. the change in him was remarkable; he looked old and careworn. his manner was that of resigned hopelessness. "we remained for a while without speaking, he twirling his hat as at our first interview, i making a show of arranging papers on my desk. at length, feeling that anything would be more bearable than this silence, i turned to him. "'things have not been going well with you, i'm afraid, josiah?' i said. "'no, sir,' he replied quietly; 'i can't say as they have, altogether. that hannah of yours has turned out a bit of a teaser.' "there was no touch of reproach in his tones. he simply stated a melancholy fact. "'but she is a good wife to you in other ways,' i urged. 'she has her faults, of course. we all have. but she is energetic. come now, you will admit she's energetic.' "i owed it to myself to find some good in hannah, and this was the only thing i could think of at that moment. "'oh yes, she's that,' he assented. 'a little too much so for our sized house, i sometimes think.' "'you see,' he went on, 'she's a bit cornery in her temper, hannah is; and then her mother's a bit trying, at times.' "'her mother!' i exclaimed, 'but what's _she_ got to do with you?' "'well, you see, sir,' he answered, 'she's living with us now--ever since the old man went off.' "'hannah's father! is he dead, then?' "'well, not exactly, sir,' he replied. 'he ran off about a twelvemonth ago with one of the young women who used to teach in the sunday school, and joined the mormons. it came as a great surprise to every one.' "i groaned. 'and his business,' i inquired--'the timber business, who carries that on?' "'oh, that!' answered josiah. 'oh, that had to be sold to pay his debts--leastways, to go towards 'em.' "i remarked what a terrible thing it was for his family. i supposed the home was broken up, and they were all scattered. "'no, sir,' he replied simply, 'they ain't scattered much. they're all living with us.' "'but there,' he continued, seeing the look upon my face; 'of course, all this has nothing to do with you sir. you've got troubles of your own, i daresay, sir. i didn't come here to worry you with mine. that would be a poor return for all your kindness to me.' "'what has become of julia?' i asked. i did not feel i wanted to question him any more about his own affairs. "a smile broke the settled melancholy of his features. 'ah,' he said, in a more cheerful tone than he had hitherto employed, 'it does one good to think about _her_, it does. she's married to a friend of mine now, young sam jessop. i slips out and gives 'em a call now and then, when hannah ain't round. lord, it's like getting a glimpse of heaven to look into their little home. he often chaffs me about it, sam does. "well, you _was_ a sawny-headed chunk, josiah, _you_ was," he often says to me. we're old chums, you know, sir, sam and me, so he don't mind joking a bit like.' "then the smile died away, and he added with a sigh, 'yes, i've often thought since, sir, how jolly it would have been if you could have seen your way to making it juliana.' "i felt i must get him back to hannah at any cost. i said, 'i suppose you and your wife are still living in the old place?' "'yes,' he replied, 'if you can call it living. it's a hard struggle with so many of us.' "he said he did not know how he should have managed if it had not been for the help of julia's father. he said the captain had behaved more like an angel than anything else he knew of. "'i don't say as he's one of your clever sort, you know, sir,' he explained. 'not the man as one would go to for advice, like one would to you, sir; but he's a good sort for all that.' "'and that reminds me, sir,' he went on, 'of what i've come here about. you'll think it very bold of me to ask, sir, but--' "i interrupted him. 'josiah,' i said, 'i admit that i am much to blame for what has come upon you. you asked me for my advice, and i gave it you. which of us was the bigger idiot, we will not discuss. the point is that i did give it, and i am not a man to shirk my responsibilities. what, in reason, you ask, and i can grant, i will give you.' "he was overcome with gratitude. 'i knew it, sir,' he said. 'i knew you would not refuse me. i said so to hannah. i said, "i will go to that gentleman and ask him. i will go to him and ask him for his advice."' "i said, 'his what?' "'his advice,' repeated josiah, apparently surprised at my tone, 'on a little matter as i can't quite make up my mind about.' "i thought at first he was trying to be sarcastic, but he wasn't. that man sat there, and wrestled with me for my advice as to whether he should invest a thousand dollars which julia's father had offered to lend him, in the purchase of a laundry business or a bar. he hadn't had enough of it (my advice, i mean); he wanted it again, and he spun me reasons why i should give it him. the choice of a wife was a different thing altogether, he argued. perhaps he ought _not_ to have asked me for my opinion as to that. but advice as to which of two trades a man would do best to select, surely any business man could give. he said he had just been reading again my little book, _how to be happy_, etc., and if the gentleman who wrote that could not decide between the respective merits of one particular laundry and one particular bar, both situate in the same city, well, then, all he had got to say was that knowledge and wisdom were clearly of no practical use in this world whatever. "well, it did seem a simple thing to advise a man about. surely as to a matter of this kind, i, a professed business man, must be able to form a sounder judgment than this poor pumpkin-headed lamb. it would be heartless to refuse to help him. i promised to look into the matter, and let him know what i thought. "he rose and shook me by the hand. he said he would not try to thank me; words would only seem weak. he dashed away a tear and went out. "i brought an amount of thought to bear upon this thousand-dollar investment sufficient to have floated a bank. i did not mean to make another hannah job, if i could help it. i studied the papers josiah had left with me, but did not attempt to form any opinion from them. i went down quietly to josiah's city, and inspected both businesses on the spot. i instituted secret but searching inquiries in the neighbourhood. i disguised myself as a simple-minded young man who had come into a little money, and wormed myself into the confidence of the servants. i interviewed half the town upon the pretence that i was writing the commercial history of new england, and should like some particulars of their career, and i invariably ended my examination by asking them which was their favourite bar, and where they got their washing done. i stayed a fortnight in the town. most of my spare time i spent at the bar. in my leisure moments i dirtied my clothes so that they might be washed at the laundry. "as the result of my investigations i discovered that, so far as the two businesses themselves were concerned, there was not a pin to choose between them. it became merely a question of which particular trade would best suit the hacketts. "i reflected. the keeper of a bar was exposed to much temptation. a weak-minded man, mingling continually in the company of topers, might possibly end by giving way to drink. now, josiah was an exceptionally weak-minded man. it had also to be borne in mind that he had a shrewish wife, and that her whole family had come to live with him. clearly, to place josiah in a position of easy access to unlimited liquor would be madness. "about a laundry, on the other hand, there was something soothing. the working of a laundry needed many hands. hannah's relatives might be used up in a laundry, and made to earn their own living. hannah might expend her energy in flat-ironing, and josiah could turn the mangle. the idea conjured up quite a pleasant domestic picture. i recommended the laundry. "on the following monday, josiah wrote to say that he had bought the laundry. on tuesday i read in the _commercial intelligence_ that one of the most remarkable features of the time was the marvellous rise taking place all over new england in the value of hotel and bar property. on thursday, in the list of failures, i came across no less than four laundry proprietors; and the paper added, in explanation, that the american washing industry, owing to the rapid growth of chinese competition, was practically on its last legs. i went out and got drunk. "my life became a curse to me. all day long i thought of josiah. all night i dreamed of him. suppose that, not content with being the cause of his domestic misery, i had now deprived him of the means of earning a livelihood, and had rendered useless the generosity of that good old sea- captain. i began to appear to myself as a malignant fiend, ever following this simple but worthy man to work evil upon him. "time passed away, however; i heard nothing from or of him, and my burden at last fell from me. "then at the end of about five years he came again. "he came behind me as i was opening the door with my latch-key, and laid an unsteady hand upon my arm. it was a dark night, but a gas-lamp showed me his face. i recognised it in spite of the red blotches and the bleary film that hid the eyes. i caught him roughly by the arm, and hurried him inside and up into my study. "'sit down,' i hissed, 'and tell me the worst first.' "he was about to select his favourite chair. i felt that if i saw him and that particular chair in association for the third time, i should do something terrible to both. i snatched it away from him, and he sat down heavily on the floor, and burst into tears. i let him remain there, and, thickly, between hiccoughs, he told his tale. "the laundry had gone from bad to worse. a new railway had come to the town, altering its whole topography. the business and residential portion had gradually shifted northward. the spot where the bar--the particular one which i had rejected for the laundry--had formerly stood was now the commercial centre of the city. the man who had purchased it in place of josiah had sold out and made a fortune. the southern area (where the laundry was situate) was, it had been discovered, built upon a swamp, and was in a highly unsanitary condition. careful housewives naturally objected to sending their washing into such a neighbourhood. "other troubles had also come. the baby--josiah's pet, the one bright thing in his life--had fallen into the copper and been boiled. hannah's mother had been crushed in the mangle, and was now a helpless cripple, who had to be waited on day and night. "under these accumulated misfortunes josiah had sought consolation in drink, and had become a hopeless sot. he felt his degradation keenly, and wept copiously. he said he thought that in a cheerful place, such as a bar, he might have been strong and brave; but that there was something about the everlasting smell of damp clothes and suds, that seemed to sap his manhood. "i asked him what the captain had said to it all. he burst into fresh tears, and replied that the captain was no more. that, he added, reminded him of what he had come about. the good-hearted old fellow had bequeathed him five thousand dollars. he wanted my advice as to how to invest it. "my first impulse was to kill him on the spot. i wish now that i had. i restrained myself, however, and offered him the alternative of being thrown from the window or of leaving by the door without another word. "he answered that he was quite prepared to go by the window if i would first tell him whether to put his money in the terra del fuego nitrate company, limited, or in the union pacific bank. life had no further interest for him. all he cared for was to feel that this little nest-egg was safely laid by for the benefit of his beloved ones after he was gone. "he pressed me to tell him what i thought of nitrates. i replied that i declined to say anything whatever on the subject. he assumed from my answer that i did not think much of nitrates, and announced his intention of investing the money, in consequence, in the union pacific bank. "i told him by all means to do so, if he liked. "he paused, and seemed to be puzzling it out. then he smiled knowingly, and said he thought he understood what i meant. it was very kind of me. he should put every dollar he possessed in the terra del fuego nitrate company. "he rose (with difficulty) to go. i stopped him. i knew, as certainly as i knew the sun would rise the next morning, that whichever company i advised him, or he persisted in thinking i had advised him (which was the same thing), to invest in, would, sooner or later, come to smash. my grandmother had all her little fortune in the terra del fuego nitrate company. i could not see her brought to penury in her old age. as for josiah, it could make no difference to him whatever. he would lose his money in any event. i advised him to invest in union pacific bank shares. he went and did it. "the union pacific bank held out for eighteen months. then it began to totter. the financial world stood bewildered. it had always been reckoned one of the safest banks in the country. people asked what could be the cause. i knew well enough, but i did not tell. "the bank made a gallant fight, but the hand of fate was upon it. at the end of another nine months the crash came. "(nitrates, it need hardly be said, had all this time been going up by leaps and bounds. my grandmother died worth a million dollars, and left the whole of it to a charity. had she known how i had saved her from ruin, she might have been more grateful.) "a few days after the failure of the bank, josiah arrived on my doorstep; and, this time, he brought his families with him. there were sixteen of them in all. "what was i to do? i had brought these people step by step to the verge of starvation. i had laid waste alike their happiness and their prospects in life. the least amends i could make was to see that at all events they did not want for the necessities of existence. "that was seventeen years ago. i am still seeing that they do not want for the necessities of existence; and my conscience is growing easier by noticing that they seem contented with their lot. there are twenty-two of them now, and we have hopes of another in the spring. "that is my story," he said. "perhaps you will now understand my sudden emotion when you asked for my advice. as a matter of fact, i do not give advice now on any subject." * * * * * i told this tale to macshaughnassy. he agreed with me that it was instructive, and said he should remember it. he said he should remember it so as to tell it to some fellows that he knew, to whom he thought the lesson should prove useful. chapter ii i can't honestly say that we made much progress at our first meeting. it was brown's fault. he would begin by telling us a story about a dog. it was the old, old story of the dog who had been in the habit of going every morning to a certain baker's shop with a penny in his mouth, in exchange for which he always received a penny bun. one day, the baker, thinking he would not know the difference, tried to palm off upon the poor animal a ha'penny bun, whereupon the dog walked straight outside and fetched in a policeman. brown had heard this chestnut for the first time that afternoon, and was full of it. it is always a mystery to me where brown has been for the last hundred years. he stops you in the street with, "oh, i must tell you!--such a capital story!" and he thereupon proceeds to relate to you, with much spirit and gusto, one of noah's best known jokes, or some story that romulus must have originally told to remus. one of these days somebody will tell him the history of adam and eve, and he will think he has got hold of a new plot, and will work it up into a novel. he gives forth these hoary antiquities as personal reminiscences of his own, or, at furthest, as episodes in the life of his second cousin. there are certain strange and moving catastrophes that would seem either to have occurred to, or to have been witnessed by, nearly every one you meet. i never came across a man yet who had not seen some other man jerked off the top of an omnibus into a mud-cart. half london must, at one time or another, have been jerked off omnibuses into mud-carts, and have been fished out at the end of a shovel. then there is the tale of the lady whose husband is taken suddenly ill one night at an hotel. she rushes downstairs, and prepares a stiff mustard plaster to put on him, and runs up with it again. in her excitement, however, she charges into the wrong room, and, rolling down the bedclothes, presses it lovingly upon the wrong man. i have heard that story so often that i am quite nervous about going to bed in an hotel now. each man who has told it me has invariably slept in the room next door to that of the victim, and has been awakened by the man's yell as the plaster came down upon him. that is how he (the story-teller) came to know all about it. brown wanted us to believe that this prehistoric animal he had been telling us about had belonged to his brother-in-law, and was hurt when jephson murmured, _sotto voce_, that that made the twenty-eighth man he had met whose brother-in-law had owned that dog--to say nothing of the hundred and seventeen who had owned it themselves. we tried to get to work afterwards, but brown had unsettled us for the evening. it is a wicked thing to start dog stories among a party of average sinful men. let one man tell a dog story, and every other man in the room feels he wants to tell a bigger one. there is a story going--i cannot vouch for its truth, it was told me by a judge--of a man who lay dying. the pastor of the parish, a good and pious man, came to sit with him, and, thinking to cheer him up, told him an anecdote about a dog. when the pastor had finished, the sick man sat up, and said, "i know a better story than that. i had a dog once, a big, brown, lop-sided--" the effort had proved too much for his strength. he fell back upon the pillows, and the doctor, stepping forward, saw that it was a question only of minutes. the good old pastor rose, and took the poor fellow's hand in his, and pressed it. "we shall meet again," he gently said. the sick man turned towards him with a consoled and grateful look. "i'm glad to hear you say that," he feebly murmured. "remind me about that dog." then he passed peacefully away, with a sweet smile upon his pale lips. brown, who had had his dog story and was satisfied, wanted us to settle our heroine; but the rest of us did not feel equal to settling anybody just then. we were thinking of all the true dog stories we had ever heard, and wondering which was the one least likely to be generally disbelieved. macshaughnassy, in particular, was growing every moment more restless and moody. brown concluded a long discourse--to which nobody had listened--by remarking with some pride, "what more can you want? the plot has never been used before, and the characters are entirely original!" then macshaughnassy gave way. "talking of plots," he said, hitching his chair a little nearer the table, "that puts me in mind. did i ever tell you about that dog we had when we lived in norwood?" "it's not that one about the bull-dog, is it?" queried jephson anxiously. "well, it was a bull-dog," admitted macshaughnassy, "but i don't think i've ever told it you before." we knew, by experience, that to argue the matter would only prolong the torture, so we let him go on. "a great many burglaries had lately taken place in our neighbourhood," he began, "and the pater came to the conclusion that it was time he laid down a dog. he thought a bull-dog would be the best for his purpose, and he purchased the most savage and murderous-looking specimen that he could find. "my mother was alarmed when she saw the dog. 'surely you're not going to let that brute loose about the house!' she exclaimed. 'he'll kill somebody. i can see it in his face.' "'i want him to kill somebody,' replied my father; 'i want him to kill burglars.' "'i don't like to hear you talk like that, thomas,' answered the mater; 'it's not like you. we've a right to protect our property, but we've no right to take a fellow human creature's life.' "'our fellow human creatures will be all right--so long as they don't come into our kitchen when they've no business there,' retorted my father, somewhat testily. 'i'm going to fix up this dog in the scullery, and if a burglar comes fooling around--well, that's _his_ affair.' "the old folks quarrelled on and off for about a month over this dog. the dad thought the mater absurdly sentimental, and the mater thought the dad unnecessarily vindictive. meanwhile the dog grew more ferocious-looking every day. "one night my mother woke my father up with: 'thomas, there's a burglar downstairs, i'm positive. i distinctly heard the kitchen door open.' "'oh, well, the dog's got him by now, then,' murmured my father, who had heard nothing, and was sleepy. "'thomas,' replied my mother severely, 'i'm not going to lie here while a fellow-creature is being murdered by a savage beast. if you won't go down and save that man's life, i will.' "'oh, bother,' said my father, preparing to get up. 'you're always fancying you hear noises. i believe that's all you women come to bed for--to sit up and listen for burglars.' just to satisfy her, however, he pulled on his trousers and socks, and went down. "well, sure enough, my mother was right, this time. there _was_ a burglar in the house. the pantry window stood open, and a light was shining in the kitchen. my father crept softly forward, and peeped through the partly open door. there sat the burglar, eating cold beef and pickles, and there, beside him, on the floor, gazing up into his face with a blood-curdling smile of affection, sat that idiot of a dog, wagging his tail. "my father was so taken aback that he forgot to keep silent. "'well, i'm--,' and he used a word that i should not care to repeat to you fellows. "the burglar, hearing him, made a dash, and got clear off by the window; and the dog seemed vexed with my father for having driven him away. "next morning we took the dog back to the trainer from whom we had bought it. "'what do you think i wanted this dog for?' asked my father, trying to speak calmly. "'well,' replied the trainer, 'you said you wanted a good house dog.' "'exactly so,' answered the dad. 'i didn't ask for a burglar's companion, did i? i didn't say i wanted a dog who'd chum on with a burglar the first time he ever came to the house, and sit with him while he had supper, in case he might feel lonesome, did i?' and my father recounted the incidents of the previous night. "the man agreed that there was cause for complaint. 'i'll tell you what it is, sir,' he said. 'it was my boy jim as trained this 'ere dawg, and i guess the young beggar's taught 'im more about tackling rats than burglars. you leave 'im with me for a week, sir; i'll put that all right.' "we did so, and at the end of the time the trainer brought him back again. "'you'll find 'im game enough now, sir,' said the man. ''e ain't what i call an intellectual dawg, but i think i've knocked the right idea into 'im.' "my father thought he'd like to test the matter, so we hired a man for a shilling to break in through the kitchen window while the trainer held the dog by a chain. the dog remained perfectly quiet until the man was fairly inside. then he made one savage spring at him, and if the chain had not been stout the fellow would have earned his shilling dearly. "the dad was satisfied now that he could go to bed in peace; and the mater's alarm for the safety of the local burglars was proportionately increased. "months passed uneventfully by, and then another burglar sampled our house. this time there could be no doubt that the dog was doing something for his living. the din in the basement was terrific. the house shook with the concussion of falling bodies. "my father snatched up his revolver and rushed downstairs, and i followed him. the kitchen was in confusion. tables and chairs were overturned, and on the floor lay a man gurgling for help. the dog was standing over him, choking him. "the pater held his revolver to the man's ear, while i, by superhuman effort, dragged our preserver away, and chained him up to the sink, after which i lit the gas. "then we perceived that the gentleman on the floor was a police constable. "'good heavens!' exclaimed my father, dropping the revolver, 'however did you come here?' "''ow did _i_ come 'ere?' retorted the man, sitting up and speaking in a tone of bitter, but not unnatural, indignation. 'why, in the course of my dooty, that's 'ow _i_ come 'ere. i see a burglar getting in through the window, so i just follows and slips in after 'im.' "'did you catch him?' asked my father. "'did i catch 'im!' almost shrieked the man. ''ow could i catch 'im with that blasted dog of yours 'olding me down by the throat, while 'e lights 'is pipe and walks out by the back door?' "the dog was for sale the next day. the mater, who had grown to like him, because he let the baby pull his tail, wanted us to keep him. the mistake, she said, was not the animal's fault. two men broke into the house almost at the same time. the dog could not go for both of them. he did his best, and went for one. that his selection should have fallen upon the policeman instead of upon the burglar was unfortunate. but still it was a thing that might have happened to any dog. "my father, however, had become prejudiced against the poor creature, and that same week he inserted an advertisement in _the field_, in which the animal was recommended as an investment likely to prove useful to any enterprising member of the criminal classes." macshaughnassy having had his innings, jephson took a turn, and told us a pathetic story about an unfortunate mongrel that was run over in the strand one day and its leg broken. a medical student, who was passing at the time, picked it up and carried it to the charing cross hospital, where its leg was set, and where it was kept and tended until it was quite itself again, when it was sent home. the poor thing had quite understood what was being done for it, and had been the most grateful patient they had ever had in the hospital. the whole staff were quite sorry when it left. one morning, a week or two later, the house-surgeon, looking out of the window, saw the dog coming down the street. when it came near he noticed that it had a penny in its mouth. a cat's-meat barrow was standing by the kerb, and for a moment, as he passed it, the dog hesitated. but his nobler nature asserted itself, and, walking straight up to the hospital railings, and raising himself upon his hind legs, he dropped his penny into the contribution box. macshaughnassy was much affected by this story. he said it showed such a beautiful trait in the dog's character. the animal was a poor outcast, vagrant thing, that had perhaps never possessed a penny before in all its life, and might never have another. he said that dog's penny seemed to him to be a greater gift than the biggest cheque that the wealthiest patron ever signed. the other three were very eager now to get to work on the novel, but i did not quite see the fairness of this. i had one or two dog stories of my own. i knew a black-and-tan terrier years ago. he lodged in the same house with me. he did not belong to any one. he had discharged his owner (if, indeed, he had ever permitted himself to possess one, which is doubtful, having regard to his aggressively independent character), and was now running himself entirely on his own account. he appropriated the front hall for his sleeping-apartment, and took his meals with the other lodgers--whenever they happened to be having meals. at five o'clock he would take an early morning snack with young hollis, an engineer's pupil, who had to get up at half-past four and make his own coffee, so as to be down at the works by six. at eight-thirty he would breakfast in a more sensible fashion with mr. blair, on the first floor, and on occasions would join jack gadbut, who was a late riser, in a devilled kidney at eleven. from then till about five, when i generally had a cup of tea and a chop, he regularly disappeared. where he went and what he did between those hours nobody ever knew. gadbut swore that twice he had met him coming out of a stockbroker's office in threadneedle street, and, improbable though the statement at first appeared, some colour of credibility began to attach to it when we reflected upon the dog's inordinate passion for acquiring and hoarding coppers. this craving of his for wealth was really quite remarkable. he was an elderly dog, with a great sense of his own dignity; yet, on the promise of a penny, i have seen him run round after his own tail until he didn't know one end of himself from the other. he used to teach himself tricks, and go from room to room in the evening, performing them, and when he had completed his programme he would sit up and beg. all the fellows used to humour him. he must have made pounds in the course of the year. once, just outside our door, i saw him standing in a crowd, watching a performing poodle attached to a hurdy-gurdy. the poodle stood on his head, and then, with his hind legs in the air, walked round on his front paws. the people laughed very much, and, when afterwards he came amongst them with his wooden saucer in his mouth, they gave freely. our dog came in and immediately commenced to study. in three days _he_ could stand on his head and walk round on his front legs, and the first evening he did so he made sixpence. it must have been terribly hard work for him at his age, and subject to rheumatism as he was; but he would do anything for money. i believe he would have sold himself to the devil for eightpence down. he knew the value of money. if you held out to him a penny in one hand and a threepenny-bit in the other, he would snatch at the threepence, and then break his heart because he could not get the penny in as well. you might safely have left him in the room with a leg of mutton, but it would not have been wise to leave your purse about. now and then he spent a little, but not often. he was desperately fond of sponge-cakes, and occasionally, when he had had a good week, he would indulge himself to the extent of one or two. but he hated paying for them, and always made a frantic and frequently successful effort to get off with the cake and the penny also. his plan of operations was simple. he would walk into the shop with his penny in his mouth, well displayed, and a sweet and lamblike expression in his eyes. taking his stand as near to the cakes as he could get, and fixing his eyes affectionately upon them, he would begin to whine, and the shopkeeper, thinking he was dealing with an honest dog, would throw him one. to get the cake he was obliged, of course, to drop the penny, and then began a struggle between him and the shopkeeper for the possession of the coin. the man would try to pick it up. the dog would put his foot upon it, and growl savagely. if he could finish the cake before the contest was over, he would snap up the penny and bolt. i have known him to come home gorged with sponge-cakes, the original penny still in his mouth. so notorious throughout the neighbourhood did this dishonest practice of his become, that, after a time, the majority of the local tradespeople refused to serve him at all. only the exceptionally quick and able-bodied would attempt to do business with him. then he took his custom further afield, into districts where his reputation had not yet penetrated. and he would pick out shops kept by nervous females or rheumatic old men. they say that the love of money is the root of all evil. it seemed to have robbed him of every shred of principle. it robbed him of his life in the end, and that came about in this way. he had been performing one evening in gadbut's room, where a few of us were sitting smoking and talking; and young hollis, being in a generous mood, had thrown him, as he thought, a sixpence. the dog grabbed it, and retired under the sofa. this was an odd thing for him to do, and we commented upon it. suddenly a thought occurred to hollis, and he took out his money and began counting it. "by jove," he exclaimed, "i've given that little beast half-a-sovereign--here, tiny!" but tiny only backed further underneath the sofa, and no mere verbal invitation would induce him to stir. so we adopted a more pressing plan, and coaxed him out by the scruff of his neck. he came, an inch at a time, growling viciously, and holding hollis's half- sovereign tight between his teeth. we tried sweet reasonableness at first. we offered him a sixpence in exchange; he looked insulted, and evidently considered the proposal as tantamount to our calling him a fool. we made it a shilling, then half-a-crown--he seemed only bored by our persistence. "i don't think you'll ever see this half-sovereign again, hollis," said gadbut, laughing. we all, with the exception of young hollis, thought the affair a very good joke. he, on the contrary, seemed annoyed, and, taking the dog from gadbut, made an attempt to pull the coin out of its mouth. tiny, true to his life-long principle of never parting if he could possibly help it, held on like grim death, until, feeling that his little earnings were slowly but surely going from him, he made one final desperate snatch, and swallowed the money. it stuck in his throat, and he began to choke. then we became seriously alarmed for the dog. he was an amusing chap, and we did not want any accident to happen to him. hollis rushed into his room and procured a long pair of pincers, and the rest of us held the little miser while hollis tried to relieve him of the cause of his suffering. but poor tiny did not understand our intentions. he still thought we were seeking to rob him of his night's takings, and resisted vehemently. his struggles fixed the coin firmer, and, in spite of our efforts, he died--one more victim, among many, to the fierce fever for gold. * * * * * i dreamt a very curious dream about riches once, that made a great impression upon me. i thought that i and a friend--a very dear friend--were living together in a strange old house. i don't think anybody else dwelt in the house but just we two. one day, wandering about this strange old rambling place, i discovered the hidden door of a secret room, and in this room were many iron-bound chests, and when i raised the heavy lids i saw that each chest was full of gold. and, when i saw this, i stole out softly and closed the hidden door, and drew the worn tapestries in front of it again, and crept back along the dim corridor, looking behind me, fearfully. and the friend that i had loved came towards me, and we walked together with our hands clasped. but i hated him. and all day long i kept beside him, or followed him unseen, lest by chance he should learn the secret of that hidden door; and at night i lay awake watching him. but one night i sleep, and, when i open my eyes, he is no longer near me. i run swiftly up the narrow stairs and along the silent corridor. the tapestry is drawn aside, and the hidden door stands open, and in the room beyond the friend that i loved is kneeling before an open chest, and the glint of the gold is in my eyes. his back is towards me, and i crawl forward inch by inch. i have a knife in my hand, with a strong, curved blade; and when i am near enough i kill him as he kneels there. his body falls against the door, and it shuts to with a clang, and i try to open it, and cannot. i beat my hands against its iron nails, and scream, and the dead man grins at me. the light streams in through the chink beneath the massive door, and fades, and comes again, and fades again, and i gnaw at the oaken lids of the iron-bound chests, for the madness of hunger is climbing into my brain. then i awake, and find that i really am hungry, and remember that in consequence of a headache i did not eat any dinner. so i slip on a few clothes, and go down to the kitchen on a foraging expedition. it is said that dreams are momentary conglomerations of thought, centring round the incident that awakens us, and, as with most scientific facts, this is occasionally true. there is one dream that, with slight variations, is continually recurring to me. over and over again i dream that i am suddenly called upon to act an important part in some piece at the lyceum. that poor mr. irving should invariably be the victim seems unfair, but really it is entirely his own fault. it is he who persuades and urges me. i myself would much prefer to remain quietly in bed, and i tell him so. but he insists on my getting up at once and coming down to the theatre. i explain to him that i can't act a bit. he seems to consider this unimportant, and says, "oh, that will be all right." we argue for a while, but he makes the matter quite a personal one, and to oblige him and get him out of the bedroom i consent, though much against my own judgment. i generally dress the character in my nightshirt, though on one occasion, for banquo, i wore pyjamas, and i never remember a single word of what i ought to say. how i get through i do not know. irving comes up afterwards and congratulates me, but whether upon the brilliancy of my performance, or upon my luck in getting off the stage before a brickbat is thrown at me, i cannot say. whenever i dream this incident i invariably wake up to find that the bedclothes are on the floor, and that i am shivering with cold; and it is this shivering, i suppose, that causes me to dream i am wandering about the lyceum stage in nothing but my nightshirt. but still i do not understand why it should always be the lyceum. another dream which i fancy i have dreamt more than once--or, if not, i have dreamt that i dreamt it before, a thing one sometimes does--is one in which i am walking down a very wide and very long road in the east end of london. it is a curious road to find there. omnibuses and trams pass up and down, and it is crowded with stalls and barrows, beside which men in greasy caps stand shouting; yet on each side it is bordered by a strip of tropical forest. the road, in fact, combines the advantages of kew and whitechapel. some one is with me, but i cannot see him, and we walk through the forest, pushing our way among the tangled vines that cling about our feet, and every now and then, between the giant tree-trunks, we catch glimpses of the noisy street. at the end of this road there is a narrow turning, and when i come to it i am afraid, though i do not know why i am afraid. it leads to a house that i once lived in when a child, and now there is some one waiting there who has something to tell me. i turn to run away. a blackwall 'bus is passing, and i try to overtake it. but the horses turn into skeletons and gallop away from me, and my feet are like lead, and the thing that is with me, and that i cannot see, seizes me by the arm and drags me back. it forces me along, and into the house, and the door slams to behind us, and the sound echoes through the lifeless rooms. i recognise the rooms; i laughed and cried in them long ago. nothing is changed. the chairs stand in their places, empty. my mother's knitting lies upon the hearthrug, where the kitten, i remember, dragged it, somewhere back in the sixties. i go up into my own little attic. my cot stands in the corner, and my bricks lie tumbled out upon the floor (i was always an untidy child). an old man enters--an old, bent, withered man--holding a lamp above his head, and i look at his face, and it is my own face. and another enters, and he also is myself. then more and more, till the room is thronged with faces, and the stair-way beyond, and all the silent house. some of the faces are old and others young, and some are fair and smile at me, and many are foul and leer at me. and every face is my own face, but no two of them are alike. i do not know why the sight of myself should alarm me so, but i rush from the house in terror, and the faces follow me; and i run faster and faster, but i know that i shall never leave them behind me. * * * * * as a rule one is the hero of one's own dreams, but at times i have dreamt a dream entirely in the third person--a dream with the incidents of which i have had no connection whatever, except as an unseen and impotent spectator. one of these i have often thought about since, wondering if it could not be worked up into a story. but, perhaps, it would be too painful a theme. i dreamt i saw a woman's face among a throng. it is an evil face, but there is a strange beauty in it. the flickering gleams thrown by street lamps flash down upon it, showing the wonder of its evil fairness. then the lights go out. i see it next in a place that is very far away, and it is even more beautiful than before, for the evil has gone out of it. another face is looking down into it, a bright, pure face. the faces meet and kiss, and, as his lips touch hers, the blood mounts to her cheeks and brow. i see the two faces again. but i cannot tell where they are or how long a time has passed. the man's face has grown a little older, but it is still young and fair, and when the woman's eyes rest upon it there comes a glory into her face so that it is like the face of an angel. but at times the woman is alone, and then i see the old evil look struggling back. then i see clearer. i see the room in which they live. it is very poor. an old-fashioned piano stands in one corner, and beside it is a table on which lie scattered a tumbled mass of papers round an ink-stand. an empty chair waits before the table. the woman sits by the open window. from far below there rises the sound of a great city. its lights throw up faint beams into the dark room. the smell of its streets is in the woman's nostrils. every now and again she looks towards the door and listens: then turns to the open window. and i notice that each time she looks towards the door the evil in her face shrinks back; but each time she turns to the window it grows more fierce and sullen. suddenly she starts up, and there is a terror in her eyes that frightens me as i dream, and i see great beads of sweat upon her brow. then, very slowly, her face changes, and i see again the evil creature of the night. she wraps around her an old cloak, and creeps out. i hear her footsteps going down the stairs. they grow fainter and fainter. i hear a door open. the roar of the streets rushes up into the house, and the woman's footsteps are swallowed up. time drifts onward through my dream. scenes change, take shape, and fade; but all is vague and undefined, until, out of the dimness, there fashions itself a long, deserted street. the lights make glistening circles on the wet pavement. a figure, dressed in gaudy rags, slinks by, keeping close against the wall. its back is towards me, and i do not see its face. another figure glides from out the shadows. i look upon its face, and i see it is the face that the woman's eyes gazed up into and worshipped long ago, when my dream was just begun. but the fairness and the purity are gone from it, and it is old and evil, as the woman's when i looked upon her last. the figure in the gaudy rags moves slowly on. the second figure follows it, and overtakes it. the two pause, and speak to one another as they draw near. the street is very dark where they have met, and the figure in the gaudy rags keeps its face still turned aside. they walk together in silence, till they come to where a flaring gas-lamp hangs before a tavern; and there the woman turns, and i see that it is the woman of my dream. and she and the man look into each other's eyes once more. * * * * * in another dream that i remember, an angel (or a devil, i am not quite sure which) has come to a man and told him that so long as he loves no living human thing--so long as he never suffers himself to feel one touch of tenderness towards wife or child, towards kith or kin, towards stranger or towards friend, so long will he succeed and prosper in his dealings--so long will all this world's affairs go well with him; and he will grow each day richer and greater and more powerful. but if ever he let one kindly thought for living thing come into his heart, in that moment all his plans and schemes will topple down about his ears; and from that hour his name will be despised by men, and then forgotten. and the man treasures up these words, for he is an ambitious man, and wealth and fame and power are the sweetest things in all the world to him. a woman loves him and dies, thirsting for a loving look from him; children's footsteps creep into his life and steal away again, old faces fade and new ones come and go. but never a kindly touch of his hand rests on any living thing; never a kindly word comes from his lips; never a kindly thought springs from his heart. and in all his doings fortune favours him. the years pass by, and at last there is left to him only one thing that he need fear--a child's small, wistful face. the child loves him, as the woman, long ago, had loved him, and her eyes follow him with a hungry, beseeching look. but he sets his teeth, and turns away from her. the little face grows thin, and one day they come to him where he sits before the keyboard of his many enterprises, and tell him she is dying. he comes and stands beside the bed, and the child's eyes open and turn towards him; and, as he draws nearer, her little arms stretch out towards him, pleading dumbly. but the man's face never changes, and the little arms fall feebly back upon the tumbled coverlet, and the wistful eyes grow still, and a woman steps softly forward, and draws the lids down over them; then the man goes back to his plans and schemes. but in the night, when the great house is silent, he steals up to the room where the child still lies, and pushes back the white, uneven sheet. "dead--dead," he mutters. then he takes the tiny corpse up in his arms, and holds it tight against his breast, and kisses the cold lips, and the cold cheeks, and the little, cold, stiff hands. and at that point my story becomes impossible, for i dream that the dead child lies always beneath the sheet in that quiet room, and that the little face never changes, nor the limbs decay. i puzzle about this for an instant, but soon forget to wonder; for when the dream fairy tells us tales we are only as little children, sitting round with open eyes, believing all, though marvelling that such things should be. each night, when all else in the house sleeps, the door of that room opens noiselessly, and the man enters and closes it behind him. each night he draws away the white sheet, and takes the small dead body in his arms; and through the dark hours he paces softly to and fro, holding it close against his breast, kissing it and crooning to it, like a mother to her sleeping baby. when the first ray of dawn peeps into the room, he lays the dead child back again, and smooths the sheet above her, and steals away. and he succeeds and prospers in all things, and each day he grows richer and greater and more powerful. chapter iii we had much trouble with our heroine. brown wanted her ugly. brown's chief ambition in life is to be original, and his method of obtaining the original is to take the unoriginal and turn it upside down. if brown were given a little planet of his own to do as he liked with, he would call day, night, and summer, winter. he would make all his men and women walk on their heads and shake hands with their feet, his trees would grow with their roots in the air, and the old cock would lay all the eggs while the hens sat on the fence and crowed. then he would step back and say, "see what an original world i have created, entirely my own idea!" there are many other people besides brown whose notion of originality would seem to be precisely similar. i know a little girl, the descendant of a long line of politicians. the hereditary instinct is so strongly developed in her that she is almost incapable of thinking for herself. instead, she copies in everything her elder sister, who takes more after the mother. if her sister has two helpings of rice pudding for supper, then she has two helpings of rice pudding. if her sister isn't hungry and doesn't want any supper at all, then she goes to bed without any supper. this lack of character in the child troubles her mother, who is not an admirer of the political virtues, and one evening, taking the little one on her lap, she talked seriously to her. "do try to think for yourself," said she. "don't always do just what jessie does, that's silly. have an idea of your own now and then. be a little original." the child promised she'd try, and went to bed thoughtful. next morning, for breakfast, a dish of kippers and a dish of kidneys were placed on the table, side by side. now the child loved kippers with an affection that amounted almost to passion, while she loathed kidneys worse than powders. it was the one subject on which she did know her own mind. "a kidney or a kipper for you, jessie?" asked the mother, addressing the elder child first. jessie hesitated for a moment, while her sister sat regarding her in an agony of suspense. "kipper, please, ma," jessie answered at last, and the younger child turned her head away to hide the tears. "you'll have a kipper, of course, trixy?" said the mother, who had noticed nothing. "no, thank you, ma," said the small heroine, stifling a sob, and speaking in a dry, tremulous voice, "i'll have a kidney." "but i thought you couldn't bear kidneys," exclaimed her mother, surprised. "no, ma, i don't like 'em much." "and you're so fond of kippers!" "yes, ma." "well, then, why on earth don't you have one?" "'cos jessie's going to have one, and you told me to be original," and here the poor mite, reflecting upon the price her originality was going to cost her, burst into tears. * * * * * the other three of us refused to sacrifice ourselves upon the altar of brown's originality. we decided to be content with the customary beautiful girl. "good or bad?" queried brown. "bad," responded macshaughnassy emphatically. "what do you say, jephson?" "well," replied jephson, taking the pipe from between his lips, and speaking in that soothingly melancholy tone of voice that he never varies, whether telling a joke about a wedding or an anecdote relating to a funeral, "not altogether bad. bad, with good instincts, the good instincts well under control." "i wonder why it is," murmured macshaughnassy reflectively, "that bad people are so much more interesting than good." "i don't think the reason is very difficult to find," answered jephson. "there's more uncertainty about them. they keep you more on the alert. it's like the difference between riding a well-broken, steady-going hack and a lively young colt with ideas of his own. the one is comfortable to travel on, but the other provides you with more exercise. if you start off with a thoroughly good woman for your heroine you give your story away in the first chapter. everybody knows precisely how she will behave under every conceivable combination of circumstances in which you can place her. on every occasion she will do the same thing--that is the right thing. "with a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure what is going to happen. out of the fifty or so courses open to her, she may take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-nine wrong ones, and you watch her with curiosity to see which it will be." "but surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting," i said. "at intervals--when they do something wrong," answered jephson. "a consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as socrates must have been to xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other lads. take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance. she never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could not be his, and she generally wept steadily throughout the interview. she never forgot to turn pale at the sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms at the most inconvenient moment possible. she was determined never to marry without her father's consent, and was equally resolved never to marry anybody but the one particular person she was convinced he would never agree to her marrying. she was an excellent young woman, and nearly as uninteresting as a celebrity at home." "ah, but you're not talking about good women now," i observed. "you're talking about some silly person's idea of a good woman." "i quite admit it," replied jephson. "nor, indeed, am i prepared to say what is a good woman. i consider the subject too deep and too complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon. but i _am_ talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of maidenly goodness in the age when these books were written. you must remember goodness is not a known quantity. it varies with every age and every locality, and it is, generally speaking, your 'silly persons' who are responsible for its varying standards. in japan, a 'good' girl would be a girl who would sell her honour in order to afford little luxuries to her aged parents. in certain hospitable islands of the torrid zone the 'good' wife goes to lengths that we should deem altogether unnecessary in making her husband's guest feel himself at home. in ancient hebraic days, jael was accounted a good woman for murdering a sleeping man, and sarai stood in no danger of losing the respect of her little world when she led hagar unto abraham. in eighteenth-century england, supernatural stupidity and dulness of a degree that must have been difficult to attain, were held to be feminine virtues--indeed, they are so still--and authors, who are always among the most servile followers of public opinion, fashioned their puppets accordingly. nowadays 'slumming' is the most applauded virtue, and so all our best heroines go slumming, and are 'good to the poor.'" "how useful 'the poor' are," remarked macshaughnassy, somewhat abruptly, placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair back till it stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention upon it with hopeful interest. "i don't think we scribbling fellows ever fully grasp how much we owe to 'the poor.' where would our angelic heroines and our noble-hearted heroes be if it were not for 'the poor'? we want to show that the dear girl is as good as she is beautiful. what do we do? we put a basket full of chickens and bottles of wine on her arm, a fetching little sun-bonnet on her head, and send her round among the poor. how do we prove that our apparent scamp of a hero is really a noble young man at heart? why, by explaining that he is good to the poor. "they are as useful in real life as they are in bookland. what is it consoles the tradesman when the actor, earning eighty pounds a week, cannot pay his debts? why, reading in the theatrical newspapers gushing accounts of the dear fellow's invariable generosity to the poor. what is it stills the small but irritating voice of conscience when we have successfully accomplished some extra big feat of swindling? why, the noble resolve to give ten per cent of the net profits to the poor. "what does a man do when he finds himself growing old, and feels that it is time for him to think seriously about securing his position in the next world? why, he becomes suddenly good to the poor. if the poor were not there for him to be good to, what could he do? he would be unable to reform at all. it's a great comfort to think that the poor will always be with us. they are the ladder by which we climb into heaven." there was silence for a few moments, while macshaughnassy puffed away vigorously, and almost savagely, at his pipe, and then brown said: "i can tell you rather a quaint incident, bearing very aptly on the subject. a cousin of mine was a land-agent in a small country town, and among the houses on his list was a fine old mansion that had remained vacant for many years. he had despaired of ever selling it, when one day an elderly lady, very richly dressed, drove up to the office and made inquiries about it. she said she had come across it accidentally while travelling through that part of the country the previous autumn, and had been much struck by its beauty and picturesqueness. she added she was looking out for some quiet spot where she could settle down and peacefully pass the remainder of her days, and thought this place might possibly prove to be the very thing for her. "my cousin, delighted with the chance of a purchaser, at once drove her across to the estate, which was about eight miles distant from the town, and they went over it together. my cousin waxed eloquent upon the subject of its advantages. he dwelt upon its quiet and seclusion, its proximity--but not too close proximity--to the church, its convenient distance from the village. "everything pointed to a satisfactory conclusion of the business. the lady was charmed with the situation and the surroundings, and delighted with the house and grounds. she considered the price moderate. "'and now, mr. brown,' said she, as they stood by the lodge gate, 'tell me, what class of poor have you got round about?' "'poor?' answered my cousin; 'there are no poor.' "'no poor!' exclaimed the lady. 'no poor people in the village, or anywhere near?' "'you won't find a poor person within five miles of the estate,' he replied proudly. 'you see, my dear madam, this is a thinly populated and exceedingly prosperous county: this particular district especially so. there is not a family in it that is not, comparatively speaking, well-to- do.' "'i'm sorry to hear that,' said the lady, in a tone of disappointment. 'the place would have suited me so admirably but for that.' "'but surely, madam,' cried my cousin, to whom a demand for poor persons was an entirely new idea, 'you don't mean to say that you _want_ poor people! why, we've always considered it one of the chief attractions of the property--nothing to shock the eye or wound the susceptibilities of the most tender-hearted occupant.' "'my dear mr. brown,' replied the lady, 'i will be perfectly frank with you. i am becoming an old woman, and my past life has not, perhaps, been altogether too well spent. it is my desire to atone for the--er--follies of my youth by an old age of well-doing, and to that end it is essential that i should be surrounded by a certain number of deserving poor. i had hoped to find in this charming neighbourhood of yours the customary proportion of poverty and misery, in which case i should have taken the house without hesitation. as it is, i must seek elsewhere.' "my cousin was perplexed, and sad. 'there are plenty of poor people in the town,' he said, 'many of them most interesting cases, and you could have the entire care of them all. there'd be no opposition whatever, i'm positive.' "'thank you,' replied the lady, 'but i really couldn't go as far as the town. they must be within easy driving distance or they are no good.' "my cousin cudgelled his brains again. he did not intend to let a purchaser slip through his fingers if he could help it. at last a bright thought flashed into his mind. 'i'll tell you what we could do,' he said. 'there's a piece of waste land the other end of the village that we've never been able to do much with, in consequence of its being so swampy. if you liked, we could run you up a dozen cottages on that, cheap--it would be all the better their being a bit ramshackle and unhealthy--and get some poor people for you, and put into them.' "the lady reflected upon the idea, and it struck her as a good one. "'you see,' continued my cousin, pushing his advantage, 'by adopting this method you would be able to select your own poor. we would get you some nice, clean, grateful poor, and make the thing pleasant for you.' "it ended in the lady's accepting my cousin's offer, and giving him a list of the poor people she would like to have. she selected one bedridden old woman (church of england preferred); one paralytic old man; one blind girl who would want to be read aloud to; one poor atheist, willing to be converted; two cripples; one drunken father who would consent to be talked to seriously; one disagreeable old fellow, needing much patience; two large families, and four ordinary assorted couples. "my cousin experienced some difficulty in securing the drunken father. most of the drunken fathers he interviewed upon the subject had a rooted objection to being talked to at all. after a long search, however, he discovered a mild little man, who, upon the lady's requirements and charitable intentions being explained to him, undertook to qualify himself for the vacancy by getting intoxicated at least once a week. he said he could not promise more than once a week at first, he unfortunately possessing a strong natural distaste for all alcoholic liquors, which it would be necessary for him to overcome. as he got more used to them, he would do better. "over the disagreeable old man, my cousin also had trouble. it was hard to hit the right degree of disagreeableness. some of them were so very unpleasant. he eventually made choice of a decayed cab-driver with advanced radical opinions, who insisted on a three years' contract. "the plan worked exceedingly well, and does so, my cousin tells me, to this day. the drunken father has completely conquered his dislike to strong drink. he has not been sober now for over three weeks, and has lately taken to knocking his wife about. the disagreeable fellow is most conscientious in fulfilling his part of the bargain, and makes himself a perfect curse to the whole village. the others have dropped into their respective positions and are working well. the lady visits them all every afternoon, and is most charitable. they call her lady bountiful, and everybody blesses her." brown rose as he finished speaking, and mixed himself a glass of whisky and water with the self-satisfied air of a benevolent man about to reward somebody for having done a good deed; and macshaughnassy lifted up his voice and talked. "i know a story bearing on the subject, too," he said. "it happened in a tiny yorkshire village--a peaceful, respectable spot, where folks found life a bit slow. one day, however, a new curate arrived, and that woke things up considerably. he was a nice young man, and, having a large private income of his own, was altogether a most desirable catch. every unmarried female in the place went for him with one accord. "but ordinary feminine blandishments appeared to have no effect upon him. he was a seriously inclined young man, and once, in the course of a casual conversation upon the subject of love, he was heard to say that he himself should never be attracted by mere beauty and charm. what would appeal to him, he said, would be a woman's goodness--her charity and kindliness to the poor. "well, that set the petticoats all thinking. they saw that in studying fashion plates and practising expressions they had been going upon the wrong tack. the card for them to play was 'the poor.' but here a serious difficulty arose. there was only one poor person in the whole parish, a cantankerous old fellow who lived in a tumble-down cottage at the back of the church, and fifteen able-bodied women (eleven girls, three old maids, and a widow) wanted to be 'good' to him. "miss simmonds, one of the old maids, got hold of him first, and commenced feeding him twice a day with beef-tea; and then the widow boarded him with port wine and oysters. later in the week others of the party drifted in upon him, and wanted to cram him with jelly and chickens. "the old man couldn't understand it. he was accustomed to a small sack of coals now and then, accompanied by a long lecture on his sins, and an occasional bottle of dandelion tea. this sudden spurt on the part of providence puzzled him. he said nothing, however, but continued to take in as much of everything as he could hold. at the end of a month he was too fat to get through his own back door. "the competition among the women-folk grew keener every day, and at last the old man began to give himself airs, and to make the place hard for them. he made them clean his cottage out, and cook his meals, and when he was tired of having them about the house, he set them to work in the garden. "they grumbled a good deal, and there was a talk at one time of a sort of a strike, but what could they do? he was the only pauper for miles round, and knew it. he had the monopoly, and, like all monopolises, he abused his position. "he made them run errands. he sent them out to buy his 'baccy,' at their own expense. on one occasion he sent miss simmonds out with a jug to get his supper beer. she indignantly refused at first, but he told her that if she gave him any of her stuck-up airs out she would go, and never come into his house again. if she wouldn't do it there were plenty of others who would. she knew it and went. "they had been in the habit of reading to him--good books with an elevating tendency. but now he put his foot down upon that sort of thing. he said he didn't want sunday-school rubbish at his time of life. what he liked was something spicy. and he made them read him french novels and seafaring tales, containing realistic language. and they didn't have to skip anything either, or he'd know the reason why. "he said he liked music, so a few of them clubbed together and bought him a harmonium. their idea was that they would sing hymns and play high- class melodies, but it wasn't his. his idea was--'keeping up the old girl's birthday' and 'she winked the other eye,' with chorus and skirt dance, and that's what they sang. "to what lengths his tyranny would have gone it is difficult to say, had not an event happened that brought his power to a premature collapse. this was the curate's sudden and somewhat unexpected marriage with a very beautiful burlesque actress who had lately been performing in a neighbouring town. he gave up the church on his engagement, in consequence of his _fiancee's_ objection to becoming a minister's wife. she said she could never 'tumble to' the district visiting. "with the curate's wedding the old pauper's brief career of prosperity ended. they packed him off to the workhouse after that, and made him break stones." * * * * * at the end of the telling of his tale, macshaughnassy lifted his feet off the mantelpiece, and set to work to wake up his legs; and jephson took a hand, and began to spin us stories. but none of us felt inclined to laugh at jephson's stories, for they dealt not with the goodness of the rich to the poor, which is a virtue yielding quick and highly satisfactory returns, but with the goodness of the poor to the poor, a somewhat less remunerative investment and a different matter altogether. for the poor themselves--i do not mean the noisy professional poor, but the silent, fighting poor--one is bound to feel a genuine respect. one honours them, as one honours a wounded soldier. in the perpetual warfare between humanity and nature, the poor stand always in the van. they die in the ditches, and we march over their bodies with the flags flying and the drums playing. one cannot think of them without an uncomfortable feeling that one ought to be a little bit ashamed of living in security and ease, leaving them to take all the hard blows. it is as if one were always skulking in the tents, while one's comrades were fighting and dying in the front. they bleed and fall in silence there. nature with her terrible club, "survival of the fittest"; and civilisation with her cruel sword, "supply and demand," beat them back, and they give way inch by inch, fighting to the end. but it is in a dumb, sullen way, that is not sufficiently picturesque to be heroic. i remember seeing an old bull-dog, one saturday night, lying on the doorstep of a small shop in the new cut. he lay there very quiet, and seemed a bit sleepy; and, as he looked savage, nobody disturbed him. people stepped in and out over him, and occasionally in doing so, one would accidentally kick him, and then he would breathe a little harder and quicker. at last a passer-by, feeling something wet beneath his feet, looked down, and found that he was standing in a pool of blood, and, looking to see where it came from, found that it flowed in a thick, dark stream from the step on which the dog was lying. then he stooped down and examined the dog, and the dog opened its eyes sleepily and looked at him, gave a grin which may have implied pleasure, or may have implied irritation at being disturbed, and died. a crowd collected, and they turned the dead body of the dog over on its side, and saw a fearful gash in the groin, out of which oozed blood, and other things. the proprietor of the shop said the animal had been there for over an hour. i have known the poor to die in that same grim, silent way--not the poor that you, my delicately-gloved lady bountiful and my very excellent sir simon dogood, know, or that you would care to know; not the poor who march in processions with banners and collection-boxes; not the poor that clamour round your soup kitchens and sing hymns at your tea meetings; but the poor that you don't know are poor until the tale is told at the coroner's inquest--the silent, proud poor who wake each morning to wrestle with death till night-time, and who, when at last he overcomes them, and, forcing them down on the rotting floor of the dim attic, strangles them, still die with their teeth tight shut. there was a boy i came to know when i was living in the east end of london. he was not a nice boy by any means. he was not quite so clean as are the good boys in the religious magazines, and i have known a sailor to stop him in the street and reprove him for using indelicate language. he and his mother and the baby, a sickly infant of about five months old, lived in a cellar down a turning off three colt street. i am not quite sure what had become of the father. i rather think he had been "converted," and had gone off round the country on a preaching tour. the lad earned six shillings a week as an errand-boy; and the mother stitched trousers, and on days when she was feeling strong and energetic would often make as much as tenpence, or even a shilling. unfortunately, there were days when the four bare walls would chase each other round and round, and the candle seem a faint speck of light, a very long way off; and the frequency of these caused the family income for the week to occasionally fall somewhat low. one night the walls danced round quicker and quicker till they danced away altogether, and the candle shot up through the ceiling and became a star and the woman knew that it was time to put away her sewing. "jim," she said: she spoke very low, and the boy had to bend over her to hear, "if you poke about in the middle of the mattress you'll find a couple of pounds. i saved them up a long while ago. that will pay for burying me. and, jim, you'll take care of the kid. you won't let it go to the parish." jim promised. "say 's'welp me gawd,' jim." "s'welp me gawd, mother." then the woman, having arranged her worldly affairs, lay back ready, and death struck. jim kept his oath. he found the money, and buried his mother; and then, putting his household goods on a barrow, moved into cheaper apartments--half an old shed, for which he paid two shillings a week. for eighteen months he and the baby lived there. he left the child at a nursery every morning, fetching it away each evening on his return from work, and for that he paid fourpence a day, which included a limited supply of milk. how he managed to keep himself and more than half keep the child on the remaining two shillings i cannot say. i only know that he did it, and that not a soul ever helped him or knew that there was help wanted. he nursed the child, often pacing the room with it for hours, washed it, occasionally, and took it out for an airing every sunday. notwithstanding all which care, the little beggar, at the end of the time above mentioned, "pegged out," to use jimmy's own words. the coroner was very severe on jim. "if you had taken proper steps," he said, "this child's life might have been preserved." (he seemed to think it would have been better if the child's life had been preserved. coroners have quaint ideas!) "why didn't you apply to the relieving officer?" "'cos i didn't want no relief," replied jim sullenly. "i promised my mother it should never go on the parish, and it didn't." the incident occurred, very luckily, during the dead season, and the evening papers took the case up, and made rather a good thing out of it. jim became quite a hero, i remember. kind-hearted people wrote, urging that somebody--the ground landlord, or the government, or some one of that sort--ought to do something for him. and everybody abused the local vestry. i really think some benefit to jim might have come out of it all if only the excitement had lasted a little longer. unfortunately, however, just at its height a spicy divorce case cropped up, and jim was crowded out and forgotten. i told the boys this story of mine, after jephson had done telling his, and, when i had finished, we found it was nearly one o'clock. so, of course, it was too late to do any more work to the novel that evening. chapter iv we held our next business meeting on my houseboat. brown was opposed at first to my going down to this houseboat at all. he thought that none of us should leave town while the novel was still on hand. macshaughnassy, on the contrary, was of opinion that we should work better on a houseboat. speaking for himself, he said he never felt more like writing a really great work than when lying in a hammock among whispering leaves, with the deep blue sky above him, and a tumbler of iced claret cup within easy reach of his hand. failing a hammock, he found a deck chair a great incentive to mental labour. in the interests of the novel, he strongly recommended me to take down with me at least one comfortable deck chair, and plenty of lemons. i could not myself see any reason why we should not be able to think as well on a houseboat as anywhere else, and accordingly it was settled that i should go down and establish myself upon the thing, and that the others should visit me there from time to time, when we would sit round and toil. this houseboat was ethelbertha's idea. we had spent a day, the summer before, on one belonging to a friend of mine, and she had been enraptured with the life. everything was on such a delightfully tiny scale. you lived in a tiny little room; you slept on a tiny little bed, in a tiny, tiny little bedroom; and you cooked your little dinner by a tiny little fire, in the tiniest little kitchen that ever you did see. "oh, it must be lovely, living on a houseboat," said ethelbertha, with a gasp of ecstasy; "it must be like living in a doll's house." ethelbertha was very young--ridiculously young, as i think i have mentioned before--in those days of which i am writing, and the love of dolls, and of the gorgeous dresses that dolls wear, and of the many-windowed but inconveniently arranged houses that dolls inhabit--or are supposed to inhabit, for as a rule they seem to prefer sitting on the roof with their legs dangling down over the front door, which has always appeared to me to be unladylike: but then, of course, i am no authority on doll etiquette--had not yet, i think, quite departed from her. nay, am i not sure that it had not? do i not remember, years later, peeping into a certain room, the walls of which are covered with works of art of a character calculated to send any aesthetic person mad, and seeing her, sitting on the floor, before a red brick mansion, containing two rooms and a kitchen; and are not her hands trembling with delight as she arranges the three real tin plates upon the dresser? and does she not knock at the real brass knocker upon the real front door until it comes off, and i have to sit down beside her on the floor and screw it on again? perhaps, however, it is unwise for me to recall these things, and bring them forward thus in evidence against her, for cannot she in turn laugh at me? did not i also assist in the arrangement and appointment of that house beautiful? we differed on the matter of the drawing-room carpet, i recollect. ethelbertha fancied a dark blue velvet, but i felt sure, taking the wall-paper into consideration, that some shade of terra-cotta would harmonise best. she agreed with me in the end, and we manufactured one out of an old chest protector. it had a really charming effect, and gave a delightfully warm tone to the room. the blue velvet we put in the kitchen. i deemed this extravagance, but ethelbertha said that servants thought a lot of a good carpet, and that it paid to humour them in little things, when practicable. the bedroom had one big bed and a cot in it; but i could not see where the girl was going to sleep. the architect had overlooked her altogether: that is so like an architect. the house also suffered from the inconvenience common to residences of its class, of possessing no stairs, so that to move from one room to another it was necessary to burst your way up through the ceiling, or else to come outside and climb in through a window; either of which methods must be fatiguing when you come to do it often. apart from these drawbacks, however, the house was one that any doll agent would have been justified in describing as a "most desirable family residence"; and it had been furnished with a lavishness that bordered on positive ostentation. in the bedroom there was a washing-stand, and on the washing-stand there stood a jug and basin, and in the jug there was real water. but all this was as nothing. i have known mere ordinary, middle-class dolls' houses in which you might find washing-stands and jugs and basins and real water--ay, and even soap. but in this abode of luxury there was a real towel; so that a body could not only wash himself, but wipe himself afterwards, and that is a sensation that, as all dolls know, can be enjoyed only in the very first-class establishments. then, in the drawing-room, there was a clock, which would tick just so long as you continued to shake it (it never seemed to get tired); also a picture and a piano, and a book upon the table, and a vase of flowers that would upset the moment you touched it, just like a real vase of flowers. oh, there was style about this room, i can tell you. but the glory of the house was its kitchen. there were all things that heart could desire in this kitchen, saucepans with lids that took on and off, a flat-iron and a rolling-pin. a dinner service for three occupied about half the room, and what space was left was filled up by the stove--a _real_ stove! think of it, oh ye owners of dolls' houses, a stove in which you could burn real bits of coal, and on which you could boil real bits of potato for dinner--except when people said you mustn't, because it was dangerous, and took the grate away from you, and blew out the fire, a thing that hampers a cook. i never saw a house more complete in all its details. nothing had been overlooked, not even the family. it lay on its back, just outside the front door, proud but calm, waiting to be put into possession. it was not an extensive family. it consisted of four--papa, and mamma, and baby, and the hired girl; just the family for a beginner. it was a well-dressed family too--not merely with grand clothes outside, covering a shameful condition of things beneath, such as, alas! is too often the case in doll society, but with every article necessary and proper to a lady or gentleman, down to items that i could not mention. and all these garments, you must know, could be unfastened and taken off. i have known dolls--stylish enough dolls, to look at, some of them--who have been content to go about with their clothes gummed on to them, and, in some cases, nailed on with tacks, which i take to be a slovenly and unhealthy habit. but this family could be undressed in five minutes, without the aid of either hot water or a chisel. not that it was advisable from an artistic point of view that any of them should. they had not the figure that looks well in its natural state--none of them. there was a want of fulness about them all. besides, without their clothes, it might have been difficult to distinguish the baby from the papa, or the maid from the mistress, and thus domestic complications might have arisen. when all was ready for their reception we established them in their home. we put as much of the baby to bed as the cot would hold, and made the papa and mamma comfortable in the drawing-room, where they sat on the floor and stared thoughtfully at each other across the table. (they had to sit on the floor because the chairs were not big enough.) the girl we placed in the kitchen, where she leant against the dresser in an attitude suggestive of drink, embracing the broom we had given her with maudlin affection. then we lifted up the house with care, and carried it cautiously into another room, and with the deftness of experienced conspirators placed it at the foot of a small bed, on the south-west corner of which an absurdly small somebody had hung an absurdly small stocking. to return to our own doll's house, ethelbertha and i, discussing the subject during our return journey in the train, resolved that, next year, we ourselves would possess a houseboat, a smaller houseboat, if possible, than even the one we had just seen. it should have art-muslin curtains and a flag, and the flowers about it should be wild roses and forget-me- nots. i could work all the morning on the roof, with an awning over me to keep off the sun, while ethelbertha trimmed the roses and made cakes for tea; and in the evenings we would sit out on the little deck, and ethelbertha would play the guitar (she would begin learning it at once), or we could sit quiet and listen to the nightingales. for, when you are very, very young you dream that the summer is all sunny days and moonlight nights, that the wind blows always softly from the west, and that roses will thrive anywhere. but, as you grow older, you grow tired of waiting for the gray sky to break. so you close the door and come in, and crouch over the fire, wondering why the winds blow ever from the east: and you have given up trying to rear roses. i knew a little cottage girl who saved up her money for months and months so as to buy a new frock in which to go to a flower-show. but the day of the flower-show was a wet day, so she wore an old frock instead. and all the fete days for quite a long while were wet days, and she feared she would never have a chance of wearing her pretty white dress. but at last there came a fete day morning that was bright and sunny, and then the little girl clapped her hands and ran upstairs, and took her new frock (which had been her "new frock" for so long a time that it was now the oldest frock she had) from the box where it lay neatly folded between lavender and thyme, and held it up, and laughed to think how nice she would look in it. but when she went to put it on, she found that she had out-grown it, and that it was too small for her every way. so she had to wear a common old frock after all. things happen that way, you know, in this world. there were a boy and girl once who loved each other very dearly. but they were both poor, so they agreed to wait till he had made enough money for them to live comfortably upon, and then they would marry and be happy. it took him a long while to make, because making money is very slow work, and he wanted, while he was about it, to make enough for them to be very happy upon indeed. he accomplished the task eventually, however, and came back home a wealthy man. then they met again in the poorly-furnished parlour where they had parted. but they did not sit as near to each other as of old. for she had lived alone so long that she had grown old-maidish, and she was feeling vexed with him for having dirtied the carpet with his muddy boots. and he had worked so long earning money that he had grown hard and cold like the money itself, and was trying to think of something affectionate to say to her. so for a while they sat, one each side of the paper "fire-stove ornament," both wondering why they had shed such scalding tears on that day they had kissed each other good-bye; then said "good-bye" again, and were glad. there is another tale with much the same moral that i learnt at school out of a copy-book. if i remember rightly, it runs somewhat like this:-- once upon a time there lived a wise grasshopper and a foolish ant. all through the pleasant summer weather the grasshopper sported and played, gambolling with his fellows in and out among the sun-beams, dining sumptuously each day on leaves and dew-drops, never troubling about the morrow, singing ever his one peaceful, droning song. but there came the cruel winter, and the grasshopper, looking around, saw that his friends, the flowers, lay dead, and knew thereby that his own little span was drawing near its close. then he felt glad that he had been so happy, and had not wasted his life. "it has been very short," said he to himself; "but it has been very pleasant, and i think i have made the best use of it. i have drunk in the sunshine, i have lain on the soft, warm air, i have played merry games in the waving grass, i have tasted the juice of the sweet green leaves. i have done what i could. i have spread my wings, i have sung my song. now i will thank god for the sunny days that are passed, and die." saying which, he crawled under a brown leaf, and met his fate in the way that all brave grasshoppers should; and a little bird that was passing by picked him up tenderly and buried him. now when the foolish ant saw this, she was greatly puffed up with pharisaical conceit. "how thankful i ought to be," said she, "that i am industrious and prudent, and not like this poor grasshopper. while he was flitting about from flower to flower, enjoying himself, i was hard at work, putting by against the winter. now he is dead, while i am about to make myself cosy in my warm home, and eat all the good things that i have been saving up." but, as she spoke, the gardener came along with his spade, and levelled the hill where she dwelt to the ground, and left her lying dead amidst the ruins. then the same kind little bird that had buried the grasshopper came and picked her out and buried her also; and afterwards he composed and sang a song, the burthen of which was, "gather ye rosebuds while ye may." it was a very pretty song, and a very wise song, and a man who lived in those days, and to whom the birds, loving him and feeling that he was almost one of themselves, had taught their language, fortunately overheard it and wrote it down, so that all may read it to this day. unhappily for us, however, fate is a harsh governess, who has no sympathy with our desire for rosebuds. "don't stop to pick flowers now, my dear," she cries, in her sharp, cross tones, as she seizes our arm and jerks us back into the roadway; "we haven't time to-day. we will come back again to-morrow, and you shall pick them then." and we have to follow her, knowing, if we are experienced children, that the chances are that we shall never come that way to-morrow; or that, if we do, the roses will be dead. fate would not hear of our having a houseboat that summer,--which was an exceptionally fine summer,--but promised us that if we were good and saved up our money, we should have one next year; and ethelbertha and i, being simple-minded, inexperienced children, were content with the promise, and had faith in its satisfactory fulfilment. as soon as we reached home we informed amenda of our plan. the moment the girl opened the door, ethelbertha burst out with:--"oh! can you swim, amenda?" "no, mum," answered amenda, with entire absence of curiosity as to why such a question had been addressed to her, "i never knew but one girl as could, and she got drowned." "well, you'll have to make haste and learn, then," continued ethelbertha, "because you won't be able to walk out with your young man, you'll have to swim out. we're not going to live in a house any more. we're going to live on a boat in the middle of the river." ethelbertha's chief object in life at this period was to surprise and shock amenda, and her chief sorrow that she had never succeeded in doing so. she had hoped great things from this announcement, but the girl remained unmoved. "oh, are you, mum," she replied; and went on to speak of other matters. i believe the result would have been the same if we had told her we were going to live in a balloon. i do not know how it was, i am sure. amenda was always most respectful in her manner. but she had a knack of making ethelbertha and myself feel that we were a couple of children, playing at being grown up and married, and that she was humouring us. amenda stayed with us for nearly five years--until the milkman, having saved up sufficient to buy a "walk" of his own, had become practicable--but her attitude towards us never changed. even when we came to be really important married people, the proprietors of a "family," it was evident that she merely considered we had gone a step further in the game, and were playing now at being fathers and mothers. by some subtle process she contrived to imbue the baby also with this idea. the child never seemed to me to take either of us quite seriously. she would play with us, or join with us in light conversation; but when it came to the serious affairs of life, such as bathing or feeding, she preferred her nurse. ethelbertha attempted to take her out in the perambulator one morning, but the child would not hear of it for a moment. "it's all right, baby dear," explained ethelbertha soothingly. "baby's going out with mamma this morning." "oh no, baby ain't," was baby's rejoinder, in effect if not in words. "baby don't take a hand in experiments--not this baby. i don't want to be upset or run over." poor ethel! i shall never forget how heart-broken she was. it was the want of confidence that wounded her. but these are reminiscences of other days, having no connection with the days of which i am--or should be--writing; and to wander from one matter to another is, in a teller of tales, a grievous sin, and a growing custom much to be condemned. therefore i will close my eyes to all other memories, and endeavour to see only that little white and green houseboat by the ferry, which was the scene of our future collaborations. houseboats then were not built to the scale of mississippi steamers, but this boat was a small one, even for that primitive age. the man from whom we hired it described it as "compact." the man to whom, at the end of the first month, we tried to sub-let it, characterised it as "poky." in our letters we traversed this definition. in our hearts we agreed with it. at first, however, its size--or, rather, its lack of size--was one of its chief charms in ethelbertha's eyes. the fact that if you got out of bed carelessly you were certain to knock your head against the ceiling, and that it was utterly impossible for any man to put on his trousers except in the saloon, she regarded as a capital joke. that she herself had to take a looking-glass and go upon the roof to do her back hair, she thought less amusing. amenda accepted her new surroundings with her usual philosophic indifference. on being informed that what she had mistaken for a linen- press was her bedroom, she remarked that there was one advantage about it, and that was, that she could not tumble out of bed, seeing there was nowhere to tumble; and, on being shown the kitchen, she observed that she should like it for two things--one was that she could sit in the middle and reach everything without getting up; the other, that nobody else could come into the apartment while she was there. "you see, amenda," explained ethelbertha apologetically, "we shall really live outside." "yes, mum," answered amenda, "i should say that would be the best place to do it." if only we could have lived more outside, the life might have been pleasant enough, but the weather rendered it impossible, six days out of the seven, for us to do more than look out of the window and feel thankful that we had a roof over our heads. i have known wet summers before and since. i have learnt by many bitter experiences the danger and foolishness of leaving the shelter of london any time between the first of may and the thirty-first of october. indeed, the country is always associate in my mind with recollections of long, weary days passed in the pitiless rain, and sad evenings spent in other people's clothes. but never have i known, and never, i pray night and morning, may i know again, such a summer as the one we lived through (though none of us expected to) on that confounded houseboat. in the morning we would be awakened by the rain's forcing its way through the window and wetting the bed, and would get up and mop out the saloon. after breakfast i would try to work, but the beating of the hail upon the roof just over my head would drive every idea out of my brain, and, after a wasted hour or two, i would fling down my pen and hunt up ethelbertha, and we would put on our mackintoshes and take our umbrellas and go out for a row. at mid-day we would return and put on some dry clothes, and sit down to dinner. in the afternoon the storm generally freshened up a bit, and we were kept pretty busy rushing about with towels and cloths, trying to prevent the water from coming into the rooms and swamping us. during tea-time the saloon was usually illuminated by forked lightning. the evenings we spent in baling out the boat, after which we took it in turns to go into the kitchen and warm ourselves. at eight we supped, and from then until it was time to go to bed we sat wrapped up in rugs, listening to the roaring of the thunder, and the howling of the wind, and the lashing of the waves, and wondering whether the boat would hold out through the night. friends would come down to spend the day with us--elderly, irritable people, fond of warmth and comfort; people who did not, as a rule, hanker after jaunts, even under the most favourable conditions; but who had been persuaded by our silly talk that a day on the river would be to them like a saturday to monday in paradise. they would arrive soaked; and we would shut them up in different bunks, and leave them to strip themselves and put on things of ethelbertha's or of mine. but ethel and i, in those days, were slim, so that stout, middle-aged people in our clothes neither looked well nor felt happy. upon their emerging we would take them into the saloon and try to entertain them by telling them what we had intended to do with them had the day been fine. but their answers were short, and occasionally snappy, and after a while the conversation would flag, and we would sit round reading last week's newspapers and coughing. the moment their own clothes were dry (we lived in a perpetual atmosphere of steaming clothes) they would insist upon leaving us, which seemed to me discourteous after all that we had done for them, and would dress themselves once more and start off home, and get wet again before they got there. we would generally receive a letter a few days afterwards, written by some relative, informing us that both patients were doing as well as could be expected, and promising to send us a card for the funeral in case of a relapse. our chief recreation, our sole consolation, during the long weeks of our imprisonment, was to watch from our windows the pleasure-seekers passing by in small open boats, and to reflect what an awful day they had had, or were going to have, as the case might be. in the forenoon they would head up stream--young men with their sweethearts; nephews taking out their rich old aunts; husbands and wives (some of them pairs, some of them odd ones); stylish-looking girls with cousins; energetic-looking men with dogs; high-class silent parties; low- class noisy parties; quarrelsome family parties--boatload after boatload they went by, wet, but still hopeful, pointing out bits of blue sky to each other. in the evening they would return, drenched and gloomy, saying disagreeable things to one another. one couple, and one couple only, out of the many hundreds that passed under our review, came back from the ordeal with pleasant faces. he was rowing hard and singing, with a handkerchief tied round his head to keep his hat on, and she was laughing at him, while trying to hold up an umbrella with one hand and steer with the other. there are but two explanations to account for people being jolly on the river in the rain. the one i dismissed as being both uncharitable and improbable. the other was creditable to the human race, and, adopting it, i took off my cap to this damp but cheerful pair as they went by. they answered with a wave of the hand, and i stood looking after them till they disappeared in the mist. i am inclined to think that those young people, if they be still alive, are happy. maybe, fortune has been kind to them, or maybe she has not, but in either event they are, i am inclined to think, happier than are most people. now and again, the daily tornado would rage with such fury as to defeat its own purpose by prematurely exhausting itself. on these rare occasions we would sit out on the deck, and enjoy the unwonted luxury of fresh air. i remember well those few pleasant evenings: the river, luminous with the drowned light, the dark banks where the night lurked, the storm-tossed sky, jewelled here and there with stars. it was delightful not to hear for an hour or so the sullen thrashing of the rain; but to listen to the leaping of the fishes, the soft swirl raised by some water-rat, swimming stealthily among the rushes, the restless twitterings of the few still wakeful birds. an old corncrake lived near to us, and the way he used to disturb all the other birds, and keep them from going to sleep, was shameful. amenda, who was town-bred, mistook him at first for one of those cheap alarm clocks, and wondered who was winding him up, and why they went on doing it all night; and, above all, why they didn't oil him. he would begin his unhallowed performance about dusk, just as every respectable bird was preparing to settle down for the night. a family of thrushes had their nest a few yards from his stand, and they used to get perfectly furious with him. "there's that fool at it again," the female thrush would say; "why can't he do it in the daytime if he must do it at all?" (she spoke, of course, in twitters, but i am confident the above is a correct translation.) after a while, the young thrushes would wake up and begin chirping, and then the mother would get madder than ever. "can't you say something to him?" she would cry indignantly to her husband. "how do you think the children can get to sleep, poor things, with that hideous row going on all night? might just as well be living in a saw-mill." thus adjured, the male thrush would put his head over the nest, and call out in a nervous, apologetic manner:-- "i say, you know, you there, i wish you wouldn't mind being quiet a bit. my wife says she can't get the children to sleep. it's too bad, you know, 'pon my word it is." "gor on," the corncrake would answer surlily. "you keep your wife herself quiet; that's enough for you to do." and on he would go again worse than before. then a mother blackbird, from a little further off, would join in the fray. "ah, it's a good hiding he wants, not a talking to. and if i was a cock, i'd give it him." (this remark would be made in a tone of withering contempt, and would appear to bear reference to some previous discussion.) "you're quite right, ma'am," mrs. thrush would reply. "that's what i tell my husband, but" (with rising inflection, so that every lady in the plantation might hear) "_he_ wouldn't move himself, bless you--no, not if i and the children were to die before his eyes for want of sleep." "ah, he ain't the only one, my dear," the blackbird would pipe back, "they're all alike"; then, in a voice more of sorrow than of anger:--"but there, it ain't their fault, i suppose, poor things. if you ain't got the spirit of a bird you can't help yourself." i would strain my ears at this point to hear if the male blackbird was moved at all by these taunts, but the only sound i could ever detect coming from his neighbourhood was that of palpably exaggerated snoring. by this time the whole glade would be awake, expressing views concerning that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous nature. "blow me tight, bill," some vulgar little hedge-sparrow would chirp out, in the midst of the hubbub, "if i don't believe the gent thinks 'e's a- singing." "'tain't 'is fault," bill would reply, with mock sympathy. "somebody's put a penny in the slot, and 'e can't stop 'isself." irritated by the laugh that this would call forth from the younger birds, the corncrake would exert himself to be more objectionable than ever, and, as a means to this end, would commence giving his marvellous imitation of the sharpening of a rusty saw by a steel file. but at this an old crow, not to be trifled with, would cry out angrily:-- "stop that, now. if i come down to you i'll peck your cranky head off, i will." and then would follow silence for a quarter of an hour, after which the whole thing would begin again. chapter v brown and macshaughnassy came down together on the saturday afternoon; and, as soon as they had dried themselves, and had had some tea, we settled down to work. jephson had written that he would not be able to be with us until late in the evening, and brown proposed that we should occupy ourselves until his arrival with plots. "let each of us," said he, "sketch out a plot. afterwards we can compare them, and select the best." this we proceeded to do. the plots themselves i forget, but i remember that at the subsequent judging each man selected his own, and became so indignant at the bitter criticism to which it was subjected by the other two, that he tore it up; and, for the next half-hour, we sat and smoked in silence. when i was very young i yearned to know other people's opinion of me and all my works; now, my chief aim is to avoid hearing it. in those days, had any one told me there was half a line about myself in a newspaper, i should have tramped london to obtain that publication. now, when i see a column headed with my name, i hurriedly fold up the paper and put it away from me, subduing my natural curiosity to read it by saying to myself, "why should you? it will only upset you for the day." in my cubhood i possessed a friend. other friends have come into my life since--very dear and precious friends--but they have none of them been to me quite what this friend was. because he was my first friend, and we lived together in a world that was much bigger than this world--more full of joy and of grief; and, in that world, we loved and hated deeper than we love and hate in this smaller world that i have come to dwell in since. he also had the very young man's craving to be criticised, and we made it our custom to oblige each other. we did not know then that what we meant, when we asked for "criticism," was encouragement. we thought that we were strong--one does at the beginning of the battle, and that we could bear to hear the truth. accordingly, each one pointed out to the other one his errors, and this task kept us both so busy that we had never time to say a word of praise to one another. that we each had a high opinion of the other's talents i am convinced, but our heads were full of silly saws. we said to ourselves: "there are many who will praise a man; it is only his friend who will tell him of his faults." also, we said: "no man sees his own shortcomings, but when these are pointed out to him by another he is grateful, and proceeds to mend them." as we came to know the world better, we learnt the fallacy of these ideas. but then it was too late, for the mischief had been done. when one of us had written anything, he would read it to the other, and when he had finished he would say, "now, tell me what you think of it--frankly and as a friend." those were his words. but his thoughts, though he may not have known them, were:-- "tell me it is clever and good, my friend, even if you do not think so. the world is very cruel to those that have not yet conquered it, and, though we keep a careless face, our young hearts are scored with wrinkles. often we grow weary and faint-hearted. is it not so, my friend? no one has faith in us, and in our dark hours we doubt ourselves. you are my comrade. you know what of myself i have put into this thing that to others will be but an idle half-hour's reading. tell me it is good, my friend. put a little heart into me, i pray you." but the other, full of the lust of criticism, which is civilisation's substitute for cruelty, would answer more in frankness than in friendship. then he who had written would flush angrily, and scornful words would pass. one evening, he read me a play he had written. there was much that was good in it, but there were also faults (there are in some plays), and these i seized upon and made merry over. i could hardly have dealt out to the piece more unnecessary bitterness had i been a professional critic. as soon as i paused from my sport he rose, and, taking his manuscript from the table, tore it in two, and flung it in the fire--he was but a very young man, you must remember--and then, standing before me with a white face, told me, unsolicited, his opinion of me and of my art. after which double event, it is perhaps needless to say that we parted in hot anger. i did not see him again for years. the streets of life are very crowded, and if we loose each other's hands we are soon hustled far apart. when i did next meet him it was by accident. i had left the whitehall rooms after a public dinner, and, glad of the cool night air, was strolling home by the embankment. a man, slouching along under the trees, paused as i overtook him. "you couldn't oblige me with a light, could you, guv'nor?" he said. the voice sounded strange, coming from the figure that it did. i struck a match, and held it out to him, shaded by my hands. as the faint light illumined his face, i started back, and let the match fall:-- "harry!" he answered with a short dry laugh. "i didn't know it was you," he said, "or i shouldn't have stopped you." "how has it come to this, old fellow?" i asked, laying my hand upon his shoulder. his coat was unpleasantly greasy, and i drew my hand away again as quickly as i could, and tried to wipe it covertly upon my handkerchief. "oh, it's a long, story," he answered carelessly, "and too conventional to be worth telling. some of us go up, you know. some of us go down. you're doing pretty well, i hear." "i suppose so," i replied; "i've climbed a few feet up a greasy pole, and am trying to stick there. but it is of you i want to talk. can't i do anything for you?" we were passing under a gas-lamp at the moment. he thrust his face forward close to mine, and the light fell full and pitilessly upon it. "do i look like a man you could do anything for?" he said. we walked on in silence side by side, i casting about for words that might seize hold of him. "you needn't worry about me," he continued after a while, "i'm comfortable enough. we take life easily down here where i am. we've no disappointments." "why did you give up like a weak coward?" i burst out angrily. "you had talent. you would have won with ordinary perseverance." "maybe," he replied, in the same even tone of indifference. "i suppose i hadn't the grit. i think if somebody had believed in me it might have helped me. but nobody did, and at last i lost belief in myself. and when a man loses that, he's like a balloon with the gas let out." i listened to his words in indignation and astonishment. "nobody believed in you!" i repeated. "why, _i_ always believed in you, you know that i--" then i paused, remembering our "candid criticism" of one another. "did you?" he replied quietly, "i never heard you say so. good-night." in the course of our strandward walking we had come to the neighbourhood of the savoy, and, as he spoke, he disappeared down one of the dark turnings thereabouts. i hastened after him, calling him by name, but though i heard his quick steps before me for a little way, they were soon swallowed up in the sound of other steps, and, when i reached the square in which the chapel stands, i had lost all trace of him. a policeman was standing by the churchyard railings, and of him i made inquiries. "what sort of a gent was he, sir?" questioned the man. "a tall thin gentleman, very shabbily dressed--might be mistaken for a tramp." "ah, there's a good many of that sort living in this town," replied the man. "i'm afraid you'll have some difficulty in finding him." thus for a second time had i heard his footsteps die away, knowing i should never listen for their drawing near again. i wondered as i walked on--i have wondered before and since--whether art, even with a capital a, is quite worth all the suffering that is inflicted in her behalf--whether she and we are better for all the scorning and the sneering, all the envying and the hating, that is done in her name. jephson arrived about nine o'clock in the ferry-boat. we were made acquainted with this fact by having our heads bumped against the sides of the saloon. somebody or other always had their head bumped whenever the ferry-boat arrived. it was a heavy and cumbersome machine, and the ferry-boy was not a good punter. he admitted this frankly, which was creditable of him. but he made no attempt to improve himself; that is, where he was wrong. his method was to arrange the punt before starting in a line with the point towards which he wished to proceed, and then to push hard, without ever looking behind him, until something suddenly stopped him. this was sometimes the bank, sometimes another boat, occasionally a steamer, from six to a dozen times a day our riparian dwelling. that he never succeeded in staving the houseboat in speaks highly for the man who built her. one day he came down upon us with a tremendous crash. amenda was walking along the passage at the moment, and the result to her was that she received a violent blow first on the left side of her head and then on the right. she was accustomed to accept one bump as a matter of course, and to regard it as an intimation from the boy that he had come; but this double knock annoyed her: so much "style" was out of place in a mere ferry-boy. accordingly she went out to him in a state of high indignation. "what do you think you are?" she cried, balancing accounts by boxing his ears first on one side and then on the other, "a torpedo! what are you doing here at all? what do you want?" "i don't want nothin'," explained the boy, rubbing his head; "i've brought a gent down." "a gent?" said amenda, looking round, but seeing no one. "what gent?" "a stout gent in a straw 'at," answered the boy, staring round him bewilderedly. "well, where is he?" asked amenda. "i dunno," replied the boy, in an awed voice; "'e was a-standin' there, at the other end of the punt, a-smokin' a cigar." just then a head appeared above the water, and a spent but infuriated swimmer struggled up between the houseboat and the bank. "oh, there 'e is!" cried the boy delightedly, evidently much relieved at this satisfactory solution of the mystery; "'e must ha' tumbled off the punt." "you're quite right, my lad, that's just what he did do, and there's your fee for assisting him to do it." saying which, my dripping friend, who had now scrambled upon deck, leant over, and following amenda's excellent example, expressed his feelings upon the boy's head. there was one comforting reflection about the transaction as a whole, and that was that the ferry-boy had at last received a fit and proper reward for his services. i had often felt inclined to give him something myself. i think he was, without exception, the most clumsy and stupid boy i have ever come across; and that is saying a good deal. his mother undertook that for three-and-sixpence a week he should "make himself generally useful" to us for a couple of hours every morning. those were the old lady's very words, and i repeated them to amenda when i introduced the boy to her. "this is james, amenda," i said; "he will come down here every morning at seven, and bring us our milk and the letters, and from then till nine he will make himself generally useful." amenda took stock of him. "it will be a change of occupation for him, sir, i should say, by the look of him," she remarked. after that, whenever some more than usually stirring crash or blood-curdling bump would cause us to leap from our seats and cry: "what on earth has happened?" amenda would reply: "oh, it's only james, mum, making himself generally useful." whatever he lifted he let fall; whatever he touched he upset; whatever he came near--that was not a fixture--he knocked over; if it was a fixture, it knocked _him_ over. this was not carelessness: it seemed to be a natural gift. never in his life, i am convinced, had he carried a bucketful of anything anywhere without tumbling over it before he got there. one of his duties was to water the flowers on the roof. fortunately--for the flowers--nature, that summer, stood drinks with a lavishness sufficient to satisfy the most confirmed vegetable toper: otherwise every plant on our boat would have died from drought. never one drop of water did they receive from him. he was for ever taking them water, but he never arrived there with it. as a rule he upset the pail before he got it on to the boat at all, and this was the best thing that could happen, because then the water simply went back into the river, and did no harm to any one. sometimes, however, he would succeed in landing it, and then the chances were he would spill it over the deck or into the passage. now and again, he would get half-way up the ladder before the accident occurred. twice he nearly reached the top; and once he actually did gain the roof. what happened there on that memorable occasion will never be known. the boy himself, when picked up, could explain nothing. it is supposed that he lost his head with the pride of the achievement, and essayed feats that neither his previous training nor his natural abilities justified him in attempting. however that may be, the fact remains that the main body of the water came down the kitchen chimney; and that the boy and the empty pail arrived together on deck before they knew they had started. when he could find nothing else to damage, he would go out of his way to upset himself. he could not be sure of stepping from his own punt on to the boat with safety. as often as not, he would catch his foot in the chain or the punt-pole, and arrive on his chest. amenda used to condole with him. "your mother ought to be ashamed of herself," i heard her telling him one morning; "she could never have taught you to walk. what you want is a go-cart." he was a willing lad, but his stupidity was super-natural. a comet appeared in the sky that year, and everybody was talking about it. one day he said to me:-- "there's a comet coming, ain't there, sir?" he talked about it as though it were a circus. "coming!" i answered, "it's come. haven't you seen it?" "no, sir." "oh, well, you have a look for it to-night. it's worth seeing." "yees, sir, i should like to see it. it's got a tail, ain't it, sir?" "yes, a very fine tail." "yees, sir, they said it 'ad a tail. where do you go to see it, sir?" "go! you don't want to go anywhere. you'll see it in your own garden at ten o'clock." he thanked me, and, tumbling over a sack of potatoes, plunged head foremost into his punt and departed. next morning, i asked him if he had seen the comet. "no, sir, i couldn't see it anywhere." "did you look?" "yees, sir. i looked a long time." "how on earth did you manage to miss it then?" i exclaimed. "it was a clear enough night. where did you look?" "in our garden, sir. where you told me." "whereabouts in the garden?" chimed in amenda, who happened to be standing by; "under the gooseberry bushes?" "yees--everywhere." that is what he had done: he had taken the stable lantern and searched the garden for it. but the day when he broke even his own record for foolishness happened about three weeks later. macshaughnassy was staying with us at the time, and on the friday evening he mixed us a salad, according to a recipe given him by his aunt. on the saturday morning, everybody was, of course, very ill. everybody always is very ill after partaking of any dish prepared by macshaughnassy. some people attempt to explain this fact by talking glibly of "cause and effect." macshaughnassy maintains that it is simply coincidence. "how do you know," he says, "that you wouldn't have been ill if you hadn't eaten any? you're queer enough now, any one can see, and i'm very sorry for you; but, for all that you can tell, if you hadn't eaten any of that stuff you might have been very much worse--perhaps dead. in all probability, it has saved your life." and for the rest of the day, he assumes towards you the attitude of a man who has dragged you from the grave. the moment jimmy arrived i seized hold of him. "jimmy," i said, "you must rush off to the chemist's immediately. don't stop for anything. tell him to give you something for colic--the result of vegetable poisoning. it must be something very strong, and enough for four. don't forget, something to counteract the effects of vegetable poisoning. hurry up, or it may be too late." my excitement communicated itself to the boy. he tumbled back into his punt, and pushed off vigorously. i watched him land, and disappear in the direction of the village. half an hour passed, but jimmy did not return. no one felt sufficiently energetic to go after him. we had only just strength enough to sit still and feebly abuse him. at the end of an hour we were all feeling very much better. at the end of an hour and a half we were glad he had not returned when he ought to have, and were only curious as to what had become of him. in the evening, strolling through the village, we saw him sitting by the open door of his mother's cottage, with a shawl wrapped round him. he was looking worn and ill. "why, jimmy," i said, "what's the matter? why didn't you come back this morning?" "i couldn't, sir," jimmy answered, "i was so queer. mother made me go to bed." "you seemed all right in the morning," i said; "what's made you queer?" "what mr. jones give me, sir: it upset me awful." a light broke in upon me. "what did you say, jimmy, when you got to mr. jones's shop?" i asked. "i told 'im what you said, sir, that 'e was to give me something to counteract the effects of vegetable poisoning. and that it was to be very strong, and enough for four." "and what did he say?" "'e said that was only your nonsense, sir, and that i'd better have enough for one to begin with; and then 'e asked me if i'd been eating green apples again." "and you told him?" "yees, sir, i told 'im i'd 'ad a few, and 'e said it served me right, and that 'e 'oped it would be a warning to me. and then 'e put something fizzy in a glass and told me to drink it." "and you drank it?" "yees, sir." "it never occurred to you, jimmy, that there was nothing the matter with you--that you were never feeling better in your life, and that you did not require any medicine?" "no, sir." "did one single scintilla of thought of any kind occur to you in connection with the matter, jimmy, from beginning to end?" "no, sir." people who never met jimmy disbelieve this story. they argue that its premises are in disaccord with the known laws governing human nature, that its details do not square with the average of probability. people who have seen and conversed with jimmy accept it with simple faith. the advent of jephson--which i trust the reader has not entirely forgotten--cheered us up considerably. jephson was always at his best when all other things were at their worst. it was not that he struggled in mark tapley fashion to appear most cheerful when most depressed; it was that petty misfortunes and mishaps genuinely amused and inspirited him. most of us can recall our unpleasant experiences with amused affection; jephson possessed the robuster philosophy that enabled him to enjoy his during their actual progress. he arrived drenched to the skin, chuckling hugely at the idea of having come down on a visit to a houseboat in such weather. under his warming influence, the hard lines on our faces thawed, and by supper time we were, as all englishmen and women who wish to enjoy life should be, independent of the weather. later on, as if disheartened by our indifference, the rain ceased, and we took our chairs out on the deck, and sat watching the lightning, which still played incessantly. then, not unnaturally, the talk drifted into a sombre channel, and we began recounting stories, dealing with the gloomy and mysterious side of life. some of these were worth remembering, and some were not. the one that left the strongest impression on my mind was a tale that jephson told us. i had been relating a somewhat curious experience of my own. i met a man in the strand one day that i knew very well, as i thought, though i had not seen him for years. we walked together to charing cross, and there we shook hands and parted. next morning, i spoke of this meeting to a mutual friend, and then i learnt, for the first time, that the man had died six months before. the natural inference was that i had mistaken one man for another, an error that, not having a good memory for faces, i frequently fall into. what was remarkable about the matter, however, was that throughout our walk i had conversed with the man under the impression that he was that other dead man, and, whether by coincidence or not, his replies had never once suggested to me my mistake. as soon as i finished, jephson, who had been listening very thoughtfully, asked me if i believed in spiritualism "to its fullest extent." "that is rather a large question," i answered. "what do you mean by 'spiritualism to its fullest extent'?" "well, do you believe that the spirits of the dead have not only the power of revisiting this earth at their will, but that, when here, they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action? let me put a definite case. a spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, one night as he sat alone, and pinioned him against the wall. now can any of you believe that, or can't you?" "i could," brown took it upon himself to reply; "but, before doing so, i should wish for an introduction to the friend who told you the story. speaking generally," he continued, "it seems to me that the difference between what we call the natural and the supernatural is merely the difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence. having regard to the phenomena we are compelled to admit, i think it illogical to disbelieve anything we are unable to disprove." "for my part," remarked macshaughnassy, "i can believe in the ability of our spirit friends to give the quaint entertainments credited to them much easier than i can in their desire to do so." "you mean," added jephson, "that you cannot understand why a spirit, not compelled as we are by the exigencies of society, should care to spend its evenings carrying on a laboured and childish conversation with a room full of abnormally uninteresting people." "that is precisely what i cannot understand," macshaughnassy agreed. "nor i, either," said jephson. "but i was thinking of something very different altogether. suppose a man died with the dearest wish of his heart unfulfilled, do you believe that his spirit might have power to return to earth and complete the interrupted work?" "well," answered macshaughnassy, "if one admits the possibility of spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this world at all, it is certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task such as you suggest, than to believe that they occupy themselves with the performance of mere drawing-room tricks. but what are you leading up to?" "why, to this," replied jephson, seating himself straddle-legged across his chair, and leaning his arms upon the back. "i was told a story this morning at the hospital by an old french doctor. the actual facts are few and simple; all that is known can be read in the paris police records of sixty-two years ago. "the most important part of the case, however, is the part that is not known, and that never will be known. "the story begins with a great wrong done by one man unto another man. what the wrong was i do not know. i am inclined to think, however, it was connected with a woman. i think that, because he who had been wronged hated him who had wronged him with a hate such as does not often burn in a man's brain, unless it be fanned by the memory of a woman's breath. "still that is only conjecture, and the point is immaterial. the man who had done the wrong fled, and the other man followed him. it became a point-to-point race, the first man having the advantage of a day's start. the course was the whole world, and the stakes were the first man's life. "travellers were few and far between in those days, and this made the trail easy to follow. the first man, never knowing how far or how near the other was behind him, and hoping now and again that he might have baffled him, would rest for a while. the second man, knowing always just how far the first one was before him, never paused, and thus each day the man who was spurred by hate drew nearer to the man who was spurred by fear. "at this town the answer to the never-varied question would be:-- "'at seven o'clock last evening, m'sieur.' "'seven--ah; eighteen hours. give me something to eat, quick, while the horses are being put to.' "at the next the calculation would be sixteen hours. "passing a lonely chalet, monsieur puts his head out of the window:-- "'how long since a carriage passed this way, with a tall, fair man inside?' "'such a one passed early this morning, m'sieur.' "'thanks, drive on, a hundred francs apiece if you are through the pass before daybreak.' "'and what for dead horses, m'sieur?' "'twice their value when living.' "one day the man who was ridden by fear looked up, and saw before him the open door of a cathedral, and, passing in, knelt down and prayed. he prayed long and fervently, for men, when they are in sore straits, clutch eagerly at the straws of faith. he prayed that he might be forgiven his sin, and, more important still, that he might be pardoned the consequences of his sin, and be delivered from his adversary; and a few chairs from him, facing him, knelt his enemy, praying also. "but the second man's prayer, being a thanksgiving merely, was short, so that when the first man raised his eyes, he saw the face of his enemy gazing at him across the chair-tops, with a mocking smile upon it. "he made no attempt to rise, but remained kneeling, fascinated by the look of joy that shone out of the other man's eyes. and the other man moved the high-backed chairs one by one, and came towards him softly. "then, just as the man who had been wronged stood beside the man who had wronged him, full of gladness that his opportunity had come, there burst from the cathedral tower a sudden clash of bells, and the man, whose opportunity had come, broke his heart and fell back dead, with that mocking smile still playing round his mouth. "and so he lay there. "then the man who had done the wrong rose up and passed out, praising god. "what became of the body of the other man is not known. it was the body of a stranger who had died suddenly in the cathedral. there was none to identify it, none to claim it. "years passed away, and the survivor in the tragedy became a worthy and useful citizen, and a noted man of science. "in his laboratory were many objects necessary to him in his researches, and, prominent among them, stood in a certain corner a human skeleton. it was a very old and much-mended skeleton, and one day the long-expected end arrived, and it tumbled to pieces. "thus it became necessary to purchase another. "the man of science visited a dealer he well knew--a little parchment- faced old man who kept a dingy shop, where nothing was ever sold, within the shadow of the towers of notre dame. "the little parchment-faced old man had just the very thing that monsieur wanted--a singularly fine and well-proportioned 'study.' it should be sent round and set up in monsieur's laboratory that very afternoon. "the dealer was as good as his word. when monsieur entered his laboratory that evening, the thing was in its place. "monsieur seated himself in his high-backed chair, and tried to collect his thoughts. but monsieur's thoughts were unruly, and inclined to wander, and to wander always in one direction. "monsieur opened a large volume and commenced to read. he read of a man who had wronged another and fled from him, the other man following. finding himself reading this, he closed the book angrily, and went and stood by the window and looked out. he saw before him the sun-pierced nave of a great cathedral, and on the stones lay a dead man with a mocking smile upon his face. "cursing himself for a fool, he turned away with a laugh. but his laugh was short-lived, for it seemed to him that something else in the room was laughing also. struck suddenly still, with his feet glued to the ground, he stood listening for a while: then sought with starting eyes the corner from where the sound had seemed to come. but the white thing standing there was only grinning. "monsieur wiped the damp sweat from his head and hands, and stole out. "for a couple of days he did not enter the room again. on the third, telling himself that his fears were those of a hysterical girl, he opened the door and went in. to shame himself, he took his lamp in his hand, and crossing over to the far corner where the skeleton stood, examined it. a set of bones bought for three hundred francs. was he a child, to be scared by such a bogey! "he held his lamp up in front of the thing's grinning head. the flame of the lamp flickered as though a faint breath had passed over it. "the man explained this to himself by saying that the walls of the house were old and cracked, and that the wind might creep in anywhere. he repeated this explanation to himself as he recrossed the room, walking backwards, with his eyes fixed on the thing. when he reached his desk, he sat down and gripped the arms of his chair till his fingers turned white. "he tried to work, but the empty sockets in that grinning head seemed to be drawing him towards them. he rose and battled with his inclination to fly screaming from the room. glancing fearfully about him, his eye fell upon a high screen, standing before the door. he dragged it forward, and placed it between himself and the thing, so that he could not see it--nor it see him. then he sat down again to his work. for a while he forced himself to look at the book in front of him, but at last, unable to control himself any longer, he suffered his eyes to follow their own bent. "it may have been an hallucination. he may have accidentally placed the screen so as to favour such an illusion. but what he saw was a bony hand coming round the corner of the screen, and, with a cry, he fell to the floor in a swoon. "the people of the house came running in, and lifting him up, carried him out, and laid him upon his bed. as soon as he recovered, his first question was, where had they found the thing--where was it when they entered the room? and when they told him they had seen it standing where it always stood, and had gone down into the room to look again, because of his frenzied entreaties, and returned trying to hide their smiles, he listened to their talk about overwork, and the necessity for change and rest, and said they might do with him as they would. "so for many months the laboratory door remained locked. then there came a chill autumn evening when the man of science opened it again, and closed it behind him. "he lighted his lamp, and gathered his instruments and books around him, and sat down before them in his high-backed chair. and the old terror returned to him. "but this time he meant to conquer himself. his nerves were stronger now, and his brain clearer; he would fight his unreasoning fear. he crossed to the door and locked himself in, and flung the key to the other end of the room, where it fell among jars and bottles with an echoing clatter. "later on, his old housekeeper, going her final round, tapped at his door and wished him good-night, as was her custom. she received no response, at first, and, growing nervous, tapped louder and called again; and at length an answering 'good-night' came back to her. "she thought little about it at the time, but afterwards she remembered that the voice that had replied to her had been strangely grating and mechanical. trying to describe it, she likened it to such a voice as she would imagine coming from a statue. "next morning his door remained still locked. it was no unusual thing for him to work all night and far into the next day, so no one thought to be surprised. when, however, evening came, and yet he did not appear, his servants gathered outside the room and whispered, remembering what had happened once before. "they listened, but could hear no sound. they shook the door and called to him, then beat with their fists upon the wooden panels. but still no sound came from the room. "becoming alarmed, they decided to burst open the door, and, after many blows, it gave way, and they crowded in. "he sat bolt upright in his high-backed chair. they thought at first he had died in his sleep. but when they drew nearer and the light fell upon him, they saw the livid marks of bony fingers round his throat; and in his eyes there was a terror such as is not often seen in human eyes." * * * * * brown was the first to break the silence that followed. he asked me if i had any brandy on board. he said he felt he should like just a nip of brandy before going to bed. that is one of the chief charms of jephson's stories: they always make you feel you want a little brandy. chapter vi "cats," remarked jephson to me, one afternoon, as we sat in the punt discussing the plot of our novel, "cats are animals for whom i entertain a very great respect. cats and nonconformists seem to me the only things in this world possessed of a practicable working conscience. watch a cat doing something mean and wrong--if ever one gives you the chance; notice how anxious she is that nobody should see her doing it; and how prompt, if detected, to pretend that she was not doing it--that she was not even thinking of doing it--that, as a matter of fact, she was just about to do something else, quite different. you might almost think they had a soul. "only this morning i was watching that tortoise-shell of yours on the houseboat. she was creeping along the roof, behind the flower-boxes, stalking a young thrush that had perched upon a coil of rope. murder gleamed from her eye, assassination lurked in every twitching muscle of her body. as she crouched to spring, fate, for once favouring the weak, directed her attention to myself, and she became, for the first time, aware of my presence. it acted upon her as a heavenly vision upon a biblical criminal. in an instant she was a changed being. the wicked beast, going about seeking whom it might devour, had vanished. in its place sat a long-tailed, furry angel, gazing up into the sky with an expression that was one-third innocence and two-thirds admiration of the beauties of nature. what was she doing there, did i want to know? why, could i not see, playing with a bit of earth. surely i was not so evil- minded as to imagine she wanted to kill that dear little bird--god bless it. "then note an old tom, slinking home in the early morning, after a night spent on a roof of bad repute. can you picture to yourself a living creature less eager to attract attention? 'dear me,' you can all but hear it saying to itself, 'i'd no idea it was so late; how time does go when one is enjoying oneself. i do hope i shan't meet any one i know--very awkward, it's being so light.' "in the distance it sees a policeman, and stops suddenly within the shelter of a shadow. 'now what's he doing there,' it says, 'and close to our door too? i can't go in while he's hanging about. he's sure to see and recognise me; and he's just the sort of man to talk to the servants.' "it hides itself behind a post and waits, peeping cautiously round the corner from time to time. the policeman, however, seems to have taken up his residence at that particular spot, and the cat becomes worried and excited. "'what's the matter with the fool?' it mutters indignantly; 'is he dead? why don't he move on, he's always telling other people to. stupid ass.' "just then a far-off cry of 'milk' is heard, and the cat starts up in an agony of alarm. 'great scott, hark at that! why, everybody will be down before i get in. well, i can't help it. i must chance it.' "he glances round at himself, and hesitates. 'i wouldn't mind if i didn't look so dirty and untidy,' he muses; 'people are so prone to think evil in this world.' "'ah, well,' he adds, giving himself a shake, 'there's nothing else for it, i must put my trust in providence, it's pulled me through before: here goes.' "he assumes an aspect of chastened sorrow, and trots along with a demure and saddened step. it is evident he wishes to convey the idea that he has been out all night on work connected with the vigilance association, and is now returning home sick at heart because of the sights that he has seen. "he squirms in, unnoticed, through a window, and has just time to give himself a hurried lick down before he hears the cook's step on the stairs. when she enters the kitchen he is curled up on the hearthrug, fast asleep. the opening of the shutters awakes him. he rises and comes forward, yawning and stretching himself. "'dear me, is it morning, then?' he says drowsily. 'heigh-ho! i've had such a lovely sleep, cook; and such a beautiful dream about poor mother.' "cats! do you call them? why, they are christians in everything except the number of legs." "they certainly are," i responded, "wonderfully cunning little animals, and it is not by their moral and religious instincts alone that they are so closely linked to man; the marvellous ability they display in taking care of 'number one' is worthy of the human race itself. some friends of mine had a cat, a big black tom: they have got half of him still. they had reared him from a kitten, and, in their homely, undemonstrative way, they liked him. there was nothing, however, approaching passion on either side. "one day a chinchilla came to live in the neighbourhood, under the charge of an elderly spinster, and the two cats met at a garden wall party. "'what sort of diggings have you got?' asked the chinchilla. "'oh, pretty fair.' "'nice people?' "'yes, nice enough--as people go.' "'pretty willing? look after you well, and all that sort of thing?' "'yes--oh yes. i've no fault to find with them.' "'what's the victuals like?' "'oh, the usual thing, you know, bones and scraps, and a bit of dog-biscuit now and then for a change.' "'bones and dog-biscuits! do you mean to say you eat bones?' "'yes, when i can get 'em. why, what's wrong about them?' "'shade of egyptian isis, bones and dog-biscuits! don't you ever get any spring chickens, or a sardine, or a lamb cutlet?' "'chickens! sardines! what are you talking about? what are sardines?' "'what are sardines! oh, my dear child (the chinchilla was a lady cat, and always called gentlemen friends a little older than herself 'dear child'), these people of yours are treating you just shamefully. come, sit down and tell me all about it. what do they give you to sleep on?' "'the floor.' "'i thought so; and skim milk and water to drink, i suppose?' "'it _is_ a bit thin.' "'i can quite imagine it. you must leave these people, my dear, at once.' "'but where am i to go to?' "'anywhere.' "'but who'll take me in?' "'anybody, if you go the right way to work. how many times do you think i've changed my people? seven!--and bettered myself on each occasion. why, do you know where i was born? in a pig-sty. there were three of us, mother and i and my little brother. mother would leave us every evening, returning generally just as it was getting light. one morning she did not come back. we waited and waited, but the day passed on and she did not return, and we grew hungrier and hungrier, and at last we lay down, side by side, and cried ourselves to sleep. "'in the evening, peeping through a hole in the door, we saw her coming across the field. she was crawling very slowly, with her body close down against the ground. we called to her, and she answered with a low "crroo"; but she did not hasten her pace. "'she crept in and rolled over on her side, and we ran to her, for we were almost starving. we lay long upon her breasts, and she licked us over and over. "'i dropped asleep upon her, and in the night i awoke, feeling cold. i crept closer to her, but that only made me colder still, and she was wet and clammy with a dark moisture that was oozing from her side. i did not know what it was at that time, but i have learnt since. "'that was when i could hardly have been four weeks old, and from that day to this i've looked after myself: you've got to do that in this world, my dear. for a while, i and my brother lived on in that sty and kept ourselves. it was a grim struggle at first, two babies fighting for life; but we pulled through. at the end of about three months, wandering farther from home than usual, i came upon a cottage, standing in the fields. it looked warm and cosy through the open door, and i went in: i have always been blessed with plenty of nerve. some children were playing round the fire, and they welcomed me and made much of me. it was a new sensation to me, and i stayed there. i thought the place a palace at the time. "'i might have gone on thinking so if it had not been that, passing through the village one day, i happened to catch sight of a room behind a shop. there was a carpet on the floor, and a rug before the fire. i had never known till then that there were such luxuries in the world. i determined to make that shop my home, and i did so.' "'how did you manage it?' asked the black cat, who was growing interested. "'by the simple process of walking in and sitting down. my dear child, cheek's the "open sesame" to every door. the cat that works hard dies of starvation, the cat that has brains is kicked downstairs for a fool, and the cat that has virtue is drowned for a scamp; but the cat that has cheek sleeps on a velvet cushion and dines on cream and horseflesh. i marched straight in and rubbed myself against the old man's legs. he and his wife were quite taken with what they called my "trustfulness," and adopted me with enthusiasm. strolling about the fields of an evening i often used to hear the children of the cottage calling my name. it was weeks before they gave up seeking for me. one of them, the youngest, would sob herself to sleep of a night, thinking that i was dead: they were affectionate children. "'i boarded with my shopkeeping friends for nearly a year, and from them i went to some new people who had lately come to the neighbourhood, and who possessed a really excellent cook. i think i could have been very satisfied with these people, but, unfortunately, they came down in the world, and had to give up the big house and the cook, and take a cottage, and i did not care to go back to that sort of life. "'accordingly i looked about for a fresh opening. there was a curious old fellow who lived not far off. people said he was rich, but nobody liked him. he was shaped differently from other men. i turned the matter over in my mind for a day or two, and then determined to give him a trial. being a lonely sort of man, he might make a fuss over me, and if not i could go. "'my surmise proved correct. i have never been more petted than i was by "toady," as the village boys had dubbed him. my present guardian is foolish enough over me, goodness knows, but she has other ties, while "toady" had nothing else to love, not even himself. he could hardly believe his eyes at first when i jumped up on his knees and rubbed myself against his ugly face. "why, kitty," he said, "do you know you're the first living thing that has ever come to me of its own accord." there were tears in his funny little red eyes as he said that. "'i remained two years with "toady," and was very happy indeed. then he fell ill, and strange people came to the house, and i was neglected. "toady" liked me to come up and lie upon the bed, where he could stroke me with his long, thin hand, and at first i used to do this. but a sick man is not the best of company, as you can imagine, and the atmosphere of a sick room not too healthy, so, all things considered, i felt it was time for me to make a fresh move. "'i had some difficulty in getting away. "toady" was always asking for me, and they tried to keep me with him: he seemed to lie easier when i was there. i succeeded at length, however, and, once outside the door, i put sufficient distance between myself and the house to ensure my not being captured, for i knew "toady" so long as he lived would never cease hoping to get me back. "'where to go, i did not know. two or three homes were offered me, but none of them quite suited me. at one place, where i put up for a day, just to see how i liked it, there was a dog; and at another, which would otherwise have done admirably, they kept a baby. whatever you do, never stop at a house where they keep a baby. if a child pulls your tail or ties a paper bag round your head, you can give it one for itself and nobody blames you. "well, serve you right," they say to the yelling brat, "you shouldn't tease the poor thing." but if you resent a baby's holding you by the throat and trying to gouge out your eye with a wooden ladle, you are called a spiteful beast, and "shoo'd" all round the garden. if people keep babies, they don't keep me; that's my rule. "'after sampling some three or four families, i finally fixed upon a banker. offers more advantageous from a worldly point of view were open to me. i could have gone to a public-house, where the victuals were simply unlimited, and where the back door was left open all night. but about the banker's (he was also a churchwarden, and his wife never smiled at anything less than a joke by the bishop) there was an atmosphere of solid respectability that i felt would be comforting to my nature. my dear child, you will come across cynics who will sneer at respectability: don't you listen to them. respectability is its own reward--and a very real and practical reward. it may not bring you dainty dishes and soft beds, but it brings you something better and more lasting. it brings you the consciousness that you are living the right life, that you are doing the right thing, that, so far as earthly ingenuity can fix it, you are going to the right place, and that other folks ain't. don't you ever let any one set you against respectability. it's the most satisfying thing i know of in this world--and about the cheapest. "'i was nearly three years with this family, and was sorry when i had to go. i should never have left if i could have helped it, but one day something happened at the bank which necessitated the banker's taking a sudden journey to spain, and, after that, the house became a somewhat unpleasant place to live in. noisy, disagreeable people were continually knocking at the door and making rows in the passage; and at night folks threw bricks at the windows. "'i was in a delicate state of health at the time, and my nerves could not stand it. i said good-bye to the town, and making my way back into the country, put up with a county family. "'they were great swells, but i should have preferred them had they been more homely. i am of an affectionate disposition, and i like every one about me to love me. they were good enough to me in their distant way, but they did not take much notice of me, and i soon got tired of lavishing attentions on people that neither valued nor responded to them. "'from these people i went to a retired potato merchant. it was a social descent, but a rise so far as comfort and appreciation were concerned. they appeared to be an exceedingly nice family, and to be extremely fond of me. i say they "appeared" to be these things, because the sequel proved that they were neither. six months after i had come to them they went away and left me. they never asked me to accompany them. they made no arrangements for me to stay behind. they evidently did not care what became of me. such egotistical indifference to the claims of friendship i had never before met with. it shook my faith--never too robust--in human nature. i determined that, in future, no one should have the opportunity of disappointing my trust in them. i selected my present mistress on the recommendation of a gentleman friend of mine who had formerly lived with her. he said she was an excellent caterer. the only reason he had left her was that she expected him to be in at ten each night, and that hour didn't fit in with his other arrangements. it made no difference to me--as a matter of fact, i do not care for these midnight _reunions_ that are so popular amongst us. there are always too many cats for one properly to enjoy oneself, and sooner or later a rowdy element is sure to creep in. i offered myself to her, and she accepted me gratefully. but i have never liked her, and never shall. she is a silly old woman, and bores me. she is, however, devoted to me, and, unless something extra attractive turns up, i shall stick to her. "'that, my dear, is the story of my life, so far as it has gone. i tell it you to show you how easy it is to be "taken in." fix on your house, and mew piteously at the back door. when it is opened run in and rub yourself against the first leg you come across. rub hard, and look up confidingly. nothing gets round human beings, i have noticed, quicker than confidence. they don't get much of it, and it pleases them. always be confiding. at the same time be prepared for emergencies. if you are still doubtful as to your reception, try and get yourself slightly wet. why people should prefer a wet cat to a dry one i have never been able to understand; but that a wet cat is practically sure of being taken in and gushed over, while a dry cat is liable to have the garden hose turned upon it, is an undoubted fact. also, if you can possibly manage it, and it is offered you, eat a bit of dry bread. the human race is always stirred to its deepest depths by the sight of a cat eating a bit of dry bread.' "my friend's black tom profited by the chinchilla's wisdom. a catless couple had lately come to live next door. he determined to adopt them on trial. accordingly, on the first rainy day, he went out soon after lunch and sat for four hours in an open field. in the evening, soaked to the skin, and feeling pretty hungry, he went mewing to their door. one of the maids opened it, he rushed under her skirts and rubbed himself against her legs. she screamed, and down came the master and the mistress to know what was the matter. "'it's a stray cat, mum,' said the girl. "'turn it out,' said the master. "'oh no, don't,' said the mistress. "'oh, poor thing, it's wet,' said the housemaid. "'perhaps it's hungry,' said the cook. "'try it with a bit of dry bread,' sneered the master, who wrote for the newspapers, and thought he knew everything. "a stale crust was proffered. the cat ate it greedily, and afterwards rubbed himself gratefully against the man's light trousers. "this made the man ashamed of himself, likewise of his trousers. 'oh, well, let it stop if it wants to,' he said. "so the cat was made comfortable, and stayed on. "meanwhile its own family were seeking for it high and low. they had not cared over much for it while they had had it; now it was gone, they were inconsolable. in the light of its absence, it appeared to them the one thing that had made the place home. the shadows of suspicion gathered round the case. the cat's disappearance, at first regarded as a mystery, began to assume the shape of a crime. the wife openly accused the husband of never having liked the animal, and more than hinted that he and the gardener between them could give a tolerably truthful account of its last moments; an insinuation that the husband repudiated with a warmth that only added credence to the original surmise. "the bull-terrier was had up and searchingly examined. fortunately for him, he had not had a single fight for two whole days. had any recent traces of blood been detected upon him, it would have gone hard with him. "the person who suffered most, however, was the youngest boy. three weeks before, he had dressed the cat in doll's clothes and taken it round the garden in the perambulator. he himself had forgotten the incident, but justice, though tardy, was on his track. the misdeed was suddenly remembered at the very moment when unavailing regret for the loss of the favourite was at its deepest, so that to box his ears and send him, then and there, straight off to bed was felt to be a positive relief. "at the end of a fortnight, the cat, finding he had not, after all, bettered himself, came back. the family were so surprised that at first they could not be sure whether he was flesh and blood, or a spirit come to comfort them. after watching him eat half a pound of raw steak, they decided he was material, and caught him up and hugged him to their bosoms. for a week they over-fed him and made much of him. then, the excitement cooling, he found himself dropping back into his old position, and didn't like it, and went next door again. "the next door people had also missed him, and they likewise greeted his return with extravagant ebullitions of joy. this gave the cat an idea. he saw that his game was to play the two families off one against the other; which he did. he spent an alternate fortnight with each, and lived like a fighting cock. his return was always greeted with enthusiasm, and every means were adopted to induce him to stay. his little whims were carefully studied, his favourite dishes kept in constant readiness. "the destination of his goings leaked out at length, and then the two families quarrelled about him over the fence. my friend accused the newspaper man of having lured him away. the newspaper man retorted that the poor creature had come to his door wet and starving, and added that he would be ashamed to keep an animal merely to ill-treat it. they have a quarrel about him twice a week on the average. it will probably come to blows one of these days." jephson appeared much surprised by this story. he remained thoughtful and silent. i asked him if he would like to hear any more, and as he offered no active opposition i went on. (maybe he was asleep; that idea did not occur to me at the time.) i told him of my grandmother's cat, who, after living a blameless life for upwards of eleven years, and bringing up a family of something like sixty-six, not counting those that died in infancy and the water-butt, took to drink in her old age, and was run over while in a state of intoxication (oh, the justice of it! ) by a brewer's dray. i have read in temperance tracts that no dumb animal will touch a drop of alcoholic liquor. my advice is, if you wish to keep them respectable, don't give them a chance to get at it. i knew a pony--but never mind him; we are talking about my grandmother's cat. a leaky beer-tap was the cause of her downfall. a saucer used to be placed underneath it to catch the drippings. one day the cat, coming in thirsty, and finding nothing else to drink, lapped up a little, liked it, and lapped a little more, went away for half an hour, and came back and finished the saucerful. then sat down beside it, and waited for it to fill again. from that day till the hour she died, i don't believe that cat was ever once quite sober. her days she passed in a drunken stupor before the kitchen fire. her nights she spent in the beer cellar. my grandmother, shocked and grieved beyond expression, gave up her barrel and adopted bottles. the cat, thus condemned to enforced abstinence, meandered about the house for a day and a half in a disconsolate, quarrelsome mood. then she disappeared, returning at eleven o'clock as tight as a drum. where she went, and how she managed to procure the drink, we never discovered; but the same programme was repeated every day. some time during the morning she would contrive to elude our vigilance and escape; and late every evening she would come reeling home across the fields in a condition that i will not sully my pen by attempting to describe. it was on saturday night that she met the sad end to which i have before alluded. she must have been very drunk, for the man told us that, in consequence of the darkness, and the fact that his horses were tired, he was proceeding at little more than a snail's pace. i think my grandmother was rather relieved than otherwise. she had been very fond of the cat at one time, but its recent conduct had alienated her affection. we children buried it in the garden under the mulberry tree, but the old lady insisted that there should be no tombstone, not even a mound raised. so it lies there, unhonoured, in a drunkard's grave. i also told him of another cat our family had once possessed. she was the most motherly thing i have ever known. she was never happy without a family. indeed, i cannot remember her when she hadn't a family in one stage or another. she was not very particular what sort of a family it was. if she could not have kittens, then she would content herself with puppies or rats. anything that she could wash and feed seemed to satisfy her. i believe she would have brought up chickens if we had entrusted them to her. all her brains must have run to motherliness, for she hadn't much sense. she could never tell the difference between her own children and other people's. she thought everything young was a kitten. we once mixed up a spaniel puppy that had lost its own mother among her progeny. i shall never forget her astonishment when it first barked. she boxed both its ears, and then sat looking down at it with an expression of indignant sorrow that was really touching. "you're going to be a credit to your mother," she seemed to be saying "you're a nice comfort to any one's old age, you are, making a row like that. and look at your ears flopping all over your face. i don't know where you pick up such ways." he was a good little dog. he did try to mew, and he did try to wash his face with his paw, and to keep his tail still, but his success was not commensurate with his will. i do not know which was the sadder to reflect upon, his efforts to become a creditable kitten, or his foster- mother's despair of ever making him one. later on we gave her a baby squirrel to rear. she was nursing a family of her own at the time, but she adopted him with enthusiasm, under the impression that he was another kitten, though she could not quite make out how she had come to overlook him. he soon became her prime favourite. she liked his colour, and took a mother's pride in his tail. what troubled her was that it would cock up over his head. she would hold it down with one paw, and lick it by the half-hour together, trying to make it set properly. but the moment she let it go up it would cock again. i have heard her cry with vexation because of this. one day a neighbouring cat came to see her, and the squirrel was clearly the subject of their talk. "it's a good colour," said the friend, looking critically at the supposed kitten, who was sitting up on his haunches combing his whiskers, and saying the only truthfully pleasant thing about him that she could think of. "he's a lovely colour," exclaimed our cat proudly. "i don't like his legs much," remarked the friend. "no," responded his mother thoughtfully, "you're right there. his legs are his weak point. i can't say i think much of his legs myself." "maybe they'll fill out later on," suggested the friend, kindly. "oh, i hope so," replied the mother, regaining her momentarily dashed cheerfulness. "oh yes, they'll come all right in time. and then look at his tail. now, honestly, did you ever see a kitten with a finer tail?" "yes, it's a good tail," assented the other; "but why do you do it up over his head?" "i don't," answered our cat. "it goes that way. i can't make it out. i suppose it will come straight as he gets older." "it will be awkward if it don't," said the friend. "oh, but i'm sure it will," replied our cat. "i must lick it more. it's a tail that wants a good deal of licking, you can see that." and for hours that afternoon, after the other cat had gone, she sat trimming it; and, at the end, when she lifted her paw off it, and it flew back again like a steel spring over the squirrel's head, she sat and gazed at it with feelings that only those among my readers who have been mothers themselves will be able to comprehend. "what have i done," she seemed to say--"what have i done that this trouble should come upon me?" jephson roused himself on my completion of this anecdote and sat up. "you and your friends appear to have been the possessors of some very remarkable cats," he observed. "yes," i answered, "our family has been singularly fortunate in its cats." "singularly so," agreed jephson; "i have never met but one man from whom i have heard more wonderful cat talk than, at one time or another, i have from you." "oh," i said, not, perhaps without a touch of jealousy in my voice, "and who was he?" "he was a seafaring man," replied jephson. "i met him on a hampstead tram, and we discussed the subject of animal sagacity. "'yes, sir,' he said, 'monkeys is cute. i've come across monkeys as could give points to one or two lubbers i've sailed under; and elephants is pretty spry, if you can believe all that's told of 'em. i've heard some tall tales about elephants. and, of course, dogs has their heads screwed on all right: i don't say as they ain't. but what i do say is: that for straightfor'ard, level-headed reasoning, give me cats. you see, sir, a dog, he thinks a powerful deal of a man--never was such a cute thing as a man, in a dog's opinion; and he takes good care that everybody knows it. naturally enough, we says a dog is the most intellectual animal there is. now a cat, she's got her own opinion about human beings. she don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it. the consequence is, we says a cat's got no intelligence. that's where we let our prejudice steer our judgment wrong. in a matter of plain common sense, there ain't a cat living as couldn't take the lee side of a dog and fly round him. now, have you ever noticed a dog at the end of a chain, trying to kill a cat as is sitting washing her face three-quarters of an inch out of his reach? of course you have. well, who's got the sense out of those two? the cat knows that it ain't in the nature of steel chains to stretch. the dog, who ought, you'd think, to know a durned sight more about 'em than she does, is sure they will if you only bark loud enough. "'then again, have you ever been made mad by cats screeching in the night, and jumped out of bed and opened the window and yelled at them? did they ever budge an inch for that, though you shrieked loud enough to skeer the dead, and waved your arms about like a man in a play? not they. they've turned and looked at you, that's all. "yell away, old man," they've said, "we like to hear you: the more the merrier." then what have you done? why, you've snatched up a hair-brush, or a boot, or a candlestick, and made as if you'd throw it at them. they've seen your attitude, they've seen the thing in your hand, but they ain't moved a point. they knew as you weren't going to chuck valuable property out of window with the chance of getting it lost or spoiled. they've got sense themselves, and they give you credit for having some. if you don't believe that's the reason, you try showing them a lump of coal, or half a brick, next time--something as they know you _will_ throw. before you're ready to heave it, there won't be a cat within aim. "'then as to judgment and knowledge of the world, why dogs are babies to 'em. have you ever tried telling a yarn before a cat, sir?' "i replied that cats had often been present during anecdotal recitals of mine, but that, hitherto, i had paid no particular attention to their demeanour. "'ah, well, you take an opportunity of doing so one day, sir,' answered the old fellow; 'it's worth the experiment. if you're telling a story before a cat, and she don't get uneasy during any part of the narrative, you can reckon you've got hold of a thing as it will be safe for you to tell to the lord chief justice of england. "'i've got a messmate,' he continued; 'william cooley is his name. we call him truthful billy. he's as good a seaman as ever trod quarter-deck; but when he gets spinning yarns he ain't the sort of man as i could advise you to rely upon. well, billy, he's got a dog, and i've seen him sit and tell yarns before that dog that would make a cat squirm out of its skin, and that dog's taken 'em in and believed 'em. one night, up at his old woman's, bill told us a yarn by the side of which salt junk two voyages old would pass for spring chicken. i watched the dog, to see how he would take it. he listened to it from beginning to end with cocked ears, and never so much as blinked. every now and then he would look round with an expression of astonishment or delight that seemed to say: "wonderful, isn't it!" "dear me, just think of it!" "did you ever!" "well, if that don't beat everything!" he was a chuckle-headed dog; you could have told him anything. "'it irritated me that bill should have such an animal about him to encourage him, and when he had finished i said to him, "i wish you'd tell that yarn round at my quarters one evening." "'why?' said bill. "'oh, it's just a fancy of mine,' i says. i didn't tell him i was wanting my old cat to hear it. "'oh, all right,' says bill, 'you remind me.' he loved yarning, billy did. "'next night but one he slings himself up in my cabin, and i does so. nothing loth, off he starts. there was about half-a-dozen of us stretched round, and the cat was sitting before the fire fussing itself up. before bill had got fairly under weigh, she stops washing and looks up at me, puzzled like, as much as to say, "what have we got here, a missionary?" i signalled to her to keep quiet, and bill went on with his yarn. when he got to the part about the sharks, she turned deliberately round and looked at him. i tell you there was an expression of disgust on that cat's face as might have made a travelling cheap jack feel ashamed of himself. it was that human, i give you my word, sir, i forgot for the moment as the poor animal couldn't speak. i could see the words that were on its lips: "why don't you tell us you swallowed the anchor?" and i sat on tenter-hooks, fearing each instant that she would say them aloud. it was a relief to me when she turned her back on bill. "'for a few minutes she sat very still, and seemed to be wrestling with herself like. i never saw a cat more set on controlling its feelings, or that seemed to suffer more in silence. it made my heart ache to watch it. "'at last bill came to the point where he and the captain between 'em hold the shark's mouth open while the cabin-boy dives in head foremost, and fetches up, undigested, the gold watch and chain as the bo'sun was a- wearing when he fell overboard; and at that the old cat giv'd a screech, and rolled over on her side with her legs in the air. "'i thought at first the poor thing was dead, but she rallied after a bit, and it seemed as though she had braced herself up to hear the thing out. "'but a little further on, bill got too much for her again, and this time she owned herself beat. she rose up and looked round at us: "you'll excuse me, gentlemen," she said--leastways that is what she said if looks go for anything--"maybe you're used to this sort of rubbish, and it don't get on your nerves. with me it's different. i guess i've heard as much of this fool's talk as my constitution will stand, and if it's all the same to you i'll get outside before i'm sick." "'with that she walked up to the door, and i opened it for her, and she went out. "'you can't fool a cat with talk same as you can a dog.'" chapter vii does man ever reform? balzac says he doesn't. so far as my experience goes, it agrees with that of balzac--a fact the admirers of that author are at liberty to make what use of they please. when i was young and accustomed to take my views of life from people who were older than myself, and who knew better, so they said, i used to believe that he did. examples of "reformed characters" were frequently pointed out to me--indeed, our village, situate a few miles from a small seaport town, seemed to be peculiarly rich in such. they were, from all accounts, including their own, persons who had formerly behaved with quite unnecessary depravity, and who, at the time i knew them, appeared to be going to equally objectionable lengths in the opposite direction. they invariably belonged to one of two classes, the low-spirited or the aggressively unpleasant. they said, and i believed, that they were happy; but i could not help reflecting how very sad they must have been before they were happy. one of them, a small, meek-eyed old man with a piping voice, had been exceptionally wild in his youth. what had been his special villainy i could never discover. people responded to my inquiries by saying that he had been "oh, generally bad," and increased my longing for detail by adding that little boys ought not to want to know about such things. from their tone and manner i assumed that he must have been a pirate at the very least, and regarded him with awe, not unmingled with secret admiration. whatever it was, he had been saved from it by his wife, a bony lady of unprepossessing appearance, but irreproachable views. one day he called at our house for some purpose or other, and, being left alone with him for a few minutes, i took the opportunity of interviewing him personally on the subject. "you were very wicked once, weren't you?" i said, seeking by emphasis on the "once" to mitigate what i felt might be the disagreeable nature of the question. to my intense surprise, a gleam of shameful glory lit up his wizened face, and a sound which i tried to think a sigh, but which sounded like a chuckle, escaped his lips. "ay," he replied; "i've been a bit of a spanker in my time." the term "spanker" in such connection puzzled me. i had been hitherto led to regard a spanker as an eminently conscientious person, especially where the shortcomings of other people were concerned; a person who laboured for the good of others. that the word could also be employed to designate a sinful party was a revelation to me. "but you are good now, aren't you?" i continued, dismissing further reflection upon the etymology of "spanker" to a more fitting occasion. "ay, ay," he answered, his countenance resuming its customary aspect of resigned melancholy. "i be a brand plucked from the burning, i be. there beant much wrong wi' deacon sawyers, now." "and it was your wife that made you good, wasn't it?" i persisted, determined, now that i had started this investigation, to obtain confirmation at first hand on all points. at the mention of his wife his features became suddenly transformed. glancing hurriedly round, to make sure, apparently, that no one but myself was within hearing, he leaned across and hissed these words into my ear--i have never forgotten them, there was a ring of such evident sincerity about them-- "i'd like to skin her, i'd like to skin her alive." it struck me, even in the light of my then limited judgment, as an unregenerate wish; and thus early my faith in the possibility of man's reformation received the first of those many blows that have resulted in shattering it. nature, whether human or otherwise, was not made to be reformed. you can develop, you can check, but you cannot alter it. you can take a small tiger and train it to sit on a hearthrug, and to lap milk, and so long as you provide it with hearthrugs to lie on and sufficient milk to drink, it will purr and behave like an affectionate domestic pet. but it is a tiger, with all a tiger's instincts, and its progeny to the end of all time will be tigers. in the same way, you can take an ape and develop it through a few thousand generations until it loses its tail and becomes an altogether superior ape. you can go on developing it through still a few more thousands of generations until it gathers to itself out of the waste vapours of eternity an intellect and a soul, by the aid of which it is enabled to keep the original apish nature more or less under control. but the ape is still there, and always will be, and every now and again, when constable civilisation turns his back for a moment, as during "spanish furies," or "september massacres," or western mob rule, it creeps out and bites and tears at quivering flesh, or plunges its hairy arms elbow deep in blood, or dances round a burning nigger. i knew a man once--or, rather, i knew of a man--who was a confirmed drunkard. he became and continued a drunkard, not through weakness, but through will. when his friends remonstrated with him, he told them to mind their own business, and to let him mind his. if he saw any reason for not getting drunk he would give it up. meanwhile he liked getting drunk, and he meant to get drunk as often as possible. he went about it deliberately, and did it thoroughly. for nearly ten years, so it was reported, he never went to bed sober. this may be an exaggeration--it would be a singular report were it not--but it can be relied upon as sufficiently truthful for all practical purposes. then there came a day when he did see a reason for not getting drunk. he signed no pledge, he took no oath. he said, "i will never touch another drop of drink," and for twenty-six years he kept his word. at the end of that time a combination of circumstances occurred that made life troublesome to him, so that he desired to be rid of it altogether. he was a man accustomed, when he desired a thing within his reach, to stretch out his hand and take it. he reviewed the case calmly, and decided to commit suicide. if the thing were to be done at all, it would be best, for reasons that if set forth would make this a long story, that it should be done that very night, and, if possible, before eleven o'clock, which was the earliest hour a certain person could arrive from a certain place. it was then four in the afternoon. he attended to some necessary business, and wrote some necessary letters. this occupied him until seven. he then called a cab and drove to a small hotel in the suburbs, engaged a private room, and ordered up materials for the making of the particular punch that had been the last beverage he had got drunk on, six- and-twenty years ago. for three hours he sat there drinking steadily, with his watch before him. at half-past ten he rang the bell, paid his bill, came home, and cut his throat. for a quarter of a century people had been calling that man a "reformed character." his character had not reformed one jot. the craving for drink had never died. for twenty-six years he had, being a great man, held it gripped by the throat. when all things became a matter of indifference to him, he loosened his grasp, and the evil instinct rose up within him as strong on the day he died as on the day he forced it down. that is all a man can do, pray for strength to crush down the evil that is in him, and to keep it held down day after day. i never hear washy talk about "changed characters" and "reformed natures" but i think of a sermon i once heard at a wesleyan revivalist meeting in the black country. "ah! my friends, we've all of us got the devil inside us. i've got him, you've got him," cried the preacher--he was an old man, with long white hair and beard, and wild, fighting eyes. most of the preachers who came "reviving," as it was called, through that district, had those eyes. some of them needed "reviving" themselves, in quite another sense, before they got clear out of it. i am speaking now of more than thirty years ago. "ah! so us have--so us have," came the response. "and you carn't get rid of him," continued the speaker. "not of oursel's," ejaculated a fervent voice at the end of the room, "but the lord will help us." the old preacher turned on him almost fiercely:-- "but th' lord woan't," he shouted; "doan't 'ee reckon on that, lad. ye've got him an' ye've got ta keep him. ye carn't get rid of him. th' lord doan't mean 'ee to." here there broke forth murmurs of angry disapproval, but the old fellow went on, unheeding:-- "it arn't good for 'ee to get rid of him. ye've just got to hug him tight. doan't let him go. hold him fast, and--lam into him. i tell 'ee it's good, healthy christian exercise." we had been discussing the subject with reference to our hero. it had been suggested by brown as an unhackneyed idea, and one lending itself, therefore, to comparative freshness of treatment, that our hero should be a thorough-paced scamp. jephson seconded the proposal, for the reason that it would the better enable us to accomplish artistic work. he was of opinion that we should be more sure of our ground in drawing a villain than in attempting to portray a good man. macshaughnassy thirded (if i may coin what has often appeared to me to be a much-needed word) the motion with ardour. he was tired, he said, of the crystal-hearted, noble-thinking young man of fiction. besides, it made bad reading for the "young person." it gave her false ideas, and made her dissatisfied with mankind as he really is. and, thereupon, he launched forth and sketched us his idea of a hero, with reference to whom i can only say that i should not like to meet him on a dark night. brown, our one earnest member, begged us to be reasonable, and reminded us, not for the first time, and not, perhaps, altogether unnecessarily, that these meetings were for the purpose of discussing business, not of talking nonsense. thus adjured, we attacked the subject conscientiously. brown's idea was that the man should be an out-and-out blackguard, until about the middle of the book, when some event should transpire that would have the effect of completely reforming him. this naturally brought the discussion down to the question with which i have commenced this chapter: does man ever reform? i argued in the negative, and gave the reasons for my disbelief much as i have set them forth here. macshaughnassy, on the other hand, contended that he did, and instanced the case of himself--a man who, in his early days, so he asserted, had been a scatterbrained, impracticable person, entirely without stability. i maintained that this was merely an example of enormous will-power enabling a man to overcome and rise superior to the defects of character with which nature had handicapped him. "my opinion of you," i said, "is that you are naturally a hopelessly irresponsible, well-meaning ass. but," i continued quickly, seeing his hand reaching out towards a complete shakespeare in one volume that lay upon the piano, "your mental capabilities are of such extraordinary power that you can disguise this fact, and make yourself appear a man of sense and wisdom." brown agreed with me that in macshaughnassy's case traces of the former disposition were clearly apparent, but pleaded that the illustration was an unfortunate one, and that it ought not to have weight in the discussion. "seriously speaking," said he, "don't you think that there are some experiences great enough to break up and re-form a man's nature?" "to break up," i replied, "yes; but to re-form, no. passing through a great experience may shatter a man, or it may strengthen a man, just as passing through a furnace may melt or purify metal, but no furnace ever lit upon this earth can change a bar of gold into a bar of lead, or a bar of lead into one of gold." i asked jephson what he thought. he did not consider the bar of gold simile a good one. he held that a man's character was not an immutable element. he likened it to a drug--poison or elixir--compounded by each man for himself from the pharmacopoeia of all things known to life and time, and saw no impossibility, though some improbability, in the glass being flung aside and a fresh draught prepared with pain and labour. "well," i said, "let us put the case practically; did you ever know a man's character to change?" "yes," he answered, "i did know a man whose character seemed to me to be completely changed by an experience that happened to him. it may, as you say, only have been that he was shattered, or that the lesson may have taught him to keep his natural disposition ever under control. the result, in any case, was striking." we asked him to give us the history of the case, and he did so. "he was a friend of some cousins of mine," jephson began, "people i used to see a good deal of in my undergraduate days. when i met him first he was a young fellow of twenty-six, strong mentally and physically, and of a stern and stubborn nature that those who liked him called masterful, and that those who disliked him--a more numerous body--termed tyrannical. when i saw him three years later, he was an old man of twenty-nine, gentle and yielding beyond the border-line of weakness, mistrustful of himself and considerate of others to a degree that was often unwise. formerly, his anger had been a thing very easily and frequently aroused. since the change of which i speak, i have never known the shade of anger to cross his face but once. in the course of a walk, one day, we came upon a young rough terrifying a small child by pretending to set a dog at her. he seized the boy with a grip that almost choked him, and administered to him a punishment that seemed to me altogether out of proportion to the crime, brutal though it was. "i remonstrated with him when he rejoined me. "'yes,' he replied apologetically; 'i suppose i'm a hard judge of some follies.' and, knowing what his haunted eyes were looking at, i said no more. "he was junior partner in a large firm of tea brokers in the city. there was not much for him to do in the london office, and when, therefore, as the result of some mortgage transactions, a south indian tea plantation fell into the hands of the firm, it was suggested that he should go out and take the management of it. the plan suited him admirably. he was a man in every way qualified to lead a rough life; to face a by no means contemptible amount of difficulty and danger, to govern a small army of native workers more amenable to fear than to affection. such a life, demanding thought and action, would afford his strong nature greater interest and enjoyment than he could ever hope to obtain amid the cramped surroundings of civilisation. "only one thing could in reason have been urged against the arrangement, that thing was his wife. she was a fragile, delicate girl, whom he had married in obedience to that instinct of attraction towards the opposite which nature, for the purpose of maintaining her average, has implanted in our breasts--a timid, meek-eyed creature, one of those women to whom death is less terrible than danger, and fate easier to face than fear. such women have been known to run screaming from a mouse and to meet martyrdom with heroism. they can no more keep their nerves from trembling than an aspen tree can stay the quivering of its leaves. "that she was totally unfitted for, and would be made wretched by the life to which his acceptance of the post would condemn her might have readily occurred to him, had he stopped to consider for a moment her feelings in the matter. but to view a question from any other standpoint than his own was not his habit. that he loved her passionately, in his way, as a thing belonging to himself, there can be no doubt, but it was with the love that such men have for the dog they will thrash, the horse they will spur to a broken back. to consult her on the subject never entered his head. he informed her one day of his decision and of the date of their sailing, and, handing her a handsome cheque, told her to purchase all things necessary to her, and to let him know if she needed more; and she, loving him with a dog-like devotion that was not good for him, opened her big eyes a little wider, but said nothing. she thought much about the coming change to herself, however, and, when nobody was by, she would cry softly; then, hearing his footsteps, would hastily wipe away the traces of her tears, and go to meet him with a smile. "now, her timidity and nervousness, which at home had been a butt for mere chaff, became, under the new circumstances of their life, a serious annoyance to the man. a woman who seemed unable to repress a scream whenever she turned and saw in the gloom a pair of piercing eyes looking out at her from a dusky face, who was liable to drop off her horse with fear at the sound of a wild beast's roar a mile off, and who would turn white and limp with horror at the mere sight of a snake, was not a companionable person to live with in the neighbourhood of indian jungles. "he himself was entirely without fear, and could not understand it. to him it was pure affectation. he had a muddled idea, common to men of his stamp, that women assume nervousness because they think it pretty and becoming to them, and that if one could only convince them of the folly of it they might be induced to lay it aside, in the same way that they lay aside mincing steps and simpering voices. a man who prided himself, as he did, upon his knowledge of horses, might, one would think, have grasped a truer notion of the nature of nervousness, which is a mere matter of temperament. but the man was a fool. "the thing that vexed him most was her horror of snakes. he was unblessed--or uncursed, whichever you may prefer--with imagination of any kind. there was no special enmity between him and the seed of the serpent. a creature that crawled upon its belly was no more terrible to him than a creature that walked upon its legs; indeed, less so, for he knew that, as a rule, there was less danger to be apprehended from them. a reptile is only too eager at all times to escape from man. unless attacked or frightened, it will make no onset. most people are content to acquire their knowledge of this fact from the natural history books. he had proved it for himself. his servant, an old sergeant of dragoons, has told me that he has seen him stop with his face six inches from the head of a hooded cobra, and stand watching it through his eye-glass as it crawled away from him, knowing that one touch of its fangs would mean death from which there could be no possible escape. that any reasoning being should be inspired with terror--sickening, deadly terror--by such pitifully harmless things, seemed to him monstrous; and he determined to try and cure her of her fear of them. "he succeeded in doing this eventually somewhat more thoroughly than he had anticipated, but it left a terror in his own eyes that has not gone out of them to this day, and that never will. "one evening, riding home through a part of the jungle not far from his bungalow, he heard a soft, low hiss close to his ear, and, looking up, saw a python swing itself from the branch of a tree and make off through the long grass. he had been out antelope-shooting, and his loaded rifle hung by his stirrup. springing from the frightened horse, he was just in time to get a shot at the creature before it disappeared. he had hardly expected, under the circumstances, to even hit it. by chance the bullet struck it at the junction of the vertebrae with the head, and killed it instantly. it was a well-marked specimen, and, except for the small wound the bullet had made, quite uninjured. he picked it up, and hung it across the saddle, intending to take it home and preserve it. "galloping along, glancing down every now and again at the huge, hideous thing swaying and writhing in front of him almost as if still alive, a brilliant idea occurred to him. he would use this dead reptile to cure his wife of her fear of living ones. he would fix matters so that she should see it, and think it was alive, and be terrified by it; then he would show her that she had been frightened by a mere dead thing, and she would feel ashamed of herself, and be healed of her folly. it was the sort of idea that would occur to a fool. "when he reached home, he took the dead snake into his smoking-room; then, locking the door, the idiot set out his prescription. he arranged the monster in a very natural and life-like position. it appeared to be crawling from the open window across the floor, and any one coming into the room suddenly could hardly avoid treading on it. it was very cleverly done. "that finished, he picked out a book from the shelves, opened it, and laid it face downward upon the couch. when he had completed all things to his satisfaction he unlocked the door and came out, very pleased with himself. "after dinner he lit a cigar and sat smoking a while in silence. "'are you feeling tired?' he said to her at length, with a smile. "she laughed, and, calling him a lazy old thing, asked what it was he wanted. "'only my novel that i was reading. i left it in my den. do you mind? you will find it open on the couch.' "she sprang up and ran lightly to the door. "as she paused there for a moment to look back at him and ask the name of the book, he thought how pretty and how sweet she was; and for the first time a faint glimmer of the true nature of the thing he was doing forced itself into his brain. "'never mind,' he said, half rising, 'i'll--'; then, enamoured of the brilliancy of his plan, checked himself; and she was gone. "he heard her footsteps passing along the matted passage, and smiled to himself. he thought the affair was going to be rather amusing. one finds it difficult to pity him even now when one thinks of it. "the smoking-room door opened and closed, and he still sat gazing dreamily at the ash of his cigar, and smiling. "one moment, perhaps two passed, but the time seemed much longer. the man blew the gray cloud from before his eyes and waited. then he heard what he had been expecting to hear--a piercing shriek. then another, which, expecting to hear the clanging of the distant door and the scurrying back of her footsteps along the passage, puzzled him, so that the smile died away from his lips. "then another, and another, and another, shriek after shriek. "the native servant, gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down the thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the door. the man started up and held him back. "'keep where you are,' he said hoarsely. 'it is nothing. your mistress is frightened, that is all. she must learn to get over this folly.' then he listened again, and the shrieks ended with what sounded curiously like a smothered laugh; and there came a sudden silence. "and out of that bottomless silence, fear for the first time in his life came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each other with eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a common instinct moved together towards the place where the silence came from. "when the man opened the door he saw three things: one was the dead python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, bloody heap in the middle of the floor. "he himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found the second python with its head torn off. "that is the incident that changed the character of my man--if it be changed," concluded jephson. "he told it me one night as we sat on the deck of the steamer, returning from bombay. he did not spare himself. he told me the story, much as i have told it to you, but in an even, monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind. i asked him, when he had finished, how he could bear to recall it. "'recall it!' he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; 'it is always with me.'" chapter viii one day we spoke of crime and criminals. we had discussed the possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would be uninteresting. "it is a terribly sad reflection," remarked macshaughnassy, musingly; "but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for our friends the bad people. do you know," he continued, "when i hear of folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them good, i get positively nervous. once do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past. without the criminal classes we authors would starve." "i shouldn't worry," replied jephson, drily; "one half mankind has been 'reforming' the other half pretty steadily ever since the creation, yet there appears to be a fairly appreciable amount of human nature left in it, notwithstanding. suppressing sin is much the same sort of task that suppressing a volcano would be--plugging one vent merely opens another. evil will last our time." "i cannot take your optimistic view of the case," answered macshaughnassy. "it seems to me that crime--at all events, interesting crime--is being slowly driven out of our existence. pirates and highwaymen have been practically abolished. dear old 'smuggler bill' has melted down his cutlass into a pint-can with a false bottom. the pressgang that was always so ready to rescue our hero from his approaching marriage has been disbanded. there's not a lugger fit for the purposes of abduction left upon the coast. men settle their 'affairs of honour' in the law courts, and return home wounded only in the pocket. assaults on unprotected females are confined to the slums, where heroes do not dwell, and are avenged by the nearest magistrate. your modern burglar is generally an out-of-work green-grocer. his 'swag' usually consists of an overcoat and a pair of boots, in attempting to make off with which he is captured by the servant-girl. suicides and murders are getting scarcer every season. at the present rate of decrease, deaths by violence will be unheard of in another decade, and a murder story will be laughed at as too improbable to be interesting. a certain section of busybodies are even crying out for the enforcement of the seventh commandment. if they succeed authors will have to follow the advice generally given to them by the critics, and retire from business altogether. i tell you our means of livelihood are being filched from us one by one. authors ought to form themselves into a society for the support and encouragement of crime." macshaughnassy's leading intention in making these remarks was to shock and grieve brown, and in this object he succeeded. brown is--or was, in those days--an earnest young man with an exalted--some were inclined to say an exaggerated--view of the importance and dignity of the literary profession. brown's notion of the scheme of creation was that god made the universe so as to give the literary man something to write about. i used at one time to credit brown with originality for this idea; but as i have grown older i have learned that the theory is a very common and popular one in cultured circles. brown expostulated with macshaughnassy. "you speak," he said, "as though literature were the parasite of evil." "and what else is she?" replied the macshaughnassy, with enthusiasm. "what would become of literature without folly and sin? what is the work of the literary man but raking a living for himself out of the dust-heap of human woe? imagine, if you can, a perfect world--a world where men and women never said foolish things and never did unwise ones; where small boys were never mischievous and children never made awkward remarks; where dogs never fought and cats never screeched; where wives never henpecked their husbands and mothers-in-law never nagged; where men never went to bed in their boots and sea-captains never swore; where plumbers understood their work and old maids never dressed as girls; where niggers never stole chickens and proud men were never sea-sick! where would be your humour and your wit? imagine a world where hearts were never bruised; where lips were never pressed with pain; where eyes were never dim; where feet were never weary; where stomachs were never empty! where would be your pathos? imagine a world where husbands never loved more wives than one, and that the right one; where wives were never kissed but by their husbands; where men's hearts were never black and women's thoughts never impure; where there was no hating and no envying; no desiring; no despairing! where would be your scenes of passion, your interesting complications, your subtle psychological analyses? my dear brown, we writers--novelists, dramatists, poets--we fatten on the misery of our fellow-creatures. god created man and woman, and the woman created the literary man when she put her teeth into the apple. we came into the world under the shadow of the serpent. we are special correspondents with the devil's army. we report his victories in our three-volume novels, his occasional defeats in our five-act melodramas." "all of which is very true," remarked jephson; "but you must remember it is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune. the doctor, the lawyer, the preacher, the newspaper proprietor, the weather prophet, will hardly, i should say, welcome the millennium. i shall never forget an anecdote my uncle used to relate, dealing with the period when he was chaplain of the lincolnshire county jail. one morning there was to be a hanging; and the usual little crowd of witnesses, consisting of the sheriff, the governor, three or four reporters, a magistrate, and a couple of warders, was assembled in the prison. the condemned man, a brutal ruffian who had been found guilty of murdering a young girl under exceptionally revolting circumstances, was being pinioned by the hangman and his assistant; and my uncle was employing the last few moments at his disposal in trying to break down the sullen indifference the fellow had throughout manifested towards both his crime and his fate. "my uncle failing to make any impression upon him, the governor ventured to add a few words of exhortation, upon which the man turned fiercely on the whole of them. "'go to hell,' he cried, 'with your snivelling jaw. who are you, to preach at me? _you're_ glad enough i'm here--all of you. why, i'm the only one of you as ain't going to make a bit over this job. where would you all be, i should like to know, you canting swine, if it wasn't for me and my sort? why, it's the likes of me as _keeps_ the likes of you,' with which he walked straight to the gallows and told the hangman to 'hurry up' and not keep the gentlemen waiting." "there was some 'grit' in that man," said macshaughnassy. "yes," added jephson, "and wholesome wit also." macshaughnassy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly. this caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him. "you remind me," he said, "of a scene i once witnessed in the office of _the daily_--well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper. it was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow. an endeavour had been made to launch a discussion on the question 'are babies a blessing?' the youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the simple but touching signature of 'mother of six,' had led off with a scathing, though somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a class; the sporting editor, signing himself 'working man,' and garnishing his contribution with painfully elaborated orthographical lapses, arranged to give an air of verisimilitude to the correspondence, while, at the same time, not to offend the susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived its chief support), had replied, vindicating the british father, and giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his own. the gallery man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, 'gentleman and christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of _the_ --- should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of 'mother of six' and 'working man.' "the topic had, however, fallen flat. with the exception of one man who had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to advertise it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and over the editorial department gloom had settled down. "one evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs, praying secretly for a war or a famine, todhunter, the town reporter, rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the sub-editor's room. we followed. he was waving his notebook above his head, and clamouring, after the manner of people in french exercises, for pens, ink, and paper. "'what's up?' cried the sub-editor, catching his enthusiasm; 'influenza again?' "'better than that!' shouted todhunter. 'excursion steamer run down, a hundred and twenty-five lives lost--four good columns of heartrending scenes.' "'by jove!' said the sub, 'couldn't have happened at a better time either'--and then he sat down and dashed off a leaderette, in which he dwelt upon the pain and regret the paper felt at having to announce the disaster, and drew attention to the exceptionally harrowing account provided by the energy and talent of 'our special reporter.'" "it is the law of nature," said jephson: "we are not the first party of young philosophers who have been struck with the fact that one man's misfortune is another man's opportunity." "occasionally, another woman's," i observed. i was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse. if a nurse in fair practice does not know more about human nature--does not see clearer into the souls of men and women than all the novelists in little bookland put together--it must be because she is physically blind and deaf. all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; so long as we are in good health, we play our parts out bravely to the end, acting them, on the whole, artistically and with strenuousness, even to the extent of sometimes fancying ourselves the people we are pretending to be. but with sickness comes forgetfulness of our part, and carelessness of the impression we are making upon the audience. we are too weak to put the paint and powder on our faces, the stage finery lies unheeded by our side. the heroic gestures, the virtuous sentiments are a weariness to us. in the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained to catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a brief space, ourselves. this nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy, soft gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that passed before them without seeming to look at anything. gazing upon much life, laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical expression, but there was a background of kindliness behind. during the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her nursing experiences. i have sometimes thought i would put down in writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading. the majority of them, i fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of human nature, and god knows there is little need for us to point that out to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work worth doing. a few of them were sweet, but i think they were the saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it would not be a pleasant laugh. "i never enter the door of a house to which i have been summoned," she said to me one evening, "without wondering, as i step over the threshold, what the story is going to be. i always feel inside a sick-room as if i were behind the scenes of life. the people come and go about you, and you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient's eyes, and you just know that it's all a play." the incident that jephson's remark had reminded me of, she told me one afternoon, as i sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a glass of port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering i did not like it. "one of my first cases," she said, "was a surgical operation. i was very young at the time, and i made rather an awkward mistake--i don't mean a professional mistake--but a mistake nevertheless that i ought to have had more sense than to make. "my patient was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman. the wife was a pretty, dark little woman, but i never liked her from the first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill. however, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other--too prettily for it to be quite genuine, i should have said, if i'd known as much of the world then as i do now. "the operation was a difficult and dangerous one. when i came on duty in the evening i found him, as i expected, highly delirious. i kept him as quiet as i could, but towards nine o'clock, as the delirium only increased, i began to get anxious. i bent down close to him and listened to his ravings. over and over again i heard the name 'louise.' why wouldn't 'louise' come to him? it was so unkind of her--they had dug a great pit, and were pushing him down into it--oh! why didn't she come and save him? he should be saved if she would only come and take his hand. "his cries became so pitiful that i could bear them no longer. his wife had gone to attend a prayer-meeting, but the church was only in the next street. fortunately, the day-nurse had not left the house: i called her in to watch him for a minute, and, slipping on my bonnet, ran across. i told my errand to one of the vergers and he took me to her. she was kneeling, but i could not wait. i pushed open the pew door, and, bending down, whispered to her, 'please come over at once; your husband is more delirious than i quite care about, and you may be able to calm him.' "she whispered back, without raising her head, 'i'll be over in a little while. the meeting won't last much longer.' "her answer surprised and nettled me. 'you'll be acting more like a christian woman by coming home with me,' i said sharply, 'than by stopping here. he keeps calling for you, and i can't get him to sleep.' "she raised her head from her hands: 'calling for me?' she asked, with a slightly incredulous accent. "'yes,' i replied, 'it has been his one cry for the last hour: where's louise, why doesn't louise come to him.' "her face was in shadow, but as she turned it away, and the faint light from one of the turned-down gas-jets fell across it, i fancied i saw a smile upon it, and i disliked her more than ever. "'i'll come back with you,' she said, rising and putting her books away, and we left the church together. "she asked me many questions on the way: did patients, when they were delirious, know the people about them? did they remember actual facts, or was their talk mere incoherent rambling? could one guide their thoughts in any way? "the moment we were inside the door, she flung off her bonnet and cloak, and came upstairs quickly and softly. "she walked to the bedside, and stood looking down at him, but he was quite unconscious of her presence, and continued muttering. i suggested that she should speak to him, but she said she was sure it would be useless, and drawing a chair back into the shadow, sat down beside him. "seeing she was no good to him, i tried to persuade her to go to bed, but she said she would rather stop, and i, being little more than a girl then, and without much authority, let her. all night long he tossed and raved, the one name on his lips being ever louise--louise--and all night long that woman sat there in the shadow, never moving, never speaking, with a set smile on her lips that made me long to take her by the shoulders and shake her. "at one time he imagined himself back in his courting days, and pleaded, 'say you love me, louise. i know you do. i can read it in your eyes. what's the use of our pretending? we _know_ each other. put your white arms about me. let me feel your breath upon my neck. ah! i knew it, my darling, my love!' "the whole house was deadly still, and i could hear every word of his troubled ravings. i almost felt as if i had no right to be there, listening to them, but my duty held me. later on, he fancied himself planning a holiday with her, so i concluded. 'i shall start on monday evening,' he was saying, and you can join me in dublin at jackson's hotel on the wednesday, and we'll go straight on.' "his voice grew a little faint, and his wife moved forward on her chair, and bent her head closer to his lips. "'no, no,' he continued, after a pause, 'there's no danger whatever. it's a lonely little place, right in the heart of the galway mountains--o'mullen's half-way house they call it--five miles from ballynahinch. we shan't meet a soul there. we'll have three weeks of heaven all to ourselves, my goddess, my mrs. maddox from boston--don't forget the name.' "he laughed in his delirium; and the woman, sitting by his side, laughed also; and then the truth flashed across me. "i ran up to her and caught her by the arm. 'your name's not louise,' i said, looking straight at her. it was an impertinent interference, but i felt excited, and acted on impulse. "'no,' she replied, very quietly; 'but it's the name of a very dear school friend of mine. i've got the clue to-night that i've been waiting two years to get. good-night, nurse, thanks for fetching me.' "she rose and went out, and i listened to her footsteps going down the stairs, and then drew up the blind and let in the dawn. "i've never told that incident to any one until this evening," my nurse concluded, as she took the empty port wine glass out of my hand, and stirred the fire. "a nurse wouldn't get many engagements if she had the reputation for making blunders of that sort." another story that she told me showed married life more lovelit, but then, as she added, with that cynical twinkle which glinted so oddly from her gentle, demure eyes, this couple had only very recently been wed--had, in fact, only just returned from their honeymoon. they had been travelling on the continent, and there had both contracted typhoid fever, which showed itself immediately on their home-coming. "i was called in to them on the very day of their arrival," she said; "the husband was the first to take to his bed, and the wife followed suit twelve hours afterwards. we placed them in adjoining rooms, and, as often as was possible, we left the door ajar so that they could call out to one another. "poor things! they were little else than boy and girl, and they worried more about each other than they thought about themselves. the wife's only trouble was that she wouldn't be able to do anything for 'poor jack.' 'oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won't you?' she would cry, with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the moment i went in to him it would be: 'oh, don't trouble about me, nurse, i'm all right. just look after the wifie, will you?' "i had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her sister, i was nursing them both. it was an unprofessional thing to do, but i could see they were not well off, and i assured the doctor that i could manage. to me it was worth while going through the double work just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two sick-rooms. the average invalid is not the patient sufferer people imagine. it is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in. it gave me a new heart, nursing these young people. "the man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife was a wee slip of a girl, and her strength--what there was of it--ebbed day by day. as he got stronger he would call out more and more cheerfully to her through the open door, and ask her how she was getting on, and she would struggle to call back laughing answers. it had been a mistake to put them next to each other, and i blamed myself for having done so, but it was too late to change then. all we could do was to beg her not to exhaust herself, and to let us, when he called out, tell him she was asleep. but the thought of not answering him or calling to him made her so wretched that it seemed safer to let her have her way. "her one anxiety was that he should not know how weak she was. 'it will worry him so,' she would say; 'he is such an old fidget over me. and i _am_ getting stronger, slowly; ain't i, nurse?' "one morning he called out to her, as usual, asking her how she was, and she answered, though she had to wait for a few seconds to gather strength to do so. he seemed to detect the effort, for he called back anxiously, 'are you _sure_ you're all right, dear?' "'yes,' she replied, 'getting on famously. why?' "'i thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,' he answered; 'don't call out if it tries you.' "then for the first time she began to worry about herself--not for her own sake, but because of him. "'do you think i _am_ getting weaker, nurse?' she asked me, fixing her great eyes on me with a frightened look. "'you're making yourself weak by calling out,' i answered, a little sharply. 'i shall have to keep that door shut.' "'oh, don't tell him'--that was all her thought--'don't let him know it. tell him i'm strong, won't you, nurse? it will kill him if he thinks i'm not getting well.' "i was glad when her sister came up, and i could get out of the room, for you're not much good at nursing when you feel, as i felt then, as though you had swallowed a tablespoon and it was sticking in your throat. "later on, when i went in to him, he drew me to the bedside, and whispered me to tell him truly how she was. if you are telling a lie at all, you may just as well make it a good one, so i told him she was really wonderfully well, only a little exhausted after the illness, as was natural, and that i expected to have her up before him. "poor lad! that lie did him more good than a week's doctoring and nursing; and next morning he called out more cheerily than ever to her, and offered to bet her a new bonnet against a new hat that he would race her, and be up first. "she laughed back quite merrily (i was in his room at the time). 'all right,' she said, 'you'll lose. i shall be well first, and i shall come and visit you.' "her laugh was so bright, and her voice sounded so much stronger, that i really began to think she had taken a turn for the better, so that when on going in to her i found her pillow wet with tears, i could not understand it. "'why, we were so cheerful just a minute ago,' i said; 'what's the matter?' "'oh, poor jack!' she moaned, as her little, wasted fingers opened and closed upon the counterpane. 'poor jack, it will break his heart.' "it was no good my saying anything. there comes a moment when something tells your patient all that is to be known about the case, and the doctor and the nurse can keep their hopeful assurances for where they will be of more use. the only thing that would have brought comfort to her then would have been to convince her that he would soon forget her and be happy without her. i thought it at the time, and i tried to say something of the kind to her, but i couldn't get it out, and she wouldn't have believed me if i had. "so all i could do was to go back to the other room, and tell him that i wanted her to go to sleep, and that he must not call out to her until i told him. "she lay very still all day. the doctor came at his usual hour and looked at her. he patted her hand, and just glanced at the untouched food beside her. "'yes,' he said, quietly. 'i shouldn't worry her, nurse.' and i understood. "towards evening she opened her eyes, and beckoned to her sister, who was standing by the bedside, to bend down. "'jeanie,' she whispered, 'do you think it wrong to deceive any one when it's for their own good?' "'i don't know,' said the girl, in a dry voice; 'i shouldn't think so. why do you ask?' "'jeanie, your voice was always very much like mine--do you remember, they used to mistake us at home. jeanie, call out for me--just till--till he's a bit better; promise me.' "they had loved each other, those two, more than is common among sisters. jeanie could not answer, but she pressed her sister closer in her arms, and the other was satisfied. "then, drawing all her little stock of life together for one final effort, the child raised herself in her sister's arms. "'good-night, jack,' she called out, loud and clear enough to be heard through the closed door. "'good-night, little wife,' he cried back, cheerily; 'are you all right?' "'yes, dear. good-night.' "her little, worn-out frame dropped back upon the bed, and the next thing i remember is snatching up a pillow, and holding it tight-pressed against jeanie's face for fear the sound of her sobs should penetrate into the next room; and afterwards we both got out, somehow, by the other door, and rushed downstairs, and clung to each other in the back kitchen. "how we two women managed to keep up the deceit, as, for three whole days, we did, i shall never myself know. jeanie sat in the room where her dead sister, from its head to its sticking-up feet, lay outlined under the white sheet; and i stayed beside the living man, and told lies and acted lies, till i took a joy in them, and had to guard against the danger of over-elaborating them. "he wondered at what he thought my 'new merry mood,' and i told him it was because of my delight that his wife was out of danger; and then i went on for the pure devilment of the thing, and told him that a week ago, when we had let him think his wife was growing stronger, we had been deceiving him; that, as a matter of fact, she was at that time in great peril, and i had been in hourly alarm concerning her, but that now the strain was over, and she was safe; and i dropped down by the foot of the bed, and burst into a fit of laughter, and had to clutch hold of the bedstead to keep myself from rolling on the floor. "he had started up in bed with a wild white face when jeanie had first answered him from the other room, though the sisters' voices had been so uncannily alike that i had never been able to distinguish one from the other at any time. i told him the slight change was the result of the fever, that his own voice also was changed a little, and that such was always the case with a person recovering from a long illness. to guide his thoughts away from the real clue, i told him jeanie had broken down with the long work, and that, the need for her being past, i had packed her off into the country for a short rest. that afternoon we concocted a letter to him, and i watched jeanie's eyes with a towel in my hand while she wrote it, so that no tears should fall on it, and that night she travelled twenty miles down the great western line to post it, returning by the next up-train. "no suspicion of the truth ever occurred to him, and the doctor helped us out with our deception; yet his pulse, which day by day had been getting stronger, now beat feebler every hour. in that part of the country where i was born and grew up, the folks say that wherever the dead lie, there round about them, whether the time be summer or winter, the air grows cold and colder, and that no fire, though you pile the logs half-way up the chimney, will ever make it warm. a few months' hospital training generally cures one of all fanciful notions about death, but this idea i have never been able to get rid of. my thermometer may show me sixty, and i may try to believe that the temperature _is_ sixty, but if the dead are beside me i feel cold to the marrow of my bones. i could _see_ the chill from the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up about his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart. "jeanie and i redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if death were waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out. i hardly ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and jeanie sat close to the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers to his anxious questions. "at times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and, shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh till we reeled against the dirty walls. i think we were both getting a little mad. "one day--it was the third of that nightmare life, so i learned afterwards, though for all i could have told then it might have been the three hundredth, for time seemed to have fled from that house as from a dream, so that all things were tangled--i made a slip that came near to ending the matter, then and there. "i had gone into that other room. jeanie had left her post for a moment, and the place was empty. "i did not think what i was doing. i had not closed my eyes that i can remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses were losing their hold of one another. i went through my usual performance of talking loudly to the thing underneath the white sheet, and noisily patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on the table. "on my return, he asked me how she was, and i answered, half in a dream, 'oh, bonny, she's trying to read a little,' and he raised himself on his elbow and called out to her, and for answer there came back silence--not the silence that _is_ silence, but the silence that is as a voice. i do not know if you understand what i mean by that. if you had lived among the dead as long as i have, you would know. "i darted to the door and pretended to look in. 'she's fallen asleep,' i whispered, closing it; and he said nothing, but his eyes looked queerly at me. "that night, jeanie and i stood in the hall talking. he had fallen to sleep early, and i had locked the door between the two rooms, and put the key in my pocket, and had stolen down to tell her what had happened, and to consult with her. "'what can we do! god help us, what can we do!' was all that jeanie could say. we had thought that in a day or two he would be stronger, and that the truth might be broken to him. but instead of that he had grown so weak, that to excite his suspicions now by moving him or her would be to kill him. "we stood looking blankly in each other's faces, wondering how the problem could be solved; and while we did so the problem solved itself. "the one woman-servant had gone out, and the house was very silent--so silent that i could hear the ticking of jeanie's watch inside her dress. suddenly, into the stillness there came a sound. it was not a cry. it came from no human voice. i have heard the voice of human pain till i know its every note, and have grown careless to it; but i have prayed god on my knees that i may never hear that sound again, for it was the sob of a soul. "it wailed through the quiet house and passed away, and neither of us stirred. "at length, with the return of the blood to our veins, we went upstairs together. he had crept from his own room along the passage into hers. he had not had strength enough to pull the sheet off, though he had tried. he lay across the bed with one hand grasping hers." * * * * * my nurse sat for a while without speaking, a somewhat unusual thing for her to do. "you ought to write your experiences," i said. "ah!" she said, giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as much sorrow in the world as i have, you wouldn't want to write a sad book." "i think," she added, after a long pause, with the poker still in her hand, "it can only be the people who have never _known_ suffering who can care to read of it. if i could write a book, i should write a merry book--a book that would make people laugh." chapter ix the discussion arose in this way. i had proposed a match between our villain and the daughter of the local chemist, a singularly noble and pure-minded girl, the humble but worthy friend of the heroine. brown had refused his consent on the ground of improbability. "what in thunder would induce him to marry _her_?" he asked. "love!" i replied; "love, that burns as brightly in the meanest villain's breast as in the proud heart of the good young man." "are you trying to be light and amusing," returned brown, severely, "or are you supposed to be discussing the matter seriously? what attraction could such a girl have for such a man as reuben neil?" "every attraction," i retorted. "she is the exact moral contrast to himself. she is beautiful (if she's not beautiful enough, we can touch her up a bit), and, when the father dies, there will be the shop." "besides," i added, "it will make the thing seem more natural if everybody wonders what on earth could have been the reason for their marrying each other." brown wasted no further words on me, but turned to macshaughnassy. "can _you_ imagine our friend reuben seized with a burning desire to marry mary holme?" he asked, with a smile. "of course i can," said macshaughnassy; "i can imagine anything, and believe anything of anybody. it is only in novels that people act reasonably and in accordance with what might be expected of them. i knew an old sea-captain who used to read the _young ladies' journal_ in bed, and cry over it. i knew a bookmaker who always carried browning's poems about with him in his pocket to study in the train. i have known a harley street doctor to develop at forty-eight a sudden and overmastering passion for switchbacks, and to spend every hour he could spare from his practice at one or other of the exhibitions, having three-pen'orths one after the other. i have known a book-reviewer give oranges (not poisoned ones) to children. a man is not a character, he is a dozen characters, one of them prominent, the other eleven more or less undeveloped. i knew a man once, two of whose characters were of equal value, and the consequences were peculiar." we begged him to relate the case to us, and he did so. "he was a balliol man," said macshaughnassy, "and his christian name was joseph. he was a member of the 'devonshire' at the time i knew him, and was, i think, the most superior person i have ever met. he sneered at the _saturday review_ as the pet journal of the suburban literary club; and at the _athenaeum_ as the trade organ of the unsuccessful writer. thackeray, he considered, was fairly entitled to his position of favourite author to the cultured clerk; and carlyle he regarded as the exponent of the earnest artisan. living authors he never read, but this did not prevent his criticising them contemptuously. the only inhabitants of the nineteenth century that he ever praised were a few obscure french novelists, of whom nobody but himself had ever heard. he had his own opinion about god almighty, and objected to heaven on account of the strong clapham contingent likely to be found in residence there. humour made him sad, and sentiment made him ill. art irritated him and science bored him. he despised his own family and disliked everybody else. for exercise he yawned, and his conversation was mainly confined to an occasional shrug. "nobody liked him, but everybody respected him. one felt grateful to him for his condescension in living at all. "one summer, i was fishing over the norfolk broads, and on the bank holiday, thinking i would like to see the london 'arry in his glory, i ran over to yarmouth. walking along the sea-front in the evening, i suddenly found myself confronted by four remarkably choice specimens of the class. they were urging on their wild and erratic career arm-in-arm. the one nearest the road was playing an unusually wheezy concertina, and the other three were bawling out the chorus of a music-hall song, the heroine of which appeared to be 'hemmer.' "they spread themselves right across the pavement, compelling all the women and children they met to step into the roadway. i stood my ground on the kerb, and as they brushed by me something in the face of the one with the concertina struck me as familiar. "i turned and followed them. they were evidently enjoying themselves immensely. to every girl they passed they yelled out, 'oh, you little jam tart!' and every old lady they addressed as 'mar.' the noisiest and the most vulgar of the four was the one with the concertina. "i followed them on to the pier, and then, hurrying past, waited for them under a gas-lamp. when the man with the concertina came into the light and i saw him clearly i started. from the face i could have sworn it was joseph; but everything else about him rendered such an assumption impossible. putting aside the time and the place, and forgetting his behaviour, his companions, and his instrument, what remained was sufficient to make the suggestion absurd. joseph was always clean shaven; this youth had a smudgy moustache and a pair of incipient red whiskers. he was dressed in the loudest check suit i have ever seen, off the stage. he wore patent-leather boots with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necktie that in an earlier age would have called down lightning out of heaven. he had a low-crowned billycock hat on his head, and a big evil-smelling cigar between his lips. "argue as i would, however, the face was the face of joseph; and, moved by a curiosity i could not control, i kept near him, watching him. "once, for a little while, i missed him; but there was not much fear of losing that suit for long, and after a little looking about i struck it again. he was sitting at the end of the pier, where it was less crowded, with his arm round a girl's waist. i crept close. she was a jolly, red- faced girl, good-looking enough, but common to the last degree. her hat lay on the seat beside her, and her head was resting on his shoulder. she appeared to be fond of him, but he was evidently bored. "'don'tcher like me, joe?' i heard her murmur. "'yas,' he replied, somewhat unconvincingly, 'o' course i likes yer.' "she gave him an affectionate slap, but he did not respond, and a few minutes afterwards, muttering some excuse, he rose and left her, and i followed him as he made his way towards the refreshment-room. at the door he met one of his pals. "'hullo!' was the question, 'wot 'a yer done wi' 'liza?' "'oh, i carn't stand 'er,' was his reply; 'she gives me the bloomin' 'ump. you 'ave a turn with 'er.' "his friend disappeared in the direction of 'liza, and joe pushed into the room, i keeping close behind him. now that he was alone i was determined to speak to him. the longer i had studied his features the more resemblance i had found in them to those of my superior friend joseph. "he was leaning across the bar, clamouring for two of gin, when i tapped him on the shoulder. he turned his head, and the moment he saw me, his face went livid. "'mr. joseph smythe, i believe,' i said with a smile. "'who's mr. joseph smythe?' he answered hoarsely; 'my name's smith, i ain't no bloomin' smythe. who are you? i don't know yer.' "as he spoke, my eyes rested upon a curious gold ring of indian workmanship which he wore upon his left hand. there was no mistaking the ring, at all events: it had been passed round the club on more than one occasion as a unique curiosity. his eyes followed my gaze. he burst into tears, and pushing me before him into a quiet corner of the saloon, sat down facing me. "'don't give me away, old man,' he whimpered; 'for gawd's sake, don't let on to any of the chaps 'ere that i'm a member of that blessed old waxwork show in saint james's: they'd never speak to me agen. and keep yer mug shut about oxford, there's a good sort. i wouldn't 'ave 'em know as 'ow i was one o' them college blokes for anythink.' "i sat aghast. i had listened to hear him entreat me to keep 'smith,' the rorty 'arry, a secret from the acquaintances of 'smythe,' the superior person. here was 'smith' in mortal terror lest his pals should hear of his identity with the aristocratic 'smythe,' and discard him. his attitude puzzled me at the time, but, when i came to reflect, my wonder was at myself for having expected the opposite. "'i carn't 'elp it,' he went on; 'i 'ave to live two lives. 'arf my time i'm a stuck-up prig, as orter be jolly well kicked--' "'at which times,' i interrupted, 'i have heard you express some extremely uncomplimentary opinions concerning 'arries.' "'i know,' he replied, in a voice betraying strong emotion; 'that's where it's so precious rough on me. when i'm a toff i despises myself, 'cos i knows that underneath my sneering phiz i'm a bloomin' 'arry. when i'm an 'arry, i 'ates myself 'cos i knows i'm a toff.' "'can't you decide which character you prefer, and stick to it?' i asked. "'no,' he answered, 'i carn't. it's a rum thing, but whichever i am, sure as fate, 'bout the end of a month i begin to get sick o' myself.' "'i can quite understand it,' i murmured; 'i should give way myself in a fortnight.' "'i've been myself, now,' he continued, without noticing my remark, 'for somethin' like ten days. one mornin', in 'bout three weeks' time, i shall get up in my diggins in the mile end road, and i shall look round the room, and at these clothes 'angin' over the bed, and at this yer concertina' (he gave it an affectionate squeeze), 'and i shall feel myself gettin' scarlet all over. then i shall jump out o' bed, and look at myself in the glass. "you howling little cad," i shall say to myself, "i have half a mind to strangle you"; and i shall shave myself, and put on a quiet blue serge suit and a bowler 'at, tell my landlady to keep my rooms for me till i comes back, slip out o' the 'ouse, and into the fust 'ansom i meets, and back to the halbany. and a month arter that, i shall come into my chambers at the halbany, fling voltaire and parini into the fire, shy me 'at at the bust of good old 'omer, slip on my blue suit agen, and back to the mile end road.' "'how do you explain your absence to both parties?' i asked. "'oh, that's simple enough,' he replied. 'i just tells my 'ousekeeper at the halbany as i'm goin' on the continong; and my mates 'ere thinks i'm a traveller.' "'nobody misses me much,' he added, pathetically; 'i hain't a partic'larly fetchin' sort o' bloke, either of me. i'm sich an out-and- outer. when i'm an 'arry, i'm too much of an 'arry, and when i'm a prig, i'm a reg'lar fust prize prig. seems to me as if i was two ends of a man without any middle. if i could only mix myself up a bit more, i'd be all right.' "he sniffed once or twice, and then he laughed. 'ah, well,' he said, casting aside his momentary gloom; 'it's all a game, and wot's the odds so long as yer 'appy. 'ave a wet?' "i declined the wet, and left him playing sentimental airs to himself upon the concertina. "one afternoon, about a month later, the servant came to me with a card on which was engraved the name of 'mr. joseph smythe.' i requested her to show him up. he entered with his usual air of languid superciliousness, and seated himself in a graceful attitude upon the sofa. "'well,' i said, as soon as the girl had closed the door behind her, 'so you've got rid of smith?' "a sickly smile passed over his face. 'you have not mentioned it to any one?' he asked anxiously. "'not to a soul,' i replied; 'though i confess i often feel tempted to.' "'i sincerely trust you never will,' he said, in a tone of alarm. 'you can have no conception of the misery the whole thing causes me. i cannot understand it. what possible affinity there can be between myself and that disgusting little snob passes my comprehension. i assure you, my dear mac, the knowledge that i was a ghoul, or a vampire, would cause me less nausea than the reflection that i am one and the same with that odious little whitechapel bounder. when i think of him every nerve in my body--' "'don't think about him any more,' i interrupted, perceiving his strongly- suppressed emotion. 'you didn't come here to talk about him, i'm sure. let us dismiss him.' "'well,' he replied, 'in a certain roundabout way it is slightly connected with him. that is really my excuse for inflicting the subject upon you. you are the only man i _can_ speak to about it--if i shall not bore you?' "'not in the least,' i said. 'i am most interested.' as he still hesitated, i asked him point-blank what it was. "he appeared embarrassed. 'it is really very absurd of me,' he said, while the faintest suspicion of pink crossed his usually colourless face; 'but i feel i must talk to somebody about it. the fact is, my dear mac, i am in love.' "'capital!' i cried; 'i'm delighted to hear it.' (i thought it might make a man of him.) 'do i know the lady?' "'i am inclined to think you must have seen her,' he replied; 'she was with me on the pier at yarmouth that evening you met me.' "'not 'liza!' i exclaimed. "'that was she,' he answered; 'miss elizabeth muggins.' he dwelt lovingly upon the name. "'but,' i said, 'you seemed--i really could not help noticing, it was so pronounced--you seemed to positively dislike her. indeed, i gathered from your remark to a friend that her society was distinctly distasteful to you.' "'to smith,' he corrected me. 'what judge would that howling little blackguard be of a woman's worth! the dislike of such a man as that is a testimonial to her merit!' "'i may be mistaken,' i said; 'but she struck me as a bit common.' "'she is not, perhaps, what the world would call a lady,' he admitted; 'but then, my dear mac, my opinion of the world is not such as to render _its_ opinion of much value to me. i and the world differ on most subjects, i am glad to say. she is beautiful, and she is good, and she is my choice.' "'she's a jolly enough little girl,' i replied, 'and, i should say, affectionate; but have you considered, smythe, whether she is quite--what shall we say--quite as intellectual as could be desired?' "'really, to tell the truth, i have not troubled myself much about her intellect,' he replied, with one of his sneering smiles. 'i have no doubt that the amount of intellect absolutely necessary to the formation of a british home, i shall be able to supply myself. i have no desire for an intellectual wife. one is compelled to meet tiresome people, but one does not live with them if one can avoid it.' "'no,' he continued, reverting to his more natural tone; 'the more i think of elizabeth the more clear it becomes to me that she is the one woman in the world for whom marriage with me is possible. i perceive that to the superficial observer my selection must appear extraordinary. i do not pretend to explain it, or even to understand it. the study of mankind is beyond man. only fools attempt it. maybe it is her contrast to myself that attracts me. maybe my, perhaps, too spiritual nature feels the need of contact with her coarser clay to perfect itself. i cannot tell. these things must always remain mysteries. i only know that i love her--that, if any reliance is to be placed upon instinct, she is the mate to whom artemis is leading me.' "it was clear that he was in love, and i therefore ceased to argue with him. 'you kept up your acquaintanceship with her, then, after you'--i was going to say 'after you ceased to be smith,' but not wishing to agitate him by more mention of that person than i could help, i substituted, 'after you returned to the albany?' "'not exactly,' he replied; 'i lost sight of her after i left yarmouth, and i did not see her again until five days ago, when i came across her in an aerated bread shop. i had gone in to get a glass of milk and a bun, and _she_ brought them to me. i recognised her in a moment.' his face lighted up with quite a human smile. 'i take tea there every afternoon now,' he added, glancing towards the clock, 'at four.' "'there's not much need to ask _her_ views on the subject,' i said, laughing; 'her feelings towards you were pretty evident.' "'well, that is the curious part of it,' he replied, with a return to his former embarrassment; 'she does not seem to care for me now at all. indeed, she positively refuses me. she says--to put it in the dear child's own racy language--that she wouldn't take me on at any price. she says it would be like marrying a clockwork figure without the key. she's more frank than complimentary, but i like that.' "'wait a minute,' i said; 'an idea occurs to me. does she know of your identity with smith?' "'no,' he replied, alarmed, 'i would not have her know it for worlds. only yesterday she told me that i reminded her of a fellow she had met at yarmouth, and my heart was in my mouth.' "'how did she look when she told you that?' i asked. "'how did she look?' he repeated, not understanding me. "'what was her expression at that moment?' i said--'was it severe or tender?' "'well,' he replied, 'now i come to think of it, she did seem to soften a bit just then.' "'my dear boy,' i said, 'the case is as clear as daylight. she loves smith. no girl who admired smith could be attracted by smythe. as your present self you will never win her. in a few weeks' time, however, you will be smith. leave the matter over until then. propose to her as smith, and she will accept you. after marriage you can break smythe gently to her.' "'by jove!' he exclaimed, startled out of his customary lethargy, 'i never thought of that. the truth is, when i am in my right senses, smith and all his affairs seem like a dream to me. any idea connected with him would never enter my mind.' "he rose and held out his hand. 'i am so glad i came to see you,' he said; 'your suggestion has almost reconciled me to my miserable fate. indeed, i quite look forward to a month of smith, now.' "'i'm so pleased,' i answered, shaking hands with him. 'mind you come and tell me how you get on. another man's love affairs are not usually absorbing, but there is an element of interest about yours that renders the case exceptional.' "we parted, and i did not see him again for another month. then, late one evening, the servant knocked at my door to say that a mr. smith wished to see me. "'smith, smith,' i repeated; 'what smith? didn't he give you a card?' "'no, sir,' answered the girl; 'he doesn't look the sort that would have a card. he's not a gentleman, sir; but he says you'll know him.' she evidently regarded the statement as an aspersion upon myself. "i was about to tell her to say i was out, when the recollection of smythe's other self flashed into my mind, and i directed her to send him up. "a minute passed, and then he entered. he was wearing a new suit of a louder pattern, if possible, than before. i think he must have designed it himself. he looked hot and greasy. he did not offer to shake hands, but sat down awkwardly on the extreme edge of a small chair, and gaped about the room as if he had never seen it before. "he communicated his shyness to myself. i could not think what to say, and we sat for a while in painful silence. "'well,' i said, at last, plunging head-foremost into the matter, according to the method of shy people, 'and how's 'liza?' "'oh, _she's_ all right,' he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on his hat. "'have you done it?' i continued. "'done wot?' he asked, looking up. "'married her.' "'no,' he answered, returning to the contemplation of his hat. "'has she refused you then?' i said. "'i ain't arst 'er,' he returned. "he seemed unwilling to explain matters of his own accord. i had to put the conversation into the form of a cross-examination. "'why not?' i asked; 'don't you think she cares for you any longer?' "he burst into a harsh laugh. 'there ain't much fear o' that,' he said; 'it's like 'aving an alcock's porous plaster mashed on yer, blowed if it ain't. there's no gettin' rid of 'er. i wish she'd giv' somebody else a turn. i'm fair sick of 'er.' "'but you were enthusiastic about her a month ago!' i exclaimed in astonishment. "'smythe may 'ave been,' he said; 'there ain't no accounting for that ninny, 'is 'ead's full of starch. anyhow, i don't take 'er on while i'm myself. i'm too jolly fly.' "'that sort o' gal's all right enough to lark with,' he continued; 'but yer don't want to marry 'em. they don't do yer no good. a man wants a wife as 'e can respect--some one as is a cut above 'imself, as will raise 'im up a peg or two--some one as 'e can look up to and worship. a man's wife orter be to 'im a gawddess--a hangel, a--' "'you appear to have met the lady,' i remarked, interrupting him. "he blushed scarlet, and became suddenly absorbed in the pattern of the carpet. but the next moment he looked up again, and his face seemed literally transformed. "'oh! mr. macshaughnassy,' he burst out, with a ring of genuine manliness in his voice, 'you don't know 'ow good, 'ow beautiful she is. i ain't fit to breathe 'er name in my thoughts. an' she's so clever. i met 'er at that toynbee 'all. there was a party of toffs there all together. you would 'ave enjoyed it, mr. macshaughnassy, if you could 'ave 'eard 'er; she was makin' fun of the pictures and the people round about to 'er pa--such wit, such learnin', such 'aughtiness. i follered them out and opened the carriage door for 'er, and she just drew 'er skirt aside and looked at me as if i was the dirt in the road. i wish i was, for then perhaps one day i'd kiss 'er feet.' "his emotion was so genuine that i did not feel inclined to laugh at him. 'did you find out who she was?' i asked. "'yes,' he answered; 'i 'eard the old gentleman say "'ome" to the coachman, and i ran after the carriage all the way to 'arley street. trevior's 'er name, hedith trevior.' "'miss trevior!' i cried, 'a tall, dark girl, with untidy hair and rather weak eyes?' "'tall and dark,' he replied 'with 'air that seems tryin' to reach 'er lips to kiss 'em, and heyes, light blue, like a cambridge necktie. a 'undred and seventy-three was the number.' "'that's right,' i said; 'my dear smith, this is becoming complicated. you've met the lady and talked to her for half an hour--as smythe, don't you remember?' "'no,' he said, after cogitating for a minute, 'carn't say i do; i never can remember much about smythe. he allers seems to me like a bad dream.' "'well, you met her,' i said; 'i'm positive. i introduced you to her myself, and she confided to me afterwards that she thought you a most charming man.' "'no--did she?' he remarked, evidently softening in his feelings towards smythe; 'and did _i_ like '_er_?' "'well, to tell the truth,' i answered, 'i don't think you did. you looked intensely bored.' "'the juggins,' i heard him mutter to himself, and then he said aloud: 'd'yer think i shall get a chance o' seein' 'er agen, when i'm--when i'm smythe?' "'of course,' i said, 'i'll take you round myself. by the bye,' i added, jumping up and looking on the mantelpiece, 'i've got a card for a cinderella at their place--something to do with a birthday. will you be smythe on november the twentieth?' "'ye--as,' he replied; 'oh, yas--bound to be by then.' "'very well, then,' i said, 'i'll call round for you at the albany, and we'll go together.' "he rose and stood smoothing his hat with his sleeve. 'fust time i've ever looked for'ard to bein' that hanimated corpse, smythe,' he said slowly. 'blowed if i don't try to 'urry it up--'pon my sivey i will.' "'he'll be no good to you till the twentieth,' i reminded him. 'and,' i added, as i stood up to ring the bell, 'you're sure it's a genuine case this time. you won't be going back to 'liza?' "'oh, don't talk 'bout 'liza in the same breath with hedith,' he replied, 'it sounds like sacrilege.' "he stood hesitating with the handle of the door in his hand. at last, opening it and looking very hard at his hat, he said, 'i'm goin' to 'arley street now. i walk up and down outside the 'ouse every evening, and sometimes, when there ain't no one lookin', i get a chance to kiss the doorstep.' "he disappeared, and i returned to my chair. "on november twentieth, i called for him according to promise. i found him on the point of starting for the club: he had forgotten all about our appointment. i reminded him of it, and he with difficulty recalled it, and consented, without any enthusiasm, to accompany me. by a few artful hints to her mother (including a casual mention of his income), i manoeuvred matters so that he had edith almost entirely to himself for the whole evening. i was proud of what i had done, and as we were walking home together i waited to receive his gratitude. "as it seemed slow in coming, i hinted my expectations. "'well,' i said, 'i think i managed that very cleverly for you.' "'managed what very cleverly?' said he. "'why, getting you and miss trevior left together for such a long time in the conservatory,' i answered, somewhat hurt; '_i_ fixed that for you.' "'oh, it was _you_, was it,' he replied; 'i've been cursing providence.' "i stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, and faced him. 'don't you love her?' i said. "'love her!' he repeated, in the utmost astonishment; 'what on earth is there in her to love? she's nothing but a bad translation of a modern french comedy, with the interest omitted.' "this 'tired' me--to use an americanism. 'you came to me a month ago,' i said, 'raving over her, and talking about being the dirt under her feet and kissing her doorstep.' "he turned very red. 'i wish, my dear mac,' he said, 'you would pay me the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad with whom i have the misfortune to be connected. you would greatly oblige me if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar drivel you would kindly kick him downstairs.' "'no doubt,' he added, with a sneer, as we walked on, 'miss trevior would be his ideal. she is exactly the type of woman, i should say, to charm that type of man. for myself, i do not appreciate the artistic and literary female.' "'besides,' he continued, in a deeper tone, 'you know my feelings. i shall never care for any other woman but elizabeth.' "'and she?' i said "'she,' he sighed, 'is breaking her heart for smith.' "'why don't you tell her you are smith?' i asked. "'i cannot,' he replied, 'not even to win her. besides, she would not believe me.' "we said good-night at the corner of bond street, and i did not see him again till one afternoon late in the following march, when i ran against him in ludgate circus. he was wearing his transition blue suit and bowler hat. i went up to him and took his arm. "'which are you?' i said. "'neither, for the moment,' he replied, 'thank god. half an hour ago i was smythe, half an hour hence i shall be smith. for the present half- hour i am a man.' "there was a pleasant, hearty ring in his voice, and a genial, kindly light in his eyes, and he held himself like a frank gentleman. "'you are certainly an improvement upon both of them,' i said. "he laughed a sunny laugh, with just the shadow of sadness dashed across it. 'do you know my idea of heaven?' he said. "'no,' i replied, somewhat surprised at the question. "'ludgate circus,' was the answer. 'the only really satisfying moments of my life,' he said, 'have been passed in the neighbourhood of ludgate circus. i leave piccadilly an unhealthy, unwholesome prig. at charing cross i begin to feel my blood stir in my veins. from ludgate circus to cheapside i am a human thing with human feeling throbbing in my heart, and human thought throbbing in my brain--with fancies, sympathies, and hopes. at the bank my mind becomes a blank. as i walk on, my senses grow coarse and blunted; and by the time i reach whitechapel i am a poor little uncivilised cad. on the return journey it is the same thing reversed.' "'why not live in ludgate circus,' i said, 'and be always as you are now?' "'because,' he answered, 'man is a pendulum, and must travel his arc.' "'my dear mac,' said he, laying his hand upon my shoulder, 'there is only one good thing about me, and that is a moral. man is as god made him: don't be so sure that you can take him to pieces and improve him. all my life i have sought to make myself an unnaturally superior person. nature has retaliated by making me also an unnaturally inferior person. nature abhors lopsidedness. she turns out man as a whole, to be developed as a whole. i always wonder, whenever i come across a supernaturally pious, a supernaturally moral, a supernaturally cultured person, if they also have a reverse self.' "i was shocked at his suggested argument, and walked by his side for a while without speaking. at last, feeling curious on the subject, i asked him how his various love affairs were progressing. "'oh, as usual,' he replied; 'in and out of a _cul de sac_. when i am smythe i love eliza, and eliza loathes me. when i am smith i love edith, and the mere sight of me makes her shudder. it is as unfortunate for them as for me. i am not saying it boastfully. heaven knows it is an added draught of misery in my cup; but it is a fact that eliza is literally pining away for me as smith, and--as smith i find it impossible to be even civil to her; while edith, poor girl, has been foolish enough to set her heart on me as smythe, and as smythe she seems to me but the skin of a woman stuffed with the husks of learning, and rags torn from the corpse of wit.' "i remained absorbed in my own thoughts for some time, and did not come out of them till we were crossing the minories. then, the idea suddenly occurring to me, i said: "'why don't you get a new girl altogether? there must be medium girls that both smith and smythe could like, and that would put up with both of you.' "'no more girls for this child,' he answered 'they're more trouble than they're worth. those yer want yer carn't get, and those yer can 'ave, yer don't want.' "i started, and looked up at him. he was slouching along with his hands in his pockets, and a vacuous look in his face. "a sudden repulsion seized me. 'i must go now,' i said, stopping. 'i'd no idea i had come so far.' "he seemed as glad to be rid of me as i to be rid of him. 'oh, must yer,' he said, holding out his hand. 'well, so long.' "we shook hands carelessly. he disappeared in the crowd, and that is the last i have ever seen of him." * * * * * "is that a true story?" asked jephson. "well, i've altered the names and dates," said macshaughnassy; "but the main facts you can rely upon." chapter x the final question discussed at our last meeting been: what shall our hero be? macshaughnassy had suggested an author, with a critic for the villain. my idea was a stockbroker, with an undercurrent of romance in his nature. said jephson, who has a practical mind: "the question is not what we like, but what the female novel-reader likes." "that is so," agreed macshaughnassy. "i propose that we collect feminine opinion upon this point. i will write to my aunt and obtain from her the old lady's view. you," he said, turning to me, "can put the case to your wife, and get the young lady's ideal. let brown write to his sister at newnham, and find out whom the intellectual maiden favours, while jephson can learn from miss medbury what is most attractive to the common-sensed girl." this plan we had adopted, and the result was now under consideration. macshaughnassy opened the proceedings by reading his aunt's letter. wrote the old lady: "i think, if i were you, my dear boy, i should choose a soldier. you know your poor grandfather, who ran away to america with that _wicked_ mrs. featherly, the banker's wife, was a soldier, and so was your poor cousin robert, who lost eight thousand pounds at monte carlo. i have always felt singularly drawn towards soldiers, even as a girl; though your poor dear uncle could not bear them. you will find many allusions to soldiers and men of war in the old testament (see jer. xlviii. ). of course one does not like to think of their fighting and killing each other, but then they do not seem to do that sort of thing nowadays." "so much for the old lady," said macshaughnassy, as he folded up the letter and returned it to his pocket. "what says culture?" brown produced from his cigar-case a letter addressed in a bold round hand, and read as follows: "what a curious coincidence! a few of us were discussing this very subject last night in millicent hightopper's rooms, and i may tell you at once that our decision was unanimous in favour of soldiers. you see, my dear selkirk, in human nature the attraction is towards the opposite. to a milliner's apprentice a poet would no doubt be satisfying; to a woman of intelligence he would he an unutterable bore. what the intellectual woman requires in man is not something to argue with, but something to look at. to an empty-headed woman i can imagine the soldier type proving vapid and uninteresting; to the woman of mind he represents her ideal of man--a creature strong, handsome, well-dressed, and not too clever." "that gives us two votes for the army," remarked macshaughnassy, as brown tore his sister's letter in two, and threw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. "what says the common-sensed girl?" "first catch your common-sensed girl," muttered jephson, a little grumpily, as it seemed to me. "where do you propose finding her?" "well," returned macshaughnassy, "i looked to find her in miss medbury." as a rule, the mention of miss medbury's name brings a flush of joy to jephson's face; but now his features wore an expression distinctly approaching a scowl. "oh!" he replied, "did you? well, then, the common-sensed girl loves the military also." "by jove!" exclaimed macshaughnassy, "what an extraordinary thing. what reason does she give?" "that there's a something about them, and that they dance so divinely," answered jephson, shortly. "well, you do surprise me," murmured macshaughnassy, "i am astonished." then to me he said: "and what does the young married woman say? the same?" "yes," i replied, "precisely the same." "does _she_ give a reason?" he asked. "oh yes," i explained; "because you can't help liking them." there was silence for the next few minutes, while we smoked and thought. i fancy we were all wishing we had never started this inquiry. that four distinctly different types of educated womanhood should, with promptness and unanimity quite unfeminine, have selected the soldier as their ideal, was certainly discouraging to the civilian heart. had they been nursemaids or servant girls, i should have expected it. the worship of mars by the venus of the white cap is one of the few vital religions left to this devoutless age. a year or two ago i lodged near a barracks, and the sight to be seen round its huge iron gates on sunday afternoons i shall never forget. the girls began to assemble about twelve o'clock. by two, at which hour the army, with its hair nicely oiled and a cane in its hand, was ready for a stroll, there would be some four or five hundred of them waiting in a line. formerly they had collected in a wild mob, and as the soldiers were let out to them two at a time, had fought for them, as lions for early christians. this, however, had led to scenes of such disorder and brutality, that the police had been obliged to interfere; and the girls were now marshalled in _queue_, two abreast, and compelled, by a force of constables specially told off for the purpose, to keep their places and wait their proper turn. at three o'clock the sentry on duty would come down to the wicket and close it. "they're all gone, my dears," he would shout out to the girls still left; "it's no good your stopping, we've no more for you to-day." "oh, not one!" some poor child would murmur pleadingly, while the tears welled up into her big round eyes, "not even a little one. i've been waiting _such_ a long time." "can't help that," the honest fellow would reply, gruffly, but not unkindly, turning aside to hide his emotion; "you've had 'em all between you. we don't make 'em, you know: you can't have 'em if we haven't got 'em, can you? come earlier next time." then he would hurry away to escape further importunity; and the police, who appeared to have been waiting for this moment with gloating anticipation, would jeeringly hustle away the weeping remnant. "now then, pass along, you girls, pass along," they would say, in that irritatingly unsympathetic voice of theirs. "you've had your chance. can't have the roadway blocked up all the afternoon with this 'ere demonstration of the unloved. pass along." in connection with this same barracks, our char-woman told amenda, who told ethelbertha, who told me a story, which i now told the boys. into a certain house, in a certain street in the neighbourhood, there moved one day a certain family. their servant had left them--most of their servants did at the end of a week--and the day after the moving-in an advertisement for a domestic was drawn up and sent to the _chronicle_. it ran thus: wanted, general servant, in small family of eleven. wages, pounds; no beer money. must be early riser and hard worker. washing done at home. must be good cook, and not object to window-cleaning. unitarian preferred.--apply, with references, to a. b., etc. that advertisement was sent off on wednesday afternoon. at seven o'clock on thursday morning the whole family were awakened by continuous ringing of the street-door bell. the husband, looking out of window, was surprised to see a crowd of about fifty girls surrounding the house. he slipped on his dressing-gown and went down to see what was the matter. the moment he opened the door, fifteen of them charged tumultuously into the passage, sweeping him completely off his legs. once inside, these fifteen faced round, fought the other thirty-five or so back on to the doorstep, and slammed the door in their faces. then they picked up the master of the house, and asked him politely to conduct them to "a. b." at first, owing to the clamour of the mob outside, who were hammering at the door and shouting curses through the keyhole, he could understand nothing, but at length they succeeded in explaining to him that they were domestic servants come ill answer to his wife's advertisement. the man went and told his wife, and his wife said she would see them, one at a time. which one should have audience first was a delicate question to decide. the man, on being appealed to, said he would prefer to leave it to them. they accordingly discussed the matter among themselves. at the end of a quarter of an hour, the victor, having borrowed some hair-pins and a looking-glass from our char-woman, who had slept in the house, went upstairs, while the remaining fourteen sat down in the hall, and fanned themselves with their bonnets. "a. b." was a good deal astonished when the first applicant presented herself. she was a tall, genteel-looking girl. up to yesterday she had been head housemaid at lady stanton's, and before that she had been under- cook for two years to the duchess of york. "and why did you leave lady stanton?" asked "a. b." "to come here, mum," replied the girl. the lady was puzzled. "and you'll be satisfied with six pounds a year?" she asked. "certainly, mum, i think it ample." "and you don't mind hard work?" "i love it, mum." "and you're an early riser?" "oh yes, mum, it upsets me stopping in bed after half-past five." "you know we do the washing at home?" "yes, mum. i think it so much better to do it at home. those laundries ruin good clothes. they're so careless." "are you a unitarian?" continued the lady. "not yet, mum," replied the girl, "but i should like to be one." the lady took her reference, and said she would write. the next applicant offered to come for three pounds--thought six pounds too much. she expressed her willingness to sleep in the back kitchen: a shakedown under the sink was all she wanted. she likewise had yearnings towards unitarianism. the third girl did not require any wages at all--could not understand what servants wanted with wages--thought wages only encouraged a love of foolish finery--thought a comfortable home in a unitarian family ought to be sufficient wages for any girl. this girl said there was one stipulation she should like to make, and that was that she should be allowed to pay for all breakages caused by her own carelessness or neglect. she objected to holidays and evenings out; she held that they distracted a girl from her work. the fourth candidate offered a premium of five pounds for the place; and then "a. b." began to get frightened, and refused to see any more of the girls, convinced that they must be lunatics from some neighbouring asylum out for a walk. later in the day, meeting the next-door lady on the doorstep, she related her morning's experiences. "oh, that's nothing extraordinary," said the next-door lady; "none of us on this side of the street pay wages; and we get the pick of all the best servants in london. why, girls will come from the other end of the kingdom to get into one of these houses. it's the dream of their lives. they save up for years, so as to be able to come here for nothing." "what's the attraction?" asked "a. b.," more amazed than ever. "why, don't you see," explained the next door lady, "our back windows open upon the barrack yard. a girl living in one of these houses is always close to soldiers. by looking out of window she can always see soldiers; and sometimes a soldier will nod to her or even call up to her. they never dream of asking for wages. they'll work eighteen hours a day, and put up with anything just to be allowed to stop." "a. b." profited by this information, and engaged the girl who offered the five pounds premium. she found her a perfect treasure of a servant. she was invariably willing and respectful, slept on a sofa in the kitchen, and was always contented with an egg for her dinner. the truth of this story i cannot vouch for. myself, i can believe it. brown and macshaughnassy made no attempt to do so, which seemed unfriendly. jephson excused himself on the plea of a headache. i admit there are points in it presenting difficulties to the average intellect. as i explained at the commencement, it was told to me by ethelbertha, who had it from amenda, who got it from the char-woman, and exaggerations may have crept into it. the following, however, were incidents that came under my own personal observation. they afforded a still stronger example of the influence exercised by tommy atkins upon the british domestic, and i therefore thought it right to relate them. "the heroine of them," i said, "is our amenda. now, you would call her a tolerably well-behaved, orderly young woman, would you not?" "she is my ideal of unostentatious respectability," answered macshaughnassy. "that was my opinion also," i replied. "you can, therefore, imagine my feelings on passing her one evening in the folkestone high street with a panama hat upon her head (_my_ panama hat), and a soldier's arm round her waist. she was one of a mob following the band of the third berkshire infantry, then in camp at sandgate. there was an ecstatic, far-away look in her eyes. she was dancing rather than walking, and with her left hand she beat time to the music. "ethelbertha was with me at the time. we stared after the procession until it had turned the corner, and then we stared at each other. "'oh, it's impossible,' said ethelbertha to me. "'but that was my hat,' i said to ethelbertha. "the moment we reached home ethelbertha looked for amenda, and i looked for my hat. neither was to be found. "nine o'clock struck, ten o'clock struck. at half-past ten, we went down and got our own supper, and had it in the kitchen. at a quarter-past eleven, amenda returned. she walked into the kitchen without a word, hung my hat up behind the door, and commenced clearing away the supper things. "ethelbertha rose, calm but severe. "'where have you been, amenda?' she inquired. "'gadding half over the county with a lot of low soldiers,' answered amenda, continuing her work. "'you had on my hat,' i added. "'yes, sir,' replied amenda, still continuing her work, 'it was the first thing that came to hand. what i'm thankful for is that it wasn't missis's best bonnet.' "whether ethelbertha was mollified by the proper spirit displayed in this last remark, i cannot say, but i think it probable. at all events, it was in a voice more of sorrow than of anger that she resumed her examination. "'you were walking with a soldier's arm around your waist when we passed you, amenda?' she observed interrogatively. "'i know, mum,' admitted amenda, 'i found it there myself when the music stopped.' "ethelbertha looked her inquiries. amenda filled a saucepan with water, and then replied to them. "'i'm a disgrace to a decent household,' she said; 'no mistress who respected herself would keep me a moment. i ought to be put on the doorstep with my box and a month's wages.' "'but why did you do it then?' said ethelbertha, with natural astonishment. "'because i'm a helpless ninny, mum. i can't help myself; if i see soldiers i'm bound to follow them. it runs in our family. my poor cousin emma was just such another fool. she was engaged to be married to a quiet, respectable young fellow with a shop of his own, and three days before the wedding she ran off with a regiment of marines to chatham and married the colour-sergeant. that's what i shall end by doing. i've been all the way to sandgate with that lot you saw me with, and i've kissed four of them--the nasty wretches. i'm a nice sort of girl to be walking out with a respectable milkman.' "she was so deeply disgusted with herself that it seemed superfluous for anybody else to be indignant with her; and ethelbertha changed her tone and tried to comfort her. "'oh, you'll get over all that nonsense, amenda,' she said, laughingly; 'you see yourself how silly it is. you must tell mr. bowles to keep you away from soldiers.' "'ah, i can't look at it in the same light way that you do, mum,' returned amenda, somewhat reprovingly; 'a girl that can't see a bit of red marching down the street without wanting to rush out and follow it ain't fit to be anybody's wife. why, i should be leaving the shop with nobody in it about twice a week, and he'd have to go the round of all the barracks in london, looking for me. i shall save up and get myself into a lunatic asylum, that's what i shall do.' "ethelbertha began to grow quite troubled. 'but surely this is something altogether new, amenda,' she said; 'you must have often met soldiers when you've been out in london?' "'oh yes, one or two at a time, walking about anyhow, i can stand that all right. it's when there's a lot of them with a band that i lose my head.' "'you don't know what it's like, mum,' she added, noticing ethelbertha's puzzled expression; 'you've never had it. i only hope you never may.' "we kept a careful watch over amenda during the remainder of our stay at folkestone, and an anxious time we had of it. every day some regiment or other would march through the town, and at the first sound of its music amenda would become restless and excited. the pied piper's reed could not have stirred the hamelin children deeper than did those sandgate bands the heart of our domestic. fortunately, they generally passed early in the morning when we were indoors, but one day, returning home to lunch, we heard distant strains dying away upon the hythe road. we hurried in. ethelbertha ran down into the kitchen; it was empty!--up into amenda's bedroom; it was vacant! we called. there was no answer. "'that miserable girl has gone off again,' said ethelbertha. 'what a terrible misfortune it is for her. it's quite a disease.' "ethelbertha wanted me to go to sandgate camp and inquire for her. i was sorry for the girl myself, but the picture of a young and innocent-looking man wandering about a complicated camp, inquiring for a lost domestic, presenting itself to my mind, i said that i'd rather not. "ethelbertha thought me heartless, and said that if i would not go she would go herself. i replied that i thought one female member of my household was enough in that camp at a time, and requested her not to. ethelbertha expressed her sense of my inhuman behaviour by haughtily declining to eat any lunch, and i expressed my sense of her unreasonableness by sweeping the whole meal into the grate, after which ethelbertha suddenly developed exuberant affection for the cat (who didn't want anybody's love, but wanted to get under the grate after the lunch), and i became supernaturally absorbed in the day-before-yesterday's newspaper. "in the afternoon, strolling out into the garden, i heard the faint cry of a female in distress. i listened attentively, and the cry was repeated. i thought it sounded like amenda's voice, but where it came from i could not conceive. it drew nearer, however, as i approached the bottom of the garden, and at last i located it in a small wooden shed, used by the proprietor of the house as a dark-room for developing photographs. "the door was locked. 'is that you, amenda?' i cried through the keyhole. "'yes, sir,' came back the muffled answer. 'will you please let me out? you'll find the key on the ground near the door.' "i discovered it on the grass about a yard away, and released her. 'who locked you in?' i asked. "'i did, sir,' she replied; 'i locked myself in, and pushed the key out under the door. i had to do it, or i should have gone off with those beastly soldiers.' "'i hope i haven't inconvenienced you, sir,' she added, stepping out; 'i left the lunch all laid.'" * * * * * amenda's passion for soldiers was her one tribute to sentiment. towards all others of the male sex she maintained an attitude of callous unsusceptibility, and her engagements with them (which were numerous) were entered into or abandoned on grounds so sordid as to seriously shock ethelbertha. when she came to us she was engaged to a pork butcher--with a milkman in reserve. for amenda's sake we dealt with the man, but we never liked him, and we liked his pork still less. when, therefore, amenda announced to us that her engagement with him was "off," and intimated that her feelings would in no way suffer by our going elsewhere for our bacon, we secretly rejoiced. "i am confident you have done right, amenda," said ethelbertha; "you would never have been happy with that man." "no, mum, i don't think i ever should," replied amenda. "i don't see how any girl could as hadn't the digestion of an ostrich." ethelbertha looked puzzled. "but what has digestion got to do with it?" she asked. "a pretty good deal, mum," answered amenda, "when you're thinking of marrying a man as can't make a sausage fit to eat." "but, surely," exclaimed ethelbertha, "you don't mean to say you're breaking off the match because you don't like his sausages!" "well, i suppose that's what it comes to," agreed amenda, unconcernedly. "what an awful idea!" sighed poor ethelbertha, after a long pause. "do you think you ever really loved him?" "oh yes," said amenda, "i loved him right enough, but it's no good loving a man that wants you to live on sausages that keep you awake all night." "but does he want you to live on sausages?" persisted ethelbertha. "oh, he doesn't say anything about it," explained amenda; "but you know what it is, mum, when you marry a pork butcher; you're expected to eat what's left over. that's the mistake my poor cousin eliza made. she married a muffin man. of course, what he didn't sell they had to finish up themselves. why, one winter, when he had a run of bad luck, they lived for two months on nothing but muffins. i never saw a girl so changed in all my life. one has to think of these things, you know." but the most shamefully mercenary engagement that i think amenda ever entered into, was one with a 'bus conductor. we were living in the north of london then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop in lupus street, chelsea. he could not come up to her because of the shop, so once a week she used to go down to him. one did not ride ten miles for a penny in those days, and she found the fare from holloway to victoria and back a severe tax upon her purse. the same 'bus that took her down at six brought her back at ten. during the first journey the 'bus conductor stared at amenda; during the second he talked to her, during the third he gave her a cocoanut, during the fourth he proposed to her, and was promptly accepted. after that, amenda was enabled to visit her cheesemonger without expense. he was a quaint character himself, this 'bus conductor. i often rode with him to fleet street. he knew me quite well (i suppose amenda must have pointed me out to him), and would always ask me after her--aloud, before all the other passengers, which was trying--and give me messages to take back to her. where women were concerned he had what is called "a way" with him, and from the extent and variety of his female acquaintance, and the evident tenderness with which the majority of them regarded him, i am inclined to hope that amenda's desertion of him (which happened contemporaneously with her jilting of the cheesemonger) caused him less prolonged suffering than might otherwise have been the case. he was a man from whom i derived a good deal of amusement one way and another. thinking of him brings back to my mind a somewhat odd incident. one afternoon, i jumped upon his 'bus in the seven sisters road. an elderly frenchman was the only other occupant of the vehicle. "you vil not forget me," the frenchman was saying as i entered, "i desire sharing cross." "i won't forget yer," answered the conductor, "you shall 'ave yer sharing cross. don't make a fuss about it." "that's the third time 'ee's arst me not to forget 'im," he remarked to me in a stentorian aside; "'ee don't giv' yer much chance of doin' it, does 'ee?" at the corner of the holloway road we drew up, and our conductor began to shout after the manner of his species: "charing cross--charing cross--'ere yer are--come along, lady--charing cross." the little frenchman jumped up, and prepared to exit; the conductor pushed him back. "sit down and don't be silly," he said; "this ain't charing cross." the frenchman looked puzzled, but collapsed meekly. we picked up a few passengers, and proceeded on our way. half a mile up the liverpool road a lady stood on the kerb regarding us as we passed with that pathetic mingling of desire and distrust which is the average woman's attitude towards conveyances of all kinds. our conductor stopped. "where d'yer want to go to?" he asked her severely--"strand--charing cross?" the frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of the speech, but he caught the words "charing cross," and bounced up and out on to the step. the conductor collared him as he was getting off, and jerked him back savagely. "carn't yer keep still a minute," he cried indignantly; "blessed if you don't want lookin' after like a bloomin' kid." "i vont to be put down at sharing cross," answered the frenchman, humbly. "you vont to be put down at sharing cross," repeated the other bitterly, as he led him back to his seat. "i shall put yer down in the middle of the road if i 'ave much more of yer. you stop there till i come and sling yer out. i ain't likely to let yer go much past yer sharing cross, i shall be too jolly glad to get rid o' yer." the poor frenchman subsided, and we jolted on. at "the angel" we, of course, stopped. "charing cross," shouted the conductor, and up sprang the frenchman. "oh, my gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am i to do? carn't somebody sit on 'im?" he held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released him. at the top of chancery lane the same scene took place, and the poor little frenchman became exasperated. "he keep saying sharing cross, sharing cross," he exclaimed, turning to the other passengers; "and it is _no_ sharing cross. he is fool." "carn't yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant; "of course i say sharing cross--i mean charing cross, but that don't mean that it _is_ charing cross. that means--" and then perceiving from the blank look on the frenchman's face the utter impossibility of ever making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing gesture, and asked: "does any gentleman know the french for 'bloomin' idiot'?" a day or two afterwards, i happened to enter his omnibus again. "well," i asked him, "did you get your french friend to charing cross all right?" "no, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but i 'ad a bit of a row with a policeman just before i got to the corner, and it put 'im clean out o' my 'ead. blessed if i didn't run 'im on to victoria." chapter xi said brown one evening, "there is but one vice, and that is selfishness." jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe. he puffed the tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then said: "and the seed of all virtue also." "sit down and get on with your work," said macshaughnassy from the sofa where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; "we're discussing the novel. paradoxes not admitted during business hours." jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood. "selfishness," he continued, "is merely another name for will. every deed, good or bad, that we do is prompted by selfishness. we are charitable to secure ourselves a good place in the next world, to make ourselves respected in this, to ease our own distress at the knowledge of suffering. one man is kind because it gives him pleasure to be kind, just as another is cruel because cruelty pleases him. a great man does his duty because to him the sense of duty done is a deeper delight than would be the case resulting from avoidance of duty. the religious man is religious because he finds a joy in religion; the moral man moral because with his strong self-respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness. self- sacrifice itself is only a subtle selfishness: we prefer the mental exaltation gained thereby to the sensual gratification which is the alternative reward. man cannot be anything else but selfish. selfishness is the law of all life. each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to its strength; and brooding over all, the eternal, working for _himself_: that is the universe." "have some whisky," said macshaughnassy; "and don't be so complicatedly metaphysical. you make my head ache." "if all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness," replied brown, "then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness: and your bad selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any adjective, so we are back where we started. i say selfishness--bad selfishness--is the root of all evil, and there you are bound to agree with me." "not always," persisted jephson; "i've known selfishness--selfishness according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the term--to be productive of good actions. i can give you an instance, if you like." "has it got a moral?" asked macshaughnassy, drowsily, jephson mused a moment. "yes," he said at length; "a very practical moral--and one very useful to young men." "that's the sort of story we want," said the macshaughnassy, raising himself into a sitting position. "you listen to this, brown." jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite attitude, with his elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for a while in silence. "there are three people in this story," he began; "the wife, the wife's husband, and the other man. in most dramas of this type, it is the wife who is the chief character. in this case, the interesting person is the other man. "the wife--i met her once: she was the most beautiful woman i have ever seen, and the most wicked-looking; which is saying a good deal for both statements. i remember, during a walking tour one year, coming across a lovely little cottage. it was the sweetest place imaginable. i need not describe it. it was the cottage one sees in pictures, and reads of in sentimental poetry. i was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge, drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny casements i saw, looking out at me, a face. it stayed there only a moment, but in that moment the cottage had become ugly, and i hurried away with a shudder. "that woman's face reminded me of the incident. it was an angel's face, until the woman herself looked out of it: then you were struck by the strange incongruity between tenement and tenant. "that at one time she had loved her husband, i have little doubt. vicious women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them. she had probably married him, borne towards him by one of those waves of passion upon which the souls of animal natures are continually rising and falling. on possession, however, had quickly followed satiety, and from satiety had grown the desire for a new sensation. "they were living at cairo at the period; her husband held an important official position there, and by virtue of this, and of her own beauty and tact, her house soon became the centre of the anglo-saxon society ever drifting in and out of the city. the women disliked her, and copied her. the men spoke slightingly of her to their wives, lightly of her to each other, and made idiots of themselves when they were alone with her. she laughed at them to their faces, and mimicked them behind their backs. their friends said it was clever. "one year there arrived a young english engineer, who had come out to superintend some canal works. he brought with him satisfactory letters of recommendation, and was at once received by the european residents as a welcome addition to their social circle. he was not particularly good- looking, he was not remarkably charming, but he possessed the one thing that few women can resist in a man, and that is strength. the woman looked at the man, and the man looked back at the woman; and the drama began. "scandal flies swiftly through small communities. before a month, their relationship was the chief topic of conversation throughout the quarter. in less than two, it reached the ears of the woman's husband. "he was either an exceptionally mean or an exceptionally noble character, according to how one views the matter. he worshipped his wife--as men with big hearts and weak brains often do worship such women--with dog- like devotion. his only dread was lest the scandal should reach proportions that would compel him to take notice of it, and thus bring shame and suffering upon the woman to whom he would have given his life. that a man who saw her should love her seemed natural to him; that she should have grown tired of himself, a thing not to be wondered at. he was grateful to her for having once loved him, for a little while. "as for 'the other man,' he proved somewhat of an enigma to the gossips. he attempted no secrecy; if anything, he rather paraded his subjugation--or his conquest, it was difficult to decide which term to apply. he rode and drove with her; visited her in public and in private (in such privacy as can be hoped for in a house filled with chattering servants, and watched by spying eyes); loaded her with expensive presents, which she wore openly, and papered his smoking-den with her photographs. yet he never allowed himself to appear in the least degree ridiculous; never allowed her to come between him and his work. a letter from her, he would lay aside unopened until he had finished what he evidently regarded as more important business. when boudoir and engine- shed became rivals, it was the boudoir that had to wait. "the woman chafed under his self-control, which stung her like a lash, but clung to him the more abjectly. "'tell me you love me!' she would cry fiercely, stretching her white arms towards him. "'i have told you so,' he would reply calmly, without moving. "'i want to hear you tell it me again,' she would plead with a voice that trembled on a sob. 'come close to me and tell it me again, again, again!' "then, as she lay with half-closed eyes, he would pour forth a flood of passionate words sufficient to satisfy even her thirsty ears, and afterwards, as the gates clanged behind him, would take up an engineering problem at the exact point at which half an hour before, on her entrance into the room, he had temporarily dismissed it. "one day, a privileged friend put bluntly to him this question: 'are you playing for love or vanity?' "to which the man, after long pondering, gave this reply: ''pon my soul, jack, i couldn't tell you.' "now, when a man is in love with a woman who cannot make up her mind whether she loves him or not, we call the complication comedy; where it is the woman who is in earnest the result is generally tragedy. "they continued to meet and to make love. they talked--as people in their position are prone to talk--of the beautiful life they would lead if it only were not for the thing that was; of the earthly paradise--or, maybe, 'earthy' would be the more suitable adjective--they would each create for the other, if only they had the right which they hadn't. "in this work of imagination the man trusted chiefly to his literary faculties, which were considerable; the woman to her desires. thus, his scenes possessed a grace and finish which hers lacked, but her pictures were the more vivid. indeed, so realistic did she paint them, that to herself they seemed realities, waiting for her. then she would rise to go towards them only to strike herself against the thought of the thing that stood between her and them. at first she only hated the thing, but after a while there came an ugly look of hope into her eyes. "the time drew near for the man to return to england. the canal was completed, and a day appointed for the letting in of the water. the man determined to make the event the occasion of a social gathering. he invited a large number of guests, among whom were the woman and her husband, to assist at the function. afterwards the party were to picnic at a pleasant wooded spot some three-quarters of a mile from the first lock. "the ceremony of flooding was to be performed by the woman, her husband's position entitling her to this distinction. between the river and the head of the cutting had been left a strong bank of earth, pierced some distance down by a hole, which hole was kept closed by means of a closely- fitting steel plate. the woman drew the lever releasing this plate, and the water rushed through and began to press against the lock gates. when it had attained a certain depth, the sluices were raised, and the water poured down into the deep basin of the lock. "it was an exceptionally deep lock. the party gathered round and watched the water slowly rising. the woman looked down, and shuddered; the man was standing by her side. "'how deep it is,' she said. "'yes,' he replied, 'it holds thirty feet of water, when full.' "the water crept up inch by inch. "'why don't you open the gates, and let it in quickly?' she asked. "'it would not do for it to come in too quickly,' he explained; 'we shall half fill this lock, and then open the sluices at the other end, and so let the water pass through.' "the woman looked at the smooth stone walls and at the iron-plated gates. "'i wonder what a man would do,' she said, 'if he fell in, and there was no one near to help him?' "the man laughed. 'i think he would stop there,' he answered. 'come, the others are waiting for us.' "he lingered a moment to give some final instructions to the workmen. 'you can follow on when you've made all right,' he said, 'and get something to eat. there's no need for more than one to stop.' then they joined the rest of the party, and sauntered on, laughing and talking, to the picnic ground. "after lunch the party broke up, as is the custom of picnic parties, and wandered away in groups and pairs. the man, whose duty as host had hitherto occupied all his attention, looked for the woman, but she was gone. "a friend strolled by, the same that had put the question to him about love and vanity. "'have you quarrelled?' asked the friend. "'no,' replied the man. "'i fancied you had,' said the other. 'i met her just now walking with her husband, of all men in the world, and making herself quite agreeable to him.' "the friend strolled on, and the man sat down on a fallen tree, and lighted a cigar. he smoked and thought, and the cigar burnt out, but he still sat thinking. "after a while he heard a faint rustling of the branches behind him, and peering between the interlacing leaves that hid him, saw the crouching figure of the woman creeping through the wood. "his lips were parted to call her name, when she turned her listening head in his direction, and his eyes fell full upon her face. something about it, he could not have told what, struck him dumb, and the woman crept on. "gradually the nebulous thoughts floating through his brain began to solidify into a tangible idea, and the man unconsciously started forward. after walking a few steps he broke into a run, for the idea had grown clearer. it continued to grow still clearer and clearer, and the man ran faster and faster, until at last he found himself racing madly towards the lock. as he approached it he looked round for the watchman who ought to have been there, but the man was gone from his post. he shouted, but if any answer was returned, it was drowned by the roar of the rushing water. "he reached the edge and looked down. fifteen feet below him was the reality of the dim vision that had come to him a mile back in the woods: the woman's husband swimming round and round like a rat in a pail. "the river was flowing in and out of the lock at the same rate, so that the level of the water remained constant. the first thing the man did was to close the lower sluices and then open those in the upper gate to their fullest extent. the water began to rise. "'can you hold out?' he cried. "the drowning man turned to him a face already contorted by the agony of exhaustion, and answered with a feeble 'no.' "he looked around for something to throw to the man. a plank had lain there in the morning, he remembered stumbling over it, and complaining of its having been left there; he cursed himself now for his care. "a hut used by the navvies to keep their tools in stood about two hundred yards away; perhaps it had been taken there, perhaps there he might even find a rope. "'just one minute, old fellow!' he shouted down, 'and i'll be back.' "but the other did not hear him. the feeble struggles ceased. the face fell back upon the water, the eyes half closed as if with weary indifference. there was no time for him to do more than kick off his riding boots and jump in and clutch the unconscious figure as it sank. "down there, in that walled-in trap, he fought a long fight with death for the life that stood between him and the woman. he was not an expert swimmer, his clothes hampered him, he was already blown with his long race, the burden in his arms dragged him down, the water rose slowly enough to make his torture fit for dante's hell. "at first he could not understand why this was so, but in glancing down he saw to his horror that he had not properly closed the lower sluices; in each some eight or ten inches remained open, so that the stream was passing out nearly half as fast as it came in. it would be another five- and-twenty minutes before the water would be high enough for him to grasp the top. "he noted where the line of wet had reached to, on the smooth stone wall, then looked again after what he thought must be a lapse of ten minutes, and found it had risen half an inch, if that. once or twice he shouted for help, but the effort taxed severely his already failing breath, and his voice only came back to him in a hundred echoes from his prison walls. "inch by inch the line of wet crept up, but the spending of his strength went on more swiftly. it seemed to him as if his inside were being gripped and torn slowly out: his whole body cried out to him to let it sink and lie in rest at the bottom. "at length his unconscious burden opened its eyes and stared at him stupidly, then closed them again with a sigh; a minute later opened them once more, and looked long and hard at him. "'let me go,' he said, 'we shall both drown. you can manage by yourself.' "he made a feeble effort to release himself, but the other held him. "'keep still, you fool!' he hissed; 'you're going to get out of this with me, or i'm going down with you.' "so the grim struggle went on in silence, till the man, looking up, saw the stone coping just a little way above his head, made one mad leap and caught it with his finger-tips, held on an instant, then fell back with a 'plump' and sank; came up and made another dash, and, helped by the impetus of his rise, caught the coping firmly this time with the whole of his fingers, hung on till his eyes saw the stunted grass, till they were both able to scramble out upon the bank and lie there, their breasts pressed close against the ground, their hands clutching the earth, while the overflowing water swirled softly round them. "after a while, they raised themselves and looked at one another. "'tiring work,' said the other man, with a nod towards the lock. "'yes,' answered the husband, 'beastly awkward not being a good swimmer. how did you know i had fallen in? you met my wife, i suppose?' "'yes,' said the other man. "the husband sat staring at a point in the horizon for some minutes. 'do you know what i was wondering this morning?' said he. "'no,' said the other man. "'whether i should kill you or not.' "'they told me,' he continued, after a pause, 'a lot of silly gossip which i was cad enough to believe. i know now it wasn't true, because--well, if it had been, you would not have done what you have done.' "he rose and came across. 'i beg your pardon,' he said, holding out his hand. "'i beg yours,' said the other man, rising and taking it; 'do you mind giving me a hand with the sluices?' "they set to work to put the lock right. "'how did you manage to fall in?' asked the other man, who was raising one of the lower sluices, without looking round. "the husband hesitated, as if he found the explanation somewhat difficult. 'oh,' he answered carelessly, 'the wife and i were chaffing, and she said she'd often seen you jump it, and'--he laughed a rather forced laugh--'she promised me a--a kiss if i cleared it. it was a foolish thing to do.' "'yes, it was rather,' said the other man. "a few days afterwards the man and woman met at a reception. he found her in a leafy corner of the garden talking to some friends. she advanced to meet him, holding out her hand. 'what can i say more than thank you?' she murmured in a low voice. "the others moved away, leaving them alone. 'they tell me you risked your life to save his?' she said. "'yes,' he answered. "she raised her eyes to his, then struck him across the face with her ungloved hand. "'you damned fool!' she whispered. "he seized her by her white arms, and forced her back behind the orange trees. 'do you know why?' he said, speaking slowly and distinctly; 'because i feared that, with him dead, you would want me to marry you, and that, talked about as we have been, i might find it awkward to avoid doing so; because i feared that, without him to stand between us, you might prove an annoyance to me--perhaps come between me and the woman i love, the woman i am going back to. now do you understand?' "'yes,' whispered the woman, and he left her. "but there are only two people," concluded jephson, "who do not regard his saving of the husband's life as a highly noble and unselfish action, and they are the man himself and the woman." we thanked jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the moral, when discovered. meanwhile, macshaughnassy said that he knew a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have anything to do with inventions. brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral. we agreed to hear the particulars, and judge for ourselves. "this story," commenced macshaughnassy, "comes from furtwangen, a small town in the black forest. there lived there a very wonderful old fellow named nicholaus geibel. his business was the making of mechanical toys, at which work he had acquired an almost european reputation. he made rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a cabbage, flap their ears, smooth their whiskers, and disappear again; cats that would wash their faces, and mew so naturally that dogs would mistake them for real cats, and fly at them; dolls, with phonographs concealed within them, that would raise their hats and say, 'good morning; how do you do?' and some that would even sing a song. "but he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist. his work was with him a hobby, almost a passion. his shop was filled with all manner of strange things that never would, or could, be sold--things he had made for the pure love of making them. he had contrived a mechanical donkey that would trot for two hours by means of stored electricity, and trot, too, much faster than the live article, and with less need for exertion on the part of the driver; a bird that would shoot up into the air, fly round and round in a circle, and drop to earth at the exact spot from where it started; a skeleton that, supported by an upright iron bar, would dance a hornpipe; a life-size lady doll that could play the fiddle; and a gentleman with a hollow inside who could smoke a pipe and drink more lager beer than any three average german students put together, which is saying much. "indeed, it was the belief of the town that old geibel could make a man capable of doing everything that a respectable man need want to do. one day he made a man who did too much, and it came about in this way. "young doctor follen had a baby, and the baby had a birthday. its first birthday put doctor follen's household into somewhat of a flurry, but on the occasion of its second birthday, mrs. doctor follen gave a ball in honour of the event. old geibel and his daughter olga were among the guests. "during the afternoon of the next day, some three or four of olga's bosom friends, who had also been present at the ball, dropped in to have a chat about it. they naturally fell to discussing the men, and to criticising their dancing. old geibel was in the room, but he appeared to be absorbed in his newspaper, and the girls took no notice of him. "'there seem to be fewer men who can dance, at every ball you go to,' said one of the girls. "'yes, and don't the ones who can, give themselves airs,' said another; 'they make quite a favour of asking you.' "'and how stupidly they talk,' added a third. 'they always say exactly the same things: "how charming you are looking to-night." "do you often go to vienna? oh, you should, it's delightful." "what a charming dress you have on." "what a warm day it has been." "do you like wagner?" i do wish they'd think of something new.' "'oh, i never mind how they talk,' said a fourth. 'if a man dances well he may be a fool for all i care.' "'he generally is,' slipped in a thin girl, rather spitefully. "'i go to a ball to dance,' continued the previous speaker, not noticing the interruption. 'all i ask of a partner is that he shall hold me firmly, take me round steadily, and not get tired before i do.' "'a clockwork figure would be the thing for you,' said the girl who had interrupted. "'bravo!' cried one of the others, clapping her hands, 'what a capital idea!' "'what's a capital idea?' they asked. "'why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down.' "the girls took up the idea with enthusiasm. "'oh, what a lovely partner he would make,' said one; 'he would never kick you, or tread on your toes.' "'or tear your dress,' said another. "'or get out of step.' "'or get giddy and lean on you.' "'and he would never want to mop his face with his handkerchief. i do hate to see a man do that after every dance.' "'and wouldn't want to spend the whole evening in the supper-room.' "'why, with a phonograph inside him to grind out all the stock remarks, you would not be able to tell him from a real man,' said the girl who had first suggested the idea. "'oh yes, you would,' said the thin girl, 'he would be so much nicer.' "old geibel had laid down his paper, and was listening with both his ears. on one of the girls glancing in his direction, however, he hurriedly hid himself again behind it. "after the girls were gone, he went into his workshop, where olga heard him walking up and down, and every now and then chuckling to himself; and that night he talked to her a good deal about dancing and dancing men--asked what they usually said and did--what dances were most popular--what steps were gone through, with many other questions bearing on the subject. "then for a couple of weeks he kept much to his factory, and was very thoughtful and busy, though prone at unexpected moments to break into a quiet low laugh, as if enjoying a joke that nobody else knew of. "a month later another ball took place in furtwangen. on this occasion it was given by old wenzel, the wealthy timber merchant, to celebrate his niece's betrothal, and geibel and his daughter were again among the invited. "when the hour arrived to set out, olga sought her father. not finding him in the house, she tapped at the door of his workshop. he appeared in his shirt-sleeves, looking hot, but radiant. "'don't wait for me,' he said, 'you go on, i'll follow you. i've got something to finish.' "as she turned to obey he called after her, 'tell them i'm going to bring a young man with me--such a nice young man, and an excellent dancer. all the girls will like him.' then he laughed and closed the door. "her father generally kept his doings secret from everybody, but she had a pretty shrewd suspicion of what he had been planning, and so, to a certain extent, was able to prepare the guests for what was coming. anticipation ran high, and the arrival of the famous mechanist was eagerly awaited. "at length the sound of wheels was heard outside, followed by a great commotion in the passage, and old wenzel himself, his jolly face red with excitement and suppressed laughter, burst into the room and announced in stentorian tones: "'herr geibel--and a friend.' "herr geibel and his 'friend' entered, greeted with shouts of laughter and applause, and advanced to the centre of the room. "'allow me, ladies and gentlemen,' said herr geibel, 'to introduce you to my friend, lieutenant fritz. fritz, my dear fellow, bow to the ladies and gentlemen.' "geibel placed his hand encouragingly on fritz's shoulder, and the lieutenant bowed low, accompanying the action with a harsh clicking noise in his throat, unpleasantly suggestive of a death rattle. but that was only a detail. "'he walks a little stiffly' (old geibel took his arm and walked him forward a few steps. he certainly did walk stiffly), 'but then, walking is not his forte. he is essentially a dancing man. i have only been able to teach him the waltz as yet, but at that he is faultless. come, which of you ladies may i introduce him to, as a partner? he keeps perfect time; he never gets tired; he won't kick you or tread on your dress; he will hold you as firmly as you like, and go as quickly or as slowly as you please; he never gets giddy; and he is full of conversation. come, speak up for yourself, my boy.' "the old gentleman twisted one of the buttons of his coat, and immediately fritz opened his mouth, and in thin tones that appeared to proceed from the back of his head, remarked suddenly, 'may i have the pleasure?' and then shut his mouth again with a snap. "that lieutenant fritz had made a strong impression on the company was undoubted, yet none of the girls seemed inclined to dance with him. they looked askance at his waxen face, with its staring eyes and fixed smile, and shuddered. at last old geibel came to the girl who had conceived the idea. "'it is your own suggestion, carried out to the letter,' said geibel, 'an electric dancer. you owe it to the gentleman to give him a trial.' "she was a bright saucy little girl, fond of a frolic. her host added his entreaties, and she consented. "herr geibel fixed the figure to her. its right arm was screwed round her waist, and held her firmly; its delicately jointed left hand was made to fasten itself upon her right. the old toymaker showed her how to regulate its speed, and how to stop it, and release herself. "'it will take you round in a complete circle,' he explained; 'be careful that no one knocks against you, and alters its course.' "the music struck up. old geibel put the current in motion, and annette and her strange partner began to dance. "for a while every one stood watching them. the figure performed its purpose admirably. keeping perfect time and step, and holding its little partner tightly clasped in an unyielding embrace, it revolved steadily, pouring forth at the same time a constant flow of squeaky conversation, broken by brief intervals of grinding silence. "'how charming you are looking to-night,' it remarked in its thin, far- away voice. 'what a lovely day it has been. do you like dancing? how well our steps agree. you will give me another, won't you? oh, don't be so cruel. what a charming gown you have on. isn't waltzing delightful? i could go on dancing for ever--with you. have you had supper?' "as she grew more familiar with the uncanny creature, the girl's nervousness wore off, and she entered into the fun of the thing. "'oh, he's just lovely,' she cried, laughing, 'i could go on dancing with him all my life.' "couple after couple now joined them, and soon all the dancers in the room were whirling round behind them. nicholaus geibel stood looking on, beaming with childish delight at his success, "old wenzel approached him, and whispered something in his ear. geibel laughed and nodded, and the two worked their way quietly towards the door. "'this is the young people's house to-night,' said wenzel, as soon as they were outside; 'you and i will have a quiet pipe and a glass of hock, over in the counting-house.' "meanwhile the dancing grew more fast and furious. little annette loosened the screw regulating her partner's rate of progress, and the figure flew round with her swifter and swifter. couple after couple dropped out exhausted, but they only went the faster, till at length they were the only pair left dancing. "madder and madder became the waltz. the music lagged behind: the musicians, unable to keep pace, ceased, and sat staring. the younger guests applauded, but the older faces began to grow anxious. "'hadn't you better stop, dear,' said one of the women, 'you'll make yourself so tired.' "but annette did not answer. "'i believe she's fainted,' cried out a girl, who had caught sight of her face as it was swept by. "one of the men sprang forward and clutched at the figure, but its impetus threw him down on to the floor, where its steel-cased feet laid bare his cheek. the thing evidently did not intend to part with its prize easily. "had any one retained a cool head, the figure, one cannot help thinking, might easily have been stopped. two or three men, acting in concert, might have lifted it bodily off the floor, or have jammed it into a corner. but few human heads are capable of remaining cool under excitement. those who are not present think how stupid must have been those who were; those who are, reflect afterwards how simple it would have been to do this, that, or the other, if only they had thought of it at the time. "the women grew hysterical. the men shouted contradictory directions to one another. two of them made a bungling rush at the figure, which had the result of forcing it out of its orbit in the centre of the room, and sending it crashing against the walls and furniture. a stream of blood showed itself down the girl's white frock, and followed her along the floor. the affair was becoming horrible. the women rushed screaming from the room. the men followed them. "one sensible suggestion was made: 'find geibel--fetch geibel.' "no one had noticed him leave the room, no one knew where he was. a party went in search of him. the others, too unnerved to go back into the ballroom, crowded outside the door and listened. they could hear the steady whir of the wheels upon the polished floor, as the thing spun round and round; the dull thud as every now and again it dashed itself and its burden against some opposing object and ricocheted off in a new direction. "and everlastingly it talked in that thin ghostly voice, repeating over and over the same formula: 'how charming you are looking to-night. what a lovely day it has been. oh, don't be so cruel. i could go on dancing for ever--with you. have you had supper?' "of course they sought for geibel everywhere but where he was. they looked in every room in the house, then they rushed off in a body to his own place, and spent precious minutes in waking up his deaf old housekeeper. at last it occurred to one of the party that wenzel was missing also, and then the idea of the counting-house across the yard presented itself to them, and there they found him. "he rose up, very pale, and followed them; and he and old wenzel forced their way through the crowd of guests gathered outside, and entered the room, and locked the door behind them. "from within there came the muffled sound of low voices and quick steps, followed by a confused scuffling noise, then silence, then the low voices again. "after a time the door opened, and those near it pressed forward to enter, but old wenzel's broad shoulders barred the way. "'i want you--and you, bekler,' he said, addressing a couple of the elder men. his voice was calm, but his face was deadly white. 'the rest of you, please go--get the women away as quickly as you can.' "from that day old nicholaus geibel confined himself to the making of mechanical rabbits and cats that mewed and washed their faces." we agreed that the moral of macshaughnassy's story was a good one. chapter xii how much more of our--fortunately not very valuable--time we devoted to this wonderful novel of ours, i cannot exactly say. turning the dogs'- eared leaves of the dilapidated diary that lies before me, i find the record of our later gatherings confused and incomplete. for weeks there does not appear a single word. then comes an alarmingly business-like minute of a meeting at which there were--"present: jephson, macshaughnassy, brown, and self"; and at which the "proceedings commenced at . ." at what time the "proceedings" terminated, and what business was done, the chronicle, however, sayeth not; though, faintly pencilled in the margin of the page, i trace these hieroglyphics: " . . - . . ," bringing out a result of " . . ." evidently an unremunerative night. on september th we seem to have become suddenly imbued with energy to a quite remarkable degree, for i read that we "resolved to start the first chapter at once"--"at once" being underlined. after this spurt, we rest until october th, when we "discussed whether it should be a novel of plot or of character," without--so far as the diary affords indication--arriving at any definite decision. i observe that on the same day "mac told a story about a man who accidentally bought a camel at a sale." details of the story are, however, wanting, which, perhaps, is fortunate for the reader. on the th, we were still debating the character of our hero; and i see that i suggested "a man of the charley buswell type." poor charley, i wonder what could have made me think of him in connection with heroes; his lovableness, i suppose--certainly not his heroic qualities. i can recall his boyish face now (it was always a boyish face), the tears streaming down it as he sat in the schoolyard beside a bucket, in which he was drowning three white mice and a tame rat. i sat down opposite and cried too, while helping him to hold a saucepan lid over the poor little creatures, and thus there sprang up a friendship between us, which grew. over the grave of these murdered rodents, he took a solemn oath never to break school rules again, by keeping either white mice or tame rats, but to devote the whole of his energies for the future to pleasing his masters, and affording his parents some satisfaction for the money being spent upon his education. seven weeks later, the pervadence throughout the dormitory of an atmospheric effect more curious than pleasing led to the discovery that he had converted his box into a rabbit hutch. confronted with eleven kicking witnesses, and reminded of his former promises, he explained that rabbits were not mice, and seemed to consider that a new and vexatious regulation had been sprung upon him. the rabbits were confiscated. what was their ultimate fate, we never knew with certainty, but three days later we were given rabbit-pie for dinner. to comfort him i endeavoured to assure him that these could not be his rabbits. he, however, convinced that they were, cried steadily into his plate all the time that he was eating them, and afterwards, in the playground, had a stand-up fight with a fourth form boy who had requested a second helping. that evening he performed another solemn oath-taking, and for the next month was the model boy of the school. he read tracts, sent his spare pocket-money to assist in annoying the heathen, and subscribed to _the young christian_ and _the weekly rambler_, an evangelical miscellany (whatever that may mean). an undiluted course of this pernicious literature naturally created in him a desire towards the opposite extreme. he suddenly dropped _the young christian_ and _the weekly rambler_, and purchased penny dreadfuls; and taking no further interest in the welfare of the heathen, saved up and bought a second-hand revolver and a hundred cartridges. his ambition, he confided to me, was to become "a dead shot," and the marvel of it is that he did not succeed. of course, there followed the usual discovery and consequent trouble, the usual repentance and reformation, the usual determination to start a new life. poor fellow, he lived "starting a new life." every new year's day he would start a new life--on his birthday--on other people's birthdays. i fancy that, later on, when he came to know their importance, he extended the principle to quarter days. "tidying up, and starting afresh," he always called it. i think as a young man he was better than most of us. but he lacked that great gift which is the distinguishing feature of the english-speaking race all the world over, the gift of hypocrisy. he seemed incapable of doing the slightest thing without getting found out; a grave misfortune for a man to suffer from, this. dear simple-hearted fellow, it never occurred to him that he was as other men--with, perhaps, a dash of straightforwardness added; he regarded himself as a monster of depravity. one evening i found him in his chambers engaged upon his sisyphean labour of "tidying up." a heap of letters, photographs, and bills lay before him. he was tearing them up and throwing them into the fire. i came towards him, but he stopped me. "don't come near me," he cried, "don't touch me. i'm not fit to shake hands with a decent man." it was the sort of speech to make one feel hot and uncomfortable. i did not know what to answer, and murmured something about his being no worse than the average. "don't talk like that," he answered excitedly; "you say that to comfort me, i know; but i don't like to hear it. if i thought other men were like me i should be ashamed of being a man. i've been a blackguard, old fellow, but, please god, it's not too late. to-morrow morning i begin a new life." he finished his work of destruction, and then rang the bell, and sent his man downstairs for a bottle of champagne. "my last drink," he said, as we clicked glasses. "here's to the old life out, and the new life in." he took a sip and flung the glass with the remainder into the fire. he was always a little theatrical, especially when most in earnest. for a long while after that i saw nothing of him. then, one evening, sitting down to supper at a restaurant, i noticed him opposite to me in company that could hardly be called doubtful. he flushed and came over to me. "i've been an old woman for nearly six months," he said, with a laugh. "i find i can't stand it any longer." "after all," he continued, "what is life for but to live? it's only hypocritical to try and be a thing we are not. and do you know"--he leant across the table, speaking earnestly--"honestly and seriously, i'm a better man--i feel it and know it--when i am my natural self than when i am trying to be an impossible saint." that was the mistake he made; he always ran to extremes. he thought that an oath, if it were only big enough, would frighten away human nature, instead of serving only as a challenge to it. accordingly, each reformation was more intemperate than the last, to be duly followed by a greater swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. being now in a thoroughly reckless mood, he went the pace rather hotly. then, one evening, without any previous warning, i had a note from him. "come round and see me on thursday. it is my wedding eve." i went. he was once more "tidying up." all his drawers were open, and on the table were piled packs of cards, betting books, and much written paper, all, as before, in course of demolition. i smiled: i could not help it, and, no way abashed, he laughed his usual hearty, honest laugh. "i know," he exclaimed gaily, "but this is not the same as the others." then, laying his hand on my shoulder, and speaking with the sudden seriousness that comes so readily to shallow natures, he said, "god has heard my prayer, old friend. he knows i am weak. he has sent down an angel out of heaven to help me." he took her portrait from the mantelpiece and handed it me. it seemed to me the face of a hard, narrow woman, but, of course, he raved about her. as he talked, there fluttered to the ground from the heap before him an old restaurant bill, and, stooping, he picked it up and held it in his hand, musing. "have you ever noticed how the scent of the champagne and the candles seems to cling to these things?" he said lightly, sniffing carelessly at it. "i wonder what's become of her?" "i think i wouldn't think about her at all to-night," i answered. he loosened his hand, letting the paper fall into the fire. "my god!" he cried vehemently, "when i think of all the wrong i have done--the irreparable, ever-widening ruin i have perhaps brought into the world--o god! spare me a long life that i may make amends. every hour, every minute of it shall be devoted to your service." as he stood there, with his eager boyish eyes upraised, a light seemed to fall upon his face and illumine it. i had pushed the photograph back to him, and it lay upon the table before him. he knelt and pressed his lips to it. "with your help, my darling, and his," he murmured. the next morning he was married. she was a well-meaning girl, though her piety, as is the case with most people, was of the negative order; and her antipathy to things evil much stronger than her sympathy with things good. for a longer time than i had expected she kept him straight--perhaps a little too straight. but at last there came the inevitable relapse. i called upon him, in answer to an excited message, and found him in the depths of despair. it was the old story, human weakness, combined with lamentable lack of the most ordinary precautions against being found out. he gave me details, interspersed with exuberant denunciations of himself, and i undertook the delicate task of peace-maker. it was a weary work, but eventually she consented to forgive him. his joy, when i told him, was boundless. "how good women are," he said, while the tears came into his eyes. "but she shall not repent it. please god, from this day forth, i'll--" he stopped, and for the first time in his life the doubt of himself crossed his mind. as i sat watching him, the joy died out of his face, and the first hint of age passed over it. "i seem to have been 'tidying up and starting afresh' all my life," he said wearily; "i'm beginning to see where the untidiness lies, and the only way to get rid of it." i did not understand the meaning of his words at the time, but learnt it later on. he strove, according to his strength, and fell. but by a miracle his transgression was not discovered. the facts came to light long afterwards, but at the time there were only two who knew. it was his last failure. late one evening i received a hurriedly-scrawled note from his wife, begging me to come round. "a terrible thing has happened," it ran; "charley went up to his study after dinner, saying he had some 'tidying up,' as he calls it, to do, and did not wish to be disturbed. in clearing out his desk he must have handled carelessly the revolver that he always keeps there, not remembering, i suppose, that it was loaded. we heard a report, and on rushing into the room found him lying dead on the floor. the bullet had passed right through his heart." hardly the type of man for a hero! and yet i do not know. perhaps he fought harder than many a man who conquers. in the world's courts, we are compelled to judge on circumstantial evidence only, and the chief witness, the man's soul, cannot very well be called. i remember the subject of bravery being discussed one evening at a dinner party, when a german gentleman present related an anecdote, the hero of which was a young prussian officer. "i cannot give you his name," our german friend explained--"the man himself told me the story in confidence; and though he personally, by virtue of his after record, could afford to have it known, there are other reasons why it should not be bruited about. "how i learnt it was in this way. for a dashing exploit performed during the brief war against austria he had been presented with the iron cross. this, as you are well aware, is the most highly-prized decoration in our army; men who have earned it are usually conceited about it, and, indeed, have some excuse for being so. he, on the contrary, kept his locked in a drawer of his desk, and never wore it except when compelled by official etiquette. the mere sight of it seemed to be painful to him. one day i asked him the reason. we are very old and close friends, and he told me. "the incident occurred when he was a young lieutenant. indeed, it was his first engagement. by some means or another he had become separated from his company, and, unable to regain it, had attached himself to a line regiment stationed at the extreme right of the prussian lines. "the enemy's effort was mainly directed against the left centre, and for a while our young lieutenant was nothing more than a distant spectator of the battle. suddenly, however, the attack shifted, and the regiment found itself occupying an extremely important and critical position. the shells began to fall unpleasantly near, and the order was given to 'grass.' "the men fell upon their faces and waited. the shells ploughed the ground around them, smothering them with dirt. a horrible, griping pain started in my young friend's stomach, and began creeping upwards. his head and heart both seemed to be shrinking and growing cold. a shot tore off the head of the man next to him, sending the blood spurting into his face; a minute later another ripped open the back of a poor fellow lying to the front of him. "his body seemed not to belong to himself at all. a strange, shrivelled creature had taken possession of it. he raised his head and peered about him. he and three soldiers--youngsters, like himself, who had never before been under fire--appeared to be utterly alone in that hell. they were the end men of the regiment, and the configuration of the ground completely hid them from their comrades. "they glanced at each other, these four, and read one another's thoughts. leaving their rifles lying on the grass, they commenced to crawl stealthily upon their bellies, the lieutenant leading, the other three following. "some few hundred yards in front of them rose a small, steep hill. if they could reach this it would shut them out of sight. they hastened on, pausing every thirty yards or so to lie still and pant for breath, then hurrying on again, quicker than before, tearing their flesh against the broken ground. "at last they reached the base of the slope, and slinking a little way round it, raised their heads and looked back. where they were it was impossible for them to be seen from the prussian lines. "they sprang to their feet and broke into a wild race. a dozen steps further they came face to face with an austrian field battery. "the demon that had taken possession of them had been growing stronger the further they had fled. they were not men, they were animals mad with fear. driven by the same frenzy that prompted other panic-stricken creatures to once rush down a steep place into the sea, these four men, with a yell, flung themselves, sword in hand, upon the whole battery; and the whole battery, bewildered by the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack, thinking the entire battalion was upon them, gave way, and rushed pell-mell down the hill. "with the sight of those flying austrians the fear, as independently as it had come to him, left him, and he felt only a desire to hack and kill. the four prussians flew after them, cutting and stabbing at them as they ran; and when the prussian cavalry came thundering up, they found my young lieutenant and his three friends had captured two guns and accounted for half a score of the enemy. "next day, he was summoned to headquarters. "'will you be good enough to remember for the future, sir,' said the chief of the staff, 'that his majesty does not require his lieutenants to execute manoeuvres on their own responsibility, and also that to attack a battery with three men is not war, but damned tomfoolery. you ought to be court-martialled, sir!' "then, in somewhat different tones, the old soldier added, his face softening into a smile: 'however, alertness and daring, my young friend, are good qualities, especially when crowned with success. if the austrians had once succeeded in planting a battery on that hill it might have been difficult to dislodge them. perhaps, under the circumstances, his majesty may overlook your indiscretion.' "'his majesty not only overlooked it, but bestowed upon me the iron cross,' concluded my friend. 'for the credit of the army, i judged it better to keep quiet and take it. but, as you can understand, the sight of it does not recall very pleasurable reflections.'" * * * * * to return to my diary, i see that on november th we held another meeting. but at this there were present only "jephson, macshaughnassy, and self"; and of brown's name i find henceforth no further trace. on christmas eve we three met again, and my notes inform me that macshaughnassy brewed some whiskey-punch, according to a recipe of his own, a record suggestive of a sad christmas for all three of us. no particular business appears to have been accomplished on either occasion. then there is a break until february th, and the assemblage has shrunk to "jephson and self." with a final flicker, as of a dying candle, my diary at this point, however, grows luminous, shedding much light upon that evening's conversation. our talk seems to have been of many things--of most things, in fact, except our novel. among other subjects we spoke of literature generally. "i am tired of this eternal cackle about books," said jephson; "these columns of criticism to every line of writing; these endless books about books; these shrill praises and shrill denunciations; this silly worship of novelist tom; this silly hate of poet dick; this silly squabbling over playwright harry. there is no soberness, no sense in it all. one would think, to listen to the high priests of culture, that man was made for literature, not literature for man. thought existed before the printing press; and the men who wrote the best hundred books never read them. books have their place in the world, but they are not its purpose. they are things side by side with beef and mutton, the scent of the sea, the touch of a hand, the memory of a hope, and all the other items in the sum- total of our three-score years and ten. yet we speak of them as though they were the voice of life instead of merely its faint echo. tales are delightful _as_ tales--sweet as primroses after the long winter, restful as the cawing of rooks at sunset. but we do not write 'tales' now; we prepare 'human documents' and dissect souls." he broke off abruptly in the midst of his tirade. "do you know what these 'psychological studies,' that are so fashionable just now, always make me think of?" he said. "one monkey examining another monkey for fleas. "and what, after all, does our dissecting pen lay bare?" he continued. "human nature? or merely some more or less unsavoury undergarment, disguising and disfiguring human nature? there is a story told of an elderly tramp, who, overtaken by misfortune, was compelled to retire for a while to the seclusion of portland. his hosts, desiring to see as much as possible of their guest during his limited stay with them, proceeded to bath him. they bathed him twice a day for a week, each time learning more of him; until at last they reached a flannel shirt. and with that they had to be content, soap and water proving powerless to go further. "that tramp appears to me symbolical of mankind. human nature has worn its conventions for so long that its habit has grown on to it. in this nineteenth century it is impossible to say where the clothes of custom end and the natural man begins. our virtues are taught to us as a branch of 'deportment'; our vices are the recognised vices of our reign and set. our religion hangs ready-made beside our cradle to be buttoned upon us by loving hands. our tastes we acquire, with difficulty; our sentiments we learn by rote. at cost of infinite suffering, we study to love whiskey and cigars, high art and classical music. in one age we admire byron and drink sweet champagne: twenty years later it is more fashionable to prefer shelley, and we like our champagne dry. at school we are told that shakespeare is a great poet, and that the venus di medici is a fine piece of sculpture; and so for the rest of our lives we go about saying what a great poet we think shakespeare, and that there is no piece of sculpture, in our opinion, so fine as the venus di medici. if we are frenchmen we adore our mother; if englishmen we love dogs and virtue. we grieve for the death of a near relative twelve months; but for a second cousin we sorrow only three. the good man has his regulation excellencies to strive after, his regulation sins to repent of. i knew a good man who was quite troubled because he was not proud, and could not, therefore, with any reasonableness, pray for humility. in society one must needs be cynical and mildly wicked: in bohemia, orthodoxly unorthodox. i remember my mother expostulating with a friend, an actress, who had left a devoted husband and eloped with a disagreeable, ugly, little low comedian (i am speaking of long, long ago). "'you must be mad,' said my mother; 'what on earth induced you to take such a step?' "'my dear emma,' replied the lady; 'what else was there for me? you know i can't act. i had to do _something_ to show i was 'an artiste!' "we are dressed-up marionettes. our voice is the voice of the unseen showman, convention; our very movements of passion and pain are but in answer to his jerk. a man resembles one of those gigantic bundles that one sees in nursemaids' arms. it is very bulky and very long; it looks a mass of delicate lace and rich fur and fine woven stuffs; and somewhere, hidden out of sight among the finery, there is a tiny red bit of bewildered humanity, with no voice but a foolish cry. "there is but one story," he went on, after a long pause, uttering his own thoughts aloud rather than speaking to me. "we sit at our desks and think and think, and write and write, but the story is ever the same. men told it and men listened to it many years ago; we are telling it to one another to-day; we shall be telling it to one another a thousand years hence; and the story is: 'once upon a time there lived a man, and a woman who loved him.' the little critic cries that it is not new, and asks for something fresh, thinking--as children do--that there are strange things in the world." * * * * * at that point my notes end, and there is nothing in the book beyond. whether any of us thought any more of the novel, whether we ever met again to discuss it, whether it were ever begun, whether it were ever abandoned--i cannot say. there is a fairy story that i read many, many years ago that has never ceased to haunt me. it told how a little boy once climbed a rainbow. and at the end of the rainbow, just behind the clouds, he found a wondrous city. its houses were of gold, and its streets were paved with silver, and the light that shone upon it was as the light that lies upon the sleeping world at dawn. in this city there were palaces so beautiful that merely to look upon them satisfied all desires; temples so perfect that they who once knelt therein were cleansed of sin. and all the men who dwelt in this wondrous city were great and good, and the women fairer than the women of a young man's dreams. and the name of the city was, "the city of the things men meant to do." [illustration: plate i from "sylva sylvarum," ] bacon is shake-speare by sir edwin durning-lawrence, bt. "every hollow idol is dethroned by skill, insinuation and regular approach." together with a reprint of bacon's promus of formularies and elegancies. collated, with the original ms. by the late f.b. bickley, and revised by f.a. herbert, of the british museum. mcmx to the reader the plays known as shakespeare's are at the present time universally acknowledged to be the "greatest birth of time," the grandest production of the human mind. their author also is generally recognised as the greatest genius of all the ages. the more the marvellous plays are studied, the more wonderful they are seen to be. classical scholars are amazed at the prodigious amount of knowledge of classical lore which they display. lawyers declare that their author must take rank among the greatest of lawyers, and must have been learned not only in the theory of law, but also intimately acquainted with its forensic practice. in like manner, travellers feel certain that the author must have visited the foreign cities and countries which he so minutely and graphically describes. it is true that at a dark period for english literature certain critics denied the possibility of bohemia being accurately described as by the sea, and pointed out the "manifest absurdity" of speaking of the "port" at milan; but a wider knowledge of the actual facts has vindicated the author at the expense of his unfortunate critics. it is the same with respect to other matters referred to in the plays. the expert possessing special knowledge of any subject invariably discovers that the plays shew that their author was well acquainted with almost all that was known at the time about that particular subject. and the knowledge is so extensive and so varied that it is not too much to say that there is not a single living man capable of perceiving half of the learning involved in the production of the plays. one of the greatest students of law publicly declared, while he was editor of the _law times_, that although he thought that he knew something of law, yet he was not ashamed to confess that he had not sufficient legal knowledge or mental capacity to enable him to fully comprehend a quarter of the law contained in the plays. of course, men of small learning, who know very little of classics and still less of law, do not experience any of these difficulties, because they are not able to perceive how great is the vast store of learning exhibited in the plays. there is also shewn in the plays the most perfect knowledge of court etiquette, and of the manners and the methods of the greatest in the land, a knowledge which none but a courtier moving in the highest circles could by any possibility have acquired. in his diary, wolfe tone records that the french soldiers who invaded ireland behaved exactly like the french soldiers are described as conducting themselves at agincourt in the play of "henry v," and he exclaims, "it is marvellous!" (wolfe tone also adds that shakespeare could never have seen a french soldier, but we know that bacon while in paris had had considerable experience of them.) the mighty author of the immortal plays was gifted with the most brilliant genius ever conferred upon man. he possessed an intimate and accurate acquaintance, which could not have been artificially acquired, with all the intricacies and mysteries of court life. he had by study obtained nearly all the learning that could be gained from books. and he had by travel and experience acquired a knowledge of cities and of men that has never been surpassed. who was in existence at that period who could by any possibility be supposed to be this universal genius? in the days of queen elizabeth, for the first time in human history, one such man appeared, the man who is described as the marvel and mystery of the age, and this was the man known to us under the name of francis bacon. in answer to the demand for a "mechanical proof that bacon is shakespeare" i have added a chapter shewing the meaning of "honorificabilitudinitatibus," and i have in chapter xiv. shewn how completely the documents recently discovered by dr. wallace confirm the statements which i had made in the previous chapters. i have also annexed a reprint of bacon's "promus," which has recently been collated with the original manuscript. "promus" signifies storehouse, and the collection of "fourmes and elegancyes" stored therein was largely used by bacon in the shakespeare plays, in his own acknowledged works, and also in some other works for which he was mainly responsible. i trust that students will derive considerable pleasure and profit from examining the "promus" and from comparing the words and phrases, as they are there preserved, with the very greatly extended form in which many of them finally appeared. edwin durning-lawrence. contents i. preliminary ii. the shackspere monument, bust, and portrait iii. the [so-called] "signatures" iv. contemporary allusions to shackspere in "every man out of his humour"; and "as you like it" v. further contemporary allusions in "the return from parnassus"; and "ratsei's ghost" vi. shackspere's correspondence vii. bacon acknowledged to be a poet viii. the author revealed in the sonnets ix. mr. sidney lee, and the stratford bust x. the meaning of the word "honorificabilitudinitatibus" xi. on page of the shakespeare folio of , being a portion of the play "loves labour's lost," and its connection with gustavi seleni "cryptomenytices" xii. the "householder of stratford" xiii. conclusion, with further evidences from title pages xiv. postscriptum xv. appendix addenda et corrigenda introduction to bacon's "promus" reprint of bacon's "promus" list of illustrations plate. i. _frontispiece_. portrait of francis bacon, from his "sylva sylvarum," . ii. portrait of francis bacon, by van somer. engraved by w.c. edwards. iii. the original "shakespeare" monument in stratford parish church, a facsimile from dugdale's "history of warwickshire," published in . iv. the shakespeare monument as it appears at the present time. v. the original bust, enlarged from plate iii. vi. the present bust, enlarged from plate iv. vii. reduced facsimile of the title page of the first folio edition of "mr. william shakespeare's" plays, published in . viii. facsimile, full size, of the original portrait [so-called] of "shakespeare" from the folio. ix. verses ascribed to ben jonson, facing the title page which is shewn in plate vii. x. the back of the left arm, which does duty for the right arm of the figure, shewn on plates vii. and viii. xi. the front of the left arm of the figure, shewn on plates vii. and viii. xii. the [mask] head from the [so-called] portrait by droeshout in the folio. xiii. portrait of sir nicholas bacon. by zucchero. xiv. the five [so-called] "shakespeare" signatures. [the sixth is shewn in plate xxxviii., page ]. xv. francis bacon's crest, from the binding of a presentation copy of his "novum organum," published in . xvi. facsimile of the title page of "the great assises holden in parnassus." xvii.-xviii. facsimiles of pages iii. and iv. of the same. xix. the original "shakespeare" monument in stratford parish church, a facsimile from rowe's "life and works of shakespeare," vol. i, . xx. reduced facsimile of page of the first folio edition of the plays, . xxi. full size facsimile of a portion of the same page of the first folio edition of the plays, . xxii. full size facsimile of page f of "loves labor's lost," first quarto edition, published in . xxiii. facsimile of a portion of a contemporary copy of a letter by francis bacon, dated . xxiv. facsimiles from page of gustavi seleni "cryptomenytices et cryptographiae," published in . xxv. facsimile from page o b of "traicte des chiffres ou secretes manieres d'escrire," par blaise de vigenere, published in . xxvi. ornamental heading, from william camden's "remains," published in . xxvii. reduced facsimile of the title page of gustavi seleni "cryptomenytices et cryptographiae," published in . xxviii.-xxxi various portions of plate xxvii. enlarged. xxxii. scene from "the merry wives of windsor," from a painting by thomas stothard. xxxiii. facsimile of the title page of bacon's "de augmentis scientiarum," published in . xxxiv. facsimile of the title page of "new atlantis, begun by lord verulam and continued by r.h., esquire," published in . xxxv. facsimile of the title page of bacon's "historia regni henrici septem," published in . xxxvi. nemesis, from alciati's "emblems," published in . xxxvii. nemesis, from baudoin's "emblems," published in . xxxviii.-ix. portion of the mss. mentioning shakespeare, discovered by dr. wallace. xl. facsimiles of three examples of law clerks' writing of the name "shakespeare." xli. facsimile of the dedication of "the attourney's academy." . xlii. facsimile of portion of folio of the original ms. of bacon's "promus." xliii. portrait of francis bacon, from painting by van somer, formerly in the collection of the duke of fife. the ornamental headings of the various chapters are mostly variations of the "double a" ornament found in certain shakespeare quarto plays, and in various other books published circa - . a few references will be found below:-- _title page_, and _to the reader_. shakespeare's works. . _contents_. page ix. north's "lives." . spenser's "faerie queene." , . works of king james. . purchas' "pilgrimages." . bacon's "novum organum." . seneca's works. . speed's "great britaine." . bacon's "operum moralium." . page . heading of chapter i. "contention of yorke and lancaster," part i. . "romeo and juliet." . "henry v." , . "sir john falstaffe." . "richard iii." . "regimen sanitatis salerni." . page . heading of chapter ii. hardy's "le theatre," vol. . . barclay's "argenis." vols. - . aleman's "le gueux." . page . heading of chapter iii. mayer's "praxis theologica." . ben jonson's works, vol. . . page . heading of chapter iv. "the shepheard's calendar." . "the rogue." . barclay's "argenis." . bacon's "remaines." . "the mirrour of state." . page . heading to chapter v. preston's "breast-plate of faith." . page . heading to chapter vi. "venus and adonis." . "unnatural conspiracie of scottish papists." . "nosce te ipsum." . the ornament reversed is found in: spenser's "faerie queene." . "historie of tamerlane." . barckley's "felicitie of man." . page . heading to chapter vii. james i. "essayes of a prentise in the art of poesie." , . de loque's "single combat." . "taming of a shrew." hartwell's "warres." . heywood's works. . hayward's "of the union." . page _(continued)_. cervantes' "don quixote." . peacham's "compleat gentleman." . page . heading of chapter viii. "richard ii." . "richard iii." . "henrie iv." . "hamlet." . shakespeare's "sonnets." . matheieu's "henry iv." [of france.] . page . heading of chapter ix. hardy's "le theatre." . page . heading of chapter x. boys' "exposition of the last psalme." . page . heading of chapter xi. bacon's "henry vii." . bacon's "new atlantis." . page . printed upside down. camden's "remains." . page . heading of chapter xii. preston's "life eternall." . page . heading of chapter xiii. barclay's "argenis." . page . heading of chapter xiv. martyn's "lives of the kings." . seneca's works. . slatyer's "great britaine." . bacon's "resuscitatio," part ii. . page . heading of chapter xv. gustavi seleni "cryptomenytices." . page . introduction to "promus." "king john." . florio's "second frutes." . de loque's "single combat." montaigne's "essais." . cervantes' "don quixote," translated by shelton. - . page . tail piece from spenser's "faerie queen." . [illustration: plate ii portrait of francis bacon, by van somer. engraved by w.c. edwards] bacon is shakespeare. chapter i. "what does it matter whether the immortal works were written by shakespeare (of stratford) or by another man who bore (or assumed) the same name?" some twenty years ago, when this question was first propounded, it was deemed an excellent joke, and i find that there still are a great number of persons who seem unable to perceive that the question is one of considerable importance. when the shakespeare revival came, some eighty or ninety years ago, people said "pretty well for shakespeare" and the "learned" men of that period were rather ashamed that shakespeare should be deemed to be "_the_" english poet. "three poets in three distant ages born, greece, italy and england did adorn, . . . . . . . . . . the force of nature could no further go, to make a third she joined the other two." dryden did not write these lines in reference to shakespeare but to milton. where will you find the person who to-day thinks milton comes within any measurable distance of the greatest genius among the sons of earth who was called by the name of shakespeare? ninety-two years ago, viz.: in june , an article appeared in _blackwood's edinburgh magazine_, under the heading "time's magic lantern. no. v. dialogue between lord bacon and shakspeare" [shakespeare being spelled shakspeare]. the dialogue speaks of "lord" bacon and refers to him as being engaged in transcribing the "novum organum" when shakspeare enters with a letter from her majesty (meaning queen elizabeth) asking him, shakspeare, to see "her own" sonnets now in the keeping of _her_ lord chancellor. of course this is all topsy turvydom, for in queen elizabeth's reign bacon was never "lord" bacon or lord chancellor. but to continue, shakspeare tells bacon "near to castalia there bubbles also a fountain of petrifying water, wherein the muses are wont to dip whatever posies have met the approval of apollo; so that the slender foliage which originally sprung forth in the cherishing brain of a true poet becomes hardened in all its leaves and glitters as if it were carved out of rubies and emeralds. the elements have afterwards no power over it." _bacon_. such will be the fortune of your own productions. _shakspeare_. ah my lord! do not encourage me to hope so. i am but a poor unlettered man, who seizes whatever rude conceits his own natural vein supplies him with, upon the enforcement of haste and necessity; and therefore i fear that such as are of deeper studies than myself, will find many flaws in my handiwork to laugh at both now and hereafter. _bacon_. he that can make the multitude laugh and weep as you do mr. shakspeare need not fear scholars.... more scholarship might have sharpened your judgment but the particulars whereof a character is composed are better assembled by force of imagination than of judgment.... _shakspeare_. my lord thus far i know, that the first glimpse and conception of a character in my mind, is always engendered by chance and accident. we shall suppose, for instance, that i, sitting in a tap-room, or standing in a tennis court. the behaviour of some one fixes my attention.... thus comes forth shallow, and slender, and mercutio, and sir andrew aguecheek. _bacon_. these are characters who may be found alive in the streets. but how frame you such interlocutors as brutus and coriolanus? _shakspeare_. by searching histories, in the first place, my lord, for the germ. the filling up afterwards comes rather from feeling than observation. i turn myself into a brutus or a coriolanus for the time; and can, at least in fancy, partake sufficiently of the nobleness of their nature, to put proper words in their mouths.... my knowledge of the tongues is but small, on which account i have read ancient authors mostly at secondhand. i remember, when i first came to london, and began to be a hanger-on at the theatres, a great desire grew in me for more learning than had fallen to my share at stratford; but fickleness and impatience, and the bewilderment caused by new objects, dispersed that wish into empty air.... this ridiculous and most absurd nonsense, which appeared in in _blackwood's edinburgh magazine_ was deemed so excellent and so _instructive_ that (slightly abridged) it was copied into "reading lessons for the use of public and private schools" by john pierpont, of boston, u.s.a., which was published in london nearly twenty years later, viz., in . as i said before, the dialogue is really all topsy turvydom, for the writer must have known perfectly well that bacon was not lord keeper till , the year after shakspeare's death in , and was not made lord chancellor till , and that he is not supposed to have began to write the "novum organum" before the death of queen elizabeth. i have therefore arrived at the conclusion that the whole article was really intended to poke fun at the generally received notion that the author of the plays was an _un_lettered man, who picked up his knowledge at tavern doors and in taprooms and tennis courts. i would specially refer to the passage where bacon asks "how frame you such interlocutors as brutus and coriolanus?" and shakspeare replies "by searching histories, in the first place, my lord, for the germ. the filling up afterwards comes rather from feeling than observation. i turn myself into a brutus or a coriolanus for the time and can at least in fancy partake sufficiently of the nobleness of their nature to put proper words in their mouths." surely this also must have been penned to open the eyes of the public to the absurdity of the popular conception of the author of the plays as an _un_lettered man who "had small latin and less greek"! the highest scholarship not only in this country and in germany but throughout the world has been for many years concentrated upon the classical characters portrayed in the plays, and the adverse criticism of former days has given place to a reverential admiration for the marvellous knowledge of antiquity displayed throughout the plays in the presentation of the historical characters of bygone times; classical authority being found for nearly every word put into their mouths. what does it matter whether the immortal works were written by shakspeare (of stratford) or by a great and learned man who assumed the name shakespeare to "shake a lance at ignorance"? we should not forget that this phrase "shake a lance at ignorance" is contemporary, appearing in ben jonson's panegyric in the shakespeare folio of . chapter ii. the shackspere monument, bust, and portrait. in the year mr. george hookham in the january number of the _national review_ sums up practically all that is really known of the life of william shakspeare of stratford as follows:-- 'we only know that he was born at stratford, of illiterate parents-- (we do _not_ know that he went to school there)--that, when - / years old, he married anne hathaway (who was eight years his senior, and who bore him a child six months after marriage); that he had in all three children by her (whom with their mother he left, and went to london, having apparently done his best to desert her before marriage);--that in london he became an actor with an interest in a theatre, and was reputed to be the writer of plays;--that he purchased property in stratford, to which town he returned;--engaged in purchases and sales and law-suits (of no biographical interest except as indicating his money-making and litigious temperament); helped his father in an application for coat armour (to be obtained by false pretences); promoted the enclosure of common lands at stratford (after being guaranteed against personal loss); made his will--and died at the age of , without a book in his possession, and leaving nothing to his wife but his second best bed, and this by an afterthought. no record of friendship with anyone more cultured than his fellow actors. no letter,--only two contemporary reports of his conversation, one with regard to the commons enclosure as above, and the other in circumstances not to be recited unnecessarily. in a word we know his parentage, birth, marriage, fatherhood, occupation, his wealth and his chief ambition, his will and his death, and absolutely nothing else; his death being received with unbroken and ominous silence by the literary world, not even ben jonson who seven years later glorified the plays _in excelsis_, expending so much as a quatrain on his memory.' [illustration: plate iii. the stratford monument, from dugdale's warwickshire, .] [illustration: plate iv. the stratford monument as it appears at the present time.] to this statement by mr. george hookham i would add that we know w. shakspeare was christened th april , that his will which commences "in the name of god amen! i willim shackspeare, of stratford upon avon, in the countie of warr gent in perfect health and memorie, god be praysed," was dated th (january altered to) march , and it was proved nd june , shakspeare having died rd april , four weeks after the date of the will. we also know that a monument was erected to him in stratford church. and because l. digges, in his lines in the shakespeare folio of says "when time dissolves thy stratford moniment,"[ ] it is supposed that the monument must have been put up before . but we should remember that as mrs. stopes (who is by no means a baconian) pointed out in the _monthly review_ of april , the original monument was not like the present monument which shews a man with a pen in his hand; but was the very different monument which will be found depicted in sir william dugdale's "antiquities of warwickshire," published in . the bust taken from this is shewn on plate , page , and the whole monument on plate , page . [illustration: plate v. the stratford bust, from dugdale's warwickshire. published .] the figure bears no resemblance to the usually accepted likeness of shakspeare. it hugs a sack of wool, or a pocket of hops to its belly and does not hold a pen in its hand. in plate , page , is shewn the bust from the monument as it exists at the present time, with the great pen in the right hand and a sheet of paper under the left hand. the whole monument is shewn on plate , page . [illustration: plate vi. the stratford bust as it appears at the present time.] the face seems copied from the mask of the so-called portrait in the folio, which is shewn in plate . [illustration: plate viii. full size facsimile of part of the title page of the shakespeare folio] it is desirable to look at that picture very carefully, because every student ought to know that the portrait in the title-page of the first folio edition of the plays published in , which was drawn by martin droeshout, is cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. martin droeshout, its designer, was, as mr. sidney lee tells us, but years of age when shakspeare died. he is not likely therefore ever to have seen the actor of stratford, yet this is the "authentic," that is the "authorised" portrait of shakspeare, although there _is_ no question--there _can be_ no possible question--that in fact it is a cunningly drawn cryptographic picture, shewing two left arms and a mask. the back of the left arm which does duty for the right arm is shewn in plate , page . [illustration: plate x. the back of the left arm, from plate viii] every tailor will admit that this is not and cannot be the front of the right arm, but is, without possibility of doubt, the back of the left arm. [illustration: plate xi. the front of the left arm, from plate viii] [illustration: (not included in list of plates) the front of left arm. _from plate viii_. the back of left arm _from plate viii._ arranged tailor fashion, shoulder to shoulder, as in the _gentleman's tailor magazine_, april, ] plate shews the front of the left arm, and you at once perceive that you are no longer looking at the back of the coat but at the front of the coat. [illustration: plate xii. the [mask] head, from the [so-called] portrait, by droeshout, in the folio] now in plate , page , you see the mask, especially note that the ear is a mask ear and stands out curiously; note also how distinct the line shewing the edge of the mask appears. perhaps the reader will perceive this more clearly if he turns the page upside down. [illustration: plate xiii. sir nicholas bacon, from the painting by zucchero] plate , page , depicts a real face, that of sir nicholas bacon, eldest son of the lord keeper, from a contemporary portrait by zucchero, lately in the duke of fife's collection. this shews by contrast the difference between the portrait of a living man, and the drawing of a lifeless mask with the double line from ear to chin. again examine plates , pages , , the complete portrait in the folio. the reader having seen the separate portions, will, i trust, be able now to perceive that this portrait is correctly characterised as cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. while examining this portrait, the reader should study the lines that describe it in the shakespeare folio of , a facsimile of which is here inserted. to the reader. this figure, that thou here seest put, it was for gentle shakespeare cut; wherein the grauer had a strife with nature, to out-doo the life: o, could he but haue drawne his wit as well in brasse, as he hath hit his face; the print would then surpasse all, that was euer writ in brasse. but, since he cannot, reader, looke not on his picture, but his booke. b.i. plate ix. verses ascribed to ben jonson, from the folio edition of shakespeare's works. b.i. call the ridiculous dummy a "portrait" but describes it as the "figure put for" (that is "instead of") and as "the print," and as "his picture"; he likewise most clearly tells us to "looke not on his (ridiculous) picture, but (only) his booke." it seems, therefore, evident that he knew the secret of bacon's authorship and intended to inform those capable of understanding that the graver had done out the life when he writes, "out-doo the life." in the new english dictionary, edited by sir j.a.h. murray, there are upwards of six hundred words beginning with "out," and every one of them, with scarcely a single exception, requires, in order to be fully understood, to be read reversed. out-law does not mean outside of the law, but lawed out by a legal process. "out-doo" was used only in the sense of "do out"; thus, in the "cursor mundi," written centuries before the days of elizabeth, we read that adam was out done [of paradise]; and in drayton's "barons' wars," published in , we find in book v. s. li. "that he his foe not able to withstand, was ta'en in battle and his eyes out-done." the graver has indeed done out the life so cleverly that for hundreds of years learned pedants and others have thought that the figure represented a real man, and altogether failed to perceive that it was a mere stuffed dummy clothed in an impossible coat, cunningly composed of the front of the left arm buttoned on to the back of the same left arm, as to form a double left armed apology for a man. moreover, this dummy is surmounted by a hideous staring mask, furnished with an imaginary ear, utterly unlike anything human, because, instead of being hollowed in, it is rounded out something like the rounded outside of a shoe-horn, in order to form a cup which would cover and conceal any real ear that might be behind it. perhaps the reader will more fully understand the full meaning of b.i.'s lines if i paraphrase them as follows:-- to the reader. the dummy that thou seest set here, was put instead of shake-a-speare; wherein the graver had a strife to extinguish all of nature's life; o, could he but have drawn his mind as well as he's concealed behind his face; the print would then surpasse all, that was ever writ in brasse. but since he cannot, do not looke on his mas'd picture, but his booke. do out appears in the name of the little instrument something like a pair of snuffer which was formerly used to extinguish the candles and called a "doute." therefore i have correctly substituted "extinguished" for "out-doo." at the beginning i have substituted "dummy" for "figure" because we are told that the figure is "put for" (that is, put instead of) shakespeare. in modern english we frequently describe a chairman who is a mere dummy as a figurehead. then "wit" in these lines means absolutely the same as "mind," which i have used in its place because i think it refers to the fact that upon the miniature of bacon in his th year, which was painted by hilliard in , we read:--"si tabula daretur digna animum mallem." this line is believed to have been written at the time by the artist, and was translated in "spedding":--"if one could but paint his mind." in march, , the _tailor and cutter_ newspaper stated that the figure, put for shakepeare in the folio, was undoubtedly clothed in an impossible coat, composed of the back and the front of the same left arm. and in the following april the _gentleman's tailor magazine_, under the heading of a "problem for the trade," shews the two halves of the coat as printed on page a, and says: "it is passing strange that something like three centuries should have been allowed to elapse before the tailors' handiwork should have been appealed to in this particular manner." "the special point is that in what is known as the authentic portrait of william shakespeare, which appears in the celebrated first folio edition, published in , a remarkable sartorial puzzle is apparent." "the tunic, coat, or whatever the garment may have been called at the time, is so strangely illustrated that the right-hand side of the forepart is obviously the left-hand side of the backpart; and so gives a harlequin appearance to the figure, which it is not unnatural to assume was intentional, and done with express object and purpose." "anyhow, it is pretty safe to say that if a referendum of the trade was taken on the question whether the two illustrations shown above represent the foreparts of the same garments, the polling would give an unanimous vote in the negative." "it is outside the province of a trade journal to dogmatise on such a subject; but when such a glaring incongruity as these illustrations show is brought into court, it is only natural that the tailor should have something to say; or, at any rate, to think about." this one simple fact which can neither be disputed nor explained away, viz., that the "figure" put upon the title-page of the first folio of the plays in to represent shakespeare, is a doubly left-armed and stuffed dummy, surmounted by a ridiculous putty-faced mask, disposes once and for all of any idea that the mighty plays were written by the illiterate clown of stratford-upon-avon. "he hath _hit_ his face" it is thought that _hit_ means _hid_ as in chaucer's squiere's tale, line etc. "right as a serpent _hit_ him under floures til he may seen his tyme for to byte" if indeed "hit" be intended to be read as "hid" then these ten lines are no longer the cryptic puzzle which they have hitherto been considered to be, but in conjunction with the portrait, they clearly reveal the true facts, that the real author is writing left-handedly, that means secretly, in shadow, with his face hidden behind a mask or pseudonym. we should also notice "out-doo" is spelled with a hyphen. in the language of to-day and still more in that of the time of shakespeare all, or nearly all, words beginning with _out_ may be read reversed, out-bar is bar out, out-bud is bud out, out-crop is crop out, out-fit is fit out, and so on through the alphabet. if therefore we may read "out-doo the life" as "doo out the life" meaning "shut out the real face of the living man" we perceive that here also we are told "that the real face is hidden." the description, with the head line "to the reader" and the signature "b.i.," forms twelve lines, the words of which can be turned into numerous significant anagrams, etc., to which, however, no allusion is made in the present work. but our readers will find that if all the letters are counted (the two v.v.'s in line nine being counted as four letters) they will amount to the number . in subsequent chapters a good deal is said about this number, but here we only desire to say that we are "informed" that the "great author" intended to reveal himself years after , the date when the first folio was published, that is in the present year, , when very numerous tongues will be loosened. examine once more the original stratford bust, plate , page , and the present stratford bust, plate , page , _with the large pen in the right hand_. if the stratford actor were indeed the author of the plays it was most appropriate that he should have a pen in his hand. but in the original monument as shewn in plate , page , the figure hugs a sack of wool or a pocket of hops or may be a cushion. for about years, this continued to be the stratford effigy and shewed nothing that could in any way connect the man portrayed, with literary work. i believe that this was not accidental. i think that everybody in stratford must have known that william "sha_c_kspeare" could not write so much as his own name, for i assert that we possess nothing which can by any reasonable possibility be deemed to be his signature. [illustration: decorative chapter heading] chapter iii. the so-called "signatures." in plate , page , are shewn the five so-called signatures. these five being the only pieces of writing in the world that can, even by the most ardent stratfordians, be supposed to have been written by shakspeare's pen; let us consider them carefully. the will commences "in the name of god amen i willum shackspeare." it is written upon three sheets of paper and each sheet bears a supposed signature. the will is dated in latin "vicesimo quinto die [januarij] mtij anno regni dni nri jacobi, nunc r anglie, &c. decimo quarto & scotie xlix° annoq dni ", or shortly in english th march . shakspeare died rd april just four weeks after publishing his will. i say after "publishing his will" advisedly, for such is the attestation, viz., "witnes to the publyshing hereof," "fra: collyns julius shawe john robinson hamnet sadler robert whattcott" nothing is said about the witnessing of the signing hereof. the will might therefore have been, and i myself am perfectly certain that it was, marked with the name of william shakspeare by the solicitor, fra (ncis) collyns, who wrote the body of the will. [illustration: plate xiv. the five so-called "shakespeare signatures." the five so-called "shakespeare signatures."] he also wrote the names of the other witnesses, which are all in the same hand-writing as the will; shewing that shakspeare's witnesses were also unable to write their names. this fact, that shakspeare's name is written by the solicitor, is conclusively proved by the recent article of magdalene thumm-kintzel in the leipzig magazine, _der menschenkenner_, which was published in january . in this publication, photo reproductions of certain letters in the body of the will, and in the so-called shakspeare signatures are placed side by side, and the evidence is irresistible that they are written by the same hand. moreover when we remember that the will commences "i willim sha_c_kspeare" with a "c" between the "a" and "k," the idea that shakspeare himself wrote his own will cannot be deemed worthy of serious consideration. the whole will is in fact in the handwriting of francis collyns, the warwick solicitor, who added the attestation clause. i myself was sure that the solicitor had added the so-called signatures, when, many years ago, i examined under the strongest magnifying glasses the will at somerset house. look first at the upper writings and never again call them "signatures." the top one is on the first page of the will, the second on the second page, the third on the last page of the will. the original of the top one has been very much damaged but the "w" remains quite clear. look first only at the "w's". if the writings were signatures what could induce a man when signing his last will to make each "w" as different from the others as possible, and why is the second christian name written willm? compare also the second and third "shakspeare" and note that every letter is formed in a different manner. compare the two "s's", next compare the two "h's", the "h" of the second begins at the bottom, the "h" of the third begins at the top, the same applies to the next letter the "a", so also with respect to the "k's "; how widely different these are. plate shews at the bottom two other names also. these are taken, the one on the left from a deed of purchase of a dwelling house in blackfriars dated march th - (now in the city library of the corporation of london); the other on the right is from a mortgage of the same property executed on the following day, viz: march th - , which is now in the british museum. neither of these documents states that it was "signed" but only says that it was "sealed," and it was at that date in no way necessary that any signatures should be written over the seals, but the clerks might and evidently did, place upon these deeds an abbreviated name of william shakspeare over the seal on each document. in the case of the other two parties to the documents, the signatures are most beautifully written and are almost absolutely identical in the two deeds. look at these two supposititious signatures. to myself it is difficult to imagine that anyone with eyes to see could suppose them to be signatures by the same hand. [illustration: the signatures (so called) of "shakespeare," which are the best possible reproductions of the originals, and shew that all are written in "lawscript" by skilled penman.] note on the so-called "signatures." when part of the purchase money is what is commonly called "left on mortgage," the mortgage deed is always dated one day _after_, but is always signed one moment _before_, the purchase deed, because the owner will not part with his property before he receives his security. the shakespeare purchase deed and the mortgage deed were therefore both signed at the same time, in the same place, with the same pen, and the same ink. this is evidently true with respect to the signatures of wm. johnson and jno. jackson, the other parries to both of the deeds. but as i wrote to the city authorities and the british museum authorities, it would be impossible to discover a scoundrel who would venture to perjure himself and falsely swear that it was even remotely possible that the two supposed signature of wm. shakespeare could have been written at the same time, in the same place, with the same pen, and the same ink, by the _same hand_. they are widely different, one having been written by the law clerk of the seller, the other by the law clerk of the purchaser. according to the law of england, anyone may (by request) attach any person's name to any document, and if that person touch it, any third person may witness it as a signature. some years ago by the courtesy of the corporation of london, the librarian and the chairman of the library committee carried the purchase deed to the british museum to place it side by side with the mortgage deed there. after they had with myself and the museum authorities most carefully examined the two deeds, the librarian of the city corporation said to me, there is no reason to suppose that the corporation deed has upon it the signature of wm. shakespeare, and the british museum authorities likewise told me that they did not think that the museum mortgage deed had upon it a signature of william shakespeare. the more you examine the whole five the more you will be certain, as the writer is, after the most careful study of the will and of the deeds, that not one of the five writings is a "signature," or pretends to be a "signature," and that therefore there is a probability, practically amounting to a certainty, that the stratford actor could not so much as manage to scrawl his own name. no! we possess not a scrap of writing, not even an attempt at a signature, [see also chapter xiv., p. ] that can be reasonably supposed to be written by the stratford _gentleman_. he is styled "gentle shakespeare": this does not refer to anything relating to his character or to his manners but it means that possessing a coat of arms he was legally entitled to call himself a "gentleman." chapter iv. contemporary allusions to shackspere. shakspeare the actor purchased new place at stratford-on-avon in for £ and he became a "gentleman" and an esquire when he secured a grant of arms in . how did the stage "honour" the player who had bought a coat of arms and was able to call himself a "gentleman"? three contemporary plays give us scenes illustrating the incident: st. ben jonson's "every man out of his humour" which was acted in the very year of shakspeare's grant of arms. nd. shakespeare's "as you like it" which was entered at stationers' hall in , although no copy is known to exist before the folio of . rd. "the return from parnassus" which was acted at st. john's college, cambridge in , though not printed till . in addition to these three plays, there is a fourth evidence of the way in which the clown who had purchased a coat of arms was regarded, in a pamphlet or tract of which only one copy is known to exist. this tract which can be seen in the rylands library, manchester, used to be in lord spencer's library at althorp, and is reprinted by halliwell-phillipps in "outlines of the life of shakespeare," , vol. i, pages - . [illustration: plate xv. bacon's crest from the binding of a presentation copy of the novum organum, .] to commence with ben jonson's "every man out of his humour." the clown who had purchased a coat of arms is said to be the brother of sordido (a miser), and is described as an "essential" clown (that is an uneducated rustic), and is styled sogliardo which is the italian for the filthiest possible name. the other two characters in the scene (act iii. sc. i) are puntarvolo who, as his crest is a _boar_, must be intended to represent bacon;[ ] and carlo buffone who is a buffoon or jester. enter sogliardo (the filth), who is evidently the stratford clown, who has just purchased a coat of arms:-- actus tertius, scena prima, sogliardo, punt., carlo. _sog_. nay i will haue him, i am resolute for that, by this parchment gentlemen, i haue ben so toil'd among the harrots [meaning _heralds_] yonder, you will not beleeue, they doe speake i' the straungest language, and giue a man the hardest termes for his money, that euer you knew. _car_. but ha' you armes? ha' your armes? _sog_. yfaith, i thanke god i can write myselfe gentleman now, here's my pattent, it cost me thirtie pound by this breath. _punt_. a very faire coat, well charg'd and full of armorie. _sog_. nay, it has, as much varietie of colours in it, as you haue seene a coat haue, how like you the crest, sir? _punt_. i vnderstand it not well, what is't? _sog_. marry sir, it is your bore without a head rampant. _punt_. a bore without a head, that's very rare. _car_. i, [aye] and rampant too: troth i commend the herald's wit, he has deciphered him well: a swine without a head, without braine, wit, anything indeed, ramping to gentilitie. you can blazon the rest signior? can you not? . . . . . . . . . . . . _punt_. let the word be, _not without mustard_, your crest is very rare sir. shakspeare's "word" that is his "motto" was--non sanz droict--not without right--and i desire the reader also especially to remember sogliardo's words "yfaith i thanke god" a phrase which though it appears in the quartos is changed in the ben jonson folio into "i thank _them_" which has no meaning. next we turn to shakespeare's "as you like it." this play though entered at stationers' hall in and probably played quite as early is not known in print till it appeared in the folio of . the portion to which i wish to refer is the commencement of actus quintus, scena prima. act , scene i. enter clowne and awdrie. _clow_. we shall finde a time _awdrie_, patience gentle awdrie. _awd_. faith the priest was good enough, for all the olde gentlemans saying. _clow_. a most wicked sir _oliver, awdrie_, a most vile _mar-text._ but _awdrie_, there is a youth heere in the forrest layes claime to you. _awd_. i, i know who 'tis: he hath no interest in mee in the world: here comes the man you meane. (enter william) _clo_. it is meat and drinke to me to see a clowne, by my troth, we that haue good wits, haue much to answer for: we shall be flouting: we cannot hold. _will_. good eu'n _audrey._ _awd_. god ye good eu'n _william_. _will_. and good eu'n to you sir. _clo_. good eu'n gentle friend. couer thy head, couer thy head: nay prethee bee couer'd. how olde are you friend? _will_. fiue and twentie sir. _clo_. a ripe age: is thy name _william_? _will_. _william_, sir. _clo_. a faire name. was't borne i' the forrest heere? _will_. i [aye] sir, i thanke god. _clo_. thanke god: a good answer: art rich? _will_. 'faith sir, so, so. _clo_. so, so, is good, very good, very excellent good: and yet it is not, it is but so, so: art thou wise? _will_. i [aye] sir, i haue a prettie wit. _clo_. why, thou saist well. i do now remember a saying: the foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wise man knowes himselfe to be a foole.... you do loue this maid? _will_. i do sir. _clo_. giue me your hand: art thou learned? _will_. no sir. _clo_. then learne this of me, to haue is to haue. for it is a figure in rhetoricke, that drink being powr'd out of a cup into a glasse, by filling the one, doth empty the other. for all your writers do consent, that _ipse_ is hee: now you are not _ipse_, for i am he. _will_. which he sir? _clo_. he sir, that must marrie this woman. firstly i want to call your attention to touchstone the courtier who is playing clown and who we are told "uses his folly like a stalking horse and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit." notice that touchstone refuses to be married to awdrey (who probably represents the plays of shakespeare) by a-mar-text_, and she declares that the clown william "has no interest in mee in the world." william--shall we say shakspeare of stratford?--enters and is greeted as "gentle" (_i. e_. he is possessed of a coat of arms). he says "thank god" he was born in the forest here (ardennes, very near in sound to arden). "thank god" is repeated by touchstone and as it is the same phrase that is used by sogliardo in ben jonson's play i expect that it was an ejaculation very characteristic of the real man of stratford and i am confirmed in this belief because in the folio edition of ben jonson's plays the phrase is changed to "i thank _them_" which has no meaning. the clown of ardennes is rich but only rich for a clown (shakspeare of stratford was not really rich, new place cost only £ ). asked if he is wise, he says "aye," that is "yes," and adds that he has "a pretty wit," a phrase we must remember that is constantly used in reference to the stratford actor. touchstone mocks him with a paraphrase of the well-known maxim "if you are wise you are a foole if you be a foole you are wise" which is to be found in bacon's "advancement of learning" antitheta xxxi. then he asks him "_art thou learned_" and william replies "_no sir_." this means, _unquestionably_, as every lawyer must know, that william replies that he cannot _read_ one line of print. i feel sure the man called shackspeare of stratford was an uneducated rustic, never able to read a single line of print, and that this is the reason why no books were found in his house, this is the reason why his solicitor, thomas greene, lived with him in his house at new place (halliwell-phillipps: outlines, , vol. i, p. );--a well-known fact that very much puzzles those who do not realize the depth of shakspeare's illiteracy. chapter v. "the return from parnassus" and "ratsei's ghost." the next play to which attention must be called is "the return from parnassus" which was produced at cambridge in and was printed in with the following title page:-- the returne from parnassus or the scourge of simony. publiquely acted by the students in saint johns colledge in cambridge. at london printed by g. eld for john wright, and are to bee sold at his shop at christchurch gate. . the portion to which i wish to direct attention is:-- actus , scena i. _studioso_. fayre fell good _orpheus_, that would rather be king of a mole hill, then a keysars slaue: better it is mongst fidlers to be chiefe, then at plaiers trencher beg reliefe. but ist not strange this mimick apes should prize vnhappy schollers at a hireling rate. vile world, that lifts them vp to hye degree, and treades vs downe in groueling misery. _england_ affordes those glorious vagabonds, that carried earst their fardels on their backes, coursers to ride on through the gazing streetes sooping it in their glaring satten sutes, and pages to attend their maisterships: with mouthing words that better wits haue framed, they purchase lands, and now esquiers are made. _philomusus_. what ere they seeme being euen at the best they are but sporting fortunes _scornfull_ iests. can these last two lines refer to shakspeare the actor seeming to be the poet? note that they are spoken by philomusus that is friend of the poetic muse. mark also the words "this mimick apes." notice especially "with mouthing words that _better_ wits haue framed, they purchase lands and now esquiers are made" i.e. get grants of arms. who at this period among mimics excepting w. shakspeare of stratford purchased lands and obtained also a grant of arms? that this sneer "mouthing words that better wits have framed" must have been aimed at shakspeare is strongly confirmed by the tract (reprinted by halliwell-phillipps in his "outlines of shakespeare," , vol. i, p. ) which is called "ratsei's ghost or the second part of his mad prankes and robberies." this pamphlet bears no date, but was entered at stationers' hall may st . there is only a single copy in existence, which used to be in earl spencer's library at althorp but is now in the rylands; library at manchester. as i said, it is reprinted by halliwell-phillipps, and stratfordians are obliged to agree with him that the reference is unquestionably to "wm shakespeare of stratford." the most important part which is spoken by ratsei the robber to a country player is as follows:-- _ratsei_. and for you sirra, saies hee to the chiefest of them, thou hast a good presence upon a stage; methinks thou darkenst thy merite by playing in the country. get thee to london, for if one man were dead, they will have much neede of such a one as thou art. there would be none in my opinion fitter then thyselfe to play his parts. my conceipt is such of thee, that i durst venture all the mony in my purse on thy head to play hamlet with him for a wager. there thou shalt learn to be frugall,--for players were never so thriftie as they are now about london--and to feed upon all men, to let none feede upon thee; to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket, thy hart slow to performe thy tongues promise, and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place of lordship in the country, that, growing weary of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation; then thou needest care for no man, nor not for them that before made thee prowd with speaking their words upon the stage. the whole account of buying a place in the country, of feeding upon all men (that is lending money upon usury) of never keeping promises, of never giving anything in charity, agrees but too well with the few records we possess of the man of stratford. and therefore stratfordians are obliged to accept halliwell-phillipps' dictum that this tract called ratsei's ghost refers to the actor of stratford and that "_he_ needed not to care for them that before made _him_ proud with speaking _their_ words upon the stage." how is it possible that stratfordians can continue to refuse to admit that the statement in the "return from pernassus" "with mouthing words that better wits haue framed they purchase lands and now esquiers are made" must also refer to the stratford actor? chapter vi. shackspere's correspondence! there is only a single letter extant addressed to shakspeare, and this asks for a loan of £ it is dated th october , and is from richard quiney. it reads "loveinge countreyman i am bolde of vow as of a ffrende, craveinge yowr helpe wth xxxll vppon mr bushells & my securytee or mr myttons wth me. mr rosswell is nott come to london as yeate & i have especiall cawse. yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debttes i owe in london i thancke god & muche quiet my mynde wch wolde nott be indebeted i am nowe towardes the cowrte in hope of answer for the dispatche of my buysenes. yow shall nether loase creddytt nor monney by me the lorde wyllinge and nowe butt perswade yowr selfe soe as i hope & yow shall nott need to feare butt wth all hartie thanckefullenes i wyll holde my tyme & content yowr ffrende & yf we bargaine farther yow shalbe the paie mr yowr selfe. my tyme biddes me hasten to an ende & soe i committ thys [to] yowr care & hope of yowr helpe. i feare i shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the cowrte. haste, the lorde be wth yow & with us all amen ffrom the bell in carter lane the october . yowrs in all kyndenes ryc. quyney (_addressed_) ls to my loveinge good ffrend & contreymann mr wm shackespere d[e]l[ive]r thees." this letter is the only letter known to exist which was ever addressed to william shackspere, the illiterate householder of stratford, who as has been pointed out in these pages was totally unable to read a line of print, or to write even his own name. there are however in existence three, and three only, contemporary letters referring in any way to him, and these are not about literature with which the stratford man had nothing whatever to do--but about mean and sordid small business transactions. one is from master abraham sturley, who writes in to a friend in london in reference to shakspeare lending "some monei on some od yarde land or other att shottri or neare about us." another is dated nov. th , and is from the same abraham sturley to richard quiney in which we are told that "our countriman mr wm shak would procure us monei wc i will like of." a third from adrian quiney written (about - ) to his son rycharde quiney in which he says "yff yow bargen with wm sha or receve money therfor, brynge youre money homme." there exists no contemporary letter from anyone to anyone, referring to the stratford actor as being a poet or as being in any way connected with literature. but from the court records we learn that; in shakespeare brought action against john clayton in london for £ and got judgment in his favour. he also sued philip rogers of stratford for two shillings loaned. in he sued philip rogers for several bushels of malt sold to him at various times between march th and the end of may of that year, amounting in all to the value of £ . s. d. the poet a dealer in malt? in he prosecuted john addenbroke to recover a debt of £ and sued his surety horneby. halliwell-phillipps tells us that "the precepts as appears from memoranda in the originals, were issued by the poet's solicitor thomas greene who was then residing under some unknown conditions[ ] at new place." referring to these sordid stories, richard grant white, that strong believer in the stratford man, says in his "life and genius of william shakespeare," p. "the pursuit of an impoverished man for the sake of imprisoning him and depriving him both of the power of paying his debts and supporting himself and his family, is an incident in shakespeare's life which it requires the utmost allowance and consideration for the practice of the time and country to enable us to contemplate with equanimity--satisfaction is impossible." "the biographer of shakespeare must record these facts because the literary antiquaries have unearthed and brought them forward as new particulars of the life of shakespeare. we hunger and receive these husks; we open our mouths for food and we break our teeth against these stones." yes! the world has broken its teeth too long upon these stones to continue to mistake them for bread. and as the accomplished scholar and poetess the late miss anna swanwick once declared to the writer, she knew nothing of the bacon and shakespeare controversy, but mr. sidney lee's "life of shakespeare" had convinced her that his man never wrote the plays. and that is just what everybody else is saying at eton, at oxford, at cambridge, in the navy, in the army, and pretty generally among unprejudiced people everywhere, who are satisfied, as is mark twain, that the most learned of works could not have been written by the most _un_learned of men. yes! it does matter that the "greatest birth of time" should no longer be considered to have been the work of the unlettered rustic of stratford; and the hour has at last come when it should be universally known that this mighty work was written by the man who had taken all knowledge for his province, the man who said "i have, though in a despised weed [that is under a pseudonym] procured the good of all men"; the man who left his "name and memory to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages." chapter vii. bacon acknowledged to be a poet. in discussing the question of the authorship of the plays many people appear to be unaware that bacon was considered by his contemporaries to be a great poet. it seems therefore advisable to quote a few witnesses who speak of his pre-eminence in poetry. in there was published "the great assises holden in parnassus by apollo and his assessours" a facsimile of the title of which is given on page . this work is anonymous but is usually ascribed to george withers and in it bacon as lord verulan is placed first and designated "chancellor of parnassus" that is "greatest of poets." after the title, the book commences with two pages of which facsimiles are given on pages , . [illustration: plate xvi. facsimile title page] [illustration: plate xvii. facsimile of page iii of "the great assises"] [illustration: plate xviii facsimile of page iv of "the great assises"] apollo appears at the top, next comes lord verulan as chancellor of parnassus, sir philip sidney and other world renowned names follow and then below the line side by side is a list of the jurors and a list of the malefactors. a little examination will teach us that the jurors are really the same persons as the malefactors and that we ought to read right across the page as if the dividing line did not exist. acting on this principle we perceive that george wither [withers] is correctly described as mercurius britanicus. mr. sidney lee tells us that withers regarded "britain's remembrancer" and "prosopopaeia britannica" as his greatest works. thomas cary [carew] is correctly described as mercurias aulicus--court messenger. he went to the french court with lord herbert and was made gentleman of the privy chamber by charles i who presented him with an estate at sunninghill. thomas may is correctly described as mercurius civicus. he applied for the post of chronologer to the city of london and james i wrote to the lord mayor (unsuccessfully) in his favour. josuah sylvester is correctly described as the writer of diurnals. he translated du bartas "divine weekes," describing day by day, that is "diurnally," the creation of the world. georges sandes [sandys] is the intelligencer. he travelled all over the world and his book of travels was one of the popular works of the period. michael drayton is the writer of occurrences. besides the "poly-olbion," he wrote "england's heroicall epistles" and "the barron's wars." francis beaumont is the writer of passages. this exactly describes him as he is known as writing in conjunction with fletcher. "beamount and fletcher make one poet, they single dare not adventure on a play." william shakespeere is "the writer of weekely accounts." this exactly describes him, for the only literature for which he was responsible was the accounts sent out by his clerk or attorney. turning over the pages of the little book on page the cryer calls out "then sylvester, sands, drayton, beaumont, fletcher, massinger, shakespeare (sic) and heywood, poets good and true." this statement seems to be contradicted so far as shakespeare is concerned by the defendant who says on page "shakespear's (sic) a mimicke" (that is a mere actor not a poet). "beamount and fletcher make one poet, they single, dare not adventure on a play." each of these statements seems to be true. and on page apollo[ ] says "we should to thy exception give consent but since we are assur'd, 'tis thy intent, by this refusall, onely to deferre that censure, which our justice must conferre upon thy merits; we must needs decline from approbation of these pleas of thine." that is, apollo _admits_ that shakespeare is not a poet but a "mimic," the word to which i called your attention in the "return from parnassus" in relation to "this mimick apes." in this little book shakespeare's name occurs three times, and on each occasion is spelled differently. this clear statement that the actor shakespeare was not a poet but only a tradesman who sent out his "weekly accounts" is, i think, here for the first time pointed out. it seems very difficult to conceive of a much higher testimony to bacon's pre-eminence in poetry than the fact that he is placed as "chancellor of parnassus" under apollo. but a still higher position is accorded to him when it is suggested that apollo feared that he himself should lose his crown which would be placed on bacon's head. walter begbie in "is it shakespeare?" , p. , tells us:--that thomas randolf, in latin verses published in but probably written some years earlier says that phoebus was accessory to bacon's death because he was afraid lest bacon should some day come to be crowned king of poetry or the muses. farther on the same writer declares that as bacon "was himself a singer" he did not need to be celebrated in song by others, and that george herbert calls bacon the colleague of sol [phoebus apollo]. george herbert was himself a dramatic poet and bacon dedicated his "translation of the psalms" to him "who has overlooked so many of my works." mr. begbie also tells us that thomas campion addresses bacon thus "whether the thorny volume of the law or the schools or the _sweet muse_ allure thee." it may be worth while here to quote the similar testimony which is borne by john davies of hereford who in his "scourge of folly" published about , writes "to the royall, ingenious, and all-learned knight,-- sr francis bacon. thy _bounty_ and the _beauty_ of thy witt comprisd in lists of _law_ and learned _arts_, each making thee for great _imployment_ fitt which now thou hast, (though short of thy deserts) compells my pen to let fall shining _inke_ and to bedew the _baies_ that _deck_ thy _front_;-- and to thy health in _helicon_ to drinke as to her _bellamour_ the _muse_ is wont: for thou dost her embozom; and dost vse her company for sport twixt grave affaires; so vtterst law the liuelyer through thy _muse_. and for that all thy _notes_ are sweetest _aires_; _my muse thus notes thy worth in eu'ry line, with yncke which thus she sugers; so, to shine_." but nothing can much exceed in value the testimony of ben jonson who in his "discoveries," , says "but his learned, and able (though unfortunate) _successor_ [bacon in margin] is he, who hath fill'd up all numbers, and perform'd that in our tongue, which may be compar'd or preferr'd either to insolent _greece_, or haughty _rome_." "he who hath filled up all numbers" means unquestionably "he that hath written every kind of poetry."[ ] alexander pope the poet declares that he himself "lisped in numbers for the numbers came." ben jonson therefore bears testimony to the fact that bacon was so great a poet that he had in poetry written that "which may be compar'd or preferr'd either to insolent _greece_ or haughty _rome_." but in ben jonson had said of the author of the plays _"or when thy sockes were on leaue thee alone, for the comparison of all, that insolent_ greece _or haughtie_ rome _sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."_ surely the statements in the "discoveries" were intended to tell us who was the author of the plays. after perusing these contemporary evidences, and they might be multiplied, it is difficult to understand how anyone can venture to dispute bacon's position as pre-eminent in poetry. but it may be of interest to those who doubt whether bacon (irrespective of any claim to the authorship of the plays) could be deemed to be a great poet, to quote here the words of percy bysshe shelley, who in his "defence of poetry" says "bacon was a poet. his language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect. it is a strain which distends and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy." the immortal plays are the "greatest birth of time," and contain a short summary of the wisdom of the world from ancient times, and they exhibit an extent and depth of knowledge in every branch which has never been equalled at any period of the world's history. in classic lore, as the late mr. churton collins recently pointed out, they evince the ripest scholarship. and this is confirmed by classical scholars all the world over. none but the profoundest lawyers can realise the extent of the knowledge not only of the theory but of the practice of law which is displayed. lord campbell says that lord eldon [supposed to have been the most learned of judges] need not have been ashamed of the law of shakespeare. and as an instance of the way in which the members of the legal profession look up to the mighty author i may mention that some years ago, at a banquet of a shakespeare society at which mr. sidney lee and the writer were present, the late mr. crump, q.c., editor of the _law times_, who probably possessed as much knowledge of law as any man in this country, declared that to tell him that the plays were not written by the greatest lawyer the world has ever seen, or ever would see, was to tell him what he had sufficient knowledge of law to know to be nonsense. he said also that he was not ashamed to confess that he himself, though he had some reputation for knowledge of law, did not possess sufficient legal knowledge to realise one quarter of the law that was contained in the shakespeare plays. it requires a philologist to fully appreciate what the enormous vocabulary employed in the plays implies. max muller in his "science of language," vol. i, , p. , says "a well-educated person in england, who has been at a public school and at the university ... seldom uses more than about , or , words. ... the hebrew testament says all that it has to say with , words, milton's poetry is built up with , ; and shakespeare, who probably displayed a greater variety of expression than any writer in any language ... produced all his plays with about , words." shakspeare the householder of stratford could not have known so many as one thousand words. but bacon declared that we must make our english language capable of conveying the highest thoughts, and by the plays he has very largely created what we now call the english language. the plays and the sonnets also reveal their author's life. in the play of "hamlet" especially, bacon seems to tell us a good deal concerning himself, for the auto-biographical character of that play is clearly apparent to those who have eyes to see. i will, however, refer only to a single instance in that play. in the quarto of , which is the first known edition of the play of "hamlet," we are told, in the scene at the grave, that yorick has been dead a dozen years; but in the quarto, which was printed in the following year, yorick is stated to have been dead twenty-three years. this corrected number, twenty-three, looks therefore like a real date of the death of a real person. the words in the quarto of are as follows:-- hamlet, act v, scene i. "[grave digger called.] clow[n] ... heer's a scull now hath lyen you i' th' earth yeeres ... this same scull, sir, was, sir, yorick's skull, the kings jester ... _ham_[_let_]. alas poore _yoricke_, i knew him _horatio_, a fellow of infinite iest, of most excellent fancie, hee hath bore me on his backe a thousand times ... heere hung those lyppes that i haue kist, i know not howe oft, where be your gibes now? your gamboles, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roare, not one now to mocke your owne grinning...." the king's jester who died about - , just twenty-three years before (as stated in the play), was john heywood, the last of the king's jesters. the words spoken by hamlet exactly describe john heywood, who was wont to set the table in a roar with his jibes, his gambols, his songs, and his flashes of merriment. he was a favourite at the english court during three if not four reigns, and it is recorded that queen elizabeth as a princess rewarded him. it is an absolutely gratuitous assumption that he was obliged permanently to leave england when she became queen. indeed it is believed that he was an intimate friend of the bacon family, and must have carried little francis bacon any number of times upon his back, and the little fellow must have kissed him still more oftentimes. the story in the play of "hamlet" seems, therefore, to fit in exactly with the facts of bacon's life; but it is not possible that the most fertile imagination of the most confirmed stratfordian can suppose that the stratford actor ever saw john heywood, who died long before shakspere came to london. chapter viii. the author revealed in the sonnets. bacon also reveals much of himself in the play "as you like it," which of course means "wisdom from the mouth of a fool." in that play, besides giving us much valuable information concerning his "mask" william shakespeare, he also tells us why it was necessary for him to write under a pseudonym. speaking in the character of jaques, who is the alter ego of touchstone, he says, act ii, scene . "o that i were a foole, i am ambitious for a motley coat. _duke_. thou shalt haue one. _jag_. it is my onely suite, prouided that you weed your better judgements of all opinion that growes ranke in them, that i am wise. i must haue liberty wiithall, as large a charter as the winde, to blow on whom i please, for so fooles haue: and they that are most gauled with my folly, they most must laugh.... inuest me in my motley: giue me leaue to speake my minde, and i will through and through cleanse the foule bodie of th' infected world if they will patiently receiue my medicine." he also gives us most valuable information in sonnet . or i shall liue your epitaph to make, or you suruiue when i in earth am rotten, from hence your memory death cannot take, although in me each part will be forgotten, your name from hence immortall life shall haue, though i (once gone) to all the world must dye, the earth can yeeld me but a common graue, when you intombed in men's eyes shall lye, your monument shall be my gentle verse, which eyes not yet created shall ore read, and toungs to be, your being shall rehearse, when all the breathers of this world are dead, you still shall liue (such vertue hath my pen) where breath most breaths euen in the mouths of men. stratfordians tell us that the above is written in reference to a poet whom shakespeare "evidently" regarded as a rival. but it is difficult to imagine how sensible men can satisfy their reason with such an explanation. is it possible to conceive that a poet should write _against a rival_ "your name from hence immortall life shall haue though i (once gone) to all the world must dye" or should say _against_ a _rival_, "the earth can yeeld me but a common graue while you intombed in men's eyes shall lye." or should have declared "_against_ a _rival_," "your monument shall be my gentle verse" no! this sonnet is evidently written in reference to the writer's mask or pseudonym which would continue to have immortal life (even though he himself might be forgotten) as he says "although in me each part will be forgotten." it is sometimes said that shakespeare (meaning the stratford actor) did not know the value of his immortal works. is that true of the writer of this sonnet who says "my gentle verse which eyes not yet created shall ore read" no! the writer knew his verses were immortal and would immortalize the pseudonym attached to them "when all the breathers of this world are dead." perhaps the reader will better understand sonnet if i insert the words necessary to fully explain it. or shall i [bacon] live your epitaph to make, or you [shakespeare] survive when i in earth am rotten, from hence your memory death cannot take, although in me each part will be forgotten. your name [shakespeare] from hence immortal life shall have, though i [bacon] once gone to all the world must die, the earth can yield me but a common grave, when you entombed in men's eyes shall lie, your monument shall be my [not your] gentle verse, which eyes not yet created shall ore read, and tongues to be your being [which as an author was not] shall rehearse, when all the breathers of this world are dead, you [shakespeare] still shall live, such vertue hath my pen [not your own pen, for you never wrote a line] where breathe most breaths even in the mouths of men. this sonnet was probably written considerably earlier than , but at that date bacon's name had not been attached to any work of great literary importance. after the writer had learned the true meaning of sonnet , his eyes were opened to the inward meaning of other sonnets, and he perceived that sonnet no. repeated the same tale. "why write i still all one, euer the same, and keep inuention in a noted weed, that euery word doth almost sel my name, shewing their birth and where they did proceed?" (sel may mean spell or tell or possibly betray.) especially note that "invention" is the same word that is used by bacon in his letter to sir tobie matthew of (same date as the sonnets), and also especially remark the phrase "in a noted weed," which means in a "pseudonym," and compare it with the words of bacon's prayer, "i have (though in a 'despised weed') procured the good of all men." [resuscitatio, .] was not the pseudonym of the actor shakespeare a very "despised weed" in those days? let us look also at sonnet no. . "so oft have i enuoked thee for my muse, and found such faire assistance in my verse, as every _alien_ pen hath got my use, and under thee their poesy disperse." here again we should understand how to read this sonnet as under:-- "so oft have i enuoked thee [shakespeare] for my muse, and found such faire assistance in my verse, as every _alien_ pen hath got my use, and under thee [shakespeare] their poesy disperse." "shakespeare" is frequently charged with being careless of his works and indifferent to the piracy of his name; but we see by this sonnet, no. , that the real author was not indifferent to the false use of his pseudonym, though it was, of course, impossible for him to take any effectual action if he desired to preserve his incognito, his mask, his pseudonym. chapter ix. mr. sidney lee and the stratford bust. one word to the stratfordians. the "shakespeare of stratford-on-avon" myth has been shattered and destroyed by the mass of inexactitudes collected in the supposititious "life of shakespeare" by mr. sidney lee, who has done his best to pulverise what remained of that myth by recently writing as follows:-- "most of those who have pressed the question [of bacon being the real shake-speare] on my notice, are men of acknowledged intelligence and reputation in their own branch of life, both at home and abroad. i therefore desire as respectfully, but also as emphatically and as publicly, as i can, to put on record the fact, as one admitting to my mind of no rational ground for dispute, that there exists every manner of contemporary evidence to prove that shakspere, the householder of stratford-on-avon, wrote with his own hand, and exclusively by the light of his only genius (merely to paraphrase the contemporary inscription on his tomb in stratford-on-avon church) those dramatic works which form the supreme achievement in english literature." as a matter of fact, not a single scrap of evidence, contemporary or otherwise, exists to show that shakspere, the householder of stratford-on-avon, wrote the plays or anything else; indeed, the writer thinks that he has conclusively proved that this child of illiterate parents and father of an illiterate child was himself so illiterate that he was never able to write so much as his own name. but mr. sidney lee seems prepared to accept _anything_ as "contemporary evidence," for on pages - ( edition) of his "life of shakespeare" he writes "before an elaborate monument, by a london sculptor of dutch birth, gerard johnson, was erected to shakespeare's memory in the chancel of the parish church. it includes a half-length bust, depicting the dramatist on the point of writing. the fingers of the right hand are disposed as if holding a pen, and under the left hand lies a quarto sheet of paper." as a matter of fact, the _present_ stratford monument was not put up till about one hundred and twenty years _after_ shakspeare's death. the original monument, see plate on page , was a very different monument, and the figure, as i have shewn in plate , instead of holding a pen in its hand, rests its two hands on a wool-sack or cushion. of course, the false bust in the existing monument was substituted for the old bust for the purpose of fraudulently supporting the stratford myth. when mr. sidney lee wrote that the present monument was erected before he did not do this consciously to deceive the public; still, it is difficult to pardon him for this and the other reckless statements with which his book is filled. but what are we to say of his words (respecting the _present_ monument) which we read on page ? "it was first engraved--very imperfectly--in rowe's edition of ." an exact full size photo facsimile reproduction of rowe's engraving is shown in plate , page . [illustration: plate. xix. the original stratford monument, from rowe's life of shakespeare, ] as a matter of fact, the real stratford monument of was first engraved in dugdale's "warwickshire" of , where it appears opposite to page . we can, however, pardon mr. sidney lee for his ignorance of the existence of that engraving; but how shall we pardon him for citing rowe as a witness to the early existence of the present bust? to anyone not wilfully blinded by passion and prejudice, rowe's engraving [see plate , page ] clearly shews a figure absolutely different from the bust in the present monument. rowe's figure is in the same attitude as the bust of the original monument engraved by dugdale, and does not hold a pen in its hand, but its two hands are supported on a wool-sack or cushion, in the same manner as in the bust from dugdale which i have shewn in plate , on page . what are we to say respecting the frontispiece to the edition of what he is pleased to describe as the "life of william shakespeare," which mr. sidney lee tells us is "from the 'droeshout' painting now in the shakespeare memorial gallery at stratford-on-avon"? as a matter of fact there is no "droeshout" painting. the picture falsely so called is a manifest forgery and a palpable fraud, for in it all the revealing marks of the engraving by martin droeshout which appeared in the folio are purposely omitted. a full size photo facsimile of martin droeshout's engraving is shewn in plate , pp. - . in the false and fraudulent painting we find no double line to shew the mask, and the coat is really a coat and not a garment cunningly composed of two left arms. still it does seem singularly appropriate and peculiarly fitting that mr. sidney lee should have selected as the frontispiece of the romance which he calls the "life" of shakespeare, an engraving of the false and fraudulent painting now in the stratford-on-avon gallery for his first edition of ; and should also have selected an engraving of the false and fraudulent monument now in stratford-on-avon church as the frontispiece for his first illustrated library edition of . mr. sidney lee is aware of the fact that martin droeshout was only fifteen years old when the stratford actor died. but it is possible that he may not know that (in addition to the shakespeare mask which droeshout drew for the frontispiece of the folio edition of the plays of shakespeare, in order to reveal, to those who were able to understand, the true facts of the authorship of those plays), martin droeshout also drew frontispieces for other books, which may be similarly correctly characterised as cunningly composed, in order to reveal the true facts of the authorship of such works, unto those who were capable of grasping the hidden meaning of his engravings. one other point it is worth while referring to. the question is frequently asked, if bacon wrote under the name of shakespeare, why so carefully conceal the fact? an answer is readily supplied by a little anecdote related by ben jonson, which was printed by the shakespeare society in , in their "notes of ben jonson's conversations with william drummond of hawthornden". "he [ben jonson] was dilated by sir james murray to the king, for writting something against the scots, in a play eastward hoe, and voluntarly imprissonned himself with chapman and marston who had written it amongst them. the report was that they should then [have] had their ears cut and noses. after their delivery, he banqueted all his friends; there was camden, selden, and others; at the midst of the feast his old mother dranke to him, and shew him a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prisson among his drinke, which was full of lustie strong poison, and that she was no churle, she told, she was minded first to have drunk of it herself." this was in , and it is a strange and grim illustration of the dangers that beset men in the highway of letters. it was necessary for bacon to write under pseudonyms to conceal his identity, but he intended that at some time posterity should do him justice and it was for this purpose that, among the numerous clues he supplied to reveal himself he wrote "the tempest" in its present form, which emile montegut writing in the _revue des deux mondes_ in declared to be the author's literary testament. the island is the stage. prospero the prime duke, the great magician, represents the mighty author who says "my brother ... called anthonio who next thyself of all the world i lov'd" ... "graves at my command have wak'd their sleepers op'd and let them forth by my so potent art" ... "and deeper than ever plummet sound he drown my booke." yet he does not forget finally to add "i do ... require my dukedome of thee, which perforce i know thou must restore." the falsely crowned and gilded king of the island who had stolen the wine (the poetry) "where should they find this grand liquor that hath gilded them" and whose name is stephanos (greek for crown) throws off at the close of the play, his false crown while caliban says "what a thrice double asse was i to take this drunkard for a god." the mighty magician prospero says "knowing i lov'd my bookes, he furnished me from mine own library, with volumes, that i prize above my dukedome." bacon when he was dismissed from his high offices, devoted himself to his books. not a book of any kind was found at new place, stratford. bacon's brother "whom next himself he loved" was called anthony. "gentle" shakespeare of stratford died from the effects of a "drunken" bout! it does matter whether it is thought that the immortal works were written by the sordid money-lender of stratford, the "swine without a head, without braine, wit, anything indeed, ramping to gentilitie"; or were written by him who was himself the "greatest birth of time"; the man pre-eminently distinguished amongst the sons of earth; the man who in order to "do good to all mankind," disguised his personality "in a despised weed," and wrote under the name of william shakespeare. it does matter, and england is now declining any longer to _dishonour_ and _defame_ the greatest genius of all time by continuing to identify him with the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutely unlettered, rustic of stratford who never in his life wrote so much as his own name and in all probability was totally unable to read one single line of print. the hour has come for revealing the truth. the hour has come when it is no longer necessary or desirable that the world should remain in ignorance that the great author of shakespeare's plays was himself alive when the folio was published in . the hour has come when all should know that this the greatest book produced by man was given to the world more carefully edited by its author as to every word in every column, as to every italic in every column, as to every apparent misprint in every column, than any book had ever before been edited, and more exactly printed than there seems any reasonable probability that any book will ever again be printed that may be issued in the future. the hour has come when it is desirable and necessary to state with the utmost distinctness that bacon is shakespeare. [illustration: plate xx. reduced facsimile of page of the shakespeare folio, ] [illustration: plate xxi. portion of page , full size, as in the shakespeare folio ] chapter x bacon is shakespeare. proved mechanically in a short chapter on the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus. the long word found in "loves labour's lost" was not created by the author of shakespeare's plays. mr. paget toynbee, writing in the _athenoeum_ (london weekly) of december nd , tells us the history of this long word. it is believed to have first appeared in the latin dictionary by uguccione, called "magnae derivationes," which was written before the invention of printing, in the latter half of the twelfth century and seems never to have been printed. excerpts from it were, however, included in the "catholicon" of giovanni da geneva, which was printed among the earliest of printed books (that is, it falls into the class of books known as "incunabula," so called because they belong to the "cradle of printing," the fifteenth century). in this "catholicon," which, though undated, was printed before a.d. , we read "ab _honorifico, hic_ et _hec honorificabilis,--le_ et --hec honororificabilitas,--tis_ et _hec honorificabilitudinitas_, et est longissima dictio, que illo versu continetur-- fulget honorificabilitudinitatibus iste." it is perhaps not without interest to call the reader's attention to the fact that "fulget hon|orifi |cabili|tudini|tatibus|iste" forms a neat latin hexameter. it will be found that the revelation derived from the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus is itself also in the form of a latin hexameter. the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus occurs in the quarto edition of "loues labor's lost," which is stated to be "newly corrected and augmented by w. shakespere." imprinted in london by w.w. for cutbert burby. . this is the very first play that bore the name w. shakespere, but so soon as he had attached the name w. shakespere to that play, the great author francis bacon caused to be issued almost immediately a book attributed to francis meres which is called "palladis tamia, wits treasury" and is stated to be printed by p. short for cuthbert burbie, . this is the same publisher as the publisher of the quarto of "loues labor's lost" although both the christian name and the surname are differently spelled. this little book "palladis tamia, wits treasury" tells us on page , "as plautus and seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the latines, so shakespeare among ye english, is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his gentlemen of verona, his errors, his love labors lost, his love labours wonne, his midsummers night dreame, and his merchant of venice: for tragedy, his richard the , richard the , henry the , king john, titus andronicus, and his romeo and juliet." here we are distinctly told that eleven other plays are also shakespeare's work although only loues labors lost at that time bore his name. we refer on page to the reason why it had become absolutely necessary for the author to affix a false name to all these twelve plays. for our present purpose it is sufficient to point out that on the very first occasion when the name w. shakespere was attached to any play, viz., to the play called "loues labor's lost," the author took pains to insert a revelation that would enable him to claim his own when the proper time should arrive. accordingly he prepared the page which is found f (the little book is not paged) in the quarto of "loues labor's lost" which was published in . a photo-facsimile of the page is shewn, page , plate . so far as is known there never was any other edition printed until the play appeared in the folio of under the name of "loues labour's lost," and we put before the reader a reduced facsimile of the whole page of the folio, on which the long word occurs, page , plate , and we give also an exact full size photo reproduction of a portion of the first column of that page. page , plate . on comparing the page of the quarto with that of the folio, it will be seen that the folio page commences with the same word as does the quarto and that each and every word, and each and every italic in the folio is exactly reproduced from the quarto excepting that alms-basket in the folio is printed with a hyphen to make it into two words. a hyphen is also inserted in the long word as it extends over one line to the next. the only other change is that the lines are a little differently arranged. these slight differences are by no means accidental, because alms-basket is hyphened to count as two words and thereby cause the long word to be the st word. this is exceedingly important and it was only by a misprint in the quarto that it incorrectly appears there as the th word. by the rearrangement of the lines, the long word appears on the th line, and the line, "what is a.b. speld backward with the horn on his head" appears as it should do on the rd line. at the time the quarto was issued, when the trouble was to get shakespere's name attached to the plays, these slight printer's errors in the quarto--for they are printer's errors--were of small consequence, but when the play was reprinted in the folio of all these little blemishes were most carefully corrected. the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus is found in "loues labour's lost" not far from the commencement of the fifth act, which is called actus quartus in the folio, and on page , plate , is given a full size photo facsimile from the folio, of that portion of page , in which the word occurs in the th line. on lines , occurs the phrase, "bome boon for boon prescian, a little scratcht, 'twil serve." i do not know that hitherto any rational explanation has been given of the reason why this reference to the pedantic grammarian "priscian" is there inserted. the mention of priscian's name can have no possible reference to anything apparent in the text, but it refers solely and entirely to the phrase which is to be formed by the transposition of the twenty-seven letters contained in the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus; and it was absolutely impossible that the citation of priscian could ever have been understood before the sentence containing the information which is of the most important description had been "revealed." we say "revealed" because the riddle could never have been "guessed." the "revealed" and "all revealing" sentence forms a correct latin hexameter, and we will proceed to prove that it is without possibility of doubt or question the real solution which the "author" intended to be known at some future time, when he placed the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus, which is composed of twenty-seven letters, on the twenty-seventh line of page , where it appears as the st word printed in ordinary type. the all-important statement which reveals the authorship of the plays in the most clear and direct manner (every one of the twenty-seven letters composing the long word being employed and no others) is in the form of a correct latin hexameter, which reads as follows-- hi ludi f. baconis nati tuiti orbi these plays f. bacon's offspring are preserved for the world. this verse will scan as a spondaic hexameter as under hi lu |di f | baco | nis na | ti tui | ti orbi hi one long syllable meaning "these." ludi two long syllables meaning "stage plays," and especially "stage plays" in contradistinction to "circus games." (suetonius hist: julius caes: . venationes autem ludosque et cum collega et separatim edidit). f, one long syllable. now for the first time can the world be informed why the sneer "bome boon for boon prescian, a little scratcht, 'twil serve" was inserted on lines , , page of the folio of . priscian declares that f was a mute and bacon mocks him for so doing. ausonius while giving the pronunciation of most letters of the alphabet does not afford us any information respecting the sound of f, but quintilian xii. , s. , describes the pronunciation of the roman f. some scholars understand him as indicating that the roman f had rather a rougher sound than the english f. others agree with dr. h.j. roby, and are of opinion that quintilian means that the roman f was "blown out between the intervals of the teeth with no sound of voice." (see roby's grammar of the latin language, , xxxvi.) but dr. a. bos in his "petit traite de prononciation latine," , asserts that the old latin manner of pronouncing f was effe. even if dr. a. bos is correct it is not at all likely that effe was a dissyllable, but most probably it would be sounded very nearly like the greek "[greek: phi]," that is as "pfe." in any case (even if it were a dissyllable) f would, with the di of ludi, form two long syllables and scan as a spondee. the use of single consonants to form long or short syllables was very common among the romans, but such appear mostly in lines impossible to quote. but the great author was well acquainted with such instances, and in this same page , in lines , , , he gives an example, shewing that the letter "b," although silent in debt, becomes, when debt is spelled, one of the four full words--d e b t, each of which has to be counted to make up the number " ."[ ] this, which is an example of the great value and importance of what, in many of the plays, appears to be merely "silly talk" affords a strong additional evidence of the correctness of the "revealed" and "revealing" sentence which we shew was intended by the author to be constructed out of the long word. bacon therefore was amply justified in making use of f as a long syllable to form the second half of a spondee. baconis three long syllables, the final syllable being long by position. pedantic grammarians might argue that natus being a participle ought not to govern a genitive case, but should be followed by a preposition with the ablative case, and that we ought to say "e bacone nati" or "de bacone nati." other pedants have declared that natus is properly, i.e., classically, said of the mother only, although in low latin, such as the vulgate, we find john v. , "natos dei," "born of god." but the author of the plays, who instead of having "small latin and less greek" knew "_all_ latin and very much greek," was well aware that vergil, aeneid i. (or when the four additional lines are inserted at the beginning) gives us "maxima natarum priami," "greatest of the daughters of priam," and in aeneid ii. "unus natorum priami," "one of the sons of priam." there exists therefore the highest classical authority for the use of "nati" in the sense of "sons" or "offspring" governing a genitive case. "f. baconis nati," "francis bacon's offspring," is therefore absolutely and classically correct. nati two long syllables. a noun substantive meaning as shewn above "sons" or "offspring." tuiti two short syllables and one long syllable, which last is elided and disappears before the "o" of orbi. tuiti which is the same word as tuti is a passive past participle meaning saved or preserved. it is derived from tueor, which is generally used as a deponent or reflexive verb, but tueor is used by varro and the legal writers as a passive verb. orbi two long syllables. the word orbi may be either the plural nominative of orbus meaning "deprived" "orphaned," or it may be the dative singular of orbis meaning "for the world." both translations make good sense because the plays are "preserved for the world" and are "preserved orphaned." the present writer prefers the translation "for the world," indeed he thinks that to most classical scholars "tuiti orbi," "preserved discarded," looks almost like a contradiction in terms. note on honorficabilitudinitatibus baconis.--on page is shewn a photogravure of the title page of bacon's "de augmentis," , which is in fact a pictorial representation of an anagram "hi ludi f. baconis nati tuiti orbi." on this title page we find "baconis" used as the genitive of bacon's name in latin. baconis is also found in xiii th century manuscript copies of roger bacon's works, where the title reads "opus minus fratris rogeri baconis," and in there was published in ° at frankfurt "rogeri baconis ... de arte chymiae." tuiti.--pedanticgrammarians such as priscian whom the author mocks at in the line "bome boom for boon precian, a little scratcht, 'twil serve," falsely tel us that there is a passive verb "tueor" with a past participle "tutus." as a matter of fact it is the same verb "tueor" that is used both as a passive and as a deponent, and "tutus" or "tuitus" may be used indifferently at the pleasure of the writer. sallust uses "tutus," not "tuitus," as the past participle of the deponent verb. opposite to the next page is shewn a type transcript of the cover or outside page of a collection of manuscripts in the possession of the duke of northumberland, which were discovered in at northumberland house. three years later, viz., in , james spedding published a thin little volume entituled "a conference of pleasure," in which he gave a full size facsimile of the original of the outside page which is here shewn in _reduced type_ facsimile. he also gave a few particulars of the mss. themselves. in mr. frank j. burgoyne brought out a collotype facsimile of every page that now remains of the collection of mss. in an edition limited to copies i a fine royal quarto at the price of £ s. d. o f the mss. mentioned on the cover nine now remain, and of these, six are certainly by francis bacon; the first being written by him for a masque or "fanciful devise" which mr. spedding thinks was presented at the court of elizabeth in . the list of contents was written upon this outside page about , and among those original contents which are now missing were richard ii. and richard iii. mr. spedding was satisfied that these were the so-called skakespearean plays. there are also the tiles of various other works to which it is not now necessary to allude, but the reader's attention should be especially directed to the (so-called) scribblings. mr. spedding says: "i find nothing either in these later scribblings or in what remains of the book itself to indicate a date later than the reign of elizabeth." the "scribblings" are therefore written by a contemporary hand. for the purpose of reference i have placed the letters _a, b, c, d, e_, outside of the facsimile. (_a_) "honorificabilitudine." this curious long word when taken in conjunction with the words "your william shakespeare." which are also found upon this page, appears to have some reference to the same curious long word which is found in the ablative plural in "loves labour's lost," which appeared i , and was the play to which shakespeare's name was for the first time attached, and, as i shew, in chapter x., p. , it was placed there in order to give with absolute certainty a key to the real authorship. (_b_) "by mr ffrauncis william shakespeare baco"--with ffrauncis written upside down over it and your/yourself written upside down at the commencement of the line. baco would require baconis as its genitive. (_c_) "revealing day through every crany peepes." we think that this is an accurate statement of the revelations here afforded. [illustration: modern script facsimile of ms folio _reduced to about one-third the size of the original_] (_d_) your "william shakespeare." almost directly above this your appears also william shakespeare. [illustration: full-size facsimile of written ornament on outside page of northumberland mss.] [illustration: full-size facsimile of written ornament in "les tenure de monsieur littleton." annotate by francic bacon.] (_e_) the three curious scrolles at the top right-hand corner are very similar to the scrolls which are found upon the title page of a law book entitled, "les tenures de monsieur littleton," printed in , in the possession of the writer, which is throughout noted in what the authorities at the british museum say is undoubtedly the handwriting of francis bacon. as i have pointed out upon page and upon various other pages in my book "upside down" printing is a device continually employed by the authors of certain books in order to afford revelations concerning bacon and shakespeare. as a whole this curious scribbled page affords remarkable evidence that william shakespeare is "yourself" francis bacon. now and now only can a reasonable explanation be given for the first time of the purpose of the reference to priscian, in lines and , plate , page . and it is a singular circumstance that so far as the writer is aware not one of the critics has perceived that the mockery of priscian forms a neat english iambic hexameter, indeed, in almost all modern editions of the shakespeare plays, both the form and the meaning of the line have been utterly destroyed. in the original the line reads "bome boon for boon prescian, a little scracht, 'twil serve." perhaps the reader will be enabled better to understand the sneer and the mockery by reading the following couplet-- a fig for old priscián, a little scrátcht, 'twil serve a poet súrely need not áll his rúles observe. and we still more perfectly understand the purpose of the hexameter form of the reference to priscian if we scan the line side by side with the "revealed" interpretation of the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus. bome boon | for boon | prescian | a lit | tle scratcht | 'twil serve hi lu | di f | baco | nis na | ti tui | ti orbi these plays f bacon's offspring are preserved for the world. this explanation of the real meaning to be derived from the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus seems to be so convincing as scarcely to require further proof. but the author of the plays intended when the time had fully come for him to claim his own that there should not be any possibility of cavil or doubt. he therefore so arranged the plays and the acts of the plays in the folio of that the long word should appear upon the th page, be the st word thereon, should fall on the th line and that the interpretation should indicate the numbers and , thus forming a mechanical proof so positive that it can neither be misconstrued nor explained away, a mechanical proof that provides an evidence which absolutely compels belief. the writer desires especially to bring home to the reader the manifest fact that the revealed and revealing sentence must have been constructed before the play of "loues labor's lost" first appeared in , and that when the plays were printed in their present form in the folio the scenes and the acts of the preceding plays and the printing of the columns in all those plays as well as in the play of "loues labour's lost" required to be arranged with extraordinary skill in order that the revealing page in the folio should commence with the first word of the revealing page in the original quarto of , and that that page should form the th page of the folio, so that the long word "honorificabilitudinitatibus" should appear on page , be the st word, and fall upon the th line. bacon tells us that there are letters in the alphabet (_i_ and _j_ being deemed to be forms of the same letter, as are also _u_ and _v_). bacon was himself accustomed frequently to use the letters of the alphabet as numerals (the greeks similarly used letters for numerals). thus a is , b is ... y is , z is . let us take as an example bacon's own name--b= , a= , c= , o= , n=i ; all these added together make the number , a number about which it is possible to say a good deal.[ ] we now put the numerical value to each of the letters that form the long word, and we shall find that their total amounts to the number , thus: h o n o r i f i c a b i l i t u d i n i t a t i b u s = from a word containing so large a number of letters as twenty-seven it is evident that we can construct very numerous words and phrases; but i think it "surpasses the wit of man" to construct any "sentence" other than the "revealed sentence," which by its construction shall reveal not only the number of the page on which it appears--which is --but shall also reveal the fact that the long word shall be the st word printed in ordinary type counting from the first word. on one side of the facsimile reproduction of part of page of the folio, numbers are placed shewing that the long word is on the th line, which was a skilfully purposed arrangement, because there are letters in the word. there is also another set of numbers at the other side of the facsimile page which shews that, counting from the first word, the long word is the st word. how is it possible that the revealing sentence, "hi ludi f. baconis nati tuiti orbi," can tell us that the page is and the position of the long word is the st word? the answer is simple. the numerical value of the initial letters and of the terminal letters of the revealed sentence, when added together, give us , the number of the page, while the numerical value of all the other letters amount to the number , which is the number of words necessary to find the position of the long word "honorificabilitudinitatibus," which is the st word on page , counting those printed in ordinary type, the italic words being of course omitted. the solution is as follows hi ludi f baconis nati tuiti orbi the initial letters of which are h l f b n t o their numerical values being = total and the terminal letters are i i s i i i their numerical values being = total __ adding this to we get while the intermediate letters are u d a c o n i a t u i t r b their numerical values being = ___ total the reader thus sees that it is a fact that in the "revealed" sentence the sum of the numerical values of the initial letters, when added to the sum of the numerical values of the terminal letters, do, with mathematical certainty produce , the number of the page in the first folio, which is , and that the sum of the numerical values of the intermediate letters amounts to , which gives the position of the long word on that page, which is the st word in ordinary type. these two sums of and , when added together, give , which is the sum of the numerical value of all the letters of the long word "honorificabilitudinitatibus," which, as we saw on page , amounted to the same total, . as a further evidence of the marvellous manner in which the author had arranged the whole plan, the long word of letters is placed on the th line. can anyone be found who will pretend to produce from the letters which form the word "honorificabilitudinitatibus" another sentence which shall also tell the number of the page, , and that the position of the long word on the page is the st word? i repeat that to do this "surpasses the wit of man," and that therefore the true solution of the meaning of the long word "honorificabilitudinitatibus," about which so much nonsense has been written, is without possibility of doubt or question to be found by arranging the letters to form the latin hexameter. hi ludi f. baconis nati tuiti orbi these plays f. bacon's offspring are preserved for the world. it is not possible to afford a clearer mechanical proof that the shakespeare plays are bacon's offspring. it is not possible to make a clearer and more definite statement that bacon is the author of the plays. it is not possible that any doubt can any longer be entertained respecting the manifest fact that bacon is shakespeare. chapter xi. on the revealing page in "loves labour's lost." in the previous chapter it was pointed out that using letters for numbers, bacon's name is represented by . b a c o n . = and that the long word possesses the numerical value of . h o n o r i f i c a b i l i t u d i n i t a t i b u s = in the shakespeare folio, page , shewn in plate and plate , on pages - , on line , we read "what is ab speld backward with the horn on his head?" the answer which is given is evidently an incorrect answer, it is "ba, puericia with a horne added," and the boy mocks him with "ba most seely sheepe, with a horne: you heare his learning." the reply should of course have been in latin. the latin for a horn is cornu. the real answer therefore is "ba corn-u fool." this is the exact answer you might expect to find on the line , since the number indicates bacon's name. and now, and now only, can be explained the very frequent use of the ornament representing a horned sheep, inside and outside "baconian" books, under whatever name they may be known. an example will be found at the head of the present chapter on page . the uninitiated are still "informed" or rather "misinformed" that this ornament alludes to the celebrated golden fleece of the argonauts and they little suspect that they have been purposely fooled, and that the real reference is to bacon. it should be noted here that in the quarto of "loues labor's lost," see plate , page , if the heading "loues labor's lost" be counted as a line, we read on the rd line: "ba most seely sheepe with a horne: you heare his learning." this would direct you to a reference to bacon, although not so perfectly as the final arrangement in the folio of . proceeding with the other lines in the page, we read:-- "quis quis, thou consonant?" this means "who, who"? [which bacon] because in order to make the revelation complete we must be told that it is "francis" bacon, so as to leave no ambiguity or possibility of mistake. how then is it possible that we can be told that it is francis bacon? we read in answer to the question: [illustration: plate xxii. facsimile from "loues labor lost," first edition ] "quis quis, thou consonant? the last of five vowels if you repeat them, the fifth if i. i will repeat them a, e, i. the sheepe, the other two concludes it o, u." now here we are told that a, e, i, o, u is the answer to quis quis, and we must note that the i is a capital letter. therefore a is followed by e, but i being a capital letter does not follow e but starts afresh, and we must read i followed by o, and o followed by u. [illustration: plate xxiii. facsimile of a contemporary copy of a letter of francis bacon.] is it possible that these vowels will give us the christian name of bacon? can it be that we are told on what page to look? the answer to both these questions is the affirmative "yes." the great folio of shakespeare was published in , and in the following year, , there was brought out a great cryptographic book by the "man in the moon." we shall speak about this work presently; suffice for the moment to say that this book was issued as the key to the shakespeare folio of . if we turn to page in the cryptographic book we shall find chapter xiv. "de transpositione obliqua, per dispositionem alphabeti." [illustration: plate xxiv. facsimiles from page of "gu tavi seleni cryptomenytices," published . [the square table is much enlarged].] this chapter describes how, by means of square tables, one letter followed by another letter will give the cypher letter. on the present page appears the square, which is shown in plate , which enables us to answer the question "quis quis." by means of this square we perceive that "a" followed by "e" gives us the letter f, that "i" followed by "o" gives us the letter r, and that "o" followed by "u" gives us the letter a. the answer therefore to quis quis (which bacon do you mean) is fra [bacon]. _see_ plate , page . [illustration: plate xxv. facsimile from page o b of "traicte des chiffres ou secretes manieres d'escrire," par vlgen�re.] but what should induce us to look at this particular chapter on page of the cryptographic book for the solution? the answer is clearly given in the wonderful page of the folio of shakespeare. as has been pointed out the numerical value of the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus is , and the numerical value of bacon is . we have found bacon from ba with a horn, and we require the remainder of his name, accordingly deduct from , and we get the answer which is the number of the required page in the cryptographic book of . but the wise author knew that someone would say "how does this apply to the quarto published twenty-six years before the great cryptographic book appeared?" on plate , page , taken from page of the cryptographic book of , it is shewn that the following lines are attached to the square "quarta tabula, ex vigenerio, pag. .b, etc." =square table taken from vigenerio, page .b. this reference is to the work entitled, "traicte des chiffres ou secretes manieres d'escrire": par blaise de vigenere, which was published in paris in . spedding states (vol. i. of "bacon's letters and life," p. - ) that francis bacon went in to france, with sir amias paulet, the english ambassador. bacon remained in france until - , and when in he published his "de augmentis scientiarum"--(the advancement of learning) he tells us that while in paris he invented his own method of secret writing. _see_ spedding's "works of bacon," vol. , p. . the system which bacon then invented is now known as the biliteral cypher, and it is in fact practically the same as that which is universally employed in telegraphy under the name of the morse code. a copy of vigenere's book will be found in the present writer's baconian library, for he knew by the ornaments and by the other marks that bacon must have had a hand in its production. anyone, therefore, reading the quarto edition of "loues labor's lost," , and putting _two_ and _two_ together will find on p. .b of vigenere's book, the table, of which a facsimile is here given, plate , page . this square is even more clear than the square table in the great cryptographic book. thus, upon the same page in the folio, or on f. in the quarto, in addition to honorificabilitudinitatibus containing the revealing sentence "hi ludi f baconis nati tuiti orbi"--"these plays f bacon's offspring are entrusted to the world," we see that we are able to discover on line the name of bacon, and by means of the lines which follow that it is fra. bacon who is referred to. before parting with this subject we will give one or two examples to indicate how often the number is employed to indicate bacon. we have just shewn that on page of the folio we obtain bacon's name on line . on page we refer to ben jonson's "every man out of his humour." in an extremely rare early quarto [_circa_ ] of that play some unknown hand has numbered the pages referring to sogliardo (shakespeare) and puntarvolo (bacon) and repeated. incorrect pagination is a common method used in "revealing" books to call attention to some statements, and anyone can perceive that the second is really and as usual reveals something about bacon. on page we point out that on page of the little book called "the great assizes holden in parnassus" apollo speaks. as the king speaks in a law court only through the mouth of his high chancellor so apollo speaks in the supposititious law action through the mouth of his chancellor of parnassus, who is lord verulam, i.e. bacon. thus again bacon is found on page . the writer could give very numerous examples, but these three which occur incidentally will give some idea how frequently the number is used to indicate bacon.[ ] the whole page of the folio is cryptographic, but we will not now proceed to consider any other matters contained upon it, but pass on to discuss the great cryptographic book which was issued under bacon's instructions in the year following the publication of the great folio of shakespeare. before, however, speaking of the book, we must refer to the enormous pains always taken to provide traps for the uninitiated. if you go to lunaeburg, where the cryptographic book was published, you will be referred to the library at wolfenbuttel and to a series of letters to be found there which contain instructions to the engraver which seem to prove that this book has no possible reference to shakespeare. we say, seem to prove, for the writer possesses accurate photographs of all these letters and they really prove exactly the reverse, for they are, to those capable of understanding them, cunningly devised false clues, quite clear and plain. that these letters are snares for the uninitiated, the writer, who possesses a "baconian" library, could easily prove to any competent scholar. [illustration: _surnames_. plate xxvi.] before referring to the wonderful title page of the cryptographic book which reveals the bacon-shakespeare story, it is necessary to direct the reader's attention to camden's "remains," published . we may conclude that bacon had a hand in the production of this book, since spedding's "bacon's works," vol. , p. , and letters, vol. , p. , informs us that bacon assisted camden with his "annales." in camden's "remains," , the chapter on surnames, p. , commences with an ornamental headline like the head of chapter , p. , but printed "_upside down_." a facsimile of the heading in camden's book is shewn in plate , page . this trick of the upside down printing of ornaments and even of engravings is continually resorted to when some revelation concerning bacon's works is given. therefore in camden's "remains" of in the chapter on surnames, because the head ornament is printed upside down, we may be perfectly certain that we shall find some revelation concerning bacon and shakespeare. accordingly on p. we find as the name of a village "bacon creping." there never was a village called "bacon creping." and on page we read "such names as shakespeare, shotbolt, wagstaffe." in referring to the great cryptographic book, we shall realise the importance of this conjunction of names. on plate , page , we give a reduced facsimile of the title page, which as the reader will see, states in latin that the work is by gustavus selenus, and contains systems of cryptographic writing, also methods of the shorthand of trithemius. the imprint at the end, under a very handsome example of the double a ornament which in various forms is used generally in books of baconian learning, states that it was published and printed at lunaeburg in . gustavus selenus we are told in the dedicatory poems prefixed to the work is "homo lunae" [the man in the moon]. [illustration: plate xxvii. facsimile title page.] [illustration: plate xxviii. left-handed portion, much enlarged, of plate xxviii.] [illustration: .--royal eagle. facsimile from p. of boutell's english heraldry, . if this is compared with the bird in plate xxviii. it will at once be seen that the later is an eagle in full flight.] [illustration: plate xxix. right-hand portion, much enlarged, of plate xxvii.] [illustration: plate xxx. top portion of plate xxvii., much enlarged.] [illustration: plate xxxi. bottom portion of plate xxvii., much enlarged.] look first at the whole title page; on the top is a tempest with flaming beacons, on the left (of the reader) is a gentleman giving something to a spearman, and there are also other figures; on the right is a man on horseback, and at the bottom in a square is a much dressed up man taking the "cap of maintenance" from a man writing a book. examine first the left-hand picture shewn enlarged, plate , page . you see a man, evidently bacon, giving his writing to a spearman who is dressed in actor's boots (see stothard's painting of falstaff in the "merry wives of windsor" wearing similar actor's boots, plate , page ). note that the spearman has a sprig of bay in the hat which he holds in his hand. this man is a shake-spear, nay he really is a correct portrait of the stratford householder, which you will readily perceive if you turn to dugdale's engraving of the shakespeare bust, plate , page . in the middle distance the man still holding a spear, still being a shake-speare, walks with a staff, he is therefore a wagstaffe. on his back are books--the books of the plays. in the sky is seen an arrow, no, it is not sufficiently long for an arrow, it is a shotbolt (shakespeare, wagstaffe, shotbolt, of camden's "remains"). this shotbolt is near to a bird which seems about to give to it the scroll it carries in its beak. but is it a real bird? no, it has no real claws, its feet are jove's lightnings, verily, "it is the eagle of great verse." next, look on plate , page , which is the picture on the right of the title page. here you see that the same shake-spear whom we saw in the left-hand picture is now riding on a courser. that he is the same man is shewn by the sprig of bay in his hat, but he is no longer a shake-spear, he is a shake-_spur_. note how much the artist has emphasised the drawing of the spur. it is made the one prominent thing in the whole picture. we refer our reader to "the returne from pernassus" (see pp. - ) where he will read, "england affordes those glorious vagabonds that carried earst their fardels on their backes coursers to ride on through the gazing streetes." now glance at the top picture on the title page (see plate , page ,) which is enlarged in plate , page . note that the picture is enclosed in the magic circle of the imagination, surrounded by the masks of tragedy, comedy, and farce (in the same way as stothard's picture of the "merry wives of windsor," plate , page ). [illustration: plate xxxii. scene from "the merry wives of windsor," painted by thomas stothard.] the engraving represents a tempest with beacon lights; no; it represents "the tempest" of shakespeare and tells you that the play is filled with bacon lights. (in the sixteenth century beacon was pronounced bacon. "bacon great beacon of the state.") we have already pointed out that "the tempest," as emile montegut shewed in the _revue des deux mondes_ in , is a mass of bacon's revelations concerning himself. at the bottom (see plate , page , and plate , page ), within the "four square corners of fact," surrounded with disguised masks of tragedy, comedy, and farce, is shewn the same man who gave the scroll to the spearman, see plate , page (note the pattern of his sleeves). he is now engaged in writing his book, while an actor, very much overdressed and wearing a mask something like the accepted mask of shakespeare, is lifting from the real writer's head a cap known in heraldry as the "cap of maintenance." again we refer to our quotation on page . "those glorious vagabonds.... sooping it in their glaring satten sutes." is not this masquerading fellow an actor "sooping it in his glaring satten sute"? the figure which we say represents bacon, see plate , wears his clothes as a gentleman. nobody could for a moment imagine that the masked creature in plate was properly wearing his own clothes. no, he is "sooping it in his glaring satten sute." the whole title page clearly shows that it is drawn to give a revelation about shakespeare, who might just as well have borne the name of shotbolt or of wagstaffe or of shakespur, see "the tempest," act v., scene i. "the strong bass'd promontorie have i made shake, and by the spurs pluckt up." there are also revealing title pages in other books, shewing a spear and an actor wearing a single spur only (see plate , page ). it will be of interest to shew another specially revealing title page, which for upwards of a hundred years remained unaltered as the title page to vol. i. of bacon's collected works, printed abroad in latin. a different engraving, representing the same scene was also published in france. these engravings, however, were never reproduced or used in england, because the time for revelation had not yet come. bacon is shewn seated (see plate , page ). compare his portrait with the engraving of the gentleman giving his scroll to the spearman in the gustavus silenus frontispiece, plate , page , and plate , page . bacon is pointing with his right hand in full light to his open book, while his left hand in deepest shadow is putting forward a figure holding in both its hands a closed and clasped book, which by the cross lines on its side (the accepted symbol of a mirror) shows that it represents the mirror up to nature, i.e., shakespeare's plays. specially note that bacon puts forward with his left hand the figure holding the book which is the mirror up to nature. in the former part of this treatise the writer has proved that the figure that forms the frontispiece of the great folio of shakespeare's plays, which is known as the droeshout portrait of wm. shakespeare, is really composed of two left arms and a mask. the reader will now be able to fully realise the revelation contained in droeshout's masked figure with its two left arms when he examines it with the title page shown, plate , page . [illustration: plate xxxiii. facsimile title page.] bacon is putting forward what we described as a "figure"; it is a "man" with false breasts to represent a woman (women were not permitted to act in bacon's time), and the man is clothed in a goat skin. tragedos was the greek word for a goat skin, and tragedies were so called because the actors were dressed in goat skins. this figure therefore represents the tragic muse. here in the book called _de augmentis scientiarum_, which formed one part of the great instauration, is placed an engraving to show that another part of the great instauration known as shakespeare's plays was issued left-handedly, that is, was issued under the name of a mean actor, the actor shakespeare. this title page is very revealing, and should be taken in conjunction with the title page of the cryptographic book which under the name of gustavus silenus, "_homo lunae_," the "man in the moon," was published in in order to form a key to certain cyphers in the folio of shakespeare's plays. these two title pages were prepared with consummate skill in order to reveal to the world, when the time was ripe, that bacon is shakespeare. chapter xii. the "householder of stratford." we have in chapter ii. printed mr. george hookham's list of the very few incidents recorded concerning shakespeare's life, but, as we have already shewn, a great deal of the "authentic history" of the stratford clown has in fact been revealed to us. ben jonson calls the stratford man who had purchased a coat of arms "sogliardo" (scum of the earth), says he was brother to sordido, the miser (shakspeare was a miser), describes him as an essential clown (that means that he was a rustic totally unable to read and write), shews that he speaks "i' th' straungest language," and calls heralds "harrots," and finally sums him up definitely as a "swine without a head, without braine, wit, anything indeed, ramping to gentilitie." in order that there should be no mistake as to the man who is referred to, "sogliardo's" motto is stated to be "not without mustard," shakespeare's motto being "not without right" (non sanz droict). ben jonson's account of the real stratford man is confirmed by shakespeare's play of "as you like it," where touchstone, the courtier playing clown, says, "it is meat and drinke to me to see a clowne" (meaning an essential clown, an uneducated rustic); yet he salutes him as "gentle," shewing that the mean fellow possesses a coat of arms. the clown is born in the forest of ardennes (shakespeare's mother's name was arden). he is rich, but only so-so rich, that is rich for a clowne (new place cost only £ ). he says he is wise, and touchstone mocks him with bacon's words, "the foole doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." he says he has "a prettie wit" (pretty wit is the regular orthodox phrase as applied to shakespeare). but when asked whether he is learned, he distinctly replies "no," which means that he says that he cannot read one line of print. a man who could read one line of print was at that period in the eye of the law "learned," and could not be hanged when convicted for the first time except for murder. if any persons be found to dispute the fact that the reply "no" to the question "art thou learned?" meant in queen elizabeth's day "i cannot read one line of print" such persons must be totally unacquainted with law literature.[ ] the play "as you like it" confirms ben jonson's characterisation of shakespeare being "an essential clowne." next let us turn to ratsei's _ghost_ (see p. ), which, as mr. sidney lee, in his "life of william shakespeare," p. , ed., confesses, refers to shakespeare. ratsei advises the young actor to copy shakespeare, "and to feed upon all men, to let none feede upon thee" (meaning shakespeare was a cruel usurer). as we shew, page , grant white says: "the pursuit of an impoverished man for the sake of imprisoning him and depriving him both of the power of paying his debts and supporting himself and his family, is an incident in shakespeare's life which it requires the utmost allowance and consideration for the practice of the time and country to enable us to contemplate with equanimity--satisfaction is impossible." ratsei continues, "let thy hand be a stranger to thy pocket" [like the miser, shakespeare], "thy hart slow to perform thy tongues promise" [like the lying rascal shakespeare], "and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee a place of lordship in the country" [as shakespeare had bought new place, stratford] "that, growing weary of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation" [as shakespeare obtained a coat of arms], "then thou needest care for no man, nor not for them that before made thee prowd with speaking their words upon the stage." this manifestly refers to two things, one that shakespeare when he bought new place, quitted london and ceased to act; the other that he continually tried to exact more and more "blackmail" from those to whom he had sold his name. now we begin at last to understand what we are told by rowe, in his "life of shakespeare," published in , that is, years after shakespeare's death in , when all traces of the actual man had been of set purpose obliterated, because the time for revealing the real authorship of the plays had not yet come. rowe, page x., tells us: "there is one instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of shakespeare's, that if i had not been assur'd that the story was handed down by sir william d'avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, i should not have ventured to have inserted, that my lord southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." this story has been hopelessly misunderstood, because people did not know that a large sum had to be paid to shakespeare to obtain his consent to allow his name to be put to the plays, and that new place had to be purchased for him, (the title deeds were not given to him for five or six years later), and that he had also to be sent away from london before "w shakespeare's" name was attached to any play, the first play bearing that name being, as we have already pointed out, page , "loues labor's lost," with its very numerous revelations of authorship. then, almost immediately, the world is informed that eleven other plays had been written by the same author, the list including the play of "richard ii." the story of the production of the play of "richard ii." is very curious and extremely instructive. it was originally acted with the parliament scene, where richard ii. is made to surrender, commencing in the folio of with the words-- "fetch hither richard, that in common view he may surrender," continuing with a description of his deposition extending over lines to the words-- "that rise thus nimbly by a true king's fall." this account of the deposition of a king reached queen elizabeth's ears; she was furiously angry and she exclaimed: "seest thou not that i am richard ii." a copy of the play without any author's name was printed in , omitting the story of the deposition of richard ii.; this was followed by a second and probably a third reprint in , with no important alterations, but still without any author's name. then, after the actor had been sent away to stratford, shakespeare's name was put upon a fourth reprint, dated . the story of richard ii.'s deposition was not printed in the play till , five years after the death of queen elizabeth.[ ] this history of the trouble arising out of the production of the play of "richard ii." explains why a name had to be found to be attached to the plays. who would take the risk? an actor was never "hanged," he was often whipped, occasionally one lost his ears, but an actor of repute would probably have refused even a large bribe. there was, however, a grasping money-lending man, of little or no repute, that bore a name called shaxpur, which might be twisted into bacon's pen-name shake-speare, and that man was secured, but as long as he lived he was continually asking for more and more money. the grant of a coat of arms was probably part of the original bargain. at one time it seems to have been thought easier to grant arms to his father. this, however, was found impossible. but when in bacon's friend essex was earl marshal and chief of the heralds' college, and bacon's servant camden (whom bacon had assisted to prepare the "annales"--see spedding's "bacon's works," vol. , p. , and letters, vol. , p. ), was installed as clarenceux, king-of-arms, the grant of arms to shakespeare was recognised, . shakespeare must have been provisionally secured soon after , when the "venus and adonis" was signed with his name, because in the next year, , "the taming of a shrew" was printed, in which the opening scene shews a drunken "warwickshire" rustic [shakspeare was a drunken warwickshire rustic], who is dressed up as "my lord," for whom the play had been prepared. (in the writer's possession there is a very curious and absolutely unique masonic painting revealing "on the square" that the drunken tinker is shakspeare and the hostess, bacon.) the early date at which shakspeare had been secured explains how in an application for a grant of arms seems to have been made (we say seems) for the date may possibly be a fraud like the rest of the lying document. we have referred to shakspeare as a drunken warwickshire rustic who lived in the mean and dirty town of stratford-on-avon. there is a tradition that shakespeare as a very young man was one of the stratfordians selected to drink against "the bidford topers," and with his defeated friends lay all night senseless under a crab tree, that was long known as shakespeare's crab tree. shakespeare's description of the stratford man as the drunken tinker in "the taming of a shrew" shews that the actor maintained his "drunken" character. this habit seems to have remained with him till the close of his life, for halliwell-phillipps says: "it is recorded that the party was a jovial one, and according to a somewhat late but apparently reliable tradition when the great dramatist [shakespeare of stratford] was returning to new place in the evening, he had taken more wine than was conducive to pedestrian accuracy. shortly or immediately afterwards he was seized by the lamentable fever which terminated fatally on friday, april rd." the story of his having to leave stratford because he got into very bad company and became one of a gang of deer-stealers, has also very early support. we have already proved that shakspeare could neither read nor write. we must also bear in mind that the stratford man never had any reputation as an actor. rowe, p. vi., thus writes: "his name is printed, as the custom was in those times, amongst those of the other players, before some old plays,[ ] but without any particular account of what sort of parts he us'd to play; and tho' i have inquir'd i could never meet with any further account of him this way than that the top of his performance was the ghost in his own hamlet." the humblest scene-shifter could play this character, as we shall shew later. what about being manager of a theatre? shakspeare never was manager of a theatre. what about being master of a shakespeare company of actors? there never existed a shakespeare company of actors. what about ownership of a theatre? dr. wallace, says in the _times_ of oct. nd , that at the time of his death shakespeare owned one fourteenth of the globe theatre, and one-seventh of the blackfriars theatre. the profit of each of these was probably exceedingly small. the pleadings, put forth the present value at £ each, but as a broad rule, pleadings always used to set forth at least ten times the actual facts. in the first case which the writer remembers witnessing in court, the pleadings were oxen, cows, calves, sheep, and pigs, the real matter in dispute being one cow and perhaps one calf. if we assume, therefore, that the total capital value of the holding of w. shakespeare in both theatres taken together amounted to £ in all, we shall probably, even then, considerably over-estimate their real worth. now having disposed of the notion that shakespeare was ever an important actor, was ever a manager of a theatre, was ever the master of a company of actors, or was ever the owner of any theatre, let us consider what rowe means by the statement that the top of his performance was the ghost in "hamlet." this grotesque and absurd fable has for two hundred years been accepted as an almost indisputable historical fact. men of great intelligence in other matters seem when the life of shakespeare of stratford-on-avon is concerned, quite prepared to refuse to exercise either judgment or common sense, and to swallow without question any amount of preposterous nonsense, even such as is contained in the above statement. the part of the ghost in the play of "hamlet" is one of the smallest and most insignificant possible, and can be easily played by the most ignorant and most inexperienced of actors. all that is required is a suit of armour with somebody inside it, to walk with his face concealed, silently and slowly a few times across the stage. then on his final appearance he should say a few sentences ( lines in the folio, ), but these can be and occasionally are spoken by some invisible speaker in the same manner as the word "_swear_" which is always growled out by someone concealed beneath the stage. no one knows, and no one cares, for no one sees who plays the part, which requires absolutely no histrionic ability. sir henry irving, usually, i believe, put two men in armour upon the stage, in order to make the movements of the ghost more mysterious. what then can be the meaning of the statement that the highest point to which the actor, shakespeare, attained was to play the part of the ghost in "hamlet"? the rumour is so positive and so persistent that it cannot be disregarded or supposed to be merely a foolish jest or a senselessly false statement put forward for the purpose of deceiving the public. we are compelled, therefore, to conclude that there must be behind this fable some real meaning and some definite purpose, and we ask ourselves; what is the purpose of this puzzle? what can be its real meaning and intention? as usual, the bacon key at once solves the riddle. the moment we realise that bacon is hamlet, we perceive that the purpose of the rumour is to reveal to us the fact that the highest point to which the actor, shakespeare, of stratford-on-avon, attained was to play the part of ghost to bacon, that is to act as his "pseudonym," or in other words, the object of the story is to reveal to us the fact that bacon is shakespeare. chapter xiii. conclusion, with further evidences from title pages. bacon had published eleven plays anonymously, when it became imperatively necessary for him to find some man who could be purchased to run the risk, which was by no means inconsiderable, of being supposed to be the author of these plays which included "richard ii."; the historical play which so excited the ire of queen elizabeth. bacon, as we have already pointed out, succeeded in discovering a man who had little, if any, repute as an actor, but who bore a name which was called shaxpur or shackspere, which could be twisted into something that might be supposed to be the original of bacon's pen name of shake-speare. when in through the medium of powerful friends, by means of the bribe of a large sum of money, the gift of new place, and the promise of a coat of arms, this man had been secured, he was at once sent away from london to the then remote village of stratford-on-avon, where scarcely a score of people could read, and none were likely to connect the name of their countryman, who they knew could neither read nor write and whom they called shak or shackspur, with "william shakespeare" the author of plays the very names of which were absolutely unknown to any of them. bacon, when shackspur had been finally secured in , brought out in the following year "loues labor's lost" with the imprint "newly corrected and augmented by w. shakespere," and immediately he also brought out under the name of francis meres "wits treasury," containing the statement that eleven other plays, including "richard ii.," were also by this same shakespeare who had written the poems of "venus and adonis" and "lucrece." francis meres says: "as the soule of euphorbus was thought to live in pythagoras so the sweete wittie soule of ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued shakespeare, witnes his 'venus and adonis,' his 'lucrece,' his sugred sonnets among his private friends." the sonnets were not printed, so far as is known, before , and they as has been shown in chapter repeat the story of bacon's authorship of the plays. bacon in , as we have stated in previous pages, fully intended that at some future period posterity should do him justice. among his last recorded words are those in which he commends his name and fame to posterity, "after many years had past." accordingly we find, as we should expect to find, that when he put shakespeare's name to "loues labor's lost" (the first play to bear that name) bacon took especial pains to secure that at some future date he should be recognised as the real author. does he not clearly reveal this to us by the wonderful words with which the play of "loues labor's lost" opens? "let fame, that all hunt after in their lyues, liue registred vpon our brazen tombes, and then grace vs, in the disgrace of death: when spight of cormorant deuouring time, thendeuour of this present breath may buy: that honour which shall bate his sythes keene edge, and make us heires of all eternitie." bacon intended that "spight of cormorant devouring time" ... honour.... should make [him] heir of all eternitie. compare the whole of this grand opening passage of "loues labor's lost" with the lines ascribed to milton in the edition of shakespeare's plays when bacon was [supposed to be] dead. no epitaph appeared in the edition, but in the edition appeared the following: "an epitaph on the admirable dramaticke poet, w. shakespeare. what neede my shakespeare for his honour'd bones, the labour of an age in piled stones or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid under a starrey-pointed pyramid? deare sonne of memory, great heire of fame, what needst thou such dull witnesse of thy name? thou in our wonder and astonishment hast built thy selfe a lasting monument: for whil'st, to th' shame of slow-endevouring art thy easie numbers flow, and that each part, hath from the leaves of thy unvalued booke, those delphicke lines with deepe impression tooke then thou our fancy of her selfe bereaving, dost make us marble with too much conceiving, and so sepulcher'd, in such pompe dost lie that kings for such a tombe would wish to die." we have pointed out in chapter and in chapter how clearly in "loues labour's lost," on page of the folio of , bacon reveals the fact that he is the author of the plays, and we have shewn how the title pages of certain books support this revelation, beginning with the title page of the first folio of with its striking revelation given to us in the supposititious portrait which really consists of "a mask supported on two left arms." we may, however, perhaps here mention that instructions are specially given to all who can understand, in the little book which is said to be a continuation of bacon's "nova atlantis," and to be by r. h., esquire, [whom no one has hitherto succeeded in identifying]. [illustration: plate xxxiv facsimile title page.] on plate , page , we give a facsimile of its title page which describes the book and states that it was printed in . in this book a number of very extraordinary inventions are mentioned such as submarine boats to blow up ships and harbours, and telegraphy by means of magnetic needles, but the portion to which we now wish to allude is that which refers to a "solid kind of heraldry." this will be found on pp. - , and reads as follows: "we have a solid kind of heraldry, not made specious with ostentative pydecoats and titular atcheivements, which in europe puzzel the tongue as well as memory to blazon, and any fool may buy and wear for his money. here in each province is a register to record the memorable acts, extraordinary qualities and worthy endowments of mind of the most eminent patricians. where for the escutcheon of pretence each noble person bears the hieroglyphic of that vertue he is famous for. e.g. if eminent for courage, the lion; if for innocence, the white lamb; if for chastity, a turtle; if for charity, the sun in his full glory; if for temperance, a slender virgin, girt, having a bridle in her mouth; if for justice, she holds a sword in the right, and a scales in the left hand; if for prudence, she holds a lamp; if for meek simplicity, a dove in her right hand; if for a discerning judgment, an eagle; if for humility, she is in sable, the head inclining and the knees bowing; if for innocence, she holds a lilie; if for glory or victory, a garland of baies; if for wisdom, she holds a salt; if he excels in physic, an urinal; if in music, a lute; if in poetry, a scrowle; if in geometry, an astrolabe; if in arithmetic, a table of cyphers; if in grammar, an alphabetical table; if in mathematics, a book; if in dialectica she holds a serpent in either hand; and so of the rest; the pretence being ever paralel to his particular excellency. and this is sent him cut in brass, and in colours, as he best phansies for the field; only the hieroglyphic is alwayes proper." these references to a solid kind of heraldry refer to the title pages and frontispieces of books which may be characterised broadly as baconian books, and examples of every one of them can be found in books extending from the elizabethan period almost up to the present date. we place plate , page , before the reader, which is a photo enlargement of the title page of bacon's "history of henry vii.," printed in holland, , the first latin edition (in mo). here is seen the virgin holding the salt, shewing the wisdom of the author. in her right hand, which holds the salt, she holds also two other objects which seem difficult to describe. they represent "a bridle without a bit," in order to tell us the purpose of the plate is to unmuzzle bacon, and to reveal to us his authorship of the plays known as shakespeare's. but in order to prove that the objects represent a bridle without a bit, we must refer to two emblem books of very different dates and authorship. first we refer our readers to plate , page , which is a photo enlargement of the figure of nemesis in the first (february ) edition of alciati's emblems. the picture shews us a hideous figure holding in her left hand a bridle with a tremendous bit to destroy false reputations, _improba verba_. we next put before our readers the photo reproduction of the figure of nemesis, which will be found on page , of baudoin's emblems, . baudoin had previously brought out in french a translation of bacon's "essays," which was published at paris in . in the preface to his book of emblems he tells us that he was induced to undertake the task by bacon (printed in capital letters), and by alciat (printed in ordinary type). in this book of emblems, baudoin, on page , placed his figure of nemesis opposite to bacon's name. if the reader carefully examines plate he will perceive that it is no longer a grinning hideous figure, but is a figure of fame, and carries a bridle in which there is found to be no sign of any kind of bit, because the purpose of the emblem is to shew that nemesis will unmuzzle and glorify bacon. in order to make the meaning of baudoin's emblem still more emphatically explicit a special rosicrucian edition of the same date, , was printed, in which baudoin's nemesis is printed "upside down"; we do not mean bound upside down, but printed upside down, for there is the printing of the previous page at the back of the engraving. we have already alluded on page to the frequent practice of the upside down printing of ornaments and engravings when a revelation concerning bacon's connection with shakespeare is afforded to us. [illustration: plate xxxv. facsimile title page] [illustration: plate xxxvi. "nemesis," from alcaiti's emblems, ] [illustration: plate xxxvii. page from baudoin's emblems ] the writer possesses an ordinary copy of baudoin's emblems, , and also a copy of the edition with the nemesis printed upside down which appears opposite bacon's name. the copy so specially printed is bound with rosicrucian emblems outside. the reader, by comparing baudoin's nemesis, plate , and the title page of henry vii., plate , will at once perceive that the objects in the right hand of the virgin holding the salt box are correctly described as representing a "bridle without a bit," and he will know that a revelation concerning bacon and shakespeare is going to be given to him. now we will tell him the whole story. on the right of the picture, plate (the reader's left) we see a knight in full armour, and also a philosopher who is, as the roses on his shoes tell us, a rosicrucian philosopher. on the left on a lower level is the same philosopher, evidently bacon, but without the roses on his shoes. he is holding the shaft of a spear with which he seems to stop the wheel. by his side stands what appears to be a knight or esquire, but the man's sword is girt on the wrong side, he wears a lace collar and lace trimming to his breeches, and he wears actor's boots (see plate , page , and plate , page ). we are therefore forced to conclude that he is an actor. and, lo, he wears but one spur. he is therefore a shake-spur actor (on plate , page , is shewn a shake-spur on horseback). this same actor is also shaking the spear which is held by the philosopher. he is therefore also a shake-spear actor. and now we can read the symbols on the wheel which is over his head: the "mirror up to nature," "the rod for the back of fools," the "basin to hold your guilty blood" ("titus andronicus," v. ), and "the fool's bawble." on the other side of the spear: the spade the symbol of the workman, the cap the symbol of the gentleman, the crown the symbol of the peer, the royal crown, and lastly the imperial crown. bacon says henry vii. wore an imperial crown. quite easily now we can read the whole story. the "history of henry vii.," though in this picture displayed on a stage curtain, is set forth by bacon in prose while the rest of the histories of england are given to the world by bacon by means of his pseudonym the shake-spear actor at the globe to which that figure is pointing. plain as the plate appears to the instructed eye it seems hitherto to have failed to reveal to the _un_instructed its clear meaning that bacon is shake-speare. chapter xiv. postscriptum. most fortunately before going to press we were able to see at the record office, chancery lane, london, the revealing documents recently discovered by dr. wallace and described by him in an article published in the march number of _harper's monthly magazine_, under the title of "new shakespeare discoveries." the documents found by dr. wallace are extremely valuable and important. they tell us a few real facts about the householder of stratford-upon-avon, and they effectually once and for all dispose of the idea that the stratford man was the poet and dramatist,--the greatest genius of all the ages. in the first place they prove beyond the possibility of cavil or question that "shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman," was totally unable to write even so much as any portion of his own name. it is true that the answers to the interrogatories which are given by "william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman," are marked at the bottom "wilm shaxpr," but this is written by the lawyer or law clerk, in fact "dashed in" by the ready pen of an extremely rapid writer. a full size photographic facsimile of this "so-called" signature, with a portion of the document above it, is given in plate , page , and on the opposite page, in plate , is shewn also in full size facsimile the real signature of daniell nicholas with a portion of the document, which he signed, above it. in order that the reader may be able more easily to read the law writing we give on page , in modern type, the portion of the document photographed above the name wilm shaxp'r, and on the same page a modern type transcript of the document above the signature of daniell nicholas. any expert in handwriting will at once perceive that "wilm shaxp'r" is written by the same hand that wrote the lower portion of shakespeare's answers to interrogatories, and by the same hand that wrote the other set of answers to interrogatories which are signed very neatly by "daniell nicholas." the words "daughter marye" occur in the portion photographed of both documents, and are evidently written by the same law writer, and can be seen in plate , page , just above the "wilm shaxp'r," and in plate , page , upon the fifth line from the top. the name of "shakespeare" also occurs several times in the "answers to interrogatories." one instance occurs in plate , page , eight lines above the name of daniell nicholas, and if the reader compares it with the "wilm shaxp'r" on plate , page , it will be at once seen that both writings are by the same hand. [illustration: plate xxxviii full size facsimile of part of "shakespeare's answers to the interrogatories," discovered by dr. wallace in the british records office.] [illustration: plate xxxix. full size facsimile of part of daniell nicholas' "answers to the interrogatories," discovered by dr. wallace in british record office.] portion what c'tayne he . . . . . . . plt twoe hundered pounds decease. but sayth that his house. and they had amo about their marriadge w'ch nized. and more he can ponnt saythe he can saye of the same interro for cessaries of houshould stuffe his daughter marye wilm shaxpr type facsimile of plate xxxviii. * * * * * interr this depnnt sayth that the deft did beare ted him well when he by him the said shakespeare his daughter marye that purpose sent him swade the plt to the solempnised uppon pmise of nnt. and more he can this deponnt sayth is deponnt to goe wth daniell nicholas. type facsimile of plate xxxix. answers to interrogatories are required to be signed by the deponents. in the case of "johane johnsone," who could not write her name, the depositions are signed with a very neat cross which was her mark. in the case of "william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman," who was also unable to write his name, they are signed with a dot which might quite easily be mistaken for an accidental blot. our readers will see this mark, which is not a blot but a purposely made mark, just under "wilm shaxp'r." dr. wallace reads the "so-called" signature as willm shaks, but the christian name is written quite clearly wilm. and we should have supposed that any one possessing even the smallest acquaintance with the law writing of the period must have known that the scroll which looks like a flourish at the end of the surname is not and cannot be an "s," but is most certainly without any possibility of question a "p," and that the dash through the "p" is the usual and accepted abbreviation for words ending in "per," or "peare," etc.[ ] then how ought we, nay how arewe, compelled to read the so-called signature? the capital s is quite clear, so also is the "h," then the next mass of strokes all go to make up simply the letter "a." then we come to the blotted letter, [illustration: plate xl. facsimiles of law clerks' writing of the name "shakespeare," from halliwell-phillipps' "outlines of the life of shakespeare," vol. , .] this is not and cannot be "kes" or "ks" because in the law writing of the period every letter "s" (excepting "s" at the end of a word) was written as a very long letter. this may readily be seen in the word shakespeare which occurs in plate on the eighth line above the signature of daniell nicholas. what then is this blotted letter if it is not kes or ks? the answer is quite plain, it is an "x," and a careful examination under a very strong magnifying glass will satisfy the student that it is without possibility of question correctly described as an "x."[ ] yes, the lawclerk marked the stratford gentleman's "answers to interrogatories" with the name "wilm shaxp'r." does there exist a stratfordian who will contend that william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, if he had been able to write any portion of his name would have marked his depositions wilm shaxp'r? does there exist any man who will venture to contend that the great dramatist, the author of the immortal plays, would or could have so signed his name? we trow not; indeed, such an abbreviation would be impossible in a legal document in a court of law where depositions are required to be signed in full. with reference to the other so-called shakespeare's signatures we must refer the reader to our chapter iii. which was penned before these "new shakespeare discoveries" were announced. and it is perhaps desirable to say that the dot in the "w" which appears in two of those "so-called" signatures of shakespeare, and also in the one just discovered, is part of the regular method of writing a "w" in the law writing of the period. in the purchase deed of the property in blackfriars, of march th - , mentioned on page , there are in the first six lines of the deed seven "w's," in each of which appears a dot. and in the mortgage deed of march th - , there are seven "w's" in the first five lines, in each of which appears a similar dot. the above-mentioned two deeds are in the handwriting of different law clerks. it may not be out of place here again to call our readers' attention to the fact that law documents are required to be signed "in full," and that if the very rapid and ready writer who wrote "wilm shaxp'r" were indeed the gentleman of stratford it would have been quite easy for such a good penman to have written his name in full; this the law writer has not done because he did not desire to forge a signature to the document, but desired only to indicate by an abbreviation that the dot or spot below was the mark of william shakespeare of stratford-upon-avon. thus the question, whether william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, could or could not write his name is for ever settled in the negative, and there is no doubt, there can be no doubt, upon this matter. dr. wallace declares "i have had no theory to defend and no hypothesis to propose." but as a matter of fact his whole article falsely assumes that "william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman," who is referred to in the documents, is no other than the great dramatist who wrote the immortal plays. and the writer can only express his unbounded wonder and astonishment that even so ardent a stratfordian as dr. wallace, after studying the various documents which he discovered, should have ventured to say: "shakespeare was the third witness examined. although, forsooth, the matter of his statements is of no high literary quality and the manner is lacking in imagination and style, as the rev. joseph green in complained of the will, we feel none the less as we hear him talk that we have for the first time met shakespeare in the flesh and that the acquaintance is good." as a matter of fact none of the words of any of the deponents are their own words, but they are the words of the lawyers who drew the answers to the interrogatories. the present writer, when a pupil in the chambers of a distinguished lawyer who afterwards became a lord justice, saw any number of interrogatories and answers to interrogatories, and even assisted in their preparation. the last thing that any one of the pupils thought of, was in what manner the client would desire to express his own views. they drew the most plausible answers they could imagine, taking care that their words were sufficiently near to the actual facts for the client to be able to swear to them. the so-called signature "wilm shaxp'r," is written by the lawyer or law clerk who wrote the lower part of shakespeare's depositions, and this same clerk also wrote the depositions above the name of another witness who really _signs_ his own name, viz., "daniell nicholas." the only mark william shakespeare put to the document was the blot above which the abbreviated name "wilm shaxp'r" was written by the lawyer or law clerk. the documents shew that shakespeare of stratford occasionally "lay" in the house in silver street, and ben jonson's words in "the staple of news" (third intermeane; act iii.), to which dr. wallace refers viz., that "siluer-streete" was "a good seat for a vsurer" are very informing, because as we have before pointed out the stratford man was a cruel usurer. dr. wallace's contention that mountjoy, the wig-maker, of the corner house in silver street where shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, occasionally slept, was the original of the name of the herald in henry v.[ ] really surpasses, in want of knowledge of history, anything that the writer has ever previously encountered, and he is afraid that it really is a measure of the value of dr. wallace's other inferences connecting the illiterate stratford rustic with the great dramatist who "took all knowledge for his province." dr. wallace's "new shakespeare discoveries" are really extremely valuable and informing, and very greatly assist the statements which the writer has made in the previous chapters, viz., that the stratford householder was a mean rustic who was totally unable to read or to write, and was not even an actor of repute, but was a mere hanger-on at the theatre. indeed, the more these important documents are examined the clearer it will be perceived that, as dr. wallace points out, they shew us that the real william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, was not the "aristocrat," whom tolstoi declares the author of the plays to have been, but was in fact a man who resided [occasionally when he happened to revisit london] "in a hardworking family," a man who was familiar with hairdressers and their apprentices, a man who mixed as an equal among tradesmen in a humble position of life, who referred to him as "one shakespeare." these documents prove that "one shakespeare" was not and could not have been the "poet and dramatist." in a word these documents strongly confirm the fact that bacon is shakespeare. [illustration: plate xli. facsimile of the dedication of powell's "attourney's academy," ] chapter xv. appendix. the facsimile shewn in plate , page , is from "the attourney's academy," . the reader will perceive that the ornamental heading is printed upside down. in the ordinary copies it is not so printed, but only in special copies such as that possessed by the writer; the object of the upside-down printing being, as we have already pointed out in previous pages, to reveal, to those deemed worthy of receiving it, some secret concerning bacon. in the present work, while we have used our utmost endeavour to place in the vacant frame, the true portrait of him who was the wonder and mystery of his own age and indeed of all ages, we have never failed to remember the instructions given to us in "king lear":-- "have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest." our object has been to supply exact and positive information and to confirm it by proofs so accurate and so certain as to compel belief and render any effective criticism an impossibility. it may however not be without advantage to those who are becoming convinced against their will, if we place before them a few of the utterances of men of the greatest distinction who, without being furnished with the information which we have been able to afford to our readers, were possessed of sufficient intelligence and common sense to perceive the truth respecting the real authorship of the plays. lord palmerston, b. , d. . viscount palmerston, the great british statesman, used to say that he rejoiced to have lived to see three things--the re-integration of italy, the unveiling of the mystery of china and japan, and the explosion of the shakespearian illusions.--_from the diary of the right hon. mount-stewart e. grant_. lord houghton, b. , d. . lord houghton (better known as a statesman under the name of richard monckton milnes) reported the words of lord palmerston, and he also told dr. appleton morgan that he himself no longer considered shakespeare, the actor, as the author of the plays. samuel taylor coleridge, b. , d. . samuel taylor coleridge, the eminent british critic and poet, although he assumed that shakespeare was the author of the plays, rejected the facts of his life and character, and says: "ask your own hearts, ask your own common sense, to conceive the possibility of the author of the plays being the anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. what! are we to have miracles in sport? does god choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?" john bright, b. , d. . john bright, the eminent british statesman, declared: "any man that believes that william shakespeare of stratford wrote hamlet or lear is a fool." in its issue of march th , the _rochdale observer_ reported john bright as scornfully angry with deluded people who believe that shakespeare wrote othello. ralph waldo emerson, b. , d. . ralph waldo emerson, the great american philosopher and poet, says: "as long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.... the egyptian verdict of the shakespeare societies comes to mind that he was a jovial actor and manager. i cannot marry this fact to his verse."--_emerson's works. london, . vol. , p. _. john greenleaf whittier, b. , d. . john greenleaf whittier, the american poet, declared: "whether bacon wrote the wonderful plays or not, i am quite sure the man shakspere neither did nor could." dr. w. h. furness, b. , d. . dr. w. h. furness, the eminent american scholar, who was the father of the editor of the variorum edition of shakespeare's works, wrote to nathaniel holmes in a letter dated oct. th : "i am one of the many who have never been able to bring the life of william shakespeare and the plays of shakespeare within planetary space of each other. are there any two things in the world more incongruous? had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon after generations, i think we could have found no one of that day but f. bacon to whom to assign the crown. in this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent." mark twain, b. , d. . samuel langhorne clemens, who wrote under the pseudonym of mark twain, was,--it is universally admitted,--one of the wisest of men. last year ( ) he published a little book with the title, "is shakespeare dead?" in this he treats with scathing scorn those who can persuade themselves that the immortal plays were written by the stratford clown. he writes, pp. - : "you can trace the life histories of the whole of them [the world's celebrities] save one far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation--shakespeare. about him you can find out _nothing_. nothing of even the slightest importance. nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly common-place person--a manager,[ ] an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten him before he was fairly cold in his grave. we can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned _race-horse_ of modern times--but not shakespeare's! there are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself--_he hadn't any history to record_. there is no way of getting around that deadly fact. and no sane way has yet been discovered of getting round its formidable significance. its quite plain significance --to any but those thugs (i do not use the term unkindly) is, that shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations. the plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning." prince bismarck, b. , d. . we are told in sydney whitman's "personal reminiscences of prince bismarck," pp. - , that in , prince bismarck said, "he could not understand how it were possible that a man, however gifted with the intuitions of genius, could have written what was attributed to shakespeare unless he had been in touch with the great affairs of state, behind the scenes of political life, and also intimate with all the social courtesies and refinements of thought which in shakspeare's time were only to be met with in the highest circles." "it also seemed to prince bismarck incredible that the man who had written the greatest dramas in the world's literature could of his own free will, whilst still in the prime of life, have retired to such a place as stratford-on-avon and lived there for years, cut off from intellectual society, and out of touch with the world." the foregoing list of men of the very greatest ability and intelligence who were able clearly to perceive the absurdity of continuing to accept the commonly received belief that the mighty author of the immortal plays was none other than the mean rustic of stratford, might be extended indefinitely, but the names that we have mentioned are amply sufficient to prove to the reader that he will be in excellent company when he himself realises the truth that bacon is shakespeare. a neuer writer, to an euer reader. newes. eternall reader, you haue heere a new play, neuer stal'd with the stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger, and yet passing full of the palme comicall; for it is a birth of your braine, that neuer under-tooke any thing commicall, vainely: and were but the vaine names of commedies changde for the titles of commodities, or of playes for pleas; you should see all those grand censors, that now stile them such vanities, flock to them for the maine grace of their grauities: especially this authors commedies, that are so fram'd to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries, of all the actions of our hues shewing such a dexteritie, and power of witte, that the most displeased with playes are pleasd with his commedies..... and beleeue this, that when hee is gone, and his commedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new english inquisition. take this for a warning, and at the perrill of your pleasures losse, and judgements, refuse not, nor like this the lesse, for not being sullied, with the smoaky breath of the multitude.[ ] addenda et corrigenda. footnote to page . there was a forest of arden in warwickshire. footnote to page . this richard quyney's son thomas married th february , judith, william shakespeare's younger daughter, who, like her father, the supposed poet, was totally illiterate, and signed the register with a mark. footnote to page . in , although nothing of poetical importance bearing bacon's name had been published, we find in stowe's "annales," p. , that bacon's name appears seventh in the list there given of elizabethan poets. errata. p. . for "knew little latin" read "had small latin." p. . for "line " read "line ." p. . for "montegut" read "montegut." for "greek for crowned" read "greek for crown." p. & . for "quintillian" read "quintilian." p. . for "greek name" read "greek word." promus of fourmes and elegancyes by francis bacon. preface to promus to these essays i have attached a carefully collated reprint of francis bacon's "promus of formularies and elegancies," a work which is to be found in manuscript at the british museum in the harleian collection (no. , .) the folios at present known are numbered from to , and are supposed to have been written about a.d. - , because folio is dated december th , and folio , january . the pagination of the ms. is modern, and was inserted for reference purposes when the promus was bound up in one volume together with certain other miscellaneous manuscripts which are numbered from to , and from onwards. a facsimile of a portion of a leaf of the promus ms., folio , is given on pages - , in order to illustrate bacon's handwriting, and also to shew his method of marking the entries. it will be perceived that some entries have lines //// drawn across the writing, while upon others marks similar to the capital letters t, f, and a are placed at the end of the lines. but as the promus is here printed page for page as in the manuscript, i am not raising the question of the signification of these marks, excepting only to say they indicate that bacon made considerable use of these memoranda. "promus" means larder or storehouse, and these "fourmes, formularies and elegancyes" appear to have been intended as a storehouse of words and phrases to be employed in the production of subsequent literary works. mrs. pott was the first to print the "promus," which, with translations and references, she published in . in her great work, which really may be described as monumental, mrs. pott points out, by means of some thousands of quotations, how great a use appears to have been made of the "promus" notes, both in the acknowledged works of bacon and in the plays which are known as shakespeare's. mrs. pott's reading of the manuscript was extremely good, considering the great difficulty experienced in deciphering the writing. but i thought it advisable when preparing a reprint to secure the services of the late mr. f. b. bickley, of the british museum, to carefully revise the whole of bacon's "promus." this task he completed and i received twenty-four proofs, which i caused to be bound with a title page in . there were no other copies, the whole of the type having unfortunately been broken up. the proof has again been carefully collated with the original manuscript and corrected by mr. f. a. herbert, of the british museum, and i have now reprinted it here, as i am satisfied that the more bacon's promus--the storehouse--is examined, the more it will be recognised how large a portion of the material collected therein has been made use of in the immortal plays, and i therefore now issue the promus with the present essay as an additional proof of the identity of bacon and shakespeare. edwin durning-lawrence. [illustration: plate xlii. facsimile of portion of folio of the original ms of bacon's "promus." see page ] [illustration: plate xliii. portrait of francis bacon, from a painting by van somers. formerly in the collection of the duke of fife] promus of formularies. _folio , front_. ingenuous honesty and yet with opposition and strength. corni contra croci good means against badd, homes to crosses. in circuitu ambulant impij; honest by antiperistasis. siluj a bonis et dolor meus renouatus est. credidj propter quod locutus sum. memoria justi cum laudibus at impiorum nomen putrescet justitiamque omnes cupida de mente fugarunt. non recipit stultus verba prudential nisi ea dixeris quaee uersantur in corde ejus veritatem erne et noli vendere qui festinat ditari non erat insons nolite dare sanctum canibus. qui potest capere capiat quoniam moses ad duritiam cordis uestri permisit uobis obedire oportet deo magis quam hominibus. et vniuscujusque opus quale sit probabit ignis non enim possumus aliquid aduersus ueritatem sed pro ueritate. _folio , front--continued_. for which of y'e good woorkes doe yow stone me quorundam hominum peccata praecedunt ad judicium quorundam sequuntur bonum certamen certauj sat patriae priamoque datum. ilicet obruimur numero. atque animis illabere nostris hoc praetexit nomine culpam. procul o procul este prophani magnanimj heroes nati melioribus annis _folio , back_. ille mihi ante alios fortunatusque laborum egregiusque animi qui ne quid tale videret procubuit moriens et humum semel ore momordit fors et uirtus miscentur in vnum. non ego natura nec sum tam callidus vsu. aeuo rarissima nostro simplicitas viderit vtilitas ego cepta fideliter edam. prosperum et foelix scelus, virtus vocatur tibi res antiquas laudis et artis inuidiam placare paras uirtute relicta. iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra homo sum humanj a me nil alienum puto. the grace of god is woorth a fayre black will take no other hue vnum augurium optimum tueri patria. exigua res est ipsa justitia dat veniam coruis uexat censura columbas. homo hominj deus semper virgines furiae; cowrting a furye di danarj di senno et di fede ce ne manco che tu credj chi semina spine non vada discalzo mas vale a quien dios ayuda que a quien mucho madruga. quien nesciamente pecca nesciamente ua al infierno quien ruyn es en su uilla ruyn es en seuilla de los leales se hinchen los huespitales _folio , front_. we may doe much yll or we doe much woorse vultu laeditur saepe pietas. difficilia quae pulchra conscientia mille testes. summum jus summa injuria nequiequam patrias tentasti lubricus artes. et monitj meliora sequamur nusquam tuta fides discite justitiam moniti et non temnere diuos quisque suos patimur manes. extinctus amabitur idem. optimus ille animi vindex laedentium pectus vincula qui rupit dedoluitque semel. virtue like a rych geme best plaine sett quibus bonitas a genere penitus insita est ij iam non mali esse nolunt sed nesciunt oeconomicae rationes publicas peruertunt. divitiae impedimenta virtutis; the bagage of vertue habet et mors aram. nemo virtuti invidiam reconciliauerit praeter mort ... turpe proco ancillam sollicitare est autem virtutis ancilia laus. si suum cuique tribuendum est certe et venia humanitati qui dissimulat liber non est leue efficit jugum fortunae jugum amicitiae omnis medecina innouatio _folio , front--continued_. auribus mederi difficillimum. suspitio fragilem fidem soluit fortem incendit pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis dulce et decorum est pro patria mori mors et fugacem persequitur virum. danda est hellebori multo pars maxima avar [is] _folio , back_. minerall wytts strong poyson and they be not corrected aquexar. ametallado fayned inameled. totum est majus sua parte against factions and priuate profite galens compositions not paracelsus separations full musike of easy ayres withowt strange concordes and discordes in medio non sistit uirtus totem est quod superest a stone withowt foyle a whery man that lookes one way and pulls another ostracisme mors in olla poysonings fumos uendere. [sidenote up the left margin oriented at ninety degrees to the text: fourmes comersate] _folio , front_. dec. , . promus // suauissima vita indies meliorem fierj the grace of god is woorth a faire mors in olla f // no wise speech thowgh easy and voluble. notwithstanding his dialogues (of one that giueth life to his speach by way of quaestion). t he can tell a tale well (of those cowrtly giftes of speach w'ch. are better in describing then in consydering) f a goode comediante t (of one that hath good grace in his speach) to commend judgments. // to comend sense of law // cunyng in the humors of persons but not in the condicons of actions stay a littell that we make an end the sooner. a // a fooles bolt is soone shott his lippes hang in his light. a. t // best we lay a straw hear a myll post thwitten to a pudding pricke t // one swallo maketh no sumer l'astrologia e vera ma l'astrologuo non sj truoua // hercules pillers non vltra. t // he had rather haue his will then his wyshe. t well to forgett make much of yourselfe _folio , front--continued_. wyshing yow all &c and myself occasion to doe yow servyce // i shalbe gladd to vnderstand your newes but none // rather then some ouerture whearin i may doe // yow service // ceremonyes and green rushes are for strangers t how doe yow? they haue a better question in cheap side w'lak ye // poore and trew. not poore therefore not trew t _folio , back_. tuque inuidiosa vestustas. t licentia sumus omnes deteriores. t qui dat nivem sicut lanam t lilia agri non laborant neque nent t mors omnia solvit t // a quavering tong. like a cuntry man that curseth the almanach. t ecce duo gladij his. t arnajore ad minorem. t in circuitu ambulant impij t exijt sermo inter fratres quod discipulus iste non moritur t omne majus continet in se mjnus t sine vlla controuersia quod minus est majore benedic ... t she is light she may be taken in play t he may goe by water for he is sure to be well landed t // small matters need sollicitacion great are remem- bred of themselues the matter goeth so slowly forward that i haue almost forgott it my self so as i maruaile not if my frendes forgett not like a crabb though like a snaile honest men hardly chaung their name. t the matter thowgh it be new (if that be new wch) hath been practized in like case thowgh not in this particular i leaue the reasons to the parties relacions and the consyderacion of them to your wysdome _folio , front_. i shall be content my howrs intended for service leaue me in liberty // it is in vayne to forbear to renew that greef by // speach w'ch the want of so great a comfort must // needes renew. // as i did not seeke to wynne your thankes so your // courteous acceptacion deserueth myne // the vale best discouuereth the hill t. // sometymes a stander by seeth more than a plaier t. the shortest foly is the best. t. // i desire no secrett newes but the truth of comen newes. t. // yf the bone be not trew[ ] sett it will neuer be well till it be broken. t. // cheries and newes fall price soonest. t. you vse the lawyers fourme of pleading t. // the difference is not between yow and me but between your proffite and my trust // all is not in years some what is in howres well spent. t. // offer him a booke t // why hath not god sent yow my mynd or me your // means. // i thinke it my dowble good happ both for the obteynyng and for the mean. // shutt the doore for i mean to speak treason t. i wysh one as fytt as i am vnfitt i doe not onely dwell farre from neighbors but near yll neighbors. t _folio , front--continued_. // as please the paynter t. receperunt mercedem suam. t. secundum tidem vestram fiet vobis ministerium meum honorificabo _folio , back_. beati mortuj qui moriuntur in domino detractor portat diabolum in lingua t frangimur heu fatis inquit ferimurque procella nunc ipsa vocat res dij meliora pijs erroremque hostibus illum aliquisque malo fuit vsus in illo vsque acleo latet vtilitas et tamen arbitrium que, rit res ista duorum. vt esse phebi dulcius lumen solet jam jam cadentis velle suum cuique est nee voto viuitur vno who so knew what would be dear nead be a marchant but a year. blacke will take no other hew he can yll pipe that wantes his vpper lip nota res mala optima balbus balbum rectius intelligit l' agua va al mar a tyme to gett and a tyme to loose nee dijs nee viribus equis vnum pro multis dabitur caput mitte hanc de pectore curam neptunus ventis impleuit vela secundis a brayne cutt with facettes t t yow drawe for colors but it prooueth contrarie t qui in paruis non distinguit in magnis labitur. every thing is subtile till it be conceyued _folio , front_. that y't. is forced is not forcible more ingenious then naturall quod longe jactum est leviter ferit doe yow know it? hoc solum scio quod nihil scio i know it? so say many now yow say somewhat.s. euen when yow will; now yow begynne to conceyue i begynne to say. what doe yow conclude vpon that? etiam tentas all is one.s. contrariorum eadam est ratio. repeat your reason.s. bis ac ter pulchra. hear me owt.s. you were neuer in. yow iudg before yow vnderstand.s. i iudg as i vnderstand. you goe from the matter.s. but it was to folow yow. come to the poynt.s. why i shall not find yow thear yow doe not vnderstand y'e poynt.s. for if i did. let me make an end of my tale.s. that which i will say will make an end of it yow take more then is graunted.s. you graunt lesse then is prooued yow speak colorably.s. yow may not say truly. that is not so by your fauour.s. but by my reason it is so _folio , back_. it is so i will warrant yow.s. yow may warrant me but i thinke i shall not vowche yow awnswere directly.s. yow mean as you may direct me awnswere me shortly.s. yea that yow may coment vpon it. the cases will come together.s. it wilbe to fight then. audistis quia dictum est antiquis secundum hominem dico et quin[ ] non novit talia? hoc praetexit nomine culpa et fuit in toto notissima fabula celo quod quidam facit nee nihil neque omnia sunt quae dicit facete nunc demum nata ista est oratio qui mal intend pis respond tum decujt cum sceptra dabas en haec promissa fides est? proteges eos in tabernaculo tuo a contradictione linuarum. [greek: prin to thronein katathronein epistasai] sicut audiuimus sic vidimus credidj propter quod locutus sum. quj erudit derisorem sibj injuriam facit super mjrarj ceperunt philosopharj _folio , front_. prudens celat scientiam stultus proclamat stultitiam querit derisor sapientiam nee invenit eam. non recipit stultus verba prudentie nisi ea dixeris quae sunt in corde ejus lucerna dej spiraculum hominis veritatem eme et noli vendere melior claudus in via quam cursor extra viam. the glory of god is to conceale a thing and the glory of man is to fynd owt a thing. melior est finis orationis quam principium. injtium verborum ejus stultitia et novissimum oris illius pura insania verba sapientium sicut aculej et vebut clavj in altum defixj. quj potest capere capiat vos adoratis quod nescitis vos nihil scitis quod est veritas. quod scripsj scripsj nolj dicere rex judeorum sed dicens se regem judeorum virj fratres liceat audacter dicere apud vos quod uult seminator his verborum dicere _folio , back_. multe te litere ad insaniam redigunt. sapientiam loquiraur inter perfectos et justificata est sapientia a filijs suis. scientia inflat charitas edificat eadem vobis scribere mihi non pigrum vobis autem necessarium hoc autem dico vt nemo vos decipiat in sublimi- tate sermonum. omnia probate quod bonum este tenete fidelis sermo semper discentes et nunquam ad scientiam veritatis pervenientes proprius ipsorum propheta testimonium hoc verum est tantam nubem testium. sit omnis homo velox ad audiendum tardus ad loquendum. error novissimus pejor priore. quecunque ignorant blasphemant non credimus quia non legimus facile est vt quis augustinum vincat viderit vtrum veritate an clamore. bellum omnium pater de nouueau tout est beau de saison tout est bon dj danarj di senno et di fede ce ne manca che tu credj di mentira y saqueras verdad _folio , front_. magna civitas magna solitude light gaines make heuy purses he may be in my paternoster indeed but sure he shall neuer be in my creed tanti causas sciat ilia furosis what will yow? for the rest it is possible not the lesse for that allwaies provyded yf yow stay thear for a tyme will yow see what shalbe the end. incident yow take it right all this while whear stay we? prima facie. that agayne. more or less. i find that straunge it is bycause not vnlike quasi vero yf that be so best of all what els nothing lesse yt cometh to that hear yow faile to meet with that bear with that and how now _folio , front--continued_. of grace as if let it not displease yow yow putt me in mynd i object, i demaund i distinguish etc. a matter not in question few woordes need much may be said, yow haue well offred. the mean the tyme all will not serue yow haue forgott nothing. causa patet tamen quaere. well remembred i arreste yow thear i cannot thinke that discourse better i was thinking of that i come to that that is iust nothing peraduenture interrogatory. se then how (for much lesse) note.--this folio is written in three columns. the first two are printed on page , and this page forms the third column. the first line, "of grace," is written opposite the sixth line on page , "what will yow?" _folio , back_. non est apud aram consultandem. eumenes litter sorti pater equus vtrique est quoddam [_sic_] prodire tenus si non datur vltra. quem si non tenuit magnis tamen excidit ausis conamur tenues grandia tentantem majora fere praesentibus equum. da facilem cursum atque audacibus annue ceptis neptunus ventis implevit vela secundis crescent illae crescetis amores et quae nunc ratio est impetus ante fuit aspice venturo laetentur vt omnia seclo in academijs discunt credere _vos adoratis quod nescitis_ to gyue awthors thear due as yow gyue tyme his dew w'ch is to discouuer troth. vos graeci semper pueri non canimus surdis respondent omnia syluae populus volt decipi _scientiam loquimur inter perfectos et justificata est sapientia a filijs suis_ pretiosa in oculis domini mors sanctorum ejus felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. magistratus virum iudicat. da sapienti occasionem et addetur ej sapienta vite me redde priorj i had rather know then be knowne _folio , front_. orpheus in syluis inter delphinas arion inopem me copia fecit. an instrument in tunyng a yowth sett will neuer be higher. like as children doe w'th their babies when they haue plaied enowgh wth them they take sport to undoe them. faber quisque fortune suae hinc errores multiplices quod de partibus vitae singuli deliberant de summa nemo. vtilitas magnos hominesque deosque efficit auxilijs quoque fauente suis. qui in agone contendit a multis abstinet quidque cupit sperat suaque illum oracula fallunt serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco the athenians holyday. optimi consiliarij mortuj cum tot populis stipatus eat in tot populis vix vna fides odere reges dicta quae dici iubent nolite confidere in principibus et multis vtile bellum. pulchrorum autumnus pulcher vsque adeone times quern tu facis ipse timendum. dux femina facti res est ingeniosa dare a long wynter maketh a full ear. declinat cursus aurumque uolubile tollit romaniscult. vnum augurium optimum tueri patriam bene omnia fecit _folio , back_. et quo quenque modo fugiatque feratque laborem edocet. non vlla laborum o virgo nova mi facies inopinave surgit; omnia praecepi atque animo mecum ante peregi. cultus major censu tale of y'e frogg that swelled. viderit vtilitas qui eget verseter in turba while the legg warmeth the boote harmeth augustus rapide ad locum leniter in loco my father was chudd for not being a baron. prowd when i may doe any man good. i contemn few men but most thinges. a vn matto vno & mezo tantene animis celestibus ire tela honoris tenerior alter rixatur de lana sepe caprina propugnat nugis armatus scilicet vt non sit mihi prima fides. nam cur ego amicum offendam in nugis a skulter we haue not drunke all of one water. ilicet obruimur numer[o]. numbring not weighing let them haue long mornynges that haue not good afternoones cowrt howres constancy to remayne in the same state _folio , back--continued_. the art of forgetting. rather men then maskers. variam dans otium mentem spire lynes. _folio , front_. veruntamen vane conturbatur omnis homo be the day never so long at last it ringeth to even-song. vita salillum. non possumus aliquid contra veritatem sed pro veritate. sapie[n]tia quoque perseueravit mecum magnorum fluuiorum navigabiles fontes. dos est vxoria lites haud numine nostro atque animis illabere nostris animos nil magne laudi egentes magnanimj heroes nati mehioribus annis aeuo rarissima nostro simplicitas qui silet est firmus si nunquam fallit imago and i would haue thowght sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile temp[us] totum est quod superest in a good beleef possunt quia posse videntur justitiamque omnes cupida de mente fugaru[nt] lucrificulus qui bene nugatur ad mensam sepe vocatur faciunt et tedi[urn finitum?][ ] malum bene conditum ne moveas be it better be it woorse goe yow after him that beareth the purse tranquillo quilibet gubernator nullus emptor difficilis bonum emit opsonium chi semina spine non vada discalzo _folio , back_. quoniam moses ad duritiem cordis permi [sit] vobis non nossem peccatum nisi per legem. discite justitiam monit; vbj testamentum ibi necesse est mors intercedat testatoris scimus quia lex bona est si quis ea vtatur legitime ve vobis jurisperitj nee me verbosas leges ediscere nee me ingrato voces prostituisse foro. fixit leges pretio atque refixit nec ferrea jura insanumque forum et populi tabularia vidit miscueruntque novercae non innoxia verba jurisconsultj domus oraculum civitatis now as ambiguows as oracles. hic clamosi rabiosa forj jurgia vendens improbus iras et verba locat in veste varietas sit scissura non sit plenitude potestatis est plenitudo tempestatis iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra prosperum et felix scelus virtus vocatur da mihi fallere da iustum sanctumque viderj. nil nisi turpe iuuat cure est sua cuique voluptas hec quoque ab alterius grata dolore venit casus ne deusne fabuleque manes _folio , front_. ille bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro existimamus diuitem omnia scire recte querunt cum qua gente cadant totus mu[n]dus in malingo positus o major tandem parcas insane minori reall forma dat esse nee fandj fictor vlisses non tu plus cernis sed plus temerarius audes nec tibj plus cordis sed minus oris inest. invidiam placare paras virtute relicta [greek: ho polla klepsas oliga douk ekpheuxetai] botrus oppositus botro citius maturescit. old treacle new losanges. soft fire makes sweet malt. good to be mery and wise. seeldome cometh the better. he must needes swymme that is held vp by the chynne. he that will sell lawne before he can fold it. shall repent him before he haue sold it. no man loueth his fetters thowgh they be of gold. the nearer the church the furder from god. all is not gold that glisters. beggers should be no chuzers. a beck is as good as a dieu vous gard. the rowling stone neuer gathereth mosse. better children weep then old men. _folio , back_. when bale is heckst boote is next. ill plaieng w'th short dag (taunting replie). he that neuer clymb neuer fell. the loth stake standeth long. itch and ease can no man please. to much of one thing is good for nothing. ever spare and euer bare. a catt may looke on a kyng. he had need be a wyly mowse should breed in the cattes ear. many a man speaketh of rob. hood that neuer shott in his bowe. batchelers wyues and maides children are well taught. god sendeth fortune to fooles. better are meales many then one to mery. many kisse the child for the nurses sake. when the head akes all the body is the woorse. when theeues fall owt trew men come to their good. an yll wynd that bloweth no man to good. all this wynd shakes no corn. thear be more waies to the wood then one. tymely crookes the tree that will a good camocke be. better is the last smile then thefirst laughter. no peny no pater noster. every one for himself and god for vs all. _folio , front_. long standing and small offring. the catt knowes whose lippes she lickes. as good neuer a whitt as neuer the better. fluvius quae procul sunt irrigat. as far goeth the pilgrymme as the post. cura esse quod audis. [greek: erga neon bomlai de meson enchai de geronton.] taurum tollet qui vitulum sustulerit. lunae radijs non maturescit botrus. nil profuerit bulbus; y'e potado will doe no good. dormientis rete trahit the sleeping mans nett draweth. ijsdem e literis efficitur tragedia et comedia. tragedies and comedies are made of one alphabett. good wyne needes no bush. heroum filij noxae. the sonnes of demy goddes demy men. alia res sceptrum alia plectrum fere danides.[ ] abore dejecta quivis ligna colligit. the hasty bytch whelpes a blind lytter. priscis credendum. we must beleeue the wytnesses are dead. thear is no trusting a woman nor a tapp. _folio , back_. not onely y'e spring but the michelmas spring. virj iurejurandi pueri talis fallendj. ipsa dies quandoque parens quandoque noverca est. vbj non sis qui fueris non esse cur velis viuere. compendiaria res improbitas. it is in action as it is in wayes; comonly the nearest is the fowlest. lachrima nil citius arescit. woorke when god woorkes. a shrewd turn comes vnbidden. hirundines sub eodem tecto ne habeas. a thorn is gentle when it is yong. aut regem aut fatuum nasci oportet (of a free jester). exigua res est ipsa justitia. quae non posuistj ne tollas. dat veniam coruis vexat censura columbas. lapsa lingua verum dicit. the toung trippes vpon troth. the evill is best that is lest [best?] knowen. a mercury cannot be made of every wood (bvt priapus may). princes haue a cypher. anger of all passions beareth the age lest [best?]. one hand washeth another. iron sharpeth against iron. _folio , front_. eyther bate conceyte or putt to strength. faciunt et sphaceli immunitatem. he may be a fidler that cannot be a violine. milke the staunding cowe. why folowe yow the flyeng. he is the best prophete that telleth the best fortune. garlike and beans like lettize like lips. mons cum monte non miscetur. hilles meet not. a northen man may speake broad. haesitantia cantoris tussis. no hucking cator buyeth good achates. spes alit exules. romanus sedendo vincit. yow must sowe w'th the hand not w'th the baskett. mentiuntur multa cantores (few pleasing speches true). it is noth if it be in verse. leonis catulum ne alas. he cowrtes a fury. dij laneos habent pedes (they leaue no prynt). the weary ox setteth stronger. a mans customes are the mowldes whear his fortune is cast. _folio , back_. beware of the vinegar of sweet wyne. adoraturj sedeant.[ ] to a foolish people a preest possest. the packes may be sett right by the way. it is the cattes nature and the wenches fault. coene fercula nostre. mallem conviuis quam placuisse cocis. al confessor medico e aduocato. non si de tener [tena?] il ver celato. assaj ben balla a chi fortuna suona. a yong barber and an old phisicion. buon vin cattina testa dice il griego. buon vin fauola lunga. good watch chazeth yll aduenture. campo rotto paga nuoua. better be martyr then confessor. l'imbassador no porta pena. bella botta non ammazza vecello. a tender finger maketh a festred sore. a catt will neuer drowne if she see the shore. qui a teme [temor?] a lie. he that telleth tend [tond?] lyeth is eyther a foole himself or he to whome he telles them. che posce a [ci?] cana pierde piu che guadagna. _folio , front_. ramo curto vindimi lunga tien l'amico tuo con viso suo. gloria in the end of the salme an asses trott and a fyre of strawe dureth not por mucho madrugar no amanece mas ayna erly rising hasteneth not y'e morning. do yra el buey que no are? mas vale buena quexa que mala paga better good pleint then yll pay he that pardons his enemy the amner shall haue his goodes chi offendi maj perdona he that resolues in hast repentes at leasure a dineros pagados brazos quebrados. mas uale bien de lexos que mal de cerca. el lobo & la vulpeja son todos d'vna conseja no haze poco quien tu mal echa a otro (oster before) el buen suena, el mal buela. at the trest of the yll the lest di mentira y sagueras verdad tell a lye to knowe a treuth la oveja mansa mamma su madre y agena en fin la soga quiebra por el mas delgado. quien ruyn es en su villa ruyn es en sevilla quien no da nudo pierde punto quien al ciel escupe a la cara se le buelve covetousenesse breakes the sacke dos pardales a tua espiga haze mala ligua _folio , back_. quien ha las hechas ha las sospechas. la muger que no vera no haze larga tela quien a las hechas ha las sospechas. todos los duelos con pan son buenos. el mozo por no saber, y el viejo por no poder dexan las cosas pierder. la hormiga quandose a de perder nasiente alas de los leales se hinchen los huespitales. dos que se conoscan de lexos se saludan. bien ayrna quien mal come. por mejoria mi casa dexaria hombre apercebido medio combatido he caries fier in one hand and water in the other to beat the bush while another catches the byrd to cast beyond the moone his hand is on his halfpeny as he brues so he must drinke both badd me god speed but neyther bad me wellcome to bear two faces in a whood to play cold prophett to sett vp a candell before the devill he thinketh his farthing good syluer _folio , front_. let them that be a cold blowe at the cold. i haue seen as farre come as nigh the catt would eat fish but she will not wett her foote jack would be a gentleman if he could speake french tell your cardes and tell me what yow haue wonne men know how the markett goeth by the markett men. the keyes hang not all by one mans gyrdell. while the grasse growes the horse starueth i will hang the bell about the cattes neck. he is one of them to whome god bedd heu i will take myne altar in myne armes for the mooneshyne in the water it may ryme but it accords not to make a long haruest for a lyttell corn _folio , back_. neyther to heavy nor to hott soft for dashing thowght is free the deuill hath cast a bone to sett strife to putt ones hand between the barke and the tree who meddles in all thinges may shoe the gosling let the catt wynke and lett the mowse runne he hath one pointe of a good haulke he is handy the first poynt of a faulkener to hold fast ech finger is a thumb owt of gods blessing into the warme sune. at eve[r]y dogges barke to awake a lone day my self can tell best where my shoe wringes me a cloke for the rayne to leap owt of the frieng pan into the fyre now toe on her distaff then she can spynne to byte and whyne the world runs on wheeles he would haue better bread than can be made of whea[t] to take hart of grace _folio , front_. thear was no more water then the shipp drewe a man must tell yow tales and find yow ears haruest ears (of a busy man). when thrift is in the feeld he is in the towne that he wynnes in y'e hundreth he louseth in the shyre to stumble at a strawe and leap over a bloc to stoppe two gappes with one bush to doe more than the preest spake of on sunday to throwe the hatchet after the helve yow would be ouer the stile before yow come at it. asinus avis (a foolish conjecture). herculis cothurnos aptare infantj to putt a childes leg into hercules buskin jupiter orbus tales of jupiter dead withowt yssue juxta fluuium puteum fodere to dig a well by the ryuer side a ring of gold on a swynes snowte to help the sunne with lantornes in ostio formosus (gratiows to shew) myosobae flyflappers (offyciows fellowes) [greek: adelphizein]. to brother it (fayre speech) jactare iugum to shake the yoke when it was to salt to wash it with fresh water (when speach groweth in bi ... to fynd taulke more gratfull) _folio , back_. mira de lente quid ad farinas. quarta luna natj (hercules nativity). olle amicitia. venus font. utraque nutans sententia hasta caduceum the two that went to a feast both at dyner and supper neyther knowne, the one a tall the other a short man and said they would be one anothers shadowe. it was replied it fell owt fitt, for at noone the short man mowght be the long mans shadowe and at night the contrary. a sweet dampe (a dislike of moist perfume). wyld tyme on the grownd hath a sent like a cypresse chest. panis lapidosus grytty bread plutoes helmett; secrecy invisibility laconismus omnem vocem mittere (from inchantmentes) tertium caput; (of one ouercharged that hath a burden upon eyther showder and the rd. vpon his head). triceps mercurius (great cunyng). creta notare (chaulking and colouring). _folio , front_. vt phidie signum (presently allowed). jovis sandalium; (jupiters slipper, a man onely esteemed for nearnesse). pennas nido majore extendere. hic rhodus hic saltus (exacting demonstracion). atticus in portum divinum excipio sermonem agamemnonis hostia with sailes and owres to way ancre. to keep strooke (fitt conjunctes). to myngle heauen and earth together. to stirr his curteynes (to raise his wyttes and sprites). comovere sacra to iudg the corne by the strawe. domj conjecturam facere [greek: oikothen eikax[ein]] to divine with a sive (?) mortuus per somnum vacabis curis (of one that interpretes all thinges to the best). nil sacrj es (hercules to adonis). plumbeo iugulare gladio (a tame argument). locrensis bos (a mean present). ollaris deus. (a man respected for his profession withowt woorth in himself). in foribus vrceus; an earthen pott in the threshold numerus _folio , back_. to drawe of the dregges lightenyng owt of a payle durt tramped w'th bloude. ni pater esses vates secum auferat omen. in eo ipso stas lapide vbj praeco praedicat, of one that is abowt to be bowght and sold. lydus ostium claudit (of one that is gone away w'th his purpose). vtranque paginam facit an auditors booke (of one to whome both good and yll is imputed). non navigas noctu (of one that govern[s] himself acaso [bycause] the starres which were wont to be the shipmans direction appear but in the night). it smelleth of the lampe you are in the same shippe between the hamer and the andville res est in cardine vndarum in vinis lepus pro carnibus (of a man persecuted for profite and not for malice). corpore effugere nunquid es saul inter prophetas a dog in the manger [greek: oaekonous] (a howsedowe a dedman). _folio , front_. officere luminibus i may be in their light but not in their way. felicibus sunt et timestres liberj. to stumble at the threshold aquilae senectus of the age now they make popes of nil ad parmenonis suem aquila in nubibus (a thing excellent but remote). mox sciemus melius vate in omni fabula et daedali execratio (of one made a party to all complaintes). semper tibj pendeat hamus. res redit ad triarios. tentantes ad trojam pervenere greci cignea cantio to mowe mosse (vnseasonable taking of vse or profite). ex tripode ominabitur aliquis te conspecto. he came of an egge leporem comedit _folio , back_. h [greek: ae tan ae epi tun] dormientis rete trahit vita doliaris he castes another mans chaunces. i neuer liked proceeding vpon articles before bookes nor betrothinges before mariages. lupus circa puteum chorum agit the woolue danceth about the welle. spem pretio emere agricola semper in nouum annam diues. to lean to a staffe of reed fuimus troes. ad vinum disertj. to knytt a rope of sand. pedum visa est via panicus casus penelopes webb [greek: skiamachein] to striue for an asses shade laborem serere. hylam inclamat. [greek: theomachein] to plowe the wyndes actum agere versuram soluere to euade by a greater mischeef. bulbos querit (of those that looke downe between the mowth and the morsell). a buskin (that will serve both legges not an indifferent man but a dowble spye). _folio , front_. chameleon proteus, euripus. mu[l]ta novit uulpes sed echinus unum magnum semper africa aliquid monstrj parit ex eodem ore calidum et frigidum. ex se finxit velut araneus laqueus laqueum cepit. hinc ille lachrime; hydrus in dolio dicas tria ex curia (liberty vpon dispaire) argi collis (a place of robbing). older then chaos. samiorum flores a bride groomes life samius comatus (of one of no expectacion and great proof). adonis gardens (thinges of great pleasure but soone fading). que sub axillis fiunt. in crastinum seria. to remooue an old tree [greek: kymakophon] (of one that fretteth and vaunteth boldnesse to vtter choler). to bite the br[i]dle lesbia regula. vnguis in vlcere to feed vpon musterd in antro trophonij (of one that neuer laugheth). arctum annulum ne gestato. _folio , back_. areopagita; scytala. cor ne edito. cream of nectar promus magis quam condus. he maketh to deep a furrowe charons fares amazonum cantile[n]a; the amazons song (delicate persons). to sow curses. to quench fyre with oyle ex ipso boue lora sumere. mala attrahens ad se vt cesias nubes pryauste gaudes gaudium. bellerophontis literae (producing lettres or evidence against a mans self). puer glaciem. to hold a woolf by the ears fontibus apros, floribus austrum softer then the lippe of the ear more tractable then wax aurem vellere. [greek: aeeritrimma]; frippon to picke owt the ravens eyes. centones improbitas musce (an importune that wilbe soone awnswered but straght in hand agayne). argentangina, sylver mumpes lupi illum videre priores dorica musa. to looke a gyven horse in the mowth. _folio , front_. vlysses pannos exuit. fatis imputandum lychnobij terrae filius hoc jam et vates sciunt whear hartes cast their hornes few dead byrdes fownd. prouolvitur ad milvios (a sickly man gladd of the spring). amnestia odi memorem compotorem. delius natator. numeris platonis obscurius dauus sum non oedipus infixo aculeo fugere genuino mordere. ansam quaerere. que sunt apud inferos sermones. et scellij filium abominor (of him that cannot endure the sound of a matter; from aristocrates scellius sonne, whome a man deuoted to a democracy said he could not abide for the nearnesse of his name to an aristocracy). water from the handes (such doctrynes as are polluted by custome). _folio , back_. famis campus an yll horse kept the thredd is sponne now nedes the neadle quadratus homo. a cube. fenum habet in cornu. armed intreaty. omnia secunda saltat senex. [greek: theon cheires] mopso nisa datur dedecus publicum. riper then a mulbery. tanquam de narthecio satis quercus; enowgh of acornes. haile of perle. intus canere. symonidis cantilena. viam qui nescit ad mare alter janus. to swyme withowt a barke an owles egg. shake another tree e terra spectare naufragia in diem vivere vno die consenescere. [greek: porro dios te k[a]i keraunou] servire scenae. omnium horarum homo spartae servi maxime servi non sum ex istis heriobus (_sic_) (potentes ad nocendum) _folio , back--continued_. scopae dissolute clavum clauo pellere extra querere sese _folio , front_. cumjnj sector laconice lunae. coruus aquat. ne incalceatus in montes. domj milesia sacra hec non aliter constant. gallus insistit leonis vestigia quaeris (ostentation with couardize) fumos vendere epiphillides. calidum mendacium optimum solus currens vincit. vulcaneum vinclum. salt to water (whence it came). canis seviens in lapidem aratro iacularj. semel rubidus decies pallidus. tanto buon che ual niente so good, as he is good for nothing. the crowe of the bellfry. the vinegar of sweet wyne. en vne nuit naist vn champignon. he hath more to doe then the ovens in christmas. piu doppio ch' una zevola il cuopre vn altare & discuopre l' altro he will hide himself in a mowne medowe il se crede segnar & se da de dettj ne gli occhi he thinkes to blesse himself and thrustes his fingers into his eyes _folio , back_. he is gone like a fay withowt his head la sopra scritta e buona la pazzia li fa andare | la vergogna li fa restare | mangia santj & caga diauolj. testa digiuna, barba pasciuta. l'asne qui porte le vin et boit l'eau lyke an ancher that is euer in the water and will neuer learn to swyme he doth like the ape that the higher he clymbes the more he shews his ars. se no va el otero a mahoma vaya mahoma al otero. nadar y nadar y ahogar a la orilla llorar duelos agenos si vos sabes mucho tambien se yo mi salm [o?] por hazer mi miel comieron mj muxcas come suol d'invierno quien sale tarde y pone presto. lo que con el ojo veo con el dedo lo adeuino hijo no tenemos y nombre lo ponemos. por el buena mesa y mal testamento. era mejor lamiendo que no mordiendo perro del hortelano despues d'yo muerto ni vinna ni huerto perdj mj honor hablando mal y oyendo peor tomar asino que me lleue y no cauallo que me derruque. _folio , front_. so many heades so many wittes happy man happy dole in space cometh grace nothing is impossible to a willing hand of two ylles chuze the lest. better to bow then to breake of suffrance cometh ease two eyes are better then one. leaue is light better vnborn then vntaught. all is well that endes well of a good begynyng comes a good ending thinges doone cannot be vndoone pride will haue a fall some what is better then nothing better be envyed then pytied every man after his fashon he may doe much yll ere he doe much woorse we be but where we were vse maketh mastery loue me lyttell love me long. they that are bownd must obey foly it is to spurn against the pricke better sitt still then rise and fall. might overcomes right no smoke w'th owt some fire tyme tryeth troth make not to sorowes of one _folio , back_. thear is no good accord whear euery one would be a lord saieng and doing are two thinges better be happy then wise who can hold that will away allwaies let leasers haue their woordes warned and half armed he that hath an yll name is half hanged frenzy heresy and jalousy are three that seeldome or neuer cured be that the ey seeth not the hart rueth not better comyng to the ending of a feast then to the begynyng of a fray yll putting a swoord in a mad mans hand he goes farre that neuer turneth principium dimidium totius quot homines tot sententiae suum cujque pulchrum. que supra nos nihil ad nos ama tanquam osurus oderis tanquam amaturus. amicorum omnia communia vultu sepe leditur pietas fortes fortuna adjuuat. omne tulit punctum. in magnis et uoluisse sat est difficilia quoee pulchra. turn tua res agitur paries cum proximus ardet et post malam segetem serendum est omnium rerum vicissitudo _folio back--continued_. in nil sapiendo vita jucundissima parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus dulce bellum inexpertis naturam expellas furca licet vsque recurret. _folio , front_. quo semel est imbuta recens servabit odorem bis dat qui cito dat consciencia mille testes in vino veritas bonae leges ex malis moribus nequicquam sapit qui sibj non sapit summum jus summa injuria sera in fundo parsimonia optimum non nasci musa mihi causas memora longe ambages sed summa sequar fastigia rerum causasque innecte morandj incipit effari mediaque in voce resistit sensit enim simulata voce locutam quae prima exordia sumat haec alternantj potior sententia visa est. et inextricabilis error obscuris vera inuolvens. hae tibi erunt artes sic genus amborum scindit se sanguine ab vno. varioque viam sermone leuabat quid causas petis ex alto fiducia cessit quo tibj diua mej causas nequicquam nectis inanes quid me alta silentia cogis rumpere et obductum verbis vulgare dolorem nequicquam patrias tentasti lubricus artes do quod uis et me victusque uolensque remitto _folio , front--continued_. sed scelus hoc meritj pondus et instar habet quaeque prior nobis intulit ipse ferat officium fecere pium sed invtile nobis exiguum sed plus quam nihil illud erit sed lateant vires nec sis in fronte disertus sit tibj credibilis sermo consuetaque verba praesens vt videare loqui _folio , back_. ille referre aliter sepe solebat idem nec uultu destrue verba tuo nec sua vesanus scripta poeta legat ars casum simulet quid cum legitima fraudatur litera uoce blaesaque fit iusso lingua coacta sono sed quae non prosunt singula multa iuuant. sic parvis componere magna solebam alternis dicetis paulo majora canamus non omnes arbusta iuuant et argutos inter strepere anser olores. causando nostros in longum ducis amores nec tibj tam sapiens quisquam persuadeat autor nec sum animj dubius verbis ea vincere magnum quam sit et angustis hunc addere rebus honorem sic placet an melius quis habet suadere quamquam ridentem dicere verum quis vetat sed tamen amoto quaeramus seria ludo posthabuj tamen illorum mea seria ludo o imitatores seruum pecus quam temere in nobis legem sancimus iniquam. mores sensusque repugnant atque ipsa vtilitas justj prope mater et equi dummodo visum excutiat sibj non hic cuiquam parcit amico nescio quod meritum nugarum totus in illis num[ ] quid vis occupo _folio , back--continued_. noris nos inquit doctj sumus o te bollane cerebrj felicem aiebam tacitus. _folio , front_. ridiculum acrj fortius et melius magnas plerunque secat res. at magnum fecit quod verbis graeca latinis } miscuit o serj studiorum } nil ligat exemplum litem quod lite resoluit nimirum insanus paucis videatur eo quod } maxima pars hominum morbo laborat eodem } neu si vafer vnus et alter insidiatorem praeroso fugerit hamo aut spem deponas aut artem illusus omittas gaudent praenomine molles } auriculae } renuis tu quod jubet alter qui variare cupit rem prodigaliter unam. et adhuc sub judice lis est. proijcit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu atque ita mentitur sic veris falsa remittet tantum series juncturaque pollet tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris ergo fungar vice cotis acutum } reddere que possit ferrum exors ipsa secandj } haec placuit semel haec decies repetita placebit fas est et ab hoste docerj vsque adeo quod tangit idem est tamen vltima quis furor auditos inquit praeponere visis [distans]. pro munere poscimus vsum inde retro redeunt idemque retexitur ordo nil tam bonum est quin male narrando possit deprauarier _folio , back_. furor arma ministrat pulchrumque morj succurrit in armis aspirat primo fortuna laborj facilis jactura sepulchrj cedamus phoebo et monitj meliora sequamu[r] fata uiam invenient degeneres animos timor arguit viresque acquirit eundo et caput inter nubila condit et magnas territat vrbes tam ficti prauique tenax quam nuntia verj gaudens et pariter facta atque infecta canebat nusquam tuta fides et oblitos famae meliori amantes varium et mutabile semper femina furens quid femina possit quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur quicquid id est superanda est omnis fortun[a] ferendo tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior i[to] hoc opus hic labor est nullj fas casto sceleratum insistere li[men] discite justitiam monitj. quisque suos patimur manes neu patrie validat[ ] in viscera vertite vires verique effeta senectus. at patiens operum paruoque assueta iuuen[tus] juno vires animumque ministrat nescia mens hominum fatj sortisque futur[ae] et servare modum rebus sublata secund[is] _folio , front_. spes sibi quisque nee te vllius violentia vincat respice res hello varias credidimus lachrimis an et hae simulare docentur he quoque habent artes quaque iubentur eunt quaecunque ex merito spes venit equa venit simplicitas digna fauore fuit exitus acta probat careat successibus opto quisquis ab euentu facta notanda putet. ars fit vbj a teneris crimen condiscitur annis jupiter esse pium statuit quodcunque iunaret non honor est sed onus si qua voles apte nubere nube parj perdere posse sat est si quern iuuat ista potestas. terror in his ipso major solet esse periclo quaeque timere libet pertimuisse pudet an nescis longas regibus esse manus vtilis interdum est ipsis injuria passis fallitur augurio spes bona sepe suo quae fecisse iuuat facta referre pudet consilium prudensque animj sententia jurat et nisi judicij vincula nulla valent sin abeunt studia in mores illa verecundis lux est praebenda puellis qua timidus latebras speret habere pudor casta est quam nemo rogauit quj non vult fierj desidiosus amet gratia pro rebus merito debetur inemptis quern metuit quisque perisse cupit _folio , back_. a late promus of formularies and elegancies synanthr synanthropy _folio , front_. he that owt leaps his strength standeth not he keeps his grownd; of one that speaketh certenly & pertinently he lighteth well; of one that concludeth his speach well of speaches digressive; this goeth not to the ende of the matter; from the lawyers, for learnyng sake. mot. of the mynd explicat in woords implicat in thowghts i iudg best implicat in thowg. or of trial or mark bycause of swiftnes collocat. & differe & to make woords sequac. _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. vpon impatience of audience verbera sed audi. the fable of the syrenes auribus mederj difficillimum. placidasque viri deus obstruit noluit intelligerevt bene aures ageret the ey is the gate of the affection, but the ear of the vnderstanding vpon question to reward evill w'th evill noli aemularj in malig- cum perverso perverteris; nantibus lex talionis crowne him wth tols (?) yow are not for this world nil malo quam illos simil- tanto buon cheval niente les esse suj et me mej vpon question whether a man should speak or forbear speach quia tacuj inveterauerunt obmutuj et non aperuj os ossa mea (speach may meum quoniam tu fecistj now & then breed it is goddes doing. smart in y'e flesh; but posuj custodiam orj keeping it in goeth to meo cum consisteret y'e bone). peccator aduersum me. credidi propter quod ego autem tanquam locutus sum. surdus nonaudiebam et obmutuj et humiliatus tanquam mutus non sum siluj etaim a bonis aperiens os suum et dolor meus re- nouatus est. _folio , back_. benedictions and maledictions et folium eius non defluet mella fluant illj ferat et rubus asper amonium abominacion dij meliora pijs horresco referens _folio , front_. per otium to any thing impertinent. speech yt hangeth not together nor is concludent. raw sylk; sand. speech of good & various wayght but not neerely applied; a great vessell yt cannot come neer land. of one yt. rippeth things vp deepely. he shooteth to high a compass to shoote neere. y'e law at twicknam for mery tales synanthropie _folio , back_. [blank] _folio c, front_. [blank] _folio d, back_. synanthropie _folio , front_. play. the syn against y'e holy ghost termd in zeal by one of y'e fathers cause of oths; quarells; expence & vnthriftynes; ydlenes & indisposition of y'e mynd to labors. art of forgetting; cause of society acquaintance familiarity in frends; neere & ready attendance in servants; recreation & putting of melancholy; putting of malas curas & cupiditates. games of actiuity & passetyme; _sleight_ of act. of strength quicknes; quick of y'e hand; legg, the whole mocion; strength of arme; legge; _of activity of sleight_. of passetyme onely; of hazard, of play mixt of hazard; meere hazard cunnyng in making yor. game; of playe: exercise of attention; of memory; of dissimulacion; of discrecion; of many hands or of receyt; of few; of quick returne tedious; of praesent iudgment; of vncerten yssue. seuerall playes or ideas of play. frank play; wary play, venturous not venturous quick slowe; oversight dotage betts lookers on judgment groome porter; christmas; invention for hunger oddes; stake; sett; he that folowes his losses & giueth soone over at wynnings will never gayne by play ludimus incauti studioque aperimur ab ipso _folio , front--continued_. he that playeth not the begynnyng of a game well at tick tack & y'e later end at yrish shall never wynne frier gilbert y'e lott; earnest in old tyme sport now as musik owt of church to chamber _folio , back_. [blank] _folio _. [blank] _folio , front_. good morow_ good swear[ ] good trauaile good hast good matens good betymes; bonum mane bon iouyr. bon iour; (bridgrome). good day to me & good morow to yow. i haue not sayd all my prayers till i haue bid yow good morow. late rysing fynding a bedde, early risinge, summons to ryse diluculo surgere saluberrimum est. surge puer mane sed noli surgere vane. yow will not rise afore yor betters (y'e sonne). por mucho madrugar no amanece mas ayna. qui a bon voisin a bon matin (lodged next); stulte quid est somnus gelidae nisi mortis imago longa quiescendi tempora fata dabunt. albada; golden sleepe. early vp & neuer y'e neere. the wings of y'e mornyng. the yowth & spring of y'e day the cock; the larke. cowrt howres. _folio , front--continued_. constant; abedd when yow are bedd; & vp when yow are vp. trew mens howres. is this your first flight x i doe not as byrds doe for i fly owt of my feathersz is it not a fayre one sweet, fresh of y'e mornyng. i pray god your early rysing doe yow no hurt; amen when i vse it. i cannot be ydle vp as yow canne. yow could not sleep for your yll lodging; i cannot gett owt of my good lodginge. yow have an alarum in your head block heads & clock heads. there is law against lyers a bedde. yow haue no warrant to ly a bedde synce yow are not gott vp turn vp. hott cocckles withowt sands god night well to forgett; i wish yow may so well sleepe as yow may not fynd yor yll lodging. note.--this folio is written in two columns. the second column begins with the line, "i pray god your early rysing." * * * * * _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. fourmes & elegancyes. _folio , front_. _formularies promus jan. _. against con-} es. conceyt of // ceyt of diffi-}tentantes ad trojam peruenere impossibili- // culty or im-} ties & ima- // possibility ginations // vt s[upra] ad id ess. indear- // abstinence}qui in agone contendit a multis ing generali-// negatiues } abstinet. ties & prae- // cepts // vt s[upra] all the commaundments nega ad id tiue saue two ad id // parerga; mouente sed nil pro- ad id. and curious; busy extenuating // without jug mouentes operosities, nil ad deuises & // ment good summam. particulars. direction claudus i via ad id. vt s[upra] [ ]direction}to give the grownd in bowling. // generall. } vt sup[ra] like tempring with phisike a ad id. // good diett much better. zeal affection}omni possum in eo qui me idea. zeal alacrity } confortat & good affec-// tion ye e. // vt s[upra] possunt quia posse videntur ad id. vt s[upra] exposition of not overweenning but ouerwilling. ad id. // vt s[upra] goddes presse; voluntaries ad id. // detraction chesters wytt to depraue & otherwise not wyse [ ]s. p. s. j.// hast in actions as in wayes the nearest ind my stay// ikpatience y'e fowlest * * * * * _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. ffrancys dalle fragments of elegancyes _folio , front_. //quod adulationis nomine dicitur bonum quod // obtrectationis malum. cujus contrarium majus; majus aut priuatio cujus minus animis.# //cujus opus et uirtus majus majus cujus minus minus //quorum cupiditates majores aut meliores, //quorum scientiae aut artes honestiores. //quod uir melior eligeret vt injuriam potius pati // quam facere. //quod manet melius quam quod transit. //quorum quis autor cupit esse bonum, cujus horret // malum. //quod quis amico cupit facere bonum quod inimico // malum. //diuturniora minus diuturnis conjugata //quod plures eligunt potius quam quod pauciores. //quod controuertentes dicunt bonum perinde ac omnes quod scientes et potentes, quod judicantes. //quorum praemia majora, majora bona, quorum mulctae majores, majora mala. quas confessis et tertijs majoribus majora. //quod ex multis constat magis bonum cum multi // articulj bonj dissectj magnitudinem prae se ferunt natiua ascitis. //qua supra aetatem praeter occasionem aut oportuni- // tate praeter naturam toe; praeter conditionem // temporis praeter naturam personae vel instru- // mentivel iuuamentimajora quam quae secundum. _folio, back_. //quae in grauiore tempore vtilia vt in morbo senectute // aut aduersis. //ex duobus medijs quod propinquius est fruj //quae tempore futuro et vltimo quia sequens tempus // evacuat praeterita antiqua novis noua antiquis consueta nouis noua consuetis //quod ad veritatem magis quam ad opinionem ejus // [ ]ante, quae ad opinionem pertinet, ratio est ac // modus, quod quis sj clam fore putaret non // eligeret //polychreston vt diuitiae, robur, potentia, facultates // animj # ex duobus quod tertio aequali adjunctum majus ipsa[ ] reddit # quae non latent cum adsunt, quam quae latere possunt majora. //quod magis ex necessitate vt oculus vnus lusco //quod expertus facile reliquit //quod quis cogitur facere malum //quod sponte fit bonum //quod bono confesso redimitur * * * * * _folio , front_ in deliberatives and electives _folio , back_. cujus excusatio paratior est vel venia indulta inagis minus malum. _folio , front_. melior est oculorum visio quam animj progressio //spes in dolio remansit sed non vt antedotum sed vt // major morbus spes omnis in futuram vitam consumendus sufficit praesentibus bonis purus sensus. spes vigilantis somnium; vitae summa breuis spem nos uetat inchoare longam. //spes facit animos leues timidos inaequales peregrinantes //vidi ambulantes sub sole cum adolescente secundo // qui consurget post eum. //imaginationes omnia turbant, timores multiplicant // voluptates corrumpunt. //anticipatio timores[ ]salubris ob inventionem remedij // spei institit[ ] imminent futuro, ingrati in praeteritum semper adolescentes //vitam sua sponte fluxam magis fluxam reddimus per continuationes spe praesentia erunt futura non contra * * * * * _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. the fallaxes of y'e and y'e assurance of erophil. to fall well euery waye watry impressions, fier elementall fier aethereall. y'e memory of that is past cannot be taken from him. all in purchaze nothing in injoyeng. _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. // quod inimicis nostris gratum est ac optabile vt // _nobis_ eveniat malum, quod molestiae et terrorj // est bonum. metuo danaos et dona ferentes hoc ithacus velit et magno mercentur atridae. both parties haue wyshed battaile the launching of y'e. imposture by him that intended murder. conciliam homines mala. a forein warre to appeas parties at home // quod quis sibj tribuit et sumit bonum, quod in // alium transfert malum non tarn inuidiae impertiendae quam laudis com- municandae gratia loquor. // quod quis facile impertit minus bonum quod quis // paucis et grauatim impertit majus bonum te nunc habet ista secundum. // quod per ostentationem fertur bonum, quod per // excusationem purgatur malum. // nescio quid peccati portet haec purgatio. // cuj sectae diuersae quae sibj quaeque praestantiam // vendicat secundas tribuit melior singulis // secta academicae quam epicureus et stoicus sibi // tantum postponit // neutrality. _folio , back_. //cujus exuperantia vel excellentia melior ejus et // genus melius. bougeon de mars, enfant de paris. whear they take some thinges of lyttell valew but excellencye some more indifferent and after one sort. //in quo periculosius erratur melius eo in quo erratur // minore cum periculo. //quod rem integram seruat, melius eo a quo receptus // non est potestatem enim donat potestas autem // bonum the tale of the frogges that were wyshed by one in a drowth to repayre to the bottome of a well, ay (?) but if water faile thear how shall we gett vp agayne //quod polychrestum est melius quam quod ad vnum // refertur ob incertos casus humanos. //cujus contrarium priuatio malum bonum cujus // bonum malum. //in quo non est satietas neque nimium melius eo in // quo satietas est //in quo vix erratur melius eo in quo error procliuis //finis melior ijs quae ad finem; //cujus causa sumptus facti et labores toleratj // bonum; si vt euitetur malum, //quod habet riuales et de quo homines contendunt // bonum; de quo non est contentio malum. differ, inter fruj et acquirere. _folio , front_. // quod laudatur et praedicatur bonum quod occultatur // et uituperatur malum. // quod etiam inimicj et maleuoli laudant valde bonum, // quod etiam amicj reprehendunt magnum malum. quod consulto et per meliora judicia proponitur majus bonum. // quod sine mixtura malj melius quam quod refractum // et non syncerum. possibile et facile bonum quod sine labore et paruo tempore cont[ra] malum bona confessa jucundum sensu; comparatione. honor; voluptas; vita bona ualetudo suauia objecta sensuum; inducunt tranquillum sensum virtutes ob securitatem et contemptum rerum humanarum; facultates animk et rerum gerendarum ob spem et metum subigendum; et diuiti ... ex aliena opinione; laus. quae propria sunt et minus communicata; ob honor, quae continent, vt animalia vt plantae et amplius; sed id amplius potest esse malj. congruentia, ob raritatem et genium et proprietatem vt in familijs et professionibus quae sibj deesse quis putat licet sint exigua _folio , back_. ad quae natura procliues sunt quae nemo abjectus capax est vt faciat majus et continens minore et contento ipsum quod suj causa eligitur quod omnia appetunt. quod prudentiam adepti eligunt quod efficiendi et custodiendj vim habet. cuj res bonae sunt consequentes. maximum maximo ipsum ipsis; vnde exuperant ... quae majoris bonj conficientia sunt ea majora sunt bona. quod propter se expetendum eo quod propter alios fall. in diuersis generibus et proportionibus finis non finis minus indigens eo quod magis indiget quod paucioribus et facilioribus indiget quoties ho (_sic_) sine illo fierj no (_sic_) potest, illud sine hoc fierj potest illud melius principium non principio; finis autem et principium antitheta; non majus videtur principium quia primum est in opere; contra finis quia primum in mente; de perpetratore et consiliario. rarurn copiosis honores; mutton venison copiosum varit vsu: optimum aqua difficiliora, facilioribus | faciliora, difficilioribus | _folio , front_. quod magis a necessitate vt oculus vnus lusco. major videtur gradus priuationis quam diminutionis quae non latent cum adsunt majora quam que latere possunt. quod expertus facile reliquit malum, quod mordicus tenet bonum. in aliquibus manetur quia non datur regressus quae in grauiore tempore vtilia vt in morbo senectute aduersis. the soldier like a coreselett; bellaria, et appetitiua, redd hearing. loue quod controuertentes dicunt bonum perinde ac omnes. sermon frequented by papists and puritans; matter of circumstance not of substance boriae penetrabile frigus adurit cacus oxen forwards and backwards not examyning. _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. [blank] _folio , front_. _analogia caesaris_ verb. et clausalae ad exercitationem accentus et ad gratiam sparsam et ad suitatem sat that; (for admitt that) it is like sr. etc. putting peradventure can yow: sp. a man agayne into his (what can yow) tale interruted so much there is. fr.(neuer- your reason thelesse) i haue been allwaies at see then bow. sp. (much his request; lesse) his knowledg lieth about yf yow be at leasure fur- him nyshed etc. as perhappes such thoughts i would yow are (in stead of are exile into into my not) dreames for the rest (a transition a good crosse poynt but concluding) the woorst cinq a pase the rather bycause con- tynuing anothers speach he will never doe his tricks to the end, sauing that, whereas yet (contynu- a proper young man and ance) and so of all kynds so will he be while he liues in contemplation (in con- of these fowre take them sideracon) where yow will not praejudicing. i have knowne the tyme with this (cum hoc quod and it was not half an verificare vult) howre agoe without that (adsque hoc pyonner in the myne of quod) truth _folio , front--continued_. for this tyme (when a man as please the painter extends his hope or imag- a nosce teipsum (a chiding inacion or beleefe to farre) or disgrace) a mery world when such valew me not y'e lesse by- fellowes must correct cause i am yours. (a mery world when the simplest may correct). is it a small thing yt & (can not yow not be content) an hebraisme what els? nothing lesse. it is not the first vntruth i have heard reported nor it is not y'e first truth i haue heard denied. i will prooue x why goe and prooue it minerallwyttsstrongpoyson yf they be not corrected. o the' o my i. st. beleeue it beleeue it not; for a time mought it pleas god that fr (i would to god) neuer may it please yow as good as the best: i would not but yow had doone it (but shall i doe it againe) * * * * * note.--this folio is written in three columns. the third column begins, "it is a small thing." _folio , back_. the sonne of some what y'e ayre of his behauior; factious; to frime (to sp)[ ] sp to cherish or endear; to vndeceyue. sp to dis- abuse deliuer and vnwrapped to discount (to cleere) brazed (impudent brawned seared) vn- payned. vuelight (twylight) band- ing (factions). remoouing (remuant) a third person (a broker) a nose cutt of; tucked vp. his disease hath certen traces to plaine him on ameled (fayned counterfett) in y'e best kynd. having (?) the vpper grownd (awthority) his resorts (his conceyts) it may be well last for it hath lasted well those are great with yow y't are great by yow * * * * * _folio , back--continued_. the avenues; a back thought. baragan; perpetuo juuenis a bonance (a caulme) to drench to potion (to insert) haggard insauvaged infistuled (made hollow with malign deales). _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. cursitours lament and cry [ ]verba interjectiua siue ad gratiam sparsam _folio , front_. semblances or popularities of good and evill w'th their redargutions for deliberacions cujus contrarium malum bonum, cujus bonum malum. non tenet in ijs rebus quarum vis in temperamento et mensura sita est. dum vitant stulti vitia in contraria currunt x media via nulla est quae nee amicos parit nee inimi- cos tollit solons law that in states every man should declare him self of one faction. neutralitye: vtinam esses calidus aut frigidus sed quoniam tepidus es eveniet vt te expuam ex ore meo. dixerunt fatui medium tenuere beatj cujus origo occasio bona, bonum; cujus mala malum. non tenet in ijs malis quae vel mentem informant, vel affectum corrigunt, siue resipiscentiam in- ducendo siue necessitatem, nec etiam in fortuitis. no man gathereth grapes of thornes nor figges of thistelles the nature of every thing is best consydered in the seed primum mobile turnes about all y'e rest of y'e orbes. a good or yll foundacion. x ex malis moribus bonae leges. [greek: pathaemata maaemata] when thinges are at the periode of yll they turn agayne _folio , front--continued_. many effectes like the serpent that deuoureth her moother so they destroy their first cause as inopia luxuria etc. the fashon of d. hert. to the dames of lond. your way is to be sicker usque adeo latet vtilitas aliquisque malo fuit vsus in illo _folio , back_. quod ad bonum finem dirigitur bonum, quod ad mulum malum _folio front_. [blank] _folio back_. philologia colors of good and euill _folio front_. some choice frensh proverbes. ii a chie en son chapeau et puis s'en va couvert par trop debatre la verite se perd. apres besogne fait le fou barguine. l'hoste et le poisson passes trois jours puent. le mort n'ha point d'amis, le malade et l'absent qu'vn demye. ii est tost trompe qui mal ne pense. la farine du diable s'en va moitie en son. qui prest a l'ami, perd an double. c'est vn valett du diable, qui fait plus qu'on luy command. il n'est horologe plus iust que le ventre. mere pitieuse, fille rigueuse ii commence bien a mourrir qui abandonne son desir. chien qui abaye de loin ne mord pas. achete maison faite, femme a faire le riche disne quand il veut, le poure quand il peut. bien part de sa place qui son amy y lesse. il n'y a melieur mirroir que le vieil amy. amour fait beaucoup, mais l'argent fait tout. l'amour la tousse et la galle ne se peuvent celer. amour fait rage, mais l'argent fait marriage. ma chemise blanche, baise mon cul tous les dimanches. mieux vaut vn tenes, que deux fois l'aurez. craindre ce qu'on peut vaincre, est vn bas courage. a folle demande il ne faut point de responce. _folio , front--continued_. qui manie ses propres affaires, ne souille point se mains. argent receu les bras rompus. vn amoreux fait touiours quelque chose folastre. le povre qui donne au riche demande six heures dort l'escholier, sept y'e voyager, huict y'e vigneron, et neuf en demand le poltron. la guerre fait les larrons et la paix les meine au gibbett au prester couzin germaine, au rendre fils de putaine qui n'ha point du miel en sa cruche, qu'il en aye en sa bouche. langage de hauts bonnetts. les paroles du soir ne sembles a celles du matin. qui a bon voisin a bon matin. estre en la paille jusque an ventre. il faut prendre le temps comme il est, et les gens comme ils sont. il n'est tresor que de vivre a son aise. la langue n'a point d'os, et casse poitrine et dos. quand la fille pese vn auque, ou luy peut mettre la coque. il en tuera dix de la chandelle, et vingt du chandelier. _folio , back_. qui seme de chardons recuielle des espines il n'est chasse que de vieux levriers. qui trop se haste en beau chemin se fourvoye. il ne choisit pas qui emprunt. ostez vn vilain an gibett, il vous y mettra. son habit feroit peur an voleur. j'employerai verd et sec. tost attrappe est le souris, qui n'a pour tout qu'vn pertuis. le froid est si apre, qu'il me fait battre le tambour avec les dents. homme de deux visages, n'aggree en ville ny en villages. perdre la volee pour le bound. homme roux et femme barbue de cinquante pas les salue. quand beau vient sur beau il perd sa beaute. les biens de la fortune passe comme la lune. ville qui parle, femme qui escoute, i'vne se prend, lautre se foute. coudre le peau du renard, a celle du lyon. il a la conscience large comme la manche d'vn cordelier. brusler la chandelle par les deux bouts. bon bastard c'est d'avanture, meschant c'est la nature. argent content portent medecine. bonne renommee vaut plus que cincture doree. _folio , back--continued_. fille qui prend, se vend; fille qui donne s'abban- donne. fais ce que tu dois, avien que pourra. il est tost deceu qui mal ne pense. vos finesses sont cousues de fil blanc, elles sont trop apparentes. assez demand qui se plaint. assez demand qui bien sert. il ne demeure pas trop qui vient a la fin. secrett de dieux, secrett de dieux ton fils repeu et mal vestu, ta fille vestue et mal repue. du dire an fait il y a vn grand trait. courtesye tardive est discourtesye. femme se plaint, femme se deult, femme est malade quand elle veut-- et par madame ste. marie, quand elle veut, elle est guerrye. quie est loin du plat, est prez de son dommage. le diable estoit alors en son grammaire. il a vn quartier de la lune en sa teste. homme de paille vaut vne femme d'or. amour de femme, feu d'estoupe. fille brunette gaye et nette renard qui dort la mattinee, n'a pas la langue emplumee. _folio , front_. tout est perdu qu'on donne au fol. bonnes paroles n'escorche pas la langue. pour durer il faut endurer qui veut prendre vn oiseau, qu'il ne l'effarouche. soleil qui luise au matin, femme qui parle latin, enfant nourri du vin ne vient point a bonne fin. il peut hardiment heurter a la porte, qui bonnes novelles apporte. a bon entendeur ne faut que demy mot. qui fol envoye fol attend. la faim chaisse le loup hors du bois. qui pen se prize, dieu l'advise. en pont, en planche, en riviere, valett devant, maistre arriere. l'oeil du maistre engraisse le chevall. qui mal entend, mal respond. mal pense qui ne repense. mal fait qui ne pairfait. si tous les fols portoient marrottes, on ne scauroit pas de quell bois se chaufer mieux vaut en paix vn oeuf, qu'en guerre vn boeuf. couper l'herbe sous les pieds. toutes les heures ne sont pas meures. qui vit a compte, vit a honte. meschante parole jettee, va par toute alia volee. amour se nourrit de ieune chaire innocence porte avec soy sa deffence. il ne regard plus loin que le bout de son nez. a paroles lourdes, aureilles sourdes. _folio , front--continued_ ce n'est pas evangile, qu'on dit parmi la ville. qui n'a patience n'a rien. de mauvais payeur, foin ou paille en fin les renards se troue chez le pelletier. qui prest a l'ami perd an double chantez a l'asne il vous fera de petz mieux vault glisser du pied, que de la langue. tout vient a point a chi peut attendre. il n'est pas si fol qu'il en porte l'habit. il est plus fol, qui a fol sens demand. nul n'a trop de sens, n'y d'argent. en seurte dort qui n'a que perdre. le trou trop overt sous le nez fait porter soulier dechirez. a laver la teste d'vn asne, on ne perd que le temps et la lexive. chi choppe et ne tombe pas adiouste a ces pas. _folio , back_. amour, toux et fumee, en secrett ne sont demeuree. il a pour chaque trou vne cheville, il n'est vie que d'estre content. si tu veux cognoistre villain, baille luy la baggette en main. le boeuf sale, fait trover le vin sans chandelle. le sage va toujours la sonde a la main. qui se couche avec les chiens, se leve avec de puces. a tous oiseaux leur nids sont beaux ovrage de commune, ovrage de nul. oy, voi, et te tais, si tu veux vivre en paix. rouge visage et grosse panche, ne sont signes de penitence. a celuy qui a son paste an four, on peut donner de son tourteau. au serviteur le morceau d'honneur. pierre qui se remue n'accuille point de mousse necessite fait trotter la vieille. nourriture passe nature. la mort n'espargne ny roy ny roc. en mangeant l' appetit vient. table sans sel, bouche sans salive les maladyes vient a cheval, et s'en returne a pieds. tenez chauds le pied et la teste, an demeurant vivez en beste. faillir est vne chose humaine, se repentir divine, perseverer diabolique. fourmage est sain qui vient de ciche main. _folio , back--continued_. si tu veux engraisser promptement, mangez avec faim, bois a loisir et lentement. a l'an soixante et douse, temps est qu'on se house. vin sur laict c'est souhait, lait sur vin c'est venin faim fait disner passetemps souper. le maux terminans en ique, font an medecine la nique. au morceau restiffe esperon de vin. vn oeuf n'est rien, deux font grand bien, trois c'est assez, quattre c'est fort, cinque c'est la mort. apres les poire le vin ou le prestre qui a la sante est riche et ne le scait pas. a la trogne on cognoist l'yvrogne. le fouriere de la lune a marque le logis. vne pillule fromentine, vne dragme sermentine, et la balbe[ ] d'vne galline est vne bonne medecine. il faut plus tost prendre garde avec qui tu bois et mange, qu'a ce que tu bois et mange. qui tout mange le soir, le lendemain rogne son pain noir vin vieux, amy vieux, et or vieux sont amez en tous lieux. * * * * * _folio , front_. qui veut vivre sain, disne pen et soupe moins. lever a six, manger a dix, souper a six, coucher a dix, font l'homme vivre dix fois dix. de tous poissons fors que la tenche, prenez les dos, lessez le ventre. qui couche avec la soif, se leve avec la sante. amour de garze et saut de chien, ne dure si l'on ne dit tien. il en est plus assotte qu'vn fol de sa marotte. qui fol envoye fol attende. pennache de boeuf. vn espagnol sans jesuite est comme perdis sans orange. c'est la maison de robin de la vallee, ou il y a ny pott an feu, ny escuelle lavee. celuy gouverne bien mal le miel qui n'en taste. auiourdhuy facteur, demaine fracteur. ii est crotte en archidiacre. apres trois jours on s'ennuy, de femme, d'hoste, et de pluye. il n'est pas eschappe qui son lien traine. en la terre des aveugles, le borgne est roy. il faut que la faim soit bien grande, quand les loups mange l'vn l'autre. il n'est[ ] faut qu'vne mouche luy passe, par devant le nez, pour le facher. la femme est bien malade, quand elle ne se peut tenir sur le dos. * * * * * _folio , front--continued_. il n'a pas bien assise ses lunettes. cette flesche n'est pas sorti de son carquois. l'affaire vas a quattre roues merchand d'allumettes c'est vn marchand qui prend l'argent sans center ou peser. je vous payeray en monnoye de cordelier. vous avez mis le doit dessus. s'embarquer sans bisquit. coucher a l'enseigne de l'estoile on n'y trove ny trie ny troc. cecy n'est pas de mon gibier. joyeux comme sourris en graine il a beaucoup de grillons en la teste. elle a son cardinall il est fourni du fil et d'esguille. chevalier de corneuaille. angleterre le paradis de femmes, le pourgatoire de valetts, l'enfer de chevaux. le mal an entre en nageant. qui a la fievre an mois de may, le rest de l'an vit sain et gay. fol a vint cinque carrattes celuy a bon gage du chatte qui en tient la peau. il entend autant comme truye en espices nul soulas humaine sans helas in (_sic_) n'est pas en seurete qui ne mescheut onques. _folio , front_. [blank] _folio , back_. some choice frensh prover[bs.] [illustration: tail piece from spencer's "faerie queen." ] footnotes. [ ] digges really means "when time dissolves thy stratford mask". [ ] through the whole play the fact that puntarvolo represents bacon is continually apparent to the instructed reader. note especially act ii., scene , where puntarvolo addresses his wife, who appears at a window, in a parody of the address of romeo to juliet. again in act ii., scene , carlo buffone calls puntarvolo "a yeoman pheuterer." pheuter or feuter means a rest or supportfor a spear--which is informing. [ ] this fact so puzzling to halliwell-phillipps is fully explained when it is realised that william shackspere of stratford could neither read or write. [ ] the words attriuted to apollo, are of course spoken by his chancellor bacon. see note on the number on page . [ ] while i am perfectly satisfied that the above explanation of the meaning of the expression "all numbers" is the correct one; i am not unaware that at the date at which the discoveries appeared "all numbers" would be generally understood in its classical sense; jonson of course not being permitted to speak too plainly. he was foreman of bacon's good pens and one of his "left-hands"; as any visitor to westminster abbey may learn, the attendants there being careful to point out that the sculptor has "accidentally" clothed jonson's bust in a left-handed coat. (with respect to the meaning of this the reader is referred to plate , page .) thus far was written and in print when the writer's attention was called to the rev. george o neill's little brochure, "could bacon have written the plays?" in which in a note to page we find "numeri" in latin, "numbers" in english, applied to literature mean nothing else than verse, and even seem to exclude prose. thus tibullus writes, "_numeris ille hic pede libero scribit_" (one writes in verse another in prose), and shakespeare has the same antithesis in "love's labour lost" (iv., ), "these numbers i will tear and write in prose." yet all this does not settle the matter, for "numeri" is also used in the sense merely of "parts". pliny speaks of a prose work as perfect in all its parts, "_omnibus numeris absolutus_," and cicero says of a plan of life, "_omnes numeros virtutis continet_" (it contains every element of virtue). so that jonson may have merely meant to say in slightly pedantic phrase that bacon had passed away all parts fulfilled. [ ] under what is now known as "rask's law" the roman f becomes b in the teutonic languages: fero, bear; frater, brother; feru, brew; flo, blow, etc., etc., shewing that the roman f was by no means really a mute. [ ] see page . [ ] the number too obviously represented bacon, and therefore which spells sow (s , o , w = ) was substituted for . scores of examples can be found where on page some reference is made to bacon in books published under various names, especially in the emblem books. in many cases page is _misprinted_ as . in the shakespeare folio on the first page we read "hang hog is latten for bacon," and on the second page we find "gammon of bacon." when the seven extra plays were added in thethird folio in each of the two new pages appears "st. albans." in the fifth edition, published by kowe in , on page we read "deeper than did ever plummet sound i'll drown my book"; and on page _misprinted_ (the only mispagination in the whole book of pages) we find "i do ... require my dukedom of thee, which perforce i know thou must restore." in bacon's "advancement of learning," first english edition, , on page _misprinted_ in the margin in capital letters (the only name in capital letters in the whole book) we read "bacon." in florio's "second frutes," , on page , is "slice of bacon" and also "gammon of bakon," to shew that bacon may be misspelled as it is in drayton's "polyolbion," , where on page we find _becanus_. a whole book could be filled with similar instances. [ ] about a.d. benefit of clergy was extended to all males who could read. in it was enacted that mere laymen should have the benefit only once and should be branded on the thumb to shew they had once had it. _whimsies_, , p. , tells us: "if a prisoner, by help of a compassionate prompter, hack out his neck verse (psalm li. _v_. i in latin) and be admitted to his clergy, the jailors have a cold iron in store if his purse be hot, but if not, a hot iron that his fist may _fiz_." benefit of clergy was not totally abolished till . [ ] in sir john hayward, ll.d., brought out "the life and raigne of king henrie iiii extending to the end of the first yeare of his raigne." this little book contains an account of the trial of richard ii., and was dedicated to the earl of essex in very encomiastic terms. it irritated queen elizabeth in the highest degree, and she clapped hayward into prison and employed sir francis bacon to search his book for treason. (lowndes, bohn, p. ). the story carefully read reveals the fact that it was really the play rather than the book which enraged queen elizabeth. [ ] the appearance of shakespeare's name in the list of actors in ben jonson's plays and in the plays known as shakespeare's was, of course, part of the plot to place shakespeare's name in a prominent position while the pseudonym had to be preserved. [ ] facsimiles of law clerks' writing of the name "john shakespeare," are given in plate , page . they are taken from halliwell-phillipps' "outlines of the life of shakespeare," , vol. , pp. and . in the first two examples the name is written "shakes," followed by an exactly similar scroll and dash to complete the name. in saunders' "ancient handwriting," , page , we are shown that such a "scroll and dash" represents "per" "par," and "por"; and in wright's "court handwriting restored" we find that in the most perfectly formed script a "p" with a dash through the lower part similarly represented "per," "par," and "por," this is repeated in thoyts' "how to decipher and study old documents," and the same information is given in numerous other works. there is therefore no possible excuse for dr. wallace's blundering. [ ] a facsimile example of the way in which the law clerk wrote "shaxper" is shewn in the third line of plate , page , where it will be seen that the writer uses a similar "x". [ ] holinshed's chronicles ( ) state that "montioy, king-at-arms, was sent to the king of england to defie him as the enemie of france, and to tell him that he should shortlie have battell." moreover, "montioy" is not the personal name, but the official title of a herald of france, just as "norroy" is not a personal name, but the official title of one of the three chief heralds of the college of arms of england. [ ] he never was a manager. [ ] from the introduction of "the famous historie of troylus and cresseid, by william shakespeare," . this play as the above introduction says was never acted. [ ] 'well' has been struck out. [ ] 'quin,' this may be 'quis.' [ ] this is difficult to read. it may be "faciunt et tedia funera." [ ] this is difficult to read. it may be "fero danid es." [ ] "sedeant." this word is doubtful. it may be "tedeant," "te deum" is not an impossible reading. [ ] "num" may by read as "nunc." [ ] "validat" may be read "validas". [ ] "swear," this may be read "sweat." [ ] the side note "direction generall" has been struck out in the ms. [ ] s. p. s. j. may be read s r s. f. [ ] "ante," this may be read "aute" = "autem." "ipsa" this may be read "ipsu"--"ipsum". [ ] "timores" may be read "timoris". [ ] "institit" = insistit. [ ] "to frime (to sp." this line may read, "to trime) to suse sp." [ ] [this is an endorsement across the page.] [ ] "balbe" may be read "balle." [ ] for "il n'est faut" may be read "il n'en faut." the celebrity by winston churchill volume . chapter i i was about to say that i had known the celebrity from the time he wore kilts. but i see i shall have to amend that, because he was not a celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after i had left new york for the west. in the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. he never read me any of his manuscripts, which i can safely say he would have done had he written any at that time, and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. but he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which i hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when i came in contact with the celebrity. hence i am constrained to the belief that his eccentricity must have arrived with his genius, and both after the age of twenty-five. far be it from me to question the talents of one upon whose head has been set the laurel of fame! when i knew him he was a young man without frills or foibles, with an excellent head for business. he was starting in to practise law in a downtown office with the intention of becoming a great corporation lawyer. he used to drop into my chambers once in a while to smoke, and was first-rate company. when i gave a dinner there was generally a cover laid for him. i liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me. i look upon notoriety with the same indifference as on the buttons on a man's shirt-front, or the crest on his note-paper. when i went west, he fell out of my life. i probably should not have given him another thought had i not caught sight of his name, in old capitals, on a daintily covered volume in a book-stand. i had little time or inclination for reading fiction; my days were busy ones, and my nights were spent with law books. but i bought the volume out of curiosity, wondering the while whether he could have written it. i was soon set at rest, for the dedication was to a young woman of whom i had often heard him speak. the volume was a collection of short stories. on these i did not feel myself competent to sit in judgment, for my personal taste in fiction, if i could be said to have had any, took another turn. the stories dealt mainly with the affairs of aristocratic young men and aristocratic young women, and were differentiated to fit situations only met with in that society which does not have to send descriptions of its functions to the newspapers. the stories did not seem to me to touch life. they were plainly intended to have a bracing moral effect, and perhaps had this result for the people at whom they were aimed. they left with me the impression of a well-delivered stereopticon lecture, with characters about as life-like as the shadows on the screen, and whisking on and off, at the mercy of the operator. their charm to me lay in the manner of the telling, the style, which i am forced to admit was delightful. but the book i had bought was a success, a great success, if the newspapers and the reports of the sales were to be trusted. i read the criticisms out of curiosity more than any other prompting, and no two of them were alike: they veered from extreme negative to extreme positive. i have to confess that it gratified me not a little to find the negatives for the most part of my poor way of thinking. the positives, on the other hand, declared the gifted young author to have found a manner of treatment of social life entirely new. other critics still insisted it was social ridicule: but if this were so, the satire was too delicate for ordinary detection. however, with the dainty volume my quondam friend sprang into fame. at the same time he cast off the chrysalis of a commonplace existence. he at once became the hero of the young women of the country from portland, maine, to portland, oregon, many of whom wrote him letters and asked him for his photograph. he was asked to tell what he really meant by the vague endings of this or that story. and then i began to hear rumors that his head was turning. these i discredited, of course. if true, i thought it but another proof of the undermining influence of feminine flattery, which few men, and fewer young men, can stand. but i watched his career with interest. he published other books, of a high moral tone and unapproachable principle, which i read carefully for some ray of human weakness, for some stroke of nature untrammelled by the calling code of polite society. but in vain. chapter ii it was by a mere accident that i went west, some years ago, and settled in an active and thriving town near one of the great lakes. the air and bustle and smack of life about the place attracted me, and i rented an office and continued to read law, from force of habit, i suppose. my experience in the service of one of the most prominent of new york lawyers stood me in good stead, and gradually, in addition to a heterogeneous business of mines and lumber, i began to pick up a few clients. but in all probability i should be still pegging away at mines and lumber, and drawing up occasional leases and contracts, had it not been for mr. farquhar fenelon cooke, of philadelphia. although it has been specifically written that promotion to a young man comes neither from the east nor the west, nor yet from the south, mr. cooke arrived from the east, and in the nick of time for me. i was indebted to farrar for mr. cooke's acquaintance, and this obligation i have since in vain endeavored to repay. farrar's profession was forestry: a graduate of an eastern college, he had gone abroad to study, and had roughed it with the skilled woodsmen of the black forest. mr. cooke, whom he represented, had large tracts of land in these parts, and farrar likewise received an income from the state, whose legislature had at last opened its eyes to the timber depredations and had begun to buy up reserves. we had rooms in the same elizabethan building at the corner of main and superior streets, but it was more than a year before i got farther than a nod with him. farrar's nod in itself was a repulsion, and once you had seen it you mentally scored him from the list of your possible friends. besides this freezing exterior he possessed a cutting and cynical tongue, and had but little confidence in the human race. these qualities did not tend to render him popular in a western town, if indeed they would have recommended him anywhere, and i confess to have thought him a surly enough fellow, being guided by general opinion and superficial observation. afterwards the town got to know him, and if it did not precisely like him, it respected him, which perhaps is better. and he gained at least a few warm-friends, among whom i deem it an honor to be mentioned. farrar's contempt for consequences finally brought him an unsought-for reputation. admiration for him was born the day he pushed o'meara out of his office and down a flight of stairs because he had undertaken to suggest that which should be done with the timber in jackson county. by this summary proceeding farrar lost the support of a faction, o'meara being a power in the state and chairman of the forestry board besides. but he got rid of interference from that day forth. oddly enough my friendship with farrar was an indirect result of the incident i have just related. a few mornings after, i was seated in my office trying to concentrate my mind on page twenty of volume ten of the records when i was surprised by o'meara himself, accompanied by two gentlemen whom i remembered to have seen on various witness stands. o'meara was handsomely dressed, and his necktie made but a faint pretence of concealing the gorgeous diamond in his shirt-front. but his face wore an aggrieved air, and his left hand was neatly bound in black and tucked into his coat. he sank comfortably into my wicker chair, which creaked a protest, and produced two yellow-spotted cigars, chewing the end of one with much apparent relish and pushing the other at me. his two friends remained respectfully standing. i guessed at what was coming, and braced myself by refusing the cigar,--not a great piece of self-denial, by the way. but a case meant much to me then, and i did seriously regret that o'meara was not a possible client. at any rate, my sympathy with farrar in the late episode put him out of the question. o'meara cleared his throat and began gingerly to undo the handkerchief on his hand. then he brought his fist down on the table so that the ink started from the stand and his cheeks shook with the effort. "i'll make him pay for this!" he shouted, with an oath. the other gentlemen nodded their approval, while i put the inkstand in a place of safety. "you're a pretty bright young man, mr. crocker," he went on, a look of cunning coming into his little eyes, "but i guess you ain't had too many cases to object to a big one." "did you come here to tell me that?" i asked. he looked me over queerly, and evidently decided that i meant no effrontery. "i came here to get your opinion," he said, holding up a swollen hand, "but i want to tell you first that i ought to get ten thousand, not a cent less. that scoundrelly young upstart--" "if you want my opinion," i replied, trying to speak slowly, "it is that mr. farrar ought to get ten thousand dollars. and i think that would be only a moderate reward." i did not feel equal to pushing him into the street, as farrar had done, and i have now but a vague notion of what he said and how he got there. but i remember that half an hour afterwards a man congratulated me openly in the bank. that night i found a new friend, although at the time i thought farrar's visit to me the accomplishment of a perfunctory courtesy to a man who had refused to take a case against him. it was very characteristic of farrar not to mention this until he rose to go. about half-past eight he sauntered in upon me, placing his hat precisely on the rack, and we talked until ten, which is to say that i talked and he commented. his observations were apt, if a trifle caustic, and it is needless to add that i found them entertaining. as he was leaving he held out his hand. "i hear that o'meara called on you to-day," he said diffidently. "yes," i answered, smiling, "i was sorry not to have been able to take his case." i sat up for an hour or more, trying to arrive at some conclusion about farrar, but at length i gave it up. his visit had in it something impulsive which i could not reconcile with his manner. he surely owed me nothing for refusing a case against him, and must have known that my motives for so doing were not personal. but if i did not understand him, i liked him decidedly from that night forward, and i hoped that his advances had sprung from some other motive than politeness. and indeed we gradually drifted into a quasi-friendship. it became his habit, as he went out in the morning, to drop into my room for a match, and i returned the compliment by borrowing his coal oil when mine was out. at such times we would sit, or more frequently stand, discussing the affairs of the town and of the nation, for politics was an easy and attractive subject to us both. it was only in a general way that we touched upon each other's concerns, this being dangerous ground with farrar, who was ever ready to close up at anything resembling a confidence. as for me, i hope i am not curious, but i own to having had a curiosity about farrar's philadelphia patron, to whom farrar made but slight allusions. his very name--farquhar fenelon cooke--had an odd sound which somehow betokened an odd man, and there was more than one bit of gossip afloat in the town of which he was the subject, notwithstanding the fact that he had never honored it with a visit. the gossip was the natural result of mr. cooke's large properties in the vicinity. it has never been my habit, however, to press a friend on such matters, and i could easily understand and respect farrar's reluctance to talk of one from whom he received an income. i had occasion, in the may of that year, to make a somewhat long business trip to chicago, and on my return, much to my surprise, i found farrar awaiting me in the railroad station. he smiled his wonted fraction by way of greeting, stopped to buy a newspaper, and finally leading me to his buggy, turned and drove out of town. i was completely mystified at such an unusual proceeding. "what's this for?" i asked. "i shan't bother you long," he said; "i simply wanted the chance to talk to you before you got to your office. i have a philadelphia client, a mr. cooke, of whom you may have heard me speak. since you have been away the railroad has brought suit against him. the row is about the lands west of the washita, on copper rise. it's the devil if he loses, for the ground is worth the dollar bills to cover it. i telegraphed, and he got here yesterday. he wants a lawyer, and i mentioned you." there came over me then in a flash a comprehension of farrar which i had failed to grasp before. but i was quite overcome at his suggestion. "isn't it rather a big deal to risk me on?" i said. "better go to chicago and get parks. he's an expert in that sort of thing." i am afraid my expostulation was weak. "i merely spoke of you," replied farrar, coolly,--"and he has gone around to your office. he knows about parks, and if he wants him he'll probably take him. it all depends upon how you strike cooke whether you get the case or not. i have never told you about him," he added with some hesitation; "he's a trifle queer, but a good fellow at the bottom. i should hate to see him lose his land." "how is the railroad mixed up in it?" i asked. "i don't know much about law, but it would seem as if they had a pretty strong case," he answered. he went on to tell me what he knew of the matter in his clean, pithy sentences, often brutally cynical, as though he had not a spark of interest in any of it. mr. cooke's claim to the land came from a maternal great-uncle, long since deceased, who had been a settler in these regions. the railroad answered that they had bought the land with other properties from the man, also deceased, to whom the old gentleman was alleged to have sold it. incidentally i learned something of mr. cooke's maternal ancestry. we drove back to the office with some concern on my part at the prospect of so large a case. sunning himself on the board steps, i saw for the first time mr. farquhar fenelon cooke. he was dressed out in broad gaiters and bright tweeds, like an english tourist, and his face might have belonged to dagon, idol of the philistines. a silver snaffle on a heavy leather watch guard which connected the pockets of his corduroy waistcoat, together with a huge gold stirrup in his ascot tie, sufficiently proclaimed his tastes. but i found myself continually returning to the countenance, and i still think i could have modelled a better face out of putty. the mouth was rather small, thick-tipped, and put in at an odd angle; the brown eyes were large, and from their habit of looking up at one lent to the round face an incongruous solemnity. but withal there was a perceptible acumen about the man which was puzzling in the extreme. "how are you, old man?" said he, hardly waiting for farrar to introduce me. "well, i hope." it was pure cordiality, nothing more. he seemed to bubble over with it. i said i was well, and invited him inside. "no," he said; "i like the look of the town. we can talk business here." and talk business he did, straight and to the point, so fast and indistinctly that at times i could scarcely follow him. i answered his rapid questions briefly, and as best i knew how. he wanted to know what chance he had to win the suit, and i told him there might be other factors involved beside those of which he had spoken. plainly, also, that the character of his great-uncle was in question, an intimation which he did not appear to resent. but that there was no denying the fact that the railroad had a strong thing of it, and a good lawyer into the bargain. "and don't you consider yourself a good lawyer?" he cut in. i pointed out that the railroad lawyer was a man of twice my age, experience, and reputation. without more ado, and before either farrar or myself had time to resist, he had hooked an arm into each of us, and we were all three marching down the street in the direction of his hotel. if this was agony for me, i could see that it was keener agony for farrar. and although mr. farquhar fenelon cooke had been in town but a scant twenty-four hours, it seemed as if he knew more of its inhabitants than both of us put together. certain it is that he was less particular with his acquaintances. he hailed the most astonishing people with an easy air of freedom, now releasing my arm, now farrar's, to salute. he always saluted. he stopped to converse with a dozen men we had never seen, many of whom smelled strongly of the stable, and he invariably introduced farrar as the forester of his estate, and me as his lawyer in the great quarrel with the railroad, until i began to wish i had never heard of blackstone. and finally he steered us into the spacious bar of the lake house. the next morning the three of us were off early for a look at the contested property. it was a twenty-mile drive, and the last eight miles wound down the boiling washita, still high with the melting snows of the pine lands. and even here the snows yet slept in the deeper hollows. unconscious of the budding green of the slopes. how heartily i wished mr. farquhar fenelon cooke back in philadelphia! by his eternal accounts of his germantown stables and of the blue ribbons of his hackneys he killed all sense of pleasure of the scene, and set up an irritation that was well-nigh unbearable. at length we crossed the river, climbed the foot-hills, and paused on the ridge. below us lay the quaint inn and scattered cottages of asquith, and beyond them the limitless and foam-flecked expanse of lake: and on our right, lifting from the shore by easy slopes for a mile at stretch, farrar pointed out the timbered lands of copper rise, spread before us like a map. but the appreciation of beauty formed no part of mr. cooke's composition,--that is, beauty as farrar and i knew it. "if you win that case, old man," he cried, striking me a great whack between the shoulder-blades, "charge any fee you like; i'll pay it! and i'll make such a country-place out of this as was never seen west of new york state, and call it mohair, after my old trotter. i'll put a palace on that clearing, with the stables just over the knoll. they'll beat the germantown stables a whole lap. and that strip of level," he continued, pointing to a thinly timbered bit, "will hold a mile track nicely." farrar and i gasped: it was as if we had tumbled into the washita. "it will take money, mr. cooke," said farrar, "and you haven't won the suit yet." "damn the money!" said mr. cooke, and we knew he meant it. over the episodes of that interminable morning it will, be better to pass lightly. it was spent by farrar and me in misery. it was spent by mr. farquhar fenelon cooke in an ecstasy of enjoyment, driving over and laying out mohair, and i must admit he evinced a surprising genius in his planning, although, according to farrar, he broke every sacred precept of landscape gardening again and again. he displayed the enthusiasm of a pioneer, and the energy of a napoleon. and if he were too ignorant to accord to nature a word of praise, he had the grace and intelligence to compliment farrar on the superb condition of the forests, and on the judgment shown in laying out the roads, which were so well chosen that even in this season they were well drained and dry. that day, too, my views were materially broadened, and i received an insight into the methods and possibilities of my friend's profession sufficient to instil a deeper respect both for it and for him. the crowded spots had been skilfully thinned of the older trees to give the younger ones a chance, and the harmony of the whole had been carefully worked out. now we drove under dark pines and hemlocks, and then into a lighter relief of birches and wild cherries, or a copse of young beeches. and i learned that the estate had not only been paying the taxes and its portion of farrar's salary, but also a considerable amount into mr. cooke's pocket the while it was being improved. mr. cooke made his permanent quarters at the lake house, and soon became one of the best-known characters about town. he seemed to enjoy his popularity, and i am convinced that he would have been popular in spite of his now-famous quarrel with the railroad. his easy command of profanity, his generous use of money, his predilection for sporting characters, of whom he was king; his ready geniality and good-fellowship alike with the clerk of the lake house or the mayor, not to mention his own undeniable personality, all combined to make him a favorite. he had his own especial table in the dining-room, called all the waiters by their first names, and they fought for the privilege of attending him. he likewise called the barkeepers by their first names, and had his own particular corner of the bar, where none dared intrude, and where he could almost invariably be found when not in my office. from this corner he dealt out cigars to the deserving, held stake moneys, decided all bets, and refereed all differences. his name appeared in the personal column of one of the local papers on the average of twice a week, or in lieu thereof one of his choicest stories in the "notes about town" column. the case was to come up early in july, and i spent most of my time, to the detriment of other affairs, in preparing for it. i was greatly hampered in my work by my client, who filled my office with his tobacco-smoke and that of his friends, and he took it very much for granted that he was going to win the suit. fortune had always played into his hands, he said, and i had no little difficulty in convincing him that matters had passed from his hands into mine. in this i believe i was never entirely successful. i soon found, too, that he had no ideas whatever on the value of discretion, and it was only by repeated threats of absolute failure that i prevented our secret tactics from becoming the property of his sporting fraternity and of the town. the more i worked on the case, the clearer it became to me that mr. farquhar fenelon cooke's great-uncle had been either a consummate scoundrel or a lunatic, and that our only hope of winning must be based on proving him one or the other; it did not matter much which, for my expectations at best were small. when i had at length settled to this conclusion i confided it as delicately as possible to my client, who was sitting at the time with his feet cocked up on the office table, reading a pink newspaper. "which'll be the easier to prove?" he asked, without looking up. "it would be more charitable to prove he had been out of his mind," i replied, "and perhaps easier." "charity be damned," said this remarkable man. "i'm after the property." so i decided on insanity. i hunted up and subpoenaed white-haired witnesses for miles around. many of them shook their heads when they spoke of mr. cooke's great-uncle, and some knew more of his private transactions than i could have wished, and i trembled lest my own witnesses should be turned against me. i learned more of mr. cooke's great-uncle than i knew of mr. cooke himself, and to the credit of my client be it said that none of his relative's traits were apparent in him, with the possible exception of insanity; and that defect, if it existed in the grand-nephew, took in him a milder and less criminal turn. the old rascal, indeed, had so cleverly worded his deed of sale as to obtain payment without transfer. it was a trifle easier to avoid being specific in that country in his day than it is now, and the document was, in my opinion, sufficiently vague to admit of a double meaning. the original sale had been made to a man, now dead, whom the railroad had bought out. the copper rise property was mentioned among the other lands in the will in favor of mr. farquhar fenelon cooke, and the latter had gone ahead improving them and increasing their output in spite of the repeated threats of the railroad to bring suit. and it was not until its present attorney had come in and investigated the title that the railroad had resorted to the law. i mention here, by the way, that my client was the sole heir. but as the time of the sessions drew near, the outlook for me was anything but bright. it is true that my witnesses were quite willing to depose that his actions were queer and out of the common, but these witnesses were for the most part venerable farmers and backwoodsmen: expert testimony was deplorably lacking. in this extremity it was mr. farquhar fenelon cooke himself who came unwittingly to my rescue. he had bought a horse,--he could never be in a place long without one,--which was chiefly remarkable, he said, for picking up his hind feet as well as his front ones. however he may have differed from the ordinary run of horses, he was shortly attacked by one of the thousand ills to which every horse is subject. i will not pretend to say what it was. i found mr. cooke one morning at his usual place in the lake house bar holding forth with more than common vehemence and profanity on the subject of veterinary surgeons. he declared there was not a veterinary surgeon in the whole town fit to hold a certificate, and his listeners nodded an extreme approval to this sentiment. a grizzled old fellow who kept a stock farm back in the country chanced to be there, and managed to get a word in on the subject during one of my client's rare pauses. "yes," he said, "that's so. there ain't one of 'em now fit to travel with young doctor vane, who was here some fifteen years gone by. he weren't no horse-doctor, but he could fix up a foundered horse in a night as good as new. if your uncle was livin', he'd back me on that, mr. cooke." here was my chance. i took the old man aside, and two or three glasses of old crow launched him into reminiscence. "where is doctor vane now?" i asked finally. "over to minneapolis, sir, with more rich patients nor he can take care of. wasn't my darter over there last month, and seen him? and demned if he didn't pull up his carriage and talk to her. here's luck to him." i might have heard much more of the stockraiser had i stayed, but i fear i left him somewhat abruptly in my haste to find farrar. only three days remained before the case was to come up. farrar readily agreed to go to minneapolis, and was off on the first train that afternoon. i would have asked mr. cooke to go had i dared trust him, such was my anxiety to have him out of the way, if only for a time. i did not tell him about the doctor. he sat up very late with me that night on the lake house porch to give me a rubbing down, as he expressed it, as he might have admonished some favorite jockey before a sweepstake. "take it easy, old man," he would say repeatedly, "and don't give things the bit before you're sure of their wind!" days passed, and not a word from farrar. the case opened with mr. cooke's friends on the front benches. the excitement it caused has rarely been equalled in that section, but i believe this was due less to its sensational features than to mr. cooke, who had an abnormal though unconscious talent for self-advertisement. it became manifest early that we were losing. our testimony, as i had feared, was not strong enough, although they said we were making a good fight of it. i was racked with anxiety about farrar; at last, when i had all but given up hope, i received a telegram from him dated at detroit, saying he would arrive with the doctor that evening. this was friday, the fourth day of the trial. the doctor turned out to be a large man, well groomed and well fed, with a twinkle in his eye. he had gone to narragansett pier for the summer, whither farrar had followed him. on being introduced, mr. cooke at once invited him out to have a drink. "did you know my uncle?" asked my client. "yes," said the doctor, "i should say i did." "poor old duffer," said mr. cooke, with due solemnity; "i understand he was a maniac." "well," said the doctor, while we listened with a breathless interest, "he wasn't exactly a maniac, but i think i can safely say he was a lunatic." "then here's to insanity!" said the irrepressible, his glass swung in mid-air, when a thought struck him, and he put it down again and looked hard at the doctor. "will you swear to it?" he demanded. "i would swear to it before saint peter," said the doctor, fervently. he swore to it before a jury, which was more to the point, and we won our case. it did not even go to the court of appeals; i suppose the railroad thought it cheaper to drop it, since no right of way was involved. and the decision was scarcely announced before mr. farquhar fenelon cooke had begun work on his new country place, mohair. i have oftentimes been led to consider the relevancy of this chapter, and have finally decided to insert it. i concluded that the actual narrative of how mr. cooke came to establish his country-place near asquith would be interesting, and likewise throw some light on that gentleman's character. and i ask the reader's forbearance for the necessary personal history involved. had it not been for mr. cooke's friendship for me i should not have written these pages. chapter iii events, are consequential or inconsequential irrespective of their size. the wars of troy were fought for a woman, and charles viii, of france, bumped his head against a stone doorway and died because he did not stoop low enough. and to descend from history down to my own poor chronicle, mr. cooke's railroad case, my first experience at the bar of any gravity or magnitude, had tied to it a string of consequences then far beyond my guessing. the suit was my stepping-stone not only to a larger and more remunerative practice, but also, i believe, to the position of district attorney, which i attained shortly afterwards. mr. cooke had laid out mohair as ruthlessly as napoleon planned the new paris; though not, i regret to say, with a like genius. fortunately farrar interposed and saved the grounds, but there was no guardian angel to do a like turn for the house. mr. langdon willis, of philadelphia, was the architect who had nominal charge of the building. he had regularly submitted some dozen plans for mr. cooke's approval, which were as regularly rejected. my client believed, in common with a great many other people, that architects should be driven and not followed, and was plainly resolved to make this house the logical development of many cherished ideas. it is not strange, therefore, that the edifice was completed by a chicago contractor who had less self-respect than mr. willis, the latter having abruptly refused to have his name tacked on to the work. mohair was finished and ready for occupation in july, two years after the suit. i drove out one day before mr. cooke's arrival to look it over. the grounds, where farrar had had matters pretty much his own way, to my mind rivalled the best private parks in the east. the stables were filled with a score or so of mr. cooke's best horses, brought hither in his private cars, and the trotters were exercising on the track. the middle of june found farrar and myself at the asquith inn. it was farrar's custom to go to asquith in the summer, being near the forest properties in his charge; and since asquith was but five miles from the county-seat it was convenient for me, and gave me the advantages of the lake breezes and a comparative rest, which i should not have had in town. at that time asquith was a small community of summer residents from cincinnati, chicago, st. louis, and other western cities, most of whom owned cottages and the grounds around them. they were a quiet lot that long association had made clannish; and they had a happy faculty, so rare in summer resorts, of discrimination between an amusement and a nuisance. hence a great many diversions which are accounted pleasurable elsewhere are at asquith set down at their true value. it was, therefore, rather with resentment than otherwise that the approaching arrival of mr. cooke and the guests he was likely to have at mohair were looked upon. i had not been long at asquith before i discovered that farrar was acting in a peculiar manner, though i was longer in finding out what the matter was. i saw much less of him than in town. once in a while in the evenings, after ten, he would run across me on the porch of the inn, or drift into my rooms. even after three years of more or less intimacy between us, farrar still wore his exterior of pessimism and indifference, the shell with which he chose to hide a naturally warm and affectionate disposition. in the dining-room we sat together at the end of a large table set aside for bachelors and small families of two or three, and it seemed as though we had all the humorists and story-tellers in that place. and farrar as a source of amusement proved equal to the best of them. he would wait until a story was well under way, and then annihilate the point of it with a cutting cynicism and set the table in a roar of laughter. among others who were seated here was a mr. trevor, of cincinnati, one of the pioneers of asquith. mr. trevor was a trifle bombastic, with a tendency towards gesticulation, an art which he had learned in no less a school than the ohio state senate. he was a self-made man,--a fact which he took good care should not escape one,--and had amassed his money, i believe, in the dry-goods business. he always wore a long, shiny coat, a low, turned-down collar, and a black tie, all of which united to give him the general appearance of a professional pallbearer. but mr. trevor possessed a daughter who amply made up for his shortcomings. she was the only one who could meet farrar on his own ground, and rarely a meal passed that they did not have a tilt. they filled up the holes of the conversation with running commentaries, giving a dig at the luckless narrator and a side-slap at each other, until one would have given his oath they were sworn enemies. at least i, in the innocence of my heart, thought so until i was forcibly enlightened. i had taken rather a prejudice to miss trevor. i could find no better reason than her antagonism to farrar. i was revolving this very thing in my mind one day as i was paddling back to the inn after a look at my client's new pier and boat-houses, when i descried farrar's catboat some distance out. the lake was glass, and the sail hung lifeless. it was near lunch-time, and charity prompted me to head for the boat and give it a tow homeward. as i drew near, farrar himself emerged from behind the sail and asked me, with a great show of nonchalance, what i wanted. "to tow you back for lunch, of course," i answered, used to his ways. he threw me a line, which i made fast to the stern, and then he disappeared again. i thought this somewhat strange, but as the boat was a light one, i towed it in and hitched it to the wharf, when, to my great astonishment, there disembarked not farrar, but miss trevor. she leaped lightly ashore and was gone before i could catch my breath, while farrar let down the sail and offered me a cigarette. i had learned a lesson in appearances. it could not have been very long after this that i was looking over my batch of new york papers, which arrived weekly, when my eye was arrested by a name. i read the paragraph, which announced the fact that my friend the celebrity was about to sail for europe in search of "color" for his next novel; this was already contracted for at a large price, and was to be of a more serious nature than any of his former work. an interview was published in which the celebrity had declared that a new novel was to appear in a short time. i do not know what impelled me, but i began at once to search through the other papers, and found almost identically the same notice in all of them. by one of those odd coincidents which sometimes start one to thinking, the celebrity was the subject of a lively discussion when i reached the table that evening. i had my quota of information concerning his european trip, but i did not commit myself when appealed to for an opinion. i had once known the man (which, however, i did not think it worth while to mention) and i did not feel justified in criticising him in public. besides, what i knew of him was excellent, and entirely apart from the literary merit or demerit of his work. the others, however, were within their right when they censured or praised him, and they did both. farrar, in particular, surprised me by the violence of his attacks, while miss trevor took up the celebrity's defence with equal ardor. her motives were beyond me now. the celebrity's works spoke for themselves, she said, and she could not and would not believe such injurious reports of one who wrote as he did. the next day i went over to the county-seat, and got back to asquith after dark. i dined alone, and afterwards i was strolling up and down one end of the long veranda when i caught sight of a lonely figure in a corner, with chair tilted back and feet on the rail. a gleam of a cigar lighted up the face, and i saw that it was farrar. i sat down beside him, and we talked commonplaces for a while, farrar's being almost monosyllabic, while now and again feminine voices and feminine laughter reached our ears from the far end of the porch. they seemed to go through farrar like a knife, and he smoked furiously, his lips tightly compressed the while. i had a dozen conjectures, none of which i dared voice. so i waited in patience. "crocker," said he, at length, "there's a man here from boston, charles wrexell allen; came this morning. you know boston. have you ever heard of him?" "allen," i repeated, reflecting; "no charles wrexell." "it is charles wrexell, i think," said farrar, as though the matter were trivial. "however, we can go into the register and make sure." "what about him?" i asked, not feeling inclined to stir. the celebrity "oh, nothing. an arrival is rather an occurrence, though. you can hear him down there now," he added, tossing his head towards the other end of the porch, "with the women around him." in fact, i did catch the deeper sound of a man's voice among the lighter tones, and the voice had a ring to it which was not wholly unfamiliar, although i could not place it. i threw farrar a bait. "he must make friends easily," i said. "with the women?--yes," he replied, so scathingly that i was forced to laugh in spite of myself. "let us go in and look at the register," i suggested. "you may have his name wrong." we went in accordingly. sure enough, in bold, heavy characters, was the name charles wrexell allen written out in full. that handwriting was one in a thousand. i made sure i had seen it before, and yet i did not know it; and the more i puzzled over it the more confused i became. i turned to farrar. "i have had a poor cigar passed off on me and deceive me for a while. that is precisely the case here. i think i should recognize your man if i were to see him." "well," said farrar, "here's your chance." the company outside were moving in. two or three of the older ladies came first, carrying their wraps; then a troop of girls, among whom was miss trevor; and lastly, a man. farrar and i had walked to the door while the women turned into the drawing-room, so that we were brought face to face with him, suddenly. at sight of me he halted abruptly, as though he had struck the edge of a door, changed color, and held out his hand, tentatively. then he withdrew it again, for i made no sign of recognition. it was the celebrity! i felt a shock of disgust as i passed out. masquerading, it must be admitted, is not pleasant to the taste; and the whole farce, as it flashed through my mind,--his advertised trip, his turning up here under an assumed name, had an ill savor. perhaps some of the things they said of him might be true, after all. "who the devil is he?" said farrar, dropping for once his indifference; "he looked as if he knew you." i evaded. "he may have taken me for some one else," i answered with all the coolness i could muster. "i have never met any one of his name. his voice and handwriting, however, are very much like those of a man i used to know." farrar was very poor company that evening, and left me early. i went to my rooms and had taken down a volume of carlyle, who can generally command my attention, when there came a knock at the door. "come in," i replied, with an instinctive sense of prophecy. this was fulfilled at once by the appearance of the celebrity. he was attired--for the details of his dress forced themselves upon me vividly --in a rough-spun suit of knickerbockers, a colored-shirt having a large and prominent gold stud, red and brown stockings of a diamond pattern, and heavy walking-boots. and he entered with an air of assurance that was maddening. "my dear crocker," he exclaimed, "you have no idea how delighted i am to see you here!" i rose, first placing a book-mark in carlyle, and assured him that i was surprised to see him here. "surprised to see me!" he returned, far from being damped by my manner. "in fact, i am a little surprised to see myself here." he sank back on the window-seat and clasped his hands behind his head. "but first let me thank you for respecting my incognito," he said. i tried hard to keep my temper, marvelling at the ready way he had chosen to turn my action. "and now," he continued, "i suppose you want to know why i came out here." he easily supplied the lack of cordial solicitation on my part. "yes, i should like to know," i said. thus having aroused my curiosity, he took his time about appeasing it, after the custom of his kind. he produced a gold cigarette case, offered me a cigarette, which i refused, took one himself and blew the smoke in rings toward the ceiling. then, raising himself on his elbow, he drew his features together in such a way as to lead me to believe he was about to impart some valuable information. "crocker," said he, "it's the very deuce to be famous, isn't it?" "i suppose it is," i replied curtly, wondering what he was driving at; "i have never tried it." "an ordinary man, such as you, can't conceive of the torture a fellow in my position is obliged to go through the year round, but especially in the summer, when one wishes to go off on a rest. you know what i mean, of course." "i am afraid i do not," i answered, in a vain endeavor to embarrass him. "you're thicker than when i used to know you, then," he returned with candor. "to tell the truth, crocker, i often wish i were back at the law, and had never written a line. i am paying the penalty of fame. wherever i go i am hounded to death by the people who have read my books, and they want to dine and wine me for the sake of showing me off at their houses. i am heartily sick and tired of it all; you would be if you had to go through it. i could stand a winter, but the worst comes in the summer, when one meets the women who fire all sorts of socio-psychological questions at one for solution, and who have suggestions for stories." he shuddered. "and what has all this to do with your coming here?" i cut in, strangling a smile. he twisted his cigarette at an acute angle with his face, and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "i'll try to be a little plainer," he went on, sighing as one unused to deal with people who require crosses on their t's. "i've been worried almost out of my mind with attention--nothing but attention the whole time. i can't go on the street but what i'm stared at and pointed out, so i thought of a scheme to relieve it for a time. it was becoming unbearable. i determined to assume a name and go to some quiet little place for the summer, west, if possible, where i was not likely to be recognized, and have three months of rest." he paused, but i offered no comment. "well, the more i thought of it, the better i liked the idea. i met a western man at the club and asked him about western resorts, quiet ones. 'have you heard of asquith?' says he. 'no,' said i; 'describe it.' he did, and it was just the place; quaint, restful, and retired. of course i put him off the track, but i did not count on striking you. my man boxed up, and we were off in twenty-four hours, and here i am." now all this was very fine, but not at all in keeping with the celebrity's character as i had come to conceive it. the idea that adulation ever cloyed on him was ludicrous in itself. in fact i thought the whole story fishy, and came very near to saying so. "you won't tell anyone who i am, will you?" he asked anxiously. he even misinterpreted my silences. "certainly not," i replied. "it is no concern of mine. you might come here as emil zola or ralph waldo emerson and it would make no difference to me." he looked at me dubiously, even suspiciously. "that's a good chap," said he, and was gone, leaving me to reflect on the ways of genius. and the longer i reflected, the more positive i became that there existed a more potent reason for the celebrity's disguise than ennui. as actions speak louder than words, so does a man's character often give the lie to his tongue. chapter iv a lion in an ass's skin is still a lion in spite of his disguise. conversely, the same might be said of an ass in a lion's skin. the celebrity ran after women with the same readiness and helplessness that a dog will chase chickens, or that a stream will run down hill. women differ from chickens, however, in the fact that they find pleasure in being chased by a certain kind of a man. the celebrity was this kind of a man. from the moment his valet deposited his luggage in his rooms, charles wrexell allen became the social hero of asquith. it is by straws we are enabled to tell which way the wind is blowing, and i first noticed his partiality for miss trevor from the absence of the lively conflicts she was wont to have with farrar. these ceased entirely after the celebrity's arrival. it was the latter who now commanded the conversation at our table. i was truly sorry for farrar, for i knew the man, the depth of his nature, and the scope of the shock. he carried it off altogether too well, and both the studied lightness of his actions and the increased carelessness of his manner made me fear that what before was feigned, might turn to a real bitterness. for farrar's sake, if the celebrity had been content with women in general, all would have been well; but he was unable to generalize, in one sense, and to particularize, in another. and it was plain that he wished to monopolize miss trevor, while still retaining a hold upon the others. for my sake, had he been content with women alone, i should have had no cause to complain. but it seemed that i had an attraction for him, second only to women, which i could not account for. and i began to be cursed with a great deal of his company. since he was absolutely impervious to hints, and would not take no for an answer, i was helpless. when he had no engagement he would thrust himself on me. he seemed to know by intuition--for i am very sure i never told him--what my amusement was to be the mornings i did not go to the county-seat, and he would invariably turn up, properly equipped, as i was making my way with judge short to the tennis court, or carrying my oars to the water. it was in vain that i resorted to subterfuge: that i went to bed early intending to be away before the celebrity's rising hour. i found he had no particular rising hour. no matter how early i came down, i would find him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or otherwise his man would be there with a message to say that his master would shortly join me if i would kindly wait. and at last i began to realize in my harassed soul that all elusion was futile, and to take such holidays as i could get, when he was off with a girl, in a spirit of thankfulness. much of this persecution i might have put up with, indeed, had i not heard, in one way or another, that he was doing me the honor of calling me his intimate. this i could not stand, and i soberly resolved to leave asquith and go back to town, which i should indeed have done if deliverance had not arrived from an unexpected quarter. one morning i had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the celebrity to join him in a variety of amusements. but even here i was not free from interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with a fox terrier. judge short had gone to town, and farrar was off for a three days' cruise up the lake. i was bitterly regretting i had not gone with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and i descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the direction of mohair. "that must be your friend cooke," remarked the celebrity, looking up. there could be no doubt of it. with little difficulty i recognized on the box the familiar figure of my first important client, and beside him was a lady whom i supposed to be mrs. farquhar fenelon cooke, although i had had no previous knowledge that such a person existed. the horses were on a brisk trot, and mr. cooke seemed to be getting the best out of them for the benefit of the sprinkling of people on the inn porch. indeed, i could not but admire the dexterous turn of the wrist which served mr. cooke to swing his leaders into the circle and up the hill, while the liveried guard leaned far out in anticipation of a stumble. mr. cooke hailed me with a beaming smile and a flourish of the whip as he drew up and descended from the box. "maria," he exclaimed, giving me a hearty grip, "this is the man that won mohair. my wife, crocker." i was somewhat annoyed at this effusiveness before the celebrity, but i looked up and caught mrs. cooke's eye. it was the calm eye of a general. "i am glad of the opportunity to thank you, mr. crocker," she said simply. and i liked her from that moment. mr. cooke at once began a tirade against the residents of asquith for permitting a sandy and generally disgraceful condition of the roads. so roundly did he vituperate the inn management in particular, and with such a loud flow of words, that i trembled lest he should be heard on the veranda. the celebrity stood by the block, in an amazement which gave me a wicked pleasure, and it was some minutes before i had the chance to introduce him. mr. cooke's idea of an introduction, however, was no mere word-formula: it was fraught with a deeper and a bibulous meaning. he presented the celebrity to his wife, and then invited both of us to go inside with him by one of those neat and cordial paraphrases in which he was skilled. i preferred to remain with mrs. cooke, and it was with a gleam of hope at a possible deliverance from my late persecution that i watched the two disappear together through the hall and into the smoking-room. "how do you like mohair?" i asked mrs. cooke. "do you mean the house or the park?" she laughed; and then, seeing my embarrassment, she went on: "oh, the house is just like everything else fenelon meddles with. outside it's a mixture of all the styles, and inside a hash of all the nationalities from siamese to spanish. fenelon hangs the oriental tinsels he has collected on pieces of black baronial oak, and the coat-of-arms he had designed by our philadelphia jewellers is stamped on the dining-room chairs, and even worked into the fire screens." there was nothing paltry in her criticism of her husband, nothing she would not have said to his face. she was a woman who made you feel this, for sincerity was written all over her. i could not help wondering why she gave mr. cooke line in the matter of household decoration, unless it was that he considered mohair his own, private hobby, and that she humored him. mrs. cooke was not without tact, and i have no doubt she perceived my reluctance to talk about her husband and respected it. "we drove down to bring you back to luncheon," she said. i thanked her and accepted. she was curious to hear about asquith and its people, and i told her all i knew. "i should like to meet some of them," she explained, "for we intend having a cotillon at mohair,--a kind of house-warming, you know. a party of mr. cooke's friends is coming out for it in his car, and he thought something of inviting the people of asquith up for a dance." i had my doubts concerning the wisdom of an entertainment, the success of which depended on the fusion of a party of mr. cooke's friends and a company from asquith. but i held my peace. she shot a question at me suddenly: "who is this mr. allen?" "he registers from boston, and only came a fortnight ago," i replied vaguely. "he doesn't look quite right; as though he had been set down on the wrong planet, you know," said mrs. cooke, her finger on her temple. "what is he like?" "well," i answered, at first with uncertainty, then with inspiration, "he would do splendidly to lead your cotillon, if you think of having one." "so you do not dance, mr. crocker?" i was somewhat set back by her perspicuity. "no, i do not," said i. "i thought not," she said, laughing. it must have been my expression which prompted her next remark. "i was not making fun of you," she said, more soberly; "i do not like mr. allen any better than you do, and i have only seen him once." "but i have not said i did not like him," i objected. "of course not," said mrs. cooke, quizzically. at that moment, to my relief, i discerned the celebrity and mr. cooke in the hallway. "here they come, now," she went on. "i do wish fenelon would keep his hands off the people he meets. i can feel he is going to make an intimate of that man. mark my words, mr. crocker." i not only marked them, i prayed for their fulfilment. there was that in mr. cooke which, for want of a better name, i will call instinct. as he came down the steps, his arm linked in that of the celebrity, his attitude towards his wife was both apologetic and defiant. he had at once the air of a child caught with a forbidden toy, and that of a stripling of twenty-one who flaunts a cigar in his father's face. "maria," he said, "mr. allen has consented to come back with us for lunch." we drove back to mohair, mr. cooke and the celebrity on the box, mrs. cooke and i behind. except to visit the boathouses i had not been to mohair since the day of its completion, and now the full beauty of the approach struck me for the first time. we swung by the lodge, the keeper holding open the iron gate as we passed, and into the wide driveway, hewn, as it were, out of the virgin forest. the sandy soil had been strengthened by a deep road-bed of clay imported from the interior, which was spread in turn with a fine gravel, which crunched under the heavy wheels. from the lodge to the house, a full mile, branches had been pruned to let the sunshine sift through in splotches, but the wild nature of the place had been skilfully retained. we curved hither and thither under the giant trees until suddenly, as a whip straightens in the snapping, one of the ancient tribes of the forest might have sent an arrow down the leafy gallery into the open, and at the far end we caught sight of the palace framed in the vista. it was a triumph for farrar, and i wished that the palace had been more worthy. the celebrity did not stint his praises of mohair, coming up the drive, but so lavish were his comments on the house that they won for him a lasting place in mr. cooke's affections, and encouraged my client to pull up his horses in a favorable spot, and expand on the beauties of the mansion. "taking it altogether," said he, complacently, "it is rather a neat box, and i let myself loose on it. i had all these ideas i gathered knocking about the world, and i gave them to willis, of philadelphia, to put together for me. but he's honest enough not to claim the house. take, for instance, that minaret business on the west; i picked that up from a mosque in algiers. the oriel just this side is whole cloth from haddon hall, and the galleried porch next it from a florentine villa. the conical capped tower i got from a french chateau, and some of the features on the south from a buddhist temple in japan. only a little blending and grouping was necessary, and willis calls himself an architect, and wasn't equal to it. now," he added, "get the effect. did you ever see another house like it?" "magnificent!" exclaimed the celebrity. "and then," my client continued, warming under this generous appreciation, "there's something very smart about those colors. they're my racing colors. of course the granite's a little off, but it isn't prominent. willis kicked hard when it came to painting the oriel yellow, but an architect always takes it for granted he knows it all, and a--" "fenelon," said mrs. cooke, "luncheon is waiting." mrs. cooke dominated at luncheon and retired, and it is certain that both mr. cooke and the celebrity breathed more freely when she had gone. if her criticisms on the exterior of the house were just, those on the interior were more so. not only did i find the coat-of-arms set forth on the chairs, fire-screens, and other prominent articles, but it was even cut into the swinging door of the butler's pantry. the motto i am afraid my client never took the trouble to have translated, and i am inclined to think his jewellers put up a little joke on him when they chose it. "be sober and boast not." i observed that mrs. cooke, when she chose, could exert the subduing effect on her husband of a soft pedal on a piano; and during luncheon she kept, the soft pedal on. and the celebrity, being in some degree a kindred spirit, was also held in check. but his wife had no sooner left the room when mr. cooke began on the subject uppermost in his mind. i had suspected that his trip to asquith that morning was for a purpose at which mrs. cooke had hinted. but she, with a woman's tact, had aimed to accomplish by degrees that which her husband would carry by storm. "you've been at asquith sometime, crocker," mr. cooke began, "long enough to know the people." "i know some of them," i said guardedly. but the rush was not to be stemmed. "how many do you think you can muster for that entertainment of mine? fifty? i ought to have fifty, at least. suppose you pick out fifty, and send me up the names. i want good lively ones, you understand, that will stir things up." "i am afraid there are not fifty of that kind there," i replied. his face fell, but brightened again instantly. he appealed to the celebrity. "how about it, old man?" said he. the celebrity answered, with becoming modesty, that the asquithians were benighted. they had never had any one to show them how to enjoy life. but there was hope for them. "that's it," exclaimed my client, slapping his thigh, and turning triumphantly to me, he continued, "you're all right, crocker, and know enough to win a damned big suit, but you're not the man to steer a delicate thing of this kind." this is how, to my infinite relief, the celebrity came to engineer the matter of the housewarming; and to him it was much more congenial. he accepted the task cheerfully, and went about it in such a manner as to leave no doubt in my mind as to its ultimate success. he was a master hand at just such problems, and this one had a double attraction. it pleased him to be thought the arbiter of such a worthy cause, while he acquired a prominence at asquith which satisfied in some part a craving which he found inseparable from incognito. his tactics were worthy of a skilled diplomatist. before we left mohair that day he had exacted as a condition that mr. cooke should not appear at the inn or in its vicinity until after the entertainment. to this my client readily pledged himself with that absolute freedom from suspicion which formed one of the most admirable traits of his character. the celebrity, being intuitively quick where women were concerned, had surmised that mrs. cooke did not like him; but as her interests in the affair of the cotillon coincided with those of mr. cooke, she was available as a means to an end. the celebrity deemed her, from a social standpoint, decidedly the better part of the mohair establishment, and he contrived, by a system of manoeuvres i failed to grasp, to throw her forward while he kept mr. cooke in the background. he had much to contend with; above all, an antecedent prejudice against the cookes, in reality a prejudice against the world, the flesh, and the devil, natural to any quiet community, and of which mohair and its appurtenances were taken as the outward and visible signs. older people came to asquith for simplicity and rest, and the younger ones were brought there for these things. nearly all had sufficient wealth to seek, if they chose, gayety and ostentation at the eastern resorts. but asquithians held gayety and ostentation at a discount, and maintained there was gayety enough at home. if any one were fitted to overcome this prejudice, it was mrs. cooke. her tastes and manners were as simple as her gowns. the celebrity, by arts unknown, induced mrs. judge short and two other ladies to call at mohair on a certain afternoon when mr. cooke was trying a trotter on the track. the three returned wondering and charmed with mrs. cooke; they were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious house. their example was followed by others at a time when the master of mohair was superintending in person the docking of some two-year-olds, and equally invisible. these ladies likewise came back to sing mrs. cooke's praises. mrs. cooke returned the calls. she took tea on the inn veranda, and drove mrs. short around mohair in her victoria. mr. cooke being seen only on rare and fleeting occasions, there gradually got abroad a most curious misconception of that gentleman's character, while over his personality floated a mist of legend which the celebrity took good care not to dispel. farrar, who despised nonsense, was ironical and non-committal when appealed to, and certainly i betrayed none of my client's attributes. hence it came that asquith, before the house-warming, knew as little about farquhar fenelon cooke, the man, as the nineteenth century knows about william shakespeare, and was every whit as curious. like shakespeare, mr. cooke was judged by his works, and from these he was generally conceded to be an illiterate and indifferent person of barbarous tastes and a mania for horses. he was further described as ungentlemanly by a brace of spinsters who had been within earshot on the veranda the morning he had abused the asquith roads, but their evidence was not looked upon as damning. that mr. cooke would appear at the cotillon never entered any one's head. thus it was, for a fortnight, mr. cooke maintained a most rigid seclusion. would that he had discovered in the shroud of mystery the cloak of fame! the celebrity by winston churchill volume . chapter xv i am convinced that mr. cooke possessed at least some of the qualities of a great general. in certain campaigns of past centuries, and even of this, it has been hero-worship that impelled the rank and file rather than any high sympathy with the cause they were striving for. and so it was with us that morning. our commander was everywhere at once, encouraging us to work, and holding over us in impressive language the awful alternative of capture. for he had the art, in a high degree, of inoculating his followers with the spirit which animated him; and shortly, to my great surprise, i found myself working as though my life depended on it. i certainly did not care very much whether the celebrity was captured or not, and yet, with the prospect of getting him over the border, i had not thought of breakfast. farrar had a natural inclination for work of this sort, but even he was infused somewhat with the contagious haste and enthusiasm which filled the air; and together we folded the tents with astonishing despatch and rowed them out to the maria, mr. cooke having gone to his knees in the water to shove the boat off. "what are we doing this for?" said farrar to me, as we hoisted the sail. we both laughed. "i have just been asking myself that question," i replied. "you are a nice district attorney, crocker," he said. "you have made a most proper and equitable decision in giving your consent to allen's escape. doesn't your conscience smart?" "not unbearably. i'll tell you what, farrar," said i, "the truth is, that this fellow never embezzled so much as a ten-cent piece. he isn't guilty: he isn't the man." "isn't the man?" repeated farrar. "no," i answered; "it's a long tale, and no time to tell it now. but he is really, as he claims to be, the author of all those detestable books we have been hearing so much of." "the deuce he is!" exclaimed farrar, dropping the stopper he was tying. "did he write the sybarites?" "yes, sir; he wrote the sybarites, and all the rest of that trash." "he's the fellow that maintains a man ought to marry a girl after he has become engaged to her." "exactly," i said, smiling at his way of putting it. "preaches constancy to all men, but doesn't object to stealing." i laughed. "you're badly mixed," i explained. "i told you he never stole anything. he was only ass enough to take the man's name who is the living image of him. and the other man took the bonds." "oh, come now," said he, "tell me something improbable while you are about it." "it's true," i replied, repressing my mirth; "true as the tale of timothy. i knew him when he was a mere boy. but i don't give you that as a proof, for he might have become all things to all men since. ask miss trevor; or miss thorn; she knows the other man, the bicycle man, and has seen them both together." "where, in india? was one standing on the ground looking at his double go to heaven? or was it at one of those drawing-room shows where a medium holds conversation with your soul, while your body sleeps on the lounge? by george, crocker, i thought you were a sensible man." no wonder i got angry. but i might have come at some proper estimation of farrar's incredulity by that time. "i suppose you wouldn't take a lady's word," i growled. "not for that," he said, busy again with the sail stops; "nor st. chrysostom's, were he to come here and vouch for it. it is too damned improbable." "stranger things than that have happened," i retorted, fuming. "not to any of us," he said. presently he added, chuckling: "he'd better not get into the clutches of that man drew." "what do you mean?" i demanded. farrar was exasperating at times. "drew will wind those handcuffs on him like tourniquets," he laughed. there seemed to be something behind this remark, but before i could inquire into it we were interrupted by mr. cooke, who was standing on the beach, swearing and gesticulating for the boat. "i trust," said farrar, as we rowed ashore, "that this blind excitement will continue, and that we shall have the extreme pleasure of setting down our friend in her majesty's dominions with a yachting-suit and a ham sandwich." we sat down to a hasty breakfast, in the middle of which the celebrity arrived. his appearance was unexceptionable, but his heavy jaw was set in a manner which should have warned mr. cooke not to trifle with him. "sit down, old man, and take a bite before we start for canada," said my client. the celebrity walked up to him. "mr. cooke," he began in a menacing tone, "it is high time this nonsense was ended. i am tired of being made a buffoon of for your party. for your gratification i have spent a sleepless night in those cold, damp woods; and i warn you that practical joking can be carried too far. i will not go to canada, and i insist that you sail me back to asquith." mr. cooke winked significantly in our direction and tapped his head. "i don't wonder you're a little upset, old man," he said, humoringly patting him; "but sit down for a bite of something, and you'll see things differently." "i've had my breakfast," he said, taking out a cigarette. then mr. trevor got up. "he demands, sir, to be delivered over to the authorities," said he, "and you have no right to refuse him. i protest strongly." "and you can protest all you damn please," retorted my client; "this isn't the ohio state senate. do you know where i would put you, mr. trevor? do you know where you ought to be? in a hencoop, sir, if i had one here. in a hen-coop. what would you do if a man who had gone a little out of his mind asked you for a gun to shoot himself with? give it him, i suppose. but i put mr. allen ashore in canada, with the funds to get off with, and then my duty's done." this speech, as mr. cooke had no doubt confidently hoped, threw the senator into a frenzy of wrath. "the day will come, sir," he shouted, shaking his fist at my client, "the day will come when you will rue this bitterly." "don't get off any of your oratorical frills on me," replied mr. cooke, contemptuously; "you ought to be tied and muzzled." mr. trevor was white with anger. "i, for one, will not go to canada," he cried. "you'll stay here and starve, then," said mr. cooke; "damned little i care." mr. trevor turned to farrar, who was biting his lip. "mr. farrar, i know you to be a rising young man of sound principles, and mr. crocker likewise. you are the only ones who can sail. have you reflected that you are about to ruin your careers?" "we are prepared to take the chances, i think," said farrar. mr. cooke looked us over, proudly and gratefully, as much as to say that while he lived we should not lack the necessities of life. at nine we embarked, the celebrity and mr. trevor for the same reason that the animals took to the ark,--because they had to. there was a spanking breeze in the west-northwest, and a clear sky, a day of days for a sail. mr. cooke produced a map, which farrar and i consulted, and without much trouble we hit upon a quiet place to land on the canadian side. our course was north-northwest, and therefore the wind enabled us to hold it without much trouble. bear island is situated some eighteen miles from shore, and about equidistant between asquith and far harbor, which latter we had to pass on our way northward. although a brisk sea was on, the wind had been steady from that quarter all night, and the motion was uniform. the maria was an excellent sea-boat. there was no indication, therefore, of the return of that malady which had been so prevalent on the passage to bear island. mr. cooke had never felt better, and looked every inch a sea-captain in his natty yachting-suit. he had acquired a tan on the island; and, as is eminently proper on a boat, he affected nautical manners and nautical ways. but his vernacular savored so hopelessly of the track and stall that he had been able to acquire no mastery over the art of marine invective. and he possessed not so much as one maritime oath. as soon as we had swung clear of the cove he made for the weather stays, where he assumed a posture not unlike that in the famous picture of farragut ascending mobile bay. his leather case was swung over his shoulder, and with his glasses he swept the lake in search of the scimitar and other vessels of a like unamiable character. although my client could have told you, offhand, jackstraw's last mile in a bicycle sulky, his notion of the scimitar's speed was as vague as his knowledge of seamanship. and when i informed him that in all probability she had already passed the light on far harbor reef, some nine miles this side of the far harbor police station, he went into an inordinate state of excitement. mr. cooke was, indeed, that day the embodiment of an unselfish if misdirected zeal. he was following the dictates of both heart and conscience in his endeavor to rescue his guest from the law; and true zeal is invariably contagious. what but such could have commanded the unremitting labors of that morning? farrar himself had done three men's work before breakfast, and it was, in great part, owing to him that we were now leaving the island behind us. he was sailing the maria that day as she will never be sailed again: her lee gunwale awash, and a wake like a surveyor's line behind her. more than once i called to mind his facetious observation about mr. drew, and wondered if he knew more than he had said about the detective. once in the open, the maria showed but small consideration for her passengers, for she went through the seas rather than over them. and mr. cooke, manfully keeping his station on the weather bow, likewise went through the seas. no argument could induce him to leave the post he had thus heroically chosen, which was one of honor rather than utility, for the lake was as vacant of sails as the day that father marquette (or some one else) first beheld it. under such circumstances ease must be considered as only a relative term; and the accommodations of the maria afforded but two comfortable spots,--the cabin, and the lea aft of the cabin bulkhead. this being the case, the somewhat peculiar internal relations of the party decided its grouping. i know of no worse place than a small yacht, or than a large one for that matter, for uncongenial people. the four betook themselves to the cabin, which was fortunately large, and made life bearable with a game of cards; while mrs. cooke, whose adaptability and sense i had come greatly to, admire, contented herself with a corner and a book. the ungrateful cause of the expedition himself occupied another corner. i caught sight of him through the cabin skylight, and the silver pencil he was holding over his note-book showed unmistakable marks of teeth. outside, mr. trevor, his face wearing an immutable expression of defiance for the wickedness surrounding him, had placed his daughter for safe-keeping between himself and the only other reliable character on board,--the refrigerator. but miss thorn appeared in a blue mackintosh and a pair of heavy yachting-boots, courting rather than avoiding a drenching. even a mackintosh is becoming to some women. all morning she sat behind mr. cooke, on the rise of the cabin, her back against the mast and her hair flying in the wind, and i, for one, was not sorry the celebrity had given us this excuse for a sail. chapter xvi about half-past eleven mr. cooke's vigilance was rewarded by a glimpse of the lighthouse on far harbor reef, and almost simultaneously he picked up, to the westward, the ragged outline of the house-tops and spires of the town itself. but as we neared the reef the harbor appeared as quiet as a sunday morning: a few mackinaws were sailing hither and thither, and the far harbor and beaverton boat was coming out. my client, in view of the peaceful aspect affairs had assumed, presently consented to relinquish his post, and handed the glasses over to me with an injunction to be watchful. i promised. and mr. cooke, feeling his way aft with more discretion than grace, finally descended into the cabin, where he was noisily received. and i was left with miss thorn. while my client had been there in front of us, his lively conversation and naive if profane remarks kept us in continual laughter. when with him it was utterly impossible to see any other than the ludicrous side of this madcap adventure, albeit he himself was so keenly in earnest as to its performance. it was with misgiving that i saw him disappear into the hatchway, and my impulse was to follow him. our spirits, like those in a thermometer, are never stationary: mine were continually being sent up or down. the night before, when i had sat with miss thorn beside the fire, they went up; this morning her anxious solicitude for the celebrity had sent them down again. she both puzzled and vexed me. i could not desert my post as lookout, and i remained in somewhat awkward suspense as to what she was going to say, gazing at distant objects through the glasses. her remark, when it came, took me by surprise. "i am afraid," she said seriously, "that uncle fenelon's principles are not all that they should be. his morality is something like his tobacco, which doesn't injure him particularly, but is dangerous to others." i was more than willing to meet her on the neutral ground of uncle fenelon. "do you think his principles contagious?" i asked. "they have not met with the opposition they deserve," she replied. "uncle fenelon's ideas of life are not those of other men,--yours, for instance. and his affairs, mental and material, are, happily for him, such that he can generally carry out his notions with small inconvenience. he is no doubt convinced that he is acting generously in attempting to rescue the celebrity from a term in prison; what he does not realize is that he is acting ungenerously to other guests who have infinitely more at stake." "but our friend from ohio has done his best to impress this upon him," i replied, failing to perceive her drift; "and if his words are wasted, surely the thing is hopeless." "i am not joking," said she. "i was not thinking of mr. trevor, but of you. i like you, mr. crocker. you may not believe it, but i do." for the life of me i could think of no fitting reply to this declaration. why was that abominable word "like" ever put into the english language? "yes, i like you," she continued meditatively, "in the face of the fact that you persist in disliking me." "nothing of the kind." "oh, i know. you mustn't think me so stupid as all that. it is a mortifying truth that i like you, and that you have no use for me." i have never known how to take a jest from a woman. i suppose i should have laughed this off. instead, i made a fool of myself. "i shall be as frank with you," i said, "and declare that i like you, though i should be much happier if i didn't." she blushed at this, if i am not mistaken. perhaps it was unlooked for. "at any rate," she went on, "i should deem it my duty to warn you of the consequences of this joke of yours. they may not be all that you have anticipated. the consequences for you, i mean, which you do not seem to have taken into account." "consequences for me!" i exclaimed. "i fear that you will think what i am going to say uncalled for, and that i am meddling with something that does not concern me. but it seems to me that you are undervaluing the thing you have worked so hard to attain. they say that you have ability, that you have acquired a practice and a position which at your age give the highest promise for the future. that you are to be counsel for the railroad. in short, that you are the coming man in this section of the state. i have found this out," said she, cutting short my objections, "in spite of the short time i have been here." "nonsense!" i said, reddening in my turn. "suppose that the celebrity is captured," she continued, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her mackintosh. "it appears that he is shadowed, and it is not unreasonable to expect that we shall be chased before the day is over. then we shall be caught red-handed in an attempt to get a criminal over the border. please wait until i have finished," she said, holding up her hand at an interruption i was about to make. "you and i know he is not a criminal; but he might as well be as far as you are concerned. as district attorney you are doubtless known to the local authorities. if the celebrity is arrested after a long pursuit, it will avail you nothing to affirm that you knew all along he was the noted writer. you will pardon me if i say that they will not believe you then. he will be taken east for identification. and if i know anything about politics, and especially the state of affairs in local politics with which you are concerned, the incident and the interval following it will be fatal to your chances with the railroad,--to your chances in general. you perceive, mr. crocker, how impossible it is to play with fire without being burned." i did perceive. at the time the amazing thoroughness with which she had gone into the subject of my own unimportant affairs, the astuteness and knowledge of the world she had shown, and the clearness with which she had put the situation, did not strike me. nothing struck me but the alarming sense of my own stupidity, which was as keen as i have ever felt it. what man in a public position, however humble, has not political enemies? the image of o'meara was wafted suddenly before me, disagreeably near, and his face wore the smile of victory. all of mr. cooke's money could not save me. my spirits sank as the immediate future unfolded itself, and i even read the article in o'meara's organ, the northern lights, which was to be instrumental in divesting me of my public trust and fair fame generally. yes, if the celebrity was caught on the other side of far harbor, all would be up with john crocker! but it would never do to let miss thorn discover my discomfiture. "there is something in what you say," i replied, with what bravado i could muster. "a little, i think," she returned, smiling; "now, what i wish you to do is to make uncle fenelon put into far harbor. if he refuses, you can go in in spite of him, since you and mr. farrar are the only ones who can sail. you have the situation in your own hands." there was certainly wisdom in this, also. but the die was cast now, and pride alone was sufficient to hold me to the course i had rashly begun upon. pride! what an awkward thing it is, and more difficult for most of us to swallow than a sponge. "i thank you for this interest in my welfare, miss thorn," i began. "no fine speeches, please, sir," she cut in, "but do as i advise." "i fear i cannot." "why do you say that? the thing is simplicity itself." "i should lose my self-respect as a practical joker. and besides," i said maliciously, "i started out to have some fun with the celebrity, and i want to have it." "well," she replied, rather coolly, "of course you can do as you choose." we were passing within a hundred yards of the lighthouse, set cheerlessly on the bald and sandy tip of the point. an icy silence sat between us, and such a silence is invariably insinuating. this one suggested a horrible thought. what if miss thorn had warned me in order to save the celebrity from humiliation? i thrust it aside, but it returned again and grinned. had she not practised insincerity before? and any one with half an eye could see that she was in love with the celebrity; even the fraction had remarked it. what more natural than, with her cleverness, she had hit upon this means of terminating the author's troubles by working upon my fears? human weakness often proves too much for those of us who have the very best intentions. up to now the refrigerator and mr. trevor had kept the strictest and most jealous of vigils over irene. but at length the senator succumbed to the drowsiness which never failed to attack him at this hour, and he forgot the disrepute of his surroundings in a respectable sleep. whereupon his daughter joined us on the forecastle. "i knew that would happen to papa if i only waited long enough," she said. "oh, he thinks you're dreadful, mr. crocker. he says that nowadays young men haven't any principle. i mustn't be seen talking to you." "i have been trying to convince mr. crocker that his stand in the matter is not only immoral, but suicidal," said miss thorn. "perhaps," she added meaningly, "he will listen to you." "i don't understand," answered miss trevor. "miss thorn has been good enough to point out," i explained, "that the political machine in this section, which has the honor to detest me, will seize upon the pretext of the celebrity's capture to ruin me. they will take the will for the deed." "of course they will do just that," cried miss trevor. "how bright of you to think of it, marian!" miss thorn stood up. "i leave you to persuade him," said she; "i have no doubt you will be able to do it." with that she left us, quite suddenly. abruptly, i thought. and her manner seemed to impress miss trevor. "i wonder what is the matter with marian," said she, and leaned over the skylight. "why, she has gone down to talk with the celebrity." "isn't that rather natural?" i asked with asperity. she turned to me with an amused expression. "her conduct seems to worry you vastly, mr. crocker. i noticed that you were quite upset this morning in the cave. why was it?" "you must have imagined it," i said stiffly. "i should like to know," she said, with the air of one trying to solve a knotty problem, "i should like to know how many men are as blind as you." "you are quite beyond me, miss trevor," i answered; "may i request you to put that remark in other words?" "i protest that you are a most unsatisfactory person," she went on, not heeding my annoyance. "most abnormally modest people are. if i were to stick you with this hat-pin, for instance, you would accept the matter as a positive insult." "i certainly should," i said, laughing; "and, besides, it would be painful." "there you are," said she, exultingly; "i knew it. but i flatter myself there are men who would go into an ecstasy of delight if i ran a hat-pin into them. i am merely taking this as an illustration of my point." "it is a very fine point," said i. "but some people take pleasure in odd things. i can easily conceive of a man gallant enough to suffer the agony for the sake of pleasing a pretty girl." "i told you so," she pouted; "you have missed it entirely. you are hopelessly blind on that side, and numb. perhaps you didn't know that you have had a hat-pin sticking in you for some time." i began feeling myself, nervously. "for more than a month," she cried, "and to think that you have never felt it." my action was too much for her gravity, and she fell back against the skylight in a fit of merriment, which threatened to wake her father. and i hoped it would. "it pleases you to speak in parables this morning," i said. "mr. crocker," she began again, when she had regained her speech, "shall i tell you of a great misfortune which might happen to a girl?" "i should be pleased to hear it," i replied courteously. "that misfortune, then, would be to fall in love with you." "happily that is not within the limits of probability," i answered, beginning to be a little amused. "but why?" "lightning often strikes where it is least expected," she replied archly. "listen. if a young woman were unlucky enough to lose her heart to you, she might do everything but tell you, and you would never know it. i scarcely believe you would know it if she did tell you." i must have jumped unconsciously. "oh, you needn't think i am in love with you." "not for a minute," i made haste to say. she pointed towards the timber-covered hills beyond the shore. "do you see that stream which comes foaming down the notch into the lake in front of us?" she asked. "let us suppose that you lived in a cabin beside that brook; and that once in a while, when you went out to draw your water, you saw a nugget of--gold washing along with the pebbles on the bed. how many days do you think you would be in coming to the conclusion that there was a pocket of gold somewhere above you, and in starting in search of it?" "not long, surely." "ah, you are not lacking in perception there. but if i were to tell you that i knew of the existence of such a mine, from various proofs i have had, and that the mine was in the possession of a certain person who was quite willing to share it with you on application, you would not believe me." "probably not." "well," said miss trevor, with a nod of finality, "i was actually about to make such a disclosure. but i see it would be useless." i confess she aroused my curiosity. no coaxing, however, would induce her to interpret. "no," she insisted strangely, "if you cannot put two and two together, i fear i cannot help you. and no one i ever heard of has come to any good by meddling." miss trevor folded her hands across her lap. she wore that air which i am led to believe is common to all women who have something of importance to disclose; or at least what they consider is of importance. there was an element of pity, too, in her expression. for she had given me my chance, and my wits had been found wanting. do not let it be surmised that i attach any great value to such banter as she had been indulging in. at the same time, however, i had an uneasy feeling that i had missed something which might have been to my advantage. it was in vain that i whipped my dull senses; but one conclusion was indicated by all this inference, and i don't care even to mention that: it was preposterous. then miss trevor shifted to a very serious mood. she honestly did her best to persuade me to relinquish our enterprise, to go to mr. cooke and confess the whole thing. "i wish we had washed our hands of this celebrity from the first," she said, with a sigh. "how dreadful if you lose your position on account of this foolishness!" "but i shan't," i answered reassuringly; "we are getting near the border now, and no sign of trouble. and besides," i added, "i think miss thorn tried to frighten me. and she very nearly succeeded. it was prettily done." "of course she tried to frighten you. i wish she had succeeded." "but her object was transparent." "her object!" she exclaimed. "her object was to save you." "i think not," i replied; "it was to save the celebrity." miss trevor rose and grasped one of the sail rings to keep her balance. she looked at me pityingly. "do you really believe that?" "firmly." "then you are hopeless, mr. crocker, totally hopeless. i give you up." and she went back to her seat beside the refrigerator. chapter xvii "crocker, old man, crocker, what the devil does that mean?" i turned with a start to perceive a bare head thrust above the cabin roof, the scant hair flying, and two large, brown eyes staring into mine full of alarm and reproach. a plump finger was pointing to where the sandy reef lay far astern of us. the mackinaws were flecked far and wide over the lake, and a dirty smudge on the blue showed where the far harbor and beaverton boat had gone over the horizon. but there, over the point and dangerously close to the land, hung another smudge, gradually pushing its way like a writhing, black serpent, lakewards. thus i was rudely jerked back to face the problem with which we had left the island that morning. i snatched the neglected glasses from the deck and hurried aft to join my client on the overhang, but a pipe was all they revealed above the bleak hillocks of sand. my client turned to me with a face that was white under the tan. "crocker," he cried, in a tragic voice, "it's a blessed police boat, or i never picked a winner." "nonsense," i said; "other boats smoke beside police boats. the lake is full of tugs." i was a little nettled at having been scared for a molehill. "but i know it, sure as hell," he insisted. "you know nothing about it, and won't for an hour. what's a pipe and a trail of smoke?" he laid a hand on my shoulder, and i felt it tremble. "why do you suppose i came out?" he demanded solemnly. "you were probably losing," i said. "i was winning." "then you got tired of winning." but he held up a thumb within a few inches of my face, and with it a ring i had often noticed, a huge opal which he customarily wore on the inside of his hand. "she's dead," said mr. cooke, sadly. "dead?" i repeated, perplexed. "yes, she's dead as the day i lost the two thousand at sheepshead. she's never gone back on me yet. and unless i can make some little arrangement with those fellows," he added, tossing his head at the smoke, "you and i will put up to-night in some barn of a jail. i've never been in jail but once," said mr. cooke, "and it isn't so damned pleasant, i assure you." i saw that he believed every word of it; in fact, that it was his religion. i might as well have tried to argue the sultan out of mohammedanism. the pipe belonged to a tug, that was certain. farrar said so after a look over his shoulder, disdaining glasses, and he knew the lake better than many who made their living by it. it was then that i made note of a curious anomaly in the betting character; for thus far mr. cooke, like a great many of his friends, was a skeptic. he never ceased to hope until the stake had found its way into the other man's pocket. and it was for hope that he now applied to farrar. but even farrar did not attempt to account for the tug's appearance that near the land. "she's in some detestable hurry to get up this way, that's flat," he said; "where she is, the channel out of the harbor is not forty feet wide." by this time the rest of the party were gathered behind us on the high side of the boat, in different stages of excitement, scrutinizing the smoke. mr. cooke had the glasses glued to his eyes again, his feet braced apart, and every line of his body bespeaking the tension of his mind. i imagined him standing thus, the stump of his cigar tightly clutched between his teeth, following the fortunes of some favorite on the far side of the belmont track. we waited without comment while the smoke crept by degrees towards the little white spindle on the tip of the point, now and again catching a gleam of the sun's rays from off the glass of the lantern. and presently, against the white lather of the lake, i thought i caught sight of a black nose pushed out beyond the land. another moment, and the tug itself was bobbing in the open. barely had she reached the deep water beyond the sands when her length began to shorten, and the dense cloud of smoke that rose made it plain that she was firing. at the sight i reflected that i had been a fool indeed. a scant flue miles of water lay between us and her, and if they really meant business back there, and they gave every sign of it, we had about an hour and a half to get rid of the celebrity. the maria was a good boat, but she had not been built to try conclusions with a far harbor tug. my client, in spite of the ominous condition of his opal, was not slow to make his intentions exceedingly clear. for mr. cooke was first and last, and always, a gentleman. after that you might call him anything you pleased. meditatively he screwed up his glasses and buckled them into the case, and then he descended to the cockpit. it was the celebrity he singled out of the party. "allen," said he, when he stood before him, "i want to impress on you that my word's gold. i've stuck to you thus far, and i'll be damned now if i throw you over, like they did jonah." mr. cooke spoke with a fine dignity that in itself was impressive, and when he had finished he looked about him until his eye rested on mr. trevor, as though opposition were to come from that quarter. and the senator gave every sign of another eruption. but the celebrity, either from lack of appreciation of my client's loyalty, or because of the nervousness which was beginning to show itself in his demeanor, despite an effort to hide it, returned no answer. he turned on his heel and resumed his seat in the cabin. mr. cooke was visibly affected. "i'd sooner lose my whip hand than go back on him now," he declared. then vesuvius began to rumble. "mr. cooke," said the senator, "may i suggest something which seems pertinent to me, though it does not appear to have occurred to you?" his tone was the calm one that the heroes used in the celebrity's novels when they were about to drop on and annihilate wicked men. "certainly, sir," my client replied briskly, bringing himself up on his way back to the overhang. "you have announced your intention of 'standing by' mr. allen, as you express it. have you reflected that there are some others who deserve to be consulted and considered beside mr. allen and yourself?" mr. cooke was puzzled at this change of front, and unused, moreover, to that veiled irony of parliamentary expression. "talk english, my friend," said he. "in plain words, sir, mr. allen is a criminal who ought to be locked up; he is a menace to society. you, who have a reputation, i am given to understand, for driving four horses, have nothing to lose by a scandal, while i have worked all my life for the little i have achieved, and have a daughter to think about. i will neither stand by mr. allen nor by you." mr. cooke was ready with a retort when the true significance of this struck him. things were a trifle different now. the tables had turned since leaving the island, and the senator held it in his power to ruin our one remaining chance of escape. strangely enough, he missed the cause of mr. cooke's hesitation. "look here, old man," said my client, biting off another cigar, "i'm a first-rate fellow when you get to know me, and i'd do the same for you as i'm doing for allen." "i daresay, sir, i daresay," said the other, a trifle mollified; "i don't claim that you're not acting as you think right." "i see it," said mr. cooke, with admirable humility; "i see it. i was wrong to haul you into this, trevor. and the only thing to consider now is, how to get you out of it." here he appeared for a moment to be wrapped in deep thought, and checked with his cigar an attempt to interrupt him. "however you put it, old man," he said at last, "we're all in a pretty bad hole." "all!" cried mr. trevor, indignantly. "yes, all," asserted mr. cooke, with composure. "there are the police, and here is allen as good as run down. if they find him when they get abroad, you don't suppose they'll swallow anything you have to say about trying to deliver him over. no, sir, you'll be bagged and fined along with the rest of us. and i'd be damned sorry to see it, if i do say it; and i blame myself freely for it, old man. now you take my advice and keep your mouth shut, and i'll take care of you. i've got a place for allen." during this somewhat remarkable speech mr. trevor, as it were, blew hot and cold by turns. although its delivery was inconsiderate, its logic was undeniable, and the senator sat down again on the locker, and was silent. but i marked that off and on his fingers would open and shut convulsively. time alone would disclose what was to happen to us; in the interval there was nothing to do but wait. we had reached the stage where anxiety begins to take the place of excitement, and we shifted restlessly from spot to spot and looked at the tug. she was ploughing along after us, and to such good purpose that presently i began to catch the white of the seas along her bows, and the bright red with which her pipe was tipped. farrar alone seemed to take but slight interest in her. more than once i glanced at him as he stood under me, but his eye was on the shuddering leach of the sail. then i leaned over. "what do you think of it?" i asked. "i told you this morning drew would have handcuffs on him before night," he replied, without raising his head. "hang your joking, farrar; i know more than you about it." "then what's the use of asking me?" "don't you see that i'm ruined if we're caught?" i demanded, a little warmly. "no, i don't see it," he replied. "you don't suppose i think you fool enough to risk this comedy if the man were guilty, do you? i don't believe all that rubbish about his being the criminal's double, either. that's something the girls got up for your benefit." i ignored this piece of brutality. "but i'm ruined anyway." "how?" i explained shortly what i thought our friend, o'meara, would do under the circumstances. an inference sufficed farrar. "why didn't you say something about this before?" he asked gravely. "i would have put into far harbor." "because i didn't think of it," i confessed. farrar pulled down the corners of his mouth with trying not to smile. "miss thorn is a woman of brains," he remarked gently; "i respect her." i wondered by what mysterious train of reasoning he had arrived at this conclusion. he said nothing for a while, but toyed with the spokes of the wheel, keeping the wind in the sail with undue nicety. "i can't make them out," he said, all at once. "then you believe they're after us?" "i changed the course a point or two, just to try them." "and--" "and they changed theirs." "who could have informed?" "drew, of course," i said; "who else?" he laughed. "drew doesn't know anything about allen," said he; "and, besides, he's no more of a detective than i am." "but drew was told there was a criminal on the island." "who told him?" i repeated the conversation between drew and mr. trevor which i had overheard. farrar whistled. "but you did not speak of that this morning," said he. "no," i replied, feeling anything but comfortable. at times when he was facetious as he had been this morning i was wont to lose sight of the fact that with farrar the manner was not the man, and to forget the warmth of his friendship. i was again to be reminded of this. "well, crocker," he said briefly, "i would willingly give up this year's state contract to have known it." chapter xviii it was, accurately as i can remember, half after noon when mr. cooke first caught the smoke over the point, for the sun was very high: at two our fate had been decided. i have already tried to describe a part of what took place in that hour and a half, although even now i cannot get it all straight in my mind. races, when a great deal is at stake, are more or less chaotic: a close four miles in a college eight is a succession of blurs with lucid but irrelevant intervals. the weary months of hard work are forgotten, and you are quite as apt to think of your first velocipede, or of the pie that is awaiting you in the boathouse, as of victory and defeat. and a yacht race, with a pair of rivals on your beam, is very much the same. as i sat with my feet dangling over the washboard, i reflected, once or twice, that we were engaged in a race. all i had to do was to twist my head in order to make sure of it. i also reflected, i believe, that i was in the position of a man who has bet all he owns, with large odds on losing either way. but on the whole i was occupied with more trivial matters a letter i had forgotten to write about a month's rent, a client whose summer address i had mislaid. the sun was burning my neck behind when a whistle aroused me to the realization that the tug was no longer a toy boat dancing in the distance, but a stern fact but two miles away. there could be no mistake now, for i saw the white steam of the signal against the smoke. i slid down and went into the cabin. the celebrity was in the corner by the companionway, with his head on the cushions and a book in his hand. and forward, under the low deck beams beyond the skylight, i beheld the crouching figure of my client. he had stripped off his coat and was busy at some task on the floor. "they're whistling for us to stop," i said to him. "how near are they, old man?" he asked, without looking up. the perspiration was streaming down his face, and he held a brace and bit in his hand. under him was the trap-door which gave access to the ballast below, and through this he had bored a neat hole. the yellow chips were still on his clothes. "they're not two miles away," i answered. "but what in mystery are you doing there?" but he only laid a finger beside his nose and bestowed a wink in my direction. then he took some ashes from his cigar, wetted his finger, and thus ingeniously removed all appearance of newness from the hole he had made, carefully cleaning up the chips and putting them in his pocket. finally he concealed the brace and bit and opened the trap, disclosing the rough stones of the ballast. i watched him in amazement as he tore a mattress from an adjoining bunk and forced it through the opening, spreading it fore and aft over the stones. "now," he said, regaining his feet and surveying the whole with undisguised satisfaction, "he'll be as safe there as in my new family vault." "but" i began, a light dawning upon me. "allen, old man," said mr. cooke, "come here." the celebrity laid down his book and looked up: my client was putting on his coat. "come here, old man," he repeated. and he actually came. but he stopped when he caught sight of the open trap and of the mattress beneath it. "how will that suit you?" asked mr. cooke, smiling broadly as he wiped his face with an embroidered handkerchief. the celebrity looked at the mattress, then at me, and lastly at mr. cooke. his face was a study: "and--and you think i am going to get in there?" he said, his voice shaking. my client fell back a step. "why not?" he demanded. "it's about your size, comfortable, and all the air you want" (here mr. cooke stuck his finger through the bit hole). "damn me, if i were in your fix, i wouldn't stop at a kennel." "then you're cursed badly mistaken," said the celebrity, going back to his corner; "i'm tired of being made an ass of for you and your party." "an ass!" exclaimed my client, in proper indignation. "yes, an ass," said the celebrity. and he resumed his book. it would seem that a student of human nature, such as every successful writer should be, might by this time have arrived at some conception of my client's character, simple as it was, and have learned to overlook the slight peculiarity in his mode of expressing himself. but here the celebrity fell short, if my client's emotions were not pitched in the same key as those of other people, who shall say that his heart was not as large or his sympathies as wide as many another philanthropist? but mr. cooke was an optimist, and as such disposed to look at the best side of his friends and ignore the worst; if, indeed, he perceived their faults at all. it was plain to me, even now, that he did not comprehend the celebrity's attitude. that his guest should reject the one hope of escape left him was, according to mr. cooke, only to be accounted for by a loss of mental balance. nevertheless, his disappointment was keen. he let down the door and slowly led the way out of the cabin. the whistle sounded shrilly in our ears. mr. cooke sat down and drew a wallet from his pocket. he began to count the bills, and, as if by common consent, the four followed suit. it was a task which occupied some minutes, and when completed my client produced a morocco note-book and a pencil. he glanced interrogatively at the man nearest him. "three hundred and fifty." mr. cooke put it down. it was entirely a matter of course. what else was there to be done? and when he had gone the round of his followers he turned to farrar and me. "how much are you fellows equal to?" he asked. i believe he did it because he felt we should resent being left out: and so we should have. mr. cooke's instincts were delicate. we told him. then he paused, his pencil in the air, and his eyes doubtfully fixed on the senator. for all this time mr. trevor had been fidgeting in his seat; but now he opened his long coat, button by button, and thrust his hand inside the flap. oh, falstaff! "father, father!" exclaimed miss trevor. but her tongue was in her cheek. i have heard it stated that if a thoroughly righteous man were cast away with ninety and nine ruffians, each of the ruffians would gain one-one-hundredth in virtue, whilst the righteous man would sink to their new level. i am not able to say how much better mr. cooke's party was for mr. trevor's company, but the senator seemed to realize that something serious had happened to him, for his voice was not altogether steady as he pronounced the amount of his contribution. "trevor," cried mr. cooke, with great fervor, "i take it all back. you're a true, public-spirited old sport." but the senator had not yet reached that extreme of degradation where it is pleasurable to be congratulated on wickedness. my client added up the figures and rubbed his hands. i regret to say that the aggregate would have bought up three small police organizations, body and soul. "pull up, farrar, old man," he shouted. farrar released the wheel and threw the maria into the wind. with the sail cracking and the big boom dodging over our heads, we watched the tug as she drew nearer and nearer, until we could hear the loud beating of her engines. on one side some men were making ready to lower a boat, and then a conspicuous figure in blue stood out by the davits. then came the faint tinkle of a bell, and the h sinclair, of far harbor, glided up and thrashed the water scarce a biscuit-throw away. "hello, there!" the man in uniform called out. it was captain mccann, chief of the far harbor police. mr. cooke waved his cigar politely. "is that mr. cooke's yacht, the maria? "the same," said mr. cooke. "i'm fearing i'll have to come aboard you, mr. cooke." "all right, old man, glad to have you," said my client. this brought a smile to mccann's face as he got into his boat. we were all standing in the cockpit, save the celebrity, who was just inside of the cabin door. i had time to note that he was pale, and no more: i must have been pale myself. a few strokes brought the chief to the maria's stern. "it's not me that likes to interfere with a gent's pleasure party, but business is business," said he, as he climbed aboard. my client's hospitality was oriental. "make yourself at home, old man," he said, a box of his largest and blackest cigars in his hand. and these he advanced towards mccann before the knot was tied in the painter. then a wave of self-reproach swept over me. was it possible that i, like mr. trevor, had been deprived of all the morals i had ever possessed? could it be that the district attorney was looking calmly on while mr. cooke wilfully corrupted the far harbor chief-of-police? as agonizing a minute as i ever had in my life was that which it took mccann to survey those cigars. his broad features became broader still, as a huge, red hand was reached out. i saw it close lingeringly over the box, and then mr. cooke had struck a match. the chief stepped over the washboard onto the handsome turkey-red cushions on the seats, and thus he came face to face with me. "holy fathers!" he exclaimed. "is it you who are here, mr. crocker?" and he pulled off his cap. "no other, mccann," said i, with what i believe was a most pitiful attempt at braggadocio. mccann began to puff at his cigar. clouds of smoke came out of his face and floated down the wind. he was so visibly embarrassed that i gained a little courage. "and what brings you here?" i demanded. he scrutinized me in perplexity. "i think you're guessing, sir." "never a guess, mccann. you'll have to explain yourself." mccann had once had a wholesome respect for me. but it looked now as if the bottom was dropping out of it. "sure, mr. crocker," he said, "what would you be doing in such company as i'm hunting for? can it be that ye're helping to lift a criminal over the border?" "mccann," i asked sternly, "what have you had on the, tug?" force of habit proved too much for the man. he went back to the apologetic. "never a drop, mr. crocker. upon me soul!" this reminded mr. cooke of something (be it recorded) that he had for once forgotten. he lifted up the top of the refrigerator. the chief's eye followed him. but i was not going to permit this. "now, mccann," i commenced again, "if you will state your business here, if you have any, i shall be obliged. you are delaying mr. cooke." the chief was seized with a nervous tremor. i think we were a pair in that, only i managed to keep mine, under. when it came to the point, and any bribing was to be done, i had hit upon a course. self-respect demanded a dignity on my part. with a painful indecision mccann pulled a paper from his pocket which i saw was a warrant. and he dropped his cigar. mr. cooke was quick to give him another. "ye come from bear island, mr. crocker?" he inquired. i replied in the affirmative. "i hope it's news i'm telling you," he said soberly; "i'm hoping it's news when i say that i'm here for mr. charles wrexell allen,--that's the gentleman's name. he's after taking a hundred thousand dollars away from boston." then he turned to mr. cooke. "the gentleman was aboard your boat, sir, when you left that country place of yours,--what d'ye call it? --mohair? thank you, sir." and he wiped the water from his brow. "and they're telling me he was on bear island with ye? sure, sir, and i can't see why a gentleman of your standing would be wanting to get him over the border. but i must do my duty. begging your pardon, mr. crocker," he added, with a bow to me. "certainly, mccann," i said. for a space there was only the bumping and straining of the yacht and the swish of the water against her sides. then the chief spoke again. "it will be saving you both trouble and inconvenience, mr. crocker, if you give him up, sir." what did the man mean? why in the name of the law didn't he make a move? i was conscious that my client was fumbling in his clothes for the wallet; that he had muttered an invitation for the chief to go inside. mccann smoked uneasily. "i don't want to search the boat, sir." at these words we all turned with one accord towards the cabin. i felt farrar gripping my arm tightly from behind. the celebrity had disappeared! it was mr. cooke who spoke. "search the boat!" he said, something between a laugh and a cry. "yes, sir," the chief repeated firmly. "it's sorry i am to do it, with mr. crocker here, too." i have always maintained that nature had endowed my client with rare gifts; and the ease with which he now assumed a part thus unexpectedly thrust upon him, as well as the assurance with which he carried it out, goes far to prove it. "if there's anything in your line aboard, chief," he said blandly, "help yourself!" some of us laughed. i thought things a little too close to be funny. since the celebrity had lost his nerve and betaken himself to the place of concealment mr. cooke had prepared for him, the whole composition of the affair was changed. before, if mccann had arrested the ostensible mr. allen, my word, added to fifty dollars from my client, would probably have been sufficient. should he be found now, no district attorney on the face of the earth could induce the chief to believe that he was any other than the real criminal; nor would any bribe be large enough to compensate mccann for the consequences of losing so important a prisoner. there was nothing now but to carry it off with a high hand. mccann got up. "be your lave, mr. crocker," he said. "never you mind me, mccann," i replied, "but you do what is right." with that he began his search. it might have been ludicrous if i had had any desire to laugh, for the chief wore the gingerly air of a man looking for a rattlesnake which has to be got somehow. and my client assisted at the inspection with all the graces of a dancing-master. mccann poked into the forward lockers where we kept the stores,--dropping the iron lid within an inch of his toe,--and the clothing-lockers and the sail-lockers. he reached under the bunks, and drew out his hand again quickly, as though he expected to be bitten. and at last he stood by the trap with the hole in it, under which the celebrity lay prostrate. i could hear my own breathing. but mr. cooke had his wits about him still, and at this critical juncture he gave mccann a thump on the back which nearly carried him off his feet. "they say the mast is hollow, old man," he suggested. "be jabers, mr. cooke," said mccann, "and i'm beginning to think it is! "he took off his cap and scratched his head. "well, mccann, i hope you're contented," i said. "mr. crocker," said he, "and it's that thankful i am for you that the gent ain't here. but with him cutting high finks up at mr. cooke's house with a valet, and him coming on the yacht with yese, and the whole country in that state about him, begorra," said mccann, "and it's domned strange! maybe it's swimmin' in the water he is!" the whole party had followed the search, and at this speech of the chief's our nervous tension became suddenly relaxed. most of us sat down to laugh. "i'm asking no questions, mr. crocker, yell take notice," he remarked, his voice full of reproachful meaning. "mccann," said i, "you come outside. i want to speak to you." he followed me out. "now," i went on, "you know me pretty well" (he nodded doubtfully), "and if i give you my word that charles wrexell allen is not on this yacht, and never has been, is that sufficient?" "is it the truth you're saying, sir?" i assured him that it was. "then where is he, mr. crocker?" "god only knows!" i replied, with fervor. "i don't, mccann." the chief was satisfied. he went back into the cabin, and mr. cooke, in the exuberance of his joy, produced champagne. mccann had heard of my client and of his luxurious country place, and moreover it was the first time he had ever been on a yellow-plush yacht. he tarried. he drank mr. cooke's health and looked around him in wonder and awe, and his remarks were worthy of record. these sayings and the thought of the author of the sybarites stifling below with his mouth to an auger-hole kept us in a continual state of merriment. and at last our visitor rose to go. as he was stepping over the side, mr. cooke laid hold of a brass button and pressed a handful of the black cigars upon him. "my regards to the detective, old man," said he. mccann stared. "my regards to drew," my client insisted. "oh!" said mccann, his face lighting up, "him with the whiskers, what came from bear island in a cat-boat. sure, he wasn't no detective, sir." "what was he? a police commissioner?" "mr. cooke," said mccann, disdainfully, as he got into his boat, "he wasn't nothing but a prospector doing the lake for one of them summer hotel companies." chapter xix when the biography of the celebrity is written, and i have no doubt it will be some day, may his biographer kindly draw a veil over that instant in his life when he was tenderly and obsequiously raised by mr. cooke from the trap in the floor of the maria's cabin. it is sometimes the case that a good fright will heal a feud. and whereas, before the arrival of the h. sinclair, there had been much dissension and many quarrels concerning the disposal of the quasi charles wrexell allen, when the tug steamed away to the southwards but one opinion remained,--that, like jonah, he must be got rid of. and no one concurred more heartily in this than the celebrity himself. he strolled about and smoked apathetically, with the manner of one who was bored beyond description, whilst the discussion was going on between farrar, mr. cooke, and myself as to the best place to land him. when considerately asked by my client whether he had any choice in the matter, he replied, somewhat facetiously, that he could not think of making a suggestion to one who had shown such superlative skill in its previous management. mr. trevor, too, experienced a change of sentiment in mr. cooke's favor. it is not too much to say that the senator's scare had been of such thoroughness that he was willing to agree to almost anything. he had come so near to being relieved of that most precious possession, his respectability, that the reason in mr. cooke's course now appealed to him very strongly. thus he became a tacit assenter in wrong-doing, for circumstances thrust this, once in a while, upon the best of our citizens. the afternoon wore cool; nay, cold is a better word. the wind brought with it a suggestion of the pine-clad wastes of the northwestern wilderness whence it came, and that sure harbinger of autumn, the blue haze, settled around the hills, and benumbed the rays of the sun lingering over the crests. farrar and i, as navigators, were glad to get into our overcoats, while the others assembled in the little cabin and lighted the gasoline stove which stood in the corner. outside we had our pipes for consolation, and the sunset beauty of the lake. by six we were well over the line, and consulting our chart, we selected a cove behind a headland on our left, which seemed the best we could do for an anchorage, although it was shallow and full of rocks. as we were changing our course to run in, mr. cooke appeared, bundled up in his reefer. he was in the best of spirits, and was good enough to concur with our plans. "now, sir," asked farrar, "what do you propose to do with allen?" but our client only chuckled. "wait and see, old man," he said; "i've got that all fixed." "well," farrar remarked, when he had gone in again, "he has steered it deuced well so far. i think we can trust him." it was dark when we dropped anchor, a very tired party indeed; and as the maria could not accommodate us all with sleeping quarters, mr. cooke decided that the ladies should have the cabin, since the night was cold. and so it might have been, had not miss thorn flatly refused to sleep there. the cabin was stuffy, she said, and so she carried her point. leaving farrar and one of mr. cooke's friends to take care of the yacht, the rest of us went ashore, built a roaring fire and raised a tent, and proceeded to make ourselves as comfortable as circumstances would allow. the sense of relief over the danger passed produced a kind of lightheartedness amongst us, and the topics broached at supper would not have been inappropriate at a friendly dinner party. as we were separating for the night miss thorn said to me: "i am so happy for your sake, mr. crocker, that he was not discovered." for my sake! could she really have meant it, after all? i went to sleep thinking of that sentence, beside my client beneath the trees. and it was first in my thoughts when i awoke. as we dipped our faces in the brook the next morning my client laughed softly to himself between the gasps, and i knew that he had in mind the last consummate touch to his successful enterprise. and the revelation came when the party were assembled at breakfast. mr. cooke stood up, and drawing from his pocket a small and mysterious paper parcel he forthwith delivered himself in the tone and manner which had so endeared him to the familiars of the lake house bar. "i'm not much for words, as you all know," said he, with becoming modesty, "and i don't set up to be an orator. i am just what you see here,--a damned plain man. and there's only one virtue that i lay any claim to,--no one can say that i ever went back on a friend. i want to thank all of you (looking at the senator) for what you have done for me and allen. it's not for us to talk about that hundred thousand dollars. --my private opinion is (he seemed to have no scruples about making it public) that allen is insane. no, old man, don't interrupt me; but you haven't acted just right, and that's a fact. and i won't feel square with myself until i put him where i found him, in safety. i am sorry to say, my friends," he added, with emotion, "that mr. allen is about to leave us." he paused for breath, palpably satisfied with so much of it, and with the effect on his audience. "now," continued he, "we start this morning for a place which is only four miles or so from the town of saville, and i shall then request my esteemed legal adviser, mr. crocker, to proceed to the town and buy a ready-made suit of clothes for mr. allen, a slouch hat, a cheap necktie, and a stout pair of farmer's boots. and i have here," he said, holding up the package, "i have here the rest of it. my friends, you heard the chief tell me that drew was doing the lake for a summer hotel syndicate. but if drew wasn't a detective you can throw me into the lake! he wasn't exactly pinkerton, and i flatter myself that we were too many for him," said mr. cooke, with deserved pride; "and he went away in such a devilish hurry that he forgot his hand-bag with some of his extra things." then my client opened the package, and held up on a string before our astonished eyes a wig, a pair of moustaches, and two bushy red whiskers. and this was mr. cooke's scheme! did it electrify his hearers? perhaps. even the senator was so choked with laughter that he was forced to cast loose one of the buttons which held on his turn-down collar, and farrar retired into the woods. but the gravity of mr. cooke's countenance remained serene. "old man," he said to the celebrity, "you'll have to learn the price of potatoes now. here are mr. drew's duplicates; try 'em on." this the celebrity politely but firmly refused to do. "cooke," said he, "it has never been my lot to visit so kind and considerate a host, or to know a man who pursued his duty with so little thought and care of his own peril. i wish to thank you, and to apologize for any hasty expressions i may have dropped by mistake, and i would it were possible to convince you that i am neither a maniac nor an embezzler. but, if it's just the same to you, i believe i can get along without the disguise you mentioned, and so save mr. crocker his pains. in short, if you will set me down at saville, i am willing to take my chances of reaching the canadian pacific from that point without fear of detection." the celebrity's speech produced a good impression on all save mr. cooke, who appeared a trifle water-logged. he had dealt successfully with mr. allen when that gentleman had been in defiant moods, or in moods of ugly sarcasm. but this good-natured, turn-you-down-easy note puzzled my client not a little. was this cherished scheme a whim or a joke to be lightly cast aside? mr. cooke thought not. the determination which distinguished him still sat in his eye as he bustled about giving orders for the breaking of camp. this refractory criminal must be saved from himself, cost what it might, and responsibility again rested heavy on my client's mind as i rowed him out to the maria. "crocker," he said, "if allen is scooped in spite of us, you have got to go east and make him out an idiot." he seemed to think that i had a talent for this particular defence. i replied that i would do my best. "it won't be difficult," he went on; "not near as tough as that case you won for me. you can bring in all the bosh about his claiming to be an author, you know. and i'll stand expenses." this was downright generous of mr. cooke. we have all, no doubt, drawn our line between what is right and what is wrong, but i have often wondered how many of us with the world's indorsement across our backs trespass as little on the other side of the line as he. after farrar and the four got aboard it fell to my lot to row the rest of the party to the yacht. and this was no slight task that morning. the tender was small, holding but two beside the man at the oars, and owing to the rocks and shallow water of which i have spoken, the maria lay considerably over a quarter of a mile out. hence each trip occupied some time. mr. cooke i had transferred with a load of canvas and the tent poles, and next i returned for mrs. cooke and mr. trevor, whom i deposited safely. then i landed again, helped in miss trevor and miss thorn, leaving the celebrity for the last, and was pulling for the yacht when a cry from the tender's stern arrested me. "mr. crocker, they are sailing away without us!" i turned in my seat. the maria's mainsail was up, and the jib was being hoisted, and her head was rapidly falling off to the wind. farrar was casting. in the stern, waving a handkerchief, i recognized mrs. cooke, and beside her a figure in black, gesticulating frantically, a vision of coat-tails flapping in the breeze. then the yacht heeled on her course and forged lakewards. "row, mr. crocker, row! they are leaving us!" cried miss trevor, in alarm. i hastened to reassure her. "farrar is probably trying something," i said. "they will be turning presently." this is just what they did not do. once out of the inlet, they went about and headed northward, up the coast, and we remained watching them until mr. trevor became a mere oscillating black speck against the sail. "what can it mean?" asked miss thorn. i had not so much as an idea. "they certainly won't desert us, at any rate," i said. "we had better go ashore again and wait." the celebrity was seated on the beach, and he was whittling. now whittling is an occupation which speaks of a contented frame of mind, and the maria's departure did not seem to have annoyed or disturbed him. "castaways," says he, gayly, "castaways on a foreign shore. two delightful young ladies, a bright young lawyer, a fugitive from justice, no chaperon, and nothing to eat. and what a situation for a short story, if only an author were permitted to make use of his own experiences!" "only you don't know how it will end," miss thorn put in. the celebrity glanced up at her. "i have a guess," said he, with a smile. "is it true," miss trevor asked, "that a story must contain the element of love in order to find favor with the public?" "that generally recommends it, especially to your sex, miss trevor," he replied jocosely. miss trevor appeared interested. "and tell me," she went on, "isn't it sometimes the case that you start out intent on one ending, and that your artistic sense of what is fitting demands another?" "don't be silly, irene," said miss thorn. she was skipping flat pebbles over the water, and doing it capitally, too. i thought the celebrity rather resented the question. "that sometimes happens, of course," said he, carelessly. he produced his inevitable gold cigarette case and held it out to me. "be sociable for once, and have one," he said. i accepted. "do you know," he continued, lighting me a match, "it beats me why you and miss trevor put this thing up on me. you have enjoyed it, naturally, and if you wanted to make me out a donkey you succeeded rather well. i used to think that crocker was a pretty good friend of mine when i went to his dinners in new york. and i once had every reason to believe," he added, "that miss trevor and i were on excellent terms." was this audacity or stupidity? undoubtedly both. "so we were," answered miss trevor, "and i should be very sorry to think, mr. allen," she said meaningly, "that our relations had in any way changed." it was the celebrity's turn to flush. "at any rate," he remarked in his most offhand manner, "i am much obliged to you both. on sober reflection i have come to believe that you did the very best thing for my reputation." chapter xx he had scarcely uttered these words before the reason for the maria's abrupt departure became apparent. the anchorage of the yacht had been at a spot whence nearly the whole south of the lake towards far harbor was open, whilst a high tongue of land hid that part from us on the shore. as he spoke, there shot before our eyes a steaming tug-boat, and a second look was not needed to assure me that she was the "h. sinclair, of far harbor." they had perceived her from the yacht an hour since, and it was clear that my client, prompt to act as to think, had decided at once to put out and lead her a blind chase, so giving the celebrity a chance to make good his escape. the surprise and apprehension created amongst us by her sudden appearance was such that none of us, for a space, spoke or moved. she was about a mile off shore, but it was even whether the chief would decide that his quarry had been left behind in the inlet and turn in, or whether he would push ahead after the yacht. he gave us an abominable five minutes of uncertainty. for when he came opposite the cove he slowed up, apparently weighing his chances. it was fortunate that we were hidden from his glasses by a copse of pines. the sinclair increased her speed and pushed northward after the maria. i turned to the celebrity. "if you wish to escape, now is your chance," i said. for contrariness he was more than i have ever had to deal with. now he crossed his knees and laughed. "it strikes me you had better escape, crocker," said he. "you have more to run for." i looked across at miss thorn. she had told him, then, of my predicament. and she did not meet my eye. he began to whittle again, and remarked: "it is only seventeen miles or so across these hills to far harbor, old chap, and you can get a train there for asquith." "just as you choose," said i, shortly. with that i started off to gain the top of the promontory in order to watch the chase. i knew that this could not last as long as that of the day before. in less than three hours we might expect the maria and the tug in the cove. and, to be frank, the indisposition of the celebrity to run troubled me. had he come to the conclusion that it was just as well to submit to what seemed the inevitable and so enjoy the spice of revenge over me? my thoughts gave zest to my actions, and i was climbing the steep, pine-clad slope with rapidity when i heard miss trevor below me calling out to wait for her. at the point of our ascent the ridge of the tongue must have been four hundred feet above the level of the water, and from this place of vantage we could easily make out the maria in the distance, and note from time to time the gain of the sinclair. "it wasn't fair of me, i know, to leave marian," said miss trevor, apologetically, "but i simply couldn't resist the temptation to come up here." "i hardly think she will bear you much ill will," i answered dryly; "you did the kindest thing possible. who knows but what they are considering the advisability of an elopement!" we passed a most enjoyable morning up there, all things taken into account, for the day was too perfect for worries. we even laughed at our hunger, which became keen about noon, as is always the case when one has nothing to eat; so we set out to explore the ridge for blackberries. these were so plentiful that i gathered a hatful for our friends below, and then i lingered for a last look at the boats. i could make out but one. was it the yacht? no; for there was a trace of smoke over it. and yet i was sure of a mast. i put my hand over my eyes. "what is it?" asked miss trevor, anxiously. "the tug has the maria in tow," i said, "and they are coming this way." we scrambled down, sobered by this discovery and thinking of little else. and breaking through the bushes we came upon miss thorn and the celebrity. to me, preoccupied with the knowledge that the tug would soon be upon us, there seemed nothing strange in the attitude of these two, but miss trevor remarked something out of the common at once. how keenly a woman scents a situation. the celebrity was standing with his back to miss thorn, at the edge of the water. his chin was in the air, and to a casual observer he looked to be minutely interested in a flock of gulls passing over us. and miss thorn? she was enthroned upon a heap of drift-wood, and when i caught sight of her face i forgot the very existence of the police captain. her lips were parted in a smile. "you are just in time, irene," she said calmly; "mr. allen has asked me to be his wife." i stood, with the hatful of berries in my hand, like a stiff wax figure in a museum. the expected had come at last; and how little do we expect the expected when it comes! i was aware that both the young women were looking at me, and that both were quietly laughing. and i must have cut a ridiculous figure indeed, though i have since been informed on good authority that this was not so. much i cared then what happened. then came miss trevor's reply, and it seemed to shake the very foundations of my wits. "but, marian," said she, "you can't have him. he is engaged to me. and if it's quite the same to you, i want him myself. it isn't often, you know, that one has the opportunity to marry a celebrity." the celebrity turned around: an expression of extraordinary intelligence shot across his face, and i knew then that the hole in the well-nigh invulnerable armor of his conceit had been found at last. and miss thorn, of all people, had discovered it. "engaged to you?" she cried, "i can't believe it. he would be untrue to everything he has written." "my word should be sufficient," said miss trevor, stiffly. (may i be hung if they hadn't acted it all out before.) "if you should wish proofs, however, i have several notes from him which are at your service, and an inscribed photograph. no, marian," she added, shaking her head, "i really cannot give him up." miss thorn rose and confronted him, and her dignity was inspiring. "is this so?" she demanded; "is it true that you are engaged to marry miss trevor?" the bone of contention was badly troubled. he had undoubtedly known what it was to have two women quarrelling over his hand at the same time, but i am willing to bet that the sensation of having them come together in his presence was new to him. "i did not think--" he began. "i was not aware that miss trevor looked upon the matter in that light, and you know--" "what disgusting equivocation," miss trevor interrupted. "he asked me point blank to marry him, and of course i consented. he has never mentioned to me that he wished to break the engagement, and i wouldn't have broken it." i felt like a newsboy in a gallery,--i wanted to cheer. and the celebrity kicked the stones and things. "who would have thought," she persisted, "that the author of the sybarites, the man who chose desmond for a hero, could play thus idly with the heart of woman? the man who wrote these beautiful lines: 'inconstancy in a woman, because of the present social conditions, is sometimes pardonable. in a man, nothing is more despicable.' and how poetic a justice it is that he has to marry me, and is thus forced to lead the life of self-denial he has conceived for his hero. mr. crocker, will you be my attorney if he should offer any objections?" the humor of this proved too much for the three of us, and miss trevor herself went into peals of laughter. would that the celebrity could have seen his own face. i doubt if even he could have described it. but i wished for his sake that the earth might have kindly opened and taken him in. "marian," said miss trevor, "i am going to be very generous. i relinquish the prize to you, and to you only. and i flatter myself there are not many girls in this world who would do it." "thank you, irene," miss thorn replied gravely, "much as i want him, i could not think of depriving you." well, there is a limit to all endurance, and the celebrity had reached his. "crocker," he said, "how far is it to the canadian pacific?" i told him. "i think i had best be starting," said he. and a moment later he had disappeared into the woods. we stood gazing in the direction he had taken, until the sound of his progress had died away. the shock of it all had considerably muddled my brain, and when at last i had adjusted my thoughts to the new conditions, a sensation of relief, of happiness, of joy (call it what you will), came upon me, and i could scarce restrain an impulse to toss my hat in the air. he was gone at last! but that was not the reason. i was safe from o'meara and calumny. nor was this all. and i did not dare to look at miss thorn. the knowledge that she had planned and carried out with dignity and success such a campaign filled me with awe. that i had misjudged her made me despise myself. then i became aware that she was speaking to me, and i turned. "mr. crocker, do you think there is any danger that he will lose his way?" "no, miss thorn," i replied; "he has only to get to the top of that ridge and strike the road for saville, as i told him." we were silent again until miss trevor remarked: "well, he deserved every bit of it." "and more, irene," said miss thorn, laughing; "he deserved to marry you." "i think he won't come west again for a very long time," said i. miss trevor regarded me wickedly, and i knew what was coming. "i hope you are convinced, now, mr. crocker, that our sex is not as black as you painted it: that miss thorn knew what she was about, and that she is not the inconsistent and variable creature you took her to be." i felt the blood rush to my face, and miss thorn, too, became scarlet. she went up to the mischievous irene and grasping her arms from behind, bent them until she cried for mercy. "how strong you are, marian! it is an outrage to hurt me so. i haven't said anything." but she was incorrigible, and when she had twisted free she began again: "i took it upon myself to speak a few parables to mr. crocker the other day. you know, marian, that he is one of these level-headed old fogies who think women ought to be kept in a menagerie, behind bars, to be inspected on saturday afternoons. now, i appeal to you if it wouldn't be disastrous to fall in love with a man of such ideas. and just to let you know what a literal old law-brief he is, when i said he had had a hat-pin sticking in him for several weeks, he nearly jumped overboard, and began to feel himself all over. did you know that he actually believed you were doing your best to get married to the celebrity?" (here she dodged miss thorn again.) "oh, yes, he confided in me. he used to worry himself ill over that. i'll tell you what he said to me only--" but fortunately at this juncture miss trevor was captured again, and miss thorn put her hand over her mouth. heaven only knows what she would have said! the two boats did not arrive until nearly four o'clock, owing to some trouble to the tug's propeller. not knowing what excuse my client might have given for leaving some of his party ashore, i thought it best to go out to meet them. seated on the cabin roof of the maria i beheld mr. cooke and mccann in conversation, each with a black cigar too big for him. "hello, crocker, old man," shouted my client, "did you think i was never coming back? i've had lots of sport out of this hayseed captain" (and he poked that official playfully), "but i didn't get any grub. so we'll have to go to far harbor." i caught the hint. mr. cooke had given out that he had started for saville to restock the larder. "no," he continued, "brass buttons didn't let me get to saville. you see, when he got back to town last night they told him he had been buncoed out of the biggest thing for years, and they got it into his head that i was child enough to run a ferry for criminals. they told him he wasn't the sleuth he thought he was, so he came back. they'll have the laugh on him now, for sure." mccann listened with admirable good-nature, gravely pulling at his cigar, and eyeing mr. cooke with a friendly air of admiration. "mr. crocker," he said, with melancholy humor, "it's leery i am with the whole shooting-match. mr. cooke here is a gentleman, every inch of him, and so be you, mr. crocker. but i'm just after taking a look at the hole in the bottom of the boat. 'ye have yer bunks in queer places, mr. cooke,' says i. it's not for me to be doubting a gentleman's word, sir, but i'm thinking me man is over the hills and far away, and that's true for ye." mr. cooke winked expressively. "mccann, you've been jerked," said he. "have another bottle!" the sinclair towed us to far harbor for a consideration, the wind being strong again from the south, and mccann was induced by the affable owner to remain on the yellow-plush yacht. i cornered him before we had gone a great distance. "mccann," said i, "what made you come back to-day?" "faith, mr. crocker, i don't care if i am telling you. i always had a liking for you, sir, and bechune you and me it was that divil o'meara what made all the trouble. i wasn't taking his money, not me; the saints forbid! but glory be to god, if he didn't raise a rumpus whin i come back without allen! it was sure he was that the gent left that place, --what are ye calling it?--mohair, in the maria, and we telegraphs over to asquith. he swore i'd lose me job if i didn't fetch him to-day. mr. crocker, sir, it's the lumber business i'll be startin' next week," said mccann. "don't let that worry you, mccann," i answered. "i will see that you don't lose your place, and i give you my word again that charles wrexell allen has never been aboard this yacht, or at mohair to my knowledge. what is more, i will prove it to-morrow to your satisfaction." mccann's faith was touching. "ye're not to say another word, sir," he said, and he stuck out his big hand, which i grasped warmly. my affection for mccann still remains a strong one. after my talk with mccann i was sitting on the forecastle propped against the bitts of the maria's anchor-chain, and looking at the swirling foam cast up by the tug's propeller. there were many things i wished to turn over in my mind just then, but i had not long been in a state of reverie when i became conscious that miss thorn was standing beside me. i got to my feet. "i have been wondering how long you would remain in that trance, mr. crocker," she said. "is it too much to ask what you were thinking of?" now it so chanced that i was thinking of her at that moment. it would never have done to say this, so i stammered. and miss thorn was a young woman of tact. "i should not have put that to so literal a man as you," she declared. "i fear that you are incapable of crossing swords. and then," she added, with a slight hesitation that puzzled me, "i did not come up here to ask you that,--i came to get your opinion." "my opinion?" i repeated. "not your legal opinion," she replied, smiling, "but your opinion as a citizen, as an individual, if you have one. to be frank, i want your opinion of me. do you happen to have such a thing?" i had. but i was in no condition to give it. "do you think me a very wicked girl?" she asked, coloring. "you once thought me inconsistent, i believe, but i am not that. have i done wrong in leading the celebrity to the point where you saw him this morning?" "heaven forbid!" i cried fervently; "but you might have spared me a great deal had you let me into the secret." "spared you a great deal," said miss thorn. "i--i don't quite understand." "well--" i began, and there i stayed. all the words in the dictionary seemed to slip out of my grasp, and i foundered. i realized i had said something which even in my wildest moments i had not dared to think of. my secret was out before i knew i possessed it. bad enough had i told it to farrar in an unguarded second. but to her! i was blindly seeking some way of escape when she said softly: "did you really care?" i am man enough, i hope, when there is need to be. and it matters not what i felt then, but the words came back to me. "marian," i said, "i cared more than you will ever learn." but it seems that she had known all the time, almost since that night i had met her at the train. and how? i shall not pretend to answer, that being quite beyond me. i am very sure of one thing, however, which is that i never told a soul, man or woman, or even hinted at it. how was it possible when i didn't know myself? the light in the west was gone as we were pulled into far harbor, and the lamps of the little town twinkled brighter than i had ever seen them before. i think they must have been reflected in our faces, since miss trevor, when she came forward to look for us, saw something there and openly congratulated us. and this most embarrassing young woman demanded presently: "how did it happen, marian? did you propose to him?" i was about to protest indignantly, but marian laid her hand on my arm. "tell it not in asquith," said she. "irene, i won't have him teased any more." we were drawing up to the dock, and for the first time i saw that a crowd was gathered there. the report of this chase had gone abroad. some began calling out to mccann when we came within distance, among others the editor of the northern lights, and beside him i perceived with amusement the generous lines: of the person of mr. o'meara himself. i hurried back to give farrar a hand with the ropes, and it was o'meara who caught the one i flung ashore and wound it around a pile. the people pressed around, peering at our party on the maria, and i heard mccann exhorting them to make way. and just then, as he was about to cross the plank, they parted for some one from behind. a breathless messenger halted at the edge of the wharf. he held out a telegram. mccann seized it and dived into the cabin, followed closely by my client and those of us who could push after. he tore open the envelope, his eye ran over the lines, and then he began to slap his thigh and turn around in a circle, like a man dazed. "whiskey!" shouted mr. cooke. "get him a glass of scotch!" but mccann held up his hand. "holy saint patrick!" he said, in a husky voice, "it's upset i am, bottom upwards. will ye listen to this?" "'drew is your man. reddish hair and long side whiskers, gray clothes. pretends to represent summer hotel syndicate. allen at asquith unknown and harmless. "' (signed.) everhardt."' "sew me up," said mr. cooke; "if that don't beat hell!" chapter xxi in this world of lies the good and the bad are so closely intermingled that frequently one is the means of obtaining the other. therefore, i wish very freely to express my obligations to the celebrity for any share he may have had in contributing to the greatest happiness of my life. marian and i were married the very next month, october, at my client's palatial residence of mohair. this was at mr. cooke's earnest wish: and since marian was mrs. cooke's own niece, and an orphan, there seemed no good reason why my client should not be humored in the matter. as for marian and me, we did not much care whether we were married at mohair or the city of mexico. mrs. cooke, i think, had a secret preference for germantown. mr. cooke quite over-reached himself in that wedding. "the knot was tied," as the papers expressed it, "under a huge bell of yellow roses." the paper also named the figure which the flowers and the collation and other things cost mr. cooke. a natural reticence forbids me to repeat it. but, lest my client should think that i undervalue his kindness, i will say that we had the grandest wedding ever seen in that part of the world. mccann was there, and mr. cooke saw to it that he had a punchbowl all to himself in which to drink our healths: judge short was there, still followed by the conjugal eye: and senator trevor, who remained over, in a new long black coat to kiss the bride. mr. cooke chartered two cars to carry guests from the east, besides those who came as ordinary citizens. miss trevor was of the party, and farrar, of course, was best man. would that i had the flow of words possessed by the reporter of the chicago sunday newspaper! but there is one thing i must mention before mrs. crocker and i leave for new york, in a shower of rice, on mr. cooke's own private car, and that is my client's gift. in addition to the check he gave marian, he presented us with a huge, 'repousse' silver urn he had had made to order, and he expressed a desire that the design upon it should remind us of him forever and ever. i think it will. mercury is duly set forth in a gorgeous equipage, driving four horses around the world at a furious pace; and the artist, by special instructions, had docked their tails. from new york, mrs. crocker and i went abroad. and it so chanced, in december, that we were staying a few days at a country-place in sussex, and the subject of the sybarites was broached at a dinner-party. the book was then having its sale in england. "crocker," said our host, "do you happen to have met the author of that book? he's an american." i looked across the table at my wife, and we both laughed. "i happen to know him intimately," i replied. "do you, now?" said the englishman; "what a very entertaining chap he is, is he not? i had him down in october, and, by jove, we were laughing the blessed time. he was telling us how he wrote his novels, and he said, 'pon my soul he did, that he had a secretary or something of that sort to whom he told the plot, and the secretary elaborated, you know, and wrote the draft. and he said, 'pon my honor, that sometimes the clark wrote the plot and all,--the whole blessed thing,--and that he never saw the book except to sign his name to it." "you say he was here in october?" asked marian, when the laugh had subsided. "i have the date," answered our host, "for he left me an autograph copy of the sybarites when he went away." and after dinner he showed us the book, with evident pride. inscribed on the fly-leaf was the name of the author, october th. but a glance sufficed to convince both of us that the celebrity had never written it. "john," said marian to me, a suspicion of the truth crossing her mind, "john, can it be the bicycle man?" "yes, it can be," i said; "it is." "well," said marian, "he's been doing a little more for our friend than we did." nor was this the last we heard of that meteoric trip through england, which the alleged author of the sybarites had indulged in. he did not go up to london; not he. it was given out that he was travelling for his health, that he did not wish to be lionized; and there were friends of the author in the metropolis who had never heard of his secretary, and who were at a loss to understand his conduct. they felt slighted. one of these told me that the celebrity had been to a lincolnshire estate where he had created a decided sensation by his riding to hounds, something the celebrity had never been known to do. and before we crossed the channel, marian saw another autograph copy of the famous novel. one day, some months afterwards, we were sitting in our little salon in a paris hotel when a card was sent up, which marian took. "john," she cried, "it's the celebrity." it was the celebrity, in the flesh, faultlessly groomed and clothed, with frock coat, gloves, and stick. he looked the picture of ruddy, manly health and strength, and we saw at once that he bore no ill-will for the past. he congratulated us warmly, and it was my turn to offer him a cigarette. he was nothing loath to reminisce on the subject of his experiences in the wilds of the northern lakes, or even to laugh over them. he asked affectionately after his friend cooke. time had softened his feelings, and we learned that he had another girl, who was in paris just then, and invited us on the spot to dine with her at "joseph's." let me say, in passing, that as usual she did credit to the celebrity's exceptional taste. "now," said he, "i have something to tell you two." he asked for another cigarette, and i laid the box beside him. "i suppose you reached saville all right," i said, anticipating. "seven at night," said he, "and so hungry that i ate what they call marble cake for supper, and a great many other things out of little side dishes, and nearly died of indigestion afterward. then i took a train up to the main line. an express came along. 'why not go west?' i asked myself, and i jumped aboard. it was another whim--you know i am subject to them. when i got to victoria i wired for money and sailed to japan; and then i went on to india and through the suez, taking things easy. i fell in with some people i knew who were going where the spirit moved them, and i went along. "algiers, for one place, and whom do you think i saw there, in the lobby of a hotel?" "charles wrexell allen," cried marian and i together. the celebrity looked surprised. "how did you know?" he demanded. "go on with your story," said marian; "what did he do?" "what did he do?" said the celebrity; "why, the blackguard stepped up and shook me by the hand, and asked after my health, and wanted to know whether i were married yet. he was so beastly familiar that i took out my glass, and i got him into a cafe for fear some one would see me with him. 'my dear fellow,' said he, 'you did me the turn of my life.--how can i ever repay you?' 'hang your impudence,' said i, but i wanted to hear what he had to say. 'don't lose your temper, old chap,' he laughed; 'you took a few liberties with my name, and there was no good reason why i shouldn't take some with yours. was there? when i think of it, the thing was most decidedly convenient; it was the hand of providence.' 'you took liberties with my name,' i cried. with that he coolly called to the waiter to fill our glasses. 'now,' said he, 'i've got a story for you. do you remember the cotillon, or whatever it was, that cooke gave? well, that was all in the chicago papers, and the "miles standish" agent there saw it, and he knew pretty well that i wasn't west. so he sent me the papers, just for fun. you may imagine my surprise when i read that i had been leading a dance out at mohair, or some such barbarous place in the northwest. i looked it up on the map (asquith, i mean), and then i began to think. i wondered who in the devil it might be who had taken my name and occupation, and all that. you see, i had just relieved the company of a little money, and it hit me like a clap of thunder one day that the idiot was you. but i couldn't be sure. and as long as i had to get out very soon anyway, i concluded to go to mohair and make certain, and then pile things off on you if you happened to be the man.'" at this point marian and i were seized with laughter, in which the celebrity himself joined. presently he continued: "'so i went,' said allen. 'i provided myself with two disguises, as a careful man should, but by the time i reached that outlandish hole, asquith, the little thing i was mixed up in burst prematurely, and the papers were full of it that morning. the whole place was out with sticks, so to speak, hunting for you. they told me the published description hit you to a dot, all except the scar, and they quarrelled about that. i posed as the promoter of resort syndicates, and i hired the scimitar and sailed over to bear island; and i didn't have a bad time that afternoon, only cooke insisted on making remarks about my whiskers, and i was in mortal fear lest he might accidentally pull one off. he came cursed near it. by the way, he's the very deuce of a man, isn't he? i knew he took me for a detective, so i played the part. and in the night that ass of a state senator nearly gave me pneumonia by getting me out in the air to tell me they had hid you in a cave. so i sat up all night, and followed the relief party in the morning, and you nearly disfigured me for life when you threw that bottle into the woods. then i went back to camp, and left so fast that i forgot my extra pair of red whiskers. i had two of each disguise, you know, so i didn't miss them. "'i guess,' mr. allen went on, gleefully, 'that i got off about as cleanly as any criminal ever did, thanks to you. if we'd fixed the thing up between us it couldn't have been any neater, could it? because i went straight to far harbor and got you into a peck of trouble, right away, and then slipped quietly into canada, and put on the outfit of a travelling salesman. and right here another bright idea struck me. why not carry the thing farther? i knew that you had advertised a trip to europe (why, the lord only knows), so i went east and sailed for england on the canadian line. and let me thank you for a little sport i had in a quiet way as the author of the sybarites. i think i astonished some of your friends, old boy.'" the celebrity lighted another cigarette. "so if it hadn't been for me," he said, "the 'miles standish bicycle company' wouldn't have gone to the wall. can they sentence me for assisting allen to get away, crocker? if they can, i believe i shall stay over here." "i think you are safe," said i. "but didn't allen tell you any more?" "no. a man he used to know came into the cafe, and allen got out of the back door. and i never saw him again." "i believe i can tell you a little more," said marian. ...................... the celebrity is still writing books of a high moral tone and unapproachable principle, and his popularity is undiminished. i have not heard, however, that he has given way to any more whims. personal reminiscences of book making, by r.m. ballantyne ( - ). ________________________________________________________________________ he was educated at the edinburgh academy, and in he became a clerk with the hudson bay company, working at the red river settlement in northen canada until , arriving back in edinburgh in . the letters he had written home were very amusing in their description of backwoods life, and his family publishing connections suggested that he should construct a book based on these letters. three of his most enduring books were written over the next decade, "the young fur traders", "ungava", "the hudson bay company", and were based on his experiences with the h.b.c. in this period he also wrote "the coral island" and "martin rattler", both of these taking place in places never visited by ballantyne. having been chided for small mistakes he made in these books, he resolved always to visit the places he wrote about. with these books he became known as a great master of literature intended for teenagers. he researched the cornish mines, the london fire brigade, the postal service, the railways, the laying down of submarine telegraph cables, the construction of light-houses, the light-ship service, the life-boat service, south africa, norway, the north sea fishing fleet, ballooning, deep-sea diving, algiers, and many more, experiencing the lives of the men and women in these settings by living with them for weeks and months at a time, and he lived as they lived. he was a very true-to-life author, depicting the often squalid scenes he encountered with great care and attention to detail. his young readers looked forward eagerly to his next books, and through the s and s there was a flow of books from his pen, sometimes four in a year, all very good reading. the rate of production diminished in the last ten or fifteen years of his life, but the quality never failed. he published over ninety books under his own name, and a few books for very young children under the pseudonym "comus". for today's taste his books are perhaps a little too religious, and what we would nowadays call "pi". in part that was the way people wrote in those days, but more important was the fact that in his days at the red river settlement, in the wilds of canada, he had been a little dissolute, and he did not want his young readers to be unmindful of how they ought to behave, as he felt he had been. some of his books were quite short, little over pages. these books formed a series intended for the children of poorer parents, having less pocket-money. these books are particularly well-written and researched, because he wanted that readership to get the very best possible for their money. they were published as six series, three books in each series. in this book of personal reminiscences, the author, hearing in the distance the grim reaper, is at his most pi. the first few chapters describe the effort he had to make to gain the background information he needed to write the books, but suddenly he tells us that he doesn't feel at all well, that his time may well be near, and he fills out the book with half-a- dozen short stories, all very moralist, but still well up to his usual quality of output. re-created as an e-text by nick hodson, august . ________________________________________________________________________ personal reminiscences of book making, by r.m. ballantyne. chapter one. incidents in book making--introductory. book making is mixed up, more or less, with difficulties. it is sometimes disappointing; often amusing; occasionally lucrative; frequently expensive, and always interesting--at least to the maker. of course i do not refer to that sort of book making which is connected with the too prevalent and disgraceful practice of gambling, but to the making of literary books--especially story-books for the young. for over eight-and-thirty years i have had the pleasure of making such books and of gathering the material for them in many and distant lands. during that period a considerable number of the juvenile public have accepted me as one of their guides in the world of fiction, and through many scenes in the wildest and most out-of-the-way regions of our wonderful world. surely, then, it is not presumptuous in me to suppose--at least to hope--that a rambling account of some of the curious incidents which have occurred, now and then, in connection with my book making, will interest the young people of the present day. indeed i entertain a hope that some even of the old boys and girls who condescended to follow me in the days gone by may perchance derive some amusement, if not profit, from a perusal of these reminiscences. the shadows of life are lengthening, and, for me, that night, "in which no man can work," may not be far off. before it is too late, and while yet the flame of the lamp burns with sufficient clearness, i would fain have a personal chat with those for whom, by god's blessing, i have been permitted to cater so long. but fear not, dear reader, that i shall inflict on you a complete autobiography. it is only the great ones of the earth who are entitled to claim attention to the record of birth and parentage and school-days, etcetera. to trace my ancestry back through "the conquerors" to adam, would be presumptuous as well as impossible. nevertheless, for the sake of aspirants to literary fame, it may be worth while to tell here how one of the rank and file of the moderately successful brotherhood was led to authorship as a profession and how he followed it out. i say "led" advisedly, because i made no effort whatever to adopt this line of life, and never even dreamed of it as a possibility until i was over twenty-eight years of age. let me commence, then, by at once taking a header into the middle of that period when god--all unknown to, and unrecognised by, myself--was furnishing me with some of the material and weapons for the future battle of life. one day my dear father was reading in the newspapers some account of the discoveries of dease and simpson in the neighbourhood of the famous north-west passage. looking at me over his spectacles with the perplexed air of a man who has an idle son of sixteen to start in the race of life, he said-- "how would you like to go into the service of the hudson's bay company and discover the north-west passage?"--or words to that effect. "all right, father," said i--or something of that sort. i was at that age, and in that frame of mind, which regards difficulties with consummate presumption and profound inexperience. if the discovery of the north-pole had been suggested, or the south-pole, or any other terrestrial pole that happened to exist at the time, i was quite ready to "rush in" where even a franklin might "fear to tread!" this incident was but a slight one, yet it was the little hinge on which turned my future career. we had a relation--i won't say what, because distant relationships, especially if complicated, are utterly beyond my mental grasp--who was high up in the service of the hudson's bay fur company. through iain i became a clerk in the service with a salary of pounds for the first year. having been born without a silver spoon in my mouth, i regarded this as an adequate, though not a princely, provision. in due time i found myself in the heart of that vast north american wilderness which is variously known as rupert's land, the territories of the hudson's bay company, and the great nor'west, many hundreds of miles north of the outmost verge of canadian civilisation. i am not learned in the matter of statistics, but if a rough guess may be allowed, i should say that the population of some of the regions in which i and my few fellow-clerks vegetated might have been about fifty to the hundred square miles--with uninhabited regions around. of course we had no libraries, magazines, or newspapers out there. indeed we had almost no books at all, only a stray file or two of american newspapers, one of which made me acquainted with some of the works of dickens and of lever. while in those northern wilds i also met--as with dear old friends--some stray copies of _chambers's edinburgh journal_, and the _penny magazine_. we had a mail twice in the year--once by the hudson's bay ship in summer, and once through the trackless wilderness by sledge and snow-shoe in winter. it will easily be understood that surroundings of such a nature did not suggest or encourage a literary career. my comrades and i spent the greater part of our time in fur-trading with the red indians; doing a little office-work, and in much canoeing, boating, fishing, shooting, wishing, and skylarking. it was a "jolly" life, no doubt, while it lasted, but not elevating! we did not drink. happily there was nothing alcoholic to be had out there for love or money. but we smoked, more or less consumedly, morning, noon, and night. before breakfast the smoking began; after supper it went on; far into the night it continued. some of us even went to sleep with the pipes in our mouths and dropped them on our pillows. being of such an immature age, i laboured under the not uncommon delusion that to smoke looked manly, and therefore did my best to accommodate myself to my surroundings, but i failed signally, having been gifted with a blessed incapacity for tobacco-smoking. this afflicted me somewhat at the time, but ever since i have been unmistakably thankful. but this is wandering. to return. with a winter of eight months' duration and temperature sometimes at below zero of fahrenheit, little to do and nothing particular to think of, time occasionally hung heavy on our hands. with a view to lighten it a little, i began to write long and elaborate letters to a loving mother whom i had left behind me in scotland. the fact that these letters could be despatched only twice in the year was immaterial. whenever i felt a touch of home-sickness, and at frequent intervals, i got out my sheet of the largest-sized narrow-ruled imperial paper--i think it was called "imperial"--and entered into spiritual intercourse with "home." to this long-letter writing i attribute whatever small amount of facility in composition i may have acquired. yet not the faintest idea of story-writing crossed the clear sky of my unliterary imagination. i am not conscious of having had, at that time, a love for writing in any form--very much the reverse! of course i passed through a highly romantic period of life--most youths do so--and while in that condition i made a desperate attempt to tackle a poem. most youths do that also! the first two lines ran thus:-- "close by the shores of hudson's bay, where arctic winters--stern and grey--" i must have gloated long over this couplet, for it was indelibly stamped upon my memory, and is as fresh to-day as when the lines were penned. this my first literary effort was carried to somewhere about the middle of the first canto. it stuck there--i am thankful to say--and, like the smoking, never went further. rupert's land, at that time, was little known and very seldom visited by outsiders. during several years i wandered to and fro in it, meeting with a few savages, fewer white men--servants of the company--and becoming acquainted with modes of life and thought in what has been aptly styled "the great lone land." hearing so seldom from or of the outside world, things pertaining to it grew dim and shadowy, and began to lose interest. in these circumstances, if it had not been that i knew full well my mother's soul was ready to receive any amount of out-pourings of which i was capable, i should have almost forgotten how to use the pen. it was in circumstances such as i have described that i began my first book, but it was not a story-book, and i had no idea that it would ever become a printed book at all. it was merely a free-and-easy record of personal adventure and every-day life, written, like all else that i penned, solely for the uncritical eye of that long-suffering and too indulgent mother! i had reached the advanced age of twenty-two at the time, and had been sent to take charge of an outpost, on the uninhabited northern shores of the gulf of saint lawrence, named seven islands. it was a dreary, desolate, little-known spot, at that time. the gulf, just opposite the establishment, was about fifty miles broad. the ships which passed up and down it were invisible, not only on account of distance, but because of seven islands at the mouth of the bay coming between them and the outpost. my next neighbour, in command of a similar post up the gulf, was, if i remember rightly, about seventy miles distant. the nearest house down the gulf was about eighty miles off, and behind us lay the virgin forests, with swamps, lakes, prairies, and mountains, stretching away without break right across the continent to the pacific ocean. the outpost--which, in virtue of a ship's carronade and a flagstaff, was occasionally styled a "fort"--consisted of four wooden buildings. one of these--the largest, with a verandah--was the residency. there was an offshoot in rear which served as a kitchen. the other houses were a store for goods wherewith to carry on trade with the indians, a stable, and a workshop. the whole population of the establishment--indeed of the surrounding district--consisted of myself and one man--also a horse! the horse occupied the stable, i dwelt in the residency, the rest of the population lived in the kitchen. there were, indeed, other five men belonging to the establishment, but these did not affect its desolation, for they were away netting salmon at a river about twenty miles distant at the time i write of. my "friday"--who was a french-canadian--being cook, as well as man-of-all-work, found a little occupation in attending to the duties of his office, but the unfortunate governor had nothing whatever to do except await the arrival of indians, who were not due at that time. the horse was a bad one, without a saddle, and in possession of a pronounced backbone. my "friday" was not sociable. i had no books, no newspapers, no magazines or literature of any kind, no game to shoot, no boat wherewith to prosecute fishing in the bay, and no prospect of seeing any one to speak to for weeks, if not months, to come. but i had pen and ink, and, by great good fortune, was in possession of a blank paper book fully an inch thick. when, two or three years after, a printer-cousin, seeing the manuscript, offered to print it, and the well-known blackwood, of edinburgh, seeing the book, offered to publish it--and did publish it--my ambition was still so absolutely asleep that i did not again put pen to paper in _that_ way for eight years thereafter, although i might have been encouraged thereto by the fact that this first book--named _hudson's bay_--besides being a commercial success, received favourable notice from the press. it was not until the year that my literary path was opened up. at that time i was a partner in the late publishing firm of thomas constable and company of edinburgh. happening one day to meet with the late william nelson, publisher, i was asked by him how i should like the idea of taking to literature as a profession. my answer i forget. it must have been vague, for i had never thought of the subject at all. "well," said he, "what would you think of trying to write a story?" somewhat amused, i replied that i did not know what to think, but i would try if he wished me to do so. "do so," said he, "and go to work at once,"--or words to that effect. i went to work at once, and wrote my first story, or work of fiction. it was published in under the name of _snowflakes and sunbeams; or, the young fur-traders_. afterwards the first part of the title was dropped, and the book is now known as _the young fur-traders_. from that day to this i have lived by making story-books for young folk. from what i have said it will be seen that i have never aimed at the achieving of this position, and i hope that it is not presumptuous in me to think--and to derive much comfort from the thought--that god led me into the particular path along which i have walked for so many years. the scene of my first story was naturally laid in those backwoods with which i was familiar, and the story itself was founded on the adventures and experiences of my companions and myself. when a second book was required of me, i stuck to the same regions, but changed the locality. while casting about in my mind for a suitable subject, i happened to meet with an old, retired "nor'wester" who had spent an adventurous life in rupert's land. among other duties he had been sent to establish an outpost of the hudson's bay company at ungava bay, one of the most dreary parts of a desolate region. on hearing what i wanted, he sat down and wrote a long narrative of his proceedings there, which he placed at my disposal, and thus furnished me with the foundation of _ungava, a tale of eskimo-land_. but now i had reached the end of my tether, and when a third story was wanted i was compelled to seek new fields of adventure in the books of travellers. regarding the southern seas as the most romantic part of the world--after the backwoods!--i mentally and spiritually plunged into those warm waters, and the dive resulted in _the coral island_. it now began to be borne in upon me that there was something not quite satisfactory in describing, expatiating on, and energising in, regions which one has never seen. for one thing, it was needful to be always carefully on the watch to avoid falling into mistakes geographical, topographical, natural-historical, and otherwise. for instance, despite the utmost care of which i was capable, while studying up for _the coral island_, i fell into a blunder through ignorance in regard to a familiar fruit. i was under the impression that cocoa-nuts grew on their trees in the same form as that in which they are usually presented to us in grocers' windows--namely, about the size of a large fist with three spots, suggestive of a monkey's face, at one end. learning from trustworthy books that at a certain stage of development the nut contains a delicious beverage like lemonade, i sent one of my heroes up a tree for a nut, through the shell of which he bored a hole with a penknife and drank the "lemonade"! it was not till long after the story was published that my own brother--who had voyaged in southern seas--wrote to draw my attention to the fact that the cocoa-nut is nearly as large as a man's head, and its outer husk over an inch thick, so that no ordinary penknife could bore to its interior! of course i should have known this, and, perhaps, should be ashamed of my ignorance--but, somehow, i'm not! i admit that this was a slip, but such, and other slips, hardly justify the remark that some people have not hesitated to make, namely, that i have a tendency to draw the long bow. i feel almost sensitive on this point, for i have always laboured to be true to fact, and to nature, even in my wildest flights of fancy. this reminds me of the remark made to myself once by a lady in reference to this same _coral island_. "there is one thing, mr ballantyne," she said, "which i really find it hard to believe. you make one of your three boys dive into a clear pool, go to the bottom, and then, turning on his back, look up and wink and laugh at the other two." "no, no, peterkin did not `_laugh_,'" said i remonstratively. "well, then, you make him smile." "ah, that is true, but there is a vast difference between laughing and smiling under water. but is it not singular that you should doubt the only incident in the story which i personally verified? i happened to be in lodgings at the seaside while writing that story, and, after penning the passage you refer to, i went down to the shore, pulled off my clothes, dived to the bottom, turned on my back, and, looking up, i smiled and winked." the lady laughed, but i have never been quite sure, from the tone of that laugh, whether it was a laugh of conviction or of unbelief. it is not improbable that my fair friend's mental constitution may have been somewhat similar to that of the old woman who declined to believe her sailor-grandson when he told her he had seen flying-fish, but at once recognised his veracity when he said he had seen the remains of pharaoh's chariot-wheels on the shores of the red sea. recognising, then, the difficulties of my position, i formed the resolution always to visit--when possible--the scenes in which my stories were laid, converse with the people who, under modification, were to form the _dramatis personae_ of the tales, and, generally, to obtain information in each case, as far as lay in my power, from the fountain-head. thus, when about to begin _the lifeboat_, i went to ramsgate, and, for some time, was hand and glove with jarman, the heroic coxswain of the ramsgate boat, a lion-like as well as lion-hearted man, who rescued hundreds of lives from the fatal goodwin sands during his career. in like manner, when getting up information for _the lighthouse_, i obtained permission from the commissioners of northern lights to visit the bell rock lighthouse, where i hobnobbed with the three keepers of that celebrated pillar-in-the-sea for three weeks, and read stevenson's graphic account of the building of the structure in the library, or visitor's room, just under the lantern. i was absolutely a prisoner there during those three weeks, for boats seldom visited the rock, and it need scarcely be said that ships kept well out of our way. by good fortune there came on a pretty stiff gale at the time, and stevenson's thrilling narrative was read to the tune of whistling winds and roaring seas, many of which sent the spray right up to the lantern and caused the building, more than once, to quiver to its foundation. in order to do justice to _fighting the flames_ i careered through the streets of london on fire-engines, clad in a pea-jacket and a black leather helmet of the salvage corps;--this, to enable me to pass the cordon of police without question--though not without recognition, as was made apparent to me on one occasion at a fire by a fireman whispering confidentially, "i know what _you_ are, sir, you're a hamitoor!" "right you are," said i, and moved away in order to change the subject. it was a glorious experience, by the way, this galloping on fire-engines through the crowded streets. it had in it much of the excitement of the chase--possibly that of war--with the noble end in view of saving, instead of destroying, life! such tearing along at headlong speed; such wild roaring of the firemen to clear the way; such frantic dashing aside of cabs, carts, 'buses, and pedestrians; such reckless courage on the part of the men, and volcanic spoutings on the part of the fires! but i must not linger. the memory of it is too enticing. _deep down_ took me to cornwall, where, over two hundred fathoms beneath the green turf, and more than half-a-mile out under the bed of the sea, i saw the sturdy miners at work winning copper and tin from the solid rock, and acquired some knowledge of their life, sufferings, and toils. in the land of the vikings i shot ptarmigan, caught salmon, and gathered material for _erling the bold_. a winter in algiers made me familiar with the _pirate city_. i enjoyed a fortnight with the hearty inhabitants of the gull lightship off the goodwin sands, from which resulted _the floating light_; and went to the cape of good hope, and up into the interior of the colony, to spy out the land and hold intercourse with _the settler and the savage_--although i am bound to confess that, with regard to the latter, i talked to him only with mine eyes. i also went afloat for a short time with the fishermen of the north sea, in order to be able to do justice to _the young trawler_. to arrive still closer at the truth, and to avoid errors, i have always endeavoured to submit my proof-sheets, when possible, to experts and men who knew the subject well. thus, captain shaw, late chief of the london fire brigade, kindly read the proofs of _fighting the flames_, and prevented my getting off the rails in matters of detail, and sir arthur blackwood, financial secretary to the general post office, obligingly did me the same favour in regard to _post haste_. in conclusion, there are some things that i shrink from flaunting in the eyes of the public. personal religion is one of these. nevertheless, there are a few words which i feel constrained to write before closing this chapter. during all the six years that i spent in rupert's land i was "without god." he was around me and within me, guarding me, bestowing upon me the physical and mental health by which alone i could fully enjoy a life in the wilderness, and furnishing me with much of the material that was to serve as my stock-in-trade during my subsequent career; yet--i confess it with shame--i did not recognise or think of, or care for, him. it was not until after i had returned home that he opened my eyes to see myself a lost soul, and jesus christ--"god with us"--an all-sufficient redeemer, able and willing to save me from sin, as he is to save all sinners--even the chief. more than this i will not say. less i could not say, without being unfaithful to my creator. chapter two. life in the bell rock lighthouse. one of my most interesting experiences in hunting up materials for books was at the bell rock lighthouse; interesting because of the novelty of the situation, the pleasant intercourse with the keepers, and the grandeur of the subjects brought under my observation. the lighthouses of this kingdom present, in their construction, a remarkable evidence of the capacity of man to overcome almost insurmountable difficulties, and his marvellous power of adapting means to ends. they also stand forth as a grand army of sentinels, who, with unobtrusive regularity, open their brilliant eyes on the great deep, night after night--from year to year--from age to age, and gaze-- argus-like--all around our shores, to guard our shipping from the dangers of the sea, perhaps i should rather say from the dangers of the coast, for it must be well-known to most people that the sailor regards "blue water" as his safe and native home, and that it is only when he enters the green and shallow waters of the coast that a measure of anxiety overclouds his free-and-easy spirit. it is when he draws near to port that the chief dangers of his career surround him, and it is then that the lighthouse is watched for anxiously, and hailed with satisfaction. these observations scarce need confirmatory proof. of all the vessels, great and small, that annually seek and leave our ports, a large proportion meet their doom, and, despite all our lighthouses, beacons, and buoys, lay their timbers and cargoes in fragments, on our shores. this is a significant fact, for if those lost ships be--as they are--a mere fraction of our commerce, how great must be the fleet, how vast the wealth, that our lighthouses guide safely into port every year? if all our coast-lights were to be extinguished for only a single night, the loss of property and life would be terrible beyond conception. but such an event can never happen, for our coast-lights arise each evening at sunset with the regularity of the sun himself. like the stars, they burst out when darkness begins to brood upon land and sea like them, too, their action and aspect are varied. some, at great heights, in exposed places, blaze bright and steady like stars of the first magnitude. others, in the form of revolving lights, twinkle like the lesser stars--now veiling, now flashing forth their beams. one set of lights shine ruby-red like mars; another set are white, like venus; while those on our pier-heads and at our harbour mouths are green; and, in one or two instances, if not more, they shine, (by means of reflecting prisms), with borrowed light like the moon; but all-- whether revolving or fixed, large or small, red or white or green--beam forth, like good angels, offering welcome and guidance to the mariner approaching from beyond seas; with god-like impartiality shedding their radiance on friend and foe, and encircling--as with a chaplet of living diamonds, rubies, and emeralds--our highly favoured little islands of the sea. lighthouses may be divided into _two_ classes, namely, those which stand on cliffs, and elsewhere, somewhat above the influence of the waves, and those built on outlying rocks which are barely visible at high tide, or invisible altogether except at low-water. the north and south foreland lights in kent, the girdleness in aberdeenshire, and inchkeith in the forth, are examples of the former. the eddystone, bell rock, and skerryvore, are well-known examples of the latter, also the wolf rock off the land's end. in one of the latter--namely the bell rock--i obtained permission, a good many years ago, from the commissioners of northern lights, to spend a fortnight for literary purposes--to be imprisoned, in fact, for that period. this lighthouse combines within itself more or less of the elements of all lighthouses. the principles on which it was built are much the same with those of skerryvore. it is founded on a tidal rock, is exposed to the full "fetch" and fury of an open sea, and it has stood for the greater part of a century exposed to inconceivable and constantly recurring violence of wind and wave--not, indeed, unshaken, but altogether undamaged. the bell rock lies on the east of scotland, off the mouths of the forth and tay, miles from the forfarshire coast, which is the nearest land. its foundation is always under water except for an hour or two at low-tide. at high tides there are about or feet of water above the highest ledge of the bell rock, which consists of a series of sandstone ridges. these, at ordinary low-tides, are uncovered to the extent of between and yards. at neap tides the rock shows only a few black teeth with sea-weed gums above the surface. there is a boat which attends upon this lighthouse. on the occasion of my visit i left arbroath in it one morning before daybreak and reached the rock about dawn. we cast anchor on arriving--not being able to land, for as yet there _was_ no land! the lighthouse rose out of the sea like a bulrush out of a pond! no foundation rock was visible, and the water played about the tower in a fashion that would have knocked our boat to pieces had we ventured to approach the entrance-door. in a short time the crest of the rock began to show above the foam. there was little or no wind, but the ordinary swell of the calm ocean rolled in upon these rocks, and burst upon them in such a way that the tower seemed to rise out of a caldron of boiling milk. at last we saw the three keepers moving amid the surges. they walked on an iron platform, which, being light and open, and only a few feet above the waves, was nearly invisible. when the tide was near its lowest ebb, so that there was a piece of smooth water under the lee of the rock, we hoisted out our little "twin" boat. this was a curious contrivance, being simply a small boat cut across amidships, so as to form two parts which fitted into each other like saucers, and were thus rendered small enough to be easily carried in the larger boat. when about to be used, the twins are put into the water and their sterns brought together and screwed tight. thus one little boat, sharp at each end, is formed. embarking in this we rowed between tangle-covered ridges up to the wrought-iron landing-place. the keepers looked surprised as we drew near. it was evident that visitors were not "common objects of the shore" out there! there were three keepers. one, the chief, was very tall, dark, and thin; of grave temperament and sedate mien. another was a florid, hearty young fellow, full of fire and energy. the third was a stout, short, thick-set man, with placidity and good-humour enthroned on his fat countenance. he was a first-rate man. i shall call him stout; his comrade, young. the chief may appropriately be named long. there was no time for more than a hurried introduction at first, for the fresh water-casks and fortnightly allowance of fresh provisions had to be hoisted into the tower, the empty casks got out, and the boat reloaded and despatched, before the tide--already rising--should transform the little harbour into a wild whirlpool. in little more than an hour the boat was gone, and i proceeded to make myself at home with my new friends. probably every one knows that the bell rock is the inch cape rock, immortalised by southey in his poem of "sir ralph the rover," in which he tells how that, in the olden time-- "the abbot of aberbrothock had placed a bell on the inch cape rock. on a buoy in the storm it floated and swung and over the waves its warning rung." a pirate named "sir ralph the rover" came there one day and cut away the bell in a wicked frolic. long years after, returning with a rich cargo of ill-gotten wealth, retributive justice overtook sir ralph, caused his vessel to strike on the inch cape rock--for want of the warning bell which he had cut away--and sent him and his belongings to the bottom. whether this legend be true or not, there is no doubt that the rock had been so dangerous to shipping, that seamen often avoided the firths of forth and tay in bad weather for fear of it, and many captains, in their anxiety to keep clear of it, ran their vessels in the neighbouring coasts and perished. another proof that numerous wrecks took place there lay in the fact that the fishermen were wont to visit the rock after every gale, for the purpose of gathering wreckage. it was resolved, therefore, about the beginning of this century, to erect a lighthouse on the inchcape rock, and to mr robert stevenson, engineer at that time to the board of northern lights, was assigned the task of building it. he began the work in august , and finished it in february . i began my sojourn in the bell rock lighthouse with breakfast. on ascending to the kitchen i found stout preparing it. mr long, the chief, offered, with delicate hospitality, to carry my meals up to the library, so that i might feast in dignified solitude, but i declined the honour, preferring to fraternise with the men in the kitchen. breakfast over, they showed me through the tower--pointed out and explained everything--especially the lantern and the library--in which last i afterwards read mr stevenson's interesting volume on the building of the bell rock; a book which has been most appropriately styled the _robinson crusoe_ of engineering literature. on returning to the entrance-door, i found that there was now _no land_! the tide had risen. the lighthouse was a mere pillar in the sea. "water, water everywhere"--nothing else visible save the distant coast of forfarshire like a faint blue line on the horizon. but in the evening the tide again fell, and, the moment the rock was uncovered, we descended. then mr long showed me the various points of interest about the rock, and stout volunteered anecdotes connected with these, and young corroborated and expounded everything with intense enthusiasm. evidently young rejoiced in the rare opportunity my visit afforded him of breaking the monotony of life on the bell rock. he was like a caged bird, and on one occasion expressed his sentiments very forcibly by saying to me, "oh, sir, i sometimes wish i could jump up and never come doon!" as for long and stout, they had got used to lighthouses and monotony. the placid countenance of each was a sure index of the profound tranquillity within! small though it was, the rock was a very world in itself to the residents--crowded with "ports," and "wharves" and "ledges," which had reference to the building-time. there were "sir ralph the rover's ledge," and "the abbot's ledge," and "the engineer's ledge," and "cunningham's ledge," and "the smith's ledge," etcetera. then there were "port stevenson," and "port boyle," and "port hamilton," and many others--each port being a mere hole capable of holding a boat or two. besides which there were "tracks," leading to these ports--such as "wilson's track," and "macurich's track," and "gloag's track." and then there were "hope's wharf," and "rae's wharf," and "watt's reach," and "scoresby point," while, among numerous outlying groups of rocklets, there were the "royal burghs," the "crown lawyers," and the "maritime sheriffs"--each and all teeming with interesting associations to those who know the story of the rock,--_all_ comprehended within an area of a few hundred yards--the whole affair being wiped entirely and regularly off the face of nature by every rising tide. close beside rae's wharf, on which we stood, mr long showed me the holes in which had been fixed the ends of the great beams of the beacon. the beacon was a point of considerable interest to me. if you had seen the rock as i saw it, reader, in a storm, with the water boiling all over and round it for more than a mile, like seething milk--and if you had reflected that the _first_ beacon built there was carried away in a gale, you would have entertained very exalted ideas of the courage of the men who built the bell rock lighthouse. while the tower was building, mr stevenson and his men were exposed for many days and nights in this beacon--this erection of timber-beams, with a mere pigeon-house on the top of it for a dwelling. before the beacon was built, the men lived in the _pharos_ floating light; a vessel which was moored not far from the rock. every day--weather permitting--they rowed to the rock, landed, and worked for _one, two_, or _three_ hours, when they were drowned out, so to speak, and obliged to return to their floating home. sometimes the landing was easy. more frequently it was difficult. occasionally it was impossible. when a landing was accomplished, they used to set to work without delay. there was no time to lose. some bored holes in the rock for hold-fasts; others, with pick and chisel, cut out the foundation-pit. then the courses began to be laid. on each occasion of landing the smith had to set up his bellows, light his fire, and work in hot haste; because his whole shop, except the anvil, had to be taken down, and carried away every tide! frequently, in fine weather, this enterprising son of vulcan might have been seen toiling with his head enveloped in volumes of smoke and sparks, and his feet in the water, which gradually rose to his ankles and knees until, with a sudden "hiss," it extinguished his fire and ended his labours for the day. then he was forced to pack up his bellows and tools, and decamp with the rest of the men. sometimes they wrought in calm, sometimes in storm; always, more or less, in water. three hours was considered a fair day's work. when they had the good fortune to work "double tides" in a day, they made five, or five-and-a-half, hours; but this was of rare occurrence. "you see that mark there, sir, on smith's ledge?" said mr long to me one day, "that was the place where the forge stood; and the ledge beyond, with the old bit of iron on it, is the `_last hope_,' where mr stevenson and his men were so nearly lost." then he went on to tell me the following incident, as illustrating one of the many narrow escapes made by the builders. one day, soon after the men had commenced work, it began to blow hard, and the crew of the boat belonging to the attending vessel, named the "smeaton," fearing that her moorings might be insufficient, went off to examine them. this was wrong. the workmen on the rock were sufficiently numerous to completely fill three boats. for one of these to leave the rock was to run a great risk, as the event proved. almost as soon as they reached the "smeaton," her cables parted and she went adrift, carrying the boat with her away to leeward, and although sail was instantly made, they found it impossible to regain the rock against wind and tide. mr stevenson observed this with the deepest anxiety, but the men, (busy as bees about the rock), were not aware of it at first. the situation was terrible. there were thirty-two men left on a rock which would in a short time be overflowed to a depth of twelve or fifteen feet by a stormy sea, and only two boats in which to remove them. these two boats, if loaded to the gunwales, could have held only a few more than the half of them. while the sound of the numerous hammers and the ring of the anvil were heard, the situation did not appear so hopeless; but soon the men at the lowest part of the foundation were driven from work by the rising tide; then the forge-fire was extinguished, and the men generally began to make towards their respective boats for their jackets and dry socks. when it was discovered that one of the three boats was gone not a word was uttered, but the men looked at each other in evident perplexity. they seemed to realise their position at once. in a few minutes some of that band must inevitably be left to perish, for the absent boat and vessel were seen drifting farther and farther away to leeward. mr stevenson knew that in such a case, where life and death were in the balance, a desperate struggle among the men for precedence would be certain. indeed he afterwards learned that the pickmen had resolved to stick by their boat against all hazards. while they were thus gazing in silence at each other and at the distant vessel, their enterprising leader had been casting about in his mind as to the best method of at least attempting the deliverance of his men, and he finally turned round to propose, as a forlorn hope, that all hands should strip off their upper clothing, that every unnecessary article should be removed from the boats, that a specified number should get into each, and that the remainder should hang on by the gunwales, and thus be dragged through the water while they were rowed cautiously towards the "smeaton"! but when he tried to speak his mouth was so parched that his tongue refused utterance! and then he discovered, (as he says himself), "that saliva is as necessary to speech as the tongue itself!" turning to a pool, he moistened his lips with sea-water, and found immediate relief. he was again about to speak when some one shouted "a boat! a boat!" and, sure enough, a large boat was seen through the haze making towards the rock. this timely visitor was james spink, the bell rock pilot, who had come off express from arbroath with letters. his visit was altogether an unusual one, and his truly providential appearance unquestionably prevented loss of life on that critical occasion. this is one specimen--selected from innumerable instances of danger and risk--which may give one some idea of what is encountered by those who build such lighthouses as the bell rock. our rambles on the rock were necessarily of short duration. we used to stand in the doorway watching the retreating waves, and, the moment the rails were uncovered, we hurried down the ladder--all of us bent on getting as much exercise as possible on land! we marched in single file, up and down the narrow rails, until the rock was uncovered--then we rambled over the slippery ledges. sometimes we had one hour--sometimes two, or even three hours, according to the state of the tides. then the returning waves drove us gradually from the rocks to the rails, from the rails to the ladder--and so back into the lighthouse. among other things that impressed me deeply was the grandeur of the waves at the bell rock. one enjoys an opportunity there of studying the form and colour of ocean billows which cannot be obtained on any ordinary shore, because, the water being deep alongside the rock, these waves come up to it in all their unbroken magnificence. i tried to paint them, but found it difficult, owing to the fact that, like refractory children, they would not stand still to be painted! it was not only in stormy weather that these waves arose. i have seen them during a dead calm, when the sea was like undulating glass. no doubt the cause of them was a gale in some distant part of the sea--inducing a heavy ground-swell; but, be the cause what it might, these majestic rollers often came in without a breath of air to help them, and with the sun glittering on their light-green crystal sides. their advance seemed slow and solemn amid the deep silence, which made them all the more impressive. the rise of each wave was so gradual that you could not tell where it began in the distant sea. as it drew near, it took definite form and swelled upwards, and at last came on like a wall of glass--probably ten or twelve feet high--so high, at all events, that i felt as if looking up at it from my position on the low rock. when close at hand its green edge lipped over and became fringed with white--then it bent forward with a profound obeisance to the bell rock and broke the silence with a grand reverberating roar, as it fell in a ruin of foam and rushed up to my very feet! when those waves began to paint the canvas with their own spray and change the oil into a water-colour, i was constrained to retire to the lighthouse, where mr long, (a deeply interested student), watched me as i continued my studies from the doorway. mr long had an inquiring mind and closely observed all that went on around him. among other things, he introduced me to a friend of his, a species of fish which he called a "_paddle_." stout called it a sucker, in virtue of an arrangement on its breast whereby it could fasten itself to a rock and hold on. this fish dwelt in port hamilton, near sir ralph the rover's ledge, and could be visited at low-tide. he happened to be engaged at that time in watching his wife's spawn, and could not be induced to let go his hold of the rock on any account! mr long pulled at him pretty forcibly once or twice, but with no effect, and the fish did not seem in the least alarmed! while mr paddle did duty in the nursery, mrs paddle roamed the sea at large. apparently women's rights have made some progress in that quarter! it was supposed by stout that she took the night-watches. mr young inclined to the opinion that she attended to the commissariat--was out marketing in fact, and brought food to her husband. all that i can say on the matter is, that i visited the family frequently, and always saw the father "on duty," but only once found mrs paddle at home! the tameness of this kind of fish is very remarkable. one day i saw a large one in a pool which actually allowed me to put my hand under him and lift him gently out! suddenly it occurred to me that i might paint him! the palette chanced to be at hand, so i began at once. in about two minutes the paddle gave a flop of discomfort as he lay on the rock; i therefore put him into a small pool for a minute or so to let him, breathe, then took him out and had a second sitting, after which he had another rest and a little refreshment in the pool. thus in about ten minutes, i had his portrait, and put him back into his native element. i am inclined to think that this is the only fish in the sea that has had his portrait taken and returned to tell the tale to his admiring, perhaps unbelieving, friends! of course one of the most interesting points in the lighthouse was the lantern. i frequently sat in it at night with the man on duty, who expounded the lighting apparatus to me, or "spun yarns." the fifth day of my sojourn on the bell rock was marked by an event of great interest,--the arrival of a fishing-boat with letters and newspapers. i had begun by that time to feel some degree of longing to hear something about the outer world, though i had not felt lonely by any means--my companions were too pleasant to admit of that. our little world contained a large amount of talent! mr long had a magnificent bass voice and made good use of it. then, young played the violin, (not so badly), and sang tenor--not quite so well; besides which he played the accordion. his instrument, however, was not perfect. one of the bass notes would not sound, and one of the treble notes could not by any means be silenced! between the two, some damage was done to the harmony; but we were not particular. as to stout--he could neither sing nor play, but he was a _splendid_ listener! and the sight of his good-humoured face, smiling through clouds of tobacco smoke as he sat by the kitchen fire, was of itself sufficient to encourage us. but stout could do more than listen and admire. he was cook to the establishment during my visit. the men took this duty by turns--each for a fortnight--and stout excelled the others. it was he who knew how to extract sweet music from the tea-kettle and the frying-pan! but stout's forte was buttered toast! he was quite an adept at the formation of this luxury. if i remember rightly, it was an entire loaf that stout cut up and toasted each morning for breakfast. he knew nothing of delicate treatment. every slice was an inch thick at the least! it was quite a study to see him go to work. he never sawed with the knife. having a powerful hand and arm, one sweep of the blade sufficed for one slice, and he cut up the whole loaf before beginning to toast. then, he always had the fire well prepared. you never saw alternate stripes of black and white on stout's toast; and he laid on the butter as he might have laid tar on the side of a ship, thick and heavy. he never scraped it off one part to put it on another--and he never picked the lumps out of the holes. truly, stout was quite a genius in this matter. the fisherman who brought off our letters could not have landed if the weather had not been fine. poor fellow! after i left, he lost his boat in consequence of being on too familiar terms with the bell rock. he was in the habit of fishing near the rock, and occasionally ran in at low-water to smoke a pipe with the keepers. one morning he stayed too long. the large green billows which had been falling with solemn boom on the outlying rocks began to lip over into the pool where his boat lay--port stevenson. embarking in haste with his comrade he pushed off. just then there came a tremendous wave, the crest of which toppled over smith's ledge, fell into the boat, and sank it like a stone. the men were saved by the keepers, but their boat was totally destroyed. they never saw a fragment of it again. what a commentary this was on the innumerable wrecks that have taken place on the inch cape rock in days gone by! sometimes, on a dark stormy night, i used to try to realise something of this. turning my back on the lighthouse i tried to forget it, and imagine what must have been the feelings of those who had actually stood there and been driven inch by inch to the higher ledges, with the certain knowledge that their doom was fixed, and without the comfort and assurance that, behind them, stood a strong tower of refuge from the storm! i was fortunate, during my stay, in having experience of every variety of weather--from a dead calm to a regular gale. it was towards the end of my visit that the gale came on, and it lasted two days. no language can convey an adequate idea of the sublimity of the scene and the sense of power in the seething waves that waged furious war over the rock during the height of that gale. the spray rose above the kitchen windows, ( feet on the tower), in such solid masses as to darken the room in passing, and twice during the storm we were struck by waves with such force as to shake the tower to its foundation. this storm delayed the "relief boat" a day. next day, however, it succeeded in getting alongside--and at length, after a most agreeable and interesting sojourn of two weeks, i parted from the hospitable keepers with sincere regret and bade adieu to a lighthouse which is not only a monument of engineering skill, but a source of safety to the shipping, and of confidence to the mariners frequenting these waters. in former days men shunned the dreaded neighbourhood of the inch cape rock with anxious care. now, they look out for that:-- "ruddy gem of changeful light bound on the dusky brow of night,--" and _make for it_ with perfect safety. in time past human lives, and noble ships, and costly merchandise were lost on the bell rock every year. now, disaster to shipping there is not even dreamed of; and one of the most notable proofs of the value of the lighthouse, (and, indirectly, of all other lighthouses), lies in the fact, that not a single wreck has occurred on the bell rock since that auspicious evening in when the sturdy pillar opened its eyes for the first time, and threw its bright beams far and wide over the north sea. chapter three. nights with the fire brigade. there are few lives, we should think, more trying or more full of curious adventure and thrilling incident than that of a london fireman. he must always be on the alert. no hour of the day or night can he ever count on as being his own, unless on those occasions when he obtains leave of absence, which i suppose are not frequent. if he does not absolutely sleep in his clothes, he sleeps beside them--arranged in such a way that he can jump into them at a moment's notice. when the summons comes there must be no preliminary yawning; no soft transition from the land of dreams to the world of reality. he jumps into his boots which stand invitingly ready, pulls on his trousers, buttons his braces while descending to the street, and must be brass-helmeted on the engine and away like a fiery dragon-gone-mad within three minutes of "the call," or thereabouts, if he is to escape a fine. moreover, the london fireman must be prepared to face death at any moment. when the call comes he never knows whether he is turning out to something not much more serious than "a chimney," or to one of those devastating conflagrations on the river-side in which many thousand pounds worth of property are swept away, and his life may go along with them. far more frequently than the soldier or sailor is he liable to be ordered on a duty which shall turn out to be a forlorn hope, and not less pluckily does he obey. there is no respite for him. the field which the london brigade covers is so vast that the liability to be sent into action is continuous-- chiefly, of course, at night. at one moment he may be calmly polishing up the "brasses" of his engine, or skylarking with his comrades, or sedately reading a book, or snoozing in bed, and the next he may be battling fiercely with the flames. unlike the lifeboat heroes, who may sleep when the world of waters is calm, he must be ever on the watch; for his enemy is a lurking foe--like the red indian who pounces on you when you least expect him, and does not utter his warwhoop until he deems his victory secure. the little spark smoulders while the fireman on guard, booted and belted, keeps watch at his station. it creeps while he waits, and not until its energies have gained considerable force does it burst forth with a grand roar and bid him fierce defiance. even when conquered in one quarter it often leaps up in another, so that the fireman sometimes returns from the field twice or thrice in the same night to find that the enemy is in force elsewhere and that the fight must be resumed. in the spring of i went to london to gather material for my book _fighting the flames_, and was kindly permitted by captain shaw--then chief of the fire brigade--to spend a couple of weeks at one of the principal west-end stations, and accompany the men to fires. my first experience was somewhat stirring. my plan was to go to the station late in the evening and remain up all night with the men on guard waiting for fires. one day, in the afternoon, when it was growing dusk, and before i had made my first visit to the station, a broad-shouldered jovial-looking fellow in blue coat, belted, and with a sailor's cap, called on me and asked if i should like to "see a 'ouse as 'ad bin blowed up with gas." of course i was only too glad to follow him. he conducted me to an elegant mansion in bayswater, and chatted pleasantly as we went along in somewhat nautical tones, for he had been a man-of-war's man. his name was flaxmore. i may remark here that the men of the london brigade were, and still are, i believe, chosen from among seamen. "you see, sir," said flaxmore, in explanation of this fact, "sailors are found to be most suitable for the brigade because they're accustomed to strict discipline,--to turn out suddenly at all hours, in all weathers, and to climbing in dangerous circumstances." arrived at the mansion, we found that the outside looked all right except that most of the windows were broken. the interior, however, presented a sad and curious appearance. the house had been recently done up in the most expensive style, and its gilded cornices, painted pilasters and other ornaments, with the lath and plaster of walls and ceilings had been blown into the rooms in dire confusion. "bin a pretty considerable smash here, sir," said flaxmore, with a genial smile on his broad countenance. i admitted the fact, and asked how it happened. "well, sir, you see," said he, "there was an 'orrid smell of gas in the 'ouse, an' the missus she sent for a gas man to find out where it was, and, _would_ _you believe it_, sir, they went to look for it _with a candle_! sure enough they found it too, in a small cupboard. the gas had been escapin', it had, but couldn't git out o' that there cupboard, 'cause the door was a tight fit, so it had made its way all over the 'ouse between the lath and plaster and the walls. as soon as ever it caught light, sir, it blowed the whole place into smash--as you see. it blowed the gas man flat on his back; (an' sarved him right!) it blowed the missus through the doorway, an' it blowed the cook--(as was on the landin' outside)--right down the kitchen stairs, it did;--but there was none of 'em much hurt, sir, they wasn't, beyond a bruise or two!" after examining this house, flaxmore proposed that i should go and see his engine. he was proud of his engine, evidently, and spoke of it as a man might speak of his wife! on our way to the station the driver of a passing 'bus called out-- "fireman, there's a fire in new bond street." one word flaxmore exchanged with the driver, and then, turning to me, said, "come on, sir, i'll give you a ride!" off we went at a run, and burst into the station. "get her out, jim," cried flaxmore, (_her_ being the engine). jim, the man on duty, put on his helmet without saying a word, and hauled out the fire-engine, while a comrade ran for the horses, and another called up the men. in five minutes more i was seated beside seven men in blue uniforms and brass helmets, dashing through the streets of london at full gallop! now, those who have never seen a london fire-engine go to a fire have no conception of what it is--much less have they any conception of what it is to ride on the engine! to those accustomed to it, no doubt, it may be tame enough--i cannot tell; but to those who mount an engine for the first time and dash through the crowded thoroughfares at a wild tearing gallop; it is probably the most exciting drive conceivable. it beats steeplechasing! it feels like driving to destruction--so desperate and reckless is it. and yet, it is not reckless in the strict sense of that word; for there is a stern need-be in the case. every moment, (not to mention minutes or hours), is of the utmost importance in the progress of a fire, for when it gets the mastery and bursts into flames it flashes to its work, and completes it quickly. at such times one moment wasted may involve the loss of thousands of pounds, ay, and of human lives also. this is well-known to those whose profession it is to fight the flames. hence the union of apparent mad desperation, with cool, quiet self-possession in their proceedings. when firemen can work in silence they do so. no unnecessary word is uttered, no voice is needlessly raised; but, when occasion requires it, their course is a tumultuous rush, amid a storm of shouting and gesticulation! so was it on the present occasion. had the fire been distant, they would have had to commence their gallop somewhat leisurely, for fear of breaking down the horses; but it was not far off--not much more than a couple of miles--so they dashed round the corner of their own street and swept into the edgeware road at full speed. here the noise of our progress began, for the great thoroughfare was crowded with vehicles and pedestrians. to pass through such a crowd without coming into collision with anything required not only dexterous driving, but rendered it necessary that two of the men on the engine should stand up and shout incessantly as we whirled along, clearing everything out of our way. the men seemed to shout with the memory of the boatswain strong upon them, for their tones were pitched in the deepest and gruffest bass-key. sometimes there was a lull for a moment, as a comparatively clear space of yards or so lay before us; then their voices rose like the roaring of the gale as a stupid or deaf cabman got in our way, or a plethoric 'bus threatened to interrupt our furious career. the cross streets were the points where the chief difficulties met us. there cab- and van-drivers turned into or crossed the great thoroughfare, all ignorant of the thunderbolt that was rushing on like a fiery meteor, with its lanterns casting a glare of light before, and the helmets of the stern charioteers flashing back the rays from street-lamps and windows. at the corner of one of the streets the crowd of vehicles was so great that the driver of the engine began to tighten his reins, while flaxmore and his comrades raised a furious roar. cabs, 'buses, and pedestrians scattered right and left in a marvellous manner; the driver slackened his reins, cracked his whip, and the horses stretched out again. "there, it shows a light," observed flaxmore, as we tore along oxford street. at that moment a stupid cabman blocked up the way. there was a terrific shout from all the firemen, at once! but the man did not hear. our driver attempted both to pull up and to turn aside; the first was impossible, the latter he did so effectively that he not only cleared the cab but made straight at a lamp-post on the other side! a crash seemed inevitable, but flaxmore, observing the danger, seized the rein next to him and swung the horses round. we flew past, just shaving the lamp-post, and in three minutes more pulled up at a house which was blazing in the upper floors. three engines were already at work on it. flaxmore and his men at once entered the burning house, which by that time was nearly gutted. i stood outside looking on, but soon became anxious to know what was doing inside, and attempted to enter. a policeman stopped me, but at that moment flaxmore came out like a half-drowned rat, his face streaked with brick-dust and charcoal. seeing what i wanted he led me into the house, and immediately i found myself in a hot shower-bath which did not improve my coat or hat! at the same time i stepped up to the ankles in hot water! tons of water were being poured on the house by three powerful engines, and this, in passing through so much heated material had become comfortably warm. the first thing i saw on entering was a foaming cataract! this was the staircase, down which the water rushed, breaking over masses of fallen brickwork and debris, with a noise like a goodly highland burn! up this we waded, but could get no further than the room above, as the upper stair had fallen in. i was about to descend in order to try to reach the roof by some other way, when a fireman caught me by the collar, exclaiming--"hold on, sir!" he thought the staircase was about to fall. "bolt now, sir," he added, releasing me. i bolted, and was out in the street in a moment, where i found that some of the firemen who had first arrived, and were much exhausted, were being served with a glass of brandy. if there were any case in which a teetotaller might be justified in taking spirits, it would be, i think, when exhausted by toiling for hours amid the heat and smoke and danger of a fire-- nevertheless i found that several of the firemen there were teetotallers. there was a shout of laughter at this moment, occasioned by one of the firemen having accidentally turned the _branch_ or delivery pipe full on the faces of the crowd and drenched some of them. this was followed by a loud cheer when another fireman was seen to have clambered to the roof whence he could apply the water with better effect. at last their efforts were crowned with success. before midnight the fire was extinguished, and we drove back to the paddington station at a more leisurely pace. thus ended my first experience of a london fire. accidents, as may be easily believed, are of frequent occurrence. accidents. there were between forty to fifty a year. in they were as follows:-- +=========================+==+ |cuts and lacerated wounds| | +-------------------------+--+ |contusions | | +-------------------------+--+ |fractures | | +-------------------------+--+ |sprains | | +-------------------------+--+ |burns and scalds | | +-------------------------+--+ |injury to eyes | | +-------------------------+--+ | | | +=========================+==+ my friend flaxmore himself met with an accident not long afterwards. he slipped off the roof of a house and fell on his back from a height of about fifteen feet. being a heavy man, the fall told severely on him. for about two weeks i went almost every evening to the regent street station and spent the night with the men, in the hope of accompanying them to fires. the "lobby"--as the watch room of the station was named--was a small one, round the walls of which the brass helmets and hatchets of the men were hung. here, each night, two men slept on two trestle-beds. they were fully equipped, with the exception of their helmets. their comrades slept at their own homes, which were within a few yards of the station. the furniture of the "lobby" was scanty--a desk, a bookcase, two chairs, a clock, an alarm-bell, and four telegraphic instruments comprised it all. these last formed part of a network of telegraphs which extended from the central station to nearly all the other stations in london. by means of the telegraph a "call" is given--i.e. a fire is announced to the firemen all over london, if need be, in a very few minutes. those who are nearest to the scene of conflagration hasten to it at once with their engines, while each outlying or distant station sends forward a man on foot. these men, coming up one by one, relieve those who have first hastened to the fire. "calls," however, are not always sent by telegraph. sometimes a furious ring comes to the alarm-bell, and a man or a boy rushes in shouting "_fire_!" with all his might. people are generally much excited in such circumstances,--sometimes half mad. in one case a man came with a "call" in such perturbation of mind that he could not tell where the fire was at all for nearly five minutes! on another occasion two men rushed in with a call at the same moment, and both were stutterers. my own opinion is that one stuttered by nature and the other from agitation. be that as it may, they were both half mad with excitement. "f-f-f-fire!" roared one. "f-f-f-fire!" yelled the other. "where away?" asked a fireman as he quietly buckled his belt and put on his helmet. "b-b-brompton!"--"b-b-bayswater!" burst from them both at the same moment. then one cried, "i--i s-s-say brompton," and the other shouted, "i--i s-say bayswater." "what street?" asked the fireman. "w-w-walton street," cried one. "n-no--p-p-orchester terrace," roared the other, and at the word the walton street man hit the porchester terrace man between the eyes and knocked him down. a regular scuffle ensued, in the midst of which the firemen got out two engines--and, before the stutterers were separated, went off full swing, one to brompton, the other to bayswater, and found that, as they had guessed, there were in reality two fires! one night's experience in the "lobby" will give a specimen of the fireman's work. i had spent the greater part of the night there without anything turning up. about three in the morning the two men on duty lay down on their trestle-beds to sleep, and i sat at the desk reading the reports of recent fires. the place was very quiet--the sounds of the great city were hushed--the night was calm, and nothing was heard but the soft breathing of the sleepers and the ticking of the clock as i sat there waiting for a fire. i often looked at the telegraph needles and, (i am half ashamed to say it), longed for them to move and give us "a call." at last, when i had begun to despair, the sharp little telegraph bell rang. up i started in some excitement--up started one of the sleepers too, quite as quickly as i did, but without any excitement whatever--he was accustomed to alarms! reading the telegraph with sleepy eyes he said, with a yawn, "it's only a stop for a chimbley." he lay down again to sleep, and i sat down again to read and wait. soon after the foreman came down-stairs to have a smoke and a chat. among the many anecdotes which he told me was one which had a little of the horrible in it. he said he was once called to a fire in a cemetery, where workmen had been employed in filling some of the vaults with sawdust and closing them up. they had been smoking down there and had set fire to the sawdust, which set light to the coffins, and when the firemen arrived these were burning fiercely, and the stench and smoke were almost overpowering--nevertheless one of the men ran down the stair of the vaults, but slipped his foot and fell. next moment he rushed up with a face like a ghost, having fallen, he said, between two coffins! quickly recovering from his fright he again descended with his comrades, and they soon managed to extinguish the fire. the foreman went off to bed after relating this pleasant little incident and left me to meditate on it. presently a sound of distant wheels struck my ear. on they came at a rattling pace. in a few minutes a cab dashed round the corner and drew up sharply at the door, which was severely kicked, while the bell was rung furiously. up jumped the sleepers again and in rushed a cabman, backed by a policeman, with the usual shout of "fire." then followed "question brief and quick reply"--"a fire in great portland street close at hand." "get her out, bill," was the order. bill darted to the engine-shed and knocked up the driver in passing. he got out the horses while the other man ran from house to house of the neighbouring firemen giving a _double_ ring to their bells. before the engine was horsed one and another and another of the men darted into the station, donned his helmet, and buckled on his axe; then they all sprang to their places, the whip cracked, and off we went at full gallop only eight minutes after the alarm-bell rang. we spun through the streets like a rocket with a tail of sparks behind us, for the fire of the engine had been lighted before starting. on reaching the fire it was found to be only smouldering in the basement of the house, and the men of another engine were swarming through the place searching for the seat of it. i went in with our men, and the first thing i saw was a coffin lying ready for use! the foreman led me down into a vaulted cellar, and here, strange to say, i found myself in the midst of coffins! it seemed like the realisation of the story i had just heard. there were not fewer than thirty of them on the floor and ranged round the walls. happily, however, they were not tenanted. in fact the fire had occurred in an undertaker's workshop, and, in looking through the premises, i came upon several coffins laid out ready for immediate use. two of these impressed me much. they lay side by side. one was of plain black wood--a pauper's coffin evidently. the other was covered with fine cloth and gilt ornaments, and lined with padded white satin! i was making some moral reflections on the curious difference between the last resting-place of the rich man and the poor, when i was interrupted by the firemen who had discovered the fire and put it out, so we jumped on the engine once more, and galloped back to the station. most of the men went off immediately to bed; the engine was housed; the horses were stabled; the men on guard hung up their helmets and lay down again on their trestle-beds; the foreman bade me "good-night," and i was left once more in a silence that was broken only by the deep breathing of the sleepers and the ticking of the clock--scarcely able to believe that the stirring events of the previous hour were other than a vivid dream. all over london, at short distances apart, fire-escapes may be seen rearing their tall heads in recesses and corners formed by the angles in churches or other public buildings. each night these are brought out to the streets, where they stand in readiness for instant use. at the present time the escapes are in charge of the fire brigade. when i visited the firemen they were under direction of the royal society for the protection of life from fire, and in charge of conductors, who sat in sentry-boxes beside the escapes every night, summer and winter, ready for action. these conductors were clad like the firemen--except that their helmets were made of black leather instead of brass. they were not very different from other mortals to look at, but they were picked men--every one--bold as lions; true as steel; ready each night, at a moment's notice, to place their lives in jeopardy in order to rescue their fellow-creatures from the flames. of course they were paid for the work, but the pay was small when we consider that it was the price of indomitable courage, tremendous energy, great strength of limb, and untiring perseverance in the face of appalling danger. here is a specimen of the way in which the escapes were worked. on the night of the nd march , the premises of a blockmaker named george milne caught fire. the flames spread with great rapidity, arousing milne and his family, which consisted of his wife and seven children. all these sought refuge in the attics. at first milne thought he could have saved himself, but with so many little children round him he found himself utterly helpless. not far from the spot, henry douglas, a fire-escape conductor, sat in his sentry-box, reading a book, perchance, or meditating, mayhap, on the wife and little ones slumbering snugly at home, while he kept watch over the sleeping city. soon the shout of fire reached his ears. at once his cloth-cap was exchanged for the black helmet, and, in a few seconds, the escape was flying along the streets, pushed by the willing hands of policemen and passers-by. the answer to the summons was very prompt on this occasion, but the fire was burning fiercely when conductor douglas arrived, and the whole of the lower part of the house was so enveloped in flames and smoke that the windows could not be seen at all. douglas therefore pitched his escape, at a venture, on what he _thought_ would bring him to the second-floor windows, and up he went amid the cheers of the on-lookers. entering a window, he tried to search the room, (and the cheers were hushed while the excited multitude gazed and listened with breathless anxiety--for they knew that the man was in a position of imminent danger). in a few moments he re-appeared on the escape, half suffocated. he had heard screams in the room above, and at once threw up the fly-ladder, by which he ascended to the parapet below the attic rooms. here he discovered milne and his family grouped together in helpless despair. we may conceive the gush of hope that must have thrilled their breasts when conductor douglas leaped through the smoke into the midst of them; but we can neither describe nor conceive, (unless we have heard it in similar circumstances), the _tone_ of the deafening cheers that greeted the brave man when he re-appeared on the ladders, and, (with the aid of a policeman named john pead), bore the whole family, one by one, in safety to the ground! for this deed conductor douglas received the silver medal of the society, and pead, the policeman, received a written testimonial and a sovereign. subsequently, in consequence of conductor douglas's serious illness,-- resulting from his efforts on this occasion--the society voted him a gratuity of pounds beyond his sick allowance to mark their strong approbation of his conduct. now in this case it is obvious that but for the fire-escape, the blockmaker and his family must have perished. here is another case. i quote the conductor's own account of it, as given in the fire escape society's annual report. the conductor's name was shaw. he writes:-- "upon my arrival from aldersgate street station, the fire had gained strong hold upon the lower portion of the building, and the smoke issuing therefrom was so dense and suffocating as to render all escape by the staircase quite impossible. hearing cries for help from the upper part of the house, i placed my fire escape, ascended to the third floor, whence i rescued four persons--viz. mrs ferguson, her two children, and a lodger named gibson. they were all leaning against the window-sill, almost overcome. i carried each down the escape, (a height of nearly fifty feet), in perfect safety; and afterwards entered the back part of the premises, and took five young children from a yard where they were exposed to great danger from the fire." there was a man in the london brigade who deserves special notice--viz. conductor samuel wood. wood had been many years in the service, and had, in the course of his career, saved no fewer than lives. on one occasion he was called to a fire in church lane. he found a mr nathan in the first-floor unable to descend the staircase, as the ground floor was in flames. he unshipped his first-floor ladder, and, with the assistance of a policeman, brought mr nathan down. being informed that there was a servant girl in the kitchen, wood took his crowbar, wrenched up the grating, and brought the young woman out in safety. now this i give as a somewhat ordinary case. it involved danger; but not so much as to warrant the bestowal of the silver medal. nevertheless, wood and the policeman were awarded a written testimonial and a sum of money. i have had some correspondence with conductor wood, whose broad breast was covered with medals and clasps won in the service of the f.e. society. at one fire he rushed up the escape before it was properly pitched, and caught in his arms a man named middleton as he was in the act of jumping from a window. at another time, on arriving at a fire, he found that the family thought all had escaped, "but," wrote the conductor to me, "they soon missed the old grandmother.--i immediately broke the shop door open and passed through to the first-floor landing, where i discovered the old lady lying insensible. i placed her on my back, and crawled back to the door, and i am happy to say she is alive now and doing well!" so risky was a conductor's work that sometimes he had to be rescued by others--as the following extract will illustrate. it is from one of the society's reports:-- "case , . "awarded to james griffin, inspector of the k division of police, the society's silver medal, for the intrepid and valuable assistance rendered to fire escape conductor rickell at a fire at the `rose and crown' public-house, bridge street, at one o'clock on the morning of february st, when, but for his assistance there is little doubt that the conductor would have perished. on the arrival of conductor rickell with the mile end fire escape, not being satisfied that all the inmates had escaped, the conductor entered the house, the upper part of which was burning fiercely; the conductor not being seen for some time, the inspector called to him, and, not receiving an answer, entered the house and ascended the stairs, and saw the conductor lying on the floor quite insensible. with some difficulty the inspector reached him, and, dragging him down the staircase, carried him into the air, where he gradually recovered." while attending fires in london, i wore one of the black leather helmets of the salvage corps. this had the double effect of protecting my head from falling bricks, and enabling me to pass the cordon of police unquestioned. after a night of it i was wont to return home about dawn, as few fires occur after that. on these occasions i felt deeply grateful to the keepers of small coffee-stalls, who, wheeling their entire shop and stock-in-trade in a barrow, supplied early workmen with cups of hot coffee at a halfpenny a piece, and slices of bread and butter for the same modest sum. at such times i came to know that "man wants but little here below," if he only gets it hot and substantial. fire is such an important subject, and an element that any one may be called on so suddenly and unexpectedly to face, that, at the risk of being deemed presumptuous, i will, for a few minutes, turn aside from these reminiscences to put a few plain questions to my reader. has it ever occurred to you to think what you would do if your house took fire at night? do you know of any other mode of exit from your house than by the front or back doors and the staircase? have you a rope at home which would support a man's weight, and extend from an upper window to the ground? nothing easier than to get and keep such a rope. a few shillings would purchase it. do you know how you would attempt to throw water on the walls of one of your rooms, if it were on fire near the ceiling? a tea-cup would be of no use! a sauce-pan would not be much better. as for buckets or basins, the strongest man could not heave such weights of water to the ceiling with any precision or effect. but there are garden hand-pumps in every seedsman's shop with which a man could deluge his property with the greatest ease. do you know how to tie two blankets or sheets together, so that the knot shall not slip? your life may one day depend on such a simple piece of knowledge. still further, do you know that in retreating from room to room before a fire you should shut doors and windows behind you to prevent the supply of air which feeds the flames? are you aware that by creeping on your hands and knees, and keeping your head close to the ground, you can manage to breathe in a room where the smoke would suffocate you if you stood up?--also, that a wet sponge or handkerchief held over the mouth and nose will enable you to breathe with less difficulty in the midst of smoke?--do you know that many persons, especially children, lose their lives by being forgotten by the inmates of a house in cases of fire, and that, if a fire came to you, you ought to see to it that every member of your household is present to take advantage of any means of escape that may be sent to you? these subjects deserve to be considered thoughtfully by every one, especially by heads of families--not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of those whom god has committed to their care. for suppose that, (despite the improbability of such an event), your dwelling really _did_ catch fire, how inconceivable would be the bitterness added to your despair, if, in the midst of gathering smoke and flames--with death staring you in the face, and rescue all but hopeless--you were compelled to feel that you and yours might have escaped the impending danger if you had only bestowed on fire-prevention, fire-extinction, and fire-escape a very little forethought and consideration. chapter four. a war of mercy. there is a great war in which the british nation is at all times engaged. no bright seasons of peace mark the course of this war. year by year it is waged unceasingly, though not at all times with the same fury, nor always with the same results. sometimes, as in ordinary warfare, there are minor skirmishes in which many a deed of heroism is done, though not recorded, and there are pitched battles in which all our resources are called into action, and the papers teem with the news of the defeats, disasters, and victories of the great fight. this war costs us hundreds of lives, thousands of ships, and millions of money every year. our undying and unconquerable enemy is the storm, and our great engines of war with which, through the blessing of god, we are enabled to fight more or less successfully against the foe, are the lifeboat and the rocket. these engines, and the brave men who work them, are our sentinels of the coast. when the storm is brewing; when grey clouds lower, and muttering thunder comes rolling over the sea, men with hard hands and bronzed faces, clad in oilskin coats and sou'westers, saunter down to our quays and headlands, all round the kingdom. these are the lifeboat crews on the look-out. the enemy is moving, and the sentinels are being posted-- or, rather, they are posting themselves--for the night, for all the fighting men in this great war are volunteers. they need no drilling to prepare them for the field; no bugle or drum to sound the charge. their drum is the rattling thunder, their trumpet the roaring storm. they began to train for this warfare when they were not so tall as their fathers' boots, and there are no awkward squads among them now. their organisation is rough and ready, like themselves, and simple too. the heavens call them to action; the coxswain grasps the helm; the men seize the oars; the word is given, and the rest is straightforward fighting-- over everything, through everything, in the teeth of everything, until the victory is gained, and rescued men and women and children are landed in safety on our shores. in the winter of my enthusiasm in the lifeboat cause was aroused by the reading in the papers of that wonderful achievement of the famous ramsgate lifeboat, which, on a terrible night in that year, fought against the storm for sixteen hours, and rescued a hundred and twenty souls from death. a strange fatality attaches to me somehow--namely, that whenever i have an attack of enthusiasm, a book is the result! immediately after reading this episode in the great war, i called on the secretary of the royal national lifeboat institution, who kindly gave me minute information as to the working of his society, and lent me its journals. then i took train to the coast of deal, and spent a considerable part of the succeeding weeks in the company of isaac jarman--at that time the coxswain of the ramsgate lifeboat, and the chief hero in many a gallant fight with the sea. the splendid craft which he commanded was one of the self-righting, insubmergible boats of the institution. jarman's opinion of her was expressed in the words "she's parfect, sir, and if you tried to improve her you'd only spile her." from him i obtained much information, and many a yarn about his experiences on the famous and fatal goodwin sands, which, if recorded, would fill a volume. indeed a volume has already been written about them, and other deeds of daring on those sands, by one of the clergymen of ramsgate. i also saw the captain of the steam-tug that attends upon that boat. he took me on board his vessel and showed me the gold and silver medals he had received from his own nation, and from the monarchs of foreign lands, for rescuing human lives. i chatted with the men of deal whose profession it is to work in the storm, and succour ships in distress, and who have little to do but lounge on the beach and spin yarns when the weather is fine. i also listened to the thrilling yarns of jarman until i felt a strong desire to go off with him to a wreck. this, however, was not possible. no amateur is allowed to go off in the ramsgate boat on any pretext whatever, but the restriction is not so absolute in regard to the steamer which attends on her. i obtained leave to go out in this tug, which always lies with her fires banked up ready to take the lifeboat off to the sands, if her services should be required. jarman promised to rouse me if a summons should come. as in cases of rescue from fire, speed is all-important. i slept for several nights with my clothes on--boots and all--at the hotel nearest to the harbour. but it was not to be. night after night continued exasperatingly calm. no gale would arise or wreck occur. this was trying, as i lay there, wakeful and hopeful, with plenty of time to study the perplexing question whether it is legitimate, under any circumstance, to wish for a wreck or a fire! when patience was worn out i gave it up in despair. at another time, however, i had an opportunity of seeing the lifeboat in action. it was when i was spending a couple of weeks on board of the "gull" lightship, which lies between ramsgate and the goodwins. a "dirty" day had culminated in a tempestuous night. the watch on deck, clad in drenched oil-skins, was tramping overhead, rendering my repose fitful. suddenly he opened the skylight, and shouted that the southsand head lightship was firing, and sending up rockets. as this meant a wreck on the sands we all rushed on deck, and saw the flare of a tar-barrel in the far distance. already our watch was loading, and firing our signal-gun, and sending up rockets for the purpose of calling off the ramsgate lifeboat. it chanced that the broadstairs boat observed the signals first, and, not long after, she flew past us under sail, making for the wreck. a little later we saw the signal-light of the ramsgate tug, looming through the mist like the great eye of the storm-fiend. she ranged close up, in order to ask whereaway the wreck was. being answered, she sheared off, and as she did so, the lifeboat, towing astern, came full into view. it seemed as if she had no crew, save only one man-- doubtless my friend jarman--holding the steering lines; but, on closer inspection, we could see the men crouching down, like a mass of oilskin coats and sou'westers. in a few minutes they were out of sight, and we saw them no more, but afterwards heard that the wrecked crew had been rescued and landed at deal. in this manner i obtained information sufficient to enable me to write _the lifeboat: a tale of our coast heroes_, and _the floating light of the goodwin sands_. a curious coincidence occurred when i was engaged with the lifeboat story, which merits notice. being much impressed with the value of the lifeboat service to the nation, i took to lecturing as well as writing on this subject. one night, while in edinburgh in the spring of , a deputation of working men, some of whom had become deeply interested in lifeboat work, asked me to re-deliver my lecture. i willingly agreed to do so, and the result was that the working men of edinburgh resolved to raise pounds among themselves, and present a boat to the institution. they set to work energetically; appointed a committee, which met once a week; divided the city into districts; canvassed all the principal trades and workshops, and, before the year was out, had almost raised the necessary funds. in the end, the boat was ordered and paid for, and sent to edinburgh to be exhibited. it was drawn by six magnificent horses through the principal streets of the city, with a real lifeboat crew on board, in their sou'westers and cork life-belts. then it was launched in saint margaret's loch, at the foot of arthur's seat, where it was upset--with great difficulty, by means of a large erection with blocks and ropes--in order to show its self-righting and self-emptying qualities to the thousands of spectators who crowded the hill-sides. at this time the good people of glasgow had been smitten with a desire to present a lifeboat to the institution, and, in order to create an interest in the movement, asked the loan of the edinburgh boat for exhibition. the boat was sent, and placed on view in a conspicuous part of the city. among the thousands who paid it a visit was a lady who took her little boy to see it, and who dropped a contribution into the box, which stood invitingly alongside. that lady was the wife of a sea-captain, who lost his ship on the coast of wigton, where the edinburgh boat was stationed, and whose life was saved by that identical boat. and not only so, but the rescue was accomplished on the anniversary of the very day on which his wife had put her contribution into the collecting-box! sixteen lives were saved by it at that time, and, not long afterwards, fourteen more people were rescued by it from the insatiable sea; so that the working men of edinburgh have reason to be thankful for the success which has attended them in their effort to "rescue the perishing." moreover, some time afterwards, the ladies of edinburgh--smitten with zeal for the cause of suffering humanity, and for the honour of their "own romantic town"--put their pretty, if not lusty, shoulders to the wheel, raised a thousand pounds, and endowed the boat, so that, with god's blessing, it will remain in all time coming on that exposed coast, ready for action in the good cause. chapter five. descent into the cornish mines. from lighthouses, lifeboats, and fire-brigades into the tin and copper mines of cornwall is a rather violent leap, but by no means an unpleasant one. in the year i took this leap when desirous of obtaining material for _deep down: a tale of the cornish mines_. for three months my wife and i stayed in the town of saint just, close to the land's end, during which time i visited some of the principal mines in cornwall; associated with the managers, "captains," and miners, and tried my best to become acquainted with the circumstances of the people. the cornish tin trade is very old. in times so remote that historical light is dim, the phoenicians came in their galleys to trade with the men of cornwall for tin. herodotus, (writing years b.c.) mentions the tin islands of britain under the name of the _cassiterides_ and diodorus siculus, (writing about half a century b.c.), says: "the inhabitants of that extremity of britain which is called bolerion, excel in hospitality, and also, by their intercourse with foreign merchants, they are civilised in their mode of life. these prepare the tin, working very skilfully the earth which produces it." there is said to be ground for believing that cornish tin was used in the construction of the temple of jerusalem. at the present time the men of cornwall are to be found toiling, as did their forefathers in the days of old, deep down in the bowels of the earth--and even out under the bed of the sea--in quest of tin. "tin, copper, and fish" is one of the standing toasts in cornwall, and in these three words lie the head, backbone, and tail of the county, the sources of its wealth, and the objects of its energies. as my visit, however, was paid chiefly for the purpose of investigating the mines, i will not touch on fish here. having obtained introduction to the managers of botallack--the most famous of the cornish mines--i was led through miles of subterranean tunnels and to depths profound, by the obliging, amiable, and anecdotal captain jan--one of the "captains" or overseers of the mine. he was quite an original, this captain jan; a man who knew the forty miles of underground workings in botallack as well, i suppose, as a postman knows his beat; a man who dived into the bowels of the earth with the vigour and confidence of a mole and the simple-minded serenity of a seraph. the land at this part of cornwall is not picturesque, except at the sea-cliffs, which rise somewhere about three hundred feet sheer out of deep water, where there is usually no strip of beach to break the rush of the great atlantic billows that grind the rocks incessantly. the most prominent objects elsewhere are masses of debris; huge pieces of worn-out machinery; tall chimneys and old engine-houses, with big ungainly beams, or "bobs," projecting from them. these "bobs" are attached to pumps which work continually to keep the mines dry. they move up and down very slowly, with a pause between each stroke, as if they were seriously considering whether it was worth while continuing the dreary work any longer, and could not make up their minds on the point. their slow motions, however, give evidence of life and toil below the surface. other "bobs" standing idle tell of disappointed hopes and broken fortunes. there are not a few such landmarks at the land's end--stern monitors, warning wild and wicked speculators to beware. one day--it might have been night as far as our gloomy surroundings indicated--captain jan and i were stumbling along one of the levels of botallack, i know not how many fathoms down. we wore miners' hats with a candle stuck in front of each by means of a piece of clay. the hats were thicker than a fireman's helmet, though by no means as elegant. you might have plunged upon them head first without causing a dint. captain jan stopped beside some fallen rocks. we had been walking for more than an hour in these subterranean labyrinths and felt inclined to rest. "you were asking about the word _wheal_," said the captain, sticking his candle against the wall of the level and sitting down on a ledge, "it do signify a mine, as wheal frances, wheal owles, wheal edwards, and the like. when cornishmen do see a london company start a mine on a grand scale, with a deal of fuss and superficial show, and an imposing staff of directors, etcetera, while, down in the mine itself, where the real work ought to be done, perhaps only two men and a boy are known to be at work, they shake their heads and button up their pockets; perhaps they call the affair wheal _do-em_, and when that mine stops, (becomes what we call a `knacked bal') it may be styled wheal _donem_!" a traveller chanced to pass a water-wheel not long ago, near saint just. "what's that?" he said to a miner who sat smoking his pipe beside it. "that, sur? why, that's a pump, that is." "what does it pump?" asked the traveller. "pump, sur?" replied the man with a grim smile, "why, et do pump gold out o' the londoners!" there have been too many wheal _do-ems_ in cornwall. botallack mine is not, i need scarcely say, a wheal do-em. it is a grand old mine--grand because its beginning is enveloped in the mists of antiquity; because it affords now, and has afforded for ages back, sustenance to hundreds of miners and their families, besides enriching the country; because its situation on the wild cliffs is unusually picturesque, and because its dark shafts and levels not only descend to an immense depth below the surface, but extend far out under the bottom of the sea. its engine-houses and machinery are perched upon the edge of a steep cliff, and scattered over its face and down among its dark chasms in places where one would imagine that only a sea-gull would dare to venture. underground there exists a vast region of shafts and levels, or tunnels--mostly low, narrow, and crooked places--in which men have to stoop and walk with caution, and where they work by candlelight--a region which is measured to the inch, and has all its parts mapped out and named as carefully as are the fields above. some idea of the extent of this mine may be gathered from the fact that it is fathoms, ( feet), deep, and that all the levels put together form an amount of cutting through almost solid granite equal to nearly miles in extent. the deepest part of the mine is that which lies under the bottom of the sea, three-quarters of a mile from the shore; and, strange to say, that is also the _driest_ part of the mine. the great eastern would find depth of water sufficient to permit of her anchoring and floating securely in places where miners are at work, blowing up the solid rock, feet below her keel--a depth so profound that the wildest waves that ever burst upon the shore, or the loudest thunder that ever reverberated among the cliffs, could not send down the faintest echo of a sound. the ladder-way by which the men descend to their work is feet deep. it takes half an hour to descend and an hour to climb to the surface. it was a bright morning in may when i walked over from saint just with captain jan to pay my first underground visit to botallack. arrayed in the red-stained canvas coat and trousers of the mine, with a candle stuck in the front of our very strong hats and three spare ones each hung at our breasts, we proceeded to the ladder-way. this was a small platform with a hole in it just big enough to admit a man, out of which projected the head of a strong ladder. before descending captain jan glanced down the hole and listened to a distant, regular, clicking sound--like the ticking of a clock. "a man coming up," said he, "we'll wait a minute." i looked down, and, in the profound abyss, saw the twinkling of, apparently, a little star. the steady click of the miner's nailed shoes on the iron rounds of the ladder continued, and the star advanced, until, by its feeble light i saw the hat to which it was attached. presently a man emerged from the hole, and raising himself erect, gave vent to a long, deep-drawn sigh. it was, i may say, a suggestive sigh, for there was a sense of intense relief conveyed by it. the man had just completed an hour of steady, continuous climbing up the ladders, after eight hours of night-work in impure atmosphere, and the first great draught of the fresh air of heaven must have seemed like nectar to his soul! his red garments were soaking, perspiration streamed from every pore in his body, and washed the red earth in streaks down his pale countenance. although pale, however, the miner was strong and in the prime of life. chills and bad air, (the two great demons of the mines), had not yet smitten his sturdy frame with "miner's complaint." he looked tired, but not exhausted, and bestowed a grave glance on me and a quiet nod on captain jan as he walked away to change his dress in the drying-house. my contemplation of the retiring miner was interrupted by captain jan saying--"i'll go first, sir, to catch you if you should fall." this remark reminded me of many stories i had heard of men "falling away from the ladders;" of beams breaking and letting them tumble into awful gulfs; of stones giving way and coming down the shafts like grape or cannon-shot, and the like. however, i stepped on the ladder and prepared to follow my guide into the regions of unchanging night! a few fathoms' descent brought us into twilight and to a small platform on which the foot of the first ladder rested. through a hole in this the head of the second ladder appeared. here we lighted the candles, for the next ladder--a longer one, feet or so--would have landed us in midnight darkness. half way down it, i looked up and saw the hole at the top like a large white star. at the foot i looked up again, the star was gone, and i felt that we were at last in a region where, (from the time of creation), sunlight had never shone. down, down, ever _downwards_, was the uppermost idea in my mind for some time after that. other thoughts there were, of course, but that one of never-ending descent outweighed them all for a time. as we got lower the temperature increased; then perspiration broke out. never having practised on the treadmill, my muscles ere long began to feel the unwonted exercise, and i thought to myself, "if you are in this state so soon, what will you be when you get to the bottom, and how will you get up again?" at this point we reached the foot of another ladder, and captain jan said, "we'll walk a bit in the level here and then go down the pump-shaft." the change of posture and action in the level we had now entered was agreeable, but the path was not a good one. it was an old, low, and irregular level, with a rugged floor full of holes with water in them, and with projections in the roof that rendered frequent stooping necessary. the difficulty of one's progress in such places is that, while you are looking out for your head, you stumble into the holes, and when the holes claim attention you run your head against the roof; but, thanks to the miner's hat, no evil follows. we were now in a region of profound _silence_! when we paused for a minute to rest, it felt as if the silence of the tomb itself had surrounded us--for not the faintest echo reached us from the world above, and the miners at work below us were still far down out of ear-shot. in a few seconds we came to a yawning hole in the path, bridged by a single plank. captain jan crossed. "how deep is it?" i asked, preparing to follow. "about feet," said he, "it's a winze, and goes down to the next level!" i held my breath and crossed with caution. "are there many winzes, captain jan?" "yes, dozens of 'em. there are nigh miles of levels and lots of winzes everywhere!" the possibility of anything happening to captain jan, and my light getting blown out occurred to me, but i said nothing. when we had walked a quarter of a mile in this level, we came to the point where it entered the pump-shaft. the shaft itself was narrow--about or feet in diameter--but everything in it was ponderous and gigantic. the engine that drove the pump was horse power; the pump-rod was a succession of wooden beams, each like the ridge-pole of a house, jointed together--a rugged affair, with iron bolts, and nuts, and projections at the joints. in this shaft the kibbles were worked. these kibbles are iron buckets by which ore is conveyed to the surface. two are worked together by a chain--one going up full while the other comes down empty. both are free to clatter about the shaft and bang against each other in passing, but they are prevented from damaging the pump-rod by a wooden partition. between this partition and the pump was the ladder we had now to descend, with just space for a man to pass. captain jan got upon it, and as he did so the pump went up, (a sweep of or feet), with a deep watery gurgle, as if a giant were being throttled. as i got upon the ladder the pump came down with another gurgle, close to my shoulder in passing. to avoid this i kept close to the planks on the other side, but at that moment i heard a noise as if of distant thunder. "it's only the kibbles," said captain jan. up came one and down went the other, passing each other with a dire crash, not far from where we stood, and causing me to shrink into the smallest possible space. "there's no danger," said the captain encouragingly, "if you only keep cool and hold on." water was coursing freely down the shaft and spirting over us in fine spray, so that, ere long, we were as wet and dirty as any miner in botallack. at last we reached the fathom level, feet from "grass." here the captain told me men were at work not far off and he wished to visit them. "would i wait where i was until he returned?" "what!" said i, "wait in a draughty level with an extinguishable candle close to the main shaft, with or miles of levels around, and no end of winzes? no, no, captain jan, go on; i'll stick to you _now_ through thick and thin like your own shadow!" with one of his benignant smiles the captain resumed his progress. in a few minutes i heard the clink of hammers, and, soon after, came to a singular cavern. it was a place where the lode had been very wide and rich. years before it had been all cut away from level to level, leaving a void space so high and deep that the rays of our candles were lost in obscurity. we walked through it in mid-air, as it were, supported on cross beams with planks laid thereon. beyond this we came to a spot where a number of miners were at work in various places and positions. one, a big, broad-shouldered man named dan, was seated on a wooden box hammering at the rock with tremendous energy. with him captain jan conversed a few minutes on the appearance of the lode, and then whispered to me, "a good specimen of a man that, sir, and he's got an uncommon large family,"--then, turning to the man--"i say, dan, you've got a biggish family, haven't you?" "iss, a'w iss, cap'n jan, i've a braave lot o' child'n." "how many have you had altogether, dan?" "i've had seventeen, sur, but ten of 'em's gone dead--only seven left. my brother jim, though, he's had more than me." after a few more words we left this man, and, in another place, found this brother jim, working in the roof of the level with several others. they had cut so high up in a slanting direction that they appeared to be in another chamber, which was brilliantly lighted with their candles. jim, stripped naked to the waist, stood on the end of a plank, hammering violently. looking up into his curious burrow, captain jan shouted--"hallo! jim!" "hallo, captain jan." "here's a gentleman wants to know how many children you've had." "how many child'n, say 'ee? why, i've had nineteen, sur, but there's eleven of 'em gone dead. seven of 'em did come in three years and a half--_three doubles and a single_--but there's only eight of 'em alive now!" i afterwards found that, although this man and his brother were exceptions, the miners generally had very large families. while we were talking, a number of shots were heard going off in various directions. this was explained by captain jan. all the forenoon the miners employ their time in boring and charging the blast-holes. about mid-day they fire them and then hasten to a clear part of the mine to eat luncheon and smoke their pipes while the gunpowder smoke clears away. this it does very slowly, taking sometimes more than an hour to clear sufficiently so as to let the men resume work. immediately after the shots were heard, the men began to assemble. they emerged from the gloom on all sides like red hobgoblins--wet and perspiring. some walked out of darkness from either end of the level; some stalked out from diverging levels; others slid, feet first, from holes in the roof and sides, and some rose, head-foremost, from yawning gulfs in the floor. they all saluted captain jan as they came up, and each stuck his candle against the wall and sat down on a heap of wet rubbish, to lunch. some had cornish pasty, and others a species of heavy cake--so heavy that the fact of their being able to carry it at all said much for their digestive organs--but most of them ate plain bread, and all of them drank water which had been carried down from the realms of light in little canteens. frugal though the fare was, it sufficed to brace them for the rest of the day's work. after a short talk with these men captain jan and i continued our descent of the ladders--down we went, ever downwards, until at last we reached the very bottom of that part of the mine-- feet below the surface. here we found only two men at work, with whom captain jan conversed for a time while we rested, and then proceeded to ascend "to grass" by the same ladder-ways. if i felt that the descent was like never getting to the bottom, much more did the ascent seem like never getting to the top! i may remark here that the bottom which we had reached was not the bottom under the sea. at another time captain jan took me to that submarine cavern where, as i have said, no sound ever reaches the ear from the world above. there is, however, a level close under the sea where the roar of ocean is distinctly heard. it is in a part of botallack mine named wheal cock. it was very rich in copper ore, and the miners worked at the roof of it so vigorously, that they began to fear it would give way. one of them, therefore, in order to ascertain what thickness of solid rock still lay between them and the sea, bored a small hole upwards, and advanced about three feet or so before the water rushed in. of course they had a wooden plug ready and stopped up the hole. but, as it was dangerous to cut away any more of the roof, they were finally obliged unwillingly to forsake that part of the mine. this occurred some thirty years before my visit, yet when i went to see the place, i found the wooden plug still hard and fast in the hole and quite immoveable. as i stood and listened i could well understand the anxiety of the miners, for at the upward rush of each wave, i could hear the rattle of the boulders overhead, like monster cannon balls, and a repetition of the thunder when the waves retreated. on our way up the ladders we stopped several times to rest. at such times captain jan related various anecdotes illustrative of mining life. "this is a place," said he, on one occasion, "which reminds me of a man who was always ready to go in for dangerous work. his name was old maggot. he was not really old, but he had a son named after himself, and his friends had to distinguish him from the young maggot." so saying, captain jan trimmed his candle with nature's own pair of snuffers--the finger and thumb--and proceeded as follows: "some time ago the miners in botallack came to an old deserted mine that was full of water--this is what miners call a `_house of water_.' the ore there was rich, but the men were afraid to work it lest they should come suddenly on the old mine and break a hole through to it--in other words `_hole to that house of water_.' they stopped working at last, and no one seemed willing to run the risk of driving the hole and letting out the water. in this difficulty they appealed to old maggot, who at once agreed to do it. the old mine was about three-quarters of a mile back from the sea-shore, but at that time it could only be got at by entering the _adit_ level from the shore. it was through this level that the water would have to escape. at the mouth of it a number of men assembled to see old maggot go in. in he went, alone, with a bunch of candles, and, as he walked along, he stuck a lighted candle every here and there against the wall to light him out,--for he expected to have to run for it. "when he came to the place, the water was spirting out everywhere. but old maggot didn't mind. he grasped his hammer and borer and began. the work was done sooner than he had expected! suddenly the rock gave way and the water burst upon him, putting out his candle and turning him heels over head. he jumped up and tried to run, but the flood rose on him, carried him off his legs, swept him right through the level, and hurled him through the adit-mouth at last, upon the sea-shore! he was stunned a little, but soon recovered, and, beyond a few bruises and a wetting, was nothing the worse of his adventure. "_that_," said captain jan, pointing to the rock beside us, "was the place where old maggot holed to the house of water, and _this_ was the level through which he was washed and through part of which i will now conduct you." accordingly, we traversed the level, and, coming to another shaft, continued our upward progress. while we were slowly toiling up, step by step, we were suddenly arrested by the sound of voices singing in the far distance above us. the music was slow and solemn. coming as it did so unexpectedly in such a strange place, it sounded quite magical and inexpressibly sweet. "miners descending to work," said my guide, as we listened. the air was familiar to me, and, as it grew louder and louder, i recognised that beautiful tune called "french," to which we are accustomed to sing the st psalm, "i to the hills will lift mine eyes." gradually the men came down to us. we stood on one side. as they passed they ceased singing and nodded to captain jan. there were five or six stout fellows and a boy. the latter was as active as his companions, and his treble voice mingled tunefully with theirs as they continued the descent, and resumed the psalm, keeping time to the slow measured tread of their steps. we watched until their lights disappeared, and then resumed our upward way, while the sweet strains grew fainter and fainter, until they were gradually lost in the depths below. the pleasant memory of that psalm still remained with me, when i emerged from the ladder-shaft of botallack mine, and--after having been five hours underground--once more drank in, (with a new and intensified power of appreciation), the fresh air of heaven and the blessed influences of green fields and sunshine. to many a weird and curious part of the great mine did the obliging captain jan lead me, but perhaps the most interesting part was the lowest depth under the sea, to which my wife accompanied us. this part is reached by the boscawen shaft, a sloping one which the men descend in an iron car or gig. the car is let down and hauled up by an iron rope. once this rope broke, the car flew to the bottom, was dashed against the rock, and all the men--eight in number--were killed. in the prince and princess of wales descended this shaft, and captain jan was their amiable, not to say eccentric, guide. the captain was particularly enthusiastic in praise of the princess. he said that she was a "fine intelligent young lady; that she asked no end of questions, would not rest until she understood everything, and afterwards undertook to explain it all to her less-informed companions." a somewhat amusing incident occurred while they were underground. when about to begin his duty as guide it suddenly flashed across the mind of poor captain jan that, in the excitement of the occasion, he had forgotten to take gloves with him. he was about to lead the princess by the hand over the rugged floors of the levels. to offer to do so without gloves was not to be thought of. to procure gloves fathoms below the sea was impossible. to borrow from the prince or the duke of sutherland, who were of the party, was out of the question. what was he to do? suddenly he remembered that he had a newspaper in his pocket. in desperation he wrapped his right hand in a piece of this, and, thus covered, held it out to the princess. she, innocently supposing that the paper was held up to be looked at, attempted to read. this compelled captain jan to explain himself, whereupon she burst into a hearty fit of laughter, and, flinging away the paper, took the ungloved hand of the loyal but bashful miner. chapter six. the land of the vikings. to this romantic land of mountain and flood i paid four visits at various times. these were meant as holiday and fishing rambles, but were also utilised to gather material for future books. norway, as every one knows, was the land of the ancient vikings--those grand old rascally freebooters--whose indomitable pluck carried them in their open galleys, (little better than big boats), all round the coasts of europe, across the unknown sea to iceland, and even to the shores of america itself, before the other nations dreamed of such a continent, and long before columbus was born; who possessed a literature long before we did; whose blood we britons carry in our veins; and from whom we have inherited many of our best laws, much of our nautical enterprise, and not a little of our mischief and pugnacity. norway, too, is the land where liberty once found refuge in distress,-- that much abused goddess, whom, since the fall of adam and eve, license has been endeavouring to defame, and tyranny to murder, but who is still alive and kicking--ay, and will continue to kick and flourish in spite of all her enemies! liberty found a home, and a rough welcome, strange to say, among those pagans of the north, at a time when she was banished from every other spot, even from the so-called christian states in europe. no wonder that that grand old country with its towering snow-clad mountains, its mighty fords, its lonesome glens and its historical memories should be styled "_gamle norge_" (old norway--as we speak of old england), with feelings of affection by its energetic and now peaceful inhabitants. i was privileged to go to norway as one of a yachting party. there were twelve of us altogether, three ladies, three gentlemen, and a crew of six sailors. our object was to see the land and take what of amusement, discomfort, or otherwise might chance to come in our way. we had a rough passage over, and were very sick, sailors included! except the captain, an old scotch highlander who may be described as a compound of obstinacy and gutta-percha. it took us four days to cross. we studied the norse language till we became sea-sick, wished for land till we got well, then resumed the study of norse until we sighted the outlying islands and finally cast anchor in the quaint old city and port of bergen. now, it is well to admit at once that some of us were poor linguists; but it is only just to add that we could not be expected to learn much of any language in four days during intervals of internal derangement! however, it is curious to observe how very small an amount of norse will suffice for ordinary travellers--especially for scotchmen. the danish language is the vernacular tongue of norway and there is a strong affinity between danish, (or norse), and broad scotch. roughly speaking, i should say that a mixture of three words of norse to two of broad scotch, with a powerful emphasis and a strong infusion of impudence, will carry you from the naze to the north cape in perfect comfort. bergen is a most interesting city, and our party had many small adventures in it, which, however, i will not touch on here. but one scene--the fish-market--must not be passed over. there must certainly be something in the atmosphere of a fish-market which tends to call forth the mental and physical energies of mankind, (perhaps i should rather say of _womankind_), and which calls forth a tremendous flow of abusive language. billingsgate is notorious, but i think that the bergen fish-market beats it hollow. one or two phases of the national character are there displayed in perfection. it is the billingsgate of norway--the spot where norse females are roused to a pitch of frenzy that is not equalled, i believe, in any other country. there are one or two peculiarities about the bergen market, too, which are noteworthy, and which account in some degree for the frantic excitement that reigns there. the sellers of the fish, in the first place, are not women but men. the pier and fleet of boats beside it constitute the market-place. the fishermen row their cargoes of fish direct from the sea to the pier, and there transact sales. there is a stout iron railing along the edge of that pier--a most needful safeguard--over which the servant girls of the town lean and look down at the fishermen, who look up at them with a calm serio-comic "don't-you-wish-you-may-get-it" expression that is deeply impressive. bargains, of course, are not easily made, and it is in attempting to make these that all the hubbub occurs. the noise is all on the women's side. the men, secure in their floating position, and certain of ultimate success, pay very little attention to the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed damsels who shout at them like maniacs, waving their arms, shaking their fists, snapping their fingers, and flourishing their umbrellas! they all carry umbrellas--cotton ones--of every colour in the rainbow, chiefly pink and sky-blue, for bergen is celebrated as being the most rainy city in europe. the shouting of the girls is not only a safety-valve to their feelings, but is absolutely necessary in order to attract the attention of the men. as or of them usually scream at once, it is only she who screams loudest and flourishes her umbrella most vigorously that can obtain a hearing. the calm unruffled demeanour of the men is as much a feature in the scene as is the frenzy of the women. during one of my visits i saw a fisherman there who was the most interesting specimen of cool impudence i ever encountered. he wore a blue coat, knee-breeches, white worsted stockings, and on his head of long yellow hair a red night-cap with a tall hat on top of all. when i discovered him he was looking up with a grave sarcastic expression into the flushed countenance of a stout, blue-eyed lass who had just eagerly offered him _syv skillings_ (seven skillings), for a lot of fish. that was about and a half pence, the skilling being half a penny. the man had declined by look, not by tongue, and the girl began to grow angry. "haere du, fiskman," (hear you, fisherman), she cried, "vil du har otte skillings?" (will you have eight skillings?) the fisherman turned away and gazed out to sea. the girl grew crimson in the face at this. "fiskman, fiskman!" she cried, "vil du har _ni_ (nine) skillings?" the fisherman kicked out of the way a lobster that was crawling too near his naked toes, and began to bale out the boat. the girl now seemed to become furious. her blue eyes flashed like those of a tiger. she gasped for breath, while her cotton umbrella flashed over the fisherman's head like a pink meteor. had that umbrella been only a foot longer the tall black hat would have come to grief undoubtedly. suddenly she paused, and in a tone of the deepest solemnity, said-- "haere du, fiskman, vil du har ti (ten) shillings?" the rock of gibraltar is not more unyielding than was that "fiskman." he took off his hat, removed his night-cap, smoothed his yellow hair, and wiped his forehead; then, replacing the cap and hat, he thrust both hands into his coat pockets, turned his back on the entire market, and began to whistle. this was too much! it was past female endurance! the girl turned round, scattered the bystanders right and left, and fled as if she had resolved then and there to dash out her brains on the first post she met, and so have done with men and fish for ever. but she was not done with them yet! the spell was still upon her. ere she had got a dozen yards away she paused, stood one moment in uncertainty, and then rushing back forced her way to the old position, and shouted in a tone that might have moved the hearts even of the dead fish-- "fiskman, here du, vil du hav tolve?" "tolve" (or twelve) skillings was apparently not quite the sum he meant to take; but he could hold out no longer--he wavered--and the instant man wavers, woman's victory is gained! smiling benignly he handed up the fish to the girl, and held out his baling dish for the money. the storm was over! the girl walked off in triumph with her fish, not a trace of her late excitement visible, the pink cotton umbrella tucked under her arm, and her face beaming with the consciousness of having conquered a "_fiskman_" in fair and open fight! steamers ply regularly between the north and south of norway in summer, and an excursion in one of these is very enjoyable, not only on account of the scenery, but because of the opportunity afforded of making the acquaintance of the people. i once made a voyage in one of those steamers from the nordfjord to bergen, and one thing struck me very particularly on that occasion, namely, the _quietness_ that seemed to be cultivated by the people as if it were a virtue. i do not mean to say that the passengers and crew were taciturn--far from it. they bustled about actively; they were quite sociable and talkative, but no voice was ever raised to a loud pitch. even the captain gave his orders in a quiet tone. whether this quietness of demeanour is peculiar to norwegian steamers in general, or was a feature of this steamer in particular, i am not prepared to say. i can only state the fact of the prevailing quietude on that particular occasion without pretending to explain it. the state of quiescence culminated at the dinner-table, for there the silence was total! i never saw anything like it! when we had all assembled in the cabin, at the almost whispered invitation of the steward, and had stood for a few minutes looking benign and expectant, but not talking, the captain entered, bowed to the company, was bowed to by the company, motioned us to our seats, whispered "_ver so goot_," and sat down. now this phrase "_ver so goot_" merits particular notice. it is an expression that seems to me capable of extension and distension. it is a flexible, comfortable, jovial, rollicking expression. to give a perfect translation of it is not easy; but i cannot think of a better way of conveying its meaning, than by saying that it is a compound of the phrases--"be so good," "by your leave," "what's your will," "bless your heart," "all serene," and "that's your sort!" the first of these, "be so good," is the literal translation--the others are the super-induced sentiments, resulting from the tone and manner in which it is said. you may rely on it, that, when a norwegian offers you anything and says _ver so goot_, he means you well and hopes you will make yourself comfortable. well, there was no carving at that dinner. the dishes were handed round by waiters. first we had very thin rice soup with wine and raisins in it--the eating of which seemed to me like spoiling one's dinner with a bad pudding. this finished, the plates were removed. "_now_," thought i, "surely some one will converse with his neighbour during this interval." no! not a lip moved! i looked at my right and left-hand men; i thought, for a moment, of venturing out upon the unknown deep of a foreign tongue, and cleared my throat for that purpose, but every eye was on me in an instant; and the sound of my own voice, even in that familiar process, was so appalling that i said nothing! i looked at a pretty girl opposite me. i felt certain that the youth beside her was about to speak--he looked as if he meant to, but he didn't. in a few minutes the next course came on. this was a dish like bread-pudding, minus currants and raisins; it looked like a sweet dish, but it turned out to be salt,--and pure melted butter, without any admixture of flour or water, was handed round as sauce. after this came veal and beef cutlets, which were eaten with cranberry jam, pickles, and potatoes. fourth and last came a course of cold sponge-cake, with almonds and raisins stewed over it, so that, when we had eaten the cake as a sort of cold pudding, we slid, naturally and pleasantly, into dessert, without the delay of a change of plates. there was no remaining to drink at that dinner. when the last knife and fork were laid down, we all rose simultaneously, and then a general process of bowing ensued. in regard to this proceeding i have never been able to arrive at a clear understanding, as to what was actually done or intended to be done, but my impression is, that each bowed to the other, and all bowed to the captain; then the captain bowed to each individually and to all collectively, after which a comprehensive bow was made by everybody to all the rest all round--and then we went on deck to smoke. as each guest passed out, he or she said to the captain, "_tak for mad_," which is a manner and custom, and means "_thanks for meat_." with the exception of these three words, not a single syllable, to the best of my belief, was uttered by any one during the whole course of that meal! of course the gentlemen of our party performed many wonderful exploits in fishing, for sea-trout and salmon abound in norway, and the river beds are very rugged. in that land fishing cannot be styled the "gentle art." it is a tearing, wearing, rasping style of work. an account of the catching of one fish will prove this. one morning i had gone off to fish by myself, with a norwegian youth to gaff and carry the fish. coming to a sort of weir, with a deep pool above and a riotous rapid below, i put on a salmon fly and cast into the pool. at once a fish rose and was hooked. it was not a big one--only pounds or thereabouts--but quite big enough to break rod and line if not played respectfully. for some time, as is usual with salmon, he rushed about the pool, leaped out of the water, and bored up stream. then he took to going down stream steadily. now this was awkward, for when a fish of even that size resolves to go down stream, nothing can stop him. my efforts were directed to turning him before he reached the rapid, for, once into that, i should be compelled to follow him or break the line--perhaps the rod also. at last he reached the head of the rapid. i put on a heavy strain. the rod bent like a hoop and finally began to crack, so i was compelled to let him go. at the lower end of the pool there was a sort of dam, along which i ran, but soon came to the end of it, where it was impossible to reach the shore owing to the dense bushes which overhung the stream. but the fish was now in the rapid and was forced down by the foaming water. being very unwilling to break the line or lose the fish, i went slowly into the rapid until the water reached the top of my long wading boots-- another step and it was over them, but that salmon would not--indeed could not--stop. the water filled my boots at once, and felt very cold at first, but soon became warm, and each boot was converted into a warmish bath, in which the legs felt reasonably comfortable. i was reckless now, and went on, step by step, until i was up to the waist, then to the arm-pits, and then i spread out one arm and swam off while with the other i held up the rod. the rapid was strong but deep, so that nothing obstructed me till i reached the lower end, when a rock caught my legs and threw me into a horizontal position, with the rod flat on the water. i was thrown against the bank, where my norwegian boy was standing mouth open, eyes blazing, and hand extended to help me out. when i stood panting on the bank, i found that the fish was still on and still inclined to descend, but i found that i could not follow, for my legs were heavy as lead--the boots being full of water. to take the latter off in a hurry and empty them was impossible. to think of losing the fish after all was maddening. suddenly a happy thought struck me. handing the rod to the boy i lay down on my back, cocked my legs in the air, and the water ran like a deluge out at the back of my neck! much relieved, i resumed the rod, but now i found that the fish had taken to sulking. this sulking is very perplexing, for the fish bores its nose into some deep spot below a stone, and refuses to budge. pulling him this way and that way had no effect. jerking him was useless. even throwing stones at him was of no avail. i know not how long he kept me there, but at last i lost patience, and resolved to force him out, or break the line. but the line was so good and strong that it caused the rod to show symptoms of giving way. just then it struck me that as there were several posts of an old weir in the middle of the stream, he must have twisted the line round one of these, broken himself off and left me attached to it! i made up my mind therefore to wade out to the old weir, and unwind the line, and gave the rod to the boy to hold while i did so. the water was deep. it took me nearly up to the neck before i reached the shallow just above the posts, but, being thoroughly wet, that did not matter. on reaching the post, and unwinding the line, i found to my surprise that the fish was still there. at first i thought of letting go the line, and leaving the boy to play him; "but," thought i, "the boy will be sure to lose him," so i held on to the line, and played it with my hands. gradually the fish was tired out. i drew him slowly to my side, and gaffed him in four feet of water. even then i was not sure of him, for when i got him under one arm he wriggled violently, so that it was difficult to wade ashore with him. in this difficulty i took him to a place where the shoal in the middle of the stream was about three inches deep. there i lay down on him, picked up a stone and hammered his head with it, while the purling water rippled pleasantly over my face. the whole of this operation took me upwards of two hours. it will be seen, therefore, that fishing in norway, as i have said, cannot be called "the gentle art." one extremely interesting excursion that we made was to a place named the esse fjord. the natives here were very hospitable and kind. besides that, they were fat! it would almost seem as if fat and good-humour were invariably united; for nearly all the natives of the esse fjord were good-humoured and stout! the language at this place perplexed me not a little. nevertheless the old proverb, "where there's a will there's a way," held good, for the way in which i conversed with the natives of that region was astounding even to myself. one bluff, good-humoured fellow took me off to see his house and family. i may as well admit, here, that i am not a good linguist, and usually left our ladies to do the talking! but on this occasion i found myself, for the first time, alone with a norwegian! fairly left to my own resources. well, i began by stringing together all the norse i knew, (which wasn't much), and endeavoured to look as if i knew a great deal more. but i soon found that the list of sentences, which i had learned from murray's _handbook_, did not avail much in a lengthened conversation. my speech quickly degenerated into sounds that were almost unintelligible to either my new friend or myself! and i terminated at last in a mixture of bad norse and broad scotch. i have already remarked on the strong family-likeness between norse and broad scotch. here are a few specimens. they call a cow a _coo_! a house is a _hoose_, and a mouse is a _moose_! _gaae til land_, is go to land, or go ashore. _tak ain stole_ is take a stool, or sit down. vil du tak am dram? scarcely needs translation--will you take a dram! and the usual answer to that question is equally clear and emphatic--"ya, jeg vil tak am dram!" one day our pilot saw the boat of a fisherman, (or fiskman), not far off. he knew we wanted fish, so, putting his hands to his mouth, he shouted "fiskman! har du fisk to sell?" if you talk of bathing, they will advise you to "dook oonder;" and should a mother present her baby to you, she will call it her "smook barn"--her pretty bairn--smook being the norse word for "pretty," and _barn_ for child; and it is a curious fact, worthy of particular note, that all the mothers in norway think their bairns smook--very smook! and they never hesitate to tell you so--why, i cannot imagine, unless it be that if you were not told you would not be likely to find it out for yourself. despite our difficulty of communication, my fat friend and i soon became very amicable and talkative. he told me no end of stories, of which i did not comprehend a sentence, but looked as if i did--smiled, nodded my head, and said "ya, ya,"--to which he always replied "ya, ya,"--waving his arms, and slapping his breast, and rolling his eyes, as he bustled along beside me towards his dwelling. the house was perched on a rock close to the water's edge. here my host found another subject to expatiate upon and dance round, in the shape of his own baby, a soft, smooth, little imitation of himself, which lay sleeping in its crib, like a small cupid. the man was evidently extremely fond of this infant. he went quite into ecstasies about it; now gazing at it with looks of pensive admiration; anon, starting and looking at me as if to say, "_did you ever, in all your life, see such a beautiful cherub_?" the man's enthusiasm was really catching--i began to feel quite a fatherly interest in the cherub myself. "oh!" he cried, in rapture, "det er smook barn!" "ya, ya," said i, "megit smook," (very pretty)--although i must confess that _smoked_ bairn would have been nearer the mark, for it was as brown as a red-herring. i spent an agreeable, though i must confess mentally confused, afternoon with this gentleman, who, (when he succeeded in tearing himself away from that much-loved and megit smook barn), introduced me to his two sisters, who were stout and good-humoured like himself. they treated me to a cup of excellent coffee, and to a good deal more of incomprehensible conversation. altogether, the natives of the esse fjord made a deep impression on us, and we parted from their grand and gloomy but hospitable shores with much regret. i had hoped, good reader, to have jotted down some more of my personal reminiscences of travel--in algiers, the "pirate city," at the cape of good hope, and elsewhere--but bad health is not to be denied, and i find that i must hold my hand. perchance this may be no misfortune, for possibly the "garrulity of age" is descending on me! before closing this sketch, however, i would say briefly, that in all my writings i have always tried--how far successfully i know not--to advance the cause of truth and light, and to induce my readers to put their trust in the love of god our saviour, for this life as well as the life to come. chapter seven. the burglars and the parson. a country mansion in the south of england. the sun rising over a laurel-hedge, flooding the ivy-covered walls with light, and blazing in at the large bay-window of the dining-room. "take my word for it, robin, if ever this 'ouse is broke into, it will be by the dinin'-room winder." so spake the gardener of the mansion--which was also the parsonage--to his young assistant as they passed one morning in front of the window in question. "for why?" he continued; "the winder is low, an' the catches ain't overstrong, an there's no bells on the shutters, an' it lies handy to the wall o' the back lane." to this robin made no response, for robin was young and phlegmatic. he was also strong. the gardener, simon by name, was not one of the prophets--though in regard to the weather and morals he considered himself one--but if any person had chanced to overhear the conversation of two men seated in a neighbouring public-house that morning, that person would have inclined to give the gardener credit for some sort of second sight. "bill," growled one of the said men, over his beer, in a low, almost inaudible tone, "i've bin up to look at the 'ouse, an' the dinin'-room winder'll be as easy to open as a door on the latch. i had a good look at it." "you are the man for cheek an' pluck," growled the other man, over his beer, with a glance of admiration at his comrade. "how ever did you manage it, dick?" "the usual way, in course. comed it soft over the 'ousemaid; said i was a gardener in search of a job, an' would she mind tellin' me where the head-gardener was? you see, bill, i had twigged him in front o' the 'ouse five minutes before. `i don't know as he's got any odd jobs to give 'ee,' says she; `but he's in the front garden at this minute. if you goes round, you'll find him.' `hall right, my dear,' says i; an' away i goes right round past the dinin'-room winder, where i stops an' looks about, like as if i was awful anxious to find somebody. in coorse i glanced in, an' saw the fastenin's. "they couldn't keep out a babby! sideboard all right at the t'other end, with a lookin'-glass over it--to help folk, i fancy, to see what they look like w'en they're a-eatin' their wittles. anyhow, it helped me to see the gardener comin' up one o' the side walks; so i wheels about double quick, an' looked pleased to see him. "`hallo!' cries he. "`i was lookin' for you,' says i, quite easy like. "`did you expect to find me in the dinin'-room?' says he. "`not just that,' says i, `but it's nat'ral for a feller to look at a 'andsome room w'en he chances to pass it.' "`ah,' says he, in a sort o' way as i didn't quite like. `what d'ee want wi' me?' "`i wants a job,' says i. "`are you a gardener?' he axed. "`yes--leastwise,' says i, `i've worked a goodish bit in gardings in my time, an' can turn my 'and to a'most anythink.' "`oh,' says he. `look 'ere, my man, what d'ee call that there tree?' he p'inted to one close alongside. "`that?' says i. `well, it--it looks uncommon like a happle.' "`do it?' says he. `now look 'ere, you be off as fast as your legs can take you, or i'll set the 'ousedog at 'ee.' "w'en he said that, bill, i do assure you, lad, that my experience in the ring seemed to fly into my knuckles, an' it was as much as ever i could do to keep my left off his nob and my right out of his breadbasket. but i restrained myself. if there's one thing i'm proud of, bill, it's the wirtue o' self-restraint in the way o' business. i wheeled about, held up my nose, an' walked off wi' the air of a dook. you see, i didn't want for to have no more words wi' the gardener,--for why? because i'd seen all i wanted to see--d'ee see? but there was one--no, two--things i saw which it was as well i did see." "an' what was they?" asked bill. "two statters." "an' what are statters?" "man alive i don't ye know? it's them things that they make out o' stone, an' marable, an' chalk--sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes babbies, an' mostly with no clo'es on to speak of--" "oh! i know; but _i_ call 'em statoos. fire away, dick; what see'd you about the statoos?" "why, i see'd that they wasn't made in the usual way of stone or chalk, but of iron. i have heerd say that sodgers long ago used to fight in them sort o' dresses, though i don't believe it myself. anyhow, there they was, the two of 'em, one on each side of the winder, that stiff that they could stand without nobody inside of 'em, an' one of 'em with a big thing on his shoulder, as if he wor ready to smash somebody over the head. i thought to myself if you an' me, bill, had come on 'em unbeknown like, we'd ha' got such a start as might have caused us to make a noise. but i hadn't time to think much, for it was just then i got sight o' the gardener." "now my plan is," continued dick, swigging off his beer, and lowering his voice to a still more confidential tone, as he looked cautiously round, "my plan is to hang about here till dark, then take to the nearest plantation, an' wait till the moon goes down, which will be about two o'clock i' the mornin'--when it will be about time for us to go in and win." "all right," said bill, who was not loquacious. but bill was mistaken, for it was all wrong. there was indeed no one in the public at that early hour of the day to overhear the muttered conversation of the plotters, and the box in which they sat was too remote from the bar to permit of their words being overheard, but there was a broken pane of glass in a window at their elbow, with a seat outside immediately below it. just before the burglars entered the house they had observed this seat, and noticed that no one was on it; but they failed to note that a small, sleepy-headed pot-boy lay at full length underneath it, basking in the sunshine and meditating on nothing--that is, nothing in particular. at first little pat paid no attention to the monotonous voices that growled softly over his head, but one or two words that he caught induced him to open his eyes very wide, rise softly from his lair and sit down on the seat, cock one ear intelligently upward, and remain so absolutely motionless that dick, had he seen him, might have mistaken him for a very perfect human "statter." when little pat thought that he had heard enough, he slid off the seat, crawled close along the side of the house, doubled round the corner, rose up, and ran off towards the parsonage as fast as his little legs could go. the reverend theophilus stronghand was a younger son of a family so old that those families which "came over with the conqueror" were mere moderns in comparison. its origin, indeed, is lost in those mists of antiquity which have already swallowed up so many millions of the human race, and seem destined to go on swallowing, with ever-increasing appetite, to the end of time. the stronghands were great warriors--of course. they could hardly have developed into a family otherwise. the reverend theophilus, however, was a man of peace. we do not say this to his disparagement. he was by no means a degenerate son of the family. physically he was powerful, broad and tall, and his courage was high; but spiritually he was gentle, and in manner urbane. he drew to the church as naturally as a duck draws to the water, and did not by any means grudge to his elder brothers the army, the navy, and the bar. one of his pet theories was, to overcome by love, and he carried this theory into practice with considerable success. perhaps no one put this theory to the test more severely or frequently than his only son harry. war had been that young gentleman's chief joy in life from the cradle. he began by shaking his fat fists at the universe in general. war-to-the-knife with nurse was the chronic condition of a stormy childhood. intermittent warfare with his only sister emmie chequered the sky of his early boyhood, and a decided tendency to disobey wrung the soul of his poor mother, and was the cause of no little anxiety to his father; while mischief, pure and simple for its own sake, was the cherished object of his life. nevertheless, harry stronghand was a lovable boy, and love was the only power that could sway him. the lad grew better as he grew older. love began to gain the day, and peace began--slowly at first--to descend on the parsonage; but the desire for mischief--which the boy named "fun"--had not been quite dislodged at the time we write of. as harry had reached the age of fifteen, feared nothing, and was quick-witted and ingenious, his occasional devices not only got him into frequent hot water, but were the source of some amusement to his people--and he still pretty well ruled his easy-going father and the house generally with a rod of iron. it was to harry stronghand that little pat directed his steps, after overhearing the conversation which we have related. pat knew that the son of the parsonage was a hero, and, in his opinion, the most intelligent member of the family, and the best fitted to cope with the facts which he had to reveal. he met the object of his search on the road. "plaze yer honour," said pat--who was an irishman, and therefore "honoured" everybody--"there's two tramps at the public as is plottin' to break into your house i' the mornin'." "you don't mean it, do you?" returned harry, with a smile and raised eyebrows. "that's just what i do, yer honour. i heard 'em reel off the whole plan." hereupon the boy related all that he knew to the youth, who leaned against a gate and nodded his curly head approvingly until the story was finished. "you've not mentioned this to any one, have you, pat?" "niver a sowl but yersilf, sir." "you're a sensible boy, pat. here's a shilling for you--and, look here, pat, if you keep dark upon the matter till after breakfast to-morrow and don't open your lips to a living soul about it, i'll give you half a crown." "thank yer honour." "now mind--no hints to the police; no remarks to your master. be dumb, in fact, from this moment, else i won't give you a penny." "sure i've forgot all about it already, sir," said the boy, with a wink so expressive that harry felt his word to be as good as his bond, and went back to the parsonage laughing. arrived there, he went in search of his sister, but found that she was out. "just as well," he muttered, descending to the dining-room with his hands deep in his pockets, a pleased expression on his handsome mouth, and a stern frown on his brows. "it would not be safe to make a confidant of her in so delicate a matter. no, i'll do it all alone. but how to do it? that is the question. shall i invite the aid of the police? perish the thought! shall i consult the pater? better not. the dear, self-devoted man might take it out of my hands altogether." harry paused in profound meditation. he was standing near the window at the time, with the "statters" on either hand of him. they were complete suits of armour--one representing a knight in plate armour, the other a crusader in chain-mail. both had been in the family since two of the stronghand warriors had followed richard of the lion heart to the east. as the eldest brother of the reverend theophilus was in india, the second was on the deep, and the lawyer was dead, the iron shells of the ancient warriors had naturally found a resting-place in the parsonage, along with several family portraits, which seemed to show that the males of the race were prone to look very stern, and to stand in the neighbourhood of pillars and red curtains in very dark weather, while the females were addicted to old lace, scant clothing, and benign smiles. one of the warriors stood contemplatively leaning on his sword. the other rested a heavy mace on his shoulder, as if he still retained a faint hope that something might turn up to justify his striking yet one more blow. "what would you advise, old man?" said harry, glancing up at the crusader with the mace. the question was put gravely, for, ever since he could walk or do anything, the boy had amused himself by putting free-and-easy questions to the suits of armour, or defying them to mortal combat. as he was true to ancient friendships, he had acquired the habit of giving the warriors an occasional nod or word of recognition long after he had ceased to play with them. "shades of my ancestors!" exclaimed harry with sudden animation, gazing earnestly at the crusader on his right, "the very thing! i'll do it." that evening, after tea, he went to his father's study. "may i sit up in the dining-room to-night, father, till two in the morning?" "well, it will puzzle you to do that to-night, my son; but you may if you have a good reason." "my reason is that i have a problem--a very curious problem--to work out, and as i positively shan't be able to sleep until i've done it, i may just as well sit up as not." "do as you please, harry; i shall probably be up till that hour myself-- if not later--for unexpected calls on my time have prevented the preparation of a sermon about which i have had much anxious thought of late." "indeed, father!" remarked the son, in a sympathetic tone, on observing that the reverend theophilus passed his hand somewhat wearily over his brow. "what may be your text?" "`be gentle, showing meekness to all men,'" answered the worthy man, with an abstracted faraway look, as if he were wrestling in anticipation with the seventh head. "well, good-night, father, and please don't think it necessary to come in upon me to see how i am getting on. i never can work out a difficult problem if there is a chance of interruption." "all right, my son--good-night." "h'm," thought harry, as he returned to the dining-room in a meditative mood; "i am afraid, daddy, that you'll find it hard to be gentle to _some_ men to-night! however, we shall see." ringing the bell, he stood with his back to the fire, gazing at the ceiling. the summons was answered by the gardener, who also performed the functions of footman and man-of-all-work at the parsonage. "simon, i am going out, and may not be home till late. i want either you or robin to sit up for me." "very well, sir." "and," continued the youth, with an air of offhand gravity, "i shall be obliged to sit up working well into the morning, so you may have a cup of strong coffee ready for me. wait until i ring for it--perhaps about two in the morning. i shall sit in the dining-room, but don't bring it until i ring. mind that, for i can't stand interruption--as you know." "yes, sir." simon knew his imperious young master too well to make any comment on his commands. he returned, therefore, to the kitchen, told the cook of the order he had received to sit up and take master harry's coffee to him when he should ring, and made arrangements with robin to sit up and help him to enliven his vigil with a game of draughts. having thus made his arrangements, harry stronghand went out to enjoy a walk. he was a tremendous walker--thought nothing of twenty or thirty miles, and rather preferred to walk at night than during the day, especially when moon and stars were shining. perhaps it was a dash of poetry in his nature that induced this preference. about midnight he returned, went straight to the dining-room, and, entering, shut the door, while simon retired to his own regions and resumed his game with robin. a small fire was burning in the dining-room grate, the flickering flames of which leaped up occasionally, illuminated the frowning ancestors on the walls, and gleamed on the armour of the ancient knight and the crusader. walking up to the latter, harry looked at him sternly; but as he looked, his mouth relaxed into a peculiar smile, and displayed his magnificent teeth as far back as the molars. then he went to the window, saw that the fastenings were right, and drew down the blinds. he did not think it needful to close the shutters, but he drew a thick heavy curtain across the opening of the bay-window, so as to shut it off effectually from the rest of the room. this curtain was so arranged that the iron sentinels were not covered by it, but were left in the room, as it were, to mount guard over the curtain. this done, the youth turned again to the crusader and mounted behind him on the low pedestal on which he stood. unfastening his chain-mail armour at the back, he opened him up, so to speak, and went in. the suit fitted him fairly well, for harry was a tall, strapping youth for his years, and when he looked out at the aperture of the headpiece and smiled grimly, he seemed by no means a degenerate warrior. returning to the fireplace, he sat down in an easy chair and buried himself in a favourite author. one o'clock struck. harry glanced up, nodded pleasantly, as if on familiar terms with time, and resumed his author. the timepiece chimed the quarters. this was convenient. it prevented anxious watchfulness. the half-hour chimed. harry did not move. then the three-quarters rang out in silvery tones. thereupon harry arose, shut up his author, blew out his light, drew back the heavy curtains, and, returning to the arm-chair sat down to listen in comparative darkness. the moon by that time had set and darkness profound had settled down upon that part of the universe. the embers in the grate were just sufficient to render objects in the room barely visible and ghost-like. presently there was the slightest imaginable sound near the bay-window. it might have been the crusader's ghost, but that was not likely, for at the moment something very like harry's ghost flitted across the room and entered into the warrior. again the sound was heard, more decidedly than before. it was followed by a sharp click as the inefficient catch was forced back. then the sash began to rise, softly, slowly--an eighth of an inch at a time. during this process harry remained invisible and inactive; paterfamilias in the study addressed himself to the sixth head of his discourse, and the gardener with his satellite hung in silent meditation over the draught-board in the kitchen. after the sash stopped rising, the centre blind was moved gently to one side, and the head of dick appeared with a furtive expression on the countenance. for a few seconds his eyes roved around without much apparent purpose; then, as they became accustomed to the dim light, a gleam of intelligence shot from them; the rugged head turned to one side; the coarse mouth turned still more to one side in its effort to address some one behind, and, in a whisper that would have been hoarse had it been loud enough, dick said-- "hall right, bill. we won't need matches. keep clear o' the statters in passin'." as he spoke, dick's hobnailed boot appeared, his corduroy leg followed, and next moment he stood in the room with a menacing look and attitude and a short thick bludgeon in his knuckly hand. bill quickly stood beside him. after another cautious look round, the two advanced with extreme care--each step so carefully taken that the hobnails fell like rose-leaves on the carpet. feeling that the "coast was clear," dick advanced with more confidence, until he stood between the ancient warriors, whose pedestals raised them considerably above his head. at that moment there was a sharp click, as of an iron hinge. dick's heart seemed to leap into his throat. before he could swallow it, the iron mace of the crusader descended with stunning violence on his crown. well was it for the misguided man that morning that he happened to have purchased a new and strong billycock the day before, else would that mace have sent him--as it had sent many a saracen of old--to his long home. the blow effectually spoilt the billycock, however, and stretched its owner insensible on the floor. the other burglar was too close behind his comrade to permit of a second blow being struck. the lively crusader, however, sprang upon him, threw his mailed arms round his neck, and held him fast. and now began a combat of wondrous ferocity and rare conditions. the combatants were unequally matched, for the man was huge and muscular, while the youth was undeveloped and slender, but what the latter lacked in brute force was counterbalanced by the weight of his armour, his youthful agility, and his indomitable pluck. by a deft movement of his legs he caused bill to come down on his back, and fell upon him with all his weight plus that of the crusader. annoyed at this, and desperately anxious to escape before the house should be alarmed, bill delivered a roundabout blow with his practised fist that ought to have driven in the skull of his opponent, but it only scarified the man's knuckles on the crusader's helmet. he tried another on the ribs, but the folds of chain-mail rendered that abortive. then the burglar essayed strangulation, but there again the folds of mail foiled him. during these unavailing efforts the unconscious dick came in for a few accidental raps and squeezes as he lay prone beside them. meanwhile, the crusader adopted the plan of masterly inactivity, by simply holding on tight and doing nothing. he did not shout for help, because, being bull-doggish in his nature, he preferred to fight in silent ferocity. exasperated as well as worn by this method, bill became reckless, and made several wild plunges to regain his feet. he did not succeed, but he managed to come against the pedestal of the knight in mail with great violence. the iron warrior lost his balance, toppled over, and came down on the combatants with a hideous crash, suggestive of coal-scuttles and fire-irons. sleep, sermons, and draughts could no longer enchain! mrs stronghand awoke, buried her startled head in the bed-clothes, and quaked. emmie sprang out of bed and huddled on her clothes, under the impression that fire-engines were at work. the reverend theophilus leaped up, seized the study poker and a lamp, and rushed towards the dining-room. overturning the draught-board, simon grasped a rolling-pin, robin the tongs, and both made for the same place. they all collided at the door, burst it open, and advanced to the scene of war. it was a strange scene! bill and the crusader, still struggling, were giving the remains of the other knight a lively time of it, and dick, just beginning to recover, was sitting with a dazed look in a sea of iron debris. "that's right; hit him hard, father!" cried harry, trying to look round. "no, don't, sir," cried the burglar; "i gives in." "let my son--let the crusa--let _him_ go, then," said the reverend gentleman, raising his poker. "i can't, sir, 'cause he won't let _me_ go." "all right, i'll let you go now," said harry, unclasping his arms and rising with a long-drawn sigh. "now you. come to the light and let's have a look at you." so saying, the lad thrust his mailed hand into the burglar's neckerchief, and assisted by the reverend theophilus, led his captive to the light which had been put on the table. the gardener and robin did the same with dick. for one moment it seemed as if the two men meditated a rush for freedom, for they both glanced at the still open window, but the stalwart simon with the rolling-pin and the sturdy robin with the tongs stood between them and that mode of exit, while the crusader with his mace and huge mr stronghand with the study poker stood on either side of them. they thought better of it. "bring two chairs here," said the clergyman, in a gentle yet decided tone. robin and harry obeyed--the latter wondering what "the governor was going to be up to." "sit down," said the clergyman, quietly and with much solemnity. the burglars humbly obeyed. "now, my men, i am going to preach you a sermon." "that's right, father," interrupted harry, in gleeful surprise. "give it 'em hot. don't spare them. put plenty of brimstone into it." but, to harry's intense disgust, his father put no brimstone into it at all. on the contrary, without availing himself of heads or subdivisions, he pointed out in a few plain words the evil of their course, and the only method of escaping from that evil. then he told them that penal servitude for many years was their due according to the law of the land. "now," said he, in conclusion, "you are both of you young and strong men who may yet do good service and honest work in the land. i have no desire to ruin your lives. penal servitude might do so. forgiveness may save you--therefore i forgive you! there is the open window. you are at liberty to go." the burglars had been gazing at their reprover with wide-open eyes. they now turned and gazed at each other with half-open mouths; then they again turned to the clergyman as if in doubt, but with a benignant smile he again pointed to the open window. they rose like men in a dream, went softly across the room, stepped humbly out, and melted into darkness. the parson's conduct may not have been in accordance with law, but it was eminently successful, for it is recorded that those burglars laid that sermon seriously to heart--at all events, they never again broke into that parsonage, and never again was there occasion for harry to call in the services of the ancient knight or the crusader. chapter eight. jim greely, the north sea skipper. when nellie sumner married james greely--the strapping skipper of a yarmouth fishing-smack--there was not a prettier girl in all the town, at least so said, or thought, most of the men and many of the women who dwelt near her. of course there were differences of opinion on the point, but there was no doubt whatever about it in the mind of james greely, who was overwhelmed with astonishment, as well as joy, at what he styled his "luck in catching such a splendid wife." and there was good ground for his strong feeling, for nellie was neat, tidy, and good-humoured, as well as good-looking, and she made jim's home as neat and tidy as herself. "there's always sunshine inside o' my house," said greely to his mates once, "no matter what sort o' weather there may be outside." ere long a squall struck that house--a squall that moved the feelings of our fisherman more deeply than the fiercest gale he had ever faced on the wild north sea, for it was the squall of a juvenile jim! from that date the fisherman was wont to remark, with a quiet smile of satisfaction, that he had got moonlight now, as well as sunshine, in the yarmouth home. the only matter that distressed the family at first was that the father saw so little of his lightsome home; for, his calling being that of a deep-sea smacksman, or trawler, by far the greater part of our fisherman's rugged life was spent on the restless ocean. two months at sea and eight days ashore was the unvarying routine of jim's life, summer and winter, all the year round. that is to say, about fifty days on shore out of the year, and three hundred and fifteen days on what the cockney greengrocer living next door to jim styled the "'owlin' deep." and, truly, the greengrocer was not far wrong, for the wild north sea does a good deal of howling, off and on, during the year, to say nothing of whistling and shrieking and other boisterous practices when the winter gales are high. but a cloud began to descend, very gradually at first, on james greely's dwelling, for a demon--a very familiar one on the north sea--had been twining his arms for a considerable time round the stalwart fisherman. at the time of jim's marriage those mission-ships of the dutch--and, we may add, of the devil--named _copers_, or floating grog-shops, were plying their deadly traffic in strong drink full swing among the trawlers of the north sea. through god's blessing the mission-ships of the cross have now nearly driven the _copers_ off the sea, but at the time we write of the dutchmen had it all their own way, and many a splendid man, whom toil, cold, hardship, and fierce conflict with the elements could not subdue, was laid low by the poisonous spirits of the _coper_. greely went to the _copers_ at first to buy tobacco, but, being a hearty, sociable fellow, he had no objection to take an occasional friendly dram. gradually, imperceptibly, he became enslaved. he did not give way at once. he was too much of a man for that. many a deadly battle had he with the demon--known only to himself and god-- but as he fought in his own strength, of course he failed; failed again and again, until he finally gave way to despair. poor nellie was quick to note the change, and tried, with a brave heart at first but a sinking heart at last, to save him, but without success. the eight days which used to be spent in the sunny home came at last to be spent in the green dragon public-house; and in course of time nellie was taught by bitter experience that if her husband, on his periodical return from the sea, went straight from the smack to the public-house, it was little that she would see of him during his spell on shore. even curly-headed juvenile jimmie--his father's pride--ceased to overcome the counter-attraction of strong drink. is it to be wondered at that nellie lost some of her old characteristics--that, the wages being spent on drink, she found it hard to provide the mere necessaries of life for herself and her boy, and that she finally gave up the struggle to keep either person or house as neat and orderly as of yore, while a haggard look and lines of care began to spoil the beauty of her countenance? or is it a matter for surprise that her temper began to give way under the strain? "you are ruining yourself and killing me," said the sorely-tried wife one evening--the last evening of a spell on shore--as jim staggered into the once sunny home to bid his wife good-bye. it was the first time that nellie had spoken roughly to him. he made no answer at first. he was angry. the green dragon had begun to demoralise him, and the reproof which ought to have melted only hardened him. "the last of the coals are gone," continued the wife with bitterness in her tone, "and there's scarcely enough of bread in the house for a good supper to jimmie. you should be ashamed of yourself, jim." a glare of drunken anger shot fiercely from the fisherman's eyes. no word did he utter. turning on his heel, he strode out of the house and shut the door after him with cannon-shot violence. "o jim--stop jim!" burst from timid nellie. "i'll never--" she ceased abruptly, for the terrified jimmie was clinging to her skirts, and her husband was beyond the reach of her voice. falling on her knees, she prayed to god passionately for pardon. it was their first quarrel. she ended by throwing herself on her bed and bursting into a fit of sobbing that not only horrified but astounded little jim. to see his mother sobbing wildly while he was quiet and grave was a complete inversion of all his former experiences. as if to carry out the spirit of the situation, he proceeded to act the part of comforter by stroking his mother's brown hair with his fat little hand until the burst of grief subsided. "dare, you's dood now, muzzer. tiss me!" he said. nellie flung her arms round the child and kissed him fervently. meanwhile james greely's smack, the _dolphin_, was running down the yare before a stiff breeze, and jim himself had commenced the most momentous, and, in one sense, disastrous voyage of his life. as he stood at the tiller, guiding his vessel with consummate skill out into the darkening waters, his heart felt like lead. he would have given all he possessed to recall the past hour, to have once again the opportunity of bidding nellie good-bye as he had been wont to do in the days that were gone. but it was too late. wishes and repentance, he knew, avail nothing to undo a deed that is done. jim toiled with that branch of the north sea fleets which is named the "short blue." it was trawling at a part of the north sea called "botney gut" at that time, but our fisherman had been told that it was fishing at another part named the "silverpits." it blew hard from the nor'west, with much snow, so that jim took a long time to reach his destination. but no "short blue" fleet was to be seen at the silverpits. to the eyes of ordinary men the north sea is a uniform expanse of water, calm or raging as the case may be. not so to the deep-sea trawler. jim's intimate knowledge of localities, his sounding-lead and the nature of the bottom, etcetera, enabled him at any time to make for, and surely find, any of the submarine banks. but fleets, though distinguished by a name, have no "local habitation." they may be on the "dogger bank" to-day, on the "swarte bank" or the "great silverpits" to-morrow. with hundreds of miles of open sea around, and neither milestone nor finger-post to direct, a lost fleet is not unlike a lost needle in a haystack. fortunately jim discovered a brother smacksman looking, like himself, for his own fleet. being to windward the brother ran down to him. "what cheer o! have 'ee seen anything o' the red cross fleet?" roared the skipper, with the power of a brazen trumpet. "no," shouted jim, in similar tones. "i'm lookin' for the short blue." "i passed it yesterday, bearin' away for botney gut." "'bout ship" went jim, and away with a stiff breeze on his quarter. he soon found the fleet--a crowd of smacks, all heading in the same direction, with their huge trawling nets down and bending over before what was styled a good "fishing-breeze." it requires a stiff breeze to haul a heavy net, with its forty or fifty feet beam and other gear, over the rough bottom of the north sea. with a slight breeze and the net down a smack would be simply anchored by the stern to her own gear. down went jim's net, and, like a well-drilled fisherman, he fell into line. it was a rough grey day with a little snow falling, which whitened all the ropes and covered the decks with slush. greely's crew had become demoralised, like their skipper. there were five men and a fair-haired boy. all could drink and swear except the boy. charlie was the only son of his mother, and she was a good woman, besides being a widow. charlie was the smack's cook. "grub's ready," cried the boy, putting his head up the hatchway after the gear was down. he did not name the meal. smacksmen have a way of taking food irregularly at all or any hours, when circumstances permit, and are easy about the name so long as they get it, and plenty of it. a breakfast at mid-day after a night of hardest toil might be regarded indifferently as a luncheon or an early dinner. black whistler, the mate, who stood at the helm, pronounced a curse upon the weather by way of reply to charlie's summons. "you should rather bless the ladies on shore that sent you them wursted mittens an' 'elmet, you ungrateful dog," returned the boy with a broad grin, for he and whistler were on familiar terms. the man growled something inaudible, while his mates went below to feed. each north sea trawling fleet acts unitedly under an "admiral." it was early morning when the signal was given by rocket to haul up the nets. between two and three hours at the capstan--slow, heavy toil, with every muscle strained to the utmost--was the result of the admiral's order. bitter cold; driving snow; cutting flashes of salt spray, and dark as erebus save for the light of a lantern lashed to the mast. tramp, tramp, tramp, the seemingly everlasting round went on, with the clank of heavy sea-boots and the rustle of hard oil-skins, and the sound of labouring breath as accompaniment; while the endless cable came slowly up from the "vasty deep." but everything comes to an end, even on the north sea! at last the great beam appears and is secured. with a sigh of relief the capstan bars are thrown down, and the men vary their toil by clawing up the net with scarred and benumbed fingers. it is heavy work, causes much heaving and gasping, and at times seems almost too much for all hands to manage. again black whistler pronounces a malediction on things in general, and is mockingly reminded by the boy-cook that he ought to bless the people as sends him wursted cuffs to save his wrists from sea-blisters. "seems to me we've got a hold of a bit o' noah's ark," growled one of the hands, as something black and big begins to appear. he is partially right, for a bit of an old wreck is found to have been captured with a ton or so of fish. when this is disengaged the net comes in more easily, and the fish are dropped like a silver cataract on the wet deck. one might imagine that there was rest for the fishermen now. far from it. the fish had to be "cleaned"--i.e. gutted and the superfluous portions cut off and packed in boxes for the london market. the grey light of a bleak winter morning dawned before the work was finished. during the operation the third hand, lively dick, ran a fish-bone deeply into his hand, and laid a foundation for future trouble. it was noon before the trunks, or fish-boxes, were packed. then the little boat had to be launched over the side, loaded with fish, and ferried to one of the steamers which ply daily and regularly between billingsgate and the fleets. three men jumped into it and pushed off--a mere cockle-shell on a heaving flood, now dancing on a wave-crest, now lost to view in a water-valley. "what's that?" said whistler, as they pulled towards the steamer. "looks bigger than the or'nary mission-ships." "why, that must be the noo hospital-ship, the _queen victoria_," answered lively dick, glancing over his shoulder at a large vessel, smack-rigged, which loomed up through the haze to leeward. they had no time for further remark, for the great side of the steamer was by that time frowning over them. it was dangerous work they had to do. the steamer rolled heavily in the rough sea. the boat, among a dozen other boats, was soon attached to her by a strong rope. men had to be athletes and acrobats in order to pass their fish-boxes from the leaping and plunging boats to the deck of the rolling steamer. the shouting and noise and bumping were tremendous. an awkward heave occasionally sent a box into the sea amid oaths and laughter. jim's cargo was put safely on board, and the boat was about to cast off when a heavier lurch than usual caused black whistler to stagger. to save himself from plunging overboard he laid both hands on the gunwale of the boat--a dangerous thing to do at any time when alongside of a vessel. before he could recover himself the boat went crashing against the steamer's iron side and the fisherman's hands were crushed. he fell back into the boat almost fainting with agony. no cry escaped him, however. lively dick saw the blood streaming, and while his mate shoved off the boat he wrapped a piece of canvas in a rough-and-ready fashion round the quivering hands. "i'm done for this trip," groaned whistler, "for this means go ashore-- weeks in hospital--wages stopped, and wife and chicks starving." "never a bit, mate," said dick; "didn't you know that the noo mission-ship does hospital work afloat and that they'll keep you aboard of her, and lend us one o' their hands till you're fit for work again?" whether poor whistler believed, or understood, or was comforted by this we cannot say, for he made no reply and appeared to be almost overcome with pain. on reaching the _dolphin_ a signal of distress was made to the floating hospital, which at once bore down to them. the injured man was transferred to it, and there, in the pleasant airy cabin, black whistler made acquaintance with men who were anxious to cure his soul as well as his body. up to this time he had resolutely declined to visit the mission-ships, but now, when a skilled medical man tenderly dressed his terrible wounds and a sympathetic skipper led him to a berth and supplied him with some warm coffee, telling him that he would be free to remain there without charge as long as was needed, and that meanwhile one of the mission hands would take his place in the _dolphin_ till he was able to resume work, his opinion of mission-ships and work underwent modification, and he began to think that mission crews were not such a bad lot after all. meanwhile skipper greely, leaving his man in the _queen victoria_, returned to his smack accompanied by george king, the new hand. king's position was by no means an enviable one, for he found himself thus suddenly in the midst of a set of men who had no sympathy with him in religious matters, and whose ordinary habits and conversation rendered remonstrance almost unavoidable. unwilling to render himself obnoxious at first, the man resolved to try the effect of music on his new shipmates. he happened to possess a beautiful tenor voice, and the first night--a calm bright one--while taking his turn at the helm, he sang in a soft sweet voice one after another of those hymns which mr sankey has rendered so popular. he began with "come to the saviour, make no delay," and the first effect on his mates, most of whom were below, was to arouse a feeling of contempt. but they could not resist the sweetness of the voice. in a few minutes they were perfectly silent, and listening with a species of fascination--each being wafted, both by words and music, to scenes on shore and to times when his spirit had not been so demoralised by sin. greely, in particular, was transported back to the sunny home in yarmouth, and to the days of first-love, before the _demon_ had gained the mastery and clouded the sunshine. as the night wore on, a fog settled down over the north sea, and the smacks of the short blue fleet began to blow their fog-horns, while the crews became more on the alert and kept a bright look-out. suddenly, and without warning, a dull beating sound was heard by the look-out on the _dolphin_. next moment a dark object like a phantom ship loomed out of the fog, and a wild cry arose as the men saw the bows of a huge ocean steamer coming apparently straight at them. the smack was absolutely helpless, without steering way. for an instant there was shouting on board the steamer, and she fell off slightly as she rushed into the small circle of the _dolphin's_ light. a tremendous crash followed, but the change of direction had been sufficient to prevent a fatal collision. another moment and the great steamer was gone, while the little smack rocked violently from the blow as well as from the swell left in the steamer's wake. this was but the beginning of a night of disaster. skipper greely and his men had scarcely recovered from the surprise of this incident when the fog lifted and quickly cleared away, revealing the short blue fleet floating all round with flapping sails, but it was observed also that a very dark cloud rested on the north-western horizon. soon a stiffish breeze sprang up, and the scattered fleet drew together, lay on the same tack, and followed the lead of their admiral, to whom they looked for the signal to shoot the trawls. but instead of giving this order the admiral signalled to "lay-to." being disgusted as well as surprised that their leader was not going to fish, jim greely, being also exhausted by long watching, went below and turned in to have a sleep. he had not been long asleep when fair-haired charlie came to tell him that lively dick, who acted as mate in whistler's absence, wanted him on deck. he ran up at once. "looks like dirty weather, skipper," said dick, pointing to windward. "right you are, lad," said jim, and called all hands to close-reef. this being done and everything made snug, the skipper again turned in, with orders to call him if things should get worse. soon after, dick, who was at the helm, saw a squall bearing down on them, but did not think it worth while to call the skipper. it broke on them with a clap like thunder, but the good _dolphin_ stood the shock well, and dick was congratulating himself when he saw a sea coming towards them, but sufficiently astern, he thought, to clear them. he was wrong. it broke aboard, right into the mainsail, cleared the deck, and hove the smack on her beam-ends. this effectually aroused the skipper, who made desperate but at first ineffectual efforts to get out of his berth, for the water, which poured down the hatchway, washed gear, tackles, turpentine-tins, paint-pots, and nearly everything moveable from the iron locker on the weather-side down to leeward, and blocked up the openings. making another effort he cleared all this away, and sprang out of the berth, which was half full of water. pitchy darkness enshrouded him, for the water had put out the lights as well as the fire. just then the vessel righted a little. "are you all right on deck?" shouted jim, as he scrambled up the hatchway. "all right, as far as i can see," answered dick. "hold on, i've a bottle o' matches in my bunk," cried the skipper, returning to the flooded cabin. fortunately the matches were dry; a light was struck, and a candle and lamp lighted. the scene revealed was not re-assuring. the water in the cabin was knee-deep. a flare, made of a woollen scarf soaked in paraffin, was lighted on deck, and showed that the mainsail had been split, the boat hopelessly damaged, and part of the lee bulwarks broken. the mast also was leaning aft, the forestay having been carried away. a few minutes later lively dick went tumbling down into the cabin all of a heap, to avoid the mast as it went crashing over the side in such a way as to prevent the use of the pumps, and carrying the mizzenmast along with it. "go to work with buckets, boys, or she'll sink," shouted the skipper, himself setting the example, for the ballast had shifted and the danger was great. meanwhile george king seized an axe and cut away the rigging that held on to the wrecked masts, and fair-haired charlie laboured like a hero to clear the pumps. the rays of the cabin lights did not reach the deck, so that much of the work had to be done in what may be styled darkness visible, while the little vessel kicked about like a wild thing in the raging sea, and the torn canvas flapped with a horrible noise. pitiless wind, laden with sleet, howled over them as if thirsting impatiently for the fishermen's lives. at last they succeeded in clearing the pumps, and worked them with untiring energy for hours, but could not tell how many, for the thick end of a marline-spike had been driven through the clock-face and stopped it. it was still dark when they managed to rig up a jury-mast on the stump of the old one and hoist a shred of sail. george king was ordered to the tiller. as he passed greely he said in a cheerful voice, "trust in the lord, skipper, he can bring us out o' worse than this." it might have been half an hour later when another sea swept the deck. jim took shelter under the stump of the mast and held on for dear life. charlie got inside the coil of the derrick-fall and so was saved, while the others dived into the cabin. when that sea had passed they found no one at the tiller. poor king had been washed overboard. nothing whatever could be done for him, even if he had been seen, but the greedy sea had swallowed him, and he was taken to swell with his tuneful voice the company of those who sing on high the praises of redeeming love. the sea which swept him into eternity also carried away the jury-mast, and as the smack was now a mere wreck, liable to drift on shore if the gale should continue long, jim let down an anchor, after removing its stock so that it might drag on the bottom and retard the drifting while it kept the vessel's head to the sea. a watch was then set, and the rest of the crew went below to wait and wish for daybreak! it was a dreary vigil under appalling circumstances, for although the smack had not actually sprung a leak there was always the danger of another sea overwhelming and altogether sinking her. her crew sat there for hours utterly helpless and literally facing death. fortunately their matches had escaped the water, so that they were able to kindle a fire in the stove and obtain a little warmth as well as make a pot of tea and eat some of their sea-soaked biscuit. it is wonderful how man can accommodate himself to circumstances. no sooner had the crew in this wreck felt the stimulating warmth of the hot tea than they began to spin yarns! not indeed of a fanciful kind--they were too much solemnised for that--but yarns of their experience of gales in former times. "it minds me o' this wery night last year," said lively dick, endeavouring to light his damp pipe. "i was mate o' the _beauty_ at the time. we was workin' wi' the short blues on the dogger, when a tremendous squall struck us, an' it began to snow that thick we could scarce see the end o' the jib-boom. well, the gale came on in real arnest before long, so we had to lay-to all that night. when it came day we got some sail set and i went below to have a hot pot o' tea when the skipper suddenly sang out `jump up here, dick!' an' i did jump up, double quick, to find that we was a'most runnin' slap into a dismasted craft. we shoved the tiller hard a-starboard and swung round as if we was on a swivel, goin' crash through the rackage alongside an' shavin' her by a hair. we could just see through the snow one of her hands choppin' away at the riggin', and made out that her name was the _henry and thomas_." "an' did ye see nothin' more of 'er arter that?" asked the boy charlie with an eager look. "nothin' more. she was never heard of arter that mornin'." while the men were thus talking, the watch on deck shouted that one of the mission-ships was close alongside. every one ran on deck to hail her, for they stood much in need of assistance, two of their water-casks having been stove in and everything in the hold turned topsy-turvy-- beef, potatoes, flour, all mixed up in horrible confusion. just then another sea came on board, and the crew had to dive again to the cabin for safety. that sea carried away the boat and the rest of the starboard bulwarks, besides starting a plank, and letting the water in at a rate which the pumps could not keep down. quickly the mission-ship loomed up out of the grey snow-cloud and ran past. "you'll want help!" shouted the mission skipper. "ay, we do," shouted jim greely in reply. "we're sinkin', and our boat's gone." an arm thrown up indicated that the words were understood. a few minutes later and the crew of the _dolphin_ saw the mission crew launching their little boat. with, such a sea running the venture was perilous in the extreme, but when the mission skipper said "who'll go?" he had no lack of volunteers. the boat was manned at once, and the crew of the _dolphin_ were rescued a few minutes before the _dolphin_ herself went head-foremost to the bottom. just as they got safely on deck the mission-ship herself shipped a heavy sea, which washed several of the men into the lee scuppers. they jumped up immediately--some with "thank god" on their lips, others with a laugh--but james greely did not rise. he lay stunned and rolling about in the water. it was found on raising him that his right leg was broken at the thigh. when jim recovered consciousness he did not complain. he was a man of stern mould, and neither groaned nor spoke; but he was not the less impressed with the kindness and apparent skill with which the mission skipper treated him. having received a certain amount of surgical training, the skipper-- although unlearned and a fisherman--knew well how to put the leg in splints and otherwise to treat the patient. "it's pretty bad, i fear," he said soothingly, observing that jim's lips were compressed, and that beads of perspiration were standing on his brow. jim did not reply, but smiled grimly and nodded, for the rolling of the ship caused him increasing agony as the injured parts began to inflame. "i'm not very good at this sort o' work," said the mission skipper modestly, "but thank god the new hospital-ship is cruisin' wi' the short blue just now. i saw her only yesterday, so we'll put you aboard of her and there you'll find a reg'lar shore-goin' surgeon, up to everything, and with all the gimcracks and arrangements of a reg'lar shore-goin' hospital. they've got a new contrivance too--a sort o' patent stretcher, invented by a mr dark o' the head office in london--which'll take you out o' the boat into the ship without movin' a bone or muscle, so keep your mind easy, skipper, for you'll be aboard the _queen victoria_ before many hours go by." poor greely appreciated the statement about the stretcher more than all the rest that was said, for he was keenly alive to the difficulty of passing a broken-boned man out of a little boat into a smack or steamer in a heavy sea, having often had to do it. the mission skipper was right, for early the next day jim was strapped to a wonderful frame and passed into the hospital-ship without shake or shock, and his comrades were retained in the mission smack until they could be sent on shore. greely and his men learned many lessons which they never afterwards forgot on board of the _queen victoria_--the foundation lesson being that they were lost sinners and that jesus christ came "to seek and to save the lost." slowly, and at first unwillingly, skipper greely took the great truths in. several weeks passed, and he began to move about with some of his wonted energy. much to his surprise he found himself one morning signing the temperance pledge-books, persuaded thereto by the skipper of the _queen victoria_. still more to his surprise he found himself one sunday afternoon listening, with unwonted tears in his eyes, to some of his mates as they told their spiritual experiences to an assembly of some hundred or so of weather-beaten fishermen. before quitting that vessel he discovered that he possessed a powerful and tuneful voice, admirably adapted for singing hymns, and that he was capable of publicly stating the fact that he was an unworthy sinner saved by grace. when at last he returned ashore and unexpectedly entered the yarmouth home, nellie could scarcely believe her senses, so great was the change. "jim!" she cried, with opening eyes and beating heart, "you're like your old self again." "thank god," said jim, clasping her in his strong arms. but he could say no more for some time. then he turned suddenly on curly-headed jimmie, who had been fiercely embracing one of his enormous sea-boots, and began an incoherent conversation and a riotous romp with that juvenile fisherman. a brighter sunshine than had ever been there before enlightened that yarmouth home, for god had entered it and the hearts of its occupants. example is well-known to be infectious. in course of time a number of brother fishermen began to think as jim greely thought and feel as he felt. his house also became the centre, or headquarters, of an informal association got up for the purpose of introducing warmth and sunshine into poor homes in all weathers, and there were frequently such large meetings of the members of that association that it taxed nellie's ingenuity to supply seats and stow them all away. she managed it, however; for, as jim was wont to remark, "nellie had a powerful intellec' for her size." among the frequenters of this yarmouth home were several of the men who had once been staunch supporters of the green dragon, and of these the most enthusiastic, perhaps, if not the most noisy, were black whistler, lively dick, and fair-haired charlie. chapter nine. a northern waif. if a waif is a lost wanderer, then little poosk was a decided waif for he had gone very much astray indeed in the north american backwoods. it was a serious matter for an indian child of six years of age to become a waif in the dead of winter, with four feet of snow covering the entire wilderness, and the thermometer far below zero. yes, little poosk was lost. his indian mother, when she tied up his little head in a fur cap with ear-pieces, had said to him that morning-- and it was a new year's day morning--"poosk, you go straight to the mission-house. the feast will be a very grand one--oh! _such_ a good one! better than the feast we have when the geese and ducks come back in spring. go straight; don't wander; follow in your father's tracks, and you can't go wrong." ah! what a compliment to father would have been implied in these words had the mother meant his moral tracks. but she did not: she referred to his snow-shoe tracks, which would serve as a sure guide to the mission-house, if closely followed. poosk had promised to obey orders, of course, as readily as if he had been a civilised white boy, and with equal readiness had forgotten his promise when the first temptation came. that temptation had come in the form of a wood-partridge, in chase of which, with the spirit of a true son of the forest, poosk had bolted, and soon left his father's tracks far behind him. thus it came to pass that in the pursuit of game, our little savage became a "waif and stray." had he been older, he would doubtless have returned on his own little track to the spot where he had left that of his father; but, being so young, he fancied that he could reach it by bending round towards it as he advanced. poosk was uncommonly small for his age--hence his name, which, in the cree language, means _half_. he came at the tail-end of a very large family. being remarkably small from the first, he was regarded as the extreme tip of that tail. his father styled him _half_ a child--poosk. but his lack of size was counterbalanced by great physical activity and sharp intelligence. wrapped in his warm deerskin coat, which was lined with flannel, and edged with fur, and secured with a scarlet belt, with his little legs in ornamented leggings, his little feet in new moccasins, and shod with little snowshoes not more than twenty-four inches long by eight broad--his father's being five-feet by fifteen inches,--and his little hands in leather mittens of the bag-and-thumb order, poosk went over the snow at an amazing rate for his size, but failed to rejoin his father's track. suddenly he stopped, and a pucker on his brow betrayed anxiety. compressing his little lips, he looked round him with an expression of serious determination in his large brown eyes. was he not in his native wilds? was he not the son of a noted brave? was _he_ going to submit to the disgrace of losing his way; and, what was much worse, losing his feast? certainly not! with stern resolve on every lineament of his infantile visage he changed his direction, and pushed on. we need scarcely add that he soon stopped again; resolved and re-resolved to succeed, and changed his direction again and again till he became utterly bewildered, and, finally, sitting down on the trunk of a fallen tree, shut his eyes, opened his little mouth, and howled. it was sad, but it was natural that at so early a period of life the stoicism of the savage should be overcome by the weakness of the child. finding after a while that howling resulted in nothing but noise, poosk suddenly shut his mouth, and opened his eyes. there seemed to be some intimate connection between the two operations. perhaps there was. the opening of the eyes went on to the uttermost, and then became a fixed glare, for, right in front of him sat a white rabbit on its hind legs, and, from its expression, evidently filled with astonishment equal to his own. the spirit of the hunter arose, and that of the child vanished, as little poosk sprang up and gave chase. of course the rabbit "sloped," and in a few minutes both pursued and pursuer were lost in the depths of the snow-encumbered forest. on a point of rocks which jutted out into a frozen lake, stood a small church with a small spire, small porch, and diminutive windows. the pastor of that church dwelt close to it in a wooden house or log cabin, which possessed only one window and a door. a much larger hut alongside of it served as a school-house and meeting-hall. in this little building the man of god, assisted by a red indian convert, taught the red men of the wilderness the way of life through jesus christ, besides giving them a little elementary and industrial education suited to their peculiar circumstances; and here, on the day of which we write, he had prepared the sumptuous feast to which reference has just been made. the pastor's wife and daughter had prepared it. there were venison pies and ptarmigan pasties; there were roasts of fowls, and roasts of rabbits, and stews of many things which we will not venture to describe, besides puddings of meat, and puddings of rice, and puddings of plums; also tea and coffee to wash it all down. there was no strong drink. strong health and appetite were deemed sufficient to give zest to the proceedings. the company was remarkably savage to look at, but wonderfully civilised in conduct, for the influence of christian love was there, and that influence is the same everywhere. leathern garments clothed the men; curtailed petticoats adorned the women; both wore leggings and moccasins. the boys and girls were similarly costumed, and all had brilliant teeth, brown faces, glittering eyes, lank black hair, and a look of eager expectancy. the pastor went to the head of the table, and silence ensued while he briefly asked god's blessing on the feast. then, when expectation had reached its utmost point, there was a murmur. where was the smallest mite of all the guests? nobody knew. poosk's mother said she had sent him off hours ago, and had thought that he must be there. poosk's father--a very tall man, with remarkably long legs,--hearing this, crossed the room in three strides, put on his five-feet by fifteen-inch snow-shoes and went off into the forest at express speed. anxiety is not an easily-roused condition in the north american indian. the feast began, despite the absence of our waif; and the waif's mother set to work with undiminished appetite. meanwhile the waif himself went farther and farther astray--swayed alternately by the spirit of the stoic and the spirit of the little child. but little poosk was made of sterling stuff, and the two spirits had a hard battle in him for the mastery that wintry afternoon. his chase of the rabbit was brought to an abrupt conclusion by a twig which caught one of his snow-shoes, tripped him up, and sent him headlong into the snow. when snow averages four feet in depth it affords great scope for ineffectual floundering. the snow-shoes kept his feet near the surface, and the depth prevented his little arms from reaching solid ground. when at last he recovered his perpendicular, his hair, eyes, nose, ears, sleeves, and mittens were stuffed with snow; and the child-spirit began to whimper, but the stoic sprang on him and quickly crushed him down. drawing his little body up with a look of determination, and wiping away the tears which had already begun to freeze on his eyelashes, our little hero stepped out more vigorously than ever, in the full belief that every yard carried him nearer home, though in reality he was straying farther and farther from his father's track. well was it for little poosk that day that his hope of reaching home did not depend on his own feeble efforts. already the father was traversing the wilderness in search of his lost lamb, though the lamb knew it not. but poosk's disasters were not yet over. although brave at heart and, for his years, sturdy of frame, he could not withstand the tremendous cold peculiar to those regions of ice and snow; and ere long the fatal lethargy that is often induced by extreme frost began to tell. the first symptom was that poosk ceased to feel the cold as much as he had felt it some time before. then a drowsy sensation crept over him, and he looked about for a convenient spot on which to sit down and rest. alas for the little savage if he had given way at that time! fortunately a small precipice was close in front of him, its upper edge concealed by wreaths of snow. he fell over it, turning a somersault as he went down, and alighted safely in a snow-bed at the bottom. the shock revived him, but it also quelled the stoic in his breast. rising with difficulty, he wrinkled up his brown visage, and once again took to howling. half an hour later his father, steadily following up the little track in the snow, reached the spot and heard the howls. a smile lit up his swarthy features, and there was a gleam of satisfaction in his black eyes as he descended to the spot where the child stood. sudden calm after a storm followed the shutting of poosk's mouth and the opening of his eyes. another moment, and his father had him in his strong arms, turned him upside down, felt him over quietly, shook him a little, ascertained that no bones were broken, put him on his broad shoulders, and carried him straight back to the mission hall, where the feasters were in full swing--having apparently quite forgotten the little "waif and stray." north american indians, as is well-known, are not demonstrative. there was no shout of joy when the lost one appeared. even his mother took no further notice of him than to make room for him on the form beside her. she was a practical mother. instead of fondling him she proceeded to stuff him, which she was by that time at leisure to do, having just finished stuffing herself. the father, stalking sedately to a seat at another table, proceeded to make up for lost time. he was marvellously successful in his efforts. he was one of those indian braves who are equal to any emergency. although near the end of the feast and with only _debris_ left to manipulate, he managed to refresh himself to his entire satisfaction before the tables were cleared. the feast of reason which followed was marked by one outstanding and important failure. the pastor had trained the indian boys and girls of his school to sing several hymns, and repeat several pieces in prose and verse. our waif, besides being the smallest boy, possessed the sweetest voice in the school. he was down on the programme for a hymn--a solo. having fallen sound asleep after being stuffed, it was found difficult to awake him when his turn came. by dint of shaking, however, his mother roused him up and set him on his legs on a table, where he was steadied a little by the pastor's wife, and gently bid to begin, by the pastor's daughter. poosk was very fond of the pastor's daughter. he would have done anything for her. he opened his large eyes, from which a sleepy gleam of intelligence flashed. he opened his little mouth, from which rolled the sweetest of little voices. the indians, who had been purposely kept in ignorance of this musical treat, were ablaze with surprise and expectation; but the sound died away, the mouth remained open, and the eyes shut suddenly as poosk fell over like a ninepin, sound asleep, into the arms of the pastor's daughter. nothing more was to be got out of him that day. even the boisterous laugh which greeted his breakdown failed to rouse him; and finally our northern waif was carried home, and put to bed beside a splendid fire in a warm robe of rabbit skins. chapter ten. how to make the best of life: from a young man's standpoint. this world is full of niches that have to be filled, of paths that have to be trod, of work that has to be done. pouring continually into it there are millions of human beings who are capable of being fitted to fill those niches, to traverse those paths, and to do that work. i venture a step further and assert that every human being, without exception, who arrives at the years of maturity must, in the nature of things, have a particular niche and path and work appointed for him; and just in proportion as a man finds out his exact work, and walks in or strays from his peculiar path, will be the success of his life. he may miss his aim altogether, and his life turn out a failure, because of his self-will, or, perhaps, his mistaken notions; and there are few sights more depressing than that of a round young man rushing into a square hole, except that of a square young man trying to wriggle himself into a round hole. what the world wants is "the right man in the right place." what each man wants is to find his right place. but the fact that man may, and often does, make a wrong choice, that he may try to traverse the wrong path, to accomplish the wrong work, and do many things in the wrong way, is a clear proof that his course in life is not arbitrarily fixed, that he has been left to the freedom of his own will, and may therefore fall short of the _best_, though he may be fortunate enough to attain the good or the better. hence devolves upon every one the responsibility of putting and finding an answer to the question--how shall i make the best of life? and let me say here in passing that i venture to address young men on this subject, not because i conceive myself to be gifted with superior wisdom, but because, being an old man, i stand on the heights and vantage ground of experience, and looking back, can see the rocks and shoals and quicksands in life's ocean, which have damaged and well-nigh wrecked myself. i would not only try my hand as a pilot to guide, but as, in some sense, a buoy or beacon to warn from dangers that are not only unseen but unsuspected. every young man of ordinary common sense will at least aim at what he believes to be best in life, and the question will naturally arise--what _is_ best? if a youth's chief idea of felicity is to "have a good time;" to enjoy himself to the utmost; to cram as much of sport, fun, and adventure into his early manhood as possible, with a happy-go-lucky indifference as to the future, he is not yet in a frame of mind to consider our question at all. i feel disposed to say to him--in paraphrase--"be serious, man, or, if ye can't be serious, be as serious as ye can," while we consider a subject that is no trifling matter. what, then, _is_ best? i reply--so to live and work that we shall do the highest good of which we are capable to the world, and, in the doing thereof, achieve the highest possible happiness to ourselves, and to those with whom we are connected. in the end, to leave the world better than we found it. now, there is only one foundation on which such a life can be reared, and that foundation is god. to attempt the building on any other, or to neglect a foundation altogether, is to solicit and ensure disaster. but supposing, young man, that you agree with me in this; are fully alive to the importance of the question, and are desirous of obtaining all the light you can on it, then i would, with all the earnestness of which i am capable, urge you to begin on this sure foundation by asking god to guide you and open up your way. "ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find." "commit thy way unto the lord, and he will bring it to pass." without this beginning there is, there can be, no possibility of real success, no hope of reaching the best. with it there may still be partial mistake--owing to sin and liability to err-- but there can be no such thing as absolute failure. man's first prayer in all his plans of life should be--"lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" many people think that they have put up that petition and got no answer, when the answer is obviously before their eyes. it seems to me that god's answers are always indicative, and not very difficult to understand. an anxious father says--if he does not also pray--"what shall i train my boy to be?" god, through the medium of common sense, replies, watch your son, observe his tastes, and especially his powers, and train him accordingly. his capacities, whatever they are, were given to him by his maker for the express purpose of being developed. if you don't develop them, you neglect a clear indication, unless, indeed, it be held that men were made in some haphazard way for no definite purpose at all; but this would be equivalent to making out the creator to be less reasonable than most of his own creatures! if a lad has a strong liking for some particular sort of work or pursuit, and displays great aptitude for it, there is no need of an audible voice to tell what should be his path in life. contrariwise, strong dislike, coupled with incapacity, indicates the path to be avoided with equal precision. of course, liking and disliking are not a sufficient indication, for both may be based upon partial ignorance. the sea, as a profession, is a case in point. how many thousands of lads have an intense liking for the idea of a sailor's life! but the liking is not for the sea; it is for some romantic notion of the sea; and the romancer's aptitude for a sea life must at first be taken for granted while his experience is _nil_. he dreams, probably, of majestic storms, or heavenly calms, of coral islands, and palm groves, and foreign lands and peoples. if very imaginative, he will indulge in malay pirates and wrecks, and lifeboats, and desert islands, on which he will always land safely, and commence a second edition of robinson crusoe. but he will scarcely think, till bitter experience compels him, of very long watches in dirty unromantic weather, of holy-stoning the decks, scraping down the masts, and clearing out the coal-hole. happily for our navy and the merchant service there are plenty of lads who go through all this and stick to it, their love of the ocean is triumphant--but there are a few exceptions! on the other hand, liking and fitness may be discovered by experience. i know a man who, from childhood, took pleasure in construction and invention. at the age of nine he made a real steam engine which "could go" with steam, and which was small enough to be carried in his pocket. he was encouraged to follow the providential indication, went through all the drudgery of workshops, and is now a successful engineer. of course, there are thousands of lads whose paths are not so clearly marked out; but does it not seem reasonable to expect that, with prayer for guidance, and thoughtful consideration on the part of the boy's parents, as well as of the boy himself, the best path in life may be discovered for each? no doubt there are many difficulties in the way; as when parents are too ambitious, or when sons are obstinate and self-willed, or when both are antagonistic to each other. if, as is not infrequently the case, a youth has no particular taste for any profession, and shows no very obvious capacity for anything, is it not a pretty strong indication that he was meant to tread one of the many subordinate paths of life and be happy therein? all men cannot be generals. some must be content to rub shoulders with the rank and file. if a lad is fit only to dig in a coal pit or sweep the streets, he is as surely intended to follow these honourable callings as is the captain who has charge of an ocean steamer to follow the _sea_. and even in the selection of these lowly occupations the path is divinely indicated, while the free-will is left to the influence of common sense, so that the robust youth with powerful frame and sinews will probably select the pit, and the comparatively delicate man will prefer the crossing. i repeat, to say that any creature was called into being for no purpose at all, is to question the wisdom of the almighty. even if a babe makes its appearance on this terrestrial scene, and wails out its brief career in a single day, it was sent here for a special purpose, else it would not have been sent, and that purpose must have been fully accomplished, else it would not have died. to my mind this is an exceedingly cheering view of things, for it encourages the belief that however poor or feeble may have been our efforts to live a good life, these efforts cannot have been made in vain, even although they may fall very far short of the "best." and there is also this very hopeful consideration to comfort us, that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, that wisdom sometimes proceeds out of the mouths of babes, and that "we little know what great things from little things may rise." to be sure, that cuts both ways, for, what sometimes are called "little sins" may result in tremendous evil, but, equally, efforts that seem insignificant may be the cause of great and unexpected blessing. if, then, as i sincerely believe, every living being has a special work to do--or, rather, has a variety of appropriate paths in any one of which he may walk with more or less advantage to himself and his fellow-men--it behoves every young man to find out what path is the best one for him, and to walk in it vigorously. fatalism is folly. no one believes in it. at least no one in this country acts upon it. when i say that every being has a special work to do, i don't mean that it has been decreed _exactly_ what each man has to do. were this so, he would have to do it, _nolens volens_, and there would be no such thing as responsibility--for it would be gross injustice to hold a man responsible for that which he could by no means prevent or accomplish. that which has really been decreed is that man shall have free-will and be allowed to exercise that free-will in the conduct of his affairs. it is a most mysterious gift, but there it is--an unquestionable fact--and it must be taken into account in all our reasoning. there is a confusion here into which men are sometimes liable to fall. man's will is absolutely free, but his action is not so. he may will just as he pleases, but all experience tells us that he may not do just as he pleases. whether his intentions be good or bad, they are frequently and effectively interfered with, but his will--never. seeing, then, that there is a best way for every one, and that there are sundry common sense methods by which the path may be discovered, it may be well to consider for a moment whether there are not some obstacles which stand in the way of a young man's success in life, not only because they are providentially allowed to lie there, but because the young man himself either carelessly or unwittingly has planted them in his own path. selfishness is one of those obstacles. and by selfishness i do not mean that gross form of it which secures for the man who gives way to it a bad name, but those subtle phases of it which may possibly be allied with much that is good, amiable, and attractive. it is not unfrequently the consequence of that thoughtlessness which results in evil not less than does want of heart. talking too much about oneself and one's own affairs, and being too little interested in the affairs of others, is one aspect of the selfishness to which i refer. some men, the moment they meet you, begin to talk energetically about what they have been doing, or thinking, or about what they are going to do, and if you encourage them they will go on talking in the same strain, totally forgetting that _you_ may chance to be interested in other things. such men, if they begin young, and are not checked, soon degenerate into "bores," and no bore, however well-meaning or even religious, ever succeeded in making the best of life. the cure for this is to be found--as usual--in the scripture: "wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word." and what says the word? "look not (only) on your own things, but upon the things of others." i have a friend who was the confidant of a large number of his kindred and of many other people besides. it was said of him that everybody went to him for sympathy and advice. i can well believe it, for he never spoke about himself at all that i can remember. he was not unusually wise or superlatively clever, but he had "a heart at leisure from itself to soothe and sympathise." the consequence was that, in spite of a good many faults, he was greatly beloved. and it is certain, reader, that to gain the affection of your fellow-men is one of the surest steps in the direction of success in life. to be too much concerned in conversation about yourself, your affairs and your opinions will prove to be a mighty obstruction in your way. perhaps one of the best methods of fighting against this tendency is to resolve, when meeting with friends, _never_ to begin with self, but _always_ with them. but it is hard to crucify self! this mode of procedure, be it observed, would not be a hypocritical exhibition of interest where none was felt, but an honest attempt to snub self by deliberately putting your friends' interests before your own. it is probable that we are not sufficiently alive to the influence of comparatively insignificant matters on success in life. illegible handwriting, for instance, may go far to retard or arrest a youth's success. it sometimes interferes with friendly intercourse. i once had a friend whose writing was so illegible, and the cause of so much worry in mere decipherment, that i was constrained to give up epistolary correspondence with him altogether. there can be little doubt that many a would-be author fails of success because of the illegibility of his penmanship, for it is impossible that an editor or publisher can form a fair estimate of the character or value of a manuscript which he has much difficulty in reading. there is one thing which men are prone to do, and which it would be well that they should not do, and that is, "nail their colours to the mast" in early youth. the world is a school. we are ever learning--or ought to be--and, in some cases, "never coming to a knowledge of the truth!" is not this partly owing to that fatal habit of nailing the colours? i do not for a moment advocate the holding of opinions loosely. on the contrary, whether a man be young or old, whenever he gets hold of what he believes to be true, he ought to grasp it tenaciously and with a firm grip, but he should never "nail" it. being fallible, man is liable to more or less of error; and, therefore, ought to hold himself open to correction--ay, even to conversion. new or stronger light may convince him that he has been wrong--and if a man will not change when he is convinced, or "fully persuaded in his own mind," he has no chance of finding out how to make the best of life, either from a young, or middle-aged, or old man's standpoint. why, new or stronger light--if he would let it illumine him--might even convince him that his opinion was not only true, but involved much greater and grander truths than he supposed. it is difficult to go more minutely into details, even if it were advisable to do so. i may fittingly conclude by saying that the sum of all that might be written is comprehended in the statement that obedience to god in all things is the sure and only road to success. of all the bright and glorious truths with which our fallen world is enlightened, there is one--a duplex truth--which lies at the foundation of everything. it is unchangeable. without it all other facts would be valueless, and i would recommend every man, woman, and child to nail it to the mast without hesitation, namely--"god is love," and "love is the fulfilling of the law." chapter eleven. forgive and forget: a lifeboat story. old captain bolter said he would never forgive jo grain--never. and what captain bolter said he meant: for he was a strong and self-willed man. there can be no doubt that the captain had some ground of complaint against grain: for he had been insulted by him grossly--at least so he thought. it happened thus:-- joseph grain was a young fisherman, and the handsomest, tallest, strongest, and most active among the youths of the little seaport town in which he dwelt. he was also one of the lifeboat's crew, and many a time had his strong hand been extended in the midst of surging sea and shrieking tempest to save the perishing. moreover, he was of a frank, generous disposition; was loved by most of his comrades; envied by a few; hated by none. but with all his fine qualities young grain had a great and serious fault--he was rather fond of strong drink. it must not, however, be supposed that he was a drunkard, in the ordinary sense at least of that term. no, he was never seen to stagger homeward, or to look idiotic: but, being gifted with a robust frame and finely-strung nerves, a very small quantity of alcohol sufficed to rouse within him the spirit of combativeness, inducing him sometimes to say and do things which afterwards could not be easily unsaid or undone, however much he might repent. one afternoon grain and some of his mates were sauntering towards the little lighthouse that stood at the end of their pier. it was an old-fashioned stone pier, with a dividing wall or parapet down the middle of it. as they walked along, some of the younger men began to question jo about a rumour that had recently been spread abroad. "come, now, jo," said one, named blunt, "don't try to deceive us; you can't deny that you're after cappen bolter's little gal." "well, i _won't_ deny it," replied jo, with sudden energy and somewhat forced gaiety, while the blood mounted to his bronzed cheeks: "moreover, i don't care who knows it, for there's not a sweeter lass in all the town than mary bolter, an' the man that would be ashamed to own his fondness for her don't deserve to have her." "that's true," said a young fisherman, named guy, with a nod of approval--"though there may be two opinions as to which is the sweetest lass in all the town!" "i tell 'ee what, jo," remarked a stern and rather cross-grained bachelor, named grime, "you may save yourself the trouble of givin' chase to that little craft, for although old bolter ain't much to boast of--bein' nothin' more than the skipper of a small coastin' craft--he thinks hisself far too big a man to give his darter to a fisherman." "does he?" exclaimed grain, with vehemence, and then suddenly checked himself. "ay, that does he," returned grime, with something of a sneer in his tone. it chanced that jo grain had been to the public-house that day, and the sneer, which at other times would have been passed over with indifference, stung him--coupled as it was with a slur on his lowly position. he looked fiercely at grime, and said, in a loud, angry tone: "it's a matter of moonshine to me what bolter thinks of himself. if the girl's willin' to have me i'll wed her in spite o' the old grampus." now, unhappily for jo grain, the "old grampus" chanced at that very time to be sunning himself, and enjoying his pipe on the other side of the pier-wall, and heard distinctly what jo said. moreover, there was some truth in what grime had said about the old skipper looking down on the young fisherman's position: so that, although he could not deny that jo was a first-rate man, and knew that mary was fond of him, he had hitherto felt a strong disinclination to allow his darling and only child to wed, as he considered it beneath her. when, therefore, the speech above quoted broke harshly on his ears, the matter became finally settled in his mind. he dropped his pipe, set his heel on it, and ground it to powder. he also ground his teeth, and, turning round with a snort, worthy of the creature to which he had been compared, sailed wildly homewards. next day jo grain chanced to meet him in the street, and held out his hand as usual; but the captain, thrusting both hands deep into his trousers pockets, looked the young man firmly in the face-- "no, grain," he said sternly. "i've done with _you_!" "why so, captain bolter?" asked jo, in great surprise. "because," hissed the captain, as his wrath rose, "an _old grampus_ don't choose to have anything more to do with a _young puppy_!" instantly his reckless speech of the day before flashed into jo's mind. "forgive me, captain bolter," he said respectfully: "forgive me, and try to forget it--i didn't mean it, believe me--i--i wasn't quite myself, sir, when--" "no!" interrupted the captain fiercely; "i'll never forgive you, nor forget it." with that he turned away and left jo grain to meditate on the folly of indulging in a stimulant which robbed him of his self-control. but youth is very hopeful. jo did not quite believe in the captain's sincerity. he comforted himself with the thought that time would soften the old man's feelings, and meanwhile he would continue to court mary when opportunity offered. the captain, however, soon proved that he was thoroughly in earnest: for, instead of leaving his daughter under the care of a maiden aunt, as had been his custom previously, during his frequent absences from home, he took her to sea with him, and left jo with an extra supply of food for meditation. poor jo struggled hard under this his first severe trial, but struggled in his own strength and failed. instead of casting away the glass which had already done him so much damage, he madly took to it as a solace to his secret grief. yet jo took good care that his comrades should see no outward trace of that grief. he was not, however, suffered to remain long under the baleful influence of drink. soon after the departure of captain bolter, a missionary visited the little seaport to preach salvation from sin through jesus christ, and, being a man of prayer and faith, his mission was very successful. among the many sins against which he warned the people, he laid particular stress on that of drunkenness. this was long before the days of the blue ribbon movement: but the spirit of that movement was there, though the particular title had not yet arisen. the missionary preached christ the saviour of sinners, and temperance as one of the fruits of salvation. many of the rough fishermen were converted--bowed their heads and wills, and ceased to resist god. among them was joseph grain. there was not, indeed, a remarkably great outward change in jo after this: for he had always been an amiable, hearty, sweet-tempered fellow: but there was, nevertheless, a radical change; for whereas in time past he had acted to please himself, he now acted to please his lord. to natural enthusiasm, which had previously made him the hero of the town, was now superadded the enthusiasm of a soldier of the cross: and when lifeboat duty called him, as in days gone by, to hold out his hand to the perishing, even while in the act of saving their bodies he prayed that the result might be salvation to their souls. you may be sure that jo did not forget mary: but his thoughts about her were wonderfully changed: for in this affair of the heart despair had given place to trust and submission. time passed by, and one night in the dreary month of november the storm-fiend was let loose on the shores of england. all round the coast the crews of our lifeboats assembled at pier-heads and other points of vantage to watch the enemy and prepare for action. among others jo grain and his comrades assembled at their post of duty. it was an awful night--such as, happily, does not often visit our shores. thick darkness seemed to brood over land and sea. only the robust and hardy dared to show face to the keen, withering blast, which was laden with sleet. sometimes a gleam of lightning would dart through the raging elements; occasionally the murky clouds rolled off the sky for a short time, allowing the moon to render darkness hideously visible. tormented foam came in from the sea in riven masses, and the hoarse roaring of the breakers played a bass accompaniment to the yelling blast, which dashed gravel and sand, as well as sleet, in the faces of those who had courage enough to brave it. "there--wasn't that a light?" cried the coxswain of the lifeboat, as he cowered under the shelter of the pier-wall and gazed seaward with difficulty. "ay," responded blunt, who was bowman of the boat; "there it goes again." "and a rocket!" shouted jo grain, starting up. "no mistake now," cried the coxswain. "look alive, lads!" he ran as he spoke to the spot where the lifeboat lay ready under the shelter of the pier, but jo was on board before him. almost simultaneously did a dozen strong and fearless men leap into the noble craft and don their cork life-belts. a few seconds sufficed. every man knew well his place and his duty. the short, powerful oars were shipped. "give way!" cried the coxswain. there was no cheer--no onlooker to encourage. silently the strong backs were bent, and the lively boat shot away towards the entrance of the harbour like a "thing of life." no description can adequately convey to landsmen the work to be done and the conditions under which it was performed. on passing the shelter of the pier-head the boat and her crew were met not only by the tumultuous surging of cross seas, but by a blast which caught the somewhat high bow and almost whirled them into the air; while in its now unbroken force the cold blast seemed to wither up the powers of the men. then, in the dark distance, an unusually huge billow was seen rushing down on them. to meet it straight as an arrow and with all possible speed was essential. failure here--and the boat, turning side on, would have been rolled over and swept back into the harbour, if not wrecked against the breakwater. the coxswain strained at the steering oar as a man strains for life. the billow was fairly met. the men also strained till the stout oars were ready to snap; for they knew that the billow must be cut through if they were to reach the open sea; but it was so high that the bow of the boat was lifted up, and for one instant it seemed as if she were to be hurled backward right over the stern. the impulse given, however, was sufficient. the crest of the wave was cut, and next moment the bow fell forward, plunging deep into the trough of the sea. at the same time a cross-wave leaped right over the boat and filled it to the gunwales. this initial danger past, it was little the men cared for their drenching. as little did the boat mind the water, which she instantly expelled through the discharging tubes in her floor. but the toil now began. in the teeth of tide and tempest they had to pull with might and main; advancing foot by foot, sometimes only inch by inch. no rest; no breathing time; nothing but continuous tearing at the oars, if progress was to be made, while the spray enveloped them perpetually, and at frequent intervals the "solid" water, plunging inboard, almost swept the heroes from their seats. but if the raging sea through which the lifeboat struggled was dreadful, much more terrible was the turmoil on the outlying sands where the wreck was being gradually dashed to pieces. there the mad billows held high revelry. rushing in from all sides, twisted and turned in their courses by the battered shoals, they met not far from, the wreck with the shock of opposing armies, and clouds of foam sprang upward in dire, indescribable confusion. the vessel in distress was a small brig. she had been lifted like a plaything by the waves, and hurled high on the sand, where, although now unable to lift her up, they rolled her to and fro with extreme violence. rocket after rocket had been sent up, until the drenching seas had rendered the firing of them impossible. the foremast had already gone by the board, carrying most of the crew with it. on the cross-trees of the mainmast only two remained--a man and a woman, who could barely maintain their hold as the battered craft swayed from side to side. "the end comes at last, darling mary," said the man, as he grasped the woman tightly with one arm and the mast with the other. "no, father--not yet," gasped the woman; "see--the lifeboat! i felt sure that god would send it." on came the gallant little craft. there was just light enough to enable those on the wreck to see dimly her white and blue sides as she laboured through the foam towards them. "they have missed us, father; they don't see us!" cried the girl. the blast blew her long hair about, adding wildness to the look of alarm which she cast on the man while speaking. "nay, darling, it's all right. they've only pulled a bit to wind'ard. keep on praying, mary." when well to windward of the wreck the anchor of the lifeboat was let go, and they began to drop down towards the vessel by the cable. then, for the first time, the men could draw a long breath and relax their efforts at the oars, for wind and waves were now in their favour, though they still dashed and tossed and buffeted them. soon they were nearly alongside, and the man on the cross-trees was heard to shout, but his words could not be made out. what could it be that caused jo grain's heart to beat against his strong ribs with the force of a sledge-hammer and his eyes to blaze with excitement, as he turned on his thwart and crouched like a tiger ready to spring? there was tremendous danger in drawing near: for, at one moment, the boat rushed up on a sea as if about to plunge through the rigging of the vessel, and the next she was down in a seething caldron, with the black hull looming over her. it was observed that the two figures aloft, which could barely be seen against the dark sky, were struggling with some difficulty. they had lashed themselves to the mast, and their benumbed fingers could not undo the fastenings. "haul off!" shouted the coxswain, as the boat was hurled with such force towards the vessel's hull that destruction seemed imminent. "no, hold on!" roared jo grain. the men obeyed their coxswain, but as the boat heaved upwards jo sprang with all his might, and fell into the rigging of the wreck. a few seconds later and he was on the cross-trees, knife in hand, and the lashings were cut. at the same moment a rending crash was heard, and again the stentorian voice of the coxswain was heard shouting to the men. the lifeboat was pulled off just in time to escape from the mainmast as it fell, burying its cross-trees and all its tangled gearing in the sea. the bowman and young guy leaned over the side, and at the risk of their lives grasped at a drowning man. they caught him, and captain bolter was dragged into the boat insensible. a moment later and a hand was seen to rise in the midst of the wreckage. guy knew it well. he grasped it and held on. a few seconds more and jo grain, with blood pouring down his face, from a deep cut in his head, was raised to the gunwale. "have a care," he gasped faintly. his right arm encircled an inanimate form. both were dragged on board, and then it was seen that the form was that of mary bolter, uninjured though insensible. to haul up to the anchor was a slow process and laborious, but it was done cheerily, for the hearts of the men were aglow with satisfaction. three lives saved! it was what blunt styled a grand haul. not many, indeed: but was not one that of a loved comrade, and was not another that of "the sweetest lass in all the town," in spite of young guy's difference of opinion? it was grey dawn when the lifeboat returned to port under sail, with a small flag flying in token of success, and it would have done your heart good, reader, to have seen the faces of the crowds that lined the pier, and heard the ringing cheers that greeted the gallant rescuers as they brought the rescued safe to land. six hours after that captain bolter sat at the bedside of jo grain. "you've been hard hit, jo, i fear," he said kindly. "yes, rather hard, but the doctor says i'll be all right in a week or two; and it's little i'll care about it, captain, if you'll only agree to forgive and forget." the captain seized jo's hand and tried to speak, but could not. after an abortive effort he turned away with a grunt and left the room. six months after that, joseph grain, transformed into a coast-guardsman, led "the sweetest lass in all the town" to the village church, and young guy, still objecting to the title, was groom's-man. "jo," said captain bolter that day, at parting, "i've forgiven you long ago, but i _can't_ forget; for you said the truth that time. i _was_ an old grampus, or a fool, if you like, and i'm not much better now. however, good-bye, dear boy, and take care of her, for there's not another like her in all england." "except one," murmured young guy, as he squeezed his friend's hand and quietly attached an old slipper to their cab as they drove away. thereafter he swaggered off to a certain familiar cottage to talk over the wedding with one whom _he_ considered the sweetest lass in all the town. chapter twelve. "rescue the perishing." proverbial philosophy asserts that the iron should be struck when it is hot. i sympathise with proverbial philosophy in this case, but that teacher says nothing whatever about striking the iron when it is cold; and experience--at least that of blacksmiths--goes to prove that cold iron may be struck till heat is evolved, and, once heated, who knows what intensity of incandescence may be attained? i will try it. my hammer may not be a large one. a sledge-hammer it certainly is not. such as it is i wield it under the impulse of great heat within me, and will direct my blows at the presumably cold iron around. i say presumably,--because if you, good reader, have not been subjected to the same influences with myself you cannot reasonably be expected to be even warm--much less white-hot. the cause of all this heat was dr barnardo's splendid meeting held recently in the royal albert hall. i came home from that meeting incandescent--throwing off sparks of enthusiasm, and eagerly clutching at every cold or lukewarm creature that came in my way with a view to expend on it some of my surplus heat! the great albert hall filled is enough of itself to arouse enthusiasm, whatever the object of the gathering may be. ten thousand human beings, more or less, swarming on the floor, clustering on the walls, rising tier above tier, until in dim distance the pigmy throng seems soaring up into the very heavens, is a tremendous, a solemn, a heart-stirring sight, suggestive--i write with reverence--of the judgment day. and when such an assembly is convened for the purpose of considering matters of urgent importance, matters affecting the well-being of multitudes, matters of life and death which call for instant and vigorous action, then the enthusiasm is naturally intensified and needs but little hammering to rouse it to the fiercest glow. it was no ordinary gathering this--no mere "annual meeting" of a grand society. it was indeed that, but a great deal more. there was a "noble chairman," of course, and an address, and several speeches by eminent men; but i should suppose that one-half of the audience could not well see the features of the speakers or hear their words. these were relatively insignificant matters. the business of the evening was to present to the people a great object lesson, and the only figure on the platform that bulked large--at least in my esteem--was that of dr barnardo himself, and a magical master of the ceremonies did the doctor prove himself to be. being unable to induce the "west end" to visit the "east end," he had simply cut several enormous slices out of the slums and set them down in the royal albert hall for inspection. the display was set forth interestingly and with emphasis, insomuch that things almost spoke for themselves, and wherein they failed to do so the doctor supplemented in a satisfactorily sonorous voice. one of the slum-slices was a large one. it consisted of thirteen hundred children--boys and girls--in bright, light, smart dresses, who clustered on the orchestra and around the great organ, like flowers in june. looking at their clean, wholesome faces, neat attire, and orderly demeanour, i thought, "is it possible that these are the sweepings of the streets?" the question was tellingly answered later on; but here it may be stated that this beautiful band of was only a slice--a sample--of the doctor's large family, which at present numbers nearly . (it now, in , numbers nearly .) it was grand to hear them sing! the great organ itself had to sing small beside them, for wood and metal can never hope to equal the living human voice, even though it be but a voice from the slums. not only hymns but humorous songs they sang, and heroic. a telling effect was produced while singing one of the latter by the sudden display of union jacks, each the size of a 'kerchief, which the singers waved in time to the chorus. it seemed as though a stiff breeze had swept over the flower-bed and kissed the national flag in passing. another surprise of this kind was given during the stirring song of _the fire brigade_, when bits of gold and silver paper, waved to and fro, seemed to fill the orchestra with flashing fire. but much of this was for show, to tickle our eyes and ears and prepare the way, as it were, for the grave and stern realities yet to come. there was a mighty platform covered with crimson cloth in the centre of the hall in front of the orchestra. on it were several mysterious objects covered with sheets. at a signal--a whistle--given by the doctor, a band of sturdy boys, clad in their work-a-day uniform, scampered down the central passage of the hall, jumped on the platform, flung off the sheets, and discovered carpenters' benches, saws, hammers, wood--in short, all the appliances with which they carry on the various trades at their "home" in the east end. in a few seconds, as if by magic, the platform was a workshop in full swing--hammering, sawing, chiselling, wood-chopping, clattering, and indescribable din, which was enhanced, but not drowned, by the applause of the astonished audience. the little fellows worked as though life depended on their activity, for the space, it seemed to me, of half a minute. then the shrill whistle sounded again, and the work ceased, as if the springs of life had been suddenly cut off. dead silence ensued; each worker remaining in the attitude in which he had been petrified--a group of artisan statuary in colour! the doctor was thus enabled quietly to explain that the display represented only a very few of the trades taught and carried on by his rescued boys at stepney causeway. at another signal the splendidly drilled young fellows scampered off, carrying not only their tools, but their benches, tables, stools, and even debris along with them, and, disappearing in less than a couple of minutes, left not a chip or shaving behind. it would take a good many pages of close writing to give anything like a detailed account of all that i saw. i must pass over much in order to emphasise one or two very telling incidents. the doctor presented a sample of all his wares. one of these was a very touching sample-- namely, a band of cripples, who made their way slowly on crutches down the passage to the platform--for it is one of the noteworthy points in this mission that no destitute boy is turned away, whether he be well or ill, crippled or sound. so, also, there was a small procession of neat, pleasant-looking nurses, each leading one or more mites of forsaken humanity from "babies' castle." but it seemed to me that the kernel of the nut had been reached, and the foundation of the god-like mission laid bare for our inspection, when the raw material was led forth. we had got accustomed by that time to turn an expectant gaze at a far distant door when the doctor's voice ceased or his whistle sounded. presently a solitary nurse with the neat familiar white cap and apron appeared at the door leading two little creatures by the hand. a hush--a distinct though indescribable sensation--as of profound pity and pathos,--passed over the vast assembly as a little boy and girl direct from the slums were led forward. the nurse had to walk slowly to accommodate her pace to theirs. half naked, ragged, dirty, unkempt, bereft of their natural guardians, or forsaken by them--helpless, yet left to help themselves almost before they could walk! forward they came to the central platform, casting timid, wondering glances around at the mighty host of well-to-do beings, not one of whom, perhaps, ever knew what it is to hunger for a whole day and lie down at night with a door-step for a pillow. oh, it was pitiful! the doctor advanced to these forlorn ones and took them by the hands with inexpressible tenderness, and then, facing the assembly, broke the silence and presented the human material which it was, under god, his mission in life to rescue. then turning abruptly to the flower-bed in the orchestra, he signalled with his finger. a flower that might well have been styled a rosebud--a neat little girl in pink with a natty straw hat--tripped lightly down and stood on the platform beside the poor waifs. looking up once more to the entranced audience and pointing to the children, the doctor said-- "such as these are, she was but a few months ago, and such as she is now they will soon become, with god's blessing." i may not quote the words correctly, but that is my recollection of the substance. the doctor was not content, however, to show us the foundation and progress of his work. he showed us the work, as it were, completed, in the form of a band of sturdy young men in their working costume, ready to start as rescued, trained, useful, earnest labourers for the fields of manitoba--young men who all had once been lost waifs and strays. still further, he, as it were, put the copestone on his glorious work by presenting a band of men and women--"old boys and girls"--who had been tested by rough contact with the world and its temptations, and had come off victorious "by keeping their situations with credit" for periods varying from one to nine years--kept by the power of christ! when i saw the little waifs and looked up at the bands of happy children before me, and thought of the thousands more in the "homes," and of the multitudes which have passed through these homes in years gone by; the gladness and the great boon to humanity which must have resulted, and of the terrible crime and degradation that might have been--my heart offered the prayer, which at that moment my voice could not have uttered--"god bless and prosper dr barnardo and his work!" i hear a voice from the "back of beyont," or some such far off locality--a timid voice, perhaps that of a juvenile who knows little, and can scarce be expected to care much, about london--asking "who is dr barnardo?" for the sake of that innocent one i reply that he is a scavenger--the chief of london scavengers! he and his subordinates sweep up the human rubbish of the slums and shoot it into a receptacle at stepney causeway, where they manipulate and wash it, and subject it to a variety of processes which result, with god's blessing, in the recovery of innumerable jewels of inestimable value. i say inestimable, because men have not yet found a method of fixing the exact value of human souls and rescued lives. the "rubbish" which is gathered consists of destitute children. the assistant scavengers are men and women who love and serve the lord jesus christ. chapter thirteen. a knotty question. "tom blunt," said richard sharp, "i deny your premises, condemn your reasoning as illogical, and reject your conclusions with scorn!" the youth who made this remark with very considerable assurance and emphasis was a student. his fellow-student received it with an air of bland good-nature. "dick," said he, "your oratory is rotund, and if it were convincing might be impressive; but it fails to some extent in consequence of a certain smack of self-assertion which is unphilosophical. suppose, now, that we have this matter out in a calm, dispassionate manner, without `tooth,' or egotism, or prejudice, which tend so powerfully to mar human disputation and render it abortive." "with all my heart, tom," said the other, drawing close to the fire, placing one foot against the mantelpiece, as being a comfortable, though not elegant posture, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, and placing his hands in that position--with all the finger tips touching each other--which seems, from the universal practice of civilised society, to assist mental elucidation. "i am quite prepared. come on!" "stay; while my mind is working i like to have my hands employed. i will proceed with my monkey while we talk," said blunt, taking up a walking-stick, the head of which he had carved into the semblance of a monkey. "sweet creature!" he added, kissing the object of his affection, and holding it out at arm's-length. "silent companion of my solitary rambles, and patient auditor of my most secret aspirations, you are becoming quite a work of art. a few more touches of the knife, and something like perfection shall have been attained! look here, dick, when i turn it towards the light--so--isn't there a beauty about the contour of that upper lip and nose which--" "don't be a fool, tom," interrupted his friend, somewhat impatiently; "you seem to me to be growing more and more imbecile every day. we did not sit down to discuss fine art--" "true, richard, true; but there is a power in the consideration of fine art, which, when judiciously interpolated in the affairs of life, tends to soften the asperities, to round away, as it were, the ruggedness of human intercourse, and produce a tranquillity of mind which is eminently conducive to--to--don't you see?" "no, i don't see!" "then," continued blunt, applying his knife to one of the monkey's eyes, "there arises the question--how far is this intellectual blindness the result of incapacity of intellectual vision, or of averted gaze, or of the wilful shutting of the intellectual eyelids?" "well, well, tom, let that question alone for the present. let us come to the point, for i wish to have my mind cleared up on the subject. you hold that gambling is wrong--essentially wrong." "i do; but let us not have a misunderstanding at the very beginning," said blunt. "by gambling i do not mean the playing of games. that is not gambling. what i understand by gambling is betting on games--or on anything--and the playing of games for the purpose of winning money, or anything that possesses value, great or small. such gambling i hold to be wrong--essentially, morally, absolutely wrong, without one particle of right or good in it whatever." as he spoke blunt became slightly more earnest in tone, and less devoted to the monkey. "well, now, tom, do you know i don't see that." "if you did see it, my dear fellow," returned blunt, resuming his airy tone, "our discussion of the subject would be useless." "well, then, i _can't_ see it to be wrong. here are you and i. we want to have a game of billiards. it is uninteresting to play even billiards for nothing; but we each have a little money, and choose to risk a small sum. our object is not gain, therefore we play for merely sixpenny points. we both agree to risk that sum. if i lose, all right. if you lose, all right. that's fair, isn't it?" "no; it is undoubtedly equal, but not necessarily fair. fair means `free from blemish,' `pure,' in other words, right. two thieves may make a perfectly fair division of spoil; but the fairness of the division does not make their conduct fair or right. neither of them is entitled to divide their gains at all. their agreeing to do so does not make it fair." "agreed, tom, as regards thieves; but you and i are not thieves. we propose to act with that which is our own. we mutually agree to run the risk of loss, and to take our chance of gain. we have a right to do as we choose with our own. is not that fair?" "you pour out so many fallacies and half truths, dick, that it is not easy to answer you right off." "morally and politically you are wrong. politically a man is not entitled to do what he chooses with his own. there are limitations. for instance, a man owns a house. abstractly, he is entitled to burn it down if he chooses. but if his house abuts upon mine, he may not set it on fire if he chooses, because in so doing he would set fire to my house also, which is very much beyond his right. then--" "oh, man, i understand all that," said sharp quickly. "of course a man may put what he likes in his garden, but with such-like limitations as that he shall not set up a limekiln to choke his neighbours, or a piggery to breed disease; but gambling does nothing like that." "does it not?" exclaimed blunt. "does it not ruin hundreds of men, turning them into sots and paupers, whereby the ruined gamblers become unable to pay their fair share of taxation; and, in addition, lay on the shoulders of respectable people the unfair burden of supporting them, and perhaps their families?" "but what if the gambler has no family?" "there still remains his ruined self to be maintained." "but suppose he is not ruined--that he manages, by gambling, to support himself?" "in that case he still remains guilty of two mean and contemptible acts. on the one hand he produces nothing whatever to increase the wealth or happiness of the world, and, on the other hand, whatever he gains is a matter of direct loss and sorrow to others without any tangible equivalent. it is not so with the orator or the musician. though their products are not indeed tangible they are distinctly real and valuable. during the hour of action the orator charms the ear, eye, and intellect. so does the musician. when the hour is past the heart is gladdened by the memory of what has been, and the hopes are aroused in anticipation of what may yet be in the future. as regards the orator, the lessons inculcated may be a lasting gain and pleasure, and source of widespread benefit through life. to a great extent this may also be said of the musician when words are wedded to music. who has not heard of souls being delivered from spiritual darkness and brought into spiritual light by means of song?--a benefit which will last through eternity as well as time. even the man of wealth who lives on the interest of his possessions is not necessarily a drone in the human hive. he may, by wise and careful use of his wealth, greatly increase the world's riches. by the mere management of it he may fill up his days with useful and happy employment, and by devoting it and himself to god he may so influence the world for good that men shall bless him while he lives and mourn him profoundly when he dies. but what fraction of good is done by the gambler in all the wide world?" "much the same that is accomplished by the others," put in sharp at this point. "the orator gives pleasure to those who are fond of recitation or declamation; the musician pleases those who are fond of sweet sounds, and the gambler gives pleasure to men who are fond of the excitement of play. besides, by paying his way he gives benefit to all whom he employs. he rents a house, he buys furniture, he eats food, all of which brings profit to house-owners, cabinet-makers, butchers, bakers, etcetera, and is good done to the world by the gambler." "nay, friend richard, not by the gambler, but by the money which the gambler spends." "isn't that much the same thing?" "by no means. the money--or its equivalent--is created by some one else. the gambler merely passes it on. if he had never been born the same money would have been there for some one else to spend. the labour of the gambler has not added one penny to it. he brought nothing into the world, and has added nothing to the world's pile, though he has managed to consume a good deal of its produce. is there not something very mean and contemptible in this state of being? on the other hand the orator has spent laborious days and exerted much brain-power before he made himself capable of pleasing and benefiting his fellows. the musician has gone through exhausting drudgery and practice before being fit to thrill or instruct by means of his sweet sounds, and the man of wealth has had to be educated up to the point of using his possessions to profitable account--so that his fields shall grow heavier crops than they did when he began his work; his tenants shall be better housed than they were at first, and shall lead healthier and happier lives to the great moral and material advantage of the community. nearly all the other members of the hive produce, or help to produce, some sort of equivalent for the money they obtain. even those who produce what is bad have still _something_ to show for their money, and that something, bad though it be in one form, may be decidedly good in another form, or if put to another use. the gambler alone--except, perhaps, the absolute idler--enjoys the unenviable position of a thorough, out-and-out, unmitigated drone. he does absolutely _nothing_, except produce unhealthy excitement in himself and his fellows! he has nothing whatever to show for the money he has obtained except `risk,' and that can hardly be styled a commodity." "i beg pardon," interrupted sharp, "the gambler produces skill; and there can be no doubt that hundreds of men derive as much pleasure from an exhibition of skill with the billiard-cue as others derive from an exhibition of skill with the flute or violin." "you forget, dick, my boy, that skill with the billiard-cue is not gambling. what i condemn as being morally and politically wrong is betting on games and staking anything upon the issue of them. gamblers are, if i may say so, a set of living pockets which circulate money about amongst themselves, one pocket gaining neither more nor less than what another pocket loses." "but you are now talking of professional gamblers, tom. of course i don't defend these. what i do defend is my right to play, now and then, for sixpenny, or say shilling, or even half-crown points, without laying myself open to the charge of having been guilty of what you term a mean, dishonourable, unjust, contemptible act." "in other words, you wish to steal now and then without being called a thief! but come, old man, i won't call you bad names. i know you don't look at this matter as i do, and therefore i don't think that you are either mean or contemptible. nevertheless, we must bear in mind that honourable, upright men may sometimes be reasoned into false beliefs, so that for a time they may fail to see the evil of that which they uphold. i am not infallible. if my reasoning is false, i stand open to correction." laying the monkey down on the table at this point and looking earnestly at his friend, tom blunt continued-- "let me ask a question, dick. is it for the sake of getting money that you gamble?" "certainly not," returned his friend, with a slight touch of indignation. "you know that i _never_ play for high stakes, and with penny or sixpenny points you know it is impossible for me either to win or lose any sum that would be worth a moment's consideration. the game is all that i care for." "if so, why do you lose interest in the game when there are no stakes?" "oh--well, it's hard to say; but the value of the stake cannot be that which adds interest, for it is so trifling." "i'm not so sure of that, dick. you have heard gambling talked of as a disease." "yes, but i don't believe it is." "do you believe that a miser is a morally diseased man?" "well, perhaps he is," returned sharp; "but a gambler is not necessarily a miser." "yet the two have some symptoms of this moral disease in common. the miser is sometimes rich, nevertheless the covetous spirit is so strong in him that he gloats over a sixpence, has profound interest in gaining it, and mourns over it if lost. you, being well off with a rich and liberal father, yet declare that the interest of a game is much decreased if there are no stakes on it." "the cases are not parallel." "i did not say they were, but you must admit--indeed you have admitted-- that you have one symptom of this disease in common with the miser." "what disease?" "the love of money." richard sharp burst into a laugh at this, a good-humoured laugh in which there was more of amusement than annoyance. "tom, tom," he said, "how your notions about gambling seem to blind you to the true character of your friends! did you ever see me gloating over gold, or hoarding sixpences, or going stealthily in the dead of night to secret places for the purpose of counting over my wealth? have i not rather, on the contrary, got credit among my friends for being somewhat of a spendthrift? but go on, old fellow, what more have you to say against gambling--for you have not yet convinced me?" "hold on a bit. let me pare off just a morsel of my monkey's nose-- there, that's about as near perfection as is possible in a monkey. what a pity that he has not life enough to see his beautiful face in a glass! but perhaps it's as well, for he would never see himself as others see him. men never do. no doubt monkeys are the same. well now," continued blunt, again laying down the stick, and becoming serious, "try if you can see the matter in this light. two gamblers meet. not blacklegs, observe, but respectable men, who nevertheless bet much, and play high, and keep `books,' etcetera. one is rich, the other poor. each wishes ardently to gain money from his friend. this is a somewhat low, unmanly wish, to begin with; but let it pass. the poor one has a wife and family to keep, and debts to pay. many thousands of men, ay, and women, are in the same condition, and work hard to pay their debts. our poor gambler, however, does not like work. he prefers to take his chance at gambling; it is easier, he thinks, and it is certainly, in a way, more exciting than work. our rich gambler has no need to work, but he also likes excitement, and he loves money. neither of these men would condescend for one moment to ask a gift of money from the other, yet each is so keen to obtain his friend's money that they agree to stake it on a chance, or on the issue of a contest. for one to _take_ the money from the other, who does not wish to part with it, would be unfair and wrong, of course; but their agreement gets rid of the difficulty. it has not altered the _conditions_, observe. neither of them wishes to give up his money, but an arrangement has been come to, in virtue of which one consents to be a defrauder, and the other to be defrauded. does the agreement make wrong right?" "i think it does, because the gamblers have a right to make what agreement they please, as it is between themselves." "hold there, dick. suppose that the poor man loses. is it then between themselves? does not the rich gambler walk away with the money that was due to the poor one's butcher, baker, brewer, etcetera?" "but the rich one did not know that. it is not his fault." "that does not free the poor gambler from the dishonourable act of risking money which was not his own; and do you really think that if the rich one did know it he would return the money? i think not. the history of gambling does not point to many, if any, such cases of self-sacrifice. the truth is that selfishness in its meanest form is at the bottom of all gambling, though many gamblers may not quite see the fact. i want your money. i am too proud to ask it. i dare not demand it. i cannot cajole you out of it. i will not rob you. you are precisely in the same mind that i am. come, let us resort to a trick, let us make an arrangement whereby one of us at least shall gain his sneaking, nefarious, unjust end, and we will, anyhow, have the excitement of leaving to chance which of us is to be the lucky man. chance and luck! dick sharp, there is no such condition as chance or luck. it is as surely fixed in the mind of god which gambler is to gain and which to lose as it is that the morrow shall follow to-day." "my dear blunt, i had no idea you were such a fatalist," said sharp in surprise. "i am not a fatalist in the sense you mean," returned his friend. "everything has been fixed from the beginning." "is not that fatalism of the most pronounced nature, tom?" "you don't seem to see that, among other fixtures, it was fixed that free-will should be given to man, and with it the right as well as the power to fix many things for himself, also the responsibility. without free-will we could have had no responsibility. the mere fact that god of course _knew_ what each man would will, did not alter the fixed arrangement that man has been left perfectly free to will as he pleases. i do not say that man is free to _do_ as he pleases. sometimes the doing is permitted; sometimes it is interfered with--never the willing. that is always and for ever free. gamblers use their free-wills, often to their own great damage and ruin; just as good men use their free-wills to their great advantage and happiness. in both cases they make free use of the free-wills that have been bestowed on them." "then i suppose that you consider gambling, even to the smallest extent, to be sin?" "i do." "under which of the ten commandments does it fall?" "`thou shalt not covet.'" chapter fourteen. two remarkable dreams. some natures are better than others. there can be no question about that. some dispositions are born moderately sweet, others are born slightly sour. if you doubt the fact, reader, go study nature, or get you to an argumentative friend and dispute the point. we refuse flatly to enter into a discussion of the subject. look at that little boy sleeping there under the railway arch in the east end of london--not the boy with the black hair and the hook nose and the square under-jaw, but the one with the curly head, the extremely dirty face, and the dimpled chin, on the tip of whose snub nose the rising sun shines with a power that causes it to resemble a glowing carbuncle on a visage still lying in shadow. that little boy's disposition is sweet. you can see it in every line, in every curve, in every dimple of his dirty little face. he has not been sweetened by training, he has had no training--at least none from man or woman with a view to his good. he has no settled principles of any kind, good or bad. all his actions are the result of impulse based on mere animal propensity, but, like every other human being, he has a conscience. at the time of his introduction to the reader his conscience is, like himself, asleep, and it has not as yet been much enlightened. his name is stumpy, but he was never christened. critical minds will object here that a boy would not be permitted to sleep under a railway arch, and that london houses would effectually prevent the rising sun from entering such a place. to which we reply that the arch in question was a semi-suburban arch; that it was the last, (or the first), of a series of arches, an insignificant arch under which nothing ever ran except stray cats and rats, and that it spanned a morsel of waste ground which gave upon a shabby street running due east, up which, every fine morning, the rising sun gushed in a flood of glory. each fleeting moment increased the light on stumpy's upturned nose, until it tipped the dimpled chin and cheeks and at last kissed his eyelids. this appeared to suggest pleasant dreams, for the boy smiled like a dirty-faced angel. he even gave vent to an imbecile laugh, and then awoke. stumpy's eyes were huge and blue. the opening of them was like the revealing of unfathomable sky through clouds of roseate hue! they sparkled with a light all their own in addition to that of the sun, for there was in them a gleam of mischief as their owner poked his companion in the ribs and then tugged his hair. "i say, you let me alone!" growled the companion, turning uneasily on his hard couch. "i say, you get up," answered stumpy, giving the companion a pinch on the tender part of his arm. "come, look alive, howlet. i sees a railway porter and a bobby." owlet, whose nose had suggested his name, had been regardless of the poke, the tug, and the pinch, but was alive to the hint. he at once came to the sitting posture on hearing the dreaded name of "bobby," and rubbed his eyes. on seeing that there was neither policeman nor guard near, he uttered an uncomplimentary remark and was about to lie down again, but was arrested by the animated expression of his comrade's face and the heaving of his shoulders. "why, what ever is the matter with you?" he demanded. "are you goin' to bust yourself wi' larfin', by way of gettin' a happetite for the breakfast that you hain't no prospect of?" to this stumpy replied by pulling from his trousers pocket four shining pennies, which he held out with an air of triumph. "oh!" exclaimed owlet; and then being unable to find words sufficiently expressive, he rubbed the place where the front of his waistcoat would have been if he had possessed one. "yes," said stumpy, regarding the coppers with a pensive air, "i've slep' with you all night in my 'and, an' my 'and in my pocket, an' my knees doubled up to my chin to make all snug, an' now i'm going to have a tuck in--a blow out--a buster--a--" he paused abruptly, and looking with a gleeful air at his companion, said-- "but that wasn't what i was laughin' at." "well, i suppose it warn't. what was it, then?" the boy's eyes sparkled again, and for some moments a half-suppressed chuckling prevented speech. "it was a dream," he said at last. "a dream!" exclaimed owlet contemptuously. "i hate dreams. when i dreams 'em they're always about bobbies and maginstrates, an' wittles, an' when other fellows tells about 'em they're so long-winded an' prosy. but i had a dream too. what was yours?" "my dream was about a bobby," returned his friend. "see, here it is, an' i won't be long-winded or prosy, howlet, so don't growl and spoil your happetite for that 'ere breakfast that's a-comin'. i dreamed--let me see, was it in piccadilly--no, it was oxford street, close by regent street, where all the swells go to promynade, you know. well, i sees a bobby--of course i never can go the length my little toe without seein' a bobby! but this bobby was a stunner. you never see'd sitch a feller. not that he was big, or fierce, but he had a nose just two-foot-six long. i know for certain, for i'm a good judge o' size, besides, i went straight up to him, as bold as brass, and axed him how long it was, an' he told me without winkin'. the strange thing about it is that i wasn't a bit surprised at his nose. wery odd, ain't it, eh, howlet, that people never is surprised at anything they sees in dreams? i do b'lieve, now, if i was to see a man takin' a walk of a' arternoon with his head in his coat-tail pocket i'd take it quite as a matter of course. "well, w'en that bobby had told me his nose was two-foot-six inches long i feels a most unaccountable and astonishin' gush of indignation come over me. what it was at i don't know no more nor the man in the moon. p'r'aps it was the sudden thought of all the troubles that bobbies has brought on me from the day i was born till now. anyhow, i was took awful bad. my buzzum felt fit to bust. i knowed that i must do somethin' to him or die; so i seized that bobby by the nose, and hauled him flat down on his breast. he was so took with surprise that he never made any struggle, but gived vent to a most awful howl. my joy at havin' so easily floored my natural enemy was such that i replied with a cherokee yell. then i gave his nose a pull up so strong that it well-nigh broke his neck an' set him straight on his pins again! oh! howlet, you can't think what a jolly dream it was. to do it all so easy, too!" "well, what happened arter that?" asked owlet. "nothin' happened after that," returned stumpy, with a somewhat sad expression on his usually gleeful visage. "it's a wery strange thing, howlet, that dreams inwariably wanishes away just at the most interestin' p'int. did you ever notice that?" "notice it! i should think i did. why the dream that i had w'en i was layin' alongside o' you was o' that sort exactly. it was all about wittles, too, an' it's made me that 'ungry i feels like a ravagin' wolf." "come along, then, howlet, an' you an' me will ravage somethin' wi' them browns o' mine. we'll 'ave a good breakfast, though it should be our last, an' i'll stand treat." "you're a trump, stumpy; an' i'll tell you _my_ dream as we goes along." "hall right--but mind you don't come prosy over me. i can't stand it no more nor yourself." "you mind dick wilkin, don't you?" "what--the young man from the country as i've see'd standin' at the dock gates day after day for weeks without getting took on?" "that's him," continued owlet, with a nod, as he shoved his hand into his trousers pockets. "he brought a wife and five kids from the country with him--thinkin' to better hisself in london. ha! a sweet little town for a cove as is 'ard up to better hisself in--ho yes, certingly!" remarked the precocious boy in a tone of profound sarcasm. "well," he continued, "dick wilkin came to better hisself an' he set about it by rentin' a single room in cherubs court--a fine saloobrious spot, as you know, not far from the tower. he 'ad a few bobs when he came, and bought a few sticks o' furniture, but i don't need for to tell _you_, stumpy, that the most o' that soon went up the spout, and the wilkins was redooced to beggary--waried off an' on with an odd job at the docks. it was when they first comed to town that i was down wi' that fever, or 'flenzy, or somethink o' that sort. the streets bein' my usual 'abitation, i 'ad no place in partikler to go to, an' by good luck, when i gave in, i lay down at the wilkins' door. o! but i _was_ bad--that bad that it seemed as if i should be cleared out o' my mortal carcase entirely--" "mulligrumps?" inquired his sympathetic friend. "no, no. nothin' o' that sort, but a kind of hot all-overishness, wi' pains that--but you can't understand it, stumpy, if you've never 'ad it." "then i don't want to understand it. but what has all this to do wi' your dream?" "everythink to do with it, 'cause it was about them i was dreamin'. as i was sayin', i fell down at their door, an' they took me in, and mrs wilkin nussed me for weeks till i got better. oh, she's a rare nuss is mrs wilkin. an' when i began to get better the kids all took to me. i don't know when i would have left them, but when times became bad, an' dick couldn't git work, and mrs wilkin and the kids began to grow thin, i thought it was time for me to look out for myself, an' not remain a burden on 'em no longer. i know'd they wouldn't let me away without a rumpus, so i just gave 'em the slip, and that's 'ow i came to be on the streets again, an' fell in wi' you, stumpy." "'ave you never seen 'em since?" "never." "you ungrateful wagibone!" "what was the use o' my goin' to see 'em w'en i 'ad nothin' to give 'em?" returned owlet in an apologetic tone. "you might 'ave given 'em the benefit of your adwice if you 'ad nothin' else. but what did you dream about 'em?" "i dreamt that they was all starvin'--which ain't unlikely to be true-- an' i was so cut up about it, that i went straight off to a butcher's shop and stole a lot o' sasengers; then to a baker's and stole a loaf the size of a wheel-barrer; then to a grocer's and stole tea an' sugar; an' the strange thing was that neither the people o' the shops nor the bobbies seemed to think i was stealin'! another coorious thing was that i carried all the things in my pockets--stuffed 'em in quite easy, though there was 'arf a sack o' coals among 'em!" "always the way in dreams," remarked his friend philosophically. "yes--ain't it jolly convenient?" continued the other. "well, w'en i got to the 'ouse i set to work, made a rousin' fire, put on the kettle, cooked the wittles as if i'd bin born and bred in a 'otel, and in less than five minutes 'ad a smokin' dinner on the table, that would 'ave busted an alderman. in course the wilkins axed no questions. father, mother, five kids, and self all drew in our chairs, and sot down--" "what fun!" exclaimed stumpy. "ay, but you spoilt the fun, for it was just at that time you shoved your fist into my ribs, and woke me before one of us could get a bite o' that grub into our mouths. if we'd even 'ad time to smell it, that would 'ave bin somethink to remember." "howlet," said the other impressively, "d'ye think the wilkins is livin' in the same place still?" "as like as not." "could you find it again?" "could i find saint paul's, or the moniment? i should think so!" "come along, then, and let's pay 'em a wisit." they were not long in finding the place--a dirty court at the farther end of a dark passage. owlet led the way to the top of a rickety stair, and knocked at one of the doors which opened on the landing. no answer was returned, but after a second application of the knuckles, accompanied by a touch of the toe, a growling voice was heard, then a sound of some one getting violently out of bed, a heavy tread on the floor, and the door was flung open. "what d'ee want?" demanded a fierce, half-drunken man. "please, sir, does the wilkins stop here?" "no, they don't," and the door was shut with a bang. "sweet creature!" observed stumpy as they turned disappointed away. "wonder if his mother 'as any more like 'im?" said owlet. "they've 'ad to change to the cellar," said a famished-looking woman, putting her head out of a door on the same landing. "d'ye want 'em?" "in course we does, mother, else we wouldn't ax for 'em. w'ereabouts is the cellar?" "foot o' this stair." descending to the regions below, the two boys groped their way along an underground passage till they came to a door. it was opened by a woman, who timidly demanded what they wanted. "it's me, missis wilkin. 'ave you forgotten howlet?" with an exclamation of surprise and joy the woman flung the door wide, seized owlet, dragged him into the room, and embraced him with as much affection as if he had been her own child. instantly there arose a shout of juvenile joy, and stumpy could see, in the semi-darkness, that four little creatures were helping their mother to overwhelm his friend, while a fifth--a biggish girl--was prevented from joining them by the necessity that lay on her to take care of the baby. when the greetings were over, the sad condition of the family was soon explained, and a single glance round sufficed to show that they had reached the lowest state of destitution. it was a back room rather than a cellar, but the dirty pane of thick glass near the roof admitted only enough of light to make its wretchedness visible. a rickety table, two broken chairs, and a bedstead without a bottom was all the furniture left, and the grate was empty. "we've been obleeged to pawn everything," said mrs wilkin, with difficulty suppressing a sob, "and i need hardly tell you why," she added, with a glance at the children, who were living skeletons. the baby was perhaps the saddest object there, for it was so thin and weak that it had not strength to cry--though the faces which it frequently made were obviously the result of an effort to do so. much interested in the scene, young stumpy stood admiring it patronisingly for a little, but when he heard the poor woman tell of their desperate struggle to merely keep themselves alive, his feelings were touched, and when he learned that not a bite of food had passed their lips since the previous morning, a sudden impulse swelled his little breast. he clutched his four pennies tightly; glanced quickly round; observed an empty basket in a corner; caught it up, and left the place hurriedly. he had scarcely gone when the father of the family entered. the expression of his face and his whole bearing and aspect told eloquently of disappointment as he sat down with a heavy sigh. "stumped again," he said; "only a few hands took on." the words sounded as a death-knell to the famishing family, and the man himself was too much cut up to take notice of the return of his friend owlet, except by a slight nod of recognition. meanwhile stumpy ran along several streets in quest of food. he had not far to run in such a locality. at a very small grocer's shop he purchased one halfpenny worth of tea and put it in his basket. to this he added one farthing's worth of milk, which the amiable milkman let him have in a small phial, on promise of its being returned. two farthings more procured a small supply of coal, which he wrapped in two cabbage leaves. then he looked about for a baker. one penny farthing of his fund having been spent, it behoved him to consider that the staff of life must be secured in preference to luxuries. at this point the boy's nose told him of a most delicious smell which pervaded the air. he stood still for a moment and sniffed eagerly. "ah, ain't it prime? i've jist 'ad some," said another much smaller and very ragged street-boy who had noticed the sniff. "what ever is it?" demanded stumpy. "pea-soup," answered the other. "where?" "right round the corner. look alive, they're shovellin' it out like one o'clock for _fard'ns_!" our hero waited for no more. he dashed round the corner, and found a place where the salvation army was dispensing farthing and halfpenny breakfasts to a crowd of the hungriest and raggedest creatures he had ever seen, though his personal experience of london destitution was extensive. "here you are," said a smiling damsel in a poke bonnet. "i see you're in a hurry; how much do you want?" "'ow much for a fard'n?" asked stumpy, with the caution natural to a man of limited means. a small bowl full of steaming soup was placed before him and a hunk of bread. "for _one_ fard'n?" inquired the boy in surprise. "for one farthing," replied the presiding angel in the poke bonnet. "here, young 'ooman," said stumpy, setting down his basket, "let me 'ave eleven fard'n's worth right away. there's a big family awaitin' for it an' they're all starvin', so do make haste." "but, dear boy, you've brought nothing to carry the soup in." stumpy's visage fell. the basket could not serve him here, and the rate at which the soup was being ladled out convinced him that if he were to return for a jug there would not be much left for him. observing his difficulty, the attendant said that she would lend him a jug if he would promise to bring it back. "are you an honest boy?" she asked, with an amused look. "about as honest as most kids o' the same sort." "well, i'll trust you--and, mind, god sees you. there, now, don't you fall and break it." our hero was not long in returning to the dreary cellar, with the eleven basins of soup and eleven hunks of bread--all of which, with the previously purchased luxuries, he spread out on the rickety table, to the unutterable amazement and joy of the wilkin family. need we say that it was a glorious feast? as there were only two chairs, the table was lifted inside of the bottomless bed, and some of the young people sat down on the frame thereof on one side, and some on the other side, while mrs wilkin and her husband occupied the places of honour at the head and foot. there was not much conversation at first. hunger was too exacting, but in a short time tongues began to wag. then the fire was lighted, and the kettle boiled, and the half-pennyworth of tea infused, and thus the sumptuous meal was agreeably washed down. even the baby began--to recover under the genial influence of warm food, and made faces indicative of a wish to crow--but it failed, and went to sleep on sister's shoulder instead. when it was all over poor mrs wilkin made an attempt to "return thanks" for the meal, but broke down and sobbed her gratitude. reader, this is no fancy sketch. it is founded on terrible fact, and gives but a faint idea of the wretchedness and poverty that prevail in london--even the london of _to-day_! the end. transcribed from the harper & brothers edition by david price, email ccx @pglaf.org. proofing by alan ross, ana charlton and david. is shakespeare dead? from my autobiography mark twain harper & brothers publishers new york and london m c m i x chapter i scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript which constitute this formidable autobiography and diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found which deal with "claimants"--claimants historically notorious: satan, claimant; the golden calf, claimant; the veiled prophet of khorassan, claimant; louis xvii., claimant; william shakespeare, claimant; arthur orton, claimant; mary baker g. eddy, claimant--and the rest of them. eminent claimants, successful claimants, defeated claimants, royal claimants, pleb claimants, showy claimants, shabby claimants, revered claimants, despised claimants, twinkle starlike here and there and yonder through the mists of history and legend and tradition--and oh, all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to. it has always been so with the human race. there was never a claimant that couldn't get a hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be. arthur orton's claim that he was the lost tichborne baronet come to life again was as flimsy as mrs. eddy's that she wrote _science and health_ from the direct dictation of the deity; yet in england near forty years ago orton had a huge army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and to-day mrs. eddy's following is not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and enthusiasm. orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, mrs. eddy has had the like among hers from the beginning. her church is as well equipped in those particulars as is any other church. claimants can always count upon a following, it doesn't matter who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without. it was always so. down out of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you listen you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for perkin warbeck and lambert simnel. a friend has sent me a new book, from england--_the shakespeare problem restated_--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once more. it is an interest which was born of delia bacon's book--away back in that ancient day-- , or maybe . about a year later my pilot-master, bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the _pennsylvania_, and placed me under the orders and instructions of george ealer--dead now, these many, many years. i steered for him a good many months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction of the master. he was a prime chess player and an idolater of shakespeare. he would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity something to do that. also--quite uninvited--he would read shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and i was steering. he read well, but not profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. that broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were shakespeare's and which were ealer's. for instance: what man dare, _i_ dare! approach thou _what_ are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the _there_ she goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you _know_ she'd smell the reef if you crowded it like that? hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the _woods_ the first you know! stop the starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! . . . _now_ then, you're all right; come ahead on the starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble: or be alive again, and dare me to the desert damnation can't you keep away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling i inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no, only the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby of a girl. hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, i reckon, go down and call brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence! he certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because i have never since been able to read shakespeare in a calm and sane way. i cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with their irrelevant "what in hell are you up to _now_! pull her down! more! _more_!--there now, steady as you go," and the other disorganizing interruptions that were always leaping from his mouth. when i read shakespeare now, i can hear them as plainly as i did in that long-departed time--fifty-one years ago. i never regarded ealer's readings as educational. indeed they were a detriment to me. his contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that detail he was a good reader, i can say that much for him. he did not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his shakespeare as well as euclid ever knew his multiplication table. did he have something to say--this shakespeare-adoring mississippi pilot--anent delia bacon's book? yes. and he said it; said it all the time, for months--in the morning watch, the middle watch, the dog watch; and probably kept it going in his sleep. he bought the literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed it all through thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed in every thirty-five days--the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round trips. we discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he did, and i got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a vacancy. he did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and i did mine with the reserve and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that is perched forty feet above the water. he was fiercely loyal to shakespeare and cordially scornful of bacon and of all the pretensions of the baconians. so was i--at first. and at first he was glad that that was my attitude. there were even indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true, by the distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a compliment--compliment coming down from above the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; still a detectable compliment, and precious. naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to shakespeare--if possible--than i was before, and more prejudiced against bacon--if possible than i was before. and so we discussed and discussed, both on the same side, and were happy. for a while. only for a while. only for a very little while, a very, very, very little while. then the atmosphere began to change; began to cool off. a brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier than i did, perhaps, but i saw it early enough for all practical purposes. you see, he was of an argumentative disposition. therefore it took him but a little time to get tired of arguing with a person who agreed with everything he said and consequently never furnished him a provocative to flare up and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard, rose-cut, hundred-faceted, diamond-flashing reasoning. that was his name for it. it has been applied since, with complacency, as many as several times, in the bacon-shakespeare scuffle. on the shakespeare side. then the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to me when principle and personal interest found themselves in opposition to each other and a choice had to be made: i let principle go, and went over to the other side. not the entire way, but far enough to answer the requirements of the case. that is to say, i took this attitude, to wit: i only _believed_ bacon wrote shakespeare, whereas i _knew_ shakespeare didn't. ealer was satisfied with that, and the war broke loose. study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly. after that, i was welded to my faith, i was theoretically ready to die for it, and i looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else's faith that didn't tally with mine. that faith, imposed upon me by self-interest in that ancient day, remains my faith to-day, and in it i find comfort, solace, peace, and never-failing joy. you see how curiously theological it is. the "rice christian" of the orient goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice and the missionary is after _him_; he goes for rice, and remains to worship. ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially all of it. the slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that large name. we others do not call our inductions and deductions and reductions by any name at all. they show for themselves, what they are, and we can with tranquil confidence leave the world to ennoble them with a title of its own choosing. now and then when ealer had to stop to cough, i pulled my induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself: always getting eight feet, eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes even quarter-less-twain--as _i_ believed; but always "no bottom," as _he_ said. i got the best of him only once. i prepared myself. i wrote out a passage from shakespeare--it may have been the very one i quoted a while ago, i don't remember--and riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings. when an unrisky opportunity offered, one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled patch of crossings known as hell's half acre, and were aboard again and he had sneaked the pennsylvania triumphantly through it without once scraping sand, and the _a. t. lacey_ had followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling good, i showed it to him. it amused him. i asked him to fire it off: read it; read it, i diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry. the compliment touched him where he lived. he did read it; read it with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read again; for _he_ knew how to put the right music into those thunderous interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them sound as if they were bursting from shakespeare's own soul, each one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without damage to the massed and magnificent whole. i waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position, my pet argument, the one which i was fondest of, the one which i prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon, to wit: that shakespeare couldn't have written shakespeare's works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways--and if shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, how did he get it, and _where_, and _when_? "from books." from books! that was always the idea. i answered as my readings of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer: that a man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the _argot_ of a trade at which he has not personally served. he will make mistakes; he will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that trade will know the writer _hasn't_. ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-masonries of any trade by careful reading and studying. but when i got him to read again the passage from shakespeare with the interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover. it was a triumph for me. he was silent awhile, and i knew what was happening: he was losing his temper. and i knew he would presently close the session with the same old argument that was always his stay and his support in time of need; the same old argument, the one i couldn't answer--because i dasn't: the argument that i was an ass, and better shut up. he delivered it, and i obeyed. oh, dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago! and here am i, old, forsaken, forlorn and alone, arranging to get that argument out of somebody again. when a man has a passion for shakespeare, it goes without saying that he keeps company with other standard authors. ealer always had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the same ones over and over again, and did not care to change to newer and fresher ones. he played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. so did i. he had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under the breast-board. when the _pennsylvania_ blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother henry among them), pilot brown had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him; but ealer escaped unhurt. he and his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and ealer sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and the boiler deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scalding and deadly steam. but not for long. he did not lose his head: long familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all emergencies. he held his coat-lappels to his nose with one hand, to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till he found the joints of his flute, then he is took measures to save himself alive, and was successful. i was not on board. i had been put ashore in new orleans by captain klinefelter. the reason--however, i have told all about it in the book called _old times on the mississippi_, and it isn't important anyway, it is so long ago. chapter ii when i was a sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, i became interested in satan, and wanted to find out all i could about him. i began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, mr. barclay the stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it seemed to me. i was anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn't another boy in the village who could be hired to do such a thing. i was greatly interested in the incident of eve and the serpent, and thought eve's calmness was perfectly noble. i asked mr. barclay if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber. he did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension. i will say for mr. barclay that he was willing to tell me the facts of satan's history, but he stopped there: he wouldn't allow any discussion of them. in the course of time we exhausted the facts. there were only five or six of them, you could set them all down on a visiting-card. i was disappointed. i had been meditating a biography, and was grieved to find that there were no materials. i said as much, with the tears running down. mr. barclay's sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials! i can still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot through me. then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement and joy. like this: it was "conjectured"--though not established--that satan was originally an angel in heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was defeated, and banished to perdition. also, "we have reason to believe" that later he did so-and-so; that "we are warranted in supposing" that at a subsequent time he travelled extensively, seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up the cruel trade of tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by-and-by, "as the probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done certain things, he might have done certain other things, he must have done still other things. and so on and so on. we set down the five known facts by themselves, on a piece of paper, and numbered it "page "; then on fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the "conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes," and "perhapses," and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and "guesses," and "probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted to thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might have beens," and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and "unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubts"--and behold! _materials_? why, we had enough to build a biography of shakespeare! yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the history of satan. why? because, as he said, he had suspicions; suspicions that my attitude in this matter was not reverent; and that a person must be reverent when writing about the sacred characters. he said any one who spoke flippantly of satan would be frowned upon by the religious world and also be brought to account. i assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly misconceived my attitude; that i had the highest respect for satan, and that my reverence for him equalled, and possibly even exceeded, that of any member of any church. i said it wounded me deeply to perceive by his words that he thought i would make fun of satan, and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at him: whereas in truth i had never thought of such a thing, but had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at _them_. "what others?" "why, the supposers, the perhapsers, the might-have-beeners, the could-have-beeners, the must-have-beeners, the without-a-shadow-of-doubters, the we-are-warranted-in-believingers, and all that funny crop of solemn architects who have taken a good solid foundation of five indisputable and unimportant facts and built upon it a conjectural satan thirty miles high." what did mr. barclay do then? was he disarmed? was he silenced? no. he was shocked. he was so shocked that he visibly shuddered. he said the satanic traditioners and perhapsers and conjecturers were _themselves_ sacred! as sacred as their work. so sacred that whoso ventured to mock them or make fun of their work, could not afterward enter any respectable house, even by the back door. how true were his words, and how wise! how fortunate it would have been for me if i had heeded them. but i was young, i was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract attention. i wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house since. chapter iii how curious and interesting is the parallel--as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned--between satan and shakespeare. it is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in tradition. how sublime is their position, and how over-topping, how sky-reaching, how supreme--the two great unknowns, the two illustrious conjecturabilities! they are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. for the instruction of the ignorant i will make a list, now, of those details of shakespeare's history which are _facts_--verified facts, established facts, undisputed facts. facts he was born on the d of april, . of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not sign their names. at stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to "make their mark" in attesting important documents, because they could not write their names. of the first eighteen years of his life _nothing_ is known. they are a blank. on the th of november ( ) william shakespeare took out a license to marry anne whateley. next day william shakespeare took out a license to marry anne hathaway. she was eight years his senior. william shakespeare married anne hathaway. in a hurry. by grace of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication of the banns. within six months the first child was born. about two (blank) years followed, during which period _nothing at all happened to shakespeare_, so far as anybody knows. then came twins-- . february. two blank years follow. then-- --he makes a ten-year visit to london, leaving the family behind. five blank years follow. during this period _nothing happened to him_, as far as anybody actually knows. then-- --there is mention of him as an actor. next year-- --his name appears in the official list of players. next year-- --he played before the queen. a detail of no consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. and remained obscure. three pretty full years follow. full of play-acting. then in he bought new place, stratford. thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager. meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the same. some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no protest. then-- - --he returned to stratford and settled down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed. he lived five or six years--till --in the joy of these elevated pursuits. then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages with his name. a thoroughgoing business man's will. it named in minute detail every item of property he owned in the world--houses, lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to his "second-best bed" and its furniture. it carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. not even his wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money still lacking. no, even this wife was remembered in shakespeare's will. he left her that "second-best bed." and _not another thing_; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood with. it was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a poet's. it mentioned _not a single book_. books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one he gave it a high place in his will. the will mentioned _not a play_,_ not a poem_,_ not an unfinished literary work_, _not a scrap of manuscript of any kind_. many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has died _this_ poor; the others all left literary remains behind. also a book. maybe two. if shakespeare had owned a dog--but we need not go into that: we know he would have mentioned it in his will. if a good dog, susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have got a dower interest in it. i wish he had had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business way. he signed the will in three places. in earlier years he signed two other official documents. these five signatures still exist. there are _no other specimens of his penmanship in existence_. not a line. was he prejudiced against the art? his granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it was shakespeare's. when shakespeare died in stratford _it was not an event_. it made no more stir in england than the death of any other forgotten theatre-actor would have made. nobody came down from london; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears--there was merely silence, and nothing more. a striking contrast with what happened when ben jonson, and francis bacon, and spenser, and raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of shakespeare's time passed from life! no praiseful voice was lifted for the lost bard of avon; even ben jonson waited seven years before he lifted his. _so far as anybody actually knows and can prove_, shakespeare of stratford-on-avon never wrote a play in his life. _so far as anybody knows and can prove_, he never wrote a letter to anybody in his life. _so far as any one knows_, _he received only one letter during his life_. so far as any one _knows and can prove_, shakespeare of stratford wrote only one poem during his life. this one is authentic. he did write that one--a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head. he commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. there it abides to this day. this is it: good friend for iesus sake forbeare to digg the dust encloased heare: blest be ye man yt spares thes stones and curst be he yt moves my bones. in the list as above set down, will be found _every positively known_ fact of shakespeare's life, lean and meagre as the invoice is. beyond these details we know _not a thing_ about him. all the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures--an eiffel tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts. chapter iv--conjectures the historians "suppose" that shakespeare attended the free school in stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was thirteen. there is no _evidence_ in existence that he ever went to school at all. the historians "infer" that he got his latin in that school--the school which they "suppose" he attended. they "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it necessary for him to leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to work and help support his parents and their ten children. but there is no evidence that he ever entered or retired from the school they suppose he attended. they "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering business; and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown butchering, but only slaughtered calves. also, that whenever he killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it. this supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't there at the time; a man who got it from a man who could have been there, but did not say whether he was or not; and neither of them thought to mention it for decades, and decades, and decades, and two more decades after shakespeare's death (until old age and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their memories). they hadn't two facts in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only just the one: he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was at it. curious. they had only one fact, yet the distinguished citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little town--just half his lifetime. however, rightly viewed, it was the most important fact, indeed almost the only important fact, of shakespeare's life in stratford. rightly viewed. for experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. rightly viewed, calf-butchering accounts for _titus andronicus_, the only play--ain't it?--that the stratford shakespeare ever wrote; and yet it is the only one everybody tries to chouse him out of, the baconians included. the historians find themselves "justified in believing" that the young shakespeare poached upon sir thomas lucy's deer preserves and got haled before that magistrate for it. but there is no shred of respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened. the historians, having argued the thing that _might_ have happened into the thing that _did_ happen, found no trouble in turning sir thomas lucy into mr. justice shallow. they have long ago convinced the world--on surmise and without trustworthy evidence--that shallow _is_ sir thomas. the next addition to the young shakespeare's stratford history comes easy. the historian builds it out of the surmised deer-stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the young shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh _such_ a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for all time! it is the very way professor osborn and i built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the natural history museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on the planet. we had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of plaster of paris. we ran short of plaster of paris, or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the stratford shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster. shakespeare pronounced _venus and adonis_ "the first heir of his invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at literary composition. he should not have said it. it has been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. they have to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped from stratford and his family-- or ' --age, twenty-two, or along there; because within the next five years he wrote five great plays, and could not have found time to write another line. it is sorely embarrassing. if he began to slaughter calves, and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn english, at the earliest likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched from that school where he was supposably storing up latin for future literary use--he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. he must have had to put aside his warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be understood in london, and study english very hard. very hard indeed; incredibly hard, almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and rounded and flexible and letter-perfect english of the _venus and adonis_ in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn great and fine and unsurpassable literary form. however, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this and more, much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the complex procedure of the law courts; and all about soldiering, and sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his one head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge of the world's great literatures, ancient and modern, than was possessed by any other man of his time--for he was going to make brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the moment he got to london. and according to the surmisers, that is what he did. yes, although there was no one in stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig them out of. his father could not read, and even the surmisers surmise that he did not keep a library. it is surmised by the biographers that the young shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the _clerk of a stratford court_; just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the behring strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a "trot-line" sundays. but the surmise is damaged by the fact that there is no evidence--and not even tradition--that the young shakespeare was ever clerk of a law court. it is further surmised that the young shakespeare accumulated his law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in london, through "amusing himself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-courts and listening. but it is only surmise; there is no _evidence_ that he ever did either of those things. they are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of paris. there is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in front of the london theatres, mornings and afternoons. maybe he did. if he did, it seriously shortened his law-study hours and his recreation-time in the courts. in those very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get. the horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next day's imperishable drama. he had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his dramas. how did he acquire these rich assets? in the usual way: by surmise. it is _surmised_ that he travelled in italy and germany and around, and qualified himself to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he perfected himself in french, italian and spanish on the road; that he went in leicester's expedition to the low countries, as soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years--or whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and soldier-talk, and generalship and general-ways and general-talk, and seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk. maybe he did all these things, but i would like to know who held the horses in the meantime; and who studied the books in the garret; and who frollicked in the law-courts for recreation. also, who did the call-boying and the play-acting. for he became a call-boy; and as early as ' he became a "vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in ' a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that (in those days) lightly-valued and not much respected profession. right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theatres, and manager of them. thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty years. then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his one poem--his only poem, his darling--and laid him down and died: good friend for iesus sake forbeare to digg the dust encloased heare: blest be ye man yt spares thes stones and curst be he yt moves my bones. he was probably dead when he wrote it. still, this is only conjecture. we have only circumstantial evidence. internal evidence. shall i set down the rest of the conjectures which constitute the giant biography of william shakespeare? it would strain the unabridged dictionary to hold them. he is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris. chapter v--"we may assume" in the assuming trade three separate and independent cults are transacting business. two of these cults are known as the shakespearites and the baconians, and i am the other one--the brontosaurian. the shakespearite knows that shakespeare wrote shakespeare's works; the baconian knows that francis bacon wrote them; the brontosaurian doesn't really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and contentedly sure that shakespeare _didn't_, and strongly suspects that bacon _did_. we all have to do a good deal of assuming, but i am fairly certain that in every case i can call to mind the baconian assumers have come out ahead of the shakespearites. both parties handle the same materials, but the baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and rational and persuasive results out of them than is the case with the shakespearites. the shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite principle, an unchanging and immutable law--which is: and and and , added together, make . i believe this to be an error. no matter, you cannot get a habit-sodden shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon any other basis. with the baconian it is different. if you place before him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will never in any case get more than out of them, and in nine cases out of ten he will get just the proper . let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and unintelligent. we will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old tom that's scarred from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse. lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell. wait half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a shakespearite and a baconian, and let them cipher and assume. the mouse is missing: the question to be decided is, where is it? you can guess both verdicts beforehand. one verdict will say the kitten contains the mouse; the other will as certainly say the mouse is in the tomcat. the shakespearite will reason like this--(that is not my word, it is his). he will say the kitten _may have been_ attending school when nobody was noticing; therefore _we are warranted in assuming_ that it did so; also, it _could have been_ training in a court-clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could have happened, _we are justified in assuming_ that it did happen; it _could have studied catology in a garret_ when no one was noticing--therefore it _did_; it _could have_ attended cat-assizes on the shed-roof nights, for recreation, when no one was noticing, and harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat lawyer-talk in that way: it _could_ have done it, therefore without a doubt it did; it could have gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one was noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to do with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain inference, therefore is, that that is what it _did_. since all these manifold things _could_ have occurred, we have _every right to believe_ they did occur. these patiently and painstakingly accumulated vast acquirements and competences needed but one thing more--opportunity--to convert themselves into triumphant action. the opportunity came, we have the result; _beyond shadow of question_ the mouse is in the kitten. it is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a "_we think we may assume_," we expect it, under careful watering and fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy and weather-defying "_there isn't a shadow of a doubt_" at last--and it usually happens. we know what the baconian's verdict would be: "_there is not a rag of evidence that the kitten has had any training_, _any education_, _any experience qualifying it for the present occasion_, _or is indeed equipped for any achievement above lifting such unclaimed milk as comes its way_; _but there is abundant evidence_--_unassailable proof_, _in fact_--_that the other animal is equipped_, _to the last detail_, _with every qualification necessary for the event_. _without shadow of doubt the tomcat contains the mouse_." chapter vi when shakespeare died, in , great literary productions attributed to him as author had been before the london world and in high favor for twenty-four years. yet his death was not an event. it made no stir, it attracted no attention. apparently his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a celebrated poet had passed from their midst. perhaps they knew a play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him as the author of his works. "we are justified in assuming" this. his death was not even an event in the little town of stratford. does this mean that in stratford he was not regarded as a celebrity of _any_ kind? "we are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed _obliged_ to assume--that such was the case. he had spent the first twenty-two or twenty-three years of his life there, and of course knew everybody and was known by everybody of that day in the town, including the dogs and the cats and the horses. he had spent the last five or six years of his life there, diligently trading in every big and little thing that had money in it; so we are compelled to assume that many of the folk there in those said latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and hearsay. but not as a _celebrity_? apparently not. for everybody soon forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident connected with him. the dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the same unremembering condition: if they knew of any incident connected with that period of his life they didn't tell about it. would they if they had been asked? it is most likely. were they asked? it is pretty apparent that they were not. why weren't they? it is a very plausible guess that nobody there or elsewhere was interested to know. for seven years after shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been interested in him. then the quarto was published, and ben jonson awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and put it in the front of the book. then silence fell _again_. for sixty years. then inquiries into shakespeare's stratford life began to be made, of stratfordians. of stratfordians who had known shakespeare or had seen him? no. then of stratfordians who had seen people who had known or seen people who had seen shakespeare? no. apparently the inquiries were only made of stratfordians who were not stratfordians of shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had learned had come to them from persons who had not seen shakespeare; and what they had learned was not claimed as _fact_, but only as legend--dim and fading and indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering rank, and not worth remembering either as history or fiction. has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where he was born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly voiceless, utterly gossipless? and permanently so? i don't believe it has happened in any case except shakespeare's. and couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death. when i examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite likely to result, most likely to result, indeed substantially _sure_ to result in the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the human race. like me. my parents brought me to the village of hannibal, missouri, on the banks of the mississippi, when i was two and a half years old. i entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to another in the village during nine and a half years. then my father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill forever, and i became a printer's apprentice, on board and clothes, and when the clothes failed i got a hymn-book in place of them. this for summer wear, probably. i lived in hannibal fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according to the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. i never lived there afterward. four years later i became a "cub" on a mississippi steamboat in the st. louis and new orleans trade, and after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the u. s. inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings and decided that i knew every inch of the mississippi--thirteen hundred miles--in the dark and in the day--as well as a baby knows the way to its mother's paps day or night. so they licensed me as a pilot--knighted me, so to speak--and i rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of the united states government. now then. shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two. he had lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about that. he died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books). yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman remembered to say anything about him or about his life in stratford. when the inquirer came at last he got but one fact--no, _legend_--and got that one at second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor, and didn't claim copyright in it as a production of his own. he couldn't, very well, for its date antedated his own birth-date. but necessarily a number of persons were still alive in stratford who, in the days of their youth, had seen shakespeare nearly every day in the last five years of his life, and they would have been able to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the villagers. why did not the inquirer hunt them up and interview them? wasn't it worth while? wasn't the matter of sufficient consequence? had the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight and couldn't spare the time? it all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity, there or elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager. now then, i am away along in life--my seventy-third year being already well behind me--yet _sixteen_ of my hannibal schoolmates are still alive to-day, and can tell--and do tell--inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their young lives and mine together; things that happened to us in the morning of life, in the blossom of our youth, in the good days, the dear days, "the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago." most of them creditable to me, too. one child to whom i paid court when she was five years old and i eight still lives in hannibal, and she visited me last summer, traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred miles of railroad without damage to her patience or to her old-young vigor. another little lassie to whom i paid attention in hannibal when she was nine years old and i the same, is still alive--in london--and hale and hearty, just as i am. and on the few surviving steamboats--those lingering ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big river in the beginning of my water-career--which is exactly as long ago as the whole invoice of the life-years of shakespeare number--there are still findable two or three river-pilots who saw me do creditable things in those ancient days; and several white-headed engineers; and several roustabouts and mates; and several deck-hands who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the still night air the "six--feet--_scant_!" that made me shudder, and the "_m-a-r-k--twain_!" that took the shudder away, and presently the darling "by the d-e-e-p--four!" that lifted me to heaven for joy. { } they know about me, and can tell. and so do printers, from st. louis to new york; and so do newspaper reporters, from nevada to san francisco. and so do the police. if shakespeare had really been celebrated, like me, stratford could have told things about him; and if my experience goes for anything, they'd have done it. chapter vii if i had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide whether shakespeare wrote shakespeare or not, i believe i would place before the debaters only the one question, _was shakespeare ever a practicing lawyer_? and leave everything else out. it is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished: that he not only knew some thousands of things about human life in all its shades and grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, but that he could _talk_ about the men and their grades and trades accurately, making no mistakes. maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken, or is it only tom, dick, and harry? does the exhibit stand upon wide, and loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is not evidence, and not proof--or upon details, particulars, statistics, illustrations, demonstrations? experts of unchallengeable authority have testified definitely as to only one of shakespeare's multifarious craft-equipments, so far as my recollections of shakespeare-bacon talk abide with me--his law-equipment. i do not remember that wellington or napoleon ever examined shakespeare's battles and sieges and strategies, and then decided and established for good and all, that they were militarily flawless; i do not remember that any nelson, or drake or cook ever examined his seamanship and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that art; i don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever testified that shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of royal court-manners and the talk and manners of aristocracies; i don't remember that any illustrious latinist or grecian or frenchman or spaniard or italian has proclaimed him a past-master in those languages; i don't remember--well, i don't remember that there is _testimony_--great testimony--imposing testimony--unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law. other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back with certainty the changes that various trades and their processes and technicalities have undergone in the long stretch of a century or two and find out what their processes and technicalities were in those early days, but with the law it is different: it is mile-stoned and documented all the way back, and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex and intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of knowing whether shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether his law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal shop-talk is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional loiterings in westminster. richard h. dana served two years before the mast, and had every experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of our day. his sailor-talk flows from his pen with the sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has _lived_ what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random listenings. hear him: having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under headway. again: the royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and sky-sails set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all were aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards and booms, reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas, her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black speck. once more. a race in the pacific: our antagonist was in her best trim. being clear of the point, the breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under our sails, but we would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the rigging of the _california_; then they were all furled at once, but with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the top-gallant mast-heads and loose them again at the word. it was my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while standing by to loose it again, i had a fine view of the scene. from where i stood, the two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while their narrow decks, far below, slanting over by the force of the wind aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics raised upon them. the _california_ was to windward of us, and had every advantage; yet, while the breeze was stiff we held our own. as soon as it began to slacken she ranged a little ahead, and the order was given to loose the royals. in an instant the gaskets were off and the bunt dropped. "sheet home the fore-royal!"--"weather sheet's home!"--"lee sheet's home!"--"hoist away, sir!" is bawled from aloft. "overhaul your clewlines!" shouts the mate. "aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"taut leech! belay! well the lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the royals are set. what would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to that? he would say, "the man that wrote that didn't learn his trade out of a book, he has _been_ there!" but would this same captain be competent to sit in judgment upon shakespeare's seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost to history in the last three hundred years? it is my conviction that shakespeare's sailor-talk would be choctaw to him. for instance--from _the tempest_: _master_. boatswain! _boatswain_. here, master; what cheer? _master_. good, speak to the mariners: fall to't, yarely, or we run ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir! (_enter mariners_.) _boatswain_. heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! take in the topsail. tend to the master's whistle . . . down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! bring her to try wi' the main course . . . lay her a-hold, a-hold! set her two courses. off to sea again; lay her off. that will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a change. if a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say, "here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposing stone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it," i should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing, and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically, not practically. i have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard life; i know all the palaver of that business: i know all about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; i know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally i know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. i know the _argot_ of the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever bret harte introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his miners opens his mouth i recognize from his phrasing that harte got the phrasing by listening--like shakespeare--i mean the stratford one--not by experience. no one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse. i have been a surface-miner--gold--and i know all its mysteries, and the dialect that belongs with them; and whenever harte introduces that industry into a story i know by the phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have ever served that trade. i have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in any but one little spot in the world, so far as i know. i know how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up the mountain to its source, and find the compact little nest of yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground. i know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who tries to use it without having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands. i know several other trades and the _argot_ that goes with them; and whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without having learned it at its source i can trap him always before he gets far on his road. and so, as i have already remarked, if i were required to superintend a bacon-shakespeare controversy, i would narrow the matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the previous controversies have informed me, concerning which illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified: _was the author of shakespeare's works a lawyer_?--a lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience? i would put aside the guesses, and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are justified-in-presumings, and the rest of those vague spectres and shadows and indefinitenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict rendered by the jury upon that single question. if the verdict was yes, i should feel quite convinced that the stratford shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him, did not write the works. chapter xiii of _the shakespeare problem restated_ bears the heading "shakespeare as a lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert testimony, with comments thereon, and i will copy the first nine, as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle the question which i have conceived to be the master-key to the shakespeare-bacon puzzle. chapter viii--shakespeare as a lawyer { } the plays and poems of shakespeare supply ample evidence that their author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law, but that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of members of the inns of court and with legal life generally. "while novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the laws of marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." such was the testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers of the nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of lord chief justice in , and subsequently became lord chancellor. its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and to discuss legal doctrines. "there is nothing so dangerous," wrote lord campbell, "as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry." a layman is certain to betray himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never employ. mr. sidney lee himself supplies us with an example of this. he writes (p. ): "on february , , shakespeare . . . obtained judgment from a jury against addenbroke for the payment of no. , and no. . _s._ _d._ costs." now a lawyer would never have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but to find a verdict on the facts. the error is, indeed, a venial one, but it is just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft." but when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence. "let a non-professional man, however acute," writes lord campbell again, "presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science in discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into laughable absurdity." and what does the same high authority say about shakespeare? he had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in english jurisprudence." and again: "whenever he indulges this propensity he uniformly lays down good law." of _henry iv._, part , he says: "if lord eldon could be supposed to have written the play, i do not see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law while writing it." charles and mary cowden clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and force." malone, himself a lawyer, wrote: "his knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill." another lawyer and well-known shakespearean, richard grant white, says: "no dramatist of the time, not even beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the common pleas, and who after studying in the inns of court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with shakespeare's readiness and exactness. and the significance of this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the language of the law that he exhibits this inclination. the phrases peculiar to other occupations serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison or illustration, generally when something in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as part of his vocabulary, and parcel of his thought. take the word 'purchase' for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar sense the word occurs five times in shakespeare's thirty-four plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of beaumont and fletcher. it has been suggested that it was in attendance upon the courts in london that he picked up his legal vocabulary. but this supposition not only fails to account for shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not such as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at _nisi prius_, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,' 'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' 'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc. this conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in london two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. and beside, shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his first london years, as in those produced at a later period. just as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a chief justice and a lord chancellor." senator davis wrote: "we seem to have something more than a sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. no legal solecisms will be found. the abstrusest elements of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service. over and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it. in the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers and double vouchers, in the procedure of the courts, the method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marriage, in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority." to all this testimony (and there is much more which i have not cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times, _viz._: sir james plaisted wilde, q.c. created a baron of the exchequer in , promoted to the post of judge-ordinary and judge of the courts of probate and divorce in , and better known to the world as lord penzance, to which dignity he was raised in . lord penzance, as all lawyers know, and as the late mr. inderwick, k.c., has testified, was one of the first legal authorities of his day, famous for his "remarkable grasp of legal principles," and "endowed by nature with a remarkable facility for marshalling facts, and for a clear expression of his views." lord penzance speaks of shakespeare's "perfect familiarity with not only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of english law, a knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault . . . the mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts, was quite unexampled. he seems to have had a special pleasure in his complete and ready mastership of it in all its branches. as manifested in the plays, this legal knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which places it on a wholly different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge which is exhibited in page after page of the plays. at every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned _first_ to the law. he seems almost to have _thought_ in legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or illustration. that he should have descanted in lawyer language when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as shylock's bond, was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in 'shakespeare' was exhibited in a far different manner: it protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or inappropriate, and mingled itself with strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects." again: "to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's office but of the pleader's chambers and the courts at westminster, nothing short of employment in some career involving constant contact with legal questions and general legal work would be requisite. but a continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was just what the manager of two theatres had not at his disposal. in what portion of shakespeare's (_i.e._ shakspere's) career would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of practising lawyers?" stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible explanation of shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have made the suggestion that shakespeare might, conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney's office before he came to london. mr. collier wrote to lord campbell to ask his opinion as to the probability of this being true. his answer was as follows: "you require us to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. not having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at stratford nor of the superior courts at westminster would present his name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it might reasonably have been expected that there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, and after a very diligent search none such can be discovered." upon this lord penzance comments: "it cannot be doubted that lord campbell was right in this. no young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and name." there is not a single fact or incident in all that is known of shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship. and after much argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject, we may, i think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less an authority than mr. grant white says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces." it is altogether characteristic of mr. churton collins that he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. "that shakespeare was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office, may be correct. at stratford there was by royal charter a court of record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, beside the town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining probability to suppose that the young shakespeare may have had employment in one of them. there is, it is true, no tradition to this effect, but such traditions as we have about shakespeare's occupation between the time of leaving school and going to london are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in them. it is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high style,' and making speeches over them." this is a charming specimen of stratfordian argument. there is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that shakespeare was a butcher's apprentice. john dowdall, who made a tour in warwickshire in , testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over the church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by mr. halliwell-phillipps. (vol i, p. , and see vol. ii, p. , .) mr. sidney lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported by aubrey, who must have written his account some time before , when his manuscript was completed. of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition. it has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the stratford rustic's marvellous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. but mr. churton collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there no shred of positive evidence, but which, as lord campbell and lord penzance point out, is really put out of court by the negative evidence, since "no young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and name." and as mr. edwards further points out, since the day when lord campbell's book was published (between forty and fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of other legal papers, dated during the period of william shakespeare's youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one signature of the young man has been found." moreover, if shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's office it is clear that he must have so served for a considerable period in order to have gained (if indeed it is credible that he could have so gained) his remarkable knowledge of law. can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so, tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter? that dowdall's old clerk, over eighty years of age, should have never heard of it (though he was sure enough about the butcher's apprentice), and that all the other ancient witnesses should be in similar ignorance! but such are the methods of stratfordian controversy. tradition is to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case. shakespeare of stratford was the author of the _plays_ and _poems_, but the author of the _plays_ and _poems_ could not have been a butcher's apprentice. away, therefore, with tradition. but the author of the _plays_ and _poems must_ have had a very large and a very accurate knowledge of the law. therefore, shakespeare of stratford must have been an attorney's clerk! the method is simplicity itself. by similar reasoning shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things beside, according to the inclination and the exigencies of the commentator. it would not be in the least surprising to find that he was studying latin as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time. however, we must do mr. collins the justice of saying that he has fully recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that shakespeare must have had a sound legal training. "it may, of course, be urged," he writes, "that shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has ever contended that he was a physician. (here mr. collins is wrong; that contention also has been put forward.) it may be urged that his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a sailor or a soldier. (wrong again. why even messrs. garnett and gosse 'suspect' that he was a soldier!) this may be conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. to these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was simply saturated. in season and out of season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration. at least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. it would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by it. much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily accessible to him, namely tottell's _precedents_ ( ), pulton's _statutes_ ( ), and fraunce's _lawier's logike_ ( ), works with which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings. we quite agree with mr. castle that shakespeare's legal knowledge is not what could have been picked up in an attorney's office, but could only have been learned by an actual attendance at the courts, at a pleader's chambers, and on circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the bench and bar." this is excellent. but what is mr. collins' explanation. "perhaps the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!), that he there contracted a love for the law which never left him, that as a young man in london, he continued to study or dabble in it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the courts, and to frequent the society of lawyers. on no other supposition is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself from tripping." a lame conclusion. "no other supposition" indeed! yes, there is another, and a very obvious supposition, namely, that shakespeare was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade, versed in all the ways of the courts, and living in close intimacy with judges and members of the inns of court. one is, of course, thankful that mr. collins has appreciated the fact that shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but i may be forgiven if i do not attach quite so much importance to his pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those of malone, lord campbell, judge holmes, mr. castle, k.c., lord penzance, mr. grant white, and other lawyers, who have expressed their opinion on the matter of shakespeare's legal acquirements. here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from lord penzance's book as to the suggestion that shakespeare had somehow or other managed "to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's chambers and the courts at westminster." this, as lord penzance points out, "would require nothing short of employment in some career involving _constant contact_ with legal questions and general legal work." but "in what portion of shakespeare's career would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of practising lawyers? . . . it is beyond doubt that at an early period he was called upon to abandon his attendance at school and assist his father, and was soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a trade. while under the obligation of this bond he could not have pursued any other employment. then he leaves stratford and comes to london. he has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this he did in some capacity at the theatre. no one doubts that. the holding of horses is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever the nature of his employment was at the theatre, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid. ere long he had been taken into the company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a 'johannes factotum.' his rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for the constancy and activity of his services. one fails to see when there could be a break in the current of his life at this period of it, giving room or opportunity for legal or indeed any other employment. 'in ,' says knight, 'we have undeniable evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a salaried servant, as many players were, but was a shareholder in the company of the queen's players with other shareholders below him on the list.' this ( ) would be within two years after his arrival in london, which is placed by white and halliwell-phillipps about the year . the difficulty in supposing that, starting with a state of ignorance in , when he is supposed to have come to london, he was induced to enter upon a course of most extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable. still it was physically possible, provided always that he could have had access to the needful books. but this legal training seems to me to stand on a different footing. it is not only unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by the known facts of his career." lord penzance then refers to the fact that "by (according to the best authority, mr. grant white) several of the plays had been written. _the comedy of errors_ in , _love's labour's lost_ in , _two gentlemen of verona_ in or , and so forth," and then asks, "with this catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible that he could have taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theatres, and if mr. phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the performances of the provincial tours of his company--and at the same time devoted himself to the study of the law in all its branches so efficiently as to make himself complete master of its principles and practice, and saturate his mind with all its most technical terms?" i have cited this passage from lord penzance's book, because it lay before me, and i had already quoted from it on the matter of shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still better set forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to me, which beset the idea that shakespeare might have found time in some unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other occupations, for the study of classics, literature and law, to say nothing of languages and a few other matters. lord penzance further asks his readers: "did you ever meet with or hear of an instance in which a young man in this country gave himself up to legal studies and engaged in legal employments, which is the only way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless with the view of practicing in that profession? i do not believe that it would be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance in which the law has been seriously studied in all its branches, except as a qualification for practice in the legal profession." * * * * * this testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's, and might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster of paris out of which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which goes by the stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me that the man who wrote shakespeare's works knew all about law and lawyers. also, that that man could not have been the stratford shakespeare--and _wasn't_. who did write these works, then? i wish i knew. chapter ix did francis bacon write shakespeare's works? nobody knows. we cannot say we _know_ a thing when that thing has not been proved. _know_ is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and absolutely conclusive. we can infer, if we want to, like those slaves . . . no, i will not write that word, it is not kind, it is not courteous. the upholders of the stratford-shakespeare superstition call _us_ the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but i will not so undignify myself as to follow them. i cannot call them harsh names; the most i can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom. to resume. what i was about to say, was, those thugs have built their entire superstition upon _inferences_, not upon known and established facts. it is a weak method, and poor, and i am glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything else to resort to. but when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that sort. since the stratford shakespeare couldn't have written the works, we infer that somebody did. who was it, then? this requires some more inferring. ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a tidal wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration, delight and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up and claim the authorship. why a dozen, instead of only one or two? one reason is, because there's a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that poem. do you remember "beautiful snow"? do you remember "rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep"? do you remember "backward, turn backward, o time, in thy flight! make me a child again just for to-night"? i remember them very well. their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least: to wit, he could have done the authoring; he was competent. have the works been claimed by a dozen? they haven't. there was good reason. the world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not two. a long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. was there any doubt as to who had made that mighty trail? were there a dozen claimants? were there two? no--the people knew who it was that had been along there: there was only one hercules. there has been only one shakespeare. there couldn't be two; certainly there couldn't be two at the same time. it takes ages to bring forth a shakespeare, and some more ages to match him. this one was not matched before his time; nor during his time; and hasn't been matched since. the prospect of matching him in our time is not bright. the baconians claim that the stratford shakespeare was not qualified to write the works, and that francis bacon was. they claim that bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both natural and acquired--for the miracle; and that no other englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed, anything closely approaching it. macaulay, in his essay, has much to say about the splendor and horizonless magnitude of that equipment. also, he has synopsized bacon's history: a thing which cannot be done for the stratford shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize. bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death in old age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and multitudinous detail; _facts_, not guesses and conjectures and might-have-beens. whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a lord chancellor for his father, and a mother who was "distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian: she corresponded in greek with bishop jewell, and translated his _apologia_ from the latin so correctly that neither he nor archbishop parker could suggest a single alteration." it is the atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations shall tend. the atmosphere furnished by the parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite culture. it had its natural effect. shakespeare of stratford was reared in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education. this may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort. there were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to the dead languages. "all the valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of europe would hardly have filled a single shelf"--imagine it! the few existing books were in the latin tongue mainly. "a person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all acquaintance--not merely with cicero and virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time"--a literature necessary to the stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his twenties. at fifteen bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years there. thence he went to paris in the train of the english ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. a total of six years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men. the three spent at the university were coeval with the second and last three spent by the little stratford lad at stratford school supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to infer from. the second three of the baconian six were "presumably" spent by the stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. that is, the thugs presume it--on no evidence of any kind. which is their way, when they want a historical fact. fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to them. they know the difference, but they also know how to blink it. they know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when _they_ have the handling of it. they know by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to _stay_ tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of _fact_, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud. the thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning convinces but one. i wouldn't be a thug, not even if--but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. if i am better than a thug, is the merit mine? no, it is his. then to him be the praise. that is the right spirit. they "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. they also "presume" that the butcher was his father. they don't know. there is no written record of it, nor any other actual evidence. if it would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers--all by their patented method "presumption." if it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers were his father. and the week after, they will _say_ it. why, it is just like being the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative noun of multitude; which is father to the expression which the grammarians call verb. it is like a whole ancestry, with only one posterity. to resume. next, the young bacon took up the study of law, and mastered that abstruse science. from that day to the end of his life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a theatre, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a renowned one, a launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal table round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the lord chancellorship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place. when we read the praises bestowed by lord penzance and the other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses, brilliances, profundities and felicities so prodigally displayed in the plays, and try to fit them to the history-less stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of bacon they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there. please turn back and read them again. attributed to shakespeare of stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. "at every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or illustration, his mind ever turned _first_ to the law; he seems almost to have _thought_ in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen." that could happen to no one but a person whose _trade_ was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it. veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere _passenger_ ever does it, be he of stratford or elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to try. please read again what lord campbell and the other great authorities have said about bacon when they thought they were saying it about shakespeare of stratford. chapter x--the rest of the equipment the author of the plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace and majesty of expression. every one has said it, no one doubts it. also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always wanting to break out. we have no evidence of any kind that shakespeare of stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of these acquirements. the only lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially barren of them--barren of all of them. good friend for iesus sake forbeare to digg the dust encloased heare: blest be ye man yt spares thes stones and curst be he yt moves my bones. ben jonson says of bacon, as orator: his language, _where he could spare and pass by a jest_, was nobly censorious. no man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. no member of his speech but consisted of his (its) own graces . . . the fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end. from macaulay: he continued to distinguish himself in parliament, particularly by his exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the king's heart was set--the union of england and scotland. it was not difficult for such an intellect to discover many irresistible arguments in favor of such a scheme. he conducted the great case of the _post nati_ in the exchequer chamber; and the decision of the judges--a decision the legality of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which must be acknowledged--was in a great measure attributed to his dexterous management. again: while actively engaged in the house of commons and in the courts of law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. the noble treatise on the _advancement of learning_, which at a later period was expanded into the _de augmentis_, appeared in . the _wisdom of the ancients_, a work which if it had proceeded from any other writer would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and learning, was printed in . in the meantime the _novum organum_ was slowly proceeding. several distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of his genius. even sir thomas bodley, after perusing the _cogitata et visa_, one of the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all proposals and plots in that book, bacon showed himself a master workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but all the treatise over did abound with choice conceits of the present state of learning, and with worthy contemplations of the means to procure it." in a new edition of the _essays_ appeared, with additions surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality. nor did these pursuits distract bacon's attention from a work the most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling," to use his own phrase, "of the laws of england." to serve the exacting and laborious offices of attorney general and solicitor general would have satisfied the appetite of any other man for hard work, but bacon had to add the vast literary industries just described, to satisfy his. he was a born worker. the service which he rendered to letters during the last five years of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase the regret with which we think on the many years which he had wasted, to use the words of sir thomas bodley, "on such study as was not worthy such a student." he commenced a digest of the laws of england, a history of england under the princes of the house of tudor, a body of national history, a philosophical romance. he made extensive and valuable additions to his essays. he published the inestimable _treatise de argumentis scientiarum_. did these labors of hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and quiet his appetite for work? not entirely: the trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore the mark of his mind. _the best jestbook in the world_ is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study. here are some scattered remarks (from macaulay) which throw light upon bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he was competent to write the plays and poems: with great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human being. the "essays" contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden or a court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the whole world of knowledge. his understanding resembled the tent which the fairy paribanou gave to prince ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful sultans might repose beneath its shade. the knowledge in which bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge. in a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, lord burleigh, he said, "i have taken all knowledge to be my province." though bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric. the practical faculty was powerful in bacon; but not, like his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to tyrannize over the whole man. there are too many places in the plays where this happens. poor old dying john of gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance of it. "we may assume" that it is bacon's fault, but the stratford shakespeare has to bear the blame. no imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated. it stopped at the first check from good sense. in truth much of bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--amid things as strange as any that are described in the "arabian tales" . . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the golden water of parizade, conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of ruggiero, arms more formidable than the lance of astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the balsam of fierabras. yet in his magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild--nothing but what sober reason sanctioned. bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the _novum organum_ . . . every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. no book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many new opinions. but what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science--all the past, the present and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age. he had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering it portable. his eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in literature. it is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally displayed in the plays and poems, and in much higher and richer degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time. he was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable. there was only one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at one birth, nor in one age. he could have written anything that is in the plays and poems. he could have written this: the cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. also, he could have written this, but he refrained: good friend for iesus sake forbeare to digg the dust encloased heare: blest be ye man yt spares thes stones and curst be ye yt moves my bones. when a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with good friend for iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort. it will give him a shock. you never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is, until you bite into a layer of it in a pie. chapter xi am i trying to convince anybody that shakespeare did not write shakespeare's works? ah, now, what do you take me for? would i be so soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly seventy-four years? it would grieve me to know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. no-no, i am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. i doubt if i could do it myself. we always get at second hand our notions about systems of government; and high-tariff and low-tariff; and prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter of religious and political parties; and our acceptance or rejection of the shakespeares and the arthur ortons and the mrs. eddys. we get them all at second-hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves. it is the way we are made. it is the way we are all made, and we can't help it, we can't change it. and whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion. in morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of our environment and associations, and it is a color that can safely be warranted to wash. whenever we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it. we submit, not reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid we should find, upon examination, that the jewels are of the sort that are manufactured at north adams, mass. i haven't any idea that shakespeare will have to vacate his pedestal this side of the year . disbelief in him cannot come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never been known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a very slow process. it took several thousand years to convince our fine race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is no such thing as a witch; it has taken several thousand years to convince that same fine race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is no such person as satan; it has taken several centuries to remove perdition from the protestant church's program of postmortem entertainments; it has taken a weary long time to persuade american presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can; and it looks as if their scotch brethren will still be burning babies in the everlasting fires when shakespeare comes down from his perch. we are the reasoning race. we can't prove it by the above examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories" built by those stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a barrel of sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can prove it by, if i could think of them. we are the reasoning race, and when we find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing through the dust of stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that hercules has been along there. i feel that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet. the bust, too--there in the stratford church. the precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy moustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle, expression of a bladder. chapter xii--irreverence one of the most trying defects which i find in these--these--what shall i call them? for i will not apply injurious epithets to them, the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant to my nature and my dignity. the furthest i can go in that direction is to call them by names of limited reverence--names merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never tainted by harsh feeling. if _they_ would do like this, they would feel better in their hearts. very well, then--to proceed. one of the most trying defects which i find in these stratfordolaters, these shakesperoids, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes, these herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their spirit of irreverence. it is detectable in every utterance of theirs when they are talking about us. i am thankful that in me there is nothing of that spirit. when a thing is sacred to me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it. i cannot call to mind a single instance where i have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people. am i in the right? i think so. but i ask no one to take my unsupported word; no, look at the dictionary; let the dictionary decide. here is the definition: _irreverence_. the quality or condition of irreverence toward god and sacred things. what does the hindu say? he says it is correct. he says irreverence is lack of respect for vishnu, and brahma, and chrishna, and his other gods, and for his sacred cattle, and for his temples and the things within them. he endorses the definition, you see; and there are , , hindus or their equivalents back of him. the dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital g it could restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for _our_ deity and our sacred things, but that ingenious and rather sly idea miscarried: for by the simple process of spelling _his_ deities with capitals the hindu confiscates the definition and restricts it to his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory upon us to revere _his_ gods and _his_ sacred things, and nobody's else. we can't say a word, for he has our own dictionary at his back, and its decision is final. this law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this: . whatever is sacred to the christian must be held in reverence by everybody else; , whatever is sacred to the hindu must be held in reverence by everybody else; , therefore, by consequence, logically, and indisputably, whatever is sacred to _me_ must be held in reverence by everybody else. now then, what aggravates me is, that these troglodytes and muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are _also_ trying to crowd in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere their shakespeare and hold him sacred. we can't have that: there's enough of us already. if you go on widening and spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded that each man's sacred things are the _only_ ones, and the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward them or suffer for it. that can surely happen, and when it happens, the word irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent and dictatorial word in the language. and people will say, "whose business is it, what gods i worship and what things hold sacred? who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get that right?" we cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. we must save the word from this destruction. there is but one way to do it, and that is, to stop the spread of the privilege, and strictly confine it to its present limits: that is, to all the christian sects, to all the hindu sects, and me. we do not need any more, the stock is watered enough, just as it is. it would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone. i think so because i am the only sect that knows how to employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately. the other sects lack the quality of self-restraint. the catholic church says the most irreverent things about matters which are sacred to the protestants, and the protestant church retorts in kind about the confessional and other matters which catholics hold sacred; then both of these irreverencers turn upon thomas paine and charge _him_ with irreverence. this is all unfortunate, because it makes it difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of mentality to find out what irreverence really _is_. it will surely be much better all around if the privilege of regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me. then there will be no more quarrelling, no more bandying of disrespectful epithets, no more heart burnings. there will then be nothing sacred involved in this bacon-shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me. that will simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease. there will be irreverence no longer, because i will not allow it. the first time those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their stratford myth an arthur-orton-mary-baker-thompson-eddy-louis-the-seventeenth-veiled- prophet-of-khorassan will be the last. taught by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier offenders by the inquisition, of holy memory, i shall know how to quiet them. chapter xiii isn't it odd, when you think of it: that you may list all the celebrated englishmen, irishmen, and scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first tudors--a list containing five hundred names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them. every one of them except one--the most famous, the most renowned--by far the most illustrious of them all--shakespeare! you can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists, claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons--you can get the life-histories of all of them but _one_. just one--the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all--shakespeare! you may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by the rest of christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find out the life-histories of all those people, too. you will then have listed celebrities, and you can trace the authentic life-histories of the whole of them. save one--far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation--shakespeare! about him you can find out _nothing_. nothing of even the slightest importance. nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly common-place person--a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave. we can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned _race-horse_ of modern times--but not shakespeare's! there are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself--_he hadn't any history to record_. there is no way of getting around that deadly fact. and no sane way has yet been discovered of getting around its formidable significance. its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (i do not use the term unkindly) is, that shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations. the plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out. he ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely a _nom de plume_ for another man to hide behind. if he had been less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous about his works, it would have been better for his good name, and a kindness to us. the bones were not important. they will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the works will endure until the last sun goes down. mark twain. p.s. _march_ . about two months ago i was illuminating this autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the bacon-shakespeare controversy, and i then took occasion to air the opinion that the stratford shakespeare was a person of no public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure and unimportant. and not only in great london, but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried. i argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had much to tell about him many and many a year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact connected with him. i believed, and i still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village out in missouri. it is a good argument, a prodigiously strong one, and a most formidable one for even the most gifted, and ingenious, and plausible stratfordolater to get around or explain away. to-day a hannibal _courier-post_ of recent date has reached me, with an article in it which reinforces my contention that a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of sixty years. i will make an extract from it: hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son mark twain, or s. l. clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him famous. his name is associated with every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove into his stories, such as holiday hill, jackson's island, or mark twain cave, are now monuments to his genius. hannibal is glad of any opportunity to do him honor as he has honored her. so it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school with mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come. like aunt beckey and mrs. clemens, they can now see that mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad after all. so they have been in no hesitancy about drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to get a "mark twain story," all incidents being viewed in the light of his present fame, until the volume of "twainiana" is already considerable and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their descendants. with some seventy-three years young and living in a villa instead of a house he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his "works" that will go swooping up hannibal chimneys as long as gray-beards gather about the fires and begin with "i've heard father tell" or possibly "once when i." the mrs. clemens referred to is my mother--_was_ my mother. and here is another extract from a hannibal paper. of date twenty days ago: miss becca blankenship died at the home of william dickason, rock street, at . o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged years. the deceased was a sister of "huckleberry finn," one of the famous characters in mark twain's _tom sawyer_. she had been a member of the dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years, and was a highly respected lady. for the past eight years she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by mr. dickason and his family as if she had been a near relative. she was a member of the park methodist church and a christian woman. i remember her well. i have a picture of her in my mind which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago. she was at that time nine years old, and i was about eleven. i remember where she stood, and how she looked; and i can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-linen frock. she was crying. what it was about, i have long ago forgotten. but it was the tears that preserved the picture for me, no doubt. she was a good child, i can say that for her. she knew me nearly seventy years ago. did she forget me, in the course of time? i think not. if she had lived in stratford in shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him? yes. for he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in stratford, and there wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a week. "injun joe," "jimmy finn," and "general gaines" were prominent and very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in hannibal two generations ago. plenty of gray-heads there remember them to this day, and can tell you about them. isn't it curious that two "town-drunkards" and one half-breed loafer should leave behind them, in a remote missourian village, a fame a hundred times greater and several hundred times more particularized in the matter of definite facts than shakespeare left behind him in the village where he had lived the half of his lifetime? mark twain. footnotes: { } four fathoms--twenty-four feet. { } from chapter xiii of "the shakespeare problem restated." proofreaders the author's craft by arnold bennett works by arnold bennett novels a man from the north anna of the five towns leonora a great man sacred and profane love whom god hath joined buried alive the old wives' tale the glimpse helen with the high hand clayhanger the card hilda lessways the regent fantasias the grand babylon hotel the gates of wrath teresa of watling street the loot of cities hugo the ghost the city of pleasure short stories tales of the five towns the grim smile of the five towns the matador of the five towns belles-lettres journalism for women fame and fiction how to become an author the reasonable life how to live on twenty-four hours a day the human machine literary taste the feast of st friend those united states the plain man and his wife paris nights drama polite farces cupid and common sense what the public wants the honeymoon the great adventure * * * * * (_in collaboration with eden phillpotts_) the sinews of war: a romance the statue: a romance (_in collaboration with edward knoblauch_) milestones: a play the author's craft by arnold bennett hodder and stoughton london new york toronto printed in contents part i. seeing life part ii. writing novels part iii. writing plays part iv. the artist and the public part i seeing life i a young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary education, ambles and frisks along the footpath of fulham road, near the mysterious gates of a marist convent. he is a large puppy, on the way to be a dog of much dignity, but at present he has little to recommend him but that gawky elegance, and that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which distinguish the normal puppy. he is an ignorant fool. he might have entered the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and interesting continent imperfectly explored. his confidence in his nose, in his agility, and in the goodness of god is touching, absolutely painful to witness. he glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it as less important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. the next instant he is lying inert in the mud. his confidence in the goodness of god had been misplaced. since the beginning of time god had ordained him a victim. an impressive thing happens. the motor-bus reluctantly slackens and stops. not the differential brake, nor the foot-brake, has arrested the motor-bus, but the invisible brake of public opinion, acting by administrative transmission. there is not a policeman in sight. theoretically, the motor-'bus is free to whiz onward in its flight to the paradise of shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. a man in brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it, and they move gingerly towards the puppy. a little while ago the motor-bus might have overturned a human cyclist or so, and proceeded nonchalant on its way. but now even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such is the force of public opinion aroused. two policemen appear in the distance. "a street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers with calm joy and stares, passive and determined. the puppy offers no sign whatever; just lies in the road. then a boy, destined probably to a great future by reason of his singular faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and carries him by the scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter. relinquished by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal attitude, and seems bent upon repose. the boy lifts the puppy's head to examine it, and the head drops back wearily. the puppy is dead. no cry, no blood, no disfigurement! even no perceptible jolt of the wheel as it climbed over the obstacle of the puppy's body! a wonderfully clean and perfect accident! the increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. people emerge impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down from its back, and either join the crowd or vanish. the two policemen and the crew of the motor-bus have now met in parley. the conductor and the driver have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures are quick and vivacious. the policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. and they could not be more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had them manacled and leashed. the conductor and the driver admit the absolute dominion of the elephantine policemen; they admit that before the simple will of the policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages, count as less than naught. and the policemen are carelessly sublime, well knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very home secretary on his throne--yes, and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury and brutality--are at their beck in case of need. and yet occasionally in the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor and the driver there is a silent message that says: "after all, we, too, are working men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in the service of the pitiless and dishonest public. we, too, have wives and children and privations and frightful apprehensions. we, too, have to struggle desperately. only the awful magic of these garments and of the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an abyss between us and you." and the conductor writes and one of the policemen writes, and they keep on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them. the still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of pleasure. a close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of _the sportsman_ in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus, starts stamping his feet. "i was knocked down by a taxi last year," he says fiercely. "but nobody took no notice of _that_! are they going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?" and for all his respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and brings most of the trinity into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart. and he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. and the crowd never moves nor ceases to stare. then the new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on. and only that which is immortal and divine of the puppy remains behind, floating perhaps like an invisible vapour over the scene of the tragedy. the crowd is tireless, all eyes. the four principals still converse and write. nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about. at length the driver separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is commenced. but everything ends. the policemen turn on their immense heels. the driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus. the bell rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears snorting round the corner into walham green. the crowd is now lessening. but it separates with reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare with intense absorption at the place where the puppy lay or the place where the policemen stood. an appreciable interval elapses before the "street accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon. the members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the course of the day remark to acquaintances: "saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the fulham road this morning! killed dead!" and that is all they do remark. that is all they have witnessed. they will not, and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the dog or the number of the bus-service). they have watched a dog run over. they analyse neither their sensations nor the phenomenon. they have witnessed it whole, as a bad writer uses a _cliché_. they have observed--that is to say, they have really seen--nothing. ii it will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension towards the crowd. because in the matter of looking without seeing we are all about equal. we all go to and fro in a state of the observing faculties which somewhat resembles coma. we are all content to look and not see. and if and when, having comprehended that the _rôle_ of observer is not passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. let a man resolve: "i will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a morning," and the probability if that for many mornings he will see naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be absurdly distorted. the unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal. travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity. a man went to paris for the first time, and observed right off that the carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. he was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost nothing else. this enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. he returned home and announced that paris was a place where people rode on the tops of trains. a frenchwoman came to london for the first time--and no english person would ever guess the phenomenon which vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. she saw a cat walking across a street. the vision excited her. for in paris cats do not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement of cats. i remember once, in the days when observation had first presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and making the circuit of inner london before summer dawn in quest of interesting material. and the one note i gathered was that the ground in front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! what i needed then was an operation for cataract. i also remember taking a man to the opera who had never seen an opera. the work was _lohengrin_. when we came out he said: "that swan's neck was rather stiff." and it was all he did say. we went and had a drink. he was not mistaken. his observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel under survey is not wholly tedious. but a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. i have read, in some work of literary criticism, that dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an illustration of his great powers of observation. dickens was a great observer, but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and unco-ordinated details. good observation consists not in multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordination of detail according to a true perspective of relative importance, so that a finally just general impression may be reached in the shortest possible time. the skilled observer is he who does not have to change his mind. one has only to compare one's present adjusted impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of him to perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of observation. the man as one has learnt to see him is simply not the same man who walked into one's drawing-room on the day of introduction. there are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the first glance: women, children, and dogs. by virtue of a mystic gift with which rumour credits them, they are never mistaken. it is merely not true. women are constantly quite wrong in the estimates based on their "feminine instinct"; they sometimes even admit it; and the matrimonial courts prove it _passim_. children are more often wrong than women. and as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. not seldom have i grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs. nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women, children, and dogs, will persist in anglo-saxon countries. iii one is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one watches them. and generally the more intelligent one is, the more curious one is, and the more one observes. the mere satisfaction of this curiosity is in itself a worthy end, and would alone justify the business of systematised observation. but the aim of observation may, and should, be expressed in terms more grandiose. human curiosity counts among the highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of human conduct. observation is not practised directly with this high end in view (save by prigs and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a moral act and must inevitably promote kindliness--whether we like it or not. it also sharpens the sense of beauty. an ugly deed--such as a deed of cruelty--takes on artistic beauty when its origin and hence its fitness in the general scheme begin to be comprehended. in the perspective of history we can derive an æsthetic pleasure from the tranquil scrutiny of all kinds of conduct--as well, for example, of a renaissance pope as of a savonarola. observation endows our day and our street with the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity--not the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity which puts itself to the trouble of understanding. the one condition is that the observer must never lose sight of the fact that what he is trying to see is life, is the woman next door, is the man in the train--and not a concourse of abstractions. to appreciate all this is the first inspiring preliminary to sound observation. iv the second preliminary is to realise that all physical phenomena are interrelated, that there is nothing which does not bear on everything else. the whole spectacular and sensual show--what the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose scents, the tongue tastes and the skin touches--is a cause or an effect of human conduct. naught can be ruled out as negligible, as not forming part of the equation. hence he who would beyond all others see life for himself--i naturally mean the novelist and playwright--ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. being finite, he cannot. of course he cannot! but he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and relative importance of the particular series of phenomena to which his instinct draws him. if he does not thus envisage the immense background of his special interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for interplay and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted and positively darkened. now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet itself. any logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and climatic phenomena. this is surely obvious. if you say that you are not interested in meteorology or the configurations of the earth, i say that you deceive yourself. you are. for an east wind may upset your liver and cause you to insult your wife. beyond question the most important fact about, for example, great britain is that it is an island. we sail amid the hebrides, and then talk of the fine qualities and the distressing limitations of those islanders; it ought to occur to us english that we are talking of ourselves in little. in moments of journalistic vainglory we are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. but that we are insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain. why not? a genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that great britain is surrounded by water--an effort to keep it always at the back of the consciousness--will help to explain all the minor phenomena of british existence. geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole direct terrestrial influence determining the evolution of original vital energy. all other influences are secondary, and have been effects of character and temperament before becoming causes. perhaps the greatest of them are roads and architecture. nothing could be more english than english roads, or more french than french roads. enter england from france, let us say through the gate of folkestone, and the architectural illustration which greets you (if you can look and see) is absolutely dramatic in its spectacular force. you say that there is no architecture in folkestone. but folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of architecture as a wood is full of trees. as the train winds on its causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once unostentatious and conceited. each a separate, clearly-defined entity! each saying to the others: "don't look over my wall, and i won't look over yours!" each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own individuality! each a stronghold--an island! and all careless of the general effect, but making a very impressive general effect. the english race is below you. your own son is below you insisting on the inviolability of his own den of a bedroom! ... and contrast all that with the immense communistic and splendid façades of a french town, and work out the implications. if you really intend to see life you cannot afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena. yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of walking through a french street and through an english street, and noting chiefly that whereas english lamp-posts spring from the kerb, french lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! not that that detail is not worth noting. it is--in its place. french lamp-posts are part of what we call the "interesting character" of a french street. we say of a french street that it is "full of character." as if an english street was not! such is blindness--to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical faculty, most properly termed common sense. if one is struck by the magnificence of the great towns of the continent, one should ratiocinate, and conclude that a major characteristic of the great towns of england is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. it is so. but there are people who have lived fifty years in manchester, leeds, hull and hanley without noticing it. the english idiosyncrasy is in that awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused by it. every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an explanation, of the human beings who live in it. nothing in it is to be neglected. everything in it is valuable, if the perspective is maintained. nevertheless, in the narrow individualistic novels of english literature--and in some of the best--you will find a domestic organism described as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the sahara, or between heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered without reference to anything exterior to itself. how can such novels satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to acquire the faculty of seeing life? v the net result of the interplay of instincts and influences which determine the existence of a community is shown in the general expression on the faces of the people. this is an index which cannot lie and cannot be gainsaid. it is fairly easy, and extremely interesting, to decipher. it is so open, shameless, and universal, that not to look at it is impossible. yet the majority of persons fail to see it. we hear of inquirers standing on london bridge and counting the number of motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that pass over the bridge in an hour. but we never hear of anybody counting the number of faces happy or unhappy, honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind or cruel, that pass over the bridge. perhaps the public may be surprised to hear that the general expression on the faces of londoners of all ranks varies from the sad to the morose; and that their general mien is one of haste and gloomy preoccupation. such a staring fact is paramount in sociological evidence. and the observer of it would be justified in summoning heaven, the legislature, the county council, the churches, and the ruling classes, and saying to them: "glance at these faces, and don't boast too much about what you have accomplished. the climate and the industrial system have so far triumphed over you all." vi when we come to the observing of the individual--to which all human observing does finally come if there is any right reason in it--the aforesaid general considerations ought to be ever present in the hinterland of the consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps vaguely, perhaps almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. if they do nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to the highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena. especially in england a haphazard particularity is the chief vitiating element in the operations of the mind. in estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget his environment, but--really strange!--to ignore much of the evidence visible in the individual himself. the inexperienced and ardent observer, will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an individual except his face. telling himself that the face must be the reflection of the soul, and that every thought and emotion leaves inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate on the face, singling it out as a phenomenon apart and self-complete. were he a god and infallible, he could no doubt learn the whole truth from the face. but he is bound to fall into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he minimises the opportunity for correction. the face is, after all, quite a small part of the individual's physical organism. an englishman will look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or a plain woman. but a woman may have a plain face, and yet by her form be entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps) _vice versâ_. it is true that the face is the reflexion of the soul. it is equally true that the carriage and gestures are the reflection of the soul. had one eyes, the tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the soul. one piece of evidence can be used to correct every other piece of evidence. a refined face may be refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the gait may nullify the smile. none of the phenomena which every individual carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus terrorising the streets of london is meaningless or negligible. again, in observing we are generally guilty of that particularity which results from sluggishness of the imagination. we may see the phenomenon at the moment of looking at it, but we particularise in that moment, making no effort to conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at other moments. for example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning and rises with reluctance. being a big man, and existing with his wife and children in a very confined space, he has to adapt himself to his environment as he goes through the various functions incident to preparing for his day's work. he is just like you or me. he wants his breakfast, he very much wants to know where his boots are, and he has the usually sinister preoccupations about health and finance. whatever the force of his egoism, he must more or less harmonise his individuality with those of his wife and children. having laid down the law, or accepted it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction of a minute late. he arrives at his office, resumes life with his colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the office for an expedition extending over several hours. in the course of his expedition he encounters the corpse of a young dog run down by a motor-bus. now you also have encountered that corpse and are gazing at it; and what do you say to yourself when he comes along? you say: "oh! here's a policeman." for he happens to be a policeman. you stare at him, and you never see anything but a policeman--an indivisible phenomenon of blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a helmet; "a stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than an algebraic symbol: in a word--a policeman. only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of the reality which it stands for. you are satisfied with it as you are satisfied with the description of a disease. a friend tells you his eyesight is failing. you sympathise. "what is it?" you ask. "glaucoma." "ah! glaucoma!" you don't know what glaucoma is. you are no wiser than you were before. but you are content. a name has contented you. similarly the name of policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further curiosity as to the phenomenon. you have looked at tens of thousands of policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth part of the reality of a single one. your imagination has not truly worked on the phenomenon. there may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a policeman, because a uniform is always a thick veil. but you--i mean you, i, any of us--are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population. for instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it. probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of life. all the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are moving towards a future. but how often does our imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this? we may observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! no human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it back into its past and forward into its future. and this is the final process of observation of the individual. vii seeing life, as i have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the individual. neither does it end with seeing the individual. particular and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless. just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of the observer. the predominant interests of the observer will ultimately direct his observing activities to their own advantage. if he is excited by the phenomena of organisation--as i happen to be--he will see individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will insist on the variations from type due to that grouping. if he is convinced--as numbers of people appear to be--that society is just now in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms--he will see mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the human dilemma demands. and so on! these tendencies, while they should not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent. for, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common sense. part ii writing novels i the novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it that he absolutely must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. he is like other artists--he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell--the affair is too thrilling! only he differs from most artists in this--that what most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner of existing. of course, he is the result of evolution from the primitive. and you can see primitive novelists to this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude visions of life in the café or the club, or on the kerbstone. they belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the form that they adopt is the very basis of the novel. by innumerable entertaining steps from them you may ascend to the major artist whose vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due transmission the great traditional form of the novel as perfected by the masters of a long age which has temporarily set the novel higher than any other art-form. i would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme among the great traditional forms of art. even if there is a greatest form, i do not much care which it is. i have in turn been convinced that chartres cathedral, certain greek sculpture, mozart's _don juan_, and the juggling of paul cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world--not to mention the achievements of shakspere or nijinsky. but there is something to be said for the real pre-eminence of prose fiction as a literary form. (even the modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from prose-fiction.) the novel has, and always will have, the advantage of its comprehensive bigness. st peter's at rome is a trifle compared with tolstoi's _war and peace_; and it is as certain as anything can be that, during the present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as _war and peace_ will ever be read, even if written. notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other artists. in the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. and whereas the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their audacious schemes, the novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with a success that is not denied. there is scarcely any aspect of the interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction--from landscape-painting to sociology--and none which might not be. unnecessary to go back to the ante-scott age in order to perceive how the novel has aggrandised itself! it has conquered enormous territories even since _germinal_. within the last fifteen years it has gained. were it to adopt the hue of the british empire, the entire map of the universe would soon be coloured red. wherever it ought to stand in the hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. it is, and will be for some time to come, the form to which the artist with the most inclusive vision instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive form, and the most adaptable. indeed, before we are much older, if its present rate of progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling position to which the mighty balzac lifted it, and in which he left it in . so much, by the way, for the rank of the novel. ii in considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes which may always be taken for granted. the first is the sense of beauty--indispensable to the creative artist. every creative artist has it, in his degree. he is an artist because he has it. an artist works under the stress of instinct. no man's instinct can draw him towards material which repels him--the fact is obvious. obviously, whatever kind of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and seduced by it, he is under its spell--that is, he has seen beauty in it. he could have no other reason for writing about it. he may see a strange sort of beauty; he may--indeed he does--see a sort of beauty that nobody has quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd spirits ever will or can be made to see. but he does see beauty. to say, after reading a novel which has held you, that the author has no sense of beauty, is inept. (the mere fact that you turned over his pages with interest is an answer to the criticism--a criticism, indeed, which is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer who remarks: "mr blank has produced a thrilling novel, but unfortunately he cannot write." mr blank has written; and he could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the reviewer.) all that a wise person will assert is that an artist's sense of beauty is different for the time being from his own. the reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been brought against nearly all original novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre novelist. even in the extreme cases it is untrue; perhaps it is most untrue in the extreme cases. i do not mean such a case as that of zola, who never went to extremes. i mean, for example, gissing, a real extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. and i mean huysmans, a case even more extreme. possibly no works have been more abused for ugliness than huysman's novel _en ménage_ and his book of descriptive essays _de tout_. both reproduce with exasperation what is generally regarded as the sordid ugliness of commonplace daily life. yet both exercise a unique charm (and will surely be read when _la cathédrale_ is forgotten). and it is inconceivable that huysmans--whatever he may have said--was not ravished by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in it. the other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. unless the vision is passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. he will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree. it is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional. such people have no notion at all of the processes of artistic creation. iii a sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the novelist--the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and whose absence renders futile all the rest--is fineness of mind. a great novelist must have great qualities of mind. his mind must be sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just, merciful. he must be able to conceive the ideal without losing sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. above all, his mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. his mind, in a word, must have the quality of being noble. unless his mind is all this, he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. that which counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his mind--the glass through which he sees things. every other attribute is secondary, and is dispensable. fielding lives unequalled among english novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled. he is read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality. and no advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his position. he will take second place when a more noble mind, a more superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before. what undermines the renown of dickens is the growing conviction that the texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. as much may be said of thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality. it is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose artists have shown contempt for form, yet i am obliged to say that, as the years pass, i attach less and less importance to good technique in fiction. i love it, and i have fought for a better recognition of its importance in england, but i now have to admit that the modern history of fiction will not support me. with the single exception of turgenev, the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have either ignored technique or have failed to understand it. what an error to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form than the finest english novels! balzac was a prodigious blunderer. he could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a book. and as for a greater than balzac--stendhal--his scorn of technique was notorious. stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "by the way i ought to have told you earlier that the duchess--!" and as for a greater than either balzac or stendhal--dostoievsky--what a hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable _brothers karamazov_! any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction by post in twelve lessons could show where dostoievsky was clumsy and careless. what would have been flaubert's detailed criticism of that book? and what would it matter? and, to take a minor example, witness the comically amateurish technique of the late "mark rutherford"--nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire. and when we come to consider the great technicians, guy de maupassant and flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds? exceptional artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the level of the second-rate. human nature being what it is, and de maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with interest by mankind; but he is already classed. nobody, now, despite all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de maupassant with the first magnitudes. and the declension of flaubert is one of the outstanding phenomena of modern french criticism. it is being discovered that flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough--that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little anæmic. _bouvard et pécuchet_ was the crowning proof that flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet. the glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it against him. in regard to one section of human activity only did his mind seem noble--namely, literary technique. his correspondence, written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his best work--a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. so i return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute (beyond the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. it and nothing else makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence of technique is slight and transitory. and i repeat that it is a hard saying. i begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." there may be something of the amateur in all great artists. i do not know why it should be so, unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. assuredly no great artist was ever a profound scholar. the great artist has other ends to achieve. and every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed rapidly with the affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating anything twice, thrice, or ten times over--unnatural task!--are responsible for much of that artifice. we can all point in excuse to shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods would shock flaubert. indeed, the amateurishness of shakspere has been mightily exposed of late years. but nobody seems to care. if flaubert had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur. iv of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is design--or construction. it is the branch of the art--of all arts--which comes next after "inspiration"--a capacious word meant to include everything that the artist must be born with and cannot acquire. the less important branch of technique--far less important--may be described as an ornamentation. there are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few are capital. nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted or ignored them--to the detriment of their work. in my opinion the first rule is that the interest must be centralised; it must not be diffused equally over various parts of the canvas. to compare one art with another may be perilous, but really the convenience of describing a novel as a canvas is extreme. in a well-designed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one particular spot. if the eye is drawn with equal force to several different spots, then we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the interest of the picture. similarly with the novel. a novel must have one, two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. these figures must be in the foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or in the back-ground. moreover, these figures--whether they are saints or sinners--must somehow be presented more sympathetically than the others. if this cannot be done, then the inspiration is at fault. the single motive that should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for that figure. what else could the motive be? the race of heroes is essential to art. but what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the figure. to say that the hero has disappeared from modern fiction is absurd. all that has happened is that the characteristics of the hero have changed, naturally, with the times. when thackeray wrote "a novel without a hero," he wrote a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this better than thackeray. what he meant was that he was sick of the conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his day, and that he had changed the type. since then we have grown sick of dobbins, and the type has been changed again more than once. the fateful hour will arrive when we shall be sick of ponderevos. the temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with creative force, is to scatter the interest. in both his major works tolstoi found the temptation too strong for him. _anna karenina_ is not one novel, but two, and suffers accordingly. as for _war and peace_, the reader wanders about in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a sense of direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post; at intervals encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in vain tries to recall. on a much smaller scale meredith committed the same error. who could assert positively which of the sisters fleming is the heroine of _rhoda fleming_? for nearly two hundred pages at a stretch rhoda scarcely appears. and more than once the author seems quite to forget that the little knave algernon is not, after all, the hero of the story. the second rule of design--perhaps in the main merely a different view of the first--is that the interest must be maintained. it may increase, but it must never diminish. here is that special aspect of design which we call construction, or plot. by interest i mean the interest of the story itself, and not the interest of the continual play of the author's mind on his material. in proportion as the interest of the story is maintained, the plot is a good one. in so far as it lapses, the plot is a bad one. there is no other criterion of good construction. readers of a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to happen next." but in some of the most tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. it would be nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure what will happen next"! good plots set you anxiously guessing what will happen next. when the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect, but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. this calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work another calamity does occur with far too much frequency--namely, the tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme. a sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first chapter of _rhoda_ _fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling for the interview between roberts and rhoda, the author, unable to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for algernon, devotes some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit thousand pounds. that the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design. the edwardian and georgian out-and-out defenders of victorian fiction are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot" is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. i have never yet been able to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot (any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the event-plot (which i positively do not believe),--even then i still hold that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave iniquity. in this connection i have in mind, among english novels, chiefly the work of "mark rutherford," george eliot, the brontës, and anthony trollope. the one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be kept throughout within the same convention. all plots--even those of our most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a conventionalisation of life. we imagine we have arrived at a convention which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners. perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely appreciable! an aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun, the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. no novelist has yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself. it is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. the defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. the notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "naturalist" is merely an epithet expressing self-satisfaction. similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots constructed in an earlier convention, is ridiculous. under this head dickens in particular has been assaulted; i have assaulted him myself. but within their convention, the plots of dickens are excellent, and show little trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled accomplishment. and dickens did not blunder out of one convention into another, as certain of ourselves undeniably do. thomas hardy, too, has been arraigned for the conventionalism of his plots. and yet hardy happens to be one of the rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their idiosyncrasy. hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed this with a virtuosity of skill which ought to have put humility into the hearts of naturalists, but which has not done so. the plot of _the woodlanders_ is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved; it makes the symbolism of ibsen seem crude. you may say that _the woodlanders_ could not have occurred in real life. no novel could have occurred in real life. the balance of probabilities is incalculably against any novel whatsoever; and rightly so. a convention is essential, and the duty of a novelist is to be true within his chosen convention, and not further. most novelists still fail in this duty. is there any reason, indeed, why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? i do not think we are. v leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, i come lastly to the question of getting the semblance of life on to the page before the eyes of the reader--the daily and hourly texture of existence. the novelist has selected his subject; he has drenched himself in his subject. he has laid down the main features of the design. the living embryo is there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure. whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be his material? the answer is that he digs it out of himself. first-class fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. what else should it be? the novelist may take notes of phenomena likely to be of use to him. and he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative incident. but he cannot invent psychology. upon occasion some human being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for his craft. but such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. from outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others. he can use a real person as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each of his characters.... and all that is nothing. and all special research is nothing. when the real intimate work of creation has to be done--and it has to be done on every page--the novelist can only look within for effective aid. almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end. an inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. but, as a fact, every good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could reveal. episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected and traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be detected. in dealing with each character in each episode the novelist must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own individuality which corresponds to the particular character. the foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. and the result of this (or the cause--i don't know which) is that in his own individuality there is something of everybody. if he is a born novelist he is safe in asking himself, when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage at a given point: "now, what should _i_ have done?" and incorporating the answer! and this in practice is what he does. good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind. the necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts for the creative repetition to which all novelists--including the most powerful--are reduced. they monotonously yield again and again to the strongest predilections of their own individuality. again and again they think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character--and lo! when finished it is an old one--autobiographical psychology has triumphed! a novelist may achieve a reputation with only a single type, created and re-created in varying forms. and the very greatest do not contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate types. in cerfberr and christophe's biographical dictionary of the characters of balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages, there are some two thousand entries of different individuals, but probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinctive types. no creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more successfully than balzac. his miser, his vicious delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid servant--each is continually popping up with a new name in the human comedy. a similar phenomenon, as frank harris has proved, is to be observed in shakspere. hamlet of denmark was only the last and greatest of a series of shaksperean hamlets. it may be asked, finally: what of the actual process of handling the raw material dug out of existence and of the artist's self--the process of transmuting life into art? there is no process. that is to say, there is no conscious process. the convention chosen by an artist is his illusion of the truth. consciously, the artist only omits, selects, arranges. but let him beware of being false to his illusion, for then the process becomes conscious, and bad. this is sentimentality, which is the seed of death in his work. every artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be cynical--practically the same thing. and when he falls to the temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only for one instant: "that is not true to life." and in turn the reader's illusion of reality is impaired. readers are divided into two classes--the enemies and the friends of the artist. the former, a legion, admire for a fortnight or a year. they hate an uncompromising struggle for the truth. they positively like the artist to fall to temptation. if he falls, they exclaim, "how sweet!" the latter are capable of savouring the fine unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. and when they whisper in their hearts: "that is not true to life," they are ashamed for the artist. they are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. it is they who confer immortality. part iii writing plays i there is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by critics who happen to have written neither novels nor plays, that it is more difficult to write a play than a novel. i do not think so. i have written or collaborated in about twenty novels and about twenty plays, and i am convinced that it is easier to write a play than a novel. personally, i would sooner _write_ two plays than one novel; less expenditure of nervous force and mere brains would be required for two plays than for one novel. (i emphasise the word "write," because if the whole weariness between the first conception and the first performance of a play is compared with the whole weariness between the first conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play has it. i would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced than one play. but my immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) it seems to me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the comparative difficulty of writing plays and writing novels are those authors who have succeeded or failed equally well in both departments. and in this limited band i imagine that the differences of opinion on the point could not be marked. i would like to note in passing, for the support of my proposition, that whereas established novelists not infrequently venture into the theatre with audacity, established dramatists are very cautious indeed about quitting the theatre. an established dramatist usually takes good care to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the risks of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite properly that of self-preservation. of many established dramatists all over the world it may be affirmed that if they were so indiscreet as to publish a novel, the result would be a great shattering and a great awakening. ii an enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked about the technique of the stage, the assumption being that in difficulty it far surpasses any other literary technique, and that until it is acquired a respectable play cannot be written. one hears also that it can only be acquired behind the scenes. a famous actor-manager once kindly gave me the benefit of his experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who wished to learn his business must live behind the scenes--and study the works of dion boucicault! the truth is that no technique is so crude and so simple as the technique of the stage, and that the proper place to learn it is not behind the scenes but in the pit. managers, being the most conservative people on earth, except compositors, will honestly try to convince the naïve dramatist that effects can only be obtained in the precise way in which effects have always been obtained, and that this and that rule must not be broken on pain of outraging the public. and indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus, seeing the low state of the drama, because in any art rules and reaction always flourish when creative energy is sick. the mandarins have ever said and will ever say that a technique which does not correspond with their own is no technique, but simple clumsiness. there are some seven situations in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one of those situations in each act will be condemned as "undramatic," or "thin," or as being "all talk." it may contain half a hundred other situations, but for the mandarin a situation which is not one of the seven is not a situation. similarly there are some dozen character types in the customary drama, and all original--that is, truthful--characterisation will be dismissed as a total absence of characterisation because it does not reproduce any of these dozen types. thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted for bad technique. the author is bound to be told that what he has written may be marvellously clever, but that it is not a play. i remember the day--and it is not long ago--when even so experienced and sincere a critic as william archer used to argue that if the "intellectual" drama did not succeed with the general public, it was because its technique was not up to the level of the technique of the commercial drama! perhaps he has changed his opinion since then. heaven knows that the so-called "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama could hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most successful commercial plays of modern times. i tremble to think what the mandarins and william archer would say to the technique of _hamlet_, could it by some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by a mr shakspere. they would probably recommend mr shakspere to consider the ways of sardou, henri bernstein, and sir herbert tree, and be wise. most positively they would assert that _hamlet_ was not a play. and their pupils of the daily press would point out--what surely mr shakspere ought to have perceived for himself--that the second, third, or fourth act might be cut wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece. in the sense in which mandarins understand the word technique, there is no technique special to the stage except that which concerns the moving of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations of the human senses. the dramatist must not expect his audience to be able to see or hear two things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. and he must not expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in a satisfactory manner unless he provides them with satisfactory reasons for strolling round, coming on, or going off. lastly, he must not expect his interpreters to achieve physical impossibilities. the dramatist who sends a pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail in stage technique, but he has not proved that stage technique is tremendously difficult; he has proved something quite else. iii one reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is that a play is shorter than a novel. on the average, one may say that it takes six plays to make the matter of a novel. other things being equal, a short work of art presents fewer difficulties than a longer one. the contrary is held true by the majority, but then the majority, having never attempted to produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an opinion. it is said that the most difficult form of poetry is the sonnet. but the most difficult form of poetry is the epic. the proof that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to be in the fewness of perfect sonnets. there are, however, far more perfect sonnets than perfect epics. a perfect sonnet may be a heavenly accident. but such accidents can never happen to writers of epics. some years ago we had an enormous palaver about the "art of the short story," which numerous persons who had omitted to write novels pronounced to be more difficult than the novel. but the fact remains that there are scores of perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but turgenev ever did write a perfect novel. a short form is easier to manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more easily corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is lawful and even necessary in it to leave undone many things which are very hard to do, and because the emotional strain is less prolonged. the most difficult thing in all art is to maintain the imaginative tension unslackened throughout a considerable period. then, not only does a play contain less matter than a novel--it is further simplified by the fact that it contains fewer kinds of matter, and less subtle kinds of matter. there are numerous delicate and difficult affairs of craft that the dramatist need not think about at all. if he attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety, he is merely wasting his time. what passes for subtle on the stage would have a very obvious air in a novel, as some dramatists have unhappily discovered. thus whole continents of danger may be shunned by the dramatist, and instead of being scorned for his cowardice he will be very rightly applauded for his artistic discretion. fortunate predicament! again, he need not--indeed, he must not--save in a primitive and hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." he may roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating" an atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will have departed before he has reached the crisis of the play. the last suburban train is the best friend of the dramatist, though the fellow seldom has the sense to see it. further, he is saved all descriptive work. see a novelist harassing himself into his grave over the description of a landscape, a room, a gesture--while the dramatist grins. the dramatist may have to imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not got to write it--and it is the writing which hastens death. if a dramatist and a novelist set out to portray a clever woman, they are almost equally matched, because each has to make the creature say things and do things. but if they set out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can recline in an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper, digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household by his moodiness and unapproachability. the electric light burns in the novelist's study at three a.m.,--the novelist is still endeavouring to convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and he never has really succeeded and never will. the dramatist writes curtly, "enter millicent." all are anxious to do the dramatist's job for him. is the play being read at home--the reader eagerly and with brilliant success puts his imagination to work and completes a charming millicent after his own secret desires. (whereas he would coldly decline to add one touch to millicent were she the heroine of a novel.) is the play being performed on the stage--an experienced, conscientious, and perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest to prove that the dramatist was right about millicent's astounding fascination. and if she fails, nobody will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive naught but sympathy. and there is still another region of superlative difficulty which is narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: i mean the whole business of persuading the public that the improbable is probable. every work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities and artifice; and the greater portion of the artifice is employed in just this trickery of persuasion. only, the public of the dramatist needs far less persuading than the public of the novelist. the novelist announces that millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the novelist's corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as unconvincing. the dramatist decides that millicent must accept the hand of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in flesh and blood, veritably doing it! not easy for even the critical beholder to maintain that millicent could not and did not do such a silly thing when he has actually with his eyes seen her in the very act! the dramatist, as usual, having done less, is more richly rewarded by results. of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued, by those who have not written novels, that it is precisely the "doing less"--the leaving out--that constitutes the unique and fearful difficulty of dramatic art. "the skill to leave out"--lo! the master faculty of the dramatist! but, in the first place, i do not believe that, having regard to the relative scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. the adjective "photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. and, in the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. to know when to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder. sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, i have been moved to suggest that, if the art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a dramatist who practised the habit of omitting to write anything whatever ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman. iv the more closely one examines the subject, the more clear and certain becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental artistic difference between the novel and the play, and that difference (to which i shall come later) is not the difference which would be generally named as distinguishing the play from the novel. the apparent differences are superficial, and are due chiefly to considerations of convenience. whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to tell a story--using the word story in a very wide sense. just as a novel is divided into chapters, and for a similar reason, a play is divided into acts. but neither chapters nor acts are necessary. some of balzac's chief novels have no chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a theatre audience can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. indeed, audiences, under the compulsion of an artist strong and imperious enough, could, i am sure, be trained to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity. however, chapters and acts are usual, and they involve the same constructional processes on the part of the artist. the entire play or novel must tell a complete story--that is, arouse a curiosity and reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. and each act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the question. and each scene or other minor division must do the same according to its scale. everything basic that applies to the technique of the novel applies equally to the technique of the play. in particular, i would urge that a play, any more than a novel, need not be dramatic, employing the term as it is usually employed. in so far as it suspends the listener's interest, every tale, however told, may be said to be dramatic. in this sense _the golden bowl_ is dramatic; so are _dominique_ and _persuasion_. a play need not be more dramatic than that. very emphatically a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense. it need never induce interest to the degree of excitement. it need have nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the theatre as a situation. it may amble on--and it will still be a play, and it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of thousands, according to the talent of the author. without doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet to excommunicate certain plays from the category of plays. but nobody will be any the worse. and dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. some arch-mandarin may launch at me one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which are supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart. "do you seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama need not be dramatic?" i do, if the word dramatic is to be used in the mandarinic signification. i mean to state that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling. example, henri becque's _la parisienne_, than which there is no better. if i am asked to give my own definition of the adjective "dramatic," i would say that that story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined to be spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any narrower definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted as such--even by mandarins. for be it noted that the mandarin is never consistent. my definition brings me to the sole technical difference between a play and a novel--in the play the story is told by means of a dialogue. it is a difference less important than it seems, and not invariably even a sure point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. for a novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. and plays may contain other matter than dialogue. the classic chorus is not dialogue. but nowadays we should consider the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays, it indeed would be. we have grown very ingenious and clever at the trickery of making characters talk to the audience and explain themselves and their past history while seemingly innocent of any such intention. and here, i admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. i believe it to be the sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, and that it is not acute is proved by the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally vanquished it. mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material. this is not so. rigid economy in the use of material is equally advisable in every form of art. if it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other artist. v and now, having shown that some alleged differences between the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and slight, i come to the fundamental difference between them--a difference which the laity does not suspect, which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to feel profoundly. the emotional strain of writing a play is not merely less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character. and herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write than a novel. the drama does not belong exclusively to literature, because its effect depends on something more than the composition of words. the dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the sole creator of it. without him nothing can be done, but, on the other hand, he cannot do everything himself. he begins the work of creation, which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in the study. it is as if he carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other people. consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist is the base--but he is not the apex. a play is a collaboration of creative faculties. the egotism of the dramatist resents this uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. and further, the creative faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director ("producer") and the actors--the audience itself is unconsciously part of the collaboration. hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others, and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end. the dramatist must deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely foresee nor completely control. the point is not that in the writing of a play there are various sorts of matters--as we have already seen---which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final limit. he must ever remember those who are to come after him. for instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he should not visualise it completely, as a novelist should. the novelist may perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions. this aspect of the subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of practising dramatists. vi when the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration have yet to begin. the serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most desolating part of his toil awaits him. i do not refer to the business of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play. for, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that theatrical managers are--no doubt inevitably--theatrical. nevertheless, even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a play is not a play till it is performed. the manager reads the play, and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. in particular the manager reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed--indeed, a play against whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced. it is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a manuscript, and very seldom success. the manager's profoundest instinct--self-preservation again!--is to refuse a play; if he accepts, it is against the grain, against his judgment--and out of a mad spirit of adventure. some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed in an atmosphere of settled despair. the dramatist naturally feels an immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager, and he is therein justified. the manager's vocation is not to write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to be pitiably delusive. the manager's true and only vocation is to refrain from producing plays. despite all this, however, the manager has already collaborated in the play. the dramatist sees it differently now. all sorts of new considerations have been presented to him. not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another play. which is merely to say that the creative work on it which still remains to be done has been more accurately envisaged. this strange experience could not happen to a novel, because when a novel is written it is finished. and when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been chosen, and this priceless and mysterious person has his first serious confabulation with the author, then at once the play begins to assume new shapes--contours undreamt of by the author till that startling moment. and even if the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals, similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer is a different fellow from the author as author. the producer is up against realities. he, first, renders the play concrete, gradually condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... he suggests the casting. "what do you think of x. for the old man?" asks the producer. the author is staggered. is it conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so misread and misunderstood the play? x. would be preposterous as the old man. but the producer goes on talking. and suddenly the author sees possibilities in x. but at the same time he sees a different play from what he wrote. and quite probably he sees a more glorious play. quite probably he had not suspected how great a dramatist he is.... before the first rehearsal is called, the play, still without a word altered, has gone through astounding creative transmutations; the author recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is the likeness of a first cousin. at the first rehearsal, and for many rehearsals, to an extent perhaps increasing, perhaps decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an apologetic and self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between that of a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a father over the crude body of a new-born child. now in truth he deeply realises that the play is a collaboration. in extreme cases he may be brought to see that he himself is one of the less important factors in the collaboration. the first preoccupation of the interpreters is not with his play at all, but--quite rightly--with their own careers; if they were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the chief genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the play they would not act very well. but, more than that, they do not regard his play as a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their careers. at the most favourable, what they secretly think is that if they are permitted to exercise their talents on his play there is a chance that they may be able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their careers. the attitude of every actor towards his part is: "my part is not much of a part as it stands, but if my individuality is allowed to get into free contact with it, i may make something brilliant out of it." which attitude is a proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion justified by the facts of the case. the actor's phrase is that he _creates_ a part, and he is right. he completes the labour of creation begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if reasonable liberty is not accorded to him--if either the author or the producer attempts to do too much of the creative work--the result cannot be satisfactory. as the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day. however autocratic the producer, however obstinate the dramatist, the play will vary at each rehearsal like a large cloud in a gentle wind. it is never the same play for two days together. nor is this surprising, seeing that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two dozen, human beings endowed with the creative gift are creatively working on it. every dramatist who is candid with himself--i do not suggest that he should be candid to the theatrical world--well knows that though his play is often worsened by his collaborators it is also often improved,--and improved in the most mysterious and dazzling manner--without a word being altered. producer and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they execute them. and the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for which lawfully he may not claim credit. on the other hand, he may be confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which lawfully he is blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a battle,--certain persons are theoretically in control, but in fact the thing principally fights itself. and thus the creation goes on until the dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. and the dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically, fatalistically: "well, that is the play that they have made of _my_ play!" and he may be pleased or he may be disgusted. but if he attends the first performance he cannot fail to notice, after the first few minutes of it, that he was quite mistaken, and that what the actors are performing is still another play. the audience is collaborating. part iv the artist and the public i i can divide all the imaginative writers i have ever met into two classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity. the latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or religious life. and indeed, since (as i have held in a previous chapter) the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to himself. an enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the artist thereto. but possibly the attitude of a first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide. the _letters of george meredith_ (of which the first volume is a magnificent unfolding of the character of a great man) are full of references to popularity, references overt and covert. meredith could never--and quite naturally--get away from the idea of popularity. he was a student of the english public, and could occasionally be unjust to it. writing to m. andré raffalovich (who had sent him a letter of appreciation) in november, , he said: "i venture to judge by your name that you are at most but half english. i can consequently believe in the feeling you express for the work of an unpopular writer. otherwise one would incline to be sceptical, for the english are given to practical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are supposed to languish in the shade amuses them." a remark curiously unfair to the small, faithful band of admirers which meredith then had. the whole letter, while warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy. further on in it he says: "good work has a fair chance to be recognised in the end, and if not, what does it matter?" but there is constant proof that it did matter very much. in a letter to william hardman, written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "never mind: if we do but get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" to captain maxse, in reference to a vast sum of £ , paid by the _cornhill_ people to george eliot (for an unreadable novel), he exclaims: "bon dieu! will aught like this ever happen to me?" and to his son he was very explicit about the extent to which unpopularity "mattered": "as i am unpopular i am ill-paid, and therefore bound to work double tides, hardly ever able to lay down the pen. this affects my weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is looped." (vol. i., p. .) and in another letter to arthur meredith about the same time he sums up his career thus: "as for me, i have failed, and i find little to make the end undesirable." (vol. i., p. .) this letter is dated june rd, . meredith was then fifty-three years of age. he had written _modern love_, _the shaving of shagpat_, _the ordeal of richard feverel_, _rhoda fleming_, _the egoist_ and other masterpieces. he knew that he had done his best and that his best was very fine. it would be difficult to credit that he did not privately deem himself one of the masters of english literature and destined to what we call immortality. he had the enthusiastic appreciation of some of the finest minds of the epoch. and yet, "as for me, i have failed, and i find little to make the end undesirable." but he had not failed in his industry, nor in the quality of his work, nor in achieving self-respect and the respect of his friends. he had failed only in one thing--immediate popularity. ii assuming then that an author is justified in desiring immediate popularity, instead of being content with poverty and the unheard plaudits of posterity, another point presents itself. ought he to limit himself to a mere desire for popularity, or ought he actually to do something, or to refrain from doing something, to the special end of obtaining popularity? ought he to say: "i shall write exactly what and how i like, without any regard for the public; i shall consider nothing but my own individuality and powers; i shall be guided solely by my own personal conception of what the public ought to like"? or ought he to say: "let me examine this public, and let me see whether some compromise between us is not possible"? certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the alternative. occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately constituted and so brilliantly endowed that he captures the public at once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never arises. but this is exceedingly rare. on the other hand, many mediocre authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. such authors enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness. of nearly all really original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads with the public--as an almost inevitable consequence of their originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise acutely exists. george meredith was such an artist. george meredith before anything else was a poet. he would have been a better poet than a novelist, and i believe that he thought so. the public did not care for his poetry. if he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said: "i shall keep on writing poetry, even if i have to become a stockbroker in order to do it." but when he was only thirty-three--a boy, as authors go--he had already tired of no-compromise. he wrote to augustus jessopp: "it may be that in a year or two i shall find time for a full sustained song.... the worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and life, one's affections are divided.... and in truth, being a servant of the public, _i must wait till my master commands before i take seriously to singing_." (vol. i., p. .) here is as good an example as one is likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something else, less to his taste, that will be read. the same sentiment has actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent.... so much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer to do because it is not appreciated by the public. there remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the public appreciates it--otherwise the pot-boiler. in meredith wrote to mrs ross: "i am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to do this," i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (vol. i., p. .) oh, base compromise! seventeen years later he wrote to r.l. stevenson: "of potboilers let none speak. jove hangs them upon necks that could soar above his heights but for the accursed weight." (vol. i., p. .) it may be said that meredith was forced to write potboilers. he was no more forced to write potboilers than any other author. sooner than wallow in that shame, he might have earned money in more difficult ways. or he might have indulged in that starvation so heartily prescribed for authors by a plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the english tongue in prose. meredith subdued his muse, and meredith wrote potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of profound common sense. being extremely creative, he had to arrive somehow, and he remembered that the earth is the earth, and the world the world, and men men, and he arrived as best he could. the great majority of his peers have acted similarly. the truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. and he is somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former. he wants too much. there are two sides to every bargain, including the artistic. the most fertile and the most powerful artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. the lack of the sense of proportion is the mark of the _petit maître_. the sagacious artist, while respecting himself, will respect the idiosyncrasies of his public. to do both simultaneously is quite possible. in particular, the sagacious artist will respect basic national prejudices. for example, no first-class english novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which continental writers enjoy as a matter of course. the british public is admittedly wrong on this important point--hypocritical, illogical and absurd. but what would you? you cannot defy it; you literally cannot. if you tried, you would not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters. you can only get round it by ingenuity and guile. you can only go a very little further than is quite safe. you can only do one man's modest share in the education of the public. in valery larbaud's latest novel, _a.o. barnabooth,_ occurs a phrase of deep wisdom about women: "_la femme est une grande realite, comme la guerre_." it might be applied to the public. the public is a great actuality, like war. if you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. there it is! you can do something with it, but not much. and what you do not do with it, it must do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the artistic function. this contact may be closened and completed by the artist's cleverness--the mere cleverness of adaptability which most first-class artists have exhibited. you can wear the fashions of the day. you can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his attention while you stab him in the chest. you can cajole money out of him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in which to force him to accept later on something that he would prefer to refuse. you can use a thousand devices on the excellent simpleton.... and in the process you may degrade yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! of course you may; as you may become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. only, if you have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't succumb to this danger. if you have anything to say worth saying, you usually manage somehow to get it said, and read. the artist of genuine vocation is apt to be a wily person. he knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he may retain essentials. and he can mysteriously put himself even into a potboiler. _clarissa harlowe_, which influenced fiction throughout europe, was the direct result of potboiling. if the artist has not the wit and the strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, and ought to retire to the upper branches of the civil service. iii when the author has finished the composition of a work, when he has put into the trappings of the time as much of his eternal self as they will safely hold, having regard to the best welfare of his creative career as a whole, when, in short, he has done all that he can to ensure the fullest public appreciation of the essential in him--there still remains to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the entire affair of obtaining contact with the public. he has to see that the work is placed before the public as advantageously as possible. in other words, he has to dispose of the work as advantageously as possible. in other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant, for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more skilfully he sells it the better will be the result, not only for the public appreciation of his message, but for himself as a private individual and as an artist with further activities in front of him. now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards one's finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary world, to whom the very word "royalties" is anathema. they apparently would prefer to treat literature as they imagine byron treated it, although as a fact no poet in a short life ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out of verse as byron made. or perhaps they would like to return to the golden days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist; or even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all authors save the most successful--and not a few of the successful also--failed to obtain the fair reward of their work. the dilettanti's snobbishness and sentimentality prevent them from admitting that, in a democratic age, when an author is genuinely appreciated, either he makes money or he is the foolish victim of a scoundrel. they are fond of saying that agreements and royalties have nothing to do with literature. but agreements and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature. full contact between artist and public depends largely upon publisher or manager being compelled to be efficient and just. and upon the publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice depend also the dignity, the leisure, the easy flow of coin, the freedom, and the pride which are helpful to the full fruition of any artist. no artist was ever assisted in his career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by overwork, by economic inferiority. see meredith's correspondence everywhere. nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which might be done well. if an artist writes a fine poem, shows it to his dearest friend, and burns it--i can respect him. but if an artist writes a fine poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to be inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own interests in the transaction, on the plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, then i refuse to respect him. a man cannot fulfil, and has no right to fulfil, one function only in this complex world. some, indeed many, of the greatest creative artists have managed to be very good merchants also, and have not been ashamed of the double _rôle_. to read the correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme artists one might be excused for thinking, indeed, that they were more interested in the _rôle_ of merchant than in the other _rôle_; and yet their work in no wise suffered. in the distribution of energy between the two _rôles_ common sense is naturally needed. but the artist who has enough common sense--or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of reality--not to disdain the _rôle_ of merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it. he may be reassured on one point--namely, that success in the _rôle_ of merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel in the _rôle_ of artist. the late discovery of a large public in america delighted meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system. it is often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great popularity ought to disturb the conscience of the artist. i do not believe it. if the conscience of the artist is not disturbed during the actual work itself, no subsequent phenomenon will or should disturb it. once the artist is convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large for his peace of mind. on the other hand, failure in the _rôle_ of merchant will emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in the _rôle_ of artist and his courage in the further pursuance of that _rôle_. but many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry. not only is their sense of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but they are apt in business to behave in a puerile manner, to close an arrangement out of mere impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by their vanity, to believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit what is patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. an artist may say: "i cannot work unless i have a free mind, and i cannot have a free mind if i am to be bothered all the time by details of business." apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a man can in this world hope for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neglecting his debtors he will be deprived of it by his creditors--apart from that, the artist's demand for a free mind is reasonable. moreover, it is always a distressing sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not fitted him to do, and so doing it ill. such artists, however--and they form possibly the majority--can always employ an expert to do their business for them, to cope on their behalf with the necessary middleman. not that i deem the publisher or the theatrical manager to be by nature less upright than any other class of merchant. but the publisher and the theatrical manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and grave temptation. the ordinary merchant deals with other merchants--his equals in business skill. the publisher and the theatrical manager deal with what amounts to a race of children, of whom even arch-angels could not refrain from taking advantage. when the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it inevitably grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical manager had very humanly been giving way to the temptation with which heaven in her infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict them,--and the society of authors came into being. a natural consequence of the general awakening was the self-invention of the literary agent. the society of authors, against immense obstacles, has performed wonders in the economic education of the creative artist, and therefore in the improvement of letters. the literary agent, against obstacles still more immense, has carried out the details of the revolution. the outcry--partly sentimental, partly snobbish, but mainly interested--was at first tremendous against these meddlers who would destroy the charming personal relations that used to exist between, for example, the author and the publisher. (the less said about those charming personal relations the better. documents exist.) but the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is beautifully aware who holds the field. though much remains to be done, much has been done; and today the creative artist who, conscious of inability to transact his own affairs efficiently, does not obtain efficient advice and help therein, stands in his own light both as an artist and as a man, and is a reactionary force. he owes the practice of elementary common sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large. iv the same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. this is a still more serious error of attitude--especially in a storyteller. no artist is likely to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an artist. the notion that art is first and the rest of the universe nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in art. the artist who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself. the classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who repudiates the world is flaubert. at an early age flaubert convinced himself that he had no use for the world of men. he demanded to be left in solitude and tranquillity. the morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly under the fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. he was brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. as an old man of twenty-two, mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to perfection. only when he was travelling (as, for example, in egypt) do his letters lose for a time their distemper. his love-letters are often ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of the refined and cultivated hermit. his mistress was a woman difficult to handle and indeed a tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy. full of a grievance against the whole modern planet, flaubert turned passionately to ancient times (in which he would have been equally unhappy had he lived in them), and hoped to resurrect beauty when he had failed to see it round about him. whether or not he did resurrect beauty is a point which the present age is now deciding. his fictions of modern life undoubtedly suffer from his detestation of the material; but considering his manner of existence it is marvellous that he should have been able to accomplish any of them, except _un coeur simple_. the final one, _bouvard et pécuchet_, shows the lack of the sense of reality which must be the inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. it is realism without conviction. no such characters as bouvard and pecuchet could ever have existed outside flaubert's brain, and the reader's resultant impression is that the author has ruined a central idea which was well suited for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands of a french swift. but the spectacle of flaubert writing in _mots justes_ a grand larkish extravaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy. there are many sub-flauberts rife in london. they are usually more critical than creative, but their influence upon creators, and especially the younger creators, is not negligible. their aim in preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from the world. they are for ever being surprised and hurt by the crudity and coarseness of human nature, and for ever bracing themselves to be not as others are. they would have incurred the anger of dr. johnson, and a just discipline for them would be that they should be cross-examined by the great bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced accordingly. the morbid flaubertian shrinking from reality is to be found to-day even in relatively robust minds. i was recently at a provincial cinema, and witnessed on the screen with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama entitled "gold is not all." my friend, who combines the callings of engineer and general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said: "you know, this kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." i answered him as johnsonially as the circumstances would allow. had he lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a cinema audience to show him what the general level of human nature really is? nobody has any right to be ashamed of human nature. is one ashamed of one's mother? is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? human nature _is_. and the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work. there is a numerous band of persons in london--and the novelist and dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art that they become incapable of real existence. each is a stylites on a pillar. their opinion on leon bakst, francis thompson, augustus john, cyril scott, maurice ravel, vuillard, james stephens, e.a. rickards, richard strauss, eugen d'albert, etc., may not be without value, and their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but they know no more about reality than a pekinese dog on a cushion. they never approach normal life. they scorn it. they have a horror of it. they class politics with the differential calculus. they have heard of lloyd george, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts. the occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to the creative artist. but let him keep himself inoculated against its disease by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general national life. let him mingle with the public, for god's sake! no phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet for the artist's shrinking scorn. and the average man, as to whom the artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the main part of the material in which he works. above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the antidote to the circle of dilettantism is the circle of social reform. it is not. i referred in the first chapter to the prevalent illusion that the republic has just now arrived at a crisis, and that if something is not immediately done disaster will soon be upon us. this is the illusion to which the circle of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an illusion against which the common sense of the creative artist must mightily protest. the world is, without doubt, a very bad world; but it is also a very good world. the function of the artist is certainly concerned more with what is than with what ought to be. when all necessary reform has been accomplished our perfected planet will be stone-cold. until then the artist's affair is to keep his balance amid warring points of view, and in the main to record and enjoy what is.... but is not the minimum wage bill urgent? but when the minimum wage is as trite as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be tempting the artist too far out of his true path. and the artist who yields is lost. produced from scanned images of public domain material from the internet archive.) [illustration: book's cover] my first book printed by spottiswoode and co., new-street square london [illustration: signed: yours sincerely, jerome k. jerome] my first book the experiences of walter besant james payn w. clark russell grant allen hall caine george r. sims rudyard kipling a. conan doyle m. e. braddon f. w. robinson h. rider haggard r. m. ballantyne i. zangwill morley roberts david christie murray marie corelli jerome k. jerome john strange winter bret harte 'q.' robert buchanan robert louis stevenson with an introduction by jerome k. jerome _and illustrations_ london chatto & windus, piccadilly introduction by jerome k. jerome 'please, sir,' he said, 'could you tell me the right time?' 'twenty minutes to eight,' i replied, looking at my watch. 'oh,' he remarked. then added for my information after a pause: 'i haven't got to be in till half-past eight.' after that we fell back into our former silence, and sat watching the murky twilight, he at his end of the park seat, i at mine. 'and do you live far away?' i asked, lest, he having miscalculated, the short legs might be hard put to it. 'oh no, only over there,' he answered, indicating with a sweep of his arm the northern half of london where it lay darkening behind the chimney-fringed horizon; 'i often come and sit here.' it seemed an odd pastime for so very small a citizen. 'and what makes you like to come and sit here?' i said. 'oh, i don't know,' he replied, 'i think.' 'and what do you think about?' 'oh--oh, lots of things.' he inspected me shyly out of the corner of his eye, but, satisfied apparently by the scrutiny, he sidled up a little nearer. 'mama does not like this evening time,' he confided to me; 'it always makes her cry. but then,' he went on to explain, 'mama has had a lot of trouble, and that makes anyone feel different about things, you know.' i agreed that this was so. 'and do you like this evening time?' i enquired. 'yes,' he answered; 'don't you?' 'yes, i like it too,' i admitted. 'but tell me why you like it, then i will tell you why i like it.' 'oh,' he replied, 'things come to you.' 'what things?' i asked. again his critical eye passed over me, and it raised me in my own conceit to find that again the inspection contented him, he evidently feeling satisfied that here was a man to whom another gentleman might speak openly and without reserve. he wriggled sideways, slipping his hands beneath him and sitting on them. 'oh, fancies,' he explained; 'i'm going to be an author when i grow up, and write books.' then i knew why it was that the sight of his little figure had drawn me out of my path to sit beside him, and why the little serious face had seemed so familiar to me, as of some one i had once known long ago. so we talked of books and bookmen. he told me how, having been born on the fourteenth of february, his name had come to be valentine, though privileged parties, as for example aunt emma, and mr. dawson, and cousin naomi, had shortened it to val, and mama would sometimes call him pickaniny, but that was only when they were quite alone. in return i confided to him my name, and discovered that he had never heard it, which pained me for the moment, until i found that of all my confrères, excepting only mr. stevenson, he was equally ignorant, he having lived with the heroes and the heroines of the past, the new man and the new woman, the new pathos and the new humour being alike unknown to him. scott and dumas and victor hugo were his favourites. 'gulliver's travels,' 'robinson crusoe,' 'don quixote,' and the 'arabian nights,' he knew almost by heart, and these we discussed, exchanging many pleasant and profitable ideas upon the same. but the psychological novel, i gathered, was not to his taste. he liked '_real_ stories,' he told me, naïvely unconscious of the satire, 'where people did things.' 'i used to read silly stuff once,' he confessed humbly, 'indian tales and that sort of thing, you know, but mama said i'd never be able to write if i read that rubbish.' 'so you gave it up,' i concluded for him. 'yes,' he answered. but a little sigh of regret, i thought, escaped him at the same time. 'and what do you read now?' i asked. 'i'm reading marlowe's plays and de quincey's confessions (he called him quinsy) just now,' was his reply. 'and do you understand them?' i queried. 'fairly well,' he answered. then added more hopefully, 'mama says i'll get to like them better as i go on.' 'i want to learn to write very, very well indeed,' he suddenly added after a long pause, his little earnest face growing still more serious, 'then i'll be able to earn heaps of money.' it rose to my lips to answer him that it was not always the books written very, very well that brought in the biggest heaps of money; that if heaps of money were his chiefest hope he would be better advised to devote his energies to the glorious art of self-advertisement and the gentle craft of making friends upon the press. but something about the almost baby face beside me, fringed by the gathering shadows, silenced my middle-aged cynicism. involuntarily my gaze followed his across the strip of foot-worn grass, across the dismal-looking patch of ornamental water, beyond the haze of tangled trees, beyond the distant row of stuccoed houses, and, arrived there with him, i noticed many men and women clothed in the garments of all ages and all lands, men and women who had written very, very well indeed and who notwithstanding had earned heaps of money, the hire worthy of the labourer, and who were not ashamed; men and women who had written true words which the common people had read gladly; men and women who had been raised to lasting fame upon the plaudits of their day; and before the silent faces of these, made beautiful by time, the little bitter sneers i had counted truth rang foolish in my heart, so that i returned with my young friend to our green seat beside the foot-worn grass, feeling by no means so sure as when i had started which of us twain were the better fitted to teach wisdom to the other. 'and what would you do, valentine, with heaps of money?' i asked. again for a moment his old shyness of me returned. perhaps it was not quite a legitimate question from a friend of such recent standing. but his frankness wrestled with his reserve and once more conquered. 'mama need not do any work then,' he answered. 'she isn't really strong enough for it, you know,' he explained, 'and i'd buy back the big house where she used to live when she was a little girl, and take her back to live in the country--the country air is so much better for her, you know--and aunt emma, too.' but i confess that as regards aunt emma his tone was not enthusiastic. i spoke to him--less dogmatically than i might have done a few minutes previously, and i trust not discouragingly--of the trials and troubles of the literary career, and of the difficulties and disappointments awaiting the literary aspirant, but my croakings terrified him not. 'mama says that every work worth doing is difficult,' he replied, 'and that it doesn't matter what career we choose there are difficulties and disappointments to be overcome, and that i must work very hard and say to myself "i _will_ succeed," and then in the end, you know, i shall.' 'though of course it may be a long time,' he added cheerfully. only one thing in the slightest daunted him, and that was the weakness of his spelling. 'and i suppose,' he asked, 'you must spell very well indeed to be an author.' i explained to him, however, that this failing was generally met by a little judicious indistinctness of caligraphy, and all obstacles thus removed, the business of a literary gent seemed to him an exceptionally pleasant and joyous one. 'mama says it is a noble calling,' he confided to me, 'and that anyone ought to be very proud and glad to be able to write books, because they give people happiness and make them forget things, and that one ought to be awfully good if one's going to be an author, so as to be worthy to help and teach others.' 'and do you try to be awfully good, valentine?' i enquired. 'yes,' he answered; 'but it's awfully hard, you know. i don't think anybody could ever be _quite_ good--until,' he corrected himself, 'they were grown up.' 'i suppose,' he added with a little sigh, 'it's easy for grown-up people to be good.' it was my turn to glance suspiciously at him, this time wondering if the seeds of satire could have taken root already in that tiny brain. but his eyes met mine without flinching, and i was not loath to drift away from the point. 'and what else does your mama say about literature, valentine?' i asked. for the strangeness of it was that, though i kept repeating under my breath 'copy-book maxims, copy-book maxims,' hoping by such shibboleth to protect myself from their influence, the words yet stirred within me old childish thoughts and sentiments that i, in my cleverness, had long since learnt to laugh at, and had thought forgotten. i, with my years of knowledge and experience behind me, seemed for the nonce to be sitting with valentine at the feet of this unseen lady, listening, as i again told myself, to 'copy-book maxims' and finding in them in spite of myself a certain element of truth, a certain amount of helpfulness, an unpleasant suggestion of reproach. he tucked his hands underneath him, as before, and sat swinging his short legs. 'oh--oh lots of things,' he answered vaguely. 'yes?' i persisted. 'oh, that--' he repeated it slowly, recalling it word for word as he went on, 'that he who can write a great book is greater than a king; that a good book is better than a good sermon; that the gift of being able to write is given to anybody in trust, and that an author should never forget that he is god's servant.' i thought of the chatter of the clubs, and could not avoid a smile. but the next moment something moved me to take his hand in mine, and, turning his little solemn face towards mine, to say: 'if ever there comes a time, little man, when you are tempted to laugh at your mother's old-fashioned notions--and such a time may come--remember that an older man than you once told you he would that he had always kept them in his heart, he would have done better work.' then growing frightened at my own earnestness, as we men do, deeming it, god knows why, something to be ashamed of, i laughed away his answering questions, and led the conversation back to himself. 'and have you ever tried writing anything?' i asked him. of course he had, what need to question! and it was, strange to say, a story about a little boy who lived with his mother and aunt, and who went to school. 'it is sort of,' he explained, 'sort of auto--bio--graphical, you know.' 'and what does mama think of it?' was my next question, after we had discussed the advantages of drawing upon one's own personal experiences for one's material. 'mama thinks it is very clever--in parts,' he told me. 'you read it to her?' i suggested. 'yes,' he acknowledged, 'in the evening, when she's working, and aunt emma isn't there.' the room rose up before me, i could see the sweet-faced lady in her chair beside the fire, her white hands moving to and from the pile of sewing by her side, the little flushed face of the lad bending over his pages written in sprawling schoolboy hand. i saw the love light in her eyes as every now and then she stole a covert glance across at him, i heard his childish treble rising and falling, as his small finger moved slowly down the sheet. suddenly it said, a little more distinctly: 'please, sir, could you tell me the time?' 'just over the quarter, valentine,' i answered, waking up and looking at my watch. he rose and held out his hand. 'i didn't know it was so late,' he said, 'i must go now.' but as our hands met another question occurred to him. 'oh,' he exclaimed, 'you said you'd tell me why you liked to come and sit here of an evening, like i do. why?' 'so i did, valentine,' i replied, 'but i've changed my mind. when you are a big man, as old as i am, you come and sit here and you'll know. but it isn't so pleasant a reason as yours, valentine, and you wouldn't understand it. good-night.' he raised his cap with an old-fashioned courtesy and trotted off, looking however a little puzzled. some distance down the path, he turned and waved his hand to me, and i watched him disappear into the twilight. i sat on for a while, thinking many thoughts, until across the rising mist there rang a hoarse, harsh cry, 'all out, all out,' and slowly i moved homeward. contents page ready-money mortiboy. by walter besant the family scapegrace. by james payn the wreck of the 'grosvenor.' by w. clark russell physiological Æsthetics and philistia. by grant allen the shadow of a crime. by hall caine the social kaleidoscope. by george r. sims departmental ditties. by rudyard kipling juvenilia. by a. conan doyle the trail of the serpent. by m. e. braddon the house of elmore. by f. w. robinson dawn. by h. rider haggard hudson's bay. by r. m. ballantyne the premier and the painter. by i. zangwill the western avernus. by morley roberts a life's atonement. by david christie murray a romance of two worlds. by marie corelli on the stage and off. by jerome k. jerome cavalry life. by 'john strange winter' (mrs. arthur stannard) californian verse. by bret harte dead man's rock. by 'q.' undertones and idyls and legends of inverburn. by robert buchanan treasure island. by robert louis stevenson list of illustrations page jerome k. jerome _frontispiece_ walter besant james rice julia mr. besant's study the oyster shop a book plate a wicked sister james payn it 'took off' from his shoulder mr. payn's study count gotsuchakoff 'would you mind just reading a bit of it?' the servant came to put coals on the fire mr. payn's office at waterloo place killed by lions clark russell clark russell as a midshipman of seventeen i was a child of thirteen neatby anchored in the downs some of the crew the magistrates the wreck of the 'grosvenor' mrs. clark russell the boatswain of the 'grosvenor' the 'hougoumont' poor jack! grant allen fiction science andrew chatto a shelf in the study 'thank you, sir' i left it hall caine my ms. went sprawling over the table derwentwater sty head pass wastwater from sty head pass the horse broke away something strapped on its back the castle rock, st. john's vale thirlmere rossetti walking to and fro dante gabriel rossetti mr. hall caine in his study mrs. hall caine coming up in the train clarence terrace the hall george r. sims george r. sims the 'social kaleidoscope' the snuggery mr. sims's 'little dawg' the dining-room the library 'sir hugo' the balcony 'beauty,' an old favourite, twenty years old the drawing-room 'faust up to date' mr. sims's dinner party the newspaper files 'your potery very good, sir; just coming proper length to-day.' rudyard kipling sung to the banjoes round camp fires departmental ditties a. conan doyle i was six on the prairies and the oceans my dÉbut as a story-teller 'with the editor's compliments' 'have you seen what they say about you?' 'mrs. thurston's little boy wants to see you, doctor' mr. andrew lang lichfield house, richmond the hall the dining-room the drawing-room the evening-room the smoking-room the library miss braddon's favourite mare the orangery miss braddon's cottage at lyndhurst miss braddon's inkstand at twenty f. w. robinson elmore house at thirty mr. robinson's library the garden the drawing-room at forty mr. robinson at work h. rider haggard the front garden mr. rider haggard and his daughters the hall mr. rider haggard's study some curios a study corner mr. rider haggard the farm where i wrote my first book r. m. ballantyne mr. ballantyne's house at harrow trophies from mr. ballantyne's travels the study mr. r. m. ballantyne looking for toole i. zangwill i sat down and wrote something arthur goddard it was hawked about the streets a policeman told him to get down such stuff as little boys scribble upon walls life in bethnal green we sent it round mr. zangwill at work editing a comic paper a fame less widespread than a prizefighter's mr. morley roberts before the mast i married them all off at the end an american saw-mill where mr. roberts worked defying the universe cowboy roberts the very prairie dogs taught me the california coast range by the camp fire d. christie murray i handed him two chapters i sent all my people into a coal-mine they invested him with the medal consulting old almanacs she drew from it a brown-paper parcel if there had been no 'david copperfield' the stock was transferred some novels the drawing-room the library the study facsimile of marie corelli's ms. as prepared for the press my first-born jerome k. jerome 'he and you had to carry lisa weber across the stage' that brilliant idea i hated the dismal little 'slavey' the study i am remembering mr. jerome k. jerome three soldiers and a pig john strange winter mr. arthur stannard 'the firm' considering he squinted! miss stannard 'the twins'--bootles and betty long-legged soldiers cavalry life i took up the 'saturday review' bret harte we settled to our work a circulation it had never known before 'consider them at your service' i was inwardly relieved the book sold tremendously a. t. quiller couch 'q.' junior 'the haven,' fowey mr. and mrs. quiller couch fowey grammar school crew and mr. quiller couch the old study mr. and mrs. quiller couch in a canadian canoe robert buchanan mr. buchanan's house the study mr. robert buchanan and his favourite dog robert louis stevenson mr. stevenson's house in samoa mrs. r. l. stevenson stevenson telling 'yarns' [illustration: drawing, signed: walter besant] my first book '_ready money mortiboy_' by walter besant [illustration] not the very first. that, after causing its writer labour infinite, hope exaggerated, and disappointment dire, was consigned, while still in manuscript, to the flames. my little experience, however, with this work of art, which never saw the light, may help others to believe, what is so constantly denied, that publishers _do_ consider mss. sent to them. my ms. was sent anonymously, without any introduction, through a friend. it was not only read--and refused--but it was read very conscientiously and right through. so much was proved by the reader's opinion, which not only showed the reasons--good and sufficient reasons--why he could not recommend the manuscript to be published, but also contained, indirectly, certain hints and suggestions, which opened up new ideas as to the art of fiction, and helped to put a strayed sheep in the right way. now it is quite obvious that what was done for me must be constantly and consistently done for others. my very first novel, therefore, was read and refused. would that candidates for literary honours could be made to understand that refusal is too often the very best thing that can happen to them! but the gods sometimes punish man by granting his prayers. how heavy may be the burden laid upon the writer by his first work! if anyone, for instance, should light upon the first novels written by richard jefferies, he will understand the weight of that burden. my first ms., therefore, was destined to get burned or somehow destroyed. for some years it lay in a corner--say, sprawled in a corner--occupying much space. at dusk i used to see a strange, wobbling, amorphous creature in that corner among those papers. his body seemed not made for his limbs, nor did these agree with each other, and his head was out of proportion to the rest of him. he sat upon the pile of papers, and he wept, wringing his hands. 'alas!' he said: 'not another like me. don't make another like me. i could not endure another like myself.' finally, the creature's reproaches grew intolerable; so i threw the bundle of papers behind the fire, and he vanished. one had discovered by this time that for the making even of a tolerable novel it is necessary to leave off copying other people, to observe on your own account, to study realities, to get out of the conventional groove, to rely upon one or other of the great emotions of human nature, and to try to hold the reader by dramatic presentation rather than by talk. i do not say that this discovery came all at once, but it came gradually, and it proved valuable. [illustration: drawing signed: yours faithfully james rice] one more point. a second assertion is continually being heard concerning editors. it is said that they do not read contributions offered to them. when editors publicly advertise that they do not invite contributions, or that they will not return contributions, it is reasonable to suppose that they do not read them. well, you have heard my first experience with a publisher. hear next an experience with editors. it is, first, to the fact that contributions _are_ read by editors that i owe my introduction to james rice and my subsequent collaboration with him. it was, next, to an unsolicited contribution that i owed a connection of many years with a certain monthly magazine. it was, lastly, through an unsolicited contribution that i became and continued for some time a writer of leading articles for a great london daily. therefore, when i hear that editors will not read contributions, i ask if things have changed in twenty years--and why? i sent a paper, then, unasked, and without introduction, to the editor of _once a week_. the editor read it, accepted it, and sent it to the press. immediately afterwards he left the journal because it was sold to rice, then a young man, not long from cambridge, and just called to the bar. he became editor as well as proprietor. the former editor forgot to tell his successor anything about my article. rice, finding it in type, and not knowing who had written it, inserted it shortly after he took over the journal, so that the first notice that i received that the paper was accepted was when i saw it in the magazine, bristling with printer's errors. of course i wrote indignantly to the editor. i received a courteous reply begging me to call. i did so, and the matter was explained. then for a year or two i continued to send things to _once a week_. but the paper was anything but prosperous. indeed, i believe there was never any time during its existence of twenty years when it could be called prosperous. after three years of gallant struggle, rice concluded to give it up. he sold the paper. he would never confess how much he lost over it; but the ambition to become proprietor and editor of a popular weekly existed no longer in his bosom, and he was wont to grow thoughtful in after years when this episode was recalled to his memory. during this period, however, i saw a great deal of the management, and was admitted behind the scenes, and saw several remarkable and interesting people. for instance, there was a certain literary hack, a pure and simple hack, who was engaged at a salary to furnish so many columns a week to order. he was clever, something of a scholar, something of a poet, and could write a very readable paper on almost any subject. in fact, he was not in the least proud, and would undertake anything that was proposed. it was not his duty to suggest, nor did he show the least interest in his work, nor had he the least desire to advance himself. in most cases, i believe, he simply 'conveyed' the matter; and if the thing was found out, he would be the first to deplore that he had 'forgotten the quotes.' he was a thirsty soul; he had no enthusiasm except for drink; he lived, in fact, only for drink; in order to get more money for drink he lived in one squalid room, and went in rags. one day he dismissed himself after an incident over which we may drop a veil. some time after it was reported that he was attempting the stage as a pantomime super. but fate fell upon him; he became ill; he was carried to a hospital; and pneumonia opened for him the gates of the other world. he was made for better things. [illustration: julia] again, it was in the editor's small back room that i made the acquaintance of a young lady named julia, whose biography i afterwards related. she was a bookbinder's accountant all the day, and in the evening she was a _figurante_ at one of the theatres. i think she was not a very pretty girl, but she had good eyes--of the soft, sad kind, which seem to belong to those destined to die young; and in the evening, when she was dressed, she looked very well indeed, and was placed in the front. to the editor's office came in multitudes seedy and poverty-stricken literary men; there were not, twenty-four years ago, so many literary women as at present, but there were many more seedy literary men, because in those days the great doors of journalism were neither so wide nor so wide open as they are now. every one, i remember, wanted to write a series of articles. each in turn proposed a series as if it was a new and striking idea. a certain airy, rollicking, red-nosed person, who had once walked the hospitals, proposed, i remember, to 'catch science on the wing--on the wing, sir'--in a series of articles; a heavy, conscientious person, also red-nosed, proposed, in a series of articles, to set the world right in economics; an irresponsible, fluttering, elderly gentleman, with a white waistcoat and a red nose, thought that a series of articles on--say the vestries of our native land, would prove enormously popular; if not the vestries, then the question of education, or of emigration, or--or--something else. the main point with all was not the subject, but the series. as it happened, nobody ever was allowed to contribute a series at all. then there were the people who sent up articles, and especially the poor ladies who were on the point of starving. would the editor only--only take their article? heavens! what has become of all these ladies? it was twenty-four years ago; these particular ladies must have perished long since; but there are more--and more--and more--still starving, as every editor knows full well. [illustration: mr. besant's study] sometimes, sitting in that sanctum, i looked through their mss. for them. sometimes the writers called in person, and the editor had to see them, and if they were women, they went away crying, though he was always as kind as possible. poor things! yet what could one do? their stuff was too--too terrible. another word as to the contributions. in most cases a glance at the first page was sufficient. the ms. was self-condemned. 'oh!' says the contributor; 'if the editor would only tell me what is wrong, i would alter it.' dear contributor, no editor has time for teaching. you must send him the paper complete, finished, and ready for press; else it either goes back or lies on the shelf. when rice handed over the paper to his successor, there were piles of mss. lying on all the shelves. where are those mss. now? to be sure, i do not believe there was one among them all worth having. rice wrote a novel by himself, for his own paper. it was a work which he did not reproduce, because there were certain chapters which he wished to re-write. he was always going to re-write these chapters, but never did, and the work remains still in the columns of _once a week_, where it may be hunted out by those who are curious. one day, when he was lamenting the haste with which he had been compelled to send off a certain instalment, he told me that he had an idea of another novel, which seemed to him not only possible, but hopeful. he proposed that we should take up this idea together, work it out, if it approved itself to me as it did to him, and write a novel upon it together. his idea, in the first crude form, was simple--so simple that i wonder it had never occurred to anybody before. the prodigal son was to come home again--apparently repentant--really with the single intention of feigning repentance and getting what he could out of the old man and then going back to his old companions. that was the first germ. when we came to hammer this out together, a great many modifications became necessary. the profligate, stained with vice, the companion of scoundrels, his conscience hardened and battered and reckless, had yet left, hitherto undiscovered, some human weakness. by this weakness he had to be led back to the better life. perhaps you have read the story, dear reader. one may say without boasting that it attracted some attention from the outset i even believe that it gave an upward turn--a last gasp--to the circulation of the dying paper. when--to anticipate a little--the time came for publishing it, we were faced with the fact that a new and anonymous novel is naturally regarded with doubt by publishers. nothing seems more risky than such a venture. on the other hand, we were perfectly satisfied that there was no risk in our novel at all. this, of course, we had found out, not only from the assurances of vanity, but also from the reception the work had met with during its progress through the magazine. therefore, we had it printed and bound at our own expense, and we placed the book, ready for publication, in the hands of mr. william tinsley. we so arranged the business that the printer's bill was not due till the first returns came from the publisher. by this artful plan we avoided paying anything at all. we had only printed a modest edition of , and these all went off, leaving, of course, a very encouraging margin. the cheap edition was sold to henry s. king & co. for a period of five years. then the novel was purchased outright by chatto & windus, who still continue to publish it--and, i believe, to sell it. as things go, a novelist has reason to be satisfied with an immortality which stretches beyond the twenty-first year. in another place i am continually exhorting young writers never to pay for production. it may be said that i broke my own rule. but it will be observed that this case was not one in which production was 'paid for,' in the ordinary sense of the term--it was one of publication on commission of a book concerning which, we were quite certain, there was neither doubt nor risk. and this is a very good way indeed to publish, provided you have such a book, and provided your publisher will push the book with as much vigour as his own. now, since the origin of the story cannot be claimed as my own, i may be allowed to express an opinion upon it. [illustration: the oyster shop] [illustration: a book plate] the profligate, with his dreadful past behind him, dragging him down; the low woman whom he has married; the gambler, his associate; the memory of robbery and of prison; and with the new influences around him--the girl he loves, pure and sweet, and innocent; the boy whom he picks out of the gutter; the wreck of his old father--form together a group which i have always thought to be commanding, strong, attractive, interesting, much beyond any in the ordinary run of fiction. the central figure, which, i repeat, is not my own, but my partner's initial conception, has been imitated since--in fiction and on the stage--which shows how strong he is. i do not venture to give an opinion upon the actual presentment or working out of that story. no doubt it might have been better told. but i wish i was five-and-twenty years younger, sitting once more in that dingy little office where we wrangled over this headstrong hero of ours, and had to suppress so many--oh! so very many--of the rows and troubles and fights into which he fell even after he became respectable. the office was handy for rule's and oysters. we would adjourn for the 'delicious mollusc,' and then go back again to the editor's room to resume the wrangle. here we would be interrupted by julia, who brought the bookbinder's account; or by the interesting but thirsty hack, who brought his copy, and with it an aroma of rum; or by the airy gentleman who wanted to catch science on the wing, sir--on the wing; or by the economic man; or by the irresponsible man, ready for anything. in the evening we would dine together, or go to a theatre, or sit in my chambers and play cards before resuming the wrangle--we used to take an hour of vingt-un, by way of relaxation. and always during that period, whatever we did, wherever we went, dick mortiboy sat between us. dear old dick grew quiet towards the end. the wrangling was finished. the inevitable was before him; he must pay for the past. love could not be his, nor honour, such as comes to most men, nor the quiet _vie de famille_, which is all that life really has to give worth having. his cousin frank might have love and honour. for him--dick's brave eyes looked straight before--he had no illusions; for him, the end that belongs to the nineteenth-century ruffler, the man of the west, the sportsman and the gambler, the only end--the bullet from the revolver of his accomplice, was certain and inevitable. so it ended. dick died. the novel was finished. dick died; our friend died; he had his faults--but he was dick; and he died. and alas! his history was all told and done with; the manuscript finished; the last wrangle over; the fatal word, the melancholy word, _finis_, written below the last line. '_the family scapegrace_' by james payn [illustration] i had written a great many short stories and articles in all sorts of publications, from _eliza cook's journal_ to the _westminster review_, before i ventured upon writing a novel; and the appearance of them i have since had cause to regret. not at all because they were 'immature,' and still less because i am ashamed of them--on the contrary, i still think them rather good--but because the majority of them were not made the most of from a literary point of view, and also went very cheap. as a friend observed to me, who was much my senior, and whose advice was therefore treated with contempt, 'you are like an extravagant cook, who wastes too much material on a single dish.' the _entrées_ of the story-teller--his early and tentative essays in fiction--if he has really any turn for his calling, are generally open to this criticism. later on, he becomes more economical (sometimes, indeed, a good deal too much so, because, alas! there is so little in the cupboard), and has a much finer sense of proportion. i don't know how many years i went on writing narratives of school and college life, and spinning short stories, like a literary spider, out of my own interior, but i don't remember that it was ever borne in upon me that the reservoir could hardly hold out for ever, and that it was time to be doing something on a more permanent and extended scale. the cause of that act of prudence and sagacity was owing mainly to a travelling menagerie. i had had in my mind, for some time, to write a sort of autobiography (of which character first novels almost always consist, or at least partake), but had in truth abstained from doing so on the not unreasonable ground that my life had been wholly destitute of incidents of public interest. true, i had mended that matter by the wholly gratuitous invention of a cheerless home and a wicked sister, but i had hitherto found nothing more attractive to descant upon than my own domestic wrongs. even if they had existed, it was doubtful whether they would have aroused public indignation, and i mistrusted my powers of making them exist. what i wanted was a dramatic situation or two (a 'plot,' the evolution of which by no means comes by nature, though the germ is often an inspiration, was at that time beyond me), and especially the opportunity of observation. [illustration: a wicked sister] [illustration: signed drawing: james payne] my own slender experiences were used up, and imagination had no material to work upon; one can't blow even glass out of nothing at all. just in the nick of time arrived in edinburgh, where i was then editing _chambers's journal_, tickeracandua, 'the african lion tamer.' at that time (though i have seen a great deal of them since) lions were entirely out of my line, and also tamers; but this gentleman was a most attractive specimen of his class. handsome, frank, and intelligent, he took my fancy from the first, and we became great friends. 'his actual height,' says my notebook, 'could scarcely have been less than six feet two, while it was artificially increased by a circlet of cock's feathers set in a coronet, which the majority of enraptured beholders believed to be of virgin gold. a leopard skin, worn after the fashion of a scotch plaid, set off a jerkin of green leather, while his legs were encased in huge jack boots.' this, of course, was his performing dress, and i used to wonder how the leopards (with whom he had a great deal to do) liked his wearing their relative's cast-off clothing. in the 'leopard-hunt' (twice a day) these animals raced over him as he stood erect, and each, as it 'took off' from his shoulder, left its mark there with its claws. he was so good as to show me his shoulder, which looked as if he had been profusely vaccinated in the wrong place. a much more dangerous, if less painful, experience was his daily (and nightly) doings with the lions. there were two of them, with a lioness of an uncertain temper, who jumped through hoops at his imperious bidding with many a growl and snarl of remonstrance. [illustration: it 'took off' from his shoulder] 'are you never afraid?' i once asked him tentatively. 'if i was,' he answered, quietly, but not contemptuously, 'i might count myself from that moment a dead man. then, you see, i have my whip.' it was a carter's whip, good to keep off a dog, but scarcely a lion. 'the handle is loaded,' he explained, 'and i know exactly where to hit 'em with it, if the worst comes to the worst.' if i remember right, it was the tip of the nose. [illustration: mr. payn's study] his conversation was delightful, and he often honoured me with his company at supper, when the toils and perils of the day were o'er. upon the whole, though i have since known many other eminent persons, he has left a more marked impression on me than any of them, and it is no wonder that in those youthful days he influenced my imagination. his autobiography, without his having the least suspicion of the appropriation, became in fact _my_ autobiography, as may be read (if there is anybody who has not enjoyed that treat) in 'the family scapegrace.' but, as my predecessors in the field of fiction were wont to exclaim, 'i am anticipating.' another official connected with the menagerie gave daily lectures upon the animals, so curiously dry and grave that they filled me with admiration; he was like an embodiment of the answers to 'mangnall's questions.' whatever suspicions tickeracandua may have subsequently entertained of me, i am quite sure that 'mr. mopes' would no more have seen himself in the portrait i drew of him than would the animals under his charge, if their attention had been drawn to them, have recognised their counterfeit presentments outside the show. i also became acquainted with the earthman and earthwoman, the slaughterman of the establishment, mr. and mrs. tredgold (its proprietors), and other individuals seldom met with in ordinary society. the adventures of 'richard arbour' were, therefore, cut out for me in a most convenient and unexpected fashion, but i had the intelligence to perceive that though the interest they might excite would be dramatic enough, they would be in danger of dealing too much with the animal world to interest adult readers; nor would the narrative have made an attractive book for boys, since i felt it would be too full of fun (for my spirits were very high in those days) to suit juvenile tastes. i knew little of the world, but had seen much of boys (though i had never belonged to the species), and was well aware that, except as regards practical jokes, the boy is not gifted with humour. i accordingly looked about me for some dramatic material of a wholly different kind, and eventually found it in the person of count gotsuchakoff. it was a mistake to call such a sombre and serious individual by so ludicrous a name, but it was a characteristic one. my disposition was at that time lively (not to say frivolous), and the atmosphere i usually lived in was one of mirth, but, as often happens, it had another side to it, which was melancholy almost to melodrama. in after years i found this to be the case in an infinitely greater story-teller, who, while he delighted all the world with humour and pathos, in reality nourished a taste for the weird and terrible, which, though its ghastly face but very rarely showed itself in his writings, was the favourite topic of his familiar and confidential talk. tickeracandua himself was not dearer to me than the count, who was almost entirely the offspring of my own invention; and though i have since seen in nihilist novels a good many gentlemen of the same type, i venture to think that, slightly as he is sketched, he will bear comparison with the best of them. the conception of his long years of enforced silence, and even of the terrible moment in which he forgot that he was dumb, owed its origin, if i remember right, to a child's game that was popular in our nursery. it consisted in resisting the temptation to laugh, and the resolution to reply in tones of gravity when such questions as 'have you heard the emperor of morocco is dead?' were put. the adaptation of it, in the substitution of speech for laughter, suddenly suggested itself, like any other happy thought. [illustration: count gotsuchakoff] instead of writing straight ahead, as the fancy prompted, which, in my less ambitious attempts at fiction (like all young writers) i had hitherto done, i had all these materials pretty well arranged in my mind before sitting down to write my first book. it was, after all, only a string of adventures, but it is still, and i think deservedly, a popular book. the question with its author, however, was how, when it was finished, he was to get it published. i took it to my friend, robert chambers, and asked for his opinion about it. he looked at the manuscript, which was certainly not in such good handwriting as his own, and observed slyly-- 'would you mind just reading a bit of it?' [illustration: 'would you mind just reading a bit of it?'] i had never done such a thing before, nor have i since, and the proposal was a little staggering, not to my _amour propre,_ but to my natural modesty. moreover, i mistrusted my ability to do justice to it, remembering what the poet has said about reading one's own productions: the chariot wheels jar in the gates through which we drive them forth. however, i started with it, and notwithstanding that we were subjected to 'jars' (one by the servant, who came to put coals on the fire, just at a crisis, and made me at heart a murderer), the specimen was pronounced satisfactory. 'i think it will suit nicely for the _journal_,' said my friend, which i think were the pleasantest words i ever heard from the mouth of man. i might have taken them, indeed, as a good omen; for though i have since written more novels than i can count, i have never failed to secure serial publication for every one of them. 'this gentleman's novels are suitable enough for serial publication,' once wrote a critic of them, intending to be very particularly disagreeable, but it aroused no emotion in my breast warmer than gratitude. [illustration: the servant came to put coals on the fire] so 'the family scapegrace' came out in _chambers's journal_. i do not remember whether it had any effect upon its circulation, but it was well spoken of, and there was at least one person in the world who thought it a masterpiece. the difficulty, which no one but a young and unknown writer can estimate, was to get a publisher to share in this belief. for many years afterwards i published my books anonymously (_i.e._, 'by the author' of so and so), and many a humorous interview i had with various denizens of paternoster row, to whom i (very strongly) recommended them, by proxy. 'if i were speaking to the author,' they said, 'it would be unpleasant to say this (that, and the other of a deprecatory character), but with _you_ we can be quite frank.' and they were sometimes very frank; and, though i didn't much like it at the time, their candour (when i had sold the book tolerably well) tickled me afterwards immensely. for persons who have enjoyed this experience, mere literary criticism has henceforth no terrors. [illustration: mr. payn's office at waterloo place] 'the family scapegrace,' however, had appeared under my own name, so that concealment was out of the question; it was in one volume, a form of publication which, at that time at all events (though i see they now affirm the contrary), was unpopular with the libraries, and i was quite an unknown novelist. under these circumstances, i have never forgotten the kindness of mr. douglas (of the firm of edmonston & douglas), who gave me fifty pounds for the first edition of the book--by which enterprise he lost his money. there were many reasons for it, no doubt, though the story has since done well enough, but i think the chief of them was the alteration of the title to 'richard arbour,' which, contrary to the wishes both of myself and my publisher, was insisted upon by a leading librarian. it is difficult, nowadays, to guess his reason, but people were more 'square-toed' in those times, and i fancy he thought his highly respectable customers would scent something bohemian, if not absolutely scampish, in a scapegrace. a mere name is not an attractive title for a book; though many books so called--such as 'martin chuzzlewit' and 'robinson crusoe'--have become immensely popular, they owed nothing to their baptism; and certainly 'richard arbour' prospered better when he got rid of his rather commonplace name. [illustration: killed by lions] a rather curious incident took place with respect to this book, which annoyed me greatly at the time, because i was quite unacquainted with the queer crotchets and imaginary grievances that would-be literary persons often take into their heads. somebody wrote to complain that he had written (not published) a story upon the same lines, and even incidents, as 'the family scapegrace,' just before its appearance in the columns of _chambers's journal_, and the delicate inference he drew was that, whether in my capacity of editor or otherwise, i must have somehow got hold of it. he gave the exact date of the conclusion of his own composition, which was prior to the commencement of my story in the _journal_. conscious of innocence, but troubled by so disagreeable an imputation, i laid the matter before robert chambers. 'you are not so versed in the ways of this class of person as i am,' he said, smiling; 'but since he has been so injudicious as to give a date, i think we can put him out of court. i am one of those methodical individuals who keep a diary.' and on reference to it, he found that i had read him my story long before that of my traducer, according to his own account, had left his hands. it was a small matter, but proved a useful lesson to me, for there is a great deal of imposture of this kind going on in the literary world; sometimes, as perhaps in this case, the result of mere egotistic fancy, but also sometimes begotten by the desire to levy blackmail. the above, so far as i can remember them, are the circumstances under which i published my first novel. i am sorry to add that poor tickeracandua, to whom it owed so much, subsequently met the very fate in reality which i had assigned to him in fiction; though as good a fellow as many i have met _out_ of a show, he came to the same end as 'don't care' did in the nursery story, and was 'eaten (or at all events killed) by lions.' [illustration: signed drawing: w. clark russell] '_the wreck of the "grosvenor"_' by w. clark russell [illustration: clark russell as a midshipman of seventeen] i am complimented by an invitation to tell what i can recollect of the writing, publication, and reception of the earliest of my sea books, 'the wreck of the "grosvenor."' i approach the subject with diffidence, and ask the reader to forgive me if he thinks or finds me unduly egotistical. 'john holdsworth: chief mate,' preceded 'the wreck of the "grosvenor."' i do not regard that story as a novel of the sea. i was reluctant and timid in dealing with ocean topics when the scheme of that tale came into my head; i contented myself with pulling off my shoes and socks and walking about ankle deep into the ripples. but in the 'grosvenor' i went to sea like a man; i signed articles aboard her as second mate; i had ruffians for shipmates, and the stench of the harness-cask was the animating influence of the narrative. it is the first sea book i ever wrote, in the sense, i mean, that its successors are sea books: what i have to say, therefore, agreeably to the plan of these personal contributions, will refer to it. [illustration: i was a child of thirteen] and first, i must write a few words about my own experience as a sailor. i went to sea in the year , when i was a child of thirteen years and a few months old. my first ship was a well-known australian liner, the 'duncan dunbar,' commanded by an old salt, named neatby, who will always be memorable to me for his habit of wearing the tall chimney-pot hat of the london streets in all weathers and parallels, whether in the roasting calms of the equator, or in the snow-darkened hurricanes of the horn. i went to sea as a 'midshipman' as it is termed, though i never could persuade myself that a lad in the merchant service, no matter how heavy might be the premium his friends paid for him, has a right to a title of grade or rating that belongs essentially and peculiarly to the royal navy. i signed for a shilling a month, and with the rest of us (there were ten) was called 'young gentleman'; but we were put to work which an able seaman would have been within his rights in refusing, as being what is called 'boys'' duty. i need not be particular. enough that the discipline was as rough as though we had been lads in the forecastle, with a huge boatswain and brutal boatswain's mates to look after us. we paid ten guineas each as a contribution to some imagination of a stock of eatables for the midshipmen's berth; but my memory carries no more than a few tins of preserved potatoes, a great number of bottles of pickles, and a cask of exceedingly moist sugar. therefore, we were thrown upon the ship's provisions, and i very soon became intimately acquainted with the quality and nature of the stores served out to forecastle hands. [illustration: neatby] i made, but not after the manner of gulliver, several voyages into remote nations of the world, and in the eight years i was at sea i picked up enough knowledge to qualify me to give the public a few new ideas about the ocean life. yet when the scribbling mania possessed me it was long before i could summon courage to write about the sea and sailors. i asked myself, who is interested in the merchant service? what public shall i find to listen to me? those who read novels want stories about love and elopements, abductions, and the several violations of the sanctities of domestic life. the great mass of readers--those who support the circulating libraries--are ladies. will it be possible to interest ladies in forecastle life and in the prosaics of the cabin? [illustration: anchored in the downs] then, again, i was frightened by the writer for boys. _he_ was very much at sea. i never picked up a book of his without lighting upon some hideous act of piracy, some astounding and unparalleled shipwreck, some marvellous island of treasure. this writer, of a clan numerous as wordsworth's 'little lot of stars,' warned me off and affrighted me. his paper ship had so long and successfully filled the public eye that i shrank from launching anything real, anything with strakes and treenails, anything with running rigging so leading that a sailor would exactly know what to let go when the order was given. in plain english, i judged that the sea story had been irremediably depressed, and rendered wholly ridiculous by the strenuous periodic and christmas labours of the writer for boys. had he not sunk even marryat and michael scott, who, because they wrote about the sea, were compelled in due course by the publishers to address themselves exclusively to boys! the late george cupples--a man of fine genius--in the course of a letter to me, complained warmly of being made to figure as 'captain' george cupples upon the title-page of his admirable work, 'the green hand.' he assured me that he was no captain, and that his name thus written was merely a bookseller's dodge to recommend his story to boys. and, still, i would sometimes think that if i would but take heart and go afloat in imagination, under the old red flag, i should find within the circle of the horizon such materials for a book as might recommend it, at all events on the score of freshness. only two writers had dealt with the mercantile side of the ocean life--dana, the author of 'two years before the mast,' and herman melville, both of them, it is needless to say, americans. i could not recollect a book, written by an englishman, relating, as a work of fiction, to shipboard life on the high seas under the flag of the merchant service. i excluded the writer for boys. i could recall no author who, himself a practical seaman, one who had slept with sailors, eaten with them, gone aloft with them, and suffered with them, had produced a book, a novel--call it what you will--wholly based on what i may term the inner life of the forecastle and the cabin. [illustration: some of the crew] [illustration: the magistrates] it chanced one day that a big ship, with a mastheaded colour, telling of trouble on board, let go her anchor in the downs. i then lived in a town which overlooks those waters. the crew of the ship had mutinied: they had carried the vessel halfway down channel, when, discovering by that time what sort of provisions had been shipped for them, they forced the master to shift his helm for the inwards course. the crew of thirteen or fourteen hairy, queerly attired fellows, in scotch caps, divers-coloured shirts, dungaree breeches stuffed into half wellingtons, were brought before the magistrates. the bench consisted of an old sea captain, who had lost a ship in his day through the ill conduct of his crew, and whose hatred of the forecastle hand was strong and peculiar; a parson, who knew about as much of the sea as his wife; a medical practitioner, and a schoolmaster. i was present, and listened to the men's evidence, and i also heard the captain's story. samples of the food were produced. a person with whom i had some acquaintance found me an opportunity to examine and taste samples of the forecastle provisions of the ship whose crew had mutinied. nothing more atrociously nasty could be found amongst the neglected putrid sweepings of a butcher's back premises. nothing viler in the shape of food ever set a famished mongrel hiccoughing. nevertheless, this crew of thirteen or fourteen men, for refusing to sail in the vessel unless fresh forecastle stores were shipped, were sent to gaol for terms ranging from three to six weeks. [illustration: the wreck of the 'grosvenor'] some time earlier than this there had been legislation helpful to the seaman through the humane and impassioned struggles of mr. samuel plimsoll. the crazy, rotten old coaster had been knocked into staves. the avaricious owner had been compelled to load with some regard to the safety of sailors. but i could not help thinking that the shore-going menace of the sailor's life did not lie merely in overloaded ships, and in crazy, porous hulls. mutinies were incessantly happening in consequence of the loathsome food shipped for sailors' use, and many disasters attended these outbreaks. when i came away from the magistrates' court, after hearing the men sentenced, i found my mind full of that crew's grievance. i reflected upon what mr. plimsoll had done, and how much of the hidden parts of the sea life remained to be exposed to the public eye, to the advantage of the sailor, providing the subject should be dealt with by one who had himself suffered, and very well understood what he sat down to write about. this put into my head the idea of the tale which i afterwards called 'the wreck of the "grosvenor."' i said to myself, i'll found a story on a mutiny at sea, occasioned entirely by the shipment of bad provisions for the crew. no writer has as yet touched this ugly feature of the life. dana is silent. herman melville merely drops a joke or two as he rolls out of the caboose with a cube of salt horse in his hand. it has never been made a serious canvas of. and yet deeper tragedies lie in the stinking harness-cask than in the started butt. there are wilder and bloodier possibilities in a barrel of rotten pork, and in a cask of worm-riddled ship's bread, than in a whole passage of shifting cargoes, and in a long round voyage of deadweight that sinks to the wash-streak. but if i was to find a public i must make my book a romance. i must import the machinery of the petticoat. the pannikin of rum i proposed to offer must be palatable enough to tempt the lips of the ladies to sip it. my publisher would want a market, and if messrs. mudie and smith would have none of me i should write in vain; for assuredly i was not going to find a public among sailors. sailors don't read: a good many of them _can't_ read. those who can have little leisure, and they do not care to fill up their spare hours with yarns of a calling which eighty out of every hundred of them loathe. so i schemed out a nautical romance and went to work, and in two months and a week i finished the story of 'the wreck of the "grosvenor."' [illustration: mrs. clark russell] whilst i was writing it an eminent publisher, a gentleman whose friendship i had been happy in possessing for many years, asked me to let him have a sea story. i think he had been looking into 'john houldsworth: chief mate', which some months before this time had been received with much kindness by the reviewers. i sent him the manuscript of 'the wreck of the "grosvenor."' one of his readers was a lady, and to this lady my friend the publisher forwarded the manuscript, with a request for a report on its merits. now to send the manuscript of a sea book to a woman! to submit a narrative abounding in marine terms, thunder-charged with the bully-in-our-alley passions of the forecastle, throbbing with suppressed oaths, clamorous with rolling oceans, the like of which no female would ever dream of leaving her bunk to behold--to submit all this, and how much more, to a lady for an opinion on its merits! of course, the poor woman barely understood a third of what she looked at, and as, obviously she couldn't quite collect the meaning of the remainder, she pronounced against the whole. she called it a 'catalogue of ship's furniture,' and the manuscript came back to me. i never regret this. i do not believe that this sea book would have cut a figure in my old esteemed friend's list. publishers are well known by the public for the sort of intellectual fare they deal in. if i desired a charming story about flirtation, divorce, inconvenient husbands, the state of the soul when it has flown out of the body, the passions of the female heart whilst it still beats hot in the breast, i should turn to my friend's list, well assured of handsome satisfaction. but i don't think i could read a sea book published by him. i should suspect the marine qualities of a jack who had run foul of, and got smothered up in, a whole wardrobe of female apparel, grinning with a scarcely sunburnt face through the horse-collar of a crinoline, the deep sea roll of his gait hampered and destroyed by the clinging folds of a flannel petticoat. [illustration: the boatswain of the 'grosvenor'] be this as it may, i sent the manuscript of 'the wreck of the "grosvenor"' to my old friend edward marston, of the firm of sampson low & co. the firm offered me fifty pounds for it; i took the money and signed the agreement, in which i disposed of all rights. do i murmur over the recollection of this fifty pounds which, with another ten pounds kindly sent to me by mr. marston as the whole of, or a part of, a cheque received from messrs. harper & brothers, was all i ever got for this sea book? certainly not. the transaction was absolutely fair, and what leaning there was was in my favour. the book was an experiment; it was published anonymously; it might have fallen dead. happily for publisher and author, the book made its way. i believe it was immediately successful in america, and that its reception there somewhat influenced inquiry here. american critics who try to vex me say that my books never would have been read in this country but for what was said of them in the states, and for the publicity provided for them there by the twenty-cent editions. how far this is true i don't know; but certainly the yankees are handsomer and prompter in their recognition of what pleases them than we are on our side. what they like they raise a great cry over, and the note of so mighty a concourse, i don't doubt, fetches an echo out of distances below the horizon. [illustration: the 'hougoumont'[a]] [illustration: poor jack!] it is many years now since 'the wreck of the "grosvenor"' was written, and i do not very clearly recollect its reception in this country. i believe it speedily went into a second edition. but before we talk of an edition seriously we must first learn the number of copies which make it. since this was written, my friend, mr. r. b. marston, of the firm of sampson low & co., has been good enough to look into the sales of 'the wreck of the "grosvenor,"' and he informs me that down to there had been sold , copies. one of the most cordial welcomes the story received was from _vanity fair_. i supposed that the review was written by the editor, mr. thomas gibson bowles, until i learnt that the late mr. james runciman was the author. the critics on the whole were generous. they thought the book fresh. they judged that it was an original piece of work wrought largely out of the personal experiences of the writer. one gentleman, indeed, said that he had crossed the channel on several occasions between boulogne and folkestone, but had never witnessed such seas as i described; and another that he had frequently travelled to plymouth on the great western railway in company with sailors, but had never met such seamen as the forecastle hands i depicted. the book is considered my best--this, perhaps, because it was my first, and its reputation lies in the memory and impression of its freshness. it is far from being my best. were it my property i would re-write it. i had quitted the sea some years when i wrote the story, and here and there my memory played me false; that is to say, in the direction of certain minute technicalities and in accounts of the internal discipline of the ship. yet, on the whole, the blunders are few considering how very complicated a fabric a vessel is, and how ceaselessly one needs to go on living the life of the sea to hold all parts of it clear to the sight of the mind. professionally, the influence of the book has been small. i have heard that it made one ship-owner sorry and rather virtuous, and that for some time his harness-casks went their voyages fairly sweet. he is, however, but a solitary figure, the lonesome crusoe of my little principality of fancy. as a piece of literature, 'the wreck of the "grosvenor"' has been occasionally imitated. mr. plimsoll, i understand, has lately been dealing with the subject of sailors' food. i heartily wish success to his efforts. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: yours very sincerely, grant allen.] _'physiological Æsthetics' and 'philistia'_ by grant allen the story of my first book is a good deal mixed, and, like many other stories, cannot be fully understood without some previous allusion to what historians call 'the causes which led to it.' for my first book was not my first novel, and it is the latter, i take it, not the former, that an expectant world, as represented by the readers of this volume, is anxious to hear about. i first blossomed into print with 'physiological Æsthetics' in --the title alone will be enough for most people--and it was not till seven years later that i wrote and published my earliest long work of fiction, which i called 'philistia.' i wasn't born a novelist, i was only made one. philosophy and science were the first loves of my youth. i dropped into romance as many men drop into drink, or opium-eating, or other bad practices, not of native perversity, but by pure force of circumstances. and this is how fate (or an enterprising publisher) turned me from an innocent and impecunious naturalist into a devotee of the muse of shilling shockers. when i left oxford in , with a decent degree and nothing much else in particular to brag about, i took perforce to that refuge of the destitute, the trade of schoolmaster. to teach latin and greek verse at brighton college, cheltenham college, reading grammar school, successively, was the extremely uncongenial task imposed upon me by the chances of the universe. but in , providence, disguised as the colonial office, sent me out in charge of a new government college at spanish town, jamaica. i had always been psychological, and in the space and leisure of the lazy tropics i began to excogitate by slow degrees various expansive works on the science of mind, the greater number of which still remain unwritten. returning to england in ' i found myself out of work, and so committed to paper some of my views on the origin of the higher pleasure we derive from natural or artistic products; and i called my book 'physiological Æsthetics.' it was not my very first attempt at literature; already i had produced about a hundred or more magazine articles on various philosophical and scientific subjects, every one of which i sent to the editors of leading reviews, and every one of which was punctually 'declined with thanks,' or committed without even that polite formality to the editorial waste paper basket. nothing daunted by failure, however, i wrote on and on, and made up my mind, in my interval of forced idleness, to print a book of my own at all hazards. [illustration: fiction] i wrote 'physiological Æsthetics' in lodgings at oxford. when it was finished and carefully revised, i offered it to messrs. henry s. king & co., who were then leading publishers of philosophical literature. mr. kegan paul, their reader, reported doubtfully of the work. it was not likely to pay, he said, but it contained good matter, and the firm would print it for me on the usual commission. i was by no means rich--for fear of exaggeration i am stating the case mildly--but i believed somehow in 'physiological Æsthetics.' i was young then, and i hope the court of public opinion will extend to me, on that ground, the indulgence usually shown to juvenile offenders. but i happened to possess a little money just at that moment, granted me as compensation for the abolition of my office in jamaica. messrs. king reported that the cost of production (that mysterious entity so obnoxious to the soul of the society of authors) would amount to about a hundred guineas. a hundred guineas was a lot of money then; but, being young, i risked it. it was better than if i had taken it to monte carlo, anyway. so i wrote to mr. paul with heedless haste to publish away right off, and he published away right off accordingly. when the bill came in, it was, if i recollect aright, somewhere about _l._ i paid it without a murmur; i got my money's worth. the book appeared in a stately green cover, with my name in front, and looked very philosophical, and learned, and psychological. [illustration: science] poor 'physiological Æsthetics' had a very hard fate. when i come to look back upon the circumstances calmly and dispassionately now, i'm not entirely surprised at its unhappy end. it was a good book in its way, to be sure, though it's me that says it as oughtn't to say it, and it pleased the few who cared to read it; but it wasn't the sort of literature the public wanted. the public, you know, doesn't hanker after philosophy. darwin, and herbert spencer, and the editor of _mind_, and people of that sort, tried my work and liked it; in point of fact, my poor little venture gained me at once, an unknown man, the friendship of not a few whose friendship was worth having. but financially, 'physiological Æsthetics' was a dead failure; it wasn't the sort of work to sell briskly at the bookstalls. mr. smith would have none of it. the reviews, indeed, were, almost without exception, favourable; the volume went off well for a treatise of its kind--that is to say, we got rid of nearly copies; but even so, it left a deficit of some forty or fifty pounds to the bad against me. finally, the remaining stock fell a victim to the flames in mr. kegan paul's historical fire, when many another stout volume perished: and that was the end of my _magnum opus_. peace to its ashes! mr. paul gave me _l._ as compensation for loss sustained, and i believe i came out some _l._ a loser by this, my first serious literary venture. in all these matters, however, i speak from memory alone, and it is possible i may be slightly wrong in my figures. but though 'physiological Æsthetics' was a financial failure, it paid me in the end, both scientifically and commercially. not only did it bring me into immediate contact with several among the leaders of thought in london, but it also made my name known in a very modest way, and induced editors--those arbiters of literary fate--to give a second glance at my unfortunate manuscripts. almost immediately after its appearance, leslie stephen (i omit the mr., _honoris causa_) accepted two papers of mine for publication in the _cornhill_. 'carving a cocoanut' was the first, and it brought me in twelve guineas. that was the very first money i earned in literature. i had been out of work for months, the abolition of my post in jamaica having thrown me on my beam-ends, and i was overjoyed at so much wealth poured suddenly in upon me. other magazine articles followed in due course, and before long i was earning a modest--a very modest--and precarious income, yet enough to support myself and my family. moreover, sir william hunter, who was then engaged on his gigantic 'gazetteer of india,' gave me steady employment in his office at edinburgh, and i wrote with my own hand the greater part of the articles on the north-west provinces, the punjaub, and sind, in those twelve big volumes. meanwhile, i was hard at work in my leisure moments (for i have sometimes some moments which i regard as leisure) on another ambitious scientific work, which i called 'the colour-sense.' this book i published on the half-profits system with trübner. compared with my first unhappy venture, 'the colour-sense' might be counted a distinct success. it brought me in, during the course of about ten years, something like _l._ or _l._ as it only took me eighteen months to write, and involved little more than five or six thousand references, this result may be regarded as very fair pay for an educated man's time and labour. i have sometimes been reproached by thoughtless critics for deserting the noble pursuit of science in favour of fiction and filthy lucre. if those critics think twenty pounds a year a sufficient income for a scientific writer to support himself and a growing family upon--well, they are perfectly at liberty to devote their own pens to the instruction of their kind without the slightest remonstrance or interference on my part. i won't detail in full the history of my various intermediate books, most of which were published first as newspaper articles, and afterwards collected and put forth on a small royalty. time is short, and art is long, so i'll get on at once to my first novel. i drifted into fiction by the sheerest accident. my friend, mr. chatto, most generous of men, was one of my earliest and staunchest literary supporters. from the outset of my journalistic days, he printed my articles in _belgravia_ and the _gentleman's magazine_ with touching fidelity; and i take this opportunity of saying in public that to his kindness and sympathy i owe as much as to anyone in england. some people will have it there is no such thing as 'generosity' in publishers. i beg leave to differ from them. i know the commercial value of literary work as well as any man, and i venture to say that both from mr. chatto and from mr. arrowsmith, of bristol, i have met, time and again, with what i cannot help describing as most generous treatment. one day it happened that i wanted to write a scientific article on the impossibility of knowing one had seen a ghost, even if one saw one. for convenience sake, and to make the moral clearer, i threw the argument into narrative form, but without the slightest intention of writing a story. it was published in _belgravia_ under the title of 'our scientific observations on a ghost,' and was reprinted later in my little volume of 'strange stories.' a little while after, to my immense surprise, mr. chatto wrote to ask me whether i could supply him with another story, like the last i had written, for the _belgravia annual_. i was rather taken aback at this singular request, as i hadn't the slightest idea i could do anything at all in the way of fiction. still, like a good journalist, i never refuse an order of any sort; so i sat down at once and wrote a tale about a mummy on the ghastliest and most approved christmas number pattern. strange to say, mr. chatto again printed it, and, what was still more remarkable, asked for more of the same description. from that time forth, i went on producing short stories for _belgravia_; but i hardly took them seriously, being immersed at the time in biological study. i looked upon my own pretensions in the way of fiction as an amiable fad of my kind friend chatto; and not to prejudice any little scientific reputation i might happen to have earned, i published them all under the carefully veiled pseudonym of 'j. arbuthnot wilson.' i would probably never have gone any further on my downward path had it not been for the accidental intervention of another believer in my powers as a story-writer. i had sent to _belgravia_ a little tale about a chinaman, entitled 'mr. chung,' and written perhaps rather more seriously and carefully than my previous efforts. this happened to attract the attention of mr. james payn, who had then just succeeded to the editorship of the _cornhill_. i had been a constant contributor to the _cornhill_ under leslie stephen's management, and by a singular coincidence i received almost at the same time two letters from mr. payn, one of them addressed to me in my own name, and regretting that he would probably be unable to insert my scientific papers in his magazine in future; the other, sent through chatto & windus to the imaginary j. arbuthnot wilson, and asking for a short story somewhat in the style of my 'admirable mr. chung.' [illustration] encouraged by the discovery that so good a judge of fiction thought well of my humble efforts at story-writing, i sat down at once and produced two pieces for the _cornhill_. one was 'the reverend john creedy'--a tale of a black parson who reverted to savagery--which has perhaps attracted more attention than any other of my short stories. the other, which i myself immensely prefer, was 'the curate of churnside.' both were so well noticed that i began to think seriously of fiction as an alternative subject. in the course of the next year i wrote several more sketches of the same sort, which were published, either anonymously or still under the pseudonym, in the _cornhill_, _longmans'_, _the gentleman's_, and _belgravia_. if i recollect aright, the first suggestion to collect and reprint them all in a single volume came from mr. chatto. they were published as 'strange stories,' under my own name, and i thus, for the first time, acknowledged my desertion of my earliest loves--science and philosophy--for the less profound but more lucrative pursuit of literature. [illustration: a shelf in the study] 'strange stories' was well received and well reviewed. its reception gave me confidence for future ventures. acting upon james payn's advice, i set to work seriously upon a three-volume novel. my first idea was to call it 'born out of due time,' as it narrated the struggles of a socialist thinker a century in front of his generation; but, at mr. chatto's suggestion, the title was afterwards changed to 'philistia.' i desired, if possible, to run it through the _cornhill_, and mr. payn promised to take it into his most favourable consideration for that purpose. however, when the unfinished manuscript was submitted in due time to his editorial eye, he rightly objected that it was far too socialistic for the tastes of his public. he said it would rather repel than attract readers. i was disappointed at the time. i see now that, as an editor, he was perfectly right; i was giving the public what i felt and thought and believed myself, not what the public felt and thought and wanted. the education of an english novelist consists entirely in learning to subordinate all his own ideas and tastes and opinions to the wishes and beliefs of the inexorable british matron. [illustration: 'thank you, sir'] mr. chatto, however, was prepared to accept the undoubted risk of publishing 'philistia.' only, to meet his views, the _dénoûment_ was altered. in the original version, the hero came to a bad end, as a hero in real life who is in advance of his age, and consistent and honest, must always do. but the british matron, it seems, likes her novels to 'end well'; so i married him off instead, and made him live happily ever afterward. mr. chatto gave me a lump sum down for serial rights and copyright, and ran 'philistia' through the pages of _the gentleman's_. when it finally appeared in book form, it obtained on the whole more praise than blame, and, as it paid a great deal better than scientific journalism, it decided me that my _rôle_ in life henceforth must be that of a novelist. and a novelist i now am, good, bad, or indifferent. if anybody gathers, however, from this simple narrative, that my upward path from obscurity to a very modest modicum of popularity and success was a smooth and easy one, he is immensely mistaken. i had a ten years' hard struggle for bread, into the details of which i don't care to enter. it left me broken in health and spirit, with all the vitality and vivacity crushed out of me. i suppose the object of this series of papers is to warn off ingenuous and aspiring youth from the hardest worked and worst paid of the professions. if so, i would say earnestly to the ingenuous and aspiring--'brain for brain, in no market can you sell your abilities to such poor advantage. don't take to literature if you've capital enough in hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to annex a vacant crossing.' _'the shadow of a crime'_ by hall caine i cannot follow mr. besant with any pitiful story of rejection at the hands of publishers. if refusal is quite the best thing that can happen to the candidate for literary honours, my fate has not been favourable. no tale of mine has yet passed from publishing house to publishing house. except the first of the series, my stories have been accepted before they have been read. in two or three instances they have been bought before they have been written. it has occurred to me, as to others, to have two or three publishers offering terms for the same book. i have even been offered half payment in hand on account of a book which i could not hope to write for years, and might never write at all. thus the most helpful confession which the more or less successful man of letters can make for the comfort and cheer of his younger and less fortunate brethren, it is out of my power to offer. but i reflect that this is true of my literary experiences in the character of a novelist only. i had an earlier and semi-subterranean career that was very different. at eighteen i wrote a poem of a mystical sort, which was printed (not at my own risk) and published under a pseudonym. happily, no man will ever identify me behind the romantic name wherein i hid my own. only one literary man knew my secret. that was george gilfillan, and he is dead. then at twenty i wrote an autobiography for another person, and was paid ten pounds for it. these were really my first books, and i grow quite hot when i think of them. at five-and-twenty i came up to london with the manuscript of a critical work, which i had written while at liverpool. somebody had recommended that i should submit it to a certain great publishing house, and i took it in person. at the door of the office i was told to write my own name, and the name of the person whom i wished to see, and to state the nature of my business. i did so, and the boy who took my message brought back word that i might leave my manuscript for consideration. it seemed to me that somebody might have seen me for a minute, but i had expected too much. the manuscript was carefully tied up in brown paper, and so i left it. [illustration: i left it] after waiting three torturing weeks for the decision of the publishers, i made bold to call again. at the same little box at the door of the office i had once more to fill up the same little document. the boy took it in, and i was left to sit on his table, to look at the desk which he had been whittling away with his penknife, to wait and to tremble. after a time i heard a footstep returning. i thought it might be the publisher or the editor of the house. it was the boy back again. he had a pile of loose sheets of white paper in his hands. they were the sheets of my book. 'the editor's compliments, sir, and--thank you,' said the boy, and my manuscript went sprawling over the table. i gathered it up, tucked it as deep as possible into the darkness, under the wings of my inverness cape, and went downstairs ashamed, humiliated, crushed, and broken-spirited. not quite that, either, for i remember that, as i got to the fresh air at the door, my gorge rose within me, and i cried in my heart, 'by god! you shall---- ' and something proud and vain. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: with kindest regards, hall caine] i dare say it was all right and proper and in good order. the book was afterwards published, and i think it sold well. i hardly know whether i ought to say that the editor should have shown me more courtesy. it was all a part of the anarchy of things which mr. hardy considers the rule of life. but the sequel is worth telling. that editor became my personal friend. he is dead, and he was a good and able man. of course he remembered nothing of this incident, and i never poisoned one hour of our intercourse by telling him how, when i was young and a word of cheer would have buoyed me up, he made me drink the waters of marah. and three times since that day the publishing house i speak of has come to me with the request that i should write a book for them. i have never been able to do so, but i have outgrown my bitterness, and, of course, i show no malice. indeed, i have now the best reasons for wishing the great enterprise well. but if literary confessions are worth anything, this one may perhaps be a seed that will somewhere find grateful soil. keep a good heart, even if you have to knock in vain at many doors, and kick about the backstairs of the house of letters. there is room enough inside. [illustration: my ms. went sprawling over the table.] [illustration: derwentwater] i wrote and edited sundry things during my first years in london, but not until i had published a story did i feel that i had so much as touched the consciousness of the public. hence, my first novel may very properly be regarded as my first book, and if i have no tale to tell of heart-broken impediments in getting it published, i have something to say of the difficulty of getting it written. the novel is called 'the shadow of a crime,' but title it had none until it was finished, and a friend christened it. i cannot remember when the story was begun, because i cannot recall a time when the idea of it did not exist in my mind. something of the same kind is true of every tale i have ever written or shall ever write. i think it must be in the nature of imagination that an imaginative idea does not spring into being, that it has no spontaneous generation, but, as a germinating conception, a shadow of a vision, always comes floating from somewhere out of the back chambers of memory. you are waiting for the central thought that shall link together incidents that you have gleaned from among the stubble of many fields, for the _motif_ that shall put life and meaning into the characters that you have gathered and grouped, and one morning, as you awake, just at that moment when you are between the land of light and the mists of sleep, and as your mind is grappling back for the vanishing form of some delicious dream, a dim but familiar ghost of an idea comes up unbidden for the hundredth time, and you say to yourself, with surprise at your own stupidity, 'that's it!' [illustration: sty head pass] the idea of my first novel moved about me in this way for many years before i recognised it. as usually happens, it came in the shape of a story. i think it was, in actual fact, first of all, a tale of a grandfather. my mother's father was a cumberland man, and he was full of the lore of the hills and dales. one of the oldest legends of the lake mountains tells of the time of the plague. the people were afraid to go to market, afraid to meet at church, and afraid to pass on the highway. when any lonely body was ill, the nearest neighbour left meat and drink at the door of the afflicted house, and knocked and ran away. in these days, a widow with two sons lived in one of the darkest of the valleys. the younger son died, and the body had to be carried over the mountains to be buried. its course lay across sty head pass, a bleak and 'brant' place, where the winds are often high. the eldest son, a strong-hearted lad, undertook the duty. he strapped the coffin on to the back of a young horse, and they started away. the day was wild, and on the top of the pass, where the path dips into wastdale, between the breast of great gable and the heights of scawfell, the wind rose to a gale. the horse was terrified. it broke away and galloped over the fells, carrying its burden with it. the lad followed and searched for it, but in vain, and he had to go home at last, unsatisfied. [illustration: wastwater from sty head pass] [illustration: the horse broke away] [illustration: something strapped on its back] this was in the spring, and nearly all the summer through the surviving son of the widow was out on the mountains, trying to recover the runaway horse, but never once did he catch sight of it, though sometimes, as he turned homeward at night, he thought he heard, in the gathering darkness, above the sough of the wind, the horse's neigh. then winter came, and the mother died. once more the dead body had to be carried over the fells for burial, and once again the coffin was strapped on the back of a horse. it was an old mare that was chosen this time, the mother of the young one that had been lost. the snow lay deep on the pass, and from the cliffs of the scawfell pikes it hung in great toppling masses. all went well with the little funeral party until they came to the top of the pass, and though the day was dead calm the son held the rein with a hand that was like a vice. but just as the mare reached the spot where the wind had frightened the young horse, there was a terrific noise. an immense body of the snow had parted at that instant from the beetling heights overhead, and rushed down into the valley with the movement as of a mighty earthquake, and the deafening sound as of a peal of thunder. the dale echoed and re-echoed from side to side, and from height to height. the old mare was affrighted; she reared, leapt, flung her master away, and galloped off. when they had recovered from their consternation, the funeral party gave chase, and at length, down in a hollow place, they thought they saw what they were in search of. it was a horse with something strapped on its back. when they came up with it they found it was the _young_ horse, with the coffin of the younger son. they led it away and buried the body that it had carried so long, but the old mare they never recovered, and the body of the mother never found sepulchre. [illustration: the castle rock, st. john's vale] such was the legend, sufficiently terrible, and even ghastly, which was the germ of my first novel. its fascination for me lay in its shadow and suggestion of the supernatural. i thought it had all the grip of a ghost story without ever passing out of the world of reality. imagination played about the position of that elder son, and ingenuity puzzled itself for the sequel to his story. what did he think? what did he feel? what were his superstitions? what became of him? did he die mad, or was he a man, and did he rise out of all doubt and terror? i cannot say how many years this ghost of a conception (with various brothers and sisters of a similar complexion) haunted my mind before i recognised it as the central incident of a story, the faggot for a fire from which other incidents might radiate and imaginary characters take life. when i began to think of it in this practical way i was about six-and-twenty, and was lodging in a lonely farmhouse in the vale of st. john. [illustration: thirlmere] [illustration: rossetti walking to and fro] rossetti was with me, for i had been up to london at his request, and had brought him down to my retreat. the story of that sojourn among the mountains i have told elsewhere. it lives in my memory as a very sweet and sad experience. the poet was a dying man. he spent a few hours of every day in painful efforts to paint a picture. his nights were long, for sleep never came to him until the small hours of the morning; his sight was troublesome, and he could not read with ease; he was in that condition of ill-health when he could not bear to be alone, and thus he and i were much together. i was just then looking vaguely to the career of a public lecturer, and was delivering a long course of lectures at liverpool. the subject was prose fiction, and to fortify myself for the work i was reading the masterpieces over again. seeing this, rossetti suggested that i should read aloud, and i did so. many an evening we passed in this way. the farmhouse stood at the foot of a fell by the side of the lowest pool of a ghyll, fishers' ghyll, and the roar of falling waters could be heard from within. on the farther side of the vale there were black crags where ravens lived, and in the unseen bed of the dale between lay the dark waters of thirlmere. the surroundings were striking to the eye and ear in the daylight, but when night came, and the lamp was lit, and the curtains were drawn, and darkness covered everything outside, they were yet more impressive to the imagination. i remember those evenings with gratitude and some pain. the little oblong room, the dull thud of the ghyll like faint thunder overhead, the crackle of the wood fire, myself reading aloud, and rossetti in a long sack painting coat, his hands thrust into its upright pockets, walking with his heavy and uncertain step to and fro, to and fro, laughing sometimes his big deep laugh, and sometimes sitting down to wipe his moist spectacles and clear his dim eyes. the autumn was far spent, and the nights were long. not rarely the dead white gleams of the early dawn before the coming of the sun met the yellow light of our candles as we passed on the staircase going to bed a little window that looked up to the mountains, and over them to the east. [illustration: dante gabriel rossetti] perhaps it was not all pleasure, so far as i was concerned, but certainly it was all profit. the novels we read were 'tom jones,' in four volumes, and 'clarissa,' in its original eight, one or two of smollett's, and some of scott's. rossetti had not, i think, been a great reader of fiction, but his critical judgment was in some respects the surest and soundest i have known. he was one of the only two men i have ever met with who have given me in personal intercourse a sense of the presence of a gift that is above and apart from talent--in a word, of genius. nothing escaped him. his alert mind seized upon everything. he had never before, i think, given any thought to fiction as an art, but his intellect played over it like a bright light. it amazes me now, after ten years' close study of the methods of story-telling, to recall the general principles which he seemed to formulate out of the back of his head for the defence of his swift verdicts. 'now why?' i would say, when the art of the novelist seemed to me to fail, or when the poet's condemnation appeared extreme. 'because so-and-so _must_ happen,' he would answer. he was always right. he grasped with masterly strength the operation of the two fundamental factors in the novelist's art--the sympathy and the 'tragic mischief.' if these were not working well, he knew by the end of the first chapters that, however fine in observation, or racy in humour, or true in pathos, the work as an organism must fail. it was an education in literary art to sharpen one's wits on such a grindstone, to clarify one's thought in such a stream, to strengthen one's imagination by contact with a mind that was 'of imagination all compact.' now, down to that time, though i had often aspired to the writing of plays, it had never occurred to me that i might write a novel. but i began to think of it then as a remote possibility, and the immediate surroundings of our daily life brought back recollection of the old cumberland legend. i told the story to rossetti, and he was impressed by it, but he strongly advised me not to tackle it. the incident did not repel him by its ghastliness, but he saw no way of getting sympathy into it on any side. his judgment disheartened me, and i let the idea go back to the dark chambers of memory. he urged me to try my hand at a manx story. '"the bard of manxland"--it's worth while to be that,' he said--he did not know the author of 'foc's'le yarns.' i thought so, too, but the cumbrian 'statesman' had begun to lay hold of my imagination. i had been reviving my recollection and sharpening my practice of the cumbrian dialect which had been familiar to my ear, and even to my tongue, in childhood, and so my manx ambitions had to wait. two years passed, the poet died, i had spent eighteen months in daily journalism in london, and was then settled in a little bungalow of three rooms in a garden near the beach at sandown in the isle of wight. and there, at length, i began to write my first novel. i had grown impatient of critical work, had persuaded myself (no doubt wrongly) that nobody would go on writing about other people's writing who could do original writing himself, and was resolved to live on little and earn nothing, and never go back to london until i had written something of some sort. as nearly as i can remember, i had enough to keep things going for four months, and if, at the end of that time, nothing had got itself done, i must go back bankrupt. something did get done, but at a heavy price of labour and heart-burning. when i began to think of a theme, i found four or five subjects clamouring for acceptance. there was the story of the prodigal son, which afterwards became 'the deemster'; the story of jacob and esau, which in the same way turned into 'the bondman'; the story of samuel and eli, which, after a fashion, moulded itself ultimately into 'the scapegoat'; and half-a-dozen other stories, chiefly biblical, which are still on the forehead of my time to come. but the cumbrian legend was first favourite, and to that i addressed myself. i thought i had seen a way to meet rossetti's objection. the sympathy was to be got out of the elder son. he was to think god's hand was upon him. but whom god's hand rested on had god at his right hand; so the elder son was to be a splendid fellow--brave, strong, calm, patient, long-suffering, a victim of unrequited love, a man standing square on his legs against all weathers. it is said that the young novelist usually begins with a glorified version of his own character; but it must interest my friends to see how every quality of my first hero was a rebuke to my own peculiar infirmities. [illustration: mr. hall caine in his study (_from a photograph by a. m. pettit_)] above this central figure and legendary incident i grouped a family of characters. they were heroic and eccentric, good and bad, but they all operated upon the hero. then i began to write. [illustration: mrs. hall caine (_from a photograph by a. m. pettit_)] shall i ever forget the agony of the first efforts? there was the ground to clear with necessary explanations. this i did in the way of scott in a long prefatory chapter. having written it i read it aloud, and found it unutterably slow and dead. twenty pages were gone, and the interest was not touched. throwing the chapter aside i began with an alehouse scene, intending to work back to the history in a piece of retrospective writing. the alehouse was better, but to try its quality i read it aloud, after the 'rainbow' scene in 'silas marner,' and then cast it aside in despair. a third time i began, and when the alehouse looked tolerable the retrospective chapter that followed it seemed flat and poor. how to begin by gripping the interest, how to tell all and yet never stop the action--these were agonising difficulties. it took me nearly a fortnight to start that novel, sweating drops as of blood at every fresh attempt. i must have written the first half volume four times at the least. after that i saw the way clearer, and got on faster. at the end of three months i had written nearly two volumes, and then in good spirits i went up to london. my first visit was to j. s. cotton, an old friend, and to him i detailed the lines of my story. his rapid mind saw a new opportunity. 'you want _peine forte et dure_,' he said. 'what's that?' i said. 'an old punishment--a beautiful thing,' he answered. 'where's my dear old blackstone?' and the statute concerning the punishment for standing mute was read to me. it was just the thing i wanted for my hero, and i was in rapture, but i was also in despair. to work this fresh interest into my theme, half of what i had written would need to be destroyed! it _was_ destroyed, the interesting piece of ancient jurisprudence took a leading place in my scheme, and after two months more i got well into the third volume. then i took my work down to liverpool, and showed it to my friend, the late john lovell, a most able man, first manager of the press association, but then editing the local _mercury_. after he had read it he said, 'i suppose you want my _candid_ opinion?' 'well, ye--s,' i said. 'it's crude,' he said. 'but it only wants sub-editing.' sub-editing! i took it back to london, began again at the first line, and wrote every page over again. at the end of another month the story had been reconstructed, and was shorter by some fifty pages of manuscript. it had drawn my heart's blood to cut out my pet passages, but they were gone, and i knew the book was better. after that i went on to the end and finished with a tragedy. then the story was sent back to lovell, and i waited for his verdict. my home (or what served for it) was now on the fourth floor of new court, in lincoln's inn, and one morning lovell came purring and blowing and steaming (the good fellow was a twenty-stone man) into my lofty nest. he had re-read my novel coming up in the train. 'well?' i asked, nervously. 'it's magnificent,' he said. that was all the favourable criticism he offered. all save one practical and tangible bit. 'we'll give you _l._ for the serial right of the story for the _weekly_'. [illustration: coming up in the train] he offered one unfavourable criticism. 'the death of your hero will never do,' he said. 'if you kill that man ralph, you'll kill your book. what's the good? take no more than the public will give you to begin with, and by-and-by they'll take what _you_ give _them_.' it was practical advice, but it went sorely against my grain. the death of the hero was the natural sequel to the story; the only end that gave meaning, and intention, and logic to its _motif_. i had a strong predisposition towards a tragic climax to a serious story. to close a narrative of disastrous events with a happy ending it always seemed necessary to turn every incident into accident. that was like laughing at the reader. comedy was comedy, but comedy and tragedy together was farce. then a solemn close was so much more impressive. a happy end nearly always frayed off into rags and nothingness, but a sad one closed and clasped a story as with a clasp. besides, a tragic end might be a glorious and satisfying one, and need by no means be squalid and miserable. but all these arguments went down before my friend's practical assurance: 'kill that man, and you kill your book.' with much diffidence i altered the catastrophe and made my hero happy. then, thinking my work complete, i asked mr. theodore watts (a friend to whose wise counsel i owed much in those days) to read some 'galley' slips of it. he thought the rustic scenes good, but advised me to moderate the dialect, and he propounded to me his well-known views on the use of _patois_ in fiction. 'it gives a sense of reality,' he said, 'and often has the effect of wit, but it must not stand in the way.' the advice was sound. a man may know over much of his subject to write on it properly. i had studied cumbrian to too much purpose, and did not realise that some of my scenes were like sealed books to the general reader. so once again i ran over my story, taking out some of the 'nobbuts' and the 'dustas' and the 'wiltas.' my first novel was now written, but i had still to get it published. in my early days in london, while trying to live in the outer court of a calling wherein the struggle for existence is keenest and bitterest and cruellest, i conceived one day the idea of offering myself as a reader to the publishers. with this view i called on several of that ilk, who have perhaps no recollection of my early application. i recall my interview with one of them. he was sitting at a table when i was taken into his room, and he never once raised his head from his papers to look at me. i just remember that he had a neck like a three-decker, and a voice like a peahen's. 'well, sir?' he said. i mentioned the object of my visit. 'what can you read?' 'novels and poems,' i answered. 'don't publish either--good day,' he said, and i went out. but one of the very best, and quite, i think, the very oldest of publishers now living, received me differently. 'come into my own room,' he said. it was a lovely little place, full of an atmosphere that recalled the publishing house of the old days, half office, half study; a workshop where books might be made, not turned out by machinery. i read many manuscripts for that publisher, and must have learned much by the experience. and now that my novel was finished i took it to him first. he offered to publish it the following year. that did not suit me, and i took my book elsewhere. next day i was offered _l._ for my copyright. that was wages at the rate of about four shillings a day for the time i had been actually engaged upon the work, sweating brain and heart and every faculty. nevertheless, one of my friends urged me to accept it. 'why?' i asked. 'because it is a story of the past, and therefore not one publisher in ten will look at it.' i used strong language, and then took my novel to chatto & windus. within a few hours mr. chatto made me an offer which i accepted. the book is now, i think, in its fifteenth edition. the story i have told of many breakdowns in the attempt to write my first novel may suggest the idea that i was merely serving my apprenticeship to fiction. it is true that i was, but it would be wrong to conclude that the writing of a novel has been plain sailing with me ever since. let me 'throw a crust to my critics,' and confess that i am serving my apprenticeship still. every book that i have written since has offered yet greater difficulties. not one of the little series but has at some moment been a despair to me. there has always been a point of the story at which i have felt confident that it must kill me. i have written six novels (that is to say, about sixteen), and sworn as many oaths that i would never begin another. three times i have thrown up commissions in sheer terror of the work ahead of one. yet here i am at this moment (like half-a-dozen of my fellow-craftsmen), with contracts in hand which i cannot get through for three years. the public expects a novel to be light reading. it may revenge itself for occasional disappointments by remembering that a novel is not always light writing. let me conclude with a few words that may be timely. of all the literary cants that i despise and hate, the one i hate and despise the most is that which would have the world believe that greatly gifted men who have become distinguished in literature and are earning thousands a year by it, and have no public existence and no apology apart from it, hold it in pity as a profession and in contempt as an art. for my own part, i have found the profession of letters a serious pursuit, of which in no company and in no country have i had need to be ashamed. it has demanded all my powers, fired all my enthusiasm, developed my sympathies, enlarged my friendships, touched, amused, soothed, and comforted me. if it has been hard work, it has also been a constant inspiration, and i would not change it for all the glory and more than all the emoluments of the best-paid and the most illustrious profession in the world. '_the social kaleidoscope_' by george r. sims my first book hardly deserved the title. i have only a dim remembrance of it now, because it is one of those things which i have studiously set myself to forget. i was very proud of it before i saw it. after i had seen it, i realised in one swift moment's anguish the concentrated truth of the word vanity as applied to human wishes. hidden away in the bottom corner of an old box, which is not to be opened until after i am dead, that first book lies at the present moment; that is to say, unless the process of decay, which had already set in upon the paper on which it was printed, has gone on to the bitter end, and the book has disappeared entirely of its own accord. [illustration: clarence terrace] before that book was published, i used to lie awake at night and fancy how great and how grand a thing it would be for me to see a book with my name on the cover lying on smith's bookstalls, and staring me in the face from the booksellers' windows. after it was published, i felt that i owed messrs. smith & sons a deep debt of gratitude for refusing to take it, and my heart rejoiced within me greatly that the only booksellers who exhibited it lived principally in old back streets and half-finished suburban thoroughfares. [illustration: the hall] stay--i will go upstairs to my lumber room, i will open that box, i will dig deep down among the buried memories of the past, and i will find that book, and i will summon up my courage and ask the publishers of this volume to kindly allow the cover of that book to be reproduced here. it is only by looking at it as i looked at it that you will thoroughly appreciate my feelings on the subject. i have found the box, but my heart sinks within me as i try to open the lid. all my lost youth lies there. the key is rusty and will hardly turn in the lock. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: very sincerely yours, george r. sims] so--so--so, at last! ghosts of the long ago, come forth from your resting-places and haunt me once again. dear me! dear me! how musty everything smells; how old, and worn, and time-stained everything is. a folded poster: 'grecian theatre 'mr. g. r. sims will positively _not_ appear this evening at the entertainment held in the hall.' yes, i remember. i had been announced, entirely without my consent or knowledge, to appear at a hall attached to the grecian theatre with mrs. georgina weldon, and take part in an entertainment. this notice was stuck about outside the theatre in consequence of my indignant remonstrance. my old friend mr. george conquest had, i need hardly say, nothing to do with that bill. some one had taken the hall for a special occasion. i think it was something remotely connected with lunatics. [illustration: george r. sims] my first play! poor little play--a burlesque written for my brothers and sisters, and played by us in the theatre royal day nursery. there were some really brilliant lines in it, i remember. they were taken bodily from a burlesque of h. j. byron's, which i purchased at lacy & son's (now french's) in the strand--'a new and original burlesque by master g. r. sims.' my misguided parents actually had the playbill printed and invited friends to witness the performance. they little knew what they were doing by pandering to my boyish vanity in such a way. but for that printed playbill, and that public performance in my nursery, i might never have taken to the stage, and inflicted upon a long-suffering public adelphi melodrama and gaiety burlesque, farcical comedy and comic opera; i might have remained all my life an honest, hard-working city man, relieving my feelings occasionally by joining in the autumn discussions in the _daily telegraph_. i was still in the city when my first book was published. i used, in those days, to get to the city at nine and leave it at six, but i had a dinner hour, and in that dinner hour i wrote short stories and little things that i fancied were funny, and i used to put them in big envelopes and send them to the different magazines. i sent about twenty out in that way. i never had one accepted, but several returned. [illustration: photo of title page of "the social kaleidoscope."] i wrote my first book in my dinner hour, in a city office. i have just found it. here is the cover. you will observe that it has my portrait on it. i look very ill and thin and haggard. that was, perhaps, the result of going without my dinner in order to devote myself to 'literature.' if you could look inside that book, if you could see the paper on which it is printed, you would understand the shock it was to me when they laid it in my arms and said: 'behold your firstborn.' all the vanity in me (and they tell me that i have a good deal) rose up as i gazed at the battered wreck upon the cover--the man with the face that suggested a prompt subscription to a burial club. but i shouldn't have minded that so much if the people who bought my book hadn't written to me personally to complain. one gentleman sent me a postcard to say that his volume fell to pieces while he was carrying it home. another assured me that he had picked enough pieces of straw out of the leaves to make a bed for his horse with, and a third returned a copy to me without paying the postage, and asked me kindly to put it in _my_ dustbin, because his cook was rather proud of the one he had in his back garden. still the book sold (the sketches had all previously appeared in the _weekly dispatch_), and when the first edition was exhausted, a new and better one was prepared (without that haggard face upon the cover), and i was happy. the sale ran into thirty thousand the first year of publication, and as i was fortunate enough to have published it on a royalty, i am glad to say it is still selling. [illustration: the snuggery] 'the social kaleidoscope' was my first book. with it i made my actual _début_ between covers. i hadn't done very well before then; since then i have, from a worldly point of view, done remarkably well--far better than i deserved to do, my good-natured friends assure me, and i cordially agree with them. but i had made a good fight for it, and i had suffered years of disappointment and rebuff. i began to send contributions to periodicals when i was fourteen years old, and a boy at hanwell college. _fun_ was the first journal i favoured with my effusions, and week after week i had a sinking at the heart as i bought that popular periodical and searched in vain for my comic verses, my humorous sketches, and my smart paragraphs. it took me thirteen years to get something printed and paid for, but i succeeded at last, and it was _fun_, my early love, that first took me by the hand. when i was on the staff of _fun_, and its columns were open to me for all i cared to write, i used often to look over the batch of boyish efforts that littered the editor's desk, and let my heart go out to the writers who were suffering the pangs that i had known so well. [illustration: mr. sims's 'little dawg'] i had had effusions of mine printed before that, but i didn't get any money for them. i had the pleasure of seeing my signature more than once in the columns of certain theatrical journals, in the days when i was a constant first-nighter, and a determined upholder of the privileges of the pit. and i even had some of my poetry printed. in the old box to which i have gone in search of the first edition of my first book, there are two papers carefully preserved, because they were once my pride and glory. one is a copy of the _halfpenny journal_, and the other is a copy of the _halfpenny welcome guest_. on the back page of the correspondence column of the former there is a poem signed 'g. r. s.,' addressed to a young lady's initials in affectionately complimentary terms. alas! i don't know what has become of that young lady. probably she is married, and is the mother of a fine family of boys and girls, and has forgotten that i ever wrote verses in her honour. i think i sent her a copy of the _halfpenny journal_, but a few weeks after a coldness sprang up between us. she was behind the counter of a confectioner's shop in camden town, and i found her one afternoon giggling at a young friend of mine who used to buy his butterscotch there. my friend and i had words, but between myself and that fair confectioner 'the rest was silence.' [illustration: the dining-room] i was really very much distressed that my pride compelled me never again to cross the threshold of that establishment. there wasn't a confectioner's in all camden town that could come within measurable distance of it for strawberry ices. in the correspondence column of the _halfpenny welcome guest_, which is among my buried treasures, there is an 'answer' instead of the poem which i had fondly hoped to see inserted in its glorious pages. and this is the answer: 'g. r. s.--your poem is not quite up to our standard, but it gives decided promise of better things. we should advise you to persevere.' i am quoting from memory, for after turning that box upside down, i can't lay my hand on this particular _welcome guest_, though i know that it is there. i don't know who the editor was who gave me that kindly pat on the head, but whoever he was he earned my undying gratitude. at the time i felt i should have liked him better had he printed my poem. i was no more fortunate with my prose than i was with my poetry. i began to tell stories at a very early age, but it was not until after i had succeeded in getting a poem printed among the 'answers to correspondents' that i took seriously to prose with a view of publication. i was encouraged to try my hand at writing stories by the remembrance of the success which had attended my efforts at romantic narrative when i was a school-boy. [illustration: the library] there were eight other boys in the dormitory i slept in at hanwell (the college, not the asylum), and they used to make me tell them stories every night until they fell asleep, and woe betide me if i cut my narrative short while one of them remained awake. i wasn't much of a boy with a bolster or a boot, but they were all champions, and many a time when i had married the hero and heroine and wound up my story did i have to start a fresh complication in a hurry to save myself from chastisement. i remember on one occasion, when i was dreadfully sleepy, and i had got into a fearful fog as to who committed the murder, i made a wild plunge at a ghost to get me out of the difficulty, and the whole dormitory rose to a boy and set about me with bolsters in their indignation at such a lame and impotent conclusion. night after night did those maddening words, 'tell us a story,' salute my ears as i laid my weary little head upon the pillow, and i had to tell one or run the gauntlet of eight bolsters and sixteen slippers, to say nothing of the biggest boy of all, who kept a reserve pair of boots hidden away under his bed for purposes not altogether unconnected with midnight excursions to a neighbouring orchard. [illustration: 'sir hugo'] it was the remembrance of my early story-telling days that prompted me, when poetry seemed a drug in the market, to try my hand at what is now, i believe, called 'the complete novelette.' i set myself seriously to work, laid in a large stock of apples and jumbles, and spent several consecutive afternoons in completing a story which i called 'a pleasant evening.' after i had written it i copied it out in my best hand, and then, with fear and trembling, i sent it to the _family herald_. i sent it to the _family herald_ because i had heard a lady who visited at our house say that she knew a lady who knew a lady who had sent a story to the _family herald_, never having written anything before in her life, and the story had been accepted, and the writer had received five pounds for it by return of post. [illustration: the balcony] i didn't receive anything by return of post, but in about a fortnight my manuscript came back to me. nothing daunted, i carefully cut off the corner on which 'declined with thanks' had been written, and i sent the story to _chamber's journal_. here it met with a similar fate, but i fancy it took a little longer to come back, and it bore signs of wear and tear. i knew, or i had read, that it was not wise to let your manuscript have the appearance of being rejected, so i spent several unpleasant evenings in writing 'a pleasant evening' out again, and i sent it to _all the year round_. it came back! this time i didn't take the trouble to open it i knew it directly i saw it, and as it reached me so i flung it in my desk and bit my lips, and made up my mind that after all it was better to be accepted as a poet in the 'answers to correspondents' column of the _halfpenny journal_ than to be rejected as a story-writer by the editors of higher-priced periodicals. [illustration: 'beauty,' an old favourite, twenty years old.] but though i played with poetry again, i didn't even succeed in getting into the 'answers to correspondents.' my vaulting ambition o'erleaped its selle, and i sent my verses to journals which didn't 'correspond.' in those days i kept a little book, in which i entered all the manuscripts i sent to editors, and from it now i copy the following instructive record. r stands for 'returned':-- _once a week_ 'the minstrel's curse' r. _belgravia_ 'after the battle' r. _broadway_ 'after the battle' r. _fun_ 'nearer and dearer' r. _fun_ 'an unfortunate attachment' r. _fun_ 'a song of may' r. _banter_ 'nearer and dearer' r. _judy_ 'an unfortunate attachment' r. _london society_ 'the minstrel's curse' r. _owl_ 'nearer and dearer' r. returned! returned! returned! all i got for my pains was the chance of making a joke in my diary on my birthday. in those days of my wild struggles with fate i find written against the nd of september, 'many unhappy returns.' i believe that i should have flung up authorship in despair, and never have had a first book, but for the chance remark of the dear old doctor who looked after my health in the days when i hadn't to pay my own doctor's bills. [illustration: the drawing-room] he was talking about me one day in my father's private office, and i happened to be passing, and i heard him say, 'he's a nice lad--what a pity he scribbles!' scribbles! the word burnt itself into my brain, it seared my heart, it brought the hot blood to my cheeks, and the indignant tears to my eyes. was i not ready to write an acrostic at a moment's notice on the name of the sweetheart of any fellow who asked me to do it? had i not written a poem on the fall of napoleon, which my eldest sister had read aloud to her schoolfellows, and made them all mad with jealousy to think there wasn't a brother among the lot of them who could even rhyme decently? had i not had stories rejected by the _family herald_, _all the year round_, and _chambers's journal_, and a letter on the subject of the crossing opposite st. mark's church, hamilton terrace, printed in the _marylebone mercury_? and was i to be dubbed a scribbler, and pitied for my weakness? it is nearly twenty years since those words were uttered, and my dear old doctor rests beyond the reach of all human ills, but i can hear them now. they have never ceased to ring in my ears as they rang that day. [illustration: 'faust up to date'] my pride was wounded, my vanity was hurt, i was put upon my mettle. i registered a silent vow there and then that some day i would have a noble revenge on my friendly detractor, and make him confess that he was wrong when he said that it was a pity i scribbled. from that hour i set myself steadily to be an author. i wrote poetry by the mile, prose by the acre, and i sent it to every kind of periodical that i could find in the 'post office directory.' i had to pass through years of rejection, but still i wrote on, and still i spent all my pocket-money on books, and postage-stamps, and paper. and at last the chance came. i was allowed to write paragraphs in the _weekly dispatch_ by a friend who was a real journalist, and had a column at his disposal to fill with gossip. after doing the work for a month for nothing, i had the whole column given to me, and one day i received my first guinea earned by scribbling. [illustration: mr. sims's dinner party] i was a proud man when i went out of the _dispatch_ office that day with a sovereign and a shilling in my hand. i had forced the gates of the citadel at last. i had marched in with the honours of war, and i was marching out with the price of victory in my hand. soon afterwards there came another chance. the editor of the _dispatch_ wanted a series of short complete stories. i asked to be allowed to try if i could do them. under the title of 'the social kaleidoscope,' i wrote a series of short stories or sketches, and from that day no week has passed that i have not contributed something to the columns of a weekly journal. when the sketches were complete, the publisher of the _dispatch_ offered to bring them out in book form for me and publish them in the office. 'the social kaleidoscope' was my first book, and that is how it came into the world. years afterwards, my chance came with the dear old fellow who had said that it was a pity i scribbled so. fortune had smiled upon me in one way then, and i was earning an excellent income with my pen. but my health had broken down, and it was thought necessary that i should place myself in the hands of a celebrated surgeon. i had not seen my old doctor for some years, but my people wished that he should be consulted, because he had known me so well in the days of my youth. so i submitted, and he came, and he shook his head and agreed that so-and-so was the man to take me in hand. 'i think he'll cure you, my dear fellow,' said the doctor; 'he's the most skilful surgeon we have for cases like yours, but his fee is a heavy one. still, you can afford it.' 'yes, doctor,' i replied, 'thanks to my _scribbling_, i can.' that was the hour of my triumph. i had waited for it for fifteen years, but it had come at last. the dear old boy gripped my hand. 'i was wrong,' he said, with a quiet smile, 'and i confess it; but we'll get you well, and you shall scribble for many a year to come.' and i am scribbling still. '_departmental ditties_' by rudyard kipling [illustration: the newspaper files] as there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man in charge of a newspaper, and he is the editor. my chief taught me this on an indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an order, to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press. he was breaking me into harness, and i owe him a deep debt of gratitude, which i did not discharge at the time. the path of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling in of reading matter, could be done as the spirit served. now, a sub-editor is not hired to write verses: he is paid to sub-edit. at the time, this discovery shocked me greatly; but, some years later, when i came to be a sort of an editor in charge, providence dealt me for my subordinate one saturated with elia. he wrote very pretty, lamblike essays, but he wrote them when he should have been sub-editing. then i saw a little of what my chief must have suffered on my account. there is a moral here for the ambitious and aspiring who are oppressed by their superiors. [illustration: 'your potery very good, sir; just coming proper length to-day'] this is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office work. they came without invitation, unmanneredly, in the nature of things; but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. to the best of my remembrance, no one then discovered their grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and i was far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: sincerely, rudyard kipling] so they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they were very bad indeed, and the joy of doing them was payment a thousand times their worth. some, of course, came and ran away again, and the dear sorrow of going in search of these (out of office hours, and catching them) was almost better than writing them clear. bad as they were, i burned twice as many as were published, and of the survivors at least two-thirds were cut down at the last moment. nothing can be wholly beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his advertisements and my chief fighting for his reading-matter. they were born to be sacrificed. rukn-din, the foreman of our side, approved of them immensely, for he was a muslim of culture. he would say: 'your potery very good, sir; just coming proper length to-day. you giving more soon? one-third column just proper. always can take on third page.' mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new lyric as '_ek aur chiz_'--one more thing--which i never liked. the job side, too, were unsympathetic, because i used to raid into their type for private proofs with old english and gothic headlines. even a hindoo does not like to find the serifs of his f's cut away to make long s's. and in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the paper. i was in very good company, for there is always an undercurrent of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the indian papers. the bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done by those less than sir alfred lyall--to whom i would apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery--'pekin,' 'latakia,' 'cigarette,' 'o.,' 't. w.,' 'foresight,' and others, whose names come up with the stars out of the indian ocean going eastward. sometimes a man in bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the bombay side would answer him, and a man in bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be crowing together like cocks before daybreak, when it is too dark to see your fellow. and, occasionally, some unhappy chaaszee, away in the china ports, would lift up his voice among the tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers of the far east brought us his sorrows. the newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the men sang of just the same subjects as we did--of heat, loneliness, love, lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war. further back still, at the end of the eighteenth century, hickey's _bengal gazette_, a very wicked little sheet in calcutta, published the songs of the young factors, ensigns, and writers to the east india company. they, too, wrote of the same things, but in those days men were strong enough to buy a bullock's heart for dinner, cook it with their own hands because they could not afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of all the squalor and poverty. lives were not worth two monsoons' purchase, and perhaps the knowledge of this a little coloured the rhymes when they sang: in a very short time you're released from all cares-- if the padri's asleep, mr. oldham reads prayers! the note of physical discomfort that runs through so much anglo-indian poetry had been struck then. you will find it most fully suggested in 'the long, long indian day,' a comparatively modern affair; but there is a set of verses called 'scanty ninety-five,' dated about warren hastings's time, which gives a lively idea of what our seniors in the service had to put up with. one of the most interesting poems i ever found was written at meerut, three or four days before the mutiny broke out there. the author complained that he could not get his clothes washed nicely that week, and was very facetious over his worries. [illustration: sung to the banjoes round camp fires] my verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than some others, which were more true to facts and certainly better workmanship. men in the army, and the civil service, and the railway, wrote to me saying that the rhymes might be made into a book. some of them had been sung to the banjoes round camp fires, and some had run as far down coast as rangoon and moulmein, and up to mandalay. a real book was out of the question, but i knew that rukn-din and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if i did not use the office time. also, i had handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which i was part owner, and had lost nothing. so there was built a sort of a book, a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a d.o. government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. it was addressed to all heads of departments and all government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years' service. of these 'books' we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my hand, i took reply-postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the empire from aden to singapore, and from quetta to colombo. there was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. the money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as i remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. the down-country papers complained of the form of the thing. the wire binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. this was not intentional, but heaven helps those who help themselves. consequently, there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time i exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real publisher's imprint on the title-page. more verses were taken out and put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as hong-kong on the map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and, at last, the book came to london with a gilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in the publishers' poetry department. [illustration] but i loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string round its stomach; a child's child, ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments; and before people had learned, beyond doubt, how its author lay awake of nights in india, plotting and scheming to write something that should 'take' with the english public. [illustration: portrait by geo. hutchinson. signed: yours very truly a conan doyle] juvenilia by a. conan doyle it is very well for the master craftsman with twenty triumphs behind him to look down the vista of his successes, and to recall how he picked out the path which has led him to fame, but for the tiro whose first book is perilously near to his last one it becomes a more invidious matter. his past presses too closely upon his present, and his reminiscences, unmellowed by the flight of years, are apt to be rawly and crudely personal. and yet even time helps me when i speak of my first work, for it was written seven-and-twenty years ago. [illustration: i was six] i was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the achievement it was written, i remember, upon foolscap paper, in what might be called a fine bold hand--four words to the line, and was illustrated by marginal pen-and-ink sketches by the author. there was a man in it, and there was a tiger. i forget which was the hero, but it didn't matter much, for they became blended into one about the time when the tiger met the man. i was a realist in the age of the romanticists. i described at some length, both verbally and pictorially, the untimely end of that wayfarer. but when the tiger had absorbed him, i found myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on. 'it is very easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again,' i remarked, and i have often had cause to repeat the precocious aphorism of my childhood. on this occasion the situation was beyond me, and my book, like my man, was engulfed in my tiger. there is an old family bureau with secret drawers, in which lie little locks of hair tied up in circles, and black silhouettes and dim daguerreotypes, and letters which seem to have been written in the lightest of straw-coloured inks. somewhere there lies my primitive manuscript, where my tiger, like a many-hooped barrel with a tail to it, still envelops the hapless stranger whom he has taken in. [illustration: on the prairies and the oceans] then came my second book, which was told and not written, but which was a much more ambitious effort than the first. between the two, four years had elapsed, which were mainly spent in reading. it is rumoured that a special meeting of a library committee was held in my honour, at which a bye-law was passed that no subscriber should be permitted to change his book more than three times a day. yet, even with these limitations, by the aid of a well-stocked bookcase at home, i managed to enter my tenth year with a good deal in my head that i could never have learned in the class-rooms. [illustration: my dÉbut as a story-teller] i do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. and how vivid and fresh it all is! your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans with your hero. it is you who act and suffer and enjoy. you carry the long small-bore kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are done, and you lie out upon the topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap of the sail into the pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. what a magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and mind! long ere i came to my teens i had traversed every sea and knew the rockies like my own back garden. how often had i sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo and so escaped him! it was an everyday emergency to have to set the prairie on fire in front of me in order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a mile down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. i had creased horses, i had shot down rapids, i had strapped on my mocassins hind-foremost to conceal my tracks, i had lain under water with a reed in my mouth, and i had feigned madness to escape the torture. as to the indian braves whom i slew in single combats, i could have stocked a large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though i was a good deal chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it, and i was always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young squaw. it was all more real than the reality. since those days i have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was flat compared with the first time that i did it with mr. ballantyne or captain mayne reid at my elbow. [illustration: 'with the editor's compliments'] in the fulness of time i was packed off to a public school, and in some way it was discovered by my playmates that i had more than my share of the lore after which they hankered. there was my _début_ as a story-teller. on a wet half-holiday i have been elevated on to a desk, and with an audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with their chins upon their hands, i have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes. week in and week out those unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for the amusement of that little circle. i was bribed with pastry to continue these efforts, and i remember that i always stipulated for tarts down and strict business, which shows that i was born to be a member of the authors' society. sometimes, too, i would stop dead in the very thrill of a crisis, and could only be set agoing again by apples. when i had got as far as 'with his left hand in her glossy locks, he was waving the blood-stained knife above her head, when---- ' or 'slowly, slowly, the door turned upon its hinges, and with eyes which were dilated with horror, the wicked marquis saw---- ' i knew that i had my audience in my power. and thus my second book was evolved. [illustration: 'have you seen what they say about you?'] it may be that my literary experiences would have ended there had there not come a time in my early manhood when that good old harsh-faced schoolmistress, hard times, took me by the hand. i wrote, and with amazement i found that my writing was accepted. _chambers's journal_ it was which rose to the occasion, and i have had a kindly feeling for its mustard-coloured back ever since. fifty little cylinders of manuscript did i send out during eight years, which described irregular orbits among publishers, and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that they had started from. yet in time they all lodged somewhere or other. mr. hogg, of _london society_, was one of the most constant of my patrons, and mr. james payn wasted hours of his valuable time in encouraging me to persevere. knowing as i did that he was one of the busiest men in london, i never received one of his shrewd and kindly and most illegible letters without a feeling of gratitude and wonder. i have heard folk talk as though there were some hidden back door by which one may creep into literature, but i can say myself that i never had an introduction to any editor or publisher before doing business with them, and that i do not think that i suffered on that account. yet my apprenticeship was a long and trying one. during ten years of hard work, i averaged less than fifty pounds a year from my pen. i won my way into the best journals, _cornhill_, _temple bar_, and so on; but what is the use of that when the contributions to those journals must be anonymous? it is a system which tells very hardly against young authors. i saw with astonishment and pride that 'habakuk jephson's statement' in the _cornhill_ was attributed by critic after critic to stevenson, but, overwhelmed as i was by the compliment, a word of the most lukewarm praise sent straight to my own address would have been of greater use to me. after ten years of such work i was as unknown as if i had never dipped a pen into an ink-bottle. sometimes, of course, the anonymous system may screen you from blame as well as rob you of praise. how well i can see a dear old friend running after me in the street, waving a london evening paper in his hand! 'have you seen what they say about your _cornhill_ story?' he shouted. 'no, no. what is it?' 'here it is! here it is!' eagerly he turned over the column, while i, trembling with excitement, but determined to bear my honours meekly, peeped over his shoulder. 'the _cornhill_ this month,' said the critic, 'has a story in it which would have made thackeray turn in his grave.' there were several witnesses about, and the portsmouth bench are severe upon assaults, so my friend escaped unscathed. then first i realised that british criticism had fallen into a shocking state of decay, though when some one has a pat on the back for you you understand that, after all, there are some very smart people upon the literary press. [illustration: 'mrs. thurston's little boy wants to see you, doctor'] and so at last it was brought home to me that a man may put the very best that is in him into magazine work for years and years and reap no benefit from it, save, of course, the inherent benefits of literary practice. so i wrote another of my first books and sent it off to the publishers. alas for the dreadful thing that happened! the publishers never received it, the post office sent countless blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this no word has ever been heard of it. of course it was the best thing i ever wrote. who ever lost a manuscript that wasn't? but i must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again--in print. if one or two other of my earlier efforts had also been lost in the post, my conscience would have been the lighter. this one was called 'the narrative of john smith,' and it was of a personal-social-political complexion. had it appeared i should have probably awakened to find myself infamous, for it steered, as i remember it, perilously near to the libellous. however, it was safely lost, and that was the end of another of my first books. then i started upon an exceedingly sensational novel, which interested me extremely at the time, though i have never heard that it had the same effect upon anyone else afterwards. i may urge in extenuation of all shortcomings that it was written in the intervals of a busy though ill-paying practice. and a man must try that and combine it with literary work before he quite knows what it means. how often have i rejoiced to find a clear morning before me, and settled down to my task, or rather, dashed ferociously at it, as knowing how precious were those hours of quiet! then to me enter my housekeeper, with tidings of dismay. 'mrs. thurston's little boy wants to see you, doctor.' 'show him in,' say i, striving to fix my scene in my mind that i may splice it when this trouble is over. 'well, my boy?' 'please, doctor, mother wants to know if she is to add water to that medicine.' 'certainly, certainly.' not that it matters in the least, but it is well to answer with decision. exit the little boy, and the splice is about half accomplished when he suddenly bursts into the room again. 'please, doctor, when i got back mother had taken the medicine without the water.' 'tut, tut!' i answer. 'it really does not matter in the least.' the youth withdraws with a suspicious glance, and one more paragraph has been written when the husband puts in an appearance. 'there seems to have been some misunderstanding about that medicine,' he remarks coldly. 'not at all,' i say, 'it really didn't matter.' 'well, then, why did you tell the boy that it should be taken with water?' and then i try to disentangle the business, and the husband shakes his head gloomily at me. 'she feels very queer,' says he; 'we should all be easier in our minds if you came and looked at her.' so i leave my heroine in the four-foot way with an express thundering towards her, and trudge sadly off, with the feeling that another morning has been wasted, and another seam left visible to the critic's eye in my unhappy novel. such was the genesis of my sensational romance, and when publishers wrote to say that they could see no merit in it, i was, heart and soul, of the same way of thinking. [illustration: mr. andrew lang] and then, under more favourable circumstances, i wrote 'micah clarke,' for patients had become more tractable, and i had married, and in every way i was a brighter man. a year's reading and five months' writing finished it, and i thought i had a tool in my hands that would cut a path for me. so i had, but the first thing that i cut with it was my finger. i sent it to a friend, whose opinion i deeply respected, in london, who read for one of the leading houses, but he had been bitten by the historical novel, and very naturally he distrusted it. from him it went to house after house, and house after house would have none of it. blackwood found that the people did not talk so in the seventeenth century; bentley that its principal defect was that there was a complete absence of interest; cassells that experience had shown that an historical novel could never be a commercial success. i remember smoking over my dog-eared manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air after one of its descents upon town, and wondering what i should do if some sporting, reckless kind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and make me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot. and then suddenly i bethought me to send it to messrs. longmans, where it was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of mr. andrew lang. from that day the way was smoothed to it, and, as things turned out, i was spared that keenest sting of ill-success, that those who had believed in your work should suffer pecuniarily for their belief. a door had been opened for me into the temple of the muses, and it only remained that i should find something that was worthy of being borne through it. 'the trail of the serpent' by m. e. braddon my first novel! far back in the distinctness of childish memories i see a little girl who has lately learnt to write, who has lately been given a beautiful brand-new mahogany desk, with a red velvet slope, and a glass ink-bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for three-and-sixpence, but which in the forties cost at least half a guinea. very proud is the little girl, with the kenwigs pigtails and the kenwigs frills, of that mahogany desk, and its infinite capacities for literary labour, above all, gem of gems, its stick of variegated sealing-wax, brown, speckled with gold, and its little glass seal with an intaglio representing two doves--pliny's doves, perhaps, famous in mosaic, only the little girl had never heard of pliny, or his laurentine villa. armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, mary elizabeth braddon--very fond of writing her name at full length, and her address also at full length, though the word 'middlesex' offered difficulties--began that pilgrimage on the broad high road of fiction, which was destined to be a longish one. so much for the little girl of eight years old, in the third person, and now to become strictly autobiographical. my first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened to me the world of imaginative literature. my first attempt in fiction, and in round-hand, on carefully pencilled double lines, was a story of two sisters, a good sister and a wicked, and i fear adhered more faithfully to the lines of the archetypal story than the writer's pen kept to the double fence which should have ensured neatness. the interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a prolific period, fertile in unfinished mss., among which i can now trace an historical novel on the siege of calais, an eastern story, suggested by a passionate love of miss pardoe's turkish tales, and byron's 'bride of abydos,' which my mother, a devoted byron worshipper, allowed me to read aloud to her--and doubtless murder in the reading--a story of the hartz mountains, with audacious flights in german diablerie; and lastly, very seriously undertaken, and very perseveringly worked upon, a domestic story, the outline of which was suggested by the same dear and sympathetic mother. [illustration: lichfield house, richmond] now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be common to other story-spinners, that i have never been able to take kindly to a plot--or the suggestion of a plot--offered to me by anybody else. the moment a friend tells me that he or she is desirous of imparting a series of facts--strictly true--as if truth in fiction mattered one jot!--which in his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an admirable, startling, and altogether original three-volume novel, i know in advance that my imagination will never grapple with those startling circumstances--that my thoughts will begin to wander before my friend has got half through the remarkable chain of events, and that if the obliging purveyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of the story, i should be spun ignominiously. for the most part, such subjects as have been proposed to me by friends have been hopelessly unfit for the circulating library; or, where not immoral, have been utterly dull; but it is, i believe, a fixed idea in the novel-reader's mind that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will make an admirable subject for the novelist's art. [illustration: the hall] my dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years, and perhaps influenced in somewise by her own love of picking up odd bits of sheraton or chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less ambitious second-hand dealers of those simpler days, offered me the following _scenario_ for a domestic story. it was an incident which, i doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and which certainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea-serpent, and the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits half a million. it was eminently a simple story, and far more worthy of that title than mrs. inchbald's long and involved romance. an honest couple, in humble circumstances, possess among their small household gear a good old easy chair, which has been the pride of a former generation, and is the choicest of their household gods. a comfortable cushioned chair, snug and restful, albeit the chintz covering, though clean and tidy, as virtuous people's furniture always is in fiction, is worn thin by long service, while the dear chair itself is no longer the chair it once was as to legs and framework. [illustration: the dining-room] evil days come upon the praiseworthy couple and their dependent brood, among whom i faintly remember the love interest of the story to have lain; and that direful day arrives when the average landlord of juvenile fiction, whose heart is of adamant and brain of brass, distrains for the rent. the rude broker swoops upon the humble dovecot; a cart or hand-barrow waits on the carefully hearth-stoned doorstep for the household gods; the family gather round the cherished chair, on which the rude broker has already laid his grimy fingers; they hang over the back and fondle the padded arms; and the old grandmother, with clasped hands, entreats that, if able to raise the money in a few days, they may be allowed to buy back that loved heirloom. [illustration: the drawing-room] the broker laughs the plea to scorn; they might have their chair, and cheap enough, he had no doubt. the cover was darned and patched--as only the virtuous poor of fiction do darn and do patch--and he made no doubt the stuffing was nothing better than brown wool; and with that coarse taunt the coarser broker dug his clasp-knife into the cushion against which grandfatherly backs had leaned in happier days, and lo! an avalanche of banknotes fell out of the much-maligned horsehair, and the family was lifted from penury to wealth. nothing more simple--or more natural. a prudent but eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of putting by his savings, assured that, whenever discovered, the money would be useful to--somebody. so ran the _scenario_; but i fancy my juvenile pen hardly held on to the climax. my brief experience of boarding school occurred at this time, and i well remember writing 'the old arm chair' in a penny account book, in the schoolroom of cresswell lodge, and that i was both surprised and offended at the laughter of the kindly music-teacher who, coming into the room to summon a pupil, and seeing me gravely occupied, inquired what i was doing, and was intensely amused at my stolid method of composition, plodding on undisturbed by the voices and occupations of the older girls around me. 'the old arm chair' was certainly my first serious, painstaking effort in fiction; but as it was abandoned unfinished before my eleventh birthday, and as no line thereof ever achieved the distinction of type, it can hardly rank as my first novel. [illustration: the evening room] there came a very few years later the sentimental period, in which my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form, and were modelled chiefly upon 'jane eyre,' with occasional tentative imitations of thackeray. stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation. one romance there was, i well remember, begun with resolute purpose, after the first reading of 'esmond,' and in the endeavour to give life and local colour to a story of the restoration period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of england, which, after the lapse of thirty years, i am still as bent upon taking for the background of a love story as i was when i began 'master anthony's record' in esmondese, and made my girlish acquaintance with the reading-room of the british museum, where i went in quest of local colour, and where much kindness was shown to my youth and inexperience of the book world. poring over a folio edition of the 'state trials' at my uncle's quiet rectory in sleepy sandwich, i had discovered the passionate romantic story of lord grey's elopement with his sister-in-law, next in sequence to the trial of lawrence braddon and hugh speke for conspiracy. at the risk of seeming disloyal to my own race, i must add that it seemed to me a very tinpot order of plot to which these two learned gentlemen bent their legal minds, and which cost the braddon family a heavy fine in land near camelford--confiscation which i have heard my father complain of as especially unfair--lawrence being a younger son. the romantic story of lord grey was to be the subject of 'master anthony's record,' but master anthony's sentimental autobiography went the way of all my earlier efforts. it was but a year or so after the collapse of master anthony, that a blindly enterprising printer of beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the _beverley recorder_, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial story, to be set up and printed at beverley, and published on commission by a london firm in warwick lane. i cannot picture to myself, in my after-knowledge of the bookselling trade, any enterprise more futile in its inception or more feeble in its execution; but to my youthful ambition the actual commission to write a novel, with an advance payment of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my yorkshire speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink paradise which i had sighed for ever since i could hold a pen. i had, previously to this date, found a mæcenas in beverley, in the person of a learned gentleman who volunteered to foster my love of the muses by buying the copyright of a volume of poems and publishing the same at his own expense--which he did, poor man, without stint, and by which noble patronage of poet's corner verse he must have lost money. he had, however, the privilege of dictating the subject of the principal poem, which was to sing--however feebly--garibaldi's sicilian campaign. [illustration: the smoking-room] the beverley printer suggested that my warwick lane serial should combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial humour of dickens with the plot-weaving of g. w. r. reynolds; and, furnished with these broad instructions, i filled my ink-bottle, spread out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my first novel--now known as 'the trail of the serpent'--but published in warwick lane, and later in the stirring high street of beverley, as 'three times dead.' in 'three times dead' i gave loose to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama. death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages: and villainy reigned triumphant till the nemesis of the last chapter. i wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic; and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of its original production, and its re-issue as the ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its way as a chartered libertine. people buy it and read it, and its faults and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen unchastened by experience; but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it ever became after long practice. [illustration: the library] i dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images of horror or of mirth, and boldly built the framework of my story, and set my puppets moving. to me, at least, they were living creatures, who seemed to follow impulses of their own, to be impelled by their own passions, to love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord. there was unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story, and in the knowledge that it was to be actually printed and published, and not to be declined with thanks by adamantine magazine editors, like a certain short story which i had lately written, and which contained the germ of 'lady audley's secret.' indeed, at this period of my life, the postman's knock had become associated in my mind with the sharp sound of a rejected ms. dropping through the open letter-box on to the floor of the hall, while my heart seemed to drop in sympathy with that book-post packet. short of never being printed at all, my beverley-born novel could have hardly entered upon the world of books in a more profound obscurity. that one living creature ever bought a number of 'three times dead' i greatly doubt. i can recall the thrill of emotion with which i tore open the envelope that contained my complimentary copy of the first number, folded across, and in aspect inferior to a gratis pamphlet about a patent medicine. the miserable little wood block which illustrated that first number would have disgraced a baker's whitey-brown bag, would have been unworthy to illustrate a penny bun. my spirits were certainly dashed at the technical shortcomings of that first serial, and i was hardly surprised when i was informed a few weeks later, that although my admirers at beverley were deeply interested in the story, it was not a financial success, and that it would be only obliging on my part, and in accordance with my known kindness of heart, if i were to restrict the development of the romance to half its intended length, and to accept five pounds in lieu of ten as my reward. having no desire that the rash beverley printer should squander his own or his children's fortune in the obscurity of warwick lane, i immediately acceded to his request, shortened sail, and went on with my story, perhaps with a shade less enthusiasm, having seen the shabby figure it was to make in the book world. i may add that the beverley publisher's payments began and ended with his noble advance of fifty shillings. the balance was never paid; and it was rather hard lines that, on his becoming bankrupt in his poor little way a few years later, a judge in the bankruptcy court remarked that, as miss braddon was now making a good deal of money by her pen, she ought to 'come to the relief' of her first publisher. and now my volume of verses being well under way, i went with my mother to farmhouse lodgings in the neighbourhood of that very beverley, where i spent perhaps the happiest half-year of my life--half a year of tranquil, studious days, far from the madding crowd, with the mother whose society was always all sufficient for me--half a year among level pastures, with unlimited books from the library in hull, an old farm-horse to ride about the green lanes, the breath of summer, with all its sweet odours of flower and herb, around and about us; half a year of unalloyed bliss, had it not been for one dark shadow, the heroic figure of garibaldi, the sailor-soldier, looming large upon the foreground of my literary labours, as the hero of a lengthy narrative poem in the spenserian metre. [illustration: miss braddon's favourite mare] my chief business at beverley was to complete the volume of verse commissioned by my yorkshire mæcenas, at that time a very rich man, who paid me a much better price for my literary work than his townsman, the enterprising printer, and who had the first claim on my thought and time. [illustration: the orangery] with the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, i went every morning to my file of the _times_, and pored and puzzled over neapolitan revolution and sicilian campaign, and i can only say that if emile zola has suffered as much over sedan as i suffered in the freshness of my youth, when flowery meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer idlesse, over the fighting in sicily, his dogged perseverance in uncongenial labour should place him among the immortal forty. how i hated the great joseph g. and the spenserian metre, with its exacting demands upon the rhyming faculty! how i hated my own ignorance of modern italian history, and my own eyes for never having looked upon italian landscape, whereby historical allusion and local colour were both wanting to that dry-as-dust record of heroic endeavour! i had only the _times_ correspondent; where he was picturesque i could be picturesque--allowing always for the spenserian straining--where he was rich in local colour i did my utmost to reproduce his colouring, stretched always on the spenserian rack, and lengthened out by the bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes. next to giuseppe garibaldi i hated edmund spenser, and it may be from a vengeful remembrance of those early struggles with a difficult form of versification, that, although throughout my literary life i have been a lover of england's earlier poets, and have delighted in the quaintness and _naïveté_ of chaucer, i have refrained from reading more than a casual stanza or two of the 'faëry queen.' when i lived at beverley, spenser was to me but a name, and byron's 'childe harold' was my only model for that exacting verse. i should add that the beverley mæcenas, when commissioning this volume of verse, was less superb in his ideas than the literary patron of the past. he looked at the matter from a purely commercial standpoint, and believed that a volume of verse, such as i could produce, would pay--a delusion on his part which i honestly strove to combat before accepting his handsome offer of remuneration for my time and labour. it was with this idea in his mind that he chose and insisted upon the sicilian campaign as a subject for my muse, and thus started me heavily handicapped on the racecourse of parnassus. [illustration: miss braddon's cottage at lyndhurst] the weekly number of 'three times dead' was 'thrown off' in brief intervals of rest from my _magnum opus_, and it was an infinite relief to turn from garibaldi and his brothers in arms to the angels and the monsters which my own brain had engendered, and which to me seemed more alive than the good great man whose arms i so laboriously sang. my rustic pipe far better loved to sing of melodramatic poisoners and ubiquitous detectives; of fine houses in the west of london, and dark dens in the east. so the weekly chapter of my first novel ran merrily off my pen while the printer's boy waited in the farmhouse kitchen. happy, happy days, so near to memory, and yet so far! in that peaceful summer i finished my first novel, knocked garibaldi on the head with a closing rhapsody, saw the york spring and summer races in hopelessly wet weather, learnt to love the yorkshire people, and left yorkshire almost broken-heartedly on a dull, grey october morning, to travel londonwards through a landscape that was mostly under water. [illustration: miss braddon's inkstand] and, behold, since that october morning i have written fifty-three novels; i have lost dear old friends and found new friends, who are also dear, but i have never looked on a yorkshire landscape since i turned my reluctant eyes from those level meadows and green lanes where the old chestnut mare used to carry me ploddingly to and fro between tall, tangled hedges of eglantine and honeysuckle. [illustration: signature: very truly yours, m. e. braddon] '_the house of elmore_' by f. w. robinson [illustration] it is a far cry back to , when dreams of writing a book had almost reached the boundary line of 'probable events.' i was then a pale, long-haired, consumptive-looking youth, who had been successful in prize poems--for there were prize competitions even in those far-off days--and in acrostics, and in the acceptance of one or two short stories, which had been actually published in a magazine that did not pay for contributions (it was edited by a clergyman of the church of england, and the chaplain to a real duke), which magazine has gone the way of many magazines, and is now as extinct as the dodo. it was in the year , or a month or two earlier, that i wrote my first novel--which, upon a moderate computation, i think, would make four or five good-sized library volumes, but i have never attempted to 'scale' the manuscript. it is in my possession still, although i have not seen it for many weary years. it is buried with a heap more rubbish in a respectable old oak chest, the key of which is even lost to me. and yet that ms. was the turning-point of my small literary career. and it is the history of that manuscript which leads up to the publication of my first novel; my first step, though i did not know it, and hence it is part and parcel of the history of my first book--a link in the chain. [illustration: at twenty] [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: yours very truly, f. w. robinson (_from a photograph by elliott & fry_)] when that manuscript was completed, it was read aloud, night after night, to an admiring audience of family members, and pronounced as fit for publication as anything of dickens or thackeray or bulwer, who were then in the full swing of their mighty capacities. alas! i was a better judge than my partial and amiable critics. i had very grave doubts--'qualms,' i think they are called--and i had read that it was uphill work to get a book published, and swagger through the world as a real live being who had actually written a novel. there was a faint hope, that was all; and so, with my ms. under my arm, i strolled into the palatial premises of messrs. hurst & blackett ('successors to henry colburn' they proudly designated themselves at that period), laid my heavy parcel on the counter, and waited, with fear and trembling, for some one to emerge from the galleries of books and rows of desks beyond, and inquire the nature of my business. and here ensued my first surprise--quite a dramatic coincidence--for the tall, spare, middle-aged gentleman who advanced from the shadows towards the counter, proved, to my intense astonishment, to be a constant chess antagonist of mine at kling's chess rooms, round the corner, in new oxford street--rooms which have long since disappeared, together with horwitz, harrwitz, loewenthal, williams, and other great chess lights of those far-away times, who were to be seen there, night after night, prepared for all comers. kling's was a great chess house, and i was a chess enthusiast, as well as a youth who wanted to get into print. failing literature, i had made up my mind to become a chess champion, if possible, although i knew already by quiet observation of my antagonists, that in that way madness lay, sheer uncontrollable, raging madness--for me at any rate. and the grave, middle-aged gentleman behind the counter of great marlborough street, proved to be the cashier of the firm, and used--being chess-mad with the rest of us--to spend his evenings at 'kling's.' he was a player of my own strength, and for twelve months or so had i skirmished with him over the chessboard, and fought innumerable battles with him. he had never spoken of his occupation, nor i of my restless ambitions--chess players never go far beyond the chequered board. [illustration: elmore house] 'hallo, robinson!' he exclaimed in his surprise, 'you don't mean to say that you---- ' and then he stopped and regarded my youthful appearance very critically. 'yes, mr. kenny--it's a novel,' i said modestly; 'my first.' 'there's plenty of it,' he remarked dryly. 'i'll send it upstairs at once. and i'll wish you luck, too; but,' he added, kindly preparing to soften the shock of a future refusal, 'we have plenty of these come in--about seven a day--and most of them go back to their writers again.' [illustration: at thirty] 'ye-es, i suppose so,' i answered, with a sigh. for a while, however, i regarded the meeting as a happy augury--a lucky coincidence. i even had the vain, hopeless notion that mr. kenny might put in a good word for me, ask for special consideration, out of that kindly feeling which we had for each other, and which chess antagonists have invariably for each other, i am inclined to believe. but though we met three or four times a week, from that day forth not one word concerning the fate of my manuscript escaped the lips of mr. kenny. it is probable the incident had passed from his memory; he had nothing to do with the novel department itself, and the delivery of mss. was a very common everyday proceeding to him. i was too bashful, perhaps too proud, an individual to ask any questions; but every evening that i encountered him i used to wonder 'if he had heard anything,' if any news of the book's fate had reached him, directly or indirectly; occasionally even, as time went on, i was disposed to imagine that he was letting me win the game out of kindness--for he was a gentle, kindly soul always--in order to soften the shock of a disappointment which he knew perfectly well was on its way towards me. [illustration: mr. robinson's library] [illustration: the garden] some months afterwards, the fateful letter came to me from the firm, regretting its inability to make use of the ms., and expressing many thanks for a perusal of the same--a polite, concise, all-round kind of epistle, which a publisher is compelled to keep in stock, and to send out when rejected literature pours forth like a waterfall from the dusky caverns of a publishing house in a large way of business. it was all over, then--i had failed! from that hour i would turn chess player, and soften my brain in a quest for silver cups or champion amateur stakes. i could play chess better than i could write fiction, i was sure. still, after some days of dead despair, i sent the ms. once more on its travels--this time to smith & elder's, whose reader, mr. williams, had leapt into singular prominence since his favourable judgment of charlotte brontë's book, and to whom most mss. flowed spontaneously for many years afterwards. and in due course of time, mr. williams, acting for messrs. smith & elder, asked me to call upon him--_for the ms.!_--at cornhill, and there i received my first advice, my first thrill of exultation. 'presently, and probably, _and with perseverance_,' he said, 'you will succeed in literature, and if you will remember now, that to write a good novel is a very considerable achievement. years of short story-writing is the best apprenticeship for you. write and rewrite, and spare no pains.' i thanked him, and i went home with tears in my eyes of gratitude and consolation, though my big story had been declined with thanks. but i did not write again. i put away my ms., and went on for six or eight hours a day at chess for many idle months before i was in the vein for composition, and then, with a sudden dash, i began 'the house of elmore.' it was half finished when another strange incident occurred. i received one morning a letter from lascelles wraxall (afterwards sir lascelles wraxall, bart., as the reader may be probably aware), informing me that he was one of the readers for messrs. hurst & blackett, and that it had been his duty some time ago to decide unfavourably against a story which i had submitted to the notice of his firm, but that he had intended to write to me a private note urging me to adopt literature as a profession. his principal object in writing at that time was to suggest my trying the fortunes of the novel, which he had already read, with messrs. routledge, and he kindly added a letter of introduction to that firm in the broadway--an introduction which, by the way, never came to anything. [illustration: the drawing-room] poor lascelles wraxall, clever writer and editor, press-man and literary adviser, real bohemian and true friend--indeed, everybody's friend but his own--i look back at him with feelings of deep gratitude. he was a rolling stone, and when i met him for the first time in my life, years afterwards, he had left marlborough street for the crimea; he had been given a commission in the turkish contingent at kertch; he had come back anathematising the service, and 'chock full' of grievances against the government, and he became once more editor and sub-editor, and publisher's hack even, until he stepped into his baronetcy--an empty title, for he had sold the reversion of the estates for a mere song long ago--and became special correspondent in austria for the _daily telegraph_. and in vienna he died, young in years still--not forty, i think--closing a life that only wanted one turn more of 'application,' i have often thought, to have achieved very great distinction. there are still a few writing men about who remember lascelles wraxall, but they are 'the boys of the old brigade.' [illustration: at forty] it was to lascelles wraxall i sent, when finished, 'the house of elmore,' as the reader may very easily guess. wraxall had stepped so much out of his groove--for the busy literary man that he was--to take me by the hand, and point the way along 'the perilous road;' he had given me so many kind words, that i wrote my hardest to complete my new story before i should fade from his recollection. the book was finished in five weeks, and in hot haste, and for months again i was left wondering what the outcome of it all was to be; whether wraxall was reading my story, or whether--oh, horror!--some other reader less kindly disposed, and more austere and critical, and hard to please, had been told off to sit in judgment upon my second ms. [illustration: mr. robinson at work] i went back to chess for a distraction till the fate of that book was pronounced or sealed--it was always chess in the hours of my distress and anxiety--and i once again faced charles kenny, and once again wondered if he knew, and how much he knew, whilst he was deep in his king's gambit or his giuoco piano; but he was not even aware that i had sent in a second story, i learned afterwards. and then at last came the judgment--the pleasant, if formal, notice from marlborough street that the novel had been favourably reported upon by the reader, and that messrs. hurst & blackett would be pleased to see me at marlborough street to talk the matter of its publication over with me. ah! what a letter that was!--what a surprise, after all!--what a good omen! and some three months afterwards, at the end of the year , my first book--but my second novel--was launched into the reading world, and i have hardly got over the feeling yet that i had actually a right to dub myself a novelist! when the first three notices of the book appeared, wild dreams of a brilliant future beset me. they were all favourable notices--too favourable; but _john bull_, _the press_, and _bell's messenger_ (i think they were the papers) scattered favourable notices indiscriminately at that time. presently the _athenæum_ sobered me a little, but wound up with a kindly pat on the back, and the _saturday review_, then in its seventh number, drenched me with vitriolic acid, and brought me to a lower level altogether; and, finally, the _morning herald_ blew a loud blast to my praise and glory--that last notice, i believe, having been written by my old friend sir edward clarke, then a very young reviewer on the _herald_ staff, with no dreams of becoming her majesty's solicitor-general just then! 'the house of elmore' actually paid its publishers' expenses, and left a balance, and brought me in a little cheque; and thus my writing life began in sober earnest. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: very truly yours, h. rider haggard] '_dawn_' by h. rider haggard [illustration: the front garden[b]] i think that it was in an article by a fellow-scribe, where, doubtless more in sorrow than in anger, that gentleman exposed the worthlessness of the productions of sundry of his brother authors, in which i read that whatever success i had met with as a writer of fiction was due to my literary friends and 'nepotic criticism.' this is scarcely the case, since when i began to write i do not think that i knew a single creature who had published books--blue books alone excepted. nobody was ever more outside the ring, or less acquainted with the art of 'rolling logs,' than the humble individual who pens these lines. but the reader shall judge for himself. to begin at the beginning: my very first attempt at imaginative writing was made while i was a boy at school. one of the masters promised a prize to that youth who should best describe on paper any incident, real or imaginary. i entered the lists, and selected the scene at an operation in a hospital as my subject. the fact that i had never seen an operation, nor crossed the doors of a hospital, did not deter me from this bold endeavour, which, however, was justified by its success. i was declared to have won in the competition, though, probably through the forgetfulness of the master, i remember that i never received the promised prize. my next literary effort, written in , was an account of a zulu war dance, which i witnessed when i was on the staff of the governor of natal. it was published in the _gentleman's magazine_, and very kindly noticed in various papers. a year later i wrote another article, entitled 'a visit to the chief secocoeni,' which very nearly got me into trouble. i was then serving on the staff of sir theophilus shepstone, and the article, signed with my initials, reached south africa in its printed form shortly after the annexation of the transvaal. young men with a pen in their hands are proverbially indiscreet, and in this instance i was no exception. in the course of my article i had described the transvaal boer at home with a fidelity that should be avoided by members of a diplomatic mission, and had even gone the length of saying that most of the dutch women were 'fat.' needless to say, my remarks were translated into the africander papers, and somewhat extensively read, especially by the ladies in question and their male relatives; nor did the editors of those papers forbear to comment on them in leading articles. shortly afterwards, there was a great and stormy meeting of boers at pretoria. as matters began to look serious, somebody ventured among them to ascertain the exciting cause, and returned with the pleasing intelligence that they were all talking of what the englishman had written about the physical proportions of their womenkind and domestic habits, and threatening to take up arms to avenge it. of my feelings on learning this news i will not discourse, but they were uncomfortable, to say the least of it. happily, in the end, the gathering broke up without bloodshed, but when the late sir bartle frere came to pretoria, some months afterwards, he administered to me a sound and well-deserved lecture on my indiscretion. i excused myself by saying that i had set down nothing which was not strictly true, and he replied to the effect that therein lay my fault. i quite agree with him; indeed, there is little doubt but that these bald statements of fact as to the stoutness of the transvaal 'fraus,' and the lack of cleanliness in their homes, went near to precipitating a result that, as it chanced, was postponed for several years. well, it is all done with now, and i take this opportunity of apologising to such of the ladies in question as may still be in the land of life. [illustration: mr. rider haggard and his daughters] this unfortunate experience cooled my literary ardour, yet, as it chanced, when some five years later i again took up my pen, it was in connection with african affairs. these pages are no place for politics, but i must allude to them in explanation. it will be remembered that the transvaal was annexed by great britain in . in the boers rose in rebellion and administered several thrashings to our troops, whereon the government of this country came suddenly to the conclusion that a wrong had been done to the victors, and, subject to some paper restrictions, gave them back their independence. as it chanced, at the time i was living on some african property belonging to me in the centre of the operations, and so disgusted was i, in common with thousands of others, at the turn which matters had taken, that i shook the dust of south africa off my feet and returned to england. now, the first impulse of an aggrieved englishman is to write to the _times_, and if i remember right i took this course, but, my letter not being inserted, i enlarged upon the idea and composed a book called 'cetewayo and his white neighbours.' this semi-political work, or rather history, was very carefully constructed from the records of some six years' experience, and by the help of a shelf full of blue books that stare me in the face as i write these words; and the fact that it still goes on selling seems to show that it has some value in the eyes of students of south african politics. but when i had written my book i was confronted by a difficulty which i had not anticipated, being utterly without experience in such affairs--that of finding somebody willing to publish it. i remember that i purchased a copy of the _athenæum_, and selecting the names of various firms at hazard, wrote to them offering to submit my manuscript, but, strange to say, none of them seemed anxious to peruse it. at last--how i do not recollect--it came into the hands of messrs. trübner, who, after consideration, wrote to say that they were willing to bring it out on the half profit system, provided that i paid down fifty pounds towards the cost of production. i did not at all like the idea of parting with the fifty pounds, but i believed in my book, and was anxious to put my views on the transvaal rebellion and other african questions before the world. so i consented to the terms, and in due course 'cetewayo' was published in a neat green binding. somewhat to my astonishment, it proved a success from a literary point of view. it was not largely purchased--indeed, that fifty pounds took several years on its return journey to my pocket, but it was favourably, and in some instances almost enthusiastically, reviewed, especially in the colonial papers. [illustration: the hall] about this time the face of a girl whom i saw in a church at norwood gave me the idea of writing a novel. the face was so perfectly beautiful, and at the same time so refined, that i felt i could fit a story to it which should be worthy of a heroine similarly endowed. when next i saw mr. trübner i consulted him on the subject. 'you can write--it is certain that you can write. yes, do it, and i will get the book published for you,' he answered. thus encouraged i set to work. how to compose a novel i knew not, so i wrote straight on, trusting to the light of nature to guide me. my main object was to produce the picture of a woman perfect in mind and body, and to show her character ripening and growing spiritual, under the pressure of various afflictions. of course, there is a vast gulf between a novice's aspiration and his attainment, and i do not contend that angela as she appears in 'dawn' fulfils this ideal; also, such a person in real life might, and probably would, be a bore-- something too bright and good for human nature's daily food. [illustration: mr. rider haggard's study] still, this was the end i aimed at. indeed, before i had done with her, i became so deeply attached to my heroine that, in a literary sense, i have never quite got over it. i worked very hard at this novel during the next six months or so, but at length it was finished and despatched to mr. trübner, who, as his firm did not deal in this class of book, submitted it to five or six of the best publishers of fiction. one and all they declined it, so that by degrees it became clear to me that i might as well have saved my labour. mr. trübner, however, had confidence in my work, and submitted the manuscript to mr. john cordy jeaffreson for report; and here i may pause to say that i think there is more kindness in the hearts of literary men than is common in the world. it is not a pleasant task, in the face of repeated failure, again and again to attempt the adventure of persuading brother publishers to undertake the maiden effort of an unknown man. still less pleasant is it, as i can vouch from experience, to wade through a lengthy and not particularly legible manuscript, and write an elaborate opinion thereon for the benefit of a stranger. yet mr. trübner and mr. jeaffreson did these things for me without fee or reward. mr. jeaffreson's report i have lost or mislaid, but i remember its purport well. it was to the effect that there was a great deal of power in the novel, but that it required to be entirely rewritten. the first part he thought so good that he advised me to expand it, and the unhappy ending he could not agree with. if i killed the heroine, it would kill the book, he said. he may have been right, but i still hold to my first conception, according to which angela was doomed to an early and pathetic end, as the fittest crown to her career. that the story needed rewriting there is no doubt, but i believe that it would have been better as a work of art if i had dealt with it on the old lines, especially as the expansion of the beginning, in accordance with the advice of my kindly critic, took the tale back through the history of another generation--always a most dangerous experiment. still, i did as i was told, not presuming to set up a judgment of my own in the matter. if i had worked hard at the first draft of the novel, i worked much harder at the second, especially as i could not give all my leisure to it, being engaged at the time in reading for the bar. so hard did i work that at length my eyesight gave out, and i was obliged to complete the last hundred sheets in a darkened room. but let my eyes ache as they might, i would not give up till it was finished, within about three months from the date of its commencement. recently, i went through this book to prepare it for a new edition, chiefly in order to cut out some of the mysticism and tall writing, for which it is too remarkable, and was pleased to find that it still interested me. but if a writer may be allowed to criticise his own work, it is two books, not one. also, the hero is a very poor creature. evidently i was too much occupied with my heroines to give much thought to him; moreover, women are so much easier and more interesting to write about, for whereas no two of them are alike, in modern men, or rather, in young men of the middle and upper classes, there is a paralysing sameness. as a candid friend once said to me, 'there is nothing manly about that chap, arthur'--he is the hero--'except his bull-dog!' with angela herself i am still in love; only she ought to have died, which, on the whole, would have been a better fate than being married to arthur, more especially if he was anything like the illustrator's conception of him in the current edition. in its new shape 'dawn' was submitted to messrs. hurst & blackett, and at once accepted by that firm. why it was called 'dawn' i am not now quite clear, but i think it was because i could find no other title acceptable to the publishers. the discovery of suitable titles is a more difficult matter than people who do not write romances would suppose, most of the good ones having been used already and copyrighted. in due course the novel was published in three fat volumes, and a pretty green cover, and i sat down to await events. at the best i did not expect to win a fortune out of it, as if every one of the five hundred copies printed were sold, i could only make fifty pounds under my agreement--not an extravagant reward for a great deal of labour. as a matter of fact, but four hundred and fifty sold, so the net proceeds of the venture amounted to ten pounds only, and forty surplus copies of the book, which i bored my friends by presenting to them. but as the copyright of the work reverted to me at the expiration of a year, i cannot grumble at this result. the reader may think that it was mercenary of me to consider my first book from this financial point of view, but to be frank, though the story interested me much in its writing, and i had a sneaking belief in its merits, it never occurred to me that i, an utterly inexperienced beginner, could hope to make any mark in competition with the many brilliant writers of fiction who were already before the public. therefore, so far as i was concerned, any reward in the way of literary reputation seemed to be beyond my reach. [illustration: some curios] it was on the occasion of the publication of this novel that i made my first and last attempt to 'roll a log,' with somewhat amusing results. almost the only person of influence whom i knew in the world of letters was the editor of a certain society paper. i had not seen him for ten years, but at this crisis i ventured to recall myself to his memory, and to ask him, not for a favourable notice, but that the book should be reviewed in his journal. he acceded to my prayer; it was reviewed, but after a fashion for which i did not bargain. this little incident taught me a lesson, and the moral of it is: never trouble an editor about your immortal works; he can so easily be even with you. i commend it to all literary tiros. even if you are in a position to command 'puffs,' the public will find you out in the second edition, and revenge itself upon your next book. here is a story that illustrates the accuracy of this statement; it came to me on good authority, and i believe it to be true. a good many years ago, the relation of an editor of a great paper published a novel. it was a bad novel, but a desperate effort was made to force it upon the public, and in many of the leading journals appeared notices so laudatory that readers fell into the trap, and the book went through several editions. encouraged by success, the writer published a second book, but the public had found her out, and it fell flat. being a person of resource, she brought out a third work under a _nom de plume_, which, as at first, was accorded an enthusiastic reception by previous arrangement, and forced into circulation. a fourth followed under the same name, but again the public had found her out, and her career as a novelist came to an end. to return to the fate of 'dawn.' in most quarters it met with the usual reception of a first novel by an unknown man. some of the reviewers sneered at it, and some 'slated' it, and made merry over the misprints--a cheap form of wit that saves those who practise it the trouble of going into the merits of a book. two very good notices fell to its lot, however, in the _times_ and in the _morning post_, the first of these speaking about the novel in terms of which any amateur writer might feel proud, though, unfortunately, it appeared too late to be of much service. also, i discovered that the story had interested a great many readers, and none of them more than the late mr. trübner, through whose kind offices it came to be published, who, i was told, paid me the strange compliment of continuing its perusal till within a few hours of his death, a sad event that the enemy might say was hastened thereby. in this connection i remember that the first hint i received that my story was popular with the ordinary reading public, whatever reviewers might say of it, came from the lips of a young lady, a chance visitor at my house, whose name i have forgotten. seeing the book lying on the table, she took a volume up, saying-- [illustration: a study corner] 'oh, have you read 'dawn'? it is a first-rate novel; i have just finished it.' somebody explained, and the subject dropped, but i was not a little gratified by the unintended compliment. these facts encouraged me, and i wrote a second novel--'the witch's head.' this book i endeavoured to publish serially by posting the ms. to the editors of various magazines for their consideration. but in those days there were no literary agents or authors' societies to help young writers with their experience and advice, and the bulky manuscript always came back to my hand like a boomerang, till at length i wearied of the attempt. of course i sent to the wrong people; afterwards the editor of a leading monthly told me that he would have been delighted to run the book had it fallen into the hands of his firm. in the end, as in the case of 'dawn,' i published 'the witch's head' in three volumes. its reception astonished me, for i did not think so well of the book as i had done of its predecessor. in that view, by the way, the public has borne out my judgment, for to this day three copies of 'dawn' are absorbed for every two of 'the witch's head,' a proportion that has never varied since the two works appeared in one-volume form. 'the witch's head' was very well reviewed; indeed, in one or two cases, the notices were almost enthusiastic, most of all when they dealt with the african part of the book, which i had inserted as padding, the fight between jeremy and the boer giant being singled out for especial praise. whatever it may lack, one merit this novel has, however, that was overlooked by all the reviewers. omitting the fictitious incidents introduced for the purposes of the story, it contains an accurate account of the great disaster inflicted upon our troops by the zulus at isandhlwana. i was in the country at the time of the massacre, and heard its story from the lips of survivors; also, in writing of it, i studied the official reports in the blue books and the minutes of the court martial. [illustration: mr. rider haggard] 'the witch's head' attained the dignity of being pirated in america, and in england went out of print in a few weeks, but no argument that i could use would induce my publishers to re-issue it in a one volume edition. the risk was too great, they said. then it was i came to the conclusion that i would abandon the making of books. the work was very hard, and when put to the test of experience the glamour that surrounds this occupation vanished. i did not care much for the publicity it involved, and, like most young authors, i failed to appreciate being sneered at by anonymous critics who happened not to admire what i wrote, and whom i had no opportunity of answering. it is true that then, as now, i liked the work for its own sake. indeed, i have always thought that literature would be a charming profession if its conditions allowed of the depositing of manuscripts, when completed, in a drawer, there to language in obscurity, or of their private publication only. but i could not afford myself these luxuries. i was too modest to hope for any renown worth having, and for the rest the game seemed scarcely worth the candle. i had published a history and two novels. on the history i had lost fifty pounds, on the first novel i had made ten pounds, and on the second fifty; net profit on the three, ten pounds, which in the case of a man with other occupations and duties did not appear to be an adequate return for the labour involved. but i was not destined to escape thus from the toils of romance. one day i chanced to read a clever article in favour of boys' books, and it occurred to me that i might be able to do as well as others in that line. i was working at the bar at the time, but in my spare evenings, more from amusement than from any other reason, i entered on the literary adventure that ended in the appearance of 'king solomon's mines.' this romance has proved very successful, although three firms, including my own publishers, refused even to consider it. but as it can scarcely be called one of my first books, i shall not speak of it here. in conclusion, i will tell a moving tale, that it may be a warning to young authors for ever. after my publishers declined to issue 'the witch's head' in a six-shilling edition, i tried many others without success, and at length in my folly signed an agreement with a firm since deceased. under this document the firm in question agreed to bring out 'dawn' and 'the witch's head' in a two-shilling edition, and generously to remunerate me with a third share in the profits realised, if any. in return for this concession, i on my part undertook to allow the said firm to republish any novel that i might write, for a period of five years from the date of the agreement, in a two-shilling form, and on the same third-profit terms. of course, so soon as the success of 'king solomon's mines' was established, i received a polite letter from the publishers in question, asking when they might expect to republish that romance at two shillings. then the matter came under the consideration of lawyers and other skilled persons, with the result that it appeared that, if the courts took a strict view of the agreement, ruin stared me in the face, so far as my literary affairs were concerned. to begin with, either by accident or design, this artful document was so worded that, _primâ facie_, the contracting publisher had a right to place his cheap edition on the market whenever it might please him to do so, subject only to the payment of a third of the profit, to be assessed by himself, which practically might have meant nothing at all. how could i expect to dispose of work subject to such a legal 'servitude'? for five long years i was a slave to the framer of the 'hanging' clause of the agreement. things looked black indeed, when, thanks to the diplomacy of my agent, and to a fortunate change in the _personnel_ of the firm to which i was bound, i avoided disaster. the fatal agreement was cancelled, and in consideration of my release i undertook to write two books upon a moderate royalty. thus, then, did i escape out of bondage. to be just, it was my own fault that i should ever have been sold into it, but authors are proverbially guileless when they are anxious to publish their books, and a piece of printed paper with a few additions written in a neat hand looks innocent enough. now no such misfortunes need happen, for the authors' society is ready and anxious to protect them from themselves and others, but in those days it did not exist. [illustration: the farm] this is the history of how i drifted into the writing of books. if it saves one beginner so inexperienced and unfriended as i was in those days from putting his hand to a 'hanging' agreement under any circumstances whatsoever, it will not have been set out in vain. the advice that i give to would-be authors, if i may presume to offer it, is to think for a long while before they enter at all upon a career so hard and hazardous, but having entered on it, not to be easily cast down. there are great virtues in perseverance, even though critics sneer and publishers prove unkind. '_hudson's bay_' by r. m. ballantyne having been asked to give some account of the commencement of my literary career, i begin by remarking that my first book was not a tale or 'story-book,' but a free-and-easy record of personal adventure and every-day life in those wild regions of north america which are known, variously, as rupert's land--the hudson's bay territory--the nor' west, and 'the great lone land.' [illustration: where i wrote my first book (_a sketch by the author_)] the record was never meant to see the light in the form of a book. it was written solely for the eye of my mother, but, as it may be said that it was the means of leading me ultimately into the path of my life-work, and was penned under somewhat peculiar circumstances, it may not be out of place to refer to it particularly here. the circumstances were as follows:-- after having spent about six years in the wild nor' west, as a servant of the hudson's bay fur company, i found myself, one summer--at the advanced age of twenty-two--in charge of an outpost on the uninhabited northern shores of the gulf of st. lawrence named seven islands. it was a dreary, desolate spot; at that time far beyond the bounds of civilisation. the gulf, just opposite the establishment, was about fifty miles broad. the ships which passed up and down it were invisible, not only on account of distance, but because of seven islands at the mouth of the bay coming between them and the outpost. my next neighbour, in command of a similar post up the gulf, was about seventy miles distant. the nearest house down the gulf was about eighty miles off, and behind us lay the virgin forests, with swamps, lakes, prairies, and mountains, stretching away without break right across the continent to the pacific ocean. the outpost--which, in virtue of a ship's carronade and a flagstaff, was occasionally styled a 'fort'--consisted of four wooden buildings. one of these--the largest, with a verandah--was the residency. there was an offshoot in rear which served as a kitchen. the other houses were a store for goods wherewith to carry on trade with the indians, a stable, and a workshop. the whole population of the establishment--indeed of the surrounding district--consisted of myself and one man--also a horse! the horse occupied the stable, i dwelt in the residency, the rest of the population lived in the kitchen. there were, indeed, five other men belonging to the establishment, but these did not affect its desolation, for they were away netting salmon at a river about twenty miles distant at the time i write of. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: r. m. ballantyne] my 'friday'--who was a french-canadian--being cook, as well as man-of-all-works, found a little occupation in attending to the duties of his office, but the unfortunate governor had nothing whatever to do except await the arrival of indians, who were not due at that time. the horse was a bad one, without a saddle, and in possession of a pronounced backbone. my 'friday' was not sociable. i had no books, no newspapers, no magazines or literature of any kind, no game to shoot, no boat wherewith to prosecute fishing in the bay, and no prospect of seeing anyone to speak to for weeks, if not months, to come. but i had pen and ink, and, by great good fortune, was in possession of a blank paper book fully an inch thick. these, then, were the circumstances in which i began my first book. when that book was finished, and, not long afterwards, submitted to the--i need hardly say favourable--criticism of my mother, i had not the most distant idea of taking to authorship as a profession. even when a printer-cousin, seeing the ms., offered to print it, and the well-known blackwood of edinburgh, seeing the book, offered to publish it--and did publish it--my ambition was still so absolutely asleep that i did not again put pen to paper in _that_ way for eight years thereafter, although i might have been encouraged thereto by the fact that this first book--named 'hudson's bay'--besides being a commercial success, received favourable notice from the press. it was not until the year that my literary path was opened up. at that time i was a partner in the late publishing firm of constable & co., of edinburgh. happening one day to meet with the late william nelson, publisher, i was asked by him how i should like the idea of taking to literature as a profession. my answer i forget. it must have been vague, for i had never thought of the subject before. 'well,' said he, 'what would you think of trying to write a story?' somewhat amused, i replied that i did not know what to think, but i would try if he wished me to do so. 'do so,' said he, 'and go to work at once'--or words to that effect. i went to work at once, and wrote my first story or work of fiction. it was published in under the name of 'snowflakes and sunbeams; or, the young fur-traders.' afterwards the first part of the title was dropped, and the book is now known as 'the young fur-traders.' from that day to this i have lived by making story-books for young folk. [illustration: mr. ballantyne's house at harrow[c]] from what i have said it will be seen that i have never aimed at the achieving of this position, and i hope that it is not presumptuous in me to think--and to derive much comfort from the thought--that god led me into the particular path along which i have walked for so many years. the scene of my first story was naturally laid in those backwoods with which i was familiar, and the story itself was founded on the adventures and experiences of myself and my companions. when a second book was required of me, i stuck to the same regions, but changed the locality. when casting about in my mind for a suitable subject, i happened to meet with an old retired 'nor'wester' who had spent an adventurous life in rupert's land. among other duties he had been sent to establish an outpost of the hudson's bay company at ungava bay, one of the most dreary parts of a desolate region. on hearing what i wanted he sat down and wrote a long narrative of his proceedings there, which he placed at my disposal, and thus furnished me with the foundation of 'ungava.' but now i had reached the end of my tether, and when a third story was wanted i was compelled to seek new fields of adventure in the books of travellers. regarding the southern seas as a most romantic part of the world--after the backwoods!--i mentally and spiritually plunged into those warm waters, and the dive resulted in the 'coral island.' it now began to be borne in upon me that there was something not quite satisfactory in describing, expatiating on, and energising in, regions which one has never seen. for one thing, it was needful to be always carefully on the watch to avoid falling into mistakes--geographical, topographical, natural-historical, and otherwise. [illustration: trophies from mr. ballantyne's travels] for instance, despite the utmost care of which i was capable while studying up for the 'coral island,' i fell into a blunder through ignorance in regard to a familiar fruit. i was under the impression that cocoanuts grew on their trees in the same form as that in which they are usually presented to us in grocers' windows--namely, about the size of a large fist, with three spots at one end. learning from trustworthy books that at a certain stage of development the nut contains a delicious beverage like lemonade, i sent one of my heroes up a tree for a nut, through the shell of which he bored a hole with a penknife. it was not till long after the story was published that my own brother--who had voyaged in southern seas--wrote to draw my attention to the fact that the cocoanut is nearly as large as a man's head, and its outer husk is over an inch thick, so that no ordinary penknife could bore to its interior! of course i should have known this, and, perhaps, should be ashamed of my ignorance, but, somehow i'm not! i admit that this was a slip, but such, and other slips, hardly justify the remark that some people have not hesitated to make--namely, that i have a tendency to draw the long bow. i feel almost sensitive on this point, for i have always laboured to be true to nature and to fact even in my wildest flights of fancy. this reminds me of the remark made to myself once by a lady in reference to this same 'coral island.' 'there is one thing, mr. ballantyne,' she said, 'which i really find it hard to believe. you make one of your three boys dive into a clear pool, go to the bottom, and then, turning on his back, look up and wink and laugh at the other two.' 'no, no, not "_laugh_,"' said i, remonstratively. 'well, then, you make him smile.' 'ah! that is true, but there is a vast difference between laughing and smiling under water. but is it not singular that you should doubt the only incident in the story which i personally verify? i happened to be in lodgings at the seaside while writing that story, and, after penning the passage you refer to, i went down to the shore, pulled off my clothes, dived to the bottom, turned on my back, and, looking up, i smiled and winked.' the lady laughed, but i have never been quite sure, from the tone of that laugh, whether it was a laugh of conviction or of unbelief. it is not improbable that my fair friend's mental constitution may have been somewhat similar to that of the old woman who declined to believe her sailor-grandson when he told her he had seen flying-fish, but at once recognised his veracity when he said he had seen the remains of pharaoh's chariot wheels on the shores of the red sea. recognising, then, the difficulties of my position, i formed the resolution to visit--when possible--the scenes in which my stories were laid; converse with the people who, under modification, were to form the _dramatis personæ_ of the tales, and, generally, to obtain information in each case, as far as lay in my power, from the fountain-head. [illustration: the study] thus, when about to begin 'the lifeboat,' i went to ramsgate, and, for some time, was hand and glove with jarman, the heroic coxswain of the ramsgate boat, a lion-like as well as a lion-hearted man, who rescued hundreds of lives from the fatal goodwin sands during his career. in like manner, when getting up information for 'the lighthouse,' i obtained permission from the commissioners of northern lights to visit the bell rock lighthouse, where i hobnobbed with the three keepers of that celebrated pillar-in-the-sea for three weeks, and read stevenson's graphic account of the building of the structure in the library, or visitors' room, just under the lantern. i was absolutely a prisoner there during those three weeks, for no boats ever came near us, and it need scarcely be said that ships kept well out of our way. by good fortune there came on a pretty stiff gale at the time, and stevenson's thrilling narrative was read to the tune of whistling winds and roaring seas, many of which latter sent the spray right up to the lantern and caused the building, more than once, to quiver to its foundation. in order to do justice to 'fighting the flames' i careered through the streets of london on fire-engines, clad in a pea-jacket and a black leather helmet of the salvage corps. this to enable me to pass the cordon of police without question--though not without recognition, as was made apparent to me on one occasion at a fire by a fireman whispering confidentially, 'i know what _you_ are, sir, you're a hamitoor!' 'right you are,' said i, and moved away in order to change the subject. it was a glorious experience, by the way, this galloping on fire-engines through the crowded streets. it had in it much of the excitement of the chase--possibly that of war--with the noble end in view of saving instead of destroying life! such tearing along at headlong speed; such wild roaring of the firemen to clear the way; such frantic dashing aside of cabs, carts, 'buses, and pedestrians; such reckless courage on the part of the men, and volcanic spoutings on the part of the fires! but i must not linger. the memory of it is too enticing. 'deep down' took me to cornwall, where, over two hundred fathoms beneath the green turf, and more than half a mile out under the bed of the sea, i saw the sturdy miners at work winning copper and tin from the solid rock, and acquired some knowledge of their life, sufferings, and toils. [illustration: mr. r. m. ballantyne] in the land of the vikings i shot ptarmigan, caught salmon, and gathered material for 'erling the bold.' a winter in algiers made me familiar with the 'pirate city.' i enjoyed a fortnight with the hearty inhabitants of the gull lightship off the goodwin sands; and went to the cape of good hope and up into the interior of the colony, to spy out the land and hold intercourse with 'the settler and the savage'--although i am bound to confess that, with regard to the latter, i talked to him only with mine eyes. i also went afloat for a short time with the fishermen of the north sea in order to be able to do justice to 'the young trawler.' to arrive still closer at the truth, and to avoid errors, i have always endeavoured to submit my proof sheets, when possible, to experts and men who knew the subjects well. thus, captain shaw, late chief of the london fire brigade, kindly read the proofs of 'fighting the flames,' and prevented my getting off the rails in matters of detail, and sir arthur blackwood, financial secretary to the general post office, obligingly did me the same favour in regard to 'post haste.' one other word in conclusion. always, while writing--whatever might be the subject of my story--i have been influenced by an undercurrent of effort and desire to direct the minds and affections of my readers towards the higher life. '_the premier and the painter_' by i. zangwill as it is scarcely two years since my name (which, i hear, is a _nom de plume_) appeared in print on the cover of a book, i may be suspected of professional humour when i say i do not really know which was my first book. yet such is the fact. my literary career has been so queer that i find it not easy to write my autobibliography. 'what is a pound?' asked sir robert peel in an interrogative mood futile as pilate's. 'what is a book?' i ask, and the dictionary answers with its usual dogmatic air, 'a collection of sheets of paper, or similar material, blank, written, or printed, bound together.' at this rate my first book would be that romance of school life in two volumes, which, written in a couple of exercise books, circulated gratuitously in the schoolroom, and pleased our youthful imaginations with teacher-baiting tricks we had not the pluck to carry out in the actual. i shall always remember this story because, after making the tour of the class, it was returned to me with thanks and a new first page from which all my graces of style had evaporated. indignant inquiry discovered the criminal--he admitted he had lost the page, and had rewritten it from memory. he pleaded that it was better written (which in one sense was true), and that none of the facts had been omitted. this ill-treated tale was 'published' when i was ten, but an old schoolfellow recently wrote to me reminding me of an earlier novel written in an old account-book. of this i have no recollection, but, as he says he wrote it day by day at my dictation, i suppose he ought to know. i am glad to find i had so early achieved the distinction of keeping an amanuensis. the dignity of print i achieved not much later, contributing verses and virtuous essays to various juvenile organs. but it was not till i was eighteen that i achieved a printed first book. the story of this first book is peculiar; and, to tell it in approved story form, i must request the reader to come back two years with me. [illustration: looking for toole] one fine day, when i was sixteen, i was wandering about the ramsgate sands looking for toole. i did not really expect to see him, and i had no reason to believe he was in ramsgate, but i thought if providence were kind to him it might throw him in my way. i wanted to do him a good turn. i had written a three-act farcical comedy at the request of an amateur dramatic club. i had written out all the parts, and i think there were rehearsals. but the play was never produced. in the light of after knowledge i suspect some of those actors must have been of quite professional calibre. you understand, therefore, why my thoughts turned to toole. but i could not find toole. instead, i found on the sands a page of a paper called _society_. it is still running merrily at a penny, but at that time it had also a saturday edition at threepence. on this page was a great prize-competition scheme, as well as details of a regular weekly competition. the competitions in those days were always literary and intellectual, but then popular education had not made such strides as to-day. [illustration: drawing with signature below: i. zangwill] i sat down on the spot, and wrote something which took a prize in the weekly competition. this emboldened me to enter for the great stakes. [illustration: i sat down and wrote something] there were various events. i resolved to enter for two. one was a short novel, and the other a comedietta. the ' _l._ humorous story' competition i did not go in for; but when the last day of sending in mss. for that had passed, i reproached myself with not having despatched one of my manuscripts. modesty had prevented me sending in old work, as i felt assured it would stand no chance, but when it was too late i was annoyed with myself for having thrown away a possibility. after all i could have lost nothing. then i discovered that i had mistaken the last date, and that there was still a day. in the joyful reaction i selected a story called 'professor grimmer,' and sent it in. judge of my amazement when this got the prize ( _l._), and was published in serial form running through three numbers of _society_. last year, at a press dinner, i found myself next to mr. arthur goddard, who told me he had acted as competition editor, and that quite a number of now well-known people had taken part in these admirable competitions. my painfully laboured novel only got honourable mention, and my comedietta was lost in the post. but i was now at the height of literary fame, and success stimulated me to fresh work. i still marvel when i think of the amount of rubbish i turned out in my seventeenth and eighteenth years, in the scanty leisure of a harassed pupil-teacher at an elementary school, working hard in the evenings for a degree at the london university to boot. there was a fellow pupil-teacher (let us call him y.) who believed in me, and who had a little money with which to back his belief. i was for starting a comic paper. the name was to be _grimaldi_, and i was to write it all every week. 'but don't you think your invention would give way ultimately?' asked y. it was the only time he ever doubted me. 'by that time i shall be able to afford a staff,' i replied triumphantly. [illustration: arthur goddard] y. was convinced. but before the comic paper was born, y. had another happy thought. he suggested that if i wrote a jewish story, we might make enough to finance the comic paper. i was quite willing. if he had suggested an epic, i should have written it. so i wrote the story in four evenings (i always write in spurts), and within ten days from the inception of the idea the booklet was on sale in a coverless pamphlet form. the printing cost ten pounds. i paid five (the five i had won), y. paid five, and we divided the profits. he has since not become a publisher. [illustration: it was hawked about the streets] my first book (price one penny nett) went well. it was loudly denounced by those it described, and widely bought by them; it was hawked about the streets. one little shop in whitechapel sold copies. it was even on smith's bookstalls. there was great curiosity among jews to know the name of the writer. owing to my anonymity, i was enabled to see those enjoying its perusal, who were afterwards to explain to me their horror and disgust at its illiteracy and vulgarity. by vulgarity vulgar jews mean the reproduction of the hebrew words with which the poor and the old-fashioned interlard their conversation. it is as if english-speaking scotchmen and irishmen should object to 'dialect' novels reproducing the idiom of their 'uncultured' countrymen. i do not possess a copy of my first book, but somehow or other i discovered the ms. when writing 'children of the ghetto.' the description of market-day in jewry was transferred bodily from the ms. of my first book, and is now generally admired. what the profits were i never knew, for they were invested in the second of our publications. still jealously keeping the authorship secret, we published a long comic ballad which i had written on the model of 'bab.' with this we determined to launch out in style, and so we had gorgeous advertisement posters printed in three colours, which were to be stuck about london to beautify that great dreary city. y. saw the black-hair of fortune almost within our grasp. one morning our headmaster walked into my room with a portentously solemn air. i felt instinctively that the murder was out. but he only said, 'where is y.?' though the mere coupling of our names was ominous, for our publishing partnership was unknown. i replied, 'how should i know? in his room, i suppose.' he gave me a peculiar sceptical glance. [illustration: a policeman told him to get down] 'when did you last see y.?' he said. 'yesterday afternoon,' i replied wonderingly. 'and you don't know where he is now?' 'haven't an idea--isn't he in school?' 'no,' he replied in low, awful tones. 'where then?' i murmured. '_in prison!_' 'in prison!' i gasped. 'in prison; i have just been to help bail him out.' it transpired that y. had suddenly been taken with a further happy thought. contemplation of those gorgeous tricoloured posters had turned his brain, and, armed with an amateur paste-pot and a ladder, he had sallied forth at midnight to stick them about the silent streets, so as to cut down the publishing expenses. a policeman, observing him at work, had told him to get down, and y., being legal-minded, had argued it out with the policeman _de haut en bas_ from the top of his ladder. the outraged majesty of the law thereupon haled y. off to the cells. naturally the cat was now out of the bag, and the fat in the fire. to explain away the poster was beyond the ingenuity of even a professed fiction-monger. straightway the committee of the school was summoned in hot haste, and held debate upon the scandal of a pupil-teacher being guilty of originality. and one dread afternoon, when all nature seemed to hold its breath, i was called down to interview a member of the committee. in his hand were copies of the obnoxious publications. i approached the great person with beating heart. he had been kind to me in the past, singling me out, on account of some scholastic successes, for an annual vacation at the seaside. it has only just struck me, after all these years, that, if he had not done so, i should not have found the page of _society_, and so not have perpetrated the deplorable compositions. in the course of a bad quarter of an hour, he told me that the ballad was tolerable, though not to be endured; he admitted the metre was perfect, and there wasn't a single false rhyme. but the prose novelette was disgusting. 'it is such stuff,' said he, 'as little boys scribble upon walls.' i said i could not see anything objectionable in it. 'come now, confess you are ashamed of it,' he urged. 'you only wrote it to make money.' 'if you mean that i deliberately wrote low stuff to make money,' i replied calmly, 'it is untrue. there is nothing i am ashamed of. what you object to is simply realism.' i pointed out that bret harte had been as realistic; but they did not understand literature on that committee. 'confess you are ashamed of yourself,' he reiterated, 'and we will look over it.' 'i am not,' i persisted, though i foresaw only too clearly that my summer's vacation was doomed if i told the truth. 'what is the use of saying i am?' the headmaster uplifted his hands in horror. 'how, after all your kindness to him, he can contradict you--!' he cried. [illustration: such stuff as little boys scribble upon walls] 'when i come to be your age,' i conceded to the member of the committee, 'it is possible i may look back on it with shame. at present i feel none.' in the end i was given the alternative of expulsion or of publishing nothing which had not passed the censorship of the committee. after considerable hesitation i chose the latter. this was a blessing in disguise; for, as i have never been able to endure the slightest arbitrary interference with my work, i simply abstained from publishing. thus, although i still wrote--mainly sentimental verses--my nocturnal studies were less interrupted. not till i had graduated, and was of age, did i return to my inky vomit. then came my next first book--a real book at last. in this also i had the collaboration of a fellow-teacher, louis cowen by name. this time my colleague was part-author. it was only gradually that i had been admitted to the privilege of communion with him, for he was my senior by five or six years, and a man of brilliant parts who had already won his spurs in journalism, and who enjoyed deservedly the reputation of an admirable crichton. what drew me to him was his mordant wit (to-day, alas! wasted on anonymous journalism! if he would only reconsider his indetermination, the reading public would be the richer!) together we planned plays, novels, treatises on political economy, and contributions to philosophy. those were the days of dreams. [illustration: life in bethnal green] one afternoon he came to me with quivering sides, and told me that an idea for a little shilling book had occurred to him. it was that a radical prime minister and a conservative working man should change into each other by supernatural means, and the working man be confronted with the problem of governing, while the prime minister should be as comically out of place in the east end environment. he thought it would make a funny 'arabian nights' sort of burlesque. and so it would have done; but, unfortunately, i saw subtler possibilities of political satire in it, nothing less than a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole system of party government. i insisted the story must be real, not supernatural, the prime minister must be a tory, weary of office, and it must be an ultra-radical atheistic artisan bearing a marvellous resemblance to him who directs (and with complete success) the conservative administration. to add to the mischief, owing to my collaborator's evenings being largely taken up by other work, seven-eighths of the book came to be written by me, though the leading ideas were, of course, threshed out and the whole revised in common, and thus it became a vent-hole for all the ferment of a youth of twenty-one, whose literary faculty had furthermore been pent up for years by the potential censorship of a committee. the book, instead of being a shilling skit, grew to a ten-and-sixpenny (for that was the unfortunate price of publication) political treatise of over sixty long chapters and closely printed pages. i drew all the characters as seriously and complexly as if the fundamental conception were a matter of history; the outgoing premier became an elaborate study of a nineteenth-century hamlet; the bethnal green life amid which he came to live was presented with photographic fulness and my old trick of realism; the governmental manoeuvres were described with infinite detail; numerous real personages were introduced under nominal disguises; and subsequent history was curiously anticipated in some of the female franchise and home rule episodes. worst of all, so super-subtle was the satire, that it was never actually stated straight out that the premier had changed places with the radical working man, so that the door might be left open for satirically suggested alternative explanations of the metamorphosis in their characters; and as, moreover, the two men re-assumed their original _rôles_ for one night only with infinitely complex effects, many readers, otherwise unimpeachable, reached the end without any suspicion of the actual plot--and yet (on their own confession) enjoyed the book! [illustration: 'we sent it round'] in contrast to all this elephantine waggery the half-dozen chapters near the commencement, in which my collaborator sketched the first adventures of the radical working man in downing street, were light and sparkling, and i feel sure the shilling skit he originally meditated would have been a great success. we christened the book. 'the premier and the painter,' ourselves j. freeman bell, had it type-written, and sent it round to the publishers in two enormous quarto volumes. i had been working at it for more than a year every evening after the hellish torture of the day's teaching, and all day every holiday, but now i had a good rest while it was playing its boomerang prank of returning to me once a month. the only gleam of hope came from bentleys, who wrote to say that they could not make up their minds to reject it; but they prevailed upon themselves to part with it at last, though not without asking to see mr. bell's next book. at last it was accepted by spencer blackett, and, though it had been refused by all the best houses, it failed. failed in a material sense, that is; for there was plenty of praise in the papers, though at too long intervals to do us any good. the _athenæum_ has never spoken so well of anything i have done since. the late james runciman (i learnt after his death that it was he) raved about it in various uninfluential organs. it even called forth a leader in the _family herald_(!), and there are odd people here and there, who know the secret of j. freeman bell, who declare that i. zangwill will never do anything so good. there was a cheaper edition, but it did not sell much then, though now it is in its third edition, issued uniformly with my other books by heinemann, and absolutely unrevised. but not only did 'the premier and the painter fail with the great public at first, it did not even help either of us one step up the ladder; never got us a letter of encouragement nor a stroke of work. i had to begin journalism at the very bottom and entirely unassisted, narrowly escaping canvassing for advertisements, for i had by this time thrown up my scholastic position, and had gone forth into the world penniless and without even a 'character,' branded as an atheist (because i did not worship the lord who presided over our committee) and a revolutionary (because i refused to break the law of the land). i should stop here if i were certain i had written the required article. but as 'the premier and the painter' was not entirely _my_ first book, i may perhaps be expected to say something of my third first book, and the first to which i put my name--'the bachelors' club.' years of literary apathy succeeded the failure of 'the premier and the painter.' all i did was to publish a few serious poems (which, i hope, will survive _time_), a couple of pseudonymous stories signed 'the baroness von s.' (!), and a long philosophical essay upon religion, and to lend a hand in the writing of a few playlets. becoming convinced of the irresponsible mendacity of the dramatic profession, i gave up the stage, too, vowing never to write except on commission (i kept my vow and yet was played ultimately), and sank entirely into the slough of journalism (glad enough to get there), _inter alia_ editing a comic paper (not _grimaldi_, but _ariel_) with a heavy heart. at last the long apathy wore off, and i resolved to cultivate literature again in my scraps of time. it is a mere accident that i wrote a pair of 'funny' books, or put serious criticism of contemporary manners into a shape not understood in a country where only the dull are profound and only the ponderous are earnest. 'the bachelors' club' was the result of a whimsical remark made by my dear friend, eder of bartholomew's, with whom i was then sharing rooms in bernard street, and who helped me greatly with it, and its publication was equally accidental. one spring day, in the year of grace , having lived unsuccessfully for a score of years and seven upon this absurd planet, i crossed fleet street and stepped into what is called 'success.' it was like this. mr. j. t. grein, now of the independent theatre, meditated a little monthly called _the playgoers' review_, and he asked me to do an article for the first number, on the strength of some speeches i had made at the playgoers' club. [illustration: mr. zangwill at work] [illustration: editing a comic paper] when i got the proof it was marked, 'please return at once to bouverie street.' my office boy being out, and bouverie street being only a few steps away, i took it over myself, and found myself, somewhat to my surprise, in the office of henry & co., publishers, and in the presence of mr. j. hannaford bennett, an active partner in the firm. he greeted me by name, also to my surprise, and told me he had heard me speak at the playgoers' club. a little conversation ensued, and he mentioned that his firm was going to bring out a library of wit and humour. i told him i had begun a book, avowedly humorous, and had written two chapters of it, and he straightway came over to my office, heard me read them, and immediately secured the book. (the then editor ultimately refused to have it in the 'whitefriars' library of wit and humour,' and so it was brought out separately.) within three months, working in odds and ends of time, i finished it, correcting the proofs of the first chapters while i was writing the last; indeed, ever since the day i read those two chapters to mr. hannaford bennett i have never written a line anywhere that has not been purchased before it was written. for, to my undying astonishment, two average editions of my real 'first book' were disposed of on the day of publication, to say nothing of the sale in new york. unless i had acquired a reputation of which i was totally unconscious, it must have been the title that 'fetched' the trade. or, perhaps, it was the illustrations by my friend, mr. george hutchinson, whom i am proud to have discovered as a cartoonist for _ariel_. so here the story comes to a nice sensational climax. re-reading it, i feel dimly that there ought to be a moral in it somewhere for the benefit of struggling fellow-scribblers. but the best i can find is this: that if you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp of the log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less widespread than a prizefighter's, and a pecuniary position which you might with far less trouble have been born to. [illustration: a fame less widespread than a prizefighter's] [illustration: drawing signed e. m. jessop with signature below: morley roberts] '_the western avernus_' by morley roberts certainly no one was more surprised than myself when i discovered that i could write decent prose, and even make money out of it, for during many years my youthful aspirations had been to rival rossetti, or get on a level with browning, rather than to make a living out of literature as a profession. but when i did start a book, i went through three years of american experience like fire through flax, and wrote 'the western avernus,' a volume containing ninety-three thousand words, in less than a lunar month. [illustration: before the mast] i had been in australia years before, coming home before the mast as an a.b. in a blackwall liner, but my occasional efforts to turn that experience into form always failed. once or twice, i read some of my prose to friends, who told me that it was worse even than my poetry. such criticism naturally confirmed me in the belief that i must be a poet or nothing, and i soon got into a fair way to become nothing, for my health broke down. at last, finding my choice lay between two kinds of tragedies, i chose the least, and went off to texas. on february , , i was working in a government office as a writer; on march , i was sheep-herding in scurry county, north-west texas, in the south of the panhandle. this experience was the opening of 'the western avernus.' [illustration: i married them all off at the end] but i should never have written the book if it had not been for two friends of mine. one was george gissing, and the other w. h. hudson, the argentine naturalist. when i returned from the west, and yarned to them of starvation and toil and strife in that new world, they urged me to put it down instead of talking it. i suppose they looked on it as good material running to verbal conversational waste, being both writers of many years' standing. now i understand their point of view, and carry a note-book, or an odd piece of paper, to jot down motives that crop up in occasional talk, but then i was ignorant, and astonished at the wild notion of writing anything saleable. however, in desperation, for i had no money, i began to write, and went ahead in the same way that i have so far kept to. i wrote it without notes, without care, without thought, save that each night the past was resurgent and alive before and within me, just as it was when i worked and starved between texas and the great north-west. each sunday i read what i had done to george gissing; at first with terror, but afterwards with more confidence when he nodded approval, and as the end approached i began to believe in it myself. [illustration: an american saw-mill where mr. roberts worked] it is only six years since the book was finished and sent to messrs. smith, elder, & co., but it seems half a century ago, so much has happened since then; and when it was accepted and published and paid for, and actually reviewed favourably, i almost determined to take to literature as a profession. i remembered that when i was a boy of eleven i wrote a romance with twenty people, men and women, in it. i married them all off at the end, being then in the childish mind of the most usual novelist who believes, or pretends to believe, or at any rate by implication teaches, that the interesting part of life finishes then instead of beginning. i recalled the fact that i wrote doggerel verse at the age of thirteen when i was at bedford grammar school, and that an ardent, ignorant conservatism drove me, when i was at owens college, manchester, to lampoon the liberal candidates in rhymes, and paste them up in the big lavatory; and under the influence of these memories i began to think that perhaps scribbling was my natural trade. i had tried some forty different callings, including 'sailorising,' saw-mill work, bullock-driving, tramping, and the selling of books in san francisco, with indifferent financial success, so perhaps my _métier_ was the making of books instead. so i went on trying, and had a very bad time for two years. having written 'the western avernus' in a kind of intuitive, instructive way, it came easy enough to me, but very soon i began to think of the technique of writing, and wrote badly. i had to look back at the best part of that book to be assured i could write at all. for a long time it was a consolation and a distress to me, for i had to find out that knowledge must get into one's fingers before it can be used. only those who know nothing, or who know a great deal very well, can write decently, and the intermediate state is exceedingly painful. both the public and private laudation of my american book made me unhappy then. i thought i had only that one book in me. some of the letters i received from america, and, more particularly, british columbia, were anything but cheerful reading. one man, of whom i had spoken rather freely, said i should be hanged on a cottonwood tree if i ever set foot in the colony again. i do not believe there are any cottonwoods there, but he used a phrase common in american literature. another whilom friend of mine, who had read some favourable criticisms, wrote me to say he was sure messrs. smith & elder had paid for them. he had understood it was always done, and now he knew the truth of it, because the book was so bad. i almost feared to return to british columbia: the critics there might use worse weapons than a sneering paragraph. in england the worst one need fear is an action for criminal libel, or a rough and tumble fight. there it might end in an inquest. i wrote back to my critics that if i ever came out again, i would come armed, and endeavour to reply effectually. for that wild life, far away from the ancient set and hardened bonds of social law which crush a man and make him just like his fellows, or so nearly like that only intimacy can distinguish individual differences, had allowed me to grow in another way, and become more myself; more independent, more like a savage, better able to fight and endure. that is the use of going abroad, and going abroad to places that are not civilised. they allow a man to revert and be himself. it may make his return hard, his endurance of social bonds bitterer, but it may help him to refuse to endure. he may attain to some natural sight. [illustration: defying the universe] not many weeks ago i was talking to a well-known american publisher, and our conversation ran on the trans-oceanic view of europe. he was amused and delighted to come across an englishman who was so americanised in one way as to look on our standing camps and armed kingdoms as citizens of the states do, especially those who live in the west. to the american, europe seems like a small collection of walled yards, each with a crowing fighting-cock defying the universe on the top of his own dunghill, with an occasional scream from the wall. the whole of our international politics gets to look small and petty, and a bitter waste of power. perhaps the american view is right. at any rate, it seemed so when i sat far aloof upon the lofty mountains to the west of the great plains. the isolation from the politics of the moment allowed me to see nature and natural law. and as it was with nations, so it was with men. out yonder, in the west, most of us were brutal at times, and ready to kill, or be killed, but my american-bred acquaintances looked like men, strikingly like men, independent, free, equal to the need of the ensuing day or the call of some sudden hour. it is a liberal education to the law-abiding englishman to see a good specimen of a texan cowboy walk down a western street; for he looks like a law unto himself, calm and greatly assured of the validity of his own enactments. we live in a crowd here, and it takes a rebel to be himself; and in the struggle for freedom he is likely to go under. [illustration: cowboy roberts] while i was gaining the experience that went solid and crystallised into 'the western avernus,' i was discovering much that had never been discovered before, not in a geographical sense--for i have been in few places where men have not been--but in myself. each new task teaches us something new, and something more than the mere way to do it. to drive horses or milk a cow or make bread, or kill a sheep, sets us level with facts and face to face with some reality. we are called on to be real, and not the shadow of others. this is the worth that is in all real workers, whatever they do, under whatever conditions. every truth so learnt strips away ancient falsehood from us; it is real education, not the taught instruction which makes us alike, and thus shams, merely arming us with weapons to fight our fellows in the crowded, unwholesome life of falsely civilised cities. [illustration: the very prairie dogs taught me] and in america there is the sharp contrast between the city life and the life of the mountain and the plain. it is seen more clearly than in england, which is all more or less city. there are no clear stellar interspaces in our life here. but out yonder, a long day's train ride across the high barren cactus plateaus of arizona teaches us as much as a clear and open depth in the sky. for, of a sudden, we run into the very midst of a big town, and shams are made gods for our worship. it is difficult to be oneself when all others refuse to be themselves. this was for me the lesson of the west and the life there. when i wrote this book i did not know it; i wrote almost unconsciously, without taking thought, without weighing words, without conscious knowledge. but i see now what i learnt in a hard and bitter school. for i acknowledge that the experience was at times bitterly painful. it is not pleasant to toil sixteen hours a day; it is not good to starve overmuch; it is not well to feel bitter for long months. and yet it is well and good and pleasant in the end to learn realities and live without lies. it is better to be a truthful animal than a civilised man, as things go. i learnt much from horses and cattle and sheep; the very prairie dogs taught me; the ospreys and the salmon they preyed on expressed truths. they didn't attempt to live on words, or the dust and ashes of dead things. they were themselves and no one else, and were not diseased with theories or a morbid altruism that is based on dependence. this, i think, is the lesson i learnt from my own book. i did not know it when i wrote it. i never thought of writing it; i never meant to write anything; i only went to america because england and the life of london made me ill. if i could have lived my own life here i would have stayed, but the crushing combination of social forces drove me out. for fear of cutting my own throat i left, and took my chance with natural forces. to fight with nature makes men, to fight with society makes devils, or criminals, or martyrs, and sometimes a man may be all three. i preferred to revert to mere natural conditions for a time. to lead such a life for a long time is to give up creeds, and to go to the universal storehouse whence all creeds come. it is giving up dogmas and becoming religious. in true opposition to instructive nature, we find our own natural religion, which cannot be wholly like any other. so a life of this kind does not make men good, in the common sense of the word. but it makes a man good for something. it may make him an ethical outcast, as facts faced always will. he prefers induction to deduction, especially the sanctioned unverified deductions of social order. for nature affords the only verification for the logical process of deduction. 'we fear nature too much, to say the least.' for most of us hold to other men's theories instead of making our own. when mill said, 'solitude, in the sense of being frequently alone, is necessary to the formation of any depth of character,' he spoke almost absolute truth. but here we can never be alone; the very air is full of the dead breath of others. i learnt more in a four days' walk over the california coast range, living on parched indian corn, than i could have done in a lifetime of the solitude of a lonely house. the selkirks and the rocky mountains are books of ancient learning: the long plains of grey grass, the burnt plateaus of the hot south, speak eternal truths to all who listen. they need not listen, for there men do not learn by the ear. they breathe the knowledge in. [illustration: the california coast range] in speaking as i have done about america i do not mean to praise it as a state or a society. in that respect it is perhaps worse than our own, more diseased, more under the heel of the money fiend, more recklessly and brutally acquisitive. but there are parts of it still more or less free; nature reigns still over vast tracts in the west. as a democracy it is so far a failure, as democracies must be organised on a plutocratic basis; but it at any rate allows a man to think himself a man. walt whitman is the big expression of that thought, but his fervent belief in america was really but deep trust in man himself, in man's power of revolt, in his ultimate recognition of the beauty of the truth. the power of america to teach lies in the fact that a great part of her fertile and barren soil has not yet been taught, not yet cultivated for the bread which of itself can feed no man wholly. [illustration: by the camp fire] perhaps among the few who have read 'the western avernus' (for it was not a financial success), fewer still have seen what i think i myself see in it now. but it has taken me six years to understand it, six years to know how i came to write it, and what it meant. that is the way in life: we do not learn at once what we are taught, we do not always understand all we say even when speaking earnestly. there is often one aspect of a book that the writer himself can learn from, and that is not always the technical part of it. all sayings may have an esoteric meaning. in those hard days by the camp fire, on the trail, on the prairie with sheep and cattle, i did not understand that they called up in me the ancient underlying experience of the race, and, like a deep plough, brought to the surface the lowest soil which should hereafter be a little fertile. when i starved, i thought not of our far ancestors who had suffered too; as i watched the sheep or the sharp-horned texas steers, i could not reflect upon our pastoral forefathers; as i climbed with bleeding feet the steep slopes of the western hills, my thoughts were set in a narrow circle of dark misery. i could not think of those who had striven, like me, in distant ages. but the songs of the camp fire, and the leap of the flame, and the crackling wood, and the lofty snow-clad hills, and the long dim plains, the wild beast, and the venomous serpents, and the need of food, brought me back to nature, the nature that had created those who were the fathers of us all, and, bringing me back, they taught me, as they strive to teach all, that the real and deeper life is everywhere, even in a city, if we will but look for it with unsealed eyes and minds set free from the tedious trivialities of this debauched modern life. [illustration: (_from a photograph by thos. fall, baker street_) signed: yours very truly, d. christie murray] '_a life's atonement_' by david christie murray [illustration: i handed him two chapters] [illustration: sent all my people into a coal-mine] i began my first book more years ago than i care to count, and, naturally enough, it took poetic form, if not poetic substance. in its original shape it was called 'marsh hall,' and ran into four cantos. on the eve of my twenty-first birthday i sent the ms. to messrs. macmillan, who, very wisely, as i have since come to believe, counselled me not to publish it. i say this in full sincerity, though i remember some of the youthful bombast not altogether without affection. here and there i can recall a passage which still seems respectable. i wrote reams of verse in those days, but when i came into the rough and tumble of journalistic life i was too occupied to court the muses any longer, and found myself condemned to a life of prose. i was acting as special correspondent for the _birmingham morning news_ in the year ' --i think it was ' , though it might have been a year later--and at that time mr. edmund yates was lecturing in america, and a novel of his, the last he ever wrote, was running through our columns. whether the genial 'atlas,' who at that time had not taken the burden of _the world_ upon his shoulders, found his associations too numerous and heavy, i can only guess, but he closed the story with an unexpected suddenness, and the editor, who had supposed himself to have a month or two in hand in which to make arrangements for his next serial, was confronted with the _finis_ of mr. yates's work, and was compelled to start a new novel at a week's notice. in this extremity he turned to me. 'i think, young 'un,' he said, 'that you ought to be able to write a novel.' i shared his faith, and had, indeed, already begun a story which i had christened 'grace forbeach.' i handed him two chapters, which he read at once, and, in high feather, sent to the printer. it never bade fair to be a mighty work, but at least it fulfilled the meaning of the original edition of pope's famous line, for it was certainly 'all without a plan.' i had appropriate scenery in my mind, no end of typical people to draw, and one or two moving actualities to work from. but i had forgotten the plot. to attempt a novel without a definite scheme of some sort is very like trying to make a christmas pudding without a cloth. ruth pinch was uncertain as to whether her first venture at a pudding might not turn out a soup. my novelistic effort, i am sorry to confess, had no cohesion in it. its parts got loose in the cooking, and i have reason to think that most people who tried it found the dish repellent. the cashier assured me that i had sent down the circulation of the saturday issue by sixteen thousand. i had excellent reasons for disbelieving this circumstantial statement in the fact that the saturday issue had never reached that number, but i have no doubt i did a deal of damage. there had been an idea in 'marsh hall,' and what with interpolated ballads and poetic excursions and alarums of all sorts, i had found in it matter enough to fill out my four cantos. i set out with the intent to work that same idea through the pages of 'grace forbeach,' but it was too scanty for the uses of a three-volume novel, at least in the hands of a tiro. i know one or two accomplished gentlemen who could make it serve the purpose admirably, and, perhaps, i myself might do something with it at a pinch at this time of day. anyhow, as it was, the cloth was too small to hold the pudding, and, in the process of cooking, i was driven to the most desperate expedients. to drop the simile and to come to the plain facts of the case, i sent all my wicked and superfluous people into a coal-mine, and there put an end to them by an inrush of water. i forget what became of the hero, but i know that some of the most promising characters dropped out of that story, and were no more heard of. the sub-editor used occasionally, for my encouragement, to show me letters he received, denouncing the work, and asking wrathfully when it would end. whilst i am about 'grace forbeach,' it may be worth while to tell the story of the champion printer's error of my experience. i wrote at the close of the story: 'are there no troubles now?' the lover asks. 'not one, dear frank. not one.' and then, in brackets, thus [] i set the words: [white line.] this was a technical instruction to the printer, and meant that one line of space should be left clear. the genius who had the copy in hand put the lover's speech in type correctly, and then, setting it out as if it were a line of verse, he gave me-- 'not one, dear frank, not one white line!' * * * * * it was a custom in the printing office to suspend a leather medal by a leather bootlace round the neck of the man who had achieved the prize _bêtise_ of the year. it was somewhere about midsummer at this time, but it was instantly and unanimously resolved that nothing better than this would or could be done by anybody. the compositors performed what they called a 'jerry' in the blunderer's honour, and invested him, after an animated fight, with the medal. 'grace forbeach' has been dead and buried for very nearly a score of years. it never saw book form, and i was never anxious that it should do so, but as _it_ had grown out of 'marsh hall,' so my first book grew out of it, and, oddly enough, not only my first, but my second and my third. 'joseph's coat,' which made my fortune, and gave me such literary standing as i have, was built on one episode of that abortive story, and 'val strange' was constructed and written to lead up to the episode of the attempted suicide on welbeck head, which had formed the culminating point in the poem. [illustration: they invested him with the medal] when i got to london i determined to try my hand anew, and, having learned by failure something more than success could ever have taught me, i built up my scheme before i started on my book. having come to utter grief for want of a scheme to work on, i ran, in my eagerness to avoid that fault, into the opposite extreme, and built an iron-bound plot, which afterwards cost me very many weeks of unnecessary and unvalued labour. i am quite sure that no reader of 'a life's atonement' ever guessed that the author took one tithe, or even one-twentieth part, of the trouble it actually cost to weave the two strands of its narrative together. i divided my story into thirty-six chapters. twelve of these were autobiographical, in the sense that they were supposed to be written by the hero in person. the remaining twenty-four were historical, purporting to be written, that is, by an impersonal author. the autobiographical portions necessarily began in the childhood of the narrator, and between them and the 'history' there was a considerable gulf of time. little by little this gulf had to be bridged over until the action in both portions of the story became synchronous. i really do not suppose that the most pitiless critic ever felt it worth his while to question the accuracy of my dates, and i dare say that all the trouble i took was quite useless, but i fixed in my own mind the actual years over which the story extended, and spent scores of hours in the consultation of old almanacs. i have never verified the work since it was done, but i believe that in this one respect, at least, it is beyond cavil. the two central figures of the book were lifted straight from the story of 'marsh hall,' and 'grace forbeach' gave her quota to the narrative. [illustration: consulting old almanacs] [illustration: she drew from it a brown-paper parcel] [illustration: if there had been no 'david copperfield'] i had completed the first volume when i received a commission to go out as special correspondent to the russo-turkish war. i left the ms. behind me, and for many months the scheme was banished from my mind. i went through those cities of the dead, kesanlik, calofar, carlova, and sopot. i watched the long-drawn artillery duel at the shipka pass, made the dreary month-long march in the rainy season from orkhanié to plevna, with the army of reinforcement, under chefket pasha and chakir pasha, lived in the besieged town until osman drove away all foreign visitors, and sent out his wounded to sow the whole melancholy road with corpses. i put up on the heights of tashkesen, and saw the stubborn defence of mehemet ali, and there was pounced upon by the turkish authorities for a too faithful dealing with the story of the horrors of the war, and was deported to constantinople. i had originally gone out for an american journal at the instance of a gentleman who exceeded his instructions in despatching me, and i was left high and dry in the turkish capital without a penny and without a friend. but work of the kind i could do was wanted, and i was on the spot. i slid into an engagement with the _scotsman_, and then into another with the _times_. the late mr. macdonald, who was killed by the pigott forgeries, was then manager of the leading journal, and offered me fresh work. i waited for it, and a year of wild adventure in the face of war had given me such a taste for that sort of existence that i let 'a life's atonement' slide, and had no thought of taking it up again. a misunderstanding with the _times_ authorities--happily cleared up years after--left me in the cold, and i was bound to do something for a living. the first volume of 'a life's atonement' had been written in the intervals of labour in the gallery of the house of commons, and such work as an active hack journalist can find among the magazines and the weekly society papers. i had been away a whole year, and everywhere my place was filled. it was obviously no use to a man in want of ready money to undertake the completion of a three-volume novel of which only one volume was written, and so i betook myself to the writing of short stories. the very first of these was blessed by a lucky accident. mr. george augustus sala had begun to write for _the gentleman's magazine_ a story called, if i remember rightly, 'dr. cupid.' sala was suddenly summoned by the proprietors of the _daily telegraph_ to undertake one of his innumerable journeys, and the copy of the second instalment of his story reached the editor too late for publication. just when the publishers of the _gentleman's_ were at a loss for suitable copy, my ms. of 'an old meerschaum' reached them, and, to my delighted surprise, i received proofs almost by return of post. the story appeared, with an illustration by arthur hopkins, and, about a week later, there came to me, through messrs. chatto & windus, a letter from robert chambers: 'sir,--i have read, with unusual pleasure and interest, in this month's _gentleman's magazine_, a story from your pen entitled "an old meerschaum." if you have a novel on hand, or in preparation, i should be glad to see it. in the meantime, a short story, not much longer than "an old meerschaum," would be gladly considered by--yours very truly, robert chambers. p.s.--we publish no authors' names, but we pay handsomely.' this letter brought back to mind at once the neglected 'life's atonement,' but i was uncertain as to the whereabouts of the ms. i searched everywhere amongst my own belongings in vain, but it suddenly occurred to me that i had left it in charge of a passing acquaintance of mine, who had taken up the unexpired lease of my chambers in gray's inn at the time of my departure for the seat of war. i jumped into a cab, and drove off in search of my property. the shabby old laundress who had made my bed and served my breakfast was pottering about the rooms. she remembered me perfectly well, of course, but could not remember that i had left anything behind me when i went away. i talked of manuscript, and she recalled doubtfully a quantity of waste paper, of the final destination of which she knew nothing. i began to think it extremely improbable that i should ever recover a line of the missing novel, when she opened a cupboard and drew from it a brown-paper parcel, and, opening it, displayed to me the ms. of which i was in search. i took it home and read it through with infinite misgiving. the enthusiasm with which i had begun the work had long since had time to pall, and the whole thing looked weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. for one thing, i had adopted the abominable expedient of writing in the present tense so far as the autobiographical portion of the work was concerned, and, in the interval which had gone by, my taste had, i suppose, undergone an unconscious correction. it was a dull business, but, despondent as i was, i found the heart to rewrite those chapters. charles reade describes the task of writing out one's work a second time as 'nauseous,' and i confess that i am with him with all my heart. it is a misery which i have never since, in all my work, imposed upon myself. at that time i counted amongst my friends an eminent novelist, on whose critical faculty and honesty i knew i could place the most absolute reliance. i submitted my revised first volume to his judgment, and was surprised to learn that he thought highly of it. his judgment gave me new courage, and i sent the copy in to chambers. after a delay of a week or two, i received a letter which gave me, i think, a keener delight than has ever touched me at the receipt of any other communication. 'if,' wrote robert chambers,'the rest is as good as the first volume, i shall accept the book with pleasure. our price for the serial use will be _l._, of which we will pay _l._ on receipt of completed ms.; the remaining _l._ will be paid on the publication of the first monthly number.' i had been out of harness for so long a time, and had been, by desultory work, able to earn so little, that this letter seemed to open a sort of eldorado to my gaze. it was not that alone which made it so agreeable to receive. it opened the way to an honourable ambition which i had long nourished, and i slaved away at the remaining two volumes with an enthusiasm which i have never been able to revive. there are two or three people still extant who know in part the privations i endured whilst the book was being finished. i set everything else on one side for it, incautiously enough, and for two months i did not earn a penny by other means. the most trying accident of all the time was the tobacco famine which set in towards the close of the third volume, but, in spite of all obstacles, the book was finished. i worked all night at the final chapter, and wrote 'finis' somewhere about five o'clock on a summer morning. i shall never forget the solemn exultation with which i laid down my pen and looked from the window of the little room in which i had been working over the golden splendour of the gorse-covered common of ditton marsh. all my original enthusiasm had revived, and in the course of my lonely labours had grown to a white heat. i solemnly believed at that moment that i had written a great book. i suppose i may make that confession now without proclaiming myself a fool. i really and seriously believed that the work i had just finished was original in conception, style, and character. no reviewer ever taunted me with the fact, but the truth is that 'a life's atonement' is a very curious instance of unconscious plagiarism. it is quite evident to my mind now that if there had been no 'david copperfield' there would have been no 'life's atonement.' my gascoigne is steerforth, my john campbell is david, john's aunt is miss betsy trotwood, sally troman is peggotty. the very separation of the friends, though brought about by a different cause, is a reminiscence. i was utterly unconscious of these facts, and, remembering how devotedly and honestly i worked, how resolute i was to put my best of observation and invention into the story, i have ever since felt chary of entertaining a charge of plagiarism against anybody. there are, of course, flagrant and obvious cases, but i believe that in nine instances out of ten the supposed criminal has worked as i did, having so completely absorbed and digested in childhood the work of an admired master that he has come to feel that work as an actual portion of himself. 'a life's atonement' ran its course through _chambers's journal_ in due time, and was received with favour. messrs. griffith & farran undertook its publication in book form, but one or two accidental circumstances forbade it to prosper in their hands. to begin with, the firm at that time had only newly decided on publishing novels at all, and a work under such a title, and issued by such a house, was naturally supposed to have a theological tendency. then again, in the very week in which my book saw the light, 'lothair' appeared, and for the time being swamped everything. all the world read 'lothair,' all the world talked about it, and all the newspapers and reviews dealt with it, to the exclusion of the products of the smaller fry. later on, 'a life's atonement' was handsomely reviewed, and was indeed, as i am disposed to think, praised a good deal beyond its merits. but it lay a dead weight on the hands of its original publishers, until messrs. chatto & windus expressed a wish to incorporate it in their piccadilly series. the negotiations between the two houses were easily completed, the stock was transferred from one establishment to the other, the volumes were stripped of their old binding and dressed anew, and with this novel impetus the story reached a second edition in three-volume form. it brought me almost immediately two commissions, and by the time that they were completed i had grown into a professional novel-writer. [illustration: the stock was transferred] [illustration: some novels] '_a romance of two worlds_' by marie corelli it is an unromantic thing for an author to have had no literary vicissitudes. one cannot expect to be considered interesting, unless one has come up to london with the proverbial solitary 'shilling,' and gone about hungry and footsore, begging from one hard-hearted publisher's house to another with one's perpetually rejected manuscript under one's arm. one ought to have consumed the 'midnight oil;' to have 'coined one's heart's blood' (to borrow the tragic expression of a contemporary gentleman-novelist); to have sacrificed one's self-respect by metaphorically crawling on all-fours to the critical faculty; and to have become æsthetically cadaverous and blear-eyed through the action of inspired dyspepsia. now, i am obliged to confess that i have done none of these things, which, to quote the prayer-book, i ought to have done. i have had no difficulty in making my career or winning my public. and i attribute my good fortune to the simple fact that i have always tried to write straight from my own heart to the hearts of others, regardless of opinions and indifferent to results. my object in writing has never been, and never will be, to concoct a mere story which shall bring me in a certain amount of cash or notoriety, but solely because i wish to say something which, be it ill or well said, is the candid and independent expression of a thought which i will have uttered at all risks. in this spirit i wrote my first book, 'a romance of two worlds,' now in its seventh edition. it was the simply worded narration of a singular psychical experience, and included certain theories on religion which i, personally speaking, accept and believe. i had no sort of literary pride in my work whatsoever; there was nothing of self in the wish i had, that my ideas, such as they were, should reach the public, for i had no particular need of money, and certainly no hankering after fame. when the book was written i doubted whether it would ever find a publisher, though i determined to try and launch it if possible. my notion was to offer it to arrowsmith as a shilling railway volume, under the title 'lifted up.' but in the interim, as a kind of test of its merit or demerit, i sent the ms. to mr. george bentley, head of the long-established and famous bentley publishing firm. it ran the gauntlet of his 'readers' first, and they all advised its summary rejection. among these 'readers' at that time was mr. hall caine. his strictures on my work were peculiarly bitter, though, strange to relate, he afterwards forgot the nature of his own report. for, on being introduced to me at a ball given by miss eastlake, when my name was made and my success assured, he blandly remarked, before a select circle of interested auditors, that he 'had had the pleasure of _recommending_' my first book to mr. bentley! comment on this were needless and unkind: he tells stories so admirably that i readily excuse him for his 'slip of memory,' and accept the whole incident as a delightful example of his inventive faculty. his severe judgment pronounced upon me, combined with similar, but perhaps milder, severity on the part of the other 'readers,' had, however, an unexpected result. mr. george bentley, moved by curiosity, and possibly by compassion for the impending fate of a young woman so 'sat upon' by his selected censors, decided to read my ms. himself. happily for me, the consequence of his unprejudiced and impartial perusal was acceptance; and i still keep the kind and encouraging letter he wrote to me at the time, informing me of his decision, and stating the terms of his offer. these terms were, a sum down for one year's rights, the copyright of the work to remain my own entire property. i did not then understand what an advantage this retaining of my copyright in my own possession was to prove to me, financially speaking; but i am willing to do mr. bentley the full justice of supposing that he foresaw the success of the book; and that, therefore, his action in leaving me the sole owner of my then very small literary estate redounds very much to his credit, and is an evident proof amongst many of his manifest honour and integrity. of course, the copyright of an unsuccessful book is valueless; but my 'romance' was destined to prove a sound investment, though i never dreamed that it would be so. glad of my chance of reaching the public with what i had to say, i gratefully closed with mr. bentley's proposal. he considered the title 'lifted up' as lacking attractiveness; it was therefore discarded, and mr. eric mackay, the poet, gave the book its present name, 'a romance of two worlds.' once published, the career of the 'romance' became singular, and totally apart from that of any other so-called 'novel.' it only received four reviews, all brief and distinctly unfavourable. the one which appeared in the dignified _morning post_ is a fair sample of the rest. i keep it by me preciously, because it serves as a wholesome tonic to my mind, and proves to me that when a leading journal can so 'review' a book, one need fear nothing from the literary knowledge, acumen, or discernment of reviewers. i quote it _verbatim_: 'miss corelli would have been better advised had she embodied her ridiculous ideas in a sixpenny pamphlet. the names of heliobas and zara are alone sufficient indications of the dulness of this book.' this was all. no explanation was vouchsafed as to why my ideas were 'ridiculous,' though such explanation was justly due; nor did the reviewer state why he (or she) found the 'names' of characters 'sufficient indications' of dulness, a curious discovery which i believe is unique. however, the so-called 'critique' did one good thing; it moved me to sincere laughter, and showed me what i might expect from the critical brethren in these days--days which can no longer boast of a lord macaulay, a brilliant, if bitter, jeffrey, or a generous sir walter scott. [illustration: the drawing-room[d]] to resume: the four 'notices' having been grudgingly bestowed, the press 'dropped' the 'romance,' considering, no doubt, that it was 'quashed,' and would die the usual death of 'women's novels,' as they are contemptuously called, in the prescribed year. but it did nothing of the sort. ignored by the press, it attracted the public. letters concerning it and its theories began to pour in from strangers in all parts of the united kingdom; and at the end of its twelvemonth's run in the circulating libraries mr. bentley brought it out in one volume in his 'favorite' series. then it started off at full gallop--the 'great majority' got at it, and, what is more, kept at it. it was 'pirated' in america; chosen out and liberally paid for by baron tauchnitz for the 'tauchnitz' series; translated into various languages on the continent, and became a topic of social discussion. a perfect ocean of correspondence flowed in upon me from india, africa, australia, and america, and at this very time i count through correspondence a host of friends in all parts of the world whom i do not suppose i shall ever see; friends who even carry their enthusiasm so far as to place their houses at my disposal for a year or two years--and surely the force of hospitality can no further go! with all these attentions, i began to find out the advantage my practical publisher had given me in the retaining of my copyright; my 'royalties' commenced, increased, and accumulated with every quarter, and at the present moment continue still to accumulate, so much so, that the 'romance of two worlds' alone, apart from all my other works, is the source of a very pleasant income. and i have great satisfaction in knowing that its prolonged success is not due to any influence save that which is contained within itself. it certainly has not been helped on by the press, for since i began my career six years ago, i have never had a word of open encouragement or kindness from any leading english critic. the only real 'reviews' i ever received worthy of the name appeared in the _spectator_ and the _literary world_. the first was on my book 'ardath: the story of a dead self,' and in this the over-abundant praise in the beginning was all smothered by the unmitigated abuse at the end. the second in the _literary world_ was eminently generous; it dealt with my last book, 'the soul of lilith.' so taken aback was i with surprise at receiving an all-through kindly, as well as scholarly, criticism from any quarter of the press, that, though i knew nothing about the _literary world_, i wrote a letter of thanks to my unknown reviewer, begging the editor to forward it in the right direction. he did so, and my generous critic turned out to be--a woman--a literary woman, too, fighting a hard fight herself, who would have had an excuse to 'slate' me as an unrequired rival in literature had she so chosen, but who, instead of this easy course, adopted the more difficult path of justice and unselfishness. [illustration: the library] after the 'romance of two worlds' i wrote 'vendetta;' then followed 'thelma,' and then 'ardath: the story of a dead self,' which, among other purely personal rewards, brought me a charming autograph letter from the late lord tennyson, full of valuable encouragement. then followed 'wormwood: a drama of paris'--now in its fifth edition; 'ardath' and 'thelma' being in their seventh editions. my publishers seldom advertise the number of my editions, which is, i suppose, the reason why the continuous 'run' of the books escapes the press comment of the 'great success' supposed to attend various other novels which only attain to third or fourth editions. 'the soul of lilith,' published only last year, ran through four editions in three-volume form; it is issued now in one volume by messrs. bentley, to whom, however, i have not offered any new work. a change of publishers is sometimes advisable; but i have a sincere personal liking for mr. george bentley, who is himself an author of distinct originality and ability, though his literary gifts are only known to his own private circle. his book of essays, entitled 'after business,' is a delightful volume, full of point and brilliancy, two specially admirable papers being those on villon and carlyle, while it would be difficult to discover a more 'taking' prose bit than the concluding chapter, 'under an old poplar.' [illustration: the study] a very foolish and erroneous rumour has of late been circulated concerning me, asserting that i owe a great measure of my literary success to the kindly recognition and interest of the queen. i take the present opportunity to clear up this perverse misunderstanding. my books have been running successfully through several editions for six years, and the much-commented-upon presentation of a complete set of them to her majesty took place only last year. if it were possible to regret the honour of the queen's acceptance of these volumes, i should certainly have cause to do so, as the extraordinary spite and malice that has since been poured on my unoffending head has shown me a very bad side of human nature, which i am sorry to have seen. there is very little cause to envy me in this matter. i have but received the courteously formal thanks of the queen and the empress frederick, conveyed through the medium of their ladies-in-waiting, for the special copies of the books their majesties were pleased to admire; yet for this simple and quite ordinary honour i have been subjected to such forms of gratuitous abuse as i did not think possible to a 'just and noble' english press. i have often wondered why i was not equally assailed when the queen of italy, not content with merely 'accepting' a copy of the 'romance of two worlds,' sent me an autograph portrait of herself, accompanied by a charming letter, a souvenir which i value, not at all because the sender is a queen, but because she is a sweet and noble woman whose every action is marked by grace and unselfishness, and who has deservedly won the title given her by her people, 'the blessing of italy.' i repeat, i owe nothing whatever of my popularity, such as it is, to any 'royal' notice or favour, though i am naturally glad to have been kindly recognised and encouraged by those 'thronëd powers' who command the nation's utmost love and loyalty. but my appeal for a hearing was first made to the great public, and the public responded; moreover, they do still respond with so much heartiness and goodwill, that i should be the most ungrateful scribbler that ever scribbled if i did not (despite press 'drubbings' and the amusing total ignoring of my very existence by certain cliquey literary magazines) take up my courage in both hands, as the french say, and march steadily onward to such generous cheering and encouragement. i am told by an eminent literary authority that critics are 'down upon me' because i write about the supernatural. i do not entirely believe the eminent literary authority, inasmuch as i have not always written about the supernatural. neither 'vendetta,' nor 'thelma,' nor 'wormwood' is supernatural. but, says the eminent literary authority, why write at all, at any time, about the supernatural? why? because i feel the existence of the supernatural, and feeling it, i must speak of it. i understand that the religion we profess to follow emanates from the supernatural. and i presume that churches exist for the solemn worship of the supernatural. wherefore, if the supernatural be thus universally acknowledged as a guide for thought and morals, i fail to see why i, and as many others as choose to do so, should not write on the subject. an author has quite as much right to characterise angels and saints in his or her pages as a painter has to depict them on his canvas. and i do not keep my belief in the supernatural as a sort of special mood to be entered into on sundays only; it accompanies me in my daily round, and helps me along in all my business. but i distinctly wish it to be understood that i am neither a 'spiritualist' nor a 'theosophist.' i am not a 'strong-minded' woman, with egotistical ideas of a 'mission.' i have no other supernatural belief than that which is taught by the founder of our faith, and this can never be shaken from me or 'sneered down.' if critics object to my dealing with this in my books, they are very welcome to do so; their objections will not turn me from what they are pleased to consider the error of my ways. i know that unrelieved naturalism and atheism are much more admired subjects with the critical faculty; but the public differ from this view. the public, being in the main healthy-minded and honest, do not care for positivism and pessimism. they like to believe in something better than themselves; they like to rest on the ennobling idea that there is a great loving maker of this splendid universe, and they have no lasting affection for any author whose tendency and teaching is to despise the hope of heaven, and 'reason away' the existence of god. it is very clever, no doubt, and very brilliant to deny the creator; it is as if a monkey should, while being caged and fed by man, deny man's existence. such a circumstance would make us laugh, of course; we should think it uncommonly 'smart' of the monkey. but we should not take his statement for a fact all the same. of the mechanical part of my work there is little to say. i write every day from ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, alone and undisturbed, save for the tinpot tinkling of unmusical neighbours' pianos, and the perpetual organ-grinding which is freely permitted to interfere _ad libitum_ with the quiet and comfort of all the patient brain-workers who pay rent and taxes in this great and glorious metropolis. i generally scribble off the first rough draft of a story very rapidly in pencil; then i copy it out in pen and ink, chapter by chapter, with fastidious care, not only because i like a neat manuscript, but because i think everything that is worth doing at all is worth doing well; and i do not see why my publishers should have to pay for more printers' errors than the printers themselves make necessary. i find, too, that in the gradual process of copying by hand, the original draft, like a painter's first sketch, gets improved and enlarged. no one sees my manuscript before it goes to press, as i am now able to refuse to submit my work to the judgment of 'readers.' these worthies treated me roughly in the beginning, but they will never have the chance again. i correct my proofs myself, though i regret to say my instructions and revisions are not always followed. in my novel 'wormwood' i corrected the french article '_le_ chose' to '_la_ chose' three times, but apparently the printers preferred their own french, for it is still '_le_ chose' in the 'favorite' edition, and the error is stereotyped. in accordance with the arrangement made by mr. george bentley for my first book, i retain to myself sole possession of all my copyrights, and as all my novels are successes, the financial results are distinctly pleasing. america, of course, is always a thorn in the side of an author. the 'romance,' 'vendetta,' 'thelma' and 'ardath' were all 'pirated' over there before the passing of the american copyright act, it being apparently out of messrs. bentley & son's line to make even an attempt to protect my rights. after the act was passed, i was paid a sum for 'wormwood,' and a larger sum for 'the soul of lilith,' but, as everyone knows, the usual honorarium offered by american publishers for the rights of a successful english novel are totally inadequate to the sales they are able to command. american critics, however, have been very good to me. they have at least read my books before starting to review them, which is a great thing. i have always kept my 'tauchnitz' rights, and very pleasant have all my dealings been with the courteous and generous baron. all wanderers on the continent love the 'tauchnitz' volumes--their neatness, handy form, and remarkably clear type give them precedence over every other foreign series. baron tauchnitz pays his authors excellently well, and takes a literary as well as commercial interest in their fortunes. [illustration: facsimile of marie corelli's ms. as prepared for the press _a page of the "romance of two worlds"_] perhaps one of the pleasantest things connected with my 'success' is the popularity i have won in many quarters of the continent without any exertion on my own part. my name is as well known in germany as anywhere, while in sweden they have been good enough to elect me as one of their favourite authors, thanks to the admirable translations made of all my books by miss emilie kullmann, of stockholm, whose energy did not desert her even when she had so difficult a task to perform as the rendering of 'ardath' into swedish. in italy and spain 'vendetta,' translated into the languages of those countries, is popular. madame emma guarducci-giaconi is the translator of 'wormwood' into italian, and her almost literal and perfect rendering has been running as the _feuilleton_ in the florentine journal, _la nazione_, under the title 'l'alcoolismo: un dramma di parigi.' the 'romance of two worlds' is to be had in russian, so i am told; and it will shortly be published at athens, rendered into modern greek. while engaged in writing this article, i have received a letter asking for permission to translate this same 'romance' into one of the dialects of north-west india, a request i shall very readily grant. in its eastern dress the book will, i understand, be published at lucknow. i may here state that i gain no financial advantage from these numerous translations, nor do i seek any. sometimes the translators do not even ask my permission to translate, but content themselves with sending me a copy of the book when completed, without any word of explanation. and now to wind up; if i have made a name, if i have made a career, as it seems i have, i have only one piece of pride connected with it. not pride in my work, for no one with a grain of sense or modesty would, in these days, dare to consider his or her literary efforts of much worth, as compared with what has already been done by the past great authors. my pride is simply this: that i have fought my fight alone, and that i have no thanks to offer to anyone, save those legitimately due to the publisher who launched my first book, but who, it must be remembered, would, as a good business man, have unquestionably published nothing else of mine had i been a failure. i count no 'friend on the press,' and i owe no 'distinguished critic' any debt of gratitude. i have come, by happy chance, straight into close and sympathetic union with my public, and attained to independence and good fortune while still young and able to enjoy both. an 'incomprehensibly successful' novelist i was called last summer by an irritated correspondent of _life_, who chanced to see me sharing in the full flow of pleasure and social amusement during the 'season' at homburg. well, if it be so, this 'incomprehensible success' has been attained, i rejoice to say, without either 'log-roller' or 'boom,' and were i of the old greek faith, i should pour a libation to the gods for giving me this victory. certainly i used to hope for what britishers aptly call 'fair play' from the critics, but i have ceased to expect that now. it is evidently a delight to them to abuse me, else they would not go out of their way to do it; and i have no wish to interfere with either their 'copy' or their fun. the public are beyond them altogether. and literature is like that famous hill told of in the 'arabian nights,' where threatening anonymous voices shouted the most deadly insults and injuries to anyone who attempted to climb it. if the adventurer turned back to listen, he was instantly changed into stone; but if he pressed boldly on, he reached the summit and found magic talismans. now i am only at the commencement of the journey, and am ascending the hill with a light heart and in good humour. i hear the taunting voices on all sides, but i do not stop to listen, nor have i once turned back. my eyes are fixed on the distant peak of the mountain, and my mind is set on arriving there if possible. my ambition may be too great, and i may never arrive. that is a matter for the fates to settle. but, in the meanwhile, i enjoy climbing. i have nothing to grumble about. i consider literature the noblest art in the world, and have no complaint whatever to urge against it as a profession. its rewards, whether great or small, are sufficient for me, inasmuch as i love my work, and love makes all things easy. [illustration: signature of marie corelli] note.--since writing the above i have been asked to state whether, in my arrangements for publishing, i employ a 'literary agent' or use a 'type-writer.' i do not. with regard to the first part of the query, i consider that authors, like other people, should learn how to manage their own affairs themselves, and that when they take a paid agent into their confidence, they make open confession of their business incapacity, and voluntarily elect to remain in foolish ignorance of the practical part of their profession. secondly, i dislike type-writing, and prefer to make my own ms. distinctly legible. it takes no more time to write clearly than in spidery hieroglyphics, and a slovenly scribble is no proof of cleverness, but rather of carelessness and a tendency to 'scamp' work. '_on the stage and off_' by jerome k. jerome the story of one's 'first book' i take to be the last chapter of one's literary romance. the long wooing is over. the ardent young author has at last won his coy public. the good publisher has joined their hands. the merry critics, invited to the feast of reason, have blessed the union, and thrown the rice and slippers--occasionally other things. the bridegroom sits alone with his bride, none between them, and ponders. the fierce struggle, with its wild hopes and fears, its heart-leapings and heart-achings, its rose-pink dawns of endless promise, its grey twilights of despair, its passion and its pain, lies behind. before him stretches the long, level road of daily doing. will he please her to all time? will she always be sweet and gracious to him? will she never tire of him? the echo of the wedding-bells floats faintly through the darkening room. the fair forms of half-forgotten dreams rise up around him. he springs to his feet with a slight shiver, and rings for the lamps to be lighted. ah! that 'first book' we meant to write! how it pressed forward an oriflamme of joy, through all ranks and peoples; how the world rang with the wonder of it! how men and women laughed and cried over it! from every page there leaped to light a new idea. its every paragraph scintillated with fresh wit, deep thought, and new humour. and, ye gods! how the critics praised it! how they rejoiced over the discovery of the new genius! how ably they pointed out to the reading public its manifold merits, its marvellous charm! aye, it was a great work, that book we wrote as we strode laughing through the silent streets, beneath the little stars. and, heigho! what a poor little thing it was, the book that we did write! i draw him from his shelf (he is of a faint pink colour, as though blushing all over for his sins), and stand him up before me on the desk. 'jerome k. jerome'--the k very big, followed by a small j, so that in many quarters the author is spoken of as 'jerome kjerome,' a name that in certain smoke-laden circles still clings to me--'on the stage--and off: the brief career of a would-be actor. one shilling.' i suppose i ought to be ashamed of him, but how can i be? is he not my first-born? did he not come to me in the days of weariness, making my heart glad and proud? do i not love him the more for his shortcomings? [illustration: my first-born] somehow, as i stare at him in this dim candlelight, he seems to take odd shape. slowly he grows into a little pink imp, sitting cross-legged among the litter of my books and papers, squinting at me (i think the squint is caused by the big 'k'), and i find myself chatting with him. it is an interesting conversation to me, for it is entirely about myself, and i do nearly all the talking, he merely throwing in an occasional necessary reply, or recalling to my memory a forgotten name or face. [illustration: drawing with signature: yours sincerely, jerome k. jermome] we chat of the little room in whitfield street, off the tottenham court road, where he was born; of our depressing, meek-eyed old landlady, and of how, one day, during the course of chance talk, it came out that she, in the far back days of her youth, had been an actress, winning stage love and breaking stage hearts with the best of them; of how the faded face would light up as, standing with the tea-tray in her hands, she would tell us of her triumphs, and repeat to us her 'press notices,' which she had learned by heart; and of how from her we heard not a few facts and stories useful to us. we talk of the footsteps that of evenings would climb the creaking stairs and enter at our door; of george, who always believed in us (god bless him!), though he could never explain why; of practical charley, who thought we should do better if we left literature alone and stuck to work. ah! well, he meant kindly, and there be many who would that he had prevailed. we remember the difficulties we had to contend with; the couple in the room below, who would come in and go to bed at twelve, and lie there, quarrelling loudly, until sleep overcame them about two, driving our tender and philosophical sentences entirely out of our head; of the asthmatical old law-writer, whose never-ceasing cough troubled us greatly (maybe, it troubled him also, but i fear we did not consider that); of the rickety table that wobbled as we wrote, and that, whenever in a forgetful moment we leant upon it, gently but firmly collapsed. 'yes,' i said to the little pink imp; 'as a study the room had its drawbacks, but we lived some grand hours there, didn't we? we laughed and sang there, and the songs we chose breathed ever of hope and victory, and so loudly we sang them we might have been modern joshuas, thinking to capture a city with our breath. 'and then that wonderful view we used to see from its dingy window panes--that golden country that lay stretched before us, beyond the thousand chimney pots, above the drifting smoke, above the creeping fog--do you remember that?' it was worth living in that cramped room, worth sleeping on that knobbly bed, to gain an occasional glimpse of that shining land, with its marble palaces, where one day we should enter, an honoured guest; its wide market-places, where the people thronged to listen to our words. i have climbed many stairs, peered through many windows in this london town since then, but never have i seen that view again. yet, from somewhere in our midst, it must be visible for friends of mine, as we have sat alone, and the talk has sunk into low tones, broken by long silences, have told me that they, too, have looked upon those same glittering towers and streets. but the odd thing is that none of us has seen them since he was a very young man. so, maybe, it is only that the country is a long way off, and that our eyes have grown dimmer as we have grown older. 'and who was that old fellow that helped us so much?' i ask of my little pink friend; 'you remember him surely--a very ancient fellow, the oldest actor on the boards he always boasted himself--had played with edmund kean and macready. i used to put you in my pocket of a night and meet him outside the stage door of the princess's; and we would adjourn to a little tavern in old oxford market to talk you over, and he would tell me anecdotes and stories to put in you.' 'you mean johnson,' says the pink imp; 'j. b. johnson. he was with you in your first engagement at astley's, under murray wood and virginia blackwood. he and you were the high priests in "mazeppa," if you remember, and had to carry lisa weber across the stage, you taking her head and he her heels. do you recollect what he said to her, on the first night, as you were both staggering towards the couch?--"well, i've played with fanny kemble, cushman, glyn, and all of them, but hang me, my dear, if you ain't the heaviest lead i've ever supported."' [illustration: 'he and you had to carry lisa weber across the stage'] 'that's the old fellow,' i reply; 'i owe a good deal to him, and so do you. i used to read bits of you to him in a whisper as we stood in the bar; and he always had one formula of praise for you: "it's damned clever, young 'un; damned clever. i shouldn't have thought it of you." 'and that reminds me,' i continue--i hesitate a little here, for i fear what i am about to say may offend him--'what have you done to yourself since i wrote you? i was looking you over the other day, and really i could scarcely recognise you. you were full of brilliancy and originality when you were in manuscript. what have you done with it all?' by some mysterious process he contrives to introduce an extra twist into the squint with which he is regarding me, but makes no reply, and i continue: 'take, for example, that gem i lighted upon one drizzly night in portland place. i remember the circumstance distinctly. i had been walking the deserted streets, working at you; my note-book in one hand and a pencil in the other. i was coming home through portland place, when suddenly, just beyond the third lamp-post from the crescent, there flashed into my brain a thought so original, so deep, so true, that involuntarily i exclaimed: "my god, what a grand idea!" and a coffee-stall keeper, passing with his barrow just at that moment, sang out: "tell it us, guv'nor. there ain't many knocking about." [illustration: that brilliant idea] 'i took no notice of the man, but hurried on to the next lamp-post to jot down that brilliant idea before i should forget it; and the moment i reached home i pulled you out of your drawer and copied it out on to your pages, and sat long staring at it, wondering what the world would say when it came to read it. altogether i must have put into you nearly a dozen startlingly original thoughts. what have you done with them? they are certainly not there now.' still he keeps silence, and i wax indignant at the evident amusement with which he regards my accusation. 'and the bright wit, the rollicking humour with which i made your pages sparkle, where are they?' i ask him, reproachfully; 'those epigrammatic flashes that, when struck, illumined the little room with a blaze of sudden light, showing each cobweb in its dusty corner, and dying out, leaving my dazzled eyes groping for the lamp; those grand jokes at which i myself, as i made them, laughed till the rickety iron bedstead beneath me shook in sympathy with harsh metallic laughter; where are they, my friend? i have read you through, page by page, and the thoughts in you are thoughts that the world has grown tired of thinking; at your wit one smiles, thinking that anyone could think it wit; and your humour your severest critic could hardly accuse of being very new. what has happened to you? what wicked fairy has bewitched you? i poured gold into your lap, and you yield me back only crumpled leaves.' with a jerk of his quaint legs he assumes a more upright posture. 'my dear parent,' he begins in a tone that at once reverses our positions, so that he becomes the monitor and i the wriggling admonished; 'don't, i pray you, turn prig in your old age; don't sink into the "superior person" who mistakes carping for criticism, and jeering for judgment. any fool can see faults, they lie on the surface. the merit of a thing is hidden within it, and is visible only to insight. and there is merit in me, in spite of your cheap sneers, sir. maybe i do not contain an original idea. show me the book published since the days of caxton that does! are our young men, as are the youth of china, to be forbidden to think, because confucius thought years ago? the wit you appreciate now needs to be more pungent than the wit that satisfied you at twenty; are you sure it is as wholesome? you cannot smile at humour you would once have laughed at; is it you or the humour that has grown old and stale? i am the work of a very young man, who, writing of that which he knew and had felt, put down all things truthfully as they appeared to him, in such way as seemed most natural to him, having no thought of popular taste, standing in no fear of what critics might say. be sure that all your future books are as free from unworthy aims.' 'besides,' he adds, after a short pause, during which i have started to reply, but have turned back to think again, 'is not this talk idle between you and me? this apologetic attitude, is it not the cant of the literary profession? at the bottom of your heart you are proud of me, as every author is of every book he has written. some of them he thinks better than others; but, as the irishman said of whiskies, they are all good. he sees their shortcomings. he dreams he could have done better; but he is positive no one else could.' his little twinkling eyes look sternly at me, and, feeling that the discussion is drifting into awkward channels, i hasten to divert it, and we return to the chat about our early experiences. i ask him if he remembers those dreary days when, written neatly in round hand on sermon paper, he journeyed a ceaseless round from newspaper to newspaper, from magazine to magazine, returning always soiled and limp to whitfield street, still further darkening the ill-lit room as he entered. some would keep him for a month, making me indignant at the waste of precious time. others would send him back by the next post, insulting me by their indecent haste. many, in returning him, would thank me for having given them the privilege and pleasure of reading him, and i would curse them for hypocrites. others would reject him with no pretence at regret whatever, and i would marvel at their rudeness. i hated the dismal little 'slavey' who, twice a week, on an average, would bring him up to me. if she smiled as she handed me the packet, i fancied she was jeering at me. if she looked sad, as she more often did, poor little over-worked slut, i thought she was pitying me. i shunned the postman if i saw him in the street, sure that he guessed my shame. 'did anyone ever read you out of all those i sent you to?' i ask him. 'do editors read manuscript by unknown authors?' he asks me in return. 'i fear not more than they can help,' i confess; 'they would have little else to do.' 'oh,' he remarks demurely, 'i thought i had read that they did.' 'very likely,' i reply; 'i have also read that theatrical managers read all the plays sent to them, eager to discover new talent. one obtains much curious information by reading.' [illustration: i hated the dismal little 'slavey'] 'but somebody did read me eventually,' he reminds me; 'and liked me. give credit where credit is due.' 'ah, yes,' i admit; 'my good friend aylmer gowing--the "walter gordon" of the old haymarket in buckstone's time, "gentleman gordon" as charles matthews nicknamed him--kindliest and most genial of men. shall i ever forget the brief note that came to me four days after i had posted you to "the editor--_play_":--"dear sir, i like your articles very much. can you call on me to-morrow morning before twelve?--yours truly, w. aylmer gowing."' so success had come at last--not the glorious goddess i had pictured, but a quiet, pleasant-faced lady. i had imagined the editor of _cornhill_, or the _nineteenth century_, or _the illustrated london news_ writing me that my manuscript was the most brilliant, witty, and powerful story he had ever read, and enclosing me a cheque for two hundred guineas. _the play_ was an almost unknown little penny weekly, 'run' by mr. gowing--who, though retired, could not bear to be altogether unconnected with his beloved stage--at a no inconsiderable yearly loss. it could give me little fame and less wealth. but a crust is a feast to a man who has grown weary of dreaming dinners, and as i sat with that letter in my hand a mist rose before my eyes, and i--acted in a way that would read foolish if written down. [illustration: the study (_from a photograph by fradelle & young_)] the next morning, at eleven, i stood beneath the porch of victoria road, kensington, wishing i did not feel so hot and nervous, and that i had not pulled the bell-rope quite so vigorously. but when mr. gowing, in smoking-coat and slippers, came forward and shook me by the hand, my shyness left me. in his study, lined with theatrical books, we sat and talked. mr. gowing's voice seemed the sweetest i had ever listened to, for, with unprofessional frankness, it sang the praises of my work. he, in his young acting days, had been through the provincial mill, and found my pictures true, and many of my pages seemed to him, so he said, 'as good as _punch_.' (he meant it complimentary.) he explained to me the position of his paper, and i agreed (only too gladly) to give him the use of the book for nothing. as i was leaving, however, he called me back and slipped a five-pound note into my hand--a different price from what friend a. p. watt charms out of proprietors' pockets for me nowadays, yet never since have i felt as rich as on that foggy november morning when i walked across kensington gardens with that 'bit of flimsy' held tight in my left hand. i could not bear the idea of spending it on mere mundane things. now and then, during the long days of apprenticeship, i drew it from its hiding-place and looked at it, sorely tempted. but it always went back, and later, when the luck began to turn, i purchased with it, at a second-hand shop in goodge street, an old dutch bureau that i had long had my eye upon. it is an inconvenient piece of furniture. one cannot stretch one's legs as one sits writing at it, and if one rises suddenly it knocks bad language into one's knees and out of one's mouth. but one must pay for sentiment, as for other things. in _the play_ the papers gained a fair amount of notice, and won for me some kindly words; notably, i remember, from john clayton and palgrave simpson. i thought that in the glory of print they would readily find a publisher, but i was mistaken. the same weary work lay before me, only now i had more heart in me, and, having wrestled once with fate and prevailed, stood less in fear of her. sometimes with a letter of introduction, sometimes without, sometimes with a bold face, sometimes with a timid step, i visited nearly every publisher in london. a few received me kindly, others curtly, many not at all. from most of them i gathered that the making of books was a pernicious and unprofitable occupation. some thought the work would prove highly successful if i paid the expense of publication, but were less impressed with its merits on my explaining to them my financial position. all kept me waiting long before seeing me, but made haste to say 'good day' to me. i suppose all young authors have had to go through the same course. i sat one evening, a few months ago, with a literary friend of mine. the talk turned upon early struggles, and, with a laugh, he said: 'do you know one of the foolish things i love to do? i like to go with a paper parcel under my arm into some big publishing house, and to ask, in a low, nervous voice, if mr. so-and-so is disengaged. the clerk, with a contemptuous glance towards me, says that he is not sure, and asks if i have an appointment. "no," i reply; "not--not exactly, but i think he will see me. it's a matter of importance. i shall not detain him a minute." 'the clerk goes on with his writing, and i stand waiting. at the end of about five minutes, he, without looking up, says curtly, "what name?" and i hand him my card. 'up to that point, i have imagined myself a young man again, but there the fancy is dispelled. the man glances at the card, and then takes a sharp look at me. "i beg your pardon, sir," he says, "will you take a seat in here for a moment?" in a few seconds he flies back again with "will you kindly step this way, sir?" as i follow him upstairs i catch a glimpse of somebody being hurriedly bustled out of the private office, and the great man himself comes to the door, smiling, and as i take his outstretched hand i am remembering other times that he has forgotten. [illustration: i am remembering] in the end--to make a long story short, as the saying is--mr. tuer, of 'ye leadenhall press,' urged thereto by a mutual friend, read the book, and, i presume, found merit in it, for he offered to publish it if i would make him a free gift of the copyright. i thought the terms hard at the time (though in my eagerness to see my name upon the cover of a real book i quickly agreed to them), but with experience, i am inclined to admit that the bargain was a fair one. the english are not a book-buying people. out of every hundred publications hardly more than one obtains a sale of over a thousand, and, in the case of an unknown writer, with no personal friends upon the press, it is surprising how few copies sometimes _can_ be sold. i am happy to think that in this instance, however, nobody suffered. the book was, as the phrase goes, well received by the public, who were possibly attracted to it by its subject, a perennially popular one. some of the papers praised it, others dismissed it as utter rubbish; and then, fifteen months later, on reviewing my next book, regretted that a young man who had written such a capital first book should have followed it up by so wretched a second. one writer--the greatest enemy i have ever had, though i exonerate him of all but thoughtlessness--wrote me down a 'humourist,' which term of reproach (as it is considered to be in merrie england) has clung to me ever since, so that now, if i pen a pathetic story, the reviewer calls it 'depressing humour,' and if i tell a tragic story, he says it is 'false humour,' and, quoting the dying speech of the broken-hearted heroine, indignantly demands to know 'where he is supposed to laugh.' i am firmly persuaded that if i committed a murder half the book reviewers would allude to it as a melancholy example of the extreme lengths to which the 'new humour' had descended. 'once a humourist, always a humourist,' is the reviewer's motto. 'and all things allowed for--the unenthusiastic publisher, the insufficiently appreciative public, the wicked critic,' says my little pink friend, breaking his somewhat long silence, 'what do you think of literature as a profession?' i take some time to reply, for i wish to get down to what i really think, not stopping, as one generally does, at what one thinks one ought to think. 'i think,' i begin, at length, 'that it depends upon the literary man. if a man think to use literature merely as a means to fame and fortune, then he will find it an extremely unsatisfactory profession, and he would have done better to take up politics or company promoting. if he trouble himself about his status and position therein, loving the uppermost tables at feasts, and the chief seats in public places, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, master, master, then he will find it a profession fuller than most professions of petty jealousy, of little spite, of foolish hating and foolish log-rolling, of feminine narrowness and childish querulousness. if he think too much of his prices per thousand words, he will find it a degrading profession; as the solicitor, thinking only of his bills-of-cost, will find the law degrading; as the doctor, working only for two-guinea fees, will find medicine degrading; as the priest, with his eyes ever fixed on the bishop's mitre, will find christianity degrading. 'but if he love his work for the work's sake, if he remain child enough to be fascinated with his own fancies, to laugh at his own jests, to grieve at his own pathos, to weep at his own tragedy--then, as, smoking his pipe, he watches the shadows of his brain coming and going before his half-closed eyes, listens to their voices in the air about him, he will thank god for making him a literary man. to such a one, it seems to me, literature must prove ennobling. of all professions it is the one compelling a man to use whatever brain he has to its fullest and widest. with one or two other callings, it invites him--nay, compels him--to turn from the clamour of the passing day to speak for a while with the voices that are eternal. 'to me it seems that if anything outside oneself can help one, the service of literature must strengthen and purify a man. thinking of his heroine's failings, of his villain's virtues, may he not grow more tolerant of all things, kinder thinking towards man and woman? from the sorrow that he dreams, may he not learn sympathy with the sorrow that he sees? may not his own brave puppets teach him how a man should live and die? 'to the literary man, all life is a book. the sparrow on the telegraph wire chirps cheeky nonsense to him as he passes by. the urchin's face beneath the gas lamp tells him a story, sometimes merry, sometimes sad. fog and sunshine have their voices for him. [illustration: mr. jerome k. jerome (_from a photograph by fradelle & young_)] 'nor can i see, even from the most worldly and business-like point of view, that the modern man of letters has cause of complaint. the old grub street days when he starved or begged are gone. thanks to the men who have braved sneers and misrepresentation in unthanked championship of his plain rights, he is now in a position of dignified independence; and if he cannot attain to the twenty thousand a year prizes of the fashionable q.c. or m.d., he does not have to wait their time for his success, while what he can and does earn is amply sufficient for all that a man of sense need desire. his calling is a password into all ranks. in all circles he is honoured. he enjoys the luxury of a power and influence that many a prime minister might envy. 'there is still a last prize in the gift of literature that needs no sentimentalist to appreciate. in a drawer of my desk lies a pile of letters, of which if i were not very proud i should be something more or less than human. they have come to me from the uttermost parts of the earth, from the streets near at hand. some are penned in the stiff phraseology taught when old fashions were new, some in the free and easy colloquialism of the rising generation. some, written on sick beds, are scrawled in pencil. some, written by hands unfamiliar with the english language, are weirdly constructed. some are crested, some are smeared. some are learned, some are ill-spelled. in different ways they tell me that, here and there, i have brought to some one a smile or pleasant thought; that to some one in pain and in sorrow i have given a moment's laugh.' * * * * * pinky yawns (or a shadow thrown by the guttering candle makes it seem so). 'well,' he says, 'are we finished? have we talked about ourselves, glorified our profession, and annihilated our enemies to our entire satisfaction? because, if so, you might put me back. i'm feeling sleepy.' i reach out my hand, and take him up by his wide, flat waist. as i draw him towards me, his little legs vanish into his squat body, the twinkling eye becomes dull and lifeless. the dawn steals in upon him, for i have sat working long into the night, and i see that he is only a little shilling book bound in pink paper. wondering whether our talk together has been as good as at the time i thought it, or whether he has led me into making a fool of myself, i replace him in his corner. '_cavalry life_' by 'john strange winter' (mrs. arthur stannard) [illustration: three soldiers and a pig] my first book 'as ever was' was written, or, to speak quite correctly, was printed, on the nursery floor some thirty odd years ago. i remember the making of the book very well; the leaves were made from an old copybook, and the back was a piece of stiff paper, sewed in place and carefully cut down to the right size. so far as i remember, it was about three soldiers and a pig. i don't quite know how the pig came in, but that is a mere detail. i have no data to go upon (as i did not dream thirty years ago that i should ever be so known to fame as to be asked to write the true history of my first book), but i have a wonderful memory, and to the best of my recollection it was, as i say, about three soldiers and a pig. it never saw the light, and there are times when i feel thankful to a gracious providence that i have been spared the power of gratifying the temptation to give birth to those early efforts, after the manner of sir edwin landseer and that pathetic little childish drawing of two sheep, which is to be seen at provincial exhibitions of pictures, for the encouragement and example of the rising generation. so far as i can recall, i made no efforts for some years to woo fickle fortune after the attempt to recount the story of the three soldiers and a pig; but when i was about fourteen my heart was fired by the example of a schoolfellow, one josephine h----, who spent a large portion of her time writing stories, or, as our schoolmistress put it, wasting time and spoiling paper. all the same, josephine h---- 's stories were very good, and i have often wondered since those days whether she, in after life, went on with her favourite pursuits. i have never heard of her again except once, and then somebody told me that she had married a clergyman, and lived at west hartlepool. yes, all this has something to do, and very materially, with the story of my first book. for in emulating josephine h----, whom i was very fond of, and whom i admired immensely, i discovered that i could write myself, or at least that i wanted to write, and that i had ideas that i wanted to see on paper. without that gentle stimulant, however, i might never have found out that i might one day be able to do something in the same way myself. [illustration: signed drawing: ever yours, john strange winter. (_from a photograph by russell & sons, wimbledon_)] my next try was at a joint story--a story written by three girls, myself and two friends. that was in the same year. we really made considerable headway with that story; and had visions of completely finishing it and getting no less a sum than thirty pounds for it. i have a sort of an idea that i supplied most of the framework for the story, and that the elder of my collaborators filled in the millinery and the love-making. but--alas for the futility of human hopes and desires!--that book was destined never to be finished, for i had a violent quarrel with my collaborators, and we have never spoken to each other from that day to this. so came to an untimely end my second serious attempt at writing a book; for the stories that i had written in emulation of josephine h---- were only short ones, and were mostly unfinished. i wasted a terrible deal of paper between my second try and my seventeenth birthday, and i believe that i was, at that time, one of the most hopeless trials of my father's life. he many times offered to provide me with as much cheap paper as i liked to have; but cheap paper did not satisfy my artistic soul, for i always liked the best of everything. good paper was my weakness--as it was his--and i used it, or wasted it, which you will, with just the same lavish hand as i had done aforetime. when i was seventeen, i did a skit on a little book called 'how to live on sixpence a day.' it was my first soldier story--excepting the original three soldiers and a pig--and introduced the 'sixpence a day' pamphlet into a smart cavalry regiment, whose officers were in various degrees of debt and difficulty, and every man was a barefaced portrait, without the smallest attempt at concealment of his identity. eventually this sketch was printed in a york paper, and the honour of seeing myself in print was considered enough reward for me. i, on the contrary, had no such pure love of fame. i had done what i considered a very smart sketch, and i thought it well worth payment of some kind, which it certainly was. after this, i spent a year abroad, improving my mind--and i think, on the whole, it will be best to draw a veil over that portion of my literary history, for i went out to dinner on every possible occasion, and had a good time generally. stay--did i not say my literary history? well, that year had a good deal to do with my literary history, for i wrote stories most of the time, during a large part of my working hours and during the whole of my spare time, when i did not happen to be going out to dinner. and when i came home, i worked on just the same until, towards the end of ' , i drew blood for the first time. oh, the joy of that first bit of money--my first earnings! and it was but a bit, a mere scrap. to be explicit, it amounted to ten shillings. i went and bought a watch on the strength of it--not a very costly affair; a matter of two pounds ten and an old silver turnip that i had by me. it was wonderful how that one half-sovereign opened up my ideas. i looked into the future as far as eye could see, and i saw myself earning an income--for at that time of day i had acquired no artistic feelings at all, and i genuinely wanted to make name and fame and money--i saw myself a young woman who could make a couple of hundred pounds from one novel, and i gloried in the prospect. [illustration: mr. arthur stannard (_from a photograph by frances browne, regent street, w._)] i disposed of a good many stories in the same quarter at starvation prices, ranging from the original ten shillings to thirty-five. then, after a patient year of this not very luxurious work, i made a step forward and got a story accepted by the dear old _family herald_. oh, yes, this is really all relevant to my first book; very much so, indeed, for it was through mr. william stevens, one of the proprietors of the _family herald_, that i learned to know the meaning of the word 'caution'--a word absolutely indispensable to any young author's vocabulary. at this time i wrote a great deal for the _family herald_, and also for various magazines, including _london society_. in the latter, my first 'winter' work appeared--a story called 'a regimental martyr.' i was very oddly placed at this point of my career, for i liked most doing the 'winter' work, but the ordinary young-lady-like fiction paid me so much the best, that i could not afford to give it up. i was, like all young magazine writers, passionately desirous of appearing in book form. i knew not a single soul in the way connected with literary matters, had absolutely no help or interest of any kind to aid me over the rough places, or even of whom to ask advice in times of doubt and difficulty. mr. william stevens was the only editor that i knew to whom i could go and say, 'is this right?' or 'is that wrong?' and i think it may be interesting to say here that i have never asked for, or indeed used, a letter of introduction in my life--that is, in connection with any literary business. well, when i had been hard at work for several years, i wrote a very long book--upon my word, in spite of my good memory, i forget what it was called. the story, however, lives in my mind well enough; it was the story of a very large family--about ten girls and boys, who all made brilliant marriages and lived a sort of shabby, idyllic, happy life, somewhat on the plan of 'god for us all and the devil take the hindermost.' need i say that it was told in the first person and in the present tense, and that the heroine was anything but good-looking? i was very young then, and thought a great deal of my pretty bits of writing and those seductive scraps of moralising, against which mr. stevens was always warning me. well, this very long, not to say spun-out, account of this very large family of boys and girls, did not happen to please the 'readers' for the _family herald_--then my stay-by--so i thought i would have a try round the various publishers and see if i could not get it brought out in three volumes. of course, i tried all the best people first, and very often, when i receive from struggling young authors (who know a great deal more about my past history than i do myself, and who frequently write to ask me the best and easiest way to get on at novel-writing, without either hard work, or waiting, or disappointment, because, if you please, my own beginnings were so singularly successful and delightful) the information that i have never known of any of their troubles, it seems to me that my past and my present cannot be the past and present of the same woman. yet they are. i went through it all; the same sickening disappointments, the same hopes and fears; i trod the self-same path that every beginner must assuredly tread, as we must all in time tread that other path to the grave. i went through it all, and with that exceedingly long and detailed account of that large and shabby family, i trod the thorny path of publishing almost to the bitter end--ay, even to the goal where we find the full-blown swindler waiting for us, with bland looks and honeyed words of sweetest flattery. dear, dear! many who read this will know the process. it seldom varies. first, i sent my carefully written ms., whose very handwriting betrayed my youth, to a certain firm which had offices off the strand, to be considered for publication. the firm very kindly did consider it, and their consideration was such that they made me an offer of publication--_on certain terms_. their polite note informed me that their readers had read the work and thought very highly of it, that they were inclined--just by the way of completing their list for the approaching september, the best month in the year for bringing out novels--to bring it out, although i was, as yet, unknown to fame. then came the first hint of 'the consideration,' which took the form of a hundred pounds, to be paid down in three sums, all to fall due before the day of publication. i worked out the profits which _could_ accrue if the entire edition sold out i found that, in that case, i should have a nice little sum for myself of _l._ now, no struggling young author in his or her senses is silly enough to throw away the chance of making _l._ in one lump. i thought, and i thought the whole scheme out, and i must confess that the more i thought about it, the more utterly tempting did the offer seem. to risk _l._--and to make _l._! why, it was a positive sin to lose such a chance. therefore, i scraped a hundred pounds together, and, with my mother, set off for london, feeling that, at last, i was going to conquer the world. we did a theatre on the strength of my coming good fortune, and the morning after our arrival in town set off--in my case, at all events--with swelling hearts, to keep the appointment with the kindly publisher who was going to put me in the way of making fame and fortune. [illustration: 'the firm' considering] i opened the door and went in. 'is mr.---- at home?' i asked. i was forthwith conducted to an inner sanctum, where i was received by the head of the firm himself. then i experienced my first shock--he squinted! now, i never could endure a man with a squint, and i distrusted this man instantly. you know, there are squints and squints! there is the soft uncertain squint feminine, which is really charming. and there is a particular obliquity of vision which, in a man, rather gives a larky expression, and so makes you feel that there is nothing prim and formal about him, and seems to put you on good terms at once. [illustration: he squinted!] and there is a cold-blooded squint, which makes your flesh creep, and which, when taken in connection with business, brings little stories to your mind--'is anyone coming, sister anne?' and that sort of thing. mr.---- asked me to excuse him a moment while he gave some instructions, and, without waiting for my permission, looked through a few letters, shouted a message down a speaking-tube, and then, after having arranged the fate of about half-a-dozen novels by the means of the same instrument, he sent a final message down the tube asking for my ms., only to be told that he would find it in the top right-hand drawer of his desk. as a matter of fact, all this delay, intended to impress me and make me understand what a great thing had happened to me in having won attention from so busy a man, simply did for mr.---- so far as i was concerned. instead of impressing me, it gave me time to get used to the place, it gave me time to look at mr.---- when he was not looking at me. then, having found the ms., he looked at me and prepared to give me his undivided attention. [illustration: miss stannard (_from a photograph by h. s. mendelssohn_)] 'well,' he said, with a long breath, as if it was quite a relief to see a new face, 'i am very glad you have decided to close with our offer. we confidently expect a great success with your book. we shall have to change the title though. there's a good deal in a title.' i replied modestly that there was a good deal in a title. 'but,' i added, 'i have not closed with your offer--on the contrary, i---- ' he looked up sharply, and he squinted worse than ever. 'oh, i quite thought that you had definitely---- ' 'not at all,' i replied; then added a piece of information, which could not by any chance have been new to him. 'a hundred pounds is a lot of money, you know,' i remarked. mr.---- looked at me in a meditative fashion. 'well, if you have not got the money,' he said rather contemptuously, 'we might make a slight reduction--say, if we brought it down to _l._, solely because our readers have spoken so highly of the story. now look here, i will show you what our reader says--which is a favour that we don't extend to everyone, that i can tell you. here it is!' [illustration: 'the twins'--bootles and betty (_from photographs by h. s. mendelssohn_)] probably in the whole of his somewhat chequered career as a publisher, mr.---- never committed such a fatal mistake as by handing me the report on my history (in detail) of that very large family of boys and girls. 'bright, crisp, racy,' it ran. 'very unequal in parts, wants a good deal of revision, and should be entirely re-written. would be better if the story was brought to a conclusion when the heroine first meets with the hero after the parting, as all the rest forms an anti-climax. this might be worked up into a really popular novel, especially as it is written very much in miss---- 's style' (naming a then popular authoress whose sole merit consisted in being the most faithful imitator of the gifted founder of a very pernicious school). i put the sheet of paper down, feeling very sick and ill. and the worst of it was, i knew that every word of it was true. i was young and inexperienced then, and had not _nous_ enough to say plump out that my eyes had been opened, and that i could see that i should be neither more nor less than a fool if i wasted a single farthing over a story that must be utterly worthless. so i prevaricated mildly, and said that i certainly did not feel inclined to throw a hundred or even seventy-five pounds away over a story without some certainty of success. 'i'll think it over during the day,' i said, rising from my chair. 'oh, we must know within an hour, at the outside,' mr.---- said very curtly. 'our arrangements will not wait, and the time is very short now for us to decide on our books for september. of course, if you have not got the money, we might reduce a little more. we are always glad, if possible, to meet our clients.' 'it's not that,' i replied, looking at him straight. 'i have the money in my pocket; but a yorkshire woman does not put down a hundred pounds without some idea what is going to be done with it.' 'you must let me have your answer within an hour,' mr.---- remarked briefly. 'i will,' said i, in my most polite manner; 'but i really must think out the fact that you are willing to knock off twenty-five pounds at one blow. it seems to me if you could afford to take that much off, and perhaps a little more, there must have been something very odd about your original offer.' 'my time is precious,' said mr.---- in a grumpy voice. 'then, good morning,' said i cheerfully. my hopes were all dashed to the ground again, but i felt very cheerful, nevertheless. i trotted round to my friend, mr. stevens, who gave a whistle of astonishment at my story. 'i'll send my head clerk round for your ms. at once,' he said, 'else you'll probably never see it again.' and so he did, and so ended my next attempt to bring out my first book. after this i felt very keenly the real truth of the old saying, 'virtue is its own reward.' for, not long after my episode with mr.----, the then editor of _london society_ wrote to me, saying that he thought that as i had already had several stories published in the magazine, it might make a very attractive volume if i could add a few more and bring them out as a collection of soldier stories. [illustration: long-legged soldiers] i did not hesitate very long over this offer, but set to work with all the enthusiasm of youth--and youth does have the advantage of being full of the fire of enthusiasm, if of nothing else--and i turned out enough new stories to make a very respectable volume. then followed the period of waiting to which all literary folk must accustom themselves. i was, however, always of a tolerably long-suffering disposition, and possessed my soul in patience as well as i could. the next thing i heard was that the book had very good prospects, but that it would have its chances greatly improved if it were in two volumes instead of being in only one. well, youth is generous, and i did not see the wisdom of spoiling the ship for the traditional ha'porth of tar, so i cheerfully set to work and evolved another volume of stories, all of smart, long-legged soldiers, and with--as heaven knows--no more idea of setting myself up as possessing all knowledge about soldiers and the service than i had of aspiring to the crown of the united kingdom of great britain and ireland. but, even then, i had need of a vast amount of patience, for time went on, and really my book seemed as far from publication as ever. every now and then i had a letter telling me that the arrangements were nearly completed, and that it would probably be brought out by messrs. so-and-so. but days wore into weeks, and weeks into months, until i really began to feel as if my first literary babe was doomed to die before it was born. then arose a long haggle over terms, which i had thought were settled, and to be on the same terms as the magazine rates--no such wonderful scale after all. however, my literary guide, philosopher, and friend thought, as he was doing me the inestimable service of bringing me out, that _l._ was an ample honorarium for myself; but i, being young and poor, did not see things in the same light at all. try as i would--and i cannot lay claim to trying very hard--i could not see why a man, who had never seen me, should have put himself to so much trouble out of a spirit of pure philanthropy, and a desire to help a struggling young author forward. so i obstinately kept to my point, and said if i did not have _l._, i would rather have all of the stories back again. i think nobody would credit to-day what that special bit of firmness cost me. still, i would cheerfully have died before i would have given in, having once conceived my claim to be a just one. a bad habit on the whole, and one that has since cost me dear more than once. eventually, my guide and i came to terms for the sum for which i had held out, namely, _l._, which was the price i received for my very first book, in addition to about _l._ that i had already had from the magazine for serial use of a few of the stories. so, in due course, my book, under the title of 'cavalry life,' was brought out in two great cumbersome volumes by messrs. chatto & windus, and i was launched upon the world as a full-blown author under the name of 'winter.' [illustration: cavalry life] so many people have asked me why i took that name, and how i came to think of it, that it will not, perhaps, be amiss if i give the reason in this paper. it happened like this. during our negotiations, my guide suggested that i had better take some _nom de guerre_, as it would never do to bring out such a book under a woman's name. 'make it as real-sounding and non-committing as you can,' he wrote, and so, after much cogitation and cudgelling of my brains, i chose the name of the hero of the only story of the series which was written in the first person, and called myself j. s. winter. i believe that 'cavalry life' was published on the last day of . then followed the most trying time of all--that of waiting to see what the press would say of this, my first child, which had been so long in coming to life, and had been chopped and changed, bundled from pillar to post, until my heart was almost worn out before ever it saw the light. then, on january , , i went into the subscription library at york, where i was living, and began to search the new journals through, in but faint hopes, however, of seeing a review of my book so soon as that; for i was quite alone in the world, so far as literary matters went. indeed, not one friend did i possess who could in any way influence my career, or obtain the slightest favour for me. i remember that morning so well; it is, i think, printed on my memory as the word 'calais' was on the heart of queen mary. it was a fine, cold morning, and there was a blazing fire in the inner room, where the reviews were kept. i sat down at the table, and took up the _saturday review_, never dreaming for a moment that i should be honoured by so much as a mention in a journal which i held in such awe and respect. and as i turned over the leaves, my eyes fell on a row of foot-notes at the bottom of the page, giving the names of the books which were noticed above, and among them i saw--'cavalry life, by j. s. winter.' for full ten minutes i sat there, feeling sick and more fit to die than anything else. i was perfectly incapable of looking at the notice above. but, at last, i plucked up courage to meet my fate, very much as one summons up courage to have a tooth out and get the horrid wrench over. judge of my surprise and joy when, on reading the notice, i found that the _saturday_ had given me a rattling good notice, praising the new author heartily and without stint. i shall never, as long as i live, forget the effect of that, my first review, upon me. for quite half an hour i sat without moving, only feeling, 'i shall never be able to keep it up. i shall never be able to follow it up by another.' i felt paralysed, faint, crushed, anything but elated and jubilant. and, at last, through some instinct, i put my hand up to my head to find that it was cold and wet, as if it had been dipped in the river. thank heaven, from that day to this i have never known what a cold sweat was. it was my first experience of such a thing, and sincerely i hope it will be my last. [illustration: i took up the 'saturday review'] [illustration: drawing signed a. s. boyd, th mar. with signature below: bret harte _a sketch from life_] '_californian verse_' by bret harte when i say that my 'first book' was _not_ my own, and contained beyond the title-page not one word of my own composition, i trust that i shall not be accused of trifling with paradox, or tardily unbosoming myself of youthful plagiary. but the fact remains that in priority of publication the first book for which i became responsible, and which probably provoked more criticism than anything i have written since, was a small compilation of californian poems indited by other hands. a well-known bookseller of san francisco one day handed me a collection of certain poems which had already appeared in pacific coast magazines and newspapers, with the request that i should, if possible, secure further additions to them, and then make a selection of those which i considered the most notable and characteristic for a single volume to be issued by him. i have reason to believe that this unfortunate man was actuated by a laudable desire to publish a pretty californian book--_his_ first essay in publication--and at the same time to foster eastern immigration by an exhibit of the californian literary product, but, looking back upon his venture, i am inclined to think that the little volume never contained anything more poetically pathetic or touchingly imaginative than that gentle conception. equally simple and trustful was his selection of myself as compiler. it was based somewhat, i think, upon the fact that 'the artless helicon' i boasted 'was youth,' but i imagine it was chiefly owing to the circumstance that i had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to him my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect. [illustration: we settled to our work] [illustration: a circulation it had never known before] we settled to our work with fatuous self-complacency, and no suspicion of the trouble in store for us, or the storm that was to presently hurtle around our devoted heads. i winnowed the poems, and he exploited a preliminary announcement to an eager and waiting press, and we moved together unwittingly to our doom. i remember to have been early struck with the quantity of material coming in--evidently the result of some popular misunderstanding of the announcement. i found myself in daily and hourly receipt of sere and yellow fragments, originally torn from some dead and gone newspaper, creased and seamed from long folding in wallet or pocket-book. need i say that most of them were of an emotional or didactic nature; need i add any criticism of these homely souvenirs, often discoloured by the morning coffee, the evening tobacco, or, heaven knows! perhaps blotted by too easy tears! enough that i knew now what had become of those original but never re-copied verses which filled the 'poet's corner' of every country newspaper on the coast. i knew now the genesis of every didactic verse that 'coldly furnished forth the marriage table' in the announcement of weddings in the rural press. i knew now who had read--and possibly indited--the dreary _hic jacets_ of the dead in their mourning columns. i knew now why certain letters of the alphabet _had_ been more tenderly considered than others, and affectionately addressed. i knew the meaning of the 'lines to her who can best understand them,' and i knew that they had been understood. the morning's post buried my table beneath these withered leaves of posthumous passion. they lay there like the pathetic nosegays of quickly-fading wild flowers, gathered by school children, inconsistently abandoned upon roadsides, or as inconsistently treasured as limp and flabby superstitions in their desks. the chill wind from the bay blowing in at my window seemed to rustle them into sad articulate appeal. i remember that when one of them was whisked from the window by a stronger gust than usual, and was attaining a circulation it had never known before, i ran a block or two to recover it. i was young then, and in an exalted sense of editorial responsibility which i have since survived, i think i turned pale at the thought that the reputation of some unknown genius might have thus been swept out and swallowed by the all-absorbing sea. there were other difficulties arising from this unexpected wealth of material. there were dozens of poems on the same subject. 'the golden gate,' 'mount shasta,' 'the yosemite,' were especially provocative. a beautiful bird known as the 'californian canary' appeared to have been shot at and winged by every poet from portland to san diego. lines to the 'mariposa' flower were as thick as the lovely blossoms themselves in the merced valley, and the madrone tree was as 'berhymed' as rosalind. again, by a liberal construction of the publisher's announcement, _manuscript_ poems, which had never known print, began to coyly unfold their virgin blossoms in the morning's mail. they were accompanied by a few lines stating, casually, that their sender had found them lying forgotten in his desk, or, mendaciously, that they were 'thrown off' on the spur of the moment a few hours before. some of the names appended to them astonished me. grave, practical business men, sage financiers, fierce speculators, and plodding traders, never before suspected of poetry, or even correct prose, were among the contributors. it seemed as if most of the able-bodied inhabitants of the pacific coast had been in the habit at some time of expressing themselves in verse. some sought confidential interviews with the editor. the climax was reached when, in montgomery street, one day, i was approached by a well-known and venerable judicial magnate. after some serious preliminary conversation, the old gentleman finally alluded to what he was pleased to call a task of 'great delicacy and responsibility' laid upon my 'young shoulders.' 'in fact,' he went on paternally, adding the weight of his judicial hand to that burden, 'i have thought of speaking to you about it. in my leisure moments on the bench i have, from time to time, polished and perfected a certain college poem begun years ago, but which may now be said to have been finished in california, and thus embraced in the scope of your proposed selection. if a few extracts, selected by myself, to save you all trouble and responsibility, be of any benefit to you, my dear young friend, consider them at your service.' [illustration: 'consider them at your service'] in this fashion the contributions had increased to three times the bulk of the original collection, and the difficulties of selection were augmented in proportion. the editor and publisher eyed each other aghast. 'never thought there were so many of the blamed things alive,' said the latter with great simplicity, 'had you?' the editor had not. 'couldn't you sort of shake 'em up and condense 'em, you know? keep their ideas--and their names--separate, so that they'd have proper credit. see?' the editor pointed out that this would infringe the rule he had laid down. 'i see,' said the publisher thoughtfully--'well, couldn't you pare 'em down; give the first verse entire and sorter sample the others?' the editor thought not. there was clearly nothing to do but to make a more rigid selection--a difficult performance when the material was uniformly on a certain dead level, which it is not necessary to define here. among the rejections were, of course, the usual plagiarisms from well-known authors imposed upon an inexperienced country press; several admirable pieces detected as acrostics of patent medicines, and certain veiled libels and indecencies such as mark the 'first' publications on blank walls and fences of the average youth. still the bulk remained too large, and the youthful editor set to work reducing it still more with a sympathising concern which the good-natured, but unliterary, publisher failed to understand, and which, alas! proved to be equally unappreciated by the rejected contributors. the book appeared--a pretty little volume typographically, and externally a credit to pioneer book-making. copies were liberally supplied to the press, and authors and publisher self-complacently awaited the result. to the latter this should have been satisfactory; the book sold readily from his well-known counters to purchasers who seemed to be drawn by a singular curiosity, unaccompanied, however, by any critical comment. people would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly, 'got a new book of california poetry out, haven't you?' purchase it, and quietly depart. there were as yet no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. [illustration: i was inwardly relieved] out of it the bolt fell. a well-known mining weekly, which i here poetically veil under the title of the red dog _jay hawk_, was first to swoop down upon the tuneful and unsuspecting quarry. at this century-end of fastidious and complaisant criticism, it may be interesting to recall the direct style of the californian 'sixties.' 'the hogwash and "purp"-stuff ladled out from the slop bucket of messrs.---- & co., of 'frisco, by some lop-eared eastern apprentice, and called "a compilation of californian verse," might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. a club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of red dog and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. but when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture "californian," it is an insult to the state that has produced the gifted "yellow hammer," whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the _jay hawk_. that this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to california's greatest bard, is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.' i turned hurriedly to my pile of rejected contributions--the _nom de plume_ of 'yellow hammer' did _not_ appear among them; certainly i had never heard of its existence. later, when a friend showed me one of that gifted bard's pieces, i was inwardly relieved! it was so like the majority of the other verses, in and out of the volume, that the mysterious poet might have written under a hundred aliases. but the dutch flat _clarion_, following, with no uncertain sound, left me small time for consideration. 'we doubt,' said that journal, 'if a more feeble collection of drivel could have been made, even if taken exclusively from the editor's own verses, which we note he has, by an equal editorial incompetency, left out of the volume. when we add that, by a felicity of idiotic selection, this person has chosen only one, and the least characteristic, of the really clever poems of adoniram skaggs, which have so often graced these columns, we have said enough to satisfy our readers.' the mormon hill _quartz crusher_ relieved this simple directness with more fancy: 'we don't know why messrs.---- & co. send us, under the title of "selections of californian poetry," a quantity of slum-gullion which really belongs to the sluices of a placer mining camp, or the ditches of the rural districts. we have sometimes been compelled to run a lot of tailings through our stamps, but never of the grade of the samples offered, which, we should say, would average about - / cents per ton. we have, however, come across a single specimen of pure gold evidently overlooked by the serene ass who has compiled this volume. we copy it with pleasure, as it has already shone in the "poet's corner" of the _crusher_ as the gifted effusion of the talented manager of the excelsior mill, otherwise known to our delighted readers as "outcrop."' the green springs _arcadian_ was no less fanciful in imagery: 'messrs.---- & co. send us a gaudy green-and-yellow, parrot-coloured volume, which is supposed to contain the first callow "cheepings" and "peepings" of californian songsters. from the flavour of the specimens before us we should say that the nest had been disturbed prematurely. there seems to be a good deal of the parrot inside as well as outside the covers, and we congratulate our own sweet singer "blue bird," who has so often made these columns melodious, that she has escaped the ignominy of being exhibited in messrs.---- & co.'s aviary.' i should add that this simile of the aviary and its occupants was ominous, for my tuneful choir was relentlessly slaughtered; the bottom of the cage was strewn with feathers! the big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. the book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but i am afraid that the public was disappointed. the fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection, and i fear i cannot claim for it even that merit. and it will be observed that the animus of the criticism appeared to be the omission rather than the retention of certain writers. [illustration: the book sold tremendously] but this brings me to the most extraordinary feature of this singular demonstration. i do not think that the publishers were at all troubled by it; i cannot conscientiously say that _i_ was; i have every reason to believe that the poets themselves, in and out of the volume, were not displeased at the notoriety they had not expected, and i have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse started by the first attacking journal. the extravagance of the red dog _jay hawk_ was emulated by others: it was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic western fashion. and there still lingers, not unpleasantly, in my memory the conclusion of a cheerfully scathing review of the book which may make my meaning clearer: 'if we have said anything in this article which might cause a single pang to the poetically sensitive nature of the youthful individual calling himself mr. francis bret harte--but who, we believe, occasionally parts his name and his hair in the middle--we will feel that we have not laboured in vain, and are ready to sing _nunc dimittis_, and hand in our checks. we have no doubt of the absolutely pellucid and lacteal purity of franky's intentions. he means well to the pacific coast, and we return the compliment. but he has strayed away from his parents and guardians while he was too fresh. he will not keep without a little salt.' it was thirty years ago. the book and its rabelaisian criticisms have been long since forgotten. alas! i fear that even the capacity for that gargantuan laughter which met them, in those days, exists no longer. the names i have used are necessarily fictitious, but where i have been obliged to quote the criticisms from memory i have, i believe, only softened their asperity. i do not know that this story has any moral. the criticisms here recorded never hurt a reputation nor repressed a single honest aspiration. a few contributors to the volume, who were of original merit, have made their mark, independently of it or its critics. the editor, who was for two months the most abused man on the pacific slope, within the year became the editor of its first successful magazine. even the publisher prospered, and died respected! [illustration: signed, very faithfully yours, a. t. quiller couch.] '_dead man's rock_' by 'q.' i cherish no parental illusions about 'dead man's rock.' it is two or three years since i read a page of that blood-thirsty romance, and my only copy of it was found, the other day, in turning out the lumber-room at the top of the house. later editions have been allowed to appear with all the inaccuracies and crudities of the first. on page , bombay is still situated in the bay of bengal, and may continue to adorn that shore. the error must be amusing, since unknown friends continue to write and confess themselves tickled by it; and it is stupid to begin amending a book in which you have lost interest. but though this is my attitude towards 'dead man's rock,' i can still look back on the writing of it as on an amusing adventure. [illustration: 'q.' junior] it was begun in the late summer of , and was my first attempt at telling a story on paper. i am careful to say 'on paper,' because in childhood i was telling myself stories from morning to night. tens of thousands of small boys are doing the same every day in the year; but i should be sorry to guess how much of my time, between the ages of seven and thirteen, must have been given up to weaving these childish epics. they were curious jumbles; the characters (of which i had a constant set) being drawn indiscriminately from the 'morte d'arthur,' 'bunyan's holy war,' 'pope's iliad,' 'ivanhoe,' and a book of fairy tales by holme lee, as well as from history; and the themes ranging from battles and tournaments to cricket, wrestling, and sailing matches. anachronisms never troubled the story-teller. the duke of wellington would cheerfully break a lance with captain credence or tristram of lyonesse, and i rarely made up a football fifteen without including hardicanute (whom i loved for his name), hector (dear for his own sake) and wamba (who supplied the comic interest and scored off thersites). they were brave companions; but at the age of thirteen they deserted me suddenly. or perhaps after reading mr. stevenson's 'chapter on dreams,' i had better say it was the piskies--the small people--who deserted me. they alone know why--for their pensioner had never betrayed a single one of their secrets--or why in these later times, when he sells their confidences for money, they have come back to help him, though more sparingly. three or four of the little stories in 'noughts and crosses' are but translated dreams, and there are others in my notebook; but now i never compose without some pain, whereas in the old days i had but to sit alone in a corner or take a solitary walk and invite them, and they did all the work. but one summer evening i summoned them and met with no response. without warning the tales had come to an end. from my first school at newton abbot i went to clifton, and from clifton in my nineteenth year to oxford. it was here that the old desire to weave stories began to come back. mr. stevenson's 'treasure island' was the immediate cause. i had been scribbling all through my school days; had written a prodigious quantity of bad reflective poetry and burnt it as soon as i really began to reflect; and was now plying the _oxford magazine_ with light verse, a large proportion of which was lately reprinted in a thin volume, with the title of 'green bays.' but i wrote little or no prose. my prose essays at school were execrable. i had followed after false models for a while, and when gently made aware of this by the sound and kindly scholar who looked over our sixth-form essays at clifton, had turned dispirited and wrote scarcely at all. though reading great quantities of fiction, i had, as has been said, no thought of telling a story, and so far as i knew, no faculty. the desire, at least, was awakened by 'treasure island,' and, in explanation of this, i can only quote the gentleman who reviewed my first book in the _athenæum_, and observed that 'great wits jump, and lesser wits jump with them.' that is just the truth of it. i began as a pupil and imitator of mr. stevenson, and was lucky in my choice of a master. the germ of 'dead man's rock' was a curious little bit of family lore, which i may extract from my father's history of polperro, a small haven on the cornish coast. the richard quiller of whom he speaks is my great grandfather. 'in the old home of the quillers, at polperro, there was hanging on a beam a key, which we as children regarded with respect and awe, and never dared to touch, for richard quiller had put the key of his quadrant on a nail, with strong injunctions that no one should take it off until his return (which never happened), and there, i believe, it still hangs. his brother john served for several years as commander of a hired armed lugger, employed in carrying despatches in the french war, richard accompanying him as subordinate officer. they were engaged in the inglorious bombardment of flushing in . some short time after this they were taken, after a desperate fight with a pirate, into algiers, but were liberated on the severe remonstrances of the british consul. they returned to their homes in most miserable plight, having lost their all, except their bible, much valued then by the unfortunate sailors, and now by a descendant in whose possession it is. about the year these same brothers sailed to the island of teneriffe in an armed merchant ship, but after leaving that place were never heard of.' here, then, i had the simple apparatus for a mystery; for, of course, the key must be made to unlock something far more uncommon than a quadrant; and i still think it a capital apparatus, had i only possessed the wit to use it properly. there was romance in this key--that was obvious enough, and i puzzled over it for some weeks, by the end of which my plot had grown to something like this: a family living in poverty, though heirs to great wealth--this wealth buried close to their door, and the key to unlock it hanging over their heads from morning to night. it was soon settled, too, that this family should be cornish, and the scene laid on the cornish coast, cornwall being the only corner of the earth with which i had more than a superficial acquaintance. so far, so good; but what was the treasure to be? and what the reason that stood between its inheritors and their enjoyment of it? as it happened, these two questions were answered together. the small library at trinity--a delightful room, where dr. johnson spent many quiet hours at work upon his 'dictionary'--is fairly rich in books of old travel and discovery; fine folios, for the most part, filling the shelves on your left as you enter. to the study of these i gave up a good many hours that should have been spent on ancient history of another pattern, and more directly profitable for greats; and in one of them--purchas, i think, but will not swear--first came on the great ruby of ceylon. not long after, a note in yule's edition of 'marco polo' set my imagination fairly in chase of this remarkable gem; and i hunted up all the accessible authorities. the size of this ruby (as thick as a man's arm, says marco polo, while maundevile, who was an artist, and lied with exactitude, puts it at a foot in length and five fingers in girth), its colour, 'like unto fire,' and the mystery and completeness of its disappearance, combined to fascinate me. no form of riches is so romantic as a precious stone with a heart in it and a history. i had only to endow it with a curse proportionate to its size and beauty, and i had all that a story-teller could possibly want. [illustration: 'the haven,' fowey[e]] but even a treasure hunt is a poor affair unless you have two parties vying for the booty, and a curse can hardly be worked effectively until you introduce the fighting element, and make destiny strike her blows through the passions--hate, greed, &c.--of her victims. i had shaped my story to this point: the treasure was to be buried by a man who had slain his comrade and only confidant in order to enjoy the booty alone, and had afterwards become aware of the curse attached to its possession. and the descendants of these two men were to be rivals in the search for it, each side possessing half of the clue. it was at this point that, like george iv., i invented a buckle. my buckle had two clasps, and on these the secret of the treasure was so engraved as to become intelligible only when they were united. my plot had now taken something like a shape; but it had one serious defect. it would not start to walk. coax it as i might it would not budge. even the worst book must have a beginning--this reflection was no less distressing than obvious, for mine had none. and there is no saying it would ever have found one but for a lucky accident. in the long vacation of i spent three weeks or a month at the lizard pollacking and reading plato. knowing at that time comparatively little of this corner of the coast, i had brought one or two guide books and local histories in the bottom of my portmanteau. one evening, after a stiff walk along the cliffs, i put the 'republic' aside for a certain 'history and description of the parish of mullyon,' by its vicar, the rev. e. g. harvey, and came upon a passage that immediately shook my scraps of invention into their proper places. the passage in question was a narrative of the wreck of the 'jonkheer meester van de wall,' a dutch barque, on the night of march , . i cannot quote at length the vicar's description of this wreck; but in substance and in many of its details it is the story of the 'belle fortune' in 'dead man's rock.' the vessel broke up in the night and drowned every soul on board except a greek sailor, who was found early next morning clambering about the rocks under cliff, between polurrian and poljew. this man's behaviour was mysterious from the first, and his evidence at the inquest held on the drowned bodies of his shipmates was, to say the least, extraordinary. he said: 'my name is georgio buffani. i was seaman on board the ship, which belonged to dordrecht. i joined the ship at batavia, _but i do not know the name of the ship or the name of the captain_.' being shown, however, the official list of dutch east indiamen, he pointed to one built in , the 'kosmopoliet,' captain könig. he then told his story of the disaster, which there was no one to contradict, and the jury returned a verdict of 'accidentally drowned.' the greek made his bow and left the neighbourhood. [illustration: mr. and mrs. quiller couch] just after the inquest mr. broad, dutch consul at falmouth, arrived, bringing with him the captains of two dutch east indiamen then lying at falmouth. one of them asked at once 'is it klaas lammerts's?' being told that the 'kosmopoliet' was the name of the wrecked ship, he said, 'i don't believe it. the "kosmopoliet" wouldn't be due for a fortnight, almost. it must be klaas lammerts's vessel.' the vicar, who had now come up, showed a scrap of flannel he had picked up, with ' . k. l.' marked upon it. 'ah!' said the dutchman, 'it must be so. it _must_ be the "jonkheer."' but she had been returned 'kosmopoliet' at the inquest, so there the matter rested. 'on the friday following, however,' pursues the vicar, 'when mr. broad and this dutch captain again visited mullyon, the first thing handed them was a parchment which had been picked up meanwhile, and this was none other than the masonic diploma of klaas van lammerts. here, then, was no room for doubt. the ship was identified as the "jonkheer meester van de wall van puttershoek," captain klaas van lammerts, tons register, homeward bound from the east indies, with a cargo of sugar, coffee, spices, and some banca tin. the value of the ship and cargo would be between , _l._ and , _l._' it may be added that on the afternoon before the wreck, the vessel had been seen to miss stays more than once in her endeavour to beat off the land, and generally to behave as if handled by an unaccountably clumsy crew. altogether, folks on shore had grave suspicions that there was mutiny or extreme disorder of some kind on board; but of this nothing was ever certainly known. i think this narrative was no sooner read than digested into the scheme of my romance, now for some months neglected and almost forgotten. but the final school of literæ humaniores loomed unpleasantly near, and just a year passed before i could turn my discovery to account. the following august found me at petworth, in sussex, lodging over a clockmaker's shop that looked out upon the market square. petworth is quiet; and at that time i knew scarcely a soul in the place; but lovely scenery lies all around it, and on a hot afternoon you may do worse than stretch yourself on the slopes above the weald and smoke and do nothing. there is one small common in particular, close to the monument at the top of the park, and just outside the park wall, where i spent many hours looking across the blue country to blackdown, and lazily making up my mind about the novel. in the end--it was some time in september--i called on the local stationer and bought a large heap of superior foolscap. [illustration: fowey grammar school crew and mr. quiller couch] a travelling waxwork company was unpacking its caravan in the square outside my window on the morning when i pulled in my chair and light-heartedly wrote 'dead man's rock (a romance), by q.,' at the top of the first sheet of foolscap. the initial was my old initial of the _oxford magazine_ verses, and the title had been settled on for some time before. staying with some friends on the cornish coast, i had been taken to a picnic, or some similar function, on a beach, where they showed me a pillar-shaped rock, standing boldly up from the sands, and veined with curious red streaks resembling bloodstains. 'i want a story written about that rock,' a lady of the party had said; 'something really blood-thirsty. "slaughter rock" might do for the name.' but my title was really borrowed from the dodman, locally called deadman, a promontory east of falmouth, between veryan and st. austell bays. i had covered two pages of foolscap before the brass band of the waxwork show struck up and drove me out of doors and along the road that leads to the railway station--the only dull road around petworth, and chosen now for that very reason. a good half of that morning's work was afterwards torn up; but i felt at the time that the enterprise was going well. i had written slowly, but easily; and, of course, believed that i had found my vocation, and would always be able to write easily--most vain delusion! for in six years and a half i have recaptured the fluency of that morning not half-a-dozen times. still, i continued to take a lively interest in my story, and wrote at it very steadily, finishing book i. before my return to oxford. it surprised me, though, that, for all my interest in it, the story gave me little or no emotion. once only did i get a genuine thrill, and that was at the point where young jasper finds the sailor's cap (p. ), and why at this point more than another is past explaining. in later efforts i have written several pages with a shaking pen and amid dismal signs of grief; and, on revision, have usually had to tear those pages up. on the whole, my short experience goes against _si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi._ but if _on revision_ an author is moved to tears or laughter by any part of his work, then he may reckon pretty safely upon it, no matter with how stony a gravity it was written. [illustration: the old study] book i.--just half the tale--was finished then, and put aside. the oxford michaelmas term was beginning, and there were lectures to be prepared; but this was not all the reason. to tell the truth, i had wound up my story into a very pretty coil, and how to unwind it was past my contriving. when the book appeared, its critics agreed in pronouncing part i. to be a deal better than part ii., and they were right; for book ii. is little more than a violent cutting of half-a-dozen knots that had been tied in the gayest of spirits; and it must be owned, moreover, that the long arm of coincidence was invoked to perform a great part of the cutting. for the time, however, the unfinished ms. lay in the drawer of my writing-table; and i went back to virgil and aristophanes and scribbled more verses for the _oxford magazine_. none of my friends knew at that time of my excursion into fiction; but one of them possesses the acutest eye in oxford, and, with just a perceptible twinkle in it, he asked me suddenly, one evening towards the end of term, if i had yet begun to write a novel. the shot was excellently fired, and i surrendered my ms. at once, the more gladly because believing in his judgment. next morning he asserted that he had sat up half the night to read it. his look was of the freshest, but he came triumphantly out of cross-examination, and urged me to finish the story. in my elated mood i would have promised anything, and set to work at once to think out the rest of the plot; but it was not until the easter vacation that i finished the book, in a farmhouse at the head of wastwater. another friend was with me, who, in the intervals of climbing, put all his enthusiasm into aristotelian logic while i hammered away at the 'immortal product,' as we termed it by consent. it was further agreed that he should abstain from looking at a line of it until the whole was written--a compact which i have not heard he found any difficulty in keeping. indeed, there was plenty to occupy us both without the book. snow lay thick on the fells that spring, and the glissading was excellent; we had found, or thought we had, a new way up the mickledore cliffs; and mr. gladstone had just introduced his first home rule bill, and made the newspapers (which reached us a day late) very good reading. however, the ms. was finished and read with sincere, if discriminating, approval, on the eve of our departure. the next step was to find a publisher. my earliest hopes had inclined upon my friend, mr. arrowsmith, of bristol, who (i hoped) might remember me as having for a time edited the _cliftonian_; but the book was clearly too long for his 'railway library,' and on this reflection i determined to try the publishers of 'treasure island.' mr. lyttelton gell, of the clarendon press, was kind enough to provide a letter of introduction; the ms. went to messrs. cassell & co., and i fear the end of my narrative must be even duller than the beginning. messrs. cassell accepted the book, and have published all its successors. the inference to be drawn from this is pleasant and obvious, and i shall be glad if my readers will draw it. [illustration: mr. and mrs. quiller couch in a canadian canoe] it is the rule, i find, to conclude such a confession as this with a paragraph or so in abuse of the literary calling; to parade one's self before the youth of merry england as the spartans paraded their drunken helot; to mourn the expense of energies that in any other profession would have fetched a nobler pecuniary return. i cannot do this; at any rate, i cannot do it yet. my calling ties me to no office stool, makes me no man's slave, compels me to no action that my soul condemns. it sets me free from town life, which i loathe, and allows me to breathe clean air, to exercise limbs as well as brain, to tread good turf and wake up every morning to the sound and smell of the sea and that wide prospect which to my eyes is the dearest on earth. all happiness must be purchased with a price, though people seldom recognise this; and part of the price is that, living thus, a man can never amass a fortune. but as it is extremely unlikely that i could have done this in any pursuit, i may claim to have the better of the bargain. certain gentlemen who have preceded me in this series have spoken of letters as of any ordinary characteristic pursuit. naturally, therefore, they report unfavourably; but they seem to me to prove the obvious. literature has her own pains, her own rewards; and it scarcely needs demonstration that one who can only bring to these a bagman's estimate had very much better be a bagman than an author. _'undertones' and 'idyls and legends of inverburn'_ by robert buchanan my first serious effort in literature was what i may call a double-barrelled one; in other words, i was seriously engaged upon two books at the same time, and it was by the merest accident that they did not appear simultaneously. as it was, only a few months divided one from the other, and they are always, in my own mind, inseparable, or siamese, twins. the book of poems called 'undertones' was the one; the book of poems called 'idyls and legends of inverburn' was the other. they were published nearly thirty years ago, when i was still a boy, and as they happened to bring me into connection, more or less intimately, with some of the leading spirits of the age, a few notes concerning them may be of interest. a word, first, as to my literary beginnings. i can scarcely remember the time when the idea of winning fame as an author had not occurred to me, and so i determined very early to adopt the literary profession, a determination which i unfortunately carried out, to my own life-long discomfort, and the annoyance of a large portion of the reading public. when a boy in glasgow, i made the acquaintance of david gray, who was fired with a similar ambition to fly incontinently to london-- the terrible city whose neglect is death, whose smile is fame! and to take it by storm. it seemed so easy! 'westminster abbey,' wrote my friend to a correspondent; 'if i live, i shall be buried there--so help me god!' 'i mean, after tennyson's death,' i myself wrote to philip hamerton, 'to be poet laureate!' from these samples of our callow speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. well, it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise! through some blunder of arrangement we two started for london on the same day, but from different railway stations, and, until some weeks afterwards, one knew nothing of the other's exodus. i arrived at king's cross railway station with the conventional half-crown in my pocket; literally and absolutely half-a-crown; i wandered about the great city till i was weary, fell in with a thief and good samaritan who sheltered me, starved and struggled with abundant happiness, and finally found myself located at stamford street, waterloo bridge, in a top room, for which i paid, when i had the money, seven shillings a week. here i lived royally, with duke humphrey, for many a day; and hither, one sad morning, i brought my poor friend gray, whom i had discovered languishing somewhere in the borough, and who was already death-struck through 'sleeping out' one night in hyde park.[f] 'westminster abbey--if i live, i shall be buried there!' poor country singing-bird, the great dismal cage of the dead was not for _him_, thank god! he lies under the open heaven, close to the little river which he immortalised in song. after a brief sojourn in the 'dear old ghastly bankrupt garret at no. ,' he fluttered home to die. [illustration: drawing by geo. hutchinson signed: truly yours, robert buchanan] to that old garret, in these days, came living men of letters who were of large and important interest to us poor cheepers from the north: richard monckton milnes, laurence oliphant, sydney dobell, among others, who took a kindly interest in my dying comrade. but afterwards, when i was left to fight the battle alone, the place was solitary. ever reserved and independent, not to say 'dour' and opinionated, i made no friends, and cared for none. i had found a little work on the newspapers and magazines, just enough to keep body and soul alive, and while occupied with this i was busy on the literary twins to which i referred at the opening of this paper. what did my isolation matter, when i had all the gods of greece for company, to say nothing of the fays and trolls of scottish fairyland? pallas and aphrodite haunted that old garret; out on waterloo bridge, night after night, i saw selene and all her nymphs; and when my heart sank low, the fairies of scotland sang me lullabies! it was a happy time. sometimes, for a fortnight together, i never had a dinner--save, perhaps, on sunday, when a good-natured hebe would bring me covertly a slice from the landlord's joint. my favourite place of refreshment was the caledonian coffee house in covent garden. here, for a few coppers, i could feast on coffee and muffins--muffins saturated with butter, and worthy of the gods! then, issuing forth, full-fed, glowing, oleaginous, i would light my pipe, and wander out into the lighted streets. criticisms for the _athenæum_, then edited by hepworth dixon, brought me ten-and-sixpence a column. i used to go to the old office in wellington street and have my contributions measured off on the current number with a foot-rule, by good old john francis, the publisher. i wrote, too, for the _literary gazette_, where the pay was less princely--seven-and-sixpence a column, i think, but with all extracts deducted! the _gazette_ was then edited by john morley, who came to the office daily with a big dog. 'i well remember the time when you, a boy, came to me, a boy, in catherine street,' wrote honest john to me years afterwards. but the neighbourhood of covent garden had greater wonders! two or three times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from charing cross station to the office of _all the year round_ in wellington street, came the good, the only dickens! from that good genie the poor straggler from fairyland got solid help and sympathy. few can realise now what dickens was then to london. his humour filled its literature like broad sunlight; the gospel of plum-pudding warmed every poor devil in bohemia. [illustration: mr. buchanan's house] at this time, i was (save the mark!) terribly in earnest, with a dogged determination to bow down to no graven literary idol, but to judge men of all ranks on their personal merits. i never had much reverence for gods of any sort; if the superior persons could not win me by love, i remained heretical. so it was a long time before i came close to any living souls, and all that time i was working away at my poems. then, a little later, i used to go o' sundays to the open house of westland marston, which was then a great haunt of literary bohemians. here i first met dinah muloch, the author of 'john halifax,' who took a great fancy to me, used to carry me off to her little nest on hampstead heath, and lend me all her books. at hampstead, too, i foregathered with sydney dobell, a strangely beautiful soul, with (what seemed to me then) very effeminate manners. dobell's mouth was ever full of very pretty latinity, for the most part virgilian. he was fond of quoting, as an example of perfect expression, sound conveying absolute sense of the thing described, the doggrel lines-- down the stairs the young missises ran to have a look at miss kate's young man! the sibilants in the first line, he thought, admirably suggested the idea of the young ladies slipping along the banisters and peeping into the hall! but i had other friends, more helpful to me in preparing my first twin-offering to the muses; the faces under the gas, the painted women on the bridge (how many a night have i walked up and down by their sides, and talked to them for hours together), the actors in the theatres, the ragged groups at the stage doors. london to me, then, was still fairyland! even in the haymarket, with its babbles of nymph and satyr, there was wonderful life from midnight to dawn--deep sympathy with which told me that i was a born pagan, and could never be really comfortable in any modern temple of the proprieties. on other points connected with that old life on the borders of bohemia, i need not touch; it has all been so well done already by murger, in the 'vie de bohème,' and it will not bear translation into contemporary english. there were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was hot in the mouth too! _et ego fui in bohemiâ!_ there were inky fellows and bouncing girls, _then; now_ there are only fine ladies, and respectable, god-fearing men of letters. it was while the twins were fashioning, that i went down in summer time to live at chertsey on the thames, chiefly in order to be near to one i had long admired, thomas love peacock, the friend of shelley and the author of 'headlong hall'--'greekey peekey,' as they called him, on account of his prodigious knowledge of things and books hellenic. i soon grew to love the dear old man, and sat at his feet, like an obedient pupil, in his green old-fashioned garden at lower halliford. to him i first read some of my 'undertones,' getting many a rap over the knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering with divine myths. what mercy could _i_ expect from one who had never forgiven 'johnny' keats for his frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of endymion and selene? and who was horrified at the base 'modernism' of shelley's 'prometheus unbound?' but to think of it! he had known shelley, and all the rest of the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all! dear old pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life. when, shortly before he died, his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly refused to listen, and cried roundly, in a line of vehement blank verse, 'by the immortal gods, i will not stir!'[g] under such auspices, and with all the ardour of youth to help, my book, or books, progressed. meantime, i was breaking out into poetry in the magazines, and writing 'criticism' by the yard. at last the time came when i remembered another friend with whom i had corresponded, and whose advice i thought i might now ask with some confidence. this was george henry lewes, to whom, when i was a boy in glasgow, i had sent a bundle of manuscript, with the blunt question, 'am i, or am i not, a poet?' to my delight he had replied to me with a qualified affirmative, saying that in the productions he had 'discerned a real faculty, and _perhaps_ a future poet. i say perhaps,' he added, 'because i do not know your age, and because there are so many poetical blossoms which never come to fruit.' he had, furthermore, advised me 'to write as much as i felt impelled to write, but to publish nothing'--at any rate, for a couple of years. three years had passed, and i had neither published anything--that is to say, in book form--nor had i had any further communication with my kind correspondent. to lewes, then, i wrote, reminding him of our correspondence, telling him that i _had_ waited, not two years, but three, and that i now felt inclined to face the public. i soon received an answer, the result of which was that i went, on lewes's invitation, to the priory, north bank, regent's park, and met my friend and his partner, better known as 'george eliot.' but, as the novelists say, i am anticipating. sick to death, david gray had returned to the cottage of his father, the handloom weaver, at kirkintilloch, and there had peacefully passed away, leaving as his legacy to the world the volume of beautiful poems published under the auspices of lord houghton. i knew of his death the hour he died; awaking in the night, i was certain of my loss, and spoke of it (long before the formal news reached me) to a friend. this by the way; but what is more to the purpose is that my first grief for a beloved comrade had expressed itself in the words which were to form the 'proem' of my first book-- poet gentle hearted, are you then departed, and have you ceased to dream the dream we loved of old so well? has the deeply-cherish'd aspiration perished, and are you happy, david, in that heaven where you dwell? have you found the secret we, so wildly, sought for, and is your soul enswath'd at last in the singing robes you fought for? full of my dead friend, i spoke of him to lewes and george eliot, telling them the piteous story of his life and death. both were deeply touched, and lewes cried, 'tell that story to the public'; which i did, immediately afterwards, in the _cornhill magazine_. by this time i had my twins ready, and had discovered a publisher for one of them, _undertones_. the other, _idyls and legends of inverburn_, was a ruggeder bantling, containing almost the first _blank verse_ poems ever written in scottish dialect. i selected one of the poems, 'willie baird,' and showed it to lewes. he expressed himself delighted, and asked for more. i then showed him the 'two babes.' 'better and better!' he wrote; 'publish a volume of such poems and your position is assured.' more than this, he at once found me a publisher, mr. george smith, of messrs. smith and elder, who offered me a good round sum (such it seemed to me then) for the copyright. eventually, however, after 'willie baird' had been published in the _cornhill_, i withdrew the manuscript from messrs. smith and elder, and transferred it to mr. alexander strahan, who offered me both more liberal terms and more enthusiastic appreciation. [illustration: the study] it was just after the appearance of my story of david gray in the _cornhill_ that i first met, at the priory, north bank, with robert browning. it was an odd and representative gathering of men, only one lady being present, the hostess, george eliot. i was never much of a hero-worshipper, but i had long been a sympathetic browningite, and i well remember george eliot taking me aside after my first _tête-à-tête_ with the poet, and saying, 'well, what do you think of him? does he come up to your ideal?' he _didn't_ quite, i must confess, but i afterwards learned to know him well and to understand him better. he was delighted with my statement that one of gray's wild ideas was to rush over to florence and 'throw himself on the sympathy of robert browning.' phantoms of these first books of mine, how they begin to rise around me! faces of friends and counsellors that have flown for ever; the sibylline marian evans with her long, weird, dreamy face; lewes, with his big brow and keen thoughtful eyes; browning, pale and spruce, his eye like a skipper's cocked-up at the weather; peacock, with his round, mellifluous speech of the old greeks; david gray, great-eyed and beautiful, like shelley's ghost; lord houghton, with his warm worldly smile and easy-fitting enthusiasm. where are they all now? where are the roses of last summer, the snows of yester year? i passed by the priory to-day, and it looked like a great lonely tomb. in those days, the house where i live now was not built; all up here hampstead-ways was grass and fields. it was over these fields that herbert spencer and george eliot used to walk on their way to hampstead heath. the sibyl has gone, but the great philosopher still remains, to brighten the sunshine. it was not my luck to know him _then_--would it had been!--but he is my friend and neighbour in these latter days, and, thanks to him, i still get glimpses of the manners of the old gods. with the publication of my first two books, i was fairly launched, i may say, on the stormy waters of literature. when the _athenæum_ told its readers that 'this was _poetry_, and of a noble kind,' and when lewes vowed in the _fortnightly review_ that even if i 'never wrote another line, my place among the pastoral poets would be undisputed,' i suppose i felt happy enough--far more happy than any praise could make me now. poor little pigmy in a cockle-boat, i thought creation was ringing with my name! i think i must have seemed rather conceited and 'bounceable,' for i have a vivid remembrance of a _fortnightly_ dinner at the star and garter, richmond, when anthony trollope, angry with me for expressing a doubt about the poetical greatness of horace, wanted to fling a decanter at my head! it was about this time that an omniscient publisher, after an interview with me, exclaimed (the circumstance is historical), 'i don't like that young man; he talked to me as if he was god almighty, or _lord byron_!' but in sober truth, i never had the sort of conceit with which men credited me; i merely lacked gullibility, and saw, at the first glance, the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity of the literary life. i think still that, as a rule, the profession of letters narrows the sympathy and warps the intelligence. when i saw the importance which a great man or woman could attach to a piece of perfunctory criticism, when i saw the care with which this eminent person 'humoured his reputation,' and the anxiety with which that eminent person concealed his true character, i found my young illusions very rapidly fading. on one occasion, when george eliot was very much pestered by an unknown lady, an insignificant individual, who had thrust herself somewhat pertinaciously upon her, she turned to me and asked, with a smile, for my opinion. i gave it, rudely enough, to the effect that it was good for 'distinguished people' to be reminded occasionally of how very small consequence they really were, in the mighty life of the world! from that time until the present i have pursued the vocation into which fatal fortune, during boyhood, incontinently thrust me, and have subsisted, ill sometimes, well sometimes, by a busy pen. i may, therefore, with a certain experience, if with little authority, imitate those who have preceded me in giving reminiscences of their first literary beginnings, and offer a few words of advice to my younger brethren--to those persons, i mean, who are entering the profession of literature. to begin with, i entirely agree with mr. grant allen in his recent avowal that literature is the poorest and least satisfactory of all professions; i will go even further, and affirm that it is one of the least ennobling. with a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of my own period, i can honestly say that i have scarcely met one individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary fame. for complete literary success among contemporaries, it is imperative that a man should either have no real opinions, or be able to conceal such as he possesses, that he should have one eye on the market and the other on the public journals, that he should humbug himself into the delusion that book-writing is the highest work in the universe, and that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of expediency. if his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in society or in literature itself, he must be silent. above all, he must lay this solemn truth to heart, that when the world speaks well of him the world will demand the _price_ of praise, and that price will possibly be his living soul. he may tinker, he may trim, he may succeed, he may be buried in westminster abbey, he may hear before he dies all the people saying, 'how good and great he is! how perfect is his art! how gloriously he embodies the tendencies of his time!'[h] but he will know all the same that the price has been paid, and that his living soul has gone, to furnish that whitewashed sepulchre, a blameless reputation. [illustration: mr. robert buchanan and his favourite dog] for one other thing, also, the neophyte in literature had better be prepared. he will never be able to subsist by creative writing unless it so happens that the form of expression he chooses is popular in form (fiction, for example), and even in that case, the work he does, if he is to live by it, must be in harmony with the social and artistic _status quo_. revolt of any kind is always disagreeable. three-fourths of the success of lord tennyson (to take an example) was due to the fact that this fine poet regarded life and all its phenomena from the standpoint of the english public school, that he ethically and artistically embodied the sentiments of our excellent middle-class education. his great american contemporary, whitman, in some respects the most commanding spirit of this generation, gained only a few disciples, and was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary criticism. another prosperous writer, to whom i have already alluded, george eliot, enjoyed enormous popularity in her lifetime, while the most strenuous and passionate novelist of her period, charles reade, was entirely distanced by her in the immediate race for fame. in literature, as in all things, manners and costume are most important; the hall-mark of contemporary success is perfect respectability. it is not respectable to be too candid on any subject, religious, moral, or political. it is very respectable to say, or imply, that this country is the best of all possible countries, that war is a noble institution, that the protestant religion is grandly liberal, and that social evils are only diversified forms of social good. above all, to be respectable, one must have 'beautiful ideas.' 'beautiful ideas' are the very best stock-in-trade a young writer can begin with. they are indispensable to every complete literary outfit. without them, the short cut to parnassus will never be discovered, even though one starts from rugby. '_treasure island_' by robert louis stevenson it was far indeed from being my first book, for i am not a novelist alone. but i am well aware that my paymaster, the great public, regards what else i have written with indifference, if not aversion; if it call upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indelible character; and when i am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world but what is meant is my first novel. sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, i was bound to write a novel. it seems vain to ask why. men are born with various manias: from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events; and as soon as i was able to write, i became a good friend to the paper-makers. reams upon reams must have gone to the making of 'rathillet,' 'the pentland rising,'[i] 'the king's pardon' (otherwise 'park whitehead'), 'edward daven,' 'a country dance,' and 'a vendetta in the west'; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams are now all ashes, and have been received again into the soil. i have named but a few of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of years. 'rathillet' was attempted before fifteen, 'the vendetta' at twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till i was thirty-one. by that time, i had written little books and little essays and short stories; and had got patted on the back and paid for them--though not enough to live upon. i had quite a reputation, i was the successful man; i passed my days in toil, the futility of which would sometimes make my cheek to burn--that i should spend a man's energy upon this business, and yet could not earn a livelihood: and still there shone ahead of me an unattained ideal: although i had attempted the thing with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, i had not yet written a novel. all--all my pretty ones--had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch. i might be compared to a cricketer of many years' standing who should never have made a run. anybody can write a short story--a bad one, i mean--who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. it is the length that kills. the accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. not so the beginner. human nature has certain rights; instinct--the instinct of self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks. there must be something for hope to feed upon. the beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those hours when the words come and the phrases balance of themselves--_even to begin_. and having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the book shall be accomplished! for so long a time, the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous! i remember i used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat--not possibly of literature--but at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of ajax. [illustration: drawing by a. s. boyd signed: sincerely yours, robert louis stevenson] [illustration: mr. stevenson's house in samoa] in the fated year i came to live with my father and mother at kinnaird, above pitlochry. then i walked on the red moors and by the side of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains inspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my wife and i projected a joint volume of logic stories, for which she wrote 'the shadow on the bed,' and i turned out 'thrawn janet' and a first draft of 'the merry men.' i love my native air, but it does not love me; and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister, and a migration by strathairdle and glenshee to the castleton of braemar. there it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and i must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriously known as the late miss mcgregor's cottage. and now admire the finger of predestination. there was a schoolboy in the late miss mcgregor's cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of 'something craggy to break his mind upon.' he had no thought of literature; it was the art of raphael that received his fleeting suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery. my more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be showman; but i would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings. on one of these occasions, i made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (i thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, i ticketed my performance 'treasure island.' i am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. the names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the _standing stone_ or the _druidic circle_ on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with! no child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. somewhat in this way, as i paused upon my map of 'treasure island,' the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. the next thing i knew i had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters. how often have i done so, and the thing gone no further! but there seemed elements of success about this enterprise. it was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and i had a boy at hand to be a touchstone. women were excluded. i was unable to handle a brig (which the _hispaniola_ should have been), but i thought i could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame. and then i had an idea for john silver from which i promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as i do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin. such psychical surgery is, i think, a common way of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. we can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? our friend with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know--but can we put him in? upon the first, we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of. on a chill september morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, i began 'the sea cook,' for that was the original title. i have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but i cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency. it is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. i am now upon a painful chapter. no doubt the parrot once belonged to robinson crusoe. no doubt the skeleton is conveyed from poe. i think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. the stockade i am told, is from 'masterman ready.' it may be, i care not a jot. these useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing, they had left behind them footprints on the sands of time, footprints which perhaps another--and i was the other! it is my debt to washington irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for i believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. i chanced to pick up the 'tales of a traveller' some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: billy bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters--all were there, all were the property of washington irving. but i had no guess of it then as i sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as i read aloud my morning's work to the family. it seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye. i had counted on one boy, i found i had two in my audience. my father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. his own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era of steam. he never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! but in 'treasure island' he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was _his_ kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. when the time came for billy bones's chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which i exactly followed; and the name of 'flint's old ship'--the 'walrus'--was given at his particular request. and now who should come dropping in, _ex machinâ_, but dr. japp, like the disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a talisman, but a publisher--had, in fact, been charged by my old friend, mr. henderson, to unearth new writers for _young folks_. even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of 'the sea cook'; at the same time, we would by no means stop our readings; and accordingly the tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of dr. japp. from that moment on, i have thought highly of his critical faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau. here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a positive engagement. i had chosen besides a very easy style. compare it with the almost contemporary 'merry men'; one reader may prefer the one style, one the other--'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. it seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out 'treasure island' at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. but alas! this was not my case. fifteen days i stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. my mouth was empty; there was not one word of 'treasure island' in my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the 'hand and spear'! then i corrected them, living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with what i had done, and more appalled than i can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. i was thirty one; i was the head of a family; i had lost my health; i had never yet paid my way, never yet made _l._ a year; my father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? i was indeed very close on despair; but i shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to davos, where i was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of m. de boisgobey. arrived at my destination, down i sat one morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a day, i finished 'treasure island.' it had to be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained alone of the faithful; and john addington symonds (to whom i timidly mentioned what i was engaged on) looked on me askance. he was at that time very eager i should write on the characters of theophrastus: so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men. but symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy's story. he was large-minded; 'a full man,' if there was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. well! he was not far wrong. [illustration: mrs. r. l. stevenson] 'treasure island'--it was mr. henderson who deleted the first title, 'the sea cook'--appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention. i did not care. i liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque. i was not a little proud of john silver, also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. what was infinitely more exhilarating, i had passed a landmark; i had finished a tale, and written 'the end' upon my manuscript, as i had not done since 'the pentland rising,' when i was a boy of sixteen not yet at college. in truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents: had not dr. japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular ease, it must have been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire. purists may suggest it would have been better so. i am not of that mind. the tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine to a deserving family in which i took an interest. i need scarcely say i mean my own. [illustration: stevenson telling 'yarns'] but the adventures of 'treasure island' are not yet quite at an end. i had written it up to the map. the map was the chief part of my plot. for instance, i had called an islet 'skeleton island,' not knowing what i meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that i broke into the gallery of mr. poe and stole flint's pointer. and in the same way, it was because i had made two harbours that the 'hispaniola' was sent on her wanderings with israel hands. the time came when it was decided to republish, and i sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it, to messrs. cassell. the proofs came, they were corrected, but i heard nothing of the map. i wrote and asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. it is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. it is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. i did it; and the map was drawn again in my father's office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and elaborately _forged_ the signature of captain flint, and the sailing directions of billy bones. but somehow it was never 'treasure island' to me. i have said the map was the most of the plot. i might almost say it was the whole. a few reminiscences of poe, defoe, and washington irving, a copy of johnson's 'buccaneers,' the name of the dead man's chest from kingsley's 'at last,' some recollections of canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. it is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important. the author must know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil. and how troublesome the moon is! i have come to grief over the moon in 'prince otto,' and so soon as that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which i recommend to other men--i never write now without an almanack. with an almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders. with the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in 'the antiquary.' with the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days, from three of the monday morning till late in the saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of 'rob roy.' and it is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such 'croppers.' but it is my contention--my superstition, if you like--that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. the tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. but even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in 'treasure island,' it will be found to be a mine of suggestion. the end [illustration] footnotes: [a] in this ship, the 'hougoumont,' i served three years. she was a transport, and was in the china war, - . her burden was about , tons. this picture represents her as a sheer hulk employed in the construction of the forth bridge. i saw her towing down channel in this state in --she drew abreast of my house at deal--and i could have wept to witness my old floating home in so miserable a condition.--c. r. [b] this and succeeding illustrations are from photographs by fradelle and young. [c] this and the succeeding illustrations are from photographs by fradelle & young. [d] this and the succeeding illustrations are from photographs by 'adrian.' [e] most of the illustrations in this chapter are from photographs by messrs. w. heath & co., plymouth. [f] see the writer's _life of david gray_. [g] i have given a detailed account of peacock in my _look round literature_. [h] o those 'tendencies of one's time'! o those dismal phantoms, conjured up by the blatant book-taster and the indolent reviewer! how many a poor soul, that would fain have been honest, have they bewildered into the slough of despond and the bog of beautiful ideas!--r. b. [i] _ne pas confondre._ not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint of andrew elliott, for which (as i see with amazement from the book-lists) the gentlemen of england are willing to pay fancy prices; but its predecessor, a bulky historical romance without a spark of merit, and now deleted from the world. proofreaders the life and letters of lewis carroll (rev. c. l. dodgson) by stuart dodgson collingwood b.a. christ church, oxford to the child friends of lewis carroll and to all who love his writings this book is dedicated preface it is with no undue confidence that i have accepted the invitation of the brothers and sisters of lewis carroll to write this memoir. i am well aware that the path of the biographer is beset with pitfalls, and that, for him, _suppressio veri_ is almost necessarily _suggestio falsi_--the least omission may distort the whole picture. to write the life of lewis carroll as it should be written would tax the powers of a man of far greater experience and insight than i have any pretension to possess, and even he would probably fail to represent adequately such a complex personality. at least i have done my best to justify their choice, and if in any way i have wronged my uncle's memory, unintentionally, i trust that my readers will pardon me. my task has been a delightful one. intimately as i thought i knew mr. dodgson during his life, i seem since his death to have become still better acquainted with him. if this memoir helps others of his admirers to a fuller knowledge of a man whom to know was to love, i shall not have written in vain. i take this opportunity of thanking those who have so kindly assisted me in my work, and first i must mention my old schoolmaster, the rev. watson hagger, m.a., to whom my readers are indebted for the portions of this book dealing with mr. dodgson's mathematical works. i am greatly indebted to mr. dodgson's relatives, and to all those kind friends of his and others who have aided me, in so many ways, in my difficult task. in particular, i may mention the names of h.r.h. the duchess of albany; miss dora abdy; mrs. egerton allen; rev. f. h. atkinson; sir g. baden-powell, m.p.; mr. a. ball; rev. t. vere bayne; mrs. bennie; miss blakemore; the misses bowman; mrs. boyes; mrs. bremer; mrs. brine; miss mary brown; mrs. calverley; miss gertrude chataway; mrs. chester; mr. j. c. cropper; mr. robert davies; miss decima dodgson; the misses dymes; mrs. eschwege; mrs. fuller; mr. harry furniss; rev. c. a. goodhart; mrs. hargreaves; miss rose harrison; mr. henry holiday; rev. h. hopley; miss florence jackson; rev. a. kingston; mrs. kitchin; mrs. freiligrath kroeker; mr. f. madan; mrs. maitland; miss m. e. manners; miss adelaide paine; mrs. porter; miss edith rix; rev. c. j. robinson, d.d.; mr. s. rogers; mrs. round; miss isabel standen; mr. l. sergeant; miss gaynor simpson; mrs. southwall; sir john tenniel; miss e. gertrude thomson; mrs. woodhouse; and mrs. wyper. for their help in the work of compiling the bibliographical chapter and some other parts of the book, my thanks are due to mr. e. baxter, oxford; the controller of the university press, oxford; mr. a. j. lawrence, rugby; messrs. macmillan and co., london; mr. james parker, oxford; and messrs. ward, lock and co., london. in the extracts which i have given from mr. dodgson's journal and correspondence it will be noticed that italics have been somewhat freely employed to represent the words which he underlined. the use of italics was so marked a feature of his literary style, as any one who has read his books must have observed, that without their aid the rhetorical effect, which he always strove to produce, would have been seriously marred. s. dodgson collingwood guildford, _september_, . contents preface list of illustrations chapter i ( - ) lewis carroll's forebears--the bishop of elphin--murder of captain dodgson--daresbury--living in "wonderland"--croft--boyish amusements--his first school--latin verses--a good report--he goes to rugby--_the rectory umbrella_--"a lay of sorrow" chapter ii ( - ) matriculation at christ church--death of mrs. dodgson--the great exhibition--university and college honours--a wonderful year--a theatrical treat--_misch-masch_--_the train_--_college rhymes_--his _nom de plume_--"dotheboys hall"--alfred tennyson--ordination--sermons--a visit to farringford--"where does the day begin?"--the queen visits oxford chapter iii ( - ) jowett--index to "in memoriam"--the tennysons--the beginning of "alice"--tenniel--artistic friends--"alice's adventures in wonderland"--"bruno's revenge"--tour with dr. liddon--cologne--berlin architecture--the "majesty of justice"--peterhof--moscow--a russian wedding--nijni--the troitska monastery--"hieroglyphic" writing--giessen chapter iv ( - ) death of archdeacon dodgson--lewis carroll's rooms at christ church--"phantasmagoria"--translations of "alice"--"through the looking-glass"--"jabberwocky" in latin--c.s. calverley--"notes by an oxford chiel"--hatfield--vivisection--"the hunting of the snark" chapter v ( - ) dramatic tastes--miss ellen terry--"natural science at oxford"--mr. dodgson as an artist--miss e.g. thomson--the drawing of children--a curious dream--"the deserted parks"--"syzygies"--circus children--row-loving undergraduates--a letter to _the observer_--resignation of the lectureship--he is elected curator of the common room--dream-music. chapter vi ( - ) "the profits of authorship"--"rhyme? and reason?"--the common room cat--visit to jersey--purity of elections--parliamentary representation--various literary projects--letters to miss e. rix--being happy--"a tangled tale"--religious arguments--the "alice" operetta--"alice's adventures underground"--"the game of logic"--mr. harry furniss. chapter vii ( - ) a systematic life--"memoria technica"--mr. dodgson's shyness--"a lesson in latin"--the "wonderland" stamp-case--"wise words about letter-writing"--princess alice--"sylvie and bruno"--"the night cometh"--"the nursery 'alice'"--coventry patmore--telepathy--resignation of dr. liddell--a letter about logic. chapter viii ( - ) mr. dodgson resigns the curatorship--bazaars--he lectures to children--a mechanical "humpty dumpty"--a logical controversy--albert chevalier--"sylvie and bruno concluded"--"pillow problems"--mr. dodgson's generosity--college services--religious difficulties--a village sermon--plans for the future--reverence--"symbolic logic" chapter ix ( - ) logic-lectures--irreverent anecdotes--tolerance of his religious views--a mathematical discovery--"the little minister"--sir george baden-powell--last illness--"thy will be done"--"wonderland" at last!--letters from friends--"three sunsets"--"of such is the kingdom of heaven" chapter x child friends mr. dodgson's fondness for children--miss isabel standen--puzzles--"me and myself"--a double acrostic--"father william"--of drinking healths--kisses by post--tired in the face--the unripe plum--eccentricities--"sylvie and bruno"--"mr. dodgson is going on _well_" chapter xi the same--_continued._ books for children--"the lost plum-cake"--"an unexpected guest"--miss isa bowman--interviews--"matilda jane"--miss edith rix--miss kathleen eschwege bibliography index footnotes * * * * * list of illustrations lewis carroll--frontispiece _from a photograph_. archdeacon dodgson as a young man _from a miniature, painted about_ . daresbury parsonage, lewis carroll's birthplace _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. lewis carroll, aged _from a silhouette_. mrs. dodgson, lewis carroll's mother _from a silhouette_. croft rectory; archdeacon dodgson and family in foreground _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . toy station in garden at croft _from a photograph_. archbishop tait _from a photograph by elliott and fry_. "the only sister who _would_ write to her brother" _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. "the age of innocence". _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. "the scanty meal" _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. "the first earring" _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. illustrations to "lays of sorrow," no. _from drawings by lewis carroll_. exterior of christ church _from a photograph_. grave of archdeacon and mrs. dodgson in croft churchyard _from a photograph_. lewis carroll, aged _from a photograph_. archdeacon dodgson _from a photograph_. archbishop longley _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. "alas! what boots--" _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. alfred tennyson _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . the bishop of lincoln _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . bishop wilberforce _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . alice liddell as "the beggar-child" _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . sketch from st. leonard's concert-room _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. george macdonald and his daughter lily _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . mrs. rossetti and her children, dante gabriel, christina, and william _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . lorina, alice, and edith liddell _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. george macdonald _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . j. sant, r.a. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . holman hunt _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . sir john millais _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . charlotte m. yonge _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . canon liddon _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . "instance of hieroglyphic writing of the date " _from a sketch by lewis carroll_. sir john tenniel _from a photograph by bassano_. lewis carroll's study at christ church, oxford _from a photograph_. professor faraday _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . justice denman _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . lord salisbury and his two sons _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . facsimile of a letter from sir john tenniel to lewis carroll, dated june , john ruskin _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . henry holiday in his studio _from a photograph_. lewis carroll _from a photograph_. ellen terry _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. tom taylor _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . kate terry _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . miss e. gertrude thomson _from a photograph_. dr. liddell _from a photograph by hill & saunders_. "responsions" _from a photograph by a.t. shrimpton_. h. furniss _from a photograph_. "balbus and the dragon" _from a crayon drawing by the rev. h.c. gaye_. medley of tenniel's illustrations in "alice" _from an etching by miss whitehead_. facsimile of a letter from h. furniss to lewis carroll, dated august , sylvie and bruno _from a drawing by henry holiday_. facsimile of programme of "alice in wonderland" produced at the royal globe theatre, december , . "the mad tea party" _from a photograph by elliott and fry_. the late duke of albany _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . the dean of christ church _from a photograph by hill & saunders_. the mechanical "humpty dumpty" _from a photograph_. lewis carroll _from a photograph_. the chestnuts, guildford _from a photograph_. lewis carroll's grave _from a photograph_. lorina and alice liddell _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. alice liddell _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. xie kitchin _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. xie kitchin as a chinaman _from a photograph by lewis carroll_. alice and the dormouse _from a photograph by elliott and fry_. facsimile of a "looking-glass" letter from lewis carroll to miss edith ball arthur hughes and his daughter agnes _from a photograph by lewis carroll_, . "what i look like when i'm lecturing" _from a drawing by lewis carroll_. * * * * * chapter i ( - .) lewis carroll's forebears--the bishop of elphin--murder of captain dodgson--daresbury--living in "wonderland"--croft--boyish amusements--his first school--latin verses--a good report--he goes to rugby--_the rectory umbrella_--"a lay of sorrow." the dodgsons appear to have been for a long time connected with the north of england, and until quite recently a branch of the family resided at stubb hall, near barnard castle. in the early part of the last century a certain rev. christopher dodgson held a living in yorkshire. his son, charles, also took holy orders, and was for some time tutor to a son of the then duke of northumberland. in his patron presented him to the living of elsdon, in northumberland, by no means a desirable cure, as mr. dodgson discovered. the following extracts from his letters to various members of the percy family are interesting as giving some idea of the life of a rural clergyman a hundred years ago: i am obliged to you for promising to write to me, but don't give yourself the trouble of writing to this place, for 'tis almost impossible to receive 'em, without sending a messenger miles to fetch 'em. 'tis impossible to describe the oddity of my situation at present, which, however, is not void of some pleasant circumstances. a clogmaker combs out my wig upon my curate's head, by way of a block, and his wife powders it with a dredging-box. the vestibule of the castle (used as a temporary parsonage) is a low stable; above it the kitchen, in which are two little beds joining to each other. the curate and his wife lay in one, and margery the maid in the other. i lay in the parlour between two beds to keep me from being frozen to death, for as we keep open house the winds enter from every quarter, and are apt to sweep into bed to me. elsdon was once a market town as some say, and a city according to others; but as the annals of the parish were lost several centuries ago, it is impossible to determine what age it was either the one or the other. there are not the least traces of the former grandeur to be found, whence some antiquaries are apt to believe that it lost both its trade and charter at the deluge. ... there is a very good understanding between the parties [he is speaking of the churchmen and presbyterians who lived in the parish], for they not only intermarry with one another, but frequently do penance together in a white sheet, with a white wand, barefoot, and in the coldest season of the year. i have not finished the description for fear of bringing on a fit of the ague. indeed, the ideas of sensation are sufficient to starve a man to death, without having recourse to those of reflection. if i was not assured by the best authority on earth that the world is to be destroyed by fire, i should conclude that the day of destruction is at hand, but brought on by means of an agent very opposite to that of heat. i have lost the use of everything but my reason, though my head is entrenched in three night-caps, and my throat, which is very bad, is fortified by a pair of stockings twisted in the form of a cravat. as washing is very cheap, i wear _two_ shirts at a time, and, for want of a wardrobe, i hang my great coat upon my own back, and generally keep on my boots in imitation of my namesake of sweden. indeed, since the snow became two feet deep (as i wanted a 'chaappin of yale' from the public-house), i made an offer of them to margery the maid, but her legs are too thick to make use of them, and i am told that the greater part of my parishioners are not less substantial, and notwithstanding this they are remarkable for agility. in course of time this mr. dodgson became bishop of ossory and ferns, and he was subsequently translated to the see of elphin. he was warmly congratulated on this change in his fortunes by george iii., who said that he ought indeed to be thankful to have got away from a palace where the stabling was so bad. the bishop had four children, the eldest of whom, elizabeth anne, married charles lutwidge, of holmrook, in cumberland. two of the others died almost before they had attained manhood. charles, the eldest son, entered the army, and rose to the rank of captain in the th dragoon guards. he met with a sad fate while serving his king and country in ireland. one of the irish rebels who were supposed to have been concerned in the murder of lord kilwarden offered to give himself up to justice if captain dodgson would come alone and at night to take him. though he fully realised the risk, the brave captain decided to trust himself to the honour of this outlaw, as he felt that no chance should be missed of effecting so important a capture. having first written a letter of farewell to his wife, he set out on the night of december , , accompanied by a few troopers, for the meeting-place--an old hut that stood a mile or so from phillipstown, in king's county. in accordance with the terms of the agreement, he left his men a few hundred yards from the hut to await his return, and advanced alone through the night. a cowardly shot from one of the windows of the cottage ended his noble life, and alarmed the troopers, who, coming up in haste, were confronted with the dead body of their leader. the story is told that on the same night his wife heard two shots fired, and made inquiry about it, but could find out nothing. shortly afterwards the news came that her husband had been killed just at that time. captain dodgson left two sons behind him--hassard, who, after a brilliant career as a special pleader, became a master of the court of common pleas, and charles, the father of the subject of this memoir. charles, who was the elder of the two, was born in the year , at hamilton, in lanarkshire. he adopted the clerical profession, in which he rose to high honours. he was a distinguished scholar, and took a double first at christ church, oxford. although in after life mathematics were his favourite pursuit, yet the fact that he translated tertullian for the "library of the fathers" is sufficient evidence that he made good use of his classical education. in the controversy about baptismal regeneration he took a prominent part, siding on the question with the tractarians, though his views on some other points of church doctrine were less advanced than those of the leaders of the oxford movement. he was a man of deep piety and of a somewhat reserved and grave disposition, which, however, was tempered by the most generous charity, so that he was universally loved by the poor. in moments of relaxation his wit and humour were the delight of his clerical friends, for he had the rare power of telling anecdotes effectively. his reverence for sacred things was so great that he was never known to relate a story which included a jest upon words from the bible. in he married his cousin, frances jane lutwidge, by whom he had eleven children, all of whom, except lewis carroll, survive. his wife, in the words of one who had the best possible opportunities for observing her character, was "one of the sweetest and gentlest women that ever lived, whom to know was to love. the earnestness of her simple faith and love shone forth in all she did and said; she seemed to live always in the conscious presence of god. it has been said by her children that they never in all their lives remember to have heard an impatient or harsh word from her lips." it is easy to trace in lewis carroll's character the influence of that most gentle of mothers; though dead she still speaks to us in some of the most beautiful and touching passages of his works. not so long ago i had a conversation with an old friend of his; one of the first things she said to me was, "tell me about his mother." i complied with her request as well as i was able, and, when i had finished my account of mrs. dodgson's beautiful character, she said, "ah, i knew it must have been so; i felt sure he must have had a good mother." on january , , charles lutwidge dodgson was born at daresbury, of which parish his father was then incumbent. the village of daresbury is about seven miles from warrington; its name is supposed to be derived from a word meaning oak, and certainly oaks are very plentiful in the neighbourhood. a canal passes through an outlying part of the parish. the bargemen who frequented this canal were a special object of mr. dodgson's pastoral care. once, when walking with lord francis egerton, who was a large landowner in the district, he spoke of his desire to provide some sort of religious privileges for them. "if i only had £ ," he said, "i would turn one of those barges into a chapel," and, at his companion's request, he described exactly how he would have the chapel constructed and furnished. a few weeks later he received a letter from lord francis to tell him that his wish was fulfilled, and that the chapel was ready. in this strange church, which is believed to have been the first of its kind, mr. dodgson conducted service and preached every sunday evening! [illustration: daresbury parsonage] the parsonage is situated a mile and a half from the village, on the glebe-farm, having been erected by a former incumbent, who, it was said, cared more for the glebe than the parish. here it was that charles spent the first eleven years of his life--years of complete seclusion from the world, for even the passing of a cart was a matter of great interest to the children. [illustration: lewis carroll, aged .] in this quiet home the boy invented the strangest diversions for himself; he made pets of the most odd and unlikely animals, and numbered certain snails and toads among his intimate friends. he tried also to encourage civilised warfare among earthworms, by supplying them with small pieces of pipe, with which they might fight if so disposed. his notions of charity at this early age were somewhat rudimentary; he used to peel rushes with the idea that the pith would afterwards "be given to the poor," though what possible use they could put it to he never attempted to explain. indeed he seems at this time to have actually lived in that charming "wonderland" which he afterwards described so vividly; but for all that he was a thorough boy, and loved to climb the trees and to scramble about in the old marl-pits. one of the few breaks in this very uneventful life was a holiday spent with the other members of his family in beaumaris. the journey took three days each way, for railroads were then almost unknown; and whatever advantages coaching may have had over travelling in trains, speed was certainly not one of them. mr. dodgson from the first used to take an active part in his son's education, and the following anecdote will show that he had at least a pupil who was anxious to learn. one day, when charles was a very small boy, he came up to his father and showed him a book of logarithms, with the request, "please explain." mr. dodgson told him that he was much too young to understand anything about such a difficult subject. the child listened to what his father said, and appeared to think it irrelevant, for he still insisted, "_but_, please, explain!" [illustration: mrs. dodgson] on one occasion mr. and mrs. dodgson went to hull, to pay a visit to the latter's father, who had been seriously ill. from hull mrs. dodgson wrote to charles, and he set much store by this letter, which was probably one of the first he had received. he was afraid that some of his little sisters would mess it, or tear it up, so he wrote upon the back, "no one is to touch this note, for it belongs to c. l. d."; but, this warning appearing insufficient, he added, "covered with slimy pitch, so that they will wet their fingers." the precious letter ran as follows:-- my dearest charlie, i have used you rather ill in not having written to you sooner, but i know you will forgive me, as your grandpapa has liked to have me with him so much, and i could not write and talk to him comfortably. all your notes have delighted me, my precious children, and show me that you have not quite forgotten me. i am always thinking of you, and longing to have you all round me again more than words can tell. god grant that we may find you all well and happy on friday evening. i am happy to say your dearest papa is quite well--his cough is rather _tickling_, but is of no consequence. it delights me, my darling charlie, to hear that you are getting on so well with your latin, and that you make so few mistakes in your exercises. you will be happy to hear that your dearest grandpapa is going on nicely--indeed i hope he will soon be quite well again. he talks a great deal and most kindly about you all. i hope my sweetest will says "mama" sometimes, and that precious tish has not forgotten. give them and all my other treasures, including yourself, , , , kisses from me, with my most affectionate love. i am sending you a shabby note, but i cannot help it. give my kindest love to aunt dar, and believe me, my own dearest charlie, to be your sincerely affectionate mama. among the few visitors who disturbed the repose of daresbury parsonage was mr. durnford, afterwards bishop of chichester, with whom mr. dodgson had formed a close friendship. another was mr. bayne, at that time head-master of warrington grammar school, who used occasionally to assist in the services at daresbury. his son, vere, was charles's playfellow; he is now a student of christ church, and the friendship between him and lewis carroll lasted without interruption till the death of the latter. the memory of his birthplace did not soon fade from charles's mind; long afterwards he retained pleasant recollections of its rustic beauty. for instance, his poem of "the three sunsets," which first appeared in in _all the year round,_ begins with the following stanzas, which have been slightly altered in later editions:-- i watch the drowsy night expire, and fancy paints at my desire her magic pictures in the fire. an island farm, 'mid seas of corn, swayed by the wandering breath of morn, the happy spot where i was born. though nearly all mr. dodgson's parishioners at daresbury have passed away, yet there are still some few left who speak with loving reverence of him whose lips, now long silenced, used to speak so kindly to them; whose hands, long folded in sleep, were once so ready to alleviate their wants and sorrows. in sir robert peel presented him to the crown living of croft, a yorkshire village about three miles south of darlington. this preferment made a great change in the life of the family; it opened for them many more social opportunities, and put an end to that life of seclusion which, however beneficial it may be for a short time, is apt, if continued too long, to have a cramping and narrowing influence. the river tees is at croft the dividing line between yorkshire and durham, and on the middle of the bridge which there crosses it is a stone which shows where the one county ends and the other begins. "certain lands are held in this place," says lewis in his "topographical dictionary," "by the owner presenting on the bridge, at the coming of every new bishop of durham, an old sword, pronouncing a legendary address, and delivering the sword to the bishop, who returns it immediately." the tees is subject to extraordinary floods, and though croft church stands many feet above the ordinary level of the river, and is separated from it by the churchyard and a field, yet on one occasion the church itself was flooded, as was attested by water-marks on the old woodwork several feet from the floor, still to be seen when mr. dodgson was incumbent. this church, which is dedicated to st. peter, is a quaint old building with a norman porch, the rest of it being of more modern construction. it contains a raised pew, which is approached by a winding flight of stairs, and is covered in, so that it resembles nothing so much as a four-post bedstead. this pew used to belong to the milbanke family, with which lord byron was connected. mr. dodgson found the chancel-roof in so bad a state of repair that he was obliged to take it down, and replace it by an entirely new one. the only village school that existed when he came to the place was a sort of barn, which stood in a corner of the churchyard. during his incumbency a fine school-house was erected. several members of his family used regularly to help in teaching the children, and excellent reports were obtained. the rectory is close to the church, and stands in the middle of a beautiful garden. the former incumbent had been an enthusiastic horticulturist, and the walls of the kitchen garden were covered with luxuriant fruit-trees, while the greenhouses were well stocked with rare and beautiful exotics. among these was a specimen of that fantastic cactus, the night-blowing cereus, whose flowers, after an existence of but a few hours, fade with the waning sun. on the day when this occurred large numbers of people used to obtain mr. dodgson's leave to see the curiosity. [illustration: croft rectory] near the rectory is a fine hotel, built when croft was an important posting-station for the coaches between london and edinburgh, but in mr. dodgson's time chiefly used by gentlemen who stayed there during the hunting season. the village is renowned for its baths and medicinal waters. the parish of croft includes the outlying hamlets of halnaby, dalton, and stapleton, so that the rector's position is by no means a sinecure. within the village is croft hall, the old seat of the chaytors; but during mr. dodgson's incumbency the then sir william chaytor built and lived at clervaux castle, calling it by an old family name. shortly after accepting the living of croft, mr. dodgson was appointed examining chaplain to the bishop of ripon; subsequently he was made archdeacon of richmond and one of the canons of ripon cathedral. charles was at this time very fond of inventing games for the amusement of his brothers and sisters; he constructed a rude train out of a wheelbarrow, a barrel and a small truck, which used to convey passengers from one "station" in the rectory garden to another. at each of these stations there was a refreshment-room, and the passengers had to purchase tickets from him before they could enjoy their ride. the boy was also a clever conjuror, and, arrayed in a brown wig and a long white robe, used to cause no little wonder to his audience by his sleight-of-hand. with the assistance of various members of the family and the village carpenter, he made a troupe of marionettes and a small theatre for them to act in. he wrote all the plays himself the most popular being "the tragedy of king john"--and he was very clever at manipulating the innumerable strings by which the movements of his puppets were regulated. one winter, when the snow lay thick upon the lawn, he traced upon it a maze of such hopeless intricacy as almost to put its famous rival at hampton court in the shade. [illustration: toy station in garden at croft.] when he was twelve years old his father sent him to school at richmond, under mr. tate, a worthy son of that well-known dr. tate who had made richmond school so famous. i am able to give his earliest impressions of school-life in his own words, for one of his first letters home has been fortunately preserved. it is dated august th, and is addressed to his two eldest sisters. a boy who has _ten_ brothers and sisters can scarcely be expected to write separate letters to each of them. my dear fanny and memy,--i hope you are all getting on well, as also the sweet twins, the boys i think that i like the best, are harry austin, and all the tates of which there are besides a little girl who came down to dinner the first day, but not since, and i also like edmund tremlet, and william and edward swire, tremlet is a sharp little fellow about years old, the youngest in the school, i also like kemp and mawley. the rest of the boys that i know are bertram, harry and dick wilson, and two robinsons, i will tell you all about them when i return. the boys have played two tricks upon me which were these--they first proposed to play at "king of the cobblers" and asked if i would be king, to which i agreed. then they made me sit down and sat (on the ground) in a circle round me, and told me to say "go to work" which i said, and they immediately began kicking me and knocking me on all sides. the next game they proposed was "peter, the red lion," and they made a mark on a tombstone (for we were playing in the churchyard) and one of the boys walked with his eyes shut, holding out his finger, trying to touch the mark; then a little boy came forward to lead the rest and led a good many very near the mark; at last it was my turn; they told me to shut my eyes well, and the next minute i had my finger in the mouth of one of the boys, who had stood (i believe) before the tombstone with his mouth open. for nights i slept alone, and for the rest of the time with ned swire. the boys play me no tricks now. the only fault (tell mama) that there has been was coming in one day to dinner just after grace. on sunday we went to church in the morning, and sat in a large pew with mr. fielding, the church we went to is close by mr. tate's house, we did not go in the afternoon but mr. tate read a discourse to the boys on the th commandment. we went to church again in the evening. papa wished me to tell him all the texts i had heard preached upon, please to tell him that i could not hear it in the morning nor hardly one sentence of the sermon, but the one in the evening was i cor. i. . i believe it was a farewell sermon, but i am not sure. mrs. tate has looked through my clothes and left in the trunk a great many that will not be wanted. i have had misfortunes in my clothes etc. st, i cannot find my tooth-brush, so that i have not brushed my teeth for or days, nd, i cannot find my blotting paper, and rd, i have no shoe-horn. the chief games are, football, wrestling, leap frog, and fighting. excuse bad writing. yr affec' brother charles. _to_ skeff [_a younger brother, aged six_]. my dear skeff,--roar not lest thou be abolished. yours, etc.,--. the discomforts which he, as a "new boy," had to put up with from his school-mates affected him as they do not, unfortunately, affect most boys, for in later school days he was famous as a champion of the weak and small, while every bully had good reason to fear him. though it is hard for those who have only known him as the gentle and retiring don to believe it, it is nevertheless true that long after he left school his name was remembered as that of a boy who knew well how to use his fists in defence of a righteous cause. as was the custom at that time, charles began to compose latin verses at a very early age, his first copy being dated november , . the subject was evening, and this is how he treated it:-- phoebus aqua splendet descendens, æquora tingens splendore aurato. pervenit umbra solo. mortales lectos quærunt, et membra relaxant fessa labore dies; cuncta per orbe silet. imperium placidum nunc sumit phoebe corusca. antris procedunt sanguine ore feræ. these lines the boy solemnly copied into his diary, apparently in the most blissful ignorance of the numerous mistakes they contained. the next year he wrote a story which appeared in the school magazine. it was called "the unknown one," so it was probably of the sensational type in which small boys usually revel. though richmond school, as it was in , may not compare favourably in every respect with a modern preparatory school, where supervision has been so far "reduced to the absurd" that the unfortunate masters hardly get a minute to themselves from sunrise till long after sunset, yet no better or wiser men than those of the school of mr. tate are now to be found. nor, i venture to think, are the results of the modern system more successful than those of the old one. charles loved his "kind old schoolmaster," as he affectionately calls him, and surely to gain the love of the boys is the main battle in school-management. the impression he made upon his instructors may be gathered from the following extracts from mr. tate's first report upon him: sufficient opportunities having been allowed me to draw from actual observation an estimate of your son's character and abilities, i do not hesitate to express my opinion that he possesses, along with other and excellent natural endowments, a very uncommon share of genius. gentle and cheerful in his intercourse with others, playful and ready in conversation, he is capable of acquirements and knowledge far beyond his years, while his reason is so clear and so jealous of error, that he will not rest satisfied without a most exact solution of whatever appears to him obscure. he has passed an excellent examination just now in mathematics, exhibiting at times an illustration of that love of precise argument, which seems to him natural. i must not omit to set off against these great advantages one or two faults, of which the removal as soon as possible is desirable, tho' i am prepared to find it a work of time. as you are well aware, our young friend, while jealous of error, as i said above, where important faith or principles are concerned, is exceedingly lenient towards lesser frailties--and, whether in reading aloud or metrical composition, frequently sets at nought the notions of virgil or ovid as to syllabic quantity. he is moreover marvellously ingenious in replacing the ordinary inflexions of nouns and verbs, as detailed in our grammars, by more exact analogies, or convenient forms of his own devising. this source of fault will in due time exhaust itself, though flowing freely at present.... you may fairly anticipate for him a bright career. allow me, before i close, one suggestion which assumes for itself the wisdom of experience and the sincerity of the best intention. you must not entrust your son with a full knowledge of his superiority over other boys. let him discover this as he proceeds. the love of excellence is far beyond the love of excelling; and if he should once be bewitched into a mere ambition to surpass others i need not urge that the very quality of his knowledge would be materially injured, and that his character would receive a stain of a more serious description still.... and again, when charles was leaving richmond, he wrote: "be assured that i shall always feel a peculiar interest in the gentle, intelligent, and well-conducted boy who is now leaving us." although his father had been a westminster boy, charles was, for some reason or other, sent to rugby. the great arnold, who had, one might almost say, created rugby school, and who certainly had done more for it than all his predecessors put together, had gone to his rest, and for four years the reins of government had been in the firm hands of dr. tait, afterwards archbishop of canterbury. he was headmaster during the whole of the time charles was at rugby, except the last year, during which dr. goulburn held that office. charles went up in february, , and he must have found his new life a great change from his quiet experiences at richmond. football was in full swing, and one can imagine that to a new boy "big-side" was not an unalloyed delight. whether he distinguished himself as a "dropper," or ever beat the record time in the "crick" run, i do not know. probably not; his abilities did not lie much in the field of athletics. but he got on capitally with his work, and seldom returned home without one or more prizes. moreover, he conducted himself so well that he never had to enter that dreaded chamber, well known to _some_ rugbeians, which is approached by a staircase that winds up a little turret, and wherein are enacted scenes better imagined than described. [illustration: archbishop tait. _from a photograph by messrs. elliott and fry_] a schoolboy's letter home is not, usually, remarkable for the intelligence displayed in it; as a rule it merely leads up with more or less ingenuity to the inevitable request for money contained in the postscript. some of charles's letters were of a different sort, as the following example shows: yesterday evening i was walking out with a friend of mine who attends as mathematical pupil mr. smythies the second mathematical master; we went up to mr. smythies' house, as he wanted to speak to him, and he asked us to stop and have a glass of wine and some figs. he seems as devoted to his duty as mr. mayor, and asked me with a smile of delight, "well dodgson i suppose you're getting well on with your mathematics?" he is very clever at them, though not equal to mr. mayor, as indeed few men are, papa excepted.... i have read the first number of dickens' new tale, "davy copperfield." it purports to be his life, and begins with his birth and childhood; it seems a poor plot, but some of the characters and scenes are good. one of the persons that amused me was a mrs. gummidge, a wretched melancholy person, who is always crying, happen what will, and whenever the fire smokes, or other trifling accident occurs, makes the remark with great bitterness, and many tears, that she is a "lone lorn creetur, and everything goes contrairy with her." i have not yet been able to get the second volume macaulay's "england" to read. i have seen it however and one passage struck me when seven bishops had signed the invitation to the pretender, and king james sent for bishop compton (who was one of the seven) and asked him "whether he or any of his ecclesiastical brethren had anything to do with it?" he replied, after a moment's thought "i am fully persuaded your majesty, that there is not one of my brethren who is not as innocent in the matter as myself." this was certainly no actual lie, but certainly, as macaulay says, it was very little different from one. the mr. mayor who is mentioned in this letter formed a very high opinion of his pupil's ability, for in he wrote to archdeacon dodgson: "i have not had a more promising boy at his age since i came to rugby." dr. tait speaks no less warmly:-- my dear sir,--i must not allow your son to leave school without expressing to you the very high opinion i entertain of him. i fully coincide in mr. cotton's estimate both of his abilities and upright conduct. his mathematical knowledge is great for his age, and i doubt not he will do himself credit in classics. as i believe i mentioned to you before, his examination for the divinity prize was one of the most creditable exhibitions i have ever seen. during the whole time of his being in my house, his conduct has been excellent. believe me to be, my dear sir, yours very faithfully, a.c. tait. public school life then was not what it is now; the atrocious system then in vogue of setting hundreds of lines for the most trifling offences made every day a weariness and a hopeless waste of time, while the bad discipline which was maintained in the dormitories made even the nights intolerable--especially for the small boys, whose beds in winter were denuded of blankets that the bigger ones might not feel cold. charles kept no diary during his time at rugby; but, looking back upon it, he writes in :-- during my stay i made i suppose some progress in learning of various kinds, but none of it was done _con amore_, and i spent an incalculable time in writing out impositions--this last i consider one of the chief faults of rugby school. i made some friends there, the most intimate being henry leigh bennett (as college acquaintances we find fewer common sympathies, and are consequently less intimate)--but i cannot say that i look back upon my life at a public school with any sensations of pleasure, or that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again. when, some years afterwards, he visited radley school, he was much struck by the cubicle system which prevails in the dormitories there, and wrote in his diary, "i can say that if i had been thus secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear." the picture on page was, i believe, drawn by charles rile he was at rugby in illustration of a letter received from one of his sisters. halnaby, as i have said before, was an outlying district of croft parish. during his holidays he used to amuse himself by editing local magazines. indeed, they might be called _very local_ magazines, as their circulation was confined to the inmates of croft rectory. the first of these, _useful and instructive poetry_, was written about . it came to an untimely end after a six months' run, and was followed at varying intervals by several other periodicals, equally short-lived. in or , _the rectory umbrella_ began to appear. as the editor was by this time seventeen or eighteen years old, it was naturally of a more ambitious character than any of its precursors. it contained a serial story of the most thrilling interest, entitled, "the walking-stick of destiny," some meritorious poetry, a few humorous essays, and several caricatures of pictures in the vernon gallery. three reproductions of these pictures follow, with extracts from the _umbrella_ descriptive of them. [illustration: the only sister who _would_ write to her brother, though the table had just "folded down"! the other sisters are depicted "sternly resolved to set off to halnaby & the castle," tho' it is yet "early, early morning"--rembrondt.] the vernon gallery. as our readers will have seen by the preceding page, we have commenced engraving the above series of pictures. "the age of innocence," by sir j. reynolds, representing a young hippopotamus seated under a shady tree, presents to the contemplative mind a charming union of youth and innocence. editor. [illustration: _"the scanty meal."_] we have been unusually[ ] successful in our second engraving from the vernon gallery. the picture is intended, as our readers will perceive, to illustrate the evils of homoeopathy.[ ] this idea is well carried out through the whole picture. the thin old lady at the head of the table is in the painter's best style; we almost fancy we can trace in the eye of the other lady a lurking suspicion that her glasses are not really in fault, and that the old gentleman has helped her to _nothing_ instead of a nonillionth.[ ] her companion has evidently got an empty glass in his hand; the two children in front are admirably managed, and there is a sly smile on the footman's face, as if he thoroughly enjoyed either the bad news he is bringing or the wrath of his mistress. the carpet is executed with that elaborate care for which mr. herring is so famed, and the picture on the whole is one of his best. "_the first ear-ring_" the scene from which this excellent picture is painted is taken from a passage in the autobiography[ ] of the celebrated sir william smith[ ] of his life when a schoolboy: we transcribe the passage: "one day bill tomkins[ ] and i were left alone in the house, the old doctor being out; after playing a number of pranks bill laid me a bet of sixpence that i wouldn't pour a bottle of ink over the doctor's cat. _i did it_, but at that moment old muggles came home, and caught me by the ear as i attempted to run away. my sensations at the moment i shall never forget; _on that occasion i received my first ear-ring_.[ ] the only remark bill made to me, as he paid me the money afterwards was, 'i say, didn't you just howl jolly!'" the engraving is an excellent copy of the picture. [illustration: sir d. wilkie painter the first earring. w. greatbach engraver. _from the picture in the vernon gallery_] the best thing in the _rectory umbrella_ was a parody on lord macaulay's style in the "lays of ancient rome"; charles had a special aptitude for parody, as is evidenced by several of the best-known verses in his later books. lays of sorrow. no. . fair stands the ancient[ ] rectory, the rectory of croft, the sun shines bright upon it, the breezes whisper soft. from all the house and garden its inhabitants come forth, and muster in the road without, and pace in twos and threes about, the children of the north. some are waiting in the garden, some are waiting at the door, and some are following behind, and some have gone before. but wherefore all this mustering? wherefore this vast array? a gallant feat of horsemanship will be performed to-day. to eastward and to westward, the crowd divides amain, two youths are leading on the steed, both tugging at the rein; and sorely do they labour, for the steed[ ] is very strong, and backward moves its stubborn feet, and backward ever doth retreat, and drags its guides along. and now the knight hath mounted, before the admiring band, hath got the stirrups on his feet. the bridle in his hand. yet, oh! beware, sir horseman! and tempt thy fate no more, for such a steed as thou hast got, was never rid before! the rabbits[ ] bow before thee. and cower in the straw; the chickens[ ] are submissive, and own thy will for law; bullfinches and canary thy bidding do obey; and e'en the tortoise in its shell doth never say thee nay. but thy steed will hear no master, thy steed will bear no stick, and woe to those that beat her, and woe to those that kick![ ] for though her rider smite her, as hard as he can hit, and strive to turn her from the yard, she stands in silence, pulling hard against the pulling bit. and now the road to dalton hath felt their coming tread, the crowd are speeding on before, and all have gone ahead. yet often look they backward, and cheer him on, and bawl, for slower still, and still more slow, that horseman and that charger go, and scarce advance at all. and now two roads to choose from are in that rider's sight: in front the road to dalton, and new croft upon the right. "i can't get by!" he bellows, "i really am not able! though i pull my shoulder out of joint, i cannot get him past this point, for it leads unto his stable!" then out spake ulfrid longbow,[ ] a valiant youth was he, "lo! i will stand on thy right hand and guard the pass for thee!" and out spake fair flureeza,[ ] his sister eke was she, "i will abide on thy other side, and turn thy steed for thee!" and now commenced a struggle between that steed and rider, for all the strength that he hath left doth not suffice to guide her. though ulfrid and his sister have kindly stopped the way, and all the crowd have cried aloud, "we can't wait here all day!" round turned he as not deigning their words to understand, but he slipped the stirrups from his feet the bridle from his hand, and grasped the mane full lightly, and vaulted from his seat, and gained the road in triumph,[ ] and stood upon his feet. all firmly till that moment had ulfrid longbow stood, and faced the foe right valiantly, as every warrior should. but when safe on terra firma his brother he did spy, "what _did_ you do that for?" he cried, then unconcerned he stepped aside and let it canter by. they gave him bread and butter,[ ] that was of public right, as much as four strong rabbits, could munch from morn to night, for he'd done a deed of daring, and faced that savage steed, and therefore cups of coffee sweet, and everything that was a treat, were but his right and meed. and often in the evenings, when the fire is blazing bright, when books bestrew the table and moths obscure the light, when crying children go to bed, a struggling, kicking load; we'll talk of ulfrid longbow's deed, how, in his brother's utmost need, back to his aid he flew with speed, and how he faced the fiery steed, and kept the new croft road. [illustration: exterior of christ church] * * * * * chapter ii ( - .) matriculation at christ church--death of mrs. dodgson--the great exhibition--university and college honours--a wonderful year--a theatrical treat--_misch-masch--the train--college rhymes_--his _nom de plume_--"dotheboys hall"--alfred tennyson--ordination--sermons--a visit to farringford--"where does the day begin?"--the queen visits oxford. we have traced in the boyhood of lewis carroll the beginnings of those characteristic traits which afterwards, more fully developed, gave him so distinguished a position among his contemporaries. we now come to a period of his life which is in some respects necessarily less interesting. we all have to pass through that painful era of self-consciousness which prefaces manhood, that time when we feel so deeply, and are so utterly unable to express to others, or even to define clearly to ourselves, what it is we do feel. the natural freedom of childhood is dead within us; the conventional freedom of riper years is struggling to birth, and its efforts are sometimes ludicrous to an unsympathetic observer. in lewis carroll's mental attitude during this critical period there was always a calm dignity which saved him from these absurdities, an undercurrent of consciousness that what seemed so great to him was really very little. on may , , he matriculated at christ church, the venerable college which had numbered his father's among other illustrious names. a letter from dr. jelf, one of the canons of christ church, to archdeacon dodgson, written when the former heard that his old friend's son was coming up to "the house," contains the following words: "i am sure i express the common feeling of all who remember you at christ church when i say that we shall rejoice to see a son of yours worthy to tread in your footsteps." lewis carroll came into residence on january , . from that day to the hour of his death--a period of forty-seven years--he belonged to "the house," never leaving it for any length of time, becoming almost a part of it. i, for one, can hardly imagine it without him. though technically "in residence," he had not rooms of his own in college during his first term. the "house" was very full; and had it not been for one of the tutors, the rev. j. lew, kindly lending him one of his own rooms, he would have had to take lodgings in the town. the first set of rooms he occupied was in peckwater quadrangle, which is annually the scene of a great bonfire on guy fawkes' day, and, generally speaking, is not the best place for a reading man to live in. in those days the undergraduates dining in hall were divided into "messes." each mess consisted of about half a dozen men, who had a table to themselves. dinner was served at five, and very indifferently served, too; the dishes and plates were of pewter, and the joint was passed round, each man cutting off what he wanted for himself. in mr. dodgson's mess were philip pusey, the late rev. g. c. woodhouse, and, among others, one who still lives in "alice in wonderland" as the "hatter." only a few days after term began, mrs. dodgson died suddenly at croft. the shock was a terrible one to the whole family, and especially to her devoted husband. i have come across a delightful and most characteristic letter from dr. pusey--a letter full of the kindest and truest sympathy with the archdeacon in his bereavement. the part of it which bears upon mrs. dodgson's death i give in full:-- [illustration: grave of archdeacon and mrs. dodgson in croft churchyard.] my dear friend, i hear and see so little and so few persons, that i had not heard of your sorrow until your to-day's letter; and now i but guess what it was: only your language is that of the very deepest. i have often thought, since i had to think of this, how, in all adversity, what god takes away he may give us back with increase. one cannot think that any holy earthly love will cease, when we shall "be like the angels of god in heaven." love here must shadow our love there, deeper because spiritual, without any alloy from our sinful nature, and in the fulness of the love of god. but as we grow here by god's grace will be our capacity for endless love. so, then, if by our very sufferings we are purified, and our hearts enlarged, we shall, in that endless bliss, love more those whom we loved here, than if we had never had that sorrow, never been parted.... lewis carroll was summoned home to attend the funeral--a sad interlude amidst the novel experiences of a first term at college. the oxford of was in many ways quite unlike the oxford of . the position of the undergraduates was much more similar to that of schoolboys than is now the case; they were subject to the same penalties--corporal punishment, even, had only just gone out of vogue!--and were expected to work, and to work hard. early rising then was strictly enforced, as the following extract from one of his letters will show:-- i am not so anxious as usual to begin my personal history, as the first thing i have to record is a very sad incident, namely, my missing morning chapel; before, however, you condemn me, you must hear how accidental it was. for some days now i have been in the habit of, i will not say getting up, but of being called at a quarter past six, and generally managing to be down soon after seven. in the present instance i had been up the night before till about half-past twelve, and consequently when i was called i fell asleep again, and was thunderstruck to find on waking that it was ten minutes past eight. i have had no imposition, nor heard anything about it. it is rather vexatious to have happened so soon, as i had intended never to be late. [illustration: lewis carroll, aged .] it was therefore obviously his custom to have his breakfast _before_ going to chapel. i wonder how many undergraduates of the present generation follow the same hardy rule! but then no "impositions" threaten the modern sluggard, even if he neglects chapel altogether. during the long vacation he visited the great exhibition, and wrote his sister elizabeth a long account of what he had seen:-- i think the first impression produced on you when you get inside is one of bewilderment. it looks like a sort of fairyland. as far as you can look in any direction, you see nothing but pillars hung about with shawls, carpets, &c., with long avenues of statues, fountains, canopies, etc., etc., etc. the first thing to be seen on entering is the crystal fountain, a most elegant one about thirty feet high at a rough guess, composed entirely of glass and pouring down jets of water from basin to basin; this is in the middle of the centre nave, and from it you can look down to either end, and up both transepts. the centre of the nave mostly consists of a long line of colossal statues, some most magnificent. the one considered the finest, i believe, is the amazon and tiger. she is sitting on horseback, and a tiger has fastened on the neck of the horse in front. you have to go to one side to see her face, and the other to see the horse's. the horse's face is really wonderful, expressing terror and pain so exactly, that you almost expect to hear it scream.... there are some very ingenious pieces of mechanism. a tree (in the french compartment) with birds chirping and hopping from branch to branch exactly like life. the bird jumps across, turns round on the other branch, so as to face back again, settles its head and neck, and then in a few moments jumps back again. a bird standing at the foot of the tree trying to eat a beetle is rather a failure; it never succeeds in getting its head more than a quarter of an inch down, and that in uncomfortable little jerks, as if it was choking. i have to go to the royal academy, so must stop: as the subject is quite inexhaustible, there is no hope of ever coming to a regular finish. on november st he won a boulter scholarship, and at the end of the following year obtained first class honours in mathematics and a second in classical moderations. on christmas eve he was made a student on dr. pusey's nomination, for at that time the dean and canons nominated to studentships by turn. the only conditions on which these old studentships were held were that the student should remain unmarried, and should proceed to holy orders. no statute precisely defined what work was expected of them, that question being largely left to their own discretion. the eight students at the bottom of the list that is to say, the eight who had been nominated last--had to mark, by pricking on weekly papers called "the bills," the attendance at morning and evening chapel. they were allowed to arrange this duty among themselves, and, if it was neglected, they were all punished. this long-defunct custom explains an entry in lewis carroll's diary for october , , "found i had got the prickbills two hundred lines apiece, by not pricking in in the morning," which, i must confess, mystified me exceedingly at first. another reference to college impositions occurs further on in his diary, at a time when he was a lecturer: "spoke to the dean about f--, who has brought an imposition which his tutor declares is not his own writing, after being expressly told to write it himself." the following is an extract from his father's letter of congratulation, on his being nominated for the studentship:-- my dearest charles,--the feelings of thankfulness and delight with which i have read your letter just received, i must leave to _your conception_; for they are, i assure you, beyond _my expression_; and your affectionate heart will derive no small addition of joy from thinking of the joy which you have occasioned to me, and to all the circle of your home. i say "_you_ have occasioned," because, grateful as i am to my old friend dr. pusey for what he has done, i cannot desire stronger evidence than his own words of the fact that you have _won_, and well won, this honour for _yourself_, and that it is bestowed as a matter of _justice_ to _you_, and not of _kindness_ to _me_. you will be interested in reading extracts from his two letters to me--the first written three years ago in answer to one from me, in which i distinctly told him that i neither asked nor expected that he should serve me in this matter, unless my son should fairly reach the standard of merit by which these appointments were regulated. in reply he says-- "i thank you for the way in which you put the application to me. i have now, for nearly twenty years, not given a studentship to any friend of my own, unless there was no very eligible person in the college. i have passed by or declined the sons of those to whom i was personally indebted for kindness. i can only say that i shall have _very great_ pleasure, if circumstances permit me to nominate your son." in his letter received this morning he says-- "i have great pleasure in telling you that i have been enabled to recommend your son for a studentship this christmas. it must be so much more satisfactory to you that he should be nominated thus, in consequence of the recommendation of the college. one of the censors brought me to-day five names; but in their minds it was plain that they thought your son on the whole the most eligible for the college. it has been very satisfactory to hear of your son's uniform steady and good conduct." the last clause is a parallel to your own report, and i am glad that you should have had so soon an evidence so substantial of the truth of what i have so often inculcated, that it is the "steady, painstaking, likely-to-do-good" man, who in the long run wins the race against those who now and then give a brilliant flash and, as shakespeare says, "straight are cold again." [illustration: archdeacon dodgson.] in archdeacon dodgson was collated and installed as one of the canons of ripon cathedral. this appointment necessitated a residence of three months in every year at ripon, where dr. erskine was then dean. a certain miss anderson, who used to stay at the deanery, had very remarkable "clairvoyant" powers; she was able--it was averred--by merely holding in her hand a folded paper containing some words written by a person unknown to her, to describe his or her character. in this way, at what precise date is uncertain, she dictated the following description of lewis carroll: "very clever head; a great deal of number; a great deal of imitation; he would make a good actor; diffident; rather shy in general society; comes out in the home circle; rather obstinate; very clever; a great deal of concentration; very affectionate; a great deal of wit and humour; not much eventuality (or memory of events); fond of deep reading; imaginative, fond, of reading poetry; _may_ compose." those who knew him well will agree that this was, at any rate, a remarkable coincidence. longley, afterwards primate, was then bishop of ripon. his charming character endeared him to the archdeacon and his family, as to every one else who saw much of him. he was one of the few men whose faces can truly be called _beautiful_; it was a veil through which a soul, all gentleness and truth, shone brightly. in the early part of mr. dodgson was reading hard for "greats." for the last three weeks before the examination he worked thirteen hours a day, spending the whole night before the _viva voce_ over his books. but philosophy and history were not very congenial subjects to him, and when the list was published his name was only in the third class. [illustration: archbishop longley.] he spent the long vacation at whitby, reading mathematics with professor price. his work bore good fruit, for in october he obtained first class honours in the final mathematical school. "i am getting quite tired of being congratulated on various subjects," he writes; "there seems to be no end of it. if i had shot the dean i could hardly have had more said about it." in another letter dated december th, he says: enclosed you will find a list which i expect you to rejoice over considerably; it will take me more than a day to believe it, i expect--i feel at present very like a child with a new toy, but i daresay i shall be tired of it soon, and wish to be pope of rome next.... i have just been to mr. price to see how i did in the papers, and the result will i hope be gratifying to you. the following were the sums total for each in the first class, as nearly as i can remember:-- dodgson ... ... ... bosanquet ... ... ... cookson ... ... ... fowler ... ... ... ranken ... ... ... he also said he never remembered so good a set of men in. all this is very satisfactory. i must also add (this is a very boastful letter) that i ought to get the senior scholarship next term.... one thing more i will add, to crown all, and that is, i find i am the next first class mathematical student to faussett (with the exception of kitchin who has given up mathematics), so that i stand next (as bosanquet is going to leave) for the lectureship. on december th he took the degree of bachelor of arts, and on october , , he was made a "master of the house," in honour of the appointment of the new dean (dr. liddell) who succeeded dean gaisford. to be made master of the house means that a man has all the privileges of a master of arts within the walls of christ church. but he must be of a certain number of terms' standing, and be admitted in due form by the vice-chancellor, before he is a master of arts of the university. in this wider sense mr. dodgson did not take his master's degree until . this is anticipating events, and there is much to tell of the year , which was a very eventful one for him. on february th he was made sub-librarian. "this will add £ to my income," he writes, "not much towards independence." for he was most anxious to have a sufficient income to make him his own master, that he might enter on the literary and artistic career of which he was already dreaming. on may th he wrote in his diary: "the dean and canons have been pleased to give me one of the bostock scholarships, said to be worth £ a year--this very nearly raises my income this year to independence. courage!" his college work, during , was chiefly taking private pupils, but he had, in addition, about three and a half hours a day of lecturing during the last term of the year. he did not, however, work as one of the regular staff of lecturers until the next year. from that date his work rapidly increased, and he soon had to devote regularly as much as seven hours a day to delivering lectures, to say nothing of the time required for preparing them. the following extract from his journal, june , , will serve to show his early love for the drama. the scene is laid at the princess' theatre, then at the height of its glory:-- the evening began with a capital farce, "away with melancholy," and then came the great play, "henry viii.," the greatest theatrical treat i ever had or ever expect to have. i had no idea that anything so superb as the scenery and dresses was ever to be seen on the stage. kean was magnificent as cardinal wolsey, mrs. kean a worthy successor to mrs. siddons as queen catherine, and all the accessories without exception were good--but oh, that exquisite vision of queen catherine's! i almost held my breath to watch: the illusion is perfect, and i felt as if in a dream all the time it lasted. it was like a delicious reverie, or the most beautiful poetry. this is the true end and object of acting--to raise the mind above itself, and out of its petty cares. never shall i forget that wonderful evening, that exquisite vision--sunbeams broke in through the roof, and gradually revealed two angel forms, floating in front of the carved work on the ceiling: the column of sunbeams shone down upon the sleeping queen, and gradually down it floated, a troop of angelic forms, transparent, and carrying palm branches in their hands: they waved these over the sleeping queen, with oh! such a sad and solemn grace. so could i fancy (if the thought be not profane) would real angels seem to our mortal vision, though doubtless our conception is poor and mean to the reality. she in an ecstasy raises her arms towards them, and to sweet slow music, they vanish as marvellously as they came. then the profound silence of the audience burst at once into a rapture of applause; but even that scarcely marred the effect of the beautiful sad waking words of the queen, "spirits of peace, where are ye?" i never enjoyed anything so much in my life before; and never felt so inclined to shed tears at anything fictitious, save perhaps at that poetical gem of dickens, the death of little paul. on august st he received a long letter from his father, full of excellent advice on the importance to a young man of saving money:-- i will just sketch for you [writes the archdeacon] a supposed case, applicable to your own circumstances, of a young man of twenty-three, making up his mind to work for ten years, and living to do it, on an income enabling him to save £ a year--supposing him to appropriate it thus:-- £ s. d. invested at per cent. ... ... life insurance of £ , ... books, besides those bought in ordinary course ... ... ... _____________ £ suppose him at the end of the ten years to get a living enabling him to settle, what will be the result of his savings:-- . a nest egg of £ , ready money, for furnishing and other expenses. . a sum of £ , secured at his death on payment of a _very much_ smaller annual premium than if he had then begun to insure it. . a useful library, worth more than £ , besides the books bought out of his current income during the period.... the picture on the opposite page is one of mr. dodgson's illustrations in _misch-masch,_ a periodical of the nature of _the rectory umbrella_, except that it contained printed stories and poems by the editor, cut out of the various newspapers to which he had contributed them. of the comic papers of that day _punch,_ of course, held the foremost place, but it was not without rivals; there was a certain paper called _diogenes_, then very near its end, which imitated _punch's_ style, and in the proprietor of _the illustrated news_, at that time one of the most opulent publishers in london, started _the comic times._ a capable editor was found in edmund yates; "phiz" and other well-known artists and writers joined the staff, and , copies of the first number were printed. [illustration: studies from english poets ii "alas! what boots--" milton's lucidas.] among the contributors was frank smedley, author of "frank fairleigh." though a confirmed invalid, and condemned to spend most of his days on a sofa, mr. smedley managed to write several fine novels, full of the joy of life, and free from the least taint of discontent or morbid feeling. he was one of those men--one meets them here and there--whose minds rise high above their bodily infirmities; at moments of depression, which come to them as frequently, if not more frequently, than to other men, they no doubt feel their weakness, and think themselves despised, little knowing that we, the stronger ones in body, feel nothing but admiration as we watch the splendid victory of the soul over its earthly companion which their lives display. it was through frank smedley that mr. dodgson became one of the contributors to _the comic times_. several of his poems appeared in it, and mr. yates wrote to him in the kindest manner, expressing warm approval of them. when _the comic times_ changed hands in , and was reduced to half its size, the whole staff left it and started a new venture, _the train_. they were joined by sala, whose stories in _household words_ were at that time usually ascribed by the uninitiated to charles dickens. mr. dodgson's contributions to _the train_ included the following: "solitude" (march, ); "novelty and romancement" (october, ); "the three voices" (november, ); "the sailor's wife" (may, ); and last, but by no means least, "hiawatha's photographing" (december, ). all of these, except "novelty and romancement," have since been republished in "rhyme? and reason?" and "three sunsets." the last entry in mr. dodgson's diary for this year reads as follows:-- i am sitting alone in my bedroom this last night of the old year, waiting for midnight. it has been the most eventful year of my life: i began it a poor bachelor student, with no definite plans or expectations; i end it a master and tutor in ch. ch., with an income of more than £ a year, and the course of mathematical tuition marked out by god's providence for at least some years to come. great mercies, great failings, time lost, talents misapplied--such has been the past year. his diary is full of such modest depreciations of himself and his work, interspersed with earnest prayers (too sacred and private to be reproduced here) that god would forgive him the past, and help him to perform his holy will in the future. and all the time that he was thus speaking of himself as a sinner, and a man who was utterly falling short of his aim, he was living a life full of good deeds and innumerable charities, a life of incessant labour and unremitting fulfilment of duty. so, i suppose, it is always with those who have a really high ideal; the harder they try to approach it the more it seems to recede from them, or rather, perhaps, it is impossible to be both "the subject and spectator" of goodness. as coventry patmore wrote:-- become whatever good you see; nor sigh if, forthwith, fades from view the grace of which you may not be the subject and spectator too. the reading of "alton locke" turned his mind towards social subjects. "if the book were but a little more definite," he writes, "it might stir up many fellow-workers in the same good field of social improvement. oh that god, in his good providence, may make me hereafter such a worker! but alas, what are the means? each one has his own _nostrum_ to propound, and in the babel of voices nothing is done. i would thankfully spend and be spent so long as i were sure of really effecting something by the sacrifice, and not merely lying down under the wheels of some irresistible juggernaut." he was for some time the editor of _college rhymes_, a christ church paper, in which his poem, "a sea dirge" (afterwards republished in "phantasmagoria," and again in "rhyme? and reason?"), first appeared. the following verses were among his contributions to the same magazine:-- i painted her a gushing thing, with years perhaps a score i little thought to find they were at least a dozen more; my fancy gave her eyes of blue, a curly auburn head: i came to find the blue a green, the auburn turned to red. she boxed my ears this morning, they tingled very much; i own that i could wish her a somewhat lighter touch; and if you were to ask me how her charms might be improved, i would not have them _added to_, but just a few _removed_! she has the bear's ethereal grace, the bland hyena's laugh, the footstep of the elephant, the neck of the giraffe; i love her still, believe me, though my heart its passion hides; "she is all my fancy painted her," but oh! _how much besides_! it was when writing for _the train_ that he first felt the need of a pseudonym. he suggested "dares" (the first syllable of his birthplace) to edmund yates, but, as this did not meet with his editor's approval, he wrote again, giving a choice of four names, ( ) edgar cuthwellis, ( ) edgar u. c. westhall, ( ) louis carroll, and ( ) lewis carroll. the first two were formed from the letters of his two christian names, charles lutwidge; the others are merely variant forms of those names--lewis = ludovicus = lutwidge; carroll = carolus = charles. mr. yates chose the last, and thenceforward it became mr. dodgson's ordinary _nom de plume_. the first occasion on which he used it was, i believe, when he wrote "the path of roses," a poem which appeared in _the train_ in may, . on june th he again visited the princess's theatre. this time the play was "a winter's tale," and he "especially admired the acting of the little mamillius, ellen terry, a beautiful little creature, who played with remarkable ease and spirit." during the long vacation he spent a few weeks in the english lake district. in spite of the rain, of which he had his full share, he managed to see a good deal of the best scenery, and made the ascent of gable in the face of an icy gale, which laid him up with neuralgia for some days. he and his companions returned to croft by way of barnard castle, as he narrates in his diary:-- we set out by coach for barnard castle at about seven, and passed over about forty miles of the dreariest hill-country i ever saw; the climax of wretchedness was reached in bowes, where yet stands the original of "dotheboys hall"; it has long ceased to be used as a school, and is falling into ruin, in which the whole place seems to be following its example--the roofs are falling in, and the windows broken or barricaded--the whole town looks plague-stricken. the courtyard of the inn we stopped at was grown over with weeds, and a mouthing idiot lolled against the corner of the house, like the evil genius of the spot. next to a prison or a lunatic asylum, preserve me from living at bowes! although he was anything but a sportsman, he was interested in the subject of betting, from a mathematical standpoint solely, and in he sent a letter to _bell's life_, explaining a method by which a betting man might ensure winning over any race. the system was either to back _every_ horse, or to lay against _every_ horse, according to the way the odds added up. he showed his scheme to a sporting friend, who remarked, "an excellent system, and you're bound to win--_if only you can get people to take your bets_." in the same year he made the acquaintance of tennyson, whose writings he had long intensely admired. he thus describes the poet's appearance:-- a strange shaggy-looking man; his hair, moustache, and beard looked wild and neglected; these very much hid the character of the face. he was dressed in a loosely fitting morning coat, common grey flannel waistcoat and trousers, and a carelessly tied black silk neckerchief. his hair is black; i think the eyes too; they are keen and restless--nose aquiline--forehead high and broad--both face and head are fine and manly. his manner was kind and friendly from the first; there is a dry lurking humour in his style of talking. i took the opportunity [he goes on to say] of asking the meaning of two passages in his poems, which have always puzzled me: one in "maud"-- strange that i hear two men somewhere talking of me; well, if it prove a girl, my boy will have plenty; so let it be. he said it referred to maud, and to the two fathers arranging a match between himself and her. the other was of the poet-- dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love. he said that he was quite willing it should bear any meaning the words would fairly bear; to the best of his recollection his meaning when he wrote it was "the hate of the quality hate, &c.," but he thought the meaning of "the quintessence of hatred" finer. he said there had never been a poem so misunderstood by the "ninnies of critics" as "maud." [illustration: alfred tennyson. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] during an evening spent at tent lodge tennyson remarked, on the similarity of the monkey's skull to the human, that a young monkey's skull is quite human in shape, and gradually alters--the analogy being borne out by the human skull being at first more like the statues of the gods, and gradually degenerating into human; and then, turning to mrs. tennyson, "there, that's the second original remark i've made this evening!" mr. dodgson saw a great deal of the tennysons after this, and photographed the poet himself and various members of his family. in october he made the acquaintance of john ruskin, who in after years was always willing to assist him with his valuable advice on any point of artistic criticism. mr. dodgson was singularly fortunate in his friends; whenever he was in difficulties on any technical matters, whether of religion, law, medicine, art, or whatever it might be, he always had some one especially distinguished in that branch of study whose aid he could seek as a friend. in particular, the names of canon king (now bishop of lincoln), and sir james paget occur to me; to the latter mr. dodgson addressed many letters on questions of medicine and surgery--some of them intricate enough, but never too intricate to weary the unfailing patience of the great surgeon. a note in mr. dodgson's journal, may , , describes his introduction to thackeray:-- i breakfasted this morning with fowler of lincoln to meet thackeray (the author), who delivered his lecture on george iii. in oxford last night. i was much pleased with what i saw of him; his manner is simple and unaffected; he shows no anxiety to shine in conversation, though full of fun and anecdote when drawn out. he seemed delighted with the reception he had met with last night: the undergraduates seem to have behaved with most unusual moderation. the next few years of his life passed quietly, and without any unusual events to break the monotony of college routine. he spent his mornings in the lecture-rooms, his afternoons in the country or on the river--he was very fond of boating--and his evenings in his room, reading and preparing for the next day's work. but in spite of all this outward calm of life, his mind was very much exercised on the subject of taking holy orders. not only was this step necessary if he wished to retain his studentship, but also he felt that it would give him much more influence among the undergraduates, and thus increase his power of doing good. on the other hand, he was not prepared to live the life of almost puritanical strictness which was then considered essential for a clergyman, and he saw that the impediment of speech from which he suffered would greatly interfere with the proper performance of his clerical duties. [illustration: the bishop of lincoln. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_] the bishop of oxford, dr. wilberforce, had expressed the opinion that the "resolution to attend theatres or operas was an absolute disqualification for holy orders," which discouraged him very much, until it transpired that this statement was only meant to refer to the parochial clergy. he discussed the matter with dr. pusey, and with dr. liddon. the latter said that "he thought a deacon might lawfully, if he found himself unfit for the work, abstain from direct ministerial duty." and so, with many qualms about his own unworthiness, he at last decided to prepare definitely for ordination. on december , , he was ordained deacon by the bishop of oxford. he never proceeded to priest's orders, partly, i think, because he felt that if he were to do so it would be his duty to undertake regular parochial work, and partly on account of his stammering. he used, however, to preach not unfrequently, and his sermons were always delightful to listen to, his extreme earnestness being evident in every word. [illustration: bishop wilberforce. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] "he knew exactly what he wished to say" (i am quoting from an article in _the guardian_), "and completely forgot his audience in his anxiety to explain his point clearly. he thought of the subject only, and the words came of themselves. looking straight in front of him he saw, as it were, his argument mapped out in the form of a diagram, and he set to work to prove it point by point, under its separate heads, and then summed up the whole." one sermon which he preached in the university church, on eternal punishment, is not likely to be soon forgotten by those who heard it. i, unfortunately, was not of that number, but i can well imagine how his clear-cut features would light up as he dwelt lovingly upon the mercy of that being whose charity far exceeds "the measure of man's mind." it is hardly necessary to say that he himself did not believe in eternal punishment, or any other scholastic doctrine that contravenes the love of god. he disliked being complimented on his sermons, but he liked to be told of any good effects that his words had had upon any member of the congregation. "thank you for telling me that fact about my sermon," he wrote to one of his sisters, who told him of some such good fruit that one of his addresses had borne. "i have once or twice had such information volunteered; and it is a _great_ comfort--and a kind of thing that is _really_ good for one to know. it is _not_ good to be told (and i never wish to be told), 'your sermon was so _beautiful_.' we shall not be concerned to know, in the great day, whether we have preached beautiful sermons, but whether they were preached with the one object of serving god." he was always ready and willing to preach at the special service for college servants, which used to be held at christ church every sunday evening; but best of all he loved to preach to children. some of his last sermons were delivered at christ church, eastbourne (the church he regularly attended during the long vacation), to a congregation of children. on those occasions he told them an allegory--_victor and arnion,_ which he intended to publish in course of time--putting all his heart into the work, and speaking with such deep feeling that at times he was almost unable to control his emotion as he told them of the love and compassion of the good shepherd. i have dwelt at some length on this side of his life, for it is, i am sure, almost ignored in the popular estimate of him. he was essentially a religious man in the best sense of the term, and without any of that morbid sentimentality which is too often associated with the word; and while his religion consecrated his talents, and raised him to a height which without it he could never have reached, the example of such a man as he was, so brilliant, so witty, so successful, and yet so full of faith, consecrates the very conception of religion, and makes it yet more beautiful. on april , , he paid another visit to tennyson, this time at farringford. after dinner we retired for about an hour to the smoking-room, where i saw the proof-sheets of the "king's idylls," but he would not let me read them. he walked through the garden with me when i left, and made me remark an effect produced on the thin white clouds by the moon shining through, which i had not noticed--a ring of golden light at some distance off the moon, with an interval of white between--this, he says, he has alluded to in one of his early poems ("margaret," vol. i.), "the tender amber." i asked his opinion of sydney dobell--he agrees with me in liking "grass from the battlefield," and thinks him a writer of genius and imagination, but extravagant. on another occasion he showed the poet a photograph which he had taken of miss alice liddell as a beggar-child, and which tennyson said was the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen. [illustration: alice liddell as beggar-child. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] tennyson told us he had often dreamed long passages of poetry, and believed them to be good at the time, though he could never remember them after waking, except four lines which he dreamed at ten years old:-- may a cock sparrow write to a barrow? i hope you'll excuse my infantile muse; --which, as an unpublished fragment of the poet laureate, may be thought interesting, but not affording much promise of his after powers. he also told us he once dreamed an enormously long poem about fairies, which began with very long lines that gradually got shorter, and ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each! on october , , the prince of wales came into residence at christ church. the dean met him at the station, and all the dons assembled in tom quadrangle to welcome him. mr. dodgson, as usual, had an eye to a photograph, in which hope, however, he was doomed to disappointment. his royal highness was tired of having his picture taken. during his early college life he used often to spend a few days at hastings, with his mother's sisters, the misses lutwidge. in a letter written from their house to his sister mary, and dated april , , he gives an account of a lecture he had just heard:-- i am just returned from a series of dissolving views on the arctic regions, and, while the information there received is still fresh in my mind, i will try to give you some of it. in the first place, you may not know that one of the objects of the arctic expeditions was to discover "the intensity of the magnetic needle." he [the lecturer] did not tell us, however, whether they had succeeded in discovering it, or whether that rather obscure question is still doubtful. one of the explorers, baffin, "_though_ he did not suffer all the hardships the others did, _yet_ he came to an untimely end (of course one would think in the arctic regions), _for instance_ (what follows being, i suppose, one of the untimely ends he came to), being engaged in a war of the portuguese against the prussians, while measuring the ground in front of a fortification, a cannon-ball came against him, with the force with which cannon-balls in that day _did_ come, and killed him dead on the spot." how many instances of this kind would you demand to prove that he did come to an untimely end? one of the ships was laid up three years in the ice, during which time, he told us, "summer came and went frequently." this, i think, was the most remarkable phenomenon he mentioned in the whole lecture, and gave _me_ quite a new idea of those regions. on tuesday i went to a concert at st. leonard's. on the front seat sat a youth about twelve years of age, of whom the enclosed is a tolerably accurate sketch. he really was, i think, the ugliest boy i ever saw. i wish i could get an opportunity of photographing him. [illustration: sketch from st. leonard's concert-room.] the following note occurs in his journal for may th:-- a christ church man, named wilmot, who is just returned from the west indies, dined in hall. he told us some curious things about the insects in south america--one that he had himself seen was a spider charming a cockroach with flashes of light; they were both on the wall, the spider about a yard the highest, and the light was like a glow-worm, only that it came by flashes and did not shine continuously; the cockroach gradually crawled up to it, and allowed itself to be taken and killed. a few months afterwards, when in town and visiting mr. munroe's studio, he found there two of the children of mr. george macdonald, whose acquaintance he had already made: "they were a girl and boy, about seven and six years old--i claimed their acquaintance, and began at once proving to the boy, greville, that he had better take the opportunity of having his head changed for a marble one. the effect was that in about two minutes they had entirely forgotten that i was a total stranger, and were earnestly arguing the question as if we were old acquaintances." mr. dodgson urged that a marble head would not have to be brushed and combed. at this the boy turned to his sister with an air of great relief, saying, "do you hear _that_, mary? it needn't be combed!" and the narrator adds, "i have no doubt combing, with his great head of long hair, like hallam tennyson's, was _the_ misery of his life. his final argument was that a marble head couldn't speak, and as i couldn't convince either that he would be all the better for that, i gave in." [illustration: george macdonald and his daughter lily. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] in november he gave a lecture at a meeting of the ashmolean society on "where does the day begin?" the problem, which was one he was very fond of propounding, may be thus stated: if a man could travel round the world so fast that the sun would be always directly above his head, and if he were to start travelling at midday on tuesday, then in twenty-four hours he would return to his original point of departure, and would find that the day was now called wednesday--at what point of his journey would the day change its name? the difficulty of answering this apparently simple question has cast a gloom over many a pleasant party. on december th he wrote in his diary:-- visit of the queen to oxford, to the great surprise of everybody, as it had been kept a secret up to the time. she arrived in christ church about twelve, and came into hall with the dean, where the collections were still going on, about a dozen men being in hall. the party consisted of the queen, prince albert, princess alice and her intended husband, the prince of hesse-darmstadt, the prince of wales, prince alfred, and suite. they remained a minute or two looking at the pictures, and the sub-dean was presented: they then visited the cathedral and library. evening entertainment at the deanery, _tableaux vivants_. i went a little after half-past eight, and found a great party assembled--the prince had not yet come. he arrived before nine, and i found an opportunity of reminding general bruce of his promise to introduce me to the prince, which he did at the next break in the conversation h.r.h. was holding with mrs. fellowes. he shook hands very graciously, and i began with a sort of apology for having been so importunate about the photograph. he said something of the weather being against it, and i asked if the americans had victimised him much as a sitter; he said they had, but he did not think they had succeeded well, and i told him of the new american process of taking twelve thousand photographs in an hour. edith liddell coming by at the moment, i remarked on the beautiful _tableau_ which the children might make: he assented, and also said, in answer to my question, that he had seen and admired my photographs of them. i then said that i hoped, as i had missed the photograph, he would at least give me his autograph in my album, which he promised to do. thinking i had better bring the talk to an end, i concluded by saying that, if he would like copies of any of my photographs, i should feel honoured by his accepting them; he thanked me for this, and i then drew back, as he did not seem inclined to pursue the conversation. a few days afterwards the prince gave him his autograph, and also chose a dozen or so of his photograph (sic). [illustration: mrs. rossetti and her children dante gabriel, christina, and william. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] * * * * * chapter iii ( - ) jowett--index to "in memoriam"--the tennysons--the beginning of "alice"--tenniel--artistic friends--"alice's adventures in wonderland"--"bruno's revenge"--tour with dr. liddon--cologne--berlin architecture--the "majesty of justice"--peterhof--moscow--a russian wedding--nijni--the troitska monastery--"hieroglyphic" writing--giessen. it is my aim in this memoir to let mr. dodgson tell his own story as much as possible. in order to effect this object i have drawn largely upon his diary and correspondence. very few men have left behind them such copious information about their lives as he has; unfortunately it is not equally copious throughout, and this fact must be my apology for the somewhat haphazard and disconnected way in which parts of this book are written. that it is the best which, under the circumstances, i have been able to do needs, i hope, no saying, but the circumstances have at times been too strong for me. though in later years mr. dodgson almost gave up the habit of dining out, at this time of his life he used to do it pretty frequently, and several of the notes in his diary refer to after-dinner and common room stories. the two following extracts will show the sort of facts he recorded:-- _january , ._--mr. grey (canon) came to dine and stay the night. he told me a curious old custom of millers, that they place the sails of the mill as a saint andrew's cross when work is entirely suspended, thus x, but in an upright cross, thus +, if they are just going to resume work. he also mentioned that he was at school with dr. tennyson (father of the poet), and was a great favourite of his. he remembers that tennyson used to do his school-translations in rhyme. _may th._--met in common room rev. c.f. knight, and the hon'ble. f.j. parker, both of boston, u.s. the former gave an amusing account of having seen oliver wendell holmes in a fishmonger's, lecturing _extempore_ on the head of a freshly killed turtle, whose eyes and jaws still showed muscular action: the lecture of course being all "cram," but accepted as sober earnest by the mob outside. old oxford men will remember the controversies that raged from about onwards over the opinions of the late dr. jowett. in my time the name "jowett" only represented the brilliant translator of plato, and the deservedly loved master of balliol, whose sermons in the little college chapel were often attended by other than balliol men, and whose reputation for learning was expressed in the well-known verse of "the masque of balliol":-- first come i, my name is jowett. there's no knowledge but i know it; i am master of this college; what i don't know isn't knowledge. but in he was anything but universally popular, and i am afraid that mr. dodgson, nothing if not a staunch conservative, sided with the majority against him. thus he wrote in his diary:-- _november th._--promulgation, in congregation, of the new statute to endow jowett. the speaking took up the whole afternoon, and the two points at issue, the endowing a _regius_ professorship, and the countenancing jowett's theological opinions, got so inextricably mixed up that i rose to beg that they might be kept separate. once on my feet, i said more than i at first meant, and defied them ever to tire out the opposition by perpetually bringing the question on (_mem_.: if i ever speak again i will try to say no more than i had resolved before rising). this was my first speech in congregation. at the beginning of an "index to in memoriam," compiled by mr. dodgson and his sisters, was published by moxon. tennyson had given his consent, and the little book proved to be very useful to his admirers. on january th morning prayer was for the first time read in english at the christ church college service. on the same day mr. dodgson moved over into new rooms, as the part of the college where he had formerly lived (chaplain's quadrangle) was to be pulled down. during the easter vacation he paid another visit to the tennysons, which he describes as follows:-- after luncheon i went to the tennysons, and got hallam and lionel to sign their names in my album. also i made a bargain with lionel, that he was to give me some ms. of his verses, and i was to send him some of mine. it was a very difficult bargain to make; i almost despaired of it at first, he put in so many conditions--first, i was to play a game of chess with him; this, with much difficulty, was reduced to twelve moves on each side; but this made little difference, as i check-mated him at the sixth move. second, he was to be allowed to give me one blow on the head with a mallet (this he at last consented to give up). i forget if there were others, but it ended in my getting the verses, for which i have written out "the lonely moor" for him. mr. dodgson took a great interest in occult phenomena, and was for some time an enthusiastic member of the "psychical society." it was his interest in ghosts that led to his meeting with the artist mr. heaphy, who had painted a picture of a ghost which he himself had seen. i quote the following from a letter to his sister mary:-- during my last visit to town, i paid a very interesting visit to a new artist, mr. heaphy. do you remember that curious story of a ghost lady (in _household words_ or _all the year round_), who sat to an artist for her picture; it was called "mr. h.'s story," and he was the writer.... he received me most kindly, and we had a very interesting talk about the ghost, which certainly is one of the most curious and inexplicable stories i ever heard. he showed me her picture (life size), and she must have been very lovely, if it is like her (or like it, which ever is the correct pronoun).... mr. heaphy showed me a most interesting collection of drawings he has made abroad; he has been about, hunting up the earliest and most authentic pictures of our saviour, some merely outlines, some coloured pictures. they agree wonderfully in the character of the face, and one, he says, there is no doubt was done before the year .... i feel sure from his tone that he is doing this in a religious spirit, and not merely as an artist. on july , , there is a very important entry: "i made an expedition _up_ the river to godstow with the three liddells; we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach christ church till half-past eight." [illustration: lorina, alice, and edith liddell. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] on the opposite page he added, somewhat later, "on which occasion i told them the fairy-tale of 'alice's adventures underground,' which i undertook to write out for alice." these words need to be supplemented by the verses with which he prefaced the "wonderland":-- all in the golden afternoon full leisurely we glide; for both our oars, with little skill, by little arms are plied, while little hands make vain pretence our wanderings to guide. ah, cruel three! in such an hour, beneath such dreamy weather, to beg a tale of breath too weak to stir the tiniest feather! yet what can one poor voice avail against three tongues together? imperious prima flashes forth her edict "to begin it"-- in gentler tones secunda hopes "there will be nonsense in it!" while tertia interrupts the tale not _more_ than once a minute. anon, to sudden silence won, in fancy they pursue the dream-child moving through a land of wonders wild and new, in friendly chat with bird or beast-- and half believe it true. and ever, as the story drained the wells of fancy dry, and faintly strove that weary one to put the subject by, "the rest next time"--"it _is_ next time!" the happy voices cry. thus grew the tale of wonderland: thus slowly, one by one, its quaint events were hammered out-- and now the tale is done, and home we steer, a merry crew, beneath the setting sun. "alice" herself (mrs. reginald hargreaves) has given an account of the scene, from which what follows is quoted:-- most of mr. dodgson's stories were told to us on river expeditions to nuneham or godstow, near oxford. my eldest sister, now mrs. skene, was "prima," i was "secunda," and "tertia" was my sister edith. i believe the beginning of "alice" was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. here from all three came the old petition of "tell us a story," and so began the ever-delightful tale. sometimes to tease us--and perhaps being really tired--mr. dodgson would stop suddenly and say, "and that's all till next time." "ah, but it is next time," would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. another day, perhaps, the story would begin in the boat, and mr. dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay. "alice's adventures underground" was the original name of the story; later on it became "alice's hour in elfland." it was not until june , , that he finally decided upon "alice's adventures in wonderland." the illustrating of the manuscript book gave him some trouble. he had to borrow a "natural history" from the deanery to learn the correct shapes of some of the strange animals with which alice conversed; the mock turtle he must have evolved out of his inner consciousness, for it is, i think, a species unknown to naturalists. he was lucky enough during the course of the year to see a ceremony which is denied to most oxford men. when degrees are given, any tradesman who has been unable to get his due from an undergraduate about to be made a bachelor of arts is allowed, by custom, to pluck the proctor's gown as he passes, and then to make his complaint. this law is more honoured in the breach than in the observance; but, on the occasion of this visit of mr. dodgson's to convocation, the proctor's gown was actually plucked--on account of an unfortunate man who had gone through the bankruptcy court. when he promised to write out "alice" for miss liddell he had no idea of publication; but his friend, mr. george macdonald, to whom he had shown the story, persuaded him to submit it to a publisher. messrs. macmillan agreed to produce it, and as mr. dodgson had not sufficient faith in his own artistic powers to venture to allow his illustrations to appear, it was necessary to find some artist who would undertake the work. by the advice of tom taylor he approached mr. tenniel, who was fortunately well disposed, and on april , , the final arrangements were made. [illustration: george macdonald. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] the following interesting account of a meeting with mr. dodgson is from the pen of mrs. bennie, wife of the rector of glenfield, near leicester:-- some little time after the publication of "alice's adventures" we went for our summer holiday to whitby. we were visiting friends, and my brother and sister went to the hotel. they soon after asked us to dine with them there at the _table d'hôte._ i had on one side of me a gentleman whom i did not know, but as i had spent a good deal of time travelling in foreign countries, i always, at once, speak to any one i am placed next. i found on this occasion i had a very agreeable neighbour, and we seemed to be much interested in the same books, and politics also were touched on. after dinner my sister and brother rather took me to task for talking so much to a complete stranger. i said. "but it was quite a treat to talk to him and to hear him talk. of one thing i am quite sure, he is a genius." my brother and sister, who had not heard him speak, again laughed at me, and said, "you are far too easily pleased." i, however, maintained my point, and said what great delight his conversation had given me, and how remarkably clever it had been. next morning nurse took out our two little twin daughters in front of the sea. i went out a short time afterwards, looked for them, and found them seated with my friend of the _table d'hôte_ between them, and they were listening to him, open-mouthed, and in the greatest state of enjoyment, with his knee covered with minute toys. i, seeing their great delight, motioned to him to go on; this he did for some time. a most charming story he told them about sea-urchins and ammonites. when it was over, i said, "you must be the author of 'alice's adventures.'" he laughed, but looked astonished, and said, "my dear madam, my name is dodgson, and 'alice's adventures' was written by lewis carroll." i replied, "then you must have borrowed the name, for only he could have told a story as you have just done." after a little sparring he admitted the fact, and i went home and proudly told my sister and brother how my genius had turned out a greater one than i expected. they assured me i must be mistaken, and that, as i had suggested it to him, he had taken advantage of the idea, and said he was what i wanted him to be. a few days after some friends came to whitby who knew his aunts, and confirmed the truth of his statement, and thus i made the acquaintance of one whose friendship has been the source of great pleasure for nearly thirty years. he has most generously sent us all his books, with kind inscriptions, to "minnie and doe," whom he photographed, but would not take canon bennie or me; he said he never took portraits of people of more than seventeen years of age until they were seventy. he visited us, and we often met him at eastbourne, and his death was indeed a great loss after so many happy years of friendship with one we so greatly admired and loved. he spent a part of the long vacation at freshwater, taking great interest in the children who, for him, were the chief attraction of the seaside. every morning four little children dressed in yellow go by from the front down to the beach: they go by in a state of great excitement, brandishing wooden spades, and making strange noises; from that moment they disappear entirely--they are never to be seen _on_ the beach. the only theory i can form is, that they all tumble into a hole somewhere, and continue excavating therein during the day: however that may be, i have once or twice come across them returning at night, in exactly the same state of excitement, and seemingly in quite as great a hurry to get home as they were before to get out. the evening noises they make sound to me very much like the morning noises, but i suppose they are different to them, and contain an account of the day's achievements. his enthusiasm for photography, and his keen appreciation of the beautiful, made him prefer the society of artists to that of any other class of people. he knew the rossettis intimately, and his diary shows him to have been acquainted with millais, holman hunt, sant, westmacott, val prinsep, watts, and a host of others. arthur hughes painted a charming picture to his order ("the lady with the lilacs") which used to hang in his rooms at christ church. the andersons were great friends of his, mrs. anderson being one of his favourite child-painters. those who have visited him at oxford will remember a beautiful girl's head, painted by her from a rough sketch she had once made in a railway carriage of a child who happened to be sitting opposite her. [illustration: j. sant. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] his own drawings were in no way remarkable. ruskin, whose advice he took on his artistic capabilities, told him that he had not enough talent to make it worth his while to devote much time to sketching, but every one who saw his photographs admired them. considering the difficulties of the "wet process," and the fact that he had a conscientious horror of "touching up" his negatives, the pictures he produced are quite wonderful. some of them were shown to the queen, who said that she admired them very much, and that they were "such as the prince would have appreciated very highly, and taken much pleasure in." [illustration: holman hunt. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] on july , , exactly three years after the memorable row up the river, miss alice liddell received the first presentation copy of "alice's adventures in wonderland": the second was sent to princess beatrice. the first edition, which consisted of two thousand copies, was condemned by both author and illustrator, for the pictures did not come out well. all purchasers were accordingly asked to return their copies, and to send their names and addresses; a new edition was prepared, and distributed to those who had sent back their old copies, which the author gave away to various homes and hospitals. the substituted edition was a complete success, "a perfect piece of artistic printing," as mr. dodgson called it. he hardly dared to hope that more than two thousand copies would be sold, and anticipated a considerable loss over the book. his surprise was great when edition after edition was demanded, and when he found that "alice," far from being a monetary failure, was bringing him in a very considerable income every year. [illustration: sir john millais. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_] a rough comparison between "alice's adventures underground" and the book in its completed form, shows how slight were the alterations that lewis carroll thought it necessary to make. the "wonderland" is somewhat longer, but the general plan of the book, and the simplicity of diction, which is one of its principal charms, are unchanged. his memory was so good that i believe the story as he wrote it down was almost word for word the same that he had told in the boat. the whole idea came like an inspiration into his mind, and that sort of inspiration does not often come more than once in a lifetime. nothing which he wrote afterwards had anything like the same amount of freshness, of wit, of real genius. the "looking-glass" most closely approached it in these qualities, but then it was only the following out of the same idea. the most ingenuous comparison of the two books i have seen was the answer of a little girl whom lewis carroll had asked if she had read them: "oh yes, i've read both of them, and i think," (this more slowly and thoughtfully) "i think 'through the looking-glass' is more stupid than 'alice's adventures.' don't you think so?" the critics were loud in their praises of "alice"; there was hardly a dissentient voice among them, and the reception which the public gave the book justified their opinion. so recently as july, , the _pall mall gazette_ conducted an inquiry into the popularity of children's books. "the verdict is so natural that it will surprise no normal person. the winner is 'alice in wonderland'; 'through the looking-glass' is in the twenty, but much lower down." "alice" has been translated into french, german, italian, and dutch, while one poem, "father william," has even been turned into arabic. several plays have been based upon it; lectures have been given, illustrated by magic-lantern slides of tenniel's pictures, which have also adorned wall-papers and biscuit-boxes. mr. dodgson himself designed a very ingenious "wonderland" stamp-case; there has been an "alice" birthday-book; at schools, children have been taught to read out of "alice," while the german edition, shortened and simplified for the purpose, has also been used as a lesson-book. with the exception of shakespeare's plays, very few, if any, books are so frequently quoted in the daily press as the two "alices." in mr. dodgson was introduced to miss charlotte m. yonge, whose novels had long delighted him. "it was a pleasure i had long hoped for," he says, "and i was very much pleased with her cheerful and easy manners--the sort of person one knows in a few minutes as well as many in many years." [illustration: c. m. yonge. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] in he contributed a story to _aunt judy's magazine_ called "bruno's revenge," the charming little idyll out of which "sylvie and bruno" grew. the creation of bruno was the only act of homage lewis carroll ever paid to boy-nature, for which, as a rule, he professed an aversion almost amounting to terror. nevertheless, on the few occasions on which i have seen him in the company of boys, he seemed to be thoroughly at his ease, telling them stories and showing them puzzles. i give an extract from mrs. gatty's letter, acknowledging the receipt of "bruno's revenge" for her magazine:-- i need hardly tell you that the story is _delicious_. it is beautiful and fantastic and childlike, and i cannot sufficiently thank you. i am so _proud_ for _aunt judy_ that you have honoured _her_ by sending it here, rather than to the _cornhill_, or one of the grander magazines. to-morrow i shall send the manuscript to london probably; to-day i keep it to enjoy a little further, and that the young ladies may do so too. one word more. make this one of a series. you may have great mathematical abilities, but so have hundreds of others. this talent is peculiarly your own, and as an englishman you are almost unique in possessing it. if you covet fame, therefore, it will be (i think) gained by this. some of the touches are so exquisite, one would have thought nothing short of intercourse with fairies could have put them into your head. somewhere about this time he was invited to witness a rehearsal of a children's play at a london theatre. as he sat in the wings, chatting to the manager, a little four-year-old girl, one of the performers, climbed up on his knee, and began talking to him. she was very anxious to be allowed to play the principal part (mrs. mite), which had been assigned to some other child. "i wish i might act mrs. mite," she said; "i know all her part, and i'd get an _encore_ for every word." during the year he published his book on "determinants." to those accustomed to regard mathematics as the driest of dry subjects, and mathematicians as necessarily devoid of humour, it seems scarcely credible that "an elementary treatise on determinants," and "alice in wonderland" were written by the same author, and it came quite as a revelation to the undergraduate who heard for the first time that mr. dodgson of christ church and lewis carroll were identical. the book in question, admirable as it is in many ways, has not commanded a large sale. the nature of the subject would be against it, as most students whose aim is to get as good a place as possible in the class lists cannot afford the luxury of a separate work, and have to be content with the few chapters devoted to "determinants" in works on higher algebra or the theory of equations, supplemented by references to mr. dodgson's work which can be found in the college libraries. the general acceptance of the book would be rather restricted by the employment of new words and symbols, which, as the author himself felt, "are always a most unwelcome addition to a science already burdened with an enormous vocabulary." but the work itself is largely original, and its arrangement and style are, perhaps, as attractive as the nature of the subject will allow. such a book as this has little interest for the general reader, yet, amongst the leisured few who are able to read mathematics for their own sake, the treatise has found warm admirers. in the summer vacation of he went for a tour on the continent, accompanied by dr. liddon, whom i have already mentioned as having been one of his most intimate friends at this time. during the whole of this tour mr. dodgson kept a diary, more with the idea that it would help him afterwards to remember what he had seen than with any notion of publication. however, in later years it did occur to him that others might be interested in his impressions and experiences, though he never actually took any steps towards putting them before the public. perhaps he was wise, for a traveller's diary always contains much information that can be obtained just as well from any guide-book. in the extracts which i reproduce here, i hope that i have not retained anything which comes under that category. [illustration: dr. liddon. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] _july th_.--the sultan and i arrived in london almost at the same time, but in different quarters--_my_ point of entry being paddington, and _his_ charing cross. i must admit that the crowd was greatest at the latter place. mr. dodgson and dr. liddon met at dover, and passed the night at one of the hotels there:-- _july th_.--we breakfasted, as agreed, at eight, or at least we then sat down and nibbled bread and butter till such time as the chops should be done, which great event took place about half past. we tried pathetic appeals to the wandering waiters, who told us, "they are coming, sir," in a soothing tone, and we tried stern remonstrance, and they then said, "they are coming, sir," in a more injured tone; and after all such appeals they retired into their dens, and hid themselves behind side-boards and dish-covers, and still the chops came not. we agreed that of all virtues a waiter can display, that of a retiring disposition is quite the least desirable.... the pen refuses to describe the sufferings of some of the passengers during our smooth trip of ninety minutes: my own sensations were those of extreme surprise, and a little indignation, at there being no other sensations--it was not for _that_ i paid my money.... we landed at calais in the usual swarm of friendly natives, offering services and advice of all kinds; to all such remarks i returned one simple answer, _non!_ it was probably not strictly applicable in all cases, but it answered the purpose of getting rid of them; one by one they left me, echoing the _non_! in various tones, but all expressive of disgust. at cologne began that feast of beautiful things which his artistic temperament fitted him so well to enjoy. though the churches he visited and the ceremonies he witnessed belonged to a religious system widely different from his own, the largeness and generosity of his mind always led him to insist upon that substratum of true devotion--to use a favourite word of his--which underlies all forms of christianity. we spent an hour in the cathedral, which i will not attempt to describe further than by saying it was the most beautiful of all churches i have ever seen or can imagine. if one could imagine the spirit of devotion embodied in any material form, it would be in such a building. in spite of all the wealth of words that has been expended upon german art, he found something new to say on this most fertile subject:-- the amount of art lavished on the whole region of potsdam is marvellous; some of the tops of the palaces were like forests of statues, and they were all over the gardens, set on pedestals. in fact, the two principles of berlin architecture appear to me to be these. on the house-tops, wherever there is a convenient place, put up the figure of a man; he is best placed standing on one leg. wherever there is room on the ground, put either a circular group of busts on pedestals, in consultation, all looking inwards--or else the colossal figure of a man killing, about to kill, or having killed (the present tense is preferred) a beast; the more pricks the beast has, the better--in fact a dragon is the correct thing, but if that is beyond the artist, he may content himself with a lion or a pig. the beast-killing principle has been carried out everywhere with a relentless monotony, which makes some parts of berlin look like a fossil slaughter-house. he never missed an opportunity of studying the foreign drama, which was most praiseworthy, as he knew very little german and not a word of russ:-- at the hotel [at danzig] was a green parrot on a stand; we addressed it as "pretty poll," and it put its head on one side and thought about it, but wouldn't commit itself to any statement. the waiter came up to inform us of the reason of its silence: "er spricht nicht englisch; er spricht nicht deutsch." it appeared that the unfortunate bird could speak nothing but mexican! not knowing a word of that language, we could only pity it. _july rd._--we strolled about and bought a few photographs, and at . left for königsberg. on our way to the station we came across the grandest instance of the "majesty of justice" that i have ever witnessed. a little boy was being taken to the magistrate, or to prison (probably for picking a pocket). the achievement of this feat had been entrusted to two soldiers in full uniform, who were solemnly marching, one in front of the poor little urchin and one behind, with bayonets fixed, of course, to be ready to charge in case he should attempt an escape. _july th._--in the evening i visited the theatre at königsberg, which was fairly good in every way, and very good in the singing and some of the acting. the play was "anno ," but i could only catch a few words here and there, so have very little idea of the plot. one of the characters was a correspondent of an english newspaper. this singular being came on in the midst of a soldiers' bivouac before sadowa, dressed very nearly in white--a very long frock-coat, and a tall hat on the back of his head, both nearly white. he said "morning" as a general remark, when he first came on, but afterwards talked what i suppose was broken german. he appeared to be regarded as a butt by the soldiers, and ended his career by falling into a drum. from königsberg the travellers went on to st. petersburg, where they stayed several days, exploring the wonderful city and its environs:-- there is a fine equestrian statue of peter the great near the admiralty. the lower part is not a pedestal, but left shapeless and rough like a real rock. the horse is rearing, and has a serpent coiled about its hind feet, on which, i think, it is treading. if this had been put up in berlin, peter would no doubt have been actively engaged in killing the monster, but here he takes no notice of it; in fact, the killing theory is not recognised. we found two colossal figures of lions, which are so painfully mild that each of them is rolling a great ball about like a kitten. _aug. st_.--about half-past ten mr. merrilies called for us, and with really remarkable kindness gave up his day to taking us down to peterhof, a distance of about twenty miles, and showing us over the place. we went by steamer down the tideless, saltless gulf of finland; the first peculiarity extends through the baltic, and the second through a great part of it. the piece we crossed, some fifteen miles from shore to shore, is very shallow, in many parts only six or eight feet deep, and every winter it is entirely frozen over with ice two feet thick, and when this is covered with snow it forms a secure plain, which is regularly used for travelling on, though the immense distance, without means of food or shelter, is dangerous for poorly clad foot passengers. mr. merrilies told us of a friend of his who, in crossing last winter, passed the bodies of eight people who had been frozen. we had a good view, on our way, of the coast of finland, and of kronstadt. when we landed at peterhof, we found mr. muir's carriage waiting for us, and with its assistance, getting out every now and then to walk through portions where it could not go, we went over the grounds of two imperial palaces, including many little summer-houses, each of which would make a very good residence in itself, as, though small, they were fitted up and adorned in every way that taste could suggest or wealth achieve. for varied beauty and perfect combination of nature and art, i think the gardens eclipse those of sans souci. at every corner, or end of an avenue or path, where a piece of statuary could be introduced with effect, there one was sure to find one, in bronze or in white marble; many of the latter had a sort of circular niche built behind, with a blue background to throw the figure into relief. here we found a series of shelving ledges made of stone, with a sheet of water gliding down over them; here a long path, stretching down slopes and flights of steps, and arched over all the way with trellises and creepers; here a huge boulder, hewn, just as it lay, into the shape of a gigantic head and face, with mild, sphinx-like eyes, as if some buried titan were struggling to free himself; here a fountain, so artfully formed of pipes set in circles, each set shooting the water higher than those outside, as to form a solid pyramid of glittering spray; here a lawn, seen through a break in the woods below us, with threads of scarlet geraniums running over it, and looking in the distance like a huge branch of coral; and here and there long avenues of trees, lying in all directions, sometimes three or four together side by side, and sometimes radiating like a star, and stretching away into the distance till the eye was almost weary of following them. all this will rather serve to remind me, than to convey any idea, of what we saw. but the beauties of peterhof were quite eclipsed by the oriental splendours of moscow, which naturally made a great impression upon a mind accustomed to the cold sublimity of gothic architecture at oxford. we gave five or six hours to a stroll through this wonderful city, a city of white houses and green roofs, of conical towers that rise one out of another like a foreshortened telescope; of bulging gilded domes, in which you see, as in a looking-glass, distorted pictures of the city; of churches which look, outside, like bunches of variegated cactus (some branches crowned with green prickly buds, others with blue, and others with red and white) and which, inside, are hung all round with _eikons_ and lamps, and lined with illuminated pictures up to the very roof; and, finally, of pavement that goes up and down like a ploughed field, and _drojky_-drivers who insist on being paid thirty per cent. extra to-day, "because it is the empress's birthday."... _aug. th._--after dinner we went by arrangement to mr. penny, and accompanied him to see a russian wedding. it was a most interesting ceremony. there was a large choir, from the cathedral, who sang a long and beautiful anthem before the service began; and the deacon (from the church of the assumption) delivered several recitative portions of the service in the most magnificent bass voice i ever heard, rising gradually (i should say by less than half a note at a time if that is possible), and increasing in volume of sound as he rose in the scale, until his final note rang through the building like a chorus of many voices. i could not have conceived that one voice could have produced such an effect. one part of the ceremony, the crowning the married couple, was very nearly grotesque. two gorgeous golden crowns were brought in, which the officiating priest first waved before them, and then placed on their heads--or rather the unhappy bridegroom had to wear _his_, but the bride, having prudently arranged her hair in a rather complicated manner with a lace veil, could not have hers put on, but had it held above her by a friend. the bridegroom, in plain evening dress, crowned like a king, holding a candle, and with a face of resigned misery, would have been pitiable if he had not been so ludicrous. when the people had gone, we were invited by the priests to see the east end of the church, behind the golden gates, and were finally dismissed with a hearty shake of the hand and the "kiss of peace," of which even i, though in lay costume, came in for a share. one of the objects of the tour was to see the fair at nijni novgorod, and here the travellers arrived on august th, after a miserable railway journey. owing to the breaking down of a bridge, the unfortunate passengers had been compelled to walk a mile through drenching rain. we went to the smernovaya (or some such name) hotel, a truly villainous place, though no doubt the best in the town. the feeding was very good, and everything else very bad. it was some consolation to find that as we sat at dinner we furnished a subject of the liveliest interest to six or seven waiters, all dressed in white tunics, belted at the waist, and white trousers, who ranged themselves in a row and gazed in a quite absorbed way at the collection of strange animals that were feeding before them. now and then a twinge of conscience would seize them that they were, after all, not fulfilling the great object of life as waiters, and on these occasions they would all hurry to the end of the room, and refer to a great drawer which seemed to contain nothing but spoons and corks. when we asked for anything, they first looked at each other in an alarmed way; then, when they had ascertained which understood the order best, they all followed his example, which always was to refer to the big drawer. we spent most of the afternoon wandering through the fair, and buying _eikons_, &c. it was a wonderful place. besides there being distinct quarters for the persians, the chinese, and others, we were constantly meeting strange beings with unwholesome complexions and unheard-of costumes. the persians, with their gentle, intelligent faces, the long eyes set wide apart, the black hair, and yellow-brown skin, crowned with a black woollen fez something like a grenadier, were about the most picturesque we met. but all the novelties of the day were thrown into the shade by our adventure at sunset, when we came upon the tartar mosque (the only one in nijni) exactly as one of the officials came out on the roof to utter the muezzin cry, or call to prayers. even if it had been in no way singular in itself, it would have been deeply interesting from its novelty and uniqueness, but the cry itself was quite unlike anything i have ever heard before. the beginning of each sentence was uttered in a rapid monotone, and towards the end it rose gradually till it ended in a prolonged, shrill wail, which floated overhead through the still air with an indescribably sad and ghostlike effect; heard at night, it would have thrilled one like the cry of the banshee. this reminds one of the wonderful description in mr. kipling's "city of dreadful night." it is not generally known that mr. dodgson was a fervent admirer of mr. kipling's works; indeed during the last few years of his life i think he took more pleasure in his tales than in those of any other modern author. dr. liddon's fame as a preacher had reached the russian clergy, with the result that he and mr. dodgson found many doors open to them which are usually closed to travellers in russia. after their visit to nijni novgorod they returned to moscow, whence, escorted by bishop leonide, suffragan bishop of moscow, they made an expedition to the troitska monastery. _august th_.--a most interesting day. we breakfasted at half-past five, and soon after seven left by railway, in company with bishop leonide and mr. penny, for troitska monastery. we found the bishop, in spite of his limited knowledge of english, a very conversational and entertaining fellow-traveller. the service at the cathedral had already begun when we reached it, and the bishop took us in with him, through a great crowd which thronged the building, into a side room which opened into the chancel, where we remained during the service, and enjoyed the unusual privilege of seeing the clergy communicate--a ceremony for which the doors of the chancel are always shut, and the curtains drawn, so that the congregation never witness it. it was a most elaborate ceremony, full of crossings, and waving of incense before everything that was going to be used, but also clearly full of much deep devotion.... in the afternoon we went down to the archbishop's palace, and were presented to him by bishop leonide. the archbishop could only talk russian, so that the conversation between him and liddon (a most interesting one, which lasted more than an hour) was conducted in a very original fashion--the archbishop making a remark in russian, which was put into english by the bishop; liddon then answered the remark in french, and the bishop repeated his answer in russian to the archbishop. so that a conversation, entirely carried on between two people, required the use of three languages! the bishop had kindly got one of the theological students, who could talk french, to conduct us about, which he did most zealously, taking us, among other things, to see the subterranean cells of the hermits, in which some of them live for many years. we were shown the doors of two of the inhabited ones; it was a strange and not quite comfortable feeling, in a dark narrow passage where each had to carry a candle, to be shown the low narrow door of a little cellar, and to know that a human being was living within, with only a small lamp to give him light, in solitude and silence day and night. his experiences with an exorbitant _drojky_-driver at st. petersburg are worthy of record. they remind one of a story which he himself used to tell as having happened to a friend of his at oxford. the latter had driven up in a cab to tom gate, and offered the cabman the proper fare, which was, however, refused with scorn. after a long altercation he left the irate cabman to be brought to reason by the porter, a one-armed giant of prodigious strength. when he was leaving college, he stopped at the gate to ask the porter how he had managed to dispose of the cabman. "well, sir," replied that doughty champion, "i could not persuade him to go until i floored him." after a hearty breakfast i left liddon to rest and write letters, and went off shopping, &c., beginning with a call on mr. muir at no. , galerne ulitsa. i took a _drojky_ to the house, having first bargained with the driver for thirty _kopecks_; he wanted forty to begin with. when we got there we had a little scene, rather a novelty in my experience of _drojky_-driving. the driver began by saying "_sorok_" (forty) as i got out; this was a warning of the coming storm, but i took no notice of it, but quietly handed over the thirty. he received them with scorn and indignation, and holding them out in his open hand, delivered an eloquent discourse in russian, of which _sorok_ was the leading idea. a woman, who stood by with a look of amusement and curiosity, perhaps understood him. _i_ didn't, but simply held out my hand for the thirty, returned them to the purse and counted out twenty-five instead. in doing this i felt something like a man pulling the string of a shower-bath--and the effect was like it--his fury boiled over directly, and quite eclipsed all the former row. i told him in very bad russian that i had offered thirty once, but wouldn't again; but this, oddly enough, did not pacify him. mr. muir's servant told him the same thing at length, and finally mr. muir himself came out and gave him the substance of it sharply and shortly--but he failed to see it in a proper light. some people are very hard to please. when staying at a friend's house at kronstadt he wrote:-- liddon had surrendered his overcoat early in the day, and when going we found it must be recovered from the waiting-maid, who only talked russian, and as i had left the dictionary behind, and the little vocabulary did not contain _coat_, we were in some difficulty. liddon began by exhibiting his coat, with much gesticulation, including the taking it half-off. to our delight, she appeared to understand at once--left the room, and returned in a minute with--a large clothes-brush. on this liddon tried a further and more energetic demonstration; he took off his coat, and laid it at her feet, pointed downwards (to intimate that in the lower regions was the object of his desire), smiled with an expression of the joy and gratitude with which he would receive it, and put the coat on again. once more a gleam of intelligence lighted up the plain but expressive features of the young person; she was absent much longer this time, and when she returned, she brought, to our dismay, a large cushion and a pillow, and began to prepare the sofa for the nap that she now saw clearly was the thing the dumb gentleman wanted. a happy thought occurred to me, and i hastily drew a sketch representing liddon, with one coat on, receiving a second and larger one from the hands of a benignant russian peasant. the language of hieroglyphics succeeded where all other means had failed, and we returned to st. petersburg with the humiliating knowledge that our standard of civilisation was now reduced to the level of ancient nineveh. [illustration: instance of hieroglyphic writing of the date mdccclxvii--interpretation. "there is a coat here, left in the care of a russian peasant, which i should be glad to receive from him."] at warsaw they made a short stay, putting up at the hotel d'angleterre:-- our passage is inhabited by a tall and very friendly grey-hound, who walks in whenever the door is opened for a second or two, and who for some time threatened to make the labour of the servant, who was bringing water for a bath, of no effect, by drinking up the water as fast as it was brought. from warsaw they went on to leipzig, and thence to giessen, where they arrived on september th. we moved on to giessen, and put up at the "rappe hotel" for the night, and ordered an early breakfast of an obliging waiter who talked english. "coffee!" he exclaimed delightedly, catching at the word as if it were a really original idea, "ah, coffee--very nice--and eggs? ham with your eggs? very nice--" "if we can have it broiled," i said. "boiled?" the waiter repeated, with an incredulous smile. "no, not _boiled_," i explained--"_broiled_." the waiter put aside this distinction as trivial, "yes, yes, ham," he repeated, reverting to his favourite idea. "yes, ham," i said, "but how cooked?" "yes, yes, how cooked," the waiter replied, with the careless air of one who assents to a proposition more from good nature than from a real conviction of its truth. _sept. th_.--at midday we reached ems, after a journey eventless, but through a very interesting country--valleys winding away in all directions among hills clothed with trees to the very top, and white villages nestling away wherever there was a comfortable corner to hide in. the trees were so small, so uniform in colour, and so continuous, that they gave to the more distant hills something of the effect of banks covered with moss. the really unique feature of the scenery was the way in which the old castles seemed to grow, rather than to have been built, on the tops of the rocky promontories that showed their heads here and there among the trees. i have never seen architecture that seemed so entirely in harmony with the spirit of the place. by some subtle instinct the old architects seem to have chosen both form and colour, the grouping of the towers with their pointed spires, and the two neutral tints, light grey and brown, on the walls and roof, so as to produce buildings which look as naturally fitted to the spot as the heath or the harebells. and, like the flowers and the rocks, they seemed instinct with no other meaning than rest and silence. and with these beautiful words my extracts from the diary may well conclude. lewis carroll's mind was completely at one with nature, and in her pleasant places of calm and infinite repose he sought his rest--and has found it. [illustration: sir john tenniel. _from a photograph by bassano_.] * * * * * chapter iv ( - ) death of archdeacon dodgson--lewis carroll's rooms at christ church--"phantasmagoria"--translations of "alice"--"through the looking-glass"--"jabberwocky" in latin--c.s. calverley--"notes by an oxford chiel"--hatfield--vivisection--"the hunting of the snark." the success of "alice in wonderland" tempted mr. dodgson to make another essay in the same field of literature. his idea had not yet been plagiarised, as it was afterwards, though the book had of course been parodied, a notable instance being "alice in blunderland," which appeared in _punch_. it was very different when he came to write "sylvie and bruno"; the countless imitations of the two "alice" books which had been foisted upon the public forced him to strike out in a new line. long before the publication of his second tale, people had heard that lewis carroll was writing again, and the editor of a well-known magazine had offered him two guineas a page, which was a high rate of pay in those days, for the story, if he would allow it to appear in serial form. the central idea was, as every one knows, the adventures of a little girl who had somehow or other got through a looking-glass. the first difficulty, however, was to get her through, and this question exercised his ingenuity for some time, before it was satisfactorily solved. the next thing was to secure tenniel's services again. at first it seemed that he was to be disappointed in this matter; tenniel was so fully occupied with other work that there seemed little hope of his being able to undertake any more. he then applied to sir noel paton, with whose fairy-pictures he had fallen in love; but the artist was ill, and wrote in reply, "tenniel is _the_ man." in the end tenniel consented to undertake the work, and once more author and artist settled down to work together. mr. dodgson was no easy man to work with; no detail was too small for his exact criticism. "don't give alice so much crinoline," he would write, or "the white knight must not have whiskers; he must not be made to look old"--such were the directions he was constantly giving. on june st archdeacon dodgson died, after an illness of only a few days' duration. lewis carroll was not summoned until too late, for the illness took a sudden turn for the worse, and he was unable to reach his father's bedside before the end had come. this was a terrible shock to him; his father had been his ideal of what a christian gentleman should be, and it seemed to him at first as if a cloud had settled on his life which could never be dispelled. two letters of his, both of them written long after the sad event, give one some idea of the grief which his father's death, and all that it entailed, caused him. the first was written long afterwards, to one who had suffered a similar bereavement. in this letter he said:-- we are sufficiently old friends, i feel sure, for me to have no fear that i shall seem intrusive in writing about your great sorrow. the greatest blow that has ever fallen on _my_ life was the death, nearly thirty years ago, of my own dear father; so, in offering you my sincere sympathy, i write as a fellow-sufferer. and i rejoice to know that we are not only fellow-sufferers, but also fellow-believers in the blessed hope of the resurrection from the dead, which makes such a parting holy and beautiful, instead of being merely a blank despair. the second was written to a young friend, miss edith rix, who had sent him an illuminated text: my dear edith,--i can now tell you (what i wanted to do when you sent me that text-card, but felt i could not say it to _two_ listeners, as it were) _why_ that special card is one i like to have. that text is consecrated for me by the memory of one of the greatest sorrows i have known--the death of my dear father. in those solemn days, when we used to steal, one by one, into the darkened room, to take yet another look at the dear calm face, and to pray for strength, the one feature in the room that i remember was a framed text, illuminated by one of my sisters, "then are they glad, because they are at rest; and so he bringeth them into the haven where they would be!" that text will always have, for me, a sadness and a sweetness of its own. thank you again for sending it me. please don't mention this when we meet. i can't _talk_ about it. always affectionately yours, c. l. dodgson. the object of his edition of euclid book v., published during the course of the year, was to meet the requirements of the ordinary pass examination, and to present the subject in as short and simple a form as possible. hence the theory of incommensurable magnitudes was omitted, though, as the author himself said in the preface, to do so rendered the work incomplete, and, from a logical point of view, valueless. he hinted pretty plainly his own preference for an equivalent amount of algebra, which would be complete in itself. it is easy to understand this preference in a mind so strictly logical as his. so far as the object of the book itself is concerned, he succeeded admirably; the propositions are clearly and beautifully worked out, and the hints on proving propositions in euclid book v., are most useful. in november he again moved into new rooms at christ church; the suite which he occupied from this date to the end of his life was one of the best in the college. situated at the north-west corner of tom quad, on the first floor of the staircase from the entrance to which the junior common room is now approached, they consist of four sitting-rooms and about an equal number of bedrooms, besides rooms for lumber, &c. from the upper floor one can easily reach the flat college roof. mr. dodgson saw at once that here was the very place for a photographic studio, and he lost no time in obtaining the consent of the authorities to erect one. here he took innumerable photographs of his friends and their children, as indeed he had been doing for some time under less favourable conditions. one of his earliest pictures is an excellent likeness of professor faraday. [illustration: prof. faraday. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] his study was characteristic of the man; oil paintings by a. hughes, mrs. anderson, and heaphy proclaimed his artistic tastes; nests of pigeon-holes, each neatly labelled, showed his love of order; shelves, filled with the best books on every subject that interested him, were evidence of his wide reading. his library has now been broken up and, except for a few books retained by his nearest relatives, scattered to the winds; such dispersions are inevitable, but they are none the less regrettable. it always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned. talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless. [illustration: lewis carroll's study at christ church, oxford.] lewis carroll's dining-room has been the scene of many a pleasant little party, for he was very fond of entertaining. in his diary, each of the dinners and luncheons that he gave is recorded by a small diagram, which shows who his guests were, and their several positions at the table. he kept a _menu_ book as well, that the same people might not have the same dishes too frequently. he sometimes gave large parties, but his favourite form of social relaxation was a _dîner à deux_. at the beginning of his "phantasmagoria," a collection of poems grave and gay, was published by macmillan. upon the whole he was more successful in humorous poetry, but there is an undeniable dignity and pathos in his more serious verses. he gave a copy to mr. justice denman, with whom he afterwards came to be very well acquainted, and who appreciated the gift highly. "i did not lay down the book," he wrote, "until i had read them [the poems] through; and enjoyed many a hearty laugh, and something like a cry or two. moreover, i hope to read them through (as the _old man_ said) 'again and again.'" [illustration: justice denman. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] it had been lewis carroll's intention to have "phantasmagoria" illustrated, and he had asked george du maurier to undertake the work; but the plan fell through. in his letter to du maurier, mr. dodgson had made some inquiries about miss florence montgomery, the authoress of "misunderstood." in reply du maurier said, "miss florence montgomery is a very charming and sympathetic young lady, the daughter of the admiral of that ilk. i am, like you, a very great admirer of "misunderstood," and cried pints over it. when i was doing the last picture i had to put a long white pipe in the little boy's mouth until it was finished, so as to get rid of the horrible pathos of the situation while i was executing the work. in reading the book a second time (knowing the sad end of the dear little boy), the funny parts made me cry almost as much as the pathetic ones." a few days after the publication of "phantasmagoria," lewis carroll sent the first chapter of his new story to the press. "behind the looking-glass and what alice saw there" was his original idea for its title; it was dr. liddon who suggested the name finally adopted. during this year german and french translations of "alice in wonderland" were published by macmillan; the italian edition appeared in . henri bué, who was responsible for the french version, had no easy task to perform. in many cases the puns proved quite untranslatable; while the poems, being parodies on well-known english pieces, would have been pointless on the other side of the channel. for instance, the lines beginning, "how doth the little crocodile" are a parody on "how doth the little busy bee," a song which a french child has, of course, never heard of. in this case bué gave up the idea of translation altogether, and, instead, parodied la fontaine's "maître corbeau" as follows:-- maître corbeau sur un arbre perché faisait son nid entre des branches; il avait relevé ses manches, car il était très affairé. maître renard par là passant, lui dit: "descendez donc, compère; venez embrasser votre frère!" le corbeau, le reconnaissant, lui répondit en son ramage!-- "fromage." the dialogue in which the joke occurs about "tortoise" and "taught us" ("wonderland," p. ) is thus rendered:-- "la maîtresse était une vieille tortue; nous l'appelions chélonée." "et pourquoi l'appeliez-vous chélonée, si ce n'était pas son nom?" "parcequ'on ne pouvait s'empêcher de s'écrier en la voyant: quel long nez!" dit la fausse-tortue d'un ton fâché; "vous êtes vraiment bien bornée!" at two points, however, both m. bué and miss antonie zimmermann, who translated the tale into german, were fairly beaten: the reason for the whiting being so called, from its doing the boots and shoes, and for no wise fish going anywhere without a porpoise, were given up as untranslatable. at the beginning of lord salisbury came up to oxford to be installed as chancellor of the university. dr. liddon introduced mr. dodgson to him, and thus began a very pleasant acquaintance. of course he photographed the chancellor and his two sons, for he never missed an opportunity of getting distinguished people into his studio. [illustration: lord salisbury and his two sons. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] in december, seven "puzzles from wonderland" appeared in mrs. gatty's paper, _aunt judy's magazine_. they had originally been written for the cecil children, with whom lewis carroll was already on the best terms. meanwhile "through the looking-glass" was steadily progressing--not, however, without many little hitches. one question which exercised mr. dodgson very much was whether the picture of the jabberwock would do as a frontispiece, or whether it would be too frightening for little children. on this point he sought the advice of about thirty of his married lady friends, whose experiences with their own children would make them trustworthy advisers; and in the end he chose the picture of the white knight on horseback. in the book appeared, and was an instantaneous success. eight thousand of the first edition had been taken up by the booksellers before mr. dodgson had even received his own presentation copies. the compliments he received upon the "looking-glass" would have been enough to turn a lesser man's head, but he was, i think, proof against either praise or blame. i can say with a clear head and conscience [wrote henry kingsley] that your new book is the finest thing we have had since "martin chuzzlewit." ... i can only say, in comparing the new "alice" with the old, "this is a more excellent song than the other." it is perfectly splendid, but you have, doubtless, heard that from other quarters. i lunch with macmillan habitually, and he was in a terrible pickle about not having printed enough copies the other day. jabberwocky[ ] was at once recognised as the best and most original thing in the book, though one fair correspondent of _the queen_ declared that it was a translation from the german! the late dean of rochester, dr. scott, writes about it to mr. dodgson as follows:-- are we to suppose, after all, that the saga of jabberwocky is one of the universal heirlooms which the aryan race at its dispersion carried with it from the great cradle of the family? you must really consult max müller about this. it begins to be probable that the _origo originalissima_ may be discovered in sanscrit, and that we shall by and by have a _iabrivokaveda_. the hero will turn out to be the sun-god in one of his _avatars_; and the tumtum tree the great ash _ygdrasil_ of the scandinavian mythology. in march, , the late mr. a.a. vansittart, of trinity college, cambridge, translated the poem into latin elegiacs. his rendering was printed, for private circulation only, i believe, several years later, but will probably be new to most of my readers. a careful comparison with the original shows the wonderful fidelity of this translation:-- "mors iabrochii" coesper[ ] erat: tunc lubriciles[ ] ultravia circum urgebant gyros gimbiculosque tophi; moestenui visae borogovides ire meatu; et profugi gemitus exgrabuêre rathae. o fuge iabrochium, sanguis meus![ ] ille recurvis unguibus, estque avidis dentibus ille minax. ububae fuge cautus avis vim, gnate! neque unquam faedarpax contra te frumiosus eat! vorpali gladio juvenis succingitur: hostis manxumus ad medium quaeritur usque diem: jamque via fesso, sed plurima mente prementi, tumtumiae frondis suaserat umbra moram. consilia interdum stetit egnia[ ] mente revolvens: at gravis in densa fronde susuffrus[ ] erat, spiculaque[ ] ex oculis jacientis flammea, tulscam per silvam venit burbur?[ ] iabrochii! vorpali, semel atque iterum collectus in ictum, persnicuit gladio persnacuitque puer: deinde galumphatus, spernens informe cadaver, horrendum monstri rettulit ipse caput. victor iabrochii, spoliis insignis opimis, rursus in amplexus, o radiose, meos! o frabiose dies! callo clamateque calla! vix potuit laetus chorticulare pater. coesper erat: tunc lubriciles ultravia circum urgebant gyros gimbiculosque tophi; moestenui visae borogovides ire meatu; et profugi gemitus exgrabuêre rathae. a.a.v. jabberwocky. 'twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe. "beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that scratch! beware the jubjub bird, and shun the frumious bandersnatch!" he took his vorpal sword in hand: long time the manxome foe he sought-- so rested he by the tumtum tree, and stood awhile in thought. and as in uffish thought he stood, the jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood and burbled as it came! one, two! one, two! and through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack! he left it dead, and with its head he went galumphing back. "and hast thou slain the jabberwock? come to my arms, my beamish boy! o frabjous day! callooh! callay!" he chortled in his joy. 'twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe. the story, as originally written, contained thirteen chapters, but the published book consisted of twelve only. the omitted chapter introduced a wasp, in the character of a judge or barrister, i suppose, since mr. tenniel wrote that "a _wasp_ in a _wig_ is altogether beyond the appliances of art." apart from difficulties of illustration, the "wasp" chapter was not considered to be up to the level of the rest of the book, and this was probably the principal reason of its being left out. "it is a curious fact," wrote mr. tenniel some years later, when replying to a request of lewis carroll's that he would illustrate another of his books, "that with 'through the looking-glass' the faculty of making drawings for book illustration departed from me, and, notwithstanding all sorts of tempting inducements, i have done nothing in that direction since." [illustration: _facsimile of a letter from sir john tenniel to lewis carroll, june_ , .] "through the looking glass" has recently appeared in a solemn judgment of the house of lords. in _eastman photographic materials company v. comptroller general of patents, designs, and trademarks_ ( ), the question for decision was, what constitutes an invented word? a trademark that consists of or contains an invented word or words is capable of registration. "solio" was the word in issue in the case. lord macnaghten in his judgment said, when alluding to the distinguishing characteristics of an invented word: i do not think that it is necessary that it should be wholly meaningless. to give an illustration: your lordships may remember that in a book of striking humour and fancy, which was in everybody's hands when it was first published, there is a collection of strange words where "there are" (to use the language of the author) "two meanings packed up into one word." no one would say that those were not invented words. still they contain a meaning--a meaning is wrapped up in them if you can only find it out. before i leave the subject of the "looking-glass," i should like to mention one or two circumstances in connection with it which illustrate his reverence for sacred things. in his original manuscript the bad-tempered flower (pp. - ) was the passion-flower; the sacred origin of the name never struck him, until it was pointed out to him by a friend, when he at once changed it into the tiger-lily. another friend asked him if the final scene was based upon the triumphal conclusion of "pilgrim's progress." he repudiated the idea, saying that he would consider such trespassing on holy ground as highly irreverent. he seemed never to be satisfied with the amount of work he had on hand, and in he determined to add to his other labours by studying anatomy and physiology. professor barclay thompson supplied him with a set of bones, and, having purchased the needful books, he set to work in good earnest. his mind was first turned to acquiring medical knowledge by his happening to be at hand when a man was seized with an epileptic fit. he had prevented the poor creature from falling, but was utterly at a loss what to do next. to be better prepared on any future occasion, he bought a little manual called "what to do in emergencies." in later years he was constantly buying medical and surgical works, and by the end of his life he had a library of which no doctor need have been ashamed. there were only two special bequests in his will, one of some small keepsakes to his landlady at eastbourne, mrs. dyer, and the other of his medical books to my brother. whenever a new idea presented itself to his mind he used to make a note of it; he even invented a system by which he could take notes in the dark, if some happy thought or ingenious problem suggested itself to him during a sleepless night. like most men who systematically overtax their brains, he was a poor sleeper. he would sometimes go through a whole book of euclid in bed; he was so familiar with the bookwork that he could actually see the figures before him in the dark, and did not confuse the letters, which is perhaps even more remarkable. most of his ideas were ingenious, though many were entirely useless from a practical point of view. for instance, he has an entry in his diary on november , : "i wrote to calverley, suggesting an idea (which i think occurred to me yesterday) of guessing well-known poems as acrostics, and making a collection of them to hoax the public." calverley's reply to this letter was as follows:-- my dear sir,--i have been laid up (or laid down) for the last few days by acute lumbago, or i would have written before. it is rather absurd that i was on the point of propounding to you this identical idea. i realised, and i regret to add revealed to two girls, a fortnight ago, the truth that all existing poems were in fact acrostics; and i offered a small pecuniary reward to whichever would find out gray's "elegy" within half an hour! but it never occurred to me to utilise the discovery, as it did to you. i see that it might be utilised, now you mention it--and i shall instruct these two young women not to publish the notion among their friends. this is the way mr. calverley treated kirke white's poem "to an early primrose." "the title," writes c.s.c. "might either be ignored or omitted. possibly carpers might say that a primrose was not a rose." mild offspring of a dark and sullen sire! whose modest form, so delicately fine, wild was nursed in whistling storms rose and cradled in the winds! thee, when young spring first questioned winter's sway, and dared the sturdy blusterer to the fight, w a r thee on this bank he threw to mark his victory. in this low vale, the promise of the year, serene thou openest to the nipping gale, unnoticed and alone i ncognit o thy tender elegance. so virtue blooms, brought forth amid the storms of chill adversity, in some lone walk of life she rears her head l owlines s obscure and unobserved. while every bleaching breeze that on her blows chastens her spotless purity of breast, and hardens her to bear d isciplin e serene the ills of life. in the course of their correspondence mr. calverley wrote a shakespearian sonnet, the initial letters of which form the name of william herbert; and a parody entitled "the new hat." i reproduce them both. when o'er the world night spreads her mantle dun, in dreams, my love, i see those stars, thine eyes, lighting the dark: but when the royal sun looks o'er the pines and fires the orient skies, i bask no longer in thy beauty's ray, and lo! my world is bankrupt of delight. murk night seemed lately fair-complexioned day; hope-bringing day now seems most doleful night. end, weary day, that art no day to me! return, fair night, to me the best of days! but o my rose, whom in my dreams i see, enkindle with like bliss my waking gaze! replete with thee, e'en hideous night grows fair: then what would sweet morn be, if thou wert there? the new hat. my boots had been wash'd, well wash'd, by a shower; but little i car'd about that: what i felt was the havoc a single half-hour had made with my beautiful hat. for the boot, tho' its lustre be dimm'd, shall assume new comeliness after a while; but no art may restore its original bloom, when once it hath fled, to the tile. i clomb to my perch, and the horses (a bay and a brown) trotted off with a clatter; the driver look'd round in his humorous way, and said huskily, "who is your hatter?" i was pleased that he'd noticed its shape and its shine; and, as soon as we reached the "old druid," i begged him to drink to its welfare and mine in a glass of my favourite fluid. a gratified smile sat, i own, on my lips when the barmaid exclaimed to the master, (he was standing inside with his hands on his hips), "just look at that gentleman's castor." i laughed, when an organman paus'd in mid-air-- ('twas an air that i happened to know, by a great foreign _maestro_)--expressly to stare at ze gent wiz _ze joli chapeau_. yet how swift is the transit from laughter to tears! how rife with results is a day! that hat might, with care, have adorned me for years; but one show'r wash'd its beauty away. how i lov'd thee, my bright one! i pluck in remorse my hands from my pockets and wring 'em: oh, why did not i, dear, as a matter of course, ere i purchas'd thee purchase a gingham? c.s. calverley. mr. dodgson spent the last night of the old year ( ) at hatfield, where he was the guest of lord salisbury. there was a large party of children in the house, one of them being princess alice, to whom he told as much of the story of "sylvie and bruno" as he had then composed. while the tale was in progress lady salisbury entered the room, bringing in some new toy or game to amuse her little guests, who, with the usual thoughtlessness of children, all rushed off and left mr. dodgson. but the little princess, suddenly appearing to remember that to do so might perhaps hurt his feelings, sat down again by his side. he read the kind thought which prompted her action, and was much pleased by it. as mr. dodgson knew several members of the _punch_ staff, he used to send up any little incidents or remarks that particularly amused him to that paper. he even went so far as to suggest subjects for cartoons, though i do not know if his ideas were ever carried out. one of the anecdotes he sent to _punch_ was that of a little boy, aged four, who after having listened with much attention to the story of lot's wife, asked ingenuously, "where does salt come from that's _not_ made of ladies?" this appeared on january , . the following is one of several such little anecdotes jotted down by lewis carroll for future use: dr. paget was conducting a school examination, and in the course of his questions he happened to ask a small child the meaning of "average." he was utterly bewildered by the reply, "the thing that hens lay on," until the child explained that he had read in a book that hens lay _on an average_ so many eggs a year. among the notable people whom he photographed was john ruskin, and, as several friends begged him for copies, he wrote to ask mr. ruskin's leave. the reply was, "buy number of _fors clavigera_ for , which will give you your answer." this was not what mr. dodgson wanted, so he wrote back, "can't afford ten-pence!" finally mr. ruskin gave his consent. [illustration: john ruskin. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] about this time came the anonymous publication of "notes by an oxford chiel," a collection of papers written on various occasions, and all of them dealing with oxford controversies. taking them in order, we have first "the new method of evaluation as applied to [_pi_]," first published by messrs. parker in , which had for its subject the controversy about the regius professorship of greek. one extract will be sufficient to show the way in which the affair was treated: "let u = the university, g = greek, and p = professor. then g p = greek professor; let this be reduced to its lowest terms and call the result j [i.e., jowett]." the second paper is called "the dynamics of a parti-cle," and is quite the best of the series; it is a geometrical treatment of the contest between mr. gathorne hardy and mr. gladstone for the representation of the university. here are some of the "definitions" with which the subject was introduced:-- _plain superficiality_ is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points. _plain anger_ is the inclination of two voters to one another, who meet together, but whose views are not in the same direction. when two parties, coming together, feel a right anger, each is _said_ to be _complimentary_ to the other, though, strictly speaking, this is very seldom the case. _a surd_ is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained. as the "notes of an oxford chiel" has been long out of print, i will give a few more extracts from this paper:-- _on differentiation._ the effect of differentiation on a particle is very remarkable, the first differential being frequently of greater value than the original particle, and the second of less enlightenment. for example, let l = "leader", s = "saturday", and then ls = "leader in the saturday" (a particle of no assignable value). differentiating once, we get l.s.d., a function of great value. similarly it will be found that, by taking the second differential of an enlightened particle (_i.e.,_ raising it to the degree d.d.), the enlightenment becomes rapidly less. the effect is much increased by the addition of a c: in this case the enlightenment often vanishes altogether, and the particle becomes conservative. propositions. prop. i. pr. _to find the value of a given examiner_. _example_.--a takes in ten books in the final examination and gets a rd class; b takes in the examiners, and gets a nd. find the value of the examiners in terms of books. find also their value in terms in which no examination is held. prop. ii. pr. _to estimate profit and loss_. _example_.--given a derby prophet, who has sent three different winners to three different betting-men, and given that none of the three horses are placed. find the total loss incurred by the three men (_a_) in money, (_b_) in temper. find also the prophet. is this latter usually possible? prop. iv. th. _the end_ (i.e., "_the product of the extremes") justifies_ (i.e., "_is equal to_"--_see latin "aequus") the means_. no example is appended to this proposition, for obvious reasons. prop. v. pr. _to continue a given series._ _example_.--a and b, who are respectively addicted to fours and fives, occupy the same set of rooms, which is always at sixes and sevens. find the probable amount of reading done by a and b while the eights are on. the third paper was entitled "facts, figures, and fancies." the best thing in it was a parody on "the deserted village," from which an extract will be found in a later chapter. there was also a letter to the senior censor of christ church, in burlesque of a similar letter in which the professor of physics met an offer of the clarendon trustees by a detailed enumeration of the requirements in his own department of natural science. mr. dodgson's letter deals with the imaginary requirements of the mathematical school:-- dear senior censor,--in a desultory conversation on a point connected with the dinner at our high table, you incidentally remarked to me that lobster-sauce, "though a necessary adjunct to turbot, was not entirely wholesome!" it is entirely unwholesome. i never ask for it without reluctance: i never take a second spoonful without a feeling of apprehension on the subject of a possible nightmare. this naturally brings me to the subject of mathematics, and of the accommodation provided by the university for carrying on the calculations necessary in that important branch of science. as members of convocation are called upon (whether personally, or, as is less exasperating, by letter) to consider the offer of the clarendon trustees, as well as every other subject of human, or inhuman, interest, capable of consideration, it has occurred to me to suggest for your consideration how desirable roofed buildings are for carrying on mathematical calculations: in fact, the variable character of the weather in oxford renders it highly inexpedient to attempt much occupation, of a sedentary nature, in the open air. again, it is often impossible for students to carry on accurate mathematical calculations in close contiguity to one another, owing to their mutual conversation; consequently these processes require different rooms in which irrepressible conversationalists, who are found to occur in every branch of society, might be carefully and permanently fixed. it may be sufficient for the present to enumerate the following requisites--others might be added as funds permit:-- a. a very large room for calculating greatest common measure. to this a small one might be attached for least common multiple: this, however, might be dispensed with. b. a piece of open ground for keeping roots and practising their extraction: it would be advisable to keep square roots by themselves, as their corners are apt to damage others. c. a room for reducing fractions to their lowest terms. this should be provided with a cellar for keeping the lowest terms when found, which might also be available to the general body of undergraduates, for the purpose of "keeping terms." d. a large room, which might be darkened, and fitted up with a magic lantern, for the purpose of exhibiting circulating decimals in the act of circulation. this might also contain cupboards, fitted with glass doors, for keeping the various scales of notation. e. a narrow strip of ground, railed off and carefully levelled, for investigating the properties of asymptotes, and testing practically whether parallel lines meet or not: for this purpose it should reach, to use the expressive language of euclid, "ever so far." this last process of "continually producing the lines," may require centuries or more; but such a period, though long in the life of an individual, is as nothing in the life of the university. as photography is now very much employed in recording human expressions, and might possibly be adapted to algebraical expressions, a small photographic room would be desirable, both for general use and for representing the various phenomena of gravity, disturbance of equilibrium, resolution, &c., which affect the features during severe mathematical operations. may i trust that you will give your immediate attention to this most important subject? believe me, sincerely yours, mathematicus. next came "the new belfry of christ church, oxford; a monograph by d.c.l." on the title-page was a neatly drawn square--the figure of euclid i. --below which was written "east view of the new belfry, christ church, as seen from the meadow." the new belfry is fortunately a thing of the past, and its insolent hideousness no longer defaces christ church, but while it lasted it was no doubt an excellent target for lewis carroll's sarcasm. his article on it is divided into thirteen chapters. three of them are perhaps worth quoting:-- § . _on the etymological significance of the new belfry, ch. ch_. the word "belfry" is derived from the french _bel_, "beautiful, becoming, meet," and from the german _frei_, "free unfettered, secure, safe." thus, the word is strictly equivalent to "meat-safe," to which the new belfry bears a resemblance so perfect as almost to amount to coincidence. § . _on the chief architectural merit of the new belfry, ch. ch_. its chief merit is its simplicity--a simplicity so pure, so profound, in a word, so _simple_, that no other word will fitly describe it. the meagre outline, and baldness of detail, of the present chapter, are adopted in humble imitation of this great feature. § . _on the other architectural merits of the new belfry, ch. ch_. the belfry has no other architectural merits. "the vision of the three t's" followed. it also was an attack on architectural changes in christ church; the general style was a parody of the "compleat angler." last of all came "the blank cheque, a fable," in reference to the building of the new schools, for the expenses of which it was actually proposed (in ), to sign a blank cheque before any estimate had been made, or any plan laid before the university, and even before a committee had been elected to appoint an architect for the work. at the end of mr. dodgson was again at hatfield, where he told the children the story of prince uggug, which was afterwards made a part of "sylvie and bruno," though at that time it seems to have been a separate tale. but "sylvie and bruno," in this respect entirely unlike "alice in wonderland," was the result of notes taken during many years; for while he was thinking out the book he never neglected any amusing scraps of childish conversation or funny anecdotes about children which came to his notice. it is this fact which gives such verisimilitude to the prattle of bruno; childish talk is a thing which a grown-up person cannot possibly _invent_. he can only listen to the actual things the children say, and then combine what he has heard into a connected narrative. during mr. dodgson wrote an article on "some popular fallacies about vivisection," which was refused by the _pall mall gazette_, the editor saying that he had never heard of most of them; on which mr. dodgson plaintively notes in his diary that seven out of the thirteen fallacies dealt with in his essay had appeared in the columns of the _pall mall gazette_. ultimately it was accepted by the editor of _the fortnightly review_. mr. dodgson had a peculiar horror of vivisection. i was once walking in oxford with him when a certain well-known professor passed us. "i am afraid that man vivisects," he said, in his gravest tone. every year he used to get a friend to recommend him a list of suitable charities to which he should subscribe. once the name of some lost dogs' home appeared in this list. before mr. dodgson sent his guinea he wrote to the secretary to ask whether the manager of the home was in the habit of sending dogs that had to be killed to physiological laboratories for vivisection. the answer was in the negative, so the institution got the cheque. he did not, however, advocate the total abolition of vivisection--what reasonable man could?--but he would have liked to see it much more carefully restricted by law. an earlier letter of his to the _pall mall gazette_ on the same subject is sufficiently characteristic to deserve a place here. be it noted that he signed it "lewis carroll," in order that whatever influence or power his writings had gained him might tell in the controversy. vivisection as a sign of the times. _to the editor of the "pall mall gazette."_ sir,--the letter which appeared in last week's _spectator_, and which must have saddened the heart of every one who read it, seems to suggest a question which has not yet been asked or answered with sufficient clearness, and that is, how far may vivisection be regarded as a sign of the times, and a fair specimen of that higher civilisation which a purely secular state education is to give us? in that much-vaunted panacea for all human ills we are promised not only increase of knowledge, but also a higher moral character; any momentary doubt on this point which we may feel is set at rest at once by quoting the great crucial instance of germany. the syllogism, if it deserves the name, is usually stated thus: germany has a higher scientific education than england; germany has a lower average of crime than england; _ergo_, a scientific education tends to improve moral conduct. some old-fashioned logician might perhaps whisper to himself, "praemissis particularibus nihil probatur," but such a remark, now that aldrich is out of date, would only excite a pitying smile. may we, then, regard the practice of vivisection as a legitimate fruit, or as an abnormal development, of this higher moral character? is the anatomist, who can contemplate unmoved the agonies he is inflicting for no higher purpose than to gratify a scientific curiosity, or to illustrate some well-established truth, a being higher or lower, in the scale of humanity, than the ignorant boor whose very soul would sicken at the horrid sight? for if ever there was an argument in favour of purely scientific education more cogent than another, it is surely this (a few years back it might have been put into the mouth of any advocate of science; now it reads like the merest mockery): "what can teach the noble quality of mercy, of sensitiveness to all forms of suffering, so powerfully as the knowledge of what suffering really is? can the man who has once realised by minute study what the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being?" a little while ago we should have confidently replied, "he cannot do it"; in the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess "he can." and let it never be said that this is done with serious forethought of the balance of pain and gain; that the operator has pleaded with himself, "pain is indeed an evil, but so much suffering may fitly be endured to purchase so much knowledge." when i hear of one of these ardent searchers after truth giving, not a helpless dumb animal, to whom he says in effect, "_you_ shall suffer that _i_ may know," but his own person to the probe and to the scalpel, i will believe in him as recognising a principle of justice, and i will honour him as acting up to his principles. "but the thing cannot be!" cries some amiable reader, fresh from an interview with that most charming of men, a london physician. "what! is it possible that one so gentle in manner, so full of noble sentiments, can be hardhearted? the very idea is an outrage to common sense!" and thus we are duped every day of our lives. is it possible that that bank director, with his broad honest face, can be meditating a fraud? that the chairman of that meeting of shareholders, whose every tone has the ring of truth in it, can hold in his hand a "cooked" schedule of accounts? that my wine merchant, so outspoken, so confiding, can be supplying me with an adulterated article? that the schoolmaster, to whom i have entrusted my little boy, can starve or neglect him? how well i remember his words to the dear child when last we parted. "you are leaving your friends," he said, "but you will have a father in me, my dear, and a mother in mrs. squeers!" for all such rose-coloured dreams of the necessary immunity from human vices of educated men the facts in last week's _spectator_ have a terrible significance. "trust no man further than you can see him," they seem to say. "qui vult decipi, decipiatur." allow me to quote from a modern writer a few sentences bearing on this subject:-- "we are at present, legislature and nation together, eagerly pushing forward schemes which proceed on the postulate that conduct is determined, not by feelings, but by cognitions. for what else is the assumption underlying this anxious urging-on of organisations for teaching? what is the root-notion common to secularists and denominationalists but the notion that spread of knowledge is the one thing needful for bettering behaviour? having both swallowed certain statistical fallacies, there has grown up in them the belief that state education will check ill-doing.... this belief in the moralising effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd _a priori_.... this faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the superstitions of the age.... not by precept, though heard daily; not by example, unless it is followed; but only by action, often caused by the related feeling, can a moral habit be formed. and yet this truth, which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored in current educational fanaticisms." there need no praises of mine to commend to the consideration of all thoughtful readers these words of herbert spencer. they are to be found in "the study of sociology" (pp. l- ). let us, however, do justice to science. it is not so wholly wanting as mr. herbert spencer would have us believe in principles of action--principles by which we may regulate our conduct in life. i myself once heard an accomplished man of science declare that his labours had taught him one special personal lesson which, above all others, he had laid to heart. a minute study of the nervous system, and of the various forms of pain produced by wounds had inspired in him one profound resolution; and that was--what think you?--never, under any circumstances, to adventure his own person into the field of battle! i have somewhere read in a book--a rather antiquated book, i fear, and one much discredited by modern lights--the words, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." truly we read these words with a new meaning in the present day! "groan and travail" it undoubtedly does still (more than ever, so far as the brute creation is concerned); but to what end? some higher and more glorious state? so one might have said a few years back. not so in these days. the _telos teleion_ of secular education, when divorced from religious or moral training, is--i say it deliberately--the purest and most unmitigated selfishness. the world has seen and tired of the worship of nature, of reason, of humanity; for this nineteenth century has been reserved the development of the most refined religion of all--the worship of self. for that, indeed, is the upshot of it all. the enslavement of his weaker brethren--"the labour of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do not labour"--the degradation of woman--the torture of the animal world--these are the steps of the ladder by which man is ascending to his higher civilisation. selfishness is the key-note of all purely secular education; and i take vivisection to be a glaring, a wholly unmistakable case in point. and let it not be thought that this is an evil that we can hope to see produce the good for which we are asked to tolerate it, and then pass away. it is one that tends continually to spread. and if it be tolerated or even ignored now, the age of universal education, when the sciences, and anatomy among them, shall be the heritage of all, will be heralded by a cry of anguish from the brute creation that will ring through the length and breadth of the land! this, then, is the glorious future to which the advocate of secular education may look forward: the dawn that gilds the horizon of his hopes! an age when all forms of religious thought shall be things of the past; when chemistry and biology shall be the abc of a state education enforced on all; when vivisection shall be practised in every college and school; and when the man of science, looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a hell for animals. i am, sir, your obedient servant, lewis carroll. _february th_. on march , , "the hunting of the snark" was published. mr. dodgson gives some interesting particulars of its evolution. the first idea for the poem was the line "for the snark _was_ a boojum, you see," which came into his mind, apparently without any cause, while he was taking a country walk. the first complete verse which he composed was the one which stands last in the poem:-- in the midst of the word he was trying to say, in the midst of his laughter and glee, he had softly and suddenly vanished away-- for the snark _was_ a boojum, you see. the illustrations were the work of mr. henry holiday, and they are thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of the poem. many people have tried to show that "the hunting of the snark" was an allegory; some regarding it as being a burlesque upon the tichborne case, and others taking the snark as a personification of popularity. lewis carroll always protested that the poem had no meaning at all. as to the meaning of the snark [he wrote to a friend in america], i'm very much afraid i didn't mean anything but nonsense. still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. so, whatever good meanings are in the book, i'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book. the best that i've seen is by a lady (she published it in a letter to a newspaper), that the whole book is an allegory on the search after happiness. i think this fits in beautifully in many ways--particularly about the bathing-machines: when the people get weary of life, and can't find happiness in towns or in books, then they rush off to the seaside, to see what bathing-machines will do for them. [illustration: henry holiday in his studio. _from a photograph_.] mr. h. holiday, in a very interesting article on "the snark's significance" (_academy,_ january , ), quoted the inscription which mr. dodgson had written in a vellum-bound, presentation-copy of the book. it is so characteristic that i take the liberty of reproducing it here:-- presented to henry holiday, most patient of artists, by charles l. dodgson, most exacting, but not most ungrateful of authors, march , . a little girl, to whom mr. dodgson had given a copy of the "snark," managed to get the whole poem off by heart, and insisted on reciting, it from beginning to end during a long carriage-drive. her friends, who, from the nature of the case, were unable to escape, no doubt wished that she, too, was a boojum. during the year, the first public dramatic representation of "alice in wonderland" was given at the polytechnic, the entertainment taking the form of a series of _tableaux_, interspersed with appropriate readings and songs. mr. dodgson exercised a rigid censorship over all the extraneous matter introduced into the performance, and put his veto upon a verse in one of the songs, in which the drowning of kittens was treated from the humorous point of view, lest the children in the audience might learn to think lightly of death in the case of the lower animals. [illustration: lewis carroll. _from a photograph_.] * * * * * chapter v ( - ) dramatic tastes--miss ellen terry--"natural science at oxford"--mr. dodgson as an artist--miss e. g. thomson--the drawing of children--a curious dream--"the deserted parks"--"syzygies"--circus children--row-loving undergraduates--a letter to _the observer_--resignation of the lectureship--he is elected curator of the common room--dream-music. mr. dodgson's love of the drama was not, as i have shown, a taste which he acquired in later years. from early college days he never missed anything which he considered worth seeing at the london theatres. i believe he used to reproach himself--unfairly, i think--with spending too much time on such recreations. for a man who worked so hard and so incessantly as he did; for a man to whom vacations meant rather a variation of mental employment than absolute rest of mind, the drama afforded just the sort of relief that was wanted. his vivid imagination, the very earnestness and intensity of his character enabled him to throw himself utterly into the spirit of what he saw upon the stage, and to forget in it all the petty worries and disappointments of life. the old adage says that a man cannot burn the candle at both ends; like most proverbs, it is only partially true, for often the hardest worker is the man who enters with most zest into his recreations, and this was emphatically the case with mr. dodgson. walter pater, in his book on the renaissance, says (i quote from rough notes only), "a counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. how may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? how shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." here we have the truer philosophy, here we have the secret of lewis carroll's life. he never wasted time on social formalities; he refused to fulfil any of those (so called) duties which involve ineffable boredom, and so his mind was always fresh and ready. he said in one of his letters that he hoped that in the next world all knowledge would not be given to us suddenly, but that we should gradually grow wiser, for the _acquiring_ knowledge was to him the real pleasure. what is this but a paraphrase of another of pater's thoughts, "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end." and so, times without number, he allowed himself to be carried away by emotion as he saw life in the mirror of the stage; but, best of all, he loved to see the acting of children, and he generally gave copies of his books to any of the little performers who specially pleased him. on january , , he wrote in his diary:-- went up to town for the day, and took e-- with me to the afternoon pantomime at the adelphi, "goody two-shoes," acted entirely by children. it was a really charming performance. little bertie coote, aged ten, was clown--a wonderfully clever little fellow; and carrie coote, about eight, was columbine, a very pretty graceful little thing. in a few years' time she will be just _the_ child to act "alice," if it is ever dramatised. the harlequin was a little girl named gilchrist, one of the most beautiful children, in face and figure, that i have ever seen. i must get an opportunity of photographing her. little bertie coote, singing "hot codlings," was curiously like the pictures of grimaldi. it need hardly be said that the little girl was miss constance gilchrist. mr. dodgson sent her a copy of "alice in wonderland," with a set of verses on her name. many people object altogether to children appearing on the stage; it is said to be bad for their morals as well as for their health. a letter which mr. dodgson once wrote in the _st. james's gazette_ contains a sufficient refutation of the latter fancy:-- i spent yesterday afternoon at brighton, where for five hours i enjoyed the society of three exceedingly happy and healthy little girls, aged twelve, ten, and seven. i think that any one who could have seen the vigour of life in those three children--the intensity with which they enjoyed everything, great or small, that came in their way--who could have watched the younger two running races on the pier, or have heard the fervent exclamation of the eldest at the end of the afternoon, "we _have_ enjoyed ourselves!" would have agreed with me that here, at least, there was no excessive "physical strain," nor any _imminent_ danger of "fatal results"! a drama, written by mr. savile clarke, is now being played at brighton, and in this (it is called "alice in wonderland") all three children have been engaged. they had been acting every night this week, and _twice_ on the day before i met them, the second performance lasting till half-past ten at night, after which they got up at seven next morning to bathe! that such (apparently) severe work should co-exist with blooming health and buoyant spirits seems at first sight a paradox; but i appeal to any one who has ever worked _con amore_ at any subject whatever to support me in the assertion that, when you really love the subject you are working at, the "physical strain" is absolutely _nil_; it is only when working "against the grain" that any strain is felt, and i believe the apparent paradox is to be explained by the fact that a taste for _acting_ is one of the strongest passions of human nature, that stage-children show it nearly from infancy, and that, instead of being miserable drudges who ought to be celebrated in a new "cry of the children," they simply _rejoice_ in their work "even as a giant rejoiceth to run his course." mr. dodgson's general views on the mission of the drama are well shown by an extract from a circular which he sent to many of his friends in :-- the stage (as every playgoer can testify) is an engine of incalculable power for influencing society; and every effort to purify and ennoble its aims seems to me to deserve all the countenance that the great, and all the material help that the wealthy, can give it; while even those who are neither great nor wealthy may yet do their part, and help to-- "ring out the darkness of the land, ring in the christ that is to be." [illustration: ellen terry. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] i do not know if mr. dodgson's suggested amendment of some lines in the "merchant of venice" was ever carried out, but it further illustrates the serious view he took of this subject. the hint occurs in a letter to miss ellen terry, which runs as follows:-- you gave me a treat on saturday such as i have very seldom had in my life. you must be weary by this time of hearing your own praises, so i will only say that portia was all i could have imagined, and more. and shylock is superb--especially in the trial-scene. now i am going to be very bold, and make a suggestion, which i do hope you will think well enough of to lay it before mr. irving. i want to see that clause omitted (in the sentence on shylock)-- that, for this favour, he presently become a christian; it is a sentiment that is entirely horrible and revolting to the feelings of all who believe in the gospel of love. why should our ears be shocked by such words merely because they are shakespeare's? in his day, when it was held to be a christian's duty to force his belief on others by fire and sword--to burn man's body in order to save his soul--the words probably conveyed no shock. to all christians now (except perhaps extreme calvinists) the idea of forcing a man to abjure his religion, whatever that religion may be, is (as i have said) simply horrible. i have spoken of it as a needless outrage on religious feeling: but surely, being so, it is a great artistic mistake. its tendency is directly contrary to the spirit of the scene. we have despised shylock for his avarice, and we rejoice to see him lose his wealth: we have abhorred him for his bloodthirsty cruelty, and we rejoice to see him baffled. and now, in the very fulness of our joy at the triumph of right over wrong, we are suddenly called on to see in him the victim of a cruelty a thousand times worse than his own, and to honour him as a martyr. this, i am sure, shakespeare never meant. two touches only of sympathy does he allow us, that we may realise him as a man, and not as a demon incarnate. "i will not pray with you"; "i had it of leah, when i was a bachelor." but i am sure he never meant our sympathies to be roused in the supreme moment of his downfall, and, if he were alive now, i believe he would cut out those lines about becoming a christian. no interpolation is needed--(i should not like to suggest the putting in a single word that is not shakespeare's)--i would read the speech thus:-- that lately stole his daughter: provided that he do record a gift, here in the court, &c. and i would omit gratiano's three lines at shylock's exit, and let the text stand:-- _duke_: "get thee gone, but do it." (_exit shylock_.) the exit, in solemn silence, would be, if possible, even grander than it now is, and would lose nothing by the omission of gratiano's flippant jest.... on january th he saw "new men and old acres" at the court theatre. the two authors of the pieces, dubourg and tom taylor, were great friends of his. "it was a real treat," he writes, "being well acted in every detail. ellen terry was wonderful, and i should think unsurpassable in all but the lighter parts." mr. dodgson himself had a strong wish to become a dramatic author, but, after one or two unsuccessful attempts to get his plays produced, he wisely gave up the idea, realising that he had not the necessary constructive powers. the above reference to miss ellen terry's acting is only one out of a countless number; the great actress and he were excellent friends, and she did him many a kindness in helping on young friends of his who had taken up the stage as a profession. [illustration: tom taylor. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] she and her sister, miss kate terry, were among the distinguished people whom he photographed. the first time he saw the latter actress was, i think, in , when she was playing in "the tempest" at the princess's. "the gem of the piece," he writes, "was the exquisitely graceful and beautiful ariel, miss kate terry. her appearance as a sea-nymph was one of the most beautiful living pictures i ever saw, but this, and every other one in my recollection (except queen katherine's dream), were all outdone by the concluding scene, where ariel is left alone, hovering over the wide ocean, watching the retreating ship. it is an innovation on shakespeare, but a worthy one, and the conception of a true poet." [illustration: kate terry. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] mr. dodgson was a frequent contributor to the daily press. as a rule his letters appeared in the _st. james's gazette_, for the editor, mr. greenwood, was a friend of his, but the following sarcastic epistle was an exception:-- natural science at oxford. _to the editor of the "pall mall gazette."_ sir,--there is no one of the many ingenious appliances of mechanical science that is more appreciated or more successfully employed than the wedge; so subtle and imperceptible are the forces needed for the insertion of its "thin end," so astounding the results which its "thick end" may ultimately produce. of the former process we shall see a beautiful illustration in a congregation to be holden at oxford on the th inst., when it will be proposed to grant, to those who have taken the degrees of bachelor and master in natural science only, the same voting powers as in the case of the "m.a." degree. this means the omission of one of the two classical languages, latin and greek, from what has been hitherto understood as the curriculum of an oxford education. it is to this "thin end" of the wedge that i would call the attention of our non-residents, and of all interested in oxford education, while the "thick end" is still looming in the distance. but why fear a "thick end" at all? i shall be asked. has natural science shown any such tendency, or given any reason to fear that such a concession would lead to further demands? in answer to that question, let me sketch, in dramatic fashion, the history of her recent career in oxford. in the dark ages of our university (some five-and-twenty years ago), while we still believed in classics and mathematics as constituting a liberal education, natural science sat weeping at our gates. "ah, let me in!" she moaned; "why cram reluctant youth with your unsatisfying lore? are they not hungering for bones; yea, panting for sulphuretted hydrogen?" we heard and we pitied. we let her in and housed her royally; we adorned her palace with re-agents and retorts, and made it a very charnel-house of bones, and we cried to our undergraduates, "the feast of science is spread! eat, drink, and be happy!" but they would not. they fingered the bones, and thought them dry. they sniffed at the hydrogen, and turned away. yet for all that science ceased not to cry, "more gold, more gold!" and her three fair daughters, chemistry, biology, and physics (for the modern horse-leech is more prolific than in the days of solomon), ceased not to plead, "give, give!" and we gave; we poured forth our wealth like water (i beg her pardon, like h{_ }o), and we could not help thinking there was something weird and uncanny in the ghoul-like facility with which she absorbed it. the curtain rises on the second act of the drama. science is still weeping, but this time it is for lack of pupils, not of teachers or machinery. "we are unfairly handicapped!" she cries. "you have prizes and scholarships for classics and mathematics, and you bribe your best students to desert us. buy us some bright, clever boys to teach, and then see what we can do!" once more we heard and pitied. we had bought her bones; we bought her boys. and now at last her halls were filled--not only with teachers paid to teach, but also with learners paid to learn. and we have not much to complain of in results, except that perhaps she is a little too ready to return on our hands all but the "honour-men"--all, in fact, who really need the helping hand of an educator. "here, take back your stupid ones!" she cries. "except as subjects for the scalpel (and we have not yet got the human vivisection act through parliament) we can do nothing with them!" the third act of the drama is yet under rehearsal; the actors are still running in and out of the green-room, and hastily shuffling on their new and ill-fitting dresses; but its general scope is not far to seek. at no distant day our once timid and tearful guest will be turning up her nose at the fare provided for her. "give me no more youths to teach," she will say; "but pay me handsomely, and let me think. plato and aristotle were all very well in their way; diogenes and his tub for me!" the allusion is not inappropriate. there can be little doubt that some of the researches conducted by that retiring philosopher in the recesses of that humble edifice were strictly scientific, embracing several distinct branches of entomology. i do not mean, of course, that "research" is a new idea in oxford. from time immemorial we have had our own chosen band of researchers (here called "professors"), who have advanced the boundaries of human knowledge in many directions. true, they are not left so wholly to themselves as some of these modern thinkers would wish to be, but are expected to give some few lectures, as the outcome of their "research" and the evidence of its reality, but even that condition has not always been enforced--for instance, in the case of the late professor of greek, dr. gaisford, the university was too conscious of the really valuable work he was doing in philological research to complain that he ignored the usual duties of the chair and delivered no lectures. and, now, what is the "thick end" of the wedge? it is that latin and greek may _both_ vanish from our curriculum; that logic, philosophy, and history may follow; and that the destinies of oxford may some day be in the hands of those who have had no education other than "scientific." and why not? i shall be asked. is it not as high a form of education as any other? that is a matter to be settled by facts. i can but offer my own little item of evidence, and leave it to others to confirm or to refute. it used once to be thought indispensable for an educated man that he should be able to write his own language correctly, if not elegantly; it seems doubtful how much longer this will be taken as a criterion. not so many years ago i had the honour of assisting in correcting for the press some pages of the _anthropological review_, or some such periodical. i doubt not that the writers were eminent men in their own line; that each could triumphantly prove, to his own satisfaction, the unsoundness of what the others had advanced; and that all would unite in declaring that the theories of a year ago were entirely exploded by the latest german treatise; but they were not able to set forth these thoughts, however consoling in themselves, in anything resembling the language of educated society. in all my experience, i have never read, even in the "local news" of a country paper, such slipshod, such deplorable english. i shall be told that i am ungenerous in thus picking out a few unfavourable cases, and that some of the greatest minds of the day are to be found in the ranks of science. i freely admit that such may be found, but my contention is that _they_ made the science, not the science them; and that in any line of thought they would have been equally distinguished. as a general principle, i do not think that the exclusive study of any _one_ subject is really education; and my experience as a teacher has shown me that even a considerable proficiency in natural science, taken alone, is so far from proving a high degree of cultivation and great natural ability that it is fully compatible with general ignorance and an intellect quite below par. therefore it is that i seek to rouse an interest, beyond the limits of oxford, in preserving classics as an essential feature of a university education. nor is it as a classical tutor (who might be suspected of a bias in favour of his own subject) that i write this. on the contrary, it is as one who has taught science here for more than twenty years (for mathematics, though good-humouredly scorned by the biologists on account of the abnormal certainty of its conclusions, is still reckoned among the sciences) that i beg to sign myself,--your obedient servant, charles l. dodgson, _mathematical lecturer of christ church, oxford. may th._ i give the above letter because i think it amusing; it must not be supposed that the writer's views on the subject remained the same all through his life. he was a thorough conservative, and it took a long time to reconcile him to any new departure. in a political discussion with a friend he once said that he was "first an englishman, and then a conservative," but however much a man may try to put patriotism before party, the result will be but partially successful, if patriotism would lead him into opposition to the mental bias which has originally made him either a conservative or a radical. he took, of course, great pleasure in the success of his books, as every author must; but the greatest pleasure of all to him was to know that they had pleased others. notes like the following are frequent in his diary: "_june_ _th_.--spent the afternoon in sending off seventy circulars to hospitals, offering copies of 'alice' and the 'looking-glass' for sick children." he well deserved the name which one of his admirers gave him--"the man who loved little children." in april, , he saw a performance of "olivia" at the court theatre. "the gem of the piece is olivia herself, acted by ellen terry with a sweetness and pathos that moved some of the audience (nearly including myself) to tears. her leave-taking was exquisite; and when, in her exile, she hears that her little brother had cried at the mention of her name, her exclamation 'pet!' was tenderness itself. altogether, i have not had a greater dramatic treat for a long time. _dies cretâ notandus_." i see that i have marked for quotation the following brief entries in the diary:-- _aug. th_ (at eastbourne).--went, morning and evening, to the new chapel-of-ease belonging to s. saviour's. it has the immense advantage of _not_ being crowded; but this scarcely compensates for the vile gregorian chants, which vex and weary one's ear. _aug. th_.--a very inquisitive person, who had some children with her, found out my name, and then asked me to shake hands with her child, as an admirer of my books: this i did, unwisely perhaps, as i have no intention of continuing the acquaintance of a "mrs. leo hunter." _dec. rd_.--i have been making a plan for work next term, of this kind: choose a subject (_e.g._, "circulation," "journeys of s. paul," "english counties") for each week. on monday write what i know about it; during week get up subject; on saturday write again; put the two papers away, and six months afterwards write again and compare. as an artist, mr. dodgson possessed an intense natural appreciation of the beautiful, an abhorrence of all that is coarse and unseemly which might almost be called hyper-refinement, a wonderfully good eye for form, and last, but not least, the most scrupulous conscientiousness about detail. on the other hand his sense of colour was somewhat imperfect, and his hand was almost totally untrained, so that while he had all the enthusiasm of the true artist, his work always had the defects of an amateur. [illustration: miss e. gertrude thomson.] in some drawings of miss e. gertrude thomson's excited his keen admiration, and he exerted himself to make her acquaintance. their first meeting is described so well by miss thomson herself in _the gentlewoman_ for january , , that i cannot do better than quote the description of the scene as given there:-- it was at the end of december, , that a letter, written in a singularly legible and rather boyish-looking hand, came to me from christ church, oxford, signed "c. l. dodgson." the writer said that he had come across some fairy designs of mine, and he should like to see some more of my work. by the same post came a letter from my london publisher (who had supplied my address) telling me that the "rev. c. l. dodgson" was "lewis carroll." "alice in wonderland" had long been one of my pet books, and as one regards a favourite author as almost a personal friend, i felt less restraint than one usually feels in writing to a stranger, though i carefully concealed my knowledge of his identity, as he had not chosen to reveal it. this was the beginning of a frequent and delightful correspondence, and as i confessed to a great love for fairy lore of every description, he asked me if i would accept a child's fairy-tale book he had written, called "alice in wonderland." i replied that i knew it nearly all off by heart, but that i should greatly prize a copy given to me by himself. by return came "alice," and "through the looking-glass," bound most luxuriously in white calf and gold. and this is the graceful and kindly note that came with them: "i am now sending you 'alice,' and the 'looking-glass' as well. there is an incompleteness about giving only one, and besides, the one you bought was probably in red and would not match these. if you are at all in doubt as to what to do with the (now) superfluous copy, let me suggest your giving it to some poor sick child. i have been distributing copies to all the hospitals and convalescent homes i can hear of, where there are sick children capable of reading them, and though, of course, one takes some pleasure in the popularity of the books elsewhere, it is not nearly so pleasant a thought to me as that they may be a comfort and relief to children in hours of pain and weariness. still, no recipient _can_ be more appropriate than one who seems to have been in fairyland herself, and to have seen, like the 'weary mariners' of old-- 'between the green brink and the running foam white limbs unrobed in a crystal air, sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest to little harps of gold.'" "do you ever come to london?" he asked in another letter; "if so, will you allow me to call upon you?" early in the summer i came up to study, and i sent him word that i was in town. one night, coming into my room, after a long day spent at the british museum, in the half-light i saw a card lying on the table. "rev. c. l. dodgson." bitter, indeed, was my disappointment at having missed him, but just as i was laying it sadly down i spied a small t.o. in the corner. on the back i read that he couldn't get up to my rooms early or late enough to find me, so would i arrange to meet him at some museum or gallery the day but one following? i fixed on south kensington museum, by the "schliemann" collection, at twelve o'clock. a little before twelve i was at the rendezvous, and then the humour of the situation suddenly struck me, that _i_ had not the ghost of an idea what _he_ was like, nor would _he_ have any better chance of discovering _me!_ the room was fairly full of all sorts and conditions, as usual, and i glanced at each masculine figure in turn, only to reject it as a possibility of the one i sought. just as the big clock had clanged out twelve, i heard the high vivacious voices and laughter of children sounding down the corridor. at that moment a gentleman entered, two little girls clinging to his hands, and as i caught sight of the tall slim figure, with the clean-shaven, delicate, refined face, i said to myself, "_that's_ lewis carroll." he stood for a moment, head erect, glancing swiftly over the room, then, bending down, whispered something to one of the children; she, after a moment's pause, pointed straight at me. dropping their hands he came forward, and with that winning smile of his that utterly banished the oppressive sense of the oxford don, said simply, "i am mr. dodgson; i was to meet you, i think?" to which i as frankly smiled, and said, "how did you know me so soon?" "my little friend found you. i told her i had come to meet a young lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once. but _i_ knew you before she spoke." this acquaintance ripened into a true, artistic friendship, which lasted till mr. dodgson's death. in his first letter to miss thomson he speaks of himself as one who for twenty years had found his one amusement in photographing from life--especially photographing children; he also said that he had made attempts ("most unsuccessfully") at drawing them. when he got to know her more intimately, he asked her to criticise his work, and when she wrote expressing her willingness to do so, he sent her a pile of sketch-books, through which she went most carefully, marking the mistakes, and criticising, wherever criticism seemed to be necessary. after this he might often have been seen in her studio, lying flat on his face, and drawing some child-model who had been engaged for his especial benefit. "i _love_ the effort to draw," he wrote in one of his letters to her, "but i utterly fail to please even my own eye--tho' now and then i seem to get somewhere _near_ a right line or two, when i have a live child to draw from. but i have no time left now for such things. in the next life, i do _hope_ we shall not only _see_ lovely forms, such as this world does not contain, but also be able to _draw_ them." but while he fully recognised the limits of his powers, he had great faith in his own critical judgment; and with good reason, for his perception of the beautiful in contour and attitude and grouping was almost unerring. all the drawings which miss thomson made for his "three sunsets" were submitted to his criticism, which descended to the smallest details. he concludes a letter to her, which contained the most elaborate and minute suggestions for the improvement of one of these pictures, with the following words: "i make all these suggestions with diffidence, feeling that i have _really no_ right at all, as an amateur, to criticise the work of a real artist." the following extract from another letter to miss thomson shows that seeking after perfection, that discontent with everything short of the best, which was so marked a feature of his character. she had sent him two drawings of the head of some child-friend of his:-- your note is a puzzle--you say that "no. would have been still more like if the paper had been exactly the same shade--but i'd no more at hand of the darker colour." had i given you the impression that i was in a _hurry_, and was willing to have no. _less_ good than it _might_ be made, so long as i could have it _quick?_ if i did, i'm very sorry: i never _meant_ to say a word like it: and, if you had written "i could make it still more like, on darker paper; but i've no more at hand. how long can you wait for me to get some?" i should have replied, "six weeks, or six _months_, if you prefer it!" i have already spoken of his love of nature, as opposed to the admiration for the morbid and abnormal. "i want you," he writes to miss thomson, "to do my fairy drawings from _life_. they would be very pretty, no doubt, done out of your own head, but they will be ten times as valuable if done from life. mr. furniss drew the pictures of 'sylvie' from life. mr. tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more needed one than i should need a multiplication-table to work a mathematical problem!" on another occasion he urges the importance of using models, in order to avoid the similarity of features which would otherwise spoil the pictures: "cruikshank's splendid illustrations were terribly spoiled by his having only _one_ pretty female face in them all. leech settled down into _two_ female faces. du maurier, i think, has only _one_, now. all the ladies, and all the little girls in his pictures look like twin sisters." it is interesting to know that sir noel paton and mr. walter crane were, in lewis carroll's opinion, the most successful drawers of children: "there are but few artists who seem to draw the forms of children _con amore_. walter crane is perhaps the best (always excepting sir noel paton): but the thick outlines, which he insists on using, seem to take off a good deal from the beauty of the result." he held that no artist can hope to effect a higher type of beauty than that which life itself exhibits, as the following words show:-- i don't quite understand about fairies losing "grace," if too like human children. of course i grant that to be like some _actual_ child is to lose grace, because no living child is perfect in form: many causes have lowered the race from what god made it. but the _perfect_ human form, free from these faults, is surely equally applicable to men, and fairies, and angels? perhaps that is what you mean--that the artist can imagine, and design, more perfect forms than we ever find in life? i have already referred several times to miss ellen terry as having been one of mr. dodgson's friends, but he was intimate with the whole family, and used often to pay them a visit when he was in town. on may , , he records a very curious dream which he had about miss marion ("polly") terry:-- last night i had a dream which i record as a curiosity, so far as i know, in the literature of dreams. i was staying, with my sisters, in some suburb of london, and had heard that the terrys were staying near us, so went to call, and found mrs. terry at home, who told us that marion and florence were at the theatre, "the walter house," where they had a good engagement. "in that case," i said, "i'll go on there at once, and see the performance--and may i take polly with me?" "certainly," said mrs. terry. and there was polly, the child, seated in the room, and looking about nine or ten years old: and i was distinctly conscious of the fact, yet without any feeling of surprise at its incongruity, that i was going to take the _child_ polly with me to the theatre, to see the _grown-up_ polly act! both pictures--polly as a child, and polly as a woman, are, i suppose, equally clear in my ordinary waking memory: and it seems that in sleep i had contrived to give the two pictures separate individualities. of all the mathematical books which mr. dodgson wrote, by far the most elaborate, if not the most original, was "euclid and his modern rivals." the first edition was issued in , and a supplement, afterwards incorporated into the second edition, appeared in . this book, as the author says, has for its object to furnish evidence ( ) that it is essential for the purposes of teaching or examining in elementary geometry to employ one text-book only; ( ) that there are strong _a priori_ reasons for retaining in all its main features, and especially in its sequence and numbering of propositions, and in its treatment of parallels, the manual of euclid; and ( ) that no sufficient reasons have yet been shown for abandoning it in favour of any one of the modern manuals which have been offered as substitutes. the book is written in dramatic form, and relieved throughout by many touches in the author's happiest vein, which make it delightful not only to the scientific reader, but also to any one of average intelligence with the slightest sense of humour. whether the conclusions are accepted in their entirety or not, it is certain that the arguments are far more effective than if the writer had presented them in the form of an essay. mr. dodgson had a wide experience as a teacher and examiner, so that he knew well what he was writing about, and undoubtedly the appearance of this book has done very much to stay the hand of the innovator. the scene opens in a college study--time, midnight. minos, an examiner, is discovered seated between two immense piles of manuscripts. he is driven almost to distraction in his efforts to mark fairly the papers sent up, by reason of the confusion caused through the candidates offering various substitutes for euclid. rhadamanthus, another equally distracted examiner, comes to his room. the two men consult together for a time, and then rhadamanthus retires, and minos falls asleep. hereupon the ghost of euclid appears, and discusses with minos the reasons for retaining his manual as a whole, in its present order and arrangement. as they are mainly concerned with the wants of beginners, their attention is confined to books i. and ii. we must be content with one short extract from the dialogue:-- _euclid_.--it is, i think, a friend of yours who has amused himself by tabulating the various theorems which might be enunciated on the single subject of pairs of lines. how many did he make them out to be? _minos_.--about two hundred and fifty, i believe. _euclid_.--at that rate there would probably be within the limit of my first book--how many? _minos_.--a thousand at least. _euclid_.--what a popular school-book it will be! how boys will bless the name of the writer who first brings out the complete thousand! with a view to discussing and criticising his various modern rivals, euclid promises to send to minos the ghost of a german professor (herr niemand) who "has read all books, and is ready to defend any thesis, true or untrue." "a charming companion!" as minos drily remarks. this brings us to act ii., in which the manuals which reject euclid's treatment of parallels are dealt with one by one. those manuals which adopt it are reserved for act iii., scene i.; while in scene ii., "the syllabus of the association for the improvement of geometrical teaching," and wilson's "syllabus," come under review. only one or two extracts need be given, which, it is hoped, will suffice to illustrate the character and style of the book: act ii., scene v.--niemand and minos are arguing for and against henrici's "elementary geometry." _minos_.--i haven't quite done with points yet. i find an assertion that they never jump. do you think that arises from their having "position," which they feel might be compromised by such conduct? _niemand_.--i cannot tell without hearing the passage read. _minos_.--it is this: "a point, in changing its position on a curve, passes in moving from one position to another through all intermediate positions. it does not move by jumps." _niemand_.--that is quite true. _minos_.--tell me then--is every centre of gravity a point? _niemand_.--certainly. _minos_.--let us now consider the centre of gravity of a flea. does it-- _niemand (indignantly)_.--another word, and i shall vanish! i cannot waste a night on such trivialities. _minos_.--i can't resist giving you just _one_ more tit-bit--the definition of a square at page : "a quadrilateral which is a kite, a symmetrical trapezium, and a parallelogram is a square!" and now, farewell, henrici: "euclid, with all thy faults, i love thee still!" again, from act ii., scene vi.:-- _niemand_.--he (pierce, another "modern rival,") has a definition of direction which will, i think, be new to you. _(reads.)_ "the _direction of a line_ in any part is the direction of a point at that part from the next preceding point of the line!" _minos_.--that sounds mysterious. which way along a line are "preceding" points to be found? _niemand_.--_both ways._ he adds, directly afterwards, "a line has two different directions," &c. _minos_.--so your definition needs a postscript.... but there is yet another difficulty. how far from a point is the "next" point? _niemand_.--at an infinitely small distance, of course. you will find the matter fully discussed in my work on the infinitesimal calculus. _minos_.--a most satisfactory answer for a teacher to make to a pupil just beginning geometry! in act iv. euclid reappears to minos, "followed by the ghosts of archimedes, pythagoras, &c., who have come to see fair play." euclid thus sums up his case:-- "'the cock doth craw, the day doth daw,' and all respectable ghosts ought to be going home. let me carry with me the hope that i have convinced you of the necessity of retaining my order and numbering, and my method of treating straight lines, angles, right angles, and (most especially) parallels. leave me these untouched, and i shall look on with great contentment while other changes are made--while my proofs are abridged and improved--while alternative proofs are appended to mine--and while new problems and theorems are interpolated. in all these matters my manual is capable of almost unlimited improvement." in appendices i. and ii. mr. dodgson quotes the opinions of two eminent mathematical teachers, mr. todhunter and professor de morgan, in support of his argument. before leaving this subject i should like to refer to a very novel use of mr. dodgson's book--its employment in a school. mr. g. hopkins, mathematical master in the high school at manchester, u.s., and himself the author of a "manual of plane geometry," has so employed it in a class of boys aged from fourteen or fifteen upwards. he first called their attention to some of the more prominent difficulties relating to the question of parallels, put a copy of euclid in their hands, and let them see his treatment of them, and after some discussion placed before them mr. dodgson's "euclid and his modern rivals" and "new theory of parallels." perhaps it is the fact that american boys are sharper than english, but at any rate the youngsters are reported to have read the two books with an earnestness and a persistency that were as gratifying to their instructor as they were complimentary to mr. dodgson. in june of the same year an entry in the diary refers to a proposal in convocation to allow the university club to have a cricket-ground in the parks. this had been proposed in , and then rejected. mr. dodgson sent round to the common rooms copies of a poem on "the deserted parks," which had been published by messrs. parker in , and which was afterwards included in "notes by an oxford chiel." i quote the first few lines:-- museum! loveliest building of the plain where cherwell winds towards the distant main; how often have i loitered o'er thy green, where humble happiness endeared the scene! how often have i paused on every charm,-- the rustic couple walking arm in arm, the groups of trees, with seats beneath the shade for prattling babes and whisp'ring lovers made, the never-failing brawl, the busy mill, where tiny urchins vied in fistic skill. (two phrases only have that dusky race caught from the learned influence of the place; phrases in their simplicity sublime, "scramble a copper!" "please, sir, what's the time?") these round thy walks their cheerful influence shed; these were thy charms--but all these charms are fled, amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, and rude pavilions sadden all thy green; one selfish pastime grasps the whole domain, and half a faction swallows up the plain; adown thy glades, all sacrificed to cricket, the hollow-sounding bat now guards the wicket; sunk are thy mounds in shapeless level all, lest aught impede the swiftly rolling ball; and trembling, shrinking from the fatal blow, far, far away thy hapless children go. ill fares the place, to luxury a prey, where wealth accumulates, and minds decay: athletic sports may flourish or may fade, fashion may make them, even as it has made; but the broad parks, the city's joy and pride, when once destroyed can never be supplied! readers of "sylvie and bruno" will remember the way in which the invisible fairy-children save the drunkard from his evil life, and i have always felt that mr. dodgson meant sylvie to be something more than a fairy--a sort of guardian angel. that such an idea would not have been inconsistent with his way of looking at things is shown by the following letter: ch. ch., _july_, . my dear ethel,--i have been long intending to answer your letter of april th, chiefly as to your question in reference to mrs. n--'s letter about the little s--s [whose mother had recently died]. you say you don't see "how they can be guided aright by their dead mother, or how light can come from her." many people believe that our friends in the other world can and do influence us in some way, and perhaps even "guide" us and give us light to show us our duty. my own feeling is, it _may_ be so: but nothing has been revealed about it. that the angels do so _is_ revealed, and we may feel sure of _that_; and there is a beautiful fancy (for i don't think one can call it more) that "a mother who has died leaving a child behind her in this world, is allowed to be a sort of guardian angel to that child." perhaps mrs. n-- believes that. here are two other entries in the diary:-- _aug. th_.--worked from about . to . , and again from . to . (making / hours altogether) at an idea which occurred to me of finding limits for _pi_ by elementary trigonometry, for the benefit of the circle-squarers. _dec. th_.--invented a new way of working one word into another. i think of calling the puzzle "syzygies." i give the first three specimens:-- man } permanent } entice } send man on ice. ice. } acre } sacred } credentials } rely on acre. entirely } rely } prism } prismatic } dramatic } prove prism to be odious. melodrama } melodious } odious. } in february, , mr. dodgson proposed to the christ church "staff-salaries board," that as his tutorial work was lighter he should have £ instead of £ a year. it is not often that a man proposes to cut down _his own_ salary, but the suggestion in this case was intended to help the college authorities in the policy of retrenchment which they were trying to carry out. _may th_.--percival, president of trin. coll., who has cardinal newman as his guest, wrote to say that the cardinal would sit for a photo, to me, at trinity. but i could not take my photography there and he couldn't come to me: so nothing came of it. _aug. th_. [at eastbourne].--took ruth and maud to the circus (hutchinson and tayleure's--from america). i made friends with mr. tayleure, who took me to the tents of horses, and the caravan he lived in. and i added to my theatrical experiences by a chat with a couple of circus children--ada costello, aged , and polly (evans, i think), aged . i found ada in the outer tent, with the pony on which she was to perform--practising vaulting on to it, varied with somersaults on the ground. i showed her my wire puzzle, and ultimately gave it her, promising a duplicate to polly. both children seemed bright and happy, and they had pleasant manners. _sept. nd_.--mrs. h-- took me to dr. bell's (the old homoeopathic doctor) to hear lord radstock speak about "training children." it was a curious affair. first a very long hymn; then two very long extempore prayers (not by lord r--), which were strangely self-sufficient and wanting in reverence. lord r--'s remarks were commonplace enough, though some of his theories were new, but, i think, not true--_e.g.,_ that encouraging emulation in schoolboys, or desiring that they should make a good position in life, was un-christian. i escaped at the first opportunity after his speech, and went down on the beach, where i made acquaintance with a family who were banking up with sand the feet and legs of a pretty little girl perched on a sand-castle. i got her father to make her stand to be drawn. further along the beach a merry little mite began pelting me with sand; so i drew _her_ too. _nov. th_.--thought of a plan for simplifying money-orders, by making the sender fill up two duplicate papers, one of which he hands in to be transmitted by the postmaster--it containing a key-number which the receiver has to supply in _his_ copy to get the money. i think of suggesting this, and my plan for double postage on sunday, to the government. _dec. th_.--the idea occurred to me that a game might be made of letters, to be moved about on a chess-board till they form words. a little book, published during this year, "alice (a dramatic version of lewis carroll's 'alice'), and other fairy tales for children," by mrs. freiligrath-kroeker, was very successful, and, i understand, still has a regular sale. mr. dodgson most gladly gave his consent to the dramatisation of his story by so talented an authoress, and shortly afterwards mrs. kroeker brought out "through the looking-glass" in a similar form. _jan._ , .--to the lyceum to see "the cup" and "the corsican brothers." the first is exquisitely put on, and ellen terry as camma is the perfection of grace, and irving as the villain, and mr. terriss as the husband, were very good. but the piece wants substance. _jan._ _th_.--tried to go to oxford, but the line is blocked near didcot, so stayed another night in town. the next afternoon the line was reported clear, but the journey took hours! on the day before the dean of ch. ch. and his family were snowed up for hours near radley. _march_ _th_.--went to s. mary's and stayed for holy communion, and, as ffoulkes was alone, i mustered up courage to help him. i read the exhortation, and was pleased to find i did not once hesitate. i think i must try preaching again soon, as he has often begged me to do. _april_ _th_.--mr. greenwood approves my theory about general elections, and wants me to write on it in the _st. james's gazette_. (the letter appeared on may , .) _may_ _th_.--took the longest walk (i believe) i have ever done--round by dorchester, didcot and abingdon-- miles--took hours--no blisters, i rejoice to find, and i feel very little tired. _may_ _th_.--the row-loving men in college are beginning to be troublesome again, and last night some or of them, aided by out-college men, made a great disturbance, and regularly defied the censors. i have just been with the other tutors into hall, and heard the dean make an excellent speech to the house. some two or three will have to go down, and twelve or fifteen others will be punished in various ways. (a later note says): the punishments had to be modified--it turned out that the disturbers were nearly all out-college men. [illustration : dr. liddell. _from a photograph by hill & saunders._] mr. dodgson sent a letter to _the observer_ on this subject:-- sir,--your paper of may th contains a leading article on christ church, resting on so many mis-statements of fact that i venture to appeal to your sense of justice to allow me, if no abler writer has addressed you on the subject, an opportunity of correcting them. it will, i think, be found that in so doing i shall have removed the whole foundation on which the writer has based his attack on the house, after which i may contentedly leave the superstructure to take care of itself. "christ church is always provoking the adverse criticism of the outer world." the writer justifies this rather broad generalisation by quoting three instances of such provocation, which i will take one by one. at one time we are told that "the dean ... neglects his functions, and spends the bulk of his time in madeira." the fact is that the dean's absence from england more than twenty years ago during two successive winters was a sad necessity, caused by the appearance of symptoms of grave disease, from which he has now, under god's blessing, perfectly recovered. the second instance occurred eleven years ago, when some of the undergraduates destroyed some valuable statuary in the library. here the writer states that the dean first announced that criminal proceedings would be taken, and then, on discovering that the offenders were "highly connected," found himself "converted to the opinion that mercy is preferable to stern justice, and charity to the strict letter of the law." the facts are that the punishment awarded to the offenders was deliberated on and determined on by the governing body, consisting of the dean, the canons, and some twenty senior students; that their deliberations were most assuredly in no way affected by any thoughts of the offenders being "highly connected"; and that, when all was over, we had the satisfaction of seeing ourselves roundly abused in the papers on both sides, and charged with having been too lenient, and also with having been too severe. the third instance occurred the other night. some undergraduates were making a disturbance, and the junior censor "made his appearance in person upon the scene of riot," and "was contumeliously handled." here the only statement of any real importance, the alleged assault by christ church men on the junior censor, is untrue. the fact is that nearly all the disturbers were out-college men, and, though it is true that the censor was struck by a stone thrown from a window, the unenviable distinction of having thrown it belongs to no member of the house. i doubt if we have one single man here who would be capable of so base and cowardly an act. the writer then gives us a curious account of the present constitution of the house. the dean, whom he calls "the right reverend gentleman," is, "in a kind of way, master of the college. the canons, in a vague kind of way, are supposed to control the college." the senior students "dare not call their souls their own," and yet somehow dare "to vent their wrath" on the junior students. his hazy, mental picture of the position of the canons may be cleared up by explaining to him that the "control" they exercise is neither more nor less than that of any other six members of the governing body. the description of the students i pass over as not admitting any appeal to actual facts. the truth is that christ church stands convicted of two unpardonable crimes--being great, and having a name. such a place must always expect to find itself "a wide mark for scorn and jeers"--a target where the little and the nameless may display their skill. only the other day an m.p., rising to ask a question about westminster school, went on to speak of christ church, and wound up with a fierce attack on the ancient house. shall we blame him? do we blame the wanton schoolboy, with a pebble in his hand, all powerless to resist the alluring vastness of a barndoor? the essence of the article seems to be summed up in the following sentence: "at christ church all attempts to preserve order by the usual means have hitherto proved uniformly unsuccessful, and apparently remain equally fruitless." it is hard for one who, like myself, has lived here most of his life, to believe that this is seriously intended as a description of the place. however, as general statements can only be met by general statements, permit me, as one who has lived here for thirty years and has taught for five-and-twenty, to say that in my experience order has been the rule, disorder the rare exception, and that, if the writer of your leading article has had an equal amount of experience in any similar place of education, and has found a set of young men more gentlemanly, more orderly, and more pleasant in every way to deal with, than i have found here, i cannot but think him an exceptionally favoured mortal.--yours, &c. charles l. dodgson, _student and mathematical lecturer of christ church_. in july began an amusing correspondence between mr. dodgson and a "circle-squarer," which lasted several months. mr. dodgson sent the infatuated person, whom we will call mr. b--, a proof that the area of a circle is less than . the square of the radius. mr. b--replied, "your proof is not in accordance with euclid, it assumes that a circle may be considered as a rectangle, and that two right lines can enclose a space." he returned the proof, saying that he could not accept any of it as elucidating the exact area of a circle, or as euclidean. as mr. dodgson's method involved a slight knowledge of trigonometry, and he had reason to suspect that mr. b--was entirely ignorant of that subject, he thought it worth while to put him to the test by asking him a few questions upon it, but the circle-squarer, with commendable prudence, declined to discuss anything not euclidean. mr. dodgson then wrote to him, "taking leave of the subject, until he should be willing to enlarge his field of knowledge to the elements of algebraical geometry." mr. b--replied, with unmixed contempt, "algebraical geometry is all moon-shine." _he_ preferred "weighing cardboard" as a means of ascertaining exact truth in mathematical research. finally he suggested that mr. dodgson might care to join in a prize-competition to be got up among the followers of euclid, and as he apparently wished him to understand that he (mr. b--) did not think much of his chances of getting a prize, mr. dodgson considered that the psychological moment for putting an end to the correspondence had arrived. meanwhile he was beginning to feel his regular college duties a terrible clog upon his literary work. the studentship which he held was not meant to tie him down to lectures and examinations. such work was very well for a younger man; he could best serve "the house" by his literary fame. _july_ _th._--came to a more definite decision than i have ever yet done--that it is about time to resign the mathematical lectureship. my chief motive for holding on has been to provide money for others (for myself, i have been many years able to retire), but even the £ a year i shall thus lose i may fairly hope to make by the additional time i shall have for book-writing. i think of asking the g.b. (governing body) next term to appoint my successor, so that i may retire at the end of the year, when i shall be close on fifty years old, and shall have held the lectureship for exactly years. (i had the honourmen for the last two terms of , but was not full lecturer till hilary, .) _oct_. _th_.--i have just taken an important step in life, by sending to the dean a proposal to resign the mathematical lectureship at the end of this year. i shall now have my whole time at my own disposal, and, if god gives me life and continued health and strength, may hope, before my powers fail, to do some worthy work in writing--partly in the cause of mathematical education, partly in the cause of innocent recreation for children, and partly, i hope (though so utterly unworthy of being allowed to take up such work) in the cause of religious thought. may god bless the new form of life that lies before me, that i may use it according to his holy will! _oct. st_.--i had a note in the evening from the dean, to say that he had seen the censors on the subject of my proposed resignation at the end of the year, and that arrangements should be made, as far as could be done, to carry out my wishes; and kindly adding an expression of regret at losing my services, but allowing that i had "earned a right to retirement." so my lectureship seems to be near its end. _nov. th_.--i find by my journal that i gave my _first_ euclid lecture in the lecture-room on monday, january , . it consisted of twelve men, of whom nine attended. this morning, i have given what is most probably my _last_: the lecture is now reduced to nine, of whom all attended on monday: this morning being a saint's day, the attendance was voluntary, and only two appeared--e.h. morris, and g. lavie. i was lecturer when the _father_ of the latter took his degree, viz., in . there is a sadness in coming to the end of anything in life. man's instincts cling to the life that will never end. _may , ._--called on mrs. r--. during a good part of the evening i read _the times_, while the party played a round game of spelling words--a thing i will never join in. rational conversation and _good_ music are the only things which, to me, seem worth the meeting for, for grown-up people. _june st._--went out with charsley, and did four miles on one of his velocimans, very pleasantly. the velociman was an early and somewhat cumbrous form of tricycle; mr. dodgson made many suggestions for its improvement. he never attempted to ride a bicycle, however, but, in accordance with his own dictum, "in youth, try a bicycle, in age, buy a tricycle," confined himself to the three-wheeled variety. [illustration: xi oxford types from a photograph by a.t. shrimpton] _nov. th_.--whitehead, of trinity, told us a charming story in common room of a father and son. they came up together: the son got into a college--the father had to go to new inn hall: the son passed responsions, while his father had to put off: finally, the father failed in mods and has gone down: the son will probably take his degree, and may then be able to prepare his father for another try. among the coloured cartoons in shrimpton's window at oxford there used to be, when i was up, a picture which i think referred to this story. _nov. rd._--spent two hours "invigilating" in the rooms of w.j. grant (who has broken his collar-bone, and is allowed to do his greats papers in this way) while he dictated his answers to another undergraduate, pakenham, who acted as scribe. _nov. th_.--dined with fowler (now president of c.c.c.) in hall, to meet ranken. both men are now mostly bald, with quite grey hair: yet how short a time it seems since we were undergraduates together at whitby! (in ). _dec th._--a common room meeting. fresh powers were given to the wine committee, and then a new curator elected. i was proposed by holland, and seconded by harcourt, and accepted office with no light heart: there will be much trouble and thought needed to work it satisfactorily, but it will take me out of myself a little, and so may be a real good--my life was tending to become too much that of a selfish recluse. during this year he composed the words of a song, "dreamland." the air was _dreamed_ by his friend, the late rev. c. e. hutchinson, of chichester. the history of the dream is here given in the words of the dreamer:-- i found myself seated, with many others, in darkness, in a large amphitheatre. deep stillness prevailed. a kind of hushed expectancy was upon us. we sat awaiting i know not what. before us hung a vast and dark curtain, and between it and us was a kind of stage. suddenly an intense wish seized me to look upon the forms of some of the heroes of past days. i cannot say whom in particular i longed to behold, but, even as i wished, a faint light flickered over the stage, and i was aware of a silent procession of figures moving from right to left across the platform in front of me. as each figure approached the left-hand corner it turned and gazed at me, and i knew (by what means i cannot say) its name. one only i recall--saint george; the light shone with a peculiar blueish lustre on his shield and helmet as he turned and slowly faced me. the figures were shadowy, and floated like mist before me; as each one disappeared an invisible choir behind the curtain sang the "dream music." i awoke with the melody ringing in my ears, and the words of the last line complete--"i see the shadows falling, and slowly pass away." the rest i could not recall. [illustration: dreamland--facsimile of words and music.] dreamland. words by lewis carroll. music by c.e. hutchinson. when midnight mists are creeping and all the land is sleeping around me tread the mighty dead, and slowly pass away. lo, warriors, saints, and sages, from out the vanished ages, with solemn pace and reverend face appear and pass away. the blaze of noonday splendour, the twilight soft and tender, may charm the eye: yet they shall die, shall die and pass away but here, in dreamland's centre, no spoiler's hand may enter, these visions fair, this radiance rare, shall never pass away i see the shadows falling, the forms of eld recalling; around me tread the mighty dead, and slowly pass away one of the best services to education which mr. dodgson performed was his edition of "euclid i. and ii.," which was published in . in writing "euclid and his modern rivals," he had criticised somewhat severely the various substitutes proposed for euclid, so far as they concerned beginners; but at the same time he had admitted that within prescribed limits euclid's text is capable of amendment and improvement, and this is what he attempted to do in this book. that he was fully justified is shown by the fact that during the years - the book ran through eight editions. in the introduction he enumerates, under the three headings of "additions," "omissions," and "alterations," the chief points of difference between his own and the ordinary editions of euclid, with his reasons for adopting them. they are the outcome of long experience, and the most conservative of teachers would readily accept them. the proof of i. , for example, is decidedly better and more satisfactory than the ordinary proof, and the introduction of the definition of "projection" certainly simplifies the cumbrous enunciations of ii. and . again, the alternative proof of ii. , suggested in the introduction, is valuable, and removes all excuse for omitting this proposition, as is commonly clone. the figures used are from the blocks prepared for the late mr. todhunter's well-known edition of euclid, to which mr. dodgson's manual forms an excellent stepping-stone. at the beginning of he went up to town to see the collection of d. g. rossetti's pictures in the burlington gallery. he was especially struck with "found," which he thus describes-- a picture of a man finding, in the streets of london, a girl he had loved years before in the days of her innocence. she is huddled up against the wall, dressed in gaudy colours, and trying to turn away her agonised face, while he, holding her wrists, is looking down with an expression of pain and pity, condemnation and love, which is one of the most marvellous things i have ever seen done in painting. _jan_. , [his birthday].--i cannot say i feel much older at than at ! had my first "tasting-luncheon"; it seemed to give great satisfaction. [the object of the curator's "tasting-luncheon" was, of course, to give members of common room an opportunity of deciding what wines should be bought.] _march_ _th._--went up to town to fulfil my promise to lucy a.--: to take her for her _first_ visit to the theatre. we got to the lyceum in good time, and the play was capitally acted. i had hinted to beatrice (miss ellen terry) how much she could add to lucy's pleasure by sending round a "carte" of herself; she sent a cabinet. she is certainly an adept in giving gifts that gratify. _april_ _d_.--tried another long walk-- miles, to besilsleigh, fyfield, kingston, bagpuize, frilford, marcham, and abingdon. the last half of the way was in the face of wind, rain, snow, and hail. was too lame to go into hall. * * * * * chapter vi ( - ) "the profits of authorship"--"rhyme? and reason?"--the common room cat--visit to jersey--purity of elections--parliamentary representation--various literary projects--letters to miss e. rix--being happy--"a tangled tale"--religious arguments--the "alice" operetta--"alice's adventures underground"--"the game of logic"--mr. harry furniss. in lewis carroll was advised to make a stand against the heavy discount allowed by publishers to booksellers, and by booksellers to the public. accordingly the following notice began to appear in all his books: "in selling mr. lewis carroll's books to the trade, messrs. macmillan and co. will abate d. in the shilling (no odd copies), and allow per cent, discount within six months, and per cent, for cash. in selling them to the public (for cash only) they will allow per cent, discount." it was a bold step to take, and elicited some loud expressions of disapproval. "rather than buy on the terms mr. lewis carroll offers," "a firm of london booksellers" wrote in _the bookseller_ of august th, "the trade will do well to refuse to take copies of his books, new or old, so long as he adheres to the terms he has just announced to the trade for their delectation and delight." on the other hand, an editorial, which appeared in the same number of _the bookseller,_ expressed warm approval of the innovation. to avoid all possible misconceptions, the author fully explained his views in a little pamphlet on "the profits of authorship." he showed that the bookseller makes as much profit out of every volume he sells (assuming the buyer to pay the full published price, which he did in those days more readily than he does to-day) as author and publisher together, whereas his share in the work is very small. he does not say much about the author's part in the work--that it is a very heavy one goes without saying--but in considering the publisher's share he says:-- the publisher contributes about as much as the bookseller in time and bodily labour, but in mental toil and trouble a great deal more. i speak with some personal knowledge of the matter, having myself, for some twenty years, inflicted on that most patient and painstaking firm, messrs. macmillan and co., about as much wear and worry as ever publishers have lived through. the day when they undertake a book for me is a _dies nefastus_ for them. from that day till the book is out--an interval of some two or three years on an average--there is no pause in "the pelting of the pitiless storm" of directions and questions on every conceivable detail. to say that every question gets a courteous and thoughtful reply--that they are still outside a lunatic asylum--and that they still regard me with some degree of charity--is to speak volumes in praise of their good temper and of their health, bodily and mental. i think the publisher's claim on the profits is on the whole stronger than the booksellers. "rhyme? and reason?" appeared at christmas; the dedicatory verses, inscribed "to a dear child: in memory of golden summer hours and whispers of a summer sea," were addressed to a little friend of the author's, miss gertrude chataway. one of the most popular poems in the book is "hiawatha's photographing," a delicious parody of longfellow's "hiawatha." "in an age of imitation," says lewis carroll, in a note at the head, "i can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy." it is not every one who has read this note who has observed that it is really in the same metre as the poem below it. another excellent parody, "atalanta in camden-town," exactly hit off the style of that poet who stands alone and unapproached among the poets of the day, and whom mr. dodgson used to call "the greatest living master of language." "fame's penny trumpet," affectionately dedicated to all "original researchers" who pant for "endowment," was an attack upon the vivisectionists, who preach of justice--plead with tears that love and mercy should abound-- while marking with complacent ears the moaning of some tortured hound. lewis carroll thus addresses them:-- fill all the air with hungry wails-- "reward us, ere we think or write! without your gold mere knowledge fails to sate the swinish appetite!" and, where great plato paced serene, or newton paused with wistful eye, rush to the chase with hoofs unclean and babel-clamour of the stye! be yours the pay: be theirs the praise: we will not rob them of their due, nor vex the ghosts of other days by naming them along with you. they sought and found undying fame: they toiled not for reward nor thanks: their cheeks are hot with honest shame for you, the modern mountebanks! "for auld lang syne" the author sent a copy of his book to mrs. hargreaves (miss alice liddell), accompanied by a short note. christ church, _december_ , . dear mrs. hargreaves,--perhaps the shortest day in the year is not _quite_ the most appropriate time for recalling the long dreamy summer afternoons of ancient times; but anyhow if this book gives you half as much pleasure to receive as it does me to send, it will be a success indeed. wishing you all happiness at this happy season, i am, sincerely yours, c. l. dodgson. the beginning of was chiefly occupied in common room business. the curatorship seems to have been anything but a sinecure. besides weightier responsibilities, it involved the care of the common room cat! in this case the "care" ultimately killed the cat--but not until it had passed the span of life usually allotted to those animals, and beyond which their further existence is equally a nuisance to themselves and to every one else. as to the best way of "terminating its sublunary existence," mr. dodgson consulted two surgeons, one of whom was sir james paget. i do not know what method was finally adopted, but i am sure it was one that gave no pain to pussy's nerves, and as little as possible to her feelings. on march th there was a debate in congregation on the proposed admission of women to some of the honour schools at oxford. this was one of the many subjects on which mr. dodgson wrote a pamphlet. during the debate he made one of his few speeches, and argued strongly against the proposal, on the score of the injury to health which it would inflict upon the girl-undergraduates. later in the month he and the rev. e.f. sampson, tutor of christ church, paid a visit to jersey, seeing various friends, notably the rev. f.h. atkinson, an old college friend of mr. dodgson's, who had helped him when he was editor of _college rhymes_. i quote a few lines from a letter of his to mr. atkinson, as showing his views on matrimony:-- so you have been for twelve years a married man, while i am still a lonely old bachelor! and mean to keep so, for the matter of that. college life is by no means unmixed misery, though married life has no doubt many charms to which i am a stranger. a note in his diary on may th shows one of the changes in his way of life which advancing years forced him to make:-- wrote to -- (who had invited me to dine) to beg off, on the ground that, in my old age, i find dinner parties more and more fatiguing. this is quite a new departure. i much grudge giving an evening (even if it were not tiring) to bandying small-talk with dull people. the next extract i give does not look much like old age! i called on mrs. m--. she was out; and only one maid in, who, having come to the gate to answer the bell, found the door blown shut on her return. the poor thing seemed really alarmed and distressed. however, i got a man to come from a neighbouring yard with a ladder, and got in at the drawing-room window--a novel way of entering a friend's house! oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened to him in : "the door blew shut, with the maid outside, and no one in the house. i got the cook of the next house to let me go through their premises, and with the help of a pair of steps got over the wall between the two back-yards." in july there appeared an article in the _st. james's gazette_ on the subject of "parliamentary elections," written by mr. dodgson. it was a subject in which he was much interested, and a few years before he had contributed a long letter on the "purity of elections" to the same newspaper. i wish i had space to give both in full; as things are, a summary and a few extracts are all i dare attempt. the writer held that there are a great number of voters, and _pari passu_ a great number of constituencies, that like to be on the winning side, and whose votes are chiefly influenced by that consideration. the ballot-box has made it practically impossible for the individual voter to know which is going to be the winning side, but after the first few days of a general election, one side or the other has generally got a more or less decided advantage, and a weak-kneed constituency is sorely tempted to swell the tide of victory. but this is not all. the evil extends further than to the single constituency; nay, it extends further than to a single general election; it constitutes a feature in our national history; it is darkly ominous for the future of england. so long as general elections are conducted as at present we shall be liable to oscillations of political power, like those of and , but of ever-increasing violence--one parliament wholly at the mercy of one political party, the next wholly at the mercy of the other--while the government of the hour, joyfully hastening to undo all that its predecessors have done, will wield a majority so immense that the fate of every question will be foredoomed, and debate will be a farce; in one word, we shall be a nation living from hand to mouth, and with no settled principle--an army, whose only marching orders will be "right about face!" his remedy was that the result of each single election should be kept secret till the general election is over:-- it surely would involve no practical difficulty to provide that the boxes of voting papers should be sealed up by a government official and placed in such custody as would make it impossible to tamper with them; and that when the last election had been held they should be opened, the votes counted, and the results announced. the article on "parliamentary elections" proposed much more sweeping alterations. the opening paragraph will show its general purport:-- the question, how to arrange our constituencies and conduct our parliamentary elections so as to make the house of commons, as far as possible, a true index of the state of opinion in the nation it professes to represent, is surely equal in importance to any that the present generation has had to settle. and the leap in the dark, which we seem about to take in a sudden and vast extension of the franchise, would be robbed of half its terrors could we feel assured that each political party will be duly represented in the next parliament, so that every side of a question will get a fair hearing. the axioms on which his scheme was based were as follows:-- ( ) that each member of parliament should represent approximately the same number of electors. ( ) that the minority of the two parties into which, broadly speaking, each district may be divided, should be adequately represented. ( ) that the waste of votes, caused by accidentally giving one candidate more than he needs and leaving another of the same party with less than he needs, should be, if possible, avoided. ( ) that the process of marking a ballot-paper should be reduced to the utmost possible simplicity, to meet the case of voters of the very narrowest mental calibre. ( ) that the process of counting votes should be as simple as possible. then came a precise proposal. i do not pause to compare it in detail with the suggestions of mr. hare, mr. courtney, and others:-- i proceed to give a summary of rules for the method i propose. form districts which shall return three, four, or more members, in proportion to their size. let each elector vote for one candidate only. when the poll is closed, divide the total number of votes by the number of members to be returned _plus_ one, and take the next greater integer as "quota." let the returning officer publish the list of candidates, with the votes given for each, and declare as "returned" each that has obtained the quota. if there are still members to return, let him name a time when all the candidates shall appear before him; and each returned member may then formally assign his surplus votes to whomsoever of the other candidates he will, while the other candidates may in like manner assign their votes to one another. this method would enable each of the two parties in a district to return as many members as it could muster "quotas," no matter how the votes were distributed. if, for example, , were the quota, and the "reds" mustered , votes, they could return three members; for, suppose they had four candidates, and that a had , votes, b , , c , , d , , a would simply have to assign , votes to b and , to c; while d, being hopeless of success, would naturally let c have his , also. there would be no risk of a seat being left vacant through two candidates of the same party sharing a quota between them--an unwritten law would soon come to be recognised--that the one with fewest votes should give place to the other. and, with candidates of two opposite parties, this difficulty could not arise at all; one or the other could always be returned by the surplus votes of his party. some notes from the diary for march, , are worth reproducing here:-- _march_ _st_.--sent off two letters of literary importance, one to mrs. hargreaves, to ask her consent to my publishing the original ms. of "alice" in facsimile (the idea occurred to me the other day); the other to mr. h. furniss, a very clever illustrator in _punch_, asking if he is open to proposals to draw pictures for me. the letter to mrs. hargreaves, which, it will be noticed, was earlier in date than the short note already quoted in this chapter, ran as follows:-- my dear mrs. hargreaves,--i fancy this will come to you almost like a voice from the dead, after so many years of silence, and yet those years have made no difference that i can perceive in _my_ clearness of memory of the days when we _did_ correspond. i am getting to feel what an old man's failing memory is as to recent events and new friends, (for instance, i made friends, only a few weeks ago, with a very nice little maid of about twelve, and had a walk with her--and now i can't recall either of her names!), but my mental picture is as vivid as ever of one who was, through so many years, my ideal child-friend. i have had scores of child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a different thing. however, i did not begin this letter to say all _that_. what i want to ask is, would you have any objection to the original ms. book of "alice's adventures" (which i suppose you still possess) being published in facsimile? the idea of doing so occurred to me only the other day. if, on consideration, you come to the conclusion that you would rather _not_ have it done, there is an end of the matter. if, however, you give a favourable reply, i would be much obliged if you would lend it me (registered post, i should think, would be safest) that i may consider the possibilities. i have not seen it for about twenty years, so am by no means sure that the illustrations may not prove to be so awfully bad that to reproduce them would be absurd. there can be no doubt that i should incur the charge of gross egoism in publishing it. but i don't care for that in the least, knowing that i have no such motive; only i think, considering the extraordinary popularity the books have had (we have sold more than , of the two), there must be many who would like to see the original form. always your friend, c.l. dodgson. the letter to harry furniss elicited a most satisfactory reply. mr. furniss said that he had long wished to illustrate one of lewis carroll's books, and that he was quite prepared to undertake the work ("sylvie and bruno"). [illustration: h. furniss. _from a photograph_.] two more notes from the diary, referring to the same month follow:-- _march th_.--a great convocation assembled in the theatre, about a proposed grant for physiology, opposed by many (i was one) who wish restrictions to be enacted as to the practice of vivisection for research. liddon made an excellent speech against the grant, but it was carried by to . _march th_.--never before have i had so many literary projects on hand at once. for curiosity, i will here make a list of them. ( ) supplement to "euclid and modern rivals." ( ) nd edition of "euc. and mod. rivals." ( ) a book of math. curiosities, which i think of calling "pillow problems, and other math. trifles." this will contain problems worked out in the dark, logarithms without tables, sines and angles do., a paper i am now writing on "infinities and infinitesimals," condensed long multiplication, and perhaps others. ( ) euclid v. ( ) "plain facts for circle-squarers," which is nearly complete, and gives actual proof of limits . , . . ( ) a symbolical logic, treated by my algebraic method. ( ) "a tangled tale." ( ) a collection of games and puzzles of my devising, with fairy pictures by miss e.g. thomson. this might also contain my "mem. tech." for dates; my "cipher-writing" scheme for letter-registration, &c., &c. ( ) nursery alice. ( ) serious poems in "phantasmagoria." ( ) "alice's adventures underground." ( ) "girl's own shakespeare." i have begun on "tempest." ( ) new edition of "parliamentary representation." ( ) new edition of euc. i., ii. ( ) the new child's book, which mr. furniss is to illustrate. i have settled on no name as yet, but it will perhaps be "sylvie and bruno." i have other shadowy ideas, _e.g._, a geometry for boys, a vol. of essays on theological points freely and plainly treated, and a drama on "alice" (for which mr. mackenzie would write music): but the above is a fair example of "too many irons in the fire!" a letter written about this time to his friend, miss edith rix, gives some very good hints about how to work, all the more valuable because he had himself successfully carried them out. the first hint was as follows:-- when you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, _stop_, you will only hurt yourself by going on. put it aside till the next morning; and if _then_ you can't make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject which you _do_ understand. when i was reading mathematics for university honours, i would sometimes, after working a week or two at some new book, and mastering ten or twenty pages, get into a hopeless muddle, and find it just as bad the next morning. my rule was _to begin the book again_. and perhaps in another fortnight i had come to the old difficulty with impetus enough to get over it. or perhaps not. i have several books that i have begun over and over again. my second hint shall be--never leave an unsolved difficulty _behind_. i mean, don't go any further in that book till the difficulty is conquered. in this point, mathematics differs entirely from most other subjects. suppose you are reading an italian book, and come to a hopelessly obscure sentence--don't waste too much time on it, skip it, and go on; you will do very well without it. but if you skip a _mathematical_ difficulty, it is sure to crop up again: you will find some other proof depending on it, and you will only get deeper and deeper into the mud. my third hint is, only go on working so long as the brain is _quite_ clear. the moment you feel the ideas getting confused leave off and rest, or your penalty will be that you will never learn mathematics _at all_! two more letters to the same friend are, i think, deserving of a place here:-- eastbourne, _sept_. , . my dear edith,--one subject you touch on--"the resurrection of the body"--is very interesting to me, and i have given it much thought (i mean long ago). _my_ conclusion was to give up the _literal_ meaning of the _material_ body altogether. _identity_, in some mysterious way, there evidently is; but there is no resisting the scientific fact that the actual _material_ usable for _physical_ bodies has been used over and over again--so that each atom would have several owners. the mere solitary fact of the existence of _cannibalism_ is to my mind a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of the theory that the particular set of atoms i shall happen to own at death (changed every seven years, they say) will be mine in the next life--and all the other insuperable difficulties (such as people born with bodily defects) are swept away at once if we accept s. paul's "spiritual body," and his simile of the grain of corn. i have read very little of "sartor resartus," and don't know the passage you quote: but i accept the idea of the material body being the "dress" of the spiritual--a dress needed for material life. ch. ch., _dec_. , . dear edith,--i have been a severe sufferer from _logical_ puzzles of late. i got into a regular tangle about the "import of propositions," as the ordinary logical books declare that "all _x_ is _z_" doesn't even _hint_ that any _x_'s exist, but merely that the qualities are so inseparable that, if ever _x_ occurs, _z_ must occur also. as to "some _x_ is _z_" they are discreetly silent; and the living authorities i have appealed to, including our professor of logic, take opposite sides! some say it means that the qualities are so connected that, if any _x_'s _did_ exist, some _must_ be _z_--others that it only means compatibility, _i.e.,_ that some _might_ be _z_, and they would go on asserting, with perfect belief in their truthfulness, "some boots are made of brass," even if they had all the boots in the world before them, and knew that _none_ were so made, merely because there is no inherent impossibility in making boots of brass! isn't it bewildering? i shall have to mention all this in my great work on logic--but _i_ shall take the line "any writer may mean exactly what he pleases by a phrase so long as he explains it beforehand." but i shall not venture to assert "some boots are made of brass" till i have found a pair! the professor of logic came over one day to talk about it, and we had a long and exciting argument, the result of which was "_x -x_"--a magnitude which you will be able to evaluate for yourself. c. l. dodgson. as an example of the good advice mr. dodgson used to give his young friends, the following letter to miss isabel standen will serve excellently:-- eastbourne, _aug_. , . i can quite understand, and much sympathise with, what you say of your feeling lonely, and not what you can honestly call "happy." now i am going to give you a bit of philosophy about that--my own experience is, that _every_ new form of life we try is, just at first, irksome rather than pleasant. my first day or two at the sea is a little depressing; i miss the christ church interests, and haven't taken up the threads of interest here; and, just in the same way, my first day or two, when i get back to christ church, i miss the seaside pleasures, and feel with unusual clearness the bothers of business-routine. in all such cases, the true philosophy, i believe, is "_wait_ a bit." our mental nerves seem to be so adjusted that we feel _first_ and most keenly, the _dis_-comforts of any new form of life; but, after a bit, we get used to them, and cease to notice them; and _then_ we have time to realise the enjoyable features, which at first we were too much worried to be conscious of. suppose you hurt your arm, and had to wear it in a sling for a month. for the first two or three days the discomfort of the bandage, the pressure of the sling on the neck and shoulder, the being unable to use the arm, would be a constant worry. you would feel as if all comfort in life were gone; after a couple of days you would be used to the new sensations, after a week you perhaps wouldn't notice them at all; and life would seem just as comfortable as ever. so my advice is, don't think about loneliness, or happiness, or unhappiness, for a week or two. then "take stock" again, and compare your feelings with what they were two weeks previously. if they have changed, even a little, for the better you are on the right track; if not, we may begin to suspect the life does not suit you. but what i want _specially_ to urge is that there's no use in comparing one's feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a reasonable interval, for the _direction of_ change to show itself. sit on the beach, and watch the waves for a few seconds; you say "the tide is coming in "; watch half a dozen successive waves, and you may say "the last is the lowest; it is going out." wait a quarter of an hour, and compare its _average_ place with what it was at first, and you will say "no, it is coming in after all." ... with love, i am always affectionately yours, c. l. dodgson. the next event to chronicle in lewis carroll's life is the publication, by messrs. macmillan, of "a tangled tale," a series of mathematical problems which had originally appeared in the _monthly packet_. in addition to the problems themselves, the author added their correct solutions, with criticisms on the solutions, correct or otherwise, which the readers of the _monthly packet_ had sent in to him. with some people this is the most popular of all his books; it is certainly the most successful attempt he ever made to combine mathematics and humour. the book was illustrated by mr. a.b. frost, who entered most thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. one of his pictures, "balbus was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon," is irresistibly comic. a short quotation will better enable the reader to understand the point of the joke:-- balbus was waiting for them at the hotel; the journey down had tried him, he said; so his two pupils had been the round of the place, in search of lodgings, without the old tutor who had been their inseparable companion from their childhood. they had named him after the hero of their latin exercise-book, which overflowed with anecdotes about that versatile genius--anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was more than compensated by their sensational brilliance. "balbus has overcome all his enemies" had been marked by their tutor, in the margin of the book, "successful bravery." in this way he had tried to extract a moral from every anecdote about balbus--sometimes one of warning, as in "balbus had borrowed a healthy dragon," against which he had written, "rashness in speculation "--sometimes of encouragement, as in the words, "influence of sympathy in united action," which stood opposite to the anecdote "balbus was assisting his mother-in-law to convince the dragon"--and sometimes it dwindled down to a single word, such as "prudence," which was all he could extract from the touching record that "balbus, having scorched the tail of the dragon, went away." his pupils liked the short morals best, as it left them more room for marginal illustrations, and in this instance they required all the space they could get to exhibit the rapidity of the hero's departure. balbus and his pupils go in search of lodgings, which are only to be found in a certain square; at no. , one of the pupils supplements the usual questions by asking the landlady if the cat scratches:-- the landlady looked round suspiciously, as if to make sure the cat was not listening. "i will not deceive you, gentlemen," she said. "it _do_ scratch, but not without you pulls its whiskers! it'll never do it," she repeated slowly, with a visible effort to recall the exact words of some written agreement between herself and the cat, "without you pulls its whiskers!" "much may be excused in a cat so treated," said balbus as they left the house and crossed to no. , leaving the landlady curtesying on the doorstep, and still murmuring to herself her parting words, as if they were a form of blessing--"not without you pulls its whiskers!" [illustration: _from a crayon drawing by the rev. h.c. gaye_.] they secure one room at each of the following numbers--the square contains doors on each side--nine, twenty-five, fifty-two, and seventy-three. they require three bedrooms and one day-room, and decide to take as day-room the one that gives them the least walking to do to get to it. the problem, of course, is to discover which room they adopted as the day-room. there are ten such "knots" in the book, and few, if any of them, can be untied without a good deal of thought. owing, probably, to the strain of incessant work, mr. dodgson about this period began to be subject to a very peculiar, yet not very uncommon, optical delusion, which takes the form of seeing moving fortifications. considering the fact that he spent a good twelve hours out of every twenty-four in reading and writing, and that he was now well over fifty years old, it was not surprising that nature should begin to rebel at last, and warn him of the necessity of occasional rest. some verses on "wonderland" by "one who loves alice," appeared in the christmas number of _sylvia's home journal_, . they were written by miss m.e. manners, and, as lewis carroll himself admired them, they will, i think, be read with interest:-- wonderland. how sweet those happy days gone by, those days of sunny weather, when alice fair, with golden hair, and we--were young together;-- when first with eager gaze we scann'd the page which told of wonderland. on hearthrug in the winter-time we lay and read it over; we read it in the summer's prime, amidst the hay and clover. the trees, by evening breezes fann'd, murmured sweet tales of wonderland. we climbed the mantelpiece, and broke the jars of dresden china; in jabberwocky tongue we spoke, we called the kitten "dinah!" and, oh! how earnestly we planned to go ourselves to wonderland. the path was fringed with flowers rare, with rainbow colours tinted; the way was "up a winding stair," our elders wisely hinted. we did not wish to understand _bed_ was the road to wonderland. we thought we'd wait till we should grow stronger as well as bolder, but now, alas! full well we know we're only growing older. the key held by a childish hand, fits best the door of wonderland. yet still the hatter drinks his tea, the duchess finds a moral, and tweedledum and tweedledee forget in fright their quarrel. the walrus still weeps on the sand, that strews the shores of wonderland. and other children feel the spell which once we felt before them, and while the well-known tale we tell, we watch it stealing o'er them: before their dazzled eyes expand the glorious realms of wonderland. yes, "time is fleet," and we have gained years more than twice eleven; alice, dear child, hast thou remained "exactually" seven? with "proper aid," "two" could command time to go back in wonderland. or have the years (untouched by charms), with joy and sorrow laden, rolled by, and brought unto thy arms a dainty little maiden? another alice, who shall stand by thee to hear of wonderland. carroll! accept the heartfelt thanks of children of all ages, of those who long have left their ranks, yet still must love the pages written by him whose magic wand called up the scenes of wonderland. long mayst thou live, the sound to hear which most thy heart rejoices, of children's laughter ringing clear, and children's merry voices, until for thee an angel-hand draws back the veil of wonderland. one who loves "alice." three letters, written at the beginning of to miss edith rix, to whom he had dedicated "a tangled tale," are interesting as showing the deeper side of his character:-- guildford, _jan_. , . my dear edith,--i have been meaning for some time to write to you about agnosticism, and other matters in your letter which i have left unnoticed. and yet i do not know, much as what you say interests me, and much as i should like to be of use to any wandering seeker after truth, that i am at all likely to say anything that will be new to you and of any practical use. the moral science student you describe must be a beautiful character, and if, as you say, she lives a noble life, then, even though she does not, as yet, see any god, for whose sake she can do things, i don't think you need be unhappy about her. "when thou wast under the fig tree, i saw thee," is often supposed to mean that nathanael had been _praying_, praying no doubt ignorantly and imperfectly, but yet using the light he had: and it seems to have been accepted as faith in the messiah. more and more it seems to me (i hope you won't be _very_ much shocked at me as an ultra "broad" churchman) that what a person _is_ is of more importance in god's sight than merely what propositions he affirms or denies. _you_, at any rate, can do more good among those new friends of yours by showing them what a christian _is_, than by telling them what a christian _believes_.... i have a deep dread of argument on religious topics: it has many risks, and little chance of doing good. you and i will never _argue_, i hope, on any controverted religious question: though i do hope we may see the day when we may freely _speak_ of such things, even where we happen to hold different views. but even then i should have no inclination, if we did differ, to conclude that my view was the right one, and to try to convert you to it.... now i come to your letter dated dec. nd, and must scold you for saying that my solution of the problem was "quite different _to_ all common ways of doing it": if _you_ think that's good english, well and good; but _i_ must beg to differ to you, and to hope you will _never_ write me a sentence similar from this again. however, "worse remains behind"; and if you deliberately intend in future, when writing to me about one of england's greatest poets, to call him "shelly," then all i can say is, that you and i will have to quarrel! be warned in time. c. l. dodgson. ch. ch., _jan_. , . my dear edith,--i am interested by what you say of miss--. you will know, without my saying it, that if she, or any other friend of yours with any troubles, were to like to write to me, i would _very_ gladly try to help: with all my ignorance and weakness, god has, i think, blessed my efforts in that way: but then his strength is made perfect in weakness.... ch. ch., _feb_. , . my dear edith,... i think i've already noticed, in a way, most of the rest of that letter--except what you say about learning more things "after we are dead." _i_ certainly like to think that may be so. but i have heard the other view strongly urged, a good deal based on "then shall we know even as we are known." but i can't believe that that means we shall have _all_ knowledge given us in a moment--nor can i fancy it would make me any happier: it is the _learning_ that is the chief joy, here, at any rate.... i find another remark anent "pupils"--a bold speculation that my , pupils may really "go on" in the future life, till they _have_ really outstripped euclid. and, please, what is _euclid_ to be doing all that time? ... one of the most dreadful things you have ever told me is your students' theory of going and speaking to any one they are interested in, without any introductions. this, joined with what you say of some of them being interested in "alice," suggests the horrid idea of their some day walking into this room and beginning a conversation. it is enough to make one shiver, even to think of it! never mind if people do say "good gracious!" when you help old women: it _is_ being, in some degree, both "good" _and_ "gracious," one may hope. so the remark wasn't so inappropriate. i fear i agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then i release my attention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment--like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect. c. l. dodgson. the "alice" operetta, which mr. dodgson had despaired of, was at last to become a reality. mr. savile clarke wrote on august th to ask his leave to dramatise the two books, and he gladly assented. he only made one condition, which was very characteristic of him, that there should be "no _suggestion_ even of coarseness in libretto or in stage business." the hint was hardly necessary, for mr. savile clarke was not the sort of man to spoil his work, or to allow others to spoil it, by vulgarity. several alterations were made in the books before they were suitable for a dramatic performance; mr. dodgson had to write a song for the ghosts of the oysters, which the walrus and the carpenter had devoured. he also completed "tis the voice of the lobster," so as to make it into a song. it ran as follows:-- tis the voice of the lobster; i heard him declare "you have baked me too brown: i must sugar my hair." as a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes. when the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, and talks with the utmost contempt of the shark; but when the tide rises, and sharks are around, his words have a timid and tremulous sound. i passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye, how the owl and the panther were sharing a pie: the panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat, and the owl had the dish for his share of the treat. when the plate was divided, the owl, as a boon, was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon: but the panther obtained both the fork and the knife, so, when _he_ lost his temper, the owl lost its life. the play, for the first few weeks at least, was a great success. some notes in mr. dodgson's diary which relate to it, show how he appreciated mr. savile clarke's venture:-- _dec. th._--to london with m--, and took her to "alice in wonderland," mr. savile clarke's play at the prince of wales's theatre. the first act (wonderland) goes well, specially the mad tea party. mr. sydney harcourt is a capital hatter, and little dorothy d'alcourt (æt. / ) a delicious dormouse. phoebe carlo is a splendid alice. her song and dance with the cheshire cat (master c. adeson, who played the pirate king in "pirates of penzance") was a gem. as a whole the play seems a success. _feb_. , .--went to the "alice" play, where we sat next a chatty old gentleman, who told me that the author of "alice" had sent phoebe carlo a book, and that she had written to him to say that she would do her very best, and further, that he is "an oxford man"--all which i hope i received with a sufficient expression of pleased interest. shortly before the production of the play, a miss whitehead had drawn a very clever medley-picture, in which nearly all tenniel's wonderful creations--the dormouse, the white knight, the mad hatter, &c.--appeared. this design was most useful as a "poster" to advertise the play. after the london run was over, the company made a tour of the provinces, where it met with a fair amount of success. [illustration: medley of tenniel's illustrations in "alice." _from an etching by miss whitehead; used as a theatrical advertisement_.] at the end of , "alice's adventures underground," a facsimile of the original ms. book, afterwards developed into "alice's adventures in wonderland," with thirty-seven illustrations by the author, was published by macmillan & co. a postscript to the preface stated that any profits that might arise from the book would be given to children's hospitals and convalescent homes for sick children. shortly before the book came out, lewis carroll wrote to mrs. hargreaves, giving a description of the difficulties that he had encountered in producing it:-- christ church, oxford, _november_ , . my dear mrs. hargreaves,--many thanks for your permission to insert "hospitals" in the preface to your book. i have had almost as many adventures in getting that unfortunate facsimile finished, _above_ ground, as your namesake had _under_ it! first, the zincographer in london, recommended to me for photographing the book, page by page, and preparing the zinc-blocks, declined to undertake it unless i would entrust the book to _him_, which i entirely refused to do. i felt that it was only due to you, in return for your great kindness in lending so unique a book, to be scrupulous in not letting it be even _touched_ by the workmen's hands. in vain i offered to come and reside in london with the book, and to attend daily in the studio, to place it in position to be photographed, and turn over the pages as required. he said that could not be done because "other authors' works were being photographed there, which must on no account be seen by the public." i undertook not to look at _anything_ but my own book; but it was no use: we could not come to terms. then -- recommended me a certain mr. x--, an excellent photographer, but in so small a way of business that i should have to _prepay_ him, bit by bit, for the zinc-blocks: and _he_ was willing to come to oxford, and do it here. so it was all done in my studio, i remaining in waiting all the time, to turn over the pages. but i daresay i have told you so much of the story already. mr. x-- did a first-rate set of negatives, and took them away with him to get the zinc-blocks made. these he delivered pretty regularly at first, and there seemed to be every prospect of getting the book out by christmas, . on october , , i sent your book to mrs. liddell, who had told me your sisters were going to visit you and would take it with them. i trust it reached you safely? soon after this--i having prepaid for the whole of the zinc-blocks--the supply suddenly ceased, while twenty-two pages were still due, and mr. x-- disappeared! my belief is that he was in hiding from his creditors. we sought him in vain. so things went on for months. at one time i thought of employing a detective to find him, but was assured that "all detectives are scoundrels." the alternative seemed to be to ask you to lend the book again, and get the missing pages re-photographed. but i was most unwilling to rob you of it again, and also afraid of the risk of loss of the book, if sent by post--for even "registered post" does not seem _absolutely_ safe. in april he called at macmillan's and left _eight_ blocks, and again vanished into obscurity. this left us with fourteen pages (dotted up and down the book) still missing. i waited awhile longer, and then put the thing into the hands of a solicitor, who soon found the man, but could get nothing but promises from him. "you will never get the blocks," said the solicitor, "unless you frighten him by a summons before a magistrate." to this at last i unwillingly consented: the summons had to be taken out at--(that is where this aggravating man is living), and this entailed two journeys from eastbourne--one to get the summons (my _personal_ presence being necessary), and the other to attend in court with the solicitor on the day fixed for hearing the case. the defendant didn't appear; so the magistrate said he would take the case in his absence. then i had the new and exciting experience of being put into the witness-box, and sworn, and cross-examined by a rather savage magistrate's clerk, who seemed to think that, if he only bullied me enough, he would soon catch me out in a falsehood! i had to give the magistrate a little lecture on photo-zincography, and the poor man declared the case was so complicated he must adjourn it for another week. but this time, in order to secure the presence of our slippery defendant, he issued a warrant for his apprehension, and the constable had orders to take him into custody and lodge him in prison, the night before the day when the case was to come on. the news of _this_ effectually frightened him, and he delivered up the fourteen negatives (he hadn't done the blocks) before the fatal day arrived. i was rejoiced to get them, even though it entailed the paying a second time for getting the fourteen blocks done, and withdrew the action. the fourteen blocks were quickly done and put into the printer's hands; and all is going on smoothly at last: and i quite hope to have the book completed, and to be able to send you a very special copy (bound in white vellum, unless you would prefer some other style of binding) by the end of the month. believe me always, sincerely yours, c. l. dodgson. "the game of logic" was lewis carroll's next book; it appeared about the end of february, . as a method of teaching the first principles of logic to children it has proved most useful; the subject, usually considered very difficult to a beginner, is made extremely easy by simplification of method, and both interesting and amusing by the quaint syllogisms that the author devised, such as-- no bald person needs a hair-brush; no lizards have hair; therefore[ ] no lizard needs a hair brush. caterpillars are not eloquent; jones is eloquent; jones is not a caterpillar. meanwhile, with much interchange of correspondence between author and artist, the pictures for the new fairy tale, "sylvie and bruno," were being gradually evolved. each of them was subjected by lewis carroll to the most minute criticism--hyper-criticism, perhaps, occasionally. a few instances of the sort of criticisms he used to make upon mr. furniss's work may be interesting; i have extracted them from a letter dated september , . it will be seen that when he really admired a sketch he did not stint his praise:-- ( ) "sylvie helping beetle" [p. ]. a quite charming composition. ( ) "the doctor" and "eric." (mr. furniss's idea of their appearance). no! the doctor won't do _at all!_ he is a smug london man, a great "ladies' man," who would hardly talk anything but medical "shop." he is forty at least, and can have had no love-affair for the last fifteen years. i want him to be about twenty-five, powerful in frame, poetical in face: capable of intelligent interest in any subject, and of being a passionate lover. how would you draw king arthur when he first met guinevere? try _that_ type. eric's attitude is capital: but his face is a little too near to the ordinary "masher." please avoid _that_ inane creature; and please don't cut his hair short. that fashion will be "out" directly. ( ) "lady muriel" (head); ditto (full length); "earl." i don't like _either_ face of lady muriel. i don't think i could talk to her; and i'm quite sure i couldn't fall in love with her. her dress ("evening," of course) is very pretty, i think. i don't like the earl's face either. he is proud of his title, very formal, and one who would keep one "at arm's length" always. and he is too prodigiously tall. i want a gentle, genial old man; with whom one would feel at one's ease in a moment. ( ) "uggug becoming porcupine" ("sylvie and bruno, concluded," page ), is exactly my conception of it. i expect this will be one of the most effective pictures in the book. the faces of the people should express intense _terror_. ( ) "the professor" is altogether _delightful_. when you get the text, you will see that you have hit the very centre of the bull's-eye. [a sketch of "bruno"]. no, no! please don't give us the (to my mind) very ugly, quite modern costume, which shows with such cruel distinctness a podgy, pot-bellied (excuse the vulgarism) boy, who couldn't run a mile to save his life. i want bruno to be _strong_, but at the same time light and active--with the figure of one of the little acrobats one sees at the circus--not "master tommy," who habitually gorges himself with pudding. also that dress i dislike very much. please give him a short tunic, and _real_ knickerbockers--not the tight knee-breeches they are rapidly shrinking to. very truly yours, c. l. dodgson. by mr. furniss's kind permission i am enabled to give an example of the other side of the correspondence, one of his letters to mr. dodgson, all the more interesting for the charming little sketch which it contains. with respect to the spider, mr. dodgson had written: "some writer says that the full face of a spider, as seen under a magnifying-glass, is very striking." [illustration: _facsimile of a letter from h. furniss to lewis carroll, august , _.] [illustration: sylvie and bruno. _from a drawing by henry holiday_.] * * * * * chapter vii ( - ) a systematic life--"memoria technica"--mr. dodgson's shyness--"a lesson in latin"--the "wonderland" stamp-case--"wise words about letter-writing"--princess alice--"sylvie and bruno"--"the night cometh"--"the nursery 'alice'"--coventry patmore--telepathy--resignation of dr. liddell--a letter about logic. an old bachelor is generally very precise and exact in his habits. he has no one but himself to look after, nothing to distract his attention from his own affairs; and mr. dodgson was the most precise and exact of old bachelors. he made a précis of every letter he wrote or received from the st of january, , to the th of the same month, . these précis were all numbered and entered in reference-books, and by an ingenious system of cross-numbering he was able to trace a whole correspondence, which might extend through several volumes. the last number entered in his book is , . he had scores of green cardboard boxes, all neatly labelled, in which he kept his various papers. these boxes formed quite a feature of his study at oxford, a large number of them being arranged upon a revolving bookstand. the lists, of various sorts, which he kept were innumerable; one of them, that of unanswered correspondents, generally held seventy or eighty names at a time, exclusive of autograph-hunters, whom he did not answer on principle. he seemed to delight in being arithmetically accurate about every detail of life. he always rose at the same early hour, and, if he was in residence at christ church, attended college service. he spent the day according to a prescribed routine, which usually included a long walk into the country, very often alone, but sometimes with another don, or perhaps, if the walk was not to be as long as usual, with some little girl-friend at his side. when he had a companion with him, he would talk the whole time, telling delightful stories, or explaining some new logical problem; if he was alone, he used to think out his books, as probably many another author has done and will do, in the course of a lonely walk. the only irregularity noticeable in his mode of life was the hour of retiring, which varied from p.m. to four o'clock in the morning, according to the amount of work which he felt himself in the mood for. he had a wonderfully good memory, except for faces and dates. the former were always a stumbling-block to him, and people used to say (most unjustly) that he was intentionally short-sighted. one night he went up to london to dine with a friend, whom he had only recently met. the next morning a gentleman greeted him as he was walking. "i beg your pardon," said mr. dodgson, "but you have the advantage of me. i have no remembrance of having ever seen you before this moment." "that is very strange," the other replied, "for i was your host last night!" such little incidents as this happened more than once. to help himself to remember dates, he devised a system of mnemonics, which he circulated among his friends. as it has never been published, and as some of my readers may find it useful, i reproduce it here. my "memoria technica" is a modification of gray's; but, whereas he used both consonants and vowels to represent digits, and had to content himself with a syllable of gibberish to represent the date or whatever other number was required, i use only consonants, and fill in with vowels _ad libitum,_ and thus can always manage to make a real word of whatever has to be represented. the principles on which the necessary consonants have been chosen are as follows:-- . "b" and "c," the first two consonants in the alphabet. . "d" from "duo," "w" from "two." . "t" from "tres," the other may wait awhile. . "f" from "four," "q" from "quattuor." . "l" and "v," because "l" and "v" are the roman symbols for "fifty" and "five." . "s" and "x" from "six." . "p" and "m" from "septem." . "h" from "huit," and "k" from the greek "okto." . "n" from "nine"; and "g" because it is so like a " ." . "z" and "r" from "zero." there is now one consonant still waiting for its digit, viz., "j," and one digit waiting for its consonant, viz., " ," the conclusion is obvious. the result may be tabulated thus:-- | | | | | | | | | | | |b |d |t |f |l |s |p |h |n |z | |c |w |j |q |v |x |m |k |g |r | when a word has been found, whose last consonants represent the number required, the best plan is to put it as the last word of a rhymed couplet, so that, whatever other words in it are forgotten, the rhyme will secure the only really important word. now suppose you wish to remember the date of the discovery of america, which is ; the " " may be left out as obvious; all we need is " ." write it thus:-- f n d q g w and try to find a word that contains "f" or "q," "n" or "g," "d" or "w." a word soon suggests itself--"found." the poetic faculty must now be brought into play, and the following couplet will soon be evolved:-- "columbus sailed the world around, until america was f o u n d." if possible, invent the couplets for yourself; you will remember them better than any others. _june_, . the inventor found this "memoria technica" very useful in helping him to remember the dates of the different colleges. he often, of course, had to show his friends the sights of oxford, and the easy way in which, asked or unasked, he could embellish his descriptions with dates used to surprise those who did not know how the thing was done. the couplet for st. john's college ran as follows:-- "they must have a bevel to keep them so level." the allusion is to the beautiful lawns, for which st. john's is famous. in his power of remembering anecdotes, and bringing them out just at the right moment, mr. dodgson was unsurpassed. a guest brought into christ church common room was usually handed over to him to be amused. he was not a good man to tell a story to--he had always heard it before; but as a _raconteur_ i never met his equal. and the best of it was that his stories never grew--except in number. one would have expected that a mind so clear and logical and definite would have fought shy of the feminine intellect, which is generally supposed to be deficient in those qualities; and so it is somewhat surprising to find that by far the greater number of his friends were ladies. he was quite prepared to correct them, however, when they were guilty of what seemed to him unreasoning conduct, as is shown by the following extract from a letter of his to a young lady who had asked him to try and find a place for a governess, without giving the latter's address:-- some of my friends are business-men, and it is pleasant to see how methodical and careful they are in transacting any business-matter. if, for instance, one of them were to write to me, asking me to look out for a place for a french governess in whom he was interested, i should be sure to admire the care with which he would give me _her name in full_--(in extra-legible writing if it were an unusual name)--as well as her address. some of my friends are not men of business. so many such requests were addressed to him that at one time he had a circular letter printed, with a list of people requiring various appointments or assistants, which he sent round to his friends. in one respect lewis carroll resembled the stoic philosophers, for no outward circumstance could upset the tranquillity of his mind. he lived, in fact, the life which marcus aurelius commends so highly, the life of calm contentment, based on the assurance that so long as we are faithful to ourselves, no seeming evils can really harm us. but in him there was one exception to this rule. during an argument he was often excited. the war of words, the keen and subtle conflict between trained minds--in this his soul took delight, in this he sought and found the joy of battle and of victory. yet he would not allow his serenity to be ruffled by any foe whom he considered unworthy of his steel; he refused to argue with people whom he knew to be hopelessly illogical--definitely refused, though with such tact that no wound was given, even to the most sensitive. he was modest in the true sense of the term, neither overestimating nor underrating his own mental powers, and preferring to follow his own course without regarding outside criticism. "i never read anything about myself or my books," he writes in a letter to a friend; and the reason he used to give was that if the critics praised him he might become conceited, while, if they found fault, he would only feel hurt and angry. on october , , he wrote in his diary: "i see there is a leader in to-day's _standard_ on myself as a writer; but i do not mean to read it. it is not healthy reading, i think." he hated publicity, and tried to avoid it in every way. "do not tell any one, if you see me in the theatre," he wrote once to miss marion terry. on another occasion, when he was dining out at oxford, and some one, who did not know that it was a forbidden subject, turned the conversation on "alice in wonderland," he rose suddenly and fled from the house. i could multiply instances of this sort, but it would be unjust to his memory to insist upon the morbid way in which he regarded personal popularity. as compared with self-advertisement, it is certainly the lesser evil; but that it _is_ an evil, and a very painful one to its possessor, mr. dodgson fully saw. of course it had its humorous side, as, for instance, when he was brought into contact with lion-hunters, autograph-collectors, _et hoc genus omne_. he was very suspicious of unknown correspondents who addressed questions to him; in later years he either did not answer them at all, or used a typewriter. before he bought his typewriter, he would get some friend to write for him, and even to sign "lewis carroll" at the end of the letter. it used to give him great amusement to picture the astonishment of the recipients of these letters, if by any chance they ever came to compare his "autographs." on one occasion the secretary of a "young ladies' academy" in the united states asked him to present some of his works to the school library. the envelope was addressed to "lewis carroll, christ church," an incongruity which always annoyed him intensely. he replied to the secretary, "as mr. dodgson's books are all on mathematical subjects, he fears that they would not be very acceptable in a school library." some fourteen or fifteen years ago, the fourth-class of the girl's latin school at boston, u.s., started a magazine, and asked him if they might call it _the jabberwock._ he wrote in reply:-- mr. lewis carroll has much pleasure in giving to the editors of the proposed magazine permission to use the title they wish for. he finds that the anglo-saxon word "wocer" or "wocor" signifies "offspring" or "fruit." taking "jabber" in its ordinary acceptation of "excited and voluble discussion," this would give the meaning of "the result of much excited discussion." whether this phrase will have any application to the projected periodical, it will be for the future historian of american literature to determine. mr. carroll wishes all success to the forthcoming magazine. from that time forward he took a great interest in the magazine, and thought very well of it. it used, i believe, to be regularly supplied to him. only once did he express disapproval of anything it contained, and that was in , when he felt it necessary to administer a rebuke for what he thought to be an irreverent joke. the sequel is given in the following extract from _the jabberwock_ for june, :-- a friend worth having. _the jabberwock_ has many friends, and perhaps a few (very few, let us hope) enemies. but, of the former, the friend who has helped us most on the road to success is mr. lewis carroll, the author of "alice in wonderland," &c. our readers will remember his kind letter granting us permission to use the name "jabberwock," and also giving the meaning of that word. since then we have received another letter from him, in which he expresses both surprise and regret at an anecdote which we published in an early number of our little paper. we would assure mr. carroll, as well as our other friends, that we had no intention of making light of a serious matter, but merely quoted the anecdote to show what sort of a book washington's diary was. but now a third letter from our kind friend has come, enclosing, to our delight, a poem, "a lesson in latin," the pleasantest latin lesson we have had this year. the first two letters from mr. carroll were in a beautiful literary hand, whereas the third is written with a typewriter. it is to this fact that he refers in his letter, which is as follows:-- " , bedford street, covent garden, london, _may_ , . dear young friends,--after the black draught of serious remonstrance which i ventured to send to you the other day, surely a lump of sugar will not be unacceptable? the enclosed i wrote this afternoon on purpose for you. i hope you will grant it admission to the columns of _the jabberwock_, and not scorn it as a mere play upon words. this mode of writing, is, of course, an american invention. we never invent new machinery here; we do but use, to the best of our ability, the machines you send us. for the one i am now using, i beg you to accept my best thanks, and to believe me your sincere friend, lewis carroll." surely we can patiently swallow many black draughts, if we are to be rewarded with so sweet a lump of sugar! the enclosed poem, which has since been republished in "three sunsets," runs as follows: a lesson in latin. our latin books, in motley row, invite us to the task-- gay horace, stately cicero; yet there's one verb, when once we know, no higher skill we ask: this ranks all other lore above-- we've learned "amare" means "to love"! so hour by hour, from flower to flower, we sip the sweets of life: till ah! too soon the clouds arise, and knitted brows and angry eyes proclaim the dawn of strife. with half a smile and half a sigh, "amare! bitter one!" we cry. last night we owned, with looks forlorn, "too well the scholar knows there is no rose without a thorn "-- but peace is made! we sing, this morn, "no thorn without a rose!" our latin lesson is complete: we've learned that love is "bitter-sweet" lewis carroll. in october mr. dodgson invented a very ingenious little stamp-case, decorated with two "pictorial surprises," representing the "cheshire cat" vanishing till nothing but the grin was left, and the baby turning into a pig in "alice's" arms. the invention was entered at stationers' hall, and published by messrs. emberlin and son, of oxford. as an appropriate accompaniment, he wrote "eight or nine wise words on letter-writing," a little booklet which is still sold along with the case. the "wise words," as the following extracts show, have the true "carrollian" ring about them:-- some american writer has said "the snakes in this district may be divided into one species--the venomous." the same principle applies here. postage-stamp-cases may be divided into one species--the "wonderland." since i have possessed a "wonderland-stamp-case," life has been bright and peaceful, and i have used no other. i believe the queen's laundress uses no other. my fifth rule is, if your friend makes a severe remark, either leave it unnoticed or make your reply distinctly less severe: and, if he makes a friendly remark, tending towards "making up" the little difference that has arisen between you, let your reply be distinctly _more_ friendly. if, in picking a quarrel, each party declined to go more than _three-eighths_ of the way, and if, in making friends, each was ready to go _five-eighths_ of the way--why, there would be more reconciliations than quarrels! which is like the irishman's remonstrance to his gad-about daughter: "shure, you're _always_ goin' out! you go out _three_ times for wanst that you come in!" my sixth rule is, _don't try to have the last word!_ how many a controversy would be nipped in the bud, if each was anxious to let the _other_ have the last word! never mind how telling a rejoinder you leave unuttered: never mind your friend's supposing that you are silent from lack of anything to say: let the thing drop, as soon as it is possible without discourtesy: remember "speech is silvern, but silence is golden"! (n.b. if you are a gentleman, and your friend a lady, this rule is superfluous: _you won't get the last word!_) remember the old proverb, "cross-writing makes cross-reading." "the _old_ proverb?" you say inquiringly. "_how_ old?" well, not so _very_ ancient, i must confess. in fact, i invented it while writing this paragraph. still, you know, "old" is a _comparative_ term. i think you would be _quite_ justified in addressing a chicken, just out of the shell, as "old boy!" _when compared_ with another chicken that was only half-out! the pamphlet ends with an explanation of lewis carroll's method of using a correspondence-book, illustrated by a few imaginary pages from such a compilation, which are very humorous. [illustration: _facsimile of programme of "alice in wonderland_."] at the end of the year the "alice" operetta was again produced at the globe theatre, with miss isa bowman as the heroine. "isa makes a delightful alice," mr. dodgson writes, "and emsie [a younger sister] is wonderfully good as dormouse and as second ghost [of an oyster!], when she sings a verse, and dances the sailor's hornpipe." [illustration: "the mad tea-party." _from a photograph by elliott & fry_.] the first of an incomplete series, "curiosa mathematica," was published for mr. dodgson by messrs. macmillan during the year. it was entitled "a new theory of parallels," and any one taking it up for the first time might be tempted to ask, is the author serious, or is he simply giving us some _jeu d'esprit?_ a closer inspection, however, soon settles the question, and the reader, if mathematics be his hobby, is carried irresistibly along till he reaches the last page. the object which mr. dodgson set himself to accomplish was to prove euclid i. without assuming the celebrated th axiom, a feat which calls up visions of the "circle-squarers." the work is divided into two parts: book i. contains certain propositions which require no disputable axiom for their proof, and when once the few definitions of "amount," &c., have become familiar it is easy reading. in book ii. the author introduces a new axiom, or rather "quasi-axiom"--for it's _self-evident_ character is open to dispute. this axiom is as follows:-- in any circle the inscribed equilateral tetragon (hexagon in editions st and nd) is greater than any one of the segments which lie outside it. assuming the truth of this axiom, mr. dodgson proves a series of propositions, which lead up to and enable him to accomplish the feat referred to above. at the end of book ii. he places a proof (so far as finite magnitudes are concerned) of euclid's axiom, preceded by and dependent on the axiom that "if two homogeneous magnitudes be both of them finite, the lesser may be so multiplied by a finite number as to exceed the greater." this axiom, he says, he believes to be assumed by every writer who has attempted to prove euclid's th axiom. the proof itself is borrowed, with slight alterations, from cuthbertson's "euclidean geometry." in appendix i. there is an alternative axiom which may be substituted for that which introduces book ii., and which will probably commend itself to many minds as being more truly axiomatic. to substitute this, however, involves some additions and alterations, which the author appends. appendix ii. is headed by the somewhat startling question, "is euclid's axiom true?" and though true for finite magnitudes--the sense in which, no doubt, euclid meant it to be taken--it is shown to be not universally true. in appendix iii. he propounds the question, "how should parallels be defined?" appendix iv., which deals with the theory of parallels as it stands to-day, concludes with the following words:-- i am inclined to believe that if ever euclid i. is proved without a new axiom, it will be by some new and ampler definition of the _right line_--some definition which shall connote that mysterious property, which it must somehow possess, which causes euclid i. to be true. try _that_ track, my gentle reader! it is not much trodden as yet. and may success attend your search! in the introduction, which, as is frequently the case, ought to be read _last_ in order to be appreciated properly, he relates his experiences with two of those "misguided visionaries," the circle-squarers. one of them had selected . as the value for "_pi_," and the other proved, to his own satisfaction at least, that it is correctly represented by ! the rev. watson hagger, to whose kindness, as i have already stated in my preface, my readers are indebted for the several accounts of mr. dodgson's books on mathematics which appear in this memoir, had a similar experience with one of these "cranks." this circle-squarer selected . as the value for "_pi_," and mr. hagger, who was fired with mr. dodgson's ambition to convince his correspondent of his error, failed as signally as mr. dodgson did. the following letter is interesting as showing that, strict conservative though he was, he was not in religious matters narrow-minded; he held his own opinions strongly, but he would never condemn those of other people. he saw "good in everything," and there was but little exaggeration, be it said in all reverence, in the phrase which an old friend of his used in speaking of him to me: "mr. dodgson was as broad--as broad as _christ_." christ church, oxford, _may_ , . dear miss manners,--i hope to have a new book out very soon, and had entered your name on the list of friends to whom copies are to go; but, on second thoughts, perhaps you might prefer that i should send it to your little sister (?) (niece) rachel, whom you mentioned in one of your letters. it is to be called "the nursery alice," and is meant for very young children, consisting of coloured enlargements of twenty of the pictures in "alice," with explanations such as one would give in showing them to a little child. i was much interested by your letter, telling me you belong to the society of friends. please do not think of _me_ as one to whom a "difference of creed" is a bar to friendship. my sense of brother- and sisterhood is at least broad enough to include _christians_ of all denominations; in fact, i have one valued friend (a lady who seems to live to do good kind things) who is a unitarian. shall i put "rachel manners" in the book? believe me, very sincerely yours, c. l. dodgson. from june th to june th he stayed at hatfield. once at luncheon [he writes] i had the duchess (of albany) as neighbour and once at breakfast, and had several other chats with her, and found her very pleasant indeed. princess alice is a sweet little girl. her little brother (the duke of albany) was entirely fascinating, a perfect little prince, and the picture of good-humour. on sunday afternoon i had a pleasant half-hour with the children [princess alice, the duke of albany, honorable mabel palmer, lady victoria manners, and lord haddon], telling them "bruno's picnic" and folding a fishing-boat for them. i got the duchess's leave to send the little alice a copy of the "nursery alice," and mean to send it with "alice underground" for herself. towards the end of the year lewis carroll had tremendously hard work, completing "sylvie and bruno." for several days on end he worked from breakfast until nearly ten in the evening without a rest. at last it was off his hands, and for a month or so he was (comparatively) an idle man. some notes from his diary, written during this period, follow:-- _nov. th._--met, for first time, an actual believer in the "craze" that buying and selling are wrong (!) (he is rather 'out of his mind'). the most curious thing was his declaration that he himself _lives_ on that theory, and never buys anything, and has no money! i thought of railway travelling, and ventured to ask how he got from london to oxford? "on a bicycle!" and how he got the bicycle? "it was given him!" so i was floored, and there was no time to think of any other instances. the whole thing was so new to me that, when he declared it to be _un-christian_, i quite forgot the text, "he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one." _dec. th._--went over to birmingham to see a performance of "alice" (mrs. freiligrath kroeker's version) at the high school. i rashly offered to tell "bruno's picnic" afterwards to the little children, thinking i should have an audience of or , mostly children, instead of which i had to tell it from the stage to an audience of about , mostly older girls and grown-up people! however, i got some of the children to come on the stage with me, and the little alice (muriel howard-smith, æt. ) stood by me, which made it less awful. the evening began with some of "julius caesar" in german. this and "alice" were really capitally acted, the white queen being quite the best i have seen (miss b. lloyd owen). i was introduced to alice and a few more, and was quite sorry to hear afterwards that the other performers wanted to shake hands. the publication of "sylvie and bruno" marks an epoch in its author's life, for it was the publication of all the ideals and sentiments which he held most dear. it was a book with a definite purpose; it would be more true to say with several definite purposes. for this very reason it is not an artistic triumph as the two "alice" books undoubtedly are; it is on a lower literary level, there is no unity in the story. but from a higher standpoint, that of the christian and the philanthropist, the book is the best thing he ever wrote. it is a noble effort to uphold the right, or what he thought to be the right, without fear of contempt or unpopularity. the influence which his earlier books had given him he was determined to use in asserting neglected truths. [illustration: the late duke of albany. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] of course the story has other features, delightful nonsense not surpassed by anything in "wonderland," childish prattle with all the charm of reality about it, and pictures which may fairly be said to rival those of sir john tenniel. had these been all, the book would have been a great success. as things are, there are probably hundreds of readers who have been scared by the religious arguments and political discussions which make up a large part of it, and who have never discovered that sylvie is just as entrancing a personage as alice when you get to know her. perhaps the sentiment of the following poem, sent to lewis carroll by an anonymous correspondent, may also explain why some of "alice's" lovers have given "sylvie" a less warm welcome:-- to sylvie. ah! sylvie, winsome, wise and good! fain would i love thee as i should. but, to tell the truth, my dear,-- and sylvie loves the truth to hear,-- though fair and pure and sweet thou art, thine elder sister has my heart! i gave it her long, long ago to have and hold; and well i know, brave lady sylvie, thou wouldst scorn to accept a heart foresworn. lovers thou wilt have enow under many a greening bough-- lovers yet unborn galore, like alice all the wide world o'er; but, darling, i am now too old to change. and though i still shall hold thee, and that puckling sprite, thy brother, dear, i cannot _love_ another: in this heart of mine i own _she_ must ever reign alone! _march_, . n.p. i do not know n.p.'s name and address, or i should have asked leave before giving publicity to the above verses. if these words meet his eye, i hope he will accept my most humble apologies for the liberty i have taken. at the beginning of a baptist minister, preaching on the text, "no man liveth to himself," made use of "sylvie and bruno" to enforce his argument. after saying that he had been reading that book, he proceeded as follows: a child was asked to define charity. he said it was "givin' away what yer didn't want yerself." this was some people's idea of self-sacrifice; but it was not christ's. then as to serving others in view of reward: mr. lewis carroll put this view of the subject very forcibly in his "sylvie and bruno"--an excellent book for youth; indeed, for men and women too. he first criticised archdeacon paley's definition of virtue (which was said to be "the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of god, and for the sake of everlasting happiness,") and then turned to such hymns as the following:-- whatever, lord, we lend to thee, _repaid a thousandfold shall be_, then gladly will we give to thee, giver of all! mr. carroll's comment was brief and to the point. he said: "talk of original _sin_! can you have a stronger proof of the original goodness there must be in this nation than the fact that religion has been preached to us, as a commercial speculation, for a century, and that we still believe in a god?" ["sylvie and bruno," part i., pp. , .] of course it was quite true, as mr. carroll pointed out, that our good deeds would be rewarded; but we ought to do them because they were _good_, and not because the reward was great. in the preface to "sylvie and bruno," lewis carroll alluded to certain editions of shakespeare which seemed to him unsuitable for children; it never seemed to strike him that his words might be read by children, and that thus his object very probably would be defeated, until this fact was pointed out to him in a letter from an unknown correspondent, mr. j.c. cropper, of hampstead. mr. dodgson replied as follows:-- dear sir,--accept my best thanks for your thoughtful and valuable suggestion about the preface to "sylvie and bruno." the danger you point out had not occurred to me (i suppose i had not thought of _children_ reading the preface): but it is a very real one, and i am very glad to have had my attention called to it. believe me, truly yours, lewis carroll. mathematical controversy carried on by correspondence was a favourite recreation of mr. dodgson's, and on february , , he wrote:-- i've just concluded a correspondence with a cambridge man, who is writing a geometry on the "direction" theory (wilson's plan), and thinks he has avoided wilson's (what _i_ think) fallacies. he _hasn't_, but i can't convince him! my view of life is, that it's next to impossible to convince _anybody_ of _anything_. the following letter is very characteristic. "whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might," was mr. dodgson's rule of life, and, as the end drew near, he only worked the harder:-- christ church, oxford, _april_ , . my dear atkinson,--many and sincere thanks for your most hospitable invitation, and for the very interesting photo of the family group. the former i fear i must ask you to let me defer _sine die_, and regard it as a pleasant dream, not _quite_ hopeless of being some day realised. i keep a list of such pleasant possibilities, and yours is now one of ten similar kind offers of hospitality. but as life shortens in, and the evening shadows loom in sight, one gets to _grudge any_ time given to mere pleasure, which might entail the leaving work half finished that one is longing to do before the end comes. there are several books i _greatly_ desire to get finished for children. i am glad to find my working powers are as good as they ever were. even with the mathematical book (a third edition) which i am now getting through the press, i think nothing of working six hours at a stretch. there is one text that often occurs to me, "the night cometh, when no man can work." kindest regards to mrs. atkinson, and love to gertrude. always sincerely yours, c. l. dodgson. for the benefit of children aged "from nought to five," as he himself phrased it, lewis carroll prepared a nursery edition of "alice." he shortened the text considerably, and altered it so much that only the plot of the story remained unchanged. it was illustrated by the old pictures, coloured by tenniel, and the cover was adorned by a picture designed by miss e. gertrude thomson. as usual, the dedication takes the form of an anagram, the solution of which is the name of one of his later child-friends. "_the nursery 'alice,_'" was published by macmillan and co., in march, . on august th the following letter on the "eight hours movement" appeared in _the standard:_-- sir,--supposing it were the custom, in a certain town, to sell eggs in paper bags at so much per bag, and that a fierce dispute had arisen between the egg vendors and the public as to how many eggs each bag should be understood to contain, the vendors wishing to be allowed to make up smaller bags; and supposing the public were to say, "in future we will pay you so much per egg, and you can make up bags as you please," would any ground remain for further dispute? supposing that employers of labour, when threatened with a "strike" in case they should decline to reduce the number of hours in a working day, were to reply, "in future we will pay you so much per hour, and you can make up days as you please," it does appear to me--being, as i confess, an ignorant outsider--that the dispute would die out for want of a _raison d'être_, and that these disastrous strikes, inflicting such heavy loss on employers and employed alike, would become things of the past. i am, sir, your obedient servant, lewis carroll. the remainder of the year was uneventful; a few notes from his diary must represent it here:-- _oct. th._--called on mr. coventry patmore (at hastings), and was very kindly received by him, and stayed for afternoon tea and dinner. he showed me some interesting pictures, including a charming little drawing, by holman hunt, of one of his daughters when three years old. he gave me an interesting account of his going, by tennyson's request, to his lodging to look for the ms. of "in memoriam," which he had left behind, and only finding it by insisting on going upstairs, in spite of the landlady's opposition, to search for it. also he told me the story (i think i have heard it before) of what wordsworth told his friends as the "one joke" of his life, in answer to a passing carter who asked if he had seen his wife. "my good friend, i didn't even know you had a wife!" he seems a very hale and vigorous old man for nearly seventy, which i think he gave as his age in writing to me. _oct. st._--this morning, thinking over the problem of finding two squares whose sum is a square, i chanced on a theorem (which seems _true_, though i cannot prove it), that if x² + y² be even, its half is the sum of two squares. a kindred theorem, that (x² + y²) is always the sum of two squares, also seems true and unprovable. _nov. th.--_i have now proved the above two theorems. another pretty deduction from the theory of square numbers is, that any number whose square is the sum of two squares, is itself the sum of two squares. i have already mentioned mr. dodgson's habit of thinking out problems at night. often new ideas would occur to him during hours of sleeplessness, and he had long wanted to hear of or invent some easy method of taking notes in the dark. at first he tried writing within oblongs cut out of cardboard, but the result was apt to be illegible. in he conceived the device of having a series of squares cut out in card, and inventing an alphabet, of which each letter was made of lines, which could be written along the edges of the squares, and dots, which could be marked at the corners. the thing worked well, and he named it the "typhlograph," but, at the suggestion of one of his brother-students, this was subsequently changed into "nyctograph." he spent the long vacation at eastbourne, attending service every sunday at christ church, according to his usual rule. _sept._ , .--at the evening service at christ church a curious thing happened, suggestive of telepathy. before giving out the second hymn the curate read out some notices. meanwhile i took my hymn-book, and said to myself (i have no idea _why_), "it will be hymn ," and i turned to it. it was not one i recognised as having ever heard; and, on looking at it, i said, "it is very prosaic; it is a very unlikely one"--and it was really startling, the next minute, to hear the curate announce "hymn ." in october it became generally known that dean liddell was going to resign at christmas. this was a great blow to mr. dodgson, but little mitigated by the fact that the very man whom he himself would have chosen, dr. paget, was appointed to fill the vacant place. the old dean was very popular in college; even the undergraduates, with whom he was seldom brought into contact, felt the magic of his commanding personality and the charm of his gracious, old-world manner. he was a man whom, once seen, it was almost impossible to forget. [illustration: the dean of christ church. _from a photograph by hill & saunders._] shortly before the resignation of dr. liddell, the duchess of albany spent a few days at the deanery. mr. dodgson was asked to meet her royal highness at luncheon, but was unable to go. princess alice and the little duke of albany, however, paid him a visit, and were initiated in the art of making paper pistols. he promised to send the princess a copy of a book called "the fairies," and the children, having spent a happy half-hour in his rooms, returned to the deanery. this was one of the days which he "marked with a white stone." he sent a copy of "the nursery 'alice'" to the little princess alice, and received a note of thanks from her, and also a letter from her mother, in which she said that the book had taught the princess to like reading, and to do it out of lesson-time. to the duke he gave a copy of a book entitled "the merry elves." in his little note of thanks for this gift, the boy said, "alice and i want you to love us both." mr. dodgson sent princess alice a puzzle, promising that if she found it out, he would give her a "golden chair from wonderland." at the close of the year he wrote me a long letter, which i think worthy of reproducing here, for he spent a long time over it, and it contains excellent examples of his clear way of putting things. _to s.d. collingwood._ ch. ch., oxford, _dec_. , . my dear stuart,--(rather a large note-sheet, isn't it? but they do differ in size, you know.) i fancy this book of science (which i have had a good while, without making any use of it), may prove of some use to you, with your boys. [i was a schoolmaster at that time.] also this cycling-book (or whatever it is to be called) may be useful in putting down engagements, &c., besides telling you a lot about cycles. there was no use in sending it to _me; my _cycling days are over. you ask me if your last piece of "meritt" printing is dark enough. i think not. i should say the rollers want fresh inking. as to the _matter_ of your specimen--[it was a poor little essay on killing animals for the purpose of scientific recreations, _e.g._, collecting butterflies]--i think you _cannot_ spend your time better than in trying to set down clearly, in that essay-form, your ideas on any subject that chances to interest you; and _specially_ any theological subject that strikes you in the course of your reading for holy orders. it will be most _excellent_ practice for you, against the time when you try to compose sermons, to try thus to realise exactly what it is you mean, and to express it clearly, and (a much harder matter) to get into proper shape the _reasons_ of your opinions, and to see whether they do, or do not, tend to prove the conclusions you come to. you have never studied technical logic, at all, i fancy. [i _had_, but i freely admit that the essay in question proved that i had not then learnt to apply my principles to practice.] it would have been a great help: but still it is not indispensable: after all, it is only the putting into rules of the way in which _every_ mind proceeds, when it draws valid conclusions; and, by practice in careful thinking, you may get to know "fallacies" when you meet with them, without knowing the formal _rules_. at present, when you try to give _reasons_, you are in considerable danger of propounding fallacies. instances occur in this little essay of yours; and i hope it won't offend your _amour propre_ very much, if an old uncle, who has studied logic for forty years, makes a few remarks on it. i am not going to enter _at all_ on the subject-matter itself, or to say whether i agree, or not, with your _conclusions_: but merely to examine, from a logic-lecturer's point of view, your _premisses_ as relating to them. ( ) "as the lower animals do not appear to have personality or individual existence, i cannot see that any particular one's life can be very important," &c. the word "personality" is very vague: i don't know what you mean by it. if you were to ask yourself, "what test should i use in distinguishing what _has_, from what has _not_, personality?" you might perhaps be able to express your meaning more clearly. the phrase "individual existence" is clear enough, and is in direct logical contradiction to the phrase "particular one." to say, of anything, that it has _not_ "individual existence," and yet that it _is_ a "particular one," involves the logical fallacy called a "contradiction in terms." ( ) "in both cases" (animal and plant) "death is only the conversion of matter from one form to another." the word "form" is very vague--i fancy you use it in a sort of _chemical_ sense (like saying "sugar is starch in another form," where the change in nature is generally believed to be a rearrangement of the very same atoms). if you mean to assert that the difference between a live animal and a dead animal, _i.e.,_ between animate and sensitive matter, and the same matter when it becomes inanimate and insensitive, is a mere rearrangement of the same atoms, your premiss is intelligible. (it is a bolder one than any biologists have yet advanced. the most sceptical of them admits, i believe, that "vitality" is a thing _per se. _however, that is beside my present scope.) but this premiss is advanced to prove that it is of no "consequence" to kill an animal. but, granting that the conversion of sensitive into insensitive matter (and of course _vice versa_) is a mere change of "form," and _therefore_ of no "consequence"; granting this, we cannot escape the including under this rule all similar cases. if the _power_ of feeling pain, and the _absence_ of that power, are only a difference of "form," the conclusion is inevitable that the _feeling_ pain, and the _not_ feeling it, are _also_ only a difference in form, _i.e.,_ to convert matter, which is _not_ feeling pain, into matter _feeling_ pain, is only to change its "form," and, if the process of "changing form" is of no "consequence" in the case of sensitive and insensitive matter, we must admit that it is _also_ of no "consequence" in the case of pain-feeling and _not_ pain-feeling matter. this conclusion, i imagine, you neither intended nor foresaw. the premiss, which you use, involves the fallacy called "proving too much." the best advice that could be given to you, when you begin to compose sermons, would be what an old friend once gave to a young man who was going out to be an indian judge (in india, it seems, the judge decides things, without a jury, like our county court judges). "give _your decisions_ boldly and clearly; they will probably be _right_. but do _not_ give your _reasons: they_ will probably be _wrong"_ if your lot in life is to be in a _country_ parish, it will perhaps not matter _much_ whether the reasons given in your sermons do or do not prove your conclusions. but even there you _might_ meet, and in a town congregation you would be _sure_ to meet, clever sceptics, who know well how to argue, who will detect your fallacies and point them out to those who are _not_ yet troubled with doubts, and thus undermine _all_ their confidence in your teaching. at eastbourne, last summer, i heard a preacher advance the astounding argument, "we believe that the bible is true, because our holy mother, the church, tells us it is." i pity that unfortunate clergyman if ever he is bold enough to enter any young men's debating club where there is some clear-headed sceptic who has heard, or heard of, that sermon. i can fancy how the young man would rub his hands, in delight, and would say to himself, "just see me get him into a corner, and convict him of arguing in a circle!" the bad logic that occurs in many and many a well-meant sermon, is a real danger to modern christianity. when detected, it may seriously injure many believers, and fill them with miserable doubts. so my advice to you, as a young theological student, is "sift your reasons _well_, and, before you offer them to others, make sure that they prove your conclusions." i hope you won't give this letter of mine (which it has cost me some time and thought to write) just a single reading and then burn it; but that you will lay it aside. perhaps, even years hence, it may be of some use to you to read it again. believe me always your affectionate uncle, c. l. dodgson. * * * * * chapter viii ( - ) mr. dodgson resigns the curatorship--bazaars--he lectures to children--a mechanical "humpty dumpty"--a logical controversy--albert chevalier--"sylvie and bruno concluded"--"pillow problems"--mr. dodgson's generosity--college services--religious difficulties--a village sermon--plans for the future--reverence--"symbolic logic." at christ church, as at other colleges, the common room is an important feature. open from eight in the morning until ten at night, it takes the place of a club, where the "dons" may see the newspapers, talk, write letters, or enjoy a cup of tea. after dinner, members of high table, with their guests if any are present, usually adjourn to the common room for wine and dessert, while there is a smoking-room hard by for those who do not despise the harmless but unnecessary weed, and below are cellars, with a goodly store of choice old wines. the curator's duties were therefore sufficiently onerous. they were doubly so in mr. dodgson's case, for his love of minute accuracy greatly increased the amount of work he had to do. it was his office to select and purchase wines, to keep accounts, to adjust selling price to cost price, to see that the two common room servants performed their duties, and generally to look after the comfort and convenience of the members. "having heard," he wrote near the end of the year , "that strong was willing to be elected (as curator), and common room willing to elect him, i most gladly resigned. the sense of relief at being free from the burdensome office, which has cost me a large amount of time and trouble, is very delightful. i was made curator, december , , so that i have held the office more than nine years." the literary results of his curatorship were three very interesting little pamphlets, "twelve months in a curatorship, by one who has tried it"; "three years in a curatorship, by one whom it has tried"; and "curiosissima curatoria, by 'rude donatus,'" all printed for private circulation, and couched in the same serio-comic vein. as a logician he naturally liked to see his thoughts in print, for, just as the mathematical mind craves for a black-board and a piece of chalk, so the logical mind must have its paper and printing-press wherewith to set forth its deductions effectively. a few extracts must suffice to show the style of these pamphlets, and the opportunity offered for the display of humour. in the arrangement of the prices at which wines were to be sold to members of common room, he found a fine scope for the exercise of his mathematical talents and his sense of proportion. in one of the pamphlets he takes old port and chablis as illustrations. the original cost of each is about s. a bottle; but the present value of the old port is about s. a bottle. let us suppose, then, that we have to sell to common room one bottle of old port and three of chablis, the original cost of the whole being s., and the present value s. these are our data. we have now two questions to answer. first, what sum shall we ask for the whole? secondly, how shall we apportion that sum between the two kinds of wine? the sum to be asked for the whole he decides, following precedent, is to be the present market-value of the wine; as to the second question, he goes on to say-- we have, as so often happens in the lives of distinguished premiers, three courses before us: ( ) to charge the _present_ value for each kind of wine; ( ) to put on a certain percentage to the _original_ value of each kind; ( ) to make a compromise between these two courses. course seems to me perfectly reasonable; but a very plausible objection has been made to it--that it puts a prohibitory price on the valuable wines, and that they would remain unconsumed. this would not, however, involve any loss to our finances; we could obviously realise the enhanced values of the old wines by selling them to outsiders, if the members of common room would not buy them. but i do not advocate this course. course would lead to charging s. a bottle for port and chablis alike. the port-drinker would be "in clover," while the chablis-drinker would probably begin getting his wine direct from the merchant instead of from the common room cellar, which would be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the tariff. yet i have heard this course advocated, repeatedly, as an abstract principle. "you ought to consider the _original_ value only," i have been told. "you ought to regard the port-drinker as a private individual, who has laid the wine in for himself, and who ought to have all the advantages of its enhanced value. you cannot fairly ask him for more than what you need to refill the bins with port, _plus_ the percentage thereon needed to meet the contingent expenses." i have listened to such arguments, but have never been convinced that the course is just. it seems to me that the s. additional value which the bottle of port has acquired, is the property of _common room_, and that common room has the power to give it to whom it chooses; and it does not seem to me fair to give it all to the port-drinker. what merit is there in preferring port to chablis, that could justify our selling the port-drinker his wine at less than half what he would have to give outside, and charging the chablis-drinker five-thirds of what he would have to give outside? at all events, i, as a port-drinker, do not wish to absorb the whole advantage, and would gladly share it with the chablis-drinker. the course i recommend is course , which is a compromise between and , its essential principle being to sell the new wines _above_ their value, in order to be able to sell the old _below_ their value. and it is clearly desirable, as far as possible, to make the reductions _where they will be felt,_ and the additions _where they will not be felt._ moreover it seems to me that reduction is most felt where it _goes down to the next round sum,_ and an addition in the reverse case, _i.e.,_ when it _starts from a round sum._ thus, if we were to take d. off a s. d. wine, and add it to a s. d.--thus selling them at s. d. and s. d. the reduction would be welcomed, and the addition unnoticed; and the change would be a popular one. the next extract shows with what light-hearted frivolity he could approach this tremendous subject of wine:-- the consumption of madeira (b) has been during the past year, zero. after careful calculation i estimate that, if this rate of consumption be steadily maintained, our present stock will last us an infinite number of years. and although there may be something monotonous and dreary in the prospect of such vast cycles spent in drinking second-class madeira, we may yet cheer ourselves with the thought of how economically it can be done. to assist the curator in the discharge of his duties, there was a wine committee, and for its guidance a series of rules was drawn up. the first runs as follows: "there shall be a wine committee, consisting of five persons, including the curator, whose duty it shall be to assist the curator in the management of the cellar." "hence," wrote mr. dodgson, "logically it is the bounden duty of the curator 'to assist himself.' i decline to say whether this clause has ever brightened existence for me--or whether, in the shades of evening, i may ever have been observed leaving the common room cellars with a small but suspicious-looking bundle, and murmuring, 'assist thyself, assist thyself!'" every christmas at christ church the children of the college servants have a party in the hall. this year he was asked to entertain them, and gladly consented to do so. he hired a magic lantern and a large number of slides, and with their help told the children the three following stories: ( ) "the epiphany"; ( ) "the children lost in the bush"; ( ) "bruno's picnic." i have already referred to the services held in christ church for the college servants, at which mr. dodgson used frequently to preach. the way in which he regarded this work is very characteristic of the man. "once more," he writes, "i have to thank my heavenly father for the great blessing and privilege of being allowed to speak for him! may he bless my words to help some soul on its heavenward way." after one of these addresses he received a note from a member of the congregation, thanking him for what he had said. "it is very sweet," he said, "to get such words now and then; but there is danger in them if more such come, i must beg for silence." during the year mr. dodgson wrote the following letter to the rev. c.a. goodhart, rector of lambourne, essex:-- dear sir,--your kind, sympathising and most encouraging letter about "sylvie and bruno" has deserved a better treatment from me than to have been thus kept waiting more than two years for an answer. but life is short; and one has many other things to do; and i have been for years almost hopelessly in arrears in correspondence. i keep a register, so that letters which i intend to answer do somehow come to the front at last. in "sylvie and bruno" i took courage to introduce what i had entirely avoided in the two "alice" books--some reference to subjects which are, after all, the _only_ subjects of real interest in life, subjects which are so intimately bound up with every topic of human interest that it needs more effort to avoid them than to touch on them; and i felt that such a book was more suitable to a clerical writer than one of mere fun. i hope i have not offended many (evidently i have not offended _you_) by putting scenes of mere fun, and talk about god, into the same book. only one of all my correspondents ever guessed there was more to come of the book. she was a child, personally unknown to me, who wrote to "lewis carroll" a sweet letter about the book, in which she said, "i'm so glad it hasn't got a regular wind-up, as it shows there is more to come!" there is indeed "more to come." when i came to piece together the mass of accumulated material i found it was quite _double_ what could be put into one volume. so i divided it in the middle; and i hope to bring out "sylvie and bruno concluded" next christmas--if, that is, my heavenly master gives me the time and the strength for the task; but i am nearly , and have no right to count on years to come. in signing my real name, let me beg you not to let the information go further--i have an _intense_ dislike to personal publicity; and, the more people there are who know nothing of "lewis carroll" save his books, the happier i am. believe me, sincerely yours, charles l. dodgson. i have made no attempt to chronicle all the games and puzzles which lewis carroll invented. a list of such as have been published will be found in the bibliographical chapter. he intended to bring out a book of "original games and puzzles," with illustrations by miss e. gertrude thomson. the ms. was, i believe, almost complete before his death, and one, at least, of the pictures had been drawn. on june th he wrote in his diary, "invented what i think is a new kind of riddle. a russian had three sons. the first, named rab, became a lawyer; the second, ymra, became a soldier; the third became a sailor. what was his name?" the following letter written to a child-friend, miss e. drury, illustrates lewis carroll's hatred of bazaars:-- ch. ch., oxford, _nov_. , . my dear emmie,--i object to _all_ bazaars on the general principle that they are very undesirable schools for young ladies, in which they learn to be "too fast" and forward, and are more exposed to undesirable acquaintances than in ordinary society. and i have, besides that, special objections to bazaars connected with charitable or religious purposes. it seems to me that they desecrate the religious object by their undesirable features, and that they take the reality out of all charity by getting people to think that they are doing a good action, when their true motive is amusement for themselves. ruskin has put all this far better than i can possibly do, and, if i can find the passage, and find the time to copy it, i will send it you. but _time_ is a very scarce luxury for me! always yours affectionately, c.l. dodgson. in his later years he used often to give lectures on various subjects to children. he gave a series on "logic" at the oxford girls' high school, but he sometimes went further afield, as in the following instance:-- went, as arranged with miss a. ottley, to the high school at worcester, on a visit. at half-past three i had an audience of about a hundred little girls, aged, i should think, from about six to fourteen. i showed them two arithmetic puzzles on the black-board, and told them "bruno's picnic." at half-past seven i addressed some serious words to a second audience of about a hundred elder girls, probably from fifteen to twenty--an experience of the deepest interest to me. the illustration on the next page will be best explained by the following letter which i have received from mr. walter lindsay, of philadelphia, u.s.:-- phila., _september_ , . dear sir,--i shall be very glad to furnish what information i can with respect to the "mechanical humpty dumpty" which i constructed a few years ago, but i must begin by acknowledging that, in one sense at least, i did not "invent" the figure. the idea was first put into my head by an article in the _cosmopolitan_, somewhere about , i suppose, describing a similar contrivance. as a devoted admirer of the "alice" books, i determined to build a humpty dumpty of my own; but i left the model set by the author of the article mentioned, and constructed the figure on entirely different lines. in the first place, the figure as described in the magazine had very few movements, and not very satisfactory ones at that; and in the second place, no attempt whatever was made to reproduce, even in a general way, the well-known appearance of tenniel's drawing. humpty, when completed, was about two feet and a half high. his face, of course, was white; the lower half of the egg was dressed in brilliant blue. his stockings were grey, and the famous cravat orange, with a zigzag pattern in blue. i am sorry to say that the photograph hardly does him justice; but he had travelled to so many different places during his career, that he began to be decidedly out of shape before he sat for his portrait. [illustration: the mechanical "humpty dumpty." _from a photograph._] when humpty was about to perform, a short "talk" was usually given before the curtain rose, explaining the way in which the sheep put the egg on the shelf at the back of the little shop, and how alice went groping along to it. and then, just as the explanation had reached the opening of the chapter on humpty dumpty, the curtain rose, and humpty was discovered, sitting on the wall, and gazing into vacancy. as soon as the audience had had time to recover, alice entered, and the conversation was carried on just as it is in the book. humpty dumpty gesticulated with his arms, rolled his eyes, raised his eyebrows, frowned, turned up his nose in scorn at alice's ignorance, and smiled from ear to ear when he shook hands with her. besides this, his mouth kept time with his words all through the dialogue, which added very greatly to his life-like appearance. the effect of his huge face, as it changed from one expression to another, was ludicrous in the extreme, and we were often obliged to repeat sentences in the conversation (to "go back to the last remark but one") because the audience laughed so loudly over humpty dumpty's expression of face that they drowned what he was trying to say. the funniest effect was the change from the look of self-satisfied complacency with which he accompanied the words: "the king has promised me--" to that of towering rage when alice innocently betrays her knowledge of the secret. at the close of the scene, when alice has vainly endeavoured to draw him into further conversation, and at last walks away in disgust, humpty loses his balance on the wall, recovers himself, totters again, and then falls off backwards; at the same time a box full of broken glass is dropped on the floor behind the scenes, to represent the "heavy crash," which "shook the forest from end to end";--and the curtain falls. now, as to how it was all done. humpty was made of barrel hoops, and covered with stiff paper and muslin. his eyes were round balls of rags, covered with muslin, drawn smoothly, and with the pupil and iris marked on the front. these eyes were pivoted to a board, fastened just behind the eye-openings in the face. to the eyeballs were sewed strong pieces of tape, which passed through screw-eyes on the edges of the board, and so down to a row of levers which were hinged in the lower part of the figure. one lever raised both eyes upward, another moved them both to the left, and so on. the eyebrows were of worsted and indiarubber knitted together. they were fastened at the ends, and raised and lowered by fine white threads passing through small holes in the face, and also operated by levers. the arms projected into the interior of the machine, and the gestures were made by moving the short ends inside. the right hand contained a spring clothes-pin, by which he was enabled to hold the note-book in which alice set down the celebrated problem-- ___ the movement of the mouth, in talking, was produced by a long tape, running down to a pedal, which was controlled by the foot of the performer. and the smile consisted of long strips of red tape, which were drawn out through slits at the corners of the mouth by means of threads which passed through holes in the sides of the head. the performer--who was always your humble servant--stood on a box behind the wall, his head just reaching the top of the egg, which was open all the way up the back. at the lower end of the figure, convenient to the hands of the performer, was the row of levers, like a little keyboard; and by striking different chords on the keys, any desired expression could be produced on the face. of course, a performance of this kind without a good alice would be unutterably flat; but the little girl who played opposite to humpty, miss nellie k---, was so exactly the counterpart of alice, both in appearance and disposition, that most children thought she was the original, right out of the book. humpty still exists, but he has not seen active life for some years. his own popularity was the cause of his retirement; for having given a number of performances (for charity, of course), and delighted many thousands of children of all ages, the demands upon his time, from sunday-schools and other institutions, became so numerous that the performers were obliged to withdraw him in self-defence. he was a great deal of trouble to build, but the success he met with and the pleasure he gave more than repaid me for the bother; and i am sure that any one else who tries it will reach the same conclusion. yours sincerely, walter lindsay. at the beginning of a fierce logical battle was being waged between lewis carroll and mr. cook wilson, professor of logic at oxford. the professor, in spite of the countless arguments that mr. dodgson hurled at his head, would not confess that he had committed a fallacy. on february th the professor appears to have conceded a point, for mr. dodgson writes: "heard from cook wilson, who has long declined to read a paper which i sent january th, and which seems to me to prove the fallacy of a view of his about hypotheticals. he now offers to read it, if _i_ will study a proof he sent, that another problem of mine had contradictory _data_. i have accepted his offer, and studied and answered his paper. so i now look forward hopefully to the result of his reading mine." the hopes which he entertained were doomed to be disappointed; the controversy bore no fruits save a few pamphlets and an enormous amount of correspondence, and finally the two antagonists had to agree to differ. as a rule mr. dodgson was a stern opponent of music-halls and music-hall singers; but he made one or two exceptions with regard to the latter. for chevalier he had nothing but praise; he heard him at one of his recitals, for he never in his life entered a "variety theatre." i give the passage from his diary:-- went to hear mr. albert chevalier's recital. i only knew of him as being now recognised as _facile princeps_ among music-hall singers, and did not remember that i had seen him twice or oftener on the stage--first as "mr. hobbs" in "little lord fauntleroy," and afterwards as a "horsy" young man in a _matinée_ in which violet vanbrugh appeared. he was decidedly _good_ as an actor; but as a comic singer (with considerable powers of pathos as well) he is quite first-rate. his chief merit seems to be the earnestness with which he throws himself into the work. the songs (mostly his own writing) were quite inoffensive, and very funny. i am very glad to be able to think that his influence on public taste is towards refinement and purity. i liked best "the future mrs. 'awkins," with its taking tune, and "my old dutch," which revealed powers that, i should think, would come out grandly in robsonian parts, such as "the porter's knot." "the little nipper" was also well worth hearing. mr. dodgson's views on sunday observance were old-fashioned, but he lived up to them, and did not try to force them upon people with whose actions he had no concern. they were purely matters of "private opinion" with him. on october nd he wrote to miss e.g. thomson, who was illustrating his "three sunsets":-- would you kindly do _no_ sketches, or photos, for _me_, on a sunday? it is, in _my_ view (of _course_ i don't condemn any one who differs from me) inconsistent with keeping the day holy. i do _not_ hold it to be the jewish "sabbath," but i _do_ hold it to be "the lord's day," and so to be made very distinct from the other days. in december, the logical controversy being over for a time, mr. dodgson invented a new problem to puzzle his mathematical friends with, which was called "the monkey and weight problem." a rope is supposed to be hung over a wheel fixed to the roof of a building; at one end of the rope a weight is fixed, which exactly counterbalances a monkey which is hanging on to the other end. suppose that the monkey begins to climb the rope, what will be the result? the following extract from the diary illustrates the several possible answers which may be given:-- got professor clifton's answer to the "monkey and weight problem." it is very curious, the different views taken by good mathematicians. price says the weight goes _up_, with increasing velocity; clifton (and harcourt) that it goes _up_, at the same rate as the monkey; while sampson says that it goes _down_. on december th mr. dodgson received the first twelve copies of "sylvie and bruno concluded," just about four years after the appearance of the first part of the story. in this second volume the two fairy children are as delightful as ever; it also contains what i think most people will agree to be the most beautiful poem lewis carroll ever wrote, "say, what is the spell, when her fledglings are cheeping?" (p. ). in the preface he pays a well-deserved compliment to mr. harry furniss for his wonderfully clever pictures; he also explains how the book was written, showing that many of the amusing remarks of bruno had been uttered by real children. he makes allusion to two books, which only his death prevented him from finishing--"original games and puzzles," and a paper on "sport," viewed from the standpoint of the humanitarian. from a literary point of view the second volume of "sylvie and bruno" lacks unity; a fairy tale is all very well, and a novel also is all very well, but the combination of the two is surely a mistake. however, the reader who cares more for the spirit than the letter will not notice this blemish; to him "sylvie and bruno concluded" will be interesting and helpful, as the revelation of a very beautiful personality. you have made everything turn out just as i should have chosen [writes a friend to whom he had sent a copy], and made right all that disappointed me in the first part. i have not only to thank you for writing an interesting book, but for writing a helpful one too. i am sure that "sylvie and bruno" has given me many thoughts that will help me all life through. one cannot know "sylvie" without being the better for it. you may say that "mister sir" is not consciously meant to be yourself, but i cannot help feeling that he is. as "mister sir" talks, i hear your voice in every word. i think, perhaps, that is why i like the book so much. i have received an interesting letter from mr. furniss, bearing upon the subject of "sylvie and bruno," and lewis carroll's methods of work. the letter runs as follows:-- i have illustrated stories of most of our leading authors, and i can safely say that lewis carroll was the only one who cared to understand the illustrations to his own book. he was the w. s. gilbert for children, and, like gilbert producing one of his operas, lewis carroll took infinite pains to study every detail in producing his extraordinary and delightful books. mr. gilbert, as every one knows, has a model of the stage; he puts up the scenery, draws every figure, moves them about just as he wishes the real actors to move about. lewis carroll was precisely the same. this, of course, led to a great deal of work and trouble, and made the illustrating of his books more a matter of artistic interest than of professional profit. i was _seven years_ illustrating his last work, and during that time i had the pleasure of many an interesting meeting with the fascinating author, and i was quite repaid for the trouble i took, not only by his generous appreciation of my efforts, but by the liberal remuneration he gave for the work, and also by the charm of having intercourse with the interesting, if somewhat erratic genius. a book very different in character from "sylvie and bruno," but under the same well-known pseudonym, appeared about the same time. i refer to "pillow problems," the second part of the series entitled "curiosa mathematica." "pillow problems thought out during wakeful hours" is a collection of mathematical problems, which mr. dodgson solved while lying awake at night. a few there are to which the title is not strictly applicable, but all alike were worked out mentally before any diagram or word of the solution was committed to paper. the author says that his usual practice was to write down the _answer_ first of all, and afterwards the question and its solution. his motive, he says, for publishing these problems was not from any desire to display his powers of mental calculation. those who knew him will readily believe this, though they will hardly be inclined to accept his own modest estimate of those powers. still the book was intended, not for the select few who can scale the mountain heights of advanced mathematics, but for the much larger class of ordinary mathematicians, and they at least will be able to appreciate the gifted author, and to wonder how he could follow so clearly in his head the mental diagrams and intricate calculations involved in some of these "pillow problems." his chief motive in publishing the book was to show how, by a little determination, the mind "can be made to concentrate itself on some intellectual subject (not necessarily mathematics), and thus banish those petty troubles and vexations which most people experience, and which--unless the mind be otherwise occupied--_will_ persist in invading the hours of night." and this remedy, as he shows, serves a higher purpose still. in a paragraph which deserves quoting at length, as it gives us a momentary glimpse of his refined and beautiful character, he says:-- perhaps i may venture for a moment to use a more serious tone, and to point out that there are mental troubles, much worse than mere worry, for which an absorbing object of thought may serve as a remedy. there are sceptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith: there are blasphemous thoughts, which dart unbidden into the most reverent souls: there are unholy thoughts, which torture with their hateful presence the fancy that would fain be pure. against all these some real mental work is a most helpful ally. that "unclean spirit" of the parable, who brought back with him seven others more wicked than himself, only did so because he found the chamber "swept and garnished," and its owner sitting with folded hands. had he found it all alive with the "busy hum" of active _work_, there would have been scant welcome for him and his seven! it would have robbed the book of its true character if lewis carroll had attempted to improve on the work done in his head, and consequently we have the solutions exactly as he worked them out before setting them down on paper. of the problems themselves there is not much to be said here; they are original, and some of them (e.g., no. ) expressed in a style peculiarly the author's own. the subjects included in their range are arithmetic, algebra, pure geometry (plane), trigonometry, algebraic geometry, and differential calculus; and there is one problem to which mr. dodgson says he "can proudly point," in "transcendental probabilities," which is here given: "a bag contains two counters, as to which nothing is known except that each is either black or white. ascertain their colour without taking them out of the bag." the answer is, "one is black and the other white." for the solution the reader is referred to the book itself, a study of which will well repay him, apart from the chance he may have of discovering some mistake, and the consequent joy thereat! a few extracts from the diary follow, written during the early part of :-- _feb._ _st.--dies notandus._ as ragg was reading prayers, and bayne and i were the only m.a.'s in the stalls, i tried the experiment of going to the lectern and reading the lesson. i did not hesitate much, but feel it too great a strain on the nerves to be tried often. then i went to the latin chapel for holy communion. only paget (dean) and dr. huntley came: so, for the first time in my recollection, it had to be given up. then i returned to my rooms, and found in _the standard_ the very important communication from gladstone denying the rumour that he has decided upon resigning the premiership, but admitting that, owing to failing powers, it may come at any moment. it will make a complete change in the position of politics! then i got, from cook wilson, what i have been so long trying for--an accepted transcript of the fallacious argument over which we have had an (apparently) endless fight. i think the end is near, _now_. _feb._ _th._--the idea occurred to me that it might be a pleasant variation in backgammon to throw _three_ dice, and choose any two of the three numbers. the average quality of the throws would be much raised. i reckon that the chance of " , " would be about two and a half what it now is. it would also furnish a means, similar to giving points in billiards, for equalising players: the weaker might use three dice, the other using two. i think of calling it "thirdie backgammon." _march_ _st._--have just got printed, as a leaflet, "a disputed point in logic"--the point professor wilson and i have been arguing so long. this paper is wholly in his own words, and puts the point very clearly. i think of submitting it to all my logical friends. "a disputed point in logic" appeared also, i believe, in _mind_, july, . this seems a fitting place in which to speak of a side of mr. dodgson's character of which he himself was naturally very reticent--his wonderful generosity. my own experience of him was of a man who was always ready to do one a kindness, even though it put him to great expense and inconvenience; but of course i did not know, during his lifetime, that my experience of him was the same as that of all his other friends. the income from his books and other sources, which might have been spent in a life of luxury and selfishness, he distributed lavishly where he saw it was needed, and in order to do this he always lived in the most simple way. to make others happy was the golden rule of his life. on august st he wrote, in a letter to a friend, miss mary brown: "and now what am i to tell you about myself? to say i am quite well 'goes without saying' with me. in fact, my life is so strangely free from all trial and trouble that i cannot doubt my own happiness is one of the talents entrusted to me to 'occupy' with, till the master shall return, by doing something to make other lives happy." in several instances, where friends in needy circumstances have written to him for loans of money, he has answered them, "i will not _lend_, but i will _give_ you the £ you ask for." to help child-friends who wanted to go on the stage, or to take up music as a profession, he has introduced them to leading actors and actresses, paid for them having lessons in singing from the best masters, sent round circulars to his numerous acquaintances begging them to patronise the first concert or recital. in writing his books he never attempted to win popularity by acceding to the prejudices and frailties of the age--his one object was to make his books useful and helpful and ennobling. like the great master, in whose steps he so earnestly strove to follow, he "went about doing good." and one is glad to think that even his memory is being made to serve the same purpose. the "alice" cots are a worthy sequel to his generous life. even mr. dodgson, with all his boasted health, was not absolutely proof against disease, for on february , , he writes:-- tenth day of a rather bad attack of influenza of the ague type. last night the fever rose to a great height, partly caused by a succession of _five_ visitors. one, however, was of my own seeking--dean paget, to whom i was thankful to be able to tell all i have had in my mind for a year or more, as to our chapel services _not_ being as helpful as they could be made. the chief fault is extreme _rapidity_. i long ago gave up the attempt to say the confession at that pace; and now i say it, and the lord's prayer, close together, and never hear a word of the absolution. also many of the lessons are quite unedifying. on july th he wrote to my brother on the subject of a paper about eternal punishment, which was to form the first of a series of essays on religious difficulties:-- i am sending you the article on "eternal punishment" as it is. there is plenty of matter for consideration, as to which i shall be glad to know your views. also if there are other points, connected with religion, where you feel that perplexing difficulties exist, i should be glad to know of them in order to see whether i can see my way to saying anything helpful. but i had better add that i do not want to deal with any such difficulties, _unless_ they tend to affect _life. speculative_ difficulties which do not affect conduct, and which come into collision with any of the principles which i intend to state as axioms, lie outside the scope of my book. these axioms are:-- ( ) human conduct is capable of being _right_, and of being _wrong_. ( ) i possess free-will, and am able to choose between right and wrong. ( ) i have in some cases chosen wrong. ( ) i am responsible for choosing wrong. ( ) i am responsible to a person. ( ) this person is perfectly good. i call them axioms, because i have no _proofs_ to offer for them. there will probably be others, but these are all i can think of just now. the rev. h. hopley, vicar of westham, has sent me the following interesting account of a sermon mr. dodgson preached at his church:-- in the autumn of the vicar of eastbourne was to have preached my harvest sermon at westham, a village five miles away; but something or other intervened, and in the middle of the week i learned he could not come. a mutual friend suggested my asking mr. dodgson, who was then in eastbourne, to help me, and i went with him to his rooms. i was quite a stranger to mr. dodgson; but knowing from hearsay how reluctant he usually was to preach, i apologised and explained my position--with sunday so near at hand. after a moment's hesitation he consented, and in a most genial manner made me feel quite at ease as to the abruptness of my petition. on the morrow he came over to my vicarage, and made friends with my daughters, teaching them some new manner of playing croquet [probably castle croquet], and writing out for them puzzles and anagrams that he had composed. the following letter was forwarded on the saturday:-- " , lushington road, eastbourne, _september_ , . dear mr. hopley,--i think you will excuse the liberty i am taking in asking you to give me some food after the service on sunday, so that i may have no need to catch the train, but can walk back at leisure. this will save me from the worry of trying to conclude at an exact minute, and you, perhaps, from the trouble of finding short hymns, to save time. it will not, i hope, cause your cook any trouble, as my regular rule here is _cold_ dinner on sundays. this not from any "sabbatarian" theory, but from the wish to let our _employés_ have the day _wholly_ at their own disposal. i beg miss hopley's acceptance of the enclosed papers-- (puzzles and diagrams.) believe me, very truly yours, c.l. dodgson." on sunday our grand old church was crowded, and, although our villagers are mostly agricultural labourers, yet they breathlessly listened to a sermon forty minutes long, and apparently took in every word of it. it was quite extempore, in very simple words, and illustrated by some delightful and most touching stories of children. i only wish there had been a shorthand-writer there. in the vestry after service, while he was signing his name in the preachers' book, a church officer handed him a bit of paper. "mr. dodgson, would you very kindly write your name on that?" "sir!" drawing himself up sternly--"sir, i never do that for any one"--and then, more kindly, "you see, if i did it for one, i must do it for all." an amusing incident in mr. dodgson's life is connected with the well-known drama, "two little vagabonds." i give the story as he wrote it in his diary:-- _nov._ _th.--matinée_ at the princess's of "two little vagabonds," a very sensational melodrama, capitally acted. "dick" and "wally" were played by kate tyndall and sydney fairbrother, whom i guess to be about fifteen and twelve. both were excellent, and the latter remarkable for the perfect realism of her acting. there was some beautiful religious dialogue between "wally" and a hospital nurse-- most reverently spoken, and reverently received by the audience. _dec._ _th._--i have given books to kate tyndall and sydney fairbrother, and have heard from them, and find i was entirely mistaken in taking them for children. both are married women! the following is an extract from a letter written in to one of his sisters, in allusion to a death which had recently occurred in the family:-- it is getting increasingly difficult now to remember _which_ of one's friends remain alive, and _which_ have gone "into the land of the great departed, into the silent land." also, such news comes less and less as a shock, and more and more one realises that it is an experience each of _us_ has to face before long. that fact is getting _less_ dreamlike to me now, and i sometimes think what a grand thing it will be to be able to say to oneself, "death is _over_ now; there is not _that_ experience to be faced again." i am beginning to think that, if the _books i_ am still hoping to write are to be done _at all,_ they must be done _now_, and that i am _meant_ thus to utilise the splendid health i have had, unbroken, for the last year and a half, and the working powers that are fully as great as, if not greater, than i have ever had. i brought with me here (this letter was written from eastbourne) the ms., such as it is (very fragmentary and unarranged) for the book about religious difficulties, and i meant, when i came here, to devote myself to that, but i have changed my plan. it seems to me that _that_ subject is one that hundreds of living men could do, if they would only try, _much_ better than i could, whereas there is no living man who could (or at any rate who would take the trouble to) arrange and finish and publish the second part of the "logic." also, i _have_ the logic book in my head; it will only need three or four months to write out, and i have _not_ got the other book in my head, and it might take years to think out. so i have decided to get part ii. finished _first_, and i am working at it day and night. i have taken to early rising, and sometimes sit down to my work before seven, and have one and a half hours at it before breakfast. the book will be a great novelty, and will help, i fully believe, to make the study of logic _far_ easier than it now is. and it will, i also believe, be a help to religious thought by giving _clearness_ of conception and of expression, which may enable many people to face, and conquer, many religious difficulties for themselves. so i do really regard it as work for _god_. another letter, written a few months later to miss dora abdy, deals with the subject of "reverence," which mr. dodgson considered a virtue not held in sufficient esteem nowadays:-- my dear dora,--in correcting the proofs of "through the looking-glass" (which is to have "an easter greeting" inserted at the end), i am reminded that in that letter (i enclose a copy), i had tried to express my thoughts on the very subject we talked about last night--the relation of _laughter_ to religious thought. one of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another, but the _sort_ of meaning i want to convey to other minds is that while the laughter of _joy_ is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. the danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of _mockery_, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising _wit_. that is the spirit which has spoiled, for me, the beauty of some of the bible. surely there is a deep meaning in our prayer, "give us an heart to love and _dread_ thee." we do not mean _terror_: but a dread that will harmonise with love; "respect" we should call it as towards a human being, "reverence" as towards god and all religious things. yours affectionately, c.l. dodgson. in his "game of logic" lewis carroll introduced an original method of working logical problems by means of diagrams; this method he superseded in after years for a much simpler one, the method of "subscripts." in "symbolic logic, part i." (london: macmillan, ) he employed both methods. the introduction is specially addressed "to learners," whom lewis carroll advises to read the book straight through, without _dipping_. this rule [he says] is very desirable with other kinds of books--such as novels, for instance, where you may easily spoil much of the enjoyment you would otherwise get from the story by dipping into it further on, so that what the author meant to be a pleasant surprise comes to you as a matter of course. some people, i know, make a practice of looking into vol. iii. first, just to see how the story ends; and perhaps it _is_ as well just to know that all ends _happily_--that the much persecuted lovers _do_ marry after all, that he is proved to be quite innocent of the murder, that the wicked cousin is completely foiled in his plot, and gets the punishment he deserves, and that the rich uncle in india (_qu._ why in _india? ans._ because, somehow, uncles never _can_ get rich anywhere else) dies at exactly the right moment--before taking the trouble to read vol i. this, i say, is _just_ permissible with a _novel_, where vol. iii. has a _meaning_, even for those who have not read the earlier part of the story; but with a _scientific_ book, it is sheer insanity. you will find the latter part _hopelessly_ unintelligible, if you read it before reaching it in regular course. * * * * * chapter ix ( - ) logic-lectures--irreverent anecdotes--tolerance of his religious views--a mathematical discovery--"the little minister" sir george baden-powell--last illness--"thy will be done"--"wonderland" at last!--letters from friends "three sunsets"--"of such is the kingdom of heaven." the year , the last complete year which he was destined to spend, began for mr. dodgson at guildford. on january rd he preached in the morning at the beautiful old church of s. mary's, the church which he always attended when he was staying with his sisters at the chestnuts. on the th he began a course of logic lectures at abbot's hospital. the rev. a. kingston, late curate of holy trinity and s. mary's parishes, guildford, had requested him to do this, and he had given his promise if as many as six people could be got together to hear him. mr. kingston canvassed the town so well that an audience of about thirty attended the first lecture. [illustration: lewis carroll. _from a photograph._] a long sunday walk was always a feature of mr. dodgson's life in the vacations. in earlier years the late mr. w. watson was his usual companion at guildford. the two men were in some respects very much alike; a peculiar gentleness of character, a winning charm of manner which no one could resist, distinguished them both. after mr. watson's death his companion was usually one of the following guildford clergymen: the rev. j.h. robson, ll.d., the rev. h.r. ware, and the rev. a. kingston. on the th mr. dodgson paid a visit to the girls' high school, to show the pupils some mathematical puzzles, and to teach the elder ones his "memoria technica." on the th he returned to oxford, so as to be up in time for term. i have said that he always refused invitations to dinner; accordingly his friends who knew of this peculiarity, and wished to secure him for a special evening, dared not actually invite him, but wrote him little notes stating that on such and such days they would be dining at home. thus there is an entry in his journal for february th: "dined with mrs. g--(she had not sent an 'invitation'--only 'information')." his system of symbolic logic enabled him to work out the most complex problems with absolute certainty in a surprisingly short time. thus he wrote on the th: "made a splendid logic-problem, about "great-grandsons" (modelled on one by de morgan). my method of solution is quite new, and i greatly doubt if any one will solve the problem. i have sent it to cook wilson." on march th he preached in the university church, the first occasion on which he had done so:-- there is now [he writes] a system established of a course of six sermons at s. mary's each year, for university men _only_, and specially meant for undergraduates. they are preached, preceded by a few prayers and a hymn, at half-past eight. this evening ended the course for this term: and it was my great privilege to preach. it has been the most formidable sermon i have ever had to preach, and it is a _great_ relief to have it over. i took, as text, job xxviii. , "and unto man he said, the fear of the lord, that is wisdom"--and the prayer in the litany "give us an heart to love and dread thee." it lasted three-quarters of an hour. one can imagine how he would have treated the subject. the views which he held on the subject of reverence were, so at least it appears to me, somewhat exaggerated; they are well expressed in a letter which he wrote to a friend of his, during the year, and which runs as follows:-- dear--, after changing my mind several times, i have at last decided to venture to ask a favour of you, and to trust that you will not misinterpret my motives in doing so. the favour i would ask is, that you will not tell me any more stories, such as you did on friday, of remarks which children are said to have made on very sacred subjects-- remarks which most people would recognise as irreverent, if made by _grown-up people_, but which are assumed to be innocent when made by children who are unconscious of any irreverence, the strange conclusion being drawn that they are therefore innocent when _repeated_ by a grown-up person. the misinterpretation i would guard against is, your supposing that i regard such repetition as always _wrong_ in any grown-up person. let me assure you that i do _not_ so regard it. i am always willing to believe that those who repeat such stories differ wholly from myself in their views of what is, and what is not, fitting treatment of sacred things, and i fully recognise that what would certainly be wrong in _me_, is not necessarily so in _them_. so i simply ask it as a personal favour to myself. the hearing of that anecdote gave me so much pain, and spoiled so much the pleasure of my tiny dinner-party, that i feel sure you will kindly spare me such in future. one further remark. there are quantities of such anecdotes going about. i don't in the least believe that per cent. of them were ever said by _children_. i feel sure that most of them are concocted by people who _wish_ to bring sacred subjects into ridicule--sometimes by people who _wish_ to undermine the belief that others have in religious truths: for there is no surer way of making one's beliefs _unreal_ than by learning to associate them with ludicrous ideas. forgive the freedom with which i have said all this. sincerely yours, c.l. dodgson. the entry in the diary for april th (sunday) is interesting:-- went my eighteen-mile round by besilsleigh. from my rooms back to them again, took me five hours and twenty-seven minutes. had "high tea" at twenty minutes past seven. this entails only leaving a plate of cold meat, and gives much less trouble than hot dinner at six. dinner at six has been my rule since january st, when it began--i then abandoned the seven o'clock sunday dinner, of which i entirely disapprove. it has prevented, for two terms, the college servants' service. on may th he wrote:-- as the prince of wales comes this afternoon to open the town hall, i went round to the deanery to invite them to come through my rooms upon the roof, to see the procession arrive.... a party of about twenty were on my roof in the afternoon, including mrs. moberly, mrs. driver, and mrs. baynes, and most, if not all, of the children in christ church. dinner in hall at eight. the dean had the prince on his right, and lord salisbury on his left. my place was almost _vis-à-vis_ with the prince. he and the dean were the only speakers. we did not get out of hall till nearly ten. in june he bought a "whiteley exerciser," and fixed it up in his rooms. one would have thought that he would have found his long walks sufficient exercise (an eighteen-mile round was, as we have seen, no unusual thing for him to undertake), but apparently it was not so. he was so pleased with the "exerciser," that he bought several more of them, and made presents of them to his friends. as an instance of his broad-mindedness, the following extract from his diary for june th is interesting. it must be premised that e--was a young friend of his who had recently become a member of the roman catholic church, and that their place of worship in oxford is dedicated to s. aloysius. i went with e-- to s. aloysius. there was much beauty in the service, part of which consisted in a procession, with banner, all round the church, carrying the host, preceded by a number of girls in white, with veils (who had all had their first communion that morning), strewing flowers. many of them were quite little things of about seven. the sermon (by father richardson) was good and interesting, and in a very loyal tone about the queen. a letter he wrote some years before to a friend who had asked him about his religious opinions reveals the same catholicity of mind:-- i am a member of the english church, and have taken deacon's orders, but did not think fit (for reasons i need not go into) to take priest's orders. my dear father was what is called a "high churchman," and i naturally adopted those views, but have always felt repelled by the yet higher development called "ritualism." but i doubt if i am fully a "high churchman" now. i find that as life slips away (i am over fifty now), and the life on the other side of the great river becomes more and more the reality, of which _this_ is only a shadow, that the petty distinctions of the many creeds of christendom tend to slip away as well--leaving only the great truths which all christians believe alike. more and more, as i read of the christian religion, as christ preached it, i stand amazed at the forms men have given to it, and the fictitious barriers they have built up between themselves and their brethren. i believe that when you and i come to lie down for the last time, if only we can keep firm hold of the great truths christ taught us--our own utter worthlessness and his infinite worth; and that he has brought us back to our one father, and made us his brethren, and so brethren to one another--we shall have all we need to guide us through the shadows. most assuredly i accept to the full the doctrines you refer to--that christ died to save us, that we have no other way of salvation open to us but through his death, and that it is by faith in him, and through no merit of ours, that we are reconciled to god; and most assuredly i can cordially say, "i owe all to him who loved me, and died on the cross of calvary." he spent the long vacation at eastbourne as usual, frequently walking over to hastings, which is about twenty miles off. a good many of his mornings were spent in giving lectures and telling stories at schools. a letter to the widow of an old college friend reveals the extraordinary sensitiveness of his nature:-- , bedford well road, eastbourne, _august_ , . my dear mrs. woodhouse,--your letter, with its mournful news, followed me down here, and i only got it on saturday night; so i was not able to be with you in thought when the mortal remains of my dear old friend were being committed to the ground; to await the time when our heavenly father shall have accomplished the number of his elect, and when you and i shall once more meet the loved ones from whom we are, for a little while only--what a little while even a long human life lasts!--parted in sorrow, yet _not_ sorrowing as those without hope. you will be sure without words of mine, that you have my true and deep sympathy. of all the friends i made at ch. ch., your husband was the very _first_ who spoke to me--across the dinner-table in hall. that is forty-six years ago, but i remember, as if it were only yesterday, the kindly smile with which he spoke.... september th and th are marked in his diary "with a white stone":-- _sept. th.--dies notandus._ discovered rule for dividing a number by , by mere addition and subtraction. i felt sure there must be an analogous one for , and found it, and proved first rule by algebra, after working about nine hours! _sept. th.--dies cretâ notandus._ i have actually _superseded_ the rules discovered yesterday! my new rules require to ascertain the -remainder, and the -remainder, which the others did _not_ require; but the new ones are much the quickest. i shall send them to _the educational times_, with date of discovery. on november th he wrote:-- completed a rule for dividing a given number by any divisor that is within of a power of , either way. the _principle_ of it is not my discovery, but was sent me by bertram collingwood--a rule for dividing by a divisor which is within of a power of , _below_ it. my readers will not be surprised to learn that only eight days after this he had superseded his rule:-- an inventive morning! after waking, and before i had finished dressing, i had devised a new and much neater form in which to work my rules for long division, and also decided to bring out my "games and puzzles," and part iii. of "curiosa mathematica," in _numbers_, in paper covers, paged consecutively, to be ultimately issued in boards. on november th he spent the day in london, with the object of seeing "the little minister" at the haymarket. "a beautiful play, beautifully acted," he calls it, and says that he should like to see it "again and again." he especially admired the acting of mrs. cyril maude (miss winifred emery) as lady babbie. this was the last theatrical performance he ever witnessed. he apparently kept rough notes for his diary, and only wrote it up every few weeks, as there are no entries at all for , nor even for the last week of . the concluding page runs as follows:-- _dec. (w.) a.m._--i am in my large room, with no fire, and open window--temperature degrees. _dec. (f.)._--maggie [one of his sisters], and our nieces nella and violet, came to dinner. _dec. (sun.)._--sat up last night till a.m., over a tempting problem, sent me from new york, "to find equal rational-sided rt.-angled _triangles_." i found _two_, whose sides are , , ; , , ; but could not find _three_. _dec. (th.)._--i start for guildford by the . today. as my story of lewis carroll's life draws near its end, i have received some "stray reminiscences" from sir george baden-powell, m.p., which, as they refer to several different periods of time, are as appropriate here as in any other part of the book. the rev. e.h. dodgson, referred to in these reminiscences, is a younger brother of lewis carroll's; he spent several years of his life upon the remote island of tristan d'acunha, where there were only about seventy or eighty inhabitants besides himself. about once a year a ship used to call, when the island-folk would exchange their cattle for cloth, corn, tea, &c., which they could not produce themselves. the island is volcanic in origin, and is exposed to the most terrific gales; the building used as a church stood at some distance from mr. dodgson's dwelling, and on one occasion the wind was so strong that he had to crawl on his hands and knees for the whole distance that separated the two buildings. my first introduction (writes sir george baden-powell) to the author of "through the looking-glass" was about the year or , and under appropriate conditions! i was then coaching at oxford with the well-known rev. e. hatch, and was on friendly terms with his bright and pretty children. entering his house one day, and facing the dining-room, i heard mysterious noises under the table, and saw the cloth move as if some one were hiding. children's legs revealed it as no burglar, and there was nothing for it but to crawl upon them, roaring as a lion. bursting in upon them in their strong-hold under the table, i was met by the staid but amused gaze of a reverend gentleman. frequently afterwards did i see and hear "lewis carroll" entertaining the youngsters in his inimitable way. we became friends, and greatly did i enjoy intercourse with him over various minor oxford matters. in later years, at one time i saw much of him, in quite another _rôle_--namely that of ardent sympathy with the, as he thought, ill-treated and deserted islanders of tristan d'acunha. his brother, it will be remembered, had voluntarily been left at that island with a view to ministering to the spiritual and educational needs of the few settlers, and sent home such graphic accounts and urgent demands for aid, that "lewis carroll" spared no pains to organise assistance and relief. at his instance i brought the matter before government and the house of commons, and from that day to this frequent communication has been held with the islanders, and material assistance has been rendered them--thanks to the warm heart of "lewis carroll." on december , , as the note in his diary states, he went down, in accordance with his usual custom, to guildford, to spend christmas with his sisters at the chestnuts. he seemed to be in his ordinary health, and in the best of spirits, and there was nothing to show that the end was so near. [illustration: the chestnuts, guildford. _from a photograph._] at guildford he was hard at work upon the second part of his "symbolic logic," spending most of the day over this task. this book, alas! he was not destined to finish, which is the more to be regretted as it will be exceedingly difficult for any one else to take up the thread of the argument, even if any one could be found willing to give the great amount of time and trouble which would be needed. on january th my father, the rev. c.s. collingwood, rector of southwick, near sunderland, died after a very short illness. the telegram which brought mr. dodgson the news of this contained the request that he would come at once. he determined to travel north the next day--but it was not to be so. an attack of influenza, which began only with slight hoarseness, yet enough to prevent him from following his usual habit of reading family prayers, was pronounced next morning to be sufficiently serious to forbid his undertaking a journey. at first his illness seemed a trifle, but before a week had passed bronchial symptoms had developed, and dr. gabb, the family physician, ordered him to keep his bed. his breathing rapidly became hard and laborious, and he had to be propped up with pillows. a few days before his death he asked one of his sisters to read him that well-known hymn, every verse of which ends with 'thy will be done.' to another he said that his illness was a great trial of his patience. how great a trial it must have been it is hard for us to understand. with the work he had set himself still uncompleted, with a sense of youth and joyousness, which sixty years of the battle of life had in no way dulled, lewis carroll had to face death. he seemed to know that the struggle was over. "take away those pillows," he said on the th, "i shall need them no more." the end came about half-past two on the afternoon of the th. one of his sisters was in the room at the time, and she only noticed that the hard breathing suddenly ceased. the nurse, whom she summoned, at first hoped that this was a sign that he had taken a turn for the better. and so, indeed, he had--he had passed from a world of incompleteness and disappointment, to another where god is putting his beautiful soul to nobler and grander work than was possible for him here, where he is learning to comprehend those difficulties which used to puzzle him so much, and where that infinite love, which he mirrored so wonderfully in his own life, is being revealed to him "face to face." in accordance with his expressed wish, the funeral was simple in the extreme--flowers, and flowers only, adorned the plain coffin. there was no hearse to drag it up the steep incline that leads to the beautiful cemetery where he lies. the service was taken by dean paget and canon grant, rector of holy trinity and s. mary's, guildford. the mourners who followed him in the quiet procession were few--but the mourners who were not there, and many of whom had never seen him--who shall tell _their_ number? after the grave had been filled up, the wreaths which had covered the coffin were placed upon it. many were from "child-friends" and bore such inscriptions as "from two of his child-friends"--"to the sweetest soul that ever looked with human eyes," &c. then the mourners left him alone there--up on the pleasant downs where he had so often walked. a marble cross, under the shadow of a pine, marks the spot, and beneath his own name they have engraved the name of "lewis carroll," that the children who pass by may remember their friend, who is now--himself a child in all that makes childhood most attractive--in that "wonderland" which outstrips all our dreams and hopes. i cannot forbear quoting from professor sanday's sermon at christ church on the sunday after his death:-- the world will think of lewis carroll as one who opened out a new vein in literature, a new and a delightful vein, which added at once mirth and refinement to life.... may we not say that from our courts at christ church there has flowed into the literature of our time a rill, bright and sparkling, health-giving and purifying, wherever its waters extend? [illustration: lewis carroll's grave. _from a photograph._] on the following sunday dean paget, in the course of a sermon on the "virtue of simplicity," said:-- we may differ, according to our difference of taste or temperament, in appraising charles dodgson's genius; but that that great gift was his, that his best work ranks with the very best of its kind, this has been owned with a recognition too wide and spontaneous to leave room for doubt. the brilliant, venturesome imagination, defying forecast with ever-fresh surprise; the sense of humour in its finest and most naïve form; the power to touch with lightest hand the undercurrent of pathos in the midst of fun; the audacity of creative fancy, and the delicacy of insight--these are rare gifts; and surely they were his. yes, but it was his simplicity of mind and heart that raised them all, not only in his work but in his life, in all his ways, in the man as we knew him, to something higher than any mere enumeration of them tells: that almost curious simplicity, at times, that real and touching child-likeness that marked him in all fields of thought, appearing in his love of children and in their love of him, in his dread of giving pain to any living creature, in a certain disproportion, now and then, of the view he took of things--yes, and also in that deepest life, where the pure in heart and those who become as little children see the very truth and walk in the fear and love of god. some extracts from the numerous sympathetic letters received by mr. dodgson's brothers and sisters will show how greatly his loss was felt. thus canon jelf writes:-- it was quite a shock to me to see in the paper to-day the death of your dear, good brother, to whom we owe so much of the brightening of our lives with pure, innocent fun. personally i feel his loss very much indeed. we were together in old ch. ch. days from onwards; and he was always such a loyal, faithful friend to me. i rejoice to think of the _serious_ talks we had together--of the grand, brave way in which he used the opportunities he had as a man of humour, to reach the consciences of a host of readers--of his love for children--his simplicity of heart--of his care for servants--his spiritual care for them. who can doubt that he was fully prepared for a change however sudden--for the one clear call which took him away from us? yet the world seems darker for his going; we can only get back our brightness by realising who gave him all his talent, all his mirth of heart--the one who never leaves us. in deep sympathy, yours very sincerely, george e. jelf. p.s.--when you have time tell me a little about him; he was so dear to me. mr. frederic harrison writes as follows:-- the occasional visits that i received from your late brother showed me a side of his nature which to my mind was more interesting and more worthy of remembrance even than his wonderful and delightful humour--i mean his intense sympathy with all who suffer and are in need. he came to see me several times on sundry errands of mercy, and it has been a lesson to me through life to remember his zeal to help others in difficulty, his boundless generosity, and his inexhaustible patience with folly and error. my young daughter, like all young people in civilised countries, was brought up on his beautiful fancies and humours. but for my part i remember him mainly as a sort of missionary to all in need. we all alike grieve, and offer you our heartfelt sympathy. i am, faithfully yours, frederic harrison. his old friend and tutor. dr. price, writes:-- ... i feel his removal from among us as the loss of an old and dear friend and pupil, to whom i have been most warmly attached ever since he was with me at whitby, reading mathematics, in, i think, -- years ago! and years of uninterrupted friendship .... i was pleased to read yesterday in _the times_ newspaper the kindly obituary notice: perfectly just and true; appreciative, as it should be, as to the unusual combination of deep mathematical ability and taste with the genius that led to the writing of "alice's adventures." only the other day [writes a lady friend] he wrote to me about his admiration for my dear husband, and he ended his letter thus: "i trust that when _my_ time comes, i may be found, like him, working to the last, and ready for the master's call"--and truly so he was. a friend at oxford writes:-- mr. dodgson was ever the kindest and gentlest of friends, bringing sunshine into the house with him. we shall mourn his loss deeply, and my two girls are quite overcome with grief. all day memories of countless acts of kindness shown to me, and to people i have known, have crowded my mind, and i feel it almost impossible to realise that he has passed beyond the reach of our gratitude and affection. the following are extracts from letters written by some of his "child-friends," now grown up:-- how beautiful to think of the track of light and love he has left behind him, and the amount of happiness he brought into the lives of all those he came in contact with! i shall never forget all his kindness to us, from the time he first met us as little mites in the railway train, and one feels glad to have had the privilege of knowing him. one of mr. dodgson's oldest "child-friends" writes:-- he was to me a dear and true friend, and it has been my great privilege to see a good deal of him ever since i was a tiny child, and especially during the last two years. i cannot tell you how much we shall miss him here. ch. ch. without mr. dodgson will be a strange place, and it is difficult to realise it even while we listen to the special solemn anthems and hymns to his memory in our cathedral. one who had visited him at guildford, writes:-- it must be quite sixteen years now since he first made friends with my sister and myself as children on the beach at eastbourne, and since then his friendship has been and must always be one of my most valued possessions. it culminated, i think, in the summer of --the year when he brought me to spend a very happy sunday at guildford. i had not seen him before, that year, for some time; and it was then, i think, that the childish delight in his kindness, and pride in his friendship, changed into higher love and reverence, when in our long walks over the downs i saw more and more into the great tenderness and gentleness of his nature. shortly after mr. dodgson's death, his "three sunsets" was published by messrs. macmillan. the twelve "fairy fancies," which illustrate it, were drawn by miss e. g. thomson. though they are entirely unconnected with the text, they are so thoroughly in accordance with the author's delicate refinement, and so beautiful in themselves, that they do not strike one as inappropriate. some of the verses are strangely in keeping with the time at which they are published. i could not see, for blinding tears, the glories of the west: a heavenly music filled my ears, a heavenly peace my breast. "come unto me, come unto me-- all ye that labour, unto me-- ye heavy-laden, come to me-- and i will give you rest." one cannot read this little volume without feeling that the shadow of some disappointment lay over lewis carroll's life. such i believe to have been the case, and it was this that gave him his wonderful sympathy with all who suffered. but those who loved him would not wish to lift the veil from these dead sanctities, nor would any purpose be served by so doing. the proper use of sympathy is not to weep over sorrows that are over, and whose very memory is perhaps obliterated for him in the first joy of possessing new and higher faculties. before leaving the subject of this book, i should like to draw attention to a few lines on "woman's mission," lines full of the noblest chivalry, reminding one of tennyson's "idylls of the king":-- in the darkest path of man's despair, where war and terror shake the troubled earth, lies woman's mission; with unblenching brow to pass through scenes of horror and affright where men grow sick and tremble: unto her all things are sanctified, for all are good. nothing so mean, but shall deserve her care: nothing so great, but she may bear her part. no life is vain: each hath his place assigned: do thou thy task, and leave the rest to god. of the unpublished works which mr. dodgson left behind him, i may mention "original games and puzzles"; "symbolic logic, part ii.," and a portion of a mathematical book, the proofs of which are now in the hands of the controller of the oxford university press. i will conclude this chapter with a poem which appeared in _punch_ for january th, a fortnight after lewis carroll's death. it expresses, with all the grace and insight of the true poet, what i have tried, so feebly and ineffectually, to say:-- lewis carroll. _born_ . _died january_ , . lover of children! fellow-heir with those of whom the imperishable kingdom is! beyond all dreaming now your spirit knows the unimagined mysteries. darkly as in a glass our faces look to read ourselves, if so we may, aright; you, like the maiden in your faërie book-- you step behind and see the light! the heart you wore beneath your pedant's cloak only to children's hearts you gave away; yet unaware in half the world you woke the slumbering charm of childhood's day. we older children, too, our loss lament, we of the "table round," remembering well how he, our comrade, with his pencil lent your fancy's speech a firmer spell. master of rare woodcraft, by sympathy's sure touch he caught your visionary gleams, and made your fame, the dreamer's, one with his. the wise interpreter of dreams. farewell! but near our hearts we have you yet, holding our heritage with loving hand, who may not follow where your feet are set upon the ways of wonderland.[ ] [illustration: lorina and alice liddell. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] * * * * * chapter x child friends mr. dodgson's fondness for children--miss isabel standen--puzzles--"me and myself"--a double acrostic--"father william"--of drinking healths--kisses by post--tired in the face--the unripe plum--eccentricities--"sylvie and bruno"--"mr. dodgson is going on _well_." this chapter, and the next will deal with mr. dodgson's friendships with children. it would have been impossible to arrange them in chronological sequence in the earlier part of this book, and the fact that they exhibit a very important and distinct side of his nature seems to justify me in assigning them a special and individual position. for the contents of these two chapters, both my readers and myself owe a debt of gratitude to those child-friends of his, without whose ever-ready help this book could never have been written. from very early college days began to emerge that beautiful side of lewis carroll's character which afterwards was to be, next to his fame as an author, the one for which he was best known--his attitude towards children, and the strong attraction they had for him. i shall attempt to point out the various influences which led him in this direction; but if i were asked for one comprehensive word wide enough to explain this tendency of his nature, i would answer unhesitatingly--love. my readers will remember a beautiful verse in "sylvie and bruno"; trite though it is, i cannot forbear to quote it-- say, whose is the skill that paints valley and hill, like a picture so fair to the sight? that flecks the green meadow with sunshine and shadow, till the little lambs leap with delight? 'tis a secret untold to hearts cruel and cold, though 'tis sung by the angels above, in notes that ring clear for the ears that can hear, and the name of the secret is love! that "secret"--an open secret for him--explains this side of his character. as _he_ read everything in its light, so it is only in its light that _we_ can properly understand _him_. i think that the following quotation from a letter to the rev. f. h. atkinson, accompanying a copy of "alice" for his little daughter gertrude, sufficiently proves the truth of what i have just stated:-- many thanks to mrs. atkinson and to you for the sight of the tinted photograph of your gertrude. as you say, the picture speaks for itself, and i can see exactly what sort of a child she is, in proof of which i send her my love and a kiss herewith. it is possible i may be the first (unseen) gentleman from whom she has had so ridiculous a message; but i can't say she is the first unseen child to whom i have sent one! i think the most precious message of the kind i ever got from a child i never saw (and never shall see in this world) was to the effect that she liked me when she read about alice, "but please tell him, whenever i read that easter letter he sent me i _do_ love him!" she was in a hospital, and a lady friend who visited there had asked me to send the letter to her and some other sick children. and now as to the secondary causes which attracted him to children. first, i think children appealed to him because he was pre-eminently a teacher, and he saw in their unspoiled minds the best material for him to work upon. in later years one of his favourite recreations was to lecture at schools on logic; he used to give personal attention to each of his pupils, and one can well imagine with what eager anticipation the children would have looked forward to the visits of a schoolmaster who knew how to make even the dullest subjects interesting and amusing. again, children appealed to his æsthetic faculties, for he was a keen admirer of the beautiful in every form. poetry, music, the drama, all delighted him, but pictures more than all put together. i remember his once showing me "the lady with the lilacs," which arthur hughes had painted for him, and how he dwelt with intense pleasure on the exquisite contrasts of colour which it contained--the gold hair of a girl standing out against the purple of lilac-blossom. but with those who find in such things as these a complete satisfaction of their desire for the beautiful he had no sympathy; for no imperfect representations of life could, for him, take the place of life itself, life as god has made it--the babbling of the brook, the singing of the birds, the laughter and sweet faces of the children. and yet, recognising, as he did, what mr. pater aptly terms "the curious perfection of the human form," in man, as in nature, it was the soul that attracted him more than the body. his intense admiration, one might almost call it adoration, for the white innocence and uncontaminated spirituality of childhood emerges most clearly in "sylvie and bruno." he says very little of the personal beauty of his heroine; he might have asked, with mr. francis thompson-- how can i tell what beauty is her dole, who cannot see her countenance for her soul? so entirely occupied is he with her gentleness, her pity, her sincerity, and her love. again, the reality of children appealed strongly to the simplicity and genuineness of his own nature. i believe that he understood children even better than he understood men and women; civilisation has made adult humanity very incomprehensible, for convention is as a veil which hides the divine spark that is in each of us, and so this strange thing has come to be, that the imperfect mirrors perfection more completely than the perfected, that we see more of god in the child than in the man. and in those moments of depression of which he had his full share, when old age seemed to mock him with all its futility and feebleness, it was the thought that the children still loved him which nerved him again to continue his life-work, which renewed his youth, so that to his friends he never seemed an old man. even the hand of death itself only made his face look more boyish--the word is not too strong. "how wonderfully young your brother looks!" were the first words the doctor said, as he returned from the room where lewis carroll's body lay, to speak to the mourners below. and so he loved children because their friendship was the true source of his perennial youth and unflagging vigour. this idea is expressed in the following poem--an acrostic, which he wrote for a friend some twenty years ago:-- around my lonely hearth, to-night, ghostlike the shadows wander: now here, now there, a childish sprite, earthborn and yet as angel bright, seems near me as i ponder. gaily she shouts: the laughing air echoes her note of gladness-- or bends herself with earnest care round fairy-fortress to prepare grim battlement or turret-stair-- in childhood's merry madness! new raptures still hath youth in store: age may but fondly cherish half-faded memories of yore-- up, craven heart! repine no more! love stretches hands from shore to shore: love is, and shall not perish! his first child-friend, so far as i know, was miss alice liddell, the little companion whose innocent talk was one of the chief pleasures of his early life at oxford, and to whom he told the tale that was to make him famous. in december, , miss m.e. manners presented him with a little volume, of which she was the authoress, "aunt agatha ann and other verses," and which contained a poem (which i quoted in chapter vi.), about "alice." writing to acknowledge this gift, lewis carroll said:-- permit me to offer you my sincere thanks for the very sweet verses you have written about my dream-child (named after a real alice, but none the less a dream-child) and her wonderland. that children love the book is a very precious thought to me, and, next to their love, i value the sympathy of those who come with a child's heart to what i have tried to write about a child's thoughts. next to what conversing with an angel _might_ be--for it is hard to imagine it--comes, i think, the privilege of having a real child's thoughts uttered to one. i have known some few _real_ children (you have too, i am sure), and their friendship is a blessing and a help in life. [illustration: alice liddell. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] it is interesting to note how in "sylvie and bruno" his idea of the thoughts of a child has become deeper and more spiritual. yet in the earlier tale, told "all in a golden afternoon," to the plash of oars and the swish of a boat through the waters of cherwell or thames, the ideal child is strangely beautiful; she has all sylvie's genuineness and honesty, all her keen appreciation of the interest of life; only there lacks that mysterious charm of deep insight into the hidden forces of nature, the gentle power that makes the sky "such a darling blue," which almost links sylvie with the angels. another of lewis carroll's early favourites was miss alexandra (xie) kitchin, daughter of the dean of durham. her father was for fifteen years the censor of the unattached members of the university of oxford, so that mr. dodgson had plenty of opportunities of photographing his little friend, and it is only fair to him to say that he did not neglect them. it would be futile to attempt even a bare list of the children whom he loved, and who loved him; during forty years of his life he was constantly adding to their number. some remained friends for life, but in a large proportion of cases the friendship ended with the end of childhood. to one of those few, whose affection for him had not waned with increasing years, he wrote:-- i always feel specially grateful to friends who, like you, have given me a child-friendship and a woman-friendship. about nine out of ten, i think, of my child-friendships get ship-wrecked at the critical point, "where the stream and river meet," and the child-friends, once so affectionate, become uninteresting acquaintances, whom i have no wish to set eyes on again. [illustration: xie kitchin. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] these friendships usually began all very much in the same way. a chance meeting on the sea-shore, in the street, at some friend's house, led to conversation; then followed a call on the parents, and after that all sorts of kindnesses on lewis carroll's part, presents of books, invitations to stay with him at oxford, or at eastbourne, visits with him to the theatre. for the amusement of his little guests he kept a large assortment of musical-boxes, and an organette which had to be fed with paper tunes. on one occasion he ordered about twelve dozen of these tunes "on approval," and asked one of the other dons, who was considered a judge of music, to come in and hear them played over. in addition to these attractions there were clock-work bears, mice, and frogs, and games and puzzles in infinite variety. one of his little friends, miss isabel standen, has sent me the following account of her first meeting with him:-- we met for the first time in the forbury gardens, reading. he was, i believe, waiting for a train. i was playing with my brothers and sisters in the gardens. i remember his taking me on his knee and showing me puzzles, one of which he refers to in the letter (given below. this puzzle was, by the way, a great favourite of his; the problem is to draw three interlaced squares without going over the same lines twice, or taking the pen off the paper), which is so thoroughly characteristic of him in its quaint humour:-- "the chestnuts, guildford, _august _ , . my dear isabel,--though i have only been acquainted with you for fifteen minutes, yet, as there is no one else in reading i have known so long, i hope you will not mind my troubling you. before i met you in the gardens yesterday i bought some old books at a shop in reading, which i left to be called for, and had not time to go back for them. i didn't even remark the name of the shop, but i can tell _where_ it was, and if you know the name of the woman who keeps the shop, and would put it into the blank i have left in this note, and direct it to her i should be much obliged ... a friend of mine, called mr. lewis carroll, tells me he means to send you a book. he is a _very_ dear friend of mine. i have known him all my life (we are the same age) and have _never_ left him. of course he was with me in the gardens, not a yard off--even while i was drawing those puzzles for you. i wonder if you saw him? your fifteen-minute friend, c.l. dodgson. have you succeeded in drawing the three squares?" another favourite puzzle was the following--i give it in his own words:-- a is to draw a fictitious map divided into counties. b is to colour it (or rather mark the counties with _names_ of colours) using as few colours as possible. two adjacent counties must have _different_ colours. a's object is to force b to use as _many_ colours as possible. how many can he force b to use? one of his most amusing letters was to a little girl called magdalen, to whom he had given a copy of his "hunting of the snark":-- christ church, _december_ , . my dear magdalen,--i want to explain to you why i did not call yesterday. i was sorry to miss you, but you see i had so many conversations on the way. i tried to explain to the people in the street that i was going to see you, but they wouldn't listen; they said they were in a hurry, which was rude. at last i met a wheelbarrow that i thought would attend to me, but i couldn't make out what was in it. i saw some features at first, then i looked through a telescope, and found it was a countenance; then i looked through a microscope, and found it was a face! i thought it was father like me, so i fetched a large looking-glass to make sure, and then to my great joy i found it was me. we shook hands, and were just beginning to talk, when myself came up and joined us, and we had quite a pleasant conversation. i said, "do you remember when we all met at sandown?" and myself said, "it was very jolly there; there was a child called magdalen," and me said, "i used to like her a little; not much, you know--only a little." then it was time for us to go to the train, and who do you think came to the station to see us off? you would never guess, so i must tell you. they were two very dear friends of mine, who happen to be here just now, and beg to be allowed to sign this letter as your affectionate friends, lewis carroll and c.l. dodgson. another child-friend, miss f. bremer, writes as follows:-- our acquaintance began in a somewhat singular manner. we were playing on the fort at margate, and a gentleman on a seat near asked us if we could make a paper boat, with a seat at each end, and a basket in the middle for fish! we were, of course, enchanted with the idea, and our new friend--after achieving the feat--gave us his card, which we at once carried to our mother. he asked if he might call where we were staying, and then presented my elder sister with a copy of "alice in wonderland," inscribed "from the author." he kindly organised many little excursions for us--chiefly in the pursuit of knowledge. one memorable visit to a light house is still fresh in our memories. it was while calling one day upon mrs. bremer that he scribbled off the following double acrostic on the names of her two daughters-- double acrostic--five letters. two little girls near london dwell, more naughty than i like to tell. . upon the lawn the hoops are seen: the balls are rolling on the green. t ur f . the thames is running deep and wide: and boats are rowing on the tide. r ive r . in winter-time, all in a row, the happy skaters come and go. i c e . "papa!" they cry, "do let us stay!" he does not speak, but says they may. n o d . "there is a land," he says, "my dear, which is too hot to skate, i fear." a fric a at margate also he met miss adelaide paine, who afterwards became one of his greatest favourites. he could not bear to see the healthy pleasures of childhood spoiled by conventional restraint. "one piece of advice given to my parents," writes miss paine, "gave me very great glee, and that was not to make little girls wear gloves at the seaside; they took the advice, and i enjoyed the result." _apropos_ of this i may mention that, when staying at eastbourne, he never went down to the beach without providing himself with a supply of safety-pins. then if he saw any little girl who wanted to wade in the sea, but was afraid of spoiling her frock, he would gravely go up to her and present her with a safety-pin, so that she might fasten up her skirts out of harm's way. tight boots were a great aversion of his, especially for children. one little girl who was staying with him at eastbourne had occasion to buy a new pair of boots. lewis carroll gave instructions to the bootmaker as to how they were to be made, so as to be thoroughly comfortable, with the result that when they came home they were more useful than ornamental, being very nearly as broad as they were long! which shows that even hygienic principles may be pushed too far. the first meeting with miss paine took place in . when lewis carroll returned to christ church he sent her a copy of "the hunting of the snark," with the following acrostic written in the fly-leaf:-- 'a re you deaf, father william?' the young man said, 'd id you hear what i told you just now? e xcuse me for shouting! don't waggle your head l ike a blundering, sleepy old cow! a little maid dwelling in wallington town, i s my friend, so i beg to remark: d o you think she'd be pleased if a book were sent down e ntitled "the hunt of the snark?"' 'p ack it up in brown paper!' the old man cried, 'a nd seal it with olive-and-dove. i command you to do it!' he added with pride, 'n or forget, my good fellow, to send her beside e aster greetings, and give her my love.' this was followed by a letter, dated june , :-- my dear adelaide,--did you try if the letters at the beginnings of the lines about father william would spell anything? sometimes it happens that you can spell out words that way, which is very curious. i wish you could have heard him when he shouted out "pack it up in brown paper!" it quite shook the house. and he threw one of his shoes at his son's head (just to make him attend, you know), but it missed him. he was glad to hear you had got the book safe, but his eyes filled with tears as he said, "i sent _her_ my love, but she never--" he couldn't say any more, his mouth was so full of bones (he was just finishing a roast goose). another letter to miss paine is very characteristic of his quaint humour:-- christ church, oxford, _march_ , . my dear ada,--(isn't that your short name? "adelaide" is all very well, but you see when one's _dreadfully_ busy one hasn't time to write such long words--particularly when it takes one half an hour to remember how to spell it--and even then one has to go and get a dictionary to see if one has spelt it right, and of course the dictionary is in another room, at the top of a high bookcase--where it has been for months and months, and has got all covered with dust--so one has to get a duster first of all, and nearly choke oneself in dusting it--and when one _has_ made out at last which is dictionary and which is dust, even _then_ there's the job of remembering which end of the alphabet "a" comes--for one feels pretty certain it isn't in the _middle_--then one has to go and wash one's hands before turning over the leaves--for they've got so thick with dust one hardly knows them by sight--and, as likely as not, the soap is lost, and the jug is empty, and there's no towel, and one has to spend hours and hours in finding things--and perhaps after all one has to go off to the shop to buy a new cake of soap--so, with all this bother, i hope you won't mind my writing it short and saying, "my dear ada"). you said in your last letter you would like a likeness of me: so here it is, and i hope you will like it--i won't forget to call the next time but one i'm in wallington. your very affectionate friend, lewis carroll. it was quite against mr. dodgson's usual rule to give away photographs of himself; he hated publicity, and the above letter was accompanied by another to mrs. paine, which ran as follows:-- i am very unwilling, usually, to give my photograph, for i don't want people, who have heard of lewis carroll, to be able to recognise him in the street--but i can't refuse ada. will you kindly take care, if any of your ordinary acquaintances (i don't speak of intimate friends) see it, that they are _not_ told anything about the name of "lewis carroll"? he even objected to having his books discussed in his presence; thus he writes to a friend:-- your friend, miss--was very kind and complimentary about my books, but may i confess that i would rather have them ignored? perhaps i am too fanciful, but i have somehow taken a dislike to being talked to about them; and consequently have some trials to bear in society, which otherwise would be no trials at all.... i don't think any of my many little stage-friends have any shyness at all about being talked to of their performances. _they_ thoroughly enjoy the publicity that i shrink from. the child to whom the three following letters were addressed, miss gaynor simpson, was one of lewis carroll's guildford friends. the correct answer to the riddle propounded in the second letter is "copal":-- _december_ , . my dear gaynor,--my name is spelt with a "g," that is to say "_dodgson_." any one who spells it the same as that wretch (i mean of course the chairman of committees in the house of commons) offends me _deeply_, and _for ever!_ it is a thing i _can_ forget, but _never can forgive! _if you do it again, i shall call you "'aynor." could you live happy with such a name? as to dancing, my dear, i _never_ dance, unless i am allowed to do it _in my own peculiar way. _there is no use trying to describe it: it has to be seen to be believed. the last house i tried it in, the floor broke through. but then it was a poor sort of floor--the beams were only six inches thick, hardly worth calling beams at all: stone arches are much more sensible, when any dancing, _of my peculiar kind_, is to be done. did you ever see the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus, at the zoölogical gardens, trying to dance a minuet together? it is a touching sight. give any message from me to amy that you think will be most likely to surprise her, and, believe me, your affectionate friend, lewis carroll. my dear gaynor,--so you would like to know the answer to that riddle? don't be in a hurry to tell it to amy and frances: triumph over them for a while! my first lends its aid when you plunge into trade. _gain_. who would go into trade if there were no gain in it? my second in jollifications-- _or_ [the french for "gold"--] your jollifications would be _very_ limited if you had no money. my whole, laid on thinnish, imparts a neat finish to pictorial representations. _gaynor_. because she will be an ornament to the shakespeare charades--only she must be "laid on thinnish," that is, _there musn't be too much of her._ yours affectionately, c. l. dodgson. my dear gaynor,--forgive me for having sent you a sham answer to begin with. my first--_sea_. it carries the ships of the merchants. my second--_weed_. that is, a cigar, an article much used in jollifications. my whole--_seaweed_. take a newly painted oil-picture; lay it on its back on the floor, and spread over it, "thinnish," some wet seaweed. you will find you have "finished" that picture. yours affectionately, c.l. dodgson. lewis carroll during the last fifteen years of his life always spent the long vacation at eastbourne; in earlier times, sandown, a pleasant little seaside resort in the isle of wight, was his summer abode. he loved the sea both for its own sake and because of the number of children whom he met at seaside places. here is another "first meeting"; this time it is at sandown, and miss gertrude chataway is the narrator:-- i first met mr. lewis carroll on the sea-shore at sandown in the isle of wight, in the summer of , when i was quite a little child. we had all been taken there for change of air, and next door there was an old gentlemen--to me at any rate he seemed old--who interested me immensely. he would come on to his balcony, which joined ours, sniffing the sea-air with his head thrown back, and would walk right down the steps on to the beach with his chin in air, drinking in the fresh breezes as if he could never have enough. i do not know why this excited such keen curiosity on my part, but i remember well that whenever i heard his footstep i flew out to see him coming, and when one day he spoke to me my joy was complete. thus we made friends, and in a very little while i was as familiar with the interior of his lodgings as with our own. i had the usual child's love for fairy-tales and marvels, and his power of telling stories naturally fascinated me. we used to sit for hours on the wooden steps which led from our garden on to the beach, whilst he told the most lovely tales that could possibly be imagined, often illustrating the exciting situations with a pencil as he went along. one thing that made his stories particularly charming to a child was that he often took his cue from her remarks--a question would set him off on quite a new trail of ideas, so that one felt that one had somehow helped to make the story, and it seemed a personal possession it was the most lovely nonsense conceivable, and i naturally revelled in it. his vivid imagination would fly from one subject to another, and was never tied down in any way by the probabilities of life. to _me_ it was of course all perfect, but it is astonishing that _he_ never seemed either tired or to want other society. i spoke to him once of this since i have been grown up, and he told me it was the greatest pleasure he could have to converse freely with a child, and feel the depths of her mind. he used to write to me and i to him after that summer, and the friendship, thus begun, lasted. his letters were one of the greatest joys of my childhood. i don't think that he ever really understood that we, whom he had known as children, could not always remain such. i stayed with him only a few years ago, at eastbourne, and felt for the time that i was once more a child. he never appeared to realise that i had grown up, except when i reminded him of the fact, and then he only said, "never mind: you will always be a child to me, even when your hair is grey." some of the letters, to which miss chataway refers in these reminiscences, i am enabled, through her kindness, to give below:-- christ church, oxford, _october_ , . my dear gertrude,--i never give birthday _presents_, but you see i _do_ sometimes write a birthday _letter_: so, as i've just arrived here, i am writing this to wish you many and many a happy return of your birthday to-morrow. i will drink your health, if only i can remember, and if you don't mind--but perhaps you object? you see, if i were to sit by you at breakfast, and to drink your tea, you wouldn't like _that_, would you? you would say "boo! hoo! here's mr. dodgson's drunk all my tea, and i haven't got any left!" so i am very much afraid, next time sybil looks for you, she'll find you sitting by the sad sea-wave, and crying "boo! hoo! here's mr. dodgson has drunk my health, and i haven't got any left!" and how it will puzzle dr. maund, when he is sent for to see you! "my dear madam, i'm very sorry to say your little girl has got _no health at all_! i never saw such a thing in my life!" "oh, i can easily explain it!" your mother will say. "you see she would go and make friends with a strange gentleman, and yesterday he drank her health!" "well, mrs. chataway," he will say, "the only way to cure her is to wait till his next birthday, and then for _her_ to drink _his_ health." and then we shall have changed healths. i wonder how you'll like mine! oh, gertrude, i wish you wouldn't talk such nonsense!... your loving friend, lewis carroll. christ church, oxford, _dec_. , . my dear gertrude,--this really will _not_ do, you know, sending one more kiss every time by post: the parcel gets so heavy it is quite expensive. when the postman brought in the last letter, he looked quite grave. "two pounds to pay, sir!" he said. "_extra weight_, sir!" (i think he cheats a little, by the way. he often makes me pay two _pounds_, when i think it should be _pence_). "oh, if you please, mr. postman!" i said, going down gracefully on one knee (i wish you could see me go down on one knee to a postman--it's a very pretty sight), "do excuse me just this once! it's only from a little girl!" "only from a little girl!" he growled. "what are little girls made of?" "sugar and spice," i began to say, "and all that's ni--" but he interrupted me. "no! i don't mean _that_. i mean, what's the good of little girls, when they send such heavy letters?" "well, they're not _much_ good, certainly," i said, rather sadly. "mind you don't get any more such letters," he said, "at least, not from that particular little girl. _i know her well, and she's a regular bad one!"_ that's not true, is it? i don't believe he ever saw you, and you're not a bad one, are you? however, i promised him we would send each other _very_ few more letters--"only two thousand four hundred and seventy, or so," i said. "oh!" he said, "a little number like _that_ doesn't signify. what i meant is, you mustn't send _many_." so you see we must keep count now, and when we get to two thousand four hundred and seventy, we mustn't write any more, unless the postman gives us leave. i sometimes wish i was back on the shore at sandown; don't you? your loving friend, lewis carroll. why is a pig that has lost its tail like a little girl on the sea-shore? because it says, "i should like another tale, please!" christ church, oxford, _july_ , . my dear gertrude,--explain to me how i am to enjoy sandown without _you_. how can i walk on the beach alone? how can i sit all alone on those wooden steps? so you see, as i shan't be able to do without you, you will have to come. if violet comes, i shall tell her to invite you to stay with her, and then i shall come over in the heather-bell and fetch you. if i ever _do_ come over, i see i couldn't go back the same day, so you will have to engage me a bed somewhere in swanage; and if you can't find one, i shall expect _you_ to spend the night on the beach, and give up your room to _me_. guests of course must be thought of before children; and i'm sure in these warm nights the beach will be quite good enough for _you_. if you _did_ feel a little chilly, of course you could go into a bathing-machine, which everybody knows is _very_ comfortable to sleep in--you know they make the floor of soft wood on purpose. i send you seven kisses (to last a week) and remain your loving friend, lewis carroll. christ church, oxford, _october_ , . my dearest gertrude,--you will be sorry, and surprised, and puzzled, to hear what a queer illness i have had ever since you went. i sent for the doctor, and said, "give me some medicine, for i'm tired." he said, "nonsense and stuff! you don't want medicine: go to bed!" i said, "no; it isn't the sort of tiredness that wants bed. i'm tired in the _face_." he looked a little grave, and said, "oh, it's your _nose_ that's tired: a person often talks too much when he thinks he nose a great deal." i said, "no; it isn't the nose. perhaps it's the _hair_." then he looked rather grave, and said, "_now_ i understand: you've been playing too many hairs on the piano-forte." "no, indeed i haven't!" i said, "and it isn't exactly the _hair_: it's more about the nose and chin." then he looked a good deal graver, and said, "have you been walking much on your chin lately?" i said, "no." "well!" he said, "it puzzles me very much. do you think that it's in the lips?" "of course!" i said. "that's exactly what it is!" then he looked very grave indeed, and said, "i think you must have been giving too many kisses." "well," i said, "i did give _one_ kiss to a baby child, a little friend of mine." "think again," he said; "are you sure it was only _one_?" i thought again, and said, "perhaps it was eleven times." then the doctor said, "you must not give her _any_ more till your lips are quite rested again." "but what am i to do?" i said, "because you see, i owe her a hundred and eighty-two more." then he looked so grave that the tears ran down his cheeks, and he said, "you may send them to her in a box." then i remembered a little box that i once bought at dover, and thought i would some day give it to _some_ little girl or other. so i have packed them all in it very carefully. tell me if they come safe, or if any are lost on the way. reading station, _april_ , . my dear gertrude,--as i have to wait here for half an hour, i have been studying bradshaw (most things, you know, ought to be studied: even a trunk is studded with nails), and the result is that it seems i could come, any day next week, to winckfield, so as to arrive there about one; and that, by leaving winckfield again about half-past six, i could reach guildford again for dinner. the next question is, _how far is it from winckfield to rotherwick?_ now do not deceive me, you wretched child! if it is more than a hundred miles, i can't come to see you, and there is no use to talk about it. if it is less, the next question is, _how much less?_ these are serious questions, and you must be as serious as a judge in answering them. there mustn't be a smile in your pen, or a wink in your ink (perhaps you'll say, "there can't be a _wink_ in _ink_: but there _may_ be _ink_ in a _wink_"--but this is trifling; you mustn't make jokes like that when i tell you to be serious) while you write to guildford and answer these two questions. you might as well tell me at the same time whether you are still living at rotherwick--and whether you are at home--and whether you get my letter--and whether you're still a child, or a grown-up person--and whether you're going to the seaside next summer--and anything else (except the alphabet and the multiplication table) that you happen to know. i send you , , kisses, and remain. your loving friend, c. l. dodgson. the chestnuts, guildford, _april_ , . my dear gertrude,--i'm afraid it's "no go"--i've had such a bad cold all the week that i've hardly been out for some days, and i don't think it would be wise to try the expedition this time, and i leave here on tuesday. but after all, what does it signify? perhaps there are ten or twenty gentlemen, all living within a few miles of rotherwick, and any one of them would do just as well! when a little girl is hoping to take a plum off a dish, and finds that she can't have that one, because it's bad or unripe, what does she do? is she sorry, or disappointed? not a bit! she just takes another instead, and grins from one little ear to the other as she puts it to her lips! this is a little fable to do you good; the little girl means _you_--the bad plum means _me_--the other plum means some other friend--and all that about the little girl putting plums to her lips means--well, it means--but you know you can't expect _every bit_ of a fable to mean something! and the little girl grinning means that dear little smile of yours, that just reaches from the tip of one ear to the tip of the other! your loving friend, c.l. dodgson. i send you - / kisses. the next letter is a good example of the dainty little notes lewis carroll used to scribble off on any scrap of paper that lay to his hand:-- chestnuts, guildford, _january_ , . yes, my child, if all be well, i shall hope, and you may fear, that the train reaching hook at two eleven, will contain your loving friend, c.l. dodgson. only a few years ago, illness prevented him from fulfilling his usual custom of spending christmas with his sisters at guildford. this is the allusion in the following letter:-- my dear old friend,--(the friendship is old, though the child is young.) i wish a very happy new year, and many of them, to you and yours; but specially to you, because i know you best and love you most. and i pray god to bless you, dear child, in this bright new year, and many a year to come. ... i write all this from my sofa, where i have been confined a prisoner for six weeks, and as i dreaded the railway journey, my doctor and i agreed that i had better not go to spend christmas with my sisters at guildford. so i had my christmas dinner all alone, in my room here, and (pity me, gertrude!) it wasn't a christmas dinner at all--i suppose the cook thought i should not care for roast beef or plum pudding, so he sent me (he has general orders to send either fish and meat, or meat and pudding) some fried sole and some roast mutton! never, never have i dined before, on christmas day, without _plum pudding_. wasn't it sad? now i think you must be content; this is a longer letter than most will get. love to olive. my clearest memory of her is of a little girl calling out "good-night" from her room, and of your mother taking me in to see her in her bed, and wish her good-night. i have a yet clearer memory (like a dream of fifty years ago) of a little bare-legged girl in a sailor's jersey, who used to run up into my lodgings by the sea. but why should i trouble you with foolish reminiscences of _mine_ that _cannot_ interest you? yours always lovingly, c. l. dodgson. it was a writer in _the national review_ who, after eulogising the talents of lewis carroll, and stating that _he_ would never be forgotten, added the harsh prophecy that "future generations will not waste a single thought upon the rev. c.l. dodgson." if this prediction is destined to be fulfilled, i think my readers will agree with me that it will be solely on account of his extraordinary diffidence about asserting himself. but such an unnatural division of lewis carroll, the author, from the rev. c.l. dodgson, the man, is forced in the extreme. his books are simply the expression of his normal habit of mind, as these letters show. in literature, as in everything else, he was absolutely natural. to refer to such criticisms as this (i am thankful to say they have been very few) is not agreeable; but i feel that it is owing to mr. dodgson to do what i can to vindicate the real unity which underlay both his life and all his writings. of many anecdotes which might be adduced to show the lovable character of the man, the following little story has reached me through one of his child-friends:-- my sister and i [she writes] were spending a day of delightful sightseeing in town with him, on our way to his home at guildford, where we were going to pass a day or two with him. we were both children, and were much interested when he took us into an american shop where the cakes for sale were cooked by a very rapid process before your eyes, and handed to you straight from the cook's hands. as the preparation of them could easily be seen from outside the window, a small crowd of little ragamuffins naturally assembled there, and i well remember his piling up seven of the cakes on one arm, and himself taking them out and doling them round to the seven hungry little youngsters. the simple kindness of his act impressed its charm on his child-friends inside the shop as much as on his little stranger friends outside. it was only to those who had but few personal dealings with him that he seemed stiff and "donnish"; to his more intimate acquaintances, who really understood him, each little eccentricity of manner or of habits was a delightful addition to his charming and interesting personality. that he was, in some respects, eccentric cannot be denied; for instance he hardly ever wore an overcoat, and always wore a tall hat, whatever might be the climatic conditions. at dinner in his rooms small pieces of cardboard took the place of table-mats; they answered the purpose perfectly well, he said, and to buy anything else would be a mere waste of money. on the other hand, when purchasing books for himself, or giving treats to the children he loved, he never seemed to consider expense at all. he very seldom sat down to write, preferring to stand while thus engaged. when making tea for his friends, he used, in order, i suppose, to expedite the process, to walk up and down the room waving the teapot about, and telling meanwhile those delightful anecdotes of which he had an inexhaustible supply. great were his preparations before going a journey; each separate article used to be carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper all to itself, so that his trunks contained nearly as much paper as of the more useful things. the bulk of the luggage was sent on a day or two before by goods train, while he himself followed on the appointed day, laden only with his well-known little black bag, which he always insisted on carrying himself. he had a strong objection to staring colours in dress, his favourite combination being pink and grey. one little girl who came to stay with him was absolutely forbidden to wear a red frock, of a somewhat pronounced hue, while out in his company. at meals he was very abstemious always, while he took nothing in the middle of the day except a glass of wine and a biscuit. under these circumstances it is not very surprising that the healthy appetites of his little friends filled him with wonder, and even with alarm. when he took a certain one of them out with him to a friend's house to dinner, he used to give the host or hostess a gentle warning, to the mixed amazement and indignation of the child, "please be careful, because she eats a good deal too much." another peculiarity, which i have already referred to, was his objection to being invited to dinners or any other social gatherings; he made a rule of never accepting invitations. "because you have invited me, therefore i cannot come," was the usual form of his refusal. i suppose the reason of this was his hatred of the interference with work which engagements of this sort occasion. he had an extreme horror of infection, as will appear from the following illustration. miss isa bowman and her sister, nellie, were at one time staying with him at eastbourne, when news came from home that their youngest sister had caught the scarlet fever. from that day every letter which came from mrs. bowman to the children was held up by mr. dodgson, while the two little girls, standing at the opposite end of the room, had to read it as best they could. mr. dodgson, who was the soul of honour, used always to turn his head to one side during these readings, lest he might inadvertently see some words that were not meant for his eyes. some extracts from letters of his to a child-friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, follow: _november_ , . i have been awfully busy, and i've had to write _heaps_ of letters--wheelbarrows full, almost. and it tires me so that generally i go to bed again the next minute after i get up: and sometimes i go to bed again a minute _before_ i get up! did you ever hear of any one being so tired as _that?_... _november_ , . my dear e--, how often you must find yourself in want of a pin! for instance, you go into a shop, and you say to the man, "i want the largest penny bun you can let me have for a halfpenny." and perhaps the man looks stupid, and doesn't quite understand what you mean. then how convenient it is to have a pin ready to stick into the back of his hand, while you say, "now then! look sharp, stupid!"... and even when you don't happen to want a pin, how often you think to yourself, "they say interlacken is a very pretty place. i wonder what it looks like!" (that is the place that is painted on this pincushion.) when you don't happen to want either a pin or pictures, it may just remind you of a friend who sometimes thinks of his dear little friend e--, and who is just now thinking of the day he met her on the parade, the first time she had been allowed to come out alone to look for him.... _december_ , . my dear e--, though rushing, rapid rivers roar between us (if you refer to the map of england, i think you'll find that to be correct), we still remember each other, and feel a sort of shivery affection for each other.... _march_ , . i _do_ sympathise so heartily with you in what you say about feeling shy with children when you have to entertain them! sometimes they are a real _terror_ to me--especially boys: little girls i can now and then get on with, when they're few enough. they easily become "de trop." but with little _boys_ i'm out of my element altogether. i sent "sylvie and bruno" to an oxford friend, and, in writing his thanks, he added, "i think i must bring my little boy to see you." so i wrote to say "_don't_," or words to that effect: and he wrote again that he could hardly believe his eyes when he got my note. he thought i doted on _all_ children. but i'm _not_ omnivorous!--like a pig. i pick and choose.... you are a lucky girl, and i am rather inclined to envy you, in having the leisure to read dante--_i_ have never read a page of him; yet i am sure the "divina commedia" is one of the grandest books in the world--though i am _not_ sure whether the reading of it would _raise_ one's life and give it a nobler purpose, or simply be a grand poetical treat. that is a question you are beginning to be able to answer: i doubt if _i_ shall ever (at least in this life) have the opportunity of reading it; my life seems to be all torn into little bits among the host of things i want to do! it seems hard to settle what to do _first. one_ piece of work, at any rate, i am clear ought to be done this year, and it will take months of hard work: i mean the second volume of "sylvie and bruno." i fully _mean_, if i have life and health till xmas next, to bring it out then. when one is close on sixty years old, it seems presumptuous to count on years and years of work yet to be done.... she is rather the exception among the hundred or so of child-friends who have brightened my life. usually the child becomes so entirely a different being as she grows into a woman, that our friendship has to change too: and _that_ it usually does by gliding down from a loving intimacy into an acquaintance that merely consists of a smile and a bow when we meet!... _january_ , . ... you are quite correct in saying it is a long time since you have heard from me: in fact, i find that i have not written to you since the th of last november. but what of that? you have access to the daily papers. surely you can find out negatively, that i am all right! go carefully through the list of bankruptcies; then run your eye down the police cases; and, if you fail to find my name anywhere, you can say to your mother in a tone of calm satisfaction, "mr. dodgson is going on _well_." * * * * * chapter xi (the same--_continued_.) books for children--"the lost plum-cake"--"an unexpected guest"--miss isa bowman--interviews--"matilda jane"--miss edith rix--miss kathleen eschwege. lewis carroll's own position as an author did not prevent him from taking a great interest in children's books and their writers. he had very strong ideas on what was or was not suitable in such books, but, when once his somewhat exacting taste was satisfied, he was never tired of recommending a story to his friends. his cousin, mrs. egerton allen, who has herself written several charming tales for young readers, has sent me the following letter which she received from him some years ago:-- dear georgie,--_many_ thanks. the book was at ch. ch. i've done an unusual thing, in thanking for a book, namely, _waited to read it_. i've read it _right through_! in fact, i found it very refreshing, when jaded with my own work at "sylvie and bruno" (coming out at xmas, i hope) to lie down on the sofa and read a chapter of "evie." i like it very much: and am so glad to have helped to bring it out. it would have been a real loss to the children of england, if you had burned the ms., as you once thought of doing.... [illustration: xie kitchin as a chinaman. _from a photograph by lewis carroll_.] the very last words of his that appeared in print took the form of a preface to one of mrs. allen's tales, "the lost plum-cake," (macmillan & co., ). so far as i know, this was the only occasion on which he wrote a preface for another author's book, and his remarks are doubly interesting as being his last service to the children whom he loved. no apology, then, is needed for quoting from them here:-- let me seize this opportunity of saying one earnest word to the mothers in whose hands this little book may chance to come, who are in the habit of taking their children to church with them. however well and reverently those dear little ones have been taught to behave, there is no doubt that so long a period of enforced quietude is a severe tax on their patience. the hymns, perhaps, tax it least: and what a pathetic beauty there is in the sweet fresh voices of the children, and how earnestly they sing! i took a little girl of six to church with me one day: they had told me she could hardly read at all--but she made me find all the places for her! and afterwards i said to her elder sister "what made you say barbara couldn't read? why, i heard her joining in, all through the hymn!" and the little sister gravely replied, "she knows the _tunes_, but not the _words_." well, to return to my subject--children in church. the lessons, and the prayers, are not wholly beyond them: often they can catch little bits that come within the range of their small minds. but the sermons! it goes to one's heart to see, as i so often do, little darlings of five or six years old, forced to sit still through a weary half-hour, with nothing to do, and not one word of the sermon that they can understand. most heartily can i sympathise with the little charity-girl who is said to have written to some friend, "i think, when i grows up, i'll never go to church no more. i think i'se getting sermons enough to last me all my life!" but need it be so? would it be so _very_ irreverent to let your child have a story-book to read during the sermon, to while away that tedious half-hour, and to make church-going a bright and happy memory, instead of rousing the thought, "i'll never go to church no more"? i think not. for my part, i should love to see the experiment tried. i am quite sure it would be a success. my advice would be to _keep_ some books for that special purpose. i would call such books "sunday-treats"--and your little boy or girl would soon learn to look forward with eager hope to that half-hour, once so tedious. if i were the preacher, dealing with some subject too hard for the little ones, i should love to see them all enjoying their picture-books. and if _this_ little book should ever come to be used as a "sunday-treat" for some sweet baby reader, i don't think it could serve a better purpose. lewis carroll. miss m.e. manners was another writer for children whose books pleased him. she gives an amusing account of two visits which he paid to her house in :-- _an unexpected guest._ "mr. dobson wants to see you, miss." i was in the kitchen looking after the dinner, and did not feel that i particularly wished to see anybody. "he wants a vote, or he is an agent for a special kind of tea," thought i. "i don't know him; ask him to send a message." presently the maid returned-- "he says he is mr. dodgson, of oxford." "lewis carroll!" i exclaimed; and somebody else had to superintend the cooking that day. my apologies were soon made and cheerfully accepted. i believe i was unconventional enough to tell the exact truth concerning my occupation, and matters were soon on a friendly footing. indeed i may say at once that the stately college don we have heard so much about never made his appearance during our intercourse with him. he did not talk "alice," of course; authors don't generally _talk_ their books, i imagine; but it was undoubtedly lewis carroll who was present with us. a portrait of ellen terry on the wall had attracted his attention, and one of the first questions he asked was, "do you ever go to the theatre?" i explained that such things were done, occasionally, even among quakers, but they were not considered quite orthodox. "oh, well, then you will not be shocked, and i may venture to produce my photographs." and out into the hall he went, and soon returned with a little black bag containing character portraits of his child-friends, isa and nellie bowman. "isa used to be alice until she grew too big," he said. "nellie was one of the oyster-fairies, and emsie, the tiny one of all, was the dormouse." "when 'alice' was first dramatised," he said, "the poem of the 'walrus and the carpenter' fell rather flat, for people did not know when it was finished, and did not clap in the right place; so i had to write a song for the ghosts of the oysters to sing, which made it all right." [illustration: alice and the dormouse. _from a photograph by elliott & fry_.] he was then on his way to london, to fetch isa to stay with him at eastbourne. she was evidently a great favourite, and had visited him before. of that earlier time he said:-- "when people ask me why i have never married, i tell them i have never met the young lady whom i could endure for a fortnight--but isa and i got on so well together that i said i should keep her a month, the length of the honeymoon, and we didn't get tired of each other." nellie afterwards joined her sister "for a few days," but the days spread to some weeks, for the poor little dormouse developed scarlet fever, and the elder children had to be kept out of harm's way until fear of infection was over. of emsie he had a funny little story to tell. he had taken her to the aquarium, and they had been watching the seals coming up dripping out of the water. with a very pitiful look she turned to him and said, "don't they give them any towels?" [the same little girl commiserated the bear, because it had got no tail.] asked to stay to dinner, he assured us that he never took anything in the middle of the day but a glass of wine and a biscuit; but he would be happy to sit down with us, which he accordingly did and kindly volunteered to carve for us. his offer was gladly accepted, but the appearance of a rather diminutive piece of neck of mutton was somewhat of a puzzle to him. he had evidently never seen such a joint in his life before, and had frankly to confess that he did not know how to set about carving it. directions only made things worse, and he bravely cut it to pieces in entirely the wrong fashion, relating meanwhile the story of a shy young man who had been asked to carve a fowl, the joints of which had been carefully wired together beforehand by his too attentive friends. the task and the story being both finished, our visitor gazed on the mangled remains, and remarked quaintly: "i think it is just as well i don't want anything, for i don't know where i should find it." at least one member of the party felt she could have managed matters better; but that was a point of very little consequence. a day or two after the first call came a note saying that he would be taking isa home before long, and if we would like to see her he would stop on the way again. of course we were only too delighted to have the opportunity, and, though the visit was postponed more than once, it did take place early in august, when he brought both isa and nellie up to town to see a performance of "sweet lavender." it is needless to remark that we took care, this time, to be provided with something at once substantial and carvable. the children were bright, healthy, happy and childlike little maidens, quite devoted to their good friend, whom they called "uncle"; and very interesting it was to see them together. but he did not allow any undue liberties either, as a little incident showed. he had been describing a particular kind of collapsible tumbler, which you put in your pocket and carried with you for use on a railway journey. "there now," he continued, turning to the children, "i forgot to bring it with me after all." "oh goosie," broke in isa; "you've been talking about that tumbler for days, and now you have forgotten it." he pulled himself up, and looked at her steadily with an air of grave reproof. much abashed, she hastily substituted a very subdued "uncle" for the objectionable "goosie," and the matter dropped. the principal anecdote on this occasion was about a dog which had been sent into the sea after sticks. he brought them back very properly for some time, and then there appeared to be a little difficulty, and he returned swimming in a very curious manner. on closer inspection it appeared that he had caught hold of his own tail by mistake, and was bringing it to land in triumph. this was told with the utmost gravity, and though we had been requested beforehand not to mention "lewis carroll's" books, the temptation was too strong. i could not help saying to the child next me-- "that was like the whiting, wasn't it?" our visitor, however, took up the remark, and seemed quite willing to talk about it. "when i wrote that," he said, "i believed that whiting really did have their tails in their mouths, but i have since been told that fishmongers put the tail through the eye, not in the mouth at all." he was not a very good carver, for miss bremer also describes a little difficulty he had--this time with the pastry: "an amusing incident occurred when he was at lunch with us. he was requested to serve some pastry, and, using a knife, as it was evidently rather hard, the knife penetrated the d'oyley beneath--and his consternation was extreme when he saw the slice of linen and lace he served as an addition to the tart!" it was, i think, through her connection with the "alice" play that mr. dodgson first came to know miss isa bowman. her childish friendship for him was one of the joys of his later years, and one of the last letters he wrote was addressed to her. the poem at the beginning of "sylvie and bruno" is an acrostic on her name-- is all our life, then, but a dream, seen faintly in the golden gleam athwart times's dark, resistless stream? bowed to the earth with bitter woe, or laughing at some raree-show, we flutter idly to and fro. man's little day in haste we spend, and, from the merry noontide, send no glance to meet the silent end. every one has heard of lewis carroll's hatred of interviewers; the following letter to miss manners makes one feel that in some cases, at least, his feeling was justifiable:-- if your manchester relatives ever go to the play, tell them they ought to see isa as "cinderella"--she is evidently a success. and she has actually been "interviewed" by one of those dreadful newspapers reporters, and the "interview" is published with her picture! and such rubbish he makes her talk! she tells him that something or other was "tacitly conceded": and that "i love to see a great actress give expression to the wonderful ideas of the immortal master!" (n.b.--i never let her talk like that when she is with _me_!) emsie recovered in time to go to america, with her mother and isa and nellie: and they all enjoyed the trip much; and emsie has a london engagement. only once was an interviewer bold enough to enter lewis carroll's _sanctum_. the story has been told in _the guardian_ (january , ), but will bear repetition:-- not long ago mr. dodgson happened to get into correspondence with a man whom he had never seen, on some question of religious difficulty, and he invited him to come to his rooms and have a talk on the subject. when, therefore, a mr. x-- was announced to him one morning, he advanced to meet him with outstretched hand and smiles of welcome. "come in mr. x--, i have been expecting you." the delighted visitor thought this a promising beginning, and immediately pulled out a note-book and pencil, and proceeded to ask "the usual questions." great was mr. dodgson's disgust! instead of his expected friend, here was another man of the same name, and one of the much-dreaded interviewers, actually sitting in his chair! the mistake was soon explained, and the representative of the press was bowed out as quickly as he had come in. it was while isa and one of her sisters were staying at eastbourne that the visit to america was mooted. mr. dodgson suggested that it would be well for them to grow gradually accustomed to seafaring, and therefore proposed to take them by steamer to hastings. this plan was carried out, and the weather was unspeakably bad--far worse than anything they experienced in their subsequent trip across the atlantic. the two children, who were neither of them very good sailors, experienced sensations that were the reverse of pleasant. mr. dodgson did his best to console them, while he continually repeated, "crossing the atlantic will be much worse than this." however, even this terrible lesson on the horrors of the sea did not act as a deterrent; it was as unsuccessful as the effort of the old lady in one of his stories: "an old lady i once knew tried to check the military ardour of a little boy by showing him a picture of a battlefield, and describing some of its horrors. but the only answer she got was, 'i'll be a soldier. tell it again!'" the bowman children sometimes came over to visit him at oxford, and he used to delight in showing them over the colleges, and pointing out the famous people whom they encountered. on one of these occasions he was walking with maggie, then a mere child, when they met the bishop of oxford, to whom mr. dodgson introduced his little guest. his lordship asked her what she thought of oxford. "i think," said the little actress, with quite a professional _aplomb,_ "it's the best place in the provinces!" at which the bishop was much amused. after the child had returned to town, the bishop sent her a copy of a little book called "golden dust," inscribed "from w. oxon," which considerably mystified her, as she knew nobody of that name! another little stage-friend of lewis carroll's was miss vera beringer, the "little lord fauntleroy," whose acting delighted all theatre-goers eight or nine years ago. once, when she was spending a holiday in the isle of man, he sent her the following lines:-- there was a young lady of station, "i love man" was her sole exclamation; but when men cried, "you flatter," she replied, "oh! no matter, isle of man is the true explanation." many of his friendships with children began in a railway carriage, for he always took about with him a stock of puzzles when he travelled, to amuse any little companions whom chance might send him. once he was in a carriage with a lady and her little daughter, both complete strangers to him. the child was reading "alice in wonderland," and when she put her book down, he began talking to her about it. the mother soon joined in the conversation, of course without the least idea who the stranger was with whom she was talking. "isn't it sad," she said, "about poor mr. lewis carroll? he's gone mad, you know." "indeed," replied mr. dodgson, "i had never heard that." "oh, i assure you it is quite true," the lady answered. "i have it on the best authority." before mr. dodgson parted with her, he obtained her leave to send a present to the little girl, and a few days afterwards she received a copy of "through the looking-glass," inscribed with her name, and "from the author, in memory of a pleasant journey." when he gave books to children, he very often wrote acrostics on their names on the fly-leaf. one of the prettiest was inscribed in a copy of miss yonge's "little lucy's wonderful globe," which he gave to miss ruth dymes:-- r ound the wondrous globe i wander wild, u p and down-hill--age succeeds to youth-- t oiling all in vain to find a child h alf so loving, half so dear as ruth. in another book, given to her sister margaret, he wrote:-- m aidens, if a maid you meet a lways free from pout and pet, r eady smile and temper sweet, g reet my little margaret. a nd if loved by all she be r ightly, not a pampered pet, e asily you then may see 'tis my little margaret. here are two letters to children, the one interesting as a specimen of pure nonsense of the sort which children always like, the other as showing his dislike of being praised. the first was written to miss gertrude atkinson, daughter of an old college friend, but otherwise unknown to lewis carroll except by her photograph:-- my dear gertrude,--so many things have happened since we met last, really i don't know _which_ to begin talking about! for instance, england has been conquered by william the conqueror. we haven't met since _that_ happened, you know. how did you like it? were you frightened? and one more thing has happened: i have got your photograph. thank you very much for it. i like it "awfully." do they let you say "awfully"? or do they say, "no, my dear; little girls mustn't say 'awfully'; they should say 'very much indeed'"? i wonder if you will ever get as far as jersey? if not, how _are_ we to meet? your affectionate friend, c.l. dodgson. from the second letter, to miss florence jackson, i take the following extract:-- i have two reasons for sending you this fable; one is, that in a letter you wrote me you said something about my being "clever"; and the other is that, when you wrote again you said it again! and _each_ time i thought, "really, i _must_ write and ask her _not_ to say such things; it is not wholesome reading for me." the fable is this. the cold, frosty, bracing air is the treatment one gets from the world generally--such as contempt, or blame, or neglect; all those are very wholesome. and the hot dry air, that you breathe when you rush to the fire, is the praise that one gets from one's young, happy, rosy, i may even say _florid_ friends! and that's very bad for me, and gives pride--fever, and conceit--cough, and such-like diseases. now i'm sure you don't want me to be laid up with all these diseases; so please don't praise me _any_ more! the verses to "matilda jane" certainly deserve a place in this chapter. to make their meaning clear, i must state that lewis carroll wrote them for a little cousin of his, and that matilda jane was the somewhat prosaic name of her doll. the poem expresses finely the blind, unreasoning devotion which the infant mind professes for inanimate objects:-- matilda jane, you never look at any toy or picture-book; i show you pretty things in vain, you must be blind, matilda jane! i ask you riddles, tell you tales, but all our conversation fails; you never answer me again, i fear you're dumb, matilda jane! matilda, darling, when i call you never seem to hear at all; i shout with all my might and main, but you're _so_ deaf, matilda jane! matilda jane, you needn't mind, for though you're deaf, and dumb, and blind, there's some one loves you, it is plain, and that is _me_, matilda jane! in an earlier chapter i gave some of mr. dodgson's letters to miss edith rix; the two which follow, being largely about children, seem more appropriate here:-- my dear edith,--would you tell your mother i was aghast at seeing the address of her letter to me: and i would much prefer "rev. c.l. dodgson, ch. ch., oxford." when a letter comes addressed "lewis carroll, ch. ch.," it either goes to the dead letter office, or it impresses on the minds of all letter-carriers, &c., through whose hands it goes, the very fact i least want them to know. please offer to your sister all the necessary apologies for the liberty i have taken with her name. my only excuse is, that i know no other; and how _am_ i to guess what the full name is? it _may_ be carlotta, or zealot, or ballot, or lotus-blossom (a very pretty name), or even charlotte. never have i sent anything to a young lady of whom i have a more shadowy idea. name, an enigma; age, somewhere between and (you've no idea how bewildering it is, alternately picturing her as a little toddling thing of , and a tall girl of !); disposition--well, i _have_ a fragment of information on _that_ question--your mother says, as to my coming, "it must be when lottie is at home, or she would never forgive us." still, i _cannot_ consider the mere fact that she is of an unforgiving disposition as a complete view of her character. i feel sure she has some other qualities besides. believe me, yrs affectionately, c.l. dodgson. my dear child,--it seems quite within the bounds of possibility, if we go on long in this style, that our correspondence may at last assume a really friendly tone. i don't of course say it will actually do so--that would be too bold a prophecy, but only that it may tend to shape itself in that direction. your remark, that slippers for elephants _could_ be made, only they would not be slippers, but boots, convinces me that there is a branch of your family in _ireland_. who are (oh dear, oh dear, i am going distracted! there's a lady in the opposite house who simply sings _all_ day. all her songs are wails, and their tunes, such as they have, are much the same. she has one strong note in her voice, and she knows it! i _think_ it's "a natural," but i haven't much ear. and when she gets to that note, she howls!) they? the o'rixes, i suppose? about your uninteresting neighbours, i sympathise with you much; but oh, i wish i had you here, that i might teach you _not_ to say "it is difficult to visit one's district regularly, like every one else does!" and now i come to the most interesting part of your letter-- may you treat me as a perfect friend, and write anything you like to me, and ask my advice? why, _of course_ you may, my child! what else am i good for? but oh, my dear child-friend, you cannot guess how such words sound to _me_! that any one should look up to _me_, or think of asking _my_ advice--well, it makes one feel humble, i think, rather than proud--humble to remember, while others think so well of me, what i really _am_, in myself. "thou, that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?" well, i won't talk about myself, it is not a healthy topic. perhaps it may be true of _any_ two people, that, if one could see the other through and through, love would perish. i don't know. anyhow, i like to _have_ the love of my child-friends, tho' i know i don't deserve it. please write as freely as _ever_ you like. i went up to town and fetched phoebe down here on friday in last week; and we spent _most_ of saturday upon the beach--phoebe wading and digging, and "as happy as a bird upon the wing" (to quote the song she sang when first i saw her). tuesday evening brought a telegram to say she was wanted at the theatre next morning. so, instead of going to bed, phoebe packed her things, and we left by the last train, reaching her home by a quarter to a.m. however, even four days of sea-air, and a new kind of happiness, did her good, i think. i am rather lonely now she is gone. she is a very sweet child, and a thoughtful child, too. it was very touching to see (we had a little bible-reading every day: i tried to remember that my little friend had a soul to be cared for, as well as a body) the far-away look in her eyes, when we talked of god and of heaven--as if her angel, who beholds his face continually, were whispering to her. of course, there isn't _much_ companionship possible, after all, between an old man's mind and a little child's, but what there is is sweet--and wholesome, i think. three letters of his to a child-friend, miss kathleen eschwege, now mrs. round, illustrate one of those friendships which endure: the sort of friendship that he always longed for, and so often failed to secure:-- [illustrations and: facsimile of a "looking-glass letter" from lewis carroll to miss edith ball.] ch. ch., oxford, _october_ , . my dear kathleen,--i was really pleased to get your letter, as i had quite supposed i should never see or hear of you again. you see i knew only your christian name--not the ghost of a surname, or the shadow of an address--and i was not prepared to spend my little all in advertisements--"if the young lady, who was travelling on the g.w. railway, &c." --or to devote the remainder of my life to going about repeating "kathleen," like that young woman who came from some foreign land to look for her lover, but only knew that he was called "edward" (or "richard" was it? i dare say you know history better than i do) and that he lived in england; so that naturally it took her some time to find him. all i knew was that _you_ could, if you chose, write to me through macmillan: but it is three months since we met, so i was _not_ expecting it, and it was a pleasant surprise. well, so i hope i may now count you as one of my child-friends. i am fond of children (except boys), and have more child-friends than i could possibly count on my fingers, even if i were a centipede (by the way, _have_ they fingers? i'm afraid they're only feet, but, of course, they use them for the same purpose, and that is why no other insects, _except centipedes_, ever succeed in doing _long multiplication_), and i have several not so very far from you--one at beckenham, two at balham, two at herne hill, one at peckham--so there is every chance of my being somewhere near you _before the year_ . if so, may i call? i am _very_ sorry your neck is no better, and i wish they would take you to margate: margate air will make _any_ body well of _any_ thing. it seems you have already got my two books about "alice." have you also got "the hunting of the snark"? if not, i should be very glad to send you one. the pictures (by mr. holiday) are pretty: and you needn't read the verses unless you like. how do you pronounce your surname? "esk-weej"? or how? is it a german name? if you can do "doublets," with how many links do you turn kath into leen? with kind remembrances to your mother, i am your affectionate friend, charles l. dodgson (_alias_ "lewis carroll"). ch. ch., oxford, _january_ , . my dear kathleen,--some months ago i heard, from my cousin, may wilcox, that you were engaged to be married. and, ever since, i have cherished the intention of writing to offer my congratulations. some might say, "why not write _at once?"_ to such unreasoning creatures, the obvious reply is, "when you have bottled some peculiarly fine port, do you usually begin to drink it _at once?"_ is not that a beautiful simile? of course, i need not remark that my congratulations are like fine old port--only finer, and _older!_ accept, my dear old friend, my _heartiest_ wishes for happiness, of all sorts and sizes, for yourself, and for him whom you have chosen as your other self. and may you love one another with a love second only to your love for god--a love that will last through bright days and dark days, in sickness and in health, through life and through death. a few years ago i went, in the course of about three months, to the weddings of three of my old child-friends. but weddings are not very exhilarating scenes for a miserable old bachelor; and i think you'll have to excuse me from attending _yours_. however, i have so far concerned myself in it that i actually _dreamed_ about it a few nights ago! i dreamed that you had had a photograph done of the wedding-party, and had sent me a copy of it. at one side stood a group of ladies, among whom i made out the faces of dolly and ninty; and in the foreground, seated in a boat, were two people, a gentleman and a lady i _think_ (could they have been the bridegroom and the bride?) engaged in the natural and usual occupation for a riverside picnic--pulling a christmas cracker! i have no idea what put such an idea into my head. _i_ never saw crackers used in such a scene! i hope your mother goes on well. with kindest regards to her and your father, and love to your sisters--and to yourself too, if he doesn't object!--i am, yours affectionately, c.l. dodgson. p.s.--i never give wedding-presents; so please regard the enclosed as an _unwedding_ present. ch. ch., oxford, _december_ , . my dear kathleen,--many thanks for the photo of yourself and your _fiancé_, which duly reached me january , . also for a wedding-card, which reached me august , . neither of these favours, i fear, was ever acknowledged. our only communication since, has been, that on december , , i sent you a biscuit-box adorned with "looking-glass" pictures. this _you_ never acknowledged; so i was properly served for my negligence. i hope your little daughter, of whose arrival mrs. eschwege told me in december, , has been behaving well? how quickly the years slip by! it seems only yesterday that i met, on the railway, a little girl who was taking a sketch of oxford! your affectionate old friend, c.l. dodgson. the following verses were inscribed in a copy of "alice's adventures," presented to the three miss drurys in august, :-- _to three puzzled little girls, from the author._ three little maidens weary of the rail, three pairs of little ears listening to a tale, three little hands held out in readiness, for three little puzzles very hard to guess. three pairs of little eyes, open wonder-wide, at three little scissors lying side by side. three little mouths that thanked an unknown friend, for one little book, he undertook to send. though whether they'll remember a friend, or book, or day-- in three little weeks is very hard to say. he took the same three children to german reed's entertainment, where the triple bill consisted of "happy arcadia," "all abroad," and "very catching." a few days afterwards he sent them "phantasmagoria," with a little poem on the fly-leaf to remind them of their treat:-- three little maids, one winter day, while others went to feed, to sing, to laugh, to dance, to play, more wisely went to--reed. others, when lesson-time's begun, go, half inclined to cry, some in a walk, some in a run; but _these_ went in a--fly. i give to other little maids a smile, a kiss, a look, presents whose memory quickly fades, i give to these--a book. _happy arcadia _may blind, while _all abroad,_ their eyes; at home, this book (i trust) they'll find a _very catching_ prize. the next three letters were addressed to two of mr. arthur hughes' children. they are good examples of the wild and delightful nonsense with which lewis carroll used to amuse his little friends:-- my dear agnes,--you lazy thing! what? i'm to divide the kisses myself, am i? indeed i won't take the trouble to do anything of the sort! but i'll tell _you_ how to do it. first, you must take _four_ of the kisses, and--and that reminds me of a very curious thing that happened to me at half-past four yesterday. three visitors came knocking at my door, begging me to let them in. and when i opened the door, who do you think they were? you'll never guess. why, they were three cats! wasn't it curious? however, they all looked so cross and disagreeable that i took up the first thing i could lay my hand on (which happened to be the rolling-pin) and knocked them all down as flat as pan-cakes! "if _you_ come knocking at _my_ door," i said, "_i_ shall come knocking at _your_ heads." "that was fair, wasn't it?" yours affectionately, lewis carroll. my dear agnes,--about the cats, you know. of course i didn't leave them lying flat on the ground like dried flowers: no, i picked them up, and i was as kind as i could be to them. i lent them the portfolio for a bed--they wouldn't have been comfortable in a real bed, you know: they were too thin--but they were _quite_ happy between the sheets of blotting-paper--and each of them had a pen-wiper for a pillow. well, then i went to bed: but first i lent them the three dinner-bells, to ring if they wanted anything in the night. you know i have _three_ dinner-bells--the first (which is the largest) is rung when dinner is _nearly_ ready; the second (which is rather larger) is rung when it is quite ready; and the third (which is as large as the other two put together) is rung all the time i am at dinner. well, i told them they might ring if they happened to want anything--and, as they rang _all_ the bells _all_ night, i suppose they did want something or other, only i was too sleepy to attend to them. in the morning i gave them some rat-tail jelly and buttered mice for breakfast, and they were as discontented as they could be. they wanted some boiled pelican, but of course i knew it wouldn't be good _for_ them. so all i said was "go to number two, finborough road, and ask for agnes hughes, and if it's _really_ good for you, she'll give you some." then i shook hands with them all, and wished them all goodbye, and drove them up the chimney. they seemed very sorry to go, and they took the bells and the portfolio with them. i didn't find this out till after they had gone, and then i was sorry too, and wished for them back again. what do i mean by "them"? never mind. how are arthur, and amy, and emily? do they still go up and down finborough road, and teach the cats to be kind to mice? i'm _very_ fond of all the cats in finborough road. give them my love. who do i mean by "them"? never mind. your affectionate friend, lewis carroll. [illustration: arthur hughes and his daughter agnes. _from a photograph by lewis carroll._] my dear amy,--how are you getting on, i wonder, with guessing those puzzles from "wonderland"? if you think you've found out any of the answers, you may send them to me; and if they're wrong, i won't tell you they're right! you asked me after those three cats. ah! the dear creatures! do you know, ever since that night they first came, they have _never left me?_ isn't it kind of them? tell agnes this. she will be interested to hear it. and they _are_ so kind and thoughtful! do you know, when i had gone out for a walk the other day, they got _all_ my books out of the bookcase, and opened them on the floor, to be ready for me to read. they opened them all at page , because they thought that would be a nice useful page to begin at. it was rather unfortunate, though: because they took my bottle of gum, and tried to gum pictures upon the ceiling (which they thought would please me), and by accident they spilt a quantity of it all over the books. so when they were shut up and put by, the leaves all stuck together, and i can never read page again in any of them! however, they meant it very kindly, so i wasn't angry. i gave them each a spoonful of ink as a treat; but they were ungrateful for that, and made dreadful faces. but, of course, as it was given them as a treat, they had to drink it. one of them has turned black since: it was a white cat to begin with. give my love to any children you happen to meet. also i send two kisses and a half, for you to divide with agnes, emily, and godfrey. mind you divide them fairly. yours affectionately, c.l. dodgson. the intelligent reader will make a discovery about the first of the two following letters, which miss maggie cunningham, the "child-friend" to whom both were addressed, perhaps did not hit upon at once. mr. dodgson wrote these two letters in :-- dear maggie,--i found that _the friend, _that the little girl asked me to write to, lived at ripon, and not at land's end--a nice sort of place to invite to! it looked rather suspicious to me--and soon after, by dint of incessant inquiries, i found out that _she_ was called maggie, and lived in a crescent! of course i declared, "after that" (the language i used doesn't matter), "i will _not_ address her, that's flat! so do not expect me to flatter." well, i hope you will soon see your beloved pa come back--for consider, should you be quite content with only jack? just suppose they made a blunder! (such things happen now and then.) really, now, i shouldn't wonder if your "john" came home again, and your father stayed at school! a most awkward thing, no doubt. how would you receive him? you'll say, perhaps, "you'd turn him out." that would answer well, so far as concerns the boy, you know--but consider your papa, learning lessons in a row of great inky schoolboys! this (though unlikely) might occur: "haly" would be grieved to miss him (don't mention it to _her_). no _carte_ has yet been done of me, that does real justice to my _smile_; and so i hardly like, you see, to send you one. however, i'll consider if i will or not--meanwhile, i send a little thing to give you an idea of what i look like when i'm lecturing. the merest sketch, you will allow--yet still i think there's something grand in the expression of the brow and in the action of the hand. have you read my fairy tale in _aunt judy's magazine?_ if you have you will not fail to discover what i mean when i say "bruno yesterday came to remind me that _he_ was my god-son!"--on the ground that i "gave him a name"! your affectionate friend, c.l. dodgson. p.s.--i would send, if i were not too shy, the same message to "haly" that she (though i do not deserve it, not i!) has sent through her sister to me. my best love to yourself--to your mother my kindest regards--to your small, fat, impertinent, ignorant brother my hatred. i think that is all. [illustration: what i look like when i'm lecturing. _from a drawing, by lewis carroll._] my dear maggie,--i am a very bad correspondent, i fear, but i hope you won't leave off writing to me on that account. i got the little book safe, and will do my best about putting my name in, if i can only manage to remember what day my birthday is--but one forgets these things so easily. somebody told me (a little bird, i suppose) that you had been having better photographs done of yourselves. if so, i hope you will let me buy copies. fanny will pay you for them. but, oh maggie, how _can_ you ask for a better one of me than the one i sent! it is one of the best ever done! such grace, such dignity, such benevolence, such--as a great secret (please don't repeat it) the _queen_ sent to ask for a copy of it, but as it is against my rule to give in such a case, i was obliged to answer-- "mr. dodgson presents his compliments to her majesty, and regrets to say that his rule is never to give his photograph except to _young_ ladies." i am told she was annoyed about it, and said, "i'm not so old as all that comes to!" and one doesn't like to annoy queens; but really i couldn't help it, you know. i will conclude this chapter with some reminiscences of lewis carroll, which have been kindly sent me by an old child-friend of his, mrs. maitland, daughter of the late rev. e.a. litton, rector of naunton, and formerly fellow of oriel college and vice-principal of saint edmund's hall:-- to my mind oxford will be never quite the same again now that so many of the dear old friends of one's childhood have "gone over to the great majority." often, in the twilight, when the flickering firelight danced on the old wainscotted wall, have we--father and i--chatted over the old oxford days and friends, and the merry times we all had together in long wall street. i was a nervous, thin, remarkably ugly child then, and for some years i was left almost entirely to the care of mary pearson, my own particular attendant. i first remember mr. dodgson when i was about seven years old, and from that time until we went to live in gloucestershire he was one of my most delightful friends. i shall never forget how mr. dodgson and i sat once under a dear old tree in the botanical gardens, and how he told me, for the first time, hans andersen's story of the "ugly duckling." i cannot explain the charm of mr. dodgson's way of telling stories; as he spoke, the characters seemed to be real flesh and blood. this particular story made a great impression upon me, and interested me greatly, as i was very sensitive about my ugly little self. i remember his impressing upon me that it was better to be good and truthful and to try not to think of oneself than to be a pretty, selfish child, spoiled and disagreeable; and, after telling me this story, he gave me the name of "ducky." "never mind, little ducky," he used often to say, "perhaps some day you will turn out a swan." i always attribute my love for animals to the teaching of mr. dodgson: his stories about them, his knowledge of their lives and histories, his enthusiasm about birds and butterflies enlivened many a dull hour. the monkeys in the botanical gardens were our special pets, and when we fed them with nuts and biscuits he seemed to enjoy the fun as much as i did. every day my nurse and i used to take a walk in christ church meadows, and often we would sit down on the soft grass, with the dear old broad walk quite close, and, when we raised our eyes, merton college, with its walls covered with virginian creeper. and how delighted we used to be to see the well-known figure in cap and gown coming, so swiftly, with his kind smile ready to welcome the "ugly duckling." i knew, as he sat beside me, that a book of fairy tales was hidden in his pocket, or that he would have some new game or puzzle to show me--and he would gravely accept a tiny daisy-bouquet for his coat with as much courtesy as if it had been the finest hot-house _boutonnière_. two or three times i went fishing with him from the bank near the old mill, opposite addison's walk, and he quite entered into my happiness when a small fish came wriggling up at the end of my bent pin, just ready for the dinner of the little white kitten "lily," which he had given me. my hair was a great trouble to me, as a child, for it would tangle, and mary was not too patient with me, as i twisted about while she was trying to dress it. one day i received a long blue envelope addressed to myself, which contained a story-letter, full of drawings, from mr. dodgson. the first picture was of a little girl--with her hat off and her tumbled hair very much in evidence--asleep on a rustic bench under a big tree by the riverside, and two birds, holding what was evidently a very important conversation, above in the branches, their heads on one side, eyeing the sleeping child. then there was a picture of the birds flying up to the child with twigs and straw in their beaks, preparing to build their nest in her hair. next came the awakening, with the nest completed, and the mother-bird sitting on it; while the father-bird flew round the frightened child. and then, lastly, hundreds of birds--the air thick with them--the child fleeing, small boys with tin trumpets raised to their lips to add to the confusion, and mary, armed with a basket of brushes and combs, bringing up the rear! after this, whenever i was restive while my hair was being arranged, mary would show me the picture of the child with the nest on her head, and i at once became "as quiet as a lamb." i had a daily governess, a dear old soul, who used to come every morning to teach me. i disliked particularly the large-lettered copies which she used to set me; and as i confided this to mr. dodgson, he came and gave me some copies himself. the only ones which i can remember were "patience and water-gruel cure gout" (i always wondered what "gout" might be) and "little girls should be seen and not heard" (which i thought unkind). these were written many times over, and i had to present the pages to him, without one blot or smudge, at the end of the week. one of the fellows of magdalen college at that time was a mr. saul, a friend of my father's and of mr. dodgson, and a great lover of music--his rooms were full of musical instruments of every sort. mr. dodgson and father and i all went one afternoon to pay him a visit. at that time he was much interested in the big drum, and we found him when we arrived in full practice, with his music-book open before him. he made us all join in the concert. father undertook the 'cello, and mr. dodgson hunted up a comb and some paper, and, amidst much fun and laughter, the walls echoed with the finished roll, or shake, of the big drum--a roll that was mr. saul's delight. my father died on august , , and mr. dodgson on january , . and we, who are left behind in this cold, weary world can only hope we may some day meet them again. till then, oh! father, and my dear old childhood's friend, _requiescalis in pace!_ * * * * * bibliography "notes on the first two books of euclid." oxford: parker. vo. d "photographs." (?) (printed for private circulation; a list of negatives taken by the rev. c. l. dodgson.) pp. , to "a syllabus of plane algebraical geometry," systematically arranged, with formal definitions, postulates, and axioms. by charles lutwidge dodgson. part i. containing points, right lines, rectilinear figures, pencils and circles. oxford: parker. pp. xvi + , vo. cloth, paper label. s "rules for court circular." (a new game, invented by the rev. c.l. dodgson.) pp. . (reprinted in ). "the formulÃ� of plane trigonometry," printed with symbols (instead of words) to express the "goniometrical ratios." by charles lutwidge dodgson. oxford: parker. pp. , to. stitched, s. "notes on the first part of algebra." oxford: parker. vo. d "index to 'in memoriam.'" [suggested and edited by the rev. c.l. dodgson; much of the actual work of compilation was done by his sisters] london: moxon. "the enunciations of euclid, books i. and ii." oxford: printed at the university press. "general list of (mathematical) subjects, and cycle for working examples." oxford: printed at the university press. "croquÃ�t castles." (a new game invented by the rev. c.l. dodgson). london(?) pp. . (reprinted, with additions and alterations, in at oxford.) "the new examination statute." (a letter to the vice-chancellor.) pp. , to. oxford. "a guide to the mathematical student in reading, reviewing, and working examples." by charles lutwidge dodgson. part i. pure mathematics. oxford: parker. two leaves and pp. , vo. stitched, s. "the dynamics of a parti-cle, with an excursus on the new method of evaluation as applied to pi." oxford: vincent. pp. , vo. (three editions). "alice's adventures in wonderland." by lewis carroll, with forty-two illustrations by john tenniel. london: macmillan. pp. , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. the st edition (recalled) was printed in oxford, and is very rare; all subsequent editions ( onwards) by richard clay in london. now in its th thousand. [people's edition, price s. d.; first published in . now in its th thousand.] "condensation of determinants," being a new and brief method for computing their arithmetical values. by the rev. c.l. dodgson. from "the proceedings of the royal society, no. , ." london: taylor and francis. pp. , vo. "an elementary treatise on determinants." london: macmillan. (printed in oxford.) pp. viii + , to. cloth. s. d. "the fifth book of euclid treated algebraically, so far as it relates to commensurable magnitudes." with notes. by charles l. dodgson. oxford and london: parker. two leaves and pp. , vo. in wrapper, s. d. "algebraical formulÃ� for responsions." oxford: printed at the university press. "the telegraph cipher." (?) (invented, in , by the rev. c.l. dodgson.) "phantasmagoria and other poems." by lewis carroll. london: macmillan. (printed in oxford.) pp. viii + , small vo. cloth, gilt edges. "aventures d'alice au pays de merveilles." par lewis carroll, ouvrage illustré de vignettes par john tenniel. traduit de l'anglais, par h. bué. london: macmillan. pp. , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. (now in its nd thousand.) "alice's abenteuer im wunderland." von lewis carroll, mit zweiundvierzig illustrationen von john tenniel. uebersetzt von antonie zimmermann. london: macmillan. pp. , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. "gazette extraordinary." oxford: printed at the university press. "algebraical formulÃ� and rules." oxford: printed at the university press. "arithmetical formulÃ� and rules." oxford: printed at the university press. "to all child readers of 'alice's adventures in wonderland.'" pp. "through the looking-glass and what alice found there." by lewis carroll. with fifty illustrations by john tenniel. london: macmillan. pp. ., cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. now in its st thousand [people's edition. price s. d. first published in . now in its th thousand.] "le avventure d'alice nel paese della meraviglie." per lewis carroll. tradotte dall'inglese da t. pietrocòla-rossetti. con vignette di giovanni tenniel. london: macmillan. pp. , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. circular to hospitals offering copies of the two "alice" books. london: macmillan. "symbols, &c., to be used in euclid, books i. and ii." oxford: printed at the university press. "number of propositions in euclid." oxford: printed at the university press. "the new belfry of christ church, oxford." a monograph. by d.c.l. oxford: parker. pp. + , cr. vo. in wrapper. d. (five editions.) "enunciations, euclid, i.-vi." oxford: printed at the university press. "objections, submitted to the governing body of christ church, oxford, against certain proposed alterations in the great quadrangle." oxford: printed at the university press. pp. , to. [printed for private circulation.] "the vision of the three t's." a threnody. by the author of "the new belfry." oxford. parker. pp. + , vo. in wrapper, d. (three editions.) "a discussion of the various modes of procedure in conducting elections." oxford: printed at the university press. "euclid, book v. proved algebraically," so far as it relates to commensurable magnitudes. to which is prefixed a summary of all the necessary algebraical operations, arranged in order of difficulty. by charles l. dodgson. oxford: parker. pp. viii + , vo. cloth. s. d. "suggestions as to the best method of taking votes, where more than two issues are to be voted on." oxford: hall and stacy. pp. , vo. "the blank cheque." a fable. by the author of "the new belfry," and "the vision of the three t's" oxford: parker. pp. + , cr. vo. in wrapper. d. "preliminary algebra, and euclid book v." oxford: printed at the university press. "the dynamics of a parti-cle." oxford: parker. pp. , cr. vo. in wrapper. d. "the new method of evaluation as applied to pi." oxford: parker. pp. , cr. vo. in wrapper. d. "facts, figures, and fancies," relating to the elections to the hebdomadal council, the offer of the clarendon trustees, and the proposal to convert the parks into cricket-grounds. oxford: parker. pp. + , cr. vo. in wrapper. d. "notes by an oxford chiel." oxford: parker. cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. [this book consists of the following six pamphlets bound together--"the new method of evaluation," "the dynamics of a particle," "facts, figures, and fancies," "the new belfry," "the vision of the three t's," and "the blank cheque."] "examples in arithmetic." oxford: printed at the university press. "euclid, books i. and ii." edited by charles l. dodgson. oxford: parker. diagram, title, preface, and pp. , cr. vo. cloth. [the book was circulated privately among mathematical friends for hints. "not yet published" was printed above title.] "the professorship of comparative philology." (three leaflets.) oxford: printed at the university press. "a method of taking votes of more than two issues." oxford: printed at the university press. pp. , cr. vo. [a note on the title-page runs as follows: "as i hope to investigate this subject further, and to publish a more complete pamphlet on the subject, i shall feel greatly obliged if you will enter in this copy any remarks that occur to you, and return it to me any time before--"] letter and questions to hospitals. oxford: printed at the university press. "an easter greeting." [reprinted in london, by macmillan & co., in .] "fame's penny trumpet." not published. oxford: baxter. pp. , to. [afterwards published in "rhyme? and reason?"] "the hunting of the snark." an agony, in eight fits. by lewis carroll. with nine illustrations by henry holiday. london: macmillan. pp. xi + , vo. cloth, gilt edges. s.. d. "the responsions of hilary term, ." (a letter to the vice-chancellor.) oxford: printed at the university press. "a charade." (written with a cyclostyle.) pp. . "word-links." (a game, afterwards called "doublets," invented by the rev. c.l. dodgson.) oxford: printed at the university press. pp. , vo.[there is also a form written with a cyclostyle.] "doublets." a word-puzzle. by lewis carroll. london: macmillan. pp. , vo. cloth. s. ( nd edition, .) "euclid and his modern rivals." london: macmillan. vo. cloth. s. ( nd edition, . pp. xxxi + .) "doublets." a word-puzzle. by lewis carroll. oxford: printed at the university press. pp. . vo. [this puzzle appeared in vanity fair, april , .] "letter from mabel to emily." to illustrate common errors in letter-writing. (written with a cyclostyle.) "lize's avonturen in het wonderland." (?) naar het engelsch. [a dutch version of "alice in wonderland."] nijmegen. to. "on catching cold." (a pamphlet, consisting of extracts from two books by dr. inman.) oxford: printed at the university press. "jabberwocky." (lewis carroll's poem, with a.a. vansittart's latin rendering.) oxford: printed at the university press. notice re concordance to "in memoriam." oxford: printed at the university press. "lanrick." a game for two players. oxford: printed at the university press. a circular about the "school of dramatic art." oxford: printed at the university press. "an analysis of the responsions-lists from michaelmas, , to michaelmas, ." oxford: printed at the university press. circular asking for suggestions for a girls' edition of shakespeare. oxford: printed at the university press. [two different forms, one pp. , the other pp. .] "euclid, books i. and ii." london: macmillan. printed in oxford. pp. xi + . vo. cloth. s. [seven editions were subsequently published.] "dreamland." a song. words by lewis carroll; music by rev. c. e. hutchinson. oxford: printed at the university press. "mischmasch." (a game invented by the rev. c. l. dodgson.) oxford: printed at the university press. two editions. "rhyme? and reason?" by lewis carroll. with sixty-five illustrations by arthur b. frost, and nine by henry holiday. london: macmillan. pp. xii + , cr. vo. cloth, s. (now in its th thousand.) [this book is a reprint, with a few additions, of "the hunting of the snark," and of the comic portions of "phantasmagoria and other poems."] "lawn tennis tournaments: the true method of assigning prizes, with a proof of the fallacy of the present method." london: macmillan. printed in oxford. vo. "rules for reckoning postage." oxford: baxter. "twelve months in a curatorship." by one who has tried it. oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo supplement to ditto. oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo postscript to ditto. oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. "christmas greetings." london: macmillan. "the profits of authorship." by lewis carroll. london: macmillan. vo. d. "the principles of parliamentary representation." london: harrison. pp. , vo. (reprinted in .) supplement to ditto. oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. two editions. postscript to supplement to ditto. oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. two editions. supplement to first edition of "euclid and his modern rivals." london: macmillan. vo. s "a tangled tale." by lewis carroll. with six illustrations by arthur b. frost. london: macmillan. printed in oxford. pp. , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. d. (now in its th thousand.) [first appeared in monthly packet, april, -november, . there are also separate reprints of each "knot," and of the answers to "knots" i. and ii.] "proposed procuratorial cycle." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , to. "the procuratorial cycle. further remarks." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , to. "suggestions as to the election of proctors." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , to. (reprinted, with additions, in ) "alice's adventures under ground." by lewis carroll. with thirty-seven illustrations by the author. london: macmillan. pp. viii + , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. (now in its th thousand.) [this book is a facsimile of the original manuscript story, afterwards developed into "alice in wonderland."] "three years in a curatorship." by one whom it has tried. oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , cr. vo. "remarks on the report of the finance committee." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , cr. vo. "remarks on mr. sampson's proposal." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , cr. vo. "observations on mr. sampson's proposal." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. "first paper on logic." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. "fourth paper on logic." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. "fifth paper on logic." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. "sixth paper on logic." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , vo. "questions in logic." oxford: printed by e. baxter. pp. , fcap. fol. "alice's adventures in wonderland; and through the looking-glass." people's editions, vol. london: macmillan. cr. vo. cloth. s. d. "the game of logic." by lewis carroll. london: macmillan. pp. , cr. vo. cloth. s. "curiosa mathematica, part i. a new theory of parallels." by c. l. dodgson. london: macmillan. pp. . vo. cloth. s. (reprinted in , , and .) "memoria technica." [written with a cyclostyle.] pp. "circular billiards for two players." invented, in (?) , by lewis carroll. two editions "sylvie and bruno." by lewis carroll. with forty-six illustrations by harry furniss. london: macmillan. pp. xxiii + , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. (now in its th thousand.) [the picture on p. was drawn by miss alice havers.] "the nursery 'alice.'" containing twenty coloured enlargements from tenniel's illustrations to "alice's adventures in wonderland." with text adapted to nursery readers by lewis carroll. the cover designed and coloured by e. gertrude thomson. london: macmillan. pp. , to. boards. s. (now in its th thousand.) "eight or nine wise words about letter-writing." by lewis carroll. oxford: emberlin and son. (now in its th edition.) [this pamphlet is sold with the "wonderland" postage-stamp case, published by messrs. emberlin and son.] "the stranger circular." (a leaflet sent by mr. dodgson to people who wrote to him about his "lewis carroll" books, addressing the envelope to rev. c. l. dodgson.) oxford: printed by sheppard. circular, asking friends to send addresses of stationers likely to sell the "wonderland" postage-stamp case. oxford: printed by sheppard. circular sent to various hospitals, offering free copies of lewis carroll's books. oxford: printed by sheppard. list of institutions to which above was to be sent. oxford: printed by sheppard. circular, addressed to the governing body of christ church, oxford, about the proposal to invite m.a.'s to dine at high table. "a postal problem." june, . ditto, supplement. a circular about resignation of curatorship. oxford: printed by sheppard. a circular about "unparliamentary" words used by some competitors in the "syzygies" competition in the lady. oxford: printed by sheppard. "curiosissima curatoria." by 'rude donatus.' (a pamphlet sent to all resident members of christ church common room.) oxford: printed by sheppard. "eighth paper on logic." oxford: printed by sheppard. [a revised version of one page was printed in same year.] "ninth paper on logic." oxford: printed by sheppard. "notes to logic papers eight and nine." oxford: printed by sheppard. "curiosa mathematica, part iii. pillow problems," thought out during wakeful hours, by c. l. dodgson. london, macmillan: printed in oxford. pp. xvii + , vo. cloth, st and nd editions. (reprinted in , .) "syzygies and lanrick." by lewis carroll. london: the lady office. pp. . d. "sylvie and bruno concluded." by lewis carroll. with forty-six illustrations by harry furniss. london: macmillan. pp. xxi + , cr. vo. cloth, gilt edges. s. d. (now in its rd thousand.) [the picture on p. was drawn by miss alice havers.] "a disputed point in logic." "what the tortoise said to achilles." (reprinted from mind, december, .) pp. . "a fascinating mental recreation for the young." (?) (a circular about symbolic logic, signed "lewis carroll.") "resident women-students." (a circular, signed "charles l dodgson.") oxford: printed by sheppard. "symbolic logic. part i. elementary." by lewis carroll. london: macmillan. pp. xxxi + , cr. vo. cloth. s. (now in its th edition.) "three sunsets and other poems." by lewis carroll. with twelve fairy-fancies by e. gertrude thomson. london: macmillan. pp. , fcap. to. cloth, gilt edges. s. [this book is a reprint, with additions, of the serious portions of "phantasmagoria and other poems."] "to my child-friend." (a poem, reprinted in "the no date game of logic.") pp. "the alphabet-cipher." no date * * * * * index a abdy, miss dora, albany, the duchess of, "alice's adventures in wonderland," "alice's adventures underground," "alice" operetta, the, alice, princess, "alice, the nursery," allen, mrs. egerton, anderson, mrs., atkinson, miss g., atkinson, rev. f. h., b baden-powell, sir george, bayne, rev. t. vere, bennie, mrs., "blank cheque, the," bowman, miss isa, bremer, miss, "bruno's revenge," c calverley, c. s., chataway, miss g., chevalier, albert, circle-squarers, _college rhymes,_ college servants, _comic times, the,_ cook wilson, professor, croft, cunningham, miss m., d daresbury, "deserted parks, the," "determinants, an elementary treatise on," dodgson, archdeacon, dodgson, captain, dodgson, mrs., "dotheboys hall," "dreamland," drury, miss dymes, miss "dynamics of a parti-cle, the" e egerton, lord francis elphin, the bishop of elsdon eschwege, miss k. eternal punishment "euclid and his modern rivals" "euclid, books i. and ii." "euclid, book v." exhibition, the great f "facts, figures, and fancies" freiligrath kroeker, mrs. frost, a.b. furniss, harry g "game of logic, the" gatty, mrs. general elections h harrison, frederic holiday, henry hopley, rev. h. hughes, arthur hughes, miss agnes "hunting of the snark, the" hutchinson, rev. c.e. j _jabberwock, the_ jackson, miss f. jelf, canon jowett, dr. k kean, mrs. kingsley, henry kitchin, miss alexandra (xie) l "lays of sorrow" liddell, dr. liddell, miss alice liddon, canon "little minister, the" longley, archbishop m macdonald, george maitland, mrs. manners, miss m.e. maurier, george du mechanical "humpty dumpty," the "memoria technica" _misch-masch_ moscow n natural science "new belfry, the" "new method of evaluation, the" "new theory of parallels, the" nijni novgorod "notes by an oxford chiel" p paget, dean paget, sir james paine, miss adelaide patmore, coventry paton, sir noel "phantasmagoria" "pillow problems" potsdam price, professor "profits of authorship, the" pusey, dr. r _rectory umbrella, the_ "rhyme? and reason?" richmond rix, miss edith rugby ruskin, john s salisbury, the marquis of st. petersburg sanday, professor simpson, miss gaynor smedley, frank standen, miss isabel "sylvie and bruno" "sylvie and bruno concluded" "symbolic logic, part i." "syzygies" t tait, archbishop "tangled tale, a" taylor, tom tenniel, sir john tennyson, alfred terry, miss ellen terry, miss kate thackeray, w.m. thomson, miss e.g. "three sunsets" "through the looking-glass" _train, the_ "twelve months in a curatorship" v vansittart, a.a. "vision of the three t's, the" vivisection w wilberforce, bishop "wise words on letter-writing" "wonderland" stamp-case, the woodhouse, rev. g.c. y yates, edmund yonge, miss charlotte m. * * * * * footnotes. [footnote : perhaps an incorrect expression, as it was only the second attempt.] [footnote : the science of taking medicine in infinitely small doses.] [footnote : _________________________ ] [footnote : a man's history of his own life.] [footnote : the author of "the bandy-legged butterfly."] [footnote : afterwards president of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals.] [footnote : or a pulling by the ear.] [footnote : this rectory has been supposed to have been built in the time of edward vi., but recent discoveries clearly assign its origin to a much earlier period. a stone has been found in an island formed by the river tees on which is inscribed the letter "a," which is justly conjectured to stand for the name of the great king alfred, in whose reign this house was probably built.] [footnote : the poet entreats pardon for having represented a donkey under this dignified name.] [footnote : with reference to these remarkable animals see "moans from the miserable," page .] [footnote : a full account of the history and misfortunes of these interesting creatures may be found in the first "lay of sorrow," page .] [footnote : it is a singular fact that a donkey makes a point of returning any kicks offered to it.] [footnote : this valiant knight, besides having a heart of steel and nerves of iron, has been lately in the habit of carrying a brick in his eye.] [footnote : she was sister to both.] [footnote : the reader will probably be at a loss to discover the nature of this triumph, as no object was gained, and the donkey was obviously the victor; on this point, however, we are sorry to say, we can offer no good explanation.] [footnote : much more acceptable to a true knight than "corn-land" which the roman people were so foolish as to give to their daring champion, horatius.] [footnote : lewis carroll composed this poem while staying with his cousins, the misses wilcox, at whitburn, near sunderland. to while away an evening the whole party sat down to a game of verse-making, and "jabberwocky" was his contribution.] [footnote : coesper from coena and vesper.] [footnote : lubriciles, from lubricus and graciles. see the commentary in "humpty dumpty's square," which will also explain ultravia, and, if it requires explanation, moestenui.] [footnote : sanguis meus: verg. aen. vi. --"projice tela manu, sanguis meus!"] [footnote : egnia: "muffish"--segnis; therefore "uffish" = egnis. this is a conjectural analogy, but i can suggest no better solution.] [footnote : susuffrus: "whiffling," susurrus: "whistling."] [footnote : spicula: see the picture.] [footnote : burbur: apparently a labial variation of murmur, stronger but more dissonant.] [footnote : this poem is reproduced here by the kind permission of the proprietors of punch.] transcribed from the field & tuer edition by david price, email ccx @coventry.ac.uk how to fail in literature: a lecture by andrew lang preface _this lecture was delivered at the south kensington museum, in aid of the college for working men and women. as the publishers, perhaps erroneously, believe that some of the few authors who were not present may be glad to study the advice here proffered, the lecture is now printed. it has been practically re-written, and, like the kiss which the lady returned to rodolphe_, is revu, corrige, et considerablement augmente. a. l. how to fail in literature what should be a man's or a woman's reason for taking literature as a vocation, what sort of success ought they to desire, what sort of ambition should possess them? these are natural questions, now that so many readers exist in the world, all asking for something new, now that so many writers are making their pens "in running to devour the way" over so many acres of foolscap. the legitimate reasons for enlisting (too often without receiving the shilling) in this army of writers are not far to seek. a man may be convinced that he has useful, or beautiful, or entertaining ideas within him, he may hold that he can express them in fresh and charming language. he may, in short, have a "vocation," or feel conscious of a vocation, which is not exactly the same thing. there are "many thyrsus bearers, few mystics," many are called, few chosen. still, to be sensible of a vocation is something, nay, is much, for most of us drift without any particular aim or predominant purpose. nobody can justly censure people whose chief interest is in letters, whose chief pleasure is in study or composition, who rejoice in a fine sentence as others do in a well modelled limb, or a delicately touched landscape, nobody can censure them for trying their fortunes in literature. most of them will fail, for, as the bookseller's young man told an author once, they have the poetic temperament, without the poetic power. still among these whom _pendennis_ has tempted, in boyhood, to run away from school to literature as marryat has tempted others to run away to sea, there must be some who will succeed. but an early and intense ambition is not everything, any more than a capacity for taking pains is everything in literature or in any art. some have the gift, the natural incommunicable power, without the ambition, others have the ambition but no other gift from any muse. this class is the more numerous, but the smallest class of all has both the power and the will to excel in letters. the desire to write, the love of letters may shew itself in childhood, in boyhood, or youth, and mean nothing at all, a mere harvest of barren blossom without fragrance or fruit. or, again, the concern about letters may come suddenly, when a youth that cared for none of those things is waning, it may come when a man suddenly finds that he has something which he really must tell. then he probably fumbles about for a style, and his first fresh impulses are more or less marred by his inexperience of an art which beguiles and fascinates others even in their school-days. it is impossible to prophesy the success of a man of letters from his early promise, his early tastes; as impossible as it is to predict, from her childish grace, the beauty of a woman. but the following remarks on how to fail in literature are certainly meant to discourage nobody who loves books, and has an impulse to tell a story, or to try a song or a sermon. discouragements enough exist in the pursuit of this, as of all arts, crafts, and professions, without my adding to them. famine and fear crouch by the portals of literature as they crouch at the gates of the virgilian hades. there is no more frequent cause of failure than doubt and dread; a beginner can scarcely put his heart and strength into a work when he knows how long are the odds against his victory, how difficult it is for a new man to win a hearing, even though all editors and publishers are ever pining for a new man. the young fellow, unknown and unwelcomed, who can sit down and give all his best of knowledge, observation, humour, care, and fancy to a considerable work has got courage in no common portion; he deserves to triumph, and certainly should not be disheartened by our old experience. but there be few beginners of this mark, most begin so feebly because they begin so fearfully. they are already too discouraged, and can scarce do themselves justice. it is easier to write more or less well and agreeably when you are certain of being published and paid, at least, than to write well when a dozen rejected manuscripts are cowering (as theocritus says) in your chest, bowing their pale faces over their chilly knees, outcast, hungry, repulsed from many a door. to write excellently, brightly, powerfully, with these poor unwelcomed wanderers, returned mss., in your possession, is difficult indeed. it might be wiser to do as m. guy de maupassant is rumoured to have done, to write for seven years, and shew your essays to none but a mentor as friendly severe as m. flaubert. but all men cannot have such mentors, nor can all afford so long an unremunerative apprenticeship. for some the better plan is _not_ to linger on the bank, and take tea and good advice, as keats said, but to plunge at once in mid-stream, and learn swimming of necessity. one thing, perhaps, most people who succeed in letters so far as to keep themselves alive and clothed by their pens will admit, namely, that their early rejected mss. _deserved to be rejected_. a few days ago there came to the writer an old forgotten beginner's attempt by himself. whence it came, who sent it, he knows not; he had forgotten its very existence. he read it with curiosity; it was written in a very much better hand than his present scrawl, and was perfectly legible. but _readable_ it was not. there was a great deal of work in it, on an out of the way topic, and the ideas were, perhaps, not quite without novelty at the time of its composition. but it was cramped and thin, and hesitating between several manners; above all it was uncommonly dull. if it ever was sent to an editor, as i presume it must have been, that editor was trebly justified in declining it. on the other hand, to be egotistic, i have known editors reject the attempts of those old days, and afterwards express lively delight in them when they struggled into print, somehow, somewhere. these worthy men did not even know that they had despised and refused what they came afterwards rather to enjoy. editors and publishers, these keepers of the gates of success, are not infallible, but their opinion of a beginner's work is far more correct than his own can ever be. they should not depress him quite, but if they are long unanimous in holding him cheap, he is warned, and had better withdraw from the struggle. he is either incompetent, or he has the makings of a browning. he is a genius born too soon. he may readily calculate the chances in favour of either alternative. so much by way of not damping all neophytes equally: so much we may say about success before talking of the easy ways that lead to failure. and by success here is meant no glorious triumph; the laurels are not in our thoughts, nor the enormous opulence (about a fourth of a fortunate barrister's gains) which falls in the lap of a dickens or a trollope. faint and fleeting praise, a crown with as many prickles as roses, a modest hardly-gained competence, a good deal of envy, a great deal of gossip--these are the rewards of genius which constitute a modern literary success. not to reach the moderate competence in literature is, for a professional man of letters of all work, something like failure. but in poetry to-day a man may succeed, as far as his art goes, and yet may be unread, and may publish at his own expense, or not publish at all. he pleases himself, and a very tiny audience: i do not call that failure. i regard failure as the goal of ignorance, incompetence, lack of common sense, conceited dulness, and certain practical blunders now to be explained and defined. the most ambitious may accept, without distrust, the following advice as to how to fail in literature. the advice is offered by a mere critic, and it is an axiom of the arts that the critics "are the fellows who have failed," or have not succeeded. the persons who really can paint, or play, or compose seldom tell us how it is done, still less do they review the performances of their contemporaries. that invidious task they leave to the unsuccessful novelists. the instruction, the advice are offered by the persons who cannot achieve performance. it is thus that all things work together in favour of failure, which, indeed, may well appear so easy that special instruction, however competent, is a luxury rather than a necessary. but when we look round on the vast multitude of writers who, to all seeming, deliberately aim at failure, who take every precaution in favour of failure that untutored inexperience can suggest, it becomes plain that education in ill-success, is really a popular want. in the following remarks some broad general principles, making disaster almost inevitable, will first be offered, and then special methods of failing in all special departments of letters will be ungrudgingly communicated. it is not enough to attain failure, we should deserve it. the writer, by way of insuring complete confidence, would modestly mention that he has had ample opportunities of study in this branch of knowledge. while sifting for five or six years the volunteered contributions to a popular periodical, he has received and considered some hundredweights of manuscript. in all these myriad contributions he has not found thirty pieces which rose even to the ordinary dead level of magazine work. he has thus enjoyed unrivalled chances of examining such modes of missing success as spontaneously occur to the human intellect, to the unaided ingenuity of men, women, and children. { } he who would fail in literature cannot begin too early to neglect his education, and to adopt every opportunity of not observing life and character. none of us is so young but that he may make himself perfect in writing an illegible hand. this method, i am bound to say, is too frequently overlooked. most manuscripts by ardent literary volunteers are fairly legible. on the other hand there are novelists, especially ladies, who not only write a hand wholly declining to let itself be deciphered, but who fill up the margins with interpolations, who write between the lines, and who cover the page with scratches running this way and that, intended to direct the attention to after-thoughts inserted here and there in corners and on the backs of sheets. to pin in scraps of closely written paper and backs of envelopes adds to the security for failure, and produces a rich anger in the publisher's reader or the editor. the cultivation of a bad handwriting is an elementary precaution, often overlooked. few need to be warned against having their mss. typewritten, this gives them a chance of being read with ease and interest, and this must be neglected by all who have really set their hearts on failure. in the higher matters of education it is well to be as ignorant as possible. no knowledge comes amiss to the true man of letters, so they who court disaster should know as little as may be. mr. stevenson has told the attentive world how, in boyhood, he practised himself in studying and imitating the styles of famous authors of every age. he who aims at failure must never think of style, and should sedulously abstain from reading shakespeare, bacon, hooker, walton, gibbon, and other english and foreign classics. he can hardly be too reckless of grammar, and should always place adverbs and other words between "to" and the infinitive, thus: "hubert was determined to energetically and on all possible occasions, oppose any attempt to entangle him with such." here, it will be noticed, "such" is used as a pronoun, a delightful flower of speech not to be disregarded by authors who would fail. but some one may reply that several of our most popular novelists revel in the kind of grammar which i am recommending. this is undeniable, but certain people manage to succeed in spite of their own earnest endeavours and startling demerits. there is no royal road to failure. there is no rule without its exception, and it may be urged that the works of the gentlemen and ladies who "break priscian's head"--as they would say themselves--may be successful, but are not literature. now it is about literature that we are speaking. in the matter of style, there is another excellent way. you need not neglect it, but you may study it wrongly. you may be affectedly self- conscious, you may imitate the ingenious persons who carefully avoid the natural word, the spontaneous phrase, and employ some other set of terms which can hardly be construed. you may use, like a young essayist whom i have lovingly observed, a proportion of eighty adjectives to every sixty- five other words of all denominations. you may hunt for odd words, and thrust them into the wrong places, as where you say that a man's nose is "beetling," that the sun sank in "a cauldron of daffodil chaos," and the like. { } you may use common words in an unwonted sense, keeping some private interpretation clearly before you. thus you may speak, if you like to write partly in the tongue of hellas, about "assimilating the _ethos_" of a work of art, and so write that people shall think of the processes of digestion. you may speak of "exhausting the beauty" of a landscape, and, somehow, convey the notion of sucking an orange dry. or you may wildly mix your metaphors, as when a critic accuses mr. browning of "giving the irridescence of the poetic afflatus," as if the poetic afflatus were blown through a pipe, into soap, and produced soap bubbles. this is a more troublesome method than the mere picking up of every newspaper commonplace that floats into your mind, but it is equally certain to lead--where you want to go. by combining the two fashions a great deal may be done. thus you want to describe a fire at sea, and you say, "the devouring element lapped the quivering spars, the mast, and the sea-shouldering keel of the doomed _mary jane_ in one coruscating catastrophe. the sea deeps were incarnadined to an alarming extent by the flames, and to escape from such many plunged headlong in their watery bier." as a rule, authors who would fail stick to one bad sort of writing; either to the newspaper commonplace, or to the out of the way and inappropriate epithets, or to the common word with a twist on it. but there are examples of the combined method, as when we call the trees round a man's house his "domestic boscage." this combination is difficult, but perfect for its purpose. you cannot write worse than "such." to attain perfection the young aspirant should confine his reading to the newspapers (carefully selecting his newspapers, for many of them will not help him to write ill) and to those modern authors who are most praised for their style by the people who know least about the matter. words like "fictional" and "fictive" are distinctly to be recommended, and there are epithets such as "weird," "strange," "wild," "intimate," and the rest, which blend pleasantly with "all the time" for "always"; "back of" for "behind"; "belong with" for "belong to"; "live like i do" for "as i do." the authors who combine those charms are rare, but we can strive to be among them. in short, he who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef, and must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the _bizarre_, the slipshod or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or the sepulchral. i need not specially recommend you to write in "wardour-street english," the sham archaic, a lingo never spoken by mortal man, and composed of patches borrowed from authors between piers plowman and gabriel harvey. a few literal translations of icelandic phrases may be thrown in; the result, as furniture-dealers say, is a "made-up article." on the subject of style another hint may be offered. style may be good in itself, but inappropriate to the subject. for example, style which may be excellently adapted to a theological essay, may be but ill-suited for a dialogue in a novel. there are subjects of which the poet says _ornari res ipsa vetat, contenta doceri_. the matter declines to be adorned, and is content with being clearly stated. i do not know what would occur if the writer of the money article in the _times_ treated his topic with reckless gaiety. probably that number of the journal in which the essay appeared would have a large sale, but the author might achieve professional failure; in the office. on the whole it may not be the wiser plan to write about the origins of religion in the style which might suit a study of the life of ballet dancers; the two mm. halevy, the learned and the popular, would make a blunder if they exchanged styles. yet gibbon never denies himself a jest, and montesquieu's _esprit des lois_ was called _l'esprit sur les lois_. m. renan's _histoire d'israel_ may almost be called skittish. the french are more tolerant of those excesses than the english. it is a digression, but he who would fail can reach his end by not taking himself seriously. if he gives himself no important airs, whether out of a freakish humour, or real humility, depend upon it the public and the critics will take him at something under his own estimate. on the other hand, by copying the gravity of demeanour admired by mr. shandy in a celebrated parochial animal, even a very dull person may succeed in winning no inconsiderable reputation. to return to style, and its appropriateness: all depends on the work in hand, and the audience addressed. thus, in his valuable essay on style, mr. pater says, with perfect truth: { } "the otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all other arts, structure is all important, felt or painfully missed, everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning, and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the artist himself, to be spoken of later, i shall call the necessity of _mind_ in style." these are words which the writer should have always present to his memory, if he has something serious that he wants to say, or if he wishes to express himself in the classic and perfect manner. but if it is his fate merely to be obliged to say something, in the course of his profession, or if he is bid to discourse for the pleasure of readers in the underground railway, i fear he will often have to forget mr. pater. it may not be literature, the writing of _causeries_, of roundabout papers, of rambling articles "on a broomstick," and yet again, it _may_ be literature! "parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden"--mr. pater charges heavily against these. the true artist "knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any _diversion_, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject . . . in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be lying somewhere, according to michel angelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone." excellent, but does this apply to every kind of literary art? what would become of montaigne if you blew away his allusions, and drove him out of "the allusive way," where he gathers and binds so many flowers from all the gardens and all the rose-hung lanes of literature? montaigne sets forth to write an essay on coaches. he begins with a few remarks on seasickness in the common pig; some notes on the pont neuf at paris follow, and a theory of why tyrants are detested by men whom they have obliged; a glance at coaches is then given, next a study of montezuma's gardens, presently a brief account of the spanish cruelties in mexico and peru, last--_retombons a nos coches_--he tells a tale of the inca, and the devotion of his guard: _another for hector_! the allusive style has its proper place, like another, if it is used by the right man, and the concentrated and structural style has also its higher province. it would not do to employ either style in the wrong place. in a rambling discursive essay, for example, a mere straying after the bird in the branches, or the thorn in the way, he might not take the safest road who imitated mr. pater's style in what follows: "in this way, according to the well-known saying, 'the style is the man,' complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world: all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that." clearly the author who has to write so that the man may read who runs will fail if he wrests this manner from its proper place, and uses it for casual articles: he will fail to hold the vagrom attention! thus a great deal may be done by studying inappropriateness of style, by adopting a style alien to our matter and to our audience. if we "haver" discursively about serious, and difficult, and intricate topics, we fail; and we fail if we write on happy, pleasant, and popular topics in an abstruse and intent, and analytic style. we fail, too, if in style we go outside our natural selves. "the style is the man," and the man will be nothing, and nobody, if he tries for an incongruous manner, not naturally his own, for example if miss yonge were suddenly to emulate the manner of lever, or if mr. john morley were to strive to shine in the fashion of _uncle remus_, or if mr. rider haggard were to be allured into imitation by the example, so admirable in itself, of the master of balliol. it is ourselves we must try to improve, our attentiveness, our interest in life, our seriousness of purpose, and then the style will improve with the self. or perhaps, to be perfectly frank, we shall thus convert ourselves into prigs, throw ourselves out of our stride, lapse into self- consciousness, lose all that is natural, _naif_, and instinctive within us. verily there are many dangers, and the paths to failure are infinite. so much for style, of which it may generally be said that you cannot be too obscure, unnatural, involved, vulgar, slipshod, and metaphorical. see to it that your metaphors are mixed, though, perhaps, this attention is hardly needed. the free use of parentheses, in which a reader gets lost, and of unintelligible allusions, and of references to unread authors--the _kalevala_ and lycophron, and the scholiast on apollonius rhodius, is invaluable to this end. so much for manner, and now for matter. the young author generally writes because he wants to write, either for money, from vanity, or in mere weariness of empty hours and anxiety to astonish his relations. this is well, he who would fail cannot begin better than by having nothing to say. the less you observe, the less you reflect, the less you put yourself in the paths of adventure and experience, the less you will have to say, and the more impossible will it be to read your work. never notice people's manner, conduct, nor even dress, in real life. walk through the world with your eyes and ears closed, and embody the negative results in a story or a poem. as to poetry, with a fine instinct we generally begin by writing verse, because verse is the last thing that the public want to read. the young writer has usually read a great deal of verse, however, and most of it bad. his favourite authors are the bright lyrists who sing of broken hearts, wasted lives, early deaths, disappointment, gloom. without having even had an unlucky flirtation, or without knowing what it is to lose a favourite cat, the early author pours forth laments, just like the laments he has been reading. he has too a favourite manner, the old consumptive manner, about the hectic flush, the fatal rose on the pallid cheek, about the ruined roof tree, the empty chair, the rest in the village churchyard. this is now a little _rococo_ and forlorn, but failure may be assured by travelling in this direction. if you are ambitious to disgust an editor at once, begin your poem with "only." in fact you may as well head the lyric "only." { } only. only a spark of an ember, only a leaf on the tree, only the days we remember, only the days without thee. only the flower that thou worest, only the book that we read, only that night in the forest, only a dream of the dead, only the troth that was broken, only the heart that is lonely, only the sigh and the token that sob in the saying of only! in literature this is a certain way of failing, but i believe a person might make a livelihood by writing verses like these--for music. another good way is to be very economical in your rhymes, only two to the four lines, and regretfully vague. thus: shadows. in the slumber of the winter, in the secret of the snow, what is the voice that is crying out of the long ago? when the accents of the children are silent on the stairs, when the poor forgets his troubles, and the rich forgets his cares. what is the silent whisper that echoes in the room, when the days are full of darkness, and the night is hushed in gloom? 'tis the voice of the departed, who will never come again, who has left the weary tumult, and the struggle and the pain. { } and my heart makes heavy answer, to the voice that comes no more, to the whisper that is welling from the far off happy shore. if you are not satisfied with these simple ways of not succeeding, please try the grosvenor gallery style. here the great point is to make the rhyme arrive at the end of a very long word, you should also be free with your alliterations. lullaby. when the sombre night is dumb, hushed the loud chrysanthemum, sister, sleep! sleep, the lissom lily saith, sleep, the poplar whispereth, soft and deep! filmy floats the wild woodbine, jonquil, jacinth, jessamine, float and flow. sleeps the water wild and wan, as in far off toltecan mexico. see, upon the sun-dial, waves the midnight's misty pall, waves and wakes. as, in tropic timbuctoo, water beasts go plashing through lilied lakes! alliteration is a splendid source of failure in this sort of poetry, and adjectives like lissom, filmy, weary, weird, strange, make, or ought to make, the rejection of your manuscript a certainty. the poem should, as a rule, seem to be addressed to an unknown person, and should express regret and despair for circumstances in the past with which the reader is totally unacquainted. thus: ghosts. we met at length, as souls that sit at funeral feast, and taste of it, and empty were the words we said, as fits the converse of the dead, for it is long ago, my dear, since we two met in living cheer, yea, we have long been ghosts, you know, and alien ways we twain must go, nor shall we meet in shadow land, till time's glass, empty of its sand, is filled up of eternity. farewell--enough for once to die-- and far too much it is to dream, and taste not the lethaean stream, but bear the pain of loves unwed even here, even here, among the dead! that is a cheerful intelligible kind of melody, which is often practised with satisfactory results. every form of imitation (imitating of course only the faults of a favourite writer) is to be recommended. imitation does a double service, it secures the failure of the imitator and also aids that of the unlucky author who is imitated. as soon as a new thing appears in literature, many people hurry off to attempt something of the same sort. it may be a particular trait and accent in poetry, and the public, weary of the mimicries, begin to dislike the original. "most can grow the flowers now, for all have got the seed; and once again the people call it but a weed." in fiction, if somebody brings in a curious kind of murder, or a study of religious problems, or a treasure hunt, or what you will, others imitate till the world is weary of murders, or theological flirtations, or the search for buried specie, and the original authors themselves will fail, unless they fish out something new, to be vulgarised afresh. therefore, imitation is distinctly to be urged on the young author. as a rule, his method is this, he reads very little, but all that he reads is _bad_. the feeblest articles in the weakliest magazines, the very mildest and most conventional novels appear to be the only studies of the majority. apparently the would-be contributor says to himself, or herself, "well, _i_ can do something almost on the level of this or that maudlin and invertebrate novel." then he deliberately sits down to rival the most tame, dull, and illiterate compositions that get into print. in this way bad authors become the literary parents of worse authors. nobody but a reader of mss. knows what myriads of fiction are written without one single new situation, original character, or fresh thought. the most out-worn ideas: sudden loss of fortune; struggles; faithlessness of first lover; noble conduct of second lover: frivolity of younger sister; excellence of mother: naughtiness of one son, virtue of another, these are habitually served up again and again. on the sprained ankles, the mad bulls, the fires, and other simple devices for doing without an introduction between hero and heroine i need not dwell. the very youngest of us is acquainted with these expedients, which, by this time of day, will spell failure. the common novels of governess life, the daughters and granddaughters of _jane eyre_, still run riot among the rejected manuscripts. the lively large family, all very untidy and humorous, all wearing each other's boots and gloves, and making their dresses out of bedroom curtains and marrying rich men, still rushes down the easy descent to failure. the sceptical curate is at large, and is disbelieving in everything except the virtues of the young woman who "has a history." mr. swinburne hopes that one day the last unbelieving clergyman will disappear in the embrace of the last immaculate magdalen, as the princess and the geni burn each other to nothingness, in the _arabian nights_. on that happy day there will be one less of the roads leading to failure. if the pair can carry with them the self-sacrificing characters who take the blame of all the felonies that they did not do, and the nice girl who is jilted by the poet, and finds that the squire was the person whom she _really_ loved, so much the better. if not only monte carlo, but the inevitable scene in the rooms there can be abolished; if the riviera, and italy can be removed from the map of europe as used by novelists, so much the better. but failure will always be secured, while the huge majority of authors do not aim high, but aim at being a little lower than the last domestic drivel which came out in three volumes, or the last analysis of the inmost self of some introspective young girl which crossed the water from the states. these are general counsels, and apply to the production of books. but, when you have done your book, you may play a number of silly tricks with your manuscript. i have already advised you to make only one copy, a rough one, as that secures negligence in your work, and also disgusts an editor or reader. it has another advantage, you may lose your copy altogether, and, as you have not another, no failure can be more complete. the best way of losing it, i think and the safest, is to give it to somebody you know who has once met some man or woman of letters.. this somebody must be instructed to ask that busy and perhaps casual and untidy person to read your manuscript, and "place" it, that is, induce some poor publisher or editor to pay for and publish it. now the man, or woman of letters, will use violent language on receiving your clumsy brown paper parcel of illegible wares, because he or she has no more to do with the matter than the crossing sweeper. the ms. will either be put away so carefully that it can never be found again, or will be left lying about so that the housemaid may use it for her own domestic purposes, like betty barnes, the cook of mr. warburton, who seems to have burned several plays of shakespeare. the ms. in short will go where the old moons go. and all dead days drift thither, and all disastrous things. not only can you secure failure thus yourself, but you can so worry and badger your luckless victim, that he too will be unable to write well till he has forgotten you and your novel, and all the annoyance and anxiety you have given him. much may be done by asking him for "introductions" to an editor or publisher. these gentry don't want introductions, they want good books, and very seldom get them. if you behave thus, the man whom you are boring will write to his publisher: dear brown, a wretched creature, who knows my great aunt, asks me to recommend his rubbish to you. i send it by to-day's post, and i wish you joy of it. this kind of introduction will do you excellent service in smoothing the path to failure. you can arrive at similar results by sending your ms. _not_ to the editor of this or that magazine, but to some one who, as you have been told by some nincompoop, is the editor, and who is _not_. he _may_ lose your book, or he may let it lie about for months, or he may send it on at once to the real editor with his bitter malison. the utmost possible vexation is thus inflicted on every hand, and a prejudice is established against you which the nature of your work is very unlikely to overcome. by all means bore many literary strangers with correspondence, this will give them a lively recollection of your name, and an intense desire to do you a bad turn if opportunity arises. { } if your book does, in spite of all, get itself published, send it with your compliments to critics and ask them for favourable reviews. it is the publisher's business to send out books to the editors of critical papers, but never mind _that_. go on telling critics that you know praise is only given by favour, that they are all more or less venal and corrupt and members of the something club, add that _you_ are no member of a _coterie_ nor clique, but that you hope an exception will be made, and that your volume will be applauded on its merits. you will thus have done what in you lies to secure silence from reviewers, and to make them request that your story may be sent to some other critic. this, again, gives trouble, and makes people detest you and your performance, and contributes to the end which you have steadily in view. i do not think it is necessary to warn young lady novelists, who possess beauty, wealth, and titles, against asking reviewers to dine, and treating them as kindly, almost, as the fairy paribanou treated prince ahmed. they only act thus, i fear, in mr. william black's novels. much may be done by re-writing your book on the proof sheets, correcting everything there which you should have corrected in manuscript. this is an expensive process, and will greatly diminish your pecuniary gains, or rather will add to your publisher's bill, for the odds are that you will have to publish at your own expense. by the way, an author can make almost a certainty of disastrous failure, by carrying to some small obscure publisher a work which has been rejected by the best people in the trade. their rejections all but demonstrate that your book is worthless. if you think you are likely to make a good thing by employing an obscure publisher, with little or no capital, then, as some one in thucydides remarks, congratulating you on your simplicity, i do not envy your want of common sense. be very careful to enter into a perfectly preposterous agreement. for example, accept "half profits," but forget to observe that before these are reckoned, it is distinctly stated in your "agreement" that the publisher is to pay _himself_ some twenty per cent. on the price of each copy sold before you get your share. here is "another way," as the cookery books have it. in your gratitude to your first publisher, covenant with him to let him have all the cheap editions of all your novels for the next five years, at his own terms. if, in spite of the advice i have given you, you somehow manage to succeed, to become wildly popular, you will still have reserved to yourself, by this ingenious clause, a chance of ineffable pecuniary failure. a plan generally approved of is to sell your entire copyright in your book for a very small sum. you want the ready money, and perhaps you are not very hopeful. but, when your book is in all men's hands, when you are daily reviled by the small fry of paragraphers, when the publisher is clearing a thousand a year by it, while you only got a hundred down, then you will thank me, and will acknowledge that, in spite of apparent success, you are a failure after all. there are publishers, however, so inconsiderate that they will not leave you even this consolation. finding that the book they bought cheap is really valuable, they will insist on sharing the profits with the author, or on making him great presents of money to which he has no legal claim. some persons, some authors, cannot fail if they would, so wayward is fortune, and such a quixotic idea of honesty have some middlemen of literature. but, of course, you _may_ light on a publisher who will not give you _more_ than you covenanted for, and then you can go about denouncing the whole profession as a congregation of robbers and clerks of st. nicholas. the ways of failure are infinite, and of course are not nearly exhausted. one good plan is never to be yourself when you write, to put in nothing of your own temperament, manner, character--or to have none, which does as well. another favourite method is to offer the wrong kind of article, to send to the _cornhill_ an essay on the evolution of the hittite syllabary, (for only one author could make _that_ popular;) or a sketch of cock fighting among the ancients to the _monthly record_; or an essay on _ayahs in india_ to an american magazine; or a biography of washington or lincoln to any english magazine whatever. we have them every month in some american periodicals, and our poor insular serials can get on without them: "have no use for them." it is a minor, though valuable scheme, to send poems on christmas to magazines about the beginning of december, because, in fact, the editors have laid in their stock of that kind of thing earlier. always insist on _seeing_ an editor, instead of writing to him. there is nothing he hates so much, unless you are very young and beautiful indeed, when, perhaps, if you wish to fail you had better _not_ pay him a visit at the office. even if you do, even if you were as fair as the golden helen, he is not likely to put in your compositions if, as is probable, they fall _much_ below the level of his magazine. a good way of making yourself a dead failure is to go about accusing successful people of plagiarising from books or articles of yours which did not succeed, and, perhaps, were never published at all. by encouraging this kind of vanity and spite you may entirely destroy any small powers you once happened to possess, you will, besides, become a person with a grievance, and, in the long run, will be shunned even by your fellow failures. again, you may plagiarise yourself, if you can, it is not easy, but it is a safe way to fail if you can manage it. no successful person, perhaps, was ever, in the strict sense, a plagiarist, though charges of plagiary are always brought against everybody, from virgil to milton, from scott to moliere, who attains success. when you are accused of being a plagiarist, and shewn up in double columns, you may be pretty sure that all this counsel has been wasted on you, and that you have failed to fail, after all. otherwise nobody would envy and malign you, and garble your book, and print quotations from it which you did not write, all in the sacred cause of morality. advice on how to secure the reverse of success should not be given to young authors alone. their kinsfolk and friends, also, can do much for their aid. a lady who feels a taste for writing is very seldom allowed to have a quiet room, a quiet study. if she retreats to her chill and fireless bed chamber, even there she may be chevied by her brothers, sisters, and mother. it is noticed that cousins, and aunts, especially aunts, are of high service in this regard. they never give an intelligent woman an hour to herself. "is miss mary in?" "yes, ma'am, but she is very busy." "oh, she won't mind me, i don't mean to stay long." then in rushes the aunt. "over your books again: my dear! you really should not overwork yourself. writing something"; here the aunt clutches the manuscript, and looks at it vaguely. "well, i dare say it's very clever, but i don't care for this kind of thing myself. where's your mother? is jane better? now, do tell me, do you get much for writing all that? do you send it to the printers, or where? how interesting, and that reminds me, you that are a novelist, have you heard how shamefully miss baxter was treated by captain smith? no, well you might make something out of it." here follows the anecdote, at prodigious length, and perfectly incoherent. "now, write _that_, and i shall always say i was partly the author. you really should give me a commission, you know. well, good bye, tell your mother i called. why, there she is, i declare. oh, susan, just come and hear the delightful plot for a novel that i have been giving mary." and then she begins again, only further back, this time. it is thus that the aunts of england may and do assist their nieces to fail in literature. many and many a morning do they waste, many a promising fancy have they blighted, many a temper have they spoiled. sisters are rather more sympathetic: the favourite plan of the brother is to say, "now, mary, read us your new chapter." mary reads it, and the critic exclaims, "well, of all the awful rot! now, why can't you do something like _bootles's baby_?" fathers never take any interest in the business at all: they do not count. the sympathy of a mother may be reckoned on, but not her judgement, for she is either wildly favourable, or, mistrusting her own tendencies, is more diffident than need be. the most that relations can do for the end before us is to worry, interrupt, deride, and tease the literary member of the family. they seldom fail in these duties, and not even success, as a rule, can persuade them that there is anything in it but "luck." perhaps reviewing is not exactly a form of literature. but it has this merit that people who review badly, not only fail themselves, but help others to fail, by giving a bad idea of their works. you will, of course, never read the books you review, and you will be exhaustively ignorant of the subjects which they treat. but you can always find fault with the _title_ of the story which comes into your hands, a stupid reviewer never fails to do this. you can also copy out as much of the preface as will fill your eighth of a column, and add, that the performance is not equal to the promise. you must never feel nor shew the faintest interest in the work reviewed, that would be fatal. never praise heartily, that is the sign of an intelligence not mediocre. be vague, colourless, and languid, this deters readers from approaching the book. if you have glanced at it, blame it for not being what it never professed to be; if it is a treatise on greek prosody, censure the lack of humour; if it is a volume of gay verses, lament the author's indifference to the sorrows of the poor or the wrongs of the armenians. if it has humour, deplore its lack of thoughtfulness; if it is grave, carp at its lack of gaiety. i have known a reviewer of half a dozen novels denounce half a dozen _kinds_ of novels in the course of his two columns; the romance of adventure, the domestic tale, the psychological analysis, the theological story, the detective's story, the story of "society," he blamed them all in general, and the books before him in particular, also the historical novel. this can easily be done, by dint of practice, after dipping into three or four pages of your author. many reviewers have special aversions, authors they detest. whatever they are criticising, novels, poems, plays, they begin by an attack on their pet aversion, who has nothing to do with the matter in hand. they cannot praise a, b, c, and d, without first assailing e. it will generally be found that e is a popular author. but the great virtue of a reviewer, who would be unreadable and make others unread, is a languid ignorant lack of interest in all things, a habit of regarding his work as a tedious task, to be scamped as rapidly and stupidly as possible. you might think that these qualities would displease the reviewer's editor. not at all, look at any column of short notices, and you will occasionally find that the critic has anticipated my advice. there is no topic in which the men who write about it are so little interested as contemporary literature. perhaps this is no matter to marvel at. by the way, a capital plan is not to write your review till the book has been out for two years. this is the favourite dodge of the ---, that distinguished journal. if any one has kindly attended to this discourse, without desiring to be a failure, he has only to turn the advice outside in. he has only to be studious of the very best literature, observant, careful, original, he has only to be himself and not an imitator, to aim at excellence, and not be content with falling a little lower than mediocrity. he needs but bestow the same attention on this art as others give to the other arts and other professions. with these efforts, and with a native and natural gift, which can never be taught, never communicated, and with his mind set not on his reward, but on excellence, on style, on matter, and even on the not wholly unimportant virtue of vivacity, a man will succeed, or will deserve success. first, of course, he will have to "find" himself, as the french say, and if he does _not_ find an ass, then, like saul the son of kish, he may discover a kingdom. one success he can hardly miss, the happiness of living, not with trash, but among good books, and "the mighty minds of old." in an unpublished letter of mr. thackeray's, written before he was famous, and a novelist, he says how much he likes writing on historical subjects, and how he enjoys historical research. _the work is so gentlemanly_, he remarks. often and often, after the daily dreadful lines, the bread and butter winning lines on some contemporary folly or frivolity, does a man take up some piece of work hopelessly unremunerative, foredoomed to failure as far as money or fame go, some dealing with the classics of the world, homer or aristotle, lucian or moliere. it is like a bath after a day's toil, it is tonic and clean; and such studies, if not necessary to success, are, at least, conducive to mental health and self-respect in literature. to the enormous majority of persons who risk themselves in literature, not even the smallest measure of success can fall. they had better take to some other profession as quickly as may be, they are only making a sure thing of disappointment, only crowding the narrow gates of fortune and fame. yet there are others to whom success, though easily within their reach, does not seem a thing to be grasped at. of two such, the pathetic story may be read, in the memoir of _a scotch probationer_, mr. thomas davidson, who died young, an unplaced minister of the united presbyterian church, in . he died young, unaccepted by the world, unheard of, uncomplaining, soon after writing his latest song on the first grey hairs of the lady whom he loved. and she, miss alison dunlop, died also, a year ago, leaving a little work newly published, _anent old edinburgh_, in which is briefly told the story of her life. there can hardly be a true tale more brave and honourable, for those two were eminently qualified to shine, with a clear and modest radiance, in letters. both had a touch of poetry, mr. davidson left a few genuine poems, both had humour, knowledge, patience, industry, and literary conscientiousness. no success came to them, they did not even seek it, though it was easily within the reach of their powers. yet none can call them failures, leaving, as they did, the fragrance of honourable and uncomplaining lives, and such brief records of these as to delight, and console and encourage us all. they bequeath to us the spectacle of a real triumph far beyond the petty gains of money or of applause, the spectacle of lives made happy by literature, unvexed by notoriety, unfretted by envy. what we call success could never have yielded them so much, for the ways of authorship are dusty and stony, and the stones are only too handy for throwing at the few that, deservedly or undeservedly, make a name, and therewith about one-tenth of the wealth which is ungrudged to physicians, or barristers, or stock-brokers, or dentists, or electricians. if literature and occupation with letters were not its own reward, truly they who seem to succeed might envy those who fail. it is not wealth that they win, as fortunate men in other professions count wealth; it is not rank nor fashion that come to their call nor come to call on them. their success is to be let dwell with their own fancies, or with the imaginations of others far greater than themselves; their success is this living in fantasy, a little remote from the hubbub and the contests of the world. at the best they will be vexed by curious eyes and idle tongues, at the best they will die not rich in this world's goods, yet not unconsoled by the friendships which they win among men and women whose faces they will never see. they may well be content, and thrice content, with their lot, yet it is not a lot which should provoke envy, nor be coveted by ambition. it is not an easy goal to attain, as the crowd of aspirants dream, nor is the reward luxurious when it is attained. a garland, usually fading and not immortal, has to be run for, not without dust and heat. footnotes { } as the writer has ceased to sift, editorially, the contributions of the age, he does hope that authors will not instantly send him their mss. but if they do, after this warning, they will take the most direct and certain road to the waste paper basket. no mss. will be returned, even when accompanied by postage stamps. { } i have made a rich selection of examples from the works of living english and american authors. from the inextensive volumes of an eminent and fastidious critic i have culled a dear phrase about an oasis of style in "a desert of literary limpness." but it were hardly courteous, and might be dangerous, to publish these exotic blossoms of art. { } _appreciations_, p. . { } it was the custom of longinus, of the author of _the bathos_, and other old critics, to take their examples of how _not_ to do it from the works of famous writers, such as sir richard blackmore and herodotus. it seems altogether safer and more courteous for an author to supply his own awful examples. the musical rights in the following poems are reserved. { } or, if you prefer the other rhyme, read: _and the wilderness of men_. { } it is a teachable public: since this lecture was delivered the author has received many mss. from people who said they had heard the discourse, "and enjoyed it so much." the ignatian epistles entirely spurious. a reply to the right rev. dr. lightfoot, bishop of durham. by w. d. killen, d.d. professor of ecclesiastical history, and principal of the presbyterian theological faculty, ireland. "as the account of the martyrdom of ignatius may be justly suspected, so, too, the letters which presuppose the correctness of this suspicious legend do not wear at all a stamp of a distinct individuality of character, and of a man of these times addressing his last words to the churches." --augustus neander. edinburgh . preface. this little volume is respectfully submitted to the candid consideration of all who take an interest in theological inquiries, under the impression that it will throw some additional light on a subject which has long created much discussion. it has been called forth by the appearance of a treatise entitled, "_the apostolic fathers_, part ii. s. ignatius, s. polycarp. revised texts, with introductions, notes, dissertations, and translations, by j. b. lightfoot, d.d., d.c.l., ll.d, bishop of durham." in this voluminous production the right reverend author has maintained, not only that all the seven letters attributed by eusebius to ignatius are genuine, but also that "no christian writings of the second century, and very few writings of antiquity, whether christian or pagan, are so well authenticated." these positions, advocated with the utmost confidence by the learned prelate, are sure to be received with implicit confidence by a wide circle of readers; and i have felt impelled here openly to protest against them, inasmuch as i am satisfied that they cannot be accepted without overturning all the legitimate landmarks of historical criticism. i freely acknowledge the eminent services which dr. lightfoot has rendered to the christian church by his labours as a commentator on scripture, and it is therefore all the more important that the serious errors of a writer so distinguished should not be permitted to pass unchallenged. all who love the faith once delivered to the saints, may be expected to regard with deference the letters of a martyr who lived on the borders of the apostolic age; but these ignatian epistles betray indications of a very different original, for they reveal a spirit of which no enlightened christian can approve, and promulgate principles which would sanction the boldest assumptions of ecclesiastical despotism. in a work published by me many years ago, i have pointed out the marks of their imposture; and i have since seen no cause to change my views. regarding all these letters as forgeries from beginning to end, i have endeavoured, in the following pages, to expose the fallacy of the arguments by which dr. lightfoot has attempted their vindication. assembly college, belfast, july . contents. chapter i. preliminary observations. the critical spirit stimulated by the reformation--the ignatian epistles as regarded by calvin, ussher, vossius, daillé, pearson, wake, and cureton--dr. lightfoot as a scholar and a commentator--the valuable information supplied in his recent work--his estimate of the parties who have pronounced judgment on the question of the ignatian epistles--his verdict unfair--his introduction of lucian as a witness in his favour--the story of peregrinus--dr. lightfoot's cardinal mistake in his treatment of this question. chapter ii. the testimony of polycarp to the ignatian epistles examined. dr. lightfoot makes a most unguarded statement as to the ignatian epistles--the letter of polycarp better authenticated--the date assigned for the martyrdom of ignatius--the date of polycarp's epistle--written in the reign of marcus aurelius--not written in the reign of trajan--the epistle of polycarp has no reference to ignatius of antioch--it refers to another ignatius of another age and country--it was written at a time of persecution--the postscript to the letter of polycarp quite misunderstood--what is meant by letters being carried to syria--psyria and syria, two islands in the aegaean sea--the errors of transcribers of the postscript--the true meaning of the postscript--what has led to the mistake as to the claims of the ignatian epistles--the continued popularity of these epistles among high churchmen. chapter iii. the date of the martyrdom of polycarp. dr. lightfoot's strange reasoning on this subject--the testimony of eusebius, jerome, and others--eusebius and jerome highly competent witnesses--dr. döllinger's estimate of jerome--the basis on which dr. lightfoot rests the whole weight of his chronological argument--aristides and his _sacred discourses_--statius quadratus, the consuls and proconsuls--ummidius quadratus--polycarp martyred in the reign of marcus aurelius--his visit to rome in the time of anicetus--put to death when there was only one emperor--age of polycarp at the time of his martyrdom--the importance of the chronological argument. chapter iv. the testimony of irenaeus and the genesis of prelacy. the testimony of irenaeus quite misunderstood--refers to the dying words of one of the martyrs of lyons--the internal evidence against the genuineness of the ignatian epistles--the contrast between the epistle of polycarp and the ignatian epistles as exhibited by dr. lightfoot himself--additional points of contrast--dr. lightfoot quite mistaken as to the origin of prelacy--it did not originate in the east, or asia minor, but in rome--the argument from the cases of timothy and titus untenable--jerome's account of the origin of prelacy--james not the first bishop of jerusalem--in the early part of the second century the churches of rome, corinth, and smyrna were presbyterian--irenaeus conceals the origin of prelacy--coins the doctrine of the apostolical succession--the succession cannot be determined even in rome--testimony of stillingfleet--in what sense polycarp may have been constituted a bishop by the apostles. chapter v. the forgery of the ignatian epistles. we have no positive historical information as to the origin of the ignatian epistles--first saw the light in the early part of the third century--such forgeries then common--what was then thought by many as to pious frauds--callistus of rome probably concerned in the fabrication of the ignatian epistles--his remarkable history--the epistle to the romans first forged--it embodies the credentials of the rest--montanism stimulated the desire for martyrdom--the prevalence of this mania early in the third century--the ignatian epistles present it in its most outrageous form--the epistle to the romans must have been very popular at rome--doubtful whether ignatius was martyred at rome--the ignatian epistles intended to advance the claims of prelacy--well fitted to do so at the time of their appearance--the account of callistus given by hippolytus--the ignatian letters point to callistus as their author--cannot have been written in the beginning of the second century--their doctrine that of the papacy. appendix i.--letter of dr. cureton. ii.--the ignatian epistle to the romans. endnotes the ignatian epistles entirely spurious. chapter i. preliminary observations. the question of the genuineness of the epistles attributed to ignatius of antioch has continued to awaken interest ever since the period of the reformation. that great religious revolution gave an immense impetus to the critical spirit; and when brought under the light of its examination, not a few documents, the claims of which had long passed unchallenged, were summarily pronounced spurious. eusebius, writing in the fourth century, names only seven letters as attributed to ignatius; but long before the days of luther, more than double that number were in circulation. many of these were speedily condemned by the critics of the sixteenth century. even the seven recognised by eusebius were regarded with grave suspicion; and calvin--who then stood at the head of protestant theologians--did not hesitate to denounce the whole of them as forgeries. the work, long employed as a text-book in cambridge and oxford, was the _institutes_ of the reformer of geneva; [endnote : ] and as his views on this subject are there proclaimed very emphatically, [ : ] we may presume that the entire body of the ignatian literature was at that time viewed with distrust by the leaders of thought in the english universities. but when the doctrine of the divine right of episcopacy began to be promulgated, the seven letters rose in the estimation of the advocates of the hierarchy; and an extreme desire was manifested to establish their pretensions. so great was the importance attached to their evidence, that in --in the very midst of the din and confusion of the civil war between charles i. and his parliament--the pious and erudite archbishop ussher presented the literary world with a new edition of these memorials. two years later the renowned isaac vossius produced a kindred publication. some time afterwards, daillé, a learned french protestant minister, attacked them with great ability; and proved, to the satisfaction of many readers, that they are utterly unworthy of credit. pearson, subsequently bishop of chester, now entered the arena, and in a work of much talent and research--the fruit of six years' labour--attempted to restore their reputation. this vindication was not permitted to pass without an answer; but, meanwhile, the dark prospects of the reformed faith in england and the continent directed attention to matters of more absorbing interest, and the controversy was discontinued. from time to time, however, these epistles were kept before the eyes of the public by archbishop wake and other editors; and more recently the appearance of a syriac copy of three of them--printed under the supervision of the late rev. dr. cureton--reopened the discussion. dr. cureton maintained that his three epistles are the only genuine remains of the pastor of antioch. in a still later publication, [ : ] bishop lightfoot controverts the views of dr. cureton, and makes a vigorous effort to uphold the credit of the seven letters quoted by eusebius and supported by pearson. dr. lightfoot has already acquired a high and deserved reputation as a scholar and a commentator, and the present work furnishes abundant evidence of his linguistic attainments and his perseverance; but it is somewhat doubtful whether it will add to his fame as a critic and a theologian. in these three portly octavo volumes--extending to upwards of pages of closely printed matter--he tries to convince his readers that a number of the silliest productions to be found among the records of antiquity, are the remains of an apostolic father. he tells us, in his preface, that the subject has been before him "for nearly thirty years;" and that, during this period, it has "engaged his attention off and on in the intervals of other literary pursuits and official duties." many, we apprehend, will feel that the result is not equal to such a vast expenditure of time and labour; and will concur with friends who, as he informs us, have complained to him that he has thus "allowed himself to be diverted from the more congenial task of commenting on s. paul's epistles." there is not, we presume, an evangelical minister in christendom who would not protest against the folly exhibited in these ignatian letters; and yet it appears that the good bishop of durham has spent a large portion of his life in an attempt to accomplish their vindication. to dr. lightfoot may be justly awarded the praise of having here made the reading public acquainted with the various manuscripts and versions of these ignatian letters, as well as with the arguments which may be urged in their favour; and he has thus rendered good service to the cause of historical criticism. professor harnack, in a late number of the _expositor_ [ : ], states no more than the truth when he affirms that "this work is the most learned and careful patristic monograph which has appeared in the nineteenth century." to any one who wishes to study the ignatian controversy, it supplies a large amount of valuable evidence, not otherwise easily accessible. some, indeed, may think that, without any detriment to ecclesiastical literature, some of the matter which has helped to swell the dimensions of these volumes might have been omitted. everything in any way associated with the name of ignatius seems to have a wonderful fascination for the learned prelate. not content with publishing and commending what he considers the genuine productions of the apostolic father, he here edits and annotates letters which have long since been discredited by scholars of all classes, and which he himself confesses to be apocryphal. the _acts of martyrdom of ignatius_--which he also acknowledges to be a mere bundle of fables--he treats with the same tender regard. nor is this all. he gives these acts, or large portions of them, in latin and greek, as well as in coptic and syriac; and annotates them in addition. he supplies, likewise, english translations. it may be argued, that the publication of such a mass of legendary rubbish is necessary to enable the student to form a correct judgment on the merits of the subject in debate; but surely the question might be settled without the aid of some of these auxiliaries. dr. lightfoot has long been known as one of the most candid and painstaking of scriptural commentators; but it must always be remembered that he is an episcopalian, and the ruler of an english diocese. he would be something almost more than human, were he to hold up the scales of testimony with strict impartiality when weighing the claims of his own order. it strikes us that, in the work before us, his prejudices and predilections reveal their influence more conspicuously than in any of his other publications. he can see support for his views in words and phrases where an ordinary observer can discover nothing of the kind; and he can close his eyes against evidence which others may deem very satisfactory. even when appraising the writers who have taken part in this controversy, he has presented a very one-sided estimate. he speaks of those who reject the claims of these epistles as forming "a considerable list of _second and third rate_ names;" [ : ] and he mentions ussher and bentley among those who espouse his sentiments. according to our author, there cannot be a "shadow of doubt" that the seven vossian epistles "represent the genuine ignatius." [ : ] "no christian writings of the second century," says he, "and very few writings of antiquity, whether christian or pagan, are so well authenticated." [ : ] he surely cannot imagine that ussher would have endorsed such statements; for he knows well that the primate of armagh condemned the epistle to polycarp as a forgery. he has still less reason to claim bentley as on his side. on authority which bishop monk, the biographer of bentley, deemed well worthy of acceptance, it is stated that in , "on occasion of a divinity act," the master of trinity college, cambridge, "made a speech _condemning_ the epistles of s. ignatius." his address created a "great ferment" in the university. [ : ] it is further reported that bentley "refused to hear the respondent who attempted to reply." we might have expected such a deliverance from the prince of british critics; for, with the intuition of genius, he saw the absurdity of recognising these productions as proceeding from a christian minister who had been carefully instructed by the apostles. bentley's refusal to hear the respondent who attempted to reply to him, was exactly in keeping with his well-known dictatorial temper. does dr. lightfoot bring forward any evidence to contradict this piece of collegiate history? none whatever. he merely treats us to a few of his own _conjectures_, which simply prove his anxiety to depreciate its significance. and yet he ventures to parade the name of bentley among those of the scholars who contend for the genuineness of these letters! he deals after the same fashion with the celebrated porson. in a letter to the author of this review [ : ], dr. cureton states that porson "rejected" these letters "in the form in which they were put forth by ussher and vossius;" and declares that this piece of information was conveyed to himself by no less competent an authority than bishop kaye. dr. lightfoot meets this evidence by saying that "the _obiter dictum_ even of a porson," in the circumstances in which it was given, might be "of little value." [ : ] it was given, however, exactly in the circumstances in which the speaker was best prepared to deliver a sound verdict, for it was pronounced after the great critic had read the _vindiciae_ of pearson. it would be hopeless to attempt to settle a disputed question of criticism by enumerating authorities on different sides, as, after all, the value of these authorities would be variously discounted. we must seek to arrive at truth, not by quoting names, but by weighing arguments. not a few, however, whose opinion may be entitled to some respect, will not be prepared to agree with bishop lightfoot when he affirms that those who reject these ignatian letters are, with few exceptions, only to be found in the "list of second and third rate names" in literature. [ : ] we have seen that bentley and porson disagree with him--and he can point to no more eminent critics in the whole range of modern scholarship. if daillé must be placed in the second rank, surely pearson may well be relegated to the same position; for there is most respectable proof that his _vindiciae_, in reply to the treatise of the french divine, was pronounced by porson to be a "very unsatisfactory" performance. [ : ] "the most elaborate and ingenious portion of the work" is, as bishop lightfoot himself confesses, "the least satisfactory." [ : ] dr. lightfoot, we believe, will hardly pretend to say that vossius, bull, and waterland stand higher in the literary world than salmasius, john milton, and augustus neander; and he will greatly astonish those who are acquainted with the history and writings of one of the fathers of the reformation, if he will contend that john calvin must be placed only in the second or third class of protestant theologians. in the presence of the great doctor of geneva, hammond, grotius, zahn, and others whom dr. lightfoot has named as his supporters, may well hide their diminished heads. in the work before us the bishop of durham has pretty closely followed pearson, quoting his explanations and repeating his arguments. some of these are sufficiently nebulous. professor harnack--who has already reviewed his pages in the _expositor_, and who, to a great extent, adheres to the views which they propound--admits, notwithstanding, that he has "overstrained" his case, and has adduced as witnesses writers of the second and third centuries of whom it is impossible to prove that they knew anything of the letters attributed to ignatius. [ : ] as a specimen of the depositions which dr. lightfoot has pressed into his service, we may refer to the case of lucian. that author wrote about sixty years after the alleged date of the martyrdom of ignatius, and his lordship imagines that in one of his works he can trace allusions to the pastor of antioch under the fictitious name of peregrinus. "writing," says he "soon after a.d. ," lucian "caricatures the progress of ignatius through asia minor in his death of peregrinus." [ : ] this peregrinus was certainly an odd character. early in life he had murdered his own father, and for this he was obliged to make his escape from his country. wandering about from place to place, he identified himself with the christians, gained their confidence, and became, as is alleged, a distinguished member of their community. his zeal in their cause soon exposed him to persecution, and he was thrown into prison. his incarceration added greatly to his fame. his co-religionists, including women and children, were seen from morning to night lingering about the place of his confinement; he was abundantly supplied with food; and the large sums of money, given to him as presents, provided him with an ample revenue. after his release he forfeited the favour of his christian friends, and became a cynic philosopher; but he could not be at peace. he at length resolved to immortalize himself by voluntary martyrdom. meanwhile he despatched letters to many famous cities, containing laws and ordinances; and appointed certain of his companions--under the name of death-messengers--to scatter abroad these missives. finally, at the close of the olympian games he erected a funeral pile; and when it was all ablaze, he threw himself into it, and perished in the flames. "there is very strong reason for believing" says dr. lightfoot, "that lucian has drawn his picture, at least in part, from the known circumstances of ignatius' history." [ : ] the bishop returns again and again to the parallelism between ignatius and peregrinus, and appears to think it furnishes an argument of singular potency in favour of the disputed epistles. "second only," says he, to certain other vouchers, which he produces, "stands this testimony." [ : ] from such a sample the judicious reader may form some idea of the conclusiveness of the bishop's reasoning. peregrinus begins life as a parricide, and dies like a madman; and yet we are asked to believe that lucian has thus sketched the history of an apostolic father! when lucian wrote, ignatius had been dead about sixty years; but the pagan satirist sought to amuse the public by sketching the career of an individual whom he had himself heard and seen, [ : ] and who must have been well known to many of his readers. about the middle of the second century the church was sorely troubled by false teachers, especially of the gnostic type; and it may have been that some adventurer, of popular gifts and professing great zeal in the christian cause, contrived to gather around him a number of deluded followers, who, for a time, adhered to him with wonderful enthusiasm. it may be that it is this charlatan to whom lucian points, and whose history he perhaps exaggerates. but there is nothing in the life of peregrinus which can fairly be recognised even as a caricature of the career of one of the most distinguished of the early christian martyrs. were we to maintain that the pagan satirist was referring to the apostle john, we might be able to show almost as many points of resemblance. the beloved disciple travelled about through various countries; acquired a high reputation among the christians; was imprisoned in the isle of patmos; wrote letters to the seven churches of asia; and was visited in his place of exile by angels or messengers, who probably did not repair to him empty-handed. john died only a few years before ignatius, and was connected with the same quarter of the globe. we have, however, never yet heard that lucian was suspected of alluding to the author of the apocalypse. if bishop lightfoot thinks that he can convince sensible men of the genuineness of the ignatian epistles by bringing forward such witnesses as lucian and his hero peregrinus, we believe he is very much mistaken. the argument is not original, for it is pressed with great confidence by his predecessor pearson, and by others more recently. but its weakness is transparent. professor harnack, whilst admitting the weight of much of the evidence adduced in these volumes, scornfully refuses to acknowledge its relevancy. "above all," says he, "lucian should be struck out. i confess i cannot imagine how writers go on citing lucian as a witness for the epistles." [ : ] there is, however, an old adage, "any port in a storm:" and before the close of this discussion it may perhaps be found that lucian is as good a harbour of refuge as can be furnished for the credit of the ignatian epistles in the whole of the second century. it is obvious that, even according to his own account of the history of his present work, dr. lightfoot has not entered on its preparation under circumstances likely to result in a safe and unprejudiced verdict. "_i never once doubted_," says he in the preface, [ : ] "that we possessed in one form or another the genuine letters of ignatius." this is, however, the very first point to be proved; and the bishop has been labouring throughout to make good a foregone conclusion. no wonder that the result should be unsatisfactory. if he has built on a false foundation, nothing else could be expected. there is not, we are satisfied, a particle of solid evidence to show that ignatius of antioch left behind him any writings whatever. this may be deemed a very bold statement, but it is deliberately advanced. i hope, in a subsequent chapter, to demonstrate that it is not made without due consideration. chapter ii. the testimony of polycarp to the ignatian epistles examined. the bishop of durham affirms, in a passage already quoted, that "no christian writings of the second century, and very few writings of antiquity, whether christian or pagan, are so _well authenticated_" as the epistles attributed to ignatius. this assuredly is an astounding announcement, made deliberately by a distinguished author, whose attention, for nearly thirty years, has been directed to the subject. the letter of polycarp to the philippians is a writing of the second century, and it is by far the most important witness in support of the ignatian letters; but we must infer, from the words just quoted, that it is not "so well authenticated" as they are. it is difficult to understand by what process of logic his lordship has arrived at this conclusion. in an ordinary court of law, the witness who deposes to character is expected to stand on at least as high a moral platform in public estimation as the individual in whose favour he bears testimony; but if the letter of polycarp is not "so well authenticated" as these ignatian letters, how can it be brought forward to establish their reputation? nor is this the only perplexing circumstance connected with this discussion. there was a time when, according to his own statement in the present work, dr. lightfoot "accepted the curetonian letters as representing the genuine ignatius;" [ : ] and, of course, when he regarded as forgeries the four others which he now acknowledges. in the volumes before us, as if to make compensation for the unfavourable opinion which he once cherished, he advances the whole seven of the larger edition to a position of especial honour. the letter of polycarp, the works of justin martyr, the treatise of irenaeus _against heresies_, and other writings of the second century, have long sustained an honest character; but now they must all take rank below the ignatian epistles. according to the bishop of durham, they are not "so well authenticated." in his eagerness to exalt the credit of these ignatian letters, dr. lightfoot, in his present publication, has obviously expressed himself most incautiously. in point of fact, the letter of polycarp, as a genuine production of the second century, occupies an incomparably higher position than the ignatian epistles. the internal evidence in its favour is most satisfactory. it is exactly such a piece of correspondence as we might expect from a pious and sensible christian minister, well acquainted with the scriptures, and living on the confines of the apostolic age. it has, besides, all the external confirmation we could desire. irenaeus, who was personally well known to the author, and who has left behind him the treatise _against heresies_ already mentioned, speaks therein of this letter in terms of high approval. "there is," says he, "a very sufficient epistle of polycarp written to the philippians, from which those who desire it, and who care for their own salvation, can learn both the character of his faith and the message of the truth." [ : ] could such a voucher as this be produced for the epistles ascribed to ignatius, and were the external evidence equally satisfactory, it would be absurd to doubt their genuineness. but whilst the internal evidence testifies against them, they are not noticed by any writer for considerably more than a century after they are said to have appeared. the date commonly assigned for the martyrdom of ignatius, and consequently for the writing of the letters ascribed to him, is the ninth year of trajan, corresponding to a.d. . this date, dr. lightfoot tells us, is "the one fixed element in the common tradition." [ : ] it is to be found in the _chronicon paschale_, and in the antiochene and the roman "acts," as well as elsewhere. [ : ] this same date is assigned by the advocates of the ignatian epistles for the writing of polycarp's letter. "only a few months at the outside," says dr. lightfoot, "probably only a few weeks, after these ignatian epistles purport to have been written, the bishop of smyrna himself addresses a letter to the philippians." [ : ] in due course it will be shown that polycarp was at this time only about four-and-twenty years of age; and any intelligent reader who pursues his epistle can judge for himself whether it can be reasonably accepted as the production of so very youthful an author. it appears that it was dictated in answer to a communication from the church at philippi, in which he was requested to interpose his influence with a view to the settlement of some grave scandals which disturbed that ancient christian community. is it likely that a minister of so little experience would have been invited to undertake such a service? the communication is rather such an outpouring of friendly counsel as befitted an aged patriarch. in a fatherly style he here addresses himself to wives and widows, to young men and maidens, to parents and children, to deacons and presbyters. [ : ] there are other indications in this letter that it cannot have been written at the date ascribed to it by the advocates of the ignatian epistles. it contains an admonition to "pray for _kings_ (or _the_ kings), _authorities_, and _princes_." [ : ] we are not at liberty to assume that these three names are precisely synonymous. by kings, or _the_ kings, we may apparently understand the imperial rulers; by authorities, consuls, proconsuls, praetors, and other magistrates; and by princes, those petty sovereigns and others of royal rank to be found here and there throughout the roman dominions. [ : ] dr. lightfoot, indeed, argues that the translation adopted by some--"_the_ kings"--is inadmissible, as, according to his ideas, "we have very good ground for believing that the definite article had no place in the original." [ : ] he has, however, assigned no adequate reason why the article may not be prefixed. his contention, that the expression "pray for kings" has not "anything more than a general reference," [ : ] cannot be well maintained. in a case such as this, we must be, to a great extent, guided in our interpretation by the context; and if so, we may fairly admit the article, for immediately afterwards polycarp exhorts the philippians to pray for their persecutors and their enemies,--an admonition which obviously has something more than "a general reference." such an advice would be inappropriate when persecution was asleep, and when no enemy was giving disturbance. but, at the date when ignatius is alleged to have been martyred, polycarp could not have exhorted the philippians to pray for "the kings," as there was then only _one_ sovereign ruling over the empire. that this letter of polycarp to the philippians was written at a time when persecution was rife, is apparent from its tenor throughout. if we except the case of ignatius of antioch--many of the tales relating to which dr. lightfoot himself rejects as fabulous [ : ]--we have no evidence that in a.d. the christians were treated with severity. the roman world was then under the mild government of trajan, and the troubles which afflicted the disciples in bithynia, under pliny, had not yet commenced. the emperor, so far as we have trustworthy information, had hitherto in no way interfered with the infant church. but in a.d. two sovereigns were in power, and a reign of terror was inaugurated. we can therefore well understand why polycarp, after exhorting his correspondents to pray for "the kings," immediately follows up this advice by urging them to pray for their persecutors and their enemies. if by "kings" we here understand emperors, as distinguished from "princes" or inferior potentates, it must be obvious that polycarp here refers to the two reigning sovereigns. it so happened that, when two kings began to reign, persecution at once commenced; and the language of the epistle exactly befits such a crisis. the whole strain of this letter points, not to the reign of trajan, but to that of marcus aurelius. polycarp exhorts the philippians "to practise all endurance" (§ ) in the service of christ. "if," says he, "we should suffer for his name's sake, let us glorify him" (§ ). he speaks of men "encircled in saintly bonds;" (§ ) and praises the philippians for the courage which they had manifested in sympathizing with these confessors. he reminds them how, "with their own eyes," they had seen their sufferings (§ ). all these statements suggest times of tribulation. a careful examination of this letter may convince us that it contains no reference to the epistles attributed to ignatius of antioch. of the seven letters mentioned by eusebius, four are said to have been written from _smyrna_ and three from _troas_. but the letters of which polycarp speaks were written from neither of these places, but from _philippi_. in the letters attributed to ignatius of antioch, the martyr describes himself as a solitary sufferer, hurried along by ten rough soldiers from city to city on his way to rome; in the letter of polycarp to the philippians, ignatius is only one among a crowd of victims, of whose ultimate destination the writer was ignorant. a considerable time after the party had left philippi, polycarp begs the brethren there to tell him what had become of them. "concerning ignatius himself, and those _who are with him_, if," says he, "ye have any sure tidings, certify us." [ : ] in the ignatian epistle addressed to polycarp, he is directed to "write to the churches," to "call together a godly council," and "to elect" a messenger to be sent to syria (§ ). polycarp, in his letter to the philippians, takes no notice of these instructions. he had obviously never heard of them. it is indeed plain that the letter of the philippians to polycarp had only a partial reference to the case of ignatius and his companions. it was largely occupied with other matters; and to these polycarp addresses himself in his reply. the simple solution of all these difficulties is to be found in the fact that the ignatius mentioned by polycarp was a totally different person from the pastor of antioch. he lived in another age and in another country. ignatius or egnatius--for the name is thus variously written--was not a very rare designation; [ : ] and in the neighbourhood of philippi it seems to have been common. the famous _egnatian_ road, [ : ] which passed through the place, probably derived its title originally from some distinguished member of the family. we learn from the letter of polycarp that _his_ ignatius was a man of philippi. addressing his brethren there, he says, "i exhort you all, therefore, to be obedient unto the word of righteousness, and to practise all endurance, which also ye saw with your own eyes in the blessed ignatius, and zosimus, and rufus, and in others also among yourselves" (sec. ). these words surely mean that the individuals here named were men of philippi. it is admitted that two of them, viz. zosimus and rufus, answered to this description; and in the latin martyrologies, as dr. lightfoot himself acknowledges, [ : ] they are said to have been natives of the town. it will require the introduction of some novel canon of criticism to enable us to avoid the conclusion that ignatius, their companion, is not to be classed in the same category. it is well known that when marcus aurelius became emperor he inaugurated a new system of persecution. instead of at once consigning to death those who boldly made a profession of christianity, as had heretofore been customary in times of trial, he employed various expedients to extort from them a recantation. he threw them into confinement, bound them with chains, kept them in lingering suspense, and subjected them to sufferings of different kinds, in the hope of overcoming their constancy. it would seem that ignatius, zosimus, rufus, and their companions were dealt with after this fashion. they were made prisoners, put in bonds, plied with torture under the eyes of the philippians, and taken away from the city, they knew not whither. it may be that they were removed to thessalonica, the residence of the roman governor, that they might be immured in a dungeon, to await there the imperial pleasure. it is pretty clear that they did not expect instant execution. when polycarp wrote, he speaks of them as still living; and he is anxious to know what may yet betide them. let us now call attention to another passage in this letter of polycarp to the philippians. towards its close the following sentence appears somewhat in the form of a postscript. "ye wrote to me, both ye yourselves and ignatius, asking that if any one should go to syria, he _might_ carry thither the letters _from you_." we have here the reading, and translation adopted by dr. lightfoot; but it so happens that there is another reading perhaps, on the whole, quite as well supported by the authority of versions and manuscripts. it may be thus rendered: "ye wrote to me, both ye yourselves and ignatius, suggesting that if any one is going to syria, he might carry thither _my letters to you_." [ : ] the sentence, as interpreted by the advocates of the ignatian epistles, wears a strange and suspicious aspect. if ignatius and the philippians wished their letters to be carried to _antioch_, why did they not say so? syria was an extensive province,--much larger than all ireland,--and many a traveller might have been going there who would have found it quite impracticable to deliver letters in its metropolis. when there was no penny postage, and when letters of friendship were often carried by private hands, if an individual residing in the north or south of the emerald isle had requested a correspondent in bristol to send his letters by "any one" going over to ireland, it would not have been extraordinary if the englishman had received the message with amazement. could "any one" passing over to ireland be expected to deliver letters in cork or londonderry? there were many places of note in syria far distant from antioch; and it was preposterous to propose that "any one" travelling to that province should carry letters to its capital city. no one can pretend to say that the whole, or even any considerable part of syria, was under the ecclesiastical supervision of ignatius; for, long after this period, the jurisdiction of a bishop did not extend beyond the walls of the town in which he dwelt. if ignatius meant to have his letters taken to _antioch_, why vaguely say that they were to be carried to syria? [ : ] why not distinctly name the place of their destination? it had long been the scene of his pastoral labours; and it might have been expected that its very designation would have been repeated by him with peculiar interest. no good reason can be given why he should speak of syria, and not of antioch, as the place to which his letters were to be transmitted. nor is this the only perplexing circumstance associated with the request mentioned in the postscript to this letter. if the philippians, or ignatius, had sent letters to polycarp addressed to the church of antioch, was it necessary for them to say to him that they should be forwarded? would not his own common sense have directed him what to do? he was not surely such a dotard that he required to be told how to dispose of these epistles. if we are to be guided by the statements in the ignatian epistles, we must infer that the letters to be sent to antioch were to be forwarded with the utmost expedition. a council was to be called forthwith, and by it a messenger "fit to bear the name of god's courier" [ : ] was to be chosen to carry them to the syrian metropolis. there are no such signs of haste or urgency indicated in the postscript to polycarp's epistle. the letters of which he speaks could afford to wait until some one happened to be travelling to syria; and then, it is suggested, he _might_ take them along with him. if we adopt the reading to be found in the latin version, and which, from internal evidence, we may judge to be a true rendering of the original, we are, according to the interpretation which must be given to it by the advocates of the ignatian epistles, involved in hopeless bewilderment. if by syria we understand the eastern province, what possibly can be the meaning of the words addressed by polycarp to the philippians, "if any one is going to syria, he might _carry thither my letters to you_"? [ : ] any one passing from smyrna to philippi turns his face to the north-west, but a traveller from smyrna to syria proceeds south-east, or in the exactly opposite direction. how could polycarp hope to keep up a correspondence with his brethren of philippi, if he sent his letters to the distant east by any one who might be going there? it is pretty evident that the latin version has preserved the true original of this postscript, and that the current reading, adopted by dr. lightfoot and others, must be traced to the misapprehensions of transcribers. puzzled by the statement that letters from polycarp to the philippians were to be sent to syria, they have tried to correct the text by changing [greek: par haemon] into [greek: par humon]--implying that the letters were to be transmitted, not from polycarp to the philippians, but from the philippians to antioch. a very simple explanation may, however, remove this whole difficulty. if by syria we understand, not the great eastern province so called, but a little island of similar name in the aegaean sea, the real bearing of the request is at once apparent. psyria [ : ]--in the course of time contracted into psyra--lies a few miles west of chios, [ : ] and is almost directly on the way between smyrna and neapolis, the port-town of philippi. a letter from smyrna left there would be carried a considerable distance on its journey to philippi. some friendly hand might convey it from thence to its destination. psyria and syria are words so akin in sound that a transcriber of polycarp's letter, copying from dictation, might readily mistake the one for the other; and thus an error creeping into an early manuscript may have led to all this perplexity. letters in those days could commonly be sent only by special messengers, or friends traveling abroad; and the philippians had made a suggestion to polycarp as to the best mode of keeping up their correspondence. they had probably some co-religionists in psyria; and a letter sent there to one or other of them, could, at the earliest opportunity, be forwarded. but another explanation, perhaps quite as worthy of acceptance, may solve this mystery. syria was the ancient name of another island in the aegaean sea, and one of the cyclades. though it is not so much as psyria in the direct course between smyrna and philippi, it is a place of greater celebrity and of more commercial importance. like psyria, in the course of ages its name has been contracted, and it is now known as syra. between it and smyrna there has been much intercourse from time immemorial. it has been famous since the days of homer, [ : ] and it was anciently the seat of a bishop, [ : ]--an evidence that it must soon have had a christian population. it is at the present day the centre of an active trade; and a late distinguished traveller has told us how, not many years ago, in an afternoon, he and his party "left syra, and next morning anchored in front of the town of smyrna." [ : ] syria is not, as has been intimated, in the direct route to philippi; but the shortest way is not always either the best or the most convenient. at present this place is the principal port of the greek archipelago; [ : ] and probably, in the days of polycarp, vessels were continually leaving its harbour for towns on the opposite coasts of the aegaean. a christian merchant resident in syria would thus have facilities for sending letters left with him either to smyrna or philippi. ignatius or his friends may have heard of an offer from such a quarter to take charge of their correspondence, and may have accordingly made the suggestion noticed at the close of polycarp's letter. as the island of syria was well known to them all, the smyrnaeans could not have misunderstood the intimation. this explanation throws light on another part of this postscript which has long been embarrassing to many readers. after adverting to the request of ignatius and the philippians relative to the conveyance of the letters, polycarp adds, "which request i will attend to if i get a fit opportunity, either personally, or by one whom i shall depute to act likewise on your behalf." [ : ] according to the current interpretation, polycarp here suggests the probability of a personal visit to the eastern capital, if he could find no one else to undertake the service. the occasion evidently called for no such piece of self-sacrifice on the part of this apostolic father. the church of antioch, after the removal of its pastor ignatius, was, we are assured, delivered from farther trouble, and was now at peace. [ : ] the presence of the minister of smyrna there was utterly unnecessary; [ : ] the place was very far distant; and why then should he be called on to undertake a wearisome and expensive journey to antioch and back again? polycarp admits that his visit was not essential, and that a messenger might do all that was required quite as well. but if by syria we understand one of the sporades or cyclades, we are furnished with a ready solution of this enigma. the little island of psyria was distant from smyrna only a few hours' sail; and as it was perhaps the residence of some of his co-religionists, polycarp might soon require to repair to it in the discharge of his ecclesiastical duties. he could then take along with him, so far, the letters intended for philippi. or if by syria we here understand the little island anciently so called, near the centre of the cyclades, the explanation is equally satisfactory. the letter of polycarp was written, not as dr. lightfoot contends, in a.d. but, as we have seen, about a.d. , when, as the whole strain of the epistle indicates, he was far advanced in life. there is reason to believe that about this very juncture he was contemplating a journey to rome, that he might have a personal conference with its chief pastor, anicetus. his appearance in the seat of empire on that occasion created a great sensation, and seems to have produced very important results. if he now went there, any one who looks at the map may see that he must pass syria on the way. he could thus take the opportunity of leaving there any letters for philippi of which he might be the bearer. at a subsequent stage of our discussion, this visit of polycarp to rome must again occupy our attention. the facts brought under the notice of the reader in this chapter may help him to understand how it has happened that so many have been befooled by the claims of these ignatian epistles. a mistake as to two of the names mentioned in the letter of polycarp, created, as will subsequently appear, by the crafty contrivance of a manufacturer of spurious documents, has led to a vast amount of blundering and misapprehension. ignatius, a man of philippi, has been supposed to be ignatius, the pastor of antioch; and syria, the eastern province of the roman empire, has been confounded with psyria or syria--either of these names representing an island in the aegean sea not far from smyrna. ignatius, the confessor of philippi, when in bonds wrote, as we find, a number of letters which were deemed worthy of preservation, but which have long since perished; and some time afterwards an adroit forger, with a view to the advancement of a favourite ecclesiastical system, concocted a series of letters which he fathered upon ignatius of antioch. in an uncritical age the cheat succeeded; the letters were quite to the taste of many readers; and ever since they have been the delight of high churchmen. popes and protestant prelates alike have perused them with devout enthusiasm; and no wonder that archbishop laud, bishop jeremy taylor, bishop hall, and archbishop wake, have quoted ignatius with applause. the letters ascribed to him are the title-deeds of their order. even the worthy bishop of durham, who has never permitted himself to doubt that we possess in some form the letters of the pastor of antioch, has been the victim of his own credulity; and has been striving "off and on" for "nearly thirty years" to establish the credit of epistles which teach, in the most barefaced language the gospel of sacerdotal pretension and passive obedience. chapter iii. the date of the martyrdom of polycarp. to many it may appear that there can be no connection between the date of the martyrdom of polycarp and the claims of the ignatian epistles. all conversant with the history of this controversy must, however, be aware that the question of chronology has entered largely into the discussion. if we defer to the authority of the earliest and best witnesses to whom we can appeal for guidance, it is impossible to remove the cloud of suspicion which at once settles down on these letters. their advocates are aware of the chronological objection, and they have accordingly expended immense pains in trying to prove that eusebius, jerome, and other writers of the highest repute have been mistaken. in his recent work, the bishop of durham has exhausted the resources of his ability and erudition in attempting to demonstrate that the only parties from whom we can fairly expect anything like evidence have all been misinformed. he has secured a verdict in his favour from a number of reviewers, who have apparently at once given way before the formidable array of learned lore brought together in these volumes; [ : ] but, withal, the intelligent reader who cautiously peruses and ponders the elaborate chapter in which he deals with this question, will feel rather mystified than enlightened by his argumentation. it may therefore be proper to state the testimony of the ancient christian writers, and to describe the line of reasoning pursued by dr. lightfoot. "the main source of opinion," says the bishop, "respecting the year of polycarp's death, among ancient and modern writers alike, has been the _chronicon_ of eusebius ... after the seventh year of m. aurelius, he appends the notice, 'a persecution overtaking the church, polycarp underwent martyrdom.' ... eusebius is here assumed to date polycarp's martyrdom in the seventh year of m. aurelius, _i.e._ a.d. ." [ : ] dr. lightfoot then proceeds to observe that "this inference is unwarrantable," inasmuch as "the notice is not placed opposite to, but _after this year_." he adds that it "is associated with the persecutions in vienne and lyons, which we know to have happened a.d. ." [ : ] so far the statement of the bishop is unobjectionable, and, according to his own showing, we might conclude that polycarp suffered some time after the seventh year of m. aurelius. but this plain logical deduction would be totally ruinous to the system of chronology which he advocates; and he is obliged to resort to a most outlandish assumption that he may get over the difficulty. he contends that eusebius did not know at what precise period these martyrdoms occurred. "we can," says the bishop, "only infer with safety that eusebius _supposed_ polycarp's martyrdom to have happened _during the reign_ of m. aurelius." "as a matter of fact, the gallican persecutions took place some ten years later [than a.d. ], and therefore, so far as this notice goes, the martyrdom of polycarp might have taken place _as many years earlier_." [ : ] these extracts may give the reader some idea of the manner in which dr. lightfoot proceeds to build up his chronological edifice. eusebius places the martyrdom of polycarp and the martyrdoms of vienne and lyons after the seventh year of m. aurelius; and therefore, argues dr. lightfoot, he did not know when they occurred! because the martyrdoms of vienne and lyons took place ten years after a.d. , therefore the martyrdom at smyrna may, for anything that the father of ecclesiastical history could tell, have been consummated in a.d. ! dr. lightfoot himself supplies proof that such an inference is inadmissible; for he acknowledges that, according to eusebius, the pastor of smyrna finished his career in the reign of m. aurelius. but, in a.d. , m. aurelius was not emperor. such are the contradictions to which this writer commits himself in attempting to change the times and the seasons. it is quite clear that eusebius laboured under no such uncertainty, as dr. lightfoot would fondly persuade himself, relative to the date of the martyrdom of polycarp. he directs attention to the subject in his _history_ as well as in his _chronicon_, and in both his testimony is to the same effect. in both it is alleged that polycarp was martyred in the reign of marcus aurelius. it must be remembered, too, that eusebius was born only about a century after the event; that from his youth he had devoted himself to ecclesiastical studies; that he enjoyed the privilege of access to the best theological libraries in existence in his day; that, from his position in the church as bishop of the metropolis of palestine, and as the confidential counselor of the emperor constantine, he had opportunities of coming into personal contact with persons of distinction from all countries, who must have been well acquainted with the traditions of their respective churches; and that he was a man of rare prudence, intelligence, and discernment. he was certainly not a philosophical historian, and in his great work he has omitted to notice many things of much moment; but it must be conceded that, generally speaking, he is an accurate recorder of facts; and, in the case before us, he was under no temptation whatever to make a misleading statement. we must also recollect that his testimony is corroborated by jerome, who lived in the same century; who, at least in two places in his writings, reports the martyrdom; and who affirms that it occurred in the seventh year of m. aurelius. [ : ] dr. lightfoot, indeed, asserts that jerome "derived his knowledge from eusebius," [ : ] and that, "though well versed in works of biblical exegesis, ... he was otherwise _extremely ignorant_ of early christian literature." [ : ] we have here unhappily another of those rash utterances in which the bishop of durham indulges throughout these volumes; for assuredly it is the very extravagance of folly to tax jerome with "extreme ignorance of early christian literature." those who are acquainted with his writings will decline to subscribe any such depreciatory certificate. he was undoubtedly bigoted and narrow-minded, but he had a most capacious memory; he had travelled in various countries; he had gathered a prodigious stock of information; he was the best christian scholar of his generation; he has preserved for us the knowledge of not a few important facts which eusebius has not registered; and he at one time contemplated undertaking himself the composition of an ecclesiastical history. [ : ] we cannot, therefore, regard him as the mere copyist of the bishop of caesarea. "every one acquainted with the literature of the primitive church," says dr. döllinger, "knows that it is precisely in jerome that we find _a more exact knowledge of the more ancient teachers_ of the church, and that we are indebted to him for more information about their teaching and writings, than to any other of the latin fathers." [ : ] dr. döllinger is a church historian whom even the bishop of durham cannot afford to ignore,--as, in his own field of study, he has, perhaps, no peer in existence,--and yet he here states explicitly, not certainly that jerome was extremely ignorant of early christian literature, but that, in this very department, he was specially well informed. the learned monk of bethlehem must have felt a deep interest in polycarp as an apostolic father: he was quite capable of testing the worth of the evidence relative to the time of the martyrdom; and his endorsement of the statement of eusebius must be accepted as a testimony entitled to very grave consideration. some succeeding writers assign even a later period to the death of polycarp. it is a weighty fact that no christian author for the first eight centuries of our era places it before the reign of m. aurelius. the first writer who attaches to it an earlier date is georgius hamartolus, who flourished about the middle of the ninth century. dr. lightfoot confesses that what he says cannot be received as based on "any historical tradition or critical investigation." [ : ] it is, in fact, utterly worthless. the manner in which dr. lightfoot tries to meet the array of evidence opposed to him is somewhat extraordinary. he does not attempt to show that it is improbable in itself, or that there are any rebutting depositions. he leaves it in its undiminished strength; but he raises such a cloud of learned dust around it, that the reader may well lose his head, and be unable, for a time, to see the old chronological landmarks. [ : ] he rests his case chiefly on a statement to be found in a postscript, of admittedly doubtful authority, appended to the letter of the smyrnaeans relative to the martyrdom of polycarp. he argues as if the authority for this statement were unimpeachable; and, evidently regarding it as the very key of the position, he endeavours, by means of it, to upset the chronology of eusebius, jerome, the _chronicon paschale_, and other witnesses. as the reader peruses his chapter on "the date of the martyrdom," he cannot but feel that the evidence presented to him is bewildering, indecisive, and obscure; and it may occur to him that the author is very like an individual who proposes to determine the value of two or three unknown quantities from one simple algebraic equation. his principal witness, aristides, were he now living and brought up in presence of a jury, would find himself in rather an odd predicament. he is expected to settle the date of the death of polycarp, and yet he knows nothing either of the pastor of smyrna or of his tragic end. it does not appear that he had ever heard of the worthy apostolic father. aristides was a rhetorician who has left behind him certain orations, entitled _sacred discourses_, written in praise of the god aesculapius. it might be thought that such a writer is but poorly qualified to decide a disputed question of chronology. our readers may have heard of papias,--one of the early fathers, noted for the imbecility of his intellect. aristides, it seems, was quite as liable to imposition. "the credulity of a papias," says dr. lightfoot, "is more than matched by the credulity of an aristides." [ : ] such is the bishop's leading witness. aristides was an invalid and a hypochondriac; and, in the discourses he has left behind him, he describes the course of a long illness, with an account of his pains, aches, purgations, dreams, and visions--interspersed, from time to time, with what dr. lightfoot estimates as "valuable chronological notices!" [ : ] the reader may be at a loss to understand how it happens that this eccentric character has been brought forward as a witness to the date of the martyrdom of polycarp. he has been introduced under the following circumstances. in the postscript to the smyrnaean letter--an appendage of very doubtful authority--we are told that the martyrdom occurred when statius quadratus was proconsul of asia. from certain incidental allusions made by aristides in his discourses, the bishop labours hard to prove that this statius quadratus was proconsul of asia somewhere about a.d. . the evidence is not very clear or well authenticated; and we have reason to fear that very little reliance can be placed on the declarations of this afflicted rhetorician. his sickness is said to have lasted seventeen years; and it is possible that, meanwhile, his memory as to dates may have been somewhat impaired. dr. lightfoot cannot exactly tell when his sickness commenced or when it terminated. but he has ascertained that this quadratus was consul in a.d. ; and, by weighing probabilities as to the length of the interval which may have elapsed before he became proconsul, he has arrived at the conclusion that it might have amounted to twelve or thirteen years. nothing, however, can be more unsatisfactory than the process by which he has reached this result. according to the usual routine, an individual advanced to the consulate became, in a number of years afterwards, a proconsul; and yet, as everything depended on the will of the emperor, it was impossible to tell how long he might have to wait for the appointment. he might obtain it in five years, or perhaps sooner, if "an exceptionally able man;" [ : ] or he might be kept in expectancy for eighteen or nineteen years. the proconsulship commonly terminated in a year; but an individual might be retained in the office for five or six years. [ : ] he might become consul a second time, and then possibly he might again be made proconsul. dr. lightfoot, as we have seen, has proved that statius quadratus was consul in a.d. ; and then, by the aid of the dreamer aristides, he has tried to show that he probably became proconsul of asia about a.d. or a.d. . his calculations are obviously mere guesswork. even admitting their correctness, it would by no means follow that polycarp was then consigned to martyrdom. the postscript of the smyrnaean letter is, as we have seen, justly suspected as no part of the original document. dr. lightfoot himself tells us, that it is "_generally_ treated as a later addition to the letter, and as coming from a different hand;" [ : ] and, whilst disposed to uphold its claims as of high authority, he admits that, when tested as to "external evidence," the supplementary paragraphs, of which this is one, "do not stand on the same ground" [ : ] as the rest of the epistle. and yet his whole chronology rests on the supposition that the name of the proconsul is correctly given in this probably apocryphal addition to the smyrnaean letter. were we even to grant that this postscript belonged originally to the document, it would supply no conclusive evidence that polycarp was martyred in a.d. . it is far more probable that the writer has been slightly inaccurate as to the exact designation of the proconsul of asia about the time of the martyrdom. [ : ] he was called quadratus--not perhaps _statius_, but possibly _ummidius quadratus_. [ : ] there is nothing more common among ourselves than to make such a mistake as to a name. how often may we find john put for james, or robert for andrew? quadratus was a patrician name, well known all over the empire; and if statius quadratus had, not long before, been proconsul of asia, it is quite possible that the writer of this postscript may have taken it for granted that the proconsul about the time of polycarp's death was the same individual. the author, whoever he may have been, was probably not very well acquainted with these roman dignitaries, and may thus have readily fallen into the error. dr. lightfoot has himself recorded a case in which a similar mistake has been made--not in an ordinary communication such its this, but in an imperial ordinance. in a rescript of the emperor hadrian, _licinius_ granianus, the proconsul, is styled _serenus_ granianus. [ : ] if such a blunder could be perpetrated in an official state document, need we wonder if the penman of the postscript of the smyrnaean letter has written statius quadratus for ummidius quadratus? and yet, if we admit this very likely oversight, the whole chronological edifice which the bishop of durham has been at such vast pains to construct, vanishes like the dreams and visions of his leading witness, the hypochondriac aristides. [ : ] archbishop ussher and others, who have carefully investigated the subject, have placed in a.d. the martyrdom of polycarp. the following reasons may be assigned why this date is decidedly preferable to that contended for by dr. lightfoot. . all the surrounding circumstances point to the reign of marcus aurelius as the date of the martyrdom. eusebius has preserved an edict, said to have been issued by antoninus pius, in which he announces that he had written to the governors of provinces "not to trouble the christians at all, unless they appeared to make attempts against the roman government." [ : ] doubts--it may be, well founded--have been entertained as to the genuineness of this ordinance; but it has been pretty generally acknowledged that it fairly indicates the policy of antoninus pius. "though certainly spurious," says dr. lightfoot, "it represents the conception of him entertained by christians in the generations next succeeding his own." [ : ] in his reign, the disciples of our lord, according to the declarations of their own apologists, were treated with special indulgence. melito, for example, who wrote not long after the middle of the second century, bears this testimony. capitolinus, an author who flourished about the close of the third century, reports that antoninus pius lived "without bloodshed, either of citizen or foe," during his reign of twenty-two years. [ : ] dr. lightfoot strives again and again to evade the force of this evidence, and absurdly quotes the sufferings of polycarp and his companions as furnishing a contradiction; but he thus only takes for granted what he has elsewhere failed to prove. he admits, at the same time, that this case stands alone. "_the only recorded martyrdoms_," says he, "in proconsular asia during his reign [that of antoninus pius] are those of polycarp and his companions." [ : ] it must, however, be obvious that he cannot establish even this exception. we have seen that the chronology supported by the bishop of durham is at variance with the express statements of all the early christian writers; and certain facts mentioned in the letter of the smyrnaeans concur to demonstrate its inaccuracy. the description there given of the sufferings endured by those of whom it speaks, supplies abundant evidence that the martyrdoms must have happened in the time of marcus aurelius. dr. lightfoot himself attests that "persecutions extended throughout this reign;" that they were "fierce and deliberate;" and that they were "_aggravated by cruel tortures_." [ : ] such precisely were the barbarities reported in this epistle. it states that the martyrs "were so torn by lashes that the mechanism of their flesh was visible, even as far as the inward veins and arteries;" that, notwithstanding, they were enabled to "endure the fire;" and that those who were finally "condemned to the wild beasts" meanwhile "suffered fearful punishments, _being made to lie on sharp shells, and buffeted with other forms of manifold tortures._" [ : ] these words attest that, before the christians were put to death, various expedients were employed to extort from them a recantation. such was the mode of treatment recommended by marcus aurelius. in an edict issued against those who professed the gospel by this emperor, we have the following directions: "let them be arrested, and unless they offer to the gods, _let them be punished with divers tortures._" [ : ] "various means," says neander, "were employed to constrain them to a renunciation of their faith; and only in the last extremity, when they could not be forced to submit, was the punishment of death to be inflicted." [ : ] this, undoubtedly, was the inauguration of a new system of persecution. in former times, the christians who refused to apostatize were summarily consigned to execution. now, they were horribly tormented in various ways, with a view to compel them to abandon their religion. this new policy is characteristic of the reign of marcus aurelius. nothing akin to it, sanctioned by imperial authority, can be found in the time of any preceding emperor. its employment now in the case of polycarp and his companions fixes the date of the martyrdom to this reign. . we have distinct proof that the visit of polycarp to rome took place _after_ the date assigned by bishop lightfoot to his martyrdom! eusebius tells us that, in the _first_ year of the reign of antoninus pius, [ : ] telesphorus of rome died, and was succeeded in his charge by hyginus. [ : ] he subsequently informs us that hyginus dying "_after the fourth year of his office,_" was succeeded by pius; and he then adds that pius dying at rome, "in the _fifteenth_ year of his episcopate," was succeeded by anicetus. [ : ] it was in the time of this chief pastor that polycarp paid his visit to the imperial city. it is apparent from the foregoing statements that anicetus could not have entered on his office until at least nineteen, or perhaps twenty years, after antoninus pius became emperor, that is, until a.d. , or possibly until a.d. . this, however, is two or three years after the date assigned by dr. lightfoot for the martyrdom. surely the bishop of durham would not have us to believe that polycarp reappeared in rome two or three years after he expired on the funeral pile; and yet it is only by some such desperate supposition that he can make his chronology square with the history of the apostolic father. it is not at all probable that polycarp arrived in rome immediately after the appointment of anicetus as chief pastor. the account of his visit, as given by irenaeus, rather suggests that a considerable time must meanwhile have elapsed before he made his appearance there. it would seem that he had been disturbed by reports which had reached him relative to innovations with which anicetus was identified; and that, apprehending mischief to the whole christian community from anything going amiss in a church of such importance, he was prompted, at his advanced age, to undertake so formidable a journey, in the hope that, by the weight of his personal influence with his brethren in the imperial city, he might be able to arrest the movement. it is not necessary now to inquire more particularly what led the venerable asiatic presbyter at this period to travel all the way from smyrna to the seat of empire. it is enough for us to know, as regards the question before us, that it took place sometime during the pastorate of anicetus; that polycarp effected much good by his dealings with errorists when in rome; and that its chief christian minister, by his tact and discretion, succeeded in quieting the fears of the aged stranger. that the visit occurred long after the date assigned by dr. lightfoot for his martyrdom, may now be evident; and in a former chapter proof has been adduced to show that it must be dated, not, as the bishop of durham argues, about a.d. , but in a.d. . neither is there any evidence whatever that polycarp was put to death immediately after his return to smyrna. this supposition is absolutely necessary to give even an appearance of plausibility to the bishop's chronology; but he has not been able to furnish so much as a solitary reason for its adoption. . we have good grounds for believing that the martyrdom of polycarp occurred not earlier than a.d. . this date fulfils better than any other the conditions enumerated in the letter of the smyrnaeans. archbishop ussher has been at pains to show that the month and day there mentioned precisely correspond to and verify this reckoning. it is unnecessary here to repeat his calculations; but it is right to notice another item spoken of in the smyrnaean epistle, supplying an additional confirmatory proof which the bishop of durham cannot well ignore. when polycarp was pressed to apostatize by the officials who had him in custody, they pleaded with him as if anxious to save his life--"why, what harm is there in saying _caesar is lord_, and offering incense?" and they urged him to "_swear by the genius of caesar_" [ : ] these words suggest that, at the time of this transaction, the roman world had only one emperor. in january a.d. , l. verus died. after recording this event in his _imperial fasti_, dr. lightfoot adds, "m. aurelius is now _sole emperor_." [ : ] when he is contending for a.d. as the date of the martyrdom, he lays much stress on the fact that "throughout this smyrnaean letter _the singular_ is used of the emperor." "polycarp," he says, "is urged to declare 'caesar is lord;' he is bidden, and he refuses to swear by the 'genius of caesar.'" "it is," he adds, "at least a matter of surprise that these forms should be persistently used, if the event had happened _during a divided sovereignty_." [ : ] the bishop cannot, at this stage of the discussion, decently refuse to recognise the potency of his own argument. the three reasons just enumerated show conclusively that a.d. , for which the bishop of durham contends so strenuously, cannot be accepted as the date of the martyrdom. for some years after this, anicetus was not placed at the head of the church of the imperial city; and he must have been for a considerable time in that position, when polycarp paid his visit to rome. we have seen that the aged pastor of smyrna suffered in the reign of marcus aurelius; and that a.d. is the earliest period to which we can refer the martyrdom, inasmuch as that was the first year in which marcus aurelius was sole emperor. all the reliable chronological indications point to this as the more correct reckoning. it has now, we believe, been demonstrated by a series of solid and concurring testimonies, that archbishop ussher made no mistake when he fixed on a.d. as the proper date of polycarp's martyrdom. the bearing of this conclusion on the question of the ignatian epistles must at once be apparent. polycarp was eighty-six years of age at the time of his death; and it follows that in a.d. ,--or sixty-two years before,--when the ignatian letters are alleged to have been dictated, he was only four-and-twenty. the absurdity of believing that at such an age he wrote the epistle to the philippians, or that another apostolic father would then have addressed him in the style employed in the ignatian correspondence, must be plain to every reader of ordinary intelligence. no wonder that the advocates of the genuineness of these epistles have called into requisition such an enormous amount of ingenuity and erudition to pervert the chronology. pearson, as we have seen, spent six years in this service; and the learned bishop of durham has been engaged "off and on" for nearly thirty in the same labour. at the close of his long task he seems to have persuaded himself that he has been quite successful; and speaking of the theory of dr. cureton, he adopts a tone of triumph, and exclaims: "i venture to hope that the discussion which follows will extinguish the last sparks of its waning life." [ : ] it remains for the candid reader to ponder the statements submitted to him in this chapter, and to determine how many sparks of life now remain in the bishop's chronology. chapter iv. the testimony of irenaeus, and the genesis of prelacy. . _the testimony of irenaeus._ the only two vouchers of the second century produced in support of the claims of the epistles attributed to ignatius, are the letter of polycarp to the philippians and a sentence from the treatise of irenaeus _against heresies_. the evidence from polycarp's epistle has been discussed in a preceding chapter. when examined, it has completely broken down, as it is based on an entire misconception of the meaning of the writer. the words of irenaeus can be adduced with still less plausibility to uphold the credit of these letters. the following is the passage in which they are supposed to be authenticated: "_one of our people said_, when condemned to the beasts on account of his testimony towards god--'as i am the wheat of god, i am also ground by the teeth of beasts, that i may be found the pure bread of god.'" [ : ] it is worse than a mere begging of the question to assert that irenaeus here gives us a quotation from one of the letters of ignatius. in the extensive treatise from which the words are an extract, he never once mentions the name of the pastor of antioch. had he been aware of the existence of these epistles, he would undoubtedly have availed himself of their assistance when contending against the heretics--as they would have furnished him with many passages exactly suited for their refutation. the words of a man taught by the apostles, occupying one of the highest positions in the christian church, and finishing his career by a glorious martyrdom in the very beginning of the second century, would have been by far the weightiest evidence he could have produced, next to the teaching of inspiration. but though he brings forward clemens romanus, papias, justin martyr, polycarp, [ : ] and others to confront the errorists, he ignores a witness whose antiquity and weight of character would have imparted peculiar significance to his testimony. to say that though he never names him elsewhere, he points to him in this place as "one of our people," is to make a very bold and improbable statement. even the apostle paul himself would not have ventured to describe the evangelist john in this way. he would have alluded to him more respectfully. neither would the pastor of a comparatively uninfluential church in the south of gaul have expressed himself after this fashion when speaking of a minister who had been one of the most famous of the spiritual heroes of the church. not many years before, a terrific persecution had raged in his own city of lyons; many had been put in prison, and some had been thrown to wild beasts; [ : ] and it is obviously to one of these anonymous sufferers that irenaeus here directs attention. the "one of our people" is not certainly an apostolic father; but some citizen of lyons, moving in a different sphere, whose name the author does not deem it necessary to enrol in the record of history. neither is it to a _written_ correspondence, but to the _dying words_ of the unknown martyr, to which he adverts when we read,--"one of our people _said_, as i am the wheat of god, i am also ground by the teeth of beasts, that i may be found the pure bread of god." the two witnesses of the second century who are supposed to uphold the claims of the ignatian epistles have now been examined, and it must be apparent that their testimony amounts to nothing. thus far, then, there is no external evidence whatever in favour of these letters. the result of this investigation warrants the suspicion that they are forgeries. [ : ] the internal evidence abundantly confirms this impression. any one who carefully peruses them, and then reads over the epistle of clemens romanus, the teaching of the apostles, the writings of justin martyr, and the epistle of polycarp, may see that the works just named are the productions of quite another period. the ignatian letters describe a state of things which they totally ignore. dr. lightfoot himself has been at pains to point out the wonderful difference between the ignatian correspondence and the epistle of polycarp. "in whatever way," says he, "we test the documents, the contrast is very striking,--more striking, indeed, than we should have expected to find between two christian writers who lived at the same time and were personally acquainted with each other." [ : ] he then proceeds to mention some of the points of contrast. whilst the so-called ignatius lays stress on episcopacy "as the key-stone of the ecclesiastical order," polycarp, in his epistle, from first to last makes "no mention of the episcopate," and "the bishop is entirely ignored." in regard to doctrinal statement the same contrariety is apparent. ignatius speaks of "the blood of god" and "the passion of my god," whilst no such language is used by polycarp. again, in the letter of the pastor of smyrna, there is "an entire absence of that sacramental language which confronts us again and again in the most startling forms in ignatius." [ : ] "though the seven ignatian letters are many times longer than polycarp's epistle, the quotations in the latter are incomparably more numerous as well as more precise than in the former." in the ignatian letters, of "quotations from the new testament, strictly speaking, there is none." [ : ] "of all the fathers of the church, early or later, no one is more incisive or more persistent in advocating the claims of the threefold ministry to allegiance than ignatius." [ : ] polycarp, on the other hand, has written a letter "which has proved a stronghold of presbyterianism." [ : ] and yet dr. lightfoot would have us to believe that these various letters were written by two ministers living at the same time, taught by the same instructors, holding the closest intercourse with each other, professing the same doctrines, and adhering to the same ecclesiastical arrangements! the features of distinction between the teaching of the ignatian letters and the teaching of polycarp, which have been pointed out by dr. lightfoot himself, are sufficiently striking; but his lordship has not exhibited nearly the full amount of the contrast. ignatius is described as offering himself voluntarily that he may suffer as a martyr, and as telling those to whom he writes that his supreme desire is to be devoured by the lions at rome. "i desire," says he, "to fight with wild beasts." [ : ] "may i have joy of the beasts that have been prepared for me ... i will entice them that they may devour me promptly." [ : ] "though i desire to suffer, yet i know not whether i am worthy." [ : ] "i delivered myself over to death." [ : ] "i bid all men know that of my own free will i die for god." [ : ] the church, instructed by polycarp, condemns this insane ambition for martyrdom. "we praise not those," say the smyrnaeans, "who deliver themselves up, _since the gospel does not so teach us_." [ : ] in these letters ignatius speaks as a vain babbler, drunken with fanaticism; polycarp, in his epistle, expresses himself like an humble-minded presbyterian minister in his sober senses. ignatius is made to address polycarp as if he were a full-blown prelate, and tells the people under his care, "he that honoureth the bishop is honoured of god; he that doth aught against the knowledge of the bishop, rendereth service to the devil" [ : ] polycarp, on the other hand, describes himself as one of the elders, and exhorts the philippians to "submit to the presbyters and deacons," and to be "all subject one to another." [ : ] when their church had got into a state of confusion, and when they applied to him for advice, he recommended them "to walk in the commandment of the lord," and admonished their "presbyters to be compassionate and merciful towards all men," [ : ]--never hinting that the appointment of a bishop would help to keep them in order; whereas, when ignatius addresses various churches,--that of the smyrnaeans included,--he assumes a tone of high churchmanship which archbishop laud himself would have been afraid, and perhaps ashamed, to emulate. "as many as are of god and of jesus christ," says he, "they are with the bishop." "it is good to recognise god and the bishop!" "give ye heed to the bishop, that god may also give heed to you." [ : ] the internal evidence furnished by the ignatian epistles seals their condemnation. i do not intend, however, at present to pursue this subject. in a work published by me six and twenty years ago, [ : ] i have called attention to various circumstances which betray the imposture; and neither dr. lightfoot, zahn, nor any one else, so far as i am aware, has ever yet ventured to deal with my arguments. i might now add new evidences of their fabrication, but i deem this unnecessary. i cannot, however, pass from this department of the question in debate, without protesting against the view presented by the bishop of durham of the origin of prelacy. "it is shown," says he, referring to his _essay on the christian ministry_, [ : ] "that though the new testament itself contains as yet no direct and indisputable notices of a localized episcopate in the gentile churches, as distinguished from the moveable episcopate exercised by timothy in ephesus and by titus in crete, yet there is satisfactory evidence of its development in the later years of the apostolic age, ... and that, in the early years of the second century, the episcopate was widely spread and had taken firm root, more especially in asia minor and in syria. if the evidence on which its extension in the regions east of the aegaean at this epoch be resisted, _i am at a loss to understand what single fact relating to the history of the christian church during the first half of the second century can be regarded as established_." [ : ] in this statement, as well as in not a few others already submitted to the reader, dr. lightfoot has expressed himself with an amount of confidence which may well excite astonishment. it would not be difficult to show that his speculations as to the development of episcopacy in asia minor and syria in the early years of the second century, as presented in the essay to which he refers, are the merest moonshine. on what grounds can he maintain that timothy exercised what he calls a "moveable episcopate" in ephesus? paul besought him to abide there for a time that he might withstand errorists, and he gave him instructions as to how he was to behave himself in the house of god; [ : ] but it did not therefore follow that he was either a bishop or an archbishop. he was an able man, sound in the faith, wise and energetic; and, as he was thus a host in himself, paul expected that meanwhile he would be eminently useful in helping the less gifted ministers who were in the place to repress error and keep the church in order. that paul intended to establish neither a moveable nor an immoveable episcopate in ephesus, is obvious from his own testimony; for when he addresses its elders,--as he believed for the last time,--he ignored their submission to any ecclesiastical superior, and committed the church to their own supervision. [ : ] and if he left titus in crete to take charge of the organization of the church there, he certainly did not intend that the evangelist was to act alone. in those days there was no occasion for the services of a diocesan bishop, inasmuch as the christian community was governed by the common council of the elders, and ordination was performed "with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery." [ : ] titus was a master builder, and paul believed that, proceeding in concert with the ministers in crete, he would render effectual aid in carrying forward the erection of the ecclesiastical edifice. and what proof has dr. lightfoot produced to show that "the episcopate was widely spread in asia minor and in syria" in "the early years of the second century"? if the ignatian epistles be discredited, he has none at all. but there is very decisive evidence to the contrary. the teaching of the apostles, the shepherd of hermas, and the epistle of polycarp prove the very reverse. and yet dr. lightfoot is at a loss to understand what single fact relating to the history of the christian church during the first half of the second century can be regarded as established, if we reject his baseless assertion! . _the genesis of prelacy._ jerome gives us the true explanation of the origin of the episcopate, when he tells us that it was set up with a view to prevent divisions in the church. [ : ] these divisions were created chiefly by the gnostics, who swarmed in some of the great cities of the empire towards the middle of the second century. about that time the president of the presbytery was in a few places armed with additional authority, in the hope that he would thus be the better able to repress schism. the new system was inaugurated in rome, and its church has ever since maintained the proud boast that it is the centre of ecclesiastical unity. from the imperial city episcopacy gradually radiated over all christendom. the position assumed by dr. lightfoot--that it commenced in jerusalem--is without any solid foundation. to support it, he is obliged to adopt the fable that james was the first bishop of the mother church. the new testament ignores this story, and tells us explicitly that james was only one of the "pillars," or ruling spirits, among the christians of the jewish capital. [ : ] the very same kind of argumentation employed to establish the prelacy of james, may be used, with far greater plausibility, to demonstrate the primacy of peter. dr. lightfoot himself acknowledges that, about the close of the first century, we cannot find a trace of the episcopate in either of the two great christian churches of rome and corinth. [ : ] "at the close of the first century," says he, "clement writes to corinth, as at the beginning of the second century polycarp writes to philippi. as in the latter epistle, so in the former, there is no allusion to the episcopal office." [ : ] he might have said that, even after the middle of the second century, it did not exist either in smyrna or philippi. he admits also, that "as late as the close of the second century, the bishop of alexandria was regarded as distinct, and yet not as distinct from the presbytery." [ : ] "the first bishop of alexandria," says he, "of whom any distinct incident is recorded on trustworthy authority, was a contemporary of origen," [ : ] who flourished in the third century. dr. lightfoot tells us in the same place, that "at alexandria the bishop was nominated and apparently ordained by the twelve presbyters out of their own number." [ : ] instead of asserting, as has been done, that no single fact relating to the history of the christian church during the first half of the second century can be regarded as established, if we deny that the episcopate was widely spread in the early years of the second century in asia minor and elsewhere, it may be fearlessly affirmed that, at the date here mentioned, there is not a particle of proof that it was established anywhere. irenaeus could have given an account of the genesis of episcopacy, for he lived throughout the period of its original development; but he has taken care not to lift the veil which covers its mysterious commencement. he could have told what prompted polycarp to undertake a journey to rome when burthened with the weight of years; but he has left us to our own surmises. it is, however, significant that the presbyterian system was kept up in smyrna long after the death of its aged martyr. [ : ] dr. lightfoot has well observed that "irenaeus was probably the most learned christian of his time;" [ : ] and it is pretty clear that he contributed much to promote the acceptance of the episcopal theory. when arguing with the heretics, he coined the doctrine of the apostolical succession, and maintained that the true faith was propagated to his own age through an unbroken line of bishops from the days of the apostles. to make out his case, he was necessitated to speak of the presidents of the presbyteries as bishops, [ : ] and to ignore the change which had meanwhile taken place in the ecclesiastical constitution. subsequent writers followed in his wake, and thus it is that the beginnings of episcopacy have been enveloped in so much obscurity. even in rome, the seat of the most prominent church in christendom, it is impossible to settle the order in which its early presiding pastors were arranged. "come we to rome," says stillingfleet, "and here the succession is as muddy as the tiber itself; for here tertullian, rufinus, and several others, place clement next to peter. irenaeus and eusebius set anacletus before him; epiphanius and optatus, both anacletus and cletus; augustinus and damasus, with others, make anacletus, cletus, and linus all to precede him. what way shall we find to extricate ourselves out of this labyrinth?" [ : ] the different lists preserved attest that there was no such continuous and homogeneous line of bishops as the doctrine of the apostolical succession implies. when irenaeus speaks of polycarp as having "received his appointment in asia from apostles as bishop in the church of smyrna," [ : ] he makes a statement which, literally understood, even dr. lightfoot hesitates to endorse. [ : ] the apostle john may have seen polycarp in his boyhood, and may have predicted his future eminence as a christian minister,--just as timothy was pointed out by prophecy [ : ] as destined to be a champion of the faith. when episcopacy was introduced, its abettors tried to manufacture a little literary capital out of some such incident; but the allegation that polycarp was ordained to the episcopal office by the apostles, is a fable that does not require refutation. almost all of them were dead before he was born. [ : ] chapter v. the forgery of the ignatian epistles. if, as there is every reason to believe, the ignatian epistles are forgeries from beginning to end, various questions arise as to the time of their appearance, and the circumstances which prompted their fabrication. their origin, like that of many other writings of the same description, cannot be satisfactorily explored; and we must in vain attempt a solution of all the objections which may be urged against almost any hypothesis framed to elucidate their history. it is, however, pretty clear that, in their original form, they first saw the light in the early part of the third century. about that time there was evidently something like a mania for the composition of such works,--as various spurious writings, attributed to clemens romanus and others, abundantly testify. their authors do not seem to have been aware of the impropriety of committing these pious frauds, and may even have imagined that they were thus doing god service. [ : ] several circumstances suggest that callistus--who became bishop of rome about a.d. --may, before his advancement to the episcopal chair, have had a hand in the preparation of these ignatian epistles. his history is remarkable. he was originally a slave, and in early life he is reported to have been the child of misfortune. he had at one time the care of a bank, in the management of which he did not prosper. he was at length banished to sardinia, to labour there as a convict in the mines; and when released from servitude in that unhealthy island, he was brought under the notice of victor, the roman bishop. to his bounty he was, about this time, indebted for his support. [ : ] on the death of victor, callistus became a prime favourite with zephyrinus, the succeeding bishop. by him he was put in charge of the cemetery of the christians connected with the catacombs; and he soon attained the most influential position among the roman clergy. so great was his popularity, that, on the demise of his patron, he was himself unanimously chosen to the episcopal office in the chief city of the empire. callistus was no ordinary man. he was a kind of original in his way. he possessed a considerable amount of literary culture. he took a prominent part in the current theological controversies,--and yet, if we are to believe hippolytus, he could accommodate himself to the views of different schools of doctrine. he had great versatility of talent, restless activity, deep cunning, and much force of character. hippolytus tells us that he was sadly given to intrigue, and so slippery in his movements that it was no easy matter to entangle him in a dilemma. it may have occurred to him that, in the peculiar position of the church, the concoction of a series of letters, written in the name of an apostolic father, and vigorously asserting the claims of the bishops, would help much to strengthen the hands of the hierarchy. he might thus manage at the same time quietly to commend certain favourite views of doctrine, and aid the pretensions of the roman chief pastor. but the business must be kept a profound secret; and the letters must, if possible, be so framed as not at once to awaken suspicion. if we carefully examine them, we shall find that they were well fitted to escape detection at the time when they were written. the internal evidence warrants the conclusion that the epistle to the romans was the first produced. it came forth alone; and, if it crept into circulation originally in the imperial city, it was not likely to provoke there any hostile criticism. it is occupied chiefly with giving expression to the personal feelings of the supposed writer in the prospect of martyrdom. it scarcely touches on the question of ecclesiastical regimen; and it closes by soliciting the prayers of the roman brethren for "the church which is in syria." [ : ] "if," says dr. lightfoot, "ignatius had not incidentally mentioned himself as the bishop 'of' or 'from syria,' the letter to the romans would have contained no indication of the existence of the episcopal office" [ : ] whilst observing this studied silence on the subject which above all others occupied his thoughts, the writer was craftily preparing the way for the more ready reception of the letters which were to follow. the epistle to the romans tacitly embodies their credentials. it slyly takes advantage of the connection of the name of ignatius with syria in the letter of polycarp to the philippians; assumes that syria is the eastern province; and represents ignatius as a bishop from that part of the empire on his way to die at rome. it does not venture to say that the western capital had then a bishop of its own,--for the epistle of clemens, which was probably in many hands, and which ignored the episcopal office there--might thus have suggested doubts as to its genuineness; but it tells the sensational story of the journey of ignatius in chains, from east to west, in the custody of what are called "ten leopards." this tale at the time was likely to be exceedingly popular. ever since the rise of montanism--which made its appearance about the time of the death of polycarp--there had been an increasing tendency all over the church to exaggerate the merits of martyrdom. this tendency reached its fullest development in the early part of the third century. the letter of ignatius to the romans exhibits it in the height of its folly. ignatius proclaims his most earnest desire to be torn to pieces by the lions, and entreats the romans not to interfere and deprive him of a privilege which he coveted so ardently. the words reported by irenaeus as uttered by one of the martyrs of lyons are adroitly appropriated by the pseudo-ignatius as if spoken by himself; and, in an uncritical age, when the subject-matter of the communication was otherwise so much to the taste of the reader, the quotation helped to establish the credit of the ignatian correspondence. another portion of the letter was sure to be extremely acceptable to the church of rome--for here the writer is most lavish in his complimentary acknowledgements. that church is described as "having the presidency in the country of the region of the romans, being worthy of god, worthy of honour, worthy of felicitation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity, and having the presidency of love, filled with the grace of god, without wavering, and filtered clear from every foreign stain." "the epistle to the romans," says dr. lightfoot, "had a wider popularity than the other letters of ignatius, both early and late. it appears to have been circulated apart from them, sometimes alone." [ : ] it was put forth as a feeler, to discover how the public would be disposed to entertain such a correspondence; and, in case of its favourable reception, it was intended to open the way for additional epistles. it was cleverly contrived. it employed the epistle of polycarp to the philippians as a kind of voucher for its authenticity, inasmuch as it is there stated that ignatius had written a number of letters; and it contained little or nothing which any one in that age would have been disposed to controvert. the christians of rome had long enjoyed the reputation of a community ennobled by the blood of martyrs, and they would be quite willing to believe that ignatius had contributed to their celebrity by dying for the faith within their borders. it is very doubtful whether he really finished his career there: some ancient authorities attest that he suffered at antioch; [ : ] and the fact that, in the fourth century, his grave was pointed out in that locality, apparently supports their testimony. [ : ] the account of his hurried removal as a prisoner from antioch to rome, in the custody of ten fierce soldiers--whilst he was permitted, as he passed along, to hold something like a levee of his co-religionists at every stage of his journey--wears very much the appearance of an ill-constructed fiction. but the disciples at rome about this period were willing to be credulous in such matters; and thus it was that this tale of martyrdom was permitted to pass unchallenged. in due time the author of the letters, as they appeared one after another, accomplished the design of their composition. the question of the constitution of the church had recently awakened much attention; and the threat of victor to excommunicate the christians of asia minor, because they ventured to differ from him as to the mode of celebrating the paschal festival, had, no doubt, led to discussions relative to the claims of episcopal authority which, at rome especially, were felt to be very inconvenient and uncomfortable. no one could well maintain that it had a scriptural warrant. the few who were acquainted with its history were aware that it was only a human arrangement of comparatively recent introduction; and yet a bishop who threatened with excommunication such as refused to submit to his mandates, could scarcely be expected to make such a confession. irenaeus had sanctioned its establishment; but, when victor became so overbearing, he took the alarm, and told him plainly that those who presided over the church of rome before him were nothing but presbyters. [ : ] this was rather an awkward disclosure; and it was felt by the friends of the new order that some voucher was required to help it in its hour of need, and to fortify its pretensions. the letters of an apostolic father strongly asserting its claims could not fail to give it encouragement. we can thus understand how at this crisis these epistles were forthcoming. they were admirably calculated to quiet the public mind. they were comparatively short, so that they could be easily read; and they were quite to the point, for they taught that we are to "regard the bishop as the lord himself," and that "he presides after the likeness of god." [ : ] who after all this could doubt the claims of episcopacy? should not the words of an apostolic father put an end to all farther questionings? hippolytus, who was his contemporary, has given us much information in relation to callistus. he writes, indeed, in an unfriendly spirit; but he speaks, notwithstanding, as an honest man; and we cannot well reject his statements as destitute of foundation. his account of the general facts in the career of this roman bishop obviously rest on a substratum of truth. as we read these ignatian letters, it may occur to us that the real author sometimes betrays his identity. callistus had been originally a slave, and he here represents ignatius as saying of himself, "i am a slave." [ : ] callistus had been a convict, and more than once this ignatius declares, "i am a convict." [ : ] may he not thus intend to remind his co-religionists at rome that an illustrious bishop and martyr had once been a slave and a convict like himself? callistus, when labouring in the mines of sardinia, must have been well acquainted with ropes and hoists; and here ignatius describes the ephesians as "hoisted up to the heights through the engine of jesus christ," having faith as their "windlass," and as "using for a rope the holy spirit." [ : ] callistus had at one time been in charge of a bank; and ignatius, in one of these epistles, is made to say, "let your works be your _deposits_, that you may receive your _assets_ due to you." [ : ] callistus also had charge of the christian cemetery in the roman catacombs; and ignatius here expresses himself as one familiar with graves and funerals. he speaks of a heretic as "being himself a bearer of a corpse," and of those inclined to judaism "as tombstones and graves of the dead." [ : ] it is rather singular that, in these few short letters, we find so many expressions which point to callistus as the writer. there are, however, other matters which warrant equally strong suspicions. hippolytus tells us that callistus was a patripassian. "the father," said he, "having taken human nature, deified it by uniting it to himself, ... and so he said that the father had suffered with the son." [ : ] hence ignatius, in these epistles, startles us by such expressions as "the blood of god," [ : ] and "the passion of my god." [ : ] callistus is accused by hippolytus as a trimmer prepared, as occasion served, to conciliate different parties in the church by appearing to adopt their views. sometimes he sided with hippolytus, and sometimes with those opposed to him; hence it is that the theology taught in these letters is of a very equivocal character. dr. lightfoot has seized upon this fact as a reason that they are never quoted by irenaeus. "the language approaching dangerously near to heresy might," says he, "have led him to avoid directly quoting the doctrinal teaching." [ : ] a much better reason was that he had never heard of these letters; and yet their theology is exactly such a piebald production as might have been expected from callistus. it is not easy to understand how dr. lightfoot has brought himself to believe that these ignatian epistles were written in the beginning of the second century. "_throughout the whole range of christian literature_," says he, "no more uncompromising advocacy of the episcopate can be found than appears in these writings ... it is when asserting the claims of the episcopal office to obedience and respect that the language is _strained to the utmost_. the bishops established _in the farthest part of the world_ are in the counsels of jesus christ." [ : ] it is simply incredible that such a state of things could have existed six or seven years after the death of the apostle john. all the extant writings for sixty years after the alleged date of the martyrdom of ignatius demonstrate the utter falsehood of these letters. it is certain that they employ a terminology, and develop church principles unknown before the beginning of the third century, and which were not current even then. the forger, whoever he may have been, has displayed no little art and address in their fabrication. from all that we know of callistus, he was quite equal to the task. like the false decretals, these letters exerted much influence on the subsequent history of the church. cyprian, though he never mentions them, [ : ] speedily caught their spirit. his assertion of episcopal authority is quite in the same style. origen visited rome shortly after they appeared; he is the first writer who recognises them; and it is worthy of note that, of the three quotations from them found in his works, two are from the epistle to the romans. it is quite within the range of possibility that evidence may yet be forthcoming to prove that they emanated from one of the early popes. they are worthy of such an origin. they recommend that blind and slavish submission to ecclesiastical dictation which the so-called successors of peter have ever since inculcated. "it need hardly be remarked," says dr. lightfoot, "how subversive of the true spirit of christianity, in the negation of individual freedom and the consequent suppression of direct responsibility to god in christ, is the _crushing despotism_ with which" the language of these letters, "if taken literally, would invest the episcopal office." [ : ] and yet, having devoted nearly thirty years off and on to the study of these epistles, the bishop of durham maintains that we have here the genuine writings of an apostolic father who was instructed by the inspired founders of the christian church!! in this review no notice is taken of the various forms of these epistles. if they are all forgeries, it is not worth while to spend time in discussing the merits of the several editions. appendices. i. letter of the late dr. cureton. immediately after the appearance of the second edition of _the ancient church_, a copy of it was sent to the late rev. w. cureton, d.d., canon of westminster--the well-known author of various publications relating to the ignatian epistles. it was considered only due to that distinguished scholar to call his attention to a work in which he was so prominently noticed, and in which various arguments were adduced to prove that all the letters he had edited are utterly spurious. in a short time that gentleman acknowledged the presentation of the volume in a most kind and courteous communication, which will be read with special interest by all who have studied the ignatian controversy. i give the letter entire--just as it reached me. it was published several years ago, appended to my _old catholic church_. deans yard, westminster, _sept._ , . dear sir,--i beg to thank you very much for your kindness in sending me a valuable contribution to ecclesiastical history in your book, _the ancient church_, which i found here upon my return to london two or three days ago. how much would it contribute to the promotion of charity and the advancement of the truth were all who combated the opinions and views of another to give him the means of seeing what was written fairly and openly, and not to endeavour to overthrow his arguments without his knowledge. this will indeed ever be the case when truth is sought for itself, and no personal feelings enter into the matter. i have read your chapters on ignatius, and you will perhaps hardly expect that i should subscribe to your views. it is now about twenty years since i first undertook this inquiry, and constantly have i been endeavouring to add some new light ever since. i once answered an opponent in my present brother canon, dr. wordsworth, but since that time i have never replied to any adverse views--but have only looked to see if i could find anything either to show that i was wrong or to strengthen my convictions that i was right. and i have found the wisdom of this, and have had the satisfaction of knowing that my ablest opponents, after having had more time to inquire and to make greater research, have of their own accord conformed to my views and written in their support. i attach no very great importance to the epistles of ignatius. i shall not draw from them any dogma. i only look upon them as evidence of the time to certain facts, which indeed were amply established even without such evidence. i think that in such cases, we must look chiefly to the historical testimony of facts; and you will forgive me for saying that i think your arguments are based upon presumptive evidence, negative evidence, and the evidence of appropriateness--all of which, however valuable, must tumble to the ground before one single fact. you notice that archbishop ussher doubted the epistle to polycarp. but why? simply because its style (not having been altered by the forger) was different from the rest. but you know he says there was more _historical_ evidence in its favour than for any of the rest. it thus becomes an argument in support of the syriac text instead of against it. can you explain how it happens that the syriac text, found in the very language of ignatius himself, and transcribed many hundreds of years before the ignatian controversy was thought of, now it is discovered, should contain only the _three epistles_ of the existence of which there is any historical evidence before the time of eusebius, and that, although it may contain some things which you do not approve, still has rejected all the passages which the critics of the ignatian controversy protested against? you go too far to say that bentley rejected the ignatian epistles--he only rejected them in the form in which they were put forth by ussher and vossius, and not in the form of the syriac. so did porson, as bishop kaye informed me--but he never denied that ignatius had written letters--indeed, the very forgeries were a proof of true patterns which were falsified. a great many of the ablest scholars in europe, who had refused to accept the greek letters, are convinced of the genuineness of the syriac. but time will open. believe me, yours faithfully, william cureton. the rev. dr. killen. some time after this letter was written, ecclesiastical literature sustained a severe loss in the death of its amiable and accomplished author. though dr. cureton here expressed himself with due caution, his language is certainly not calculated to reassure the advocates of the ignatian epistles. one of their most learned editors in recent times--so far from speaking in a tone of confidence respecting them--here admits that he attached to them "no very great importance." though he had spent twenty years chiefly in their illustration, he acknowledges that he was constantly endeavouring "to add some new light" for his guidance. to him, therefore, the subject must have been still involved in much mystery. it is noteworthy that, in the preceding letter, he has not been able to point out a solitary error in the statement of the claims of these epistles as presented in _the ancient church_. he alleges, indeed, that the arguments employed are "based upon presumptive evidence, negative evidence, and the evidence of appropriateness;" he confesses that these proofs are "valuable;" but, though he contends that they must all "tumble to the around before one single fact," he has failed to produce the one single fact required for their overthrow. dr. cureton had obviously not been previously aware that dr. bentley, the highest authority among british critics, had rejected the ignatian epistles. had he been cognisant of that fact when he wrote the _corpus ignatianum_, he would have candidly announced it to his readers. the manner in which he here attempts to dispose of it is certainly not very satisfactory. he pleads that, though bentley condemned as spurious the letters edited by ussher and vossius, he would not have pronounced the same decision on the syriac version recently discovered. why not? this syriac version is an edition of _the same epistles_ in an abbreviated form. if bentley denounced _the whole_ as a forgery, it seems to follow, by logical inference, that he would have pronounced the same verdict on the half or the third part. dr. cureton is mistaken when he affirms in the preceding communication that his syriac version has rejected "all the passages" against which "the critics of the ignatian controversy" had protested. the very contrary has been demonstrated in _the ancient church_. a large number of the sentences which had provoked the most unsparing criticism are retained in the curetonian edition. it is right to add that archbishop ussher more than "doubted" the epistle to polycarp. he discarded it altogether. without hesitation he set it aside as spurious. whilst he disliked its style, he felt that it wanted other marks of genuineness. when writing _the ancient church_--now nearly thirty years ago--i was disposed to think that the ignatian epistles had been manufactured at antioch; but more mature consideration has led me to adopt the conclusion that they were concocted at rome. they bear a strong resemblance to several other spurious works which appeared there; and the servile submission to episcopal authority which they so strenuously inculcate was first most offensively challenged by the chief pastor of the great western bishopric. these epistles tended much to promote the progress of ecclesiastical despotism. any one who studies the two chapters on the ignatian epistles in _the ancient church_, must see that what is there urged against them is something more than "presumptive evidence, negative evidence, and the evidence of appropriateness." it is shown that their anachronisms, historical blundering, and false doctrine clearly convict them of forgery. ii. it has been deemed right to subjoin here a copy of the ignatian epistle to the romans, as some readers may not have it at hand for consultation. various translations of this epistle have been published. the following adheres pretty closely to that given by the bishop of durham:-- "ignatius, who is also theophorus, to her that has obtained mercy through the might of the most high father, and of jesus christ his only son, to the church which is beloved and enlightened through the will of him who willeth all things that are according to the love of jesus christ our god, to her that has the presidency in the country of the region of the romans; being worthy of god, worthy of honour, worthy of felicitation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity, and having the presidency of love, walking in the law of christ, and bearing the father's name, which i also salute in the name of jesus christ, the son of the father, to those that are united both according to the flesh and spirit to every one of his commandments, being filled inseparably with the grace of god, and filtered clear from every foreign stain; abundance of happiness unblameably in jesus christ our god. " . through prayer to god i have obtained the privilege of seeing your most worthy faces, and have even been granted more than i requested, for i hope as a prisoner in jesus christ to salute you, if indeed it be the will of god that i be thought worthy of attaining unto the end. for the beginning has been well ordered, if so be i shall attain unto the goal, that i may receive my inheritance without hindrance. for i am afraid of your love, lest it should be to me an injury; for it is easy for you to accomplish what you please, but it is difficult for me to attain to god, if ye spare me. " . for i would not have you to be men-pleasers, but to please god, as ye do please him. for neither shall i ever have such an opportunity of attaining to god, nor can ye, if ye be silent, ever be entitled to the honour of a better work. for if ye are silent concerning me, i shall become god's; but if ye love my body, i shall have my course again to run. pray, then, do not seek to confer any greater favour upon me than that i be poured out a libation to god, while there is still an altar ready; that being gathered together in love ye may sing praise to the father through jesus christ, that god has deemed me, the bishop of syria, worthy to be sent for from the east to the west. it is good to set from the world to god, that i may rise again to him. " . ye have never envied any one. ye have taught others, and my desire is that those lessons shall hold good, which as teachers ye enjoin. only request in my behalf both inward and outward strength, so that i may not only say it, but also desire it; that i may not only be called a christian, but really be found one. for if i shall be found so, then can i also be called one, and be faithful then, when i shall no longer appear to the world. nothing visible is good: for our god, jesus christ, now that he is with the father, is all the more revealed. the work is not of persuasiveness, but of greatness, whensoever it is hated by the world. " . i write to all the churches, and i bid all men know that of my own free will i die for god, unless ye should hinder me. i exhort you not to show an unseasonable good-will towards me. suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, that through them i shall attain to god. i am the wheat of god, and i am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that i may be found the pure bread of christ. rather entice the wild beasts that they may become my sepulchre, and may leave no part of my body behind, so that i may not, when i am fallen asleep, be burdensome to any one. then shall i be truly a disciple of jesus christ, when the world shall not so much as see my body. supplicate the lord for me, that through these instruments i may be found a sacrifice to god. i do not enjoin you as peter and paul did. they were apostles, i am a convict; they were free, i am a slave to this very hour. but, when i suffer, i shall be a freed-man of jesus christ, and shall rise free in him. now i am learning in my bonds to put away every desire. " . from syria even to rome i fight with wild beasts; by land and sea, by night and by day, being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only become worse when they are kindly treated. howbeit through their wrong-doings i am become more completely a disciple, yet am i not hereby justified. may i have joy of the beasts that have been prepared for me; and i pray that i may find them prompt; nay, i will entice them that they may devour me promptly, not as they have done to some, refusing to touch them through fear. yea, though of themselves they should not be willing while i am ready, i myself will force them to it. bear with me, i know what is expedient for me. now am i beginning to be a disciple. may nought of things visible and things invisible envy me, that i may attain unto jesus christ. come fire and cross, and grapplings with wild beasts, cuttings and manglings, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body, come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me, only be it mine to attain to jesus christ. " . the farthest bounds of the universe shall profit me nothing, neither the kingdoms of this world. it is good for me to die for jesus christ, rather than to reign over the farthest bounds of the earth. i seek him who died on our behalf, i desire him who rose again for our sake. my birth-pangs are at hand. pardon me, brethren, do not hinder me from living. do not wish to keep me in a state of death, while i desire to belong to god; do not give me over to the world, neither allure me with material things. suffer me to obtain pure light; when i have gone thither, then shall i be a man. permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my god. if any man has him within himself, let him consider what i desire, and let him have sympathy with me, as knowing how i am straitened. " . the prince of this world would fain seize me, and corrupt my disposition towards god. let not any of you, therefore, that are near abet him. rather be ye on my side, that is, on god's side. do not speak of jesus christ and set your desires on the world. let not envy dwell among you. even though i myself, when i am with you, should beseech you, obey me not, but rather give credit to those things which i now write. my earthly passion has been crucified, and there is no fire of material longing in me; but there is within me a water that lives and speaks, saying to me inwardly, 'come to the father.' i have no delight in the food of corruption, or in the delights of this life. i desire the bread of god, which is the flesh of christ, who was of the seed of david; and for a draught i desire his blood, which is love incorruptible. " . i desire no longer to live after the manner of men; and this shall be, if ye desire it. be ye willing, then, that ye also may be desired. in a brief letter i beseech you, do ye give credit to me. jesus christ will reveal these things to you, so that ye shall know that i speak the truth--jesus christ the unerring mouth by which the father has spoken truly. pray for me that i may attain the object of my desire. i write not unto you after the flesh, but after the mind of god. if i shall suffer, it was your desire; but if i am rejected, ye have hated me. " . remember in your prayers the church which is in syria, which has god for its shepherd in my stead. jesus christ alone shall be its bishop, he and your love; but for myself, i am ashamed to be called one of them; for neither am i worthy, being the very last of them and an untimely birth; but i have found mercy that i should be some one, if so i shall attain unto god. my spirit salutes you, and the love of the churches which received me in the name of jesus christ, not as a mere wayfarer; for even those churches which did not lie on my route after the flesh, went before me from city to city. " . now i write these things to you from smyrna, by the hand of the ephesians, who are worthy of all felicitation. and crocus also, a name very dear to me, is with me, with many others besides. " . as touching those who went before me from syria to rome, to the glory of god, i believe that ye have received instructions; whom also apprize that i am near, for they all are worthy of god and of you, and it becomes you to refresh them in all things. these things i write to you on the th before the kalends of september. fare-ye-well unto the end in the patient waiting for jesus christ." this letter is a strange mixture of silly babblement, mysticism, and fanaticism; but throughout it wants the true ring of an honest correspondence. why does the writer describe himself as the _bishop of syria_, and why does he never once mention _antioch_ from beginning to end? when an apostle was imprisoned, his brethren prayed for his release (acts xii. ); but this ignatius forbade the christians at rome to make any attempt to save him from martyrdom. paul taught that he might give his body to be burned, and yet after all be a reprobate ( cor. xiii. ); but this ignatius indicates that all would be well with him, if he had the good fortune to be eaten by the lions. his letter is pervaded, not by the enlightened and cheerful piety of the new testament, but by the gloomy and repulsive spirit of montanism. bishop lightfoot tells us that it had "a wider popularity than the other letters of ignatius" (vol. ii, § i. p. ). it was accommodated to the taste of an age of deteriorated christianity. polycarp would have sternly condemned its extravagance. but, in the early part of the third century, the tone of public sentiment in the christian church was greatly changed, and the writings of tertullian contributed much to give encouragement to such productions as the ignatian epistles. tertullian, however, in his numerous writings, never once names ignatius. it would appear that he had never heard of these letters. [endnotes] [ : ] carwithen, _hist. ch. of england_, i. , nd ed. [ : ] _instit._ i. c. xiii. § . "there is," says calvin, "nothing more abominable than that trash which is in circulation under the name of ignatius." [ : ] _the apostolic fathers_, part ii., s. ignatius, s. polycarp. revised texts, with introductions, notes, dissertations, and translations. by j. b. lightfoot, d.d., d.c.l., ll.d., bishop of durham. london . [ : ] _expositor_ for dec. , p. . london, hodder & stoughton. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] pref. i. vii. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] monk's _life of bentley_, ii. p. , ed. . monk adds, that the affair was "the talk of the long vacation"--a clear proof that the truth of the statement was indisputable. [ : ] see my _old catholic church_, p. , edinburgh ; and appendix no. to this reply. [ : ] vol. i. p. , note. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] see _expositor_ for dec. , p. . [ : ] vol. ii. sec. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] see lightfoot, vol. i. p. . [ : ] see _expositor_ for dec. , p. . [ : ] page v. [ : ] preface, p. vi. [ : ] _contra haer._ iii. . . [ : ] vol. ii. sec. i. p. . [ : ] _ibid._ [ : ] vol. i. p. . he says elsewhere "almost simultaneously," vol. i. p. . [ : ] § , , . it is worthy of remark that eusebius notices the letter of polycarp, not along with the ignatian epistles, but in connection with the beginning of the reign of marcus aurelius. see eusebius, book iv. chap. xiv. [ : ] the words "for kings" of this part of the letter are extant only in a latin version. the passage in the latin stands thus: "orate etiam, pro regibus et potestatibus et principibus." [ : ] as the great monarch of assyria surveyed the potentates under his dominion, he was tempted to exclaim vaingloriously, "are not my princes all of them kings?" isa. x. , revised version. the emperor of rome might have uttered the same proud boast. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] _ibid._ in support of this view dr. lightfoot appeals to tim ii. , where the apostle says that "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks," as circumstances required, should be made "for kings and all that are in authority." paul is here giving general directions suited to all time; but polycarp is addressing himself to the philippians, and furnishing them with instructions adapted to their existing condition. [ : ] vol. i. p. [ : ] § . this part of the letter is only extant in the latin version. its words are: "de ipso ignatio, et _de his qui cum eo sunt_, quod certius agnoveritis, significate." dr. lightfoot admits that "it was made from an older form of the greek" than any of the existing greek mss., vol. ii. § ii. p. . he vainly tries to prove that the words "qui cum eo sunt" must be a mistranslation. they do not suit his theory. they imply that ignatius and his party were still living when the letter was written. [ : ] see dr. lightfoot, vol. i. p. , and zahn, _ignatius von antiochien_, pp. and . [ : ] this road was several hundred miles in length. [ : ] vol. ii. sec. ii. p. , note. [ : ] "si quis vadit ad syriam, deferat literas meas, quas fecero ad vos." this is the reading of the old latin version, which, as dr. lightfoot tells us, "is sometimes useful for correcting the text of the extant greek mss." vol. ii. sec. ii. p. . even some of the greek mss. read, not [greek: par humon] but [greek: par haemon]. this reading is found in some copies of eusebius and in nicephorus, and is followed by rufinus. see jacobson, _pat. apost._ ii. , note. [ : ] the apostles and elders assembled at jerusalem directed their letters to the brethren "in _antioch_, and syria, and cilicia," acts xv. ; but, according to dr. lightfoot and his supporters, ignatius ignores his own city, though one of the greatest in the empire, and remembers only the province to which it belonged! [ : ] epistle to polycarp, § . [ : ] the words may be literally translated, "if any one is going to syria, he might convey to you my letters which i shall have finished," that is, which i have ready. friendly letters were then generally much longer than in our day, as the opportunities of transmitting them were few; and much longer time was occupied in their preparation. [ : ] [greek: psuria]--see the _iliad_ and _odyssey_, by j. b. friedreich, p. . erlangen . it is mentioned by homer in the _odyssey_, lib. iii. . see also dunbar's _greek lexicon_, art. [greek: psuria]. [ : ] mr. gladstone has remarked that "the [greek: suriae naesos], or syros, has the same bearing in respect to delos as [greek: psuriae] in respect to chios."--_studies on homer_, vol. iii. , note. [ : ] see homer, _odyssey_, xv. . see the note in the _odyssey_, by f. h. rothe, pp. - . leipsic . in the latin version of strabo we have these words: "videtur sub-syriae nomine mentionem facere homerus his quidem verbis:-- 'ortygiam supra syria est quaedam insula.'" strabo, _rer. geog._ lib. x. p. . oxford . the passage in homer is thus rendered by chapman:-- "there is an isle above ortygia, if thou hast heard, they call it syria." the present inhabitants of this island call themselves [greek: surianoi] or syrians. see smith's _dictionary of greek and roman geography_, art. "syros." [ : ] bingham's _origines ecclesiasticae_, iii. . london . [ : ] smith's _assyrian discoveries_, p. . london . [ : ] smith, p. . [ : ] dr. lightfoot imagines that he has discovered a wonderful confirmation of his views in the word "likewise" which here occurs (vol. i. p. ). it is not easy to see the force of his argument; but, with the explanations given in the text, the word has peculiar significance. it implies that whilst the messenger was to carry the letters from smyrna to syria, he was _also_, or likewise, to bring back smyrna the letters sent to syria from philippi. [ : ] ignatius to the smyrnaeans, § . [ : ] zahn speaks of the mission to antioch as "senseless, even considering the time of the year."--_ignatius von antiochien_, p. . [ : ] i was myself so much impressed at one time by dr. lightfoot's reasoning in the _contemporary review_ (may ), that i actually adopted his reckoning as to the date of polycarp's death in a late edition of my _ancient church_; but, on more mature consideration, i have found it to be quite untenable. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. pp. , . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] lightfoot, vol. i. p. . [ : ] _ibid._ [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] _vita malchi_, opera iv. pp. , . paris . [ : ] döllinger's _hippolytus and callistus_, by plummer, pp. , . edinburgh . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] dr. lightfoot is not supported in his chronology by his favourite zahn, who places the date of the martyrdom of polycarp after the death of peregrinus, in a.d. .--_ignatius von antiochien_, p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. pp. , . [ : ] vol. i. . [ : ] _ibid._ even the manuscript authorities of this postscript differ as to the name. according to some, the prenomen was _statius_; according to others, _stratius_; according to another, _tatius_; whilst in another the name is omitted altogether. see lightfoot, vol. i. p. , note; vol. ii. sec. ii. p. ; see also jacobson, ii. p. . [ : ] it is probable that the postscript was written many years after the event; and, under these circumstances, the writer may have mistaken the name of the proconsul at the time. eusebius seems to have known nothing of this postscript, and it is now impossible to tell when it was added. [ : ] ummidius quadratus, in a.d. , was associated with the emperor lucius verus in the consulship; and it would appear that about a.d. --on the ground of exceptional ability and influence--he was appointed to the proconsulship of asia. [ : ] vol. i. pp. , . in another case we find the proconsul _sergius_ paulus styled incorrectly _servillius_ paullus, vol. i. p. . see also i. p. . [ : ] it is stated in this same postscript, that "philip of tralles was high priest," or asiarch, at the time of the martyrdom of polycarp. from this fact dr. lightfoot has endeavoured to derive support for his chronology. his argument is, however, quite inconclusive. the dignity of asiarch could be enjoyed only by the very rich, as none others could sustain the expense of it; and the same individual might hold it for years together, as well as again and again. the philip of whom dr. lightfoot speaks, had a son of the same name, who may also have been high priest or asiarch. see lightfoot, vol. i. pp. , , , . [ : ] euseb. iv. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. pp. - . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] § . [ : ] see neander, i. p. . edinburgh . [ : ] neander, i. p. . [ : ] antoninus pius became emperor in a.d. .--lightfoot, i. p. . hadrian died on the th of july of that year.--_ibid._ [ : ] book iv. . [ : ] book iv. . dr. lightfoot states that eusebius had lists of roman and alexandrian bishops, "giving the lengths of their respective terms of office," vol. ii. sec. i. p. . it is said that hippolytus was the first who ever made a chronological list of the bishops of rome.--döllinger's _hippolytus and callistus_, p. . [ : ] § , . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] _contra haer._ lib. v. c. . § . [ : ] dr. lightfoot seems to have been in a condition of strange forgetfulness when he asks, "why does not irenaeus quote polycarp's epistle?"--vol. i. p. . the simple answer is that he mentions the epistle, and quotes polycarp by name as a witness against the heretics. _contra haer._ book iii. c. . § . [ : ] eusebius, v. c. i. the writer here mentions a number of individuals by name, who were at this time "led into the amphitheatre to the wild beasts." [ : ] professor harnack says: "if we do not retain the epistle of polycarp, then we must allow that _the external evidence on behalf of the ignatian epistles is exceedingly weak, and hence is highly favourable to the suspicion that they are spurious."--expositor_ for jan. , p. . we have seen, however, that the epistle of polycarp furnishes no evidence in their favour. see chap. ii. [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] to the trallians, § . [ : ] to the romans, § . [ : ] to the trallians, § . [ : ] to the smyrnaeans, § . [ : ] to the romans, § . [ : ] letter of the smyrnaeans relating to the death of polycarp, § . [ : ] to the smyrnaeans, § . [ : ] polycarp to the philippians, section § , , . [ : ] § , . [ : ] to the philad. § . to the smyrnaeans, § . to polycarp, § . [ : ] _the ancient church_, period ii. sec. ii. chap. ii., iii. [ : ] _epistle to the philippians_, pp. - . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] tim. i. , iii. . [ : ] acts xx. , . [ : ] tim. iv. . [ : ] _comment. in titum_. [ : ] gal. ii. . [ : ] _philippians._ essay, pp. , . [ : ] dr. lightfoot, as we have seen, here completely mistakes the date of the epistle of polycarp. [ : ] _philippians_, p. . [ : ] _ibid._ p. . [ : ] _ibid._ p. . [ : ] see my _ancient church_, th edition, pp. - . new york . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] it is quite clear that the bishops of whom irenaeus speaks were not a distinct order from presbyters. thus he says, "it is incumbent to obey the _presbyters_ who are in the church, those who possess the succession from the apostles, and who together with the _succession of the episcopate_ have received the certain gift of truth." ... "it behoves us ... to adhere to those who ... hold the doctrine of the apostles, and who, together with _the order of the presbytery_, display sound speech and blameless conduct."--_contra haer._ lib. iv. c. , § , . [ : ] _irenicum_, part ii. chap. . [ : ] _contra haer._ iii. , . [ : ] "it is," says he, "at all events _not likely_," vol. i. p. . [ : ] tim. i. . [ : ] if he was eighty-six years of age at the time of his martyrdom in a.d. , he was born a.d. . [ : ] even eusebius has given some countenance to this practice. see his _evangelical preparation_, xii. c. . [ : ] döllinger's _hippolytus and callistus_, p. . [ : ] § . see this letter in appendix ii. [ : ] vol. i. p. . it is worthy of note that, in this epistle to the romans, antioch is not named. ignatius speaks of himself as "the bishop from syria," § . he thus seeks to identify himself with the ignatius mentioned in the epistle of polycarp, who speaks of sending letters to syria. [ : ] vol. ii. sec. i. p. . [ : ] lightfoot, vol. ii. sec. i. pp. , . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] euseb. v. c. . [ : ] eph. § ; magn. § . [ : ] rom. § . [ : ] eph. § ; rom. § ; trallians, § . [ : ] eph. § . [ : ] polycarp, § . [ : ] smyrnaeans, § ; philad. § . [ : ] _philosophumena_, book ix. [ : ] eph. § . [ : ] rom. § . [ : ] vol. i. p. . [ : ] philippians, p. . [ : ] cyprian could not sympathize with this ignatius in his passion for martyrdom. the bishop of carthage incurred some odium by retiring to a place of safety in a time of persecution. [ : ] philippians, essay . [the greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or very suspect.] [illustration: f. finden sculp. _london, john murray, albernarle st. _] [autographed: dear sir, your obliged servant. s. t. coleridge] specimens of the table talk of samuel taylor coleridge. to james gillman, esquire, of the grove, highgate, and to mrs. gillman, this volume is gratefully inscribed. preface. * * * * * it is nearly fifteen years since i was, for the first time, enabled to become a frequent and attentive visitor in mr. coleridge's domestic society. his exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very first evening which i spent with him after my boyhood, i committed to writing, as well as i could, the principal topics of his conversation in his own words. i had no settled design at that time of continuing the work, but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a strain of music as i had just heard, should not last forever. what i did once, i was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. i know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of mr. coleridge's conversation. how should it be otherwise? who could always follow to the turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? who could fix those ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made me bend before him as before an inspired man? such acts of spirit as these were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. yet i would fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent shape for general use. and although, in the judgment of many persons, i may incur a serious responsibility by this publication; i am, upon the whole, willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of truth and of goodness will be every way a gainer. this sprig, though slight and immature, may yet become its place, in the poet's wreath of honour, among flowers of graver hue. if the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every thing is good that has been said by the dead. the following pages do not, i trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. their contents may not, in every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can hardly be without some, and, i hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or political grounds of common notoriety. upon the justice of the remarks here published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance, the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. but, for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few notes, and to make some quotations from mr. coleridge's own works; and in doing so, i was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral, and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits deserve, and will, as i believe, finally obtain. and i can truly say, that if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles, in the light of which mr. coleridge was accustomed to regard god and the world,--i shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me. a cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked with those of boswell in point of dramatic interest. coleridge differed not more from johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time in which i was intimately conversant with him. he was naturally very fond of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. he was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have been the length or mood of his discourse. and indeed, although i have been present in mixed company, where mr. coleridge has been questioned and opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--i own that it was always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream itself produced. if the course it took was not the shortest, it was generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. it is possible, indeed, that coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial power of johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and i have, upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their particular lines. but he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion. he was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men of letters by his moral thirst after the truth--the ideal truth--in his own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. to leave the everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely-- the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day with coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. it was a sabbath past expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. you came to a man who had travelled in many countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art were absolutely subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was in a most extraordinary degree familiar. throughout a long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like paul, become blind in the very act of conversion. and this he would do, without so much as one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--without one anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured rays of his discourse should converge in light. in all this he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance of his pleasant eye! there were, indeed, some whom coleridge tired, and some whom he sent asleep. it would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. i have seen him at times when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common conversation. then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to _him_, and there he would float at ease. like enough, what coleridge then said, his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a newspaper; but upon such a listener there would steal an influence, and an impression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and thought became merged in contemplation;-- and so, his senses gradually wrapt in a half sleep, he'd dream of better worlds, and dreaming hear thee still, o singing lark, that sangest like an angel in the clouds! but it would be a great mistake to suppose that the general character of mr. coleridge's conversation was abstruse or rhapsodical. the contents of the following pages may, i think, be taken as pretty strong presumptive evidence that his ordinary manner was plain and direct enough; and even when, as sometimes happened, he seemed to ramble from the road, and to lose himself in a wilderness of digressions, the truth was, that at that very time he was working out his fore-known conclusion through an almost miraculous logic, the difficulty of which consisted precisely in the very fact of its minuteness and universality. he took so large a scope, that, if he was interrupted before he got to the end, he appeared to have been talking without an object; although, perhaps, a few steps more would have brought you to a point, a retrospect from which would show you the pertinence of all he had been saying. i have heard persons complain that they could get no answer to a question from coleridge. the truth is, he answered, or meant to answer, so fully that the querist should have no second question to ask. in nine cases out of ten he saw the question was short or misdirected; and knew that a mere _yes_ or _no_ answer could not embrace the truth--that is, the whole truth--and might, very probably, by implication, convey error. hence that exhaustive, cyclical mode of discoursing in which he frequently indulged; unfit, indeed, for a dinner- table, and too long-breathed for the patience of a chance visiter,--but which, to those who knew for what they came, was the object of their profoundest admiration, as it was the source of their most valuable instruction. mr. coleridge's affectionate disciples learned their lessons of philosophy and criticism from his own mouth. he was to them as an old master of the academy or lyceum. the more time he took, the better pleased were such visiters; for they came expressly to listen, and had ample proof how truly he had declared, that whatever difficulties he might feel, with pen in hand, in the expression of his meaning, he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the utterance of his most subtle reasonings by word of mouth. how many a time and oft have i felt his abtrusest thoughts steal rhythmically on my soul, when chanted forth by him! nay, how often have i fancied i heard rise up in answer to his gentle touch, an interpreting music of my own, as from the passive strings of some wind-smitten lyre! mr. coleridge's conversation at all times required attention, because what he said was so individual and unexpected. but when he was dealing deeply with a question, the demand upon the intellect of the hearer was very great; not so much for any hardness of language, for his diction was always simple and easy; nor for the abstruseness of the thoughts, for they generally explained, or appeared to explain, themselves; but preeminently on account of the seeming remoteness of his associations, and the exceeding subtlety of his transitional links. upon this point it is very happily, though, according to my observation, too generally, remarked, by one whose powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent that the obliquity of his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;--"coleridge, to many people--and often i have heard the complaint--seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest,--viz. when the compass and huge circuit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions, before they began to revolve. long before this coming round commenced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. they continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. * * * * however, i can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his language." [footnote: tait's mag. sept. , p. .] true: his mind was a logic-vice; let him fasten it on the tiniest flourish of an error, he never slacked his hold, till he had crushed body and tail to dust. he was _always_ ratiocinating in his own mind, and therefore sometimes seemed incoherent to the partial observer. it happened to him as to pindar, who in modern days has been called a rambling rhapsodist, because the connections of his parts, though never arbitrary, are so fine that the vulgar reader sees them not at all. but they are there nevertheless, and may all be so distinctly shown, that no one can doubt their existence; and a little study will also prove that the points of contact are those which the true genius of lyric verse naturally evolved, and that the entire pindaric ode, instead of being the loose and lawless out-burst which so many have fancied, is, without any exception, the most artificial and highly wrought composition which time has spared to us from the wreck of the greek muse. so i can well remember occasions, in which, after listening to mr. coleridge for several delightful hours, i have gone away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate beauty and coherency of which i deeply felt, but how they had produced, or how they bore upon, each other, i could not then perceive. in such cases i have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, till at length, spontaneously as it seemed, "the fire would kindle," and the association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before, flash itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light. it may well be imagined that a style of conversation so continuous and diffused as that which i have just attempted to describe, presented remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. it is easy to preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote; these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind. but where the salient angles are comparatively few, and the object of attention is a long-drawn subtle discoursing, you can never recollect, except by yourself thinking the argument over again. in so doing, the order and the characteristic expressions will for the most part spontaneously arise; and it is scarcely credible with what degree of accuracy language may thus be preserved, where practice has given some dexterity, and long familiarity with the speaker has enabled, or almost forced, you to catch the outlines of his manner. yet with all this, so peculiar were the flow and breadth of mr. coleridge's conversation, that i am very sensible how much those who can best judge will have to complain of my representation of it. the following specimens will, i fear, seem too fragmentary, and therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing properties of that which they are designed to represent; and this is true. yet the reader will in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. as i never attempted to give dialogue--indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give --the great point with me was to condense what i could remember on each particular topic into intelligible _wholes_ with as little injury to the living manner and diction as was possible. with this explanation, i must leave it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent" ringing in their ears, to say how far i have succeeded in this delicate enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity. in reviewing the contents of the following pages, i can clearly see that i have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by those who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--_the_ liberal. i allude of course to mr. coleridge's remarks on the reform bill and the malthusian economists. the omission of such passages would probably have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and my disposition does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one. but the opinions of mr. coleridge on these subjects, however imperfectly expressed by me, were deliberately entertained by him; and to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a collection as this, what he was well known to have said, would have argued in me a disapprobation or a fear, which i disclaim. a few words, however, may be pertinently employed here in explaining the true bearing of coleridge's mind on the politics of our modern days. he was neither a whig nor a tory, as those designations are usually understood; well enough knowing that, for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the parliamentary tenets of one party or the other. in the common struggles of a session, therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal sympathies, the friend of frere and of poole, the respected guest of canning and of lord lansdowne, could have nothing to choose. but he threw the weight of his opinion--and it was considerable--into the tory or conservative scale, for these two reasons:--first, generally, because he had a deep conviction that the cause of freedom and of truth is now seriously menaced by a democratical spirit, growing more and more rabid every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come; and secondly, in particular, because the national church was to him the ark of the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the whigs about to coalesce with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the hand of spoliation upon it. add to these two grounds, some relics of the indignation which the efforts of the whigs to thwart the generous exertions of england in the great spanish war had formerly roused within him; and all the constituents of any active feeling in mr. coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, i believe, fairly laid before the reader. the reform question in itself gave him little concern, except as he foresaw the present attack on the church to be the immediate consequence of the passing of the bill; "for let the form of the house of commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for better or for worse, pretty much what the country at large is; but once invade that truly national and essentially popular institution, the church, and divert its funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public taxation--how specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never thereafter recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. give back to the church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those whose very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation designed for the general purposes of the clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making the church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the sanction of legal robbery?" upon this subject mr. coleridge did indeed feel very warmly, and was accustomed to express himself accordingly. it weighed upon his mind night and day, and he spoke upon it with an emotion, which i never saw him betray upon any topic of common politics, however decided his opinion might be. in this, therefore, he was _felix opportunitate mortis; non enim vidit_----; and the just and honest of all parties will heartily admit over his grave, that as his principles and opinions were untainted by any sordid interest, so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a reflective patriotism, without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social union. it would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of coleridge's mind. it was too deep, subtle, and peculiar, to be fathomed by a morning visiter. few persons knew much of it in any thing below the surface; scarcely three or four ever got to understand it in all its marvellous completeness. mere personal familiarity with this extraordinary man did not put you in possession of him; his pursuits and aspirations, though in their mighty range presenting points of contact and sympathy for all, transcended in their ultimate reach the extremest limits of most men's imaginations. for the last thirty years of his life, at least, coleridge was really and truly a philosopher of the antique cast. he had his esoteric views; and all his prose works from the "friend" to the "church and state" were little more than feelers, pioneers, disciplinants for the last and complete exposition of them. of the art of making hooks he knew little, and cared less; but had he been as much an adept in it as a modern novelist, he never could have succeeded in rendering popular or even tolerable, at first, his attempt to push locke and paley from their common throne in england. a little more working in the trenches might have brought him closer to the walls with less personal damage; but it is better for christian philosophy as it is, though the assailant was sacrificed in the bold and artless attack. mr. coleridge's prose works had so very limited a sale, that although published in a technical sense, they could scarcely be said to have ever become _publici juris_. he did not think them such himself, with the exception, perhaps, of the "aids to reflection," and generally made a particular remark if he met any person who professed or showed that he had read the "friend" or any of his other books. and i have no doubt that had he lived to complete his great work on "philosophy reconciled with christian religion," he would without scruple have used in that work any part or parts of his preliminary treatises, as their intrinsic fitness required. hence in every one of his prose writings there are repetitions, either literal or substantial, of passages to be found in some others of those writings; and there are several particular positions and reasonings, which he considered of vital importance, reiterated in the "friend," the "literary life," the "lay sermons," the "aids to reflection," and the "church and state." he was always deepening and widening the foundation, and cared not how often he used the same stone. in thinking passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship--and sowed beside many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling might take root and bear fruit to the glory of god and the spiritualization of man. his mere reading was immense, and the quality and direction of much of it well considered, almost unique in this age of the world. he had gone through most of the fathers, and, i believe, all the schoolmen of any eminence; whilst his familiarity with all the more common departments of literature in every language is notorious. the early age at which some of these acquisitions were made, and his ardent self-abandonment in the strange pursuit, might, according to a common notion, have seemed adverse to increase and maturity of power in after life: yet it was not so; he lost, indeed, for ever the chance of being a popular writer; but lamb's _inspired charity-boy_ of twelve years of age continued to his dying day, when sixty-two, the eloquent centre of all companies, and the standard of intellectual greatness to hundreds of affectionate disciples far and near. had coleridge been master of his genius, and not, alas! mastered by it;-- had he less romantically fought a single-handed fight against the whole prejudices of his age, nor so mercilessly racked his fine powers on the problem of a universal christian philosophy,--he might have easily won all that a reading public can give to a favourite, and have left a name--not greater nor more enduring indeed--but--better known, and more prized, than now it is, amongst the wise, the gentle, and the good, throughout all ranks of society. nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his productions at present may seem to the cursory observer--my undoubting belief is, that in the end it will be found that coleridge did, in his vocation, the day's work of a giant. he has been melted into the very heart of the rising literatures of england and america; and the principles he has taught are the master-light of the moral and intellectual being of men, who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn, the age in which they live. as it is, they 'bide their time. coleridge himself--blessings on his gentle memory!--coleridge was a frail mortal. he had indeed his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers; sensibilities that an averted look would rack, a heart which would have beaten calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. he shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death- attack like a martyr. sinned against a thousand times more than sinning, he himself suffered an almost life-long punishment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labours, his genius, and his sacrifice. _necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam; si tamen fas est aut flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti viri mortalitas magis finita quam vita est. vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit._ * * * * * samuel taylor coleridge was the youngest child of the reverend john coleridge, vicar of the parish of ottery st. mary, in the county of devon, and master of henry the eighth's free grammar school in that town. his mother's maiden name was ann bowdon. he was born at ottery on the st of october, , "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father the vicar has, with rather a curious particularity, entered it in the register. he died on the th of july, , in mr. gillman's house, in the grove, highgate, and is buried in the old church-yard, by the road side. [greek: ----] h. n. c. contents * * * * * character of othello schiller's robbers shakspeare scotch novels lord byron john kemble mathews parliamentary privilege permanency and progression of nations kant's races of mankind materialism ghosts character of the age for logic plato and xenophon greek drama kotzebue burke st. john's gospel christianity epistle to the hebrews the logos reason and understanding kean sir james mackintosh sir h. davy robert smith canning national debt poor laws conduct of the whigs reform of the house of commons church of rome zendavesta pantheism and idolatry difference between stories of dreams and ghosts phantom portrait witch of endor socinianism plato and xenophon religions of the greeks egyptian antiquities milton virgil granville penn and the deluge rainbow english and greek dancing greek acoustics lord byron's versification and don juan parental control in marriage marriage of cousins differences of character blumenbach and kant's races iapetic and semitic hebrew solomon jewish history spinozistic and hebrew schemes roman catholics energy of man and other animals shakspeare _in minimis_ paul sarpi bartram's travels the understanding parts of speech grammar magnetism electricity galvanism spenser character of othello hamlet polonius principles and maxims love measure for measure ben jonson beaumont and fletcher version of the bible craniology spurzheim bull and waterland the trinity scale of animal being popedom scanderbeg thomas à becket pure ages of greek, italian, and english luther baxter algernon sidney's style ariosto and tasso prose and poetry the fathers rhenferd jacob behmen non-perception of colours restoration reformation william iii. berkeley spinosa genius envy love jeremy taylor hooker ideas knowledge painting prophecies of the old testament messiah jews the trinity conversion of the jews jews in poland mosaic miracles pantheism poetic promise nominalists and realists british schoolmen spinosa fall of man madness brown and darwin nitrous oxide plants insects men dog ant and bee black, colonel holland and the dutch religion gentilizes women and men biblical commentators walkerite creed horne tooke diversions of purley gender of the sun in german horne tooke jacobins persian and arabic poetry milesian tales sir t. monro sir s. raffles canning shakspeare milton homer reason and understanding words and names of things the trinity irving abraham isaac jacob origin of acts love lord eldon's doctrine as to grammar schools democracy the eucharist st. john, xix. . divinity of christ genuineness of books of moses mosaic prophecies talent and genius motives and impulses constitutional and functional life hysteria hydro-carbonic gas bitters and tonics specific medicines epistles to the ephesians and colossians oaths flogging eloquence of abuse the americans book of job translation of the psalms ancient mariner undine martin pilgrim's progress prayer church-singing hooker dreams jeremy taylor english reformation catholicity gnosis tertullian st. john principles of a review party spirit southey's life of bunyan laud puritans and cavaliers presbyterians, independents, and bishops study of the bible rabelais swift bentley burnet giotto painting seneca plato aristotle duke of wellington monied interest canning bourrienne jews the papacy and the reformation leo x. thelwall swift stella iniquitous legislation spurzheim and craniology french revolution, captain b. hall and the americans english reformation democracy idea of a state church government french gendarmerie philosophy of young men at the present day thucydides and tacitus poetry modern metre logic varro socrates greek philosophy plotinus tertullian scotch and english lakes love and friendship opposed marriage characterlessness of women mental anarchy ear and taste for music different english liturgy belgian revolution galileo, newton, kepler, bacon the reformation house of commons government earl grey government popular representation napier buonaparte southey patronage of the fine arts old women pictures chillingworth superstition of maltese, sicilians, and italians asgill the french the good and the true romish religion england and holland iron galvanism heat national colonial character, and naval discipline england holland and belgium greatest happiness principle hobbism the two modes of political action truths and maxims drayton and daniel mr. coleridge's system of philosophy keenness and subtlety duties and needs of an advocate abolition of the french hereditary peerage conduct of ministers on the reform bill religion union with ireland irish church a state persons and things history beauty genius church state dissenters gracefulness of children dogs ideal tory and whig the church ministers and the reform bill disfranchisement genius feminine pirates astrology alchemy reform bill crisis john, chap. iii. ver. . dictation and inspiration gnosis new testament canon unitarianism--moral philosophy moral law of polarity epidemic disease quarantine harmony intellectual revolutions modern style genius of the spanish and italians vico spinosa colours destruction of jerusalem epic poem vox populi vox dei black asgill and defoe horne tooke fox and pitt horner adiaphori citizens and christians professor park english constitution democracy milton and sidney de vi minimorum hahnemann luther sympathy of old greek and latin with english roman mind war charm for cramp greek dual, neuter pleural *sic*, and verb singular theta talented homer valcknaer principles and facts schmidt puritans and jacobins wordsworth french revolution infant schools mr. coleridge's philosophy sublimity solomon madness c. lamb faith and belief dobrizhoffer scotch and english criterion of genius dryden and pope milton's disregard of painting baptismal service jews' division of the scripture sanskrit hesiod virgil genius metaphysical don quixote steinmetz keats christ's hospital bowyer st. paul's melita english and german best state of society great minds androgynous philosopher's ordinary language juries barristers' and physicians' fees quacks cæsarean operation inherited disease mason's poetry northern and southern states of the american union all and the whole ninth article sin and sins old divines preaching extempore church of england union with ireland faust michael scott, goethe, schiller, and wordsworth beaumont and fletcher ben jonson massinger house of commons appointing the officers of the army and navy penal code in ireland churchmen coronation oaths divinity professions and trades modern political economy national debt property tax duty of landholders massinger shakspeare hieronimo love's labour lost gifford's massinger shakspeare the old dramatists statesmen burke prospect of monarchy or democracy the reformed house of commons united states of america captain b. hall northern and southern states democracy with slavery quakers land and money methods of investigation church of rome celibacy of the clergy roman conquest of italy wedded love in shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists tennyson's poems rabelais and luther wit and madness colonization machinery capital roman conquest constantine papacy and the schoolmen civil war of the seventeenth century hampden's speech reformed house of commons food medicine poison obstruction wilson shakspeare's sonnets wickliffe love luther reverence for ideal truths johnson the whig asgill james i. sir p. sidney things are finding their level german goethe god's providence man's freedom dom miguel and dom pedro working to better one's condition negro emancipation fox and pitt revolution virtue and liberty epistle to the romans erasmus luther negro emancipation hackett's life of archbishop williams charles i. manners under edward iii. richard ii. and henry viii. hypothesis suffiction theory lyell's geology gothic architecture gerard's douw's "schoolmaster" and titian's "venus" sir j. scarlett mandeville's fable of the bees bestial theory character of bertram beaumont and fletcher's dramas aeschylus, sophocles, euripides milton style cavalier slang junius prose and verse imitation and copy dr. johnson boswell burke newton milton painting music poetry public schools scott and coleridge nervous weakness hooker and bull faith quakers philanthropists jews sallust thucydides herodotus gibbon key to the decline of the roman empire dr. johnson's political pamphlets taxation direct representation universal suffrage right of women to vote horne tooke etymology of the final _ive_ "the lord" in the english version of the psalms, etc. scotch kirk and irving milton's egotism claudian sterne humour and genius great poets good men diction of the old and new testament version hebrew vowels and consonants greek accent and quantity consolation in distress mock evangelicals autumn day rosetti on dante laughter: farce and tragedy baron von humboldt modern diplomatists man cannot be stationary fatalism and providence characteristic temperament of nations greek particles latin compounds propertius tibullus lucan statius valerius flaccus claudian persius prudentius hermesianax destruction of jerusalem epic poem german and english paradise lost modern travels the trinity incarnation redemption education elegy lavacrum pallados greek and latin pentameter milton's latin poems poetical filter gray and cotton homeric heroes in shakspeare dryden dr. johnson scott's novels scope of christianity times of charles i. messenger of the covenant prophecy logic of ideas and of syllogisms w. s. lander's poetry beauty chronological arrangement of works toleration norwegians articles of faith modern quakerism devotional spirit sectarianism origen some men like musical glasses sublime and nonsense atheist proof of existence of god kant's attempt plurality of worlds a reasoner shakspeare's intellectual action crabbe and southey peter simple and tom cringle's log chaucer shakspeare ben jonson beaumont and fletcher daniel massinger lord byron and h. walpole's "mysterious mother" lewis's jamaica journal sicily malta sir alexander ball cambridge petition to admit dissenters corn laws christian sabbath high prizes and revenues of the church sir charles wetherell's speech national church dissenters papacy universities schiller's versification german blank verse roman catholic emancipation duke of wellington coronation oath corn laws modern political economy socinianism unitarianism fancy and imagination mr. coleridge's system biographia literaria dissenters lord brooke barrow and dryden peter wilkins and stothard fielding and richardson bishop sandford roman catholic religion euthanasia recollections, by mr. justice coleridge address to a god-child table talk december , character of othello--schiller's robbers-shakspeare --scotch novels--lord byron--john kemmble--mathews othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous moorish chief. shakspeare learned the sprit of the character from the spanish poetry, which was prevalent in england in his time.[ ] jelousy does not strike me as the point in his passion; i take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. it was the struggle _not_ to love her. it was a moral indignation and regret that virture should so fall:--"but yet the _pity_ of it, iago!--o iago! the _pity_ of it, iago!" in addition to this, his hourour was concerned: iago would not have succeeded but by hinting that this honour was compromised. there is no ferocity in othello; his mind is majestic and composed. he deliberately determines to die; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the venetian state, though it had superseded him. [footnote : caballaeros granadinos, aunque moros, hijos d'algo--ed.] * * * * * schiller has the material sublime; to produce an effect he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower.[ ] but shakspeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. [footnote : this expression--"material sublime"--like a hundred others which have slipped into general use, came originally from mr. coleridege, and was by him, in the first instatnce, applied to schiller's robbers-- see act iv, sc. .--ed.] lear is the most tremendous effort of shakspeare as a poet; hamlet as a philosopher or meditater; and othello is the union of the two. there is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter, every thing assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium. i think old mortality and guy mannering the best of the scotch novels. it seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in lord byron's verses. is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? does such a combination often really exist in rerum naturae? i always had a great liking--i may say, a sort of nondescript reverence-- for john kemble. what a quaint creature he was! i remember a party, in which he was discoursing in his measured manner after dinner, when the servant announced his carriage. he nodded, and went on. the announcement took place twice afterwards; kemble each time nodding his head a little more impatiently, but still going on. at last, and for the fourth time, the servant entered, and said,--"mrs. kemble says, sir, she has the rheumat_ise_, and cannot stay." "add_ism!_" dropped john, in a parenthesis, and proceeded quietly in his harangue. * * * * * kemble would correct any body, at any time, and in any place. dear charles mathews--a true genius in his line, in my judgment--told me he was once performing privately before the king. the king was much pleased with the imitation of kemble, and said,--"i liked kemble very much. he was one of my earliest friends. i remember once he was talking, and found himself out of snuff. i offered him my box. he declined taking any--'he, a poor actor, could not put his fingers into a royal box.' i said, 'take some, pray; you will obl_ee_ge me.' upon which kemble replied,--'it would become your royal mouth better to say, obl_i_ge me;' and took a pinch." * * * * * it is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of the time by mere external noise or circumstance; yet once i was thoroughly _done up_, as you would say. i was reciting, at a particular house, the "remorse;" and was in the midst of alhadra's description of the death of her husband, [ ] when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door and cried out,--"please, ma'am, master says, will you ha'; or will you _not_ ha', the pin-round?" [footnote : "alhadra. this night your chieftain arm'd himself, and hurried from me. but i follow'd him at distance, till i saw him enter _there_! naomi. the cavern? alhadra. yes, the mouth of yonder cavern. after a while i saw the son of valdez rush by with flaring torch: he likewise enter'd. there was another and a longer pause; and once, methought, i heard the clash of swords! and soon the son of valdez re-appear'd: he flung his torch towards the moon in sport, and seem'd as he were mirthful! i stood listening, impatient for the footsteps of my husband. naomi. thou calledst him? alhadra. i crept into the cavern-- 'twas dark and very silent. what saidst thou? no! no! i did not dare call isidore, lest i should hear no answer! a brief while, belike, i lost all thought and memory of that for which i came! after that pause, o heaven! i heard a groan, and follow'd it; and yet another groan, which guided me into a strange recess--and there was light, a hideous light! his torch lay on the ground; its flame burnt dimly o'er a chasm's brink: i spake; and whilst i spake, a feeble groan came from that chasm! it was his last--his death-groan! naomi. comfort her, allah! alhadra. i stood in unimaginable trance and agony that cannot be remember'd, listening with horrid hope to hear a groan! but i had heard his last;--my husband's death-groan! naomi. haste! let us onward! alhadra. i look'd far down the pit-- my sight was bounded by a jutting fragment; and it was stain'd with blood. then first i shriek'd; my eyeballs burnt, my brain grew hot as fire, and all the hanging drops of the wet roof turn'd into blood--i saw them turn to blood! and i was leaping wildly down the chasm, when on the further brink i saw his sword, and it said, vengeance!--curses on my tongue! the moon hath moved in heaven, and i am here, and he hath not had vengeance!--isidore! spirit of isidore, thy murderer lives! away, away!"--act iv. sc. .] _january_ . . parliamentary privilege.---permanency and progression of nations.--kant's races of mankind. privilege is a substitution for law, where, from the nature of the circumstances, a law cannot act without clashing with greater and more general principles. the house of commons must, of course, have the power of taking cognizance of offences against its own rights. sir francis burdett might have been properly sent to the tower for the speech he made in the house [ ]; but when afterwards he published it in cobbett, and they took cognizance of it as a breach of privilege, they violated the plain distinction between privilege and law. as a speech in the house, the house could alone animadvert upon it, consistently with the effective preservation of its most necessary prerogative of freedom of debate; but when that speech became a book, then the law was to look to it; and there being a law of libel, commensurate with every possible object of attack in the state, privilege, which acts, or ought to act, only as a substitute for other laws, could have nothing to do with it. i have heard that one distinguished individual said,--"that he, for one, would not shrink from affirming, that if the house of commons chose to _burn_ one of their own members in palace yard, it had an inherent power and right by the constitution to do so." this was said, if at all, by a moderate-minded man; and may show to what atrocious tyranny some persons may advance in theory, under shadow of this word privilege. [footnote : march . . sir francis burdett made a motion in the house of commons for the discharge of mr. gale jones, who had been committed to newgate by a resolution of the house on the st of february preceding. sir francis afterwards published, in cobbett's political register, of the th of the same month of march, a "letter to his constituents, denying the power of the house of commons to imprison the people of england," and he accompanied the letter with an argument in support of his position. on the th of march a complaint of breach of privilege, founded on this publication, was made in the house by mr. (now sir thomas) lethbridge, and after several long debates, a motion that sir francis burdett should be committed to the tower was made on the th of april, , by sir robert salisbury, and carried by a majority of .--ed.] * * * * * there are two principles in every european and christian state: permanency and progression.[ ] in the civil wars of the seventeenth century in england, which are as new and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so for ever to us, these two principles came to a struggle. it was natural that the great and the good of the nation should he found in the ranks of either side. in the mohammedan states, there is no principle of permanence; and, therefore, they sink directly. they existed, and could only exist, in their efforts at progression; when they ceased to conquer, they fell in pieces. turkey would long since have fallen, had it not been supported by the rival and conflicting interests of christian europe. the turks have no church; religion and state are one; hence there is no counterpoise, no mutual support. this is the very essence of their unitarianism. they have no past; they are not an historical people; they exist only in the present. china is an instance of a permanency without progression. the persians are a superior race: they have a history and a literature; they were always considered by the greeks as quite distinct from the other barbarians. the afghans are a remarkable people. they have a sort of republic. europeans and orientalists may be well represented by two figures standing back to back: the latter looking to the east, that is, backwards; the former looking westward, or forwards. [footnote : see this position stated and illustrated in detail in mr. coleridge's work, "on the constitution of the church and state, according to the idea of each," p. . d edit. . well acquainted as i am with the fact f the comparatively small acceptation which mr. coleridge's prose works have ever found in the literary world, and with the reasons, and, what is more, with the causes, of it, i still wonder that this particular treatise has not been more noticed: first, because it is a little book; secondly, because it is, or at least nineteen-twentieths of it are, written in a popular style; and thirdly, because it is the only work, that i know or have ever heard mentioned, that even attempts a solution of the difficulty in which an ingenious enemy of the church of england may easily involve most of its modern defenders in parliament, or through the press, upon their own principles and admissions. mr. coleridge himself prized this little work highly, although he admitted its incompleteness as a composition:--"but i don't care a rush about it," he said to me, "as an author. the saving distinctions are plainly stated in it, and i am sure nothing is wanted to make them _tell_, but that some kind friend should steal them from their obscure hiding-place, and just tumble them down before the public as _his own_."--ed.] * * * * * kant assigns three great races of mankind. if two individuals of distinct races cross, a third, or _tertium aliquid_, is _invariably_ produced, different from either, as a white and a negro produce a mulatto. but when different varieties of the same race cross, the offspring is according to what we call chance; it is now like one, now like the other parent. note this, when you see the children of any couple of distinct european complexions,--as english and spanish, german and italian, russian and portuguese, and so on. _january_ . . materialism.--ghosts. either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. if we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. [ ] we shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. but by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts--and this also we say from our own consciousness. therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference. [footnote : "try to conceive a _man_ without the ideas of god, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth; of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. an _animal_ endowed with a memory of appearances and facts might remain. but the _man_ will have vanished, and you have instead a creature more subtle than any beast of the field, but likewise cursed above every beast of the field; upon the belly must it go, and dust must it eat all the days of its life."--_church and state_, p. . n.] * * * * * read the first chapter of genesis without prejudice, and you will be convinced at once. after the narrative of the creation of the earth and brute animals, moses seems to pause, and says:--"and god said, let us make man in _our image_, after _our likeness_." and in the next chapter, he repeats the narrative:--"and the lord god formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" and then he adds these words,--"_and man became a living soul_." materialism will never explain those last words. * * * * * define a vulgar ghost with reference to all that is called ghost-like. it is visibility without tangibility; which is also the definition of a shadow. therefore, a vulgar ghost and a shadow would be the same; because two different things cannot properly have the same definition. a _visible substance_ without susceptibility of impact, i maintain to be an absurdity. unless there be an external substance, the bodily eye _cannot_ see it; therefore, in all such cases, that which is supposed to be seen is, in fact, _not_ seen, but is an image of the brain. external objects naturally produce sensation; but here, in truth, sensation produces, as it were, the external object. in certain states of the nerves, however, i do believe that the eye, although not consciously so directed, may, by a slight convulsion, see a portion of the body, as if opposite to it. the part actually seen will by common association seem the whole; and the whole body will then constitute an external object, which explains many stories of persons seeing themselves lying dead. bishop berkeley once experienced this. he had the presence of mind to ring the bell, and feel his pulse; keeping his eye still fixed on his own figure right opposite to him. he was in a high fever, and the brain image died away as the door opened. i observed something very like it once at grasmere; and was so conscious of the cause, that i told a person what i was experiencing, whilst the image still remained. of course, if the vulgar ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. these visible and intangible shadows, without substances to cause them, are absurd. january . . character of the age for logic.--plato and xenophon.----greek drama.---- kotzebue.--burke.--plagiarists. this is not a logical age. a friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the times of charles i. and the cromwellate. in them the premisses are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premisses are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. i think a great deal of commendation is due to the university of oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. it is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it. * * * * * negatively, there may be more of the philosophy of socrates in the memorabilia of xenophon than in plato: that is, there is less of what does not belong to socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by, plato, are more socratic.[ ] [footnote : see p. . mr. coleridge meant in both these passages, that xenophon had preserved the most of the _man_ socrates; that he was the best boswell; and that socrates, as a _persona dialogi_, was little more than a poetical phantom in plato's hands. on the other hand, he says that plato is more _socratic_, that is, more of a philosopher in the socratic _mode_ of reasoning (cicero calls the platonic writings generally, _socratici libri_); and mr. c. also says, that in the metaphysical disquisitions plato is pythagorean, meaning, that he worked on the supposed ideal or transcendental principles of the extraordinary founder of the italian school.] * * * * * in Ã�schylus religion appears terrible, malignant, and persecuting: sophocles is the mildest of the three tragedians, but the persecuting aspect is still maintained: euripides is like a modern frenchman, never so happy as when giving a slap at the gods altogether. * * * * * kotzebue represents the petty kings of the islands in the pacific ocean exactly as so many homeric chiefs. riches command universal influence, and all the kings are supposed to be descended from the gods. * * * * * i confess i doubt the homeric genuineness of [greek: dakruoen gelaschsa]. [ ] it sounds to me much more like a prettiness of bion or moschus. [footnote : [greek: hos eipon, alochoio thilaes en chersin ethaeke paid eon hae d ara min chaeodei dexato cholpo, dachruoen gelasasa.]--illiad. z. vi. ] * * * * * the very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. the french revolution was alone a subject fit for him. we are not yet aware of all the consequences of that event. we are too near it. * * * * * goldsmith did every thing happily. * * * * * you abuse snuff! perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose. * * * * * a rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool _in circumbendibus_. * * * * * _omne ignotum pro magnifico_. a dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. * * * * * plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from,--as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets. _january _. . st. john's gospel.--christianity--epistle to the hebrews.--the logos.-- reason and understanding. st. john had a twofold object in his gospel and his epistles,--to prove the divinity, and also the actual human nature and bodily suffering, of jesus christ,--that he was god and man. the notion that the effusion of blood and water from the saviour's side was intended to prove the real _death_ of the sufferer originated, i believe, with some modern germans, and seems to me ridiculous: there is, indeed, a very small quantity of water occasionally in the præcordia: but in the pleura, where wounds are not generally mortal, there is a great deal. st. john did not mean, i apprehend, to insinuate that the spear-thrust made the _death_, merely as such, certain or evident, but that the effusion showed the human nature. "i saw it," he would say, "with my own eyes. it was real blood, composed of lymph and crassamentum, and not a mere celestial ichor, as the phantasmists allege." * * * * * i think the verse of the three witnesses ( john, v. .) spurious, not only because the balance of external authority is against it, as porson seems to have shown; but also, because, in my way of looking at it, it spoils the reasoning. * * * * * st. john's logic is oriental, and consists chiefly in position and parallel; whilst st. paul displays all the intricacies of the greek system. * * * * * whatever may be thought of the genuineness or authority of any part of the book of daniel, it makes no difference in my belief in christianity; for christianity is within a man, even as he is a being gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first-remembered tones of her blessed voice. * * * * * i do not believe st. paul to be the author of the epistle to the hebrews. luther's conjecture is very probable, that it was by apollos, an alexandrian jew. the plan is too studiously regular for st. paul. it was evidently written during the yet existing glories of the temple. for three hundred years the church did not affix st. paul's name to it; but its apostolical or catholic character, independently of its genuineness as to st. paul, was never much doubted. * * * * * the first three gospels show the history, that is, the fulfilment of the prophecies in the facts. st. john declares explicitly the doctrine, oracularly, and without comment, because, being pure reason, it can only be proved by itself. for christianity proves itself, as the sun is seen by its own light. its evidence is involved in its existence. st. paul writes more particularly for the dialectic understanding; and proves those doctrines, which were capable of such proof, by common logic. * * * * * st. john used the term [greek: ho logos] technically. philo-judæus had so used it several years before the probable date of the composition of this gospel; and it was commonly understood amongst the jewish rabbis at that time, and afterwards, of the manifested god. * * * * * our translators, unfortunately, as i think, render the clause [greek: pros ton theos] "_with_ god;" that would be right, if the greek were [greek: syn to theo].[ ] by the preposition [greek: pros] in this place, is meant the utmost possible _proximity_, without _confusion_; likeness, without sameness. the jewish church understood the messiah to be a divine person. philo expressly cautions against any one's supposing the logos to be a mere personification, or symbol. he says, the logos is a substantial, self- existent being. the gnostics, as they were afterwards called, were a kind of arians; and thought the logos was an after-birth. they placed [greek: abyssos] and [greek: sigae] (the abyss and silence) before him. therefore it was that st. john said, with emphasis, [greek: en archae aen ho logos]-- "in the _beginning_ was the word." he was begotten in the first simultaneous burst of godhead, if such an expression may be pardoned, in speaking of eternal existence. [footnote : john, ch. i. v. , .] * * * * * the understanding suggests the materials of reasoning: the reason decides upon them. the first can only say,--this _is_, or _ought_ to be so. the last says,--it _must_ be so.[ ] [footnote : i have preserved this, and several other equivalent remarks, out of a dutiful wish to popularize, by all the honest means in my power, this fundamental distinction; a thorough mastery of which mr. coleridge considered necessary to any sound system of psychology; and in the denial or neglect of which, he delighted to point out the source of most of the vulgar errors in philosophy and religion. the distinction itself is implied throughout almost all mr. c.'s works, whether in verse or prose; but it may be found minutely argued in the "aids to reflection," p. , &c. d edit. .--ed.] _april_ . . kean.--sir james mackintosh.--sir h. davy.--robert smith.--canning.-- national debt.--poor laws. kean is original; but he copies from himself. his rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. to see him act, is like reading shakspeare by flashes of lightning. i do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play othello. * * * * * sir james mackintosh is the king of the men of talent. he is a most elegant converger. how well i remember his giving breakfast to me and sir humphry davy, at that time an unknown young man, and our having a very spirited talk about locke and newton, and so forth! when davy was gone, mackintosh said to me, "that's a very extraordinary young man; but he is gone wrong on some points." but davy was, at that time at least, a man of genius; and i doubt if mackintosh ever heartily appreciated an eminently original man. he is uncommonly powerful in his own line; but it is not the line of a first- rate man. after all his fluency and brilliant erudition, you can rarely carry off any thing worth preserving. you might not improperly write on his forehead, "warehouse to let!" he always dealt too much in generalities for a lawyer. he is deficient in power in applying his principles to the points in debate. i remember robert smith had much more logical ability; but smith aimed at conquest by any gladiatorial shift; whereas mackintosh was uniformly candid in argument. i am speaking now from old recollections. * * * * * canning is very irritable, surprisingly so for a wit who is always giving such hard knocks. he should have put on an ass's skin before he went into parliament. lord liverpool is the single stay of this ministry; but he is not a man of a directing mind. he cannot ride on the whirlwind. he serves as the isthmus to connect one half of the cabinet with the other. he always gives you the common sense of the matter, and in that it is that his strength in debate lies. * * * * * the national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be so, or, rather, any ultimate power, in case of a struggle, of actualizing their riches. it is, in effect, like an ordinary, where three hundred tickets have been distributed, but where there is, in truth, room only for one hundred. so long as you can amuse the company with any thing else, or make them come in successively, all is well, and the whole three hundred fancy themselves sure of a dinner; but if any suspicion of a hoax should arise, and they were all to rush into the room at once, there would be two hundred without a potato for their money; and the table would be occupied by the landholders, who live on the spot. * * * * * poor-laws are the inevitable accompaniments of an extensive commerce and a manufacturing system. in scotland, they did without them, till glasgow and paisley became great manufacturing places, and then people said, "we must subscribe for the poor, or else we shall have poor-laws." that is to say, they enacted for themselves a poor-law in order to avoid having a poor-law enacted for them. it is absurd to talk of queen elizabeth's act as creating the poor-laws of this country. the poor-rates are the consideration paid by, or on behalf of, capitalists for having labour at demand. it is the price, and nothing else. the hardship consists in the agricultural interest having to pay an undue proportion of the rates; for although, perhaps, in the end, the land becomes more valuable, yet, at the first, the landowners have to bear all the brunt. i think there ought to be a fixed revolving period for the equalization of rates. _april_ . . conduct of the whigs.--reform of the house of commons. the conduct of the whigs is extravagantly inconsistent. it originated in the fatal error which fox committed, in persisting, after the first three years of the french revolution, when every shadow of freedom in france had vanished, in eulogizing the men and measures of that shallow-hearted people. so he went on gradually, further and further departing from all the principles of english policy and wisdom, till at length he became the panegyrist, through thick and thin, of a military frenzy, under the influence of which the very name of liberty was detested. and thus it was that, in course of time, fox's party became the absolute abettors of the buonapartean invasion of spain, and did all in their power to thwart the generous efforts of this country to resist it. now, when the invasion is by a bourbon, and the cause of the spanish nation neither united nor, indeed, sound in many respects, the whigs would precipitate this country into a crusade to fight up the cause of a faction. i have the honour of being slightly known to my lord darnley. in - , i met him accidentally, when, after a few words of salutation, he said to me, "are you mad, mr. coleridge?"--"not that i know, my lord," i replied; "what have i done which argues any derangement of mind?"--"why, i mean," said he, "those letters of yours in the courier, 'on the hopes and fears of a people invaded by foreign armies.' the spaniards are absolutely conquered; it is absurd to talk of their chance of resisting."--"very well, my lord," i said, "we shall see. but will your lordship permit me, in the course of a year or two, to retort your question upon you, if i should have grounds for so doing?"--"certainly!" said he; "that is fair!" two years afterwards, when affairs were altered in spain, i met lord darnley again, and, after some conversation, ventured to say to him, "does your lordship recollect giving me leave to retort a certain question upon you about the spaniards? who is mad now?"--"very true, very true, mr. coleridge," cried he: "you are right. it is very extraordinary. it was a very happy and hold guess." upon which i remarked, "i think '_guess_' is hardly a fair term. for, has any thing happened that has happened, from any other causes, or under any other conditions, than such as i laid down beforehand?" lord darnley, who was always very courteous to me, took this with a pleasant nod of his head. * * * * * many votes are given for reform in the house of commons, which are not honest. whilst it is well known that the measure will not he carried in parliament, it is as well to purchase some popularity by voting for it. when hunt and his associates, before the six acts, created a panic, the ministers lay on their oars for three or four months, until the general cry, even from the opposition, was, "why don't the ministers come forward with some protective measure?" the present ministry exists on the weakness and desperate character of the opposition. the sober part of the nation are afraid of the latter getting into power, lest they should redeem some of their pledges. * * * * * _april_ . . church of rome. the present adherents of the church of rome are not, in my judgment, catholics. we are the catholics. we can prove that we hold the doctrines of the primitive church for the first three hundred years. the council of trent made the papists what they are. [ ] a foreign romish bishop has declared, that the protestants of his acquaintance were more like what he conceived the enlightened catholics to have been before the council of trent, than the best of the latter in his days. perhaps you will say, this bishop was not a _good catholic_.[ ] i cannot answer for that. the course of christianity and the christian church may not unaptly be likened to a mighty river, which filled a wide channel, and bore along with its waters mud, and gravel, and weeds, till it met a great rock in the middle of its stream. by some means or other, the water flows purely, and separated from the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader current, and then cries out, "_we_ are the river!" [footnote : see aids to reflection, p. . note.] [footnote : mr. coleridge named him, but the name was strange to me, and i have been unable to recover it--ed.] * * * * * a person said to me lately, "but you will, for civility's sake, _call_ them _catholics_, will you not?" i answered, that i would not; for i would not tell a lie upon any, much less upon so solemn an occasion. "the adherents of the church of rome, i repeat, are not _catholic_ christians. if they are, then it follows that we protestants are heretics and schismatics, as, indeed, the papists very logically, from their own premisses, call us. and '_roman_ catholics' makes no difference. catholicism is not capable of degrees or local apportionments. there can be but one body of catholics, _ex vi termini_. to talk strictly of _irish_ or _scotch roman_ catholics is a mere absurdity." * * * * * it is common to hear it said, that, if the legal disabilities are removed, the romish church will lose ground in this country. i think the reverse: the romish religion is, or, in certain hands, is capable of being made, so flattering to the passions and self-delusion of men, that it is impossible to say how far it would spread, amongst the higher orders of society especially, if the secular disadvantages now attending its profession were removed.[ ] [footnote : here, at least, the prophecy has been fulfilled. the wisdom of our ancestors, in the reign of king william iii., would have been jealous of the daily increase in the numbers of the romish church in england, of which every attentive observer must be aware. see _sancti dominici pallium_, in vol. ii. p. . of mr. coleridge's poems.-ed.] april . . zendavesta.--pantheism and idolatry. the zendavesta must, i think, have been copied in parts from the writings of moses. in the description of the creation, the first chapter of genesis is taken almost literally, except that the sun is created _before_ the light, and then the herbs and the plants after the sun; which are precisely the two points they did not understand, and therefore altered as errors.[ ] there are only two acts of creation, properly so called, in the mosaic account,--the material universe and man. the intermediate acts seem more as the results of secondary causes, or, at any rate, of a modification of prepared materials. [footnote : the zend, or zendavesta, is the sacred book ascribed to zoroaster, or zerdusht, the founder or reformer of the magian religion. the modern edition or paraphrase of this work, called the sadda, written in the persian of the day, was, i believe, composed about three hundred years ago --ed.] * * * * * pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet. the judaic religion is the exact medium, the true compromise. _may_ . . difference between stories of dreams and ghosts. --phantom portrait.--witch of endor.--socinianism. there is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of dreams and stories of ghosts. dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and, though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment. [ ] all the external senses have their correspondents in the mind; the eye can see an object before it is distinctly apprehended;--why may there not be a corresponding power in the soul? the power of prophecy might have been merely a spiritual excitation of this dormant faculty. hence you will observe that the hebrew seers sometimes seem to have required music, as in the instance of elisha before jehoram:--"but now bring me a minstrel. and it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the lord came upon him." [ ] every thing in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. no doubt, many such take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind acts without interruption. terror and the heated imagination will, even in the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a simple object possessing none of them in reality. but ghost stories are absurd. whenever a real ghost appears,--by which i mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,--if the supernatural character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on the spectator have always been most terrible,--convulsion, idiocy, madness, or even death on the spot. consider the awful descriptions in the old testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers of the hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of all animal power. but in our common ghost stories, you always find that the seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite well the next day. perhaps, he may have a headach; but that is the outside of the effect produced. alston, a man of genius, and the best painter yet produced by america, when he was in england told me an anecdote which confirms what i have been saying. it was, i think, in the university of cambridge, near boston, that a certain youth took it into his wise head to endeavour to convert a tom-painish companion of his by appearing as a ghost before him. he accordingly dressed himself up in the usual way, having previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the head of his friend's bed. upon first awaking, and seeing the apparition, the youth who was to be frightened, a., very coolly looked his companion the ghost in the face, and said, "i know you. this is a good joke; but you see i am not frightened. now you may vanish!" the ghost stood still. "come," said a., "that is enough. i shall get angry. away!" still the ghost moved not. "by ----," ejaculated a., "if you do not in three minutes go away, i'll shoot you." he waited the time, deliberately levelled the pistol, fired, and, with a scream at the immobility of the figure, became convulsed, and afterwards died. the very instant he believed it _to be_ a ghost, his human nature fell before it. [footnote : see this point suggested and reasoned with extraordinary subtlety in the third essay (marked c), in the appendix to the statesman's manual, or first lay sermon, p. , &c. one beautiful paragraph i will venture to quote:-- "not only may we expect that men of strong religious feelings, but little religious knowledge, will occasionally be tempted to regard such occurrences as supernatural visitations; but it ought not to surprise us if such dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as though they had actually possessed a character of divination. for who shall decide how far a perfect reminiscence of past experiences (of many, perhaps, that had escaped our reflex consciousness at the time)--who shall determine to what extent this reproductive imagination, unsophisticated by the will, and undistracted by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be concentred and sublimed into foresight and presentiment? there would be nothing herein either to foster superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous disbelief on the other. incredulity is but credulity seen from behind, bowing and nodding assent to the habitual and the fashionable"-ed.] [footnote : kings, iii. ., and see sam. x. .--ed.] * * * * * [what follows in the text within commas was written about this time, and communicated to me by mr. justice coleridge.--ed.] "last thursday my uncle, s. t. c., dined with us, and several men came to meet him. i have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and delighted every one very much. it is impossible to carry off, or commit to paper, his long trains of argument; indeed, it is not always possible to understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question in so original a manner. nothing can be finer than the principles which he lays down in morals and religion. his deep study of scripture is very astonishing; the rest of the party were but as children in his hands, not merely in general views of theology, but in nice verbal criticism. he thinks it clear that st. paul did not write the epistle to the hebrews, but that it must have been the work of some alexandrian greek, and he thinks apollos. it seemed to him a desirable thing for christianity that it should have been written by some other person than st. paul; because, its inspiration being unquestioned, it added another independent teacher and expounder of the faith. "we fell upon ghosts, and he exposed many of the stories physically and metaphysically. he seemed to think it impossible that you should really see with the bodily eye what was impalpable, unless it were a shadow; and if what you fancied you saw with the bodily eye was in fact only an impression on the imagination, then you were seeing something _out of your senses_, and your testimony was full of uncertainty. he observed how uniformly, in all the best-attested stories of spectres, the appearance might be accounted for from the disturbed state of the mind or body of the seer, as in the instances of dion and brutus. upon some one's saying that he _wished_ to believe these stories true, thinking that they constituted a useful subsidiary testimony of another state of existence, mr. c. differed, and said, he thought it a dangerous testimony, and one not wanted: it was saul, with the scriptures and the prophet before him, calling upon the witch of endor to certify him of the truth! he explained very ingeniously, yet very naturally, what has often startled people in ghost stories--such as lord lyttelton's--namely, that when a real person has appeared, habited like the phantom, the ghost-seer has immediately seen two, the real man and the phantom. he said that such must be the case. the man under the morbid delusion sees with the eye of the imagination, and sees with the bodily eye too; if no one were really present, he would see the spectre with one, and the bed-curtains with the other. when, therefore, a real person comes, he sees the real man as he would have seen any one else in the same place, and he sees the spectre not a whit the less: being perceptible by different powers of vision, so to say, the appearances do not interfere with each other. "he told us the following story of the phantom portrait [ ]:-- "a stranger came recommended to a merchant's house at lubeck. he was hospitably received; but, the house being full, he was lodged at night in an apartment handsomely furnished, but not often used. there was nothing that struck him particularly in the room when left alone, till he happened to cast his eyes on a picture, which immediately arrested his attention. it was a single head; but there was something so uncommon, so frightful and unearthly, in its expression, though by no means ugly, that he found himself irresistibly attracted to look at it. in fact, he could not tear himself from the fascination of this portrait, till his imagination was filled by it, and his rest broken. he retired to bed, dreamed, and awoke from time to time with the head glaring on him. in the morning, his host saw by his looks that he had slept ill, and inquired the cause, which was told. the master of the house was much vexed, and said that the picture ought to have been removed, that it was an oversight, and that it always was removed when the chamber was used. the picture, he said, was, indeed, terrible to every one; but it was so fine, and had come into the family in so curious a way, that he could not make up his mind to part with it, or to destroy it. the story of it was this:--'my father,' said he, 'was at hamburgh on business, and, whilst dining at a coffee-house, he observed a young man of a remarkable appearance enter, seat himself alone in a corner, and commence a solitary meal. his countenance bespoke the extreme of mental distress, and every now and then he turned his head quickly round, as if he heard something, then shudder, grow pale, and go on with his meal after an effort as before. my father saw this same man at the same place for two or three successive days; and at length became so much interested about him, that he spoke to him. the address was not repulsed, and the stranger seemed to find some comfort in the tone of sympathy and kindness which my father used. he was an italian, well informed, poor but not destitute, and living economically upon the profits of his art as a painter. their intimacy increased; and at length the italian, seeing my father's involuntary emotion at his convulsive turnings and shuddering, which continued as formerly, interrupting their conversation from time to time, told him his story. he was a native of rome, and had lived in some familiarity with, and been much patronized by, a young nobleman; but upon some slight occasion they had fallen out, and his patron, besides using many reproachful expressions, had struck him. the painter brooded over the disgrace of the blow. he could not challenge the nobleman, on account of his rank; he therefore watched for an opportunity, and assassinated him. of course he fled from his country, and finally had reached hamburgh. he had not, however, passed many weeks from the night of the murder, before, one day, in the crowded street, he heard his name called by a voice familiar to him: he turned short round, and saw the face of his victim looking at him with a fixed eye. from that moment he had no peace: at all hours, in all places, and amidst all companies, however engaged he might be, he heard the voice, and could never help looking round; and, whenever he so looked round, he always encountered the same face staring close upon him. at last, in a mood of desperation, he had fixed himself face to face, and eye to eye, and deliberately drawn the phantom visage as it glared upon him; and _this_ was the picture so drawn. the italian said he had struggled long, but life was a burden which he could now no longer bear; and he was resolved, when he had made money enough to return to rome, to surrender himself to justice, and expiate his crime on the scaffold. he gave the finished picture to my father, in return for the kindness which he had shown to him.'" [footnote : this is the story which mr. washington irving has dressed up very prettily in the first volume of his "tales of a traveller," pp. - .; professing in his preface that he could not remember whence he had derived the anecdote.--ed.] * * * * * i have no doubt that the jews believed generally in a future state, independently of the mosaic law. the story of the witch of endor is a proof of it. what we translate "_witch_," or "familiar spirit," is, in the hebrew, ob, that is, a bottle or bladder, and means a person whose belly is swelled like a leathern bottle by divine inflation. in the greek it is [greek: engastrimuthos], a ventriloquist. the text ( sam. ch. xxviii.) is a simple record of the facts, the solution of which the sacred historian leaves to the reader. i take it to have been a trick of ventriloquism, got up by the courtiers and friends of saul, to prevent him, if possible, from hazarding an engagement with an army despondent and oppressed with bodings of defeat. saul is not said to have seen samuel; the woman only pretends to see him. and then what does this samuel do? he merely repeats the prophecy known to all israel, which the true samuel had uttered some years before. read captain lyon's account of the scene in the cabin with the esquimaux bladder, or conjurer; it is impossible not to be reminded of the witch of endor. i recommend you also to look at webster's admirable treatise on witchcraft. * * * * * the pet texts of a socinian are quite enough for his confutation with acute thinkers. if christ had been a mere man, it would have been ridiculous in _him_ to call himself "the son of man;" but being god and man, it then became, in his own assumption of it, a peculiar and mysterious title. so, if christ had been a mere man, his saying, "my father is greater than i," (john, xv. .) would have been as unmeaning. it would be laughable enough, for example, to hear me say, "my 'remorse' succeeded, indeed, but shakspeare is a greater dramatist than i." but how immeasurably more foolish, more monstrous, would it not be for a _man_, however honest, good, or wise, to say, "but jehovah is greater than i!" _may_ . . plato and xenophon.--religions of the greeks.--egyptian antiquities.-- milton.--virgil. plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. little that is positive is advanced in them. socrates may be fairly represented by plato in the more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is pythagoras. xenophon's representation of his master is quite different.[ ] [footnote : see p. . n.--ed.] * * * * * observe the remarkable contrast between the religion of the tragic and other poets of greece. the former are always opposed in heart to the popular divinities. in fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of greece, represented roughly by homer, pindar, and Ã�schylus. the ancients had no notion of a _fall_ of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in aeschylus, is the redeemer and the devil jumbled together. * * * * * i cannot say i expect much from mere egyptian antiquities. almost every thing really, that is, intellectually, great in that country seems to me of grecian origin. * * * * * i think nothing can be added to milton's definition or rule of poetry,-- that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned; that is to say, single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and informing them all with the spirit of the mind. milton's latin style is, i think, better and easier than his english. his style, in prose, is quite as characteristic of him as a philosophic republican, as cowley's is of _him_ as a first-rate gentleman. if you take from virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him? * * * * * _june_ . . cranville penn and the deluge.--rainbow. i confess i have small patience with mr. granville penn's book against professor buckland. science will be superseded, if every phenomenon is to be referred in this manner to an actual miracle. i think it absurd to attribute so much to the deluge. an inundation, which left an olive-tree standing, and bore up the ark peacefully on its bosom, could scarcely have been the sole cause of the rents and dislocations observable on the face of the earth. how could the tropical animals, which have been discovered in england and in russia in a perfectly natural state, have been transported thither by such a flood? those animals must evidently have been natives of the countries in which they have been found. the climates must have been altered. assume a sudden evaporation upon the retiring of the deluge to have caused an intense cold, the solar heat might not be sufficient afterwards to overcome it. i do not think that the polar cold is adequately explained by mere comparative distance from the sun. * * * * * you will observe, that there is no mention of rain previously to the deluge. hence it may be inferred, that the rainbow was exhibited for the first time after god's covenant with noah. however, i only suggest this. * * * * * the earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the past; the air and heaven, of futurity. _june_ . . english and greek dancing.--greek acoustics. the fondness for dancing in english women is the reaction of their reserved manners. it is the only way in which they can throw themselves forth in natural liberty. we have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. the pleasure which the greeks received from it had for its basis difference and the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity and intense the delight at seeing the difficulty overcome. * * * * * the ancients certainly seem to have understood some principles in acoustics which we have lost, or, at least, they applied them better. they contrived to convey the voice distinctly in their huge theatres by means of pipes, which created no echo or confusion. our theatres--drury lane and covent garden--are fit for nothing: they are too large for acting, and too small for a bull-fight. * * * * * _june_ . . lord byron's versification, and don juan. how lamentably the _art_ of versification is neglected by most of the poets of the present day!--by lord byron, as it strikes me, in particular, among those of eminence for other qualities. upon the whole, i think the part of don juan in which lambro's return to his home, and lambro himself, are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all i know of lord b.'s works. the festal abandonment puts one in mind of nicholas poussin's pictures.[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge particularly noticed, for its classical air, the d stanza of this canto (the third):-- "a band of children, round a snow-white ram, there wreathe his venerable horns with flowers, while, peaceful as if still an unwean'd lamb, the patriarch of the flock all gently cowers his sober head, majestically tame, or eats from out the palm, or playful lowers his brow, as if in act to butt, and then yielding to their small hands, draws back again." but mr. c. said that _then_, and _again_, made no rhyme to his ear. why should not the old form _agen_ be lawful in verse? we wilfully abridge ourselves of the liberty which our great poets achieved and sanctioned for us in innumerable instances.--ed.] _june_ . . parental control in marriage.--marriage of cousins.--difference of character. up to twenty-one, i hold a father to have power over his children as to marriage; after that age, authority and influence only. show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and i will show you ten that are wretched from other causes. * * * * * if the matter were quite open, i should incline to disapprove the intermarriage of first cousins; but the church has decided otherwise on the authority of augustine, and that seems enough upon such a point. * * * * * you may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage. _february_ . . blumenbach and kant's races.--iapetic and semitic.--hebrew.--solomon. blumenbach makes five races; kant, three. blumenbach's scale of dignity may be thus figured:-- . caucasian or european. . malay ================= . american . negro ========================== . mongolian, asiatic there was, i conceive, one great iapetic original of language, under which greek, latin, and other european dialects, and, perhaps, sanscrit, range as species. the iapetic race, [greek: iaones]; separated into two branches; one, with a tendency to migrate south-west,--greeks, italians, &c.; and the other north-west,--goths, germans, swedes, &c. the hebrew is semitic. * * * * * hebrew, in point of force and purity, seems at its height in isaiah. it is most corrupt in daniel, and not much less so in ecclesiastes; which i cannot believe to have been actually composed by solomon, but rather suppose to have been so attributed by the jews, in their passion for ascribing all works of that sort to their _grand monurque_. _march_ . . jewish history.--spinozistic and hebrew schemes. the people of all other nations, but the jewish, seem to look backwards and also to exist for the present; but in the jewish scheme every thing is prospective and preparatory; nothing, however trifling, is done for itself alone, but all is typical of something yet to come. * * * * * i would rather call the book of proverbs solomonian than as actually a work of solomon's. so i apprehend many of the psalms to be davidical only, not david's own compositions. * * * * * you may state the pantheism of spinosa, in contrast with the hebrew or christian scheme, shortly, as thus:-- spinosism. w-g = ; _i.e._ the world without god is an impossible idea. g-w = ; _i.e._ god without the world is so likewise. hebrew or christian scheme. w-g = ; _i.e._ the same as spinosa's premiss. but g-w = g; _i.e._ god without the world is god the self-subsistent. * * * * * _march_ . . roman catholics.--energy of man and other animals.--shakspeare _in minimis_.--paul sarpi.--bartram's travels. i have no doubt that the real object closest to the hearts of the leading irish romanists is the destruction of the irish protestant church, and the re-establishment of their own. i think more is involved in the manner than the matter of legislating upon the civil disabilities of the members of the church of rome; and, for one, i should he willing to vote for a removal of those disabilities, with two or three exceptions, upon a solemn declaration being made legislatively in parliament, that at no time, nor under any circumstances, could or should a branch of the romish hierarchy, as at present constituted, become an estate of this realm.[ ] [footnote : see church and state, second part, p. .] * * * * * internal or mental energy and external or corporeal modificability are in inverse proportions. in man, internal energy is greater than in any other animal; and you will see that he is less changed by climate than any animal. for the highest and lowest specimens of man are not one half as much apart from each other as the different kinds even of dogs, animals of great internal energy themselves. * * * * * for an instance of shakspeare's power _in minimis_, i generally quote james gurney's character in king john. how individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life! [ ] and pray look at skelton's richard sparrow also! paul sarpi's history of the council of trent deserves your study. it is very interesting. [footnote : "_enter lady falconbridge and james gurney._ bast. o me! it is my mother:--how now, good lady? what brings you here to court so hastily? lady f. where is that slave, thy brother? where is he? that holds in chase mine honour up and down? bast. my brother robert? old sir robert's son? colbrand the giant, that same mighty man? is it sir robert's son that you seek so? lady f. sir robert's son! ay, thou unreverend boy, sir robert's son: why scorn'st thou at sir robert? he is sir robert's son; and so art thou. bast. james gurney, wilt thou give us leave a while? gur. _good leave, good philip._ bast. philip?--sparrow! james, there's toys abroad; anon i'll tell thee more. [_exit_ gurney." the very _exit gurney_ is a stroke of james's character.--ed.]] * * * * * the latest book of travels i know, written in the spirit of the old travellers, is bartram's account of his tour in the floridas. it is a work of high merit every way.[ ] [footnote : "travels through north and south carolina, georgia, east and west florida, the cherokee country, the extensive territories of the muscogulges, or creek confederacy, and the country of the chactaws, &c. by william bartram." philadelphia, . london, . vo. the expedition was made at the request of dr. fothergill, the quaker physician, in , and was particularly directed to botanical discoveries.--ed.] * * * * * _march_ . . the understanding. a pun will sometimes facilitate explanation, as thus;--the understanding is that which _stands under_ the phenomenon, and gives it objectivity. you know _what_ a thing is by it. it is also worthy of remark, that the hebrew word for the understanding, _bineh_, comes from a root meaning _between_ or _distinguishing_. * * * * * _march_ . . parts of speech.--grammar. there are seven parts of speech, and they agree with the five grand and universal divisions into which all things finite, by which i mean to exclude the idea of god, will be found to fall; that is, as you will often see it stated in my writings, especially in the aids to reflection[ ]:-- prothesis. . thesis. mesothesis. antithesis. . . . synthesis. . conceive it thus:-- . prothesis, the noun-verb, or verb-substantive, _i am_, which is the previous form, and implies identity of being and act. . thesis, the noun. . antithesis, the verb. note, each of these may be converted; that is, they are only opposed to each other. . mesothesis, the infinitive mood, or the indifference of the verb and noun, it being either the one or the other, or both at the same time, in different relations. . synthesis, the participle, or the community of verb and noun; being and acting at once. now, modify the noun by the verb, that is, by an act, and you have-- . the adnoun, or adjective. modify the verb by the noun, that is, by being, and you have-- . the adverb. interjections are parts of sound, not of speech. conjunctions are the same as prepositions; but they are prefixed to a sentence, or to a member of a sentence, instead of to a single word. the inflections of nouns are modifications as to place; the inflections of verbs, as to time. the genitive case denotes dependence; the dative, transmission. it is absurd to talk of verbs governing. in thucydides, i believe, every case has been found absolute.[ ] dative:--[greek: ----] thuc.viii. . this is the latin usage. accusative.--i do not remember an instance of the proper accusative absolute in thucydides; but it seems not uncommon in other authors: [greek: ----] yet all such instances may be nominatives; for i cannot find an example of the accusative absolute in the masculine or feminine gender, where the difference of inflexion would show the case.--ed.] the inflections of the tenses of a verb are formed by adjuncts of the verb substantive. in greek it is obvious. the e is the prefix significative of a past time. [footnote : p. . d edition.] [footnote : nominative absolute:--[greek: theon de phozos ae anthropon nomos, oudeis apeirge, to men krinontes en homoio kai sezein kai mae--ton de hamartaematon.]--thuc. ii. .] _june . . magnetism.--electricity.--galvanism. perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, but i am in the habit of realizing to myself magnetism as length; electricity as breadth or surface; and galvanism as depth. _june . ._ spenser.--character of othello.--hamlet.--polonius.--principles and maxims.--love.--measure for measure.--ben jonson.--beaumont and fletcher.-- version of the bible.--spurzheim.--craniology. spenser's epithalamion is truly sublime; and pray mark the swan-like movement of his exquisite prothalamion. [ ] his attention to metre and rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear, and you know how highly i prize good versification. [footnote : how well i remember this midsummer-day! i shall never pass such another. the sun was setting behind caen wood, and the calm of the evening was so exceedingly deep that it arrested mr. coleridge's attention. we were alone together in mr. gillman's drawing-room, and mr. c. left off talking, and fell into an almost trance-like state for ten minutes whilst contemplating the beautiful prospect before us. his eyes swam in tears, his head inclined a little forward, and there was a slight uplifting of the fingers, which seemed to tell me that he was in prayer. i was awestricken, and remained absorbed in looking at the man, in forgetfulness of external nature, when he recovered himself, and after a word or two fell by some secret link of association upon spenser's poetry. upon my telling him that i did not very well recollect the prothalamion: "then i must read you a bit of it," said he; and, fetching the book from the next room, he recited the whole of it in his finest and most musical manner. i particularly bear in mind the sensible diversity of tone and rhythm with which he gave:-- "sweet thames! run softly till i end my song," the concluding line of each of the ten strophes of the poem. when i look upon the scanty memorial, which i have alone preserved of this afternoon's converse, i am tempted to burn these pages in despair. mr. coleridge talked a volume of criticism that day, which, printed verbatim as he spoke it, would have made the reputation of any other person but himself. he was, indeed, particularly brilliant and enchanting; and i left him at night so thoroughly _magnetized_, that i could not for two or three days afterwards reflect enough to put any thing on paper,--ed.] * * * * * i have often told you that i do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of othello. there is no predisposition to suspicion, which i take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. desdemona very truly told emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. iago's suggestions, you see, are quite new to him; they do not correspond with any thing of a like nature previously in his mind. if desdemona had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought of calling othello's conduct that of a jealous man. he could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. see how utterly unlike othello is to leontes, in the winter's tale, or even to leonatus, in cymbeline! the jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it; and the conduct of leonatus in accepting the wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already formed. * * * * * hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. he does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. i have a smack of hamlet myself, if i may say so. * * * * * a maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective: an idea, or, if you like, a principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. polonius is a man of maxims. whilst he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. [ ] you see hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him. [footnote : act i. sc. ] * * * * * a man of maxims only is like a cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. * * * * * in the scene with ophelia, in the third act,[ ] hamlet is beginning with great and unfeigned tenderness; but, perceiving her reserve and coyness, fancies there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks out into all that coarseness. love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action. the qualities of the sexes correspond. the man's courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. his vigorous intellect is answered by her infallible tact. can it be true, what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?--i doubt it, i doubt it exceedingly. [ ] [footnote : sc. .] [footnote : mr. coleridge was a great master in the art of love, but he had not studied in ovid's school. hear his account of the matter:-- "love, truly such, is itself not the most common thing in the world, and mutual love still less so. but that enduring personal attachment, so beautifully delineated by erin's sweet melodist, and still more touchingly, perhaps, in the well-known ballad, 'john anderson, my jo, john,' in addition to a depth and constancy of character of no every-day occurrence, supposes a peculiar sensibility and tenderness of nature; a constitutional communicativeness and utterancy of heart and soul; a delight in the detail of sympathy, in the outward and visible signs of the sacrament within,--to count, as it were, the pulses of the life of love. but, above all, it supposes a soul which, even in the pride and summer-tide of life, even in the lustihood of health and strength, had felt oftenest and prized highest that which age cannot take away, and which in all our lovings is _the_ love; i mean, that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself, which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the supplement and completion of its own; that quiet perpetual seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends, where the heart momently finds, and, finding again, seeks on; lastly, when 'life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity, thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to the very bosom of hourly experience; it supposes, i say, a heartfelt reverence for worth, not the less deep because divested of its solemnity by habit, by familiarity, by mutual infirmities, and even by a feeling of modesty which will arise in delicate minds, when they are conscious of possessing the same, or the correspondent, excellence in their own characters. in short, there must be a mind, which, while it feels the beautiful and the excellent in the beloved as its own, and by right of love appropriates it, can call goodness its playfellow; and dares make sport of time and infirmity, while, in the person of a thousand-foldly endeared partner, we feel for aged virtue the caressing fondness that belongs to the innocence of childhood, and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been dictated by the same affection to the same object when attired in feminine loveliness or in manly beauty." (poetical works, vol. ii. p. .)--ed.] measure for measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of shakspeare's plays. it is a hateful work, although shakspearian throughout. our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in angelo's escape. isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and claudio is detestable. * * * * * i am inclined to consider the fox as the greatest of ben jonson's works. but his smaller works are full of poetry. * * * * * monsieur thomas and the little french lawyer are great favourites of mine amongst beaumont and fletcher's plays. how those plays overflow with wit! and yet i scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene any where than that in rollo, in which edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer. [ ] [footnote : act iii. sc. .:-- "rollo. hew off her hands! hamond. lady, hold off! edith. no! hew 'em; hew off my innocent hands, as he commands you! they'll hang the faster on for death's convulsion.-- thou seed of rocks, will nothing move thee, then? are all my tears lost, all my righteous prayers drown'd in thy drunken wrath? i stand up thus, then, thou boldly bloody tyrant, and to thy face, in heav'n's high name defy thee! and may sweet mercy, when thy soul sighs for it,-- when under thy black mischiefs thy flesh trembles,-- when neither strength, nor youth, nor friends, nor gold, can stay one hour; when thy most wretched conscience, waked from her dream of death, like fire shall melt thee,-- when all thy mother's tears, thy brother's wounds, thy people's fears, and curses, and my loss, my aged father's loss, shall stand before thee-- rollo. save him, i say; run, save him, save her father; fly and redeem his head! edith. may then that pity," &c.] * * * * * our version of the bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things,--that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. hence the french have lost their poetical language; and mr. blanco white says the same thing has happened to the spanish. * * * * * i have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. i remember the man or the tree, but where i saw them i mostly forget.[ ] [footnote : there was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, i would have sooner adopted than mr. coleridge's; but i would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. he had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way. in this, as in many other peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned and excellent father, who deserves, and will, i trust, obtain, a separate notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. i believe the beginning of mr. c.'s liking for dr. spurzheim was the hearty good humour with which the doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any _ideality_, and awarded an unusual share of _locality_, to the majestic silver-haired head of my dear uncle and father-in-law. but mr. coleridge immediately shielded the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps, since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter faculty.--ed.] * * * * * craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its rudiments and guesses yet. but all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident. the confusion and absurdity, however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or significancy. the forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions. * * * * * silence does not always mark wisdom. i was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and i thought him intelligent. at length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with--"them's the jockies for me!" i wish spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head. * * * * * some folks apply epithets as boys do in making latin verses. when i first looked upon the falls of the clyde, i was unable to find a word to express my feelings. at last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said:--"how majestic!"--(it was the precise term, and i turned round and was saying--"thank you, sir! that _is_ the exact word for it"--when he added, _eodem flatu_)--"yes! how very _pretty_!" * * * * * _july_ . . bull and waterland.--the trinity. bull and waterland are the classical writers on the trinity.[ ] in the trinity there is, . ipseity. . alterity. . community. you may express the formula thus:-- god, the absolute will or identity, = prothesis. the father = thesis. the son = antithesis. the spirit = synthesis. [footnote : mr. coleridge's admiration of bull and waterland as high theologians was very great. bull he used to read in the latin defensio fidei nicaenae, using the jesuit zola's edition of , which, i think, he bought at rome. he told me once, that when he was reading a protestant english bishop's work on the trinity, in a copy edited by an italian jesuit in italy, he felt proud of the church of england, and in good humour with the church of rome.--ed.] * * * * * the author of the athanasian creed is unknown. it is, in my judgment, heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the filial subordination in the godhead, which is the doctrine of the nicene creed, and for which bull and waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not holding to which, sherlock staggered to and fro between tritheism and sabellianism. this creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, which i will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived language. * * * * * how much i regret that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other. they must _improve_ this and that text, and they must do so and so in a _prayerful_ way; and so on. why not use common language? a young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the _marrow_ of all religion; upon which i recommended her to try to walk to london upon her marrow-bones only. * * * * * _july_ . . scale of animal being. in the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of being, there is an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. a little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. at length, the animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature. there are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.[ ] [footnote : these remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of the aids to reflection have long since laid up in cedar:-- "every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. the metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. the blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped psyche that flutters with free wing above it. and wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinate thereto,--most wonderfully, i say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and earth, in the days that the lord god made the earth and the heavens." and who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. all things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. and shall man alone stoop? shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? no! it must be a higher good to make you happy. while you labour for any thing below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. well saith the moral poet:-- 'unless above himself he can erect himself, how mean a thing is man!'" p. . d ed.--ed.] july . . popedom.--scanderbeg.--thomas Ã� becket.--pure ages of greek, italian, and english.--luther.--baxter.--algernon sidney's style.--ariosto and tasso.-- prose and poetry.--the fathers.--rhenferd.--jacob behmen. what a grand subject for a history the popedom is! the pope ought never to have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within st. angelo, and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and office. he spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty italian politics. * * * * * scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for walter scott; and so would thomas à becket, if it is not rather too much for him. it involves in essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters. * * * * * observe the superior truth of language, in greek, to theocritus inclusively; in latin, to the augustan age exclusively; in italian, to tasso exclusively; and in english, to taylor and barrow inclusively. * * * * * luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer i know, after the apostles and apostolic men. * * * * * pray read with great attention baxter's life of himself. it is an inestimable work. [ ] i may not unfrequently doubt baxter's memory, or even his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but i could almost as soon doubt the gospel verity as his veracity. [footnote : this, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of mr. coleridge's text books for english church history. he used to say that there was _no_ substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and that the modern political dissenters, who affected to glory in baxter as a leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of it. in a marginal note i find mr. c. writing thus: "alas! in how many respects does my lot resemble baxter's! but how much less have my bodily evils been, and yet how very much greater an impediment have i suffered them to be! but verily baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace."--ed.] * * * * * i am not enough read in puritan divinity to know the particular objections to the surplice, over and above the general prejudice against the _retenta_ of popery. perhaps that was the only ground,--a foolish one enough. in my judgment bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of cowley or dryden. read algernon sidney; his style reminds you as little of books as of blackguards. what a gentleman he was! * * * * * burke's essay on the sublime and beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and what he says upon taste is neither profound nor accurate. * * * * * well! i am for ariosto against tasso; though i would rather praise aristo's poetry than his poem. * * * * * i wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the _best_ words in the best order. * * * * * i conceive origen, jerome, and augustine to be the three great fathers in respect of theology, and basil, gregory nazianzen, and chrysostom in respect of rhetoric. * * * * * rhenferd possessed the immense learning and robust sense of selden, with the acuteness and wit of jortin. * * * * * jacob behmen remarked, that it was not wonderful that there were separate languages for england, france, germany, &c.; but rather that there was not a different language for every degree of latitude. in confirmation of which, see the infinite variety of languages amongst the barbarous tribes of south america. _july_ . . non-perception of colours. what is said of some persons not being able to distinguish colours, i believe. it may proceed from general weakness, which will render the differences imperceptible, just as the dusk or twilight makes all colours one. this defect is most usual in the blue ray, the negative pole. * * * * * i conjecture that when finer experiments have been applied, the red, yellow, and orange rays will be found as capable of communicating magnetic action as the other rays, though, perhaps, under different circumstances. remember this, if you are alive twenty years hence, and think of me. _july_ . . restoration.--reformation. the elements had been well shaken together during the civil wars and interregnum under the long parliament and protectorate; and nothing but the cowardliness and impolicy of the nonconformists, at the restoration, could have prevented a real reformation on a wider basis. but the truth is, by going over to breda with their stiff flatteries to the hollow-hearted king, they put sheldon and the bishops on the side of the constitution. * * * * * the reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed reform. as soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost. _july_ . . william iii.--berkeley.--spinosa.--genius.--envy.--love. william the third was a greater and much honester man than any of his ministers. i believe every one of them, except shrewsbury, has now been detected in correspondence with james. * * * * * berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. so it is with spinosa. his premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant. * * * * * genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious disposition. envy is *[greek: kakistos kai dikaiotatos theos], as i once saw it expressed somewhere in a page of stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its worshippers. * * * * * the man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.[ ] [footnote : "a woman's friendship," i find written by mr. c. on a page dyed red with an imprisoned rose-leaf, "a woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs, and more signs and expressions of attachment."--ed.] august . . jeremy taylor.--hooker.--ideas.--knowledge. jeremy taylor is an excellent author for a young man to study, for the purpose of imbibing noble principles, and at the same time of learning to exercise caution and thought in detecting his numerous errors. * * * * * i must acknowledge, with some hesitation, that i think hooker has been a little over-credited for his judgment. take as an instance of an idea the continuity and coincident distinctness of nature; or this,--vegetable life is always striving to be something that it is not; animal life to be itself.[ ] hence, in a plant the parts, as the root, the stem, the branches, leaves, &c. remain after they have each produced or contributed to produce a different _status_ of the whole plant: in an animal nothing of the previous states remains distinct, but is incorporated into, and constitutes progressively, the very self. [footnote : the reader who has never studied plato, bacon, kant, or coleridge in their philosophic works, will need to be told that the word idea is not used in this passage in the sense adopted by "dr. holofernes, who in a lecture on metaphysics, delivered at one of the mechanics' institutions, explodes all _ideas_ but those of sensation; whilst his friend, deputy costard, has no _idea_ of a better-flavoured haunch of venison, than he dined off at the london tavern last week. he admits (for the deputy has travelled) that the french have an excellent _idea_ of cooking in general; but holds that their most accomplished _maîtres de cuisine_ have no more _idea_ of dressing a turtle, than the parisian gourmands themselves have any _real idea_ of the true _taste_ and _colour_ of the fat." church and state, p. . no! what mr. coleridge meant by an idea in this place may be expressed in various ways out of his own works. i subjoin a sufficient definition from the church and state, p. . "that which, contemplated _objectively_, (that is, as existing _externally_ to the mind,) we call a law; the same contemplated _subjectively_, (that is, as existing in a subject or mind,) is an idea. hence plato often names ideas, laws; and lord bacon, the british plato, describes the laws of the material universe as the ideas in nature. "quod in natura _naturata_ lex, in natura _naturante_ idea dicitur." a more subtle limitation of the word may be found in the last paragraph of essay (e) in the appendix to the statesman's manual.--ed.] * * * * * to know any thing for certain is to have a clear insight into the inseparability of the predicate from the subject (the matter from the form), and _vice versâ_. this is a verbal definition,--a _real_ definition of a thing absolutely known is impossible. i _know_ a circle, when i perceive that the equality of all possible radii from the centre to the circumference is inseparable from the idea of a circle. _august_ . . painting. painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing. april . . prophecies of the old testament.--messiah.--jews.--the trinity. if the prophecies of the old testament are not rightly interpreted of jesus our christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that stupendous event--the rise and establishment of christianity--in comparison with which all the preceding jewish history is as nothing. with the exception of the book of daniel, which the jews themselves never classed among the prophecies, and an obscure text of jeremiah, there is not a passage in all the old testament which favours the notion of a temporal messiah. what moral object was there, for which such a messiah should come? what could he have been but a sort of virtuous sesostris or buonaparte? * * * * * i know that some excellent men--israelites without guile--do not, in fact, expect the advent of any messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may possibly have been god's will and meaning, that the jews should remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine of the unity of god. to which i say, that this truth of the essential unity of god has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by christianity alone. the romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the jews; the persians, the hindus, the chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the jews. but from christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still learning it. the religion of the jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself. * * * * * it has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the trinity are at variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the trinity thought of it as i did. to which again humbly, yet confidently, i reply, that my superior light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this,--that i more clearly see that the doctrine of trinal unity is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. i may or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more logical terms than some others; but this i say, go and ask the most ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in and worships a plurality of gods, and he will start with horror at the bare suggestion. he may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he will tell you that he _does_ believe in one god, and in one god only,-- reason about it as you may. * * * * * what all the churches of the east and west, what romanist and protestant believe in common, that i call christianity. in no proper sense of the word can i call unitarians and socinians believers in christ; at least, not in the only christ of whom i have read or know any thing. april , . conversion of the jews.--jews in poland. there is no hope of converting the jews in the way and with the spirit unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches. in the first age, the jewish christians undoubtedly considered themselves as the seed of abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a superior order. witness the account of st. peter's conduct in the acts [ ], and the epistle to the galatians.[ ] st. paul protested against this, so far as it went to make jewish observances compulsory on christians who were not of jewish blood, and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion on the mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the jews would ultimately be restored; and he says,--if the gentiles have been so blest by the rejection of the jews, how much rather shall they be blest by the conversion and restoration of israel! why do we expect the jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions? the abyssinian church said that they claimed a descent from abraham; and that, in virtue of such ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in jesus christ. in consequence of this appeal, the abyssinians were permitted to retain their customs. if rhenferd's essays were translated--if the jews were made acquainted with the real argument--if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to become christians _as of the seed of abraham_--i believe there would be a christian synagogue in a year's time. as it is, the jews of the lower orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation. a learned jew once said to me, upon this subject:--"o sir! make the inhabitants of hollywell street and duke's place israelites first, and then we may debate about making them christians."[ ] in poland, the jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants. they have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. they never meet them in common worship. land, in the hand of a large number of jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. then, again, if a popular tumult were to take place in poland, who can doubt that the jews would be the first objects of murder and spoliation? [footnote : chap. xv.] [footnote : chap. ii.] [footnote : mr. coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned jews in this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a jew of thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. i may mention here the best known of his jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected, hyman hurwitz.--ed.] april . . mosaic miracles.--pantheism. in the miracles of moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts, which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should still call miraculous. the passing of the jordan, in the d chapter of the book of joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby to show to the jews--the descendants of those who had come out of egypt-- that the _same_ god who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the wilderness, was _their_ god also. the manna and quails were ordinary provisions of providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities annexed to them in the particular instance. the passage of the red sea was effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove hack the waters; and so on. but then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous. hence, then, both jews and egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it was _one and the same god_ who interfered specially, and who governed all generally. * * * * * take away the first verse of the hook of genesis, and then what immediately follows is an exact history or sketch of pantheism. pantheism was taught in the mysteries of greece; of which the samothracian or cabeiric were probably the purest and the most ancient. _april_ . . poetic promise. in the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all. poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. but genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. mr. tennyson's sonnets, such as i have seen, have many of the characteristic excellencies of those of wordsworth and southey. _april . ._ it is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some things he _does_ know better than his physician. * * * * * i never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death. * * * * * good and bad men are each less so than they seem. _april . ._ nominalists and realists.--british schoolmen.--spinosa. the result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the devil in a strait waistcoat. * * * * * the controversy of the nominalists and realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. they were both right, and both wrong. they each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. duns scotus was the head of the realists; ockham,[ ] his own disciple, of the nominalists. ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer. [footnote : john duns scotus was born in , at dunstone in the parish of emildune, near alnwick. he was a fellow of merton college, and professor of divinity at oxford. after acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he went to paris, and thence to cologne, and there died in , at the early age of thirty-four years. he was called the subtle doctor, and found time to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. see the lyons edition, by luke wadding, in . william ockham was an englishman, and died about ; but the place and year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. he was styled the invincible doctor, and wrote bitterly against pope john xxii. we all remember butler's account of these worthies:-- "he knew what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly; in school divinity as able as he that hight irrefragable, a second thomas, or at once to name them all, another _dunse_; profound in all the nominal and real ways beyond them all; for he a rope of sand could twist as tough as learned sorbonist." hudibras. part i. canto i. v. . the irrefragable doctor was alexander hales, a native of gloucestershire, who died in . amongst his pupils at paris, was fidanza, better known by the name of bonaventura, the seraphic doctor. the controversy of the realists and the nominalists cannot he explained in a note; but in substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. the realists held _generally_ with aristotle, that there were universal _ideas_ or essences impressed upon matter, and covëal with, and inherent in, their objects. plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal forms. on the other hand, zeno and the old stoics denied the existence of these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere tenms and nominal representatives of their particular objects. the nominalists were the followers of zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. it does not require much reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of christianity.--ed.] * * * * * it is remarkable, that two thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of british birth. it was the schoolmen who made the languages of europe what they now are. we laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected; whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily use. * * * * * one of the scholastic definitions of god is this,--_deus est, cui omne quod est est esse omne quod est:_ as long a sentence made up of as few words, and those as oligosyllabic, as any i remember. by the by, that _oligosyllabic_ is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, _ex opposito_. * * * * * spinosa, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. in the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his premiss. his _unica substantia_ is, in fact, a mere notion, --a _subject_ of the mind, and no _object_ at all. * * * * * plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. he leads you to see, that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic-- that of ideas. they are contradictory only in the aristotelian logic, which is the instrument of the understanding. i have read most of the works of plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. in fact, i soon found that i had read plato by anticipation. he was a consummate genius.[ ] [footnote : "this is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (--a truth of the reason, an idea)--that in its own proper form it is _inconceivable_. for to _conceive_, is a function of the understanding, which can he exercised only on subjects subordinate thereto. and yet to the forms of the understanding all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection, and to be rendered _expressible_. and here we have a second test and sign of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the representative or _expression_ (--the _exponent_) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible. examples: _before_ abraham was, i am. god is a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference no where. the soul is all in every part." aids to reflection, n. .n. see also _church and state_, p. .--ed.] * * * * * my mind is in a state of philosophical doubt as to animal magnetism. von spix, the eminent naturalist, makes no doubt of the matter, and talks coolly of giving doses of it. the torpedo affects a third or external object, by an exertion of its own will: such a power is not properly electrical; for electricity acts invariably under the same circumstances. a steady gaze will make many persons of fair complexions blush deeply. account for that. [ ] [footnote : i find the following remarkable passage in p. . vol. i. of the richly annotated copy of mr. southey's life of wesley, which mr. c. bequeathed as his "darling book and the favourite of his library" to its great and honoured author and donor:-- "the coincidence throughout of all these methodist cases with those of the magnetists makes me wish for a solution that would apply to all. now this sense or appearance of a sense of the distant, both in time and space, is common to almost all the _magnetic_ patients in denmark, germany, france, and north italy, to many of whom the same or a similar solution could not apply. likewise, many cases have been recorded at the same time, in different countries, by men who had never heard of each other's names, and where the simultaneity of publication proves the independence of the testimony. and among the magnetisers and attesters are to be found names of men, whose competence in respect of integrity and incapability of intentional falsehood is fully equal to that of wesley, and their competence in respect of physio- and psychological insight and attainments incomparably greater. who would dream, indeed, of comparing wesley with a cuvier, hufeland, blumenbach, eschenmeyer, reil, &c.? were i asked, what _i_ think, my answer would be,--that the evidence enforces scepticism and a _non liquet_;--too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of imposture or casual coincidence;--too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a correspondent faculty in the human soul. and nothing less than such an hypothesis would be adequate to the _satisfactory_ explanation of the facts;--though that of a _metastasis_ of specific functions of the nervous energy, taken in conjunction with extreme nervous excitement, _plus_ some delusion, _plus_ some illusion, _plus_ some imposition, _plus_ some chance and accidental coincidence, might determine the direction in which the scepticism should vibrate. nine years has the subject of zoo-magnetism been before me. i have traced it historically, collected a mass of documents in french, german, italian, and the latinists of the sixteenth century, have never neglected an opportunity of questioning eye-witnesses, _ex. gr._ tieck, treviranus, de prati, meyer, and others of literary or medical celebrity, and i remain where i was, and where the first perusal of klug's work had left me, without having moved an inch backward or forward. the reply of treviranus, the famous botanist, to me, when he was in london, is worth recording:--'ich habe gesehen was (ich weiss das) ich nicht würde geglaubt haben auf _ihren_ erzählung,' &c. 'i have seen what i am certain i would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, i can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on _mine_.'"--ed.] _may_ . . fall of man.--madness.--brown and darwin.--nitrous oxide. a fall of some sort or other--the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute--is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. the mystery itself is too profound for human insight. * * * * * madness is not simply a bodily disease. it is the sleep of the spirit with certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals. during this sleep, or recession of the spirit, the lower or bestial states of life rise up into action and prominence. it is an awful thing to be eternally tempted by the perverted senses. the reason may resist--it does resist--for a long time; but too often, at length, it yields for a moment, and the man is mad for ever. an act of the will is, in many instances, precedent to complete insanity. i think it was bishop butler who said, that he was "all his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of his senses," which would have maddened him, if he had relaxed the stern wakefulness of his reason for a single moment. * * * * * brown's and darwin's theories are both ingenious; but the first will not account for sleep, and the last will not account for death: considerable defects, you must allow. * * * * * it is said that every excitation is followed by a commensurate exhaustion. that is not so. the excitation caused by inhaling nitrous oxide is an exception at least; it leaves no exhaustion on the bursting of the bubble. the operation of this gas is to prevent the decarbonating of the blood; and, consequently, if taken excessively, it would produce apoplexy. the blood becomes black as ink. the voluptuous sensation attending the inhalation is produced by the compression and resistance. _may_ . . plants.--insects.--men.--dog.--ant and bee. plants exist _in_ themselves. insects _by_, or by means of, themselves. men, _for_ themselves. the perfection of irrational animals is that which is best for _them_; the perfection of man is that which is absolutely best. there is growth only in plants; but there is irritability, or, a better word, instinctivity, in insects. * * * * * you may understand by _insect_, life in sections--diffused generally over all the parts. * * * * * the dog alone, of all brute animals, has a [*greek: storgae], or affection _upwards_ to man. * * * * * the ant and the bee are, i think, much nearer man in the understanding or faculty of adapting means to proximate ends than the elephant.[ ] [footnote : i remember mr. c. was accustomed to consider the ant, as the most intellectual, and the dog as the most affectionate, of the irrational creatures, so far as our present acquaintance with the facts of natural history enables us to judge.--ed.] _may_ . . black colonel. what an excellent character is the black colonel in mrs. bennett's "beggar girl!"[ ] if an inscription be put upon my tomb, it may be that i was an enthusiastic lover of the church; and as enthusiastic a hater of those who have betrayed it, be they who they may.[ ] [footnote : this character was frequently a subject of pleasant description and enlargement with mr. coleridge, and he generally passed from it to a high commendation of miss austen's novels, as being in their way perfectly genuine and individual productions.--ed.] [footnote : this was a strong way of expressing a deep-rooted feeling. a better and a truer character would be, that coleridge was a lover of the church, and a defender of the faith! this last expression is the utterance of a conviction so profound that it can patiently wait for time to prove its truth.--ed.] _may_ . . holland and the dutch. holland and the netherlands ought to be seen once, because no other country is like them. every thing is artificial. you will be struck with the combinations of vivid greenery, and water, and building; but every thing is so distinct and rememberable, that you would not improve your conception by visiting the country a hundred times over. it is interesting to see a country and a nature _made_, as it were, by man, and to compare it with god's nature.[ ] if you go, remark, (indeed you will be forced to do so in spite of yourself,) remark, i say, the identity (for it is more than proximity) of a disgusting dirtiness in all that concerns the dignity of, and reverence for, the human person; and a persecuting painted cleanliness in every thing connected with property. you must not walk in their gardens; nay, you must hardly look into them. [footnote : in the summer of , mr. coleridge made an excursion with mr. wordsworth in holland, flanders, and up the rhine, as far as bergen. he came back delighted, especially with his stay near bonn, but with an abiding disgust at the filthy habits of the people. upon cologne, in particular, he avenged himself in two epigrams. see poet. works, vol. ii. p. .--ed.] * * * * * the dutch seem very happy and comfortable, certainly; but it is the happiness of _animals_. in vain do you look for the sweet breath of hope and advancement among them. [ ]in fact, as to their villas and gardens, they are not to be compared to an ordinary london merchant's box. [footnote : "for every gift of noble origin is breathed upon by hope's perpetual breath." _wordsworth._] _may . ._ religion gentilizes.--women and men.--biblical commentators.--walkerite creed. you may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. it will _alone_ gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and i know nothing else that will, _alone_. certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners. * * * * * a woman's head is usually over ears in her heart. man seems to have been designed for the superior being of the two; but as things are, i think women are generally better creatures than men. they have, taken universally, weaker appetites and weaker intellects, but they have much stronger affections. a man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever. * * * * * i never could get much information out of the biblical commentators. cocceius has told me the most; but he, and all of them, have a notable trick of passing _siccissimis pedibus_ over the parts which puzzle a man of reflection. the walkerite creed, or doctrine of the new church, as it is called, appears to be a miscellany of calvinism and quakerism; but it is hard to understand it. * * * * * _may_ , . horne tooke.----diversions of purley.----gender of the sun in german. horne tooke was pre-eminently a ready-witted man. he had that clearness which is founded on shallowness. he doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. his voice was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. his mind had no progression or developement. all that is worth any thing (and that is but little) in the diversions of purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter which he addressed to mr. dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo, hut there was not a foot of progression beyond the pamphlet; at last, a quarto volume, believe, came out; and yet, verily, excepting newspaper lampoons and political insinuations, there was no addition to the argument of the pamphlet, it shows a base and unpoetical mind to convert so beautiful, so divine, a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political squibs. all that is true in horne tooke's book is taken from lennep, who gave it for so much as it was worth, and never pretended to make a system of it. tooke affects to explain the origin and whole philosophy of language by what is, in fact, only a mere accident of the history of one language, or one or two languages. his abuse of harris is most shallow and unfair. harris, in the hermes, was dealing--not very profoundly, it is true,--with the philosophy of language, the moral, physical, and metaphysical causes and conditions of it, &c. horne tooke, in writing about the formation of words only, thought he was explaining the philosophy of language, which is a very different thing. in point of fact, he was very shallow in the gothic dialects. i must say, all that _decantata fabula_ about the genders of the sun and moon in german seems to me great stuff. originally, i apprehend, in the _platt-deutsch_ of the north of germany there were only two definite articles--_die_ for masculine and feminine, and _das_ for neuter. then it was _die sonne_, in a masculine sense, as we say with the same word as article, _the_ sun. luther, in constructing the _hoch-deutsch_ (for really his miraculous and providential translation of the bible was the fundamental act of construction of the literary german), took for his distinct masculine article the _der_ of the _ober-deutsch_, and thus constituted the three articles of the present high german, _der, die, das_. naturally, therefore, it would then have been, _der sonne_; but here the analogy of the greek grammar prevailed, and as _sonne_ had the arbitrary feminine termination of the greek, it was left with its old article _die_, which, originally including masculine and feminine both, had grown to designate the feminine only. to the best of my recollection, the minnesingers and all the old poets always use the sun as masculine; and, since luther's time, the poets feel the awkwardness of the classical gender affixed to the sun so much, that they more commonly introduce phoebus or some other synonyme instead. i must acknowledge my doubts, whether, upon more accurate investigation, it can be shown that there ever was a nation that considered the sun in itself, and apart from language, as the feminine power. the moon does not so clearly demand a feminine as the sun does a masculine sex: it might be considered negatively or neuter;--yet if the reception of its light from the sun were known, that would have been a good reason for making her feminine, as being the recipient body. * * * * * as our _the_ was the german _die_, so i believe our _that_ stood for _das_, and was used as a neuter definite article. the _platt-deutsch_ was a compact language like the english, not admitting much agglutination. the _ober-deutsch_ was fuller and fonder of agglutinating words together, although it was not so soft in its sounds. _may . ._ horne tooke.--jacobins. horne tooke said that his friends might, if they pleased, go as far as slough,--he should go no farther than hounslow; but that was no reason why he should not keep them company so far as their roads were the same. the answer is easy. suppose you know, or suspect, that a man is about to commit a robbery at slough, though you do not mean to be his accomplice, have you a moral right to walk arm in arm with him to hounslow, and, by thus giving him your countenance, prevent his being taken up? the history of all the world tells us, that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. * * * * * enlist the interests of stern morality and religious enthusiasm in the cause of political liberty, as in the time of the old puritans, and it will be irresistible; but the jacobins played the whole game of religion, and morals, and domestic happiness into the hands of the aristocrats. thank god! that they did so. england was saved from civil war by their enormous, their providential, blundering. * * * * * can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of the whole matronage of his country? the women are as influential upon such national interests as the men. * * * * * horne tooke was always making a butt of mr. godwin; who, nevertheless, had that in him which tooke could never have understood. i saw a good deal of tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man. _may_ . . persian and arabic poetry.--milesian tales. i must acknowledge i never could see much merit in the persian poetry, which i have read in translation. there is not a ray of imagination in it, and but a glimmering of fancy. it is, in fact, so far as i know, deficient in truth. poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. the arabian nights' tales are a different thing --they are delightful, but i cannot help surmising that there is a good deal of greek fancy in them. no doubt we have had a great loss in the milesian tales.[ ] the book of job is pure arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast. think of the sublimity, i should rather say the profundity, of that passage in ezekiel, [ ]"son of man, can these bones live? and i answered, o lord god, thou knowest." i know nothing like it. [footnote : the milesiacs were so called, because written or composed by aristides of miletus, and also because the scene of all or most of them was placed in that rich and luxurious city. harpocration cites the sixth book of this collection. nothing, i believe, is now known of the age or history of this aristides, except what may be inferred from the fact that lucius cornelius sisenna translated the tales into latin, as we learn from ovid:-- junxit aristides _milesia crimina_ secum-- and afterwards, vertit aristidem sisenna, nec obfuit illi historiae turpes inseruisse jocos:-- _fasti_, ii. - . and also from the incident mentioned in the _plutarchian_ life of crassus, that after the defeat at carrhae, a copy of the milesiacs of aristides was found in the baggage of a roman officer, and that surena (who, by the by, if history has not done him injustice, was not a man to be over scrupulous in such a case,) caused the book to be brought into the senate house of seleucia, and a portion of it read aloud, for the purpose of insulting the romans, who, even during war, he said, could not abstain from the perusal of such _infamous compositions_,--c. . the immoral character of these tales, therefore, may be considered pretty clearly established; they were the decameron and heptameron of antiquity.--ed.] [footnote : chap. xxxvii. v. .] _may_ . . sir t. monro.--sir s. raffles.--canning. sir thomas monro and sir stamford raffles were both great men; but i recognise more genius in the latter, though, i believe, the world says otherwise. * * * * * i never found what i call an idea in any speech or writing of ----'s. those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp. canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; --- rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. i confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. in my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. how fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of england, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! yet some men never seem to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical squire westerns! from what i saw of homer, i thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness. * * * * * canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it. _may_ . . shakspeare.--milton.--homer. shakspeare is the spinosistic deity--an omnipresent creativeness. milton is the deity of prescience; he stands _ab extra_, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual shakspeare; but john milton himself is in every line of the paradise lost. shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,-- epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. no one can understand shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely shakspeare's own. his rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. the necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse. * * * * * i have no doubt whatever that homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the iliad.[ ] of course there was _a_ homer, and twenty besides. i will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of england, about arthur and the knights of the round table. i say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. the different qualities were traditional. tristram is always courteous, lancelot invincible, and so on. the same might be done with the spanish romances of the cid. there is no subjectivity whatever in the homeric poetry. there is a subjectivity of the poet, as of milton, who is himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the _persona_, or dramatic character, as in all shakspeare's great creations, hamlet, lear, &c. [footnote : mr. coleridge was a decided wolfian in the homeric question; but he had never read a word of the famous prolegomena, and knew nothing of wolf's reasoning, but what i told him of it in conversation. mr. c. informed me, that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text upon the first perusal of vico's scienza nuova; "not," he said, "that vico has reasoned it out with such learning and accuracy as you report of wolf, but vico struck out all the leading hints, and i soon filled up the rest out of my own head."-- ed.] _may_ . . reason and understanding.--words and names of things. until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. it is pre-eminently the _gradus ad philosophiam_. * * * * * the general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of _things_ is very well deserving notice. there are nearly a hundred names in the different german dialects for the alder-tree. i believe many more remarkable instances are to be found in arabic. indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between _words_ and mere arbitrary _names of things_. _may . ._ the trinity.--irving. the trinity is, . the will; . the reason, or word; . the love, or life. as we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one god. the union must be as transcendant as the distinction. mr. irving's notion is tritheism,--nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. his opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. how can there be a sinful carcass? but what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. i told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.[ ] [footnote : the admiration and sympathy which mr. coleridge felt and expressed towards the late mr. irving, at his first appearance in london, were great and sincere; and his grief at the deplorable change which followed was in proportion. but, long after the tongues shall have failed and been forgotten, irving's name will live in the splendid eulogies of his friend. see _church and state_, p. . n.--ed.] _may . ._ abraham.--isaac.--jacob. how wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in genesis! to be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of god," abraham was that man. we are not surprised that abimelech and ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. he was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to god; in other respects, he takes fire, like an arah sheikh, at the injuries suffered by lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately. * * * * * isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father abraham. born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation of abraham's stratagem about his wife. [ ] isaac does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity. [footnote : gen. xxvi. .] * * * * * jacob is a regular jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. but you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and i think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from christians. jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. see his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the schechemites. [ ] he is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother rebecca. no man could be a bad man who loved as he loved rachel. i dare say laban thought none the worse of jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs. [footnote : gen. xxxiv.] _may . ._ origin of acts.--love. if a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? passion without any appetite is fiendish. * * * * * the best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him _feel_ something in any way. love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him _think_ to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. * * * * * "never marry but for love," says william penn in his reflexions and maxims; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely." _may . ._ lord eldon's doctrine as to grammar schools.--democracy. lord eldon's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of edward vi. and queen elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching latin and greek, is, i think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. ben jonson uses the term "grammar" without any reference to the learned languages. * * * * * it is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer every thing. * * * * * although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another. a democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. there would he focal points in it, but no superior. _may . ._ the eucharist.--st. john, xix. .--genuineness of books of moses.-- divinity of christ.--mosaic prophecies. no doubt, chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much earlier. [ ] in clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated by saint john and saint paul; but in hermas we see the seeds of the error, and more clearly in irenaeus; and so it went on till the idea was changed into an idol. [footnote : mr. coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting selden's well-known saying (table talk), "that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into logic."--ed.] * * * * * the errors of the sacramentaries, on the one hand, and of the romanists on the other, are equally great. the first have volatilized the eucharist into a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol. jeremy taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the latter part of the sixth chapter of st. john's gospel has no reference to the eucharist. if so, st. john wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. would not a total silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange? a mystery, i say; for it _is_ a mystery; it is the only mystery in our religious worship. when many of the disciples left our lord, and apparently on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were spirit. if he had really meant that the eucharist should he a mere commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let these disciples go away from him upon such a gross misunderstanding? would he not have said, "you need not make a difficulty; i only mean so and so?" * * * * * arnauld, and the other learned romanists, are irresistible against the low sacramentary doctrine. * * * * * the sacrament of baptism applies itself, and has reference to the faith or conviction, and is, therefore, only to be performed once;--it is the light of man. the sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol of _all_ our religion;-- it is the life of man. it is commensurate with our will, and we must, therefore, want it continually. * * * * * the meaning of the expression, [greek: ei m_e _en soi didomenon an_othen], "except it were given thee _from above_," in the th chapter of st. john, ver. ., seems to me to have been generally and grossly mistaken. it is commonly understood as importing that pilate could have no power to deliver jesus to the jews, unless it had been given him _by god_, which, no doubt, is true; but if that is the meaning, where is the force or connection of the following clause, [greek: dia touto], "_therefore_ he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin?" in what respect were the jews more sinful in delivering jesus up, _because_ pilate could do nothing except by god's leave? the explanation of erasmus and clarke, and some others, is very dry- footed. i conceive the meaning of our lord to have been simply this, that pilate would have had no power or jurisdiction--[greek: exousian]--over him, if it had not been given by the sanhedrin, the [greek: an_o boul_e], and _therefore_ it was that the jews had the greater sin. there was also this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the jews. the mere assumption of messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of the jews; they hated jesus, because he would not be _their sort_ of messiah: on the other hand, the romans cared not for his declaration that he was the son of god; the crime in _their_ eyes was his assuming to be a king. now, here were the jews accusing jesus before the roman governor of _that_ which, in the first place, they knew that jesus denied in the sense in which they urged it, and which, in the next place, had the charge been true, would have been so far from a crime in their eyes, that the very gospel history itself, as well as all the history to the destruction of jerusalem, shows it would have been popular with the whole nation. they wished to destroy him, and for that purpose charge him falsely with a crime which yet was no crime in their own eyes, if it had been true; but only so as against the roman domination, which they hated with all their souls, and against which they were themselves continually conspiring! * * * * * observe, i pray, the manner and sense in which the high-priest understands the plain declaration of our lord, that he was the son of god. [footnote: matt. xxvi. v. . mark, xiv. .] "i adjure thee by the living god, that thou tell us whether thou be the christ, the son of god," or "the son of the blessed," as it is in mark. jesus said, "i am,--and hereafter ye shall see the son of man (or me) sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." does caiaphas take this explicit answer as if jesus meant that he was full of god's spirit, or was doing his commands, or walking in his ways, in which sense moses, the prophets, nay, all good men, were and are the sons of god? no, no! he tears his robes in sunder, and cries out, "he hath spoken blasphemy. what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy." what blasphemy, i should like to know, unless the assuming to be the "son of god" was assuming to be of the _divine nature_? * * * * * one striking proof of the genuineness of the mosaic books is this,--they contain precise prohibitions--by way of predicting the consequences of disobedience--of all those things which david and solomon actually did, and gloried in doing,--raising cavalry, making a treaty with egypt, laying up treasure, and polygamising. now, would such prohibitions have been fabricated in those kings' reigns, or afterwards? impossible. * * * * * the manner of the predictions of moses is very remarkable. he is like a man standing on an eminence, and addressing people below him, and pointing to things which he can, and they cannot, see. he does not say, you will act in such and such a way, and the consequences will be so and so; but, so and so will take place, because you will act in such a way! may . . talent and genius.--motives and impulses. talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. * * * * * motives imply weakness, and the existence of evil and temptation. the angelic nature would act from impulse alone. a due mean of motive and impulse is the only practicable object of our moral philosophy. _may_ . . constitutional and functional life.--hysteria.--hydro-carbonic gas.-- bitters and tonics.--specific medicines. it is a great error in physiology not to distinguish between what may be called the general or fundamental life--the _principium vitae_, and the functional life--the life in the functions. organization must presuppose life as anterior to it: without life, there could not be or remain any organization; but then there is also _a_ life in the organs, or functions, distinct from the other. thus, a flute presupposes,--demands the existence of a musician as anterior to it, without whom no flute could ever have existed; and yet again, without the instrument there can be no music. * * * * * it often happens that, on the one hand, the _principium vitae_, or constitutional life, may be affected without any, or the least imaginable, affection of the functions; as in inoculation, where one pustule only has appeared, and no other perceptible symptom, and yet this has so entered into the constitution, as to indispose it to infection under the most accumulated and intense contagion; and, on the other hand, hysteria, hydrophobia, and gout will disorder the functions to the most dreadful degree, and yet often leave the life untouched. in hydrophobia, the mind is quite sound; but the patient feels his muscular and cutaneous life forcibly removed from under the control of his will. * * * * * hysteria may be fitly called _mimosa_, from its counterfeiting so many diseases,--even death itself. * * * * * hydro-carbonic gas produces the most death-like exhaustion, without any previous excitement. i think this gas should be inhaled by way of experiment in cases of hydrophobia. there is a great difference between bitters and tonics. where weakness proceeds from excess of irritability, there bitters act beneficially; because all bitters are poisons, and operate by stilling, and depressing, and lethargizing the irritability. but where weakness proceeds from the opposite cause of relaxation, there tonics are good; because they brace up and tighten the loosened string. bracing is a correct metaphor. bark goes near to be a combination of a bitter and a tonic; but no perfect medical combination of the two properties is yet known. * * * * * the study of specific medicines is too much disregarded now. no doubt the hunting after specifics is a mark of ignorance and weakness in medicine, yet the neglect of them is proof also of immaturity; for, in fact, all medicines will be found specific in the perfection of the science. _may_ . . epistles to the ephesians and colossians.--oaths. the epistle to the ephesians is evidently a catholic epistle, addressed to the whole of what might be called st. paul's diocese. it is one of the divinest compositions of man. it embraces every doctrine of christianity;-- first, those doctrines peculiar to christianity, and then those precepts common to it with natural religion. the epistle to the colossians is the overflowing, as it were, of st. paul's mind upon the same subject. * * * * * the present system of taking oaths is horrible. it is awfully absurd to make a man invoke god's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so. the jews' oath is an adjuration by the judge to the witness: "in the name of god, i ask you." there is an express instance of it in the high-priest's adjuring or exorcising christ by the living god, in the twenty-sixth chapter of matthew, and you will observe that our lord answered the appeal.[ ] you may depend upon it, the more oath-taking, the more lying, generally among the people. [footnote : see this instance cited, and the whole history and moral policy of the common system of judicial swearing examined with clearness and good feeling, in mr. tyler's late work on oaths.--ed.] may . . flogging.--eloquence of abuse. i had _one_ just flogging. when i was about thirteen, i went to a shoemaker, and begged him to take me as his apprentice. he, being an honest man, immediately brought me to bowyer, who got into a great rage, knocked me down, and even pushed crispin rudely out of the room. bowyer asked me why i had made myself such a fool? to which i answered, that i had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that i hated the thought of being a clergyman. "why so?" said he.--"because, to tell you the truth, sir," said i, "i am an infidel!" for this, without more ado, bowyer flogged me,-- wisely, as i think,--soundly, as i know. any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, i was laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. * * * * * how rich the aristophanic greek is in the eloquence of abuse!-- [greek: 'o bdelyre, kanaischunte, kai tolmaere su, kai miare, kai pammiare, kai miarotate.][ ] we are not behindhand in english. fancy my calling you, upon a fitting occasion,--fool, sot, silly, simpleton, dunce, blockhead, jolterhead, clumsy-pate, dullard, ninny, nincompoop, lackwit, numpskull, ass, owl, loggerhead, coxcomb, monkey, shallow-brain, addle-head, tony, zany, fop, fop-doodle; a maggot-pated, hare-brained, muddle-pated, muddle-headed, jackan-apes! why i could go on for a minute more! [footnote : in the frogs.--ed.] _may_ . . the americans. i deeply regret the anti-american articles of some of the leading reviews. the americans regard what is said of them in england a thousand times more than they do any thing said of them in any other country. the americans are excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never forgive or forget any slight or abuse. it would be better for them if they were a trifle thicker-skinned. * * * * * the last american war was to us only something to talk or read about; but to the americans it was the cause of misery in their own homes. * * * * * i, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. but language, religion, laws, government, blood,--identity in these makes men of one country. _may_ . . book of job. the book of job is an arab poem, antecedent to the mosaic dispensation. it represents the mind of a good man not enlightened by an actual revelation, but seeking about for one. in no other book is the desire and necessity for a mediator so intensely expressed. the personality of god, the i am of the hebrews, is most vividly impressed on the book, in opposition to pantheism. * * * * * i now think, after many doubts, that the passage, "i know that my redeemer liveth," &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a _quasi_ prophecy. [ ] "i know not _how_ this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this i _do_ know, that i shall be recompensed." [footnote : chap. xix. , .] * * * * * it should be observed, that all the imagery in the speeches of the men is taken from the east, and is no more than a mere representation of the forms of material nature. but when god speaks, the tone is exalted; and almost all the images are taken from egypt, the crocodile, the war-horse, and so forth. egypt was then the first monarchy that had a splendid court. * * * * * satan, in the prologue, does not mean the devil, our diabolus. there is no calumny in his words. he is rather the _circuitor_, the accusing spirit, a dramatic attorney-general. but after the prologue, which was necessary to bring the imagination into a proper state for the dialogue, we hear no more of this satan. * * * * * warburton's notion, that the book of job was of so late a date as ezra, is wholly groundless. his only reason is this appearance of satan. _may_ . . translation of the psalms. i wish the psalms were translated afresh; or, rather, that the present version were revised. scores of passages are utterly incoherent as they now stand. if the primary visual images had been oftener preserved, the connection and force of the sentences would have been better perceived.[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the christian church, had an _affectionate_ reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the book of psalms. he told me that, after having studied every page of the bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities. during many of his latter years he used to read ten or twelve verses every evening, ascertaining (for his knowledge of hebrew was enough for that) the exact visual image or first radical meaning of every noun substantive; and he repeatedly expressed to me his surprise and pleasure at finding that in nine cases out of ten the bare primary sense, if literally rendered, threw great additional light on the text. he was not disposed to allow the prophetic or allusive character so largely as is done by horne and others; but he acknowledged it in some instances in the fullest manner. in particular, he rejected the local and temporary reference which has been given to the th psalm, and declared his belief in its deep mystical import with regard to the messiah. mr. c. once gave me the following note upon the _ d_ psalm written by him, i believe, many years previously, but which, he said, he approved at that time. it will find as appropriate a niche here as any where else:-- "i am much delighted and instructed by the hypothesis, which i think probable, that our lord in repeating _eli, eli, lama sabacthani_, really recited the whole or a large part of the d psalm. it is impossible to read that psalm without the liveliest feelings of love, gratitude, and sympathy. it is, indeed, a wonderful prophecy, whatever might or might not have been david's notion when he composed it. whether christ did audibly repeat the whole or not, it is certain. i think, that he did it mentally, and said aloud what was sufficient to enable his followers to do the same. even at this day to repeat in the same manner but the first line of a common hymn would be understood as a reference to the whole. above all, i am thankful for the thought which suggested itself to my mind, whilst i was reading this beautiful psalm, namely, that we should not exclusively think of christ as the logos united to human nature, but likewise as a perfect man united to the logos. this distinction is most important in order to conceive, much more, appropriately to _feel_, the conduct and exertions of jesus."--ed.] _may_ . . ancient mariner.--undine.--martin.--pilgrim's progress. mrs. barbauld once told me that she admired the ancient mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it,--it was improbable, and had no moral. as for the probability, i owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, i told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if i might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. it ought to have had no more moral than the arabian nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, _because_ one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.[ ] i took the thought of "_grinning for joy_," in that poem, from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. we could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. he said to me,--"you grinned like an idiot!" he had done the same. [footnote : "there he found, at the foot of a great walnut-tree, a fountain of a very clear running water, and alighting, tied his horse to a branch of a tree, and sitting clown by the fountain, took some biscuits and dates out of his portmanteau, and, as he ate his dates, threw the shells about on both sides of him. when he had done eating, being a good mussulman, he washed his hands, his face, and his feet, and said his prayers. he had not made an end, but was still on his knees, when he saw a genie appear, all white with age, and of a monstrous bulk; who, advancing towards him with a cimetar in his hand, spoke to him in a terrible voice thus:--'rise up, that i may kill thee with this cimetar as you have killed my son!' and accompanied these words with a frightful cry. the merchant being as much frightened at the hideous shape of the monster as at these threatening words, answered him trembling:--'alas! my good lord, of what crime can i be guilty towards you that you should take away my life?'--'i will,' replies the genie, 'kill thee, as thou hast killed my son!'--'o heaven!' says the merchant, 'how should i kill your son? i did not know him, nor ever saw him.'--'did not you sit down when you came hither?' replies the genie. 'did not you take dates out of your portmanteau, and, as you ate them, did not you throw the shells about on both sides?'--'i did all that you say,' answers the merchant, 'i cannot deny it.'--'if it be so,' replied the genie, 'i tell thee that thou hast killed my son; and the way was thus: when you threw the nutshells about, my son was passing by, and you threw one of them into his eye, which killed him, _therefore_ i must kill thee.'--'ah! my good lord, pardon me!' cried the merchant.--'no pardon,' answers the genie, 'no mercy! is it not just to kill him that has killed another?'--'i agree to it,' says the merchant, 'but certainly i never killed your son, and if i have, it was unknown to me, and i did it innocently; therefore i beg you to pardon me, and suffer me to live.'--'no, no,' says the genie, persisting in his resolution, 'i must kill thee, since thou hast killed my son;' and then taking the merchant by the arm, threw him with his face upon the ground, and lifted up his cimetar to cut off his head!"--the merchant and the genie. first night.--ed.] * * * * * undine is a most exquisite work. it shows the general want of any sense for the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deep impression. undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful.[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge's admiration of this little romance was unbounded. he read it several times in german, and once in the english translation, made in america, i believe; the latter he thought inadequately done. mr. c. said that there was something in undine even beyond scott,--that scott's best characters and conceptions were _composed_; by which i understood him to mean that baillie nicol jarvie, for example, was made up of old particulars, and received its individuality from the author's power of fusion, being in the result an admirable product, as corinthian brass was said to be the conflux of the spoils of a city. but undine, he said, was one and single in projection, and had presented to his imagination, what scott had never done, an absolutely new idea--ed.] * * * * * it seems to me, that martin never looks at nature except through bits of stained glass. he is never satisfied with any appearance that is not prodigious. he should endeavour to school his imagination into the apprehension of the true idea of the beautiful.[ ] the wood-cut of slay-good[ ] is admirable, to be sure; but this new edition of the pilgrim's progress is too fine a book for it. it should be much larger, and on sixpenny coarse paper. the pilgrim's progress is composed in the lowest style of english, without slang or false grammar. if you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. for works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. this wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure. i read it once as a theologian--and let me assure you, that there is great theological acumen in the work--once with devotional feelings--and once as a poet. i could not have believed beforehand that calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours.[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge said this, after looking at the engravings of mr. martin's two pictures of the valley of the shadow of death, and the celestial city, published in the beautiful edition of the pilgrim's progress by messrs. murray and major, in . i wish mr. martin could have heard the poet's lecture: he would have been flattered, and at the same time, i believe, instructed; for in the philosophy of painting coleridge was a master.--ed.] [footnote : p. ., by s. mosses from a design by mr. w. harvey. "when they came to the place where he was, they found him with one _feeble-mind_ in his hand, whom his servants had brought unto him, having taken him in the way. now the giant was rifling him, with a purpose, after that, to pick his bones; for he was of the nature of flesh eaters."--ed.] [footnote : i find written on a blank leaf of my copy of this edition of the p.'s p. the following note by mr. c.:--"i know of no book, the bible excepted as above all comparison, which i, according to _my_ judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in christ jesus, as the pilgrim's progress. it is, in my conviction, incomparably the best _summa theologiae evangalicae_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired." june . .--ed.] _june_ . . prayer.--church-singing.--hooker.--dreams. there are three sorts of prayer:-- . public; . domestic; . solitary. each has its peculiar uses and character. i think the church ought to publish and authorise a directory of forms for the latter two. yet i fear the execution would be inadequate. there is a great decay of devotional unction in the numerous books of prayers put out now-a-days. i really think the hawker was very happy, who blundered new form of prayer into new _former_ prayers.[ ] i exceedingly regret that our church pays so little attention to the subject of congregational singing. see how it is! in that particular part of the public worship in which, more than in all the rest, the common people might, and ought to, join,--which, by its association with music, is meant to give a fitting vent and expression to the emotions,--in that part we all sing as jews; or, at best, as mere men, in the abstract, without a saviour. you know my veneration for the book of psalms, or most of it; but with some half dozen exceptions, the psalms are surely not adequate vehicles of christian thanksgiving and joy! upon this deficiency in our service, wesley and whitfield seized; and you know it is the hearty congregational singing of christian hymns which keeps the humbler methodists together. luther did as much for the reformation by his hymns as by his translation of the bible. in germany, the hymns are known by heart by every peasant: they advise, they argue from the hymns, and every soul in the church praises god, like a christian, with words which are natural and yet sacred to his mind. no doubt this defect in our service proceeded from the dread which the english reformers had of being charged with introducing any thing into the worship of god but the text of scripture. [footnote : "i will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on this my first introduction to coleridge he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. in one of his youthful poems, speaking of god, he had said-- --'of whose all-seeing eye aught to demand were impotence of mind.' this sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable, praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer."--_tait's magazine_, september, , p. . mr. coleridge within two years of his death very solemnly declared to me his conviction upon the same subject. i was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, and he fell, an unusual thing for him, into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others, but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. "but i have no difficulty," said he, "in forgiveness; indeed, i know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the lord's prayer, which asks forgiveness _as we forgive_. i feel nothing answering to it in my heart. neither do i find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in god as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will. o no, my dear, it is _to pray, to pray_ as god would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that god will listen to your voice through christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon--this is the last, the greatest achievement of the christian's warfare upon earth. _teach_ us to pray, o lord!" and then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. o what a sight was there!--ed.] * * * * * hooker said,--that by looking for that in the bible which it is impossible that _any book_ can have, we lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of all books. * * * * * you will observe, that even in dreams nothing is fancied without an antecedent _quasi_ cause. it could not be otherwise. _june_ . . jeremy taylor.--english reformation. taylor's was a great and lovely mind; yet how much and injuriously was it perverted by his being a favourite and follower of laud, and by his intensely popish feelings of church authority. [ ] his liberty of prophesying is a work of wonderful eloquence and skill; but if we believe the argument, what do we come to? why to nothing more or less than this, that--so much can be said for every opinion and sect,--so impossible is it to settle any thing by reasoning or authority of scripture,--we must appeal to some positive jurisdiction on earth, _ut sit finis controversiarum_. in fact, the whole book is the precise argument used by the papists to induce men to admit the necessity of a supreme and infallible head of the church on earth. it is one of the works which preeminently gives countenance to the saying of charles or james ii., i forget which:--"when you of the church of england contend with the catholics, you use the arguments of the puritans; when you contend with the puritans, you immediately adopt all the weapons of the catholics." taylor never speaks with the slightest symptom of affection or respect of luther, calvin, or any other of the great reformers--at least, not in any of his learned works; but he _saints_ every trumpery monk and friar, down to the very latest canonizations by the modern popes. i fear you will think me harsh, when i say that i believe taylor was, perhaps unconsciously, half a socinian in heart. such a strange inconsistency would not be impossible. the romish church has produced many such devout socinians. the cross of christ is dimly seen in taylor's works. compare him in this particular with donne, and you will feel the difference in a moment. why are not donne's volumes of sermons reprinted at oxford?[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge placed jeremy taylor amongst the four great geniuses of old english literature. i think he used to reckon shakspeare and bacon, milton and taylor, four-square, each against each. in mere eloquence, he thought the bishop without any fellow. he called him chrysostom. further, he loved the man, and was anxious to find excuses for some weak parts in his character. but mr. coleridge's assent to taylor's views of many of the fundamental positions of christianity was very limited; and, indeed, he considered him as the least sound in point of doctrine of any of the old divines, comprehending, within that designation, the writers to the middle of charles ii.'s reign. he speaks of taylor in "the friend" in the following terms:--"among the numerous examples with which i might enforce this warning, i refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent, and one of the most learned, of our divines; a rigorist, indeed, concerning the authority of the church, but a latitudinarian in the articles of its faith; who stretched the latter almost to the advanced posts of socinianism, and strained the former to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the roman hierarchy." vol. ii. p. .--ed.] [footnote : why not, indeed! it is really quite unaccountable that the sermons of this great divine of the english church should be so little known as they are, even to very literary clergymen of the present day. it might have been expected, that the sermons of the greatest preacher of his age, the admired of ben jonson, selden, and all that splendid band of poets and scholars, would even as curiosities have been reprinted, when works, which are curious for nothing, are every year sent forth afresh under the most authoritative auspices. dr. donne was educated at both universities, at hart hall, oxford, first, and afterwards at cambridge, but at what college walton does not mention--ed.] * * * * * in the reign of edward vi., the reformers feared to admit almost any thing on human authority alone. they had seen and felt the abuses consequent on the popish theory of christianity; and i doubt not they wished and intended to reconstruct the religion and the church, as far as was possible, upon the plan of the primitive ages? but the puritans pushed this bias to an absolute bibliolatry. they would not put on a corn-plaster without scraping a text over it. men of learning, however, soon felt that this was wrong in the other extreme, and indeed united itself to the very abuse it seemed to shun. they saw that a knowledge of the fathers, and of early tradition, was absolutely necessary; and unhappily, in many instances, the excess of the puritans drove the men of learning into the old popish extreme of denying the scriptures to be capable of affording a rule of faith without the dogmas of the church. taylor is a striking instance how far a protestant might be driven in this direction. _june_ . . catholicity.--gnosis.--tertullian.--st. john. in the first century, catholicity was the test of a book or epistle-- whether it were of the evangelicon or apostolicon--being canonical. this catholic spirit was opposed to the gnostic or peculiar spirit,--the humour of fantastical interpretation of the old scriptures into christian meanings. it is this gnosis, or _knowingness,_ which the apostle says puffeth up,--not _knowledge_, as we translate it. the epistle of barnabas, of the genuineness of which i have no sort of doubt, is an example of this gnostic spirit. the epistle to the hebrews is the only instance of gnosis in the canon: it was written evidently by some apostolical man before the destruction of the temple, and probably at alexandria. for three hundred years, and more, it was not admitted into the canon, especially not by the latin church, on account of this difference in it from the other scriptures. but its merit was so great, and the gnosis in it is so kept within due bounds, that its admirers at last succeeded, especially by affixing st. paul's name to it, to have it included in the canon; which was first done, i think, by the council of laodicea in the middle of the fourth century. fortunately for us it was so. * * * * * i beg tertullian's pardon; but amongst his many _bravuras_, he says something about st. paul's autograph. origen expressly declares the reverse. * * * * * it is delightful to think, that the beloved apostle was born a plato. to him was left the almost oracular utterance of the mysteries of the christian religion while to st. paul was committed the task of explanation, defence, and assertion of all the doctrines, and especially of those metaphysical ones touching the will and grace;[ ] for which purpose his active mind, his learned education, and his greek logic, made him pre-eminently fit. [footnote : "the imperative and oracular form of the inspired scripture is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational and moral."--_statesman's manual_, p. .] june . . principles of a review.--party-spirit. notwithstanding what you say, i am persuaded that a review would amply succeed even now, which should be started upon a published code of principles, critical, moral, political, and religious; which should announce what sort of books it would review, namely, works of literature as contradistinguished from all that offspring of the press, which in the present age supplies food for the craving caused by the extended ability of reading without any correspondent education of the mind, and which formerly was done by conversation, and which should really give a fair account of what the author intended to do, and in his own words, if possible, and in addition, afford one or two fair specimens of the execution,--itself never descending for one moment to any personality. it should also be provided before the commencement with a dozen powerful articles upon fundamental topics to appear in succession. you see the great reviewers are now ashamed of reviewing works in the old style, and have taken up essay writing instead. hence arose such publications as the literary gazette and others, which are set up for the purpose--not a useless one--of advertizing new books of all sorts for the circulating libraries. a mean between the two extremes still remains to be taken. * * * * * party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. i quite calculate on my being one day or other holden in worse repute by many christians than the unitarians and open infidels. it must be undergone by every one who loves the truth for its own sake beyond all other things. * * * * * truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. _june_ . . southey's life of bunyan.--laud.--puritans and cavaliers.--presbyterians, independents, and bishops. southey's life of bunyan is beautiful. i wish he had illustrated that mood of mind which exaggerates, and still more, mistakes, the inward depravation, as in bunyan, nelson, and others, by extracts from baxter's life of himself. what genuine superstition is exemplified in that bandying of texts and half texts, and demi-semi-texts, just as memory happened to suggest them, or chance brought them before bunyan's mind! his tract, entitled, "grace abounding to the chief of sinners"[ ] is a study for a philosopher. [footnote : "grace abounding to the chief of sinners, in a faithful account of the life and death of john bunyan, &c." is it not, however, an historical error to call the puritans dissenters? before st. bartholomew's day, they were essentially a part of the church, and had as determined opinions in favour of a church establishment as the bishops themselves. * * * * * laud was not exactly a papist to be sure; but he was on the road with the church with him to a point, where declared popery would have been inevitable. a wise and vigorous papist king would very soon, and very justifiably too, in that case, have effected a reconciliation between the churches of rome and england, when the line of demarcation had become so very faint. * * * * * the faults of the puritans were many; but surely their morality will, in general, bear comparison with that of the cavaliers after the restoration. * * * * * the presbyterians hated the independents much more than they did the bishops, which induced them to cooperate in effecting the restoration. * * * * * the conduct of the bishops towards charles, whilst at breda, was wise and constitutional. they knew, however, that when the forms of the constitution were once restored, all their power would revive again as of course. june . . study of the bible. intense study of the bible will keep any writer from being _vulgar_, in point of style. june . . rabelais.--swift.--bentley.--subnet. rabelais is a most wonderful writer. pantagruel is the reason; panurge the understanding,--the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the reason. i scarcely know an example more illustrative of the distinction between the two. rabelais had no mode of speaking the truth in those days but in such a form as this; as it was, he was indebted to the king's protection for his life. some of the commentators talk about his book being all political; there are contemporary politics in it, of course, but the real scope is much higher and more philosophical. it is in vain to look about for a hidden meaning in all that he has written; you will observe that, after any particularly deep thrust, as the papimania[ ] for example, rabelais, as if to break the blow, and to appear unconscious of what he has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery. he, every now and then, flashes you a glimpse of a real face from his magic lantern, and then buries the whole scene in mist. the morality of the work is of the most refined and exalted kind; as for the manners, to be sure, i cannot say much. swift was _anima rabelaisii habitans in sicco_,--the soul of rabelais dwelling in a dry place. yet swift was rare. can any thing beat his remark on king william's motto, --_recepit, non rapuit_,--"that the receiver was as bad as the thief?" [footnote : b. iv. c. . "comment pantagruel descendit en l'isle de papimanes." see the five following chapters, especially c. .; and note also c. . of the fifth book; "comment nous fut monstré papegaut à grande difficulté."--ed.] * * * * * the effect of the tory wits attacking bentley with such acrimony has been to make them appear a set of shallow and incompetent scholars. neither bentley nor burnet suffered from the hostility of the wits. burnet's "history of his own times" is a truly valuable book. his credulity is great, but his simplicity is equally great; and he never deceives you for a moment. _june_ . . giotto.--painting. the fresco paintings by giotto[ ] and others, in the cemetery at pisa, are most noble. giotto was a contemporary of dante: and it is a curious question, whether the painters borrowed from the poet, or _vice versa_. certainly m. angelo and raffael fed their imaginations highly with these grand drawings, especially m. angelo, who took from them his bold yet graceful lines. [footnote : giotto, or angiolotto's birth is fixed by vasari in , but there is some reason to think that he was born a little earlier. dante, who was his friend, was born in . giotto was the pupil of cimabue, whom he entirely eclipsed, as dante testifies in the well-known lines in the purgatorio:-- "o vana gloria dell'umane posse! com' poco verde in su la cima dura, se non e giunta dall' etati grosse! credette cirnabue nella pintura tener lo campo: ed ora ha giotto il grido, si che la fama di colui oscura."--c. xi. v. . his six great frescos in the cemetery at pisa are upon the sufferings and patience of job.--ed.] * * * * * people may say what they please about the gradual improvement of the arts. it is not true of the substance. the arts and the muses both spring forth in the youth of nations, like minerva from the front of jupiter, all armed: manual dexterity may, indeed, he improved by practice. * * * * * painting went on in power till, in raffael, it attained the zenith, and in him too it showed signs of a tendency downwards by another path. the painter began to think of overcoming difficulties. after this the descent was rapid, till sculptors began to work inveterate likenesses of perriwigs in marble,--as see algarotti's tomb in the cemetery at pisa,--and painters did nothing but copy, as well as they could, the external face of nature. now, in this age, we have a sort of reviviscence,--not, i fear, of the power, but of a taste for the power, of the early times. _june_ . . seneca. you may get a motto for every sect in religion, or line of thought in morals or philosophy, from seneca; but nothing is ever thought _out_ by him. _july_ . . plato.--aristotle. every man is born an aristotelian, or a platonist. i do not think it possible that any one born an aristotelian can become a platonist; and i am sure no born platonist can ever change into an aristotelian. they are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. the one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. i believe that aristotle never could get to understand what plato meant by an idea. there is a passage, indeed, in the eudemian ethics which looks like an exception; but i doubt not of its being spurious, as that whole work is supposed by some to be. with plato ideas are constitutive in themselves.[ ] aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. he was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths. yet what a mind was aristotle's--only not the greatest that ever animated the human form!--the parent of science, properly so called, the master of criticism, and the founder or editor of logic! but he confounded science with philosophy, which is an error. philosophy is the middle state between science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom. [footnote : mr. coleridge said the eudemian ethics; but i half suspect he must have meant the metaphysics, although i do not know that _all_ the fourteen books under that title have been considered non-genuine. the [greek: aethicha eusaemeia] are not aristotle's. to what passage in particular allusion is here made, i cannot exactly say; many might be alleged, but not one seems to express the true platonic idea, as mr. coleridge used to understand it; and as, i believe, he ultimately considered ideas in his own philosophy. fourteen or fifteen years previously, he seems to have been undecided upon this point. "whether," he says, "ideas are regulative only, according to aristotle and kant, or likewise _constitutive_, and one with the power and life of nature, according to plato and plotinus [greek:--eg logo zoae aeg, chai ae zoae aeg to phos tog agthwpog] is the highest problem of philosophy, and not part of its nomenclature." essay (e) in the appendix to the _statesman's manual_, .--ed.] _july_ . . duke of wellington.--moneyed interest.--canning. i sometimes fear the duke of wellington is too much disposed to imagine that he can govern a great nation by word of command, in the same way in which he governed a highly disciplined army. he seems to be unaccustomed to, and to despise, the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the bursts of heroism followed by prostration and cowardice, which invariably characterise all popular efforts. he forgets that, after all, it is from such efforts that all the great and noble institutions of the world have come; and that, on the other hand, the discipline and organization of armies have been only like the flight of the cannon-ball, the object of which is destruction.[ ] [footnote : straight forward goes the lightning's path, and straight the fearful path of the cannon-ball. direct it flies and rapid, shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches. _wallenstein_, part i, act i, sc. ] * * * * * the stock-jobbing and moneyed interest is so strong in this country, that it has more than once prevailed in our foreign councils over national honour and national justice. the country gentlemen are not slow to join in this influence. canning felt this very keenly, and said he was unable to contend against the city trained-bands. _july_ , . bourrienne. bourienne is admirable. he is the french pepys,--a man with right feelings, but always wishing to participate in what is going on, be it what it may. he has one remark, when comparing buonaparte with charlemagne, the substance of which i have attempted to express in "the friend"[ ] but which bourrienne has condensed into a sentence worthy of tacitus, or machiavel, or bacon. it is this; that charlemagne was above his age, whilst buonaparte was only above his competitors, but under his age! bourrienne has done more than any one else to show buonaparte to the world as he really was,--always contemptible, except when acting a part, and that part not his own. [footnote : vol. i. essay . p. .] _july_ . . jews. the other day i was what you would call _floored_ by a jew. he passed me several times crying out for old clothes in the most nasal and extraordinary tone i ever heard. at last i was so provoked, that i said to him, "pray, why can't you say 'old clothes' in a plain way as i do now?" the jew stopped, and looking very gravely at me, said in a clear and even fine accent, "sir, i can say 'old clothes' as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say _ogh clo_ as i do now;" and so he marched off. i was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that i followed and gave him a shilling, the only one i had. * * * * * i have had a good deal to do with jews in the course of my life, although i never borrowed any money of them. once i sat in a coach opposite a jew--a symbol of old clothes' bags--an isaiah of hollywell street. he would close the window; i opened it. he closed it again; upon which, in a very solemn tone, i said to him, "son of abraham! thou smellest; son of isaac! thou art offensive; son of jacob! thou stinkest foully. see the man in the moon! he is holding his nose at thee at that distance; dost thou think that i, sitting here, can endure it any longer?" my jew was astounded, opened the window forthwith himself, and said, "he was sorry he did not know before i was so great a gentleman." _july_ . . the papacy and the reformation.--leo x. during the early part of the middle ages, the papacy was nothing, in fact, but a confederation of the learned men in the west of europe against the barbarism and ignorance of the times. the pope was chief of this confederacy; and so long as he retained that character exclusively, his power was just and irresistible. it was the principal mean of preserving for us and for our posterity all that we now have of the illumination of past ages. but as soon as the pope made a separation between his character as premier clerk in christendom and as a secular prince; as soon as he began to squabble for towns and castles; then he at once broke the charm, and gave birth to a revolution. from that moment, those who remained firm to the cause of truth and knowledge became necessary enemies to the roman see. the great british schoolmen led the way; then wicliffe rose, huss, jerome, and others;--in short, every where, but especially throughout the north of europe, the breach of feeling and sympathy went on widening,--so that all germany, england, scotland, and other countries started like giants out of their sleep at the first blast of luther's trumpet. in france, one half of the people--and that the most wealthy and enlightened-- embraced the reformation. the seeds of it were deeply and widely spread in spain and in italy; and as to the latter, if james i. had been an elizabeth, i have no doubt at all that venice would have publicly declared itself against rome. it is a profound question to answer, why it is, that since the middle of the sixteenth century the reformation has not advanced one step in europe. * * * * * in the time of leo x. atheism, or infidelity of some sort, was almost universal in italy amongst the high dignitaries of the romish church. _july_ . . thelwall.--swift.--stella. john thelwall had something very good about him. we were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the quantocks, when i said to him, "citizen john, this is a fine place to talk treason in!"--"nay! citizen samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!" thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself. i showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. "how so?" said he, "it is covered with weeds."--"oh," i replied, "_that_ is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. the weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and i thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries." * * * * * i think swift adopted the name of stella, which is a man's name, with a feminine termination, to denote the mysterious epicene relation in which poor miss johnston stood to him. _july_ . . iniquitous legislation. that legislation is iniquitous which sets law in conflict with the common and unsophisticated feelings of our nature. if i were a clergyman in a smuggling town, i would _not_ preach against smuggling. i would not be made a sort of clerical revenue officer. let the government, which by absurd duties fosters smuggling, prevent it itself, if it can. how could i show my hearers the immorality of going twenty miles in a boat, and honestly buying with their money a keg of brandy, except by a long deduction which they could not understand? but were i in a place where wrecking went on, see if i would preach on any thing else! _july_ . . spurzheim and craniolooy. spurzheim is a good man, and i like him; but he is dense, and the most ignorant german i ever knew. if he had been content with stating certain remarkable coincidences between the moral qualities and the configuration of the skull, it would have been well; but when he began to map out the cranium dogmatically, he fell into infinite absurdities. you know that every intellectual act, however you may distinguish it by name in respect of the originating faculties, is truly the act of the entire man; the notion of distinct material organs, therefore, in the brain itself, is plainly absurd. pressed by this, spurzheim has, at length, been guilty of some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so forth. observe, also, that it is constantly found, that so far from there being a concavity in the interior surface of the cranium answering to the convexity apparent on the exterior--the interior is convex too. dr. baillie thought there was something in the system, because the notion of the brain being an extendible net helped to explain those cases where the intellect remained after the solid substance of the brain was dissolved in water.[ ] that a greater or less development of the forepart of the head is generally coincidedent with more or less of reasoning power, is certain. the line across the forehead, also, denoting musical power, is very common. [footnote : "the very marked, _positive_ as well as comparative, magnitude and prominence of the bump, entitled _benevolence_ (see spurzheim's _map of the human skull_) on the head of the late mr. john thurtell, has woefully unsettled the faith of many ardent phrenologists, and strengthened the previous doubts of a still greater number into utter disbelief. on _my_ mind this fact (for a _fact_ it is) produced the directly contrary effect; and inclined me to suspect, for the first time, that there may be some truth in the spurzheimian scheme. whether future craniologists may not see cause to _new-name_ this and one or two others of these convex gnomons, is quite a different question. at present, and according to the present use of words, any such change would be premature; and we must be content to say, that mr. thurtell's benevolence was insufficiently modified by the unprotrusive and unindicated convolutes of the brain, that secrete honesty and common sense. the organ of destructiveness was indirectly _potentiated_ by the absence or imperfect development of the glands of reason and conscience in this '_unfortunate gentleman.'"--_aids to reflection_, p. . n.] _august_ . . french revolution, .--captain r. and the americans. the french must have greatly improved under the influence of a free and regular government (for such it, in general, has been since the restoration), to have conducted themselves with so much moderation in success as they seem to have done, and to be disposed to do. * * * * * i must say i cannot see much in captain b. hall's account of the americans, but weaknesses--some of which make me like the yankees all the better. how much more amiable is the american fidgettiness and anxiety about the opinion of other nations, and especially of the english, than the sentiments of the rest of the world.[ ] as to what captain hall says about the english loyalty to the person of the king--i can only say, i feel none of it. i respect the man while, and only while, the king is translucent through him: i reverence the glass case for the saint's sake within; except for that it is to me mere glazier's work,-- putty, and glass, and wood. [footnote : "there exists in england a _gentlemanly_ character, a _gentlemanly_ feeling, very different even from that which is most like it,--the character of a well-born spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of europe. this feeling _originated_ in the fortunate circumstance, that the titles of our english nobility follow the law of their property, and are inherited by the eldest sons only. from this source, under the influences of our constitution and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in different modifications through the whole country. the uniformity of our dress among all classes above that of the day labourer, while it has authorized all ranks to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same time inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly the most commonly received attribute of which character is a certain generosity in trifles. on the other hand, the encroachments of the lower classes on the higher, occasioned and favoured by this resemblance in exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have rendered each class more reserved and jealous in their general communion; and, far more than our climate or natural temper, have caused that haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanour, which is so generally complained of among foreigners. far be it from me to depreciate the value of this gentlemanly feeling: i respect it under all its forms and varieties, from the house of commons * to the gentleman in the one-shilling gallery. it is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but it is a wretched substitute for it. its _worth_, as a moral good, is by no means in proportion to its _value_ as a social advantage. these observations are not irrelevant: for to the want of reflection that this diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of our moral excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar to england; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and uncharitable to expect the same consequences, where the same causes have not existed to produce them; and lastly, to our prorieness to regard the absence of this character (which, as i have before said, does, for the greater part, and in the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or national worth; we must, i am convinced, attribute a large portion of that conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of countries conquered or appropriated by great britain doubtful whether the various solid advantages which they have derived from our protection and just government were not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings and prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanour of the english, as individuals."--_friend_, vol. iii. p, . this was written long before the reform act.--ed.] _september . ._ english reformation. the fatal error into which the peculiar character of the english reformation threw our church, has borne bitter fruit ever since,--i mean that of its clinging to court and state, instead of cultivating the people. the church ought to be a mediator between the people and the government, between the poor and the rich. as it is, i fear the church has let the hearts of the common people be stolen from it. see how differently the church of rome--wiser in its generation--has always acted in this particular. for a long time past the church of england seems to me to have been blighted with prudence, as it is called. i wish with all my heart we had a little zealous imprudence. _september . ._ democracy.----idea of a state.----church. it has never yet been seen, or clearly announced, that democracy, as such, is no proper element in the constitution of a state. the idea of a state is undoubtedly a government [greek: ek ton aristou]--an aristocracy. democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself. a state, in idea, is the opposite of a church. a state regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, &c. but a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradation of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. a church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. the church, so considered, and the state, exclusively of the church, constitute together the idea of a state in its largest sense. _september_ . . government.----french gend'armerie. all temporal government must rest on a compromise of interests and abstract rights. who would listen to the county of bedford, if it were to declare itself disannexed from the british empire, and to set up for itself? * * * * * the most desirable thing that can happen to france, with her immense army of gensd'armes, is, that the service may at first become very irksome to the men themselves, and ultimately, by not being called into real service, fall into general ridicule, like our trained bands. the evil in france, and throughout europe, seems now especially to be, the subordination of the legislative power to the direct physical force of the people. the french legislature was weak enough before the late revolution; now it is absolutely powerless, and manifestly depends even for its existence on the will of a popular commander of an irresistible army. there is now in france a daily tendency to reduce the legislative body to a mere deputation from the provinces and towns. september . . philosophy of young men at the present day. i do not know whether i deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds, and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which i rarely witness now. no one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of facts and personal experiences. mr. ---- is, i suppose, one of the rising young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable with each other. he told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which i said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. you must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "but then," said mr. ----, "_that_ principle of selection came from facts!"--"to be sure!" i replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those antecedent facts. the relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for ever,--but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous aim or principle." he then asked me what i had to say to bacon's induction: i told him i had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for the baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction--a very different thing.[ ] [footnote : as far as i can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by mr. coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the platonic and baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the friend, from p. to . no edition of the novum organum should ever be published without a transcript of it.--ed.] _september_ . . thucydides and tacitus.----poetry.----modern metre. the object of thucydides was to show the ills resulting to greece from the separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and oligarchy. the object of tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men. * * * * * a poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory. * * * * * really the metre of some of the modern poems i have read, bears about the same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, i think. * * * * * nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. all things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections. september . . logic. there are two kinds of logic: . syllogistic. . criterional. how any one can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric. all syllogistic logic is-- . _se_clusion; . _in_clusion; . _con_clusion; which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. the first says, this _ought_ to be; the second adds, this _is_; and the last pronounces, this must be so. the criterional logic, or logic of premisses, is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated. * * * * * the object of rhetoric is persuasion,--of logic, conviction,--of grammar, significancy. a fourth term is wanting, the rhematic, or logic of sentences. _september_ . . varro.--socrates.--greek philosophy.--plotinus.--tertullian. what a loss we have had in varro's mythological and critical works! it is said that the works of epicurus are probably amongst the herculanean manuscripts. i do not feel much interest about them, because, by the consent of all antiquity, lucretius has preserved a complete view of his system. but i regret the loss of the works of the old stoics, zeno and others, exceedingly. * * * * * socrates, as such, was only a poetical character to plato, who worked upon his own ground. the several disciples of socrates caught some particular points from him, and made systems of philosophy upon them according to their own views. socrates himself had no system. * * * * * i hold all claims set up for egypt having given birth to the greek philosophy, to be groundless. it sprang up in greece itself, and began with physics only. then it took in the idea of a living cause, and made pantheism out of the two. socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally, plato asserted or re-asserted the idea of a god the maker of the world. the measure of human philosophy was thus full, when christianity came to add what before was wanting--assurance. after this again, the neo-platonists joined theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and mere mysticism. plotinus was a man of wonderful ability, and some of the sublimest passages i ever read are in his works. i was amused the other day with reading in tertullian, that spirits or demons dilate and contract themselves, and wriggle about like worms-- lumbricix similes. _september_ . . scotch and english lakes. the five finest things in scotland are-- . edinburgh; . the antechamber of the fall of foyers; . the view of loch lomond from inch tavannach, the highest of the islands; . the trosachs; . the view of the hebrides from a point, the name of which i forget. but the intervals between the fine things in scotland are very dreary;--whereas in cumberland and westmoreland there is a cabinet of beauties,--each thing being beautiful in itself, and the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley, to another, is itself a beautiful thing again. the scotch lakes are so like one another, from their great size, that in a picture you are obliged to read their names; but the english lakes, especially derwent water, or rather the whole vale of keswick, is so rememberable, that, after having been once seen, no one ever requires to be told what it is when drawn. this vale is about as large a basin as loch lomond; the latter is covered with water; but in the former instance, we have two lakes with a charming river to connect them, and lovely villages at the foot of the mountain, and other habitations, which give an air of life and cheerfulness to the whole place. * * * * * the land imagery of the north of devon is most delightful. _september_ . . love and friendship opposed.--marriage.--characterlessness of women. a person once said to me, that he could make nothing of love, except that it was friendship accidentally combined with desire. whence i concluded that he had never been in love. for what shall we say of the feeling which a man of sensibility has towards his wife with her baby at her breast! how pure from sensual desire! yet how different from friendship! sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. luther has sketched the most beautiful picture of the nature, and ends, and duties of the wedded life i ever read. st. paul says it is a great symbol, not mystery, as we translate it.[ ] [footnote : greek: ---- ] * * * * * "most women have no character at all," said pope[ ] and meant it for satire. shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. every one wishes a desdemona or ophelia for a wife,--creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you. [footnote : "nothing so true as what you once let fall-- 'most women have no character at all,'-- matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, and best distinguish'd by black, brown, and fair." _epist. to a lady_, v. i.], _september_ . . mental anarchy. why need we talk of a fiery hell? if the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel, from the anarchy of our powers. it would be conscious madness--a horrid thought! october . . ear and taste for music different.----english liturgy.----belgian revolution. in politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly. * * * * * an ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. i have no ear whatever; i could not sing an air to save my life; but i have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. naldi, a good fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that i did not seem much interested with a piece of rossini's which had just been performed. i said, it sounded to me like nonsense verses. but i could scarcely contain myself when a thing of beethoven's followed. * * * * * i never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the english liturgy, till i had attended some kirks in the country parts of scotland, i call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near london--walking advertisements. * * * * * the brussels riot--i cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name --is a wretched parody on the last french revolution. were i king william, i would banish the belgians, as coriolanus banishes the romans in shakspeare.[ ] it is a wicked rebellion without one just cause. [footnote : "you common cry of curs! whose breath i hate as reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves i prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men that do corrupt my air, i banish you; and here remain with _your uncertainty!_" act iii. sc. .] _october_ . . galileo, newton, kepler, bacon. galileo was a great genius, and so was newton; but it would take two or three galileos and newtons to make one kepler.[ ] it is in the order of providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind--the kepler-- should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind--the newton--should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining guesses of the former. the laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due to kepler. there is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius upon record, than kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law[ ] of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions round the sun. gravitation, too, he had fully conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to nature. yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; _"vexat me et lacessit,"_ are his words, i believe. we praise newton's clearness and steadiness. he was clear and steady, no doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea brought forth by another. newton had his ether, and could not rest in--he could not conceive--the idea of a law. he thought it a physical thing after all. as for his chronology, i believe, those who are most competent to judge, rely on it less and less every day. his lucubrations on daniel and the revelations seem to me little less than mere raving. [footnote : galileo galilei was born at pisa, on the th of february, . john kepler was born at weil, in the duchy of wirtemberg, on the lst of december, .--ed.] [footnote : namely, that the squares of their times vary as the cubes of their distances,--ed.] * * * * * personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation of the experiments which nature herself makes for us--i mean, the phenomena of the universe. but then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and substantiate the course of experiment. experiments alone cannot advance knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off the scene and leave no trace behind them. * * * * * bacon, when like himself--for no man was ever more inconsistent--says, _"prudens qiuestio--dimidium scientiæ est."_ _october_ . . the reformation. at the reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. they knew that the romanists were on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them whenever a fair pretext could be found; and i have no doubt it was the excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of servetus, and also to the thanks offered by all the protestant churches, to calvin and the church of geneva, for burning him. _november_ . . house of commons. ---- never makes a figure in quietude. he astounds the vulgar with a certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he scrawls every thing. he thinks aloud; every thing in his mind, good, bad, or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the newgate gutter, flowing with garbage, dead dogs, and mud. he is preeminently a man of many thoughts, with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through every thing to see any thing. * * * * * it is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. where are our statesmen to meet this emergency? i see no reformer who asks himself the question, _what_ is it that i propose to myself to effect in the result? is the house of commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? if on the former, we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, i am sure that women have as good a right to vote as men.[ ] [footnote : in mr. coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic system of the early french revolutionists, in the friend, he has the following passage in the nature of a _reductio ad absurdum_. "rousseau, indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the constitution of deduce, that the people itself is its own sole rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the general will. but this is wholly without proof; for it has been already fully shown, that, according to the principle out of which this consequence is attempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the abstract reason alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. the confusion of two things so different is so gross an error, that the constituent assembly could scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without some glaring inconsistency. children are excluded from all political power; are they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? yes! but|in _them_ the faculty is not yet adequately developed. but are not gross ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and sensuality, equally preventives of the developement, equally impediments to the rightful exercise, of the reason, as childhood and early youth? who would not rely on the judgment of a well-educated english lad, bred in a virtuous and enlightened family, in preference to that of a brutal russian, who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour, or attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings of a windmill? again: women are likewise excluded; a full half, and that assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable half, of the whole human race is excluded, and this too by a constitution which boasts to have no other foundations but those of universal reason! is reason, then, an affair of sex? no! but women are commonly in a state of dependence, and are not likely to exercise their reason with freedom. well! and does not this ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force to the poor, to the infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, to all, in short, whose maintenance, be it scanty, or be it ample, depends on the will of others? how far are we to go? where must we stop? what classes should we admit? whom must we disfranchise? the objects concerning whom we are to determine these questions, are all human beings, and differenced from each other by _degrees_ only, these degrees, too, oftentimes changing. yet the principle on which the whole system rests, is that reason is not susceptible of degree. nothing, therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which do not obey any necessary law, can be the object of pure science, or determinate by mere reason,"--vol. i. p. , ed.] _march_ . . government.--earl grey. government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the abstract; it is founded on _unequal_ property; the inequality is an essential term in the position. the phrases--higher, middle, and lower classes, with reference to this point of representation--are delusive; no such divisions as classes actually exist in society. there is an indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as _l_. householders. i cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan, --not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the realm,--not a remark on the nature of the constitution of england, and the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. half the wealth of this country is purely artificial,--existing only in and on the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. this property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress: and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to their good faith--the lamb to the wolves! necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. the people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. i hope lord grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. they came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out his of wits, could only stammer forth,--"i pray you, my friends, be gone down again!" at which the devils, with one voice, replied,-- "yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down!-- but we'll take _you_ with us to swim or to drown!"[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge must have been thinking of that "very pithy and profitable" ballad by the laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read unlawful books, and how he was punished:"-- "the _young_ man, he began to read he knew not what, but he would proceed, when there was heard a sound at the door, which as he read on grew more and more. "and more and more the knocking grew, the young man knew not what to do: but trembling in fear he sat within, _till the door was broke, and the devil came in_. "'what would'st thou with me?' the wicked one cried; but not a word the young man replied; every hair on his head was standing upright, and his limbs like a palsy shook with affright. "'what would'st thou with me?' cried the author of ill; but the wretched young man was silent still," &c. the catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times show. "henceforth let all young men take heed how in a conjuror's books they read!" _southey's minor poems_, vol. iii. p. .--ed.] * * * * * _june_ . . government.--popular representation. the three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,-- . security to possessors; . facility to acquirers; and; . hope to all. * * * * * a nation is the unity of a people. king and parliament are the unity made visible. the king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested unity as the commons.[ ] in that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. the counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is say,--the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. but for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any english localities. yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! the miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. there is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand. undoubtedly it is a great evil, that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. but then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. you acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own? [footnote : mr. coleridge was very fond of quoting george withers's fine lines:-- "let not your king and parliament in one, much less apart, mistake themselves for that which is most worthy to be thought upon: nor think _they_ are, essentially, the state. let them not fancy that th' authority and privileges upon them bestown, conferr'd are to set up a majesty, a power, or a glory, of their own! but let them know, 't was for a deeper life, which they but _represent_-- that there's on earth a yet auguster thing, veil'd though it be, than parliament and king!"--ed.] * * * * * the malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific whig newspapers are to me detestable. i prefer the open endeavours of those publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in effect: there is a sort of honesty in _that_ which i approve, though i would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press. _june_ . . napier.--buonaparte.--southey. i have been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of colonel napier's history of the peninsular war. it is a specimen of the true french military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,--not a consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the french invasion. all is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is regularly awarded to the most successful player. how perfectly ridiculous is the prostration of napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the name of buonaparte! i declare i know no book more likely to undermine the national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than this work of napier's. if a. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and b. has only one or two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendant superiority, if a. surpasses b.? buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he neither originated nor controlled. he had no chance of preserving his power but by continual warfare. no thought of a wise tranquillization of the shaken elements of france seems ever to have passed through his mind; and i believe that at no part of his reign could be have survived one year's continued peace. he never had but one obstacle to contend with--physical force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts- martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome. * * * * * southey's history[ ] is on the right side, and starts from the right point; but he is personally fond of the spaniards, and in bringing forward their nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality of the spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to all strangers as such. in this sense every thing is national in spain. even their so called catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine spaniard's mind; he does not regard the religious professions of the frenchman or italian at all in the same light with his own. [footnote : mr. coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in english;--that it was more than a campaign to the duke's fame.--ed.] _july_ . . patronage of the fine arts.--old women. the darkest despotisms on the continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the english government. a great musical composer in germany and italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity and rank are universally conceded to him. so it is with a sculptor, or painter, or architect. without this sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. in this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,--_laissez faire_. paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for him here. * * * * * there are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever i knew were to be divided:-- . that dear old soul; . that old woman; . that old witch. _july_ . . pictures.[ ] observe the remarkable difference between claude and teniers in their power of painting vacant space. claude makes his whole landscape a _plenum:_ the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. hence there are no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the eye. there is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of claude's sunsets. never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as teniers. that picture of the archers[ ] exemplifies this excellence. see the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact! but oh! what a wonderful picture is that triumph of silenus![ ] it is the very revelry of hell. every evil passion is there that could in any way be forced into juxtaposition with joyance. mark the lust, and, hard by, the hate. every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of the grace of heaven. the animal is triumphing--not over, but--in the absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. i could fancy that rubens had seen in a vision-- all the souls that damned be leap up at once in anarchy, clap their hands, and dance for glee! that landscape[ ] on the other side is only less magnificent than dear sir george beaumont's, now in the national gallery. it has the same charm. rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,-- nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. no; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous château, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he--and he peter paul rubens alone--handles these every- day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and earth and all things therein. he extracts the latent poetry out of these common objects,--that poetry and harmony which every man of genius perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. in other landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;--in rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent infinity of space. so long as rubens confines himself to space and outward figure--to the mere animal man with animal passions--he is, i may say, a god amongst painters. his satyrs, silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated beasts. [footnote : all the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of ancient masters at the british gallery in pall mall. the recollection of those two hours has made the rooms of that institution a melancholy place for me. mr. coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed to kindle in his mind at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. he did not examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the gallery _potentially_. i can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to convey with clearness to the ear. his admiration for rubens showed itself in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake hands with his pictures. what the company, which by degrees formed itself round this silver-haired, bright-eyed, music-breathing, old man, took him for, i cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be that ancient mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and constrained them, like three years' children, to hear his tale. in the midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely young woman, whose attention he had involuntarily arrested;--to her, without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he addressed many remarks, although i must acknowledge they were couched in a somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. he was, verily, a gentle-hearted man at all times; but i never was in company with him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant's breath over the mirror of his intellect.--ed.] [footnote : "figures shooting at a target," belonging, i believe, to lord bandon.--ed.] [footnote : this belongs to sir robert peel.--ed.] [footnote : "landscape with setting sun,"--lord farnborough's picture.--ed.] * * * * * the italian masters differ from the dutch in this--that in their pictures ages are perfectly ideal. the infant that raffael's madonna holds in her arms cannot be guessed of any particular age; it is humanity in infancy. the babe in the manger in a dutch painting is a fac-simile of some real new-born bantling; it is just like the little rabbits we fathers have all seen with some dismay at first burst. * * * * * carlo dolce's representations of our saviour are pretty, to be sure; but they are too smooth to please me. his christs are always in sugar-candy. * * * * * that is a very odd and funny picture of the connoisseurs at rome[ ] by reynolds. [footnote : "portraits of distinguished connoisseurs painted at rome,"--belonging to lord burlington.--ed.] * * * * * the more i see of modern pictures, the more i am convinced that the ancient art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,--very pleasing, but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. portraits by the old masters,--take for example the pock-fritten lady by cuyp[ ]--are pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species. modern portraits--a few by jackson and owen, perhaps, excepted--give you not the man, not the inward humanity, but merely the external mark, that in which tom is different from bill. there is something affected and meretricious in the snake in the grass[ ] and such pictures, by reynolds. [footnote : i almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to mr. heneage finch's picture of a lady with a fan.--ed.] [footnote : sir robert peel's.--ed.] july . . chillingworth.--superstition of maltese, sicilians, and italians. it is now twenty years since i read chillingworth's book[ ]; but certainly it seemed to me that his main position, that the mere text of the bible is the sole and exclusive ground of christian faith and practice, is quite untenable against the romanists. it entirely destroys the conditions of a church, of an authority residing in a religious community, and all that holy sense of brotherhood which is so sublime and consolatory to a meditative christian. had i been a papist, i should not have wished for a more vanquishable opponent in controversy. i certainly believe chillingworth to have been in some sense a socinian. lord falkland, his friend, said so in substance. i do not deny his skill in dialectics; he was more than a match for knott[ ] to be sure. i must be bold enough to say, that i do not think that even hooker puts the idea of a church on the true foundation. [footnote : "the religion of protestants a safe way to salvation; or, an answer to a booke entitled 'mercy and truth; or, charity maintained by catholicks,' which pretends to prove the contrary."] [footnote : socinianism, or some inclination that way, is an old and clinging charge against chillingworth. on the one hand, it is well known that he subscribed the articles of the church of england, in the usual form, on the th of july, ; and on the other, it is equally certain that within two years immediately previous, he wrote the letter to some unnamed correspondent, beginning "dear harry," and printed in all the lives of chillingworth, in which letter he sums up his arguments upon the arian doctrine in this passage:--"in a word, whosoever shall freely and impartially consider of this thing, and how on the other side the ancient fathers' weapons against the arrians are in a manner only places of scripture (and these now for the most part discarded as importunate and unconcluding), and how in the argument drawn from the authority of the ancient fathers, they are almost always defendants, and scarse ever opponents, _he shall not choose but confesses or at least be very inclinable to beleeve, that the doctrine of arrius is eyther a truth, or at least no damnable heresy_." the truth is, however, that the socinianism of chillingworth, such as it may have been, had more reference to the doctrine of the redemption of man than of the being of god. edward knott's real name was matthias wilson.--ed.] * * * * * the superstition of the peasantry and lower orders generally in malta, sicily, and italy exceeds common belief. it is unlike the superstition of spain, which is a jealous fanaticism, having reference to their catholicism, and always glancing on heresy. the popular superstition of italy is the offspring of the climate, the old associations, the manners, and the very names of the places. it is pure paganism, undisturbed by any anxiety about orthodoxy, or animosity against heretics. hence, it is much more good-natured and pleasing to a traveller's feelings, and certainly not a whit less like the true religion of our dear lord than the gloomy idolatry of the spaniards. * * * * * i well remember, when in valetta in , asking a boy who waited on me, what a certain procession, then passing, was, and his answering with great quickness, that it was jesus christ, _who lives here (sta di casa qui)_, and when he comes out, it is in the shape of a wafer. but, "eccelenza," said he, smiling and correcting himself, "non è cristiano."[ ] [footnote : the following anecdote related by mr. coleridge, in april, , was preserved and communicated to me by mr. justice coleridge:--"as i was descending from mount aetna with a very lively talkative guide, we passed through a village (i think called) nicolozzi, when the host happened to be passing through the street. every one was prostrate; my guide became so; and, not to be singular, i went down also. after resuming our journey, i observed in my guide an unusual seriousness and long silence, which, after many _hums_ and _hahs_, was interrupted by a low bow, and leave requested to ask a question. this was of course granted, and the ensuing dialogue took place. guide. "signor, are you then a christian?" coleridge. "i hope so." g. "what! are all englishmen christians?" c. "i hope and trust they are." g. "what! are you not turks? are you not damned eternally?" c. "i trust not, through christ." g. "what! you believe in christ then?" c. "certainly." this answer produced another long silence. at length my guide again spoke, still doubting the grand point of my christianity. g. "i'm thinking, signor, what is the difference between you and us, that you are to be certainly damned?" c. "nothing very material; nothing that can prevent our both going to heaven, i hope. we believe in the father, the son, and the holy ghost." g. (interrupting me) "oh those damned priests! what liars they are! but (pausing) we can't do without them; we can't go to heaven without them. but tell me, signor, what _are_ the differences?" c. "why, for instance, we do not worship the virgin." g. "and why not, signor?" c. "because, though holy and pure, we think her still a woman, and, therefore, do not pay her the honour due to god." g. "but do you not worship jesus, who sits on the right hand of god?" c. "we do." g. "then why not worship the virgin, who sits on the left?" c. "i did not know she did. if you can show it me in the scriptures, i shall readily agree to worship her." "oh," said my man, with uncommon triumph, and cracking his fingers, "sicuro, signor! sicuro, signor!""--ed.] _july_ . . asgill.--the french. asgill was an extraordinary man, and his pamphlet[ ] is invaluable. he undertook to prove that man is literally immortal; or, rather, that any given living man might probably never die. he complains of the cowardly practice of dying. he was expelled from two houses of commons for blasphemy and atheism, as was pretended;--really i suspect because he was a staunch hanoverian. i expected to find the ravings of an enthusiast, or the sullen snarlings of an infidel; whereas i found the very soul of swift--an intense half self-deceived humorism. i scarcely remember elsewhere such uncommon skill in logic, such lawyer-like acuteness, and yet such a grasp of common sense. each of his paragraphs is in itself a whole, and yet a link between the preceding and following; so that the entire series forms one argument, and yet each is a diamond in itself. [footnote : "an argument proving, that, according to the covenant of eternal life, revealed in the scriptures, man may be translated from hence, without passing through death, although the human nature of christ himself could not be thus translated, till he had passed through death." asgill died in the year , in the king's bench prison, where he had been a prisoner for debt thirty years.--ed.] * * * * * was there ever such a miserable scene as that of the exhibition of the austrian standards in the french house of peers the other day?[ ] every other nation but the french would see that it was an exhibition of their own falsehood and cowardice. a man swears that the property intrusted to him is burnt, and then, when he is no longer afraid, produces it, and boasts of the atmosphere of "_honour_," through which the lie did not transpire. frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder,--each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed. [footnote : when the allies were in paris in , all the austrian standards were reclaimed. the answer was that they had been burnt by the soldiers at the hôtel des invalides. this was untrue. the marquis de semonville confessed with pride that he, knowing of the fraud, had concealed these standards, taken from mack at ulm in , in a vault under the luxemburg palace. "an inviolable asylum," said the marquis in his speech to the peers, "formed in the vault of this hall has protected this treasure from every search. vainly, during this long space of time, have the most authoritative researches endeavoured to penetrate the secret. it would have been culpable to reveal it, as long as we were liable to the demands of haughty foreigners. no one in this atmosphere of honour is capable of so great a weakness," &c.--ed.] _august_ . . as there is much beast and some devil in man; so is there some angel and some god in him. the beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed. * * * * * i will defy any one to answer the arguments of a st. simonist, except on the ground of christianity--its precepts and its assurances. _august_ . . the good and the true.--romish religion. there is the love of the good for the good's sake, and the love of the truth for the truth's sake. i have known many, especially women, love the good for the good's sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth's sake. yet; without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth,--the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. to see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical--is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends. * * * * * look through the whole history of countries professing the romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action--that the end will sanction any means. _august_ . . england and holland. the conduct of this country to king william of holland has been, in my judgment, base and unprincipled beyond any thing in our history since the times of charles the second. certainly, holland is one of the most important allies that england has; and we are doing our utmost to subject it, and portugal, to french influence, or even dominion! upon my word, the english people, at this moment, are like a man palsied in every part of his body but one, in which one part he is so morbidly sensitive that he cannot bear to have it so much as breathed upon, whilst you may pinch him with a hot forceps elsewhere without his taking any notice of it. _august_ . . iron.--galvanism.--heat. iron is the most ductile of all hard metals, and the hardest of all ductile metals. with the exception of nickel, in which it is dimly seen, iron is the only metal in which the magnetic power is visible. indeed, it is almost impossible to purify nickel of iron. * * * * * galvanism is the union of electricity and magnetism, and, by being continuous, it exhibits an image of life;--i say, an image only: it is life in death. * * * * * heat is the mesothesis or indifference of light and matter. _august_ . . national colonial character, and naval discipline. the character of most nations in their colonial dependencies is in an inverse ratio of excellence to their character at home. the best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. or, perhaps, i may state it less offensively thus:--the colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. i am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in upon this. where this tendency is exemplified, the cause is obvious. in countries well governed and happily conditioned, none, or very few, but those who are desperate through vice or folly, or who are mere trading adventurers, will be willing to leave their homes and settle in another hemisphere; and of those who do go, the best and worthiest are always striving to acquire the means of leaving the colony, and of returning to their native land. in ill-governed and ill-conditioned countries, on the contrary, the most respectable of the people are willing and anxious to emigrate for the chance of greater security and enlarged freedom; and if they succeed in obtaining these blessings in almost any degree, they have little inducement, on the average, to wish to abandon their second and better country. hence, in the former case, the colonists consider themselves as mere strangers, sojourners, birds of passage, and shift to live from hand to mouth, with little regard to lasting improvement of the place of their temporary commerce; whilst, in the latter case, men feel attached to a community to which they are individually indebted for otherwise unattainable benefits, and for the most part learn to regard it as their abode, and to make themselves as happy and comfortable in it as possible. i believe that the internal condition and character of the english and french west india islands of the last century amply verified this distinction; the dutch colonists most certainly did, and have always done. analogous to this, though not founded on precisely the same principle, is the fact that the severest naval discipline is always found in the ships of the freest nations, and the most lax discipline in the ships of the most oppressed. hence, the naval discipline of the americans is the sharpest; then that of the english;[ ] then that of the french (i speak as it used to be); and on board a spanish ship, there is no discipline at all. at genoa, the word "liberty" is, or used to be, engraved on the chains of the galley-slaves, and the doors of the dungeons. [footnote : this expression needs explanation. it _looks_ as if mr. coleridge rated the degree of liberty enjoyed by the english, _after_ that of the citizens of the united states; but he meant no such thing. his meaning was, that the form of government of the latter was more democratic, and formally assigned more power to each individual. the americans, as a nation, had no better friend in england than coleridge; he contemplated their growth with interest, and prophesied highly of their destiny, whether under their present or other governments. but he well knew their besetting faults and their peculiar difficulties, and was most deliberately of opinion that the english had, for years last past, possessed a measure of individual freedom and social dignity which had never been equalled, much less surpassed, in any other country ancient or modern. there is a passage in mr. coleridge's latest publication (church and state}, which clearly expresses his opinion upon this subject: "it has been frequently and truly observed that in england, where the ground-plan, the skeleton, as it were, of the government is a monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character finding a better support in the harangues and theories of popular men, than in state documents, and the records of clear history), afar greater degree of liberty is, and long has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in, the ostensibly freest, that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient or modern times; greater, indeed, and with a more decisive predominance of the spirit of freedom, than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of antiquity, or than the great commonwealth's men,--the stars of that narrow interspace of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second charles's reigns--believed compatible, the one with the safety of the state, the other with the interests of morality. yes! for little less than a century and a half, englishmen have, collectively and individually, lived and acted with fewer restraints on their free-agency, than the citizens of any known republic, past or present." (p. .) upon which he subjoins the following note: "it will be thought, perhaps, that the united states of north america should have been excepted. but the identity of stock, language, customs, manners, and laws scarcely allows us to consider this an exception, even though it were quite certain both that it is and that it will continue such. it was at all events a remark worth remembering, which i once heard from a traveller (a prejudiced one, i must admit), that where every man may take, liberties, there is little liberty for any man; or, that where every man takes liberties, no man can enjoy any." (p. .) see also a passage to the like effect in the _friend_, vol. i. p. --ed.] august . . england.--holland and belgium. i cannot contain my indignation at the conduct of our government towards holland. they have undoubtedly forgotten the true and well-recognized policy of this country in regard to portugal in permitting the war faction in france to take possession of the tagus, and to bully the portuguese upon so flimsy--indeed, false--a pretext[ ] yet, in this instance, something may be said for them. miguel is such a wretch, that i acknowledge a sort of morality in leaving him to be cuffed and insulted; though, of course, this is a poor answer to a statesman who alleges the interest and policy of the country. but, as to the dutch and king william: the first, as a nation, the most ancient ally, the _alter idem_ of england, the best deserving of the cause of freedom and religion and morality of any people in europe; and the second, the very best sovereign now in christendom, with, perhaps, the single exception of the excellent king of sweden[ ]--was ever any thing so mean and cowardly as the behaviour of england! the five powers have, throughout this conference, been actuated exclusively by a selfish desire to preserve peace--i should rather say, to smother war --at the expense of a most valuable but inferior power. they have over and over again acknowledged the justice of the dutch claims, and the absurdity of the belgian pretences; but as the belgians were also as impudent as they were iniquitous,--as they would not yield _their_ point, why then--that peace may be preserved--the dutch must yield theirs! a foreign prince comes into belgium, pending these negotiations, and takes an unqualified oath to maintain the belgian demands:--what could king william or the dutch do, if they ever thereafter meant to call themselves independent, but resist and resent this outrage to the uttermost? it was a crisis in which every consideration of state became inferior to the strong sense and duty of national honour. when, indeed, the french appear in the field, king william retires. "i now see," he may say, "that the powers of europe are determined to abet the belgians. the justice of such a proceeding i leave to their conscience and the decision of history. it is now no longer a question whether i am tamely to submit to rebels and a usurper; it is no longer a quarrel between holland and belgium: it is an alliance of all europe against holland,--in which case i yield. i have no desire to sacrifice my people." [footnote : meaning, principally, the whipping, so richly deserved, inflicted on a frenchman called bonhomme, for committing a disgusting breach of common decency in the cathedral of coimbra, during divine service in passion week.--ed.]; [footnote : "every thing that i have heard or read of this sovereign has contributed to the impression on my mind, that he is a good and a wise man, and worthy to be the king of a virtuous people, the purest specimen of the gothic race."--_church and state_, p. . n.--ed.] * * * * * when leopold said that he was called to "_reign over_ four millions of noble belgians," i thought the phrase would have been more germane to the matter, if he had said that he was called to "_rein in_ four million restive asses." _august_ . . greatest happiness principle.----hobbism. o. p. q. in the morning chronicle is a clever fellow. he is for the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, and for the longest possible time! so am i; so are you, and every one of us, i will venture to say, round the tea-table. first, however, what does o. p. q. mean by the word _happiness_? and, secondly, how does he propose to make other persons agree in _his_ definition of the term? don't you see the ridiculous absurdity of setting up _that_ as a principle or motive of action, which is, in fact, a necessary and essential instinct of our very nature--an inborn and inextinguishable desire? how can creatures susceptible of pleasure and pain do otherwise than desire happiness? but, _what_ happiness? that is the question. the american savage, in scalping his fallen enemy, pursues _his_ happiness naturally and adequately. a chickasaw, or pawnee bentham, or o. p. q., would necessarily hope for the most frequent opportunities possible of scalping the greatest possible number of savages, for the longest possible time. there is no escaping this absurdity, unless you come back to a standard of reason and duty, imperative upon our merely pleasurable sensations. oh! but, says o. p. q., i am for the happiness of _others!_ of others! are you, indeed? well, i happen to be one of those _others_, and, so far as i can judge from what you show me of your habits and views, i would rather be excused from your banquet of happiness. _your_ mode of happiness would make _me_ miserable. to go about doing as much _good_ as possible to as many men as possible, is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to propose to himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the real good and happiness of others to your particular views, which may be quite different from your neighbour's, you must do _that_ good to others which the reason, common to all, pronounces to be good for all. in this sense your fine maxim is so very true as to be a mere truism. * * * * * so you object, with old hobbes, that i do good actions _for_ the pleasure of a good conscience; and so, after all, i am only a refined sensualist! heaven bless you, and mend your logic! don't you see that if conscience, which is in its nature a consequence, were thus anticipated and made an antecedent--a party instead of a judge--it would dishonour your draft upon it--it would not pay on demand? don't you see that, in truth, the very fact of acting with this motive properly and logically destroys all claim upon conscience to give you any pleasure at all? august . . the two modes of political action. there are many able and patriotic members in the house of commons--sir robert inglis, sir robert peel, and some others. but i grieve that they never have the courage or the wisdom--i know not in which the failure is-- to take their stand upon duty, and to appeal to all men as men,--to the good and the true, which exist for _all_, and of which _all_ have an apprehension. they always set to work--especially, his great eminence considered, sir robert peel--by addressing themselves to individual interests; the measure will be injurious to the linen-drapers, or to the bricklayers; or this clause will bear hard on bobbin-net or poplins, and so forth. whereas their adversaries--the demagogues--always work on the opposite principle: they always appeal to men as men; and, as you know, the most terrible convulsions in society have been wrought by such phrases as _rights of man_, _sovereignty of the people_, _&c_., which no one understands, which apply to no one in particular, but to all in general.[ ] the devil works precisely in the same way. he is a very clever fellow; i have no acquaintance with him, but i respect his evident talents. consistent truth and goodness will assuredly in the end overcome every thing; but inconsistent good can never be a match for consistent evil. alas! i look in vain for some wise and vigorous man to sound the word duty in the ears of this generation. [footnote : "it is with nations as with individuals. in tranquil moods and peaceable times we are quite _practical_; facts only, and cool common sense, are then in fashion. but let the winds of passion swell, and straightway men begin to generalize, to connect by remotest analogies, to express the most universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy; in short, to feel particular truths and mere facts as poor, cold, narrow, and incommensurate with their feelings."--_statesman's manual_, p. . "it seems a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none but the unread in history will deny, that, in periods of popular tumult and innovation, the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people, and with all their immediate impulses to action. at the commencement of the french revolution, in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratic politicians and economists. the public roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts, disputing on the inalienable sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws of the pure reason, and the universal constitution, which, as rising out of the nature and rights of man as man, all nations alike were under the obligation of adopting."-- _statesman's manual_.] _august_ . . truths and maxims. the english public is not yet ripe to comprehend the essential difference between the reason and the understanding--between a principle and a maxim-- an eternal truth and a mere conclusion generalized from a great number of facts. a man, having seen a million moss roses all red, concludes from his own experience and that of others that all moss roses are red. that is a maxim with him--the _greatest_ amount of his knowledge upon the subject. but it is only true until some gardener has produced a white moss rose,-- after which the maxim is good for nothing. again, suppose adam watching the sun sinking under the western horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved by scarce a ray of hope that he shall ever see the glorious light again. the next evening, when it declines, his hopes are stronger, but still mixed with fear; and even at the end of a thousand years, all that a man can feel is a hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety. now compare this in its highest degree with the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are together greater than the third. this, demonstrated of one triangle, is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. this is a truth perceived at once by the intuitive reason, independently of experience. it is and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may. * * * * * it used to be said that four and five _make_ nine. locke says, that four and five _are_ nine. now i say, that four and five _are not_ nine, but that they will _make_ nine. when i see four objects which will form a square, and five which will form a pentagon, i see that they are two different things; when combined, they will form a third different figure, which we call nine. when separate they _are not_ it, but will _make_ it. _september_ . . drayton and daniel. drayton is a sweet poet, and selden's notes to the early part of the polyolbion are well worth your perusal. daniel is a superior man; his diction is pre-eminently pure,--of that quality which i believe has always existed somewhere in society. it is just such english, without any alteration, as wordsworth or sir george beaumont might have spoken or written in the present day. yet there are instances of sublimity in drayton. when deploring the cutting down of some of our old forests, he says, in language which reminds the reader of lear, written subsequently, and also of several passages in mr. wordsworth's poems:-- ----"our trees so hack'd above the ground, that where their lofty tops the neighbouring countries crown'd, their trunks (like aged folks) now bare and naked stand, _as for revenge to heaven each held a wither'd hand._" [ ] that is very fine. [footnote : polyol vii. "he (drayton) was a poet by nature, and carefully improved his talent; one who sedulously laboured to deserve the approbation of such as were capable of appreciating and cared nothing for the censures which others might pass upon him." 'like me that list,' he says, ----'my honest rhymes nor care for critics, nor regard the times.' and though he is not a poet _virum volitarc per ora_, nor one of those whose better fortune it is to live in the hearts of their devoted admirers,--yet what he deemed his greatest work will be preserved by its subject; some of his minor poems have merit enough in their execution to ensure their preservation; and no one who studies poetry as an art will think his time misspent in perusing the whole, if he have any real love for the art he is pursuing. the youth who enters upon that pursuit without a feeling of respect and gratitude for those elder poets, who by their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce any thing himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity."-_the doctor_, &c. c. . p.i. i heartily trust that the author or authors, as the case may be, of this singularly thoughtful and diverting book will in due time continue it. let some people say what they please, there has not been the fellow of it published for many a long day.--ed.] _september_ . . mr. coleridge's system of philosophy. my system, if i may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt, i know, ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. it opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, _because_ it was only half the truth. i have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. i show to each system that i fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then i lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which i enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations;--so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. thus the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never could, discover the truth--that is, the whole truth. as soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. i wish, in short, to connect by a moral _copula_ natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical--to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism. * * * * * i never from a boy could, under any circumstances, feel the slightest dread of death as such. in all my illnesses i have ever had the most intense desire to be released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish, namely, to be able to finish my work on philosophy. not that i have any author's vanity on the subject: god knows that i should be absolutely glad, if i could hear that the thing had already been done before me. * * * * * illness never in the smallest degree affects my intellectual powers. i can _think_ with all my ordinary vigour in the midst of pain; but i am beset with the most wretched and unmanning reluctance and shrinking from action. i could not upon such occasions take the pen in hand to write down my thoughts for all the wide world. _october ._ . keenness and subtlety. few men of genius are keen; but almost every man of genius is subtle. if you ask me the difference between keenness and subtlety, i answer that it is the difference between a point and an edge. to split a hair is no proof of subtlety; for subtlety acts in distinguishing differences--in showing that two things apparently one are in fact two; whereas, to split a hair is to cause division, and not to ascertain difference. _october_ . . duties and needs of an advocate. there is undoubtedly a limit to the exertions of an advocate for his client. he has a right, it is his bounden duty, to do every thing which his client might honestly do, and to do it with all the effect which any exercise of skill, talent, or knowledge of his own may be able to produce. but the advocate has no right, nor is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client _in foro conscientiae_ has no right to do for himself; as, for a gross example, to put in evidence a forged deed or will, knowing it to be so forged. as to mere confounding of witnesses by skilful cross-examination, i own i am not disposed to be very strict. the whole thing is perfectly well understood on all hands, and it is little more in general than a sort of cudgel-playing between the counsel and the witness, in which, i speak with submission to you, i think i have seen the witness have the best of it as often as his assailant. it is of the utmost importance in the administration of justice that knowledge and intellectual power should be as far as possible equalized between the crown and the prisoner, or plaintiff and defendant. hence especially arises the necessity for an order of advocates,--men whose duty it ought to be to know what the law allows and disallows; but whose interests should be wholly indifferent as to the persons or characters of their clients. if a certain latitude in examining witnesses is, as experience seems to have shown, a necessary mean towards the evisceration of the truth of matters of fact, i have no doubt, as a moralist, in saying, that such latitude within the bounds, now existing is justifiable. we must be content with a certain quantum in this life, especially in matters of public cognizance; the necessities of society demand it; we must not be righteous overmuch, or wise overmuch; and, as an old father says, in what vein may there not be a plethora, when the scripture tells us that there may under circumstances be too much of virtue and of wisdom? still i think that, upon the whole, the advocate is placed in a position unfavourable to his moral being, and, indeed, to his intellect also, in its higher powers. therefore i would recommend an advocate to devote a part of his leisure time to some study of the metaphysics of the mind, or metaphysics of theology; something, i mean, which shall call forth all his powers, and centre his wishes in the investigation of truth alone, without reference to a side to be supported. no studies give such a power of distinguishing as metaphysical, and in their natural and unperverted tendency they are ennobling and exalting. some such studies are wanted to counteract the operation of legal studies and practice, which sharpen, indeed, but, like a grinding-stone, narrow whilst they sharpen. _november_ . . abolition of the french hereditary peerage. i cannot say what the french peers _will_ do; but i can tell you what they _ought_ to do. "so far," they might say, "as our feelings and interests, as individuals, are concerned in this matter--if it really be the prevailing wish of our fellow-countrymen to destroy the hereditary peerage--we shall, without regret, retire into the ranks of private citizens: but we are bound by the provisions of the existing constitution to consider ourselves collectively as essential to the well-being of france: we have been placed here to defend what france, a short time ago at least, thought a vital part of its government; and, if we did not defend it, what answer could we make hereafter to france itself, if she should come to see, what we think to be an error, in the light in which we view it? we should be justly branded as traitors and cowards, who had deserted the post which we were specially appointed to maintain. as a house of peers, therefore,--as one substantive branch of the legislature, we can never, in honour or in conscience, consent to a measure of the impolicy and dangerous consequences of which we are convinced. "if, therefore, this measure is demanded by the country, let the king and the deputies form themselves into a constituent assembly; and then, assuming to act in the name of the total nation, let them decree the abolition. in that case we yield to a just, perhaps, but revolutionary, act, in which we do not participate, and against which we are, upon the supposition, quite powerless. if the deputies, however, consider themselves so completely in the character of delegates as to be at present absolutely pledged to vote without freedom of deliberation, let a concise, but perspicuous, summary of the ablest arguments that can be adduced on either side be drawn up, and printed, and circulated throughout the country; and then, after two months, let the deputies demand fresh instructions upon this point. one thing, as men of honour, we declare beforehand--that, come what will, none of us who are now peers will ever accept a peerage created _de novo_ for life." _november_ . . conduct of ministers on the reform bill.--the multitude. the present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty of two things preeminently wicked, _sensu politico_, in their conduct upon this reform bill. first, they have endeavoured to carry a fundamental change in the material and mode of action of the government of the country by so exciting the passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and utility of discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place, should be precluded. in doing this they have used, or sanctioned the use of, arguments which may he applied with equal or even greater force to the carrying of any measure whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or destructive in its consequences. they have appealed directly to the argument of the greater number of voices, no matter whether the utterers were drunk or sober, competent or not competent; and they have done the utmost in their power to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation of interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarizing scheme of a delegation of individuals. and they have done all this without one word of thankfulness to god for the manifold blessings of which the constitution as settled at the revolution, imperfect as it may be, has been the source or vehicle or condition to this great nation,--without one honest statement of the manner in which the anomalies in the practice grew up, or any manly declaration of the inevitable necessities of government which those anomalies have met. with no humility, nor fear, nor reverence, like ham the accursed, they have beckoned, with grinning faces, to a vulgar mob, to come and insult over the nakedness of a parent; when it had become them, if one spark of filial patriotism had burnt within their breasts, to have marched with silent steps and averted faces to lay their robes upon his destitution! secondly, they have made the _king_ the prime mover in all this political wickedness: they have made the _king_ tell his people that they were deprived of their rights, and, by direct and necessary implication, that they and their ancestors for a century past had been slaves: they have made the king vilify the memory of his own brother and father. rights! there are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the rights of man. no! they were too wise for that. they took good care to refer their claims to custom and prescription, and boldly--sometimes very impudently--asserted them upon traditionary and constitutional grounds. the bill is bad enough, god knows; but the arguments of its advocates, and the manner of their advocacy, are a thousand times worse than the bill itself; and you will live to think so. i am far, very far, from wishing to indulge in any vulgar abuse of the vulgar. i believe that the feeling of the multitude will, in most cases, be in favour of something good; but this it is which i perceive, that they are always under the domination of some one feeling or view;--whereas truth, and, above all, practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide comprehension of the more and the less, the balance and the counter- balance. _december_ . . religion. a religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere philosophy;-- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be mere history. _december_ . . union with ireland.--irish church. i am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by england from the disannexing and independence of ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to england by the union. we have never received one particle of advantage from our association with ireland, whilst we have in many most vital particulars violated the principles of the british constitution solely for the purpose of conciliating the irish agitators, and of endeavouring--a vain endeavour--to find room for them under the same government. mr. pitt has received great credit for effecting the union; but i believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it, made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of england. from it came the catholic bill. from the catholic bill has come this reform bill! and what next? * * * * * the case of the irish church is certainly anomalous, and full of practical difficulties. on the one hand, it is the only church which the constitution can admit; on the other, such are the circumstances, it is a church that cannot act as a church towards five sixths of the persons nominally and legally within its care. _december_ . . a state.--persons and things.--history. the difference between an inorganic and an organic body lies in this:--in the first--a sheaf of corn--the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts or phenomena. in the second--a man--the whole is the effect of, or results from, the parts; it--the whole--is every thing, and the parts are nothing. a state is an idea intermediate between the two--the whole being a result from, and not a mere total of, the parts, and yet not so merging the constituent parts in the result, but that the individual exists integrally within it. extremes, especially in politics, meet. in athens each individual athenian was of no value; but taken altogether, as demus, they were every thing in such a sense that no individual citizen was any thing. in turkey there is the sign of unity put for unity. the sultan seems himself the state; but it is an illusion: there is in fact in turkey no state at all: the whole consists of nothing but a vast collection of neighbourhoods. * * * * * when the government and the aristocracy of this country had subordinated _persons to things_, and treated the one like the other,--the poor, with some reason, and almost in self-defence, learned to set up _rights_ above _duties_. the code of a christian society is, _debeo, et tu debes_--of heathens or barbarians, _teneo, teneto et tu, si potes_.[ ] [footnote : "and this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of _person_ in contradistinction from _thing_, all social law and justice being grounded on the principle that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such; and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether, and merely as the _means_ to an end; but the person must always be included in the _end_; his interest must always form a part of the object,--a _mean_ to which he, by consent, that is, by his own act, makes himself. we plant a tree, and we fell it; we breed the sheep, and we shear, or we kill it,--in both cases wholly as means to _our_ ends: for trees and animals are things. the woodcutter and the hind are likewise employed as _means_; but on agreement, and that too an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which includes them as well as their employer in the _end_; for they are persons. and the government under which the contrary takes place is not worthy to be called a state, if, as in the kingdom of dahomey, it be unprogressive; or only by anticipation, where, as in russia, it is in advance to a better and more _manworthy_ order of things."--_church and state_, p. .] * * * * * if men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! but passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us! _december_ . . beauty.--genius. the old definition of beauty in the roman school of painting was, _il più nell' uno_--multitude in unity; and there is no doubt that such is the principle of beauty. and as one of the most characteristic and infallible criteria of the different ranks of men's intellects, observe the instinctive habit which all superior minds have of endeavouring to bring, and of never resting till they have brought, into unity the scattered facts which occur in conversation, or in the statements of men of business. to attempt to argue any great question upon facts only, is absurd; you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called. i wonder why facts were ever called stubborn things: i am sure they have been found pliable enough lately in the house of commons and elsewhere. facts, you know, are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses. the truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from _all_ the facts which are truly material. * * * * * _december_ . . church.--state.--dissenters. even to a church,--the only pure democracy, because in it persons are alone considered, and one person _à priori_ is equal to another person,--even to a church, discipline is an essential condition. but a state regards classes, and classes as they represent classified property; and to introduce a system of representation which must inevitably render all discipline impossible, what is it but madness-the madness of ignorant vanity, and reckless obstinacy? * * * * * i have known, and still know, many dissenters, who profess to have a zeal for christianity; and i dare say they have. but i have known very few dissenters indeed, whose hatred to the church of england was not a much more active principle of action with them than their love for christianity. the wesleyans, in uncorrupted parts of the country, are nearly the only exceptions. there never was an age since the days of the apostles, in which the catholic spirit of religion was so dead, and put aside for love of sects and parties, as at present. * * * * * _january_ . . gracefulness of children.--dogs. how inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance! * * * * * there seems a sort of sympathy between the more generous dogs and little children. i believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large dog is very rare indeed. _january_ . . ideal tory and whig. the ideal tory and the ideal whig (and some such there have really been) agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three estates: but the tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the people; the whig, of its being deranged by the crown. but this was a habit, a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances, without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as the ultimate object required it. this the tories did at the revolution, but remained tories as before. i have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on whiggism, from dryden's achitophel (shaftesbury), the first whig, (for, with dr. johnson's leave, the devil is no such cattle,) down to ----, who, i trust, in god's mercy to the interests of peace, union, and liberty in this nation, will be the last. in it i would take the last years of queen anne's reign as the zenith, or palmy state, of whiggism in its divinest _avatar_ of common sense, or of the understanding, vigorously exerted in the right direction on the right and proper objects of the understanding; and would then trace the rise, the occasion, the progress, and the necessary degeneration of the whig spirit of compromise, even down to the profound ineptitudes of their party in these days. a clever fellow might make something of this hint. how asgill would have done it! _february_ . . the church. the church is the last relic of our nationality. would to god that the bishops and the clergy in general could once fully understand that the christian church and the national church are as little to be confounded as divided! i think the fate of the reform bill, in itself, of comparatively minor importance; the fate of the national church occupies my mind with greater intensity. _february_ . . ministers and the reform bill. i could not help smiling, in reading the report of lord grey's speech in the house of lords, the other night, when he asked lord wicklow whether he seriously believed that he, lord grey, or any of the ministers, intended to subvert the institutions of the country. had i been in lord wicklow's place, i should have been tempted to answer this question something in the following way:--"waiving the charge in an offensive sense of personal consciousness against the noble earl, and all but one or two of his colleagues, upon my honour, and in the presence of almighty god, i answer, yes! you have destroyed the freedom of parliament; you have done your best to shut the door of the house of commons to the property, the birth, the rank, the wisdom of the people, and have flung it open to their passions and their follies. you have disfranchised the gentry, and the real patriotism of the nation: you have agitated and exasperated the mob, and thrown the balance of political power into the hands of that class (the shopkeepers) which, in all countries and in all ages, has been, is now, and ever will be, the least patriotic and the least conservative of any. you are now preparing to destroy for ever the constitutional independence of the house of lords; you are for ever displacing it from its supremacy as a co-ordinate estate of the realm; and whether you succeed in passing your bill by actually swamping our votes by a batch of new peers, or by frightening a sufficient number of us out of our opinions by the threat of one,--equally you will have superseded the triple assent which the constitution requires to the enactment of a valid law, and have left the king alone with the delegates of the populace!" _march_ . . disfranchisement. i am afraid the conservative party see but one half of the truth. the mere extension of the franchise is not the evil; i should be glad to see it greatly extended;--there is no harm in that _per se_; the mischief is that the franchise is nominally extended, but to such classes, and in such a manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results. _march_ . . genius feminine.----pirates. ----'s face is almost the only exception i know to the observation, that something feminine--not _effeminate_, mind--is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius. look at that face of old dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. how soft is the air of his countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples! * * * * * i think it very absurd and misplaced to call raleigh and drake, and others of our naval heroes of elizabeth's age, pirates. no man is a _pirate_, unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. drake said,--"the subjects of the king of spain have done their best to ruin my country: _ergo_, i will try to ruin the king of spain's country." would it not be silly to call the argonauts pirates in our sense of the word? _march_ . . astrology.--alchemy. it is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by inadequate means. now they applied to their appetites, now to their passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the intuitive reason again. there is no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must he chemical relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes compared with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise; but this, though, as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune- telling and other nonsense. so alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry: there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all; but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver. _march_ . . reform bill.--crisis. i have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing this reform bill, and they are in substance these:-- . we will blow your brains out if you don't pass it. . we will drag you through a horsepond if you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both. * * * * * talk to me of your pretended crisis! stuff! a vigorous government would in one month change all the data for your reasoning. would you have me believe that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with god at one end and the devil at the other, and that the devil is now uppermost! are you a christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense! _march_ . . john, chap. iii. ver. .--dictation and inspiration.--gnosis--new testament canon. i certainly understand the [greek: ti emoi kai soi gynai] in the second chapter[ ] of st. john's gospel, as having a _liquid increpationis_ in it-- a mild reproof from jesus to mary for interfering in his ministerial acts by requests on her own account. i do not think that [greek: gynai] was ever used by child to parent as a common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but i cannot think that [greek: m_eter] and [greek: gynai] were equivalent terms in the mouth of a son speaking to his mother. no part of the christopaedia is found in john or paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal authority in mary. see the two passages where she endeavours to get access to him when he is preaching:--"whosoever shall do the will of god, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"[ ] and also the recommendation of her to the care of john at the crucifixion. [footnote : verse .] [footnote : mark, ch. iii. ver. .] * * * * * there may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. balaam and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, i suppose, will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. it is my profound conviction that st. john and st. paul were divinely inspired; but i totally disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout their writings. observe, there was revelation. all religion is revealed;-- _revealed_ religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. revelations of facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were as undoubtedly made to john and paul;--but is it not a mere matter of our very senses that john and paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? we receive the books ascribed to john and paul as their books on the judgment of men, for whom no miraculous discernment is pretended; nay, whom, in their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred. shall we give less credence to john and paul themselves? surely the heart and soul of every christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all things that concern him as a _man_, the words that he reads are spirit and truth, and could only proceed from him who made both heart and soul.-- understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the holy spirit of god, without an absurd violence offered to the text. you read the bible as the best of all books, but still as a book; and make use of all the means and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of god, can afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it--not solicitous to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear _ad hominem et pro tempore_ allusions to national traditions. * * * * * tertullian, i think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the apostles' writings. the truth is, the ancient church was not guided by the mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing it canonical;-- its catholicity was the test applied to it. i have not the smallest doubt that the epistle of barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is full of the [greek: gn_osis], though of the most simple and pleasing sort. i think the same of hermas. the church would never admit either into the canon, although the alexandrians always read the epistle of barnabas in their churches for three hundred years together. it was upwards of three centuries before the epistle to the hebrews was admitted, and this on account of its [greek: gn_osis]; at length, by help of the venerable prefix of st. paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded. * * * * * so little did the early bishops and preachers think their christian faith wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the new testament,--indeed, can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years? --that i remember a letter from ----[ ] to a friend of his, a bishop in the east, in which he most evidently speaks of the _christian_ scriptures as of works of which the bishop knew little or nothing. [footnote : i have lost the name which mr. coleridge mentioned.--ed.] _april_ . . unitarianism.--moral philosophy. i make the greatest difference between _ans_ and _isms_. i should deal insincerely with you, if i said that i thought unitarianism was christianity. no; as i believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not the truth in jesus christ; but god forbid that i should doubt that you, and many other unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense, very good christians. we do not win heaven by logic. by the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of unitarians? as if tri-unitarians were not necessarily unitarians, as much (pardon the illustration) as an apple-pie must of course be a pie! the schoolmen would, perhaps, have called you unicists; but your proper name is psilanthropists--believers in the mere human nature of christ. upon my word, if i may say so without offence, i really think many forms of pantheistic atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than unitarianism as it is professed in terms: in particular, i prefer the spinosistic scheme infinitely. the early socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad reasoning, you came to a doctrine on which the _heart_, at least, might rest for some support. they adored jesus christ. both laelius and faustus socinus laid down the adorability of jesus in strong terms. i have nothing, you know, to do with their logic. but unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of one kind of atheism, joined to the worst of one kind of calvinism, like two asses tied tail to tail. it has no covenant with god; and looks upon prayer as a sort of self-magnetizing--a getting of the body and temper into a certain _status_, desirable _per se_, but having no covenanted reference to the being to whom the prayer is addressed. * * * * * the sum total of moral philosophy is found in this one question, is _good_ a superfluous word,--or mere lazy synonyme for the pleasurable, and its causes;--at most, a mere modification to express degree, and comparative duration of pleasure?--or the question may be more unanswerably stated thus, is _good_ superfluous as a word exponent of a _kind_?--if it be, then moral philosophy is but a subdivision of physics. if not, then the writings of paley and all his predecessors and disciples are false and _most_ pernicious; and there is an emphatic propriety in the superlative, and in a sense which of itself would supply and exemplify the difference between _most_ and _very_. _april_ . . moral law of polarity. it is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of polarity in the history of politics, religion, &c. when the maximum of one tendency has been attained, there is no gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its minimum, till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and then you see another corresponding revulsion. with the restoration came in all at once the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy, which, with the increase of manufactures, trade, and arts, made every thing in philosophy, religion, and poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external worldliness and forms got to its maximum,--when out burst the french revolution; and with it every thing became immediately subjective, without any object at all. the rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, were subject and object both. we are now, i think, on the turning point again. this reform seems the _ne plus ultra_ of that tendency of the public mind which substitutes its own undefined notions or passions for real objects and historical actualities. there is not one of the ministers--except the one or two revolutionists among them--who has ever given us a hint, throughout this long struggle, as to _what_ he really does believe will be the product of the bill; what sort of house of commons it will make for the purpose of governing this empire soberly and safely. no; they have actualized for a moment a wish, a fear, a passion, but not an idea. _april_ . . epidemic disease.--quarantine. there are two grand divisions under which all contagious diseases may be classed:-- . those which spring from organized living beings, and from the life in them, and which enter, as it were, into the life of those in whom they reproduce themselves--such as small-pox and measles. these become so domesticated with the habit and system, that they are rarely received twice. . those which spring from dead organized, or unorganized matter, and which may be comprehended under the wide term _malaria_. you may have passed a stagnant pond a hundred times without injury: you happen to pass it again, in low spirits and chilled, precisely at the moment of the explosion of the gas: the malaria strikes on the cutaneous or veno-glandular system, and drives the blood from the surface; the shivering fit comes on, till the musculo-arterial irritability re-acts, and then the hot fit succeeds; and, unless bark or arsenic--particularly bark, because it is a bitter as well as a tonic--be applied to strengthen the veno- glandular, and to moderate the musculo-arterial, system, a man may have the ague for thirty years together. but if, instead of being exposed to the solitary malaria of a pond, a man, travelling through the pontine marshes, permits his animal energies to flag, and surrenders himself to the drowsiness which generally attacks him, then blast upon blast strikes upon the cutaneous system, and passes through it to the musculo-arterial, and so completely overpowers the latter that it cannot re-act, and the man dies at once, instead of only catching an ague. there are three factors of the operation of an epidemic or atmospheric disease. the first and principal one is the predisposed state of the body; secondly, the specific _virus_ in the atmosphere; and, thirdly, the accidental circumstances of weather, locality, food, occupation, &c. against the second of these we are powerless: its nature, causes, and sympathies are too subtle for our senses to find data to go upon. against the first, medicine may act profitably. against the third, a wise and sagacious medical police ought to be adopted; but, above all, let every man act like a christian, in all charity, and love, and brotherly kindness, and sincere reliance on god's merciful providence. quarantine cannot keep out an atmospheric disease; but it can, and does always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception. _april_ . . harmony. all harmony is founded on a relation to rest--on relative rest. take a metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest. the clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. there could be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them. april . . intellectual revolutions.--modern style. there have been three silent revolutions in england:--first, when the professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from literature. * * * * * common phrases are, as it were, so stereotyped now by conventional use, that it is really much easier to write on the ordinary politics of the day in the common newspaper style, than it is to make a good pair of shoes. an apprentice has as much to learn now to be a shoemaker as ever he had; but an ignorant coxcomb, with a competent want of honesty, may very effectively wield a pen in a newspaper office, with infinitely less pains and preparation than were necessary formerly. _april_ . . genius of the spanish and italians.--vico.--spinosa. the genius of the spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. the genius of the italians, on the contrary, is acute, profound, and sensual, but not subtle; hence what they think to be humorous is merely witty. * * * * * to estimate a man like vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and committed errors, you ought to say to yourself--"he did so and so in the year , a papist, at naples. now, what would he not have done if he had lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in physical science?" * * * * * after the _scienza nuova_[ ] read spinosa, _de monarchia ex rationis praescripto_[ ].they differed--vico in thinking that society tended to monarchy; spinosa in thinking it tended to democracy. now, spinosa's ideal democracy was realized by a contemporary--not in a nation, for that is impossible, but in a sect--i mean by george fox and his quakers.[ ] [footnote : see michelet's principes de la philosophie de l'histoire, &c. paris, . an admirable analysis of vico.--ed.] [footnote : tractatus politici, c. vi.] [footnote : spinosa died in ; fox in .--ed.] _april_ . . colours. colours may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. indeed, the heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. the adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of god; which, again, is reducible into, and is, in reality, the same with, the trinity. take colours thus:-- prothesis, red, or colour [greek: kat exoch_en]. ^ / \ / \ mesothesis, or indifference of / \ red and yellow = orange. / \ indigo, violet = indifference /synthesis\ of red and blue. /-- \ thesis = yellow. blue = antithesis. \green indi-/ \componi- / \ble / \ / \ / to which you must add \ / which is spurious or artificial v synthesis of yellow and blue. green, decom- ponible _april_ . . destruction of jerusalem.--epic poem. the destruction of jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like milton's fall of man, should interest all christendom, as the homeric war of troy interested all greece. there would be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated and thrown into the shade, as milton has done with the numerous difficulties in the paradise lost. but there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. as for the old mythology, _incredulus odi;_ and yet there must be a mythology, or a _quasi_-mythology, for an epic poem. here there would be the completion of the prophecies--the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the roman and the jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. i schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! _venturum expectat_. _april_ . . vox populi, vox dei.--black. i never said that the _vox populi_ was of course the _vox dei_. it may be; but it may be, and with equal probability, _a priori_, _vox diaboli_. that the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, i believe; but whether that be a spirit of heaven or hell, i can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and god's will. * * * * * black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. without lustre, it indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity, as in a polished ebony box. * * * * * in finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. god alone is identity. in the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a _quasi_ identity only. april . . asgill and defoe. i know no genuine saxon english superior to asgill's. i think his and defoe's irony often finer than swift's. may . . horne tooke.--fox and pitt horne tooke's advice to the friends of the people was profound:--"if you wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful." * * * * * fox and pitt constantly played into each other's hands. mr. stuart, of the courier, who was very knowing in the politics of the day, soon found out the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told fox so. yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought to have done, fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister intentions; and pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses. fox's gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to pitt. he could never conceive the french right without making the english wrong. ah! i remember-- --it vex'd my soul to see so grand a cause, so proud a realm with goose and goody at the helm; who long ago had fall'n asunder but for their rivals' baser blunder, the coward whine and frenchified slaver and slang of the other side! _may_ . . horner. i cannot say that i thought mr. horner a man of genius. he seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well--shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow. there was great goodness about him. _may_ . . adiaphori.--citizens and christians. ------ is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of existence; i mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. i could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as all that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me. * * * * * in two points of view i reverence man; first, as a citizen, a part of, or in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a christian. if men are neither the one nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds, who acknowledge no national unity, nor believe with me in christ, i have no more personal sympathy with them than with the dust beneath my feet. may . . professor park.--english constitution--democracy.--milton and sidney. professor park talks[ ] about its being very _doubtful_ whether the constitution described by blackstone ever in fact existed. in the same manner, i suppose, it is doubtful whether the moon is made of green cheese, or whether the souls of welchmen do, in point of fact, go to heaven on the backs of mites. blackstone's was the age of shallow law. monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, as _such_, exclude each the other: but if the elements are to interpenetrate, how absurd to call a lump of sugar hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon! nay, to take three lumps, and call the first hydrogen; the second, oxygen; and the third, carbon! don't you see that each is in all, and all in each? the democracy of england, before the reform bill, was, where it ought to be, in the corporations, the vestries, the joint-stock companies, &c. the power, in a democracy, is in focal points, without a centre; and in proportion as such democratical power is strong, the strength of the central government ought to be intense--otherwise the nation will fall to pieces. we have just now incalculably increased the democratical action of the people, and, at the same time, weakened the executive power of the government. [footnote : in his "dogmas of the constitution, four lectures on the theory and practice of the constitution, delivered at the king's college, london," . lecture i. there was a stiffness, and an occasional uncouthness in professor park's style; but his two works, the one just mentioned, and his "contre-projet to the humphreysian code," are full of original views and vigorous reasonings. to those who wished to see the profession of the law assume a more scientific character than for the most part it has hitherto done in england, the early death of john james park was a very great loss.--ed.] * * * * * it was the error of milton, sidney, and others of that age, to think it possible to construct a purely aristocratical government, defecated of all passion, and ignorance, and sordid motive. the truth is, such a government would be weak from its utter want of sympathy with the people to be governed by it. _may_ . . de vi minimorum.--hahnemann.--luther. mercury strongly illustrates the theory _de vi minimorum_. divide five grains into fifty doses, and they may poison you irretrievably. i don't believe in all that hahnemann says; but he is a fine fellow, and, like most germans, is not altogether wrong, and like them also, is never altogether right. * * * * * six volumes of translated selections from luther's works, two being from his letters, would be a delightful work. the translator should be a man deeply imbued with his bible, with the english writers from henry the seventh to edward the sixth, the scotch divines of the th century, and with the old racy german.[ ] hugo de saint victor, luther's favourite divine, was a wonderful man, who, in the th century, the jubilant age of papal dominion, nursed the lamp of platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined christianity.[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge was fond of pressing this proposed publication:--"i can scarcely conceive," he says in the friend, "a more delightful volume than might be made from luther's letters, especially those that were written from the warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, _hearty_ mother tongue of the original. a difficult task i admit, and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in other respects, whose favourite reading has not lain among the english writers from edward the sixth to charles the first." vol. i. p. . n.-- ed.] [footnote : this celebrated man was a fleming, and a member of the augustinian society of st. victor. he died at paris in , aged forty-four. his age considered, it is sufficient praise for him that protestants and romanists both claim him for their own on the subject of transubstantiation.--ed.] _june_ . . sympathy of old greek and latin with english.--roman mind.--war. if you take sophocles, catullus, lucretius, the better parts of cicero, and so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother english, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so with virgil or tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense. * * * * * there is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of ennius, actius, and other very old roman writers. this vivid manner was lost in the augustan age. * * * * * much as the romans owed to greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was, as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered more in proportion by the influence of greek literature subsequently, when it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. it then became a superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. with the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it left nothing original to the latin muse.[ ] a nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself--as greece by persia; and rome by etruria, the italian states, and carthage. i remember commodore decatur saying to me at malta, that he deplored the occupation of louisiana by the united states, and wished that province had been possessed by england. he thought that if the united states got hold of canada by conquest or cession, the last chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost. [footnote : perhaps it left letter-writing also. even if the platonic epistles are taken as genuine, which mr. coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to believe, they can hardly interfere, i think, with the uniqueness of the truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of cicero and pliny.--ed.] * * * * * war in republican rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. as long as there was any thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but what was roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began. _june_ . . charm for cramp. when i was a little hoy at the blue-coat school, there was a charm for one's foot when asleep; and i believe it had been in the school since its foundation, in the time of edward the sixth. the march of intellect has probably now exploded it. it ran thus:-- foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep! thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep: crosses three we make to ease us, two for the thieves, and one for christ jesus! and the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following substitution:-- the devil is tying a knot in my leg! mark, luke, and john, unloose it i beg!-- crosses three, &c. and really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, i can safely affirm that i do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds. i should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but i cannot say i ever tried it for _that_. july . . greek.--dual, neuter plural, and verb singular.--theta. it is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the greek. if you compare it with the modern european tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former particulars, and only equalled in the last by german. but it is in variety of termination alone that the german surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. the spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the italian, in this particular, the most deficient. italian prose is excessively monotonous. * * * * * it is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite distinct from plurality. most very primitive languages have a dual, as the greek, welch, and the native chilese, as you will see in the abbé raynal. the neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the many instances in greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. in truth, there may be _multeity_ in things; but there can only be _plurality_ in persons. observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in greek has no real nominative case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the accusative. the reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case. it is extraordinary that the germans should not have retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. how particularly fine the hard _theta_ is in an english termination, as in that grand word--death-- for which the germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loathsome toad. _july_ . . talented. i regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c.? the formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. if mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. most of these pieces of slang come from america.[ ] [footnote : see "_eventuate_," in mr. washington irving's "tour on the prairies," _passim_.--ed.] * * * * * never take an iambus as a christian name. a trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. edith and rotha are my favourite names for women. _july_ . . homer.--valcknaer. i have the firmest conviction that _homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the iliad. you cannot conceivefor a moment any thing about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. difference in men there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same feelings as the rest. the want of adverbs in the iliad is very characteristic. with more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them. the greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of individuality. valckenaer's treatise[ ] on the interpolation of the classics by the later jews and early christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and critic. [footnote : _diatribe de aristobulo judaeo_.--ed.] july . . principles and facts.--schmidt. i have read all the famous histories, and, i believe, some history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed; but i never did so for the story itself as a story. the only thing interesting to me was the principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.[ ] after i had gotten my principles, i pretty generally left the facts to take care of themselves. i never could remember any passages in books, or the particulars of events, except in the gross. i can refer to them. to be sure, i must be a different sort of man from herder, who once was seriously annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some german royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could not recall the name. [footnote : "the true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. and no wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the former, on the score even of probability. i well remember that, when the examples of former jacobins, as julius caesar, cromwell, and the like, were adduced in france and england, at the commencement of the french consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened eighteenth century_! even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers marius, cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the peasants' war in germany (differenced from the tenets of the first french constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning."--_statesman's manual_, p. .] * * * * * schmidt[ ] was a romanist; but i have generally found him candid, as indeed almost all the austrians are. they are what is called _good catholics_; but, like our charles the second, they never let their religious bigotry interfere with their political well-doing. kaiser is a most pious son of the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order. [footnote : michael ignatius schmidt, the author of the history of the germans. he died in the latter end of the last century.--ed.] _july_ . . puritans and jacobins. it was god's mercy to our age that our jacobins were infidels and a scandal to all sober christians. had they been like the old puritans, they would have trodden church and king to the dust--at least for a time. * * * * * for one mercy i owe thanks beyond all utterance,--that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. _july_ . . wordsworth. i have often wished that the first two books of the excursion had been published separately, under the name of "the deserted cottage." they would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language. * * * * * can dialogues in verse be defended? i cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. a poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. in prose there may be a difference; though i must confess that, even in plato and cicero, i am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. the introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; i would not lose them; but i have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth. * * * * * i cannot help regretting that wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind--superior, as i used to think, upon the whole, to the excursion. you may judge how i felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion.[ ] then the plan laid out, and, i believe, partly suggested by me, was, that wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. he was to treat man as man, --a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. something of this sort was, i think, agreed on. it is, in substance, what i have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy. [footnote : poetical works, vol. i. p. . it is not too much to say of this beautiful poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the poet, his subject, and his object:-- "an orphic song indeed, a song divine of high and passionate thoughts, to their own music chanted."--ed.] * * * * * i think wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man i ever knew, or, as i believe, has existed in england since milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly--perhaps i might say exclusively--fitted for him. his proper title is _spectator ab extra_. * * * * * _july_ . . french revolution. no man was more enthusiastic than i was for france and the revolution: it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. before , i clearly saw and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of the whole affair.[ ] when some one said in my brother james's presence[ ] that i was a jacobin, he very well observed,--"no! samuel is no jacobin; he is a hot-headed moravian!" indeed, i was in the extreme opposite pole. [footnote : "forgive me, freedom! o forgive those dreams! i hear thy voice, i hear thy loud lament, from bleak helvetia's icy cavern sent-- i hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams! heroes, that for your peaceful country perish'd, and ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows with bleeding wounds; forgive me, that i cherish'd one thought that ever blest your cruel foes! to scatter rage and traitorous guilt, where peace her jealous home had built; a patriot race to disinherit of all that made her stormy wilds so dear: and with inexpiable spirit to taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer-- o france, that mockest heaven, adult'rous, blind, and patriot only in pernicious toils, are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind? to mix with kings in the low lust of sway, yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey-- to insult the shrine of liberty with spoils from freemen torn--to tempt and to betray?-- the sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves by their own compulsion! in mad game they burst their manacles, and wear the name of freedom, graven on a heavier chain! o liberty! with profitless endeavour have i pursued thee many a weary hour; but thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,) alike from priestcraft's harpy minions, and factious blasphemy's obscener slaves, _thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, the guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!_" france, an ode. poetical works, vol. i. p. .] [footnote : a soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the king was the symbol of the majesty, as the church was of the life, of the nation, and who would most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the houses of commons or committees of public safety in the world.--ed.] _july_ . . infant schools. i have no faith in act of parliament reform. all the great--the permanently great--things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. the rage now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c., as if the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock of it. hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and others, who think them a grand invention. is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table, or a verse from the bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? in a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient--a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, i think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have made, and are making, a good many, god knows. _july_ . . mr. coleridge's philosophy.--sublimity.--solomon.--madness.--c. lamb-- sforza's decision. the pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind--not the mind out of the senses, as locke did. * * * * * could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the classic greek literature? never could. sublimity is hebrew by birth. * * * * * i should conjecture that the proverbs and ecclesiastes were written, or, perhaps, rather collected, about the time of nehemiah. the language is hebrew with chaldaic endings. it is totally unlike the language of moses on the one hand, and of isaiah on the other. * * * * * solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. i cannot think his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state protection or toleration of the foreign worship. * * * * * when a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. a madman is properly so defined. * * * * * charles lamb translated my motto _sermoni propriora_ by--_properer for a sermon_! * * * * * i was much amused some time ago by reading the pithy decision of one of the sforzas of milan, upon occasion of a dispute for precedence between the lawyers and physicians of his capital;--_paecedant fures--sequantur carnifices_. i hardly remember a neater thing. _july_ . . faith and belief. the sublime and abstruse doctrines of christian belief belong to the church; but the faith of the individual, centered in his heart, is or may be collateral to them.[ ] faith is subjective. i throw myself in adoration before god; acknowledge myself his creature,--simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon through jesus christ: but when i rise from my knees, i discuss the doctrine of the trinity as i would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of mind, i mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course. [footnote : mr. coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between belief and faith. he once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he were that moment convinced--a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself--that the new testament was a forgery from beginning to end--wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in god's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not. this was, i believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not _recognize_ in the scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured to the reception of the christian doctrines and promises.--ed.] _august_ . . dobrizhoffer.[ ] i hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest german jesuitry of dobrizhoffer. his chapter on the dialects is most valuable. he is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,--i wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula,--forgetting his own german and the english, which are, in truth, the same. the confident belief entertained by the abipones of immortality, in connection with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a god, is very remarkable. if warburton were right, which he is not, the mosaic scheme would be the exact converse. my dear daughter's translation of this book[ ] is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother english by any thing i have read for a long time. [footnote : "he was a man of rarest qualities, who to this barbarous region had confined a spirit with the learned and the wise worthy to take its place, and from mankind receive their homage, to the immortal mind paid in its just inheritance of fame. but he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined: from gratz amid the styrian hills he came, and dobrizhofter was the good man's honour'd name. "it was his evil fortune to behold the labours of his painful life destroyed; his flock which he had brought within the fold dispers'd; the work of ages render'd void, and all of good that paraguay enjoy'd by blind and suicidal power o'erthrown. so he the years of his old age employ'd, a faithful chronicler, in handing down names which he lov'd, and things well worthy to be known. "and thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene, in proud vienna he beguiled the pain of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen, that great teresa, she did not disdain in gracious mood sometimes to entertain discourse with him both pleasurable and sage; and sure a willing ear she well might deign to one whose tales may equally engage the wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age. "but of his native speech, because well-nigh disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought, in latin he composed his history; a garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught with matter of delight, and food for thought. and if he could in merlin's glass have seen by whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught, the old man would have felt as pleased, i ween, as when he won the ear of that great empress-queen. "little he deem'd, when with his indian band he through the wilds set forth upon his way, a poet then unborn, and in a land which had proscribed his order, should one day take up from thence his moralizing lay, and, shape a song that, with no fiction drest, should to his worth its grateful tribute pay, and sinking deep in many an english breast, foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest." _southey's tale of paraguay_, canto iii. st. .] [footnote : "an account of the abipones, an equestrian people of paraguay, from the latin of martin dobrizhoffer, eighteen years a missionary in that country."--vol. ii. p. .] _august_ . . scotch and english.--criterion of genius.--dryden and pope. i have generally found a scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. he is a superficial german or a dull frenchman. the scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the english; the english have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort, to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies. * * * * * you will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. take dryden's achitophel and zimri,--shaftesbury and buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in pope's timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. in like manner compare charles lamb's exquisite criticisms on shakspeare with hazlitt's round and round imitations of them. _august_ . . milton's disregard of painting. it is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does milton take any notice of the great painters of italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art; whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. yet it is curious that, in one passage in the paradise lost, milton has certainly copied the _fresco_ of the creation in the sistine chapel at rome. i mean those lines,-- ----"now half appear'd the tawny lion, pawing to get free his hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, and rampant shakes his brinded mane;--"&c.[ ] an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. adam bending over the sleeping eve in the paradise lost[ ] and dalilah approaching samson, in the agonistes[ ] are the only two proper pictures i remember in milton. [footnote : par. lost, book vii. ver. .] [footnote : ----"so much the more his wonder was to find unwaken'd eve with tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek, as through unquiet rest: he on his side leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love hung over her enamour'd, and beheld beauty, which, whether waking or asleep, shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice mild, as when zephyrus on flora breathes, her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: awake, my fairest," &c. book v. ver. .] [footnote : "but who is this, what thing of sea or land? female of sex it seems, that so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, comes this way sailing like a stately ship of tarsus, bound for the isles of javan or gadire, with all her bravery on, and tackle trim, sails fill'd, and streamers waving, courted by all the winds that hold them play; an amber-scent of odorous perfume her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"] august . . baptismal service.--jews' division of the scripture.--sanskrit. i think the baptismal service almost perfect. what seems erroneous assumption in it to me, is harmless. none of the services of the church affect me so much as this. i never could attend a christening without tears bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms. * * * * * the jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their scriptures:--first, the writings of moses, who had the [greek: autopsia]; secondly, the prophets; and, thirdly, the good books. philo, amusingly enough, places his works somewhere between the second and third degrees. * * * * * the claims of the sanskrit for priority to the hebrew as a language are ridiculous. august . . hesiod.--virgil.--genius metaphysical.--don quixote. i like reading hesiod, meaning the works and days. if every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say. * * * * * there is nothing real in the georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[ ] mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. such didactic poetry as that of the works and days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities. [footnote : i used to fancy mr. coleridge _paulo iniquior virgilio_, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all eton men, i swore _per maronem_. this was far enough from being the case; but i acknowledge that mr. c.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of virgil excited my surprise.--ed.] * * * * * all genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances. * * * * * don quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. you see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him. _august_ . . steinmetz.--keats. poor dear steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! could i for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. i never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate. * * * * * a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met mr. ---- and myself in a lane near highgate.---- knew him, and spoke. it was keats. he was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. after he had left us a little way, he came back and said: "let me carry away the memory, coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"--"there is death in that hand," i said to ----, when keats was gone; yet this was, i believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. _august_ . . christ's hospital.--bowyer. the discipline at christ's hospital in my time was ultra-spartan;--all domestic ties were to be put aside. "boy!" i remember bowyer saying to me once when i was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "boy! the school is your father! boy! the school is your mother! boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! let's have no more crying!" * * * * * no tongue can express good mrs. bowyer. val. le grice and i were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and bowyer was thundering away at us by way of prologue, when mrs. b. looked in, and said, "flog them soundly, sir, i beg!" this saved us. bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, "away, woman! away!" and we were let off. _august_ . . st. paul's melita. the belief that malta is the island on which st. paul was wrecked is so rooted in the common maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious nationality, that the government would run the chance of exciting a tumult, if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. the supposition itself is quite absurd. not to argue the matter at length, consider these few conclusive facts:--the narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and "barbarians,"[ ] of the island. now, our malta was at that time fully peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from cicero and other writers.[ ] a viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted: the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. now in our malta there are, i may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the maltese attribute to st. paul's having cursed them away. melita in the adriatic was a perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is now, infested with serpents. besides the context shows that the scene is in the adriatic. [footnote : acts xxviii. . and . mr. c. seemed to think that the greek words had reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking latin or greek; the classical meaning of [greek: barbaroi].-ed.] [footnote : upwards of a century before the reign of nero, cicero speaks at considerable length of our malta in one of the verrine orations. see act. ii. lib. iv. c. . "insula est melita, judices," &c. there was a town, and verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton stuffs, the _melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly celebrated:-- "fertilis est melite sterili vicina cocyrae insula, quam libyci verberat unda freti." ovid. fast. iii. . and silius italicus has-- ----"telaque _superba_ _lanigera_ melite." punic. xiv. . yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of malta. cicero describes an _ancient_ temple of juno situated on a promontory near the town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of masinissa, at least years b.c., that prince had religiously restored some relics which his admiral had taken from it. the plunder of this very temple is an article of accusation against verres; and a deputation of maltese (_legati melitenses_) came to rome to establish the charge. these are all the facts, i think, which can be gathered from cicero; because i consider his expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece of rhetoric. strabo merely marks the position of melita, and says that the lap-dogs called [greek: kunidia melitaia] were sent from this island, though some writers attribute them to the other melite in the adriatic, (lib. vi.) diodorus, however, a sicilian himself by birth, gives the following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time, which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of st. paul's shipwreck. "there are three islands to the south of sicily, each of which has a city or town ([greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe reception of ships. the first of these is melite, distant about stadia from syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence. its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([greek: tous katoikountas tais ousiais eudaimonas]). there are artizans of every kind ([greek: pantodapous tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness and softness. the houses are worthy of admiration for their superb adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([greek: oikias axiologous kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon])."-- lib. v. c. . mela (ii. c. .) and pliny (iii. .) simply mark the position.--ed.] * * * * * the maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the incomparable materials at hand.[ ] [footnote : the passage which i have cited from diodorus shows that the origin was much earlier.--ed.] _august_ . . english and german.--best state of society. it may be doubted whether a composite language like the english is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the german. we possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our saxon and latin quasi-synonymes, which the germans have not. for "the pomp and _prodigality_ of heaven," the germans must have said "_the spendthriftness_."[ ] shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the saxon. [footnote : _verschwendung_, i suppose.--ed.] * * * * * that is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. september . . great minds androgynous.--philosopher's ordinary language. in chemistry and nosology, by extending the degree to a certain point, the constituent proportion may be destroyed, and a new kind produced. * * * * * i have known _strong_ minds with imposing, undoubting, cobbett-like manners, but i have never met a _great_ mind of this sort. and of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. the truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. great minds--swedenborg's for instance--are never wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly. * * * * * a philosopher's ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings _ad populum_, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. he sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it. _january_ . . juries.--barristers' and physicians' fees.--quacks.--caesarean operation.-- inherited disease. i certainly think that juries would be more conscientious, if they were allowed a larger discretion. but, after all, juries cannot be better than the mass out of which they are taken. and if juries are not honest and single-minded, they are the worst, because the least responsible, instruments of judicial or popular tyranny. i should he sorry to see the honorary character of the fees of barristers and physicians done away with. though it seems a shadowy distinction, i believe it to be beneficial in effect. it contributes to preserve the idea of a profession, of a class which belongs to the public,--in the employment and remuneration of which no law interferes, but the citizen acts as he likes _in foro conscientiae_. * * * * * there undoubtedly ought to be a declaratory act withdrawing expressly from the st. john longs and other quacks the protection which the law is inclined to throw around the mistakes or miscarriages of the regularly educated practitioner. * * * * * i think there are only two things wanting to justify a surgeon in performing the caesarean operation: first, that he should possess infallible knowledge of his art: and, secondly, that he should be infallibly certain that he is infallible. * * * * * can any thing he more dreadful than the thought that an innocent child has inherited from you a disease or a weakness, the penalty in yourself of sin or want of caution? * * * * * in the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician, who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope. _january_ . . mason's poetry. i cannot bring myself to think much of mason's poetry. i may be wrong; but all those passages in the caractacus, which we learn to admire at school, now seem to me one continued _falsetto_. _january_ . . northern and southern states of the american union.--all and the whole. naturally one would have thought that there would have been greater sympathy between the northern and north-western states of the american union and england, than between england and the southern states. there is ten times as much english blood and spirit in new england as in virginia, the carolinas, &c. nevertheless, such has been the force of the interests of commerce, that now, and for some years past, the people of the north hate england with increasing bitterness, whilst, amongst those of the south, who are jacobins, the british connection has become popular. can there ever be any thorough national fusion of the northern and southern states? i think not. in fact, the union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very serious question between the states arises. the american union has no _centre_, and it is impossible now to make one. the more they extend their borders into the indians' land, the weaker will the national cohesion be. but i look upon the states as splendid masses to be used, by and by, in the composition of two or three great governments. * * * * * there is a great and important difference, both in politics and metaphysics, between _all_ and _the whole_. the first can never be ascertained as a standing quantity; the second, if comprehended by insight into its parts, remains for ever known. mr. huskisson, i thought, satisfactorily refuted the ship owners; and yet the shipping interest, who must know where the shoe pinches, complain to this day. _january_ , . ninth article.--sin and sins.--old divines.--preaching extempore. "very far gone," is _quam longissime_ in the latin of the ninth article,-- as far gone as possible, that is, as was possible for _man_ to go; as far as was compatible with his having any redeemable qualities left in him. to talk of man's being _utterly_ lost to good, is absurd; for then he would be a devil at once. * * * * * one mistake perpetually made by one of our unhappy parties in religion,-- and with a pernicious tendency to antinomianism,--is to confound _sin_ with _sins_. to tell a modest girl, the watchful nurse of an aged parent, that she is full of _sins_ against god, is monstrous, and as shocking to reason as it is unwarrantable by scripture. but to tell her that she, and all men and women, are of a sinful nature, and that, without christ's redeeming love and god's grace, she cannot be emancipated from its dominion, is true and proper.[ ] [footnote : in a marginal scrap mr. c. wrote:--"what are the essential doctrines of our religion, if not sin and original sin, as the necessitating occasion, and the redemption of sinners by the incarnate word as the substance of the christian dispensation? and can these be intelligently believed without knowledge and steadfast meditation. by the unlearned, they may be worthily received, but not by the unthinking and self-ignorant, christian."--ed.] * * * * * no article of faith can be truly and duly preached without necessarily and simultaneously infusing a deep sense of the indispensableness of a holy life. * * * * * how pregnant with instruction, and with knowledge of all sorts, are the sermons of our old divines! in this respect, as in so many others, how different from the major part of modern discourses! * * * * * every attempt, in a sermon, to cause emotion, except as the consequence of an impression made on the reason, or the understanding, or the will, i hold to be fanatical and sectarian. * * * * * no doubt preaching, in the proper sense of the word, is more effective than reading; and, therefore, i would not prohibit it, but leave a liberty to the clergyman who feels himself able to accomplish it. but, as things now are, i am quite sure i prefer going to church to a pastor who reads his discourse: for i never yet heard more than one preacher without book, who did not forget his argument in three minutes' time; and fall into vague and unprofitable declamation, and, generally, very coarse declamation too. these preachers never progress; they eddy round and round. sterility of mind follows their ministry. _january_ . . church of england. when the church at the reformation ceased to be extra-national, it unhappily became royal instead; its proper bearing is intermediate between the crown and the people, with an inclination to the latter. * * * * * the present prospects of the church weigh heavily on my soul. oh! that the words of a statesman-like philosophy could win their way through the ignorant zealotry and sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day! _february_ . . union with ireland. if any modification of the union takes place, i trust it will be a total divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_. i am sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. let us have no silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the union. i am deliberately of opinion, that england, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with ireland. my only difficulty is as to the protestants, to whom we owe protection. but i cannot forget that the protestants themselves have greatly aided in accelerating the present horrible state of things, by using that as a remedy and a reward which should have been to them an opportunity.[ ] if the protestant church in ireland is removed, of course the romish church must be established in its place. there can be no resisting it in common reason. how miserably imbecile and objectless has the english government of ireland been for forty years past! oh! for a great man--but one really great man,-- who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! but truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly perisheth. see how triumphant in debate and in action o'connell is! why? because he asserts a broad principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. our ministers--true whigs in that-- have faith in nothing but expedients _de die in diem_. indeed, what principles of government can _they_ have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this and that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in pique at a parliamentary defeat? [footnote : "whatever may be thought of the settlement that followed the battle of the boyne and the extinction of the war in ireland, yet when this had been made and submitted to, it would have been the far wiser policy, i doubt not, to have provided for the safety of the constitution by improving the quality of the elective franchise, leaving the eligibility open, or like the former, limited only by considerations of property. still, however, the scheme of exclusion and disqualification had its plausible side. the ink was scarcely dry on the parchment-rolls and proscription-lists of the popish parliament. the crimes of the man were generalized into attributes of his faith; and the irish catholics collectively were held accomplices in the perfidy and baseness of the king. alas! his immediate adherents had afforded too great colour to the charge. the irish massacre was in the mouth of every protestant, not as an event to be remembered, but as a thing of recent expectation, fear still blending with the sense of deliverance. at no time, therefore, could the disqualifying system have been enforced with so little reclamation of the conquered party, or with so little outrage on the general feeling of the country. there was no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly useful as a _sedative_ in order to the application of the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter-power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing forces might have interfered with their operation. and had this use been made of these exclusive laws, and had they been enforced as the precursors and negative conditions,--but, above all, as _bonâ fide_ accompaniments, of a process of _emancipation_, properly and worthily so named, the code would at this day have been remembered in ireland only as when, recalling a dangerous fever of our boyhood, we think of the nauseous drugs and drenching-horn, and congratulate ourselves that our doctors now-a-days know how to manage these things less coarsely. but this angry code was neglected as an opportunity, and mistaken for a _substitute_: _et hinc illae* lacrymae!_"--church and state, p. .] * * * * * i sometimes think it just possible that the dissenters may once more be animated by a wiser and nobler spirit, and see their dearest interest in the church of england as the bulwark and glory of protestantism, as they did at the revolution. but i doubt their being able to resist the low factious malignity to the church which has characterized them as a body for so many years. _february_ . . faust.----michael scott, goethe, schiller, and wordsworth. before i had ever seen any part of goethe's faust[ ], though, of course, when i was familiar enough with marlowe's, i conceived and drew up the plan of a work, a drama, which was to be, to my mind, what the faust was to goethe's. my faust was old michael scott; a much better and more likely original than faust. he appeared in the midst of his college of devoted disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. he did not love knowledge for itself--for its own exceeding great reward--but in order to be powerful. this poison-speck infected his mind from the beginning. the priests suspect him, circumvent him, accuse him; he is condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement: this constituted the _prologus_ of the drama. a pause of four or five years takes place, at the end of which michael escapes from prison, a soured, gloomy, miserable man. he will not, cannot study; of what avail had all his study been to him? his knowledge, great as it was, had failed to preserve him from the cruel fangs of the persecutors; he could not command the lightning or the storm to wreak their furies upon the heads of those whom he hated and contemned, and yet feared. away with learning! away with study! to the winds with all pretences to knowledge! we _know_ nothing; we are fools, wretches, mere beasts. anon i began to tempt him. i made him dream, gave him wine, and passed the most exquisite of women before him, but out of his reach. is there, then, no knowledge by which these pleasures can be commanded? _that way_ lay witchcraft, and accordingly to witchcraft michael turns with all his soul. he has many failures and some successes; he learns the chemistry of exciting drugs and exploding powders, and some of the properties of transmitted and reflected light: his appetites and his curiosity are both stimulated, and his old craving for power and mental domination over others revives. at last michael tries to raise the devil, and the devil comes at his call. my devil was to be, like goethe's, the universal humorist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. i had many a trick for him to play, some better, i think, than any in the faust. in the mean time, michael is miserable; he has power, but no peace, and he every day more keenly feels the tyranny of hell surrounding him. in vain he seems to himself to assert the most absolute empire over the devil, by imposing the most extravagant tasks; one thing is as easy as another to the devil. "what next, michael?" is repeated every day with more imperious servility. michael groans in spirit; his power is a curse: he commands women and wine! but the women seem fictitious and devilish, and the wine does not make him drunk. he now begins to hate the devil, and tries to cheat him. he studies again, and explores the darkest depths of sorcery for a receipt to cozen hell; but all in vain. sometimes the devil's finger turns over the page for him, and points out an experiment, and michael hears a whisper--"try _that_, michael!" the horror increases; and michael feels that he is a slave and a condemned criminal. lost to hope, he throws himself into every sensual excess,--in the mid-career of which he sees agatha, my margaret, and immediately endeavours to seduce her. agatha loves him; and the devil facilitates their meetings; but she resists michael's attempts to ruin her, and implores him not to act so as to forfeit her esteem. long struggles of passion ensue, in the result of which his affections are called forth against his appetites, and, love-born, the idea of a redemption of the lost will dawns upon his mind. this is instantaneously perceived by the devil; and for the first time the humorist becomes severe and menacing. a fearful succession of conflicts between michael and the devil takes place, in which agatha helps and suffers. in the end, after subjecting him to every imaginable horror and agony, i made him triumphant, and poured peace into his soul in the conviction of a salvation for sinners through god's grace. the intended theme of the faust is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. but a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy purposes. there is neither causation nor progression in the faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the _incredulus odi_ is felt from the first line. the sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. mephistopheles and margaret are excellent; but faust himself is dull and meaningless. the scene in auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. but there is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. the german is very pure and fine. the young men in germany and england who admire lord byron, prefer goethe to schiller; but you may depend upon it, goethe does not, nor ever will, command the common mind of the people of germany as schiller does. schiller had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:--the first as author of the robbers--a piece which must not be considered with reference to shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. it is quite genuine, and deeply imbued with schiller's own soul. after this he outgrew the composition of such plays as the robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful stand in the grand historical drama--the wallenstein;--not the intense drama of passion,--he was not master of that--but the diffused drama of history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. the wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike shakspeare's historical plays--a species by itself. you may take up any scene, and it will please you by itself; just as you may in don quixote, which you read _through_ once or twice only, but which you read _in_ repeatedly. after this point it was, that goethe and other writers injured by their theories the steadiness and originality of schiller's mind; and in every one of his works after the wallenstein you may perceive the fluctuations of his taste and principles of composition. he got a notion of re-introducing the characterlessness of the greek tragedy with a chorus, as in the bride of messina, and he was for infusing more lyric verse into it. schiller sometimes affected to despise the robbers and the other works of his first youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as of works not in a right line, but full of excellence in their way. in his ballads and lighter lyrics goethe is most excellent. it is impossible to praise him too highly in this respect. i like the wilhelm meister the best of his prose works. but neither schiller's nor goethe's prose style approaches to lessing's, whose writings, for _manner_, are absolutely perfect. although wordsworth and goethe are not much alike, to be sure, upon the whole; yet they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry. they are always, both of them, spectators _ab extra_,--feeling _for_, but never _with_, their characters. schiller is a thousand times more _hearty_ than goethe. i was once pressed--many years ago--to translate the faust; and i so far entertained the proposal as to read the work through with great attention, and to revive in my mind my own former plan of michael scott. but then i considered with myself whether the time taken up in executing the translation might not more worthily be devoted to the composition of a work which, even if parallel in some points to the faust, should be truly original in motive and execution, and therefore more interesting and valuable than any version which i could make; and, secondly, i debated with myself whether it became my moral character to render into english--and so far, certainly, lend my countenance to language--much of which i thought vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. i need not tell you that i never put pen to paper as a translator of faust. i have read a good deal of mr. hayward's version, and i think it done in a very manly style; but i do not admit the argument for prose translations. i would in general rather see verse attempted in so capable a language as ours. the french cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as theirs. [footnote : "the poem was first published in , and forms the commencement of the seventh volume of _goethe's schriften, wien und leipzig, bey j. stahel and g. j. goschen_, . this edition is now before me. the poem entitled, _faust, ein fragment_ (not _doktor faust, ein trauerspiel_, as döring says), and contains no prologue or dedication of any sort. it commences with the scene in faust's study, _antè_, p. ., and is continued, as now, down to the passage ending, _antè_, p. . line . in the original, the line-- "und froh ist, wenn er regenwürmer findet," ends the scene. the next scene is one between faust and mephistopheles, and begins thus:-- "und was der ganzen menschheit zugetheilt ist," _i. e._ with the passage (_antè_, p. .) beginning, "i will enjoy, in my own heart's core, all that is parcelled out among mankind," &c. all that intervenes, in later editions, is wanting. it is thenceforth continued, as now, to the end of the cathedral scene (_antè_, p. ( )), except that the whole scene, in which valentine is killed, is wanting. thus margaret's prayer to the virgin and the cathedral scene come together, and form the conclusion of the work. according to düring's verzeichniss, there was no new edition of faust until . according to dr. sieglitz, the first part of faust first appeared, in its present shape, in the collected edition of goethe's works, which was published in .--_hayward's translation of faust_, second edition, note, p. .] _february_ . . beaumont and fletcher.--ben jonson.--massinger. in the romantic drama beaumont and fletcher are almost supreme. their plays are in general most truly delightful. i could read the beggar's bush from morning to night. how sylvan and sunshiny it is! the little french lawyer is excellent. lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. monsieur thomas is also capital. i have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the two noble kinsmen are shakspeare's. beaumont and fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. how lamentable it is that no gentleman and scholar can he found to edit these beautiful plays![ ] did the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands of those two fools and knaves, seward and simpson? there are whole scenes in their edition which i could with certainty put back into their original verse, and more that could he replaced in their native prose. was there ever such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that displayed by shakspeare, and beaumont and fletcher?[ ] [footnote : i believe mr. dyce could edit beaumont and fletcher as well as any man of the present or last generation; but the truth is, the limited sale of the late editions of ben jonson, shirley, &c., has damped the spirit of enterprise amongst the respectable publishers. still i marvel that some cheap reprint of b. and f. is not undertaken.--ed.] [footnote : "the men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works, or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper, in all that related to themselves. in the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation." * * * * * "shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. that this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to mr. pope, when he asserted, that our great bard 'grew immortal in his own despite.'"--_biog. lit._ vol. i, p. .] * * * * * in ben jonson you have an intense and burning art. some of his plots, that of the alchemist, for example, are perfect. ben jonson and beaumont and fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near shakspeare; but no doubt ben jonson was the greatest man after shakspeare in that age of dramatic genius. the styles of massinger's plays and the sampson agonistes are the two extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. shakspeare in his great plays is the midpoint. in the samson agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable: in massinger the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry. there's such a divinity doth hedge our shakspeare round, that we cannot even imitate his style. i tried to imitate his manner in the remorse, and, when i had done, i found i had been tracking beaumont and fletcher, and massinger instead. it is really very curious. at first sight, shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike: nothing so easy as to fall into that of massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the shakspearian idiom. i suppose it is because shakspeare is universal, and, in fact, has no _manner_; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than nature herself. _february_ . . house of commons appointing the officers of the army and navy. i was just now reading sir john cam hobhouse's answer to mr. hume, i believe, upon the point of transferring the patronage of the army and navy from the crown to the house of commons. i think, if i had been in the house of commons, i would have said, "that, ten or fifteen years ago, i should have considered sir j. c. h.'s speech quite unanswerable,--it being clear constitutional law that the house of commons has not, nor ought to have, any share, directly or indirectly, in the appointment of the officers of the army or navy. but now that the king had been reduced, by the means and procurement of the honourable baronet and his friends, to a puppet, which, so far from having any independent will of its own, could not resist a measure which it hated and condemned, it became a matter of grave consideration whether it was not necessary to vest the appointment of such officers in a body like the house of commons, rather than in a junta of ministers, who were obliged to make common cause with the mob and democratic press for the sake of keeping their places." _march_ . . penal code in ireland.--churchmen. the penal code in ireland, in the beginning of the last century, was justifiable, as a temporary mean of enabling government to take breath and look about them; and if right measures had been systematically pursued in a right spirit, there can be no doubt that all, or the greater part, of ireland would have become protestant. protestantism under the charter schools was greatly on the increase in the early part of that century, and the complaints of the romish priests to that effect are on record. but, unfortunately, the drenching-horn was itself substituted for the medicine. * * * * * there seems to me, at present, to be a curse upon the english church, and upon the governors of all institutions connected with the orderly advancement of national piety and knowledge; it is the curse of prudence, as they miscall it--in fact, of fear. clergymen are now almost afraid to explain in their pulpits the grounds of their being protestants. they are completely cowed by the vulgar harassings of the press and of our hectoring sciolists in parliament. there should be no _party_ politics in the pulpit to be sure; but every church in england ought to resound with national politics,--i mean the sacred character of the national church, and an exposure of the base robbery from the nation itself--for so indeed it is[ ]--about to be committed by these ministers, in order to have a sop to throw to the irish agitators, who will, of course, only cut the deeper, and come the oftener. you cannot buy off a barbarous invader. [footnote : "that the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a plato found it hard to learn, and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as _common-place_; this is a phenomenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. yet he who should confine the efficiency of an established church to these, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. that to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; _this_ unobtrusive, continuous agency of a protestant church establishment, _this_ it is, which the patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. 'it cannot be valued with the gold of ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. no mention shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies.'--the clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. he is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. and among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, i know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against church property. whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder; while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family that may have a member educated for the church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. instead of being _foreclosed_ and immovable, it is, in fact, the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulative. that there exist no inconveniences who will pretend to assert?--but i have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either _trullibers_ or salaried _placemen_."--_church and state_, p. .] _march_ . . coronation oaths. lord grey has, in parliament, said two things: first, that the coronation oaths only bind the king in his executive capacity; and, secondly, that members of the house of commons are bound to represent by their votes the wishes and opinions of their constituents, and not their own. put these two together, and tell me what useful part of the constitutional monarchy of england remains. it is clear that the coronation oaths would be no better than highgate oaths. for in his executive capacity the king _cannot_ do any thing, against the doing of which the oaths bind him; it is _only_ in his legislative character that he possesses a free agency capable of being bound. the nation meant to bind _that_. _march_ . . divinity.--professions and trades. divinity is essentially the first of the professions, because it is necessary for all at all times; law and physic are only necessary for some at some times. i speak of them, of course, not in their abstract existence, but in their applicability to man. * * * * * every true science bears necessarily within itself the germ of a cognate profession, and the more you can elevate trades into professions the better. _march_ . . modern political economy. what solemn humbug this modern political economy is! what is there true of the little that is true in their dogmatic books, which is not a simple deduction from the moral and religious _credenda_ and _agenda_ of any good man, and with which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which every man of common sense instinctively acted? i know none. but what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half- ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well- founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of positive error. this particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence. political economy, at the highest, can never be a pure science. you may demonstrate that certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder _can_ ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but a chimera--a practical falsehood. for there are no theorems in political economy--but problems only. certain things being actually so and so; the question is, _how_ to _do_ so and so with them. political _philosophy_, indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce will be a utopia or oceana. you talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from _d_. to _d_. but suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, i take it, after all. is not its real price enhanced to every christian and patriot a hundred-fold? * * * * * _all_ is an endless fleeting abstraction; _the whole_ is a reality. _march_ . . national debt.--property tax.--duty of landholders. what evil results now to this country, taken at large, from the actual existence of the national debt? i never could get a plain and practical answer to that question. i do not advert to the past loss of capital, although it is hard to see how that capital can be said to have been unproductive, which produces, in the defence of the nation itself, the conditions of the permanence and productivity of all other capital. as to taxation to pay the interest, how can the country suffer by a process, under which the money is never one minute out of the pockets of the people? you may just as well say that a man is weakened by the circulation of his blood. there may, certainly, be particular local evils and grievances resulting from the mode of taxation or collection; but how can that debt be in any proper sense a burthen to the nation, which the nation owes to itself, and to no one but itself? it is a juggle to talk of the nation owing the capital or the interest to the stockholders; it owes to itself only. suppose the interest to be owing to the emperor of russia, and then you would feel the difference of a debt in the proper sense. it is really and truly nothing more in effect than so much moneys or money's worth, raised annually by the state for the purpose of quickening industry.[ ] i should like to see a well graduated property tax, accompanied by a large loan. one common objection to a property tax is, that it tends to diminish the accumulation of capital. in my judgment, one of the chief sources of the bad economy of the country now is the enormous aggregation of capitals. when shall we return to a sound conception of the right to property-- namely, as being official, implying and demanding the performance of commensurate duties! nothing but the most horrible perversion of humanity and moral justice, under the specious name of political economy, could have blinded men to this truth as to the possession of land,--the law of god having connected indissolubly the cultivation of every rood of earth with the maintenance and watchful labour of man. but money, stock, riches by credit, transferable and convertible at will, are under no such obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession of _such_ property, that our landholders have learnt their present theory of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of commerce. [footnote : see the splendid essay in the friend (vol. ii, p. .) on the vulgar errors respecting taxes and taxation. "a great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said, 'the nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' this blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large. "but a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the earth. the sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. the gardens in the south of europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills, hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population by the joint effect of taxation and trade. for taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the government maybe fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying on, in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of the shipbuilder, the clothier, the iron-founder," &c. &c.--ed.] _april_ . . massinger.--shakspeare.--hieronimo. to please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, i confess i cannot interest myself in it. * * * * * the first act of the virgin martyr is as fine an act as i remember in any play. the very woman is, i think, one of the most perfect plays we have. there is some good fun in the first scene between don john, or antonio, and cuculo, his master[ ]; and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story?[ ] the bondman is also a delightful play. massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels. but, like most of his contemporaries, except shakspeare, massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. malefort senior, in the unnatural combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. he would have been, in fact, mad. regan and goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in shakspeare; the pure unnatural--and you will observe that shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. whereas in edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. hamlet is, inclusively, an edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which edmund had not. it is worth while to remark the use which shakspeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character. [footnote : act iii. sc. .] [footnote : act iv. sc. .:-- "ant. not far from where my father lives, a lady, a neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beauty as nature durst bestow without undoing, dwelt, and most happily, as i thought then, and bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in. this beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate incense, nor i no way to flatter, but my fondness; in all the bravery my friends could show me, in all the faith my innocence could give me, in the best language my true tongue could tell me, and all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, i sued and served: long did i love this lady, long was my travail, long my trade to win her; with all the duty of my soul, i served her. alm. how feelingly he speaks! (_aside_.) and she loved you too? it must be so. ant. i would it had, dear lady; this story had been needless, and this place, i think, unknown to me. alm. were your bloods equal? ant. yes; and i thought our hearts too. alm. then she must love. ant. she did--but never me; she could not love me, she would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me, and in so poor and base a way abused me, for all my services, for all my bounties, so bold neglects flung on me-- alm. an ill woman! belike you found some rival in your love, then? ant. how perfectly she points me to my story! (_aside_.) madam, i did; and one whose pride and anger, ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on, doted to my undoing, and my ruin. and, but for honour to your sacred beauty, and reverence to the noble sex, though she fall, as she must fall that durst be so unnoble, i should say something unbeseeming me. what out of love, and worthy love, i gave her, shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools, to girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung, and in disdain of me. alm. pray you take me with you. of what complexion was she? ant. but that i dare not commit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue, she look'd not much unlike--though far, far short, something, i see, appears--your pardon, madam-- her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen; and so she would look sad; but yours is pity, a noble chorus to my wretched story; hers was disdain and cruelty. alm. pray heaven, mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story, (_aside_.)" &c.--ed.] * * * * * the parts pointed out in hieronimo as ben jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of shakspeare's great pieces.[ ] [footnote : by hieronimo mr. coleridge meant the spanish tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called the first part of jeronimo. the spanish tragedy is, upon the authority of heywood, attributed to kyd. it is supposed that ben jonson originally performed the part of hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, ben jonson's own writing. some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the spanish tragedy; the style is singularly unlike jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from shakspeare. mr. lamb at one time gave them to webster. take this, passage, in the fourth act:-- "hieron. what make you with your torches in the dark? pedro. you bid us light them, and attend you here. hieron. no! you are deceived; not i; you are deceived. was i so mad to bid light torches now? light me your torches at the mid of noon, when as the sun-god rides in all his glory; light me your torches then. pedro. then we burn day-light. hieron. _let it be burnt; night is a murd'rous slut, that would not have her treasons to be seen; and yonder pale-faced hecate there, the moon, doth give consent to that is done in darkness; and all those stars that gaze upon her face are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train; and those that should be powerful and divine, do sleep in darkness when they most should shine._ pedro. provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words. the heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrow make you speak you know not what hieron. _villain! thou liest, and thou dost nought but tell me i am mad: thou liest, i am not mad; i know thee to be pedro, and he jaques; i'll prove it thee; and were i mad, how could i? where was she the same night, when my horatio was murder'd! she should have shone then; search thou the book: had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, that i know--nay, i do know, had the murderer seen him, his weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth, had he been framed of nought but blood and death," &c._ again, in the fifth act:-- "hieron. but are you sure that they are dead? castile. ay, slain, too sure. hieron. what, and yours too? viceroy. ay, all are dead; not one of them survive. hibron. nay, then i care not--come, we shall be friends; let us lay our heads together. see, here's a goodly noose will hold them all. viceroy. o damned devil! how secure he is! hieron. secure! why dost thou wonder at it? _i tell thee, viceroy, this day i've seen revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch than ever sate under the crown of spain. had i as many lives at there be stars,_, _as many heavens to go to as those lives, i'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, but i would see thee ride in this red pool. methinks, since i grew inward with revenge, i cannot look with scorn enough on death._ king. what! dost thou mock us, slave? bring tortures forth. hieron. _do, do, do; and meantime i'll torture you. you had a son as i take it, and your son should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so? you had a son too, he was my liege's nephew. he was proud and politic--had he lived, he might have come to wear the crown of spain: i think 't was so--'t was i that killed him; look you--this same hand was it that stabb'd his heart--do you see this hand? for one horatio, if you ever knew him-- a youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden-- one that did force your valiant son to yield_," &c.--ed. ] _april_ . . love's labour lost.--gifford's massinger.--shakspeare.--the old dramatists. i think i could point out to a half line what is really shakspeare's in love's labour lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. what he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the venus and adonis, and rape of lucrece. [ ] in the drama alone, as shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. in the love's labour lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life--as for example, in particular, of benedict and beatrice.[ ] [footnote : "in shakspeare's _poems_ the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. at length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."--_biog. lit._ vol. ii. p. .] [footnote : mr. coleridge, of course, alluded to biron and rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in a midsummer night's dream.--ed.] * * * * * gifford has done a great deal for the text of massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. his comparison of shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[ ] [footnote : see his _introduction to massinger, vol_.i. p. ., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, mr. gifford pronounces that _rhythmical modulation is not one of shakspeare's merits!_--ed.] * * * * * in shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. he goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. you see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius. * * * * * the old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under some faint disguise. some of their finest scenes are constructed on this ground. shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, i think,--in twelfth night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play; and in the comedy of errors, which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. the definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will fairly follow from it! _april _ . . statesmen.--burke. i never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of feelings. when i was very young, i wrote and spoke very enthusiastically, but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle, the violation of which i thought i could point out. as to mere details of administration, i honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must, of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and it was not till i went to malta, and had to correspond with official characters myself, that i fully understood the extreme shallowness and ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire. i then quite assented to oxenstiern's saying, _nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus_. * * * * * burke was, indeed, a great man. no one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner bell. hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendant greatness. he would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as fox and pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects. * * * * * as a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture requires a scientific audience. _april _ . . prospect of monarchy or democracy.--the reformed house of commons. i have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the european nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become efficient in the apparent will of the king.[ ] as it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in england, france, and belgium. the statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed to think. [footnote : this is backing vico against spinosa. it must, however, be acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to be considered the favourite.--ed.] * * * * * you see how this house of commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! the direct and personal despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land. as for the house of lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it? _april _ . . united states of america.--captain b. hall.--northern and southern states. --democracy with slavery.--quakers. the possible destiny of the united states of america,--as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the atlantic to the pacific, living under the laws of alfred, and speaking the language of shakspeare and milton, is an august conception. why should we not wish to see it realized? america would then be england viewed through a solar microscope; great britain in a state of glorious magnification! how deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the americans! they hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. a very little humouring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the americans. * * * * * captain basil hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. after all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have? * * * * * what you say about the quarrel in the united states is sophistical. no doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. in such cases there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the over-taxed class. for example, take the householders of london, who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent, --or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? but when new england, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the carolinians, another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. what would you think of a law which should tax every person in devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in yorkshire? and yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the new england deputies over the property of the southern states. * * * * * there are two possible modes of unity in a state; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. now, i maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in athens. the poor swiss cantons are no exception. the mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. such a community _may_ exist, as in the case of the quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_. * * * * * the free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and distinction and supremacy. _april _ . . land and money. land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any respectability with it. money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made him at once the object of plunder and hatred. witness the history of the jews in this country in the early reigns after the conquest. * * * * * i have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the benthamite or malthusian schools. _april _ . . methods of investigation. there are three ways of treating a subject:-- in the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is necessarily assumed as the truth. as the argument proceeds, the conclusion from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. now, it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as, therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive definition. hence you may set out, like spinosa, with all but the truth, and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere deduction shall be irrefragable. warburton's "divine legation" is also a splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure figure and number. but you cannot _make _any thing true which results from, or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. the chief use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which purpose it is the best exercitation. . the historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. suppose the question is as to the true essence and character of the english constitution. first, where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? what facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? and how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? what can be more striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises and constitutional histories which we have in every library? a whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old tory (carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. a. takes this class of facts; b. takes that class: each proves something true, neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the whole truth. . you must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. you must carry your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. if you ask me how i can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the phenomena of history are to be explained, i answer, in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because you _do _see with them. if i propose to you an idea or self-realizing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it _all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals or effects;--if i show you that such an event or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, i think, i have a right to say that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only truth. to set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles, and horns. in order to make music, you must know how to play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.[ ] [footnote : i have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. the readers of mr. coleridge's works generally, or of his "church and state" in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. the analysis of the platonic and baconian methods in "the friend," to which i have before referred, and the "church and state," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of mr. coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.--ed.] _april _ . . church of rome.--celibacy of the clergy. in my judgment, protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack when they labour to convict the romanists of false doctrines. destroy the _papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and i am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. they might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,--originally sprang. but, so long as the bishop of rome remains pope, and has an army of mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. in the milanese, and elsewhere in the north of italy, i am told there is a powerful feeling abroad against the papacy. that district seems to be something in the state of england in the reign of our henry the eighth. how deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! even the best and most enlightened men in romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. and can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? impossible! and the morals of both sexes in spain, italy, france, &c. prove it abundantly. the papal church has had three phases,--anti-caesarean, extra-national, anti-christian. _april _ . . roman conquest of italy. the romans would never have subdued the italian tribes if they had not boldly left italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure. _april _ . . wedded love in shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists.--tennyson's poems. except in shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. in massinger, and beaumont and fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. there is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. in this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet shakspeare! * * * * * i have not read through all mr. tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but i think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what i have seen. the misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. what i would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to tennyson,--indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the allegro and penseroso. he would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as eton boys get to write such good latin verses by conning ovid and tibullus. as it is, i can scarcely scan some of his verses. _may _ . . rabelais and luther.--wit and madness. i think with some interest upon the fact that rabelais and luther were born in the same year.[ ] glorious spirits! glorious spirits! ----"hos utinam inter heroas natum me!" [footnote : they were both born within twelve months of each other, i believe; but luther's birth was in november, , and that of rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding.--ed.] * * * * * "great wits are sure to madness near allied," says dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,-- namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit." _may _ . . colonization.--machinery.--capital. colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, great britain. god seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. but it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the scotch to america; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair. * * * * * the wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now than in queen elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. in some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. a pretty benefit truly! * * * * * i think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself. _may _ . . roman conquest.--constantine.--papacy and the schoolmen. the romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the patricians against the increasing powers of the plebeians. all we know of the early romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. then it is that they go to war with carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that war was the occupation of sicily. thence they, in succession, conquered spain, macedonia, asia minor, &c., and so at last contrived to subjugate italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the italian states with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized world. they were ordained by providence to conquer and amalgamate the materials of christendom. they were not a national people; they were truly-- _romanos rerum dominos--_ --and that's all. * * * * * under constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the temporal. there were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. the clergy and the lawyers, the church and the state, were opposed. * * * * * the beneficial influence of the papacy upon the whole has been much over- rated by some writers; and certainly no country in europe received less benefit and more harm from it than england. in fact, the lawful kings and parliaments of england were always essentially protestant in feeling for a national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, john, henry iv., &c., that went against this policy. all the great english schoolmen, scotus erigena[ ], duns scotus, ockham, and others, those morning stars of the reformation, were heart and soul opposed to rome, and maintained the papacy to be antichrist. the popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which grew out of the old monasteries. the papacy was, and is, essentially extra- national, and was always so considered in this country, although not believed to be anti-christian. [footnote : john scotus, or erigena, was born, according to different authors, in wales, scotland, or ireland; but i do not find any account making him an englishman of saxon blood. his death is uncertainly placed in the beginning of the ninth century. he lived in well-known intimacy with charles the bald, of france, who died about a. d. . he resolutely resisted the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that account. but the king of france protected him--ed.] _may_ . . civil war of the seventeenth century.--hampden's speech. i know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of charles i., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. the side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. no man of that age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. the consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. the king became a martyr, and the parliamentarians traitors, and _vice versâ_. the great reform brought into act by and under william the third combined the principles truly contended for by charles and his parliament respectively: the great revolution of has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. as to hampden's speech[ ], no doubt it means a declaration of passive obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an english protestant individual: every man, cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions by protestants up to that time. but it implies nothing of hampden's creed as to the duty of parliament. [footnote : on his impeachment with the other four members, . see the "letter to john murray, esq. _touching_ lord nugent," . it is extraordinary that lord n. should not see the plain distinction taken by hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the king because of it. he approves the one, and condemns the other. his words are, "to _yield obedience to_ the commands of a king, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject:"--"to _resist_ the lawful power of the king; to raise insurrection against the king; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject."--ed.] _may_ . . reformed house of commons. well, i think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of those who seriously and solemnly opposed the reform bill are in a fair way of exact fulfilment! for myself, i own i did not expect such rapidity of movement. i supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the house of commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their politics. but really the truth is something more than this. think of upwards of members voting away two millions and a half of tax on friday[ ], at the bidding of whom, shall i say? and then no less than of those very members rescinding their votes on the tuesday next following, nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! of course i approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a picture of the composition of this house of commons! [footnote : on friday, the th of april, , sir william ingilby moved and carried a resolution for reducing the duty on malt from s. d. to l s. per quarter. one hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. on tuesday following, the th of april, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the same resolution.--ed.] _may_ . . food.--medicine.--poison.--obstruction. . that which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and part rejected, is--food. . that which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly assimilated, and partly not, is--medicine. . that which is digested, but not assimilated, is--poison. . that which is neither digested nor assimilated is--mere obstruction. as to the stories of slow poisons, i cannot say whether there was any, or what, truth in them; but i certainly believe a man may be poisoned by arsenic a year after he has taken it. in fact, i think that is known to have happened. may . . wilson.--shakspeare's sonnets.--love. professor wilson's character of charles lamb in the last blackwood, _twaddle on tweed-side_[ ], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. it does honour to wilson, to his head and his heart. [footnote : "charles lamb ought really not to abuse scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of enfield; for scotland loves charles lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a cockney is a better man even than christopher north. but what will not christopher forgive to genius and goodness! even lamb, bleating libels on his native land. nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their bower of rest." some of mr. coleridge's poems were first published with some of c. lamb's at bristol in . the remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly cited in the new monthly magazine for february, , p. .: "duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque camcoenarum,--quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas." and even so it came to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ed.] * * * * * how can i wish that wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! yet what a waste, what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his i know not how many years' management of blackwood! if wilson cares for fame, for an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, i think, hold his hand, and say, as he well may,-- "militavi non sine gloria: nunc arma defunctumque bello barbiton hic paries habebit." two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very delightful. but he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad work in general with their testators' brains. * * * * * i believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. in elizabeth's and james's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally, were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. of course there were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of beaumont and fletcher-- the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the english stage--will show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent. certainly the language of the two friends, musidorus and pyrocles, in the arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in cervantes the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the curious impertinent. and i think there is a passage in the new atlantis[ ] of lord bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral theory. i mention this with reference to shakspeare's sonnets, which have been supposed, by some, to be addressed to william herbert, earl of pembroke, whom clarendon calls[ ] the most beloved man of his age, though his licentiousness was equal to his virtues. i doubt this. i do not think that shakespeare, merely because he was an actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the real object had perchance been a laura or a leonora. it seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, i take to be a purposed blind. these extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh. these sonnets, like the venus and adonis, and the rape of lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. these are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_. [footnote : i cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed that mr. coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of joabin the jew; but it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. the only approach to it seems to be:--"as for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again as are there; and to speak generally, as i said before, i have not read of any such chastity in any people as theirs."--ed.] [footnote : "william earl of pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man of that age." ......."he indulged to himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses."--_hist. of the rebellion_, book i. he died in , aged fifty years. the dedication by t. t. (thomas thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, mr. w. h." and malone is inclined to think that william hughes is meant. as to mr. w. h. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed, that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a woman. i suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by mr. c. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet was a woman.--ed.] * * * * * every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the reverse is the case in her presence. _may_ . . wicliffe.--luther.--reverence for ideal truths.--johnson the whig.-- asgill.--james i. wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to luther's; but really the more i know of him from vaughan and le bas, both of whose books i like, i think him as extraordinary a man as luther upon the whole. he was much sounder and more truly catholic in his view of the eucharist than luther. and i find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which i was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of christ, but to the caro noumenon, or symbolical body, the rock that followed the israelites. whitaker beautifully says of luther;--_felix ille, quem dominus eo honore dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_. * * * * * there is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only. now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself superior. if it were possible to conceive god in a strict sense, that is, as we conceive a horse or a tree, even god himself could not excite any reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a tiger or a beautiful woman. but reverence, which is the synthesis of love and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man, towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. it is the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power. * * * * * samuel johnson[ ], whom, to distinguish him from the doctor, we may call the whig, was a very remarkable writer. he may be compared to his contemporary de foe, whom he resembled in many points. he is another instance of king william's discrimination, which was so much superior to that of any of his ministers, johnson was one of the most formidable advocates for the exclusion bill, and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under james accordingly. like asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. i do not know where i could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of johnson's works; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern whigs! a close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. read that page of johnson; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. it is a linked strain throughout. in your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without adhering. asgill evidently formed his style upon johnson's, but he only imitates one part of it. asgill never rises to johnson's eloquence. the latter was a sort of cobbett-burke. james the first thought that, because all power in the state seemed to proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the seed. the constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in two words this:--he is a representative of the whole of that, of which he is himself a part. [footnote : dryden's ben jochanan, in the second part of absalom and achitophel. he was born in , and died in . he was a clergyman. in , when the army was encamped on hounslow heath, he published "a humble and hearty address to all english protestants in the present army." for this he was tried and sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from newgate to tyburn. an attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders, but this failed through an informality. after the revolution he was preferred.--ed.] _may_ . . sir p. sidney.--things are finding their level. when sir philip sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman, and child in the netherlands against philip and d'alva, he told queen elizabeth that it was the spirit of god, and that it was invincible. what is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in england and on the continent at this time? upon my conscience, and judging by st. john's rule, i think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar devil too! * * * * * your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their science--that all things _find_ their level;--which i deny; and say, on the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_ their level like water in a storm. _may_ . . german.--goethe.--god's providence.--man's freedom. german is inferior to english in modifications of expression of the affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all objects of the senses. * * * * * goethe's small lyrics are delightful. he showed good taste in not attempting to imitate shakspeare's witches, which are threefold,--fates, furies, and earthly hags o' the caldron. * * * * * man does not move in cycles, though nature does. man's course is like that of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile. in natural history, god's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. in moral history, god's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom. _june_ . . dom miguel and dom pedro.--working to better one's condition.--negro emancipation.--fox and pitt.--revolution. there can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this government in the portuguese affair; but i wish the tories had left the matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that scoundrel dom miguel. you can never interest the common herd in the abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and though pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother; and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl. * * * * * it is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! and this, too, of a maxim true only, if at all, of england or a part of england, or some other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all asia and africa give the lie. nay, even in england at this day, every man in manchester, birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of idling the rest. i believe st. monday is very well kept by the workmen in london. the love of indolence is universal, or next to it. * * * * * must not the ministerial plan for the west indies lead necessarily to a change of property, either by force or dereliction? i can't see any way of escaping it. * * * * * you are always talking of the _rights_ of the negroes. as a rhetorical mode of stimulating the people of england _here_, i do not object; but i utterly condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the blacks themselves. they ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which their brethren in africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the providence which has placed them within reach of the means of grace. i know no right except such as flows from righteousness; and as every christian believes his righteousness to be imputed, so must his right be an imputed right too. it must flow out of a duty, and it is under that name that the process of humanization ought to begin and to be conducted throughout. * * * * * thirty years ago, and more, pitt availed himself, with great political dexterity, of the apprehension, which burke and the conduct of some of the clubs in london had excited, and endeavoured to inspire into the nation a panic of property. fox, instead of exposing the absurdity of this by showing the real numbers and contemptible weakness of the disaffected, fell into pitt's trap, and was mad enough to exaggerate even pitt's surmises. the consequence was, a very general apprehension throughout the country of an impending revolution, at a time when, i will venture to say, the people were more heart-whole than they had been for a hundred years previously. after i had travelled in sicily and italy, countries where there were real grounds for fear, i became deeply impressed with the difference. now, after a long continuance of high national glory and influence, when a revolution of a most searching and general character is actually at work, and the old institutions of the country are all awaiting their certain destruction or violent modification--the people at large are perfectly secure, sleeping or gambolling on the very brink of a volcano. _june_ . . virtue and liberty.--epistle to the romans.--erasmus.----luther. the necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigour of his self-government. where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. hence, the more virtue the more liberty. * * * * * i think st. paul's epistle to the romans the most profound work in existence; and i hardly believe that the writings of the old stoics, now lost, could have been deeper. undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from the form in which the epistle appears. if we could now arrange this work in the way in which we may be sure st. paul would himself do, were he now alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out clearer. his accumulated parentheses would be thrown into notes, or extruded to the margin. you will smile, after this, if i say that i think i understand st. paul; and i think so, because, really and truly, i recognize a cogent consecutiveness in the argument--the only evidence i know that you understand any book. how different is the style of this intensely passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the epistle to the ephesians!--and how different that of both from the style of the epistles to timothy and titus, which i venture to call [greek: epistolal panloeideiz] erasmus's paraphrase of the new testament is clear and explanatory; but you cannot expect any thing very deep from erasmus. the only fit commentator on paul was luther--not by any means such a gentleman as the apostle, but almost as great a genius. _june_ . . negro emancipation. have you been able to discover any principle in this emancipation bill for the slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large? well! i will not prophesy; and god grant that this tremendous and unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of humanity and freedom which i cannot but fear! but yet, what can be hoped, when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith-- the only miraculous agent amongst men--is not invoked or regarded! and that most unblest phrase--the dissenting _interest_--enters into the question! _june_ . . hacket's life of archbishop williams.--charles i.--manners under edward iii., richard ii., and henry viii. what a delightful and instructive hook bishop hacket's life of archbishop williams is! you learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the civil war than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period. * * * * * charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during james's life. there is nothing dutiful in his demeanour. * * * * * i think the spirit of the court and nobility of edward iii. and richard ii. was less gross than that in the time of henry viii.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry. _june_ . . hypothesis.--suffiction.--theory.--lyell's geology.--gothic architecture. --gerard douw's "schoolmaster" and titian's "venus."--sir j. scarlett. it seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. it is a mere _suffiction_. newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. it was a subposition of something certain. but descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. but your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? it explains nothing. besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the _vis inertiae_: whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass. * * * * * the use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question; it is a collected view, [greek: the_orhia], of all he yet knows in _one_. of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. a theory, therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. the only true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses are true and unalterable. but, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology is altogether accurate, is absurd:--it cannot be true. mr. lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. he affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth. so it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory motion of light;--i believe both; though philosophy has as yet but imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the laws by which they are regulated. * * * * * those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity. * * * * * the principle of the gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. it is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. i was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of king's college chapel.[ ] it is quite unparalleled. i think gerard douw's "schoolmaster," in the fitzwilliam museum, the finest thing of the sort i ever saw;--whether you look at it at the common distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. and that glorious picture of the venus--so perfectly beautiful and perfectly innocent--as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! the french thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the french taste. titian's picture is made quite bestial. [footnote : mr. coleridge visited cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting there in june, .--"my emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university were at first, overwhelming. i could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings were upon the whole very pleasurable, and i have not passed, of late years at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of mind and body. the bed on which i slept--and slept soundly too--was, as near as i can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together. i understand the young men think it hardens them. truly i lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise." he told me "that the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old quaker philosopher dalton's face was like all souls' college." the two persons of whom he spoke with the greatest interest were mr. faraday and mr. thirlwall; saying of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings, into the matured strength of manhood!" for, as mr. coleridge had long before expressed the same thought,--"to find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the ancient of days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. to carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar; 'with sun and moon and stars throughout the year, and man and woman;'-- this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. and therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read burns's comparison of sensual pleasure 'to snow that falls upon a river, a moment white--then gone for ever!'" _biog. lit_. vol. i, p. .--ed.] * * * * * i think sir james scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of cobbett v. the times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of greece or rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients. * * * * * i am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which i fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all. _july_ . . mandeville's fable of the bees.--bestial theory.--character of bertram.-- beaumont and fletcher's dramas.--Ã�schylus, sophocles, euripides,--milton. if i could ever believe that mandeville really meant any thing more by his fable of the bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, i should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world--how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals. by the by, i wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not quoted the pithy lines in mandeville upon this registration question:-- "the lawyers, of whose art the basis was raising feuds and splitting cases, _oppos'd all registers_, that cheats might make more work with dipt estates; as 'twere unlawful that one's own without a lawsuit should be known! they put off hearings wilfully, to finger the refreshing fee; and to defend a wicked cause examined and survey'd the laws, as burglars shops and houses do, to see where best they may break through." there is great hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors are also very terse. * * * * * look at that head of cline, by chantrey! is that forehead, that nose, those temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? no, no. to a man of sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust. * * * * * i cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon bertram in "all's well that ends well." he was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. of course he had never regarded helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. and after all, her _prima facie_ merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king,--a merit, which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry helena as a very tyrannical act. indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all shakspeare's consummate skill to interest us for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters,--the countess, lafeu, &c. we get to like helena from their praising and commending her so much. * * * * * in beaumont and fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. in shakspeare, this is always managed with transcendant skill. the fool in lear contributes in a very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. beaumont and fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids,--neither fish nor flesh,--upon any rules, greek, roman, or gothic: and yet they are very delightful notwithstanding. no doubt, they imitate the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be too much associated to succeed perfectly in this. when i was a boy, i was fondest of Ã�schylus; in youth and middle age i preferred euripides; now in my declining years i admire sophocles. i can now at length see that sophocles is the most perfect. yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of Ã�schylus--simplicity of design, i mean--nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of euripides. i understand why the ancients called euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,-- love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which sophocles seems to have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic drama. certainly euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than sophocles. his choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and affecting they are as odes and songs! i think the famous [greek: euippoy xene], in oedipus coloneus[ ] cold in comparison with many of the odes of euripides, as that song of the chorus in the hippolytus--[greek: "eoos," eoos[ ]] and so on; and i remember a choric ode in the hecuba, which always struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; i mean, where the chorus speaks of troy and the night of the capture.[ ] there is nothing very surprising in milton's preference of euripides, though so unlike himself. it is very common--very natural--for men to _like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from any thing of their own. no jealousy arises. milton preferred ovid too, and i dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman, with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. with aeschylus or sophocles he might perchance have matched himself. in euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and i hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversation. [footnote : greek: euíppoy, xége, tmsde chosas tchoy tà chzátista gãs esaula tdn àxgaeta kolanón'--ch. t. l. v. ] [footnote : greek: "exos" exos, ó chat' ômmátton s tázeos póthon eisagog glycheïan psuchä cháriu oûs èpithtzateúsei mae moi totè sèn chachõ phaneiaes maeô ãrruthmos ëlthois--x.t.l v. ] [footnote : i take it for granted that mr. coleridge alluded to the chorus,-- [greek: su men, _o patrhis ilias t_on aporhth_et_on polis ouketi lexei toion el- lan_on nephos amphi se krhuptei, dorhi d_e, dorhi perhsan--k. t. l.] v. . thou, then, oh, natal troy! no more the city of the unsack'd shalt be, so thick from dark achaia's shore the cloud of war hath covered thee. ah! not again i tread thy plain-- the spear--the spear hath rent thy pride; the flame hath scarr'd thee deep and wide; thy coronal of towers is shorn, and thou most piteous art--most naked and forlorn! i perish'd at the noon of night! when sleep had seal'd each weary eye; when the dance was o'er, and harps no more rang out in choral minstrelsy. in the dear bower of delight my husband slept in joy; his shield and spear suspended near, secure he slept: that sailor band full sure he deem'd no more should stand beneath the walls of troy. and i too, by the taper's light, which in the golden mirror's haze flash'd its interminable rays, bound up the tresses of my hair, that i love's peaceful sleep might share. i slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread, which rolling through the city spread; and this the cry,--"when, sons of greece, when shall the lingering leaguer cease; when will ye spoil troy's watch-tower high, and home return?"--i heard the cry, and, starting from the genial bed, veiled, as a doric maid, i fled, and knelt, diana, at thy holy fane, a trembling suppliant--all in vain.] july . . style.--cavalier slang.--juntos.--prose and verse.--imitation and copy. the collocation of words is so artificial in shakspeare and milton, that you may as well think of pushing a[ ] brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages.[ ] a good lecture upon style might he composed, by taking on the one hand the slang of l'estrange, and perhaps, even of roger north,[ ] which became so fashionable after the restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other, the johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. it is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the cavalier slang style in the divines of charles the second's time. barrow could not of course adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular roger north way--much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. see particularly, for instances of this, his work on the pope's supremacy. south is full of it. the style of junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. when he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the english. horne tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. still the antithesis of junius is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of johnson is rarely more than verbal. the definition of good prose is--proper words in their proper places;--of good verse--the most proper words in their proper places. the propriety is in either case relative. the words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. in the very best styles, as southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;--it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. but in verse you must do more;--there the words, the _media_, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice--yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. this is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the _media_ may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. but the great thing in poetry is, _quocunque modo_, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of hudibras at one time? each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. there is no fusion,--just as it is in seneca. [footnote : they led me to the sounding shore-- heavens! as i passed the crowded way, my bleeding lord before me lay-- i saw--i saw--and wept no more, till, as the homeward breezes bore the bark returning o'er the sea, my gaze, oh ilion, turn'd on thee! then, frantic, to the midnight air, i cursed aloud the adulterous pair:-- "they plunge me deep in exile's woe; they lay my country low: their love--no love! but some dark spell, in vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell. rise, hoary sea, in awful tide, and whelm that vessel's guilty pride; nor e'er, in high mycene's hall, let helen boast in peace of mighty ilion's fall." the translation was given to me by mr. justice coleridge.--ed.] [footnote : "the amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. they are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."-- _quarterly review_, no. ciii. p. .] [footnote : but mr. coleridge took a great distinction between north and the other writers commonly associated with him. in speaking of the examen and the life of lord north, in the friend, mr. c. calls them "two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. the pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. a fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call _slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the restoration of charles the second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. these instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. they are not _sought for_, as is too often and too plainly done by l'estrange, collyer, tom brown, and their imitators. north never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _english_."--vol. ii. p. .--ed.] * * * * * imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. the difference is as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be copy or facsimile. but to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to difference, as in sculpture. july . . dr. johnson.--boswell.--burke.--newton.--milton. dr. johnson's fame now rests principally upon boswell. it is impossible not to be amused with such a book. but his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced;--for no one, i suppose, will set johnson before burke,--and burke was a great and universal talker;--yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in boswell. the fact is, burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.[ ] besides, as to burke's testimony to johnson's powers, you must remember that burke was a great courtier; and after all, burke said and wrote more than once that he thought johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in boswell than in real life.[ ] [footnote : burke, i am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as coleridge. madame de stael told a nephew of the latter, at coppet, that mr. c. was a master of monologue, _mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue_. there was a spice of vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining. and if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, i, for one, will admit that coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed it not. but i am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. in general, it was certainly otherwise. "you must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my talking so long to you--i pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, i can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient." but the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or ultimate ends. you might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely hated.--ed.] [footnote : this was said, i believe, to the late sir james mackintosh.--ed.] * * * * * newton _was_ a great man, but you must excuse me if i think that it would take many newtons to make one milton. _july_ . . painting.----music.----poetry. it is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure stands out of the canvass, or that you start at the likeness of the portrait. take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvass, and place the figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life. or take one of mrs. salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation, of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. look at that flower vase of van huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! the last are likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? none, except to children.[ ] some music is above me; most music is beneath me. i like beethoven and mozart--or else some of the aërial compositions of the elder italians, as palestrina[ ] and carissimi.--and i love purcell. the best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the devil. good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. i feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as milton says he did. i could write as good verses now as ever i did, if i were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. the reason of my not finishing christabel is not, that i don't know how to do it--for i have, as i always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but i fear i could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one. besides, after this continuation of faust, which they tell me is very poor, who can have courage to attempt[ ] a reversal of the judgment of all criticism against continuations? let us except don quixote, however, although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno flatu_ with the original conception. [footnote : this passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even of this little work must have seen, that mr. coleridge had an eye, almost exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. he knew nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition in the other. yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to astonish me. every picture which i have looked at in company with him, seems now, to my mind, translated into english. he would sometimes say, after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one, "there's no use in stopping at this; for i see the painter had no idea. it is mere mechanical drawing. come on; _here_ the artist _meant_ something for the mind." it was just the same with his knowledge of music. his appetite for what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. he told me he could listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away _refreshed_. but he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for rossini, and his reverence for beethoven and mozart--ed.] [footnote : giovanni pierluigi da palestrina was born about , and died in . i believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the italian church music. his masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst lovers of the old composers; but mr. coleridge used to speak with delight of some of palestrina's madrigals which he heard at rome. giacomo carissimi composed about the years -- . his style has been charged with effeminacy; but mr. c. thought it very graceful and chaste. henry purcell needs no addition in england.--ed.] [footnote : "the thing attempted in christabel is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is complete."--_quarterly review_, no. ciii. p. .] _july . ._ public schools. i am clear for public schools as the general rule; but for particular children private education may be proper. for the purpose of moving at ease in the best english society,--mind, i don't call the london exclusive clique the best english society,--the defect of a public education upon the plan of our great schools and oxford and cambridge is hardly to be supplied. but the defect is visible positively in some men, and only negatively in others. the first _offend_ you by habits and modes of thinking and acting directly attributable to their private education; in the others you only regret that the freedom and facility of the established and national mode of bringing up is not _added_ to their good qualities. * * * * * i more than doubt the expediency of making even elementary mathematics a part of the routine in the system of the great schools. it is enough, i think, that encouragement and facilities should be given; and i think more will be thus effected than by compelling all. much less would i incorporate the german or french, or any modern language, into the school labours. i think that a great mistake.[ ] [footnote : "one constant blunder"--i find it so pencilled by mr. c. on a margin--"of these new-broomers--these penny magazine sages and philanthropists, in reference to our public schools, is to confine their view to what schoolmasters teach the boys, with entire oversight of all that the boys are excited to learn from each other and of themselves--with more geniality even because it is not a part of their compelled school knowledge. an eton boy's knowledge of the st. lawrence, mississippi, missouri, orellana, &c. will be, generally, found in exact proportion to his knowledge of the ilissus, hebrus, orontes, &c.; inasmuch as modern travels and voyages are more entertaining and fascinating than cellarius; or robinson crusoe, dampier, and captain cook, than the periegesis. compare the _lads_ themselves from eton and harrow, &c. with the alumni of the new-broom institution, and not the lists of school-lessons; and be that comparison the criterion.--ed.] august , . scott and coleridge. dear sir walter scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for myself, notwithstanding dr. johnson, i believe i should walk over the plain of marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. yet i receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in herodotus, as any one can. charles lamb wrote an essay [ ] on a man who lived in past time:--i thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future,--but beside or collaterally. [footnote : i know not when or where; but are not all the writings of this exquisite genius the effusions of one whose spirit lived in past time? the place which lamb holds, and will continue to hold, in english literature, seems less liable to interruption than that of any other writer of our day.--ed.] august . . nervous weakness.----hooker and bull.-----faith.----a poet's need of praise. a person, nervously weak, has a sensation of weakness which is as bad to him as muscular weakness. the only difference lies in the better chance of removal. * * * * * the fact, that hooker and bull, in their two palmary works respectively, are read in the jesuit colleges, is a curious instance of the power of mind over the most profound of all prejudices. there are permitted moments of exultation through faith, when we cease to feel our own emptiness save as a capacity for our redeemer's fulness. * * * * * there is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-breeding or incubation; a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself, like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. _august_ . . quakers.--philanthropists.--jews. a quaker is made up of ice and flame. he has no composition, no mean temperature. hence he is rarely interested about any public measure but he becomes a fanatic, and oversteps, in his irrespective zeal, every decency and every right opposed to his course. * * * * * i have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in heart somewhere or other. individuals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations,--men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labour and time on the race, the abstract notion. the cosmopolitism which does not spring out of, and blossom upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality or patriotism, is a spurious and rotten growth. * * * * * when i read the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters of the epistle to the romans to that fine old man mr. ----, at ramsgate, he shed tears. any jew of sensibility must be deeply impressed by them. * * * * * the two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, i think, isaiah [ ]--"hear, o heavens, and give ear, o earth!"--and levi of holywell street--"old clothes!"--both of them jews, you'll observe. _immane quantum discrepant!_ [footnote : i remember mr. coleridge used to call isaiah his ideal of the hebrew prophet. he studied that part of the scripture with unremitting attention and most reverential admiration. although mr. c. was remarkably deficient in the technical memory of words, he could say a great deal of isaiah by heart, and he delighted in pointing out the hexametrical rhythm of numerous passages in the english version:-- "hear, o heavens, and give ear, | o earth: for the lord hath spoken. i have nourished and brought up children, | and they have rebelled against me. the ox knoweth his owner, | and the ass his master's crib: but israel doth not know, | my people doth not consider."--ed.] _august_ . . sallust.--thucydides.--herodotus.--gibbon.--key to the decline of the roman empire. i consider the two works of sallust which have come down to us entire, as romances founded on facts; no adequate causes are stated, and there is no real continuity of action. in thucydides, you are aware from the beginning that you are reading the reflections of a man of great genius and experience upon the character and operation of the two great political principles in conflict in the civilized world in his time; his narrative of events is of minor importance, and it is evident that he selects for the purpose of illustration. it is thucydides himself whom you read throughout under the names of pericles, nicias, &c. but in herodotus it is just the reverse. he has as little subjectivity as homer, and, delighting in the great fancied epic of events, he narrates them without impressing any thing as of his own mind upon the narrative. it is the charm of herodotus that he gives you the spirit of his age--that of thucydides, that he reveals to you his own, which was above the spirit of his age. the difference between the composition of a history in modern and ancient times is very great; still there are certain principles upon which the history of a modern period may be written, neither sacrificing all truth and reality, like gibbon, nor descending into mere biography and anecdote. gibbon's style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him. his history has proved an effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and habits of imperial rome. few persons read the original authorities, even those which are classical; and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can be obtained from gibbon's rhetorical sketches. he takes notice of nothing but what may produce an effect; he skips on from eminence to eminence, without ever taking you through the valleys between: in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book concerning any persons or nations from the antonines to the capture of constantinople. when i read a chapter in gibbon, i seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog:--figures come and go, i know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and, as it were, exhibited by candlelight. and then to call it a history of the decline and fall of the roman empire! was there ever a greater misnomer? i protest i do not remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire. how miserably deficient is the narrative of the important reign of justinian! and that poor scepticism, which gibbon mistook for socratic philosophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character and influence of christianity in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have done. gibbon was a man of immense reading; but he had no philosophy; and he never fully understood the principle upon which the best of the old historians wrote. he attempted to imitate their artificial construction of the whole work--their dramatic ordonnance of the parts--without seeing that their histories were intended more as documents illustrative of the truths of political philosophy than as mere chronicles of events. the true key to the declension of the roman empire--which is not to be found in all gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:--the _imperial_ character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. rome under trajan was an empire without a nation. _august_ . . dr. johnson's political pamphlets.--taxation.-direct representation.--- universal suffrage.---right of women to vote----horne tooke.----etymology of the final ive. i like dr. johnson's political pamphlets better than any other parts of his works:-particularly his "taxation no tyranny" is very clever and spirited, though he only sees half of his subject, and that not in a very philosophical manner. plunder--tribute--taxation--are the three gradations of action by the sovereign on the property of the subject. the first is mere violence, bounded by no law or custom, and is properly an act only between conqueror and conquered, and that, too, in the moment of victory. the second supposes law; but law proceeding only from, and dictated by, one party, the conqueror; law, by which he consents to forego his right of plunder upon condition of the conquered giving up to him, of their own accord, a fixed commutation. the third implies compact, and negatives any right to plunder,--taxation being professedly for the direct benefit of the party taxed, that, by paying a part, he may through the labours and superintendence of the sovereign be able to enjoy the rest in peace. as to the right to tax being only commensurate with direct representation, it is a fable, falsely and treacherously brought forward by those who know its hollowness well enough. you may show its weakness in a moment, by observing that not even the universal suffrage of the benthamites avoids the difficulty;--for although it may be allowed to be contrary to decorum that women should legislate; yet there can be no reason why women should not choose their representatives to legislate;--and if it be said that they are merged in their husbands, let it be allowed where the wife has no separate property; but where she has a distinct taxable estate, in which her husband has no interest, what right can her husband have to choose for her the person whose vote may affect her separate interest?--besides, at all events, an unmarried woman of age, possessing one thousand pounds a year, has surely as good a moral right to vote, if taxation without representation is tyranny, as any ten-pounder in the kingdom. the truth, of course, is, that direct representation is a chimera, impracticable in fact, and useless or noxious if practicable. johnson had neither eye nor ear; for nature, therefore, he cared, as he knew, nothing. his knowledge of town life was minute; but even that was imperfect, as not being contrasted with the better life of the country. horne tooke was once holding forth on language, when, turning to me, he asked me if i knew what the meaning of the final _ive_ was in english words. i said i thought i could tell what he, horne tooke himself, thought. "why, what?" said he. "_vis_," i replied; and he acknowledged i had guessed right. i told him, however, that i could not agree with him; but believed that the final _ive_ came from _ick_--_vicus_, [greek: --] a'txaq; the root denoting collectivity and community, and that it was opposed to the final _ing_, which signifies separation, particularity, and individual property, from _ingle_, a hearth, or one man's place or seat: [greek: --] oi'xo?, _vicus_, denoted an aggregation of _ingles_. the alteration of the _c_ and _k_ of the root into the _v_ was evidently the work of the digammate power, and hence we find the _icus_ and _ivus_ indifferently as finals in latin. the precise difference of the etymologies is apparent in these phrases:--- the lamb is spor_tive;_ that is, has a nature or habit of sporting: the lamb is sport_ing;_ that is, the animal is now performing a sport. horne tooke upon this said nothing to my etymology; but i believe he found that he could not make a fool of me, as he did of godwin and some other of his butts. august . . "the lord" in the english version of the psalms, etc.----scotch kirk and irving. it is very extraordinary that, in our translation of the psalms, which professes to be from the hebrew, the name jehovah--[hebrew: --] 'o -- the being, or god--should be omitted, and, instead of it, the [hebrew: --] ktlpio?, or lord, of the septuagint be adopted. the alexandrian jews had a superstitious dread of writing the name of god, and put [greek: kurhios] not as a translation, but as a mere mark or sign--every one readily understanding for what it really stood. we, who have no such superstition, ought surely to restore the jehovah, and thereby bring out in the true force the overwhelming testimony of the psalms to the divinity of christ, the jehovah or manifested god.[ ] [footnote : i find the same remark in the late most excellent bishop sandford's diary, under date th december, :--"[greek: chairhete en t_o kurhi_o kurhios] idem significat quod [hebrew: --] apud hebraeos. hebraei enim nomine [hebrew: --] sanctissimo nempe dei nomine, nunquam in colloquio utebantur, sed vice ejus [hebrew: --] pronuntiabant, quod lxx per [greek: kurhios] exprimebant."--_remains of bishop sandford_, vol. i. p. . mr. coleridge saw this work for the first time many months after making the observation in the text. indeed it was the very last book he ever read. he was deeply interested in the picture drawn of the bishop, and said that the mental struggles and bodily sufferings indicated in the diary had been his own for years past. he conjured me to peruse the memoir and the diary with great care:--"i have received," said he, "much spiritual comfort and strength from the latter. o! were my faith and devotion, like my sufferings, equal to that good man's! he felt, as i do, how deep a depth is prayer in faith." in connection with the text, i may add here, that mr. c. said, that long before he knew that the late bishop middleton was of the same opinion, he had deplored the misleading inadequacy of our authorized version of the expression, [greek: pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os] in the epistle to the colossians, i. .: [greek: hos estin eik_on tou theou tou aoratou, pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os.] he rendered the verse in these words:--"who is the manifestation of god the invisible, the begotten antecedently to all creation;" observing, that in [greek: pr_ototokos] there was a double superlative of priority, and that the natural meaning of "_first-born of every creature_,"--the language of our version,--afforded no premiss for the causal [greek: hoti] in the next verse. the same criticism may be found in the stateman's manual, p. . n.; and see bishop sandford's judgment to the same effect, vol. i. p. .--ed.] * * * * * i cannot understand the conduct of the scotch kirk with regard to poor irving. they might with ample reason have visited him for the monstrous indecencies of those exhibitions of the spirit;--perhaps the kirk would not have been justified in overlooking such disgraceful breaches of decorum; but to excommunicate him on account of his language about christ's body was very foolish. irving's expressions upon this subject are ill judged, inconvenient, in had taste, and in terms false: nevertheless his apparent meaning, such as it is, is orthodox. christ's body--as mere body, or rather carcass (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours;--that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. he was of like passions as we, and was tempted. how could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced? it is irving's error to use declamation, high and passionate rhetoric, not introduced and pioneered by calm and clear logic, which is--to borrow a simile, though with a change in the application, from the witty-wise, but not always wisely-witty, fuller--like knocking a nail into a board, without wimbling a hole for it, and which then either does not enter, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it pierces. august . . milton's egotism.--claudian.--sterne. in the paradise lost--indeed in every one of his poems--it is milton himself whom you see; his satan, his adam, his raphael, almost his eve--are all john milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading milton's works. the egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit. * * * * * claudian deserves more attention than is generally paid to him. he is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. you will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. his power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remarkable, as it is in pope. read particularly the phoenix, and see how the single image of renascence is varied.[ ] [footnote : mr. coleridge referred to claudian's first idyll:--"oceani summo circumfluus cequore lucus trans indos eurumque viret," &c. see the lines-- "hic neque concepto fetu, nec semine surgit; sed pater est prolesque sibi, nulloque creante emeritos artus foecunda morte reformat, et petit alternam totidem per funera vitam. ... et cumulum texens pretiosa fronde sabaeum componit bustumque sibi partumque futurum. ... o senium positure rogo, falsisque sepulcris natales habiture vices, qui saepe renasci exitio, proprioque soles pubescere leto, accipe principium rursus. ... parturiente rogo-- ... victuri cineres-- ... qm fuerat genitor, natus nunc prosilit idem, succeditque novus--- ... o felix, haeresque tui! quo solvimur omnes, hoc tibi suppeditat vires; praebetur origo per cinerem; moritur te non pereunte senectus."--ed.] * * * * * i think highly of sterne--that is, of the first part of tristram shandy: for as to the latter part about the widow wadman, it is stupid and disgusting; and the sentimental journey is poor sickly stuff. there is a great deal of affectation in sterne, to be sure; but still the characters of trim and the two shandies[ ] are most individual and delightful. sterne's morals are bad, but i don't think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women. [footnote : mr. coleridge considered the character of the father, the elder shandy, as by much the finer delineation of the two. i fear his low opinion of the sentimental journey will not suit a thorough sterneist; but i could never get him to modify his criticism. he said, "the oftener you read sterne, the more clearly will you perceive the _great_ difference between tristram shandy and the sentimental journey. there is truth and reality in the one, and little beyond a clever affectation in the other."--ed.] august . . humour and genius.--great poets good men.--diction of the old and new testament version.--hebrew.--vowels and consonants. men of humour are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may amongst other gifts possess wit, as shakspeare. * * * * * genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. in short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower. * * * * * men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking _at_ such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether. * * * * * i quite agree with strabo, as translated by ben jonson in his splendid dedication of the fox[ ]--that there can be no great poet who is not a good man, though not, perhaps, a _goody_ man. his heart must be pure; he must have learned to look into his own heart, and sometimes to look _at_ it; for how can he who is ignorant of his own heart know any thing of, or be able to move, the heart of any one else? [footnote : [greek: 'h de (arhet_e) poi_etou synezeyktai t_e tou anthrh_opou kai ouch oion te agathon genesthai poi_et_en, m_e prhoterhon gen_ethenta angrha agathon.]--lib. i. p. . folio. "for, if men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being the good poet without first being a good man."] * * * * * i think there is a perceptible difference in the elegance and correctness of the english in our versions of the old and new testament. i cannot yield to the authority of many examples of usages which may be alleged from the new testament version. st. paul is very often most inadequately rendered, and there are slovenly phrases which would never have come from ben jonson or any other good prose writer of that day. * * * * * hebrew is so simple, and its words are so few and near the roots, that it is impossible to keep up any adequate knowledge of it without constant application. the meanings of the words are chiefly traditional. the loss of origen's heptaglott bible, in which he had written out the hebrew words in greek characters, is the heaviest which biblical literature has ever experienced. it would have fixed the sounds as known at that time. * * * * * brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants. it is natural, therefore, that the consonants should be marked first, as being the framework of the word; and no doubt a very simple living language might be written quite intelligibly to the natives without any vowel sounds marked at all. the words would be traditionally and conventionally recognized as in short hand--thus--_gd crtd th hvn nd th rth_. i wish i understood arabic; and yet i doubt whether to the european philosopher or scholar it is worth while to undergo the immense labour of acquiring that or any other oriental tongue, except hebrew. _august_ . . greek accent and quantity. the distinction between accent and quantity is clear, and was, no doubt, observed by the ancients in the recitation of verse. but i believe such recitation to have been always an artificial thing, and that the common conversation was entirely regulated by accent. i do not think it possible to _talk_ any language without confounding the quantity of syllables with their high or low tones[ ]; although you may _sing_ or _recitative_ the difference well enough. why should the marks of accent have been considered exclusively necessary for teaching the pronunciation to the asiatic or african hellenist, if the knowledge of the acuted syllable did not also carry the stress of time with it? if _[greek: **anthropos]_ was to be pronounced in common conversation with a perceptible distinction of the length of the penultima as well as of the elevation of the antepenultima, why was not that long quantity also marked? it was surely as important an ingredient in the pronunciation as the accent. and although the letter omega might in such a word show the quantity, yet what do you say to such words as [greek: lelonchasi, tupsasa], and the like--the quantity of the penultima of which is not marked to the eye at all? besides, can we altogether disregard the practice of the modern greeks? their confusion of accent and quantity in verse is of course a barbarism, though a very old one, as the _versus politici_ of john tzetzes [ ] in the twelfth century and the anacreontics prefixed to proclus will show; but these very examples prove _a fortiori_ what the common pronunciation in prose then was. [footnote : this opinion, i need not say, is in direct opposition to the conclusion of foster and mitford, and scarcely reconcilable with the apparent meaning of the authorities from the old critics and grammarians. foster's opponent was for rejecting the accents and attending only to the syllabic quantity;--mr. c. would, _in prose_, attend to the accents only as indicators of the quantity, being unable to conceive any practical distinction between time and tone in common speech. yet how can we deal with the authority of dionysius of halicarnassus alone, who, on the one hand, discriminates quantity so exquisitely as to make four degrees of _shortness_ in the penultimates of _[greek: --hodos hr odos, tz opos]_ and _[greek: --stz ophos]_, and this expressly _[greek: --eu logois psilois]_, or plain prose, as well as in verse; and on the other hand declares, according to the evidently correct interpretation of the passage, that the difference between music and ordinary speech consists in the number only, and not in the quality, of tones:--_[greek: **to poso diallattousa taes su odais kahi oznauois, kahi ouchi to poio_. (pezhi sun. c. .?]) the extreme sensibility of the athenian ear to the accent in prose is, indeed, proved by numerous anecdotes, one of the most amusing of which, though, perhaps, not the best authenticated as a fact, is that of demosthenes in the speech for the crown, asking, "whether, o athenians, does aeschines appear to you to be the mercenary (_[greek: **misthothos]_} of alexander, or his guest or friend (_[greek: **xenos]_)?" it is said that he pronounced _[greek: **misthothos]_ with a false accent on the antepenultima, as _[greek: **misthotos]_, and that upon the audience immediately crying out, by way of correction, _[greek: **misthothos]_, with an emphasis, the orator continued coolly,--_[greek: **achoueis a legousi]_--"you yourself hear what they say!" demosthenes is also said, whether affectedly, or in ignorance, to have sworn in some speech by _[greek: asklaepios]_, throwing the accent falsely on the antepenultima, and that, upon being interrupted for it, he declared, in his justification, that the pronunciation was proper, for that the divinity was _[greek: aepios]_, mild. the expressions in plutarch are very striking:--"[greek: **thozuxon ekinaesen, omnue dhe kahi thon' asklaepion, pzopasoxunon' asklaepion, kai pazedeiknuen autohn ozthos legonta' einai gahz tohn thehon aepion' kahi epi outo polakis hethozuzaethae." dec. orat._--ed.] [footnote : see his chiliads. the sort of verses to which mr. coleridge alluded are the following, which those who consider the scansion to be accentual, take for tetrameter catalectic iambics, like-- [greek: ----] ( _chil_. i. i 'll climb the frost | y mountains high |, and there i 'll coin | the weather; i'll tear the rain | bow from the sky |, and tie both ends | together. some critics, however, maintain these verses to be trochaics, although very loose and faulty. see foster, p. . a curious instance of the early confusion of accent and quantity may be seen in prudentius, who shortens the penultima in _eremus_ and _idola_, from [greek: ezaemos] and [greek: eidola]. cui jejuna _eremi_ saxa loquacibus exundant scatebris, &c. _cathemer_. v. . --cognatumque malum, pigmenta, camoenas, _idola_, conflavit fallendi trina potestas. _cont. symm_. .--ed.] _august . ._ consolation in distress.---mock evangelicals.--autumn day. i am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. i believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. i am something of the quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to _wait_ for the spirit. * * * * * the most common effect of this mock evangelical spirit, especially with young women, is self-inflation and busy-bodyism. * * * * * how strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day! august . . rosetti on dante.--laughter: farce and tragedy. rosetti's view of dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. how could a poet--and such a poet as dante--have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by rosetti? the boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, i think, at first reading. * * * * * to resolve laughter into an expression of contempt is contrary to fact, and laughable enough. laughter is a convulsion of the nerves; and it seems as if nature cut short the rapid thrill of pleasure on the nerves by a sudden convulsion of them, to prevent the sensation becoming painful. aristotle's definition is as good as can be:--surprise at perceiving any thing out of its usual place, when the unusualness is not accompanied by a sense of serious danger. _such_ surprise is always pleasurable; and it is observable that surprise accompanied with circumstances of danger becomes tragic. hence farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is. august . . baron von humboldt.--modern diplomatists. baron von humboldt, brother of the great traveller, paid me the following compliment at rome:--"i confess, mr. coleridge, i had my suspicions that you were here in a political capacity of some sort or other; but upon reflection i acquit you. for in germany and, i believe, elsewhere on the continent, it is generally understood that the english government, in order to divert the envy and jealousy of the world at the power, wealth, and ingenuity of your nation, makes a point, as a _ruse de guerre_, of sending out none but fools of gentlemanly birth and connections as diplomatists to the courts abroad. an exception is, perhaps, sometimes made for a clever fellow, if sufficiently libertine and unprincipled." is the case much altered now, do you know? * * * * * what dull coxcombs your diplomatists at home generally are. i remember dining at mr. frere's once in company with canning and a few other interesting men. just before dinner lord ---- called on frere, and asked himself to dinner. from the moment of his entry he began to talk to the whole party, and in french--all of us being genuine english--and i was told his french was execrable. he had followed the russian army into france, and seen a good deal of the great men concerned in the war: of none of those things did he say a word, but went on, sometimes in english and sometimes in french, gabbling about cookery and dress and the like. at last he paused for a little--and i said a few words remarking how a great image may be reduced to the ridiculous and contemptible by bringing the constituent parts into prominent detail, and mentioned the grandeur of the deluge and the preservation of life in genesis and the paradise lost [ ], and the ludicrous effect produced by drayton's description in his noah's flood:-- "and now the beasts are walking from the wood, as well of ravine, as that chew the cud. the king of beasts his fury doth suppress, and to the ark leads down the lioness; the bull for his beloved mate doth low, and to the ark brings on the fair-eyed cow," &c. hereupon lord ---- resumed, and spoke in raptures of a picture which he had lately seen of noah's ark, and said the animals were all marching two and two, the little ones first, and that the elephants came last in great majesty and filled up the fore-ground. "ah! no doubt, my lord," said canning; "your elephants, wise fellows! staid behind to pack up their trunks!" this floored the ambassador for half an hour. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries almost all our ambassadors were distinguished men. [ ] read lloyd's state worthies. the third-rate men of those days possessed an infinity of knowledge, and were intimately versed not only in the history, but even in the heraldry, of the countries in which they were resident. men were almost always, except for mere compliments, chosen for their dexterity and experience--not, as now, by parliamentary interest. [footnote : genesis, c. vi. vii. par. lost, book xi. v. , &c.] [footnote : yet diego de mendoza, the author of lazarillo de tormes, himself a veteran diplomatist, describes his brethren of the craft, and their duties, in the reigns of charles the emperor and philip the second, in the following terms:-- o embajadores, puros majaderos, que si los reyes quieren engañar, comienzan por nosotros los primeros. _nuestro mayor negocio es, no dañar, y jamas hacer cosa, ni dezilla, que no corramos riesgo de enseñar._ what a pity it is that modern diplomatists, who, for the most part, very carefully observe the precept contained in the last two lines of this passage, should not equally bear in mind the importance of the preceding remark--_that their principal business is just to do no mischief_.--ed.] * * * * * the sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it. what can an english minister abroad really want but an honest and bold heart, a love for his country and the ten commandments? your art diplomatic is stuff:--no truly greatly man now would negotiate upon any such shallow principles. august . . man cannot be stationary.--fatalism and providence.--sympathy in joy. if a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. he cannot stop at the beast. the most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse. * * * * * the conduct of the mohammedan and western nations on the subject of contagious plague illustrates the two extremes of error on the nature of god's moral government of the world. the turk changes providence into fatalism; the christian relies upon it--when he has nothing else to rely on. he does not practically rely upon it at all. * * * * * for compassion a human heart suffices; but for full and adequate sympathy with joy an angel's only. and ever remember, that the more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it. _september_ . . characteristic temperament of nations.--greek particles.--latin compounds.- -propertius.--tibullus.--lucan.--statius.--valerius flaccus.--claudian.-- persius.------prudentius.--hermesianax. the english affect stimulant nourishment--beef and beer. the french, excitants, irritants--nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. the austrians, sedatives--hyoscyamus. the russians, narcotics--opium, tobacco, and beng. * * * * * it is worth particular notice how the style of greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity. so it was with homer as compared with nonnus, tryphiodorus, and the like. in the latter there are in the same number of lines fewer words by one half than in the iliad. all the appoggiaturas of time are lost. all the greek writers after demosthenes and his contemporaries, what are they but the leavings of tyranny, in which a few precious things seem sheltered by the mass of rubbish! yet, whenever liberty began but to hope and strive, a polybius appeared. theocritus is almost the only instance i know of a man of true poetic genius nourishing under a tyranny. the old latin poets attempted to compound as largely as the greek; hence in ennius such words as _belligerentes_, &c. in nothing did virgil show his judgment more than in rejecting these, except just where common usage had sanctioned them, as _omnipotens_ and a few more. he saw that the latin was too far advanced in its formation, and of too rigid a character, to admit such composition or agglutination. in this particular respect virgil's latin is very admirable and deserving preference. compare it with the language of lucan or statius, and count the number of words used in an equal number of lines, and observe how many more short words virgil has. * * * * * i cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration which the ancients expressed for propertius, and i own that tibullus is rather insipid to me. lucan was a man of great powers; but what was to be made of such a shapeless fragment of party warfare, and so recent too! he had fancy rather than imagination, and passion rather than fancy. his taste was wretched, to be sure; still the pharsalia is in my judgment a very wonderful work for such a youth as lucan[ ] was. i think statius a truer poet than lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes. valerius flaccus is very pretty in particular passages. i am ashamed to say, i have never read silius italicus. claudian i recommend to your careful perusal, in respect of his being properly the first of the moderns, or at least the transitional link between the classic and the gothic mode of thought. i call persius hard--not obscure. he had a bad style; but i dare say, if he had lived[ ], he would have learned to express himself in easier language. there are many passages in him of exquisite felicity, and his vein of thought is manly and pathetic. prudentius[ ] is curious for this,--that you see how christianity forced allegory into the place of mythology. mr. frere [greek: ho philokalos, ho kalokagathos] used to esteem the latin christian poets of italy very highly, and no man in our times was a more competent judge than he. [footnote : lucan died by the command of nero, a.d. , in his twenty-sixth year. i think this should be printed at the beginning of every book of the pharsalia.--ed.] [footnote : aulus persius flaccus died in the th year of his age, a.d. .--ed.] [footnote : aurelius prudentius clemens was born a.d. , in spain.--ed.] * * * * * how very pretty are those lines of hermesianax in athenaeus about the poets and poetesses of greece![ ] [footnote : see the fragment from the leontium:-- [greek: hoi_en men philos huios an_egagen oiagrhoio agrhiop_en, thr_essan steilamenos kithar_en aidothen k. t. l.] _athen_. xiii. s. --ed] september . . destruction of jerusalem.--epic poem.--german and english.--modern travels.--paradise lost. i have already told you that in my opinion the destruction of jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect--that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,--in the destruction of jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. the fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming. * * * * * in my judgment, an epic poem must either be national or mundane. as to arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to englishmen. what have _we_ to do with him? milton saw this, and with a judgment at least equal to his genius, took a mundane theme--one common to all mankind. his adam and eve are all men and women inclusively. pope satirizes milton for making god the father talk like a school divine.[ ] pope was hardly the man to criticize milton. the truth is, the judgment of milton in the conduct of the celestial part of his story is very exquisite. wherever god is represented as directly acting as creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, milton adopts the simplest and sternest language of the scriptures. he ventures upon no poetic diction, no amplification, no pathos, no affection. it is truly the voice or the word of the lord coming to, and acting on, the subject chaos. but, as some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, milton takes advantage of the dramatic representation of god's address to the son, the filial alterity, and in _those addresses_ slips in, as it were by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment. indeed, although milton was undoubtedly a high arian in his mature life, he does in the necessity of poetry give a greater objectivity to the father and the son, than he would have justified in argument. he was very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the hebrew scriptures at once. compare the paradise lost with klopstock's messiah, and you will learn to appreciate milton's judgment and skill quite as much as his genius. [footnote : "milton's strong pinion now not heav'n can bound, now, serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground; in quibbles angel and archangel join, and god the father turns a school divine." epist. d book of hor. v. .] * * * * * the conquest of india by bacchus might afford scope for a very brilliant poem of the fancy and the understanding. * * * * * it is not that the german can express external imagery more _fully_ than english; but that it can flash more images _at once_ on the mind than the english can. as to mere power of expression, i doubt whether even the greek surpasses the english. pray, read a very pleasant and acute dialogue in schlegel's athenaeum between a german, a greek, a roman, italian, and a frenchman, on the merits of their respective languages. * * * * * i wish the naval and military officers who write accounts of their travels would just spare us their sentiment. the magazines introduced this cant. let these gentlemen read and imitate the old captains and admirals, as dampier, &c. october . . the trinity.--incarnation.--redemption.--education. the trinity is the idea: the incarnation, which implies the fall, is the fact: the redemption is the mesothesis of the two--that is--the religion. * * * * * if you bring up your children in a way which puts them out of sympathy with the religious feelings of the nation in which they live, the chances are, that they will ultimately turn out ruffians or fanatics--and one as likely as the other. october . . elegy.--lavacrum pallados.--greek and latin pentameter.--milton's latin poems.--poetical filter.--gray and cotton. elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. it _may_ treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject _for itself_; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. as he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. the elegy is the exact opposite of the homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice. the true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself. * * * * * i think the lavacrum pallados of callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of tiresias and minerva.[ ] i have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac couplet of the greeks? i greatly prefer the greek rhythm of the short verse to ovid's, though, observe, i don't dispute his taste with reference to the genius of his own language. augustus schlegel gave me a copy of latin elegiacs on the king of prussia's going down the rhine, in which he had almost exclusively adopted the manner of propertius. i thought them very elegant. [footnote : greek: paides, athanaia numphan mian en poka th_ezais po_olu ti kai pezi d_e philato tan hetezan, mateza teizesiao, kai oupoka ch_ozis egento k.t.l. v , &c.] * * * * * you may find a few minute faults in milton's latin verses; but you will not persuade me that, if these poems had come down to us _as_ written in the age of tiberius, we should not have considered them to be very beautiful. * * * * * i once thought of making a collection,--to be called "the poetical filter,"--upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. you would be surprised at the number of exquisite _wholes_ which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them;--just as whole volumes of wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if i may so call them, of that great man--whilst at the same time five sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of byron or moore or campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. but he has won the battle now, ay! and will wear the crown, whilst english is english. * * * * * i think there is something very majestic in gray's installation ode; but as to the bard and the rest of his lyrics, i must say i think them frigid and artificial. there is more real lyric feeling in cotton's ode on winter.[ ] [footnote : let me borrow mr. wordsworth's account of, and quotation from, this poem:-- "finally, i will refer to cotton's 'ode upon winter,' an admirable composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of fancy. the middle part of this ode contains a most lively description of the entrance of winter, with his retinue, as 'a palsied king,' and yet a military monarch, advancing for conquest with his army; the several bodies of which, and their arms and equipments, are described with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of _fanciful_ comparisons, which indicate, on the part of the poet, extreme activity of intellect, and a correspondent hurry of delightful feeling. he retires from the foe into his fortress, where-- a magazine of sovereign juice is cellared in; liquor that will the siege maintain should phoebus ne'er return again." though myself a water-drinker, i cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing what follows, as an instance still more happy of fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than, in its preceding passages, the poem supplies of her management of forms. 'tis that, that gives the poet rage, and thaws the gelly'd blood of age; matures the young, restores the old, and makes the fainting coward bold. it lays the careful head to rest, calms palpitations in the breast, renders our lives' misfortune sweet; * * * * * then let the _chill_ scirocco blow, and gird us round with hills of snow; or else go whistle to the shore, and make the hollow mountains roar: whilst we together jovial sit careless, and crowned with mirth and wit; where, though bleak winds confine us home, our fancies round the world shall roam. we'll think of all the friends we know, and drink to all worth drinking to; when, having drunk all thine and mine, we rather shall want healths than wine. but where friends fail us, we'll supply our friendships with our charity; men that remote in sorrows live shall by our lusty brimmers thrive. we'll drink the wanting into wealth, and those that languish into health, th' afflicted into joy, th' opprest into security and rest. the worthy in disgrace shall find favour return again more kind, and in restraint who stifled lie shall taste the air of liberty. the brave shall triumph in success, the lovers shall have mistresses, poor unregarded virtue, praise, and the neglected poet, bays. thus shall our healths do others good, whilst we ourselves do all we would; for, freed from envy and from care, what would we be but what we are? _preface to the editions of mr. w.'s poems, in_ and .--ed.] _november_ . . homeric heroes in shakspeare.--dryden.--dr. johnson.--scott's novels.-- scope of christianity. compare nestor, ajax, achilles, &c. in the troilus and cressida of shakspeare with their namesakes in the iliad. the old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since. i scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength and pregnancy of the gothic mind. dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels _get_ hot by driving fast. * * * * * dr. johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing _vivâ voce_ in conversation than with his pen in hand. it seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings i cannot see. his antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite meaning whatever. in his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. he was more excited and in earnest. * * * * * when i am very ill indeed, i can read scott's novels, and they are almost the only books i can then _read_. i cannot at such times read the bible; my mind reflects on it, but i can't bear the open page. * * * * * unless christianity be viewed and felt in a high and comprehensive way, how large a portion of our intellectual and moral nature does it leave without object and action! * * * * * let a young man separate i from me as far as he possibly can, and remove me till it is almost lost in the remote distance. "i am me," is as bad a fault in intellectuals and morals as it is in grammar, whilst none but one--god-- can say, "i am i," or "that i am." _november_ . . times of charles i. how many books are still written and published about charles the first and his times! such is the fresh and enduring interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government! but these books are none of them works of any genius or imagination; not one of these authors seems to be able to throw himself back into that age; if they did, there would be less praise and less blame bestowed on both sides. _december_ . . messenger of the covenant--prophecy.--logic of ideas and of syllogisms. when i reflect upon the subject of the messenger of the covenant, and observe the distinction taken in the prophets between the teaching and suffering christ,--the priest, who was to precede, and the triumphant messiah, the judge, who was to follow,--and how jesus always seems to speak of the son of man in a future sense, and yet always at the same time as identical with himself; i sometimes think that our lord himself in his earthly career was the messenger; and that the way is _now still preparing_ for the great and visible advent of the messiah of glory. i mention this doubtingly. * * * * * what a beautiful sermon or essay might be written on the growth of prophecy!--from the germ, no bigger than a man's hand, in genesis, till the column of cloud gathers size and height and substance, and assumes the shape of a perfect man; just like the smoke in the arabian nights' tale, which comes up and at last takes a genie's shape.[ ] [footnote : the passage in mr. coleridge's mind was, i suppose, the following:--"he (the fisherman) set it before him, and while he looked upon it attentively, there came out a very thick smoke, which obliged him to retire two or three paces from it. the smoke ascended to the clouds, and extending itself along the sea, and upon the shore, formed a great mist, which, we may well imagine, did mightily astonish the fisherman. when the smoke was all out of the vessel, it reunited itself, and became a solid body, of which there was formed a genie twice as high as the greatest of giants." _story of the fisherman_. ninth night.--ed.] * * * * * the logic of ideas is to that of syllogisms as the infinitesimal calculus to common arithmetic; it proves, but at the same time supersedes. _january_ . . landor's poetry.--beauty.--chronological arrangement of works. what is it that mr. landor wants, to make him a poet? his powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. the truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form,--that of stamping _il più nell' uno_. hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid english. * * * * * the useful, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, are distinguishable. you are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed it is opposite, although not contrary. beauty is an immediate presence, between (_inter_) which and the beholder _nihil est_. it is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. i exceedingly regret the loss of those essays on beauty, which i wrote in a bristol newspaper. i would give much to recover them. * * * * * after all you can say, i still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet's works. all your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius. _january_ . . toleration.--norwegians. i have known books written on tolerance, the proper title of which would be--intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next,--those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?--is it fitting to run jesus christ in a silly parallel with socrates--the being whom thousand millions of intellectual creatures, of whom i am a humble unit, take to be their redeemer, with an athenian philosopher, of whom we should know nothing except through his glorification in plato and xenophon?--and then to hitch latimer and servetus together! to be sure there was a stake and a fire in each case, but where the rest of the resemblance is i cannot see. what ground is there for throwing the odium of servetus's death upon calvin alone?--why, the mild melancthon wrote to calvin[ ], expressly to testify his concurrence in the act, and no doubt he spoke the sense of the german reformers; the swiss churches _advised_ the punishment in formal letters, and i rather think there are letters from the english divines, approving calvin's conduct!-- before a man deals out the slang of the day about the great leaders of the reformation, he should learn to throw himself back to the age of the reformation, when the two great parties in the church were eagerly on the watch to fasten a charge of heresy on the other. besides, if ever a poor fanatic thrust, himself into the fire, it was michael servetus. he was a rabid enthusiast, and did every thing he could in the way of insult and ribaldry to provoke the feeling of the christian church. he called the trinity _triceps monstrum et cerberum quendam tripartitum_, and so on. indeed, how should the principle of religious toleration have been acknowledged at first?--it would require stronger arguments than any which i have heard as yet, to prove that men in authority have not a right, involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable, and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition. i am sure that bellarmine would have had small difficulty in turning locke round his fingers' ends upon this ground. a _right_ to protection i can understand; but a _right_ to toleration seems to me a contradiction in terms. some criterion must in any case be adopted by the state; otherwise it might be compelled to admit whatever hideous doctrine and practice any man or number of men may assert to be his or their religion, and an article of his or their faith. it was the same pope who commanded the romanists of england to separate from the national church, which previously their own consciences had not dictated, nor the decision of any council,--and who also commanded them to rebel against queen elizabeth, whom they were bound to obey by the laws of the land; and if the pope had authority for one, he must have had it for the other. the only true argument, as it seems to me, apart from christianity, for a discriminating toleration is, that _it is of no use_ to attempt to stop heresy or schism by persecution, unless, perhaps, it be conducted upon the plan of direct warfare and massacre. you _cannot_ preserve men in the faith by such means, though you may stifle for a while any open appearance of dissent. the experiment has now been tried, and it has failed; and that is by a great deal the best argument for the magistrate against a repetition of it. i know this,--that if a parcel of fanatic missionaries were to go to norway, and were to attempt to disturb the fervent and undoubting lutheranism of the fine independent inhabitants of the interior of that country, i should be right glad to hear that the busy fools had been quietly shipped off--any where. i don't include the people of the seaports in my praise of the norwegians;--i speak of the agricultural population. if that country could be brought to maintain a million more of inhabitants, norway might defy the world; it would be [greek: autarhk_as] and impregnable; but it is much under-handed now. [footnote : melancthon's words are:--"tuo judicio prorsus assentior. affirmo etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, _interfecerunt_." th oct. .--ed.] _january_ . . articles of faith.--modern quakerism.--devotional spirit.--sectarianism.--origen. i have drawn up four or perhaps five articles of faith, by subscription, or rather by assent, to which i think a large comprehension might take place. my articles would exclude unitarians, and i am sorry to say, members of the church of rome, but with this difference--that the exclusion of unitarians would be necessary and perpetual; that of the members of the church of rome depending on each individual's own conscience and intellectual light. what i mean is this:--that the romanists hold the faith in christ,--but unhappily they also hold certain opinions, partly ceremonial, partly devotional, partly speculative, which have so fatal a facility of being degraded into base, corrupting, and even idolatrous practices, that if the romanist will make _them_ of the essence of his religion, he must of course be excluded. as to the quakers, i hardly know what to say. an article on the sacraments would exclude them. my doubt is, whether baptism and the eucharist are properly any _parts_ of christianity, or not rather christianity itself;--the one, the initial conversion or light,--the other, the sustaining and invigorating life;--both together the [greek: ph_os ahi z_oh_a], which are christianity. a line can only begin once; hence, there can be no repetition of baptism; but a line may be endlessly prolonged by continued production; hence the sacrament of love and life lasts for ever. but really there is no knowing what the modern quakers are, or believe, excepting this--that they are altogether degenerated from their ancestors of the seventeenth century. i should call modern quakerism, so far as i know it as a scheme of faith, a socinian calvinism. penn himself was a sabellian, and seems to have disbelieved even the historical fact of the life and death of jesus;--most certainly jesus of nazareth was not penn's christ, if he had any. it is amusing to see the modern quakers appealing now to history for a confirmation of their tenets and discipline--and by so doing, in effect abandoning the strong hold of their founders. as an _imperium in imperio_, i think the original quakerism a conception worthy of lycurgus. modern quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of north america,--apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. modern quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. _bark_ a quaker, and he is a poor creature. * * * * * how much the devotional spirit of the church has suffered by that necessary evil, the reformation, and the sects which have sprung up subsequently to it! all our modern prayers seem tongue-tied. we appear to be thinking more of avoiding an heretical expression or thought than of opening ourselves to god. we do not pray with that entire, unsuspecting, unfearing, childlike profusion of feeling, which so beautifully shines forth in jeremy taylor and andrewes and the writings of some of the older and better saints of the romish church, particularly of that remarkable woman, st. theresa.[ ] and certainly protestants, in their anxiety to have the historical argument on their side, have brought down the origin of the romish errors too late. many of them began, no doubt, in the apostolic age itself;--i say errors-- not heresies, as that dullest of the fathers, epiphanius, calls them. epiphanius is very long and fierce upon the ebionites. there may have been real heretics under that name; but i believe that, in the beginning, the name was, on account of its hebrew meaning, given to, or adopted by, some poor mistaken men--perhaps of the nazarene way--who sold all their goods and lands, and were then obliged to beg. i think it not improbable that barnabas was one of these chief mendicants; and that the collection made by st. paul was for them. you should read rhenferd's account of the early heresies. i think he demonstrates about eight of epiphanius's heretics to be mere nicknames given by the jews to the christians. read "hermas, or the shepherd," of the genuineness of which and of the epistle of barnabas i have no doubt. it is perfectly orthodox, but full of the most ludicrous tricks of gnostic fancy--the wish to find the new testament in the old. this gnosis is perceptible in the epistle to the hebrews, but kept exquisitely within the limit of propriety. in the others it is rampant, and most truly "puffeth up," as st. paul said of it. what between the sectarians and the political economists, the english are denationalized. england i see as a country, but the english nation seems obliterated. what could redintegrate us again? must it be another threat of foreign invasion? [footnote : she was a native of avila in old castile, and a carmelite nun. theresa established an order which she called the "reformed," and which became very powerful. her works are divided into ten books, of which her autobiography forms a remarkable part. she died in , and was canonised by gregory xv. in --ed.] * * * * * i never can digest the loss of most of origen's works: he seems to have been almost the only very great scholar and genius combined amongst the early fathers. jerome was very inferior to him. _january_ . . some men like musical glasses.--sublime and nonsense.--atheist. some men are like musical glasses;--to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet. * * * * * well! that passage is what i call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense. * * * * * how did the atheist get his idea of that god whom he denies? _february_ . . proof of existence of god.--kant's attempt.--plurality of worlds. assume the existence of god,--and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption;--but to set about _proving_ the existence of a god by such means is a mere circle, a delusion. it can be no proof to a good reasoner, unless he violates all syllogistic logic, and presumes his conclusion. kant once set about proving the existence of god, and a masterly effort it was.* but in his later great work, the "critique of the pure reason," he saw its fallacy, and said of it--that _if_ the existence could he _proved_ at all, it must be on the grounds indicated by him. * * * * * i never could feel any force in the arguments for a plurality of worlds, in the common acceptation of that term. a lady once asked me--"what then could be the intention in creating so many great bodies, so apparently useless to us?" i said--i did not know, except perhaps to make dirt cheap. the vulgar inference is _in alio genere_. what in the eye of an intellectual and omnipotent being is the whole sidereal system to the soul of one man for whom christ died? _march_ . . a reasoner. i am by the law of my nature a reasoner. a person who should suppose i meant by that word, an arguer, [ ] would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. i can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact--merely as having happened. it must refer to something within me before i can regard it with any curiosity or care. my mind is always energic--i don't mean energetic; i require in every thing what, for lack of another word, i may call _propriety_,--that is, a reason why the thing _is_ at all, and why it is _there_ or _then_ rather than elsewhere or at another time. [footnote : in his essay, "_der einzig mögliche beweisgrund zu einer demonstration des daseyns gottes_."--"the only possible argument or ground of proof for a demonstration of the existence of god." it was published in ; the "critique" in .--ed.] _march_ . . shakspeare's intellectual action.--crabbe and southey.--peter simple and tom cringle's log. shakspeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of ben jonson or beaumont and fletcher. the latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving b. out of a., and c. out of b., and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength. * * * * * i think crabbe and southey are something alike; but crabbe's poems are founded on observation and real life--southey's on fancy and books. in facility they are equal, though crabbe's english is of course not upon a level with southey's, which is next door to faultless. but in crabbe there is an absolute defect of the high imagination; he gives me little or no pleasure: yet, no doubt, he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature. i read all sorts of books with some pleasure except modern sermons and treatises on political economy. * * * * * i have received a great deal of pleasure from some of the modern novels, especially captain marryat's "peter simple." that book is nearer smollett than any i remember. and "tom cringle's log" in blackwood is also most excellent. _march_ . . chaucer.--shakspeare.--ben jonson.--beaumont and fletcher.--daniel.--massinger. i take unceasing delight in chaucer. his manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.[ ] how exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! the sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in shakspeare and chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. how well we seem to know chaucer! how absolutely nothing do we know of shakspeare! i cannot in the least allow any necessity for chaucer's poetry, especially the canterbury tales, being considered obsolete. let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final _è_ of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as _ocëan_, and _natiön_, &c. as dissyllables,-- or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. this simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of chaucer's verse. [footnote : eighteen years before, mr. coleridge entertained the same feelings towards chaucer:--"through all the works of chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself." _biog. lit_., vol. i. p. .--ed.] * * * * * as to understanding his language, if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty, even as it is; but i should have no objection to see this done:--strike out those words which are now obsolete, and i will venture to say that i will replace every one of them by words still in use out of chaucer himself, or gower his disciple. i don't want this myself: i rather like to see the significant terms which chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candidates for admission into our language; but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned, even by black--_letterati_, for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity. * * * * * shakspeare is of no age. it is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from ben jonson, beaumont and fletcher, &c. his language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. the construction of shakspeare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. his is not the style of the age. more particularly, shakspeare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. read daniel[ ]--the admirable daniel--in his "civil wars," and "triumphs of hymen." the style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day--wordsworth, for example--would use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of shakspeare. ben jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps massinger's is even still nobler. in beaumont and fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms. i believe shakspeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. as i said, he is of no age--nor, i may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. the body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.[ ] [footnote : "this poet's well-merited epithet is that of the '_well-languaged daniel_;' but, likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries, no less than of all succeeding critics, the 'prosaic daniel.' yet those who thus designate this wise and amiable writer, from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction with his metre, in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts, but willingly admit that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his _epistles_ and in his _hymen's triumph_, many and exquisite specimens of that style, which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both."--_biog. lit_., vol. ii. p. .] [footnote : mr. coleridge called shakspeare "_the myriad-minded man_," [greek: au_az muzioyous]--" a phrase," said he, "which i have borrowed from a greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of constantinople. i might have said, that i have _reclaimed_, rather than borrowed, it, for it seems to belong to shakspeare _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae." see biog. lit., vol. ii. p. .--ed.] * * * * * as for editing beaumont and fletcher, the task would be one _immensi laboris_. the confusion is now so great, the errors so enormous, that the editor must use a boldness quite unallowable in any other case. all i can say as to beaumont and fletcher is, that i can point out well enough where something has been lost, and that something so and so was probably in the original; but the law of shakspeare's thought and verse is such, that i feel convinced that not only could i detect the spurious, but supply the genuine, word. _march_ . . lord byron and h. walpole's "mysterious mother."--lewis's "jamaica journal." lord byron, as quoted by lord dover[ ], says, that the "mysterious mother" raises horace walpole above every author living in his, lord byron's, time. upon which i venture to remark, first, that i do not believe that lord byron spoke sincerely; for i suspect that he made a tacit exception in favour of himself at least;--secondly, that it is a miserable mode of comparison which does not rest on difference of kind. it proceeds of envy and malice and detraction to say that a. is higher than b., unless you show that they are _in pari materia_;--thirdly, that the "mysterious mother" is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. no one with a spark of true manliness, of which horace walpole had none, could have written it. as to the blank verse, it is indeed better than rowe's and thomson's, which was execrably bad:--any approach, therefore, to the manner of the old dramatists was of course an improvement; but the loosest lines in shirley are superior to walpole's best. [footnote : in the memoir prefixed to the correspondence with sir h. mann. lord byron's words are:--"he is the _ultimus romanorum_, the author of the 'mysterious mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love play. he is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy, in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who he may."--_preface to marino faliero_. is not "romeo and juliet" a love play? --but why reason about such insincere, splenetic trash?--ed.] * * * * * lewis's "jamaica journal" is delightful; it is almost the only unaffected book of travels or touring i have read of late years. you have the man himself, and not an inconsiderable man,--certainly a much finer mind than i supposed before from the perusal of his romances, &c. it is by far his best work, and will live and be popular. those verses on the hours are very pretty; but the isle of devils is, like his romances,--a fever dream-- horrible, without point or terror. _april_ . . sicily.--malta--sir alexander ball. i found that every thing in and about sicily had been exaggerated by travellers, except two things--the folly of the government and the wretchedness of the people. _they_ did not admit of exaggeration. really you may learn the fundamental principles of political economy in a very compendious way, by taking a short tour through sicily, and simply reversing in your own mind every law, custom, and ordinance you meet with. i never was in a country in which every thing proceeding from man was so exactly wrong. you have peremptory ordinances _against_ making roads, taxes on the passage of common vegetables from one miserable village to another, and so on. by the by, do you know any parallel in modern history to the absurdity of our giving a legislative assembly to the sicilians? it exceeds any thing i know. this precious legislature passed two bills before it was knocked on the head: the first was, to render lands inalienable; and the second, to cancel all debts due before the date of the bill. and then consider the gross ignorance and folly of our laying a tax upon the sicilians! taxation in its proper sense can only exist where there is a free circulation of capital, labour, and commodities throughout the community. but to tax the people in countries like sicily and corsica, where there is no internal communication, is mere robbery and confiscation. a crown taken from a corsican living in the sierras would not get back to him again in ten years. * * * * * it is interesting to pass from malta to sicily--from the highest specimen of an inferior race, the saracenic, to the most degraded class of a superior race, the european. * * * * * no tongue can describe the moral corruption of the maltese when the island was surrendered to us. there was not a family in it in which a wife or a daughter was not a kept mistress. a marquis of ancient family applied to sir alexander ball to be appointed his valet. "my valet!" said ball, "what can you mean, sir?" the marquis said, he hoped he should then have had the honour of presenting petitions to his excellency. "oh, that is it, is it!" said sir alexander: "my valet, sir, brushes my clothes, and brings them to me. if he dared to meddle with matters of public business, i should kick him down stairs." in short, malta was an augean stable, and ball had all the inclination to be a hercules.[ ] his task was most difficult, although his qualifications were most remarkable. i remember an english officer of very high rank soliciting him for the renewal of a pension to an abandoned woman who had been notoriously treacherous to us. that officer had promised the woman as a matter of course--she having sacrificed her daughter to him. ball was determined, as far as he could, to prevent malta from being made a nest of home patronage. he considered, as was the fact, that there was a contract between england and the maltese. hence the government at home, especially dundas, disliked him, and never allowed him any other title than that of civil commissioner. we have, i believe, nearly succeeded in alienating the hearts of the inhabitants from us. every officer in the island ought to be a maltese, except those belonging to the immediate executive: _l_. per annum to a maltese, to enable him to keep a gilt carriage, will satisfy him where an englishman must have _l_. [footnote : i refer the reader to the five concluding essays of the third volume of the "friend," as a specimen of what mr. c. might have done as a biographer if an irresistible instinct had not devoted him to profounder labours. as a sketch--and it pretends to nothing more--is there any thing more perfect in our literature than the monument raised in those essays to the memory of sir alexander ball?--and there are some touches added to the character of nelson, which the reader, even of southey's matchless life of our hero, will find both new and interesting.--ed.] _may_ . . cambridge petition to admit dissenters. there are, to my grief, the names of some men to the cambridge petition for admission of the dissenters to the university, whose cheeks i think must have burned with shame at the degrading patronage and befouling eulogies of the democratic press, and at seeing themselves used as the tools of the open and rancorous enemies of the church. how miserable to be held up for the purpose of inflicting insult upon men, whose worth and ability and sincerity you well know,--and this by a faction banded together like obscene dogs and cats and serpents, against a church which you profoundly revere! the _time_--the _time_--the _occasion_ and the _motive_ ought to have been argument enough, that even if the measure were right or harmless in itself, not _now_, nor with such as _these_, was it to be effected! _may_ . . corn laws. those who argue that england may safely depend upon a supply of foreign corn, if it grow none or an insufficient quantity of its own, forget that they are subjugating the necessaries of life itself to the mere luxuries or comforts of society. is it not certain that the price of corn abroad will be raised upon us as soon as it is once known that we _must_ buy?--and when that fact is known, in what sort of a situation shall we be? besides this, the argument supposes that agriculture is not a positive good to the nation, taken in and by itself, as a mode of existence for the people, which supposition is false and pernicious; and if we are to become a great horde of manufacturers, shall we not, even more than at present, excite the ill will of all the manufacturers of other nations? it has been already shown, in evidence which is before all the world, that some of our manufacturers have acted upon the accursed principle of deliberately injuring foreign manufactures, if they can, even to the ultimate disgrace of the country and loss to themselves. _may_ . . christian sabbath. how grossly misunderstood the genuine character of the christian sabbath, or lord's day, seems to be even by the church! to confound it with the jewish sabbath, or to rest its observance upon the fourth commandment, is, in my judgment, heretical, and would so have been considered in the primitive church. that cessation from labour on the lord's day could not have been absolutely incumbent on christians for two centuries after christ, is apparent; because during that period the greater part of the christians were either slaves or in official situations under pagan masters or superiors, and had duties to perform for those who did not recognize the day. and we know that st. paul sent back onesimus to his master, and told every christian slave, that, being a christian, he was free in his mind indeed, but still must serve his earthly master, although he might laudably seek for his personal freedom also. if the early christians had refused to work on the lord's day, rebellion and civil war must have been the immediate consequences. but there is no notice of any such cessation. the jewish sabbath was commemorative of the termination of the great act of creation; it was to record that the world had not been from eternity, nor had arisen as a dream by itself, but that god had created it by distinct acts of power, and that he had hallowed the day or season in which he rested or desisted from his work. when our lord arose from the dead, the old creation was, as it were, superseded, and the new creation then began; and therefore the first day and not the last day, the commencement and not the end, of the work of god was solemnized. luther, in speaking of the _good by itself_, and the good _for its expediency alone_, instances the observance of the christian day of rest,-- a day of repose from manual labour, and of activity in spiritual labour,--a day of joy and co-operation in the work of christ's creation. "keep it holy"--says he--"for its use' sake,--both to body and soul! but if any where the day is made holy for the mere day's sake,--if any where any one sets up its observance upon a jewish foundation, then i order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it--to do any thing that shall reprove this encroachment on the christian spirit and liberty." the early church distinguished the day of christian rest so strongly from a fast, that it was unlawful for a man to bewail even _his own sins_, as such only, on that day. he was to bewail the sins of _all_, and to pray as one of the whole of christ's body. and the english reformers evidently took the same view of the day as luther and the early church. but, unhappily, our church, in the reigns of james and charles the first, was so identified with the undue advancement of the royal prerogative, that the puritanical judaizing of the presbyterians was but too well seconded by the patriots of the nation, in resisting the wise efforts of the church to prevent the incipient alteration in the character of the day of rest. after the restoration, the bishops and clergy in general adopted the view taken and enforced by their enemies. by the by, it is curious to observe, in this semi-infidel and malthusian parliament, how the sabbatarian spirit unites itself with a rancorous hostility to that one institution, which alone, according to reason and experience, can insure the continuance of any general religion at all in the nation at large. some of these gentlemen, who are for not letting a poor labouring man have a dish of baked potatoes on a sunday, _religionis gratia_--(god forgive that audacious blasphemy!)--are foremost among those who seem to live but in vilifying, weakening, and impoverishing the national church. i own my indignation boils over against such contemptible fellows. i sincerely wish to preserve a decent quiet on sunday. i would prohibit compulsory labour, and put down operas, theatres, &c., for this plain reason--that if the rich be allowed to play, the poor will be forced, or, what comes to the same thing, will be induced, to work. i am not for a paris sunday. but to stop coaches, and let the gentleman's carriage run, is monstrous. _may_ . . high prizes and revenues of the church. your argument against the high prizes in the church might be put strongly thus:--admit that in the beginning it might have been fairly said, that some eminent rewards ought to be set apart for the purpose of stimulating and rewarding transcendant merit; what have you to say now, after centuries of experience to the contrary?--_have_ the high prizes been given to the highest genius, virtue, or learning? is it not rather the truth, as jortin said, that twelve votes in a contested election will do more to make a man a bishop than an admired commentary on the twelve minor prophets?--to all which and the like i say again, that you ought not to reason from the abuse, which may be rectified, against the inherent uses of the thing. _appoint_ the most deserving--and the prize _will_ answer its purpose. as to the bishops' incomes,--in the first place, the net receipts--that which the bishops may spend--have been confessedly exaggerated beyond measure; but, waiving that, and allowing the highest estimate to be correct, i should like to have the disposition of the episcopal revenue in any one year by the late or the present bishop of durham, or the present bishops of london or winchester, compared with that of the most benevolent nobleman in england of any party in politics. i firmly believe that the former give away in charity of one kind or another, public, official, or private, three times as much in proportion as the latter. you may have a hunks or two now and then; but so you would much more certainly, if you were to reduce the incomes to _l_. per annum. as a body, in my opinion the clergy of england do in truth act as if their property were impressed with a trust to the utmost extent that can be demanded by those who affect to believe, ignorantly or not, that lying legend of a tripartite or quadripartite division of the tithe by law. _may . ._ sir c. wetherell's speech.--national church.--dissenters.--papacy.---- universities. i think sir charles wetherell's speech before the privy council very effective. i doubt if any other lawyer in westminster hall could have done the thing so well. * * * * * the national church requires, and is required by, the christian church, for the perfection of each. for if there were no national church, the mere spiritual church would either become, like the papacy, a dreadful tyranny over mind and body;--or else would fall abroad into a multitude of enthusiastic sects, as in england in the seventeenth century. it is my deep conviction that, in a country of any religion at all, liberty of conscience can only be permanently preserved by means and under the shadow of a national church--a political establishment connected with, but distinct from, the spiritual church. * * * * * i sometimes hope that the undisguised despotism of temper of the dissenters may at last awaken a jealousy in the laity of the church of england. but the apathy and inertness are, i fear, too profound--too providential. * * * * * whatever the papacy may have been on the continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. it destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. the papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;--it affects, _temporally_, to do that which the spiritual church of christ can alone do--to break down the natural distinctions of nations. now, as the roman papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations. the institution of universities was the single check on the papacy. the pope always hated and maligned the universities. the old coenobitic establishments of england were converted--perverted, rather--into monasteries and other monking receptacles. you see it was at oxford that wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement. _june_ . . schiller's versification.--german blank verse. schiller's blank verse is bad. he moves in it as a fly in a glue bottle. his thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. how different from shakspeare's endless rhythms! there is a nimiety--a too-muchness--in all germans. it is the national fault. leasing had the best notion of blank verse. the trochaic termination of german words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. we have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close _ad libitum._ _june_ . . roman catholic emancipation.--duke of wellington.--coronation oath. the roman catholic emancipation act--carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was--was in effect a surinam toad;--and the reform bill, the dissenters' admission to the universities, and the attack on the church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute. * * * * * if you say there is nothing in the romish religion, sincerely felt, inconsistent with the duties of citizenship and allegiance to a territorial protestant sovereign, _cadit quæstio_. for if _that_ is once admitted, there can be no answer to the argument from numbers. certainly, if the religion of the majority of the _people_ be innocuous to the interests of the _nation_, the majority have a natural right to be trustees of the nationalty--that property which is set apart for the nation's use, and rescued from the gripe of private hands. but when i say--_for the nation's use_.--i mean the very reverse of what the radicals mean. they would convert it to relieve taxation, which i call a private, personal, and perishable use. a nation's uses are immortal. * * * * * how lamentable it is to hear the duke of wellington expressing himself doubtingly on the abominable sophism that the coronation oath only binds the king as the executive power--thereby making a highgate oath of it. but the duke is conscious of the ready retort which his language and conduct on the emancipation bill afford to his opponents. he is hampered by that affair. _june_ . . corn laws.--modern political economy. in the argument on the corn laws there is a [greek: metazasis eis allo gevos]. it may be admitted that the great principles of commerce require the interchange of commodities to be free; but commerce, which is barter, has no proper range beyond luxuries or conveniences;--it is properly the complement to the full existence and development of a state. but how can it be shown that the principles applicable to an interchange of conveniences or luxuries apply also to an interchange of necessaries? no state can be such properly, which is not self-subsistent at least; for no state that is not so, is essentially independent. the nation that cannot even exist without the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation. in common times, indeed, pecuniary interest will prevail, and prevent a ruinous exercise of the power which the nation supplying the necessary must have over the nation which has only the convenience or luxury to return; but such interest, both in individuals and nations, will yield to many stronger passions. is holland any authority to the contrary? if so, tyre and sidon and carthage were so! would you put england on a footing with a country, which can be overrun in a campaign, and starved in a year? * * * * * the entire tendency of the modern or malthusian political economy is to denationalize. it would dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of ephesus to burn as fuel for a steam-engine! _june_ . . mr. ----, in his poem, makes trees coeval with chaos;--which is next door to hans sachse[ ] who, in describing chaos, said it was so pitchy dark, that even the very _cats_ ran against each other! [footnote : hans sachse was born , and died .--ed], _june_ . . socinianism.--unitarianism.--fancy and imagination. faustus socinus worshipped jesus christ, and said that god had given him the power of being omnipresent. davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men;--that a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer god in essence than the vulgarest of the race. prayer, therefore, was inapplicable. and how could a _man_ be a mediator between god and man? how could a _man_ with sins himself offer any compensation for, or expiation of, sin, unless the most arbitrary caprice were admitted into the counsels of god?--and so, at last, you see, it was discovered by the better logicians amongst the socinians, that there was no such thing as sin at all. it is wonderful how any socinian can read the works of philo judæus without some pause of doubt in the truth of his views as to the person of christ. whether philo wrote on his own ground as a jew, or borrowed from the christians, the testimony as to the then jewish expectation and belief, is equally strong. you know philo calls the logos [greek: yios theoy], the _son of god_, and [greek: agap_athon te non], _beloved son_. he calls him [greek: arhchierheus], _high priest_, [greek: deuterhos thehos], _second divinity_, [greek: ei an theoy], _image of god_, and describes him as [greek: eggutat_o m_adenhos ovtos methorhioy diast_amatos], the _nearest possible to god without any intervening separation_. and there are numerous other remarkable expressions of the same sort. my faith is this:--god is the absolute will: it is his name and the meaning of it. it is the hypostasis. as begetting his own alterity, the jehovah, the manifested--he is the father; but the love and the life--the spirit-- proceeds from both. i think priestley must be considered the author of the modern unitarianism. i owe, under god, my return to the faith, to my having gone much further than the unitarians, and so having come round to the other side. i can truly say, i never falsified the scripture. i always told them that their interpretations of the scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that, if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their maker, they would be scouted out of society. i said then plainly and openly, that it was clear enough that john and paul were not unitarians. but at that time i had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and i thought nothing could counterbalance that. "what care i," i said, "for the platonisms of john, or the rabbinisms of paul?-- my conscience revolts!" that was the ground of my unitarianism. always believing in the government of god, i was a fervent optimist. but as i could not but see that the present state of things was not the best, i was necessarily led to look forward to some future state. * * * * * you may conceive the difference in kind between the fancy and the imagination in this way,--that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. the fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; as in the well-known passage in hudibras: "the sun had long since in the lap of thetis taken out his nap, and like a lobster boyl'd, the morn from black to red began to turn."[ ] the imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, _il più nell' uno_. there is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in milton; and the dramatic, of which shakspeare is the absolute master. the first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the messiah to battle[ ], the poet, by one touch from himself-- --"far off their coming shone!"-- makes the whole one image. and so at the conclusion of the description of the appearance of the entranced angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate,--the reader is brought back to the single image by-- "he call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep of hell resounded."[ ] the dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in lear throughout. [footnote : part ii. c. . v. .] [footnote : ----"forth rush'd with whirlwind sound the chariot of paternal deity, flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel undrawn, itself instinct with spirit, but convoy'd by four cherubic shapes; four faces each had wonderous; as with stars their bodies all and wings were set with eyes; with eyes the wheels of beryl, and careering fires between; over their heads a crystal firmament, whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure amber, and colours of the showery arch. he, in celestial panoply all arm'd of radiant urim, work divinely wrought, ascended; at his right hand victory sat eagle-wing'd; beside him hung his bow and quiver, with three-bolted thunder stored; and from about him fierce effusion roll'd of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire; attended with ten thousand thousand saints, he onward came; _far off their coming shone;_ and twenty thousand (i their number heard) chariots of god, half on each hand, were seen: he on the wings of cherub rode sublime on the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned, illustrious far and wide; but by his own first seen."--p. l. b. vi. v. , &c.] [footnote : ----"and call'd his legions, angel forms, who lay intranced thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in vallombrosa, where th' etrurian shades, high over arch'd, embower; or scatter'd sedge afloat, when with fierce winds orion arm'd hath vex'd the red sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew busiris, and his memphian chivalry, while with perfidious hatred they pursued the sojourners of goshen, who beheld from the safe shore their floating carcasses and broken chariot wheels; so thick bestrewn, abject and lost lay these, covering the flood, under amazement of their hideous change. _he call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep of hell resounded_."--p. l. b. i. v. , &c.] * * * * * at the very outset, what are we to think of the soundness of this modern system of political economy, the direct tendency of every rule of which is to denationalize, and to make the love of our country a foolish superstition? _june_ . . mr. coleridge's system.--biographia literahia.--dissenters. you may not understand my system, or any given part of it,--or by a determined act of wilfulness, you may, even though perceiving a ray of light, reject it in anger and disgust:--but this i will say,--that if you once master it, or any part of it, you cannot hesitate to acknowledge it as the truth. you cannot be sceptical about it. the metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the "biographia literaria" is unformed and immature;--it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. it is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. the circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense. * * * * * the generation of the modern worldly dissenter was thus: presbyterian, arian, socinian, and last, unitarian. * * * * * is it not most extraordinary to see the dissenters calling themselves the descendants of the old nonconformists, and yet clamouring for a divorce of church and state? why--baxter, and the other great leaders, would have thought a man an atheist who had proposed such a thing. _they_ were rather for merging the state _in_ the church. but these our modern gentlemen, who are blinded by political passion, give the kiss of alliance to the harlot of rome, and walk arm in arm with those who deny the god that redeemed them, if so they may but wreak their insane antipathies on the national church! well! i suppose they have counted the cost, and know what it is they would have, and can keep. _july_ . . lord brooke.--barrow and dryden.--peter wilkins and stothard.--fielding and richardson.--bishop sandford.--roman catholic religion. i do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in english than the consolation addressed by lord brooke (fulke greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. the diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste. * * * * * barrow often debased his language merely to evidence his loyalty. it was, indeed, no easy task for a man of so much genius, and such a precise mathematical mode of thinking, to adopt even for a moment the slang of l'estrange and tom brown; but he succeeded in doing so sometimes. with the exception of such parts, barrow must be considered as closing the first great period of the english language. dryden began the second. of course there are numerous subdivisions. * * * * * peter wilkins is to my mind a work of uncommon beauty; and yet stothard's illustrations have _added_ beauties to it. if it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for stothard's designs. they give me great pleasure. i believe that robinson crusoe and peter wilkins could only have been written by islanders. no continentalist could have conceived either tale. davis's story is an imitation of peter wilkins; but there are many beautiful things in it; especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside--she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers--to be like him! it would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, _ejusdem generis_, to robinson crusoe and peter wilkins. i once projected such a thing; but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. perhaps la motte fouqué might effect something; but i should fear that neither he, nor any other german, could entirely understand what may be called the "_desert island_" feeling. i would try the marvellous line of peter wilkins, if i attempted it, rather than the _real_ fiction of robinson crusoe. * * * * * what a master of composition fielding was! upon my word, i think the oedipus tyrannus, the alchemist, and tom jones the three most perfect plots ever planned. and how charming, how wholesome, fielding always is! to take him up after richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in may. * * * * * i have been very deeply interested in the account of bishop sandford's life, published by his son. he seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of st. paul, whose manners were the finest of any man's upon record. * * * * * i think i could have conformed to the then dominant church before the reformation. the errors existed, but they had not been riveted into peremptory articles of faith before the council of trent. if a romanist were to ask me the question put to sir henry wotton, [ ]i should content myself by answering, that i could not exactly say when my religion, as he was pleased to call it, began--but that it was certainly some sixty or seventy years before _his_, at all events--which began at the council of trent. [footnote : "having, at his being in rome, made acquaintance with a pleasant priest, who invited him, one evening, to hear their vesper music at church; the priest, seeing sir henry stand obscurely in a corner, sends to him by a boy of the choir this question, writ in a small piece of paper;--'where was your religion to be found before luther?' to which question sir henry presently underwrit;--'my religion was to be found then, where yours is not to be found now--in the written word of god.'"--_isaak walton's life of sir henry wotton_.] _july_ . . _euthanasia._ i am, dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of youth and hope-- those twin realities of this phantom world! i do not add love,--for what is love but youth and hope embracing, and so seen as _one?_ i say _realities_; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the iliad to a dream; [greek: *ai g_or t onar e di s esti]. yet, in a strict sense, reality is not predicable at all of aught below heaven. "es enim _in coelis_, pater noster, qui tu vere _es!_" hooker wished to live to finish his ecclesiastical polity;--so i own i wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my philosophy. for, as god hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. but _visum aliter deo_, and his will be done. * * * * * ** this note may well finish the present specimens. what followed was for the memory of private friends only. mr. coleridge was then extremely ill; but certainly did not believe his end to be quite so near at hand as it was.--ed. the following recollections of mr. coleridge, written in may, , have been also communicated to me by my brother, mr. justice coleridge:-- " _th april_, , _at richmond_. "we got on politics, and he related some curious facts of the prince and perceval. then, adverting to the present state of affairs in portugal, he said that he rejoiced not so much in the mere favourable turn, as in the end that must now be put to the base reign of opinion respecting the superiority and invincible skill of the french generals. brave as sir john moore was, he thought him deficient in that greater and more essential manliness of soul which should have made him not hold his enemy in such fearful respect, and which should have taught him to care less for the opinion of the world at home. "we then got, i know not how, to german topics. he said that the language of their literature was entirely factitious, and had been formed by luther from the two dialects, high and low german; that he had made it, grammatically, most correct, more so, perhaps, than any other language; it was equal to the greek, except in harmony and sweetness. and yet the germans themselves thought it sweet;--klopstock had repeated to him an ode of his own to prove it, and really had deceived himself, by the force of association, into a belief that the harsh sounds, conveying, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. mr. c. was asked what he thought of klopstock. he answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in germany; that an englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of young, the bombast of hervey, and the minute description of richardson. as to sublimity, he had, with all germans, one rule for producing it;--it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to elevate. thus, for example, klopstock says,--'as the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the creator scatter worlds with his right hand.' here _worlds_, a large object, are made small in the hands of the creator; consequently, the creator is very great. in short, the germans were not a poetical nation in the very highest sense. wieland was their best poet: his subject was bad, and his thoughts often impure; but his language was rich and harmonious, and his fancy luxuriant. sotheby's translation had not at all caught the manner of the original. but the germans were good metaphysicians and critics: they criticised on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with english critics. "young, he said, was not a poet to be read through at once. his love of point and wit had often put an end to his pathos and sublimity; but there were parts in him which must be immortal. he (mr. c.) loved to read a page of young, and walk out to think of him. "returning to the germans, he said that the state of their religion, when he was in germany, was really shocking. he had never met one clergyman a christian; and he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the gospel. he instanced, i think, paulus, whose lectures he had attended. the object was to resolve the miracles into natural operations; and such a disposition evinced was the best road to preferment. he severely censured mr. taylor's book, in which the principles of paulus were explained and insisted on with much gratuitous indelicacy. he then entered into the question of socinianism, and noticed, as i recollect, the passage in the old testament; 'the people bowed their faces, and _worshipped_ god and the king.' he said, that all worship implied the presence of the object worshipped: the people worshipped, bowing to the sensuous presence of the one, and the conceived omnipresence of the other. he talked of his having constantly to defend the church against the socinian bishop of llandaff, watson. the subject then varied to roman catholicism, and he gave us an account of a controversy he had had with a very sensible priest in sicily on the worship of saints. he had driven the priest from one post to another, till the latter took up the ground, that though the saints were not omnipresent, yet god, who was so, imparted to them the prayers offered up, and then they used their interference with him to grant them. 'that is, father, (said c. in reply)--excuse my seeming levity, for i mean no impiety--that is; i have a deaf and dumb wife, who yet understands me, and i her, by signs. you have a favour to ask of me, and want my wife's interference; so you communicate your request to me, who impart it to her, and she, by signs back again, begs me to grant it.' the good priest laughed, and said, '_populus milt decipi, et decipiatur!_' "we then got upon the oxford controversy, and he was decidedly of opinion that there could be no doubt of copleston's complete victory. he thought the review had chosen its points of attack ill, as there must doubtless be in every institution so old much to reprehend and carp at. on the other hand, he thought that copleston had not been so severe or hard upon them as he might have been; but he admired the critical part of his work, which he thought very highly valuable, independently of the controversy. he wished some portion of mathematics was more essential to a degree at oxford, as he thought a gentleman's education incomplete without it, and had himself found the necessity of getting up a little, when he could ill spare the time. he every day more and more lamented his neglect of them when at cambridge, "then glancing off to aristotle, he gave a very high character of him. he said that bacon objected to aristotle the grossness of his examples, and davy now did precisely the same to bacon: both were wrong; for each of those philosophers wished to confine the attention of the mind in their works to the _form_ of reasoning only, by which other truths might be established or elicited, and therefore the most trite and common-place examples were in fact the best. he said that during a long confinement to his room, he had taken up the schoolmen, and was astonished at the immense learning and acute knowledge displayed by them; that there was scarcely any thing which modern philosophers had proudly brought forward as their own, which might not be found clearly and systematically laid down by them in some or other of their writings. locke had sneered at the schoolmen unfairly, and had raised a foolish laugh against them by citations from their _quid libet_ questions, which were discussed on the eyes of holydays, and in which the greatest latitude was allowed, being considered mere exercises of ingenuity. we had ridiculed their _quiddities_, and why? had we not borrowed their _quantity_ and their _quality_, and why then reject their _quiddity_, when every schoolboy in logic must know, that of every thing may be asked, _quantum est? quale est?_ and _quid est?_ the last bringing you to the most material of all points, its individual being. he afterwards stated, that in a history of speculative philosophy which he was endeavouring to prepare for publication, he had proved, and to the satisfaction of sir james mackintosh, that there was nothing in locke which his best admirers most admired, that might not be found more clearly and better laid down in descartes or the old schoolmen; not that he was himself an implicit disciple of descartes, though he thought that descartes had been much misinterpreted. "when we got on the subject of poetry and southey, he gave us a critique of the curse of kehama, the fault of which he thought consisted in the association of a plot and a machinery so very wild with feelings so sober and tender: but he gave the poem high commendation, admired the art displayed in the employment of the hindu monstrosities, and begged us to observe the noble feeling excited of the superiority of virtue over vice; that kehama went on, from the beginning to the end of the poem, increasing in power, whilst kailyal gradually lost her hopes and her protectors; and yet by the time we got to the end, we had arrived at an utter contempt and even carelessness of the power of evil, as exemplified in the almighty rajah, and felt a complete confidence in the safety of the unprotected virtue of the maiden. this he thought the very great merit of the poem. "when we walked home with him to the inn, he got on the subject of the english essay for the year at oxford, and thought some consideration of the corruption of language should he introduced into it. [footnote: on etymology.] it originated, he thought, in a desire to abbreviate all expression as much as possible; and no doubt, if in one word, without violating idiom, i can express what others have done in more, and yet be as fully and easily understood, i have manifestly made an improvement; but if, on the other hand, it becomes harder, and takes more time to comprehend a thought or image put in one word by apuleius than when expressed in a whole sentence by cicero, the saving is merely of pen and ink, and the alteration is evidently a corruption." _"april_ .--richmond._ "before breakfast we went into mr. may's delightful book-room, where he was again silent in admiration of the prospect. after breakfast, we walked to church. he seemed full of calm piety, and said he always felt the most delightful sensations in a sunday church-yard,--that it struck him as if god had given to man fifty-two springs in every year. after the service, he was vehement against the sermon, as common-place, and invidious in its tone towards the poor. then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of the day, as affording fit subjects for discourses. he ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of dr. parr's to a man of the name of frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:--'then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's i know.' "as we walked up mr. cambridge's meadows towards twickenham, he criticised johnson and gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. the excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage;--the position of a single word could not be altered in milton without injury. gray's personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications-- persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. he thought collins had more genius than gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. he contrasted dryden's opening of the th satire of juvenal with johnson's:-- "'let observation, with extensive view, survey mankind from ganges to peru.' which was as much as to say,-- "'let observation with extensive observation observe mankind.' "after dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for quakerism, when he was at cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him. when the little children came in, he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood. he lamented the haughtiness with which englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war; and he particularly remarked upon our abandonment of minorca. these two things, he said, made us universally disliked on the continent; though, as a people, most highly respected. he thought a war with america inevitable; and expressed his opinion, that the united states were unfortunate in the prematureness of their separation from this country, before they had in themselves the materials of moral society--before they had a gentry and a learned class,--the former looking backwards, and giving the sense of stability--the latter looking forwards, and regulating the feelings of the people. "afterwards, in the drawing-room, he sat down by professor rigaud, with whom he entered into a discussion of kant's system of metaphysics. the little knots of the company were speedily silent: mr. c.'s voice grew louder; and abstruse as the subject was, yet his language was so ready, so energetic, and so eloquent, and his illustrations so very neat and apposite, that the ladies even paid him the most solicitous and respectful attention. they were really entertained with kant's metaphysics! at last i took one of them, a very sweet singer, to the piano-forte; and, when there was a pause, she began an italian air. she was anxious to please him, and he was enraptured. his frame quivered with emotion, and there was a titter of uncommon delight on his countenance. when it was over, he praised the singer warmly, and prayed she might finish those strains in heaven! "this is nearly all, except some anecdotes, which i recollect of our meeting with this most interesting, most wonderful man. some of his topics and arguments i have enumerated; but the connection and the words are lost. and nothing that i can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner,--of the hold which he soon got on his audience--of the variety of his stores of information--or, finally, of the artlessness of his habits, or the modesty and temper with which he listened to, and answered arguments, contradictory to his own."--j. t. c. the following address has been printed before; but it cannot be too widely circulated, and it will form an appropriate conclusion to this volume. _to adam steinmetz k----._ my dear godchild, i offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as i did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into christ, and solemnly received as a living member of his spiritual body, the church. years must pass before you will be able to read, with an understanding heart, what i now write. but i trust that the all-gracious god, the father of our lord jesus christ, the father of mercies, who, by his only-begotten son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light--out of death, but into life--out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the lord our righteousness; i trust that he will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind! my dear godchild!--you received from christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late adam steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration, and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a christian in thought, word, and deed--in will, mind, and affections. i too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than threescore years can give, i now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction,) that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honourable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a christian. but i have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and manifold infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and, at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal; and i, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the almighty redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled god, who will not withdraw his spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the evil one! o, my dear godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their god, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their lord, redeemer, saviour, and everlasting high priest, jesus christ! o preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen godfather and friend, s. t. coleridge. _grove, highgate, july_ . . he died on the th day of the same month. index. * * * * * a. abraham. abuse, eloquence of. acoustics. acts, origin of. adiaphori. advocate, duties and needs of an. aeschylus, sophocles, and euripides. alchemy. all and the whole. america, united states of. american union, northern and southern states of the. americans, the. anarchy, mental. ancient mariner. animal being, scale of. ant and bee. architecture, gothic. ariosto and tasso. aristotle. army and navy, house of commons appointing the officers of the. article, ninth. asgill. -----and defoe. astrology. atheist. autumn day. b. bacon. ball, sir alexander. baptismal service. barrow and dryden. _bartram's travels_. baxter. beaumont and fletcher. ----'s dramas. beauty. behmen, jacob. bentley. berkeley. bertram, character of. bestial theory. bible, study of the. ----, version of the. biblical commentators. biographia literaria. bitters and tonics. black. black, colonel. blumenbach and kant's races. books of moses, genuineness of. boswell. bourrienne. bowyer. british schoolmen. brooke, lord. brown and darwin. bull and waterland. burke. burnet. buonaparte. byron, lord. ----and h. walpole's "mysterious mother." ----, his versification, and don juan. c. caesarean operation. cambridge petition to admit dissenters. canning. capital. catholicity. cavalier slang. character, differences of. charles i. chaucer. children, gracefulness of, chillingworth, christ, divinity of, christ's hospital, christian sabbath, christianity, ----, scope of, church, ----, high prizes and revenues of the, ----, national, ----of england, ----of rome, churchmen, church singing, citizens and christians, claudian, clergy, celibacy of the, coleridge's (mr.) system, colonization, colours, ----, non-perception of, commons, house of, ----, the reformed house of, compounds, latin, consolation in distress, constantine, constitution, english, corn laws, coronation oaths, crabbe and southey, cramp, charm for, craniology, crisis, d. dancing, english and greek, daniel, davy, sir h., democracy, ----, with slavery, devotional spirit, de vi minimorum, dictation and inspiration, diction of the old and new testament version, diplomatists, modern, disfranchisement, dissenters, diversions of purley, divines, old, divinity, dobrizhoffer, dog, don quixote, douw's (gerard) "schoolmaster," and titian's "venus," dramatists, the old, drayton and daniel, dreams, ----and ghosts, difference between stories of, dryden, ----and pope, dual, neuter plural, and verb singular, e. education, egyptian antiquaries, eldon's (lord) doctrine as to grammar schools, electricity, elegy, energy of man and other animals, england, ----and holland, english and german, envy, epidemic disease, epistles to the ephesians and colossians, ----to the hebrews, ----to the romans, erasmus, etymology of the final _ive_, eucharist, the, euripides, euthanasia, evangelicals, mock, f. faith, ----, articles of, ----and belief fantasy and imagination, fatalism and providence, fathers, the, faust, fees, barristers' and physicians', fielding and richardson, fine arts, patronage of the, flaccus, valerius, flogging, food, fox and pitt, french, the, ----gendarmerie, ----hereditary peerage, abolition of the, g. galileo, newton, kepler, bacon, galvanism, gas, hydro-carbonic, gender of the sun in german, genius, genius, criterion of. ----, feminine. ----, metaphysical. ----of the spanish and italians. german. ----blank verse. ----and english. ghosts, gibbon, gifford's massier, giotto, gnosis, god, proof of existence of, ----'s providence, goethe, good and the true, the, government, grammar, gray and cotton great minds androgynous, ----poets, good men, greek, ----, italian, and english, pure ages of, ----accent and quantity, ----drama, ----particles, grey, earl, h. hacket's life of archbishop williams, hahnemann, hall, captain b., ----and the americans, hamlet, hampden's speech, harmony, heat, hebrew, hermesianax, herodotus, hesiod, hieronimo, history, ----, jewish, hobbism, holland and belgium, ----and the dutch, homer, homeric heroes in shakspeare, hooker, hooker and bull, horner, humour and genius, hypothesis, hysteria, i. iapetic and semitic, ideal tory and whig, ideal truths, reverence for, ideas, imitation and copy, incarnation, inherited disease, insects, interest, monied, investigation, methods of, ireland, union with, irish church, iron, irving, isaac, italy, roman conquest of, j. jacob, jacobins, james i, jerusalem, destruction of, jews, ----, conversion of the, ----, division of the scripture, ----, in poland, job, book of, johnson, dr., ----, his political pamphlets, ----, the whig, jonson, ben, junius, juries, k. kant's attempt, kant's races of mankind, kean, keats, keenness and subtlety, kemble, john, kepler, knowledge, kotzebue, l. lakes, scotch and english, lamb, c., land and money, landholders, duty of, landor's (w. s.) poetry, laud, laughter, farce and tragedy, lavacrum pallados, legislation, iniquitous, leo x., lewis's jamaica journal, life, constitutional and functional, liturgy, english, logic, ----, character of the age for, logic of ideas and of syllogisms. logos, the. "lord, the," in the english version of the psalms. love. ----and friendship opposed. love's labour lost. lucan. luther. lyell's geology. m. machinery. mackintosh, sir james. madness. magnetism. malta. man cannot be stationary. ----fall of. ----'s freedom. mandeville's fable of the bees. manners under edward iii., richard ii., and henry viii. marriage. ----parental control in. ----of cousins. martin. mason's poetry. massier. materialism. mathews. measure for measure. medicine. medicines, specific. men. messenger of the covenant. messiah. metre, modern. miguel, dom, and dom pedro. milesian tales. milton. ----and sydney. ----'s disregard of painting. ----'s egotism. ----'s latin poems. ministers and the reform bill. monarchy or democracy, prospect of. monro, sir t. mosaic miracles. ----prophecies. motives and impulses. music. ----, ear and taste for, different. musical glasses, some men like. n. napier. national colonial character and naval discipline. ----debt. nations, characteristic temperament of. negro emancipation. nervous weakness. new testament canon. newton. nitrous oxide. nominalists and realists. northern and southern states. norwegians. o. oath, coronation. oaths. obstruction. origen. othello, character of. p. painting. pantheism. ----and idolatry. papacy. ----, the, and the reformation. ----and the schoolmen. paradise lost. park, professor. parliamentary privilege. party spirit. penal code in ireland. penn, granville, and the deluge. pentameter, greek and latin. permanency and progression of nations. persius. persons and things. peter simple, and tom cringle's log. phantom portrait. philanthropists. philosopher's ordinary language. philosophy, greek. ----, moral. ----, mr. coleridge's system of. ----of young men of the present day. pictures. pilgrim's progress. pirates. plants. plato. ----and xenophon. plotinus. poem, epic. poetic promise. poetical filter. poetry. ----, persian and arabic. poison. polarity, moral law of. political action, the two modes of. political economy, modern. polonius. poor laws. popedom. prayer. preaching extempore. presbyterians, independents, and bishops. principle, greatest happiness. principles and facts. ----and maxims. professions and trades. propertius. property tax. prophecies of the old testament. prophecy. prose and poetry. ----and verse. prudentius. psalms, translation of the. puritans and cavaliers. ----and jacobins. q. quacks. quakerism, modern. quakers. quarantine. r. rabelais. ----and luther. raffles, sir s. rainbow. reason and understanding. reasoner, a. redemption. reform of the house of commons. ----bill. ----, conduct of ministers on the. reformation. ----, english. religion. religion gentilizes. ----of the greeks. -----, roman catholic. -----, romish representation, popular. ----, direct. restoration. review, principles of a. revolution. ----, belgian. ----, french. ----, intellectual. rhenferd. roman conquest. ----empire. key to the decline of the. ----mind. ----catholics. ----catholic emancipation. rosetti on dante. s. sallust. sandford, bishop. sanskrit. sarpi, paul. scanderbeg. scarlett, sir j. schemes, spinozistic and hebrew. schiller. ----'s robbers. ----'s versification. schmidt. schools, infant. ----, public. scotch and english. ----kirk and irving. ----novels. scott, michael. ----and coleridge. ----'s novels. sectarianism. seneca. shakspeare. ----, _in minimis_. ----'s intellectual action. ----'s sonnets. sicily. sidney, sir p. sin and sins. smith, robert. society, best state of. socinianism. socrates. solomon. sophocles. southey. ----'s life of bunyan. speech, parts of. spenser. spinosa. spurzheim. spurzheim and craniology. st. john. ----'s gospel. ----, chap. xix. ver. . ----, chap. iii. ver. . st. paul's melita. state. ----, a. ----, idea of a. statesmen. statius. steinmetz. stella. sterne. style. ----, algernon sydney's. ----, modern. sublime and nonsense. sublimity. suffiction. superstition of maltese, sicilians, and italians. swift. sympathy of old greek and latin with english, . t. talent and genius. talented. taxation. taylor, jeremy. tennyson's poems. tertullian. thelwall. theory. theta. things are finding their level. thomas à becket. thucydides. ----and tacitus. tibullus. times of charles i. toleration. tooke, horne. travels, modern. trinity, the. truths and maxims. u. understanding, the. undine. unitarianism. universal suffrage. universities. v. valcknaer. varro. vico. virgil. virtue and liberty. von humboldt, baron. vote, right of women to. vowels and consonants. vox populi, vox dei. w. walkerite creed. war. ----, civil, of the seventeenth century. wedded love in shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists. wellington, duke of. wetherell's (sir charles) speech. whigs, conduct of the. wicliffe. wilkins, peter, and stothard. william iii. wilson. wit and madness. witch of endor. women, characterlessness of. ----, old. ----and men. words and names of things. wordsworth. works, chronological arrangement of. working to better one's condition. worlds, plurality of. z. zendavesta. the end. the celebrity by winston churchill volume . chapter v it was small wonder, said the knowing at asquith, that mr. charles wrexell allen should be attracted by irene trevor. with the lake breezes of the north the red and the tan came into her cheeks, those boon companions of the open who are best won by the water-winds. perhaps they brought, too, the spring to the step and the light under the long lashes when she flashed a look across the table. little by little it became plain that miss trevor was gaining ground with the celebrity to the neglect of the other young women at asquith, and when it was announced that he was to lead the cotillon with her, the fact was regarded as significant. even at asquith such things were talked about. mr. allen became a topic and a matter of conjecture. he was, i believe, generally regarded as a good match; his unimpeachable man-servant argued worldly possessions, of which other indications were not lacking, while his crest was cited as a material sign of family. yet when miss brewster, one of the brace of spinsters, who hailed from brookline and purported to be an up-to-date edition of the boston blue book, questioned the celebrity on this vital point after the searching manner warranted by the gravity of the subject, he was unable to acquit himself satisfactorily. when this conversation was repeated in detail within the hearing of the father of the young woman in question, and undoubtedly for his benefit, mr. trevor threw shame to the winds and scandalized the misses brewster then and there by proclaiming his father to have been a country storekeeper. in the eyes of mr. farquhar fenelon cooke the apotheosis of the celebrity was complete. the people of asquith were not only willing to attend the house-warming, but had been worked up to the pitch of eagerness. the celebrity as a matter of course was master of ceremonies. he originated the figures and arranged the couples, of which there were twelve from asquith and ten additional young women. these ten were assigned to the ten young men whom mr. cooke expected in his private car, and whose appearances, heights, and temperaments the celebrity obtained from mr. cooke, carefully noted, and compared with those of the young women. be it said in passing that mrs. cooke had nothing to do with any of it, but exhibited an almost criminal indifference. mr. cooke had even chosen the favors; charity forbids that i should say what they were. owing to the frequent consultations which these preparations made necessary the celebrity was much in the company of my client, which he came greatly to prefer to mine, and i therefore abandoned my determination to leave asquith. i was settling down delightedly to my old, easy, and unmolested existence when farrar and i received an invitation, which amounted to a summons, to go to mohair and make ourselves generally useful. so we packed up and went. we made an odd party before the arrival of the ten, particularly when the celebrity dropped in for lunch or dinner. he could not be induced to remain permanently at mohair because miss trevor was at asquith, but he appropriated a hempstead cart from the mohair stables and made the trip sometimes twice in a day. the fact that mrs. cooke treated him with unqualified disapproval did not dampen his spirits or lessen the frequency of his visits, nor, indeed, did it seem to create any breach between husband and wife. mr. cooke took it for granted that his friends should not please his wife, and mrs. cooke remarked to farrar and me that her husband was old enough to know better, and too old to be taught. she loved him devotedly and showed it in a hundred ways, but she was absolutely incapable of dissimulation. thanks to mrs. cooke, our visit to mohair was a pleasant one. we were able in many ways to help in the arrangements, especially farrar, who had charge of decorating the grounds. we saw but little of mr. cooke and the celebrity. the arrival of the ten was an event of importance, and occurred the day of the dance. i shall treat the ten as a whole because they did not materially differ from one another in dress or habits or ambition or general usefulness on this earth. it is true that mr. cooke had been able to make delicate distinctions between them for the aid of the celebrity, but such distinctions were beyond me, and the power to make them lay only in a long and careful study of the species which i could not afford to give. likewise the life of any one of the ten was the life of all, and might be truthfully represented by a single year, since each year was exactly like the preceding. the ordinary year, as is well-known, begins on the first of january. but theirs was not the ordinary year, nor the church year, nor the fiscal year. theirs began in the fall with the new york horse show. and i am of the opinion, though open to correction, that they dated from the first horse show instead of from the birth of christ. it is certain that they were much better versed in the history of the association than in that of the union, in the biography of excelsior rather than that of lincoln. the dog show was another event to which they looked forward, when they migrated to new york and put up at the country places of their friends. but why go farther? the ten made themselves very much at home at mohair. one of them told the celebrity he reminded him very much of a man he had met in new york and who had written a book, or something of that sort, which made the celebrity wince. the afternoon was spent in one of the stable lofts, where mr. cooke had set up a mysterious l-shaped box, in one arm of which a badger was placed by a groom, while my client's sarah, a terrier, was sent into the other arm to invite the badger out. his objections exceeded the highest hopes; he dug his claws into the wood and devoted himself to sarah's countenance with unremitting industry. this occupation was found so absorbing that it was with difficulty the ten were induced to abandon it and dress for an early dinner, and only did so after the second peremptory message from mrs. cooke. "it's always this way," said mr. cooke, regretfully, as he watched sarah licking the accessible furrows in her face; "i never started in on anything worth doing yet that maria did not stop it." farrar and i were not available for the dance, and after dinner we looked about for a quiet spot in which to weather it, and where we could be within reach if needed. such a place as this was the florentine galleried porch, which ran along outside the upper windows of the ball-room; these were flung open, for the night was warm. at one end of the room the musicians, imported from minneapolis by mr. cooke, were striking the first discordant notes of the tuning, while at the other the celebrity and my client, in scarlet hunting-coats, were gravely instructing the ten, likewise in scarlet hunting-coats, as to their conduct and functions. we were reviewing these interesting proceedings when mrs. cooke came hurrying towards us. she held a letter in her hand. "you know," said she, "that mr. cooke is forgetful, particularly when his mind is occupied with important matters, as it has been for some time. here is a letter from my niece, miss thorn, which he has carried in his pocket since monday. we expected her two weeks ago, and had given her up. but it seems she was to leave philadelphia on wednesday, and will be at that forlorn little station of asquith at half-past nine to-night. i want you two to go over and meet her." we expressed our readiness, and in ten minutes were in the station wagon, rolling rapidly down the long drive, for it was then after nine. we passed on the way the van of the guests from asquith. as we reached the lodge we heard the whistle, and we backed up against one side of the platform as the train pulled up at the other. farrar and i are not imaginative; we did not picture to ourselves any particular type for the girl we were going to meet, we were simply doing our best to get to the station before the train. we jumped from the wagon and were watching the people file out of the car, and i noticed that more than one paused to look back over their shoulders as they reached the door. then came a maid with hand-bag and shawls, and after her a tall young lady. she stood for a moment holding her skirt above the grimy steps, with something of the stately pose which richter has given his queen louise on the stairway, and the light of the reflector fell full upon her. she looked around expectantly, and recognizing mrs. cooke's maid, who had stepped forward to relieve hers of the shawls, miss thorn greeted her with a smile which greatly prepossessed us in her favor. "how do you do, jennie?" she said. "did any one else come?" "yes, miss marian," replied jennie, abashed but pleased,--"these gentlemen." farrar and i introduced ourselves, awkwardly enough, and we both tried to explain at once how it was that neither mr. nor mrs. cooke was there to meet her. of course we made an absolute failure of it. she scanned our faces with a puzzled expression for a while and then broke into a laugh. "i think i understand," she said; "they are having the house-warming." "she's first-rate at guessing," said farrar to me as we fled precipitately to see that the trunks were hoisted into the basket. neither of us had much presence of mind as we climbed into the wagon, and, what was even stranger, could not account for the lack of it. miss thorn was seated in the corner; in spite of the darkness i could see that she was laughing at us still. "i feel very badly that i should have taken you away from the dance," we heard her say. "we don't dance," i answered clumsily, "and we were glad to come." "yes, we were glad to come," farrar chimed in. then we relapsed into a discomfited silence, and wished we were anywhere else. but miss thorn relieved the situation by laughing aloud, and with such a hearty enjoyment that instead of getting angry and more mortified we began to laugh ourselves, and instantly felt better. after that we got along famously. she had at once the air of good fellowship and the dignity of a woman, and she seemed to understand farrar and me perfectly. not once did she take us over our heads, though she might have done so with ease, and we knew this and were thankful. we began to tell her about mohair and the cotillon, and of our point of observation from the florentine galleried porch, and she insisted she would join us there. by the time we reached the house we were thanking our stars she had come. mrs. cooke came out under the port-cochere to welcome her. "unfortunately there is no one to dance with you, marian," she said; "but if i had not by chance gone through your uncle's pockets, there would have been no one to meet you." i think i had never felt my deficiency in dancing until that moment. but miss thorn took her aunt's hand affectionately in hers. "my dear aunt maria," said she, "i would not dance to-night if there were twenty to choose from. i should like nothing better than to look on with these two. we are the best of friends already," she added, turning towards us, "are we not?" "we are indeed," we hastened to assure her. mrs. cooke smiled. "you should have been a man, marian," she said as they went upstairs together. we made our way to the galleried porch and sat down, there being a lull in the figures just then. we each took out a cigar and lighted a match; and then looked across at the other. we solemnly blew our matches out. "perhaps she doesn't like smoke," said farrar, voicing the sentiment. "perhaps not," said i. silence. "i wonder how she will get along with the ten?" i queried. "better than with us," he answered in his usual strain. "they're trained." "or with allen?" i added irresistibly. "women are all alike," said farrar. at this juncture miss thorn herself appeared at the end of the gallery, her shoulders wrapped in a gray cape trimmed with fur. she stood regarding us with some amusement as we rose to receive her. "light your cigars and be sensible," said she, "or i shall go in." we obeyed. the three of us turned to the window to watch the figure, the music of which was just beginning. mr. cooke, with the air of an english squire at his own hunt ball, was strutting contentedly up and down one end of the room, now pausing to exchange a few hearty words with some presbyterian matron from asquith, now to congratulate mr. trevor on the appearance of his daughter. lined against the opposite wall were the celebrity and his ten red-coated followers, just rising for the figure. it was very plain that miss trevor was radiantly happy; she was easily the handsomest girl in the room, and i could not help philosophizing when i saw her looking up into the celebrity's eyes upon the seeming inconsistency of nature, who has armed and warned woman against all but her most dangerous enemy. and then a curious thing happened. the celebrity, as if moved by a sudden uncontrollable impulse, raised his eyes until they rested on the window in which we were. although his dancing was perfect, he lost the step without apparent cause, his expression changed, and for the moment he seemed to be utterly confused. but only for the moment; in a trice he had caught the time again and swept miss trevor rapidly down the room and out of sight. i looked instinctively at the girl beside me. she had thrown her head forward, and in the streaming light i saw that her lips were parted in a smile. i resolved upon a stroke. "mr. allen," i remarked, "leads admirably." "mr. allen!" she exclaimed, turning on me. "yes, it is mr. allen who is leading," i repeated. an expression of perplexity spread over her face, but she said nothing. my curiosity was aroused to a high pitch, and questions were rising to my lips which i repressed with difficulty. for miss thorn had displayed, purposely or not, a reticence which my short acquaintance with her compelled me to respect; and, besides, i was bound by a promise not to betray the celebrity's secret. i was, however, convinced from what had occurred that she had met the celebrity in the east, and perhaps known him. had she fallen in love with him, as was the common fate of all young women he met? i changed my opinion on this subject a dozen times. now i was sure, as i looked at her, that she was far too sensible; again, a doubt would cross my mind as the celebrity himself would cross my view, the girl on his arm reduced to adoration. i followed him narrowly when in sight. miss thorn was watching him, too, her eyes half closed, as though in thought. but beyond the fact that he threw himself into the dance with a somewhat increased fervor, perhaps, his manner betokened no uneasiness, and not even by a glance did he betray any disturbing influence from above. thus we stood silently until the figure was finished, when miss thorn seated herself in one of the wicker chairs behind us. "doesn't it make you wish to dance?" said farrar to her. "it is hard luck you should be doomed to spend the evening with two such useless fellows as we are." she did not catch his remark at first, as was natural in a person preoccupied. then she bit her lips to repress a smile. "i assure you, mr. farrar," she said with force, "i have never in my life wished to dance as little as i do now." but a voice interrupted her, and the scarlet coat of the celebrity was thrust into the light between us. farrar excused himself abruptly and disappeared. "never wished to dance less!" cried the celebrity. "upon my word, miss thorn, that's too bad. i came up to ask you to reconsider your determination, as one of the girls from asquith is leaving, and there is an extra man." "you are very kind," said miss thorn, quietly, "but i prefer to remain here." my surmise, then, was correct. she had evidently met the celebrity, and there was that in his manner of addressing her, without any formal greeting, which seemed to point to a close acquaintance. "you know mr. allen, then, miss thorn?" said i. "what can you mean?" she exclaimed, wheeling on me; "this is not mr. allen." "hang you, crocker," the celebrity put in impatiently; "miss thorn knows who i am as well as you do." "i confess it is a little puzzling," said she; "perhaps it is because i am tired from travelling, and my brain refuses to work. but why in the name of all that is strange do you call him mr. allen?" the celebrity threw himself into the chair beside her and asked permission to light a cigarette. "i am going to ask you the favor of respecting my incognito, miss thorn, as crocker has done," he said. "crocker knew me in the east, too. i had not counted upon finding him at asquith." miss thorn straightened herself and made a gesture of impatience. "an incognito!" she cried. "but you have taken another man's name. and you already had his face and figure!" i jumped. "that is so," he calmly returned; "the name was ready to hand, and so i took it. i don't imagine it will make any difference to him. it's only a whim of mine, and with me there's no accounting for a whim. i make it a point to gratify every one that strikes me. i confess to being eccentric, you know." "you must get an enormous amount of gratification out of this," she said dryly. "what if the other man should happen along?" "scarcely at asquith." "i have known stranger things to occur," said she. the celebrity smiled and smoked. "i'll wager, now," he went on, "that you little thought to find me here incognito. but it is delicious, i assure you, to lead once more a commonplace and unmolested existence." "delightful," said miss thorn. "people never consider an author apart from his work, you know, and i confess i had a desire to find out how i would get along. and there comes a time when a man wishes he had never written a book, and a longing to be sought after for his own sake and to be judged on his own merits. and then it is a great relief to feel that one is not at the beck and call of any one and every one wherever one goes, and to know that one is free to choose one's own companions and do as one wishes." "the sentiment is good," miss thorn agreed, "very good. but doesn't it seem a little odd, mr. crocker," she continued, appealing to me, "that a man should take the pains to advertise a trip to europe in order to gratify a whim of this sort?" "it is indeed incomprehensible to me," i replied, with a kind of grim pleasure, "but you must remember that i have always led a commonplace existence." although the celebrity was almost impervious to sarcasm, he was now beginning to exhibit visible signs of uneasiness, the consciousness dawning upon him that his eccentricity was not receiving the ovation it merited. it was with a palpable relief that he heard the first warning notes of the figure. "am i to understand that you wish me to do my part in concealing your identity?" asked miss thorn, cutting him short as he was expressing pleasure at her arrival. "if you will be so kind," he answered, and departed with a bow. there was a mischievous mirth in her eye as she took her place in the window. below in the ball-room sat miss trevor surrounded by men, and i saw her face lighting at the celebrity's approach. "who is that beautiful girl he is dancing with?" said miss thorn. i told her. "have you read his books?" she asked, after a pause. "some of them." "so have i." the celebrity was not mentioned again that evening. chapter vi as an endeavor to unite mohair and asquith the cotillon had proved a dismal failure. they were as the clay and the brass. the next morning asquith was split into factions and rent by civil strife, and the porch of the inn was covered by little knots of women, all trying to talk at once; their faces told an ominous tale. not a man was to be seen. the minneapolis, st. paul, and chicago papers, all of which had previously contained elaborate illustrated accounts of mr. cooke's palatial park and residence, came out that morning bristling with headlines about the ball, incidentally holding up the residents of a quiet and retiring little community in a light that scandalized them beyond measure. and mr. charles wrexell allen, treasurer of the widely known miles standish bicycle company, was said to have led the cotillon in a manner that left nothing to be desired. so it was this gentleman whom the celebrity was personating! a queer whim indeed. after that, i doubt if the court of charles the second was regarded by the puritans with a greater abhorrence than was mohair by the good ladies of asquith. mr. cooke and his ten friends were branded as profligates whose very scarlet coats bore witness that they were of the devil. mr. cooke himself, who particularly savored of brimstone, would much better have remained behind the arras, for he was denounced with such energy and bitterness that those who might have attempted his defence were silent, and their very silence told against them. mr. cooke had indeed outdone himself in hospitality. he had posted punch-bowls in every available corner, and so industriously did he devote himself to the duties of host, as he conceived them, that as many as four of the patriarchs of asquith and pillars of the church had returned home more or less insensible, while others were quite incoherent. the odds being overwhelming, the master of mohair had at length fallen a victim to his own good cheer. he took post with judge short at the foot of the stair, where, in spite of the protests of the celebrity and of other well-disposed persons, the two favored the parting guests with an occasional impromptu song and waved genial good-byes to the ladies. and, when mrs. short attempted to walk by with her head in the air, as though the judge were in an adjoining county, he so far forgot his judicial dignity as to chuck her under the chin, an act which was applauded with much boyish delight by mr. cooke, and a remark which it is just as well not to repeat. the judge desired to spend the night at mohair, but was afterwards taken home by main force, and the next day his meals were brought up to him. it is small wonder that mrs. short was looked upon as the head of the outraged party. the ten were only spoken of in whispers. three of them had been unable to come to time when the last figure was called, whereupon their partners were whisked off the scene without so much as being allowed to pay their respects to the hostess. besides these offences, there were other minor barbarisms too numerous to mention. although mrs. short's party was all-powerful at asquith, there were some who, for various reasons, refused to agree in the condemnation of mr. cooke. judge short and the other gentlemen in his position were, of course, restricted, but mr. trevor came out boldly in the face of severe criticism and declared that his daughter should accept any invitation from mrs. cooke that she chose, and paid but little attention to the coolness resulting therefrom. he was fast getting a reputation for oddity. and the celebrity tried to conciliate both parties, and succeeded, though none but he could have done it. at first he was eyed with suspicion and disgust as he drove off to mohair in his hempstead cart, and was called many hard names. but he had a way about him which won them in the end. a few days later i ran over to mohair and found my client with the colored sunday supplement of a chicago newspaper spread out before him, eyeing the page with something akin to childish delight. i discovered that it was a picture of his own hunt ball, and as a bit of color it was marvellous, the scarlet coats being very much in evidence. "there, old man!" he exclaimed. "what do you think of that? something of a sendoff, eh?" and he pointed to a rather stout and important gentleman in the foreground. "that's me!" he said proudly, "and they wouldn't do that for farquhar fenelon cooke in philadelphia." "a prophet is without honor in his own country," i remarked. "i don't set up for a prophet," said mr. cooke, "but i did predict that i would start a ripple here, didn't i?" i did not deny this. "how do i stand over there?" he inquired, designating asquith by a twist of the head. "i hear they're acting all over the road; that they think i'm the very devil." "well, your stock has dropped some, i admit," i answered. "they didn't take kindly to your getting the judge drunk, you know." "they oughtn't to complain about that," said my client; "and besides, he wasn't drunk enough to amount to anything." "however that may be," said i, "you have the credit for leading him astray. but there is a split in your favor." "i'm glad to know that," he said, brightening; "then i won't have to import any more." "any more what?" i asked. "people from the east to keep things moving, of course. what i have here and those left me at the inn ought to be enough to run through the summer with. don't you think so?" i thought so, and was moving off when he called me back. "is the judge locked up, old man?" he demanded. "he's under rather close surveillance," i replied, smiling. "crocker;" he said confidentially, "see if you can't smuggle him over here some day soon. the judge always holds good cards, and plays a number one hand." i promised, and escaped. on the veranda i came upon miss thorn surrounded by some of her uncle's guests. i imagine that she was bored, for she looked it. "mr. crocker," she called out, "you're just the man i have been wishing to see." the others naturally took this for a dismissal, and she was not long in coming to her point when we were alone. "what is it you know about this queer but gifted genius who is here so mysteriously?" she asked. "nothing whatever," i confessed. "i knew him before he thought of becoming a genius." "retrogression is always painful," she said; "but tell me something about him then." i told her all i knew, being that narrated in these pages. "now," said i, "if you will pardon a curiosity on my part, from what you said the other evening i inferred that he closely resembles the man whose name it pleased him to assume. and that man, i learn from the newspapers, is mr. charles wrexell allen of the 'miles standish bicycle company.'" miss thorn made a comic gesture of despair. "why he chose mr. allen's name," she said, "is absolutely beyond my guessing. unless there is some purpose behind the choice, which i do not for an instant believe, it was a foolish thing to do, and one very apt to lead to difficulties. i can understand the rest. he has a reputation for eccentricity which he feels he must keep up, and this notion of assuming a name evidently appealed to him as an inspiration." "but why did he come out here?" i asked. "can you tell me that?" miss thorn flushed slightly, and ignored the question. "i met the 'celebrity,' as you call him," she said, "for the first time last winter, and i saw him frequently during the season. of course i had heard not a little about him and his peculiarities. his name seems to have gone the length and breadth of the land. and, like most girls, i had read his books and confess i enjoyed them. it is not too much to say," she added archly, "that i made a sort of archangel out of the author." "i can understand that," said i. "but that did not last," she continued hastily. "i see i have got beside my story. i saw a great deal of him in new york. he came to call, and i believe i danced with him once or twice. and then my aunt, mrs. rivers, bought a place near epsom, in massachusetts, and had a house party there in may. and the celebrity was invited." i smiled. "oh, i assure you it was a mere chance," said miss thorn. "i mention this that i may tell you the astonishing part of it all. epsom is one of those smoky manufacturing towns one sees in new england, and the 'miles standish' bicycle is made there. the day after we all arrived at my aunt's a man came up the drive on a wheel whom i greeted in a friendly way and got a decidedly uncertain bow in return. "i thought it rather a strange shift from a marked cordiality, and spoke of the circumstance to my aunt, who was highly amused. 'why, my dear,' said she, 'that was mr. allen, of the bicycle company. i was nearly deceived myself.'" "and is the resemblance so close as that?" i exclaimed. "so close! believe me, they are as like as two ices from a mould. of course, when they are together one can distinguish the celebrity from the bicycle man. the celebrity's chin is a little more square, and his nose straighter, and there are other little differences. i believe mr. allen has a slight scar on his forehead. but the likeness was remarkable, nevertheless, and it grew to be a standing joke with us. they actually dressed ludicrously alike. the celebrity became so sensitive about it that he went back to new york before the party broke up. we grew to be quite fond of the bicycle man." she paused and shifted her chair, which had rocked close to mine. "and can you account for his coming to asquith?" i asked innocently. she was plainly embarrassed. "i suppose i might account for it, mr. crocker," she replied. then she added, with something of an impulse, "after all, it is foolish of me not to tell you. you probably know the celebrity well enough to have learned that he takes idiotic fancies to young women." "not always idiotic," i protested. "you mean that the young women are not always idiotic, i suppose. no, not always, but nearly always. i imagine he got the idea of coming to asquith," she went on with a change of manner, "because i chanced to mention that i was coming out here on a visit." "oh," i remarked, and there words failed me. her mouth was twitching with merriment. "i am afraid you will have to solve the rest of it for yourself, mr. crocker," said she; "that is all of my contribution. my uncle tells me you are the best lawyer in the country, and i am surprised that you are so slow in getting at motives." and i did attempt to solve it on my way back to asquith. the conclusion i settled to, everything weighed, was this: that the celebrity had become infatuated with miss thorn (i was far from blaming him for that) and had followed her first to epsom and now to asquith. and he had chosen to come west incognito partly through the conceit which he admitted and gloried in, and partly because he believed his prominence sufficient to obtain for him an unpleasant notoriety if he continued long enough to track the same young lady about the country. hence he had taken the trouble to advertise a trip abroad to account for his absence. undoubtedly his previous conquests had been made more easily, for my second talk with miss thorn had put my mind at rest as to her having fallen a victim to his fascinations. her arrival at mohair being delayed, the celebrity had come nearly a month too soon, and in the interval that tendency of which he was the dupe still led him by the nose; he must needs make violent love to the most attractive girl on the ground,--miss trevor. now that one still more attractive had arrived i was curious to see how he would steer between the two, for i made no doubt that matters had progressed rather far with miss trevor. and in this i was not mistaken. but his choice of the name of charles wrexell allen bothered me considerably. i finally decided that he had taken it because convenient, and because he believed asquith to be more remote from the east than the sandwich islands. reaching the inn grounds, i climbed the hillside to a favorite haunt of mine, a huge boulder having a sloping back covered with soft turf. hence i could watch indifferently both lake and sky. presently, however, i was aroused by voices at the foot of the rock, and peering over the edge i discovered a kind of sewing-circle gathered there. the foliage hid me completely. i perceived the celebrity perched upon the low branch of an apple-tree, and miss trevor below him, with two other girls, doing fancy-work. i shall not attempt to defend the morality of my action, but i could not get away without discovery, and the knowledge that i had heard a part of their conversation might prove disquieting to them. the celebrity had just published a book, under the title of 'the sybarites', which was being everywhere discussed; and asquith, where summer reading was general, came in for its share of the debate. why it was called the sybarites i have never discovered. i did not read the book because i was sick and tired of the author and his nonsense, but i imbibed, in spite of myself, something of the story and its moral from hearing it talked about. the celebrity himself had listened to arguments on the subject with great serenity, and was nothing loth to give his opinion when appealed to. i realized at once that 'the sybarites' was the present topic. "yes, it is rather an uncommon book," he was saying languidly, "but there is no use writing a story unless it is uncommon." "dear, how i should like to meet the author!" exclaimed a voice. "he must be a charming man, and so young, too! i believe you said you knew him, mr. allen." "an old acquaintance," he answered, "and i am always reminding him that his work is overestimated." "how can you say he is overestimated!" said a voice. "you men are all jealous of him," said another. "is he handsome? i have heard he is." "he would scarcely be called so," said the celebrity, doubtfully. "he is, girls," miss trevor interposed; "i have seen his photograph." "what does he look like, irene?" they chorused. "men are no judges." "he is tall, and dark, and broad-shouldered," miss trevor enumerated, as though counting her stitches, "and he has a very firm chin, and a straight nose, and--" "perfect!" they cried. "i had an idea he was just like that. i should go wild about him. does he talk as well as he writes, mr. allen?" "that is admitting that he writes well." "admitting?" they shouted scornfully, "and don't you admit it?" "some people like his writing, i have to confess," said the celebrity, with becoming calmness; "certainly his personality could not sell an edition of thirty thousand in a month. i think 'the sybarites' the best of his works." "upon my word, mr. allen, i am disgusted with you," said the second voice; "i have not found a man yet who would speak a good word for him. but i did not think it of you." a woman's tongue, like a firearm, is a dangerous weapon, and often strikes where it is least expected. i saw with a wicked delight that the shot had told, for the celebrity blushed to the roots of his hair, while miss trevor dropped three or four stitches. "i do not see how you can expect men to like 'the sybarites'," she said, with some heat; "very few men realize or care to realize what a small chance the average woman has. i know marriage isn't a necessary goal, but most women, as well as most men, look forward to it at some time of life, and, as a rule, a woman is forced to take her choice of the two or three men that offer themselves, no matter what they are. i admire a man who takes up the cudgels for women, as he has done." "of course we admire him," they cried, as soon as miss trevor had stopped for breath. "and can you expect a man to like a book which admits that women are the more constant?" she went on. "why, irene, you are quite rabid on the subject," said the second voice; "i did not say i expected it. i only said i had hoped to find mr. allen, at least, broad enough to agree with the book." "doesn't mr. allen remind you a little of desmond?" asked the first voice, evidently anxious to avoid trouble. "do you know whom he took for desmond, mr. allen? i have an idea it was himself." mr. allen, had now recovered some of his composure. "if so, it was done unconsciously," he said. "i suppose an author must put his best thoughts in the mouth of his hero." "but it is like him?" she insisted. "yes, he holds the same views." "which you do not agree with." "i have not said i did not agree with them," he replied, taking up his own defence; "the point is not that men are more inconstant than women, but that women have more excuse for inconstancy. if i remember correctly, desmond, in a letter to rosamond, says: 'inconstancy in a woman, because of the present social conditions, is often pardonable. in a man, nothing is more despicable.' i think that is so. i believe that a man should stick by the woman to whom he has given his word as closely as he sticks by his friends." "ah!" exclaimed the aggressive second voice, "that is all very well. but how about the woman to whom he has not given his word? unfortunately, the present social conditions allow a man to go pretty far without a definite statement." at this i could not refrain from looking at miss trevor. she was bending over her knitting and had broken her thread. "it is presumption for a man to speak without some foundation," said the celebrity, "and wrong unless he is sure of himself." "but you must admit," the second voice continued, "that a man has no right to amuse himself with a woman, and give her every reason to believe he is going to marry her save the only manly and substantial one. and yet that is something which happens every day. what do you think of a man who deserts a woman under those conditions?" "he is a detestable dog, of course," declared the celebrity. and the cock in the inn yard was silent. "i should love to be able to quote from a book at will," said the quieting voice, for the sake of putting an end to an argument which bid fair to become disagreeable. "how do you manage to do it?" "it was simply a passage that stuck in my mind," he answered modestly; "when i read a book i pick them up just as a roller picks up a sod here and there as it moves over the lawn." "i should think you might write, mr. allen, you have such an original way of putting things!" "i have thought of it," returned the celebrity, "and i may, some fine day." wherewith he thrust his hands into his pockets and sauntered off with equanimity undisturbed, apparently unaware of the impression he had left behind him. and the fifth reader story popped into my head of good king william (or king frederick, i forgot which), who had a royal fancy for laying aside the gayeties of the court and straying incognito among his plainer subjects, but whose princely origin was invariably detected in spite of any disguise his majesty could invent. chapter vii i experienced a great surprise a few mornings afterwards. i had risen quite early, and found the celebrity's man superintending the hoisting of luggage on top of a van. "is your master leaving?" i asked. "he's off to mohair now, sir," said the valet, with a salute. at that instant the celebrity himself appeared. "yes, old chap, i'm off to mohair," he explained. "there's more sport in a day up there than you get here in a season. beastly slow place, this, unless one is a deacon or a doctor of divinity. why don't you come up, crocker? cooke would like nothing better; he has told me so a dozen times." "he is very good," i replied. i could not resist the temptation to add, "i had an idea asquith rather suited your purposes just now." "i don't quite understand," he said, jumping at the other half of my meaning. "oh, nothing. but you told me when you came here, if i am not mistaken, that you chose asquith because of those very qualities for which you now condemn it." "magna est vis consuetudinis," he laughed; "i thought i could stand the life, but i can't. i am tired of their sects and synods and sermons. by the way," said he pulling at my sleeve, "what a deuced pretty girl that miss thorn is! isn't she? rollins, where's the cart? well, good-bye, crocker; see you soon." he drove rapidly off as the clock struck six, and an uneasy glance he gave the upper windows did not escape me. when farrar appeared, i told him what had happened. "good riddance," he replied sententiously. we sat in silence until the bell rang, looking at the morning sun on the lake. i was a little anxious to learn the state of farrar's feelings in regard to miss trevor, and how this new twist in affairs had affected them. but i might as well have expected one of king louis's carp to whisper secrets of the old regime. the young lady came to the breakfast-table looking so fresh and in such high spirits that i made sure she had not heard of the celebrity's ignoble escape. as the meal proceeded it was easy to mark that her eye now and again fell across his empty chair, and glanced inquiringly towards the door. i made up my mind that i would not be the bearer of evil news, and so did farrar, so we kept up a vapid small-talk with mr. trevor on the condition of trade in the west. miss trevor, however, in some way came to suspect that we could account for that vacant seat. at last she fixed her eye inquiringly on me, and i trembled. "mr. crocker," she began, and paused. then she added with a fair unconcern, "do you happen to know where mr. allen is this morning?" "he has gone over to mohair, i believe," i replied weakly. "to mohair!" she exclaimed, putting down her cup; "why, he promised to go canoeing at ten. "probably he will be back by then," i ventured, not finding it in my heart to tell her the cruel truth. but i kept my eyes on my plate. they say a lie has short legs. mine had, for my black friend, simpson, was at that instant taking off the fruit, and overheard my remark. "mr. allen done gone for good," he put in, "done give me five dollars last night. why, sah," he added, scratching his head, "you was on de poch dis mornin' when his trunks was took away!" it was certainly no time to quibble then. "his trunks!" miss trevor exclaimed. "yes, he has left us and gone to mohair," i said, "bag and baggage. that is the flat truth of it." i suppose there is some general rule for calculating beforehand how a young woman is going to act when news of this sort is broken. i had no notion of what miss trevor would do. i believe farrar thought she would faint, for he laid his napkin on the table. she did nothing of the kind, but said simply: "how unreliable men are!" i fell to guessing what her feelings were; for the life of me i could not tell from her face. i was sorry for miss trevor in spite of the fact that she had neglected to ask my advice before falling in love with the celebrity. i asked her to go canoeing with me. she refused kindly but very firmly. it is needless to say that the celebrity did not come back to the inn, and as far as i could see the desertion was designed, cold-blooded, and complete. miss trevor remained out of sight during the day of his departure, and at dinner we noticed traces of a storm about her,--a storm which had come and gone. there was an involuntary hush as she entered the dining-room, for asquith had been buzzing that afternoon over the episode. and i admired the manner in which she bore her inspection. already rumors of the cause of mr. allen's departure were in active circulation, and i was astonished to learn that he had been seen that day seated upon indian rock with miss thorn herself. this piece of news gave me a feeling of insecurity about people, and about women in particular, that i had never before experienced. after holding the celebrity up to such unmeasured ridicule as she had done, ridicule not without a seasoning of contempt, it was difficult to believe miss thorn so inconsistent as to go alone with him to indian rock; and she was not ignorant of miss trevor's experience. but the fact was attested by trustworthy persons. i have often wondered what prompted me to ask miss trevor again to go canoeing. to do myself justice, it was no wish of mine to meddle with or pry into her affairs. neither did i flatter myself that my poor company would be any consolation for that she had lost. i shall not try to analyze my motive. suffice it to record that she accepted this second invitation, and i did my best to amuse her by relating a few of my experiences at the bar, and i told that memorable story of farrar throwing o'meara into the street. we were getting along famously, when we descried another canoe passing us at some distance, and we both recognized the celebrity at the paddle by the flannel jacket of his college boat club. and miss thorn sat in the bow! "do you know anything about that man, miss trevor?" i asked abruptly. she grew scarlet, but replied: "i know that he is a fraud." "anything else?" "i can't say that i do; that is, nothing but what he has told me." "if you will forgive my curiosity," i said, "what has he told you?" "he says he is the author of the sybarites," she answered, her lip curling, "but of course i do not believe that, now." "but that happens to be true," i said, smiling. she clapped her hands. "i promised him i wouldn't tell," she cried, "but the minute i get back to the inn i shall publish it." "no, don't do that just yet," said i. "why not? of course i shall." i had no definite reason, only a vague hope that we should get some better sort of enjoyment out of the disclosure before the summer was over. "you see," i said, "he is always getting into scrapes; he is that kind of a man. and it is my humble opinion that he has put his head into a noose this time, for sure. mr. allen, of the 'miles standish bicycle company,' whose name he has borrowed for the occasion, is enough like him in appearance to be his twin brother." "he has borrowed another man's name!" she exclaimed; "why, that's stealing!" "no, merely kleptomania," i replied; "he wouldn't be the other man if he could. but it has struck me that the real mr. allen might turn up here, or some friend of his, and stir things a bit. my advice to you is to keep quiet, and we may have a comedy worth seeing." "well," she remarked, after she had got over a little of her astonishment, "it would be great fun to tell, but i won't if you say so." i came to, have a real liking for miss trevor. farrar used to smile when i spoke of this, and i never could induce him to go out with us in the canoe, which we did frequently,--in fact, every day i was at asquith, except of course sundays. and we grew to understand each other very well. she looked upon me in the same light as did my other friends, --that of a counsellor-at-law,--and i fell unconsciously into the role of her adviser, in which capacity i was the recipient of many confidences i would have got in no other way. that is, in no other way save one, and in that i had no desire to go, even had it been possible. miss trevor was only nineteen, and in her eyes i was at least sixty. "see here, miss trevor," i said to her one day after we had become more or less intimate, "of course it's none of my business, but you didn't feel very badly after the celebrity went away, did you?" her reply was frank and rather staggering. "yes, i did. i was engaged to him, you know." "engaged to him! i had no idea he ever got that far," i exclaimed. miss trevor laughed merrily. "it was my fault," she said; "i pinned him down, and he had to propose. there was no way out of it. i don't mind telling you." i did not know whether to be flattered or aggrieved by this avowal. "you know," she went on, her tone half apologetic, "the day after he came he told me who he was, and i wanted to stop the people we passed and inform them of the lion i was walking with. and i was quite carried away by the honor of his attentions: any girl would have been, you know." "i suppose so," i assented. "and i had heard and read so much of him, and i doted on his stories, and all that. his heroes are divine, you must admit. and, mr. crocker," she concluded with a charming naivety, "i just made up my mind i would have him." "woman proposes, and man disposes," i laughed. "he escaped in spite of you." she looked at me queerly. "only a jest," i said hurriedly; "your escape is the one to be thankful for. you might have married him, like the young woman in the sybarites. you remember, do you not, that the hero of that book sacrifices himself for the lady who adores him, but whom he has ceased to adore?" "yes, i remember," she laughed; "i believe i know that book by heart." "think of the countless girls he must have relieved of their affections before their eyes were opened," i continued with mock gravity. "think of the charred trail he has left behind him. a man of that sort ought to be put under heavy bonds not to break any more hearts. but a kleptomaniac isn't responsible, you understand. and it isn't worth while to bear any malice." "oh, i don't bear any malice now," she said. "i did at first, naturally. but it all seems very ridiculous now i have had time to think it over. i believe, mr. crocker, that i never really cared for him." "simply an idol shattered this time," i suggested, "and not a heart broken." "yes, that's it," said she. "i am glad to hear it," said i, much pleased that she had taken such a sensible view. "but you are engaged to him." "i was." "you have broken the engagement, then?" "no, i--haven't," she said. "then he has broken it?" she did not appear to resent this catechism. "that's the strange part of it," said miss trevor, "he hasn't even thought it necessary." "it is clear, then, that you are still engaged to him," said i, smiling at her blank face. "i suppose i am," she cried. "isn't it awful? what shall i do, mr. crocker? you are so sensible, and have had so much experience." "i beg your pardon," i remarked grimly. "oh, you know what i mean: not that kind of experience, of course. but breach of promise cases and that sort of thing. i have a photograph of him with something written over it." "something compromising?" i inquired. "yes, you would probably call it so," she answered, reddening. "but there is no need of my repeating it. and then i have a lot of other things. if i write to break off the engagement i shall lose dignity, and it will appear as though i had regrets. i don't wish him to think that, of all things. what shall i do?" "do nothing," i said. "what do you mean?" "just that. do not break the engagement, and keep the photograph and other articles for evidence. if he makes any overtures, don't consider them for an instant. and i think, miss trevor, you will succeed sooner or later in making him very uncomfortable. were he any one else i shouldn't advise such a course, but you won't lose any dignity and self-respect by it, as no one will be likely to hear of it. he can't be taken seriously, and plainly he has never taken any one else so. he hasn't even gone to the trouble to notify you that he does not intend marrying you." i saw from her expression that my suggestion was favorably entertained. "what a joke it would be!" she cried delightedly. "and a decided act of charity," i added, "to the next young woman on his list." chapter viii the humor of my proposition appealed more strongly to miss trevor than i had looked for, and from that time forward she became her old self again; for, even after she had conquered her love for the celebrity, the mortification of having been jilted by him remained. now she had come to look upon the matter in its true proportions, and her anticipation of a possible chance of teaching him a lesson was a pleasure to behold. our table in the dining-room became again the abode of scintillating wit and caustic repartee, farrar bracing up to his old standard, and the demand for seats in the vicinity rose to an animated competition. mr. charles wrexell allen's chair was finally awarded to a nephew of judge short, who could turn a story to perfection. so life at the inn settled down again to what it had been before the celebrity came to disturb it. i had my own reasons for staying away from mohair. more than once as i drove over to the county-seat in my buggy i had met the celebrity on a tall tandem cart, with one of mr. cooke's high-steppers in the lead, and miss thorn in the low seat. i had forgotten to mention that my friend was something of a whip. at such times i would bow very civilly and pass on; not without a twinge, i confess. and as the result of one of these meetings i had to retrace several miles of my road for a brief i had forgotten. after that i took another road, several miles longer, for the sight of miss thorn with him seriously disturbed my peace of mind. but at length the day came, as i had feared, when circumstances forced me to go to my client's place. one morning miss trevor and i were about stepping into the canoe for our customary excursion when one of mr. cooke's footmen arrived with a note for each of us. they were from mrs. cooke, and requested the pleasure of our company that day for luncheon. "if you were i, would you go?" miss trevor asked doubtfully. "of course," i replied. "but the consequences may be unpleasant." "don't let them," i said. "of what use is tact to a woman if not for just such occasions?" my invitation had this characteristic note tacked on the end of it "dear crocker: where are you? where is the judge? f. f. c." i corralled the judge, and we started off across the fields, in no very mild state of fear of that gentleman's wife, whose vigilance was seldom relaxed. and thus we came by a circuitous route to mohair, the judge occupied by his own guilty thoughts, and i by others not less disturbing. my client welcomed the judge with that warmth of manner which grappled so many of his friends to his heart, and they disappeared together into the ethiopian card-room, which was filled with the assegais and exclamation point shields mr. cooke had had made at the sawmill at beaverton. i learned from one of the lords-in-waiting loafing about the hall that mrs. cooke was out on the golf links, chaperoning some of the asquith young women whose mothers had not seen fit to ostracize mohair. mr. cooke's ten friends were with them. but this discreet and dignified servant could not reveal the whereabouts of miss thorn and of mr. allen, both of whom i was decidedly anxious to avoid. i was much disgusted, therefore, to come upon the celebrity in the smoking-room, writing rapidly, with, sheets of manuscript piled beside him. and he was quite good-natured over my intrusion. "no," said he, "don't go. it's only a short story i promised for a christmas number. they offered me fifteen cents a word and promised to put my name on the cover in red, so i couldn't very well refuse. it's no inspiration, though, i tell you that." he rose and pressed a bell behind him and ordered whiskeys and ginger ales, as if he were in a hotel. "sit down, crocker," he said, waving me to a morocco chair. "why don't you come over to see us oftener?" "i've been quite busy," i said. this remark seemed to please him immensely. "what a sly old chap you are," said he; "really, i shall have to go back to the inn and watch you." "what the deuce do you mean?" i demanded. he looked me over in well-bred astonishment and replied: "hang me, crocker, if i can make you out. you seem to know the world pretty well, and yet when a fellow twits you on a little flirtation you act as though you were going to black his eyes." "a little flirtation!" i repeated, aghast. "oh, well," he said, smiling, "we won't quarrel over a definition. call it anything you like." "don't you think this a little uncalled for?" i asked, beginning to lose my temper. "bless you, no. not among friends: not among such friends as we are." "i didn't know we were such devilish good friends," i retorted warmly. "oh, yes, we are, devilish good friends," he answered with assurance; "known each other from boyhood, and all that. and i say, old chap," he added, "you needn't be jealous of me, you know. i got out of that long ago. and i'm after something else now." for a space i was speechless. then the ludicrous side of the matter struck me, and i laughed in spite of myself. better, after all, to deal with a fool according to his folly. the celebrity glanced at the door and drew his chair closer to mine. "crocker," he said confidentially, "i'm glad you came here to-day. there is a thing or two i wished to consult you about." "professional?" i asked, trying to head him off. "no," he replied, "amateur,--beastly amateur. a bungle, if i ever made one. the truth is, i executed rather a faux pas over there at asquith. tell me," said he, diving desperately at the root of it, "how does miss trevor feel about my getting out? i meant to let her down easier; 'pon my word, i did." this is a way rascals have of judging other men by themselves. "well;" said i, "it was rather a blow, of course." "of course," he assented. "and all the more unexpected," i went on, "from a man who has written reams on constancy." i flatter myself that this nearly struck home, for he was plainly annoyed. "oh, bother that!" said he. "how many gowns believe in their own sermons? how many lawyers believe in their own arguments?" "unhappily, not as many as might." "i don't object to telling you, old chap," he continued, "that i went in a little deeper than i intended. a good deal deeper, in fact. miss trevor is a deuced fine girl, and all that; but absolutely impossible. i forgot myself, and i confess i was pretty close to caught." "i congratulate you," i said gravely. "that's the point of it. i don't know that i'm out of the woods yet. i wanted to see you and find out how she was acting." my first impulse was to keep him in hot water. fortunately i thought twice. "i don't know anything about miss trevor's feelings--" i began. "naturally not--" he interrupted, with a smile. "but i have a notion that, if she ever fancied you, she doesn't care a straw for you to-day." "doesn't she now," he replied somewhat regretfully. here was one of the knots in his character i never could untie. "understand, that is simply my guess," i said. "you must have discovered that it is never possible to be sure of a woman's feelings." "found that out long ago," he replied with conviction, and added: "then you think i need not anticipate any trouble from her?" "i have told you what i think," i answered; "you know better than i what the situation is." he still lingered. "does she appear to be in,--ah,--in good spirits?" i had work to keep my face straight. "capital," i said; "i never saw her happier." this seemed to satisfy him. "downcast at first, happy now," he remarked thoughtfully. "yes, she got over it. i'm much obliged to you, crocker." i left him to finish his short story and walked out across the circle of smooth lawn towards the golf links. and there i met mrs. cooke and her niece coming in together. the warm red of her costume became miss thorn wonderfully, and set off the glossy black of her hair. and her skin was glowing from the exercise. an involuntary feeling of admiration for this tall, athletic young woman swept over me, and i halted in my steps for no other reason, i believe, than that i might look upon her the longer. what man, i thought resentfully, would not travel a thousand miles to be near her? "it is mr. crocker," said mrs. cooke; "i had given up all hope of ever seeing you again. why have you been such a stranger?" "as if you didn't know, aunt maria," miss thorn put in gayly. "oh yes, i know," returned her aunt, "and i have not been foolish enough to invite the bar without the magnet. and yet, mr. crocker," she went on playfully, "i had imagined that you were the one man in a hundred who did not need an inducement." miss thorn began digging up the turf with her lofter: it was a painful moment for me. "you might at least have tried me, mrs. cooke," i said. miss thorn looked up quickly from the ground, her eyes searchingly upon my face. and mrs. cooke seemed surprised. "we are glad you came, at any rate," she answered. and at luncheon my seat was next to miss thorn's, while the celebrity was placed at the right of miss trevor. i observed that his face went blank from time to time at some quip of hers: even a dull woman may be sharp under such circumstances, and miss trevor had wits to spare. and i marked that she never allowed her talk with him to drift into deep water; when there was danger of this she would draw the entire table into their conversation by some adroit remark, or create a laugh at his expense. as for me, i held a discreet if uncomfortable silence, save for the few words which passed between miss thorn and me. once or twice i caught her covert glance on me. but i felt, and strongly, that there could be no friendship between us now, and i did not care to dissimulate merely for the sake of appearances. besides, i was not a little put out over the senseless piece of gossip which had gone abroad concerning me. it had been arranged as part of the day's programme that mr. cooke was to drive those who wished to go over the rise in his new brake. but the table was not graced by our host's presence, mrs. cooke apologizing for him, explaining that he had disappeared quite mysteriously. it turned out that he and the judge had been served with luncheon in the ethiopian card-room, and neither threats nor fair words could draw him away. the judge had not held such cards for years, and it was in vain that i talked to him of consequences. the ten decided to remain and watch a game which was pronounced little short of phenomenal, and my client gave orders for the smaller brake and requested the celebrity to drive. and this he was nothing loth to do. for the edification as well as the assurance of the party mr. allen explained, while we were waiting under the porte cochere, how he had driven the windsor coach down piccadilly at the height of the season, with a certain member of parliament and noted whip on the box seat. and, to do him justice, he could drive. he won the instant respect of mr. cooke's coachman by his manner of taking up the lines, and clinched it when he dropped a careless remark concerning the off wheeler. and after the critical inspection of the horses which is proper he climbed up on the box. there was much hesitation among the ladies as to who should take the seat of honor: mrs. cooke declining, it was pressed upon miss thorn. but she, somewhat to my surprise, declined also, and it was finally filled by a young woman from asquith. as we drove off i found myself alone with mrs. cooke's niece on the seat behind. the day was cool and snappy for august, and the rise all green with a lavish nature. now we, plunged into a deep shade with the boughs lacing each other overhead, and crossed dainty, rustic bridges over the cold trout-streams, the boards giving back the clatter of our horses' feet: or anon we shot into a clearing, with a colored glimpse of the lake and its curving shore far below us. i had always loved that piece of country since the first look i had of it from the asquith road, and the sight of it rarely failed to set my blood a-tingle with pleasure. but to-day i scarcely saw it. i wondered what whim had impelled miss thorn to get into this seat. she paid but little attention to me during the first part of the drive, though a mere look in my direction seemed to afford her amusement. and at last, half way up the rise, where the road takes to an embankment, i got a decided jar. "mr. allen," she cried to the celebrity, "you must stop here. do you remember how long we tarried over this bit on friday?" he tightened the lines and threw a meaning glance backward. i was tempted to say: "you and mr. allen should know these roads rather well, miss thorn." "every inch of them," she replied. we must have gone a mile farther when she turned upon me. "it is your duty to be entertaining, mr. crocker. what in the world are you thinking of, with your brow all puckered up, forbidding as an owl?" "i was thinking how some people change," i answered, with a readiness which surprised me. "strange," she said, "i had the same thing in mind. i hear decidedly queer tales of you; canoeing every day that business does not prevent, and whole evenings spent at the dark end of a veranda." "what rubbish!" i exclaimed, not knowing whether to be angered or amused. "come, sir," she said, with mock sternness, "answer the charge. guilty or not guilty?" "first let me make a counter-charge," said i; "you have given me the right. not long ago a certain young lady came to mohair and found there a young author of note with whom she had had some previous acquaintance. she did not hesitate to intimate her views on the character of this celebrity, and her views were not favorable." i paused. there was some satisfaction in seeing miss thorn biting her lip. "well?" "not at all favorable, mind you," i went on. "and the young lady's general appearance was such as to lead one to suppose her the sincerest of persons. now i am at a loss to account for a discrepancy between her words and her actions." while i talked miss thorn's face had been gradually turning from mine until now i saw only the dainty knot at the back of her head. her shoulders were quivering with laughter. but presently her face came back all gravity, save a suspicious gleam of mirth in the eyes. "it does seem inconsistent, mr. crocker; i grant you that. no doubt it is so. but let me ask you something: did you ever yet know a woman who was not inconsistent?" i did not realize i had been side-tracked until i came to think over this conversation afterwards. "i am not sure," i replied. "perhaps i merely hoped that one such existed." she dropped her eyes. "then don't be surprised at my failing," said she. "no doubt i criticised the celebrity severely. i cannot recall what i said. but it is upon the better side of a character that we must learn to look. did it ever strike you that the celebrity had some exceedingly fine qualities?" "no, it did not," i answered positively. "nevertheless, he has," she went on, in all apparent seriousness. "he drives almost as well as uncle farquhar, dances well, and is a capital paddle." "you were speaking of qualities, not accomplishments," i said. a horrible suspicion that she was having a little fun at my expense crossed my mind. very good, then. you must admit that he is generous to a fault, amiable; and persevering, else he would never have attained the position he enjoys. and his affection for you, mr. crocker, is really touching, considering how little he gets in return." "come, miss thorn," i said severely, "this is ridiculous. i don't like him, and never shall. i liked him once, before he took to writing drivel. but he must have been made over since then. and what is more, with all respect to your opinion, i don't believe he likes me." miss thorn straightened up with dignity and said: "you do him an injustice. but perhaps you will learn to appreciate him before he leaves mohair." "that is not likely," i replied--not at all pleasantly, i fear. and again i thought i observed in her the same desire to laugh she had before exhibited. and all the way back her talk was of nothing except the celebrity. i tried every method short of absolute rudeness to change the subject, and went from silence to taciturnity and back again to silence. she discussed his books and his mannerisms, even the growth of his popularity. she repeated anecdotes of him from naples to st. petersburg, from tokio to cape town. and when we finally stopped under the porte cochere i had scarcely the civility left to say good-bye. i held out my hand to help her to the ground, but she paused on the second step. "mr. crocker," she observed archly, "i believe you once told me you had not known many girls in your life." "true," i said; "why do you ask?" "i wished to be sure of it," she replied. and jumping down without my assistance, she laughed and disappeared into the house. the mystery of francis bacon _william t. smedley_ [illustration: francis bacon at years of age. _from the bust at gorhambury._] the mystery of francis bacon by william t. smedley. ad d.b. "si bene qui latuit, bene vixit, tu bene vivis: ingeniumque tuum grande latendo patet." --_john owen's epigrammatum_, . london: robert banks & son, racquet court, fleet street e.c. . "_but such is the infelicity and unhappy disposition of the human mind in the course of invention that it first distrusts and then despises itself: first will not believe that any such thing can be found out; and when it is found out, cannot understand how the world should have missed it so long._" --"novum organum," chap. cx. contents. page preface chapter i.--sources of information ii.--the stock from which bacon came iii.--francis bacon, to iv.--at cambridge v.--early compositions vi.--bacon's "temporis partus maximus" vii.--bacon's first allegorical romance viii.--bacon in france, - ix.--bacon's suit on his return to england, x.--the "rare and unaccustomed suit" xi.--bacon's second visit to the continent and after xii.--is it probable that bacon left manuscripts hidden away? xiii.--how the elizabethan literature was produced xiv.--the clue to the mystery of bacon's life xv.--burghley and bacon xvi.--the folio edition of shakespeare's plays xvii.--the authorised version of the bible, xviii.--how bacon marked books with the publication of which he was connected xix.--bacon and emblemata xx.--shakespeare's sonnets xxi.--bacon's library xxii.--two german opinions on shakespeare and bacon xxiii.--the testimony of bacon's contemporaries xxiv.--the missing fourth part of "the great instauration" xxv.--the philosophy of bacon appendix preface. is there a mystery connected with the life of francis bacon? the average student of history or literature will unhesitatingly reply in the negative, perhaps qualifying his answer by adding:--unless it be a mystery that a man with such magnificent intellectual attainments could have fallen so low as to prove a faithless friend to a generous benefactor in the hour of his trial, and, upon being raised to one of the highest positions of honour and influence in the state, to become a corrupt public servant and a receiver of bribes to pervert justice.--it is one of the most remarkable circumstances to be found in the history of any country that a man admittedly pre-eminent in his intellectual powers, spoken of by his contemporaries in the highest terms for his virtues and his goodness, should, in subsequent ages, be held up to obloquy and scorn and seldom be referred to except as an example of a corrupt judge, a standing warning to those who must take heed how they stand lest they fall. truly the treatment which francis bacon has received confirms the truth of the aphorism, "the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." it is not the intention in the following brief survey of bacon's life to enter upon any attempt to vindicate his character. since his works and life have come prominently before the reading public, he has never been without a defender. montagu, hepworth dixon, and spedding have, one after the other, raised their voices against the injustice which has been done to the memory of this great englishman; and although macaulay, in his misleading and inaccurate essay,[ ] abounding in paradoxes and inconsistencies, produced the most powerful, though prejudiced, attack which has been made on bacon's fame, he may almost be forgiven, because it provided the occasion for james spedding in "evenings with a reviewer," to respond with a thorough and complete vindication of the man to whose memory he devoted his life. there rests on every member of the anglo-saxon race an obligation--imposed upon him by the benefits which he enjoys as the result of francis bacon's life-work--to read this vindication of his character. nor should mention be omitted of the essay by mr. j. m. robertson on "francis bacon" in his excellent work "pioneer humanists." all these defenders of bacon treat their subject from what may be termed the orthodox point of view. they follow in the beaten track. they do not look for bacon outside his acknowledged works and letters. since , however, there has been steadily growing a belief that bacon was associated with the literature of the elizabethan and early jacobean periods, and that he deliberately concealed his connection with it. that this view is scouted by what are termed the men of letters is well-known. they will have none of it. they refuse its claim to a rational hearing. but, in spite of this, as years go on, the number of adherents to the new theory steadily increases. the scornful epithets that are hurled at them only appear to whet their appetite, and increase their determination. men and women devote their lives with enthusiasm to the quest for further knowledge. they dig and delve in the records of the period, and in the byeways of literature. theories which appear extravagant and untenable are propounded. whether any of these theories will come to be accepted and established beyond cavil, time alone can prove. but, at any rate, it is certain that in this quest many forgotten facts are brought to light, and the general stock of information as to the literature of the period is augmented. in the following pages it is sought to establish what may be termed one of these extravagant theories. how far this attempt is successful, it is for the reader to judge. notwithstanding all that may be said to the contrary, by far the greater part of francis bacon's life is unknown. an attempt will be made by the aid of accredited documents and books to represent in a new light his youth and early manhood. it is contended that he deliberately sought to conceal his movements and work, although, at the same time, he left the landmarks by which a diligent student might follow them. in his youth he conceived the idea that the man francis bacon should be concealed, and be revealed only by his works. the motto, "_mente videbor_"--by the mind i shall be seen--became the guiding principle of his life. footnotes: [ ] attention is drawn to one of the inaccuracies in "an introduction to mathematics," by a. w. whithead, sc.d., f.r.s., published in the home university library of modern knowledge. the author says: "macaulay in his essay on bacon contrasts the certainty of mathematics with the uncertainty of philosophy, and by way of a rhetorical example he says, 'there has been no re-action against taylor's theorem.' he could not have chosen a worse example. for, without having made an examination of english text-books on mathematics contemporary with the publication of this essay, the assumption is a fairly safe one that taylor's theorem was enunciated and proved wrongly in every one of them." the mystery of francis bacon. chapter i. sources of information. the standard work is "the life and letters of francis bacon," by james spedding, which was published from - . it comprises seven volumes, with , pages. the first twenty years of bacon's life are disposed of in pages, and the next ten years in pages, of which pages are taken up with three tracts attributed to him. there is practically no information given as to what should be the most important years of his life. the two first volumes carry the narrative to the end of elizabeth's reign, when bacon had passed his fortieth year. there is in them a considerable contribution to the history of the times, but a critical perusal will establish the fact that they add very little to our knowledge of the man, and they fail to give any adequate idea of how he was occupied during those years. in the seven volumes letters of bacon's are printed, and of these no less than are addressed to james i. and the duke of buckingham, and were written during the last years of his life. the biographies by montagu and hepworth dixon are less pretentious, but contain little more information. the first published life of bacon appears to have been unknown to all these writers. in was published in paris a translation of the "sylva sylvarum," as the "histoire naturelle de mre. francois bacon." prefixed to it is a chapter entitled "discours sur la vie de mre. francois bacon, chancelier d'angleterre." reference will be made to this important discourse hereafter. it is sufficient for the present to say that it definitely states that during his youth bacon travelled in italy and spain, which fact is to-day unrecognised by those who are accepted as authorities on his life. in there was published at leyden a dutch translation of forty-six of bacon's essays--the "wisdom of the ancients" and the "religious meditations." the translation is by peter boener, an apothecary of nymegen, holland, who was in bacon's service for some years as domestic apothecary, and occasional amanuensis, and quitted his employment in . boener added a life of bacon which is a mere fragment, but contains testimony by a personal attendant which is of value. in william rawley issued a volume of unpublished manuscripts under the title of "resuscitatio," and to these he added a life of the great philosopher. rawley is only once mentioned by bacon. his will contains the sentence: "i give to my chaplain, dr. rawleigh, one hundred pounds." rawley was born in . when he became associated with his master is not known, but it could only have been towards the close of his life. bacon appears to have reposed great confidence in him. in ,[ ] the year following bacon's death, he published the "sylva sylvarum." this must have been in the press before bacon's death. rawley subsequently published other works, and was associated with isaac gruter during the seventeenth century in producing on the continent various editions of bacon's works. rawley's account of bacon's life is meagre, and, having regard to the wealth of information which must have been at his disposal, it is a very disappointing production. still, it contains information which is not to be found elsewhere. how incomplete it is may be gathered from the fact that there is no reference in it to bacon's fall. in was published a volume, "the statesmen and favourites of england since the reformation." it was compiled by david lloyd. the biographies of the elizabethan statesmen were written by someone who was closely associated with them, and who appears to have had exceptional opportunities of obtaining information as to their opinions and characters.[ ] as to how these lives came into lloyd's possession nothing is known. prefixed to the biographies are two pages containing "the lord bacon's judgment in a work of this nature." the chapter on bacon is a most important contribution to the subject, but it also appears to have escaped the notice of spedding, hepworth dixon, and montagu. in francis osborn, in letters to his son, gives a graphic description of the lord chancellor. perhaps one can better picture bacon as he was in the strength of his manhood from osborne's account of him than from any other source. thomas bushell, another of bacon's household dependents, published in "the first part of youth's errors." in a letter therein addressed to mr. john eliot, he has left contributions to our stock of knowledge. there are also some miscellaneous tracts written by him, and published about the year , which contain references to bacon. fuller's worthies ( ) gives a short account of his life and character, eulogistic but sparse. in was published "baconiana," or certain genuine remains of sir francis bacon, &c., by bishop tennison, but it contains no better account of his life. winstanley's worthies ( ) relies entirely on rawley's life, which is reproduced in it. aubrey's brief lives were written about . there are references to bacon in arthur wilson's "history of the reign of james i."; in "the court of james i.," by sir w. a.; in "simeon d'ewes' diary"; and, lastly, in his "discoveries," ben jonson contributes a high eulogy on bacon's character and attainments. in robert stephens, the court historiographer, published a volume of bacon's letters, with an introduction giving some account of his life; and there was a second edition in . in david mallet published an edition of bacon's works, and wrote a life to accompany it. this was subsequently printed as a separate volume. as a biography it is without interest, as it contains no new facts as to his life. in memoirs of the reign of queen elizabeth from the year to her death appeared, edited by dr. thomas birch. these memoirs are founded upon the letters of the various members of the bacon family. in a volume of letters of francis bacon was issued under the same editor. such are the sources of information which have come down to us in biographical notices. in the british museum, the record office, and elsewhere are the originals of the letters and the manuscripts of some of the tracts which spedding has printed. the british museum also possesses two books of memoranda used by bacon. the transportat is entirely, and the promus is partly, in his handwriting. beyond his published works, that is all that so far has been available. spedding remarks[ ]: "what became of his books which were left to sir john constable and must have contained traces of his reading, we do not know, but very few appear to have survived." happily, spedding was wrong. during the past ten years nearly , books which have passed through bacon's hands have been gathered together. these are copiously annotated by him, and from these annotations the wide range and the methodical character of his reading may be gathered. manuscripts which were in his library, and at least four common-place books in his handwriting, have also been recovered. particulars of these have not yet been made public, but the advantage of access to them has been available in the preparation this volume. footnotes: [ ] there are copies of this work bearing date , the year in which bacon died. [ ] the concluding paragraph of the epistle to the reader is as follows: "it's easily imaginable how unconcerned i am as to the fate of this book either in the history, or the observations, since i have been so faithful in the first, that it is not my own, but the historians; and so careful in the second that they are not mine, but the histories." [ ] "life and letters," vol. vii., page . chapter ii. the stock from which bacon came. "a prodigy of parts he must be who was begot by wise sir nicholas bacon, born of the accomplished mrs. ann cooke," says an early biographer. nicholas bacon is said to have been born at chislehurst, in kent, in . he was the second son of robert bacon, of drinkstone, in suffolk, esquire and sheep-reeve to the abbey of bury st. edmunds. it is believed that he was educated at the abbey school. he speaks of his intimacy with edmund rougham, a monk of that house, who was noted for his wonderful proficiency in memory. he was admitted to the college of corpus christi, cambridge, and took the degree of b.a. in - . he went to paris soon afterwards, and on his return studied law at gray's inn, being called to the bar in , and admitted ancient in . he was appointed, in , clerk to the court of augmentations. in he was made attorney of the court of wards and liveries, and continued as such under edward vi. upon the accession of mary he conformed to the change of religion and retained his office during her reign. nicholas bacon and william cecil, each being a widower, had married sisters. when elizabeth came to the throne cecil became her adviser. he was well acquainted with nicholas bacon's sterling worth and great capacity for business, and availed himself of his advice and assistance. the queen delivered to bacon the great seal, with the title of lord keeper, on the nd december, , and he was sworn of the privy council and knighted. by letters patent, dated th april, , the full powers of a chancellor were conferred upon him. in he narrowly escaped the loss of his office for alleged complicity in the issue of a pamphlet espousing the cause of the house of suffolk to the succession. he was restored to favour, and continued as lord keeper until his death in . the queen visited him at gorhambury on several occasions. sir nicholas bacon, in addition to performing the important duties of his high office in the court of chancery and in the star chamber, took an important part in all public affairs, both domestic and foreign, from the accession of elizabeth until his death. he first married jane, daughter of william fernley, of west creting, suffolk, by whom he had three sons and three daughters. for his second wife he married anne, daughter of sir anthony cooke, by whom he had two sons, anthony and francis. it is of more importance for the present purpose to know what type of man was the father of francis bacon. the author of the "arte of english poesie" ( ) relates that he came upon sir nicholas sitting in his gallery with the works of quintillian before him, and adds: "in deede he was a most eloquent man and of rare learning and wisdome as ever i knew england to breed, and one that joyed as much in learned men and good witts." this author, speaking of sir nicholas and burleigh, remarks, "from whose lippes i have seen to proceede more grave and naturall eloquence then from all the oratours of oxford and cambridge." in his "fragmenta regalia" sir robert naunton describes him as "an archpeece of wit and wisdom," stating that "he was abundantly facetious which took much with the queen when it was suited with the season as he was well able to judge of his times." fuller describes him as "a man of rare wit and deep experience," and, again, as "a good man, a grave statesman, and a father to his country." bishop burnet speaks of him as "not only one of the most learned and pious men, but one of the wisest ministers this nation ever bred." the observations of the author of "the statesmen and favourites of england in the reign of queen elizabeth" are very illuminating. "sir nicholas bacon," he says, "was a man full of wit and wisdome, a gentleman and a man of law with great knowledge therein." he proceeds: "this gentleman understood his mistress well and the times better: he could raise factions to serve the one and allay them to suit the others. he had the deepest reach into affairs of any man that was at the council table: the knottiest head to pierce into difficulties: the most comprehensive judgement to surround the merit of a cause: the strongest memory to recollect all circumstances of a business to one view: the greatest patience to debate and consider; (for it was he that first said, let us stay a little and we will have done the sooner:) and the clearest reason to urge anything that came in his way in the court of chancery.... leicester seemed wiser than he was, bacon was wiser than he seemed to be; hunsden neither was nor seemed wise.... great was this stateman's wit, greater the fame of it; which as he would say, _being nothing, made all things_. for report, though but fancy, begets opinion; and opinion begets substance.... he neither affected nor attained to greatness: _mediocria firma_, was his principle and his practice. when queen elizabeth asked him, _why his house was so little?_ he answered, _madam, my house is not too little for me, but you have made me too big for my house. give me_, said he, _a good estate rather than a great one. he had a very quaint saying and he used it often to good purpose_, that he loved the jest well but not the loss of his friend.... he was in a word, a father of his country and of _sir francis bacon_." before speaking of lady ann bacon, it is necessary to give some account of her father, sir anthony cooke. he was a great-grandson of sir thomas cooke, lord mayor of london, and was born at giddy hall, in essex. again the most valuable observations on his character are to be found in "the lives of statesmen and favourites" before referred to. the author states that sir anthony "was one of the governors to king edward the sixth when prince, and is charactered by mr. camden _vir antiqua serenitate_. he observeth him also to be happy in his daughters, learned above their sex in greek and latine: namely, mildred who married william cecil, lord treasurer of england; anne who married nichlas bacon, lord chancellor of england; katherine who married henry killigrew; elizabeth who married thomas hobby, and afterwards lord russell, and margaret who married ralph rowlet." "gravity," says this author, "was the ballast of sir anthony's soul and general learning its leading.... yet he was somebody in every art, and eminent in all, the whole circle of arts lodging in his soul. his latine, fluent and proper; his greek, critical and exact; his philology and observations upon each of these languages, deep, curious, various and pertinent: his logic, rational; his history and experience, general; his rhetorick and poetry, copious and genuine; his mathematiques, practicable and useful. knowing that souls were equal, and that women are as capable of learning as men, he instilled that to his daughters at night, which he had taught the prince in the day, being resolved to have sons by education, for fear he should have none by birth; and lest he wanted an heir of his body, he made five of his minde, for whom he had at once a _gavel-kind_ of affection and of estate." "three things there are before whom (was sir anthony's saying) i cannot do amis: , my prince; , my conscience; , my children. seneca told his sister, that though he could not leave her a good portion, he would leave her a good pattern. sir anthony would write to his daughter _mildred, my example is your inheritance and my life is your portion_.... "he said first, and his grandchilde my lord bacon after him, that the joys of parents are secrets, and so are their griefs and fears.... very providently did he secure his eternity, by leaving the image of his nature in his children and of his mind in his pupil.... the books he advised were not _many_ but _choice_: the business he pressed was not reading, but digesting.... sir john checke talked merrily, dr. coxe solidly and sir anthony cooke weighingly: a faculty that was derived with his blood to his grandchilde bacon." such then was the father of lady anne bacon. she and her sisters were famous as a family of accomplished classical scholars. she had a thorough knowledge of greek and latin. an apologie ... in defence of the churche of england by dr. jewel, bishop of salisbury, was translated by her from the latin and published in . sir anthony had been exiled during mary's reign, for his adherence to the protestant faith. his daughter, anne, inherited, not only his classical accomplishments, but his strong puritan faith and his hatred of popery. francis bacon describes her as "a saint of god." there is a portrait of her painted by nathaniel bacon, her stepson, in which she appears standing in her pantry habited as a cook. in feature francis appears to have resembled his mother. he "had the same pouting lip, the same round head, the same straight nose and hebe chin." chapter iii. francis bacon, to . in the registry of st. martin's will be found this entry: mr. franciscus bacon jan (_filius d'm nicho bacon magni angliæ sigilli custodis_)." rawley in his "life of the honourable author" says: "francis bacon, the glory of his age and nation, was born in york house or york place, in the strand, on the two and twentieth day of january in the year of our lord ." he relates that "his first and childish years were not without some mark of eminency; at which time he was endued with that pregnancy and towardness of wit, as they were pressages of that deep and universal apprehension which was manifest in him afterward." "the queen then delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him with questions unto whom he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his years that her majesty would often term him '_her young lord keeper_.' being asked by the queen how old he was he answered with much discretion, being then but a boy[ ] that he was two years younger than her majesty's happy reign, with which answer the queen was much taken." in the "lives of the statesmen and favourites of queen elizabeth" there is reference to the early development of his mental and intellectual faculties. the author writes:--"he had a large mind from his father and great abilities from his mother; his parts improved more than his years, his great fixed and methodical memory, his solide judgement, his quick fancy, his ready expression, gave assurance of that profound and universal comprehension of things which then rendered him the observation of great and wise men; and afterwards the wonder of all." the historian continues:--"he never saw anything that was not noble and becoming," "at twelve his industry was above the capacity and his minde beyond the reache of his contemporaries." this boy so marvellously endowed was brought up in surroundings which were ideal for his development. his father, a man of erudition, a wit and orator, occupying one of the highest positions in the country, his mother a lady of great classical accomplishments, who had enjoyed the benefits of an education and training by her father, that eminent scholar, sir anthony cooke, and, lastly, there was this man--his grandfather--living within riding distance from his home. it seems inevitable that the natural powers of young francis must have excited a keen interest in the old tutor of edward vi., who had devoted his evenings to imparting to his daughters what he had taught the prince during the day, so that if he left behind him no heirs of his body, he might leave heirs of his mind. the boy francis was, indeed, a worthy heir of his mind, and it is impossible to believe otherwise than that sir anthony cooke would throw himself heart and soul into the education of his grandchild, but no statement or tradition has come down to this effect. it may be, however, that a sentence which has already been quoted from "the lives of statesmen and favourites" is intended to imply that francis was the pupil of sir anthony: "he said first and his grandchilde my lord bacon after him, that the joys of parents are secrets, and so their griefs and fears.... very providently did he secure his eternity, by leaving the image of his nature in his children and of his mind in his pupil." the pupil referred to was not edward vi., for he died twenty-three years before sir anthony, and he could not, therefore, have left the image of his mind in the young king. following directly after the sentence "he said first and his grandchilde lord bacon after him" it is possible that the reference may be to the boy francis. certainly sir anthony "would secure his eternity" if he left the image of his mind in his "grandchilde." in any case the prodigious natural powers of the boy were placed in an environment well suited for their full development. the historian says that "at twelve his industry was above the capacity and his mind beyond the reache of his contemporaries." who were the contemporaries alluded to? those of his own age, or those who were living at the time? a boy of twelve, he excelled others in his great industry and the wide range of his mind. this industry appears to have accompanied him through life, for rawley states that "he would ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies, as walking or taking the air abroad in his coach or some other befitting recreation; and yet he would lose no time, inasmuch as upon the first and immediate return he would fall to reading again, and so suffer no movement of time to slip from him without some present improvement." it is a remarkable fact on which too much stress cannot be laid that in the two lives of bacon, scanty as they are, by contemporary writers, his exceptional industry is pointed out. there are certainly no visible fruits of this industry. although there is no definite information as to what was the state of francis bacon's education at twelve, there is testimony as to that of some of his contemporaries. three instances will suffice. philip melancthon (whose family name was schwartzerd) was born in . his education was at an early age directed by his maternal grandfather, john reuter. after a short stay at a public school at bretten he was removed to the academy at pforzheim. here, under the tutorship of john reuchlin, an elegant scholar and teacher of languages, he acquired the taste for greek literature in which he subsequently became so distinguished. here his genius for composition asserted itself. amongst other poetical essays in which he indulged when eleven years of age, he wrote a humorous piece in the form of a comedy, which he dedicated to his kind friend and instructor, reuchlin, in whose presence it was performed by the schoolfellows of the youthful author. after a residence of two years at pforzheim, philip matriculated at the university of heidelberg on the th october, , being eleven years and nine months old. young as he was, he appears to have been employed to compose most of the harangues that were delivered in the university, besides writing some pieces for the professors themselves. here, at this early age, he composed his "rudiments of the greek language," which were afterwards published. agrippa d'aubigné was born in and died in . at six years of age he read latin, greek, and hebrew. when ten years he translated the crito. italian and spanish were at his command. thomas bodley was born in and died in . in the short autobiography which he left he makes the following statement as to how far his education had advanced when his father decided to fix his abode in the city of geneva in :-- "i was at that time of twelve yeares age but through my fathers cost and care sufficiently instructed to become an auditour of _chevalerius_ in hebrew, of _berealdus_ in greeke, of _calvin_ and _beza_ in divinity and of some other professours in that university, (which was newly there erected) besides my domesticall teachers, in the house of philibertus saracenus, a famous physitian in that city with whom i was boarded; when robertus constantinus that made the greek lexicon read homer with me." bodley was undoubtedly proficient in french, for calvin and beza lectured in french. the "institution of the christian religion," calvin's greatest work, although published in latin in , was translated by him into french, and issued in or . this translation is one of the finest examples of french prose. bodley's english was probably very poor, and for a very good reason--there was no english language worthy of comparison with the languages of france, italy, or spain. it had yet to be created. it is fair to assume that at twelve years of age francis bacon was as proficient in languages as were philip melancthon, agrippa d'aubigné, or thomas bodley at that age. he, therefore, had at least a good knowledge of latin, greek, hebrew, french, and such english as there was. another class of evidence is now available. it has already been stated that a large number of bacon's books have been recovered, copiously annotated by him. some of these books bear the date when the annotations were made. for the most part the marginal notes appear to be aids to memory, but in many cases they are critical observations of the text. these are, however, dealt with in a subsequent chapter. gilbert wats, in dedicating to charles i. his interpretation of "the advancement of proficiency of learning" ( ), makes a statement which throws light on the course of bacon's studies, and this strongly supports the present contention. he says:-- "he (bacon) after he had survaied all the records of antiquity, after the volume of men, betook himselfe to the study of the volume of the world; and having conquerd whatever books possest, set upon the kingdome of nature and carried that victory very farre." speaking of him as a boy his biographer[ ] describes his memory as "fixed and methodical," and in another place he says "his judgment was solid yet his memory was a wonder." the extent of his reading at this time had been very wide. he had already taken all knowledge to be his province, and was with that industry which was beyond the capacity of his contemporaries rapidly laying the foundations which subsequently justified this claim. footnotes: [ ] lloyd states that this occurred when he was seven years of age. [ ] "the lives of statesmen and favourites of elizabeth." chapter iv. at cambridge. francis bacon went to reside at trinity college, cambridge, in april, , being years and months of age. while the plague raged he was absent from the end of august, , until the beginning of march following. he finally left the university at christmas, , about one month before his fifteenth birthday. rawley says he was there educated and bred under the tuition of dr. john whitgift,[ ] then master of the college, afterwards the renowned archbishop of canterbury, a prelate of the first magnitude for sanctity, learning, patience, and humility; under whom he was observed to have been more than an ordinary proficient in the several arts and sciences. amboise, in the "discours sur la vie de m. bacon," prefixed to the "histoire naturelle," paris, , says: "le jugement et la mémoire ne furent jamais en aucun home au degrè qu'ils estoient en celuy-cy; de sorte qu'en bien peu de temps il se rendit fort habile en toutes les sciences qui s'apprennent au collège. et quoi que deslors il fust jugé capable des charges les plas importantes, nean-moins pour ne tomber dedans la mesme faute que sont d'ordinaire les jeunes gens de son estoffe, qui par une ambition trop précipitée portent souvent au maniement des grandes affaires un esprit encore tout rempli des crudités de l'escole, monsieur bacon se voulut acquérir cette science, qui rendit autres-fois ulysse si recommandable et luy fit mériter le nom de sage, par la connoissance des m�urs de tant de nations diverses." that is all that can be said about his career at cambridge except that rawley adds: "whilst he was commorant in the university, about sixteen years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day." as bacon left cambridge at christmas, , before he was years of age, rawley's recollection must have been at fault when he mentions the age of as that when bacon formed this opinion. there is another account of this incident in which it is stated that francis bacon left cambridge without taking a degree as a protest against the manner in which philosophy was taught there. in the preface to the "great instauration" bacon repeats his protest: "and for its value and utility, it must be plainly avowed that that wisdom which we have derived principally from the greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge and has the characteristic property of boys: it can talk but it cannot generate: for it is fruitful of controversies but barren of works." this is merely a re-statement of the position he took up when at cambridge. so this boy set up his opinion against that of the recognised professors of philosophy of his day, against the whole authority of the staff of the university, on a fundamental point on the most important question which could be raised as to the pursuit of knowledge. it is not too much to say that he had at this time covered the whole field of knowledge in a manner more thorough than it had ever been covered before, and with his mind, which was beyond the reach of his contemporaries, he began to lay down those laws which revolutionised all thought and have become the accepted method by which the pursuit of knowledge is followed. it is necessary again to seek for parallels to justify the position which will be claimed for francis bacon at this period. philip melancthon affords one and james crichton another. at heidelberg melancthon remained three years. he left when he was , the principal cause of his leaving being disappointment at being refused a higher degree in the university solely, it is alleged, on account of his youth. in september, , he was entered at the university of tubingen, where, in the following year, before he was years of age, he was created doctor in philosophy or master of arts. he then commenced a course of public lectures, embracing an extraordinary variety of subjects, including the learned languages, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics, and theology. here in he put forth his revision of the text of terence. besides he entered into an undertaking with thomas anshelmus to revise all the books printed by him. he bestowed great labour on a large work in folio by nauclerus, which he appears to have almost entirely re-written. so much romance has been thrown around james crichton that it is difficult to obtain the real facts of his life. sir thomas urquhart, in "discovery of a most exquisite jewel," published in , gives a biography which is, without doubt, mainly apocryphal. certain facts, however, are well established. he was born in the same year as was bacon ( ). at years of age he entered st. andrew's university, and in (the year bacon left cambridge) took his degree, coming out third in the first class. in he went to france, as did bacon--to paris. in the college of navarre he issued a universal challenge. this he subsequently repeated at venice with equal success; that is, to all men, upon all things, in any of twelve languages named. the challenge is broad and formal. he pledged himself to review the schoolmen, allowed his opponents the privilege of selecting their topics--mathematics, no less than scholastic lore--either from branches publicly or privately taught, and promised to return answers in logical figure or in numbers estimated according to their occult power, or in any of a hundred sorts of verse. he is said to have justified before many competent witnesses his magnificent pretensions. what philip melancthon was at fifteen, what james crichton was at sixteen, francis bacon may have been. all the testimony which his contemporaries afford, especially having regard to his after life, justify the assertion that in knowledge and acquirements he was at least their equal. about eighteen months later his portrait was painted by hilliard, the court miniature painter, who inscribed around it, as james spedding says, the significant words--the natural ejaculation, we may presume, of the artist's own emotion--"_si tabula daretur digna animum mallem._" if one could only find materials worthy to paint his mind. footnotes: [ ] dr. whitgift was a man of strong moral rectitude, yet in he became one of its sponsors on the publication of "venus and adonis." chapter v. early compositions. it is at this stage that the mystery of francis bacon begins to develop. every channel through which information might be expected appears to be blocked. besides a few pamphlets, in the production of which little time would be occupied, there came nothing from his pen until when, at the age of , the first edition of the essays was published--only ten short essays containing less than , words. in , when , he addressed to james i. the "two books on the advancement of learning," containing less than , words. it would require no effort on bacon's part to write either of these volumes. he could turn out the "two books of the advancement of learning" with the same facility that a leader writer of the _times_ would write his daily articles. he was to all intents and purposes unoccupied. until he had not held a brief, and he never had any practice at the bar worth considering. he was a member of parliament, but the house seldom sat, and never for long periods. bacon's life is absolutely unaccounted for. it is now proposed, by the aid of the literature of the period from to , and with the help of information derived from his own handwriting, to trace, step by step, the results of his industry, and to supply the reason for the concealment which he pursued. there is an entry in the book of orders of gray's inn under date st november, , that anthony and francis bacon (who had been admitted members th june, , "_de societate magistrorum_") be admitted to the grand company, _i.e._, to the degree of ancients, a privilege to which they were entitled as sons of a judge. from a letter subsequently written by burghley, it is known that one barker was appointed as their tutor of law. apparently it was intended that they should settle down to a course of legal training, but this plan was abandoned, at any rate, as far as francis was concerned. sir amias paulet, who was chancellor of the garter, a privy counsellor, and held in high esteem by the queen,[ ] was about to proceed to paris to take the place of dr. dale as ambassador at the court of france. there is a letter written from calais, dated th september, , from sir amias to lord burghley, in which this paragraph appears: "my ordinary train is no greater than of necessity, being augmented by some young gentlemen, whereof one is sir nicholas throgmorton's son, who was recommended to me by her majesty, and, therefore, i could not refuse him. the others are so dear to me and the most part of them of such towardness, as my good hope of their doing well, and thereafter they will be able to serve their prince and country, persuades me to make so much to excuse my folly as to entreat you to use your favour in my allowance for my transportations, my charges being increased by these extraordinary occasions." francis bacon was one of this group of young gentlemen. rawley states that "after he had passed the circle of the liberal arts, his father thought fit to frame and mould him for the arts of state; and for that end sent him over into france with sir amyas paulet then employed ambassador lieger into france." there are grounds for believing that bacon's literary activity had commenced before he left england. there is abundant evidence to prove that it was the custom at this period for authors who desired to conceal their authorship to substitute for their own names, initials or the names of others on the title-pages. two instances will suffice: "the arte of english poesie" was published in , but written several years previously. the author says:--"i know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have written commendably, and suppressed it agayne, or els suffred it to be publisht without their owne names to it as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seeme learned, and to shew himself amorous of any learned art." there is a bare-faced avowal of how names were placed on title-pages in a letter which exists from henry cuffe to mr. reynolds. cuffe, an oxford scholar of distinction, was a close companion and confidant of essex. after the capture and sacking of cadiz by essex and howard, the former deemed it important that his version of the affair should be the first to be published in england. cuffe, therefore, started off post haste with the manuscript, but was taken ill on his arrival at portsmouth, and could not proceed. he despatched the manuscript by a messenger with a letter to "good mr. reynoldes," who was a private secretary of essex. he was to cause a transcript to be made and have it delivered to some good printer, in good characters and with diligence to publish it. reynoldes was to confer with mr. greville (fulke greville, afterwards lord brooke) "whether he can be contented to suffer the two first letters of his name to be used in the inscription." "if he be unwilling," adds cuffe, "you may put r.b. which some no doubt will interprete to be beale, but it skills not." that this was a common practice is admitted by those acquainted with elizabethan literature. if any of bacon's writings were published prior to the trifle which appeared in as essaies, his name was suppressed, and it would be probable some other name would appear on the title-page. there is a translation of a classical author, bearing date , which is in the baconian style, but which need not be claimed for him without further investigation. the following suggestion is put forward with all diffidence, but after long and careful investigation. francis bacon was the author of two books which were published, one before he left england, and the other shortly after. the first is a philosophical discourse entitled "the anatomie of the minde." newlie made and set forth by t.r. imprinted at london by i.c. for andrew maunsell, , mo. the dedication is addressed to master christopher hatton, and the name of tho. rogers is attached to it. there was a thomas rogers who was chaplain to archbishop bancroft, and the book has been attributed to him, apparently only because no other of the same name was known. there was published in a translation by rogers of a latin book "of the ende of the world, etc." and there are other translations by him published between then and . there are several sermons, also, but the style of these, the matter, and the manner of treatment are quite distinct from those of the book under consideration. there is nothing of his which would support the assignment to him of "the anatomie of the mind." it is foreign to his style. having regard to the acknowledged custom of the times of putting names other than the author's on title-pages, there is no need for any apology for expressing doubt as to whether the book has been correctly placed to the credit of the bishop bancroft's chaplain. in the address to the reader the author says: "i dyd once for my profite in the universitie, draw into latin tables, which since for thy profite (christian reader) at the request of a gentleman of good credite and worship, i have englished and published in these two books." there is in existence a copy of the book with the printer's and other errors corrected in bacon's own handwriting. bearing date , imprinted at london for henri cockyn, is an octavo book styled, _"beautiful blossoms" gathered by john byshop from the best trees of all kyndes, divine, philosophicall, astronomicall, cosmographical, historical and humane that are growing in greece, latium, and arabia, and some also in vulgar orchards as wel fro these that in auncient time were grafted, as also from them which with skilful head and hand beene of late yeare's, yea, and in our dayes planted: to the unspeakable, both pleasure and profite of all such as wil vouchsafe to use them._ on the title-page are the words, "the first tome," but no further volume was published. as to who or what john byshop was there is no information available. his name appears on no other book. the preface is a gem of musical sounding words. it contains the sentence, "let them pass it over and read the rest which are all as plaine as dunstable way." bacon's home was within a few miles of dunstable way, which was the local term for the main road. it is impracticable here to give at length the grounds upon which it is believed that francis bacon was the author of these two books. each of them is an outpouring of classical lore, and is evidently written by some young man who had recently assimilated the writings of nearly every classical author. in this respect both correspond with the manner of "the french academie," to which the attention of the reader will shortly be directed, whilst in "the anatomie of the minde" the treatment of the subject is identical with that in the latter. failing actual proof, the circumstantial evidence that the two books are from the same pen is almost as strong as need be. some time in october, , sir amyas paulet would reach paris, accompanied by bacon. the only fragment of information which is given by his biographers of any occurrence during his stay there is obtained from rawley. he states that "sir amias paulet after a while held him fit to be entrusted with some message, or advertisement to the queen, which having performed with great approbation, he returned back into france again with intention to continue for some years there." in his absence in france, his father, the lord keeper, died. this was in february, - . if he returned shortly after news of his father's death reached him, his stay on the continent would cover about two and a-half years. as to what he was doing nothing is known, but pierre amboise states that "france, italy, and spain as the most civilised nations of the whole world were those whither his desire for knowledge carried him." footnotes: [ ] it was to sir amias that the custody of mary queen of scots was committed. chapter vi. bacon's "temporis partus maximus." francis bacon was at blois with sir amias paulet in . in the same year was published the first edition of the first part of "académie francoise par pierre de la primaudaye esceuyer, seignor dudict lieu et de la barrée, gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du roy." the dedication, dated february, (_i.e._, ) is addressed, "au tres-chrestien roy de france et de polongne henry iii. de ce nom." the first english translation, by t. b., was "published in [ ], imprinted at london by edmund bollifant for g. bishop and ralph newbery." other parts of "the academy" followed at intervals of years, but the first and only complete edition in english bears date , and was printed for thomas adams. over the dedication is the well-known archer emblem. it is a thick folio volume, with , pages double columns. it may be termed the first encyclopædia which appeared in any language, and is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable productions of the elizabethan era. little is known of pierre de la primaudaye. the particulars for his biography in the "biographie nationale" seem to have been taken from references made to the author in the "french académie" itself. in the french edition, , there is a portrait of a man, and under it the words "anag. de l'auth. par la prierè dieu m'ayde." the following is an extract from the dedication:-- "the dinner of that prince of famous memorie, was a second table of salomon, vnto which resorted from euerie nation such as were best learned, that they might reape profit and instruction. yours, sir, being compassed about with those, who in your presence daily discourse of, and heare discoursed many graue and goodly matters, seemeth to be a schoole erected to teach men that are borne to vertue. and for myselfe, hauing so good hap during the assemblie of your estates at blois, as to be made partaker of the fruit gathered thereof, it came in my mind to offer vnto your maiestie a dish of diuers fruits, which i gathered in a platonicall garden or orchard, otherwise called an academie, where i was not long since with certaine yoong gentlemen of aniou my companions, discoursing togither of the institution in good maners, and of the means how all estates and conditions may liue well and happily. and although a thousand thoughts came then into my mind to hinder my purpose, as the small authoritie, which youth may or ought to haue in counsell amongst ancient men: the greatnes of the matter subject, propounded to be handled by yeeres of so small experience; the forgetfulness of the best foundations of their discourses, which for want of a rich and happie memorie might be in me: my iudgement not sound ynough, and my profession vnfit to set them downe in good order: briefly, the consideration of your naturall disposition and rare vertue, and of the learning which you receiuve both by reading good authors, and by your familiar communication with learned and great personages that are neere about your maiestie (whereby i seemed to oppose the light of an obscure day, full of clouds and darkness, to the bright beames of a very cleere shining sonne, and to take in hand, as we say, to teach minerua). i say all these reasons being but of too great weight to make me change my opinion, yet calling to mind manie goodlie and graue sentences taken out of sundry greeke and latine philosophers, as also the woorthie examples of the liues of ancient sages and famous men, wherewith these discourses were inriched, which might in delighting your noble mind renew your memorie with those notable sayings in the praise of vertue and dispraise of vice, which you alwaies loued to heare: and considering also that the bounty of artaxerxes that great monarke of the persians was reuiued in you, who receiued with a cheerfull countenance a present of water of a poore laborer, when he had no need of it, thinking to be as great an act of magnanimitie to take in good part, and to receiue cheerfully small presents offered with a hartie and good affection, as to giue great things liberally, i ouercame whatsoeuer would haue staied me in mine enterprise." it appears, therefore, that the author by good hap was a visitor at the court of henry iii. when at blois; that he was there studying with certain young gentlemen of anjou, his companions; that he was a youth, and of years of small experience; that his memory might not be sufficiently rich and happy, his judgment not enough, and his profession unfit in recording the discourses of himself and his companions. "the author to the reader" is an essay on philosophy, every sentence in which seems to have the same familiar sound as essays which subsequently appeared under another name. the contents of the several chapters are enumerated thus: "of man," "of the body and soule," etc. the first chapter contains a description of how the "academie" came about. an ancient wise gentleman of great calling having spent the greater part of his years in the service of two kings, and of his country, france, for many and good causes had withdrawn himself to his house. he thought that to content his mind, which always delighted in honest and vertuous things, he could not bring greater profit to the monarchie of france, than to lay open and preserve and keep youth from the corruption which resulted from the over great license and excessive liberty granted to them in the universities. he took unto his house four young gentlemen, with the consent of their parents who were distinguished noblemen. after he had shown these young men the first grounds of true wisdom, and of all necessary things for their salvation, he brought into his house a tutor of great learning and well reported of his good life and conversation, to whom he committed their instruction. after teaching them the latin tongue and some smattering of greek he propounded for their chief studies the moral philosophy of ancient sages and wise men, together with the understanding and searching out of histories which are the light of life. the four fathers, desiring to see what progress their sons had made, decided to visit them. and because they had small skill in the latin tongue, they determined to have their children discourse in their own natural tongue of all matters that might serve for the instruction and reformation of every estate and calling, in such order and method as they and their master might think best. it was arranged that they should meet in a walking place covered over with a goodly green arbour, and daily, except sundays, for three weeks, devote two hours in the morning and two hours after dinner to these discourses, the fathers being in attendance to listen to their sons. so interesting did these discussions become that the period was often extended to three or four hours, and the young men were so intent upon preparation for them that they would not only bestow the rest of the days, but oftentimes the whole night, upon the well studying of that which they proposed to handle. the author goes on to say:--"during which time it was my good hap to be one of the companie when they began their discourses, at which i so greatly wondered that i thought them worthy to be published abroad." from this it would appear that the author was a visitor, privileged, with the four fathers and the master, to listen to the discourses of these four young men. but, a little further on the position is changed; one of the four young men is, without any explanation, ignored, and his father disappointed! for the author takes his place, as will be seen from the following extract:-- "and thus all fower of us followed the same order daily until everie one in his course had intreated according to appointment, both by the precepts of doctrine, as also by the examples of the lives of ancient sages and famous men, of all things necessary for the institution of manners and happie life of all estates and callings in this french monarchie. but because i knowe not whether, in naming my companions by their proper names, supposing thereby to honour them as indeede they deserve it, i should displease them (which thing i would not so much as thinke) i have determined to do as they that play on a theater, who under borrowed maskes and disguised apparell, do represent the true personages of those whom they have undertaken to bring on the stage. i will therefore call them by names very agreeable to their skill and nature: the first aser which signifieth _felicity_: the second amana which is as much to say as _truth_: the third aram which noteth to us _highness_; and to agree with them as well in name as in education and behaviour. i will name myself achitob[ ] which is all one with _brother of goodness_. further more i will call and honour the proceeding and finishing of our sundry treatises and discourses with this goodlie and excellent title of academie, which was the ancient and renowned school amongst the greek philosophers, who were the first that were esteemed, and that the place where plato, xenophon, poleman, xenocrates, and many other excellent personages, afterward called academicks, did propound & discourse of all things meet for the instruction and teaching of wisdome: wherein we purposed to followe them to our power, as the sequele of our discourses shall make good proofe." and then the discourses commence. "love's labour's lost" was published in , and was the first quarto upon which the name of shakespeare was printed. the title-page states that it is "newly corrected and augmented," from which it may be inferred that there was a previous edition, but no copy of such is known. the commentators are in practical agreement that it was probably the first play written by the dramatist. there are differences of opinion as to the probable date when it was written. richard grant white believes this to be not later than , knight gives , but all this is conjecture. the play opens with a speech by ferdinand:-- "let fame that all hunt after in their lives, live registred upon our brazen tombes, and then grace us, in the disgrace of death: when spight of cormorant devouring time, th' endevour of this present breath may buy: that honour which shall bate his sythes keene edge, and make us heyres of all eternitie. therefore brave conquerours, for so you are, that warre against your own affections, and the huge armie of the worlds desires. our late edict shall strongly stand in force, navar shall be the wonder of the world. our court shall be a little achademe, still and contemplative in living art. you three, berowne, doumaine, and longavill, have sworne for three yeeres terme, to live with me, my fellow schollers, and to keepe those statutes that are recorded in this schedule heere. your oathes are past, and now subscribe your names; that his owne hand may strike his honour downe, that violates the smallest branch heerein: if you are arm'd to doe, as sworne to do, subscribe to your deepe oathes, and keepe it to." four young men in the french "academie" associated together, as in "love's labour lost," to war against their own affections and the whole army of the world's desires. dumaine, in giving his acquiescence to ferdinand, ends:-- "to love, to wealth, to pompe, i pine and die with all these living in philosophie." philosophie was the subject of study of the four young men to the "academie." berowne was a visitor, for he says:-- "i only swore to study with your grace and stay heere in your court for three yeeres' space." upon his demurring to subscribe to the oath as drawn, ferdinand retorts:-- well, sit you out: go home, berowne: adue." to which berowne replies:-- no, my good lord; i have sworn to stay with you." achitob was a visitor at the academie in france. there are other points of resemblance, but sufficient has been said to warrant consideration of the suggestion that the french "academie" contains the serious studies of the four young men whose experiences form the subject of the play. the parallels between passages in the shakespeare plays and the french "academie" are numerous, but they form no part of the present contention. one of these may, however, be mentioned. in the third tome the following passage occurs[ ]:-- psal. xix.: "it is not without cause that the prophet said (the heavens declare the glory of god, and the earth sheweth the workes of his handes) for thereby he evidently teacheth, as with the finger even to our eies, the great and admirable providence of god their creator; even as if the heavens should speake to anyone. in another place it is written (eccles. xliii.): (this high ornament, this cleere firmament, the beauty of the heaven so glorious to behold, tis a thing full of majesty)." on turning to the revised version of the bible it will be found that the first verse is thus translated: "the pride of the height, the cleare firmament the beauty of heaven with his glorious shew." the rendering of the text in "the french academy" is strongly suggestive of hamlet's famous soliloquy. "this most excellent canopy, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fritted with golden fire, why it appears to me no other than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." the author has forsaken the common-place rendering of the apocrypha, and has adopted the same declamatory style which shakespeare uses. it is strongly reminiscent of hamlet's famous speech, act ii., scene ii. only one of the shakespeare commentators makes any reference to the work. the rev. joseph hunter, writing in , points out that the dramatist in "as you like it," describing the seven ages of man, follows the division made in the chapter on "the ages of man" in the "academie."[ ] the suggestion now made is that the french "academie" was written by bacon, who is represented in the dialogues as achitob--the first part when he was about years of age, that he continued it until, in , the complete work was published. in the dedication the author describes himself as a youth of immature experience, but the contents bear evidence of a wide knowledge of classical authors and their works, a close acquaintance with the ancient philosophies, and a store of general information which it would be impossible for any ordinary youth of such an age to possess. but was not the boy who at years of age left cambridge disagreeing with the teaching there of aristotle's philosophy, and whose mental qualities and acquirements provoked as "the natural ejaculation of the artist's emotion" the significant words, "_si tabula daretur digna animum mallem_," altogether abnormal? was the "french academie" bacon's _temporis partus maximus_? it is only in a letter written to father fulgentio about that this work is heard of. bacon writes: "equidem memini me, quadraginta abhinc annis, juvenile opusculum circa has res confecisse, quod magna prorsus fiducia et magnifico titulo 'temporis partum maximum' inscripsi."[ ] spedding says: "this was probably the work of which henry cuffe (the great oxford scholar who was executed in as one of the chief accomplices in the earl of essex's treason) was speaking when he said that 'a fool could not have written it and a wise man would not.' bacon's intimacy with essex had begun about thirty-five years before this letter was written." forty years from would carry back to , the year preceding the date of publication of the first edition in english. if cuffe's remark was intended to apply to the "french academy," it is just such a criticism as the book might be expected to provoke. the first edition of "the french academie" in english appeared in , the second in , the third (two parts) in , the fourth (three parts) in , the fifth in (all quartos), then, in , the large folio edition containing the fourth part "never before published in english." it appears to have been more popular in england than it was in france. brunet in his edition mentions neither the book nor the author, primaudaye. the question as to whether there was at this time a reading public in england sufficiently wide to absorb an edition in numbers large enough to make the publication of this and similar works possible at a profit will be dealt with hereafter. in anticipation it may be said that the balance of probabilities justifies the conjecture that the issue of each of these editions involved someone in loss, and the folio edition involved considerable loss. a comparison between the french and english publications points to both having been written by an author who was a master of each language rather than that the latter was a mere translation of the former. the version is so natural in idiom and style that it appears to be an original rather than a translation. in how many men were there who could write such english? the marginal notes are in the exact style of bacon. "a similitude"--"a notable comparison"--occur frequently just as the writer finds them again and again in bacon's handwriting in volumes which he possesses. the book abounds in statements, phrases, and quotations which are to be found in bacon's letters and works. one significant fact must be mentioned. the first letter of the text in the dedication in the first english translation is the letter s. it is printed from a wood block (fig. i.). thirty-nine years after (in ) when the last edition of bacon's essays--and, with the exception of the small pamphlet containing his versification of certain psalms, the last publication during his life--was printed, that identical wood block (fig. ii.) was again used to print the first letter in the dedication of that book. every defect and peculiarity in the one will be found in the other. a search through many hundreds of books printed during these thirty-nine years-- to --has failed to find it used elsewhere, except on one occasion, either then, before, or since. did bacon mark his first work on philosophy and his last book by printing the first letter in each from the same block?[ ] [illustration: _fig. i._ the first letter in the text of the dedication of the st edition of the english translation of the "french academie," = =. printed at london by g. bollifant. the block is also used in a similar manner in the nd edition, = =. londini impensis, john bishop.] [illustration: _fig. ii._ the first letter in the text of the dedication of the = = edition of bacon's essays, printed in london, by john haviland.] _both letters were printed from the same block._ footnotes: [ ] in the "gesta grayorum" one of the articles which the knights of the helmet were required to vow to keep, each kissing his helmet as he took his vow, was "item--every knight of this order shall endeavour to add conference and experiment to reading; and therefore shall not only read and peruse 'guizo,' 'the french academy,' 'galiatto the courtier,' 'plutarch,' 'the arcadia,' and the neoterical writers from time to time," etc. the "gesta grayorum," which was written in , was not published until . the manuscript was probably incorrectly read as to the titles of the books. "galiatto," apparently, should be "galateo," described in a letter of gabriel harvey as "the italian archbishop brave galateo." the "courtier" is the italian work by castiglione which was englished by sir thomas hoby. "guizo" should be "guazzo." stefano guazzo's "civil conversation"--four books--was englished by g. pettie and young. [ ] "hit" is used by chaucer as the past participle of "hide." the name thus yields a suggestive anagram, "bacohit." [ ] edition, page . [ ] in addition to this and to the "gesta grayorum" ( ) i have only been able to find two references to "the french academy" in the works of english writers. j. payne collier, in his "poetical decameron," vol. ii., page , draws attention to the epistle "to the christian reader" prefixed to the second part, and suggests that the initials t.b. which occur at the end of the dedicatory epistle stand for thomas beard, the author of "theatre of god's judgments." collier does not appear to have read "the french academy." dibdin, in "notes on more's utopia," says, "but i entreat the reader to examine (if he be fortunate enough to possess the book) "the french academy of primaudaye," a work written in a style of peculiarly impressive eloquence, and which, not very improbably, was the foundation of derham's and paley's "natural theology." [ ] "it being now forty years as i remember, since i composed a juvenile work on this subject which with great confidence and a magnificent title i named "the greatest birth of time." [ ] the block was used on page of the quarto edition of william camden's "britannia," published in london by george bishop, who was the publisher of the , , and editions of "the french academy." there is a marginal note at the foot of the imprint of the block commencing "r. bacons." francis bacon is known to have assisted camden in the preparation of this work. the manuscript bears evidence of the fact in his handwriting. chapter vii. bacon's first allegorical romance. there is another work which it is impossible not to associate with this period, and that is john barclay's "argenis." it is little better known than is "the french academy," and yet cowper pronounced it the most amusing romance ever written. cardinal richelieu is said to have been extremely fond of reading it, and to have derived thence many of his political maxims. it is an allegorical novel. it is proposed now only to mention some evidence connected with the "argenis" which supports the contention that the english edition contains the original composition, and that its author was young francis bacon. the first edition of the "argenis" in latin was published in . the authority to the publisher, nicholas buon, to print and sell the "argenis" is dated the st july, , and was signed by barclay at rome. the royal authority is dated on the st august following. barclay's death took place between these dates, on the th of august, at rome. it is reported that the cause of death was stone, but in an appreciation of him, published by his friend, ralph thorie, his death is attributed to poison. the work is an example of the highest type of latinity. so impressed was cowper with its style that he stated that it would not have dishonoured tacitus himself. a translation in spanish was published in , and in italian in . the latin version was frequently reprinted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--perhaps more frequently than any other book. in a letter dated th may, , chamberlain, writing to carleton, says: "the king has ordered ben jonson to translate the 'argenis,' but he will not be able to equal the original." on the nd october, , ben jonson entered a translation in stationers' hall, but it was never published. about that time there was a fire in jonson's house, in which it is said some manuscripts were destroyed; but it is a pure assumption that the "argenis" was one of these. in an english translation appeared by sir robert le grys, knight, and the verses by thomas may, esquire. the title-page bears the statement: "the prose upon his majesty's command." there is a clavis appended, also stated to be "published at his majesties command." it was printed by felix kyngston for richard mughten and henry seile. in the address to "the understanding reader" le grys says, "what then should i say? except it were to entreate thee, that where my english phrase doth not please thee, thou wilt compare it with the originall latin and mend it. which i doe not speak as thinking it impossible, but as willing to have it done, for the saving me a labour, who, if his majesty had not so much hastened the publishing it, would have reformed some things in it, that did not give myselfe very full satisfaction." in king james ordered a translation of the "argenis." in [ ] charles i. was so impatient to have a translation that he hastened the publication, thus preventing the translator from revising his work. three years previously, however, in --if the date may be relied on--there was published as printed by g. p. for henry seile a translation by kingesmill long. james died on the th march, . the "argenis" may not have been published in his lifetime; but if the date be correct, three or four years before charles hastened the publication of le grys's translation, this far superior one with kingesmill long's name attached to it could have been obtained from h. seile. surely the publisher would have satisfied the king's impatience by supplying him with a copy of the edition had it been on sale. the publication of a translation of the "argenis" must have attracted attention. is it possible that it could have been in existence and not brought to the notice of the king? there is something here that requires explanation. the epistle dedicatorie of the edition is written in the familiar style of another pen, although it bears the name of kingesmill long. the title-page states that it is "faithfully translated out of latine into english," but it is not directly in the epistle dedicatorie spoken of as a translation. the following extract implies that the work had been lying for years waiting publication:-- "this rude piece, such as it is, hath long lyen by me, since it was finished; i not thinking it worthy to see the light. i had always a desire and hope to have it undertaken by a more able workman, that our nation might not be deprived of the use of so excellent a story: but finding none in so long time to have done it; and knowing that it spake not _english_, though it were a rich jewell to the learned linguist, yet it was close lockt from all those, to whom education had not given more languages, than nature tongues: i have adventured to become the key to this piece of hidden treasure, and have suffered myselfe to be overruled by some of my worthy friends, whose judgements i have alwayes esteemed, sending it abroad (though coursely done) for the delight and use of others." not a word about the author! the translations, said to be by thomas may, of the latin verses in the are identical with those in the edition, although kingesmill long, on the title-page, appears as the translator. nothing can be learnt as to who or what long was. over lines "authori," signed ovv: fell:[ ] in the edition is one of the well-known light and dark a devices. this work is written in flowing and majestic english; the edition in the cramped style of translation. the copy bearing date , to which reference has been made, belonged to john henry shorthouse. he has made this note on the front page: "jno. barclay's description of himself under the person of nicopompus argenis, p. ." this is the description to which he alludes:-- "him thus boldly talking, nicopompus could no longer endure: he was a man who from his infancy loved learning; but who disdaining to be nothing but a booke-man had left the schooles very young, that in the courts of kings and princes, he might serve his apprenticeship in publicke affairs; so he grew there with an equall abilitie, both in learning and imployment, his descent and disposition fitting him for that kind of life: wel esteemed of many princes, and especially of meleander, whose cause together with the rest of the princes, he had taken upon him to defend." this description is inaccurate as applied to john barclay, but in every detail it describes francis bacon. a comparison has been made between the editions of and with the latin edition. it leaves little room for doubting that the is the original work. throughout the latin appears to follow it rather than to be the leader; whilst the edition follows the latin closely. in some cases the word used in the edition has been incorrectly translated into the edition, and the latin word re-translated literally and incorrectly in view of the sense in the edition. but space forbids this comparison being further followed; suffice it to say that everything points to the edition being the original work. as to the date of composition much may be said; but the present contention is that "the french academie," "the argenis," and "love's labour's lost" are productions from the same pen, and that they all represent the work of francis bacon probably between the years and . at any rate, the first-named was written whilst he was in france, and the others were founded on the incidents and experience obtained during his sojourn there. footnotes: [ ] one copy of this edition bears the date . [ ] probably owen felltham, author of "felltham's resolves." chapter viii. bacon in france, - . this brilliant young scholar landed with sir amias paulet at calais on the th of september, , and with him went straight to the court of henry iii. of france. it is remarkable that neither montagu, spedding, hepworth dixon, nor any other biographer seems to have thought it worth while to consider under what influences he was brought when he arrived there at the most impressionable period of his life. hepworth dixon, without stating his authority, says that he "quits the galleries of the louvre and st. cloud with his morals pure," but nothing more. and yet francis bacon arrived in france at the most momentous epoch in the history of french literature. this boy, with his marvellous intellect--the same intellect which nearly half a century later produced the "novum organum"--with a memory saturated with the records of antiquity and with the writings of the classical authors, with an industry beyond the capacity and a mind beyond the reach of his contemporaries, skilled in the teachings of the philosophers, with independence of thought and a courage which enabled him to condemn the methods of study followed at the university where he had spent three years; this boy who had a "beam of knowledge derived from god" upon him, who "had not his knowledge from books, but from some grounds and notions from himself," and above and beyond all who was conscious of his powers and had unbounded confidence in his capacity for using them; this boy walked beside the english ambassador elect into the highest circles of french society at the time when the most important factors of influence were ronsard and his confrères of the pléiade. he had left behind him in his native country a language crude and almost barbaric, incapable of giving expression to the knowledge which he possessed and the thoughts which resulted therefrom. at this time there were few books written in the english tongue which could make any pretence to be considered literature: sir thomas eliot's "the governor," robert ascham's "the schoolmaster," and thomas wright's "arts of rhetoric," almost exhaust the list. thynne's edition, , and lidgate's edition, , of chaucer's works are not intelligible. only in the edition can the great poet be read with any understanding. the work of re-casting the poems for this edition was bacon's, and he is the man referred to in the following lines, which are prefixed to it:-- _the reader to geffrey chaucer._ _rea._--where hast thou dwelt, good geffrey al this while, unknown to us save only by thy bookes? _chau._--in haulks, and hernes, god wot, and in exile, where none vouchsaft to yeeld me words or lookes: till one which saw me there, and knew my friends, did bring me forth: such grace sometimes god sends. _rea._--but who is he that hath thy books repar'd, and added moe, whereby thou are more graced? _chau._--the selfe same man who hath no labor spar'd, to helpe what time and writers had defaced: and made old words, which were unknoun of many, so plaine, that now they may be knoun of any. _rea._--well fare his heart: i love him for thy sake, who for thy sake hath taken all this pains. _chau._--would god i knew some means amends to make, that for his toile he might receive some gains. but wot ye what? i know his kindnesse such, that for my good he thinks no pains too much: and more than that; if he had knoune in time, he would have left no fault in prose nor rime. there is a catalogue of the library of sir thomas smith[ ] on august , , in his gallery at hillhall. it was said to contain nearly a thousand books. of these only five were written in the english language. under theologici, k. henry viii. book; under juris civilis, littleton's tenures, an old abridgement of statutes; under historiographi, hall's chronicles, and fabian's chronicles and the decades of p. martyr; under mathematica, the art of navigation. the remainder are in greek, latin, french, and italian. burghley's biographer states that burghley "never read any books or praiers but in latin, french, or italian, very seldom in englishe." at this time francis bacon thought in latin, for his mother tongue was wholly insufficient. there is abundant proof of this in his own handwriting. under existing conditions there could be no english literature worthy of the name. if a gentleman of the court wrote he either suppressed his writings or suffered them to be published without his name to them, as it was a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned and to show himself amorous of any good art. here is where spedding missed his way and never recovered himself. deep as is the debt of gratitude due to him for his devoted labours in the preparation of "bacon's life and letters" and in the edition of his works, it must be asserted that he accomplished this work without seeing francis bacon. there was a vista before young bacon's eyes from which the practice of the law and civil dignities were absent. he arrived at the french court at the psychological moment when an object-lesson met his eyes which had a more far-reaching effect on the language and literature of the anglo-saxon race than any or all other influences that have conspired to raise them to the proud position which to-day they occupy. it is necessary briefly to explain the position of the french language and literature at this juncture. the french renaissance of literature had its beginning in the early years of the sixteenth century. it had been preceded by that of italy, which opened in the fourteenth century, and reached its limit with ariosto and tasso, macchiavelli and guicciardini during the sixteenth century. towards the end of the fifteenth century modern french poetry may be said to have had its origin in villon and french prose in comines. the style of the former was artificial and his poems abounded in recurrent rhymes and refrains. the latter had peculiarities of diction which were only compensated for by weight of thought and simplicity of expression. clement marot, who followed, stands out as one of the first landmarks in the french renaissance. his graceful style, free from stiffness and monotony, earned for him a popularity which even the brilliancy of the pléiade did not extinguish, for he continued to be read with genuine admiration for nearly two centuries. he was the founder of a school of which mellia de st. gelais, the introducer of the sonnet into france, was the most important member. rabelais and his followers concurrently effected a complete revolution in fiction. marguerite of navarre, who is principally known as the author of "the heptameron," maintained a literary court in which the most celebrated men of the time held high place. it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that the great movement took place in french literature which, if that which occurred in the same country three hundred years subsequently be excepted, is without parallel in literary history. the pléiade consisted of a group of seven men and boys who, animated by a sincere and intelligent love of their native language, banded themselves together to remodel it and its literary forms on the methods of the two great classical tongues, and to reinforce it with new words from them. they were not actuated by any desire for gain. in jean daurat, then years of age, was professor of greek at le collège de coqueret in paris. amongst those who attended his classes were five enthusiastic, ambitious youths whose ages varied from seventeen to twenty-four. they were pierre de ronsard, joachim du bellay, remy belleau, antoine de baïf, and etienne jodelle. they and their professor associated themselves together and received as a colleague pontus de tyard, who was twenty-eight. they formed a band of seven renovators, to whom their countrymen applied the cognomen of the pléiade, by which they will ever be known. realising the defects and possibilities of their language, they recognised that by appropriations from the greek and latin languages, and from the melodious forms of the italian poetry, they might reform its defects and develop its possibilities so completely that they could place at the service of great writers a vehicle for expression which would be the peer if not the superior of any language, classical or modern. it was a bold project for young men, some of whom were not out of their teens, to venture on. that they met with great success is beyond question; the extent of that success it is not necessary to discuss here. the main point to be emphasised is that it was a deliberate scheme, originated, directed, and matured by a group of little more than boys. the french renaissance was not the result of a spontaneous bursting out on all sides of genius. it was wrought out with sheer hard work, entailing the mastering of foreign languages, and accompanied by devotion and without hope of pecuniary gain. the manifesto of the young band was written by joachim de bellay in , and was entitled, "la défense et illustration de la langue francaise." in the following year appeared ronsard's ode--the first example of the new method. pierre de ronsard entered court life when ten years old. in attendance on french ambassadors he visited scotland and england, where he remained for some time. a severe illness resulted in permanent deafness and compelled him to abandon his profession, when he turned to literature. although du bellay was the originator of the scheme, ronsard became the director and the acknowledged leader of the band. his accomplishments place him in the first rank of the poets of the world. reference would be out of place here to the movement which was after his death directed by malherbe against ronsard's reputation and fame as a poet and his eventual restoration by the disciples of sainte beuve and the followers of hugo. it is desirable, however, to allude to other great frenchmen whose labours contributed in other directions to promote the growth of french literature. jean calvin, a native of noyon, in picardy, had published in latin, in , when only twenty-seven years of age, his greatest work, both from a literary and theological point of view, "the institution of the christian religion," which would be accepted as the product of full maturity of intellect rather than the firstfruits of the career of a youth. what the pléiade had done to create a french language adequate for the highest expression of poetry calvin did to enable facility in argument and discussion. a latin scholar of the highest order, avoiding in his compositions a tendency to declamation, he developed a stateliness of phrase which was marked by clearness and simplicity. théodore beza, historian, translator, and dramatist, was another contributor to the literature of this period. jacques amyot had commenced his translations from "ethiopica," treating of the royal and chaste loves of theagenes and chariclea three years before du bellay's manifesto appeared. montaigne, referring to his translation of plutarch, accorded to him the palm over all french writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his vocabulary, in which he surpassed all others, but for his industry and depth of learning. in another field michel eyquem sieur de montaigne had arisen. his moral essays found a counterpart in the biographical essays of the abbé de brantôme. agrippa d'aubigné, prose writer, historian, and poet; guillaume de saluste du bartas, the protestant ronsard whose works were more largely translated into english than those of any other french writer; philippes desportes and others might be mentioned as forming part of that brilliant circle of writers who had during a comparatively short period helped to achieve such a high position for the language and literature of france. * * * * * in , when francis bacon arrived in france, the fame of the pléiade was at its zenith. du bellay and jodelle were dead, but the fruit of their labours and of those of their colleagues was evoking the admiration of their countrymen. the popularity of ronsard, the prince of poets and the poet of princes, was without precedent. it is said that the king had placed beside his throne a state chair for ronsard to occupy. poets and men of letters were held in high esteem by their countrymen. in england, for a gentleman to be amorous of any learned art was held to be discreditable, and any proclivities in this direction had to be hidden under assumed names or the names of others. in france it was held to be discreditable for a gentleman not to be amorous of the learned arts. the young men of the pléiade were all of good family, and all came from cultured homes. marguerite of navarre had set the example of attracting poets and writers to her court and according honours to them on account of their achievements. the kings of france had adopted a similar attitude. during the same period in england henry viii., mary, and elizabeth had been following other courses. they had given no encouragement to the pursuit of literature. notwithstanding the repetition by historians of the assertion that the good queen bess was a munificent patron of men of letters, literature flourished in her reign in spite of her action and not by its aid. bacon implies this in the opening sentences of the second book of the "advancement of learning." he speaks of queen elizabeth as being "a sojourner in the world in respect of her unmarried life, rather than an inhabitant. she hath indeed adorned her own time and many waies enricht it; but in truth to your majesty, whom god hath blest with so much royall issue worthy to perpetuate you for ever; whose youthfull and fruitfull bed, doth yet promise more children; it is very proper, not only to iradiate as you doe your own times, but also to extend your cares to those acts which succeeding ages may cherish, and eternity itself behold: amongst which, if my affection to learning doe not transport me, there is none more worthy, or more noble, than the endowment of the world with sound and fruitfull advancement of learning: for why should we erect unto ourselves some few authors, to stand like hercules columnes beyond which there should be no discovery of knowledge, seeing we have your majesty as a bright and benigne starre to conduct and prosper us in this navigation." as elizabeth had been unfruitful in her body, and james fruitful, so had she been unfruitful in encouraging the advancement of learning, but the appeal is made to james that he, being blessed with a considerable issue, should also have an issue by the endowment of learning. what must have been the effect on the mind of this brilliant young englishman, francis bacon, when he entered into this literary atmosphere so different from that of the court which he had left behind him? there was hardly a classical writer whose works he had not read and re-read. he was familiar with the teachings of the schoolmen; imbued with a deep religious spirit, he had mastered the principles of their faiths and the subtleties of their disputations. the intricacies of the known systems of philosophies had been laid bare before his penetrating intellect. with the mysteries of mathematics and numbers he was familiar. what had been discovered in astronomy, alchemy and astrology he had absorbed; however technical might be a subject, he had mastered its details. in architecture the works of vitruvius had been not merely read but criticised with the skill of an expert. medicine, surgery--every subject--he had made himself master of. in fact, when he asserted that he had taken all knowledge to be his province he spoke advisedly and with a basis of truth which has never until now been recognised. the youth of who possessed the intellect, the brain and the memory which jointly produced the "novum organum," whose mind was so abnormal that the artist painting his portrait was impelled to place round it "the significant words," "_si tabula daretur digna, animum mallem_," who had taken all knowledge to be his province, was capable of any achievement of the admirable crichton. and this youth it was who in passed from a country of literary and intellectual torpor into the brilliancy of the companionship of pierre de ronsard and his associates. it is one of the most stupendous factors in his life. something happened to him before his return to england which affected the whole of his future life. it may be considered a wild assertion to make, but the time will come when its truth will be proved, that "the anatomie of the minde," "beautiful blossoms," and "the french academy," are the product of one mind, and that same mind produced the "arte of english poesie," "an apology for poetrie," by sir john harrington, and "the defense of poetry," by sir philip sydney. the former three were written before and place the philosopher before the poet; the latter three were written after and place the poet--the creator--before the philosopher. francis bacon had recognised that the highest achievement was the act of creation. henceforth he lived to create. sir nicholas bacon died on or about the th of february, - . how or where this news reached francis is not recorded, but on the th of the following march he left paris for england, after a stay of two and a-half years on the continent. he brought with him to the queen a despatch from sir amias paulet, in which he was spoken of as being "of great hope, endued with many and singular parts," and one who, "if god gave him life, would prove a very able and sufficient subject to do her highness good and acceptable service."[ ] footnotes: [ ] sir thomas smith ( - ) was secretary of state under edward vi. and elizabeth--a good scholar and philosopher. he, when greek lecturer and orator at cambridge, with john cheke, introduced, in spite of strong opposition, the correct way of speaking greek, restoring the pronunciation of the ancients. [ ] state paper office; french correspondence. chapter ix. bacon's suit on his return to england, . spedding states that the earliest composition of bacon which he had been able to discover is a letter written in his th year from grays inn. from that time forward, he continues, compositions succeed each other without any considerable interval, and in following them we shall accompany him step by step through his life. what are the compositions which spedding places as being written but not published up to the year , when the first small volume of essays containing less than , words was issued from the press? these are they:-- notes on the state of christendom[ ] (date to ). letter of advice to the queen ( - ). an advertisement touching the controversies of the church of england ( - ). speeches written for some court device, namely, mr. bacon in praise of knowledge, and mr. bacon's discourse in praise of his sovereign ( - ). certain observations made upon a libel published this present year, . a true report of the detestable treason intended by dr. roderigo lopez, . gesta grayorum, , parts of which are printed by spedding in type denoting doubtful authorship. bacon's device, - . three letters to the earl of rutland on his travels, - . that is all! these are the compositions which follow each other without considerable interval, and by which we are to accompany him step by step through those seventeen years which should be the most important years in a man's life! he could have turned them out in ten days or a fortnight with ease. we expect from mr. spedding bread, and he gives us a stone! this brilliant young man, who, when years of age, left cambridge, having possessed himself of all the knowledge it could afford to a student, who had travelled in france, spain and italy to "polish his mind and mould his opinion by intercourse with all kinds of foreigners," how was he occupying himself during what should be the most fruitful years of his life? following his profession at the bar? his affections did not that way tend. spedding expresses the opinion that he had a distaste for his profession, and, writing of the circumstances with which he was surrounded in , says: "i do not find that he was getting into practice. his main object still was to find ways and means for prosecuting his great philosophical enterprise." what was this enterprise? "i confess that i have as vast contemplative ends as i have moderate means," he says, writing to burghley, "for i have taken all knowledge to be my province." this means more than mere academic philosophy. in , when bacon was put forward and upheld for a year as a candidate for the post of attorney-general, spedding writes of him; "he had had little or no practice in the courts; what proof he had given of professional proficiency was confined to his readings and exercises in grays inn.... law, far from being his only, was not even his favourite study; ... his head was full of ideas so new and large that to most about him they must have seemed visionary." writing of him in spedding says: "the strongest point against bacon's pretensions for the attorneyship was his want of practice. his opponents said that 'he had never entered the place of battle.'[ ] whether this was because he could not find clients or did not seek them i cannot say." in order to meet the objection, bacon on the th january, - , made his first pleading, and burghley sent his secretary "to congratulate unto him the first fruits of his public practice." there is one other misconception to be corrected. it is urged that bacon was, during this period, engrossed in parliamentary life. from to five parliaments were summoned. bacon sat in each. in his twenty-fifth year he was elected member for melcombe, in dorsetshire. in the parliament of he sat for taunton, in that of for liverpool, in that of - for middlesex, and in for ipswich. but the sittings of these parliaments were not of long duration, and the speeches which he delivered and the meetings of committees upon which he was appointed would absorb but a small portion of his time. it must be patent, therefore, that spedding does not account for his occupations from his return to england in until , when the first small volume of his essays was published. during the whole of this period bacon was in monetary difficulties, and yet there is no evidence that he was living a life of dissipation or even of extravagance. on the contrary, all testimony would point to the conclusion that he was following the path of a strictly moral and studious young man. on his return to england he took lodgings in coney court, grays inn. there anthony found him when he returned from abroad. there are no data upon which to form any reliable opinion as to the amount of his income at this time. rawley states that sir nicholas bacon had collected a considerable sum of money which he had separated with intention to have made a competent purchase of land for the livelihood of his youngest son, but the purchase being unaccomplished at his death, francis received only a fifth portion of the money dividable, by which means he lived in some straits and necessities in his younger years. it is not clear whether the "money dividable" was only that separated by sir nicholas, or whether he left other sums which went to augment the fund divisible amongst the brothers. his other children were well provided for. francis was not, however, without income. sir nicholas had left certain manors, etc., in herts to his sons anthony and francis in tail male, remainder to himself and his heirs. lady ann bacon had vested an estate called markes, in essex, in francis, and there is a letter, dated th april, , from anthony to his mother urging her to concur in its sale, so that the proceeds might be applied to the relief of his brother's financial position.[ ] lady bacon lived at gorhambury. she was not extravagant, and yet in she was so impoverished that captain allen, in writing to anthony, speaking of his mother, lady bacon, says she "also saith her jewels be spent for you, and that she borrowed the last money of seven several persons." whatever her resources were, they had by then been exhausted for her sons. anthony was apparently a man of considerable means. he was master of the manor and priory of redburn, of the manor of abbotsbury, minchinbury and hores, in the parish of barley, in the county of hertford; of the brightfirth wood, merydan-meads, and pinner-stoke farms, in the county of middlesex.[ ] but within a few years after his return to england anthony was borrowing money wherever he could. mother and brother appear to have exhausted their resources and their borrowing capabilities. there is an account showing that in eighteen months, about , anthony lent francis £ , equivalent to nearly £ , at to-day's value. in francis was arrested by the sheriff for a debt of £ , for which a money-lender had obtained judgment against him, and he was cast into the tower. where had all the money gone? there is no adequate explanation. * * * * * the first letter of francis bacon's which spedding met with, to which reference has already been made, is dated th july, , to mr. doylie, and is of little importance. the six letters which follow--all there are between and [ ]--relate to one subject, and are of great significance. the first is dated from grays inn, th september, , to lady burghley. in it young francis, now years of age, makes this request: "that it would please your ladyship in your letters wherewith you visit my good lord to vouchsafe the mention and recommendation of my suit; wherein your ladyship shall bind me more unto you than i can look ever to be able to sufficiently acknowledge." the next letter--written on the same day--is addressed to lord burghley. its object is thus set forth:-- "my letter hath no further errand but to commend unto your lordship the remembrance of my suit which then i moved unto you, whereof it also pleased your lordship to give me good hearing so far forth as to promise to tender it unto her majesty, and withal to add in the behalf of it that which i may better deliver by letter than by speech, which is, that although it must be confessed that the request is rare and unaccustomed, yet if it be observed how few there be which fall in with the study of the common laws either being well left or friended, or at their own free election, or forsaking likely success in other studies of more delight and no less preferment, or setting hand thereunto early without waste of years upon such survey made, it may be my case may not seem ordinary, no more than my suit, and so more beseeming unto it. as i force myself to say this in excuse of my motion, lest it should appear unto your lordship altogether undiscreet and unadvised, so my hope to obtain it resteth only upon your lordship's good affection towards me and grace with her majesty, who methinks needeth never to call for the experience of the thing, where she hath so great and so good of the person which recommendeth it." what was this suit? spedding cannot suggest any explanation. he says: "what the particular employment was for which he hoped i cannot say; something probably connected with the service of the crown, to which the memory of his father, an old and valued servant prematurely lost, his near relationship to the lord treasurer, and the personal notice which he had himself received from the queen, would naturally lead him to look.... the proposition, whatever it was, having been explained to burghley in conversation, is only alluded to in these letters. it seems to have been so far out of the common way as to require an apology, and the terms of the apology imply that it was for some employment as a lawyer. and this is all the light i can throw upon it." subsequently spedding says the motion was one[ ] "which would in some way have made it unnecessary for him to follow 'a course of practice,' meaning, i presume, ordinary practice at the bar." another expression in the letter makes it clear that the object of the suit was an experiment. the queen could not have "experience of the thing," and bacon solicited burghley's recommendation, because she would not need the experience if he, so great and so good, vouched for it. burghley appears to have tendered the suit to the queen, for there is a letter dated th october, , addressed to him by bacon, commencing: "your lordship's comfortable relation to her majesty's gracious opinion and meaning towards me, though at that time your leisure gave me not leave to show how i was affected therewith, yet upon every representation thereof it entereth and striketh so much more deeply into me, as both my nature and duty presseth me to return some speech of thankfulness." spedding remarks thereon: "it seems that he had spoken to burghley on the subject and made some overture, which burghley undertook to recommend to the queen; and that the queen, who though slow to bestow favours was careful always to encourage hopes, entertained the motion graciously and returned a favourable answer. the proposition, whatever it was, having been explained to burghley in conversation, is only alluded to in these letters." spedding dismisses these three letters in lines of comment, which contain the extracts before set out. he regards the matter as of slight consequence, and admits that he can throw no light upon it. but he points out that it was "so far out of the common way as to require an apology." surely he has not well weighed the terms of the apology when he says they "imply that it was for some employment as a lawyer." there had been a conversation between bacon and burghley during which bacon had submitted a project to the accomplishment of which he was prepared to devote his life in the queen's service. it necessitated his abandoning the profession of the law. apparently burghley had remonstrated with him, in the manner of experienced men of the world, against forsaking a certain road and avenue to preferment in favour of any course rare and unaccustomed. referring in his letter to this, bacon's parenthetical clause beginning "either being well left or friended," etc., is confession and avoidance. in effect he says:--few study the common laws who have influence; few at their own free election; few desert studies of more delight and no less preferment; and few devote themselves to that study from their earliest years. since there are few who, having my opportunities, devote themselves to the study of the common laws, my position in so doing would not be an ordinary one, no more than is my suit. therefore, why should i, having your [burleigh's] influence to help me, sacrifice my great intellectual capabilities fitting me to accomplish my great contemplative ends? why should i sacrifice them to a study of the common laws? the sentence may be otherwise construed, but in any case it involves an apology for the abandonment of the profession which had been chosen for him. the next letter is addressed to the right honourable sir francis walsingham, principal secretary to her majesty, and is dated from grays inn, th of august, . spedding's comment on it is as follows:-- "for all this time, it seems, the suit (whatever it was) which he had made to her through burghley in remained in suspense, neither granted nor denied, and the uncertainty prevented him from settling his course of life. from the following letter to walsingham we may gather two things more concerning it: it was something which had been objected to as unfit for so young a man; and which would in some way have made it unnecessary for him to follow 'a course of practice'--meaning, i presume, ordinary practice at the bar." this is the letter:-- "it may please your honour to give me leave amidst your great and diverse business to put you in remembrance of my poor suit, leaving the time unto your honour's best opportunity and commodity. i think the objection of my years will wear away with the length of my suit. the very stay doth in this respect concern me, because i am thereby hindered to take a course of practice which, by the leave of god, if her majesty like not my suit, i must and will follow: not for any necessity of estate, but for my credit sake, which i know by living out of action will wear. i spake when the court was at theball's to mr. vice-chamberlain,[ ] who promised me his furderance; which i did lest he mought be made for some other. if it may please your honour, who as i hear hath great interest in him, to speak with him in it, i think he will be fast mine." spedding remarks: "this is the last we hear of this suit, the nature and fate of which must both be left to conjecture. with regard to its fate, my own conjecture is that he presently gave up all hope of success in it, and tried instead to obtain through his interest at court some furtherance in the direct line of his profession." he adds: "the solid grounds on which bacon's pretensions rested had not yet been made manifest to the apprehension of bench and bar; his mind was full of matters with which they could have no sympathy, and the shy and studious habits which we have seen so offend mr. faunt would naturally be misconstrued in the same way by many others."[ ] this passage refers to a letter to burghley dated the th of the following may, _i.e._, , from which it will be seen that the last had not been heard of the motion. burghley had been remonstrating with bacon as to reports which had come to him of his nephew's proceedings. bacon writes:-- "i take it as an undoubted sign of your lordship's favour unto me that being hardly informed of me you took occasion rather of good advice than of evil opinion thereby. and if your lordship had grounded only upon the said information of theirs, i mought and would truly have upholden that few of the matters were justly objected; as the very circumstances do induce in that they were delivered by men that did misaffect me and besides were to give colour to their own doings. but because your lordship did mingle therewith both a late motion of mine own and somewhat which you had otherwise heard, i know it to be my duty (and so do i stand affected) rather to prove your lordship's admonition effectual in my doings hereafter than causeless by excusing what is past. and yet (with your lordship's pardon humbly asked) it may please you to remember that i did endeavour to set forth that said motion in such sort as it mought breed no harder effect than a denial, and i protest simply before god that i sought therein an ease in coming within bars, and not any extraordinary and singular note of favour." may not the interpretation of the phrase "i sought therein an ease in coming within bars" be "i sought in that motion a freedom from the burden (or necessity) of coming within bars." the phrase "an ease in" is very unusual, and unless it was a term used in connection with the inns it is difficult to see its precise meaning. in other words, he sought an alternative method to provide means for carrying out his great philosophical enterprise. there is an interval of five years before the next and last letter of the six was written. it is undated, but an observation in it shows that it was written when he was about years of age, thus fixing the date at . from an entry in burghley's note book,[ ] dated october, , it appears that in the meantime a grant had been made to bacon of the reversion of the office of clerk to the counsel in the star chamber. this was worth about £ , per annum and executed by deputy, but the reversion did not fall in for twenty years, so it did not affect the immediate difficulty in ways and means. there are occasional references to francis in anthony's correspondence which show that the brothers were residing at grays inn, but nothing is stated as to the occupation of the younger brother. at this time, according to spedding,[ ] who, however, does not give his authority, francis had a lodge at twickenham. many of his letters are subsequently addressed from it, and three years later he was keeping a staff of scriveners there. the last letter is addressed to lord burghley, who is in it described by bacon as "the second founder of my poor estate," and contains the following:-- "i cannot accuse myself that i am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend nor my course to get. lastly, i confess that i have as vast contemplative ends as i have moderate civil ends: for i have taken all knowledge to be my province. this whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or (if one takes it favourably) _philanthropia_, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. and i do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than of a man's own, which is the thing i greatly affect. and for your lordship, perhaps you shall not find more strength and less encounter in any other. and if your lordship shall find now, or at any time, that i do seek or affect any place, whereunto any that is nearer to your lordship shall be concurrent, say then that i am a most dishonest man. and if your lordship will not carry me on, i will not do as anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty; but this i will do, i will sell the inheritance that i have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of service and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth, which he said lay so deep. this which i have writ to your lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set down without all art, disguising or reservation." the suit has been of no avail. once more bacon appeals (and this is to be his final appeal) to his uncle. he is writing thoughts rather than words, set down without art, disguising or reservation. but if his lordship will not carry him along he has definitely decided on his course of action. the law is not now even referred to. if the object of the suit was not stated in , there cannot be much doubt now but that it had to do with the making of books and pioneer work in the mine of truth. for ten years francis bacon had waited, buoyed up by encouragements and false hopes. now he decides to take his fortune into his own hands and rely no more on assistance either from the queen or burghley. one sentence in the letter should be noted: "if your lordship shall find now, or at any time, that i do seek or affect any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your lordship shall be concurrent, say then that i am a most dishonest man." surely this was an assurance on bacon's part that he did not seek or affect to stand in the way of the one--the only one, robert cecil--who stood nearer to burghley in kinship. it therefore appears evident from the foregoing facts:-- ( ) that francis bacon at years of age was an accomplished scholar; that his knowledge was abnormally great, and that his wit, memory, and mental qualities were of the highest order--probably without parallel. ( ) that in the year , when years old, he sought the assistance of burghley to induce the queen to supply him with means and the opportunity to carry out some great work upon the achievement of which he had set his heart. the work was without precedent, and in carrying it out he was prepared to dedicate to her majesty the use and spending of his life. ( ) that for ten years he waited and hoped for the granting of his suit, which was rare and unaccustomed, until eventually he was compelled to relinquish it and rely upon his own resources to effect his object. ( ) but he desired to command other wits than his own, and that could be more easily achieved by one holding place of any reasonable countenance. he therefore sought through burleigh place accompanied by income, so that he might be enabled to achieve the vast contemplative ends he had in view. ( ) that during the years to , in which he claims that he was not slothful, there is no evidence of his being occupied in his profession or in state affairs to any appreciable extent, and yet there do not exist any acknowledged works as the result of his labours. rawley states that bacon would "suffer no moment of time to slip from him without some present improvement." ( ) he received pecuniary assistance from his uncle, lord burghley. he strained the monetary resources of his mother and brother, which were not inconsiderable, to the utmost, exhausted his own, and heavily encumbered himself with debts, and yet he was not prodigal or extravagant. ( ) money and time he must have to carry out his scheme, which, if one takes it favourably, might be termed philanthropia, and he therefore decided that, failing obtaining some sinecure office, he would sell the inheritance he had, purchase some lease of quick revenue or office of gain that could be executed by a deputy, give over all care of serving the state, and become some sorry bookmaker or a true pioneer in the mine of truth. ( ) spedding says, "he could at once imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of the works"; but whatever his contemplative ends were there is nothing known to his biographers which reveals the result of his labours as clerk of the works. ( ) if he carried out the course of action which he contemplated it is clear that he decided to do so without himself appearing as its author and director. from to something more was on his mind than the works he published after he had arrived at sixty years of age. "i am no vain promiser," he said. where can the fulfilment of his promise be found? can his course be followed by tracing through the period the trail which was left by some great and powerful mind directing the progress of the english renaissance? footnotes: [ ] spedding prints this in small type, being doubtful as to the authorship. [ ] that is, never held a brief. [ ] i am indebted to mr. harold hardy for this interesting information. there is an entry in the state papers, , jan. : grant at the suit of sir francis bacon to sir william cooke, sir john constable, and three others, of the king's reversion of the estates in herts above referred to. sir nicholas, to whom it had descended from the lord keeper, conveyed the remainder to queen elizabeth her heirs and successors "with the condition that if he paid £ the grant should be void, which was apparently done to prevent the said sir francis to dispose of the same land which otherwise by law he might have done." when lady anne conveyed the markes estate to francis it was subject to a similar condition, namely, that the grant was to be null and void on lady ann paying ten shillings to francis. this condition made it impossible for francis to dispose of his interest in the estate, hence anthony's request in the letter above referred to. it is obvious that his relatives considered that francis was not to be trusted with property which he could turn into money. there was evidently some heavy strain on his resources which caused him to convert everything he could into cash. [ ] "story of lord bacon's life." hepworth dixon, p. . [ ] the two letters of th september, , and that of th october, , are taken from copies in the lansdowne collection. that of the th may, , is in the same collection, and is an original in bacon's handwriting. the letter of th august, , is also in his handwriting, and is in the state papers, domestic. the letter without date, written to burghley presumably in , is from the supplement to the "resuscitatio," . [ ] "life and letters," vol. i. p. . [ ] this was sir christopher hatton. [ ] "life and letters," vol i. p. . [ ] cott. mss. tit. cx. . [ ] "life and letters," vol. i., p. . chapter x. the rare and unaccustomed suit. what was this rare and unaccustomed suit of which the queen could have had no experience and which, according to spedding, would make it unnecessary for bacon to follow "ordinary practice at the bar"? historians and biographers have founded on this suit the allegation that from his earliest years bacon was a place hunter, entirely ignoring the fact, which is made clear from the letter to walsingham written four years after the application was first made, that he had resolved on a course of action which, if her majesty liked not his suit, by the leave of god he must and would follow, not for any necessity of estate, but for his credit sake. here was a young man of twenty years of age, earnestly urging the adoption of a scheme which he had conceived, and which he feared burghley might consider indiscreet and unadvised. failing in obtaining his object, as will be proved by definite evidence, undertaking at the cost of thomas bodley and other friends a course of travel to better fit him for the task he had mapped out as his life's work--returning to england and, four years after his first request had been made, renewing his suit--grimly in earnest and determined to carry the scheme through at all costs, with or without the queen's aid. this is not the conduct of a mere place hunter. if these letters be read aright and the reasonable theory which will be advanced of the nature of the suit be accepted--all efforts to suggest any explanation having hitherto, as spedding admits, proved futile--a fresh light will be thrown upon the character of francis bacon, and the heavy obligation under which he has placed his countrymen for all ages will for the first time be recognised. in the seven volumes of "bacon's life and letters" there is nothing to justify the eulogy on his character to which spedding gave utterance in the following words:--"but in him the gift of seeing in prophetic vision what might be and ought to be was united with the practical talent of devising means and handling minute details. he could at once imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of the works. upon the conviction _this must be done_ followed at once _how_ may it be done? upon that question answered followed the resolution to try and do it." but although spedding fails to produce any evidence to justify his statement, it is nevertheless correct. more than that, the actual achievement followed with unerring certainty, but spedding restricts bacon's life's work to the establishment of a system of inductive philosophy, and records the failure of the system. william cecil was a man of considerable classical attainments, although these were probably not superior to those of mildred cooke, the lady who became his second wife. he was initiated into the methods of statesmanship at an early age by his father, richard cecil, master of the robes to henry viii. having found favour with somerset, the protector of edward vi., he was, when years of age, made master of requests. when somerset fell from power in young cecil, with other adherents of the protector, was committed to the tower. but he was soon released and was rapidly advanced by northumberland. he became secretary of state, was knighted and made a member of the privy council. mary would have continued his employment in office had he not refused her offers on account of his adhesion to the protestant faith. he mingled during her reign with men of all parties and his moderation and cautious conduct carried him through that period without mishap. on elizabeth's accession he was the first member sworn upon the privy council, and he continued during the remainder of his life her principal minister of state. sagacious, deliberate in thought and character, tolerant, a man of peace and compromise, he became the mainstay of the queen's government and the most influential man in state affairs. whilst he maintained a princely magnificence in his affairs, his private life was pure, gentle and generous. this was the man to whom the brilliant young nephew of his wife and the son of his old friend, sir nicholas bacon, disclosed, some time during the summer of , his scheme, of which there had been no experience, and entrusted his suit, which was rare and unaccustomed. the arguments in its favour at this interview may have followed the following outline:-- i need not remind you of my devotion to learning. you know that from my earliest boyhood i have followed a course of study which has embraced all subjects. i have made myself acquainted with all knowledge which the world possesses. to enable me to do this i mastered all languages in which books are written. during my recent visit to foreign lands, i have recognized how far my country falls behind others in language, and consequently in literature. i would draw your special attention to the remarkable advance which has been made in these matters in france during your lordship's lifetime. when i arrived there in i made myself acquainted with the principles of the movement which had been carried through by du bellay, ronsard, and their confrères. they recognized that their native language was crude and lacking in gravity and art. first by obtaining a complete mastery of the greek and latin languages, as also of those of italy and spain, they prepared themselves for a study of the literatures of which those languages, with their idioms and peculiarities, form the basis. having obtained this mastery they reconstructed their native language and gave their country a medium by which her writers might express their thoughts and emotions. they have made it possible for their countrymen to rival the poets of ancient greece and rome. they and others of their countrymen have translated the literary treasures of those ancient nations into their own tongue, and thereby enabled those speaking their language, who are not skilled in classical languages, to enjoy and profit by the works of antiquity. your lordship knows well the deficiencies of the language of our england, the absence of any literature worthy of the name. in these respects the condition of affairs is far behind that which prevailed in france even before the great movement which ronsard and du bellay initiated. i do not speak of italy, which possesses a language melodious, facile, and rich, and a literature which can never die. i know my own powers. i possess every qualification which will enable me to do for my native tongue what the pléiade have done for theirs. i ask to be permitted to give to my country this great heritage. others may serve her in the law, others may serve her in affairs of state, but your lordship knows full well that there are none who could serve her in this respect as could i. you are not unmindful of the poorness of my estate. this work will not only entail a large outlay of money but it necessitates command of the ablest wits of the nation. this is my suit: that her majesty will graciously confer on me some office which will enable me to control such literary resources and the services of such men as may be necessary for the accomplishment of this work; further, that she may be pleased from time to time to make grants from the civil list to cover the cost of the work. i need not remind your lordship what fame will ever attach to her majesty and how glorious will be the memory of her reign if this great project be effected in it. your lordship must realise this because you and her ladyship, my aunt, are by your attainments qualified to appreciate its full value. my youth may be urged as an objection to my fitness for such a task, but your lordship knows full well--none better--that my powers are not to be measured by my years. this i will say, i am no vain promiser, but i am assured that i can accomplish all that i contemplate. the queen hath such confidence in the soundness of your judgment that she will listen to your advice. my prayer to you therefore is that it may please your lordship both herein and elsewhere to be my patron and urge my suit, which, although rare and unaccustomed, may be granted if it receives your powerful support. the suit was submitted to the queen, but without result. probably it was not urged with a determination to obtain its acceptance in spite of any objections which might be raised by the queen. five years after, bacon, still a suppliant, wrote to walsingham: "i think the objection to my years will wear away with the length of my suit." cautious lord burghley would give full weight to the force of this objection if it were advanced by the queen. he loved this boy, with his extraordinary abilities, but he had such novel and far-reaching ideas. he appeared to have no adequate reverence for his inferior superiors. on leaving cambridge he had arrogantly condemned its cherished methods of imparting knowledge. before power was placed in his hands the use he might make of it must be well weighed and considered. what effect might the advancement of francis bacon have on robert cecil's career? granted that the contentions of the former were sound, and the object desirable, should not this work be carried out by the universities? never leap until you know where you are going to alight was a proverb the soundness of which had been proved in lord burghley's experience. what might be the outcome if this rare and unaccustomed suit were granted? better for the queen, who, though slow to bestow favours, was always ready to encourage hopes, to follow her usual course. she might entertain the motion graciously and return a favourable answer and let it rest there. and so it did. then there was a happening which has remained unknown until now. chapter xi. bacon's second visit to the continent and after. in the "reliquiæ bodleianæ," published in , is a letter written without date by thomas bodley to francis bacon. this letter does not appear to have been known to mallett, montague, dixon, spedding, or any of bacon's biographers. it had been lost sight of until the writer noticed it and reproduced it in _baconiana_. this is the letter:-- my dear cousin,--according to your request in your letter (dated the th october at orleans, i received here the th of december), i have sent you by your merchant £ (the thirty is written thus l) sterling for your present supply, and had sent you a greater sum, but that my extraordinary charge this year _hath utterly unfurnished me_. and now, cousin, though i will be no _severe_ exactor of the account, either of your money or time, yet for the love i bear you, i am very desirous, both to satisfy myself, and your friends how you prosper in your travels, and how you find yourself bettered thereby, either in knowledge of god, or of the world; the rather, because the days you have already spent abroad, are now both sufficient to give you light, how to fix yourself and end with counsel, and accordingly to shape your course constantly unto it. besides, it is a vulgar scandal unto the travellers, that few return more religious (narrow, _editor_) than they went forth; wherein both my hope and request is to you, that your principal care be to hold your foundation, and to make no other use of informing your self in the corruptions and superstitions of other nations, than only thereby to engage your own heart more firmly to the truth. you live indeed in a country of two several professions, and you shall return a novice, if you be not able to give an account of the ordinances, strength, and progress of each, in reputation, and party, and how both are supported, ballanced and managed by the state, as being the contrary humours, in the temper of predominancy whereof, the health or disease of that body doth consist. these things you will observe, not only as an _english_-man, whom it may concern, to what interest his country may expect in the consciences of their neighbours; but also, as a christian, to consider both the beauties and blemishes, the hopes and dangers of the _church_ in all places. now for the world, i know it _too_ well, to persuade you to dive into the practices thereof; rather stand upon your own guard, against all that attempt you there unto, or may practise upon you in your conscience, reputation, or your purse. resolve, no man is wise or safe, but he that is honest: and let this persuasion turn your studies and observations from the complement and impostures of the debased age, to more real grounds of wisdom, gathered out of the story of times past, and out of the government of the present state. your guide to this, is the knowledge of the country and the people among whom ye live; for the country though you cannot see all places, yet if, as you pass along, you enquire carefully, and further help yourself with books that are written of the cosmography of those parts, you shall sufficiently gather the strength, riches, traffick, havens, shipping, _commodities_, vent, and the wants and disadvantages of places. wherein also, for your good hereafter, and for your friends, it will befit to note their buildings, furnitures, entertainments; all their husbandry, and ingenious inventions, in whatsoever concerneth either pleasure or profit. for the people, your traffick among them, while you learn their language, will sufficiently instruct you in their habilities, dispositions, and humours, if you a little enlarge the privacy of your own nature, to seek acquaintance with the best sort of strangers, and _restrain_ your _affections_ and participation, for your own countrymen of whatsoever condition. in the story of france, you have a _large and pleasant field_ in three lines of their kings, to observe their alliances and successions, their _conquests_, their wars, _especially with us_; their councils, their treaties; and all rules and examples of experiences and wisdom, which may be lights and remembrances to you hereafter, to judge of all occurants both at home and abroad. lastly, for the government, your end _must not be like an_ intelligencer, to spend all your time in fishing after the present news, humours, graces, _or_ disgraces of court, which happily may change before you come home; but your better and more constant ground will be, to know the consanguinities, alliances, and estates of their princes; proportion between the nobility and magistracy; the constitutions of their courts of justice; the state of the laws, as well for the making as the execution thereof; how the sovereignty of the king infuseth itself into all acts and ordinances; how many ways they lay impositions and taxations, and gather revenues to the _crown_. what be the liberties and servitudes of all degrees; what discipline and preparations for wars; what invention for increase of traffick at home, for multiplying their commodities, encouraging arts and manufactures, or of worth in any kind. also what establishment, to prevent the _necessities_ and _discontentment_ of _people_, to cut off suits at law, and duels, to suppress thieves and all disorders. to be short, because my purpose is not to bring all your observations to heads, but only by these few to let you know what manner of return your friends expect _from you_; let me, for all these and all the rest, give you this one note, which i desire you to observe as the counsels of a friend, _not_ to spend your spirits, and the _precious_ time of your travel, in a captious prejudice and censuring of all things, nor in an infectious collection of base vices and fashions of men and women, or general corruption of these times, which will be of use only among humorists, for jests and table-talk: but rather strain your wits and industry soundly to instruct your-self in all things between _heaven and earth_ which may tend to virtue, wisdom, and honour, and which may make your life more profitable to your country, and yourself more comfortable to your friends, and acceptable to god. and to conclude, let all these riches be treasured up, not only in your memory, where time may lessen your stock; but rather in good writings, and books of account, which will _keept_ them safe for your use hereafter. and if in this time of your liberal traffick, you will give me any advertizement of your commodities in these kinds, i will make you as liberal a return from my self and your friends here, as i shall be able. and so commending all your good endeavours, to him that must either _wither_ or _prosper_ them, i very kindly bid you farewel. your's to be commanded, thomas bodley. spedding prints this letter (vol. ii. p. ) commencing with the words, "yet for the love i bear," to the end, with the exception of the last sentence, as a letter written probably by bacon for essex to send to the earl of rutland. he identifies it as "the letter which the compiler of stephens' catalogue took for a letter addressed by bacon to buckingham," which he says it could not be. the original is at lambeth (mss. , fo. ). the seal remains, but the part of the last sheet which contained the signature on one side, and the superscription on the other, has been torn off. the letter commences, "_my good lord_," and ends, "_your lordship's in all duty to serve you_." it would appear, therefore, that someone had access to bodley's letter to bacon, and, approving its contents, used its contents a second time. there are two palpable deductions to be drawn from this letter: ( ) that bacon was on a journey through _several_ countries to obtain knowledge of their customs, laws, religion, military strength, shipping, and whatsoever concerneth pleasure or profit. there is a striking correspondence between bodley's advice and the description of bacon's travels found in the "life" prefixed to "l'histoire naturelle." ( ) that bacon was being supported by bodley and other of his friends, who desired him to keep a record of all that he observed and learnt, and to report from time to time as he progressed, and in return, said bodley, "i will make you as liberal a return from myself and your friends here as i shall be able." this letter was written from england, and there is a paragraph in bodley's "life," written by himself, which makes it possible to fix the year:-- "my resolution fully taken i departed out of england anno and continued very neare foure yeares abroad, and that in sundry parts of italy, france, and germany. a good while after my return to wit, in the yeare i was employed by the queen," etc. if this letter was written between and it would appear strange that bodley and others should be providing bacon with money for his travels, and requiring reports from him, whilst his father, sir nicholas bacon, was alive and prosperous. no such difficulty, however, arises, for the letter, being sent from england, could not have been written between the date of bacon's first departure for france in and his return on his father's death in , for during the whole of that time bodley was abroad. it is stated in it that bacon wrote from orleans a letter dated th october, the year not being given. this could not be in , for bacon wrote to lord burghley from gray's inn on the th october, . spedding commences the paragraph immediately following this letter by saying, "from this time we have no further news of francis bacon till the th of april, ," and although he does not reproduce the letter, he relies on a letter from faunt to anthony bacon, to which that date is attributed in birch's " memorials," vol. i. page . in it faunt refers to having seen anthony's mother and his brother francis. faunt left paris for england on the nd march, . this letter was written on the th of the following month, so no trace has been found of francis being in england between th october, , and th of april, . bodley's letter, must, therefore, have been written in december, , when bacon was abroad making a journey through several countries. from the foregoing facts it is impossible to form any other conclusion. now for the first time this journey has been made known. there is a letter amongst the state papers in the record office, dated february, , written by anthony bacon to lord burghley, enclosing a note of advice and instructions for his brother francis. anthony was an experienced traveller, and was then abroad. it reads as though he was sending advice and instructions to his younger brother, who was about to start on travels through countries with which anthony was familiar. if so, francis would leave england early in march, --that is, if he had not left before this letter was received by burghley. having established beyond reasonable doubt the fact of this journey, a new and remarkable suggestion presents itself. spedding, when dealing with the year , prints "notes on the state of christendom,"[ ] with the following remarks:-- "if that paper of notes concerning 'the state of europe' which was printed as bacon's in the supplement to stephens' second collection in , reprinted by mallet in , and has been placed at the beginning of his political writings in all editions since , be really of his composition, this is the period of his life to which it belongs. i must confess, however, that i am not satisfied with the evidence or authority upon which it appears to have been ascribed to him." robert stephens, who was historiographer royal in the reign of william and mary, states that the earl of oxford placed in his hands some neglected manuscripts and loose papers to see whether any of the lord bacon's compositions lay concealed there and were fit for publication. he found some of them written, and others amended, with his lordship's own hand. he found certain of the treatises had been published by him, and that others, certainly genuine, which had not, were fit to be transcribed if not divulged. spedding states that he has little doubt that this paper on the state of europe was among these manuscripts and loose papers, for the editor states that the supplementary pieces (of which this was one) were added from originals found among stephens' papers. the original is now among the harleian mss. in the british museum. spedding thus describes it:-- "the harleian ms. is a copy in an old hand, probably contemporary, but not francis bacon's. a few sentences have been inserted afterwards by the same hand, and two by another which is very like anthony bacon's; none in francis's. the blanks have all been filled up, but no words have been corrected, though it is obvious that in some places they stand in need of correction. "certain allusions to events then passing (which will be pointed out in their place) prove that the original paper was written, or at least completed, in the summer of , at which time francis bacon was studying law in gray's inn, while anthony was travelling in france in search of political intelligence and was in close correspondence with nicholas faunt, a secretary of sir francis walsingham's, who had spent the previous year in france, germany, switzerland, and the north of italy, on the same errand; and was now living about the english court, studying affairs at home, and collecting and arranging the observations which he had made abroad, 'having already recovered all his writings and books which he had left behind him in italy and in frankfort' (see birch's 'memoirs,' i. ), and it is remembered that if this paper belonged to anthony bacon, it would naturally descend at his death to francis and so remain among his manuscripts, where it is supposed to have been found. "thus it appears that the external evidence justifies no inference as to the authorship, and the only question is whether the _style_ can be considered conclusive. to me it certainly is not. but as this is a point upon which the reader should be allowed to judge for himself, and as the paper is interesting in itself and historically valuable and has always passed for bacon's, it is here printed from the original though (to distinguish it from his undoubted compositions) in a smaller type." spedding's difficulty in accepting this paper as from bacon's pen really lay in the fact that from the internal evidence it is obvious that it was written by one who had himself travelled through, at any rate, some of the countries described. the results of personal observation are again and again apparent. according to spedding, bacon was in - studying law at gray's inn; according to bodley he was on the continent making observations for his future guidance. the reader can judge of the value of the external evidence. it is not conclusive, but the draft being found amongst papers which were unquestionably bacon's writings and being adopted as bacon's and published as such by those who found it, the balance of probabilities is distinctly in favour of its being his. as to the internal evidence much may be said. it corresponds as closely as it is possible with bodley's requirements as set forth in his letter of december. it is exactly "the manner of return" bodley wrote to francis "your friends expect from you." "and," he added, "if in this time of your liberal traffick, you will give me any advertisement of your commodities in these kinds, i will make you as liberal a return from myself and your friends here as i shall be able." the date agrees with that of bacon's second visit to the continent. in spedding's life and letters it occupies twelve and a-half pages, of which five are occupied by descriptions of italy, one of austria, two of germany (chiefly a recital of names and places), two of france, three-quarters of spain, one and three-quarters of portugal, poland, denmark, and sweden. this may have been bacon's itinerary in - . italy is treated with considerable detail and was undoubtedly described from personal observation, as were france and spain. in a less degree the description of austria, poland and denmark produces this impression; in a still smaller degree portugal and sweden, and it is quite absent from the description of germany. florence, venice, mantua, genoa, savoy, are dealt with in most detail. rawley states that it was bacon's intention to have stayed abroad some years longer when he was called home by the death of his father, to find himself left in straightened circumstances. then followed his ineffectual suit, which he still persisted in. bodley evidently was, if not the instigator, at any rate the paymaster for this second journey. anthony's letter of february, , points to burghley as a participator in the project. he would assist not only out of kindly feeling, but the journey would at any rate get this ambitious, determined young man out of the way for a time, and possibly the journey might get this unaccustomed suit out of his mind. thus it came about. from faunt's letters, spedding says we derive what little information we have with regard to francis's proceedings from to . "from them we gather little more than that he remained studying at gray's inn, occasionally visiting his mother at gorhambury, or going with her to hear travers at the temple and occasionally appearing at the court." but the suit was not abandoned, for there is the letter of th august, , to walsingham, when bacon writes: "i think the objection of my years will wear away with the length of my suit. the very stay doth in this respect concern me, because i am thereby hindered to take a course of practice which by the leave of god, if her majesty like not of my suit, i must and will follow: not for any necessity of estate, but for my credit sake, which i know by living out of action will wear." again, the old, "rare and unaccustomed suit" of which the queen could have had no experience! either the persuasive powers of burghley had failed or he had not exerted them. probably the latter, because the troublesome, determined young man is now worrying walsingham and hatton to urge its acceptance with the queen. the purport of the foregoing extract effectually precludes the possibility of this suit referring to his advancement at the bar. for five years it has been proceeding--he has been indulging in hopes which have been unfulfilled. now he will wait no longer, but he will adopt a course which, if her majesty like not his suit, by the leave of god he must and will follow, not for any necessity of making money but because he feels impelled to it by a sense of responsibility which he must fulfil. walsingham and hatton do not appear to have helped the matter forward. there was little probability of them succeeding in influencing the queen where burghley had failed. there was still less probability of them attempting to influence her if burghley objected. had this suit referred to advancement in the law it would have been granted with the aid of burghley's influence years before. had it referred to some ordinary office of state, friends so powerful as burghley, walsingham and hatton could and would have obtained anything within reason for this brilliant young son of sir nicholas bacon, for there was no complication with essex until after . but this rare and unaccustomed suit of which there had been no experience was another matter. six more years pass, and although there is now no suit to the queen there is the same idea prevailing in the letter to burghley--a seeking for help to achieve some great scheme upon which bacon's mind was so fixed "as it cannot be removed," "whether it be curiosity, vainglory or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia." still he required the command of more wits than of a man's own, which is the thing he did greatly affect. still his course was not to get. still the determination to achieve the object without help, if help could not be obtained--to achieve it by becoming some sorry bookmaker or a pioneer in that mine of truth which anaxagoras said lay so deep. this is emphasised. these are "thoughts rather than words, being set down without all art, disguising or reservation." there are two significant sentences in this letter written to burghley when bacon was years of age. he describes burghley as "the second founder of my poor estate," and, further, he uses the expression "and if your lordship will not carry me on." what can these allusions mean but that burghley had been rendering financial assistance to his nephew? if the theory here put forward as to the nature of the suit be correct, the object was one which would have burghley's cordial support. that he had expressed approval of it must be deduced from the letter of the th of september, . the object was one which, without doubt, would find still warmer support from lady mildred. but the suit was so unprecedented that it is not to be wondered at that burghley did not try to force it through. the work was going forward all the time--slowly for lack of means and official recognition. burghley, generous in his nature, lavish in private life, might, however, be expected to help a work which he would be glad to see carried to a successful conclusion. had he been less cautious and let young francis have his head, what might not have happened! but there was always the fear of letting this huge intellectual power forge ahead without restraint. it was, however, working out unseen its scheme and that, too, with burghley's help and that of others. the period from to --only years--sees the english language developed from a state of almost barbaric crudeness to the highest pitch which any language, classical or modern, has reached. there was but one workman living at that period who could have constructed that wonderful instrument and used it to produce such magnificent examples of its possibilities. it is as reasonable to take up a watch keeping perfect time and aver that the parts came together by accident, as to contend that the english language of the authorised version of the bible and the works of shakespeare were the result of a general up-springing of literary taste which was diffused amongst a few writers of very mediocre ability. the english renaissance was conceived in france and born in england in . it ran its course and in attained its maturity; but when francis bacon was no more--he who had performed that in our tongue which may be preferred either to insolent greece or haughty rome--"things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward: so that he may be named and stand as the mark and [greek: achmê] of our language." footnotes: [ ] "life and letters," vol. i., page . chapter xii. is it probable that bacon left manuscripts hidden away? it is difficult to leave this subject without some reference to the articles which have appeared in the press and magazines referring to the suggestion that there were left concealed literary remains of bacon hitherto undiscovered. in an article which recently appeared in a shakespearean journal, a writer who evidently knows little about the elizabethan period said: "but why should bacon want to bury manuscripts, anyhow? who does bury manuscripts? besides, they had been printed and were, therefore, rubbish and waste paper merely." the manuscript of john harrington's translation of ariosto's "orlando furioso" may be seen in the british museum. it is beautifully written on quarto paper. it was, apparently, the fair copy sent to the printer from which the type was to be set up. be this as it may, it was undoubtedly a copy upon which bacon marked off the verses which are to go on each page and set out the folio of each page and the printer's signature which was to appear at the bottom. it also contains instructions to the printer as to the type to be used. this manuscript was not considered "rubbish and waste paper merely." francis bacon has again and again insisted upon the value of history. in the "advancement of learning" he points out to the king "the indignity and unworthiness of the history of england as it now is, in the main continuation thereof." no man appreciated as did bacon the importance in the history of england of the epoch in which he lived. that a truthful relation of the events of those times would be invaluable to posterity he knew full well. he of all men living at that time was best qualified to write such a history. he recognised that there were objections to a history being written, or, at any rate, published, wherein the actions of persons living were described, for he said "it must be confessed that such kind of relations, specially if they be published about the times of things done, seeing very often that they are written with passion or partiality, of all other narrations, are most suspected." it is hardly conceivable that bacon should have failed to provide a faithful history of his own times for the benefit of posterity, or, at any rate, that he should have failed to preserve the materials for such a history. neither the history nor such materials are known to be in existence. supposing bacon had prepared either the one or the other, what could he do with it? hand it to rawley with instructions for it to be printed? with a strong probability, if it were a faithful history, that it would never be published, but that it would be destroyed, he would never take such a risk. there would only be one course open to him. to conceal it in some place where it would not be likely to be disturbed, in which it might remain in safety, possibly for hundreds of years. and then leave a clue either in cypher or otherwise by which it might be recovered. it is by no means outside the range of possibility that bacon as early as had opened a receptacle for books and manuscripts which he desired should go down to posterity, and fearing their loss from any cause, he carefully concealed them, adding to the store from time to time. if he did so he left a problem to be solved, and arranged the place of concealment so that it could only be found by a solution of the problem. the emblems on two title-pages of two books of the period are very significant. "truth brought to light and discovered by time" is a narrative history of the first fourteen years of king james' reign. one portion of the engraved title-page represents a spreading tree growing up out of a coffin, full fraught with various fruits (manuscripts and books) most fresh and fair to make succeeding times most rich and rare. in the emblem (fig. iii.) now reproduced, which is found on the title-page of the first edition of "new atlantis," ,[ ] truth personified by a naked woman is being revealed by father time, and the inscription round the device is "_tempore patet occulta veritas_--in time the hidden truth shall be revealed." then, in further confirmation of this view, there is the statement of rawley in his introduction to the "manes verulamiani." speaking of the fame of his illustrious master he says, "be this moreover enough, to have laid, as it were, the foundations, in the name of the present age. every age will, methinks, adorn and amplify this structure, but to what age it may be vouchsafed to set the finishing hand--this is known only to god and the fates." [illustration: _fig. iii._ _from the title page of "new atlantis," ._] [illustration: _fig. iv._ _from the title page of peacham's "minerva britannia," ._] footnotes: [ ] there is a copy bearing date . chapter xiii. how the elizabethan literature was produced. the half century from to stands by itself in the history of the literature of this country. during that period not only was the english language made, not only were there produced the finest examples of its capacities, which to-day exist, but the knowledge and wisdom possessed by the classical writers, the histories of the principal nations of the world, practically everything that was worth knowing in the literature which existed in other countries were, for the first time, made available in the english tongue. and what is still more remarkable, these translations were printed and published. these works embraced every art and subject which can be imagined. further, during this period there were issued a large number of books crowded with information upon general subjects. the names on the title-pages of many of these works are unknown. it is astonishing how many men as to whom nothing can be learnt, appear about this time to have written one book and one book only. these translations were published at a considerable cost. for such works, being printed in the english language, purchasers were practically confined to this country, and their number was very limited. the quantity of copies constituting an edition must have been small. it is impossible to believe that the sale of these books could realise the amount of their cost. definite information on this point is difficult to obtain, for little is known as to the prices at which these books were sold. it appears from the "transcripts of the stationers' registers" that the maximum number of copies that went to make up an edition was in the interest of the workman fixed at , copies, so that if a larger number were required the type had to be re-set for each additional , copies. double impressions of , were allowed of primers, catechisms, proclamations, statutes and almanacs. but the solid literature which came into the language at this period would not be required in such quantities. the printer was not usually the vendor of the books. the publisher and bookseller or stationer carried on in most cases a distinct business. pamphlets, sermons, plays, books of poems, formed the staple ware of the stationer. the style of the book out of which the stationer made his money may be gathered from the following extract from _the return from parnassus_, act i, scene :-- _ingenioso._--danter thou art deceived, wit is dearer than thou takest it to bee. i tell thee this libel of cambridge has much salt and pepper in the nose: it will sell sheerely underhand when all those bookes of exhortations and catechisms lie moulding on thy shopboard. _danter._--it's true, but good fayth, m. ingenioso, i lost by your last booke; and you know there is many a one that pays me largely for the printing of their inventions, but for all this you shall have shillings and an odde pottle of wine. _ingenioso._-- shillings? a fit reward for one of your reumatick poets, that beslavers all the paper he comes by, and furnishes the chaundlers with wast papers to wrap candles in: ... it's the gallantest child my invention was ever delivered off. the title is, a chronicle of cambridge cuckolds; here a man may see, what day of the moneth such a man's commons were inclosed, and when throwne open, and when any entayled some odde crownes upon the heires of their bodies unlawfully begotten; speake quickly, ells i am gone. _danter._--oh this will sell gallantly. ile have it whatsoever it cost, will you walk on, m. ingenioso, weele sit over a cup of wine and agree on it. the publication of such works as hollingshed's "chronicles," north's "plutarch's lives," grimston's "history of france," and "the french academy," could not have been produced with profit as the object. a large body of evidence may be brought forward to support this view, but space will only permit two examples to be here set forth. in the dedication to sir william cecil, of hollingshed's "chronicles," , the writer says: yet when the volume grew so great as they that were to defraie the charges for the impression were not willing to go through with the whole, they resolved first to publish the histories of england, scotland, and ireland with their descriptions. john dee spent most of the year in writing a series of volumes to be entitled "general and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect art of navigation." in the first volume was ready for the press. in june he had to borrow £ from one friend, £ from another, and £ upon "the chayn of gold." in the following august john day commenced printing it at his press in aldersgate. the title was "the british monarchy or hexameron brytannicum," and the edition consisted of copies. the second volume, "the british complement," was ready in the following december. it was never published. dee states in his diary that the printing would cost many hundreds of pounds, as it contained tables and figures, and he must first have "a comfortable and sufficient opportunity or supply thereto." this he was unable to procure, so the book remained in manuscript.[ ] books of this class were never produced with the object of making profit. the proceeds of sale would not cover the cost of printing and publishing, without any provision for the remuneration of the translator or author. why were they published, and how was the cost provided? there was, however, another source of revenue open to the author of a book. henry peacham, in "the truth of our time," says:-- "but then you may say, the dedication will bee worth a great matter, either in present reward of money, or preferment by your patrones letter, or other means. and for this purpose you prefixe a learned and as panegyricall epistle as can," etc. it is beyond question that an author usually obtained a considerable contribution towards the cost of the production of a book from the person to whom the dedication was addressed. a number of books published during the period from to are dedicated to the queen, to the earl of leicester, and to lord burghley. one can only offer a suggestion on this point which may or may not be correct. if francis bacon was concerned in the issue of these translations and other works, and burghley was assisting him financially, it is probable that burghley would procure grants from the queen in respect of books which were dedicated to her, and would provide funds towards the cost of such books as were dedicated to himself. "the arte of english poesie" was written with the intention that it should be dedicated to the queen, but there was a change in the plans, and burghley's name was substituted. when bacon, in , is threatening to become "a sorry bookmaker," he describes burghley as the second founder of his poor estate, and uses the expression, "if your lordship will not carry me on," which can only mean that as to the matter which is the subject of the letter, burghley had not merely been assisting but carrying him. the evidence which exists is strong enough to warrant putting forward this theory as to the frequency of the names of the queen and burghley on the dedications. the earl of leicester desired to have the reputation of being a patron of the arts, and was willing to pay for advertisement. he was the chancellor of oxford university, and evidently recognised the value of printing, for in he erected, at his own expense, a new printing press for the use of the university. if he paid at all for dedications he would pay liberally. but, of course, the queen, burghley, and leicester were accessible to others besides bacon, and the argument goes no further than that towards the production of certain books upon which their names appear the patrons provided part of the cost. the recognition of this fact, however, does not detract from the importance of the expressions used by bacon in his letter to burghley. there is abundant testimony to the fact that it was the custom, during the elizabethan age, for an author to suppress his own name, and on the title-page[ ] substitute either the initials or name of some other person. the title-pages of this period are as unreliable as are the names or initials affixed to the dedications and epistles "to the reader." in was published "the historie of the life and death of mary stuart queene of scotland." the dedication is signed wil stranguage. in it was reprinted, the same dedication being signed w. vdall. there are numerous similar instances. footnotes: [ ] "john dee," by charlotte fell smith, . constable and co., ltd. [ ] see page . chapter xiv. the clue to the mystery of bacon's life. the theory now put forward is based upon the assumption that francis bacon at a very early age adopted the conception that he would devote his life to the construction of an adequate language and literature for his country and that he would do this remaining invisible. if he was the author of "the anatomie of the mind," , and of "beautiful blossoms," , he must have adopted this plan of obscurity as early as his sixteenth year. it is possible, however, that it may be shown that at a date still earlier he had decided upon this course. this, however, is beyond doubt--that if francis bacon was associated in any way with the literature of england from to , with the exception of the small volume of essays published in , he most carefully concealed his connection with it. "therefore, set it down," he says in the essay of simulation and dissimulation, "that a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral," and in _examples of the antitheta_,[ ] "dissimulation is a compendious wisdome." here again is the same idea: "beside in all wise humane government, they that sit at the helme, doe more happily bring their purposes about, and insinuate more easily things fit for the people by pretexts, and oblique courses; than by ... downright dealing. nay (which perchance may seem very strange) in things meerely naturall, you may sooner deceive nature than force her; so improper and selfeimpeaching are open direct proceedings; whereas on the other side, an oblique and an insinuating way, gently glides along, and compasseth the intended effect."[ ] it is noteworthy that bacon had a quaint conceit of the divine being which he was never tired of repeating. in the preface to the "advancement of learning" ( ), the following passage occurs:-- "_for of the knowledges which contemplate the works of nature, the holy philosopher hath said expressly_; that the glory of god is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out: _as if the divine nature, according to the innocent and sweet play of children, which hide themselves to the end they may be found; took delight to hide his works, to the end they might be found out; and of his indulgence and goodness to mankind, had chosen the soule of man to be his play-fellow in this game_." again on page of the work itself he says:-- "for so he (king solomon) saith expressly, _the glory of god is to conceale a thing, but the glory of a king is to find it out_. as if according to that innocent and affectionate play of children, the divine majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out, and as if _kings_ could not obtain a greater honour, then to be god's play-fellowes in that game, especially considering the great command they have of wits and means, whereby the investigation of all things may be perfected." another phase of the same idea is to be found on page . in the author's preface to the "novum organum" the following passage occurs:-- "whereas of the sciences which regard nature the holy philosopher declares that 'it is the glory of god to conceal a thing, but it is the glory of the king to find it out.' even as though the divine nature took pleasure in the innocent and kindly sport of children playing at hide and seek, and vouched-safe of his kindness and goodness to admit the human spirit for his play fellow in that game." in almost identical words bacon suggests the same conception in "in valerius terminus" and in "filum labyrinthi." in the epistle dedicatorie of "the french academie" and elsewhere the author is insisting on the same idea that "he (god) cannot be seene of any mortal creature but is notwithstanding known by his works." the close connection of francis bacon with the works (now seldom studied) of the emblem writers is vouched for by j. baudoin. oliver lector in "letters from the dead to the dead" has given examples of his association with the dutch and french emblem writers. three englishmen appear to have indulged in this fascinating pursuit--george whitney ( ), henry peacham ( ), and george withers ( ). from the baconian point of view peacham's "minerva britannia" is by far the most interesting. the emblem on page is addressed "to the most judicious and learned, sir francis bacon knight." on the opposite leaf, paged thus, · ,[ ] the design represents a hand holding a spear as in the act of shaking it. but it is the frontispiece which bears specially on the present contention. the design is now reproduced (fig. iv). a curtain is drawn to hide a figure, the hand only of which is protruding. it has just written the words "mente videbor"--"by the mind i shall be seen." around the scroll are the words "vivitur ingenio cetera mortis erunt"--one lives in one's genius, other things shall be (or pass away) in death. that emblem represents the secret of francis bacon's life. at a very early age, probably before he was twelve, he had conceived the idea that he would imitate god, that he would hide his works in order that they might be found out--that he would be seen only by his mind and that his image should be concealed. there was no haphazard work about it. it was not simply that having written poems or plays, and desiring not to be known as the author on publishing them, he put someone else's name on the title-page. there was first the conception of the idea, and then the carefully-elaborated scheme for carrying it out. there are numerous allusions in elizabethan and early jacobean literature to someone who was active in literary matters but preferred to remain unrecognised. amongst these there are some which directly refer to francis bacon, others which occur in books or under circumstances which suggest association with him. it is not contended that they amount to direct testimony, but the cumulative force of this evidence must not be ignored. in some of the emblem books of the period these allusions are frequent. then there is john owen's epigram appearing in his "epigrammatum," published in . ad. d.b. "si bene qui latuit, bene vixit, tu bene vivis: ingeniumque tuum grande latendo patet." "thou livest well if one well hid well lives, and thy great genius in being concealed is revealed." d. is elsewhere used by owen as the initial of dominus. the suggestion that ad. d.b. represents ad dominum baconum is therefore reasonable. thomas powell published in the "attourney's academy." the book is dedicated "to true nobility and tryde learning beholden to no mountaine for eminence, nor supportment for height, francis, lord verulam and viscount st. albanes." then follow these lines:-- "o give me leave to pull the curtaine by that clouds thy worth in such obscurity. good seneca, stay but a while thy bleeding, t' accept what i received at thy reading: here i present it in a solemne strayne, and thus i pluckt the curtayne backe again." in the "mirrour of state and eloquence," published in , the frontispiece is a very bad copy of marshall's portrait of bacon prefixed to the gilbert wat's "advancement of learning." under it are these lines:-- "grace, honour, virtue, learning, witt, are all within this porture knitt and left to time that it may tell, what worth within this peere did dwell." the frontispiece previously referred to of "truth brought to light and discovered by time, or a discourse and historicall narration of the first xiiii. yeares of king james reign," published in , is full of cryptic meaning and in one section of it there is a representation of a coffin out of which is growing "a spreading tree full fraught with various fruits most fresh and fair to make succeeding times most rich and rare." the fruits are books and manuscripts. the volume contains speeches of bacon and copies of official documents signed by him. the books of the emblem writers are still more remarkable. "jacobi bornitii emblemata ethico politica," , contains at least a dozen plates in which bacon is represented. a suggestive emblem is no. of cornelii giselberti plempii amsterodarnum monogrammon, bearing date , the year of shakespeare's death. it is now reproduced (fig. v.). it will be observed that the initial letters of each word in the sentence--_obscænumque nimis crepuit fortuna batavis appellanda_--yield f. bacon. there are in other designs figures which are evidently intended to represent bacon. emblem xxxvi. shows the inside of a printer's shop and two men at work in the foreground blacking and fixing the type. behind is a workman setting type, and standing beside him, apparently directing, or at any rate observing him, is a man with the well-known bacon hat on. the contention may be stated thus:--francis bacon possessed, to quote macaulay, "the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men." hallam described him as "the wisest, greatest of mankind," and affirmed that he might be compared to aristotle, thucydides, tacitus, philippe de comines, machiavelli, davila, hume, "all of these together," and confirming this view addison said that "he possessed at once all those extraordinary talents which were divided amongst the greatest authors of antiquity." at twelve years of age in industry he surpassed the capacity, and, in his mind, the range of his contemporaries, and had acquired a thorough command of the classical and modern languages. "he, after he had survaied all the records of antiquity, after the volumes of men, betook himself to the volume of the world and conquered whatever books possest." having, whilst still a youth, taken all knowledge to be his province, he had read, marked, and absorbed the contents of nearly every book that had been printed. how that boy read! points of importance he underlined and noted in the margin. every subject he mastered--mathematics, geometry, music, poetry, painting, astronomy, astrology, classical drama and poetry, philosophy, history, theology, architecture. then--or perhaps before--came this marvellous conception, "like god i will be seen by my works, although my image shall never be visible--_mente videbor_. by the mind i shall be seen." so equipped, and with such a scheme, he commenced and successfully carried through that colossal enterprise in which he sought the good of all men, though in a despised weed. "this," he said, "whether it be curiosity or vainglory, or (if one takes it favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed." translations of the classics, of histories, and other works were made. in those he no doubt had assistance by the commandment of more wits than his own, which is a thing he greatly affected. books came from his pen--poetry and prose--at a rate which, when the truth is revealed, will literally "stagger humanity." books were written by others under his direction. he saw them through the press, and he did more. he had his own wood blocks of devices, some, at any rate, of which were his own design, and every book produced under his direction, whether written by him or not, was marked by the use of one or more of these wood blocks. the favourite device was the light a and the dark a. probably the first book published in england which was marked with this device was _de rep. anglorum instauranda libri decem, authore thoma chalonero equite, anglo_. this was printed by thomas vautrollerius,[ ] and bears date . vautrollier, and afterwards richard field, printed many of the books in the issue of which bacon was concerned from onwards. henry bynneman, and afterwards his assignees ralph newbery and henry denham and george bishop, who was associated with denham, were also printing books issued under his auspices, and later adam islip, george eld and james haviland came in for a liberal share of his patronage. the cost of printing and publishing must have been very great. if the facts ever come to light it will probably be found that burghley was bacon's mainstay for financial support. it will also be found that lady anne bacon and anthony bacon were liberal contributors to the funds, and that the cause of francis bacon's monetary difficulties and consequent debts was the heavy obligation which he personally undertook in connection with the production of the elizabethan literature. in the dedications, prefaces, and epistles "to the reader" also francis bacon's mind may be recognised. when addison wrote of bacon, "one does not know which to admire most in his writings, the strength of reason, force of style, or brightness of imagination," his words might have been inspired by these prefixes to the literature of this period. when once the student has made himself thoroughly acquainted with bacon's style of writing prefaces he can never fail to recognise it, especially if he reads the passages aloud. the epistle dedicatorie to the edition of barclay's "argenis," signed kingesmill long, is one of the finest examples of baconian english extant. who but the writer of the shakespeare plays could have written that specimen of musical language? to hear it read aloud gives all the enjoyment of listening to a fine composition of music. it is the same with the shakespeare plays; only when they are read aloud can the richness and charm of the language they contain be appreciated. bacon's work can never be understood by anyone who has not realised the marvellous character of the mind of the boy, his phenomenal industry, and the fact that "he could imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of the works." it has been suggested that he had a secret society, by the agency of which he carried through his works, but it is difficult to find any evidence that such a society existed. it may be that he had helpers without there having been anything of the nature of a society. from to (thirty years) with the exception of the trifles published as essays in , there are no acknowledged fruits of his work to which his name is attached. even the two books of the "advancement of learning," published in , would have made little demands on his time. edmund burke said: "who is there that hearing the name of bacon does not instantly recognise everything of genius the most profound, of literature the most extensive, of discovery the most penetrating, of observation of human life the most distinguished and refined." for such a man to write "the two books" would be no hard or lengthy task. the wonder is that francis bacon should have attached his name to the edition of the essays. he had written and published under other names tomes of essays of at least equal merit. in aphorism of the "novum organum" bacon says, "but how sincere i am in my profession of affection and goodwill towards the received sciences my published writings, especially the books on the advancement of learning, sufficiently shew." what are the published writings referred to? the only works which bore his name were the incomplete volume of the essays and the "wisdom of the ancients," to neither of which the words quoted are applicable. anthony bacon, writing to lady anne in april, , referring to her "motherly offer" to help francis out of debt by being content to bestow the whole interest in an estate in essex, called markes, said "beseeching you to believe that being so near and dear unto me as he is, it cannot but be a grief unto me to see a mind that hath given so sufficient proof of itself in having brought forth many good thoughts for the general to be overburdened and cumbered with a care of clearing his particular estate." in nothing had been published under bacon's name, and there is not any production of his known which would justify anthony's remark. what was his motive in selecting this insignificant little volume of essays whereby to proclaim himself a writer? one can understand his object in addressing james in _the two books of the advancement of learning_. he obtained in , as peacham has it, "preferment by his patrone's letter" by being appointed solicitor-general. during all this period-- to --"the most exquisitely constructed mind that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men" appears to have been dormant. take the first three volumes of spedding's "life and letters," and carefully note all that is recorded as the product of that mind during the years when it must have been at the zenith of its power and activity. all the letters and tracts accredited to bacon in them which have come down to us would not account for six months--not for three months--of its occupation. the explanation that he was building up his great system of inductive philosophy is quite inadequate. rawley speaks of the "novum organum" as having been in hand for twelve years. this would give as the year when it was commenced. the "cogitata et visa," of which it was an amplification, was probably written in or , for on the th february, - , bodley writes acknowledging the receipt of it and commenting on it. rawley says that it was during the last five years of bacon's life that he composed the greatest part of his books and writings both in english and latin, and supplies a list which comprises all his acknowledged published works except the "novum organum" and the essays. in "the statesmen and favourites of england since the reformation," it is stated that the universal knowledge and comprehension of things rendered francis bacon the observation of great and wise men, and afterward the wonder of all. yet it is remarkable how few are the references to him amongst his contemporaries. practically the only one that would enable a reader to gain any knowledge of his personality is francis osborn, who, in letters to his son, published in , describes him as he was in the last few years of his life. no one has left data which enables a clear impression to be formed of francis bacon as he was up to his fortieth year. the omission may be described as a conspiracy of silence. how exactly the circumstances appear to fit in with the first line of john owen's epigram to dominus b., published in !--"thou livest well if one well hid well lives"; and if the suggestion now put forward be correct that bacon deliberately resolved that his image and personality should never be seen, but only the fruits of his mind--the issues of his brain, to use rawley's expression--how apt is the second line of the epigram: "and thy great genius in being concealed, is revealed." footnotes: [ ] "of the advancement of learning," , page . [ ] "of the advancement of learning," , pages , . [ ] is the numerical value of the name "bacon." the stop preceding it denotes cypher. [ ] vautrollier was a scholar and printer who came to england from paris or roan about the beginning of elizabeth's reign, and first commenced business in blackfriars. in he printed _jordanus brunus_, for which he was compelled to fly. in the next year he was in edinburgh, where, by his help, scottish printing was greatly improved. eventually his pardon was procured by powerful friends, amongst whom was thomas randolph. in richard field, who was apprenticed to vautrollier, married jakin, his daughter, and on his death in succeeded to the business. chapter xv. burghley and bacon. there was published in "the life of the great statesman william cecil, lord burghley." the preface signed by arthur collins states:-- the work i have for several years engaged in, of treating of those families that have been barons of this kingdom, necessarily induced me to apply to our nobility for such helps, as might illustrate the memory of their ancestors. and several noblemen having favour'd me with the perusal of their family evidences, and being recommended to the right honourable the present earl of exeter, his lordship out of just regard to the memory of his great ancestor, was pleased to order the manuscript life of the lord burghley to be communicated to me. which being very old and decayed and only legible to such who are versed in ancient writings it was with great satisfaction that i copied it literatim. and that it may not be lost to the world, i now offer it to the view of the publick. it fully appears to be wrote in the reign of queen elizabeth soon after his lordship's death, by one who was intimate with him, and an eye witness of his actions for the last twenty-five years. it needs no comment to set it off; that truth and sincerity which shines through the whole, will, i don't doubt have the same weight with the readers as it had with me and that they will be of opinion it's too valuable to be buried in oblivion. this "life of lord burghley" is referred to by nares and other of his biographers as having been written by "a domestic." it contains about , words and is the most authentic account extant of the great statesman's life. the narrative is full, but the observations on the character and habits of burghley are by far the most important feature. the method of treatment of the subject is after bacon's style; the life abounds with phrases and with tricks of diction, which enable it to be identified as his. the concluding sentences could only have been written with bacon's pen:-- and so leaving his soule with god, his fame to the world, and the truth to all charitable mynds, i leave the sensure to all judicious christians, who truly practising what they professe, will better approve, and more indifferentlie interpret it, than envie or malice can disprove it. the best sort will ever doe right, the worst can but imagine mischief and doe wrong; yet this is a comfort, the more his virtues are troden downe, the more will theire brightnes appeare. virtus vulnerata virescit. in the "responsio ad edictum reginæ angliæ" of the jesuit parsons had appeared, attacking the queen and her advisers (especially burghley), to whom were attributed all the evils of england and the disturbances of christendom. the reply to this was entrusted to francis bacon, who responded with a pamphlet entitled "certain observations upon a libel published this present year, ." it was first printed by dr. rawley in the "resuscitatio" in . at the time it was written it was circulated largely in manuscript, for at least eight copies, somewhat varying from each other, have been preserved.[ ] it is quite possible that it was printed at the time, but that no copy has survived. throughout the whole work there are continual references to burghley. chapter vi. is entirely devoted to his defence and is headed "certain true general notes upon the actions of the lord burghley." either "the life" and the "observations on a libel" are by the same writer or the author of the former borrowed the latter very freely. it is to be regretted that the original manuscript of the "life" cannot now be found. in it was at burghley house. application has been made to the present marquis of exeter for permission to inspect it, but his lordship's librarian has no knowledge of its existence. if it could be examined it is probable that if the text was not in bacon's handwriting some notes or alterations might be recognised as his. the writer says he was an eye witness of burghley's life and actions twenty-five years together--that would be from to , which would well accord with the present contention. if bacon was the author it throws considerable light on his relations with burghley and establishes the fact that they were of the most cordial and affectionate character. it is reported that bacon said that in the time of the burghleys--father and son--clever or able men were repressed, and mainly upon this has been based the impression that burghley opposed francis bacon's progress. burghley's biographer refers to this report. he writes: "he was careful and desirous to furder and advaunce men of quality and desart to be councellors and officers to her majesty wherein he placed manie and laboured to bring in more ... yet would envy with her slaunders report he hindered men from rising; but howe true it is wise men maie judge, for it was the queene to take whom she pleased and not in a subject to preferree whom he listed." it will eventually be proved that such a report conveys an incorrect view. in the letter of ,[ ] addressed to burghley, bacon says:--"besides i do not find in myself so much self-love, but that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well (if i were able) of my friends and namely of your lordship; who being the atlas of this commonwealth, the honour of my house, and the second founder of my poor estate, i am tied by all duties, both of a good patriot, and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged servant, to employ whatsoever i am to do your service," and later in the letter he employs the phrase, "and if your lordship will not carry me on," and then threatens to sell the inheritance that he has, purchase some quick revenue that may be executed by another, and become some sorry bookmaker or a pioneer in that mine of truth which anaxagoras said lay so deep. again, in a letter to burghley, dated st march, , he says:--"lastly, that howsoever this matter may go, yet i may enjoy your lordship's good favour and help as i have done in regard to my private estate, which as i have not altogether neglected so i have but negligently attended and which hath been bettered only by yourself (the queen except) and not by any other in matter of importance." further on he says: "thus again desiring the continuance of your lordship's goodness as i have hitherto found it on my part sought also to deserve, i commend," etc. it is very easy, with little information as to bacon's actions and little knowledge of the period, to form a definite opinion as to the relations of bacon and burghley. the more information as to the one and knowledge of the other one gets, the more difficult does it become to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. here was the son of elizabeth's great lord keeper, the nephew of her trusted minister, himself from his boyhood a _persona grata_ with the queen, of brilliant parts and great wisdom--if he had been a mere place-hunter his desires could have been satisfied over and over again. there was some condition of circumstance, of which nothing has hitherto been known, which prevented him from obtaining the object of his desires. that he had a definite object, and had mapped out a course by which he hoped to achieve it, is evident from his letters[ ] already quoted. it is equally clear that the course he sought to pursue entailed his abandoning the law as a profession. either he would only have such place as he desired, and on his own terms, or he was known to be following some course which, although not distasteful to his close friends, caused him to be held in suspicion, if not distrust, by the courtiers with whom elizabeth was surrounded. every additional fact that comes to light seems to point to the truth being that through his life burghley was francis bacon's staunch friend and supporter. upon sir nicholas bacon's death burghley appears with bodley to have been maintaining bacon in his travels abroad. upon his return to england burghley gave him financial support in his great project. in there was a crisis--someone had been spending money for the past twelve years freely in making english literature. that cannot be gainsaid. burghley appears to have pulled up and remonstrated; hence bacon's letter containing the threat before referred to. it is significant that it was immediately after this letter was written that bacon's association with essex commenced. bacon would take him and southampton into his confidence and seek their help. essex was just the man to respond with enthusiasm. francis introduced anthony to him. the services of the brothers were placed at his disposal, and he undertook to manage the queen. the office of attorney-general for francis would meet the case. "it was dangerous in a factious age to have my lord essex his favour," says the biographer before quoted.[ ] that burghley was favourable to his appointment as attorney-general two letters written by francis to lord keeper puckering in testify. in the first bacon writes: "i pray your lordship to call to remembrance my lord treasurer's kind course, who affirmed directly all the rest to be unfit. and because _vis unita fortior_ i beg your lordship to take a time with the queen when my lord treasurer is present." in a second letter he writes: "i thought good to remember your good lordship and to request you as i touched in my last that if my lord treasurer be absent your lordship would forbear to fall into my business with her majesty lest it mought receive some foil before the time when it should be resolutely dealt in." only burghley was found to support essex's advocacy, and on the whole this was not to be wondered at. such an appointment, to say the least, would have been an experiment. possibly essex was the stumbling-block, but it may be that the real objection on the part of the queen and her advisers was that bacon was known to be so amorous of certain learned arts, so much given over to invention, that the consensus of opinion was that he was thereby unfitted to hold an important office of the state. or it may be that he was discredited by his suspected or known association with certain printers. there was some reason of which no explanation can now be traced. it has been suggested that in there was a crisis in bacon's life. that is evident from the letter to burghley written in that year. john harrington's translation of "orlando furioso" was published about this time. the manuscript, which is in a perfect condition, is in the british museum, and has been marked in bacon's handwriting throughout. the pagination and the printer's signature are placed at the commencement of the stanzas to be printed on each page, and there are instructions to the printer at the end which are not in his hand. there are good grounds for attributing the notes at the end of each chapter to bacon. it is very improbable that sir john harrington had the classical knowledge which the writer of these notes must have possessed. there is a letter written by him to sir amias pawlett, dated january, - . he is relating an interview with king james, and says: "then he (the king) enquyrede muche of lernynge and showede me his owne in such sorte as made me remember my examiner at cambridge aforetyme. he soughte muche to knowe my advances in philosophie and utterede profounde sentences of aristotle and such lyke wryters, whiche i had never reade and which some are bolde enoughe to saye others do not understand." it would be difficult to mention any classical author with whose works the writer of these notes was not familiar, or to believe that "epigrams both pleasant and serious" ( ) came from the pen of that writer. at the end of the thirty-seventh chapter the following note occurs: "it was because she (porcia) wrote some verses in manner of an epitaph upon her husband after his decease: in which kind, that honourable ladie (widow of the late lord john russell) deserveth no lesse commendation, having done as much for two husbands. and whereas my author maketh so great bost only of one learned woman in italie, i may compare (besides one above all comparison that i have noted in the twentith booke) three or foure in england out of one family, and namely the sisters of that learned ladie, as witness that verse written by the meanest of the foure to the ladie burlie which i doubt if cambridge or oxford can mend." the four si mihi quem cupio cures mildreda she wrote to daughters of remitti lady burlie sir anthonie tu bona, tu melior, tu mihi sola to send a cooke-- soror; kinsman of ladie burlie, sin mali cessando retines, & trans hers into ladie russell, mare mittis, cornwall, lady bacon, tu mala, tu peior, tu mihi nulla where she mistress soror. dwelt, and to killygrew. is si cornubiam, tibi pax sit & stop his going omnia læta, beyond sea. sin mare ceciliæ nuncio bella. vale.[ ] the writer of the latin verse was _not_ ladie russell, and it was written _to_ ladie burlie, so she must either be ladie bacon or mistress killigrew. it is not an improbable theory that ladie bacon was writing to her sister mildred, who had, through her husband, power either to send francis to cornwall or permit him to be sent away over the seas. there is a copy of machiavelli's "history of florence," , with bacon's notes in the margins.[ ] at the end is a memorandum giving the dates when the book was read "in cornwall at," and then follow two words, the second of which is "lake," but the first is undecipherable. is it possible that lady anne bacon had a house in cornwall which francis bacon, inheriting after her death, was in the habit of visiting for retirement? but this is conjecture. the following point is of interest. in the "life of burghley" ( ) it is said that: "bookes weare so pleasing to him, as when he gott libertie to goe unto his house to take ayre, if he found a book worth the openinge, he wold rather loose his ridinge than his readinge; and yet ryding in his garden walks upon his litle moile was his greatest disport: but so soone as he came in he fell to his readinge againe or els to dispatchinge busines." rawley, in his "life of bacon" ( ), attributes an exactly similar habit to the philosopher, and almost in identical phrase: "for he would ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies as walking, or taking the air abroad in his coach or some other befitting recreation; and yet he would lose no time, inasmuch as upon his first and immediate return he would fall to reading again, and so suffer no moment of time to slip from him without some present improvement." it is difficult to approach any phase of the life of bacon without being confronted with what appears to be evidence of careful preparation to obscure the facts. this observation does not result from imagination or prejudice; bacon's movements are always enshrouded in mystery. investigation and research will, however, eventually establish as a fact that there was a closer connection between burghley and bacon than historians have recognised, and that they had a strong attachment for each other. footnotes: [ ] harl. mss., , pp. and ; additional mss., , , p. ; harl. mss., , ; harl. mss., , , p. ; cambridge univ. lib., mm. v. ; cotton mss., tit., chap. vii., p. b; harl. mss., , p. ; cotton mss., jul., f. vi., p. . [ ] see page . [ ] see pages , . [ ] see appendix. [ ] if you, o mildred, will take care to send back to me him whom i desire, you will be my good, my more than good, my only sister; but if, unfortunately, by doing nothing you keep him back and send him across the sea, you will be bad, more than bad, nay no sister at all of mine. if he comes to cornwall, peace and all joys be with you, but if he goes by sea to sicily i declare war. farewell. [ ] one note on this book contains an interesting historical fact hitherto unknown. on page the text states: "among the conspirators was nicholo fedini whom they employed as chauncellor, he persuaded with a hope more certaine, revealed to piero, all the practice argreed by his enemies, and delivered him a note of all their names." bacon has made the following note in the margin: "ex (_i.e._, essex) did the like in england which he burnt at shirfr smiths house in fenchurch street." chapter xvi. the folio edition of shakespeare's plays. sir sydney lee has written[ ]:--"as a specimen of typography, the first folio is not to be commended. there are a great many contemporary folios of larger bulk far more neatly and correctly printed. it looks as though jaggard's printing office was undermanned. the misprints are numerous, and are especially conspicuous in the pagination." in the same year was published "the theater of honour and knighthood," translated from the french of andreu favine. william jaggard was the printer. it is a large folio volume containing about , pages, and is referred to as being issued by jaggard as an example of the printer's art to maintain his reputation, which had suffered from the apparently careless manner in which the shakespeare folio was turned out. both books contain the same emblematic head-pieces and tail-pieces. there are, however, some considerable mispaginations in "the theater of honour." mispaginations were not infrequent in elizabethan and jacobean literature, but it is quite possible that they were not unintentional. the most glaring instance is to be found in the first edition of "the two bookes of francis bacon--of the proficience and advancement in learning, divine and humane," published by henrie tomes ( ). each leaf (not page) is numbered. the leaves of the first book are correctly numbered. in the second book there is no number on leaf . leaf is numbered , the right figure being printed upside down; is numbered ; from to the numbering is correct, and then the leaves are numbered as follows:-- , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and on correctly until the last page, , except that is numbered . it is impossible to attribute this mispagination to the printer's carelessness. this was the first work published bearing bacon's name, excepting the trifle of essays published in . there does not appear to have been any hurry in its production. it is quite a small volume, and yet the foregoing remarkable mispaginations occur. there must be some purpose in this which has yet to be found out. the shakespeare folio will be found to be one of the most perfect examples of the printer's art extant, because no work has been produced under such difficult conditions for the printer. there are few mistakes in pagination or spelling which are not intentional. the work is a masterpiece of enigma and cryptic design. the lines "to the reader" opposite to the title-page are a table or code of numbers. the same lines and the lettering on the title-page form another table. the ingenuity displayed in this manipulation of words and numbers to create analogies is almost beyond the comprehension of the human mind. the mispaginations are all intentional and have cryptic meanings. the acme of wit is the substitution of for on the last page of the tragedies; a hundred has been omitted in "hamlet," following , and other errors made in order to obtain this result on the last page. the manner in which the printer's signatures have been arranged with the pages is equally wonderful. the name william shakespeare must have been created without reference to him of stratford, who possibly bore or had assigned to him a somewhat similar name. a great superstructure is built up on the exact spelling of the words william shakespeare. the year was specially selected for the issue of the complete volume of the plays, because of the marvellous relations which the numbers composing it bear to the names william shakespeare and francis bacon, to the year , in which the birth of bacon is registered, and to and , the reputed dates of the birth and death of the stratford man. nor do the wonders end here. the use of numerical analogies has been carried into the construction of the english language. all this, and much more, will be made manifest when the work of mr. e. v. tanner comes to be investigated and appreciated. he has made the greatest literary discovery of all time. the wonder is how it has been possible for anyone to pierce the veil and reveal the secrets of the volume. the value of the shakespeare folio will be enhanced. it will stand alone as the greatest monument of the achievements of the human intellect. to any literary critic who should honour this book by noticing it, it is probable the foregoing statements may seem extravagant and untrustworthy. to such the request is now made that before making any comment he will inspect the proof of the foregoing statements which are in the writer's possession. the dramas of shakespeare are, by universal consent, placed at the head of all literature. the invitation is now put forth in explicit terms, and facilities are offered for the investigation of the truth, or otherwise, of every statement made in the foregoing paragraph. footnotes: [ ] "a life of shakespeare," , nd edition, p. . chapter xvii. the authorized version of the bible, . is it not strange that there is no mention of any connection of francis bacon with this work? there was a conference held at hampton court palace before king james on january, , between the episcopalians and puritans. john rainoldes urged the necessity of providing for his people a uniform translation of the bible. rainoldes was the leader of the puritans, a person of prodigious reading and doctrine, and the very treasury of erudition. dr. hall, bishop of norwich, reports that "he alone was a well furnished library, full of all faculties, of all studies, of all learning--the memory and reading of that man were near a miracle." the king approved the suggestion and commissioned for that purpose fifty-four of the most learned men in the universities and other places. there was a "careful selection of revisers made by some unknown but very competent authority." the translators were divided into six bands of nine each, and the work of translation was apportioned out to them. a set of rules was drawn up for their guidance, which has happily come down to modern times--almost the only record that remains of this great undertaking. these concise rules have a homogeneity, breadth and vigour which point to bacon as their author. each reviser was to translate the whole of the original allocated to his company; then they were to compare their translations together, and, as soon as a company had completed its part, it was to communicate the result to the other companies, that nothing might pass without the general consent. if any company, upon the review of the translation so sent, differed on any point, they were to note their objection and state their reasons for disagreement. if the differences could not be adjusted, there was a committee of arbitration which met weekly, consisting of a representative from each company, to whom the matter in dispute was referred. if any point was found to be very obscure, letters were to be addressed, by authority, to learned persons throughout the land inviting their judgment. the work was commenced in . rainoldes belonged to the company to whom isaiah and the prophets were assigned. he died in , before the work was completed. during his illness his colleagues met in his bedroom so that they might retain the benefit of his learning. only forty-seven out of the fifty-four names are known. when the companies had completed their work, one complete copy was made at oxford, one at cambridge, and one at westminster. those were sent to london. then two members were selected from each company to form a committee to review and polish the whole. the members met daily at stationers' hall and occupied nine months in their task. then a final revision was entrusted to dr. thomas bilson and dr. miles smith, and in their labours were completed and the result was handed to the king. many of the translators have left specimens of their writing in theological treatises, sermons, and other works. a careful perusal of all these available justifies the assertion that amongst the whole body there was not one man who was so great a literary stylist as to be able to write certain portions of the authorised version, which stamp it as one of the two greatest examples of the english language. naturally the interest centres on dr. thomas bilson and dr. miles smith, to whom the final revision was entrusted. there are some nine or ten theological works by the former and two sermons by the latter. unless the theory of a special divine inspiration for the occasion be admitted, it is clear that neither bilson nor miles smith could have given the final touches to the bible. and now a curious statement has come down to us. in the translators handed their work to the king, and in he returned it to them completed. james was incapable of writing anything to which the term beautiful could be applied. what had happened to the translators' work whilst it was left in his hands? james had an officer of state at that time of whom a contemporary biographer wrote that "he had the contrivance of all king james his designs, until the match with spain." it will eventually be proved that the whole scheme of the authorised version of the bible was francis bacon's. he was an ardent student not only of the bible, but of the early manuscripts. st. augustine, st. jerome, and writers of theological works, were studied by him with industry. he has left his annotations in many copies of the bible and in scores of theological works. the translation must have been a work in which he took the deepest interest and which he would follow from stage to stage. when the last stage came there was only one writer of the period who was capable of turning the phrases with that matchless style which is the great charm of the shakespeare plays. whoever that stylist was, it was to him that james handed over the manuscripts which he received from the translators. that man then made havoc of much of the translation, but he produced a result which, on its literary merits, is without an equal. thirty years ago another revision took place, but, notwithstanding the advantages which the revisers of had over their predecessors of , their version has failed to displace the older version, which is too precious to the hearts of the people for them to abandon it. although not one of the translators has left any literary work which would justify the belief that he was capable of writing the more beautiful portions of the bible, fortunately bacon has left an example which would rather add lustre to than decrease the high standard of the bible if it were incorporated in it. as to the truth of this statement the reader must judge from the following prayer, which was written after his fall, and which was described by addison as resembling the devotion of an angel rather than a man:-- _remember, o lord, how thy servant hath walked before thee; remember what i have first sought, and what been principal in mine intentions. i have loved thy assemblies; i have mourned for the divisions of thy church; i have delighted in the brightness of thy sanctuary._ _this vine, which thy right hand hath planted in this nation, i have ever prayed unto thee that it might have the first and the latter rain, and that it might stretch her branches to the seas and to the floods._ _the state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes. i have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart. i have, though in a despised weed, procured the good of all men._ _if any have been mine enemies, i thought not of them, neither hath the sun almost set upon my displeasure; but i have been as a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness._ _thy creatures have been my books, but thy scriptures much more. i have sought thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but i have found thee in thy temples._ _thousand have been my sins and ten thousand my transgressions, but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thine altar._ _o lord, my strength, i have since my youth met with thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfortable chastisements, and by thy most visible providence. as thy favours have increased upon me, so have thy corrections, so that thou hast been ever near me, o lord; and ever, as thy worldly blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me, and when i have ascended before men, i have descended in humiliation before thee._ _and now, when i thought most of peace and honour, thy hand is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me according to thy former lovingkindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard but as a child. just are thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to thy mercies; for what are the sands of the sea to the sea? earth, heavens, and all these are nothing to thy mercies._ _besides my innumerable sins, i confess before thee that i am debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces, which i have neither put into a napkin, nor put it (as i ought) to exchangers, where it might have made most profit, but misspent it in things for which i was least fit so that i may truly say my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage._ _be merciful unto me, o lord, for my saviour's sake, and receive me into thy bosom or guide me in thy ways._ there is another feature about the first editions of the authorised version which arrests attention. in the first folio edition was published. the design with archers, dogs and rabbits which is to be found over the address "to the christian reader" which introduces the genealogies is also to be found in the folio edition of shakespeare over the dedication to the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren, over the catalogue and elsewhere. except that the mark of query which is on the head of the right hand pillar in the design in the bible is missing in the shakespeare folio, and the arrow which the archer on the right hand side is shooting contains a message in the design used in the bible and is without one in the shakespeare folio. in the quarto edition of the authorised version on the title-page of the genealogies are two designs; that at the head of the page is printed from the identical block which was used on the title-page of the first edition of "venus and adonis," , and the first edition of "lucrece," . at the bottom is the design with the light a and dark a, which is over the dedication to sir william cecil in the "arte of english poesie," . an octavo edition, which is now very rare, was also published in . on the title-page of the genealogies will be found the design with the light a and dark a which is used on several of the shakespeare quartos and elsewhere. (figure xxi.) the selection of these designs was not made by chance. they were deliberately chosen to create similitudes between certain books, and mark their connection with each other. the revised translation of the bible was undertaken as a national work. it was carried out under the personal supervision of the king, but every record of the proceedings has disappeared. the british museum does not contain a manuscript connected with the proceedings of the translators. in the record office have been preserved the original documents referring to important proceedings of that period. the parliamentary, judicial, and municipal records are, on the whole, in a complete condition, but ask for any records connected with the authorised version of the bible and the reply is: "we have none." and yet it is reasonable to suppose that manuscripts and documents of such importance would be preserved. where are they to be found? chapter xviii. how bacon marked books with the publication of which he was connected. at a very early period in the history of printing, the custom was introduced of placing on title-pages, at the heads and ends of the chapters, emblematical designs. in english printed books these are seldom to be found until the latter half of the th century. an investigation of the books of the period reveals the fact that the same blocks were used by different printers. articles have been written on the migration of printer's blocks, but, so far, no explanation has been offered as to any object other than decoration for which these blocks were used. among other designs in use between and are a number of variants of a device in which a light a and a dark a form the most conspicuous points. camden, in his "remaines concerning britaine," , commences a chapter on "impresses," at the head of which the device is found, thus:--"an imprese (as the italians call it) is a device in picture with his motto, or word, borne by noble and learned personages, to notifie some particular conceit of their owne: as emblemes (that we may omitte other differences) doe propound some general instructions to all." then follow a number of examples, and amongst them this:-- "variete and vicissitude of humane things he seemed to shew which parted his shield, per pale, argent & sables and counter-changeably writte in the argent, ater and in the sables albus." but even if the light a and dark a are used in the design of the head-piece to represent albus and ater it does not afford any satisfactory explanation as to why they are so used. in mdcxvi. was published "les emblemes moraulx et militaires du sieur jacob de bruck angermundt nouvellement mis en lumiere a strasbourg, par jacob de heyden graveur." in emblem no. , now reproduced, the light a and the dark a will be found in the branch of the tree which the man is about to cut off. (figure vi.)[ ] another emblem does not contain the light a and dark a, but the bark of the trunk and branches of the tree on the design exhibit a strong contrast between the dark and light, which feature is represented in most of the title-pages of books in which the device is found. (figure vii.) mr. charles t. jacob, chiswick press, london, who is the author of "books and printing" (london, ), and several works on typography, referring to an article on the migration of woodblocks, said:-- it is a well-known fact to bibliographers that the same blocks were sometimes used by different printers in two places quite far apart, and at various intervals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. that the same blocks were employed is apparent from a comparison of technical defects of impressions taken at different places, and at two periods. there was no method of duplication in existence until stereotyping was first invented in ; even then the details were somewhat crude, and the process being new, it met with much opposition and was practically not adopted until the early part of the nineteenth century. electrotyping, which is the ideal method of reproducing woodblocks, was not introduced until or thereabouts. of course, it was quite possible to re-engrave the same design, but absolute fidelity could not be relied on by these means, even if executed by the same hand. the earliest date which appears on a book in which the head-piece, containing the device of the light a and dark a is found, is . the book is "de furtivis literarum notis vulgo. de ziferis," ioan. baptista porta neapolitano authore. cum privilegio neapoli, apud ioa. mariam scotum. mdlxiii. (figure viii.) it is only used once--over the dedication ioanni soto philippi regis. there is no other head-piece in the book. john baptist porta was, with the exception of trithemius, whom he quotes, the first writer on cyphers. at the time at which he wrote cypher-writing was studied in every court in europe. it is significant that this emblematic device is used in the earliest period in which head-pieces were adopted, in a book which is descriptive and is in fact a text-book of the art of concealment. this has, however, now been proved to be a falsely dated book. the first edition of this work was published in naples in by ioa. marius scotus, but this does not contain the a a design. in the book was published in london by john wolfe; this reprint was dedicated to henry percy, earl of northumberland. after the edition had been printed off, the title-page was altered to correspond with the naples publication. the dedication was taken out, and a reprint of the original dedication was substituted, and over this was placed the a a head-piece; then an edition was struck off, and, until to-day, it has been sold and re-sold as the first edition of baptista porta's work. it is difficult to offer any explanation as to why this fraud was committed. the first occasion upon which this device was used appears to be in a book so rare that no copy of it can be found, either in the british museum or the bodleian library. unfortunately, in the copy belonging to the writer, the title-page and the two first pages are missing. the work is called "hebraicum alphabethum jo. bovlaese." it is a hebrew grammar, with proof-sheets added. it is interleaved with sheets of english-made paper, containing bacon's handwriting. bound up with it is another hebrew grammar, similarly interleaved, called "sive compendium, quintacunque ratione fieri potuit amplessimum, totius linguæ," published in paris in . the book ends with the sentence: "ex collegio montis--acuti decembris "; then follow two pages in hebrew, with the latin translation over it, headed "decem præcepta decalogi exod." over this is the design containing the light a and the dark a, and the squirrel and rabbits. (figure ix.) one thing is certain, that the copy now referred to was in the possession of bacon, and that the interleaved sheets of paper contain his handwriting, in which have been added page by page the equivalents of the hebrew in greek, chaldæic, syriac and arabic. in christophor plantin published an edition of andrea alciat's "emblemata." on page is emblem no. , "in dies meliora." this has been re-designed for the edition. it contains at the back the pillars of hercules, with a scroll around bearing the motto: "plus oltre." these pillars stand on some arches, immediately in front of which is a mound or pyramid, two sides of which are seen. on one is to be found the light a and on the other the dark a. the design was appropriated by whitney, and appears on page in the edition of his emblems. from this time forth, a a devices are to be found in numbers of books published in england, and on some published on the continent. amongst the former are the first editions of "venus and adonis," "lucrece," the "sonnets," the quarto editions of shakespeare's plays, the folio edition ( ) of his works, and the first quarto and octavo editions ( ) of the authorised version of the bible. there are fourteen distinct designs, in all of which, varying widely in other respects, the light a and the dark a constitute the outstanding figure. the use of the two letters so shaded must have had a special significance. in nearly every case it will be observed that the letter a is so drawn as to make the letter c on the inside. was its significance of general knowledge amongst printers and readers, or was it an earmarking device used by one person, or by a society? a possible interpretation of the use of the light and dark shading, is that the book in which it is used contains more than is revealed; that is to say, the overt and the concealed. a copy of "�sopiphrygis vita et fabellæ cum latina interpretatione" exists, date . the book is annotated by bacon. on one side is the greek text and on the opposite page the latin translation. on pages and are two initial letters printed from blocks of the letter a. these are coloured so that the one on the left hand side is a light a, and that on the opposite page a dark a. there are other designs which are used apparently as part of a scheme. the identical block (figure x.) which was used at the top of the title page of "venus and adonis" ( ) and "lucrece" ( ) did service on the title page of the genealogies in the quarto edition of the authorised version of the bible, . this design was, so far as can be traced, only used twice in the intervening nineteen years--on "an apologie of the earl of essex to master anthony bacon," penned by himself in , and printed by richard bradocke in , and in , on the "world of wonders," printed by richard field. it was of this book that caldecott, the bibliophile and shakespearean scholar, wrote: "the phraseology of shakespeare is better illustrated in this work than in any other book existing." the design which is found on the title page of the "sonnets of shakespeare," , is found also in the first edition of napier's "mirifici logarithmorum," , but printed from a different block. the design with archers shooting at the base of the central figure is to be found in a large number of the folio editions of the period. amongst these are the authorised version of the bible, , the "novum organum," , and the edition of shakespeare's works. there are other designs which are usually found accompanying the light a and dark a and the other devices before referred to. these designs were first brought into use from and practically cease to appear about . afterwards they are seldom seen except in books bearing bacon's name, and eventually they lapse. the last use of an a a device is over the life of the author in the second volume of an edition of bacon's essays edited by dr. william willymott, published by henry parson in . after an interval of about years a new design is made, which is not one of those employed by bacon. by means of these devices a certain number of books may be identified as forming a class by themselves. there is another feature connected with them which is of special interest. one man appears to have contributed to all the books thus marked--either the dedication, the preface,[ ] or the lines "to the reader"; in some cases all three. it may be urged in opposition to this view that in those days there was a form in which dedications and prefaces were written, and that this was more or less followed by many writers, but this contention will not stand investigation. there are tricks of phrasing and other peculiarities which enable certain literary productions to be identified as the work of one man. some of the finest elizabethan literature is to be found in the prefaces and dedications in these books. the theory now put forth is that francis bacon was directing the production of a great quantity of the elizabethan literature, and in every book in the production of which he was interested, he caused to be inserted one of these devices. he kept the blocks in his own custody; he sent them out to a printer when a book was approved by him for printing. on the completion of the work, the printer returned the blocks to bacon so that they could be sent elsewhere by him as occasion required. the most elaborate of the aa designs is figure xii., and the writer has only found it in one volume. it is "le historie della citta di fiorenza," by m. jacopo, published in lyons by theobald ancelin in . "exact was his correspondence abroad and at home, constant his letters, frequent his visits, great his obligations," states the contemporary biographer, speaking of francis bacon. it is difficult to arrive at the exact meaning of these words. there is little correspondence with those abroad remaining, no record of visits, no particulars of the great obligations into which he entered. in the dedication of the edition of the "histoire naturelle" to monseigneur de chasteauneuf, the author speaking of bacon writes:--"le chancelier, qu'on a fait venir tant de fois en france, n'a point encore quitté l'angleterre avec tant de passion de nous découvrir ses merveilles que depuis qu'il a sceu le rang dont on avoit reconnu vos vertus." these frequent visits to france are unrecorded elsewhere, but here is definite testimony that they were made. there are good grounds for believing that bacon was throughout his life, until their deaths, in constant communication with christophor plantin ( - ), aldus manutius, henry stephen ( - ), and also with robert stephens the third ( - ). all these men were not only printers, but brilliant scholars and writers. if search be made, it is quite possible that correspondence or other evidence of their friendship may come to light. be that as it may, there were undoubtedly a number of books published on the continent between and which in the sparta upon them bear testimony to bacon's association with their publication. the following are instances of where the several designs which are reproduced may be found. they however occur in many other volumes. figure ix.--"the arte of english poesie," . " xiii.--"orlando furioso," . " xiv.--spencer's "fairie queen." " xv.--"florentine history translation," , and edition of barclay's "argenis." " xi.--"sonnets." " xvi.--simon pateriche's translation of "discourse against machiavel." " xvii.--lodge's translation of "seneca," . " xviii.--shakespeare folio, . " xix.--"dæmonologie," . " xx.--alciat's "emblems," published in paris, . footnotes: [ ] plates nos. vi. to xxi. will be found after the appendix. [ ] in the "advancement of learning" bacon says that demosthenes went so far in regard to the great force that the entrance and access into a cause had to make a good impression that he kept in readiness a stock of prefaces. chapter xix. bacon and emblemata. in "shakespeare and the emblem writers" the rev. henry green endeavours to show the similarities of thought and expression between the great poet and the authors of emblemata, but the line of enquiry which he there opened does not appear to have been followed by subsequent writers. to-day the emblemata literature is a _terra incognita_ except to a very few students, and yet it is full of interest, romance, and mystery. emblem literature may be said to have had its origin with andrea alciat, the celebrated italian jurisconsult, who was famous for his great knowledge and power of mind. in he published at milan an "emblematum libellus," or little book of emblems. green says: "it established, if it did not introduce, a new style of emblem literature, the classical in the place of the simply grotesque and humorous, or of the heraldic and mythic." the first edition now known to exist was published at augsburg in , a small octavo containing eighty-eight pages with ninety-seven emblems, and as many woodcuts. it was from time to time augmented, and passed through many editions. for some years the emblemata appears to have been produced chiefly by italians, with a few frenchmen. until the last half of the sixteenth century the output of books of this character was not large. thenceforth for the next hundred years the creation of emblems became a popular form of literary exercise. the italians continued to be prolific, but dutch, french, and german scholars were but little behind them. there were a few englishmen and spaniards who also practised the art. in was published a book called "letters from the dead to the dead," by oliver lector. in it attention is drawn to the remarkable features of some of the books on emblems printed during bacon's life, and to the evidence that he was in some manner connected with the publication of many of these volumes. the author claims this to be especially the case with the "emblemata moralia et bellica," , of jacob de bruck, of angermundt, and the "emblemata ethic politica" of j. bornitius. the emblem pictures for the most part appear to be picture puzzles. in the "critique upon the mythology of the ancients" bacon says:-- "it may pass for a farther indication of a concealed and secret meaning, that some of these fables are so absurd and idle in their narration as to proclaim and shew an allegory afar off. a fable that carries probability with it may be supposed invented for pleasure, or in imitation of history; but, those that would never be conceived or related in this way, must surely have a different use." if this line of reasoning be applied to the illustrations in the emblem books, it is clear that they conceal some hidden meaning, for they are apparently unintelligible, and the accompanying letterpress does not afford any illumination. jean baudoin was the translator of bacon's "essaies" into the french language ( ). baudoin published in - "recueil d'emblèmes divers avec des discours moraux, philos. et polit." in the preface he says: "le grand chancelier bacon m'ayant fait naître l'envie de travailler à ces emblèmes ... m'en a fourni les principaux que j'ai tirés de l'explication ingénieuse qu'il a donnée de quelques fables et de ses autres ouvrages." here is definite evidence of bacon's association with a book of emblems. the first volume of emblemata in which traces of bacon's hand are to be found is the edition of alciat's "emblems," published by the plantin press, with notes by claude mignault. it is in this edition, in emblem no. , "in dies meliora," that for the first time the light a and the dark a is to be found. in previous editions this device is absent. for this volume a new design has been engraved in which it appears. in the emblem books written in italian bacon does not appear to have been concerned, unless an exception be made of ripa's "iconologia," a copy of which contains his handwriting and initials. in some way he had control of a large number of those written in latin, and bearing names of dutch, french, and some italian authors, and also of several written in dutch and of the english writers. the field is a very wide one, and only a few of the principal examples can be mentioned. the most important work is the "emblemata moralia et bellica" of jacob à bruck, of angermundt, . "argentorati per jacobum ab heyden." with many of the designs in this volume oliver lector has dealt fully in "letters from the dead to the dead,"[ ] before referred to. there is another volume bearing the name of jacob à bruck, published in . only one copy of this book is known to be in existence, and that is in the royal library of st. petersburg. the "emblemata ethico politica of jacobus bornitius, , moguntiæ," is remarkable because many of the engravings contain portraits of bacon, namely, in sylloge prima, plates nos. vii., xxiii., xliv., xlv., xlvix.; and in sylloge ii., plates ix. and xxxvi. oliver lector says: "i have not met with an earlier edition of bornitius than . my conjecture, however, is that the manuscript came into the hands of gruter with other of bacon's published by him in the year ." there are two productions of janus jacobus boissardus in which bacon's hand may be recognised--"emblèmes latines avec l'interprétation françoise du i. pierre ioly messin. metis, ," and "emblematum liber. ipsa emblemata ab auctore delineata: a theodoro de bry sculpta et nunc recens in lucem edita," , frankfort. two editions of the latter were printed in the same year. the title-pages are identical, and the same plates have been used throughout, but the letterpress is in latin in the one, and in french in the other. in both, the dedications are addressed in french to madame de clervent, baronne de coppet, etc. the dedication of the former bears the name jan jacques boissard at the head, and addresses the lady as "que come estes addonnée à la speculation des choses qui appartiennent à l'instruction de l'âme." the dedication of the latter is signed ioly, who explains that he has translated the verses into french, so that they may be of more service to the dedicatee. otho van veen enjoys the distinction of having had rubens for a disciple. a considerable number of emblem books emanated from him. in were published at antwerp two editions of his "amorum emblemata." in one copy the verses are in latin, german, and french, and in the other in latin, english, and italian. there are commendatory verses in the latter, two of which are by daniel heinsius and r. v., who was robert verstegen, the author of "a restitution of decayed intelligence in antiquities." the dedication is "to the most honourable and worthie brothers william earle of pembroke, and phillip earle of montgomerie, patrons of learning and chevalrie," who are "the most noble and incomparable paire of brethren" to whom the shakespeare folio was dedicated. in this volume bacon has left his marks. "emblemata door zacharias heyns," published in rotterdam in , comprises four books bound together. the inscriptions over the plates are in latin. the letterpress, which is in dutch and french, apparently bears very little reference to the illustrations. johannis de brunes i.c. emblemata of sinne-werck, amsterdam, , is written in dutch. emblem viii. contains an indication that the number is a key. the "silenus alcibiades sive proteus" was published at middleburgh in . there is no author's name on the title-page, but the voor-reden, written in dutch, is signed j. cats. attached to two of the preliminary complimentary verses are the names of daniel heyns and josuah sylvester, the translator of "du bartas." the verses are in latin, dutch, and french. immediately following the title-page is a preface in latin, signed by majores de baptis. over this is the familiar emblem containing the archers, rabbits, and dogs, with the note of query on the right-hand side, and the message on the arrow. this volume is one of the most remarkable of the emblem books. the latin preface is autobiographical. if the writer can be identified as the author of "venus and adonis," it becomes one of the most important contributions to his biography. in , the year of shakespeare's death, was published at amsterdam a book bearing on its title-page the inscription: "cornelii giselberti plempii amsterodamum monogrammon." it contains fifty illustrations, with latin verses attached. emblem i. is reproduced (fig. v.) on reference to it, it will be seen that fortune stands on a globe, and with one hand is pushing off from the pinnacle of fame a man dressed as a player with a feather in his hat; with the other hand she is raising up a man who is wearing the bacon hat, but whose face is hidden. the prophecy expressed by the emblem is now being fulfilled. it will be seen that the initial letters of each word in the sentence of the letterpress--obscænùmque nimis crepuit, fortuna batavis appellanda--yield f. bacon. bacon's portrait is found in several of the illustrations in this book. other emblem writers whose works bear traces of bacon's co-operation are g. rollenhagen, j. camerius, j. typotius, d. hensius. [illustration: _fig. v._ _en fortuna: manu quos rupem ducit in altam, præcipites abigit: carnificina dea est. firma globo imponi voluerunt fata caducam, ipsa quoquè ut posset risus, & esse iocus. olim unctos salÿ qui præsilière per utres, ridebant caderet si qua puella malè. o quàm sæpe sales, plausumque merente ruinâ, erubuit vitium fors inhonest a suum! obscænùmque nimis crepuit, fortuna batavis appellanda; sono, quo sua curta vocant. quoque sono veteres olim sua furta latini: vt nec, homere, mali nomen odoris ames._ c. plempii. emblemata embl. i.] there yet remain to be mentioned two english emblem writers. a "choice of emblems" by geffrey whitney was published in by francis raphelengius in the house of christopher plantin at leyden. the dedication is to robert earle of leicester. there are only from fifteen to twenty original designs out of illustrations. the remainder are taken from other emblem writers, chiefly from alciat, sambucus, paradin, and hadrian junius. on page is the design headed "in dies meliora" found in the edition of alciat, but the letterpress, which is in english, is quite different from the latin verse attached to it in the alciat. the "minerva britanna" of henry peacham was published in . the emblem on the title-page[ ] represents the great secret of francis bacon's life, and on page · is an emblem in which the name shakespeare is represented. the volume is full of devices which will amply repay a careful study. apart from any connection which bacon may have had with this remarkable class of books, they are of great interest to the student of the elizabethan and jacobean periods. they contain pictorial representations full of information as to the habits and customs of the people. with the exception of whitney's "choice of emblems," a facsimile reprint of which was published in , edited by the rev. henry green, no reprint of any of these curious books has been issued. as the original editions of many of them are very rare, and of none of them plentiful, their study is a matter of difficulty, and few students find their way to this fascinating field of research. how close bacon's connection was with the writers of these books, or with their publishers, it is difficult to say, but there is considerable evidence that in some way he was able to introduce into every one of the books here enumerated, and many others, some plates illustrative of his inductive philosophy. footnotes: [ ] bernard quaritch, . [ ] see page . chapter xx. shakespeare's sonnets. "shakespeare's sonnets never before imprinted," have afforded commentators material for many volumes filled with theories which to the ordinary critical mind appear to have no foundation in fact. chapters have been written to prove that mr. w. h., the only begetter of the sonnets, was henry wriothesley, earl of southampton, and chapters have been written to prove that he was no such person, but that william herbert, earl of pembroke, was the man intended to be designated. theories have been elaborated to identify the individuals represented by the rival poet and the dark lady. not one of these theories is supported by the vestige of a shred of testimony that would stand investigation. there has not come down any evidence that shakspur, of stratford, knew either the earl of southampton, the earl of pembroke or marie fitton. the truth is that mr. w. h. was _shakespeare_, who _was_ the only begetter of the sonnets, and the proof of this statement will in due time be forthcoming. it may be well to try and read some of the sonnets as they stand and endeavour to realise what is the obvious meaning of the printed words. the key to the sonnets will be found in no. . the language in which it is written is explicit and capable of being understood by any ordinary intellect. "sinne of selfe-love possesseth al mine eie and all my soule, and al my every part; and for this sinne there is no remedie, it is so grounded inward in my heart. me thinkes no face so gratious is as mine, no shape so true, no truth of such account, and for my selfe mine owne worth do define, as i all other in all worth's surmount but when my glasse shewes me my selfe indeed beated and chopt with tand antiquitie, mine own selfe love quite contrary i read selfe, so selfe loving were iniquity. tis thee (my-selfe) that for myself i praise painting my age with beauty of thy daies." the writer here states definitely that he is dominated by the sin of self-love; it possesseth his eye, his soul, and every part of him. there can be found no remedy for it; it is so grounded in his heart. no face is so gracious as is his, no shape so true, no truth of such account. he defines his worth as surmounting that of all others. this is the frank expression of a man who not only believed that he was, but knew that he was superior to all his contemporaries, not only in intellectual power, but in personal appearance. then comes an arrest in the thought, and he realises that time has been at work. he has been picturing himself as he was when a young man. he turns to his glass and sees himself beated and chopt with tanned antiquity; forty summers have passed over his brow.[ ] francis bacon at forty years of age, or thereabouts, unmarried, childless, sits down to his table, hilliard's portrait before him, with pen in hand, full of self-love, full of admiration for that beautiful youth on whose counterfeit presentment he is gazing. his intellectual triumphs pass in review before him, most of them known only to himself and that youth--his companion through life. that was the francis bacon who controlled him in all his comings and goings--his ideal whom he worshipped. if he could have a son like that boy! his pen begins to move on the paper-- "from fairest creatures we desire increase that thereby beauty's rose might never die, but as the riper should by time decrease his tender heire might bear his memory." the pen stops and the writer's eye wanders to the miniature:-- "but _thou_[ ] contracted to thine own bright eyes." and so the sonnets flow on, without effort, without the need of reference to authorities, for the great, fixed and methodical memory needs none. how natural are the allusions-- "thou art thy mother's glasse and she in thee calls backe the lovely aprill of her prime." * * * * * "be as thy presence is, gracious and kind, or to thyselfe at least kind hearted prove. make thee another self, for love of me that beauty may still live in thine or thee." * * * * * "let those whom nature hath not made for store, harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perish; look, whom she best indow'd she gave the more; which bountious guift thou shouldst in bounty cherrish; she carv'd thee for her seale, and ment therby thou shouldst print more, not let that coppy die." * * * * * "o that you were yourselfe, but love you are no longer yours, then you yourselfe here live, against this cunning end you should prepare, and your sweet semblance to some other give · · · · who lets so faire a house fall to decay · · · · o none but unthrifts, deare my love you know you had a father, let your son say so." * * * * * "but wherefore do not you a mightier waie make warre uppon this bloodie tirant time? and fortifie your selfe in your decay with meanes more blessed, then my barren rime? now stand you on the top of happie houres and many maiden gardens, yet onset, with virtuous wish would beare you living flowers much liker than your painted counterfeit: * * * * * who will beleeve my verses in time to come if it were fil'd with your most high deserts? though yet heaven knows, it is but as a tombe _which hides your life_, and shewes not halfe your parts: if i could write the beauty of your eyes and in fresh numbers number all your graces, the age to come would say this poet lies, such heavenly touches nere toucht earthly faces. so should my papers (yellowed with their age) be scorn'd, like old men of lesse truth than tongue, and your true rights be termd a poets rage and stretched miter of an antique song. but were some childe of yours alive that time, you should live twise, in it and in my rime." * * * * * "yet doe thy worst, ould time, dispight thy wrong my love shall in my verse ever live young." he realises that he no longer answers ophelia's description: "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword: the expectancy and rose of the fair state the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observed of all observers.... that unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth." but he cannot forget what he has been, he cannot realise that he is no longer the brilliant youth whose miniature he has before him, with the words inscribed around, "si tabula daretur digna animum mallem"--if materials could be found worthy to paint his mind ("o could he but have drawn his wit") and then with a burst of poetic enthusiasm he exclaims:-- "tis thee (myselfe) that for myselfe i praise, painting my age with beauty of thy daies." this is the common experience of a man as he advances in life. so long as he does not see his reflection in a glass, if he tries to visualize himself, he sees the youth or young man. only in his most pessimistic moments does he realise his age. there is no longer any difficulty in understanding shakespeare's sonnets. they were addressed by "shakespeare," the poet, to the marvellous youth who was known under the name of francis bacon, and they were written, with hilliard's portrait placed on his table before him. in that age (please god it may be the present age), which is known only to god and to the fates when the finishing touch shall be given to bacon's fame,[ ] it will be found that the period of his life from twelve to thirty-five years of age surpassed all others, not only in brilliant intellectual achievements, but for the enduring wealth with which he endowed his countrymen. and yet it was part of his scheme of life that his connection with the great renaissance in english literature should lie hidden until posterity should recognise that work as the fruit of his brain:--"mente videbor"--"by the mind i shall be seen." how lacking all his modern biographers have been in perception! every difficulty in those which are termed the procreation sonnets disappears with the application of this key. only by it can sonnet be made intelligible:-- "my glass shall not persuade me i am old, as long as youth and thou are of one date; but when in thee time's furrow i behold, then look, i death my days would expirate for all that beauty that doth cover thee is but the steady raiment of my heart. which in my breast doth live, as thine in me. how can i then be older than thou art? o, therefore, love, be of thyself so wary as i, not for myself, but for thee will; bearing thy heart, which i will keep so chary as tender nurse her babe from faring ill. presume not on thy heart when mine is slain; thou gavest me thine, not to give back again." but nearly every sonnet might be quoted in support of this view. especially is it of value in bringing an intelligent and allowable explanation to sonnets , , and , which now no longer have an unsavoury flavour. sonnet no. is most noteworthy, because it implies a belief in re-incarnation. shakespeare expresses his longing to know what the ancients would have said of his marvellous intellect. if he could find his picture in some antique book over years old, see an image of himself as he then was, and learn what men thought of him! "if their bee nothing new, but that which is hath beene before, how are our braines begulld, which laboring for invention, beare amisse the second burthen of a former child? oh that record could with a back-ward looke, even of five hundredth courses of the sunne, show me your image in some antique booke, since minde at first in carrecter was done, that i might see what the old world could say to this composed wonder of your frame; whether we are mended, or where better they, or whether revolution be the same. oh sure i am, the wits of former daies, to subjects worse have given admiring praise." there is the same idea in sonnet , which suggests that in some future re-incarnation bacon might read shakespeare's praises of him. conjectures as to who was the rival poet may be dispensed with. the following rendering of sonnet no. makes this perfectly clear:-- "o how i (_the poet_) faint when i of you (_f.b._) do write, knowing a better spirit (_that of the philosopher_) doth use your name and in the praise thereof spends all his might to make me tongue tied, speaking of your fame! (_shakespeare never refers to bacon or vice-versa_) but since your (_f.b.'s_) worth wide as the ocean is, the humble as the proudest sail doth bear, my saucy bark (_that of the poet_) inferior far to his (_that of the philosopher_), on your broad main doth wilfully appear. your shallowest help will hold me (_the poet_) up afloat whilst he (_the philosopher_) upon your soundless deep doth ride." it is impossible to do justice to this subject in the space here available. by the aid of this key every line becomes intelligible. the charm and beauty of the sonnets are increased tenfold. every unpleasant association of them is removed. no longer need browning say, "if so the less shakespeare he." these are not "shakespeare's sug'rd[ ] sonnets amongst his private friends" to which meres makes reference. they are to be found elsewhere. if there had been an intelligent study of elizabethan literature from original sources the authorship of the sonnets would have been revealed long ago. it was a habit of bacon to speak of himself as some one apart from the speaker. the opening sentence of _filum labyrinthi, sivo forma inquisitiones_ is an example. _ad filios_--"francis bacon thought in this manner." prefixed to the preface to gilbert wats' interpretation of the "advancement of learning" is a chapter commencing, "francis lo verulam consulted thus: and thus concluded with himselfe. the publication whereof he conceived did concern the present and future age." nothing that has been written is more perfectly baconian in style and temperament than are the sonnets. they breathe out his hopes, his aspirations, his ideals, his fears, in every line. he knew he was not for his time. he knew future generations only would render him the fame to which his incomparable powers entitled him. he knew how far he towered above his contemporaries, aye, and his predecessors, in intellectual power. his hopes were fixed on that day in the distant future--to-day--when for the first time the meshes which he wove, behind which his life's work is obscured, are beginning to be unravelled. the most sanguine baconian, in his most enthusiastic moments, must fail adequately to appreciate the achievements of francis bacon and the obligations under which he has placed posterity. but bacon knew--and he alone knew--their full value. it was fitting that the greatest poet which the world had produced should in matchless verse do honour to the world's greatest intellect. it was a pretty conceit. only a master mind would dare to make the attempt. the result has afforded another example of how his great wit, in being concealed, was revealed. footnotes: [ ] sonnet no. . [ ] _'tis thee myselfe_, sonnet . [ ] see rawley's introduction to "manes verulamiana." [ ] the expression "sugr'd sonnets" refers to verses which were written with coloured ink to which sugar had been added. when dry the writing shone brightly. chapter xxi. bacon's library. in the "advancement of learning" bacon refers to the annotations of books as being deficient. there was living at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century a scholar through whose hands at least several thousand books passed. he appears to have made a practice of annotating in the margins every book he read. the chief purpose, however, of the notes, apparently, was to aid the memory, for in some books nearly every name occurring in the text is carried into the margin without comment. the notes are also accompanied by scrolls, marks, and brackets, which support the contention that they are the work of one man. the annotation of books was not a common practice then, nor has it been since. if a reader takes up a hundred books in a second-hand book shop he will probably not find more than one containing manuscript notes, and not one in five hundred in which the annotations have been systematically carried through. there does not appear to have been any other scholar living at that time, with the exception of this one, who was persistently making marginal notes on the books he read. spedding writes: "what became of his (bacon's) books, which were left to sir john constable and must have contained traces of his reading, we do not know; but very few appear to have survived." mrs. pott, in "francis bacon and his secret society," draws attention to the mystery as to the disappearance of bacon's library. "which is a mystery," she adds, "although the world has been content to take it very apathetically. where is bacon's library? undoubtedly the books exist and are traceable. we should expect them to be recognisable by marginal notes; yet those notes, whether in pencil or in ink, may have been effaced. if annotated, bacon and his friends would not wish his books to attract public attention." and further on: "it is probable that the latter (_i.e._, the books) will seldom or never be found to bear his name or signature." and again: "yet it may reasonably be anticipated that some at least are 'noted in the margin,' or that some will be found with traces of marks which were guides to the transcriber or amanuensis as to the portions which were to be copied for future use in bacon's collections or book of commonplaces." mrs. pott's words were written in a spirit of true prophecy. the collecting together of these books originated with that distinguished baconian scholar, mr. w. m. safford. for years past he has been steadily engaged in reconstituting bacon's library. the writer has had the privilege of being associated with him in this work during the past three years. a collection of nearly two thousand volumes has been gathered together. the annotations on the margins of these books are unquestionably the work of one man, and that man, or rather boy and man, was undoubtedly francis bacon. the books bear date from to . it is impossible to enumerate them all here, but they include the works of seneca, aristotle, plato, horace, alciat, lucanus, dionysius, catullus, lactinius, plutarch, pliny, aristophanes, plautus, cornelius agrippa, cicero, vitruvius, euclid, virgil, ovid, lucretius, apuleius, salust, tibullus, isocrates, and hundreds of other classical writers; st. augustine, st. jerome, calvin, beza, beda, erasmus, martin luther, j. cammerarius, sir thomas moore, machiavelli, and other more modern writers. the handwriting varies,[ ] but there is a particular hand which is found accompanied by a boy's sketches. there are drawings of full-length figures, heads of men and women, animals, birds, reptiles, ships, castles, cathedrals, cities, battles, storms, etc. the writing is a strong, clerkly student's hand. there is a passage in "hamlet," act v., scene ii., which is noteworthy. hamlet, speaking to horatio, says:-- "i sat me down devised a new commission; wrote it fair; i once did hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to write fair, and labour'd much how to forget that learning; but, sir, now it did me yeomans service." the nature of this statement is so personal that it could only have been written as the result of experience. hamlet had been taught, when young, to write a hand so fair that he was capable of producing a fresh commission which would pass muster as the work of a court copyist. the annotation of these books possessed the same qualification. in the margins of these books are abundant references in handwriting to the whole range of classical authors. a copy of the "grammatice compendium" of lactus pomponius, a very rare book printed by de fortis in venice in , contains on the margins the boy's scribble and drawings, besides a number of manuscript notes. it bears traces of his reading probably at eight years of age. a large folio volume entitled "t. livii palvini latinæ historiæ principis decades tres," published by frobenius in , is a treasure. it is most copiously annotated and embellished with sketches. the notes are usually in latin, but interspersed with greek and sometimes with english. obviously the writer thought in latin, and the character of the drawings justifies the assumption that, at the time, his age would be from ten to fourteen years. the most remarkable reference to these annotations is to be found in the "rape of lucrece." the fifteenth stanza is as follows:-- "but she that never cop't with straunger eies, could picke no meaning from their parling lookes, _nor read the subtle shining secrecies writ in the glassie margents of such bookes_, shee toucht no unknown baits, nor feared no hooks, nor could shee moralize his wanton sight more than his eies were opend to the light." it would be difficult to conceive a more inappropriate simile for the lustful looks in tarquin's eyes than "the subtle shining secrecies, writ in the glassie margents of such books." that this is lugged in for a purpose outside the object of the poem is manifest. how many readers of "lucrece" would know of such a practice? nay. if it did exist, was not its use very rare? but the margin of the verse itself yields a subtle shining secret! the initial letters of the lines are b, c, n, w, sh, n, m. it is only necessary to supply the vowels--bacon, w. sh., name. sh is on line , which is the numerical value of the word shakespeare. the numerical value of bacon is . in view of this the line is significant:--"why is colatine the publisher?" the use of the word _publisher_ here is quite inappropriate. it is introduced for some reason outside the purpose of the text. the "rape of lucrece" commences with bacon's monogram and, as the late rev. walter begley pointed out, ends with his signature. the theory now advanced is that when bacon read a book he made marginal notes in it--the object being mainly to assist his memory, but the critical notes are numerous. it does not follow that all these books constituted his library. he would read a book and it having served his purpose he would dispose of it. some books no doubt he would retain and these would form his library. the annotations are chiefly in latin, but some are in greek, some in hebrew, french and spanish. when these have been examined and translated the meaning of the phrase that he had taken all knowledge to be his province will be better understood. rawley says: "he read much and that with great judgment and rejection of impertinences incident to many authors." the writer having examined annotations, many and varied, of books in his library, and having enjoyed the privilege of free access to those collected by mr. safford, ventures to assert that much of the ripe learning of the shakespeare plays can be traced therein to its proper origin. amongst the former is a copy of alciat's emblems, , in the early part profusely annotated. ben jonson in his "discoveries" has incorporated the translation of a portion of one of the emblems and _has also incorporated a portion of the annotations from this very book_. footnotes: [ ] edwin a. abbot, in his work, "francis bacon," p. , writes, "bacon's style (as a writer) varied almost as much as his handwriting." chapter xxii. two german opinions on shakespeare and bacon. dr. g. g. gervinus, the eminent german historian and professor extraordinary at heidelberg, published in his work, "shakespeare commentaries." this was years before any suggestion had been made that bacon was in any way connected with the authorship of the shakespearean dramas. in the prospectus of "the new shakespeare society," written in , dr. f. j. furnivall says:-- "the profound and generous 'commentaries' of gervinus--an honour to a german to have written, a pleasure to an englishman to read--is still the only book known to me that comes near the true treatment and the dignity of its subject, or can be put into the hands of the student who wants to know the mind of shakespeare." the book abounds with references to bacon. from the preface to the last chapter gervinus appears to have bacon continually suggested to him by the thoughts and words of shakespeare. in the preface, after speaking of the value accruing to german literature by naturalizing shakespeare "even at the risk of casting our own poets still further in the shade," he says:-- "a similar benefit would it be to our intellectual life if his famed contemporary, bacon, were revived in a suitable manner, in order to counterbalance the idealistic philosophy of germany. for both these, the poet as well as the philosopher, having looked deeply into the history and politics of their people, stand upon the level ground of reality, notwithstanding the high art of the one and the speculative notions of the other. by the healthfulness of their own mind they influence the healthfulness of others, while in their most ideal and most abstract representations they aim at a preparation for life _as it is_--for _that_ life which forms the exclusive subject of all political action." in the chapter on "his age," written prior to , the professor pours out the results of a profound study of the writings attributed to both men in the following remarkable sentences:-- "judge then how natural it was that england, if not the birthplace of the drama, should be that of dramatic legislature. yet even this instance of favourable concentration is not the last. both in philosophy and poetry everything conspired, as it were, throughout this prosperous period, in favour of two great minds, shakespeare and bacon; all competitors vanished from their side, and they could give forth laws for art and science which it is incumbent even upon present ages to fulfil. as the revived philosophy, which in the former century in germany was divided among many, but in england at that time was the possession of a single man, so poetry also found one exclusive heir, compared with whom those later born could claim but little. "that shakespeare's appearance upon a soil so admirably prepared was neither marvellous nor accidental is evidenced even by the corresponding appearance of such a contemporary as bacon. scarcely can anything be said of shakespeare's position generally with regard to mediæval poetry which does not also bear upon the position of the renovator bacon with regard to mediæval philosophy. neither knew nor mentioned the other, although bacon was almost called upon to have done so in his remarks upon the theatre of his day. it may be presumed that shakespeare liked bacon but little, if he knew his writings and life; that he liked not his ostentation, which, without on the whole interfering with his modesty, recurred too often in many instances; that he liked not the fault-finding which his ill-health might have caused, nor the narrow-mindedness with which he pronounced the histrionic art to be infamous, although he allowed that the ancients regarded the drama as a school for virtue; nor the theoretic precepts of worldly wisdom which he gave forth; nor, lastly, the practical career which he lived. before his mind, however, if he had fathomed it, he must have bent in reverence. for just as shakespeare was an interpreter of the secrets of history and of human nature, bacon was an interpreter of lifeless nature. just as shakespeare went from instance to instance in his judgment of moral actions, and never founded a law on single experience, so did bacon in natural science avoid leaping from one experience of the senses to general principles; he spoke of this with blame as anticipating nature; and shakespeare, in the same way, would have called the conventionalities in the poetry of the southern races an anticipation of human nature. in the scholastic science of the middle ages, as in the chivalric poetry of the romantic period, approbation and not truth was sought for, and with one accord shakespeare's poetry and bacon's science were equally opposed to this. as shakespeare balanced the one-sided errors of the imagination by reason, reality, and nature, so bacon led philosophy away from the one-sided errors of reason to experience; both with one stroke, renovated the two branches of science and poetry by this renewed bond with nature; both, disregarding all by-ways, staked everything upon this 'victory in the race between art and nature.' just as bacon with his new philosophy is linked with the natural science of greece and rome, and then with the latter period of philosophy in western europe, so shakespeare's drama stands in relation to the comedies of plautus and to the stage of his own day; between the two there lay a vast wilderness of time, as unfruitful for the drama as for philosophy. but while they thus led back to nature, bacon was yet as little of an empiric, in the common sense, as shakespeare was a poet of nature. bacon prophesied that if hereafter his commendation of experience should prevail, great danger to science would arise from the other extreme, and shakespeare even in his own day could perceive the same with respect to his poetry; bacon, therefore, insisted on the closest union between experience and reason, just as shakespeare effected that between reality and imagination. while they thus bid adieu to the formalities of ancient art and science, shakespeare to conceits and taffeta-phrases, bacon to logic and syllogisms, yet at times it occurred that the one fell back into the subtleties of the old school, and the other into the constrained wit of the italian style. bacon felt himself quite an original in that which was his peculiar merit, and so was shakespeare; the one in the method of science he had laid down, and in his suggestions for its execution, the other in the poetical works he had executed, and in the suggestions of their new law. bacon, looking back to the waymarks he had left for others, said with pride that his words required a century for their demonstration and several for their execution; and so too it has demanded two centuries to understand shakespeare, but very little has ever been executed in his sense. and at the same time we have mentioned what deep modesty was interwoven in both with their self-reliance, so that the words which bacon liked to quote hold good for the two works:--'the kingdom of god cometh not with observation.' both reached this height from the one starting point, that shakespeare despised the million, and bacon feared with phocion the applause of the multitude. both are alike in the rare impartiality with which they avoided everything one-sided; in bacon we find, indeed, youthful exercises in which he endeavoured in severe contrasts to contemplate a series of things from two points of view. both, therefore, have an equal hatred of sects and parties; bacon of sophists and dogmatic philosophers, shakespeare of puritans and zealots. both, therefore, are equally free from prejudices, and from astrological superstition in dreams and omens. bacon says of the alchemists and magicians in natural science that they stand in similar relation to true knowledge as the deeds of amadis to those of cæsar, and so does shakespeare's true poetry stand in relation to the fantastic romance of amadis. just as bacon banished religion from science, so did shakespeare from art; and when the former complained that the teachers of religion were against natural philosophy, they were equally against the stage. from bacon's example it seems clear that shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds as himself, and took the path of morality in worldly things; in both this has been equally misconstrued, and le maistre has proved bacon's lack of christianity, as birch has done that of shakespeare. shakespeare would, perhaps, have looked down just as contemptuously on the ancients and their arts as bacon did on their philosophy and natural science, and both on the same grounds; they boasted of the greater age of the world, of more enlarged knowledge of heaven, earth, and mankind. neither stooped before authorities, and an injustice similar to that which bacon committed against aristotle, shakespeare _perhaps_ has done to homer. in both a similar combination of different mental powers was at work; and as shakespeare was often involuntarily philosophical in his profoundness, bacon was not seldom surprised into the imagination of the poet. just as bacon, although he declared knowledge in itself to be much more valuable than the use of invention, insisted throughout generally and dispassionately upon the practical use of philosophy, so shakespeare's poetry, independent as was his sense of art, aimed throughout at bearing upon the moral life. bacon himself was of the same opinion; he was not far from declaring history to be the best teacher of politics, and poetry the best instructor in morals. both were alike deeply moved by the picture of a ruling nemesis, whom they saw, grand and powerful, striding through history and life, dragging the mightiest and most prosperous as a sacrifice to her altar, as the victims of their own inward nature and destiny. in bacon's works we find a multitude of moral sayings and maxims of experience, from which the most striking mottoes might be drawn for every shakespearian play, aye, for every one of his principal characters (we have already brought forward not a few proofs of this), testifying to a remarkable harmony in their mutual comprehension of human nature. both, in their systems of morality rendering homage to aristotle, whose ethics shakespeare, from a passage in troilus, may have read, arrived at the same end as he did--that virtue lies in a just medium between two extremes. shakespeare would also have agreed with _him_ in this, that bacon declared excess to be 'the fault of youth, as defect is of age;' he accounted 'defect the worst, because excess contains some sparks of magnanimity, and, like a bird, claims kindred of the heavens, while defect, only like a base worm, crawls upon the earth.' in these maxims lie at once, as it were, the whole theory of shakespeare's dramatic forms and of his moral philosophy." dr. kuno fischer, the distinguished german critic and historian of philosophy, in a volume on bacon, published in , writes:-- the same affinity for the roman mind, and the same want of sympathy with the greek, we again find in bacon's greatest contemporary, whose imagination took as broad and comprehensive a view as bacon's intellect. indeed, how could a bacon attain that position with respect to greek poetry that was unattainable by the mighty imagination of a shakspeare? for in shakspeare, at any rate, the imagination of the greek antiquity could be met by a homogeneous power of the same rank as itself; and, as the old adage says, "like comes to like." but the age, the spirit of the nation--in a word, all those forces of which the genius of an individual man is composed, and which, moreover, genius is least able to resist--had here placed an obstacle, impenetrable both to the poet and the philosopher. shakspeare was no more able to exhibit greek characters than bacon to expound greek poetry. like bacon, shakspeare had in his turn of mind something that was roman, and not at all akin to the greek. he could appropriate to himself a coriolanus and a brutus, a cæsar and an antony; he could succeed with the roman heroes of plutarch, but not with the greek heroes of homer. the latter he could only parody, but his parody was as infelicitous as bacon's explanation of the "wisdom of the ancients." those must be dazzled critics indeed who can persuade themselves that the heroes of the iliad are excelled by the caricatures in "troilus and cressida." the success of such a parody was poetically impossible; indeed, he that attempts to parody homer shows thereby that he has not understood him. for the simple and the naïve do not admit of a parody, and these have found in homer their eternal and inimitable expression. just as well might caricatures be made of the statues of phidias. where the creative imagination never ceases to be simple and naïve, where it never distorts itself by the affected or the unnatural, there is the consecrated land of poetry, in which there is no place for the parodist. on the other hand, where there is a palpable want of simplicity and nature, parody is perfectly conceivable; nay, may even be felt as a poetical necessity. thus euripides, who, often enough, was neither simple nor naïve, could be parodied, and aristophanes has shown us with what felicity. even �schylus, who was not always as simple as he was grand, does not completely escape the parodising test. but homer is safe. to parody homer is to mistake him, and to stand so far beyond his scope that the truth and magic of his poetry can no longer be felt; and this is the position of shakespeare and bacon. the imagination of homer, and all that could be contemplated and felt by that imagination, namely, the classical antiquity of the greeks, are to them utterly foreign. we cannot understand aristotle without plato; nay, i maintain that we cannot contemplate with a sympathetic mind the platonic world of ideas, if we have not previously sympathised with the world of the homeric gods. be it understood, i speak of the _form_ of the platonic mind, not of its logical matter; in point of doctrine, the homeric faith was no more that of plato than of phidias. but these doctrinal or logical differences are far less than the formal and æsthetical affinity. the conceptions of plato are of homeric origin. this want of ability to take an historical survey of the world is to be found alike in bacon and shakspeare, together with many excellencies likewise common to them both. to the parallel between them--which gervinus, with his peculiar talent for combination, has drawn in the concluding remarks to his "shakespeare," and has illustrated by a series of appropriate instances--belongs the similar relation of both to antiquity, their affinity to the roman mind, and their diversity from the greek. both possessed to an eminent degree that faculty for a knowledge of human nature that at once pre-supposes and calls forth an interest in practical life and historical reality. to this interest corresponds the stage, on which the roman characters moved; and here bacon and shakspeare met, brought together by a common interest in these objects, and the attempt to depict and copy them. this point of agreement, more than any other argument, explains their affinity. at the same time there is no evidence that one ever came into actual contact with the other. bacon does not even mention shakspeare when he discourses of dramatic poetry, but passes over this department of poetry with a general and superficial remark that relates less to the subject itself than to the stage and its uses. as far as his own age is concerned, he sets down the moral value of the stage as exceedingly trifling. but the affinity of bacon to shakspeare is to be sought in his moral and psychological, not in his æsthetical views, which are too much regulated by material interests and utilitarian prepossessions to be applicable to art itself, considered with reference to its own independent value. however, even in these there is nothing to prevent bacon's manner of judging mankind, and apprehending characters from agreeing perfectly with that of shakspeare; so that human life, the subject-matter of all dramatic art, appeared to him much as it appeared to the great artist himself, who, in giving form to this matter, excelled all others. is not the inexhaustible theme of shakspeare's poetry the history and course of human passion? in the treatment of this especial theme is not shakspeare the greatest of all poets--nay, is he not unique among them all? and it is this very theme that is proposed by bacon as the chief problem of moral philosophy. he blames aristotle for treating of the passions in his rhetoric rather than his ethics; for regarding the artificial means of exciting them rather than their natural history. it is to the natural history of the human passions that bacon directs the attention of philosophy. he does not find any knowledge of them among the sciences of his time. "the poets and writers of histories," he says, "are the best doctors of this knowledge; where we may find painted forth with great life how passions are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves; how they work; how they vary; how they gather and fortify; how they are inwrapped one within another; and how they do fight and encounter one with another; and other the like particularities."[ ] such a lively description is required by bacon from moral philosophy. that is to say, he desired nothing less than a natural history of the passions--the very thing that shakspeare has produced. indeed, what poet could have excelled shakspeare in this respect? who, to use a baconian expression, could have depicted man and all his passions more _ad vivum_? according to bacon, the poets and historians give us copies of characters; and the outlines of these images--the simple strokes that determine characters--are the proper objects of ethical science. just as physical science requires a dissection of bodies, that their hidden qualities and parts may be discovered, so should ethics penetrate the various minds of men, in order to find out the eternal basis of them all. and not only this foundation, but likewise those external conditions which give a stamp to human character--all those peculiarities that "are imposed upon the mind by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not external; and, again, those which are caused by external fortune"[ ]--should come within the scope of ethical philosophy. in a word, bacon would have man studied in his individuality as a product of nature and history, in every respect determined by natural and historical influences, by internal and external conditions. and exactly in the same spirit has shakespeare understood man and his destiny; regarding character as the result of a certain natural temperament and a certain historical position, and destiny as a result of character. footnotes: [ ] "advancement of learning," ii. "de augment. scient.," vii. . [ ] "advancement of learning," ii. for the whole passage compare "de augment. scient.," vii. . chapter xxiii. the testimony of bacon's contemporaries. a distinguished member of the bench in a recent post-prandial address referred to bacon as "a shady lawyer." irresponsible newspaper correspondents, when attacking the baconian theory, indulge in epithets of this kind, but it is amazing that any man occupying a position so responsible as that of an english judge should, either through ignorance or with a desire to be considered a wit, make use of such a term. whatever may have been francis bacon's faults, one fact must stand unchallenged--that amongst those of his contemporaries who knew him there was a consensus of opinion that his virtues overshadowed any failings to which he might be subject. the following testimonies establish this fact:-- let ben jonson speak first: "yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. his language (where he could spare or pass a jest) was nobly censorious. no man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. no member of his speech, but consisted of his own graces. his hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. he commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. no man had their affections more in his power. the fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end," and, after referring to lord ellesmere, jonson continues:-- "but his learned and able (though unfortunate) successor, (_i.e._, bacon) is he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred either to insolent greece, or haughty rome. in short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits born, that could honour a language, or help study. now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward: so that he may be named, and stand as the mark and [greek: akôê] of our language. "my conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place, or honours: but i have and do reverence him, for the greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages. in his adversity i ever prayed god would give him strength; for greatness he could not want. neither could i condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest." sir toby matthew describes francis bacon as "a friend unalterable to his friends; a man most sweet in his conversation and ways"; and adds: "it is not his greatness that i admire, but his virtue." thomas bushel, his servant, in a letter to mr. john eliot, printed in , in a volume called "the first part of youth's errors," says: "yet lest the calumnious tongues of men might extenuate the good opinion you had of his worth and merit, i must ingenuously confess that my selfe and others of his servants were the occasion of exhaling his vertues into a darke exlipse; which god knowes would have long endured both for the honour of his king and the good of the commonaltie; had not we whom his bountie nursed, laid on his guiltlesse shoulders our base and execrable deeds to be scand and censured by the whole senate of a state, where no sooner sentence was given, but most of us forsoke him, which makes us bear the badge of jewes to this day. yet i am confident there were some godly daniels amongst us.... as for myselfe, with shame i must acquit the title, and pleade guilty; which grieves my very soule, that so matchlesse a peer should be lost by such insinuating caterpillars, who in his owne nature scorn'd the least thought of any base, unworthy, or ignoble act, though subject to infirmites as ordained to the wisest." in fuller's "worthies" it is written: "he was a rich cabinet filled with judgment, wit, fancy and memory, and had the golden key, elocution, to open it. he was singular in singulis, in every science and art, and being in-at-all came off with credit. he was too bountifull to his servants, and either too confident of their honesty, or too conniving at their falsehood. 'tis said he had servants, one in all causes patron to the plaintiff, the other to the defendant, but taking bribes of both, with this condition, to restore the mony received, if the cause went against them. such practices, tho' unknown to their master, cost him the loss of his office." in "the lives of statesmen and favourites of elizabeth's reign" it is said:-- "his religion was rational and sober, his spirit publick, his love to relations tender, to friends faithful, to the hopeful liberal, to men universal, to his very enemies civil. he left the best pattern of government in his actions under one king and the best principles of it in the life of the other." the following is a translation from the discourse on the life of mr. francis bacon which is prefixed to the "histoire naturelle," by piere amboise, published in paris in : "among so many virtues that made this great man commendable, prudence, as the first of all the moral virtues, and that most necessary to those of his profession, was that which shone in him the most brightly. his profound wisdom can be most readily seen in his books, and his matchless fidelity in the signal services that he continuously rendered to his prince. never was there man who so loved equity, or so enthusiastically worked for the public good as he; so that i may aver that he would have been much better suited to a republic than to a monarchy, where frequently the convenience of the prince is more thought of than that of his people. and i do not doubt that had he lived in a republic he would have acquired as much glory from the citizens as formerly did aristides and cato, the one in athens, the other in rome. innocence oppressed found always in his protection a sure refuge, and the position of the great gave them no vantage ground before the chancellor when suing for justice. "vanity, avarice, and ambition, vices that too often attach themselves to great honours, were to him quite unknown, and if he did a good action it was not from the desire of fame, but simply because he could not do otherwise. his good qualities were entirely pure, without being clouded by the admixture of any imperfections, and the passions that form usually the defects in great men in him only served to bring out his virtues; if he felt hatred and rage it was only against evil-doers, to shew his detestation of their crimes, and success or failure in the affairs of his country brought to him the greater part of his joys or his sorrows. he was as truly a good man as he was an upright judge, and by the example of his life corrected vice and bad living as much as by pains and penalties. and, in a word, it seemed that nature had exempted from the ordinary frailities of men him whom she had marked out to deal with their crimes. all these good qualities made him the darling of the people and prized by the great ones of the state. but when it seemed that nothing could destroy his position, fortune made clear that she did not yet wish to abandon her character for instability, and that bacon had too much worth to remain so long prosperous. it thus came about that amongst the great number of officials such as a man of his position must have in his house, there was one who was accused before parliament of exaction, and of having sold the influence that he might have with his master. and though the probity of mr. bacon was entirely exempt from censure, nevertheless he was declared guilty of the crime of his servant and was deprived of the power that he had so long exercised with so much honour and glory. in this i see the working of monstrous ingratitude and unparalleled cruelty--to say that a man who could mark the years of his life rather by the signal services that he had rendered to the state than by times or seasons, should have received such hard usage for the punishment of a crime which he never committed; england, indeed, teaches us by this that the sea that surrounds her shores imparts to her inhabitants somewhat of its restless inconstancy. this storm did not at all surprise him, and he received the news of his disgrace with a countenance so undisturbed that it was easy to see that he thought but little of the sweets of life since the loss of them caused him discomfort so slight." thus ended this great man whom england could place alone as the equal of the best of all the previous centuries." peter boener, who was private apothecary to bacon for a time, wrote in a life, of portions of which the following are translations:-- "but how runneth man's future. he who seemed to occupy the highest rank is alas! by envious tongues near king and parliament deposed from all his offices and chancellorship, little considering what treasure was being cast in the mire, as afterwards the issue and result thereof have shown in that country. but he always comforted himself with the words of scripture--nihil est novi; that means 'there is nothing new.' because so is cicero by octavianus; calisthenes by alexander; seneca (all his former teachers) by nero; yea, ovid, lucanus, statius (together with many others), for a small cause very unthankfully the one banished, the other killed, the third thrown to the lions. but even as for such men banishment is freedom--death their life, so is for this author his deposition a memory to greater honour and fame, and to such a sage no harm can come. * * * * * "whilst his fortunes were so changed, i never saw him--either in mien, word or acts--changed or disturbed towards whomsoever; _ira enim hominis non implet justitiam dei_, he was ever one and the same, both in sorrow and in joy, as becometh a philosopher; always with a benevolent allocution--_manus nostræ sunt oculatæ, credunt quod vident_.... a noteworthy example and pattern for everyone of all virtue, gentleness, peacefulness, and patience." francis osborn, in his "advice to a son," writes:-- "and my memory neither doth nor (i believe possible ever) can direct me towards an example more splendid in this kind, than the lord bacon earl of st. albans, who in all companies did appear a good proficient, if not a master in those arts entertained for the subject of every ones discourse. so as i dare maintain, without the least affectation of flattery or hyperbole, that his most casual talk deserveth to be written, as i have been told his first or foulest copys required no great labour to render them competent for the nicest judgments. a high perfection, attainable only by use, and treating with every man in his respective profession, and what he was most vers'd in. so as i have heard him entertain a country lord in the proper terms relating to hawks and dogs. and at another time out-cant a london chirurgeon. thus he did not only learn himself, but gratifie such as taught him; who looked upon their callings as honoured through his notice; nor did an easie falling into arguments (not unjustly taken for a blemish in the most) appear less than an ornament in him: the ears of the hearers receiving more gratification, than trouble; and (so) no less sorry when he came to conclude, than displeased with any did interrupt him. now this general knowledge he had in all things, husbanded by his wit, and dignifi'd by so majestical a carriage he was known to own, strook such an awful reverence in those he question'd, that they durst not conceal the most intrinsick part of their mysteries from him, for fear of appearing ignorant, or saucy. all which rendered him no less necessary, than admirable at the council table, where in reference to impositions, monopolies, &c. the meanest manufacturers were an usual argument: and, as i have heard, did in this baffle, the earl of middlesex, that was born and bred a citizen &c. yet without any great (if at all) interrupting his other studies, as is not hard to be imagined of a quick apprehension, in which he was admirable." chapter xxiv. the missing fourth part of "the great instauration." it has been urged by critics that bacon, whilst professing to take all knowledge for his province, ignored one-half of it--that half which was a knowledge of himself; that to him the external world was everything, the internal nothing. all that nature revealed was external; nothing that was internal was of much importance. it must be remembered that all that we have of bacon's was written as he was passing into the "vale of life." of his early productions nothing has come down to the present times under his own name. the following extracts from his acknowledged works establish two facts:--( ) that the foregoing criticism is unfounded, for he placed the study of man's mind and character above all other enquiries. ( ) that he had prepared examples, being "actual types and models, by which the entire process of the mind and the whole fabric and order of invention from the beginning to the end in certain subjects and those various and remarkable should be set, as it were, before the eyes." where are these works to be found? bacon never tires of quoting from the roman poet the line-- "omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci," which, in an elizabethan handwriting, may be seen in a contemporary volume thus rendered-- "he of all others fittest is to write which with some profit allso ioynes delight." he repeats in different forms, until the reiteration becomes almost tedious, the following incident:-- "and as alexander borgia was wont to say, of the expedition of the french for naples, that they came with chalk in their hands to marke up their lodgings not with weapons to fight; so we like better, that entry of truth, which comes peaceably where the mindes of men, capable to lodge so great a guest, are signed, as it were, with chalke; than that which comes with pugnacity, and forceth itselfe a way by contentions and controversies." the same idea is embodied in the following example of the antitheta:-- "a witty conceit is oftentimes a convoy of a truth which otherwise could not so handsomely have been ferried over." in the "advancement of learning," lib. ii., again the same view is insisted on:-- "besides in all wise humane government, they that sit at the helme, doe more happily bring their purposes about, and insinuate more easily things fit for the people, by pretexts, and oblique courses; than by downe-right dealing. nay (which perchance may seem very strange) in things meerely naturall, you may sooner deceive nature, than force her; so improper, and selfe impeaching are open direct proceedings; whereas on the other side, an oblique and an insinuing way, gently glides along and compasseth the intended effect." one other fact must be realised before the full import of the quotations about to be made can be appreciated. in the "distributio operis" prefixed to the "novum organum" the following significant passage occurs[ ]:-- "for as often as i have occasion to report anything as deficient, the nature of which is at all obscure, so that men may not perhaps easily understand what i mean or what the work is which i have in my head, i shall always (provided it be a matter of any worth) take care to subjoin either directions for the execution of such work, or else a portion of the work itself executed by myself as a sample of the whole: thus giving assistance in every case either by work or by counsel." in the "advancement of learning," book ii., chap. i., it is written: "that is the truest partition of humane learning, which hath reference to the three faculties of man's soule, which is the feat of learning. history is referred to memory, poesy to the imagination, philosophy to reason. by poesy, in this place, we understand nothing else, but feigned history, or fables. as for verse, that is only a style of expression, and pertaines to the art of elocution, of which in due place." "poesy, in that sense we have expounded it, is likewise of individuals, fancied to the similitude of those things which in true history are recorded, yet so as often it exceeds measure; and those things which in nature would never meet, nor come to passe, poesy composeth and introduceth at pleasure, even as painting doth: which indeed is the work of the imagination." and in the same book, chapter xiii.:-- "drammaticall, or representative poesy, which brings the world upon the stage, is of excellent use, if it were not abused. for the instructions, and corruptions, of the stage, may be great; but the corruptions in this kind abound, the discipline is altogether neglected in our times. for although in moderne commonwealths, stage-plaies be but estimed a sport or pastime, unlesse it draw from the satyre, and be mordant; yet the care of the ancients was, that it should instruct the minds of men unto virtue. nay, wise men and great philosophers, have accounted it, as the archet, or musicall bow of the mind. and certainly it is most true, and as it were, a secret of nature, that the minds of men are more patent to affections, and impressions, congregate, than solitary." the third chapter of book vii. of the "de augmentis" is devoted to emphasising the importance of a knowledge of the internal working of the mind and of the disposition and character of men. the following extracts are of special moment:-- "some are naturally formed for contemplation, others for business, others for war, others for advancement of fortune, others for love, others for the arts, others for a varied kind of life; so among the poets (heroic, satiric, tragic, comic) are everywhere interspersed, representations of characters, though generally exaggerated and surpassing the truth. and this argument touching the different characters of dispositions is one of those subjects in which the common discourse of men (as sometimes, though very rarely, happens) is wiser than books." the drama as the only vehicle through which this can be accomplished at once suggests itself to the reader. but in order to emphasize this point he proceeds-- "but far the best provision and material for this treatise is to be gained from the wiser sort of historians, not only from the commemorations which they commonly add on recording the deaths of illustrious persons, but much more from the entire body of history as often as such a person enters upon the stage." bacon becomes still more explicit. he continues:-- "wherefore out of these materials (which are surely rich and abundant) let a full and careful treatise be constructed. not, however, that i would have their characters presented in ethics (as we find them in history, or poetry, or even in common discourse) in the shape of complete individual portraits, but rather the several features and simple lineaments of which they are composed, and by the various combinations and arrangements of which all characters whatever are made up, showing how many, and of what nature these are, and how connected and subordinated one to another; that so we may have a scientific and accurate dissection of minds and characters, and the secret dispositions of particular men may be revealed; and that from a knowledge thereof better rules may be framed for the treatment of the mind. and not only should the characters of dispositions which are impressed by nature be received into this treatise, but those also which are imposed upon the mind by sex, by age, by region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity and the like; and again, those which are caused by fortune, as sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity and the like." shortly after follows this remarkable pronouncement. "but to speak the truth the poets and writers of history are the best doctors of this knowledge,[ ] where we may find painted forth with great life and dissected, how affections are kindled and excited, and how pacified and restrained, and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves, though repressed and concealed; how they work; how they vary; how they are enwrapped one within another; how they fight and encounter one with another; and many more particulars of this kind; amongst which this last is of special use in moral and civil matters; how, i say, to set affection against affection, and to use the aid of one to master another; like hunters and fowlers who use to hunt beast with beast, and catch bird with bird, which otherwise perhaps without their aid man of himself could not so easily contrive; upon which foundation is erected that excellent and general use in civil government of reward and punishment, whereon commonwealths lean; seeing these predominant affections of fear and hope suppress and bridle all the rest. for as in the government of states it is sometimes necessary to bridle one faction with another, so is it in the internal government of the mind." in his "distributio operis" bacon thus describes the missing fourth part of his "instauratio magna":-- "of these the first is to set forth examples of inquiry and invention[ ] according to my method exhibited by anticipation in some particular subjects; choosing such subjects as are at once the most noble in themselves among those under enquiry, and most different one from another, that there may be an example in every kind. i do not speak of these precepts and rules by way of illustration (for of these i have given plenty in the second part of the work); but i mean actual types and models, by which the entire process of the mind and the whole fabric and order of invention from the beginning to the end in certain subjects, and those various and remarkable, should be set as it were before the eyes. for i remember that in the mathematics it is easy to follow the demonstration when you have a machine beside you, whereas, without that help, all appears involved and more subtle than it really is. to examples of this kind--being, in fact, nothing more than an application of the second part in detail and at large--the fourth part of the work is devoted." the late mr. edwin reed has, in his "francis bacon our shakespeare," page , drawn attention to a remarkable circumstance. in bacon had written his "cogitata et visa," which was the forerunner of his "novum organum." it was not published until twenty-seven years after his death, namely, in , by isaac gruter, at leyden. in mr. spedding found a manuscript copy of the "cogitata" in the library of queen's college at oxford. this manuscript had been corrected in bacon's own handwriting. it contained passages which were omitted from gruter's print. spedding did not realise the importance of the omitted passages, but mr. edwin reed has made this manifest. the following extract is specially noteworthy, the portion printed in italics having been omitted by gruter:-- "... so he thought best, after long considering the subject and weighing it carefully, first of all to prepare _tabulæ inveniendi_ or regular forms of inquiry; in other words, a mass of particulars arranged for the understanding, and to serve, as it were, for an example and almost visible representation of the matter. for nothing else can be devised that would place in a clearer light what is true and what is false, or show more plainly that what is presented is more than words, and must be avoided by anyone who either has no confidence in his own scheme or may wish to have his scheme taken for more than it is worth. "_but when these tabulæ inveniendi have been put forth and seen, he does not doubt that the more timid wits will shrink almost in despair from imitating them with similar productions with other materials or on other subjects; and they will take so much delight in the specimen given that they will miss the precepts in it. still, many persons will be led to inquire into the real meaning and highest use of these writings, and to find the key to their interpretation, and thus more ardently desire, in some degree at least, to acquire the new aspect of nature which such a key will reveal. but he intends, yielding neither to his own personal aspirations nor to the wishes of others, but keeping steadily in view the success of his undertaking, having shared these writings with some, to withhold the rest until the treatise intended for the people shall be published._" now what conclusions may be drawn from the foregoing extracts? bacon attached the greatest importance to the consideration of the internal life of man. he affirms that dramaticall or representative poesy, which brings the world upon the stage, is of excellent use if it be not abused. the discipline of the stage was neglected in his time, but the care of the ancients was that it should instruct the minds of men unto virtue, and wise men and great philosophers accounted it as the musical bow of the mind. he has devoted the fourth part of his "instauratio magna" to setting forth examples of inquiry and invention, choosing such subjects as are at once the most noble in themselves and the most different one from another, that there may be an example in every kind. he is not speaking of precepts and rules by way of interpretation, but actual types and models by which the entire process of the mind, and the whole fabric and order of invention, should be set, as it were, before the eyes. not only should the characters of dispositions which are impressed by nature be received into this treatise, but those also which are imposed upon the mind by sex, by age, by region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity, and the like; and, again, those that are caused by fortune, as sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, and the like. _the fourth part of bacon's "great instauration" is missing._ the above requirements are met in the shakespeare plays. could the dramas be more accurately described than in the foregoing extracts? from a study of the plays let a list be made out of the qualifications which the author must have possessed. it will be found that the only person in whom every qualification will be found who has lived in any age of any country was francis bacon. any investigator who will devote the time and trouble requisite for an exhaustive examination of the subject can come to no other conclusion. one cannot without feeling deep regret recognise that we have to turn to a foreigner to give "reasons for the faith which we english have in shakespeare." it was a german, schlegel, who discovered the great dramatist, and to-day we must turn to his "lectures on the drama" for the most penetrating description of his plays. the following is a translation of a passage which in describing the plays almost adopts the words bacon uses in the foregoing passages as to the scope and object of the fourth part of his "great instauration." "never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of character as shakespeare's. it not only grasps the diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot speak and act with equal truth; not only does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of costume, the spirit of the ancient romans, of the french in their wars with the english, of the english themselves during a great part of their history, of the southern europeans (in the serious part of many comedies), the cultivated society of that time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the north; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception; no, this prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency that even when deformed monsters like caliban, he extorts the conviction that if there should be such beings they would so conduct themselves. in a word, as he carries with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature; on the other hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. we are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of in such intimate nearness." "if shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters he is equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair. he gives us the history of minds, he lays open to us in a single word a whole series of preceding conditions. his passions do not at first stand displayed to us in all their height, as is the case with so many tragic poets who, in the language of lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of love. he paints, in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin. 'he gives,' as lessing says, 'a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls; of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions.' of all poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed the mental diseases--melancholy, delirium, lunacy--with such inexpressible, and in every respect definite truth, that the physician may enrich his observations from them in the same manner as from real cases." footnotes: [ ] a translation by spedding, "works," vol. iv., p. . [ ] the knowledge touching the affections and perturbations which are the diseases of the mind. [ ] tabulæ inveniendi. chapter xxv. the philosophy of bacon. to attempt anything of the nature of a review of bacon's acknowledged works is a task far too great for the scope of the present volume. to attempt a survey of the whole of his works would require years of diligent study, and would necessitate a perusal of nearly every book published in england between and . not that it is suggested that all the literature of this period was the product of his pen or was produced under his supervision, but each book published should be read and considered with attention to arrive at a selection. there has been no abler judgment of the acknowledged works than that which will be found in william hazlitt's "lectures on the literature of the age of elizabeth." lecture vii. commences with an account of the "character of bacon's works." it may not, however, be out of place here to try and make plain in what sense bacon was a philosopher. in chapter cxvi. of the "novum organum" he makes his position clear in the following words:-- "first then i must request men not to suppose that after the fashion of ancient greeks, and of certain moderns, as telesius, patricius, severinus, i wish to found a new sect in philosophy. for this is not what i am about; nor do i think that it matters much to the fortunes of men what abstract notions one may entertain concerning nature and the principles of things; and no doubt many old theories of this kind can be revived, and many new ones introduced; just as many theories of the heavens may be supposed which agree well enough with the phenomena and yet differ with each other. "for my part, i do not trouble myself with any such speculative and withal unprofitable matters. my purpose on the contrary, is to try whether i cannot in very fact lay more firmly the foundations and extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man ... i have no entire or universal theory to propound." so the idea that there was what is termed a system of philosophy constructed by bacon must be abandoned. what justification is there for calling him the father of the inductive philosophy? it is difficult to answer this question. spedding admits that bacon was not the first to break down the dominion of aristotle. that followed the awakening throughout the intellectual world which was brought about by the reformation and the revival of learning. sir john herschel justifies the application to bacon of the term "the great reformer of philosophy" not on the ground that he introduced inductive reasoning, but because of his "keen perception and his broad and spirit-stirring, almost enthusiastic announcement of its paramount importance, as the alpha and omega of science, as the grand and only chain for linking together of physical truths and the eventual key to every discovery and application." bacon was years of age when his "novum organum" was published. it was founded on a tract he had written in , which he called "cogitata et visa," not printed until long after his death. he had previously published a portion of his essays, the two books on "the advancement of learning" and "the wisdom of the ancients." just at the end of his life he gave to the world the "novum organum," accompanied by "the parasceve." certainly it was not understood in his time. coke described it as only fit to freight the ship of fools, and the king likened it "to the peace of god which passeth all understanding." it is admittedly incomplete, and bacon made no attempt in subsequent years to complete it. it is a book that if read and re-read becomes fascinating. taine describes it as "a string of aphorisms, a collection as it were of scientific decrees as of an oracle who foresees the future and reveals the truth." "it is intuition not reasoning," he adds. the wisdom contained in its pages is profound. an understanding of the interpretation of the idols and the instances has so far evaded all commentators. who can explain the "latent process"? but the book contains no scheme of arrangement. therein is found a series of desultory discourses--full of wisdom, rich in analogies, abundant in observation and profound in comprehension. from here and there in it with the help of the "parasceve" one can grasp the intention of the great philosopher. in chapter lxi. he says:--"but the course i propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings on a level." how was this to be accomplished? by the systemization of labour expended on scientific research. a catalogue of the particulars of histories which were to be prepared is appended to the "parasceve." it embraces every subject conceivable. in chapter cxi. he says, "i plainly confess that a collection of history, natural and experimental, such as i conceive it, and as it ought to be, is a great, i may say a royal work, and of much labour and expense." in the "parasceve" he says:--"if all the wits of all the ages had met or shall hereafter meet together; if the whole human race had applied or shall hereafter apply themselves to philosophy, and the whole earth had been or shall be nothing but academies and colleges and schools of learned men; still without a natural and experimental history such as i am going to prescribe, no progress worthy of the human race could have been made or can be made in philosophy and the sciences. whereas on the other hand let such a history be once provided and well set forth and let there be added to it such auxiliary and light-giving experiments as in the very course of interpretation will present themselves or will have to be found out; and the investigation of nature and of all sciences will be the work of a few years. this therefore must be done or the business given up." to carry out this work an army of workers was required. in the preparation of each history some were to make a rough and general collection of facts. their work was to be handed over to others who would arrange the facts in order for reference. this accomplished, others would examine to get rid of superfluities. then would be brought in those who would re-arrange that which was left and the history would be completed. from chapter ciii. it is clear that bacon contemplated that eventually all the experiments of all the arts, collected and digested, _should be brought within one man's knowledge and judgment_. this man, having a supreme view of the whole range of subjects, would transfer experiments of one art to another and so lead "to the discovery of many new things of service to the life and state of man." nearly three hundred years have passed since bacon propounded his scheme. the arts and sciences have been greatly advanced. they might have proceeded more rapidly had the histories been prepared, but since his time there has arisen no man who has taken "all knowledge to be his province"--no man who could occupy the position bacon contemplated. the method by which the induction was to be followed is described in chapter cv. there must be an analysis of nature by proper rejections and exclusions, and then, after a sufficient number of negatives, a conclusion should be arrived at from the affirmative instances. "it is in this induction," bacon adds, "that our chief hope lies." bacon's new organ has never been constructed, and all wits and understandings have not yet been placed on a level. we come back to the mystery of francis bacon, the possessor of the most exquisite intellect that was ever bestowed on any of the children of men. as an historian, he gives us a taste of his quality in "henry vii." in the essays and the "novum organum," sayings which have the effect of axioms are at once striking and self-evident. but he is always desultory. in perceiving analogies between things which have nothing in common he never had an equal, and this characteristic, to quote macaulay, "occasionally obtained the mastery over all his other faculties and led him into absurdities into which no dull man could have fallen." his memory was so stored with materials, and these so diverse, that in similitude or with comparison he passed from subject to subject. in the "advancement of learning" are enumerated the deficiencies which bacon observed, _nearly the whole of which were supplied during his lifetime_. the "sylva sylvarum" is the most extraordinary jumble of facts and observations that has ever been brought together. it is a literary curiosity. the "new atlantis" and other short works in quantity amount to very little. bacon's life has hitherto remained unaccounted for. in the foregoing pages an attempt has been made to offer an intelligible explanation of the work to which he devoted his life, namely, to supply the deficiencies which he had himself pointed out and which retarded the advancement of learning. hallam has said of bacon: "if we compare what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books of the 'de augmentis,' and the various short treatises contained in his works on moral and political wisdom and on human nature, with the rhetoric, ethics, and politics of aristotle, or with the historians most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character--with thucydides, tacitus, phillipe de comines, machiavel, david hume--we shall, i think, find that one man may almost be compared with all of these together." pope wrote: "lord bacon was the greatest genius that england, or perhaps any other country, ever produced." if an examination, more thorough than has hitherto been made, of the records and literature of his age establishes beyond doubt the truth of the suggestions which have now been put forward, what more can be said? this at any rate, that to him shall be given that title to which he aspired and for which he was willing to renounce his own name. he shall be called "the benefactor of mankind." appendix. sir thomas bodley left behind him a short history of his life which is of a fragmentary description. one-fourth of it is devoted to a record of how much he suffered in permitting essex to urge his advancement in the state. the following is the passage:-- "now here i can not choose but in making report of the principall accidents that have fallen unto me in the course of my life, but record among the rest, that from the very first day i had no man more to friend among the lords of the councell, than was the lord treasurer burleigh: for when occasion had beene offered of declaring his conceit as touching my service, he would alwaies tell the queen (which i received from her selfe and some other ear-witnesses) that there was not any man in _england_ so meet as myselfe to undergoe the office of the secretary. and sithence his sonne, the present lord treasurer, hath signified unto me in private conference, that when his father first intended to advance him to that place, his purpose was withall to make me his colleague. but the case stood thus in my behalf: before such time as i returned from the provinces united, which was in the yeare , and likewise after my returne, the then earle of _essex_ did use me so kindly both by letters and messages, and other great tokens of his inward favours to me, that although i had no meaning, but to settle in my mind my chiefest desire and dependance upon the lord _burleigh_, as one that i reputed to be both the best able, and therewithall the most willing to worke my advancement with the queene, yet i know not how, the earle, who fought by all devices to divert her love and liking both from the father and the son (but from the sonne in speciall) to withdraw my affection from the one and the other, and to winne mee altogether to depend upon himselfe, did so often take occasion to entertaine the queene with some prodigall speeches of my sufficiency for a secretary, which were ever accompanied with words of disgrace against the present lord treasurer, as neither she her selfe, of whose favour before i was thoroughly assured, took any great pleasure to preferre me the sooner, (for she hated his ambition, and would give little countenance to any of his followers) and both the lord _burleigh_ and his sonne waxed jealous of my courses, as if under hand i had beene induced by the cunning and kindnesse of the earle of _essex_, to oppose my selfe against their dealings. and though in very truth they had no solid ground at all of the least alteration in my disposition towards either of them both, (for i did greatly respect their persons and places, with a settled resolution to doe them any service, as also in my heart i detested to be held of any faction whatsoever) yet the now lord treasurer, upon occasion of some talke, that i have since had with him, of the earle and his actions, hath freely confessed of his owne accord unto me, that his daily provocations were so bitter and sharpe against him, and his comparisons so odious, when he put us in a ballance, as he thought thereupon he had very great reason to use his best meanes, to put any man out of hope of raising his fortune, whom the earle with such violence, to his extreame prejudice, had endeavoured to dignifie. and this, as he affirmed, was all the motive he had to set himselfe against me, in whatsoever might redound to the bettering of my estate, or increasing of my credit and countenance with the queene. when i hae thoroughly now bethought me, first in the earle, of the slender hold-fast that he had in the favour of the queene, of an endlesse opposition of the cheifest of our statesmen like still to waite upon him, of his perillous, and feeble, and uncertain advice, as well in his owne, as in all the causes of his friends: and when moreover for my selfe i had fully considered how very untowardly these two counsellours were affected unto me, (upon whom before in cogitation i had framed all the fabrique of my future prosperity) how ill it did concurre with my naturall disposition, to become, or to be counted either a stickler or partaker in any publique faction, how well i was able, by god's good blessing, to live of my selfe, if i could be content with a competent livelyhood; how short time of further life i was then to expect by the common course of nature: when i had, i say, in this manner represented to my thoughts my particular estate, together with the earles, i resolved thereupon to possesse my soule in peace all the residue of my daies, to take my full farewell of state imployments, to satisfie my mind with that mediocrity of worldly living that i had of my owne, and so to retire me from the court, which was the epilogue and end of all my actions and endeavours of any important note, till i came to the age of fifty-three." the experience of bodley and bacon appears to have been identical. it certainly materially strengthens the case of those who contend that bacon's conduct to essex was not deserving of censure on the ground of ingratitude for favours received from him. the words which robert cecil addressed to bodley, namely, that "he had very great reason to use his best meanes, to put any man out of hope of raising his fortune whom the earle with such violence, to his extreame prejudice had endeavoured to dignifie," would with equal force have been applied to bacon's case. the drift of bodley's account of the matter points to his feeling that essex's conduct had not been of a disinterested character, and suggests that he felt the earle had been making a tool of him. the effect of this was that bodley adopted the course which bacon threatened to adopt when refused the office of attorney-general, solicited for him by essex--he took a farewell of state employments and retired from the court to devote himself to the service of his "reverend mother, the university of oxford," and to the advancement of her good. to this end he became a collector of books, whereas bacon would have become "some sorry book-maker or a true pioner in that mine of truth which anaxagoras said lay so deep." robert banks and son, racquet court, fleet street. [illustration:_ figure vi._] [illustration: _figure vii._] [illustration: _figure viii._] [illustration: _figure ix._] [illustration: _figure xx._] [illustration: the xxxviii. booke. the argvment _marfisa doth present herselfe before king charles, and in his presence is baptized: astolfo doth senapos sight restore, by whom such hardie feats are enterprised, that agramant therewith molested sore is by sobrino finally aduised, to make a challenge on rogeros hed, to end the troubles that the warre had bred._ _figure xiii._ _figure xiv._] [illustration: _figure x._] [illustration: _figure xv._] [illustration: _figure xi._] [illustration: _figure xii._] [illustration: _figure xxi._ the genealogies recorded in the sacred scriptvres, according to euery family and tribe. with the line of our sauiour iesvs christ obserued from _adam_ to the blessed virgin mary. _by_ i. s. cvm privilegio.] [illustration: _figure xvi._] [illustration: _figure xvii._] [illustration: _figure xviii._] [illustration: _figure xix._] * * * * * transcriber's notes . passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. . passages in bold are indicated by =bold=. . long "s" has been modernized. . images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break. . footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the chapters in which they are referenced. . the original text includes greek characters. for this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. . certain words use oe ligature in the original. . the following misprints have been corrected: "obain" corrected to "obtain" (page ) "shakespere" corrected to "shakespeare" (page ) "bodly" corrected to "bodley" (page ) "shakepeare's" corrected to "shakespeare's" (page ) "commenceed" corrected to "commenced" (page ) "proecepta" corrected to "præcepta" (page ) "deficiences" corrected to "deficiencies" (page ) "numercial" corrected to "numerical" (footnote ) . other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained. in the development of the great series of animal organisms, the nervous system assumes more and more of an imperial character. the rank held by any animal is determined by this character, and not at all by its bulk, its strength, or even its utility. in like manner, in the development of the social organism, as the life of nations becomes more complex, thought assumes a more imperial character; and literature, in its widest sense, becomes a delicate index of social evolution. barbarous societies show only the germs of literary life. but advancing civilisation, bringing with it increased conquest over material agencies, disengages the mind from the pressure of immediate wants, and the loosened energy finds in leisure both the demand and the means of a new activity: the demand, because long unoccupied hours have to be rescued from the weariness of inaction; the means, because this call upon the energies nourishes a greater ambition and furnishes a wider arena. literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. it deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. it stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting past and present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them. as its importance emerges into more general recognition, it necessarily draws after it a larger crowd of servitors, filling noble minds with a noble ambition. there is no need in our day to be dithyrambic on the glory of literature. books have become our dearest companions, yielding exquisite delights and inspiring lofty aims. they are our silent instructors, our solace in sorrow, our relief in weariness. with what enjoyment we linger over the pages of some well-loved author! with what gratitude we regard every honest book! friendships, prefound and generous, are formed with men long dead, and with men whom we may never see. the lives of these men have a quite personal interest for us. their homes become as consecrated shrines. their little ways and familiar phrases become endeared to us, like the little ways and phrases of our wives and children. it is natural that numbers who have once been thrilled with this delight should in turn aspire to the privilege of exciting it. success in literature has thus become not only the ambition of the highest minds, it has also become the ambition of minds intensely occupied with other means of influencing their fellow--with statesmen, warriors, and rulers. prime ministers and emperors have striven for distinction as poets, scholars, critics, and historians. unsatisfied with the powers and privileges of rank, wealth, and their conspicuous position in the eyes of men, they have longed also for the nobler privilege of exercising a generous sway over the minds and hearts of readers. to gain this they have stolen hours from the pressure of affairs, and disregarded the allurements of luxurious ease, labouring steadfastly, hoping eagerly. nor have they mistaken the value of the reward. success in literature is, in truth, the blue ribbon of nobility. there is another aspect presented by literature. it has become a profession; to many a serious and elevating profession; to many more a mere trade, having miserable trade-aims and trade-tricks. as in every other profession, the ranks are thronged with incompetent aspirants, without seriousness of aim, without the faculties demanded by their work. they are led to waste powers which in other directions might have done honest service, because they have failed to discriminate between aspiration and inspiration, between the desire for greatness and the consciousness of power. still lower in the ranks are those who follow literature simply because they see no other opening for their incompetence; just as forlorn widows and ignorant old maids thrown suddenly on their own resources open a school--no other means of livelihood seeming to be within their reach. lowest of all are those whose esurient vanity, acting on a frivolous levity of mind, urges them to make literature a plaything for display. to write for a livelihood, even on a complete misapprehension of our powers, is at least a respectable impulse. to play at literature is altogether inexcusable: the motive is vanity, the object notoriety, the end contempt. i propose to treat of the principles of success in literature, in the belief that if a clear recognition of the principles which underlie all successful writing could once be gained, it would be no inconsiderable help to many a young and thoughtful mind. is it necessary to guard against a misconception of my object, and to explain that i hope to furnish nothing more than help and encouragement? there is help to be gained from a clear understanding of the conditions of success; and encouragement to be gained from a reliance on the ultimate victory of true principles. more than this can hardly be expected from me, even on the supposition that i have ascertained the real conditions. no one, it is to be presumed, will imagine that i can have any pretension of giving recipes for literature, or of furnishing power and talent where nature has withheld them. i must assume the presence of the talent, and then assign the conditions under which that talent can alone achieve real success, no man is made a discoverer by learning the principles of scientific method; but only by those principles can discoveries be made; and if he has consciously mastered them, he will find them directing his researches and saving him from an immensity of fruitless labour. it is something in the nature of the method of literature that i propose to expound. success is not an accident. all literature is founded upon psychological laws, and involves principles which are true for all peoples and for all times. these principles we are to consider here. ii. the rarity of good books in every department, and the enormous quantity of imperfect, insincere books, has been the lament of all times. the complaint being as old as literature itself, we may dismiss without notice all the accusations which throw the burden on systems of education, conditions of society, cheap books, levity and superficialty of readers, and analogous causes. none of these can be a vera causa; though each may have had its special influence in determining the production of some imperfect works. the main cause i take to be that indicated in goethe's aphorism: "in this world there are so few voices and so many echoes." books are generally more deficient in sincerity than in cleverness. talent, as will become apparent in the course of our inquiry, holds a very subordinate position in literature to that usually assigned to it. indeed, a cursory inspection of the literature of our day will detect an abundance of remarkable talent---that is, of intellectual agility, apprehensiveness, wit, fancy, and power of expression which is nevertheless impotent to rescue "clever writing" from neglect or contempt. it is unreal splendour; for the most part mere intellectual fireworks. in life, as in literature, our admiration for mere cleverness has a touch of contempt in it, and is very unlike the respect paid to character. and justly so. no talent can be supremely effective unless it act in close alliance with certain moral qualities. (what these qualities are will be specified hereafter.) another cause, intimately allied with the absence of moral guidance just alluded to, is misdirection of talent. valuable energy is wasted by being misdirected. men are constantly attempting, without special aptitude, work for which special aptitude is indispensable. "on peut etre honnete hornme et faire mal des vers." a man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet. he may be a real poet, yet a feeble dramatist, he may have dramatic faculty, yet be a feeble novelist. he may be a good story-teller, yet a shallow thinker and a slip-shod writer. for success in any special kind of work it is obvious that a special talent is requisite; but obvious as this seems, when stated as a general proposition, it rarely serves to check a mistaken presumption. there are many writers endowed with a certain susceptibility to the graces and refinements of literature which has been fostered by culture till they have mistaken it for native power; and these men, being really destitute of native power, are forced to imitate what others have created. they can understand how a man may have musical sensibility and yet not be a good singer; but they fail to understand, at least in their own case, how a man may have literary sensibility, yet not be a good story-teller or an effective dramatist. they imagine that if they are cultivated and clever, can write what is delusively called a "brilliant style," and are familiar with the masterpieces of literature, they must be more competent to succeed in fiction or the drama than a duller man, with a plainer style and slenderer acquaintance with the "best models." had they distinctly conceived the real aims of literature this mistake would often have been avoided. a recognition of the aims would have pressed on their attention a more distinct appreciation of the requirements. no one ever doubted that special aptitudes were required for music, mathematics, drawing, or for wit; but other aptitudes not less special are seldom recognised. it is with authors as with actors: mere delight in the art deludes them into the belief that they could be artists. there are born actors, as there are born authors. to an observant eye such men reveal their native endowments. even in conversation they spontaneously throw themselves into the characters they speak of. they mimic, often quite unconsciously the speech and gesture of the person. they dramatise when they narrate. other men with little of this faculty, but with only so much of it as will enable them to imitate the tones and gestures of some admired actor, are misled by their vanity into the belief that they also are actors, that they also could move an audience as their original moves it. in literature we see a few original writers, and a crowd of imitators: men of special aptitudes, and men who mistake their power of repeating with slight variation what others have done, for a power of creating anew. the imitator sees that it is easy to do that which has already been done. he intends to improve on it; to add from his own stores something which the originator could not give; to lend it the lustre of a richer mind; to make this situation more impressive, and that character more natural. he is vividly impressed with the imperfections of the original. and it is a perpetual puzzle to him why the public, which applauds his imperfect predecessor, stupidly fails to recognise his own obvious improvements. it is from such men that the cry goes forth about neglected genius and public caprice. in secret they despise many a distinguished writer, and privately, if not publicly, assert themselves as immeasurably superior. the success of a dumas is to them a puzzle and an irritation. they do not understand that a man becomes distinguished in virtue of some special talent properly directed; and that their obscurity is due either to the absence of a special talent, or to its misdirection. they may probably be superior to dumas in general culture, or various ability; it is in particular ability that they are his inferiors. they may be conscious of wider knowledge, a more exquisite sensibility, and a finer taste more finely cultivated; yet they have failed to produce any impression on the public in a direction where the despised favourite has produced a strong impression. they are thus thrown upon the alternative of supposing that he has had "the luck" denied to them, or that the public taste is degraded and prefers trash. both opinions are serious mistakes. both injure the mind that harbours them. in how far is success a test of merit? rigorously considered it is an absolute test. nor is such a conclusion shaken by the undeniable fact that temporary applause is often secured by works which have no lasting value. for we must always ask, what is the nature of the applause, and from what circles does it rise? a work which appears at a particular juncture, and suits the fleeting wants of the hour, flattering the passions of the hour, may make a loud noise, and bring its author into strong relief. this is not luck, but a certain fitness between the author's mind and the public needs. he who first seizes the occasion, may be for general purposes intrinsically a feebler man than many who stand listless or hesitating till the moment be passed; but in literature, as in life, a sudden promptitude outrivals vacillating power. generally speaking, however, this promptitude has but rare occasions for achieving success. we may lay it down as a rule that no work ever succeeded, even for a day, but it deserved that success; no work ever failed but under conditions which made failure inevltable. this will seem hard to men who feel that in their case neglect arises from prejudice or stupidity. yet it is true even in extreme cases; true even when the work once neglected has since been acknowleged superior to the works which for a time eclipsed it. success, temporary or enduring, is the measure of the relatlon, temporary or enduring, which exists between a work and the public mind. the millet seed may be intrinsically less valuable than a pearl; but the hungry cock wisely neglected the pearl, because pearls could not, and millet seeds could, appease his hunger. who shall say how much of the subsequent success of a once neglected work is due to the preparation of the public mind through the works which for a time eclipsed it? let us look candidly at this matter. it interests us all; for we have all more or less to contend against public misconception, no less than against our own defects. the object of literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse. any book which does one of these things succeeds; any book which does none of these things fails. failure is the indication of an inability to perform what was attempted: the aim was misdirected, or the arm was too weak: in either case the mark has not been hit. "the public taste is degraded." perhaps so; and perhaps not. but in granting a want of due preparation in the public, we only grant that the author has missed his aim. a reader cannot be expected to be interested in ideas which are not presented intelligibly to him, nor delighted by art which does not touch him; and for the writer to imply that he furnishes arguments, but does not pretend to furnish brains to understand the arguments, is arrogance. what goethe says about the most legible handwriting being illegible in the twilight, is doubtless true; and should be oftener borne in mind by frivolous objectors, who declare they do not understand this or do not admire that, as if their want of taste and understanding were rather creditable than otherwise, and were decisive proofs of an author's insignificance. but this reproof, which is telling against individuals, has no justice as against the public. for--and this is generally lost sight of--the public is composed of the class or classes directly addressed by any work, and not of the heterogeneous mass of readers. mathematicians do not write for the circulating library. science is not addressed to poets. philosophy is meant for students, not for idle readers. if the members of a class do not understand--if those directly addressed fail to listen, or listening, fail to recognise a power in the voice--surely the fault lies with the speaker, who, having attempted to secure their attention and enlighten their understandings, has failed in the attempt? the mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed. he attempted to make his wisdom and his power operate on the minds of others. he has missed his mark. margaritas ante porcos! is the soothing maxim of a disappointed self-love. but we, who look on, may sometimes doubt whether they were pearls thus ineffectually thrown; and always doubt the judiciousness of strewing pearls before swine. the prosperity of a book lies in the minds of readers. public knowledge and public taste fluctuate; and there come times when works which were once capable of instructing and delighting thousands lose their power, and works, before neglected, emerge into renown. a small minority to whom these works appealed has gradually become a large minority, and in the evolution of opinion will perhaps become the majority. no man can pretend to say that the work neglected today will not be a household word tomorrow; or that the pride and glory of our age will not be covered with cobwebs on the bookshelves of our children. those works alone can have enduring success which successfully appeal to what is permanent in human nature--which, while suiting the taste of the day, contain truths and beauty deeper than the opinions and tastes of the day; but even temperary success implies a certain temporary fitness. in homer, sophocles, dante, shakspeare, cervantes, we are made aware of much that no longer accords with the wisdom or the taste of our day--temporary and immature expressions of fluctuating opinions--but we are also aware of much that is both true and noble now, and will be so for ever. it is only posterity that can decide whether the success or failure shall be enduring; for it is only posterity that can reveal whether the relation now existing between the work and the public mind is or is not liable to fluctuation. yet no man really writes for posterity; no man ought to do so. "wer machte denn der mitwelt spass?" ("who is to amuse the present?") asks the wise merry andrew in faust. we must leave posterity to choose its own idols. there is, however, this chance in favour of any work which has once achieved success, that what has pleased one generation may please another, because it may be based upon a truth or beauty which cannot die; and there is this chance against any work which has once failed, that its unfitness may be owing to some falsehood or imperfection which cannot live. iii. in urging all writers to be steadfast in reliance on the ultimate victory of excellence, we should no less strenuously urge upon them to beware of the intemperate arrogance which attributes failure to a degraded condition of the public mind. the instinct which leads the world to worship success is not dangerous. the book which succeeds accomplishes its aim. the book which fails may have many excellencies, but they must have been misdirected. let us, however, understand what is meant by failure. from want of a clear recognition of this meaning, many a serious writer has been made bitter by the reflection that shallow, feeble works have found large audiences, whereas his own work has not paid the printing expenses. he forgets that the readers who found instruction and amusement in the shallow books could have found none in his book, because he had not the art of making his ideas intelligible and attractive to them, or had not duly considered what food was assimilable by their minds. it is idle to write in hieroglyphics for the mass when only priests can read the sacred symbols. no one, it is hoped, will suppose that by what is here said i countenance the notion which is held by some authors--a notion implying either arrogant self-sufficiency or mercenary servility--that to succeed, a man should write down to the public. quite the reverse. to succeed, a man should write up to his ideal. he should do his very best; certain that the very best will still fall short of what the public can appreciate. he will only degrade his own mind by putting forth works avowedly of inferior quality; and will find himself greatly surpassed by writers whose inferior workmanship has nevertheless the indefinable aspect of being the best they can produce. the man of common mind is more directly in sympathy with the vulgar public, and can speak to it more intelligibly, than any one who is condescending to it. if you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument. it may be that the interval is too great. it may be that the nature of your arguments is such as to demand from the audience an intellectual preparation, and a habit of concentrated continuity of thought, which cannot be expected from a miscellaneous assembly. the scholarship of a scaliger or the philosophy of a kant will obviously require an audience of scholars and philosophers. and in cases where the nature of the work limits the class of readers, no man should complain if the readers he does not address pass him by to follow another. he will not allure these by writing down to them; or if he allure them, he will lose those who properly constitute his real audience. a writer misdirects his talent if he lowers his standard of excellence. whatever he can do best let him do that, certain of reward in proportion to his excellence. the reward is not always measurable by the number of copies sold; that simply measures the extent of his public. it may prove that he has stirred the hearts and enlightened the minds of many. it may also prove, as johnson says, "that his nonsense suits their nonsense." the real reward of literature is in the sympathy of congenial minds, and is precious in proportion to the elevation of those minds, and the gravity with which such sympathy moves: the admiration of a mathematician for the mecanique celeste, for example, is altogether higher in kind than the admiration of a novel reader for the last "delightful story." and what should we think of laplace if he were made bitter by the wider popularity of dumas? would he forfeit the admiration of one philosopher for that of a thousand novel readers? to ask this question is to answer it; yet daily experience tells us that not only in lowering his standard, but in running after a popularity incompatible with the nature of his talent, does many a writer forfeit his chance of success. the novel and the drama, by reason of their commanding influence over a large audience, often seduce writers to forsake the path on which they could labour with some success, but on which they know that only a very small audience can be found; as if it were quantity more than quality, noise rather than appreciation, which their mistaken desires sought. unhappily for them, they lose the substance, and only snap at the shadow. the audience may be large, but it will not listen to them. the novel may be more popular and more lucrative, when successful, than the history or the essay; but to make it popular and lucrative the writer needs a special talent, and this, as was before hinted, seems frequently forgotten by those who take to novel writing. nay, it is often forgotten by the critics; they being, in general, men without the special talent themselves, set no great value on it. they imagine that invention may be replaced by culture, and that clever "writing" will do duty for dramatic power. they applaud the "drawing" of a character, which drawing turns out on inspection to be little more than an epigrammatic enumeration of particularities, the character thus "drawn" losing all individuality as soon as speech and action are called upon. indeed, there are two mistakes very common among reviewers: one is the overvaluation of what is usually considered as literary ability ("brilliant writing" it is called; "literary tinsel" would be more descriptive) to the prejudice of invention and individuality; the other is the overvaluation of what they call "solid acquirements," which really mean no more than an acquaintance with the classics. as a fact, literary ability and solid acquirements are to be had in abundance; invention, humour, and originality are excessively rare. it may be a painful reflection to those who, having had a great deal of money spent on their education, and having given a great deal of time to their solid aquirements, now see genius and original power of all kinds more esteemed than their learning; but they should reflect that what is learning now is only the diffused form of what was once invention. "solid acquirement" is the genius of wits become the wisdom of reviewers. iv. authors are styled an irritable race, and justly, if the epithet be understood in its physiological rather than its moral sense. this irritability, which responds to the slightest stimulus, leads to much of the misdirection of talent we have been considering. the greatness of an author consists in having a mind extremely irritable, and at the same time steadfastly imperial:--irritable that no stimulus may be inoperative, even in its most evanescent solicitations; imperial, that no solicitation may divert him from his deliberately chosen aims. a magisterial subjection of all dispersive influences, a concentration of the mind upon the thing that has to be done, and a proud renunciation of all means of effect which do not spontaneously connect themselves with it--these are the rare qualities which mark out the man of genius. in men of lesser calibre the mind is more constantly open to determination from extrinsic influences. their movement is not self-determined, self-sustained. in men of still smaller calibre the mind is entirely determined by extrinsic influences. they are prompted to write poems by no musical instinct, but simply because great poems have enchanted the world. they resolve to write novels upon the vulgarest provocations: they see novels bringing money and fame; they think there is no difficulty in the art. the novel will afford them an opportunity of bringing in a variety of scattered details; scraps of knowledge too scanty for an essay, and scraps of experience too meagre for independent publication. others, again, attempt histories, or works of popular philosophy and science; not because they have any special stores of knowledge, or because any striking novelty of conception urges them to use up old material in a new shape, but simply because they have just been reading with interest some work of history or science, and are impatient to impart to others the knowledge they have just acquired for themselves. generally it may be remarked that the pride which follows the sudden emancipation of the mind from ignorance of any subject, is accompanied by a feeling that all the world must be in the state of darkness from which we have ourselves emerged. it is the knowledge learned yesterday which is most freely imparted today. we need not insist on the obvious fact of there being more irritability than mastery, more imitation than creation, more echoes than voices in the world of literature. good writers are of necessity rare. but the ranks would be less crowded with incompetent writers if men of real ability were not so often misdirected in their aims. my object is to decree, if possible, the principles of success--not to supply recipes for absent power, but to expound the laws through which power is efficient, and to explain the causes which determine success in exact proportion to the native power on the one hand, and to the state of public opinion on the other. the laws of literature may be grouped under three heads. perhaps we might say they are three forms of one principle. they are founded on our threefold nature--intellectual, moral, and aesthetic. the intellectual form is the principle of vision. the moral form is the principle of sincerity. the aesthetic form is the principle of beauty. it will be my endeavour to give definite significance, in succeeding chapters, to these expressions, which, standing unexplained and unillustrated, probably convey very little meaning. we shall then see that every work, no matter what its subject-matter, necessarily involves these three principles in varying degrees; and that its success is always strictly in accordance with its conformity to the guidance of these principles. unless a writer has what, for the sake of brevity, i have called vision, enabling him to see clearly the facts or ideas, the objects or relations, which he places before us for our own instruction, his work must obviously be defective. he must see clearly if we are to see clearly. unless a writer has sincerity, urging him to place before us what he sees and believes as he sees and believes it, the defective earnestness of his presentation will cause an imperfect sympathy in us. he must believe what he says, or we shall not believe it. insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength. this is not so obvious a principle as the first; at any rate it is one more profoundly disregarded by writers. finally, unless the writer has grace--the principle of beauty i have named it--enabling him to give some aesthetic charm to his presentation, were it only the charm of well-arranged material, and well-constructed sentences, a charm sensible through all the intricacies of composition and of style, he will not do justice to his powers, and will either fail to make his work acceptable, or will very seriously limit its success. the amount of influence issuing from this principle of beauty will, of course, be greatly determined by the more or less aesthetic nature of the work. books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance, and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and their art. truth is the aim of literature. sincerity is moral truth. beauty is aesthetic truth. how rigorously these three principles determine the success of all works whatever, and how rigorously every departure from them, no matter how slight, determines proportional failure, with the inexorable sequence of a physical law, it will be my endeavour to prove in the chapters which are to follow. editor. chapter ii the principle of vision. all good literature rests primarily on insight. all bad literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand. there are men of clear insight who never become authors: some, because no sufficient solicitation from internal or external impulses makes them bond their energies to the task of giving literary expression to their thoughts; and some, because they lack the adequate powers of literary expression. but no man, be his felicity and facility of expression what they may, ever produces good literature unless he sees for himself, and sees clearly. it is the very claim and purpose of literature to show others what they failed to see. unless a man sees this clearly for himself how can he show it to others? literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without. it tells of the facts which have been witnessed, reproduces the emotions which have been felt. it places before the reader symbols which represent the absent facts, or the relations of these to other facts; and by the vivid presentation of the symbols of emotion kindles the emotive sympathy of readers. the art of selecting the fitting symbols, and of so arranging them as to be intelligible and kindling, distinguishes the great writer from the great thinker; it is an art which also relies on clear insight. the value of the tidings brought by literature is determined by their authenticity. at all times the air is noisy with rumours, but the real business of life is transacted on clear insight and authentic speech. false tidings and idle rumours may for an hour clamorously usurp attention, because they are believed to be true; but the cheat is soon discovered, and the rumour dies. in like manner literature which is unauthentic may succeed as long as it is believed to be true: that is, so long as our intellects have not discovered the falseness of its pretensions, and our feelings have not disowned sympathy with its expressions. these may be truisms, but they are constantly disregarded. writers have seldom any steadfast conviction that it is of primary necessity for them to deliver tidings about what they themselves have seen and felt. perhaps their intimate consciousness assures them that what they have seen or felt is neither new nor important. it may not be new, it may not be intrinsically important; nevertheless, if authentic, it has its value, and a far greater value than anything reported by them at second-hand. we cannot demand from every man that he have unusual depth of insight or exceptional experience; but we demand of him that he give us of his best, and his best cannot be another's. the facts seen through the vision of another, reported on the witness of another, may be true, but the reporter cannot vouch for them. let the original observer speak for himself. otherwise only rumours are set afloat. if you have never seen an acid combine with a base you cannot instructively speak to me of salts; and this, of course, is true in a more emphatic degree with reference to more complex matters. personal experience is the basis of all real literature. the writer must have thought the thoughts, seen the objects (with bodily or mental vision), and felt the feelings; otherwise he can have no power over us. importance does not depend on rarity so much as on authenticity. the massacre of a distant tribe, which is heard through the report of others, falls far below the heart-shaking effect of a murder committed in our presence. our sympathy with the unknown victim may originally have been as torpid as that with the unknown tribe; but it has been kindled by the swift and vivid suggestions of details visible to us as spectators; whereas a severe and continuous effort of imagination is needed to call up the kindling suggestions of the distant massacre. so little do writers appreciate the importance of direct vision and experience, that they are in general silent about what they themselves have seen and felt, copious in reporting the experience of others. nay, they are urgently prompted to say what they know others think, and what consequently they themselves may be expected to think. they are as if dismayed at their own individuality, and suppress all traces of it in order to catch the general tone. such men may, indeed, be of service in the ordinary commerce of literature as distributors. all i wish to point out is that they are distributors, not producers. the commerce may be served by second-hand reporters, no less than by original seers; but we must understand this service to be commercial and not literary. the common stock of knowledge gains from it no addition. the man who detects a new fact, a new property in a familiar substance, adds to the science of the age; but the man who expounds the whole system of the universe on the reports of others, unenlightened by new conceptions of his own, does not add a grain to the common store. great writers may all be known by their solicitude about authenticity. a common incident, a simple phenomenon, which has been a part of their experience, often undergoes what may be called "a transfiguration" in their souls, and issues in the form of art; while many world-agitating events in which they have not been acters, or majestic phenomena of which they were never spectators, are by them left to the unhesitating incompetence of writers who imagine that fine subjects make fine works. either the great writer leaves such materials untouched, or he employs them as the vehicle of more cherished, because more authenticated tidings,--he paints the ruin of an empire as the scenic background for his picture of the distress of two simple hearts. the inferior writer, because he lays no emphasis on authenticity, cannot understand this avoidance of imposing themes. condemned by naive incapacity to be a reporter, and not a seer, he hopes to shine by the reflected glory of his subjects. it is natural in him to mistake ambitious art for high art. he does not feel that the best is the highest. i do not assert that inferior writers abstain from the familiar and trivial. on the contrary, as imitators, they imitate everything which great writers have shown to be sources of interest. but their bias is towards great subjects. they make no new ventures in the direction of personal experience. they are silent on all that they have really seen for themselves. unable to see the deep significance of what is common, they spontaneously turn towards the uncommon. there is, at the present day, a fashion in literature, and in art generally, which is very deporable, and which may, on a superficial glance, appear at variance with what has just been said. the fashion is that of coat-and-waistcoat realism, a creeping timidity of invention, moving almost exclusively amid scenes of drawing-room existence, with all the reticences and pettinesses of drawing-room conventions. artists have become photographers, and have turned the camera upon the vulgarities of life, instead of representing the more impassioned movements of life. the majority of books and pictures are addressed to our lower faculties; they make no effort as they have no power to stir our deeper emotions by the contagion of great ideas. little that makes life noble and solemn is reflected in the art of our day; to amuse a languid audience seems its highest aim. seeing this, some of my readers may ask whether the artists have not been faithful to the law i have expounded, and chosen to paint the small things they have seen, rather than the great things they have not seen? the answer is simple. for the most part the artists have not painted what they have seen, but have been false and conventional in their pretended realism. and whenever they have painted truly, they have painted successfully. the authenticity of their work has given it all the value which in the nature of things such work could have. titian's portrait of "the young man with a glove" is a great work of art, though not of great art. it is infinitely higher than a portrait of cromwell, by a painter unable to see into the great soul of cromwell, and to make us see it; but it is infinitely lower than titian's "tribute money," "peter the martyr," or the "assumption." tennyson's "northern farmer" is incomparably greater as a poem than mr. bailey's ambitious "festus;" but the "northern farmer" is far below "ulysses" or "guinevere," because moving on a lower level, and recording the facts of a lower life. insight is the first condition of art. yet many a man who has never been beyond his village will be silent about that which he knows well, and will fancy himself called upon to speak of the tropics or the andes---on the reports of others. never having seen a greater man than the parson and the squire and not having seen into them--he selects cromwell and plato, raphael and napoleon, as his models, in the vain belief that these impressive personalities will make his work impressive. of course i am speaking figuratively. by "never having been beyond his village," i understand a mental no less than topographical limitation. the penetrating sympathy of genius will, even from a village, traverse the whole world. what i mean is, that unless by personal experience, no matter through what avenues, a man has gained clear insight into the facts of life, he cannot successfully place them before us; and whatever insight he has gained, be it of important or of unimportant facts, will be of value if truly reproduced. no sunset is precisely similar to another, no two souls are affected by it in a precisely similar way. thus may the commonest phenomenon have a novelty. to the eye that can read aright there is an infinite variety even in the most ordinary human being. but to the careless indiscriminating eye all individuality is merged in a misty generality. nature and men yield nothing new to such a mind. of what avail is it for a man to walk out into the tremulous mists of morning, to watch the slow sunset, and wait for the rising stars, if he can tell us nothing about these but what others have already told us---if he feels nothing but what others have already felt? let a man look for himself and tell truly what he sees. we will listen to that. we must listen to it, for its very authenticity has a subtle power of compulsion. what others have seen and felt we can learn better from their own lips. ii. i have not yet explained in any formal manner what the nature of that insight is which constitutes what i have named the principle of vision; although doubtless the reader has gathered its meaning from the remarks already made. for the sake of future applications of the principle to the various questions of philosophical criticism which must arise in the course of this inquiry, it may be needful here to explain (as i have already explained elsewhere) how the chief intellectual operations--perception, inference, reasoning, and imagination--may be viewed as so many forms of mental vision. perception, as distinguished from sensation, is the presentation before consciousness of the details which once were present in conjunction with the object at this moment affecting sense. these details are inferred to be still in conjunction with the object, although not revealed to sense. thus when an apple is perceived by me, who merely see it, all that sense reports is of a certain coloured surface: the roundness, the firmness, the fragrance, and the taste of the apple are not present to sense, but are made present to consciousness by the act of perception. the eye sees a certain coloured surface; the mind sees at the same instant many other co-existent but unapparent facts--it reinstates in their due order these unapparent facts. were it not for this mental vision supplying the deficiencies of ocular vision, the coloured surface would be an enigma. but the suggestion of sense rapidly recalls the experiences previously associated with the object. the apparent facts disclose the facts that are unapparent. inference is only a higher form of the same process. we look from the window, see the dripping leaves and the wet ground, and infer that rain has fallen. it is on inferences of this kind that all knowledge depends. the extension of the known to the unknown, of the apparent to the unapparent, gives us science. except in the grandeur of its sweep, the mind pursues the same course in the interpretation of geological facts as in the interpretation of the ordinary incidents of daily experience. to read the pages of the great stone book, and to perceive from the wet streets that rain has recently fallen, are forms of the same intellectual process. in the one case the inference traverses immeasurable spaces of time, connecting the apparent facts with causes (unapparent facts) similar to those which have been associated in experience with such results; in the other case the inference connects wet streets and swollen gutters with causes which have been associated in experience with such results. let the inference span with its mighty arch a myriad of years, or link together the events of a few minutes, in each case the arch rises from the ground of familiar facts, and reaches an antecedent which is known to be a cause capable of producing them. the mental vision by which in perception we see the unapparent details---i.e, by which sensations formerly co-existing with the one now affecting us are reinstated under the form of ideas which represent the objects--is a process implied in all ratiocination, which also presents an ideal series, such as would be a series of sensations, if the objects themselves were before us. a chain of reasoning is a chain of inferences: ideal presentations of objects and relations not apparent to sense, or not presentable to sense. could we realise all the links in this chain, by placing the objects in their actual order as a visible series, the reasoning would be a succession of perceptions. thus the path of a planet is seen by reason to be an ellipse. it would be perceived as a fact, if we were in a proper position and endowed with the requisite means of following the planet in its course; but not having this power, we are reduced to infer the unapparent points in its course from the points which are apparent. we see them mentally. correct reasoning is the ideal assemblage of objects in their actual order of co-existence and succession. it is seeing with the mind's eye. false reasoning is owing to some misplacement of the order of objects, or to the omission of some links in the chain, or to the introduction of objects not properly belonging to the series. it is distorted or defective vision. the terrified traveller sees a highwayman in what is really a sign-post in the twilight; and in the twilight of knowledge, the terrified philosopher sees a pestilence foreshadowed by an eclipse. let attention also be called to one great source of error, which is also a great source of power, namely, that much of our thinking is carried on by signs instead of images. we use words as signs of objects; these suffice to carry on the train of inference, when very few images of the objects are called up. let any one attend to his thoughts and he will be surprised to find how rare and indistinct in general are the images of objects which arise before his mind. if he says "i shall take a cab and get to the railway by the shortest cut," it is ten to one that he forms no image of cab or railway, and but a very vague image of the streets through which the shortest cut will lead. imaginative minds see images where ordinary minds see nothing but signs: this is a source of power; but it is also a source of weakness; for in the practical affairs of life, and in the theoretical investigations of philosophy, a too active imagination is apt to distract the attention and scatter the energies of the mind. in complex trains of thought signs are indispensable. the images, when called up, are only vanishing suggestions: they disappear before they are more than half formed. and yet it is because signs are thus substituted for images (paper transacting the business of money) that we are so easily imposed upon by verbal fallacies and meaningless phrases. a scientific man of some eminence was once taken in by a wag, who gravely asked him whether he had read bunsen's paper on the malleability of light. he confessed that he had not read it: "bunsen sent it to me, but i've not had time to look into it." the degree in which each mind habitually substitutes signs for images will be, ceteris paribus, the degree in which it is liable to error. this is not contradicted by the fact that mathematical, astronomical, and physical reasonings may, when complex, be carried on more suecessfully by the employment of signs; because in these cases the signs themselves accurately represent the abstractness of the relations. such sciences deal only with relations, and not with objects; hence greater simplification ensures greater accuracy. but no sooner do we quit this sphere of abstractions to enter that of concrete things, than the use of symbols becomes a source of weakness. vigorous and effective minds habitually deal with concrete images. this is notably the case with poets and great literates. their vision is keener than that of other men. however rapid and remote their flight of thought, it is a succession of images, not of abstractions. the details which give significance, and which by us are seen vaguely as through a vanishing mist, are by them seen in sharp outlines. the image which to us is a mere suggestion, is to them almost as vivid as the object. and it is because they see vividly that they can paint effectively. most readers will recognise this to be true of poets, but will doubt its application to philosophers, because imperfect psychology and unscientific criticism have disguised the identity of intellectual processes until it has become a paradox to say that imagination is not less indispensable to the philosopher than to the poet. the paradox falls directly we restate the proposition thus: both poet and philosopher draw their power from the energy of their mental vision--an energy which disengages the mind from the somnolence of habit and from the pressure of obtrusive sensations. in general men are passive under sense and the routine of habitual inferences. they are unable to free themselves from the importunities of the apparent facts and apparent relations which solicit their attention; and when they make room for unapparent facts it is only for those which are familiar to their minds. hence they can see little more than what they have been taught to see; they can only think what they have been taught to think. for independent vision, and original conception, we must go to children and men of genius. the spontaneity of the one is the power of the other. ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them. then comes an independent mind which sees; and it surprises us to find how servile we have been to habit and opinion, how blind to what we also might have seen, had we used our eyes. the link, so long hidden, has now been made visible to us. we hasten to make it visible to others. but the flash of light which revealed that obscured object does not help us to discover others. darkness still conceals much that we do not even suspect. we continue our routine. we always think our views correct and complete; if we thought otherwise they would cease to be our views; and when the man of keener insight discloses our error, and reveals relations hitherto unsuspected, we learn to see with his eyes and exclaim: "now surely we have got the truth." iii. a child is playing with a piece of paper and brings it near the flame of a candle; another child looks on. both are completely absorbed by the objects, both are ignorant or oblivious of the relation between the combustible object and the flame: a relation which becomes apparent only when the paper is alight. what is called the thoughtlessness of childhood prevents their seeing this unapparent fact; it is a fact which has not been sufficiently impressed upon their experience so as to form an indissoluble element in their conception of the two in juxtaposition. whereas in the mind of the nurse this relation is so vividly impressed that no sooner does the paper approach the flame than the unapparent fact becomes almost as visible as the objects, and a warning is given. she sees what the children do not, or cannot see. it has become part of her organised experience. the superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised. the superiority may be general or special: it may manifest itself in a power of assimilating very various experiences, so as to have manifold relations familiar to it, or in a power of assimilating very special relations, so as to constitute a distinctive aptitude for one branch of art or science. the experience which is thus organised must of course have been originally a direct object of consciousness, either as an impressive fact or impressive inference. unless the paper had been seen to burn, no one could know that contact with flame would consume it. by a vivid remembrance the experience of the past is made available to the present, so that we do not need actually to burn paper once more,--we see the relation mentally. in like manner newton did not need to go through the demonstrations of many complex problems, they flashed upon him as he read the propositions; they were seen by him in that rapid glance, as they would have been made visible through the slower process of demonstration. a good chemist does not need to test many a proposition by bringing actual gases or acids into operation, and seeing the result; he foresees the result: his mental vision of the objects and their properties is so keen, his experience is so organised, that the result which would be visible in an experiment, is visible to him in an intuition. a fine poet has no need of the actual presence of men and women under the fluctuating impatience of emotion, or under the steadfast hopelessness of grief; he needs no setting sun before his window, under it no sullen sea. these are all visible, and their fluctuations are visible. he sees the quivering lip, the agitated soul; he hears the aching cry, and the dreary wash of waves upon the beach. the writer who pretends to instruct us should first assure himself that he has clearer vision of the things he speaks of,--knows them and their qualities, if not better than we, at least with some distinctive knowledge. otherwise he should announce himself as a mere echo, a middleman, a distributor. our need is for more light. this can be given only by an independent seer who "lends a precious seeing to the eye." all great authors are seers. "perhaps if we should meet shakspeare," says emerson, "we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority: no, but of great equality; only he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying his facts, which we lacked. for, notwithstanding our utter incapacity to preduce anything like hamlet or othello, we see the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all." this aggrandisement of our common stature rests on questionable ground. if our capacity of being moved by shakspeare discloses a community, our incapacity of producing hamlet no less discloses our inferiority. it is certain that could we meet shakspeare we should find him strikingly like ourselves---with the same faculties, the same sensibilities, though not in the same degree. the secret of his power over us lies, of course, in our having the capacity to appreciate him. yet we seeing him in the unimpassioned moods of daily life, it is more than probable that we should see nothing in him but what was ordinary; nay, in some qualities he would seem inferior. heroes require a perspective. they are men who look superhuman only when elevated on the pedestals of their achievements. in ordinary life they look like ordinary men; not that they are of the common mould, but seem so because their uncommon qualities are not then called forth. superiority requires an occasion. the common man is helpless in an emergency: assailed by contradictory suggestions, or confused by his incapacity, he cannot see his way. the hour of emergency finds a hero calm and strong, and strong because calm and clear-sighted; he sees what can be done, and does it. this is often a thing of great simplicity, so that we marvel others did not see it. now it has been done, and proved successful, many underrate its value, thinking that they also would have done precisely the same thing. the world is more just. it refuses to men unassailed by the difficulties of a situation the glory they have not earned. the world knows how easy most things appear when they have once been done. we can all make the egg stand on end after columbus. shakspeare, then, would probably not impress us with a sense of our inferiority if we were to meet him tomorrow. most likely we should be bitterly disappointed; because, having formed our conception of him as the man who wrote hamlet and othello we forget that these were not the preducts of his ordinary moods, but the manifestations of his power at white heat. in ordinary moods he must be very much as ordinary men, and it is in these we meet him. how notorious is the astonishment of friends and associates when any man's achievements suddenly emerge into renown. "they could never have believed it." why should they? knowing him only as one of their circle, and not being gifted with the penetration which discerns a latent energy, but only with the vision which discerns apparent results, they are taken by surprise. nay, so biased are we by superficial judgments, that we frequently ignore the palpable fact of achieved excellence simply because we cannot reconcile it with our judgment of the man who achieved it. the deed has been done, the work written, the picture painted; it is before the world, and the world is ringing with applause. there is no doubt whatever that the man whose name is in every mouth did the work; but because our personal impressions of him do not correspond with our conceptions of a powerful man, we abate or withdraw our admiration, and attribute his success to lucky accident. this blear-eyed, taciturn, timid man, whose knowledge of many things is manifestly imperfect, whose inaptitude for many things is apparent, can he be the creator of such glorious works? can he be the large and patient thinker, the delicate humourist, the impassioned poet? nature seems to have answered this question for us; yet so little are we inclined to accept nature's emphatic testimony on this point, that few of us ever see without disappointment the man whose works have revealed his greatness. it stands to reason that we should not rightly appreciate shakspeare if we were to meet him simply because we should meet him as an ordinary man, and not as the author of hamlet. yet if we had a keen insight we should detect even in his quiet talk the marks of an original mind. we could not, of course, divine, without evidence, how deep and clear his insight, how mighty his power over grand representative symbols, how prodigal his genius: these only could appear on adequate occasions. but we should notice that he had an independent way of looking at things. he would constantly bring before us some latent fact, some unsuspected relation, some resemblance between dissimilar things. we should feel that his utterances were not echoes. if therefore, in these moments of equable serenity, his mind glancing over trivial things saw them with great clearness, we might infer that in moments of intense activity his mind gazing steadfastly on important things, would see wonderful visions, where to us all was vague and shifting. during our quiet walk with him across the fields he said little, or little that was memorable; but his eye was taking in the varying forms and relations of objects, and slowly feeding his mind with images. the common hedge-row, the gurgling brook, the waving corn, the shifting cloud-architecture, and the sloping uplands, have been seen by us a thousand times, but they show us nothing new; they have been seen by him a thousand times, and each time with fresh interest, and fresh discovery. if he describe that walk he will surprise us with revelations: we can then and thereafter see all that he points out; but we needed his vision to direct our own. and it is one of the incalculable influences of poetry that each new revelation is an education of the eye and the feelings. we learn to see and feel nature in a far clearer and profounder way, now that we have been taught to look by poets. the incurious unimpassioned gaze of the alpine peasant on the scenes which mysteriously and profoundly affect the cultivated tourist, is the gaze of one who has never been taught to look. the greater sensibility of educated europeans to influences which left even the poetic greeks unmoved, is due to the directing vision of successive poets. the great difficulty which besets us all--shakspeares and others, but shakspeares less than others---is the difficulty of disengaging the mind from the thraldom of sensation and habit, and escaping from the pressure of objects immediately present, or of ideas which naturally emerge, linked together as they are by old associations. we have to see anew, to think anew. it requires great vigour to escape from the old and spontaneously recurrent trains of thought. and as this vigour is native, not acquired, my readers may, perhaps, urge the futility of expounding with so much pains a principle of success in literature which, however indispensable, must be useless as a guide; they may object that although good literature rests on insight, there is nothing to be gained by saying "unless a man have the requisite insight he will not succeed." but there is something to be gained. in the first place, this is an analytical inquiry into the conditions of success: it aims at discriminating the leading principles which inevitably determine success. in the second place, supposing our analysis of the conditions to be correct, practical guidance must follow. we cannot, it is true, gain clearness of vision simply by recognising its necessity; but by recognising its necessity we are taught to seek for it as a primary condition of success; we are forced to come to an understanding with ourselves as to whether we have or have not a distinct vision of the thing we speak of, whether we are seers or reporters, whether the ideas and feelings have been thought and felt by us as part and parcel of our own individual experience, or have been echoed by us from the books and conversation of others? we can always ask, are we painting farm-houses or fairies because these are genuine visions of our own, or only because farm-houses and fairies have been successfully painted by others, and are poetic material? the man who first saw an acid redden a vegetable-blue, had something to communicate; and the man who first saw (mentally) that all acids redden vegetable-blues, had something to communicate. but no man can do this again. in the course of his teaching he may have frequently to report the fact; but this repetition is not of much value unless it can be made to disclose some new relation. and so of other and more complex cases. every sincere man can determine for himself whether he has any authentic tidings to communicate; and although no man can hope to discover much that is actually new, he ought to assure himself that even what is old in his work has been authenticated by his own experience. he should not even speak of acids reddening vegetable-blues upon mere hearsay, unless he is speaking figuratively. all his facts should have been verified by himself, all his ideas should have been thought by himself. in proportion to the fulfilment of this condition will be his success; in proportion to its non-fulfilment, his failure. literature in its vast extent includes writers of three different classes, and in speaking of success we must always be understood to mean the acceptance each writer gains in his own class; otherwise a flashy novelist might seem more successful than a profound poet; a clever compiler more successful than an original discoverer. the primary class is composed of the born seers--men who see for themselves and who originate. these are poets, philosophers, discoverers. the secondary class is composed of men less puissant in faculty, but genuine also in their way, who travel along the paths opened by the great originaters, and also point out many a side-path and shorter cut. they reproduce and vary the materials furnished by others, but they do this, not as echoes only, they authenticate their tidings, they take care to see what the discoverers have taught them to see, and in consequence of this clear vision they are enabled to arrange and modify the materials so as to produce new results. the primary class is composed of men of genius; the secondary class of men of talent. it not unfrequently happens, especially in philosophy and science, that the man of talent may confer a lustre on the original invention; he takes it up a nugget and lays it down a coin. finally, there is the largest class of all, comprising the imitators in art, and the compilers in philosophy. these bring nothing to the general stock. they are sometimes (not often) useful; but it is as cornfactors, not as corn-growers. they sometimes do good service by distributing knowledge where otherwise it might never penetrate; but in general their work is more hurtful than beneficial: hurtful, because it is essentially bad work, being insincere work, and because it stands in the way of better work. even among imitaters and compilers there are almost infinite degrees of merit and demerit: echoes of echoes reverberating echoes in endless succession; compilations of all degrees of worth and worthlessness. but, as will be shown hereafter, even in this lower sphere the worth of the work is strictly proportional to the vision, sincerity, and beauty; so that an imitator whose eye is keen for the forms he imitates, whose speech is honest, and whose talent has grace, will by these very virtues rise almost to the secondary class, and will secure an honourable success. i have as yet said but little, and that incidentally, of the part played by the principle of vision in art. many readers who will admit the principle in science and philosophy, may hesitate in extending it to art, which, as they conceive, draws its inspirations from the imagination. properly understood there is no discrepancy between the two opinions; and in the next chapter i shall endeavour to show how imagination is only another form of this very principle of vision which we have been considering. editor. chapter iii of vision in art. there are many who will admit, without hesitation, that in philosophy what i have called the principle of vision holds an important rank, because the mind must necessarily err in its speculations unless it clearly sees facts and relations; but there are some who will hesitate before admitting the principle to a similar rank in art, because, as they conceive, art is independent of the truth of facts, and is swayed by the autocratic power of imagination. it is on this power that our attention should first be arrested; the more so because it is usually spoken of in vague rhapsodical language, with intimations of its being something peculiarly mysterious. there are few words more abused. the artist is called a creator, which in one sense he is; and his creations are said to be produced by processes wholly unallied to the creations of philosophy, which they are not. hence it is a paradox to speak of the "principia," as a creation demanding severe and continuous exercise of the imagination; but it is only a paradox to those who have never analysed the processes of artistic and philosophic creation. i am far from desiring to innovate in language, or to raise interminable discussions respecting the terms in general use. nevertheless we have here to deal with questions that lie deeper than mere names. we have to examine processes, and trace, if possible, the methods of intellectual activity pursued in all branches of literature; and we must not suffer our course to be obstructed by any confusion in terms that can be cleared up. we may respect the demarcations established by usage, but we must ascertain, if possible, the fundamental affinities. there is, for instance, a broad distinction between science and art, which, so far from requiring to be effaced, requires to be emphasised: it is that in science the paramount appeal is to the intellect---its purpose being instruction; in art, the paramount appeal is to the emotions--its purpose being pleasure. a work of art must of course indirectly appeal to the intellect, and a work of science will also indirectly appeal to the feelings; nevertheless a poem on the stars and a treatise on astronomy have distinct aims and distinct methods. but having recognised the broadly-marked differences, we are called upon to ascertain the underlying resemblances. logic and imagination belong equally to both. it is only because men have been attracted by the differences that they have overlooked the not less important affinities. imagination is an intellectual process common to philosophy and art; but in each it is allied with different processes, and directed to different ends; and hence, although the "principia" demanded an imagination of not less vivid and sustained power than was demanded by "othello," it would be very false psychology to infer that the mind of newton was competent to the creation of "othello," or the mind of shakspeare capable of producing the "principia." they were specifically different minds; their works were specifically different. but in both the imagination was intensely active. newton had a mind predominantly ratiocinative: its movement was spontaneously towards the abstract relations of things. shakspeare had a mind predominantly emotive, the intellect always moving in alliance with the feelings, and spontaneously fastening upon the concrete facts in preference to their abstract relations. their mental vision was turned towards images of different orders, and it moved in alliance with different faculties; but this vision was the cardinal quality of both. dr. johnson was guilty of a surprising fallacy in saying that a great mathematician might also be a great poet: "sir, a man can walk east as far as he can walk west." true, but mathematics and poetry do not differ as east and west; and he would hardly assert that a man who could walk twenty miles could therefore swim that distance. the real state of the case is somewhat obscured by our observing that many men of science, and some even eminent as teachers and reporters, display but slender claims to any unusual vigour of imagination. it must be owned that they are often slightly dull; and in matters of art are not unfrequently blockheads. nay, they would themselves repel it as a slight if the epithet "imaginative" were applied to them; it would seem to impugn their gravity, to cast doubts upon their accuracy. but such men are the cisterns, not the fountains, of science. they rely upon the knowledge already organised; they do not bring accessions to the common stock. they are not investigators, but imitators; they are not discoverers--inventors. no man ever made a discovery (he may have stumbled on one) without the exercise of as much imagination as, employed in another direction and in alliance with other faculties, would have gone to the creation of a poem. every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination. the relations of sequence among the phenomena must be seen; they are hidden; they can only be seen mentally; a thousand suggestions rise before the mind, but they are recognised as old suggestions, or as inadequate to reveal what is sought; the experiments by which the problem may be solved have to be imagined; and to imagine a good experiment is as difficult as to invent a good fable, for we must have distinctly present--clear mental vision--the known qualities and relations of all the objects, and must see what will be the effect of introducing some new qualifying agent. if any one thinks this is easy, let him try it: the trial will teach him a lesson respecting the methods of intellectual activity not without its use. easy enough, indeed, is the ordinary practice of experiment, which is either a mere repetition or variation of experiments already devised (as ordinary story-tellers re-tell the stories of others), or else a haphazard, blundering way of bringing phenomena together, to see what will happen. to invent is another process. the discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar. it is the special aim of philosophy to discover and systematise the abstract relations of things; and for this purpose it is forced to allow the things themselves to drop out of sight, fixing attention solely on the quality immediately investigated, to the neglect of all other qualities. thus the philosopher, having to appreciate the mass, density, refracting power, or chemical constitution of some object, finds he can best appreciate this by isolating it from every other detail. he abstracts this one quality from the complex bundle of qualities which constitute the object, and he makes this one stand for the whole. this is a necessary simplification. if all the qualities were equally present to his mind, his vision would be perplexed by their multiple suggestions. he may follow out the relations of each in turn, but he cannot follow them out together. the aim of the poet is very different. he wishes to kindle the emotions by the suggestion of objects themselves; and for this purpose he must present images of the objects rather than of any single quality. it is true that he also must exercise a power of abstraction and selection, tie cannot without confusion present all the details. and it is here that the fine selective instinct of the true artist shows itself, in knowing what details to present and what to omit. observe this: the abstraction of the philosopher is meant to keep the object itself, with its perturbing suggestions, out of sight, allowing only one quality to fill the field of vision; whereas the abstraction of the poet is meant to bring the object itself into more vivid relief, to make it visible by means of the selected qualities. in other words, the one aims at abstract symbols, the other at picturesque effects. the one can carry on his deductions by the aid of colourless signs, x or y. the other appeals to the emotions through the symbols which will most vividly express the real objects in their relations to our sensibilities. imagination is obviously active in both. from known facts the philosopher infers the facts that are unapparent. he does so by an effort of imagination (hypothesis) which has to be subjected to verification: he makes a mental picture of the unapparent fact, and then sets about to prove that his picture does in some way correspond with the reality. the correctness of his hypothesis and verification must depend on the clearness of his vision. were all the qualities of things apparent to sense, there would be no longer any mystery. a glance would be science. but only some of the facts are visible; and it is because we see little, that we have to imagine much. we see a feather rising in the air, and a quill, from the same bird, sinking to the ground: these contradictory reports of sense lead the mind astray; or perhaps excite a desire to know the reason. we cannot see,--we must imagine,--the unapparent facts. many mental pictures may be formed, but to form the one which corresponds with the reality requires great sagacity and a very clear vision of known facts. in trying to form this mental picture we remember that when the air is removed the feather fails as rapidly as the quill, and thus we see that the air is the cause of the feather's rising; we mentally see the air pushing under the feather, and see it almost as plainly as if the air were a visible mass thrusting the feather upwards. from a mistaken appreciation of the real process this would by few be called an effort of imagination. on the contrary some "wild hypothesis" would be lauded as imaginative in proportion as it departed from all suggestion of experience, i.e. real mental vision. to have imagined that the feather rose owing to its "specific lightness," and that the quill fell owing to its "heaviness," would to many appear a more decided effort of the imaginative faculty. whereas it is no effort of that faculty at all; it is simply naming differently the facts it pretends to explain. to imagine---to form an image--we must have the numerous relations of things present to the mind, and see the objects in their actual order. in this we are of course greatly aided by the mass of organised experience, which allows us rapidly to estimate the relations of gravity or affinity just as we remember that fire burns and that heated bodies expand. but be the aid great or small, and the result victorious or disastrous, the imaginative process is always the same. there is a slighter strain on the imagination of the poet, because of his greater freedom. he is not, like the philosopher, limited to the things which are, or were. his vision includes things which might be, and things which never were. the philosopher is not entitled to assume that nature sympathises with man; he must prove the fact to be so if he intend making any use of it ;--we admit no deductions from unproved assumptions. but the poet is at perfect liberty to assume this; and having done so, he paints what would be the manifestations of this sympathy. the naturalist who should describe a hippogriff would incur the laughing scorn of europe; but the poet feigns its existence, and all europe is delighted when it rises with astolfo in the air. we never pause to ask the poet whether such an animal exists. he has seen it, and we see it with his eyes. talking trees do not startle us in virgil and tennyson. puck and titania, hamlet and falstaff, are as true for us as luther and napoleon so long as we are in the realm of art. we grant the poet a free privilege because he will use it only for our pleasure. in science pleasure is not an object, and we give no licence. philosophy and art both render the invisible visible by imagination. where sense observes two isolated objects, imagination discloses two related objects. this relation is the nexus visible. we had not seen it before; it is apparent now. where we should only see a calamity the poet makes us see a tragedy. where we could only see a sunrise he enables us to see "day like a mighty river flowing in." imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men. it is simply the power of forming images. supplying the energy of sense where sense cannot reach, it brings into distinctness the facts, obscure or occult, which are grouped round an object or an idea, but which are not actually present to sense. thus, at the aspect of a windmill, the mind forms images of many characteristic facts relating to it; and the kind of images will depend very much on the general disposition, or particular mood, of the mind affected by the object: the painter, the poet, and the moralist will have different images suggested by the presence of the windmill or its symbol. there are indeed sluggish minds so incapable of self-evolved activity, and so dependent on the immediate suggestions of sense, as to be almost destitute of the power of forming distinct images beyond the immediate circle of sensuous associations; and these are rightly named unimaginative minds; but in all minds of energetic activity, groups and clusters of images, many of them representing remote relations, spontaneously present themselves in conjunction with objects or their symbols. it should, however, be borne in mind that imagination can only recall what sense has previously impressed. no man imagines any detail of which he has not previously had direct or indirect experience. objects as fictitious as mermaids and hippogriffs are made up from the gatherings of sense. "made up from the gatherings of sense" is a phrase which may seem to imply some peculiar plastic power such as is claimed exclusively for artists: a power not of simple recollection, but of recollection and recombination. yet this power belongs also to philosophers. to combine the half of a woman with the half of a fish,--to imagine the union as an existing organism,--is not really a different process from that of combining the experience of a chemical action with an electric action, and seeing that the two are one existing fact. when the poet hears the storm-cloud muttering, and sees the moonlight sleeping on the bank, he transfers his experience of human phenomena to the cloud and the moonlight: he personifies, draws nature within the circle of emotion, and is called a poet. when the philosopher sees electricity in the storm-cloud, and sees the sunlight stimulating vegetable growth, he transfers his experience of physical phenomena to these objects, and draws within the circle of law phenomena which hitherto have been unclassified. obviously the imagination has been as active in the one case as in the other; the differentia lying in the purposes of the two, and in the general constltution of the two minds. it has been noted that there is less strain on the imagination of the poet; but even his greater freedom is not altogether disengaged from the necessity of verification; his images must have at least subjective truth; if they do not accurately correspond with objective realities, they must correspond with our sense of congruity. no poet is allowed the licence of creating images inconsistent with our conceptions. if he said the moonlight burnt the bank, we should reject the image as untrue, inconsistent with our conceptions of moonlight; whereas the gentle repose of the moonlight on the bank readily associates itself with images of sleep. the often mooted question, what is imagination? thus receives a very clear and definite answer. it is the power of forming images; it reinstates, in a visible group, those objects which are invisible, either from absence or from imperfection of our senses. that is its generic character. its specific character, which marks it off from memory, and which is derived from the powers of selection and recombination, will be expounded further on. here i only touch upon its chief characteristic, in order to disengage the term from that mysteriousness which writers have usually assigned to it, thereby rendering philosophic criticism impossible. thus disengaged it may be used with more certainty in an attempt to estimate the imaginative power of various works. hitherto the amount of that power has been too frequently estimated according to the extent of departure from ordinary experience in the images selected. nineteen out of twenty would unhesitatingly declare that a hippogriff was a greater effort of imagination than a well-conceived human character; a peri than a woman; puck or titania than falstaff or imogen. a description of paradise extremely unlike any known garden must, it is thought, necessarily be more imaginative than the description of a quiet rural nook. it may be more imaginative; it may be less so. all depends upon the mind of the poet. to suppose that it must, because of its departure from ordinary experience, is a serious error. the muscular effort required to draw a cheque for a thousand pounds might as reasonably be thought greater than that required for a cheque of five pounds; and much as the one cheque seems to surpass the other in value, the result of presenting both to the bankers may show that the more modest cheque is worth its full five pounds, whereas the other is only so much waste paper. the description of paradise may be a glittering farrago; the description of the landscape may be full of sweet rural images: the one having a glare of gaslight and vauxhall splendour; the other having the scent of new-mown hay. a work is imaginative in virtue of the power of its images over our emotions; not in virtue of any rarity or surprisingness in the images themselves. a madonna and child by fra angelico is more powerful over our emotions than a crucifixion by a vulgar artist; a beggar-boy by murillo is more imaginative than an assumption by the same painter; but the assumption by titian displays far greater imagination than elther. we must guard against the natural tendency to attribute to the artist what is entirely due to accidental conditions. a tropical scene, luxuriant with tangled overgrowth and impressive in the grandeur of its phenomena, may more decisively arrest our attention than an english landscape with its green corn lands and plenteous homesteads. but this superiority of interest is no proof of the artist's superior imagination; and by a spectator familiar with the tropics, greater interest may be felt in the english landscape, because its images may more forcibly arrest his attentlon by their novelty. and were this not so, were the inalienable impressiveness of tropical scenery always to give the poet who described it a superiority in effect, this would not prove the superiority of his imagination. for either he has been familiar with such scenes, and imagines them just as the other poet imagines his english landscape---by an effort of mental vision, calling up the absent objects; or he has merely read the descriptions of others, and from these makes up his picture. it is the same with his rival, who also recalls and recombines. foolish critics often betray their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer "only copies what he has seen, or puts down what he has known." they forget that no man imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the selection of the characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested. those who suppose that familiarity with scenes or characters enables a painter or a novelist to "copy" them with artistic effect, forget the well-known fact that the vast majority of men are painfully incompetent to avail themselves of this familiarity, and cannot form vivid pictures even to themselves of scenes in which they pass their daily lives; and if they could imagine these, they would need the delicate selective instinct to guide them in the admission and omission of details, as well as in the grouping of the images. let any one try to "copy" the wife or brother he knows so well,--to make a human image which shall speak and act so as to impress strangers with a belief in its truth,--and he will then see that the much-despised reliance on actual experience is not the mechanical procedure it is believed to be. when scott drew saladin and ceaur de lion he did not really display more imaginative power than when he drew the mucklebackits, although the majority of readers would suppose that the one demanded a great effort of imagination, whereas the other formed part of his familiar experiences of scottish life. the mistake here lies in confounding the sources from which the materials were derived with the plastic power of forming these materials into images. more conscious effort may have been devoted to the collection of the materials in the one case than in the other, but that this has nothing to do with the imaginative power employed may readily be proved by an analysis of the intellectual processes of composition. scott had often been in fishermen's cottages and heard them talk; from the registered experience of a thousand details relating to the life of the poor, their feelings and their thoughts, he gained that material upon which his imagination could work; in the case of saladin and ceaur de lion he had to gain these principally through books and his general experience of life; and the images he formed--the vision he had of mucklebackit and saladin--must be set down to his artistic faculty, not to his experience or erudition. it has been well said by a very imaginative writer, that "when a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." and in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," people mistake the vagabond erratic flights of guessing for a higher range of philosophic power. in truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation with facts. i cannot here enter into the interesting question of realism and idealism in art, which must be debated in a future chapter; but i wish to call special attention to the psychological fact, that fairies and demons, remote as they are from experience, are not created by a more vigorous effort of imagination than milk maids and poachers. the intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power. ii. if this brief exposition has carried the reader's assent, he will readily apply the principle, and recognise that an artist produces an effect in virtue of the distinctness with which he sees the objects he represents, seeing them not vaguely as in vanishing apparitions, but steadily, and in their most characteristic relations. to this vision he adds artistic skill with which to make us see. he may have clear conceptions, yet fail to make them clear to us: in this case he has imagination, but is not an artist. without clear vision no skill can avail. imperfect vision necessitates imperfect representation; words take the place of ideas. in young's "night thoughts" there are many examples of the pseudo-imaginative, betraying an utter want of steady vision. here is one:-- "his hand the good man fixes on the skies, and bids earth roll, nor feels the idle whirl." "pause for a moment," remarks a critic, "to realise the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man's grasping the skies and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception." [westminster review, no. cxxxi., p. ]. it is obvious that if young had imagined the position he assigned to the good man he would have seen its absurdity; instead of imagining, he allowed the vague transient suggestion of half-nascent images to shape themselves in verse. now compare with this a passage in which imagination is really active. wordsworth recalls how-- " in november days when vapours rolling down the valleys made a lonely scene more lonesome; among the woods at noon; and mid the calm of summer nights, when by the margin of the trembling lake beneath the gloomy hills homeward i went in solitude, such intercourse was mine." there is nothing very grand or impressive in this passage, and therefore it is a better illustration for my purpose. note how happily the one image, out of a thousand possible images by which november might be characterised, is chosen to call up in us the feeling of the lonely scene; and with what delicate selection the calm of summer nights, the "trembling lake" (an image in an epithet), and the gloomy hills, are brought before us. his boyhood might have furnished him with a hundred different pictures, each as distinct as this; the power is shown in selecting this one--painting it so vividly. he continues:-- "'twas mine among the fields both day and night and by the waters, all the summer long. and in the frosty season, when the sun was set, and, visible for many a mile the cottage windows through the twilight blazed, i heeded not the summons: happy time it was indeed for all of us; for me it was a time of rapture! clear and loud the village clock tolled six--i wheeled about, proud and exulting like an untired horse that cares not for his home. all shod with steel we hissed along the polished ice, in games confederate, imitative of the chase and woodland pleasures--the resounding horn, the pack loud-chiming and the hunted hare." there is nothing very felicitous in these lines; yet even here the poet, if languid, is never false. as he proceeds the vision brightens, and the verse becomes instinct with life:-- "so through the darkness and the cold we flew and not a voice was idle: with the din smitten, the precipices rang aloud; the leafless trees and every icy crag tinkled like iron; while the distant hills into the tumult sent an alien sound of melancholy, not unnoticed while the stars eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west the orange sky of evening died away. "not seldom from the uproar i retired into a silent bay, or sportively glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, to cut across the reflex of a star; image that flying still before me gleamed upon the glassy plain: and oftentime when we had given our bodies to the wind and all the shadowy banks on either side came creeping through the darkness, spinning still the rapid line of motion, then at once have i reclining back upon my heels stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled with visible motion her diurnal round! behind me did they stretch in solemn train, feebler and feebler, and i stood and watched till all was tranquil as a summer sea." every poetical reader will feel delight in the accuracy with which the details are painted, and the marvellous clearness with which the whole scene is imagined, both in its objective and subjective relations, i.e., both in the objects seen and the emotions they suggest. what the majority of modern verse writers call "imagery," is not the product of imagination, but a restless pursuit of comparison, and a lax use of language. instead of presenting us with an image of the object, they present us with something which they tell us is like the object---which it rarely is. the thing itself has no clear significance to them, it is only a text for the display of their ingenuity. if, however, we turn from poetasters to poets, we see great accuracy in depicting the things themselves or their suggestions, so that we may be certain the things presented themselves in the field of the poet's vision, and were painted because seen. the images arose with sudden vivacity, or were detained long enough to enable their characters to be seized. it is this power of detention to which i would call particular notice, because a valuable practical lesson may be learned through a proper estimate of it. if clear vision be indispensable to success in art, all means of securing that clearness should be sought. now one means is that of detaining an image long enough before the mind to allow of its being seen in all its characteristics. the explanation newton gave of his discovery of the great law, points in this direction; it was by always thinking of the subject, by keeping it constantly before his mind, that he finally saw the truth. artists brood over the chaos of their suggestions, and thus shape them into creations. try and form a picture in your own mind of your early skating experience. it may be that the scene only comes back upon you in shifting outlines, you recall the general facts, and some few particulars are vivid, but the greater part of the details vanish again before they can assume decisive shape; they are but half nascent, or die as soon as born: a wave of recollection washes over the mind, but it quickly retires, leaving no trace behind. this is the common experience. or it may be that the whole scene flashes upon you with peculiar vividness, so that you see, almost as in actual presence, all the leading characteristics of the picture. wordsworth may have seen his early days in a succession of vivid flashes, or he may have attained to his distinctness of vision by a steadfast continuity of effort, in which what at first was vague became slowly definite as he gazed. it is certain that only a very imaginative mind could have seen such details as he has gathered together in the lines describing how he "cut across the reflex of a star; image that flying still before me gleamed upon the glassy plain." the whole description may have been written with great rapidity, or with anxious and tentative labour: the memories of boyish days may have been kindled with a sudden illumination, or they may have grown slowly into the requisite distinctness, detail after detail emerging from the general obscurity, like the appearing stars at night. but whether the poet felt his way to images and epithets, rapidly or slowly, is unimportant; we have to do only with the result; and the result implies, as an absolute condition, that the images were distinct. only thus could they serve the purposes of poetry, which must arouse in us memories of similar scenes, and kindle emotions of pleasurable experience. iii. having cited an example of bad writing consequent on imperfect vision, and an example of good writing consequent on accurate vision, i might consider that enough had been done for the immediate purpose of the present chapter; the many other illustrations which the principle of vision would require before it could be considered as adequately expounded, i must defer till i come to treat of the application of principles. but before closing this chapter it may be needful to examine some arguments which have a contrary tendency, and imply, or seem to imply, that distinctness of vision is very far from necessary. at the outset we must come to an understanding as to this word "image," and endeavour to free the word "vision" from all equivoque. if these words were understood literally there would be an obvious absurdity in speaking of an image of a sound, or of seeing an emotion. yet if by means of symbols the effect of a sound is produced in us, or the psychological state of any human being is rendered intelligible to us, we are said to have images of these things, which the poet has imagined. it is because the eye is the most valued and intellectual of our senses that the majority of metaphors are borrowed from its sensations. language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and art also can only affect us through symbols. if a phrase can summon a terror resembling that summoned by the danger which it indicates, a man is said to see the danger. sometimes a phrase will awaken more vivid images of danger than would be called up by the actual presence of the dangerous object; because the mind will more readily apprehend the symbols of the phrase than interpret the indications of unassisted sense. burke in his "essay on the sublime and beautiful," lays down the proposition that distinctness of imagery is often injurious to the effect of art. "it is one thing," he says, "to make an idea clear, another to make it affecting to the imagination. if i make a drawing of a palace or a temple or a landscape, i present a very clear idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect of imitation, which is something) my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape would have affected in reality. on the other hand the most lively and spirited verbal description i can give raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than i can do by the best painting. this experience constantly evinces. the proper manner of conveying the affections of the mind from one to the other is by words; there is great insufficiency in all other method of communication; and so far is a clearness of imagery, from being absolutely necessary to an influence upon the passions, that they may be considerably operated upon without presenting any image at all, by certain sounds adapted to that purpose." if by image is meant only what the eye can see, burke is undoubtedly right. but this is obviously not our restricted meaning of the word when we speak of poetic imagery; and burke's error becomes apparent when he proceeds to show that there "are reasons in nature why an obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear." he does not seem to have considered that the idea of an indefinite object can only be properly conveyed by indefinite images; any image of eternity or death that pretended to visual distinctness would be false. having overlooked this, he says, "we do not anywhere meet a more sublime description than this justly celebrated one of milton, wherein he gives the portrait of satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject. "he above the rest in shape and gesture proudly eminent stood like a tower; his form had not yet lost all her original brightness, nor appeared less than archangel ruined and the excess of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen looks through the horizontal misty air shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon in dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds on half the nations; and with fear of change perplexes monarchs." "here is a very noble picture," adds burke, "and in what does this poetical picture consist? in images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolution of kingdoms." instead of recognising the imagery here as the source of the power, he says, "the mind is hurried out of itself, [rather a strange result!], by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused for, separate them, and you lose much of the greatness; and join them, and you infallibly lose the clearness." this is altogether a mistake. the images are vivid enough to make us feel the hovering presence of an awe-inspiring figure having the height and firmness of a tower, and the dusky splendour of a ruined archangel. the poet indicates only that amount of concreteness which is necessary for the clearness of the picture,---only the height and firmness of the tower and the brightness of the sun in eclipse. more concretness would disturb the clearness by calling attention to irrelevant details. to suppose that these images produce the effect because they are crowded and confused (they are crowded and not confused) is to imply that any other images would do equally well, if they were equally crowded. "separate them, and you lose much of the greatness." quite true: the image of the tower would want the splendour of the sun. but this much may be said of all descriptions which proceed upon details. and so far from the impressive clearness of the picture vanishing in the crowd of images, it is by these images that the clearness is produced: the details make it impressive, and affect our imagination. it should be added that burke came very near a true explanation in the following passage:--"it is difficult to conceive how words can move the passions which belong to real objects without representing these objects clearly. this is difficult to us because we do not sufficiently distinguish between a clear expression and a strong expression. the former regards the understanding; the latter belongs to the passions. the one describes a thing as it is, the other describes it as it is felt. now as there is a moving tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted, so there are words and certain dispositions of words which being peculiarly devoted to passionate subjects, and always used by those who are under the influence of passion, touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and distinctly express the subject-matter." burke here fails to see that the tones, looks, and gestures are the intelligible symbols of passion--the "images' in the true sense just as words are the intelligible symbols of ideas. the subject-matter is as clearly expressed by the one as by the other; for if the description of a lion be conveyed in the symbols of admiration or of terror, the subject-matter is then a lion passionately and not zoologically considered. and this burke himself was led to admit, for he adds, "we yield to sympathy what we refuse to description. the truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest eflfect if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that work a strong and lively feeling in himself. then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another." this is very true, and it sets clearly forth the fact that naked description, addressed to the calm understanding, has a different subject-matter from description addressed to the feelings, and the symbols by which it is made intelligible must likewise differ. but this in no way impugns the principle of vision. intelligible symbols (clear images) are as necessary in the one case as in the other. iv. by reducing imagination to the power of forming images, and by insisting that no image can be formed except out of the elements furnished by experience, i do not mean to confound imagination with memory; indeed, the frequent occurrence of great strength of memory with comparative feebleness of imagination, would suffice to warn us against such a conclusion. its specific character, that which marks it off from simple memory, is its tendency to selection, abstraction, and recombination. memory, as passive, simply recalls previous experiences of objects and emotions; from these, imagination, as an active faculty, selects the elements which vividly symbolise the objects or emotions, and either by a process of abstraction allows these to do duty for the whole, or else by a process of recombination creates new objects and new relations in which the objects stand to us or to each other (invention), and the result is an image of great vividness, which has perhaps no corresponding reality in the external world. minds differ in the vividness with which they recall the elements of previous experience, and mentally see the absent objects; they differ also in the aptitudes for selection, abstraction, and recombination: the fine selective instinct of the artist, which makes him fasten upon the details which will most powerfully affect us, without any disturbance of the harmony of the general impression, does not depend solely upon the vividness of his memory and the clearness with which the objects are seen, but depends also upon very complex and peculiar conditions of sympathy which we call genius. hence we find one man remembering a multitude of details, with a memory so vivid that it almost amounts at times to hallucination, yet without any artistic power; and we may find men--blake was one--with an imagination of unusual activity, who are nevertheless incapable, from deficient sympathy, of seizing upon those symbols which will most affect us. our native susceptibilities and acquired tastes determine which of the many qualities in an object shall most impress us, and be most clearly recalled. one man remembers the combustible properties of a substance, which to another is memorable for its polarising property; to one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezveus for lovers. in the close of the last paragraph we came face to face with the great difficulty which constantly arrests speculation on these matters--the existence of special aptitudes vaguely characterised as genius. these are obviously incommunicable. no recipe can be given for genius. no man can be taught how to exercise the power of imagination. but he can be taught how to aid it, and how to assure himself whether he is using it or not. having once laid hold of the principle of vision as a fundamental principle of art, he can always thus far apply it, that he can assure himself whether he does or does not distinctly see the cottage he is describing, the rivulet that is gurgling through his verses, or the character he is painting; he can assure himself whether he hears the voice of the speakers, and feels that what they say is true to their natures; he can assure himself whether he sees, as in actual experience, the emotion he is depicting; and he will know that if he does not see these things he must wait until he can, or he will paint them ineffectively. with distinct vision he will be able to make the best use of his powers of expression; and the most splendid powers of expression will not avail him if his vision be indistinct. this is true of objects that never were seen by the eye, that never could be seen. it is as true of what are called the highest flights of imagination as of the lowest flights. the mind must see the angel or the demon, the hippogriff or centaur, the pixie or the mermaid. ruskin notices how repeatedly turner,--the most imaginative of landscape painters,--introduced into his pictures, after a lapse of many years, memories of something which, however small and unimportant, had struck him in his earlier studies. he believes that all turner's "composition" was an arrangement of remembrances summoned just as they were wanted, and each in its fittest place. his vision was primarily composed of strong memory of the place itself, and secondarily of memories of other places associated in a harmonious, helpful way with the now central thought. he recalled and selected. i am prepared to hear of many readers, especially young readers, protesting against the doctrine of this chapter as prosaic. they have been so long accustomed to consider imagination as peculiarly distinguished by its disdain of reality, and invention as only admirable when its products are not simply new by selection and arrangement, but new in material, that they will reject the idea of involuntary remembrance of something originally experienced as the basis of all art. ruskin says of great artists, "imagine all that any of these men had seen or heard in the whole course of their lives, laid up accurately in their memories as in vast storehouses, extending with the poets even to the slightest intonations of syllables heard in the beginning of their lives, and with painters down to minute folds of drapery and shapes of leaves and stones; and over all this unindexed and immeasurable mass of treasure, the imagination brooding and wandering, but dream-gifted, so as to summon at any moment exactly such a group of ideas as shall justly fit each other." this is the explanation of their genius, as far as it can be explained. genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes. but those who have had ample opportunities of intimately knowing the growth of works in the minds of artists, will bear me out in saying that a vivid memory supplies the elements from a thousand different sources, most of which are quite beyond the power of localisation, the experience of yesterday being strangely intermingled with the dim suggestions of early years, the tones heard in childhood sounding through the diapason of sorrowing maturity; and all these kaleidoscopic fragments are recomposed into images that seem to have a corresponding reality of their own. as all art depends on vision, so the different kinds of art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things. the painter can only put into his pictures what he sees in nature; and what he sees will be different from what another sees. a poetical mind sees noble and affecting suggestions in details which the prosaic mind will interpret prosaically. and the true meaning of idealism is precisely this vision of realities in their highest and most affecting forms, not in the vision of something removed from or opposed to realities. titian's grand picture of "peter the martyr" is, perhaps, as instructive an example as could be chosen of successful idealism; because in it we have a marvellous presentation of reality as seen by a poetic mind. the figure of the flying monk might have been equally real if it had been an ignoble presentation of terror--the superb tree, which may almost be called an actor in the drama, might have been painted with even greater minuteness, though not perhaps with equal effect upon us, if it had arrested our attention by its details--the dying martyr and the noble assassin might have been made equally real in more vulgar types--but the triumph achieved by titian is that the mind is filled with a vision of poetic beauty which is felt to be real. an equivalent reality, without the ennobling beauty, would have made the picture a fine piece of realistic art. it is because of this poetic way of seeing things that one painter will give a faithful representation of a very common scene which shall nevertheless affect all sensitive minds as ideal, whereas another painter will represent the same with no greater fidelity, but with a complete absence of poetry. the greater the fidelity, the greater will be the merit of each representation; for if a man pretends to represent an object, he pretends to represent it accurately: the only difference is what the poetical or prosaic mind sees in the object. of late years there has been a reaction against conventionalism which called itself idealism, in favour of detailism which calls itself realism. as a reaction it has been of service; but it has led to much false criticism, and not a little false art, by an obtrusiveness of detail and a preference for the familiar, under the misleading notion of adherence to nature. if the words nature and natural could be entirely banished from language about art there would be some chance of coming to a rational philosophy of the subject; at present the excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism. the pots and pans of teniers and van mieris are natural; the passions and humours of shakspeare and moliere are natural; the angels of fra angelico and luini are natural; the sleeping fawn and fates of phidias are natural; the cows and misty marshes of cuyp and the vacillations of hamlet are equally natural. in fact the natural means truth of kind. each kind of character, each kind of representation, must be judged by itself. whereas the vulgar error of criticism is to judge of one kind by another, and generally to judge the higher by the lower, to remonstrate with hamlet for not having the speech and manner of mr. jones, to wish that fra angelico could have seen with the eyes of the carracci, to wish verse had been prose, and that ideal tragedy were acted with the easy manner acceptable in drawing-rooms. the rage for "realism," which is healthy in as far as it insists on truth, has become unhealthy, in as far as it confounds truth with familiarity, and predominance of unessential details. there are other truths besides coats and waistcoats, pots and pans, drawlng-rooms and suburban villas. life has other aims besides these which occupy the conversation of "society." and the painter who devotes years to a work representing modern life, yet calls for even more attention to a waistcoat than to the face of a philosopher, may exhibit truth of detail which will delight the tailor-mind, but he is defective in artistic truth, because he ought to be representing something higher than waistcoats, and because our thoughts on modern life fall very casually and without emphasis on waistcoats. in piloty's much-admired picture of the "death of wallenstein" (at munich), the truth with which the carpet, the velvet, and all other accessories are painted, is certainly remarkable; but the falsehood of giving prominence to such details in a picture representing the dead wallenstein--as if they were the objects which could possibly arrest our attention and excite our sympathies in such a spectacle--is a falsehood of the realistic school. if a man means to paint upholstery, by all means let him paint it so as to delight and deceive an upholsterer; but if he means to paint a human tragedy, the upholsterer must be subordinate, and velvet must not draw our eyes away from faces. i have digressed a little from my straight route because i wish to guard the principle of vision from certain misconceptions which might arise on a simple statement of it. the principle insists on the artist assuring himself that he distinctly sees what he attempts to represent. what he sees, and how he represents it, depend on other principles. to make even this principle of vision thoroughly intelligible in its application to all forms of literature and art, it must be considered in connection with the two other principles--sincerity and beauty, which are involved in all successful works. in the next chapter we shall treat of sincerity. editor. chapter iv. the principle of sincerity. it is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in literature or art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both. there is nothing beyond a verbal ambiguity here if we look at it closely, and yet there is a corresponding uncertainty in the conception of literature and art commonly entertained, which leads many writers and many critics into the belief that what are called "effects" should be sought, and when found must succeed. it is desirable to clear up this moral ambiguity, as i may call it, and to show that the real method of securing the legitimate effect is not to aim at it, but to aim at the truth, relying on that for securing effect. the condemnation of whatever is "done for effect" obviously springs from indignation at a disclosed insincerity in the artist, who is self-convicted of having neglected truth for the sake of our applause; and we refuse our applause to the flatterer, or give it contemptuously as to a mountebank whose dexterity has amused us. it is unhappily true that much insincere literature and art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public. but this is only because the simulation of truth or the blindness of the public conceals the insincerity. as a maxim, the principle of sincerity is admitted. nothing but what is true, or is held to be true, can succeed; anything which looks like insincerity is condemned. in this respect we may compare it with the maxim of honesty the best policy. no far-reaching intellect fails to perceive that if all men were uniformly upright and truthful, life would be more victorious, and literature more noble. we find, however, both in life and literature, a practical disregard of the truth of these propositions almost equivalent to a disbelief in them. many men are keenly alive to the social advantages of honesty--in the practice of others. they are also strongly impressed with the conviction that in their own particular case the advantage will sometimes lie in not strictly adhering to the rule. honesty is doubtless the best policy in the long run; but somehow the run here seems so very long, and a short-cut opens such allurements to impatient desire. it requires a firm calm insight, or a noble habit of thought, to steady the wavering mind, and direct it away from delusive short-cuts: to make belief practice, and forego immediate triumph. many of those who unhesitatingly admit sincerity to be one great condition of success in literature find it difficult, and often impossible, to resist the temptation of an insincerity which promises immediate advantage. it is not only the grocers who sand their sugar before prayers. writers who know well enough that the triumph of falsehood is an unholy triumph, are not deterred from falsehood by that knowledge. they know, perhaps, that, even if undetected, it will press on their own consciences; but the knowledge avails them little. the immediate pressure of the temptation is yielded to, and sincerity remains a text to be preached to others. to gain applause they will misstate facts, to gain victory in argument they will misrepresent the opinions they oppose; and they suppress the rising misgivings by the dangerous sophism that to discredit error is good work, and by the hope that no one will detect the means by which the work is effected. the saddest aspect of this procedure is that in literature, as in life, a temporary success often does reward dishonesty. it would be insincere to conceal it. to gain a reputation as discoverers men will invent or suppress facts. to appear learned they will array their writings in the ostentation of borrowed citations. to solicit the "sweet voices" of the crowd they will feign sentiments they do not feel, and utter what they think the crowd will wish to hear, keeping back whatever the crowd will hear with disapproval. and, as i said, such men often succeed for a time; the fact is so, and we must not pretend that it is otherwise. but it no more disturbs the fundamental truth of the principle of sincerity, than the perturbations in the orbit of mars disturb the truth of kepler's law. it is impossible to deny that dishonest men often grow rich and famous, becoming powerful in their parish or in parliament. their portraits simper from shop windows; and they live and die respected. this success is theirs; yet it is not the success which a noble soul will envy. apart from the risk of discovery and infamy, there is the certainty of a conscience ill at ease, or if at ease, so blunted in its sensibilities, so given over to lower lusts, that a healthy instinct recoils from such a state. observe, moreover, that in literature the possible rewards of dishonesty are small, and the probability of detection great. in life a dishonest man is chiefly moved by desires towards some tangible result of money or power; if he get these he has got all. the man of letters has a higher aim: the very object of his toil is to secure the sympathy and respect of men; and the rewards of his toil may be paid in money, fame, or consciousness of earnest effort. the first of these may sometimes be gained without sincerity. fame may also, for a time, be erected on an unstable ground, though it will inevitably be destroyed again. but the last and not least reward is to be gained by every one without fear of failure, without risk of change. sincere work is good work, be it never so humble; and sincere work is not only an indestructible delight to the worker by its very genuineness, but is immortal in the best sense, for it lives for ever in its influence. there is no good dictionary, not even a good index, that is not in this sense priceless, for it has honestly furthered the work of the world, saving labour to others, setting an example to successors. whether i make a careful index, or an inaccurate one, will probably in no respect affect the money-payment i shall receive. my sins will never fall heavily on me; my virtue will gain me neither extra pence nor praise. i shall be hidden by obscurity from the indignation of those whose valuable time is wasted over my pretence at accuracy, as from the silent gratitude of those whose time is saved by my honest fidelity. the consciousness of faithfulness even to the poor index maker may be a better reward than pence or praise; but of course we cannot expect the unconscientious to believe this. if i sand my sugar, and tell lies over my counter, i may gain the rewards of dishonesty, or i may be overtaken by its nemesis. but if i am faithful in my work the reward cannot be withheld from me. the obscure workers who, knowing that they will never earn renown yet feel an honourable pride in doing their work faithfully, may be likened to the benevolent who feel a noble delight in performing generous actions which will never be known to be theirs, the only end they seek in such actions being the good which is wrought for others, and their delight being the sympathy with others. i should be ashamed to insist on truths so little likely to be disputed, did they not point directly at the great source of bad literature, which, as was said in our first chapter, springs from a want of proper moral guidance rather than from deficiency of talent. the principle of sincerity comprises all those qualities of courage, patience, honesty, and simplicity which give momentum to talent, and determine successful literature. it is not enough to have the eye to see; there must also be the courage to express what the eye has seen, and the steadfastness of a trust in truth. insight, imagination, grace of style are potent; but their power is delusive unless sincerely guided. if any one should object that this is a truism, the answer is ready: writers disregard its truth, as traders disregard the truism of honesty being the best policy. nay, as even the most upright men are occasionally liable to swerve from the truth, so the most upright authors will in some passages desert a perfect sincerity; yet the ideal of both is rigorous truth. men who are never flagrantly dishonest are at times unveracious in small matters, colouring or suppressing facts with a conscious purpose; and writers who never stole an idea nor pretended to honours for which they had not striven, may be found lapsing into small insincerities, speaking a language which is not theirs, uttering opinions which they expect to gain applause rather than the opinions really believed by them. but if few men are perfectly and persistently sincere, sincerity is nevertheless the only enduring strength. the principle is universal, stretching from the highest purposes of literature down to its smallest details. it underlies the labour of the philosopher, the investigator, the moralist, the poet, the novelist, the critic, the historian, and the compiler. it is visible in the publication of opinions, in the structure of sentences, and in the fidelity of citations. men utter insincere thoughts, they express themselves in echoes and affectations, and they are careless or dishonest in their use of the labours of others, all the time believing in the virtue of sincerity, all the time trying to make others believe honesty to be the best policy. let us glance for a moment at the most important applications of the principle. a man must be himself convinced if he is to convince others. the prophet must be his own disciple, or he will make none. enthusiasm is contagious: belief creates belief. there is no influence issuing from unbelief or from languid acquiescence. this is peculiarly noticeable in art, because art depends on sympathy for its influence, and unless the artist has felt the emotions he depicts we remain unmoved: in proportion to the depth of his feeling is our sympathetic response; in proportion to the shallowness or falsehood of his presentation is our coldness or indifference. many writers who have been fond of quoting the si vis me flere of horace have written as if they did not believe a word of it; for they have been silent on their own convictions, suppressed their own experience, and falsified their own feelings to repeat the convictions and fine phrases of another. i am sorry that my experience assures me that many of those who will read with complete assent all here written respecting the power of sincerity, will basely desert their allegiance to the truth the next time they begin to write; and they will desert it because their misguided views of literature prompt them to think more of what the public is likely to applaud than of what is worth applause; unfortunately for them their estimation of this likelihood is generally based on a very erroneous assumption of public wants: they grossly mistake the taste they pander to. in all sincere speech there is power, not necessarily great power, but as much as the speaker is capable of. speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent. it can be of no good that you should tell in your "clever" feeble way what another has already told us with the dynamic energy of conviction. if you can tell us something that your own eyes have seen, your own mind has thought, your own heart has felt, you will have power over us, and all the real power that is possible for you. if what you have seen is trivial, if what you have thought is erroneous, if what you have felt is feeble, it would assuredly be better that you should not speak at all; but if you insist on speaking sincerity will secure the uttermost of power. the delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected. thus although it may not be possible for any introspection to discover whether we have genius or effective power, it is quite possible to know whether we are trading upon borrowed capital, and whether the eagle's feathers have been picked up by us, or grow from our own wings. i hear some one of my young readers exclaim against the disheartening tendency of what is here said. ambitious of success, and conscious that he has no great resources within his own experience, he shrinks from the idea of being thrown upon his naked faculty and limited resources, when he feels himself capable of dexterously using the resources of others, and so producing an effective work. "why," he asks, "must i confine myself to my own small experience, when i feel persuaded that it will interest no one? why express the opinions to which my own investigations have led me when i suspect that they are incomplete, perhaps altogether erroneous, and when i know that they will not be popular because they are unlike those which have hitherto found favour? your restrictions would reduce two-thirds of our writers to silence!" this reduction would, i suspect, be welcomed by every one except the gagged writers; but as the idea of its being operative is too chimerical for us to entertain it, and as the purpose of these pages is to expound the principles of success and failure, not to make quixotic onslaughts on the windmills of stupidity and conceit, i answer my young interrogator: "take warning and do not write. unless you believe in yourself, only noodles will believe in you, and they but tepidly. if your experience seems trivial to you, it must seem trivial to us. if your thoughts are not fervid convictions, or sincere doubts, they will not have the power of convictions and doubts. to believe in yourself is the first step; to proclaim your belief the next. you cannot assume the power of another. no jay becomes an eagle by borrowing a few eagle feathers. it is true that your sincerity will not be a guarantee of power. you may believe that to be important and novel which we all recognise as trivial and old. you may be a madman, and believe yourself a prophet. you may be a mere echo, and believe yourself a voice. these are among the delusions against which none of us are protected. but if sincerity is not necessarily a guarantee of power, it is a necessary condition of power, and no genius or prophet can exist without it." "the highest merit we ascribe to moses, plato, and milton," says emerson, "is that they set at nought books and traditions, and spoke not what men thought, but what they thought. a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within; more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. in every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." it is strange that any one who has recognised the individuality of all works of lasting influence, should not also recognise the fact that his own individuality ought to be steadfastly preserved. as emerson says in continuation, "great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. they teach us to abide by our spontaneous impressions with good-humoured inflexibility, then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense, precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our opinion from another." accepting the opinions of another and the tastes of another is very different from agreement in opinion and taste. originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism. whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crochet-monger and an eccentric. whether the public will feel its truth and beauty at once, or after long years, or never cease to regard it as paradox and ugliness, no man can foresee; enough for you to know that you have done your best, have been true to yourself, and that the utmost power inherent in your work has been displayed. an orator whose purpose is to persuade men must speak the things they wish to hear; an orator, whose purpose is to move men, must also avoid disturbing the emotional effect by any obtrusion of intellectual antagonism; but an author whose purpose is to instruct men, who appeals to the intellect, must be careless of their opinions, and think only of truth. it will often be a question when a man is or is not wise in advancing unpalateable opinions, or in preaching heresies; but it can never be a question that a man should be silent if unprepared to speak the truth as he conceives it. deference to popular opinion is one great source of bad writing, and is all the more disastrous because the deference is paid to some purely hypothetical requirement. when a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent. he may be excused if he shrink from the lurid glory of martyrdom; he may be justified in not placing himself in a position of singularity. he may even be commended for not helping to perplex mankind with doubts which he feels to be founded on limited and possibly erroneous investigation. but if allegiance to truth lays no stern command upon him to speak out his immature dissent, it does lay a stern command not to speak out hypocritical assent. there are many justifications of silence; there can be none of insincerity. nor is this less true of minor questions; it applies equally to opinions on matters of taste and personal feeling. why should i echo what seem to me the extravagant praises of raphael's "transfiguration," when, in truth, i do not greatly admire that famous work ? there is no necessity for me to speak on the subject at all; but if i do speak, surely it is to utter my impressions, and not to repeat what others have uttered. here, then, is a dilemma; if i say what i really feel about this work, after vainly endeavouring day after day to discover the transcendent merits discovered by thousands (or at least proclaimed by them), there is every likelihood of my incurring the contempt of connoisseurs, and of being reproached with want of taste in art. this is the bugbear which scares thousands. for myself, i would rather incur the contempt of connoisseurs than my own; the repreach of defective taste is more endurable than the reproach of insincerity. suppose i am deficient in the requisite knowledge and sensibility, shall i be less so by pretending to admire what really gives me no exquisite enjoyment? will the pleasure i feel in pictures be enhanced because other men consider me right in my admlration, or diminished because they consider me wrong? [i have never thoroughly understood the painful anxiety of people to be shielded against the dishonouring suspicion of not rightly appreciating pictures, even when the very phrases they use betray their ignorance and insensibility. many will avow their indifference to music, and almost boast of their ignorance of science; will sneer at abstract theories, and profess the most tepid interest in history, who would feel it an unpardonable insult if you doubted their enthusiasm for painting and the "old masters" (by them secretly identified with the brown masters). it is an insincerity fostered by general pretence. each man is afraid to declare his real sentiments in the presence of others equally timid. massive authority overawes genuine feeling]. the opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed. there is something noble in the submission to a great renown, which makes all reverence a healthy attitude if it be genuine. when i think of the immense fame of raphael, and of how many high and delicate minds have found exquisite delight even in the "transfiguration," and especially when i recall how others of his works have affected me, it is natural to feel some diffidence in opposing the judgment of men whose studies have given them the best means of forming that judgment--a diffidence which may keep me silent on the matter. to start with the assumption that you are right, and all who oppose you are fools, cannot be a safe method. nor in spite of a conviction that much of the admiration expressed for the "transfiguration" is lip-homage and tradition, ought the non-admiring to assume that all of it is insincere. it is quite compatible with modesty to be perfectly independent, and with sincerity to be respectful to the opinions and tastes of others. if you express any opinion, you are bound to express your real opinion; let critics and admirers utter what dithyrambs they please. were this terror of not being thought correct in taste once got rid of, how many stereotyped judgments on books and pictures would be broken up! and the result of this sincerity would be some really valuable criticism. in the presence of raphael's "sistine madonna," titian's "peter the martyr," or masaccio's great frescoes in the brancacci chapel, one feels as if there had been nothing written about these mighty works, so little does any eulogy discriminate the elements of their profound effects, so little have critics expressed their own thoughts and feelings. yet every day some wandering connoisseur stands before these pictures, and at once, without waiting to let them sink deep into his mind, discovers all the merits which are stereotyped in the criticisms, and discovers nothing else. he does not wait to feel, he is impatient to range himself with men of taste; he discards all genuine impressions, replacing them with vague conceptions of what he is expected to see. inasmuch as success must be determined by the relation between the work and the public, the sincerity which leads a man into open revolt against established opinions may seem to be an obstacle. indeed, publishers, critics, and friends are always loud in their prophecies against originality and independence on this very ground; they do their utmost to stifle every attempt at novelty, because they fix their eyes upon a hypothetical public taste, and think that only what has already been proved successful can again succeed; forgetting that whatever has once been done need not be done over again, and forgetting that what is now commonplace was once originality. there are cases in which a disregard of public opinion will inevitably call forth opprobrium or neglect; but there is no case in which sincerity is not strength. if i advance new views in philosophy or theology, i cannot expect to have many adherents among minds altogether unprepared for such views; yet it is certain that even those who most fiercely oppose me will recognise the power of my voice if it is not a mere echo; and the very novelty will challenge attention, and at last gain adherents if my views have any real insight. at any rate the point to be considered is this, that whether the novel views excite opposition or applause, the one condition of their success is that they be believed in by the propagator. the public can only be really moved by what is genuine. even an error if believed in will have greater force than an insincere truth. lip-advocacy only rouses lip-homage. it is belief which gives momentum. nor is it any serious objection to what is here said, that insincerity and timid acquiescence in the opinion and tastes of thc public do often gain applause and temporary success. sanding the sugar is not immediately unprofitable. there is an unpleasant popularity given to falsehood in this world of ours; but we love the truth notwithstanding, and with a more enduring love. who does not know what it is to listen to public speakers pouring forth expressions of hollow belief and sham enthusiasm, snatching at commonplaces with a fervour as of faith, emphasising insincerities as if to make up by emphasis what is wanting in feeling, all the while saying not only what they do not believe, but what the listeners know they do not believe, and what the listeners, though they roar assent, do not themselves believe--a turbulence of sham, the very noise of which stuns the conscience? is such an orator really enviable, although thunders of applause may have greeted his efforts? is that success, although the newspapers all over the kingdom may be reporting the speech? what influence remains when the noise of the shouts has died away? whereas, if on the same occasion one man gave utterance to a sincere thought, even if it were not a very wise thought, although the silence of the public--perhaps its hisses--may have produced an impression of failure, yet there is success, for the thought will re-appear and mingle with the thoughts of men to be adopted or combated by them, and may perhaps in a few years mark out the speaker as a man better worth listening to than the noisy orator whose insincerity was so much cheered. the same observation applies to books. an author who waits upon the times, and utters only what he thinks the world will like to hear, who sails with the stream, admiring everything which it is "correct taste" to admire, despising everything which has not yet received that hall-mark, sneering at the thoughts of a great thinker not yet accepted as such, and slavishly repeating the small phrases of a thinker who has gained renown, flippant and contemptuous towards opinions which he has not taken the trouble to understand, and never venturing to oppose even the errors of men in authority, such an author may indeed by dint of a certain dexterity in assorting the mere husks of opinion gain the applause of reviewers, who will call him a thinker, and of indolent men and women who will pronounce him "so clever ;" but triumphs of this kind are like oratorical triumphs after dinner. every autumn the earth is strewed with the dead leaves of such vernal successes. i would not have the reader conclude that because i advocate plain-speaking even of unpopular views, i mean to imply that originality and sincerity are always in opposition to public opinion. there are many points both of doctrine and feeling in which the world is not likely to be wrong. but in all cases it is desirable that men should not pretend to believe opinions which they really reject, or express emotions they do not feel. and this rule is universal. even truthful and modest men will sometimes violate the rule under the mistaken idea of being eloquent by means of the diction of eloquence. this is a source of bad literature. there are certain views in religion, ethics, and politics, which readily lend themselves to eloquence, because eloquent men have written largely on them, and the temptation to secure this facile effect often seduces men to advocate these views in preference to views they really see to be more rational. that this eloquence at second-hand is but feeble in its effect, does not restrain others from repeating it. experience never seems to teach them that grand speech comes only from grand thoughts, passionate speech from passionate emotions. the pomp and roll of words, the trick of phrase, the rhytlnn and the gesture of an orator, may all be imitated, but not his eloquence. no man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so. trying leads to the vice of "fine writing"--the plague-spot of literature, not only unhealthy in itself, and vulgarising the grand language which should be reserved for great thoughts, but encouraging that tendency to select only those views upon which a spurious enthusiasm can most readily graft the representative abstractions and stirring suggestions which will move public applause. the "fine writer" will always prefer the opinion which is striking to the opinion which is true. he frames his sentences by the ear, and is only dissatisfied with them when their cadences are ill-distributed, or their diction is too familiar. it seldom occurs to him that a sentence should accurately express his meaning and no more; indeed there is not often a definite meaning to be expressed, for the thought which arose vanished while he tried to express it, and the sentence, instead of being determined by and moulded on a thought, is determined by some verbal suggestion. open any book or periodical, and see how frequently the writer does not, cannot, mean what he says; and you will observe that in general the defect does not arise from any poverty in our language, but from the habitual carelessness which allows expressions to be written down unchallenged provided they are sufficiently harmonious, and not glaringly inadequate. the slapdash insincerity of modern style entirely sets at nought the first principle of writing, which is accuracy. the art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind. endeavour to be faithful, and if there is any beauty in your thought, your style will be beautiful; if there is any real emotion to express, the expression will be moving. never rouge your style. trust to your native pallor rather than to cosmetics. try to make us see what you see and to feel what you feel, and banish from your mind whatever phrases others may have used to express what was in their thoughts, but is not in yours. have you never observed what a light impression writers have produced, in spite of a profusion of images, antitheses, witty epigrams, and rolling periods, whereas some simpler style, altogether wanting in such "brilliant passage," has gained the attention and respect of thousands? whatever is stuck on as ornament affects us as ornament; we do not think an old hag young and handsome because the jewels flash from her brow and bosom; if we envy her wealth, we do not admire her beauty. what "fine writing" is to prosaists, insincere imagery is to poets: it is introduced for effect, not used as expression. to the real poet an image comes spontaneously, or if it comes as an afterthought, it is chosen because it expresses his meaning and helps to paint the picture which is in his mind, not because it is beautiful in itself. it is a symbol, not an ornament. whether the image rise slowly before the mind during contemplation, or is seen in the same flash which discloses the picture, in each case it arises by natural association, and is seen, not sought. the inferior poet is dissatisfied with what he sees, and casts about in search after something more striking. he does not wait till an image is borne in upon the tide of memory, he seeks for an image that will be picturesque; and being without the delicate selective instinct which guides the fine artist, he generally chooses something which we feel to be not exactly in its right place. he thus-- "with gold and silver covers every part, and hides with ornament his want of art." be true to your own soul, and do not try to express the thought of another. "if some people," says ruskin, "really see angels where others see only empty space, let them paint angels: only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic." unhappily this is precisely what so many will attempt, inspired by the success of the angelic painter. nor will the failure of others warn them. whatever is sincerely felt or believed, whatever forms part of the imaginative experience, and is not simply imitation or hearsay, may fitly be given to the world, and will always maintain an infinite superiority over imitative splendour; because although it by no means follows that whatever has formed part of the artist's experience must be impressive, or can do without artistic presentation, yet his artistic power will always be greater over his own material than over another's. emerson has well remarked "that those facts, words, persons which dwell in a man's memory without his being able to say why, remain because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. they are symbols of value to him as they can interpret parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the conventional images of books and other minds. what attracts my attention shall have it; as i will go to the man who knocks at my door while a thousand persons as worthy go by it to whom i give no regard. it is enough that these particulars speak to me. a few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, faces, a few incidents have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance if you measure them by ordinary standards. they relate to your gift. let them have their weight, and do not reject them, or cast about for illustrations and facts more usual in literature." in the notes to the last edition of his poems, wordsworth specified the particular occasions which furnished him with particular images. it was the things he had seen which he put into his verses; and that is why they affect us. it matters little whether the poet draws his images directly from present experience, or indirectly from memory--whether the sight of the slow-sailing swan, that "floats double swan and shadow" be at once transferred to the scene of the poem he is writing, or come back upon him in after years to complete some picture in his mind; enough that the image be suggested, and not sought. the sentence from ruskin, quoted just now, will guard against the misconception that a writer, because told to rely on his own experience, is enjoined to forego the glory and delight of creation even of fantastic types. he is only told never to pretend to see what he has not seen. he is urged to follow imagination in her most erratic course, though like a will-o'-wisp she lead over marsh and fen away from the haunts of mortals; but not to pretend that he is following a will-o'-wisp when his vagrant fancy never was allured by one. it is idle to paint fairies and goblins unless you have a genuine vision of them which forces you to paint them. they are poetical objects, but only to poetic minds. "be a plain photographer if you possibly can," says ruskin, "if nature meant you for anything else she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet; go on quietly with your hard camp work, and the spirit will come to you as it did to eldad and medad if you are appointed to it." yes: if you are appointed to it; if your faculties are such that this high success is possible, it will come, provided the faculties are employed with sincerity. otherwise it cannot come. no insincere effort can secure it. if the advice i give to reject every insincerity in writing seem cruel, because it robs the writer of so many of his effects---if it seem disheartening to earnestly warn a man not to try to be eloquent, but only to be eloquent when his thoughts move with an impassioned largo--if throwing a writer back upon his naked faculty seem especially distasteful to those who have a painful misgiving that their faculty is small, and that the uttermost of their own power would be far from impressive, my answer is that i have no hope of dissuading feeble writers from the practice of insincerity, but as under no circumstances can they become good writers and achieve success, my analysis has no reference to them, my advice has no aim at them. it is to the young and strong, to the ambitious and the earnest, that my words are addressed. it is to wipe the film from their eyes, and make them see, as they will see directly the truth is placed before them, how easily we are all seduced into greater or less insincerity of thought, of feeling, and of style, either by reliance on other writers, from whom we catch the trick of thought and turn of phrase, or from some preconceived view of what the public will prefer. it is to the young and strong i say: watch vigilantly every phrase you write, and assure yourself that it expresses what you mean; watch vigilantly every thought you express, and assure yourself that it is yours, not another's; you may share it with another, but you must not adopt it from him for the nonce. of course, if you are writing humorously or dramatically, you will not be expected to write your own serious opinions. humour may take its utmost licence, yet be sincere. the dramatic genius may incarnate itself in a hundred shapes, yet in each it will speak what it feels to be the truth. if you are imaginatively representing the feelings of another, as in some playful exaggeration or some dramatic personation, the truth required of you is imaginative truth, not your personal views and feelings. but when you write in your own person you must be rigidly veracious, neither pretending to admire what you do not admire, or to despise what in secret you rather like, nor surcharging your admiration and enthusiasm to bring you into unison with the public chorus. this vigilance may render literature more laborious; but no one ever supposed that success was to be had on easy terms; and if you only write one sincere page where you might have written twenty insincere pages, the one page is worth writing--it is literature. sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less difficult than is commonly supposed. to take a trifling example: if for some reason i cannot, or do not, choose to verify a quotation which may be useful to my purpose, what is to prevent my saying that the quotation is taken at second-hand? it is true, if my quotations are for the most part second-hand and are acknowledged as such, my erudition will appear scanty. but it will only appear what it is. why should i pretend to an erudition which is not mine? sincerity forbids it. prudence whispers that the pretence is, after all, vain, because those, and those alone, who can rightly estimate erudition will infallibly detect my pretence, whereas those whom i have deceived were not worth deceiving. yet in spite of sincerity and prudence, how shamelessly men compile second-hand references, and display in borrowed footnotes a pretence of labour and of accuracy! i mention this merely to show how, even in the humbler class of compilers, the principle of sincerity may find fit illustrations, and how honest work, even in references, belongs to the same category as honest work in philosophy or poetry. editor. chapter v. the principle of beauty. it is not enough that a man has clearness of vision, and reliance on sincerity, he must also have the art of expression, or he will remain obscure. many have had "the visionary eye, the faculty to see the thing that hath been as the thing which is," but either from native defect, or the mistaken bias of education, have been frustrated in the attempt to give their visions beautiful or intelligible shape. the art which could give them shape is doubtless intimately dependent on clearness of eye and sincerity of purpose, but it is also something over and above these, and comes from an organic aptitude not less special, when possessed with fulness, than the aptitude for music or drawing. any instructed person can write, as any one can learn to draw; but to write well, to express ideas with felicity and force, is not an accomplishment but a talent. the power of seizing unapparent relations of things is not always conjoined with the power of selecting the fittest verbal symbols by which they can be made apparent to others: the one is the power of the thinker, the other the power of the writer. "style," says de quincey, "has two separate functions---first, to brighten the intelligibility of a subject which is obscure to the understanding; secondly, to regenerate the normal power and impressiveness of a subject which has become dormant to the sensibilities. . . . . decaying lineaments are to be retraced and faded colouring to be refreshed." to effect these purposes we require a rich verbal memory from which to select the symbols best fitted to call up images in the reader's mind, and we also require the delicate selective instinct to guide us in the choice and arrangement of those symbols, so that the rhythm and cadence may agreeably attune the mind, rendering it receptive to the impressions meant to be communicated. a copious verbal memory, like a copious memory of facts, is only one source of power, and without the high controlling faculty of the artist may lead to diffusive indecision. just as one man, gilted with keen insight, will from a small stock of facts extricate unapparent relations to which others, rich in knowledge, have been blind; so will a writer gifted with a fine instinct select from a narrow range of phrases symbols of beauty and of power utterly beyond the reach of commonplace minds. it is often considered, both by writers and readers, that fine language makes fine writers; yet no one supposes that fine colours make a fine painter. the copia verborum is often a weakness and a snare. as arthur helps says, men use several epithets in the hope that one of them may fit. but the artist knows which epithet does fit, uses that, and rejects the rest. the characteristic weakness of bad writers is inaccuracy: their symbols do not adequately express their ideas. pause but for a moment over their sentences, and you perceive that they are using language at random, the choice being guided rather by some indistinct association of phrases, or some broken echoes of familiar sounds, than by any selection of words to represent ideas. i read the other day of the truck system being "rampant" in a certain district; and every day we may meet with similar echoes of familiar words which betray the flaccid condition of the writer's mind drooping under the labour of expression. except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by style that writers gain distinction, by style they secure their immortality. in a lower sphere many are remarked as writers although they may lay no claim to distinction as thinkers, if they have the faculty of felicitously expressing the ideas of others; and many who are really remarkable as thinkers gain but slight recognition from the public, simply because in them the faculty of expression is feeble. in proportion as the work passes from the sphere of passionless intelligence to that of impassioned intelligence, from the region of demonstration to the region of emotion, the art of style becomes more complex, its necessity more imperious. but even in philosophy and science the art is both subtle and necessary; the choice and arrangement of the fitting symbols, though less difficult than in art, is quite indispensable to success. if the distinction which i formerly drew between the scientific and the artistic tendencies be accepted, it will disclose a corresponding difference in the style which suits a ratiocinative exposition fixing attention on abstract relations, and an emotive exposition fixing attention on objects as related to the feelings. we do not expect the scientific writer to stir our emotions, otherwise than by the secondary influences which arise from our awe and delight at the unveiling of new truths. in his own researches he should extricate himself from the perturbing influences of emotion, and consequently he should protect us from such suggestions in his exposition. feellng too often smites intellect with blindness, and intellect too often paralyses the free play of emotion, not to call for a decisive separation of the two. but this separation is no ground for the disregard of style in works, of pure demonstration--as we shall see by-and-by. the principle of beauty is only another name for style, which is an art, incommunicable as are all other arts, but like them subordinated to laws founded on psychological conditions. the laws constitute the philosophy of criticism; and i shall have to ask the reader's indulgence if for the first time i attempt to expound them scientifically in the chapter to which the present is only an introduction. a knowledge of these laws, even presuming them to be accurately expounded, will no more give a writer the power of felicitous expression than a knowledge of the laws of colour, perspective, and proportion will enable a critic to paint a picture. but all good writing must conform to these laws; all bad writing will be found to violate them. and the utility of the knowledge will be that of a constant monitor, warning the artist of the errors into which he has slipped, or into which he may slip if unwarned. how is it that while every one acknowledges the importance of style, and numerous critics from quinctilian and longinus down to quarterly reviewers have written upon it, very little has been done towards a satisfactory establishment of principles? is it not partly because the critics have seldom held the true purpose of style steadily before their eyes, and still seldomer justified their canons by deducing them from psychological conditions? to my apprehension they seem to have mistaken the real sources of influence, and have fastened attention upon some accidental or collateral details, instead of tracing the direct connection between effects and causes. misled by the splendour of some great renown they have concluded that to write like cicero or to paint like titian must be the pathway to success; which is true in one sense, and profoundly false as they understand it. one pestilent contagious error issued from this misconception, namely, that all maxims confirmed by the practice of the great artists must be maxims for the art; although a close examination might reveal that the practice of these artists may have been the result of their peculiar individualities or of the state of culture at their epoch. a true philosophy of criticism would exhibit in how far such maxims were universal, as founded on laws of human nature, and in how far adaptations to particular individualities. a great talent will discover new methods. a great success ought to put us on the track of new principles. but the fundamental laws of style, resting on the truths of human nature, may be illustrated, they cannot be guaranteed by any individual success. moreover, the strong individuality of the artist will create special modifications of the laws to suit himself, making that excellent or endurable which in other hands would be intolerable. if the purpose of literature be the sincere expression of the individual's own ideas and feelings it is obvious that the cant about the "best models" tends to pervert and obstruct that expression. unless a man thinks and feels precisely after the manner of cicero and titian it is manifestly wrong for him to express himself in their way. he may study in them the principles of effect, and try to surprise some of their secrets, but he should resolutely shun all imitation of them. they ought to be illustrations not authorities, studies not models. the fallacy about models is seen at once if we ask this simple question: will the practice of a great writer justify a solecism in grammar or a confusion in logic? no. then why should it justify any other detail not to be reconciled with universal truth? if we are forced to invoke the arbitration of reason in the one case, we must do so in the other. unless we set aside the individual practice whenever it is irreconcilable with general principles, we shall be unable to discriminate in a successful work those merits which secured from those demerits which accompanied success. now this is precisely the condition in which criticism has always been. it has been formal instead of being psychological: it has drawn its maxims from the works of successful artists, instead of ascertaining the psychological principles involved in the effects of those works. when the perplexed dramatist called down curses on the man who invented fifth acts, he never thought of escaping from his tribulation by writing a play in four acts; the formal canon which made five acts indispensable to a tragedy was drawn from the practice of great dramatists, but there was no demonstration of any psychological demand on the part of the audience for precisely five acts. [english critics are much less pedantic in adherence to "rules" than the french, yet when, many years ago, there appeared a tragedy in three acts, and without a death, these innovations were considered inadmissible; and if the success of the work had been such as to elicit critical discussion, the necessity of five acts and a death would doubtless have been generally insisted on]. although no instructed mind will for a moment doubt the immense advantage of the stimulus and culture derived from a reverent familiarity with the works of our great predecessors and contemperaries, there is a pernicious error which has been fostered by many instructed minds, rising out of their reverence for greatness and their forgetfulness of the ends of literature. this error is the notion of "models," and of fixed canons drawn from the practice of great artists. it substitutes imitation for invention; reproduction of old types instead of the creation of new. there is more bad than good work produced in consequence of the assiduous following of models. and we shall seldom be very wide of the mark if in our estimation of youthful productions we place more reliance on their departures from what has been already done, than on their resemblances to the best artists. an energetic crudity, even a riotous absurdity, has more promise in it than a clever and elegant mediocrity, because it shows that the young man is speaking out of his own heart, and struggling to express himself in his own way rather than in the way he finds in other men's books. the early works of original writers are usually very bad; then succeeds a short interval of imitation in which the influence of some favourite author is distinctly traceable; but this does not last long, the native independence of the mind reasserts itself, and although perhaps academic and critical demands are somewhat disregarded, so that the original writer on account of his very originality receives but slight recognition from the authorities, nevertheless if there is any real power in the voice it soon makes itself felt in the world. there is one word of counsel i would give to young authors, which is that they should be humbly obedient to the truth proclaimed by their own souls, and haughtily indifferent to the remonstrances of critics founded solely on any departure from the truths expressed by others. it by no means follows that because a work is unlike works that have gone before it, therefore it is excellent or even tolerable; it may be original in error or in ugliness; but one thing is certain, that in proportion to its close fidelity to the matter and manner of existing works will be its intrinsic worthlessness. and one of the severest assaults on the fortitude of an unacknowledged writer comes from the knowledge that his critics, with rare exceptions, will judge his work in reference to pre-existing models, and not in reference to the ends of literature and the laws of human nature. he knows that he will be compared with artists whom he ought not to resemble if his work have truth and originality; and finds himself teased with disparaging remarks which are really compliments in their objections. he can comfort himself by his trust in truth and the sincerity of his own work. he may also draw strength from the reflection that the public and posterity may cordially appreciate the work in which constituted authorities see nothing but failure. the history of literature abounds in examples of critics being entirely at fault missing the old familiar landmarks, these guides at once set up a shout of warning that the path has been missed. very noticeable is the fact that of the thousands who have devoted years to the study of the classics, especially to the "niceties of phrase" and "chastity of composition," so much prized in these classics, very few have learned to write with felicity, and not many with accuracy. native incompetence has doubtless largely influenced this result in men who are insensible to the nicer shades of distinction in terms, and want the subtle sense of congruity; but the false plan of studying "models" without clearly understanding the psychological conditions which the effects involve, without seeing why great writing is effective, and where it is merely individual expression, has injured even vigorous minds and paralysed the weak. from a similar mistake hundreds have deceived themselves in trying to catch the trick of phrase peculiar tn some distinguished contemporary. in vain do they imitate the latinisms and antitheses of johnson, the epigrammatic sentences of macaulay, the colloquial ease of thackeray, the cumulative pomp of milton, the diffusive play of de quincey: a few friendly or ignorant reviewers may applaud it as "brilliant writing," but the public remains unmoved. it is imitation, and as such it is lifeless. we see at once the mistake directly we understand that a genuine style is the living body of thought, not a costume that can be put on and off; it is the expression of the writer's mind; it is not less the incarnation of his thoughts in verbal symbols than a picture is the painter's incarnation of his thoughts in symbols of form and colour. a man may, if it please him, dress his thoughts in the tawdry splendour of a masquerade. but this is no more literature than the masquerade is life. no style can be good that is not slncere. it must be the expression of its author's mind. there are, of course, certain elements of composition which must be mastered as a dancer learns his steps, but the style of the writer, like the grace of the dancer, is only made effective by such mastery; it springs from a deeper source. initiation into the rules of construction will save us from some gross errors of composltion, but it will not make a style. still less will imitation of another's manner make one. in our day there are many who imitate macaulay's short sentences, iterations, antitheses, geographical and historical illustrations, and eighteenth century diction, but who accepts them as macaulays? they cannot seize the secret of his charm, because that charm lies in the felicity of his talent, not in the structure of his sentences; in the fulness of his knowledge, not in the character of his illustrations. other men aim at ease and vigour by discarding latinisms, and admitting colloquialisms; but vigour and ease are not to be had on recipe. no study of models, no attention to rules, will give the easy turn, the graceful phrase, the simple word, the fervid movement, or the large clearness; a picturesque talent will express itself in concrete images; a genial nature will smile in pleasant firms and inuendos; a rapid, unhesitating, imperious mind will deliver its quick incisive phrases; a full deliberating mind will overflow in ample paragraphs laden with the weight of parentheses and qualifying suggestions. the style which is good in one case would be vicious in another. the broken rhythm which increases the energy of one style would ruin the largo of another. both are excellencies where both are natural. we are always disagreeably impressed by an obvious imitation of the manner of another, because we feel it to be an insincerity, and also because it withdraws our attention from the thing said, to the way of saying it. and here lies the great lesson writers have to learn--namely, that they should think of the immediate purpose of their writing, which is to convey truths and emotions, in symbols and images, intelligible and suggestive. the racket-player keeps his eye on the ball he is to strike, not on the racket with which he strikes. if the writer sees vividly, and will say honestly what he sees, and how he sees it, he may want something of the grace and felicity of other men, but he will have all the strength and felicity with which nature has endowed him. more than that he cannot attain, and he will fall very short of it in snatching at the grace which is another's. do what he will, he cannot escape from the infirmities of his own mind: the affectation, arrogance, ostentation, hesitation, native in the man will taint his style, no matter how closely he may copy the manner of another. for evil and for good, le style est de l'homme meme. the french critics, who are singularly servile to all established reputations, and whose unreasoning idolatry of their own classics is one of the reasons why their literature is not richer, are fond of declaring with magisterial emphasis that the rules of good taste and the canons of style were fixed once and for ever by their great writers in the seventeenth century. the true ambition of every modern is said to be by careful study of these models to approach (though with no hope of equalling) their chastity and elegance. that a writer of the nineteenth century should express himself in the manner which was admirable in the seventeenth is an absurdity which needs only to be stated. it is not worth refuting. but it never presents itself thus to the french. in their minds it is a lingering remnant of that older superstition which believed the ancients to have discovered all wisdom, so that if we could only surprise the secret of aristotle's thoughts and clearly comprehend the drift of plato's theories (which unhappily was not clear) we should compass all knowledge. how long this superstition lasted cannot accurately be settled; perhaps it is not quite extinct even yet; but we know how little the most earnest students succeeded in surprising the secrets of the universe by reading greek treatises, and how much by studying the universe itself. advancing science daily discredits the superstition; yet the advance of criticism has not yet wholly discredited the parallel superstition in art. the earliest thinkers are no longer considered the wisest, but the earliest artists are still proclaimed the finest. even those who do not believe in this superiority are, for the most part, overawed by tradition and dare not openly question the supremacy of works which in their private convictions hold a very subordinate rank. and this reserve is encouraged by the intemperate scorn of those who question the supremacy without having the knowledge or the sympathy which could fairly appreciate the earlier artists. attacks on the classics by men ignorant of the classical languages tend to perpetuate the superstition. but be the merit of the classics, ancient and modern, what it may, no writer can become a classic by imitating them. the principle of sincerity here ministers to the principle of beauty by forbidding imitation and enforcing rivalry. write what you can, and if you have the grace of felicitous expression or the power of energetic expression your style will be admirable and admired. at any rate see that it be your own, and not another's; on no other terms will the world listen to it. you cannot be eloquent by borrowing from the opulence of another; you cannot be humorous by mimicking the whims of another; what was a pleasant smile dimpling his features becomes a grimace on yours. it will not be supposed that i would have the great writers disregardod, as if nothing were to be learned from them; but the study of great writers should be the study of general principles as illustrated or revealed in these writers; and if properly pursued it will of itself lead to a condemnation of the notion of models. what we may learn from them is a nice discrimination of the symbols which intelligibly express the shades of meaning and kindle emotion. the writer wishes to give his thoughts a literary form. this is for others, not for himself; consequently he must, before all things, desire to be intelligible, and to be so he must adapt his expressions to the mental condition of his audience. if he employs arbitrary symbols, such as old words in new and unexpected senses, he may be clear as daylight to himself, but to others, dark as fog. and the difficulty of original writing lies in this, that what is new and individual must find expression in old symbols. this difficulty can only be mastered by a peculiar talent, strengthened and rendered nimble by practice, and the commerce with original minds. great writers should be our companions if we would learn to write greatly; but no familiarity with their manner will supply the place of native endowment. writers are born, no less than poets, and like poets, they learn to make their native gifts effective. practice, aiding their vigilant sensibility, teaches them, perhaps unconsciously, certain methods of effective presentation, how one arrangement of words carries with it more power than another, how familiar and concrete expressions are demanded in one place, and in another place abstract expressions unclogged with disturbing suggestions. every author thus silently amasses a store of empirical rules, furnished by his own practice, and confirmed by the practice of others. a true philosophy of criticism would reduce these empirical rules to science by ranging them under psychological laws, thus demonstrating the validity of the rules, not in virtue of their having been employed by cicero or addison, by burke or sydney smith, but in virtue of their conformity with the constancies of human nature. the importance of style is generally unsuspected by philosophers and men of science, who are quite aware of its advantage in all departments of belles lettres; and if you allude in their presence to the deplorably defective presentation of the ideas in some work distinguished for its learning, its profundity or its novelty, it is probable that you will be despised as a frivolous setter up of manner over matter, a light-minded dilletante, unfitted for the simple austerities of science. but this is itself a light-minded contempt; a deeper insight would change the tone, and help to remove the disgraceful slovenliness and feebleness of composition which deface the majority of grave works, except those written by frenchmen, who have been taught that composition is an art and that no writer may neglect it. in england and germany, men who will spare no labour in research, grudge all labour in style; a morning is cheerfully devoted to verifying a quotation, by one who will not spare ten minutes to reconstruct a clumsy sentence; a reference is sought with ardour, an appropriate expression in lleu of the inexact phrase which first suggests itself does not seem worth seeking. what are we to say to a man who spends a quarter's income on a diamond pin which he sticks in a greasy cravat? a man who calls public attention on him, and appears in a slovenly undress? am i to bestow applause on some insignificant parade of erudition, and withhold blame from the stupidities of style which surround it? had there been a clear understanding of style as the living body of thought, and not its "dress," which might be more or less ornamental, the error i am noticing would not have spread so widely. but, naturally, when men regarded the grace of style as mere grace of manner, and not as the delicate precision giving form and relief to matter--as mere ornament, stuck on to arrest incurious eyes, and not as effective expression--their sense of the deeper value of matter made them despise such aid. a clearer conception would have rectified this error. the matter is confluent with the manner; and only through the style can thought reach the reader's mind. if the manner is involved, awkward, abrupt, obscure, the reader will either be oppressed with a confused sense of cumbrous material which awaits an artist to give it shape, or he will have the labour thrown upon him of extricating the material and reshaping it in his own mind. how entirely men misconceive the relation of style to thought may be seen in the replies they make when their writing is objected to, or in the ludicrous attempts of clumsy playfulness and tawdry eloquence when they wish to be regarded as writers. "le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse," and the principle of sincerity, not less than the suggestions of taste, will preserve the integrity of each style. a philosopher, an investigator, an historian, or a moralist so far from being required to present the graces of a wit, an essayist, a pamphleteer, or a novelist, would be warned off such ground by the necessity of expressing himself sincerely. pascal, biot, buffon, or laplace are examples of the clearness and beauty with which ideas may be presented wearing all the graces of fine literature, and losing none of the severity of science. bacon, also, having an opulent and active intellect, spontaneously expressed himself in forms of various excellence. but what a pitiable contrast is presented by kant! it is true that kant having a much narrower range of sensibility could have no such ample resource of expression, and he was wise in not attempting to rival the splendour of the novum organum; but he was not simply unwise, he was extremely culpable in sending forth his thoughts as so much raw material which the public was invited to put into shape as it could. had he been aware that much of his bad writing was imperfect thinking, and always imperfect adaptation of means to ends, he might have been induced to recast it into more logical and more intelligible sentences, which would have stimulated the reader's mind as much as they now oppress it. nor had kant the excuse of a subject too abstruse for clear presentation. the examples of descartes, spinoza, hobbes, and hume are enough to show how such subjects can be mastered, and the very implication of writing a book is that the writer has mastered his material and can give it intelligible form. a grave treatise, dealing with a narrow range of subjects or moving amid severe abstractions, demands a gravity and severity of style which is dissimilar to that demanded by subjects of a wider scope or more impassioned impulse; but abstract philosophy has its appropriate elegance no less than mathematics. i do not mean that each subject should necessarily be confined to one special mode of treatment, in the sense which was understood when people spoke of the "dignity of history," and so forth. the style must express the writer's mind; and as variously constituted minds will treat one and the same subject, there will be varieties in their styles. if a severe thinker be also a man of wit, like bacon, hobbes, pascal, or galileo, the wit will flash its sudden illuminations on the argument; but if he be not a man of wit, and condescends to jest under the impression that by jesting he is giving an airy grace to his argument, we resent it as an impertinence. i have throughout used style in the narrower sense of expression rather than in the wider sense of "treatment" which is sometimes affixed to it. the mode of treating a subject is also no doubt the writer's or the artist's way of expressing what is in his mind, but this is style in the more general sense, and does not admit of being reduced to laws apart from those of vision and sincerity. a man necessarily sees a subject in a particular light--ideal or grotesque, familiar or fanciful, tragic or humorous, he may wander into fairy-land, or move amid representative abstractions; he may follow his wayward fancy in its grotesque combinations, or he may settle down amid the homeliest details of daily life. but having chosen he must be true to his choice. he is not allowed to represent fairy-land as if it resembled walworth, nor to paint walworth in the colours of venice. the truth of consistency must be preserved in his treatment, truth in art meaning of course only truth within the limits of the art; thus the painter may produce the utmost relief he can by means of light and shade, but is peremptorily forbidden to use actual solidities on a plane surface. he must represent gold by colour, not by sticking gold on his figures. [this was done with naivete by the early painters, and is really very effective in the pictures of gentile da fabriano--that paul veronese of the fifteenth century--as the reader will confess if he has seen the "adoration of the magi," in the florence academy; but it could not be tolerated now]. our applause is greatly determined by our sense of difficulty overcome, and to stick gold on a picture is an avoidance of the difficulty of painting it. truth of presentation has an inexplicable charm for us, and throws a halo round even ignoble objects. a policeman idly standing at the corner of the street, or a sow lazily sleeping against the sun, are not in nature objects to excite a thrill of delight, but a painter may, by the cunning of his art, represent them so as to delight every spectator. the same objects represented by an inferior painter will move only a languid interest; by a still more inferior painter they may be represented so as to please none but the most uncultivated eye. each spectator is charmed in proportion to his recognition of a triumph over difficulty which is measured by the degree of verisimilitude. the degrees are many. in the lowest the pictured object is so remote from the reality that we simply recognise what the artist meant to represent. in like manner we recognise in poor novels and dramas what the authors mean to be characters, rather than what our experience of life suggests as characteristic. not only do we apportion our applause according to the degree of versimilitude attained, but also according to the difficulty each involves. it is a higher difficulty, and implies a nobler art to represent the movement and complexity of life and emotion than to catch the fixed lineaments of outward aspect. to paint a policeman idly lounging at the street corner with such verisimilitude that we are pleased with the representation, admiring the solidity of the figure, the texture of the clothes, and the human aspect of the features, is so difficult that we loudly applaud the skill which enables an artist to imitate what in itself is uninteresting; and if the imitation be carried to a certain degree of verisimilitude the picture may be of immense value. but no excellence of representation can make this high art. to carry it into the region of high art, another and far greater difficulty must be overcome; the man must be represented under the strain of great emotion, and we must recognise an equal truthfulness in the subtle indications of great mental agitation, the fleeting characters of which are far less easy to observe and to reproduce, than the stationary characters of form and costume. we may often observe how the novelist or dramatist has tolerable success so long as his personages are quiet, or moved only by the vulgar motives of ordinary life, and how fatally uninteresting, because unreal, these very personages become as soon as they are exhibited under the stress of emotion: their language ceases at once to be truthful, and becomes stagey; their conduct is no longer recognisable as that of human beings such as we have known. here we note a defect of treatment, a mingling of styles, arising partly from defect of vision, and partly from an imperfect sincerity; and success in art will always be found dependent on integrity of style. the dutch painters, so admirable in their own style, would become pitiable on quitting it for a higher. but i need not enter at any length upon this subject of treatment. obviously a work must have charm or it cannot succeed; and the charm will depend on very complex conditions in the artist's mind. what treatment is in art, composition is in philosophy. the general conception of the point of view, and the skilful distribution of the masses, so as to secure the due preparation, development, and culmination, without wasteful prodigality or confusing want of symmetry, constitute composition, which is to the structure of a treatise what style--in the narrower sense--is to the structure of sentences. how far style is reducible to law will be examined in the next chapter. editor. the laws of style. from what was said in the preceding chapter, the reader will understand that our present inquiry is only into the laws which regulate the mechanism of style. in such an analysis all that constitutes the individuality, the life, the charm of a great writer, must escape. but we may dissect style, as we dissect an organism, and lay bare the fundamental laws by which each is regulated. and this analogy may indicate the utility of our attempt; the grace and luminousness of a happy talent will no more be acquired by a knowledge of these laws, than the force and elasticity of a healthy organism will be given by a knowledge of anatomy; but the mistakes in style, and the diseases of the organism, may be often avoided, and sometimes remedied, by such knowledge. on a subject like this, which has for many years engaged the researches of many minds, i shall not be expected to bring forward discoveries; indeed, novelty would not unjustly be suspected of fallacy. the only claim my exposition can have on the reader's attention is that of being an attempt to systematise what has been hitherto either empirical observation, or the establishment of critical rules on a false basis. i know but of one exception to this sweeping censure, and that is the essay on the philosophy of style, by mr. herbert spencer, [spencer's essays: scientific, political, and speculative. first series. ]. where for the first time, i believe, the right method was pursued of seeking in psychological conditions for the true laws of expression. the aims of literature being instruction and delight, style must in varying degrees appeal to our intellect and our sensibilities, sometimes reaching the intellect through the presentation of simple ideas, and at others through the agitating influence of emotions; sometimes awakening the sensibilities through the reflexes of ideas, and sometimes through a direct appeal. a truth may be nakedly expressed so as to stir the intellect alone; or it may be expressed in terms which, without disturbing its clearness, may appeal to our sensibility by their harmony or energy. it is not possible to distinguish the combined influences of clearness, movement, and harmony, so as to assign to each its relative effect; and if in the ensuing pages one law is isolated from another, this must be understood as an artifice inevitable in such investigations. there are five laws under which all the conditions of style may be grouped.-- . the law of economy. . the law of simplicity. . the law of sequence. , the law of climax. . the law of variety. it would be easy to reduce these five to three, and range all considerations under economy, climax, and variety; or we might amplify the divisions; but there are reasons of convenience as well as symmetry which give a preference to the five. i had arranged them thus for convenience some years ago, and i now find they express the equivalence of the two great factors of style---intelligence and sensibility. two out of the five, economy and simplicity, more specially derive their significance from intellectual needs; another two, climax and variety, from emotional needs; and between these is the law of sequence, which is intermediate in its nature, and may be claimed with equal justice by both. the laws of force and the laws of pleasure can only be provisionally isolated in our inquiry; in style they are blended. the following brief estimate of each considers it as an isolated principle undetermined by any other. . the law of economy. our inquiry is scientific, not empirical; it therefore seeks the psychological basis for every law, endeavouring to ascertain what condition of a reader's receptivity determines the law. fortunately for us, in the case of the first and most important law the psychological basis is extremely simple, and may be easily appreciated by a reference to its analogue in mechanics. what is the first object of a machine? effective work--vis viva. every means by which friction can be reduced, and the force thus economised be rendered available, necessarily solicits the constructor's care. he seeks as far as possible to liberate the motion which is absorbed in the working of the machine, and to use it as vis viva. he knows that every superfluous detail, every retarding influence, is at the cost of so much power, and is a mechanical defect though it may perhaps be an aesthetic beauty or a practical convenience. he may retain it because of the beauty, because of the convenience, but he knows the price of effective power at which it is obtained. and thus it stands with style. the first object of a writer is effective expression, the power of communicating distinct thoughts and emotional suggestions. he has to overcome the friction of ignorance and pre-occupation. he has to arrest a wandering attention, and to clear away the misconceptions which cling around verbal symbols. words are not llke iron and wood, coal and water, invariable in their properties, calculable in their effects. they are mutable in their powers, deriving force and subtle variations of force from very trifling changes of position; colouring and coloured by the words which precede and succeed; significant or insignificant from the powers of rhythm and cadence. it is the writer's art so to arrange words that they shall suffer the least possible retardation from the inevitable friction of the reader's mind. the analogy of a machine is perfect. in both cases the object is to secure the maximum of disposable force, by diminishing the amount absorbed in the working. obviously, if a reader is engaged in extricating the meaning from a sentence which ought to have reflected its meaning as in a mirror, the mental energy thus employed is abstracted from the amount of force which he has to bestow on the subject; he has mentally to form anew the sentence which has been clumsily formed by the writer; he wastes, on interpretation of the symbols, force which might have been concentrated on meditation of the propositions. this waste is inappreciable in writing of ordinary excellence, and on subjects not severely tasking to the attention; but if inappreciable, it is always waste; and in bad writing, especially on topics of philosophy and science, the waste is important. and it is this which greatly narrows the circle for serious works. interest in the subjects treated of may not be wanting; but the abundant energy is wanting which to the fatigue of consecutive thinking will add the labour of deciphering the language. many of us are but too familiar with the fatigue of reconstructing unwieldy sentences in which the clauses are not logically dependent, nor the terms free from equivoque; we know what it is to have to hunt for the meaning hidden in a maze of words; and we can understand the yawning indifference which must soon settle upon every reader of such writing, unless he has some strong external impulse or abundant energy. economy dictates that the meaning should be presented in a form which claims the least possible attention to itself as form, unless when that form is part of the writer's object, and when the simple thought is less important than the manner of presenting it. and even when the manner is playful or impassioned, the law of economy still presides, and insists on the rejection of whatever is superfluous. only a delicate susceptibility can discriminate a superfluity in passages of humour or rhetoric; but elsewhere a very ordinary understanding can recognise the clauses and the epithets which are out of place, and in excess, retarding or confusing the direct appreciation of the thought. if we have written a clumsy or confused sentence, we shall often find that the removal of an awkward inversion liberates the ides, or that the modification of a cadence increases the effect. this is sometimes strikingly seen at the rehearsal of a play: a passage which has fallen flat upon the ear is suddenly brightened into effectiveness by the removal of a superfluous phrase, which, by its retarding influence, had thwarted the declamatory crescendo. young writers may learn something of the secrets of economy by careful revision of their own compositions, and by careful dissection of passages selected both from good and bad writers. they have simply to strike out every word, every clause, and every sentence, the removal of which will not carry away any of the constituent elements of the thought. having done this, let them compare the revised with the unrevised passages, and see where the excision has improved, and where it has injured, the effect. for economy, although a primal law, is not the only law of style. it is subject to various limitations from the pressure of other laws; and thus the removal of a trifling superfluity will not be justified by a wise economy if that loss entails a dissonance, or prevents a climax, or robs the expression of its ease and variety. economy is rejection of whatever is superfluous; it is not miserliness. a liberal expenditure is often the best economy, and is always so when dictated by a generous impulse, not by a prodigal carelessness or ostentatious vanity. that man would greatly err who tried to make his style effective by stripping it of all redundancy and ornament, presenting it naked before the indifferent public. perhaps the very redundancy which he lops away might have aided the reader to see the thought more clearly, because it would have kept the thought a little longer before his mind, and thus prevented him from hurrying on to the next while this one was still imperfectly conceived. as a general rule, redundancy is injurious; and the reason of the rule will enable us to discriminate when redundancy is injurious and when beneficial. it is injurious when it hampers the rapid movement of the reader's mind, diverting his attention to some collateral detail. but it is beneficial when its retarding influence is such as only to detain the mind longer on the thought, and thus to secure the fuller effect of the thought. for rapid reading is often imperfect reading. the mind is satisfied with a glimpse of that which it ought to have steadily contemplated; and any artifice by which the thought can be kept long enough before the mind, may indeed be a redundancy as regards the meaning, but is an economy of power. thus we see that the phrase or the clause which we might be tempted to lop away because it threw no light upon the proposition, would be retained by a skilful writer because it added power. you may know the character of a redundancy by this one test: does it divert the attention, or simply retard it? the former is always a loss of power; the latter is sometlmes a gain of power. the art of the writer consists in rejecting all redundancies that do not conduce to clearness. the shortest sentences are not necessarily the clearest. concision gives energy, but it also adds restraint. the labour of expanding a terse sentence to its full meaning is often greater than the labour of picking out the meaning from a diffuse and loitering passage. tacitus is more tiresome than cicero. there are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification. an example may be seen in the passage which has been a favourite illustration from the days of longinus to our own. "god said: let there be light! and there was light." this is a conception of power so calm and simple that it needs only to be presented in the fewest and the plainest words, and would be confused or weakened by any suggestion of accessories. let us amplify the expression in the redundant style of miscalled eloquent writers: "god, in the magnificent fulness of creative energy, exclaimed: let there be light! and lo! the agitating fiat immediately went forth, and thus in one indivisible moment the whole universe was illumlned." we have here a sentence which i am certain many a writer would, in secret, prefer to the masterly plainness of genesis. it is not a sentence which would have captivated critics. although this sentence from genesis is sublime in its simplicity, we are not to conclude that simple sentences are uniformly the best, or that a style composed of propositions briefly expressed would obey a wise economy. the reader's pleasure must not be forgotten; and he cannot be pleased by a style which always leaps and never flows. a harsh, abrupt, and dislocated manner irritates and perplexes him by its sudden jerks. it is easier to write short sentences than to read them. an easy, fluent, and harmonious phrase steals unobtrusively upon the mind, and allows the thought to expand quietly like an opening flower. but the very suasiveness of harmonious writing needs to be varied lest it become a drowsy monotony; and the sharp short sentences which are intolerable when abundant, when used sparingly act like a trumpet-call to the drooping attention. ii. the law of simplicity. the first obligation of economy is that of using the fewest words to secure the fullest effect. it rejects whatever is superfluous; but the question of superfluity must, as i showed just now, be determined in each individual case by various conditions too complex and numerous to be reduced within a formula. the same may be said of simplicity, which is indeed so intimately allied with economy that i have only given it a separate station for purposes of convenience. the psychological basis is the same for both. the desire for simplicity is impatience at superfluity, and the impatience arises from a sense of hindrance. the first obligation of simplicity is that of using the simplest means to secure the fullest effect. but although the mind instinctlvely rejects all needless complexity, we shall greatly err if we fail to recognise the fact, that what the mind recoils from is not the complexity, but the needlessness. when two men are set to the work of one, there is a waste of means; when two phrases are used to express one meaning twice, there is a waste of power; when incidents are multiplied and illustrations crowded without increase of illumination, there is prodigality which only the vulgar can mistake for opulence. simplicity is a relative term. if in sketching the head of a man the artist wishes only to convey the general characteristics of that head, the fewest touches show the greatest power, selecting as they do only those details which carry with them characteristic significance. the means are simple, as the effect is simple. but if, besides the general characteristics, he wishes to convey the modelling of the forms, the play of light and shade, the textures, and the very complex effect of a human head, he must use more complex means. the simplicity which was adequate in the one case becomes totally inadequate in the other. obvious as this is, it has not been sufficiently present to the mind of critics who have called for plain, familiar, and concrete diction, as if that alone could claim to be simple; who have demanded a style unadorned by the artifices of involution, cadence, imagery, and epigram, as if simplicity were incompatible with these; and have praised meagreness, mistaking it for simplicity. saxon words are words which in their homeliness have deep-seated power, and in some places they are the simplest because the most powerful words we can employ; but their very homeliness excludes them from certain places where their very power of suggestion is a disturbance of the general effect. the selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. he uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence. simplicity of style will therefore be understood as meaning absence of needless superfluity: "without o'erflowing full." its plainness is never meagreness, but unity. obedient to the primary impulse of adequate expression, the style of a complex subject should be complex; of a technical subject, technical; of an abstract subject, abstract; of a familiar subject, familiar; of a pictorial subject, picturesque. the structure of the "antigone" is simple; but so also is the structure of "othello," though it contains many more elements; the simplicity of both lies in their fulness without superfluity. whatever is outside the purpose, or the feeling, of a scene, a speech, a sentence, or a phrase, whatever may be omitted without sacrifice of effect, is a sin against this law. i do not say that the incident, description, or dialogue, which may be omitted without injury to the unity of the work, is necessarily a sin against art; still less that, even when acknowledged as a sin, it may not sometimes be condoned by its success. the law of simplicity is not the only law of art; and, moreover, audiences are, unhappily, so little accustomed to judge works as wholes, and so ready to seize upon any detail which pleases them, no matter how incongruously the detail may be placed, ["was hilft's, wenn ihr ein ganzes dargebracht! das i'ublicum wird es euch doch zerpfiucken."--goethe]. that a felicitous fault will captivate applause, let critics shake reproving heads as they may. nevertheless the law of simplicity remains unshaken, and ought only to give way to the pressure of the law of variety. the drama offers a good opportunity for studying the operation of this law, because the limitations of time compel the dramatist to attend closely to what is and what is not needful for his purpose. a drama must compress into two or three hours material which may be diffused through three volumes of a novel, because spectators are more impatient than readers, and more unequivocally resent by their signs of weariness any disregard of economy, which in the novel may be skipped. the dramatist having little time in which to evolve his story, feels that every scene which does not forward the progress of the action or intensify the interest in the characters is an artistic defect; though in itself it may be charmingly written, and may excite applause, it is away from his immediate purpose. and what is true of purposeless scenes and characters which divert the current of progress, is equally true, in a minor degree, of speeches and sentences which arrest the culminating interest by calling attention away to other objects. it is an error which arises from a deficient earnestness on the writer's part, or from a too pliant facility. the dramatis personae wander in their dialogue, not swayed by the fluctuations of feeling, but by the author's desire to show his wit and wisdom, or else by his want of power to control the vagrant suggestions of his fancy. the desire for display and the inability to control are weaknesses that lead to almost every transgression of simplicity; but sometimes the transgressions are made in more or less conscious obedience to the law of variety, although the highest reach of art is to secure variety by an opulent simplicity. the novelist is not under the same limitations of time, nor has he to contend against the same mental impatience on the part of his public. he may therefore linger where the dramatist must hurry; he may digress, and gain fresh impetus from the digression, where the dramatist would seriously endanger the effect of his scene by retarding its evolution. the novelist with a prudent prodigality may employ descriptions, dialogues, and episodes, which would be fatal in a drama. characters may be introduced and dismissed without having any important connection with the plot; it is enough if they serve the purpose of the chapter in which they appear. although as a matter of fine art no character should have a place in a novel unless it form an integral element of the story, and no episode should be introduced unless it reflects some strong light on the characters or incidents, this is a critical demand which only fine artists think of satisfying, and only delicate tastes appreciate. for the mass of readers it is enough if they are mused; and indeed all readers, no matter how critical their taste, would rather be pleased by a transgression of the law than wearied by prescription. delight condones offence. the only question for the writer is, whether the offence is so trivial as to be submerged in the delight. and he will do well to remember that the greater flexibility belonging to the novel by no means removes the novel from the laws which rule the drama. the parts of a novel should have organic relations. push the licence to excess, and stitch together a volume of unrelated chapters,--a patchwork of descriptions, dialogues, and incidents,--no one will call that a novel; and the less the work has of this unorganised character the greater will be its value, not only in the eyes of critics, but in its effect on the emotions of the reader. simplicity of structure means organic unity, whether the organism be simple or complex; and hence in all times the emphasis which critics have laid upon simplicity, though they have not unfrequently confounded it with narrowness of range. in like manner, as we said just now, when treating of diction they have overlooked the fact that the simplest must be that which best expresses the thought. simplicity of diction is integrity of speech; that which admits of least equivocation, that which by the clearest verbal symbols most readily calls up in the reader's mind the images and feelings which the writer wishes to call up. such diction may be concrete or abstract, familiar or technical; its simplicity is determined by the nature of the thought. we shall often be simpler in using abstract and technical terms than in using concrete and familiar terms which by their very concreteness and familiarity call up images and feelings foreign to our immediate purpose. if we desire the attention to fall upon some general idea we only blur its outlines by using words that call up particulars. thus, although it may be needful to give some definite direction to the reader's thoughts by the suggestion of a particular fact, we must be careful not to arrest his attention on the fact itself, still less to divert it by calling up vivid images of facts unrelated to our present purpose. for example, i wish to fix in the reader's mind a conception of a lonely meditative man walking on the sea-shore, and i fall into the vicious style of our day which is lauded as word-painting, and write something like this :-- "the fishermen mending their storm-beaten boats upon the shore would lay down the hammer to gaze after him as he passed abstractedly before their huts, his hair streaming in the salt breeze, his feet crushing the scattered seaweed, his eyes dreamily fixed upon the purple heights of the precipitous crags." now it is obvious that the details here assembled are mostly foreign to my purpose, which has nothing whatever to do with fishermen, storms, boats, sea-weeds, or purple crags; and by calling up images of these i only divert the attention from my thought. whereas, if it had been my purpose to picture the scene itself, or the man's delight in it, then the enumeration of details would give colour and distinctness to the picture. the art of a great writer is seen in the perfect fitness of his expressions. he knows how to blend vividness with vagueness, knows where images are needed, and where by their vivacity they would be obstacles to the rapid appreciation of his thought. the value of concrete illustration artfully used may be seen illustrated in a passage from macaulay's invective against frederick the great: "on his head is all the blood which was shod in a war which raged during many years and in every quarter of the globe, the blood of the column at fentonoy, the blood of the mountaineers who were slaughtered at culloden. the evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of north america." disregarding the justice or injustice of the thought, note the singular force and beauty of this passage, delightful alike to ear and mind; and observe how its very elaborateness has the effect of the finest simplicity, because the successive pictures are constituents of the general thought, and by their vividness render the conclusion more impressive. let us suppose him to have wrltten with the vague generality of expression much patronised by dignified historians, and told us that "frederick was the cause of great european conflicts extending over long periods; and in consequence of his political aggression hideous crimes were perpetrated in the most distant parts of the globe." this absence of concrete images would not have been simplicity, inasmuch as the labour of converting the general expressions into definite meanings would thus have been thrown upon the reader. pictorial illustration has its dangers, as we daily see in the clumsy imitators of macaulay, who have not the fine instinct of style, but obey the vulgar instinct of display, and imagine they can produce a brilliant effect by the use of strong lights, whereas they distract the attention with images alien to the general impression, just as crude colourists vex the eye with importunate splendours. nay, even good writers sometimes sacrifice the large effect of a diffusive light to the small effect of a brilliant point. this is a defect of taste frequently noticeable in two very good writers, de quincey and ruskin, whose command of expression is so varied that it tempts them into fioritura as flexibility of voice tempts singers to sin against simplicity. at the close of an eloquent passage de quincey writes :-- "gravitation that works without holiday for ever and searches every corner of the universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? and yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted on than the fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps of christianity amongst the political workings of man." the association of holidays and shyness with an idea so abstract as that of gravitation, the use of the learned word fluxions to express the movements of the shadows on a dial, and the discordant suggestion of stealthiness applied to vegetable growth and christianity, are so many offences against simplicity. let the passage be contrasted with one in which wealth of imagery is in accordance with the thought it expresses:-- "in the edifices of man there should be found reverent worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue--which gives veining to the leaf and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organisation but of that also which reproves the pillars of the earth, and builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky; for these and other glories more than these refuse not to connect themselves in his thoughts with the work of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some cyclopoan waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towns; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay into which chambered cities melt in their mortality." [ruskin]. i shall notice but two points in this singularly beautiful passage. the one is the exquisite instinct of sequence in several of the phrases, not only as to harmony, but as to the evolution of the meaning, especially in "builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky." the other is the injurious effect of three words in the sentence, "for these and other glories more than these refuse not to connect themselves in his thoughts." strike out the words printed in italics, and you not only improve the harmony, but free the sentence from a disturbing use of what ruskin has named the "pathetic fallacy." there are times in which nature may be assumed as in sympathy with our moods; and at such times the pathetic fallacy is a source of subtle effect. but in the passage just quoted the introduction seems to me a mistake: the simplicity of the thought is disturbed by this hint of an active participation of nature in man's feelings; it is preserved in its integrity by the omission of that hint. these illustrations will suffice to show how the law we are considering will command and forbid the use of concrete expressions and vivid imagery according to the purpose of the writer. a fine taste guided by sincerity will determine that use. nothing more than a general rule can be laid down. eloquence, as i said before, cannot spring from the simple desire to be eloquent; the desire usually leads to grandiloquence. but sincerity will save us. we have but to remember montesquieu's advice: "il faut prendre garde aux grandes phrases dans les humbles sujets; elles produisent l'effet d'une masque a barbe blanche sur la joue d'un enfant." here another warning may be placed. in our anxiety lest we err on the side of grandiloquence we may perhaps fall into the opposite error of tameness. sincerity will save us here also. let us but express the thought and feeling actually in our minds, then our very grandiloquence (if that is our weakness) will have a certain movement and vivacity not without effect, and our tameness (if we are tame) will have a gentleness not without its charm. finally, let us banish from our critical superstitions the notion that chastity of composition, or simplicity of style, is in any respect allied to timidity. there are two kinds of timidity, or rather it has two different origins, both of which cripple the free movement of thought. the one is the timidity of fastidiousness, the other of placid stupidity: the one shrinks from originality lest it should be regarded as impertinent; the other lest, being new, it should be wrong. we detect the one in the sensitive discreetness of the style. we detect the other in the complacency of its platitudes and the stereotyped commonness of its metaphors. the writer who is afraid of originality feels himself in deep water when he launches into a commonplace. for him who is timid because weak, there is no advice, except suggesting the propriety of silence. for him who is timid because fastidious, there is this advice: get rid of the superstition about chastity, and recognise the truth that a style may be simple, even if it move amid abstractions, or employ few saxon words, or abound in concrete images and novel turns of expression. iii. the law of sequence. much that might be included under this head would equally well find its place under that of economy or that of climax. indeed it is obvious that to secure perfect economy there must be that sequence of the words which will present the least obstacle to the unfolding of the thought, and that climax is only attainable through a properly graduated sequence. but there is another element we have to take into account, and that is the rhythmical effect of style. mr. herbert spencer in his essay very clearly states the law of sequence, but i infer that he would include it entirely under the law of economy; at any rate he treats of it solely in reference to intelligibility, and not at all in its scarcely less important relation to harmony. we have a priori reasons," he says, "for believing that in every sentence there is one order of words more effective than any other, and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together. as in a narrative, the events should be stated in such sequence that the mind may not have to go backwards and forwards in order rightly to connect them; as in a group of sentences, the arrangement should be such that each of them may be understood as it comes, without waiting for the subsequent ones; so in every sentence, the sequence of the words should be that which suggests the constituents of the thought in the order most convenient for building up that thought." but style appeals to the emotions as well as to the intellect, and the arrangement of words and sentences which will be the most economical may not be the most musical, and the most musical may not be the most pleasurably effective. for climax and variety it may be necessary to sacrifice something of rapid intelligibillty: hence involutions, antitheses, and suspensions, which disturb the most orderly arrangement, may yet, in virtue of their own subtle influences, be counted as improvements on that arrangement. tested by the intellect and the feelings, the law of sequence is seen to be a curious compound of the two. if we isolate these elements for the purposes of exposition, we shall find that the principle of the first is much simpler and more easy of obedience than the principle of the second. it may be thus stated:-- the constituent elements of the conception expressed in the sentence and the paragraph should be arranged in strict correspondence with an inductive or a deductive progression. all exposition, like all research, is either inductive or deductive. it groups particulars so as to lead up to a general conception which embraces them all, but which could not be fully understood until they had been estimated; or else it starts from some general conception, already familar to the mind, and as it moves along, casts its light upon numerous particulars, which are thus shown to be related to it, but which without that light would have been overlooked. if the reader will meditate on that brief statement of the principle, he will, i think, find it explain many doubtful points. let me merely notice one, namely, the dispute as to whether the direct or the indirect style should be preferred. some writers insist, and others practise the precept without insistance, that the proposition should be stated first, and all its qualifications as well as its evidences be made to follow; others maintain that the proposition should be made to grow up step by step with all its evidences and qualifications in their due order, and the conclusion disclose itself as crowning the whole. are not both methods right under different circumstances? if my object is to convince you of a general truth, or to impress you with a feeling, which you are not already prepared to accept, it is obvious that the most effective method is the inductive, which leads your mind upon a culminating wave of evidence or emotion to the very point i aim at. but the deductive method is best when i wish to direct the light of familiar truths and roused emotions, upon new particulars, or upon details in unsuspected relation to those truths; and when i wish the attention to be absorbed by these particulars which are of interest in themselves, not upon the general truths which are of no present interest except in as far as they light up these details. a growing thought requires the inductive exposition, an applied thought the deductive. this principle, which is of very wide application, is subject to two important qualifications--one pressed on it by the necessities of climax and variety, the other by the feebleness of memory, which cannot keep a long hold of details unless their significance is apprehended; so that a paragraph of suspended meaning should never be long, and when the necessities of the case bring together numerous particulars in evidence of the conclusion, they should be so arranged as to have culminating force: one clause leading up to another, and throwing its impetus into it, instead of being linked on to another, and dragging the mind down with its weight. it is surprising how few men understand that style is a fine art; and how few of those who are fastidious in their diction give much care to the arrangement of their sentences, paragraphs, and chapters--in a word, to composition. the painter distributes his masses with a view to general effect; so does the musician: writers seldom do so. nor do they usually arrange the members of their sentences in that sequence which shall secure for each its proper emphasis and its determining influence on the others--influence reflected back and influence projected forward. as an example of the charm that lies in unostentatious antiphony, consider this passage from ruskin:--"originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor in painting on invention of new colours or new modes of using them. the chords of music, the harmonies of colour, the general principles of the arrangement of sculptural masses, have been determined long ago, and in all probability cannot be added to any more than they can be altered." men write like this by instinct; and i by no means wish to suggest that writing like this can be produced by rule. what i suggest is, that in this, as in every other fine art, instinct does mostly find itself in accordance with rule; and a knowledge of rules helps to direct the blind gropings of feeling, and to correct the occasional mistakes of instinct. if, after working his way through a long and involved sentence in which the meaning is rough hewn, the writer were to try its effect upon ear and intellect, he might see its defects and re-shape it into beauty and clearness. but in general men shirk this labour, partly because it is irksome, and partly because they have no distinct conception of the rules which would make the labour light. the law of sequence, we have seen, rests upon the two requisites of clearness and harmony. men with a delicate sense of rhythm will instinctively distribute their phrases in an order that falls agreeably on the ear, without monotony, and without an echo of other voices; and men with a keen sense of logical relation will instinctively arrange their sentences in an order that best unfolds the meaning. the french are great masters of the law of sequence, and, did space permit, i could cite many excellent examples. one brief passage from royer collard must suffice:--"les faits que l'observation laisse epars et muets la causalite les rassemble, les enchaine, leur prete un langage. chaque fait revele celui qui a precede, prophetise celui qui va suivre." the ear is only a guide to the harmony of a period, and often tempts us into the feebleness of expletives or approximative expressions for the sake of a cadence. yet, on the other hand, if we disregard the subtle influences of harmonious arrangement, our thoughts lose much of the force which would otherwise result from their logical subordination. the easy evolution of thought in a melodious period, quietly taking up on its way a variety of incidental details, yet never lingering long enough over them to divert the attention or to suspend the continuous crescendo of interest, but by subtle influences of proportion allowing each clause of the sentence its separate significance, is the product of a natural gift, as rare as the gift of music, or of poetry. but until men come to understand that style is an art, and an amazingly difficult art, they will continue with careless presumption to tumble out their sentences as they would lilt stones from a cart, trusting very much to accident or gravitation for the shapeliness of the result. i will write a passage which may serve as an example of what i mean, although the defect is purposely kept within very ordinary limlts-- "to construct a sentence with many loosely and not obviously dependent clauses, each clause containing an important meaning or a concrete image the vivacity of which, like a boulder in a shallow stream, disturbs the equable current of thought, and in such a case the more beautiful the image the greater the obstacle, so that the laws of simplicity and economy are violated by it,--while each clause really requires for its interpretation a proposition that is however kept suspended till the close, is a defect." the weariness produced by such writing as this is very great, and yet the recasting of the passage is easy. thus:-- "it is a defect when a sentence is constructed with many loosely and not obviously dependent clauses, each of which requires for its interpretation a preposition that is kept suspended till the close; and this defect is exaggerated when each clause contains an important meaning, or a concrete image which, like a boulder in a shallow stream, disturbs the equable current of thought: the more beautiful the image, the greater its violation of the laws of simplicity and economy." in this second form the sentence has no long suspension of the main idea, no diversions of the current. the proposition is stated and illustrated directly, and the mind of the reader follows that of the writer. how injurious it is to keep the key in your pocket until all the locks in succession have been displayed may be seen in such a sentence as this:-- "phantoms of lost power, sudden intuitions and shadowy restorations of forgotten feelings, sometimes dim and perplexing, sometimes by bright but furtive glimpses, sometimes by a full and steady revelation overcharged with light, throw us back in a moment upon scenes and remembrances that we have left full thirty years behind us." had de quincey liberated our minds from suspense by first presenting the thought which first arose in his own mind,--namely, that we are thrown back upon scenes and remembrances by phantoms of lost power, &c.--the beauty of his language in its pregnant suggestiveness would have been felt at once. instead of that, he makes us accompany him in darkness, and when the light appears we have to travel backwards over the ground again to see what we have passed. the passage continues:-- "in solitudes, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature, and, above all, amongst the great and enduring features of nature, such as mountains and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of forests, and the silent shores of lakes--features with which (as being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a more abiding associatlon,--under these circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle and waylay us." the beauty of this passage seems to me marred by the awkward yet necessary interruption, "under these circumstances it is," which would have been avoided by opening the sentence with "such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle us in solitudes," &c. compare the effect of directness in the following:-- "this was one of the most common shapes of extinguished power from which coleridge fled to the great city. but sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and vanishing glimpses recovered for one moment from the paradise of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which for him too certainly he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever." obedience to the law of sequence gives strength by giving clearness and beauty of rhythm; it economises force and creates music. a very trifling disregard of it will mar an effect. see an example both of obedience and trifling disobedience in the following passage from ruskin:-- "people speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands and food and raiment were alone useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than life and the raiment than the body, who look on earth as a stable and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of eden." it is instinctive to contrast the dislocated sentence, "who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race," with the sentence which succeeds it, "men who think, as far as such men can be said to think, that the meat," &c. in the latter the parenthetic interruption is a source of power: it dams the current to increase its force; in the former the inversion is a loss of power: it is a dissonance to the ear and a diversion of the thought. as illustrations of sequence in composition, two passages may be quoted from macaulay which display the power of pictorial suggestions when, instead of diverting attention from the main purpose, they are arranged with progressive and culminating effect. "such, or nearly such, was the change which passed on the mogul empire during the forty years which followed the death of aurungzebe. a series of nominal sovereigns, sunk in indolence and debauchery, sauntered away life in secluded palaces, chewing bang, fondling dancing girls, and listening to buffoons. a series of ferocious invaders had descended through the western passes to prey on the defenceless wealth of hindostan. a persian conqueror crossed the indus, marched through the gates of delhi, and bore away in triumph those treasures of which the magnificence had astounded roe and bernier;--the peacock throne, on which the richest jewels of golconda had been disposed by the most skilful hands of europe, and the inestimable mountain of light, which, after many strange vicissitudes, lately shone in the bracelet of runjeet sing, and is now destined to adorn the hideous idol of prista. the afghan soon followed to complete the work of devastation which the persian had begun. the warlike tribe of rajpoots threw off the mussulman yoke. a band of'mercenary soldiers occupied the rohilcund. the seiks ruled on the indus. the jauts spread terror along the jumnah. the high lands which border on the western sea-coast of india poured forth a yet more formidable race--a race which was long the terror of every native power, and which yielded only after many desperate and doubtful struggles to the fortune and genius of england. it was under the reign of aurungzebe that this wild clan of plunderers first descended from the mountains; and soon after his death every corner of his wide empire learned to tremble at the mighty name of the mahrattas. many fertile viceroyalties were entirely subdued by them. their dominions stretched across the peninsula from sea to sea. their captains reigned at poonah, at gualior, in guzerat, in berar, and in tanjore." such prose as this affects us like poetry. the pictures and suggestions might possibly have been gathered together by any other historian; but the artful succession, the perfect sequence, could only have been found by a fine writer. i pass over a few paragraphs, and pause at this second example of a sentence simple in structure, though complex in its elements, fed but not overfed with material, and almost perfect in its cadence and logical connection. "scarcely any man, however sagacious, would have thought it possible that a trading company, separated from india by fifteen thousand miles of sea, and possessing in india only a few acres for purposes of commerce, would in less than a hundred years spread its empire from cape comorin to the eternal snows of the himalayas--would compel mahratta and mahomedan to forget their mutual feuds in common subjection--would tame down even those wild races which had resisted the most powerful of the moguls; and having established a government far stronger than any ever known in those countries, would carry its victorious arms far to the east of the burrampooter, and far to the west of the hydaspes--dictate terms of peace at the gates of ava, and seat its vassals on the throne of candahar." let us see the same principle exhibited in a passage at once pictorial and argumentative. "we know more certainly every day," says ruskin, "that whatever appears to us harmful in the universe has some beneficent or necessary operation; that the storm which destroys a harvest brightens the sunbeams for harvests yet unsown, and that a volcano which buries a city preserves a thousand from destruction. but the evil is not for the time less fearful because we have learned it to be necessary; and we can easily understand the timidity or the tenderness of the spirit which could withdraw itself from the presence of destruction, and create in its imagination a world of which the peace should be unbroken, in which the sky should not darken nor the sea rage, in which the leaf should not change nor the blossom wither. that man is greater, however, who contemplates with an equal mind the alternations of terror and of beauty; who, not rejoicing less beneath the sunny sky, can also bear to watch the bars of twilight narrowing on the horizon; and, not less sensible to the blessing of the peace of nature, can rejoice in the magnificence of the ordinances by which that peace is protected and secured. but separated from both by an immeasurable distance would be the man who delighted in convulsion and disease for their own sake; who found his daily food in the disorder of nature mingled with the suffering of humanity; and watched joyfully at the right hand of the angel whose appointed work is to destroy as well as to accuse, while the corners of the house of feasting were struck by the wind from the wilderness." i will now cite a passage from burke, which will seem tame after the pictorial animation of the passages from macaulay and ruskin; but which, because it is simply an exposition of opinions addressed to the understanding, will excellently illustrate the principle i am enforcing. he is treating of the dethronement of kings. "as it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds. the speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. it is not a single act or a single event which determines it. governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. when things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state. times and occasions and provocations will teach their own lessons. the wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and bold from love of honourable danger in a generous cause. but with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good." as a final example i will cite a passage from m. taine:--"de la encore cette insolence contre les inferieurs, et ce mepris verse d'etage en etage depuis le premier jusqu'au dernier. lorsque dans une societe la loi consacre les conditions inegales, personne n'est exempt d'insulte; le grand seigneur, outrage par le roi, outrage le noble qui outrage le peuple; la nature humaine est humilie a tous les etages, et la societe n'est plus qu'un commerce d'affronts." the law of sequence by no means prescribes that we should invariably state the proposition before its qualifications--the thought before its illustrations; it merely prescribes that we should arrange our phrases in the order of logical dependence and rhythmical cadence, the order best suited for clearness and for harmony. the nature of the thought will determine the one, our sense of euphony the other. iv. the law of climax. we need not pause long over this; it is generally understood. the condition of our sensibilities is such that to produce their effect stimulants must be progressive in intensity and varied in kind. on this condition rest the laws of climax and variety. the phrase or image which in one position will have a mild power of occupying the thoughts, or stimulating the emotions, loses this power if made to succeed one of like kind but more agitating influence, and will gain an accession of power if it be artfully placed on the wave of a climax. we laugh at "then came dalhousie, that great god of war, lieutenant-colonel to the earl of mar," because of the relaxation which follows the sudden tension of the mind; but if we remove the idea of the colonelcy from this position of anti-climax, the same couplet becomes energetic rather than ludicrous-- "lieutenant-colonel to the earl of mar, then came dalhousie, that great god of war." i have selected this strongly marked case, instead of several feeble passages which might be chosen from the first book at hand, wherein carelessness allows the sentences to close with the least important, phrases, and the style droops under frequent anti-climax. let me now cite a passage from macaulay which vividly illustrates the effect of climax:-- "never, perhaps, was the change which the progress of civilisation has produced in the art of war more strikingly illustrated than on that day. ajax beating down the trojan leader with a rock which two ordinary men could scarcely lift; horatius defending the bridge against an army; richard, the lion-hearted, spurring along the whole saracen line without finding an enemy to withstand his assault; robert bruce crushing with one blow the helmet and head of sir harry bohun in sight of the whole array of england and scotland,--such are the heroes of a dark age. [here is an example of suspended meaning, where the suspense intensifies the effect, because each particular is vividly apprehended in itself, and all culminate in the conclusion; they do not complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation]. in such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior. at landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. in some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants. in christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister. but their lot had fallen on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is far inferior in value to the strength of the mind. it is probable that among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers that were marshalled round neerwinden, under all the standards of western europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf, who urged forward the fiery onset of france, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of england." the effect of climax is very marked in the drama. every speech, every scene, every act, should have its progressive sequence. nothing can be more injudicious than a trivial phrase following an energetic phrase, a feeble thought succeeding a burst of passion, or even a passionate thought succeeding one more passionate. yet this error is frequently committed. in the drama all laws of style are more imperious than in fiction or prose of any kind, because the art is more intense. but climax is demanded in every species of composition, for it springs from a psychological necessity. it is pressed upon, however, by the law of variety in a way to make it far from safe to be too rigidly followed. it easily degenerates into monotony. v. the law of variety. some one, after detailing an elaborate recipe for a salad, wound up the enumeration of ingredients and quantities with the advice to "open the window and throw it all away." this advice might be applied to the foregoing enumeration of the laws of style, unless these were supplemented by the important law of variety. a style which rigidly interpreted the precepts of economy, simplicity, sequence, and climax, which rejected all superfluous words and redundant ornaments, adopted the easiest and most logical arrangement, and closed every sentence and every paragraph with a climax, might be a very perfect bit of mosaic, but would want the glow and movement of a living mind. monotony would settle on it like a paralysing frost. a series of sentences in which every phrase was a distinct thought, would no more serve as pabulum for the mind, than portable soup freed from all the fibrous tissues of meat and vegetable would serve as food for the body. animals perish from hunger in the presence of pure albumen; and minds would lapse into idiocy in the presence of unadulterated thought. but without invoking extreme cases, let us simply remember the psychological fact that it is as easy for sentences to be too compact as for food to be too concentrated; and that many a happy negligence, which to microscopic criticism may appear defective, will be the means of giving clearness and grace to a style. of course the indolent indulgence in this laxity robs style of all grace and power. but monotony in the structure of sentences, monotony of cadence, monotony of climax, monotony anywhere, necessarily defeats the very aim and end of style; it calls attention to the manner; it blunts the sensibilities; it renders excellences odious. "beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadow ceases to be enjoyed as light. a white canvas cannot produce an effect of sunshine; the painter must darken it in some places before he can make it look luminous in others; nor can the uninterrupted succession of beauty produce the true effect of beauty; it must be foiled by inferiority before its own power can be developed. nature has for the most part mingled her inferior and noble elements as she mingles sunshine with shade, giving due influence to both. the truly high and beautiful art of angelico is continually refreshed and strengthened by his frank portraiture of the most ordinary features of his brother monks, of the recorded peculiarities of ungainly sanctity; but the modern german and raphaelesque schools lose all honour and nobleness in barber-like admiration of handsome faces, and have in fact no real faith except in straight noses and curled hair. paul veronese opposes the dwarf to the soldier, and the negress to the queen; shakspeare places caliban beside miranda, and autolycus beside perdita; but the vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the safety of the saloon, and his innocence to the seclusion of the cloister; he pretends that he does this in delicacy of choice and purity of sentiment, while in truth he has neither courage to front the monster nor wit enough to furnish the knave.'' [ruskin]. and how is variety to be secured? the plan is simple, but like many other simple plans, is not without difficulty. it is for the writer to obey the great cardinal principle of sincerity, and be brave enough to express himself in his own way, following the mood of his own mind, rather than endeavouring to catch the accents of another, or to adapt himself to some standard of taste. no man really thinks and feels monotonously. if he is monotonous in his manner of setting forth his thoughts and feelings, that is either because he has not learned the art of writing, or because he is more or less consciously imitating the manner of others. the subtle play of thought will give movement and life to his style if he do not clog it with critical superstitions. i do not say that it will give him grace and power; i do not say that relying on perfect sincerity will make him a fine writer, because sincerity will not give talent; but i say that sincerity will give him all the power that is possible to him, and will secure him the inestimable excellence of variety. editor. the philosophy of the plays of shakspere unfolded. by delia bacon. with a preface by nathanial hawthorne author of 'the scarlet letter,' etc aphorisms representing a knowledge _broken_ do invite men to inquire further lord bacon you find not the apostophes, and so miss the accent. love's labour's lost untie the spell.--prospero london: groombridge and sons paternoster row. ames press new york harvard university library dec , reprinted from a copy in the collection of the harvard college library reprinted from the edition of , london first ams edition published manufactured in the united states of america international standard book number: - - - library of congress card catalog number: - ams press, inc. new york, n.y. table of contents. preface introduction. i. the proposition ii. the age of elizabeth, and the elizabethan men of letters iii. extracts from the life of raleigh.--raleigh's school iv. raleigh's school, continued.--the new academy * * * * * book i [the historical key to the elizabethan art of tradition, which formed the first book of this work as it was originally prepared for the press, is reserved for separate publication.] the elizabethan art of delivery and tradition. part i. michael de montaigne's 'private and retired arts.' i. ascent from particulars to the 'highest parts of sciences,' by the enigmatic method illustrated ii. further illustration of 'particular methods of tradition.'--embarrassments of literary statesmen iii. the possibility of great anonymous works,--or works published under an _assumed name_,--conveying under rhetorical disguises the principal sciences,--re-suggested and illustrated part ii. the baconian rhetoric, or the method of progression. i. the 'beginners.'--['particular methods of tradition.'-- the double method of 'illustration' and 'concealment'] ii. index to the 'illustrated' and 'concealed tradition' of the principal and supreme sciences.--the science of policy iii. the science of morality. section i. the exemplar of good iv. the science of morality. section ii. the husbandry thereunto, or the cure and culture of the mind.--application v. the science of morality.--alteration vi. method of convoying the wisdom of the moderns * * * * * book ii. elizabethan 'secrets of morality and policy'; or, the fables of the new learning. introductory. i. the design ii. the missing books of the great instauration or 'philosophy itself' part i. lear's philosopher; [or, the law of the 'special and respective duties,' defined and 'illustrated' in tables of 'presence' and 'absence.'] i. philosophy in the palace ii. unaccommodated man iii. the king and the beggar iv. the use of eyes v. the statesman's note-book--and the play part ii. julius caesar and coriolanus. the scientific cure of the common-weal; or, 'the common duty of every man as a man, or member of a state,' defined and illustrated in 'negative instances' and 'instances of presence.' julius caesar; or, the empirical treatment in diseases of the common-weal examined. i. the death of tyranny; or, the question of the prerogative ii. caesar's spirit coriolanus. the question of the consulship; or, the scientific cure of the common-weal propounded. i. the elizabethan heroism ii. criticism of the martial government iii. 'insurrections arguing' iv. political retrospect v. the popular election vi. the scientific method in politics vii. volumnia and her boy viii. metaphysical aid ix. the cure.--plan of innovation.--new definitions. x. the cure.--plan of innovation.--new constructions. xi. the cure.--plan of innovation.--'the initiative' xii. the ignorant election revoked.--a 'wrestling instance'. xiii. conclusion preface. this volume contains the argument, drawn from the plays usually attributed to shakspere, in support of a theory which the author of it has demonstrated by historical evidences in another work. having never read this historical demonstration (which remains still in manuscript, with the exception of a preliminary chapter, published long ago in an american periodical), i deem it necessary to cite the author's own account of it:-- 'the historical part of this work (which was originally the principal part, and designed to furnish the historical key to the great elizabethan writings), though now for a long time completed and ready for the press, and though repeated reference is made to it in this volume, is, for the most part, omitted here. it contains a true and before unwritten history, and it will yet, perhaps, be published as it stands; but the vivid and accumulating historic detail, with which more recent research tends to enrich the earlier statement, and disclosures which no invention could anticipate, are waiting now to be subjoined to it. 'the internal evidence of the assumptions made at the outset is that which is chiefly relied on in the work now first presented on this subject to the public. the demonstration will be found complete on that ground; and on that ground alone the author is willing, and deliberately prefers, for the present, to rest it. 'external evidence, of course, will not be wanting; there will be enough and to spare, if the demonstration here be correct. but the author of the discovery was not willing to rob the world of this great question; but wished rather to share with it the benefit which the true solution of the problem offers--the solution prescribed by those who propounded it to the future. it seemed better to save to the world the power and beauty of this demonstration, its intellectual stimulus, its demand on the judgment. it seemed better, that the world should acquire it also in the form of criticism, instead of being stupified and overpowered with the mere force of an irresistible, external, historical proof. persons incapable of appreciating any other kind of proof,--those who are capable of nothing that does not 'directly fall under and strike _the senses_' as lord bacon expresses it,--will have their time also; but it was proposed to present the subject first to minds of another order.' in the present volume, accordingly, the author applies herself to the demonstration and development of a system of philosophy, which has presented itself to her as underlying the superficial and ostensible text of shakspere's plays. traces of the same philosophy, too, she conceives herself to have found in the acknowledged works of lord bacon, and in those of other writers contemporary with him. all agree in one system; all these traces indicate a common understanding and unity of purpose in men among whom no brotherhood has hitherto been suspected, except as representatives of a grand and brilliant age, when the human intellect made a marked step in advance. the author did not (as her own consciousness assures her) either construct or originally seek this new philosophy. in many respects, if i have rightly understood her, it was at variance with her pre-conceived opinions, whether ethical, religious, or political. she had been for years a student of shakspere, looking for nothing in his plays beyond what the world has agreed to find in them, when she began to see, under the surface, the gleam of this hidden treasure. it was carefully hidden, indeed, yet not less carefully indicated, as with a pointed finger, by such marks and references as could not ultimately escape the notice of a subsequent age, which should be capable of profiting by the rich inheritance. so, too, in regard to lord bacon. the author of this volume had not sought to put any but the ordinary and obvious interpretation upon his works, nor to take any other view of his character than what accorded with the unanimous judgment upon it of all the generations since his epoch. but, as she penetrated more and more deeply into the plays, and became aware of those inner readings, she found herself compelled to turn back to the 'advancement of learning' for information as to their plan and purport; and lord bacon's treatise failed not to give her what she sought; thus adding to the immortal dramas, in her idea, a far higher value than their warmest admirers had heretofore claimed for them. they filled out the scientific scheme which bacon had planned, and which needed only these profound and vivid illustrations of human life and character to make it perfect. finally, the author's researches led her to a point where she found the plays claimed for lord bacon and his associates,--not in a way that was meant to be intelligible in their own perilous times,--but in characters that only became legible, and illuminated, as it were, in the light of a subsequent period. the reader will soon perceive that the new philosophy, as here demonstrated, was of a kind that no professor could have ventured openly to teach in the days of elizabeth and james. the concluding chapter of the present work makes a powerful statement of the position which a man, conscious of great and noble aims, would then have occupied; and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all methods of secret communication, and of hiding thought beneath a masque of conceit or folly. applicably to this subject, i quote a paragraph from a manuscript of the author's, not intended for present publication:-- 'it was a time when authors, who treated of a scientific politics and of a scientific ethics internally connected with it, naturally preferred this more philosophic, symbolic method of indicating their connection with their writings, which would limit the indication to those who could pierce within the veil of a philosophic symbolism. it was the time when the cipher, in which one could write '_omnia per omnia_,' was in such request, and when 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. it was a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated, and put to other uses than at present, and when a '_nom de plume_' was required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. it was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles, were not good for sport and child's play merely; when they had need to be close; when they had need to be solvable, at least, only to those who _should_ solve them. it was a time when all the latent capacities of the english language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling, through all its lengths and breadths, with puns and quips, and conceits, and jokes, and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down "into the bottom of a tomb"--that opened into the tower--that opened on the scaffold and the block.' i quote, likewise, another passage, because i think the reader will see in it the noble earnestness of the author's character, and may partly imagine the sacrifices which this research has cost her:-- 'the great secret of the elizabethan age did not lie where any superficial research could ever have discovered it. it was not left within the range of any accidental disclosure. it did not lie on the surface of any elizabethan document. the most diligent explorers of these documents, in two centuries and a quarter, had not found it. no faintest suspicion of it had ever crossed the mind of the most recent, and clear-sighted, and able investigator of the baconian remains. it was buried in the lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the deep elizabethan art; that art which no plummet, till now, has ever sounded. it was locked with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning. it was buried in the inmost recesses of the esoteric elizabethan learning. it was tied with a knot that had passed the scrutiny and baffled the sword of an old, suspicious, dying, military government--a knot that none could cut--a knot that must be untied. 'the great secret of the elizabethan age was inextricably reserved by the founders of a new learning, the prophetic and more nobly gifted minds of a new and nobler race of men, for a research that should test the mind of the discoverer, and frame and subordinate it to that so sleepless and indomitable purpose of the prophetic aspiration. it was "the device" by which they undertook to live again in the ages in which their achievements and triumphs were forecast, and to come forth and rule again, not in one mind, not in the few, not in the many, but in all. "for there is no throne like that throne in the thoughts of men," which the ambition of these men climbed and compassed. 'the principal works of the elizabethan philosophy, those in which the new method of learning was practically applied to the noblest subjects, were presented to the world in the form of an enigma. it was a form well fitted to divert inquiry, and baffle even the research of the scholar for a time; but one calculated to provoke the philosophic curiosity, and one which would inevitably command a research that could end only with the true solution. that solution was reserved for one who would recognise, at last, in the disguise of the great impersonal teacher, the disguise of a new learning. it waited for the reader who would observe, at last, those thick-strewn scientific clues, those thick-crowding enigmas, those perpetual beckonings from the "theatre" into the judicial palace of the mind. it was reserved for the student who would recognise, at last, the mind that was seeking so perseveringly to whisper its tale of outrage, and "the secrets it was forbid." it waited for one who would answer, at last, that philosophic challenge, and say, "go on, i'll follow thee!" it was reserved for one who would count years as days, for the love of the truth it hid; who would never turn back on the long road of initiation, though all "the idols" must be left behind in its stages; who would never stop until it stopped in that new cave of apollo, where the handwriting on the wall spells anew the old delphic motto, and publishes the word that "_unties_ the spell." on this object, which she conceives so loftily, the author has bestowed the solitary and self-sustained toil of many years. the volume now before the reader, together with the historical demonstration which it pre-supposes, is the product of a most faithful and conscientious labour, and a truly heroic devotion of intellect and heart. no man or woman has ever thought or written more sincerely than the author of this book. she has given nothing less than her life to the work. and, as if for the greater trial of her constancy, her theory was divulged, some time ago, in so partial and unsatisfactory a manner--with so exceedingly imperfect a statement of its claims--as to put her at great disadvantage before the world. a single article from her pen, purporting to be the first of a series, appeared in an american magazine; but unexpected obstacles prevented the further publication in that form, after enough had been done to assail the prejudices of the public, but far too little to gain its sympathy. another evil followed. an english writer (in a 'letter to the earl of ellesmere,' published within a few months past) has thought it not inconsistent with the fair-play, on which his country prides itself, to take to himself this lady's theory, and favour the public with it as his own original conception, without allusion to the author's prior claim. in reference to this pamphlet, she generously says:-- 'this has not been a selfish enterprise. it is not a personal concern. it is a discovery which belongs not to an individual, and not to a people. its fields are wide enough and rich enough for us all; and he that has no work, and whoso will, let him come and labour in them. the field is the world's; and the world's work henceforth is in it. so that it be known in its real comprehension, in its true relations to the weal of the world, what matters it? so that the truth, which is dearer than all the rest--which abides with us when all others leave us, dearest then--so that the truth, which is neither yours nor mine, but yours _and_ mine, be known, loved, honoured, emancipated, mitred, crowned, adored--_who_ loses anything, that does not find it.' 'and what matters it,' says the philosophic wisdom, speaking in the abstract, 'what name it is proclaimed in, and what letters of the alphabet we know it by?--what matter is it, so that they _spell_ the name that is _good_ for all, and _good_ for _each_,'--for that is the real name here? speaking on the author's behalf, however, i am not entitled to imitate her magnanimity; and, therefore, hope that the writer of the pamphlet will disclaim any purpose of assuming to himself, on the ground of a slight and superficial performance, the result which she has attained at the cost of many toils and sacrifices. and now, at length, after many delays and discouragements, the work comes forth. it had been the author's original purpose to publish it in america; for she wished her own country to have the glory of solving the enigma of those mighty dramas, and thus adding a new and higher value to the loftiest productions of the english mind. it seemed to her most fit and desirable, that america--having received so much from england, and returned so little--should do what remained to be done towards rendering this great legacy available, as its authors meant it to be, to all future time. this purpose was frustrated; and it will be seen in what spirit she acquiesces. 'the author was forced to bring it back, and contribute it to the literature of the country from which it was derived, and to which it essentially and inseparably belongs. it was written, every word of it, on english ground, in the midst of the old familiar scenes and household names, that even in our nursery songs revive the dear ancestral memories; those "royal pursuivants" with which our mother-land still follows and retakes her own. it was written in the land of our old kings and queens, and in the land of _our own_ philosophers and poets also. it was written on the spot where the works it unlocks were written, and in the perpetual presence of the english mind; the mind that spoke before in the cultured few, and that speaks to-day in the cultured many. and it is now at last, after so long a time--after all, as it should be--the english press that prints it. it is the scientific english press, with those old gags (wherewith our kings and queens sought to stop it, ere they knew what it was) champed asunder, ground to powder, and with its last elizabethan shackle shaken off, that restores, "in a better hour," the torn and garbled science committed to it, and gives back "the bread cast on its sure waters."' there remains little more for me to say. i am not the editor of this work; nor can i consider myself fairly entitled to the honor (which, if i deserved it, i should feel to be a very high as well as a perilous one) of seeing my name associated with the author's on the title-page. my object has been merely to speak a few words, which might, perhaps, serve the purpose of placing my countrywoman upon a ground of amicable understanding with the public. she has a vast preliminary difficulty to encounter. the first feeling of every reader must be one of absolute repugnance towards a person who seeks to tear out of the anglo-saxon heart the name which for ages it has held dearest, and to substitute another name, or names, to which the settled belief of the world has long assigned a very different position. what i claim for this work is, that the ability employed in its composition has been worthy of its great subject, and well employed for our intellectual interests, whatever judgment the public may pass upon the questions discussed. and, after listening to the author's interpretation of the plays, and seeing how wide a scope she assigns to them, how high a purpose, and what richness of inner meaning, the thoughtful reader will hardly return again--not wholly, at all events--to the common view of them and of their author. it is for the public to say whether my countrywoman has proved her theory. in the worst event, if she has failed, her failure will be more honorable than most people's triumphs; since it must fling upon the old tombstone, at stratford-on-avon, the noblest tributary wreath that has ever lain there. nathaniel hawthorne. the philosophy of the plays of shakspere. * * * * * introduction. chapter i. the proposition. 'one time will owe another.'--_coriolanus_. this work is designed to propose to the consideration, not of the learned world only, but of all ingenuous and practical minds, a new development of that system of practical philosophy from which the scientific arts of the modern ages proceed, and which has already become, just to the extent to which it has been hitherto opened, the wisdom,--the universally approved, and practically adopted, wisdom of the _moderns_. it is a development of this philosophy, which was deliberately postponed by the great scientific discoverers and reformers, in whose scientific discoveries and reformations our organised advancements in speculation and practice have their origin;--reformers, whose scientific acquaintance with historic laws forbade the idea of any immediate and sudden cures of the political and social evils which their science searches to the root, and which it was designed to eradicate. the proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is this: that the new philosophy which strikes out from the court--from _the court_ of that despotism that names and gives form to the modern learning,--which comes to us from the court of the last of the tudors and the first of the stuarts,--that new philosophy which we have received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us professionally _as_ philosophy, but in that not less important department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement,--in the form of fable and allegory and parable,--the proposition is, that this elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it,--not two philosophies,--not two elizabethan philosophies, not two new and wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two new inductive philosophies, but one,--one and the same: that it is philosophy in both these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable, and without it; that it is philosophy applied to much more important subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in the open statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, and not philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, illiterate, unconscious spontaneity in the other. the proposition is that it proceeds, in both cases, from a reflective deliberative, eminently deliberative, eminently conscious, _designing_ mind; and that the coincidence which is manifest not in the design only, and in the structure, but in the detail to the minutest points of execution, is _not_ accidental. it is a proposition which is demonstrated in this volume by means of evidence derived principally from the books of this philosophy--books in which the safe delivery and tradition of it to the future was artistically contrived and triumphantly achieved:--the books of a new 'school' in philosophy; books in which the connection with the school is not always openly asserted; books in which the true names of the authors are not always found on the title-page;--the books of a school, too, which was compelled to have recourse to translations in some cases, for the safe delivery and tradition of its new learning. the facts which lie on the surface of this question, which are involved in the bare statement of it, are sufficient of themselves to justify and command this inquiry. the fact that these two great branches of the philosophy of observation and practice, both already _virtually_ recognised as that,--the one openly, subordinating the physical forces of nature to the wants of man, changing the face of the earth under our eyes, leaving behind it, with its new magic, the miracles of oriental dreams and fables;--the other, under its veil of wildness and spontaneity, under its thick-woven veil of mirth and beauty, with its inducted precepts and dispersed directions, insinuating itself into all our practice, winding itself into every department of human affairs; speaking from the legislator's lips, at the bar, from the pulpit,--putting in its word every where, always at hand, always sufficient, constituting itself, in virtue of its own irresistible claims and in the face of what we are told of it, the oracle, the great practical, mysterious, but universally acknowledged, oracle of our modern life; the fact that these two great branches of the modern philosophy make their appearance in history at the same moment, that they make their appearance in the same company of men--in that same little courtly company of elizabethan wits and men of letters that the revival of the ancient learning brought out here--this is the fact that strikes the eye at the first glance at this inquiry. but that this is none other than that same little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and organize a popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise, the best of of them effecting their retreat with some difficulty, others failing entirely to accomplish it, is the next notable fact which the surface of the inquiry exhibits. that these two so illustrious branches of the modern learning were produced for the ostensible purpose of illustrating and adorning the tyrannies which the men, under whose countenance and protection they are produced, were vainly attempting, or had vainly attempted to set bounds to or overthrow, is a fact which might seem of itself to suggest inquiry. when insurrections are suppressed, when 'the monstrous enterprises of rebellious subjects are overthrown, then fame, who is _the posthumous sister of the giants_,--the sister of _defeated_ giants springs up'; so a man who had made some political experiments himself that were not very successful, tells us. the fact that the men under whose patronage and in whose service 'will the jester' first showed himself, were men who were secretly endeavouring to make political capital of that new and immense motive power, that not yet available, and not very easily organised political power which was already beginning to move the masses here then, and already threatening, to the observant eye, with its portentous movement, the foundations of tyranny, the fact, too, that these men were understood to have made use of the stage unsuccessfully as a means of immediate political effect, are facts which lie on the surface of the history of these works, and unimportant as it may seem to the superficial enquirer, it will be found to be anything but irrelevant as this inquiry proceeds. the man who is said to have contributed a thousand pounds towards the purchase of the theatre and wardrobe and machinery, in which these philosophical plays were first exhibited, was obliged to stay away from the first appearance of hamlet, in the perfected excellence of the poetic philosophic design, in consequence of being immured in the tower at that time for an attempt to overthrow the government. this was the ostensible patron and friend of the poet; the partner of his treason was the ostensible friend and patron of the philosopher. so nearly did these philosophic minds, that were 'not for an age but for all time,' approach each other in _this_ point. but the _protégé_ and friend and well-nigh adoring admirer of the _poet_, was also the _protégé_ and friend and well-nigh adoring admirer of the philosopher. the fact that these two philosophies, in this so close juxta-position, always in contact, playing always into each other's hands, never once heard of each other, know nothing of each other, is a fact which would seem at the first blush to point to the secret of these 'know-nothings,' who are men of science in an age of popular ignorance, and therefore have a 'secret'; who are men of science in an age in which the questions of science are 'forbidden questions,' and are therefore of necessity 'know-nothings.' as to ben jonson, and the evidence of his avowed admiration for the author of these plays, from the point of view here taken, it is sufficient to say in passing, that this man, whose natural abilities sufficed to raise him from a position hardly less mean and obscure than that of his great rival, was so fortunate as to attract the attention of some of the most illustrious personages of that time; men whose observation of natures was quickened by their necessities; men who were compelled to employ 'living instruments' in the accomplishment of their designs; who were skilful in detecting the qualities they had need of, and skilful in adapting means to ends. this dramatist's connection with the stage of course belongs to this history. his connection with the author of these plays, and with the player himself, are points not to be overlooked. but the literary history of this age is not yet fully developed. it is enough to say here, that he chanced to be honored with the patronage of _three_ of the most illustrious personages of the age in which he lived. he had _three_ patrons. one was sir walter raleigh, in whose service he was; one was the lord bacon, whose well nigh idolatrous admirer he appears also to have been; the other was _shakspere_, to whose favor he appears to have owed so much. with his passionate admiration of these last two, stopping only 'this side of idolatry' in his admiration for them both, and being under such deep personal obligations to them both, why could he not have mentioned some day to the author of the advancement of learning, the author of hamlet--hamlet who also 'lacked advancement?' what more natural than to suppose that these two philosophers, these men of a learning so exactly equal, might have some sympathy with each other, might like to meet each other. till he has answered that question, any evidence which he may have to produce in apparent opposition to the conclusions here stated will not be of the least value. these are questions which any one might properly ask, who had only glanced at the most superficial or easily accessible facts in this case, and without any evidence from any other source to stimulate the inquiry. these are facts which lie on the surface of this history, which obtrude themselves on our notice, and demand inquiry. that which lies immediately below this surface, accessible to any research worthy of the name is, that these two so new extraordinary developments of the modern philosophy which come to us without any _superficially_ avowed connexion, which come to us as _branches_ of learning merely, do in fact meet and unite in one stem, 'which has a quality of entireness and continuance throughout,' even to the most delicate fibre of them both, even to the 'roots' of their trunk, 'and the strings of those roots,' which trunk lies below the surface of that age, buried, carefully buried, for reasons assigned; and that it is the sap of this concealed trunk, this new trunk of sciences, which makes both these branches so vigorous, which makes the flowers and the fruit both so fine, and so unlike anything that we have had from any other source in the way of literature or art. the question of the authorship of the great philosophic poems which are the legacy of the elizabethan age to us, is an incidental question in this inquiry, and is incidentally treated here. the discovery of the authorship of these works was the necessary incident to that more thorough inquiry into their nature and design, of which the views contained in this volume are the result. at a certain stage of this inquiry,--in the later stages of it,--that discovery became inevitable. the primary question here is one of universal immediate practical concern and interest. the solution of this literary problem, happens to be involved in it. it was the necessary prescribed, pre-ordered incident of the reproduction and reintegration of the inductive philosophy in its application to its 'principal' and 'noblest subjects,' its 'more chosen subjects.' the historical key to the elizabethan art of tradition, which formed the first book of this work as it was originally prepared for the press, is not included in the present publication. it was the part of the work first written, and the results of more recent research require to be incorporated in it, in order that it should represent adequately, in that particular aspect of it, the historical discovery which it is the object of this work to produce. moreover, the demonstration which is contained in this volume appeared to constitute properly a volume of itself. those who examine the subject from this ground, will find the external collateral evidence, the ample historical confirmation which is at hand, not necessary for the support of the propositions advanced here, though it will, of course, be inquired for, when once this ground is made. the embarrassing circumstances under which this great system of scientific practice makes its appearance in history, have not yet been taken into the account in our interpretation of it. we have already the documents which contain the theory and rule of the modern civilisation, which is the civilisation of science in our hands. we have in our hands also, newly lit, newly trimmed, lustrous with the genius of our own time, that very lamp with which we are instructed to make this inquiry, that very light which we are told we must bring to bear upon the obscurities of these documents, that very light in which we are told, we must unroll them; for they come to us, as the interpreter takes pains to tell us, with an 'infolded' science in them. that light of '_times_,' that knowledge of the conditions under which these works were published, which is essential to the true interpretation of them, thanks to our contemporary historians, is already in our hands. what we need now is to explore the secrets of this philosophy with it,--necessarily secrets at the time it was issued--what we need now is to open these books of a new learning in it, and read them by it. in that part of the work above referred to, from which some extracts are subjoined for the purpose of introducing intelligibly the demonstration contained in this volume, it was the position of the elizabethan men of letters that was exhibited, and the conditions which prescribed to the founders of a new school in philosophy, which was none other than the philosophy of practice, the form of their works and the concealment of their connection with them--conditions which made the secret of an association of 'naturalists' applying science in that age to the noblest subjects of speculative inquiry, and to the highest departments of practice, a life and death secret. the _physical_ impossibility of publishing at that time, anything openly relating to the questions in which the weal of men is most concerned, and which are the primary questions of the science of man's relief, the opposition which stood at that time prepared to crush any enterprise proposing openly for its end, the common interests of man as man, is the point which it was the object of that part of the work to exhibit. it was presented, not in the form of general statement merely, but in those memorable particulars which the falsified, suppressed, garbled history of the great founder of this school betrays to us; not as it is exhibited in contemporary documents merely, but as it is carefully collected from these, and from the _traditions_ of 'the next ages.' that the suppressed elizabethan reformers and innovators were men so far in advance of their time, that they were compelled to have recourse to literature for the purpose of instituting a gradual encroachment on popular opinions, a gradual encroachment on the prejudices, the ignorance, the stupidity of the oppressed and suffering masses of the human kind, and for the purpose of making over the practical development of the higher parts of their science, to ages in which the advancements they instituted had brought the common mind within hearing of these higher truths; that these were men whose aims were so opposed to the power that was still predominant then,--though the 'wrestling' that would shake that predominance, was already on foot,--that it became necessary for them to conceal their lives as well as their works,--to veil the true worth and nobility of them, to suffer those ends which they sought as means, means which they subordinated to the noblest uses, to be regarded in their own age as their _ends_; that they were compelled to play this great game in secret, in their own time, referring themselves to posthumous effects for the explanation of their designs; postponing their honour to ages able to discover their worth; this is the proposition which is derived here from the works in which the tradition of this learning is conveyed to us. but in the part of this work referred to, from which the ensuing extracts are made, it was the life, and not merely the writings of the founders of this school which was produced in evidence of this claim. it was the life in which these disguised ulterior aims show themselves from the first on the historic surface, in the form of great contemporaneous events, events which have determined and shaped the course of the world's history since then; it was the life in which these intents show themselves too boldly on the surface, in which they penetrate the artistic disguise, and betray themselves to the antagonisms which were waiting to crush them; it was the life which combined these antagonisms for its suppression; it was the life and death of the projector and founder of the liberties of the new world, and the obnoxious historian and critic of the tyrannies of the old, it was the life and death of sir walter raleigh that was produced as the historical key to the elizabethan art of tradition. it was the man of the globe theatre, it was the man in the tower with his two hemispheres, it was the modern 'hercules and his load too,' that made in the original design of it, the frontispiece of this volume. 'but stay i see thee in the hemisphere advanced and made a _constellation_ there. shine forth, thou star of poets, and with _rage or influence_, chide or cheer the drooping stage, which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like night, and despairs day, but for thy volume's light. ['to draw no envy _shake-spear_ on thy name, am i _thus ample_ to thy book and fame.'--ben jonson.] the machinery that was necessarily put in operation for the purpose of conducting successfully, under those conditions, any honourable or decent enterprise, presupposes a forethought and skill, a faculty for dramatic arrangement and successful plotting in historic materials, happily so remote from anything which the exigencies of our time have ever suggested to us, that we are not in a position to read at a glance the history of such an age; the history which lies on the surface of such an age when such men--men who are men--are at work in it. these are the _elizabethan_ men that we have to interpret here, because, though they rest from their labours, their works do follow them--the elizabethan _men_ of _letters_; and we must know what that title means before we can read them or their works, before we can '_untie_ their _spell_.' chapter ii. the age of elizabeth, and the elizabethan men of letters. 'the times, in many cases, give great light to _true_ interpretations.' _advancement of learning_. 'on fair ground i could beat forty of them.' 'i could myself take up a brace of the best of them, yea _the two tribunes_.' 'but now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic, and _manhood_ is called _foolery_ when it stands against a falling fabric.'--_coriolanus_. the fact that the immemorial liberties of the english people, and that idea of human government and society which they brought with them to this island, had been a second time violently overborne and suppressed by a military chieftainship,--one for which the unorganised popular resistance was no match,--that the english people had been a second time 'conquered'--for that is the word which the elizabethan historian suggests--less than a hundred years before the beginning of the elizabethan age, is a fact in history which the great elizabethan philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. it is a fact with which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which the elizabethan poet and philosopher became acquainted with under circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and expositions of it which our time can furnish us. that this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading than the first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a chartered, constitutional liberty, recovered and established in acts that had made the english history, recovered on battle-fields that were fresh, not in oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was effected in violation of that which made the name of englishmen, that which made the universally recognised principle of the national life; inasmuch, too, as it was an _undivided_ conquest, the conquest of _the single will_--the will of the 'one only man'--not unchecked of commons only, unchecked by barons, unchecked by the church, unchecked by _council_ of any kind, the pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy, the crowned demon of the _lawless_, irrational will, unchained and armed with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the divinity of the common right; that _this_ was a conquest unspeakably more debasing than the conquest 'commonly so called,'--this, which left no nobility,--which clasped its collar in open day on the proudest norman neck, and not on the saxon only, which left only one nation of slaves and bondmen--that _this_ was a _subjugation_--that this was a government which the english nation had not before been familiar with, the men whose great life-acts were performed under it did not lack the sensibility and the judgment to perceive. a more _hopeless_ conquest than the norman conquest had been, it might also have seemed, regarded in some of the aspects which it presented to the eye of the statesman then; for it was in the division of the former that the element of freedom stole in, it was in the parliaments of that division that the limitation of the feudal monarchy had begun. but still more fatal was the aspect of it which its effects on the national character were continually obtruding then on the observant eye,--that debasing, deteriorating, demoralising effect which such a government must needs exert on _such_ a nation, a nation of englishmen, a nation with such memories. the poet who writes under this government, with an appreciation of the subject quite as lively as that of any more recent historian, speaks of 'the face of men' as a 'motive'--a _motive_ power, a revolutionary force, which ought to be sufficient of itself to raise, if need be, an armed opposition to such a government, and sustain it, too, without the compulsion of an oath to reinforce it; at least, this is one of the three motives which he produces in his conspiracy as motives that ought to suffice to supply the power wanting to effect a change in such a government. 'if not _the face_ of _men_, the sufferance of our _souls, the time's abuse_,-- _if these be motives weak, break of betimes._' there is no use in attempting a change where such motives are weak. 'break off _betimes_, and every man hence to his idle bed.' that this political degradation, and its deteriorating and corrupting influence on the national character, was that which presented itself to the politician's eye at that time as the most fatal aspect of the question, or as the thing most to be deprecated in the continuance of such a state of things, no one who studies carefully the best writings of that time can doubt. and it must be confessed, that this is an influence which shows itself very palpably, not in the degrading hourly detail only of which the noble mind is, in such circumstances, the suffering witness, and the secretly protesting suffering participator, but in those large events which make the historic record. the england of the plantagenets, that sturdy england which henry the seventh had to conquer, and not its pertinacious choice of colours only, not its fixed determination to have the choosing of the colour of its own 'roses' merely, but its inveterate idea of the sanctity of '_law_' permeating all the masses--that was a very different england from the england which henry the seventh willed to his children; it was a very different england, at least, from the england which henry the eighth willed to _his_. that some sparks of the old fire were not wanting, however,--that the nation which had kept alive in the common mind through so many generations, without the aid of books, the memory of that 'ancestor' that 'made its laws,' was not after all, perhaps, without a future--began to be evident about the time that the history of 'that last king of england who was the ancestor' of the english stuart, was dedicated by the author of the novum organum to the prince of wales, afterwards charles i., not without a glance at these portents. circumstances tending to throw doubt upon the durability of this institution--circumstances which seemed to portend that this monstrous innovation was destined on the whole to be a much shorter-lived one than the usurpation it had displaced--had not been wanting, indeed, from the first, in spite of those discouraging aspects of the question which were more immediately urged upon the contemporary observer. it was in the eleventh century; it was in the middle of the dark ages, that the norman and his followers effected their successful landing and lodgement here; it was in the later years of the fifteenth century,--it was when the bell that tolled through europe for a century and a half the closing hour of the middle ages, had already begun its peals, that the tudor 'came in by battle.' that magnificent chain of events which begins in the middle of the fifteenth century to rear the dividing line between the middle ages and the modern, had been slow in reaching england with its convulsions: it had originated on the continent. the great work of the restoration of the learning of antiquity had been accomplished there: italy, germany, and france had taken the lead in it by turns; spain had contributed to it. the scientific discoveries which the genius of modern europe had already effected under that stimulus, without waiting for the new organum, had all originated on the continent. the criticism on the institutions which the decaying roman empire had given to its northern conquerors,--that criticism which necessarily accompanied the revival of _learning_ began there. not yet recovered from the disastrous wars of the fifteenth century, suffering from the diabolical tyranny that had overtaken her at that fatal crisis, england could make but a feeble response as yet to these movements. they had been going on for a century before the influence of them began to be visible here. but they were at work here, notwithstanding: they were germinating and taking root here, in that frozen winter of a nation's discontent; and when they did begin to show themselves on the historic surface,--here in this ancient soil of freedom,--in this natural retreat of it, from the extending, absorbing, consolidating feudal tyrannies,--here in this 'little world by itself'--this nursery of the genius of the north--with its chief races, with its union of races, its 'happy breed of men,' as our poet has it, who notes all these points, and defines its position, regarding it, not with a narrow english partiality, but looking at it on his map of the world, which he always carries with him,--looking at it from his 'globe,' which has the old world and the new on it, and the past and the future,--'a precious stone set in the silver sea,' he calls it, 'in a great pool, a _swan's nest_':--when that seed of all ages did at last show itself above the ground here, here in this nursery of hope for man, it would be with quite another kind of fruit on its boughs, from any that the continent had been able to mature from it. it was in the later years of the sixteenth century, in the latter half of the reign of elizabeth, that the printing press, and the revived learning of antiquity, and the reformation, and the discovery of america, the new revival of the genius of the north in art and literature, and the scientific discoveries which accompanied this movement on the continent, began to combine their effects here; and it was about that time that the political horizon began to exhibit to the statesman's eye, those portents which both the poet and the philosopher of that time, have described with so much iteration and amplitude. these new social elements did not appear to promise in their combination here, stability to the institutions which henry the seventh, and henry the eighth had established in this island. the genius of elizabeth conspired with the anomaly of her position to make her the steadfast patron and promoter of these movements,--worthy grand-daughter of henry the seventh as she was, and opposed on principle, as she was, to the ultimatum to which they were visibly and stedfastly tending; but, at the same time, her sagacity and prudence enabled her to ward off the immediate result. she secured her throne,--she was able to maintain, in the rocking of those movements, her own political and spiritual supremacy,--she made gain and capital for absolutism out of them,--the inevitable reformation she herself assumed, and set bounds to: whatever new freedom there was, was still the freedom of her will; she could even secure the throne of her successor: it was mischief for charles i. that she was nursing. the consequence of _all_ this was--_the age of elisabeth_. that was what this queen meant it should be literally, and that was what it was apparently. but it so happened, that her will and humours on some great questions jumped with the time, and her dire necessities compelled her to lead the nation on its own track; or else it would have been too late, perhaps, for that exhibition of the monarchical institution,--that revival of the heroic, and _ante_-heroic ages, which her reign exhibits, to come off here as it did at that time. it is this that makes the point in this literary history. this is the key that unlocks the secret of the elizabethan art of delivery and tradition. without any material resources to sustain it--strong in the national sentiments,--strong in the moral forces with which the past controls the present,--strong in that natural abhorrence of change with which nature protects her larger growths,--that principle which tyranny can test so long with impunity--which it can test with impunity, till it forgets that this also has in nature its limits,--strong in the absence of any combination of opposition, to the young awakening england of that age, that now hollow image of the past, that phantom of the military force that had been, which seemed to be waiting only the first breath of the popular will to dissolve it, was as yet an armed and terrific reality; its iron was on every neck, its fetter was on every step, and all the new forces, and world-grasping aims and aspirations which that age was generating were held down and cramped, and tortured in its chains, dashing their eagle wings in vain against its iron limits. as yet all england cowered and crouched, in blind servility, at the foot of that terrible, but unrecognised embodiment of its own power, armed out of its own armoury, with the weapons that were turned against it. so long as any yet extant national sentiment, or prejudice, was not yet directly assailed--so long as that arbitrary power was yet wise, or fortunate enough to withhold the blow which should make the individual sense of outrage, or the feeling of a class the common one--so long as those peaceful, social elements, yet waited the spark that was wanting to unite them--so long 'the laws of england' might be, indeed, at a falstaff's or a nym's or a bardolph's 'commandment,' for the poet has but put into 'honest jack's' mouth, a boast that worse men than he, made good in his time--so long, the faith, the lives, the liberties, the dearest earthly hopes, of england's proudest subjects, her noblest, her bravest, her best, her most learned, her most accomplished, her most inspired, might be at the mercy of a woman's caprices, or the sport of a fool's sheer will and obstinacy, or conditioned on some low-lived 'favorites' whims. _so long_: and how long was that?--who does not know how long it was?--that was long enough for the whole elizabethan age to happen in. in the reign of elizabeth, and in the reign of her successor, and longer still, that was the condition of it--till its last act was finished--till its last word was spoken and penned--till its last mute sign was made--till all its celestial inspiration had returned to the god who gave it--till all its promethean clay was cold again. this was the combination of conditions of which the elizabethan literature was the result. the elizabethan men of letters, the organisers and chiefs of the modern civilization were the result of it. these were men in whom the genius of the north in its happiest union of developments, under its choicest and most favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient learning brings with it to the northern mind--to the now unimaginable stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought with it to the mind of europe in that age,--already secure, in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity under the scholastic culture--the meagre scholastic, and the rich romantic culture--of the mediaeval era. the elizabethan men of letters are men who found in those new and dazzling stores of art and literature which the movements of their age brought in all their freshly restored perfection to them, only the summons to their own slumbering intellectual activities,--fed with fires that old eastern and southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in the depths of a nature whose depths the northern antiquity had made; they were men who found in the learning of the south and the east--in the art and speculation that had satisfied the classic antiquity--only the definition of their own nobler want. the first result of the revival of the ancient learning in this island was, a report of its 'defects.' the first result of that revival here was a map--a universal map of the learning and the arts which the conditions of man's life require--a new map or globe of learning on which lands and worlds, undreamed of by the ancients, are traced. 'a map or globe' on which 'the principal and supreme sciences,' the sciences that are _essential_ to the human kind, are put down among 'the parts that lie fresh and waste, and not converted by the industry of man.' the first result of the revival of learning here was 'a plot' for the supply of these deficiencies. the elizabethan men of letters were men, in whom the revival of 'the wisdom of the ancients,' which in its last results, in its most select and boasted conservations had combined in vain to save antiquity, found the genius of a happier race, able to point out at a glance the defect in it; men who saw with a glance at those old books what was the matter with them; men prepared already to overlook from the new height of criticism which this sturdy insular development of the practical genius of the north created, the remains of that lost civilization--the splendours rescued from the wreck of empires,--the wisdom which had failed so fatally in practice that it must needs cross from a lost world of learning to the barbarian's new one, to find pupils--that it must needs cross the gulf of a thousand years in learning--such work had it made of it--ere it could revive,--the wisdom rescued from the wreck it had piloted to ruin, _not_ to enslave, and ensnare, and doom new ages, and better races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. for these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. and they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from those who lay themselves out on enterprises having that tendency. the result of this english survey of learning was the sanctioned and organised determination of the modern speculation to those new fields which it has already occupied, and its organised, but secret determination, to that end of a true learning which the need of man, in its whole comprehension in _this_ theory of it, constitutes. but the men with whom this proceeding originates, the elizabethan men of letters, were, in their own time, 'the few.' they were the chosen men, not of an age only, but of a race, 'the noblest that ever lived in the tide of times;' men enriched with the choicest culture of their age, when that culture involved not the acquisition of the learning of the ancients only, but the most intimate acquaintance with all those recent and contemporaneous developments with which its restoration on the continent had been attended. was it strange that these men should find themselves without sympathy in an age like that?--an age in which the masses were still unlettered, callous with wrongs, manacled with blind traditions, or swaying hither and thither, with the breath of a common prejudice or passion, or swayed hither and thither by the changeful humours and passions, or the conflicting dogmas and conceits of their rulers. that is the reason why the development of that age comes to us as a _literature_. that is why it is on the surface of it _elizabethan_. that is the reason why the leadership of the modern ages, when it was already here in the persons of its chief interpreters and prophets, could get as yet no recognition of its right to teach and rule--could get as yet nothing but _paper_ to print itself on, nothing but a _pen_ to hew its way with, nor that, without death and danger dogging it at the heels, and threatening it, at every turn, so that it could only wave, in mute gesticulation, its signals to the future. it had to affect, in that time, bookishness and wiry scholasticism. it had to put on sedulously the harmless old monkish gown, or the jester's cap and bells, or any kind of a tatterdemalion robe that would hide, from head to heel, the waving of its purple. '_motley's_ the only wear,' whispers the philosopher, peering through his privileged garb for a moment. king charles ii. had not more to do in reserving _himself_ in an evil time, and getting safely over to the year of his dominion. letters were the only ships that could pass those seas. but it makes a new style in literature, when such men as these, excluded from their natural sphere of activity, get driven into books, cornered into paragraphs, and compelled to unpack their hearts in letters. there is a new tone to the words spoken under such compression. it is a tone that the school and the cloister never rang with,--it is one that the fancy dealers in letters are not able to deal in. they are such words as caesar speaks, when he puts his legions in battle array,--they are such words as were heard at salamis one morning, when the breeze began to stiffen in the bay; and though they be many, never so many, and though they be musical, as is apollo's lute, that lacedemonian ring is in each one of them. there is great business to be done in them, and their haste looks through their eyes. in the sighing of the lover, in the jest of the fool, in the raving of the madman, and not in horatio's philosophy only, you hear it. the founders of the new science of nature and practice were men unspeakably too far above and beyond their time, to take its bone and muscle with them. there was no language in which their doctrines could have been openly conveyed to an english public at that time without fatal misconception. the truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal obligation,--the truth, which was to them religion, would have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow-minded, prejudiced englishwoman's opinions were accepted as the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' what was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and conscience, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, to suppress it. the only thing that could be done in such circumstances was, to _translate_ their doctrine into the language of their time. they must take the current terms--the vague popular terms--as they found them, and restrict and enlarge them, and inform them with their new meanings, with a hint to 'men of understanding' as to the sense in which they use them. that is the key to the language in which their books for the future were written. but who supposes that these men were so wholly super-human, so devoid of mortal affections and passions, so made up of 'dry light,' that they could retreat, with all those regal faculties, from the natural sphere of _their_ activity to the scholar's cell, to make themselves over in books to a future in which their mortal natures could have no share,--a future which could not begin till all the breathers of their world were dead? who supposes that the 'staff' of prospero was the first choice of these chiefs?--these 'heads of the state,' appointed of nature to the cure of the common-weal. the leading minds of that age are not minds which owed their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifications which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular sensuous existence. the mind of this school is the representative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists had missed in their abstractions,--that nature of will, and sense, and passion, and inanity, is brought out in its true historical proportions, not as it exists in books, not as it exists in speech, but as it exists in the actual human life. it is the mind in which this historical principle, this motivity which is not reason, is brought in contact with the opposing and controlling element as it had not been before. in all its earth-born titanic strength and fulness, it _is_ dragged up from its secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial antagonist. in all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to her unrelenting criticism. there are depths in this microcosm which _this_ torch only has entered, silences which this speaker only has broken, cries which he only knows how to articulate. 'the soundest disclosing and expounding of men is by their _natures_ and _ends_,' so the one who is best qualified to give us information on this question tells us,--by their natures _and_ ends; 'the weaker sort by their natures, and the _wisest_ by their ends'; and '_the distance_' of this wisest sort 'from the _ends_ to which they aspire,' is that 'from which one may take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires.' the first end which these elizabethan men of letters grasped at, the thing which they pursued with all the intensity and concentration of a master passion, was--_power_, political power. they wanted to rule their own time, and not the future only. 'you are hurt, because you do not reign,' is the inuendo which they permit us to apply to them as the key to their proceedings. 'such men as this are never at heart's ease,' caesar remarks in confidence to a friend, 'whiles they behold a greater than themselves.' 'come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,' he adds, 'and tell me truly what thou think'st of him.' these are the kind of men that seek instinctively 'predominance,' not in a clique or neighbourhood only,--they are not content with a domestic reflection of their image, they seek to stamp it on the state and on the world. these elizabethan men of letters were men who sought from the first, with inveterate determination, to rule their own time, and they never gave up that point entirely. in one way or another, directly or indirectly, they were determined to make their influence felt in that age, in spite of the want of encouragement which the conditions of that time offered to such an enterprise. but they sought that end not instinctively only, but with the stedfastness of a rational, scientifically enlightened purpose. it was an enterprise in which the intense motivity of that new and so 'conspicuous' development of the particular and private nature, which lies at the root of such a genius, was sustained by the determination of that not less superior development of the nobler nature in man, by the motivity of the intellect, by the sentiment which waits on _that_, by the motive of 'the larger whole,' which is, in this science of it, 'the worthier.' we do not need to apply the key of times to those indirectly historical remains in which the real history, the life and soul of a time, is always best found, and in which the history of such a time, if written at all, must necessarily be inclosed; we do not need to unlock these works to perceive the indications of suppressed movements in that age, in which the most illustrious men of the age were primarily concerned, the history of which has not yet fully transpired. we do not need to find the key to the cipher in which the history of that time is written, to perceive that there was to have been a change in the government here at one time, very different from the one which afterwards occurred, if the original plans of these men had succeeded. it is not the plays only that are full of that frustrated enterprise. these were the kind of men who are not easily baffled. they changed their tactics, but not their ends; and the enterprises which were conducted with so much secresy under the surveillance of the tudor, began already to crown themselves as certainties, and compare their 'olives of endless age' with the spent tombs of brass' and 'tyrant's crests,' at that sure prospect which, a change of dynasties at that moment seemed to open,--at least, to men who were in a position then to estimate its consequences. that _this_, at all events, was a state of things that was not going to endure, became palpable about that time to the philosophic mind. the transition from the rule of a sovereign who was mistress of 'the situation,' who understood that it was a popular power which she was wielding--the transition from the rule of a queen instructed in the policy of a tyranny, inducted by nature into its arts, to the policy of that monarch who had succeeded to her throne, and whose 'crest' began to be reared here then in the face of the insulted reviving english nationality,--this transition appeared upon the whole, upon calmer reflection, at least to the more patient minds of that age, all that could reasonably at that time be asked for. no better instrument for stimulating and strengthening the growing popular sentiment, and rousing the latent spirit of the nation, could have been desired by the elizabethan politicians at that crisis, 'for the great labour was with the people'--that uninstructed power, which makes the sure basis of tyrannies--that power which mark antony takes with him so easily--the ignorant, tyrannical, humour-led masses--the masses that still roar their elizabethan stupidities from the immortal groups of coriolanus and julius caesar. we ourselves have not yet overtaken the chief minds of this age; and the gulf that separated them from those overpowering numbers in their own time, to whose edicts they were compelled to pay an external submission, was broad indeed. the difficulty of establishing an understanding with this power was the difficulty. they wanted that 'pulpit' from which brutus and mark antony swayed it by turns so easily--that pulpit from which mark antony showed it caesar's mantle. they wanted some organ of communication with these so potent and resistless rulers--some 'chair' from which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story of their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of '_the kings_ their ancestors'--some school in which they could collect them and instruct them in the scientific doctrine of the _commons_, the doctrine of the common-_weal_ and its divine supremacy. they wanted a school in which they could tell them stories--stories of various kinds--such stories as they loved best to hear--midsummer stories, or winter's tales, and stories of their own battle-fields--they wanted a school in which they could teach the common people _history_ (and not english history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic lantern to aid them,--'visible history.' but to wait till these slow methods had taken effect, would be, perhaps, to wait, not merely till their estate in the earth was done, but till the mischief they wished to avert was accomplished. and thus it was, that the proposal 'to go the beaten track of getting arms into their hands under colour of caesar's designs, and _because the people understood them not_,' came to be considered. to permit the new dynasty to come in without making any terms with it, without insisting upon a definition of that indefinite power which the tudors had wielded with impunity, and without challenge, would be to make needless work for the future, and to ignore criminally the responsibilities of their own position, so at least some english statesmen of that time, fatally for their favour with the new monarch, were known to have thought. 'to proceed by process,' to check by gradual constitutional measures that overgrown and monstrous power in the state, was the project which these statesmen had most at heart. but that was a movement which required a firm and enlightened popular support. charters and statutes were dead letters till that could be had. it was fatal to attempt it till that was secured. failing in that popular support, if the statesman who had attempted that movement, if the illustrious chief, and chief man of his time, who headed it, did secretly meditate other means for accomplishing the same end--which was to limit the prerogative--such means as the time offered, and if the evidence which was wanting on his trial _had been_ produced in proof of it, who that knows what that crisis was would undertake to convict him on it now? he was arrested on suspicion. he was a man who had undertaken to set bounds to the absolute will of the monarch, and therefore he was a dangerous man. [he (sir walter raleigh), together with the lord chobham, sir j. fortescue, and _others_, would have obliged the king to _articles_ before he was admitted to the throne, and thought the number of his countrymen should be limited.--_osborne's memorials of king james_.] the charges that were made against him on that shameless trial were indignantly repelled. 'do you mix, me up with these spiders?' (alluding, perhaps, more particularly to the jesuit associated with him in this charge). 'do you think i am a jack cade or a robin hood?' he said. but though the evidence on this trial is not only in itself illegal, and by confession perjured, but the _report_ of it comes to us with a falsehood on the face of it, and is therefore not to be taken without criticism; that there was a movement of some kind meditated about that time, by persons occupying chief places of trust and responsibility in the nation--a movement not favourable to the continuance of 'the standing departments' in the precise form in which they then stood--that the project of an administrative reform had not, at least, been wholly laid aside--that there was something which did not fully come out on that trial, any one who looks at this report of it will be apt to infer. it was a project which had not yet proceeded to any overt act; there was no legal evidence of its existence produced on the trial; but suppose there were here, then, already, men 'who loved the _fundamental part of state_,' more than in such a crisis 'they _doubted_ the change of it'--men 'who preferred a noble life before a long'--men, too, '_who were more discreet_' than they were '_fearful_,' who thought it good practice to 'jump a body with a dangerous medicine _that was sure of death_ without it;' suppose there _was_ a movement of that kind arrested here then, and the evidence of it were produced, what englishman, or who that boasts the english lineage to-day, can have a word to say about it? who had a better right than those men themselves, those statesmen, those heroes, who had waked and watched for their country's weal so long, who had fought her battles on land and sea, and planned them too, not in the tented field and on the rocking deck only, but in the more 'deadly breach' of civil office, whose _scaling_-ladders had entered even the tyrant's council chamber,--who had a better right than those men themselves to say whether they would be governed by a government of laws, or by the will of the most despicable 'one-only-man power,' armed with sword and lash, that ever a nation of oriental slaves in their political imbecility cowered under? who were better qualified than those men themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril of that crisis,--men who had comprehended and weighed with a judgment which has left no successor to its seat, all the conflicting considerations and claims which that crisis brought with it,--who better qualified than these to decide on the measures by which the hideous nuisances of that time should be abated; by which that axe, that sword, that rack, that stake, and all those burglar's tools, and highwayman's weapons, should be taken out of the hands of the mad licentious crew with which an evil time had armed them against the common-weal--those weapons of lawless power, which the people had vainly, for want of leaders, refused before-hand to put into their hands. who better qualified than these natural chiefs and elected leaders of the nation, to decide on the dangerous measures for suppressing the innovation, which the tudor and his descendants had accomplished in that ancient sovereignty of laws, which was the sovereignty of this people, which even the norman and the plantagenet had been taught to acknowledge? who better qualified than they to call to an account--'the thief,' the 'cut-purse of the empire and the rule,' who 'found the precious diadem _on a shelf_, and stole and put it in his pocket'? ['shall the blessed _sun_ of _heaven_ prove a micher, and _eat blackberries_'? a question _not_ to be asked! shall the blessed 'son of england' prove a thief, and take purses? a question _to be asked_. 'the _poor_ abuses of the time want _countenance_.' _lear_. take that from me, my friend, who have the power to _seal the accuser's_ lips.] who better qualified could be found to head the dangerous enterprise for the deliverance of england from that shame, than the chief in whom her alfred arose again to break from her neck a baser than the danish yoke, to restore her kingdom and found her new empire, to give her domains, that the sun never sets on,--her poet, her philosopher, her soldier, her legislator, the builder of her empire of the sea, her founder of new 'states.' but then, of course, it is only by the rarest conjunction of circumstances, that the movements and plans which such a state of things gives rise to, can get any other than the most opprobrious name and place in history. success is their only certificate of legitimacy. to attempt to overthrow a government still so strongly planted in the endurance and passivity of the people, might seem, perhaps, to some minds in these circumstances, a hopeless, and, _therefore_, a criminal undertaking. 'that _opportunity_ which then they had to take from us, to resume, we have again,' might well have seemed a sufficient plea, so it could have been made good. but it is not strange that some few, even then, should find it difficult to believe that the national ruin was yet so entire, that the ashes of the ancient nobility and commons of england were yet so cold, as that a system of despotism like that which was exercised here then, could be permanently and securely fastened over them. it is not strange that it should seem to these impossible that there should not be enough of that old english spirit which, only a hundred years before, had ranged the people in armed thousands, in defence of law, against absolutism, enough of it, at least, to welcome and sustain the overthrow of tyranny, when once it should present itself as a fact accomplished, instead of appealing beforehand to a courage, which so many instances of vain and disastrous resistance had at last subdued, and to a spirit which seemed reduced at last, to the mere quality of the master's will. that was a narrow dominion apparently to which king james consigned his great rival in the arts of government, but that rival of his contrived to rear a 'crest' there which will outlast 'the tyrants,' and 'look fresh still' when tombs that artists were at work on then 'are spent.' 'and when a soldier was his theme, my name--my _name_ [namme de plume] was nor far off.' king james forgot how many weapons this man carried. he took one sword from him, he did not know that that pen, that harmless goose-quill, carried in its sheath another. he did not know what strategical operations the scholar, who was 'an old soldier' and a politician also, was capable of conducting under such conditions. those were narrow quarters for 'the shepherd of the ocean,' for the hero of the two hemispheres, to occupy so long; but it proved no bad retreat for the chief of this movement, as he managed it. it was in that school of elizabethan statesmanship which had its centre in the tower, that many a scholarly english gentleman came forth prepared to play his part in the political movements that succeeded. it was out of that school of statesmanship that john hampden came, accomplished for his part in them. the papers that the chief of the protestant cause prepared in that literary retreat to which the monarch had consigned him, by means of those secret channels of communication among the better minds which he had established in the reign of elizabeth, became the secret manual of the revolutionary chiefs; they made the first blast of the trumpet that summoned at last the nation to its feet. 'the famous mr. hamden' (says an author, who writes in those 'next ages' in which so many traditions of this time are still rife) '_a little before_ the civil wars was at the charge of transcribing three thousand four hundred and fifty-two sheets of sir walter raleigh's mss., as the amanuensis himself _told me_, who had his _close chamber_, his fire and _candle_, with an _attendant to deliver him the originals_ and _take his copies as fast as he could write them_.' that of itself is a pretty little glimpse of the kind of machinery which the elizabethan literature required for its 'delivery and tradition' at the time, or near the times, in which it was produced. that is a view of 'an interior' 'before the civil wars.' it was john milton who concluded, on looking over, a long time afterwards, one of the unpublished papers of this statesman, that it was his duty to give it to the public. 'having had,' he says, 'the ms. of this treatise ["the cabinet council"] written by sir walter raleigh, many years in my hands, and finding it lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof, i thought it _a kind of injury to withhold longer_ the work of so eminent an author from the public; it being both answerable in style to other works of his already extant, as far as _the subject_ would permit, and given me for a true copy by a learned man at his death, who had collected several such pieces.' '_a kind of injury_.'--that is the thought which would naturally take possession of any mind, charged with the responsibility of keeping back for years this man's writings, especially his choicest ones--papers that could not be published then on account of the subject, or that came out with the leaves uncut, labouring with the restrictions which the press opposed then to the issues of such a mind. that great result which the chief minds of the modern ages, under the influence of the new culture, in that secret association of them were able to achieve, that new and all comprehending science of life and practice which they made it their business to perfect and transmit, could not, indeed, as yet be communicated directly to the many. the scientific doctrines of the new time were necessarily limited in that age to the few. but another movement corresponding to that, simultaneous in its origin, related to it in its source, was also in progress here then, proceeding hand in hand with this, playing its game for it, opening the way to its future triumph. this was that movement of the new time,--this was that consequence, not of the revival of learning only, but of the growth of the northern mind which touched everywhere and directly the springs of government, and made 'bold power look pale,' for this was the movement in 'the many.' this was the movement which had already convulsed the continent; this was the movement of which raleigh was from the first the soldier; this was 'the cause' of which he became the chief. it was as a youth of seventeen, bursting from those old fastnesses of the middle ages that could not hold him any longer, shaking off the films of aristotle and his commentators, that he girded on his sword for the great world-battle that was raging already in europe then. it was into the thickest of it, that his first step plunged him. for he was one of that company of a hundred english gentlemen who were waiting but for the first word of permission from elizabeth to go as volunteers to the aid of the huguenots. this was the movement which had at last reached england. and like these other continental events which were so slow in taking effect in england when it did begin to unfold here at last; there was a taste of 'the island' in it, in this also. it was not on the continent only, that raleigh and other english statesmen were disposed to sustain this movement. it was not possible as yet to bring the common mind openly to the heights of those great doctrines of life and practice which the wisdom of the moderns also embodies, but the new teachers of that age knew how to appreciate, as the man of science only can fully appreciate, the worth of those motives that were then beginning to agitate so portentously so large a portion of the english people. the elizabethan politicians nourished and patronised in secret that growing faction. the scientific politician hailed with secret delight, hailed as the partner of his own enterprise, that new element of political power which the changing time began to reveal here then, that power which was already beginning to unclasp on the necks of the masses, the collar of the absolute will--that was already proclaiming, in the stifled undertones of 'that greater part which carries it,' another supremacy. they gave in secret the right hand of a joyful fellowship to it. at home and abroad the great soldier and statesman, who was the first founder of the modern science, headed that faction. he fought its battles by land and sea; he opened the new world to it, and sent it there to work out its problem. it was the first stage of an advancement that would not rest till it found its true consummation. that infinity which was speaking in its confused tones, as with the voice of many waters, was resolved into music and triumphal marches in the ear of the interpreter. it gave token that the nobler nature had not died out under the rod of tyranny; it gave token of the earnestness that would not be appeased until the ends that were declared in it were found. but at the same time, this was a power which the wise men of that age were far from being willing to let loose upon society then in that stage of its development; very far were they from being willing to put the reins into its hands. to balance the dangers that were threatening the world at that crisis was always the problem. it was a very narrow line that the policy which was to save the state had to keep to then. there were evils on both sides. but to the scientific mind there appeared to be a choice in them. the measure on one side had been taken, and it was in all men's hearts, but the abysses on the other no man had sounded. 'the danger of stirring things,'--the dangers, too, of that unscanned swiftness that too late _ties leaden pounds to his heels_ were the dangers that were always threatening the elizabethan movement, and defining and curbing it. the wisest men of that time leaned towards the monarchy, the monarchy that was, rather than the anarchy that was threatening them. the _will_ of the one rather than the _wills_ of the many, the head of the one rather than 'the many-headed.' to effect the change which the time required without 'wrenching all'--without undoing the work of ages--without setting at large from the restraints of reverence and custom the chained tiger of an unenlightened popular will, this was the problem. the wisest statesmen, the most judicious that the world has ever known were here, with their new science, weighing in exactest scales those issues. we must not quarrel with their concessions to tyranny on the one hand, nor with their determination to effect changes on the other, until we are able to command entirely the position they occupied, and the opposing dangers they had always to consider. we must not judge them till they have had their hearing. what freedom and what hope there is of it upon the earth to-day, is the legacy of their perseverance and endurance. they experienced many defeats. the hopes of youth, the hopes of manhood in turn grew cold. that the 'glorious day' which 'flattered the mountain tops' of their immortal morning with its sovereign eye would never shine on them; that their own, with all its unimagined splendours obscured so long, would go down hid in those same 'base clouds,' that for them the consummation was to 'peep about to find themselves dishonourable graves' was the conviction under which their later tasks were achieved. it did not abate their ardour. they did not strain one nerve the less for that. driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. driven from the open field, they fought in secret. 'i will bandy with thee in faction, i will o'errun thee with policy, i will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways,' the jester who brought their challenge said. the elizabethan england rejected the elizabethan man. she would have none of his meddling with her affairs. she sent him to the tower, and to the block, if ever she caught him meddling with them. she buried him alive in the heart of his time. she took the seals of office, she took the sword, from his hands and put a pen in it. she would have of him a man of letters. and a man of letters he became. a man of runes. he invented new letters in his need, letters that would go farther than the sword, that carried more execution in them than the great seal. banished from the state in that isle to which he was banished, he found not the base-born caliban only, to _instruct_, and train, and subdue to his ends, but an ariel, an imprisoned ariel, waiting to be released, able to conduct his masques, able to put his girdles round the earth, and to 'perform and point' to his tempest. 'go bring the rabble, o'er whom i give thee _power_, here to this place,' was the new magician's word. [here is another version of it. 'when sir nicholas bacon, the lord keeper, lived, every room in gorhambury was served with a pipe of water from the pond distant about a mile off. in the lifetime of mr. anthony bacon the water ceased, and his lordship coming to the inheritance could not recover the water without infinite charge. when he was lord chancellor, he built verulam house _close by the pond yard, for a place of privacy_ when he was called upon to dispatch any urgent business. and being asked why he built there, his lordship answered that, seeing _he could not carry the water to_ his house, he _would carry his house_ to the water.] this is not the place for the particulars of this history or for the barest outline of them. they make a volume of themselves. but this glimpse of the circumstances under which the works were composed which it is the object of this volume to open, appeared at the last moment to be required, in the absence of the historical key which the proper development of them makes, to that art of delivery and tradition by means of which the secrets of the elizabethan age have been conveyed to us. chapter iii. extracts from the life of raleigh.--raleigh's school 'our court shall be a little academe, still and contemplative in _living_ art.' 'what is the _end_ of study? let me know.' _love's labour's lost_. but it was not on the new world wholly, that this man of many toils could afford to lavish the revenues which the queen's favour brought him. it was not to that enterprise alone that he was willing to dedicate the _eclat_ and influence of his rising name. there was work at home which concerned him more nearly, not less deeply, to which that new influence was made at once subservient; and in that there were enemies to be encountered more formidable than the spaniard on his own deck, or on his own coast, with all his war-weapons and defences. it was an enemy which required a strategy more subtle than any which the exigencies of camp and field had called for. the fact that this hero throughout all his great public career--so full of all kinds of excitement and action--enough, one would say, to absorb the energies of a mind of any ordinary human capacity--that this soldier whose name had become, on the spanish coasts, what the name of '_coeur de lion_' was in the saracen nursery, that this foreign adventurer who had a fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at one time on his errands--this legislator, for he sat in parliament as representative of his native shire--this magnificent courtier, who had raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a position wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and merits, to a place in the social ranks so exalted; to a place in the state so _near_ that--which was chief and absolute--the fact that this many-sided man of deeds, was all the time a literary man, not a scholar merely, but himself an originator, a teacher, the founder of a school--this is the explanatory point in this history--this is the point in it which throws light on all the rest of it, and imparts to it its true dignity. for he was not a mere blind historical agent, driven by fierce instincts, intending only their own narrow ends, without any faculty of comprehensive survey and choice of intentions; impelled by thirst of adventure, or thirst of power, or thirst of gold, to the execution of his part in the great human struggle for conservation and advancement; working like other useful agencies in the providential scheme--like 'the stormy wind fulfilling his pleasure.' there is, indeed, no lack of the instinctive element in this heroic 'composition;' there is no stronger and more various and complete development of it. that '_lumen siccum_' which his great contemporary is so fond of referring to in his philosophy, that _dry light_ which is so apt, he tells us, in most men's minds, to get 'drenched' a little sometimes, in 'the humours and affections,' and distorted and refracted in their mediums, did not always, perhaps, in its practical determinations, escape from that accident even in the philosopher's own; but in this stormy, world-hero, there was a latent volcano of will and passion; there was, in his constitution, 'a complexion' which might even seem to the bystanders to threaten at times, by its 'o'ergrowth,' the 'very pales and forts of reason'; but the intellect was, notwithstanding, in its due proportion in him; and it was the majestic intellect that triumphed in the end. it was the large and manly comprehension, 'the large discourse looking before and after,' it was the overseeing and active principle of 'the larger whole,' that predominated and had the steering of his course. it is the common human form which shines out in him and makes that manly demonstration, which commands our common respect, in spite of those particular defects and o'ergrowths which are apt to mar its outline in the best historical types and patterns of it, we have been able to get as yet. it was the intellect, and the sense which belongs to _that_ in its integrity--it was the truth and the feeling of its obligation, which was sovereign with him. for this is a man who appears to have been occupied with the care of the common-weal more than with anything else; and that, too, under great disadvantages and impediments, and when there was no honour in caring for it truly, but that kind of honour which he had so much of; for this was the time precisely which the poet speaks of in that play in which he tells us that the end of playing is 'to give to the very age and body of the time _its form and pressure_.' this was the time when 'virtue of vice _must pardon beg_, and curb and beck for leave to do it good.' it was the relief of man's estate, or the creator's glory, that he busied himself about; that was the end of his ends; or if not, then was he, indeed, no hero at all. for it was the doctrine of his own school, and 'the first human principle' taught in it, that men who act without reference to that distinctly _human_ aim, without that _manly_ consideration and _kind_-liness of purpose, can lay no claim either to divine or human honours; that they are not, in fact, men, but failures; specimens of an unsuccessful attempt in nature, at an advancement; or, as his great contemporary states it more clearly, 'only a nobler kind of vermin.' during all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public life, raleigh was still persistently a scholar. he carried his books--his 'trunk of books' with him in all his adventurous voyages; and they were his 'companions' in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on land. he studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent, as brutus studied in his. he studied them year after year, in the dim light which pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which tyranny had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies. he had had some chance to study 'men and manners' in that strange and various life of his, and he did not lack the skill to make the most of it; but he was not content with that narrow, one-sided aspect of life and human nature, to which his own individual personal experience, however varied, must necessarily limit him. he would see it under greater varieties, under all varieties of conditions. he would know the history of it; he would 'delve it to the root.' he would know how that particular form of it, which he found on the surface in his time, had come to be the thing he found it. he would know what it had been in other times, in the beginning, or in that stage of its development in which the historic light first finds it. he was a man who wished even to know what it had been in _the assyrian_, in _the phenician_, in _the hebrew_, in _the egyptian_; he would see what it had been in _the greek_, and in _the roman_. he was, indeed, one of that clique of elizabethan naturalists, who thought that there was no more curious thing in nature; and instead of taking a jack cade view of the subject, and inferring that an adequate knowledge of it comes by nature, as reading and writing do in that worthy's theory of education, it was the private opinion of this school, that there was no department of learning which a scholar could turn his attention to, that required a more severe and thorough study and experiment, and none that a man of a truly _scientific_ turn of mind would find better worth his leisure. and the study of antiquity had not yet come to be then what it is now; at least, with men of this stamp. such men did not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a classic finish to their style. the books that such a man as this could take the trouble to carry about with him on such errands as those that he travelled on, were books that had in them, for the eager eyes that then o'er-ran them, the world's 'news'--the world's story. they were full of the fresh living data of his conclusions. they were notes that the master minds of all the ages had made for him; invaluable aid and sympathy they had contrived to send to him. the man who had been arrested in his career, more ignominiously than the magnificent tully had been in _his_,--in a career, too, a thousand times more noble,--by a caesar, indeed, but _such_ a caesar;--the man who had sat for years with the executioner's block in his yard, waiting only for a scratch of the royal pen, to bring down upon him that same edge which the poor cicero, with all his truckling, must feel at last,--such a one would look over the old philosopher's papers with an apprehension of their meaning, somewhat more lively than that of the boy who reads them for a prize, or to get, perhaps, some classic elegancies transfused into his mind. during the ten years which intervene between the date of raleigh's first departure for the continent and that of his beginning favour at home, already he had found means for ekeing out and perfecting that liberal education which oxford had only begun for him, so that it was as a man of rarest literary accomplishments that he made his brilliant _debût_ at the english court, where the new elizabethan age of letters was just then beginning. he became at once the centre of that little circle of highborn wits and poets, the elder wits and poets of the elizabethan age, that were then in their meridian there. sir philip sidney, thomas lord buckhurst, henry lord paget, edward earl of oxford, and some others, are included in the contemporary list of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, who refers to the condition of 'the art of poesy' at that time. '_the gentleman who wrote the late shepherds' calendar_' was beginning then to attract considerable attention in this literary aristocracy. the brave, bold genius of raleigh flashed new life into that little nucleus of the elizabethan development. the new '_round table_,' which that newly-beginning age of chivalry, with its new weapons and devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet 'full' till he came in. the round table grew rounder with this knight's presence. over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it. the round table grew spheral, as he sat talking by it; the round table dissolved, as he brought forth his lore, and unrolled his maps upon it; and instead of it,--with all its fresh yet living interests, tracked out by land and sea, with the great battle-ground of the future outlined on it,--revolved the round world. '_universality_' was still the motto of these paladins; but 'the globe'--the globe, with its two hemispheres, became henceforth their device. the promotion of raleigh at court was all that was needed to make him the centre and organiser of that new intellectual movement which was then just beginning there. he addressed himself to the task as if he had been a man of literary tastes and occupations merely, or as if that particular crisis had been a time of literary leisure with him, and there were nothing else to be thought of just then. the relation of those illustrious literary partners of his, whom he found already in the field when he first came to it, to that grand development of the english genius in art and philosophy which follows, ought not indeed to be overlooked or slightly treated in any thorough history of it. for it has its first beginning here in this brilliant assemblage of courtiers, and soldiers, and scholars,--this company of poets, and patrons and encouragers of art and learning. least of all should the relation which the illustrious founder of this order sustains to the later development be omitted in any such history,--'the prince and mirror of all chivalry,' the patron of the young english muse, whose untimely fate keeps its date for ever green, and fills the air of this new 'helicon' with immortal lamentations. the shining foundations of that so splendid monument of the later elizabethan genius, which has paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. the extraordinary facilities which certain departments of literature appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this new poetic and philosophic development had to encounter from the first, already began to attract the attention of men acquainted with the uses to which it had been put in antiquity, and who knew what gravity of aim, what height of execution, that then rude and childish english play had been made to exhibit under other conditions;--men fresh from the study of those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the genius of antiquity has left in this department. but the first essays of the new english scholarship in this untried field,--the first attempts at original composition here, derive, it must be confessed, their chief interest and value from that memorable association in which we find them. it was the first essay, which had to be made before those finished monuments of art, which command our admiration on their own account wholly, could begin to appear. it was 'the tuning of the instruments, that those who came afterwards might play the better.' we see, of course, the stiff, cramped hand of the beginner here, instead of the grand touch of the master, who never comes till his art has been prepared to his hands,--till the details of its execution have been mastered for him by others. in some arts there must be generations of essays before he can get his tools in a condition for use. ages of prophetic genius, generations of artists, who dimly saw afar off, and struggled after his perfections, must patiently chip and daub their lives away, before ever the star of his nativity can begin to shine. considering what a barbaric age it was that the english mind was emerging from then; and the difficulties attending the first attempt to create in the english literature, anything which should bear any proportion to those finished models of skill which were then dazzling the imagination of the english scholar in the unworn gloss of their fresh revival here, and discouraging, rather than stimulating, the rude poetic experiment;--considering what weary lengths of essay there are always to be encountered, where the standard of excellence is so far beyond the power of execution; we have no occasion to despise the first bold attempts to overcome these difficulties which the good taste of this company has preserved to us. they are just such works as we might expect under those circumstances;--yet full of the pedantries of the new acquisition, overflowing on the surface with the learning of the school, sparkling with classic allusions, seizing boldly on the classic original sometimes, and working their new fancies into it; but, full already of the riant vigour and originality of the elizabethan inspiration; and never servilely copying a foreign original. the english genius is already triumphant in them. their very crudeness is not without its historic charm, when once their true place in the structure we find them in, is recognised. in the later works, this crust of scholarship has disappeared, and gone below the surface. it is all dissolved, and gone into the clear intelligence;-- it has all gone to feed the majestic current of that new, all-subduing, all-grasping originality. it is in these earlier performances that the stumbling-blocks of our present criticism are strewn so thickly. nobody can write any kind of criticism of the 'comedy of errors,' for instance, without recognizing the poet's acquaintance with the classic model, [see a recent criticism in 'the times.']--without recognizing the classic treatment. 'love's labour's lost,' 'the taming of the shrew,' the condemned parts of 'henry the vi.,' and generally the poems which are put down in our criticism as doubtful, or as the earlier poems, are just those poems in which the poet's studies are so flatly betrayed on the surface. among these are plays which were anonymously produced by the company performing at the rose theatre, and other companies which english noblemen found occasion to employ in their service then. these were not so much as produced at the theatre which has had the honor of giving its name to other productions, bound up with them. we shall find nothing to object to in that somewhat heterogeneous collection of styles, which even a single play sometimes exhibits, when once the history of this phenomenon accompanies it. the cathedrals that were built, or re-built throughout, just at the moment in which the cathedral architecture had attained its ultimate perfection, are more beautiful to the eye, perhaps, than those in which the story of its growth is told from the rude, massive anglo-saxon of the crypt or the chancel, to the last refinement of the mullion, and groin, and tracery. but the antiquary, at least, does not regret the preservation. and these crude beginnings here have only to be put in their place, to command from the critic, at least, a similar respect. for here, too, the history reports itself to the eye, and not less palpably. it may seem surprising, and even incredible, to the modern critic, that men in this position should find any occasion to conceal their relation to those quite respectable contributions to the literature of the time, which they found themselves impelled to make. the fact that they did so, is one that we must accept, however, on uncontradicted cotemporary testimony, and account for it as we can. the critic who published his criticisms when 'the gentleman who wrote the late shepherd's calendar' was just coming into notice, however inferior to our modern critics in other respects, had certainly a better opportunity of informing himself on this point, than they can have at present. 'they have writ excellently well,' _he_ says of this company of poets,--this 'courtly company,' as he calls them,--' they have writ excellently well, _if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest_.' _sir philip sidney, raleigh,_ and the gentleman who wrote the late shepherd's calendar, are included in the list of poets to whom this remark is applied. it is raleigh's verse which is distinguished, however, in this commendation as the most 'lofty, insolent, and passionate;' a description which applies to the anonymous poems alluded to, but is not particularly applicable to those artificial and tame performances which he was willing to acknowledge. and this so commanding poet, who was at the same time an aspiring courtier and meddler in affairs of state, and who chose, for some mysterious reason or other, to forego the honours which those who were in the secret of his literary abilities and successes,--the very best judges of poetry in that time, too, were disposed to accord him,--and we are not without references to cases in antiquity corresponding very nearly to this; and which seemed to furnish, at least, a sufficient precedent for this proceeding;--this so successful poet, and courtier, and great man of his time, was already in a position to succeed at once to that chair of literary patronage which the death of sir philip sidney had left vacant. instinctively generous, he was ready to serve the literary friends whom he attracted to him, not less lavishly than he had served the proud queen herself, when he threw his gay cloak in her obstructed path,--at least, he was not afraid of risking those sudden splendours which her favour was then showering upon him, by wearying her with petitions on their behalf. he would have risked his new favour, at least with his 'cynthia,'--that twin sister of phoebus apollo,--to make her the patron, if not the inspirer of the elizabethan genius. 'when will you cease to be a beggar, raleigh?' she said to him one day, on one of these not infrequent occasions. 'when your majesty ceases to be a most gracious mistress,' was this courtier's reply. it is recorded of her, that 'she loved to hear his reasons to her demands.' but though, with all his wit and eloquence, he could not contrive to make of the grand-daughter of henry the seventh, a pericles, or an alexander, or a ptolemy, or an augustus, or an encourager of anything that did not appear to be directly connected with her own particular ends, he did succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary and scientific development which was then beginning to add to her reign its new lustre,--which was then suing for leave to lay at her feet its new crowns and garlands. indirectly, he did convert her into a patron,--a second-hand patron of those deeper and more subtle movements of the new spirit of the time, whose bolder demonstrations she herself had been forced openly to head. seated on the throne of henry the seventh, she was already the armed advocate of european freedom;--raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the new world's liberties; it only needed that her patronage should be systematically extended to that new enterprise for the emancipation of the human life from the bondage of ignorance, from the tyranny of unlearning,--that enterprise which the gay, insidious elizabethan literature was already beginning to flower over and cover with its devices,--it only needed _that_, to complete the anomaly of her position. and that through raleigh's means was accomplished. he became himself the head of a little _alexandrian_ establishment. his house was a home for men of learning. he employed men in literary and scientific researches on his account, whose business it was to report to him their results. he had salaried scholars at his table, to impart to him their acquisitions, antiquities, history, poetry, chemistry, mathematics, scientific research of all kinds, came under his active and persevering patronage. returning from one of his visits to ireland, whither he had gone on this occasion to inspect a _seignorie_ which his 'sovereign goddess' had then lately conferred upon him, he makes his re-appearance at court with that so obscure personage, the poet of the 'faery queene,' under his wing;--that same gentleman, as the court is informed, whose bucolics had already attracted so much attention in that brilliant circle. by a happy coincidence, raleigh, it seems, had discovered this author in the obscurity of his clerkship in ireland, and had determined to make use of his own influence at court to push his brother poet's fortunes there; but his efforts to benefit this poor bard _personally_, do not appear to have been attended at any time with much success. the mysterious literary partnership between these two, however, which dates apparently from an earlier period, continues to bring forth fruit of the most successful kind; and the 'faery queene' is not the only product of it. all kinds of books began now to be dedicated to this new and so munificent patron of arts and letters. his biographers collect his public history, not from political records only, but from the eulogies of these manifold dedications. _ladonnier_, the artist, publishes his sketches of the new world through his aid. hooker dedicates his history of ireland to him; hakluyt, his voyages to florida. a work 'on _friendship_' is dedicated to him; another 'on music,' in which art he had found leisure, it seems, to make himself a proficient; and as to the poetic tributes to him,--some of them at least are familiar to us already. in that gay court, where raleigh and his haughty rivals were then playing their deep games,--where there was no room for spenser's muse, and the worth of his 'old song' was grudgingly reckoned,--the 'rustling in silks' is long since over, but the courtier's place in the pageant of the 'faery queene' remains, and grows clearer with the lapse of ages. that time, against which he built so perseveringly, and fortified himself on so many sides, will not be able to diminish there 'one dowle that's in his plume.' [he was also a patron of plays and players in this stage of his career, and entertained private parties at his house with very _recherché_ performances of that kind sometimes.] in the lord timon of the shakspere piece, which was rewritten from an _academic_ original after raleigh's consignment to the tower,--in that fierce satire into which so much elizabethan bitterness is condensed, under the difference of the reckless prodigality which is stereotyped in the fable, we get, in the earlier scenes, some glimpses of this 'athenian' also, in this stage of his career. but it was not as a _patron_ only, or chiefly, that he aided the new literary development. a scholar, a scholar so earnest, so indefatigable, it followed of course that he must be, in one form or another, an instructor also; for that is still, under all conditions, the scholar's destiny--it is still, in one form or another, his business on the earth. but with that temperament which was included among the particular conditions of his genius, and with those special and particular endowments of his for another kind of intellectual mastery, he could not be content with the pen--with the poet's, or the historian's, or the philosopher's pen--as the instrument of his mental dictation. a teacher thus furnished and ordained, seeks, indeed, naturally and instinctively, a more direct and living and effective medium of communication with the audience which his time is able to furnish him, whether 'few' or many, whether 'fit' or unfit, than the book can give him. he must have another means of 'delivery and tradition,' when the delivery or tradition is addressed to those whom he would associate with him in his age, to work with him as one man, or those to whom he would transmit it in other ages, to carry it on to its perfection--those to whom he would communicate his own highest view, those whom he would inform with his patiently-gathered lore, those whom he would _instruct_ and move with his new inspirations. for the truth has become a personality with him--it is his nobler self. he will live on with it. he will live or die with it. for such a one there is, perhaps, no institution ready in his time to accept his ministry. no chair at oxford or cambridge is waiting for him. for they are, of course, and must needs be, the strong-holds of the past--those ancient and venerable seats of learning, 'the fountains and nurseries of all the humanities,' as a cambridge professor calls them, in a letter addressed to raleigh. the principle of these larger wholes is, of course, instinctively conservative. their business is to know nothing of the new. the new intellectual movement must fight its battles through without, and come off conqueror there, or ever those old gothic doors will creak on their reluctant hinges to give it ever so pinched an entrance. when it has once fought its way, and forced itself within--when it has got at last some marks of age and custom on its brow--then, indeed, it will stand as the last outwork of that fortuitous conglomeration, to be defended in its turn against all comers. already the revived classics had been able to push from their chairs, and drive into corners, and shut up finally and put to silence, the old aristotelian doctors--the seraphic and cherubic doctors of their day--in their own ancient halls. it would be sometime yet, perhaps, however, before that study of the dead languages, which was of course one prominent incident of the first revival of a dead learning, would come to take precisely the same place in those institutions, with their one instinct of conservation and 'abhorrence of change,' which the old monastic philosophy had taken in its day; but that change once accomplished, the old monastic philosophy itself, religious as it was, was never held more sacred than this profane innovation would come to be. it would be some time before those new observations and experiments, which raleigh and his school were then beginning to institute, experiments and inquiries which the universities would have laughed to scorn in their day, would come to be promoted to the professor's chair; but when they did, it would perhaps be difficult to convince a young gentleman liberally educated, at least, under the wings of one of those 'ancient and venerable' seats of learning, now gray in raleigh's youthful west--ambitious, perhaps, to lead off in this popular innovation, where saurians, and icthyosaurians, and entomologists, and chonchologists are already hustling the poor greek and latin teachers into corners, and putting them to silence with their growing terminologies--it would perhaps be difficult to convince one who had gone through the prescribed course of treatment in one of these 'nurseries of humanity,' that the knowledge of the domestic habits and social and political organisations of insects and shell-fish, or even the experiments of the laboratory, though never so useful and proper in their place, are not, after all, the beginning and end of a human learning. it was no such place as that that this department of the science of nature took in the systems or notions of its elizabethan founders. they were 'naturalists,' indeed; but that did not imply, with _their_ use of the term, the absence of the natural common human sense in the selection of the objects of their pursuits. 'it is a part of science to make _judicious_ inquiries and wishes,' says the speaker in chief for this new doctrine of nature; speaking of the particular and special applications of it which he is forbidden to make openly, but which he instructs, and prepares, and charges his followers to make for themselves. one of those innovations, one of those movements in which the new ground of ages of future culture is first chalked out--a movement whose end is not yet, whose beginning we have scarce yet seen--was made in england, not very far from the time in which sir walter raleigh, began first to convert the eclat of his rising fortunes at home, and the splendour of his heroic achievements abroad, and all those new means of influence which his great position gave him, to the advancement of those deeper, dearer ambitions, which the predominance of the nobler elements in his constitution made inevitable with him. even then he was ready to endanger those golden opinions, waiting to be worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon, and new-won rank, and liberty and life itself, for the sake of putting himself into his true intellectual relations with his time, as a philosopher and a beginner of a new age in the human advancement. for 'spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues.' if there was no professor's chair, if there was no pulpit or bishop's stall waiting for him, and begging his acceptance of its perquisites, he must needs institute a chair of his own, and pay for leave to occupy it. if there was no university with its appliances within his reach, he must make a university of his own. the germ of a new 'universality' would not be wanting in it. his library, or his drawing-room, or his 'banquet,' will be oxford enough for him. he will begin it as the old monks began theirs, with their readings. where the teacher is, there must the school be gathered together. and a school in the end there will be: a school in the end the true teacher will have, though he begin it, as the barefoot athenian began his, in the stall of the artisan, or in the chat of the gymnasium, amid the compliments of the morning levee, or in the woodland stroll, or in the midnight revel of the banquet. when the hour and the man are indeed met, when the time is ripe, and one _truly sent_, ordained of that power which _chooses_, not one only--what uncloaked atheism is that, to promulgate in an age like this!--_not_ the teachers and rabbis of _one race_ only, but _all the successful_ agents of human advancement, the initiators of new eras of man's progress, the inaugurators of new ages of the relief of the human estate and the creator's glory--when such an one indeed appears, there will be no lack of instrumentalities. with some verdant hill-side, it may be, some blossoming knoll or 'mount' for his 'chair,' with a daisy or a lily in his hand, or in a fisherman's boat, it may be, pushed a little way from the strand, he will begin new ages. the influence of raleigh upon his time cannot yet be fully estimated; because, in the first place, it was primarily of that kind which escapes, from its subtlety, the ordinary historical record; and, in the second place, it was an influence at the time _necessarily covert_, studiously disguised. his relation to the new intellectual development of his age might, perhaps, be characterised as _socratic_; though certainly not because he lacked the use, and the most masterly use, of that same weapon with which his younger contemporary brought out at last, in the face of his time, the plan of the great instauration. in the heart of the new establishment which the magnificent courtier, who was a 'queen's delight,' must now maintain, there soon came to be a little 'academe.' the choicest youth of the time, 'the spirits of the morning sort,' gathered about him. it was the new philosophic and poetic genius of the age that he attracted to him; it was on that philosophic and poetic genius that he left his mark for ever. he taught them, as the masters taught of old, in dialogues--in words that could not then be written, in words that needed the master's modulation to give them their significance. for the new doctrine had need to be clothed in a language of its own, whose inner meaning only those who had found their way to its inmost shrine were able to interpret. we find some contemporary and traditional references to this school, which are not without their interest and historical value, as tending to show the amount of influence which it was supposed to have exerted on the time, as well as the acknowledged necessity for concealment in the studies pursued in it. the fact that such an association _existed_, that it _began with raleigh_, that young men of distinction were attracted to it, and that in such numbers, and under such conditions, that it came to be considered ultimately as a '_school_,' of which he was the head-master--the fact that the new experimental science was supposed to have had its origin in this association,--that opinions, differing from the received ones, were also secretly discussed in it,--that _anagrams_ and other devices were made use of for the purpose of infolding the _esoteric_ doctrines of the school in popular language, so that it was possible to write in this language acceptably to the vulgar, and without violating preconceived opinions, and at the same time instructively to the initiated,--all this remains, even on the surface of statements already accessible to any scholar,--all this remains, either in the form of contemporary documents, or in the recollections of persons who have apparently had it from the most authentic sources, from persons who profess to know, and who were at least in a position to know, that such was the impression at the time. but when the instinctive dread of innovation was already so keenly on the alert, when elizabeth was surrounded with courtiers still in their first wrath at the promotion of the new 'favourite,' indignant at finding themselves so suddenly overshadowed with the growing honours of one who had risen from a rank beneath their own, and eagerly watching for an occasion against him, it was not likely that such an affair as this was going to escape notice altogether. and though the secrecy with which it was conducted, might have sufficed to elude a scrutiny such as theirs, there was _another_, and more eager and subtle enemy,--an enemy which the founder of this school had always to contend with, that had already, day and night, at home and abroad, its argus watch upon him. that vast and secret foe, which he had arrayed against him on foreign battle fields, knew already what kind of embodiment of power this was that was rising into such sudden favour here at home, and would have crushed him in the germ--that foe which would never rest till it had pursued him to the block, which was ready to join hands with his personal enemies in its machinations, in the court of elizabeth, as well as in the court of her successor, that vast, malignant, indefatigable foe, in which the spirit of the old ages lurked, was already at his threshold, and penetrating to the most secret chamber of his councils. it was on the showing of _a jesuit_ that these friendly gatherings of young men at raleigh's table came to be branded as 'a school of atheism.' and it was through such agencies, that his enemies at court were able to sow suspicions in elizabeth's mind in regard to the entire orthodoxy of his mode of explaining certain radical points in human belief, and in regard to the absolute 'conformity' of his views on these points with those which she had herself divinely authorised, suspicions which he himself confesses he was never afterwards able to eradicate. the matter was represented to her, we are told, 'as if he had set up for a doctor in the faculty and invited young gentlemen into his school, where the bible was jeered at,' and the use of profane anagrams was inculcated. the fact that he associated with him in his chemical and mathematical studies, and entertained in his house, a scholar labouring at that time under the heavy charge of getting up 'a philosophical theology,' was also made use of greatly to his discredit. and from another uncontradicted statement, which dates from a later period, but which comes to us worded in terms as cautious as if it had issued directly from the school itself, we obtain another glimpse of these new social agencies, with which the bold, creative, social genius that was then seeking to penetrate on all sides the custom-bound time, would have roused and organised a new social life in it. it is still the second-hand hearsay testimony which is quoted here. '_he is said_ to have set up an office of address, and it is _supposed_ that the office _might_ respect a _more liberal intercourse_--_a nobler mutuality of advertisement_, than would perhaps admit of _all sorts of persons_.' 'raleigh set up a kind of office of address,' says another, 'in the capacity of an agency for all sorts of persons.' john evelyn, refers also to that long dried fountain of communication which _montaigne_ first proposed, sir walter raleigh put in practice, and mr. hartlib endeavoured to renew. 'this is the scheme described by sir w. pellis, which is referred traditionally to raleigh and montaigne (see book i. chap. xxxiv.) an office of _address_ whereby the wants of _all_ may be made known to all (that painful and great instrument of this design), _where men may know what is already done in the business of learning, what is at present in doing, and what is intended to be done_, to the end that, by such a _general communication of design and mutual assistance, the wits and endeavours of the world_ may no longer be _as so many scattered coals_, which, for want of _union_, are soon quenched, whereas being laid together they would have yielded _a comfortable_ light and heat. [this is evidently _traditional_ language] ... such as advanced rather to the _improvement_ of _men_ themselves than their means.'--oldys. _this_ then is the association of which raleigh was the chief; _this_ was the state, within the state which he was founding. ('see the reach of this man,' says lord coke on his trial.) it is true that the honour is also ascribed to montaigne; but we shall find, as we proceed with this inquiry, that _all_ the works and inventions of this new english school, of which raleigh was chief, all its new and vast designs for man's relief, are also claimed by that same aspiring gentleman, as they were, too, by another of these egotists, who came out in his own name with this identical project. it was only within the walls of a school that the great principle of the new philosophy of fact and practice, which had to pretend to be profoundly absorbed in chemical experiments, or in physical observations, and inductions of some kind--though not without an occasional hint of a broader intention,--it was only in _esoteric_ language that the great principles of this philosophy could begin to be set forth _in their true comprehension_. the very trunk of it, the primal science itself, must needs be mystified and hidden in a shower of metaphysical dust, and piled and heaped about with the old dead branches of scholasticism, lest men should see for themselves _how_ broad and comprehensive _must_ be the ultimate sweep of its determinations; lest men should see for themselves, how a science which begins in fact, and returns to it again, which begins in observation and experiment, and returns in scientific practice, in scientific arts, in scientific re-formation, might have to do, ere all was done, with facts not then inviting scientific investigation--with arts not then inviting scientific reform. in consequence of a sudden and common advancement of intelligence among the leading men of that age, which left the standard of intelligence represented in more than one of its existing institutions, very considerably in the rear of its advancement, there followed, as the inevitable result, a tendency to the formation of some medium of expression,--whether that tendency was artistically developed or not, in which the new and nobler thoughts of men, in which their dearest beliefs, could find some vent and limited interchange and circulation, without startling the _ear_. eventually there came to be a number of men in england at this time,--and who shall say that there were none on the continent of this school,--occupying prominent positions in the state, heading, it might be, or ranged in opposite factions at court, who could speak and write in such a manner, upon topics of common interest, as to make themselves entirely intelligible to each other, without exposing themselves to any of the risks, which confidential communications under such circumstances involved. for there existed a certain mode of expression, originating in some of its more special forms with this particular school, yet not altogether conventional, which enabled those who made use of it to steer clear of the star chamber and its sister institution; inasmuch as the terms employed in this mode of communication were not in the more obvious interpretation of them actionable, and to a vulgar, unlearned, or stupid conceit, could hardly be made to appear so. there must be a high court of wit, and a bench of peers in that estate of the realm, or ever these treasons could be brought to trial. for it was a mode of communication which involved in its more obvious construction the necessary submission to power. it was the instructed ear,--the ear of a school,--which was required to lend to it its more recondite meanings;--it was the ear of that new school in philosophy which had made history the basis of its learning,--which, dealing with _principles_ instead of _words_, had glanced, not without some nice observation in passing, at their more '_conspicuous_' historical 'instances';--it was the ear of a school which had everywhere the great historical representations and diagrams at its control, and could substitute, without much hindrance, particulars for generals, or generals for particulars, as the case might be; it was the ear of a school intrusted with discretionary power, but trained and practised in the art of using it. originally an art of necessity, with practice, in the skilful hands of those who employed it, it came at length to have a charm of its own. in such hands, it became an instrument of literary power, which had not before been conceived of; a medium too of densest ornament, of thick crowding conceits, and nestling beauties, which no style before had ever had depth enough to harbour. it established a new, and more intimate and living relation between the author and his reader,--between the speaker and his audience. there was ever the charm of that secret understanding lending itself to all the effects. it made the reader, or the hearer, participator in the artist's skill, and joint proprietor in the result. the author's own glow must be on his cheek, the author's own flash in his eye, ere that result was possible. the nice point of the skilful pen, the depth of the lurking tone was lost, unless an eye as skilful, or an ear as fine, tracked or waited on it. it gave to the work of the artist, nature's own style;--it gave to works which had the earnest of life and death in them the sport of the 'enigma.' it is not too much to say, that the works of raleigh and bacon, and others whose connection with it is not necessary to specify just here, are written throughout in the language of this school. 'our glorious willy'--(it is the gentleman who wrote the 'faery queene' who claims him, and his glories, as 'ours'),--'our glorious willy' was born in it, and knew no other speech. it was that 'round table' at which sir philip sydney presided then, that his lurking meanings, his unspeakable audacities first 'set in a roar.' it was there, in the keen encounters of those flashing 'wit combats,' that the weapons of great genius grew so fine. it was there, where the young wits and scholars, fresh from their continental tours, full of the gallant young england of their day,--the mercutios, the benedicts, the birons, the longuevilles, came together fresh from the court of navarre, and smelling of the lore of their foreign 'academe,' or hot from the battles of continental freedom,--it was _there_, in those _réunions_, that our poet caught those gracious airs of his--those delicate, thick-flowering refinements--those fine impalpable points of courtly breeding--those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere. it was there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and manners, his acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travelled wit, that flash through all. it was there that he heard the clash of arms, and the ocean-storm. and it was there that he learned 'his old ward.' it was there, in the social collisions of that gay young time, with its bold over-flowing humours, that would not be shut in, that he first armed himself with those quips and puns, and lurking conceits, that crowd his earlier style so thickly,--those double, and triple, and quadruple meanings, that stud so closely the lines of his dialogue in the plays which are clearly dated from that era,--the natural artifices of a time like that, when all those new volumes of utterance which the lips were ready to issue, were forbidden on pain of death to be 'extended,' must needs 'be crushed together, infolded within themselves.' of course it would be absurd, or it would involve the most profound ignorance of the history of literature in general, to claim that the principle of this invention had its origin here. it had already been in use, in recent and systematic use, in the intercourse of the scholars of the middle ages; and its origin is coeval with the origin of letters. the free-masonry of learning is old indeed. it runs its mountain chain of signals through all the ages, and men whom times and kindreds have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold their sabbaths and synods on those heights. they whisper, and listen, and smile, and shake the head at one another; they laugh, and weep, and complain together; they sing their songs of victory in one key. that machinery is so fine, that the scholar can catch across the ages, the smile, or the whisper, which the contemporary tyranny had no instrument firm enough to suppress, or fine enough to detect. 'but for her father sitting still on hie, did warily still watch the way she went, and eke from far observed with jealous eye, which way his course the wanton bregog bent. him to deceive, for all his watchful ward, the wily lover did devise this slight. first, into many parts, his stream he shared, that whilst the one was watch'd, the other might pass unespide, to meet her by the way. and then besides, those little streams, so broken, he under ground so closely did convey, that of their passage doth appear no token.' it was the author of the 'faery queene,' indeed, his fine, elaborate, fertile genius burthened with its rich treasure, and stimulated to new activity by his poetical alliance with raleigh, whose splendid invention first made apparent the latent facilities which certain departments of popular literature then offered, for a new and hitherto unparalleled application of this principle. in that prose description of his great poem which he addresses to raleigh, the distinct avowal of a double intention in it, the distinction between a particular and general one, the emphasis with which the elements of the ideal name, are discriminated and blended, furnish to the careful reader already some superficial hints, as to the capabilities of such a plan to one at all predisposed to avail himself of them. and, indeed, this poet's manifest philosophical and historical tendencies, and his avowed view of the comprehension of the poet's business would have seemed beforehand to require some elbow-room,--some chance for poetic curves and sweeps,--some space for the line of beauty to take its course in, which the sharp angularities, the crooked lines, the blunt bringing up everywhere, of the new philosophic tendency to history would scarcely admit of. there was no breathing space for him, unless he could contrive to fix his poetic platform so high, as to be able to override these restrictions without hindrance. 'for the poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most concerneth him, and then recoursing to the things fore-past, and _divining of things to come_, he maketh a pleasing _analysis_ of all.' and it so happened that his prince arthur had dreamed the poet's dream, the hero's dream, the philosopher's dream, the dream that was dreamed of old under the olive shades, the dream that all our poets and inspired anticipators of man's perfection and felicity have always been dreaming; but this one '_awakening_,' determined that it should be a dream no longer. it was the hour in which the genius of antiquity was reviving; it was the hour in which the poetic inspiration of all the ages was reviving, and _arming_ itself with the knowledge of 'things not dreamt of' by old reformers--that knowledge of nature which is _power_, which is the true _magic_. for this new poet had seen in a vision that same 'excellent beauty' which 'the divine' ones saw of old, and 'the new atlantis,' the celestial vision of _her_ kingdom; and being also 'ravished with that excellence, and _awakening_, he determined to _seek her out_. and so being by _merlin armed_, and by _timon thoroughly instructed_, he went forth to seek her in _fairy land_.' there was a little band of heroes in that age, a little band of philosophers and poets, secretly bent on that same adventure, sworn to the service of that same gloriana, though they were fain to wear then the scarf and the device of another queen on _their_ armour. it is to the prince of this little band--'the prince and mirror of all chivalry'--that this poet dedicates his poem. but it is raleigh's device which he adopts in the names he uses, and it is raleigh who thus shares with sydney the honour of his dedication. 'in that faery queene, i mean,' he says, in his prose description of the poem addressed to raleigh, 'in that faery queene, i mean glory in my general intention; but, in my particular, i conceive the most glorious person of our sovereign the queen, and _her_ kingdom--in _fairy land_. 'and yet, in some places, i do otherwise shadow her. for considering she beareth _two persons, one_ of a most royal _queen_ or _empress_, the other of a most virtuous and beautiful lady--the _latter part_ i do express in bel-phebe, fashioning her name according to your own _most excellent conceit_ of "_cynthia_," phebe and cynthia being both names of _diana_.' and thus he sings his poetic dedication:-- 'to thee, that art the summer's nightingale, thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight, why do i send this rustic madrigal, that may thy tuneful ear unseason quite? _thou, only fit this argument to write_, in whose high thoughts _pleasure hath built her bower_, and dainty love learn'd sweetly to indite. my rhymes, i know, unsavoury are and soure to taste the streams, which _like a golden showre_, flow from thy fruitful head of thy love's praise. fitter, perhaps, _to thunder martial stowre_,[footnote] when thee so list thy _tuneful_ thoughts to raise, yet _till that thou thy poem wilt make known_, let thy fair cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.' [footnote: 'shine forth, thou star of poets, and with _rage_ _or influence chide_, or _cheer_ the drooping stage.' ben jonson.] 'of me,' says raleigh, in a response to this obscure partner of his works and arts,--a response not less mysterious, till we have found the solution of it, for it is an enigma. 'of me _no lines_ are loved, _no letters_ are of price, of all that speak the english tongue, but those of _thy device_.' [it was a '_device_' that symbolised _all_. it was a _circle_ containing the alphabet, or the _a b c_, and the esoteric meaning of it was '_all_ in _each_,' or _all_ in _all_, the new doctrine of the _unity_ of science (the '_ideas_' of the new '_academe_'). that was the token-name under which a great book of this academy was issued.] it is to sidney, raleigh, and the poet of the 'faery-queene,' and the rest of that courtly company of poets, that the contemporary author in the art of poetry alludes, with a special commendation of raleigh's vein, as the 'most lofty, insolent, and passionate,' when he says,' they have _writ_ excellently well, if their _doings_ could be found out and made public with the rest.' chapter iv. raleigh's school, continued.--the new academy. extract from a later chapter of raleigh's life. _oliver_. where will the old duke live? _charles_. they say _he is already_ in the forest of _arden_, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old robin hood of england: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world. as you like it. _stephano_ [sings]. flout 'em and skout'em; and skout'em and flout 'em, _thought_ is free. _cal_. that's not the tune. [ariel _plays the tune on a tabor and pipe_.] _ste_. what is this _same?_ _trin_. this is the tune of our catch, played by--the picture of--_nobody_. but all was not over with him in the old england yet--the present had still its chief tasks for him. the man who had 'achieved' his greatness, the chief who had made his way through such angry hosts of rivals, and through such formidable social barriers, from his little seat in the devonshire corner to a place in the state, so commanding, that even the jester, who was the 'mr. punch' of that day, conceived it to be within the limits of his prerogative to call attention to it, and that too in 'the presence' itself [see 'the knave' _commands_ 'the queen.'--_tarleton_]--a place of command so acknowledged, that even the poet could call him in the ear of england 'her _most_ dear delight'--such a one was not going to give up so easily the game he had been playing here so long. he was not to be foiled with this great flaw in his fortunes even here; and though all his work appeared for the time to be undone, and though the eye that he had fastened on him was 'the eye' that had in it 'twenty thousand deaths.' it is this patient piecing and renewing of his broken webs, it is this second building up of his position rather than the first, that shows us what he is. one must see what he contrived to make of those 'apartments' in the tower while he occupied them; what before unimagined conveniencies, and elegancies, and facilities of communication, and means of operation, they began to develop under the searching of his genius: what means of reaching and moving the public mind; what wires that reached to the most secret councils of state appeared to be inlaid in those old walls while he was within them; what springs that commanded even there movements not less striking and anomalous than those which had arrested the critical and admiring attention of tarleton under the tudor administration,--movements on that same royal board which ferdinand and miranda were seen to be playing on in prospero's cell when all was done,--one must see what this logician, who was the magician also, contrived to make of the lodging which was at first only 'the cell' of a condemned criminal; what power there was there to foil his antagonists, and crush them too,--if nothing but throwing themselves under the wheels of his advancement would serve their purpose; one must look at all this to see 'what manner of man' this was, what stuff this genius was made of, in whose hearts ideas that had been parted from all antiquities were getting welded here then--welded so firmly that all futurities would not disjoin them, so firmly that thrones, and dominions, and principalities, and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world might combine in vain to disjoin them--the ideas whose union was the new 'birth of time.' it is this life in 'the cell'--this game, these masques, this tempest, that the magician will command there--which show us, when all is done, what new stuff of nature's own this was, in which the new idea of combining 'the part operative' and the part speculative of human life--this new thought of making 'the art and practic part of life _the mistress_ to its theoric' was understood in this scholar's own time (as we learn from the secret traditions of the school) to have had its first germination: this idea which is the idea of the modern learning--the idea of connecting knowledge generally and in a systematic manner with the human conduct--knowledge as distinguished from pre-supposition--the idea which came out afterwards so systematically and comprehensively developed in the works of his great contemporary and partner in arts and learning. we must look at this, as well as at some other demonstrations of which this time was the witness, to see what new mastership this is that was coming out here so signally in this age in various forms, and in more minds than one; what soul of a new era it was that had laughed, even in the boyhood of its heroes, at old aristotle on his throne; that had made its youthful games with dramatic impersonations, and caricatures, and travesties of that old book-learning; that in the glory of those youthful spirits--'the spirits of youths, that meant to be of note and began betimes'--it thought itself already competent to laugh down and dethrone with its 'jests'; that had laughed all its days in secret; that had never once lost a chance for a jibe at the philosophy it found in possession of the philosophic chairs--a philosophy which had left so many things in heaven and earth uncompassed in its old futile dreamy abstractions. unless philosophy can make a juliet, displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, hang up philosophy, was the word of the poet of this new school in one of his 'lofty and passionate' moods, at a much earlier stage of this philosophic development. 'see what learning is!' exclaims the nurse, speaking at that same date from the same dictation, for there is a friar 'abroad' there already in the action of that play, who is undertaking to bring his learning to bear upon practice, and opening his cell for scientific consultation and ghostly advice on the questions of the play as they happen to arise; and it is his apparent capacity for smoothing, and reconciling, and versifying, not words only, but facts, which commands the nurse's admiration. this doctrine of a practical learning, this part operative of the new learning for which the founders of it beg leave to reintegrate the abused term of natural magic, referring to the persians in particular, to indicate the extent of the field which their magical operations are intended ultimately to occupy; this idea, which the master of this school was illustrating now in the tower so happily, did not originate in the tower, as we shall see. the first heirs of this new invention, were full of it. the babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else. the very rudest play in all this collection of the school,--left to show us the march of that 'time-bettering age,' the play which offends us most--belongs properly to this collection; contains _this_ secret, which is the elizabethan secret, and the secret of that art of delivery and tradition which this from the first inevitably created,--yet rude and undeveloped, but _there_. we need not go so far, however, as that, in this not pleasant retrospect; for these early plays are not the ones to which the interpreter of this school would choose to refer the reader, for the proof of its claims at present;--these which the faults of youth and the faults of the time conspire to mar: in which the overdoing of the first attempt to hide under a cover suited to the tastes of the court, or to the yet more faulty tastes of the rabble of an elizabethan play-house,--the boldest scientific treatment of 'the forbidden questions,' still leaves so much upon the surface of the play that repels the ordinary criticism;--these that were first sent out to bring in the rabble of that age to the scholar's cell, these in which the new science was first brought in, in its slave's costume, with all its native glories shorn, and its eyes put out 'to make sport' for the tudor--perilous sport!--these first rude essays of a learning not yet master of its unwonted tools, not yet taught how to wear its fetters gracefully, and wreathe them over and make immortal glories of them--still clanking its irons. there is nothing here to detain any criticism not yet instructed in the secret of this art union. but the faults are faults of execution merely; _the design_ of the novura organum is not more noble, not more clear. for these works are the works of that same 'school' which the jesuit thought so dangerous, and calculated to affect unfavourably the morality of the english nation--the school which the jesuit contrived to bring under suspicion as a school in which doctrines that differed from opinions received on essential points were secretly taught,--contriving to infect with his views on that point the lady who was understood, at that time, to be the only person qualified to reflect on questions of this nature; the school in which raleigh was asserted to be perverting the minds of young men by teaching them the use of profane anagrams; and it cannot be denied, that anagrams, as well as other 'devices in letters,' _were_ made use of, in involving 'the bolder meanings' contained in writings issued from this school, especially when the scorn with which science regarded the things it found set up for its worship had to be conveyed sometimes in a point or a word. it is a school, whose language might often seem obnoxious to the charge of profanity and other charges of that nature to those who do not understand its aims, to those who do not know that it is from the first a school of natural science, whose chief department was that history which makes the basis of the '_living_ art,' the art of _man's_ living, the _essential_ art of it,--a school in which the use of words was, in fact, more rigorous and scrupulous than it had ever been in any other, in which the use of words is for the first time scientific, and yet, in some respects, more bold and free than in those in which mere words, as words, are supposed to have some inherent virtue and efficacy, some mystic worth and sanctity in them. this was the learning in which the art of a new age and race first spoke, and many an old foolish, childish, borrowed notion went off like vapour in it at its first word, without any one's ever so much as stopping to observe it, any one whose place was within. it is the school of a criticism much more severe than the criticism which calls its freedom in question. it is a school in which the taking of names in vain in general is strictly forbidden. that is the first commandment of it, and it is a commandment with promise. the man who sits there in the tower, now, driving that same 'goose-pen' which he speaks of as such a safe instrument for unfolding practical doctrines, with such patient energy, is not now occupied with the statistics of noah's ark, grave as he looks; though that, too, is a subject which his nautical experience and the indomitable bias of his genius as a western man towards calculation in general, together with his notion that the affairs of the world generally, past as well as future, belong properly to his _sphere_ as a _man_, will require him to take up and examine and report upon, before he will think that his work is done. it is not a chapter in the history of the world which he is composing at present, though that work is there at this moment on the table, and forms the ostensible state-prison work of this convict. this is the man who made one so long ago in those brilliant 'round table' reunions, in which the idea of converting the new _belles lettres_ of that new time, to such grave and politic uses was first suggested; he is the genius of that company, that even in such frolic mad-cap games as love's labour's lost, and the taming of the shrew, and midsummer night's dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad farce and burlesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and pompous rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most perilous secret of the new philosophy, only, but the secret of its organ of delivery and tradition, the secret of its use of letters, the secret of its '_cipher in letters_,' and not its 'cipher in words' only, the cipher in which the secret of the authorship of these works was infolded, and in which it was _found_, but not found in these earlier plays,--plays in which these so perilous secrets are still conveyed in so many involutions, in passages so intricate with quips and puns and worthless trivialities, so uninviting or so marred with their superficial meanings, that no one would think of looking in them for anything of any value. for it is always when some necessary, but not superficial, question of the play is to be considered, that the clown and the fool are most in request, for 'there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some _barren spectators_ to laugh too'; and under cover of that mirth it is, that the grave or witty undertone reaches the ear of the judicious. it is in the later and more finished works of this school that the key to the secret doctrines of it, which it is the object of this work to furnish, is best found. but the fact, that in the very rudest and most faulty plays in this collection of plays, which form so important a department of the works of this school, which make indeed the noblest tradition, the only adequate tradition, the 'illustrated tradition' of its noblest doctrine--the fact that in the very earliest germ of this new union of 'practic and theoric,' of art and learning, from which we pluck at last advancements of learning, and hamlets, and lears, and tempests, and the novum organum, already the perilous secret of this union is infolded, already the entire organism that these great fruits and flowers will unfold in such perfection is contained, and clearly traceable,--this is a fact which appeared to require insertion in this history, and not, perhaps, without some illustration. 'it is not amiss to observe,' says the author of the advancement of learning, when at last his great exordium to the science of nature in man, and the art of culture and cure that is based on that science is finished--pausing to observe it, pausing ere he will produce his index to that science, to observe it: 'it is _not_ amiss to observe', he says--(speaking of the operation of culture in general on young minds, so forcible, though unseen, as hardly any length of time, or contention of labour, can countervail it afterwards)--'how small and mean faculties gotten by education, yet when they fall into _great men, or great matters_, do work _great and important effects_; whereof we see a notable example in _tacitus_, of _two stage-players_, percennius and vibulenus, who, _by their faculty of playing_, put the _pannonian_ armies _into an extreme tumult and combustion_; for, _there arising a mutiny_ among them, upon the death of _augustus_ caesar, _blaesus_ the lieutenant had committed some of the mutineers, _which were suddenly rescued_; whereupon vibulenus _got to be heard speak_ [being a stage-player], which he did _in this manner_. '"these poor _innocent_ wretches _appointed to cruel death_, you have restored to behold the light: but who shall restore _my brother_ to me, or life to my brother, _that was sent hither in message from the legions of germany_ to treat of--the common cause? and he hath murdered him this last night by _some of his fencers and ruffians, that he hath about him for his executioners_ upon soldiers. the mortalest enemies do not deny burial; _when i have performed my last duties to the corpse with kisses, with tears, command me to be slain besides him_, so that these, my fellows, _for our good meaning_ and our _true hearts_ to the legion, _may have leave to bury us_." 'with which speech he put the army into an infinite fury and uproar; whereas, truth was, he had no brother, neither was there any _such_ matter [in that case], but he played it merely _as if_ he had been upon the stage.' this is the philosopher and stage critic who expresses a decided opinion elsewhere, that 'the play's the thing,' though he finds this kind of writing, too, useful in its way, and for certain purposes; but he is the one who, in speaking of the original differences in the natures and gifts of men, suggests that 'there _are_ a kind of men who can, as it were, divide themselves;' and he does not hesitate to propound it as his deliberate opinion, that a man of wit should have at command a number of styles adapted to different auditors and exigencies; that is, if he expects to accomplish anything with his rhetoric. that is what he makes himself responsible for from his professional chair of learning; but it is the prince of denmark, with his remarkable natural faculty of speaking to the point, who says, '_seneca_ can not be _too heavy_, nor _plautus_ too light, for--[what?]--the _law of writ_--and--the _liberty_.' '_these_ are the only _men_,' he adds, referring apparently to that tinselled gauded group of servants that stand there awaiting his orders. 'my lord--you played once _in the university_, you say,' he observes afterwards, addressing himself to that so politic statesmen whose overreaching court plots and performances end for himself so disastrously. 'that did i, my lord,' replies polonius, '_and was accounted a good actor_.' 'and what did you enact?' 'i did enact _julius caesar_. i--was killed i' the capitol [i]. brutus killed me.' 'it was a _brute_ part of him [collateral sounds--elizabethan phonography] to kill so _capitol a calf_ there.--be the players ready?'(?). [that is the question.] 'while watching the progress of the action at sadlers' wells,' says the dramatic critic of the 'times,' in the criticism of the comedy of errors before referred to, directing attention to the juvenile air of the piece, to 'the classic severity in the form of the play,' and 'that _baldness_ of treatment which is a peculiarity of antique comedy'--'while watching the progress of the action at sadlers' wells, _we may almost fancy we are at st. peter's college_, witnessing the annual performance of _the queen's scholars_.' that is not surprising to one acquainted with the history of these plays, though the criticism which involves this kind of observation is not exactly the criticism to which we have been accustomed here. but any one who wishes to see, as a matter of antiquarian curiosity, or for any other purpose, how far from being hampered in the first efforts of his genius with _this_ class of educational associations, that particular individual would naturally have been, in whose unconscious brains this department of the modern learning is supposed to have had its accidental origin,--any one who wishes to see in what direction the antecedents of a person in that station in life would naturally have biased, _at that time_, his first literary efforts, if, indeed, he had ever so far escaped from the control of circumstances as to master the art of the collocation of letters--any person who has any curiosity whatever on this point is recommended to read in this connection a letter from a professional contemporary of this individual--one who comes to us with unquestionable claims to our respect, inasmuch as he appears to have had some care for _the future_, and some object in living beyond that of promoting his own immediate private interests and sensuous gratification. it is a letter of mr. edward alleyn (the founder of dulwich college), published by the shakspere society, to which we are compelled to have recourse for information on this interesting question; inasmuch as that distinguished contemporary and professional rival of his referred to, who occupies at present so large a space in the public eye, as it is believed for the best of reasons, has failed to leave us any specimens of his method of reducing his own personal history to writing, or indeed any demonstration of his appreciation of the art of chirography, in general. he is a person who appears to have given a decided preference to the method of oral communication as a means of effecting his objects. but in reading this truly interesting document from the pen of an elizabethan player, who _has_ left us a specimen of his use of that instrument usually so much in esteem with men of letters, we must take into account the fact, that _this_ is an exceptional case of culture. it is the case of a player who aspired to distinction, and who had raised himself by the force of his genius above his original social level; it is the case of a player who has been referred to recently as a proof of the position which it was possible for 'a stage player' to attain to under those particular social conditions. but as this letter is of a specially private and confidential nature, and as this poor player who _did_ care for the future, and who founded with his talents, such as they were, a noble charity, instead of living and dying to himself, is not to blame for his defects of education,--since his _acts_ command our respect, however faulty his attempts at literary expression,--this letter will not be produced here. but whoever has read it, or whoever may chance to read it, in the course of an antiquarian research, will be apt to infer, that whatever educational bias the first efforts of genius subjected to influences of the same kind would naturally betray, the faults charged upon the comedy of errors, the leaning to the classics, the taint of st. peter's college, the tone of the queen's scholars, are hardly the faults that the instructed critic would look for. but to ascertain the fact, that the controlling idea of that new learning which the man in the tower is illustrating now in so grand and mature a manner, not with his pen only, but with his 'living art,' and with such an entire independence of classic models, is already organically contained in those earlier works on which the classic shell is still visible, it is not necessary to go back to the westminster play of these new classics, or to the performances of the queen's scholars. plays having a considerable air of maturity, in which the internal freedom of judgment and taste is already absolute, still exhibit on the surface of them this remarkable submission to the ancient forms which are afterwards rejected on principle, and by a rule in the new rhetoric--a rule which the author of the advancement of learning is at pains to state very clearly. the _wildness_ of which we hear so much, works itself out upon the surface, and determines the form at length, as these players proceed and grow bolder with their work. a play, second to none in historical interest, invaluable when regarded simply in its relation to the history of this school, one which may be considered, in fact, the introductory play of the new school of learning, is one which exhibits very vividly these striking characteristics of the earlier period. it is one in which the vulgarities of the play-house are still the cloak of the philosophic subtleties, and incorporated, too, into the philosophic design; and it is one in which the unity of design, that one design which makes the works of this school, from first to last, as the work of one man, is still cramped with those other unities which the doctrines of dionysus and the mysteries of eleusis prescribed of old to _their_ interpreters. 'what is the _end_ of _study_? what is the _end_ of it?' was the word of the new school of learning. _that_ was its first speech. it was a speech produced with dramatic illustrations, for the purpose of bringing out its significance more fully, for the purpose of pointing the inquiry unmistakeably to those ends of learning which the study of the learned then had not yet comprehended. it is a speech on behalf of a new learning, in which the extant learning is produced on the stage, in its actual historical relation to those '_ends_' which the new school conceived to be the true ends of it, which are brought on to the stage in palpable, visible representation, not in allegorical forms, but in instances, 'conspicuous instances,' living specimens, after the manner of this school. 'what is the end of study?' cried the setter forth of this new doctrine, as long before as when lore and love were debating it together in that 'little academe' that was yet, indeed, to be 'the wonder of the world, still and contemplative in _living_ art.' 'what is the end of study?' cries already the voice of one pacing under these new olives. _that_ was the word of the new school; that was the word of new ages, and these new minds taught of nature--her priests and prophets knew it then, already, 'let fame that all hunt after _in their lives_,' _they_ cry-- _live_ registered upon our brazen _tombs_, and then _grace us in the disgrace of death_; when spite of cormorant devouring time, the endeavour of _this present breath_ may buy _that honour_ which shall bate his scythe's keen edge, and make us heirs of _all eternity_--[of all]. * * * * * _navarre_ shall be the wonder of the world, our court shall be _a little academe_, _still and contemplative in_--living _art_. this is the poet of the woods who is beginning his 'recreations' for us here--the poet who loves so well to take his court gallants in their silks and velvets, and perfumes, and fine court ladies with all their courtly airs and graces, and all the stale conventionalitites that he is sick of, out from under the low roofs of princes into that great palace in which the queen, whose service he is sworn to, keeps the state. this is the school-master who takes his school all out on holiday excursions into green fields, and woods, and treats them to country merry-makings, and not in sport merely. this is the one that breaks open the cloister, and the close walls that learning had dwelt in till then, and shuts up the musty books, and bids that old droning cease. this is the one that stretches the long drawn aisle and lifts the fretted vault into a grander temple. the court with all its pomp and retinue, the school with all its pedantries and brazen ignorance, 'high art' with its new graces, divinity, mar-texts and all, must 'come hither, come hither,' and 'under the green-wood tree lie with me,' the ding-dong of this philosopher's new learning says, calling his new school together. this is the linguist that will find '_tongues_ in trees,' and crowd out from the halls of learning the lore of ancient parchments with their verdant classics, their 'truth in beauty dyed.' this is the teacher with whose new alphabet you can find 'sermons in stones, _books_ in the running brooks,' and good,--good--his '_good_' the good of the new school, that broader '_good_' in every _thing_. 'the roof of _this_ court is too high to be _yours_,' says the princess of this out-door scene to the sovereignty that claimed it then. this is 'great nature's' poet and interpreter, and he takes us always into 'the continent of nature'; but man is his chief end, and that island which his life makes in the universal being is the point to which that naturalist brings home all his new collections. this is the poet of the woods, but man,--man at the summit of his arts, in the perfection of his refinements, is always the creature that he is 'collecting' in them. in his wildest glades, this is still the species that he is busied with. he has brought him there to experiment on him, and that we may see the better what he is. he has brought him there to improve his arts, to reduce his conventional savageness, to re-refine his coarse refinements, not to make a wild-man of him. this is the poet of the woods; but he is a woodman, he carries an axe on his shoulder. he will wake a continental forest with it and subdue it, and fill it with his music. for this is the poet who cries 'westward ho!' but he has not got into the woods yet in this play. he is only on the edge of them as yet. it is under the blue roof of that same dome which is 'too high,' the princess here says, to belong to the pygmy that this philosopher likes so well to bring out and to measure under that canopy--it is 'out of doors' that this new speech on behalf of a new learning is spoken. but there is a close rim of conventionalities about us still. it is _a park_ that this audacious proposal is uttered in. but nothing can be more orderly, for it is 'a park with a palace in it.' there it is, in the background. if it were the attic proscenium itself hollowed into the south-east corner of the acropolis, what more could one ask. but it is the palace of the king of--_navarre_, who is the prince of good fellows and the prince of good learning at one and the same time, which makes, in this case, the novelty. 'a park with a palace in it' makes the first scene. 'another part of the same' with the pavilion of a princess and the tents of _her_ court seen in the distance, makes the second; and the change from one part of this park to another, though we get into the heart of it sometimes, is the utmost license that the rigours of the greek drama permit the poet to think of at present. this criticism on the old learning, this audacious proposal for the new, with all the bold dramatic illustration with which it is enforced, must be managed here under these restrictions. whatever 'persons' the plot of this drama may require for its evolutions, whatever witnesses and reporters the trial and conviction of the old learning, and the definition of the ground of the new, may require, will have to be induced to cross this park at this particular time, because the form of the new art is not yet emancipated, and the muse of the inductive science cannot stir from the spot to search them out. however, that does not impair the representation as it is managed. there is a very bold artist here already, with all his deference for the antique. we shall be sure to have _all_ when he is the plotter. the action of this drama is not complicated. the persons of it are few; the characterization is feeble, compared with that of some of the later plays; but that does not hinder or limit the design, and it is all the more apparent for this artistic poverty, anatomically clear; while as yet that perfection of art in which all trace of the structure came so soon to be lost in the beauty of the illustration, is yet wanting; while as yet that art which made of its living instance an intenser life, or which made with its _living_ art a life more living than life itself, was only germinating. the illustration here, indeed, approaches the allegorical form, in the obtrusive, untempered predominance of the qualities represented, so overdone as to wear the air of a caricature, though the historical combination is still here. these diagrams are alive evidently; they are men, and not allegorical spectres, or toys, though they are 'painted in character.' the entire representation of the extant learning is dramatically produced on this stage; the germ of the 'new' is here also; and the unoccupied ground of it is marked out here as, in the advancement of learning, by the criticism on the deficiences of that which has the field. here, too, the line of the extant culture,--the narrow indented boundary of the _culture_ that professed to take all is always defining the new,--cutting out the wild not yet visited by the art of man;--only here the criticism is much more lively, because here 'we come _to particulars_,' a thing which the new philosophy--much insists on; and though this want in learning, and the wildness it leaves, is that which makes tragedies in this method of exhibition; it has its comical aspect also; and this is the laughing and weeping philosopher in one who manages these representations; and in this case it is the comical aspect of the subject that is seized on. our diagrams are still coarse here, but they have already the good scientific quality of exhausting the subject. it is the new school that occupies the centre of the piece. their quarters are in that palace, but the _king_ of it is the _royalty_ (raleigh) that founded and endowed this school--that was one of his secret titles,--and under that name he may sometimes be recognized in descriptions and dedications that persons who were not in the secret of the school naturally applied in another quarter, or appropriated to themselves. '_rex_ was a surname among the romans,' says the interpreter of this school, in a very explanatory passage, 'as well as _king_ is _with us_.' it is the new school that is under these boughs here, but hardly that as yet. it is rather the representation of the new classical learning,--the old learning newly revived,--in which the new is germinating. it is that learning in its _first_ effect on the young, enthusiastic, but earnest practical english mind. it is that revival of the old learning, arrested, _daguerréotyped_ at the moment in which the new begins to stir in it, in minds which are going to be the master-minds of ages. 'common sense' is the word here already. 'common sense' is the word that this new academe is convulsed with when the curtain rises. and though it is laughter that you hear there now, sending its merry english peals through those musty, antique walls, as the first ray of that new beam enters them; the muse of the new mysteries has also another mask, and if you will wait a little, you shall hear that tone too. cries that the old mysteries never caught, lamentations for adonis not heard before, griefs that dionysus never knew, shall yet ring out from those walls. under that classic dome which still calls itself platonic, the questions and experiments of the new learning are beginning. these youths are here to represent the new philosophy, which is science, in the act of taking its first step. the subject is presented here in large masses. but this central group, at least, is composed of living men, and not dramatic shadows merely. there are good historical features peering through those masks a little. these youths are full of youthful enthusiasm, and aspiring to the ideal heights of learning in their enthusiasm. but already the practical bias of their genius betrays itself. they are making a practical experiment with the classics, and to their surprise do not find them 'good for life.' here is the school, then,--with the classics on trial in the persons of these new school-men. that is the central group. what more do we want? here is the new and the old already. but this is the old _revived_--newly revived;--this is the revival of learning in whose stimulus the _new_ is beginning. there is something in the field besides that. there is a 'school-master abroad' yet, that has not been examined. these young men who have resolved themselves in their secret sittings into a committee of the whole, are going to have him up. he will be obliged to come into this park here, and speak his speech in the ear of that english 'common sense,' which is meddling here, for the first time, in a comprehensive manner with things in general; he will have to 'speak out loud and plain,' that these english parents who are sitting here in the theatre, some of 'the wiser sort' of them, at least, may get some hint of what it is that this pedagogue is beating into their children's brains, taking so much of their glorious youth from them--that priceless wealth of nature which none can restore to them,--as the purchase. but this is not all. there is a man who teaches the grown-up children of the parish in which this park is situated, who happens to live hard by,--a man who professes the care and cure of minds. he, too, has had a summons sent him; there will be no excuse taken; and his examination will proceed at the same time. these two will come into the park together; and perhaps we shall not be able to detect any very marked difference in their modes of expressing themselves. they are two ordinary, quiet-looking personages enough. there is nothing remarkable in their appearance; their coming here is not forced. there are deer in this park; and 'book-men' as they are, they have a taste for sport also it seems. unless you should get a glimpse of the type,--of the unit in their faces--and that shadowy train that _the cipher_ points to,--unless you should observe that their speech is somewhat strongly pronounced for an individual representation--merely glancing at them in passing--you would not, perhaps, suspect who they are. and yet the hints are not wanting; they are very thickly strewn,--the hints which tell you that in these two men all the extant learning, which is in places of trust and authority, is represented; all that is not included in that elegant learning which those students are making sport of in those 'golden books' of theirs, under the trees here now. but there is another department of art and literature which is put down as a department of '_learning_,' and a most grave and momentous department of it too, in that new scheme of learning which this play is illustrating,--one which will also have to be impersonated in this representation,--one which plays a most important part in the history of this school. it is that which gives it the _power_ it lacks and wants, and in one way or another will have. it is that which makes _an arm_ for it, and a _long_ one. it is that which supplies its hidden _arms_ and _armour_. but neither is this department of learning as it is extant,--as this school finds it prepared to its hands, going to be permitted to escape the searching of this comprehensive satire. there is a 'refined traveller of spain' haunting the purlieus of this court, who is just the bombastic kind of person that is wanted to act this part. for this impersonation, too, is historical. there are just such creatures in nature as this. we see them now and then; or, at least, he is not much overdone,--'this child of fancy,--don armado hight.' it is the old romance, with his ballads and allegories,--with his old 'lies' and his new arts,--that this company are going to use for their new minstrelsy; but first they will laugh him out of his bombast and nonsense, and instruct him in the knowledge of 'common things,' and teach him how to make poetry out of them. they have him here now, to make sport of him with the rest. it is the fashionable literature,-- the literature that entertains _a court_,--the literature of _a tyranny_, with his gross servility, with his courtly affectations, with his arts of amusement, his 'vain delights,' with his euphuisms, his 'fire-new words,' it is the polite learning, the elizabethan _belles lettres_, that is brought in here, along with that old dryasdust scholasticism, which the other two represent, to make up this company. these critics, who turn the laugh upon themselves, who caricature their own follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and their own failures the centre of the comedy of _love's_ labour's lost, are not going to let this thing escape; with the heights of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. for these are the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all the nonsense into heaps, and burning it up and and clearing the ground for the new. 'what is the end of study,' is the word of this play. to get the old books shut, but _not_ till they have been examined, _not_ till all the good in them has been taken out, not till we have made a _stand_ on them; to get the old books in their places, under our feet, and '_then_ to make progression' after we see where we are, is the proposal here--_here_ also. it is the shutting up of the old books, and the opening of the new ones, which is the business here. but _that_--that is not the proposal of an ignorant man (as this poet himself takes pains to observe); it is not the proposition of a man who does not know what there is in books--who does not know but there is every thing in them that they claim to have in them, every thing that is good for life, _magic_ and all. an ignorant man is in awe of books, on account of his ignorance. he thinks there are all sorts of things in them. he is very diffident when it comes to any question in regard to them. he tells you that he is not '_high learned_,' and defers to his betters. neither is this the proposition of a man who has read _a little_, who has only a smattering in books, as the poet himself observes. it is the proposition of _a scholar_, who has read them _all_, or had them read for him and examined, who knows what is in them _all_, and what they are good for, and what they are not good for. this is the man who laughs at learning, and borrows her own speech to laugh her down with. _this_, and _not the ignorant man_, it is who opens at last 'great nature's' gate to us, and tells us to come out and learn of her, _because_ that which old books did _not_ 'clasp in,' that which old philosophies have 'not _dreamt_ of,'--the lore of laws not written yet in books of man's devising, the lore of _that_ of which man's ordinary life consisteth is _here_, uncollected, waiting to be spelt out. _king_. _how well he's read_ to reason _against reading_. is the inference _here_. _dumain_. _proceeded_ well to _stop_ all good _proceeding._ it is _progress_ that is proposed here also. after the survey of learning 'has been well taken, _then_ to make _progession_' is the word. it is not the doctrine of unlearning that is taught here in this satire. it is a learning that includes all the extant wisdom, and finds it insufficient. it is one that requires a new and nobler study for its god-like _ends_. but, at the same time, the hindrances that a practical learning has to encounter are pointed at from the first. the fact, that the true ends of learning take us at once into the ground of the forbidden questions, is as plainly stated in the opening speech of the new academy as the nature of the statement will permit. the fact, that the intellect is trained to _vain delights_ under such conditions, because there is no earnest legitimate occupation of it permitted, is a fact that is glanced at here, as it is in other places, though not in such a manner, of course, as to lead to a 'question' from the government in regard to the meaning of the passages in which these grievances are referred to. under these embarrassments it is, we are given to understand, however, that the criticism on the old learning and the plot for the new is about to proceed. here it takes the form of comedy and broad farce. there is a touch of 'tart aristophanes' in the representation here. this is the introductory performance of the school in which the student hopes for _high words howsoever low the matter_, emphasizing that hope with an allusion to the heights of learning, as he finds it, and the highest word of it, which seems irreverent, until we find from the whole purport of the play how far _he_ at least is from taking it _in vain_, whatever implication of that sort his criticism may be intended to leave on others, who use good words with so much iteration and to so little purpose. 'that is a _high hope_ for a low having' is the rejoinder of that associate of his, whose views on this point agree with his own so entirely. it is the height of the _hope_ and the lowness of the _having_--it is the height of the _words_ and the lowness of the _matter_, that makes the incongruity here. that is the soul of all the mirth that is stirring here. it is the height of '_the style_' that '_gives us cause to climb in the merriment_' that makes the subject of this essay. it is literature in general that is laughed at here, and the branches of it in particular. it is the old books that are walking about under these trees, with their follies all ravelled out, making sport for us. but this is not all. it is the _defect_ in learning which is represented here--that same 'defect' which a graver work of this academy reports, in connection with a proposition for the advancement of learning--for its advancement into the fields not yet taken up, and which turn out, upon inquiry, to be the fields of human life and practice;--it is that main defect which is represented here. 'i find a kind of science of "_words_" but none of "_things_,"' says the reporter. 'what do you read, my lord?' 'words, words, words,' echoes the prince of denmark. 'i find in these antique books, in these philosophies and poems, a certain resplendent or lustrous mass of matter chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations, or to the eloquence of discourses,' says the other and graver reporter; 'but as to the ordinary and common matter of which life consisteth, i do _not_ find it erected into an art or science, or reduced to written inquiry.' 'how _low_ soever the matter, i hope in god for _high words_,' says a speaker, who comes out of that same palace of learning on to this stage with the secret badge of the new lore on him, which is the lore of practice--a speaker not less grave, though he comes in now in the garb of this pantomime, to make sport for us with his news of learning. for 'seneca cannot be too heavy, nor plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty.' it is the high _words_ and the low _having_ that make the incongruity. but we cannot see the vanity of those heights of words, till the lowness of the matter which they profess to abstract has been brought into contrast with them, till the particulars which they do _not_ grasp, which they can _not_ compel, have been brought into studious contrast with them. the delicate graces of those flowery summits of speech which the ideal nature, when it energises in speech, creates, must overhang in this design the rude actuality which the untrained nature in man, forgotten of art, is always producing. and it is the might of nature in this opposition, it is the force of 'matter,' it is the unconquerable cause contrasted with the vanity of the words that have not comprehended the _cause_, it is the futility of these heights of words that are not '_forms_' that do not correspond to things which must be exhibited here also. it is the force of the _law_ in nature, that must be brought into opposition here with the height of the _word_, the _ideal_ word, the _higher_, but not yet scientifically abstracted word, that seeks in vain because it has no 'grappling-hook' on the actuality, to bind it. there already are the _heights of learning_ as it is, as this school finds it, dramatically exhibited on the one hand; but this, too,--_life_ as it is,--as this school finds it, man's life as it is, unreduced to order by his philosophy, unreduced to melody by his verse, must also be dramatically exhibited on the other hand, must also be impersonated. it is life that we have here, the 'theoric' on the one side, the 'practic' on the other. the height of the books on the one side, the lowness, the unvisited, 'unlettered' lowness of the life on the other. that which exhibits the _defect_ in learning that the new learning is to remedy, the new uncultured, unbroken ground of science must be exhibited here also. but _that_ is man's life. that is the world. and what if it be? there are diagrams in this theatre large enough for that. it is the theatre of the new academy which deals also in ideas, but prefers the solidarities. the wardrobe and other properties of this theatre are specially adapted to exigencies of this kind. the art that put the extant learning with those few strokes into the grotesque forms you see there, will not be stopped on this side either, for any law of writ or want of space and artistic comprehension. this is the learning that can be bounded in the nut-shell of an aphorism and include all in its bounds. there are not many persons here, and they are ordinary looking persons enough. _but_ if you _lift_ those dominos a little, which that 'refined traveller of spain' has brought in fashion, you will find that this rustic garb and these homely country features hide more than they promised; and the princess, with her train, who is keeping state in the tents yonder, though there is an historical portrait there too, is greater than she seems. this antony _dull_ is a poor rude fellow; but he is a great man in this play. this is the play in which one asks 'which is the princess?' and the answer is, 'the tallest and the thickest.' antony is the thickest, he is the acknowledged sovereign here in this school; for he is of that greater part that carries it, and though he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book, these spectacles which the new 'book men' are getting up here are intended chiefly for him. and that unlettered small knowing soul 'me'--'still _me_'--insignificant as you think him when you see him in the form of a country swain, is a person of most extensive domains and occupations, and of the very highest dignity, as this philosophy will demonstrate in various ways, under various symbols. you will have that same _me_ in the form of a _mountain_, before you have read all the books of this school, and mastered all its '_tokens_' and '_symbols_.' the dramatic representation here is meagre; but we shall find upon inquiry it is already the globe theatre, with all its new solidarities, new in philosophy, new in poetry, that the leaves of this park hide--this park that the doors and windows of the new academe open into--these new grounds that it lets out its students to play and study in, and collect their specimens from--'still and contemplative in living art.' it was all the world that was going through that park that day haply, we shall find. it is all the world that we get in this narrow representation here, as we get it in a more limited representation still, in another place. 'all the world knows _me_ in my book and my book in _me_,' cries the egotist of the mountain. it is the first canto of that great epic, whose argument runs through so many books, that is chanted here. it is the war, the unsuccessful war of lore and nature, whose lost fields have made man's life, that is getting reviewed at last and reduced to speech and writing. it is the school itself that makes the centre of the plot in this case; these gay young philosophers with 'the ribands' yet floating in their 'cap of youth,' who oppose lore to love, who 'war against _their own affections_ and the huge army of the world's desires,' ere they know what they are; who think to conquer nature's potencies, her universal powers and causes, with wordy ignorance, with resolutions that ignore them simply, and make a virtue of ignoring them, these are the chief actors here, who come out of that classic tiring house where they have been shut up with the ancients so long, to celebrate on this green plot, which is life, their own defeat, and propose a better wisdom, the wisdom of the moderns. and holofernes, the schoolmaster, who cultivates minds, and sir nathaniel, the curate, who cures them, and don armado or don a_drama_dio, from the flowery heights of the new belles lettres, with the last refinement of euphuism on his lips, and antony dull, and the country damsel and her swain, and the princess and her attendants, are all there to eke out and complete the philosophic design,--to exhibit the extant learning in its airy flights and gross descents, in its ludicrous attempt to escape from those particulars or to grapple, without loss of grandeur, those particulars of which man's life consisteth. it is the vain pretension and assumption of those faulty wordy abstractions, whose falseness and failure in practice this school is going to expose elsewhere; it is the defect of those abstractions and idealisms that the novum organum was invented to remedy, which is exhibited so grossly and palpably here. it is the height of those great swelling words of rhetoric and logic, in rude contrast with those actualities which the history of man is always exhibiting, which the universal nature in man is always imposing on the learned and unlearned, the profane and the reverend, the courtier and the clown, the 'king and the beggar,' the actualities which the natural history of man continues perseveringly to exhibit, in the face of those logical abstractions and those ideal schemes of man as he should be, which had been till this time the fruit of learning;--those actualities, those particulars, whose lowness the new philosophy would begin with, which the new philosophy would erect into an art or science. the foundation of this ascent is natural history. there must be nothing omitted here, or the stairs would be unsafe. the rule in this school, as stated by the interpreter in chief, is, 'that there be _nothing in the globe of matter_, which should not be likewise in the globe of _crystal_ or _form_;' that is, he explains, 'that there should not be anything in _being_ and _action_, which should not be _drawn_ and _collected_ into _contemplation_ and _doctrine_.' the lowness of matter, all the capabilities and actualities of speech and action, not of the refined only, but of the vulgar and profane, are included in the science which contemplates an historical result, and which proposes the _reform_ of these actualities, the cure of these maladies,--which comprehends man as man in its intention,--which makes the _common weal_ its end. science is the word that unlocks the books of this school, its gravest and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately allegory, and its book of sports and riddles. science is the clue that still threads them, that never breaks, in all their departures from the decorums of literature, in their lowest descents from the refinements of society. the vulgarity is not _the_ vulgarity of the vulgar--the inelegancy is not the spontaneous rudeness of the ill-bred--any more than its doctrine of nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. the loftiest refinements of letters, the courtliest breeding, the most exquisite conventionalities, the most regal dignities of nature, are always present in _these_ works, to measure these abysses, flowering to their brink. man as he is, booked, surveyed,--surveyed from the continent of nature, put down as he is in her book of kinds, not as he is from his own interior isolated conceptions only,--the universal powers and causes as they are developed in him, in his untaught affections, in his utmost sensuous darkness,--the universal principle instanced whereit is most buried, the cause in nature found;--man as he is, in his heights and in his depths, 'from his lowest note to the top of his key,'--man in his possibilities, in his actualities, in his thought, in his speech, in his book language, and in his every-day words, in his loftiest lyric tongue, in his lowest pit of play-house degradation, searched out, explained, interpreted. that is the key to the books of this academe, who carry always on their armour, visible to those who have learned their secret, but hid under the symbol of their double worship, the device of the hunters,--the symbol of the twin-gods,--the silver bow, or the bow that finds all. 'seeing that she beareth two persons ... i do also otherwise _shadow_ her.' it is man's life, and the culture of it, erected into an art or science, that these books contain. in the lowness of the lowest, and in the aspiration of the noblest, the powers whose entire history must make the basis of a successful morality and policy are found. it is all abstracted or drawn into contemplation, 'that the precepts of cure and culture may be more rightly concluded.' 'for that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.' it is not necessary to illustrate this criticism in this case, because in this case the design looks through the execution everywhere. the criticism of the novum organum, the criticism of the advancement of learning, and the criticism of raleigh's history of the world, than which there is none finer, when once you penetrate its crust of profound erudition, is here on the surface. and the scholasticism is not more obtrusive here, the learned sock is not more ostentatiously paraded, than in some critical places in those performances; while the humour that underlies the erudition issues from a depth of learning not less profound. as, for instance, in this burlesque of the descent of _euphuism_ to the prosaic detail of the human conditions, not then accommodated with a style in literature, a defect in learning which this academy proposed to remedy. a new department in literature which began with a series of papers issued from this establishment, has since undertaken to cover the ground here indicated, the _every-day_ human life, and reduce it to written inquiry, notwithstanding 'the lowness of the matter.' letter from don armado to the king. _king_ [_reads_], 'great deputy, the welkin's vicegerent, and sole dominator of navarre, my soul's earth's god, and body's fostering patron.... so it is,--besieged with sable-coloured melancholy, i did commend the black, oppressing humour to the most wholesome physick of thy health-giving air, and, as i am a gentleman, betook myself to walk. the time when? about the sixth hour: when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper.' [no one who is much acquainted with the style of the author of this letter ought to have any difficulty in identifying him here. there was a method of dramatic composition in use then, and not in _this_ dramatic company only, which produced an amalgamation of styles. 'on a forgotten matter,' these associated authors themselves, perhaps, could not always 'make distinction of their hands.' but there are places where raleigh's share in this 'cry of players' shows through very palpably.] 'so much for the time _when_. now for the ground _which_; which i mean i walked upon: it is ycleped thy park. then for the place where; where i mean i did encounter that obscene and most preposterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink, which here thou beholdest, surveyest, or seest, etc.... 'thine in all compliments of devoted and heart-burning heat of duty. 'don adriano de armado.' and in another letter from the same source, the dramatic criticism on that style of literature which it was the intention of this school 'to reform altogether' is thus continued. ... 'the magnanimous and most illustrate king _cophetua_, set eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar _zenelophon_. and it was he that might rightly say, _veni, vidi, vici_; which to _anatomise_ in the vulgar, (_o base and obscure vulgar_!) _videlicet_, he came, saw, and overcame... who came? the king. why did he come? to see. why did he see? to overcome. to whom came he? to the beggar. what saw he? the beggar. who overcame he? the beggar. the conclusion is victory. on whose side? etc. 'thine in the dearest design of industry.' [_dramatic comment_.] _boyet. i am much deceived but i remember the style. _princess_. else your memory is bad going o'er it erewhile._ _jaquenetta_. good master parson, be so good as to read me this letter--it was sent me from don _armatho_: i beseech you to read it. _holofernes_. [speaking here, however, not in character but for 'the _academe_.'] _fauste precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra ruminat_, and so forth. ah, good old mantuan! i may speak of thee as the traveller doth of venice --vinegia, vinegia, chi non te vede, ei non te pregia. old mantuan! old mantuan! who understandeth thee not, _loves thee not.--ut re sol la mi fa.--under pardon_, sir, what are the contents? or, rather, as horace says in his--what, my soul, _verses_? _nath_. ay, sir, and _very learned_ [one would say so _upon examination_]. _hol_. let me have a _staff_, a stanza, a verse; _lege domine_. _nath_. [reads the 'verses.']--'if love make me forsworn,' etc. _hol_. you _find not the apostrophe_, and _so--miss_ the _accent_--[criticising the reading. it is necessary to find the _apostrophe_ in the verses of this academy, before you can give the accent correctly; there are other points which require to be noted also, in this refined courtier's writings, as this criticism will inform us]. let me _supervise_ the canzonet. here _are only numbers_ ratified, but for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadency of poesy, _caret_. _ovidius naso_ was the man. and _why_, indeed, naso; but for _smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy_, the _jerks of invention_. _imitari_ is nothing; so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider. [it was no such reading and writing as _that_ which this academy was going to countenance, or teach.] but, damosella, was this directed to you? _jaq_. ay, sir, from one monsieur biron, one of the strange queen's lords. _hol_. i will _over-glance_ the _super-script_. 'to the snow white hand of the most beauteous lady _rosaline_.' i will look again _on the intellect_ of the letter for the _nomination_ of the party writing, _to the person written unto_ (_rosaline_).--[_look again_.--that is the rule for the reading of letters issued from this academy, whether they come in don armado's name or another's, when the point is _not_ to 'miss the _accent_.'] 'your ladyship's, in all desired employment, biron.' sir nathaniel, this biron is one of the votaries with the king, and here he hath framed a _letter_ to a _sequent_ of the stranger queen's, which, _accidentally or by way of progression_, hath miscarried. trip and go, my sweet; deliver this paper into the _royal hand of the king. it may concern much_. stay not thy compliment, i forgive thy duty. _adieu_. _nath_. sir, you have done this in the fear of god, very religiously; and as a certain father saith-- _hol_. sir, tell me not of _the father_, i do fear colorable colors. but to return to _the verses_. did they please you, sir nathaniel? _nath_. marvellous well _for the pen_. _hol_. i _dine_ to-day at the _father's _of a certain pupil of _mine_, where, if before repast, it shall please you to gratify the table with a grace, i will, on my privilege i have with the parent of the foresaid child, or pupil, undertake your _ben venuto, where i will prove_ those _verses to be very unlearned_, neither savouring of poetry, wit, nor invention. i beseech _your society_. _nath_. and thank you, too; for _society_ (saith the text) is _the happiness of_ life. _hol_. and, _certes_, the text _most infallibly concludes it_.--sir, [to dull] i do _invite you too_, [to hear the verses ex-criticised] you _shall not_ say me _nay: pauca verba. away_; the _gentles are at their games_, and we will _to our recreation_. another part of the _same_. after dinner. _re-enter holofernes, sir nathaniel, and dull_. _hol. satis quod sufficit_. _nath_. i praise god for you, sir: your _reasons_ at dinner have been _sharp and sententious_; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. i did converse this _quondam_ day with a companion of the king's, who is intituled, nominated, or called don adriano de armado. _hol_. _novi hominem tanquam te_. his manner is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general behaviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. he is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as i may call it. _nath_. a most singular and choice epithet! [takes out his table-book.] _hol_. _he draweth out the thread of his verbosity_ finer than the _staple of his argument_, ['more matter with less art,' says the queen in hamlet], i abhor such _fantastical phantasms_, such insociable and _point device_ companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak doubt _fine_ when _he should say doubt_, etc. this is abhominable which he would call abominable; it insinuateth me of insanie; _ne intelligis, domine_? to make frantic, lunatic. _nath_. _lans deo bone intelligo_. _hol_. _bone--bone for bene_: _priscian, a little scratched 'twill serve_. [this was never meant to be printed of course; all this is understood to have been prepared only for a performance in 'a booth.'] _enter_ armado, etc. _nath. videsne quis venit?_ _ho. video et gaudeo._ _arm._ chirra! _hol. quare_ chirra not sirrah! but the first appearance of these two _book-men_, as _dull_ takes leave them to call them in this scene, is not less to the purpose. they come in with antony dull, who serves as a foil to their learning; from the moment that they open their lips they speak 'in character,' and they do not proceed far before they give us some hints of the author's purpose. _nath_. very _reverent sport_ truly, and done _in the testimony of a good conscience_. _hol_. the deer was, as you know, in _sanguis_, ripe as a pomewater, who _now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo_, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and _anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra_--the soil, the land, the earth. [a-side glance at the heights and depths of the incongruities which are the subject here.] _nath_. truly, master holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least, but, etc..... _hol_. most _barbarous_ intimation! [referring to antony dull, who has been trying to understand this learned language, and apply it to the subject of conversation, but who fails in the attempt, very much to the amusement and self-congratulation of these scholars]. yet a _kind_ of _insinuation_, as it were, _in via, in way of explication_ [a style much in use in this school], _facere_, as it were, replication, or rather _ostentare_, to show, as it were, _his inclination_, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed fashion,--to insert again my _haud credo_ for a deer.... twice sod simplicity, _bis coctus!_ oh _thou monster ignorance_, how deformed dost thou look! _nath._ [explaining] sir, _he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book_; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; _his intellect_ is not replenished; he is only an animal--only sensible in the duller parts; and such _barren_ plants are set before us that we thankful should be, (which we of taste and feeling are) for those parts that do fructify in us more than he. for _as it would ill become me_ to be vain, indiscreet, or a fool, so were there _a patch set on learning_ to see him in a _school_. [that would be a new 'school,' a new 'learning,' patching the 'defect' (as it would be called elsewhere) in the old.] _dull_. you two are book-men. can you tell me by your wit, etc. _nath_. a rare talent. _dull_. if a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent. _hol_. this is a gift that i have; simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: but the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and i am thankful for it. _nath_. sir, i praise the lord for you, and so may my parishioners; for their sons are well tutored by you, and their daughters profit very greatly under you; you are a good member of the common-wealth. he is in earnest of course. is the poet so too? 'what is the end of study?'--let me know. 'o they have lived long in the alms-basket of words,' is the criticism on this learning with which this showman, whoever he may he, explains his exhibition of it. and surely he must be, indeed, of the school of antony dull, and never fed with the dainties bred in a book, who does not see what it is that is criticised here;--that it is the learning of an unlearned time, of a barbarous time, of a vain, frivolous debased, wretched time, that has been fed long--always from "the alms-basket of words." and one who is acquainted already with the style of this school, who knows already its secret signs and stamp, would not need to be told to look again on the intellect of the letter for the nomination of the party writing, to the person written to, in order to see what source this pastime comes from,--what player it is that is behind the scene here. 'whoe'er he be, he bears a mounting mind,' and beginning in the lowness of the actual, and collecting the principles that are in all actualities, the true forms that are forms in nature, and not in man's speech only, the new ideas of the new academy, the ideas that are powers, with these 'simples' that are causes, he will reconstruct fortuitous conjunctions, he will make his poems in facts; he will find his fairy land in her kingdom whose iron chain he wears. 'the gentles were at their games,' and the soul of new ages was beginning its re-creations. for this is but the beginning of that 'armada' that this don armado--who fights with sword and pen, in ambush and in the open field--will sweep his old enemy from the seas with yet. o like a book of sports thou'lt read me o'er, but there's more in me than thou'lt understand. look how the father's face lives in his issue; even so the race of shake-spear's mind and _manners_ brightly _shines_ in his _well turn'd_ and _true filed lines_, in each of which he seems to _shake_ a _lance_, as _brandished_ in the eyes of--[what?--]_ignorance!_ ben jonson. _ignorance!_--yes, that was the word. it is the prince of that little academe that sits in the tower here now. it is in the tower that that little academe holds its 'conferences' now. there is a little knot of men of science who contrive to meet there. the associate of raleigh's studies, the partner of his plans and toils for so many years, _hariot_, too scientific for his age, is one of these. it is in the tower that raleigh's school is kept now. the english youth, the hope of england, follow this teacher still. 'many young gentlemen still resort to him.' gilbert harvey is one of this school. 'none but _my father_ would keep such a bird in such a cage,' cries _one_ of them--that prince of wales through whom the bloodless revolution was to have been accomplished; and a queen seeks his aid and counsel there still. it is in the tower now that we must look for the sequel of that holiday performance of the school. it is the genius that had made its game of that old _love's_ labour's lost that is at work here still, still bent on making a lore of life and love, still ready to spend its rhetoric on things, and composing its metres with them. nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, when in eternal lines to _time_ thou growest. he is building and manning new ships in his triumphant fleet. but they are more warlike than they were. the papers that this academe issues now have the stamp of the tower on them. 'the golden shower,' that 'flowed from his fruitful head of his love's praise' flows no more. fierce bitter things are flung forth from that retreat of learning, while the kingly nature has not yet fully mastered its great wrongs. the 'martial hand' is much used in the compositions of this school indeed for a long time afterwards. fitter perhaps to thunder martial stower when thee so list thy tuneful thoughts to raise, said the partner of his verse long before. with _rage_ or _influence chide_ or _cheer_ the drooping stage, says _his_ protegé. it was while this arrested soldier of the human emancipation sat amid his books and papers, in old julius caesar's tower, or in the tower of that conqueror, 'commonly so called,' that the 'readers of the wiser sort' found, 'thrown in at their _study windows_,' writings, _as if_ they came 'from _several citizens_, wherein _caesar's ambition was obscurely glanced at_' and thus the whisper of the roman brutus 'pieced them out.' brutus _thou sleep'st_; awake, and _see thyself_. shall _rome_ [soft--'_thus must i piece it out_.'] shall _rome_ stand under _one man's awe_? _what_ rome? * * * * * the fault, dear brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings. * * * * * age, _thou_ art shamed. it was while he sat there, that the audiences of that player who was bringing forth, on 'the banks of thames,' such wondrous things out of his treasury then, first heard the roman foot upon their stage, and the long-stifled, and pent-up speech of english freedom, bursting from the old roman patriot's lips. _cassius_. and let us swear our resolution. _brutus_. _no_, not an oath: if not the face of men, the sufferance of our soul's, the time's abuse, if these be motives weak, break off betimes, and every man hence to his idle bed; _so_ let high-sighted tyranny range on, till _each man drop by lottery_. it was while he sat there, that the player who did not _write_ his speeches, said-- _nor stony tower_, nor walls of beaten brass, nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, can be retentive to the strength of spirit; if i know this, know _all the world beside_, that part of tyranny that _i_ do bear, _i_ can shake off at pleasure. and why should caesar be a tyrant then? _poor man_! i know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the _romans_ are but sheep: _he_ were no lion, were not _romans_ hinds. but i, perhaps, speak _this_ before a willing bondman. _hamlet_. my lord,--you played once in the university, you say? _polonius_. that did i, my lord; and was accounted a good actor. _hamlet_. and what did you enact? _polonius_. i did enact _julius caesar_. i was killed i'the capitol; brutus killed me. _hamlet_. it was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.--be the players ready? seneca cannot be too heavy, nor plautus too light. for the law of writ, and the liberty. _these_ are the only _men_. _hamlet_. why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil? _guild_. o my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly. _hamlet_. i do not well understand that. will you play upon this pipe? _guild_. my lord, i cannot. _hamlet_. i pray you. _guild_. believe me, i cannot. _hamlet_. i do beseech you. _guild_. i know no touch of it, my lord. _hamlet_. 'tis as _easy as lying. govern_ these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, _and it will discourse most eloquent music_. look you, _these are the stops_. _guild_. but _these_ cannot _i_ command to any _utterance of harmony: i have not the_ skill. _hamlet. why, look you now_, how _unworthy a thing_ you make of me? you would _play upon_ me; _you would seem_ to know _my stops_; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my key; and there is much _music_, excellent voice in _this little organ, yet_ cannot you make it speak. 'sblood! do you think i am easier to be played on than a pipe? call me what _instrument_ you will, though you can _fret_ me, you cannot play upon me. _hamlet_. why did you laugh when i said, _man_ delights not me? _guild_. to think, my lord, if you delight not in _man_, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you. we coted them on the way, and thither are they coming to offer you--service. book i. the elizabethan art of delivery and tradition. part i. michael de montaigne's 'private and retired arts.' and thus do we of wisdom and of reach, with windlaces and with _assays_ of _bias_, by _indirections_, find _directions out_; so by my former lecture and advice, shall you, my son.--_hamlet_. chapter i. ascent from particulars to the 'highest parts of sciences,' by the enigmatic method illustrated. single, _i'll_ resolve you.--_tempest_. observe his inclination in yourself.--_hamlet_. for ciphers, they are commonly in letters, but may be in words. _advancement of learning_. the fact that a science of practice, not limited to physics and the arts based on the knowledge of physical laws, but covering the whole ground of the human activity, and limited only by the want and faculty of man, required, in the reigns of elizabeth and james the first, some special and profoundly artistic methods of 'delivery and tradition,' would not appear to need much demonstration to one acquainted with the peculiar features of that particular crisis in the history of the english nation. and certainly any one at all informed in regard to the condition of the world at the time in which this science,--which is the new practical science of the modern ages,--makes its first appearance in history,--any one who knows what kind of a public opinion, what amount of intelligence in the common mind the very fact of the first appearance of such a science on the stage of the human affairs presupposes,--any one who will stop to consider what kind of a public it was to which such a science had need as yet to address itself, when that engine for the diffusion of knowledge, which has been battering the ignorance and stupidity of the masses of men ever since, was as yet a novel invention, when all the learning of the world was still the learning of the cell and the cloister, when the practice of the world was still in all departments, unscientific,--any one at least who will stop to consider the nature of the 'preconceptions' which a science that is none other than the universal science of practice, must needs encounter in its principal and nobler fields, will hardly need to be told that if produced at all under such conditions, it must needs be produced covertly. who does not know, beforehand, that such a science would have to concede virtually, for a time, the whole ground of its nobler fields to the preoccupations it found on them, as the inevitable condition of its entrance upon the stage of the human affairs in any capacity, as the basis of any toleration of its claim to dictate to the men of practice in any department of their proceedings. that that little 'courtly company' of elizabethan scholars, in which this great enterprise for the relief of man's estate was supposed in their own time to have had its origin, was composed of wits and men of learning who were known, in their own time, to have concealed their connection with the works on which their literary fame chiefly depended--that that 'glorious willy,' who finds these forbidden fields of science all open to his pastime, was secretly claimed by this company--that a style of 'delivery' elaborately enigmatical, borrowed in part from the invention of the ancients, and the more recent use of the middle ages, but largely modified and expressly adapted to this exigency, was employed in the compositions of this school, both in prose and verse, a style capable of conveying not merely a double, but a triple significance; a style so capacious in its concealments, so large in its '_cryptic_,' as to admit without limitation the whole scope of this argument, and so involved as to conceal in its involutions, all that was then forbidden to appear,--this has been proved in that part of the work which contains the historical key to this delivery. we have also incontestable historical evidence of the fact, that the man who was at the head of this new conjunction in speculation and practice in its more immediate historical developments,--the scholar who was most openly concerned in his own time in the introduction of those great changes in the condition of the world, which date their beginning from this time, was himself primarily concerned in the invention of this art. that this great political chief, this founder of new polities and inventor of new social arts, who was at the same time the founder of a new school in philosophy, was understood in his own time to have found occasion for the use of such an art, in his oral as well as in his written communications with his school;--that he was connected with a scientific association, which was known to have concealed under the profession of a curious antiquarian research, an inquiry into the higher parts of sciences which the government of that time was not disposed to countenance;--that in the opinion of persons who had the best opportunity of becoming acquainted with the facts at the time, this inventor of the art was himself beheaded, chiefly on account of the discovery of his use of it in one of his gravest literary works;--all this has been produced already, as matter of historic record merely. all this remains in the form of detailed contemporary statement, which suffices to convey, if not the fact that the forbidden parts of sciences were freely handled in the discussions of this school, and not in their secret oral discussions only, but in their great published works,--if not that, at least the fact that such was the impression and belief of persons living at the time, whether any ground existed for it or not. but the arts by which these new men of science contrived to evade the ignorance and the despotic limitations of their time, the inventions with which they worked to such good purpose upon their own time, in spite of its restrictions and oppositions, and which enable them to 'outstretch their span,' and prolong and perpetuate their plan for the advancement of their kind, and compel the future ages to work with them to the fulfilment of its ends;--the arts by which these great original naturalists undertook to transfer in all their unimpaired splendour and worth, the collections they had made in the nobler fields of their science to the ages that would be able to make use of them;--these are the arts that we shall have need to master, if we would unlock the legacy they have left to us. the proof of the existence of this special art of delivery and tradition, and the definition of the objects for which it was employed, has been derived thus far chiefly from sources of evidence exterior to the works themselves; but the inventors of it and those who made use of it in their own speech and writings, are undoubtedly the persons best qualified to give us authentic and lively information on this subject; and we are now happily in a position to appreciate the statements which they have been at such pains to leave us, for the sake of clearing up those parts of their discourse which were necessarily obscured at the time. now that we have in our hands that key of _times_ which they have recommended to our use, that knowledge of times which 'gives great light in many cases to true interpretations,' it is not possible any longer to overlook these passages, or to mistake their purport. but before we enter upon the doctrine of art which was published in the first great recognized work of this philosophy, it will be necessary to produce here some extracts from a book which was not originally published in england, or in the english language, but one which was brought out here as an exotic, though it is in fact one of the great original works of this school, and one of its boldest and most successful issues; a work in which the new grounds of the actual experience and life of men, are not merely inclosed and propounded for written inquiry, but openly occupied. this is not the place to explain this fact, though the continental relations of this school, and other circumstances already referred to in the life of its founder, will serve to throw some light upon it; but on account of the bolder assertions which the particular form of writing and publication rendered possible in this case, and for the sake also of the more lively exhibition of the art itself which accompanies and illustrates these assertions in this instance, it appears on the whole excusable to commence our study of the special art for the delivery and tradition of knowledge in those departments which science was then forbidden on pain of death to enter, with that exhibition of it which is contained in this particular work, trusting to the progress of the extracts themselves to apologize to the intelligent reader for any thing which may seem to require explanation in this selection. it is only necessary to premise, that this work is one of the many works of this school, in which a grave, profoundly scientific design is concealed under the disguise of a gay, popular, attractive form of writing, though in this case the audience is from the first to a certain extent select. it has no platform that takes in--as the plays do, with their more glaring attractions and their lower and broader range of inculcation,--the populace. there is no pit in this theatre. it is throughout a book for men of liberal culture; but it is a book for the world, and for men of the world, and not for the cloister merely, and the scholar. but this, too, has its differing grades of readers, from its outer court of lively pastime and brilliant aimless chat to that _esoteric_ chamber, where the abstrusest parts of sciences are waiting for those who will accept the clues, and patiently ascend to them. the work is popular in its form, but it is inwoven throughout with a thread of lurking meanings so near the surface, and at times so boldly obtruded, that it is difficult to understand how it could ever have been read at all without occasioning the inquiry which it was intended to occasion under certain conditions, but which it was necessary for this society to ward off from their works, except under these limitations, at the time when they were issued. for these inner meanings are everywhere pointed and emphasized with the most bold and vivid illustration, which lies on the surface of the work, in the form of stories, often without any apparent relevance in that exterior connection--brought in, as it would seem, in mere caprice or by the loosest threads of association. they lie, with the 'allegations' which accompany them, strewn all over the surface of the work, like 'trap' on 'sand-stone,' telling their story to the scientific eye, and beckoning the philosophic explorer to that primeval granite of sciences that their vein will surely lead to. but the careless observer, bent on recreation, observes only a pleasing feature in the landscape, one that breaks happily its threatened dulness; the reader, reading this book as _books_ are wont to be read, finds nothing in this phenomenon to excite his curiosity. and the author knows him and his ways so well, that he is able to foresee that result, and is not afraid to trust to it in the case of those whose scrutiny he is careful to avoid. for he is one who counts largely on the carelessness, or the indifference, or the stupidity of those whom he addresses. there is no end to his confidence in that. he is perpetually staking his life on it. neither is he willing to trust to the clues which these unexplained stories might seem of themselves to offer to the studious eye, to engage the attention of the reader--the reader whose attention he is bent on securing. availing himself of one of those nooks of discourse, which he is at no loss for the means of creating when the purpose of his _essaie_ requires it, he beckons the confidential reader aside, and thus explains his method to him, outright, in terms which admit of but one construction. 'neither these stories,' he says, 'nor my allegations do always serve simply for example, authority, or ornament; i do not only regard them for the use i make of them; they carry sometimes, _besides what i apply them to_, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, and sometimes, _collaterally, a more delicate sound_, both to me myself,--who will say no more about it _in this place_' [we shall hear more of it in another place, however, and where the delicate collateral sounds will not be wanting]--'both to me myself, and _to others who happen to be of my ear_.' to the reader, who does indeed happen to be of his ear, to one who has read the 'allegations' and stories that he speaks of, and the whole work, and the works connected with it, by means of that knowledge of the inner intention, and of the method to which he alludes, this passage would of course convey no new intelligence. but will the reader, to whom the views here presented are yet too new to seem credible, endeavour to imagine or invent for himself any form of words, in which the claim already made in regard to the style in which the great original writers of this age and the founders of the new science of the human life were compelled to infold their doctrine, could have been, in the case of this one at least, more distinctly asserted. here is proof that one of them, one who counted on an _audience_ too, did find himself compelled to infold his richer and bolder meanings in the manner described. all that need be claimed at present in regard to the authorship of this sentence is, that it is written by one whose writings, in their higher intention, have ceased to be understood, for lack of the '_ear_' to which his bolder and richer meanings are addressed, for lack of the _ear_, to which the collateral and more delicate sounds which his words sometimes carry with them are perceptible; and that it is written by a philosopher whose learning and aims and opinions, down to the slightest points of detail, are absolutely identical with those of the principal writers of this school. but let us look at a few of the stories which he ventures to introduce so emphatically, selecting only such as can be told in a sentence or two. let us take the next one that follows this explanation--the story in the very next paragraph to it. the question is _apparently_ of cicero, of his style, of his vanity, of his supposed care for his _fame_ in future ages, of his _real disposition and objects_. 'away with that eloquence that so enchants us with its _harmony_, that we should more study it than _things_' [what new soul of philosophy is this, then, already?]--'unless you will affirm that of _cicero_ to be of so supreme perfection as to form _a body_ of itself. and of him, i shall further add one story we read of to this purpose, wherein _his nature_ will _much more manifestly be laid open to us_' [than in that seeming care for his fame in future ages, or in that lower object of style, just dismissed so scornfully]. 'he was to make an oration in public, and found himself a little straitened _in time_, to _fit his words to his mouth as he had a mind to do_, when _eros_, one of his slaves, brought him word that the _audience was deferred_ till the next day, at which he was so ravished with joy that _he enfranchised him_.' the word 'time'--here admits of a double rendering whereby the _author's_ aims are more manifestly laid open; and there is also another word in this sentence which carries a 'delicate sound' with it, to those who have met this author in other fields, and who happen to be of his counsel. but lest the stories of themselves should still seem flat and pointless, or trivial and insignificant to the uninstructed ear, it may be necessary to interweave them with some further 'allegations on this subject,' which the author assumes, or appears to assume, in his own person. 'i write my book for _few men_, and for _few years_. had it been _matter of duration_, i should have put it into a _better language_. according to the continual variation that ours has been subject to hitherto [and we know who had a similar view on this point], who can expect that the present _form of language_ should be in use fifty years hence. it slips every day through our fingers; and since i was born, is altered above one half. we say that it is now perfect: _every age says the same of the language it speaks_. i shall hardly trust to that so long as it runs away and _changes_ as it does. ''tis for good and useful writings to nail and rivet it to them, and its reputation will go _according to the fortune of our state. for which reason, i am not afraid to insert herein several private articles, which will spend their use amongst the men now living_, and that concern the particular knowledge of some who will see further into them than the common reader.' but that the inner reading of these private articles--that reading which lay farther in--to which he invites the attention of those whom it concerns--was not expected to spend its use among the men then living, that which follows might seem to imply. it was that wrapping of them, it was that gross superscription which 'the fortune of our state was likely to make obsolete ere long,' this author thought, as we shall see if we look into his prophecies a little. 'i will not, after all, as i often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of _me_: "he _judged_, and lived so and so. could he have spoken when he was dying, he would have said _so_ or _so_. i knew him better than any." 'so _our_ virtues lie in the interpretation of the times,' 'says the unfortunate tullus aufidius, in the act of conducting a volscian army against the infant roman state, bemoaning himself upon the conditions of his historic whereabouts, and beseeching the sympathy and favourable constructions of posterity-- so our virtues lie in the interpretation of the times; and power unto itself most commendable hath not a tomb so evident as a hair to extol what it hath done. 'the times,' says lord bacon, speaking in reference to books particularly, though _he_ also recommends the same key for the reading of lives, 'the times in many cases give _great light_ to true interpretations.' 'now as much as decency permits,' continues the other, anticipating _here_ that speech which he might be supposed to have been anxious to make in defence of his posthumous reputation, could he have spoken when he was dying, and forestalling that criticism which he foresaw--that odious criticism of posterity on the discrepancy between _his life_ and _his judgment_--'now as much as decency permits, i _here_ discover my inclinations and affections. _if any observe_, he will find that _i have either told or designed to tell_ all. _what i cannot express i point out with my finger_. 'there was never greater circumspection and _military prudence_ than sometimes is seen among us; can it be that men are afraid to lose themselves by the way, _that they reserve themselves to the end of the game_?' 'there needs no more but to see a man promoted to dignity, though we knew him but three days before a man of no mark, yet an image of grandeur and ability insensibly steals into our opinion, and we persuade ourselves that growing in reputation and attendants, he is also increased in merit':-- _hamlet_. do the boys carry it away? _ros_. ay, that they do, my lord. hercules and his load too. _hamlet_. it is not very strange; for my uncle is king of denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats a-piece for his picture in little. 'sblood, there is something _in this, more_ than _natural_ [talking of the _super_natural], _if philosophy could find it out_. 'but,' our prose philosopher, whose mind is running much on the same subjects, continues 'if it happens so that he [this favourite of fortune] falls again, and is mixed with the common crowd, every one inquires with wonder into the _cause_ of his having been hoisted so high. _is it he_? say they: did he know no more than this _when he was in_ place?' ['change _places_ ... robes and furred gowns hide all.'] do _princes_ satisfy _themselves_ with so little? _truly we were in good hands_! that which i myself adore in kings, is [note it] _the crowd of the adorers_. all reverence and submission is due to them, _except that of the understanding_; my _reason_ is not to bow and bend, 'tis my _knees_' 'i will not do't' says another, who is in this one's counsels, i will not do't lest i surcease to honour mine own truth, and by my body's action, teach my mind a most inherent baseness. _coriolanus_. 'antisthenes one day entreated _the athenians to give orders that their asses might be employed in tilling the ground_,--to which it was answered, "that _those animals were not destined to such a service_." "that's all one," replied he; "it only sticks at your command; for the most ignorant and incapable men you employ _in your commands of war_, immediately become worthy enough _because_--you employ them."' there mightst thou behold the great image of authority. a dog's obeyed in office.--lear. for thou dost know, oh damon dear, this realm dismantled was of jove himself; and now reigns here, a very--very--_peacock_. horatio. you might have rhymed. hamlet. 'to which,' continues this political philosopher,--that is, to which preceding anecdote--containing such unflattering intimations with regard to the obstinacy of nature, in the limits she has set to the practical abilities of those _animals_, not enlarging their natural gifts out of respect to the athenian selection (an anecdote which supplies a rhyme to hamlet's verse, and to many others from the same source)--'_to which the custom of so many people_, who canonize the kings they have chosen _out of their own body_, and are not content only to honour, but adore them, _comes very near. those of mexico_ [for instance, it would not of course do to take any nearer home], after the ceremonies of _their_ king's coronation are finished, _dare no more look him in the face_; but, as if they _deified_ him by his royalty, _among_ the oaths they make him take to _maintain their religion and laws_, to be valiant, just and mild; he moreover swears,--_to make the sun run his course in his wonted light,--to drain the clouds at a fit season,--to confine rivers within their channels,--and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by the earth_.' '(they told me i was everything. but when the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not peace at my bidding,' says lear, 'there i found them, there i smelt them out.)' this, in connection with the preceding anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the suggestive stories above referred to; but the bearing of these quotations upon the particular question of style, which must determine the selection here, is set forth in that which follows. it should be stated, however, that in a preceding paragraph, the author has just very pointedly expressed it as his opinion, that men who are supposed, by common consent, to be so far above the rest of mankind in their single virtue and judgment, that they are permitted to govern them at their discretion, should by no means undertake to maintain that view, by exhibiting that supposed kingly and divine faculty in the way of _speech_ or _argument_; thus putting themselves on a level with their subjects, and by meeting them on their own ground, with their own weapons, giving occasion for comparisons, perhaps not altogether favourable to that theory of a superlative and divine difference which the doctrine of a divine right to rule naturally presupposes. 'for,' he says, 'neither is it enough for those _who govern and command us, and have all the world in their hand_, to have a common understanding, and to be able to do what the rest can' [their faculty of judgment must match their position, for if it be only a common one, the difference will make it despised]: 'they are very much below us, if they be not _infinitely above us_. and, therefore, _silence_ is to them not only a countenance of respect and gravity, but very often of good profit and policy too; for, megabysus going to see _apelles_ in his _painting_ room, stood a great while without speaking a word, and at last began to talk of his paintings, for which he received this rude reproof. '_whilst thou wast silent_, thou seemedst to be something great, by reason of thy chains and pomp; _but now that we have heard thee speak_, there is not the meanest boy in my shop that does not despise thee.' but after the author's subsequent reference to 'those animals' that were to be made competent by a vote of the athenian people for the work of their superiors, to which he adds the custom of people who canonize the kings they have chosen out of their own body, which comes so near, he goes on thus:--_i differ from this common fashion_, and am more apt to suspect capacity when i see it accompanied with grandeur of fortune and _public applause_. we are to consider of what advantage it is, _to speak when one pleases, to choose the subject one will speak of_--[an advantage not common with authors then]--to interrupt or change other men's arguments, with a magisterial authority, to protect oneself from the opposition of others, by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that trembles with reverence and respect. _a man of a prodigious fortune_, coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly set on foot at his _table_, began in these words:--'it can only be a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so.' '_pursue this philosophical point with a dagger in your hand_.' here is an author who does contrive to pursue his philosophical points, however, dagger or no dagger, wherever they take him. by putting himself into the trick of singularity, and affecting to be a mere compound of eccentricities and oddities, neither knowing nor caring what it is that he is writing about, and dashing at haphazard into anything as the fit takes him,--'let us e'en fly at anything,' says hamlet,--by assuming, in short, the disguise of the elder brutus; and, on account of a similar necessity, there is no saying what he cannot be allowed to utter with impunity. under such a cover it is, that he inserts the passages already quoted, which have lain to this hour without attracting the attention of critics, unpractised happily, and unlearned also, in the subtleties which tyrannies--such tyrannies--at least generate; and under this cover it is, that he can venture now on those astounding political disquisitions, which he connects with the complaint of the restrictions and embarrassments which the presence of a man of prodigious fortune at the table occasions, when an argument, trivial or otherwise, happens to be going on there. under this cover, he can venture to bring in here, in this very connection, and to the very table, even of this man of prodigious fortune, pages of the freest political discussion, containing already the finest analysis of the existing political 'situation,' so full of dark and lurid portent, to the eye of the scientific statesman, to whom, even then, already under the most intolerable restrictions of despotism, of the two extremes of social evil, that which appeared to be the most terrible, and the most to be guarded against, in the inevitable political changes then at hand, was--not the consolidation but the dissolution of the state. for already the horizon of that political oversight included, not the eventualities of the english revolutions only, but the darker contingencies of those later political and social convulsions, from whose soundless whirlpools, men spring with joy to the hardest sharpest ledge of tyranny; or hail with joy and national thanksgiving the straw that offers to land them on it. already the scientific statesman of the elizabethan age could say, casting an eye over christendom as it stood then, 'that which most threatens us is, not an _alteration_ in the entire and solid mass, but its _dissipation_ and _divulsion_.' it is after pages of the freest philosophical discussion, that he arrives at this conclusion--discussion, in which the historical elements and powers are for the first time scientifically recognized and treated throughout with the hand of the new master. for this is a philosopher, who is able to receive into his philosophy the fact, that out of the most depraved and vicious social materials, by the inevitable operation of the universal natural laws, there will, perhaps, result a social adhesion and predominance of powers--a social 'whole,' more capable of maintaining itself than any that plato or aristotle, from the heights of their abstractions, could have invented for them. he ridicules, indeed, those ideal politics of antiquity as totally unfit for practical realisation, and admits that though the question as to that which is absolutely the best form of government might be of some value _in a new world_, the basis of all alterations in existing governments should be the fact, that we take a world already formed to certain customs, and do not beget it, as pyrrha or cadmus did theirs, and by what means soever we may have the privilege to rebuild and reform it anew, we can hardly _writhe it_ from its wonted bent, but we shall _break all_. for the subtlest principles of the philosophy of things are introduced into this discussion, and the boldest applications of the shakspere muse are repeated in it. 'that is the way to _lay all flat_,' cries the philosophic poet in the roman play, opposing on the part of the conservatist, the violence of an oppressed people, struggling for new forms of government, and bringing out fully, along with their claims, the anti-revolutionary side of the question. 'that which tempts me out on these journeys,' continues this foreign philosopher, speaking in his usual ambiguous terms of his rambling excursive habits and eccentricities of proceedings, glancing also, perhaps, at his outlandish tastes--'that which tempts me out on these journeys, is _unsuitableness to the present manners of_ our state. _i_ could easily console myself with this corruption in reference to the _public interest_, but not to _my own: i_ am _in particular_ too much oppressed:--for, _in my neighbourhood_ we are of late by _the long libertinage of our civil wars grown old_ in so _riotous a form of state_, that in earnest _'tis a wonder how it can subsist_. in fine, i see by our example, that the society of men is maintained and held together _at what price soever; in what condition soever they are placed they will close and stick together_ [see the doctrine of things and their original powers in the "novum organum"]--_moving and heaping up themselves, as uneven bodies, that shuffled together without order, find of themselves means to unite and settle_. king philip mustered up a rabble of the most wicked and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them altogether in a city which he had built for that purpose, which bore their name; i believe that they, even from vices, erected a government among them, and a commodious and just society.' 'nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation'; and let the reader note here, how the principle which has predominated historically in the english revolution, the principle which the fine frankish, half gallic genius, with all its fire and artistic faculty, could not strike instinctively or empirically, in its political experiments--it is well to note, how this distinctive element of the _english_ revolution--that revolution which is still in progress, with its remedial vitalities--already speaks beforehand, from the lips of this foreign elizabethan revolutionist. 'nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation; change only gives form to injustice and tyranny. when any piece is out of order it may be propped, one may prevent and take care that the _decay and corruption_ natural to all things, do not carry us too far from _our beginnings and principles_; but to undertake to found so great a mass anew, and to change the foundations of so vast a building, is for them to do who to _make clean, efface_, who would reform particular defects by a universal confusion, and cure diseases by _death_.' surely, one may read in good elizabethan english passages which savor somewhat of this policy. one would say that the principle was in fact identical, as, for instance, in this case. 'sir francis bacon (who was always for moderate counsels), when one was speaking of such a reformation of the church of england, as would in effect make it _no church_, said thus to him:--'sir, the subject we talk of is the _eye_ of england, and if there be a speck or two in the eye, we endeavour to take them off; but he were a strange oculist who would pull out the eye.' [and here is another writer who seems to be taking, on this point and others, very much the same view of the constitution and vitality of states, about these times:-- he's a disease that must be cut away. oh, he's a limb that has but a disease; mortal to cut it off; to cure it, easy.] but our gascon philosopher goes on thus, with his gascon inspirations: and these sportive notions, struck off at a heat, these careless intuitions, these fine new practical axioms of scientific politics, appear to be every whit as good as if they had been sifted through the scientific tables of the novum organum. they are, in fact, the identical truth which the last vintage of the novum organum yields on this point. 'the world is unapt for curing itself; _it is so impatient of any thing that presses it_, that it thinks of nothing but _disengaging itself_, at what price soever. we see, by a thousand examples, that it generally cures itself to its cost. the _discharge of a present evil is no cure, if a general amendment of condition does not follow_; the surgeon's end is _not only to cut away the dead flesh_,--that is but the progress of his cure;--he has a care over and above, _to fill up the wound with better and more natural flesh_, and _to restore the member to its due state_. whoever only proposes to himself to remove that which offends _him_, falls short; _for good_ does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, _and a worse, as it happened in caesar's killers_, who brought the republic to _such a pass, that they had reason to repent their meddling with it_.' 'i fear there will _a worse_ one come in his place,' says a fellow in shakespear's crowd, at the first caesar's funeral; and that his speech made the moral of the piece, we shall see in the course of this study. but though the frantic absolutisms and irregularities of that 'old riotous form of military government,' which the long civil wars had generated, seemed of themselves to threaten speedy dissolution, this old gascon prophet, with his inexhaustible fund of english shrewdness, and sound english sense, underlying all his gasconading, by no means considers the state as past the statesman's care: 'after all, _we are not, perhaps, at the last gasp_,' he says. 'the conservation of states _is a thing that in all likelihood surpasses our understanding_: a civil government is, as plato says, "a mighty and powerful thing, and hard to be dissolved." "states, as great engines, move slowly," says lord bacon; "and are not so soon put out of frame";--that is, so soon as "the resolution of particular persons," which is his reason for producing his moral philosophy, or rather his moral _science_, as _his_ engine for attack upon the state, a science which concerns the government of every man over himself; "for, as in egypt, the seven good years sustained the seven bad; so governments, for a time well-grounded, do bear out errors following."' but this is the way that this gascon philosopher records _his_ conclusions on the same subject. 'every thing that totters does not fall. the contexture of so great a body holds by more nails than one. _it holds even by its antiquity_, like old buildings from which the foundations are worn away by time, without rough cast or cement, which yet live or support themselves by their own weight. moreover, it is not rightly to go to work to reconnoitre only the flank and the fosse, to judge of the security of a place; it must be examined _which way approaches_ can be made to it, and in what condition the assailant is--that is the question. '_few vessels sink with their own weight_, and without some exterior violence. let us every way cast our eyes. every thing about us totters. in all the great states, both of christendom and elsewhere, that are known to us, if you will but look, you will there see evident threats of alteration and ruin. astrologers need not go to heaven to foretell, as they do, great revolutions' [this is the speech of the elizabethan age--'great revolutions'] 'and _imminent mutations_.' [this is the new kind of learning and prophecy; there was but one source of it open then, that could yield axioms of this kind; for this is the kind that lord bacon tells us the head-spring of sciences must be visited for.] 'but _conformity is a quality antagonist to_ dissolution. for my part, i despair not, and _fancy i perceive ways to save us_.' and _surely_ this is one of the inserted private articles, before mentioned, which may, or may not be, 'designed to spend their use among the men now living'; but 'which concern the particular knowledge of some who will see further into them than the common reader.' if there had been a 'london times' going then, and this old outlandish gascon antic had been an english statesman preparing this article as a leader for it, the question of the times could hardly have been more roundly dealt with, or with a clearer northern accent. but it is high time for him to bethink himself, and 'draw his old cloak about him'; for, after all, this so just and profound a view of so grave a subject, proceeds from one who has no aims, no plan, no learning, no memory;--a vain, fantastic egotist, who writes only because he will be talking, and talking of himself above all; who is not ashamed to attribute to himself all sorts of mad inconsistent humours, and to contradict himself on every page, if thereby he can only win your eye, or startle your curiosity, and induce you to follow him. after so long and grave a discussion, suddenly it occurs to him that it is time for a little miscellaneous confidential chat about himself, and those certain oddities of his which he does not wish you to lose sight of altogether; and it is time, too, for another of those _stories_, which serve to divert the attention when it threatens to become too fixed, and break up and enliven the dull passages, besides having that other purpose which he speaks of so frankly. and although this whole discussion is not without a direct bearing upon that particular topic, with which it is here connected, inasmuch as the political situation, which is so clearly exhibited, is precisely that of the elizabethan scholar, it is chiefly this little piece of confidential chat with which it closes, and _its significance in that connection_, which gives the rest its insertion here. for suddenly he recollects himself, and stops short to express the fear that he may have written _something similar to this elsewhere_; and he gives you to understand--not all at once--but by a series of strokes, that too bold a repetition _here_, of what he has said _elsewhere_ might be attended, to him, with serious consequences; and he begs you to note, as he does in twenty other passages and stories here and elsewhere, that his _style_ is all hampered with considerations such as these--that instead of merely thinking of making a good book, and presenting his subjects in their clearest and most effective form for the reader;--a thing in itself sufficiently laborious, as other authors find to their cost, he is all the time compelled to weigh his words with reference to such points as this. he must be perpetually on his guard that the identity of that which he presents here, and that which he presents elsewhere, under other and very different forms (in much graver forms perhaps, and perhaps in others not so grave), shall no where become so glaring as to attract popular attention, while he is willing and anxious to keep that identity or connection constantly present to the apprehension of the few, for whom he tells us his book--that is, this book within the book--is written. 'i fear in these _reveries_ of mine,' he continues, suspending at last suddenly this bold and continuous application to the immediate political emergency of those philosophical principles which he has exhibited in the abstract, in their _common_ and _universal form_, elsewhere; 'i fear, in these reveries of the _treachery of my memory_, lest by inadvertence it should make me write the same thing twice. now i here set down _nothing new_, these are _common_ thoughts, and having per-adventure conceived them a hundred times, _i am afraid_ i _have set them down somewhere else already_. repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in homer, _but 'tis ruinous in things that have only a superficial and transitory_ show. i do not love inculcation, even in the most profitable things, as in seneca, and the practice of his stoical school displeases me of _repeating upon every subject and at length_, the principles and presuppositions that serve in general, and _always_ to re-allege anew;' that is, under the particular divisions of the subject, _common and universal reasons_. 'what i cannot express i point out with my finger,' he tells you elsewhere, but it is thus that he continues here. 'my memory grows worse and worse every day. i must _fain for the time to come_ (collateral sounds), for _hitherto, thank god, nothing has happened much amiss_, to avoid all preparation, for fear of tying myself to some obligation upon which i must be forced to insist. to _be tied and bound to a thing_ puts _me_ quite out, and especially where i have to depend upon so weak an instrument as my memory. i never could read this story without being offended at it, with as it were _a personal_ and natural resentment.' the reader will note that the question here is of _style_, or method, and of this author's style in particular, and of his special embarrassments. 'lyncestes _accused of conspiracy against alexander_, the day that he was brought out before the army, according to the custom, to be heard in his defence, had prepared a _studied speech_, of which, _haggling and stammering_, he pronounced _some words_. as he was becoming more perplexed and struggling with his memory, and _trying to recollect himself_, the soldiers that stood _nearest_ killed him with their spears, looking upon his confusion and silence as a confession of his guilt: very fine, indeed! the place, the spectators, the expectation, would astound a man _even though were there no object in his mind but to speak well_; but what _when 'tis an harangue upon which his life depends_?' you that happen to be of my ear, it is my style that we are speaking of, and there is my story. '_for my part the very being tied to what i am to say, is enough to loose me from it_'--that is the cause of his wandering--'_the more i trust to my memory_, the more do i put myself out of my own power, so _much as to find it in my own countenance_, and have _sometimes been very much put to it to conceal the slavery wherein i was bound_, whereas _my design is_ to manifest in speaking a _perfect nonchalance_, both of face and accent, and _casual and unpremeditated motions_, as rising from present occasions, _choosing rather to say nothing to purpose, than to show that_ i came _prepared to speak well_; a thing especially unbecoming _a man of my profession_. the preparation begets a great deal more expectation than it will satisfy; a man very often absurdly strips himself to his doublet to leap no further _than he would have done in his gown_.' [perhaps the reflecting scholar will recollect to have seen an instance of this magnificent preparation for saying something to the purpose, attended with similarly lame conclusions; but, if he does not, the story which follows may tend to refresh his memory on this point.] 'it is recorded of the orator curio, that _when he proposed the division of his oration_ into three or four parts, it often happened either that he forgot some one, or added one or two more.' a much more illustrious speaker, who spoke under circumstances not very unlike those in which the poor conspirator above noted made his haggling and fatal attempts at oratory, is known to have been guilty of a similar oversight; for, having invented a plan of universal science, designed for the relief of the human estate, he forgot the principal application of it. but this author says, _i_ have always avoided falling into this inconvenience, having always hated these promises and announcements, not only out of distrust of my memory, but also because this method relishes too much of the _artificial_. you will find no scientific plan _here_ ostentatiously exhibited; you will find such a plan elsewhere with all the works set down in it, but the works themselves will be missing; and you will find the works elsewhere, but it will be under the cover of a superficial and transitory show, where it would be ruinous to produce the plan, '_i_ have always _avoided_ falling into this inconvenience. _simpliciora militares decent_.' but as he appears, after all, to have had no military weapon with which to sustain that straight-forwardness of speech which is becoming in a military power, and no dagger to pursue his points with, some artifice, though he professes not to like it, may be necessary, and the rule which he here specifies is, on the whole, perhaps, not altogether amiss. ''tis enough that i have promised to myself never to take upon me to speak in a place where i owe respect; for as to that sort of speaking where a man _reads_ his speech, besides that it is very absurd, it is a mighty disadvantage to those who _naturally could give it a grace by action_, and to rely upon the mercy of the readiness of my invention, i will much less do it; 'tis heavy and perplexed, and such as would never furnish me in sudden and important necessities.' 'speaking,' he says in another place, 'hurts and discomposes me,--my _voice_ is loud and high, so that when i have gone to whisper some great person about an affair of _consequence, they have often had to moderate my voice. this story deserves a place here_. 'some one in a certain greek school was speaking loud as _i do_. the master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak _lower_. "tell him then, he must send me," replied the other, "the tone he would have me speak in." to which the other replied, "that he should take the tone from the ear of him to whom he spake." it was well said, if it be understood. speak _according to the affair_ you are speaking about to the auditor,--(speak according to the business you have in hand, to the purpose you have to accomplish)--for if it mean, it is sufficient that he _hears_ you, i do not find it reason.' it is a more artistic use of speech that he is proposing in his new science of it, for as lord bacon has it, who writes as we shall see on this same subject, 'the _proofs_ and _persuasions_ of _rhetoric_ ought to differ according to the auditors,' and the arts of rhetoric have for their legitimate end, 'not merely proof, but _much more_, impression.' 'for many forms are _equal in signification_ which are _differing in impression_, as the difference is great in the piercing of that which is _sharp_, and that which is _flat_, though the _strength_ of the percussion be the same; for instance, there is no man but will be a little more raised, by hearing it said, "your enemies will be glad of this," than by hearing it said only, "this is evil for you."' but it is thus that our gascon proceeds, whose comment on his greek story we have interrupted. 'there is a voice to _flatter_, there is a voice to _instruct_, and a voice to _reprehend_. _i_ would not only have my voice to reach my hearer, but peradventure _that it strike_ and _pierce_ him. when i rate my footman in a sharp and bitter tone, it would be very fine for him to say, "pray master, speak lower, for i hear you very well." _speaking_ is _half his that speaks_, and _half his that hears_; the last ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its motion, as with tennis players; he that receives the ball, shifts, draws back, and prepares himself to receive it, according as he sees him move, who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.' it is not, therefore, because this author has failed to furnish the rules of interpretation necessary for penetrating to the ultimate intention of this new kind of speaking, if all this affectation of simplicity, and all these absurd contradictory statements of his, have been suffered hitherto to pass unchallenged. it is the public mind he has to deal with. 'that which he adores in kings is the _throng_ of _their adorers_.' if he should take the public at once into his confidence, and tell them beforehand precisely what his own opinions were of things in general, if he should set before them in the outset the conclusions to which he proposed to drive them, he might indeed stand some chance to have his arguments interrupted, or changed with a magisterial authority; he would indeed find it necessary to pursue his philosophical points with a dagger in his hand. and besides, this dogmatical mode of teaching does not appear to him to secure the ends of teaching. he wishes to rouse the human mind to activity, to compel it to think for itself, and put it on the inevitable road to his conclusions. he wishes the reader to strike out those conclusions for himself, and fancy himself the discoverer if he will. so far from being simple and straightforward, his style is in the profoundest degree artistic, for the soul of all our modern art inspired it. he thinks it does no good for scholars to call out to the active world from the platform of their last conclusions. the truths which men receive from those didactic heights remain foreign to them. 'we want medicines to arouse the sense,' says lord bacon, who proposed exactly the method of teaching which this philosopher had, as it would seem, already adopted. 'i bring a trumpet to awake his _ear_, to set his _sense_ on the attentive bent, and _then_ to speak,' says that poet who best put this art in practice. but here it is the prose philosopher who would meet this dull, stupid, custom-bound public on its own ground. he would assume all its absurdities and contradictions in his own person, and permit men to despise, and marvel, and laugh at them in him without displeasure. for whoever will notice carefully, will perceive that the use of the personal pronoun here, is not the limited one of our ordinary speech. such an one will find that this philosophical _i_ is very broad; that it covers too much to be taken in its literal acceptation. under this term, the term by which each man names _himself_, the common term of the individual humanity, he finds it convenient to say many things. 'they that will fight _custom_ with _grammar_,' he says, 'are fools. when another tells me, or when i say to myself, _this_ is a word of gascon growth; _this_ a dangerous phrase; _this_ is an ignorant discourse; thou art too full of figures; _this_ is a paradoxical saying; _this_ is a foolish expression: _thou makest thyself merry sometimes, and men will think_ thou sayest a thing in good earnest, which thou only speakest in jest. yes, say i; but i correct the faults of _inadvertence, not those of custom_. i have done what i designed,' he says, in triumph, '_all the world knows_ me in my book, _and my book in_ me.' and thus, by describing human nature under that term, or by repeating and stating the common opinions as his own, he is enabled to create an opposition which could not exist, so long as they remain unconsciously operative, or infolded in the separate individuality, as a part of its own particular form. 'my errors are sometimes natural and incorrigible,' he says; 'but the good which virtuous men do to the public in making themselves imitated, _i, perhaps, may do in making my manners avoided_. while i publish and accuse my own imperfections, somebody will learn to be afraid of them. _the parts that i most esteem in myself_, are more honoured in decrying than in commending _my own manners_. pausanias tells us of an ancient player upon the lyre, who used to make his scholars go to hear one that lived over against him, and played very ill, that they might learn to hate his discords and false measures. _the present time_ is fitting to reform us _backward_, more by _dissenting_ than _agreeing_; by differing than consenting.' that is his application of his previous confession. and it is this _present time_ that he impersonates, holding the mirror up to nature, and provoking opposition and criticism for that which was before buried in the unconsciousness of a common absurdity, or a common wrong. 'profiting little by good examples, i endeavour to render myself as agreeable as i see others offensive; as constant as i see others fickle; as good as i see others evil.' 'there is no fancy so frivolous and extravagant that does not seem to me a suitable product of the human mind. all such whimsies as are in use amongst us, deserve at least to be hearkened to; for my part, they only with me import _inanity_, but they import _that_. moreover, _vulgar and casual opinions are something more than nothing in nature_. 'if i converse with a man of mind, and no flincher, who presses hard upon me, right and left, his imagination raises up mine. the contradictions of judgments do neither offend nor alter, they only rouse and exercise me. i could suffer myself to be rudely handled by my friends. "thou art a fool; thou knowest not what thou art talking about." when any one contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger. i advance towards him that contradicts, as to one that instructs me. _i embrace and caress truth, in what hand soever i find it, and cheerfully surrender myself, and extend to it my conquered arms_; and take a pleasure in being reproved, and _accommodate myself to my accusers_ [aside] (very often more by reason of _civility_ than amendment); loving to gratify the liberty of admonition, by my facility of submitting to it, at my own expense. nevertheless, it is hard to bring the men of my time to it. they have not the courage _to correct_, because they have not the courage _to be corrected, and speak always with dissimulation in the presence of one another_. i take so great pleasure in being judged and known, that it is almost indifferent to me in which of the two forms i am so. my imagination does so often contradict and condemn itself, that _it is all one to me if another do it_. the study of books is a languishing, feeble motion, that heats not, whereas conversation _teaches_ and _exercises_ at once.' but what if a book could be constructed on a new principle, so as to produce the effect of _conference_--of the noblest kind of conference--so as to rouse the stupid, lethargic mind to a truly _human_ activity--so as to bring out the common, human form, in all its latent actuality, from the eccentricities of the individual varieties? something of that kind appears to be attempted here. he cannot too often charge the attentive reader, however, that his arguments require examination. 'in _conferences_,' he says, 'it is a rule that every word that _seems_ to be good, is not immediately to be accepted. one must try it on all points, to see _how it is lodged in the author_: [perhaps he is not in earnest] _for_ one must not always _presently yield_ what truth or beauty soever seem to be in the argument.' a little delay, and opposition, the necessity of hunting, or fighting, for it, will only make it the more esteemed in the end. in such a style, 'either the author must stoutly oppose it [that is, whatsoever beauty or truth is to be the end of the argument in order to challenge the reader] or draw back, under colour of not understanding it, [and so piquing the reader into a pursuit of it] or, sometimes, perhaps, he may aid the point, and carry it _beyond_ its proper reach [and so forcing the reader to correct him. this whole work is constructed on this principle]. as when i contend with a vigorous man, i please myself with anticipating his conclusions; i ease him of the trouble of explaining himself; i strive to prevent his imagination, whilst it is yet springing and imperfect; the order and pertinency of his understanding warns and threatens me afar off. but as to _these_,--and the sequel explains this relative, for it has no antecedent in the text--as to these, i deal quite contrary with them. i _must understand and presuppose nothing but by them_.... now, if you come to explain anything to them and confirm them (these readers), they presently catch at it, and rob you of the advantage of your interpretation. "it was what i was about to say; it was just _my_ thought, _and if i did not express it so_, it was only for want of _language_." very pretty! malice itself must be employed to correct this _proud ignorance_--'tis injustice and inhumanity to relieve and set him right who stands in no need of it, and is the worse for it. _i love_ to let him step deeper into the mire,'--[luring him on with his own confessions, and with my assumptions of his case] '_and so deep that if it be_ possible, they may at least discern their error. folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition. what cyrus answered him who importuned him to harangue his army upon the point of battle, "that men do not become valiant and warlike on a sudden, _by a fine oration_, no more than a man becomes a good musician by hearing a fine song," may properly be said of such an admonition as this;' or, as lord bacon has it, 'it were a strange speech, which spoken, or _spoken oft_, should reclaim a man from a vice to which he is _by nature_ subject; it is _order, pursuit, sequence_, and _interchange of application_, which is mighty in nature.' but the other continues:--'these are apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand by a long continued education. we owe this care and this assiduity of correction and instruction to _our own_, [that is the school,] but to go to preach to the first passer-by, and to lord it over the ignorance and folly of the first we meet, is a thing that i abhor. i rarely do it, even in _my own particular conferences_, and rather surrender my cause, than proceed to these _supercilious_ and _magisterial_ instructions.' the clue to the reading of his inner book. this is what lord bacon also condemns, as the _magisterial_ method,--'my _humour_ is unfit, either to speak or write for _beginners_;' he will not shock or bewilder them by forcing on them prematurely the last conclusions of science; '_but_ as to things that are said in _common discourse_ or _amongst other things_, i never oppose them either by word or sign, how false or absurd soever.' 'let none _even doubt_,' says the author of the novum organum, who thought it wisest to steer clear _even_ of _doubt_ on such a point, 'whether we are anxious to destroy and demolish _the philosophical arts and sciences which are now in use_. on the contrary, we readily cherish their practice, cultivation, and honour; for we by no means interfere to prevent _the prevalent system_ from encouraging discussion, adorning discourses, or being employed _serviceably_ in the chair of the professor, or the practice of common life, and being taken in short, by general consent, _as current coin_. nay, we plainly declare that the system we offer will not be very _suitable_ for such purposes, not being easily adapted to _vulgar apprehension, except_ by effects and works. to show our _sincerity_ [hear] in professing our regard and friendly disposition towards _the received sciences_, we can refer to the evidence of our published writings, _especially_ our books on--the advancement--[the _advancement_] of learning.' and the reader who can afford time for 'a second cogitation,' the second cogitation which a superficial _and_ interior meaning, of course, requires, with the aid of the key of times, will find much light on that point, here and there, in the works referred to, and especially in those parts of them in which the scientific use of popular terms is treated. 'we will not, therefore,' he continues, 'endeavour to evince it (our sincerity) any further by _words_, but content ourselves with steadily, etc., ... professedly premising that no great _progress_ can be made by the present methods in the _theory_ and contemplation of science, _and_ that they can _not_ be made to produce _any very abundant effects_.' this is the proof of his sincerity in professing his regard and friendly disposition towards them, to be taken in connection with his works on the advancement of learning, and no doubt it was sincere, and just to that extent to which these statements, and the practice which was connected with them, would seem to indicate; but the careful reader will perceive that it was a regard, and friendliness of disposition, which was naturally qualified by that doubly significant fact last quoted. but the question of style is still under discussion here, and no wonder that with _such_ views of the value of the 'current coin,' and with a regard and reverence for the received sciences so deeply qualified; or, as the other has it, with a humour so unfit either to speak or write for _beginners_, a style which admitted of other efficacies than bare _proofs_, should appear to be demanded for popular purposes, or for beginners. and no wonder that with views so similar on this first and so radical point, these two men should have hit upon the same method in _rhetoric_ exactly, though it _was_ then wholly new. but our gascon, goes on to describe its freedoms and novelties, its imitations of the living conference, its new vitalities. 'may we not,' says the successful experimenter in this very style, 'mix with the subject of conversation and communication, the quick and sharp repartees which mirth and familiarity introduce amongst friends pleasantly and _wittingly_ jesting with one another; an exercise for which my natural gaiety renders me fit enough, if it be not so extended and serious as _the other i just spoke of_, 'tis no less smart and ingenious, nor of less utility _as lycurgus thought_.' chapter ii. further illustration of 'particular methods of tradition.'--embarrassments of literary statesmen. here's neither bush nor shrub to bear off any weather at all, and another storm brewing. i hear it sing in the wind. my, best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. i will here shroud, till the dregs of the storm be past.--_tempest_. here then, in the passages already quoted, we find the plan and theory--the premeditated form of a new kind of socratic performance; and this whole work, as well as some others composed in this age, make the realization of it; an invention which proposes to substitute for the languishing feeble motion which is involved in the study of _books_--the kind of books which this author found invented when he came--for the passive, sluggish receptivity of another's thought, the living glow of pursuit and discovery, the flash of self-conviction. it is a socratic dialogue, indeed; but it waits for the reader's eye to open it; he is himself the principal interlocutor in it; there can be nothing done till he comes in. whatsoever beauty or truth maybe in the argument; whatsoever jokes and repartees; whatsoever infinite audacities of mirth may be hidden under that grave cover, are not going to shine out for any lazy book-worm's pleasure. he that will not work, neither shall he eat of this food. 'up to the _mountains_,' for _this is hunter's language_, 'and he that strikes the venison first shall be lord of this feast.' it is an invention whereby the author will remedy for himself the complaint, that life is short, and art is long; whereby he will 'outstretch his span,' and make over, not his learning only but his _living_ to the future;--it is an instrumentality by which he will still maintain living relations with the minds of men, by which he will put himself into the most intimate relations of sympathy, and confidence, and friendship, with the mind of the few; by which he will reproduce his purposes and his faculties in them, and train them to take up in their turn that thread of knowledges which is to be spun on. but if this design be buried so deeply, is it not _lost_ then? if all the absurd and contradictory developments--if all the mad inconsistencies--all the many-sided contradictory views, which are possible to human nature on all the questions of human life, which this single personal pronoun was made to represent, in the profoundly philosophic design of the author, are still culled out by learned critics, and made to serve as the material of a grave, though it is lamented, somewhat egotistical biography, is not all this ingenuity, which has successfully evaded thus far not the careless reader only, but the scrutiny of the scholar, and the sharp eye of the reviewer himself, is it not an ingenuity which serves after all to little purpose, which indeed defeats its own design? no, by no means. that disguise which was at first a necessity, has become the instrument of his power. it is that broad _i_ of his, that _i myself_, with which he still takes all the world; it is that single, many-sided, vivacious, historical impersonation, that ideal impersonation of the individual human nature as it is--not as it should be--with all its 'weaved-up follies ravelled out,' with all its before unconfessed actualities, its infinite absurdities and contradictions, so boldly pronounced and assumed by one laying claim to an historical existence, it is this historical assumption and pronunciation of all the before unspoken, unspeakable facts of this unexplored department of natural history, it is this apparent confession with which this magician entangles his victims, as he tells us in a passage already quoted, and leads them on through that objective representation of their follies in which they may learn to hate them, to that globe mirror--that mirror of the age which he boasts to have hung up here, when he says, 'i have done what i designed: all the world knows _me in my book_, and my book in _me_.' who shall say that it is yet time to strip him of the disguise which he wears so effectively? with all his faults, and all his egotisms, who would not be sorry to see him taken to pieces, after all? and who shall quite assure us, that it would not still be treachery, even now, for those who have unwound his clues, and traversed his labyrinths to the heart of his mystery,--for those who have penetrated to the chamber of his inner school, to come out and blab a secret with which he still works so potently; insensibly to those on whom he works, perhaps, yet so potently? but there is no harm done. it will still take the right reader to find his way through these new devices in letters; these new and vivacious proofs of learning; for him, and for none other, they lurk there still. to evade political restrictions, and to meet the popular mind on its own ground, was the double purpose of the disguise; but it is a disguise which will only detect, and not baffle, the mind that is able to identify itself with his, and able to grasp his purposes; it is a disguise which will only detect the mind that knows him, and his purposes already. the enigmatical form of the inculcation is the device whereby that mind will be compelled to follow his track, to think for itself his thoughts again, to possess itself of the inmost secret of his intention; for it is a school in whose enigmatical devices the mind of the future was to be caught, in whose subtle exercises the child of the future was to be trained to an identity that should restore the master to his work again, and bring forth anew, in a better hour, his clogged and buried genius. but, if the fact that a new and more vivid kind of writing, issuing from the heart of the new philosophy of _things_, designed to work new and extraordinary effects by means of literary instrumentalities,-- effects hitherto reserved for other modes of impression,--if the fact, that a new and infinitely artistic mode of writing, burying the secrets of philosophy in the most careless forms of the vulgar and popular discourse, did, in this instance at least, exist; if this be proved, it will suffice for our present purpose. what else remains to be established concerning points incidentally started here, will be found more pertinent to another stage of this enquiry. from beginning to end, the whole work might be quoted, page by page, in proof of this; but after the passages already produced here, there would seem to be no necessity for accumulating any further evidence on this point. a passage or two more, at least, will suffice to put _that_ beyond question. the extracts which follow, in connection with those already given, will serve, at least, to remove any rational doubt on that point, and on some others, too, perhaps. 'but whatever i deliver myself to be, provided it be such as i really am, i have my end; neither will i make any excuse for committing to paper such mean and frivolous things as these; the meanness of the _subject_ compels me to it.'--'_human reason is a two-edged_ and a _dangerous sword_. observe, in the hand of _socrates_, her most intimate and familiar friend, _how many points it has. thus_, i am good for nothing but to follow, and suffer myself to be easily carried away with the crowd.'--'i have this opinion of _these political controversies_: be on what side you will, you have as fair a game to play as your adversary, provided you do not proceed so far as to jostle _principles that are too manifest to be disputed; and yet, 'tis_ my _notion, in public affairs_ [hear], _there is no government_ so ill, _provided it be ancient_, and has been _constant_, that is not better than change and alteration. our manners are infinitely corrupted, and wonderfully incline to grow worse: of our laws and customs, _there are many that are barbarous and monstrous: nevertheless_, by reason of the difficulty of reformation, and the danger of stirring things, _if i could put something under to stay the wheel_, and keep it where it is, _i would do so with all my heart_. it is very easy to beget in a people a contempt of its ancient observances; _never any man undertook, but he succeeded; but to establish a better regimen in the stead of that a man has overthrown, many who have attempted this have foundered in the attempt_. i very little consult _my prudence_ [philosophic 'prudence'] in my conduct. i am willing to let it be guided by _public rule_. 'in fine, to return to myself, the only things by which _i_ esteem _myself_ to be something, is _that wherein never any man_ thought himself to be defective. _my recommendation is vulgar and common_; for whoever thought _he_ wanted sense. it would be a _proposition that would imply a contradiction in itself_; [in such subtleties thickly studding this popular work, the clues which link it with other works of this kind are found--the clues to a new _practical human philosophy_.] 'tis a disease that never is where it is discerned; 'tis tenacious and strong; _but the first ray of the patient's sight_ does nevertheless pierce it through and disperse it, as the beams of the sun do a thick mist: to _accuse one's self_, would be to _excuse one's self_ in this case; and to _condemn_, to _absolve_. there never was porter, or silly girl, that did not think they had sense enough for their need. the reasons that proceed from the natural arguing of others, we think that if we had turned our thoughts that way, we should ourselves have found it out as well as they. _knowledge, style_, and such parts as we see in other works, we are readily aware if they excel our own; but for the simple products of the _understanding_, every one thinks he could have found out the like, and is hardly sensible of the weight and difficulty, unless--and then with much ado--in an extreme and incomparable distance; _and whoever should be able clearly to discern_ the height of another's judgment, would be also able _to raise his own to the same pitch_; so that this is a sort of exercise, from which a man is to expect very little praise, a kind of composition of small repute. _and, besides, for whom do you write_?'--for he is merely meeting this common sense. his object is merely to make his reader confess, 'that was just what i was about to say, it was just my thought; and if i did not express it so, it was only for want of language;'--'for whom do you write? _the learned_, to whom the authority appertains of judging books, know no other value but that of learning, and allow of no other process of wit but that of erudition and art. if you have mistaken one of the scipios for another, what is all the rest you have to say worth? whoever is ignorant of aristotle, according to their rule, is in some sort ignorant of himself. _heavy and vulgar souls_ cannot discern the grace of a high and unfettered style. now these two sorts of men make the _world_. the _third sort_, into whose hands you fall, of souls that are regular, and strong of themselves, is so rare, that it _justly_ has neither _name nor place amongst us_, and it is pretty well time lost to aspire to it, or to endeavour to please it.' he will not content himself with pleasing the few. he wishes to _move_ the world, and its approbation is a secondary question with him. 'he that should record _my_ idle talk, to the prejudice of the most paltry law, opinion, or custom of his parish, would do himself a great deal of wrong, and me too; for, in what i say, i warrant no other certainty, but 'tis what i _had then in my thought, a thought tumultuous and wavering_. ["i have nothing with this answer, hamlet," says the offended king. "these words are not mine." _hamlet_: "nor mine _now_."] all i say is by way of discourse. _i should not speak so boldly, if it were my due to be believed, and so i told a great man, who complained to me of the tartness and contention of my advice_.' and, indeed, he would not, in this instance, that is very certain;--for he has been speaking on the subject of religious toleration, and among other remarks, somewhat too far in advance of his time, he has let fall, by chance, such passages as these, which, of course, he stands ready to recall again in case any one is offended. ('these words are not mine, hamlet.' 'nor mine now.') 'to _kill men_, a clear and shining light is required, and our life is too real and essential, to warrant these supernatural and fantastic accidents.' 'after all 'tis setting a _man's conjectures_ at a very high price to _cause a man to be roasted alive upon them_.' he does not look up at all, after making this accidental remark; for he is too much occupied with a very curious story, which happens to come into his head at that moment, of certain men, who being more profoundly asleep than _men usually are_, became, according to certain grave authorities, what in their dreams they fancied they were; and having mentioned one case sufficiently ludicrous to remove any unpleasant sensation or inquiry which his preceding allusion might have occasioned, he resumes, 'if _dreams can sometimes so incorporate themselves with effects of life_, i cannot believe that therefore our will should be accountable to justice. _which i say, as a man_, who am neither _judge nor privy counsellor_, nor think myself, by many degrees, worthy so to be, but a _man of the common sort_, born and vowed to the obedience of the public realm, both in _words_ and _acts_. '_thought_ is free;--_thought_ is free.' _ariel_. 'perceiving _you to be ready and prepared on one part_, i propose to you on the other, with all the care i can, to _clear_ your judgment, not to enforce it. truly, _i_ have not only a great many humours, but _also a great many opinions_ [which i bring forward here, and assume as mine] that i would _endeavour_ to make _my son dislike_, if i had one. the _truest_, are not always the most commodious to man; he is of too _wild_ a composition. "we speak of all things by precept and resolution," he continues, returning again to this covert question of toleration, and lord bacon complains also that that is the method in his meridian. they make me hate things that are _likely_, when they impose them on me for _infallible_. "wonder is the foundation of all philosophy"--(or, as lord bacon expresses it, "wonder is the seed of knowledge")--enquiry the progress--ignorance the end. ay, but there is a sort of ignorance, _strong and generous_, that yields nothing _in honour and courage to knowledge_, a knowledge, which to conceive, requires _no less knowledge_ than knowledge itself.' 'i saw, in my younger days, a report of a process that corras, a counsellor of thoulouse, put in print.'--[the vain, egotistical, incoherent, rambling old frenchman, the old roman catholic french gentleman, who is understood to be the author of this new experiment in letters, was not far from being a middle-aged man, when the pamphlet which he here alludes to was first published; but his chronology, generally, does not bear a very close examination. some very extraordinary anachronisms, which the critics are totally at a loss to account for, have somehow slipped into his story. there _was_ a young philosopher in france in those days, of a most precocious, and subtle, and inventive genius--of a most singularly artistic genius, combining speculation and practice, as they had never been combined before, and already busying himself with all sorts of things, and among other things, with curious researches in regard to ciphers, and other questions not less interesting at that time;--there was a youth in france, whose family name was also english, living there with his eyes wide open, a youth who had found occasion to _invent_ a cipher of his own even then, into whose hands that publication might well have fallen on its first appearance, and one on whose mind it might very naturally have made the impression here recorded. but let us return to the story.]--'i saw in my younger days, a report of a process, that corras, a counsellor of thoulouse, put in print, of a strange accident of _two men, who presented themselves the one for the other_. i remember, and i hardly remember anything else, that he seemed to have rendered _the imposture of him whom he judged to be guilty, so wonderful, and so far exceeding both our knowledge and his who was the judge, that i thought it a very bold sentence that condemned him to be hanged_. [that is the point.] _let us take up_ some form of arrest, that shall say, the court _understands nothing of the matter_, more freely and ingenuously than the areopagites did, _who ordered the parties to appear again in a hundred years_.' we must not forget that these stories 'are not regarded by the author merely for the use he makes of them,--that they carry, besides what he applies them to, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, and sometimes collaterally a _more delicate sound_, both to the author himself who declines saying anything more about it _in that place_, and to others who shall happen to be of his ear!' one already prepared by previous discovery of the method of communication here indicated, and by voluminous readings in it, to understand that appeal, begs leave to direct the attention of the critical reader to the delicate collateral sounds in the story last quoted. it is not irrelevant to notice that this story is introduced to the attention of the reader, 'who will, perhaps, see farther into it than others,' in that chapter on toleration in which it is suggested that considering the fantastic, and unscientific, and unsettled character of the human beliefs and opinions, and that even 'the fathers' have suggested in their speculations on the nature of human life, that what men believed themselves to be, in their dreams, they really became, it is after all setting a man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be roasted alive on them; the chapter in which it is intimated that considering the natural human liability to error, a little more room for correction of blunders, a little larger chance of arriving at the common truth, a little more chance for growth and advancement in learning, would, perhaps, on the whole, be likely to conduce to the human welfare, instead of sealing up the human advancement for ever, with axe and cord and stake and rack, within the limits of doctrines which may have been, perhaps, the very wisest, the most learned, of which the world was capable, at the time when their form was determined. it is the chapter which he calls fancifully, a chapter 'on _cripples_,' into which this odd story about the two men who presented themselves, the one for the other, in a manner so remarkable, is introduced, for _lameness_ is always this author's grievance, wherever we find him, and he is driven to all sorts of devices to overcome it; for he is the person who came prepared to speak well, and who hates that sort of speaking, where a man reads his speech, because he is one who could naturally give it a grace by action, or as another has it, he is one who would suit the action to the word. but it was not the question of 'hanging' only, or 'roasting alive,' that authors had to consider with themselves in these times. for those forms of literary production which an author's literary taste, or his desire to reach and move and mould the people, might incline him to select--the most approved forms of popular literature, were in effect forbidden to men, bent, as these men were, on taking an active part in the affairs of their time. any extraordinary reputation for excellence in these departments, would hardly have tended to promote the ambitious views of the young aspirant for honors in that school of statesmanship, in which the 'fairy queen' had been scornfully dismissed, as 'an old song.' even that disposition to the gravest and profoundest forms of philosophical speculation, which one foolish young candidate for advancement was indiscreet enough to exhibit prematurely there, was made use of so successfully to his disadvantage, that for years his practical abilities were held in suspicion on that very account, as he complains. the reputation of a _philosopher_ in those days was quite as much as this legal practitioner was willing to undertake for his part. that of a _poet_ might have proved still more uncomfortable, and more difficult to sustain. his claim to a place in the management of affairs would not have been advanced by it, in the eyes of those old statesmen, whose favour he had to propitiate. however, he was happily relieved from any suspicion of that sort. if those paraphrases of the psalms for which he chose to make himself responsible,--if those hebrew melodies of his did not do the business for him, and clear him effectually of any such suspicion in the eyes of that generation, it is difficult to say what would. but whether his devotional feelings were really of a kind to require any such painful expression as that on their own account, may reasonably be doubted by any one acquainted at all with his general habits of thought and sentiment. these lyrics of the philosopher appear on the whole to prove too much; looked at from a literary point of view merely, they remind one forcibly of the attempts of mr. _silence_ at a bacchanalian song. 'i have a reasonable good ear in music,' says the unfortunate pyramus, struggling a little with that cerebral development and uncompromising facial angle which he finds imposed on him. 'i have a reasonable good ear in music: let us have the tongs and the bones.' 'a man must frame _some probable cause_, why he should not do his best, and why he should dissemble his abilities,' says this author, speaking of _colour_, or the covering of defects; and that the prejudice just referred to was not peculiar to the english court, the remarkable piece of dramatic criticism which we are about to produce from this old gascon philosopher's pages, may or may not indicate, according as it is interpreted. it serves as an introduction to the passage in which the author's double meaning, and the occasionally double sound of his stories is noted. in the preceding chapter, it should be remarked, however, the author has been discoursing in high strains, upon the vanity of popular applause, or of any applause but that of reason and conscience; sustaining himself with quotations from the stoics, whose doctrines on this point he assumes as the precepts of a true and natural philosophy; and among others the following passage was quoted:--[taken from an epistle of seneca, but including a quotation from a letter of epicurus, on the same subject.]--'remember him who being asked why he took so much pains in an art that could come to the knowledge of but few persons, replied, "a few are enough for me. i have enough with one, i have enough with never a one." he said true; yourself and a companion _are_ theatre enough to one another, or _you_ to _yourself_. let us be to you _the whole people_, and the whole people to you but _one_. you should do like the beasts of chase who _efface the track at the entrance into their den_.' but this author's comprehensive design embraces all the oppositions in human nature; he thinks it of very little use to preach to men from the height of these lofty philosophic flights, unless you first dive down to the platform of their actualities, and by beginning with the secret of what they are, make sure that you take them with you. so then the latent human vanity, must needs be confessed, and instead of taking it all to himself this time, poor cicero and pliny are dragged up, the latter very unjustly, as the commentator complains, to stand the brunt of this philosophic shooting. 'but this exceeds all meanness of spirit in _persons of such quality as they were_, to think to derive any glory from babbling and prating, _even to the making use of their private letters to their friends, and so withal that_ though some of them _were never sent, the opportunity being lost_, they nevertheless published them; with this worthy excuse, that they were unwilling to lose their labour, and have their lucubrations thrown away.'--was it not well becoming two consuls of rome, _sovereign magistrates of the republic, that_ commanded the world, to spend their time in patching up elegant missives, in order to gain the reputation of being well versed _in their own mother tongue_? what could a pitiful schoolmaster have done worse, who got his living by it? if the _acts_ of xenophon and caesar had not far transcended their eloquence, i don't believe they would ever have taken the pains to _write_ them. they made it their business to recommend not their _saying_, but their _doing_. the companions of demosthenes in the embassy to philip, extolling that prince as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker, demosthenes said that those were commendations more proper for a woman, an advocate, or a sponge. 'tis not _his profession_ to know either how to hunt, or to dance well. orabunt causas alii, coelique meatus describent radio, et fulgentia sidera dicent, hic regere imperio populos sciat. plutarch says, moreover, that to appear so excellent in these less necessary qualities, is to produce witness against a man's self, that he has spent his time and study ill, which ought to have been employed in the acquisition of more necessary and more useful things. thus philip, king of macedon, having heard _the great alexander_, his son, _sing at a feast_ to the _wonder and envy of the best musicians_ there. 'art thou not ashamed,' he said to him, 'to _sing so well_?' and to the same philip, a musician with whom he was disputing about something concerning his art, said, '_heaven forbid, sir, that so great a misfortune should ever befall you as to understand these things better than i_.' perhaps this author might have made a similar reply, had _his_ been subjected to a similar criticism. and lord bacon quotes this story too, as he does many others, which this author has _first selected_, and for the same purpose; for, not content with appropriating his philosophy, and pretending to invent his design and his method, he borrows all his most significant stories from him, and brings them in to illustrate the same points, and the points are borrowed also: he makes use, indeed, of his common-place book throughout in the most shameless and unconscionable manner. 'rack his style, madam, _rack his style_?' he said to queen elizabeth, as he tells us, when she consulted him--he being then of her counsel learned, in the case of dr. hayward, charged with having written 'the book of the deposing of richard the second, and the _coming in_ of henry the fourth,' and sent to the tower for that offence. the queen was eager for a different kind of advice. racking an author's book did not appear to her coarse sensibilities, perfectly unconscious of the delicacy of an author's susceptibilities, a process in itself sufficiently murderous to satisfy her revenge. there must be some flesh and blood in the business before ever she could understand it. she wanted to have 'the question' put to that gentleman as to his meaning in the obscure passages in that work under the most impressive circumstances; and mr. bacon, _himself_ an author, being of her counsel learned, was requested to make out a case of treason for her; and wishes from such a source were understood to be commands in those days. now it happened that one of the managers and actors at the globe theatre, who was at that time sustaining, as it would seem, the most extraordinary relations of intimacy and friendship with the friends and patrons of this same person, then figuring as the queen's adviser, had recently composed a tragedy on this very subject; though that gentleman, more cautious than dr. hayward, and having, perhaps, some learned counsel also, had taken the precaution to keep back the scene of the deposing of royalty during the life-time of this sharp-witted queen, reserving its publication for the reign of her erudite successor; and the learned counsel in this case being aware of the fact, may have felt some sympathy with this misguided author. 'no, madam,' he replied to her inquiry, thinking to take off her bitterness with a merry conceit, as he says, 'for treason i can _not_ deliver opinion that there is any, but very much felony.' the queen apprehending it gladly, asked, 'how?' and 'wherein?' mr. bacon answered, 'because he had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of cornelius tacitus.' it would do one good to see, perhaps, how many felonious appropriations of sentences, and quotations, and ideas, the application he recommends would bring to light in this case. but the instances already quoted are not the only ones which this free spoken foreign writer, this elizabethan genius abroad, ventures to adduce in support of this position of his, that statesmen--men who aspire to the administration of republics or other forms of government--if they cannot consent on that account to relinquish altogether the company of the muses, must at least so far respect the prevailing opinion on that point, as to be able to sacrifice to it the proudest literary honours. will the reader be pleased to notice, not merely the extraordinary character of the example in this instance, but _the grounds_ of the assumption which the critic makes with so much coolness. 'and could the perfection of eloquence have added any lustre proportionable to the merit of a great person, certainly scipio and laelius had never resigned the honour of their comedies, with all the _luxuriancies and delicacies of the latin tongue_, to an african slave, for that the work was theirs _its beauty and excellency_ sufficiently prove.' [this is from a book in which the supposed autograph of shakspere is found; a work from which he quotes incessantly, and from which he appears, indeed, to have taken the whole hint of his learning.] 'besides terence himself confesses as much, and i should take it ill in any one that would _dispossess me_ of that _belief_.' for, as he says in another place, in a certain deeply disguised dedication which he makes of the work of a friend, a poet, whose early death he greatly lamented, and whom he is 'determined,' as he says, 'to revive and raise again to life if he can:' 'as we often judge of the greater by the less, and _as the very pastimes_ of great men give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted _of the source_ from which they spring, i hope you will, by this work of his, rise to the knowledge of himself, and by consequence love and embrace his memory. in so doing, you will accomplish what he exceedingly longed for whilst he lived.' but here he continues thus, 'i have, indeed, in my time known some, who, by a knack of writing, have got both title and fortune, yet disown their apprenticeship, _purposely corrupt their style,_ and affect ignorance of so vulgar a quality (which _also our nation observes_, rarely to be seen _in very learned hands_), carefully seeking a reputation by better qualities.' i once did hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to write fair: but now it did me yeoman's service.--_hamlet_. and it is in the next paragraph to _this_, that he takes occasion to mention that his stories and allegations do not always serve simply for example, authority, or ornament; that they are not limited in their application to the use he ostensibly makes of them, but that they carry, for those who are in his secret, other meanings, bolder and richer meanings, and sometimes collaterally a more delicate sound. and having interrupted the consideration upon cicero and pliny, and their vanity and pitiful desire for honour in future ages, with this criticism on the limited sphere of statesmen in general, and the devices to which _lælius and scipio_ were compelled to resort, in order to get _their_ plays published without diminishing the lustre of their personal renown, and having stopped to insert that most extraordinary avowal in regard to his two-fold meanings in his allegations and stories, he returns to the subject of this correspondence again, for there is more in this also than meets the ear; and it is not _pliny_, and _cicero_ only, whose supposed vanity, and regard for posthumous fame, as men of letters, is under consideration. 'but returning to the _speaking virtue_;' he says, 'i find _no great choice_ between not knowing to speak _anything but ill_, and not knowing anything but _speaking well_. the sages tell us, that as to what concerns _knowledge_ there is nothing but _philosophy_, and as to what concerns _effects_ nothing but _virtue_, that is generally proper to all degrees and orders. there is something like _this in these two other_ philosophers, for _they also promise_ eternity to the letters they write to their friends, but 'tis _after another manner_, and by accommodating themselves _for a good end_ to the vanity of _another_; for they write to them that if the concern of making themselves known to future ages, and the thirst of glory, do yet _detain_ them in the management of public affairs, and make them fear the solitude and retirement to which they would persuade them; let them never trouble themselves more about it, forasmuch as they shall have credit enough with posterity to assure them that, were there nothing else but the _letters_ thus writ to them, those letters will render their names as known and famous as their _own public actions_ themselves could do. [and that--_that_ is the key to the correspondence between _two other_ philosophers enigmatically alluded to here.] and besides this difference,' for it is 'these two other philosophers,' and not pliny and cicero, and not seneca and epicurus alone, that we talk of here, 'and besides _this difference, these_ are not _idle_ and _empty_ letters, that contain nothing but a fine jingle of well chosen words, and fine couched phrases; but replete and _abounding with grave and learned discourses_, by which a man may render himself--not more eloquent but more _wise_, and that instruct us not to _speak_ but _to do well_'; for that is the rhetorical theory that was adopted by the scholars and statesmen then alive, whose methods of making themselves known to future ages he is indicating, even in these references to the ancients. '_away_ with that _eloquence_ which so enchants us with its _harmony_ that we should more study it than _things_'; for this is the place where the quotation with which our investigation of this theory commenced is inserted in the text, and here it is, in the light of these preceding collections of hints that he puts in the story first quoted, wherein he says, the nature of the orator will be much more manifestly laid open to us, than in that seeming care for his fame, or in that care of his style, for its own sake. it is the story of eros, the slave, who brought the speaker word that the audience was _deferred_, when in composing a speech that he was to make in public, 'he found himself straitened in _time_, to fit his words to his mouth as he had a mind to do.' chapter iii. the possibility of great anonymous works,--or works published under an assumed name,--conveying, under rhetorical disguises, the principal sciences,--re-suggested, and illustrated. _is the storm overblown? i hid me under the dead moon-calf's gaberdine for fear of the storm.--tempest_. but as to this love of glory which the stoics, whom this philosopher quotes so approvingly, have measured at its true worth; as to this love of literary fame, this hankering after an earthly immortality, which he treats so scornfully in the roman statesman, let us hear him again in another chapter, and see if we can find any thing whereby _his_ nature and designs will more manifestly be laid open to us. 'of all the foolish dreams in the world,' he says, that which is most universally received, is the solicitude of reputation and glory, which we are fond of to that degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial good, to pursue this vain phantom. and of all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the philosophers themselves have the most ado, and do the least disengage themselves from this the most restive and obstinate of all the follies. there is not any one view of which _reason_ does so clearly accuse the vanity, as that; but it is _so deeply rooted in us_, that i doubt whether any one ever clearly freed himself from it, or no. _after you have said all, and believed all_ that has been said to its prejudice, it creates so intestine an inclination _in opposition to your best arguments_, that you have little power and firmness to resist it; _for_ (_as cicero says_) even those who controvert it, would yet that _the books they write_ should appear before the world with _their names in the title page_, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise it. all other things are communicable and fall into commerce; we lend our goods-- [it irks me not that men my garments wear.] and stake our lives for the necessities and service of our friends; but to communicate one's honour, _and to robe another with one's own glory_, is very rarely seen. and yet we have some examples of that kind. catulus luctatius, in the cymbrian war, having done all that in him lay to make his flying soldiers face about upon the enemy, _ran himself at last away with the rest, and counterfeited the coward_, to the end that his men might rather seem to follow their captain, than to fly from the enemy; and after several anecdotes full of that inner significance of which he speaks elsewhere, in which he appears, but only appears, to lose sight of this question of literary honour, for they relate to _military_ conflicts, he ventures to approach, somewhat cautiously and delicately, the latent point of his essay again, by adducing the example of persons, _not_ connected with the military profession, who have found themselves called upon in various ways, and by means of various weapons, to take part in these wars; who have yet, in consequence of certain '_subtleties of conscience_,' _relinquished_ the _honour_ of their successes; and though there is no instance adduced of that particular kind of disinterestedness, in which an author relinquishes to another the honour of his title page, as the beginning might have led one to anticipate; on the whole, the not indiligent reader of this author's performances here and elsewhere, will feel that the subject which is announced as the subject of this chapter, 'not to communicate a man's honour or glory,' has been, considering the circumstance, sufficiently illustrated. '_as women succeeding to peerages_ had, notwithstanding their sex, the right to assist and give their votes in the causes that appertain to the jurisdiction of peers; so the ecclesiastical peers, _notwithstanding their profession_, were obliged to _assist our kings_ in their wars, not only with their friends and servants, but in their own persons. and he instances the bishop of beauvais, who took a gallant share in the battle of bouvines, but did not think it _fit for him to participate in the fruit and glory of that violent and bloody trade_. he, with his own hand, reduced several of the enemy that day to his mercy, whom he delivered to the first gentleman he met, either to kill or to receive them to quarter, _referring that part to another hand_. as also did william, earl of salisbury, to messire john de neale, with a like subtlety of conscience to the other, he would kill, _but_ not wound _him_, and _for that reason_, fought only with a _mace_. and a certain person in my time, being reproached by the king that he had _laid hands_ on a _priest_, stiffly and positively denied it. the case was, he had cudgelled and kicked him.' and there the author abruptly, for that time, leaves the matter without any allusion to the case of still another kind of combatants, who, fighting with another kind of weapon, might also, from similar subtleties of conscience, perhaps think fit to devolve on others the glory of their successes. but in a chapter on _names_, in which, if he has not told, he has _designed to tell all_; and what he could not express, he has at least pointed out with his finger, this subject is more fully developed. in this chapter, he regrets that such as write _chronicles in latin_ do not leave our names as they find them, for in making of _vaudemont_ valle-montanus, and metamorphosing names to dress them out in greek or latin, we know not where we are, and with the _persons_ of _the men, lose_ the _benefit_ of the _story_: but one who tracks the inner thread of this apparently miscellaneous collection of items, need be at no such loss in this case. but at the conclusion of this apparently very trivial talk about _names_, he resumes his philosophic humour again, and the subsequent discourse on this subject, recalls once more, the considerations with which philosophy sets at nought the loss of fame, and forgets in the warmth that prompts to worthy deeds, the glory that should follow them. 'but this consideration--that is the consideration "that it is the custom in _france_, to call every man, even a stranger, by the name of any _manor_ or _seigneury_, he may chance to come in possession of, tends to the total confusion of descents, so that _surnames_ are no security,"--"for," he says, "a younger brother of a good family, having a _manor_ left him by his father, by the name of which he has been known and honoured, cannot handsomely leave it; ten years after his decease, it falls into the hand of a stranger, who does the same." do but judge whereabouts we shall be concerning the knowledge of these men. this consideration leads me therefore into another subject. let us look a little more narrowly into, and examine upon what foundation we erect this glory and reputation, for which the world is turned topsy-turvy. wherein do we place this renown, that we hunt after with such infinite anxiety and trouble. it is in the end pierre or william that bears it, takes it into his possession, and whom only it concerns. oh what a valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying her master's indigence, at her pleasure, with all things that he can imagine or desire. and this pierre or william, what is it but a sound, when all is done, ("what's in a name?") or three or four dashes with a pen?' and he has already written two paragraphs to show, that the name of william, at least, is not excepted from the general remarks he is making here on the vanity of names; while that of pierre is five times repeated, apparently with the same general intention, and another combination of sounds is not wanting which serves with that free translation the author himself takes pains to suggest and defend, to complete what was lacking to that combination, in order to give these remarks their true point and significance, in order to redeem them from that appearance of flatness which is not a characteristic of this author's intentions, and in his style merely serves as an intimation to the reader that there is something worth looking for beneath it. as to the name of william, and the amount of personal distinction which that confers upon its owners, he begins by telling us, that the name of guienne is said to be derived from the williams of our ancient aquitaine, 'which would seem,' he says, rather far fetched, were there not as crude derivations in plato himself, to whom he refers in other places for similar precedents; and when he wishes to excuse his enigmatical style--the titles of his chapters for instance. and by way of emphasizing this particular still further, he mentions, that on the occasion when henry, the duke of normandy, the son of henry the second, of england, made a feast in france, the concourse of nobility and gentry was so great, that for _sport's sake_ he divided them into _troops, according to their names_, and in the _first troop, which consisted of williams_, there were found a hundred and ten knights sitting at the table of that name, without reckoning the simple gentlemen and servants. and here he apparently digresses from his subject for the sake of mentioning the emperor _geta_, 'who distributed the several courses of his meats by the _first letters of the meats_ themselves, where those that began with _b_ were served up together; _as_ brawn, beef, beccaficos, and so of the others.' this appears to be a little out of the way; but it is not impossible that there may be an allusion in it to the author's own family name of _eyquem_, though that would be rather farfetched, as he says; but then there is _plato_ at hand, still to keep us in countenance. but to return to the point of digression. 'and this pierre, or william, what is it but a sound when all is done? _or_ three or four dashes with a pen, _so easy to be varied_, that i would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many victories, to _guesquin_, to glesquin, or to _gueaguin_. and yet there would be something more in the case than in lucian that sigma should serve tau with a process, for "he seeks no mean rewards." _the quere is here in good earnest. the point is_, which of _these letters_ is to be rewarded for so many sieges, battles, wounds, imprisonment, and services done to the crown of france by this famous constable. _nicholas denisot_ never concerned _himself_ further than _the letters of his name_, of which he has altered the _whole contexture, to build up by anagram_ the count d'alsinois _whom he has endowed with the glory of his poetry and painting_. [a good precedent--but here is a better one.] and the historian suetonius looked only to the _meaning of his_; and so, cashiering his _fathers surname, lenis_ left tranquillus _successor to the reputation of his writings_. who would believe that the captain bayard should have no honour but what he derives from the great deeds of peter (pierre) terrail, [the name of bayard--"the meaning"] and that antonio escalin should suffer himself, to his face, to be robbed of the honour of so many navigations, and commands at sea and land, by captain poulin and the baron de la garde. [the name of poulin was taken from the place where he was born, de la garde from a person who took him in his boyhood into his service.] who hinders my groom from calling himself pompey the great? but, after all, what virtue, what springs are there that convey to my deceased groom, or the other pompey (who had his head cut off in egypt), this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of the pen?' instructive suggestions, especially when taken in connection with the preceding items contained in this chapter, apparently so casually introduced, yet all with a stedfast bearing on this question of names, and all pointing by means of a thread of delicate sounds, and not less delicate suggestions, to another instance, in which the possibility of circumstances tending to countervail the so natural desire to appropriate to the name derived from one's ancestors, the lustre of one's deeds, is clearly demonstrated. ''tis with good reason that men decry the hypocrisy that is in war; for what is more easy to an old soldier than to shift in time of danger, and to counterfeit bravely, when he has no more heart than a chicken. there are so many ways to avoid hazarding a man's own person'--'and had we the use of the platonic ring, which renders those invisible that wear it, if turned inwards towards the palm of the hand, it is to be feared that a great many would often hide themselves, when they _ought to appear_.' 'it seems that to be known, _is in some sort to a man's life and its duration in another's keeping_. i for my part, hold that i am wholly in myself, and that other life of mine which lies in the knowledge of my friends, considering it nakedly and simply in itself, i know very well that i am sensible of no fruit or enjoyment of it but by the vanity of a fantastic opinion; and, when i shall be dead, i shall be much less sensible of it, and shall withal absolutely lose the use of those real advantages that sometimes accidentally follow it. [that was lord bacon's view, too, exactly.] i shall have no more handle whereby to take hold of reputation, or whereby it may take hold of me: for to expect that my name should receive it, in the first place, i have no name that is enough my own. of two that i have, one is common to all my race, and even to others also: there is one family at paris, and another at montpelier, whose surname is _montaigne_; another in brittany, and xaintonge called _de la montaigne_. the transposition of _one syllable only_ is enough to ravel our affairs, so that i shall peradventure share in their glory, and they shall partake of my shame; and, moreover, my ancestors were formerly surnamed _eyquem_, a name wherein a _family well known in england_ at this day is concerned. as to my other name, any one can _take it that will_, and _so_, perhaps, i may honour _a porter_ in my own stead. and, besides, though i had a particular distinction myself, what can it distinguish when i _am no more_. can it point out and favour inanity? but will thy manes such a gift bestow as to make violets from thy ashes grow? 'but of this i have spoken elsewhere.' he has--and to purpose. but as to the authority for these readings, lord bacon himself will give us that; for this is the style which he discriminates so sharply as 'the _enigmatical_,' a style which he, too, finds to have been in use among the ancients, and which he tells us _has some affinity_ with that new method of making over knowledge from the mind of the teacher to that of the pupil, which he terms the method of _progression_-- (which is the method of _essaie_)--in opposition to the received method, the only method he finds in use, which he, too, calls the _magisterial_. and this method of progression, with which the enigmatical has some affinity, is to be used, he tells us, in cases where knowledge is delivered as a thread to be spun on, where science is to be removed from one mind to another _to grow from the root_, and not delivered as trees for the use of the carpenter, where _the root_ is of no consequence. in this case, he tells us it is necessary for the teacher to descend to _the foundations of knowledge and consent_, and so to transplant it into another as it grew in his own mind, 'whereas as knowledge is now delivered, there is a _kind of contract of error_ between the deliverer and the receiver, for he that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as may _best be believed_, and not as may best be _examined_: and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather _present satisfaction_ than _expectant inquiry_, and so rather _not to doubt than not to err, glory_ making the author not to lay open his weakness, and _sloth_ making the disciple _not to know his strength_.' now, so very grave a defect as this, in the method of the delivery and tradition of learning, would of course be one of the first things that would require to be remedied in any plan in which '_the advancement_' of it was seriously contemplated. and this method of the delivery and tradition of knowledge which transfers _the root_ with them, that they may grow in the mind of the learner, is the method which this philosopher professes to find wanting, and the one which he seems disposed to invent. he has made a very thorough survey of the stores of the ancients, and is not unacquainted with the more recent history of learning; he knows exactly what kinds of methods have been made use of by the learned in all ages, for the purpose of putting themselves into some tolerable and possible relations with the physical majority; he knows what devices they have always been compelled to resort to, for the purpose of establishing some more or less effective communication between themselves and that world to which they instinctively seek to transfer their doctrine. but this method, which he suggests here as the essential condition of the growth and advancement of learning, he does _not_ find invented. he refers to a method which he calls the enigmatical, which has an affinity with it, 'used in some cases by the discretion of the ancients,' but disgraced since, 'by the impostures of persons, who have made it as a _false light_ for their counterfeit merchandises.' the purpose of this latter style is, as he defines it, 'to remove the _secrets_ of knowledge from the penetration of the more vulgar capacities, and to reserve them to _selected auditors_, or to wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil.' and that is a method, he tells us, which philosophy can by no means dispense with in his time, and 'whoever would let in new light upon the human understanding must still have recourse to it.' but the method of delivery and tradition in those ancient schools, appears to have been too much of the dictatorial kind to suit this proposer of advancement; its tendency was to arrest knowledge instead of promoting its growth. he is not pleased with the ambition of those old masters, and thinks they aimed too much at a personal impression, and that they sometimes undertook to impose their own particular and often very partial grasp of those universal doctrines and principles, which are and must be true for all men, in too dogmatical and magisterial a manner, without making sufficient allowance for the growth of the mind of the world, the difference of races, etc. but if any doubt in regard to the use of the method described, in the composition of the work now first produced as an example of the use of it, should still remain in any mind; or if this method of unravelling it should seem too studious, perhaps the author's own word for it in one more quotation may be thought worth taking. '_i can give no account of my life by_ my actions, fortune has placed _them_ too low; _i must do it_ by my fancies. and when shall i have done representing the continual agitation and change of my thoughts as they come into my head, seeing that diomedes filled six thousand books upon the subject of grammar.' [the commentators undertake to set him right here, but the philosopher only glances in his intention at the voluminousness of the science of _words_, in opposition to the science of _things_, which he came to establish.] 'what must prating _produce_, since prating itself, and the first beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of volumes. so many words about _words_ only. they accused one galba, of old, of living idly; he made answer that every one ought to give account of his _actions_, but _not_ of his _leisure_. he was mistaken, for _justice_--[the civil authority]--has cognizance and _jurisdiction_ over those that _do nothing_, or only play _at_ working.... scribbling appears to be the sign of a disordered age. every man applies himself negligently to the duty of his _vocation_ at such a time and debauches in it.' from that central wrong of an evil government, an infectious depravity spreads and corrupts all particulars. everything turns from its true and natural course. thus _scribbling_ is the sign of a disordered age. men write in such times instead of acting; and scribble, or seem to perhaps, instead of writing openly to purpose. and yet, again, that central, and so divergent, wrong is the result of each man's particular contribution, as he goes on to assert. 'the corruption of this age is made up by the particular contributions of every individual man,'-- he were no lion, were not romans hinds.--_cassius_. 'some contribute _treachery_, others _injustice_, irreligion, _tyranny_, _avarice_ and _cruelty, according as they have power; the_ weaker sort contribute folly, vanity, _and_ idleness, and _of these_ i am one.' _caesar_ loves no plays as thou dost, antony. such men are dangerous. or, as the same poet expresses it in another roman play:-- this _double worship_, where one part does _disdain with cause, the other insult without all reason_; where gentry, title, wisdom cannot conclude but by the _yea and no_ of _general ignorance_,--it must omit real necessities--and give way the while to unstable slightness; purpose _so barred_, it follows, nothing is done to purpose. and that is made the plea for an attempt to overthrow the popular power, and to replace it with a government containing the true head of the state, its nobility, its learning, its gentleness, its wisdom. but the essayist continues:--'it seems as if it were the season for _vain things_ when _the hurtful oppress us_; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what _signifies nothing_ is a kind of commendation. 'tis _my_ comfort that _i_ shall be one of the last that shall be called in question,--for it would be against reason _to punish the less troublesome_ while we are _infested_ with the _greater_. _as the physician_ said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, as he perceived, had an ulcer _in his lungs_, "friend, it is not now time to concern yourself about your finger's ends." _and yet_ i saw some years ago, _a person, whose name and memory i have in very great esteem_, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was _neither law nor justice put in execution, nor magistrate that performed his office_,--_no more than there is now_,--publish i know not what _pitiful reformations_ about _clothes, cookery_ and _law chicanery_. _these are amusements_ wherewith _to feed a people that are ill used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. these others_ do the same, who insist upon _stoutly defending_ the _forms_ of _speaking_, dances and games to a people totally abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices--it is for the spartans only to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they are just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their lives. 'for _my part_, i have _yet a worse_ custom. i scorn to mend myself by halves. if my _shoe_ go awry, i let my shirt and my cloak do so too: when i am out of order i feed on mischief. i abandon myself through despair, and let myself go towards the precipice, and as the saying is, throw the helve after the hatchet.' we should not need, perhaps, the aid of the explanations already quoted, to show us that the author does not confess this custom of his for the sake of commending it to the sense or judgment of the reader,--who sees it here for the first time it may be put into words or put on paper, who looks at it here, perhaps, for the first time objectively, from the critical stand-point which the review of another's confession creates; and though it may have been latent in the dim consciousness of his own experience, or practically developed, finds it now for the first time, collected from the phenomena of the blind, instinctive, human motivity, and put down on the page of science, as a principle in nature, in human nature also. but this is indeed a spartan combing and curling, that the author is falling to, in the introductory flourishes ('diversions' as he calls them) of this great adventure, that his pen is out for now: he is indeed upon the point of running headlong into the fiercest dangers;--it is the state, the wretched, discased, vicious state, dying apparently, yet full of teeth and mischief, that he is about to handle in his argument with these fine, lightsome, frolicsome preparations of his, without any perceptible 'mittens'; it is the heart of that political evil that his time groans with, and begins to find insufferable, that he is going to probe to the quick with that so delicate weapon. it is a tilt against the block and the rack, and all the instruments of torture, that he is going to manage, as handsomely, and with as many sacrifices to the graces, as the circumstances will admit of. but the political situation which he describes so boldly (and we have already seen what it is) affects us here in its relation to the question of style only, and as the author himself connects it with the point of our inquiry. 'a man may regret,' he says, 'the better times, but cannot fly from the present, we may wish for other magistrates, but we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have; and, peradventure, it is more laudable to obey the bad than the good, so long as the image of the ancient and received laws of this monarchy shall shine in any corner of the kingdom. if they happen, unfortunately, to thwart and contradict one another, so as to produce two factions of doubtful choice,'-- and my soul aches to know, [says coriolanus] when two authorities are up, neither supreme, how soon confusion may enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take the one by the other. --'in this contingency will willingly choose,' continues the other, 'to withdraw from the tempest, and in the meantime, _nature or the hazards of war may lend me a helping hand_. betwixt cæsar and pompey, i should soon and frankly have declared myself, but amongst the three robbers that came after, a man must needs _have either hid himself_, or have gone along with the current of the time, _which i think a man may lawfully do, when reason no longer rules_.' '_whither_ dost thou wandering go?' 'this _medley_ is a little from my subject, i go out of my way but 'tis rather _by licence than oversight_. my fancies _follow_ one another, _but sometimes at a great distance_, and _look towards one another_, but 'tis with an _oblique glance_. i have read a dialogue of plato of such a _motley and fantastic_ composition. the _beginning was about love_, and all the rest about rhetoric. _they_ stick not (that is, the ancients) at these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves to be carried away at the pleasure of the winds; or at least to _seem_ as if they were. the titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter, they often denote it _by some mark only_, as those other titles _andria eunuchus_, or these, _sylla, cicero, torquatus_. i love _a poetic march_, by leaps and skips, 'tis an art, as plato says, light, nimble; and _a little demoniacal_. there are places in _plutarch_ where _he_ forgets his theme, where the proposition of _his_ argument is only found _incidentally_, and stuffed throughout with foreign matter. do but observe his meanders in the demon of socrates. how beautiful are his variations and digressions; and then _most of all, when they seem to be_ fortuitous, [hear] and introduced _for want of heed. 'tis the indiligent reader_ that loses my subject--_not i. there will always be found some words_ or _other in a corner that are to the purpose, though it lie very close_ [that is the unfailing rule]. i ramble about indiscreetly and tumultously: my style and my _wit_ wander at the same rate, [he wanders _wittingly_]. a _little folly_ is _desirable_ in him _that will not be guilty of stupidity_, say the precepts, and much more the _examples_ of our masters. a thousand poets flag and languish after a _prosaic manner_; but the best old prose, and i strew it here up and down _indifferently_ for verse, shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and represents some air of its fury. certainly, prose must _yield_ the pre-eminence in speaking. "the poet," says plato, "when set upon the muse's tripod, pours out with fury, whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe of a fountain, _without considering and pausing upon what he says_, and things come from him of _various colors_, of _contrary substance_, and with an irregular torrent": he himself (plato) is all over poetical, and all the old theology (_as the learned inform us) is poetry_, and the _first philosophy_, is the origiual language of the gods. 'i would have the matter _distinguish itself_; it sufficiently shows _where it changes_, where it concludes, _where it begins, and where it resumes, without interlacing it with words of connection_, introduced for the relief of _weak or negligent ears_, and without commenting myself. who is he that had not rather not be read at all, than after a drowsy or _cursory_ manner? seeing i cannot fix the reader's attention by the _weight_ of what i write, _maneo male_, if i should chance _to do it by my intricacies_. [hear]. i mortally hate obscurity and _would avoid it if i could. in such an employment_, to whom you will not give an hour you will give nothing; _and you do nothing for him for whom you only do, whilst you are doing something else_. to which may be added, that i have, perhaps, some particular obligation to speak only _by halves_, to speak _confusedly and discordantly_.' but this is, perhaps, enough to show, in the way of direct assertion, that we have here, at least, a philosophical work composed in that style which lord bacon calls 'the enigmatical,' in which he tells us the _secrets_ of knowledge are reserved for _selected auditors_, or wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil; a style which he, too, tells us was sometimes used by the discretion of the ancients, though he does not specify either plutarch or plato; in that place, and one which he introduces in connection with his new method of progression, in consequence of its having, as he tells us, _some affinity_ with it, and that we have here also a specimen of that new method itself, by means of which knowledge is to be delivered as a thread to be spun on. but let us leave, for the present, this wondrous gascon, though it is not very easy to do so, so long as we have our present subject in hand,--this philosopher, whose fancies look towards one another at such long, such very long distances, sometimes, though not always, with an _oblique_ glance, who dares to depend so much upon the eye of his reader, and especially upon the reader of that 'far-off' age he writes to. it would have been indeed irrelevant to introduce the subject of this foreign work and its style in this connection without further explanation, but for the identity of political situation already referred to, and but for those subtle, interior, incessant connections with the higher writings of the great elizabethan school, which form the _main characteristic_ of this production. the fact, that this work was composed in the country in which the chief elizabethan men attained their maturity, that it dates from the time in which bacon was completing his education there, that it covers ostensibly not the period only, but the scenes and events of raleigh's six years campaigning there, as well as the fact alluded to by this author himself, in a passage already quoted,--the fact that there was a family then in england, _very well known_, who bore the surname of his ancestors, a family of the name of _eyquem_, he tells us with whom, perhaps, he still kept up some secret correspondence and relations, the fact, too, which he mentions in his chapter on names, that a surname in france is very easily acquired, and is not necessarily derived from one's ancestors,--that same chapter in which he adduces so many instances of men who, notwithstanding that inveterate innate love of the honour of one's own proper name, which is in men of genius still more inveterate,--have for one reason or another been willing to put upon anagrams, or synonyms, or borrowed names, all their honours, so that in the end it is william or pierre who takes them into his possession, and bears them, or it's the name of 'an african slave' perhaps, or the name of a 'groom' (promoted, it may be, to the rank of a jester, or even to that of a player,) that gets all the glory. all these facts, taken in connection with the conclusions already established, though insignificant in themselves, will be found anything but that for the philosophical student who has leisure to pursue the inquiry. and though the latent meanings, in which the interior connections and identities referred to above are found, are not yet critically recognised, a latent national affinity and liking strong enough to pierce this thin, artificial, foreign exterior, appears to have been at work here from the first. for though the seed of the richer and bolder meanings from which the author anticipated his later harvest, could not yet be reached, that new form of popular writing, that effective, and vivacious mode of communication with the popular mind on topics of common concern and interest, not heretofore recognised as fit subjects for literature, which this work offered to the world on its surface, was not long in becoming fruitful. but it was on the english mind that it began to operate first. it was in england, that it began so soon to develop the latent efficacies it held in germ, in the creation of that new and widening department in letters--that so new, so vast, and living department of them, which it takes today all our reviews, and magazines, and journals, to cover. and the work itself has been from the first adopted, and appropriated here, as heartily as if it had been an indigenous production, some singularly distinctive product too, of the so deeply characterised english nationality. but it is time to leave this wondrous gascon, this new 'michael of the mount,' this man who is 'consubstantial with his book,'--this 'man of the mountain,' as he figuratively describes it. let us yield him this new ascent, this new triumphant peak and pyramid in science, which he claims to have been the first to master,--the unity of the universal man,--the historical unity,--the universal human form, collected from particulars, not contemplatively abstracted,--the inducted man of the new philosophy. '_authors_,' he says, 'have _hitherto_ communicated themselves to the people by some _particular_ and _foreign_ mark; _i, the first of any by my universal being_, as _michael_ de montaigne, i propose a life mean and without lustre: all moral philosophy is applied as well to a private life as to one of the greatest employment. _every man_ carries _the entire form of the human condition_...i, the first of any by my universal being, as _michael_,'--see the chapter on names,--'as _michael_ de montaigne.' let us leave him for the present, or attempt to, for it is not very easy to do so, so long as we have our present subject in hand. for, as we all know, it is from this idle, tattling, rambling old gascon--it is from this outlandish looker-on of human affairs, that our spectators and ramblers and idlers and tattlers, trace their descent; and the times, and the examiners, and the observers, and the spectators, and the tribunes, and independents, and all the monthlies, and all the quarterlies, that exercise so large a sway in human affairs to-day, are only following his lead; and the best of them have not been able as yet to leave him in the rear. but how it came to pass, that a man of this particular turn of mind, who belonged to the old party, and the times that were then passing away, should have felt himself called upon to make this great signal for the human advancement, and how it happens that these radical connections with other works of that time, having the same general intention, are found in the work itself,--these are points which the future _biographers_ of this old gentleman will perhaps find it for their interest to look to. and a little of that more studious kind of reading which he himself so significantly solicited, and in so many passages, will inevitably tend to the elucidation of them. part ii. the baconian rhetoric, or the method of progression. 'the secrets of nature have not more gift in taciturnity.' _troilus and cressida_. 'i did not think that mr. silence had been a man of this mettle.' _falstaff_. chapter i. the 'beginners.' 'prospero.--go bring the rabble, o'er whom i give thee power, here, to this place.' _tempest_. but though a foreign philosopher may venture to give us the clue to it, perhaps, in the first instance, a little more roundly, it is not necessary that we should go the mayor of bordeaux, in order to ascertain on the highest possible authority, what kind of an art of communication, what kind of an art of delivery and tradition, men, in such circumstances, find themselves compelled to invent;--that is, if they would not be utterly foiled for the want of it, in their noblest purposes;--we need not go across the channel to find the men themselves, to whom this art is a necessity,--men so convinced that they have a mission of instruction to their kind, that they will permit no temporary disabilities to divert them from their end,--men who must needs open their school, no matter what oppositions there may be, to be encountered, no matter what imposing exhibitions of military weapons may be going on just then, in their vicinity; and though they should find themselves straitened in time, and not able to fit their words to their mouths as they have a mind to, though they should be obliged to accept the hint from the master in the greek school, and take their tone _from the ear of those to whom they speak_, though many speeches which would spend their use among the men then living would have to be inserted in their most enduring works with a private hint concerning that necessity, and a private reading of them for those whom it concerned; though _the audience_ they are prepared to address _should be deferred_, though the benches of the inner school should stand empty for ages. we need not go abroad at all to discover men of this stamp, and their works and pastimes, and their arts of tradition;--men so filled with that which impels men to speak, that speak they must, and speak they will, in one form or another, by word or gesture, by word or deed, though they speak to the void waste, though they must speak till they reach old ocean in his unsunned caves, and bring him up with the music of their complainings, though the marble themis fling back their last appeal, though they speak to the tempest in his wrath, to the wind and the rain, and the fire and the thunder,--men so impregnated with that which makes the human speech, that speak they will, though they have but a rusty nail, wherewith to etch their story, on their dungeon wall; though they dig in the earth and bury their secret, as one buried his of old--that same secret still; for it is still those ears--those 'ears' that 'midas hath' which makes the mystery. they know that the days are coming when the light will enter their prison house, and flash in its dimmest recess; when the light they sought in vain, will be there to search out the secrets they are forbid. they know that the day is coming, when the disciple himself, all tutored in the art of their tradition, bringing with him the key of its delivery, shall be there to unlock those locked-up meanings, to spell out those anagrams, to read those hieroglyphics, to unwind with patient loving research to its minutest point, that text, that with such tools as the most watchful tyranny would give them, they will yet contrive to leave there. they know that their buried words are seeds, and though they lie long in the earth, they will yet spring up with their 'richer and bolder meanings,' and publish on every breeze, their boldest mystery. for let not men of narrower natures fancy that such action is not proper to the larger one, and cannot be historical. for there are different _kinds_ of men, our _science_ of men tells us, and that is an unscientific judgment which omits 'the _particular addition_, that bounteous nature hath closed in each,'--her 'addition to the bill that writes them all alike.' for there is a kind of men 'whose minds are proportioned to that which may be dispatched at once, or within a short return of time, and there is another kind, whose minds are proportioned to that which begins afar off, and is to be won with length of pursuit,'--so the coryphæus of those choir that the latter kind compose, informs us, 'so that there may be fitly said to be a _longanimity_, which is commonly also ascribed to god as a magnanimity.' and our english philosophers had to light what this one calls a new 'lamp of tradition,' before they could make sure of transmitting their new science, through such mediums as those that their time gave them; and a very gorgeous many-branched lamp it is, that the great english philosopher brings out from that 'secret school of living learning and living art' to which he secretly belongs, for the admiration of the professionally learned of his time, and a very lustrous one too, as it will yet prove to be, when once it enters the scholar's apprehension that it was ever meant be lighted, when once the little movement that turns on the dazzling jet is ordered. for we have all been so taken up with the baconian _logic_ hitherto and its wonderful effects in the relief of the human estate, that the baconian rhetoric has all this time escaped our notice; and nobody appears to have suspected that there was anything in _that_ worth looking at; any more than they suspect that there is anything in some of those other divisions which the philosopher himself lays so much stress on his proposal for the advancement of learning,--in his proposal for the advancement of it into _all_ the fields of human activity. but we read this proposition still, as james the first was expected to read it, and all these departments which are brought into that general view in such a dry and formal and studiously scholastic manner, appear to be put there merely to fill up a space; and because the general plan of this so erudite performance happened to include them. for inasmuch as the real scope and main bearing of this proposition, though it is in fact _there_, is of course _not_ there, in any such form as to attract the particular attention of the monarch to whose eye the work is commended; and inasmuch as the new art of a scientific rhetoric is already put to its most masterly use in reserving that main design, for such as may find themselves able to receive it, of course, the need of any such invention is not apparent on the surface of the work, and the real significance of this new doctrine of art and its radical relation to the new science, is also reserved for that class of readers who are able to adopt the rules of interpretation which the work itself lays down. because the real applications of the new logic could not yet be openly discussed, no one sees as yet, that there was, and had to be, a rhetoric to match it. for this author, who was not any less shrewd than the one whose methods we have just been observing a little, had also early discovered in the great personages of his time, a disposition to moderate his voice whenever he went to speak to them on matters of importance, in his natural key, for his voice too, was naturally loud, and high as he gives us to understand, though he '_could_ speak small like a woman'; he too had learned to take the tone _from the ear of him to whom he spake_, and he too had learned, that it was not enough merely to speak so as to make himself heard by those whom he wished to affect. he also had learned to speak according to the affair he had in hand, according to the purpose which he wished to accomplish. he also is of the opinion that different kinds of _audiences_ and different _times_, require different modes of speech, and though he found it necessary to compose his works in the style and language of his own time, he was confident that it was a language which would not remain in use for many ages; and he has therefore provided himself with another, more to his mind which he has taken pains to fold carefully within the other, and one which lie thinks will bear the wear and tear of those revolutions that he perceives to be imminent. but in consequence of our persistent oversight of this art of tradition, on which he relies so much, (which is as fine an invention of his, as any other of his inventions which we find ourselves so much the better for), that appeal to 'the times that are farther off,' has not yet taken effect, and the audience for whom he chiefly laboured is still 'deferred.' this so noble and benign art which he calls, with his own natural modesty and simplicity, the art of _tradition_, this art which grows so truly noble and worthy, so distinctively human, in his clear, scientific treatment of it,--in his scientific clearance of it from the wildnesses and spontaneities of accident, or the superfluities and trickery of an art without science,--that stops short of the ultimate, the human principle,--this so noble art of speech or tradition is, indeed, an art which this great teacher and leader of men will think it no scorn to labour: it is one on which, even such a teacher can find time to stop; it is one which even such a teacher can stop to build from the foundation upwards, he will not care how splendidly; it is one on which he will spend without stint, and think it gain to spend, the wealth of his invention. but, at the same time, it is with him a _subordinate_ art. it has no worth or substance in itself; it borrows all its worth from that which masters and rigorously subdues it to its end. here, too, we find ourselves coming down on all its old ceremonial and observance, from that new height which we found our foreign philosopher in such quiet possession of,--taking his way at a puff through poor cicero's periods,--those periods which the old orator had taken so much pains with, and laughing at his pains:--but this english philosopher is more daring still, for it is he who disposes, at a word, without any comment, just in passing merely,--from his practical stand-point,--of 'the flutes and trumpets of the greeks,' like the other making nothing at all in his theory of criticism of _mere_ elegance, though it is the gascon, it is true, who undertakes the more lively and extreme practical demonstrations of this theoretical contempt of it,--setting it at nought, and flying in the face of it,--writing in as loquacious and homely a style as he possibly can, just for the purpose for setting it at nought, though not without giving us a glimpse occasionally, of a faculty that would enable him to mince the matter as fine as another if he should see occasion--as, perhaps, he may. for he talks very emphatically about his _poetry_ here and there, and seems to intimate that he has a gift that way; and that he has, moreover, some works of value in that department of letters, which he is anxious to 'save up' for posterity, if he can. but here, it is the scholar, and not the loquacious old gentleman at all, who is giving us in his choicest, selectest, courtliest phrase, in his most stately and condensed style, _his_ views of this subject; but that which is noticeable is, that _the art_ in its fresh, new upspringing from the secret of life and nature, from the soul of _things_, the art and that which it springs from, is in these two so different forms _identical_. here, too, the point of its criticism and review is the same. 'away with that eloquence that so enchants us with _its harmony_ that we should more study it than _things_'; but here the old roman masters the philosopher, for a moment, and he puts in a scholarly parenthesis, 'unless you will affirm that of cicero to be of so supreme perfection as to form _a body of itself_.' but hamlet, in his discourse with that wise reasoner, and unfortunate practitioner, who thought that brevity was the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, puts it more briefly still. _polonius_. what do you read, my lord? _hamlet_. words, words, words! 'more matter, and less art,' another says in that same treatise on art and speculation. now inasmuch as this art and science derives all its distinction and lustre from that new light on the human estate of which it was to be the vehicle, somebody must find the trick of it, so as to be able to bring out _that doctrine_ by its help, before we can be prepared to understand the real worth of this invention. it would be premature to undertake to set it forth fully, till that is accomplished. there must be a more elaborate exhibition of that science, before the art of its transmission can be fully treated; we cannot estimate it, till we see how it strikes to the root of the new doctrine, how it begins with its beginning, and reaches to its end: we cannot estimate it till we see its relation, its essential relation, to that new doctrine of the human nature, and that new doctrine of state, which spring from the doctrine of nature in general, which is _the_ doctrine, which is the beginning and the end of the new science. we find here on the surface, as we find everywhere in this comprehensive treatise, much apparent parade of division and subdivision, and the author appears to lay much stress upon this, and seems disposed to pride himself upon his dexterity in chopping up the subject as finely as possible, and keeping the parts quite clear of one another; and sometimes, in his distributions, putting those points the farthest apart which are the most nearly related, though not so far, that they cannot 'look towards each other,' though it may be, as the other says, '_obliquely_.' he evidently depends very much on his arrangement, and seems, indeed, to be chiefly concerned about that, when he comes to the more critical parts of his subject. but it is to _the continuities_ which underlie these separations, to which he directs the attention of those to whom he speaks in earnest, and not in particular cases only. '_generally_,' he says, '_let this be a rule_, that all partitions of knowledge be accepted rather for lines and veins, than for _sections_ and _separations_, and that _the continuance and entireness of knowledge_ be preserved. for the _contrary hereof_,' he says, 'is that which has made particular sciences barren, shallow, and erroneous, while they have not been nourished and maintained from the _common_ fountain.' for this is the one science, the deep, the true, the fruitful one, the fruitful because the one. these lines, then, which he cautions us against regarding as divisions, which are brought in with such parade of scholasticism, with such a profound appearance of artifice, will always be found by those who have leisure to go below the surface, to be but the indications of those natural articulations and branches into which the subject divides and breaks itself, and the conducting lines to that trunk and heart of sciences, that common fountain from which all this new vitality, this sudden up-springing and new blossoming of learning proceeds, that fountain in which its flowers, as well as its fruits, and its thick leaves are nourished. here in this art of tradition, which comprehends the whole subject of the human speech from the new ground of the common nature in man--that _double_ nature which tends to isolation on the one hand, and which makes him a part and a member of society on the other; we find it treated, first, as a means by which men come simply to a common understanding with each other, by which that _common ground_, that ground of _community_, and _communication_, and _identity_, which a common _understanding_ in this kind makes, can be best reached; and next we find it treated as a means by which _more than the understanding_ shall be reached, by which _the sentiment_, the _common sentiment_, which also belongs to the larger nature, shall be strengthened and developed,--by which the counteracting and partial sentiments shall be put in their place, and the _will_ compelled; whereby that common human form, which in its perfection is the object of the human love and reverence shall be scientifically developed; by which the particular form with its diseases shall be artistically disciplined and treated. this art of tradition concerns, first, the understanding; and secondly, the affections and the will. as man is constituted, it is not enough to convince his understanding. first, then, it is 'the organ' and 'method' of tradition; and next, it is what he calls the _illustration_ of it. first, the object is, to bring truth to the understanding in as clear and unobstructed a manner as the previous condition--as the diseases and pre-occupations of the mind addressed will admit of, and next to bring all the other helps and arts by which the sentiments are touched and the will mastered. first, he will speak true, or as true as they will let him; but it is not enough to speak true. he must be able to speak sharply too, perhaps--or humorously, or touchingly, or melodiously, or overwhelmingly, with words that burn. it is not enough, perhaps, to reach the ear of his auditor: 'peradventure' he too 'will also pierce it.' it is not enough to draw diagrams in chalk on a black board in this kind of mathematics, where the will and the affections are the pupils, and standing ready to defy axioms, prepared at any moment to demonstrate practically, that the part is greater than the whole, and face down the universe with it, 'murdering impossibility to make what cannot be, slight work.' it is not enough to have a tradition that is _clear_, or as clear a one as will pass muster with the government and with the preconceptions of the people themselves. he must have a pictured one--a pictorial, an illuminated one--a beautiful one,--he must have what he calls an illustrated tradition. 'why not,' he says. he runs his eye over the human instrumentalities, and this art which we call _art--par excellence_, which he sees setting up for itself, or ministering to ignorance and error, and feeding the diseased affections with 'the sweet that is their poison,' he seizes on at once, in behalf of his science, and declares that it is her lawful property, 'her slave, born in her house,' and fit for nothing in the world but to minister to her; and what is more, he suits the action to the word--he brings the truant home, and reforms her, and sets her about her proper business. that is what he proposes to have done in his theory of art, and it is what he tells us he has done himself; and he has: there is no mistake about it. that is what he means when he talks about his illustrated tradition of science--his illustrated tradition of the science of human nature and its _differences_, _original_ and _acquired_, and the _diseases_ to which it is liable, and the artificial growths which appertain to it. it is very curious, that no one has seen this tradition--this illustrated tradition, or anything else, indeed, that was at all worthy of this new interpreter of mysteries, who goes about to this day as the inventor of a method which he was not able himself to put to any practical use; an inventor who was obliged to leave his machine for men of a more quick and subtle genius, or to men of a more practical turn of mind to manage, men who had a closer acquaintance with nature. that which is first to be noted in looking carefully at this draught of a new art of tradition which the plan of the advancement of learning includes,--that which the careful reader cannot fail to note, is the fact, that throughout all this most complete and radical exhibition of the subject (for brief and casual as that exhibition seems on the surface, the science and art from its root to its outermost branches, is there)--throughout all this exhibition, under all the superficial divisions and subdivisions of the subject, it is still the method of progression which is set forth here: under all these divisions, there is still one point made; it is still the art of a tradition which is designed to reserve the _secrets_ of science, and the nobler arts of it, for the minds and ages that are able to receive them. this new art of tradition, with its new organs and methods, and its living and beautiful illustration, when once we look through the network of it to the unity within, this new rhetoric of science, is in fact the instrument which the philosopher would substitute, if he could, for those more cruel weapons which the men of his time were ready to take in hand; and it is the instrument with which he would forestall those yet more fearful political convulsions that already seemed to his eye to threaten from afar the social structures of christendom; it is the beautiful and bloodless instrumentality whereby the mind of the world is to be wrenched insensibly from its old place without 'breaking all.' for neither does this author, any more than that other, who has been quoted here on this point, think it wise for the philosopher to rush madly out of his study with his eureka, and bawl to the first passer by in scientific terms the last result of his science, 'lording it over his ignorance' with what can be to him only a _magisterial_ announcement. for what else but that can it be, for instance, to tell the poor peasant, on his way to market, with his butter and eggs in his basket, planting his feet on the firm earth without any qualms or misgivings, and measuring his day by the sun's great toil and rejoicing race in heaven, what but this same magisterial teaching is it, to stop him, and tell him to his bewildered face that the sun never rises or sets, and that the earth is but a revolving ball? instead of giving him a truth you have given him a falsehood. you have brought him a truth out of a sphere with which he is not conversant, which he cannot ascend to--whose truths he cannot translate into his own, without jarring all. either you have told him what must be to him a lie, or you have upset all his little world of beliefs with your magisterial doctrine, and confounded and troubled him to no purpose. but the method of progression, as set forth by lord bacon, requires that the new scientific truth shall be, not nakedly and flatly, but artistically exhibited; because, as he tells us, 'the great labour is with the people, and this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.' he will not have it exhibited in bare propositions, but translated into the people's dialect. he would not begin if he could--if there were no political or social restriction to forbid it--by overthrowing on all points the popular belief, or wherever it differs from the scientific conclusion. it is a very different kind of philosophy that proceeds in that manner. this is one which comprehends and respects all actualities. the popular belief, even to its least absurdity 'is something more than nothing in nature'; and the popular belief with all its admixture of error, is better than the half-truths of a misunderstood, untranslated science; better than these would be in its place. that truth of nature which it contains for those who are able to receive it, and live by it, you would destroy for them, if you should attempt to make them read it _prematurely_, in your language. any kind of organism which by means of those adjustments and compensations, with which nature is always ready to help out anything really hers,--any organism that is capable of serving as the means of an historical social continuance, is already some gain on chaos and social dissolution; and is, perhaps, better than a series of philosophical experiments. the difficulty is not to overthrow the popular errors, but to get something better in their place, he tells us; and that there are men who have succeeded in the first attempt, and very signally failed in the second. beautiful and vigorous unions grew up under the classic mythologies, that dissolved and went down for ever, in the sunshine of the classic philosophies. for there were more things in heaven and earth than were included in those last, or dreamt of in them. in your expurgation, of the popular errors, you must be sure that the truth they contain, is in some form as strongly, as _effectively_ composed in your text, or the popular error is truer and better than the truth with which you would replace it. this is a master who will have no other kind of teaching in his school. his scholars must go so far in their learning as to be able to come back to this popular belief, and account for it and understand it; they must be as wise as the peasant again, and be able to start with him, from his starting point, before they can get any diploma in this school of _advancement_, or leave to practise in it. but when the old is already ruinous and decaying, and oppressing and keeping back the new,--when the vitality is gone out of it, and it has become deadly instead, when the new is struggling for new forms, the man of science though never so conservative from inclination and principle, will not be wanting to himself and to the state in this emergency. he 'loves the _fundamental part of state_ more' than in _such_ a crisis he will 'doubt the change of it,' and will not 'fear to jump a body with a dangerous physic, that's sure of death without it.' first of all then, the condition of this lamp of tradition, that is to burn on for ages, is, that it shall be able to adapt itself to the successive stages of the advancement it lights. it is the inevitable condition of this school which begins with the present, which begins with the people, which descends to the lowest stage of the contemporary popular belief, and takes in the many-headed monster himself, without any trimming at all, for its audience,--it is the first condition of such a school, conducted by a man of science, that it shall have its proper grades of courts and platforms, its selecter and selectest audiences. there must be landing places in the ascent, points of rendezvous agreed on, where 'the delicate collateral sounds' are heard, which only those who ascend can hear. there is no jar,--there is no forced advancement in this school; there is no upward step for any, who have not first been taught to see it, who have not, indeed, already taken it. for it is an artist's school, and not a pedant's, or a vague speculator's, who knows not how to converge his speculation, even upon his mode of tradition. the founders of this school trust much in their general plan of instruction and relief, to the gradual advancement of a common intelligence, by means of a scientific, but _concealed_ historical teaching. they will teach their lower classes, their 'beginners,' as great nature teaches--insensibly;--as great nature teaches--in the concrete, 'in easy instances.' for the secret of her method is that which they have studied; that is the learning which they have mastered; the spirit of it, which is the poet's gift, the quickest, subtlest, most searching, most analytic, most synthetic spirit of it, is that with which great nature has endowed them. they will speak, as they tell us, as the masters always have spoken from of old to them who are without; they will 'open their mouths in parables,' they will 'utter their dark sayings on the harp.' they know that men are already prepared by nature's own instruction, to feel in a fact,--to receive in historical representations--truths which would startle them in the abstract, truths which they are not yet prepared to disengage from the historical combinations in which they receive them; though with every repetition, and especially with the pointed, selected, prolonged repetition of the teacher, where the 'illustrious instance' is selected and cleared of its extraneous incident, and made to enter the mind alone, and pierce it with its principle,--with every such repetition, the step to that generalization and axiom becomes insensibly shorter and more easy. they know that men are already wiser than their teachers, in some--in many things; that they have all of them a great stock of incommunicative wisdom which all their teachers have not been able to make them give up, which they never will give up, till the strong man, who is stronger, enters with his larger learning out of the same book, with his mightier weapons out of the same armory, and spoils their goods, or makes them old and worthless, by the side of the new, resplendent, magic wealth he brings with him. the new philosophy of nature has truths to teach which nature herself has already been teaching all men, with more or less effect, miscellaneously, and at odd hours, ever since they were born; and this philosopher gives a large place in his history, to that vulgar, practical human wisdom, which all the books till his time had been of too high a strain to glance at. but 'art is a second nature, and imitateth that dextrously and compendiously, which nature performs by ambages and length of time.' the scientific interpreter of nature will select, and unite, and teach continuously, and pointedly, in grand, ideal, representative fact, in 'prerogative instances,' that which nature has but faintly and unconsciously impressed with her method; for he has a scientific organum, and what is more,--a great deal more, a thousand times more,--he has the scientific genius that invented it. his soul is a novum organum--his mind is a table of rejections that sifts the historic masses, and brings out the instances that are to his purpose, the bright, bold instances that flame forth the doubtful truth, that tell their own story and need no interpreter, the high ideal instances that talk in verse because it is their native tongue and they can no other. he has found,--or rather nature lent it to him, the universal historic solvent, and the dull, formless, miscellaneous facts of the common human experience, spring up in magic orders, in beautiful, transparent, scientific continuities, as they arrange themselves by the laws of his thinking. for the truth is, and it must be said here, and not here only, but everywhere, wherever there is a chance to say it,--that novum organum was not made to examine the legs of spiders with, or the toes of 'the grandfather-long-legs,' or any of their kindred; though of course it is susceptible of such an application, when it falls into the hands of persons whose genius inclines them in those directions; and it is a use, that the inventor would not have disdained to put it to himself, if he had had time, and if his attention had not been so much distracted by the habits and history of that 'nobler kind of vermin,' which he found feeding on the human weal in his time, and eating out the heart of it. this man was not a fool, but a man. he was a naturalist indeed, of the newest and highest style, but that did not hinder his being a man at the same time. he and his company were the first that set the example of going, deliberately, and on principle, out of the human nature for knowledge; but it was that they might re-return with better axioms for the culture, and nobility, and sway of _that form_, which, 'though it be but a part in the continent of nature,' is as this one openly declares, '_the end_ and _term_ of natural philosophy, _in the intention_ of man.' his science included the humblest and least agreeable of nature's performances; his novum organum was able to take up the smallest conceivable atom of existence, whether animate or not, and make a study of it. he has no disrespect for caterpillars or any kind of worm or insect; but he is not a caterpillar himself, or an insect of any kind, or a saurian, or an icthyosaurian, but a man; and it was for the sake of building up from a new basis a practical doctrine of human life, that he invented that instrument, and put so much fine work upon it. with his 'prerogative instances,' he will build height after height, the solid, but imperceptible stair-way to his summit of knowledges, so that men shall tread its utmost floors without knowing what heights they are--even as they tread great nature's own solidities, without inquiring her secret. the shrewd unlearned man of practice shall take that great book of nature, that illustrated digest of it, on his knees, to while away his idle hours with, in rich pastime, and smile to see there, all written out, that which he faintly knew, and never knew that he knew before; he will find there in sharp points, in accumulations, and percussions, that which his own experience has at length wearily, dimly, worked and worn into him. it is his own experience, exalted indeed, and glorified, but it is that which beckons him on to that which is yet beyond it; he shall read on, and smile, and laugh, and weep, and wonder at the power; but never dream that it is science, the new science--the science of nature--the product of the new organum of it applied to _human_ nature, and _human_ life. the abstract statement of that which the concrete exhibition veils, is indeed always there, though it lie never so close, in never so snug a corner; but it is there so artistically environed, that the reader who is not ready for it, who has not learned to disengage the principle from the instance, who has had no hint of an _illustrated tradition_ in it, will never see it; or if he sees it, he will think it is there by accident, or inspiration, and pass on. here, in this open treatise upon the art of delivering and teaching of knowledge, the author lays down, in the most impressive terms, the necessity of a style which shall serve as a _veil_ of tradition, imperceptible or impenetrable to the uninitiated, and admitting 'only such as have by the help of a master, attained to the interpretation of dark sayings, or are able by their own genius to enter within the veil'; and after having distributed under many heads, the secret of this method of scientific communication, he asserts distinctly that there is no other mode of dealing with the popular belief and preconception, but the one just described--that same method which the teachers of the people have always instinctively adopted, whenever that which was new and contrary to the received doctrines, was to be communicated. 'for a man of judgment,' he says, 'must, of course, perceive, that there should be a difference in the teaching and delivery of knowledge, according to the _presuppositions, which he finds infused and impressed upon the mind of the learner_. for _that which is new and foreign from opinions received_, is to be delivered in another form, from that which is _agreeable and familiar_. and, therefore, aristotle, when he says to democritus, "if we shall indeed _dispute_ and _not_ follow after _similitudes_," as if he would tax democritus with being too full of _comparisons_, where he thought to reprove, really commended him.' there is no use in disputing in such a case, he thinks. 'for those whose doctrines are already _seated_ in popular opinion, have only to dispute or prove; but those whose doctrines are beyond the popular opinions, have a _double labour_; the one to make themselves conceived, and the other to prove and demonstrate; so that it is of _necessity with them to have recourse to similitudes_ and translations _to express themselves_. and, therefore, in the _infancy of learning_, and in rude times, when those conceptions which are now trivial, were then new, _the world was full of parables and similitudes_, for else would men either have passed over _without mark, or else_ rejected for paradoxes, that which was offered _before they had understood or judged_. so in divine learning, we see how frequent parables and tropes are, for it _is a rule in the doctrine of delivery, that every science_ which is _not consonant with presuppositions and prejudices_, must pray in aid of _similes_ and _allusions_.' the true master of the art of teaching will vary his method too, he tells us according to the _subject_ which he handles,--and the reader should note particularly the illustration of this position, the instance of this general necessity, which the author selects for the sake of pointing his meaning here, for it is here--precisely here--that we begin to touch the heart of that new method which the new science itself prescribed,--'the true teacher will vary his method according to the subject which he handles,' for there is a great difference in the delivery of _mathematics_, which are the most abstracted of sciences, and policy, which is the _most immersed_, and the opinion that 'uniformity of method, in multiformity of matter, is necessary,' has proved very hurtful to learning, for it tends to reduce learning to certain _empty_ and _barren_--note it,--_barren_-- 'generalities;'--(so important is the method as _that_; that it makes the difference between the fruitful and the barren, between the old and the new) 'being but the very _husks_ and _shells_ of sciences, all the _kernel_ being forced out and expressed with the torture and press of the method; and, _therefore_, as i did allow well of _particular topics_ for invention'--_therefore_--his science requires him to go into particulars, and as the necessary consequence of that, it requires freedom--_'therefore'_--as i did allow well of particular _topics of invention, 'so_ do i allow likewise of _particular methods of tradition_.' elsewhere,--in his novum organum--he quotes the scientific outlines and divisions of this very book, he quotes the very draught and outline of the new human science, which is the principal thing in it, and tells us plainly that he is perfectly aware that those new divisions, those essential differences, those true and radical forms in nature, which he has introduced here, in his doctrine of _human_ nature, will have no practical effect at all, as they are exhibited _here_; because they _are_ exhibited in this method which he is here criticising, that is, in empty and barren abstractions,-- because it was impossible for him to produce here anything but the _husks_ and _shells_ of that principal science, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method. but, at the same time, he gives us to understand, that these same shells and husks may be found in another place, with the kernels and _nuts_ in them, and that he has not taken so much pains to let us see in so many places, what new forms of delivery the new philosophy will require, merely for the sake of letting us see, at the same time, that when it came to _practice_, he himself stood by the old ones, and contented himself with barren abstractions, and generalities, the husks and shells of sciences, instead of aiming at particulars, and availing himself of these '_particular methods of tradition_.' he takes also this occasion to recommend a method which was found extremely serviceable at that time; namely, the method of teaching by aphorism, 'without any _show_ of an art or method; not merely because it tries the author, since aphorisms being made out of the _pith_ and _heart_ of sciences, _no man can write them who is not sound and grounded_,' who has not a system with its trunk and root, though he makes no show of it, but buries it and shows you here and there the points on the surface that are apt to look as if they had some underlying connection--not only because it tries the author, _but because they point to action_; for particulars being dispersed, do best agree with dispersed directions; and, moreover, aphorisms representing a broken knowledge, invite men _to inquire farther_, whereas methods, _carrying the show of a total_, do secure men as _if they were at farthest_, and it is the _advancement_ of learning that he is proposing. he suggests again, distinctly here, the rule he so often claims he has himself put in practice, elsewhere, that the use of confutation in the delivery of science, ought to be very sparing; and to serve to remove strong _preoccupations_ and _prejudgments_, and not to minister and excite disputations and doubts. for he says in another place, 'as alexander borgia was wont to say of the expedition of the french for naples, that they came with _chalk_ in their hands, _to mark up their lodgings_, and not with _weapons to fight_, so _i_ like better that entry of truth which cometh peaceably, with chalk to mark up those minds, which are capable to lodge and harbour it, than that which cometh with pugnacity and contention.' he alludes here too, in passing, to some other distinctions of method, which are already received, that of analysis and _synthesis_, or constitution, that of _concealment_, or cryptic, which he says 'he allows well of, though he has himself stood upon those which are least handled and observed.' he brings out his doctrine of the necessity of a method which shall include _particulars_ for _practical_ purposes also, under another head: here it is the limit of _rules_,--the propositions or precepts of _arts_ that he speaks of, and the _degree_ of particularity which these precepts ought to descend to. 'for every knowledge,' he says, 'may be fitly said to have a latitude and longitude, accounting the latitude towards _other sciences_' (for there are rules and propositions of such latitude as to include all arts, all sciences)--'and the longitude towards action, that is, from the greatest generality, to the most particular precept: and as to the degree of particularity to which a knowledge should descend,' though something must, of course, be left in all departments to the discretion of the practitioner, he thinks it is a question which will bear looking into in a general way; and that it might be possible to have rules in all departments, which would limit very much the necessity of individual experiment, and not leave us so much at the mercy of individual discretion in the most serious matters. philosophy, as he finds it, does not appear to be very helpful to practice, on account of its keeping to those general propositions, so much, as well as on some other accounts, and has fallen into bad repute, it seems, among men who find it necessary to make, without science, as they best can, rules of some sort;--rules that are capable of dealing with that quality in particulars which is apt to be called _obstinacy_ in this aspect of it. 'for we see remote and superficial generalities do but offer knowledge to scorn of practical men, and are no more aiding to practice, than an ortelius's _universal map_ is to direct the way between london and york.' and what is this itself but a universal map, this map of the advancement of learning? all this doctrine of the tradition of sciences, he produces under the head of the _method_ of their tradition, but in speaking of the _organ_ of it, he treats it _exclusively_ as the medium of tradition for _those sciences which require_ concealment, or admit only of a suggestive exhibition. and as he makes, too, the claim that he has himself given practical proof, in passing, of his proficiency in this art, and appeals to the skilful for the truth of this statement, the passage, at least, in which this assertion is made, will be likely to repay the inquiry which it invites. he begins by drawing our attention to the fact, that words are not the only representatives of things, and he says 'this is not an inconsiderable thing, _for while we are treating of the coin of intellectual_ matters, _it is_ pertinent to observe, that as money may be made of other materials besides gold and silver, so other marks of things may be invented besides words and letters.' and by way of illustrating the advantages of such a means of tradition, under certain disadvantages of position, he adduces as much in point, the case of periander, who being consulted how to preserve a tyranny _newly usurped_, bid the messenger _attend_ and _report what he saw him do_, and went into his garden and _topped all the highest flowers_; signifying that it consisted in the cutting off and keeping low of the nobility and grandees. and thus other apparently trivial, purely purposeless and sportive actions, might have a traditionary character of no small consequence, if the messenger were only given to understand beforehand, that the acts thus performed were axiomatical, pointing to rules of practice, that the forms were representative forms, whose '_real_' exhibition of the particular natures in question, was much more vivid and effective, much more memorable as well as _safe_, than any abstract statement of that philosophic truth, which is the truth of direction, could be. as to the '_accidents_ of words, which are measure, sound, and elevation of accent, and the sweetness and harshness of them,' even here the new science suggests a new rule, which is not without a remarkable relation to _that 'particular method of tradition_,' which the author tells us in another place, some parts of his new science required. 'this subject,' he says, 'involves some curious observations in rhetoric, but chiefly poesy, as we consider it in respect of the verse, and _not of the argument_; wherein, though men in learned tongues do tie themselves to _the ancient measures_, yet in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make _new measures of verses as of dances_.' the spirit of the new philosophy had a chance to speak out there for once, without intending, of course, to transcend that particular limit just laid down, namely, the measure of _verses_, and with that literal limitation, to the form of the verse, the remark is sufficiently suggestive; for he brings out from it at the next step, in the way of formula, the new principle, the new shaksperian principle of rhetoric: _in these things_ the sense is better judge than the art. and of the servile expressing antiquity in an unlike and an unfit subject, it is well said:--'_quod tempore antiquum videtur, id incongruitate est maxime novum_.'' but when he comes to speak specifically of _writing_ as a means of tradition, he confines his remarks to that particular kind of writing, which is agreed on betwixt particular persons, and called by the name of _cipher_, giving excellent reasons for this proceeding, impertinent as it may seem, to those who think that his only object is to make out a list and 'muster-roll of the arts and sciences';--stopping to tell us plainly that he knows what he is about, and that he has not brought in '_these private and retired arts_,' with so much stress, and under so many heads, in connection with 'the principal and supreme sciences,' and _the mode of their tradition_, without having some occasion for it. 'ciphers are commonly in letters, or alphabets, but _may be_ in words,' he says, proceeding to enumerate the different kinds, and furnishing on the spot, some pretty specimens of what may be done in the way of that kind which he calls 'doubles,' a kind which he is particularly fond of; one hears again the echo of those delicate, collateral sounds, which our friend, over the mountains, warned us of, declining to say any more about them in that place. in the later edition, he takes occasion to say, in this connection, 'that as writing in the received manner no way obstructs the _manner of pronunciation_, but leaves that _free_, an innovation in it is of no purpose.' and if a cipher be the proper name for a private method of writing, agreed on betwixt particular persons, it is certainly the name for the method which he proposes to adopt in _his_ tradition of the principal sciences; as he takes occasion to inform those whom it may concern, in an early portion of the work, and when he is occupied in the critical task of putting down some of the primary terms. 'i doubt not,' he says, by way of explanation, 'but it will easily appear to men of judgment, that in _this_ and _other particulars_, wheresoever _my conception and notion may differ from the ancient, i am studious to keep the ancient terms_.' surely there is no want of frankness here, so far as the men of judgment are concerned at least. and after condemning those innovators who have taken a different course, he says again, 'but to me on the other side that do desire as much as lieth in _my pen_, to ground a sociable intercourse between antiquity and _proficience_, it seemeth best to keep way with antiquity _usque ad aras_; and therefore to _retain the ancient_ terms, though i sometimes alter the _uses and definitions_, according to the moderate proceeding in civil government, where, although there be some alteration, yet that holdeth which tacitus _wisely_ noteth 'eadem magistratuum vocabula.' surely that is plain enough, especially if one has time to take into account the force and historic reach of that last illustration, 'eadem magistratuum vocabula.' in the later and enlarged edition of his work, he lays much stress upon the point that the cipher 'should be free from suspicion,' for he says, 'if a letter should come into the hands of such as have a power over the writer or receiver, though the cipher itself be trusty and impossible to decipher, it is still subject to _examination_ and _question_, and (as he says himself), 'to _avoid all suspicion_,' he introduces there a cipher in _letters_, which he invented in his youth in paris, 'having the highest perfection of a cipher, that of signifying _omnia per omnia_;' and for the same reason perhaps, that of 'avoiding all suspicion,' he quite omits there that very remarkable passage in the earlier work, in which he treats it as a medium of _tradition_, and takes pains to intimate his reasons for producing it in that connection, _with the principal and supreme sciences_. if it was, indeed, any object with him to avoid suspicion, and recent disclosures had then, perhaps, tended to sharpen somewhat the contemporary criticism; he _did well_, unquestionably, to omit that passage. but at the time when _that_ was written, he appears to be chiefly inclined to notice the remarkable facilities, which this style offers to an inventive genius. for he says, 'in regard of the rawness and unskilfulness of _the hands through which they pass_, the greatest matters, are sometimes carried in the _weakest ciphers_.' and that there may be no difficulty or mistake as to the reading of that passage, he immediately adds, 'in the enumeration of these private and retired arts, it may be thought i _seek to make a great muster-roll of sciences_, naming them for _show_ and _ostentation_, and _to little other purpose_. but'--note it--'but, let those which are _skilful in them judge, whether i bring them in only for appearance_, or whether, in that which i speak of them, though in few words, there be not _some seed of proficience_. and this must be remembered, that as there be many of great account in their countries and provinces, which, when they come up to the _seat of the estate_, are but of mean rank, and scarcely regarded; so these arts, ("these private and retired arts,") being here placed _with the principal and supreme sciences, seem_ petty things, yet to such as have chosen them to spend their labours and studies in them, they seem great matters. ("let those which are skilful in them, judge (after that) whether i bring them in only for appearance" or to _little_ other purpose).' that apology would seem sufficient, but we must know what these labours and studies are, before we can perceive the _depth_ of it. and if we have the patience to follow him but a step or two further, we shall find ourselves in the way of some very direct and accurate information, as to that. for we are coming now, in the order of the work we quote from, to that very part, which contains the point of all these labours and studies, the _end_ of them,--that part to which the science of nature in general, and the secret of this art of tradition, was a necessary _introduction_. [for this art of tradition makes the link between the new logic and the application of it to _human_ nature and human life.] thus far, this art has been treated as a means of simply _transferring_ knowledge, in such forms as the conditions of the advancement of learning prescribe,--forms adapted to the different stages of mental advancement, commencing with the lowest range of the common opinion in his time,--starting with the contemporary opinions of the majority, and reserving 'the secrets of knowledge,' for such as are able to receive them. thus far, it is the method, and the organ of the tradition of which he has spoken. but it is when he comes to speak of what he calls the _illustration_ of it, that the convergency of his design begins to be laid open to us, for this work is not what it may seem on the surface, as he takes pains to intimate to us--a 'mere muster-roll of sciences.' it is when he comes to tell us that he will have his 'truth in beauty dyed,' that he does not propose to have the new learning left in the form of argument and logic, or in the form of bare scientific fact, that he does not mean to appeal with it to the _reason_ only; that he will have it in a form in which it will be able to attract and allure men, and make them in love with it, a form in which it will be able to force its way into the will and the affections, and make a lodgement in the hearts of men, long ere it is able to reach the judgment;--it is not till he begins to bring out here, his new doctrine of the true end of rhetoric, and the use to which it ought to be put in subordination to science, that we begin to perceive the significance of the arrangement which brings this theory of an illustrated art of tradition into immediate connection with the new science of human nature and human life which the author is about to constitute,--so as to serve as an introduction to it--the arrangement which interposes this art of tradition, between the new logic and its application to human nature and human life--to policy and morality. he will not consent to have this so _powerful_ engine of popular influence, which the æsthetic art seems, to his eye, to offer, left out, in his scheme of scientific instrumentalities: he will not pass it by scornfully, as some other philosophers have done, treating it merely as a voluptuary art. he will have of it, something which shall differ, not in degree only, but in kind, from the art of the confectioner. he begins by stating frankly his reasons for making so much of it in this grave treatise, which is what it professes to be, a treatise on learning and its advancement. 'for although,' he says, 'in true value, it is inferior to _wisdom_, as it is said by god to moses, when he disabled himself for want of this faculty, "aaron shall be thy _speaker_, and thou shalt be to him as god;" _yet with people_ it is the more _mighty_, and it is just that which is mighty with the people--which he tells us in another place--is wanting. "for this people who knoweth not _the law_ are cursed."' but here he continues, 'for so solomon saith, "sapiens corde appellabitur prudens, sed dulcis eloquio majora reperiet;" signifying that profoundness of wisdom will help a man to a name or admiration,'--(it is something more than that which he is proposing as _his_ end)--'but that it is eloquence--which prevails in _active life_;' so that the very movement which brought philosophy down to earth, and put her upon reforming the practical life of men, was the movement which led her to assume, not instinctively, only, but by theory, and on principle, this new and beautiful apparel, this deep disguise of pleasure. she comes into the court with her case, and claims that this art, which has been treated hitherto as if it had some independent rights and laws of its own, is properly a subordinate of hers; a chattel gone astray, and setting up for itself as an art voluptuary. works on rhetorics are not wanting, the author reports. antiquity has laboured much in this field. notwithstanding, he says, there is something to be done here too, and the elizabethan æsthetics must be begun also in the _prima philosophia_. 'notwithstanding,' he continues, 'to stir the earth a little about the _roots_ of this science, as we have done of the rest; the duty and office of rhetoric is to apply _reason to imagination for the better moving of_ the will; for we see reason is disturbed in the administration of the will by three means; by sophism, which pertains to logic; by imagination or impression, which pertains to rhetoric; and by passion or affection, which pertains to morality.' so in this negotiation within ourselves, men are _undermined_ by inconsequences, _solicited and importuned_ by impressions and observations, and _transported_ by _passions_. neither is the nature of man so unfortunately built, as that these _powers and arts_ should have force to _disturb_ reason and not to _establish_ and _advance_ it. for the end of logic is to teach a form of logic to secure reason, not to entrap it. the end of morality is to procure the affections to obey reason, and not to invade it. the _end_ of rhetoric is to _fill the imagination_ to second reason, and not to _oppress_ it. for these abuses of arts come in but _ex obliquo_ for caution. that is the real original english doctrine of art:--that is the doctrine of the age of elizabeth, at least, as it stands in that queen's english, and though it may be very far from being orthodox at present, it is the doctrine which must determine the rule of any successful interpretation of works of art composed on that theory. 'and, therefore,' he proceeds to say, 'it was great injustice in plato, though springing out of a just hatred of the rhetoricians of his time, to esteem of rhetoric but as a voluptuary art, resembling it to cookery that did mar wholesome meats, and help unwholesome, by variety of sauces _to the pleasure of the taste_.' 'and therefore, as plato said eloquently, "that virtue, if she could be seen, would move great love and affection, so, seeing that she cannot be showed to the sense by corporal shape, the next degree is to show her to the imagination _in lively representation_": _for_ to show her to _reason only_, in _subtilty of argument_ was a thing ever derided in--_chrysippus and many of the stoics--who thought to thrust virtue upon men_ by _sharp disputations and conclusions, which have no sympathy with the will of man_.' 'again, if the affections in themselves were pliant and obedient to reason, it were true there should be no great use of persuasions and injunctions to the will, more than of _naked propositions and proofs;_ but in regard of the continual mutinies and seditions of the affections, video meliora proboque deteriora sequor; 'reason would become captive and servile, if eloquence of persuasions did not practise and win the imagination from the affections part, and contract a confederacy between the reason and the imagination, against the affections; for _the affections themselves_ carry ever an appetite to _good_, as reason doth. _the difference is_'--mark it--'the difference is, that the affection beholdeth merely _the present; reason_ beholdeth the future and _sum_ of time. and therefore the present _filling the imagination most_, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote, _appear as present_, then, _upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth_.' not less important than that is this art in his scheme of learning. no wonder that the department of learning which he refers to the imagination should take that prime place in his grand division of it, and be preferred deliberately and on principle to the two others. 'logic differeth from rhetoric chiefly in this, that logic handleth reason exact and in truth, and rhetoric handleth it as it is planted in popular opinions and manners. and therefore _aristotle_ doth _wisely_ place rhetoric as between logic on the one side, and moral or civil knowledge on the other, (and when we come to put together the works of this author, we shall find that _that_ and none other is the place it takes in _his_ system, that that is just the bridge it makes in his plan of operations.)' the proofs and demonstrations of logic _are towards all men indifferent and the same_: but the proofs and persuasions of rhetoric _ought to differ according to the auditors_. orpheus in sylvis inter delphinas arion. which application, in perfection of idea, ought to extend so far, that if a man should speak of _the same thing to several persons_, he should speak to them _all respectively, and several ways_; and there was a great folio written on this plan which came out in those days dedicated 'to the great variety of readers. from the most able to him that can but spell'; (this is just the doctrine, too, which the continental philosopher sets forth we see);--though this '_politic_ part of eloquence in private speech,' he goes on to say here, 'it is easy for the greatest orators _to want; whilst by observing their well graced forms of speech, they lose the volubility_ of application; and _therefore_ it shall not be _amiss_ to recommend this _to better inquiry_, not being curious whether we place it here, or in that part which concerneth _policy._' certainly one would not be apt to infer from that decided preference which the author himself manifests here for those stately and well-graced forms of speech, judging _merely_ from the style of this performance at least, one would not be inclined to suspect that he himself had ever been concerned in any literary enterprises, or was like to be, in which that _volubility_ of application which he appears to think desirable, was successfully put in practice. but we must remember, that he was just the man who was capable of conceiving of a _variety_ of _styles adapted to different exigencies_, if we would have the key to this style in particular. but we must look a little at these labours and studies themselves, which required such elaborate and splendid arts of delivery, if we would fully satisfy ourselves, as to whether this author really had any purpose after all in bringing them in here beyond that of mere ostentation, and for the sake of completing his muster-roll of the sciences. above, we see an intimation, that the divisions of the subject are, after all, not so 'curious' but that the inquiry might possibly be resumed again in other connections, and in the particular connection specified, namely, in that part which concerneth _policy_. in that which follows, the new science of human nature and human life--which is the end and term of this treatise, we are told--is brought out under the two heads of morality and policy; and it is necessary to look into _both_ these departments in order to find what application he was proposing to make of this art and science of tradition and delivery, and in order to see what place--what vital place it occupied in his system. chapter ii. the science of policy. 'policy is the most immersed.'--_advancement of learning_. reversing the philosophic order, we glance first into that new department of science which the author is here boldly undertaking to constitute under the above name, because in this his own practical designs, and rules of proceeding, are more clearly laid open, and the place which is assigned in his system to that radical science, for which these arts of delivery and tradition are chiefly wanting, is distinctly pointed out. and, moreover, in this department of policy itself, in marking out one of the grand divisions of it, we find him particularly noticing, and openly insisting on, the form of delivery and inculcation which the new science must take here, that is, if it is going to be at all available as a science of practice. in this so-called plan for the advancement of learning, the author proceeds, as we all know, by noticing _the deficiencies_ in human learning as he finds it; and everywhere it is that radical deficiency, which leaves human life and human conduct in the dark, while the philosophers are busied with their controversies and wordy speculations. and in that part of his inventory where he puts down as wanting a science of practice in those every-day affairs and incidents, in which the life of man is most conversant, embodying axioms of practice that shall save men the wretched mistakes and blunders of which the individual life is so largely made up; blunders which are inevitable, so long as men are left here, to natural human ignorance, to uncollected individual experience, or to the shrewdest empiricism;--in this so original and interesting part of the work, he takes pains to tell us at length, that that which he has before put down under the head of '_delivery_' as a point of form and method, becomes here essential as a point of substance also. it is not merely that he will have his axioms and precepts of direction digested from the facts, instead of being made out of the teacher's own brains, but he will have the facts themselves, in all their stubbornness and opposition to the teacher's preconceptions, for the body of the discourse, and the precepts accommodated thereto, instead of having the precepts for the body of the discourse, and the facts brought in to wait upon them. that is the form of the practical doctrine. he regrets that this part of a true learning has not been collected hitherto into writing, to the great derogation of learning, and the professors of learning; for from this proceeds the popular opinion which has passed into an adage, that there is no great concurrence between wisdom and learning. the deficiency here is well nigh total he says: 'but for the wisdom of business, wherein man's life is most conversant, there be no books of it, except some few scattered advertisements, that have no proportion to the _magnitude of the subject_. for if books were written of this, as of the other, i doubt not but _learned men_ with _mean experience_ would far excel men of _long experience without learning_, and _outshoot them with their own bow_. neither need it be thought that this knowledge is too variable to fall under precept,' he says; and he mentions the fact, that in old rome, so renowned for practical ability, in its wisest and saddest times, there were professors of this learning, that were known for general wise men, who used to walk at certain hours in the place, and give _advice_ to private citizens, who came to consult with them of the _marriage_ of _a daughter_, for instance, or the _employing_ of _a son_, or of _an accusation_, or of a _purchase or bargain_, and _every other occasion incident to man's life_. there is a pretty scheme laid out truly. have _we_ any general wise man, or ghost of one, who walks up and down at certain hours and gives advice on such topics? however that may be, this philosopher does not despair of such a science. 'so,' he says, commenting on that roman custom, 'there is a wisdom of council and advice, even in private cases, arising out of a universal _insight into the affairs_ of _the world_, which is _used_ indeed upon _particular cases propounded_, but is gathered by general _observation_ of _cases_ of _like nature_.' and fortifying himself with the example of solomon, after collecting a string of texts from the sacred proverbs, he adds, 'though they are capable, of course, of a more divine interpretation, taking them as instructions for life, they might have received large discourse, if he would have _broken them_ and _illustrated them_, by deducements and examples. nor was this in use with the hebrews only, but it is generally to be found in the wisdom of the more ancient times, that as men found out any observation that they thought was _good for life_, they would gather it, and express it in _parable_, or _aphorism_, or _fable_.' but for _fables_, they were vicegerents and supplies, _where examples failed_. now that the times abound with history, the aim is better when the mark is alive. and, therefore, he recommends as the form of writing, 'which is of all others fittest for this variable argument, discourses upon histories and examples: for knowledge drawn freshly, _and in our view_, out of particulars, _knoweth the way best to particulars again_; and it hath much greater life _for practice_, when _the discourse attendeth upon the example_, than when the example attendeth upon the discourse. for this is no point of order as it seemeth at first' (indeed it is not, it is a point as substantial as the difference between the old learning of the world and the new)--'this is no point of order, but of substance. for when the example is the _ground_ being set down in a history at large, it is set down with all circumstances, which may _sometimes control_ the discourse thereupon made, and sometimes supply it as _a very pattern for action_; whereas the examples which are alleged _for the discourse's sake_, are cited succinctly and without _particularity_, and carry a _servile aspect_ towards the discourse which they are brought in to make good.' the question of method is here, as we see, incidentally introduced; but it is to be noted, and it makes one of the rules for the interpretation of that particular kind of style which is under consideration, that in this casual and secondary introduction of a subject, we often get shrewder hints of the author's real intention than we do in those parts of the work where it is openly and distinctly treated; at least, these scattered and apparently accidental hints,--these dispersed directions, often contain the key for the 'second' reading, which he openly bespeaks for the more open and elaborate discussion. and thus we are able to collect, from every part of this proposal for a practical and progressive human learning, based on the defects of the unpractical and stationary learning which the world has hitherto been contented with, the author's opinion as to the form of delivery and inculcation best adapted to effect the proposed object under the given conditions. this question of form runs naturally through the whole work, and comes out in specifications of a very particular and significant kind under some of its divisions, as we shall see. but everywhere we find the point insisted on, which we have just seen so clearly brought out, in the department which was to contain the axioms of success in private life. whatever the particular form may be, everywhere we come upon this general rule. whatever the particular form may be, everywhere it is to be one in which the facts shall have the precedence, and the conclusions shall follow; and not one in which the conclusions stand first, and the facts are brought in to make them good. and this very circumstance is enough of itself to show that the form of this new doctrine will be thus far new, as new as the doctrine itself; that the new learning will be found in some form very different, at least, from that which the philosophers and professed teachers were then making use of in their didactic discourses, in some form so much more lively than that, and so much less oracular, that it would, perhaps, appear at first, to those accustomed only to the other, not to be any kind of learning at all, but something very different from that. but this is not the only point in the general doctrine of delivery which we find produced again in its specific applications. through all the divisions of this discourse on learning, and not in that part of it only in which the art of its tradition is openly treated, we find that the prescribed form of it is one which will adapt it to the popular preconceptions; and that it must be a form which will make it not only universally acceptable, but universally attractive; that it is not only a form which will throw open the gates of the new school to all comers, but one that will bring in mankind to its benches. not under the head of method only, or under the head of delivery and tradition, but in those parts of the work in which the substance of the new learning is treated, we find dispersed intimations and positive assertions, that the form of it is, at the same time, popular and enigmatical,--not openly philosophical, and not 'magisterial,'-- but insensibly didactic; and that it is, in its principal and higher departments--in those departments on which this plan for the human relief concentrates its forces--essentially poetical. that is what we find in the body of the work; and the author repeats in detail what he has before made a point of telling us, in general, under this head of delivery and tradition of knowledge, that he sees no reason why that same instrument, which is so powerful for delusion and error, should not be restored to its true uses as an instrument of the human advancement, and a vehicle, though a veiled _one_--a beautiful and universally-welcome vehicle--for bringing in on this globe theatre the knowledges that men are most in need of. the doctrine which is to be conveyed in this so subtle and artistic manner is none other than the doctrine of human nature and human life, or, as this author describes it here, the scientific doctrine of morality and policy. it is that new doctrine of human nature and human life which the science of nature in general creates. it is the light which universal science, collected from the continent of nature, gives to that insular portion of it 'which is the end and term of natural philosophy in the intention of man.' under these heads of _morality_ and _policy_, the whole subject is treated here. but to return to the latter. the question of civil government is, in the light of this science, a very difficult one; and this philosopher, like the one we have already quoted on this subject, is disposed to look with much suspicion on propositions for violent and sudden renovations in the state, and immediate abolitions and cures of social evil. he too takes a naturalist's estimate of those larger wholes, and their virtues, and faculties of resistance. 'civil knowledge is conversant about a subject,' he says, 'which is, of all others, _most immersed in matter_, and hardliest reduced to axiom. _nevertheless_, as cato, the censor, said, "that the romans were like sheep, for that a man might better drive a flock of them than one of them, for, in a flock, if you could get some few to go right, the rest would follow;" _so_ in that respect, moral philosophy _is more difficult than policy_. again, moral philosophy propoundeth to itself the framing of _internal_ goodness, but civil knowledge requireth only an _external_ goodness, for that, as to society, sufficeth. again, states, as great engines, move slowly, _and are not so soon put out of frame_;' (that is what our foreign statist thought also) 'for, as in egypt the seven good years sustained the seven bad, so governments for a time, well grounded, do bear out errors following. but _the resolution of particular persons_ is _more suddenly subverted. these respects do somewhat qualify the extreme difficulty of civil knowledge_.' this is the point of attack, then,--this is the point of scientific attack,--the resolution of particular persons. he has showed us where the extreme difficulty of this subject appears to lie in his mind, and he has quietly pointed, at the same time, to that place of resistance in the structure of the state, which is the key to the whole position. he has marked the spot exactly where he intends to commence his political operations. for he has discovered a point there, which admits of being operated on, by such engines as a feeble man like him, or a few such together, perhaps, may command. it is the new science that they are going to converge on that point precisely, namely the resolution of particular persons. it is the _novum organum_ that this one is bringing up, in all its finish, for the assault of that particular quarter. hard as that old wall is, great as the faculty of conservation is in these old structures that hold by time, there is one element running all through it, these chemists find, which _is_ within their power, namely, the resolution of particular persons. it is the science of the conformation of the parts, it is the constitutional structure of the human nature, which, in its scientific development, makes men, naturally, members of communities, beautiful and felicitous parts of states,--it is that which the man of science will _begin_ with. if you will let him have that part of the field to work in undisturbed, he will agree not to meddle with the state. and beside those general reasons, already quoted, which tend to prevent him from urging the immediate application of his science to this 'larger whole,' for its wholesale relief and cure, he ventures upon some specifications and particulars, when he comes to treat distinctly of government itself, and assign to it its place in his new science of affairs. if one were to judge by the space he has openly given it on his paper in this plan for the human advancement and relief, one would infer that it must be a very small matter in his estimate of agencies; but looking a little more closely, we find that it is not that at all in his esteem, that it is anything but a matter of little consequence. it was enough for him, at such a time, to be allowed to put down the fact that the art of it was properly scientific, and included in his plan, and to indicate the kind of science that is wanting to it; for the rest, he gives us to understand that he has himself fallen on such felicitous times, and finds that affair in the hands of a person so extremely learned in it, that there is really nothing to be said. and being thrown into this state of speechless reverence and admiration, he considers that the most meritorious thing he can do, is to pass to the other parts of his discourse with as little delay as possible. it is a very short paragraph indeed for so long a subject; but, short as it is, it is not less pithy, and it contains reasons why it should not be longer, and why that new torch of science which he is bringing in upon the human affairs generally, cannot be permitted to enter that department of them in his time. 'the first is, that it is a part of knowledge secret and retired in _both_ those respects in which things are deemed secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to know, and _some_ because they are not fit to utter. again, the wisdom of _antiquity_, the _shadows whereof are in the poets_, in the description of torments and pains, _next unto the crime of rebellion_, which was the _giants_ offence, doth detest _the crime of futility_, as in sisyphus and tantalus. but this was meant of _particulars_. nevertheless, _even unto the general rules and discourses_ of policy and government, [it extends; for even here] there is due a _reverent_ handling.' and after having briefly indicated the comprehension 'of this science,' and shown that it is the thing he is treating under other heads, he concludes, 'but considering that _i write to a king_ who is a _master_ of it, and is _so well assisted_, i think it decent to pass over _this part_ in silence, as willing to obtain the certificate which one of the ancient philosophers aspired unto; who being silent when others contended to make demonstration of their abilities by speech, desired it might be certified for _his part_ that there was one that knew how to hold his peace.' and having thus distinctly cleared himself of any suspicion of a disposition to introduce scientific inquiry and innovation into departments not then open to a procedure of that sort, his proposal for an advancement of learning in other quarters was, of course, less liable to criticism. but even that part of the subject to which he limits himself involves, as we shall see, an incidental reference to this, from which he here so modestly retires, and affords no inconsiderable scope for that genius which was by nature so irresistibly impelled, in one way or another, to the criticism and reformation of the larger wholes. he retires from the open assault, but it is only to go deeper into his subject. he is constituting the science of that from which the state proceeds. he is analyzing the state, and searching out in the integral parts of it, that which makes true _states_ impossible. he has found the revolutionary forces in their simple forms, and is content to treat them in these. he is bestowing all his pains upon an art that will develop--on scientific principles, by simply attending to the natural laws, as they obtain in the human kind, royalties, and nobilities, and liege-men of all degrees--an art that will make all kinds of pieces that the structure of the state requires. chapter iii. the science of morality. section i.--the exemplar of good. 'nature craves all dues to be rendered to their owners.' but this great innovator is busying himself here with drawing up a report of the deficiencies in learning; and though he is the first to propose a plan and method by which men shall build up, systematically and scientifically, a knowledge of _nature in general_, instead of throwing themselves altogether upon their own preconceptions and abstract controversial theories, after all, the principal deficiency which he has to mark--that to which, even in this dry report, he finds himself constrained to affix some notes of admiration--this principal deficiency is the science of man--the science of _human nature_ itself. and the reason of this deficiency is, that very deficiency before named; it is that very act of shutting himself up to his own theories which leaves the thinker without a _science_ of himself. 'for it is the greatest proof of want of skill, to investigate _the nature_ of any object in itself alone; and, in general, those very things which are considered as secret, are manifested and common in other objects, but will never be clearly seen if the contemplations and experiments of men be directed _to themselves alone_.' it is this science of nature in general which makes the science of _human nature_ for the first time possible; and that is the end and term of the new philosophy,--so the inventor of it tells us. and the moment that he comes in with that new torch, which he has been out into 'the continent of nature' to light,--the moment that he comes back with it, into this old debateable ground of the schools, and begins to apply it to that element in the human life in which the scientific innovation appears to be chiefly demanded, 'most of the controversies,' as he tells us very simply--'most of the controversies, wherein moral philosophy is conversant, are judged and determined by it.' but here is the bold and startling criticism with which he commences his approach to this subject; here is the ground which he makes at the first step; this is the ground of his scientific innovation; not less important than this, is the field which he finds unoccupied. in the handling of this science he says, (the science of 'the appetite and will of man'), 'those which have written seem to me to have done as if a man that _professed to teach to write_ did only exhibit _fair copies_ of alphabets _and_ letters joined, without giving any precepts or directions for the carriage of the hand, or the framing of the letters; so have they made good and fair _exemplars_ and _copies_, carrying the _draughts_ and _portraitures_ of _good, virtue, duty, felicity_; propounding them, well described, as the true _objects_ and _scopes_ of man's will and designs; _but how to attain these excellent marks_, and _how_ to _frame_ and _subdue_ the _will_ of _man_ to become _true_ and _conformable_ to _these pursuits_, they _pass it over altogether_, or slightly and _unprofitably_; for it is not,' he says, 'certain scattered glances and touches that can excuse the _absence_ of this _part_ of--science. 'the reason of this omission,' he supposes, 'to be that hidden rock, whereupon both this and many other barks of knowledge have been cast away, which is, that men have despised to be conversant in _ordinary and common matters_, the _judicious direction whereof, nevertheless_, is the wisest doctrine; for life consisteth not in novelties nor _subtleties_, but, _contrariwise_, they have compounded sciences _chiefly_ of _a certain_ resplendent or lustrous mass of matter, _chosen to give glory_ either to the _subtlety_ of _disputations_, or to the _eloquence_ of _discourses_.' but his theory of teaching is, that 'doctrine should be such as should make men in love with the _lesson_, and not with the teacher; being directed to the auditor's benefit, and not to the author's commendation.' _neither_ needed men of so excellent parts to have despaired of a fortune which the poet virgil promised himself, and, indeed, obtained, who got as much glory of eloquence, wit, and learning, in the expressing of the observations of husbandry _as of the heroical acts of �neas_. 'nec sum animi dubius, verbis ea vincere magnum quam sit, et angustis hunc addere rebus honorum.' _georg_. iii. . so, then, there is room for a new virgil, but his theme is _here_;--one who need not despair, if he be able to bring to his subject those excellent parts this author speaks of, of getting as much glory of eloquence, wit, and learning, in the expressing of the _observations of this husbandry_, as those have had who have sketched the ideal forms of the human life, the dream of what should be. the copies and exemplars of good,--that vision of heaven,--that idea of felicity, and beauty, and goodness that the human soul brings with it, like a memory,--those celestial shapes that the thought and heart of man, by a law in nature, project,--that garden of delights that all men remember, and yearn for, and aspire to, and will have, in one form or another, in delicate air patterns, or gross deceiving images,--that large, intense, ideal good which men desire--that perfection and felicity, so far above the rude mocking realities which experience brings them,--that, _that_ has had its poets. no lack of these exemplars the historian finds, when he comes to make out his report of the condition of his kind--where he comes to bring in his inventory of the human estate: when so much is wanting, that good he reports '_not_ deficient.' edens in plenty,--gods, and demi-gods, and heroes, _not_ wanting; the purest abstract notions of virtue and felicity, the most poetic embodiments of them, are put down among the goods which the human estate, as it is, comprehends. this part of the subject appears, to the critical reviewer, to have been exhausted by the poets and artists that mankind has always employed to supply its wants in this field. no room for a poet here! the draught of the ideal eden is finished;--the divine exemplar is finished; that which is wanting is,--_the husbandry thereunto_. till now, the philosophers and poetic teachers had always taken their stand at once, on the topmost peak of olympus, pouring down volleys of scorn, and amazement, and reprehension, upon the vulgar nature they saw beneath, made out of the dust of the ground, and qualified with the essential attributes of that material,--kindled, indeed, with a breath of heaven, but made out of clay,--different kinds of clay,--with more or less of the promethean spark in it; but always clay, of one kind or another, and always compelled to listen to the laws that are common to the kinds of that substance. and it was to this creature, thus bound by nature, thus _doubly_ bound,--'crawling between earth and heaven,' as the poet has it,--that these winged philosophers on the ideal cliffs, thought it enough to issue their mandates, commanding it to renounce its conditions, to ignore its laws, and come up thither at a word,--at a leap,--making no ado about it. 'i can call spirits from the vasty deep.' 'and so can i, and so can any man;' says the new philosopher-- 'but will they _come?_ _will they come_--when you do call for them?' it was simply a command, that this dirty earth should convert itself straight into elysian lilies, and bloom out, at a word, with roses of paradise. excellent patterns, celestial exemplars, of the things required were held up to it; and endless declamation and argument why it should be that, and not the other, were not wanting:--but as to any scientific inquiry into the nature of the thing on which this form was to be superinduced, as to any _scientific_ exhibition of the form itself which was to be superinduced, these so essential conditions of the proposed result, were in this case alike wanting. the position which these reformers occupy, is one so high, that the question of different kinds of soils, and chemical analyses and experiments, would not come within their range at all; and 'the resplendent or lustrous mass of matter,' of which their sciences are compounded, chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations or to the eloquence of discourses, would not bear any such vulgar admixture. it would make a terrible jar in the rhythm, which those large generalizations naturally flow in, to undertake to introduce into them any such points of detail. and the new teacher will have a mountain too; but it will be one that 'overlooks the vale,' and he will have a rock-cut-stair to its utmost summit. he is one who will undertake this despised unlustrous matter of which our ordinary human life consists, and make a science of it, building up its generalizations from its particulars, and observing the actual reality,--the thing as it is, freshly, for that purpose; and not omitting any detail,--the poorest. the poets who had undertaken this theme before had been so absorbed with the idea of what man should be, that they could only glance at him as he is: the idea of a science of him, was not of course, to be thought of. there was but one name for the creature, indeed, in their vocabulary and doctrine, and that was one which simply seized and embodied the general fact, the unquestionable historic fact, that he has not been able hitherto to attain to his ideal type in nature, or indeed to make any satisfactory approximation to it. but when the committee of inquiry sits at last, and the business begins to assume a systematic form, even the science of that ideal good, that exemplar and pattern of good, which men have been busy on so long,--the _science_ of it,--is put down as 'wanting,' and the _science_ of the _husbandry thereunto_, '_wholly deficient_.' and the report is, that this new argument, notwithstanding its every-day theme, is one that admits of being sung also; and that the virgil who is able to compose 'these georgies of the mind,' may promise himself fame, though his end is one that will enable him to forego it. let us see if we can find any further track of him and his great argument, whether in prose or verse;--this poet who cares not whether he has his 'singing robes' about him or not, so he can express and put upon record his new 'observations of this husbandry.' the exemplar of good.--'and surely,' he continues, 'if the purpose be in good earnest, _not to write at leisure that which men may read at leisure_'--note it--that which men may read at leisure--'but really to _instruct_ and _suborn action and active life_, these georgics of the mind, concerning the husbandry and tillage thereof, are no less worthy than _the heroical descriptions of virtue, duty_, and _felicity_; therefore the _main and primitive division_ of moral knowledge, seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regimen or culture of the mind, the one describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules _how_ to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto.' as to '_the nature of good_, positive or simple,' the writers on this subject have, he says, 'set it down excellently, in describing the forms of virtue and duty, with their situations, and postures, in distributing them into their kinds, parts, provinces, actions, and administrations, and the like: nay, farther, they have commended them to man's nature and spirit, with great quickness of argument, and beauty of persuasions; yea, and fortified and entrenched them, _as much as discourse can do_, against corrupt and popular opinions. and for the degrees and comparative nature of good, they have excellently handled it also.'--that part deserveth to be reported for 'excellently laboured.' what is it that is wanting then? what radical, fatal defect is it that he finds even in the doctrine of the nature of good? what is the difficulty with this platform and exemplar of good as he finds it, notwithstanding the praise he has bestowed on it? the difficulty is, that it is not scientific. it is not broad enough. it is _special_, it is limited to the species, but it is not properly, it is not effectively, specific, because it is not connected with the doctrine of nature in general. it does not strike to those universal original principles, those simple powers which determine the actual historic laws and make the nature of things itself. this is the criticism, therefore, with which this critic of the learning of the world as he finds it, is constrained to qualify that commendation. _notwithstanding_, if before they had come to _the popular and received notions of 'vice'_ and _'virtue,' 'pleasure'_ and _'pain,'_ and the rest, they had stayed a little longer upon the inquiry concerning the roots of good and evil, and the strings to those roots, they had given, in my opinion, _a great light to that which followed_, and especially _if they had consulted with nature_, they had made their doctrines less prolix and more profound, which being by them in part omitted, and in part handled with much confusion, we will endeavour to resume and open in a more clear manner. here then, is the preparation of the platform or exemplar of good, the scientific platform of virtue and felicity; going behind the popular notion of vice and virtue, pain and pleasure, and the like, he strikes at once to the nature of good, as it is 'formed in everything,' for the foundation of this specific science. he lays the beams of it, in the axioms and definitions of his '_prima philosophia_' 'which do not fall within the compass of the special parts of science, but are more common and of a higher stage, for the distributions and partitions of knowledge are _not_ like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch but in a point, but are like _branches of a tree that meet in a stem_ which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance before it comes to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs,' and it is not the narrow and specific observation on which the popular notions are framed, but the scientific, which is needed for the new ethics,--the new knowledge, which here too, is power. he must detect and recognise here also, he must track even into the nature of man, those universal 'footsteps' which are but 'the same footsteps of nature treading or printing in different substances.' 'there is formed in _everything_ a double nature of good, the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, and the other, as it is a part or member of a greater body whereof the latter is in _degree_ the greater and the worthier, because it tendeth to the conservation of a more general form.... this double nature of good, and the comparison thereof, is much more engraven upon man, _if he degenerate not_, unto whom the conservation of duty to the public ought _to be much more precious_ than the conservation of _life and being_;' and, by way of illustration, he mentions first the case of pompey the great, 'who being in commission of purveyance for a famine at rome, and being dissuaded with great vehemency by his friends, that he should not hazard himself to sea in an extremity of weather, he said only to them, "_necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam_."' but, he adds, 'it may be _truly_ affirmed, that there was never any philosophy, religion, or other discipline, which did so plainly and highly _exalt_ the good which is _communicative_, and _depress_ the good which is private and particular, as the _holy faith_, well declaring that it was the _same god_ that gave the _christian law to men_, who gave those laws of nature to inanimate creatures that we spake of before; for we read that the elected saints of god have wished themselves anathematised, and razed out of the book of life, in an ecstasy of charity, and infinite feeling of communion.' and having first made good his assertion, that this being set down, and _strongly planted_, determines most of the _controversies_ wherein moral philosophy is conversant, he proceeds to develop still further these scientific notions of good and evil, which he has gone below the popular notions and into the nature of things to find, these scientific notions, which, because they are scientific, he has still to go out of the specific nature to define; and when he comes to nail down his scientific platform of the _human_ good with them, when he comes to strike their clear and simple lines, deep as the universal constitution of things, through the popular terms, and clear up the old confused theories with them, we find that what he said of them beforehand was true; they do indeed throw great light upon that which follows. to that exclusive, incommunicative good which inheres in the private and particular nature,--and he does not call it any hard names at all from his scientific platform; indeed in the vocabulary of the naturalist we are told, that these names are omitted, 'for we call a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools their folly,'--that exclusive good he finds both passive and active, and this also is one of those primary distinctions which 'is formed in all things,' and so too is the _subdivision_ of passive good which follows. 'for there is impressed upon _all things_ a triple desire, or appetite, proceeding from _love to themselves_; one, of preserving and continuing their form; another, of _advancing_ and perfecting their form; and a third, of multiplying and extending their form upon other things; whereof the multiplying or signature of it upon other things, is that which we handled by the name of active good.' but passive good includes both conservation and perfection, or _advancement_, which latter is the highest degree of passive good. for to preserve in state is the less; to preserve with advancement is the greater. as to _man_, his approach or assumption to divine or angelical nature is the perfection of _his_ form, the error or false imitation of which good is that which is the tempest of human life. so we have heard before; but in the doctrine which we had before, it was the dogma,--the dogma whose inspiration and divinity each soul recognized; to whose utterance each soul responded, as deep calleth unto deep,--it was the law, the divine law, and not the _science of it_, that was given. and having deduced 'that good of man which is private and particular, as far as seemeth fit,' he returns 'to that good of man which respects and beholds society,' which he terms duty, because the term of duty is more proper to a mind well framed and disposed towards others, as the term of virtue is applied to a mind well formed and composed in itself; though neither can a man understand _virtue, without some relation to society_, nor _duty, without an inward disposition_. but he wishes us to understand and remember, now that he comes out of the particular nature, and begins to look towards society with this term of duty, that he is still dealing with 'the will of particular persons,' that it is still the science of _morals_, and not _politics_, that he is meddling with. 'this part may seem at first,' he says, 'to pertain to science civil and politic, but not if it be well observed; for it concerneth the regiment and _government of every man over himself_, and not over others.' and this is the plan which he has marked out in his doctrine of government as the most hopeful point in which to _commence_ political reformations; and one cannot but observe, that if this art and science should be successfully cultivated, the one which he dismisses so briefly would be cleared at once of some of those difficulties, which rendered any more direct treatment of it at that time unadvisable. this part of learning concerneth then 'the regiment and government of every man over himself, and not over others.' '_as_ in architecture _the direction_ of _the framing_ the _posts, beams_, and _other parts_ of _building_, is not the same with the manner of joining them and erecting the building; and in mechanicals, the direction _how_ to _frame_ an instrument or engine is not the same with the manner of _setting it on work_, and employing it; _and yet, nevertheless_, in expressing of the one, you _incidentally_ express the _aptness_ towards the other [hear] _so_ the doctrine of the conjugation of men in society differeth from _that_ of _their conformity thereunto_.' the received doctrine of that conjugation certainly appeared to; and the more this scientific doctrine of the parts, and the conformity thereunto, is incidentally expressed,--the more the scientific direction _how to frame_ the instrument or engine, is opened, the more this difference becomes apparent. but even in limiting himself to the individual human nature as it is developed in particular persons, regarding society only as it is incidental to that, even in putting down his new scientific platform of the good that the appetite and will of man naturally seeks, and in marking out scientifically its _degrees_ and _kinds_, he gives us an opportunity to perceive in passing, that he is not altogether without occasion for the use of that particular art, with its peculiar 'organs' and 'methods' and 'illustration,' which he recommends under so many heads in his treatise on that subject, for the delivery or tradition of knowledges, which tend to _innovation_ and _advancement_--knowledge which is 'progressive' and 'foreign from opinions received.' this doctrine of _duty_ is sub-divided into two parts; the _common_ duty of every man as a man, or a member of a state, which is that part of the platform and exemplar of good, he has before reported as 'extant, and well laboured.' the other is the _respective_ or _special_ duty of every man in his profession, vocation and place; and it is under this head of the _special_ and _respective_ duties of places, vocations and professions, where the subject begins to grow narrow and pointed, where it assumes immediately, the most critical aspects,--it is here that his new arts of delivery and tradition come in to such good purpose, and stand him instead of other weapons. for this is one of those cases precisely, which the philosopher on the mountain alluded to, where an argument is set on foot at the table of a man of prodigious fortune, when the man himself is present. nowhere, perhaps,--in his freest forms of writing, does he give a better reason, for that so deliberate and settled determination, which he so openly declares, and everywhere so stedfastly manifests, not to put himself in an antagonistic attitude towards opinions, and vocations, and professions, as they stood authorized in his time. nowhere does he venture on a more striking comparison or simile, for the purpose of setting forth that point vividly, and impressing it on the imagination of the reader. 'the first of these [sub-divisions of duty] is extant, and well laboured, as hath been said. the second, likewise, i may report rather dispersed than deficient; which _manner of dispersed argument i acknowledge to be best_; [it is one he is much given to;] for who can take upon him to write of the proper duty, virtue, _challenge_ and _right_ of every several vocation, profession and place? [--truly?--] for although sometimes a looker on, may see more than a gamester, and there be a proverb more arrogant than sound, 'that the _vale_ best discovereth _the hill_,' yet there is small doubt, that men can write best, and most really and materially of their own professions,' and it is to be wished, he says, 'as that which would make learning, indeed, solid and fruitful, that active men would, or could, become writers.' and he proceeds to mention opportunely in that connection, a case very much in point, as far as he is concerned, but not on the face of it, so immediately to the purpose, as that which follows. it will, however, perhaps, repay that very careful reading of it, which will be necessary, in order to bring out its pertinence in this connection. and we shall, perhaps, not lose time ourselves, by taking, as we pass, the glimpse which this author sees fit to give us, of the facilities and encouragements which existed then, for the scientific treatment of this so important question of the duties and vices of vocations and professions. 'in which i _cannot but_ mention, _honoris causa, your majesty's_ excellent book, touching the _duty_ of a king' [and he goes on to give a description which applies, without much 'forcing,' to the work of another king, which he takes occasion to introduce, with a direct commendation, a few pages further on]--'a work richly compounded of divinity, morality, and policy, with great _aspersion_ of all other arts; and being, in mine opinion, one of the most sound and healthful writings that i have read. not sick of business, as those are who lose themselves in their order, nor of convulsions, as those which cramp in matters impertinent; not savoring of perfumes and paintings as those do, who seek to please the reader more than nature beareth, and chiefly _well disposed_ in the _spirits_ thereof, being _agreeable to truth_, and _apt for action_;'--[this passage contains some hints as to this author's notion of what a book should be, in form, as well as substance, and, therefore, it would not be strange, if it should apply to some other books, as well]--'and far removed from _that natural infirmity_, whereunto _i noted those that write in their own professions_, to be _subject_, which is that they _exalt it above measure_; for your majesty hath truly described, _not_ a king of assyria or persia, in their _external_ glory, [and not that kind of king, or kingly author is he talking of] but a _moses_, or a _david, pastors of their people_. 'neither can i _ever lose out of my remembrance_, what i heard your majesty, in the same sacred spirit of government, deliver in a great cause of judicature, which was, that kings ruled by _their laws_, as god did by the laws of nature, and ought rarely to put in use their supreme prerogative, as god doth his power of working miracles. _and yet, notwithstanding_, in your book of _a free monarchy_, you do well give men to understand, that you know the plenitude of the _power_ and _right_ of a king, as well as _the circle of his office and duty. thus have i presumed to _allege_ this excellent writing of your majesty, _as a prime_ or _eminent example_ of tractates, concerning _special_ and _respective_ duties.' [it is, indeed, an _exemplar_ that he talks of here.] 'wherein _i should have said as much, if it had been written a thousand years since_: neither am i moved with certain courtly decencies, which i esteem it flattery to praise in presence; no, it is flattery to _praise in absence: that is_, when _either_ the virtue is absent, _or--the occasion_ is absent, and so the praise is _not natural_, but _forced_, either in truth, _or--in time_. but let cicero be read in his oration _pro marcello_, which is nothing but an excellent table of _caesar's_ virtue, and _made to his face_; besides the _example_ of many other excellent persons, _wiser a great deal than such observers_, and we will never doubt upon a _full occasion_, to give _just_ praises to _present_ or _absent_.' the reader who does not think that is, on the whole, a successful paragraph, considering the general slipperiness of the subject, and the state of the ice in those parts of it, in particular where the movements appear to be the most free and graceful; such a one has, probably, failed in applying to it, that key of 'times,' which a _full occasion_ is expected to produce for this kind of delivery. but if any doubt exists in any mind, in regard to this author's opinion of the rights of his own profession and vocation, and _the circle_ of _its_ office and duties,--if any one really doubts what only allegiance this author professionally acknowledges, and what kingship it is to which this great argument is internally dedicated, it may be well to recall the statement on that subject, which he has taken occasion to insert in another part of the work, so that that point, at least, may be satisfactorily determined. he is speaking of 'certain base conditions and courses,' in his criticism on the manners of learned men, which he says 'he has no purpose to give allowance to, wherein divers professors of learning have wronged themselves and gone too far,'--glancing in particular at the trencher philosophers of the later age of the roman state, 'who were little better than parasites in the houses of the great. but above all the rest,' he continues, 'the _gross_ and _palpable flattery_, whereunto, many, not unlearned, have abased and abused their wits and pens, turning, as du bartas saith, hecuba into helena, and faustina into lucretia, hath most diminished the price and estimation of learning. neither is the _modern dedication_, of books and writings _as to patrons_, to be commended: for that books--such as are _worthy the name of books_, ought to have _no patrons, but_--(hear) but--truth and reason. and the ancient custom was to dedicate them only to _private and equal friends_, or to _entitle_ the books with their names, or if to _kings_ and _great persons_, it was _some such_ as the argument of the book was fit and proper for: but these and the like courses may deserve rather _reprehension_ than defence. 'not that i can tax,' he continues, however, 'or condemn the application of learned men to men in fortune.' and he proceeds to quote here, approvingly, a series of speeches on this very point, which appear to be full of pertinence; the first of the philosopher who, when he was asked in mockery, 'how it came to pass that philosophers were followers of rich men, and not rich men of philosophers,' answered soberly, and yet sharply, 'because the one sort knew what they had need of, and the other did not'. and then the speech of aristippus, who, when some one, tender on behalf of philosophy, reproved him that he would offer the profession of philosophy such an indignity, as for a private suit to fall at a tyrant's feet, replied, 'it was not his fault, but it was the fault of dionysius, that he had his ears in his feet'; and, lastly, the reply of another, who, yielding his point in disputing with caesar, claimed, 'that it was reason to yield to him who commanded thirty legions,' and 'these,' he says, 'these, and _the like_ applications, and stooping to points of necessity and convenience, cannot be disallowed; for, though they may have _some outward baseness_, yet, in a _judgment truly made_, they are to be accounted submissions _to the occasion_, and _not to the person_.' and that is just _volumnia's_ view of the subject, as will be seen in another place. now, this no more dishonors you at all, than to take in a town with gentle words, which else would put you to your fortune, and the hazard of much blood.-- and you will rather show our general louts how you can frown, than spend a _fawn_ upon them, for the inheritance of their loves, and _safeguard_ of _what that want might ruin_. but then, in the dramatic exhibition, the other side comes in too:-- i will not do't; lest i surcease to honor mine own truth, and by my body's action, teach my mind _a most inherent baseness._ it is the same poet who says in another place:-- almost my nature is subdued to that it works in. 'but to return,' as our author himself says, after his complimentary notice of the king's book, accompanied with that emphatic promise to give an account of himself upon a full occasion, and we have here, apparently, a longer digression to apologize for, and return from; but, in the book we are considering, it is, in fact, rather apparent than real, as are most of the author's digressions, and casual introductions of impertinent matter; for, in fact, the exterior order of the discourse is often a submission to the _occasion_, and is not so essential as the author's apparent concern about it would lead us to infer; indeed he has left dispersed directions to have this treatise broken up, and recomposed in a more lively manner, upon a full occasion, and when time shall serve; for, at present, this too is chiefly well disposed in the spirits thereof. and in marking out the grounds in human life, then lying waste, or covered with superstitious and empirical arts and inventions, in merely showing the fields into which the inventor of this new instrument of observation and inference by rule, was then proposing to introduce it, and in presenting this new report, and this so startling proposition, in those differing aspects and shifting lights, and under those various divisions which the art of delivery and tradition under such circumstances appeared to prescribe; having come, in the order of his report, to that main ground of the good which the will and appetite of man aspires to, and the direction thereto,--this so labored ground of philosophy,--when it was found that the new scientific platform of good, included--not the exclusive good of the individual form only, but that of those 'larger wholes,' of which men are _constitutionally_ parts and members, and the special duty,--for that is the specific name of this principle of integrity in the _human_ kind, that is the name of that larger law, that spiritual principle, which informs and claims the parts, and conserves the larger form which is the worthier,--when it was found that this part included the particular duty of every man in his _place, vocation_, and _profession_, as well as the common duty of men as men, surely it was natural enough to glance here, at that _particular profession and vocation_ of authorship, and the claims of the respective _places_ of _king_ and _subject_ in that regard, as well as at the _duty_ of the _king_, and the superior advantages of a government of laws in general, as being more in accordance with the order of nature, than that other mode of government referred to. it was natural enough, since this subject lies always in abeyance, and is essentially involved in the work throughout, that it should be touched here, in its proper place, though never so casually, with a glance at those nice questions of conflicting claims, which are more fully debated elsewhere, distinguishing that which is forced in _time_, from that which is forced in _truth_, and the absence of the person, from the absence of the occasion. but the approval of that man of prodigious fortune, to whom this work is openly dedicated, is always, with this author, who understands his ground here so well, that he hardly ever fails to indulge himself in passing, with a good humoured, side-long, glance at 'the situation,' this approval is the least part of the achievement. that which he, too, adores in kings, is 'the throng of their adorers'. it is the sovereignty which makes kings, and puts them in its liveries, that he bends to; it is that that he reserves his art for. and this proposal to run the track of the science of nature through this new field of human nature and its higher and highest aims, and into the very field of _every man's_ special place, and vocation, and profession, could not well be made without a glance at those difficulties, which the clashing claims of authorship, and _other professions_, would in this case create; without a glance at the imperious necessities which threaten the life of the new science, which here also imperiously prescribe the form of its tradition; he could not go by this place, without putting into the reader's hands, with one bold stroke, the key of its delivery. for it is in the paragraph which follows the compliment to the king in his character as an author, in pursuing still further this subject of vocations and professions, that we find in the form of '_fable_' and '_allusion_,'--that form which the author himself lays down in his art of tradition, as _the_ form of inculcation for new truth,--the precise position, which is the key to this whole method of new sciences, which makes the method and the interpretation, the vital points, in the writing and the reading of them. 'but, to return, there belongeth farther to the handling of this part, touching the _duties_ of professions and vocations, a relative, or _opposite_, touching the _frauds, impostures and vices of every profession_, which hath been likewise handled. but how? rather in _a satire_ and _cynically_, than _seriously_ and _wisely_; for men have rather sought by _wit_ to deride and traduce _much of that which is good in_ professions, than _with judgment to discover and sever that which is corrupt_. for, as solomon saith, he that cometh to seek after knowledge with a mind to scorn and censure, shall be sure to find matter for his humour, but no matter for his instruction. but _the managing of this argument_ with _integrity_ and _truth_, _which i note as deficient_, seemeth to me to be _one of the best fortifications for honesty and virtue that can be planted_. _for_, as the fable goeth of the _basilisk_, that if _he see you first_, you die for it, but if you see him first--he dieth; _so_ it is with deceits and _evil arts_, which if they be first espied _lose their life_, but if they _prevent_, endanger.' [if they see you first, you die for it; and not you only, but your science. yet were there but this single plot to lose, this _mould_ of marcius, they to dust should grind it, and throw it against the wind.] 'so that we are much beholden' he continues, 'to machiavel _and others_ that write _what men do_, and not what they ought to do, [perhaps he refers here to that writer before quoted, who writes, "others _form_ men,--_i_ report him"]; for it is not possible,' continues the proposer of the science of special duties of _place_, and _vocation_, and _profession_, 'the _critic_ of this department, too,--it is not possible to join the serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent,--that is, _all forms_ and _natures of evil_, for without this, _virtue_ lieth open and un-fenced. nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil: for men of corrupted minds pre-suppose that honesty groweth out of simplicity of manners, and believing of preachers, schoolmasters, and _men's exterior language_; so as, except you can make them perceive that you know the utmost reaches of their own corrupt opinions, they despise all morality.' a book composed for the express purpose of meeting the difficulty here alluded to, has been already noticed in the preceding pages, on account of its being one of the most striking samples of that peculiar style of _tradition_, which the advancement of learning prescribes, and here is another, in which the same invention and discovery appears to be indicated:--'why i can teach you'--says a somewhat doubtful claimant to supernatural gifts: 'why, i can teach you, cousin, to command the devil.' 'and i can teach _thee_, coz, to shame the devil; by telling truth; if thou hast power to raise him, bring him hither, and i'll be sworn i have power to shame him hence: oh, while you live, tell truth.' but _this_ is the style, in which the one before referred to, falls in with the humour of this advancer of learning. 'as to the rest, i have enjoined _myself_ to dare to _say_, all that i dare _to do_, and even _thoughts_ that are not to be published, displease me. the worst of my actions and qualities do not appear to me so foul, as i find it foul and base not to dare to own them. every one is wary and discreet in _confession_, but men ought to be so in _action_. i wish that this excessive license of mine, may draw men to freedom _above these timorous and mincing pretended virtues, sprung from our imperfections_, and that at the expense of my immoderation, i may reduce them to reason. a man must see and study his vice to correct it, they who conceal it from others, commonly conceal it from themselves and do not think it covered enough, if they themselves see it.... the diseases of the soul, the greater they are, keep themselves the more obscure; the most sick are the least sensible of them: for these reasons they must often be dragged into light, by an unrelenting and pitiless hand; they must be opened and torn from the caverns and secret recesses of the heart.' 'to meet the huguenots, who condemn our auricular and private confession, i confess myself in public, religiously and purely,--others have published the errors of their _opinions_, i of my _manners_. i am greedy of making myself known, and i care not to how many, provided it be truly; or rather, i hunger for nothing, but i mortally hate to be _mistaken_ by those who happen to come across _my name_. _he that does_ all things for honor and glory [as some great men in that time were supposed to], what can he think to gain by showing himself to the world _in a mask, and by concealing his true being from the people_? commend a hunchback for his fine shape, he has a right to take it for an affront: if you are a coward, and men commend you for your valor, is it of _you_ that they speak? they take you for another. archelaus, king of macedon, walking along the street, somebody threw water on his head; which they who were with him said he ought to punish, "ay, but," said the other, "he did not throw the water upon _me_, but upon _him_ whom he took me to be." socrates being told that people spoke ill of him, "not at all," said he, "there is nothing in me of what they say!" _i am content to be less commended provided i am better known_. i may be reputed a wise man, in such a sort of wisdom as i take to be folly.' truly the advancement of learning would seem to be not all in the hands of one person in this time. it appears, indeed, to have been in the hands of some persons who were not content with simply propounding it, and noting deficiencies, but who busied themselves with actively carrying out, the precise plan propounded. here is one who does not content himself with merely criticising '_professions_ and _vocations_' and suggesting improvements, but one who appears to have an inward call himself to the cure of diseases. whoever he may be, and since he seems to care so very little for his name himself, and looks at it from such a philosophical point of view, we ought not, perhaps, to be too particular about it; whoever he may be, he is unquestionably a doctor of the new school, the scientific school, and will be able to produce his diploma when properly challenged; whoever he may be, he belongs to 'the globe' for the manager of that theatre is incessantly quoting him, and dramatizing his philosophy, and he says himself, 'i look on all men as my compatriots, and prefer the _universal and common tie to the national_.' but in marking out and indicating the plan and method of the new operation, which has for its end to substitute a scientific, in the place of an empirical procedure, in the main pursuits of human life, the philosopher does not limit himself in this survey of the special social duties to the special duties of professions and vocations. 'unto this part,' he says, 'touching _respective_ duty, doth also appertain the duties between husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant: so likewise the laws of _friendship_ and _gratitude_, the civil bond of _companies, colleges_, and _politic bodies_, of _neighbourhood_, and all other proportionate duties; _not_ as they are parts of a government and society, _but as to the framing of the mind of particular persons_.' the reader will observe, that that portion of moral philosophy which is here indicated, contains, according to this index, some extremely important points, points which require learned treatment; and in our further pursuit of this inquiry, we shall find, that the new light which the science of nature in general throws upon the doctrine of the special duties and upon these points here emphasized, has been most ably and elaborately exhibited by a contemporary of this philosopher, and in the form which he has so specially recommended,--with all that rhetorical power which he conceives to be the natural and fitting accompaniment of this part of learning. and the same is true also throughout of that which follows. 'the knowledge concerning good respecting society, doth handle it also not simply alone, but _comparatively_, whereunto belongeth the weighing of duties _between person and person, case and case, particular and public_: as we see in the proceeding of lucius brutus against his own sons, which was so much extolled, yet what was said? infelix utcunque ferent ea fata minores. 'so the case was doubtful, and had opinion on both sides. [so the philosopher on the mountain tells us, too, for his common-place book and this author's happen to be the same.] again we see when m. brutus and cassius _invited to a supper_ certain _whose opinions they meant to feel_, whether they were fit to be made their associates, and cast forth the question touching the killing of a tyrant,--being an usurper,--_they were divided in opinion_;' [this of itself is a very good specimen of the style in which points are sometimes introduced casually in passing, and by way of illustration merely] some holding that _servitude_ was the _extreme_ of evils, and _others_ that tyranny was _better than a civil war_; and this question also our philosopher of the mountain has considered very carefully from his retreat, weighing all the _pros_ and _cons_ of it. and it is a question which was treated also, as we all happen to know, in that other form of writing for which this author expresses so decided a preference, in which the art of the poet is brought in to enforce and impress the conclusion of the philosopher. indeed, as we proceed further with the plan of this so radical part of the subject, we shall find, that the ground indicated has everywhere been taken up on the spot by somebody, and to purpose. chapter iv. the science of morality. section ii.--the husbandry thereunto; or, the cure and culture of the mind. 'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed--' hamlet. but we have finished now with what he has to say here of the exemplar or science of good, and its _kinds_, and _degrees_, and the comparison of them, the good that is proper to the individual, and the good that includes society. he has found much fine work on that platform of virtue, and felicity,--excellent exemplars, the purest doctrine, the loftiest virtue, tried by the scientific standard. and though he has gone behind those popular names of vice and virtue, pain and pleasure, and the like, in which these doctrines _begin_, to the more simple and original forms, which the doctrine of nature in general and its laws supplies, for a platform of moral science, his doctrine is large enough to include all these works, in all their excellence, and give them their true place. a reviewer so discriminating, then, so far from that disposition to scorn and censure, which he reprehends, so careful to conserve that which is good in his scientific constructions and reformations, so pure in judgment in discovering and severing that which is corrupt, a reporter so clearly scientific, who is able to maintain through all this astounding report of the deficiences in human learning, a tone so quiet, so undemonstrative, such a one deserves the more attention when he comes now to 'the art and practic part' of this great science, to which all other sciences are subordinate, and declares to us that he finds it, as a part of science, 'wanting!' not defective, but _wanting_. 'now, therefore, that we have spoken of this fruit of life, it remaineth to speak of the husbandry that belongeth thereunto, without which part the former seemeth to be no better than a fair image or statue, which is beautiful to contemplate, but is without life and motion.' but as this author is very far, as he confesses, from wishing to clothe himself with the honors of an innovator,--such honors as awaited the innovator in that time,--but prefers always to sustain himself with authority from the past, though at the expense of that lustre of novelty and originality, which goes far, as he acknowledges, in establishing new opinions,--adopting in this precisely the practices, and, generally, to save trouble, the quotations of that other philosopher, so largely quoted here, who frankly gives his reasons for _his_ procedure, confessing that he pinches his authors a little, now and then, to make them speak to the purpose; and that he reads them with his pencil in his hand, for the sake of being able to produce respectable authority, grown gray in trust, with the moss of centuries on it, for the views which he has to set forth; culling bits as he wants them, and putting them together in his mosaics as he finds occasion; so now, when we come to this so important part of the subject, where the want is so clearly reported--where the scientific innovation is so unmistakeably propounded--we find ourselves suddenly involved in a storm of latin quotations, all tending to prove that the thing was perfectly understood among the ancients, and that it is as much as a man's scholarship is worth to call it in question. the author marches up to the point under cover of a perfect cannonade of classics, no less than five of the most imposing of the greek and latin authors being brought out, for the benefit of the stunned and bewildered reader, in the course of one brief paragraph, the whole concluding with a reference to the psalms, which nobody, of course, will undertake to call in question; whereas, in cases of ordinary difficulty, a proverb or two from solomon is thought sufficient. for this last writer, with his practical inspiration--with his aphorisms, or 'dispersed directions,' which the author prefers to a methodical discourse, as they best point to action--with his perpetual application of divinity to matters of common life, and to the special and respective duties, this, of all the sacred writers, is the one which he has most frequent occasion to refer to; and when, in his chapter on policy, he brings out openly his proposal to invade the every-day practical life of men, in its apparently most unaxiomatical department, with his scientific rule of procedure--a proposal which he might not have been 'so prosperously delivered of,' if it had been made in any less considerate manner--he stops to produce whole pages of solid text from this so unquestionably conservative authority, by way of clearing himself from any suspicion of innovation. first, then, in setting forth this so novel opinion of his, that the doctrine of the fruit of life should include not the scientific platform of good, and its degrees and kinds only,--not the doctrine of the ideal excellence and felicity only, but the doctrine--the scientific doctrine--the scientific art of the husbandry thereunto;--in setting forth the opinion, that that first _part_ of moral science is _but a part of it_, and that as human nature is constituted, it is not enough to have a doctrine of good in its perfection, and the divinest exemplars of it; first of all he produces the subscription of no less a person than aristotle, whose conservative faculties had proved so effectual in the dark ages, that the opinion of solomon himself could hardly have been considered more to the purpose. 'in such full words,' he says; and seeing that the advancement of learning has already taken us on to a place where the opinions of aristotle, at least, are not so binding, we need not trouble ourselves with that long quotation now--'in such full _words_, and with such _iteration_, doth he inculcate this part, so saith _cicero_ in great commendation of _cato_ the second, that he had applied himself to philosophy--"_non ita disputandi causa, sed ita vivendi_." and although the neglect of our times, wherein few men do hold any consultations touching _the reformation of their_ life, as _seneca_ excellently saith, "de partibus vitae, quisque deliberat, de summa nemo," may make this part seem superfluous, yet i must conclude with that aphorism of _hippocrates_, "qui gravi morbo correpti dolores non sentiunt, iis mens aegrotat"; they need medicines not only to assuage the disease, but _to awake the sense_. 'and if it be said _that the cure of men's minds belongeth to sacred divinity_, it is most true; but _yet_ moral philosophy'--that is, in _his_ meaning of the term, moral _science_, the new science of nature--'may be _preferred unto her, as a wise servant_ and humble handmaid. for, as _the psalm saith_, that "the eye of the handmaid looketh perpetually towards the mistress," and yet, _no doubt, many things are left to the discretion of the handmaid_, to discern of the _mistress's will_; so ought moral philosophy to give _a constant attention to the doctrines of divinity_, and yet so as it may yield of herself, within due limits, many sound and profitable directions.' _that_ is the doctrine. _that_ is the position of the new science in relation to divinity, as defined by the one who was best qualified to place it--that is the mission of the new science, as announced by the new interpreter of nature,--the priest of her ignored and violated laws,--on whose work the seal of that testimony which he challenged to it has already been set--on whose work it has already been written, in the large handwriting of that providence divine, whose benediction he invoked, 'accepted'--accepted in the councils from which the effects of life proceed. 'this part, therefore,' having thus defined his position, he continues, 'because of the _excellency thereof_, i cannot but find it exceeding strange that it is not reduced _to written inquiry_; the rather because it consisteth of much matter, wherein _both speech and action is often conversant_, and such wherein the common talk of men, _which is rare_, but yet cometh sometimes to pass, is _wiser than their books_. it is reasonable, therefore, that we propound it with the more particularity, both for the worthiness, and _because we may acquit ourselves for reporting it deficient_' [with such 'iteration and fulness,' with all his _discrimination_, does he contrive to make _this_ point]; 'which seemeth _almost incredible_, and is otherwise conceived--[note it]--and is otherwise conceived and _presupposed_ by those themselves that have written.' [they do not see that they have missed it.] 'we will, therefore, enumerate some heads or points _thereof, that it may appear the better what it is_, and __whether it be extant_.' a momentous question, truly, for the human race. that was a point, indeed, for this reporter to dare to make, and insist on and demonstrate. doctrines of the fruit of life--doctrines of its perfection, exemplars of it; but no science--no science of the culture or the husbandry thereunto--though it is otherwise conceived and presupposed by those who have written! yes, that is the position; and not taken in the general only, for he will proceed to propound it with more particularity--he will give us the heads of it--he will proceed to the articulation of that which is wanting--he will put down, before our eyes, the points and outlines of the new human science, the science of the husbandry thereto, both for the worthiness thereof, and that it may appear the better what it is, and whether--whether it be extant. for who knows but it may be? who knows, after all, but the points and outlines here, may prove but the track of that argument which the new georgics will be able to hide in the play of their illustration, as periander hid his? who knows but the naturalist in this field was then already on the ground, making his collections? who knows but this new virgil, who thought little of that resplendent and lustrous mass of matter, that old poets had taken for their glory, who seized the common life of men, and not the ideal life only, for his theme--who made the relief of the human estate, and not glory, his end, but knew that he might promise himself a fame which would make the old heroic poets' crowns grow dim,--who knows but that _he_--he himself--is extant, contemplating his theme, and composing its index--claiming as yet its index only? truly, if the propounder of this argument can in any measure supply the _defects_ which he outlines, and opens here,--if he can point out to us any new and worthy collections in that science for which he claims to break the ground--if he can, in any measure, constitute it, he will deserve that name which he aspired to, and for which he was willing to renounce his own, 'benefactor of men,' and not of an age or nation. but let us see where this new science, and scientific art of human culture begins,--this science and art which is to differ from those which have preceded it, as the other baconian arts and sciences which began in the new doctrine of nature, differed from those which preceded them. 'first, therefore, in this, _as in all things which are practical_, we ought to cast up our account, what is in our power, and what not? for the one may be dealt with by way of alteration, but the other by way of application _only_. the husbandman cannot command either the _nature of the earth or the seasons_ of the weather, no more can the physician _the constitution of the patient_, and the _variety of accidents._ so in the culture and cure of the mind of man _two things_ are without our command, points of nature, and points of fortune: for to the basis of the one, and the conditions of the other, our work is limited and tied.' that is the first step: that is where the new begins. there is no science or art till that step is taken. '_in these things_, therefore, it is left unto us to proceed by application. vincenda est omnis fortuna ferendo: and so likewise--vincenda est omnis natura ferendo. but when we speak of suffering, we do not speak of a _dull neglected suffering_, but of _a wise and industrious suffering_, which draweth and contriveth _use and advantage out of that which seemeth adverse and contrary_, which is that properly which we call _accommodating_ or _applying_. ["sweet are the uses of it," and "blest" indeed are they who can translate the _stubbornness_ of fortune into so quiet and so sweet a style.] 'now the wisdom of application resteth _principally_ in the _exact and distinct knowledge of the precedent state or disposition, unto which we do apply_.'--[this is the process which the novum organum sets forth with so much care], 'for we cannot fit a garment, except we first take the measure of the body.' so then the first article of this knowledge is--what?--'to set down _sound_ and _true distributions_ and _descriptions_ of the several characters and tempers of men's natures and dispositions, specially having regard to _those differences_ which are most _radical_, in being the fountains and causes of the rest, _or_ most frequent in _concurrence_ or commixture (not _simple_ differences merely, but the most frequent conjunctions), wherein it is not the handling of a few of them, in passage, the better to describe the _mediocrities_ of _virtues_, that can satisfy this intention'; and he proceeds to introduce a few points, casually, as it were, and by way of illustration, but the rule of interpretation for this digest of learning, in this press of method is, that such points are _never_ casual, and usually of primal, and not secondary import; 'for if it deserve to be considered that there _are_ minds which are proportioned to great matters, and _others_ to small, which aristotle handleth, or ought to have handled, by the name of _magnanimity_, doth it not deserve as well to be considered, that there are minds proportioned to intend many matters, and _others to few_?' so that some can _divide themselves_, others can perchance do exactly well, but it must be in few things at once; and so there cometh to be a narrowness of mind, _as well as a_ pusillanimity. and again, 'that some minds are proportioned to that which may be despatched at once, or within a _short return of time_; others to that _which begins afar off_, and is to be won with length of pursuit. jam tum tenditque fovetque. 'so that there may be fitly said to be a _longanimity_, which is commonly also ascribed to god as a _magnanimity_.' undoubtedly, he considers this one of those differences in the natures and dispositions of men, that it is most important to note, otherwise it would not be inserted here. 'so farther deserved it to be considered by aristotle that there is a disposition in conversation, supposing it in things which do in no sort touch or concern a man's self, _to soothe and please_; and a disposition contrary to contradict and cross; and deserveth it not much better to be considered that there is a disposition, not in conversation, or talk, but _in matter of more serious nature_, and supposing it still in things _merely indifferent_, to take pleasure in the good of another, and a disposition contrariwise to take distaste at the good of another, which is that _properly_ which we call _good-nature_, or _ill-nature_, benignity or malignity.' is not this a field for science, then, with such differences as these lying on the surface of it,--does not it begin to open up with a somewhat inviting aspect? this so remarkable product of nature, with such extraordinary 'differences' in him as these, is he the only thing that is to go without a scientific history, all wild and unbooked, while our philosophers are weeping because 'there are no more worlds to conquer,' because every stone and shell and flower and bird and insect and animal has been dragged into the day and had its portrait taken, and all its history to its secretest points scientifically detected? 'and therefore,' says this organizer of the science of nature, who keeps an eye on practice, in _his_ speculations, and recommends to his followers to observe his lead in that respect, at least, until the affairs of the world get a little straighter than they were in his time, and there is leisure for _mere_ speculation,--'and, therefore,' he resumes, having noted these remarkable differences in the natural and original dispositions of men,--and certainly there is no more curious thing in science than the points noted, though the careful reader will observe that they are not curious merely, but that they slant in one direction very much, and towards a certain kind of practice. 'and, therefore,' he resumes, noticing that fact, 'i _cannot sufficiently marvel_, that this part of knowledge, touching the _several characters_ of _natures_ and _dispositions_ should be omitted _both_ in morality and policy, considering that it is of _so great_ ministry and suppeditation to them both.' ['the _several characters_.' the range of difference is limited. they are comprehensible within a science, as the differences in other species are. no wonder, then, 'that he cannot sufficiently marvel that this part of knowledge should be omitted.'] but in neither of these two departments, which he here marks out, as the ultimate field of the naturalist, and his arts, in neither of them unfortunately, lies the practice of mankind, as yet so wholly recovered from that 'lameness,' which this critical observer remarked in it in his own time, that these observations have ceased to have a practical interest. and having thus ventured to express his surprise at this deficiency, he proceeds to note what only indications he observes of any work at all in this field, and the very quarters he goes to for these little accidental hints and beginnings of such a science, show how utterly it was wanting in those grandiloquent schools of philosophic theory, and those magisterial chairs of direction, which the author found in possession of this department in his time. 'a man shall find in the traditions of astrology, some pretty and apt _divisions of men's natures_,'--so in the discussions which occur on this same point in lear, where this part of philosophy comes under a more particular consideration, and the great ministry which it would yield to morality and policy is suggested in a different form, this same reference to the astrological observations repeatedly occurs. the poet, indeed, discards the astrological _theory _of these natural differences in the dispositions of men, but is evidently in favour of an observation, and inquiry of some sort, into the second causes of these 'sequent effects,' and an anatomy of the living subject is in one case suggested, by a person who is suffering much from the deficiencies of science in this field, as a means of throwing light on it. 'then let regan be anatomised.' for in the _play_,--in the poetic impersonation, which has a scientific purpose for its object, the historical extremes of these natural differences are touched, and brought into the most vivid dramatic oppositions; so as to force from the lips of the by-standers the very inquiries and suggestions which are put down here; so as to wring from the broken hearts of men--tortured and broken on the wheel, which 'blind men' call fortune,--tortured and broken on the rack of an unlearned and barbaric human society,--or, from hearts that do not break with anything that such a world can do, the imperious direction of the new science. 'then let regan be anatomised, and _see_ what it is that breeds about her heart.' he has asked already, 'what is the cause of thunder?' but '_his_ philosopher' must not stop there. 'is there any _cause_--is there any cause _in nature_ that makes these hard hearts?'-- it is _the stars_! the stars above us govern our conditions, else one self mate and mate could not beget such different issues. 'a man shall find in the traditions of astrology some pretty and apt _divisions of men's natures_,' ('let them be _anatomised_,' he, too, says,) 'according to the _predominance_ of the _planets_;' (this is the '_spherical predominance_,' which _edmund_ does not believe in)--'_lovers_ of quiet, _lovers_ of action, _lovers_ of victory, _lovers_ of honour, _lovers_ of pleasure, _lovers_ of arts, _lovers_ of _change_, and so forth.' and here, also, is another very singular quarter to go to for a science which is so radical in morality; here is a place, where men have empirically hit upon the fact that it has some relation to policy. 'a man shall find in the wisest sorts of these relations which the _italians_ make touching conclaves, the natures of the several _cardinals_, handsomely and livelily painted forth';--and what he has already said in the general, of this department, he repeats here under this division of it, that the conversation of men in respect to it, is in advance of their books;--'a man shall meet with, in every day's conference, the denominations of sensitive, dry, formal, real, humorous, "huomo di prima impressione, huomo di ultima impressione, and the like": but this is no substitute for science in a matter so radical,'--'and yet, nevertheless, _this observation, wandereth in words_, but is not _fixed in inquiry_. for the _distinctions_ are found, many of them, but we conclude _no precepts_ upon them'; it is induction then that we want here, after all--_here_ also--here as elsewhere: 'the distinctions are found, many of them, but we _conclude no precepts_ upon them: wherein our fault is the greater, because both history, poesy, and daily experience, _are as goodly fields where these observations grow_; whereof we make a few poesies to hold in our hands, but no man bringeth them to the confectionery that _receipts_ might be made of them for the use of life.' how could he say _that_, when there was a man then alive, who was doing in all respects, the very thing which he puts down here, as the thing which is to be done, the thing which is of such radical consequence, which is the beginning of the new philosophy, which is the beginning of the new _reformation_; who is making this very point in that science to which the others are subordinate?--how could he say it, when there was a man then alive, who was ransacking the daily lives of men, and putting all history and poesy under contribution for these very observations, one, too, who was concluding precepts upon them, bringing them to the confectionery, and composing receipts of them for the use of life; a scholar who did not content himself with merely _reporting_ a deficiency so radical as this, in the human life; a man who did not think, apparently, that he had fulfilled _his_ duty to his kind, by composing a paragraph on this subject. and how comes it--how comes it that he who is the first to discover this so fatal and radical defect in the human science, has himself failed to put upon record any of these so vital observations? how comes it that the one who is at last able to put his finger on the spot where the mischief, where all the boundless mischief, is at work here,--where the cure must begin, should content himself with observations and collections in physical history _only_? how comes it that the man who finds that all the old philosophy has failed to become operative for the lack of this historical basis, who finds it so '_exceeding strange_, so _incredible_,' who 'cannot sufficiently marvel,' that these observations should have been omitted in this science, heretofore,--the man who is so sharp upon aristotle and others, on account of this incomprehensible oversight in their ethics,--_is himself guilty of this very thing_? and how will this defect in _his_ work, compare with that same defect which he is at so much pains to note and describe in the works of others--others who did not know the value of this history? and how can he answer it to his kind, that with the views he has dared to put on record here, of the relation, the _essential_ relation, of this knowledge to human advancement and relief, _he himself has done nothing at all to constitute it, except to write this paragraph_. and yet, by his own showing, the discoverer of this field was himself the man to make collections in it; for he tells us that accidental observations are not the kind that are wanted here, and that the truth of direction must precede the severity of observation. is this so? whose note book is it then, that has come into our hands, with the rules and plummet of the new science running through it, where all the observation takes, spontaneously, the direction of this new doctrine of nature, and brings home all its collections, in all the lustre of their originality, in all their multiplicity, and variety, and comprehension, in all the novelty and scientific rigour of their exactness, into the channels of these _defects_ of learning? and who was he, who thought there were more things in heaven and earth, than were dreamt of in old philosophies, who kept his tables always by him for open questions? and whose tablets--whose many-leaved tablets, are they then, that are tumbled out upon us here, glowing with 'all saws, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there.' and if aphorisms are made out of the pith and heart of sciences, if 'no man can write good aphorisms who is not sound and grounded,' what wittenberg, what university was he bred in? till now there has been no man to claim this new and magnificent collection in natural science: it is a legacy that came to us without a donor;--this new and vast collection in natural history, which is put down here, all along, as _that which is wanting_--as that which is wanting to the science of man, to the science of his advancement to his place in nature, and to the perfection of his form,--as that which is wanting to the science of the larger wholes, and the art of their conservation. there was no _man_ to claim it, for the _boast_, the very boast made on behalf of the thing for whom it was claimed--was-- he _did not know it was worth preserving_!--he _did not know_ that this mass of new and profoundly scientific observation--this so new and subtle observation, so artistically digested, with all the precepts concluded on it, strewn, crowded everywhere with those aphorisms, those axioms of practice, that are made out of the pith and heart of sciences--he did not know it was of any value! that is his history. that is the sum of it, and surely it is enough. who, that is himself at all above the condition of an oyster, will undertake to say, deliberately and upon reflection, that it is not? so long as we have that one fact in our possession, it is absurd, it is simply disgraceful, to complain of any deficiency in this person's biography. there is enough of it and to spare. with that fact in our possession, we ought to have been able to dispense long ago with some, at least, of those details that we have of it. the only fault to be found with the biography of this individual as it stands at present is, that there is too much of it, and the public mind is labouring under a plethora of information. if that fact be not enough, it is our own fault and not the author's. he was perfectly willing to lie by, till it was. he would not take the trouble to come out for a time that had not studied his philosophy enough to find it, and to put the books of it together. many years afterwards, the author of this work on the advancement of learning, saw occasion to recast it, and put it in another language. but though he has had so long a time to think about it, and though he does not appear to have taken a single step in the interval, towards the supplying of this radical deficiency in human science; we do not find that his views of its importance are at all altered. it is still the first point with him in the scientific culture of human nature,--the first point in that art of human life, which is the end and term of _natural philosophy_, as _he_ understands the limits of it. we still find the first article of the culture of the mind put down, 'the different natures or dispositions of men,' _not the vulgar propensities_ to virtues and vices--note it--'or perturbations and passions, but of such as are _more internal and radical_, which are generally neglected.' 'this is a study,' he says, which 'might afford great light to the sciences.' and again he refers us to the existing supply, such as it is, and repeats with some amplification, his previous suggestions. 'in astrological traditions, the natures and dispositions of men, are tolerably _distinguished_ according to the influence of the planets, where _some_ are said to be by nature formed for _contemplation, others_ for _war_, others for _politics_.' apparently it _would_ be 'great ministry to policy,' if one could get the occult sources of such differences as these, so as to be able to command them at all, in the culture of men, _or_ in the fitting of men to their places. 'but' he proceeds, 'so likewise among the _poets_ of all kinds, we _everywhere find_ characters of nature, though _commonly_ drawn with excess and _exceeding the limits of nature_.' here, too, the philosopher refers us again to the common discourse of men, as containing wiser observations on this subject, than their books. 'but much the best matter of all,' he says, 'for such a treatise, may be _derived from_ the more _prudent_ historians, and not so well from eulogies or panegyrics, which are usually written soon after the death of _an illustrious person_, but much rather from a whole body of history, as often as such a person appears, for such an _inwoven_ account gives a better description than _panegyrics_.... but we do not mean that such characters should be received in ethics, as perfect civil images.' they are to be subjected to an artistic process, which will bring out the radical principles in the dispositions and tempers of men in general, as the material of inexhaustible varieties of combination. he will have these historic portraits merely 'for outlines and first draughts of the images themselves, which, being variously compounded and mixed, afford all kinds of portraits, so that an _artificial and accurate dissection_ may be made of men's minds and natures, and the _secret disposition of each particular man laid open_, that from the knowledge of the _whole_, the precepts _concerning the_ errors of the mind may be more rightly formed.' who did that very thing? who was it that stood on the spot and put that design into execution? but this is not all; this is only the beginning of the observation and study of _differences_. for he would have also included in it, 'those impressions of nature which are otherwise _imposed_ upon by the mind, by the sex, age, country, state of health, make of body, as of beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and not external:' and more, he will have included in it--in these _practical ethics_ he will have included--'points of fortune,' and the differences that they make; he will have _all the differences_ that this creature exhibits, under any conditions, put down; he will have his whole nature, so far as his history is able to show it, on his table; and not as it is exhibited accidentally, or spontaneously merely, but under the test of a studious inquiry, and essay; he will apply to it the trials and vexations of art, and wring out its last confession. this is the practical doctrine of this species; this is what the author we have here in hand, calls the _science_ of it, or the beginning of its science. this is one of the _parts of science_ which he says is wanting. let us follow his running glimpse of the points here, then, and see whether it is extant here, too, and whether there is anything to justify all this preparation in bringing it in, and all this exceeding marvelling at the want of it. 'and again _those differences_ which proceed from fortune, as sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising _per saltum, per gradus_, and the like.' these are articles that he puts down for points in his _table of natural history_, points for the collection of instances; this is the tabular preparation for induction here; for he does not conclude his precepts on the popular, miscellaneous, accidental history. that will do well enough for books. it won't do to get out axioms of practice from such loose material. they have to ring with the proof of another kind of condensation. all _his_ history is artificial, prepared history more _select_ and _subtle_ and _fit_ than the other kind, he says,--prepared on purpose; perhaps we shall come across his tables, some day, with these very points on them, filled in with the observations of one, so qualified by the truth of direction to make them 'severe'. it would not be strange, for he gives us to understand that he is not altogether idle in this part of his instauration, and that he does not think it enough to lay out work for others, without giving an occasional specimen of his own, of the thing which he notes as deficient, and proposes to have done, so that there may be no mistake about it as to what it really is; for he appears to think there is some danger of that. even here, he produces a few illustrations of his meaning, that it may appear the better what is, and whether it be extant. 'and therefore we see, that _plautus_ maketh it a wonder to see an old man beneficent. _st. paul_ concludeth that severity of _discipline_ was to be used to the _cretans_, ("increpa eos dure"), upon _the disposition_ of their country. "cretenses semper mendaces, malæ bestize, ventres pigri." _sallust_ noteth that it is usual with kings to desire _contradictories_; "sed plerumque, regiæ voluntates, ut vehementes sunt sic mobiles saepeque ipsæ sibi adversæ." _tacitus_ observeth how rarely the raising of the fortune mendeth the disposition. "solus vespasianus mutatus in melius." _pindar_ maketh an observation that great and sudden fortune for the most part defeateth men. so _the psalm_ showeth it more easy to keep a measure in the enjoying of fortune, than in the increase of fortune; "divitiæ si affluant nolite cor apponere."' '_these observations, and the like_,'--what book is it that has so many of '_the like_'?--'i deny not but are touched a little by aristotle _as in passage_ in his _rhetorics_, and are handled in some scattered discourses.' one would think it was another philosopher, with pretensions not at all inferior, but professedly very much, and altogether superior to those of aristotle, whose short-comings were under criticism here; 'but they (_these observations_) were never incorporated _into moral philosophy_, to which they do essentially appertain, as the knowledge of the diversity of ground and moulds doth to _agriculture_, and the knowledge of the diversity of complexions and constitutions doth to the _physician_; except'--note it--'except we mean to follow the indiscretion of empirics, which minister _the same medicines to all patients_.' truly this does appear to give us some vistas of a _science_, and a 'pretty one,' for these particulars and illustrations are here, that we may see the better what it is, and whether it be extant. that is the question. and it happens singularly enough, to be a question just as pertinent now, as it was when the philosopher put it on his paper, two hundred and fifty years ago. _there_ is the first point, then, in the table of this scientific history, with its subdivisions and articulations; and here is the second, not less essential. 'another article of this knowledge is the inquiry touching the affections; for, as in medicining the body,'--and it is a practical science we are on here; it is the cure of the mind, and not a word for show,--'as in medicining the body, it is in order, _first_, to know the divers complexions and constitutions; secondly, the _diseases_; and, lastly, the _cures_; so in medicining of the mind,--after knowledge of the _divers characters_ of _men's natures_, it followeth, in order, to know the diseases and infirmities of the mind, which are no other than the perturbations and distempers of the affections.' and we shall find, under the head of the medicining of the body, some things on the subject of medicine in general, which could be better said _there_ than _here_, because the wrath of professional dignitaries,--the eye of the 'basilisk,' was not perhaps quite so terrible in that quarter then, as it was in some others. for though 'the doctors' in that department, did manage, in the dark ages, to possess themselves of certain weapons of their own, which are said to have proved, on the whole, sufficiently formidable, they were not, as it happened, armed by the state as the others then were; and it was usually discretionary with the patient to avail himself, or not, of their drugs, and receipts, and surgeries; whereas, in the diseased and suffering soul, no such discretion was tolerated. the drugs were indeed compounded by the state in person, and the executive stood by, axe in hand, to see that they were taken, accompanying them with such other remedies as the case might seem to require; the most serious operations being constantly performed without ever taking 'the sense' of the patient. so we must not be surprised to find that this author who writes under such liabilities ventures to bring out the pith of his trunk of sciences,--that which sciences have in common,--the doctrine of the nature of things,--what he calls '_prima philosophia_,' when his learned sock is on--a little more strongly and fully in that branch of it, with a glance this way, with a distinct intimation that it is common to the two, and applies here as well. there, too, he complains of the ignorance of anatomy, which is just the complaint he has been making here, and that, for want of it, 'they quarrel many times with the humours which are not in fault, the fault being in the very frame and mechanic of the part, which cannot be removed by medicine _alterative_, but must be _accommodated_ and palliated by diet and medicines _familiar_.' there, too, he reports the lack of medicinal history, and gives directions for supplying it, just such directions as he gives here, but that which makes the astounding difference in the reading of these reports to-day, is, that the one has been accepted, and the other has not; nay, that the one has been _read_, and the other has not: for how else can we account for the fact, that men of learning, in our time, come out and tell us deliberately, not merely that this man's place in history, is the place of one who devoted his genius to the promotion of the personal convenience and bodily welfare of men, but, that it is the place of one who gave up the nobler nature, deliberately, on principle, and after examination and reflection, as a thing past help from science, as a thing lying out of the range of philosophy? how else comes it, that the critic to-day tells us, dares to tell us, that this leader's word to the new ages of advancement is, that there is no scientific advancement to be looked for _here_?--how else could he tell us, with such vivid detail of illustration, that this innovator and proposer of advancement, never intended his novum organum to be applied to the _cure_ of the moral diseases, to the subduing of the will and the affections,--but thought, because the old philosophy had failed, there was no use in trying the new;--because the philosophy of words, and preconceptions, had failed, the philosophy of observation and application, the philosophy of ideas as they are in nature, and not as they are in the mind of man merely, the philosophy of _laws_, must fail also;--because argument had failed, art was hopeless;--because syllogisms, based on popular, unscientific notions were of no effect, _practical axioms_ based on the scientific knowledge of natural causes, and on their specific developments, were going to be of none effect also? if the passages which are now under consideration, had been so much as _read_, how could a learned man, in our time, tell us that the author of the 'advancement of learning' had come with any such despairful word as that to us,--to tell us that the new science he was introducing upon this globe theatre, the science of _laws_ in nature, offered to _divinity_ and morality no aid,--no ministry, no service in the _cure of the mind_? and the reason why they have not been read, the reason why this part of the 'advancement of learning,' which is the principal part of it in the intention of its author, _has_ been overlooked hitherto is, that the art of tradition, which is described, here--the art of the tradition, and delivery of knowledges which are foreign from opinions received, was in the hand of its inventor, and able to fulfil his pleasure. after the knowledge of the divers characters of men's natures then, the next article of this inquiry is the diseases and infirmities of the mind, which are no other than the perturbations and distempers of the affections. for as the ancient politicians in popular estates were wont to compare the people to the sea, and the _orators_ to the winds, because the sea would of itself be calm and quiet, if the winds did not move and trouble it; _so_ the _people would be peaceable_ and _tractable_, if the _seditious orators did not set them in working and agitation_; so it may be fitly said, that the mind, in the nature thereof, would be _temperate_ and _stayed_, if _the affections_, as winds, did not put it into tumult and perturbation. and _here, again_, i find, _strange as before_, that _aristotle_ should have written divers volumes of _ethics_, and never handled the affections, which is the _principal subject thereof_; and yet, in his _rhetorics_, where they are considered but _collaterally_, and in a second degree, as they may be moved by speech, he findeth place for them, and handleth them well _for the quantity_, but where their _true place_ is, he _permitteth_ them. (very much the method of procedure adopted by the philosopher who composes that criticism; who also finds a place for the affections in passing, where they are considered collaterally, and in a second degree, and for the quantity, he handleth them well, and who knows how to bring his rhetorics to bear on them, as well as the politicians in popular estates did of old, though for a different end; but where their true place is, he, too, _permitteth_ them; and, in his novum organum, he keeps so clear of them, and _permits_ them so fully, that the critics tell us he never meant it should touch them.) 'for it is not his disputations about pleasure and pain that can satisfy this inquiry, no more than he that should _generally_ handle the nature of light can be said to handle the nature of _colours_; for pleasure and pain are to the particular affections as light is to the particular colours.' is not this a man for particulars, then? and when he comes to the practical doctrine,--to _the art_--to the knowledge, which is _power_,--will he not have particulars here, as well as in those other arts which are based on them? will he not have particulars here, as well as in chemistry and natural philosophy, and botany and mineralogy; or, when it comes to practice here, will he be content, after all, with the old line of argument, and elegant disquisition, with the old generalities and subtleties of definition, which required no collection of particulars, which were independent of observation, or for which the popular accidental observation sufficed? 'better travels, i suppose, had the stoics taken in this argument, as far as i can gather by that which we have at secondhand. _but yet_ it is like it was after their manner, rather in subtlety of definitions, which, in a subject of this nature, are _but curiosities_, than _in_ active _and_ ample descriptions and observations. so, likewise, i find some particular writings of _an elegant nature_, touching some of the affections; as of anger, of comfort upon adverse accidents, of tenderness of countenance, and others.' and such writings were not confined to the ancients. some of us have seen elegant writings of this nature, published under the name of the philosopher who composes this criticism, and suggests the possibility of essays of a more lively and _experimental_ kind, and who seems to think that the treatment should be _ample_, as well as _active_. '_but_ the poets and writers of history are the best _doctors_ of _this knowledge_, where we may find, painted forth with great _life_, _how affections are kindled and incited_, and _how pacified_ and _refrained_;'--certainly, that is the kind of learning we want here:--'and how, again, contained from _act_ and _further degree_'--very useful knowledge, one would say, and it is a pity it should not be 'diffused,' but it is not every poet who can be said to have it;--'_how_ they disclose themselves--_how_ they work--how they vary;'--this is the science of them clearly, _whoever_ has it;--'how they gather and fortify--how they are _enwrapped one within another_;'--yes, there is one poet, one doctor of this science, in whom we can find _that_ also;--'and how they do fight and encounter one with another, and other like _particularities_.' we all know what poet it is, to whose lively and ample descriptions of the affections and passions--to whose _particularities_--that description best applies, and in what age of the world he lived; but no one, who has not first studied them as scientific exhibitions, can begin to perceive the force--the exclusive force--of the reference. 'amongst the which, this last is of special _use_ in moral and civil matters: _how_, i say, to _set affection against affection_, and to master one by another, even as we used to hunt beast with beast, and fly bird with bird, which otherwise, percase, we could not so easily recover.' the poet has not only exhibited this with very voluminous and lively details, but he, too, has concluded his precept;-- 'one fire burns out another's burning'-- 'one desperate grief cures with another's languish'-- 'take thou some new infection to thine eye, and the rank poison of the old will die.' _romeo and juliet_. 'as fire drives out fire, so pity, pity; and pity to the _general wrong of rome_ hath, done this deed _on cæsar.' _julius cæsar_. for it is the _larger_ form, which is the worthier, in that new department of mixed mathematics which this philosopher was cultivating. 'one fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail: rights by rights fouler, strength by strengths do fail.' _coriolanus_. and for history of _cases_, see the same author in hamlet and other plays. [this philosopher's prose not unfrequently contains the key of the poetic paraphrase; and the true reading of the line, which has occasioned so much perplexity to the critics, may, perhaps, be suggested by this connection--'to set affection against affection, and to master one by another, even as we hunt beast with beast, and fly bird with bird.'] chapter v. the science of morality.--alteration. hast thou not learn'd me how to make perfumes? distil? preserve? yea, so, that our great king himself doth woo me oft for my confections? having thus far proceeded, (unless thou think'st me devilish,) is't not meet that i did amplify my judgment in other conclusions? _cymbeline_. thus far, it is the science of man, _as he is_, that is propounded. it is a scientific history of the mind and its diseases, built up from particulars, as other scientific histories are; and having disposed, in this general manner, of that which must be dealt with by way of _application_, those points of nature and fortune, which he puts down as the basis and conditions to _which all our_ work _is limited and tied_, we come now to that which is within our power--to those points which we can deal with by way of alteration, and not of _application_ merely; and yet points which are operating perpetually on the human character, changing the will and appetite, and altering the conduct, by laws not less sure than those which operate in the occult processes of nature, and determine differences behind the scene, or out of the range of our volition. and if after having duly weighed the hints we have already received of the importance of the subject, we do not any longer suffer ourselves to be put off the track, or bewildered by the first rhetorical effect of the sentence in which these agencies are introduced to our attention,--if we look at that rapid series of words, as something else than the points of a period, if we stop long enough to recover from the confusion which a mere string of names, a catalogue or table of contents, crowded into single sentence, will, of necessity, create,--if we stop long enough to see that each one of these words is a point in the table of a new science, we shall perceive at once, that after having made all this large allowance, this _new_ allowance for that which is _without_ our power, there is still a very, very large margin of operation, and discovery, and experiment left; that there is still a large scope of _alteration_ left--alteration in man as he is. for we shall find that these forces which _are_ within our power, are the very ones which are making, and always have been making, man what he is. running our eye along this table of forces and supplies, with that understanding of its uses, we shall perceive at once, that we have the most ample material here, if it were but scientifically handled; untried, inexhaustible means and appliances for raising man to the height of his pattern and original, to the stature of a perfect man. it is not the material of this regimen of growth and advancement, it is not the materia medica that is wanting,--it is the science of it. it is the natural history of these forces, with the precepts scientifically concluded on them, that is wanting. the appliances are here; the scientific application of them remains to be made, and until these have been tried, it is too early to pronounce on the case; until these have been tried, just as other precepts of the new science have been, it is too soon to say that that science of nature,--that knowledge of laws--that foreknowledge of effects, which operates so remedially in all other departments of the human life, is without application, is of no efficiency here; until these have been tried it is too soon to say that the science of nature is _not_ what the man who brought it in on this globe theatre _declared it_ to _be_, the handmaid of divinity, the intelligent handmaid and minister of religion, to whose discretion in the economy of providence, much, much has evidently been left. and it was no assumption in this man to claim, as he did claim, a divine and providential authority for this procedure. and those who intelligently fulfil their parts in this great enterprise for man's relief, and the creator's glory, have just as clear a right to say, as those of old who fulfilled with such means and lights, and inspirations as their time gave them, their part in the plan of the human advancement, 'it is god who worketh in us.' 'now come we to those points which _are_ within our command, and have _force_ and _operation_ upon the mind, to _affect the will and appetite_, and to alter manners: wherein they ought to have handled custom, exercise, habit, education, example, imitation, emulation, company, friends, praise, reproof, exhortation, fame, laws, books, studies: these, as they have determinate use in moralities, from these _the mind_ suffereth; and of these are such receipts and regiments compounded and described, as may serve to recover or preserve the health and good estate of the mind, as far as pertaineth to human medicine; of which number we will insist upon some one or two, _as an example of the rest_, because it _were too long_ to prosecute _all_.' but the careful reader perceives in that which follows, that the treatment of this so vital subject, though all that the author has to say upon it _here_, is condensed into these brief paragraphs, is not by any means so miscellaneous, as this introduction and 'the _first_ cogitation' on it, might, perhaps, have prepared him to find it. to be permitted to handle these forces openly, in the form of literary report, and recommendation, would, no doubt, have seemed to this inventor of sciences, in his day no small privilege. but there was another kind of experiment in them which he aspired to. he wished to take these forces in hand more directly, and compound recipes, with them, and other 'regiments' and cures. for by nature and carefullest study he was a doctor in this degree and kind--and a man thus fitted, inevitably seeks his sphere. very unlearned in this science of human nature which he has left us,--much wanting in analysis must he be, who can find in the persistent determination of such a man to possess himself of places of trust and authority, only the vulgar desire for courtly distinction, and eagerness for the paraphernalia of office. this man was not wanting in any of the common natural sentiments; the private and particular nature was large in him, and that good to which he gives the preference in his comparison of those exclusive aims and enjoyments, is 'the good which is _active_, and not that which is _passive_'; both as it tends to secure that individual perpetuity which is the especial craving of men thus specially endowed, and on account of 'that affection for variety and _proceeding_' which is also common to men, and specially developed in such men,--an affection which the goods of the passive nature are not able to satisfy. 'but in _enterprises_, pursuits and purposes of life, there is much variety whereof men are sensible with pleasure in their inceptions, progressions, recoils, re-integration, approaches and attainings to their ends.' and he gives us a long insight into his own particular nature and history in that sentence. he is careful to distinguish this kind of good from the good of society, 'though in some cases it hath an incident to it. for that gigantine state of mind which possesseth the _troublers_ of the world, such as was lucius sylla, and _infinite other in smaller model_, who would have all men happy or unhappy, as they were their friends or enemies, _and would give form to the world according to their own humours_, which is the true _theomachy_, pretendeth and aspireth to _active good_ though it _recedeth farthest_ from that _good of society_, which we have determined to be _the greater_.' in no troubler or benefactor of the world, on the largest scale, in no theomachist of any age, whether intelligent and benevolent, or demoniacal and evil, had this nature which he here defines so clearly, ever been more largely incorporated, or more effectively armed. but in him this tendency to personal aggrandisement was overlooked, and subordinated by the larger nature,--by the intelligence which includes the whole, and is able to weigh the part with it, and by the sentiments which enforce or anticipate intelligent decision. both these facts must be taken into the account, if we would read his history fairly. for he composed for himself a plan of living, in which this naturally intense desire for an individual perpetuity and renown, and this love of action and enterprise for its own sake, was sternly subordinated to the noblest ends of living, to the largest good of his kind, to the divine and eternal law of duty, to the relief of man's estate and the creator's glory. and without making any claim on his behalf, which it would be unworthy to make for one to whom the truth was dearer than the opinions of men; it may be asserted, that whatever errors of judgment or passion, we may find, or think we find in him, these ends were with him predominant, and shaped his course. he was not naturally a man of _letters_, but a man of action, intensely impelled to action, and it was because he was forbidden to fulfil his enterprise in person, because he had to write letters of direction to those to whom he was compelled to entrust it, because he had to write letters to the future, and leave himself and his will in letters, that letters became, in his hands, _practical_. he, too, knew what it was to be compelled 'to unpack his heart in words' when deeds should have expressed it. but even words are forbidden him here. after all the pains he has taken to show us what the deficiency is which he is reporting here, and what the art and science which he is proposing, he can only put down a few paragraphs on the subject, casually, as it were, in passing. of all these forces which have operation on the mind, and with which scientific appliances for the human mind should be compounded, he can only 'insist upon some one or two as an example of the rest.' that was all that a writer, who was at the same time a public man, could venture on,--a writer who had once been under violent political suspicion, and was still eagerly watched, and especially by one class of public functionaries, who seemed to feel, that with all his deference to their claims, there was something there not quite friendly to them, this was all that he could undertake to insist upon 'in that place.' but a writer who had the advantage of being already defunct--a writer whose estate on the earth was then already done, and who was in no kind of danger of losing either his head or his place, could of course manage this part of the subject differently. _he_ would not find it too long to prosecute all, perhaps. and if he had at the same time the advantage of a foreign name and seignorie, he could come out in england at this very crisis with the freest exhibitions of the points which are _here_ only _indicated_. he could even put them down openly in his table of contents, every one of them, and make them the titles of his chapters. there was a work published in england, in that age, in which these forces, of which only the _catalogue_ is inserted here, these forces which _are_ in our power, which we _can_ alter, forces from which the mind _suffereth_, which have operation upon the mind to affect the will and appetite, are directly dealt with in the most subtle and artistic manner, in the form of literary _essay_; and in the bolder chapters, the author's observations and criticisms are clearly put down; his scientific suggestions of alterations and new compounds, his scientific doctrine of _careful alterations_, his scientific doctrine of surgery, and adaptation of regimen, and cure to different ages, and differing social conditions, are all promiscuously filed in, and the english public swallows it without any difficulty at all, and perceives nothing disagreeable or dangerous in it. _this_ work contains, also, some of those other parts of the new science which have just been reported as wanting, parts which are said by the inventor of this science, to have a great ministry to policy, as well as morality, and the natural history of the creature, which it is here proposed to reform, is brought out without any regard whatever to considerations which would inevitably affect a moralist, looking at the subject from any less earnest and practical--from any less _elevated_ point of view. of course, it was perfectly competent for a gascon whose gasconading was understood to be without any motive beyond that of vanity and egotism, and without any incidence to effects, to say, in the way of mere foolery, many things which an english statesman could not then so well endorse. and in case his personality were called in question, there was the mountain to retreat to, and the saint of the mount, in whose behalf the goose is annually sacrificed by the english people, the saint under whose shield and name the great english philosopher sleeps. in fact, this personage is not so limited in his quarters as the proper name might seem to imply. one does not have to go to the south of france to find him. but it is certainly remarkable, that a work in natural history, composed by the inventors of the science of observation, and the first in the field, containing their observations in that part of the field too, in which the deficiency appeared to them most important, should have been able to pass so long under so thin a disguise, under this merest gauze of _egotism_, unchallenged. these _essaies_, however, have not been without result. they have been operating incessantly, ever since, directly upon the leading minds, and indirectly upon the minds of men in general, (for many who had never read the book, have all their lives felt its influence), and tending gradually to the clearing up of the human intelligence in 'the practice part of life' in general, and to the development of a common sense on the topics here handled, much more creditable to the species than anything that the author could find stirring in his age. when the works which the propounders of the great instauration took pains to get composed by way of filling up their plan of it, a little, corn to be collected and bound, this one will have to find its place among them. but here, at home, in his own historical name and figure, in his own person, instead of conducting his magnificent scientific experiments on that scale which the genius of his activity, and the largeness of his good will, would have prescribed to him, instead of founding his house of solomon as he would have founded it, (as that proximity to the throne, when it was the throne of an absolute monarch might have enabled him to found it, if the monarch he found there had been, indeed, what he claimed to be, a lover of learning), instead of such large help and countenance as that of the king, to whom this great proposition was addressed, the philosopher of that time could not even venture on a literary essay in this field under that protection; it was as much as he could do, it was as much as his favor with the king was worth, to slip in here, in this conspicuous place, where it would be sure to be found, sooner or later, the index of his _essaies_. 'it would be too _long_,' he says, 'to inquire here into the operation of all these social forces that are making men, that are doing more to make them what they are, than nature herself is doing,' for, 'know thou,' the poet of this philosophy says, 'know thou men are as the time is.' he has included here, in these points which he would have scientifically handled, that which makes _times_, that which _can be altered_, that which advancements of learning, however, set on foot at first, are sure in the end to _alter_. 'we will insist upon some one or two as an example of the rest.' and we find that the points he resumes to speak of here, are, indeed, points of primary consequence; social forces that do indeed need a scientific control, effects reported, and precepts concluded. custom and habit, books and studies, and then a kind of culture, which he says, 'seemeth to be more accurate and elaborate than the rest,' which we find, upon examination, to be a strictly religious culture, and lastly the method to which he gives the preference, as the most compendious and summary in its formative or reforming influence, 'the _electing_ and propounding unto a man's self _good and virtuous ends of his life_, such as may be in a _reasonable sort within his compass to attain_.' he says enough under these heads to show the difficulty of writing on a subject where the science has been reported wanting, while the 'art and practice' is prescribed. he lays much stress on custom and habit, and gives some few precepts for its management, 'made out of the pith and heart of sciences,' but he speaks briefly, and chiefly for the purpose of indicating the value he attaches to this point, for he concludes his precepts and observations on it, thus: 'many other axioms there are, touching the managing of exercise and custom, which being _so conducted_,-- scientifically conducted--do prove, _indeed_ another nature' ['almost, can _change_ the stamp of nature,'--is hamlet's word on _this_ point]; 'but being governed by _chance_, doth commonly prove but an ape of nature, and bringeth forth that which is _lame and counterfeit_.' for not less than that is the difference between the scientific administration of these things, from which the mind _suffereth_, and the blind, hap-hazard one. but in proceeding to the next point on which he ventures to offer some suggestions, that of books and studies, we shall do well to take with us that general doctrine of _cure_, founded upon the nature of things, which he produces under the head of the cure of the body, with a distinct allusion to its proper application here. and it is well to observe how exactly the tone of the criticism in _this department_, chimes in with that of the criticism already reported here. 'in the consideration of the _cures of diseases_, i find a deficiency in the receipts of _propriety_ respecting the _particular_ cures of diseases; for the physicians _have frustrated the fruit of tradition, and experience_, by their _magistralities_ in _adding and taking out_, and changing _quid pro quo_ in their receipts _at their pleasure_, commanding so over the medicine, as the medicine _cannot command over the disease_:' that is a piece of criticism which appears to belong to the general subject of cure; and here is one which he himself stops to apply to a different branch of it. 'but, lest i grow more particular than _is agreeable_, either to my intention or _proportion_, i will conclude this part with the note of one deficiency more, which seemeth to me of greatest consequence, which is, that the _prescripts_ in use are too compendious to attain their end; for, to my understanding, it is a vain and flattering opinion to think any _medicine_ can be so sovereign, or so happy, as that the receipt or use of it can work any great effect upon the body of man: it were a strange _speech_, which spoken, or spoken oft, should reclaim a man from a vice to which he were _by nature subject_; it is _order, pursuit, sequence, and interchange of application_ which is mighty in nature,' (and it is _power_ we are inquiring for here) 'which, although it requires more exact _knowledge_ in prescribing, and more precise _obedience_ in observing, yet it is recompensed with the magnitude of effects.' possessed now of his general theory of cure, we shall better understand his particular suggestions in regard to these medicines and alteratives of the mind and manners, which are here under consideration. 'so if we should handle books and studies,' he continues, having handled custom and habit a little and their powers, in that profoundly suggestive manner, 'so if we should handle books and studies, and what influence and operation _they_ have upon manners, are there not divers precepts of _great caution_ and _direction_?' a question to be asked. and he goes on to make some further enquiries and suggestions which have considerably more in them than meets the ear. they appear to involve the intimation that many of our books on moral philosophy, come to us from the youthful and poetic ages of the world, ages in which sentiment and spontaneous conviction supplied the place of learning; for the accumulations of ages of experiment and conclusion, tend to maturity and sobriety of judgment in the race, as do the corresponding accumulations in the individual experience and memory. 'and the reason why books' (which are adapted to the popular belief in these early and unlearned ages) 'are of so little effect towards _honesty of life_, is that they are not read and _revolved_--revolved--as they should be, by _men in mature years_.' but unlearned people are always beginners. and it is dangerous to put them upon the task, or to leave them to the task of remodelling their beliefs and adapting them to the advancing stages of human development. he, too, thinks it is easier to overthrow the old opinions, than it is to discriminate that which is to be conserved in them. the hints here are of the most profoundly cautious kind--as they have need to be--but they point to the danger which attends the advancement of learning when rashly and unwisely conducted, and the danger of introducing opinions which are in advance of the popular culture; dangers of which the history of former times furnished eminent examples and warnings then; warnings which have since been repeated in modern instances. he proposes that books shall be tried by their effects on manners. if they fail to produce honesty of life, and if certain particular forms of truth which were once effective to that end, in the course of a popular advancement, or change of any kind, have lost that virtue, let them be examined; let the translation of them be scientifically accomplished, so that the main truth be not lost in the process, so that men be not compelled by fearful experience to retrace their steps in search of it, even, perhaps, to the resuming of the old, dead form again, with all its cumbrous inefficacies; for the lack of a leadership which should have been able to discriminate for them, and forestall this empirical procedure. speaking of books of moral science in general, and their adaptation to different ages, he says--'did not one of the _fathers_, in great indignation, call poesy "_vinum demonum_," because it increaseth _temptations_, _perturbations_, and _vain opinions_? is not the opinion of aristotle worthy to be regarded, wherein he saith, "that _young men_ are no fit _auditors_ of moral philosophy," because they are not settled from the boiling heat of their _affections_, nor attempered with _time_ and _experience_?' [and our poet, we may remark in passing, seems to have been struck with that same observation; for by a happy coincidence, he appears to have it in his commonplace book too, and he has not only made a note of it, as this one has, but has taken the trouble to translate it into verse. he does, indeed, go a little out of his way _in time_, to introduce it; but he is a poet who is fond of an anachronism, when it happens to serve his purpose-- 'paris and troilus, you have both said well; and on the cause and question now in hand have _glozed_; but, superficially, not much unlike _young men_ whom _aristotle_ thought unfit to hear _moral philosophy_.'] the question is, then, as to the adaptations of forms, of moral instruction to different _ages_ of the human development. for when a decided want of 'honesty of life' shows itself, in any very general manner, under the fullest operation of _any_ given doctrine which is the received one, it is time for men of learning to begin to look about them a little; and it is a time when directions so cautious as these should not by any means be despised by those on whom the responsibility of direction, here, is in any way devolved. 'and doth it not hereof come, that those excellent books and discourses of the ancient writers, _whereby_ they have _persuaded unto virtue most effectually_, by representing her in _state_ and _majesty_, and popular opinions against virtue in their _parasites' coats_, fit to be scorned and derided, are of so little effect towards honesty of life-- [_polonius.--honest_, my lord? _hamlet_.--ay, honest.] '--because they are not read and _revolved_ by men, in their mature and settled years, but confined almost _to boys and beginners_? but is it not true, also, that _much less_ young men are fit auditors of _matters of policy_ till they have been _thoroughly seasoned_ in _religion and morality_, lest their judgments be corrupted, and made apt to think that there are no true differences of things, but according to utility and fortune.' by putting in here two or three of those 'elegant sentences' which the author has taken out from their connections in his discourses, and strung together, by way of making more perceptible points and stronger impressions with them, according to that theory of his in regard to aphorisms already quoted, we shall better understand this passage, for the connection in which it is introduced here tends somewhat to involve and obscure the meaning. 'in removing superstitions,' he tells us, then, in this so pointed manner, 'care should be had _the good_ be not taken away with the bad, which commonly is done _when the people is the physician_.' '_things will have_ their _first_ or _second_ agitation.' [prima philosophia--pith and heart of sciences: the author of this aphorism is sound and grounded.] 'if they be not tossed on the waves of _counsel_, they will be _tossed on the waves of fortune_.' that last 'tossing' requires a second cogitation. there might have been a more direct way of expressing it; but this author prefers similes in such cases, he tells us. but here is more on the same subject. 'it were good that men in their renovations follow the example of time itself, which, indeed, innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived;' and 'discretion in speech is more than eloquence.' these are the sentiments and opinions of that man of science, whose works we are now opening, not caring under what particular name or form we may find them. one or two of these observations do not sound at all like prescience _now_; but at the time when they were given out as precepts of direction, it required that acquaintance with the nature of things in general which is derived from a large and studious observation of particulars, to put them into a form so oracular. but this general suggestion with regard to our books of moral philosophy, and their adaptation to the largest effect on the will and appetite under the given conditions of time--conditions which involve the instruction of masses of men, in whom _affection_ predominates-- men in whom judgment is not yet matured--men not attempered with the time and experience of ages, by means of those preservations of it which the traditions of learning make; beside this general suggestion in regard to these so potent instrumentalities in manners, he has another to make, one in which this general proposition to substitute learning for preconception in _practical matters_,--at least, as far as may be, comes out again in the form of criticism, and of a most specially significant kind. it is a point which he touches lightly here; but one which he touches again and again in other parts of this work, and one which he resumes at large in his practical ethics. 'again, is there not a caution likewise to be given of the doctrines of moralities themselves, some kinds of them, lest they make men too _precise, arrogant, incompatible_, as cicero saith of cato, in _marco catone_: "haec bona quae videmus divina et egregia ipsius scitote esse propria: quae nonnunquam requirimus, ea sunt omnia non a natura, sed a magistro?"' and after glancing at the specific subject of remedial agencies which _are_ within the scope of our revision and renovation, under some other heads, concluding with that which is of all others the most compendious and summary, and again the most noble and effectual to the reducing of the mind unto virtue and good estate, he concludes this whole part, this part in which the points and outlines of the new science--that radical human science which he has dared to report deficient, come out with such masterly grasp and precision,--he concludes this _whole part_ in the words which follow,--words which it will take the author's own doctrine of interpretation to open. for this is one of those passages which he commends to the second cogitation of the reader, and he knew if 'the times that were nearer' were not able to read it, 'the times that were farther off' would find it clear enough. 'therefore i do conclude this part of moral _knowledge_ concerning the culture and regiment of the mind; wherein if any man, _considering the facts thereof which i have enumerated_, do judge that _my labour is_ to collect into an art or science, that which hath been _pretermitted by others_, as matters of common sense and experience, he judgeth well.' the practised eye will detect on the surface here, some marks of that style which this author recommends in such cases: especially where such strong pre-occupations exist; already we perceive that this is one of those sentences which is addressed to the skill of the interpreter; in which, by means of a careful selection and collocation of words, two or more meanings are conveyed under one form of expression. and it may not be amiss to remember here, that this is a style, according to the author's own description of it elsewhere, in which the more involved and enigmatical passages sometimes admit of _several_ readings, each having its own pertinence and value, according to the mental condition of the reader; and that it is a style in which even the _delicate, collateral sounds_, that are distinctly included in this art of tradition, must come in sometimes in the more critical places, in aid of the interpretation. 'but what if it be an harangue whereon his life depends?' l.--if any man considering the parts thereof, which i have enumerated, do judge that my labour is to _collect into an_ art or science that which hath been preter-mitted by others, _he_ judgeth well. .--if any man do judge that my labour is to collect into an art or science that which hath been pretermitted by others as matters of common sense and experience, _he_ judgeth well. .--if any man _considering_ the parts thereof which i have enumerated, do judge that my labor is to collect into an art or science, that which hath been pretermitted _by_ others, as matters of common sense and experience, _he_ judgeth well. but if there be any doubt, about the more critical of these meanings, let us read on, and we shall find the criticism of this great and greatest proposition, the proposition to substitute learning for preconception, in the main department of human practice, brought out with all the emphasis and significance which becomes the close of so great a period in sciences, and not without a little flowering of that rhetoric, in which beauty is the incident, and discretion is more than eloquence. 'but as philocrates sported with demosthenes you may not marvel, athenians, that _demosthenes_ and i do differ, for _he_ drinketh water, and _i_ drink wine. and like as we read of an ancient parable of the two gates of sleep-- sunt geminae somni portae, quarum altera fertur cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris: altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto, sed falsa ad coelum mittunt insomnia manes. 'so if we put on _sobriety and attention_ we shall find it a sure maxim in knowledge, _that the more pleasant liquor of wine is the more vaporous_, and the braver gate of ivory sendeth forth the falser dreams.' chapter vi. method of conveying the wisdom of the moderns it is a basilisk unto mine eyes,-- _kills me to look_ on't, this fierce abridgment hath to it circumstantial branches, which distinction should be rich in. _cymbeline_. this whole subject is introduced here in its natural and inevitable connection with that special form of delivery and tradition which it required. for we find that connection indicated here, where the matter of the tradition, and that part of it which specially requires this form is treated, and we find the form itself specified here incidentally, but not less unmistakeably, that it is in that part of the work where the art of tradition is the primary subject. in bestowing on 'the parts' of this science, which the propounder of it is here enumerating--that consideration which the concluding paragraph invites to them, we find, not only the fields clearly marked out, in which he is labouring to collect into an art and science, that which has hitherto been conducted without art or science, and left to common sense and experience, the fields in which these goodly observations grow, of which men have hitherto been content to gather a poesy to carry in their hands,--(observations which he will bring home to his confectionery, in such new and amazing prodigality and selection), but we find also _the very form_ which these new collections, with the new precepts concluded on them, would naturally take, and that it is one in which these new parts of the new science and its art, which he is labouring to constitute, might very well come out, at such a time, without being recognised as philosophy at all,--might even be brought out by _other_ men without science, as matters of common sense and experience; though the world would have to concede, and the longer the study went on, the more it would be inclined to concede, that the common sense and experience was upon the whole somewhat uncommon, and some who perceived its reaches, without finding that it was _art or science_, would even be inclined to call it preternatural. and when he tells us, that the first step in the new science is _the dissection_ of _character_, and the production and exhibition of certain scientifically constructed portraits, by means of which this may be effected, portraits which shall represent in their type-form by means of 'illustrious instances,' the several characters and tempers of men's _natures_ and _dispositions_ 'that the _secret disposition of each particular man_ may be laid open, and from a knowledge of the whole, the precepts concerning the cures of the mind may be more rightly concluded,'--surely _here_, to a man of learning, _the form_,--the form in which these artistically composed diagrams will be found, is not doubtfully indicated. and when, at the next step, we come to the history of 'the affections,' and are told distinctly that _here_ philosophy, the philosophy of practice, must needs descend from the abstraction, and generalities of the ancient morality, for those observations and experiments which it is the legitimate business of the poet to conduct, though the poet, in conducting these observations and experiments, has hitherto been wanting in the rigor which science requires, when we are told that philosophy must _inevitably_ enter here, that department of learning, of which the true poet is 'the doctor,'--surely here at least, we know where we are. certainly it is not the fault of the author of the great instauration if we do _not_ know what department of learning the collections of the new learning which he claims to have made will be found in--if found at all, _must_ be found in. it is not his fault if we do not know in what department to look for the applications of the novum organum to those 'noblest subjects' on which he preferred to try its powers, he tells us. here at least--the index to these missing books--is clear enough. but in his treatment of poetry, as one of the three grand departments of human learning, for not less noble than that is the place he openly assigns to it, though that open and primary treatment of it, is superficially brief, he contrives to insert in it, his deliberate, scientific preference of it, as a means of effective scientific exhibition, to either of the two graver parts, which he has associated with it--to history on the one hand, as corresponding to the faculty of memory, and to philosophy or mere abstract statement on the other, as corresponding to the faculty of reason; for it is that great radical department of learning, which is referred to the imagination, that constitutes in this distribution of learning the third grand division of it. he shows us here, in a few words, under different points and heads, what masterly facilities, what indispensable, incomparable powers it has for that purpose. there is a form of it, 'which is as a visible history, and is an image of actions as if _they were present_, as history is, of actions that _are past_.' there is a form of it which is applied only to express some _special purpose_ or _conceit_, which was used of old by _philosophers_ to express any point of _reason_ more sharp and subtle than the vulgar, and, nevertheless, _now and at all times_ these _allusive parabolical_ poems do retain much life and vigour because--note it,--note that because,--that _two-fold because_, because reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit. and he adds, also, 'there remains another use of this poesy, opposite to the one just mentioned, for that use tendeth to _demonstrate_ and _illustrate_ that which is taught or delivered; and this other to _retire_ and _obscure_ it: that is, when the secrets and mysteries of _religion, policy or philosophy_ are involved in fables and parables.' but under the cover of introducing the 'wisdom of the ancients,' and the form in which that was conveyed, he explains more at large the conditions which this kind of exhibition best meets; he claims it as a proper form of _learning_, and tells us outright, that the new science _must be_ conveyed in it. he has left us here, all prepared to our hands, precisely the argument which the subject now under consideration requires. 'upon deliberate consideration, my judgment is, that a _concealed instruction_ and _allegory_, was originally intended in many of the ancient fables; observing that some fables discover a great and evident similitude, relation, and connection with the things they signify, as well in the _structure of the fable_, as in the _propriety of the names_ whereby _the persons or actors are characterised_, insomuch that no one could positively deny a sense and meaning to be from the first intended and purposely shadowed out in them'; and he mentions some instances of this kind; and the first is a very explanatory one, tending to throw light upon the proceedings of men whose rebellions, so far as political action is concerned, have been successfully repressed. and he takes occasion to introduce this particular fable repeatedly in similar connections. 'for who can hear that _fame_, after the giants were destroyed, sprung up as their _posthumous sister_, and not apply it to the clamour of _parties_, and the seditious rumours which commonly fly about upon the _quelling of insurrections_. _or_ who, upon hearing that memorable expedition of the gods against the giants, when the braying of _silenus' ass_ greatly contributed in putting the giants to flight, does not clearly conceive that this directly _points_ to the _monstrous_ enterprises of _rebellious subjects_, which are frequently disappointed and frustrated by _vain fears and empty rumours_. nor is it wonder if sometimes a _piece of history_ or other things are introduced by way of ornament, or if _the times_ of the action are confounded,' [the very likeliest thing in the world to happen; things are often 'forced in _time_' as he has given us to understand in complimenting a king's book where the person was absent but not the occasion], 'or if part of one fable be tacked to another, for all this must necessarily happen, as the fables were the invention of men who lived in _different ages_, and had _different views_, some of them being _ancient_, others more _modern_, some having an eye to _natural philosophy_, _others_ to _morality_ and _civil policy_.' this appears to be just the kind of criticism we happen to be in need of in conducting our present inquiry, and the passage which follows is not less to the purpose. for, having given some other reasons for this opinion he has expressed in regard to the concealed doctrine of the ancients, he concludes in this manner: 'but if any one shall, notwithstanding this, contend that allegories are always adventitious, and no way native or _genuinely_ contained in them, we _might here leave him undisturbed in the gravity of that judgment_, though we cannot but think it somewhat dull and phlegmatic, and, _if it were worth the trouble_, proceed to another _kind_ of argument.' and, apparently, the argument he proceeds to, is worth some trouble, since he takes pains to bring it out so cautiously, under so many different heads, with such iteration and fulness, taking care to insert it so many times in his work on the advancement of learning, and here producing it again in his introduction to the wisdom of the ancients, accompanied with a distinct assurance that it is _not_ the wisdom of the _ancients_ he is concerning himself about, and _their_ necessities and helps and instruments; though if any one persists in thinking that it _is_, he is not disposed to disturb him in the gravity of that judgment. he honestly thinks that they had indeed such intentions as those that he describes; but that is a question for the curious, and he has other work on hand; he happens to be one, whose views of learning and its uses, do not keep him long on questions of mere curiosity. it is with the moderns, and not with the ancients that he has to deal; it is the present and the future, and not the past that he 'breaks his sleeps' for. whether the ancients used those fables for purposes of innovation, and gradual encroachment on error or not, here is a modern, he tells us, who for one, cannot dispense with them in _his_ teaching. for having disposed of his _graver_ readers--those of the dull and phlegmatic kind--in the preceding paragraph, and not thinking it worth exactly that kind of trouble it would have cost then to make himself more explicit for the sake of reaching _their_ apprehension, he proceeds to the following argument, which is not wanting in clearness for 'those who happen to be of his ear.' 'men have proposed to answer two different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for parables serve as well to instruct and illustrate, as to wrap up and envelope:' [and what is more, they serve at once that double purpose] 'so that for _the present we drop the concealed use_, and suppose the _ancient fables_ to be vague undeterminate things _formed for amusement, still the other use must remain_, and can never be given up. and every man of any learning must readily allow that this method of instruction is grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and _sometimes necessary in the sciences_, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understanding, in all new discoveries that are abstruse and _out of the road of vulgar opinion_. hence, in the first ages, when such inventions and conclusions of the human reason as are _now_ trite and common, were rare and little known, all things abounded with fables, parables, similes, comparisons, allusions, which were not intended to _conceal_, but to _inform and teach_, whilst the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtlety and speculation, and even impatient, and in a manner _incapable of receiving such things as did not directly fall under and strike the senses_.' [and those ages were not gone by, it seems, for these are the very men of whom hamlet speaks, 'who for the most part are capable of nothing but _inexplicable dumb-shows_ and _noise_.'] 'for as hieroglyphics were in use before writings, so were parables in use _before argument_. _and even to this day_, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding, [who was it that proposed to do that?] and _conquer prejudices without raising animosities_, opposition, or disturbance--[who was it that proposed to do that precisely]--he _must still_--[note it]--he _must still go in the same path_, and have recourse _to the like method_.' where are they then? search and see. where are they?--the lost fables of the new philosophy? 'to conclude, the knowledge of the earlier ages was either great or happy; _great_, if _by design_ they made use of tropes and figures; happy, if whilst _they had other views_ they afforded _matter_ and _occasion_ to such _noble contemplations_. let either be the case, _our_ pains perhaps will not be misemployed, _whether we illustrate_ antiquity _or_ [hear] things themselves. but he complains of those who have attempted such interpretations hitherto, that 'being _unskilled in nature_, and _their learning_ no more than that of common-place, they have applied the sense of the parables to certain _general_ and _vulgar_ matters, without reaching to their real purport, genuine interpretation and full depth;' certainly it would not be _that kind_ of criticism, then, which would be able to bring out _the_ subtleties of the _new learning_ from those popular embodiments, which he tells us it will have to take, in order to make some impression, at least, on the common understanding. 'settle that question, then, in regard to the old fables as you will, _our_ pains will not perhaps be misemployed, whether we illustrate antiquity or things themselves,' and to that he adds, 'for _myself, therefore, i expect to appear_ new in these common things, because, leaving untouched such as are sufficiently plain and open, i _shall drive only those_ that are either deep or rich.' 'for myself?'--i?--'i expect to appear new in these common things.' but elsewhere, where he lays out the argument of them, by the side of that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter,' those _heroical_ descriptions of virtue, duty, and felicity, that _others_ have got glory from, it is some _poet_ we are given to understand that is going to be found _new_ in them. _there_, the argument is all--_all_--_poetic_, and it is a theme for one who, if he know how to handle it, need not be afraid to put in his modest claim, with those who sung of old, the wrath of heroes, and their arms. any one who does not perceive that the passages here quoted were designed to introduce more than 'the wisdom of the ancients', the reader who is disposed to conclude after a careful perusal of these reiterated statements, in regard to the form in which doctrines differing from received opinions must be delivered, taken in connexion, too, with that draught of the new science of the _human culture_ and its parts and points, which has just been produced here,--the reader who concludes that _this_ is, after all, a science that _was_ able to dispense with this method of appeal to the senses and the imagination; that it was _not_ obliged to have recourse to that path;--that the new learning, 'the new discovery,' had here no fables, no particular topics, and methods of tradition; that it contented itself with abstractions and generalities, with 'the husks and shells of sciences,'--such an one ought, undoubtedly, to be left undisturbed in that opinion. he belongs precisely to that class of persons which this author himself deliberately proposed to leave to such conclusions. he is one whom this philosopher himself would not take any trouble at all to enlighten on such points. the other reading, with all its _gravity_, was designed for him. the time for such an one to adopt the reading here produced, will be, when 'those who are incapable of receiving such things as do not directly fall under and strike the senses,' have, at last, got hold of it; when 'the groundlings, who, for the most part are capable of nothing but dumb show and noise,' have had their ears split with it, it will be time enough for him. this wisdom of the moderns, then, to resume with those to whom the appeal is made, this new learning which the wise man and innovator of the modern ages tells us must be clothed in fable, and adorned with verse, this learning that must be made to fall under and strike the senses; this dumb show of science, that is but show to him who cannot yet take the player's own version of what it means; this illustrated tradition, this beautiful tradition of the new science of human nature,--where is it? this historical collection, this gallery that was to contain scientific draughts and portraitures of the human character, that should exhaust its varieties,--where is it? these new georgics of the mind whose _argument is here_,--where are they? this new virgil who might promise himself such glory,--such new glory in the singing of them,--where is he? did he make so deep a summer in his verse, that the track of the precept was lost in it? were the flowers, and the fruit, so thick, there; was the reed so sweet that the argument of that great husbandry could no point,--could leave no furrow in it? 'where souls do couch, on flowers, we'll hand in hand, and with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze: dido and her aeneas shall want troops, and all the haunt be ours.' 'the neglect of our times,' says this author, in proposing this great argument, this new argument, of the application of science to the culture and cure of the mind, 'the neglect of _our times_, wherein _few men do hold any consultations_ touching the _reformation of their lives, may_ make _this part_ seem superfluous. as seneca excellently saith, "de partibus vitae quisquae deliberat, de summa nemo."' and is that, after all,--is that the trouble still? is it, that that characteristic of elizabeth's time--that same thing which seneca complained of in nero's,--is it that _that_ is not yet obsolete? is that the reason, this so magnificent part, this radical part of the new discovery of the modern ages, is still held 'superfluous?' 'de partibus vitae quisquae deliberat, de summa nemo.' 'now that we have spoken, and spoken for so many ages, of this fruit of life, it remaineth to speak of the husbandry thereunto.' that is the scientific proposition which has waited now two hundred and fifty years, for a scientific audience. the health of the soul, the scientific promotion of it, the fruit of life, and the observations of its husbandry. 'and if it be said,' he continues, anticipating the first inconsiderate objection, 'if it be said that the cure of mens' minds belongeth to sacred divinity, it is most true; but yet, moral philosophy may be preferred unto her, as a wise servant and humble handmaid. for as the psalm saith, that the eyes of the handmaid look perpetually towards the _mistress_, and yet, no doubt, many things are left to the _discretion_ of the handmaid, to _discern of the mistress' will_; so ought moral philosophy to give a constant attention to the doctrines of divinity, and yet so as it may yield of herself, within due limits, many sound and profitable directions.' for the times that were 'far off' when that proposition was made, it is brought out anew and reopened. oh, people of the ages of arts and sciences that are called by this man's name, shall we have the fruits of his new doctrine of knowledge, brought to our relief in all other fields, and reject it in this, which he himself laid out, and claimed as its only worthy field? instructed now in the validity of its claims, by its 'magnitude of effects' in every department of the human practice to which it has yet been applied, shall we permit the department of it, on which _his_ labour was expended, to escape that application? shall we suffer that wild barbaric tract of the human life which the will and affections of man create,--that tract which he seized,--which it was his labour to collect into an art or science, to lie unreclaimed still? oh, man of the new ages of science, will you have the new fore-knowledge, the magical command of effects, which the scientific inquiry into causes as they are actual in nature, puts into our hands, in every other practice, in every other culture and cure,--will you have the rule of this knowledge imposed upon your fields, and orchards, and gardens, to assist weak nature in her 'conservations' and 'advancements' in these,--to teach her to bring forth here the latent ideals, towards which she struggles and vainly yearns, and can only point to, and wait for, till science accepts her hints;--will you have the georgics of this new virgil to load your table with its magic clusters;--will you take the novum organum to pile your plate with its ideal advancements on spontaneous nature and her perfections;--will you have the rule of that organum applied in its exactest rigors, to all the physical oppositions of your life, to minister to your physical safety, and comfort, and luxury, and never relax your exactions from it, till the last conceivable degree of these has been secured; and in this department of art and science,--this, in which the sum of our good and evil is contained,--in a mere oversight of it, in a disgraceful indifference and carelessness about it, be content to accept, without criticism, the machinery of the past--instrumentalities that the unlearned ages of the world have left to us,--arts whose precepts were concluded ages ere we knew that _knowledge_ is power. shall we be content to accept as a science any longer, a science that leaves human life and its actualities and particulars, unsearched, uncollected, unreduced to scientific nomenclature and axiom? shall we be content any longer with a knowledge that is _power_,--shall we boast ourselves any longer of a scientific _art_ that leaves _human_ nature,--that makes over human nature to the tampering of an unwatched, unchecked empiricism, that leaves our own souls it may be, and the souls in which ours are garnered up, all wild and hidden, and gnarled within with nature's crudities and spontaneities, or choked and bitter with artificial, but unscientific, unartistic repression? will you have of that divinely appointed and beautiful 'handmaid,' that was brought in on to this globe theatre, with that upward look,--with eyes turned to that celestial sovereignty for her direction, with the sum of good in her intention, with the universal doctrine of practice in her programme, with the relief 'of man's estate and the creator's glory' put down in her role,--with her _new song_--with her song of man's nature and life _as it is,_ on her lips--will you have of her, only the minister to your physical luxuries and baser wants? be it so: but in the name of that truth which is able to survive ages of misunderstanding and detraction, in the name of that honor which is armed with arts of self-delivery and tradition, that will enable it to live again, 'though all the earth o'erwhelm it to men's eyes,' while this book of the advancemement of learning stands, do not charge on this man henceforth, that election. the times of that ignorance in which it could be thus accredited, are past; for the leader of this advancement is already unfolding his tradition, and opening his books; and he bids us debase his name no longer, into a name for these sordid fatuities. the leader of ages that are yet to be,--ages whose nobler advancements, whose rational and scientific advancements to the dignity and perfection of the human form, it was given to him and to his company to plan and initiate,--he declines to be held any longer responsible for the blind, demoniacal, irrational spirit, that would seize on his great instrument of science, and wrest it from its nobler object and intent, and debase it into the _mere_ tool of the senses; the tool of a materialism more base and sordid than any that the world has ever known; more sordid, a thousand-fold, than the materialism of ages, when there was yet a god in the wood and the stone, when there was yet a god in the brick and the mortar. this '_broken science_' that has no end of ends, this godless science, this railway learning that travels with restless, ever quickening speed, no whither,--these dead, rattling 'branches' and slivers of arts and sciences, these _modern_ arts and sciences, hacked and cut away from that tree of sciences, from which they sprang, whereon they grew, are _his_ no longer. he declines to be held any longer responsible for a materialism that shelters itself under the name of philosophy, and identifies his own name with it. call it science, if you will, though science be the name for unity and comprehension, and the spirit of life, the spirit of the largest whole; call it philosophy if you will, if you think philosophy is capable of being severed from that common trunk, in which this philosopher found its pith and heart,--call it science,--call it philosophy,--but call it not, he says,--call it not henceforth '_baconian_.' for _his_ labor is to collect into an art or science the doctrine of _human_ life. he, too, has propounded that problem,--he has translated into the modern speech, that problem, which the inspired leader of men, of old propounded. 'what is a man profited if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul; or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?' he, too, has recognized that ideal type of human excellence, which the great teacher of old revealed and exemplified; he has found scientifically,--he has found in the universal law,--that divine dogma, which was taught of old by one who spake as having authority--one who also had looked on nature with a loving and observant eye, and found in its source, the inspirer of his doctrine. in his study of that old book of divinity which he calls the book of god's power this modern innovator has found the scientific version of that inspired command 'be ye therefore perfect.' this new science of morality, which is '_moral knowledge_,' is able to recognise the inspiration and divinity of that received platform and exemplar of good, and pours in on it the light of a universal illustration. and in his new scientific policy, in his scientific doctrine of success, in his doctrine of the particular and private good, when he brings out at last the rule which shall secure it from all the blows of fortune, what is it but that same old '_primum quærite_' which he produces,--clothing it with the authority and severe exaction of a scientific rule in art,--that same '_primum quærite_' which was published of old as a doctrine of faith only. 'but let men rather build,' he says, 'upon that foundation, which is as a corner-stone of divinity and _philosophy, wherein they join close; namely_, that _same 'primum quærite_.' for divinity saith, 'seek first the kingdom of god, and all other things shall be added to you'; and philosophy saith, 'primum quærite bona animi cætera aut aderunt, aut non oberunt.' and who will now undertake to say that it is, indeed, written in the book of god,--in the book of the providential design, and creative law, or that it is written in the revelation of a divine good will to men; that those who cultivate and cure the soul--who have a divine appointment to the office of its cure--shall thereby be qualified to ignore its actual laws, or that they shall find in the scientific investigation of its actual history, or in this new--so new, this so wondrous and beautiful science, which is here laid out in all its parts and points on the basis of a universal science of practice,--no 'ministry' to their end? who shall say that the regimen of the mind, that its education and healthful culture, as well as its cure, shall be able to accept of no instrumentalities from the _advancement_ of learning? who shall say that this department of the human life--_this_ alone, is going to be held back to the past, with bonds and cramps of iron, while all else is advancing; that this is going to be held forever as a place where the old aristotelian logic, which we have driven out of every other field, can keep its hold unchallenged still,--as a place for the metaphysics of the school-men, the empty conceits, the old exploded inanities of the dark ages, to breed and nestle in undisturbed? who shall claim that this department is the only one, which that gift, that is the last gift of creation and providence to man is forbidden to enter? surely it is the authorised doctrine of a supernatural aid, that it is never brought in to sanction indolence and the neglect of means and instruments already in our power; and in that book of these new ages in which the doctrine of a successful human practice was promulgated, is it not written that in no department of the human want, 'can those noble effects, which god hath set forth to be bought as the price of labour, be obtained as the price of a few easy and slothful observances?' and who that looks on the world as it is at this hour, with all our boasted aids and instrumentalities,--who that hears that cry of sorrow which goes up from it day and night,--who that looks at these masses of men as they are,--who that dares to look at all this vice and ignorance and suffering which no instrumentality, mighty to relieve, has yet reached, shall think to put back,--as if we had no need of it,--this great gift of light and healing,--this gift of _power_, which the scientific ages are bringing in; this gift which the ages of 'anticipation,' the ages of inspiration and spontaneous affirmation, could only divinely--diviningly--foresee and promise;--this gift which the knowledge of the creative laws, the historic laws, the laws of kind, as they are actual in the human nature and the human life, puts into our hands? who shall think himself competent to oppose this benefaction? alas for such an one! let us take up a lamentation for him. he has stayed too long. the constitution of things, the universal laws of being, and the providence of this world are against him. the track of the advancing ages goes over him. he is at variance with that which was and shall be. the world's wheel goes over him. and whosoever falls on that stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it falls it shall grind him to powder. it is by means of the scientific art of delivery and tradition, that this doctrine of the scientific culture and cure of the mind, which is the doctrine of the scientific ages, has been made over to us in the abstract; and it is by means of the rule of interpretation, which this art of delivery prescribes, it is by means of the secret of an illustrated tradition, or poetic tradition of this science, that we are now enabled to unlock at last those magnificent collections in it--those inexhaustible treasures and mines of it--which the discoverer, in spite of the time, has contrived to leave us, in that form of fable and parable in which the advancing truth has always been left,--in that form of poesy in which the highest truth has, from of old, been uttered. for over all this ground lay extended, then, in watchful strength all safe and unespied, the basilisk of whom the fable goes, if he sees you first, you die for it,--_but_ if you see him first, he dies. and this is the bishop who fought with a _mace_, because he would _kill_ his enemy and not _wound_ him. book ii. elizabethan 'secrets of morality and policy'; or, the fables of the new learning. reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit. _advancement of learning._ introductory. chapter i. the design. the object of this volume is merely to open _as a study_, and a study of primary consequence, those great works of the modern learning which have passed among us hitherto, for lack of the historical and scientific key to them, as works of amusement, merely. but even in that superficial acquaintance which we have had with them in that relation, they have, all the time, been subtly operating upon the minds in contact with them, and perpetually fulfilling the first intention of their inventor. 'for,' says the great innovator of the modern ages,--the author of the _novum_ organum, and of the _advancement_ of learning,--in claiming this department of letters as the necessary and proper instrumentality of a new science,--of a science at least, 'foreign to opinions received,'--as he claims elsewhere that it is, under all conditions, the inevitable essential form of this science in particular. 'men have proposed to answer two different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for they serve as well to _instruct_ and _illustrate_ as to _wrap up and envelope_, so that, though for the present, we drop the concealed use, and suppose them to be _vague undeterminate things_, formed for amusement merely, still the other _use_ remains. 'and every man of _any_ learning must readily concede,' he says, 'the value of that use of them as a method of popular instruction, grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in the _sciences_, as it opens an easy and _familiar_ passage to the human understandings in _all new_ discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion. they were used of old by _philosophers_ to express any point of reason more sharp and subtle than the vulgar, and nevertheless _now_, and _at all times_, these allusive parabolical forms retain much life and vigor, because _reason_ cannot be _so sensible_ nor _examples so fit_.' that philosophic use of them was to inform and teach, whilst the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtilty and speculation, and even impatient and in a manner incapable of receiving anything that did not directly fall under and strike the senses. 'and, even to this day, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding, and conquer prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or _disturbance_, he must still go in _the same path_ and have recourse to the like method.' that is the use which the history and fables of the new philosophy have already _had_ with us. we have been feeding without knowing it, on the 'principal and supreme sciences'--the 'prima philosophia' and its noblest branches. we have been taking the application of the inductive philosophy to the principal concerns of our human life, and to the phenomena of of the human nature itself, as mere sport and pastime; though the precepts concluded, the practical axioms inclosed with it have already forced their way into our learning, for all our learning is, even now, inlaid and glittering with those 'dispersed directions.' we have profited by this use of them. it has not been pastime merely with us. we have not spent our time in vain on this first stage of an advancing learning, a learning that will not cease to advance until it has invaded all our empiricisms, and conquered all our practice; a learning that will recompence the diligence, the exactitude, the severity of observance which it will require here also (when it comes to put in its claim here, as learning and not amusement merely), with that same magnitude of effects that, in other departments, has already justified the name which its inventor gave it--a learning which will give us here, also, in return for the severity of observance it will require, what no ceremonial, however exacting can give us, that control of effects, with which, even in its humblest departments, it has already fulfilled, in the eyes of all the world, the prophecy which its inventors uttered when they called it the new magic. that first use of the histories and fables of the modern learning, we have had already; and it is not yet exhausted. but in that rapid development of a common intelligence, to which the new science of practice has itself so largely contributed, even in its lower and limited developments, we come now to that other and so important use of these fables, which the philosophic innovator proposed to drop for the time, in his argument--that use of them, in which they serve 'to wrap up and conceal' for the time, or to limit to the few, who are able to receive them, those new discoveries which are as yet too far in advance of the common beliefs and opinions of men, and too far above the mental habits and capacities of the masses of men, to be safely or profitably communicated to the many in the abstract. but in order to arrive at this second and nobler use of them, it will be necessary to bestow on them a very different kind of study from any that we have naturally thought it worth while to spend on them, so long as we regarded them as works of pastime merely; and especially while that insuperable obstacle to any adequate examination of them, which the received history of the works themselves created, was still operating on the criticism. the truths which these parabolic and allusive poems wrap up and conceal, have been safely concealed hitherto, because they are not those common-place truths which we usually look for as the point and moral of a tale which is supposed to have a moral or politic intention,--truths which we are understood to be in possession of beforehand, while the parable or instance is only designed to impress the sensibility with them anew, and to reach the will that would not take them from the reason, by means of the senses or the imagination. it is not that spontaneous, intuitive knowledge, or those conventional opinions, those unanalysed popular beliefs, which we usually expect to find without any trouble at all, on the very surface of any work that has morality for its object, it is not any such coarse, lazy performance as that, that we need trouble ourselves to look for here. this higher intention in these works 'their real import, genuine interpretation, and full depth,' has not yet been found, _because_ the science which is wrapped in them, though it is the principal science in the plan of the advancement of learning, has hitherto escaped our notice, and _because_ of the exceeding subtlety of it,--because the truths thus conveyed or concealed are new, and recondite, and out of the way of any casual observation,--because in this scientific collection of the phenomena of the human life, designed to serve as the basis of new social arts and rules of practice, the author has had occasion to go behind the vague, popular, unscientific terms which serve well enough for purposes of discourse, and mere oratory, to those principles which are actual and historical, those simple radical forms and differences on which the doctrine of power and practice must be based. it is pastime no longer. it is a study, the most patient, the most profoundly earnest to which these works now invite us. let those who will, stay in the playground still, and make such sport and pastime of it there, as they may; and let those who feel the need of inductive rules here also,--here on the ground which this pastime covers--let those who perceive that we have as yet, set our feet only on the threshold of the great instauration, find here with diligent research, the ascent to the axioms of practice,--that ascent which the author of the science of practice in general, made it _his labour_ to hew out _here_, for _he_ undertook 'to collect here into an art or science, that which had been pretermitted by others as matters of common sense and experience.' it does not consist with the design of the present work to track that draught of a new science of morality and policy, that 'table' of an inductive science of human nature, and human life, which the plan of the advancement of learning contains, with all the lettering of its compartments put down, into these systematic scientific collections, which the fables of the modern learning,--which these magnificent parabolical poems have been able hitherto to wrap up and conceal. this work is merely introductory, and the design of it is to remove that primary obstacle to the diligent study of these works, which the present theory of them contains; since that concealment of their true intention and history, which was inevitable at the time, no longer serves the author's purpose, and now that the times are ripe for the learning which they contain, only serves indeed to hinder it. and the illustrations which are here produced, are produced with reference to that object, and are limited strictly to the unfolding of those '_secrets of policy_,' which are the necessary introduction to that which follows. chapter ii. the missing books of the great instauration; or, philosophy itself. did it never occur to the student of the _novum organum_ that the constant application of that '_new machine_' by the inventor of it himself, to one particular class of subjects, so constant as to produce on the mind of the careless reader the common impression, that it was intended to be applied to that class only, and that the relief of the human estate, in that one department of the human want, constituted its whole design: did it never occur to the curious inquirer, or to the active experimenter in this new rule of learning, that this apparently so rigorous limitation of its applications in the hands of its author is--under all the circumstances--a thing worthy of being inquired into? considering who the author of it is, and that it is on the face of it, a new method of dealing with facts in general, a new method of obtaining axioms of practice from history in general, and not a specific method of obtaining them from that particular department of history from which his instances are taken; and, considering, too, that the author was himself aware of the whole sweep of its applications, and that he has taken pains to include in his description of its powers, the assertion,--the distinct, deliberate assertion--that it is capable of being applied as _efficiently_, to those nobler departments of the human need, which are marked out for it in the great instauration--those very departments in which he was known himself to be so deeply interested, and in which he had been all his life such a diligent explorer and experimenter. did it never occur to the scholar, to inquire why he did not apply it, then, himself to those very subjects, instead of keeping so stedfastly to the physical forces in his illustration of its powers? and has any one ever read the plan of this man's works? has any one seen the scheme of that great enterprise, for which he was the responsible person in his own time--that scheme which he wrote out, and put in among these published acknowledged works of his, which he dared to produce in his own name, to show what parts of his '_labor_,'--what part of chief consequence was _not_ thus produced? has any one seen that plan of a new system of universal science, which was published in the reign of james the first, under the patronage of that monarch? and if it has been seen, what is the reason there has been no enquiry made for those works, in which the author openly proposes to apply his new organum in person to these very subjects; and that, too, when he takes pains to tell us, in reference to that undertaking, that he is _not_ a vain promiser. there is a pretence of supplying that new kind of history, which the new method of discovery and invention requires as the first step towards its conclusions, which is put down as the third part of the instauration, though the natural history which is produced for that purpose is very far from fulfilling the description and promise of that division. but where is the fourth part of the great instauration? has anybody seen the fourth part? where is that so important part for which all that precedes it is a preparation, or to which it is subsidiary? where is that part which consists of examples, that are nothing but a _particular_ application of the second; that is, the novum organum,--'and to _subjects of the noblest kind_?' where is 'that part of our work which enters upon philosophy itself,' instead of dealing any longer, or professing to deal, with the method merely of finding that which man's relief requires, or instead of exhibiting that method any longer _in the abstract_? where are the works in which he undertakes to show it in operation, with its new 'grappling hooks' on the matter of the human life--applied by the inventor himself to 'the noblest subjects?' surely that would be a sight to see. what is the reason that our editors do not produce these so important works in their editions? what is the reason that our critics do not include them in their criticism? what is the reason that our scholars do not quote them? instead of stopping with that mere report of the condition of learning and its deficiences, and that outline of what is to be done, which makes the first part or introduction to this work; or stopping with the description of the new method, or the novum organum, which makes the second; why don't they go on to the 'new philosophy itself,' and show us that as well,--the very object of all this preparation? when he describes in the second part his _method_ of finding true terms, or rather the method of his school, when he describes this new method of finding '_ideas_,' ideas as they are in nature, powers, causes, the elements of history, or _forms_, as he more commonly calls them, when he describes this new method of deducing axioms, axioms that are ready for practice, he does, indeed, give us _instances_; but it so happens, that the instances are all of _one kind_ there. they are the physical powers that supply his examples in that part. in describing this method merely, he produces what he calls his tables of invention, or tables of review of instances; but where is that part in which he tells us we shall find these same tables again, with 'the nobler subjects' on them? he produces them for careful scrutiny in his second part; and he makes no small parade in bringing them in. he shews them up very industriously, and is very particular to direct the admiring attention of the reader to their adaptation as means to an end. but certainly there is nothing in that specimen of what can be done with them which he contents himself with there, that would lead any one to infer that the power of this invention, which is the novelty of it, was going to be a dangerous thing to society, or, indeed, that they were not the most harmless things in the world. it is the true cause of heat, and the infallible means of producing that under the greatest variety of conditions, which he appears to be trying to arrive at there. but what harm can there be in that, or in any other discovery of that kind. and there is no real impression made on any one's mind by that book, that there is any other kind of invention or discovery intended in the practical applications of this method? the very free, but of course not pedantic, use of the new terminology of a new school in philosophy, in which this author indulges--a terminology of a somewhat figurative and poetic kind, one cannot but observe, for a philosopher of so strictly a logical turn of mind, one whose thoughts were running on abstractions so entirely, to construct; his continued preference for these new scholastic terms, and his inflexible adherence to a most profoundly erudite mode of expression whenever he approaches 'the part operative' of his work, is indeed calculated to awe and keep at a distance minds not yet prepared to grapple formally with those 'nobler subjects' to which allusion is made in another place. king james was a man of some erudition himself; but he declared frankly that for his part he could not understand this book; and it was not strange that he could not, for the author did not intend that he should. the philosopher drops a hint in passing, however, that all which is essential in this method, might perhaps be retained without quite so much formality and fuss in the use of it, and that the proposed result might be arrived at by means of these same tables, without any use of technical language at all, under other circumstances. the results which have since been obtained by the use of this method in that department of philosophy to which it is specially applied in the novum organum, give to the inquirer into the causes of the physical phenomena now, some advantages which no invention could supply them. that was what the founders of this philosophy expected and predicted. they left this department to their school. the author of the novum organum orders and initiates this inquiry; but the basis of the induction in this department is as yet wanting; and the collections and experiments here require combinations of skill and labour which they cannot at once command. they will do what they can here too, in their small way, just to make a beginning; but they do not lay much stress upon any thing they can accomplish with the use of their own method in this field. it serves, however, a very convenient purpose with them; neither do they at all underrate its intrinsic importance. but the man who has studiously created for himself a social position which enables him to assume openly, and even ostentatiously, the position of an innovator--an innovator _in the world of letters_, an advancer of--_learning_--is compelled to introduce his innovation with the complaint that he finds the mind of the world so stupified, so bewildered with evil, and so under the influence of dogmas, that the first thing to be done is to get so much as a thought admitted of the possibility of a better state of things. 'the present system of philosophy,' he says, 'cherishes in its bosom certain positions or dogmas which it will be found, are calculated to produce a full conviction that no difficult, commanding, and powerful operation on nature _ought_ to be anticipated, through the means of art.' and, therefore, after criticising the theory and practice of the world as he finds it, reporting as well as he can,--though he can find no words, he says, in which to do justice to his feeling in regard to it--_the deficiencies_ in its learning, he devotes a considerable portion of the description of his new method to the grounds of 'hope' which he derives from this philosophic survey, and that that hope is not a hope of a better state of things in respect to the physical wants of man merely, that it is not a hope of a renovation in the arts which minister to those wants exclusively, any very careful reader of the first book of the novum organum will be apt on the whole to infer. but the statements here are very general, and he refers us to another place _for particulars_. 'let us then speak of _hope_' he says, '_especially_ as we are not vain promisers, nor are willing to enforce or ensnare men's judgments; but would rather lead them _willingly_ forward. and although we shall employ the most cogent means of _enforcing hope when we bring them_ to particulars, and _especially_ those which are digested and arranged in our tables of invention, the subject partly of the second, but--_principally_--mark it, _principally_ of the fourth part of the instauration, which are, indeed, rather the very objects of our hopes than hope itself.' does he dare to tell us, in this very connection, that he is _not_ a vain promiser, when no such part as that to which he refers us here is to be found anywhere among his writings--when this _principal_ part of his promise remains unfulfilled. 'the fourth part of the instauration,' he says again in his formal description of it, 'enters upon philosophy itself, furnishing _examples of inquiry and investigation_, according to our own method, _in certain subjects of the noblest kind_, but greatly differing from each other, that a specimen may be had of _every sort_. by these examples, we mean _not illustrations of rules and precepts_,' [he will show the facts in such order, in such scientific, select, methodical arrangements, that rules and precepts will be forced from them; for he will show them, on the tables of invention, and rules and precepts are the vintage that flows from the illustrious instances--the prerogative instances--the ripe, large, cleared, selected clusters of facts, the subtle prepared history which the tables of invention collect. the definition of the simple original elements of history, the pure definition is the first vintage from these; but 'that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule' and _the axiom of practice_, ready for use, is the final result.] 'but perfect models, which will exemplify the second part of this work, and represent, as it were, to _the eye_ the whole progress of the mind, and _the continued structure and order of invention_ in the more chosen subjects'--note it, in the _more_ chosen subjects; but this is not at all--'_after the same manner as globes and machines facilitate the more abstruse and subtle demonstrations in mathematics_.' but in another place he tells us, that the poetic form of demonstration is the form to which it is necessary to have recourse on these subjects, _especially_ when we come to these more abstruse and subtle demonstrations, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understanding in all new discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion; and that at the time he was writing out this plan of his works, any one, who would let in new light on the human understanding, and conquer prejudices, without raising animosity, opposition, or disturbance, had no choice--_must go in that same path_, or none. where are those diagrams? and what does he mean, when he tells us in this connection that he is not a vain promiser? where are those particular cases, in which this method of investigation is applied to the noblest subjects? where are the diagrams, in which the order of the investigation is represented, as it were, to the eye, which serve the same purpose, 'that globes and machines serve in the more abstruse and subtle demonstrations in mathematics?' we are all acquainted with one poem, at least, published about that time, in which some very abstruse and subtle investigations appear to be in progress, _not_ without the use of diagrams, and very lively ones too; but one in which the intention of the poet appears to be to the last degree 'enigmatical,' inasmuch as it has engaged the attention of the most philosophical minds ever since, and inasmuch as the most able critics have never been able to comprehend that intention fully in their criticism. and it is bound up with many others, in which the subjects are not less carefully chosen, and in which the method of inquiry is the same; in which that same method that is exhibited in the 'novum organum' in the abstract, or in its application to the investigation of the physical phenomena, is everywhere illustrated in the most chosen subjects--in subjects of the noblest kind. this volume, and another which has been mentioned here, contain the third and fourth parts of the great instauration, whether this man who describes them here, and who forgot, it would seem, to fulfil his promise in reference to them, be aware of it or not. that is the part of the great instauration that we want now, and we are fairly entitled to it, because these are not 'the next ages,' or 'the times which were nearer,' and which this author seldom speaks of without betraying his clear foresight of the political and social convulsions that were then at hand. these are the times, which were farther off, to which he appeals from those nearer ages, and to which he expressly dedicates the opening of his designs. now, what is it that we have to find? what is it that is missing out of this philosophy? nothing less than the 'principal' part of it. all that is good for anything in it, according to the author's own estimate. the rest serves merely 'to pass the time,' or it is good as it serves to prepare the way for this. what is it that we have to look for? the 'novum organum,' that severe, rigorous method of scientific inquiry, applied to _the more chosen subjects_ in the reigns of queen elizabeth and james i. tables of review of instances, and all that logic which is brought out in the doctrine of the prerogative instances, whereby the mind of man is prepared for its encounter with fact in general, brought down to particulars, and applied to the noblest subjects, and to every sort of subject which the philosophic mind of that age _chose_ to apply it to. that is what we want to find. 'the prerogative instances' in 'the _more_ chosen subjects.' the whole field which that philosophy chose for its field, and called the noblest, the principal, the chosen, the more chosen one. every part of it reduced to scientific inquiry, put under the rule of the 'novum organum'; that is what we want to find. we know that no such thing could possibly be found in the acknowledged writings of this author. nothing answering to that description, composed by a statesman and a philosopher, with an avowed intention in his writing--an intention to effect changes, too, in the actual condition of men, and 'to suborn practice and actual life,' no such work by such an author could by any means have been got through the press then. no one who studies the subject will think of looking for that fourth part of the instauration among the author's acknowledged writings. does he give us any hint as to where we are to look for it? is there any intimation as to the particular form of writing in which we are to find it? for find it we must and shall, because he is _not_ a vain promiser. the _subject_ itself determines the form, he says; and the fact that the whole ground of the discovery is ground already necessarily comprehended in the preconceptions of the many--that it is ground covered all over with the traditions and rude theories of unlearned ages, this fact, also, imperiously determines the method of the inculcation. who that knows what the so-called baconian method of learning really is, will need to be told that the principal books of it will be--books of instances and particulars, specimens--living ones, and that these will occupy the prominent place in the book; and that the conclusions and precepts will come in as abstractions from these, drawn freshly and on the spot from particulars, and, therefore, ready for use, 'knowing the way to particulars again?' who would ever expect to find the principal books of this learning--the books in which it enters upon philosophy itself, and undertakes to leave a specimen of its own method in the noblest subjects in its own chosen field--who would ever expect to find these books, books of abstractions, books of precepts, with instances or examples brought in, to illustrate or make them good? for this is not a point of method merely, but a point of substance, as he takes pains to tell us. and who that has ever once read his own account of the method in which he proposes to _win_ the human mind from its preconceptions, instead of undertaking to overcome it with logic and sharp disputations,--who that knows what place he gives to rhetoric, what place he gives to the imagination in his scheme of innovation, will expect to find these books, books of a dry didactic learning? does the student know how many times, in how many forms, under how many different heads, he perseveringly inserts the bold assurance, that the form of poesy and enigmatic allusive writing is the _only_ form in which the higher applications of his discovery can be made to any purpose in that age? who would expect to find this part in any professedly scientific work, when he tells us expressly, 'reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit,' as the examples which his scientific terminology includes in the department of _poesy?_ all the old historical wisdom was in that form, he says; all the first philosophy was poetical; all the old divinity came in history and parable; and even to this day, he who would let in new light upon the human understanding, without raising opposition or disturbance, must still go in the same path, and have recourse to the like method. he was an innovator; he was _not_ an agitator. and he claims that mark of a divine presence in his work, that its benefactions come, without noise or perturbation, _in aura leni_. of innovations, there has been none in history like that which he propounded, but neither would he strive nor cry. there was no voice in the streets, there was no red ensign lifted, there was no clarion-swell, or roll of the conqueror's drum to signal to the world that entrance. he, too, claims a divine authority for his innovation, and he declares it to be of god. it is the providential order of the world's history which is revealed in it; it is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy which this new chief, laden with new gifts for men, openly announces. 'let us begin from god,' he says, when he begins to open his ground of _hope_, after he has exposed the wretched condition of men as he finds them, without any scientific knowledge of the laws and institutes of the universe they inhabit, engaged in a perpetual and mad collision with them; 'let us begin from god, and show that our pursuit, from its exceeding goodness, _clearly_ proceeds from him, the author of good and father of light. now, _in all divine works_, the smallest beginnings lead assuredly to some results; and the rule in spiritual matters, that the kingdom of god cometh without observation, is also found to be true _in every great work of_ providence, so that everything glides in quietly, without confusion or noise; and the matter is achieved before men even think of perceiving that it is commenced.' 'men,' he tells us, 'men should imitate nature, who innovateth _greatly_ but _quietly_, and by degrees scarce to be perceived,' who will not dispense with the old form till the new one is finished and in its place. what is that we want to find? we want to find the new method of scientific inquiry applied to the questions in which men are most deeply interested--questions which were then imperiously and instantly urged on the thoughtful mind. we want to see it applied to politics in the reign of james the first. we want to see it applied to the open questions of another department of inquiry,--certainly not any less important,--in that reign, and in the reign which preceded it. we want to see the facts sifted through those scientific tables of review, from which the true form of sovereignty, the _legitimate_ sovereignty, is to be inducted, and the scientific axioms of government with it. we want to see the science of observation and experiment, the science of nature in general, applied to the cure of the common-weal in the reign of james the first, and to that particular crisis in its disease, in which it appeared to the observers to be at its last gasp; and that, too, by the principal doctors in that profession,--men of the very largest experience in it, who felt obliged to pursue their work conscientiously, whether the patient _objected_ or not. but are there any such books as these? certainly. you have the author's own word for it. 'some may raise this question,' he says, 'this _question_ rather than _objection_'--[it is better that it should come in the form of a _question_, than in the form of _an objection_, as it would have come, if there had been no room to '_raise the question_']--'_whether we talk_ of perfecting _natural philosophy_' [using the term here in its usual limited sense], 'whether we talk of perfecting natural philosophy _alone_, according to our method, or, _the other_ sciences--_such as_, ethics, logic, politics.' _that_ is the question 'raised.' 'we certainly intend to comprehend them all.' _that_ is _the author's_ answer to it. 'and as _common logic_ which _regulates matters by syllogism_, is applied, not only to natural, but to every other science, _so_ our inductive method _likewise_ comprehends them all.' with such iteration will he think fit to give us this point. it is put in here for those 'who raise the question'--the question 'rather than objection.' the other sort are taken care of in other places. '_for_,' he continues, 'we form a history and tables of invention, for _anger, fear, shame,_ and _the like_; and _also for examples in civil life_' [that was to be the principal part of the science when he laid out the plan of it in the advancement of learning] 'and the _mental_ operations of _memory, composition, division, judgment_, and the rest; _as well_ as for _heat_ and _cold, light_ and _vegetation_, and _the like_.' that is the plan of the new science, as the author sketches it for the benefit of those who raise questions rather than objections. that is its comprehension precisely, whenever he undertakes to mark out its limits for the satisfaction of this class of readers. but this is that same fourth part to which he refers us in the other places for the application of his method to those nobler subjects, those more chosen subjects; and that is just the part of his science which appears to be wanting. how happens it? did he get so occupied with the question of _heat_ and _cold_, _light_ and vegetation, and _the like_, that after all he forgot this part with its nobler applications? how could that be, when he tells us expressly, that they are the more chosen subjects of his inquiry. this part which he speaks of here, is the missing part of his philosophy, unquestionably. these are the books of it which have been missing hitherto; but in that providential order of events to which he refers himself, the time has come for them to be inquired for; and this inquiry is itself a part of that movement, in which the smallest beginnings lead assuredly to some result. for, 'let us begin from god,' he says, 'and show that our pursuit, from its exceeding goodness, clearly proceeds from him, the author of good, and not of misery; the father of light, and not of darkness.' of course, it was impossible to get out any scientific doctrine of the human society, without coming at once in collision with that doctrine of the divinity of arbitrary power which the monarchs of england were then openly sustaining. who needs to be told, that he who would handle that argument scientifically, then, without military weapons, as this inquirer _would_, must indeed 'pray in aid of _similes_.' and yet a very searching and critical inquiry into the claims of that institution, which the new philosophy found in possession of the human welfare, and asserting a divine right to it as a thing of private property and legitimate family inheritance,--such a criticism was, in fact, inevitably involved in that inquiry into the principles of a _human_ subjection which appeared to this philosopher to belong properly to the more chosen subjects of a scientific investigation. and notwithstanding the delicacy of the subjects, and the extremely critical nature of the investigation, when it came to touch those particulars, with which the personal observations and experiments of the founders of this new school in philosophy had tended to enrich their collections in this department,--'and the aim is better,' says the principal spokesman of this school, who quietly proposes to introduce this method into _politics_, 'the aim is better _when the mark is alive_;' notwithstanding the difficulties which appeared to lie then in the way of such an investigation, the means of conducting it to the entire satisfaction, and, indeed, to the large entertainment of the persons chiefly concerned, were not wanting. for this was one of those 'secrets of policy,' which have always required the aid of fable, and the idea of _dramatising_ the fable for the sake of reaching in some sort those who are incapable of receiving any thing 'which does not directly fall under, and strike the senses,' as the philosopher has it; those who are capable of nothing but 'dumb shows and noise,' as hamlet has it; this idea, though certainly a very happy, was not with these men an original one. men, whose relations to the state were not so different as the difference in the forms of government would perhaps lead us to suppose,--men of the gravest learning and enriched with the choicest accomplishments of their time, had adopted that same method of influencing public opinion, some two thousand years earlier, and even as long before as that, there were 'secrets of morality and policy,' to which this form of writing appeared to offer the most fitting veil. whether 'the new' philosopher,--whether 'the new magician' of this time, was, in fact, in possession of any art which enabled him to handle without diffidence or scruple the great political question which was then already the question of the time; whether 'the crown'--that double crown of military conquest and priestly usurpation, which was the one estate of the realm at that crisis in english history, did, among other things in some way, come under the edges of that new analysis which was severing _all_ here then, and get divided clearly with 'the mind, that divine fire,'--whether any such thing as that occurred here then, the reader of the following pages will be able to judge. the careful reader of the extracts they contain, taken from a work of practical philosophy which made its appearance about those days, will certainly have no difficulty at all in deciding that question. for, first of all, it is necessary to find that political key to the elizabethan art of delivery, which unlocks the great works of the elizabethan philosophy, and that is the necessity which determines the selection of the plays that are produced in this volume. they are brought in to illustrate the fact already stated, and already demonstrated, the fact which is the subject of this volume, the fact that the new practical philosophy of the modern ages, which has its beginning here, was not limited, in the plan of its founders, to 'natural philosophy' and 'the part operative' of that,--the fact that it comprehended, as its principal department, the department in which its 'noblest subjects' lay, and in which its most vital innovations were included, a field of enquiry which could not then be entered without the aid of fable and parable, and one which required not then only, 'but now, and at all times,' the aid of a vivid poetic illustration; they are brought in to illustrate the fact already demonstrated from other sources, the fact that the new philosophy was the work of men able to fulfil their work under such conditions, able to work, if not for the times that were nearer, for the times that were further off; men who thought it little so they could fulfil and perfect their work and make their account of it to the work-master, to robe another with their glory; men who could relinquish the noblest works of the human genius, that they might save them from the mortal stabs of an age of darkness, that they might make them over unharmed in their boundless freedom, in their unstained perfection, to the farthest ages of the advancement of learning,--that they might 'teach them how to live and look fresh' still, 'when tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent.' that is the one fact, the indestructible fact, which this book is to demonstrate. part i. lear's philosopher 'thou'dst shun a bear; but if thy way lay towards the raging sea, thou'dst meet the bear i' the mouth.' chapter i. philosophy in the palace. 'i think the king is but a man, as i am.'--_king henry_. 'they told me i was everything.'--_lear_. of course, it was not possible that the prerogative should be openly dealt with at such a time, questioned, discussed, scientifically examined, in the very presence of royalty itself, except by persons endowed with extraordinary privileges and immunities, persons, indeed, of quite irresponsible authority, whose right to do and say what they pleased, elizabeth herself, though they should enter upon a critical analysis of the divine rights of kings to her face, and deliberately lay bare the defects in that title which she was then attempting to maintain, must needs notwithstanding, concede and respect. and such persons, as it happened, were not wanting in the retinue of that sovereignty which was working in disguise here then, and laying the foundations of that throne in the thoughts of men, which would replace old principalities and powers, and not political dominions merely. to the creative genius which waited on the philosophic mind of that age, making up in the splendour of its gifts for the poverty of its exterior conditions, such persons,--persons of any amount or variety of capacity which the necessary question of its play might require, were not wanting:--'came with a thought.' of course, poor bolingbroke, fevered with the weight of his ill-got crown, and passing a sleepless night in spite of its supposed exemptions, unable to command on his state-bed, with all his royal means and appliances, the luxury that the wet sea boy in the storm enjoys,--and the poet appears, to have had some experience of this mortal ill, which inclines him to put it down among those which ought to be excluded from a state of supreme earthly felicity,--the poor guilty disgusted usurper, discovering that this so blessed 'invention' was not included in the prerogative he had seized, under the exasperation of the circumstances, might surely be allowed to mutter to himself, in the solitude of his own bed-chamber, a few general reflections on the subject, and, indeed, disable his own position to any extent, without expecting to be called to an account for it, by any future son or daughter of his usurping lineage. that extraordinary, but when one came to look at it, quite incontestable fact, that nature in her sovereignty, imperial still, refused to recognize this artificial difference in men, but still went on her way in all things, as if 'the golden standard' were not there, classing the monarch with his 'poorest subject;'--the fact that this charmed 'round of sovereignty,' did not after all secure the least exemption from the common _individual_ human frailty, and helplessness,--this would, of course, strike the usurper who had purchased the crown at such an expense, as a fact in natural history worth communicating, if it were only for the benefit of future princes, who might be disposed to embark in a similar undertaking. here, of course, the moral was proper, and obvious enough; or close at hand, and ready to be produced, in case any serious inquiry should be made for it; though the poet might seem, perhaps, to a severely critical mind, disposed to pursue his philosophical inquiry a little too curiously into the awful secrets of majesty, retired within itself, and pondering its own position;--openly searching what lord bacon reverently tells us, the scriptures pronounce to be inscrutable, namely, _the hearts_ of _kings_, and audaciously laying bare those private passages, those confessions, and misgivings, and frailties, for which policy and reverence prescribe concealment, and which are supposed in the play, indeed, to be shrouded from the profane and vulgar eye, a circumstance which, of course, was expected to modify the impression. so, too, that profoundly philosophical suspicion, that a rose, or a violet, did actually smell, to a person occupying this sublime position, very much as it did to another; a suspicion which, in the mouth of a common man, would have been literally sufficient to 'make a star-chamber matter of'; and all that thorough-going analysis of the trick and pageant of majesty which follows it, would, of course, come only as a graceful concession, from the mouth of that genuine piece of royalty, who contrives to hide so much of the poet's own 'sovereignty of nature,' under the mantle of his free and princely humours, the brave and gentle hero of agincourt. 'though _i_ speak it to you,' he says, talking in the disguise of a 'private,' '_i think the king is but a man as i am_, the violet smells to him as it doth to me; all his senses, _have but human conditions_. his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. when he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are'; and in the same scene, thus the royal philosopher versifies, and soliloquises on the same delicate question. 'and what have _kings_ that "_privates_" have not, too, save ceremony,--save general ceremony? and what art thou, thou _idol ceremony?_--_what is_ thy _soul_ of _adoration_?' a grave question, for a man of an inquiring habit of mind, in those times: let us see how a poet can answer it. 'art thou aught else but _place, degree_ and _form_, creating awe and fear in _other men?_ wherein, thou _art less happy, being feared_, _than they in fearing_? [again and again this man has told us, and on his oath, that he cherished no evil intentions, no thought of harm to the king; and those who know what criticisms on the state, as it was then, he had authorised, and what changes in it he was certainly meditating and preparing the way for, have charged him with falsehood and perjury on that account; but this is what he means. he thinks that wretched victim of that most irrational and monstrous state of things, on whose head the crown of an arbitrary rule is placed, with all its responsibilities, in his infinite unfitness for them, is, in fact, the one whose case most of all requires relief. he is the one, in this theory, who suffers from this unnatural state of things, not less, but more, than his meanest subject. 'thou art less happy being feared, than they in fearing.'] what drink'st thou oft _instead of homage sweet_ but _poison'd flattery_? o! be sick, great greatness, and bid thy _ceremony_ give thee _cure_. thinkest thou the _fiery fever will go out_ with _titles blown from adulation_? will it give place to flexure and low bending? interesting physiological questions! and though the author, for reasons of his own, has seen fit to put them in blank verse here, it is not because he does not understand, as we shall see elsewhere, that they are questions of a truly scientific character, which require to be put in prose in his time--questions of vital consequence to all men. the effect of 'poisoned flattery,' and 'titles blown from adulation' on the minds, of those to whose single will and caprice the whole welfare of the state, and all the gravest questions for this life and the next, were then entrusted, naturally appeared to the philosophical mind, perseveringly addicted to inquiries, in which the practical interests of men were involved, a question of gravest moment. but here it is the physical difference which accompanies this so immense human distinction, which he appears to be in quest of; it is the control over nature with which these '_farcical titles_' invest their possessor, that he appears to be now pertinaciously bent upon ascertaining. for we shall find, as we pursue the subject, that this is not an accidental point here, a casual incident of the character, or of the plot, a thing which belongs to the play, and not to the author; but that this is a poet who is somehow perpetually haunted with the impression that those who assume a divine right to control, and dispose of their fellow-men, ought to exhibit some sign of their authority; some superior abilities; some magical control; some light and power that other men have not. how he came by any such notions, the critic of his works is, of course, not bound to show; but that which meets him at the first reading is the fact, the incontestable fact, that the poet of shakspere's stage, be he who he may, is a poet whose mind is in some way deeply occupied with this question; that it is a poet who is infected, and, indeed, perfectly possessed, with the idea, that the true human leadership ought to consist in the ability to extend the empire of man over nature,--in the ability to unite and control men, and lead them in battalions against those common evils which infest the human conditions,--not fevers only but 'worser' evils, and harder to be cured, and to the conquest of those supernal blessings which the human race have always been vainly crying for. 'i am a king that find thee,' he says. and having this inveterate notion of a true human regality to begin with, he is naturally the more curious and prying in regard to the claims of the one which he finds in possession; and when by the mystery of his profession and art, he contrives to get the cloak of that factitious royalty about him, he asks questions under its cover which another man would not think of putting. 'canst thou,' he continues, walking up and down the stage in king hal's mantle, inquiring narrowly into its virtues and taking advantage of that occasion to ascertain the limits of the prerogative--that very dubious question then,-- 'canst thou when thou command'st the beggar's knee, _command the health_ of it?'-- _no_? what mockery of power is it then? but, this in connection with the preceding inquiry in regard to the effect of titles on the progress of a fever, or the amenability of its paroxysm, to flexure and low bending, might have seemed perhaps in the mouth of a subject to savour somewhat of irony; it might have sounded too much like a taunt upon the royal helplessness under cover of a serious philosophical inquiry, or it might have betrayed in such an one a disposition to pursue scientific inquiries farther than was perhaps expedient. but thus it is, that the king can dare to pursue the subject, answering his own questions. 'no, thou proud dream that _playst so subtly with a king's repose_; _i_ am a king _that find thee_; and i know 'tis not the the balm, the sceptre, and the ball, the sword, the mace, the crown imperial, _the inter-tissued_ robe of _gold and pearl_, the farced title-- what is that?--mark it:--the _farced_ title!--a bold word, one would say, even with _a king_ to authorise it. 'the farced title running 'fore the king, the throne he sits on, nor _the tide_ of pomp that beats upon the high shore of this world, no, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony, not all these laid in bed majestical, can _sleep so soundly_ as the wretched slave who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread, never sees horrid night, the child of hell, but like a lackey from the rise to set sweats in the eye of phoebus; and all night sleeps in elysium. yes, there we have him, at last. there he is exactly. that is the scientific picture of him, 'poor man,' as this poet calls him elsewhere. what malice could a philosophic poet bear him? that is the monarchy that men were 'sanctifying themselves with,' and 'turning up the white of the eye to,' then. that is the figure that it makes when it comes to be laid in its state-bed, upon the scientific table of review, not in the formal manner of 'the second part' of this philosophy, but in that other manner which the author of the _novum organum_, speaks of so frequently, as the one to be used in applying it to subjects of this nature. that is the anatomy of him, which '_our_ method of inquiry and investigation,' brings out without much trouble 'when we come to particulars.' 'truly we were in good hands,' as the other one says, who finds it more convenient, for his part, to discourse on these points, from a distance. that is the figure the usurping monarch's pretensions make at the first blush, in the collections from which '_the vintage_' of the true sovereignty, and the scientific principles of governments are to be expressed, when the true _monarchy_, the legitimate, 'one only man power,' is the thing inquired for. this one goes to 'the negative' side apparently. a wretched fellow that cannot so much as 'sleep o' nights,' that lies there on the stage in the play of henry the fourth, in the sight of all the people, with the crown on his very pillow, by way 'facilitating the demonstration,' pining for the 'elysium' at his meanest subject,--that the poor slave, 'crammed with distressful bread,' commands; crying for the luxury that the wet seaboy, on his high and giddy couch enjoys;--and from whose note-book came that image, dashed with the ocean spray,--who saw that seaboy sleeping in _that_ storm? but, as for this king, it is the king which the scientific history brings out; whereas, in the other sort of history that was in use then, lie is hardly distinguishable at all from those mexican kings who undertook to keep the heavenly bodies in their places, and, at the same time, to cause all things to be borne by the earth which were requisite for the comfort and convenience of man; a peculiarity of those sovereigns, of which the man on the mountains, whose study is so well situated for observations of that sort, makes such a pleasant note. but whatever other view we may take of it, this, it must be conceded, is a tolerably comprehensive exhibition, in the general, of the mere pageant of royalty, and a pretty free mode of handling it; but it is at the same time a privileged and entirely safe one. for the liberty of this great prince to repeat to himself, in the course of a solitary stroll through his own camp at midnight, when nobody is supposed to be within hearing, certain philosophical conclusions which he was understood to have arrived at in the course of his own regal experience, could hardly be called in question. and as to that most extraordinary conversation in which, by means of his disguise on this occasion, he becomes a participator, if the prince himself were too generous to avail himself of it to the harm of the speakers, it would ill become any one else to take exceptions at it. and yet it is a conversation in which a party of common soldiers are permitted to 'speak their minds freely' for once, though 'the blank verse has to halt for it,' on questions which would be considered at present questions of 'gravity.' it is a dialogue in which these men are allowed to discuss one of the most important institutions of their time from an ethical point of view, in a tone as free as the president of a peace society could use to-day in discussing the same topic, intermingling their remarks with criticisms on the government, and personal allusions to the king himself, which would seem to be more in accordance with the manners of the nineteenth century, than with those of the poet's time. but then these wicked and treasonous grumblings being fortunately encountered on the spot, and corrected by the king himself in his own august person, would only serve for edification in the end; if, indeed, that appeal to the national pride which would conclude the matter, and the glory of that great day which was even then breaking in the east, should leave room for any reflections upon it. for it was none other than the field of _agincourt_ that was subjected to this philosophic inquiry. it was the lustre of that immortal victory which was to england then, what waterloo and the victories of nelson are now, that was thus chemically treated beforehand. under the cover of that renowned triumph, it was, that these soldiers could venture to search so deeply the question of war in general; it was in the person of its imperial hero, that the statesman could venture to touch so boldly, an institution which gave to one man, by his own confession no better or wiser than his neighbours, the power to involve nations in such horrors. but let us join the king in his stroll, and hear for ourselves, what it is that these soldiers are discussing, by the camp-fires of _agincourt_;--what it is that this first voice from the ranks has to say for itself. the king has just encountered by the way a poetical sentinel, who, not satisfied with the watchword--'_a friend_,'-- requests the disguised prince 'to discuss to him, and answer, whether he is an _officer_, or _base, common_, and _popular_,' when the king lights on this little group, and the discussion which pistol had solicited, apparently on his own behalf, actually takes place, for the benefit of the poet's audience, and the answer to these inquiries comes out in due order. _court_. brother john bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder? _bates_. i think it be, _but we have no great cause to desire the approach of day_. _will_. we see yonder the beginning of the day, but i think we shall never see the end of it. who goes there? _king henry_. a friend. _will_. under what captain serve you? _king_. under sir thomas erpingham. _will_. a good old commander, and a most kind gentleman: i pray you, what thinks he of our estate? _king._ even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide. _bates_. _he hath not told his thought to the king_? _king_. no; nor it is not meet that he should; for though _i speak it to you_, i think the king is but a man as i am. and it is here that he proceeds to make that important disclosure above quoted, that all his senses have but human conditions, and that all his _affections_, though _higher mounted, stoop with the like wing_; and therefore no man should in reason possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, 'should dishearten his army.' _bates_. he may show what outward courage he will; but, _i_ believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the thames, up to the neck; and so i would he were, and i by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here. _king_. by my troth, i will speak my conscience of the king. i think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is. _bates_. then would he were here alone; so should he be sure to be ransomed, and a many poor men's lives saved. _king_. i dare say you love him not so ill as to wish him here alone; _howsoever you speak this to feel other men's minds_; methinks i could not die anywhere so contented as in the king's company; _his cause being just, and his quarrel honorable_. _will. that's more than we know._ _bates_. ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the king's subjects; if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the _king_ wipes the crime of it out of us. _will_. but _if the cause be not good_, the _king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make_; when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all--we died at such a place; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them; some upon the debts they owe; some upon their children rawly left. i am afeared that few die well, that die in battle; for how can they _charitably_ dispose of anything _when blood is their argument_? now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were _against all proportion of subjection_. _king_. so, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise, do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master's command, transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers, and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation.--but this is not so.... there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrament of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers. but the king pursues this question of the royal responsibility until he arrives at the conclusion that _every subject's_ duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own, until he shows, indeed, that there is but one ultimate sovereignty; one to which the king and his subjects are alike amenable, which pursues them everywhere, with its demands and reckonings,--from whose violated laws there is no escape. _will_. 'tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill is upon his own head--[no unimportant point in the theology or ethics of that time]--the king is not to answer for it. _bates_. i do not desire the king should answer for me, and yet i determine to fight lustily for him. _king_. i, myself, heard the king say, he would not be ransomed. _will_. ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed and we ne'er the wiser. _king_. if i live to see it, i will never trust his word after. _will_. _mass, you'll pay him then!_ that's a perilous shot out of an _elder gun_, that a poor and _private_ displeasure can do against a monarch. _you may as well go about to turn the sun to ice_, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather. and, indeed, thus and not any less absurd and monstrous, appeared the idea of subjecting the king to any effect from the subject's displeasure, or the idea of calling him to account--this one, helpless, frail, private man, as he has just been conceded by the king himself to be, for any amount of fraud or dishonesty to the nation, for any breach of trust or honour. for his relation to the _mass_ and the source of this fearful irresponsible power was not understood then. the soldier states it well. one might, indeed, as well go about to turn the sun to ice, _with fanning in his face_ with a peacock's feather. 'you'll never trust his word after,' the soldier continues. 'come, 'tis a foolish saying.' 'your reproof is something _too round_,' is the king's reply. it is indeed round. it is one of those round replies that this poet is so fond of, and the king himself becomes 'the private' of it, when once the centre of this play is found, and the sweep of its circumference is taken. for the sovereignty of law, the kingship of the universal law _in whomsoever it speaks_, awful with god's power, armed with _his_ pains and penalties is the scientific sovereignty; and in the scientific diagrams the passions, 'the poor and private passions,' and the arbitrary will, in whomsoever they speak, no matter what symbols of sovereignty they have contrived to usurp, make no better figure in their struggles with that law, than that same which the poet's vivid imagination and intense perception of incompatibilities, has seized on here. the king struggles vainly against the might of the universal nature. it is but the shot out of an '_elder gun_;' he might as well 'go about to _turn the sun to ice_ with fanning in his face with a _peacock's_ feather.' 'i should be angry with you,' continues the king, after noticing the roundness of that reply, 'i should be angry with you, if _the time_ were convenient.' but as to the poet who composes these dialogues, of course he does not know whether the time is convenient or not;--he has never reflected upon any of those grave questions which are here so seriously discussed. they are not questions in which he can be supposed to have taken any interest. of course he does not know or care what it is that these men are talking about. it is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that his interlocutors are permitted to go on in this manner. it is easy to see, however, what extraordinary capabilities this particular form of writing offered to one who _had_ any purpose, or to an author, who wished on any account, to '_infold_' somewhat his meaning;--that was the term used then in reference to this style of writing. for certainly, many things dangerous in themselves could be shuffled in under cover of an artistic effect, which would not strike at the time, amid the agitations, and the skilful checks, and counteractions, of the scene, even the quick ear of despotism itself. and thus king lear--that impersonation of absolutism--the very embodiment of pure will and tyranny in their most frantic form, taken out all at once from that hot bath of flatteries to which he had been so long accustomed, that his whole self-consciousness had become saturated, tinctured in the grain with them, and he believed himself to be, within and without, indestructibly, essentially,--'ay, every inch a king;' with speeches on his supremacy copied, well nigh verbatim, from those which elizabeth's courtiers habitually addressed to her, still ringing in his ears, hurled out into a single-handed contest with the elements, stripped of all his 'social and artificial lendings,' the poor, bare, unaccommodated, individual man, this living subject of the poet's artistic treatment,--this 'ruined majesty' anatomized alive, taken to pieces literally before our eyes, pursued, hunted down scientifically, and robbed in detail of all 'the additions of a king'--must, of course, be expected to evince in some way his sense of it; 'for soul and body,' this poet tells us, 'rive not more in parting than greatness going off.' once conceive the possibility of presenting the action, the dumb show, of this piece upon the stage at that time, (there have been times since when it could not be done), and the dialogue, with its illimitable freedoms, follows without any difficulty. for the surprise of the monarch at the discoveries which this new state of things forces upon him,--the speeches he makes, with all the levelling of their philosophy, with all the unsurpassable boldness of their political criticism, are too natural and proper to the circumstances, to excite any surprise or question. indeed, a king, who, nurtured in the flatteries of the palace, was unlearned enough in the nature of things, to suppose that _the name_ of a king was anything but a shadow when _the power_ which had sustained its prerogative was withdrawn,--a king who thought that he could still be a king, and maintain 'his state' and 'his hundred knights,' and their prerogatives, and all his old arbitrary, despotic humours, with their inevitable encroachment on the will and humours, and on the welfare of others, merely on grounds of respect and affection, or on grounds of duty, when not merely the care of 'the state,' but the revenues and power of it had been devolved on others--such a one appeared, indeed, to the poet, to be engaging in an experiment very similar to the one which he found in progress in his time, in that old, decayed, riotous form of military government, which had chosen the moment of its utter dependence on the popular will and respect, as the fitting one for its final suppression of the national liberties. it was an experiment which was, of course, modified in the play by some diverting and strongly pronounced differences, or it would not have been possible to produce it then; but it was still the experiment of _the unarmed prerogative_, that the old popular tale of the ancient king of britain offered to the poet's hands, and that was an experiment which he was willing to see traced to its natural conclusion on paper at least; while in the subsequent development of the plot, the presence of an insulted trampled outcast majesty on the stage, furnishes a cover of which the poet is continually availing himself, for putting the case of that other outraged sovereignty, whose cause under one form or another, under all disguises, he is always pleading. and in the poet's hands, the debased and outcast king, becomes the impersonation of a debased and violated state, that had given all to its daughters,--the victim of a tyranny not less absolute, the victim, too, of a blindness and fatuity on its own part, not less monstrous, but not, not--_that_ is the poet's word--_not_ yet irretrievable. 'thou shalt find i will resume that shape, which thou dost think i have cast off for ever; thou shalt, i warrant thee.' 'do you mark that, my lord?' but the question of that prerogative, which has consumed, in the poet's time, all the faculties of government constitutes only a subordinate part of the action of that great play, into which it is here incorporated; a play which comprehends in its new philosophical reaches, in its new and before-unimagined subtilties of analysis, the most radical questions of a practical human science; questions which the practical reason of these modern ages at the moment of its awakening, found itself already compelled to grapple with, and master. chapter ii. unaccommodated man. 'consider him well.--three of us are sophisticated.' for this is the grand social tragedy. it is the tragedy of an unlearned human society; it is the tragedy of a civilization in which grammar, and the relations of sounds and abstract notions to each other have sufficed to absorb the attention of the learned,--a civilization in which the parts of speech, and their relations, have been deeply considered, but one in which the social elements, the parts of life, and their unions, and their prosody, have been left to spontaneity, and empiricism, and all kinds of rude, arbitrary, idiomatical conjunctions, and fortuitous rules; a civilization in which the learning of 'words' is put down by the reporter--invented-- and the learning of 'things'--omitted. and in a movement which was designed to bring the human reason to bear scientifically and artistically upon those questions in which the deepest human interests are involved, the wrong and misery of that social state to which the new machine, with its new combination of sense and reason, must be applied, had to be fully and elaborately brought out and exhibited. and there was but one language in which the impersonated human misery and wrong,--the speaker for countless hearts, tortured and broken on the rude machinery of unlearned social customs, and lawless social forces, could speak; there was but one tongue in which it could tell its story. for this is the place where science becomes inevitably poetical. that same science which fills our cabinets and herbariums, and chambers of natural history, with mute stones and shells and plants and dead birds and insects--that same science that fills our scientific volumes with coloured pictures true as life itself, and letter-press of prose description--that same science that anatomises the physical frame with microscopic nicety,--in the hand of its master, found in the soul, that which had most need of science; and his 'illustrated book' of it, the book of his experiments in it, comes to us filled with his yet living, 'ever living' _subjects_, and resounding with the tragedy of their complainings. it requires but a little reading of that book to find, that the author of it is a philosopher who is strongly disposed to ascertain the limits of that thing in nature, which men call fortune,--that is, in their week-day speech,--they have another name for it 'o' sundays.' he is greatly of the opinion, that the combined and legitimate use of those faculties with which man is beneficently 'armed against diseases of the world,' would tend very much to limit those fortuities and accidents, those wild blows,--those vicissitudes, that men, in their ignorance and indolent despair, charge on fate or ascribe to providence, while at the same time it would furnish the art of _accommodating_ the human mind to that which is inevitable. it is not fortune who is blind, but man, he says,--a creature endowed of nature for his place in nature, endowed of god with a godlike faculty, looking before and after--a creature who has eyes, eyes adapted to his special necessities, but one that will not use them. acquaintance with law, as it is actual in nature, and inventions of arts based on that acquaintance, appear to him to open a large field of relief to the human estate, a large field of encroachment on that human misery, which men have blindly and stupidly acquiesced in hitherto, as necessity. for this is the philosopher who borrows, on another page, an ancient fable to teach us that that is not the kind of submission which is pleasing to god--that that is not the kind of 'suffering' that will ever secure his favour. he, for one, is going to search this social misery to the root, with that same light which the ancient wise man tells us, 'is as the lamp of god, wherewith he searcheth the inwardness of all secrets.' the weakness and ignorance and misery of the _natural_ man,--the misery too of the _artificial man_ as he is,--the misery of man in society, when that society is cemented with arbitrary customs, and unscientific social arts, and when the instinctive spontaneous demoniacal forces of nature, are at large in it; the dependence of the social monad, the constitutional specific _human_ dependence, on the specific _human_ law,--the exquisite human liability to injury and wrong, which are but the natural indications of those higher arts and excellencies, those unborn pre-destined human arts and excellencies, which man must struggle through his misery to reach;--that is the scientific notion which lies at the bottom of this grand ideal representation. it is, in a word, the human social need, in all its circumference, clearly sketched, laid out, scientifically, as the basis of the human social art. it is the negation of that which man's conditions, which the _human_ conditions require;--it is the collection on the table of exclusion and rejection, which must precede the _practical_ affirmation. _king_. have you heard the argument? is there no offence in it? _hamlet_. none in the world. it's the image of a murder done in vienna. in the poetic representation of that state of things which was to be redressed, the central social figure must, of course, have its place. for it is the poet, the experimental poet, unseen indeed, deep buried in his fable, his new movements all hidden under its old garb, and deeper hidden still, in the new splendours he puts on it--it is the poet--invisible but not the less truly, he,--it is the scientific poet, who comes upon the monarch in his palace at noonday, and says, 'my business is with thee, o king.' it is he who comes upon the selfish arrogant old despot, drunk with elizabethan flatteries, stuffed with '_titles blown_ from adulation,' unmindful of the true ends of government, reckless of the duties which that regal assumption of the common weal brings with it--it is the poet who comes upon this doctor of laws in the palace and prescribes to him a course of treatment which the royal patient himself, when once it has taken effect, is ready to issure from the hovel's mouth, in the form of a general prescription and state ordinance. 'take physic, pomp; expose thyself to _feel_ what wretches _feel_, that thou may'st shake the superflux to them, and show the heavens more just. oh, i have taken _too little care_ of this!' it is that same poet who has already told us, confidentially, under cover of king hal's mantle, that 'the king himself is but a man' and that 'all his senses have but human conditions and that his affections, too, though higher mounted when they stoop, stoop with the like wing; that his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man';--it is that same poet, and, in carrying out the purpose of this play, it has come in his way now to make good that statement. for it was necessary to his purpose here, to show that the state is composed throughout, down to its most loathsome unimaginable depths of neglect and misery, of individual men, social units, clothed of nature with the same faculties and essential human dignities and susceptibilities to good and evil, and crowned of nature with the common sovereignty of reason,--down-trodden, perhaps, and wrung and trampled out of them, but elected of nature to that dignity; it was necessary to show this, in order that the wisdom of the state which sacrifices to the senses of _one_ individual man, and the judgment that is narrowed by the one man's senses, the weal of the whole,--in order that the wisdom of the state, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary will and passions of _the one_, the weal of _the many_, might be mathematically exhibited,--might be set down in figures and diagrams. for this is that poet who represents this method of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to _the eye_. this is that same poet, too, who surprises elsewhere _a queen_ in her swooning passion of grief, and bids her murmur to us her recovering confession. 'no more, but e'en a woman; and _commanded_ by such poor passion, as the maid that milks, and does the meanest chares.' so busy is he, indeed, in laying by this king's 'ceremonies' for him, beginning with the first doubtful perception of a most faint neglect,--a falling off in the ceremonious affection due to majesty 'as well in the general dependents as in the duke himself and his daughter,'--so faint that the king dismisses it from his thought, and charges it on his own jealousy till he is reminded of it by another,--beginning with that faint beginning, and continuing the process not less delicately, through all its swift dramatic gradations,--the direct abatement of the regal dignities,--the knightly train diminishing,--nay, 'fifty of his followers at a clap' torn from him, his messenger put in the stocks,--and '_it is worse than murder_,' the poor king cries in the anguish of his slaughtered dignity and affection, 'to do upon _respect_ such violent outrage,'--so bent is the poet upon this analytic process; so determined that this shaking out of a '_preconception_,' shall be for once a thorough one, so absorbed with the dignity of the scientific experiment, that he seems bent at one moment on giving a literal finish to this process; but the fool's scruples interfere with the philosophical humour of the king, and the presence of mad tom in his blanket, with the king's exposition, suffices to complete the demonstration. for not less lively than this, is the preaching and illustration, from that new rostrum which this 'doctor' has contrived to make himself master of. 'his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man,' says king hal. 'couldst thou save nothing?' says king lear to the bedlamite. 'why thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.' '_is man_,'--it is _the king_ who generalises, it is the king who introduces this levelling suggestion here in the _abstract_, while the poet is content with the responsibility of the concrete exhibition--'_is man no wore than this_? consider him well. thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the cat no perfume:--ha! here's three of us are _sophisticated. thou art the thing itself_. unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal, as thou art. off, off, you lendings.' but 'the fool' is of the opinion that this scientific process of unwrapping the artificial majesty, this philosophical undressing, has already gone far enough. 'pry'thee, nuncle, be contented,' he says, 'it is a naughty night to swim in.' for it is the great heath wrapped in one of those storms of wind and rain and thunder and lightning, which this wizard only of all the children of men knows how to raise, that he chooses for his physiological exhibition of majesty, when the palace-door has been shut upon it, and the last 'additions of a king' have been subtracted. it is a night-- 'wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, the lion, and the belly-pinched wolf keep their fur dry'-- into which he turns his royal patient '_unbonneted_.' for the tyranny of wild nature in her elemental uproar must be added to the tyranny of the human wildness, the cruelty of the elements must conspire, like pernicious ministers, with the cruelty of arbitrary human will and passions, the irrational, inhuman social forces must be joined by those other forces that make war upon us, before the real purpose of this exhibition and the full depth and scientific comprehension of it can begin to appear. it is in the tempest that lear finds occasion to give out the poet's text. is _man_ no more than this? consider him well. unaccommodated man in his struggle with nature. man without social combinations, man without arts to aid him in his battle with the elements, or _with_ arts that fence in his body, and robe it, it may be, in delicate and gorgeous apparelling, arts that roof his head with a princely dome it may be, and add to his native dignity and forces, the means and appliances of a material civilization, but leave his nobler nature with its more living susceptibility to injury, unsheathed, at the mercy of the brute forces that unscientific civilizations, with their coarse laws, with their cobwebs of wordy learning, with their science of abstractions, unmatched with the subtilty of things, are compelled to leave at large, uncaught, unentangled. yes, it is man in his relation to nature, man in his dependence on artificial aid, man in his two-fold dependence on art, that this tempest, this double tempest wakes and brings out, for us to 'consider,'--to 'consider well';--'the naked creature,' that were better in his grave than to answer with his uncovered body that extremity of the skies, and by his side, with his soul uncovered to a fiercer blast, his royal brother with 'the tempest in his mind, that doth from his senses take all feeling else, save what beats there.' it is the _personal_ weakness, the moral and intellectual as well as the bodily frailty and limitation of faculty, and liability to suffering and outrage, the liability to wrong from treachery, as well as violence, which are 'the common' specific _human_ conditions, common to the king in his palace, and tom o'bedlam in his hovel; it is this exquisite human frailty and susceptibility, still unprovided for, that fills the play throughout, and stands forth in these two, impersonated; it is that which fills all the play with the outcry of its anguish. and thus it is, that this poor king must needs be brought out into this wild uproar of nature, and stripped of his last adventitious aid, reduced to the authority and forces that nature gave him, invaded to the skin, and ready in his frenzy to second the poet's intent, by yielding up the last thread of his adventitious and artistic defences. all his artificial, social personality already dissolved, or yet in the agony of its dissolution, all his natural social ties torn and bleeding within him, there is yet another kind of trial for him, as the elected and royal representative of the human conditions. for the perpetual, the universal interest of this experiment arises from the fact, that it is not as _the king_ merely, dissolving like 'a mockery king of snow' that this illustrious form stands here, to undergo this fierce analysis, but as the representative, 'the conspicuous instance,' of that social name and figure, which all men carry about with them, and take to be a part of themselves, that outward life, in which men go beyond themselves, by means of their affections, and extend their identity, incorporating into their very personality, that floating, contingent material which the wills and humours and opinions, the prejudices and passions of others, and the variable tide of this world's fortunes make--that social name and figure in which men may die many times, ere the physical life is required of them, in which all men must needs live if they will live in it at all, at the mercy of these uncontrolled social eventualities. the tragedy is complicated, but it is only that same complication which the tragedy it stands for, is always exhibiting. the fact that this blow to his state is dealt to him by those to whom nature herself had so dearly and tenderly bound him, nay, with whom she had so hopelessly identified him, is that which overwhelms the sufferer. it is that which he seeks to understand in vain. he wishes to reason upon it, but his mind cannot master it; under that it is that his brain gives way,--the first mental confusion begins there. the blow to his state is a subordinate thing with him. it only serves to measure the wrong that deals it. the poet takes pains to clear this complication in the experiment. it is the wound in the affections which untunes the jarring senses of 'this _child-changed father_.' it is that which invades his identity. 'are you _our_ daughter? does anyone here know me?' that is the word with which he breaks the silence of that dumb amazement, that paralysis of frozen wonder which goneril's first rude assault brings on him. 'why, _this is not lear_; ha! sure it is not so. does any one here know me? who is it that can tell me _who i am_?' but with all her cruelty, he cannot shake her off. he curses her; but his curses do not sever the tie. 'but yet _thou art_ my flesh, my blood, _my daughter_. or rather, a disease that's in my flesh which i must needs call _mine_. filial ingratitude! is _it not as this mouth should tear this hand for lifting food to it_?' for that is the poet's conception of the extent of this social life and outgoing--that is the _interior_ of that social whole, in which the dissolution he represents here is proceeding,--and that is the kind of new phenomenon which the science of man, when it takes him as he is, not the abstract man of the schools, not the logical man that the realists and the nominalists went to blows for, but 'the thing itself,' exhibits. as to that other '_man_,'--the man of the old philosophy,--he was not 'worth the whistle,' this one thinks. 'his bones were marrowless, his blood was cold, he had no speculation in those eyes that he did glare with.' the new philosopher will have no such skeletons in his system. he is getting his _general_ man out of particular cases, building him up solid, from a basis of natural history, and, as far as he goes, there will be no question, no two words about it, as to whether he _is_ or _is not_. 'for i do take,' says the advancer of learning, 'the _consideration_ in general, and at large, of _human nature_, to be fit to be emancipated and made a knowledge by itself.' no wonder if some new aspects of these ordinary phenomena, these 'common things,' as he calls them, should come out, when they too come to be subjected to a scientific inquiry, and when the poet of this advancement, this so subtle poet of it, begins to explore them. and as to this particular point which he puts down with so much care, this point which poor lear is illustrating here, viz. 'that our affections carry themselves beyond us,' as the sage of the 'mountain' expresses it, this is the view the same poet gives of it, in accounting for ophelia's madness. 'nature is fine in love; and where 'tis fine, it sends some precious instance of itself, after the thing it loves.' 'your old kind father,' continues lear, searching to the quick the secrets of this 'broken-heartedness,' as people are content to call it, this ill to which the human species is notoriously liable, though philosophy had not thought it worth while before 'to find it out;' 'your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,-- o _that way_ madness lies; let me shun _that_, no more of _that_.' and it is while he is still undergoing the last extreme of the suffering which the human wrong is capable of inflicting on the affections, that he comes in the poet's hands to exhibit also the unexplored depth of that wrong,--that monstrous, inhuman social error, that perpetual outrage on nature in her _human_ law, which leaves the helpless human outcast to the rough discipline of nature, which casts him out from the family of man, from its common love and shelter, and leaves him in his vices, and helplessness, and ignorance, to contend alone with great nature and her unrelenting consequences. 'to wilful men the injuries that they themselves procure, must be their school-masters,'-- is the point which the philosophic regan makes, as she bids them shut the door in her father's face; but it is the common human relationship that the poet is intent on clearing, while he notes the special relationship also; he does not limit his humanities to the ties of blood, or household sympathies, or social gradations. but regan's views on this point are seconded and sustained, and there seems to be but one opinion on the subject among those who happen to have that castle in possession; at least the timid owner of it does not feel himself in a position to make any forcible resistance to the orders which his illustrious guests, who have 'taken from him the use of his own house,' have seen fit to issue in it. 'shut up your doors, (says cornwall), 'shut up your doors, my lord: 'tis a wild night. _my_ regan counsels _well_; come out o' the storm.' and it is because this representation is artistic and dramatic, and not simply historical, and the poet must seek to condense, and sum and exhibit in dramatic appreciable figures, the unreckonable, undefinable historical suffering of years, aad lifetimes of this vain human struggle,--because, too, the wildest threats which nature in her terrors makes to man, had to be incorporated in this great philosophic piece; and because, lastly, the poet would have the madness of the human will and passion, presented in its true scientific relations, that this storm collects into itself such ideal sublimities, and borrows from the human passion so many images of cruelty. in all the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and wronged natural affection, the poet, relentless as fortune herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his _senses_ undergo _their_ 'horrible pleasure.' for the senses, scorned as they had been in philosophy hitherto, the senses in this philosophy, have _their_ report also,--their full, honest report, to make to us. and the design of this piece, as already stated in the general, required in its execution, not only that these two kinds of suffering, these two grand departments of human need, should be included and distinguished in it, but that they should be brought together in this one man's experience, so that a deliberate comparison can be instituted between them; and the poet will bid the philosophic king, the living 'subject' himself, report the experiment, and tell us plainly, once for all, whether the science of the physical arts only, is the science which is wanting to man; or whether arts--scientific arts--that take hold of the moral nature, also, and deal with that not less effectively, can be dispensed with; whether, indeed, man is in any condition to dispense with _the_ science and _the_ art which puts him into intelligent and harmonious relations with nature in general. it was necessary to the purpose of the play to exhibit man's dependence on art, by means of his senses _and_ his sensibilities, and his intellectual conditions, and all his frailties and liabilities,-- his dependence on art, based on the knowledge of natural laws, universal laws,--constitutions, which _include_ the human. it was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally frail and ignorant is liable, under those coarse, fortuitous, inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social institutions, notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not yet succeed in reducing. it is, indeed, the whole ground of the scientific human art, which is revealed here by the light of this great passion, and that, in this poet's opinion, is none other than the ground of the human want, and is as large and various as that. and the careful reader of this play,--the patient searcher of its subtle lore,--the diligent collector of its thick-crowding philosophic points and flashing condensations of discovery, will find that the _need of arts_, is that which is set forth in it, with all the power of its magnificent poetic embodiment, and in the abstract as well,--the need of arts infinitely more noble and effective, more nearly matched with the subtlety of nature, and better able to entangle and subdue its oppositions, than any of which mankind have yet been able to possess themselves, or ever the true intention of nature in the human form can be realized, or anything like a truly human constitution, or common-weal, is possible. but let us return to the comparison, and collect the results of this experiment.--for a time, indeed, raised by that storm of grief and indignation into a companionship with the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, the king 'strives in his little world of man,'--for that is the phrasing of the poetic report, to _out-scorn_ these elements. nay, we ourselves hear, as the curtain rises on that ideal representative form of human suffering, the wild intonation of that human defiance--mounting and singing above the thunder, and drowning all the elemental crash with its articulation; for this is an experiment which the philosopher will try in the presence of his audience, and not report it merely. with that anguish in his heart, the crushed majesty, the stricken old man, the child-wounded father, laughs at the pains of _the senses_; the physical distress is welcome to him, he is glad of it. he does not care for anything that the _unconscious_, soulless elements can do to him, he calls to them from their heights, and bids them do their worst. or it is only as they conspire with that _wilful human_ wrong, and serve to bring home to him anew the depth of it, by these tangible, sensuous effects,--it is only by that means that they are able to wound him. 'nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters,' _that_ is the argument. 'i tax you _not_, you elements, with _unkindness_.' surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a difference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is constituted,--surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and sciences. 'i never gave you kingdoms, called you _children_; you _owe_ me no subscription; why, _then_, let fall your horrible pleasure? here i stand _your_ slave, a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man; but _yet_, i call you _servile ministers_, that have with two pernicious daughters _joined_ your high, engendered battles 'gainst a head _so old and white_ as this. o, o, '_tis foul_.' and in his calmer mood, when the storm has done its work upon him, and all the strength of his great passion is exhausted,--when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like the subtle hamlet's 'potent poison,' it begins at last to 'o'er-crow his spirit'--when he is faint with struggling with its fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; he will still defend his first position-- 'thou thinkst 'tis much that this _contentious_ storm invades _us_ to the skin; so 'tis to thee, but where the greater _malady_ is fixed, the _lesser_ is scarce felt.' 'the tempest in my mind doth from my senses take all feeling else, save what beats there.' 'in _such_ a night _to shut me out! pour on_, i will endure. _in such a night as this_.' and when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because 'it will not give him leave to think on that _which hurts him more_.' so nicely does the poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. but it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. he is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. he is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions. but there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the _man_, the pigmy man, on it--and the king, the pigmy king, on it;--it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that '_little world_ of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. it is not gloster only, who sees in that storm what 'makes him think that _a man_ is but _a worm_.' doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail. and notwithstanding all the poetry of that passionate defiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. the contest between that little world of man and the great outdoor world of nature was too unequal. compelled at last to succumb, yielding to 'the tyranny of the open night, that is _too rough_ for _nature to endure_--the night that frightens the very wanderers of the dark, and makes _them_ keep their caves, while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, that border line of the human conception which great nature's pencil, in this poet's hand, is always reaching and completing,-- '_man's_ nature cannot carry the affliction nor _the fear_.' --unable to contend any longer with 'the _fretful_ element'--unable to '_outscorn_' any longer 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain'--weary of struggling with 'the _impetuous_ blasts,' that in their 'eyeless _rage_' and '_fury_' care no more for age and reverence than his _daughters_ do--that seize his white hairs, and make nothing of them--'exposed to _feel_ what _wretches_ feel'--he finds at last, with surprise, that art--the wretch's art--that can make vile things _precious_. no longer clamoring for 'the additions of a king,' but thankful for the basest means of shelter from the elements, glad to avail himself of the rudest structure with which art '_accommodates_' man to nature, (for that is the word of this philosophy, where it is first proposed)--glad to divide with his meanest subject that shelter which the outcast seeks on such a night--ready to creep with him, under it, side by side--'fain to hovel with _swine_ and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw'--surely we have reached a point at last where the _action_ of the piece itself--the mere 'dumb show' of it--becomes luminous, and hardly needs the player's eloquence to tell us what it means. surely this is a little like 'the language' of _periander's_ message, when he bid the messenger observe and _report what he saw him do_. it is very important to note that ideas may be conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the advancement of learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition of the principal and supreme sciences. he takes pains to notice, also, that a representation, by means of these 'transient hieroglyphics,' is much more moving to the sensibilities, and leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, than the most eloquent statement in mere words. 'what is _sensible_ always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is _intellectual_. thus the memory of _brutes_ is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;' and thus, also, he proposes to impress that _class_ which coriolanus speaks of, 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,' to whom 'action is eloquence.' here we have the advantage of the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but has its word of scientific comment and interpretation. 'art cold [to the fool]? i am cold myself. _where is this_ straw, _my fellow_? the art of our necessities is strange, that can make vile things _precious_. come, _your hovel_. come, bring us to this _hovel_.' for this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and defiance comes to--this is what the 'unaccommodated man' comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the experiment is tried. 'where is this straw, my fellow? art _cold_? i am cold _myself_. come, your hovel. come, bring us to this _hovel_.' when that royal edict is obeyed,--when the wonders of the magician's art are put in requisition to fulfil it,--when the road from the palace to the hovel is laid open,--when the hovel, where tom o' bedlam is nestling in the straw, is produced on the stage, and the king--the king--stoops, before all men's eyes, to creep into its mouth,--surely we do not need 'a _chorus_ to interpret for us'--we do not need to wait for the poet's own deferred exposition to seize the more obvious meanings. surely, one catches enough in passing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play,--something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done,--something which 'the groundlings' were not expected to get, perhaps, in 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance,--something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the christmas party at whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have told them what it meant. 'we construct,' says the person who describes this method of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared history which forces the inductions--'we construct tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan, and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.' 'they told me i was everything.' _they told me i was everything_,' says the poor king himself, long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect upon him. 'to say ay and no to everything that i said!--[to say] ay and no _too_ was no good divinity. they told me, i had _white_ hairs in my beard, ere the _black_ ones were there. when the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at _my bidding_; there i found them, _there_ i smelt them out. go to, they are not men of their words: they told me i was everything; _'tis a lie; i am not ague-proof_.' '_i_ think the king is but a man, as i am' [says king hal], 'all his _senses_ have the like conditions; and his _affections_, though higher mounted, when they stoop, stoop with _the like wing_.' but at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. in vain his loving attendants, whom, for love's sake, this poet will still have with him, entreat him to enter. storm-battered, and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the shelter he has bid them bring him to. he will not '_in_.' why? is it because 'the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things would hurt him more.' that is his excuse at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain,' and says-- '_but_ i'll go in.' yet still he pauses. why? because he has not told us why he is there;--because he is in the hands of the poet of the human kind, the poet of 'those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,' who will have of them an argument that shall shame that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter' that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs;--because the rare accident--the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident--which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature;--the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level;--the accident which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many--of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of _personal_ ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for _the many_,--this accident--this grand poetic accident--with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. this poor king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts--with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this poet's hands,--this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity,--this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this poet's soul is big with. it is the tragedy of the many, and not the one,--it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception,--it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this poet has undertaken to manage. 'come, bring us to your hovel.' the royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the new magician's word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king--the king--is at the door of it: the _monarch_ is at the door of the _many_. for the scientific poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. there is no need of a poet's going to the supernatural for 'machinery,' this poet thinks, while there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 'there's something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.' there's no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an _antiquity_. the monarch has found his meanest subject's shelter, but at the door of it he is arrested--nailed with a nail fastened by the master of assemblies. he has come down from that dizzy height, on the poet's errand. he is there to speak the poet's word,--to illustrate that grave abstract learning which the poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is _not_ learning, but 'the husk and shell' of it. for this is the philosopher who puts it down as a primary article of science, that governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with 'the _natures, dispositions, necessities_ and _discontents_ of _the people_'; and though in his book of the advancement of learning, he suggests that these points '_ought to be_,' considering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the government, 'considering the variety of its intelligences, the wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station where it keeps sentinel, _transparent as crystal,'--here_ he puts the case of a government that had not availed itself of those extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the lower and more inaccessible regions of the _common_ weal it had ordered. this is the _crystal_ which proves after all the most transparent for him. this is the help for weak eyes which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the scientific crystal, which is its equivalent. the monarch is at the hovel's door, but he cannot enter. why? because he is in that school into which his own wise regan, that '_counsels_' so 'well'--that _regan_ who sat at his own council-table so long, has turned him; and it is a school in which the lessons must be learned '_by heart_,' and there is no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this poet's economy, till that lesson he was sent there to learn has been learned; and it was a monarch's lesson, and at the hovel's door he must recite it. he _will_ not enter. why? because the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharpness of its illustration it has _pierced_ him: his spirit is dilated, and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of 'the many,' he has forgotten 'the one,'--the many, all whose senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the like wing. he will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel's shelter, and the warmth of the 'precious' straw, while he knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless cruelties. it was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in the house who said, 'come, let's be snug and cheery here. _shut up the door_. let's have a fire, and a feast, and a song,--or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be _within_--no matter which it is': 'shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night,-- _my regan counsels_ well; come out o' the storm.' but here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his kindred,--his royal family, for whom god has made him responsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to him less able than himself to resist its elemental '_tyranny_.' for in that ideal revolution--in that exact turn of the wheel of fortune--in that experimental 'change of places,' which the poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in, the social structure, as a means of a more particular and practical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually flashing on him; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late owner and disposer of the common weal, it is this strangely _philosophic_, mysteriously philosophic, king--philosophic as that alfred who was going to succeed him--it is the king who is chosen by the poet as the chief commentator and expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the action of this play is itself suggesting. in that school of the tempest; in that one night's personal experience of the misery that underlies the pompous social structure, with all its stately splendours and divine pretensions; in that new school of the experimental science, the king has been taking lessons in the art of majesty. the alchemy of it has robbed him of the external adjuncts and 'additions of a king,' but the sovereignty of mercy, the divine right of pity, the majesty of the human kindness, the grandeur of the common weal, 'breathes through his lips' from the poet's heart 'like man new made.' _kent_. good, my lord, enter here. _lear_. prythee, go in thyself. _seek thine own ease_. . . . . but, i'll go in. in, boy,--_go first--[to the fool.]_ you, _houseless_ poverty'-- he knows the meaning of that phrase now. 'nay get thee in. i'll pray, and then i'll sleep.' [_fool goes in_.] 'poor, naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,'-- there are no empty phrases in this prayer, the critic of it may perceive: it is a learned prayer; the petitioner knows the meaning of each word in it: the tempest is the book in which he studied it. 'how shall your _houseless heads_ and _unfed sides_, your _looped_ and _windowed raggedness_ defend you from _seasons such as these_? o, i have taken _too little care of_ this. [hear, hear]. take physic, pomp; [hear.] expose thyself to _feel_ what wretches _feel_, _that thou mayest shake the superflux to them_, _and show the_ heavens _more just_.' that is his _prayer_. to minds accustomed to the ceremonial a religious worship, 'with court holy water in a dry house' only, or to those who have never undertaken to compose a prayer for the king and all the royal family at the hovel's mouth, and in such immediate proximity to animals of a different species, it will not perhaps seem a very pious one. but considering that it was understood to have been composed during the heathen ages of this realm, and before christianity had got itself so comfortably established as a principle of government and social regulations, perhaps it was as good a prayer for a penitent king to go to sleep on, as could well be invented. certainly the spirit of christianity, as it appeared in the life of its founder, at least, seems to be, by a poetic anachronism incorporated in it. but it is never the custom of this author to leave the diligent student of his performances in any doubt whatever as to his meaning. it is a rule, that everything in the play shall speak and reverberate his purpose. he prolongs and repeats his burthens, till the whole action echoes with them, till 'the groves, the fountains, every region near, seem all one mutual cry.' he has indeed the teacher's trick of repetition, but then he is 'so rare a wondered teacher,' so rich in magical resources, that he does not often find it necessary to weary _the sense_ with sameness. he is prodigal in variety. it is a proteus repetition. but his charge to his ariel in getting up his masques, always is,-- 'bring a corollary, rather than want a spirit.' nay, it would be dangerous, not wearisome merely, to make the text of this living commentary continuous, or to bring too near together 'those short and pithy sentences' wherein the action unwinds and fashions into its immortal groups. and the curtain must fall and rise again, ere the outcast duke,--his eyes gouged out by tyranny, turned forth to smell his way to dover,--can dare to echo, word by word, the thoughts of the outcast king. led by one whose qualification for leadership is, that he is 'madman and beggar, too,'--for as gloster explains it to us, explaining also at the same time much else that the scenic language of the play, the dumb show, the transitory hieroglyphic of it presents, and _all_ the criticism of it, ''t is the time's plague when madmen lead the blind'-- groping with such leadership his way to dover--'smelling it out'--thus it is that his secret understanding with the king, in that mad and wondrous philosophical humour of his, betrays itself. _gloster_. here, take this purse [to tom o'bedlam], _thou whom the heaven's plagues have humbled to all strokes_: that i am wretched makes thee the happier:--_heavens, deal so still_! let the _superfluous_ and lust-dieted man that _slaves_ your ordinance, that will not see _because_ he doth not feel, feel your power quickly; _so distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough_. _lear_. o i have taken _too little care of this._ take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, _that_ thou may'st shake the _superflux to them, and show the heavens more just_. truly, these men would seem to have been taking lessons in the same school. but it is very seldom that two men in real life, of equal learning on any topic, coincide so exactly in their trains of thought, and in the niceties of their expression in discussing it. the emphasis is deep, indeed, when _this_ author graves his meaning with _such_ a repetition. but regan's stern school-master is abroad in this play, enforcing the philosophic subtleties, bringing home to the _senses_ the neglected lessons of nature; full of errands to '_wilful men_,' charged with coarse lessons to those who will learn through the senses only great nature's lore--that '_slave_ heaven's ordinance--that will not see, because they do not feel.' chapter iii. the king and the beggar. _armado_. is there not a ballad, boy, of the king and the beggar? _moth_. the world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but, i think, now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing, _nor for the tune_. _armado_. i will have the subject newly writ over, _that i may example my digression by some mighty precedent_. _love's labour's lost._ but the king's philosophical studies are not yet completed; for he is in the hands of one who does not rely on general statements for his effects; one who is pertinaciously bent on exploring those subterranean social depths, that the king's prayer has just glanced at--who is determined to lay bare to the utmost, to carry the torch of his new science into the lowest recess of that wild, nameless mass of human neglect and misery, which the regal sympathy has embraced for him in the general; though not, indeed, without some niceties of detail, which shew that the eye of a true human pity has collected the terms in which he expresses it. that vast, immeasurable mass of social misery, which has no learned speech, no tragic dialect--no, or 'it would bear such an emphasis,' that 'its phrase of sorrow might conjure the wandering stars, and bid them stand like wonder-wounded hearers'--that misery which must get a king's robe about it, ere, in the poet's time, it could have an audience, must needs be produced here, ere all this play was played, in its own native and proper shape and costume, daring as the attempt might seem. the author is not satisfied with the picturesque details of that misery which he has already given us, with its 'looped and windowed raggedness,' its 'houseless head,' its 'unfed sides'; it must be yet more palpably presented. it must be embodied and dramatically developed; it must be exhibited with its proper moral and intellectual accompaniments, too, before the philosophic requisitions of this design can be fulfilled. to the lowest deeps of the lowest depths of the unfathomed social misery of that time, the new philosopher, the poet of the advancement of learning, will himself descend; and drag up to the eye of day,--undeterred by any scruple of poetic sensibility,--in his own unborrowed habiliments, with all the badges of _his_ position in the state upon him, the creature he has selected as one of the representatives of the social state as he finds it;--the creature he has selected as the representative of those loathsome, unpenetrated masses of _human_ life, which the unscientific social state must needs generate. for the design of this play, in its exhibition of the true human need, in its new and large exhibition of the ground which the arts of a true and rational human civilization must cover, could not but include the _defects_ of that, which passed for civilization then. it involved necessarily, indeed, the most searching and relentless criticisms of the existing institutions of that time. that cry of social misery which pervades it, in which the natural, and social, and artificial evils are still discriminated through all the most tragic bursts of passion--in which the true social need, in all its comprehension, is uttered--that wild cry of human anguish, prolonged, and repeated, and reverberated as it is--is all one outcry upon the social wisdom of the poet's time. it constitutes one continuous dramatic expression and embodiment of that so deeply-rooted opinion which the new philosopher is known to have entertained, in regard to the practical knowledge of mankind as he found it; his opinion of the real advances towards the true human ends which had been made in his time; an opinion which he has, indeed, taken occasion to express elsewhere with some distinctness, considering the conditions which hampered the expression of his philosophical conclusions; but it is one which could hardly have been produced from the philosophic chair in his time, or from the bench, or at the council-table, in such terms as we find him launching out into here, without any fear or scruple. for those who persuade themselves that it was any part of this player's intention to bring out, for the amusement of his audiences, an historical exhibition of the life and times of that ancient celtic king of britain, whose legendary name and chronicle he has appropriated so effectively, will be prevented by that view of the subject from ever attaining the least inkling of the matter here. for this magician has quite other work in hand. he does not put his girdles round the earth, and enforce and harass with toil his delicate spirits,--he does not get out his book and staff, and put on his enchanter's robe, for any such kind of effect as that. for this is not any antiquary at all, but the true prospero; and when a little more light has been brought into his cell, his garments will be found to be, like the disguised edgar's--'_persian_.' it is not enough, then, in the wild revolutionary sweep of this play, to bring out the monarch from his palace, and set him down at the hovel's door. it is not enough to open it, and shew us, by the light of cordelia's pity--that sunshine and rain at once--the '_swine_' in that human dwelling, and 'the short and musty-straw' there. for the poet himself will enter it, and drag out its living human tenant into the day of his immortal verse. he will set him up for all ages, on his great stage, side by side with his great brother. he will put the feet of these two men on one platform, and measure their stature--for all their senses have the like conditions, as we have heard already; and he will make the king himself own the kindred, and interpret for him. for this group must needs be completed _'to the eye_'; these two extremes in the social scale must meet and literally embrace each other, before this teacher's doctrine of 'man'--'man as distinguished from other species'--can be artistically exhibited. for it is this picture of the unaccommodated man--'unaccommodated' still, with all his empiric arts, with all his wordy philosophy--it is this picture of man '_as he is_,' in the misery of his ignorance, in his blind struggle with his law of kind, which is his law of 'being,'-- unreconciled to his place in the universal order, where he must live or have no life--for the beast, obedient to his law, rejects from his kinds the _degenerate_ man--it is this vivid, condensed, scientific exhibition, this scientific collection of the fact of man as he is, in his empiric struggle with the law which universal nature enforces, and will enforce on him with all her pains and penalties till he learns it--it is this '_negation_' which brings out the true doctrine of man and human society in this method of inquiry. for the scientific method begins with negations and exclusions, and concludes only after every species of rejection; the other, the common method, which begins with 'affirmation,' is the one that has failed in practice, the one which has brought about just this state of things which science is undertaking to reform. but this _levelling_, which the man of the new science, with his new apparatus, with his 'globe and his machines,' contrives to exhibit here with so much '_facility_,' is a scientific one, designed to answer a scientific purpose merely. the experimenter, in this case, is one who looks with scientific forebodings, and not with hope only, on those storms of violent political revolution that were hanging then on the world's horizon, and threatening to repeat this process, threatening to overwhelm in their wild crash, all the ancient social structures--threatening 'to lay all flat'! that is not the kind of change he meditates. his is the subtle, all-penetrating radicalism of the new science, which imitates the noiseless processes of nature in its change and _re-formation_. there is a wild gibberish heard in the straw. the fool shrieks, 'nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes 'tom o bedlam'--the naked creature, as gloster calls him--with his 'elf locks,' his 'blanketed loins,' his 'begrimed face,' with his shattered wits, his madness, real or assumed--there he stands. we know, indeed, in this instance, that there is gentle, nay, noble blood, there, under that horrid guise. it is the heir of a dukedom, we are told, but an out-cast one, who has found himself compelled, for the sake of prolonging life, to assume that shape, as other wretches were in the poet's time for that same purpose,--men who had lost _their_ dukedoms, too, as it would seem, such as they were, in some way, and their human relationships, too. but notwithstanding this alleviating circumstance which enables the audience to endure the exhibition in this instance, it serves not the less effectually in the poet's hand, as 'the conspicuous instance' of that lowest human condition which this grand social tragedy must needs include in its delineations. here are some of the prose english descriptions of this creature, which we find already included in the commentaries on this tragedy; and which shew that the poet has not exaggerated his portrait, and that it is not by way of celebrating any anglo-saxon or norman triumph over the barbarisms of the _joint_ reigns of regan _and_ goneril, that he is produced here. 'i remember, before the civil wars, tom o' bedlams went about begging,' aubrey says. randle holme, in his 'academy of arms and blazon,' includes them in his descriptions, as a class of vagabonds 'feigning themselves mad.' 'the bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff,' etc., 'but his cloathing is more fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with _rubans, feathers, cuttings_ of _cloth,_ and what not, to make him _seem_ a madman, when he is no other than a _dissembling knave_.' in the bellman of london, , there is another description of him--'he sweares he hath been in bedlam, and will talk frantickely _of purpose; you see pinnes_ stuck in sundry places of his _naked flesh_, especially in his armes, _which paine he gladly puts himselfe to_; calls himself by the name of _poore tom_; and coming near anybody, cries out, '_poor tom's a cold_.' of these abraham men, _some be exceeding merry_, and doe nothing but sing songs, fashioned out of their own braines; some will dance; others will doe nothing but either laugh or weepe; _others are dogged_, and so _sullen_, both in looke and speech, that spying but a small company in a house, they bluntly and boldly enter, compelling the servants, through fear, to them what they demand.' this seems very wicked, very depraved, on the part of these persons, especially the sticking of pins in their bare arms; but even our young dukeling edgar says-- 'while i may scape, i _will preserve myself_: and am bethought to take _the basest_ and _most poorest shape_, that ever _penury_, in _contempt_ of man, _brought near to beast_: my face i'll grime with filth; blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots; and with presented nakedness outface the winds, and _persecutions of the sky_. the _country gives_ me proof and precedent of bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, _strike_ in _their numb'd and mortified bare arms, pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary_; and with this horrible object, from low farms, poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills, _sometime with lunatic bans_, sometime with prayers, enforce their charity.--'poor turlygood!' 'poor tom!' _thats something yet, edgar i nothing am_. but the poet is not contented with the minuteness of this description. this character appears to have taken his eye as completely as it takes king lear's, the moment that _he_ gets a glimpse of him; and the poet betrays throughout that same philosophical interest in the study, which the monarch expresses so boldly; for beside the dramatic exhibition, and the philosophical review of him, which king lear institutes, here is an autographical sketch of him, and of his mode of living-- '_what_ are you there? your _names_?' cries gloster, when he comes to the heath, with his torch, to seek out the king and his party; whereupon tom, thinking that an occasion has now arrived for defining his social outline, takes it upon him to answer, for his part-- 'poor tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water-[newt]; that in the fury of his heart, when the _foul fiend rages_, swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; _who is whipped_ from _tything_ to _tything_' [this is an anglo-saxon institution one sees]; 'and stocked, punished, and imprisoned; who _hath had_ three suits to his back' [fallen fortunes here, too] 'six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapon to wear.' the jesuits had been, then, recently and notoriously at work in england, endeavouring professedly to cast out '_the fiend_' from many possessed persons; and it appeared, to this great practical philosopher, that this creature he has fetched up here from the subterranean social abysses of his time, presented a very fitting subject for the operations of practitioners professing any miraculous or superior influence over the demons that infest human nature, or those that have power over human fortunes. he has brought him out here thus distinctly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is any exorcism which can meet his case, or that of the great human multitude, that no man can number, of whose penury and vice he stands here as the elected, pre-eminent, royal representative. in that survey and report of human affairs, which this author felt himself called upon to make, the case of this poor creature had attracted his attention, and appeared to him to require looking to; and, accordingly, he has made a note of it. he is admirably seconded in his views on this subject, by the king himself, who, in that fine philosophic humour which his madness and his misery have served to develop in him, stands ready to lend himself to the boldest and most delicate philosophical inquiries. for the point to be noted here,--and it is one of no ordinary importance,--is, that this mad humour for philosophical investigation, which has seized so strangely the royal mind, does not appear to be at all in the vein of that old-fashioned philosophy, which had been rattling its abstractions in the face of the collective human misery for so many ages. for the helplessness of the human creature in his struggle with the elements, and those conditions of his nature which put him so hopelessly at the mercy of his own kind and kindred, seem to suggest to the royal sufferer, who has the advantage of a fresh experience to stimulate his apprehension, that there ought to be some relief for the human condition from _this source_, that is, from philosophy; and his inquiries and discoveries are all stamped with the unmistakeable impress of that fire new philosophy, which was not yet out of the mint elsewhere--which was yet undergoing the formative process in the mind of its great inventor;--that philosophy, which we are told elsewhere 'has for its principal object, to make _nature subservient to the wants and state of man_';--and which concerns itself for that purpose with ideas as they exist in nature, as _causes_, and not as they exist in the mind of man as _words_ merely. if there had been, indeed, any intention of paying a marked compliment to the philosophy which still held all the mind of the world in its grasp, at that great moment in history, in which tom o' bedlam makes his first appearance on any stage, it is not likely that _that_ sage would have been just the person appointed to hold the office of philosopher in chief, and councillor extraordinary to his majesty. the selection is indeed made on the part of the king, in perfect good faith, whatever the poet's intent may be; for from the moment that this creature makes his appearance, he has no eyes or ears for anything else. and he will not be parted from him. for this startling juxtaposition was not intended by the poet to fulfil its effect as a mere passing _tableau vivant_. the relation must be dramatically developed; that astounding juxtaposition must be prolonged, in spite of the horror of the spectators, and the disgust and rude displeasure of the king's attendants. they seek in vain to _part_ these two men. the king refuses to stir without him. 'he will _still keep with his philosopher_.' he has a vague idea that his regal administration stands in need of some assistance, and that philosophy ought to be able to give it, and that the bedlamite is in some way connected with the subject, but confused as the association is, it is a pertinacious one; and, in spite of their disgust the king's friends are obliged to take this wretch with them. for gloster does not know, after all, it is 'his own flesh and blood' he sees there. he cannot even recognize the common kindred in that guise, as the king does, when he philosophises on his condition. and the rough aristocratic contempt and indifference which is manifested by the king's party, as a matter of course, for this poor human victim of wrong and misfortune, is made to contrast with their boundless sympathy and tenderness for the _king_, while the poet aiming at broader relationships, finds the mantle of _his_ humanity wide enough for them, _both_. as for the king,--startled in the midst of those new views of human wretchedness which his own sufferings have occasioned, and while those desires to _remedy it_, with which his penitence is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this scientific artist is capable. and, in fact, it must be confessed, that this 'learned theban' himself, notwithstanding the unexpected dignity of his promotion, does not appear to be altogether wanting in a taste, at least, for that new kind of philosophical investigation, which seems to be looked for at his hands. the king's inquiries appear to fall in remarkably with the previous train of his pursuits. in the course of his experiments, he seems himself to have struck upon that new philosophic proceeding, which has been called 'putting philosophy upon the right road again.' only the philosophic domain which that new road in philosophy leads to, appears to be very considerably broader, as 'tom' takes it, than that very vivid, but narrow limitation of its fields, which mr. macaulay has set down in our time, would make it. indeed, this 'philosopher,' that _lear_ so much inclines to, appears to have included in his investigations the two _extremes_ of the new science of practice. he has sounded it apparently 'from its lowest note to the top of its key.' 'what is your study?' says the king to him, eyeing him curiously, and apparently struck with the practical result--anxious to have a word with him in private, but obliged to conduct the examination on the stage. 'how to prevent the fiend,' is tom's reply. 'how to prevent the fiend _and_ to kill vermin.' this is the poet who says elsewhere, 'that without _good_ nature, _men_ are themselves but a nobler kind of vermin.' one cannot but observe, however, that poor tom's researches in this quite new field of a practical philosophy, do not appear to have been followed up since his time with any very marked success. _one_ of these departments of 'his _study_' has indeed been seized, and is now occupied by whole troops of modern philosophers; but their inquiries, though very interesting and doubtlessly useful, do not appear to exhibit that direct and palpable bearing on practice, to which tom's programme so severely inclines. for he is one who would make 'the art and practic part of life, the mistress to his theoric.' and as to that other mysterious object of his inquiries, mr. macaulay is not the only person who appears to think, that that does not come within the range of anything human. many of our scholars are still of the opinion that, 'court holy water' is the best application in the world for _him_; and the fact that he does not appear to get '_prevented_' with it; it is a fact which of course has nothing to do with the logical result. for our philosophers are still determined to reason it 'thus and thus,' without taking into account the circumstance, that 'the sequent effect' with which 'nature finds itself scourged,' is not touched by their _reasons_. king lear's own inquiries seem also to include with great distinctness, the two great branches of the new philosophical inquiry. his mind is indeed very eagerly bent on the pursuit of _causes_. and though in the paroxysms of his mental disorder, he is apt to confound them occasionally, this very confusion, as it is managed, only serves to develop the breadth of the philosophic conception beneath it. 'he hath no daughters, sir.' '_death, traitor_! nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness, but--his unkind _daughters_.' it is, of course, his own new and terrible experience which points the inquiry, and though the physical causes are not omitted in it, it is not strange that the moral should predominate, and that his mind should seem to be very curiously occupied in tracking the _ethical_ phenomena to their sources '_in nature_.' in the midst of the uproar of the tempest, he does indeed begin with the physical investigation. he puts to his 'learned theban' the question, which no learned theban had then ever suspected of lying within the range of the scholar's investigations--that question which has been put to some purpose since--'what is the cause of _thunder_?' but his philosophic inquiry does not stop there,--where all the new philosophy has stopped ever since, and where some of our scholars declare it was meant to stop, notwithstanding the plainest declarations of its inventor to the contrary--with the investigation of physical causes. for, after all, it is 'the tempest in his _mind_' that most concerns him. _his_ philosopher, his _practical_ philosopher, must be able to explore the conditions of that, and find the conductors for its lightnings. 'for where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.' 'nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are his daughters.' after all, it is _regan's_ heart that appears to him to be the trouble--it is that which must first be laid on the table; and as soon as he decides to have a philosopher among 'his hundred,' he gives orders to that effect. 'then let them anatomise regan; see what breeds about her heart: is there any cause in nature that makes _these hard hearts_?' a very fair subject for philosophical inquiry, one would say; and, on the whole, as profitable and interesting a one, perhaps, as some of those that engage the attention of our men of learning so profoundly at present. in these days of enlightened scientific procedure, one would hardly undertake the smallest practical affair with the aid of any such vague general notions or traditional accounts of the properties to be dealt with, as those which our learned thebans appear to find all-sufficient for their practices, in that particular department which lear seems inclined to open here as a field for scientific exploration. and it is perfectly clear that the author, whoever he may be, is very much of lear's mind on this point, for he does not depend upon lear alone to suggest his views upon it. there is never a person of this drama that does not do it. chapter iv. the use of eyes. 'all that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but--_blind men_.' the play is all strewn throughout, and tinctured in the grain, with the finest natural philosophy, of that new and very subtle and peculiar kind, which belongs to the earlier stages of the physical inquiry, and while it was still in the hands of its original inventors. even in physics, there are views here which have not been developed any further since this author's time. it is not merely in the direct discourse on questions of physical science, as in the physician's report of the resources of his art, or in cordelia's invocation to 'all the _blessed secrets_--the _unpublished_ virtues of the earth,' that the track of the new physiological science, which this work embodies, may be seen. it runs through it all; it betrays itself at every turn. but the subtle and occult relations of the moral and physical are noted here, as we do not find them noted elsewhere, in less practical theories of nature. that there is something in the design of this play which requires an elaborate and systematic exhibition of the '_special_' human relationships, natural and artificial, political, social, and domestic, almost any reading of it would show. and that this design involves, also, a systematic exhibition of the social _consequences_ arising from the violation of the natural laws or duties of these relationships, and that this violation is everywhere systematically aggravated,--carried to its last conceivable extreme, so that all the play is filled with the uproar of one continued outrage on _humanity_; this is not less evident for the poet is not content with the material which his chronicle offered him, already invented to his hands for this purpose, but he has deliberately tacked to it, and intricately connected with it throughout, another plot, bearing on the surface of it, and in the most prominent statements, the author's intention in this respect; which tends not only in the most unequivocal manner to repeat and corroborate the impressions which the story of lear produces, but to widen the dramatic exhibition, so as to make it capable of conveying the whole breadth of the philosophic conception. for it is the scientific doctrine of man that is taught here; and that is, that man must be _human_ in _all_ his relations, or '_cease to be_.' it is the violation of the essential humanity. it is a degeneracy which is exhibited here, and the 'sequent effects' which belong naturally to the violation of a law that has the force of the universe to sustain it. and it is not by accident that the story of the illegitimate edmund begins the piece; it is not for nothing that we are compelled to stop to hear that, before even lear and his daughters can make their entrance. the whole story of the _base_ and base-born one, who makes what he calls _nature_--the rude, brutal, spontaneous nature--his goddess and his law, and ignores the human distinction; this part was needed in order to supply the deficiences in the social diagrams which the original plot presented; and, indeed, the whole story of the duke of gloster, which is from first to last a clear elizabethan invention, and of which this of edmund is but a part, was not less essential for the same purpose. neither does one need to go very far beneath the surface, to perceive a new and extraordinary treatment of the ethical principle in this play throughout; one which the new, artistic, practical 'stand-point' here taken naturally suggested, but one which could have proceeded only from the inmost heart of the new philosophy. it is just the kind of treatment which the proposal to introduce the inductive method of inquiry into this department of the human practice inevitably involved. a disposition to go behind the ethical phenomena, to pursue the investigation to its scientific conclusion, a refusal to accept the facts which, to the unscientific observation, appear to be the ultimate ones--a refusal to accept the coarse, vague, spontaneous notions of the dark ages, as the solution of these so essential phenomena, is everywhere betraying and declaring itself. cordelia's agonised invocation and summons to the unpublished forces of nature, to be aidant and remediate to the good man's distress, is continually echoed by the poet, but with a broader application. it is not the bodily malady and infirmity only--it is not that kind of madness, only with which the poor king is afflicted in the later stages of the play, which appears to him to need scientific treatment--it is not for the cure of these alone that he would open his prospero book, 'nature's infinite book of secresy,' as he calls it in mark antony--'the true magic,' as he calls it _elsewhere_--the book of the unpublished laws--the scientific book of 'kinds'--the book of 'the historic laws'--'the book of god's power.' all the _interior_ phenomena which attend the violation of duty are strictly omitted here. that psychological exhibition of it belongs to other plays; and the poet has left us, as we all know, no room to suspect the tenderness of his moral sensibility, or the depth of his acquaintance with these subjective phenomena. the _social_ consequences of the violation of duty in all the human relationships, the consequence to _others_, and the _social reaction_, limits the exhibition here. the object on which our sympathies are chiefly concentrated is, as he himself is made to inform us-- 'one more sinned _against_, than sinning.' 'oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions,' says the base-born edmund, sneeringly. '_fa sol la mi_,' he continues, producing that particular conjunction of sounds which was forbidden by the ancient musicians, on account of its unnatural discord. the monkish writers on music call it diabolical. it is at the conclusion of a very long and elaborate discussion on this question, that he treats us to this prohibited piece of harmony; and a discussion in which gloster refers to the influence of the _planets_, this _unnaturalness_ in all the human relations--this universal jangle--'this ruinous disorder, that hunts men disquietly to their graves.' but the 'base' edmund is disposed to acquit the celestial influences of the evil charged on them. he does not believe in men being-- 'fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves and thieves, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that they are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.' he has another method of accounting for what _he_ himself is. he does not think it necessary to go quite so far, to find the origin of his own base, lawless, _inhuman, unconscionable_ dispositions. but the inquiries, which are handled so boldly in the soliloquies of edmund, are started again and again elsewhere; and the recurrence is too emphatic, to leave any room to doubt that the author's intention in the play is concerned in it; and that this question of 'the several dispositions and characters of men,' and the inquiry as to whether there be '_any causes in_ nature' of these _degenerate_ tendencies, which he is at such pains to exhibit, is, for some reason or other, a very important point with him. that which in _contemplative philosophy_ corresponds to the _cause_, in _practical philosophy_ becomes the _rule_, the _founder_ of it tells us. but the play cannot be studied effectually without taking into account the fact, that the author avails himself of the date of his chronicle to represent that stage of human development in which the mysterious forces of nature were still blindly deified; and, therefore, the religious invocations with which the play abounds, are _not_, in the modern sense of the term, _prayers_, but only vague, poetic appeals to the unknown, unexplored powers in nature, which we call _second causes_. and when, as yet, there was no room for science in the narrow premature theories which men found imposed on them--when the new movement of human thought was still hampered by the narrowness of 'preconceived opinions,' the poet was glad to take shelter under the date of his legend now and then, here, as in macbeth and other poems, for the sake of a little more freedom in this respect. he is very far from condemning '_presuppositions_' and '_anticipations_' but only wishes them kept in their proper places, because to bring them into the region of fact and induction, and so to falsify the actual condition of things--to undertake to face down the powers of nature with them, is a merely mistaken mode of proceeding; because these powers are powers which do not yield to the human beliefs, and the _practical_ doctrine must have respect to them. the great battle of that age--the battle of the second causes, which the new philosophers were compelled to fight in behalf of humanity at the peril of their lives--the battle which they fought in the open field with aristotle and plato--fills all this magnificent poetry with its reverberations. it must be confessed, that those terrible appeals to the heavens, into which king lear launches out in his anguish now and then, are anything but pious; but the boldness which shocks our modern sensibilities becomes less offensive, if we take into account the fact that they are not made to the object of our present religious worship, but are mere vague appeals, and questioning addresses to the unknown, unexplored causes in nature--the powers which lie behind the historical phenomena. for that divine ideal of human nature to which 'our large temples, crowded with the shows of peace,' are built now, had not yet appeared at the date of this history, in that form in which we now worship it, with its triumphant assurance that it came forth from the heart of god, and declared him. paul had not yet preached his sermon at athens, in the age of this supposed king of britain; and though the author was indeed painting his own age, and not that, it so happened that there was such a heathenish and inhuman, and, as he intimates, indeed, quite '_fiendish_' and diabolical state of things to represent here then, that this discrepancy was not so shocking as it might have been if he had found a divine religion in full operation here. 'if it be you,' says lear, falling back upon the theory, which edmund has already discarded, of a divine thrusting on-- 'if it be _you_ that _stir these daughters' hearts_ against their father, fool _me_ not so much to bear it tamely; _touch me_ with noble anger.' and here is an echo of the 'spherical predominance' which gloster goes into so elaborately in the outset, confessing, much to the amusement of his graceless offspring, that he is disposed to think, after all, there may be something in it. 'for,' he says, 'though the _wisdom_ of _nature_ [the spontaneous wisdom] can reason it _thus and thus, yet_ nature _finds itself scourged_ by the sequent effect;' and he is talking under the dictation of a philosopher who, though he ridicules the pretensions of astrology in the next breath, lays it down as a principle in the scientific art, as a chief point in the science of practice and relief, that the _sequent effects_, with which nature finds itself scourged, are a better guide to the _causes_ which the _practical_ remedy must comprehend, than anything which the wisdom of nature can undertake to reason out _beforehand_, without any respect to the sequent effect--'_thus_, and--_thus_.' but here is the confirmation of gloster's view of the subject, which the sound-minded kent, who is not at all metaphysical, finds himself provoked to utter; and though this is in the fourth act, and gloster's opinions are advanced in the first, the passages do, notwithstanding, 'look towards each other.' 'it is _the stars_. the stars above us govern our conditions, else one self mate and mate could not beget such different issues.' of course, it is not the astrological theory of the constitutional original differences in the human dispositions which the honest kent is made to advocate here, literally and in earnest. it is rather the absence of any known cause, and the necessity of supposing one in a case where this difference is so obtrusive and violent, which he expresses; the stars being the natural resort of men in such circumstances, and when other solutions fail; though poor tom appears to be in possession of a much more orthodox theory for the peculiar disorders in _his_ moral constitution: but, at the same time, it must be conceded that it is one which does not appear to have led, in his case, to any such felicitous practical results as the supposed origin of it might have seemed to promise. for, indeed, this point of natural differences in the human dispositions, though, of course, quite overlooked in the moral regimen which is based on _a priori_ knowledge, and is able to dispense with science, and ride over the actual laws; this point of _difference_-- not in the dispositions of individuals only, but the differences which manifest themselves under the varying conditions of age and bodily health, of climate, or other physical differences in the same individual, as well as under the varying moral conditions of differing social and political positions and relations; this so essential point, overlooked as it is in the ordinary practice, has seized the clear eye of this great scientific practitioner, this master of arts, and he is making a radical point of it in his new speculation; he is making collections on it, and he will make a main point of it in 'the part operative' of his new science, when he comes to make out the outline of it elsewhere, referring us distinctly to this place for his collections in it, for his collections on this point, as well as on others not less radical. lear himself, in his madness, appears, as we have seen already, much disposed to speculate upon this same particular question, which gloster and edmund and kent have already indicated as 'a necessary question of the play'; namely, the question as to '_the causes in nature_' of the phenomena which the social condition of man exhibits; that is, the causes of that degeneracy, that violation of the essential human law to which all the evil is tracked here; and it is the scientific doctrine, that the _nature_ of a thing cannot be successfully studied in itself alone. it is not in water or in air only, or in any other single substance, that we find the nature of _oxygen_, or _hydrogen_, or any other of those principles in nature, which the application of this method to another department evolves from things which present themselves to the unscientific experience as most dissimilar. 'it is the greatest proof of want of skill to investigate _the nature_ of any object in itself alone; for _the same nature_ which seems concealed and hidden in some instances, is manifest and almost palpable in others; and, in general, those very things which are considered as secret, are manifest and common in other objects, but will never be clearly seen if the experiments and conclusions of men be directed to themselves alone': for it is a part of this doctrine, that man is not omitted in the order of nature--that the term human nature is _not_ a misnomer. the doctrine of this play is, that those same powers which are at work in man's life, are at work without it also; that they are powers which belong, in their highest form, to the nature of things in general; and that man himself, with all his special distinctions, is under the law of that universal constitution. the scientific remedy for the state of things which this play exhibits is the knowledge of 'causes in nature,' which must be found here, as in the other case, by scientific investigation--the spontaneous method leading to no better result here than in the other case. under cover of the excitements of this play, this inquiry is boldly opened, and the track of the new science is clearly marked in it. poor lear is, indeed, compelled to leave the practical improvement of _his_ hints for another; and when it comes to the open question of the remedy for this state of things, which is the term of the inquiry, when he undertakes to put his absolute power in motion for the avowed purpose of effecting an improvement here, he appears indeed disposed to treat the subject in the most savage and despairing manner--that is, on his own account; but the vein of the scientific inquiry still runs unbroken through all this burst of passion. for in his scorn for that failure in human nature and human life of which society, as he finds it, stands convicted--that failure to establish the distinctive law of the human kind--that failure from which he is suffering so deeply--and in his struggle to express that disgust, he proposes, as an improvement on the state of things he finds, a law which shall obliterate that human distinction; though certainly _that_ is anything but the poet's remedy; and the poor king himself does not appear to be in earnest, for the moral disgust in which the distinctive sentiment of the nobler nature, and the knowledge of _human_ good and evil betrays itself, breaks forth in floods of passion that overflow all the bounds of articulation before he can make an end of it. but the radical nature of this question of _natural causes_, which the practical theory of the social arts must comprehend, is already indicated in this play, in the very beginning of the action. this author is everywhere bent on graving the scientific distinction between those instinctive affections in which men degenerate, and tend to the rank of lower natures, and the noble natural, distinctively human affections; and when, in the first scene, the king betrays the selfishness of that fond preference for his younger daughter,--tender, and paternal, and deep as it was,--and the depth of those hopes he was resting on her kind care and nursery, by the very height of that frenzied paroxysm of rage and disappointment, which her unflattering and, as it seems to him, her unloving reply, creates;--when that 'small fault, which showed,' he tells us, 'so ugly' in _her_ whom 'he loved _most_'--which turned, in a moment, all the sweetness of his love for her '_to gall_, and like an engine, wrenched his _nature from its firm place_';--these are the terms in which he undertakes to annul the natural tie, and _disown_ her-- _lear_. so young, and so untender? _cordelia_. so young, my lord, and true. _lear_. let it be so.--thy truth then be thy dower: for, by the _sacred radiance of the sun_; _the mysteries_ of _hecate_, and _the night_; _by all the operations_ of _the orbs, from whom we do exist, and cease to be, here i disclaim all my paternal care_, propinquity and property of blood, and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee, from this, for ever. the barbarous scythian, or he that makes his generation messes to gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom be _as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved_, as thou, _my sometime daughter_. and when 'this even-handed justice commends the ingredients of his poisoned chalice to his own lips'-- when his 'dog-hearted daughters' have returned to his own bosom the cruel edge of that _unnatural_ wrong which he has impiously dared to summon nature herself--violated nature--to witness, this is the greeting which the _unnatural_ goneril receives, on her return to her husband, when she complains to him of her welcome-- _goneril_. i have been worth the whistle. _albany_. o goneril! you are not worth _the dust which the rude wind blows in your face_.--i fear your _disposition: that nature, which contemns_ its origin, cannot be bordered certain in itself; she that herself will _sliver and disbranch_ from her material sap, perforce must wither, _and come to deadly use_. [_prima philosophia_. axioms which are not limited to the particular parts of sciences, but 'such as are more common, and of a higher stage.'] _goneril_. no more; _the text_ is foolish. _albany_. tigers, not daughters,-- [you have practised on yourself--you have destroyed in yourself the nobler, fairer nature which the law of _human_ kind--the law of human duty and affection--would have given you. not daughters,--_tigers_.] 'a _father, and a gracious aged man_, whose reverence the head-lugged bear would lick, most barbarous, most degenerate!'-- [_degenerate_--that is the point--most degenerate]-- 'have you _madded_. if that the _heavens_ do not _their_ visible spirits send quickly down, to _tame these vile offences_ 'twill come, humanity _must perforce prey on itself_, like monsters of the deep.' [the land refuses a parallel.] and it is the scientific distinction between man and the brute creation--it is the law of nature in the human kind, which the poet is getting out scientifically here, in the face of that terrific failure and degeneration in the kind--which he paints so vividly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is not, perhaps, after all, some more potent provisioning and arming of man for his place in nature, than this state of things would lead one to suppose--whether there are not, perhaps, some more efficacious 'humanities' than those mild ones which appear to operate so lamely on this barbaric, _degenerate_ thing. 'milk-liver'd man!' replies goneril, speaking not on her own behalf only, for the words have a double significance; and the poet glances through them at that sufferance with which the state of things he has just noted was endured-- '_milk-livered man_, that bear'st a _cheek for blows_, a head _for_ wrongs; who hast not _in thy brows an eye_ discerning thine honour from thy sufferance; that not know'st, fools do those villains pity, _who are punished before they have done their mischief_. where's thy _drum_? france spreads his banners in _our noiseless land; with plumed helm_ thy _slayer_ begins threats; _whilst thou_, a _moral fool_, sit'st still, and _cry'st, alack_! why does he so?' this is found to be an appeal of the poet's own when all is done, and one that goes far into the necessary questions of the play. but albany, in his rejoinder, returns to the idea of the lost, _degenerate_, dissolute _humanity_ again. he has talked of tigers, and _head-lugged_ bears (and it was necessary to combine the proverbial sensitiveness of that animal to that particular mode of treatment, with the natural amiability of his disposition in general, in order to do justice to the poet's conception here);--he has called upon 'the monsters of the deep,' and quoted the laws of their societies, in illustration of the state of things to which the unscientific human combination appears to him to be visibly tending. but this human _degeneracy_ and deformity, which the action of the play exhibits in diagrams--the _descent_ to the _lower_ nature from the higher; the _voluntary_ descent; the voluntary blindness and narrowness; the rejection of the distinctive human law--of virtue and duty, as reason and conscience interpret it--appears to the scientific mind to require yet _other_ terms and comparisons. these conceits and comparisons, drawn from the habits of innocent, though not to man agreeable, animals, who have no law but blind instinct, do not suffice to convey the poet's idea of this human failing; and, accordingly, he instructs this gentle and noble man, whom this criticism best becomes, to complete this view of the subject, in his attempt to express the disgust with which this _inhuman_, this _more_ than brutal conduct, in his high-born, and gorgeously-robed, and delicately-featured spouse, inspires him-- 'see thyself, devil!'-- nay, he corrects himself-- _proper deformity_ [de-formity] seems _not_ in the _fiend_ _so_ horrid, as in woman. _goneril_. o vain fool! _albany_. thou _changed_ and _self-covered thing_. for shame, be-monster not thy _feature_. were it my fitness'-- for here it is the _human_, and not the instinctive element--not '_the blood_' element that rules-- 'were it my fitness to _let_ these hands _obey_ my blood, _they_ are _apt_ enough to _dislocate_ and _tear_ thy _flesh_ and _bones_,' rather tiger-like impulses for so mild a gentleman to own to; but the process which he confesses his hands are already inclined to undertake, is not half so cruel as the one which this woman has practised on herself while she was meditating only wrong to another, and pursuing her 'horrible pleasure' at the expense of madness and death to another; not half so cruel and injurious, for in that act she has trampled down, and torn, and dislocated, she has slaughtered in cold blood, the divine, angelic form of womanhood--that form of worth and celestial aspiration which great nature stamped upon her, and gave to her for her law in nature, her type, her essence, her original. she has desecrated, not that common form of humanity only which the common human sentiment of reason, which the human sentiment of duty is everywhere struggling to fulfil, but that lovelier soul of humanity--that softer, subtler, more gracious, more celestial, more commanding spirit of it, which the form of womanhood in its integrity must carry with it--which the form of womanhood will carry with it, if it be not counterfeit or degenerate, gone down into a lower range, 'be-monstered'--'a changed and _self-covered_ thing.' that is the poet's reading. 'howe'er,' the duke of albany concludes, after that struggle with his hands he speaks of--chivalrously refusing to let them obey that impulse of 'blood,' as a gentleman in such circumstances, under any amount of provocation, should--true to himself, true to his manliness and to his gentle breeding, though his wife is false to hers, and 'false to her nature'-- 'howe'er thou _art_ a, _fiend, a woman's shape doth shield thee. goneril_. marry! your manhood now.' this is indeed a discourse in which the reader must have '_the text_,' or ever he can begin to catch the meaning of those philosophic points with which this orator, who _talks_ so 'pressly,' studs his lines. for the passage which goneril dismisses with such scorn is indeed the text, or it will be, when the word which her commentary on it contains has been added to it: for it is '_the foolishness_' of struggling with great nature, and her law of kinds--it is the folly of ignorance, the stupidity of living without respect to nature and its sequent effects, as well as its preformed decree-- (_'perforce must_ wither, and come to deadly use'--) which this discourse is intended to illustrate. and one who has once tracked the dramatic development of this text, through all this moving exhibition of human society, and its violated rule in nature, will be at no loss to conjecture out of what 'new' book it comes, if indeed that book has ever been opened to him. the whole subject is treated here scientifically--that is, from without. the generalizations of the higher stages of philosophy--the axioms of a universal philosophy--with all the force of their universality, must be brought to bear upon it, through all its developments. the universal historical laws, in that modification of them which the speciality of the human kind creates, must be impartially set forth here. the law of duty, as the natural law of human society; the law of humanity, as the law, nay, the form, of the human kind, stamped on it with the creator's stamp, that _order_ from the universal law of kinds that gives to all life its special bounds, its '_border_ in _itself_'--that form so _essential_, that there is no _humanity_ or _kind-ness_ where that is not--that law which we hear so much of, in its narrower aspects, under various names, in all men's speech, is produced here, in its broader relations, as the necessary basis of a scientific social art. and it is this author's deliberate opinion as a naturalist, it is the opinion of this school in natural science, from which this work proceeds, that those who undertake to compose human societies, large or small, whether in families, or states, or empires, without recognising this principle--those who undertake to compose unions, human unions and societies, on any other principle--will have a diabolical jangle of it when all is done. for this law of _unity_, which is written on the soul of man, this law of conscience _within, is written without also_; and to erase it _within_ is to get the lesson from _without_ in that universal and downright speech and language which the axioms of nature are taught in--it is to get it in that fearful school in which nature _repeats_ the doctrine of her violated law, for those who are not able to solve and comprehend the science of it as it is _written_--written beforehand--in the natural law and constitutions of the human soul. 'that nature which, contemns its origin cannot be _bordered_ certain _in itself_.' [these are the mysteries of day and night, that lear, in his ignorance, vainly invokes, the operations of the orbs from _whom we do exist and cease to be_.] 'she that herself will _sliver_ and _disbranch_ from her _material_ sap, _perforce must_ wither, and come to _deadly_ use.' 'the text is--foolish.' the teacher who takes it upon himself to get out this text from the text-book of universal laws, for the purpose of conducting it to its practical application in human affairs, for the purpose of suggesting the true remedy for those great human wants which he exhibits here, is _not_ one of those 'milk-livered men,' those _moral fools_, that _goneril_ delicately alludes to, who bear a cheek for blows, a _head_ for wrongs; who have not in their brows an _eye_ discerning their _honour_ from their sufferance; who think it enough to sit still under the murderous blows of what they call misfortune, fate, _providence_, when it is their own im-_providence_; who think it is enough to sit still, and cry, _alack_! without inquiring what it is that makes that _lack_; without ever putting the question in earnest, '_why does he so_?' his play is all full of the _practical application_ of the text, the application of it which gloster sums up in a word-- ''t is the time's plague when madmen _lead_ the blind.' 'i will preach to thee. mark me: [says lear] when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. [mark me!'] the whole play is one magnificent intimation, on the part of the poet, that eyes are made to see with; and that there is no so natural and legitimate use of them as that which human affairs were crying for, through all their lengths and breadths, in his time. it is that _eye_ which is one of the distinctive features of the human kind; that eye which looks before and after, which extends human vision so far beyond individual sensuous experience, which is able to converge the light of universal truth upon particular experience, which is able to bring the infallible guidance of universal axioms into all the particulars of human conduct--that is the eye which he finds wanting in human affairs. the play is pointing everywhere with the poet's scorn of '_blind men_,' 'who will not see because they do not feel,'--who wait for the blows of 'fortune,' to teach them the lesson of nature's laws--who wait to be scourged, or dashed to pieces with 'the sequent effect,' instead of making use of their faculty of reason to ascend to causes, and _so_ 'to trammel up the consequence.' it is that same combination of human faculties, that same combination of sense and reason, which the novum organum provides for; it is that same scorn of abstract wordy speculation, on the one hand, and blind experimental groping, on the other, that is everywhere _suggested_ here. but with the aid of the persons of the drama, and their suggestions, the new philosophy is carried into departments which it would have cost the author of the novum organum and the advancement of learning his head to look into. he might as well have proposed to impeach the government in parliament outright, as to offer to advance his novum organum into these fields; fields which it enters safely enough under the cover of a spontaneous, inspired, dramatic philosophy, though it is a philosophy which overflows continually with those practical axioms, those aphorisms, which the author of the advancement of learning assures us 'are made of the pith and heart of sciences'; and that 'no man can write who is not sound and grounded.' but then, if they are only written in 'with a goose-pen,' they pass well enough for unconscious, unmeaning, spontaneous felicities. 'canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' says the fool, in the first act, by way of entertaining his master, when the poor king's want of foresight and 'prudence' begins to tell on his affairs a little. 'canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' 'no.' 'why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what a man _cannot smell out_ he may _spy into_.' _fool_. canst tell how _an oyster_ makes _his_ shell?' _lear_. no. _fool_. nor i neither; but i can tell why a snail has a house. _lear_. why? _fool_. why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case. _lear_. ... be my horses ready? _fool_. thy asses are gone about 'em. the reason why the seven stars are no more than seven, is a pretty reason. _lear_. because they are not eight? _fool_. yes, indeed: thou wouldest make a good--fool. he cannot tell how an _oyster_ makes his shell, but the nose has not stood in the middle of _his_ face for nothing. there has been some prying on either side of it, apparently; and he has pried to such good purpose, that some of the prime secrets of the new philosophy appear to have turned up in his researches. 'to take it again _perforce_,' mutters the king. 'if thou wert my fool, nuncle, i'd have thee beaten _for being_ old _before thy time_.' [this is a wit 'of the self-same colour' with that one who discovered that the times from which the world's practical wisdom was inherited, were the times when the world was young. 'they told me i had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there!'] 'i'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time.'--'_how's_ that?'--'thou shouldst _not_ have been old _before thou hadst been_ wise.' and it is in the second act that poor kent, in his misfortunes, furnishes occasion for another avowal on the part of this same learned critic, of a preference for a practical philosophy, though borrowed from the lower species. he comes upon the object of his criticism as he sits in the stocks, because he could not adopt the style of his time with sufficient earnestness, though he does make an attempt 'to go out of his dialect,' but was not more happy in it than some other men of his politics were, in the poet's time. 'sir, in good sooth, in sincere verity, _under the allowance of your grand aspect, whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire on flickering phebus' front--_ _cornwall_. 'what mean'st by this?' _kent_. 'to go out of my dialect, _which you discommend so much_. [halting in his blank verse for the explanation]:--it is from that seat, to which the plainness of this man, with the official dignities of his time, has conducted him, that he puts the inquiry to that keen observer, whose observations in natural history have just been quoted,-- _kent_. how chances that the _king comes with so small a train_? _fool_. an thou had'st been set in the stocks for that question, _thou, had'st well deserved it_. _kent_. why, fool? _fool_. we'll set thee _to school to an ant_, to teach thee there is no labouring in the winter. all that follow their noses are _led by their eyes_, but--blind men. _kent_. where learned'st thou _that_, fool? _fool_. not in the stocks, _fool_. [not from being punished with the sequent effect; not in consequence of an improvidence, that an _ant_ might have taught me to avoid.] 'i have no _way_, and _therefore_ want no eyes,' says another duke, who is also the victim of that '_absolute_' authority which is abroad in this play. 'i stumbled when i _saw_,' and this is _his prayer_. let the superfluous and lust-dieted man that slaves your ordinance; that will not see because he doth not feel, _feel_ your power quickly. 'thou seest how this world goes,' says the outcast king, meeting this poor outcast duke, just after his eyes had been taken out of his head, by the persons then occupying the chief offices in the state. 'thou seest how this world goes.' 'i see it feelingly,' is the duke's reply. _lear_. what! art _mad_? a man may _see_ how this world goes with _no_ eyes. look with thine _ears_. and his account of how it goes is--as we shall see--one that requires to be looked at with _ears_, for it contains, what one calls elsewhere in this play,--_ear-kissing_ arguments.--'get thee _glass_ eyes,' he says, in conclusion, 'and like a scurvy _politician_ pretend to see, the things thou dost not.' and that was not the kind of politician, and that was not the kind of political eye-sight, to which this statesman, and seer, proposed to leave the times, that his legacy should fall on, whatever he might be compelled to tolerate in his own. 'upon _the crown_ o' the cliff. what _thing_ was that which parted from you?' '_a poor unfortunate beggar_.' [softly.] '_as i stood here_ below, methought his eyes were two full moons; he had a thousand noses. horns welked and waved, like the enridged _sea_.' 'now, sir, what are you?' says the poor outcast duke to his true son, when in disguise he offers to attend him. 'a most poor man,' is the reply, 'made _lame_ by fortune's blows; who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, am _pregnant_ to _good_ pity. give me your hand, _i'll_ lead you to some biding. bear _free_ and _patient thoughts_,' is his whisper to him. surely this is a poet that has got an inkling, in some way, of the new idea of an _experimental philosophy_,--of a combination of the human faculties of sense and reason in some organum; one, too, whose eye passes lightly over the architectonic gifts of _univalves_ and _bivalves_, and _entomological_ developments of skill and forethought, intent on that great chrysalis, which has never been able to publish yet its creator's glory. here is a naturalist who would not think it enough to combine reason with experiment, in wind, and rain, and fire, and thunder, who would not think it enough to bring all the unpublished virtues of the earth, to the relief of the bodily human maladies. it is the poet, who says elsewhere, 'can'st thou not minister to a _mind_ diseased? no? throw physic to the dogs, i'll none of it.' it is the poet who says, 'nor wind, rain, fire, thunder, are my daughters.' '_nothing_ could have brought him to such a lowness in nature, but his un-_kind_ daughters.' it is the naturalist who says, 'then let regan's heart be anatomized, and see what _it_ is that breeds about it. is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?' in short, this play is from the hand of one who thinks that the human affairs are of a kind to require scientific investigation, scientific foresight and conduct. he is much of lear's opinion on many points, and evidently judges that there would be no harm in getting a philosopher enrolled among the king's hundred. not a logician, not a metaphysician, according to the common acceptance of these terms; not merely a natural philosopher, in the low and limited sense of that term, in which we use it; but a man of science--one who is able, by some method or other, to ascend to the actual principles of things, and so to base his remedies for the social evils, on the forms which are _forms_, which have efficacy in nature as _such_, instead of basing them on certain chimeras, or so-called logical conclusions of the human mind--conclusions which the logic of nature contradicts-- conclusions to which the universal consent of _things_ is wanting. _nature_, in the sense in which _edmund_ uses that term, is _not_ this poet's _goddess_, or his law; though he regards 'the plague of custom' and 'the curiosity of nations,' and all their fantastic and arbitrary sway in human affairs, with an eye quite as critical--though he looks at 'that old antic, the law,' as he expresses it elsewhere, with an eye quite as severe, on the world's behalf, as that which edmund turns on it, on his own; he is very far from contending for the freedom of that savage, selfish, unreclaimed, spontaneous nature,--that lawless nature, to which the natural son of gloster claims 'his services are due.' the poet teaches that the true and successful social art is, and must be scientific. that it must be based on the science of nature in general, and on the science of human nature in particular, on a science that recognizes the double _nature_ in man, that takes in, its heights as well as its depths, and its depths as well as its heights, that sounds it 'from its lowest note to the top of its key;' but it is one thing to quarrel with the unscientific, _imperfect_ social arts, and it is another to prefer nature in man _without_ arts. the picture of 'the unaccommodated man,' which forms so prominent a part of the representation here,--'the _thing itself_,' stripped of its social lendings, or setting at nought the social restraints, is not by any means an attractive one, as this philosopher does it for us. the scientific artist is no better pleased, than the king is with this kind of '_nature_.' it is the imperfection of the civilization which still generates, or leaves unchecked these savage evils, that he exposes. but it is impossible, that the true social arts should be smelt out, or stumbled on, by accident, or arrived at by any kind of empirical groping; just as impossible as it is, on the other hand, that 'the wisdom of nature,' by throwing itself on its own internal resources, and reasoning it '_thus and thus_,' without taking into account the actual forces, should be able to invent them. those forces which enter into all the plot of our human life, unworthy of philosophic note as they had seemed hitherto, those terrific, unmeasured strengths, against which the human kind are continually dashing themselves in their blind experiments,--those engines on which the human heart is racked, 'and stretched out so long,'--those rocky structures on which its choicest treasures are so wildly wrecked, these natural forces,--no matter what artificial combinations of them may have been accomplished,--'the causes _in nature_,' of the phenomena of human life, appeared to this philosopher a very fitting subject for philosophy, and one quite too important in its relation to human well-being and the arts that promote it, to be left to mere blundering experiment; quite too subtle to be reached by any kind of empirical groping, quite too subtle to be entangled with the conclusions of the _philosophy_ which he found in vogue in his time, whose social efficacies and gifts in exorcisms, he has taken leave to connect in some way, with the appearance of tom o' bedlam in his history; a philosophy which had built up its system in defiant scorn of the nature of things; as if 'by reasoning it _thus_ and _thus_,' without any respect to the actual conditions, it could undertake to bridle the might of nature, and put a hook in the nose of her oppositions. it did not seem to this philosopher well, that men who have eyes--eyes that are great nature's gift to them,--her gift to them in chief,--eyes that were meant to see with, should go on in this groping, star-gazing, fatally-stumbling fashion any longer. _lear_. [to the bedlamite.] i do not like the fashion of your garments. _you will say that they are--persian:--but_ let them be altered. chapter v. the statesman's note-book--and the play. _brutus._ how i have thought of this, and of _these times_, i shall recount _hereafter_. _hamlet_. the play's the thing. _brutus_. tell us the manner of it, gentle casca. _casca_. i can as well _be hanged_ as tell _the manner_ of it. _posthumus_. 'shall's have _a play of this_.-- the fact that the design of this play, whatever it may be, is one deep enough to go down to that place in the social system which tom o' bedlam was then peacefully occupying,--thinking of anything else in the world but a social revolution on his behalf--to bring him up for observation; and that it is high enough to go up to that apex of the social structure on which the crown was then fastened, to fetch down the impersonated state itself, for an examination not less curious and critical; the fact, too, that it was subtle enough to penetrate the retirement of the domestic life, and bring out its innermost passages for scientific criticism;--the fact that the relation of the parent to the child, and that of the child to the parent, the relation of husband and wife, and sister and brother, and master and servant, of peasant and lord, nay, the transient relation of guest and host, have each their place and part here, and the question of their duty marked not less clearly, than that prominent relation of the king and his subjects;--the fact that these relations come in from the first, along with the political, and demand a hearing, and divide throughout the stage with them; the fact of the mere range of this social criticism, as it appears on the surface of the play, in these so prominent points,--is enough to show already, that it is a _radical_ of no ordinary kind, who is at work behind this drop-scene. it was evident, at a glance, that this so extensive bill of grievances was not one which any immediate or violent political revolution, or any social reformation which was then in contemplation, would be able to meet; and that very circumstance gave to the whole essay its profoundly quiet, conservative air. it passed only for one of those common outcries on the ills of human life, which men in general are expected, or permitted to make, according to their several abilities; one of those 'alacks!'--'why does he so'? which, by relieving the mind of the complainant, tend to keep things quiet on the whole. this poet, whoever he was, was making rather more ado about it than usual, apparently: but poets are useful for that very purpose; they express other men's emotions for them, in a higher key than they could manage it themselves. it was the breadth then,--the philosophic comprehension of this great philosophic design, which made it possible for the poet to introduce into it, and exhibit in it, so glaringly, those evils of his time that were crying out to heaven then, for redress, and could not wait for philosophic revolutions and reformations. tom o' bedlam, strictly speaking, does appear, indeed, to have been one of those elizabethan institutions which were modified or annulled, in the course of the political changes that so soon followed this exhibition of his case. 'tom' himself, in his own proper person, appears to have been left--by accident or otherwise--on the other side of the revolutionary gulf. 'i remember,' says aubrey, '_before the civil wars_, tom o' bedlams went about begging,' etc.--but one cannot help remarking that a very numerous family connection of the collateral branches of his house--bearing, on the whole, a sufficiently striking family resemblance to this illustrious subject of the poet's pencil,--appear to have got safely over all the political and social gulfs that intervene between our time and that. and, as to some of those other social evils which are exhibited here in their ideal proportions, they are not, perhaps, so entirely among the former things which have passed away with our reformations, that we should have to go to aubrey's note book to find out what the poet means. as to some of these, at least, it will not be necessary to hunt up an antiquary, who can remember whether any such thing ever was really in existence here, '_before the civil wars_.' and, notwithstanding all our advancements in natural science, and in the arts which attend these advancements; notwithstanding the strong recommendations of the inventors of this science,--regan's heart, and that which breeds about it, appear, by a singular oversight, to have escaped, hitherto, any truly scientific inquiry; and the arts for improving it do not appear, after all, to have been very materially advanced since the time when this order was issued. but notwithstanding that the subject of this piece appears to be so general,--notwithstanding the fact, that the social evils which are here represented include, apparently, the universal human conditions, and include evils which are still understood to be inherent in the nature of man, and, irreclaimable, or not, at least a subject for art,--and notwithstanding the fact that this exhibition professes to borrow all its local hues and exaggerations from the barbaric times of the ancient britons--it is not very difficult to perceive that it does, in fact, involve a local exhibition of a different kind; and that, under the cover of that great revolution in the human estate, which the philosophic mind was then meditating,--_so broad_, that none could perceive its _project_,--another revolution,--that revolution which was then so near at hand, was clearly outlined; and that this revolution, too, is, after all, one towards which this poet appears to '_incline_,' in a manner which would not have seemed, perhaps, altogether consistent with his position and assumptions elsewhere, if these could have been produced here against him; and in a manner, perhaps, somewhat more decided than the general philosophic tone, and the spirit of those large and peaceful designs to which he was chiefly devoted, might have led us to anticipate. this play was evidently written at a time when the conviction that the state of things which it represents could not endure much longer, had taken deep hold of the poet's mind; at a time when those evils had attained a height so unendurable--when that evil which lay at the heart of the commonweal, poisoning all the social relations with its infection, had grown so fearful, that it might well seem, even to the scientific mind, to require the fierce '_drug_' of the political revolution,--so fearful as to make, even to such a mind, the rude surgery of the civil wars at last welcome. for, indeed, it cannot be denied that the state of things which this play represents, is that with which the author's own experience was conversant; and that all the terrible tragic satire of it, points--not to that age in the history of britain in which the druids were still responsible for the national culture,--not to that time when the celtic triads, clothed with the sanctities of an unknown past, still made the standard works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no going,--not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer,--not to that time, but to the _elizabethan_. that instinctive groping and stumbling in all human affairs, that pursuit of human ends without any science of the natures to be superinduced, and without any science of the natures that were to be subjected,--those eyes of moonshine speculation, those glass eyes with which the scurvy politician affects to see the things he does not--those thousand noses that serve for eyes, and horns welked and waved like the enridged sea, and all the wild misery of that unlearned fortuitous human living, that waits to be scourged with the sequent effect, and knows not how to ascend to the cause--colossally exaggerated as it seems here--heightened everywhere, as if the poet had put forth his whole power, and strained his imagination, and availed himself of his utmost poetic license, to give it, through all its details, its last conceivable hue of violence, its pure ideal shape, is, after all, but a copy an historical sketch. the ignorance, the stupidity, 'the _blindness_,' that this author paints, was his own 'time's plague'; 'the madness' that 'led it,' was the madness of which he was himself a mute and manacled spectator. by some singular oversight or caprice of tyranny, or on account of some fastidious scruple of the imagination perhaps, it does _not_ appear, indeed, to have been the fashion, either in the reigns of the tudors or the stuarts, to pluck out the living human eye as gloster's eyes were plucked out; and that of itself would have furnished a reason why this poor duke should have been compelled to submit to that particular operation, instead of presenting himself to have his ears cut off in a sober, decent, civilized, christian manner; or to have them grubbed out, if it happened that the operation had been once performed already; or to have his hand cut off, or his head, with his eyes in it; or to be roasted alive some noon-day in the public square, eyes and all, as many an honest gentleman was expected to present himself in those times, without making any particular demur or fuss about it. _these_ were operations that englishmen of every rank and profession, soldiers, scholars, poets, philosophers, lawyers, physicians, and grave and reverend divines, were called on to undergo in those times, and for that identical offence of which the duke of gloster stood convicted, opposition to the will of a lawless usurping tyranny,--to its merest caprice of vanity or humour, perhaps,--or on grounds slighter still, on bare suspicion of a disposition to oppose it. but then that, of course, was a thing of _custom_; so much so, that the victims themselves often took it in good part, and submitted to it as a divine institution, part of a sacred legacy, handed down to them, as it was understood, from their more enlightened ancestors. now, if the poet, in pursuance of his more general philosophic intention, which involved a moving representation of the helplessness of the social monad--that bodily as well as moral susceptibility and fragility, which leaves him open to all kinds of personal injury, not from the elements and from animals of other species merely or chiefly, but chiefly from his own kind,--if the poet, in the course of this exhibition, had caused poor gloster to be held down in his chair on the stage, for the purpose of having his _ears_ pared off, what kind of sensation could he hope to produce with that on the sensibility of an audience, who might have understood without a commentator an allusion to 'the tribulation of tower hill'--spectators accustomed to witness performances so much more thrilling, and on a stage where the play was in earnest. and as to that second operation before referred to, which might have answered the poetic purpose, perhaps; who knows whether that may not have been a refinement in civilization peculiar to the reign of that amiable and handsome christian prince, who was still a minor when this play was first brought out at whitehall? for it was in _his_ reign that that memorable instance of it occurred, which the subsequent events connected with it chanced to make so notorious. it was a learned and very conscientious lawyer, in the reign of charles the first, whose criticism upon some of the fashionable amusements of the day, which certain members of the royal family were known to be fond of, occasioned the suggestion of this mode of satisfying the outraged majesty of the state, when the prying eye of government discovered, or thought it did, remains enough of those previously-condemned appendages on this author's person, to furnish material for a second operation. 'methinks mr. prynne _hath_ ears!' does not, after all, sound so very different from--'going to pluck out gloster's _other_ eye,' as that the governments under which these two speeches are reported, need to be distinguished, on that account only, by any such essential difference as that which is supposed to exist between the human and _divine_. both these operations appear, indeed to the unprejudiced human mind, to savour somewhat of the diabolical--or of the dark ages, rather, and of the prince of darkness. and, indeed, that '_fiend_' which haunts the play--which the monster, with his moonshine eyes, appeared to have a vague idea of--seems to have been as busy here, in this department, as he was in bringing about poor tom's distresses. but in that steady persevering exhibition of the liabilities of individual human nature, the common liabilities which throw it upon the common, the distinctive law of humanity for its weal--in that continuous picture of the suffering and ignominy, and mutilation to which it is liable, moral and intellectual, as well as physical, where that law of humanity is not yet scientifically developed and scientifically sustained--the poet does not always go quite so far to find his details. it is not from the celtic regan's time that he brings out those ancient implements of state authority into which the feet of the poor duke of kent, travelling on the king's errands, are ignominiously thrust; while the poet, under cover of the fool's jests, shows prettily their relation to the human dignity. but then it is a duke on whom this indignity is practised; for it is to be remarked, in passing, that though this poet is evidently bent on making his exhibition a thorough one, though he is determined not to leave out anything of importance in his diagrams, he does not appear inclined to soil his fingers by meddling with the lower orders, or to countenance any innovation in his art in that respect. whenever he has occasion to introduce persons of this class into his pieces, they come in and go out, and perform their part in his scene, very much as they do elsewhere in his time. even when his players come in, they do not speak many words on their own behalf. they stand civilly, and answer questions, and take their orders, and fulfil them. that is all that is looked for at their hands. for this is not a poet who has ever given any one occasion in his own time, to distinguish him as the poet of the people. it is always from the highest social point of observation that he takes those views of the lower ranks, which he has occasion to introduce into his plays, from the mobs of 'greasy citizens' to the details of the sheep-shearing feast; and even in eastcheap he keeps it still. there never was a more aristocratic poet apparently, and though the very basest form of outcast misery 'that ever penury in contempt of man brought near to beast,' though the basest and most ignoble and pitiful human liabilities, are every where included in his plan; he will have nothing but the rich blood of dukes and kings to take him through with it--he will have nothing lower and less illustrious than these to play his parts for him. it is a king to whom 'the _farm house_,' where _both_ fire and food are waiting, becomes a royal luxury on his return from the _hovel's_ door, brought in chattering out of the tempest, in that pitiful stage of human want, which had made him ready to share with tom o' bedlam, nay, with the _swine_, their rude comforts. 'art cold? i am cold myself. where is this straw, my fellow. your _hovel_:--come bring us to your _hovel_.' it is a king who gets an ague in the storm, who finds the tyranny of the night too rough for nature to endure; it is a king on whose desolate outcast head, destitution and social wrongs accumulate their results, till his wits begin to turn, till his mind is shattered, and he comes on to the stage at last, a poor bedlamite. nay, 'tom' himself, is a duke's son, we are told; though that circumstance does not hinder him from giving, with much frankness and scientific accuracy, the particulars of those personal pursuits, and tastes, and habits, incidental to that particular station in life to which it has pleased providence to call _him_. and so by means of that poetic order, which is the providence of this piece, and that design which 'tunes the harmony of it,' it is a duke on whom that low correction, 'such as basest and most contemned wretches are punished with,' is exhibited, in spite of his indignant protest. _kent_. call not your stocks for me. _i_ serve the king, on _whose employment_ i was sent to you. you shall do small _respect_, show too bold malice against the _grace_ and _person_ of my master, stocking his messenger. _cornwall_. fetch forth the stocks. as i have life and honour, there shall he sit till noon.' _regan_. till noon,--till night my lord, and all night too. [in vain the prudent and loyal gloster remonstrates] --the king must take it ill that _he_, so slightly valued in his messenger, should have him thus restrained. _cornwall_. i'll answer that. _regan_. put in his legs. but then it must be confessed that the poet was not without some kind of precedent for this bold dramatic proceeding. he had, indeed, by means of the culture and diligent use of that gift of forethought, with which nature had so largely endowed him, been enabled thus far to keep his own person free from any such tangible encumbrance, though the '_lameness_' with which fortune had afflicted him personally, is always his personal grievance; but he had seen in his own time, ancient men and reverend,--men who claimed to be the ministers of heaven, and travelling on its errands, arrested, and subjected to this ludicrous indignity: he had seen this open stop, this palpable, corporeal, unfigurative arrest put upon the activity of scholars and thinkers in his time, conscientious men, between whose master and the state, there was a growing quarrel then, a quarrel that these proceedings were not likely to pacify. from noon till night, they, too, had sat thus, and all night too, they had endured that shameful lodging. 'when a man is _over_ lusty at legs,' says the fool, who arrives in time to put in an observation or two on this topic, and who seems disposed to look at it from a critical point of view, concluding with the practical improvement of the subject, already quoted--'when a man is over lusty at legs'--(when his will, or his higher intelligence, perhaps, is allowed to govern them too freely,) 'he wears wooden nether stocks,' or 'cruel garters,' as he calls them again, by way of bestowing on this institution of his ancestors as much variety of poetic imagery as the subject will admit of. '_horses_ are tied by the head, _dogs_ and _bears_ by the neck, _monkeys_ by the loins, and _men_ by the legs'; and having ransacked his memory to such good purpose, and produced such a pile of learned precedents, he appears disposed to rest the case with these; for it is a part of the play to get man into his place in the scale of nature, and to draw the line between him and the brutes, if there be any such thing possible; and the fool seems to be particularly inclined to assist the author in this process, though when we last heard of him he was, indeed, proposing to send the principal man of his time 'to school to an ant,' to improve his sagacity; intimating, also, that another department of natural science, even conchology itself, might furnish him with some rather more prudent and fortunate suggestions than those which his own brain had appeared to generate; and it is to be remarked, that in his views on this point, as on some others of importance, he has the happiness to agree remarkably with that illustrious yoke-fellow of his in philosophy, who was just then turning his attention to the 'practic part of life' and _its_ 'theoric,' and who indulges himself in some satires on this point not any less severe, though his pleasantries are somewhat more covert. but the philosopher on this occasion, having produced such a variety of precedents from natural history, appears to be satisfied with the propriety and justice of the proceeding, inasmuch as beasts and men seem to be treated with impartial consideration in it; and though a certain distinction of form appears to obtain according to the species, the main fact is throughout identical. 'then comes the time,' he says, in winding up that knotted skein of prophecy, which he leaves for merlin to disentangle, for 'he lives before his time,' as he takes that opportunity to tell us-- 'then comes the time, who lives to see't, that _going shall be used with feet_.' yes, it is a duke who is put in the stocks; it is a duke's son plays the bedlamite; it is a king who finds the hovel's shelter 'precious'; and it is a queen--it is a king's wife, and a daughter of kings--who is hanged; nay more, it is cordelia--it is cordelia, and none other, whom this inexorable poet, primed with mischief, bent on outrage, determined to turn out the heart of his time, and show, in the selectest form, the inmost lining of its lurking humanities--it is cordelia whom he will hang--and we forgive him still, and bear with him in all these assaults on our taste--in all these thick-coming blows on our outraged sensibilities; we forgive him when at last the poetic design flashes on us,--when we come to understand the providence of this piece, at least,--when we come to see at last that there is a meaning in it _all_, a meaning deep to justify even this procedure. 'we are not the _first_ who, with _the best_ meaning, have _incurred the worst_,' says the captive queen herself; nor was she the last of that good company, as the poet himself might have testified;-- upon such sacrifices the gods themselves _throw incense_. we forgive the poet here, as we forgive him in all these other pitiful and revolting exhibitions, because we know that he who would undertake the time's cure--he who would undertake the relief of the human estate in any age, must probe its evil--must reach, no matter what it costs, its deadliest _hollow_. and in that age, there was no voice which could afford to lack 'the courtier's glib and oily art.' 'hanging was the word' then, for the qualities of which this princess was the impersonation, or almost the impersonation, so predominant were they in her poetic constitution. there was no voice, gentle and low enough, to speak outright such truth as hers; and 'banishment' and 'the stocks' would have been only too mild a remedy for 'the plainness' to which kent declares, even to the teeth of majesty, 'honour's bound, when majesty stoops to folly.' the kind, considerate gloster, with all his loyalty to the powers which are able to show the divine right of possession, and with all his disposition to conform to the times, is greatly distressed and perplexed with the outrages which are perpetrated, as it were, under his own immediate sanction and authority. he has a hard struggle to reconcile his duty as the subject of a state which he is not prepared to overthrow, with his humane impulses and designs. he goes pattering about for a time, remonstrating, and apologizing, and trying 'to smooth down,' and 'hush up,' and mollify, and keep peace between the offending parties. he stands between the blunt, straightforward manliness of the honest kent on the one hand, and the sycophantic servility and self-abnegation, which knows no will but the master's, as represented by the steward, on the other. 'i am sorry for thee,' he says to kent, after having sought in vain to prevent this outrage from being perpetrated in his own court-- 'i am sorry for thee, friend: _tis the duke's pleasure, whose disposition all the world well knows, will not be rubbed or stopped_'-- as he found to his cost, poor man, when he came to have his own eyes gouged out by it. he 'saw it _feelingly_' then, as he remarked himself. 'i'll entreat for thee,' he continues, in his conversation with the disguised duke in the stocks. 'the duke's to blame in this. '_twill be ill taken_.' and when the king, on his arrival, kept waiting in the court, in his agony of indignation and grief, is told that regan and cornwall are 'sick,' 'they are weary,' 'they have travelled hard to-night,' denounces these subterfuges, and bids gloster fetch him a better answer, this is the worthy man's reply to him-- 'my dear lord, you know the fiery quality of the duke, how unremovable and fixed he is in his own course.' but lear, who has never had any but a subjective acquaintance hitherto with reasons of that kind, does not appear able to understand them from this point of view-- _lear_. vengeance! plague! death! confusion! _fiery_?--what _quality_? why gloster, gloster, i'd speak with the duke of cornwall and his wife. _gloster_. well, my good lord, i have informed them so. _lear_. informed them? dost thou understand me? _gloster_. ay, my good lord. but though gloster is not yet ready to break with tyranny, it is not difficult to see which way he secretly inclines; and though he still manages his impulses cautiously, and contrives to succour the oppressed king by stealth, his courage rises with the emergency, and grows bold with provocation. for he is himself one of the finer and finest proofs of the times which the poet represents; one, however, which he keeps back a little, for the study of those who look at his work most carefully. this man stands here in the general, indeed, as the representative of a class of men who do not belong exclusively to this particular time--men who do not stand ready, as kent and his class do, to fly in the face of tyranny at the first provocation; they are not the kind of men who 'make mouths,' as hamlet says, 'at the invisible event;'--they are the kind who know beforehand that to break with the powers that are, single-handed, is to sit on the stage and have your eyes gouged out, or to undergo some process of mutilation and disfigurement, not the less painful and oppressive, by this poet's own showing, because it does not happen, perhaps, to be a physical one, and not the less calculated, on that account, to impair one's usefulness to one's species, it may be. but besides that more general bearing of the representation, the part and disposition of gloster afford us from time to time, glimpses of persons and things which connect the representation more directly with the particular point here noted. men who found themselves compelled to occupy a not less equivocal _position_ in the state, look through it a little now and then; and here, as in other parts of the play, it only wants the right key to bring out suppressed historical passages, and a finer history generally, than the chronicles of the times were able to take up. 'alack, alack, edmund,' says gloster to his natural son, making _him_ the confidant of his nobler nature, putting what was then the perilous secret of his humanity, into the dangerous keeping of the base-born one--for this is the poet's own interpretation of his plot; though lear is allowed to intimate on his behalf, that the loves and relations which are recognised and good in courts of justice, are not always secured by that sanction from similar misfortune; that they are not secured by that from those penalties which great nature herself awards in those courts in which her institutes are vindicated. 'alack, alack, edmund, i like not this unnatural dealing! when i desired _their leave that i might pity him_, they took from me _the use of mine own house_, and charged me on pain of their perpetual displeasure, _neither to speak_ of him, _entreat for him, nor in any way to sustain him_.' _edmund_. most _savage and unnatural_. _gloster_. go to, say you nothing. [and say you nothing, my contemporary reader, if you perceive that this is one of those passages i have spoken of elsewhere, which carries with it another application besides that which i put it to]. 'there is division between the dukes--and a worse matter than that: i have received a letter this night,--'tis dangerous to be spoken;--i have _locked_ the letter in my _closet: these injuries the king now bears_, will be revenged _at home_' [softly--say you nothing]. '_there_ is _part of a power already footed_: we _must incline to the king. i_ will seek him and _privily relieve him_. _go you and maintain talk with the duke_, that my charity be not of him perceived. if he ask for me, i am ill, and gone to bed. if i die for it,--_as no less is threatened me_,--_the king, my old master_--must be relieved. there is some strange thing toward, edmund. pray you be careful.' even edmund himself professes to be not altogether without some experience of the perplexity which the claims of apparently clashing duties, and relations in such a time creates, though he seems to have found an easy method of disposing of these questions. _nature_ is his goddess and his law (that is, as _he_ uses the term, the baser nature, the degenerate, which is not nature for man, which is _unnatural_ for the human kind), and in his own 'rat'-like fashion, 'he bites the holy cords atwain.' 'how, my lord,' he says, in the act of betraying his father's secret to the duke of cornwall, in the hope of 'drawing to himself what his father loses'--'how i may be censured that nature, thus gives way to loyalty, _something fears me to think of_.' and again, 'i will persevere in my course of _loyalty_, though the conflict be sore between that and my _blood_.' '_know thou this_,' he says afterwards, to the officer whom he employs to hang cordelia, 'that men are as the time is. thy great employment will not bear question. about it, i say, instantly, and carry it so as i have set it down.' 'i cannot _draw a cart_, nor _eat dried oats_,' is the officer's reply, who appears to be also in the poet's secret, and ready to aid his intention of carrying out the distinction between the human kind and the brute, 'i cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;--if it be man's work i will do it.' but it is the steward's part, as deliberately explained by kent himself, which furnishes in detail the ideal antagonism of that which kent sustains in the piece; for beside those active demonstrations of his disgust, which the poetic order tolerates in him, though some of the powers within appear to take such violent offence at it, besides these tangible demonstrations, and that elaborate criticism, which the poet puts into his mouth, in which the steward is openly treated as the representative of a class, who seem to the poet apparently, to require some treatment in his time, kent himself is made to notice distinctly this literally striking opposition. 'no _contraries_ hold more _antipathy_ than i, and such a knave,' he says to cornwall, by way of explaining his apparently gratuitous attack upon the steward. no one, indeed, who reads the play with any care, can doubt the poet's intention to incorporate into it, for some reason or other, and to bring out by the strongest conceivable contrasts, his study of loyalty and service, and especially of regal counsel, and his criticism of it, as it stood in his time in its most approved patterns. 'such smiling rouges as these' ('that _bite_ the _holy cords atwain_'). 'smooth every _passion_ that in the _nature of their lord rebels_; bring oil to fire, snow _to their_ colder moods; revenge, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks with every _gale_ and _vary_ of their masters, as _knowing nought_ like _dogs_ but--_following_.' such ruses as this would not, of course, be wanting in such a _time_ as that in which this piece was planned, if edmund's word was, indeed, the true one. 'know thou this, _men_ are as the time is.' and even amidst the excitement and rough outrage of that scene--in which gloster's trial is so summarily conducted, even in that so rude scene--the relation between the _guest_ and his _host_, and the relation of the _slave_ to his _owner_, is delicately and studiously touched, and the human claim in both is boldly advanced, in the face of an absolute authority, and _age_ and _personal dignity_ put in their claims also, and demand, even at such a moment, their full rights of reverence. [_re-enter servants with_ gloster.] _regan_. ingrateful fox! 'tis he. _cornwall_. bind fast his _corky_ arms. _gloster_. what mean your graces?--good my friends, _consider_. _you are my guests_: do me no foul play, _friends_. _cornwall_. bind him, i say. _regan_. hard, hard:--o filthy traitor! _gloster_. unmerciful lady as you are, i am none. _cornwall_. to this chair bind him:--villain, thou shalt find--[regan _plucks his beard_]. _gloster_. by the kind gods [_for these are the gods, whose 'commission' is sitting here_]'tis most _ignobly_ done, to pluck me by the beard. _regan_. so white, and such a traitor! _gloster_. naughty lady, _these hairs_, which thou dost ravish from my chin, will quicken and accuse thee. _i am your host_: with _robber hands_, my hospitable favours you should not _ruffle_ thus. tied to the stake, questioned and cross-questioned, and insulted, finally, beyond even his faculty of endurance, he breaks forth, at last, in strains of indignation that overleap all arbitrary and conventional bounds, that are only the more terrible for having been so long suppressed. kent himself, when he 'came between the dragon and his wrath,' was not so fierce. _cornwall_. where hast thou sent the king? _gloster_. _to dover_. _regan_. wherefore to dover, was't thou not charged at peril?-- _cornwall. wherefore to dover?_ let him first answer that. _regan_. wherefore _to dover?_ _gloster_. because i would not see thy cruel nails pluck out his poor old eyes, _nor thy fierce sister_ in his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs. ... _regan_. one side will mock another; the other too. _cornwall_. if you 'see vengeance.' _servant_. hold your hand, my lord: _i have served you ever since i was a child_; but _better service_ have i never done you, than now _to bid you hold_. _regan_. how now, you _dog_? _servant_. if you did wear a beard upon your chin, i'd shake it on this quarrel: _what do you mean_? [_arbitrary power called to an account, requested to explain itself_.] _cornwall. my_ villain! _regan_. a peasant _stand up thus_? thus too, indeed, in that rude scene above referred to, in which the king finds his messenger in the stocks, and regan's door, too, shut against him, the same ground of criticism had already been revealed, the same delicacy and rigour in the exactions had already betrayed the depth of the poetic design, and the real comprehension of that _law_, whose violations are depicted here, the scientific law, the scientific sovereignty, the law of universal nature; commanding, in the human, that specific human excellence, for the _degenerate_ movement is in violation of nature, that is not _nature_ but her profanation and undoing. this is one of those passages, however, which admit, as the modern reader will more easily observe than the contemporary of the poet was likely to of a second reading. _goneril_. why might not you, my lord, receive attendance from those that she calls servants, or from mine? * * * * * what need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, to _follow_ in a _house_, where twice so many _have a command to tend you_? _regan_. what need one? _lear_. o reason not the _need_: our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous. [_poor tom must have his 'rubans_.'] allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life were cheap as beasts [_and that's not nature_] thou art _a lady_; if only to go warm were _gorgeous_, why, _nature_ needs not what _thou gorgeous_ wear'st, which scarcely keeps thee warm.--but, for true need, you heavens, give me that patience.--_patience i need_. it is, indeed, the doctrine of the 'true need' that is lurking here, and all that puts man into his true place and relations in the creative order, whether of submission or control is included in it. it is the doctrine of the natural human need, and the natural ground and limits of the arts, for which nature has endowed man beforehand, with a faculty and a sentiment corresponding in grandeur to his need,--large as he is little, noble as he is mean, powerful as he is helpless, felicitous as he is wretched; the faculty and the sentiment whereby the _want_ of man becomes the measure of his wealth and grandeur,--whereby his conscious _lowness_ becomes the means of his ascent to his ideal type in nature, and to the scientific perfection of his form. and this whole social picture,--rude, savage as it is,--savage as it shews when its sharp outline falls on that fair ideal ground of criticism which the doctrine of a scientific civilization creates,--is but the poet's report of the progress of human development as it stood in his time, and of the gain that it had made on savage instinct then. it is his report of the social institutions of his time, as he found them on his map of human advancement. it is his report of the wild social misery that was crying underneath them, with its burthen of new advancements. it is the poet's apology for his new doctrine of human living, which he is going to publish, and leave on the earth, for 'the times that are far off.' it is the negative, which is the first step towards that affirmation, which he is going to establish on the earth for ever, or so long as the species, whose law he has found, endures on it. down to its most revolting, most atrocious detail, it is still the elizabethan civility that is painted here. even goneril's unscrupulous mode of disposing of her rival sister, though _that_ was the kind of murder which was then regarded with the profoundest disgust and horror--(the queen in cymbeline expresses that vivid sentiment, when she says: 'if pisanio have given his mistress that confection which i gave him for a cordial, she is served as i would serve a rat')--even as to that we all know what a king's favourite felt himself competent to undertake then; and, if the clearest intimations of such men as bacon, and coke, and raleigh, on such a question, are of any worth, the household of james the first was not without a parallel even for that performance, if not when this play was written, when it was published. it is all one picture of social ignorance, and misery, and _frantic_ misrule. it is a faithful exhibition of the degree of personal security which a man of honourable sentiments, and humane and noble intentions, could promise himself in such a time. it shows what chance there was of any man being permitted to sustain an honourable and intelligent part in the world, in an age in which all the radical social arts were yet wanting, in which the rude institutions of an ignorant past spontaneously built up, without any science of the natural laws, were vainly seeking to curb and quench the incarnate soul of new ages,--the spirit of a scientific human advancement; and, when all the common welfare was still openly intrusted to the unchecked caprice and passion of one selfish, pitiful, narrow, low-minded man. to appreciate fully the incidental and immediate political application of the piece, however, it is necessary to observe that notwithstanding that studious exhibition of lawless and outrageous power, which it involves, it is, after all, we are given to understand, by a quiet intimation here and there, _a limited monarchy_ which is put upon the stage here. it is a constitutional government, very much in the elizabethan stage of development, as it would seem, which these arbitrary rulers affect to be administering. it is a government which professes to be one of law, under which the atrocities of this piece are sheltered. and one may even note, in passing, that that high judicial court, in which poor lear undertakes to get his cause tried, appears to have, somehow, an extremely modern air, considering what age of the british history it was, in which it was supposed to be constituted, and considering that one of the wigs appointed to that bench had to leave his speech behind him for merlin to make, in consequence of living before his time: at all events it is already tinctured with some of the more notorious elizabethan vices--vices which our poet, not content with this exposition, contrived to get exposed in another manner, and to some purpose, ere all was done. _lear_. it shall be done, i will arraign them straight! come, sit thou here, _most learned justice_. [_to the_ bedlamite_.] thou, _sapient_ sir, sit here. [_to the_ fool.] and again,-- i'll see _their trial_ first. _bring in the evidence_. thou _robed_ man of justice take _thy_ place. [_to_ tom o'bedlam.] and _thou_, his _yoke fellow_ of equity _bench by his side_. [_to the_ fool.] you are of '_the commission_'--sit _you too_. [_to_ kent.] truly it was a bold wit that could undertake to constitute that bench on the stage, and fill it with those speaking forms,--speaking to the eye the unmistakeable significance, for these judges, two of them, happened to be on the spot in full costume,--and as to the third, he was of '_the commission_.' 'sit you, too.' truly it was a bold instructor that could undertake 'to facilitate' the demonstration of 'the more chosen subjects,' with the aid of diagrams of this kind. arms! arms! sword, fire! corruption in the place! _false justicer, why hast thou let her scape_? the tongues of these ancient sovereigns of britain, 'tang' throughout with elizabethan 'arguments of state,' and even goneril, in her somewhat severe proceedings against her _father_, justifies her course in a very grave and excellent speech, enriched with the choicest phrases of that particular order of state eloquence, in which majesty stoops graciously to a recognition of the subject nation;--a speech from which we gather that the '_tender of a wholesome weal_' is, on the whole, the thing which she has at heart most deeply, and though the proceeding in question is a painful one to her feelings, a state necessity appears to prescribe it, or at least, render it '_discreet_.' even in gloster's case, though the process to which he is subjected, is, confessedly, an extemporaneous one, it appears from the duke of cornwall's statement, that it was only the _form_ which was wanting to make it legal. thus he apologizes for it.-- though well we may not pass upon his life without the form of justice, yet our _power_ shall do a _courtesy_ to _our wrath_, which men may blame, _but not control_. goneril, however, grows bolder at the last, and says outright, 'say if i do, the _laws_ are _mine_ not thine.' but it is the law which is _thine_ and _mine_, it is the law which is for tom o' bedlam and for thee, that great nature speaking at last through her interpreter, and explaining all this wild scene, will have vindicated. _most_ monstrous, exclaims her illustrious consort; but at the close of the play, where so much of the meaning sometimes comes out in a word, he himself concedes that the government which has just devolved upon him is an _absolute_ monarchy. 'for us,' he says, 'we will resign, during the life of this old majesty, our absolute power.' so that there seems to have been, in fact,--in the minds, too, of persons who ought, one would say, to have been best informed on this subject,--just that vague, uncertain, contradictory view of this important question, which appears to have obtained in the english state, during the period in which the material of this poetic criticism was getting slowly accumulated. but of course this play, so full of the consequences of arbitrary power, so full of elizabethan politics, with its 'ear-kissing arguments,' could not well end, till that word, too, had been spoken outright; and, in the duke of albany's resignation, it slips in at last so quietly, so properly, that no one perceives that it is not there by accident. this, then, is what the play contains; but those that follow the _story_ and the superficial plot only, must, of course, lose track of the interior identities. it does not occur to these that the poet is occupied with principles, and that the change of _persons_ does not, in the least, confound his pursuit of them. the fact that tyranny is in one act, or in one scene, represented by lear, and in the next by his daughters;--the fact that the king and the father is in one act the tyrant, and in another, the victim of tyranny, is quite enough to confound the criticism to which a work of mere amusement is subjected; for it serves to disguise the philosophic purport, by dividing it on the surface: and the dangerous passages are all opposed and neutralised, for those who look at it only as a piece of dramatized, poetic history. for this is a philosopher who prefers to handle his principles in their natural, historical combinations, in those modified unions of opposites, those complex wholes, which nature so stedfastly inclines to, instead of exhibiting them scientifically bottled up and labelled, in a state of fierce chemical abstraction. his characters are not like the characters in the old 'moralities,' which he found on the stage when he first began to turn his attention to it, mere impersonations of certain vague, loose, popular notions. those sickly, meagre forms would not answer his purpose. it was necessary that the actors in the new moralities he was getting up so quietly, should have some speculation in their eyes, some blood in their veins, a kind of blood that had never got manufactured in the poet's laboratory till then. his characters, no matter how strong the predominating trait, though '_the conspicuous instance_' of it be selected, have all the rich quality, the tempered and subtle power of nature's own compositions. the expectation, the interest, the surprise of life and history, waits, with its charm on all their speech and doing. the whole play tells, indeed, its own story, and scarcely needs interpreting, when once the spectator has gained the true dramatic stand-point; when once he understands that there is a teacher here,--a new one,--one who will not undertake to work with the instrumentalities that his time offered to him, who begins by rejecting the abstractions which lie at the foundation of all the learning of his time, which are not scientific, but vague, loose, popular notions, that have been collected without art, or scientific rule of rejection, and are, therefore, inefficacious in nature, and unavailable for 'the art and practic part of life;' a teacher who will build up his philosophy anew, from the beginning, a teacher who will begin with history and particulars, who will abstract his definitions from nature, and have _powers_ of them, and not _words_ only, and make _them_ the basis of his science and the material and instrument of his reform. 'i will teach you _differences_,' says kent to the steward, alluding on the part of his author, for he does not profess to be metaphysical himself to another kind of distinction, than that which obtained in the schools; and accompanying the remark, on his own part, with some practical demonstrations, which did not appear to be taken in good part at all by the person he was at such pains to instruct in his doctrine of distinctions. the reader who has once gained this clue, the clue which the question of design and authorship involves, will find this play, as he will find, indeed, all this author's plays, overflowing every where with the scientific statement,--the finest abstract statement of that which the action, with its moving, storming, laughing, weeping, praying diagrams, sets forth in the concrete. but he who has not yet gained this point,--the critic who looks at it from the point of observation which the traditionary theory of its origin and intent creates, is not in a position to notice the philosophic expositions of its purport, with which the action is all inwoven. no,--though the whole structure of the piece should manifestly hang on them, though the whole flow of the dialogue should make one tissue of them, though every interstice of the play should be filled with them, though the fool's jest, and the bedlamite's gibberish, should point and flash with them at every turn;--though the wildest incoherence of madness, real or assumed, to its most dubious hummings,--its snatches of old ballads, and inarticulate mockings of the blast, should be strung and woven with them; though the storm itself, with its wild accompaniment, and demoniacal frenzies, should articulate its response to them;--keeping open tune without, to that human uproar; and howling symphonies, to the unconquered demoniacal forces of human life,--for it is the poet who writes in 'the storm continues,'--'the storm continues,'--'the storm continues;'--though even edmund's diabolical '_fa, sol, lah, mi_,' should dissolve into harmony with them, while tom's five fiends echo it from afar, and 'mop and mow' their responses, down to the one that '_since possesses chambermaids_;' nobody that takes the play theory, and makes a matter of faith of it merely; nobody that is willing to shut his eyes and open his mouth, and swallow the whole upon trust, as a miracle simply, is going to see anything in all this, or take any exceptions at it. certainly, at the time when it was written, it was not the kind of learning and the kind of philosophy that the world was used to. nobody had ever heard of such a thing. the memory of man could not go far enough to produce any parallel to it in letters. it was manifest that this was _nature_, the living nature, the thing itself. none could perceive the tint of the school on its robust creations; no eye could detect in its sturdy compositions the stuff that books were made of; and it required no effort of faith, therefore, to believe that it was not that. it was easy enough to believe, and men were glad, on the whole, to believe that it was not that--that it was not learning or philosophy--but something just as far from that, as completely its opposite, as could well be conceived of. how could men suspect, as yet, that this was the new scholasticism, the new philosophy? was it strange that they should mistake it for rude nature herself, in her unschooled, spontaneous strength, when it had not yet publicly transpired that something had come at last upon the stage of human development, which was stooping to nature and learning of her, and stealing her secret, and unwinding the clue to the heart of her mystery? how could men know that this was the subtlest philosophy, the ripest scholasticism, the last proof of all human learning, when it was still a secret that the school of nature and her laws, that the school of natural history and natural philosophy, too, through all its lengths and breadths and depths, was open; and that '_the schools_'--the schools of old chimeras and notions--the schools where the jangle of the monkish abstractions and the 'fifes and the trumpets of the greeks' were sounding--were going to get shut up with it. how should they know that the teacher of the new philosophy was poet also--must be, by that same anointing, a singer, mighty as the sons of song who brought their harmonies of old into the savage earth--a singer able to sing down antiquities with his new gift, able to sing in new eras? but these have no clue as yet to track him with: they cannot collect or thread his thick-showered meanings. he does not care through how many mouths he draws the lines of his philosophic purpose. he does not care from what long distances his meanings look towards each other. but these interpreters are not aware of that. they have not been informed of that particular. on the contrary, they have been put wholly off their guard. their heads have been turned, deliberately, in just the opposite direction. they have no faintest hint beforehand of the depths in which the philosophic unities of the piece are hidden: it is not strange, therefore, that these unities should escape their notice, and that they should take it for granted that there are none in it. it is not the mere play-reader who is ever going to see them. it will take the philosophic student, with all his clues, to master them. it will take the student of the new school and the new ages, with the torch of natural science in his hand, to track them to their centre. here, too, as elsewhere, it is the king himself on whom the bolder political expositions are thrust. but it is not his royalty only that has need to be put in requisition here, to bring out successfully all that was working then in this poet's mind and heart, and which had to come out in some way. it was something more than royalty that was required to protect this philosopher in those astounding freedoms of speech in which he indulges himself here, without any apparent scruple or misgiving. the combination of distresses, indeed, which the old ballad accumulates on the poor king's head, offers from the first a large poetic license, of which the man of art--or '_prudence_,' as he calls it--avails himself somewhat liberally. with those _daughters_ in the foreground always, and the parental grief so wild and loud--with that deeper, deadlier, infinitely more cruel _private_ social wrong interwoven with all the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, as if that inner social evil were, after all, foremost in the poet's thought--as if that were the thing which seemed crying to him for redress more than all the rest--if, indeed, any thought of 'giving losses their remedies' could cross a player's dream, when, in the way of his profession, 'the _enormous state_' came in to fill his scene, and open its subterranean depths, and let out its secrets, and drown the stage with its elemental horror;--with his daughters in the foreground, and all that magnificent accompaniment of the elemental war without--with all nature in that terrific uproar, and the fool and the madman to create a diversion, and his friends all about him to hush up and make the best of everything--with that great storm of pathos that the magician is bringing down for him--with the stage all in tears, by their own confession, and the audience sobbing their responses--what the poor king might say between his chattering teeth was not going to be very critically treated; and the poet knew it. it was the king, in such circumstances, who could undertake the philosophical expositions of the action; and in his wildest bursts of grief he has to manage them, in his wildest bursts of grief he has to keep to them. but it is not until long afterwards, when the storm, and all the misery of that night, has had its ultimate effect--its chronic effect--upon him, that the poet ventures to produce, under cover of the sensation which the presence of a mad king on the stage creates, precisely that exposition of the scene which has been, here, insisted on. 'they flattered me like a dog; they told me i had _white_ hairs in my beard, ere the _black_ ones were there. to say _ay_ and _no_ to everything _i_ said!--ay and no too was no good divinity. _when the rain came to wet me once_, and _the wind made me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding,--there_ i found them, _there i smelt them out_. go to, they are not men of their words. _they told me i was everything: 'tis a lie. i am not ague-proof_.' _gloster_. the trick of that voice i do well remember: is't not the king? _lear_. _ay_, every inch _a king_: when _i_ do stare, _see, how the subject quakes_. but it is a subject he has conjured up from his brain that is quaking under his regal stare. and it is the impersonation of god's authority, it is the divine right to rule men at its pleasure, _with or without laws, as it sees fit_, that stands there, tricked out like tom o'bedlam, with a crown of noisome _weeds_ on its head, arguing the question of the day, taking up for the divine right, defining its own position:-- _is't not the king_? ay every inch a king: _when i do stare, see how the subject quakes_. _see_; yes, _see_. for that is what he stands there for, or that you may see _what it is_ at whose stare _the subject_ quakes. he is there to 'represent to the eye,' because impressions on the senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine right and sovereignty, the majesty of the common-weal, the rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, enforced with her dire pains and penalties. he is there that you may see whether _that_ is it, or not; that one poor wretch, that thing of pity, which has no power to protect itself, in whom _the law_ itself, the sovereignty of reason, is dethroned. that was, what all men thought it was, when this play was written; for the madness of arbitrary power, the impersonated will and passion, was the _state_ then. that is the spontaneous affirmation of rude ages, on this noblest subject,--this chosen subject of the new philosophy,--which stands there now to facilitate the demonstration, 'as globes and machines do the more subtle demonstrations in mathematics.' it is the 'affirmation' which the poet finds pre-occupying this question; but this is the table of _review_ that he stands on, and this 'instance' has been subjected to the philosophical tests, and that is the reason that all those dazzling externals of majesty, which make that 'idol ceremony' are wanting here; that is the reason that his crown has turned to weeds. this is the popular affirmative the poet is dealing with; but it stands on the scientific 'table of _review_,' and the result of this inquiry is, that it goes to 'the table of negations.' and the negative table of science in these questions is tragedy, the world's tragedy. 'is't not the king?' 'ay, every inch--_a king_. when i do stare, see how the subject quakes.' but the voice within overpowers him, and the axioms that are the vintage of science, the inductions which are the result of that experiment, are forced from his lips. 'to say ay and no to everything that _i_--that _i_--said! to say _ay_ and _no_ too, was no good divinity. they told me that i was everything. 't is a lie. i am not _ague proof_.' 't is a lie'--that is, what is called in other places a '_negative_.' in this systematic exposure of 'the particular and private nature' in the human kind, and those special susceptibilities and liabilities which qualify its relationships; in this scientific exhibition of its _special_ liability to suffering from the violation of the higher law of those relationships--its _special_ liability to injury, moral, mental, and physical--a liability from which the very one who usurps the place of that law has himself no exemption in this exhibition,-- which requires that the king himself should represent that liability in chief--it was not to be expected that this particular ill, this ill in which the human wrong in its extreme capes is so wont to exhibit its consummations, should be omitted. in this exhibition, which was designed to be scientifically inclusive, it would have been a fault to omit it. but that the poet should have dared to think of exhibiting it dramatically in this instance, and that, too, in its most hopeless form--that he should have dared to think of exhibiting the personality which was then 'the state' to the eye of 'the subject' labouring under that personal disability, in the very act, too, of boasting of its kingly terrors--this only goes to show what large prerogatives, what boundless freedoms and immunities, the resources of this particular department of art could be made to yield, when it fell into the hands of the new masters of arts, when it came to be selected by the art-king himself as his instrument. but we are prepared for this spectacle, and with the poet's wonted skill; for it is _cordelia_, her heart bursting with its stormy passion of filial love and grief, that, rebel-like, seeks to be queen o'er her, though she queens it still, and 'the smiles on her ripe lips seem not to know what tears are in her eyes,' for she has had her hour with her subject grief, and 'dealt with it alone,'--it is this child of truth and duty, this true queen, this impersonated sovereignty, whom her poet crowns with his choicest graces, on whom he devolves the task of prefacing this so critical, and, one might think, perhaps, perilous exhibition. but her description does not disguise the matter, or palliate its extremity. 'why, he was met even now, mad as the _vexed sea_, singing aloud;' _crowned_--. 'crowned with _rank fumiter_, and _furrow weeds_, with hardocks, _hemlock_, _nettles_, cuckow flowers, _darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn_.' that is the crown; and a very extraordinary symbol of sovereignty it is, one cannot help thinking, for the divine right to get on its head by any accident just then. surely that symbol of power is getting somewhat rudely handled here, in the course of the movements which the 'necessary questions of this play' involve, as the critical mind might begin to think. in the botanical analysis of that then so dazzling, and potent, and compelling instrument in human affairs, a very careful observer might perhaps take notice that the decidedly hurtful and noxious influences in nature appear to have a prominent place; and, for the rest, that the qualities of _wildness_ and idleness, and encroaching good-for-nothingness, appear to be the common and predominating elements. it is when the tragedy reaches its height that this _crown_ comes out. a hundred men are sent out to pursue this majesty; not now to wait on him in idle ceremony, and to give him the 'addition of a king'; but--to catch him--to search every acre in the high-grown field, and bring him in. he has evaded his pursuers: he comes on to the stage full of self-congratulation and royal glee, chuckling over his _prerogative_:-- 'no; they cannot touch _me_ for coining. _i am the king himself_.' 'o thou side-piercing sight!' [collateral meaning.] '_nature's above art_ in that respect.' ['so _o'er_ that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes.'] 'there's your press money. that fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard.--look, look, a mouse! _peace, peace_; this piece of toasted cheese will do't.--there's my gauntlet; i'll prove it on a giant_.' but the messengers, who were sent out for him, are on his track. _enter a gentleman, with attendants_. _gent_. o here he is, lay hand upon him. sir, your most dear daughter-- _lear_. no rescue? what, a _prisoner_? i am even _the natural fool of fortune_! use me well; you shall have ransom. let me have a surgeon, i am cut to the brains. _gent_. you shall have anything. _lear_. no seconds? all myself? _gent_. good sir,-- _lear_. i will die bravely, like a bridegroom: what? i will be _jovial_. come, come; _i am a king, my masters_; know you _that_? _gent_. _you are_, a royal one, _and we obey you_. _lear_. then _there's life in it_. nay, an you get it, you shall get it by running. sa, sa, sa, sa. [_exit, running; attendants_ follow.] ['transient hieroglyphic.'] _gent_. a sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch; _past speaking of, in_ a king! [not past exhibiting, it seems, however.] but, of course, there was nothing that a king, whose mind was in such a state, could not be permitted to say with impunity; and it is in this very scene that the poet puts into his mouth the boldest of those philosophical suggestions which the first attempt to find a theory for the art and practical part of life, gave birth to: he skilfully reserves for this scene some of the most startling of those social criticisms which the action this play is everywhere throwing out. for it is in this scene, that the outcast king encounters the victim of tyranny, whose eyes have been plucked out, and who has been turned out to beggary, as the penalty of having come athwart that disposition in 'the duke,' that 'all the world well knows will not be rubbed or stopped';--it is in this scene that lear finds him smelling his way to _dover_, for that is the name in the play--the play name--for the place towards which men's hopes appear to be turning; and that conversation as to how the world goes, to which allusion has been already made, comes off, without appearing to suggest to any mind, that it is other than accidental on the part of the poet, or that the action of the play might possibly be connected with it! for notwithstanding this great stress, which he lays everywhere on _forethought_ and a deliberative _rational_ intelligent procedure, as _the distinctive human mark_,--the characteristic feature of _a man_,--the poor poet himself, does not appear to have gained much credit hitherto for the possession of this human quality.-- _lear_. thou seest how this world goes? _gloster_. i see it feelingly. _lear_. what, art mad?-- [have you not the use of your reason, then? can you not _see_ with that? _that_ is the kind of sight we talk of here. it's the want of that which makes these falls. we have eyes with which to foresee effects,--eyes which outgo all the senses with their range of observation, with their range of certainty and foresight.] 'what, art mad? a man may see how this world goes with no eyes. look with thine--_ears: see_ how yon justice rails upon yon _simple thief_. hark, in thine ear: change _places_, and, handy-dandy, _which is the justice, and which is_ the thief?' [searching social questions, as before. 'thou robed man of _justice_ (to the bedlamite), take thy place; and thou, his yoke-fellow of _equity_ (to the fool), _bench by his side_. thou, _sapient_ sir, sit here.'] so that it would seem, perhaps, as if wisdom, as well as honesty, might be wanting there--the searching subtle wisdom, that is matched in subtlety, with nature's forces, that sees true differences, and effects true reformations. '_change places. hark, in thine ear_.' truly this is a player who knows how to suit the word to the action, and the action to the word; for there has been a revolution going on in this play which has made as complete a social overturning--which has shaken kings, and dukes, and lordlings out of their 'places,' as completely as some later revolutions have done. 'change places!' with one duke in the stocks, and another wandering blind in the streets--with a dukeling, in the form of mad tom, to lead him, with a king in a hovel, calling for the straw, and a queen hung by the neck till she is dead--with mad tom on the bench, and the fool, with his cap and bells, at his side--with tom at the council-table, and occupying the position of chief favourite and adviser to the king, and a distinct proposal now that the thief and the justice shall change places on the spot--with the inquiry as to which is _the justice_, and which is the _thief_, openly started--one would almost fancy that the subject had been exhausted here, or would be, if these indications should be followed up. what is it in the way of social alterations which the player's imagination could conceive of, which his scruples have prevented him from suggesting here? but the mad king goes on with those new and unheard-of political and social suggestions, which his madness appears to have had the effect of inspiring in him-- _lear_. thou hast seen a farmer's _dog_ bark at a _beggar_? _gloster_. ay, sir. _lear_. and the _creature_ run from the _cur? there_ might'st thou behold _the great image of_ authority: _a dog's obeyed in office_. through tattered robes _small vices_ do appear; _robes_, and _furred gowns, hide all_. [_robes,--robes_, and _furred gowns_!] plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; arm it with rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it. but that was before tom got his seat on the bench--that was before tom got his place at the council-table. 'none does offend,--_none_--' [unless you will begin your reform at the beginning, and hunt down the great rogues as well as the little ones; or, rather, unless you will go to the source of the evil, and take away the evils, of which these crimes, that you are awarding penalties to, are the result, let it all alone, i say. let's have no more legislation, and no more of _this_ justice, _this_ equity, that takes the vices which come through the tattered robes, and leaves the great _thief_ in his purple untouched. let us have no more of this mockery. let us be impartial in our justice, at least.] 'none does offend. _i say none. i'll_ able 'em.' [i'll show you the way. soft. _hark, in thine ear_.] 'take that of _me_, my friend, _who have the power_ to seal the accuser's lips.' [soft, _in thine ear_.]-- 'get thee _glass_ eyes, and like a scurvy _politician_, seem to see the things thou dost not.--_now, now, now_, now. * * * * * i know thee well enough. thy name is--gloster. _thou must be patient_; we came crying hither. thou know'st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry. i will _preach_ to thee; _mark me_. _gloster. alack, alack, the day!_ _lear_. when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of--_fools_. [mark me, for i _preach_ to thee--of _fools_. i am even the _natural fool of fortune_.] --'o matter and impertinency, mixed reason in madness.'-- --is the poet's concluding comment on this regal boldness, a safe and saving explanation; 'for to define true madness,' as polonius says, 'what is it but to _be_ nothing else but mad.' if the 'all licensed fool,' as goneril peevishly calls him, under cover of his assumed imbecility, could carry his traditional privilege to such dangerous extremes, and carp and philosophize, and fling his bitter jests about at his pleasure, surely downright madness might claim to be invested with a privilege as large. but madness, when conjoined with royalty, makes a _double_ privilege, one which this poet finds, however, at times, none too large for his purposes. thus, hamlet, when his mind is once in a questionable state, can be permitted to make, with impunity, profane suggestions as to certain possible royal progresses, and the changes to which the dust of a cæsar might be liable, without being reminded out of the play, that to follow out these suggestions 'would be' indeed, 'to consider too curiously,' and that most extraordinary humour of his enables him also to relieve his mind of many other suggestions, 'which reason and sanity,' in his time, could not have been 'so prosperously delivered of.' for what is it that men can set up as a test of _sanity_ in any age, but their own common beliefs and sentiments. and what surer proof of the king's madness,--what more pathetic indication of its midsummer height could be given, than those startling propositions which the poet here puts into his mouth, so opposed to the opinions and sentiments, not of kings only, but of the world at large; what madder thing could a poet think of than those political axioms which he introduces under cover of these suggestions,--which would lay the axe at the root of the common beliefs and sentiments on which the social structure then rested. how could he better show that this poor king's wits had, indeed, 'turned;' how could he better prove that he was, indeed, past praying for, than by putting into his mouth those bitter satires on the state, those satires on the 'one only man' power itself,--those wild revolutionary proposals, 'hark! in thine ear,--_change places_. softly, in thine ear,-- _which is the_ justice, and which is the thief?' 'take that of _me_ who have the power to _seal the accuser's lips_. none does offend. i say none. i'll able 'em. look when i stare, see how the subject quakes.' these laws have failed, you see. they shelter the most frightful depths of wrong. that bench has failed, you see; and that chair, with all its adjunct divinity. come here and look down with me from this pinnacle, into these abysses. look at that wretch there, in the form of man. fetch him up in his blanket, and set him at the council table with his elf locks and begrimed visage and inhuman gibberish. perhaps, he will be able to make some suggestion there; and those five fiends that are talking in him at once, would like, perhaps, to have a hearing there. make him 'one of your hundred.' you are of '_the commission_,' let him bench with _you_. nay, change places, let him try your cause, and tell us which is the justice, which is _the thief_, which is the sapient sir, and which is the bedlamite. surely, the man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, 'far gone,' whether he be 'a king or a yeoman.' and mad indeed he is. writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency of these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping institutions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, under that safe disguise of the robes that hide all: 'take these away at least,--that will be something gained. let us have no more of this mockery. none does offend--none--i say _none_.' let us go back to the innocent instinctive brutish state, and have done with this vain disastrous struggle of nature after the human form, and _its_ dignity, and perfection. let us talk no more of law and justice and humanity and divinity forsooth, _divinity_ and the celestial graces, that divinity which is the end and perfection of the _human_ form.--is not womanhood itself, and the angel of it _fallen_--degenerate?--that is the humour of it.--that is the meaning of the savage edicts, in which this _human_ victim of the _inhuman_ state, the subject of a social state which has failed in some way of the human end, undertakes to utter through the king's lips, his sense of the failure. for the poet at whose command he speaks, is the true scientific historian of nature and art, and the rude and struggling advances of the _human_ nature towards its ideal type, though they fall never so short, are none of them omitted in his note-book. he knows better than any other, what gain the imperfect civilization he searches and satirizes and lays bare here, _has made_, with all its imperfections, on the spontaneities and aids of the individual, unaccommodated man: he knows all the value of the accumulations of ages; he is the very philosopher who has put forth all his wisdom to guard the state from the shock of those convulsions, that to his prescient eye, were threatening then to lay all flat. 'o let him _pass_!' is the poet's word, when the loving friends seek to detain a little longer, the soul on whom this cruel time has done its work,--its elected sufferer. 'o let him pass! _he hates him_ that would upon the rack of this tough world, stretch him out longer.' [tired with all these, he cries in his own behalf.] 'tired with all these, for _restful death_ i cry. thou seest how this world goes. i see it _feelingly_.' _albany_. the weight of this sad time _we must obey_, _speak_ what we feel, _not what we ought to say_, the oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long. it needs but a point, a point which the poet could not well put in,--one of those points which he speaks of elsewhere so significantly, to make the unmeaning line with which this great social tragedy concludes, a sufficiently fitting conclusion to it; considering, at least, the pressure under which it was written; and the author has himself called our attention to that, as we see, even in this little jingle of rhymes, put in apparently, only for professional purposes, and merely to get the curtain down decently. it is a point, which it takes the key of the play--lord bacon's key, of 'times,' to put in. it wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the right place, to make english of it. plain english, unvarnished english, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that merlin was to make. 'the oldest hath borne most, we that are _young_ shall never see so much, nor live so long.' there were boys 'in england then a-bed;' nay, some of them might have been present that day, for aught we know, on which one of the managers of the surrey theatre, the owner of the wardrobe and stage-properties, and himself an actor, brought out with appropriate decorations and dresses, for the benefit of his audience on the bankside, this little ebullition of his genius;--there were boys present then, perhaps, whose names would become immortal with the fulfilment of that prophecy;--there was one at whitehall, when it was brought out there, whose name would be for ever linked with it. 'we that are young,--the oldest hath _borne_ most. we that are young shall never _see_ so much' [i _see_ it feelingly], 'shall never _see_ so much, nor live so _long_.' so. but there were evils included in that tragic picture, which those who were young then, would _not_ outlive; evils which the times that were near with their coarse, fierce remedies, would not heal; evils which the seer and leader of the times that were far off, would himself make over to _their_ cure;--evils in whose cure the discoverer of the science of nature, and the inventor of the new magic which is the part operative of it, expected to be called upon for an opinion, when the time for that extension of his science, 'crushed together and infolded within itself in these books of nature's learning,' should fully come. nothing almost sees miracles _but_ misery, says poor kent, in the stocks, waiting for the 'beacon' of the morning, by whose _comfortable_ beams, he might peruse his letter. 'i know,' he says, ''tis from cordelia, who hath most fortunately been informed of my obscured course, and shall find _time from this enormous state_--seeking--to give losses their remedies.' there is no attempt to demonstrate that the work here proposed as a study, worthy the attention of the philosophical student, is not, notwithstanding a poem, and a poet's gift, not to his contemporaries only, but to his kind. what is claimed is, indeed, that it is a poem which, with all its overpowering theatrical effects, does, in fact, reserve its true poetic wealth, for those who will find the springs of its inmost philosophic purport. there is no attempt to show that this play belongs to the category of scientific works, according to our present limitation of the term, or that there could be found any niche for it, on those lower platforms and compartments of the new science of nature, which our modern works of natural science occupy. it was inevitably a poem. there was the essence of all tragedy in the purely scientific exhibition, which the purpose of it required. the intention of the poet to exhibit the radical idea of his plot impressively, so as to reach the popular mind through its appeal to the sensibilities, involved, of course, the finest series of conjunctions of artistic effects, the most exquisite characterization, the boldest grouping, the most startling and determined contrasts, which the whole range of his art could furnish. but that which is only the incident of a genuine poetic inspiration, the effect upon the senses, which its higher appeals are sure to involve, becomes with those delighting in, and capable of appreciating, that sensuous effect merely, its sufficient and only end, and even a doctrine of criticism based on this inversion will not be wanting. but the difficulty of unlocking the great elizabethan poems with any such theory of art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of art, which the great elizabethan poets adopted, and whether we approve of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it was, for our torch in this exploration. as to that spontaneity, that seizure, that platonic divination, that poetic 'fury,' which our prose philosopher scans in so many places so curiously, which he defines so carefully and strictly, so broadly too, as the _poetic_ condition that thing which he appears to admire so much, as having something a little demoniacal in it withal, that same 'fine' thing which the poet himself speaks of by a term not any less questionable,--as to this poetic inspiration, it is not necessary to claim that it is a thing with which this poet, the poet of a new era, the poet, the deliverer of an inductive learning, has had himself, personally, no acquaintance. he knows what it is. but it is a poet who is, first of all, a man, and he takes his humanity with him into all things. the essential human principle is that which he takes to be the law and limit of the human constitution. he is perfectly satisfied with 'the measure of a man,' and he gives the preference deliberately, and on principle to the sober and rational state in the human mind. all the elements which enter into the human composition, all the states, normal or otherwise, to which it is liable, have passed under his review, and this is his conclusion; and none born of woman, ever had a better chance to look at them, for all is alike heightened in him,--heightened to the ideal boundary of nature, in the human form; but that which seems to be heightened, most of all, that in which he stands preeminent and singular in the natural history of man, would seem to be the proportion of this heightening. it is what we have all recognized it to be, nature's largest, most prodigal demonstration of her capacities in the human form, but it is, at the same time, her most excellent and exquisite balance of composition--her most subdued and tempered work. and the reason is, that he is not a particular and private man, and the deficiencies and personalities of those from whom he is abstracted, are studiously, and by method, kept out of him. for this is the 'will' not of one man only; it is the scientific abstract of a philosophic union. it is a will that has a rule in art as well as nature. certainly he is the very coolest poet; and the fullest of this common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed his head upon it, in prose or metre. the sturdiness with which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of god, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, is a thing which appears, to the careful reviewer of it, on the whole, the most novel and striking feature of this demonstration. he objects, on principle, to seizures and possessions of all kinds. he refuses to be taken off his feet by any kind of solicitation. he is a man who is never ashamed to have a reason,--one that he can produce, and make intelligible to common people, for his most exquisite proceedings; that is, if he chooses: but, 'if reasons were plentiful as blackberries,' he is not the man to give them on 'compulsion.' his ideas of the common mind, his notion of the common human intelligence, or capacity for intelligence, appears to be somewhat different from that of the other philosophers. the common sense--the common form--is that which he is always seeking and _identifying_ under all the differences. it is _that_ which he is bringing out and clothing with the 'inter-tissued robe' and all the glories which he has stripped from the extant majesty. 'robes and furred gowns hide all' no longer. he is not a bard who is careful at all about keeping his singing robes about him. he can doff them and work like a 'navvy' when he sees reason. he is very fond of coming out with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. he can rave upon occasion as well as another. spontaneities of all kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than is set down for them. his pythoness foams at the mouth too, sometimes, and appears to have it all her own way, perhaps; but he knows what she is about, and there is never a word in the oracle that has not undergone his revision. he knows that plato tells us 'it is in vain for a sober man to knock at the floor of the muses'; but he is one who has discovered, scientifically, the human law; and he is ready to make it good, on all sides, against all comers. and, though the muses knocked at his door, as they never had at any other, they could never carry him away with them. they found, for once, a sober man within, one who is not afraid to tell them, to their teeth, 'judgment holds in me, always, a magisterial seat;'--and, with all their celestial graces and pretensions, he fetters them, and drags them up to that tribunal. he superintends all his inspirations. there never was a poet in whom the poetic spontaneities were so absolutely under control and mastery; and there never was one in whose nature all the spontaneous force and faculty of genius showed itself in such tumultuous fulness, ready to issue, at a word, in such inexhaustible varieties of creative energy. of all the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts there is none to match this so delicate and gorgeous ariel of his,--this creature that he keeps to put his girdles round the earth for him, that comes at a thought, and brings in such dainty banquets, such brave pageants in the earth or in the air; there is none other that knows so well the spells 'to make this place paradise.' but, for all that, he is the merest tool,--the veriest drudge and slave. the magician's collar is always on his neck; in his airiest sweeps he takes his chain with him. caliban himself is not more sternly watched and tutored; and all the gorgeous masque has its predetermined order, its severe economy of grace; through all the slightest minutiæ of its detail, runs the inflexible purpose, the rational _human_ purpose, the common human sense, the common human aim. yes, it is a play; but it is the play of a mind sobered with all human learning. yes, it is spontaneous; but it is the spontaneity of a heart laden with human sorrow, oppressed with the burthen of the common weal. yes, indeed, it is a poet's work; but it is the work of one who consciously and deliberately recognizes, in all the variety of his gifts, in all his natural and acquired power, under all the disabilities of his position, the one, paramount, human law, and essential obligation. of 'art,' as anything whatever, but an instrumentality, thoroughly subdued, and subordinated to _that_ end, of art as anything in itself, with an independent tribunal, and law with an ethic and ritual of its own, this inventor of the one art, that has for its end the relief of the human estate and the creator's glory, knows nothing. of any such idolatry and magnifying of the creature, of any such worship of the gold of the temple to the desecration of that which sanctifieth the gold, this art-king in all his purple, this priest and high pontiff of its inner mysteries knows--will know--nothing. yes, it is play; but it is not child's play, nor an _idiot's_ play, nor the play of a 'jigging' bacchanal, who comes out on this grave, human scene, to insult our sober, human sense, with his mad humour, making a belshazzar's feast or an antonian revel of it; a creature who shows himself to our common human sense without _any_ human aim or purpose, ransacking all the life of man, exploring all worlds, pursuing the human thought to its last verge, and questioning, as with the cry of all the race, the infinities beyond, diving to the lowest depths of human life and human nature, and bringing up and publishing, the before unspoken depths of human wrong and sorrow, wringing from the hearts of those that died and made no sign, their death-buried secrets, articulating everywhere that which before had no word--and all for an artistic effect, for an hour's entertainment, for the luxury of a harmonized impression, or for the mere ostentation of his frolic, to feed his gamesome humour, to make us stare at his unconsciousness, to show what gems he can crush in his idle cup for a draught of pleasure, or in pure caprice and wantonness, confounding all our notions of sense, and manliness, and human duty and respect, with the boundless wealth and waste of his gigantic fooleries. it is play, but let us thank god it is no such play as that; let our common human nature rejoice that it has not been thus outraged in its chief and chosen one, that it has not been thus disgraced with the boundless human worthlessness of the creature on whom its choicest gifts were lavished. it is play, indeed; but it is no such monster, with his idiotic stare of unconsciousness, that the opening of it will reveal to us. let us all thank god, and take heart again, and try to revive those notions of human dignity and common human sense which this story sets at nought, and see if we cannot heal that great jar in our abused natures which this chimera of the nineteenth century makes in it--this night-mare of modern criticism which lies with its dead weight on all our higher art and learning--this creature that came in on us unawares, when the interpretation of the plays had outgrown the play-tradition, when '_the play_' had outgrown '_the player_.' it is a play in which the manliest of human voices is heard sounding throughout the order of it; it is a play stuffed to its fool's gibe, with the soberest, deepest, maturest human sense; and 'the tears of it,' as we who have tested it know, 'the tears of it are wet.' it is a play where the choicest seats, the seats in which those who see it _all_ must sit, are 'reserved;' and there is a price to be paid for these: 'children and fools' will continue to have theirs for nothing. for after so many generations of players had come and gone, there had come at last on this human stage--on 'this great stage of fools,' as the poet calls it--this stage filled with 'the natural fools of fortune,' having eyes, but seeing not--there had come to it at last a man, one who was--take him _for all in all_--that; one who thought it--for a man, enough to be truly that--one who thought he was fulfilling his part in the universal order, in _seeking to be_ modestly and truly that; one, too, who thought it was time that the _human_ part on the stage of this globe theatre should begin to be reverently studied by man himself, and scientifically and religiously ordered and determined through all its detail. for it is the movement of the new time that makes this play, and all these plays: it is the spirit of the newly-beginning ages of human advancement which makes the inspiration of them; the beginning ages of a rational, instructed--and not blind, or instinctive, or demoniacal--human conduct. it is such play and pastime as the prophetic spirit and leadership of those new ages could find time and heart to make and leave to them, on that height of vision which it was given to it to occupy. for an age in human advancement was at last reached, on whose utmost summits men could begin to perceive that tradition, and eyes of moonshine speculation, and a thousand noses, and horns welked and waved like the enridged sea, when they came to be jumbled together in one 'monster,' did not appear to answer the purpose of human combination, or the purpose of human life on earth; appeared, indeed to be still far, 'far wide' of the end which human society is everywhere blindly pushing and groping for, _en masse_. there was a point of observation from which this fortuitous social conjunction did not appear to the critical eye or ear to be making just that kind of play and music which human nature--singularly enough, considering what kind of conditions it lights on--is constitutionally inclined to expect and demand; not that, or indeed any perceptible approximation to a paradisaical state of things. there _was_, indeed, a point of view--one which commanded not the political mysteries of the time only, but the household secrets of it, and the deeper secrets of the solitary heart of man, one which commanded alike the palace and the hovel, to their blackest recesses--there was a point of view from which these social agencies appeared to be making then, in fact, whether one looked with eyes or ears, a mere diabolical jangle, and '_fa, sol, la, mi_', of it, a demoniacal storm music; and from that height of observation all ruinous disorders could be seen coming out, and driving men to vice and despair, urging them to self-destruction even, and hunting them disquietly to their graves. 'nothing almost sees miracles but misery;' and this was the age in which the new magic was invented. it was the age in which that grand discovery was made, which the fool undertakes to palm off here as the fruit of his own single invention; and, indeed, it was found that the application of it to certain departments of human affairs was more successfully managed by this gentleman in his motley, than by some of his brother philosophers who attempted it. it was the age in which the questions which are inserted here so safely in the fool's catechism, began to be started secretly in the philosophic chamber. it was the age in which the identical answers which the cap and bells are made responsible for here, were written down, but with other applications, in graver authorities. it is the philosophical discovery of the time, which the fool is undertaking to translate into the vernacular, when he puts the question, 'canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' and we have all the novum organum in what he calls, in another place, 'the boorish,' when he answers it; and all the choicest gems of 'the part operative' of the new learning have been rattling from his rattle in everybody's path, ever since he published his digests of that doctrine: 'canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' 'no.' 'why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what he cannot _smell out_ he may _spy into_.' and 'all that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but--_blind men_.' and 'the reason why the seven stars are seven, is because they are not eight;' and the king who makes that answer 'would have made a good--_fool_,' for it's 'a very pretty reason.' and neither times nor men should be 'old before their time'; neither times nor men should be revered, or clothed with authority or command in human affairs, 'till they are _wise_.' ['thou _sapient_ sir, sit _here_.'] and it is a mistake for a leader of men to think that he 'has _white_ hairs in his beard, before the _black_ ones are there.' and 'ants,' and 'snails,' and 'oysters,' are wiser than men in their arts, and practices, and pursuits of ends. it was the age in which it was perceived that 'to say ay and no to everything' that a madman says, 'is _no good divinity_,' and that it is 'the time's plague when madmen lead the blind;' and that, instead of good men sitting still, like 'moral fools,' and crying out on wrong and mischief, 'alack, why does it so?' it would be wiser, and more pious, too, to make use of the faculty of learning, with which the creator has armed man, 'against diseases of the world,' to ascend to the cause, and _punish_ that--punish _that_, 'ere it has done its mischief.' it was the age in which it was discovered that 'the sequent effect, with which nature finds itself scourged,' is not in the least touched by any kind of reasoning 'thus and thus,' except that kind which proceeds first by negatives, that kind which proceeds by a method so severe that it contrives to _exclude_ everything but the 'the _cause in nature_' from its affirmation, which 'in practical philosophy becomes _the rule_'--that is, the critical method,--which is for men, as distinguished from the spontaneous affirmation, which is for gods. it is the beginning of these yet beginning modern ages, the ages of a practical learning, and scientific relief to the human estate, which this pastime marks with its blazoned, illuminated initial. it is the opening of the era in which a common human sense is developed, and directed to the common-weal, which this pastime celebrates; the opening of the ages in which, ere all is done, the politicians who expect mankind to entrust to them their destinies, will have to find something better than 'glass eyes' to guide them with; in which it will be no longer competent for those to whom mankind entrusts its dearest interests to go on in their old stupid, conceited, heady courses, their old, blind, ignorant courses,--stumbling, and staggering, and groping about, and smelling their way with their own narrow and selfish instincts, when it is the common-weal they have taken on their shoulders;--running foul of the nature of things--quarrelling with eternal necessities, and crying out, when the wreck is made, 'alack! why does it so?' this play, and all these plays, were meant to be pastime for ages in which state reasons must needs be something else than 'the pleasure' of certain individuals, 'whose disposition, all the world well knows, will not be rubbed or stopped;' or 'the quality,' 'fiery' or otherwise, of this or that person, no matter 'how unremoveable and fixed' he may be 'in his own course.' it was to the 'far off times;' and not to the 'near,' it was to the advanced ages of the advancement of learning, that this play was dedicated by its author. for it was the spirit of the modern ages that inspired it. it was the new prometheus who planned it; the more aspiring titan, who would bring down in his new organum a new and more radiant gift; it was the benefactor and foreseer, who would advance the rude kind to new and more enviable approximations to the celestial summits. he knew there would come a time, in the inevitable advancements of that new era of scientific 'prudence' and forethought which it was given to him to initiate, when all this sober historic exhibition, with its fearful historic earnest, would read, indeed, like some old fable of the rude barbaric past--some player's play, bent on a feast of horrors--some poet's impossibility. and _that_--was the play,--that was the plot. he knew that there would come a time when all this tragic mirth--sporting with the edged tools of tyranny--playing around the edge of the great axe itself--would be indeed safe play; when his fool could open his budget, and unroll his bitter jests--crushed together and infolded within themselves so long--and have a world to smile with him, and not the few who could unfold them only. and that--that was 'the humour of it.' yes, with all their philosophy, these plays are plays and poems still. there's no spoiling the 'tragical mirth' in them. but we are told, on the most excellent contemporaneous authority--on the authority of one who was in the inmost heart of all this poet's secrets--that 'as we often judge of the greater by the less, so the very pastimes of great men give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted of the source from which they spring.' part ii. julius caesar; or, the empirical treatment in diseases of the common-weal explained. good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it happened with caesar's killers, who brought the republic to such a pass that they had reason to repent their meddling with it.... it must be examined in what condition the assailant is.--_michael de montaigne_. _citizen_. i fear there will a worse one come in his place. _cassius_. he were no lion, were not romans hinds. chapter i. the death of tyranny; or, the question of the prerogative. _casca_. 'tis caesar that you mean: is it _not_, cassius? _cassius_. let it be who it is, for romans _now_ have thewes and limbs like to _their_ ancestors. we all stand up against the _spirit_ of caesar. _julius caesar_. yes, when that royal injunction, which rested alike upon the play-house, the press, the pulpit, and _parliament_ itself, was still throttling everywhere the free voice of the nation--when a single individual could still assume to himself, or to herself, the exclusive privilege of deliberating on all those questions which men are most concerned in--questions which involve all their welfare, for this life and the life to come, certainly '_the play, the play was the thing_.' it was a vehicle of expression which offered incalculable facilities for evading these restrictions. it was the only one then invented which offered then any facilities whatever for the discussion of that question in particular--which was already for that age the question. and to the genius of that age, with its new _historical, experimental_, practical, determination--with its transcendant poetic power, nothing could be easier than to get possession of this instrument, and to exhaust its capabilities. for instance, if a roman play were to be brought out at all,--and with that mania for classical subjects which then prevailed, what could be more natural?--how could one object to that which, by the supposition, was involved in it? and what but the most boundless freedoms and audacities, on this very question, could one look for here? what, by the supposition, could it be but one mine of poetic treason? if brutus and cassius were to be allowed to come upon the stage, and discuss their views of government, deliberately and confidentially, in the presence of an english audience, certainly no one could ask to hear from their lips the political doctrine then predominant in england. it would have been a flat anachronism, to request them to keep an eye upon the tower in their remarks, inasmuch as all the world knew that the corner-stone of that ancient and venerable institution had only then just been laid by the same distinguished individual whom these patriots were about to call to an account for his military usurpation of a constitutional government at home. and yet, one less versed than the author in the mystery of theatrical effects, and their combinations--one who did not know fully what kind of criticism a mere _play_, composed by a professional play-wright, in the way of his profession, for the entertainment of the spectators, and for the sake of the pecuniary result, was likely to meet with;--or one who did not know what kind of criticism a work, addressed so strongly to the imagination and the feelings in any form, is likely to meet with, might have fancied beforehand that the author was venturing upon a somewhat delicate experiment, in producing a play like this upon the english stage at such a crisis. one would have said beforehand, that 'there were things in this comedy of julius caesar that would never please.' it is difficult, indeed, to understand how such a play as this could ever have been produced in the presence of either of those two monarchs who occupied the english throne at that crisis in its history, already secretly conscious that its foundations were moving, and ferociously on guard over their prerogative. and, indeed, unless a little of that same sagacity, which was employed so successfully in reducing the play of pyramus and thisbe to the tragical capacities of duke theseus' court, had been put in requisition here, instead of that dead historical silence, which the world complains of so much, we might have been treated to some very lively historical details in this case, corresponding to other details which the literary history of the time exhibits, in the case of authors who came out in an evil hour in their own names, with precisely the same doctrines, which are taught here word for word, with impunity; and the question as to whether this literary shadow, this name, this veiled prophet in the world of letters, ever had any flesh and blood belonging to him anywhere, (and from the tenor of his works, one might almost fancy sometimes that that might have been the case), this question would have come down to us experimentally and historically settled. for most unmistakeably, the claws of the young british lion are here, under these old roman togas; and it became the 'masters' to consider with themselves, for there is, indeed, 'no more fearful wild fowl living' than your lion in such circumstances; and if he should happen to forget his part in any case, and 'roar too loud,' it would to a dead certainty 'hang them all.' but it was only the faint-hearted tailor who proposed to 'leave out the killing part.' pyramus sets aside this cowardly proposition. he has named the obstacles to be encountered only for the sake of magnifying the fertility of his invention in overcoming them. he has a device to make all even. 'write me a prologue,' he says, 'and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our _swords_; and for the more assurance, tell them that _i, pyramus, am not_ pyramus, but _bottom, the weaver; that will put them out of fear_.' and as to the lion, there must not only be 'another prologue, to tell that he is not a lion,' but 'you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion's neck, and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same _defect_, ladies, or fair ladies, my life for yours. if you think i come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life.' to such devices, in good earnest, were those compelled to resort who ventured upon the ticklish experiment of presenting heroic entertainments for king's palaces, where 'hanging was the word' in case of a fright; but, with a genius like this behind the scenes, so fertile in invention, so various in gifts, who could aggravate his voice so effectually, giving you one moment the pitch of 'the sucking dove,' or 'roaring you like any nightingale,' and the next, 'the hercle's vein,'--with a genius who knew how to play, not 'the tyrant's part only,' but 'the lover's, which is more condoling,' and whose suggestion that the audience should look to their eyes in that case, was by no means a superfluous one; with a genius who had all passions at his command, who could drown, at his pleasure, the sharp critic's eye, or blind it with showers of pity, or 'make it water with the merriest tears, that the passion of loud laughter ever shed,' with such resources, prince's edicts could be laughed to scorn. it was vain to forbid such an one, to meddle with anything that was, or had been, or could be. but does any one say--'to what purpose,' if the end were concealed so effectually? and does any one suppose, because no faintest suspicion of the true purpose of this play, and of all these plays, has from that hour to this, apparently ever crossed the english mind, at home or abroad, though no suspicion of the existence of any purpose in them beyond that of putting the author in easy circumstances, appears as yet to have occurred to any one,--does any one suppose that this play, and all these plays, have on that account, failed of their purpose; and that they have not been all this time, steadily accomplishing it? who will undertake to estimate, for instance, the philosophical, educational influence of this single play, on every boy who has spouted extracts from it, from the author's time to ours, from the palaces of england, to the log school-house in the back-woods of america? but suppose now, instead of being the aimless, spontaneous, miraculous product of a stupid, 'rude mechanical' bent on producing something which should please the eye, and flatter the prejudices of royalty, and perfectly ignorant of the nature of that which he had produced;--suppose that instead of appearing as the work of starveling, and snout, and nick bottom, the weaver, or any person of that grade and calibre, that this play had appeared at the time, as the work of an english scholar, as most assuredly it was, profoundly versed in the history of states in general, as well as in the history of the english state in particular, profoundly versed in the history of nature in general, as well as in the history of human nature in particular. suppose, for instance, it had appeared as the work of an english statesman, already suspected of liberal opinions, but stedfastly bent for some reason or other, on advancement at court, with his eye still intently fixed, however secretly, on those insidious changes that were then in progress in the state, who knew perfectly well what crisis that ship of state was steering for; _query_, whether some of the passages here quoted would have tended to that 'advancement' he '_lacked_.' suppose that instead of julius caesar, 'looking through the lion's neck,' and gracefully rejecting the offered prostrations, it had been the english courtier, condemned to these degrading personal submissions, who 'roared you out,' on his own account, after this fashion. imagine a good sturdy english audience returning the sentiment, thundering their applause at this and other passages here quoted, in the presence of a tudor or a stuart. one might safely conclude, even if the date had not been otherwise settled, that anything so offensive as this never was produced in the presence of queen elizabeth. king james might be flattered into swallowing even such treasonable stuff as this; but in her time, the poor lion was compelled to aggravate his voice after another fashion. nothing much above the sucking-dove pitch, could be ventured on when her quick ears were present. he 'roared you' indeed, all through her part of the elizabethan time; but it was like any nightingale. the clash and clang of these roman plays were for the less sensitive and more learned stuart. _metellus cimber_. most high, most mighty, and most puissant caesar; metellus cimber throws before thy seat an humble heart:--[_kneeling_.] _caesar_. i must prevent thee, cimber. _these couchings and these lowly courtesies: might_ fire the blood of ordinary men; and turn pre-ordinance, and first decree, into the law of children. be not fond to think that caesar bears _such_ rebel _blood_, that will be thawed from the _true quality_, with that which melteth fools. (?) i mean, _sweet words, low, crooked curtsies_, and _base spaniel fawning. thy brother_ by _decree_ is banished; if thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn for _him, i spurn thee like a cur_, out of my way. know caesar doth not wrong. to appreciate this, one must recall not merely the humiliating personal prostrations which the ceremonial of the english court required then, but that base prostration of truth and duty and honour, under the feet of vanity and will and passion, which they symbolized. thus far _caesar_, but the subject's views on this point, as here set forth, are scarcely less explicit, but then it is a _roman_ subject who speaks, and the roman costume and features, look savingly through the lion's neck. one of the radical technicalities of that new philosophy of the human nature which permeates all this historical exhibition, comes in here, however; and it is one which must be mastered before any of these plays can be really read. the radical point in the new philosophy, as it applies to the human nature in particular, is the pivot on which all turns here,--here as elsewhere in the writings of this school,--the distinction of 'the double self,' the distinction between the particular and private nature, with its unenlightened instincts of passion, humour, will, caprice,--that self which is changeful, at war with itself, self-inconsistent, and, therefore, truly, no self,--since the true self is the principle of identity and immutability,--the distinction between that 'private' _nature_ when it is developed instinctively as 'selfishness,' and that rational immutable self which is constitutionally present though latent, in all men, and one in them all; that noble _special_ human form which embraces and reconciles in its intention, the private good with the good of that worthier whole whereof we are individually parts and members; 'this is the distinction on which all turns here.' for this philosophy refuses, on philosophical grounds, to accept this low, instinctive private nature, in any dressing up of accidental power as the god of its idolatry, in place of that 'divine or angelical nature, which is the perfection of the human form,' and the true sovereignty. obedience to that nature,--'the approach to, or assumption of,' that makes, in this philosophy, the end of the human endeavour, 'and the error and false imitation of that good, is that which is the tempest of the human life.' but let us hear the passionate cassius, who is full of individualities himself, and ready to tyrannize with them, but somehow, as it would seem, not fond of submitting to the 'single self' in others. 'well, honour _is_ the subject of my story.-- i can not tell what you, and other men, think of this life; but for my _single self_, i had as lief not be, as live to be in awe of such a thing _as i myself_. i was _born_ free as caesar; so were you. we both have fed as well: and we can both endure the winter's cold as well as he.'-- and the proof of this personal equality is then given; and it is precisely the one which lear produces, 'when the wind made me chatter, there i found them,--there i smelt them out.'-- 'for once upon a raw and gusty day, the troubled tiber chafing with her shores, etc. * * * * * --caesar cried, help me, cassius, or i sink. --and this man is now become a god, and cassius is a wretched creature, and _must bend his body_, if caesar carelessly but nod on him. he had a fever when he was in spain, and when the fit was on him--_i did mark how he did shake_: 'tis true, this god did shake.' [this was a pretty fellow to have about a king's privacy taking notes of this sort on his tablets. among 'those saw and forms and pressures past, which youth and observatior copied there,' all that part reserved for _caesar_ and his history, appears to have escaped the sponge in some way. 'they told me i was every thing, 'tis a lie! i am not _ague_ proof.'--_lear_. his coward lips did from their colour fly. 'and that same _eye whose bend doth awe the world, did lose his lustre!--julius caesar_. '--when i do stare see how _the subject_ quakes.--'_lear_.] i did hear him groan: aye, and that tongue of his _that bade the romans mark him, and write his speeches in their books_. alas! it cried, '_give me some drink_, titinius,' as a sick girl. ye gods, it doth amaze me, a man of _such a feeble temper should so get the start of the majestic world_, and bear the palm alone. _brutus_. another _general shout_! i do believe that these applauses are for some new honours that are heap'd on caesar. _cassius_. why man, he doth bestride the narrow world, like a colossus: and we petty men walk under his huge legs; and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. men, at _some time_, are _masters of their fates, the fault, dear brutus_, is not _in our_ stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings. _brutus_ and _caesar_: what should be in that _caesar_? * * * * * now in the names of all the gods at once, _upon what meat doth this our caesar feed that he is grown so great_? age, thou art shamed: _rome, thou_ hast lost the breed of noble bloods! when went there by an age, since the great flood, but it was famed with more than with _one man_? when could they say, till now, that talked of rome, that her wide walls encompass'd but _one man_? now is it home indeed, and room enough, when there is in it but one only man. [when there is in it (truly) but _one only_,--man]. o! you and i have heard our fathers say, there _was a brutus once_, that would have brook'd the eternal devil to keep his state in rome, as easily as _a king_. _brutus_. what you have said, i will consider;--what you have to say i will with patience hear: and _find a time_ both _meet to hear, and answer such high things_. till then, my noble friend, chew upon this;-- brutus had rather be a _villager_, than to _repute_ himself a son of rome. under these hard conditions, as _this_ time is like to lay upon us. [chew upon this]. _cassius_. i am glad that my weak words have struck but thus much show of fire from brutus. [re-enter caesar and his train.] _brutus_. the games are done, and caesar is returning. _cassius_. as they pass by, pluck casca by the sleeve; and he will, after his sour fashion, tell you what hath proceeded worthy note to-day. _brutus_. i will do so:--but look you, cassius, _the angry spot doth glow on caesar's brow. and all the rest look like a chidden train_: calphurnia's cheek is pale; and _cicero_ looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes, as we have seen him in the capitol, being crossed in conference by some senators. _cassius_. casca will tell us what the matter is. _caesar_. antonius. _antony_. caesar. _caesar_. let me have men about me that are fat; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: yond' cassius has a lean and hungry look. _he thinks too much: such men are dangerous_. _antony_. fear him not, caesar; he's not dangerous: he is a noble roman, and well given. _caesar_. would he were fatter:--but i fear him not; yet if my name were liable to fear, i do not know the man i should avoid so soon as that spare cassius. _he reads much: he is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, as thou dost antony_; he hears no music: seldom he smiles; and smiles _in such a sort, as if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit that could be moved to smile at any thing_. such men as he are never at heart's ease, whiles they behold a _greater than themselves_; and therefore are they very dangerous, i rather tell thee _what is to be feared_, than what _i_ fear, for always i am caesar. _come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf_, and tell me _truly_ what thou think'st of him. [_exeunt caesar and his train. casca stays behind_.] _casca_. you pulled me by the _cloak_: would you speak with me? _brutus_. ay, casca, tell us what hath chanced to-day, that caesar looks so sad. _casca_. why you were with him. were you not? _brutus_. i should not then ask casca what hath chanced. _casca_. why there was a crown offered him: and, being offered, he put it by with the back of his hand, thus; and then the people fell a shouting. _brutus_. what was the second noise for? _casca_. why for that too. _brutus_. they shouted thrice. what was the last cry for? _casca_. why for that too. _brutus_. was the crown offered him thrice? _casca_. ay marry was't. and he put it by thrice, every time gentler than the other; and at every putting by, mine honest neighbours shouted. _cassius_. _who offered him the crown_? _casca_. why, antony. _brutus_. tell us the manner of it, gentle casca. _casca_. i can as well be _hanged_ as tell the manner of it. it was mere foolery. i did not mark it. i saw _mark antony_ offer him a crown; yet 't was not a crown;--neither 't was one of these coronets;--and, as i told you, he put it by once; but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again: but, to my thinking, he was very both to lay his fingers off it. and then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by; and still, as he refused it, the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chapped hands, and threw up their sweaty night caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath, because caesar refused the crown, that it had almost choked caesar; for he swooned and fell down at it: and, for mine own part, i durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air. _cassius_. but soft, i pray you: what? did caesar swoon? _casca_. _he fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless_. _brutus_. 'tis very like; he hath the falling sickness. _cassius_. no, caesar hath it not; but you, and i, and honest casca, _we have the falling sickness_. _casca_. _i know not what you mean by that_: but i am sure, caesar fell down. if the _tag-rag people_ did not clap him and hiss him, _according as he pleased and displeased them_, as they use to do the players in the theatre, i am no true man. _brutus_. what said he, when he came unto himself. _casca_. marry, before he fell down, when he perceived the _common herd_ was glad when he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet, and offered them his throat to cut.--an i had been a man of any occupation, if i would not have taken him at a word; i would i might go to hell among the rogues: and so he fell. when he came to himself again, he said, if he had done or said anything amiss, he desired their worships to think it was _his infirmity_. three or four wenches, where i stood, cried, 'alas, good soul!'--and forgave him with all their hearts: but there's no heed to be taken of them; _if caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less_. _brutus_. and after that, he came thus sad away? _casca_. ay. _cassius_. did _cicero say anything_? _casca_. ay, _he spoke greek_. _cassius_. to what effect? _casca_. _nay, an i tell you that, i'll ne'er look you i' the face again. but those that understood him, smiled at one another, and shook their heads_: but for mine own part, it was _greek to me_. i could tell you more news, too: marullus and flavius, for _pulling scarfs off caesar's images, are put to silence_. fare you well. there was more foolery yet, if i could remember it. brutus says of casca, when he is gone, 'he was quick mettle _when he went to school_'; and cassius replies, '_so he is now_--however he puts on this _tardy form_. this rudeness is a sauce to his good wit, which gives men stomach _to digest_ his words with better appetite.' '_and so it_ is,' brutus returns;--and so it is, indeed, as any one may perceive, who will take the pains to bestow upon these passages the attention which the author's own criticism bespeaks for them. to the ear of such an one, the roar of the blank verse of cassius is still here, subdued, indeed, but continued, through all the humour of this comic prose. but it is brutus who must lend to the poet the sanction of his name and popularity, when he would strike home at last to the heart of his subject. brutus, however, is not yet fully won: and, in order to secure him, cassius will this night throw in at his window, '_in several hands--as if they came from several citizens_--writings, in which, obscurely, caesar's ambition shall be glanced at.' and, 'after this,' he says,-- 'let caesar seat him sure, for we will shake him, or worse days endure.' but in the interval, that night of wild tragic splendour must come, with its thunder-bolts and showers of fire, and unnatural horror. for these elements have a true part to perform here, as in lear and other plays; they come in, not merely as subsidiary to the 'artistic effect'--not merely because their wild titanic play forms an imposing harmonious accompaniment to the play of the human passions and their 'wildness'--but as a grand scientific exhibition of the element which the poet is pursuing under all its protean forms--as a most palpable and effective exhibition to the sense of that identical thing against which he has raised his eternal standard of revolt, refusing to own, under any name, its mastery. but one can hear, in that wild lurid night, in the streets of rome, amid the cross blue lightnings, what could not have been whispered in the streets of england then, or spoken in the ear in closets. _cicero_. [encountering casca in the street, with his sword drawn.] good-even, casca; brought you caesar home? why are you breathless? and why stare you so? _casca_. are _you_ not moved, _when all the sway of earth shakes like a thing unfirm_? o cicero, i have seen tempests, when the _scolding winds_ have rived the _knotty oaks_; and i have seen the _ambitious ocean swell, and rage and foam_, to be exalted with the threatening clouds; but never till to-night, never till now, did i go through a tempest dropping fire. either there is a _civil strife in heaven_; or else the world, too saucy with the gods, incenses them to send destruction. but the night has had other spectacles, it seems, which, to his eye, appeared to have some relation to the coming struggle; in answer to cicero's '_why_, saw you anything more wonderful?' thus he describes them. '_a common slave,--you know him, well by sight_, held up his _left hand_, which did flame and burn _like twenty torches join'd. against the capitol_ i met a lion, who glared upon me, and went _surly by_.' [and he had seen, 'drawn on a head,'] 'a hundred ghastly _women, transformed with their fears_; who swore they saw men, all in fire, walk up and down the streets. and, yesterday, the _bird_ of _night_ did sit, even _at noon-day, upon the market-place_, hooting, and shrieking.' an ominous circumstance,--that last. a portent sure as fate. when such things begin to appear, 'men need not go to heaven to predict imminent changes.' cicero concedes that 'it is indeed a strange disposed time?' and inserts the statement that 'men may construe things after _their_ fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves.' but this is too disturbed a sky for _him_ to walk in, so exit cicero, and enter one of another kind of mettle, who thinks 'the night a very pleasant one to honest men;' who boasts that he has been walking about the streets 'unbraced, baring his bosom to the thunder stone,' and playing with 'the cross blue lightning;' and when casca reproves him for this temerity, he replies, 'you are dull, casca, and those _sparks of life_ that should be in a roman, you do want, or else you use not.' for as to these extraordinary phenomena in nature, he says, 'if you would consider the true cause why all these things change, from their _ordinance_, their _natures_ and _fore-formed faculties_, to _monstrous_ quality; why, you shall find, that heaven hath _infused_ them with these spirits, to make them instruments of fear, and warning, unto _some_ monstrous state. now could _i_, casca, name to _thee_ a man _most like this dreadful night_; that thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars as doth the lion in the capitol: _a man no mightier than thyself_, or _me_, _in personal action_; yet _prodigious grown_, and _fearful_, as these _strange eruptions are_. _casca_. 'tis _caesar_ that you mean: is it not, cassius? _cassius_. let it be who it is: for romans _now_ have _thewes_ and _limbs_ like to their ancestors; but, woe the while! our fathers' _minds_ are dead, and we are govern'd with our mothers' spirits; our yoke and sufferance shows us womanish. _casca_. indeed, they say, the senators to-morrow mean to establish caesar as a king. and he shall wear his crown by sea, and land, in every place, save here in italy. _cassius_. i know where i will wear this dagger then; cassius from bondage will deliver cassius: therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat: nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, can be _retentive to the strength of spirit_. if i know this, know all the world besides, that part of tyranny, that _i_ do bear, _i_ can shake off at pleasure. _casca_. so can _i_; so every bondman _in his own hand bears_ the power to cancel his captivity. _cassius_. _and_ why _should caesar be a tyrant_ then? poor man! i know, _he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the romans are but sheep he were no lion, were not romans hinds_. those that with haste will make a mighty fire, begin it with weak straws: _what trash is rome, what rubbish, and what offal, when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as caesar_? but, o grief! _where_ hast thou led me? _i_ perhaps, _speak this_ before a willing bondman: but i am arm'd and dangers are to me indifferent. _casca_. you speak to casca; and to such a man, that is no fleering tell-tale. hold my hand: _be factious for redress of all these griefs_: and _i will set this foot of mine as far, as who goes farthest_. _cassius_. there's a bargain made. this is sufficiently explicit, an unprejudiced listener would be inclined to say--indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any more positively instructive exhibition of the subject, could well have been made. certainly no one can deny that this fact of the personal helplessness, the physical weakness of those in whom this arbitrary power over the liberties and lives of others is vested, seems for some reason or other to have taken strong possession of the poet's imagination. for how else, otherwise should he reproduce it so often, so elaborately under such a variety of forms?--with such a stedfastness and pertinacity of purpose? the fact that the power which makes these personalities so 'prodigious,' so 'monstrous,' overshadowing the world, '_shaming the age_' with their 'colossal' individualities, no matter what new light, what new gifts of healing for its ills, that age has been endowed with, levelling all to their will, contracting all to the limit of their stinted nature, making of all its glories but 'rubbish, offal to illuminate their vileness,'--the fact that the power which enables creatures like these, to convulse nations with their whims, and deluge them with blood, at their pleasure,--which puts the lives and liberties of the noblest, always most obnoxious to them, under their heel--the fact that this power resides after all, _not in these persons themselves_,--that they are utterly helpless, pitiful, contemptible, in themselves; but that it exists in the 'thewes and limbs' of those who are content to be absorbed in their personality, who are content to make muscles for them, in those who are content to he mere machines for the 'only one man's' will and passion to operate with,--the fact that this so fearful power lies all in the consent of those who suffer from it, is the fact which this poet wishes to be permitted to communicate, and which he will communicate in one form or another, to those whom it concerns to know it. it is a fact, which he is not content merely to state, however, in so many words, and so have done with it. he will impress it on the imagination with all kinds of vivid representation. he will exhaust the splendours of his art in uttering it. he will leave a statement on this subject, profoundly philosophical, but one that all the world will be able to comprehend eventually, one that the world will never be able to unlearn. the single individual helplessness of the man whom the multitude, in this case, were ready to arm with unlimited power over their own welfare--that physical weakness, already so strenuously insisted on by cassius, at last attains its climax in the representation, when, in the midst of his haughtiest display of will and personal authority, stricken by the hands of the men he scorned, by the hand of one 'he had just spurned like a cur out of his path,' he falls at the foot of pompey's statue--or, rather, 'when at the base of pompey's statue he lies along'--amid all the noise, and tumult, and rushing action of the scene that follows--through all its protracted arrangements, its speeches, and ceremonials--not unmarked, indeed,--the centre of all eyes,--but, mute, motionless, a thing of pity, 'a piece of bleeding earth.' that helpless cry in the tiber, 'save me, cassius, or i sink!'--that feeble cry from the sick man's bed in spain, 'give me some drink, titinius!'--and all that pitiful display of weakness, moral and physical, at the would-be coronation, which casca's report conveys so unsparingly--the falling down in the street speechless, which cassius emphasises with his scornful '_what? did_ caesar swoon?'--all this makes but a part of the exhibition, which the lamentations of mark antony complete:-- 'o mighty caesar, dost thou lie so low? are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to _this little measure_?' _this_? and 'the eye' of the spectator, more learned than 'his ear,' follows the speaker's eye, and measures it. '_fare thee well_. but yesterday the word of caesar might have stood against the world: now lies he _there_. and _none so poor, to do him reverence_.' the poet's tone breaks through mark antony's; the poet's finger points, '_now lies he there'--there_! that form which 'lies there,' with its mute eloquence speaking this poet's word, is what he calls 'a transient hieroglyphic,' which makes, he says, 'a deeper impression on minds of a certain order, than the language of arbitrary signs;' and his 'delivery' on the most important questions will be found, upon examination, to derive its principal emphasis from a running text in this hand. '_for_, in such business,' he says, '_action_ is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant more _learned_ than the ears.' or, as he puts it in another place: 'what is sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner _impresses_ itself, than what is intellectual. thus the memory of _brutes_ is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things. and therefore it is easier to retain the image of a _sportsman hunting_, than of the corresponding notion of _invention_--of an apothecary ranging his boxes, than of the corresponding notion of _disposition_--of an orator making a speech, than of the term eloquence--or _a boy repeating verses_, than the term _memory_--_or_ of a player acting his part, than the corresponding notion of--action.' so, also, '_tom o' bedlam_' was a better word for 'houseless misery,' than all the king's prayer, good as it was, about 'houseless heads, and unfed sides,' in general, and 'looped, and windowed raggedness.' 'we construct,' says this author, in another place--rejecting the ordinary history as not suitable for scientific purposes, because it is 'varied, and diffusive, and confounds and disturbs the understanding, unless it be fixed and exhibited in due order'--we construct 'tables and _combinations_ of _instances_, upon such a plan and in such order, that the understanding be enabled to act upon them.' chapter ii. caesar's spirit. _i'll_ meet thee at phillippi. in julius caesar, the most splendid and magnanimous representative of arbitrary power is selected--'the foremost man of all the world,'--even by the concession of those who condemn him to death; so that here it is the mere abstract question as to the expediency and propriety of permitting _any one man_ to impose his individual will on the nation. whatever personalities are involved in the question _here_--with brutus, at least--tend to bias the decision in his favour. for so he tells us, as with agitated step he walks his orchard on that wild night which succeeds his conference with cassius, revolving his part, and reading, by the light of the exhalations whizzing in the air, the papers that have been found thrown in at his study window. 'it must be by his death: and, _for my part_, i know _no personal cause_ to spurn at him, but for the general. he would be crown'd:-- how _that might change his nature, there's the question. it is the bright day that brings forth the adder_; and that _craves wary walking_. crown him? that;-- and then, _i grant_, we put a sting in him, that _at his will_ he may do danger with. the abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins _remorse from power_: and, to speak truth of _caesar_, i have not known when _his affections_ sway'd more than his _reason_. but 't is a common proof, that lowliness is young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber upward turns his face: but when he once attains _the utmost round_, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend: so caesar may; then, lest he may, prevent. and, since the quarrel, will bear no colour for the thing he is, fashion it thus; that _what he is, augmented_, would run to _these, and these extremities_: and _therefore_ think him as a serpent's egg, which, _hatch'd_, would, as his kind, grow mischievous; and kill him in the shell.' pretty sentiments these, to set before a king already engaged in so critical a contest with his subjects; pleasant entertainment, one would say, for the representative of a monarchy that had contrived to wake the sleeping brutus in its dominions,--that was preparing, even then, for its own death-struggle on this very question, which _this_ brutus searches to its core so untenderly. 'have you heard the argument?' says the 'bloat king' in hamlet. 'is there no offence in it?' now, let the reader suppose, for one instant, that this work had been produced from the outset openly, for what any reader of common sense will perceive it to be, with all its fire, an elaborate, scholarly composition, the product of the profoundest philosophic invention, the fruit of the ripest scholarship of the age;--let him suppose, for argument's sake, that it had been produced for what it is, the work of a scholar, and a statesman, and a courtier,--a statesman already jealously watched, or already, perhaps, in deadly collision with this very power he is defining here so largely, and tracking to its ultimate scientific comprehensions;--and then let the reader imagine, if he can, elizabeth or james, but especially elizabeth, listening entranced to such passages as the one last quoted, with an audience disposed to make points of some of the 'choice italian' lines in it. does not all the world know that scholars, men of reverence, men of world-wide renown, men of every accomplishment, were tortured, and mutilated, and hung, and beheaded, in both these two reigns, for writings wherein caesar's ambition was infinitely more obscurely hinted at--writings unspeakably less offensive to majesty than this? but, then, a play was a play, and old romans would be romans; there was, notoriously, no royal way of managing them; and if kings would have tragical mirth out of them, they must take their treason in good part, and make themselves as merry with it as they could. the poor poet was, of course, no more responsible for these men than chaucer was for his pilgrims. he but reported them. and besides, in that broad, many-sided view of the subject which the author's evolution of it from the root involves,--in that pursuit of tyranny in essence through all its disguises,--other exhibitions of it were involved, which might seem, to the careless eye, purposely designed to counteract the effect of the views above quoted. the fact that mere arbitrary will, that the individual humour and bias, is incapable of furnishing a _rule_ of _action_ anywhere,--the fact that mere will, or blind passion, whether in the _one_, or the _few_, or the _many_, should have no part, above all, in the business of the state,--should lend no colour or bias to its administration,--the fact that 'the general good,' 'the common weal,' which is justice, and reason, and humanity,--the 'one only man,'--should, in some way, under some form or other, get to the head of that and _rule_, this is all which the poet will contend for. but, alas, how? the unspeakable difficulties in the way of the solution of this problem,--the difficulties which the radical bias in the individual human nature, even under its noblest forms, creates,--the difficulties which the ignorance, and stupidity, and passion of the multitude created then, and still create, appear here without _any mitigation_. they are studiously brought out in their boldest colours. there's no attempt to shade them down. they make, indeed, the tragedy. and it is this general impartial treatment of his subjects which makes this author's writings, with all their boldness, generally, so safe; for it seems to leave him without any bias for any person or any party--without any _opinion_ on any topic; for his truth embraces and resolves all partial views, and is as broad as nature's own. and how could he better neutralise the effect of these patriotic speeches, and prove his loyalty in the face of them, than to show as he does, most vigorously and effectively, that these patriots themselves, so rebellious to tyranny, so opposed to the one-man power in others, so determined to die, rather than submit to the imposition of the humours of any man, instead of law and justice,--were themselves but men, and were as full of will and humours, and as ready to tyrannise with them, too, upon occasion, as caesar himself; and were no more fit to be trusted with absolute power than he was, nor, in fact, half so fit. caesar does, indeed, send word to the senate--'_the cause is in_ my will, _i will not come_; (_that_ is enough,' he says, '_to satisfy the senate_.') and while the conspirators are exchanging glances, and the daggers are stealing from their sheaths, he offers the strength of his decree, the immutability 'of his absolute shall,' to the suppliant for his brother's pardon. but then portia gives us to understand, that she, too, has her private troubles;--that even that excellent man, brutus, is not without his moods in his domestic administrations,--for on one occasion, when he treats her to 'ungentle looks,' and 'stamps his foot,' and angrily gesticulates her out of his presence, she makes good her retreat, thinking 'it was but the effect of humour, which,' she says, 'sometime hath his hour with every man'; and, good and patriotic as brutus truly is, cassius perceives, upon experiment, that after all _he_ too is but a man, and, with a particular and private nature, as well as a larger one 'which is the worthier,' and not unassailable through that 'single i myself': he, too, may be 'thawed from the true quality with that which melteth fools,'--with words that flatter 'his particular.' in his conference with him, cassius addresses himself skilfully to this weakness;--he poises the name of caesar with that of brutus, and, at the last, he clinches his patriotic appeal, with an appeal to his personal sentiment, of baffled, mortified emulation; for those writings, thrown in at his window, purporting to come from several citizens, 'all tended to the great opinion that rome held of _his_ name;' and, alas! the poet will not tell us that this did not unconsciously wake, in that pure mind, the feather's-weight that was perhaps needed to turn the scale. and the very children know, by heart, what a time there was between these two men afterwards, these men that had 'struck the foremost man of all the world,' and had congratulated themselves that it was not murder, and that they were not villains, because it was for justice. precious disclosures we have in this scene. it is this very cassius, this patriot, who had as lief _not_ be as submit to injustice; who brings his avaricious humour, 'his itching palm,' into the state, and 'sells and marts his offices for gold, to undeservers.' brutus does indeed come down upon him with a most unlimited burst of patriotic indignation, which looks, at first, like a mere frenzy of honest disgust at wrong in the abstract, in spite of the partiality of friendship; but, when cassius charges him, afterwards, with exaggerating his friend's infirmities, he says, frankly, 'i did not, _till you practised them on_ me.' and we find, as the dialogue proceeds, that it is indeed a personal matter with him: cassius has refused him gold to pay his legions with. and see, now, what kind of taunt it is, that brutus throws in this same patriot's face after it had been proclaimed, by his order, through the streets of rome, that tyranny 'is dead': after cassius had shouted through his own lungs. 'some to the common pulpits, and cry out liberty, freedom, enfranchisement.' (_enfranchisement_?) it would have been strange, indeed, if in so general and philosophical a view of the question, that sacred, domestic institution, which, through all this sublime frenzy for equal rights, maintained itself so peacefully under the patriot's roof, had escaped without a touch. brutus says:-- 'hear me, for i will speak. must i give way and room to your rash choler? shall i be frighted _when a madman stares_?' 'look when i stare, see how the subject quakes.' this sounds, already, as if tyranny were not quite dead. '_cassius_. o ye gods, ye gods, must i endure all this! _brutus_. all this? ay more: fret till your proud heart break; _go, show_ your slaves _how choleric you are_, and bid your bondmen tremble. must _i_ budge? must _i_ observe _you_? must _i stand_ and _crouch under your testy humour_? by the gods, you shall digest the venom of your spleen though it do split you.' so it was a mistake, then, it seems; and, notwithstanding that shout of triumph, and that bloody flourishing of knives, tyranny _was not_ dead. but one cannot help thinking that that shout must have sounded rather strangely in an english theatre just then, and that it was a somewhat delicate experiment to give brutus his pulpit on the stage, to harangue the people from. but the author knew what he was doing. that cold, stilted harangue, that logical chopping on the side of freedom, was not going to set fire to any one's blood; and was not there mark antony that plain, blunt man, coming directly after brutus,--'with his eyes as red as fire with weeping,' with 'the mantle,' of the military hero, the popular favourite, _in his hand_, with his glowing oratory, with his sweet words, and his skilful appeal to the passions of the people, under his plain, blunt professions,--to wipe out every trace of brutus's _reasons_, and lead them whither he would; and would not the moral of it all be, that with such a people,--with such a power as that, behind the state, there was no use in killing caesars--that tyranny could not die. 'i fear there will a worse one come in his place.' but this is rome in her decline, that the artist touches here so boldly. but what now, if old rome herself,--plebeian rome, in the deadliest onset of her struggle against tyranny, rome lashed into fury and conscious strength, rising from under the hard heel of her oppressors; what if rome, in the act of creating her tribunes; or, if rome, with her tribunes at her head, wresting from her oppressors a constitutional establishment of popular rights,--what if this could be exhibited, by permission; what bounds as to the freedom of the discussion would it be possible to establish afterwards? there had been no national latin tragedy, frederic schlegel suggests,--because no latin dramatist could venture to do this very thing; but of course caesar or coriolanus on the tiber was one thing, and caesar or coriolanus on the thames was another; and an english author might be allowed, then, to say of the one, with impunity, what it would certainly have cost him his good right hand, or his ears, or his head, to say of the other,--what it did cost the founder of this school in philosophy his head, to be suspected of saying of the other. nevertheless, the great question between an arbitrary and a constitutional government, the principle of a government which vests the whole power of the state in the uncontrolled will of a single individual member of it; the whole history and philosophy of a military government, from its origin in the heroic ages,--from the crowning of the military hero on the battle field in the moment of victory, to the final consummation of its conquest of the liberty of the subject, could be as clearly set forth under the one form as the other; not without some startling specialities in the filling up, too, with a tone in the details now and then, to say the least, not exclusively antique, for this was a mode of treating classical subjects in that age, too common to attract attention. and thus, whole plays could be written out and out, on this very subject. take, for instance, but these two, coriolanus and julius caesar,--plays in which, by a skilful distribution of the argument and the action, with a skilful interchange of parts now and then,--the boldest passages being put alternately into the mouths of the tribunes and patricians,--that great question, which was so soon to become the outspoken question of the nation and the age, could already be discussed in all its vexed and complicated relations, in all its aspects and bearings, as deliberately as it could be to-day; exactly as it was, in fact, discussed not long afterwards in swarms of english pamphlets, in harangues from english pulpits, in english parliaments and on english battle-fields,--exactly as it was discussed when that 'lofty roman scene' came 'to be acted over' here, with the cold-blooded prosaic formalities of an english judicature. coriolanus the question of the consulship; or, the scientific cure of the common-weal propounded. 'well, march we on to give obedience where 'tis truly owed: meet we the medicine of the sickly weal, and _with him_, pour we in our country's purge _each drop of us_. or so much as it needs to dew the sovereign flower, _and drown the weeds_'--_macbeth_. 'have you heard the argument?' chapter i. the elizabethan heroism. 'mildly is the word.' 'in a better hour, let what _is meet_ be said it must be _meet_, and throw their power in the dust.' it is the military chieftain of ancient rome who pronounces here the words in which the argument of the elizabethan revolutionist is so tersely comprehended. it is the representative of an heroic aristocracy, not one of ancient privilege merely, not one armed with parchments only, claiming descent from heroes; but the yet living leaders of the rabble people to military conquest, and the only leaders who are understood to be able to marshal from their ranks an effective force for military defence. but this is not all. the scope of the poetic design requires here, under the sheath which this dramatic exhibition of an ancient aristocracy offers it, the impersonation of another and more sovereign difference in men; and this poet has ends to serve, to which a mere historical accuracy in the reproduction of this ancient struggle of state-factions, in an extinct european common-wealth, is of little consequence; though he is not wanting in that either, or indifferent to it, when occasion serves. from the _speeches_ inserted here and there, we find that this is at the same time an aristocracy of learning which is put upon the stage here, that it is an aristocracy of statesmanship and civil ability, that it is composed of the select men of the state, and not its elect only; that it is the true and natural head of the healthful body politic, and not 'the horn of the monster' only. this is the aristocracy which appears to be in session in the background of this piece at least, and we are not without some occasional glimpses of their proceedings, and this is the element of the poetic combination which comes out in the _dialogue_, whenever the necessary question of the play requires it. for it is the collision between the civil interests and the interests which the unlearned heroic ages enthrone, that is coming off here. it is the collision between the government which uneducated masses of men create and confirm, and recreate in any age, and the government which the enlightened man 'in a better hour' demands, which the common sense and sentiment of man, as distinguished from the brute, demands, whether in the one, or the few, or the many.--this is the struggle which is getting into form and order here,--here _first_. these are the parties to it, and in the reign of the last of the tudors and the first of the stuarts, they must be content to fight it out on any stage which their time can afford to lease to them for that performance, without being over scrupulous as to the names of the actors, or the historical correctness of the costumes, and other particulars; not minding a little shuffling in the parts, now and then, if it suits their poet's convenience, who has no conscience at all on such points, and who is of the opinion that this is the very stage which an action of such gravity ought to be exhibited on, in the first place; and that a very careful and critical rehearsal of it here, ought to precede the performance elsewhere; though a contrary opinion was not then without its advocates. it is as the mouth-piece of this intellectual faction in the state, while it is as yet an _aristocracy_, contending with the physical force of it, struggling for the mastery of it with its numerical majority; it is the man in the state, the new man struggling with the chief which a popular ignorance has endowed with dominion over him; it is the hero who contends for the majesty of reason and the kingdom of the mind, it is the new speaker, the new, and now at last, commanding speaker for that law, which was old when this myth was named, which was not of yesterday when antigone quoted it, who speaks now from this roman's lips, these words of doom,--the reflection on the 'times deceased,' the prophecy of 'things not yet come to life,' the word of new ages. 'in a rebellion, when what's not meet, but what must be, was law, then were they chosen: in a better hour let what _is meet_ be said it must be _meet_, and throw their power in the dust.' _not_ in the old, sombre, etruscan streets of ancient rome, _not_ where the _roman_ market-place, joined the capitoline hill and began to ascend it, crossed the road from palatinus thither, and began to obstruct it, not in the courts and colonnades of the primeval hill of palaces, were the terms of this proposal found. and not from the old logician's chair, was the sweep of their comprehension made; not in any ancient school of rhetoric or logic were they cast and locked in that conjunction. it was another kind of weapon that the old _roman_ jove had to take in hand, when amid the din of the roman forum, _he_ awoke at last from his bronze and marble, to his empirical struggle, his unlearned, experimental struggle with the wolf and her nursling, with his own baptized, red-robed, usurping mars. it was not with any such subtlety as this, that the struggle of state forces which, under one name or another, sooner or later, in the european states is sure to come, had hitherto been conducted. and not from the lips of the haughty patrician chief, rising from the dust of ages at the spell of genius, to encounter his old plebeian vanquishers, and fight his long-lost battles o'er again, at a showman's bidding, for a showman's greed--to be stung anew into patrician scorn--to repeat those rattling volleys of the old martial latin wrath, 'in states unborn' and 'accents then unknown,' for an hour's idle entertainment, for 'a six-pen'orth or shilling's worth' of gaping amusement to a playhouse throng, not--not from any such source came that utterance. it came from the council-table of a sovereignty that was plotting here in secret then the empire that the sun shall not set on; whose beginning only, we have seen. it came from the secret chamber of a new union and society of men,--a union based on a new and, for the first time, scientific acquaintance with the nature that is in men, with the sovereignty that is in all men. it was the poet of this society who put those words together--the poet who has heard all its _pros_ and _cons_, who reports them all, and gives to them all their exact weight in the new balance of his decisions. among other things, it was understood in this association, that the power, which was at that time supreme in england, was in fact, though not in name, a _popular_ power,--a power, at least, sustained only by the popular will, though men had not, indeed, as yet, begun to perceive that momentous circumstance,--a power which, being 'but the horn and noise o' the monster,' was able to oppose its '_absolute shall_' to the embodied wisdom of the state,--not to its ancient immemorial government only, but to 'its _chartered_ liberties in the body of the weal,' and 'to a graver bench than ever frowned in greece'; and the poet has put on his record of debates on those 'questions of gravity,' that were agitating then this secret chamber of peers, a distinct demand on the part of this ancient leadership,--the leadership of 'the honoured number,' the honourable and right honourable few, that this mass of ignorance, and stupidity, and blind custom, and incapacity for rule,--this combination of mere instinctive force, which the physical majority in unlearned times constitutes, which supplies, in its want, and ignorance, and passivity, and in its passionate admiration of heroism and love of leadership, the ready material of tyranny, shall be annihilated, and cease to have any leadership or voice in the state; and this demand is put by the poet into the mouth of one who cannot see from his point of observation--with his ineffable contempt for the people--what the poet sees from his, that the demand, as he puts it, is simply 'the impossible.' for this is a question in the mixed mathematics, and 'the _greater part_ carries it.' that instinctive, unintelligent force in the state--that blind volcanic force--which foolish states dare to keep pent up within them, is that which the philosopher's eye is intent on also; he, too, has marked this as the primary source of mischief,--he, too, is at war with it,--he, too, would annihilate it; but he has his own mode of warfare for it; he thinks it must be done with apollo's own darts, if it be done when 'tis done, and not with the military chieftain's weapon. this work is one in which the question of heroism and nobility is scientifically treated, and in the most rigid manner, 'by line and level,' and through that representative form in which the historical pretence of it is tried,--through that scientific negation, with its merely instinctive, vulgar, unlearned ambition--with its monstrous 'outstretching' on the one hand, and its dwarfish limitations on the other,--through all that finely drawn, historic picture of that which claims the human subjection, the clear scientific lines of the true ideal type are visible,--the outline of the true nobility and government is visible,--towering above that detected insufficiency, into the perfection of the _human_ form,--into the heaven of the true divineness,--into the chair of the perpetual dictatorship,--into the consulship whose year revolves not, whose year is _the state_. neither is this true affirmation here in the form of a scientific abstraction merely. it is not here in the general merely. 'the instance,' the particular impersonation of nobility and heroism, which this play exhibits, is, indeed, the false heroism and nobility. it is the hitherto uncriticised, and, therefore, uncorrected, popular affirmation on this subject which is embodied here, and this turns out to be, as usual, the clearest scientific negative that could be invented. but in the design, and in all the labour of this piece,--in the steadfast purpose that is always working out that definition, with its so exquisite, but thankless, unowned, unrecognised toil, graving it and pointing it with its pen of diamond in the rock for ever, approving itself 'to the workmaster' only,--in this incessant design,--in this veiled, mysterious authorship,--an historical approximation to the true type of magnanimity and heroism is always present. but there is more in it than this. it is the old popular notion of heroism which fills the foreground; but the elizabethan heroism is always lurking behind it, watching its moment, ready to seize it; and under that cover, it contrives to advance and pronounce many words, which, in its own name and form, it could not then have been so prosperously delivered of. under the disguise of that historical impersonation--under the mask of that old roman hero, other, quite other, heroic forms--historic forms--not _less_ illustrious, not less memorable, from time to time steal in; and ere we know it, the suppressed elizabethan men are on the stage, and the theatre is, indeed, the globe; and it is shaking and flashing with the iron heel and the thunder of their leadership; and the thrones of oppression are downfalling; and the ages that seemed 'far off,' the ages that were nigh, are there--are there as they are _here_. the historical position of the men who could entertain the views which this play embodies, in the age in which it was written--the whole position of the men in whom this idea of nobility and government was already struggling to become historical--flashes out from that obscure back-ground into the most vivid historical representation, when once the light--'the great light' which 'the times give to _true_ interpretations'--has been brought to bear upon it. and it does so happen, that _that_ is the light which we are particularly directed to hold up to this particular play, and, what is more, to this particular point in it. 'so _our_ virtues,' says the old volscian captain, tullus aufidius, lamenting the limitations of his historical position, and apologizing for the figure he makes in history-- 'so _our virtues_ lie in the interpretation of the times.' ['the times, in many cases, give great light to true _interpretations_,' says the other, speaking of books, and the method of reading them; but this one applies that suggestion particularly to _lives_.] 'and power, unto itself most commendable, hath not a tomb so evident as a hair to extol what it hath done.' the spirit of the elizabethan heroism is indeed here, and under the cover of this old roman story; and under cover of those so marked differences in the positions which suffice to detain the unstudious eye, through the medium of that which is common under those differences, the history of the elizabethan heroism is here also. the spirit of it is here, not in that subtler nature only--that yet, perhaps, subtler, calmer, stronger nature, in which 'blood and judgment were so well co-mingled'--so well, in such new degree and proportion, that their balance made a new force, a new generative force, in history--not in that one only, the one in whom this new historic form is visible and palpable already, but in the haughtier and more unbending historic _attitude_, at least, of his great 'co-mate and brother in exile.' it is here in the form of the great military chieftain of that new heroic line, who found himself, with all his strategy, involved in a single-handed contest with the state and its whole physical strength, in his contest with that personal power in whose single arm, in whose miserable finger-joints, the state and all its force then lay. under that old, threadbare, martial cloak,--under the safe disguise of martial tyranny in 'the few,'--whenever the business of the play requires it, whenever 'his cue comes,' _he_ is there. under that old, rusty roman helmet, his smothered speech, his 'speech of fire,' his passionate speech, 'forbid so long,' drops thick and fast, drops unquenched at last, and glows for ever. it is the headless banquo--'the blood-boltered banquo'--that stalks through that shadowy background all unharmed; _his fleance_ lives, and in him 'nature's copy _is_ eterne.' his house of kings, with gold-bound brows, and sceptres in their hands, with _two-fold_ balls and sceptres in their hands--are here filling the stage, and claiming it to the crack of doom; and now he 'smiles,' he _smiles_ upon his baffled foe, 'and points at them for his.' the whole difficulty of this great elizabethan position, and the moral of it, is most carefully and elaborately exhibited here. no plea at the bar was ever more finely and eloquently laboured. it was for the bar of 'foreign nations and future ages' that this defence was prepared: the speaker who speaks so 'pressly,' is the lawyer; and there is nothing left unsaid at last. but it is not exhibited in words merely. it is acted. it is brought out dramatically. it is presented to the eye as well as to the ear. the impossibility of any other mode of proceeding under those conditions is not demonstrated in this instance by a diagram, drawn on a piece of paper, and handed about among the jury; it is not an exact drawing of the street, and the house, and the corner where the difficulty occurred, with the number of yards and feet put down in ink or pencil marks; it is something much more lively and tangible than that which we have here, under pardon of this old roman myth. for the story, as to this element of it, is indeed not new. the story of the struggle of the few with the many, of the one with the many, of the one with 'the many-headed,' is indeed an old one. back into the days of demi-gods and gods it takes us. it is the story of the celestial titan, with his benefactions for men, and force and strength, with art to aid them--reluctant art--compelled to serve their ends, enringing his limbs, and driving hard the stakes. here, indeed, in the fable, in the proper hero of it, it is the struggle of the 'partliness' of pride and selfish ambition, lifting itself up in the place of god, and arraying itself against the common-_weal_, as well as the common-will; but the physical relation of the one to the many, the position of the individual who differs from his time on radical questions, the relative strength of the parties to this war, and the weapons and the mode of warfare inevitably prescribed to the minority under such conditions--all this is carefully brought out from the speciality of this instance, and presented in its most general form; and the application of the result to the position of the man who contends _for_ the common-weal, against the selfish will, and passion, and narrowness, and short-sightedness of the multitude, is distinctly made. yes, the elizabethan part is here; that all-unappreciated and odious part, which the great men of the elizabethan time found forced upon them; that most odious part of all, which, the greatest of his time found forced upon _him_ as the condition of his greatness. it is here already, negatively defined, in this passionate defiance, which rings out at last in the roman street, when the hero's pride bursts through his resolve, when he breaks down at last in his studied part, and all considerations of policy, all regard to that which was dearer to him than 'his _single mould_,' is given to the winds in the tempest of his wrath, and he stands at bay, and confronts _alone_ 'the beast with many heads.' it is thus that he measures the man he contends with, the antagonist who is but 'the horn and noise of the monster':-- 'thou injurious tribune! within thine eyes sat _twenty thousand_ deaths, in thy hands clenched _as many millions_, in thy lying tongue _both numbers_, i would say, thou liest, unto thee, with voice as free as i do pray the gods.' but there was a heroism of a finer strain than that at work in england then, imitating the graces of the gods to better purpose; a heroism which must fight a harder field than that, which must fight its own great battles through alone, without acclamations, without spectators; which must come off victorious, and never count its 'cicatrices,' or claim 'the war's garland.' if we would know the secret of those struggles, those hard conflicts that were going on here then, in whose results all the future ages of mankind were concerned, we must penetrate with this poet the secret of the roman patrician's house; we must listen, through that thin poetic barrier, to the great chief himself, the chief of the unborn age of a new civilization--the leader, and hero, and conqueror of the ages of peace--as he enters and paces his own hall, with the angry fire in his eyes, and utters there the words for which there is no utterance without--as he listens there anew to the argument of that for which he lives, and seeks to reconcile himself anew to that baseness which his time demands of him. we must seek, here, not the part of him only who endured long and much, but was, at last, provoked into a premature boldness, and involved in a fatal collision with the state, but that of him who endured to the end, who played his life-long part without self-betrayal. we must seek, here, not the part of the great martial chieftain only, but the part of that heroic chief and leader of men and ages, who discovered, in the sixteenth century, when the chivalry of the sword was still exalting its standard of honour as supreme, when the law of the sword was still the world's law, that brute instinct was not the true valour, that there was a better part of it than instinct, though he knows and confesses,--though he is the first to discover, that instinct is a great matter. we must seek, here, _the words_, the very words of that part which we shall find _acted_ elsewhere,--the part of the chief who was determined, for his part, 'to live and fight another day,' who was not willing to spend _him_self in such conflicts as those in which he saw his most illustrious contemporaries perish at his side, on his right hand and on his left, in the reign of the tudor, and in the reign of the stuart. and he has not been at all sparing of his hints on this subject over his own name, for those who have leisure to take them. 'the moral of this fable is,' he says, commenting in a certain place, on the wisdom of _the ancients_, 'that men should not be confident of themselves, and imagine that a discovery of their excellences will always render them acceptable. _for this can only succeed_ according to _the nature_ and _manners_ of the person they _court or_ solicit, who, if he be a man not of the same gifts and endowments, but altogether of a haughty and insolent behaviour--(_here_ represented by _the person of juno_)--_they must entirely drop the character_ that carries the least show of worth or gracefulness; if they proceed upon _any other_ footing it is _downright folly. nor_ is it sufficient to _act_ the deformity of _obsequiousness_, unless they _really change themselves_, and _become_ abject and contemptible _in their persons_.' this was a time when abject and contemptible _persons_ could do what others could not do. large enterprises, new developments of art and science, the most radical social innovations, were undertaken and managed, and very successfully, too, in that age, by persons of that description, though not without frequent glances on their part, at that little, apparently somewhat contradictory circumstance, in their history. but the fables in which the wisdom of the moderns, and the secrets of _their_ sages are lodged, are the fables we are unlocking here. let us listen to these 'secrets of policy' for ourselves, and not take them on trust any longer. _a room in coriolanus's house_. [_enter coriolanus and patricians_.] _cor_. let them _pull all about mine ears_, present me _death on the wheel_, or at wild horses' heels, or pile ten hills on the tarpeian rock that the precipitation might down stretch below the beam of sight, yet will i still _be thus to them_. [under certain conditions that is heroism, no doubt.] _first patrician. you do the nobler_. [for the question is of nobility.] _cor_. i muse my mother does not approve me further. i talk of _you_. [_to volumnia_.] why did you wish me milder? would you have me _false to my nature_? rather say _i play the man i am_. _vol_. o sir, sir, sir, i _would have had you put your power well on before you had worn it out_. lesser had been the thwarting of your dispositions, if you had _not show'd them how you were disposed, ere they lacked power to cross you_. * * * * * [_enter menenius and senators_.] _men_. come, come, you have been too rough something too rough; you must return, and mend it. _ sen_. _there's no remedy, unless_, by _not_ so doing, _our good city cleave in the midst and perish_. _vol_. pray be counselled: _i_ have a _heart_ as little apt as yours but yet _a brain_ [hear] that leads my use of anger to better _vantage_. _men_. well said, _noble_ woman; _before he should thus stoop to the_ herd, but that the violent pit o' the time, _craves it as_ physic for the whole state, _i_ would put _mine_ armour on, which i can scarcely bear. [it is the diseased common-weal whose case this doctor is undertaking. _that_ is our subject.] _cor_. what must i do? _men_. return to the tribunes. _cor_. well, what then? what then? _men_. repent what you have spoke. _cor_. for them? i _can not do it to the gods_: must i then do't to _them_? _vol_. you are too _absolute_; _though_ therein you can never be _too noble but when extremities speak_. i have heard you say, honor _and_ policy [hear] like unsevered friends _i' the war_ do grow together: _grant that_, and tell me. in peace, what _each_ of them by the other loses that they combine not there? _cor_. tush; tush! _men_. _a good demand_. _vol_. if _it be honor_, in your wars, to seem the same you are not, (which for your best ends _you adopt your policy_), how is it _less_, or _worse_ that it shall hold companionship in peace with honor, as in war; _since that to both it stands in like request_? _cor_. why _force you this_? [truly.] _vol_. _because_ that _now_, it lies on you to speak _to the people, not_ by _your own instruction_, nor by the _matter which your heart prompts you_ to, but with such words that are but rated _in_ _your tongue_ though but bastards and syllables _of no_ allowance, to _your bosom's truth_. now this no more dishonors you at all, than to take in _a town_ with _gentle words_, which else would put you to your fortune, and the hazard of much blood.--[hear.] i would dissemble _with my nature_, where _my fortune and my friends at stake_ required _i should do so in honor_. _i am_ in this; your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles, and you will rather show our _general lowts_ how you can frown, than spend a _fawn_ upon them. for the _inheritance_ of their loves, and _safe-guard_ of _what that want might ruin_ [hear] noble lady! _come go with us_. speak fair: you may salve so, [it is the diseased common-weal we talk of still.] you may salve so, not what is dangerous present, _but_ the _loss_ of what is past. [that was this doctor's method, who was a doctor of laws as well as medicine, and very skilful in medicines 'palliative' as well as 'alterative.'] _vol_. i pry'thee now, my son, go to them with this bonnet in thy hand, and thus far having stretched it (_here_ be with them), thy _knee bussing the stones_, for in such business _action_ is eloquence, and the _eyes_ of _the ignorant_ more _learned_ than the _ears_--waving thy head, which often thus, correcting thy stout heart, now humble as the ripest mulberry that will not hold the handling: or say to them: thou art _their_ soldier, and _being bred in broils_, hast not the soft way, which thou dost confess _were fit for thee to use_, as _they to claim_, in asking _their good_ loves; but thou wilt frame thyself _forsooth hereafter theirs_, so far as thou hast power and person. pry'thee now _go and be ruled: although i know_ thou hadst rather follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf than flatter him in a bower. here is cominius. [_enter cominius_.] _com. i have been i' the market-place_, and, sir, _'tis fit_ you make strong party, _or_ defend yourself by calmness, or by absence. all's in anger. _men. only fair speech. i think 'twill serve, if he can thereto frame his spirit_. _vol_. he must, and will. pry'thee now _say_ you will _and go about it_. _cor_. must i go show them my unbarbed sconce? _must i_ with _my base tongue, give to my noble heart a lie that it must bear? well, i will do't: yet were there but this single plot to lose, this mould of marcius_, they, to dust should grind it, and throw it against the wind;--to the market-place; you have put me now to such a part, which never _i_ shall discharge _to the life_. _com_. come, come, we'll prompt you. _vol_. i pry'thee now, sweet son, as thou hast said, _my_ praises made thee first a soldier [--_volumnia_--], so to have my praise for this, _perform a part than hast not done before_. _cor_. well, i must do't. _away my disposition_, and possess me some harlot's spirit! _my throat_ of _war_ be turned, which quired with my _drum_ into a pipe! small as an eunuch's or the virgin voice that babies lulls asleep! the smiles of _knaves_ tent in my cheeks; and school-boy's tears take up the glasses of my sight! a beggar's tongue make _motion through my lips_; and my _arm'd knees who bowed but in my stirrup, bend like his_ that _hath received an alms_. i will not do't, lest i _surcease_ to _honor mine own truth_, and _by my body's action teach my mind_ a most _inherent baseness_. _vol_. at thy choice, then; to beg of thee, it is my more dishonor than thou of them. come _all to ruin_; let _thy mother_ rather _feel thy pride_, than fear thy dangerous stoutness, for _i_ mock at death with as big a heart as thou. do as thou list. thy _valiantness was mine_, thou suck'dst it from me, but _owe thy pride thyself_. _cor_. pray be content. _mother_ i _am going to the market place_, chide me no more. i'll _mountebank their loves_, cog their hearts from them, _and come back beloved_ _of all the trades in rome_.--[that he will--] look i am going. commend me to my wife. i'll return consul [--that he will--] or never trust to what my tongue can do, _i' the way of flattery further_. _vol. do your will. [exit_.] _com_. away, the tribunes do attend you: _arm yourself_ to answer _mildly_; for they are prepared with accusations as i hear more strong than are upon you yet. _cor_. _the word is mildly_: pray you let us go, let them accuse me by _invention_, i will answer in mine honor. _men_. _ay, but mildly_. _cor_. well, mildly be it then, mildly. [_the forum. enter coriolanus and his party_.] _tribune_. well, here he comes. _men_. _calmly_, i do beseech you. _cor. ay, as an ostler, that for the poorest piece will bear the knave by the volume_. the honoured gods keep rome in safety, and the chairs of _justice_ supplied with worthy men; _plant_ love among us. _throng_ our large temples _with the shows_ of peace, _and_ not _our_ streets _with_ war. _sen_. amen! amen! _men_. a noble wish. thus far the poet: but the mask through which he speaks is wanted for other purposes, for these occasional auto-biographical glimpses are but the side play of the great historical exhibition which is in progress here, and are introduced in entire subordination to its requisitions. it is, indeed, an old story into which all this elizabethan history is crowded. that mimic scene in which the great historic instances in the science of human nature and human life were brought out with such scientific accuracy, and with such matchless artistic power and splendour, was, in fact, what the poet himself, who ought to know, tells us it is; with so much emphasis,--not merely the mirror of nature in general, but the daguerreotype of the then yet living age, the plate which was able to give to the very _body_ of it, its _form and pressure_. that is what it was. and what is more, it was the only mirror, the only spectator, the only times, in which the times could get reflected and deliberated on then, with any degree of freedom and vivacity. and yet there were minds here in england then, as acute, as reflective, as able to lead the popular mind as those that compose our leaders and reviews today. there was a mind here then, reflecting not 'ages past' only, but one that had taken its knowledge of the past from the present, that found 'in all men's lives,' a history figuring the nature of the times deceased; prophetic also: and this was the mind of the one who writes 'spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues.' they had to take old stories,--these sly, ambitious aspirants to power, who were not disposed to give up their natural right to dictate, for the lack of an organ, or because they found the proper insignia of their office usurped: it was necessary that they should take old stories, or invent new ones, 'to make those slights upon the banks of thames, that so did take' not 'eliza and our james' only, but that people of whom 'eliza and our james' were only 'the outstretched shadows,' 'the monster,' of whose 'noise' these sovereigns, as the author of this play took it, were 'but the horn.' they had to take old stories of one kind and another, as they happened to find them, and vamp them up to suit their purposes; stories, old or new, they did not much care which. old and memorable ones, so memorable that the world herself with her great faculty of oblivion, could not forget them, but carried them in her mind from age to age,--stories so memorable that all men knew them by heart,--so the author could find one to his purpose,--were best for some things,--for many things; but for others new ones must be invented; and certainly there would be no difficulty as to that, for lack of gifts at least, in the mind whence these old ones were coming out so freshly, in the gloss of their new-coined immortality. it is, indeed, an old story that we have here, a story of that ancient rome, whose 'just, free and flourishing state,' the author of this new science of policy confesses himself,--under his _universal_ name,--so childishly enamoured of, that he interests himself in it to a degree of passion, though he 'neither loves it in its _birth_ or its _decline_,'--[under its kings or its emperors.]--it is a story of _republican_ rome, and the difference, the radical difference, between the civil magistracy which represented the roman people, and that unconstitutional popular power which the popular tyranny creates, is by no means omitted in the exposition. that difference, indeed, is that which makes the representation possible; it is brought out and insisted on, '_they_ choose their officers;' it is a difference which is made much of, for it contains one of the radical points in the poetic intention. but without going into the argument, the large and comprehensive argument, of this most rich and grave and splendid composition, crowded from the first line of it to the last, with the results of a political learning which has no match in letters, which had none then, which has none now; no, or the world would be in another case than it is, for it is a political learning which has its roots in the new philosophy, it is grounded in the philosophy of the nature of things, it is radical as the _prima philosophia_,--without attempting to exhaust the meaning of a work embodying through all its unsurpassed vigor and vivacity of poetic representation, the new philosophic statesman's ripest lore, the patient fruits of 'observation strange,'--without going into his argument of the whole, the reader who merely wishes to see for himself, at a glance, in a word, as a matter of curiosity merely; whether the view here given of the political sagacity and prescience of the elizabethan man of letters, is in the least chargeable with exaggeration, has only to look at the context of that revolutionary speech and proposal, that revolutionary burst of eloquence which has been here claimed as a proper historical issue of the age of elizabeth. he will not have to read very far to satisfy himself as to that. it will be necessary, indeed, for that purpose, that he should have eyes in his head, eyes not purely idiotic, but with the ordinary amount of human speculation in them, and, moreover, it will be necessary that he should use them,--as eyes are ordinarily used in such cases,--nothing more. but unfortunately this is just the kind of scrutiny which nobody has been able to bestow on this work hitherto, on account of those historical obstructions with which, at the time it was written, it was found necessary to guard such discussions, discussions running into such delicate questions in a manner so essentially incomparably free. for, in fact, there is no plainer piece of english extant, when one comes to look at it. all that has been claimed in the historical part of this work, [not published in this volume] may be found here without any research, on the mere surface of the dialogue. looking at it never so obliquely, with never so small a fraction of an eye, one cannot help seeing it. the reader who would possess himself of the utmost meaning of these passages, one who would comprehend their farthest reaches, must indeed be content to wait until he can carry with him into all the parts that knowledge of the authors general intention in this work, which only a most thorough and careful study of it will yield. it is, indeed, a work in which the whole question of government is seized at its source--one in which the whole difficulty of it is grappled with unflinching courage and veracity. it is a work in which that question of classes in the state, which lies on the surface of it, is treated in a general, and not exclusive manner; or, where the treatment is narrowed and pointed, as it is throughout in the running commentary, it is narrowed and pointed to the question of the then yet living age, and to those momentous developments of it which, 'in their weak beginnings,' the philosophic eye had detected, and not to a state of things which had to cease before the first punic war could be begun. the question of _classes_, and their respective claims in governments, is indeed incidentally treated here, but in this author's own distinctive manner, which is one that is sure to take out, always--even in his lightest, most sportive handling--the heart of his subject, so as to leave little else but gleanings to the author who follows in that track hereafter. for this is one of those unsurpassably daring productions of the elizabethan muse, which, after long experiment, encouraged by that protracted immunity from suspicion, and stimulated by the hurrying on of the great crisis, it threw out at last in the face and eyes of tyranny, things which are but intimated in the earlier plays-- political allusions, which are brought out there amid crackling volleys of conceits, under cover of a battery of quips and jests-- political doctrines, which lie there wrapped in thickest involutions of philosophic subtleties, are all unlocked and open here on the surface: he that runs may take them if he will. chapter ii. criticism of the martial government. 'would you proceed _especially_ against _caius_ marcius?' 'against him first: he's a _very dog_ to the commonalty.' in this exhibition of the social orders to which human society instinctively tends, and that so-called _state_ into which human combinations in barbaric ages rudely settles, the _principle_ of the combination--the principle of gradation, and subjection, and permanence--is called in question, and exposed as a purely instinctive principle, as, in fact, only a principle of revolution disguised; and a higher one, the distinctively human element, the principle of kind, is now, for the first time, demanded on scientific grounds, as the essential principle of any permanent human combination--as the natural principle, the only one which the science of nature can recognise as a principle of state. it is the peace principle which this great scientific war-hater and captain of the ages of peace is in search of, with his new _organum_; though he is philosopher enough to know that, in diseased states, wars are nature's own rude remedies, her barbarous surgery, for evils yet more unendurable. he has found himself chosen a justice of the peace--the world's peace; and it is the principle of permanence, of law and subjection--in a word, it is the principle of _state_, as opposed to revolution and dissolution--which he is judging of in behalf of his kind. and he makes a business of it. he goes about in his own fashion. he gets up this great war-piece on purpose to find it. he has got a state on his stage, which is ceasing to be a _state_ at the moment in which he shows it to us; a state which has the war principle--the principle of conquest within no longer working in it insidiously as government, but developed as war; for it has just overstepped the endurable point in its mastery. it is a revolution that is coming off when the curtain rises. for the government has been gnawing the roman common-weal at home, with those same teeth it ravened the volscians with abroad, till it has reached the vitals at last, and the common-weal has betaken itself to the volscian's weapons:--the people have risen. they are all out when the play begins on an armed hunt for their rat-like, gnawing, corn-consuming rulers. they are determined to 'kill them,' and have 'corn at their own price.' 'if the _wars_ eat us not, _they_ will,' is the word; 'and there's all the love _they_ bear us.' '_rome_ and _her rats_ are at the point of battle,' cries the poet. the _one_ side _shall have bale_, is his prophecy. 'without _good nature_,' he says elsewhere, using the term _good_ in its scientific sense, '_men_ are only a nobler kind of vermin'; and he makes a most unsparing application of this principle in his criticisms. many a splendid historical figure is made to show its teeth, and rat-like mien and propensities, through all the splendour of its disguises, merely by the application of his simple philosophical tests. for the question, as he puts it, is the question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, and reason; and the question incidentally arises in the course of the exhibition, whether the common-weal, when it comes to anything like common-sense, is going to stand being gnawed in this way, for the benefit of any individual, or clique, or party. for the ground on which the classes or estates, and their respective claims to the government, are tried here, is the ground of the _common_-weal; and the question as to the fitness of any existing class in the state for an exclusive, unlimited control of the welfare of the whole, is more than suggested. that which stops short of the weal of the whole for its end, is that which is under criticism here; and whether it exist in 'the one,' or 'the few,' or 'the many,'--and these are the terms that are employed here,--whether it exist in the civil magistracy, sustained by a popular submission, or in the power of the victorious military chief, at the head of his still extant and resistless armament, it is necessarily rejected as a principle of sovereignty and permanence, in this purely scientific view of the human conditions of it. it is a question which this author handles with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, let them come in what name and form they will, with more or less clearness, indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate. but _nowhere_ is the whole history of the military government, collected from the obscurity of the past, and brought out with such inflexible design--with such vividness and strength of historic exhibition, as it is _here_. it is traced to its beginnings in the distinctions which nature herself creates,--those physical, and moral, and intellectual distinctions, with which she crowns, in her happier moods, the large resplendent brows of her born kings and masters. it is traced from its origin in the crowning of the victorious chief on the field of battle, to the moment in which the sword of military conquest is turned back on the conquerors by the chief into whose hands they gave it; and the sword of conquest abroad becomes, at home, the sword of state. nay, this play goes farther, and embraces the contingency of a foreign rule--one, too, in which the _conqueror_ takes his surname from the _conquest_; it brings home 'the enemy of the whole state,' as a king, in triumph to the capital, whose streets he has filled with mourning; and though the author does not tell us in this case, at he does in another, that the nation was awed 'with an offertory of standards' in the temple, and that 'orisons and te deums were again sung,'--the victor 'not meaning that the people _should forget_ too soon _that he came in by battle_'--points, not much short of that, in the way of speciality, are not wanting. more than one conqueror, indeed, looks out from this old chieftain's roman casque. 'there is a little touch of _harry_ in the scene'; and though the author goes out of his way to tell us that 'he must by no means say his hero is _covetous_,' it will not be the elizabethan philosopher's fault, if we do not know _which_ harry it is that says-- _if you have writ your annals true_,'tis there, that like an eagle in a dove-cote, i flutter'd your volsces in corioli: _alone_, i did it. * * * * * _auf_. read it, noble lords; but tell _the traitor_, in the _highest degree_ he hath abused your powers. _cor_. traitor!--how now? _auf_. ay, _traitor_, marcius. _cor_. _marcius_! _auf_. ay, _marcius, caius_ marcius; dost thou think i'll grace thee with that robbery, _thy_ stolen name coriolanus in corioli?'--[_the conqueror in the conquest_.] never, indeed, was 'the garland of war,' whether glistening freshly on the hero's brow on the fresh battle-field, or whether glittering, transmuted into civic gold and gems, on the brow of his hereditary successor, subjected to such a searching process before, as that with which the poet, under cover of an _aristocrat's_ pretensions, and especially under cover of his pretensions to an elective magistracy, can venture to test it. this _hero_, who 'speaks of the people as if he were a _god_ to punish, and not a man of their infirmity,' is on trial for that pretension from the first scene of this play to the last. the author has, indeed, his own views of the fickle, ignorant, foolish multitude,--such views as any one, who had occasion to experiment on it personally, in the age of elizabeth, would not lack the means of acquiring; and amidst those ebullitions of wrath, which he pours from his haughty hero's lips, one hears at times a tone that sounds a little like some other things from the same source, as if the author had himself, in some way, been brought to look at the subject from a point of observation, not altogether unlike that from which his hero speaks; or as if he might, at least, have known how to sympathise with the haughty and unbending nature, that had been brought into such deadly collision with it. but in the dramatic representation, though it is far from being a flattering one, we listen in vain for any echo of this sentiment. in its rich and kindly humour there is no sneer, no satire. it is the loving eye of nature's own great pupil--it is the kindly human eye, that comes near enough to point those jests, and paint so truly; there is a great human heart here in the scene embracing the lowly. it was the heart that was putting forth then its silent but resistless energies into the ages of the human advancement, to take up the despised and rejected masses of men from their misery, and make of them truly one _kind_ and kindred. and though he has had, indeed, his own private experiences with the multitude, and the passions are, as he intimates--at least as strong in him as in another, he has his own view, also, of the common pitifulness and weakness of the human conditions; and he has a view which is, in his time, all his own, of the instrumentalities that are needed to reach that level of human nature, and to lift men up from the mire of these conditions, from the wrong and wretchedness into which, in their unaided, unartistic, unlearned struggle with nature,--within and without,--_the kind_ are fallen. and so strong in him is the sense of this pitifulness, that it predominates over the sharpness of his genius, and throws the divinest mists and veils of compassion over the harsh, scientific realities he is constrained to lay bare. and, in fact, it takes this monstrous pretence, and claim to _human leadership_, which he finds passing unquestioned in his time, to bring him out on this point fairly. the statesmanship of the man who undertakes to make his own petty personality the measure of a _world_, who would make, not that reason which is in us _all_, and embraces the _world_, and which is _not_ personal,--not that conscience which is the sensibility to reason, and is as broad and impartial as that--which goes with the reason, and embraces, like that, without bias, the common weal,--but that which is particular, and private, and limited to the individual,--his senses,--his passions, his private affections,--his mere caprice,--his mere will; the motive of the public action;--the statesmanship of the man who dares to offer these to an insulted world, as reasons of state; who claims a divine prerogative to make his single will good against reason; who claims a divine right to make his private interest outweigh the weal of the whole; who asks men to obliterate, in their judgment, its essential principle, that which makes them men, the eternal principle of the whole;--this is the phenomenon which provokes at last, in this author, the philosophic ire. the moment this thing shows itself on his stage, he puts his pity to sleep. he will show up, at last, without any mercy, in a purely scientific manner, as we see more clearly elsewhere, the common pitifulness of the human conditions, in the person of him who claims exemption from them,--who speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of their infirmity. 'there is formed in every thing a _double nature_';--this author, who is the philosopher of _nature_, tells us on another page,--'there is formed in _every thing_ a double nature of good, the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a _part_ or _member_ of a greater body; whereof the _latter_ is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it _tends to the conservation of a more general form_. therefore we see the iron in _particular sympathy_ moving to the loadstone; but yet, if _it exceed a certain quantity_, it forsakes the affection to the loadstone, and, like a good patriot, moves to the earth. this double nature of good is much more (hear)--much _more_ engraven on man, if he _de_generate not--(decline not from the law of his _kind_--for that _more_ is special) unto whom the conservation of duty to the public ought to be much more _precious_ than the conservation of life and being, according to that memorable speech of pompey the great, [the truly great, for this is the question of greatness,] when being in commission of purveyance for a famine at rome, and being dissuaded, with great vehemency and instance, by his friends about him, that he should not hazard himself to sea in an extremity of weather, answered, 'necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam.' but we happen to have set out here, in our play, at the very beginning of it, the specific case alluded to, in this general exhibition of the radical human law, viz., the case of a famine in rome, which we shall find differently treated, in this instance, by the person who aspires to 'the helm o' the state.' when the question is of the true nobility and greatness, of the true statesmanship, of the personal fitness of an individual to assume the care of the public welfare, the question, of course, as to this double nature, comes in. we wish to know--if any thing is going to depend upon his single _will_ in the matter, we must know, which of these two natures is sovereign in himself,--which good he supremely affects,--that of his senses, passions, and private affections, that good which ends in his private and particular nature,--a good which has its _due_ place in this system, and is not unnaturally mortified and depressed, as it is in less scientific ones,--or that good of the _whole_, which is each man's highest good;--whether he is, in fact, a _man_, or whether, in the absence of that perfection of the human form, which should be the end of science and government, he approximates at all,--or undertakes to approximate at all, to the true human type;--whether he be, indeed, a man, in the higher sense of that word, or whether he ranks in the scale of nature, as 'only a _nobler_ kind of vermin,' a _man_, a _noble man_, a man with a divine ideal and ambition, _degenerate_ into that. when it is a candidate for the chief magistracy, a candidate for the supreme power in the state, who is on his trial, of course that question as to the balance between the public and private affections, which, those who know how to trace this author's hand, know he is so fond of trying elsewhere, is sure to come up. the question is, as to whether there is any affection in this claimant for power, so large and so noble, that it can embrace heartily the common weal, and take _that_ to be _its_ good. the trial will be a sharp one. the trial of human greatness which is magnanimity, must needs be. the question is, as to whether this is a nature capable of pursuing that end for its own sake, without respect to its pivate and merely selfish recompence; whether it is one which has any such means of egress from its particular self, any such means of coming out of its private and exclusive motivity, that it can persevere in its care of the common weal, through good and through ill report, through personal wrong and ingratitude,--abandoning its private claim, and ascending by that conquest to the divineness. chapter iii. insurrection's arguing. 'what is granted them?' 'five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms.' 'the rabble should have first unroofed the city, ere so prevailed with me.' the common people themselves have some inkling of this. this roman who has established his claim to rule romans at home, by killing volscians abroad, appears to their simple apprehension, at the moment, at least, when they find themselves suffering the gnawings of hunger through his legislation, to have established but a questionable claim to their submission. and before ever he shows his head on the stage, this question, which is the question of the play, is already started. for it is the people who are permitted to come on first of all and explain their wants, and discuss the military hero's qualifications for rule in that relation, and that, too, in a not altogether foolish manner. for though the author knows how to do justice to the simplicity of their politics, he knows how to do justice also to that practical determination and straightforwardness and largeness of sense, which even in the common sense of uneducated masses, is already struggling a little to declare itself. they have one great piece of political learning which their lordly legislators lack, and for lack of sense and comprehension cannot have. they are learned in the doctrine of their own political and social want; they are full of the most accurate and vivid impressions on that subject. their notions of it are altogether different from those vague general abstract conceptions of it, which the brains of their refined lordly rulers stoop to admit. the terms which that legislation deals with, are one thing in the patrician's vocabulary, and another and quite different thing in the plebeian's; hunger means one thing in the 'patrician's vocabulary,' and another and very different thing in the plebeian's. they know, too, 'that meat was made for mouths,' and 'that the gods sent not corn for the rich men only.' they are under the impression that there ought to be bread for them by some means or other, when the storehouses that their toil has filled are overflowing, and though they are not clear as to the process which should accomplish this result, they have come to the conclusion that there must be some error somewhere in the legislation of those learned _few_, to whom they have resigned the task of governing them. they are strongly of opinion that there must be some mistake in the calculations by which those venerable wise men and _fathers_, do so infallibly contrive to sweep the results of the poor man's toil and privation into their own garners,--calculations which enable the legislator to enjoy in lordly ease and splendour, the sight of the plebeian's misery, which enable him to lavish on his idlest whims, to give to his dogs that which would save lifetimes of unreckoned human misery. these are their views, and when the play begins, they have resolved themselves into a committee of the whole, and are out on a commission of inquiry and administrative reform, armed with bats and clubs and other weapons,--such as came first to hand, intending to make short work of it. this is their peace budget, and as to war, they have some rude notions on that subject, too;--some dim impression that nature intended them for some other ends than to be sold in the shambles, as the purchase of some lordly chieftain's title. there's an incipient statesmanship struggling there in that rude mass, though it does not as yet get fairly expressed. it will take the tribuneship and the refinements of the aristocratic leisure, to make the rude wisdom of want and toil eloquent. but it has found a tribune at last, who will be able to speak for it, through one mouth or another, scientifically and to the purpose too, ere all is done. 'before we proceed any further, _hear me speak_,' he cries, through the roman leader's lips; for his rome, too, if it be not yet 'at the point of battle,' is drifting towards it rapidly, as he sees well enough when this speech begins. but let us take the play as we find it. take the first scene of it. the stage is filled with the people,--not with their representatives, --but with the people themselves, in their own persons, in the act of taking the government into their own hands. they are hurrying sternly and silently through the city streets. there has been no practising of 'goose step,' to teach them that movement. they are armed with clubs, staves and other weapons, peace weapons, but there is an edge in them now, fine enough for their purpose. the word of the play is the word that arrests that movement. the voice of the leader rings out,--it is a halt that is ordered. 'before we proceed any further, hear me speak,' cries one from the mass. 'speak! speak!' is the reply. they are ready to hear reason. they want a speaker. they want a voice, though never so rude, to put their stern inarticulate purpose 'into some frame.' 'you are all resolved rather to die than to famish,' continues the first speaker. yes, that is it precisely; he has spoken the word. 'resolved! resolved!' is the common response; for the revolutionary point is touched here. 'first, _you know_, caius marcius is chief enemy to the people'--a rude grasp at causes. this captain will establish a common _intelligence_ in his company _before they proceed any further_; that their acting may be one, and to purpose. for there is no command but that here. _cit._ we know't, we know't. _first cit._ let us _kill him_, and we'll have corn at our own price. is't a verdict? _cit. no _more talking on't_. let it bone done: away, away. '_one word_, good citizens,' cries another, 'who thinks that the thing will bear, perhaps, a little further discussion. and this is the hint for the first speaker to produce his cause more fully. 'good citizens,' is the word he takes up. "_we_ are _accounted_ poor citizens; the patricians good.' [that is the way the account stands, then.] 'what authority _surfeits_ on would relieve us. if they would yield us _but the superfluity_ while it were _wholesome_, we might guess they relieved us _humanely_; but they think we are _too dear_.' [they love us as we are too well. they want poor people to reflect their riches. it takes plebeians to make patricians; it takes our valleys to make their heights.] 'the leanness that _afflicts us_, the object of _our_ misery, is as an _inventory_ to particularize _their abundance_. _our_ sufferance is a gain to _them_.--let us revenge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the gods know, i speak this in _hunger_ for bread, and not in _thirst_ for _revenge_. _second cit_. would you proceed _especially_ against caius marcius? _first cit_. against him _first_;--he's a _very dog_ to the commonalty. _second cit_. consider you what _services_ he has done for _his country_? [that is one of the things which are about to be 'considered.'] _first cit. very well_, and could be content to give him good report for'it, but that he _pays himself_ with _being proud_. _second cit_. nay, but speak not maliciously. _first cit_. i say unto you, what he hath done famously, he _did it to that end_: though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to _please his mother_, and to be _partly_ proud; which he is, even to the _altitude of his virtue_. _second cit_. what he _cannot help_ in his nature, you account a _vice_ in him. you _must in no way_ say he is covetous. _first cit. if i must not_, i need not be barren of accusations; he hath faults with surplus to tire _in repetition_. [_shouts within_.] what shouts are these? the other side o' the city is risen. why stay we prating here? _to the capitol_! _cit_. come, come. _first cit_. soft; who comes here? [_enter menenius agrippa_.] _second cit_. worthy menenius agrippa, one that hath always _loved the people_. _first cit_. he's one _honest_ enough [--_honest_--a great word in the shakspere philosophy]; would _all the rest_ were so. [that is a good prayer when it comes to be understood.] _men_. what work's, my countrymen, in hand? where go you, with bats and clubs? the matter? speak, i pray you. _first cit. our business is not unknown to_ the senate [hear]; they have had _inkling_ this fortnight what we intend to do, which now we'll show 'em in deeds. they say, poor suitors have strong breaths; they shall know we have _strong arms, too_. _men_. why, _masters_, my good friends, mine honest neighbours, will you undo yourselves_? _first cit. we cannot, sir; we are undone already_. [revolution.] _men_. i tell you, friends, _most charitable care_ have the _patricians_ of you. for your wants,--your suffering in this dearth, you may as well _strike at the heavens_ with your staves, as lift them against the roman state, whose course _will on the way it takes_, cracking ten thousand curbs of more strong link asunder, than can ever appear in your impediment. for the dearth, the _gods, not_ the _patricians_, make it; and _your knees_ to them, _not arms, must_ help. [this sounds very pious, but it is not the piety of the new school. the doctrine of submission and suffering is indeed taught in it, and scientifically reinforced; but then it is the patient suffering of the harm 'which is not within our power' which is commendable, according to its tenets, and 'a wise and industrious suffering' of it, too. it is a wise 'accommodating of the nature of man to those points of nature and fortune which we cannot control,' that is pleasing to god, according to this creed.] alack! you are transported by calamity, thither where more attends you; and you slander the helms o' the state, who care for you like _fathers_, when you curse them as enemies. _first cit_. care for us! _true_, indeed! they ne'er cared for us yet. suffer us to famish, and _their_ store-houses crammed with grain! _make edicts for usury, to support usurers_! repeal daily any wholesome act _established against the rich_, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor! if the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's _all the love_ they bear us. menenius attempts to counteract these impressions; but his story and his arguments appear to have some applications which he is not aware of, and are much more to the purpose of the party in arms than they are to his own. for it is a story in which the natural subordination of the parts to the whole in the fabric of human society is illustrated by that natural instance and symbol of unity and organization which the single human form itself present; and that condition of the state which has just been exhibited--one in which the body at large is dying of inanition that a part of it may _surfeit_--is a condition which, in the light of this story, appears to need help of some kind, certainly. but the platform is now ready. it is the hero's entrance for which we are preparing. it is on the ground of this sullen want that the author will exhibit him and his dazzling military virtues. it is as the doctor of this _diseased common-weal_ that he brings him in with his sword; '_enter_ caius marcius.' and that idea--the idea of the diseased commonwealth, which menenius has already set forth--that notion of _parts_ and _partiality_, and dissonance and dissolution, which is a radical idea in the play, and runs into its minutest points of phraseology, breaks out at once in his rough speech. _men_. hail, noble marcius! _mar_. thanks. what's the matter, you dissentious rogues, that rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, make _yourselves_ scabs. [it is the _common-weal_ that must be made _whole_ and comely. opinion! your opinion.] _first cit_. we have ever your good word. _mar_. in that will give good words to _thee_, will flatter beneath abhorring.--what would you have, you _curs_, that like nor peace, nor war? the one affrights you, the other makes you proud. _he_ that trusts you, _where he should find you lions, finds you hares_. _where foxes, geese_! you are no surer, no than is the coal of fire upon the ice, or hail-stone in the sun. your _virtue_ is, to make _him worthy_ whose _offence subdues him_, and curse that _justice_ did it. who deserves greatness deserves your hate: and your affections are a sick man's appetite, who desires most that which would increase his evil. _he_ that _depends_ upon your favours, _swims with_ fins of lead, and hews down _oaks_ with rushes. hang ye! trust ye? with every minute you do change a mind; [this is not the principle of _state_, whether in the many or the one]. and call _him_ noble, that was now your hate, _him_ vile, that was your garland. _what's the matter_, that in these several places of the city you cry against the noble senate, who, under the gods, keep you in awe, _which else would feed on one another_?--what's their seeking? _men_. for corn at their own rates; _whereof, they say, the city is well stor'd_. _mar_. hang 'em! they say? they'll sit by the fire, and presume to know what's done i' the capitol: who's like to rise, who thrives, and who declines: side factions, and give out _conjectural marriages; making parties strong_, and _feebling_ such _as stand not in their liking_, below their cobbled shoes. _they say, there's grain enough_? would the nobility lay aside their ruth, and let me use my sword, _i'd make a quarry with thousands of these quartered slaves_, as high as i could _prick my lance_. [the _altitude_ of his virtue;--the _measure_ of his greatness. that is the tableau of the first scene, in the first act of the play of the cure of the common-weal and the consulship.] _men_. nay, these are almost thoroughly persuaded; for though abundantly they lack discretion, yet are they passing cowardly. but i beseech you, what says the other troop? _mar_. they are _dissolved_: hang 'em! [footnote] _they said, they were an hungry; sigh'd forth proverbs_;-- that _hunger broke stone walls_; that, _dogs_ must eat; that _meat was made for mouths_; that the gods sent not corn for the rich men only:--with these shreds they vented their complainings; which being answer'd, and a petition granted them, _a strange one_, (to break the _heart of generosity_, _and make bold power look pale_,) they threw their caps as they would hang them on the horns o'the moon, _shouting their emulation_. [footnote: 'the history of henry vii.,' produced in the historical part of this work, but omitted here, contains the key to these readings.] _men_. what is granted them. _mar_. five tribunes _to defend their vulgar wisdoms_, of their own choice: one's junius brutus, sicinius velutus, and i know not--'sdeath! the rabble should have first unroof'd the city; ere so prevail'd with me; _it will in time win upon power, and throw forth greater themes_ for insurrection's arguing. [yes, surely it will. it cannot fail of it.] _men_. this is strange. _mar_. go, get you _home_, you _fragments_! [_fragments_.] [_enter a messenger_.] _mes_. where's caius marcius? _mar_. here; what's the matter? _mes_. the news is, sir, the volces are in arms. _mar_. i am glad on't; then we shall have means _to vent our musty superfluity:_--see, our best elders. [the procession from the capitol is entering with two of the new officers of the commonwealth, and the two chief men of the army, with other senators.] _first sen_. marcius, 'tis true, that you have lately told us; the volsces are in arms. _mar_. they have a leader, tullus aufidius, that will put you to't. i sin in envying _his nobility_: and were i anything but what i am, i would wish me only he. _com_. you have fought together. _mar_. were half to half the world by the ears, and _he upon my party, i'd revolt, to make only my wars with him_ [hear, hear]. he is a lion. that i am proud to _hunt_. _first sen_. _then_, worthy _marcius_, attend upon cominius to these wars. it is the relation of the spirit of military conquest, the relation of the military hero, and his government, to the true human need, which is subjected to criticism here; a criticism which is necessarily an after-thought in the natural order of the human development. the transition 'from the casque to the cushion,' that so easy step in the heroic ages, whether it be 'an entrance by conquest,' foreign or otherwise, or whether the chieftain's own followers bring him home in triumph, and the people, whose battle he has won, conduct him to their chair of state, in either case, that transition appears, to this author's eye, worth going back, and looking into a little, in an age so advanced in civilization, as the one in which he finds himself. for though he is, as any one who will take any pains to inquire, may easily satisfy himself,--the master in chief of the new science of nature,--and the deepest in its secrets of any, his views on that subject appear to be somewhat broader, his aspirations altogether of another kind, from those, to which his school have since limited themselves. he does not content himself with pinning butterflies and hunting down beetles; his scientific curiosity is not satisfied with classifying ferns and lichens, and ascertaining the proper historical position of pudding-stone and sand-stone, and in settling the difference between them and their neighbours. nature is always, in all her varieties wonderful, and all 'her infinite book of secrecy,' that book which all the world had overlooked till he came, was to his eye, from the first, a book of spells, of magic lore, a prospero book of enchantments. he would get the key to her cipher, he would find the lost alphabet of her unknown tongue; there is no page of her composing in which he would scorn to seek it--none which he would scorn to read with it: but then he has, notwithstanding, some _choice_ in his studies. he is of the opinion that some subjects are nobler than others, and that those which concern specially the human kind, have a special claim to their regard, and the secret of those combinations which result in the varieties of shell-fish, and other similar orders of being, do _not_ exclusively, or chiefly, engage his attention. there is another natural curiosity, which strikes the eye of the founder of the science of nature, as quite the most curious and wonderful thing going, so far, at least, as his observation has extended, though he is willing to make, as he takes pains to state, philosophical allowance for the partiality of species in determining this judgment, and is perfectly willing to concede, that if any particular species of shell-fish, for instance, were to undertake a science of things in general, that particular species would, no doubt, occupy the principal place in that system; especially if arts, tending to the improvement and elevation of it, were necessarily based on this larger specific knowledge. men, and their proceedings and organisms, men, and their habits and modes of combining, did appear to the eye of this scientific observer quite as well worth observing and noting, also, as bees and beavers, for instance, and their societies; and, accordingly, he made some observations himself, and notes, too, in this particular department of his general science. for, as he tells us elsewhere, he did not wish to map out the large fields of the science of observation in general, and exhibit to the world, in bare description, the method of it, without leaving some specimens of his own, of what might be done with it, in proper hands, under favourable circumstances, selecting for his experiments the principal and noblest subjects--those of the most immediate human concern. and he has not only very carefully laboured a few of these; but he has taken extraordinary pains to preserve them to us in their proper scientific form, with just as little of the ligature of the time on them as it was possible to leave. it is no kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science--his science of the nature of things in general, but that great spenserian monstrosity,--that diseased product of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of its natural pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield. it is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men,--it is that which takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator,--this founder of the science of things, and not of words instead of them. here is a man of science, a born naturalist, who understands that _this_ phenomenon lies in his department, and takes it to be his business, among other things, to examine it. it was, indeed, a formidable phenomenon, as it presented itself to his apprehension; and his own words are always the best, when one knows how to read them-- 'he sits in state, like a thing made for alexander.' 'when he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading.' 'he talks like a knell, his hum is a battery; what he bids be done, is finished at his bidding. he wants nothing of a god but eternity, and _a heaven_ to throne in.' 'yes,' is the answer; 'yes, _mercy_, if you paint him truly.' 'i paint him in character.' 'is it possible that so short a time can alter the conditions of a _man_?' inquires the speculator upon this phenomenon, and then comes the reply--'there's a differency between a grub and a butterfly, yet _your butterfly was a grub. this marcius is grown from_ man to dragon; he has wings, he is more than a creeping thing.' this is coriolanus at the head of his army; but in julius caesar, it is nature in the wildness of the tempest--it is a night of unnatural horrors, that is brought in by the poet to illustrate the enormity of the evil he deals with, and its unnatural character--'to serve as instrument of fear and warning unto _some_ monstrous state.' 'now could _i_, casca, name to _thee_ a man most like this dreadful night; that thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars as doth the lion in the capitol: a _man no mightier_ than thyself, or me, in _personal action, yet prodigious grown_, and fearful, as these strange eruptions are. _casca_. tis _caesar_ that you mean: is it not, cassius? [i paint him in character.] _cassius_. let it be--who it is: _for romans now_ have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors.' chapter iv. political retrospect. 'i think he'll be to rome as is the osprey to the fish, who _takes_ it by sovereignty of nature.' flower of warriors the poet finds, indeed, this monstrosity full-blown in his time. he finds it 'in the civil streets,' 'talking plain cannon', 'humming batteries' in the most unmistakeable manner, with no particular account of its origin to give, without, indeed, appearing to recollect exactly how it came there, retaining only a general impression, that a descent from the celestial regions had, in some way, been effected during some undated period of human history, under circumstances which the memory of man was not expected to be able to recall in detail, and a certificate to that effect, divinely subscribed, was understood to be included among its properties, though it does not appear to have been, on the face of it, so absolutely conclusive as to render a little logical demonstration, on the part of royalty itself, superfluous. it was not very far from this time, that a very able and loyal servant of the crown undertook, openly, to assist the royal memory on this delicate point; and, though the details of that historical representation, and the manner of it, are, of course, quite different from those of the play, it will be found, upon careful examination, not so dissimilar in purport as the exterior would have seemed to imply. the philosopher does not feel called upon, in either case, to begin by contradicting flatly, in so many words, the theory which he finds the received one on that point. even the _poet_, with all his freedom, is compelled to go to work after another fashion. 'and _thus_ do we, of wisdom, and of reach, with _windlasses_, and with assays of bias, by indirections find directions out.' he has his own way of creating an historical retrospect. no one need know that it _is_ a retrospect; no one will know it, perhaps, who has not taken the author's clue elsewhere. the crisis is already reached when the play begins. the collision between the civil want and the military government is at its height. it is a revolution on which the curtain rises. it is a city street filled with dark, angry swarms of men, who have come forth to seek out this government, in the person of its chief, who stop only to conduct their summary trial of it, and then hurry on to execute their verdict. but the poet arrests this revolution. before we proceed any further, 'hear _me_ speak,' he cries, through the lips of the plebeian leader. the man of science demands a hearing, before this movement proceed any further. he has a longer story to tell than that with which menenius agrippa appeases his romans. there is a cry of war in the streets. the obscure background of that portentous scene opens, and the long vista of the heroic ages, with all its pomp and stormy splendours, scene upon scene, grows luminous behind it. the foreground is the same. the arrested mutineers stand there still, with the frown knit in their angry brows, with the weapons of their civil warfare in their hands; there is no stage direction for a change of costume, and none perceives that they have grown older as they stand, and that the shadow of the elder time is on them. but the manager of this stage is one who knows that the elder time of history is the childhood of his kind. there is a cry of war in that ancient street. the enemy of the infant state is in arms. the people rush forth to conflict with the leader of armies at their head. but this time, for the first time in the history of literature, the philosopher goes with him. the philosopher, hitherto, has been otherwise occupied. he has been too busy with his fierce war of words; he has had too much to do with his abstract generals, his logical majors and minors, to get them in squadrons and right forms of war, to have any eye for such vulgar solidarities. 'all men are mortal. peter and john are men. therefore peter and john are mortal,' he concludes; but that is his nearest and most vivacious approach to historical particulars, and his cell is broad enough to contain all that he needs for his processes and ends. he finds enough and to spare, ready prepared to his hands, in the casual, rude, unscientific observations and spontaneous distinctions of the vulgar. his generalizations are obtained from their hasty abstractions. it has never occurred to him, till now, that he must begin with criticising these _terms_; that he must begin by making a new and scientific terminology, which shall correspond to _terms in nature_, and not be air-lines merely;--that he must take pains to collect them himself, from severest scrutiny of particulars, before ever he can arrive at 'the notions of nature,' the universal notions, which differ from the spontaneous specific notions of men, and their chimeras; before ever he can put man into his true relations with nature, before ever he can teach him to speak the word which she responds to,--the words of her dictionary--the word which is _power_. this is, in fact, the first time that the philosopher has undertaken to go abroad. it is the first time he has ever been in the army. softly, invisibly, he goes. there is nothing to show that he is there. as modestly, as unnoticed, as the times 'own correspondent,' amid all the clang and tumult, the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, he goes. but he is there notwithstanding. there is no breath of scholasticism, no perfume of the cell, that the most vigorous and robust can perceive, in his battle. the scene unwinds with all its fierce reality, undimmed by the pale cast of thought: the shout is as wild, the din as fearful, the martial fury rises, as if the old heroic poet had it still in hand. but it is not the poet's voice that you hear, bursting forth into those rhythmical ecstasies of heroic passion,--unless that faint tone of exaggeration,--that slight prolonging of it, be his. that mad joy in human blood, that wolfish glare, that lights the hero's eye, gets no reflection in his: those fiendish boasts are not from _his_ lips. through all the frenzy of that demoniacal scene, he is still himself, with all his _human_ sense about him. through all the crowded incidents of that day of blood--into which he condenses, with dramatic license, the siege and assault of the city, the conquest and plunder of it, and the conflict in the open field,--he is keeping watch on his hero. he is eyeing him, and sketching him, as critically as if he were indeed an entomological or botanical specimen. he is making a specimen of him, for scientific purposes,--not 'a preservation,'--he does not think much of dried specimens in science. he proposes to dismiss the logical peter and john, and the logical man himself, that abstract notion which the metaphysicians have been at loggerheads about so long. it is the true heroism,--it is the sovereign flower which he is in search of. this specimen that he is taking here will, indeed, go by the board. he is taking him on his negative table. but for _that_ purpose,--in order to get him on his 'table of rejections,' it is necessary to take him _alive_. the question is of government, of supreme power, and universal _suffrage_, of the abnegation of reason, of the annihilation of judgment, in behalf of a superiority which has been understood, heretofore, to admit of _no_ question. the question is of awe and reverence, and worship, and submission. the poet has to put his sacrilegious hand through the dust that lies on antique time, through the sanctity of prescription and time-honoured usage, through 'mountainous error' 'too highly heaped for truth to overpeer,' in order to make this point in his scientific table. and he wishes to blazon it a little. he will pin up this old exploded hero--this legacy of barbaric ages, to the ages of human advancement--in all his actualities, in all the heroic splendours of his original, without 'diminishing one dowle that's in his plume.' but this retrospect has not yet reached its limit. it is not enough to go back, in the unravelling of this business, to the full-grown hero on the field of victory. 'for that which, in speculative philosophy, corresponds to the cause in practical philosophy becomes the rule;' and it is the cure of the common weal, which the poet is proposing, and having determined to proceed specially against caius marcius, or against him _first_, he undertakes now to 'delve him to the root.' we are already on the battle field; but before ever a stroke is struck _there_, before he will attempt to show us the instinct of the warrior in his _game_,--'he is a lion that i am proud to hunt,'--when all is ready and just as the hunt is going to begin, he steals softly back to rome; he unlocks the hero's private dwelling, he lays open to us the secrets of that domestic hearth, the secrets of that nursery in which his hero had had his training; he shows us the breasts from which he drew that martial fire; he produces the woman alive who sent him to that field. [act , scene . _an apartment in the martial chieftain's house; two women, 'on two low stools, sewing_.' 'there is where your throne begins, whatever it be.'] in that exquisite relief which the natural graces of youth and womanhood provide for it, in the young, gentle, feminine wife, desolate in her husband's absence, starting at the rumour of news from the camp, and driving back from her appalled conception, the images which her mother-in-law's fearful speech suggests to her,--in that so beautiful relief, comes out the picture of the roman matron, the woman in whom the martial instincts have been educated and the gentler ones repressed, by the common sentiments of her age and nation, the woman in whom the common standard of virtue, the conventional virtue of her time, has annihilated the wife and the mother. _virgilia_. had he died in the business, madam, what then? _volumnia_. then his good report should have been my son, _i therein would have found issue_. it is the multiplied force of a common instinct in the nation, it is the pride of conquest in a whole people, erected into the place of virtue and usurping all its sanctity, which has entered this woman's nature and reformed its yielding principles. it is the _martial_ spirit that has subdued her, for she is virtuous and religious. it is her people's god to whom she has borne her son, and in his temple she has reared him. but the poet is not satisfied with all this. it is not enough to introduce us to the hero's mother and permit us to listen to her confidential account of his birth and training. he will produce the little coriolanus himself--coriolanus in germ--he will show us the rudiments of those instincts, which his unscientific education has stimulated into such monstrous 'o'ergrowth' (but _not_ enlightened), so that the hero on the battle-field who is winning there the oaken crown, which he will transmit if he can to his posterity, is only, after all, a boy overgrown,--a boy with his _boyishness unnaturally prolonged by his culture_,--the impersonation of the childishness of a childish time,--the crowned impersonation of the instinct which is sovereign in an age of instinct. he shows us the drum and the sword in the nursery, and the boy who would rather look at the military parade than his schoolmaster;--he shows us the little viperous egg of a hero torturing and tearing the butterfly, with his 'confirmed countenance, in one of his father's moods.' surely we have reached 'the grub' at last, 'the creeping thing' that will have one day imperial armies in its wings. and we return from this little excursion to the field again, in time for the battle; and when we see the tiger in the man let loose _there_, and the boy's father comes out in one of his _own_ moods, that we may note it the better; we begin to observe where we are in the human history, and what age of the advancement of learning it is that this poet is driving at so stedfastly, and trying to get dated; and whether it is indeed one from which the advancing ages of learning can accept the bourne of the human wisdom, the limit of that advance. 'and to speak _truly_ [and that after all _is_ the best way of speaking] _antiquitas seculi juventus mundi_.' 'those times are the ancient times, when the _world_ is ancient and not those we account ancient by a computation _backward_ from _ourselves_.'--_advancement of learning_. but that was put down in a book in which we have only general statements, very wise indeed, and both new and true, most exactly true, but not ready for practice, as the author stops to tell us, and it is practice he is aiming at. that is from a book in which we have only 'the husks and shells of sciences, _all the kernel_ being forced out,' as the author informs us, 'by the _torture and press_ of the method.' but it was a method which saved them, notwithstanding. this is the book that contains the 'nuts,' and _this_ is the kernel that goes in that particular shell or a corner of it, '_antiquitas seculi juventus mundi_.' there, on the spot, he shows us the process by which a king,--an historic king,--is made. he detects and brings out and blazons, the moment in which the inequality of fortune begins, in the division of the spoils of victory. his hero is _not_, as he takes pains to tell us, covetous,--_unless_ it be a sin to covet honour, if it be, he is the most offending soul alive;--it is because he is not mercenary, that his soldiers will enrich him. the poet shows us where the throne begins, and the machinery of that engine which the earth shrinks from when it moves. on his stage, it is the moment in which, the soldiers raise their victorious leader from his feet, and carry him in triumph above them. we are there at the ceremony, for this is selected, illuminated history; this, too, is what he calls 'visible history,' but amid all those martial acclamations and plaudits, the philosopher contrives to get in a word. 'he that has effected his _good will_, has o'ertaken my act.' from the field he tracks his hero to the chair of state. first we have the news of the victory in the city, and its effect:-- 'i'll report it where _senators_ shall mingle tears with smiles; where great _patricians_ shall attend, and _shrug_; i' the end admire; where ladies shall be frighted, and, gladly quaked, hear more; where the _dull tribunes_, that, with the fusty plebeians, hate thine honours, shall say against their hearts, we thank the gods _our rome_ hath such a soldier.' then we have the hero's return--the conqueror's reception; first in the city whose battle he has won, and afterwards his reception in the city he has conquered. here is the latter:-- 'your native town _you_ entered _like a post_, and had no welcomes home; but he returns, splitting the air with noises. and _patient fools_, _whose children he hath slain, their base throats tear_ with giving him glory.' 'a goodly city is this antium! city, 'tis _i_ that made thy widows; many an heir of _these fair edifices, 'fore my wars_ have i heard groan and droop. then know me not, lest that thy wives with spits, and boys with stones, in _puny battle slay me_.' [--_know me not--lest_--' 'let us kill him, and we will have _corn_, at our own price.'] but the poet does not forget that it is the proof of the military virtue, as well as the history of the military power, that he has undertaken; 'the touch of its nobility,' as he himself words it. he is trying it by his own exact scientific standard; he is putting the test to it which the new philosophy, which is the philosophy of nature, authorises. for, in truth, this philosopher, this civilian, is a little jealous of this simple virtue of valour, which he finds in his time, as in the barbaric ages, still in such esteem, as 'the chiefest virtue, and that which most dignifies the haver.' he is of opinion, that there may be some other profession, beside that of the sword, worth an honest man's attention; that, if the world were more enlightened, there would be another kind of glory, that would make 'the garland of war' shrivel. he thinks that _jupiter_, and _not mars_, should reign supreme: that there is another kind of distinction and leadership, better worth the public esteem, better deserving the popular gratitude and reverence. and when he has once taken an analysis of this kind in hand, he is not going to permit any scruples of delicacy to impair the operation. he will invade that graceful modesty in the hero, who shrinks from hearing his exploits narrated. he will analyse that blush, and show us chemically what its hue is made of. he will bring out those retiring honours from the haze and mist which the vague, unanalytic, popular notions, have gathered about them. tucked up in scarlet, braided with gold, under its forest of feathers, through all its pomp and blazonry, through all its drums; and trumpets, and clarions, undaunted by the popular cry, undaunted by that so potent word of 'patriotism' which guards it from invasion, he will search it out. for this purpose he will go a little nearer to it than is the heroic poet's wont. when the city is wild with the news of this great victory, and the streets are swarming at the tidings of the hero's approach, he will take _his_ stand with _the family party_, and beckon us to a place where we can listen to what is going on _there_, though the heroics and the blank verse must halt for it. the glee and fluster might appear to a cool spectator a little undignified; but then we are understood to be, like menenius, old friends of the family, and too much carried away with the excitement of the moment to be very critical. _volumnia_. honourable menenius, _my boy, marcius_, approaches. for the love of _juno_, let's go. _men_. ha! marcius coming home! _vol_. ay, worthy menenius, and with most prosperous _approbation_. _men. take my cap, jupiter_, and i thank thee. _hoo_! marcius coming home? _two ladies_. nay, 't is true. _vol_. look! here's a letter from him; _the state_ hath another, _his wife_ another, and i think there's one at home for _you_. _men_. i will make my very house reel to night:--a letter for me? _the wife_. yes, certainly, there a letter for you; i saw it. _men_. a letter for me! it gives me an estate of seven years' health; in which time i will make a lip at the physician ... is he not wounded? he was wont to come home wounded. _the wife_. oh, no, no, no! _the mother_. oh, he is wounded. i thank the gods for 't. _men_. so do i, too, if it be not too much:--_brings a victory in his pocket_: the wounds become him. _vol. on's brow_, menenius: he comes the third time home with _the oaken garland_. _men_.... is the senate possessed of this? _vol_. good ladies, let's go! yes, yes, yes: the senate has letters from the general, wherein he gives _my son_ the whole name of the war. _valeria_. in truth, there's wondrous things spoke of him. _men_. wondrous, ay, i warrant you... _vir_. the gods grant them true! _vol_. true? pow wow! _men_. true? i'll be sworn they are true. where's he wounded? [to the tribunes, who _come forward_.] marcius is coming home: he has--_more cause to be_--proud.--where is he wounded? _vol_. i' the shoulder, and i' the left arm: _there will be large cicatrices to shew the people_, when he shall stand for his place. he received in the repulse of _tarquin_ seven hurts i' the body. _men. one_ in the neck, and _two_ in the thigh,--there's _nine_ that _i_ know. _vol_. he had, before this last expedition, _twenty-five_ wounds upon him. _men_. now it's _twenty-seven_: every gash was an enemy's grave. [of course there is no satire intended here at all. this is a poet who does not know what he is about.] but now we come to the blank verse again; for at this moment the shout that announces the hero's entrance is heard; and, mingling with it, the martial tones of victory. _shout and flourish._ hark! the trumpets! _vol. these are the ushers of marcius: before him_ he carries noise; _behind him he leaves tears_. death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie; which being advanced, declines, and _then men die_. then comes the imposing military pageant. a sennet. trumpets sound, and enter the hero, '_crowned_' with his _oaken_ garland, sustained by the generals on either hand, with the victorious soldiers, and a herald proclaiming before him his victory. _herald_. know, rome, that all alone marcius did fight within corioli's gates: where he hath won with fame, a name to caius marcius; these in honour follows coriolanus: welcome to rome, renowned coriolanus! but while rome is listening to this great story, and the people are shouting his name, the demi-god catches sight of his mother and of his wife; and full of private duty and affection, he forgets his state, his garland stoops, the conqueror is on his knee, in filial submission. the woman had said truly, '_my boy_ marcius is coming home.' and when he greets the weeping virgilia, who cannot speak but with her tears, these are the words with which he measures that _private joy_-- would'st thou have laughed, had i come coffin'd home, that weep'st to see me triumph? ah, my dear, _such eyes_ the _widows_ in corioli wear, and _mothers_ that lack _sons_. no; these are the poet's words, rather--'such eyes.' _such_ eyes. it was the poet who could look through the barriers--those hitherto impervious barriers of an _enemy's town_, and see in it, at that moment, eyes as beautiful--eyes that had been 'dove's eyes,' too, to those who had loved them, wet with other tears,--mothers that loved _their_ sons, and 'lacked them'; it was the poet to whose _human_ sense those hard hostile walls dissolved and cleared away, till he could see the volscian wives clasping _their_ loves, as they 'came coffined home'; it was the poet who dared to stain the joy and triumph of that fond meeting, the glory and pride of that triumphal entry, with those _human_ thoughts; it was he who heard above the roll of the drum, and the swell of the clarions and trumpets, and the shout of the rejoicing multitude above the herald's voice--the groans of mortal anguish in the field, the cries of human sorrow in the city, the shrieks of mothers that lacked sons, the greetings of wives whose loves '_came coffined home_.' and he does not mind aggravating the intense selfishness, and narrowness, and stolidity of these private passions and affections of the individual to a truly unnatural and diabolical intensity, by charging on poor volumnia and marcius his own reminiscences; as if they could have dared to heighten their joy at that moment by counting its cost--as if they could have looked in the face--as if they could have comprehended, in its actual dimensions, the theme of their vulgar, _narrow_, unlearned exultation. but this is a trick this author is much given to, we shall find, when we come to study him carefully. he is not scrupulous on such points. he has a tolerable sense of the fitness of things, too. his dramatic conscience is as nice as another man's; but he is always ready to sin against it, when he sees reason. he is much like his own mr. slender in one respect, 'he will do anything in reason'; and his theory of the chief end of man appears to differ essentially from the one which our modern doctors of '_art_' propound incidentally in their criticisms. it is the mother who cries, when she catches the swell of the trumpets that announce her son's approach--'_these_ are the ushers of marcius. before him he carries noise.' it is the poet who adds, _sotto voce, 'behind him he leaves tears_.' 'you are three,' says menenius, after some further prolongation of these private demonstrations, addressing himself to the three victorious generals-- you are three, that rome _should_ dote on: yet, _by the faith_ of _men_, we _have_ some old crab-trees here at home, that will _not_ be grafted to your relish. yet welcome, warriors: we call a _nettle_ but a _nettle_; and the _faults_ of fools, but _folly_. but the herald is driving on the crowd; and considering how very public the occasion is, and how very, very private and personal all this chat is, it does appear to have stopped the way long enough. thus hurried, the hero gives hastily a hand 'to his wife and mother' [stage direction], but stops to say a word or two more, which has the merit of being at least to the poet's purpose, though the common-weal may appear to be lost sight of in the hero's a little; and that delicacy and reserve of manner, that modesty of nature, which is the characteristic of this poet's art, serves here, as elsewhere, to disguise the internal continuities of the poetic design. the careless eye will not track it in these finer touches. 'where some stretched-mouth rascal' would have roared you out his prescribed moral, 'outscolding termagant' with it, the poet, who is the poet of truth, and who would have such fellows 'whipped' out of the sacred places of art, with a large or small cord, as the case may be, is content to bring in his '_delicate burdens_,' or to keep sight of them, at least, with some such reference to them as this-- 'ere in _our own house_ i do shade my head, the good patricians must be visited; from whom i have received not only greetings but with them change of honours'--[_change_.] that is his visit to the state-house which he is speaking of. it is the capitol which is put down in _his_ plan of the city on his way to his own house. 'the state has a letter from him, and his wife another; and i think there is one for you, too.' volumnia understands that delicate intimation as to _the change_ of honours, and in return, takes occasion to express to him, on the spot, her views about the consulship, and the use to which the new cicatrices are to be converted. coriolanus replies to this in words that admit, as this poet's words often do, of a double construction; for the poet is, indeed, lurking under all this. he is always present, and he often slips in a word for himself, when his characters are busy, and thinking of their own parts only. he is very apt to make use of occasions for emphasis, to put in _one word_ for his speakers, and _two_ for himself. it is irregular, but he does not stand much upon precedents; it was the only way he had of writing his life then-- 'know, good mother, i had rather be _their servant in my way_, than _sway with them in theirs_. _cominius. on, to_ the capitol.' [_flourish cornets. exeunt in state, as before. the tribunes remain._] and when the great pageant has moved on 'in state, as before'--when the shouts of the people, and the triumphal swell and din, have died away, this is the manner in which our two tribunes look at each other. they know their voices would not make so much as a ripple, at that moment, in the tide of that great sea of popular ignorance, which it is their business to sway,--the tide which is setting all one way then, in one of _its_ monstrous swells, and bearing every living thing with it,--the tide which is taking the military hero '_on to_ the capitol.' but though they cannot then oppose it, they can note it. and it is thus that they register that popular confirmation at home, of the soldier's vote on the field. it is a picture of the hero's return, good for all ages in its living outline, composed in that 'charactery' which lays the past and future open. it is a picture good for the roman hero's entry; 'and were now the general of our gracious empress, as in _good time he may_, from ireland coming, bringing _rebellion_ broached _on his sword_'--would it, or would it not, suit him? it is a picture of the hero's return, good for all ages in its main feature, for all the ages, at least of a brutish popular ignorance, of a merely instinctive human growth and formation; but it is a picture taken from the life,--caught,--detained with the secret of that palette, whose secret none has yet found, and the detail is all, not _roman_, but, _elizabethan_. those '_variable complexions_,' that one sees, 'smothering the stalls, bulks, windows, filling the leads,' and roofs, even to the 'ridges,' all agreeing in one expression, are elizabethan. it is an elizabethan crowd that we have got into, in some way, and it is worth noting if it were only for that. there goes 'the seld shown flamen, _puffing_ his way to _win a vulgar station_,' here is a 'veiled dame' who lets us see that 'war of white and damask in her nicely gawded cheeks,' a moment;--look at that 'kitchen malkin,' peering over the wall there with 'her richest lockram' 'pinned on her reechy neck,' eyeing the hero as he passes; and look at this poor baby here, this elizabethan baby, saved, conserved alive, crying himself 'into a _rapture_' while his 'prattling nurse' has ears and eyes for the hero only, as 'she chats him.' look at them all, for every creature you see here, from 'the seld shown flamen' to the 'kitchen malkin,' belongs soul and body to 'our gracious empress,' and essex and raleigh are still winning their garlands of the war,--that is when the scene is taken, but not when it was put in its place and framed in this composition; for their game was up ere then. england preferred old heroes and their claims to new ones. 'i fear there will a worse come in his place,' was the cautious instinct. _bru_. all tongues speak of him, and the _bleared sights are spectacled to see him_: your _prattling_ nurse _into a rapture lets her baby cry_, while she chats him: the kitchin malkin pins her richest lockram 'bout her reechy neck. _clambering the walls_ to eye him: stalls, bulks, windows, are smother'd up, leads fill'd, and ridges horsed with _variable complexions; all agreeing in earnestness to see him: seld-shown flamens do press among the popular throng, and puff to win a vulgar station_: our veil'd dames commit the war of white and damask, in their nicely-gawded cheeks to the wanton spoil of phoebus' burning kisses: such a pother, as if that whatsoever god, who leads him, were slyly crept into his human powers, and gave him graceful posture. _sic_. on the sudden, i warrant him consul. _bru. then our office may, during his power, go sleep._ _sic. he cannot temperately transport his honours .... but will lose that he hath won._ _cru. in that there's comfort._ _sic_. doubt not, the _commoners, for whom we stand_,-- [while they resolve upon the measures to be taken, which we shall note elsewhere, a messenger enters.] _bru_. what's the matter? _mess_. you are sent for to the capitol. 'tis thought, that _marcius_ shall be consul: i have seen the dumb men throng to see him, and the blind to hear him speak: the matrons flung their gloves, _ladies_ and _maids_ the _scarfs_ and _handkerchiefs_, upon him as he passed: _the nobles bended, as to jove's statue; and the commons made a shower, and thunder_, with their _caps, and shouts_: i never saw the like. _bru. lets to the capitol; and carry_ with us _ears and eyes for_ the time, _but hearts_ for the event. [and let us to the capitol also, and hear the civic claim of the oaken garland, the military claim to dispose of the _common-weal_, as set forth by one who is himself a general 'commander-in-chief' of rome's armies, and see whether or no the poet's own doubtful cheer on the battle-field has any echo in this place.] _com. it is held, that valour is the chiefest virtue_, and _most dignifies the haver_: if it be, _the man i speak_ of cannot in the world be _singly_ counterpois'd. [if it be? and he goes on to tell a story which fits, in all its points, a great hero, a true chieftain, brave as heroes of old romance, who lived when this was written, concluding thus--] _com_. he _stopped the fliers_; and, by his rare example, made the coward turn terror into sport: _as waves before a vessel under sail_, so men obey'd, _and fell below his stem_: his sword, (death's stamp.) where it did mark, it took; _from face to foot he was a thing of blood, whose every motion was timed with dying cries_: alone he enter'd the mortal gate o'the city, which he painted with shunless destiny, aidless came off, and with a sudden re-enforcement struck corioli, like a planet: now, all's his: when by and by the din of war 'gan pierce his ready sense: then straight _his doubled spirit_ re-quicken'd what in flesh was fatigate, and to the battle came he; where he did _run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if 'twere a perpetual spoil_: and _till we call'd both field and city ours, he never stood to ease his breast with panting_. _men_. worthy man! _first sen. he cannot but with measure fit the honours which we devise him._ [one more quality, however, his pleader insists on, as additional proof of this '_fitness_' for though it is a negative one, its opposite had not been reckoned among the kingly virtues, and the poet takes some pains to bring that opposite quality into relief, throughout, by this negative.] _com_. our _spoils_ he kicked at; and look'd upon things precious, as they were the common muck o' the world. _men_. he's right noble; _let him be call'd for._ _first sen. call for coriolanus._ _off. he doth appear._ at the opening of this scene, two officers appeared on the stage, '_laying cushions_,' for this is one of those specimens of the new method of investigation applied to the noblest subjects, 'which represents, as it were, _to the eye_, the whole order of the invention,' and into the capitol stalks now the casque, for this is that 'step from the casque to the cushion' which the poet is considering in the abstract; but it does not suit his purpose to treat of it in these abstract terms merely, because 'reason cannot be so sensible.' this, too, is one of those grand historic moments which this new, select, prepared history must represent to the eye in all its momentous historic splendour, for this is the kind of popular instruction which reproduces the past, which represents the historic event, not in perspective, but as present. and this is the 'business,' and this is the play in which we are told 'action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant more learned than the ears.' the seats of state are prepared for him. 'call _coriolanus_,' is the senate's word. the conqueror's step is heard. 'he does appear.' _men_. the senate, coriolanus, are well pleased to make thee consul. _cor_. i do owe them still my life, and services. _men_. it then remains, that you do speak to the people. _cor_. i do beseech you, _let me overleap that custom_. _sic. sir, the people must have their voices; neither will they bate one jot of their ceremony._ _men. put them not to't_:--[his friendly adviser says.] pray you, go fit you _to the custom_; and take to you, _as your predecessors have_, your honour, with _your form_. _cor_. it is a part that i shall blush in acting, _and might well be taken from the people_. _bru. mark you that!_ _cor_. to brag unto them,--_thus i did, and thus_;-- show them the unaching scars which i should hide, as if i had received _them for the hire_ of _their breath only_. chapter v. the popular election. 'the greater part carries it. if he would but incline to the people, there never was a worthier man.' and yet, after all, that is what he wants for them, and must have or he is nothing; for as the poet tells us elsewhere, 'our monarchs and our outstretched heroes are but the beggar's shadows.' the difficulty is, that he wishes to take his 'hire' in some more quiet way, without being rudely reminded of the nature of the transaction. but the poet's toils are about him. the man of science has caught the hero, the king in germ; the dragon wings are not yet spread. he wishes to exhibit the embryo monarch in this particular stage of his development, and the scientific process proceeds with as little regard to the victim's wishes, as if he were indeed that humble product of nature to which the poet likens him. 'there's a differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub.' just on that step between 'the casque and the cushion,' the philosopher arrests him. for this history denotes, as we have seen, a foregone conclusion. the scholar has privately anatomized in his study the dragon's wings, and this theatrical synthesis is designed to be an instructive one. he wishes to show, in a palpable form, what _is_ and what is _not_, essential to the mechanism of that greatness which, though it presents itself to the eye in the contemptible physique, and moral infirmity and pettiness of the human individual, is yet clothed with powers so monstrous, so real, so terrific, that all men are afflicted with them;--this thing in which 'the conditions of a man are so altered,' this thing which 'has grown from man to dragon, which is more than a creeping thing.' he will show that after all it is nothing in the world but the _popular power_ itself, the power of the people instinctively, unscientifically and unartistically exercised. the poet has analysed that so potent name by which men call it, and he will show upon his stage, by that same method which his followers have made familiar to us, in other departments of investigation, the elements of its power. he will let us see how it was those despised 'mechanics,' those 'poor citizens,' with their strong arms and voices, who were throwing themselves,--in their enthusiasm,--en-masse into that engine, and only asking to be welded in it; that would have made of this citizen a thing so terrific. he will show how, after all, it was the despised _commons_ who were making of that citizen a king, of that soldier a monarch,--who were changing with the alchemy of the 'shower and thunder they made with their caps and voices,' his oak leaves and acorns, into gold and jewels. he will show it on the platform of a state, where that vote is formally and constitutionally given, and not in a state where it is only a virtual and tacit one. he will show it in detail. he will cause the multitude to be _represented_, and pass by _twos_ and _threes_ across his stage, and compel the haughty chief, the would be ruler, to beg of them, individually, their suffrages, and show them his claim,--such as it is, the '_unaching scars that he should hide_.' it is to this poet's purpose to exhibit that despised element in the state, which the popular submission creates, that unnoticed element of the common suffrage which looks so smooth on its surface, which seems to the haughty chief so little worth his notice, when it goes his way and bears him on its crest. but the experimenter will undertake to show what it is by ruffling it, by instigating this chief to put himself in the madness of his private affections, in the frenzy of his pride, into open opposition with it. he will show us what it is by playing with it. he will wake it from its unvisited depths, and bid his hero strive with it. he will show what that popular consent, or the consent of 'the commons' amounts to, in the king-making process, by _omitting it_ or by _withdrawing it_, before it is too late to withdraw it;--according to the now well-known rules of that new art of scientific investigation, which was then getting worked out and cleared, from this author's own methods of investigation. for it was because this faculty was in him, so unlike what it was in others, that he was able to write that science of it, by which other men, stepping into his armour, have been able to achieve so much. he will show how those dragon teeth and claws, that were just getting the steel into them, which would have armed that single will against the whole, and its _weal_, crumble for the lack of it; he will show us the new-fledged wings, with all their fresh gauds, collapsing and dissolving with that popular withdrawal. he will continue the process, till there is nothing left of all that gorgeous state pageant, which came in with the flourish of trumpets and the voice of the herald long and loud, and the echoing thunder of the commons, but a poor grub of a man, in his native conditions, a private citizen, denied even the common privilege of citizenship,--with only his wife and his mother and a friend or two, to cling to him,--turned out of the city gates, to seek his fortune. but that is the moment in which the poet ventures to bring out a little more fully, in the form of positive statement, that latent affirmation, that definition of the true nobility which underlies all the play and glistens through it in many a fine, but hitherto, unnoticed point; that affirmation which all these negatives conclude in, that latent idea of the true personal greatness and its essential relation to the common-weal and the state, which is the predominant idea of the play, which shapes all the criticism and points all the satire of it. it is there that the true hero speaks out for a moment from the lips of that old military heroism, of a greatness which does not cease when the wings of state drop off from it, of an honour that takes no stain though all the human voices join to sully it,--the dignity that rises and soars and gains the point of immutability, when all the world would have it under foot. but in that nobility men need training,--_scientific training_. the instinctive, unartistic human growth, or the empirical unscientific arts of culture, give but a vulgar counterfeit of it, or at best a poor, sickly, distorted, convulsive, unsatisfactory type of it, for 'being gentle, wounded,'--(and it is gentility and nobility and the true aristocracy that we speak of here,)--'craves a noble cunning;' so the old military chieftain tells us. it is a _cunning_ which his author does not put _him_ upon practising personally. practically he represents another school of heroes. it is the _word_ of that higher heroism in which he was himself wanting, it is the criticism on his own part, it is the affirmation which all this grand historic negative is always pointing to, which the author borrows his lips to utter. the result in this case, the overthrow of the military hero on his way to the chair of state, is occasioned by the _premature_ arrogance to which his passionate nature impels him. for his fiery disposition refuses to obey the decision of his will, and overleaps in its passion, all the barriers of that policy which his calmer moments had prescribed. the result is occasioned by his open display of his contempt for the people, before he had as yet mastered the organizations which would make that display, in an unenlightened age, perhaps, a safe one. this point of time is much insisted on, and emphasized. 'let them pull all about mine ears,' cries the hero, as he enters his own house, after his first encounter with the multitude in their wrath. 'let them pull all about mine ears, present me _death on the wheel_, or at wild horses' heels, or pile ten hills on the tarpeian rock that the precipitation might down stretch below the beam of sight, yet will i still-- _be_ thus _to them_.' [for that is the sublime conclusion of these heroics.] 'you do the _nobler_,' responds the coryphæus of that chorus of patricians who accompany him home, and who ought, of course, to be judges of nobility. but there is another approbation wanted. volumnia is there; but she listens in silence. 'i muse,' he continues-- 'i muse my mother does not approve me further--who was wont to call them woollen vassals, _things created to buy and sell with groats_; to show bare heads in _congregations_, to yawn, be still, and wonder, when one but of my _ordinance_ stood up to speak of peace or war. i talk of you [_to volumnia_.] why did you wish me milder? would you have me _false to my nature_? [_softly_] either say i _play_ the man i am. _vol_. o sir, sir, sir, i would have had you _put your power well on_, ere you had worn it out. _cor_. let go. _vol_. lesser had been the _thwarting of your dispositions_, if you had not shown them _how_ you were _disposed_ ere they lacked _power_ to cross you. _cor_. let them hang! _vol_. _ay, and_ burn _too_! for that was the '_disposition_' which these commons, if they had waited but a little longer, might have 'lacked _power to cross_.' that was the disposition they had thwarted. but then it is necessary to our purpose, as it was to the author's, to notice that the collision in this case is a _forced_ one. it grows by plot. the people are _put up to it_. for there are men in that commonwealth who are competent to instruct the commons in the doctrine of the _common weal_, and who are carefully and perseveringly applying themselves to that task; though they are men who know how to bide their time, and they will wait till the soaring insolence of the hero is brought into open collision with that enlightened popular will. they will wait till the military hero's quarrel with the commonwealth breaks out anew. for they know that it lies in the nature of things, and cannot but occur. the éclat of his victory, and the military pride of the nation, films it over for a time; but the quarrel is a radical one, and cannot be healed. for this chief of soldiers, and would-be head and ruler of the state knows no _commonwealth_. his soul is not large enough to admit of that conception. the walls of ignorance, that he shuts himself up in, darken and narrow his world to the sphere of his own _microcosm_,-- and, therefore, there is a natural war between the world and him. the _state_ of universal subjection, on the part of others, to his single exclusive passions and affections, the state in which the whole is sacrificed to the part, is the only state that will satisfy him. that is the peace he is disposed to conquer; that is the consummation with which he would _stay_; that is _his_ notion of _state_. when that consummation is attained, or when such an approximation to it as he judges to be within his reach, is attained, then, and not till then, he is for _conservation_;--_revolution then_ is sin; but, till then he will have change and overturning--he will fill the earth with rapine, and fire, and slaughter. but this is just the peace and war principle, which this man, who proposes a durable and solid peace, and the true state, a state constructed with reference to true definitions and axioms,--this is the peace and war principle which the man of science, on scientific grounds, objects to. 'he likes nor peace nor war' on those terms. the conclusions he has framed from those solid premises which he finds in the nature of things, makes him the leader of the opposition in both cases. in one way or another he will make war on that peace; he will kindle the revolutionary fires against that conservation. in one way or another, in one age or another, he will silence that war with all its pomp and circumstance, with all the din of its fifes, and drums, and trumpets. he will make over to the ignominy of ignorant and barbaric ages,--'for we call a nettle but a nettle,' he will turn into a forgotten pageant of the rude, early, instinctive ages, the yet brutal ages of an undeveloped humanity, that triumphant reception at home, of the conqueror of foreign states. he will undermine, in all the states, the ethics and religion of brute force, till men shall grow sick, at last, of the old, rusty, bygone trumpery of its insignia, and say, 'take away those baubles.' but the hero that we deal with here, is but the pure negation of that heroism which his author conceives of, aspires to, and will have, historical, which he defines as the pattern of man's nature in all men. this one knows no _common_-wealth; the wealth that is wealth in his eyes, is all his own; the weal that he conceives of, is the weal that is warm at his own heart only. at best he can go out of his particular only as far as the limits of his own hearthstone, or the limits of his clique or caste. and in his selfish passion, when that demands it, he will sacrifice the nearest to him. as to the commons, they are 'but things to buy and sell with groats,' a herd, a mass, a machine, to be informed with his single will, to be subordinated to his single wishes; in peace enduring the gnawings of hunger, that the garners their toil has filled may overflow for him,--enduring the badges of a degradation which blots out the essential humanity in them, to feed his pride;--in war offered up in droves, to win the garland of the war for him. that is the old hero's commonwealth. his small brain, his brutish head, could conceive no other. the ages in which he ruled the world with his instincts, with his fox-like cunning, with his wolfish fury, with his dog-like ravening,--those brute ages could know no other. but it is the sturdy european race that the hero has to deal with here; and though, in the moment of victory, it is ready always to chain itself to the conqueror's car, and, in the exultation of conquest, and love for the conqueror, fastens on itself, with joy, the fetters of ages, this quarrel is always breaking out in it anew: it does not like being governed with the edge of the sword;--it is not fond of martial law as a permanent institution. two very sagacious tribunes these old romans happen to have on hand in this emergency: birds considerably too old to be caught with this chaff of victory and military virtue, which puts the populace into such a frenzy, and very learnedly they talk on this subject, with a slight tendency to anachronisms in their mode of expression, in language which sounds a little, at times, as if they might have had access to some more recent documents, than the archives of mythical rome could just then furnish to them. but the reader should judge for himself of the correctness of this criticism. refusing to join in the military procession on its way to the capitol, and stopping in the street for a little conference on the subject, when it has gone by, after that vivid complaint of the universal prostration to the military hero already quoted, the conference proceeds thus:-- _sic_. on the sudden, i warrant him consul. _bru_. then _our office_ may, _during his power_, go sleep. _sic_. he cannot temperately transport his honours from where he should begin, and end; but will lose those that he hath won. _bru_. in _that_ there's comfort. _sic_. doubt not, the commoners, _for whom we stand_. but _they, upon their ancient malice_, will forget, with the least cause, these _his new honours_; which that he'll give them, make as little question as he is proud to do't. _bru_. i heard him swear, were _he_ to stand for consul, never would he appear i'the market-place, nor on him put the napless vesture of humility; nor, showing (as the _manner is_) his wounds to the people, beg their stinking breaths. _sic_. _'tis right_. _bru_. it was his word: o, he would miss it, rather than _carry it, but by the suit o'the gentry to him_, and the _desire of the nobles_. _sic_. _i wish no better_, than have him hold _that_ purpose, and to put it in execution. _bru_. 'tis most like he will. _sic_. it shall be to him then, as our good wills a sure destruction. _bru_. so it must fall out to him, or our authorities. for an end, we must suggest the people, in what hatred he still hath held them; that to his power he would _have made them mules, silenced their pleaders_, and dispropertied their freedoms: [--note the expression--] holding them, in human action and capacity, of no more soul _nor fitness for_ the world than camels in their war; who have their provand _only for bearing burdens, and sore blows for sinking under them_. _sic_. _this as you say, suggested at some time, when his soaring insolence shall teach the people_ (which time shall not want) _if he be put upon't_; and that's as easy as to set dogs on sheep; will be his fire _to_ kindle their dry stubble; and their blaze shall darken him for ever. [there is a history in all men's lives, figuring the nature of the times deceased, the which observed a man may prophesy, with a near aim of the main chance of things, as yet not come to life, which in their seeds and weak beginnings, lie intreasured: such things become the hatch and brood of time.--_henry iv_.] coriolanus, elected by the senate to the consulship, proposes, in his arrogance, as we have already seen, to dispense with the usual form, which he understands to be a form merely, of asking the consent of the people, and exhibiting to them his claim to their suffrages. the tribunes have sternly withstood this proposition, and will hear of 'no jot' of encroachment upon the dignity and state of the commons. after the flourish with which the election in the senate chamber concludes, and the withdrawal of the senate, again they stop to discuss, confidentially, 'the situation.' _bru_. you _see_ how he intends to use the people. _sic_. may _they perceive his intent_; he will require them as if he did contemn what they requested should be in their power to give. _bru_. come, we'll inform them of our proceedings here: on the market-place i know they do attend us. and to the market-place we go; for it is there that the people are collecting in throngs; no bats or clubs in their hands now, but still full of their passion of gratitude and admiration for the hero's patriotic achievements, against the common foe; and, under the influence of that sentiment, wrought to its highest pitch by that action and reaction which is the incident of the common sentiment in 'the greater congregations,' or 'extensive wholes,' eager to sanction with their 'approbation,' the appointment of the senate, though the graver sort appear to be, even then, haunted with some unpleasant reminiscences, and not without an occasional misgiving as to the wisdom of the proceeding. there is a little tone of the former meeting lurking here still. _first cit_. once, if he do require our voices, we ought not to deny him. _second cit_. we may, sir, if we will. _third cit_. we have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do. ingratitude is _monstrous_: and for the multitude to be ungrateful, were to make a monster of the multitude,-- [there are scientific points here. this term 'monstrosity' is one of the radical terms in the science of nature; but, like many others, it is used in the popular sense, while the sweep and exactitude of the scientific definition, or '_form_' is introduced into it.] --of the which, we, being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members. _first cit_. and to make us no better thought of, a little help will serve: for once, when we stood up about the corn, he himself stuck not to call us the _many_-headed multitude. _third cit_. we have been called so _of many_; not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, _but that our wits are so diversely coloured_: and truly i think, if all _our wits_ were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south; and _their consent_ of _one direct_ way should be at once to all the points o'the compass. [an enigma; but the sphinx could propound no better one. truly this man has had good teaching. he knows how to translate the old priestly etruscan into the vernacular.] _second cit_. think you so? which way, do you judge, my wit would fly? _third cit_. nay, _your wit_ will not so soon out as _another man's_ will, 'tis _strongly wedged up_ in a block-head: _but if it were at liberty_ ... _second cit_. you are never without your tricks:--... _third cit_. are you _all_ resolved to give your voices? _but that's no matter. the greater part carries it_. i say, if he would _incline to the people_, there was never a worthier man. [_enter coriolanus and menenius_.] here he comes, and in the _gown_ of _humility_; mark his behaviour. we are not to stay _all_ together, but to come by him where he stands, by ones, by twos, and by threes. he's to make his _requests by particulars_: wherein _every one of us has a single honour_, in giving him our own voices with our own tongues: _therefore_ follow me, and i'll direct you how you shall go by him. [the voice of the true leader is lurking here, and all through these scenes the '_double_' meanings are thickly sown.] _all_. _content, content!_ _men_. o sir, you are not right: have you not known the worthiest men have done it? _cor_. what must i say?-- i pray, sir?--plague upon't! i cannot bring my tongue to such a pace:--look, sir,--my wounds;-- i got them in my country's service, _when some certain of your brethren roar'd, and ran from the noise of_ our own drums. _men_. o me, the gods! _you must not speak of that_; you must desire them to think upon you. _cor_. think upon _me? hang 'em!_ i would they would forget me, _like the virtues_ which our _divines lose_ by them. _men_. _you'll mar all_; i'll leave you: pray you, speak to them, i pray you, in _wholesome_ manner. [and now, instead of being thronged with a mob of citizens--instructed how they are to go by him with the honor of their _single_ voices they enter 'by twos' and 'threes.'] [enter two citizens.] cor. bid them wash their faces, and keep their teeth clean._--so, here comes a _brace_, you know the cause, sir, of my standing here. _first cit_. we do, sir; _tell us what hath brought you to't_, _cor. mine own desert._--[the would-be consul answers.] _second cit_. your own desert? _cor_. ay, not mine own desire. [his _own_ desert has brought him to the consulship; his _own_ desire would have omitted the conciliation of the people, and the deference to their will, that with all his desert somehow he seems to find expected from him.] _first cit_. how! not your own desire! _cor_. no, sir. 'twas never my desire yet, _to trouble the poor with begging_. he desires what the poor have to give him however; but he desires to take it, without begging. but it is the heart of the true hero that speaks in earnest through that mockery, and the reference is to a state of things towards which the whole criticism of the play is steadfastly pointed, a state in which sovereigns were reluctantly compelled to beg from the poor, what they would rather have taken without their leave, or, at least, a state in which the _form_ of this begging was still maintained, though there lacked but little to make it a form only, a state of things in which a country gentleman might be called on to sell 'his brass pans' without being supplied, on the part of the state, with what might appear, to him, any respectable reason for it, putting his life in peril, and coming off, with a hair's-breadth escape, of all his future usefulness, if he were bold enough to question the proceeding; a state of things in which a poor law-reader might feel himself called upon to buy a gown for a lady, whose gowns were none of the cheapest, at a time when the state of his finances might render it extremely inconvenient to do so. but to return to the roman citizen, for the play is written by one who knows that the human nature is what it is in all ages, or, at least, until it is improved with better arts of culture than the world has yet tried on it. _first cit. you must think, if we give you anything, we hope to gain by you._ _cor. well then_, i pray, your price o'the consulship? _first cit_. the price is, sir, to ask it _kindly_. _cor. kindly_? sir, i pray let me ha't: i have wounds to show you, which shall be yours in private.--your good voice, sir; what say you? _second cit_. you shall have it, _worthy_ sir. _cor_. a _match_, sir: there is in all two worthy voices begg'd:-- _i have your alms_; adieu. _first cit_. but this is something _odd_. _second cit. an 'twere to give again_,--but 'tis no matter. [_exeunt two citizens_.] [_enter two other citizens_.] _cor_. pray you now, if it may stand with the tune of your voices, that i may be consul, i have here _the customary gown_. _third cit_. you have deserved nobly of your country, and you have not deserved nobly. _cor. your enigma_? _third cit_. you have been a _scourge to her enemies_, you _have been a rod to her friends_; you have _not_ indeed, loved the common people. _cor_. you should account me the more virtuous, that i have not been common in my love. i will, sir, flatter my sworn brother the people, to earn a dearer estimation of them; 'tis a condition _they account_ gentle: and since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, _i will practise_ the _insinuating nod_, and be _off to them most counterfeitly_; that is, sir, i will counterfeit the bewitchment of _some popular man, and give it bountifully to the desirers_. therefore, beseech you, i may be consul. _fourth cit_. we hope to find you _our friend_; and _therefore_ give you our voices heartily. _third cit_. you have received many wounds for your country. _cor_. i will not seal your knowledge with showing them. i will make much of your voices, and so trouble you no further. _both cit_. the gods give you joy, sir, heartily! [_exeunt_.] _cor_. most sweet voices!-- better it is to die, better to starve, ...rather than fool it so, let the high office and the honour go to one that would do thus.--i am half through; _the one part suffer'd, the other will i do_. [_enter three other citizens._] here come more voices,-- your voices: _for your_ voices _i have fought_: _watch'd_ for _your voices; for your voices, bear of wounds two dozen odd_; battles thrice six, i have seen and heard of; _for your voices_, done many things, _some less, some more_: your voices: _indeed, i would be consul_. _fifth cit_. he has done _nobly_, and _cannot go without any honest man's voice_. _sixth cit_. therefore let him be consul: the gods give him joy, and make him _good friend to the people_. _all_. amen, amen.-- _god save thee, noble_ consul! [_exeunt citizens_.] _cor_. worthy voices! [_re-enter menenius, with the tribunes brutus, and sicinius._] _men_. you have stood your limitation; and the tribunes endue you with the people's voice: _remains_, that in the _official marks_ invested, you _anon_ do meet the senate. _cor_. is this done? _sic_. the _custom_ of _request_ you have discharged: _the people do admit you_; and are _summon'd_ to meet anon, _upon your approbation_. _cor_. where? at the senate-house? _sic. there_ coriolanus. _cor. may i change these garments_? _sic_. you may, sir. _cor_. that i'll straight do, and _knowing myself again_, repair to the senate house. _men_. i'll keep you company.--will you along. _bru. we stay here for the people_. _sic_. fare you well. [_exeunt coriolanus and menenius_.] _he has it now_; and by his looks, methinks, 'tis warm at his heart. _bru. with a proud heart he wore his humble weeds_: will you dismiss the people? [this is the popular election: but the afterthought, the review, the critical review, is that which must follow, for this is not the same people we had on the stage when the play began. they are the same in person, perhaps; but it is no longer a mob, armed with clubs, clamouring for bread, rushing forth to kill their chiefs, and have corn at their own price. it is a people conscious of their political power and dignity, an organised people; it is a people with a constituted head, capable of instructing them in the doctrine of political duties and rights. it is the tribune now who conducts this review of the military hero's civil claims. it is the careful, learned tribune who initiates, from the heights of his civil wisdom, this great, popular veto, this deliberate 'rejection' of the popular affirmation. for this is what is called, elsewhere, 'a _negative_ instance.'] [_re-enter citizens_.] _sic_. how now, _my masters?_ have you chose this man? _first cit_. he has our _voices_, sir. _bru_. we pray the gods he may deserve your loves. _second cit_. amen, sir: to my poor unworthy notice, _he mocked us when he begg'd our voices_. _third cit_. certainly he flouted us downright. _first cit_. no, 'tis his kind of speech; he did not mock us. _second cit_. not one amongst us save yourself, but says, he used us _scornfully_: he should have show'd us his marks of merit, wounds received for his country. _sic_. why, so he did, i am sure. _cit_. no; no man saw 'em. [_several speak_.] _third cit_. he said he _had_ wounds which he could show in private; and with his hat, thus waving it in scorn, 'i _would be consul_,' says he,' aged custom, but by your voices, will not so permit me; _your voices_ therefore:' when we granted that, here was,--'i thank you for your voices,--thank you,-- your most sweet voices:--_now you have left your voices, i have no further with you:'--was not this mockery?_ _sic_. why, either, were you ignorant to see't? or, seeing it, of such _childish friendliness to yield your voices?_ _bru_. could you not have told him as you were lesson'd--when he had no power, but was a petty servant to the state, he was your enemy; ever spake _against_ _your_ liberties, and the charters that you bear _i'_ the body of the weal: and now arriving a _place of potency, and sway_ o' the state, if he should still malignantly remain _fast foe_ to the plebeii, _your voices might be_ curses _to_ yourselves. _sic_. thus to have said as you were fore-advised, had touched his spirit, and _tried_ his inclination; from him plucked, either his gracious promise, which _you might, as cause had called you up, have_ held him to; _or else_ it would have galled his surly nature, _which easily endures, not article tying him to aught_;--so putting him to rage, you should have ta'en advantage of his choler, and so left him unelected. [somewhat sagacious instructions for these old _roman_ statesmen to give, and not so very unlike those which english commons found occasion to put in execution not long after.] _bru_. did you perceive he did solicit you _in free contempt_, when he did need your loves; and do you think that his contempt shall not be bruising to you, when, he hath _power to crush_? why had your bodies _no heart among you_, or had you tongues to cry against the rectorship of--_judgment_? _sic_. have you ere now, _deny'd the asker_, and now again, on him that _did not ask, but mock_, [with a pretence of asking,] bestow your sued for tongues? _third cit_. he's not confirmed, _we may deny him_ yet. _second cit. and will deny him: i'll have five hundred voices of that sound_. _first cit. i_, twice five hundred, and their friends to _piece 'em_. _bru_. get you hence instantly, and _tell those friends_, they have chose a consul that will from them _take their liberties_, make them of no more voice than dogs, that are as often beat for barking, as kept to do so. _sic_. let them assemble, and on a safer judgment, all revoke your ignorant election. _bru_. lay a fault on _us, your tribunes_; that we laboured no impediment between, but that you _must_ cast your election on him. _sic_. say, you chose him more after our commandment, than as guided by your own true affections, and that your minds, _pre-occupied_ with what you rather _must_ do, than what you _should_, made you _against the grain_ to voice _him_ consul: lay the fault _on us_. _bru_. ay, spare us not. _say_ we read lectures to you, how youngly _he began to serve his country_, how long continued, and what _stock_ he springs of; the noble house o' the _marcians_, from whence came, that ancus martius, _numa's_ daughter's son, who, after _great hostilius_, here was _king_: of the same house publius and quintus were, _that our best water brought by conduits hither_; and censoriuus, _darling of the people_, and nobly named so, being _censor twice_, was his great ancestor. [of course this man has never meddled with the classics at all. his reading and writing comes by nature.] _sic. one thus_ descended, that hath _beside well in his person wrought_, to be set _high in place, we_ did commend to your remembrances; but _you have found, scaling his present bearing with his past_, that _he's_ your fixed _enemy_, and revoke _your sudden approbation_. _bru._. say you ne'er had done't,-- _harp on that still_,--but by _our putting on_, and _presently_ when you have drawn your number, repair to the capitol. _citizens_. [_several speak_.] we will so. almost all repent in their election. [exeunt citizens.] _bru_. let them go on. this mutiny were better put in hazard, than stay, past doubt, for greater; if, as his nature is, he fall in rage with their refusal, both observe and answer the vantage of his anger. _sic_. to the capitol: come, _we'll be there before the stream_ o' the people, _and this shall seem, as partly'tis, their own which_ we have goaded onward. [see the play of henry the _seventh_, founder of the elizabethan tyranny, by the same author.] we have witnessed the popular election on the scientific boards: we have seen, now, in all its scientific detail, the civil confirmation of the soldier's vote on the battle-field: we have seen it in the senate-chamber and in the market-place, and we saw it in 'the smothered stalls, and bulks, and windows,' and on 'the leads and ridges': we have seen and heard it, not in the shower and thunder that the commons made with their caps and voices only, but in the scarfs, and gloves, and handkerchiefs, which 'the ladies, and maids, and matrons threw.' we have seen each single contribution to this great public act put in by the poet's selected representative of classes. 'the kitchen malkin, with her richest lockram pinned on her neck, clambering the wall to eye him,' spake for hers; 'the seld-shown flamen, puffing his way to win a vulgar station,' was hastening to record the vote of his; 'the veiled dame, exposing the war of white and damask in her nicely-gawded cheeks to the spoil of phebus' burning kisses,' was a tribune, too, in this poet's distribution of the tribes, and spake out for the veiled dames; 'the prattling nurse' who will give her baby that is 'crying itself into a rapture there, while she chats him' her reminiscence of this scene by and by, was there to give the nurses' approbation. for this is the vote which the great tribune has to sum up and count, when he comes to review at last, 'in a better hour,' these spontaneous public acts--these momentous acts that seal up the future, and bind the unborn generations of the advancing kind with the cramp of their fetters. not less careful than this is the analysis when he undertakes to track to its historic source one of those practical axioms, one of those received beliefs, which he finds determining the human conduct, limiting the human history, moulding the characters of men, determining beforehand what they shall be. this is the process when he undertakes, to get one of these rude, instinctive, spontaneous affirmations--one of those idols of the market or of the tribe--reviewed and criticised by the heads of the tribe, at least, 'in a better hour,'--criticised and rejected. 'proceeding by negatives and exclusion first': this is the form in which this tribune puts on record his scientific veto of that 'ignorant election.' and in this so carefully selected and condensed combination of historical spectacles--in this so new, this so magnificently illustrated political history--there is another historic moment to be brought out now; and in this same form of 'visible history,' one not less important than those already exhibited. in the scene that follows, we have, in the poet's arrangement, the great historic spectacle of a people 'revoking their ignorant election,' under the instigation and guidance of those same remarkable leaders, whose voice had been wanting (as they are careful to inform us) till then in the business of the state; leaders who contrive at last to inform the people, in plain terms, that they 'are at point to lose their liberties,' that 'marcius will have all from them,' and who apologise for their conduct afterwards by saying, that 'he affected one sole throne, _without assistance_'; for the time had come when the tribune could repeat the poet's whisper, 'the _one_ side shall have _bale_.' this so critical spectacle is boldly brought out and exhibited here in all its actual historical detail. it is produced by one who is able to include in his dramatic programme the whole sweep of its eventualities, the whole range of its particulars, because he has made himself acquainted with the forces, he has ascended, by scientifically inclusive definition, to the 'powers' that are to be 'operant' in it; and he who has that 'charactery' of nature, may indeed 'lay the future open.' we talk of prophecy; but there is nothing in literature to compare at all with this great specimen of the prophecy of induction. there is nothing to compare with it in its grasp of particulars, in its comprehension and historic accuracy of detail. but this great speech, which he entreats for leave to make before that revolutionary movement, which in its weak beginnings in his time lay intreasured, should proceed any further--this preliminary speech, with its so vivid political illustration, is not yet finished. the true doctrine of an instructed scientific election and government, that 'vintage' of politics--that vintage of scientific definitions and axioms which he is getting out of this new kind of history--that new vintage of the higher, subtler fact, which this fine selected, adapted history, will be made to yield, is not yet expressed. the fault with the popular and instinctive mode of inquiry is, he tells us, that _it begins with affirmation_--but that is the method for gods, and not men--men must begin with negations; they must have tables of _review_ of instances, tables of negation, tables of rejection; and _divide_ nature, not with fire, but with the mind, that divine fire. 'if the mind attempt this affirmation from the first,' he says, '_which it always will when left to itself_ there will spring up _phantoms, mere theories_, and _ill-defined notions, with axioms requiring daily correction_. these will be better or worse, according to the power and strength of the understanding which creates them. but it is only for god to recognise forms affirmatively, at the first glance of contemplation; _men_ can only proceed first by negatives, and then to conclude with affirmatives, after every species of rejection.' and though he himself appears to be profoundly absorbed with the nature of heat, at the moment in which he first produces these new scientific instruments, which he calls tables of _review_, and explains their 'facilities,' he tells us plainly, that they are adapted to _other subjects_, and that those affirmations which are most essential to the welfare of man, will in due time come off from them, practical axioms on matters of universal and incessant practical concern, that will not want _daily correction_, that will not want revolutionary correction, to fit them to the exigency. the question here is not of 'heat,' but of sovereignty; it is the question of the _consulship_, regarded from the ground of the tribuneship. it is not coriolanus that this tribune is spending so much breath on. the _instincts_, which unanalytic, barbaric ages, enthrone and mistake for greatness and nobility, are tried and rejected here; and the business of the play is, to get them excluded from the chair of state. the philosopher will have those instincts which men, in their 'particular and private natures,' share with the lower orders of animals, searched out, and put in their place in human affairs, which is _not_, as he takes it, the head--the head of the common-weal. it is not coriolanus; the author has no spite at all against him--he is partial to him, rather; it is not _coriolanus_ but the instincts that are on trial here, and the man--the so-called _man_--of instinct, who has no principle of state and sovereignty, no principle of true _man_liness and nobility in his soul; and the trial is not yet completed. the author would be glad to have that revolution which he has inserted in the heart of this play deferred, if that were possible, though he knows that it is not; he thinks it would be a saving of trouble if it could be deferred until some true and scientifically prepared notions, some practical axioms, which would not need in their turn fierce historical correction--revolutionary correction--could be imparted to the _common mind_. but we must follow him in this process of _division_ and exclusion a little further, before we come in our plot to the revolution. that revolution which he foresees as imminent and inevitable, he has put on paper here: but there is another lurking within, for which we are not yet ripe. this locked-up tribune will have to get abroad; he will have to get his limits enlarged, and find his way into some new departments, before ever _that_ can begin. chapter vi. the scientific method in politics. 'if any man think philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that all professions are _from thence_ served and supplied.' _advancement of learning_. 'we leave room on every subject for the human or optative part; for it is a part of science to make judicious inquiries and wishes.' _novum organum_. as to the _method_ of this new kind of philosophical inquiry, which is brought to bear here so stedfastly upon the most delicate questions, at a time when the play-house was expressly forbidden by a royal ordinance, on pain of dissolution, to touch them--in an age, too, when parliaments were lectured, and brow-beaten, and rudely sent home, for contumaciously persisting in meddling with questions of _state_--in an age in which prelates were shrilly interrupted in the pulpit, in the midst of their finest and gravest sunday discourse, and told, in the presence of their congregations, to hold their tongues and mind their own business, if they chanced to touch upon 'questions of church,' on a day when the head of the church herself, in her own sacred person, in her largest ruff, and 'rustling' in her last silk, happened to be in her pew;--as to the _method_ of the philosophical investigations which were conducted under such critical conditions, of course there was no harm in displaying _that_ in the abstract, as a _method_ merely. as a method of _philosophical_ inquiry, there was no harm in presenting it in a tolerably lucid and brilliant manner, accompanying the exhibition with careful, and _apparently specific_, directions as to the application of it to indifferent subjects. there was no harm, indeed, in blazoning this method a little, and in soliciting the attention of the public, and the attention of mankind in general, to it in a somewhat extraordinary manner, not without some considerable blowing of trumpets. as a method of _philosophical inquiry_, merely, what earthly harm could it do? surely there was no more innocent thing in nature than 'your philosophy,' then, so far as any overt acts were concerned; it certainly was the last thing in the world that a king or a queen need trouble their heads about then. who cared what methods the philosophers were taking, or whether this was a new one or an old one, so that the men of letters could understand it? the modern solomon was fain to confess that, for his part, he could not--that it was beyond his depth; whereas the history of _henry the seventh_, by the same author, appeared to him extremely clear and lively, and quite within his range, and to _that_ he gave his own personal approbation. the other work, however, as it was making so much noise in the world, and promising to go down to posterity, would serve to adorn his reign, and make it illustrious in future ages. there was no harm in this philosopher's setting forth his _method_ then, and giving very minute and strict directions in regard to its applications to 'certain subjects.' as to what the author of it did with it himself--that, of course, was another thing, and nobody's business but his own just then, as it happened. so totally was the world off its guard at the moment of this great and greatest innovation in its practice--so totally unaccustomed were men then to look for anything like _power_ in the quarter from which this seemed to be proceeding--so impossible was it for this single book to remove that previous impression--that the author of the novum organum could even venture to intersperse these directions, with regard to its specific and particular applications, with pointed and not infrequent allusions to the comprehensive nature--the essentially comprehensive nature--of '_the machine_' whose application to these _certain instances_ he is at such pains to specify; he could, indeed, produce it with a continuous side-long glance at this so portentous quality of it. nay, he could go farther than that, and venture to assert openly, over his own name, and leave on record for the benefit of posterity, _the assertion_ that this new method of inquiry _does apply_, directly and primarily, to those questions in which the human race are _primarily concerned_; that it strikes at once to the heart of those questions, and was invented to that end. such a certificate and warranty of the new machine was put up by the hands of the inventor on the face of it, when he dedicated it to the human use--when he appealed in its behalf from the criticism of the times that were near, to those that were far off. nay, he takes pains to tell us; he tells us in that same moment, what one who studies the novum organum with the key of '_times_' does not need to be told--can see for himself--that in his _description of the method_ he has already contrived to _make the application_, the _universal_ practical _application_. in his prerogative instances, the mind of man is brought out already from its specific narrowness, from its own abstract logical conceits and arrogant prenotions, into that collision with fact--the broader fact, the universal fact--and subjected to that discipline from it which is the intention of this logic. it is a 'machine' which is meant to serve to man as a '_new' mind_--the scientific mind, which is in harmony with nature--a mind informed and enlarged with the universal laws, the laws of kinds, instead of the spontaneous uninstructed mind, instead of the narrow specific mind of a barbaric race, filled with its own preposterous prenotions and vain conceits, and at war with universal nature; boldly pursuing its deadly feud with _that_, priding itself on it, making a virtue of it. it is a machine in which those human faculties which are the gifts of god to man, as the instruments of his welfare, are for the first time scientifically conjoined. it is a machine in which _the senses_, those hitherto despised instruments in _philosophy_, by means of a scientific rule and oversight, and with the aid of scientific instruments, are made available for philosophic purposes. it is a machine in which that organization whereby the universal nature _impresses_ itself on us--reports itself to us--striking its incessant telegraphs on us, whether we read them or not, is for the first time brought to the philosopher's aid; and it is a machine, also, by which _speculation_, that hitherto despised instrument in _practice_, is for the first time, brought to the aid of the man of practice. it is doubly 'new': it is a machine in which speculation becomes practical--it is a machine in which practice becomes scientific. [_fool_. canst thou tell why a man's nose stands in the middle of his face? _lear_. no. _fool_. why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what he cannot smell out, he may spy into.] in 'the prerogative instances,' the universal matter of _fact_ is already taken up and disposed of in grand masses, under these headships and chief cases, not in a miscellaneous, but scientific manner. the nature of things is all there; for this is a logic which bows the mind of man to the law of the universal nature, and _informs_ and enlarges it with that. it is not a logic merely in the old sense of that term. the old logic, and the cobwebs of metaphysics that grew out of it, are the things which this machine is going to puff away, with the mere whiff and wind of its inroads into nature, and disperse for ever. it is not a logic merely as logic has hitherto been limited, but a philosophy. a logic in which the general 'notions of nature' which are _causes_, powers, simple powers, elemental powers, true differences, are substituted for those spontaneous, rude, uncorrected, _specific_ notions,--_pre_-notions of men, which have in that form, as they stand thus, no correlative in nature, and are therefore impotent--not true _terms_ and _forms_, but air-words, air-lines, merely. it is a logic which includes the mind of nature, and her laws; and not one which is limited to the mind of _man_, and so fitted to its _incapacity_ as to nurse him in his natural ignorance, to educate him in his born foolery and conceit, to teach him to ignore by rule, and set at nought the infinite mystery of nature. the universal history, all of it that the mind of man is constituted to grasp, is here in the general, under these prerogative instances, in the luminous order of the inventor of this science, blazing throughout with his genius, and the mind that has abolished its prenotions, and renounced its rude, instinctive, barbaric tendencies, and has taken this scientific organum instead; has armed itself with the nature of things, and is prepared to grapple with all specifications and particulars. the author tells us plainly, that those seemingly pedantic arrangements with which he is compelled to perplex his subject in this great work of his, the work in which he openly introduces his innovation,--as that--will fall off by and by, when there is no longer any need of them. they are but the natural guards with which great nature, working in the instinct of the philosophic genius, protects her choicest growth,--the husk of that grain which must have times, and a time to grow in,--the bark which the sap must stop to build, ere its delicate works within are safe. they are like the sheaths with which she hides through frost and wind and shower, until their hour has come, her vernal patterns, her secret toils, her magic cunning, her struggling aspirations, her glorious successes, her celestial triumphs. in the midst of this studious fog of scholasticism, this complicated network of superficial divisions, the man of humour, who is always not far off and ready to assist in the priestly ministrations as he sees occasion, gently directs our attention to those more simple and natural divisions of the subject, and those more immediately practical terms, which it might be possible to use, under certain circumstances, in speaking of the _same subjects_, into which, however, _these_ are easily resolvable, as soon as the right point of observation is taken. through all this haze, he contrives to show us confidentially, the outline of those grand natural divisions, which he has already clearly produced--under their scholastic names, indeed,--in his book of the advancement of learning; but which he cannot so openly continue, in a work produced professedly, as a practical instrument fit for application to immediate use, and where the true application is constantly entering the vitals of subjects too delicate to be openly glanced at then. but he gives us to understand, however, that he _has_ made the application of this method to practice, in a much more _specific, detailed_ manner, in another place, that he _has_ brought it down from those more general forms of the novum organum, into 'the nobler' departments, 'the more chosen' departments of that universal field of human practice, which the novum organum takes up in its great outline, and boldly and clearly claims in the general, though when it comes to specific applications and particulars, it does so stedfastly strike, or appear to strike, into that one track of practice, which was the only one left open to it then,--which it keeps still as rigidly as if it had no other. he has brought it out, he tells us, from that trunk of 'universality,' and carried it with his own hand into the minutest points and fibres of particulars, those points and fibres, those living articulations in which the grand natural divisions he indicates here, naturally terminate; the divisions which the philosopher who 'makes the art and practic part of life, the _mistress_ to his theoric,' must of course follow. he tells us that he _has_ applied it to particular arts, to those departments of the human experience and practice in which the need of a _rule_ is most felt, and where things have been suffered to go on hitherto, in a specially miscellaneous manner, and that his axioms of practice in these departments have been so scientifically constructed from particulars, that he thinks they will be apt to know their way to particulars again;--that their specifications are at the same time so comprehensive and so minute, that he considers them fit for immediate use, or at least so far forth fitted, as to require but little skill on the part of the practitioner, to insure them against failure in practice. the process being, of course, in this application to the exigencies of practice, necessarily disentangled from those technicalities and relics of the old wordy scholasticism in which he was compelled to incase and seal up his meanings, in his _professedly_ scientific works, and especially in his professedly _practical_ scientific work. but these so important applications of his philosophy to practice, of which he issues so fair a prospectus, though he frequently _refers_ to them, could not then be published. the time had not come, and personally, he was obliged to leave, before it came. he was careful, however, to make the best provision which could be made, under such circumstances, for the carrying out of his intentions; for he left a will. these works of _practice_ could not then be published; and if they could have been, there was no public then ready for them. they could not be _published_; but there was nothing to hinder their being put under cover. there was no difficulty to a man of skill in packing them up in a portable form, under lids and covers of one sort and another, so unexceptionable, that all the world could carry them about, for a century or two, and not perceive that there was any harm in them. very curiously wrought covers they might be too, with some taste of the wonders of mine art pressing through, a little here and there. they might be put under a very gorgeous and attractive cover in one case, and under a very odd and fantastic one in another; but in such a manner as to command, in both cases, the admiration and wonder of men, so as to pique perpetually their curiosity and provoke inquiry, until the time had come and the key was found. 'some may raise this question,' he says, talking as he does sometimes in the historical plural of his philosophic chair,--'_this question, rather than objection_,'--[it was much to be preferred in that form certainly]--'whether we talk of perfecting natural philosophy alone, according to our method, or _the other sciences such as_--ethics, logic, politics.' a pretty _question_ to raise just then, truly, though this philosopher sees fit to take it so demurely. 'whether we talk of _perfecting politics_ with our method,' elizabethan politics,--and not politics only, but whether we talk of _perfecting 'ethics'_ with it also, and 'logic,--common logic,' which last is as much in need of perfecting as anything, and the beginning of perfecting of that is the reform in the others. 'we certainly intend,'--the emphasis here is on the word '_certainly_,' though the reader who has not the key of the times may not perceive it; 'we certainly intend to comprehend them all.' for this is the author whose words are most of them emphatic. we must read his sentences more than once to get all the emphasis. we certainly intend to comprehend them all. 'we are not vain promisers,' he says, emphasizing _that_ word in another place, and putting this intention into the shape of a _promise_. and as _common logic which regulates matters_ by syllogism is applied, not only to natural, but to every other science, so our inductive method _likewise_, comprehends them _all_.--again--[he thinks this bears repeating, repeating in this connection, for now he is measuring the claims of this new method, this _new logic_, with the claims of that which he finds in possession, regulating matters by syllogism, not producing a very logical result, however:] 'for we form a history, and tables of invention, for anger, fear, shame, and the like,' [that is--we _form_ a _history_ and tables of _invention_ for the passions or affections,] 'and _also_ for examples in civil life, and the mental operations ... as well as for heat, cold, light, vegetation and the like,' and he directs us to the fourth part of the instauration, which he reserves for his noblest and more chosen subjects for the confirmation of this assertion. '_but_ since our method of interpretation, after preparing and arranging a history, does not content itself with examining _the opinions and desires_ of the mind--[hear]--like common logic, but also inspects the nature of things, we so regulate the mind that it may be enabled to _apply itself_, in every respect, correctly to _that nature_.' our _examples_ in this part of the work, which is but a small and preparatory part of it, are limited, as you will observe, to _heat, cold, light, vegetation_, and _the like_; but this is the explanation of the general intention, which will enable you to disregard that circumstance in your reading of it.--those examples will serve their purpose with the minds that they detain. they are preparatory, and greatly useful, if you read this new logic from the height of this explanation, you will have a mind, formed by that process, able to apply itself, in every respect, correctly to the subjects omitted here by name, but so clearly claimed, not as the proper subjects only, but as the _actual_ subjects of the new investigation. but lest you should not understand this explanation, he continues--'_on this account_ we deliver _necessary_ and _various_ precepts in _our doctrine of interpretation_, so that we may apply, in some measure, to the method of discovering _the quality and condition of the subject matter of investigation_.' and this is the apology for omitting here, or _seeming_ to omit, _such sciences as_ ethics, politics, and that science which is alluded to under the name of _common logic_. this is, indeed, a very instructive paragraph, though it is a gratuitous one for the scholar who has found leisure to read this work with the aid of that doctrine of _interpretation_ referred to, especially if he is already familiar with its particular applications to the noble subjects just specified. among the prerogative instances--'suggestive instances' are included--'such as _suggest or_ point out _that_ which is _advantageous to mankind_; for _bare power_ and _knowledge_ in _themselves exalt_, rather than _enrich_, human nature. _we shall have a better opportunity of discovering these, when we treat of the application to practice._ besides, in the work of interpretation, we leave room on every subject for the _human or optative_ part; for it is a part of science, to make judicious inquiries and wishes.' 'the _generally_ useful instances. they are such as relate to various points, and _frequently occur_, sparing by that means _considerable labour_ and _new trials_. the proper place for speaking of _instruments_, and _contrivances_, will be that in which we speak of _application to practice_, and the _method_ of experiment. _all that has hitherto been ascertained and made use of_, will be applied in the particular history of each art.' [we certainly intend to _include_ them all, such as ethics, politics, and common logic.] 'we have now, therefore, exhibited the species, or _simple elements_ of the _motions_, _tendencies_, and _active powers_, which are most universal in nature; and no small portion of natural, _that is_, universal science, has been _sketched out_. we do _not_, however, deny _that_ other instances can, _perhaps, be added_' (he has confined himself chiefly to the physical agencies under this head, with a sidelong glance at others, now and then), 'and our _divisions changed_ to some _more natural order_ of _things_ [hear], and also reduced to a _less number_ [hear], in which respect we do _not_ allude to any _abstract_ classification, as if one were to say,'--and he quotes here, in this apparently disparaging manner, his own grand, new-coined classification, which he has drawn out with his new method from the heart of nature, and applied to the human,--which he had to go into the universal nature to find, that very classification which he has exhibited _abstractly_ in his advancement of learning--_abstractly_, and, therefore, without coming into any dangerous contact with any one's preconceptions,--'as if one were to say, that bodies desire the _preservation, exaltation_, propagation, or fruition of their natures; or, that motion tends to the preservation and benefit, either of the universe, as in the case of the motions of _resistance_ and _connection_--those two _universal_ motions and tendencies--or of extensive wholes, as in the case of those of the _greater congregation_.' these are phrases which look innocent enough; there is no offensive approximation to particulars here, apparently; what harm can there be in the philosophy of 'extensive wholes,' and 'larger congregations'? nobody can call that meddling with 'church and state.' surely one may speak of the nature of things in general, under such general terms as these, without being suspected of an intention to innovate. 'have you heard the argument?' says the king to hamlet. 'is there no offence in it?' 'none in the world.' but the philosopher goes on, and does come occasionally, even here, to words which begin to sound at little suspicious in such connexions, or would, if one did not know how _general_ the intention must be in this application of them. they are _abstract_ terms, and, of course, nobody need see that they are a different kind of abstraction from the old ones, that the grappling-hook on all particulars has been abstracted in them. suppose one were to say, then, to resume, 'that motion tends to the preservation and benefit, either of _the universe_, as in the case of the motions of _resistance_ and _connection_, or of _extensive wholes_, as in the case of the motions of _the greater congregation_-- [what are these motions, then?]--revolution and abhorrence of change, or of _particular forms_, as in the case of _the others_.' this looks a little like growing towards a point. we are apt to consider these motions in certain _specific_ forms, as they appear in those extensive wholes and larger congregations, which it is not necessary to name more particularly in this connection, though they are terms of a 'suggestive' character, to borrow the author's own expression, and belong properly to subjects which this author has just included in his system. but this is none other than his own philosophy which he seems to be criticising, and rating, and rejecting here so scornfully; but if we go on a little further, we shall find what the criticism amounts to, and that it is only the limitation of it to _the general statement_--that it is _the abstract_ form of it, which he complains of. he wishes to direct our attention to the fact, that he does not consider it good for anything in that general form in which he has put it in his book of learning. this is the deficiency which he is always pointing out in that work, because this is the deficiency which it has been his chief labour to supply. till that defect, that grand defect which his philosophy exhibits, as it stands in his books of abstract science, is supplied--that defect to which, even in these works themselves, he is always directing our attention--he cannot, without self-contradiction, propound his philosophy to the world as a practical one, good for human relief. in order that it should accomplish the ends to which it is addressed, it is not enough, he tells us in so many words, to exhibit it in the abstract, in general terms, for these are but 'the husks and shells of sciences.' it must be brought down and applied to those artistic reformations which afflicted, oppressed human nature demands--to those artistic constructions to which human nature spontaneously, instinctively tends, and empirically struggles to achieve. 'for _although_,' he continues,'_such remarks_--those last quoted--_be_ just, _unless they terminate in_ matter and construction, _according to the_ true definitions, _they are_ speculative, and of little use.' but in the novum organum, those more natural divisions are reduced to a form in which it is _possible to commence practice_ with them at once, in certain departments, where there is no objection to _innovation_,--where the proposal for the relief of the human estate is met without opposition,--where the new scientific achievements in the conquest of nature are met with a universal, unanimous human plaudit and gratulation. '_in the meantime_,' he continues, after condemning those abstract terms, and declaring, that unless they terminate in _matter and construction, according_ to _true definitions_, they are _speculative_, and of _little use_--'_in the meantime, our classification will suffice_, and be of much use in the consideration of the predominance of powers, and examining the wrestling instances, which constitute our present subject.' [the subject that was _present_ then. the question.] so that the novum organum presents itself to us, in these passages, only as a preparation and arming of the mind for a closer dealing with the nature of things, in particular instances, which are _not_ there instanced,--for those more critical 'wrestling instances' which the scientific re-constructions, according to true definitions, in the higher departments of human want will constitute,--those _wrestling_ instances, which will naturally arise whenever the philosophy which concerns itself experimentally with the question of the predominance of powers--the philosophy which includes in its programme the practical application of the principles of revolution and abhorrence of change, in 'greater congregations' and 'extensive wholes,' as well as the principles of _motion_ in 'particular forms'--shall come to be applied to its nobler, to its noblest subjects. that is the philosophy which dismisses its technicalities, which finds such words as these when the question of the predominance of powers, and the question of revolution and abhorrence of change in the greater congregations and extensive wholes, comes to be practically handled. this is the way we philosophise 'when we come to particulars.' 'in _a rebellion_, when what's _not meet_, but what must be, was law, then were they chosen. in a better hour, let what _is meet_ be said it must be _meet_, and _throw their power in the dust_.' that is what we should call, in a _general_ way, 'the motion of revolution' in our book of abstractions; this is the moment in which it _predominates_ over 'the abhorrence of change,' if not in the extensive whole--if not in _the whole_ of the greater congregation, in that part of it for whom this one speaks; and this is the critical moment which the man of science makes so much of,--brings out so scientifically, so elaborately in this experiment. but this is a part of science which he is mainly familiar with. here is a place, for instance, where the motion of particular forms is skilfully brought to the aid of that larger motion. here we have an experiment in which these petty motives come in to aid the revolutionary movement in the minds of the leaders of it, and with their feather's weight turn the scale, when the abhorrence of change is too nicely balanced with its antagonistic force for a predominance of powers without it. 'but for my single self, i had as lief not be, as live to be in awe of such a thing as _i_ myself. i was born free as caesar; so were you. * * * * * why man, he doth bestride the narrow world _like a colossus_; and we, petty men, walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves _dishonorable graves_. the fault, dear brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. _brutus_ and _caesar_. what should be in _that caesar_? why should that name be sounded more than yours? conjure with them; _brutus_ will start a spirit as soon as _caesar_. _now in the name_ of _all the gods at once_, _upon what meat doth this our_ caesar _feed, that he is grown so great_? age, _thou_ art shamed: rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods. when went there by an age, since the great flood, but it was famed with more than with one man? when could they say, till now, that talked of _rome_, that _her wide walls_ encompassed _but one man_? _now_ is it _rome indeed_, and _room enough_, when there is in it but _one only man_. * * * * * what you would work me to, i have some aim; _how i have thought of this_, and of _these times_, i shall recount hereafter. now could _i_, casca, _name_ to thee a man most like this dreadful night; that thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars as doth the lion in the capitol, a man no mightier than thyself, or me, in personal action; yet _prodigious_ grown, and _fearful as these strange eruptions are_.' ''t is caesar _that you mean_: is it _not_, cassius?' 'let it be--who it is: for romans now have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors. * * * * * poor man, i know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the romans are but sheep. _he_ were no _lion, were not romans hinds. those that with haste will make a mighty fire, begin it_ with--weak straws. what _trash_ is--rome what rubbish, and what offal, _when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as_--caesar. but-- _i_ perhaps _speak this_ before a willing bondman. and here is another case where the question of the predominance of powers arises. in this instance, it is the question of _british_ freedom that comes up; and the _tribute_--not the tax--that a caesar--the first caesar himself, had exacted, is refused 'in a better hour,' by a people kindling with ancestral recollections, throwing themselves upon their ancient rights, and '_the natural bravery of their isle_,' and ready to re-assert their ancient liberties. the ambassador of augustus makes his master's complaint at the british court. the answer of the state runs thus, king, queen and prince taking part in it, as the poet's convenience seems to require. 'this tribute,' complains the roman; 'by thee, lately, is left untendered.' _queen_. and, to kill the marvel, shall be so ever. _prince cloten_. _there be many caesars_, ere such another julius. britain is _a world by itself_; and we will nothing pay, for wearing our own noses. [_general principles_.] _queen_. that opportunity _which then they had to take from us, to resume we have again._ remember, sir, my liege, [it is the people who are represented here by cymbeline.] _the kings your ancestors_; together with the natural bravery of your isle; which stands as neptune's park, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscaleable, and roaring waters; with sands, that will not bear your enemies' boats, but suck them up to the top-mast. * * * * * _cloten_. come, there's no more tribute to be paid: _our kingdom is stronger_ than it was at that time; and, as _i said_, there is no more _such_ caesars: _other_ of them _may have crooked noses_; but, to owe _such straight arms_, none. _cymbeline_. son, let your mother end. _cloten. we have yet many among us can gripe as hard as cassibelan_: i do not say, i am one; but i have a hand.--why tribute? why should we pay tribute? if caesar can hide the sun from us with a blanket, or put the moon in his pocket, we will pay him tribute for light; else, sir, no more tribute, pray you now. _cymbeline_. you must know, till the _injurious romans_ did extort this tribute from us, _we were free: caesar's ambition_ .... against all colour, here did put the yoke upon us; which to _shake off_, becomes a warlike people, _whom we reckon_ _ourselves to be_. we do say then to caesar, _our_ ancestor was that mulmutius, _which ordained_ our laws, whose use the sword of caesar _hath too much mangled_; whose repair and franchise, shall, by the power we hold, be _our good deed_. mulmutius _made our laws_, who was the first of britain which did put his brows within a golden crown, and called _himself_ a king. that is the tune when the caesar comes this way, to a people who have such an ancestor to refer to; no matter what costume he comes in. this is caesar in britain; and though prince cloten appears to incline naturally to prose, as the medium best adapted to the expression of his views, the blank verse of cymbeline is as good as that of brutus and cassius, and seems to run in their vein very much. it is in some such terms as these that we handle those universal motions on whose balance the welfare of the world depends--'the motions of _resistance_ and _connection_,' as the elizabethan philosopher, with a broader grasp than the newtonian, calls them--when we come to the diagrams which represent particulars. this is the kind of language which this author adopts when he comes to the modifications of those motions which are incident to extensive wholes in the case of the greater congregations; that is, '_revolution_' and '_abhorrence of change_,' and to those which belong to _particular forms_ also. for it is the science of life; and when the universal science touches the human life, it will have nothing less vivacious than this. it will have the _particular of life_ here also. it will not have abstract revolutionists, any more than it will have abstract butterflies, or bivalves, or univalves. this is the kind of 'loud' talk that one is apt to hear in this man's school; and the clash and clang that this very play now under review is full of, is just the noise that is sure to come out of his laboratory, whenever he gets upon one of these experiments in 'extensive wholes,' which he is so fond of trying. it is the noise that one always hears on his stage, whenever the question of 'particular forms' and _predominance of powers comes_ to be put experimentally, at least, _in this class_ of 'wrestling instances.' for we have here a form of composition in which that more simple and natural order above referred to is adopted--where those clear scientific classifications, which this author himself plainly exhibits in another scientific work, though he disguises them in the novum organum, are again brought out, no longer in the abstract, but grappling the matter; where, instead of the scientific technicalities just quoted--instead of those abstract terms, such as 'extensive wholes,' 'greater congregation,' 'fruition of their natures,' and the like--we have terms not less scientific, the equivalents of these, but more living--words ringing with the detail of life in its scientific condensations--reddening with the glow, or whitening with the calm, of its ideal intensities--pursuing it everywhere--everywhere, to the last height of its poetic fervors and exaltations. and it is because this so vivid popular science has its issue from this 'source'--it is because it proceeds from this scientific centre, on the scientific radii, through all the divergencies and refrangibilities of the universal beam--it is because all this inexhaustible multiplicity and variety of particulars is threaded with the fibre of the universal science--it is because all these thick-flowering imaginations, these 'mellow hangings,' are hung upon the stems and branches that unite in the trunk of the _prima philosophia_--it is because of this that men find it so prophetic, so inclusive, so magical; _this_ is the reason they find _all_ in it. 'i have either told, or designed to tell, _all_,' says the expositor of these plays. 'what i cannot speak, i point out with my finger.' for all the building of this genius is a building on that scientific ground-plan he has left us; and that is a plan which includes all _the human_ field. it is the plan of the _great instauration_. chapter vii. volumnia and her boy. 'my boy _marcius_ approaches.' 'why should i war without the walls of troy, that find such cruel battle here within? each trojan that is master of his heart, let him to field.' is not the ground which _machiavel_ wisely and largely discourseth concerning governments, that the way to establish and _preserve_ them, is to reduce them _ad principia_; a rule in religion and nature, _as well as_ in civil administration? [again.] was not _the persian_ magic a _reduction_ or correspondence of the _principles_ and _architectures_ of nature to the rules and policy of governments?'--['_questions to be asked_.']--_advancement of learning_. it is by means of this popular rejection of the hero's claims, which the tribunes succeed in procuring, that the poet is enabled to complete his exhibition and test of the virtue which he finds in his time 'chiefest among men, and that which most dignifies the haver'; the virtue which he finds in his time rewarded with patents of nobility, with patrician trust, with priestly authority, with immortal fame, and thrones and dominions, with the disposal of the human welfare, and the entail of it to the crack of doom--no matter what 'goslings' the law of entail may devolve it on. he makes use of this incident to complete that separation he is effecting in the hitherto unanalysed, ill-defined, popular notions, and received and unquestioned axioms of practice--that separation of the instinctive military heroism, and the principle of the so-called heroic greatness, from the true principles of heroism and nobility, the true principle of subjection and sovereignty in the individual human nature and in the common-weal. that _martial_ virtue has been under criticism and suspicion torn the beginning of this action. it was shown from the first--from that ground and point of observation which the sufferings of the diseased common-weal made for it--in no favourable light. it was branded in the first scene, in the person of its hero, as 'a dog to the commonalty.' it is one of the wretched 'commons' who invents, in his distress, that title for it; but the poet himself exhibits it, not descriptively only, but dramatically, as something more brutish than that--eating the poor man's corn that the gods have sent him, and gnawing his vitals, devouring him soul and body, 'tooth and fell.' it was shown up from the first as an instinct that men share with 'rats'. it was brought out from the first, and exhibited with its teeth in the heart of the common-weal. the play begins with a cross-questioning in the civil streets, of that sentiment which the hasty affirmations of men enthrone. it was brought out from the first--it came tramping on in the first act, in the first scene--with its sneer at the commons' distress, longing to make 'a quarry of the _quartered_ slaves, as high' as the plumed hero of it 'could prick his lance'; and that, too, because they rebelled at famine, as slaves will do sometimes, when the common notion of hunger is permitted to instruct them in the principle of new unions; when that so impressive, and urgent, and unappeasable teacher comes down to them from the capitol, and is permitted by their rulers to induct them experimentally into the doctrine of 'extensive wholes,' and 'larger congregations,' and 'the predominance of powers.' and it so happened, that the threat above quoted was precisely the threat which the founder of the reigning house had been able to carry into effect here a hundred years before, in putting down an insurrection of that kind, as this author chanced to be the man to know. but the cry of the enemy is heard without; and this same principle, which shows itself in such questionable proofs of love at home, becomes with the change of circumstances--patriotism. but the poet does not lose sight of its identity under this change. this love, that looks so like hatred in the roman streets, that sniffs there so haughtily at questions about corn, and the price of 'coals,' and the price of labour, while it loves rome so madly at the volscian gates--this love, that sneers at the hunger and misery of the commons at home, while it makes such frantic demonstrations against the _common_ enemy abroad, appears to him to be a very questionable kind of _love_, to say the least of it. in that fine, conspicuous specimen of this quality, which the hero of his story offers him--this quality which the hostilities of nations deify--he undertakes to sift it a little. while in the name of that virtue which has at least the merit of comprehending and conserving a larger unity, a more extensive whole, than the limit of one's own personality, 'it runs reeking o'er the lives of men, as 'twere a perpetual spoil'; while under cover of that name which in barbaric ages limits human virtue, and puts down upon the map the outline of it--the bound which human greatness and virtue is required to come out to; while in the name of _country_ it shows itself 'from face to foot a thing of blood, whose every motion is timed with dying cries,' undaunted by the tragic sublimities of the scene, this poet confronts it, and boldly identifies it as that same principle of state and nobility which he has already exhibited at home. that sanguinary passion which the heat of conflict provokes is but the incident; it is the principle of _acquisition_, it is the natural principle of absorption, it is the instinct that nature is full of, that nature is alive with; but the one that she is at war with, too--at war with in the parts--one that she is forever opposed to, and conquering in the members, with her mathematical axioms--with her law of the whole, of 'the worthier whole,' of 'the greater congregation'; it is that principle of acquisition which it is the business of the state to set bounds to in the human constitution--which gets branded with _other_ names, very vulgar ones, too, when the faculty of grasp and absorption is smaller. that, and none other, is the principle which predominates, and is set at large here. the leashed 'dog' of the commonalty at home, is let slip here in the conquered town. the teeth that preyed on the roman weal there, have elongated and grown wolfish on the volscian fields. the consummation of the captor's deeds in the captured city--those matchless deeds of valor--the consummation for _coriolanus_ in _corioli_, for 'the _conqueror_ in the _conquest_,' is--'now all's his.' and the story of the battle without is--'he never stopped to ease his breast with panting, till he could call both field and city--ours.' the poet sets down nought in malice, but he will have the secret of this love, he will have the heart out of it--this love that stops so short with geographic limits,--that changes with the crossing of a line into a demon from the lowest pit. but it is a fair and noble specimen, it is a highly-qualified, 'illustrious instance,' of this instinctive heroic virtue, he has seized on here, and made ready now for his experiment; and even when he brings him in, reeking from the fresh battlefield, with the blood undried on his brow, rejoicing in his harvest, even amid the horrors of the conquered town, this poet, with his own ineffable and matchless grace of moderation, will have us pause and listen while _his_ coriolanus, ere he will take food or wine in _his_ corioli, gives orders that the volscian who was kind to him personally--the poor man at whose house he lay--shall be saved, when he is so weary with slaying volscians that 'his very memory is tired,' and he cannot speak his poor friend's name. he tracks this conqueror home again, and he watches him more sharply than ever--this man, whose new name is borrowed from his taken town. coriolanus of corioli. _marcius_, plain _caius marcius_, now no more. he will think it treason--even in the conquered city he will resent it--if any presume to call him by that petty name henceforth, or forget for a breathing space to include in his identity the town--the town, that in its sacked and plundered streets, and dying cries--that, with that 'painting' which he took from it so lavishly, though he scorned the soldiers who took 'spoons'--has clothed him with his purple honours: those honours which this poet will not let him wear any longer, tracked in the misty outline of the past, or in the misty complexity of the unanalysed conceptions of the vulgar, the fatal unscientific _opinion_ of the many-headed many; that old coat of arms, which the man of science will trace now anew (and not here only) with his new historic pencil, which he will fill now anew--not here only--which he will fill on another page also, 'approaching his particular more near'--with all its fresh, recent historic detail, with all its hideous, barbaric detail. he is jealous,--this new poet of his kind,--he is jealous of this love that makes such work in volscian homes, in volscian mother's sons, under this name, 'that men sanctify, and turn up the white of the eyes to.' he flings out suspicions on the way home, that it is even _narrower_ than it claims to be: he is in the city before it; he contrives to jet a jar into the sound of the trumpets that announce its triumphant entry; he has thrown over all the glory of its entering pageant, the suspicion that it is base and mercenary, that it is base and _avaricious_, though it puts nothing in its pocket, but takes its hire on its brows. _menenius_. brings a victory in his pocket. _volumnia_. on's brows menenius. he surprises the mother counting up the cicatrices. he arrests the cavalcade on its way to the capitol, and bids us note, in those private whispers of family confidence, how the camp and the capitol stand in this hero's chart, put down on the road to 'our own house.' nay, he will bring out the haughty chieftain in person, and show him on his stage, standing in his 'wolfish gown,' showing the scars that _he should hide_, and asking, like a mendicant, for his hire. and though he does it proudly enough, and as if he did not care for this return, though he sets down his own services, and expects the people to set them down, to a disinterested love for his _country_, it is to this poet's purpose to show that he was mistaken as to that. it is to his purpose to show that these two so different things which he finds confounded under one name and notion in the popular understanding here, and, what is worst of all, in the practical understanding of the populace, are two, and not one. that the mark of the primal differences, the original differences, the difference of things, the simplicity of nature herself divides them, makes two of them, two,--not one. he has caught one of those rude, vulgar notions here, which he speaks of elsewhere so often, those notions which make such mischief in the human life, and he is severely separating it--he is separating the martial virtue--from the true heroism, 'with the mind, that divine fire.' he is separating this kind of heroism from that cover under which it insinuates itself into governments, with which it makes its most bewildering claim to the popular approbation. he is bound to show that the true love of the common-weal, that principle which recognises and embraces the weal of others as its own, that principle which enters into and constitutes each man's own noblest life, is a thing of another growth and essence, a thing which needs a different culture from any that the roman volumnia could give it, a culture which unalytic, barbaric ages--wanting in all the scientific arts--could not give it. he will show, in a conspicuous instance, what that kind of patriotism amounts to, in the man who aspires to 'the helm o' the state,' while there is yet no state within himself, while the mere instincts of the lower nature have, in their turn, the sway and sovereignty in him. he will show what that patriotism amounts to in one so schooled, when the hire it asks so disdainfully is withheld. and he will bring out this point too, as he brings out all the rest, in that large, scenic, theatric, illuminated lettering, which this popular design requires, and which his myth furnishes him, ready to his hand. he will have his 'transient hieroglyphics,' his _tableaux vivants_, his 'dumb-shows' to aid him here also, because this, too, is for the spectators--this, too, is for the audience whose eyes are more learned than their ears. it is a natural hero, one who achieves his greatness, and not one who is merely born great, whom the poet deals with here. 'he has that in his face which men love--_authority_.' 'as waves before a vessel under sail, so men obey him and fall below his stern.' the romans have stripped off his wings and turned him out of the city gates, but the heroic instinct of greatness and generalship is not thus defeated. he carries with him that which will collect new armies, and make him their victorious leader. availing himself of the pride and hostility of nations, he is sure of a captaincy. his occupation is not gone so long as the unscientific ages last. the principle of his heroism and nobility has only been developed in new force by this opposition. he will have a new degree; he will purchase a new patent of it; he will _forge_ himself a new and _better_ name, for 'the patricians are called _good_ citizens.' he will forget corioli; _coriolanus_ now no more, he will conquer _rome_, and incorporate that henceforth in his name. he will make himself great, not by the grandeur of a true citizenship and membership of the larger whole, in his private subjection to it,--not by emerging from his particular into the self that comprehends the whole; he will make himself great by subduing the whole to his particular, the greater to the less, the whole to the part. he will triumph over the common-weal, and bind his brow with a new garland. that is his magnanimity. he will take it from without, if they will not let him have it within. he will turn against that country, which he loved so dearly, that same edge which the volscian hearts have felt so long. 'there's some among you have _beheld_ me fighting,' he says. 'come, _try upon yourselves_ what you have _seen me_?' he is only that same narrow, petty, pitiful private man he always was, in the city, and in the field, at the head of the roman legions, and in the legislator's chair, when, to right his single wrong, or because the people would not let him have _all_ from them, he comes upon the stage at last with volscian steel, and sits down, captain of the volscian armies, at rome's gates. 'this morning,' says menenius, after the reprieve, 'this morning for ten thousand of your throats, i'd not have given a doit.' but this is only the same 'good citizen' we saw in the first scene, who longed to make a quarry of _thousands of the quartered slaves_, as high as he could prick his lance! that was 'the altitude of his virtue' _then_. it is the same citizenship with its conditions altered. so well and thoroughly has the philosopher done his work throughout--so completely has he filled the roman story with his 'richer and bolder meanings,' that when the old, familiar scene, which makes the denouement of the roman myth, comes out at last in the representation, it comes as the crowning point of this poet's own invention. it is but the felicitous artistic consummation of the piece, when this hero, in his conflicting passions and instincts, gives at last, to one private affection and impulse, the state he would have sacrificed to another; when he gives to his boy's prattling inanities, to his wife's silence, to the moisture in her eyes, to a shade less on her cheek, to the loss of a line there, to his mother's scolding eloquence, and her imperious commands, the great city of the gods, the city he would have offered up, with all its sanctities, with all its household shrines and solemn temples, as one reeking, smoking holocaust, to his wounded honour. that is the principle of the citizenship that was 'accounted good' when this play began, when this play was written. 'he was a kind of nothing, _titleless_,-- till he had forged himself _a name_ i' the fire _of burning rome_.' that is his modest answer to the military friend who entreats him to spare the city. 'though soft-conscienced men may be content to say _it was for his country_, he did it to please his mother, and to be partly proud.' surely that starving citizen who found himself at the beginning of this play, 'as lean as a rake' with this hero's legislation, and in danger of more fatal evils, was not so very wide of the truth, after all, in his surmise as to the principles of _the heroic statesmanship_ and _warfare_, when he ventured thus early on that suggestion. the state banished him, as an enemy, and he came back with a volscian army to make good that verdict. but his sword without was not more cruel than his law had been within. it was not starving only that he had voted for. '_let them hang_,' ay--(_ay_) 'and burn too,' was 'the disposition' they had 'thwarted',--measuring 'the quarry of _the quartered slaves_,' which it _would_ make, 'would the nobility but lay aside their ruth.' that was the disposition, that was the ignorance, the blind, brutish, demon ignorance, that 'in good time' they had thwarted. they had ruled it out and banished it from their city on pain of death, forever; they had turned it out in its single impotence, and it came back '_armed_;' for this was one of rude nature's monarchs, and outstretched heroes. yet is he conquered and defeated. the enemy which has made war without so long, which has put corioli and rome in such confusion, has its warfare within also, and it is there that the hero is beaten and slain. for there is no state or fixed sovereignty in his soul. both sides of the city rise at once; there is a fearful battle, and the red-eyed mars is dethroned. the end which he has pursued at such a cost is within his reach at last; but he cannot grasp it. the city lies there before him, and his dragon wings encircle it; there is steel enough in the claws and teeth now, but he cannot take it. for there is no law and no justice of the peace, and no general within to put down the conflict of changeful, _warring selfs_, to suppress the mutiny of mutually opposing, mutually _annihilating_ selfish dictates. in vain he seeks to make his will immutable; for the single passion has its hour, this 'would-do' changes. with the impression the passion changes, and the purpose that is _passionate_ must alter with it, unless pure obstinacy remain in its place, and fulfil the annulled dictate. for _such_ purpose, one person of the scientific drama tells us--one who had had some dramatic experience in it,-- 'is but _the slave to memory_, of violent birth, and poor validity, which now, like fruit unripe, stick on the tree, but fall unshaken when they mellow be. what to ourselves _in passion_ we propose, _the passion ending doth the purpose lose_.' that is hamlet's verbal account of it, when he undertakes to reduce his philosophy to rhyme, and gets the player to insert some sixteen of his lines quietly into the court performance: that is his _verbal_ account of it; but _his_ action, too, speaks louder and more eloquently than his words. the principle of identity and the true self is wanting in this so-called _self_-ishness. for the true principle of self is the peace principle, the principle of _state_ within and without. '_to thine own self be true, and it must follow as_ the night the day, _thou canst not then be false to any man_' that is the doctrine, the scientific doctrine. but it is not the passionate, but thoughtful hamlet, shrinking from blood, with his resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of _conscientious_ thought; it is not the humane, conscience-fettered hamlet, but the man who aspires to make his single humours the law of the universal world, in whom the poet will show now this want of state and sovereignty. he steels himself against cominius; he steels himself against menenius. 'he sits in gold,' cominius reports, '_his eye red_ as 'twould burn rome'--a small flambeau the poet thinks for so large a city. 'he no more remembers his mother than an eight year old horse,' is the poor old menenius querulous account of him, when with a cracked heart he returns and reports how the conditions of a man are altered in him: but while he is making that already-quoted report of this superhuman growth and assumption of a divine authority and honour in the military chieftain, the poet is quietly starting a little piece of philosophical machinery that will shake out that imperial pageant, and show the slave that is hidden under it, for it is no _man_ at all, but, in very deed, a slave, as hamlet calls it, '_passion's slave_,' 'a pipe for fortune's finger _to sound what stop she please_.' for that _state_,--that command--depends on that which '_changes_,'-- fortuities, impressions, nay, it has the principle of revolution within it. it is its nature to change. the single passion cannot engross the large, many-passioned, complex nature, so rich and various in motivity, so large and comprehensive in its surveys--the single passion seeks in vain to subdue it to its single end. that reigning passion must give way when it is spent, or sooner if its master come. you cannot make it look to-day as it looked yesterday; you cannot make it look when its rival affection enters as it looked when it reigned alone. an hour ago, the hue of resolution on its cheek glowed immortal red. it was strong enough to defy god and all his creatures; it would annul all worlds but that one which it was god of. this is the speech of it on the lips of the actor who comes in to interpret to us _the thinker's_ inaction, the thinker's irresolution, for 'it is _conscience_ that makes cowards of us all.' here is a man who is resolute enough. _his will_ is not 'puzzled.' _his_ thoughts, _his_ scruples will not divide and destroy his purpose. _here_ is the unity which precedes action. this man is going to be revenged for his father. 'what would you undertake to do?' 'to cut his throat i' the church.' 'to hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil. conscience and grace to the profoundest pit. i _dare_ damnation. to this point i stand that both the worlds _i_ give to negligence, let come what comes, _only_ i'll be revenged most thoroughly for _my_ father.' [_only_.] that is your passionate speech, your speech of fire. that was what the principle of vindictiveness said when it was _you_, when it mastered you, and called _itself_ by your name. ay, it has many names, and many lips; but it is always _one_. that was what it said an hour ago; and now it is shrunk away you know not where, you cannot rally it, and you are there confounded, self-abandoned, self-annulled, a forgery, belying the identity which your visible form--which your _human_ form, was made to promise,--a slave,--a pipe for _fortune's_ finger. this is the kind of action which is criticised in the scientific drama, and 'rejected'; and the conclusion after these reviews and rejections, 'after every species of rejection,'--the _affirmation_ is, that there is but one principle that is _human_, and that is good yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and whose is true to that is true, in the human form, to the self which was, and will be. he cannot then be false to his yesterday, or tomorrow; he cannot then be false to himself; he cannot then be false to any man; for that is the self that is one in us all--that is the self of _reason_ and conscience, not passion. but as for this affection that is tried here now, that the diagram of this scene exhibits so tangibly, 'as it were, to the eye,'--this poor and private passion, that sits here, with its imperial crown on its head, in the place of god, but lacking his 'mercy,'--this passion of the petty man, that has made itself so hugely visible with its monstrous outstretching, that lies stretched out and glittering on these hills, with its dragon coils unwound, with its deadly fangs--those little fangs, that crush our private hearts, and torture and rend our daily lives--exposed in this great solar microscope, striking the _common-weal_,--as for this petty, usurping passion, there is a spectacle approaching that will undo it. out of that great city there comes a little group of forms, which yesterday this hero 'could not stay to pick out of that pile which had offended him,' that was his word,--which yesterday he would have burnt in it without a scruple. towards the great volscian army that beleaguers rome it comes--towards the pavilion where the volscian captain sits in gold, with his wings outspread, it shapes its course. to other eyes, it is but a group of roman ladies, two or three, clad in mourning, with their attendants, and a prattling child with them; but, with the first glance at it from afar, the great chieftain trembles, and begins to clasp his armour. he could think of them and doom them, in his over-mastering passion of revenge, with its heroic infinity of mastery triumphant in him,--he could _think_ of them and doom them; but the impressions of _the senses_ are more vivid, and the passions wait on them. as that group draws nearer, one sees, by the light of this poet's painting, a fair young matron, with subdued mien and modest graces, and an elder one, leading a wilful boy, with a 'confirmed countenance,' pattering by her side; just such a group as one might see anywhere in the lordly streets of palatinus,--much such a one as one might find anywhere under those thousand-doomed plebeian roofs. but to this usurping 'private,' to this man of passion and affection, and not reason--this man of private and particular motives only, and blind partial aims, it is more potent than rome and all her claims; it outweighs rome and all her weal--'it is worth of senators and patricians a city full, of tribunes and plebeians a sea and land full'--it outweighs all the volscians, and their trust in him. his reasons of state begin to falter, and change their aspects, as that little party draws nearer; and he finds himself within its magnetic sphere. for this is the pattern-man, for the man of mere impression and instinct. he is full of feeling within his sphere, though it is a sphere which does not embrace plebeians,--which crushes volscians with clarions, and drums, and trumpets, and poets' voices to utter its exultations. within that private sphere, his sensibilities are exquisite and poetic in their depth and delicacy. he is not wanting in the finer impulses, in the nobler affections of the particular and private nature. he is not a base, brutal man. even in his martial conquests, he will not take 'leaden spoons.' his soul is with a divine ambition fired to have _all_. it is instinct, but it is the instinct of the human; it is 'conservation with _advancement_' that he is blindly pursuing, for this is a generous nature. he knows the heights that reason lends to instinct in the human kind, and the infinities that affection borrows from it. and the poet himself has large and gentle views of 'this particular,' scientific views of it, scientific recognitions of its laws, such as no philosophic school was ever before able to pronounce. even here, on this sad and tragic ground of a subdued and debased common-weal, he will not cramp its utterance--he will give it leave to speak, in all its tenderness and beauty, in its own sweet native dialect, all its poetic wildness, its mad verities, its sober impossibilities, even at the moment in which he asks in statesmanship for the rational motive, undrenched in humours and affections--for the motive of the weal that is common, and not for the motive of that which is private and exclusive. in vain the hero struggles with his yielding passion, and seeks to retain it. in vain he struggles with a sentiment which he himself describes as 'a gosling's instinct,' and seeks to subdue it. in vain he rallies his pride, and says, 'let it be _virtuous_ to be _obstinate_'; and determines to stand 'as if a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin.' his mother kneels. it is but a frail, aged woman kneeling to the victorious chieftain of the volscian hosts; but to him it is 'as if _olympus_ to _a mole-hill_ stooped in supplication.' his boy looks at him with an eye in which great nature speaks, and says, 'deny not'; he sees the tears in the dove's eyes of the beloved, he hears her dewy voice; we hear it, too, through the poet's art, in the words she speaks; and he forgets his part. we reach the 'grub' once more. the dragon wings of armies melt from him. he is his young boy's father--he is his fair young wife's beloved. 'o a kiss, long _as_ my exile, sweet _as_ my revenge.' there's no decision yet. the scales are even now. but there is another there, waiting to be saluted, and he himself is but a boy--his own mother's boy again, at her feet. it is she that schools and lessons him; it is she that conquers him. it _was_ 'her boy,' after all--it was her boy still, that was 'coming home.' well might menenius say-- '_this volumnia_ is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, a city full; of tribunes _such as you_, a sea and land full.' but let us take the philosophic report of this experiment as we find it; for on the carefullest study, when once it is put in its connections, when once we 'have heard the argument,' we shall not find anything in it to spare. but we must not forget that this is still 'the election,' the ignorant election of the common-weal which is under criticism, and though this election has been revoked in the play already, and this is a banished man we are trying here, there was a play in progress when this play was played, in which that revocation was yet to come off; and this poet was anxious that the subject should be considered first from the most comprehensive grounds, so that _the principle of 'the election_' need never again be called in question, so that the revolution should end in the state, and not in the principle of revolution. 'my wife comes foremost; then the honoured mould wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand the grand-child to her blood. but, out, _affection_! all bond and privilege of nature, break! _let it be virtuous to be obstinate_.-- what is that curtsey worth? or those doves' eyes, which can _make gods forsworn_? ['he speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of infirmity.'] 'i melt, _and am not_ of stronger earth than others.--my mother bows; as if olympus to a molehill should in supplication nod: and my young boy hath an aspect of intercession, which great nature cries, 'deny not!'--let the volsces plough rome, and harrow italy; i'll never be such a gosling to obey instinct; but stand, as if a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin. these eyes are not the same i wore in rome. _vir_. the sorrow that delivers us thus changed, makes you think so. [the objects are altered, not the eyes. we are changed. but it is with sorrow. she bids him note that alteration, and puts upon it the blame of his loss of love. but that is just the kind of battery he is not provided for. his resolution wavers. that unrelenting warrior, that fierce revengeful man is gone already, and forgot to leave his part--the words he was to speak are wanting.] _cor_. like a dull actor now, i have forgot my part, _and i am out_, _even to a full disgrace_. best of my flesh, forgive my tyranny; but do not say, for that, forgive our romans.--o, a kiss long as my exile, sweet as my revenge! now by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss i carried from thee, dear; and my true lip hath virgin'd it e'er since.--you gods! i prate, and the _most noble mother of the world_ leave unsaluted: sink, my knee, t'the earth; [_kneels_.] of _the deep duty_ more _impression_ show _than that of common sons_. _vol_. o, stand up bless'd! whilst, with no softer cushion than the flint, i kneel before thee; and unproperly _show duty, as mistaken_-- [note it--'as mistaken,' for this is the kind of learning described elsewhere, which differs from received opinions, and must, therefore, pray in aid of similes.] --and improperly show duty, as mistaken all the while between the child and parent. [and the prostrate form of that which should command, is represented in the kneeling mother. the poet himself points us to this hieroglyphic. it is the common-weal that kneels in her person, and the rebel interprets for us. it is the violated law that stoops for pardon.] _cor_. what is this? your knees to me? to _your corrected son_? _then_ let the pebbles on the hungry beach fillip the stars; _then_ let the _mutinous_ winds strike the proud cedars 'gainst the fiery sun; _murdering impossibility, to make what cannot be, slight work_. _vol_. thou _art my warrior; i holp to frame thee_. [but it is not of the little marcius only, the hero--the roman hero in germ--that she speaks--there is more than her roman part _here_, when she adds--] _vol_. this is a poor epitome of yours, which _by the interpretation_ of _full time_ may show, _like all, yourself_. [and hear now what benediction the true hero can dare to utter, what prayer the true hero can dare to pray, through this faltering, fluctuating, martial hero's lips, when, 'that whatsoever god who led him' is failing him, and the flaws of impulse are swaying him to and fro, and darkening him for ever.] _cor._ 'the god of soldiers _with the consent of_ supreme jove,'--[the capitolian, the god of state]--'inform _thy thoughts_ with nobleness;'--[_inform thy thoughts._] 'that thou may'st prove _the shame_ unvulnerable, and stick i'the wars like a great sea-mark, _standing every flaw_, and saving those that eye thee.' [but _this_ hero's conclusion for himself, and his impulsive nature is--] 'not of a woman's tenderness to be, requires nor child, nor woman's face to see. i have sat too long.' but the mother will not let him go, and her stormy eloquence completes the conquest which that dumb rhetoric had before well nigh achieved. yes, menenius was right in his induction. his abstraction and brief summing up of 'this volumnia' and her history, is the true one. she is very potent in the business of the state, whether you take her in her first literal acceptation, as the representative mother, or whether you take her in that symbolical and allusive comprehension, to which the emphasis on the name is not unfrequently made to point, as 'the nurse and mother of all humanities,' the instructor of the state, the former of its nobility, who _in_-forms their thoughts with nobleness, such nobleness, and such notions of it as they have, and who fits them for the place they are to occupy in the body of the common-weal. menenius has not exaggerated in his exposition the relative importance of _this_ figure among those which the dumb-show of this play exhibits. among the 'transient hieroglyphics' which the diseased common-weal produces on the scientific stage, when the question of its cure is the question of the play--in that great crowd of forms, in that moving, portentous, stormy pageant of senators, and consuls, and tribunes, and plebeians, whose great acts fill the scene--there are none more significant than these two, whom we saw at first 'seated on two low stools, sewing'; these two of the wife and mother--the commanding mother, and the 'gracious silence.' 'this volumnia'--yes, let her school him, for it is from her school that he has come: let her conquer him, for she is the conserver of this harm. it is she who makes of it a tradition. to its utmost bound of consequences, she is the mother of it, and accountable to god and man for its growth and continuance. consuls, and senators, and patricians, and tribunes, such as we have, are powerless without her, are powerless against her. the state begins with her; but, instead of it, she has bred and nursed the destroyer of the state. let her conquer him, though her life-blood must flow for it now. this play is the cure of the common-weal, the convulsed and dying common-weal; and whether the assault be from within or without, this woman must undo her work. the tribunes have sent for her now: she must go forth without shrinking, and slay her son. she was the true mother; she trained him for the common-weal, she would have made a patrician of him, but that craved a noble cunning; she was not instructed in it; she must pay the penalty of her ignorance--the penalty of her traditions--and slay him now. there is no help for it, for she has made with her traditions a thing that no common-weal can bear. woe for this volumnia! woe for the common-weal whose chiefs she has reared, whose great men and 'good citizens' she has made! woe for her! woe for the _common_-weal, for _her_ boy approaches! the land is groaning and shaken; the faces of men gather blackness; the clashing of arms is heard in the streets, blood is flowing, the towns are blazing. great rome will soon be sacked with romans, for her boy is coming home; the child of her instinct, the son of her ignorance, the son of her religion, is _coming home_. 'o mother, mother! what hast thou done?.... o my mother, mother! o, you have won _a happy victory to rome_,-- but for your son--' alas for him, and his gentle blood, and noble breeding, and his patrician greatness! woe for the unlearned mother's son, who has made him great with such a training, that rome's weal and his, rome's greatness and his, must needs contend together--that 'rome's happy victory' must needs be the blaze that shall darken him for ever! yet he storms again, with something like his old patrician fierceness; and yet not that, the tone is altered; he is humbler and tamer than he was, and he says himself, 'it is the first time that ever i have learned to scold'; but he is stung, even to boasting of his old heroic deeds, when aufidius taunts him with his un-martial, un-_divine_ infirmity, and brings home to him in very words, at last, the poet's suppressed verdict, the poet's deferred sentence, guilty!--of what? he is but a boy, his nurse's boy, and he undertook _the state_! he is but a slave, and he was caught climbing to the imperial chair, and putting on the purple. he is but 'a _dog_ to the commonalty,' and he was sitting in the place of god. aufidius owns, indeed, to his own susceptibility to these particular and private affections. when coriolanus turns to him after that appeal from volumnia has had its effect, and asks:-- 'now, good aufidius, were _you in my stead_, say, would _you_ have heard a mother _less_, or granted _less_, aufidius?' he answers, guardedly, 'i was moved _withal_.' but the philosopher has his word there, too, as well as the poet, slipped in under the poet's, covertly, 'i was _moved_ with-_all_.' [it is the play of the common-weal.] and what should the single private man, the man of exclusive affections and changeful humours, do with the weal of the whole? in his noblest conditions, what business has he in the state? and who shall vote to give him the out-stretched wings and claws of volscian armies, that he may say of rome, _all's mine_, and give it to his wife or mother? who shall follow in _his_ train, to plough rome and harrow italy, who lays himself and all his forces at his mother's feet, and turns back at her word? _aufidius_. you lords and heads of the state, perfidiously has he betrayed _your business_, and given up for certain drops of salt, _your city_ rome-- i say, _your city_--to _his wife and mother: breaking his oath and resolution like a twist of rotten silk; never admitting counsel of the war_, but _at his nurse's tears_ he whined and roar'd away your victory, that pages blushed at him, and men of heart _looked wondering at each other_. [there is a look which has come down to us. that is elizabethan. that is the suppressed elizabethan.] _cor_. hear'st thou, _mars_? _auf_. name not _the god_ thou _boy_ of tears. _cor_. _ha_! _auf_. no more. [you are no more.] _cor_. measureless liar, thou hast made my heart too great for what contains it. _boy? o slave_! .... boy? false _hound_! [these are the names that are flying about here, now that the martial chiefs are criticising each other: it is no matter which side they go.] '_boy? o slave_! ... boy? false hound! ['he is a very dog to the commonalty.'] alone i did it. boy? but it is volumnia herself who searches to the quick the principle of this boyish sovereignty, in her satire on the undivine passion she wishes to unseat. it is thus that she upbraids the hero with his un_manly_, ungracious, ignoble purpose:-- 'speak to me, son. thou hast affected the fine strains of honour, to imitate the graces of the gods; to tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, and yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt that should but rive an oak. why dost not speak? think'st thou it honourable for a noble man still to remember wrongs? for that is the height of the scientific affirmation also; the other was, in scientific language, its 'anticipation.' he wants nothing of a god but an eternity, and a heaven to throne in (slight deficiences in a god already). 'yes, mercy, if you paint him truly.' 'i paint him in character.' nobility, honour, manliness, heroism, good citizenship, freedom, divinity, patriotism. we are getting a number of definitions here, vague popular terms, scientifically fixed, scientifically cleared, destined to waver, and be confused and mixed with other and fatally different things in the popular apprehension no more--when once this science is unfolded for that whole people for whom it was delivered--no more for ever. there is no open dramatic embodiment in this play of the true ideal nobility, and manliness, and honour, and divinity. this is the false affirmation which is put upon the stage here, to be tried, and examined, and rejected. for it is to this poet's purpose to show--and very much to his purpose to show, sometimes--what is not the true affirmation. his method is critical, but his rejection contains the true definition. the whole play is contrived to shape it here; all hands combine to frame it. volscians and romans conspire to pronounce it; the world is against this 'one man' and his part-liness, though he be indeed 'every man.' he himself has been compelled to pronounce it; for the speaker for the whole is the speaker in each of us, and pronounces his sentences on ourselves with our own lips. 'being gentle wounded craves a noble cunning,' is the word of the noble, who comes back with a volscian army to exhibit upon the stage this grand hieroglyphic, this grand dramatic negative of that nobility. but it is from the lips of the mother, brought into this deadly antagonism with the manliness she has trained, compelled now to echo that popular rejection, that the poet can venture to speak out, at last, from the depths of his true heroism. it is this volumnia who strikes now to the heart of the play with her satire on this affectation of the graces of the gods,--this assumption of nobility, and manliness, and the fine strains of _honour_,--in one who is led only by the blind demon gods, 'that keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,'--in one who is bounded and shut in after all to the range of his own poor petty private passions, shut up to a poverty of soul which forbids those assumptions, limited to a nature in which those _strictly_ human terms can be only affectations, one who concentrates all his glorious _special_ human gifts on the pursuit of ends for which the lower natures are also furnished. honour, forsooth! the fine strains of honour, and the graces of the gods. look at that volscian army there. 'to tear with thunder _the wide cheeks o' the air, and yet_ to charge thy sulphur with a bolt that should but rive an oak. _why dost not speak_?' he can not. there is no speech for that. it does not bear _review_. 'why dost not speak? think'st thou it honourable for a noble man _still_ to remember wrongs?' 'let it be _virtuous_ to be _obstinate_,' let there be no better principle of that identity which we insist on in men, that firmness which we call manliness, and the cherished _wrong_ is honour. it is but an interrogative point, but the height of our affirmation is taken with it. it is a figure of speech and _intensifies_ the affirmative with its irony. 'this a consul? no.' 'no more, but e'en a woman, and commanded by such _poor_ passion as the maid that milks, and does the meanest chares.' [queen.] 'give me that _man_ that is not _passion's slave_. since my dear soul _was mistress of her choice, and could of men distinguish her election_, she hath seal'd thee for herself: _for_ thou hast been as one, in suffering _all_, that _suffers_ nothing. but the man who rates so highly 'this single mould of marcius,' and the wounded name of it, that he will _forge_ another for it 'i' the fire of burning rome,' who will hurt the world to ease the rankling of his single wrong, who will plough rome and harrow italy to cool the fever of his thirst for vengeance; this is not the man, this is not the hero, this is not the god, that the scientific review accepts. whoso has put him in the chair of state on earth, or in heaven, must 'revoke that ignorant election.' whatever our 'perfect example in civil life' may be, and we are, perhaps, not likely to get it openly in the form of an historic '_composition_' on this author's stage, whatever name and shape it may take when it comes, this evidently is not it. this caius marcius is dismissed for the present from this poet's boards. this curule chair that stands here empty yet, for aught that we can see, and this crown of 'olives of endless age,' is not for him. 'would you proceed especially against caius marcius? against him first. 'we proceed first by negatives, and conclude after every species of rejection.' on the surface of this play, lies everywhere the question of the common-weal, in its relation to the good that is private and particular, scientifically reviewed, as a question in proportion,--as the question of the whole against the part,--of the greater against the less,--nay, as the question of that which is against that which is not. for it is a treatment which throws in passing, the shadow of the old metaphysical suspicion and scepticism on that chaotic unaxiomatical condition of things which the scientific eye discovers here, for the new philosophy with all its new comprehension of the actual, with all its new convergency on practice, is careful to inform us that it observes, notwithstanding the old distinction between 'being and becoming.' this is an ideal philosophy also, though the notions of nature are more respected in it, than the spontaneous unconsidered notions of men. it is the largeness of the objective whole, the historic whole and the faculty in man of comprehending it, and the sense of relation and obligation to it, as the highest historic law,--the _formal_, the _essential law_ of _kind_ in him, it is the breadth of reason, it is the circumference of conscience, it is the _grandeur_ of duty which this author arrays here scientifically against that oblivion and ignoring of the _whole_, that forgetfulness of the world, and the universal tie which the ignorance of the unaided sense and the narrowness of passion and private affection create, whether in the one, or the few, or the many. it is the weal of the whole against the will of the part, no matter where the limit of that partiality, or 'partliness,' as the '_poor_ citizen' calls it, is fixed whether it be the selfishness of the single self, or whether the household tie enlarges its range, whether it be the partiality of class or faction, or the partiality of kindred or race, or the partiality of geographic limits, the question of the play, the question of the whole, of the worthier whole, is still pursued with scientific exaction. it is the conflict with axioms which is represented here, and not with wordy axioms only, not with abstractions good for the human mind only, in its abstract self-sustained speculations, but with historical axioms, axioms which the universal nature knows, laws which have had the consent of things since this nature began, laws which passed long ago the universal commons. it is the false unscientific state which is at war, not with abstract speculation merely, but with the nature of things and the received logic of the universe, which this man of a practical science wishes to call attention to. it is the crowning and enthroning of that which is private and particular, it is the anointing of passion and instinct, it is the arming of the absolute--the demon--will; it is the putting into the hands of the ignorant part the sceptre of the whole, which strikes the scientific reviewer as the thing to be noted here. and by way of proceeding by negatives first, he undertakes to convey to others the impression which this state of things makes upon his own mind, as pointedly as may be, consistently with those general intentions which determine his proceedings and the conditions which limit them, and he is by no means timid in availing himself of the capabilities of his story to that end. the true spectacle of the play,--the principal hieroglyphic of it,--the one in which this hieroglyphic criticism approaches the metaphysical intention most nearly, is one that requires interpretation. it does not report itself to the eye at once. the showman stops to tell us before he produces it, that it _is_ a symbol,--that this is one of the places where he 'prays in aid of similes,'--that this is a specimen of what he calls elsewhere 'allusive' writing. the true spectacle of the play,--the grand hieroglyphic of it,--is that view of the city, and the woman in the foreground kneeling _for it_, 'to her _son_, her _corrected_ son,' begging for pardon of her corrected rebel--hanging for life on the chance of his changeful moods and passions. it is _rome_ that lies stretched out there upon her hills, in all her visible greatness and claims to reverence; it is rome with her capitolian crown, forth from which the roman matron steps, and with no softer cushion than the flint, in the dust at the rebel's feet, kneels '_to show_'--as she tells us--to show as clearly as the conditions of the exhibition allow it to be exhibited, duty as mistaken,--'_as_ mistaken,'--_all the while_ between _the child_ and _parent_. it is jupiter that stoops; it is olympus doing obeisance to the mole-hill; it is the divineness of the universal law--the _formal_ law in man--that is prostrate and suppliant in her person; and the poet exhausts even his own powers of expression, and grows inarticulate at last, in seeking to convey his sense of this ineffable, impossible, historical pretension. it is as 'if olympus to a mole-hill should _in supplication nod_; it is as if _the pebbles_ on the hungry beach should _fillip the stars_; as if _the mutinous winds_ should strike the proud cedars against the fiery sun, _murdering impossibility_, to make what _can not be_, slight work,'--what can not _be_. that was the spectacle of the play, and that was the world's spectacle when the play was written. nay, worse; a thousandfold more wild and pitiful, and confounding to the intellect, and revolting to its sensibilities, was the spectacle that the state offered then to the philosophic eye. the poet has all understated his great case. he has taken the pattern-man in the private affections, the noble man of mere instinct and passion, and put _him_ in the chair of state;--the man whom nature herself had chosen and anointed, and crowned with kingly graces. 'as waves before a vessel under sail so men obeyed him, and fell below his stern,' 'if he would but incline to the people, there never was a worthier man.' not to the natural private affections and instincts, touched with the nobility of human sense,--not to the loyalty of the husband,--not to the filial reverence and duty of the son, true to that private and personal relationship at least; not to the gentleness of the patrician, true to that private patricianship also, must england owe her _weal_--such weal as she could beg and wheedle from her lord and ruler then. not from the conquering hero with his fresh oakleaf on his brow, and the command of the god who led him in his speech and action,--and not from his lineal successor merely, must england beg her welfare then. it was not the venerable mother, or the gentle wife, with her dove's eyes able to make gods of earth forsworn, who could say then, 'the laws of england are at my commandment.' crimes that the historic pen can only point to,--not record,--low, illiterate, brutish stupidities, mad-cap folly, and wanton extravagancies and caprices, in their ideal impersonations--_these_ were the gods that england, in the majesty of her state, in the sovereignty of her chartered weal, must abase herself to then. to the vices of tyranny, to low companions and their companions, and _their_ kindred, the state must cringe and kneel then. to _these_,--men who meddled with affairs of state,--who took, even at such a time, the state to be _their_ business,--must address themselves; for these were the councils in which england's peace and war were settled then, and the tribune could enter them only in disguise. his _veto_ could not get spoken outright, it could only be pronounced in under-tones and circumlocutions. not with noble, eloquent, human appeals, could the soul of power be reached and conquered then--the soul of him 'within whose eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,' the man of the thirty legions, to whom this _argument_ must be dedicated. 'ducking observances,' basest flatteries, sycophancies past the power of man to utter, personal humiliations, and prostrations that seemed to teach 'the mind a most inherent baseness,' _these_ were the weapons,--the required weapons of the statesman's warfare then. from these 'dogs of the commonalty' men who were indeed 'noble,' whose 'fame' did indeed 'fold in the orb o' the world,' must take then, as a purchase or a gift, deliverance from physical restraint, and life itself. these were the days when _england's_ victories were 'blubbered and whined away,' in such a sort, that 'pages blushed at it, and men of heart looked wondering at each other.' and, when science began first to turn her eye on history, and propose to herself the relief of the human estate, as her end, and the scientific arts as her means, this was the spectacle she found herself expected to endure; this was the state of things she found herself called upon to sanction and conserve. she could not immediately reform it--she must produce first her doctrine of '_true_ forms,' her scientific definitions and precepts based on them, and her doctrine of constructions. she could not openly condemn it; but she could criticise and reject it by means of that method which is 'sometimes necessary in the sciences,' and to which 'those who would let in new light upon the human mind must have recourse.' she could seize the grand hieroglyphic of the heroic past, and make it 'point with its finger' that which was unspeakable,--her scorn of it. she could borrow the freedom of the old roman lips, to repronounce, in her own new dialect,--not their anticipation of her _veto_ only, but her eternal affirmation,--the word of her consulship, the rule of her nobility,--the nobility of being,--being in the human,--the nobility of manliness,--_the divinity of state_, the _true_ doctrine of it;--and, to speak _truly, 'antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi._' chapter viii. metaphysical aid. 'i do not like the fashion of your garments. you will say they are _persian_ attire; but let them be changed.'-- _the king to tom o' bedlam._ 'would you proceed especially against _caius marcius_? against him _first_.' it is the cure of the common-weal which this author has undertaken, for he found himself pre-elected to the care of the people and to the world's tribuneship. but he handles his subject in the natural, historical order, in the chronological order,--and not here only, but in that play of which this is a part,--of which this is the play within the play,--in that grand, historical proceeding on the world's theatre, which it was given to the author of this play to institute. he begins with the physical wants of men. the hunger, and cold, and weariness, and all the physical suffering and destitution of that human condition which is the condition of the many, has arrested his human eye, with its dumb, patient eloquence, and it is _that_ which makes the starting point of his revolution. he translates its mute language, he anticipates its word. he is setting in movement operations that are intended to make 'coals cheap'; he proposes to have corn at his own price. he has so much confidence in what his tongue can do in the way of flattery, that he expects to come back beloved of all the trades in rome. he will 'cog their hearts from them,' and get elected _consul_ yet, with all their voices. 'scribbling seems to be the sign of a disordered age,' says the philosopher, who finds so much occasion for the use of that art about these days. 'it seems as if it were the season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. 'tis my comfort that i shall be one of the last that are called in question; and, whilst the greater offenders are calling to account, i shall have leisure to amend; for it would be unreasonable to punish _the less troublesome_, whilst we are infested with _the greater_. as the physician said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, he perceived, had an ulcer in his lungs, "friend," said he, "it is not now time to concern yourself about your fingers-ends". and _yet_--[_and yet_]--i saw, some years ago, a person whose name and memory i have in very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice put in execution, _nor magistrate_ that performed _his office--no more than there is now_--publish, i know not what pitiful _reformations_, about _clothes, cookery, and law chicanery_. these are amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill-used, _to show that they are not totally forgotten_.' that is the account of it. that is the history of this innovation, beginning with books, proposing pitiful reformations in clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery. that would serve to show an ill-used people that there was some care for them stirring, some tribuneship at work already. '_what i say of physic generally_, may serve as an example of all other sciences,' says _this same_ scribbler, under his scribbling cognomen. 'we certainly _intend_ to comprehend them _all_,' says the graver authority, 'such as ethics, politics, and logic.' that is, where we are exactly in this so entertaining performance, which was also designed for the benefit of an ill-used people; for this candidate for the chief magistracy is the _aedile_ also, and while he stands for his place these spectacles will continue. it is that physical suffering of 'the poor citizens' that he begins with here. it is the question of the price of corn with which he opens his argument. the dumb and patient people are on his stage already; dumb and patient no longer, but clamoring against the surfeiting and wild wanton waste of the few; clamoring for their share in god's common gifts to men, and refusing to take any longer the portion which a diseased state puts down for them. but he tells us from the outset, that _this_ claim will be prosecuted in such a manner as to 'throw forth greater themes for insurrection's arguing.' though all the wretched poor were clothed and fed with imperial treasure, with imperial luxury and splendour--though all the arts which are based on the knowledge of physical causes should be put in requisition to relieve their need--though the scientific discoveries and inventions which are pouring in upon human life from that field of scientific inquiry which our men of science have already cultivated their golden harvests, should reach at last poor tom himself--though that scientific movement now in progress should proceed till it has reached the humblest of our human kin, and surrounded him with all the goods of the private and particular nature, with the sensuous luxuries and artistic elegancies and refinements of the lordliest home--that good which is the distinctive human good, that good which is the constitutional human _end_, that good, that formal and essential good, which it is the end of this philosophy to bring to man, would not necessarily be realised. for _that_, and nothing short of that, the '_advancement_' of the species to that which it is blindly reaching for, painfully groping for--its form in nature, its ideal perfection--the advancement of it to something more noble than the nobility of a nobler kind of vermin--a state which involves another kind of individual growth and greatness, one which involves a different, a distinctively 'human principle' and tie of congregation, is that which makes the ultimate intention of this philosophy. the organization of that large, complex, difficult form in nature, in which the many are united in 'the greater congregation'; that more extensive whole, of which the units are each, not simple forms, but the complicated, most highly complex, and not yet subdued complexity, which the individual form of man in itself constitutes; this so difficult result of nature's combinations and her laws of combination, labouring, struggling towards its consummation, but disordered, threatened, convulsed, asking aid of _art_, is the subject; the cure of it, the cure and healthful regimen of it, the problem. and it is a born doctor who has taken it in hand this time; one of your natural geniuses, with an inward vocation for the art of _healing_, instructed of nature beforehand in that mystery and profession, and appointed of her to that ministry. wherever you find him, under whatever disguise, you will find that his mind is running on the structure of _bodies_, the means of their conservation and growth, and the remedies for their disorders, and decays, and antagonisms, without and within. he has a most extraordinary and incurable natural bent and determination towards medicine and cures in general; he is always inquiring into the anatomy of things and the qualities of drugs, analysing them and mixing them, finding the art of their compounds, and modifying them to suit his purposes, or inventing new ones; for, like aristotle, to whom he refers for a precedent, he wishes 'to have a hand in everything.' but he is not a quack. he has no respect for the old authoritative prescriptions, if they fail in practice, whether they come in galen's name, or another's; but he is just as severe upon 'the empiricutics,' on the other hand, and he objects to 'a horse-drench' for the human constitution in the greater congregation, as much as he does in that distinctively complex delicate structure which the single individual human frame in itself constitutes. menenius [speaking of the letter which volumnia has told him of, and putting in a word on this doctor's behalf, for it is not very much to the purpose on his own] says, 'it gives me an estate of _seven years'_ health, _during which time i will make a lip at the physician_.' a lip--_a lip_--and 'what a deal of scorn looks beautiful on it,' when once you get to see it. but this is the play of 'conservation with advancement.' it is the cure and preservation of the common-weal, to which all lines are tending, to which all points and parentheses are pointing; and thus he continues: 'the _most sovereign prescription_ in _galen_ is but empiricutic, and to _this_ preservative of no better report than a horse-drench.' so we shall find, when we come to try it--_this_ preservative,--this conservation. this doctor has a great opinion of nature. he thinks that 'the physician must rely on her powers for his cures in the last resort, and be able to make prescriptions of _them_, instead of making them out of his own pre-conceits, if he would not have of his cure a _conceit_ also.' his opinion is, that 'nature is made better by no mean, but she herself hath made that mean;'-- 'so o'er that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes... ...this is an art which does _mend nature_, _change_ it rather: but _the art itself_ is nature.' that is the poet's view, but the philosopher is of the same opinion. 'man while _operating_ can only _apply or withdraw_ natural bodies, nature internally _performs_ the rest.' those who become _practically_ versed in nature are the mechanic, the mathematician, the alchemist, and _the magician_, but _all_, as matters now stand with faint efforts and meagre success.'... 'the syllogism forces _assent_ and not _things_.' '_the subtlety of nature is far beyond that of sense or of the understanding._ the syllogism consists of propositions, these of words, words are the signs of notions, notions represent things. if our notions are fantastical, the whole structure falls to the ground; but they are for the most part improperly abstracted and deduced from _things_.' there is the whole of it; there it is in a nut-shell. as we are very apt to find it in this method of delivery by aphorisms; there is the shell of it at least. and considering 'the torture and press of the method,' and the instruments of torture then in use for correcting the press, on these precise questions, there is as much of the kernel, perhaps, as could reasonably be looked for, in those particular aphorisms; and 'aphorisms representing a _knowledge broken_, do _invite_ men to inquire further;' so _this_ writer of them tells us. with all his reliance on nature then, and with all his scorn of the impracticable and arrogant conceits of learning as he finds it, and of the quackeries that are practised in its name, this is no empiric. he will not approach that large, complex, elaborate combination of nature, that laboured fruit of time,--her most subtle and efficacious agent, so prolific in results that amaze and confound our art, --he will not approach this great structure with all its unperceived interior adaptations,--with so much of nature's own work in it, --hehas too much respect for her own 'cunning hand,' to approach it without learning,--to undertake its cure with blind ignorant experiments. he will not go to work in the dark on this structure, with drug or surgery. this is going to be a scientific cure. 'before we proceed any further, _hear me speak_.' he will inquire beforehand the nature of this particular structure that he proposes to meddle with, and get its normal state defined at the outset. but that will take him into the question of structures in general, as they appear in nature, and the intention of nature in them. he will have a comparative anatomy to help him. this analysis will not stop with the social unit, he will analyze him. it will not stop with him. it will comprehend the principles of all combinations. he will not stop in his analysis of _this_ complexity till he comes to that which precedes all combination, and survives it--the original simplicity of nature. he will come to this cure armed with the universal 'simples;' he will have all the original powers of nature, 'which are not many,' in his hands, to begin with; and he will have more than that. he will have the doctrine of their combinations, not in man only, but _in all the kinds_;--those despised kinds, that claim such close relationship-- such wondrous relationship with man; and he will not go to the primitive instinctive nature only for his knowledge on this point. he will inquire of art,--the empiric art,--and rude accident, what latent efficacies they have detected in her, what churlish secrets of hers they have wrung from her. you will find the gardener's and the farmer's reports, and not the physician's and the surgeon's only, inserted in his books of policy and ethics. the 'nettles' theory of the rights of private life, and his policy of foreign relationships, appears to this learned politician to strengthen his case a little, and the pertinacious refusal of the 'old crab trees' to lend their organizations, such as they are, to the fructification of a bud of nobler kind, is quoted with respect as a decision of nature in another court, on this same question, which is one of the questions here. for the principle of conservation as well as the other principles of the human conduct, appears to this philosopher to require a larger treatment than our men of learning have given it hitherto. and this is the man of science who takes so much pains to acknowledge his preference for 'good _compositions_'--who thinks so much of good _natural _compositions and their virtues, who is always expressing or betraying his respect for the happy combinations, the sound results, the luxuriant and beautiful varieties with which nature herself illustrates the secret of her fertility, and publishes her own great volume of examples in the arts. first it is the knowledge of the simple forms into which all the variety of nature is convertible, the definitions which account for all--that which is always the same in all the difference, that which is always permanent in all the change; first it is the doctrine of 'those simple original forms, or differences of things, which like the alphabet are not many, _the degrees and co-ordinations_ whereof make all this variety,' and then it is the doctrine of _their combinations_,--the combinations which nature has herself accomplished, those which the arts have accomplished, and those which are possible, which have _not_ been accomplished,--those which the universal nature working in the human, working in each, from the platform of the human, from that height in her ascending scale of species, dictates now, demands,--divinely orders,--divinely instructs us in. this, and nothing short of this,--this so radical knowledge, reaching from the summit of the human complexity, to the primaeval depths of nature,--to the simplicity of the nature that is one in all,--to the indissoluble laws of being,--the laws of being in the species,--the law with which the specific law is convertible,--the law which cannot be broken in the species, which involves loss of species,--loss of being in the species,--this so large and rich and various knowledge, comprehending all the varieties of nature in its fields, putting all nature under contribution for its results, this--this is the knowledge with which the man of science approaches now, this grand particular. the reader who begins to examine for himself, for the first time, in the original books of it, this great system of the modern science, impressed with the received notions in regard to its scope and intentions, will be, perhaps, not a little surprised and puzzled, to find that the thing which is, of all others, most strenuously insisted on by this author, in his own person, next to the worthlessness of the conceits which have no correspondence with things, is the fact that the knowledge of the physical causes is altogether inadequate to that relief of the condition of man, which he finds to be the immediate end of science; and that it is a system of metaphysics, a new metaphysics, which he is everywhere propounding to that end,--openly, and with all the latent force of his new rhetoric. it is 'metaphysical aid' that he offers us; it is magic, but, 'magic lawful as eating'; it is a priestly aid that he offers us, the aid of one who has penetrated to the inner sanctuary of the law,--the priest of nature, newly instructed in her mind and will, who comes forth from his long communing with her, with her own 'great seal' in his hands--with the rod of her enchantments, that old magicians desired to pluck from her, and did not--with the gift of the new and nobler miracles of science as the witness of his anointing--with the reading of 'god's book of power'--with the alphabet of its mystery, as the proof of his ordaining--with the key of it, hid from the foundation of the world until now. the first difference between this metaphysics, and all the metaphysics that ever went before it or came after it, is, that it is practical. it carries in its hand, gathered into the simplicity of the causes that are not many, the secret of all motivity, the secret of all practice. it tells you so; over and over again, in so many words, it dares to tell you so. it opens that closed palm a little, and shows you what is there; it bids you look on while it stirs those lines but a little, and new ages have begun. it is a practical metaphysics, and the first word of its speech is to forbid abstractions--your abstractions. it sets out from that which is 'constant, eternal, and universal'; but from that which is 'constant, eternal, and universal in nature.' it sets out from that which is fixed; but it is from the fixed and constant causes: '_forms_' not '_ideas_.' the simplicity which it seeks is the simplicity into which the historical phenomena are resolvable; the terms which it seeks are the terms which do not come within the range of the unscientific experience; they are the unknown terms of the unlearned; they are the causes 'which, like the alphabet, are not many'; they are the terms which the understanding knows, which the reason grasps, and comprehends in its unity; but they are the convertible terms of all the multiplicity and variety of the senses, they are the convertible terms--the _practically_ convertible terms of the known--practically --that is the difference. in that pyramid of knowledges which the science of things constitutes; in that converging ascent to the original simplicity and identity of nature, beginning at that broad science which makes its base--the science of natural history--beginning with the basis of the historical complexity and difference; in that pyramid of science, that new and solid pyramid, which the inductive science--which the inquiry into causes that are operant in nature builds, this author will not stop, either on that broad field of the universal history of nature, which is the base of it, or on that first stage of the ascent which the platform of 'the physical causes' makes. the causes which lie next to our experience--the causes, which are variable and many, do not satisfy him. he gains that platform, and looks about him. he finds that even a diligent inquiry and observation _there_ would result in many new inventions beneficial to men; but the knowledge of these causes 'takes men in narrow and restrained paths'; he wants for the founding of his rule of art the cause which, under all conditions, secures the result, which gives the widest possible command of means. he refuses to accept of the physical causes as the bourne of his philosophy, in theory or practice. he looks with a great human scorn on all the possible arts and solutions which lie on _that_ platform, when the proposal is to stop his philosophy of speculation and practice _there_. it is not for the scientific arts, which that field of observation yields, that he begs leave to revive and _re-integrate_ the misapplied and abused name of _natural magic_, which, in the true sense, is but natural wisdom, or 'prudence.' he can hardly stop to indicate the results which the culture of that field _does_ yield for the relief of the human estate. his eye is uplifted to that new platform of a solid metaphysics, an historical metaphysics, which the inductive method builds. his eye is intent always on that higher stage of knowledge where that which is common to the sciences is found. he takes the other in passing only. beginning with the basis of a new observation and history of nature, he will found a new metaphysics--an _objective_ metaphysics--the metaphysics of induction. his logic is but a preparation for _that_. he is going to collect, by his inductive method, from all nature, from all species, the principles that are in _all things_; and he is going to build, on the basis of those _inducted_ principles,--on the sure basis of that which is constant, and eternal, and universal in nature, the sure foundations of his universal practice; for, like common logic, the inductive method comprehends '_all_.' that same simplicity, which the abstract speculations of men aspire to, and create, _it_ aspires to and _attains_, by the rough roads, by the laboured stages of observation and experiment. he is, indeed, compelled to involve his phraseology here in a most studious haze of scholasticism. perspicuity is by no means the quality of style most in request, when we come to these higher stages of sciences. impenetrable mists, clouds, and darkness, impenetrable to any but the eye that seeks also the whole, involve the heaven-piercing peak of this new height of learning, this new summit of a scientific divinity, frowning off--warding off, as with the sword of the cherubim, the unbidden invaders of this new olympus, where sit the gods, restored again,--the simple powers of nature, recovered from the greek abstractions,--not 'the idols'--not the impersonated abstractions, the false images of the mind of man--not the logical forms of those spontaneous abstractions, emptied of their poetic content--but the strong gods that make our history, that compose our epics, that conspire for our tragedies, whether we own them and build altars to them or not. this is that summit of the _prima philosophia_ where the axioms that command all are found--where the observations that are common to the sciences, and the precepts that are based on these, grow. this is that height where the _same_ footsteps of nature, treading in different substances or matters, lost in the difference below, are all cleared and identified. this is the height of the forms of the understanding, of the unity of the reason; not as it is in man only, but as it is in all matters or substances. he does not care to tell us,--he _could not_ well tell us, in _popular_ language, what the true name of that height of learning is: he could not well name without circumlocution, that height which a scientific abstraction makes,--an abstraction that attains simplicity without destroying the concrete reality, an abstraction that attains as its result only a higher history,--a new and more intelligible reading of it,--a solution of it--that which is fixed and constant and accounts for it,--an abstraction whose apex of unity is the highest, the universal history, that which accounts for all,--the equivalent,--the scientific equivalent of it. but whatever it be, it is something that is going to take the place of the unscientific abstractions, both in theory and practice; it is something that is going to supplant ultimately the vain indolent speculation, the inert because unscientific speculation, that seeks to bind the human life in the misery of an enforced and sanctioned ignorance, sealing up with its dogmas to an eternal collision with the universal laws of god and nature,--laws that no dogma or conceit can alter,--all the unreckoned generations of the life of man. whatever it be, it is going to strike with its primeval rock, through all the air palace of the vain conceits of men;--it is going straight up, through that old conglomeration of dogmas, that the ages of the human ignorance have built and left to us. the unity to which all things in nature, inspired with her universal instinct tend,--the unity of which the mind and heart of man in its sympathy with the universal whole is but an expression, that unity of its own which the mind is always seeking to impart to the diversities which the unreconciled experience offers it, which it must have in its objective reality, which it will make for itself if it cannot find it, which it _does_ make in ignorant ages, by falling back upon its own form and ignoring the historic reality,--which it builds up without any solid objective basis, by ignoring the nature of things, or founds on one-sided partial views of their nature, that unity is going to have its place in the new learning also--but it is going to be henceforth the unity of knowledge--not of dogmas, not of belief merely, for knowledge, and not belief merely,--knowledge, and not opinion, is _power_. that man is not the only creature in nature, was the discovery of this philosophy. the founders of it observed that there were a number of species, which appeared to be maintaining a certain sort of existence of their own, without being dependent for it on the movements within the human brain. to abate the arrogance of the species,--to show the absurdity and ignorance of the attempt to constitute the universe beforehand within that little sphere, the human skull, ignoring the reports of the intelligencers from the universal whole, with which great nature has herself supplied us,--to correct the arrogance and specific bias of the human learning,--was the first attempt of the new logic. it is the house of the universal father that we dwell in, and it has 'many mansions,' and 'man is not the best lodged in it.' noble, indeed, is his form in nature, inspired with the spirit of the universal whole, able in his littleness to comprehend and embrace the whole, made in the image of the universal primal cause, whose voice for us is _human_; but there are other dialects of the divine also,--there are nobler creatures lodged with us, placed above us; with larger gifts, with their ten talents ruling over our cities. there is no speech or language where _their_ voice is not heard. their line is gone out through all the earth also, and their words unto the end of the world; and the poor beetle that we tread on, and the daisy and the lily in all its glory, and the sparrows that are going 'two for a farthing,' come in for their place also in this philosophy--the philosophy of science--the philosophy of the kinds, the philosophy of the nature that is one in them,--the metaphysics of history. 'although there exists nothing in nature except individual bodies, exhibiting distinct individual _effects, according to individual_ laws, yet in each branch of learning that very law,--_its investigation, discovery and development_--are the foundation _both of theory and practice_; this law, therefore, and its _parallel_ in each _science_, is what we understand by the term, form.' that is a sentence to crack the heads of the old abstractionists. before that can be read, the new logic will have to be put in requisition; the idols of the tribe will have to be dismissed first. the inveterate and 'pernicious habit of abstraction,'--that so pernicious habit of the men of learning must be overawed first. 'there exists nothing in nature except _individual_ bodies, exhibiting distinct _individual_ effects, according to _individual laws_.' the concrete is very carefully guarded there against that 'pernicious habit'; it is saved at the expense of the human species, at the expense of its arrogance. nobody need undertake to abstract _those_ laws, whatever they may be, for this master has turned his key on them. they are in their proper place; they are in the things themselves, and cannot be taken out of them. the utmost that you can do is to attain to a scientific knowledge of them, one that exactly corresponds with them. that _correspondence_ is the point in the new metaphysics, and in the new logic;--_that_ was what was wanting in the old. 'the investigation, discovery, and development of this law, in _every branch of learning_, are the foundation both of theory and practice. this law, therefore, and its _parallel_ in each science, is what _we_ understand by the term form.' the distinction is very carefully made between the 'cause in nature,' and that which _corresponds_ to it, in the human mind, the _parallel_ to it in the sciences; for the notions of men and the notions of nature are extremely apt to differ when the mind is left to form its notions without any scientific rule or instrument; and these ill-made abstractions, which do not correspond with the cause in nature, are of no efficacy in the arts, for nature takes no notice of them whatever. there is one term in use here which represents at the same time the cause in nature, and that which corresponds to it in the mind of man--the parallel to it in the sciences. when these _exactly correspond_, one term suffices. the term 'form' is preferred for that purpose in this school. the term which was applied to the abstractions of the old philosophy, with a little modification, is made to signalise the difference between the old and the new. the 'ideas' of the old philosophy, the hasty abstractions of it, are '_the idols_' of the new--the false deceiving images--which must be destroyed ere that which is fixed and constant _in nature_ can establish its own parallels in our learning. 'too untimely a departure, and too remote a recess from particulars,' is the cause briefly assigned in this criticism for this want of correspondence hitherto. 'but it is manifest that plato, in his opinion of _ideas_, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry that forms were the true object of knowledge, but lost the real fruit of that opinion by considering of forms as absolutely abstracted from matter, and not _confined_ and _determined_ by matter.' 'lost the fruit of that opinion'--this is the author who talks so 'pressly.' two thousand years of human history are summed up in that so brief chronicle. two thousand years of barren science, of wordy speculation, of vain theory; two thousand years of blind, empirical, _unsuccessful_ groping in all the fields of human practice. 'and so,' he continues, concluding that summary criticism with a little further development of the subject, 'and _so_, turning _his opinion_ upon theology, wherewith all his natural philosophy is infected.' natural philosophy infected with 'opinion,'--no matter whose opinion it is, or under what name it comes to us, whatever else it is good for, is not good for practice. and this is the philosophy which includes both theory and practice. 'that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.' but that which distinguishes this from all others is, that it is the philosophy of 'hope'; and that is the name for it in both its fields, in speculation _and_ practice. the black intolerable wall, which those who stopped us on the lower platform of this pyramid of true knowledge brought us up with so soon--that blank wall with which the inquiry for the physical causes in nature limits and insults our speculation--has no place here, no place at all on this higher ground of science, which the knowledge of true forms creates--this true ground of _the understanding_, the understanding of nature, and the universal reason of things. 'he who is acquainted with forms, comprehends the unity of nature in substances apparently most distinct from each other.' neither is that base and sordid limit, with which the philosophy of physical causes shuts in the scientific arts and their power for human relief, found here. for this is the _prima philosophia_, where the universal axioms, the axioms that command all, are found: and the precepts of the universal practice are formed on them. 'even the philosopher himself--openly speaking from this summit--will venture to intimate briefly to men of understanding' the comprehension of its base, and the field of practice which it commands. 'is not the ground,' he inquires, modestly, 'is not the ground which machiavel wisely and largely discourseth concerning governments, that the way to establish and _preserve_ them is to reduce them _ad principia_, a rule in _religion_ and _nature, as well as in civil administration_?' there is the 'administrative reform' that will not need reforming, that waits for the science of _forms_ and constructions. but he proceeds: 'was not the _persian_ magic' [and that is the term which he proposes to restore for '_the part operative_' of this knowledge of forms], 'was not the persian magic a _reduction_ or correspondence of _the principles_ and _architecture_ of _nature_ to the _rules_ and _policy_ of _governments_?' there is no harm, of course, in that timid inquiry; but the student of the _zenda-vesta_ will be able to get, perhaps, some intimation of the designs that are lurking here, and will understand the revived and reintegrated sense with which the term _magic_ is employed to indicate the part operative of this new ground of _science_. 'neither are these only similitudes,' he adds, after extending these significant inquiries into other departments of practice, and demonstrating that this is the universality from which all other professions are nourished: 'neither are these only _similitudes_, as men of narrow observation may conceive them to be, but _the same_ footsteps of nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.' 'it must, however, be observed, that this method of operating' [which considers nature as simple, though in a concrete body] ['i the first of any, by my _universal being_.' _michael de montaigne_.] 'sets out from what is constant, eternal, and universal _in nature_; and opens such _broad_ paths to human _power_, as the thought of man can in the present state of things scarcely comprehend or figure to itself,' yes, it is the philosophy of hope. the perfection of the human form, the limit of the human want, is the limit of its practice; the limit of the human inquiry and demand is the limit of its speculation. the control of effects which this higher knowledge of nature offers us--this knowledge of what she is beforehand--the practical certainty which this _interior_ acquaintance with her, this acquaintance that identifies her under all the variety of her manifestations, is able to command--that _comprehensive_ command of results which the knowledge of _the true causes_ involves--the causes which are always present in all effects, which are constant under all fluctuations, the same under all the difference--the '_power_' of _this knowledge_, its power to relieve human suffering, is that which the discoverer of it insists on most in propounding it to men; but the mind in which that 'wonder'--that is, 'the seed of knowledge'--brought forth _this_ plant, was _not_ one to overlook or make light of that want in the human soul, which only knowledge can appease--that love which leads it to the truth, not for the sake of a secondary good, but because it is her life. 'although there is a most intimate connection, and almost an identity between the ways of human power and human knowledge, yet on account of the pernicious and inveterate habit of _dwelling_ upon abstractions, it is by far _the safest_ method to commence and build up sciences from those foundations which bear a relation to the practical division, _and to let them mark out and limit the theoretical_.' something like that the poet must have been thinking of, when he spoke of making 'the art and practic part of life, _the mistress_ to its theoric;'--'let _that_ mark out and limit the theoretical.' that inveterate and pernicious habit, which makes this course the safest one, is one that he speaks of in the advancement of learning, as that which has been of 'such ill desert towards learning,' as 'to reduce it to certain _empty_ and barren generalities, the mere husks and shells of sciences,' good for nothing at the very best, unless they serve to guide us to the kernels that have been forced out of them, by the torture and _press_ of the method,--the mere outlines and skeletons of knowledges, 'that do but offer knowledge to scorn of practical men, and are no more aiding to practice,' as the author of this universal skeleton confesses, 'than an ortelius's universal map is, to direct the way between london and york.' the way to steer clear of those empty and barren generalities, which do but offer learning to the scorn of the men of practice is, he says, to begin on the practical side, and that is just what we are doing here now in this question of the consulship,--that so practical and immediately urgent question which was, threatening then to drive out every other from the human consideration. if learning _had_ anything to offer on that subject, which would _not_ excite the scorn of practical men, then certainly was the time to produce it. we begin on the practical side here, and as to theory, we are rigidly limited to that which the question of the play requires,--the practical question marks it out,--we have just as much as is required for the solution of that, and not so much as a 'jot' more. but mark the expression:--'it is by far the safest method to commence and build up sciences'--the particular sciences,--the branches of science--from _those foundations which bear a relation_ to the practical division. we begin with a great practical question, and though the treatise is in a form which seems to offer it for amusement, rather than instruction, it has at least this advantage, that it does not offer it in the suspicious form of a theory, or in the distasteful form of a learned treatise,--a tissue of barren and empty generalities. the scorn of practical men is avoided, if it were only by its want of pretension; and the fact that it does not offer itself as a guide to practice, but rather insinuates itself into that position. we begin with the practical question, with its most sharply practical details, we begin with particulars, but that which is to be noted is, 'the foundations' of the universal philosophy are under our feet to begin with. at the first step we are on the platform of the prima philosophia; the last conclusions of the inductive science, the knowledge of the nature of things, is the ground,--the solid continuity--that we proceed on. that is the ground on which we build this practice. that is the trunk from which this branch of sciences is continued:--that trunk of universality which we are forbidden henceforth to _scorn_, because all the professions are nourished from it. that universality which the men of practice scorn no more, since they have tasted of its proofs, since they have reached that single bough of it, which stooped so low, to bring its magic clusters within their reach. fed with their own chosen delights, with the proof of the divinity of science, on their sensuous lips, they cry, 'thou hast kept the good wine until now.' clasping on the _magic_ robes for which they have not toiled or spun, sitting down by companies,--not of fifties,--not of hundreds,--not of thousands--sitting down by myriads, to this great feast, that the man of science spreads for them, in whose eye, the eye of a divine pity looked forth again, and saw them faint and weary still, and without a shepherd,--sitting down to this feast, for which there is no sweat or blood on their brows, revived, rejoicing, gazing on the bewildering basketfuls that are pouring in, they cry, answering after so long a time, for their part pilate's question: _this_, so far as it goes at least, this is _truth_. and the rod of that enchantment was _plucked_ here. it is but a branch from this same trunk--this trunk of 'universality,' which the men of practice _will_ scorn no more, when once they reach the multitudinous boughs of this great tree of miracles, where the nobler fruits, the more chosen fruits of the new science, are hidden still. continued from that 'trunk,' heavy with its juices, stoops now _this_ branch; its golden 'hangings' mellowed,--time mellowed,--ready to fall unshaken. built on _that_ 'foundation,' rises now this fair structure, the doctrine of _the state_. that knowledge of nature in general, that _interior_ knowledge of her, that loving insight, which is not baffled with her most foreign aspects; but detects her, and speaks her word, as from within, in all, is that which meets us here, that which meets us at the threshold. our guide is veiled, but his raiment is priestly. it is great nature's stole that he wears; he will alter our--_persian_. we are walking on the pavements of art; but it is nature's temple still; it is her 'pyramid,' and we are _within_, and the light from the apex is kindling all; and the dust 'that the rude wind blows in our face,' and 'the poor beetle that we tread on,' and the poor 'madman and beggar too,' are glorious in it, and of our 'kin.' those universal forms which the book of science in the abstract has laid bare already, are running through all; the cord of them is visible in all the detail. their foot-prints, which have been tracked to the height where nature is one, are seen for the first time cleared, uncovered here, in all the difference. this many-voiced speech, that sounds so deep from every point, deep as from the heart of nature, is _not_ the ventriloquist's artifice, is _not_ a poor showman's trick. it is great nature's voice--her own; and the magician who has untied her spell, who knows the cipher of 'the one in all' the priest who has unlocked her inmost shrine, and plucked out the heart of her mystery--is 'the interpreter.' chapter ix. the cure--plan of innovation--new definitions. 'swear by thy double self and that's an oath of credit.' 'having thus far proceeded ... is it not meet that i did amplify my judgment in other conclusions?' it is the trunk of the _prima philosophia_ then which puts forth these new and wondrous boughs, into all the fields of human speculation and practice, filling all our outdoor, penetrating all our indoor life, with their beauty and fragrance; overhanging every roof, stooping to every door, with their rich curtains and clusters of ornament and delight, with their ripe underhanging clusters of axioms of practice--brought down to particulars, ready for use--with their dispersed directions overhanging every path,--with their aphorisms made out of the pith and heart of sciences, 'representing a broken knowledge, and, _therefore_, inviting the men of speculation to inquire farther.' it is from this trunk of a _scientific_ universality, of a useful, practical, always-at-hand, all-inclusive, historical universality, to which the tracking of the principles, operant in history, to their simple forms and '_causes in nature_,' conducts the scientific experimenter,--it is from this primal living trunk and heart of sciences, to which the new method of learning conducts us, that this great branch of scientific practice comes, which this drama with its 'transitory shows' has brought safely down to us;--this two-fold branch of ethics and politics, which come to us--conjoined--as ethics and politics came in other systems then not scientific,--making in their junction, and through all their divergencies, 'the forbidden questions' of science. the _science_ of this essentially conjoined doctrine is that which makes, in this case, the novelty. 'the nature _which is formed_ in everything,' and not in man only, and the faculty, in man, of comprehending that wider nature, is that which makes the higher ground, from which a _science_ of his own specific nature, and the explanation of its phenomenon, is possible to man. except from this height of a _common nature_, there is no such thing as a scientific explanation of these phenomena possible. and this explanation is what the specific nature in man, with its _speculative_ grasp of a larger whole--with its speculative grasp of a universal whole,--with its instinctive _moral_ reach and comprehension corresponding to that,--constitutionally demands and 'anticipates.' and the knowledge of this nature which is formed in everything, and not in man only, is the beginning, not of a speculative science of the human nature merely,--it is the beginning,--it is the indispensable foundation of the arts in which a successful artistic advancement of that nature, or an artistic cure or culture of it is propounded. the fact that the 'human nature' is, indeed, what it is called, a '_nature_,' the fact that the human species is _a species_,--the fact that the human kind is but a _kind_, neighboured with many others from which it is isolated by its native walls of ignorance,--neighboured with many others, more or less known, known and unknown, more or less _kind_-ly, more or less hostile,--species, kinds, whose dialects of the universal laws, man has not found,--the fact that the universal, historic principles are operant in all the specific modifications of human nature, and control and determine them, the fact that the human life admits of a scientific analysis, and that its phenomena require to be traced to their true forms,--this is the fact which is the key to the new philosophy,--the key which unlocks it,--the key to the part speculative, and the part operative of it. and this is the secret of the difference between this philosophy and all other systems and theories of man's life on earth that had been before it, or that have come after it. for this new and so solid height of natural philosophy,--solid,--historical,--from its base in the divergency of natural history, to its utmost peak of unity,--this scientific height of a common nature, whose summit is 'prima philosophia,' with its new universal terms and axioms,--this height from which man, as a species, is also overlooked, and his spontaneous notions and theories criticised, subjected to that same criticism with which history itself is always flying in the face of them,--from which the specific bias in them is everywhere detected,--this new 'pyramid' of knowledge is the one on whose rock-hewn terraces the conflict of _views_, the clash of man's _opinions_ shall not sound: this is the system which has had, and shall have, no rival. and this is the key to this philosophy, not where it touches human nature only, but everywhere where it substitutes for abstract human notions--specific human notions that are powerless in the arts, or narrow observations that are restrained and uncertain in the rules of practice they produce,--powers, true forms, original agencies in nature, universal powers, sure as nature herself, and her universal form. to abase the specific human arrogance, to overthrow 'the idols of the tribe,' is the ultimate condition of this learning. man _as man_, is not a primal, if he be an ultimate, fact in nature. nature is elder and greater than he, and requires him to learn of her, and makes little of his mere conceits and dogmas. from the height of that new simplicity which this philosophy has gained--not as the elder philosophies had gained theirs, by pure contemplation, by hasty abstraction and retreat to the _à priori_ sources of knowledge and belief in man,--which it has gained, too, by a wider induction than the facts of the human nature can supply--with the torch of these universal principles cleared of their historic complexities, with the torch of the nature that is formed in everything, it enters here this great, unenclosed field of human life and practice, this spenserian wilderness, where those old, gnarled trunks, and tangled boughs, and wretched undergrowths of centuries, stop the way, where those old monsters, which the action of this play exposes, which this philosophy is bound to drag out to the day, are hid. the radical universal fact--the radical universal distinction of the _double_ nature of good which is formed in everything, and not in man only, and the two universal motions which correspond to that, the one, as everything, is a total or substantive in itself, with its corresponding motion; for this is the principle of selfishness and war in nature--the principle which struggles everywhere towards decay and the dissolution of the larger wholes, and not in man only, though the foolish, unscientific man, who does not know how to track the phenomena of his own nature to their _causes_,--who has no bridge from the natural internal phenomena of his own consciousness into the continent of nature, may think that it is, and reason of it as if it were;--this double nature of good, 'the one, as a thing, is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is, _a part_ or _member_ of a greater body, whereof the latter is in degree _the greater_ and _the worthier_, as it tends to the conservation of a more general form'--this distinction, which the philosopher of this school has laid down in his work on the scientific advancement of the human species, with a recommendation that it should be _strongly planted_, which he has planted there, openly, as the root of a new science of ethics and policy, will be found at the heart of all this new history of the human nature; but in this play of the true nobility, and the scientific cure of the commonweal, it is tracked openly to its most immediate, obvious, practical application. in all these great 'illustrated' scientific works, which this new school of learning, with the genius of science for its master, contrived to issue, all the universally actual and active principles are tracked to their _proper_ specific modifications in man, and not to their development in his actual history merely; and the distinctive essential law of the human kind--the law whereby man is man, as distinguished from the baser kinds, is brought up, and worked out, and unfolded in all its detail, from the bosom of the universal law--is brought down from its barren height of isolation, and planted in the universal rule of being, in the universal law of kinds and essence. this double nature of good, as it is specifically developed in man, not as humanity only, for man is not limited to his kind in his intelligence, or in his will, or in his affections,--this double nature of good, as it is developed in man, with his contemplative, and moral, and religious grasp of a larger whole than his particular and private nature can comprehend--with his large discourse looking before and after, on the one hand, and his blind instincts, and his narrow isolating senses on the other--with that distinctive human nature on the one hand, whereby he does, in some sort, comprehend the world, and not intellectually only--that nature whereby 'the world is set in his heart,' and not in his mind only--that nature which by the law of advancement to the perfection of his form, he struggles to ascend to--that, on the one hand, and that whereby he is kindred with the lower natures on the other, swayed by a gosling's instinct, held down to the level of the pettiest, basest kinds, forbidden to ascend to his own distinctive excellence, allied with species who have no such intelligent outgoing from particulars, who cannot grasp the common, whose sphere nature herself has narrowed and walled in,--these two universal natures of good, and all the passion and affection which lie on that tempestuous border line where they blend in the human, and fill the earth with the tragedy of their confusion,--this two-fold nature, and its tragic blending, and its true specific human development, whereby man is man, and not degenerate, lies discriminated in all these plays, tracked through all their wealth of observation, through all their characterization, through all their mirth, through all their tempests of passion, with a line so firm, that only the instrument of the new science could have graven it. of all the sciences, policy is the most immersed in matter, and the hardliest reduced to axiom'; but setting out from that which is constant and universal in nature, this philosopher is not afraid to undertake it; and, indeed, that is what he is bent on; for unless those universal, historical principles, which he has taken so much pains to exhibit to us clearly in their abstract form, 'terminate in _matter_ and _construction according_ to _the true_ definitions, they are speculative and of little use.' the termination of them in matter, and the new construction according to true definitions, is the business here. this, which is the hardliest reduced to axiom of any, is that which lies collected on the inductive tables here, cleared of all that interferes with the result; and the axiom of practice, which is the 'second vintage' of the new machine, is expressed before our eyes. 'for that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.' he starts here, with this grand advantage which no other political philosopher or reformer had ever had before; he has _the true definition_ in his hands to begin with; not the specific and futile notions with which the human mind, shut up within itself, seeks to comprehend and predict and order all, but the solid actual universals that the mind of man, by the combination and scientific balance of its faculties, is able to ascend to. he has in his hands, to begin with, the causes that are universal and constant in nature, with which all the historical phenomena are convertible,--the motives from which all movement proceeds, the true original simple powers,--the unknown, into which all the variety of the known is resolvable, or rather the known into which all the variety of the unknown is resolvable; the forms 'which are always present _when the particular nature_ is present, and universally attest that presence; which are always absent when the particular nature is absent, and universally attest that absence; which always increase as the particular nature increases; which always decrease as the particular nature decreases;' that is the kind of definitions which this philosopher will undertake his moral reform with; that is the kind of idea which the english philosopher lays down for the basis of his politics. nothing less solid than that will suit the turn of his genius, either in speculation or practice. he does full justice to the discoveries of the old greek philosophers, whose speculation had controlled, not the speculation only, but all the practical doctrine of the world, from their time to his. he saw from what height of _genius_ they achieved their command; but that was two thousand years before, and that was in the south east corner of europe; and when the modern europe began to think for itself, it was found that the greeks could not give the law any longer. it was found that the _english_ notions at least, and the _greek_ notions of things in general differed very materially--essentially--when they came to be put on paper. when the 'representative men' of those two corners of europe, and of those two so widely separated ages of the human advancement, came to discourse together from their 'cliffs' and compare notes, across that sea of lesser minds, the most remarkable differences, indeed, began to be _perceptible_ at once, though the world has not yet begun to _appreciate_ them. it was a difference that was expected to tell on the common mind, for a time, principally in its '_effects_.' everybody, the learned and the unlearned, understands now, that after the modern survey was taken, new practical directions were issued at once. orders came down for an immediate suspension of those former rules of philosophy, and the ship was laid on a new course. 'plato,' says the new philosopher, 'as one that had a wit of elevation _situate upon a cliff_, did descry that _forms_ are the true object of knowledge,' that was his discovery,--'_but_ lost the fruit of that opinion by'--shutting himself up, in short, in his own abstract contemplations, in his little world of man, and getting out his theory of the universe, before hand, from these; instead of applying himself practically and modestly to the observation of that universe, in which man's part is _so_ humble. 'vain man,' says our oldest poet, 'vain man would be wise, who is born like a wild ass's colt.' but let us take a specimen of the manner in which the propounder of the new ideal philosophy 'comes to particulars,' with this quite new kind of ideas, and we shall find that they were designed to take in some of those things in heaven and earth that were omitted, or not dreampt of in the others,--which were not included in the 'idols.' he tells us plainly that these are the ideas with which he is going to unravel the most delicate questions; but he is willing to entertain his immediate audience, and propitiate the world generally, by trying them, or rather giving orders to have them tried, on other things first. he does not pride himself very much on anything which he has done, or is able to do in these departments of inquiry from which his instances are here taken, and he says, in this connection:--'we do not, however, deny that other instances _can perhaps be added_.' in order to arrive at his doctrine of practice in general, he begins after the scientific method, not with the study of any one kind of actions only, he begins by collecting the rules of action in general. by observation of species he seeks to ascend to the principles common to them. and he comes to us with a carefully prepared scheme of the 'elementary motions,'--outlined, and enriched with such observations as he and his school have been able to make under the disadvantages of that beginning. 'the motions of bodies,' he observes, 'are compounded, decomposed and combined, no less than the bodies themselves,' and he directs the attention of the student, who has his eye on practice, with great emphasis, to those instances which he calls 'instances of predominance,'--'instances which point out the predominance and submission of powers, compared' [not in abstract contemplation but in action,] 'compared with each other, and which,' [not in books but in action,]--'which is the more _energetic_ and _superior_, or more weak and inferior.' 'these "elementary notions" direct and are directed by each other, according to their strength,--quantity, _excitement, concussion_, or the assistance, or impediments they meet with. for instance, _some magnets_ support iron sixty times their own weight; _so far_ does the motion of _lesser congregation_ predominate over _the greater_, but if the weight be increased _it yields_.' [we must observe, that he is speaking here of 'the motions, tendencies, and active powers which are most universal in nature,' for the purpose of suggesting rules of practice which apply _as widely_; though he keeps, with the intimation above quoted, principally to this class of instances.] 'a lever of a certain strength will raise a given weight, and _so far_ the notion of _liberty_ predominates over that of _the greater congregation_; but if the weight be _greater_, the former motion _yields_. a piece of leather, stretched _to a certain point_, does not break, and _so far_ the motion of continuity _predominates_' [for it is the question of predominance, and dominance, and domineering, and lordships, and liberties, of one kind and another, that he is handling]--'_so far_ the motion of continuity _predominates_ over that of tension; but if the tension be _greater_, the leather breaks, and the motion of continuity _yields_. _a certain quantity_ of water flows through a chink, and _so far_ the motion of greater congregation _predominates_ over that of continuity; but if the chink be _smaller, it yields_. if a musket be charged with ball and powdered sulphur only, and the fire be applied, the ball is not discharged, in which case the motion of greater congregation overcomes that of matter; but when gunpowder is used, the motion of matter in the sulphur _predominates_, being _assisted_ by that motion, and the motion of avoidance in the nitre; and _so of the rest_.' our more recent chemists would, of course, be inclined to criticise that explanation; but, in some respects, it is better than theirs; and it answers well enough the purpose for which it was introduced there, and for which it is introduced here also. for this is the initiative of the great inquiry into 'the wrestling instances,' and the 'instances of predominance' in general, 'such as point out the predominance of _powers, compared with each other_, and which of them is _the more energetic and_ superior, or more _weak_ and inferior'; and though this class of instances is valued chiefly for its illustration of another in this system of learning, where things are valued in proportion to their usefulness, they are not sought for as similitudes merely; they are produced by one who regards them as 'the same footsteps of nature, treading in different substances,' and leaving the foot-print of universal axioms; and this is a _class_ of instances which he particularly recommends to inquiry. 'for wrestling instances, which show _the predominance of powers_, and in _what manner_ and _proportion_ they predominate and yield, must be searched for with active and industrious diligence.' 'the _method and nature_ of this yielding' [of _this yielding_--subjection is the question] 'must also be diligently examined; as, _for instance_, whether the motions' ['of liberty'] 'completely cease, or exert themselves, but are constrained; for in all bodies with which we are acquainted, _there is no real, but an apparent rest, either in the whole, or in the parts_. this apparent rest is occasioned either by equilibrium' [as in the case of hamlet, as well as in that of some others whose acts were suspended, and whose wills were arrested then, by considerations not less comprehensive than his]--'either by equilibrium, _or by the absolute predominance_ of motions. by equilibrium, as in the scales of the balance, which _rest if the weight be equal_. by predominance, as in perforated jars, in which the water rests, and is prevented from falling by the predominance of the motion of connection.' 'it is, however, to be observed (as we have said before), _how far the yielding motions exert themselves_. _for_, if _a man_ be held stretched out on the ground _against his_ will, with arms and legs bound down, _or_ otherwise confined'--[as the duke of kent's were, for instance]--'and yet strive with all his power to get up, the struggle is not the less, though ineffectual. the _real state of the case_' [namely, whether the yielding motion be, as it were, annihilated _by the predominance_, or there be rather a continued, though an invisible effort] '_will perhaps appear_ in the concurrence of motions, although it escape our notice in _their conflict_.' so delicately must philosophy needs be conveyed in a certain stage of a certain class of wrestling instances, where _a combination_ of powers hostile to science produces an '_absolute predominance_' of powers, and it is necessary that the yielding motion should at least appear to be 'as it were, annihilated'; though, of course, that need not hinder the invisible effort at all. 'for on account of the rawness and unskilfulness of the hands through which they pass,' there is no difficulty in inserting such intimations as to the latitude of the axioms which these particular instances adduced here, and 'others which might perhaps be added,' are expected to yield. this is an instance of the freedom with which philosophical views on certain subjects are continually addressed in these times, to that immediate audience of the few 'who will perhaps see farther into them than the common reader,' and to those who shall hereafter apply to the philosophy issued under such conditions--the conditions above described, that key of 'times,' which the author of it has taken pains to leave for that purpose. but the question of 'predominance, which makes our present subject,' is not yet sufficiently indicated. there are more and less powerful motives concerned in _this_ wrestling instance, as he goes on to demonstrate. 'the rules of _such instances_ of _predominance as occur_ should be _collected, such as_ the following'--and the rule which he gives, by way of a specimen of these _rules_, is a very important one for a statesman to have, and it is one which the philosopher has himself '_collected_' from _such_ instances as occurred--'the more _general_ the desired advantage is, the _stronger_ will be _the motive_. the motion of _connection_, for instance, which relates to _the intercourse of the parts of the universe_, is more powerful than that of _gravity_, which relates to the intercourse of _dense_ bodies. again; the desire of a private good does not, _in general_, prevail against that of a public one, except where the _quantities are small_' [it is the general _law_ he is propounding here; and the exception, the anomaly, is that which he has to note]; 'would that such were the case in civil matters.' but that application to 'civil matters,' which the statesman, propounding in his own person this newly-collected knowledge of the actual historic forces, as a new and immeasurable source of relief to the human estate,--that application, which he could only make here in these side-long glances, is made in the play without any difficulty at all. these instances, which he produces here in his professed work of science, are produced as illustrations of the kind of inquiry which he is going to bring to bear, with all the force and subtlety of his genius, on the powers of nature, as manifested in the individual human nature, and in those unions and aggregations to which it tends--those larger wholes and greater congregations, which parliaments, and pulpits, and play-houses, and books, were forbidden then, on pain of death and torture and ignominy, to meddle with. _here_, he tells us, he finds it to the purpose to select '_suggestive_ instances, such as _point out_ that which is advantageous to mankind'; 'and it is a part of science to make _judicious_ inquiries and wishes.' these instances, which he produces here, are searching; but they are none too searching for his purpose. they do not come any nearer to nature than those others which he is prepared to add to them. the treatment is not any more radical and subtle here than it is in those instances in which 'he comes to particulars,' under the pretence of play and pastime, in other departments,--those in which the judicious inquiry into the laws of the actual forces promises to yield rules 'the most generally useful to mankind.' this is the philosophy precisely which underlies all this play,--this play, in which the great question, not yet ready for the handling of the unlearned, but ripe already for scientific treatment,--the question of the wrestling forces,--the question of the subjection and predominance of powers,--the question of the combination and opposition of forces in those _arrested motions_ which make _states_, is so boldly handled. those arrested motions, where the rest is only apparent, not real--where the 'yielding' forces are only, _as it were_, annihilated, whether by equilibrium of forces, or an absolute predominance, but biding their time, ready to burst their bonds and renew their wrestling, ready to show themselves, not as 'subjects,' but predominators--not as states, but revolutions. the science 'that ends in matter and new constructions'--new construction, 'according to true definitions,' is what these citizens, whom this poet has called up from their horizontal position by way of anticipation, are already, under his instructions, boldly clamouring for. constructions in which these very rules and axioms, these scientific certainties, are taken into the account, are what these men, whom this magician has set upon their feet here, whose lips he has opened and whose arms he has unbound with the magic of his art, are going to have before they lie down again, or, at least, before they make a comfortable state for any one to trample on, though they _may_, perhaps, for a time seem, 'as it were, annihilated.' these true _forms_, these _real_ definitions, this new kind of _ideas_, these new motions, new in philosophy, new in _human_ speech, old in natures,--written in her book ere man was,--these universal, elementary, original motions, which he is exhibiting here in the philosophic treatise, under cover of a certain class of instances, are the very ones which he is tracking _here_ in the play, into all the business of the state. this is that same new thread which we saw there in the grave philosophic warp, with here and there a little space filled in, not with the most brilliant filling; enough, however, to show that it was meant to be filled, and, to the careful eye,--how. but here it is the more chosen substance; and every point of this illustrious web is made of its involutions,--is a point of 'illustration.' yes, here he is again. here he is at last, in that promised field of his labours,--that field of 'noblest subjects,' for the culture of which he will have all nature put under contribution; here he is at large, 'making what work he pleases.' he who is content to talk from his chair of professional learning of 'pieces of leather,' and _their_ unions, and bid his pupil note and 'consider well' that mysterious, unknown, unexplored power in nature, which holds their particles together, in its wrestling with its opposite; and where it _ceases_, or _seems to cease_; where that obstinate freedom and predominance is vanquished, and by what rules and means; he who finds in 'water,' arrested 'in perforated jars,' or 'flowing through a chink,' or resisting gravity, _if_ the chink be smaller, or in the balanced 'scales,' with their apparent rest, the wrestling forces of all nature,--the weaker enslaved, but _there_,--_not_ annihilated; he who saw in the little magnet, beckoning and holding those dense palpable masses, or in the lever, assisted by human hands, vanquishing its mighty opposite, things that old philosophies had not dreamt of,--reports of mysteries,--revelations for those who have the key,--words from that book of creative power, words from that living word, which _he_ must study who would have his vision of god fulfilled, who would make of his 'good news' something more than a poet's prophecy. he who found in the peaceful nitre, in the harmless sulphur, in the saltpetre, 'villanous' not yet, in the impotence of fire and sulphur, combining in vain against the motion of the resisting ball,--not less real to his eye, because not apparent,--or in the _villanous_ compound itself, while yet the spark is wanting,--'rules' for other 'wrestling instances,' for _other_ combinations, where the motion of inertia was also to be overcome; requiring organized movements, analyses, and combinations of forces, not less but _more_ scientifically artistic,--rules for the enlargement of forces, waiting but _their_ spark, then, to demonstrate, with more fearful explosions, _their_ expansibility, threatening 'to lay all flat.' for here, too, the mystic, unknown, occult powers, the unreported actualities, are working still, in obedience to their orders, which they had not from man, and taking no note of his. 'for man, as the _interpreter_ of nature, _does_, and _understands_ as much as his observations on the order of things, _or_ the mind, _permits_ him, and neither _knows_ nor _is capable_ of more.' 'man, while _operating_, can only apply or withdraw natural bodies. nature internally performs the rest'; and 'the syllogism forces _assent_, but _not_ things.' great things this interpreter promises to man from these observations and interpretations, which he and his company are ordering; great things he promises from the application of this new method of learning to _this_ department of man's want; because those vague popular notions--those spontaneous but deep-rooted beliefs in man--those confused, perplexed terms, with which he seeks to articulate them, and not those acts which make up his life only--are out of nature, and all resolvable into higher terms, and require to be returned into _these_ before man can work with them to purpose. great _news_ for man he brings; the powers which are working in the human life, and _not_ those which are working without it only, are working in obedience _to laws_. great things he promises, because the facts of human life are determined by forces which admit of scientific definition, and are capable of being reduced to axioms. great things he promises, for these distinctive phenomena of human life, to their most artificial complication, are all out of the universal nature, and struggling already of themselves instinctively towards the scientific solution, already 'anticipating' science, and invoking her, and waiting and watching for her coming. good news the scientific reporter, in his turn, brings in also; good news for the state, good news for man; confirmations of reports indited beforehand; confirmations, from the universal scriptures, of the revelation of the divine in the human. good news, because that law of the greater whole, which is the worthier--that law of the common-weal, which is the human law--that law which in man is reason and conscience, is in the nature of things, and not in man only--nay, _not_ in man as yet, but prefigured only--his ideal; his true form--not in man, who 'is' not, but '_becoming_.' but in tracking these universal laws of being, this constitution of things in general into the human constitution--in tracing these universal definitions into the specific terms of human life--the clearing up of the spontaneous notions and beliefs which the mind of man shut up to itself yields--the criticism on the terms which pre-occupy this ground is of course inevitable, whether expressed or not, and is indeed no unimportant part of the result. for this is a philosophy in which even 'the most vulgar and casual opinions are something more than nothing in nature.' this play of the common-weal and its scientific cure, in which the question of the true nobility is so deeply inwrought throughout, is indeed but the filling up of that sketch of the constitution of man which we find on another page--that constitution whereby man, as man, is part and member of a common-weal--that constitution whereby his relation to the common-weal is essential to the perfection of his individual nature, and that highest good of it which is conservation with advancement--that constitution whereby the highest good of the particular and private nature, that which bids defiance to the blows of fortune, comprehends necessarily the good of the whole in its intention. ('for neither can a man understand virtue without relation to society, nor duty without an inward disposition.') and that is the reason that the question of 'the government of every man over himself,' and the predominance of powers, and the wrestling of them in 'the little state of man'--the question as to which is 'nobler'--comes to be connected with the question of civil government so closely. that is the reason that this doctrine of virtue and state comes to us conjoined; that is the reason that we find this question of the consulship, and the question of heroism and personal greatness, the question of the true nobility, forming so prominent a feature in the play of the common-weal, inwoven throughout with the question of its cure. 'constructions according to true definitions' make the end here. the definition is, of course, the necessary preliminary to such constructions: it does not in itself suffice. mere science does not avail here. scientific arts, scientific institutions of regimen and culture and cure, make the essential conditions of success in this enterprise. but we want the light of 'the true definitions' to begin with. there is no use in revolutions till we have it; and as for empirical institutions, mankind has seen the best of them;--we are perishing in their decay, dying piecemeal, going off into a race of ostriches, or something of that nature--or threatened with becoming mere petrifactions, mineral specimens of what we have been, preserved, perhaps, to adorn the museums of some future species, gifted with better faculties for maintaining itself. it is time for a change of some sort, for the worse or the better, when we get habitually, and by a social rule, water for milk, brickdust for chocolate, silex for butter, and minerals of one kind and another for bread; when our drugs give the lie to science; when mustard refuses to 'counter-irritate,' and sugar has ceased to be sweet, and pepper, to say nothing of 'ginger' is no longer 'hot in the mouth.' the question in speculative philosophy at present is-- 'why all these things change from their ordinance, their natures, and _pre_-formed faculties, to monstrous quality.' --'there's something in this _more_ than _natural_, --if _philosophy could find it out_! and what we want in practical philosophy when it comes to this, is a new kind of enchantments, with capacities large enough to swallow up these, as the rod of moses swallowed up the rods of the egyptians. that was a good test of authority; and nothing short of that will answer our present purpose; when not that which makes life desirable only, but life itself is assailed, and in so comprehensive a manner, the revolutionary point of sufferance and stolidity is reached. we cannot stay to reason it thus and thus with 'the garotte' about our throats: the scientific enchantments will have to be tried now, tried here also. now that we have 'found out' oxygen and hydrogen, and do not expect to alter their ways of proceeding by any epithets that we may apply to them, or any kind of hocus-pocus that we may practise on them, it is time to see what _gen_, or _genus_ it is, that proceeds in these departments in so successful a manner, and with so little regard to our exorcisms; and the mere calling of names, which indicate in a general way the unquestionable fact of a degeneracy, is of no use, for that has been thoroughly tried already. the experiment in the 'common logic,' as lord bacon calls it, has been a very long and patient one; the historical result is, that it forces assent, and _not_ things. the question here is _not_ of divinity, as some might suppose. there is no question about that. nobody need be troubled about that. it does not depend on this, or that man's arguments, happily. the true divinity, the true inspiration, is of that which was and shall be. its foundations are laid,--its perennial source is found, not in the soul of man, not in the constitution of the mind of man only, but in the nature of things, and in the universal laws of being. the true divinity strikes its foundations to the universal granite; it is built on 'that rock where philosophy and divinity join close;' and heaven and earth may pass, but not that. the question here is of logic. the question is between lord bacon and aristotle, and which of these two thrones and dominions in speculation and practice the moderns are disposed on the whole to give their suffrages to, in this most vital department of human practice, in this most vital common human concern and interest. the question is of these demoniacal agencies that are at large now upon this planet--on both sides of it--going about with 'tickets of _leave_,' of one kind and another; for the logic that we employ in this department still, though it has been driven, with hooting, out of every other, and the rude systems of metaphysics which it sustains, do not take hold of these things. they pay no attention to our present method of reasoning about them. there is no objection to syllogisms, as lord bacon concedes;--they are very useful in their proper place. the difficulty is, that the subtlety of nature in general, as exhibited in that result which we call fact, far surpasses the subtlety of nature, when developed within that limited sphere, which the mind of man makes; and nature is much more than a match for him, when he throws himself upon his own internal gifts of ratiocination, and undertakes to dictate to the universe. the difficulty is just this;--here we have it in a nut-shell, as we are apt to get it in lord bacon's aphorisms. 'the syllogism consists of propositions; these of words. words are the signs of notions: notions represent things:' [if these last then]--'if _our notions_ are _fantastical_, the whole structure falls to the ground. but [they _are_] they are, for the most part, _improperly abstracted_, and deduced from things,' and that is the difficulty which this new method of learning, propounded in connection with this so radical criticism of the old one, undertakes to remedy. for there are just _two_ methods of learning, as he goes on to tell us, with increasing, but cautious, amplifications. the false method lays down from the very outset some abstract and _useless_ generalities,--_the other_, gradually rises to those principles which are really the most common in nature. 'axioms determined on in argument, can never assist in the discovery of _new effects_, for the subtlety of nature is vastly superior to that of argument. but axioms properly and regularly abstracted from particulars, easily _point out and define_ new particulars, and _impart activity to the sciences_.' 'we are wont to call _that human reasoning_ which we apply to nature, the anticipation of nature (as being rash and premature), and that which is properly _deduced from_ things, the interpretation of nature.'--(a radical distinction, which it is the first business of the new machine of the mind to establish). '_anticipations_ are sufficiently powerful in producing _unanimity_; for if men were all to become even _uniformly mad_, they might agree tolerably well _with each other_,' (but not with nature; there's the trouble; that is _the assent_ that is wanting). 'in sciences founded upon opinions and dogmas, it is right to make use of anticipations and logic, if you wish to force assent, and _not_ things.' the difference, then, between the first hasty conceptions and rude theories of the nature of things,--the difference between the preconceptions which make the first steps of the human mind towards the attainment of truth, and those conceptions and axioms which are properly abstracted from things, and which correspond to their natures, is the difference in which science begins. and we shall find that the truths of science in this department of it, which makes our present subject are quite as new, quite as far out of the road of common opinion, and quite as unattainable by the old method of learning, as those truths with which science has already overpowered the popular notions and theories in those departments in which its powers have been already tested. these rude natural products of the human understanding, while it is yet undisciplined by the knowledge of nature in general, which in their broadest range proceed from the human speciality, and are therefore liable to an exterior criticism; these first words and natural beliefs of men, through all their range, from the _a priori_ conceptions of the schools, down to the most narrow and vulgar _preconceptions_ and _prejudices_ of the unlearned, the author of the 'novum organum,' and of the 'advancement of learning,' by a bold and dexterous sweep, puts quietly into one category, under the seemingly fanciful,--but, considering the time, none too fanciful,--designation of 'the idols';--(he knew, indeed, that the original of the term would suggest to the scholar a more literal reading),--'the idols of the tribe, of the den, of the market, and of the theatre,' as he sees reason--scientific, as well as rhetorical reason,--for dividing and distinguishing them. but under that common designation of _images_, and false ones too, he subjects them to a common criticism, in behalf of that mighty hitherto unknown, unsought, universality, which is all particulars--which is more universal than the notions of men, and transcends the grasp of their beliefs and pre-judgments;--that universal fact which men are brought in contact with, in all their doing, and in all their suffering, whether pleasurable or painful. that _universal_, actual fact, whose science philosophy has hitherto set aside, in favour of its own pre-notions, as a thing not worth taking into the account,--that mystic, occult, unfathomed fact, that is able to assert itself in the face of our most authoritative pre-notions, whose science, under the vulgar name of experience, all the learning of the world had till then made over with a scorn ineffable to the cultivation of the unlearned. under that despised name which the old philosophy had omitted in its chart, the new perceived that the ground lay, and made all sail thither. we cannot expect to find then any of those old terms and definitions included in the trunk of the new system, which is science. none of those airy fruits that grow on the branches which those old roots of a false metaphysics must needs nurture,--none of those apples of sodom which these have mocked us with so long, shall the true seeker find on these boughs. the man of science does not, indeed, care to displace those terms in the popular dialect _here_, any more than the chemist or the botanist will insist on reforming the ordinary speech of men with _their_ truer language in the fields they occupy. the new logician and metaphysician will himself, indeed, make use of these same terms, with a hint to 'men of understanding,' perhaps, as to the sense in which he uses them. incorporated into a system of learning on which much human labour has been bestowed, they may even serve some good practical purposes under certain conditions of social advancement. and besides, they are useful for adorning discourse, and furnish abundance of rhetorical material. above all, they are invaluable to the scholastic controversialists, and the new philosopher will not undertake to displace them in these fields. he steadfastly refuses to come into any collision with them. he leaves them to take their way without. he makes them over to the vulgar, and to those old-fashioned schools of logic and metaphysics, whose endless web is spun out of them. but when the question is of practice, that is another thing. it is the scientific word that is wanting here. that is the word which in his school he will undertake to teach. when it comes to practice, professional practice, like the botanist and the chemist, he will make his own terms. he has a machine expressly for that purpose, by which new terms are framed and turned out in exact accordance with the nature of things. he does not wish to quarrel with any one, but in the way of his profession, he will have none of those old confused terms thrust upon him. he will examine them, and analyze them; and all,--_all_ that is in them,--all, and more, will be in his; _but_ scientifically cleared, 'divided with the mind, that divine fire,' and clothed with power. and it is just as impossible that those changes for the human relief which the propounder of the new logic propounded as its chief end, should ever be effected by means of the popular terms which our metaphysicians are still allowed to retain in the highest fields of professional practice, as it would have been to effect those lesser reforms which this logic has already achieved, if those old elementary terms, earth, fire, air, water,--terms which antiquity thought fine enough; which passed the muster of the ancient schools without suspicion, had never to this hour been analyzed. it is just as easy to suppose that we could have had our magnetic telegraphs, and daguerreotypes, and our new materia medica, and all the new inventions of modern science for man's relief, if the terms which were simple terms in the vocabulary of aristotle and pliny, had never been tested with the edge of the new machine, and divided with its divine fire, if they had not ceased to be in the schools at least elementary; it is just as easy to suppose this, as it is to suppose that the true and nobler ends of science can ever be attained, so long as the powers that are _actual_ in our human life, which are still at large in all their blind instinctive demoniacal strength _there_, which still go abroad free-footed, unfettered of science _there_, while we chain the lightning, and send it on our errands,--so long as these still slip through the ring of our airy 'words,' still riot in the freedom of our large generalizations, our sublime abstractions,-- so long as a mere _human_ word-ology is suffered to remain here, clogging all with its deadly impotence,--keeping out the true generalizations with their grappling-hooks on the particulars, --the creative word of art which man learns from the creating wisdom, --the word to which rude nature bows anew,--the word which is power. but while the world is resounding with those new relations to the powers of nature which the science of nature has established in other fields, in that department of it, which its founder tells us is 'the end and term of natural science in the intention of man,' in that department of it to which his labor was directed; we are still given over to the inventions of aristotle, applied to those rude conceptions and theories of the nature of things which the unscientific ages have left to us. here we have still the loose generalization, the untested affirmation, the arrogant pre-conception, the dogmatic assumption. here we have the mere phenomena of the human speciality put forward as science, without any attempt to find their genera,--to trace them to that which is more known to nature, so as to connect them practically with the diversity and opposition, which the actual conditions of practice present. we have not, in short, the scientific language here yet. the vices and the virtues do not understand the names by which we call them, and undertake to command them. those are not the names in that 'infinite book of secrecy' which they were taught in. they find a more potent order there. and thus it is, that the demons of human life go abroad here still, impervious alike to our banning and our blessing. the powers of nature which are included in the human nature,--the powers which in this _specific_ form of them we are undertaking to manage with these vulgar generalizations, tacked together with the aristotelian logic--these powers are no more amenable to any such treatment in this form, than they are in those other forms, in which we are learning to approach them with another vocabulary. the forces which are developed in the human life will not answer to the names by which we call them _here_, any more than the lightning would answer to the old magician's incantation,--any more than it would have come if the old logician had called it by _his_ name,--which was just as good as the name--and no better, than the name, which the priest of baal gave it,--any more than it would have come, if the old logician had undertaken to fetch it, with the harness of his syllogism. but when the new logician, who was the new magician, came, with 'the part operative' of his speculation; with his 'new machine,' with the rod of his new definition, with the staff of _his_ genera and species,--when the right name was found for it, it heard, it heard afar, it heard in its heaven and _came_. it came fast enough then. it was 'asleep,' but it awaked. it was 'taking a journey' but it came. there was no affectation of the graces of the gods when the new interpreter and prophet of nature, who belonged to the new order of interpreters, sent up his little messenger, without any pomp or ceremony, or 'windy suspiration of forced breath,' and fetched it. but that was an occidental philosopher, one of the race who like to see effects of some kind, when there is nothing in the field to forbid it. that was one of the doctors who are called in this system 'interpreters of nature,' to distinguish them from those who 'rashly anticipate' it. he did not make faces, and cut himself with knives and lances, after a prescribed manner, and prophesy until evening, though there was no voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. he knew that that god at least would not stop on his journey; or if, peradventure, he slept, would not be wakened by any such process. and the farther the world proceeds on that 'new road' it is travelling at present, the more the demand will be heard in this quarter, for an adaptation of instrumentalities to the advanced, and advancing ages of modern learning and civilization, and to that more severe and exacting genius of the occidental races, that keener and more subtle, and practical genius, from whose larger requisitions and powers this advancement proceeds. chapter x. the cure--plan of innovation--new constructions. 'unless these end in matter, and constructions according to true definitions, they are speculative, and of little use.'--_novum organum_. difficult, then, as the problem of civil government appeared to the eye of the scientific philosopher, and threatening and appalling as were those immediate aspects of it which it presented at that moment, he does not despair of the state. even on the verge of that momentous political and social crisis, 'though he does not need to go to heaven to predict great revolutions and imminent changes,' 'he thinks he sees ways to save us,' and he finds in his new science of man the ultimate solution of that problem. that particular and private nature which is in all men, let them re-name themselves by what names they will, that particular and private nature which intends always the individual and private good, has in itself 'an incident towards the good of society,' which it may use as means,--which it must use, if highly successful,--as means to its end. even in this, when science has enlightened it, and it is impelled by blind and unsuccessful instinct no longer, the man of science finds a place where a pillar of the true state can be planted; even here the scientific light lays bare, in the actualities of the human constitution, a foundation-stone,--a stone that does not crumble--a stone that does not roll, which the state that shall stand must rest on. even that 'active good,' which impels 'the troublers of the world, such as was lucius sylla, and infinite others in smaller model,'--that principle which impels the particular nature to leave its signature on other things,--on the state, on the world, if it can,--though it is its own end, and though it is apt, when armed with those singular powers for 'effecting its _good_ will,' which are represented in the hero of this action, to lead to results of the kind which this piece represents,--this is the principle in man which seeks an individual immortality, and works of immortal worth for man are its natural and selectest means. but that is not all. the bettering of _itself_, the perfection of its own form, is, by the constitution of things, a force, a _motive_, an _actual_ 'power in everything that moves.' this is one of the primal, universal, natural motions. it is in the universal creative stamp of things; and strong as that is, the rock on which here, too, the hope of science rests--strong as that is, the pillar of the state, which here, too, it will rear. for to man the highest '_passive_ good,' and this, too, is of the good which is 'private and particular,' is, constitutionally, that whereby 'the conscience of good intentions, however succeeding, is a more continual joy to his nature than all the provision--the most luxurious provision--which can be made for security and repose,--whereby the mere empirical experimenter in good will count it a higher felicity to fail in good and virtuous ends towards the public, than to attain the most envied success limited to his particular. thus, even in these decried '_private_' motives, which actuate all men--these universal natural instincts, which impel men yet more intensely, by the concentration of the larger sensibility, and the faculty of the nobler nature of their species, to seek their own private good,--even in these forces, which, unenlightened and uncounterbalanced, tend in man to war and social dissolution, or 'monstrous' social combination,--even in these, the scientific eye perceives the basis of new structures, 'constructions according to true definitions,' in which _all_ the ends that nature in man grasps and aspires to, shall be artistically comprehended and attained. but this is only the beginning of the scientific politician's 'hope.' this is but a collateral aid, an incidental assistance. this is the place on his ground-plan for the buttresses of the pile he will rear. there is an unborrowed foundation, there is an internal support for the state in man. for along with that particular and private nature of good, there is another in all men;--there is another motive, which respects and beholds the good of society, not mediately, but directly as _its_ end,--which embraces in its intention 'the form of human nature, whereof we are members and portions, and _not_--not--our own proper, individual form'; and this is the good 'which is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it tends to the conservation and advancement of a more general form.' and this, also, is an _actual_ force in man, proceeding from the universal nature of things and original in that, not in him. this, also, is in the primeval creative stamp of things; and here, also, the science of the interpretation of nature finds in the constitution of man, and in the nature of things, the foundations of the true state ready to its hand; and hewn, all hewn and cut, and joined with nature's own true and cunning hand ere man was, the everlasting pillars of the common-weal. but in man _this_ law, also,--this law chiefly,--has its _special_, essentially special, development. 'it is much _more_ impressed on man, if he de-_generate_ not.' great buildings have been reared on this foundation already; great buildings, old and time-honoured, stand on it. the history of human nature is glorious, even in its degeneracy, with the exhibition of this larger, nobler form of humanity asserting itself, triumphing over the intensities of the narrower motivity. it is a species in which the organic law transcends the individual, and embraces the kind; it is a constitution of nature, in which those who seek the good of the kind, and subordinate the private nature to that, are noble, and chief. it is a species in which the law of the common-weal is for ever present to the private nature, as the law of its own being, requiring, under the pains and penalties of the universal laws of being, subjection. science cannot originate new forces in nature. 'man, while operating, can only apply or withdraw natural forces. nature, internally, performs the rest.' but here are the very forces that we want. if man were, indeed, naturally and constitutionally, that mere species of 'vermin' which, under certain modes of culture, with great facility he becomes, there would be no use in spending words upon this subject. science could not undertake the common-weal in that case. if nature's word had been here dissolution, isolation, single intention in the parts and members of that body that science sought to frame, what word of creative art could she pronounce, what bonds of life could she find, what breath of god could she boast, that she should think to frame of such material the body politic, the organic whole, the living, free, harmonious, triumphant common-weal. but here are the very forces that we want, blindly moving, moving in the dark, left to intuition and instinct, where nature had provided reason, and required science and scientific art. that has not been tried. and that is why this question of the state, dark as it is, portentous, hopeless as its aspects are, if we limit the survey to our present aids and instrumentalities, is already, to the eye of science, kindling with the aurora of unimagined change, advancements to the heights of man's felicity, that shall dim the airy portraiture of poets' visions, that shall outgo here, too, the world's young dreams with its scientific reality. there has been no help from science in this field hitherto. the proceeding of the world has been instinctive and empirical thus far, in the attainment of the ends which the complex nature of man requires him to seek. men have been driven, and swayed hither and thither, by these different and apparently contradictory aims, without any _science_ of the forces that actuated them. those ends these forces will seek,--'it is their nature to,'--whether in man, or in any other form in which they are incorporated. there's no amount of declamation that is ever going to stop them. the power that is in everything that moves, the forces of universal nature are concerned in the acts that we deprecate and cry out upon. it is the original constitution of things, as it was settled in that house of commons, to whose acts the memory of man runneth not, that is concerned in these demonstrations; and philosophy requires that whatever else we do, we should avoid, by all means, coming into any collision with those statutes. 'we must so order it,' says michael of the mountain, quoting in this case from antiquity--'we must so order it, as by no means to contend with universal nature.' 'to attempt to kick against natural necessity,' he says in his own name, and in his own peculiar and more impressive method of philosophic instruction--'to attempt to kick against natural necessity, is to represent the folly of ctesiphon, who undertook to outkick his mule.' we must begin by distinguishing 'what is in our power, and what not,' says the author of the advancement of learning, applying that universal rule of practice to our present subject. here, then, carefully reduced to their most comprehensive form, traced to the height of universal nature, and brought down to the specific nature in man--here, as they lie on the ground of the common nature in man, for the first time scientifically abstracted--are the powers which science has to begin with in this field. the varieties in the species, and the individual differences so remarkable in this kind, are not in this place under consideration. but here is the _common_ nature in this kind, which must make the basis of any permanent universal social constitution for it. different races will require that their own constitutional differences shall be respected in their social constitutions; and if they be not, for the worse or for the better, look for change. but this is the universal platform that science is clearing here. this is the world that she is concerning herself with here, in the person of that high priest of hers, who, also, took that to be his business. here are these powers in man, then, to begin with. here is this universal natural predisposition in him, not to subsist, merely, and maintain his form--which is nature's first law, they tell us--but to 'better himself' in some way. as hamlet expresses it, 'he lacks advancement'; and advancement he will have, or strive to have, if not '_formal_ and _essential_,' then 'local.' he is instinctively impelled to it; and in his ignorant attempt to compass that end which nature has prescribed to him, the 'tempest of human life' arises. the scientific plan will be, not to quarrel with these universal forces, and undertake to found society on their annihilation. science will count that structure unsafe which is founded on the supposed annihilation of these forces in anything that moves. the man of science knows, that though by the predominance of powers, or by the equilibrium of them, they may be for a time, '_as it were_, annihilated,' they are in every creature; and nature in the instincts, though blind, is cunning, and finds ways and means of overcoming barriers, and evading restrictions, and inclines to indemnify herself when once she finds her way again. instead of quarrelling with these forces, the scientific plan, having respect to the creating wisdom in the constitution of man, overlooking them from that height, will thankfully accept them, and make much of them. these are just the motive powers that science has need of; she could not compose her structure without them, which is only the perfecting of the structure which the great creating wisdom had already outlined and pre-ordered--not a machine, but a living organic whole. science takes this 'piece of work' as she finds him, ready, waiting for the hand of art--imperfect, unfinished, but with the proceeding of nature incorporated in him--with the creative, advancing, perfecting motion, incorporated in him as his essence and law;--imperfect, but with nature working within him for the rest, urging him to self-perfection. she takes him as she finds him, a creature of instinct, but with his large, rich, undeveloped, yet already active nature of reason, and conscience, and religion, already struggling for the mastery, counterbalancing his narrower motivity, holding in check, with nobler intuitions, the error of an instinct which errs in man, because eyes were included in nature's definition of him, as it was written beforehand in her book, her universal book of types and orders--eyes, and not instinct only--'that what he cannot smell out, he may spy into.' 'o'er that art, which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes.' the want of this pre-ordered art is the want here still. the war of the unenlightened instincts is raging here still. that is where the difficulty lies. that same patience of investigation with which science has pursued and found out nature elsewhere--that same intense, indefatigable concentration of endeavour, which has been rewarded with such 'magnitude of effects' in other fields--that same, in a higher degree, in more powerful combinations, proportioned to the magnitude and common desirableness of the object, is what is wanting here. it is the instincts that are at fault here,--'the blind instincts, that seeing reason' should 'guide.' that is where all the jar and confusion of this great storm begins, that 'continues still,' and blasts our lives, in spite of all the spells that we mumble over it, and in spite of all the magic that all our magicians can bring to bear on it. 'meagre success,' at least, is still the word here. no wonder that the storm continues, under such conditions. no wonder that the world is full of the uproar of this arrested work, this violated intent of nature. she will storm on till we hear her. woe to those who put themselves in opposition to her, who think to violate her intent and prosper! 'the storm continues,' and it will continue, pronounce on it what incantations we may, so long as the elemental forces of all nature are meeting in our lives, and dashing in blind elemental strength against each other, and the brooding spirit of the social life, the composing spirit of the larger whole, cannot reconcile them, because the voices that are filling the air with the discord of their controversy, and out-toning the noise of this battle with theirs, are crying in one key, 'let there be darkness here'; because the darkness of the ages of instinct and intuition is held back here, cowering, ashamed, but forbidden to flee away; because the night of human ignorance still covers all this battle-ground, and hides the combatants. science is the word here. the man of the modern ages has spoken it, 'and now the times give it proof'; the times in which the methods of earlier ages, in the rapid advancement of learning in other fields, are losing their vitalities, and leaving us without those means of social combination, without those social bonds which the rudest ages of instinct and intuition, which the most barbaric peoples have been able to command. the times give it proof, fearful proof, terrific proof, when the noblest institutions of earlier ages are losing their power to conserve the larger whole; when the conserving faith of earlier ages, with its infinities of forces, is fainting in its struggles, and is not supported; and men set at nought its divine realities, because they have not been translated into their speech and language, and think there _is_ no such thing; and under all the exterior splendours of a material civilization advanced by science, society tends to internal decay, and the primal war of atoms. to meet the exigencies of a crisis like this, it is _not_ enough to call these powers that are actual in the human nature, but which are not yet reconciled and reduced to their true and natural order--it is not enough at this age of the world, at this stage of human advancement in other fields--to call these forces by some general names which include their oppositions, and to require for want of skill that a part of them shall be annihilated; it is not enough to express a strong disapprobation of the result as it is, and to require, in never-so-authoritative manner, that it shall be otherwise. no matter what names we may use to make that requisition in, no matter under _what_ pains and penalties we require it, the result--whatever we may say to the contrary--the result does not follow. that is not the way. those who try it, and who continue to try it in the face of no matter what failures, may think it is; but there is a voice mightier than theirs, drowning all their speech, telling us in thunder-tones, that it is not; with arguments that brutes might understand, telling us that it is not! it is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring instincts and intuitions, when there is as yet no science to define them, and compare them, and pronounce from its calm height its eternal axioms here--when the world is a camp, and hostilities are deified, and mankind is in arms when all the moral terms are still wrapped in the confusion of the first outgoing of the perplexed, unanalysed human motivity--it _is_ no small gain to get the word of the nobler intuitions outspoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's nature, his _essential_ law pronounced--even in rudest ages overawing, commanding with its awful divinity the intenser motivity of the lesser nature--able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal heights, those colossal heroic forms, that cast their long shadows over the tracts of time, to tell us what type it is that humanity aspires to. it is no small gain to get these nobler intuitions outspoken in some voice that commands with its authority the world's ear, or illustrated in some exemplar that arrests the world's eye, and draws the human heart unto it. it is no small advance in human history, to get the divine authority of those nobler intuitions, which, in man, anticipate speculation, and their right to command the particular motives, recognised in the common speech of men, incorporated in their speculative belief, incorporated in their books of learning, and embalmed in institutions that keep the divine exemplar of the human form for ever in our eyes. it _is_ something. the warring nations war on. the world is in arms still. the rude instincts are not stayed in their intent. they pause, it may be; 'but a roused passion sets them _new_ a-work.' the speckled demons, that the degenerate _angelic _nature breeds, put on the new livery, and go abroad in it rejoicing. new rivers of blood, new seas of carnage, are opened in the new name of peace; new engines of torture, of fiendish wrong, are invented in the new name of love. but it _is_ some gain. there is a new rallying-place on the earth for those who seek truly the higher good; at the foot of the new symbol they recognise each other, they join hand in hand, and the bands of those who wait and watch amid the earth's darkness for the promise, cheer us with their songs. truths out of the eternal book, truths that all hearts lean on in their need, are spoken. words that shall never pass away, sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are always in our ears. the nations that have contributed to this result in any degree, whether primarily or secondarily, whether they be syrians or assyrians, arabs or egyptians, wandering or settled, wild or tame; whether they belong to the inferior unanalysing semitic races, or whether they come of the more richly endowed, but yet youthful, indo-european stock; whether they be hebrews or persians, greeks or romans, will always have the world's gratitude. those to whose intenser conceptions and bolder affirmations, in the rude ages of instinct and spontaneous allegation, it was given to pronounce and put on everlasting record, these primal truths of inspiration,--truths whose divinity all true hearts respond to, may be indeed by their natural intellectual characteristics,--if _semitic_ must be--totally disqualified by ethnological laws,--hopelessly disqualified--so hopelessly that it is to lose all to put it on them--for the task of commanding, in detail, our modern civilization;--a civilization which has made, already, the rude ethics of these youthful races, when it comes to details, so palpably and grossly inapplicable, that it is an offence to modern sensibility to name--to so much as name--decisions which stand unreversed, without comment, in our books of learning. but that is no reason why we should not take, and thankfully appropriate as the gift of god, all that it was their part to contribute to the great plot of human advancement. we cannot afford to dispense with any such gain. the movement which respects the larger whole, the divine intent incorporates it all. 'japhet shall dwell in the tents of shem,' for they are world wide; but woe to him if, in his day, he refuse to build the temple which, in his day, his god will also require of him. woe to him, if he think to put upon another age and race the tasks which his task-master will require of him,--which, with his many gifts, with his chief gifts, with his ten talents, will surely be required of him. more than his fathers' woe upon him--more than that old-world woe, which he, too, remembers, if he think to lean on asia, the youthful asia, when his own great world noon-day has come. 'there was violence on the earth in those days, and it repented the lord that he had made man on the earth.' 'twill come,' says our own poet, prefacing his proposal for a scientific art in the attainment of the chief human ends, and giving his illustrated reasons for it,-- 'twill come [at this rate] humanity must, perforce, prey on itself, like _monsters_ of the _deep_. but what are _these_?--these new orders,--these new species of nature, defying nature, that we are generating with our arts here now? what are these new varieties to which our kind is tending now? look at this kind for instance. what are these? define them. destroyers, not of their own image in their fellow-man only, not of the image of their kind only,--sacred by natural universal laws,--but of the chosen image of it, the ideal of it, the one in whom the natural love of their kind was by the law of nature concentred,--the wife and the mother,-- destroyed not as the wolf destroys its prey, but with ferocity, or with prolonged and studious harm, that it required the human brain to plan and perpetrate. look at this pale lengthening widening train of their victims. we must look at it. it will never go by till we do. we shall have to look at it, and consider it well; it will lengthen, it will _widen_ till we do:--ghastly, bruised, bleeding, trampled,-- trampled it may be, with nailed, booted heel, mother and child together into one grave. but _these_ are common drunkard's wives;--we are inured to this catastrophe, and do not think much of it. but who are _these_, whom the grave cannot hold; that by god's edict break its bonds and come back, making day hideous, to tell us what the earth could not, would not keep,--to tell us of that other band who died and made no sign? but this is nothing. here are more. here are others. what are these? these are not spectres. _their_ cheeks are red enough. what loathsome thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with the human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature has expired. these are murderers,--count them--they are all murderers, wholesale murderers, perhaps,--but of what? of their own helpless, tender, loving, trusting little ones. the wretched children of _our time_,--alone in wretchedness,--alone in the universe of nature,--who found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel agonizing drug of death. was there any cause in nature for it? yes. they did it for the 'burial fee,' perhaps, or for some other cause as good. they had a reason for it. let our naturalists throw their learning 'to the dogs,' and come this way, and tell us what this means. nay, let them bring their books with them, and example us with its meaning if they can. let them tell us what 'depth' in which nature hides her failures, or yet unperfected hideous germinations,--what formation in which she buries the kinds she repents that she has made upon the earth, or what 'deep'--what ocean cave of 'monsters' we shall drag to find our kindred in _these_ species. let our wise men tell us whether there be, or whether there ever was, any such thing as this in nature before. if 'such things are,' or have been in any other kind, let them produce the instances, and keep us in countenance and console us for our own. let them look at that murderer too, and interpret _him_ for us. for he too is waiting to be interpreted, and he will wait till we understand his signs. he is speaking mute nature's language to us; we must get her key. look at him as he stands there in the dark, subordinating that faculty which comprehends the whole, which recognises the divinity of his neighbour's right, to his fiendish end: preparing with the judgment of a man his little piece of machinery, with which he will take, as he would take a salmon, or a rat, his fellow-man. look at him as he stands there now, listening patiently for your steps, waiting to strangle you as you go by him unarmed to-night, confiding in your fellow-man; waiting to drag you down from all the hopes and joys of life, for the sake of the loose coin, gold or silver, which he thinks he may find about you,--_perhaps_. 'how to kill _vermin_ and how to prevent the _fiend_,' was tom's study. how to dispatch in the most agreeable and successful manner, creatures whose notions of _good_ are constitutionally and diametrically opposed to the good of the larger whole, who have no sensibility to that, and no faculty whereby they perceive it to be the worthier; that is no doubt one part of the problem. the scientific question is, whether this creature be really what it seems, a new and more horrid kind of beast--a demoralization and deterioration of the human species into that. if it be, let our naturalists come to our aid here also, and teach us how to hunt him down and despatch him, with as much respect to the natural decencies which the fact of the external human form would seem still to exact from us, as the circumstances will admit of. is it the beast, or is it 'the fiend?'--that is the question. the fiend which tells us that the angelic or divine nature is there--there still--overborne, trampled on, '_as it were_, annihilated,' but lighting that gleam of 'wickedness,'--making of it, not instinct, but crime. ah! we need not ask which it is. this one has told his own story, if we could but read it. he has left--he is leaving all the time, contributions, richest contributions to our natural history of man,--that history which must make the basis of our arts of cure. he was a wolf when you took him; but in his cell you found something else in him--did you not?--something that troubled and appalled you, with its kindred and likeness, and its exaction on your sympathy. when you hung him as you would _not_ hang a dog;--when you put him to a death which you would think it indecent and inhuman to award to a creature of another species, you did not find him _that_. the law of the nobler nature lay in him as it were annihilated; _he_ thought there was no such thing; but when nature's great voice was heard without also, and those 'bloody instructions he had taught returned to him'; when that voice of the people, which was the voice of god to him, echoed with its doom the voice within, and 'sweet religion,' with its divine appeals--'a rhapsody of words' no longer, came, to second that great argument,--the blind instincts were overpowered in him, the lesser usurping nature was dethroned,--the angelic nature arose, and had _her_ hour, and shed parting gleams of glory on those fleeting days and nights; and he came forth, to die at last, not dragged like a beast--with a manly step--with heroic grandeur, vindicating the heroic type in nature, of that form he wore,--vindicating the violated law, accepting his doom, bowing to its ignominy, a man, a member of society,--a reconciled and accepted member of the commonweal. how to _prevent_ the fiend? _is_ the question. ah! what unlettered forces are these, unlearned still, with all our learning, that the dark, unaided wrestling hour 'in the little state of man,' leaves at the head of affairs there, seated in its chair of state, crowned, 'predominant,' to speak the word of doom for us all. 'he poisons him in the garden for his estate.' 'lights, lights, lights!' is the word here. there _is_ a cause in nature for these hard hearts, but it is not in the constitution of man. there _is_ a cause; it is nature herself, crying out upon our learning, asking to be--interpreted. woe for the age whose universal learning is in forms that move and command no longer; that move and bind no longer with _fear_, or _hope_, or _love_, 'the common people.' woe for the people who think that the everlasting truths of being--the eternal laws of science--are things for saints, and schoolmasters, and preachers only,--the people who carry about with them in secret, for week-day purposes, edmund's creed, to whom nature is already 'their goddess, and their law,' ere they know her or her law--ere the appointed teacher has instructed them in it,--ere they know what divinity she, too, holds to,--ere the interpreter has translated into her speech, and evolved from her books, the old truths which shall not--though their old '_garments_' should '_be changed_'--which _shall not_ pass away. woe for the nations in whom that greater part that carries it, are godless, or whose vows are paid in secret to edmund's goddess,--whose true faith is in appetite,--who have no secret laws imposed on that. 'woe to the people who are in such a case,' no matter on which side of the ocean they may dwell, in the old world, or a new one; no matter under what political constitutions. no matter under what favourable external conditions, the national development that has that hollow in it, may proceed; no matter under what glorious and before unimagined conditions of a healthful, noble human development that development may proceed. alas! for such a people. the rulers may cry 'peace!' but there is none. and, alas! for the world in which such a power is growing up under new conditions, and waxing strong, and preparing for its leaps. as a principle of social or political organisation, there is no religion,--there never has been any,--so fatal as none. that is a truth of which all history is an illustration. it is one which has been illustrated in the history of modern states, not less vividly than in the history of antiquity. and it will continue to be illustrated, on the same grand scale, in those terrific evils which the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the larger whole creates, whenever the appointed teachers of a nation, the inductors of it into its highest learning, lag behind the common mind in their interpretations, and leave it to the people to construct their own rude 'tables of rejections'; whenever the practical axioms, which are the inevitable vintage of these undiscriminating and fatally false rejections, are suffered to become history. 'woe to the land when its _king_ is a child'; but thrice woe to it, when its teacher is a child. alas! for the world, when the pabulum of her youthful visions and anticipations of learning have become meat for men, the prescribed provision for that nature in which man must live, or 'cease to be,' amid the sober realities of western science. 'thou shouldst not have been old _before thy time_.' 'the glow-worm shows the matin to be near, and 'gins to pale his _ineffectual_ fire.' chapter xi. the cure--new constructions--the initiative. _pyramus_.--'write me a prologue, and let the prologue _seem to say, we will do no harm_ with our _swords_ [spears]... and for the more better assurance, tell them that i, pyramus, am not pyramus, but bottom the weaver. this will put them out of fear.'--_shake-spear_. 'truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spoke them first, than his who spoke them after. who follows another follows nothing, finds nothing, seeks nothing.' 'authors have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by some _particular_ and _foreign_ mark. _i_, the first of any, by my _universal being. every man_ carries with him _the entire form_ of human condition.' 'and besides, though i had a _particular_ distinction _by myself_, what can it distinguish when i am no more? can it point out and favor _inanity_?' '_but_ will thy manes such a gift bestow _as to make violets from thy ashes grow_?' _michael de montaigne_. _hamlet_.--'to thine own self be true, and it doth follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man.' 'to know a man well, were to know him-self.' the complaint of the practical men against the philosophers who make such an outcry upon the uses and customs of the world as they find it, that they do not undertake to give us anything better in the place of them; or if they do, with their terrible experiments they leave us worse than they find us, does not apply in this case. because this is science, and not philosophy in the sense which that word still conveys, when applied to subjects of this nature. we all know that the scientific man is a safe and brilliant practitioner. the most unspeculative men of practice have learned to prefer him and his arts to the best empiricism. it is the philosophers we have had in this field, with their rash anticipations,--with their unscientific pre-conceptions,--with a _pre-conception_, instead of a fore-knowledge of the power they deal with, commanding results which do not,--there is the point,--which do not follow. let no one say that this reformer is one of those who expose our miserable condition, without offering to improve it; or that he is one of those who take away our gold and jewels with their tests, and leave us no equivalent. this is no destroyer. he will help us to save all that we have. he is guarding us from the error of those who would let it alone till the masses have taken the work in hand for themselves, without science. '_that_ is the way to lay all flat.' he is not one of those, 'who to _make clean, efface_, and who cure diseases by death.' to found so great a thing as the state anew; to dissolve that so old and solid structure, and undertake to recompose it as a whole on the spot, is a piece of work which this chemist, after a survey of his apparatus, declines to take in; though he fairly admits, that if the question were of 'a new world,' and not 'a world already formed to certain customs,' science might have, perhaps, some important suggestions to make as to the original structure. and yet for all that, it is a scientific practice that is propounded here. it is a scientific innovation and renovation, that is propounded; the greatest that was ever propounded,--total, absolute, but not sudden. it is a remedy for the world as it is, that this reformer is propounding. new constructions according to true definitions, scientific institutions,--institutions of culture and regimen and cure, based on the recognition of the actual human constitution and laws,--based on an observation as diligent and subtle, and precepts as severe as those which we apply to the culture of any other form in nature,--that is the proposition. 'it were a strange _speech_ which, spoken or spoken oft, should reclaim a man from a vice to which he is by nature subject.' 'folly is not to be cured by bare admonition.' this plan of culture and cure involves not the knowledge of that nature which is in all men only, but a science, enriched with most careful collections of all the specific varieties of that nature. the fullest natural history of those forces that are operant in the hourly life of man, the most profound and subtle observation of the facts of this history, the most thoroughly scientific collection of them, make the beginning of this enterprise. the propounder of this cure will have to begin with the secret disposition of every man laid open, and the possibilities of human character exhausted, by means of a dissection of the entire form of that human nature, which every man carries with him, and a solar-microscopic exhibition of the several dispositions and tempers of men, in grand ideal portraits, conspicuous instances of them, where the particular disposition and temper is 'predominant,' as in the characterisation of hamlet, where it takes all the persons of the drama to exhibit characteristics which are more or less developed in all men. those natural peculiarities of disposition that work so incessantly and potently in this human business, those 'points of nature,' those predetermining forces of the human life, must come under observation here, and the whole nature of the passions also, and a science of 'the will,' very different from that philosophy of it which our metaphysicians have entertained us with so long. he will have all the light of science, all the power of the new method brought to bear on this study. and he will have a similar collection, not less scientific, of the history of the human fortunes and their necessary effects on character; for these are the points that we must deal with 'by way of application, and to these all our labour is limited and tied; for we cannot fit a garment except we take a measure of the form we would fit it to.' nothing short of this can serve as the basis of a scientific system of human education. but this is not all. it is the human nobility and greatness that is the end, and that 'craves,' as the noble who is found wanting in it tells us, 'a noble cunning.' it is no single instrumentality that makes the apparatus of this culture and cure. skilful combinations of appliances based on the history of those forces which _are_ within our power, which 'we _can_ deal with by way of alteration,' forces 'from which the _mind suffereth_,' which have operation on it, so potent that 'they can almost change the stamp of nature,'--that they can make indeed, 'another nature,'--these are the engines,--this is the machinery which the scientific state will employ for its ends. these are the engines, this is the machinery that is going to take the place of that apparatus which the state, as it is, finds such need of. this is the machinery to 'prevent the fiend,' which the scientific statesman is propounding. 'i would we were all of one mind, and one mind _good_' says our poet. 'o _there_ were desolation of gallowses and gaolers. i speak against my present profit,' [he adds,--he was speaking not as a judge or a lawyer, but as a _gaoler_,] 'i speak against my present profit, but my wish hath a _preferment_ in it.' (a _preferment_?)--that is the solution propounded by science, of the problem that is pressing on us, and urging on us with such violent appeals, its solution. 'i would we were all of one _mind_, and one mind _good_. my wish hath a _preferment_ in it.' 'folly is not to be cured by bare admonition.' 'it were a strange speech which, spoken, or spoken oft, should cure a man of _a vice_ to which he is _by nature subject_,'--_subject_--by _nature_.--that is the _philosopher_. 'what _he cannot help in his nature_ you account _a vice_ in him,' says the poor citizen, putting in a word on the _poet's_ behalf for coriolanus whose education, whatever volumnia may think about it, was not scientific, or calculated to reduce that 'partliness,' that disorganizing social principle, whose subsequent demonstrations gave her so much offence. not admonition, not preaching and scolding, and not books only, but institutions, laws, customs, habit, education in its more limited sense, 'association, emulation, praise, blame,' all the agencies 'from which the mind suffereth,'-- which have power to change it, in skilfully compounded recipes and regimen scientifically adapted to cases, and not prescribed only, but enforced,--_these_ make the state machinery--these are the engines that are going to 'prevent the fiend,' and educate the 'one mind,'-- _the one mind good_, which is the sovereign of the common-weal,--'my wish hath a preferment in it,'--the one only man who will make when he is crowned, not rome, but _room_ enough for us all,--who will make when he is crowned such desolation of gallowses and gaolers. these are the remedies for the diseases of the state, when the scientific practitioner is called in at last, and permitted to undertake his cure. but he will not wait for that. he will not wait to be asked. he has no delicacy about pushing himself forward in this business. the concentration of genius and science on it, henceforth,--the _gradual_ adaptation of all these grand remedial agencies to this common end,-- this end which all truly enlightened minds will conspire for,--find to be _their own_,--this is the plan;--this is the sober day-dream of the elizabethan reformer; this is the plot of the elizabethan revolutionist. this is the radicalism that he is setting on foot. this is the cure of the state which he is undertaking. we want to command effects, and the way to do that is to find causes; and we must find them according to the new method, and not by reasoning it thus and thus, for the result is just the same, this philosopher observes, as if we had not reasoned it thus and thus, but some other way. that is the difficulty with that method, which is in use here at present, which this philosopher calls 'common logic.' life goes on, life as it is and was, in the face of our reasonings; but it goes on in the dark; the phenomena are on the surface in the form of effects, and all our weal and woe is in them; but the causes are beneath unexplored. they are able to give us certain impressions of their _natures_; they strike us, and blast us, it may be, by way of teaching us _something_ of their powers; but _we do not know them_; they are within our own souls and lives, and we do not _know_ them; not because they lie without the range of a scientific enquiry, but _because_ we will not apply to them _the scientific method_; because the old method of 'preconception' here is still considered the true one. the plan of this great scientific enterprise was one which embraced, from the first, the whole body of the common-weal. it concerned itself immediately and directly with all the parts and members of the social state, from the king on his throne to the beggar in his straw. its aim was to disclose ultimately, and educate in every member of society that entire and noble form of human nature which 'each man carries with him,' and whereby the individual man is naturally and constitutionally a member of the common-weal. its proposition was to develop ultimately and educate--successfully educate--in each integer of the state, the integral principle--the principle whereby in man the true conservation and integrity of the part--the virtue, and felicity, and perfection, of the part, tend to the weal of the whole--tend to perfect and advance the whole. 'to thine own self be true, and it doth follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.' 'know thy-self. know thy-self.' this enterprise was not the product of a single individual mind, and it is important that this fact should be fully and unmistakeably enunciated here; because the illustrious statesman, and man of letters, who assumed, in his own name and person, that part of it which could then be openly exhibited, the one on whom the great task of perfecting and openly propounding the new method of learning was devolved, is the one whose relation to this enterprise has been principally insisted on in this volume. the history of this great philanthropic association--an association of genius, a combination of chief minds, from which the leadership and direction of the modern ages proceeds, the history of this '_society_,' as it was called, when the term was still fresh in that special application; at least, when it was not yet qualified by its application to those very different kinds of voluntary individual combinations--'bodies of neighbourhood' within the larger whole, to which that movement has given rise; the history of _this_ society,--this first 'shake-spear society'--much as it is to our purpose, and much as it is to the particular purpose of this volume, can only be incidentally treated here. but as this work was originally prepared for publication in the historical key to the elizabethan tradition which formed the first book of it, it was the part of that great political and military chief, and not less illustrious man of letters, who was recognised, in his own time, as the beginner of this movement and the founder of english philosophy, which was chiefly developed. and it is the history of that 'great unknown'--that great elizabethan unknown, for whose designs there was needed then a veil of a closer texture--of a more cunning pattern than any which the exigencies of modern authorship tend to fabricate, which must make the key to this tradition;--it is the history of that great unknown, whose incognito was a closed vizor,--that it was death to open,--a vizor that _did_ open once, and--the sequel is in our history, and will leave 'a brand' upon the page which that age makes in it,--'the age that _did_ it, and _suffered_ it, _to the end of the world_.' so says _the poet_ of that age, ('age, thou are shamed.' 'and peep about to find ourselves _dishonourable graves_'). it is the history of the tacitus who could not wait for a better caesar. it is the history of the man who was sent to the block, _they_ tell us, who are able to give us those little secret historic motives that do not get woven always into the larger story; it is the history of the man who (if his family understood it) was sent to the block for the repetition, in his own name, of the words--the very words which he had written with his 'goose-pen,' as he calls it, years before--which he had written under cover of the 'spear' that was 'shaken' in sport, or that shook with fear,--under cover of 'the well turned and true filled lines in each of which he seems to _shake a lance as brandished_ in the eyes of _ignorance_,' without suspicion--without challenge, from the crowned ignorance, or the monster that crowned it. it is the history of this unknown, obscure, unhonoured father of the modern age that _unlocks_ this tradition. it is the secret friend and 'brother' of the author of the novum organum, whose history unlocks this tradition. and when shall the friendship of such 'a twain' gladden our earth again, and build its 'eternal summer' in our common things? when shall a 'marriage of true minds' so even be celebrated on the lips and in the lives of men again? it is the friend and literary partner of our great recognised philosopher--his partner in his 'private and retired arts,' and in his cultivation of 'the principal and supreme sciences,' in whose history the key to this locked up learning is hidden. it was an enterprise which originated in the court of queen elizabeth, in that little company of wits, and poets, and philosophers, which was the first-fruit of the new development of the national genius, that followed the revival of the learning of antiquity in this island--the fruit which that old stock began manifestly to bud and blossom with, about the beginning of the latter half of that queen's reign. for it was the old northern genius, under the influence, not of the revival of the learning of antiquity only, but of that accumulated influence which its previous revival on the continent brought with it here; under the influence, too, of that insular nurture, which began so soon to colour and insulate english history;--'britain is a world by itself,' says prince cloten, 'and we will nothing pay,' etc.--it was the old northern genius nurtured in the cradle of that 'bravery' which had written its page of fire in the roman caesar's story--which had arrested the old classic historian's pen, and fired it with a poet's prophecy, and taught _him_ too how to pronounce from the old _british_ hero's lip the burning speech of _english_ freedom;--it was that which began to show itself here, then, in that new tongue, which we call the '_elizabethan_.' it was that which could not fit its words to its mouth as it had a mind to do under those conditions, and was glad to know that 'the audience was deferred.' that was the thing which found itself so much embarrassed by the presence of 'a man of prodigious fortune at the table,' who had leave 'to change its arguments with a magisterial authority.' it was that which was expected to produce its speech to 'serve as the base matter to illuminate'--not the _caesar_--but the tudor--the tudor and the stuart: the last of the tudors and the first of the stuarts. 'age, _thou_ art shamed.' it was the true indigenous product of the english nationality under that great stimulus, which made that age; and the practical determination of the english mind, and the spirit of the ancient english liberties, the recognition of the common dignity of that form of human nature which each man carries entire with him--the sentiment of a common human family and brotherhood, which this race had brought with it from the forests of the north, and which it had conserved through ages of oppression, went at once into the new speculation, and determined its practical bent, and shaped this enterprise. it was an enterprise which included in its plan of operations an immediate influence upon the popular mind--the most direct, immediate, and radically reforming influences which could be brought to bear, under those conditions, upon the habits and sentiments of the ignorant, custom-bound masses of men;--those masses which are, in all their ignorance and unfitness for rule, as the philosopher of this age perceived, 'that greater part which carries it'--those wretched statesmen, under whose rule we are all groaning. 'questions about clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery,' are the questions with which the new movement begins to attract attention--a universally favourable attention--towards its beneficent purposes, and to that new command of 'effects' which arms them. but this is only 'to show an abused people that they are not wholly forgotten.' to improve the external condition of men, to 'accommodate' man to those exterior natural forces, of which he had been, till then, the 'slave,'--to minister to the need and add to the comforts of the king in his palace, and 'tom' in his hovel,--this was the first scientific move. this was a movement which required no concealment. its far-reaching consequences, its elevating power on the masses, its educational power, its revolutionary power, did not lie within the range of any observation which the impersonated state was able to bring to bear at that time upon the new organum and its reaches. but this was not the only scientifically educational agency which this great educational association was able to include, even then, in its scheme for the culture and instruction of the masses--for the culture and instruction of that common social unit, which makes the masses and determines political predominance. quite the most powerful instrumentality which it is possible to conceive of, for purposes of direct effect in the way of intellectual and moral stimulus, in that stage of a popular development, was then already in process of preparation here; the 'plant' of a wondrous and inestimable machinery of popular influence stood offering itself, at that very moment, to the politicians with whom this movement originated, urging itself on their notice, begging to be purchased, soliciting their monopoly, proposing itself to their designs. a medium of direct communication between the philosophic mind, in its more chosen and noblest field of research, and the minds of those to whom the conventional signs of learning are not yet intelligible,--one in which the language of action and dumb show was, by the condition of the representation, predominant,--that language which is, as this philosophy observed, so much more powerful in its impression than words,--not on brutes only, but on those 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,'--a medium of communication which was one tissue of that 'mute' language, whereby the direction, 'how to _sustain_ a tyranny _newly usurped_,' was conveyed once, stood prepared to their hands, waiting the dictation of the message of these new chiefs and teachers, who had taken their cue from machiavel in exhibiting the arts of government, and who thought it well enough that the people _should_ know how to _preserve_ tyrannies _newly usurped_. those 'amusements,' with which governments that are founded and sustained, 'by cutting off and _keeping low_ the grandees and nobility' of a nation, naturally seek to propitiate and divert the popular mind,--those amusements which the peoples who sustain tyrannies are apt to be fond of--'he loves no plays as _thou_ dost, _antony_,'--that 'pulpit,' from which the orator of caesar stole and swayed the hearts of the people with his sugared words; and his dumb show of the stabs in caesar's mantle became, in the hands of these new conspirators, an engine which those old experimenters lacked,--an engine which the lean and wrinkled cassius, with his much reading and 'observation strange' and dangerous, looking through of the thoughts of men; and the grave, high-toned brutus, with his logic and his stilted oratory, could not, on second thoughts, afford to lack. it was this which supplied the means of that 'volubility of application' which those 'sir oracles,' those 'grave sirs of note,' 'in observing their well-graced forms of speech,' it is intimated, 'might easily want.' by means of that 'first use of the parable,' whereby (while for the present we drop 'the argument') it serves to illustrate, and bring first under the notice of the senses, the abstruser truths of a new learning,--truths which are as yet too far out of the road of common opinion to be conveyed in other forms,--these amusements became, in the hands of the new teachers and wise men, with whom the wisdom of the moderns had its beginning, the means of an insidious, but most 'grave and exceedingly useful,' popular instruction. but the immediate influence on the common mind was not the influence to which this association trusted for the fulfilment of its great plan of social renovation and advancement. that so aspiring _social_ position, and that not less commanding position in the world of letters, built up with so much labour, with such persistent purpose, with a pertinacity which accepted of no defeat,--built up _expressly_ to this end,--that position from which a new method of learning could be openly propounded, in the face of the schools, in the face of the universities, in the face and eyes of all the doctors of learning then, was, in itself, no unimportant part of the machinery which this political association was compelled to include in the plot of its far-reaching enterprise. that trumpet-call which rang through europe, which summoned the scholasticism and genius of the modern ages, from the endless battles of the human dogmas and conceits, into the field of true knowledge,--that summons which recalled, and disciplined, and gave the word of command to the genius of the modern ages, that was already tumultuously rushing thither,--that call which was _able_ to command the modern learning, and impose on it, for immediate use, the new machine of learning,--that machine which, even in its employment in the humblest departments of observation, has already formed, ere we know it, the new mind, which has disciplined and trained the modern intelligence, and created insidiously new habits of judgment and _belief_,--created, too, a new stock of truths, which are accepted as a part of the world's creed, and from which the whole must needs be evolved in time,--this, in itself, was no small step towards securing the great ends of this enterprise. it was a step which we are hardly in a position, as yet, to estimate. we cannot see what it was till the nobler applications of this method begin to be made. it has cost us something while we have waited for these. the letter to sir henry savile, on 'the helps to the intellectual powers,' which is referred to with so much more iteration and emphasis than anything which the surface of the letter exhibits would seem to bear, in its brief hints, points also this way, though the effect of mental exercises, by means of other instrumentalities, on the habits of a larger class, is also comprehended in it. but the formation of new intellectual habits in men liberally educated, appeared to promise, ultimately, those larger fruits in the advancement and culture of learning which, in 'the hour-glass' of that first movement, could be, as yet, only prophecy and anticipation. the perfection of the human science, then first propounded, the filling up of 'the anticipations' of learning, which the philosophy of _science_ also included in its system,--not rash and premature, however, and not claiming _the place_ of _knowledge_, but kept apart in a place by themselves,--put down as anticipations, _not interpretations_,--the filling up of this outline was what was expected as the ultimate result of this proceeding, in the department of speculative philosophy. but in that great practical enterprise of a social and political renovation--that enterprise of 'constructions' according to true definitions, which this science fastens its eye on, and never ceases to contemplate--it was not the immediate effect on the popular mind, neither was it the gradual effect on the speculative habits of men of learning and men of intelligence in general, that was chiefly relied on. it was the secret tradition, the living tradition of that intention; it was the tradition whereby that association undertook to continue itself across whatever gulfs and chasms in social history 'the fortunes of our state' might make. it was that _second_ use of the fable, which is 'to wrap up and conceal'; it was that 'enigmatic' method, which reserves the secrets of learning for those 'who by the aid of an instructor, or by their own research, are able to pierce the veil,' which was relied on for this result. it was the _power_ of that tradition, its generative power, its power to reproduce 'in a better hour' the mind and will of that 'company'--it was its power to develop and frame that _identity_ which was the secret of this association, and its new principle of union--that identity of the 'one mind, and one mind good,' which is the human principle of union--that identity which made a common name, a common personality, for those who worked together for that end, and whose will in it was '_one_.' a name, a personality, a philosophic unity, in whose great radiance we have basked so long--a name, a personality whose secret lies heavy on all our learning--whose secret of power, whose secret of inclusiveness and inexhaustible wealth of knowledge, has paralysed all our criticism, 'made marble'--as milton himself confesses--'made marble with _too much conceiving_.' 'write me a prologue, and let the prologue _seem_ to say [in dumb action], we will do no harm with our swords.' 'they all flourish their swords.' 'there is but _one mind_ in all these men, and that is bent against caesar'--julius caesar. 'even so the race of shake-spear's mind and _manners brightly shines_, in his _well turned_ and _true filed_--lines; in each of which he seems to shake a lance, as _brandished_ at the eyes of--ignorance,' [we will do _no harm_, with our--words [it _seems_ to say.]--_prologue_.] it was the power of the elizabethan art of tradition that was relied on here, that 'living art'; it was its power to reproduce this institution, through whatever fatal eventualities the movement which these men were seeking then to anticipate, and organize, and control, might involve; and though the parent union _should be_ overborne in those disastrous, not unforeseen, results--overborne and forgotten--and though other means employed for securing that end should fail. it is to that posthumous effect that all the hope points here. it is the _leonatus posthumus_ who must fulfil this oracle. 'now with the drops of this most balmy time my love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes; since, spite of him, i'll live in this poor rhyme, while he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes; and _thou_ in this shall find thy monument, when _tyrants' crests and tombs of brass_ are spent.' 'not marble, nor the gilded monuments [_elizabethan_ age.] of _princes_ shall outlive this _power_-ful rhyme.' [this is our unconscious poet, who does not know that his poems are worth printing, or that they are going to get printed--who does not know or care whether they are or not.] 'but you shall shine more bright in these contents, than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. when wasteful war _shall statues_ overturn [iconoclasm], and _broils_ [civil war] root out the work of masonry, nor mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn the _living record_ of _your memory_.' [what is it, then, that this prophet is relying on? is it a manuscript? is it the recent invention of goose-quills which he is celebrating here with so much lyrical pomp, in so many, many lyrics? here, for instance:--] 'his _beauty_ shall in _these black lines_ be seen, and _they_ shall live, and he in them still green.' and here-- 'o where, alack! shall _time's best jewel_ from _time's chest_ lie hid? or what _strong hand_ can hold his swift foot back? or _who_ his spoil of beauty can forbid? o none, unless _this_ miracle [this _miracle_] have might, that in _black ink_--' is this printer's ink? or is it the ink of the prompter's book? or the fading ink of those loose papers, so soon to be 'yellowed with age,' scattered about no one knew where, that some busy-body, who had nothing else to do, might perhaps take it into his head to save? '_o none_, unless this miracle'--this miracle, the rejoicing scholar and man of letters, who was not for an age, but for all time, cries--defying tyranny, laughing at princes' edicts, reaching into his own great assured futurity across the gulfs of civil war, planting his feet upon that sure ground, and singing songs of triumph over the spent tombs of brass and tyrants' crests; like that orator who was to make an oration _in public_, and found himself a little straitened in _time_ to fit his words to his mouth _as he had a mind to do_, when _eros_, one of his _slaves_, brought him word that the audience was deferred till the next day; at which he was so _ravished with joy_, that he _enfranchised him_. '_this miracle_.' he knows what miracles are, for he has told us; but none other knew _what_ miracle this was that he is celebrating here with all this wealth of symphonies. 'o _none_, unless this miracle have might, that in black ink _my_ love may still _shine bright_.' ['my love,'--wait till you know what it is, and do not think to know with the first or second reading of poems, that are on the surface of them scholastic, academic, mystical, obtrusively enigmatical. perhaps, after all, it is _that_ eros who was _enfranchised_, emancipated.] 'but thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that _fair_ thou _owest_ [thou _owes_!], nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, when in _eternal lines_ to time thou growest. so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so _long_ lives _this_, and this _gives life_ to--thee! but here is our prophecy, which we have undertaken to read with the aid of this collation:-- 'when wasteful war shall statues overturn, and broils root out the work of masonry; nor mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn the _living_ record of your memory. 'gainst death, _and_ all _oblivious enmity_, _shall_ you _pace forth_. _your_ praise shall still find room, even _in the eyes_ [collateral sounds] _of all posterity_, that wear this world out to the ending doom. _so_, till _the_ judgment that yourself _arise_ [_till_ then], you live in _this_, and dwell in _lovers_' eyes.' see the passages at the commencement of this chapter, if there be any doubt as to this reading. 'in lover's _eyes_.' _leonatus posthumus_. shall's have a play of _this_? thou scornful page, there lie _thy part_. [to _imogen_ disguised as _fidele_.] the consideration which qualified, in the mind of the author of the advancement of learning, the great difficulty which the question of civil government presented at that time, is the key to this 'plot.' for men, and not 'romans' only, 'are like sheep;' and if you can but get some _few_ to go right, the _rest will follow_. that was the plan. to create a better leadership of men,--to form a new order and union of men,--a new nobility of men, acquainted with the doctrine of their own nature, and in league for its advancement, to seize _the 'thoughts_' of those whose law is the law of the larger activity, and '_inform_ them with nobleness,'--was the plan. for these the inner school was opened; for these its ascending platforms were erected. for these that 'closet' and 'cabinet,' where the 'simples' of the shake-spear philosophy are all locked and labelled, was built. for these that secret 'cabinet of the muses,' where the delphic motto is cut anew, throws out its secret lures,--its gay, many-coloured, deceiving lures,--its secret labyrinthine clues,--for all lines in this building meet in that centre. all clues here unwind to that. for these--for the minds on whom the continuation of this enterprise was by will devolved, the key to that cabinet--the historical key to its inmost compartment of philosophic mysteries, was carefully laboured and left,--pointed to--pointed to with immortal gesticulations, and left ('what i cannot speak, i point out with my finger'); the key to that '_verulamian_ cabinet,' which we shall hear of when the _fictitious_ correspondence in which the more secret history of this time was written, comes to be opened. that cabinet where the subtle argument that was inserted in the poem or the play, but buried there in its gorgeous drapery, is laid bare in prose as subtle ('i here scatter it up and down indifferently for verse'); where the new truth that was spoken in jest, as well as in parables, to those who were without, is unfolded,--that truth which moved unseen amid the gambols of the masque,--preferring to raise questions rather than _objections_,--which stalked in, without suspicion, in 'the hobby-horse' of the clown,--which the laugh of the groundlings was so often in requisition to cover,--that 'to _beguile_ the time looked _like the time_,'--that 'looked like _the flower_, and _was_ the serpent under it.' for these that secret place of confidential communication was provided, where 'the argument' of all these plays is opened without respect to the 'offence in it,'--to its utmost reach of abstruseness and subtlety--in its utmost reach of departure from 'the road of common opinion,'--where the elizabethan secrets of morality, and policy and religion, which made the parables of the new doctrine, are unrolled, at last, in all the new, artistic glories of that 'wrapped up' intention. this is the second use of the fable in which we resume that dropped argument,--dropped for that time, while caesar still commanded his thirty legions; and when the question, 'how long to philosophise?' being started in the schools again, the answer returned still was, 'until our armies cease to be commanded by fools.' this is that second use of the fable where we find the moral of it at last,--that moral which our moralists have missed in it,--that moral which is not 'vulgar and common-place,' but abstruse, and out of the road of common opinion,--that moral in which the moral science, which is _the wisdom of the moderns_, lurks. it is to these that the wise man of our ages speaks (for we have him,--we do not wait for him), in the act of displaying a little, and folding up for the future, his plan of a scientific human culture; it is to these that he speaks when he says, with a little of that obscurity which 'he mortally hates, and would avoid if he could': 'as philocrates sported with demosthenes,' you may not marvel, athenians, that demosthenes and i do differ, for _he_ drinketh water, and _i_ drink wine; and like as we read of an ancient parable of the two gates of sleep '... so if we put on _sobriety_ and _attention_, we shall find it _a sure maxim in knowledge_, that the pleasant liquor of wine is the more vaporous, and the braver gate of ivory sendeth forth the falser dreams.' ['_i_,' says 'michael,' who is also in favour of 'sobriety,' and critical upon excesses of all kinds, '_i_ have ever observed, that _super_-celestial theories and _sub_-terranean _manners_ are in singular accordance.'] and in his general proposal to lay open 'those parts of learning which lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by the industry of man, to the end that such _a plot_, made and committed to memory, may both minister light to any public designation, and also serve to excite _voluntary_ endeavours,' he says, 'i do foresee that of those things which i shall enter and register as deficiencies and omissions, many will conceive and censure that some of them are already done, and extant, _others to be but curiosities_ and things of no _great use_' [such as the question of style, for instance, and those 'particular' arts of tradition to which this remark is afterwards applied]--and others to be of too great difficulty--and almost impossibility--to be compassed and effected; but for _the two first, i refer myself to particulars_; for the last,--touching impossibility,--i take it those things are to be held possible, which may be done by _some person_, though not _by every one_; and which may be done by _many_, though not by _any_ one; and which may be done in succession of ages, though _not_ within the hour-glass of one man's life; and which may be done by _public designation_, though not by private endeavour. that was 'the plot'--that was the plan of the elizabethan innovation. the enigma of leonatus posthumus. 'when as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall posthumus end his miseries, britain be _fortunate_, and flourish in peace and plenty.' the verulamian cabinet, and its workmanship. here, for instance, is a specimen of the manner in which scholars who write about these times, allude to the reserved parts of this philosophy, and to those 'richer and bolder meanings,' which could not then be inserted in the acknowledged writings of so great a person. this is a specimen of the manner in which a posthumous collection and reintegration of this philosophy, and a posthumous emancipation of it, is referred to, by scholars who write from the continent somewhere about these days. whether the date of the writing be a little earlier or a little later,--some fifty years or so,--it does not seem to make much difference as to the general intent and purport of it. here is a scholar, for instance, whose main idea of life on this planet it appears to be, to collect the philosophy, and protect the posthumous fame of the lord bacon. for this purpose, he has established a literary intimacy, quite the most remarkable one on record--at least, between scholars of different and remote nationalities--between himself and two english gentlemen, a mr. smith, and the rev. dr. rawley. he writes from _the hague_ but he appears to have acquired in some way a most extraordinary insight into this business. 'though i thought that i had already _sufficiently showed_ what veneration i had for the illustrious lord verulam, yet i shall take such care for _the future_, that it may not possibly be denied, that i endeavoured most zealously to make this thing known to _the learned world_. but neither shall this design of setting forth _in one volume all the lord bacon's works, proceed without consulting you_'--[this letter is addressed to the rev. dr. _rawley_, and is dated a number of years after lord bacon's death]--'without consulting you, and without inviting _you_ to cast in _your symbol_, worthy such an excellent edition: that so the _appetite_ of the reader'--[it was a time when symbols of various kinds--large and small--were much in use in the learned world]--'that so the _appetite_ of the reader, provoked already by his _published_ works, may be further gratified _by the pure novelty of so considerable an appendage_. 'for the _french interpreter_, who patched together his things i know not whence, and tacked that motley piece to him; they shall not have place in this great collection. but _yet_ i hope to obtain your leave to publish a-part, as _an appendix_ to _the natural history_,--_that exotic work_,--_gathered together_ from _this and the other place_ (_of his lordship's writings_), [that is the true account of it] and by me translated into--_latin_. 'for seeing the genuine pieces of the lord bacon are already extant, and in many hands, it is necessary that _the foreign reader_ be given to understand _of what threads the texture of that book consists_, and how much of truth there is in that which that shameless person does, in his preface to the reader, so stupidly write of you. 'my brother, of blessed memory, turned his words _into latin_, in the first edition of the natural history, having some suspicion of the fidelity of an unknown author. i will, in the second edition, repeat them, and with just severity animadvert upon them: that they, into whose hands that work comes, may know it to be rather patched up of many distinct pieces; how much soever the author _bears himself upon the specious title of verulam. unless, perhaps_, i should particularly suggest _in your name_, that these words were _there inserted_, by way of _caution_; and lest malignity and rashness should any way blemish the fame of so eminent a person. 'if my fate would permit me to live according to my wishes, i would fly over into england, that i might behold whatsoever remaineth in your cabinet of the verulamian workmanship, and at least make my eyes witnesses of it, if the possession of the merchandise be yet denied to the public. at present i will support the wishes of my impatient desire, _with hope of seeing, one day, those_ (_issues_) which _being committed to faithful privacy, wait the time till they may safely see the light_, and not be _stifled_ in their birth. 'i wish, _in the mean time_, i could have a sight of the copy of the epistle to sir henry savil, concerning the helps of the intellectual powers: for i am persuaded, as to the _other latin_ remains, that i shall not obtain,_for present use_, the removal of _them_ from the place in which they now are.' extract of a letter from mr. isaac gruter. here is the beginning of it:-- 'to the rev. wm. rawley, d.d. 'isaac gruter wisheth much health. 'reverend sir,--it is not just to complain of the slowness of your answer, seeing that _the difficulty of the passage_, in the season in which you wrote, _which was towards winter_, might _easily_ cause it to come _no faster_; seeing _likewise_ there is so much to be found in it which may gratify desire, and _perhaps so much the more, the longer it was ere it came to my hands_. and although i had little to send back, besides my thanks for _the little index_, yet _that seemed to me of such moment_ that i would no longer _suppress_ them: especially because i accounted it a crime to have suffered _mr. smith_ to have been without an answer: mr. smith, my most kind friend, and to whose care, in my matters, i owe _all regard_ and affection, yet without diminution of that (part and that no small one neither) in which dr. rawley hath place. so that the souls of us three, so throughly agreeing, may be aptly said to have united in a _triga_.' it is not necessary, of course, to deny the historical claims of the rev. dr. rawley, who is sufficiently authenticated; or even of mr. smith himself, who would no doubt be able to substantiate himself, in case a particular inquiry were made for him; and it would involve a serious departure from the method of invention usually employed in this association, which did not deal with shadows when contemporary instrumentalities were in requisition, if the solidarity of mr. isaac gruter himself should admit of a moment's question. the precautions of this secret, but so powerful league,--the skill with which its instrumentalities were selected and adapted to its ends, is characterised by that same matchless dramatic power, which betrays 'the source from which it springs' even when it 'only plays at working.' but if any one is anxious to know who the _third person_ of this triga really was, or is, a glance at the directory would enable such a one to arrive at a truer conclusion than the first reading of this letter would naturally suggest. for this is none other than the person whom the principle of this triga, and its enlightened sentiment and bond of union, already _symbolically_ comprehended, whom it was intended to comprehend ultimately in all the multiplicity and variety of his historical manifestations, though it involved a deliberate plan for reducing and suppressing his many-headedness, and restoring him to the use of his one only mind. for though the name of this person is often spelt in three letters, and oftener in one, it takes all the names in the directory to spell it in full. for this is none other than the person that '_michael_' refers to so often and with so much emphasis, glancing always at his own private name, and the singular largeness and comprehensiveness of his particular and private constitution. 'all the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.' '_i_, the first of any, by my universal being. every man carries with him the entire form of human condition.' but the name of mr. _isaac gruter_ was not less comprehensive, and could be made to represent the whole _triga_ in an emergency, as well as another; ['i take so great pleasure in being judged and known that it is almost indifferent to me in _which of the two forms_ i am so'] though that does not hinder him from inviting dr. eawley to cast in _his symbol_, which was 'so _considerable an appendage_.' for though the very smallest circle sometimes represents it, it was none other than the symbol that gave name to the theatre in which the illustrated works of this school were first exhibited; the theatre which hung out for its sign on the outer wall, 'hercules and his load too.' at a time when 'conceits' and 'devices in letters,' when anagrams and monograms, and charades, and all kinds of 'racking of orthography' were so much in use, not as curiosities merely, but to avoid another kind of 'racking,' a cipher referred to in this philosophy as the 'wheel cipher,' which required the letters of the alphabet to be written in a circle to serve as a key to the reading, supplies a clue to some of these symbols. _the first three letters_ of the alphabet representing the whole _in_ the circle, formed a character or symbol which was often made to stand as a 'token' for a proper name, easily spelt in that way, when phonography and anagrams were in such lively and constant use,--while it made, at the same time, a symbolical representation of the radical doctrine of the new school in philosophy,--a school then _so_ new, that its 'doctors' were compelled to 'pray in the aid of simile,' even in affixing their names to their own works, in some cases. and that same letter which was capable of representing in this secret language either the _microcosm_, or 'the larger whole,' as the case required (either with, or without the _eye_ or _i_ in it, sending rays to the circumference) sufficed also to spell the name of the grand master of this lodge,--'who also was a _man_, take him for _all in all_,'--the man who took two hemispheres for '_his symbol_.' that was the so considerable appendage which his friend alludes to,--though 'the natural gaiety of disposition,' of which we have so much experience in other places, and which the gravity of these pursuits happily does not cloud, suggests a glance in passing at another signification, which we find alluded to also in another place in mrs. quickly's '_latin_.' mere frivolities as these conceits and private and retired arts seem now, the author of the advancement of learning tells us, that to those who have spent their labours and studies in them, they seem great matters, referring particularly to that cipher in which it is possible to write _omnia per omnia_, and stopping to fasten the key of it to his 'index' of 'the principal and supreme sciences,'--those sciences 'which being committed to _faithful_ privacy, wait the time when they may safely see the light, and not be stifled in their birth.' new constructions, according to true definitions, was _the plan_,--this _triga_ was the initiative. chapter xii. the ignorant election revoked.--a wrestling instance. 'for as they were men of the best composition in the state of rome, which, either being consuls, _inclined to the people_' ['if he would but _incline to the people_, there never was a worthier man'], 'or being tribunes, inclined to the senate, so, in the matter which we handle now [doctrine of _cure_], they be the best physicians which, being learned, incline to the traditions of experience; or, being empirics, incline to the methods of learning.' _advancement of learning._ but while the man of science was yet planning these vast scientific changes--vast, but noiseless and beautiful as the movements of god in nature--there was another kind of revolution brewing. all that time there was a cloud on his political horizon--'a huge one, a black one'--slowly and steadfastly accumulating, and rolling up from it, which he had always an eye on. he knew there was that in it which no scientific apparatus that could be put in operation then, on so short a notice, and when science was so feebly aided, would be able to divert or conduct entirely. he knew that so fearful a war-cloud would have to burst, and get overblown, before any chance for those peace operations, those operations of a solid and lasting peace, which he was bent on, could be had--before any space on the earth could be found broad enough for his novum organum to get to work on, before the central levers of it could begin to stir. that revolution which 'was singing in the wind' then to his ear, was one which would have to come first in the chronological order; but it was easy enough to see that it was not going to be such a one, in all respects, as a man of his turn of genius would care to be out in with his works. he knew well enough what there was in it. he had not been so long in such sharp daily collision with the elements of it--he had not been so long trying conclusions with them under such delicate conditions, conditions requiring so nice an observation--without arriving at some degree of assurance in regard to their main properties, without attaining, indeed, to what he calls _knowledge_ on that subject--knowledge as distinguished from opinion--so as to be able to predict 'with a near aim' the results of the possible combinations. the conclusion of this observation was, that the revolutionary movements then at hand were _not_, on the whole, likely to be conducted throughout on rigidly scientific principles. the spectacle of a people violently '_revoking_ their _ignorant election_,' and empirically seeking to better their state under such leaders as such a movement was likely to throw up, and that, too, when the _old_ military government was still so strong in moral forces, so sure of a faction in the state--of a faction of the best, which would cleave the state to the centre, which would resist with the zealot's fire unto blood and desperation the _unholy_ innovation--that would stand on the last plank of the wrecked order, and wade through seas of slaughter to restore it; the prospect of untried political innovation, under such circumstances, did _not_ present itself to this poet's imagination in a form so absolutely alluring, as it might have done to a philosopher of a less rigidly _inductive_, turn of mind. his canvas, with its magic draught of the coming event, includes already some contingencies which the programme of the theoretical speculator in revolutions would have been far enough from including _then_, when such movements were yet untried in modern history, and the philosopher had to go back to mythical rome to borrow an historical frame of one that would contain his piece. the conviction that the crash was, perhaps, inevitable, that the overthrow of the existing usurpation, and the restoration of the english subject to his rights,--a movement then already determined on,--would perhaps involve these so tragic consequences--the conviction that the revolution was at hand, was the conviction with which he made his arrangements for the future. but if any one would like to see now for himself what vigorous grasp of particulars this inductive science of state involves, what a clear, comprehensive, and masterly basis of history it rests on, and how totally unlike the philosophy of prenotions it is in this respect--if one would see what breadth of revolutionary surges this artist of the peace principles was able to span with his arches and sleepers, what upheavings from the then unsounded depths of political contingencies, what upliftings from the last depths of the revolutionary abysses, this science of _stability_, this science of the future state, is settled on,--such a one must explore this work yet further, and be able to find and unroll in it that revolutionary picture which it contains--that scientific exhibition which the elizabethan statesman has contrived to fold in it of a state in which the elements are already cleaving and separating, one in which the historical solidities are already in solution, or struggling towards it--prematurely, perhaps, and in danger of being surprised and overtaken by new combinations, not less oppressive and unscientific than the old. 'unless philosophy can make a juliet, displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, hang up philosophy'-- wrote this poet's fire of old. 'canst thou not minister to a _mind_ diseased?' it writes again. no? 'throw physic to the dogs, i'll none of it.' 'see now what _learning_ is,' says the practical-minded nurse, quite dazzled and overawed with that exhibition of it which has just been brought within her reach, and expressing, in the readiest and largest terms which her vocabulary supplies to her, her admiration of the practical bent of friar laurence's genius; who seems to be doing his best to illustrate the idea which another student, who was not _a friar_ exactly, was undertaking to demonstrate from his cell about that time--the idea of the possibility of converging a large and studious observation of nature in general,--and it is a very large and curious one which _this friar_ betrays,--upon any of those ordinary questions of domestic life, which are constantly recurring for private solution. and though _this_ knowledge might seem to be 'so variable as it falleth not under _precept_,' the prose philosopher is of the opinion that 'a universal insight, and a wisdom of council and advice, gathered by general observation of cases of _like nature_,' is available for the particular instances which occur in this department. and the philosophic poet appears to be of his opinion; for there is no end to the precepts which he inducts from this 'variable knowledge' when he gets it on his table of review, in the form of natural history, in '_prerogative cases_' and 'illustrious instances,' cases cleared from their accidental and extraneous adjuncts--ideal cases. and though this poor friar does not appear to have been very successful in this particular instance; if we take into account the fact that 'the tragedy was the thing,' and that nothing but a tragedy would serve his purpose, and that all his learning was converged on that _effect_; if we take into account the fact that this is a scientific experiment, and that the characters are sacrificed for the sake of the useful conclusions, the success will not perhaps appear so questionable as to throw any discredit upon this new theory of the applicability of _learning_ to questions of this nature. 'unless philosophy can make a juliet.' but this is the philosophy that did that very thing, and the one that made a hamlet also, besides 'reversing a prince's doom'; for this is the one that takes into account those very things in heaven and earth which horatio had omitted in his abstractions; and this is the philosopher who speaks from his philosophic chair of '_men_ of good composition,' and who gives a recipe for composing _them_. 'unless philosophy can make a juliet,' is romeo's word. 'see now what learning _is_,' is the nurse's commentary; for that same _friar_, demure as he looks now under his hood, talking of 'simples' and great nature's latent virtues, is the one that will cog the nurse's hearts from them, and come back beloved of all the trades in rome. with his new art of 'composition' he will compose, not juliets nor hamlets only; mastering the radicals, he will compose, he will dissolve and recompose ultimately the greater congregation; for the powers in nature are always one, and they are not many. let us see now, then, what it is,--this 'universal insight in the affairs of the world,' this 'wisdom of counsel and advice, gathered from cases of a _like nature_,' with an observation that includes all _natures_,--let us see what this new wisdom of counsel is, when it comes to be applied to this huge growth of the state, this creature of the ages; and in its great crisis of disorder--shaken, convulsed-- wrapped in elemental horror, and threatening to dissolve into its primal warring atoms. 'doctor, the thanes fly from me.' 'if thou _couldst_, doctor, cast the water of my land, _find her disease_, and purge it to a _sound_ and _pristine health_, i would applaud thee to the very echo, that should applaud again.' 'what rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug, would scour _these english_ hence? hear'st thou of _them_?' 'cousins, i hope the days are near at hand that chambers will be safe.' let us see, then, what it is that this man will have, who criticises so severely the learning of other men,--who disposes so scornfully, right and left, of the physic and metaphysic of the schools as he finds them,--who daffs the learning of the world aside, and bids it _pass_. let us see what the learning is that is not '_words_,' as hamlet says, complaining of the reading in his book. this part has been taken out from its dramatic connections, and reserved for a separate exhibition, on account of a certain new and peculiar value it has acquired since it was produced in those connections. time has changed it 'into something rich and strange,'--time has framed it, and poured her illustration on it: it is history now. that flaming portent, this aurora that fills the seer's heaven, these fierce angry warriors, that are fighting here upon the clouds, 'in ranks, and squadrons, and right forms of war,' are but the marvels of that science that lays the future open. 'there is a history in all men's lives, figuring the nature of the times deceased; the which observed, a man may prophesy, with a near aim, of the main chance of things as yet not come to life, which, _in their seeds_ and _weak beginnings_, lie intreasured. such things become the hatch and brood of time.' 'one need not go to heaven to predict imminent changes and revolutions,' says that other philosopher, who scribbles on this same subject about these days in such an entertaining manner, and who brings so many 'buckets' from 'the headspring of sciences,' to water his plants in this field in particular. 'that which most threatens us is a divulsion of the whole mass.' this part is produced here, then, as a specimen of that kind of prophecy which one does not need to go to heaven for. and the careful reader will observe, that notwithstanding the distinct disavowal of any supernatural gift on the part of this seer, and this frank explanation of the mystery of his art, the prophecy appears to compare not unfavourably with others which seem to come to us with higher claims. a very useful and very remarkable kind of prophecy indeed, this inductive prophecy appears to be; and the question arises, whether _a kind_, endowed of god with a faculty of seeing, which commands the future in so inclusive a manner, and with so near and sufficient an aim for the most important practical purposes, ought to be besieging heaven for a _super_natural gift, and questioning the ancient seers for some vague shadows of the coming event, instead of putting this immediate endowment--this 'godlike' endowment--under culture. there is another reason for reserving this part. in the heat and turmoil of this great act, the muse of the inductive science drops her mask, and she forgets to take it up again. the hand that is put forth to draw 'the next ages' into the scene, when the necessary question of the play requires it, is _bare_. it is the man of learning here everywhere, without any disguise,--the man of the new learning, openly applying his 'universal insight,' and 'wisdom of counsel and advice, gathered by general observation of cases of like nature,' to this great question of 'policy,' which was then hurrying on, with such portentous movement, to its inevitable practical solution. he who would see at last for himself, then, the trick of this 'magician,' when he 'brings the rabble to his place,' the reader who would know at last why it is that these old roman graves 'have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, by his so potent art'; and _why_ it is, that at this great crisis in english history, the noise of the old roman battle hurtles so fiercely in the english ear, should read now--but read as a work of natural science in politics, from the scientific statesman's hands, deserves to be read--this great revolutionary scene, which the poet, for reasons of his own, has buried in the heart of this play, which he has subordinated with his own matchless skill to the general intention of it, but which we, for the sake of pursuing that general intention with the less interruption, now that the storm appears to be 'overblown,' may safely reserve for the conclusion of our reading of this scientific history, and criticism, and rejection of the military usurpation of the common-weal. the reading of it is very simple. one has only to observe that the poet avails himself of the _dialogue_ here, with even more than his usual freedom, for the purpose of disposing of the bolder passages, in the least objectionable manner,--interrupting the statement in critical points, and emphasizing it, by that interruption, to the careful reader 'of the argument,' but to the spectator, or to one who takes it as a _dialogue merely_, neutralizing it by that dramatic opposition. for the political criticism, which is of the boldest, passes safely enough, by being merely _broken_, and put into the mouths of opposing factions, who are just upon the point of coming to blows upon the stage, and cannot, therefore, be suspected of collusion. for the popular magistracy, as it represents the ignorance, and stupidity, and capricious tyranny of the multitude, and their unfitness for rule, is subjected to the criticism of the true consulship, on the one hand, while the military usurpation of the chair of state, and the law of conquest, is not less severely criticized by the true tribune--the tribune, whose tribe is the kind--on the other; and it was not necessary to produce, in any _more_ prominent manner, just then, the fact, that _both these offices_ and _relations_ were combined in that tottering estate of the realm,--that 'old riotous form of military government,' which held then only by the virtual election of the stupidity and ignorance of the people, and which, this poet and his friends were about to put on its trial, for its _innovations_ in the government, and suppressions of the ancient estates of this realm,--for its suppression of the dignities and privileges of the nobility, and its suppression of the chartered dignities and rights of the commons. _scene_.--a street. cornets. enter coriolanus with his two military friends, who have shared with him the conduct of the volscian wars, and have but just returned from their campaign, cominius and titus lartius,--and with them the old civilian menenius, who, patrician as he is, on account of his _honesty_,--a truly patrician virtue,--is in favour with the people. '_he's_ an honest one. would they were _all so_.' the military element predominates in this group of citizens, and of course, they are talking of the wars,--the foreign wars: but the principle of _inroad_ and _aggression_ on the one hand, and _defence_ on the other, the arts of _subjugation_, and _reconciliation_, the arts of war and government in their most general forms are always cleared and identified, and tracked, under the specifications of the scene. _cor_. tullus aufidius then _had made_ new head. _lart_. he had, my lord, and _that_ it was, which caused our swifter composition. _cor_. so then, the _volsces_ stand but as at first, ready, when _time_ shall _prompt_ them, to make _road_ upon _us_ again. _com_. _they_ [volsces?] _are worn_, lord consul, so that we shall hardly in _our ages_ see _their_ banners wave again. * * * * * [_enter sicinius and brutus._] _cor_. behold! these are the tribunes of the people, the _tongues_ o' the _common mouth_. i do despise them; for they do prank them in authority, against all _noble_ sufferance. _sic_. pass no further. _cor_. ha! what is that? _bru_. it will be dangerous to go on: no further. _cor_. what makes this change? _men_. _the matter_? _com_. hath he not passed the nobles and the commons? _bru_. cominius.--no. _cor_. have i had _children's voices_? [ _yes._] _sen_. tribunes, give way:--he shall to the market-place. _bru_. the people are incensed against him. _sic_. stop. or _all will fall in broil_. _cor_. are these _your herd_? must _these_ have voices that can yield them now, and straight disclaim their tongues? _you, being their mouths_, why rule you not their teeth? _have you not set them on?_ _men_. be calm, be calm. _cor._ it is a purposed thing, and grows by plot, to curb the will of the _nobility_:-- _suffer it, and live with such as cannot rule, nor_ ever will be _ruled_. _bru_. call't not a _plot_: the people cry you mocked them; and of late, when _corn_ was given them gratis, you repined; _scandaled the suppliants for the people; called them time-pleasers, flatterers, foes to nobleness._ _cor_. why, this was known before. _bru_. _not to them all._ _cor_. _have you informed them since?_ _bru_. how! _i_ inform them? _cor_. you are like to do _such business_. _bru_. not unlike, each way to better _yours_. _cor_. why _then_ should _i_ be consul? by yon clouds, let me deserve so ill as you, and make me _your fellow tribune_. _sic_. you show too much of _that_, for which the people stir: if you will pass to where you are bound, you must inquire your way,-- which you are out of,--with a _gentler_ spirit; or never be so noble as a consul, nor yoke with him for tribune. _men_. let's _be calm_. _com_. the people are abused;--set on--this paltering becomes not rome: nor has coriolanus deserved this so dishonoured rub, laid falsely i' the plain way of his merit. _cor_. tell me of _corn_: _this was my speech_, and i will speak't _again_. _men. not now, not now._ _first sen_. not in this heat, sir, _now_. _cor. now_, as i live, i will.--my nobler friends i crave their pardons:-- for the _mutable_, rank scented _many_, let them _regard me, as i do not flatter, and therein behold themselves_: i say again, in soothing _them_, we nourish 'gainst our _senate_, the cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed and scattered, by mingling them with us, _the honoured number_. who lack not _virtue, no_,--nor _power_, but _that_ _which they have given to_--beggars. _men. well, no more._ _first sen. no more words, we beseech you._ _cor_. how, no more: as for my country, i have shed my blood, not fearing outward force, _so_ shall my lungs _coin words_ till their decay against those meazels which we disdain, should tetter us, yet sought the very way to catch them. _bru_. you speak o' the people, as if you were a god to punish, not _a man of their infirmity_. _sic. 't were well_ _we let the people know't._ _men_. what, what? his _choler_. _cor. choler_! were i _as patient_ as the _midnight sleep, by jove,_ 't would be _my mind_. _sic_. it is a mind, that shall remain a poison where it is, _not poison any further_. _cor_. _shall remain!_ hear you this triton of the minnows? _mark you_ _his absolute_ shall? _com_. _'twas from the canon,_ _o good_, but most _unwise patricians_, why you _grave_, but _reckless senators_, have you thus _given hydra here to choose_ an officer, that with his _peremptory shall--being but the horn and noise o' the monster_--wants not _spirit_ to say, he'll turn _your current_ in _a ditch_, and make _your channel his? if he have power, then_ veil your ignorance:--[that let him have it.] --if _none, awake_ your _dangerous_ lenity. [mark it well, for it is not, as one may see who looks at it but a little, it is not the lost roman weal and its danger that fires the passion of this speech. 'look at this player whether he has not turned his colour, and has tears in his eyes.' 'what's _hecuba_ to him or he to _hecuba_, that he should weep for her? _what would he do_, had he the motive and the cue for passion that _i_ have.'] --if none, awake your dangerous _lenity. if_ you are _learned_, be not as _common fools_; if you are _not_-- what do you draw this foolish line for, that separates you from the commons? if you are not, there's no nobility. if you are not, what business have you in these chairs of state? --if you are not, _let them have cushions by you_. you are plebeians, if _they_ be senators; and _they are no less_, when _both your voices blended_, the greatest taste most palates _theirs_. _they choose_ their magistrate; and such a one as _he_, who puts his _shall_,-- [mark it, his _popular shall_]. his _popular shall_, against a graver bench than ever frown'd in greece! by jove himself, it makes the _consuls base_: and _my soul aches_, _to know_, when two authorities are up, [neither able to rule]. _neither supreme_, how soon confusion may enter twixt the gap of both, and take the one by the other. _com._ well,--on to the _market place_. _cor_. whoever gave that counsel, to give forth the _corn o' the store-house_ gratis, as 'twas used _sometime in greece_. [it is not _corn_, but the _property_ of the _state_, and its appropriation, we talk of here. whether the _absolute power_ be in the hands of the _people_ or '_their officer_.' there had been a speech made on that subject, which had not met with the approbation of the absolute power then conducting the affairs of this realm; and in its main principle, it is repeated here. 'that was my speech, and i will make it again.' 'not now, not now. not in this heat, sir, now.' 'now, as i live, i will.'] _men_. well, well, no more of that, _cor_. though _there_ the people had more _absolute power_, i say they _nourished disobedience, fed_ the _ruin of the state_. _bru_. why shall the people _give_ one that speaks thus their voice? _cor_. i'll give my _reasons_, more worthier than _their voices_. they know the corn was not our recompense; resting well assured _they ne'er did service for it_? . . . well, what then? how shall _this bosom multiplied_, digest; the senate's courtesy? let _deeds_ express _what's like to be their words_. we did request it, we _are_ the greater poll, and in _true fear_ _they gave us our demands_. thus we debase the nature of our seats, and make the rabble call our _cares, fears:_ which will in time _break ope the locks o' the senate_, and _bring in the crows to peck the eagles._ _mem_. come, enough. _bru_. enough, with _over measure_. _cor_. no, take _more_; what may be sworn by, _both divine and human_, seal what i end withal! this _double_ worship,-- where _one part_ does _disdain with cause, the other insult without all reason_; where _gentry, title, wisdom_, cannot conclude, but by the yea and no of _general ignorance_--it _must omit real necessities_, and _give way the while to unstable slightness_. purpose so _barred_ it follows _nothing is done to purpose: therefore_ beseech you,-- [therefore beseech you]. you that will be less fearful than discreet; that love the _fundamental part_ of _state_, more than you doubt the _change_ of't-- there was but one man in england then, able to balance this revolutionary proposition so nicely--so curiously; 'that love the _fundamental_ part of state more than you doubt the change of it'; 'you that are _less fearful_ than _discreet_'--not so _fearful_ as discreet. that prefer a noble life before a long, and wish to jump a body with a dangerous physic _that's sure_ of _death without it_,--at once _pluck out the multitudinous tongue_; let them not lick the sweet which is their poison; _your dishonour_ mangles _true_ judgment, and bereaves the state of that integrity which should _become it_: not having the power to do the good it would, for the ill which doth control it. _bru_. he has said enough. [one would think so]. _sic_. he has spoken like a traitor, and shall answer _as traitors do_. _cor_. thou wretch! despite o'erwhelm thee! what should the _people do_ with these bald tribunes? _on whom depending, their obedience fails to the greater bench_? in a rebellion, when what's not meet, but what must be was _law_ then were they chosen: in a better hour, let what _is meet_, be said it must be _meet_, and throw their power i' the _dust_. _bru_. manifest treason. _sic_. _this a consul_? no. _bru_. the aediles! ho! let him be apprehended. _sic_. go call the people; [_exit brutus_] _in whose name, myself_ attach _thee_ [_thee_] as a traitorous innovator, a foe to the public weal. obey, i charge thee, and follow to thine answer. _cor_. hence, old goat! _senators and patricians. we'll surety him_. _cor_. hence, rotten thing, or i shall shake thy bones out of thy garments. _sic_. help, ye citizens. [_re-enter brutus, with the aediles, and a rabble of citizens._] _men_. _on both sides, more respect._ _sic_. there's he that would _take from you all your power_. _bru_. _seize him, aediles_. _cit_. _down with him. down with him_. [_several speak_.] _second sen_. weapons! weapons! weapons! [_they all bustle about_ coriolanus.] tribunes, patricians:--citizens:--what ho:-- sicinius, brutus:--coriolanus:--citizens:-- _cit_. _peace!--peace!--peace!--stay!--hold!--peace!_ _men_. _what is about to be? i am out of breath: confusion's near! i cannot speak_: you tribunes to the people.--_coriolanus_, patience:-- speak, good sicinius. _sic_. hear me, people;--_peace_. _cit_. let's hear _our_ tribune:--peace,--_speak, speak, speak_. _sic_. _you are at point to lose your liberties_, marcius _would have all from you_; marcius whom late you have named for consul. _men_. fye, fye, fye. that is the way to _kindle_, not to _quench_. _sen_. to _unbuild_ the _city and to lay all flat_. _sic_. what is the city, but _the people_. _cit_. true, the _people are_ the city. _bru_. by the consent of all, we were established the _people's_ magistrates. _cit_. you so remain. _men_. and so are like to do. _cor_. that is the way to lay the city flat, to bring the _roof_ to the _foundation_; and bury all which yet _distinctly ranges, in heaps and piles of ruin_. _sic_. _this deserves death._ _bru_. or let us stand to our authority, or let us lose it:-- truly, one hears the revolutionary voices here. observing the history which is in all men's lives, 'figuring the nature of the times deceased, a man _may prophesy_,' as it would seem, 'with a _near aim_,'--quite near--'of the _main_ chance of things, as yet, not come to life, which in their weak beginnings lie intreasured. such things become the hatch and brood of _time_,' this poet says; but art, it seems, anticipates that process. there appears to be more of the future here, than of the times deceased. _bru_. we do here pronounce upon the _part of the people, in whose power we were elected theirs, marcius is worthy_ of _present death._ _sic_. therefore, lay hold of him; bear him to the rook tarpeian, and from thence into destruction cast him. _bru_. �diles, seize him. _cit_. yield, marcius, yield. _men_. hear me, one word. beseech you, tribunes, hear me, but a word. _�diles_. peace, peace. _men_. be that you _seem, truly your country's friend_, and _temperately_ proceed to what you would thus _violently_ redress. _bru_. sir, those _cold ways_ that seem _like prudent helps_, are very _poisonous_. where the _disease is violent_.--lay hands upon him, and bear him to the rock. _cor_. no: i'll die here. [_drawing his sword_.] there's some among you have beheld me fighting; come _try upon yourselves_, what you have _seen_ me. _men_. down with that sword; tribunes, withdraw awhile. _bru_. lay hands upon him. _men_. help, help, marcius, help! you that be noble, help him, young and old. _cit_. down with him! down with him! 'in this _mutiny, the tribunes, the �diles, and the people, are all_ beat in,' so the stage direction informs us, which appears a little singular, considering there is but _one sword_ drawn, and the victorious faction does not appear to have the advantage in numbers. it is, however, only a temporary success, as the victors seem to be aware. _men_. go, get you to _your houses, be gone away_, all will be nought else. _second sen_. get you gone. _cor_. _stand fast, we have as many friends as enemies._ _men_. shall it be put to _that_? _sen_. _the gods forbid!_ i pry'thee noble friend, home to thy house; _leave us to_ cure this cause. _men_. _for_ 'tis a sore _upon us, you cannot tent yourself. begone, beseech you._ _com_. come, sir, along with us. _cor_. i would they were barbarians (as they are, though in rome _littered_) not romans, (as they are _not_, though _calved_ i' the porch o' the capitol). _men_. begone; put not _your worthy rage_ into your _tongue_; _one time_ will _owe another_. [_hear_.] _cor_. on fair ground, i could beat _forty_ of them. _men_. i could _myself_ take up a _brace_ of the best of them; _yea, the two tribunes_. _com_. but now 'tis _odds_ beyond arithmetic: and manhood is called foolery, _when it stands against a falling fabric_.--will you hence, before the tag return? whose rage doth rend like interrupted waters, and _o'erbear what they are used to bear_. [change of 'predominance.'] _men_. pray you, begone: i'll _try_ whether _my_ old wit be in request with _those that have but little_; _this_ must be _patched_ with cloth of _any colour_. _com_. nay, come away. the features of that living impersonation of the heroic faults and virtues which 'the mirror,' that professed to give to 'the very body of the time, its form and pressure,' could not fail to show, are glimmering here constantly in 'this ancient piece,' and often shine out in the more critical passages, with such unmistakeable clearness, as to furnish an effectual diversion for any eye, that should undertake to fathom prematurely the player's intention. for 'the gentleman who wrote the late shepherd's calendar' was not the only poet of this time, as it would seem, who found the scope of a double intention, in his poetic representation, not adequate to the comprehension of his design--who laid on another and another still, and found the complexity convenient. 'the sense is the best judge,' this poet says, in his doctrine of criticism, declining peremptorily to accept of the ancient rules in matters of taste;--a rule in art which requires, of course, a corresponding rule of interpretation. in fact, it is no bad exercise for an ordinary mind, to undertake to track the contriver of these plays, through all the latitudes which his art, as he understands it, gives him. it is as good for that purpose, as a problem in mathematics. but, 'to whom you will not give an hour, you give nothing,' he says, and 'he had as lief not be read at all, as be read by a careless reader.' so he thrusts in his meanings as thick as ever he likes, and those who don't choose to stay and pick them out, are free to lose them. they are not the ones he laid them in for,--that is all. he is not afraid, but that he will have readers enough, ere all is done; and he can afford to wait. there's time enough. _first pat_. this man has marr'd his fortune. _men_. his nature is too noble for the world: _he_ would not _flatter_ neptune for _his trident_, or jove for _his power_ to _thunder_. his heart's his mouth; what his breast forges, _that_ his _tongue_ must vent; and being angry, does forget that _ever he heard the name of death_. [_a noise within_.] here's goodly work! _second pat_. i would they were _a-bed_! _men_. i would they were in tyber!--_what, the vengeance, could he_ not _speak them fair_? [_re-enter brutus and sicinius with the rabble_.] _sic_. where is this viper, that would _depopulate_ the city, and be every man himself? _men_. you worthy tribunes-- _sic_. _he_ shall be thrown down the tarpeian rock with rigorous hands; _he hath resisted law_, and therefore law shall scorn him further trial. ['when could they say till now that talked of rome that _her_ wide walls encompassed but _one man_?' 'what trash is rome, what rubbish, and what offal, when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as caesar.'] than the severity of the public power, _which he so sets at nought_. _first cit_. he shall _well_ know the noble _tribunes_ are the _people's mouths_, and _we their hands_. [historical _principles throughout, with much of that kind of illustration in which his works are so prolific, an illustration which is not rhetorical, but scientific, based on the common principles in nature, which it is his 'primary' business to ascend to, and which it is his 'second' business to apply to each particular branch of art. 'neither,' as he tells us plainly, in his book of advancement, 'neither are these only _similitudes_ as _men of narrow observation_ may conceive them to be, but the _same footsteps of nature_, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters,' and the tracking of these historical principles to their ultimate forms, is that which he recommends for the _disclosing_ of _nature and_ the _abridging_ of art.] _sic_. he's a _disease_, that must be cut away. _men_. o he's a _limb_, that has but a disease; mortal to cut it off; to cure it, easy. what has he done to rome, that's worthy death? _killing our enemies?_ the blood he hath _lost_, (which, i dare vouch, is more than that he hath, _by many an ounce_), he dropped it for his country. and what _is left, to lose it by his country, were to us all, that do't and suffer it, a brand to the end o' the world._ there's a piece thrust in here. this is the one of whom he says in another scene, 'i cannot speak him home.' _bru_. _merely awry_: when he did love his country, it honour'd him. _men_. the _service_ of the _foot_, being once _gangren'd_, is not then respected _for what before it was_? _bru_. we'll hear no more:-- pursue him to his house, and pluck him thence; lest his infection, being of catching nature, _spread further_. _men_. one word more, one word. this _tiger-footed_ rage, when it shall find _the harm_ of _unscann'd swiftness_, will, too late, _tie leaden pounds to his_ heels. [mark it, for it is a prophecy] _lest_ parties (as he is _beloved_) _break out_, and sack great _rome_ with _romans_. _bru_. if it were so,-- _sic. what_ do ye talk? have we not had a taste of his obedience? _our �diles smote? ourselves resisted?--come:--_ _men. consider this; he has been bred i' the wars_, since he could draw a sword,-- that has been the breeding of states, and nobility, and their rule, hitherto, as this play will show you. consider what _schooling_ these statesmen have had, before you begin the enterprise of reforming them, and take your measures accordingly. they are not learned men, you see. how should they be? there has been no demand for learning. the law of the sword has prevailed hitherto. when what's not meet but what must be was law, then were they chosen. proceed by process. _consider_ this; he has been bred i' the wars since he could draw a sword, and is _ill school'd_ in _boulted language_-- [that's the trouble; but there's been a little bolting going on in this play.] --_meal and bran, together_ he _throws without distinction. give me leave_ i'll go to him, and undertake to bring him where he shall answer by a _lawful form_, (in peace) to his utmost peril. _first sen. noble tribunes._ it is the _humane way_: the _other_ course will prove too bloody; and-- [what is very much to be deprecated in such movements]. --the end of it, unknown to the beginning. _sic_. noble menenius; be _you_ then as the people's officer: _masters_,--[and they seem to be that, truly,]--lay down _your weapons_. _bru. go not home_, _sic_. meet on the market-place,-- [--that is where the 'idols of the market' are--] _we'll attend you there: where_, if you bring not marcius, we'll proceed in our _first way_. _men_. i'll bring him to you. let me desire _your_ company [_to the senators_] he _must_ come, or what is worse will follow. _sen_. pray you, let's to him. scene--the forum. _enter sicinius and brutus_. _bru_. in this _point_ charge him _home_, that he affects tyrannical power: if he evade us there, enforce him with his envy to _the people_; and that the spoil, got on the antiates, was _ne'er distributed_.-- _enter an �dile_. what, will he come? _�d_. he's coming. _bru_. how accompanied? _�d_. _with old menenius_, and those senators that always favour'd him. _sic_. have you a _catalogue_ of all the voices that we have procured, _set down by_ the poll? _�d_. _i have; 'tis ready._ _sic_. have you collected them by tribes? _�d_. i _have_. _sic_. assemble presently the people hither: and when they hear _me_ say, _it shall be so_ _i_ the right and strength o' the commons, be it either for death, for fine, or banishment, then let them, if i say _fine_, cry _fine_; if _death_, cry _death_; insisting on the old _prerogative, and power i' the truth, o' the cause. [there is a great difference in the delivery of the mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy, which is the most immersed.--_advancement_ of learning.] _�d_. i shall inform them. _bru_. and when such time they have begun to cry, let them not cease, but with a din confused enforce the present execution of what we chance to sentence. _�d_. very well. _sic_. make them _be strong_, and _ready for this hint_. when we shall _hap_ to give't them. _bru_. go about it. [_exit �dile_.] put him to choler straight. he hath been used ever to conquer, and to have his worth of contradiction. being once chafed, he cannot be rein'd again to temperance; then he speaks what's in his heart; and _that_ is there, which looks _with me to break his neck_. [prophecy--inductive.] well, here he comes. _enter_ coriolanus, _and his party_. _men_. calmly, i do beseech you. _cor_. ay, as an ostler, that for the poorest piece will bear the knave by the volume. the honour'd gods keep _rome in safety_, and the chairs of justice _supplied_ with worthy men! _plant_ love _among us_. throng our large temples with the _shows_ of peace, and _not_ our streets with war. _first sen_. _amen, amen! [hear, hear_!] _men_. a noble _wish_. _re-enter �dile with citizens_. _sic_. draw near, ye people. _cor_. first hear _me_ speak. _�dile_. list to your _tribunes_. audience: _peace_, i say. _both tri_. well, say,--peace, ho. _cor_. shall i be charged no further than this present? must all determine here? _sic_. i do demand, if you submit you to the _people's_ voices, allow their _officers_, and are content to suffer _lawful censure for such faults as shall be proved upon you_? _cor_. i am content. _men_. lo, citizens, he says he is content-- _cor_. what is the matter, that being pass'd for consul, with full voice, i am so dishonour'd, that the very hour you take it off again? _sic_. _answer to us_. _cor_. say then,'tis true. _i ought so_. sic. we charge you, that you have contrived to take from rome, all seasoned office, and to wind yourself into a_ power tyrannical; _for which_, you are a traitor to the people. _cor_. how! _traitor_? _men_. nay, temperately: your promise. _cor_. the fires in the lowest hell fold in the people! call me _their traitor_! _cit_. to the rock, to the rock with him. _sic_. peace. we need not put _new matter_ to his charge: what you have _seen_ him do, and heard him speak, _beating_ your _officers, cursing yourselves_, opposing _laws_ with _strokes_, and here defying those whose great power must try him; even this, so _criminal_, and in such capital _kind_, deserves the extremest death.... for that he has, as much as in him lies, from time to time, envied against the people; _seeking means_ to _pluck away their power_: as now, at last, given hostile strokes, and that, not in the presence of dreaded justice, but on the _ministers_ _that do distribute it; in the name o' the people_, and in the _power of us, the tribunes, we_, even from _this instant_, banish him our city, in _peril of precipitation_ from off the rock tarpeian, never more to enter _our_ rome's gates. i' the people's name _i say it shall be so_. _cit_. _it shall be so, it shall be so_: let him away, he's banish'd, and it _shall be so_. _com_. hear me, my masters, and my common friends. _sic_. he's sentenced: no more hearing. _com_. let me speak:-- _bru_. there's no more to be said, but he is banished, _as_ enemy _to the_ people, and his country: it shall be so. _cit_. it shall be so, it shall be so. and this is the story that was set before a king! one, too, who was just then bestirring himself to get the life of 'that last king of england who was his ancestor' brought out; a king who was taking so much pains to get his triple wreath of conquest brightened up, and all the lines in it laid out and distinguished--one who was taking so much pains to get the fresh red of that last 'conqueror,' who also 'came in by battle,' cleared up in his coat of arms, in case his double line of white and red from the old _norman_ should not prove sufficient-- sufficient to convince the english nation of his divine right, and that of his heirs for ever, to dispose of it and its weal at his and their pleasure, with or without laws, as they should see fit. a pretty scene this to amuse a king with, whose ancestor, the one from whom he directly claimed, had so lately seated himself and his line by battle- -by battle with the english people _on those very questions_; who had 'beaten them in' in their mutinies with his single sword, 'and taken all from them'; who had planted his chair of state on their suppressed liberties, and 'the charters that they bore in the body of the weal'-- that chair which was even then beginning to rock a little--while there was that in the mien and bearing of the royal occupant and his heir which might have looked to the prescient mind, if things went on as they were going then, not unlike to break some one's neck. 'bid them home,' says the tribune, after the military hero is driven out by the uprisen people, with shouting, from the city gates for ever; charged never more to enter them, on peril of precipitation from the tarpeian rock. 'bid them home: say, _their great enemy is gone_, and they stand _in their ancient strength_.' but it is in the conquered nation that this scene of the deposing of the military power is completed. of course one could not tell beforehand what effect that cautious, but on the whole luminous, exhibition of the recent conquest of the english people, prepared at the suggestion and under the immediate criticism of royalty, might have with the profoundly loyal english people themselves, in the way of 'striking an awe into them,' and removing any lurking opposition they might have to the exercise of an arbitrary authority in government; but with people of the old volscian pluck, according to this poet's account of the matter, an allusion to a similar success on the part of the conqueror at a critical moment, and when his _special_ qualifications for government happened to be passing under review, was not attended with those happy results which appear to have been expected in the other instance. '_if_ you have writ _your annals true_, 't is there, that _like an_ eagle in a dove-cote, _i_ flutter'd your volsces in corioli: _alone, i did it_.' 'why-- [the answer is, in this case,] '_why_, noble lords, _will you be put in mind_ of his blind fortune, which was _your shame_, by this unholy braggart, 'fore _your own eyes and ears_? _cons_. let him die for't. [several speak at once.] _citizens_ [speaking _promiscuously_]. tear him to pieces; do it presently. he killed _my son_--_my daughter_;--he killed my cousin marcus;--he killed _my father_.... o that i had him, with six aufidiuses, or more, _his tribe_, to use _my lawful sword_. insolent villain! ...traitor!--how now?.... ay, traitor, marcius. _marcius_? ay, _marcius_, caius marcius. _dost thou think_ i'll grace thee with that robbery--thy stolen name, _coriolanus_, in corioli?.... [.... honest, my lord? 'ay, honest.'] _cons_. kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him.' 'would you proceed especially against _caius marcius?_ against him first.' surely, if that 'heir apparent' to whom the _history_ of henry the seventh was dedicated by the author, with an urgent recommendation of the '_rare accidents_' in that reign to the royal notice and consideration; if that prince had but chanced in some thoroughly thoughtful mood to light upon this yet more 'ancient piece,' he might have found here, also, some things worthy of his notice. it cannot be denied, that the poet's mode of handling the same historical question is much more bold and clear than that of the professed philosopher. but probably this prince was not aware that his father entertained at whitehall then, not a literary historian, merely--a book-maker, able to compose narratives of the past in an orderly chronological prosaic manner, according to the received method--but a show-man, also, an historical show-man, with such new gifts and arts; a true magician, who had in his closet a mirror which possessed the property of revealing, not the past nor the present only, but the future, 'with a near aim,' an aim so _near_ that it might well seem 'magical'; and that a cloud was flaming in it, even then, 'which drizzled blood upon the capitol.' this prince of wales did not know, any more than his father did, that they had in their court then an historical scholar, with such an indomitable passion for the stage, with such a decided turn for acting--one who felt himself divinely prompted to a part in that theatre which is the globe--one who had laid out all for his share in that. they did not either of them know, fortunately for us, that they had in their royal train such an historic sport-manager, such a prospero for masques; that there was a true 'phil-harmonus' there, with so clear an inspiration of scientific statesmanship. they did not know that they had in that servant of the crown, so supple, so 'patient--patient as the midnight sleep,' patient 'as the ostler that for the poorest piece will bear the knave by the volume'--such a born aspirant for rule; one who had always his eye on the throne, one who had always in mind their usurpation of it. they did not know that they had a hamlet in their court, who never lost sight of his purpose, or faltered in his execution of it; who had found a scientific ground for his actions, an end for his ends; who only affected incoherence; and that it was he who was intriguing to such purpose with the players. the elizabethan revolutionist was suppressed: then 'fame, who is the posthumous sister of rebellion, sprang up.' 'o like a book of sports thou'lt read me o'er, but there's more in me than thou'lt understand.' 'henceforth guard thee well, for i'll not kill thee there, nor there, nor there; but _by the forge_ that stithied mars his helm, i'll kill thee everywhere, yea o'er and o'er.' chapter xiii. conclusion. 'how i have thought of this, and of these times, i shall recount hereafter, . . . . . . . . and find a time both meet to hear and answer such high things. _till then_, my noble friend, _chew upon this_; brutus had rather he _a villager_, than _to repute himself_ a son of rome, under these hard conditions _as this time_ _is like to lay upon us_. inasmuch as the demonstration contained in this volume has laboured throughout under this disadvantage, that however welcome that new view of the character and aims of the great english philosopher, which is involved in it, as welcome it must be to all true lovers of learning, it presents itself to the mind of the reader as a view directly opposed, not merely to what may possibly be his own erroneous preconceptions of the case; but to facts which are among the most notable in the history of this country; and not only to facts sustained by unquestionable contemporary authority, and attested by public documents,--facts which history has graven with her pen of iron in the rock for ever, but with other exhibitions of this man's character, not less, but more painful, for which he is himself singly responsible;--not the forced exhibition of a confession wrung from him by authority,--not the craven self-blasting defamation of a glorious name that was not his to blast,--that was the property of men of learning in all coming ages, precious and venerable in their eyes for ever, at the bidding of power,--not that only, but the voluntary exhibition of those qualities with which he stands charged,--which he has gone out of his way to leave to us,--memorials of them which he has collected with his own hands, and sealed up, and sent down to posterity 'this side up,' with the most urgent directions to have them read, and examined, and considered deeply,--that posterity, too, to which he commends, with so much assurance, the care of his honor, the cure of his fame. the demonstrated fact must stand. the true mind must receive it. because our criticism or our learning is not equal to the task of reconciling it with that which we know already, or with that which we _believed_, and thought we _knew_, we must not on that account reject it. that is to hurt ourselves. that is to destroy the principle of integrity at its source. we must take our facts and reconcile them, if we can; and let them take care of themselves, if we can not. god is greater than we are, and whatever other sacrifices he may require of us, painful to our human sensibilities, to make way with facts, for the sake of advancing truths, or for any other reason never so plausible, is a thing which he never does, and never did require of any mind. the conclusion that requires facts to be dispensed with, or shorn, on either side to make it tenable, is not going to stand, let it come in what name, or with what authority it will; because the truth of history is, in its least particular, of a universal quality, and is much more potent than anything that the opinion and will of man can oppose to it. to the mind which is able to receive under all conditions the demonstrated truth, and give to it its full weight,--to the mind to which truth is religion, this book is dedicated. the facts which it contains are able to assert themselves,--will be, at least, hereafter. they will not be dependent ultimately upon the mode of their exhibition here. for they have the large quality, they have the solidity and dimensions of historical truth, and are accessible on more sides than one. but to those to whom they are already able to commend themselves in the form in which they are here set forth, the author begs leave to say, in conclusion, though it must stand for the present in the form of a simple statement, but a statement which challenges investigation, that so far from coming into any real collision with the evidence which we have on this subject from other sources, those very facts, and those very historical materials on which our views on this subject have been based hitherto, are, that which is wanting to the complete development of the views contained here. it is the true history of these great events in which the hidden great men of this age played so deep a part; it is the true history of that great crisis in which the life-long plots of these hidden actors began to show themselves on the historic surface in scenic grandeur,--in those large tableaux which history takes and keeps,--which history waits for,--it is the very evidence which has supplied the principal basis of the received views on this subject,--it is the history of the initiation of that great popular movement,--that movement of new ages, with which the chief of popular development, and the leader of these ages, has been hitherto so painfully connected in our impressions; it is that very evidence,--that blasting evidence which the learning of the modern ages has always carried in its stricken heart,--it is _that_ which is wanting here. that also is a part of the story which has begun to be related here. and those very letters which have furnished 'confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ' of the impressions which the other historical evidence, as it stands at present, inevitably creates,--those very letters which have been collected by the party whose character was concerned in them, and preserved with so much diligence and caution,--which we have been asked with so much emphasis to read and ponder,--which have been recommended to our attention as the very best means, when all is done, of putting ourselves into sympathetic relations with the writer, and attaining at last to a complete understanding of his position, and to a complete acquaintance with his character and aims,--with his _natural dispositions_, as well as his deliberate scientific _aims_,--these letters, long as we have turned from them,--often as we have turned from them,--chilled, confounded, sick at heart,--unable, in spite of those recommendations, to find in them any gleam of the soul of these proceedings,--these very letters will have to be read, after all, and with that very diligence which the directions enjoin upon us; they will have, when all is done, to take just that place in the development of this plot which the author, who always knows what he is about when he is giving directions, designed them to take. there is one very obvious reason why they should be studied--why they would have to be studied in the end. they have on the face of them a claim to the attention of the learned. there is nothing like them in the history of mankind. for, however mean and disreputable the acts of men may be, when it comes to words,--that medium of understanding and sympathy, in which the identity of the common nature is perpetually declared, even in the most private conferences,--there is usually an attempt to clothe the forlorn and shrinking actuality with the common human dignity, or to make it, at least, passably respectable, if the claim to the heroic is dispensed with,--even in oral speech. but in writing, in letters, destined to never so brief and limited an existence, who puts on paper for the eye of another, for the review of that criticism which in the lowest, basest of mankind, stands in unimpeachable dignity, prepared to detect and pass sentence, and cry out as one aggrieved, on the least failure, or shadow of failure in the best--who puts in writing,--what tenant of newgate will put on paper, when it comes to that, a deliberate display of meanness,--what convicted felon, but will undertake in that case to give some sort of heroic colour to his proceedings--some air of suffering virtue to his durance? but a great man, consciously great, who knows that his most trifling letter is liable to publication; a great man, writing on subjects and occasions which insure publicity to his writing; a man of fame, writing letters expressly for publication, and dedicating them to the far-off times; a man of poetic sensibilities, alive to the finest shades of moral differences; one of unparalleled dignity and grandeur of aims--aims pursued from youth to age, without wavering, under the most difficult conditions, pursued to their successful issue; a man whose aim in life it was to advance, and ennoble, and enrich his kind; in whose life-success the race of men are made glad; such a one sending down along with the works, in which the nobility and the deliberate worth and grandeur of his ends are set forth and proved, memorials of himself which exhibit studiously on the surface of them, by universal consent, the most odious character in history; this is the phenomenon which our men of learning have found themselves called upon to encounter here. to separate the man and the philosopher--to fly out upon the _man_, to throw him overboard with every expression of animosity and disgust, to make him out as bad as possible, to collect diligently every scrap of evidence against him, and set it forth with every conceivable aggravation--this has been the resource of an indignant scholarship in this case, bent on uttering its protest in some form; this has been the defence of learning, cast down from its excellency, and debased in all men's eyes, as it seemed for ever, in the person of its high-priest. the objection to the work here presented to the public is, that it does not go far enough. from the point of review that the research of which it is the fruit has now attained, this is the criticism to which it appears to be liable. from this point of view, the _complaint_ to be made against it is, that at the place where it stops it leaves, for want of that part of the evidence which contains it, the historical grandeur of our great men unrevealed or still obscured. for we _have_ had them, in the sober day-light of our occidental learning, in the actualities of history, and not in the mists of a poetic past only--monstrous idealisms, outstretched shadows of man's divinity, demi-gods and heroes, impersonations of ages and peoples, stalking through the twilight of the ante-historic dawn, or in the twilight of a national popular ignorance, embalmed in the traditions of those who are always 'beginners.' we have had them; we need not look to a foreign and younger race for them; we have them, fruit of our own stock; we have had them, not cloaked with falseness, but exposed in the searching noonday glare of our western science. we have had them, we have them still, with all their mortal frailty and littleness and ignorance confessed, with all their 'weaved-up follies ravelled out,' with all the illimitable capacity of affection and passion and will in man, with all his illimitable capacity for folly and wrong-doing, assumed and acknowledged in their own persons, symbolically, vicariously, assumed and confessed. 'i am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than i have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' we have them, _our_ interpreters, _our_ poets, _our_ reformers, who start from the actualities--from the actualities of nature in general, and of the human nature in particular--who make the most careful study of man as he is, in themselves and in all men, the basis of their innovation, the beginning of their advancement to the ideal or divine. we have them; and they, too, they also come to us, with that old garland of glory on their brows, with that same 'crown' of victory, which the world has given from of old to those who have taken her affairs to be their business. that the historical evidence which lies on the surface of an age, like that age from which our modern philosophy proceeds, is of a kind to require, for its unravelling, a different species of criticism from that which suffices for the historical evidence which our own times and institutions produce, is a fact which would hardly seem to require any illustration in the present state of our historical knowledge, in the present state of our knowledge in regard to the history of this age in particular; when not the professed scholar only, but every reader, knows what age in the constitutional history of england, at least, that age was; when we have here, not the erudite historian only, with his rich harvests for the scholar, that are _caviare_ to the multitude, but the poets of history also, wresting from dull prose and scholasticism its usurped domains, and giving back to the peoples their own, to tell us what age this was. the inner history of this time is indeed still wanting to us; and the reason is, that we have not yet applied to the reading of its principal documents that key of times which our contemporary historians have already put into our hands--that key which, we are told on good authority, is, in certain cases, indispensable to the true interpretation. that the direct contemporary testimony on which history depends is, in this case, vitiated, tainted at its source, and through all its details--that the documents are all of them, on the face of them, 'suspicious,' and not fit to be received as historical evidence without the severest scrutiny and re-examination--this is the fact which remains to be taken into the account here. for this is a case in which the witnesses come into court, making signs, seeking with mute gesticulation to attract our attention, pointing significantly to the difficulties of the position, asking to be cross-examined, soliciting a second cogitation on what they say, telling us that they mortally hate obscurity, and would avoid it if they could; intimating that if their testimony should be re-examined in a higher court, and when the star chamber and the court of ecclesiastical commission are no longer in session, it might perhaps be found to be susceptible of a different reading. this is a case in which the party convicted comes in with his finger on his lips, and an appeal to another tribunal, to another _age_. we all know what age in the history of the immemorial liberties and dignities of a race--what age in the history of its recovered liberties, rescued from oppression and recognised and confirmed by statute, this was. we know it was an age in which the decisions of the bench were prescribed to it by a power that had 'the laws of england at its commandment,' that it was an age in which parliament, and the press, and the pulpit, were gagged, and in which that same justice had charge, diligent charge 'of amusements also, and of those who only played at working.' that this was a time when the play house itself,--in that same year, too, in which these philosophical plays began first to attract attention, and again and again, was warned off by express ordinances from the whole ground of 'the forbidden questions.' we know that this was an age in which not the books of the learned only were subjected to 'the press and torture which expulsed' from them all those 'particulars that point to action'--action, at least, in which the common-weal of men is most concerned; that it was a time when the private manuscript was subjected to that same censorship and question, and corrected with those same instruments and engines, which made then a regular part of the machinery of the press; when the most secret cabinet of the statesman and the man of letters must be kept in order for that revision, when his most confidential correspondence, his private note-book and diary must be composed under these restrictions; when in the church, not the pulpit only, but the secrets of the study, were explored for proofs of opposition to the power then predominant; when the private desk and drawers of the poor obscure country clergyman were ransacked, and his half-formed studies of sermons, his rude sketches and hypothetical notes of sermons yet to be--which might or might not be--put down for private purposes perhaps, and never intended to be preached--were produced by government as an excuse for subjecting him to indignities and cruelties to which those practised upon the duke of kent and the duke of gloster, in the play, formed no parallel. to the genius of a race in whose mature development speculation and action were for the first time systematically united, in the intensities of that great historical impersonation which signalises its first entrance upon the stage of human affairs, stimulated into preternatural activity by that very opposition which would have shut it out from its legitimate fields, and shut it up within those impossible, insufferable limits that the will of the one man prescribed to it then,--to that many-sided genius, bent on playing well its part even under those conditions, all the more determined on it by that very opposition--kept in mind of its manliness all the time by that all comprehending prohibition on manhood, that took charge of every act--irritated all the time into a protesting human dignity by the perpetual meannesses prescribed to it, instructed in the doctrine of the human nature and its nobility in the school of that sovereignty which was keeping such a costly 'crib' here then; 'let a beast be lord of beasts,' says hamlet, 'and your crib shall stand at the king's mess;' 'would you have me false to _my nature_? says another, '_rather_ say i _play_ the _man_ i am'; to that so conscious man, playing his part under these hard conditions, on a stage so high; knowing all the time what theatre that was he played it in, how '_far_' those long-drawn aisles extended; what 'far-off' crowding ages filled them, watching his slightest movements; who knew that he was acting 'even in the eyes of all posterity that wear this world out to the ending doom'; to such a one studying out his part beforehand under such conditions, it was not one disguise only, it was not one secret literary instrumentality only, that sufficed for the plot of it. that toy stage which he seized and converted so effectually to his ends, with all its masks did not suffice for the exigencies of this speaker's speech, 'who came prepared to speak well,' and 'to give to his speech a grace by action.' under these circumstances, the art of letter-writing presented itself to this invention, as a means of accomplishing objects to which other forms of writing did not admit then of being so readily adapted. it offered itself to this invention as a means of conducting certain plots, which inasmuch as they had the weal of men for their object, were necessarily conducted with secresy then. the whole play of that dramatic genius which shaped our great dramatic poems, came out, _not_ on the stage, but in these 'plots' in which the weal of the unborn generations of men was the end; those plots for the relief of man's estate which had to be plotted, like murders and highway robberies, then, by bandits that had watch-words, and 'badges' and signals and private names, and a secret slang of their own. the minds that conducted this enterprise under these conditions, were minds conscious of powers equal, at least, to those of the greeks, and who thought they had as good a right to invent new methods of literary communication, or to convert old ones to new uses as the greeks had in their day. the speaker for this school was one who could not see why it was not just as lawful for the moderns to 'invent new measures in verses,' at least, as in 'dances,' and why it was not just as competent for him to compose 'supposititious' letters for _his_ purposes, as it was for thucydides to compose speeches for _his_; and though eloquence was, in this case, for the most part, dispensed with, these little every-day prosaic unassuming, apparently miscellaneous, scraps of life and business, shewing it up piece-meal as it was in passage, and just as it happened in which, of course, no one would think of looking for a comprehensive design, became, in the hands of this artist, an invention quite as effective as the oratory of the ancient. the letters which came out on the trial of essex, in the name of sir antony bacon, but in which the hand of mr. francis bacon appeared without much attempt at disguise, were not the only documents of that kind for which the name of the elder brother, with his more retiring and less 'dangerous' turn of mind, appeared to be, on the whole, the least objectionable. an extensive correspondence, which will tend to throw some light on the contemporary aspect of things when it is opened, was conducted in that gentleman's name, about those days. but much more illustrious persons, who were forced by the genius of this dramatist into his plots, were induced to lend their names and sanction to these little unobtrusive performances of his, when occasion served. this was a gentleman who was in the habit of writing letters and arranging plots, for quite the most distinguished personages of his time. in fact, his powers were greatly in request for that purpose. for so far as the question of mere ability was concerned, it was found upon experiment, that there was nothing he stopped at. under a sharp pressure, and when the necessary question of the play required it, and nothing else would serve, it was found that he could compose 'a sonnet' as well as a state paper, or a decision, or a philosophical treatise. he wrote a sonnet for essex, addressed to queen elizabeth, on one very important occasion. if it was not any better than those attempts at lyrical expression in another department of song, which he has produced as a specimen of his poetical abilities in general, it is not strange that queen elizabeth, who was a judge of poetry, should find herself able to resist the blandishments of that effusion. but it was not the royal favourite only, it was not essex and buckingham only, who were glad to avail themselves of these so singular gifts, devoted to their use by one who was understood to have no other object in living, but to promote their ends,--one whose vast philosophic aims,--aims already propounded in all their extent and grandeur, propounded from the first, as the ends to which the whole scheme of his life was to be--artistically--with the strong hand of that mighty artist, through all its detail subordinated, were supposed to be merged, lost sight of, forgotten in an irrepressible enthusiasm of devotion to the wishes of the person who happened, at the time, to be the sovereign's favourite; one whose great torch of genius and learning was lighted, as it was understood,--lighted and fed, to light them to their desires. elizabeth herself, unwilling as she was to add any thing to the powers with which nature had crowned this man, instructed by her instinct, that 'such men were dangerous,' was willing, notwithstanding, to employ his peculiar gifts in services of this nature; and so was her successor. and the historical fact is, that an extraordinary amount of business of one kind and another, passed in consequence through this gentleman's hands in both these reigns, and perhaps no one was ever better qualified by constitutional endowments, and by a predominant tendency to what he calls technically 'active good,' for the dispatch of business in which large and distant results were comprehended. and if in managing plots for these illustrious personages, he conducted them always with stedfast reference to his ulterior aims,--if, in writing letters for them, he wrote them always with the under-tones of his own part,--of his own immortal part that was to survive 'when tyrants' crests and tombs of brass were spent' running through them--if, in composing state papers and concocting legal advice, and legal decisions, he contrived to insert in them an inner meaning, and to point to the secret history which contained their solution, who that knows _what_ those times were, who that knows to what divine ends this man's life was dedicated, shall undertake to blame him for it. all these papers were written with an eye to publication; thay were written for the future, but they were written in that same secret method, in that same 'cipher' which he has to stop to describe before he can introduce the subject of 'the principal and supreme sciences,' with the distinct assurance that as 'matters stand then, it is an art of great use,' though some may think he introduces it with its kindred arts, in that place, for the sake of making out a muster-roll of the sciences, and to _little_ other purpose, and that trivial as these may seem in such a connexion, 'to those who have spent their labours and studies in them, they seem great matters,' appealing to 'those who are skilful in them' to say whether he has not given, in what he has said of them, 'though in few words,' a proof of his proficiency. this was the method of writing in which not the principal and supreme sciences only, but every thing that was fit to be written at all had need to be written then. 'ciphers are commonly in letters, but may be in words.' both these kinds of ciphers were employed in the writings of this school. the reading of that which is '_in letters_,' the one in which letters are secretly employed as 'symbols' of esoteric philosophic subtleties, is reserved for those who have found their way into the esoteric chambers of this learning. it is reserved for those who have read the 'book of sports and riddles,' which this school published, and who happen to have it with them when it happens to be called for; it is reserved for those who have circumvented hamlet, and tracked _him_ to his last lurking place, and plucked out the heart of his mystery; for those who have been in prospero's island, and 'untied his spell.' this point gained,--the secret of the cipher '_in letters_,'--the secret of 'the symbols,' and other 'devices' and 'conceits' which were employed in this school as a medium of secret philosophic correspondence, the characters in which these men struck through the works they could not own then, the grand colossal symbol of the school, its symbol of universality, large as the world, enduring as the ages of the human kind, and with it--_in it_, their own particular 'marks' and private signatures,--this mastered,--with the secret of _this_ in our hands, the cipher '_in words_' presents no difficulties, when we come to read the philosophical papers of this great firm in letters, with the aid of that discovery, we shall know what one of the partners of it means, when he says, that on 'account of the rawness and unskilfulness of the hands through which they pass, the greatest matters are sometimes carried in the weakest ciphers.' it was easy, for instance, in defining the position of the favourite in the court of queen elizabeth, in recommending a civil rather than a military greatness as the one least likely to provoke the animosity and suspicion of government under those conditions, in recommending that so far from taking umbrage at the advancement of a rival--the policy of the position prescribed, the deliberate putting forward and sustaining of another favourite to avert the jealousy and fatal suspicion with which, under such conditions, the government regards its favourite, when popularity and the qualities of a military chieftain are combined in him; it was easy in marking out those grand points in the conditions of the chief courtiers' policy at that time, to glance at the position of other men in that same court, seeking for power under those same conditions--men whose position, inasmuch as the immediate welfare of society and the destinies of mankind in future ages were concerned in it, was infinitely more important than that of the person whose affairs were agitated on the surface of the letter. it was easy, too, in setting forth the conflicting claims of the 'new company and the old' to the monopoly of the manufacture and dying of woollens, for instance, to glance at the new company and the old whose claims to the monopoly of another public interest, not less important, were coming forward for adjustment just about that time, and urging their respective rights upon the attention of the chief men in the nation. or in the discussion of a plan for reforming the king's household, and for reducing its wanton waste and extravagance--in exhibiting the detail of a plan for relieving the embarrassments of the palace just then, which, with the aid of the favourite and his friends, and _their_ measures for relief, were fast urging on the revolution--it was easy to indicate a more extensive reform; it was impossible to avoid a glance, in passing, at the pitifulness of the position of the man who held all men in awe and bondage then; it was impossible to avoid a touch of that same pen which writes elsewhere, 'beggar and madman,' too, so freely,--consoling _the monarch_ with the suggestion that _essex_ was also greatly in debt at a time when he was much sought after and caressed, and instancing the case of other courtiers who had been in the same position, and yet contrived to hold their heads up. under the easy artistic disguise of courtly rivalries and opposing ambitions--under cover, it might be, of an outrageous personal mutual hostility--it was easy for public men belonging to the same side in politics, who were obliged to conduct, not only the business of the state, but their own private affairs, and to protect their own most sacred interests under such conditions,--it was easy for politicians trained in such a school, by the skilful use of such artifices, to play into each other's hands, and to attain ends which in open league they would have been sure to lose; to avert evils, it might be, which it would have been vain and fatal for those most concerned in them openly to resist. to give to a courtier seeking advancement, with certain ulterior aims always in view, the character of a speculator, a scholastic dreamer, unable for practice, unfit to be trusted with state affairs, was not, after all, however pointedly it might be complained of at the time, so fatal a blow as it would have been to direct attention, already sufficiently on the alert, to the remarkable practical gifts with which this same speculator happened, as we all know, to be also endowed. this courtier's chief enemy, if he had been in his great rival's secrets, or if he had reflected at all, might have done him a worse turn than that. the hostilities of that time are no more to be taken on trust than its friendships, and the exaggerated expressions of them,--the over-doing sometimes points to another meaning. while indicating the legal method of proceeding in conducting the show of a trial, to which 'the man whose fame did indeed fold in the orb o' the world' was to be subjected--a trial in which the decision was known beforehand--'though,' says our poet-- 'though well, we may not pass upon _his life_, without _the form of justice_;'-- it was easy for the mean, sycophantic, truckling tool of a stuart--for the tool of a stuart's favourite--to insert in such a paper, if not private articles, private readings of passages, interlinings, pointing to a history in that case which has not yet transpired; it was easy for such a one to do it, when the partner of his treasons would have had no chance to criticise his case, or meddle with it. in this collection of the apparently miscellaneous remains of our great philosopher, there are included many important state papers, and much authentic correspondence with the chief personages and actors of that age, which performed their part at the time as letters and state papers, though they were every one of them written with an inner reference to the position of the writer, and intended to be unfolded eventually with the key of that position. but along with this authentic historical matter, cunningly intermingled with it, much that is '_supposititious_,' to borrow a term which this writer found particularly to his purpose--supposititious in the same sense in which the speeches of thucydides and those of his imitators are suppositious--is also introduced. there is a great deal of fictitious correspondence here, designed to eke out that view of this author's life and times which the authentic letters left unfinished, and which he was anxious, for certain reasons, to transmit to posterity,--which he was forbidden to transmit in a more direct manner. there is a good deal of miscellaneous letter-writing here, and there will be found whole series of letters, in which the correspondence is sustained on both sides in a tolerably lively manner, by this master of arts; but under a very meagre dramatic cover in this case, designedly thin, never meant to serve as a cover with 'men of understanding.' read which side of the correspondence you will in these cases, 'here is his dry hand up and down.' these fictitious supposititious letters are written in his own name, as often as in another's; for of all the impersonations, ancient and modern, historical and poetic, which the impersonated genius of the modern arts had to borrow to speak and act his part in, there is no _such_ mask, no so deep, thick-woven, impenetrable disguise, as that historical figure to which his own name and person is attached;--the man whom the tudor and the stuart admitted to their secrets,--the man whom the tudor tolerated, whom the stuart delighted to honor. in his rules of policy, he has left us the most careful directions for the interpretations of the lives of men whose 'impediments' are such, and whose '_natures_ and _ends_' are so 'differing and dissonant from the general state of the times in which they live,' that it is necessary for them to avoid 'disclosing themselves,' 'to be _in the whole course_ of their lives _close, retired_, reserved, as we see in tiberius, _who was never seen at a play_,' men who are compelled, as it were, 'to act their lives as in a theatre.' 'the _soundest disclosing_,' he says, 'and _expounding_ of men is by their natures _and_ ends. the _weaker_ sort of men are best interpreted by their _natures_, the _wisest_ by their _ends_.' 'princes are best _interpreted_ by their _natures_, private persons by their _ends_, because princes being at the top of human desires, _they_ have, for the most part, no particular ends _whereto they aspire, by distance from which_ a man _might take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires_' '_distance_ from which,'--that is the key for the interpretation of the lives of private persons of certain unusual endowments, who propound to themselves under such conditions 'good and reasonable ends, and such as are within _their_ power to attain.' as to the worthiness of these ends, we have some acquaintance with them already in our own experience. the great leaders of the new movements which make the modern ages--the discoverers of its science of sciences, the inventors of its art of arts, found themselves in an enemy's camp, and the policy of war was the only means by which they could preserve and transmit to us the benefits we have already received at their hands,--the benefits we have yet to receive from them. the story of this interpreter is sent down to us, not by accident, but by his own design. but it is sent down to us _with_ the works in which the nobility of his nature is all laid open,--in which the end of his ends is constantly declared, and constantly pursued,--it is sent down to us along with the works in which his ends are _accomplished_, to the times that have found in their experience _what_ they were. he did not think it too much to ask of ages experimentally acquainted with the virtue of the aims for which he made these sacrifices,--aims which he constantly propounded as the end of his large activity, to note the 'dissonance' between that life which the surface of these documents exhibits,--between that historic form, too, which the surface of that time's history exhibits,--and the nature which is revealed in this life-act,--the soul, the never-shaken soul of this proceeding. 'the god of soldiers, with the consent of _supreme jove_, inform thy thoughts with nobleness; that thou may'st prove _the shame_ unvulnerable, and stick i' the war like a _great sea-mark_, standing every flaw, and saving those that _eye thee_.' 'i would not, as i often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of _me_, he _judged_, and _lived_ so and so; i knew him better than any. now, as much as decency permits, i _here_ discover my inclinations and affections. if any _observe_, he will find that i have either told, or _designed_ to tell all. what i cannot speak, i point out with my finger.' 'there was never greater circumspection and _military_ prudence than is sometimes seen among us' ['naturalists']. '_can it be_ that men are afraid to lose themselves by the way, that they reserve themselves to the end of the game?' 'i mortally hate to be mistaken by those who happen to come across my _name_. he that does all things for honor and glory, what can _he_ think to gain by showing himself to the world in _a mask_, and by concealing _his true being_ from the people? if you are a coward, and men commend you for your valour, is it of you that they speak? they take you for another. archelaus, king of macedon, walking along the street, somebody threw water on his head, which they who were with him said he ought to punish: "ay, _but_," said the other, "he did not throw the water upon _me_, but upon _him_ whom he took me to be." _socrates_ being told by the people, that people spoke ill of him, "not at all," said he; "there is nothing _in me_ of what they say. _i_ am content to be less commended, provided i am better known. i may be reputed a wise man, in _such a sort of wisdom_ as i take to be folly."'--['_the french interpreter_.'] this is the man who never in all his life came into the theatre, content to work behind the scenes, scientifically enlightened as to the true ends of living, and the means of attaining those ends, propounding deliberately his _duty_ as a man, his duty to his kind, his obedience to the law of his higher nature, as his predominant end,--but not to the harm or oppression of his particular and private nature, but to its most felicitous conservation and advancement,--at large in its new epicurean emancipations, rejoicing in its great fruition, happy in its untiring activities, triumphing over all impediments, celebrating in secret lyrics, its immortal triumphs over 'death and all oblivious enmity,' and finding, 'in the consciousness of good intentions, a more continual joy to nature than all the provision that can be made for security and repose,'--not reconciled to the part he was compelled to play in his own time,--his fine, keen sensibilities perpetually at war with it,--always balancing and reviewing the nice ethical questions it involved, and seeking always the 'nobler' solution. 'the one part have i suffered, the other will i do,'--demonstrating the possibility of making, even under such conditions, a 'life sublime.' 'all places that the eye of heaven visits are, to a wise man, ports and happy havens.' there is no room here for details; but this is the account of this so irreconcileable difference between the man of these works and the man in the mask, in which he triumphantly achieved them;--this is the account, in the general, which will be found to be, upon investigation, the true one. and the more the subject is studied, even by the light which this work brings to bear upon it, the more the truth of this statement will become apparent. but though the details are, by the limits of this volume, excluded here, it cannot well close, without one word as to _the points_ in this part of the evidence, which have made the deepest impression on us. no man suffered death, or mutilation, or torture, or outrage of any kind, under the two tyrannies of this age of learning, that it was possible for this scientific propounder of the law of human _kind_-ness to avert and protect him from--this anticipator and propounder of a _human_ civilization. he was far in advance of our times in his criticism of the barbarisms which the rudest ages of social experiment have transmitted to us. he could not tread upon a beetle, without feeling through all that exquisite organization which was great nature's gift to her interpreter in chief, great nature's pang. to anticipate the sovereign's wishes, seeking to divert them first 'with a merry conceit' perhaps; for, so light as that were, the motives on which _such_ consequences might depend then--to forestall the inevitable decision was to arm himself with the powers he needed. the men who were protected and relieved by that secret combination against tyranny, which required, as the first condition of its existence, that its chiefs should occupy places of trust and authority, ought to come out of their graves to testify against the calumnies that blast our modern learning, and the virtue--the virtue of it, at its source. does any one think that a universal _slavery_ could be fastened on the inhabitants of this island, when wit and manliness are at their height here, without so much as the project of an 'underground railway' being suggested for the relief of its victims? 'i will seek him and _privily_ relieve him. go _you_ and _maintain talk with the duke_ that my charity be not of him _perceived_. if he ask for _me_, i am ill and gone to bed. go to; say you nothing. there is division between the dukes--[between the dukes]--and a worse matter than that. i have received a letter this night. it is _dangerous to be spoken_. i have _locked the letter_ in my _closet_. there is _part_ of _a power already_ footed. we must incline to the king. if i die for it, as no less is threatened me, the king, _my old master_, must be relieved.' _that_ when all is done will be found to contain some hints as to the manner in which 'charities' of this kind have need to be managed, under a government armed with powers so indefinable. _cassius_. and let us awear our resolution. _brutus_. no, not an oath: if not _the face_ of _men, the sufferance_ of _our souls_, the times abuse,-- if _these_ be motives weak, _break off betimes_, and _every man_ hence to his _idle_ bed; _so_ let high-sighted tyranny _range on_, till _each man_ drop _by_ lottery. but if these,-- _as i am sure they do_,--bear fire enough to kindle cowards, and to steel with valour the melting spirits of women, _then, countrymen_, what need we any spur but our own cause to prick us to redress? what other bond than _secret romans_, that have spoken the word, and will not falter.... swear priests and cowards, and men cautelous, old feeble carrions, and such suffering souls that welcome wrongs; unto bad causes swear such creatures as men doubt; but do not stain the _even_ virtue of our enterprise, _nor_ the insuppressive mettle of our spirits, to think that, or _our cause_, or our _performance_, did need an oath.' [doctrine of the '_secret romans_.'] as to the rest, it was this man--this man of a scientific 'prudence' with the abhorrence of change, which is the instinct of the larger whole, confirmed by a scientific forethought--it was this man who gave at last _the signal_ for change; not for war. 'proceed by process' was his word. constitutional remedies for the evils which appeared to have attained at last the unendurable point, were the remedies which he proposed--this was the _move_ which he was willing, for his part, to _initiate_.--'we are not, perhaps, at the last gasp. i think i see ways to save us.'--the proceedings of the parliament which condemned him were studiously arranged beforehand by himself,--he wrote the programme of it, and the part he undertook to perform in it was the greatest in history. [''tis the indiligent reader that loses my subject, not i,' says the 'foreign interpreter' of this style of writing. 'there will always be found some word or other, _in a corner_, though it lie very close.' that is the rule for the reading of the evidence in this case. the word is there, though _it lies very close_, as it had need to, to be available.] it was as a baffled, disgraced statesman, that he found leisure to complete and put in final order for posterity, those noble works, through which we have already learned to love and honour him, in the face of this calumny. it was as a disgraced and baffled statesman and courtier--all lurking jealousies and suspicions at last put to rest--all possibility of a political future precluded; but as a _courtier_ still hanging on the king and on the power that controlled the king, for _life_ and _liberty_; and careful still not to assert any independence of those same ends, which had always been taken to be his _ends_; it was in this character that he brought out at last the novum organum; it was in this character that he ventured to collect and republish his avowed philosophical works; it was in this character too that he ventured at last to produce that little piece of history which comes down to us loosely appended to these philosophical writings. a history of the second conquest of the children of alfred, a conquest which they resisted, in heroic wars, but vainly, for want of leaders and organization--overborne by the genius of a military chief whom this historian compares in king-craft with his contemporaries ferdinand of spain, and louis xi. it is a history which was dedicated to charles i., which was corrected in the manuscript by james i., at the request of the author; and he owed to that monarch's approval of it, permission to come to town for the purpose of superintending its publication. it is the history of _the founding_ of the tudor dynasty: prepared,--as were the rest of these works,--under the patronage of an insolent favourite with whom it was necessary 'entirely to drop the character that carried with it the least show of _truth or gracefulness_,' and under the patronage of a monarch with whom it was not sufficient 'for persons of superior gifts and endowments to _act_ the deformity of obsequiousness, unless they really changed themselves and became abject and contemptible in their persons.' '_i_ am in this (_volumnia_) your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles, and you will rather show our general lowts, how you can frown, than spend a fawn upon them, for the _inheritance_ of their loves, and _safeguard_, of what that want might ruin. away my _disposition_! when you do find him, or alive or dead, he will be found like brutus, like himself. 'yet country-men, _o yet_, hold up your heads. i will proclaim my name about the field. i am the son of marcus cato, ho! a foe to tyrants, and my country's friend. 'and _i_ am brutus, marcus brutus _i_, brutus, my country's friend, know me for brutus.' finis. generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) methods of authors erichsen wp co copyright, , by william h. hills. _all rights reserved._ _to r. e. francillon, who is admired and loved by novel-readers on both sides of the atlantic, this book is dedicated, by his permission, with sincere regard, by the author._ preface. when i began to gather the material for this volume i was quite doubtful as to whether the public would be interested in a work of this kind or not. as my labor progressed, however, it became evident that not only the body of the people, but authors themselves, were deeply interested in the subject, and would welcome a book treating of it. not only m. jules claretie, the celebrated parisian literarian, but the late dr. meissner and many others assured me of this fact. nor is this very surprising. who, after reading a brilliant novel, or some excellent treatise, would not like to know how it was written? so far as i know, this volume is a novelty, and ben akiba is outwitted for once. books about authors have been published by the thousands, but to my knowledge, up to date, none have been issued describing their methods of work. in the preparation of this book i have been greatly aided by the works of rev. francis jacox, an anonymous article in _all the year round_, and r. e. francillon's essay on "the physiology of authorship," which appeared first in the _gentleman's magazine_. i was also assisted in my labor by numerous newspaper clippings and many letters from writers, whose names appear in this volume, and to all of whom i return my sincere thanks. h. e. detroit, mich. contents. i. eccentricities in composition. ii. care in literary production. iii. speed in writing. iv. influence upon writers of time and place. v. writing under difficulties. vi. aids to inspiration--favorite habits of work. vii. goethe, dickens, schiller, and scott. viii. burning midnight oil. ix. literary partnership. x. anonymity in authorship. xi. system in novel writing. xii. traits of musical composers. xiii. the hygiene of writing. xiv. a humorist's regimen. methods of authors. i. eccentricities in composition. the public--that is, the reading world made up of those who love the products of authorship--always takes an interest in the methods of work adopted by literary men, and is fond of gaining information about authorship in the act, and of getting a glimpse of its favorite, the author, at work in that "sanctum sanctorum"--the study. the modes in which men write are so various that it would take at least a dozen volumes to relate them, were they all known, for:-- "some wits are only in the mind when beaux and belles are 'round them prating; some, when they dress for dinner, find their muse and valet both in waiting; and manage, at the self-same time, to adjust a neckcloth and a rhyme. "some bards there are who cannot scribble without a glove to tear or nibble; or a small twig to whisk about-- as if the hidden founts of fancy, like wells of old, were thus found out by mystic tricks of rhabdomancy. "such was the little feathery wand, that, held forever in the hand of her who won and wore the crown of female genius in this age, seemed the conductor that drew down those words of lightning to her page." this refers to madame de staël, who, when writing, wielded a "little feathery wand," made of paper, shaped like a fan or feather, in the manner and to the effect above described. well may the vivacious penman of "rhymes on the road" exclaim:-- "what various attitudes, and ways, and tricks we authors have in writing! while some write sitting, some, like bayes, usually stand while they're inditing. poets there are who wear the floor out, measuring a line at every stride; while some, like henry stephens, pour out rhymes by the dozen while they ride. herodotus wrote most in bed; and richerand, a french physician, declares the clockwork of the head goes best in that reclined position. if you consult montaigne and pliny on the subject, 'tis their joint opinion that thought its richest harvest yields abroad, among the woods and fields." m. de valois alleges that plato produced, like herodotus, "his glorious visions all in bed"; while "'twas in his carriage the sublime sir richard blackmore used to rhyme." but little is known of the habits of the earliest writers. the great plato, whose thoughts seemed to come so easy, we are told, toiled over his manuscripts, working with slow and tiresome elaboration. the opening sentence of "the republic" on the author's tablets was found to be written in thirteen different versions. when death called him from his labor the great philosopher was busy at his desk, "combing, and curling, and weaving, and unweaving his writings after a variety of fashions." virgil was wont to pour forth a quantity of verses in the morning, which he decreased to a very small number by incessant correction and elimination. he subjected the products of his composition to a process of continual polishing and filing, much after the manner, as he said himself, of a bear licking her cubs into shape. cicero's chief pleasure was literary work. he declared that he would willingly forego all the wealth and glory of the world to spend his time in meditation or study. the diversity in the methods adopted by authors is as great as the difference in their choice of subjects. a story is often cited in illustration of the different characteristics of three great nationalities which equally illustrates the different paths which may be followed in any intellectual undertaking. an englishman, a frenchman, and a german, competing for a prize offered for the best essay on the natural history of the camel, adopted each his own method of research upon the subject. the german, providing himself with a stock of tobacco, sought the quiet solitude of his study in order to evolve from the depths of his philosophic consciousness the primitive notion of a camel. the frenchman repaired to the nearest library, and overhauled its contents in order to collect all that other men had written upon the subject. the englishman packed his carpet-bag and set sail for the east, that he might study the habits of the animal in its original haunts. the combination of these three methods is the perfection of study; but the frenchman's method is not unknown even among americans. nor does it deserve the condemnation it usually receives. the man who peruses a hundred books on a subject for the purpose of writing one bestows a real benefit upon society, in case he does his work well. but some excellent work has been composed without the necessity either of research or original investigation. anthony trollope described his famous archdeacon without ever having met a live archdeacon. he never lived in any cathedral city except london; archdeacon grantly was the child of "moral consciousness" alone; trollope had no knowledge, except indirectly, about bishops and deans. in fact, "the warden" was not intended originally to be a novel of clerical life, but a novel which should work out a dramatic situation--that of a trustworthy, amiable man who was the holder, by no fault of his own, of an endowment which was in itself an abuse, and on whose devoted head should fall the thunders of those who assailed the abuse. bryan waller proctor, the poet (who, i believe, is better known under the name of "barry cornwall"), had never viewed the ocean when he committed to paper that beautiful poem, "the sea." many of his finest lyrics and songs were composed mentally while he was riding daily to london in an omnibus. schiller had never been in switzerland, and had only heard and read about the country, when he wrote his "william tell." harrison ainsworth, the lancashire novelist, when he composed "rookwood" and "jack sheppard," depended entirely on his ability to read up and on his facility of assimilation, for during his lifetime he never came in personal contact with thieves at all. it is said that when he wrote the really admirable ride of turpin to york he only went at a great pace over the paper, with a road-map and description of the country in front of him. it was only when he heard all the world say how faithfully the region was pictured, and how truly he had observed distances and localities, that he actually drove over the ground for the first time, and declared that it was more like his account than he could have imagined. erasmus composed on horseback, as he pricked across the country, and committed his thoughts to paper as soon as he reached his next inn. in this way he composed his "encomium moriæ," or "praise of folly," in a journey from italy to the land of the man to whose name that title bore punning and complimentary reference, his sterling friend and ally, sir thomas more. aubrey relates how hobbes composed his "leviathan": "he walked much and mused as he walked; and he had in the head of his cane a pen and inkhorn, and he carried always a note-book in his pocket, and 'as soon as the thought darted,' he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise might have lost it. he had drawn the design of the book into chapters, etc., and he knew whereabouts it would come in." hartley coleridge somewhere expresses his entire conviction that it was pope's general practice to set down in a book every line, half-line, or lucky phrase that occurred to him, and either to find or make a place for them when and where he could. richard savage noted down a whole tragedy on scraps of paper at the counters of shops, into which he entered and asked for pen and ink as if to make a memorandum. "a man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. those that come unsought are generally the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return." this was the advice of lord bacon, whose example has been followed by many eminent men. miss martineau has recorded that barry cornwall's favorite method of composition was practised when alone in a crowd. he, like savage, also had a habit of running into a shop to write down his verses. tom moore's custom was to compose as he walked. he had a table in his garden, on which he wrote down his thoughts. when the weather was bad, he paced up and down his small study. it is extremely desirable that thoughts should be written as they rise in the mind, because, if they are not recorded at the time, they may never return. "i attach so much importance to the ideas which come during the night, or in the morning," says gaston plante, the electrical engineer, "that i have always, at the head of my bed, paper and pencil suspended by a string, by the help of which i write every morning the ideas i have been able to conceive, particularly upon subjects of scientific research. i write these notes in obscurity, and decipher and develop them in the morning, pen in hand." the philosopher emerson took similar pains to catch a fleeting thought, for, whenever he had a happy idea, he wrote it down, and when mrs. emerson, startled in the night by some unusual sound, cried, "what is the matter? are you ill?" the philosopher softly replied, "no, my dear; only an idea." george bancroft, the historian, had a similar habit. his bedroom served also as a library. the room was spacious, and its walls were lined, above and below, with volumes. a single bed stood in the middle of the apartment, and beside the bed were paper, pencil, two wax candles, and matches; so that, like mr. pecksniff, mr. bancroft might not forget any idea that came into his mind in a wakeful moment of the night. as curious a mode of composition as perhaps any on record, if the story be credible, is that affirmed of fuller--that he used to write the first words of every line near the margin down to the foot of the paper, and that then, beginning again, he filled up the blanks exactly, without spaces, interlineations, or contractions, and that he would so connect the ends and beginnings that the sense would appear as complete as if it had been written in a continued series after the ordinary manner. several distinguished american writers have the habit of jotting a sentence, or a line or two here and there, upon a long page, and then filling up the outline thus made with persistent revision. with some great writers, it has been customary to do a vast amount of antecedent work before beginning their books. it is related of george eliot that she read one thousand books before she wrote "daniel deronda." for two or three years before she composed a work, she read up her subject in scores and scores of volumes. she was one of the masters, so called, of all learning, talking with scholars and men of science on terms of equality. george eliot was a hard worker, and, like many gifted writers, she was often tempted to burn at night the lines she had written during the day. carlyle was similarly tempted, and it is to be regretted that the great growler, in many instances, did not carry out the design. carlyle spent fifteen years on his "frederick the great." alison perused two thousand books before he completed his celebrated history. it is said of another that he read twenty thousand volumes and wrote only two books. "for the statistics of the negro population of south america alone," says robert dale owen, "i examined more than volumes." david livingstone said: "those who have never carried a book through the press can form no idea of the amount of toil it involves. the process has increased my respect for authors a thousandfold. i think i would rather cross the african continent again than to undertake to write another book." thackeray confessed that the title for his novel, "vanity fair," came to him in the middle of the night, and that he jumped out of bed and ran three times around the room, shouting the words. thackeray had no literary system. he wrote only when he felt like it. sometimes he was unable to write two lines in succession. then, again, he could sit down and write so rapidly that he would keep three sheets in the wind all the time. while he was editor of the _cornhill magazine_ he never succeeded in getting copy enough ahead for more than five issues. in this negligence he fell far behind the magazine editors of the present time. they always have bundles of copy on hand. ii. care in literary production. indolence, that is to say, chronic fatigue, appears to be the natural habit of imaginative brains. it is a commonplace to note that men of fertile fancy, as a class, have been notorious for their horror of formulating their ideas even by the toil of thought, much more by passing them through the crucible of the ink-bottle. in many cases they have needed the very active stimulant of hunger. the _cacoëthes scribendi_ is a disease common, not to imaginative, but to imitative, minds. probably no hewer of wood or drawer of water undergoes a tithe of the toil of those whose work is reputed play, but is, in fact, a battle, every moment, between the flesh and the spirit. campbell, who at the age of sixty-one could drudge at an unimaginative work for fourteen hours a day like a galley-slave, "and yet," as he says in one of his letters, "be as cheerful as a child," speaks in a much less happy tone of the work which alone was congenial to him: "the truth is, i am not writing poetry, but projecting it, and that keeps me more idle and abstracted than you can conceive. i pass hours thinking about what i am to compose. the actual time employed in composition is but a fraction of the time lost in setting about it." "at glasgow," we read of him even when a young man, "he seldom exercised his gift except when roused into action either by the prospect of gaining a prize or by some striking incident." campbell, if not a great man, was a typical worker. a playwright, who had written five hundred lines in three days, taunted euripides because he had spent as much time upon five lines. "yes," replied the poet, "but your five hundred lines in three days will be forgotten, while my five will live forever." it is said of one of longfellow's poems that it was written in four weeks, but that he spent six months in correcting and cutting it down. longfellow was a very careful writer. he wrote and rewrote, and laid his work by and later revised it. he often consulted his friends about his productions before they were given to the world. thus he sent his work out as perfect as great care and a brilliant intellect could make it. the poet's pleasant surroundings must have acted as a stimulus upon his mind. his library was a long room in the northeastern corner of the lower floor in the so-called craigie house, once the residence of general washington. it was walled with handsome bookcases, rich in choice works. the poet's usual seat here was at a little high table by the north window, looking upon the garden. some of his work was done while he was standing at this table, which reached then to his breast. emerson wrote with great care, and would not only revise his manuscript carefully, but frequently rewrite the article upon the proof-sheets. john owen was twenty years on his "commentary on the epistle of the hebrews." the celebrated french critic, sainte-beuve, was accustomed to devote six days to the preparation of a single one of his weekly articles. a large portion of his time was passed in the retirement of his chamber, to which, on such occasions, no one--with the exception of his favorite servant--was allowed to enter under any circumstances whatever. here he wrote those critical papers which carried captive the heart of france, and filled with wonder cultivated minds everywhere. the historian gibbon, in speaking of the manner in which he wrote his "decline and fall of the roman empire," said: "many experiments were made before i could hit the middle tone between a dull tone and a rhetorical declamation. three times did i compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before i was tolerably satisfied with their effect." gibbon spent twenty years on his immortal book lamb toiled most laboriously over his essays. these papers, which long ago took their place in the english classical language and which are replete with the most delicate fancies, were composed with the most exacting nicety, yet their author is regarded the world over as possessed of genius of a high order. la rochefoucauld was occupied for the space of fifteen years in preparing for publication his little work called "maximes," rewriting many of them more than thirty times. honoré de balzac had just completed his teens when he arrived in paris, and till , some nine years, he lived, not in a garret, but in the apartment over that, called a _grenier_; his daily expenses amounted to about half a franc--three sous for bread, three for milk, and the rest for firewood and candles. he passed his days in the public library of the arsenal, devouring books. in the evening he transcribed his notes, and during the nights he took his walks abroad, and so gained an insight into the depths of human depravity. after his first novel, in , he commenced earning money. balzac, who had the disease of creative genius in its most outrageous form, "preached to us," says théophile gautier, "the strangest hygiene ever propounded among laymen. if we desired to hand our names down to posterity as authors, it was indispensable that we should immure ourselves absolutely for two or three years; that we should drink nothing but water, and eat only soaked beans, like protogenes; that we should go to bed at sunset and rise at midnight, to work hard till morning; that we should spend the whole day in revising, amending, extending, pruning, perfecting, and polishing our night's work, in correcting proofs or taking notes, or in other necessary study." if the author happened to be in love, he was to see the lady of his heart only for one half-hour a year, but he might write to her, for the cold-blooded reason that letter-writing improves the style. not only did balzac preach this austere doctrine, but he practised it as nearly as he could without ceasing altogether to be a man and a frenchman. léon gozlan's account of the daily life of the author of the "comédie humaine" has often been quoted. on the average he worked eighteen hours a day. he began his day with dinner at six in the afternoon, at which, while he fed his friends generously, he himself ate little besides fruit and drank nothing but water. at seven o'clock he wished his friends good-night, and went to bed. at midnight he rose and worked--till dinner-time next day: and so the world went round. george sand calls him, "drunk on water, intemperate in work, and sober in all other passions." jules janin asks, "where has m. de balzac gained his knowledge of woman--he, the anchorite?" as it was, love and death came to him hand-in-hand. he married a wealthy polish lady in . they travelled over the battlefields of europe, to collect notes for a work, and then settled down in a luxurious mansion in the champs elysées. nothing was wanting in that palatial residence, for every fancy of balzac had been gratified. three months after the house-warming balzac was dead. balzac, after he had made a plan of a novel, and had, after the most laborious research, gathered together the materials which he was to embody in it, locked himself in his private apartment, shut out all the light of day, and then, by the aid of his study lamp, he toiled day and night. his servants, knowing so well his peculiar habits, brought him food and drink. finally, with his task completed, as he thought, he came forth from his retirement looking more dead than alive. but invariably his task was not altogether satisfactory to him, after all, for again he would seek the seclusion of his chamber to rearrange and make more perfect that which he had before supposed wholly complete. then, too, when his work was in the hands of the printer, he was as apt as not to alter, in one way and another, the manuscript, until both printer and publisher were on the verge of despair. he corrected up to as many as twelve proofs, and many of his "corrections" consisted in rewriting whole pages. what "copy" he must have produced during the twenty years in which he brought out ninety-seven volumes! like voltaire, balzac had a passion for coffee, more to keep him awake than as a stimulant. that beverage shortened his life, which ended by hypertrophy of the heart. when he sat down to his desk, his servant, who regarded a man that abstained even from tobacco as scarcely human, used to place coffee within reach, and upon this he worked till his full brain would drive his starved and almost sleepless body into such forgetfulness that he often found himself at daybreak bareheaded, in dressing gown and slippers, in the place du carrousel, not knowing how he came there, miles away from home. now, coffee acts upon some temperaments as laudanum acts upon others, and many of the manners and customs of balzac were those of a confirmed opium-eater. he had the same strange illusions, the same extravagant ideas, the same incapacity for distinguishing with regard to outward things, between the possible and the impossible, the false and the true. his midnight wanderings, his facility in projecting himself into personalities utterly unlike his own, belong to the experiences of the "english opium-eater." kinglake's beautiful "eothen" was rewritten half a dozen times before it was given to a publisher. tennyson's song, "come into the garden, maud," was rewritten some fifty times before it gave complete satisfaction to the author. coming to the gifted addison, whose diction is full of such grace and simplicity, so much so as to create envy, yet admiration, in the mind of every writer who has flourished since his day, we find that the great author wrote with the most painful deliberation. it is narrated that the press was stopped again and again, after a whole edition of the _spectator_ had been thrown off, in order that its author might make a slight change in a sentence. tom moore, with all his wonderful brilliancy, considered it doing very well if he wrote fifty lines of his "lalla rookh" in a week. hawthorne was slow in composing. sometimes he wrote only what amounted to half a dozen pages a week, often only a few lines in the same space of time, and, alas! he frequently went to his chamber and took up his pen, only to find himself wholly unable to perform any literary work. the author of "pleasures of hope" was slow of thought, and consequently his mode of composition was toilsome in the highest degree. he wrote with extreme caution, weighing and shaping the effect of each particular line before he permitted it to stand. bret harte, whose creations read as if they had come from his brain without a flaw or hindrance, showing brilliancy of thought with the grace of the artist, is still another writer who passes days and weeks on a short story or poem before he is ready to deliver it into the hands of the printer. so it was with bryant. though in reality the sum total of his poetry might be included in a small volume, so few are his lyrics, we cannot fail to be impressed with the truth of the statement when we are told that even these few gems of verse cost our late wordsworth hard toil to bring into being, and endow with the splendor of immortality. bernardine de st. pierre copied his sweet and beautiful "paul and virginia" nine times to make it more perfect. béranger _composait toutes ses chansons dans sa tête_. "once made, i committed them to writing in order to forget them," he said. he tells of having dreamt for ten years of a song about the taxes that weigh down the rural population. in vain he tapped his brain-pan,--nothing came of it. but one night he awoke with the air and the refrain _tout trouvés_: "jacques, lève-toi; voici venir l'huissier du roi"; and in a day or two the song was a made thing. the laborious pains bestowed by alfieri on the process of composition may seem at first sight hard to reconcile with his impulsive character. if he approved his first sketch of a piece,--after laying it by for some time, not approaching it again until his mind was free of the subject,--he submitted it to what he called "development," _i. e._, writing out in prose the indicated scenes, with all the force at his command, but without stopping to analyze a thought or correct an expression. "he then proceeded to versify at his leisure the prose he had written, selecting with care the ideas he thought best, and rejecting those which he deemed" unworthy of a place. nor did he ever yet regard this work as finished, but "incessantly polished it verse by verse and made continual alterations," as might seem to him expedient. hartley coleridge so far resembled alfieri that it was his custom to put aside what he had written for some months, till the heat and excitement of composition had effervesced, and then he thought it was in a fair condition to criticise. but he seldom altered. "strike the nail on the anvil," was his advice; he never "kneaded or pounded" his thoughts, which have been described as always coming out _cap-à-pie_, like a troop in quick march. he used to brandish his pen in the act of composition, now and then beating time with his foot, and breaking out into a shout at any felicitous idea. iii. speed in writing. dr. johnson was a very rapid writer. a modern critic says of him: "he had but to dip his pen in ink, and there flowed out a current of thought and language wide and voluminous as the ganges in flood." some of the best papers in the _rambler_ were written "_currente calamo_." johnson struck off his _ramblers_ and _idlers_ at a heat when the summons of the press forbade his indolence to put off his work another moment: he did not give himself even a minute to read over his papers before they went to the printers. often he sent a portion of the copy of an essay, and wrote the remainder while the earlier part was printing. his "life of savage" was dashed off at one sitting. sir joshua reynolds was so fascinated with this eloquent and touching narrative, that he could not lay it down until he had finished it. johnson would not have written "rasselas" except for the necessity of paying the costs of his mother's funeral. he was an extremely indolent man, and yet he was a laborious worker where the imagination was not concerned. after spending the evening at the literary club in the society of burke, goldsmith, and other friends, he returned home between midnight and sunrise, went to bed, and was seldom seen before noon. bennet langton was so delighted with the _rambler_, that he went to london to be introduced to johnson. he called upon him about twelve o'clock, but the great doctor was not yet visible. after waiting some time, the author of the _rambler_ made his appearance. the visitor expected to see a neatly dressed philosopher, but, instead, a huge, uncouth figure rolled into the room in a soiled morning-gown, with an ill-arranged wig, and stockings falling over his shoes. the elder dumas, in order to get any work done at all, had to forbid himself, by an effort of will, to leave his desk before a certain number of pages were written. victor hugo is said to have locked up his clothes while writing "notre-dame," so that he might not escape from it till the last word was written. in such cases the so-called "pleasures of imagination" look singularly like the pains of stone-breaking. the hardest part of the lot of genius, we suspect, has been not the emotional troubles popularly--and with absurd exaggeration--ascribed to it, but a disgust for labor during the activity of the fancy, and the necessity for labor when it is most disgusting. victor hugo composed with wonderful rapidity. he wrote his "cromwell" in three months, and his "notre dame de paris" in four months and a half. but even these have been his longest periods of labor, and as he grew older he wrote faster. "marion delorme" was finished in twenty-four days, "hernani" in twenty-six, and "le roi s'amuse" in twenty. although the poet wrote very quickly, he often corrected laboriously. he rarely rewrote. mme. drouet, who was his literary secretary for thirty years, copied all his manuscripts. otherwise the printers would have found him one of the most difficult authors to put into type. mme. drouet saved them much worry, and himself or his publishers much expense in the way of composition. she also assisted in the correction of the proofs. he generally had several works in the stocks at the same time. hugo considered a change of subject a recreation. he would go from poetry to fiction, from fiction to history, according to his mood. as a rule, he rose at six o'clock in the morning, took a cold bath, then took a raw egg and a cup of black coffee, and went to work. he never sat down to write, but stood at a high desk, and refreshed himself by an occasional turn across the room, and a sip of _eau sucrée_. he breakfasted at eleven. one of his recreations was riding on the top of an omnibus, a habit he contracted during a short visit to london, when he was advised that "the knife-board" was a good place from which to see the street life of the english metropolis. the "knife-board," indeed, was his favorite point of observation, whence he gathered inspiration from the passing crowds below. many of his famous characters have been caught in his mind's eye while taking a three-sou drive from the arc de triomphe to the bastile. it is on record that bulwer wrote his romance of "harold" in less than a month, resting not at all by day, and scarcely at night. in a private letter lord lytton says: "the novel of 'harold' was written in rather less than four weeks. i can personally attest this fact, as i was with my father when he wrote it--on a visit to his friend, the late mr. tennyson d'eyncourt. d'eyncourt was a great collector of norman and anglo-saxon chronicles, with which his library was well stored. the notes of research for 'harold' fill several thick commonplace books.... while my father was writing 'harold' i do not think he put down his pen except for meals and half an hour's run before dinner 'round the terrace. he was at work the greater part of every night, and again early in the morning." it is an interesting fact in regard to lord tennyson's drama on the same subject--with a dedication to the late lord lytton, in reconciliation of an old literary feud with his father--that the first sketch of "harold" took the form of a drama, entitled "william the norman." it was probably not written for publication, as the writer's way of composing many of his prose romances was to sketch them out first as dramas. the "lady of lyons" was written in ten days. it was by no means uncommon with bulwer to have two books in hand at once, and live alternate periods with the beings of his creation, as if he were passing in society from one company to another. thus "lucretia" and "the caxtons," "kenelm chillingly" and "the parisians," were written simultaneously. but despite his literary facility, bulwer rewrote some of his briefer productions as many as eight or nine times before their publication. another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs and whole pages of his book as many as fifty times. byron wrote the "bride of abydos" in a single night, and the quill pen with which he performed this marvellous feat is still preserved in the british museum. dryden wrote "alexander's feast" in two days. "the merry wives of windsor" was composed in a fortnight. beckford finished "vathek" in two days and nights. henry ward beecher's publishers have favored the world with an account of his habits in composition. "he wrote," they tell us, "with inconceivable rapidity, in a large, sprawling hand, lines wide apart, and words so thinly scattered about that some of the pages remind one of the famous description of a page of napoleon's manuscript--a scratch, a blot, and a splutter." this is, indeed, remarkable, but is far exceeded by the performance in that line of a famous chinese novelist, who wrote with such fearful speed, that, throwing the finished sheets over his head, they soon accumulated to a pile large enough to darken his windows, and threaten him with suffocation. horace, in one of his satires, makes fun of a contemporary poet, whose chief claim to distinction was that he could compose two hundred verses standing on one leg. horace did not think much of the verses, and, we suspect with good reason. there are all conceivable habits of composition, and they range from the slow elaboration of john foster to the race-horse speed of our doughty southern countryman, henry a. wise, whose prodigious gubernatorial compositions are still remembered by a suffering world. once, sitting by james parton, he observed, tersely, "the best writing distils from the pen drop by drop." sheridan once said to a friend who had a fatal facility with his pen, "your easy writing makes terribly hard reading." i would not, for the world, have the young men of the country believe that in writing speed is all. one should not be ambitious to write or do anything else any faster than he can do it well. it was henry wadsworth longfellow who once gave this excellent advice to a young author: "always write your best; remember, your best." wilkie collins' book, "heart and science," so mercilessly excited him that he says he continued writing week after week without a day's interval or rest. "rest was impossible. i made a desperate effort; rushed to the sea; went sailing and fishing, and was writing my book all the time 'in my head,' as the children say. the one wise course to take was to go back to my desk and empty my head, and then rest. my nerves are too much shaken for travelling. an armchair and a cigar, and a hundred and fiftieth reading of the glorious walter scott,--king, emperor, and president of novelists,--there is the regimen that is doing me good. all the other novel-writers i can read while i am at work myself. if i only look at the 'antiquary' or 'old mortality,' i am crushed by the sense of my own littleness, and there is no work possible for me on that day." wilkie collins made the skeleton of a novel and then proceeded to put the flesh on it. he was the greatest plotter that ever lived. he created no truly great characters, but his stories are full of thrilling pitfalls, into which the reader lunges. hugo rosenthal-bonin, the editor of _ueber land und meer_ (one of the most prominent of the illustrated journals of germany), and the author of many successful novels, writes for two hours immediately after breakfast and dinner, and within this time regularly composes five columns of reading matter, never rewriting a single line. while writing, he has a piece of looking-glass lying beside him, the glittering of which (so he says) stimulates and refreshes him; he also smokes cigars during working hours, otherwise seldom. he works with ease and rapidity, just as if he were speaking. therefore, a novel of ten columns is finished within two days, and a romance of one hundred columns is completed in less than a month. he has never written more than one long novel a year, his literary productiveness being limited by his duties as editor. mrs. helen hunt jackson ("h. h.") composed with great rapidity, writing on large sheets of yellow post-office paper, eschewing pen and ink, and insisting that a lead pencil alone could keep pace with the swiftness of her thoughts. emil ritterhaus, the poet who "dwells by the castled rhine," turns out lyrical poems without any difficulty, and with wonderful rapidity. that poem of his which was read at the consecration of the cathedral at cologne was composed in a few minutes, in the presence of his friend, ferdinand hiller, not a line being changed afterward. when he is in the proper mood, many a speech of his turns involuntarily into an improvisation. verses he pens in person, but he dictates all other literary work. when at work, a good havana cigar, a glass of first-class wine, or a cup of strong coffee are agreeable to him. when dictating, he is in the habit of lying on a sofa or walking slowly up and down the room. the poet makes it a rule not to write unless disposed to. gray found fault with mason for fancying he should succeed best by writing hastily in the first fervors of his imaginations, and, therefore, never waiting for epithets if they did not occur at the time readily, but leaving spaces for them, and putting them in afterward. this enervated his poetry, said gray, and he says the same thing of the same method by whomsoever adopted, for nothing is done so well as at the first concoction. one of shelley's biographers came upon the poet in a pine forest, writing verses on a guitar, and, picking up a fragment, saw a "frightful scrawl," all smear, and smudge, and disorder--such a dashed-off daub as conceited artists are apt to mistake for genius. shelley said: "when my brain gets heated with thought, it soon boils, and throws off images and words faster than i can skim them off. in the morning, when cooled down, out of that rude sketch, as you justly call it, i shall attempt a drawing." iv. influence upon writers of time and place. nathaniel hawthorne made innumerable notes of every fleeting, quaint fancy, strange anecdote, or eccentric person. these notes he afterward worked into his stories. julian hawthorne, his son, states in the _century magazine_: "the new husband and wife, adam and eve, as they liked to call themselves, were almost as poor in money as their prototypes, and in spite of their orchard and their vegetable garden, a good deal less able to get on without occasional remittances. accordingly, the future author of the 'scarlet letter' was compelled to alternate his hoeing and digging, his rambles over the hills and his paddling on the river, with periods of application to pen and paper in his study, where he would sit with locked doors, clad in a long and ancient flowered dressing-gown, upon the lining of the left-hand skirt of which he was in the habit of wiping his pen. his wife noticed this habit, and said nothing about it; but one day, on bringing his pen to the accustomed spot, hawthorne found stitched on there a pretty pen-wiper, in the shape of a butterfly with red and black wings, and this butterfly was ever after renewed from time to time, as necessity required. what was written in that little sunny-hued study, readers know, but nobody, not even the author's wife, ever saw him in the act of writing. he had to be alone." burns usually composed while walking in the open air, influenced, perhaps, dr. currie suggests, by habits formed in early life. until he was completely master of a tune, he never could write words for it; so his way was to consider the poetic sentiment corresponding to his idea of the musical expression; then choose his theme; begin one stanza; when that was composed,--which was generally the most difficult part of the task,--to walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around him, such as harmonized with the cogitations of his fancy, humming occasionally the air, with the verses already framed. when he felt his "muse beginning to jade," he retired to the solitary fireside of his study, and there committed his thoughts to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind leg of his elbow-chair, "by way," he says, "of calling forth my own critical strictures as my pen goes on." sometimes, and more than once too often, he composed, to use his own expression, "by the leeside of a bowl of punch, which had overset every mortal in company, except the hautbois and the muse." whether in town or country, landor reflected and composed habitually while walking, and, therefore, preferred at all times to walk alone. so did buckle. wordsworth was accustomed to compose his verse in his solitary walks, carry it in his memory, and get wife or daughter to write it down on his return. he used to compose aloud while walking in the fields and woods. sometimes he would use a slate pencil and the smooth side of a rock to jot down his lines. his excursions and peculiar habits gave rise to some anxious beliefs among the ignorant peasantry. even his sanity was questioned. the peasantry of rydal thought him "not quite hissel," because he always walked alone, and was met at odd times in odd places. some poets have been in the habit of humming or repeating their verses aloud as they composed them. southey, for instance, boomed his verses so as to be mistaken by wilson, who was a keen sportsman, for a bittern booming. if this is true, southey's voice must not have been very harmonious, for the bittern's cry is shakespeare's "night-raven's dismal voice." douglas jerrold worked at a desk without a speck upon it, using an ink-stand in a marble shell clear of all litter, his little dog at his feet. if a comedy was in progress, he would now and then walk rapidly up and down the room, talking wildly to himself. "if it be _punch_ copy, you shall hear him laugh presently as he hits upon a droll bit." and then, abruptly, the pen would be put down, and the author would pass out into the garden, and pluck a hawthorn leaf, and go, nibbling it and thinking, down the side walks; then "in again, and vehemently to work," unrolling the thought that had come to him along little blue slips of paper, in letters smaller than the type in which they were presently to be set. dr. channing had the same habit of taking a turn in the garden, during which he was a study for the calm concentration of his look, and the deliberateness of his step: "calmer, brighter, in a few moments he is seated again at his table, and his rapidly flying pen shows how full is the current of his thoughts." jane taylor, who commenced authorship as a very little girl indeed, and who used at that early stage to compose tales and dramas while whipping a top,--committing them to paper at the close of that exercise,--was in the habit, her brother isaac tells us, of rambling for half an hour after breakfast, "to seek that pitch of excitement without which she never took up the pen." of dickens we are told that "some quaint little bronze figures on his desk were as much needed for the easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens." emanuel kant, the philosopher, lived the life of a student; in fact, his life may be taken as the type of that of a scholar. kant, like balzac, gave a daily dinner-party; but when his guests were gone he took a walk in the country instead of seeking broken slumbers in a state of hunger. he came home at twilight, and read from candle-light till bedtime at ten. he arose punctually at five, and, over one cup of tea and part of a pipe, laid out his plan of work for the day. at seven he lectured, and wrote till dinner-time at about one. the regularity of his life was automatic. he regulated his diet with the care of a physician. during the blind-man's holiday between his walk and candle-light he sat down to think in twilight fashion; and while thus engaged, he always placed himself so that his eyes might fall on a certain old tower. this old tower became so necessary to his thoughts that, when some poplar trees grew up and hid it from his sight, he found himself unable to think at all, until, at his earnest request, the trees were cropped and the tower was brought into sight again. kant's old tower recalls buffon's incapability of thinking to good purpose except in full dress, and with his hair in such elaborate order that, by way of external stimulus to his brain, he had a hairdresser to interrupt his work twice, or, when very busy, thrice a day. to aubrey we owe this account of prynne's method of study: "he wore a long quilt cap, which came two or three inches at least over his eyes, and served him as an umbrella to defend his eyes from the light. about every three hours his man was to bring him a roll and a pot of ale, to refocillate his wasted spirits; so he studied and drank and munched some bread; and this maintained him till night, and then he made a good supper." refocillation is a favorite resource--whatever the word may be--with authors not a few. addison, with his bottle of wine at each end of the long gallery at holland house,--and schiller, with his flask of old rhenish and his coffee laced with old cognac, at three in the morning,--occur to the memory at once. shelley attempted to ruin his digestion by way of exciting the brain by continually munching bread while composing. the venerable leopold von ranke, one of the most eminent historians of the age, composed in the night as well as in the daytime, and even when more than ninety years of age sometimes worked till midnight. he had two secretaries. he was a late riser, as most night-workers are. after getting up late, he worked with his first amanuensis from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. thereupon, if the weather was fine, he took a walk in the public promenades, always accompanied by a servant. he dined at five p. m., and then dictated to his second secretary from six in the evening until, occasionally, one or two o'clock in the morning. he neither took stimulants nor smoked. he never worked when disinclined; in fact, the disinclination to write was foreign to his nature. he always felt like writing. j. t. trowbridge, the author of "the vagabonds," always prefers daytime to night for literary work, but sometimes can compose verse only at night. he always sets out with a tolerably distinct outline in his mind--rarely on paper--of what he intends to write. but the filling in he leaves to the suggestions of thought in the hour of composition, and often gets on to currents which carry him into unexpected by-ways. he seldom begins a story that he would not like to make twice as long as his contract allows, so many incidents and combinations suggest themselves as he goes on. he never works under the influence of stimulants. verse he never composes with a pen in his hand. it is seldom that he can compose any that is in the least satisfactory to himself; when he can, he walks in pleasant places, if the weather is favorable, or lounges on rocks or banks, or in the woods; or he lies on a sofa in a dimly-lighted room at night; or in bed, where he elaborates his lines, which he retains in his memory, to be written down at the first convenient season. he rarely puts pen to paper at night. when fairly launched in a prose composition, he writes from two to four hours a day, seldom five. the mere act of writing is a sad drudgery to him, and he often has to force himself to begin. then he usually forgets the drudgery in the interest excited by the development of his thoughts. but he never thinks it wise to continue writing when he cannot do so with pleasure and ease. in his younger days he used to think he must do a certain amount of work each day, whether he felt like it or not. but now he is of the opinion that it might have been better for his readers and himself if he had been governed more by his moods. robert hamerling, the austrian novelist, loved to compose in bed in the early hours of morning. he was an expert stenographer, and, therefore, made use of stenography when committing his thoughts to paper, thereby saving much time, which, of course, facilitated the mental labor. for this reason, he could also correct and improve the manuscript, as well as make additions to the same, with the least waste of time. he did not require refreshments at work, and wrote with remarkable facility. the duration of the time which he spent at the writing-desk depended upon the state of his health and the temper of his mind. frederick friedrich, well known in germany as a novelist, prefers the evening for literary work, although he conceives the plots of his stories in the course of the day. he asserts that the nerves are more stimulated and that the imagination is more lively in the evening. his novels are sent to the printer as they were written; he hardly ever makes corrections. while at work friedrich fills the air with cigar smoke and drinks several glasses of rhine-wine. he must be alone, and the writing-table must be in the customary order; any new arrangement of the things on the table makes the author feel uncomfortable, so much so at times that it prevents him from writing. he is a facile writer, and composes with great speed. he never writes unless inclined to, and is governed by moods. therefore, a week or two sometimes passes before he pens a line, being in perfect health, but lacking the inclination to perform intellectual work. he never devotes more than three hours a day to literary labor, generally less than that, but spends almost all day in thinking over the plots of his novels. he never begins a story until it is elaborated in his mind, and never makes notes. when once engaged in the composition of a novel, he keeps at it day after day until it is finished. while writing his own he is unable to read the novels of anybody else. celia thaxter evolves her graceful verses in the daytime. she sometimes makes a skeleton of her work first, not always; and very often forces herself to work in spite of disinclination. the austrian poet, rudolph baumbach, is partial to daylight, and never writes at night. he always makes an outline of his work before beginning in good earnest. when meditating on his poems he walks up and down the room, but gives the open air the preference. he likes much light; when the sun does not shine his work does not progress favorably. in the evening he lights up his room by a large number of candles. literary labor is pleasure to him when the weather is fine, but it is extremely hard when clouds shut out the sunlight. the poet has no fixed rule as regards working-hours; sometimes he exerts himself a great deal for weeks, and then again he does not write at all for a long time. otto von leixner, german historian, poet, novelist, and essayist, composes prose, which requires logical thinking, in the daytime, but does poetical work, which taxes principally the imagination, in the evening. he makes a skeleton of all critical and scientific compositions, indeed of all essays, and then writes out the "copy" for the press, seldom making alterations. but he files away at poems from time to time until he thinks them fit for publication. he is a smoker, but does not smoke when at work. whether promenading the shady walks of a wood or perambulating the dusty streets of the city, leixner constantly thinks about the works he has in hand. literary work has no difficulties for this author; he penned one of his poems, "the vision," consisting of five hundred and eighty lines, in three hours and a half and sent it to the printer as it was originally written; and he composed the novel "adja," thirty-nine and one-half octavo pages in print, in nine hours. but he often meditates over the topics which go to make up his novels, etc., for years and years until he has considered them from every standpoint. after composition he often locks up his manuscript in his desk for half a year, until it is almost forgotten, when he takes it from its place of concealment and examines it carefully to detect possible errors. if at such an examination the work does not prove satisfactory to him, he throws it into the stove. being the editor of a journal of fiction, he is often compelled to work whether he wants to or not. from to he worked sixteen hours a day; from till about thirteen hours, even sundays; at present he spends from ten to eleven hours every day at the writing-table, unless kept from work by visitors. he retains his health by taking a daily walk, rain or shine, to which he devotes two hours. leixner lives a very temperate life and hardly ever imbibes stimulating drinks. the greatest of all southern poets, paul hamilton hayne, had no particular time for composition, writing as often in the daytime as at night. whether he made an outline or skeleton of his work first, depended upon the nature of the poem. when the piece was elaborate, he outlined it, and subsequently filled up, much as a painter would do. the poet used to smoke a great deal in composing, but was obliged to abandon tobacco, having had attacks of hemorrhage. he used tea instead of coffee sometimes, but took little even of that. wine he did not use. hayne composed best when walking, or riding upon horseback, and as he was seldom without a book in hand, wrote a great deal on the fly-leaves of any volume he chanced to be consulting. he frequently had to force himself to work when he did not have an inclination to do so. v. writing under difficulties. it is an exceptional mind that enables an author to write at his ease amid interruptions and distractions, lets and hindrances, of a domestic kind. héloise gave this singular reason for her constant refusal to become abelard's wife--that no mind devoted to the meditations of philosophy could endure the cries of children, the chatter of nurses, and the babble and coming and going in and out of serving men and women. of abelard himself, however, we are told that he had a rare power of abstracting himself from all outward concerns; that no one knew better how to be alone, though surrounded by others; and that, in fact, his senses took no note of outward things. when cumberland was composing any work, he never shut himself up in his study, but always wrote in the room where his family sat, and did not feel in the least disturbed by the noise of his children at play beside him. the literary habits of lord hailes, as mr. robert chambers remarks, were hardly such as would have been expected from his extreme nicety of diction: it was in no secluded sanctum, or "den," that he composed, but by the "parlour fireside," with wife and bairns within very present sight and sound. cowper describes himself at weston ( ) as working in a study exposed to all manner of inroads, and in no way disconcerted by the coming and going of servants, or other incidental and inevitable impediments. a year or two later he writes from the same spot, "amidst a chaos of interruptions," including hayley spouting greek, and mrs. unwin talking sometimes to them, sometimes to herself. francis horner relates a visit he and a friend paid to jeremy bentham at ford abbey, one spacious room in which, a tapestried chamber, the utilitarian philosopher had utilized for what he called his "scribbling shop"--two or three tables being set out, covered with white napkins, on which were placed music desks with manuscripts; and here the visitors were allowed to be "present at the mysteries, for he went on as if we had not been with him." the fourth of dr. chalmers' astronomical discourses was penned in a small pocket-book, in a strange apartment, where he was liable every moment to interruption; for it was at the manse of balmerino, disappointed in not finding the minister at home, and having a couple of hours to spare,--and in a drawing-room at the manse of kilmany, with all the excitement of meeting for the first time, after a year's absence, many of his former friends and parishioners,--that he penned paragraph after paragraph of a composition which, as his son-in-law and biographer, dr. hanna, says, bears upon it so much the aspect of high and continuous elaboration. his friend,--and sometimes associate in pastoral work,--edward irving, on the other hand, could not write a sermon if any one was in the room with him. chalmers appears to have been specially endowed with that faculty of concentrated attention which is commonly regarded as one of the surest marks of the highest intellect, and which alison so much admired in wellington--as, for instance, on the day when he lay at san christoval, in front of the french army, hourly expecting a battle, and wrote out, in the field, a long and minute memorial on the establishment of a bank at lisbon on the principles of the english ones. we read of ercilla, whose epic poem, the _arancana_, has admirers out of spain, that he wrote it amidst the incessant toils and dangers of a campaign against barbarians, without shelter, and with nothing to write on but small scraps of waste paper, and often only leather; struggling at once against enemies and surrounding circumstances. louis de cormantaigne, the distinguished french engineer, composed his treatise on fortification from notes written in the trenches and on the breaches, even under the fire of the enemy. delambré was in paris when it was taken by the allies in , and is said to have worked at his problems with perfect tranquility from eight in the morning till midnight, in the continued hearing of the cannonade. "such self-possession for study under that tremendous attack, and such absence of interest in the result of the great struggle, to say nothing of indifference to personal danger," is what one of his biographers confesses himself unable to understand. small sympathy would the philosopher have had with the temperament of such a man, say, as thomas hood, who always wrote most at night, when all was quiet and the children were asleep. "i have a room to myself," exclaims hood, triumphantly, in a letter describing a change of lodgings, "which will be worth £ a year to me,--for a little disconcerts my nerves." mrs. hood brought up the children, we learn from one of them, in a sort of spartan style of education, on her husband's account, teaching them the virtues of silence and low voices. washington irving was of a less morbid temperament, and his genial nature could put up with obstacles and obstructions neither few nor small; but even in his diary we meet with such entries as this at bordeaux, in : "harassed by noises in the house, till i had to go out in despair, and write in mr. guestier's library." it was upon the essay on american scenery that he was then engaged. unlike maturin, who used to compose with a wafer pasted on his forehead, which was the signal that if any of his family entered the sanctum they must not speak to him, scott allowed his children (like their mute playmates, camp and the greyhounds) free access to his study, never considered their talk as any disturbance, let them come and go as pleased their fancy, was always ready to answer their questions, and when they, unconscious how he was engaged (writes the husband of one of them), entreated him to lay down his pen and tell them a story, he would take them on his knee, repeat a ballad or a legend, kiss them, and set them down again to their marbles or ninepins, and resume his labor as if refreshed by the interruption. there was nothing in that manly, sound, robust constitution akin to the morbid irritability of philip in the poem:-- "when philip wrote, he never seemed so well-- was startled even if a cinder fell, and quickly worried." biographers of mistress aphra behn make it noteworthy of that too facile penwoman that she could write away in company and maintain the while her share in the talk. madame roland managed to get through her memoirs with a semblance at least of unbroken serenity, though so often interrupted in the composition of them by the cries of victims in the adjoining cells, whom the executioners were dragging thence to the guillotine. madame de staël, "even in her most inspired compositions," according to madame necker de saussure, "had pleasure in being interrupted by those she loved." she was not, observed lord lytton, of the tribe of those who labor to be inspired; who darken the room and lock the door, and entreat you not to disturb them. rather, she came of the same stock as george sand's olympe, who "se mit à écrire sur un coin de la table, entre le bouteille de bière et le sucrier, au bruit des verres et de la conversation aussi tranquillement que si elle eût été dans la solitude. cette puissance de concentration était une de ses facultés les plus remarquables." that lord castlereagh was able to write his despatches at the common table in the common room of a country house is not unjustly among the admiring reminiscences of a septuagenarian (countess brownlow): "once only we found the talking and laughter were too much for his power of abstraction, and then he went off into his own room, saying next morning at breakfast, 'you fairly beat me last night; i was writing what i may call the metaphysics of politics.'" celebrated in the "noctes ambrosianæ" is the glasgow poet, sandy rogers, not less for his lyrics, one at least of which is pronounced by christopher north to be "equal to anything of the kind in burns," than for the fact that his verses--some of them, too, of a serious character--were thought out amidst the bustle and turmoil of factory labor, the din of the clanking steam-engine, and the deafening rattle of machinery, while the work of committing them to paper was generally performed amidst the squalling and clamor of children around the hearth, now in the noise of fractious contention, and anon exuberant with fun and frolic. tannahill, too, composed while plying the shuttle,--humming over the airs to which he meant to adapt new words; and, as the words occurred to him, jotting them down at a rude desk which he had attached to his loom, and which he could use without rising from his seat. but no more noteworthy example of the pursuit of authorship under difficulties--the difficulties of a narrow home--_res augusta domi_--is probably on record, in its simple, homely way, than that of jean paul, as döring pictures him, sitting in a corner of the room in which the household work was being carried on--he at his plain writing-desk, with few or no books about him, but merely with a drawer or two containing excerpts and manuscripts; the jingle and clatter that arose from the simultaneous operations at stove and dresser no more seeming to disturb him than did the cooing of the pigeons which fluttered to and fro in the chamber, at their own sweet will. dr. johnson delved at his dictionary in a poor lodging-house in london, with a cat purring near, and orange peel and tea at hand. molière tested the comic power of his plays by reading them to an old servant. dr. william e. channing used to perambulate the room while composing; his printers report that he made many revisions of the proof of his writings, so that before the words met the eyes of the public on the printed page the sentences were finished with the most elaborate minuteness. bloomfield, the poet, relates of himself that nearly one-half of his poem, "the farmer's boy," was composed without writing a word of it, while he was at work, with other shoemakers, in a garret. sharon turner, author of the valuable "history of the anglo-saxons," who received a pension of $ , from the british government for his services to literature, wrote the third volume of "the sacred history of the world" upon paper that did not cost him a farthing. the copy consisted of torn and angular fragments of letters and notes, of covers of periodicals and shreds of curling papers, unctuous with pomatum and bear's grease. mrs. lizzie w. champney writes absolutely without method. her stories, she admits, have been penned in her nursery, with her baby in her lap, and a sturdy little boy standing on the rails of her chair and strangling her with his loving little arms. she works whenever and wherever she can find the opportunity; but the children are always put first. george ticknor, the bostonian, found william hazlitt living in the very house in which milton dictated "paradise lost," and occupying the room where the poet kept the organ on which he loved to play. it was an enormous room, but furnished only with a table, three chairs, and an old picture. the most interesting thing that the visitor from boston saw, except the occupant himself, was the white-washed walls. hazlitt had used them as a commonplace book, writing on them in pencil scraps of brilliant thoughts, half-lines of poetry, and references. hazlitt usually wrote with the breakfast things on the table, and there they remained until he went out, at four or five o'clock, to dinner. his pen was more to him than a mechanical instrument; it was also the intellectual wand by which he called up thoughts and opinions, and clothed them in appropriate language. it was in a bookseller's back-shop, m. nisard tells us, on a desk to which was fastened a great newfoundland dog (who, by-the-bye, one day banged through the window of an upper room, desk and all, to join his master in the street below), that armand carrel, one moment absorbed in english memoirs and papers, another moment in caressing his four-footed friend, conceived and wrote his "history of the counter revolution in england." mr. walker, in this as in other respects "the original," adopted a mode of composition which, says he, "i apprehend to be very different from what could be supposed, and from the usual mode. i write in a bedroom at a hotel, sitting upon a cane chair, in the same dress i go out in, and with no books to refer to but the new testament, shakespeare, and a pocket dictionary." now and then, when much pressed for time, and without premeditation, and with his eye on the clock, he wrote some of his shorter essays at the athenæum club, at the same table where other members were writing notes and letters. vi. aids to inspiration. washington irving's literary work was generally performed before noon. he said the happiest hours of his life were those passed in the composition of his different books. he wrote most of "the stout gentleman" while mounted on a stile, or seated on a stone, in his excursions with leslie, the painter, 'round about stratford-on-avon,--the latter making sketches in the mean time. the artist says that his companion wrote with the greatest rapidity, often laughing to himself, and from time to time reading the manuscript aloud. dr. darwin wrote most of his works on scraps of paper with a pencil as he travelled. but how did he travel? in a worn and battered "sulky," which had a skylight at the top, with an awning to be drawn over it at pleasure; the front of the carriage being occupied by a receptacle for writing-paper and pencils, a knife, fork, and spoon; while on one side was a pile of books reaching from the floor nearly to the front window of the carriage; on the other, by mrs. schimmel-penninck's account, a hamper containing fruit and sweetmeats, cream and sugar,--to which the big, burly, keen-eyed, stammering doctor paid attentions as devoted as he ever bestowed on the pile of books. alexander kisfaludy, foremost hungarian poet of his time, wrote most of his "himfy" on horseback or in solitary walks; a poem, or collection of poems, that made an unprecedented sensation in hungary, where, by the same token, sandor kisfaludy of that ilk became at once the great unknown. cujas, the object of chateaubriand's special admiration, used to write lying flat on his breast, with his books spread about him. sir henry wotton is our authority for recording of father paul sarpi that, when engaged in writing, his manner was to sit fenced with a castle of paper about his chair, and overhead; "for he was of our lord of st. albans' opinion, that 'all air is predatory' and especially hurtful when the spirits are most employed." rousseau tells us that he never could compose pen in hand, seated at a table, and duly supplied with paper and ink; it was in his promenades,--the _promenades d'un solitaire_,--amid rocks and woods, and at night, in bed, when he was lying awake, that he wrote in his brain; to use his own phrase, "_j'écris dans mon cerveau_." some of his periods he turned and re-turned half a dozen nights in bed before he deemed them fit to be put down on paper. on moving to the hermitage of montmorency, he adopted the same plan as in paris,--devoting, as always, his mornings to the pen-work _de la copie_, and his afternoons to _la promenade_, blank paper, book, and pencil in hand; for, says he, "having never been able to write and think at my ease except in the open air, _sule dio_, i was not tempted to change my method, and i reckoned not a little on the forest of montmorency becoming--for it was close to my door--my _cabinet de travail_." in another place he affirms his sheer incapacity for meditation by day, except in the act of walking; the moment he stopped walking, he stopped thinking, too, for his head worked with, and only with, his feet. "_de jour je ne puis méditer qu'en marchant; sitôt que je m'arrête je ne pense plus, et ma tête ne va qu'avec mes pieds._" _salvitur ambulando_, whatever intellectual problem is solved by jean jacques. his strength was not to sit still. his réveries, by the way, were written on scraps of paper of all sorts and sizes, on covers of old letters, and on playing cards--all covered with a small, neat handwriting. he was as economical of material as was "paper-sparing pope" himself. in some points chateaubriand was intellectually, or, rather, sentimentally, related to rousseau, but not in his way of using ink and paper. chateaubriand sat at a table well supplied with methodically arranged heaps of paper cut in sizes; and as soon as a page was blotted over in the biggest of his big handwriting,--according to m. de marcullus, with almost as many drops of ink as words,--he tossed it aside, without using pounce or blotting-paper, to blot and be blotted by its accumulating fellows. now and then he got up from this work, to look out of the window, or to pace the room, as if in quest of new ideas. the chapter finished, he collected all the scattered leaves, and revised them in due form--more frequently adding to than curtailing their fair proportions, and paying very special attention to the punctuation of his sentences. lessing's inherent nobility of intellect is said to have been typified in his manner of study. when in the act of composition he walked up and down till his eye was caught by the title of some book. he would open it, his brother tells us, and, if struck by some sentence which pleased him, he would copy it out; in so doing, a train of thought would be suggested, and this would be immediately followed up--provided his mood was just right. the early morning would lure jean paul richter to take out his ink-flask and write as he walked in the fragrant air. such compositions as his "dream of a madman" he would set about by first seating himself at the harpsichord, and "fantasying" for a while on it, till the ideas, or "imaginings," came--which presently they would do with a rush. tradition, as we get it through the historian of the clapham sect, informs us that wilberforce wrote his "practical view" under the roof of two of his best friends, in so fragmentary and irregular a manner, that one of them, when at length the volume lay complete on the table, professed, on the strength of this experience, to have become a convert to the opinion that a fortuitous concourse of atoms might, by some felicitous chance, combine themselves into the most perfect of forms--a moss-rose or a bird of paradise. coleridge told hazlitt that he liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood. sheridan composed at night, with a profusion of lights around him, and a bottle of wine by his side. he used to say: "if a thought is slow to come, a glass of good wine encourages it; and when it does come, a glass of good wine rewards it." lamartine, in the days of his prosperity, composed in a studio with tropical plants, birds, and every luxury around him to cheer the senses. berkeley composed his "minute philosopher" under the shade of a rock on newport beach. burns wove a stanza as he ploughed the field. charlotte brontë had to choose her favorable days for writing,--sometimes weeks, or even months, elapsing before she felt that she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written; then some morning she would wake up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, says mrs. gaskell, in distinct vision; and she set to work to write out what was more present to her mind at such times than her actual life was. she wrote on little scraps of paper, in a minute hand, holding each against a piece of board, such as is used in binding books, for a desk,--a plan found to be necessary for one so short-sighted,--and this sometimes as she sat near the fire by twilight. while writing "jane eyre" she became intensely concerned in the fortunes of her heroine, whose smallness and plainness corresponded with her own. when she had brought the little jane to thornfield, her enthusiasm had grown so great that she could not stop. she went on incessantly for weeks. at the end of this time she had made the minute woman conquer temptation, and in the dawn of the summer morning leave thornfield. "after jane left thornfield, the rest of the book," says miss martineau, "was written with less vehemence and with more anxious care"--the world adds, "with less vigor and interest." "ouida" (louise de la ramée) writes in the early morning. she gets up at five o'clock, and, before she begins, works herself up into a sort of literary trance. professor wilson, the christopher north of _blackwood's magazine_, jotted down in a large ledger "skeletons," from which, when he desired an article, he would select one and clothe it with muscle and nerve. he was a very rapid writer and composer, but worked only when he liked and how he liked. he maintained that any man in good health might write an entire number of _blackwood's_. he described himself as writing "by screeds"--the fit coming on about ten in the morning, which he encouraged by a caulker ("a mere nut-shell, which my dear friend the english opium-eater would toss off in laudanum"); and as soon as he felt that there was no danger of a relapse, that his demon would be with him the whole day, he ordered dinner at nine, shut himself up within triple doors, and set manfully to work. "no desk! an inclined plane--except in bed--is my abhorrence. all glorious articles must be written on a dead flat." his friend, the ettrick shepherd, used a slate. dr. georg ebers, professor at the university of leipzig, saxony, who is known all over the world as the author of novels treating of ancient egyptian life, and as the writer of learned treatises on the country of the khedives, prefers to work in the late evening hours until midnight when composing poetry, but favors daylight for labor on scientific topics. he makes a rough draft of his work, has this copied by an amanuensis, and then polishes and files it until it is satisfactory to him, that is, as perfect as he possibly can make it. he finds that tobacco stimulates him to work, and, therefore, he uses it when engaged in literary production. when he writes poetry, he is in the habit of sitting in an arm-chair, supporting a lap-board on his knee, which holds the paper; in this position he pens his lyrics. he imagines that he is more at liberty in this posture than when behind a writing desk. ordinarily he writes with great ease, but sometimes the composition of a stirring chapter so mercilessly excites him that great beads of sweat appear upon his forehead, and he is compelled to lay down his pen, unable to write another line. he never writes unless he is in a suitable frame of mind, except it be on business matters. sometimes, when laboring on topics of science, he works from ten to twelve hours at a stretch; he never spends more than three or four hours in succession on poetry. charles reade's habit of working was unique. when he had decided on a new work he plotted out the scheme, situations, facts, and characters on three large sheets of pasteboard. then he set to work, using very large foolscap to write on, working rapidly, but with frequent references to his storehouse of facts, in the scrap-books, which were ready at his hand. the genial novelist was a great reader of newspapers. anything that struck him as interesting, or any fact which tended to support one of his humanitarian theories, was cut out, pasted in a large folio scrap-book, and carefully indexed. facts of any sort were his hobby. from the scrap-books thus collected with great care he used to elaborate the "questions" treated of in his novels. like charles reade, miss anna katherine green is a believer in scrap-books, and culls from newspapers accounts of strange events. out of such material she weaves her stories of crime and its detection. emile zola, the graphic author of realistic fiction, carefully makes studies from life for his sensational works. he writes rapidly, smoking cigarettes the while. he is an inveterate smoker, and, if there is anything he likes better than tobacco, it is his beautiful country-house near paris, where he receives daily a large circle of admiring friends. edward p. roe, who, if we may rate success by the wide circulation of an author's books, was our most successful novelist, preferred the daytime for literary work, and rarely accomplished much in the evening beyond writing letters, reading, etc. when pressed with work he put in long hours at night. in the preface to "without a home," rev. mr. roe presents some extremely interesting matter in regard to the causes which led to his authorship, and the methods of work by which he turned out so many well-constructed stories in so short a time. "ten years ago," he says, "i had never written a line of a story, and had scarcely entertained the thought of constructing one. the burning of chicago impressed me powerfully, and, obedient to an impulse, i spent several days among its smoking ruins. as a result, my first novel, 'barriers burned away,' gradually took possession of my mind. i did not manufacture the story at all, for it grew as naturally as do the plants--weeds, some may suggest--on my farm. in the intervals of a busy and practical life, and also when i ought to have been sleeping, my imagination, unspurred and almost undirected, spun the warp and woof of the tale and wove them together.... i merely let the characters do as they pleased, and work out their own destiny. i had no preparation for the work beyond a careful study of the topography of chicago and the incidents of the fire. for nearly a year my chief recreation was to dwell apart among the shadows created by my fancy, and i wrote when and where i could--on steamboats and railroad cars, as well as in my study.... when the book appeared i suppose i looked upon it much as a young father looks upon his first child. his interest in it is intense, but he knows well that its future is very doubtful." mr. roe always wrote from a feeling that he had something to say; and never "manufactured" a novel in his life. while writing he was absorbed in his work; and made elaborate studies for his novels. "i have visited," said he, in reference to "without a home," "scores of typical tenements. i have sat day after day on the bench with the police judges, and have visited the station-houses repeatedly. there are few large retail shops that i have not entered many times, and i have conversed with both employers and employees." mr. roe did not make "outlines" or "skeletons" to any great extent, and when he did so, he did not follow them closely. indeed, he often reversed his plan, satisfied that following an arbitrary outline makes both story and characters wooden. he held that the characters should control the author, not he them. he usually received the suggestion of a story unexpectedly, and let it take form in his mind and grow naturally, like a plant, for months, more often for years, before he began to write. he averred that after his characters were introduced he became merely the reporter of what they do, say, and think. he imagined that it was this spontaneity which, chiefly, made his books popular, and said that to reach intelligent people through fiction, the life portrayed must seem to them real and natural, and that this can scarcely be true of his characters if the author is forever imposing his arbitrary will upon them. mr. roe wrote in bound blank-books, using but one side of a sheet. this allowed ample space for changes and corrections, and the manuscript was kept in place and order. the novelist used tea, and especially coffee, to some extent as a stimulant, and smoked very mild cigars. but he rarely took coffee at his dinner, at six p.m., as it tended to insomnia. the author of "barriers burned away" worked three or four hours before and two or three hours after lunch. on this point, however, he varied. when wrought up and interested in a scene, he usually completed it. in the after part of the day, when he began to feel weary, he stopped, and, if hard pressed, began work again in the evening. once, many years ago, he wrote twenty-four hours at a stretch, with the aid of coffee. he did not force himself to work against inclination beyond a certain point. at the same time he fought against a tendency to "moods and tenses." the german lyric poet, martin greif, writes only in the daytime, because he can conceive poetry only when walking in the woods, meadows, and lanes that form the environs of the bavarian capital--munich. during his excursions into the surrounding country, he notes down his thoughts, which he elaborates when he reaches his quiet study. he is not a ready versifier, and is compelled to alter a poem repeatedly before it receives his approbation. at work in the afternoon, he loves to smoke moderately; but he never uses stimulants. generally work is hard to him, but sometimes--that is, rarely--he writes with unusual rapidity. as a professional writer, he must sometimes force himself to work and must mount the pegasus in spite of disinclination, as when, for instance, a product of his pen has to be delivered on a certain date. emile mario vacano composed his writings at all times that gave him the impulse for doing so: at daybreak or in the night. with him it was the "whereabouts," not the hour, that made the essence. there was a mill belonging to a good friend of his, where he found his best inspirations amidst all the hubbub of horses, peasants, poultry, cows, pigeons, and country life. and he asserted that the name of his friend, harry salzer, of stattersdorf, near st. poelten, lower austria, ought to be joined to his. he said that his friend merited a great share of his "glories" by his hospitality as well as on account of his bright ideas. vacano never made a plan in advance, but penned his novels, stories, essays, etc., as one writes a letter,--_prima vista_,--never perusing again what he had written, be it good or bad. when writing he imbibed a good deal of beer, and was in the habit of using snuff. he did not regard writing as work. for him it was like a chat in pen and ink with friends. as for an inclination to work; as for a feeling that he had something to say, and _must_ say it, come what will,--there was nothing of the sort in him. he said he hated romances, tales, and all the like, and wrote only to gain his "_pain quotidien_" and that he detested the humbug with all his heart and despised the mob that would read it. he declared that if he were a millionaire or simply wealthy, "he'd never take a pen in hand for bullying a stupid public with his nonsense." emile richebourg writes his fascinating novels in a plain style, but, despite the absence of flowery language, is capable of expressing much feeling. the novel or drama is completed in his head before he writes a line. as the plot develops, the dialogues and events suggest themselves. when he has got to work he keeps right on, seldom re-reading what he has composed. he makes an outline of his book before beginning. he is in the habit of noting down on a piece of paper the names, ages, lodgings, etc., of the persons who are pictured in his novels, also the title of each chapter. formerly he worked from eight to twelve hours a day, but never at night. now he labors only five or six hours at the most, and always in the morning. richebourg is an early riser, and goes to bed early in the evening. he gets up at six in the morning. at eight o'clock he drinks a bowl of warm milk without sugar, which constitutes his sole nourishment until dinner at noon. with him this is the principal meal of the day; and during its progress, according to his own confession, he finds a bottle of wine very agreeable. he eats but little in the evening. when at work he smokes continuously; always a pipe. he works with difficulty, yet with pleasure, and identifies himself, that is, when composing, with the personages whom he describes. during the afternoon he promenades in his garden, attends to his roses and other flowers, and trims the shrubs. the study of maurice jokai, the great hungarian romancer, is a perfect museum of valuable souvenirs and rare antiquities. books, journals, and pamphlets cover tables, chairs, and walls; busts and statuettes, which stand about here and there, give the room the appearance of picturesque disorder. the portrait of his wife, in various sizes, adorns the space on the walls not taken up by the books. the top of his writing-table is full of bric-à-brac, which leaves only sufficient room for the quarto paper upon which he pens his entertaining romances. he writes with little, fine pens, of so good a workmanship that he is enabled to write a four-volume novel with one pen. he always makes use of violet ink, to which he is so accustomed that he becomes perplexed when compelled, outside of his house, to resort to ink of another color. he claims that thoughts are not forthcoming when he writes with any other ink. when violet ink is not within reach, he prefers to write with a lead pencil, but he does so only when composing short stories and essays. for the composition of his romances, which generally fill from one to five volumes when printed, violet ink is indispensable. he rarely corrects his manuscripts, and they generally go to the printer as they were originally composed; they are written in a plain, legible hand; and are what one of the typographic fraternity would call "beautiful copy." one of the corners of his writing-desk holds a miniature library, consisting of neatly-bound note-books, which contain the outlines of his novels as they originated in his mind. when he has once begun a romance, he keeps right on till he puts down the final period; that is, he writes day by day till the novel is completed. jokai says: "it often happens that i surround my hero with dangers, that enemies arise on all sides, and escape seems impossible. then i often say to myself: 'i wonder how the fellow will get out of the scrape?'" in his home, at hartford, conn., mark twain's workshop is in his billiard-room, at the top of the house, and when he grows tired of pushing the pen he rises and eases his muscles by doing some scientific strokes with the cue. he is a hard worker, and, like trollope, believes that there is nothing like a piece of shoemaker's wax on the seat of one's chair to encourage good literary work. ordinarily he has a fixed amount of writing for each day's duty. he rewrites many of his chapters, and some of them have been scratched out and interlined again and again. robert waldmueller, a leading german novelist, who writes under the pseudonym of "charles eduard duboc," works mostly from eight, nine, or ten o'clock in the morning until two o'clock in the afternoon, but never writes at night. generally he does not plan his work beforehand. when at work he must be unmolested. in composition, he loves to change off, now producing poetry, now plays and essays, as his mood may direct. he writes with great ease and swiftness; and the many books which he has composed testify that he cannot justly be accused of indolence. he attributes his facility of expression to the discrimination which he has always exercised in the choice of books. in early boyhood he was already disgusted with florian's sickly "guillaume tell," while washington irving's "sketch-book" delighted him very much; he was also deeply impressed by the perusal of homer's immortal epics. he adopted authorship when twenty-five years of age, and has followed it successfully ever since. until then he was especially fond of composing music and of drawing and painting, but he lacked the time to perfect himself in these accomplishments. yet, even to-day, he practices both arts occasionally as a pastime and for recreation. the evening finds dr. johann fastenrath, the poet, who writes as elegant spanish as he does german, and who is as well-known in madrid as he is in cologne on the rhine, at the writing-table. he never makes a skeleton beforehand of essays in his mother-tongue; but for compositions in french or spanish he invariably makes an outline. one peculiarity which he has is to scribble his poems upon little scraps of paper. when writing prose in spanish he divides the manuscript-paper in halves, so as to be able to make additions and to lengthen any particular sentence, for in the spanish language artfully long periods are considered especially beautiful. he does not regard literary composition as work, and conceives poems faster than he can write them down. when he is at work absolute quiet must reign about him; he cannot bear noise of any kind. during the winter he works day for day at home, but in the summer he tolerates confinement no longer, and whenever he composes at this time it is always in the open air. from autumn till spring he writes from six to seven hours a day. adolf streckfusz, a german novelist, prefers to write in the afternoon and evening, and attains the greatest speed in composition at night. he makes no plan beforehand, but revises his manuscript at least twice after completion. he often allows the cigar which he smokes when at work to go out, but lights it mechanically from time to time, so that the floor of his study is sometimes covered with dozens of thrown-away lucifers after working hours. when writing, his cigar is as indispensable to him as his pen. he can do without neither. formerly he could work with extraordinary facility, but now, with increasing age, a few hours' work at times tires him out so much that he must, of necessity, take a rest. as with many other authors, a sense of duty often impels him to work; but almost always, after a beginning is made, he composes with pleasure. the time which he devotes daily to literary work varies. he never works more than eight hours, but rarely less than three or four hours a day. the author of "the lady or the tiger" and many other short stories--frank r. stockton--always works in the morning, and not at any other time. in writing a short story, such as is published in a single number of a magazine, he usually composes the whole story, description, incident, and even the dialogue, before writing a word of it. in this way the story is finished in his mind before it is begun on paper. while engaged in other writing he has carried in his memory for several months as many as three stories, each ready to be put upon paper as soon as he should have an opportunity. when he is writing a longer story, he makes in his mind a general outline of the plot, etc.; and then he composes three or four chapters before he begins to write; when these are finished, he stops writing until some more are thought out: he never composes at the point of the pen. he does not write any of his manuscripts himself; they are all written from his dictation. stockton is very fond of working in the summer in the open air, and a great many of his stories have been dictated while lying in a hammock. he usually works from about ten in the morning until one p. m., but he spends no time at the writing-desk, except when he writes letters, which he never does in his working hours. some years ago he used to work very differently, being occupied all day with editorial work, and in the evening with literary work; but his health would not stand this, and he, therefore, adopted his present methods. he works regularly every day, whether he feels like it or not; but when he has set his mind on a subject, it is generally not long before he does feel like it. dr. leopold chevalier de sacher-masoch generally used to work at night in former years, but now writes by daylight only, preferably in the morning. he is the author of a great many graphic stories about galicia, and lives at leipsic, surrounded by a coterie of admiring friends. he makes an accurate outline; then pens his novel word for word till it is finished, whereupon it is handed to the printer as it is, not a word being altered, added, or erased. he is not in the habit of using stimulating drinks or tobacco when at work, and leads altogether a temperate life. he has an innate predilection for fur, and declares that fur worn by a beautiful woman exercises a magic spell over him. formerly he had a pretty black cat that used to lie on his knees or sleep on his writing-desk when he was at work. now, when he writes, a red velvet lady's-jacket, with a fur lining of sable and borders of the same material, lies near at hand upon a divan. although he is ordinarily good-natured, his anger is easily provoked by any disturbance during working hours. composition is mere play to him after he has begun, but the first lines of a new work always are penned with difficulty. when he writes without an inclination, he is, as a rule, dissatisfied with the result. generally he spends from three to four hours at the writing-desk and devotes the rest of the day to recreation. dr. julius stinde, who is responsible for that excellent german satire, "die familie buchholz," never works by lamplight, if he can possibly avoid it. he writes on large sheets, of quarto size, and never makes an outline; the compositor gets the manuscript as it was written, with a few, but not many, alterations. whatever is not satisfactory to the author is thrown into the waste-paper basket, which, in consequence, is pretty large. while at work he takes a pinch of snuff from time to time, which, he asserts, has a beneficial action on the eyes that are taxed by incessant study and composition. when he treats of scientific topics, a few glasses of rhine wine tend to induce the proper mood; he finds the "johannisgarten," a wine grown at musbach in the palatinate of the rhine, especially valuable for this purpose. he composes humorous work most easily after a very simple breakfast, consisting of tea and bread. he is in the habit of often changing the kinds of paper, pens, pen-holders, ink, and even ink-stands, which he uses; and loves to see fresh flowers on his writing-desk. he writes with greater facility in fine, sunny weather than on dark, gloomy days. that is the reason why he prefers, on cloudy days, to write in the evening. he declares that he would rather stop writing for days and weeks than to compose without inclination, and he tells us that whenever he attempts to work "_sans inclination_" as the french say, the result is unsatisfactory, and the effort strains both mind and body. he seldom spends more than eight hours a day at the writing-table. to the many with whom it is customary to do literary work in the daytime must be added johannes nordmann, one of vienna's most able novelists and newspaper men. he writes more during the winter than in the summer time, most of which he spends in travelling. he never recopies prose. for poems, however, he first makes an outline, and then files the verse till it receives his approbation. while driving the "quill," he smokes cigars. he writes with remarkable speed and ease after the subject in hand has ripened in his thoughts. he often forces himself to do newspaper work, when he would fain do anything else; and is totally unable to compose fiction or poetry when not disposed to. moncure d. conway burns daylight, never the midnight oil, and rarely the evening oil. generally he works with his pen eight hours a day, tries to take two walks, and in the evening to get some amusement,--billiards or the theatre, of which he is very fond. he smokes as he begins work, but does not keep it up, and uses no other stimulant at work. he loves work, and never has had to force himself to labor. he generally makes some outline of what he means to write, but often leaves it, finding his thoughts developed by stating them. conway has to be alone when writing, but does not care for noise outside of his study. he is a slow writer, and is always waiting on a nursery of slowly-maturing subjects. kate field, the well-known editor and lecturer, prefers the daytime for literary work, for the reason, she says, that the brain is far clearer in the morning than at any other time. this refers, of course, to a normal brain, independent of stimulants. she thinks that, under pressure, night work in journalism is often more brilliant than any other; but that it is exceptional. she makes no outline in advance; and never uses stimulants, hot water excepted. she has no particular habit when at work, except the habit of sticking to it; and has no specified hours for work. she spends no time at a desk, as she writes in her lap, a habit which was also a peculiarity of mrs. browning. miss field maintains that it is far easier for her, and prevents round shoulders, and is also better for the lungs. she has forced herself to write at times, and does not believe in waiting for ideas "to turn up." e. vely, one of the best of the female novelists of germany, however, believes in inspirations, and does not take a pen in hand unless disposed to write. four hours in the forenoon are spent in composition, while the afternoon and evening are given up to pastime, exercise, and study. while at work she hates to be interrupted, and insists upon absolute stillness about her. she always sends her original manuscript to the printer. and now we come to one who recently joined the great majority, one who, although he has gone the way of all mortals, still lives, whose name is not only found on the long list of the illustrious dead, but is also graven in golden letters on the record of the age: dr. alfred meissner. it was his wont to do the imaginative part of his work in the stillness of the night, either in an easy chair--smoking a cigar--or in bed, in which he used to pass several hours sleepless almost every day. he used to sit down to write in the morning and quit at noon. early in his literary career this distinguished austrian novelist discovered that composition in the night-time, that is, the mechanical part of it, would not agree with him, that it was too great a strain on his nervous system, and so wisely concluded to write only by daylight. he was unable to comprehend how anybody could write a novel--a very intricate work--without making alterations and erasures subsequently in the original manuscripts. it appeared to him as if an artist would not make a sketch of his projected picture first, but would begin immediately to paint in oil and make no changes afterward. he cited the example of raphael and titian, who, although they were talented artists, made numerous sketches before they began a painting. dr. meissner first made a detailed outline of his work, which he elaborated with great care. while copying this second manuscript he was enabled to make a great many alterations, and to strike out everything that was unsuitable. practically every production of his pen was written three times. sometimes meissner would work with great ease, sometimes with difficulty. the composition of chapters that were full of stirring incidents, violent passions, or perilous situations used to excite him intensely, and progressed by degrees; whereas other chapters were written with great facility and swiftness. he wrote only when he was compelled to by his creative faculty, that urged him to set down what he had to say. he was a very diligent author, and left many books to keep his memory green and constantly endear him to the hearts of the people. dr. a. glaser, the german novelist, dictates all his stories to a private secretary, a luxury which few teutonic authors can afford. ordinarily he writes in the daytime, but when deeply interested in some new work he keeps right on till late at night. music, especially classic music, exerts a great influence on the products of his pen. when his work progresses slowly, a complication is not easily solved, or a character becomes somewhat indistinct, music, that is, oratorios and symphonies, invariably sets all matters right and dispels all difficulties. he never writes with greater facility or rapidity than when he has heard the music of handel, bach, or beethoven just before sitting down to write. what little literary work john burroughs does is entirely contingent upon his health. if he is not feeling absolutely well, with a good appetite for his food, a good appetite for sleep, for the open air, for life generally, there is no literary work for him. if his sleep has been broken or insufficient, the day that follows is lost to his pen. he leads a sane and simple life: goes to bed at nine o'clock and gets up at five in summer and at six in winter; spends half of each day in the open air; avoids tea and coffee, tobacco, and all stimulating drinks; adheres mainly to a fruit and vegetable diet, and always aims to have something to do which he can do with zest. he is fond of the mild excitement of a congenial talk, of a conversation with friends, of a walk in the fields or woods, of a row on the river, of the reading of a good book. during working-hours he likes to regale himself with good buttermilk, in which, he avers, there is great virtue. he writes for the most part only in fall and winter; writing best when his chimney draws best. he composes only when writing is play. his working hours, when he does write, are from nine or ten a. m. to two or three p. m. then he wants his dinner, and after that a brisk walk of four or five miles, rain or shine. in the evening he reads or talks with his friends. when charles deslys, the french novelist, begins to write he has a very indistinct idea of what he is about to compose; but after a while, becoming interested in the work, he writes with increasing pleasure, and the clouds which shut out the subject from view quickly clear away. he never makes an outline beforehand. he does not use stimulating drinks, but smokes much; and seldom works more than four or five hours at a time. at nice, where he spends his winters now, he writes all the morning, from eight o'clock until noon, at the window, which is opened wide to let in the sunlight. in summer he always works in the open air, preferably at the seashore or in the woods. in this way he composed his first romances, novels, and songs, writing them down first in a note-book, which he always carried with him. sometimes he dictated to a secretary. he has lost that faculty, and now must write down everything himself, either at his table or his writing-desk. john fiske, the evolutionist, describes himself as follows:-- "i am forty-three years old; six feet in height, girth of chest, forty-six inches; waist, forty-four inches; head, twenty-four inches; neck, eighteen inches; arm, sixteen inches; weight, pounds; complexion, florid; hair, auburn; beard, red." professor fiske is a fine specimen of manhood: he is alert and active, possesses a voracious appetite, a perfect digestion, and ability to sleep soundly. he works by day or night indifferently. his method, like general grant's, is to "keep hammering." sometimes he makes an outline first; but scarcely ever changes a word once written. he very seldom tastes coffee or wine, or smokes a cigar; but he drinks beer freely, and smokes tobacco in a meerschaum pipe nearly all the time when at work. he has been in the habit of working from twelve to fifteen hours daily since he was twelve years old. john fiske is one of the healthiest of men, and never has a headache or physical discomfort of any sort. he prefers to work in a cold room, ° to ° f., and always sits in a draft when he can find one. he wears the thinnest clothes he can find, both in winter and summer. despite this absence of precautions, he catches cold only once in three or four years, and then not severely. he never experienced the feeling of disinclination for work, and, therefore, has never had to force himself. if he feels at all dull when at work, he restores himself by a half-hour at the piano. ernest wichert, who, besides being an honored member of the bar of germany, is a celebrated novelist, courts the muses from eight o'clock in the morning until two in the afternoon. after five p. m. he attends to his correspondence and daily professional duties. only two forenoons in the week are taken up by his duties as judge of the superior court at koenigsberg, prussia. he never copies a romance or novel once written, but leaves a margin for alterations and additions. when a sentence--not a judicial one--presents any difficulty, he writes it out hastily on a small piece of paper before he puts it down in the manuscript. he is in the habit of revising and copying dramatic work at least three times before he submits it to a stage-manager. he is very much addicted to the use of tobacco, and smokes a pipe and a cigar alternately. he smokes at all times of the day, even during working-hours. generally he sits down to write; but cannot bear to have a pen in hand when thinking about the subject of his work. he is accustomed to walk up and down the room until his thoughts have assumed a definite form. he works sometimes from five to six hours successively. he cannot write when anybody is in the room, and, therefore, always locks the doors before he sits down to his work. literary labor is such a necessity to wichert that he invariably feels uncomfortable when he has finished one work without beginning another immediately. many of the friends of jules claretie, the famous novelist, often are at a loss to account for his great fertility, and cannot see how he manages to do all that he succeeds in doing. when this question was once asked of the author, he replied, smilingly: "i am used to working, love to work, and work regularly--without excess, and with constant pleasure. work is, with certain natures, one of the forms of health." claretie's pen is put in motion only in the daytime; at night it rests, like the genial man himself. when the author feels indisposed, he does not write except for journals to which matter must be supplied on a certain date; attacks of neuralgia and nervous headache often interfere with his work. when at work he is in the habit of humming various tunes without being conscious of it. when work is easy to him, he sings; but when it is difficult, a dead silence reigns in his study. sometimes work proves exceedingly hard to be done in the beginning, but the longer he writes the easier it becomes. claretie notes down all ideas that come to his mind, utilizing them afterward for his novels. he also makes a detailed outline of his romances; but his journalistic articles are composed at the point of the pen. he is a very fast writer, and the ink on one page is often not quite dry before another is begun. hermann rollet, a distinguished austrian author, writes on scientific topics in the evening as well as in the day-time. with him poetry is evolved, almost without exception, in the dead of night, when he lies awake after having slept a few hours. he invariably makes an outline, and when his manuscript is finished he improves it as much as possible. there must be no noise in the room where he works; outside din, however, does not affect him. when rollet has a clear conception of the subject in hand, work is mere play to him; otherwise, it is difficult indeed. the author has one great peculiarity, which is seldom met with, and has, i think, never been noted before. when composing poetry, it appears to him as if he only removes by the act of writing the covering from something that has been concealed, and he looks upon the resulting poem as if he had not produced it, as if it had been in existence before, and as if he had but revealed it. thus generally his best songs are produced. sometimes he dreams of a poem, verse for verse, line for line. if he happens to wake up at the time, and strikes a light, he is able to write down literally the poem of which he dreamt. frequently he forgets all about his dream after it is written down, and is then greatly astonished in the morning to find a finished poem on his writing-table. he says that he could more easily split wood or break stones than to write without inclination. he has to force himself merely to copy what he has written. vi. favorite habits of work. john g. whittier, our noble quaker poet, used to say that he never had any method. "when i felt like it," he said once, "i wrote, and i neither had the health nor the patience to work afterward over what i had written. it usually went as it was originally completed." whittier preferred the daytime--and the morning, in fact--for writing, and used no stimulants whatever for literary labor. he made no outline or skeleton of his work--and claimed that his verses were made as the irishman made his chimney--by holding up one brick and putting another under. he was subject to nervous headache all his life, and for this reason often had to force himself to work when he would rather have rested, especially while he was associate editor of the _national era_ and other papers. philipp galen, the german novelist, composes during the daytime, and sometimes labors till ten o'clock in the evening. he makes an outline of his story before he prepares the "copy" for the press. he requires no stimulants at work, but when he is through he relishes a glass of wine. he has a habit of perambulating the room when engaged in meditation about a new book, and he writes with remarkable rapidity. he never puts pen to paper without inclination, because, as he says, he always feels disposed to do literary work. formerly he worked daily from twelve to fourteen hours; now he spends only from six to eight hours at the writing-desk every day. w. d. howells always keeps his manuscript six or seven months ahead of the time for publication. being of a nervous disposition, he could not rely on himself to furnish matter at short notice. when it is possible, he completes a book before giving a page of it to a magazine. he finds the morning to be the best time for brain-labor. he asserts that the first half of the day is the best part of a man's life, and always selects it for his working hours. he usually begins at nine and stops at one, and manages in that time to write about a dozen manuscript pages. after that he enjoys his leisure; that is, he reads, corrects proof, walks about, and pays visits. when he went to venice as the united states consul he soon threw off the late-hour habits to which he was accustomed as a journalist. there was so little to keep him employed, and the neighborhood was so quiet and delightful, that he began doing his work in the morning, and he has continued the habit ever since. he does not generally make a "skeleton" of his work; in fact, he almost never does. he says that he leans toward indolence, and always forces himself more or less to work, keeping from it as long as he can invent any excuse. he often works when he is dull or heavy from a bad night, and finds that the indisposition wears off. howells rarely misses a day from any cause, and, for a lazy man, as he calls himself, is extremely industrious. georgiana m. craik never, except on the rarest occasions, wrote at night. she did not always make an outline of her books beforehand, but generally did so. she wrote from nine a. m. until two p. m. in winter, and in summer she seldom wrote at all. when she once began to write a book, she worked at it steadily four or five hours every day, without any regard to inclination. dr. alfred friedmann, a witty austrian journalist, writes his brilliant articles at one sitting. he makes few corrections, and, sometimes, before the ink is dry on the "copy," off it goes to the printer. whenever he feels in need of refreshment, he gets up from his writing-desk and has recourse to a wine-bottle near by. he never performs literary labor unless he is inclined to work. sometimes he does not write for weeks, and then again he writes half a book at a time. j. scherr, the noted professor of the university of zürich, switzerland, who is a novelist as well as an historian, spends his forenoon at his writing-desk. he works standing, and writes, when in good health, with wonderful facility. formerly, he often used to work as long as ten hours, but now he devotes only three or four hours a day to literary work. thomas wentworth higginson composes always in the daytime, never at night. he sometimes makes an outline. he uses no stimulants while at work, or at any time. he writes for from three to five hours a day. he sometimes forces himself to "drive the quill," but rarely, generally enjoying literary work very much. ludwig auzengruber, the austrian storyteller, never writes at night. he always makes an outline of his work at the beginning, and is addicted to tobacco, which he consumes when at work. he is in the habit of walking up and down the room when elaborating a new story, and never writes down a sentence before he has pronounced it aloud. auzengruber is a very industrious man, and sometimes writes for as many as eleven hours a day. gerhard von amyntor, who is one of the best known of german authors, is also a very diligent writer. he composes for from three to four hours every morning, but rarely in the evening, and never at night. the afternoon and evening are spent in reading or conversation, or in revising that which he has written in the forenoon. he never makes a skeleton of his work, but his manuscripts are copied before they reach the printer. tobacco is indispensable to him when he is producing poetry. he works standing, and in solitude. the production, in the mind, of novels and fiction generally is easy to him, but the mechanical labor of writing down the product of his imagination he deems sad drudgery, because he is affected by writers' cramp, and he never sets pen to paper unless he feels disposed to. walt whitman closely adhered to his home and rooms. his income was just sufficient to make both ends meet, but he used to say it was adequate to the wants of a poet. he declared that wealth and luxury would destroy his working force. the poet once wrote: "twelve years ago i came to camden to die; but every day i went into the country, and, naked, bathed in sunshine, lived with the birds and the squirrels, and played in the water with the fishes. i recovered my health from nature. strange how she carries us through periods of infirmity, into the realms of freedom and health." in contradistinction to the majority of authors, hermann herberg, german novelist and journalist, drives the pen at night. he invariably makes an outline of his work to start with, and when he is engaged in writing, he sips coffee and smokes. to him literary work is a holiday task; yet he never writes unless he is in the proper frame of mind, spending on the average three hours a day at the writing table. the method of louisa may alcott was a very simple one. she never had a study; and an old atlas on her knee was all the desk she cared for. any pen, any paper, any ink, and any quiet place contented her. years ago, when necessity drove her hard, she used to sit for fourteen hours at her work, doing about thirty pages a day, and scarcely tasting food until her daily task was done. she never copied. when the idea was in her head, it flowed into words faster than she could write them down, and she seldom altered a line. she had the wonderful power of carrying a dozen plots for months in her mind, thinking them over whenever she was in the mood, to be developed at the proper time. sometimes she carried a plan thus for years. often, in the dead of night, she lay awake and planned whole chapters, word for word, and when daylight came she had only to write them down. she never composed in the evening. she maintained that work in the early hours gives morning freshness to both brain and pen, and that rest at night is a necessity for all who do brain work. she never used stimulants of any kind. she ate sparingly when writing, and only the simplest food, holding that one cannot preach temperance if one does not practice it. miss alcott affirmed that the quality of an author's work depends much on his habits, and that sane, wholesome, happy, and wise books must come from clean lives, well-balanced minds, spiritual insight, and a desire to do good. very few of the stories of the author of "little women" were written in concord, her home. this peaceful, pleasant place, the fields of which are classic ground, utterly lacked inspiration for miss alcott. she called it "this dull town," and when she had a story to write she went to boston, where she shut herself up in a room, and emerged only when she could show a completed work. august niemann, the german novelist, devotes the forenoon to literary work, but never burns midnight-oil on his writing-desk. he prepares his manuscript at the outset for the press, never making a plan beforehand. he writes with great facility, but only when he feels like it; when disinclined, he does not touch a pen--sometimes he will not write for weeks. when he is especially interested in a topic, he is apt to write for from four to six hours at a stretch; ordinarily he spends two, or, at the most, three, hours a day at the writing-table. victor blüthgen, one of the most noted german authors, prefers the daytime, especially the early morning, for literary labor; and whenever he is compelled to work at night, in order to meet engagements, he does so after ten o'clock. he never makes a skeleton of his work, but when the manuscript is completed, he files away at it, and even makes alterations in the proof-sheets. while at work he smokes incessantly, and is so accustomed to the stimulating effects of tobacco that he cannot get along without it. he walks up and down the room while meditating on the plots of his stories. when he elaborates them everything must be quiet about him, for every loud noise, especially music, agitates him, and renders work impossible. blüthgen is a ready writer, and conception and composition are both easy to him. he always forces himself to write. when he is beginning, he struggles hard to overcome his repugnance, until he is interested in the work, when he composes with increasing pleasure and rapidity. on the average, he writes for from three to six hours daily, but never more than three hours at a time. when he sits down to the desk he has but a faint idea of the novel which he is about to write, being incapable of working out the details of a story in his mind, as some authors are able to do; but with the ink the thoughts begin to flow, and all difficulties are surmounted. lucy larcom declared that she never thought of herself as an author, and during most of her life her occupation was that of a teacher. she wrote always before she taught, and in the intervals of leisure she had,--she used to say because her head and pen would not keep still. she always wished for more leisure to write, but was obliged to do something that insured an immediate return in money,--in fact, she had always to "work for a living." so, it was her habit to take a book or a portfolio in her lap, and write when and where she could. she did not write at night, because, she said, she had learned that she must sleep. she often forced herself to write, sometimes through an entire day, although the result was not usually so satisfactory to herself. she used to keep writing, even if she felt a little ill and tired, because of the imperative "must," and because she could forget her bad feelings in her subject. she began to write as a little child,--verses chiefly,--and always preferred writing to doing anything else. most of the things she wrote seemed to her to come of themselves, poems especially. to the large number of those who prefer the daytime to the artificial light of the evening or the night must be added rudolf von gottschall, german historian, novelist, and essayist. while at work he is in the habit--that is at times--of chewing paper. he writes with ease and great speed. he often composes when disinclined to work, compelled by his occupation as a critic and journalist. only when he is writing poetry he must be in good spirits. he devotes about five hours a day to literary work, exclusive of letter-writing and the discharge of his editorial duties. before committing her manuscripts to the press, the novelist, marian tenger (a pseudonym which stands for the name of a lady of the highest german aristocracy), reads them over repeatedly, and makes many alterations. it seems incredible to her that any author, who is attached to his profession, should write fair copy at once, making no skeleton of his work whatever. she invents dialogues most easily when she is perambulating the room. when disinclined to write, she refrains from touching a pen. sometimes weeks elapse before she resumes her usual occupation--writing; but when she does so, it is with delight. she never writes for more than five hours daily. oliver wendell holmes prefers the morning from nine o'clock until noon for work. he used to write evenings, but of late he has not done so. he sometimes plans his work beforehand, but is apt to deviate more or less from the outline he has laid down. he uses no stimulants at his work, unless his cup of coffee is so considered. he spends sometimes two or three, sometimes four or five, hours a day at his writing-table. he very often forces himself to write when he has an uncompleted task before him. he must have a pen in his hand when he is composing in prose or verse--it seems a kind of conductor, without which his thoughts will not flow continuously in proper order. julius wolffe, the german poet, belongs to those who never work at night. he writes from early in the morning until the late hours of the afternoon. he makes an outline, which, however, is almost equivalent to fair copy, since very few additions and alterations are ever made. while at work he moderately smokes cigars. when he is absorbed in cogitation on a subject in hand, he often walks up and down his room. he writes with great facility, for he never treats of topics that are not congenial to him. he is a very industrious man; every day finds him at his writing-desk, where he spends from eight to nine hours out of the twenty-four. the work of edmund gosse being multiform and very pressing, he has no choice between the daytime and the night, and must use both. the central hours of the day being given up to his official business for the government, which consists of translation from the various european languages, only the morning and the evening remain for literary work. his books have mainly been written between eight and eleven p. m., and corrected for the press between nine and ten a. m. he finds the afternoon almost a useless time. in his estimation, the physical clockwork of the twenty-four hours seems to run down about four p. m.,--at least, such is his experience. he makes no written skeleton or first draft. his first draft is what goes to the printers, and commonly with very few alterations. he rounds off his sentences in his head before committing them to paper. he uses no stimulant at work. he drinks wine twice a day, but after dinner he neither eats nor drinks. he has found this habit essential to his health and power of work. the only exception he makes is that, as he is closing for the night,--a little before eleven o'clock,--he takes several cups of very strong tea, which he has proved by experience to be by far the best sedative for his nerves. if he goes to bed immediately after this strong tea, at the close of a hard day's work, he generally sleeps soundly almost as soon as his head is on the pillow. coffee keeps him awake, and so does alcohol. he has tried doing without wine, but has always returned to it with benefit. he has entirely given up tobacco, which never suited him. he can work anywhere, if he is not distracted. he has no difficulty in writing in unfamiliar places--the waiting-room of a railway station or a rock on the seashore suits him as well (except for the absence of books of reference) as the desk in his study. he cannot do literary or any other brain-work for more than three hours on a stretch, and believes that a man who will work three hours of every working-day will ultimately appear to have achieved a stupendous result in bulk, if this is an advantage. but, then, he must be rapid while he is at work, and must not fritter away his resources on starts in vain directions. gosse is utterly unable to write to order,--that is to say, on every occasion. he can generally write, but there are occasions when for weeks together he is conscious of an invincible disinclination, and this he never opposes. consequently, he is by temperament unfitted for journalism, in which he has, he thinks, happily, never been obliged to take any part. as for mr. gosse's verse, it gets itself written at odd times, wholly without rule or precedent, and, of course, cannot be submitted to rule; but his experience is that the habit of regular application is beneficial to the production of prose. felix dahn, whose fertile fancy conjures up romances of life in ancient rome, always writes by the light of day. he writes with great facility and rapidity; and devotes nine hours a day to literary work. his manuscript goes to the printer as it is originally composed, and he seldom alters a line after it is once committed to paper. albert traeger, a celebrated german poet, writes in the afternoon,--after three o'clock, by preference. when composing prose, he writes fair copy at once; for poems, however, he makes an outline, which is hardly ever altered, since he completes every line in his head before he writes it down. while at work he constantly smokes very strong cigars, and is in the habit of sipping black coffee from time to time. the poet is a ready writer, but never pens a single sentence unless he feels disposed to work. sometimes months pass before he takes up the neglected pen again. that excellent writer of short stories, sarah orne jewett, composes in the afternoon. she does not make a formal outline of her work, but has a rough plan of it in her own head, depending most upon a knowledge of the chief characters. she writes for about four hours a day, and often finds the first ten or fifteen minutes' work an effort, but after that she can almost always go on easily. thomas hardy prefers the night for working, but finds the use of daytime advisable, as a rule. he follows no plan as to outline, and uses no stimulant excepting tea. his habit is to remove boots or slippers as a preliminary to work. he has no definite hours for writing, and only occasionally works against his will. w. h. riehl, who, besides being a professor at the university of munich, is a famous novelist, always writes by daylight. he carefully outlines his work beforehand, and repeatedly revises it before it is printed. when engaged in the labor of composition, he smokes one cigar--no more. he invents easily, but is very painstaking when writing down his thoughts, mercilessly erasing whatever does not suit him. he takes a pen to hand whenever he has a leisure moment, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, as circumstances permit. the renowned divine, karl gersk, who is the author of by far the best german religious poems, as a rule makes an outline before composing poetry, but writes down prose at once. when his attention is taken up by an interesting topic, he is in the habit of curling, absent-mindedly, one of his occipital locks about the left index finger. he rarely writes for more than six hours a day, and then only when he feels especially disposed to work. the author of "st. olave" always writes in the daytime; namely, from nine a. m. to one p. m.; and does not make any outline first, but only two copies, which are improved afterward, the first copy being written in pencil, and the second in ink. the second manuscript is revised and corrected. day by day, this knight of the pen writes during the stated time, unless prevented by illness or unexpected engagements, and does not wait for "feeling disposed," but goes steadily on. r. e. francillon prefers working at night, when both ideas and words come most fluently. he always works at night, and sometimes all night, when he works against time. he has not then to conquer an unwillingness to work which besets him at other hours. next to the night-time, he prefers the afternoon, to which circumstances practically confine him. this refers to imaginative work. with regard to journalistic and critical work and study, it is just the reverse, and he prefers the morning. he never makes a skeleton of his work. he has tried the skeleton method, but found it useless, and broke away from it soon after starting. he finds that incident suggests incident, and characters develop themselves. of course, he starts with a motive (in the technical sense), and a general drift and color, and the salient points of leading characters. he uses no stimulant when at work, except tobacco in the form of cigarettes, which he smokes all the time, whatever he is doing, even when writing a letter. pen and cigarette are inseparable; but he smokes very little when not working, and next to nothing when taking a holiday. his hours of work depend very much on necessity. he is engaged on a newspaper from nine a. m. till one p. m. the afternoon and evening are devoted to fiction or whatever other work he has on hand. practically he is at his desk all day, an industry which is rendered possible by frequent change of work. he constantly forces himself to work, dead against inclination; and, though it may seem strange, it constantly happens that the less the original inclination, the better the result, and _vice versa_. francillon has no faith whatever in writing upon inclination, and maintains that even if little comes of working when disinclined, the little is something and prevents the want of inclination lasting, besides preventing one from yielding easily. he is perfectly indifferent to outside noise, and, indeed, to almost everything that most people find a trial to the nerves--except conversation in the same room. he has worked with music playing in the same room, and has not even noticed it. hubert h. bancroft, the historian of the pacific coast, works day and evening, with little interruption, except as he takes a walk or rides for exercise occasionally in the afternoon. he determines that a certain amount of work shall be accomplished within so many hours, days, and weeks, and so is always stimulated and successfully accomplishes the allotted task. he frequently writes when not disposed to work. richard schmidt cabanis, the german humorist, has often spent whole nights at the writing-desk. when composing poetry he makes an outline beforehand, otherwise not. before his manuscript goes to press he carefully revises it and strikes out a great deal. he is very fond of french red wine, which he imbibes occasionally when writing, but which he must often forego in obedience to the advice of his physicians. the only peculiarity of which he is possessed is that he cannot compose unless he is alone, and he scorns even dumb company during working hours. margaret eytinge very much prefers the morning for writing, and generally spends from eight o'clock until eleven or twelve at her desk. of course, she often works in the afternoon, and sometimes, though very rarely, at night. but at those times she only revises and copies. she makes a slight sketch of her poem or story first--a sketch written so hastily that it would be impossible for anybody but herself to decipher it, and she has found trouble in making it out herself at times. then she proceeds to clothe this skeleton, an operation which is never completed satisfactorily until after at least three times trying. she always makes it a point to produce clean manuscripts. she cannot write at all with people about her, or in an unfamiliar place, and must be in her own room, at her own desk, and secure from interruption. that astute author of innumerable novels, charlotte m. yonge, never works at night. she does not write any outline of her tales. she has such an outline in her mind, but is guided by the way the characters shape themselves. she generally composes from about . a. m. to . p. m., taking odd times later in the day for proofs and letters. having good health, she is seldom indisposed for work; if she is, she takes something mechanical, such as translating or copying. dr. karl frenzel, editor of one of the leading berlin newspapers, has to struggle hard at first to overcome his unwillingness to compose, but after he has written for some time any aversion which he may have experienced disappears. he rarely works at night, never after midnight, but prefers the evening to the afternoon for literary production. he sometimes rewrites whole pages of his novels two or three times, but never makes a plan beforehand. he has the queer habit of making bread pellets while at work; that is, whenever he is absorbed in thought. he writes with facility and swiftness, devoting from three to four hours a day to literary labor. dr. otto franz gensichen, german dramatist, poet, and essayist, always writes in the daytime, almost exclusively in the forenoon, from eight till twelve o'clock. he makes an exception in the case of lyrical poems, which, of course, must be written down whenever they occur to the mind. after his manuscript is done, he polishes it here and there, and then copies it; for while slowly transcribing he can most easily detect mistakes. while at work in the morning he smokes a mild cigar, which is, however, sometimes omitted. when writing, he likes to have as much light and silence about him as he can possibly attain. while the manuscript lies on the writing table, and the author is meditating on the subject in hand, he is in the habit of pacing up and down the room. at first he repeats the words aloud to test their euphonism and smoothness; he then commits the spoken words to paper. he can boast of himself that he has never written a line "_invita musa_," without being fully inclined to composition. sometimes he does not write for months, but when the proper mood takes possession of him, he is very industrious. even then, however, he does most of his work before midday, and, exceptionally, from five till eight in the afternoon. as he is a bachelor and given up altogether to authorship, he is governed entirely by his moods. paul burani, the brilliant parisian journalist and dramatist, is forty years of age, married and father of one daughter,--michelette,--owner of the house he lives in, and, altogether, the perfect type of a successful literarian. before writing a play, he makes a very elaborate outline, which is developed afterward. ordinarily he rewrites a play three times, but being both a ready and a rapid writer, the task is quickly accomplished. when compelled to stop writing in consequence of fatigue or a lack of interest, he takes up something else, promenades in his garden, or smokes a cigar. he is indifferent to noise, and can compose almost anywhere. the great number of books which he has written has given him the reputation of being one of the most productive authors of the times, but he does not write for more than five or six hours a day. ludwig habicht, a german novelist, loves to write by the light of the sun, and invariably works in the daytime, never at night. when his manuscript is finished and corrected, he has it copied by a professional copyist, whereupon it goes to the compositor. habicht prefers to write in the open air, and does not use a writing-desk. the duration of his working hours depends entirely upon his health and moods, but he never writes for more than four or five hours a day; and sometimes does not pen a line for months. formerly, when the world--that is to say, the german world--used to know karl stelter, the poet, as a merchant, he was in the habit of spending his leisure hours in the evening in the production of poetry, and, strange though it may seem, his best poems were made after a hard day's work. now, since he has retired from business and is in prosperous circumstances, he versifies whenever and wherever he wants to, in the evening as well as in the daytime. he writes his poems with a lead pencil, and polishes them for weeks before they are published. he works with great ease, and is a ready improviser; but he never writes against his inclination. brander matthews does his work between breakfast and lunch, as a rule; and works at night only occasionally. he makes elaborate notes, and then writes at white heat, revising at his leisure. andré theuriet, the parisian novelist, makes an outline of his work first; he delineates each chapter of his novel, indicating the situations, personages, dialogues, and so on. thereupon the novel soon assumes a definite form. theuriet spends six hours a day at his writing-desk, but always in the morning. he does not believe in night work. in the afternoon he revises the work of the previous day. during working hours the author drinks two cups of tea and smokes one or two pipes of tobacco. theuriet retires early in the evening, between ten and eleven o'clock, and rises in the morning at a quarter before six. this regular mode of life explains why the novelist is able to write so much, and is a key to the productiveness which has astonished his contemporaries. paul lindau, another german novelist, critic, and journalist, dictates a great deal, sometimes without inclination, and sometimes after hasty lead-pencil sketches. when he writes himself only one manuscript is made. he incessantly smokes cigarettes while at work. only when he has labored uninterruptedly a long time does he refresh himself with coffee, tea, wine, and water. as a rule, lindau writes with ease. he declares that dictating tires him out more than if he should write himself, but by dictation he is enabled to do twice as much work as he could otherwise accomplish. generally, he writes for from four to five hours a day, but sometimes he has spent ten or even eleven hours in literary work. a. v. winterfeld, the german humorist, devotes the day only to literary work. his original manuscript is committed to the press, for he never copies what he has written. he composes with great ease and swiftness, and spends four hours a day at the writing-desk. hector malot, the parisian novelist, makes an outline of his romances beforehand, faintly indicating all important incidents of his work. he does not take stimulating drinks, either when at work or when at rest; with him the work itself acts as a stimulant. he rises at five o'clock in the morning, and writes till eleven. after breakfast he takes a walk. at two o'clock in the afternoon he resumes work and keeps at it until seven o'clock in the evening; but he never composes at night. nine months of the year are devoted to literary labor, but the remaining three months he spends in travel, study, and recreation. victorien sardou, the dramatist, writes his play twice; first on little scraps of paper, then on foolscap. the first draft, when it is finished, is a maze of alterations and delineations. mezerai, the famous historian, used to study and write by candle-light, even at noonday in summer, and, as if there had been no sun in the world, always waited upon his company to the door with a candle in his hand. "the method of buckle, the historian," so says his biographer, "was chiefly remarkable for careful, systematic industry, and punctilious accuracy. his memory appeared to be almost faultless, yet he took as much precaution against failure as if he dared not trust it. he invariably read with "paper and pencil in his hand, making copious references for future consideration. how laboriously this system was acted upon can be appreciated only by those who have seen his note-books, in which the passages so marked during his reading were either copied or referred to under proper heads. volume after volume was thus filled, everything being written with the same precise neatness that characterizes his manuscript for the press, and indexed with care, so that immediate reference might be made to any topic. but, carefully as these extracts and references were made, there was not a quotation in one of the copious notes that accompanied his work that was not verified by collation with the original from which it was taken." joaquin miller says that he has always been so poor, or, rather, has had so many depending on his work, that he has "never been able to indulge the luxury of habits," and that he has worked in a sort of "catch-as-catch-can" way. having been mostly on the wing since he began writing, he has done his work in all kinds of ways, and hours, and houses. however, now, since he has a little home, his life has become regulated. he rises at daylight, so as to save candles, and never works at night. after he has made and imbibed his coffee, he digs or pulls weeds, and cultivates his flowers, or works in some way about the greens, for an hour or so, and at length, when he feels compelled to literary work, and can no longer keep from it, he writes whatever he feels that he must set down; and then he writes only as long as he feels impelled. holding, as he does, that all modern authors think too little and write too much, he never writes as long as he can keep from it. he looks forward with hope and pleasure to the day when he shall be able to stop writing entirely. as for stimulants, he never takes them. yet he often smokes a cigar about the greens before beginning work. but he would be ill if he attempted to drink while writing. as for making an outline of his work, he generally jots down a lot of sketches or pictures, one each day; then he puts these together, and the play, poem, or novel is finished. he works for from three to five hours every day, then goes out till dinner time. he once lived in a rude log cabin, built on an eminence overlooking the city of washington, d. c. there his latch-string was always out. he now lives near oakland, calif., not in one cabin, but in three, each as rude as that of any settler in the sierras. george manville fenn, during a period of some eighteen years, has tried a good many plans, with the result of settling down for the last twelve or fourteen years to one alone. he prefers the daytime decidedly for mental work, because the brain is fresh and vigorous from the rest of the past few hours, and because the work produced is lighter and better and can be sustained longer; and the writer is not exhausted when he leaves his table. brilliant work has often been done at night; but when fenn has made the trial he has found the results of a month's day-work better, and there has been more in quantity. he invariably makes an outline or skeleton of his work, and often with his story first in a dramatic form, which, he thinks, adds much to the vigor and effect of a tale. he is in the habit of using tobacco, but has never looked upon it as a stimulus, regarding it rather as a soothing aid to reflection. he dines early, so as to have the evenings free. the afternoon is spent in work, a visit to town, or a chat with friends; he takes tea early,--at six,--and afterward often writes for two or three hours. for years mr. fenn has been trying to solve this problem: why can one write easily and fairly well one day, and have the next be almost a blank? after long study and much musing, he has come to the determination that he knows nothing whatever about it, and that the only thing to do is to lead as quiet and temperate a life as one can. of course, the stimulated and excited brain will produce a few weird and powerful bits of work; but, judging from what mr. fenn has seen, the loaded mind soon breaks down. vii. goethe, dickens, schiller, and scott. goethe was a believer in the pleasant doctrine that the highest and freest work can be done under the healthiest conditions of fresh air, early hours, daylight, and temperance--which does not mean abstinence. he and balzac are at precisely opposite pales in their method of working. here is the account of goethe's days at weimar, according to g. h. lewes: he rose at seven. till eleven he worked without interruption. a cup of chocolate was then brought, and he worked on again till one. at two he dined. his appetite was immense. even on the days when he complained of not being hungry, he ate much more than most men. he sat a long while over his wine, chatting gayly; for he never dined alone. he was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles. there was no dessert--balzac's principal meal--nor coffee. then he went to the theatre, where a glass of punch was brought to him at six, or else he received friends at home. by ten o'clock he was in bed, where he slept soundly. like thorwaldsen, he had a talent for sleeping. no man of business or dictionary maker could make a more healthy arrangement of his hours. the five or six hours of regular morning work, which left the rest of the day open for society and recreation, the early habits, the full allowance of sleep, and the rational use of food are in glaring contrast to balzac's short and broken slumbers, his night work, and his bodily starvation. goethe differed from almost every other great poet in not doing his greatest work at a white heat; and not only so, but he differed also in constantly balancing his reasoning against his creative faculties. those long mornings of early work were not always spent in the fever of creation. he was a physiologist, a botanist, a critic; and the longer he lived, the more of a savant he became, if not less of a poet. his imagination was most fertile before he settled down into these regular ways, but not before he settled down into a full appreciation of wine. balzac would write the draft of a whole novel at a sitting, and then develop it on the margins of proofs, revises, and re-revises. goethe acted as if while art is long, life were long also. till the contrary is proved, we must consistently hold that goethe was the philosopher before dinner-time, and the poet in the theatre, or during those long after-dinner hours over his two or three bottles of wine. that these later hours were often spent socially proves nothing, one way or the other. some men need such active influences as their form of mental stimulus. alfieri found, or made, his ideas while listening to music or galloping on horseback. instances are common in every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the seething of life around them, like the scholar of padua, whose conditions of work are given by montaigne as a curiosity: "i lately found one of the most learned men in france studying in the corner of a room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. he told me--and seneca says much the same himself--that he worked all the better for this uproar, as, if overpowered by noise, he was obliged to withdraw all the more closely into himself for contemplation, while the storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. when at padua he had lodged so long over the clattering of the traffic and the tumult of the streets, that he had been trained not only to be indifferent to noise, but even to require it for the prosecution of his studies." goethe abominated smoking, though he was a german. bayard taylor says that he tolerated the use of the pipe by schiller and his sovereign, carl august, but otherwise he was very severe in denouncing it. goethe himself somewhere says that "with tobacco, garlic, bed-bugs, and hypocrites he should wage perpetual war." we learn from mr. forster that "method in everything was dickens' peculiarity, and between breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions, was his time of work. but his daily walks were less of rule than of enjoyment and necessity. in the midst of his writing they were indispensable, and especially, as it has been shown, at night." when he had work on hand he walked all over the town furiously, and in all weathers, to the injury of his health; and his walks, be it observed, were frequently what balzac's always were--at night; so that, in the matter of hours, he must be taken as having conformed in some important respects to balzac's hygiene. now, goethe was also an essentially out-of-doors man by nature--not one to let his pen do his imagining for him. he was no slave of the ink-bottle, as some are, who cannot think without the feather of a goose in their hands, by way of a sometimes appropriate talisman. there is a well-known passage in one of the roman elegies to the effect that inspiration is to be sought more directly than within the four walls of a study, and that the rhythm of the hexameter is not best drummed with the fingers on a wooden table; and if it is true, as the author tells, that "youth is drunkenness without wine," it seems to follow, according to his experience, that those two or three bottles of wine are not altogether needless as an aid to inspiration when youth is gone by. schiller could never leave off talking about his poetical projects, and thus he discussed with goethe all his best pieces, scene after scene. on the other hand, it was contrary to goethe's nature, as he told eckermann, to talk over his poetic plans with anybody--even with schiller. he carried everything about with him in silence, and usually nothing of what he was doing was known to any one until the whole was completed. sir walter scott was one of the most industrious of writers. he rose early, and accomplished a good day's literary work before half the world was out of bed. even when he was busiest, he seldom worked as late as noon. his romances were composed with amazing rapidity; and it is an astonishing fact, that in less than two weeks after his bankruptcy scott wrote an entire volume of "woodstock." his literary labors yielded him $ , a year. two thousand copies of "the lady of the lake" were sold within a few months. many of the more energetic descriptions in "marmion," and particularly that of the battle of flodden, were struck off, according to mr. skene's account, while scott was out with his cavalry, in the autumn of . in the intervals of drilling, we are told, scott used to delight "in walking his powerful black steed up and down by himself upon the portobello sands, within the beating of the surge; and now and then you would see him plunge in his spurs, and go off as if at the charge, with the spray dashing about him. as we rode back to musselburgh, he often came and placed himself beside me, to repeat the verses that he had been composing during these pauses of our exercise." in after years, mr. cadell, then a guest at abbotsford, observing how his host was harassed by lion-hunters, and what a number of hours he spent daily in the company of his work-people, expressed his wonder that scott should ever be able to work at all while in the country. "oh," said sir walter, "i lie simmering over things for an hour or so before i get up; and there's the time i'm dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking _projet de chapitre_, and when i get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty easily. besides, i often take a doze in the plantations, and while tom [purdie] marks out a dyke or a drain as i have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain rigs in some other world." by far the greater portion of "the bride of lammermoor," the whole of "the legend of montrose," and almost the whole of "ivanhoe" were dictated under the terrible stimulus of physical pain, which wrung groans from the author between the words. the very two novels wherein the creative power of the arch-master of romance shows itself most strongly were composed in the midst of literal birth-throes. laidlaw would often beseech sir walter affectionately to stop dictating, when his audible suffering filled every pause. it was then he made that grimmest of all bad puns: "nay, willie," addressing laidlaw, who wrote for him and implored him to rest, "only see that the doors are fast. i would fain keep all the cry, as well as all the wool, to ourselves; but as to giving over work, that can be done only when i am in woollen." john ballantyne, his other faithful amanuensis, after the first day, took care to have always a dozen of pens made before he seated himself opposite the sofa on which scott lay, the sufferer usually continuing his sentence in the same breath, though he often turned himself on his pillow with a groan of anguish. "but when a dialogue of peculiar animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter: he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and, as it were, acting the parts." in this last particular we are reminded of the celebrated russian author, gogol, whose practice it is said to have been in composing a dialogue to recite all the different speeches in character before committing them to paper, to assure himself of their being in complete consonance with what the character and situation required. so far from affording any argument to the contrary, the history of the years during which sir walter's hand was losing its cunning seems to illustrate the penalty of trying to reconcile two irreconcilable things--the exercise of the imagination to its fullest extent, and the observance of conditions that are too healthy to nourish a fever. apropos of his review of ritson's "caledonian annals," he himself says: "no one that has not labored as i have done on imaginary topics can judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave and dull." there spoke the man who habitually, and without artificial help, drew upon his imagination at the hours when instinct has told others they should be employing, not their fancy, but their reason. the privilege of being healthily dull before breakfast must have been an intense relief to one who compelled himself to do unhealthy or abnormal work without the congenial help of abnormal conditions. herder, in like manner, is accused by de quincey, in direct terms, of having broken down prematurely because he "led a life of most exemplary temperance. surely, if he had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he might have contrived to weather the point of sixty years." this is putting things pretty strongly; but it is said of a man of great imaginative power by a man of great imaginative power, and may, therefore, be taken as the opinion of an expert, all the more honest because he is prejudiced. a need must be strongly felt to be expressed with such daring contempt for popular axioms. the true working-life of scott, who helped nature by no artificial means, lasted for no more than twelve years, from the publication of "waverley" until the year in which his genius was put into harness; so that, of the two men, scott and balzac, who both began a literary life at nearly the same age, and were both remarkable for splendid constitutions, the man who lived abnormally surpassed the man who lived healthily by fully eight years of good work, and kept his imagination in full vigor to the end. it is amusing to read sir walter's candid avowal, when beginning the third volume of "woodstock," that he "had not the slightest idea how the story was to be wound up to a catastrophe." he declares he never could lay down a plan--or that, if he had laid one down, he never could stick to it. "i tried only to make that which i was writing diverting and interesting, leaving the rest to fate. this habnab at a venture is a perilous style, i grant, but i cannot help it." viii. burning midnight oil. that night, and not morning, is most appropriate to imaginative work is supported by a general consent among those who have followed instinct in this matter. upon this question, which can scarcely be called vexed, charles lamb is the classical authority: "no true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. the mild, internal light, that reveals the fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. milton's 'morning hymn in paradise,' we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight, and taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of a taper." "this view of evening and candle-light," to quote his commentator, de quincey, once more, "as involved in the full delight of literature," may seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is in the nature of such gayeties to travel a little into exaggeration; but substantially it is certain that lamb's sincere feelings pointed habitually in the direction here indicated. his literary studies, whether taking the color of tasks or diversions, courted the aid of evening, which, by means of physical weariness, produces a more luxurious state of repose than belongs to the labor hours of day; they courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as lord bacon remarked, "gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures, such as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light." those words, "physical weariness," if they do not contain the whole philosophy of the matter, are very near it, and are, at all events, more to the point than the quotation from lord bacon. they almost exactly define that unnatural condition of the body which, on other grounds, appears to be proper to the unnatural exercise of the mind. it will be remembered that balzac recommended the night for the artist's work, the day for the author's drudgery. southey, who knew as well as anybody who ever put pen to paper how to work, and how to get the best and the most out of himself, and who pursued the same daily routine through his whole literary life, performed his tasks in the following order: from breakfast till dinner, history, transcription for the press, and, in general, all the work that scott calls "walking on all-fours." from dinner till tea, reading, letter-writing, the newspapers, and frequently a siesta--he, also, was a heroic sleeper, and slept whenever he had the chance. after tea, poetry, or whatever else his fancy chose--whatever work called upon the creative power. it is true that he went to bed regularly at half-past ten, so that his actual consumption of midnight oil was not extravagant. but such of it as he did consume served as a stimulant for the purely imaginative part of his work, when the labor that required no stimulant was over and done. blake was a painter by day and a poet by night; he often got out of bed at midnight and wrote for hours, following by instinct the deliberate practice of less impulsive workers. schiller evolved his finest plays in a summer-house, which he built for himself, with a single chamber, on the top of an acclivity near jena, commanding a beautiful prospect of the valley of the saal and the fir mountains of the neighboring forest. on sitting down to his desk at night, says döring, he was wont to keep some strong coffee or wine chocolate, but more frequently a flask of old rhenish or champagne, standing by him: often the neighbors would hear him earnestly declaiming in the silence of the night, and he might be seen walking swiftly to and fro in his chamber, then suddenly throwing himself down into his chair and writing, drinking at intervals from the glass that stood near him. in winter he continued at his desk till four, or even five, o'clock in the morning; in summer, till toward three. the "pernicious expedient of stimulants" served only to waste the more speedily and surely, as mr. carlyle says, his already wasted fund of physical strength. schiller used an artificial stimulus altogether peculiar to himself: he found it impossible, according to the well-known anecdote, to work except in a room filled with the scent of rotten apples, which he kept in a drawer of his writing-table, in order to keep up his necessary mental atmosphere. in the park at weimar we have other glimpses of schiller; frequently he was to be seen there, wandering among the groves and remote avenues,--for he loved solitary walks,--with a note-book in his hand; now loitering along, now moving rapidly on; "if any one appeared in sight, he would dart into another alley, that his dream might not be broken." in joerden's lexicon we read that whatever schiller intended to write, he first composed in his head, before putting down a line of it on paper; and he used to call a work "ready" so soon as its existence in his spirit was complete: hence, there were often reports current of his having finished such and such a work, when, in the common sense, it was not even begun. lord byron was a late riser. he often saw the sun rise before he went to bed. in his journals we frequently find such entries as these: "got up at two p. m., spent the morning," etc. he always wrote at night. while he was the most brilliant star in london society, he was in the habit of returning from balls, routs, the theatre, and opera, and then writing for two or three hours before going to bed. in this way "the corsair," "lara," "the giaour," and "the siege of corinth" were composed. byron affords an illustration of a tendency to put himself out of working condition in order to work the better. "at disdati," says moore, "his life was passed in the same regular round of habits into which he naturally fell." these habits included very late hours and semi-starvation, the excessive smoking of cigars and chewing of tobacco, and the drinking of green tea, without milk or sugar, in the evening. like balzac, byron avoided meat and wine, and so gave less natural brain-food room for active play. the experience of p. k. rosegger, the greatest novelist of styria, whose popular works are read not only in the palace, but also in the hut, is contrary to that of most writers; he finds that with him lamp-light and night-work are most conducive to literary fertility, and that he can work with greater ease on dark, gloomy days than in fine weather. his manuscripts are generally committed to the press as they were originally composed, except for additions that fill the margins which the author leaves for that purpose when writing. poetry comes to him spontaneously when he takes his exercise in the field or garden, so that all he has to do when he gets home is to write it down; but he can compose prose only at the writing-desk. after a rest of several days he writes with great ease and velocity; in fact, writing is a necessity to him. on the average, he writes three hours a day. he is often forced to write while disinclined, to provide for the maintenance of a large family. george parsons lathrop thus speaks of the habits of work of dr. william a. hammond, one of the more recent additions to our novel-writers: "dr. hammond's habits of work are something which should interest all brain laborers. at a moderately early hour in the morning he seats himself in his consulting-room to receive patients, and he remains indoors until two in the afternoon. then he drives out and walks. on certain days he has medical lectures to deliver. his spare time in the afternoon is devoted to taking the air, reading, or diverting himself. after dinner and any social recreation that may be in hand he sits down at his desk again by ten or eleven o'clock, and writes until two in the morning. 'i do it,' he says, 'because i like it. it amuses and refreshes me.' how he manages to endure this constant sitting up is something of a marvel, considering that so much of his energies must be consumed by professional work. he seems to be always at leisure and unharassed, and lives comfortably, not denying himself a reasonable portion of stimulants and tobacco." ix. literary partnership. literary partnerships are common in france, but in england they are confined almost exclusively to dramatists. the one well-known exception was that of messrs. besant and rice. mr. rice's partnership with mr. besant began in , and ended with the death of mr. rice. "it arose," explains mr. besant, "out of some slight articles which i contributed to his magazine, and began with the novel called 'ready-money mortiboy.' of this eleven years' fellowship and intimate, almost daily, intercourse, i can say only that it was carried on throughout without a single shadow of dispute or difference. james rice was eminently a large-minded man, and things which might have proved great rocks of offence to some, he knew how to treat as the trifles they generally are." in france, the best example of literary partnership is found in that of m. erckmann and m. chatrian. how these men worked in concert has been described by the author of "men of the third republic." "m. chatrian is credited with being the more imaginative of the two. the first outlines of the plots are generally his, as also the love scenes, and all the descriptions of phalsbourg and the country around. m. erckmann puts in the political reflections, furnishes the soldier types, and elaborates those plain speeches which fit so quaintly, but well, into the mouths of his honest peasants, sergeants, watchmakers, and schoolmasters. a clever critic remarked that erckmann-chatrian's characters are always hungry and eating. the blame, if any, must lie on m. chatrian's shoulders; to his fancy belong the steaming tureens of soup, the dishes of browned sausages and sauer-kraut, and the mounds of flowery potatoes, bursting plethorically through their skins. all that m. erckmann adds to the ménu is the black coffee, of which he insists, with some energy, on being a connoisseur. habitually the co-authors meet to sketch out their plots and talk them over amid much tobacco smoking. then, when the story has taken clear shape in their minds, one or the other of the pair writes the first chapter, leaving blanks for the dialogues or descriptions which are best suited to the competency of the other. every chapter thus passes through both writers' hands, is revised, recopied, and, as occasion requires, either shortened or lengthened in the process. when the whole book is written, both authors revise it again, and always with a view to curtailment. novelists who dash off six volumes of diluted fiction in a year, and affect to think naught of the feat, would grow pensive at seeing the labor bestowed by mm. erckmann and chatrian on the least of their works, as well as their patient research in assuring themselves that their historical episodes are correct, and their descriptions of existing localities true to nature. but this careful industry will have its reward, for the novels of mm. erckmann and chatrian will live. the signs of vitality were discovered in them as soon as the two authors, nerved by their first success, settled down and produced one tale after another, all too slowly for the public demand. 'the story of a conscript,' 'waterloo,' 'the history of a man of the people,' and, above all, 'the history of a peasant,' were read with wonder as well as interest." x. anonymity in authorship. the question of the authorship of certain popular works has given rise to a great deal of speculation. a few years ago, it will be remembered, we were puzzling our brains to discover the name of the author of "the breadwinners." among other stinging charges against him, to induce him to break the silence, was the fling that it was a base and craven thing to publish a book anonymously. "my motive in withholding my name is simple enough," said the unknown author to his furious critics. "i am engaged in business in which my standing would be seriously compromised were it known that i had written a novel. i am sure that my practical efficiency is not lessened by this act, but i am equally sure that i could never recover from the injury it would occasion me if known among my own colleagues. for that positive reason, and for the negative one that i do not care for publicity, i resolved to keep the knowledge of my little venture in authorship restricted to as small a circle as possible. only two persons besides myself know who wrote 'the breadwinners.'" a far more serious dispute followed the publication of the "vestiges of creation," forty years ago. the theologians of scotland were wild with rage at the audacity of the author, who would have been torn to pieces almost had he been discovered. in scientific circles robert chambers was credited with the authorship; and henri gréville seems to have had no doubt upon the matter. in "leaves from the diary of henri gréville" there is an entry under the date december , , as follows: "i have been reading a novel called 'jane eyre,' which is just now making a great sensation, and which absorbed and interested me more than any novel i can recollect having read. the author is unknown. mrs. butler,--miss fannie kemble,--who is greatly struck by the talent of the book, fancies it is written by chambers, who is the author of the 'vestiges of creation,' because she thinks that whoever wrote it must, from its language, be a scotchman, and from its sentiments be a unitarian; and chambers, besides answering to all these peculiarities, has an intimate friend who believes in supernatural agencies, such as are described in the last volume of the book." thackeray also had the credit of the work. nobody knew charlotte brontë; but she was unable to keep her secret very long. the late r. h. horne was present at that first dinner party given by george smith, the publisher, when currer bell, then in the first flush of her fame, made her earliest appearance in a london dining-room. she was anxious to preserve the anonymity of her literary character, and was introduced by her true name. horne, however, who sat next to her, was so fortunate as to discover her identity. just previously he had sent to the new author, under cover of her publisher, a copy of his "orion." in an unguarded moment, charlotte brontë turned to him and said:-- "i was so much obliged to you, mr. horne, for sending me your--" but she checked herself with an inward start, having thus betrayed her currer bell secret, by identifying herself with the author of "jane eyre." "ah, miss brontë," whispered the innocent cause of the misfortune, "you would never do for treasons and stratagems!" the late john blackwood corresponded with george eliot for some time before he knew that she was a woman. he called her "dear george," he says, and often used expressions which a man commonly uses only to a man. after he found out who "dear george" was, he was naturally a little anxious to recall some of the expressions he had used. charles dickens, however, detected what escaped the observation of most people. writing to a correspondent in january, , he said: "will you, by such roundabout ways and methods as may present themselves, convey this note of thanks to the author of 'scenes of clerical life,' whose two first stories i can never say enough of, i think them so truly admirable. but, if those two volumes, or a part of them, were not written by a woman, then shall i begin to believe that i am a woman myself." xi. system in novel writing. anthony trollope was the most systematic of all the english novelists. sitting down at his desk, he would take out his watch and time himself. his system is well known, but a singular explanation of his fertility may be quoted: "when i have commenced a new book," he says, "i have always prepared a diary divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which i have allowed myself for the completion of the work. in this i have entered day by day the number of pages i have written, so that if at any time i have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face and demanding of me increased labor, so that the deficiency might be supplied. according to the circumstances of the time, whether any other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which i was writing was or was not wanted with speed, i have allotted myself so many pages a week. the average number has been about forty. it has been placed as low as twenty and has risen to one hundred and twelve. and as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain two hundred and fifty words, and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, i have had every word counted as i went." under the title of "a walk in a wood," anthony trollope thus describes his method of plot-making and the difficulty the novelist experiences in making the "tricksy ariel" of the imagination do his bidding: "i have to confess that my incidents are fabricated to fit my story as it goes on, and not my story to fit my incidents. i wrote a novel once in which a lady forged a will, but i had not myself decided that she had forged it till the chapter before that in which she confesses her guilt. in another a lady is made to steal her own diamonds, a grand _tour de force_, as i thought; but the brilliant idea struck me only when i was writing the page in which the theft is described. i once heard an unknown critic abuse my workmanship because a certain lady had been made to appear too frequently in my pages. i went home and killed her immediately. i say this to show that the process of thinking to which i am alluding has not generally been applied to any great effort of construction. it has expended itself on the minute ramifications of tale-telling: how this young lady should be made to behave herself with that young gentleman; how this mother or that father would be affected by the ill conduct or the good of a son or a daughter; how these words or those other would be most appropriate or true to nature if used on some special occasion. such plottings as these with a fabricator of fiction are infinite in number, but not one of them can be done fitly without thinking. my little effort will miss its wished-for result unless i be true to nature; and to be true to nature i must think what nature would produce. where shall i go to find my thoughts with the greatest ease and most perfect freedom? "i have found that i can best command my thoughts on foot, and can do so with the most perfect mastery when wandering through a wood. to be alone is, of course, essential. companionship requires conversation, for which, indeed, the spot is most fit; but conversation is not now the object in view. i have found it best even to reject the society of a dog, who, if he be a dog of manners, will make some attempt at talking; and though he should be silent, the sight of him provokes words and caresses and sport. it is best to be away from cottages, away from children, away as far as may be from chance wanderers. so much easier is it to speak than to think, that any slightest temptation suffices to carry away the idler from the harder to the lighter work. an old woman with a bundle of sticks becomes an agreeable companion, or a little girl picking wild fruit. even when quite alone, when all the surroundings seem to be fitted for thought, the thinker will still find a difficulty in thinking. it is not that the mind is inactive, but that it will run exactly whither it is not bidden to go. with subtle ingenuity, it will find for itself little easy tasks, instead of setting itself down on that which it is its duty to do at once. with me, i own, it is so weak as to fly back to things already done, which require no more thinking, which are, perhaps, unworthy of a place even in the memory, and to revel in the ease of contemplating that which has been accomplished, rather than to struggle for further performance. my eyes, which should become moist with the troubles of the embryo heroine, shed tears as they call to mind the early sorrow of mr. ----, who was married and made happy many years ago. then, when it comes to this, a great effort becomes necessary, or that day will for me have no results. it is so easy to lose an hour in maundering over the past, and to waste the good things which have been provided in remembering instead of creating! "but a word about the nature of the wood! it is not always easy to find a wood, and sometimes when you have got it, it is but a muddy, plashy, rough-hewn congregation of ill-grown trees,--a thicket rather than a wood,--in which even contemplation is difficult, and thinking is out of the question. he who has devoted himself to wandering in woods will know at the first glance whether the place will suit his purpose. a crowded undergrowth of hazel, thorn, birch, and elder, with merely a track through it, will by no means serve the occasion. the trees around you should be big and noble. there should be grass at your feet. there should be space for the felled or fallen princes of the forest. a roadway with the sign of wheels that have passed long since will be an advantage, so long as the branches above your head shall meet or seem to meet each other. i will not say that the ground should not be level, lest by creating difficulties i shall seem to show that the fitting spot may be too difficult to be found; but, no doubt, it will be an assistance in the work to be done if occasionally you can look down on the tops of the trees as you descend, and again look up to them as with increasing height they rise high above your head. and it should be a wood--perhaps a forest--rather than a skirting of timber. you should feel that, if not lost, you are losable. to have trees around you is not enough, unless you have many. you must have a feeling as of adam in the garden. there must be a confirmed assurance in your mind that you have got out of the conventional into the natural, which will not establish itself unless there be a consciousness of distance between you and the next ploughed field. if possible, you should not know the east from the west; or, if so, only by the setting of the sun. you should recognize the direction in which you must return simply by the fall of water. "but where shall the wood be found? such woodlands there are still in england, though, alas! they are becoming rarer every year. profit from the timber merchant or dealer in fire-wood is looked to; or else, as is more probable, drives are cut broad and straight, like spokes of a wheel radiating to a nave or centre, good only for the purposes of the slayer of multitudinous pheasants. i will not say that a wood prepared, not as the home, but the slaughter-ground, of game, is altogether inefficient for our purpose. i have used such, even when the sound of the guns has been near enough to warn me to turn my steps to the right or to the left. the scents are pleasant even in winter; the trees are there, and sometimes even yet the delightful feeling may be encountered that the track on which you are walking leads to some far-off, vague destination, in reaching which there may be much of delight, because it will be new;--something also of peril, because it will be distant. but the wood, if possible, should seem to be purposeless. it should have no evident consciousness of being there, either for game or fagots. the felled trunk on which you sit should seem to have been selected for some accidental purpose of house-building, as if a neighbor had searched for what was wanting and had found it. no idea should be engendered that it was let out at so much an acre to a contractor, who would cut the trees in order and sell them in the next market. the mind should conceive that this wood never had been planted by hands, but had come there from the direct beneficence of the creator--as the first woods did come, before man had been taught to recreate them systematically, and as some still remain to us, so much more lovely in their wildness than when reduced to rows and quincunxes, and made to accommodate themselves to laws of economy and order. "they will not come at once, those thoughts which are so anxiously expected; and in the process of coming they are apt to be troublesome, full of tricks, and almost traitorous. they must be imprisoned or bound with thongs when they come, as was proteus when ulysses caught him amidst his sea-calves,--as was done with some of the fairies of old, who would, indeed, do their beneficent work, but only under compulsion. it may be that your spirit should on an occasion be as obedient as ariel; but that will not be often. he will run backward,--as it were downhill,--because it is so easy, instead of upward and onward. he will turn to the right and to the left, making a show of doing fine work, only not the work that is demanded of him that day. he will skip hither and thither with pleasant, bright gambols, but will not put his shoulder to the wheel, his neck to the collar, his hand to the plough. has my reader ever driven a pig to market? the pig will travel on freely, but will always take the wrong turning; and then, when stopped for the tenth time, will head backward and try to run between your legs so it is with the tricksy ariel,--that ariel which every man owns, though so many of us fail to use him for much purpose; which but few of us have subjected to such discipline as prospero had used before he had brought his servant to do his bidding at the slightest word. "but at last i feel that i have him, perhaps by the tail, as the irishman drives his pig. when i have got him i have to be careful that he shall not escape me till that job of work be done. gradually, as i walk or stop, as i seat myself on a bank or lean against a tree, perhaps as i hurry on waving my stick above my head, till, with my quick motion, the sweatdrops come out upon my brow, the scene forms itself for me. i see, or fancy that i see, what will be fitting, what will be true, how far virtue may be made to go without walking upon stilts, what wickedness may do without breaking the link which binds it to humanity, how low ignorance may grovel, how high knowledge may soar, what the writer may teach without repelling by severity, how he may amuse without descending to buffoonery; and then the limits of pathos are searched and words are weighed which shall suit, but do no more than suit, the greatness or the smallness of the occasion. we, who are slight, may not attempt lofty things, or make ridiculous with our little fables the doings of the gods. but for that which we do there are appropriate terms and boundaries which may be reached, but not surpassed. all this has to be thought of and decided upon in reference to those little plottings of which i have spoken, each of which has to be made the receptacle of pathos or of humor, of honor or of truth, as far as the thinker may be able to furnish them. he has to see, above all things, that in his attempts he shall not sin against nature; that in striving to touch the feelings he shall not excite ridicule; that in seeking for humor he does not miss his point; that in quest of honor and truth he does not become bombastic and straitlaced. a clergyman in his pulpit may advocate an altitude of virtue fitted to a millennium here or to a heaven hereafter; nay, from the nature of his profession, he must do so. the poet, too, may soar as high as he will, and if words suffice to him, he need never fear to fail because his ideas are too lofty. but he who tells tales in prose can hardly hope to be effective as a teacher, unless he binds himself by the circumstances of the world which he finds around him. honor and truth there should be, and pathos and humor, but he should so constrain them that they shall not seem to mount into nature beyond the ordinary habitations of men and women. "such rules as to construction have probably been long known to him. it is not for them he is seeking as he is roaming listlessly or walking rapidly through the trees. they have come to him from much observation, from the writings of others, from that which we call study, in which imagination has but little immediate concern. it is the fitting of the rules to the characters which he has created, the filling in with living touches and true colors those daubs and blotches on his canvas which have been easily scribbled with a rough hand, that the true work consists. it is here that he requires that his fancy should be undisturbed, that the trees should overshadow him, that the birds should comfort him, that the green and yellow mosses should be in unison with him, that the very air should be good to him. the rules are there fixed,--fixed as far as his judgment can fix them,--and are no longer a difficulty to him. the first coarse outlines of his story he has found to be a matter almost indifferent to him. it is with these little plottings that he has to contend. it is for them that he must catch his ariel and bind him fast, but yet so bind him that not a thread shall touch the easy action of his wings. every little scene must be arranged so that--if it may be possible--the proper words may be spoken and the fitting effect produced. "alas! with all these struggles, when the wood has been found, when all external things are propitious, when the very heavens have lent their aid, it is so often that it is impossible! it is not only that your ariel is untrained, but that the special ariel which you may chance to own is no better than a rustic hobgoblin or a pease-blossom, or mustard seed at the best. you cannot get the pace of the racehorse from a farmyard colt, train him as you will. how often is one prompted to fling one's self down in despair, and, weeping between the branches, to declare that it is not that the thoughts will wander, it is not that the mind is treacherous! that which it can do, it will do; but the pace required from it should be fitted only for the farmyard. nevertheless, before all be given up, let a walk in the wood be tried." much has been said about the quality of mr. trollope's work. there seems a consensus of opinion that it degenerated. "mr. trollope," says mr. freeman, "had certainly gone far to write himself out. his later work is far from being so good as his earlier. but, after all, his worst work is better than a great many other people's best; and considering the way in which it was done, it is wonderful that it was done at all. i, myself, know what fixed hours of work are, and their value; but i could not undertake to write about william rufus or appius claudius up to a certain moment on the clock, and to stop at that moment. i suppose it was from his habits of official business that mr. trollope learned to do it, and every man undoubtedly knows best how to do his own work. still, it is strange that works of imagination did not suffer by such a way of doing." james payn said that trollope injured his reputation by publishing his methods of writing. likewise, the _daily news_, in referring to alphonse daudet's history of his own novels, doubted whether he acted wisely. as the editor said, "an effect of almost too elaborate art, a feeling that we are looking at a mosaic painfully made up of little pieces picked out of real life and fitted together, has often been present to the consciousness of m. daudet's readers. that feeling is justified by his description of his creative efforts." m. daudet's earlier works were light and humorous, like "tartarin," or they were idyllic and full of provençal scenery, the nature and the nightingales of m. daudet's birthplace, the south. one night at the theatre, when watching the splendid failure of an idyllic provençal sort of play, m. daudet made up his mind that he must give the public sterner stuff, and describe the familiar parisian scenery of streets and quais. this wise determination was the origin of his novels, "jack," "fromont jeune et risler ainé," and the rest. up to that time, m. daudet, m. zola, m. flaubert, and the brothers goncourt had all been more or less unpopular authors. it is not long since they had a little club of the unsuccessful, and m. daudet was the first of the company who began to blossom out into numerous editions. m. daudet's secret as a novelist, as far as the secret is communicable, seems to be his wonderfully close study of actual life and his unscrupulousness in reproducing its details almost without disguise. he frankly confesses that not only the characters in his political novels, but those in his other works, are drawn straight from living persons. the scenery is all sketched from nature, m. daudet describing the vast factories with which he was familiar when, at the age of sixteen, he began to earn his own living, or the interiors to which he was admitted by virtue of his position under a great man of the late imperial administration. places about which he did not know much, and which needed to be introduced into his tales, m. daudet visited with his note-book. m. daudet's mode of work is, first, to see his plot and main incidents clearly, to arrive at a full understanding of his characters, then to map out his chapters, and then, he says, his fingers tingle to be at work. he writes rapidly, handing each wet slip of paper to madame daudet for criticism and approval. there is no such sound criticism, he says, as that of this helpful collaborator, who withal is "so little a woman of letters." when a number of chapters are finished m. daudet finds it well to begin publishing his novel in a journal. thus he is obliged to finish within a certain date; he cannot go back to make alterations; he cannot afford time to write a page a dozen times over, as a conscientious artist often wishes to do. xii. traits of musical composers. a long chapter of instances might be penned on the habits of work of musical composers; such as gluck's habit of betaking himself with his harpsichord on a fine day into some grassy field, where the ideas came to him as fast again as within doors. handel, on the contrary, claims to have been inspired for his grandest compositions by the murmurous din of mighty london,--far from mighty as the london of george the second may seem to those with whom the nineteenth century is waning. sarti composed best in the sombre shadows of a dimly-lighted room. the monsieur le maître commemorated in rousseau's autobiography typified a numerous section in his constant recourse, _en travaillant dans son cabinet_, to a bottle, which was replenished as often as emptied, and that was too often by a great deal. his servant, in preparing the room for him, would no more have thought of omitting _son pot et son verre_ than his ruled paper, ink, pens, and violoncello; and one serving did for these,--not so for the drink. the learned artist haydn could not work except in court-dress, and used to declare that, if, when he sat down to his instrument, he had forgotten to put on a certain ring, he could not summon a single idea. how he managed to summon ideas before frederick ii. had given him the said ring we are not informed. charles dibdin's method of composition, or, rather, the absence of it, is illustrated in the story of his lamenting his lack of a new subject while under the hair-dresser's hand in a cloud of powder, at his rooms in the strand, preparing for his night's "entertainment." the friend who was with him suggested various topics, but all of a sudden the jar of a ladder sounded against the lamp-iron, and dibdin exclaimed, "the lamp-lighter, a good notion," and at once began humming and fingering on his knee. as soon as his head was dressed he stepped to the piano, finished off both music and words, and that very night sang "jolly dick, the lamplighter," at the theatre, nor could he, we are assured on critical authority, well have made a greater hit if the song had been the deliberate work of two authors--one of the words, another of the air--and had taken weeks to finish it, and been elaborated in studious leisure instead of the distraction of dressing-room din. xiii. the hygiene of writing. edward everett hale gives the following description of his mode of life, which at the same time is full of advice to authors in general:-- "the business of health for a literary man seems to me to depend largely upon sleep. he should have enough sleep, and should sleep well. he should avoid whatever injures sleep. "this means that the brain should not be excited or even worked hard for six hours before bedtime. young men can disregard this rule, and do; but as one grows older he finds it wiser to throw his work upon morning hours. if he can spend the afternoon, or even the evening, in the open air, his chances of sleep are better. the evening occupation, according to me, should be light and pleasant, as music, a novel, reading aloud, conversation, the theatre, or watching the stars from the piazza. of course, different men make and need different rules. i take nine hours for sleep in every twenty-four, and do not object to ten. "i accepted very early in life bulwer's estimate that three hours a day is as large an average of desk work as a man of letters should try for. i have, in old newspaper days, written for twelve consecutive hours; but this is only a _tour de force_, and in the long run you waste strength if you do not hold every day quite closely to the average. "as men live, with the telegraph and the telephone interrupting when they choose, and this fool and that coming in when they choose to say, 'i do not want to interrupt you; i will only take a moment,' the great difficulty is to hold your three hours without a break. if a man has broken my mirror, i do not thank him for leaving the pieces next each other; he has spoiled it, and he may carry them ten miles apart if he chooses. so, if a fool comes in and breaks my time in two, he may stay if he wants to; he is none the less a fool. what i want for work is unbroken time. this is best secured early in the morning. "i dislike early rising as much as any man, nor do i believe there is any moral merit in it, as the children's books pretend; but to secure an unbroken hour, or even less, i like to be at my desk before breakfast. as long before as possible i have a cup of coffee and a soda biscuit brought me there, and in the thirty to sixty minutes which follow before breakfast, i like to start the work of the day. if you rise at a quarter past six, there will be comparatively few map pedlers, or book agents, or secretaries of charities, or jailbirds, who will call before eight. the hour from . to . is that of which you are most sure. even the mother-in-law or the mother of your wife's sister's husband does not come then to say that she should like some light work with a large salary as matron in an institution where there is nothing to do. "i believe in breakfast very thoroughly, and in having a good breakfast. i have lived in paris a month at a time and detest the french practice of substituting for breakfast a cup of coffee, with or without an egg. breakfast is a meal at which much time may be spent with great advantage. people are not apt to come to it too regularly, and you may profit by the intermission to read your newspaper and lecture on its contents. there's no harm in spending an hour at the table. "after breakfast do not go to work for an hour. walk out in the garden, lie on your back on a sofa and read, in general, 'loaf' for that hour, and bid the servant keep out everybody who rings the bell, and work steadily till your day's stint is done. if you have had half an hour before breakfast, you can make two hours and a half now. "it is just so much help if you have a good amanuensis; none, if you have a poor one. the amanuensis should have enough else to do, but be at liberty to attend to you when you need. write as long as you feel like writing; the moment you do not feel like it, give him the pen and walk up and down the room dictating. there are those who say that they can tell the difference between dictated work and work written by the author. i do not believe them. i will give a share in the combination protoxide silver mine of grey's gulch to anybody who will divide this article correctly between the parts which i dictated and those which are written with my own red right hand. "stick to your stint till it is done. if philistines come in, as they will in a finite world, deduct the time which they have stolen from you and go on so much longer with your work till you have done what you set out to do. "when you have finished the stint, stop. do not be tempted to go on because you are in good spirits for work. there is no use in making ready to be tired to-morrow. you may go out of doors now, you may read, you may in whatever way get light and life for the next day. indeed, if you will remember that the first necessity for literary work is that you have something ready to say before you begin, you will remember something which most authors have thoroughly forgotten or never knew. "this business of writing is the most exhausting known to men. you should, therefore, steadily feed the machine with fuel. i find it a good habit to have standing on the stove a cup of warm milk, just tinged in color with coffee. in the days of my buoyant youth i said, 'of the color of the cheek of a brunette in seville.' i had then never seen a brunette in seville; but i have since, and i can testify that the description was good. beef tea answers as well; a bowl of chowder quite as well as either. indeed, good clam chowder is probably the form of nourishment which most quickly and easily comes to the restoration or refreshment of the brain of man. "if this bowl of coffee, or chowder, or soup is counted as one meal, the working man who wishes to keep in order will have five meals a day, besides the morning cup of coffee, or of coffee colored with milk, which he has before breakfast. breakfast is one; this extended lunch is another; dinner is the third, say at half-past two; tea is the fourth, at six or seven; and, what is too apt to be forgotten, a sufficient supper before bedtime is the fifth. this last may be as light as you please, but let it be sufficient,--a few oysters, a slice of hot toast, clam chowder again, or a bowl of soup. never go to bed in any danger of being hungry. people are kept awake by hunger quite as much as by a bad conscience. "remembering that sleep is the essential force with which the whole scheme starts, decline tea or coffee within the last six hours before going to bed. if the women kind insist, you may have your milk and water at the tea-table, colored with tea; but the less the better. "avoid all mathematics or intricate study of any sort in the last six hours. this is the stuff dreams are made of, and hot heads, and the nuisances of waking hours. "keep your conscience clear. remember that because the work of life is infinite you cannot do the whole of it in any limited period of time, and that, therefore, you may just as well leave off in one place as another. "no work of any kind should be done in the hour after dinner. after any substantial meal, observe, you need all your vital force for the beginning of digestion. for my part, i always go to sleep after dinner and sleep for exactly an hour, if people will only stay away; and i am much more fond of the people who keep away from me at that time than i am of the people who visit me." xiv. a humorist's regimen. robert barr (whose pseudonym, "luke sharp," is familiar to the readers of the _detroit free press_) has written an article on "how a literary man should live," which may be cited in conclusion:-- "i am not," he says, "an advocate of early rising. i believe, however, that every literary man should have fixed hours for getting up. i am very firm with myself on that score. i make it a rule to rise every morning in winter between the hours of six and eleven, and in summer from half-past five until ten. a person is often tempted to sleep later than the limit i tie myself to, but a little resolution with a person's self at first will be amply repaid by the time thus gained, and the feeling one has of having conquered a tendency to indolence. i believe that a literary man can get all the sleep he needs between eight o'clock at night and eleven in the morning. i know, of course, that some eminent authorities disagree with me, but i am only stating my own experience in the matter, and don't propose to enter into any controversy about it. "on rising i avoid all stimulating drinks, such as tea or coffee. they are apt to set the brain working, and i object to work, even in its most disguised forms. a simple glass of hot scotch, say half a pint or so, serves to tide over the period between getting up and breakfast-time. many literary men work before breakfast, but this i regard as a very dangerous habit. i try to avoid it, and so far have been reasonably successful. i rest until breakfast-time. this gives the person a zest for the morning meal. "for breakfast the simplest food is the best. i begin with oyster stew, then some cold chicken, next a few small lamb chops and mashed potatoes, after that a good-sized beefsteak and fried potatoes, then a rasher of bacon with fried eggs (three), followed by a whitefish or two, the meal being completed with some light, wholesome pastry, mince pie for preference. care should be taken to avoid tea or coffee, and i think a word of warning ought to go forth against milk. the devastation that milk has wrought among literary men is fearful to contemplate. they begin, thinking that if they find it is hurting them, they can break off, but too often before they awaken to their danger the habit has mastered them. i avoid anything at breakfast except a large tumbler of brandy, with a little soda water added to give it warmth and strength. "no subject is of more importance to the literary aspirant than the dividing of the hours of work. i divide the hours just as minutely as i can, and then take as few of the particles as possible. i owe much of my success in life to the fact that i never allow work to interfere with the sacred time between breakfast and dinner. that is devoted to rest and thought. much comfort can be realized during these hours by thinking what a stir you would make in the literary world if you could hire a man like howells for five dollars a week to do your work for you. such help, i find, is very difficult to obtain, and yet some people hold that the labor market is overcrowded. the great task of the forenoon should be preparation for the mid-day meal. the thorough enjoyment of this meal has much to do with a man's success in this life. "of course, i do not insist that a person should live like a hermit. because he breakfasts frugally, that is no reason why he should not dine sumptuously. some people dine at six and merely lunch at noon. others have their principal meal in the middle of the day, and have a light supper. there is such merit in both these plans that i have adopted both. i take a big dinner and a light lunch at noon, and a heavy dinner and a simple supper in the evening. a person whose brain is constantly worried about how he can shove off his work on somebody else has to have a substantial diet. the bill of fare for dinner should include everything that abounds in the market--that the literary man can get trusted for. "after a good rest when dinner is over, remain quiet until supper-time, so that the brain will not be too much agitated for the trials that come after that meal. "i am a great believer in the old adage of 'early to bed.' we are apt to slight the wisdom of our forefathers; but they knew what they were about when they advised early hours. i always get to bed early,--say two or three in the morning. i do not believe in night work. it is rarely of a good quality. the brain is wearied with the exertions of the day and should not be overtaxed. besides, the time can be put in with less irksomeness at the theatre, or in company with a lot of congenial companions who avoid the stimulating effects of tea, coffee, and milk. tobacco, if used at all, should be sparingly indulged in. i never allow myself more than a dozen cigars a day; although, of course, i supplement this with a pipe. "when do i do my literary work? why, next day, of course." the writer is a monthly magazine to interest and help all literary workers. it was started in , and is now ( ) in its seventh volume. the writer is unique--the only magazine in the world devoted solely to explaining the practical details of literary work. its remarkable success shows that such a periodical was needed, and that the writer exactly supplies the need. the writer aims:-- to be helpful, interesting, and instructive to all literary workers. to give plain and practical hints, helps, and suggestions about preparing and editing manuscript. to collect and publish the experiences, experiments, and observations of literary people, for the benefit of all writers. to note improved methods and labor-saving devices for literary workers. to discuss in a practical way interesting questions of etymology, grammar, rhetoric, or verse-making. to print entertaining personal articles by and about noted literary people. to record the important news of the literary world. to aid young writers in reaching the public, by advising them how to make their copy salable. to be of value to the writers of sermons, lectures, letters; to the student of language; to the lover of literature; to all, in brief, who write for the newspaper, the magazine, or the book-publisher. beginners and expert writers alike will find the writer valuable. for beginners each number of the magazine is a practical guide and help, teaching them how to make their work better and more profitable, and even the most skilful writer can learn something from the experiences of other writers related in its pages. such an interesting and useful series of articles about the details of literary production as the six bound volumes of the magazine contain has never been printed elsewhere. the price of the writer is ten cents a number, or one dollar a year. a sample copy will be mailed for ten cents; no sample copies will be sent free. the subscriptions of all who write or who are interested in literary work are respectfully solicited. address:-- the writer publishing co., washington st. 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(rooms and ), p. o. box . boston, mass. writing for the press: =a manual for editors, reporters, correspondents, and printers.= by robert luce. fourth edition (seventh thousand); revised and greatly enlarged. pp. cloth, $ . . "writing for the press" is a practical handbook of the art of newspaper writing, written by a practical newspaper man. there is no "padding" in it; almost every line contains a useful hint or suggestion about the proper preparation of newspaper "copy," and a wonderful amount of information of use to writers is crowded into its carefully-written pages. the work is the result of the practical experience of the author as desk editor on the _boston globe_, and was written in the main from notes made while handling ms. there and elsewhere. four editions of "writing for the press" have been required. for each edition the work has been revised and enlarged, so that it has grown from forty-two to ninety-six pages,--yet, it is believed, without the addition of a useless sentence. new matter has been added partly to make the book more useful to newspaper writers, and partly to bring within its scope all other writers. therefore, those who bought copies of earlier editions will find it desirable to buy copies of the fourth edition as well. that literary workers of every class will find "writing for the press" exceedingly helpful, both for study and for reference, is shown by these subject-headings: the preparation of copy; how to write clearly; grammar, good and bad; use and misuse of common words and phrases (with several hundred examples); mixed metaphors; slang; the use of titles; puzzling plurals; condensation; points on proof-reading; addressing editors; getting into print, etc. the book is one that every writer should keep upon his desk for constant reference and study. newspaper editors, who are naturally the best judges of the value of such a work, all commend mr. luce's book. for instance, the _boston advertiser_ says of it: "it is a remarkably compact and useful little manual, full of the wisest and most practical suggestions in regard to the mechanical requirements for the proper preparation of manuscript; the right use of doubtful and frequently misused words; punctuation; matters of style; and errors of arrangement." the _critic_ says: "it is full of sound advice and practical suggestions." quantities of the book have been bought by the managers of leading daily newspapers for distribution among their editors, reporters, and correspondents,--among others by the _boston herald_, _globe_, _journal_, and _transcript_, the _new york world_, and the _chicago news_. special rates will be made to newspaper managers on quantities for distribution in this way. the new edition of "writing for the press" is handsomely bound in cloth, and will be sent, post-paid, on receipt of price, one dollar. address:-- the writer publishing co., p. o. box , boston, mass. transcriber's note: unmatched quotation marks in the first paragraph on page , beginning with--"the method of buckle,"--have been left as they appear in the original publication. hyphenation too has been retained as in the original publication. changes have been made as follows: page such was the little feathery wand, _changed to_ "such was the little feathery wand, page influence upon writers _changed to_ influence upon writers page writing under difficulties _changed to_ writing under difficulties page cette puissance de concen tration _changed to_ cette puissance de concentration page solved by jean jaques. his strength was not _changed to_ solved by jean jacques. his strength was not page without using paunce or blotting-paper, to blot _changed to_ without using pounce or blotting-paper, to blot page accustomed as a journalist there was so _changed to_ accustomed as a journalist. there was so page berlin newpapers, has to struggle hard at first _changed to_ berlin newspapers, has to struggle hard at first page musing, he has come to the detemination that _changed to_ musing, he has come to the determination that page abbotsford, observing how his host was harrassed _changed to_ abbotsford, observing how his host was harassed provided by the internet archive the shakespearean myth william shakespeare and circumstantial evidence by appleton morgan author of "the law of literature," "notes to best's principles of evidence," etc., etc= ````sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves; ````sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves; ````sic vos non vobis melliflcatus apes; ````sic vos non vobis fertis aratra boves. `````--_p. virgil. maro_= cincinnati, robert clarke & co to d. t. morgan, esq., of whip's cross, walthamstow, essex, england. my dear sir: i do not know your opinion on the matter treated in these pages. very possibly you will disagree with every line of my brief. but it gives me pleasure to connect my name with yours on this page, and to subscribe myself very faithfully, your kinsman, appleton morgan. october, . preface. |m. guizot, in his history of england, states the shakespearean problem in a few words, when he says: "let us finally mention the great comedian, the great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is william shakespeare. in twenty years, amid the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed the thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequaled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience and for ever remaining the treasure of the age--all this being accomplished, shakespeare left the theater and the busy world, at the age of forty-five, to return to stratford-on-avon, where lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing and never returning to the stage--ignored and unknown if his works had not forever marked out his place in the world--a strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, the door to the efforts of genius." but m. guizot is very far from suggesting any prima facie inconsistency in this statement as it stands. since every man reads the shakespearean pages for himself and between the lines, much of what we are expected to accept as shakespearean criticism must fail of universal appreciation and sympathy. but none who read the english tongue can well be unconcerned with the question as to <b>who wrote</b> those pages; and it would be affectation to deny that the intense realism of our day is offering some startling contributions to the solution of that question. for instance, the gentlemen of the "new shakespeare society" (whom mr. swinburne rather mercilessly burlesques in his recent "_studies of shakespeare_") submit these dramas to a quantitative analysis; and, by deliberately counting the "male," "female," "weak," and "stopped" endings, and the alexandrines and catalectics (just as a mineralogist counts the degrees and minutes in the angles of his crystals), insist on their ability to pronounce didatically and infallibly what was written by william shakespeare, and at what age; what was composed by dekker, fletcher, marlowe, or anybody else; what was originally theirs, touched up by william shakespeare or _vice versa_, etc. it is curious to observe how this process invariably gives all the admirable sentiments to william shakespeare, and all the questionable ones to somebody else; but at least these new shakespearean gentlemen have surrendered somewhat of the "cast-iron" theory of our childhood--that every page, line, and word of the immortal shakespearean drama was written by william shakespeare demi-god, and by none other--perhaps, even opened a path through which the unbelievers may become, in due time, orthodox. there are still, however, a great many persons who are disposed to wave the whole question behind them, much as mr. podsnap disposed of the social evil or a famine in india. it is only a "historic doubt," they say, and "historic doubts" are not rare, are mainly contrived to exhibit syllogistic ingenuity in the teeth of facts, etc., etc. the french, they say, have the same set of problems about molière. was he a lawyer? was he a doctor? etc.--and they all find their material in internal evidence--e. g., an accurate handling of the technique of this or that profession or science: parallelism, practical coincidence, or something of that sort. the present work is an attempt to examine, for the benefit of these latter, from purely external evidence, a question which, dating only within the current quarter century, is constantly recurring to confront investigation, and, like banquo's troublesome shade, seems altogether indisposed to "down." i have to add my acknowledgments to mr. julian norris, for his careful preparation of the index to these pages. grandview-on-hudson, october , . { } the shakespearean myth. part i. the mystery. [illustration: ] he thirty-seven plays called, collectively, "shakespeare," are a phenomenon, not only in english letters, but in human experience. the literature of the country to which they belong, had, up to the date of their appearance, failed to furnish, and has been utterly powerless since, to produce any type, likeness, or formative trace of them; while the literature of other nations possesses not even a corresponding type. the history of a century on either side of their era discloses, within the precints of their birth, no resources upon which levy could have been made for their creation. they came and went like a meteor; neither borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what they left, their own peculiar and unapproachable magnificence. the unremitting researches of two centuries have only been able to assign their authorship (where it rested at first) to an hiatus in the life of a wayward village lad named william shakespeare--who fled his native town penniless and before the constable, to return, in a few years, a well-to-do esquire--with a coat of arms and money in his pocket. { }we have the history of the boy, and certain items as to the wealthy squire, who left behind him two or three exceedingly common-place and conventional epitaphs (said to be his handiwork) and a remarkable will; but, between them, no hint of history, chronicle, or record. still, within this unknown period of this man's career, these matchless dramas came from somewhere, and passed current under his name. the death of their reputed author attracted no contemporary attention, and for many years thereafter the dramas remained unnoticed. although written in an idiom singularly open to the comprehension of all classes and periods of english-speaking men, no sooner did they begin to be remarked, than a cloud of what are politely called "commentators" bore down upon them; any one who could spell feeling at liberty to furnish a "reading;" and any one who supposed himself able to understand one of these "readings," to add a barnacle in the shape of a "note." from these "commentators" the stately text is even now in peril, and rarely, even to-day, can it be perused, except one line at a time, across the top of a dreary page of microscopic and exasperating annotation. but, up to within a very few years, hardly a handful of shakespearean students had arisen with courage to admit--what scarcely any one of the "commentators" even, could have failed to perceive--the utterly inadequate source ascribed to the plays themselves. it is not yet thirty years since an american lady was supposed to have gone crazy because she declared that william shakespeare, of the globe and black-friars theaters in london, in the days of elizabeth, was not the author of these certain dramas and poems { }for which--for almost three hundred years--he has stood sponsor. miss bacon's "madness," indeed, has been rapidly contageous. now-a-days, men make books to prove, not that william shakespeare did not write these works, but that francis bacon, walter raleigh, or some other elizabethan, did not. and we even find, now and then, a treatise written to prove that william shakespeare was, after all, their author; an admission, at least, that the ancient presumption to that effect no longer covers the case. and, doubtless, the correct view is within this admission. for, probably, if permitted to examine this presumption by the tests which would be applied to any other question of fact, namely, the tests of contemporary history, muniments, and circumstantial evidence, it will be found to be quite as well established and proved that william shakespeare was not the author of the plays that go by his name, as any other fact, occurring in london between the years and , not recorded in history or handed down by tradition, could be established and proved in . if a doubt as to the authorship of the plays had arisen at any time during or between those years, and had been kept open thereafter, the probability is that it would have been settled by this time. but, as it is, we may be pretty certain that no such doubt did arise, and that no such question was asked, during the years when those who could have dispelled the doubt or answered the question were living. when we are about to visit a theater in these days, what we ask and concern ourselves with is: is the play entertaining? does it "draw?" and, when we wit{ }ness it, the question is: do we enjoy it--or does it bore us? will we recommend our friends to come that they may be entertained, too, and that we may discuss it with them? or will we warn them to keep away? we very speedily settle these questions for ourselves. doubtless we may and do inquire who the author is. but we do not enter into any discussion upon the subject, or charge our minds enough with the matter to doubt it when we are told. the author's name is, not unusually, printed on the play-bill before us; we glance at it indifferently, take what is told us for granted, and think no more about it. if the name happens to be assumed, we may possibly see its identity discussed in the dramatic columns of our newspapers next morning, or we may not. if the play entertains us, we commend it. if it drags, we sneer at it, get up and go off. that is all the concern we give it. the evening has slipped away; and, with it, any idle speculations as to the playwright who has essayed to amuse us for an hour. if, three hundred years hence, a question as to who wrote the play we saw at mr. daly's theater or mr. wallack's theater last evening should come up, there would be very little evidence, not any records, and scarcely an exhibit to refer to in the matter. copies of the play-bill or the newspapers of the day might chance to be discovered; but these--the internal testimony of the play itself, if any, and a sort of tacit presumption growing out of a statement it was nobody's cue to inquire into at the time it was made, and had been nobody's business to scrutinize since--would constitute all the evidence at hand. how this supposititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts { }in the matter of the dramatic works which we call, collectively, shakespeare's. precisely: except that, on the evenings when those plays were acted, there were no play-bills, and, on the succeeding morning, no daily newspaper. we have, therefore, in , much fewer facilities for setting ourselves right as to their authorship than those living three hundred years after us could possess in the case we have supposed. the audiences who witnessed a certain class of plays at shakespeare's theaters, in the years between and , were entertained. the plays "drew." people talked of them about town, and they become valuable to their proprietors. the mimic lords and ladies were acceptable to the best seats; the rabble loved the show and glitter and the alarum of drums; and all were britons who gloated over rehearsal of the prowess of their own kings and heroes, and to be told that their countrymen at agincourt had slain ten thousand frenchmen at an expense of but five and twenty of themselves. but, if m. taine's description of the shakespearean theaters and the audience therein wont to assemble may be relied upon, we can pretty safely conclude that they troubled themselves very little as to who fashioned the dialogue the counterfeit kings and queens, soldiers, lords, and ladies spoke; or that they saw any thing in that dialogue to make such speculation appear worth their while. nor can we discover any evidence, even among the cultured courtiers who listened to them--or in the case of elizabeth herself, who is said to have loved them (which we may as well admit for the argument's sake)--that any recognition of the plays as works worthy of any other than a stage-manager, occurred. { }even if it should appear that these plays thus performed were the plays we now call shakespeare's; had any of this audience suspected that these plays were not written for them, but for all time; that, three hundred years later--when the plays should not only be extant, but more loved and admired than ever--the thinking world should set itself seriously to probe the mystery of their origin; there might have been some interest as to their producer manifested, and we might have had some testimony competent to the exact point to-day. but it is evident enough that no such prophetic vision was vouchsafed to them, and no such prophetic judgment passed. nor is the phenomenon exceptional. the critic, does not live, even to-day, however learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the responsibility of affirming upon his own judgment, or even upon the universal judgment of his age and race, that any literary composition would be, after a lapse of three hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, hugged as its birthright by a whole world. such a statement would have been contrary to experience, beyond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to be known--if known at all--as a fact. moreover, it could only be known as a fact at the expiration of the three hundred years. doubtless, few critics would care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record one way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and speculative as the judgment of posterity upon a literary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort occurred in shakespeare's day, even if there were any dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the subject. there can be no doubt--and it must be conceded { }--that certain acted plays _did_ pass with their first audiences, and that certain printed plays, both contemporaneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the public who read them, as the compositions of mr. manager shakespeare; and that probably even the manager's pot companions, who had better call to know him than any others, saw nothing to shake their heads at in his claim to be their author (provided he ever made any such claim; which, by the way, does not appear from any record of his life, and which nobody ever asserted as a fact). if they did--with the exception only of robert greene--they certainly kept their own counsel. on the one hand, then, the question of the authorship was never raised, and, on the other hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who studied the plays (supposing that there were any such in those days) could not possibly have recognized them as immortal. if they had so recognized them, they would doubtless have left us something more satisfactory as to the authorship of the compositions than the mere "impression that they were informed" that the manager of the theater where they were produced wrote them; that they supposed he was clever enough to have done so, and they therefore took it for granted that he did. that is all there is of the evidence of shakespeare's own day, as to the question--if it still is a question--before us. but how about the presumption--the legal presumption, arising from such lapse of time as that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary--the presumption springing from tradition and common report--that william shakespeare composed the shakespearean plays? it is, of course, understood that one presump{ }tion is as good as another until it is disturbed. it is never safe to underrate an existing presumption; as long as it stands at all, it stands as conclusive; once overthrown, however, it is as if it had never existed. a presumption three hundred years old may be a strong one to overthrow. but if its age is all there is of it--if it be only strong in years--it can yet be toppled over. once overthrown, it is no more venerable because it is three hundred years old than if it were only three. an egg-shell will toss upon the crest of an angry surf, and, for very frailty, outride breakers when the mightiest ship man ever framed could not survive an instant. but it is only an egg-shell, for all that, and a touch of the finger will crush and destroy it. and so, formidable as it was in age, the presumption as to william shakespeare's authorship of the great dramas which for three hundred years had gone by his name, had only to be touched by the thumb and finger of common sense to crackle and shrivel like the egg that sat on the wall in the kindergarten rhyme, which all the king's army and all the king's men could not set up again, once it had tumbled over. but as the world advanced and culture increased, why did not the question arise before? simply because the times were not ripe for it. this is the age and generation for the explosion of myths, and, as one after another of them falls to pieces and disappears, who does not wonder that they have not fallen sooner? for how many years has the myth of william tell been cherished as history! and yet there is no element of absolute impossibility or even of improbability--much less of miracle--in the story of an archer with a sure eye and a steady aim. or, in the case of physical { }myths--which only required an exploration by physical sense for their explosion--the maps of two centuries or so ago represented all inaccessible seas as swarming with krakens and ship-devouring reptiles. and it is not twenty years since children were taught in their geographies that upon the coast of norway there was a whirlpool which sucked down ships prow foremost. and here, in our midst, a cannon-shot from where we sit and write these lines, there was believed to be and exist a hell gate which was a very portal of death and slaughter to hapless mariners. but there are no krakens, and not much of a maelstrom; and, for twenty years before general newton blew up a few rocks at hell gate, people had laughed at the myth of its ferocity. and again: nothing is easier than to invent a story so utterly unimportant and immaterial that it will be taken for granted, without controversy, and circulate with absolute immunity from examination, simply because worth nobody's while to contradict it. for example, it is likely enough that demosthenes, in practicing oratory, stood on a sea-beach and drilled his voice to outroar the waves. the story is always told, however, with the rider, that demosthenes did this with his mouth filled with pebble-stones; and, as nobody cares whether he did or not, nobody troubles himself to ascertain by experiment that the thing is impossible, and that nobody can roar with a mouth full of pebble-stones. and not even then would he succeed in removing the impression obtaining with the great mass of the world, that a thing is proven sufficiently if it gets into "print." charles ii. set the royal society of his day at work to { }find the reason why a dead fish weighed more than a live one--and it was only when they gave it up, that the playful monarch assured them that the fact they were searching for the reason of was not a fact at all. it is not impossible to demonstrate from experience, that the human mind will be found--as a rule--to prefer wasting laborious days in accounting for, rather than take the very simplest pains to verify even a proposition or alleged fact, which, if a fact at all, is of value beyond itself. it was objected to the system of copernicus, when first brought forward, that, if the earth turned on its axis as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west, in the same manner that a stone dropped from the masthead of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of the mast, but toward the stern. to this it was answered that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys the same laws and moves with it, whereas it is no part of the ship, of which, consequently, its motion is independent. this solution was admitted by some and opposed by others, and the controversy went on with spirit; nor was it till one hundred years after the death of copernicus that, the experiment being tried, it was ascertained that the stone thus dropped from the head of the mast does fall at the foot of it. and so, if, in the case of the shakespearean authorship, the day has come for truth to dispel fiction, and reason to scout organic miracle, why should we decline to look into an alleged shakespearean myth simply because it happens to be a little tardy in coming to the surface? but, most of all, it is to be remembered that it is, practically, only our own century that has compre{ }hended the masterliness and matchlessness of the "hamlet" and "macbeth," and the rest of those transcripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose author "spanned the ages that were to roll up after him, mastered the highest wave of modern learning and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting mankind up ont of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity; who so wrote that to his all-seeing vision schools and libraries, sciences and philosophies, were unnecessary, because his own marvelous intuition had grasped all the past and seen through all his present and all his future, and because, before his superhuman power, time and space had vanished and disappeared." * the age for which the dramas were written had not come, in that elizabethan era. * jean paul frederich richter. { }deed, why our question did not arise sooner. nobody asked, "who wrote shakespeare?" because nobody seemed to consider "shakespeare" as any thing worth speculating about. let us pause right here to demonstrate this. the tongues of the actors were tied, the ears of the audience were deaf to syllables whose burden was for the centuries that were to come after. the time for the question, "who wrote them?" was not yet. for two hundred years more--from the day of william shakespeare's death down to years within the memory of those now living--down to at least the date of lord byron (who admits that it is the perfectly correct thing to call shakespeare "god-like," "mighty," and the like, but very unfashionable to read him),--we may ransack the records of scholarship and criticism, and unearth scarcely a hint of what is now their every-where conceded superiority, to say nothing of their immortality. in short, we can not rise from such a search without understanding, very clearly in fuller, in , chronicles that william shakespeare's "genius was jocular," his comedies merry, and his tragedies wonderful; his wit quick, but that his learning was very little. evelyn notes that, in , he saw "hamlet, prince of denmark," played: "but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his majesty has been so long abroad." * pepys, his contemporary, says that the "'midsummer-night's dream' was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.... and, but having lately read the 'adventures of five hours,' 'othello' seemed a mean thing," though he liked davenant's opera of "macbeth," with its music and dancing. ** when spending some money in books he looks over shakespeare, but chooses "'hudibras,' the book now in the greatest fashion for drollery," instead. it is doubtful if milton ever read the shakespearean plays, in spite of the eloquent verses, "what needs my shakespeare," etc.; since, in "l'allegro," he speaks of his (shakespeare's) "native wood-notes wild." *** * amenities of authors--shakespeare," p. . ** ibid., p. . *** dr. maginn, in his shakespearean papers ("learning of shakespeare"), endeavors to explain what milton meant by "native wood-notes wild." surely if there is any thing in letters that is not "native wood-notes," it is the stately shakespearean verse, full of camps and courts, but very rarely of woodlands and { }pastures; besides, whatever milton might say of the book called "shakespeare" in poetry--like ben jon-son--he showed unmitigated contempt for its writer in prose: about the worst thing he could say about his king in "the iconoclast," was that charles i. kept an edition of shakespeare for his closet companion. * "other stuff of this sort," cries the blind poet, "may be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet used much license in departing from the truth of history." ** in , one nahum tate, supposed to be a poet (a delusion so widespread that he was actually created "poet laureate") stumbled upon "a thing called lear," assigned to one william shakespeare, and, after much labor, congratulated himself upon having "been able to make a play out of it." *** * "amenities of authors--shakespeare," vol. ii, p. . ibid., p. , note. ** it is fair to say that "stuff" may only have meant "matter," but it is indisputable that the passage was meant as a slur on one who would read "shakespeare." *** the "play" he did make out of it is to be found in w. h. smith's "bacon and shakespeare," p. . { }so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your mirth nor the serious part your concernment.... john dryden, in or about , in his "defence of the epilogue," a postscript to his tragedy "the conquest of granada," says: "let any man who understands english, read diligently the works of shakespeare and fletcher, and i dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven." he denounces "the lameness of their plots," made up of some "ridiculous incoherent story,... either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, he writes, in many places, below the dullest writers of our own or any precedent age." of the audiences who could tolerate such matter, he says: "they knew no better, and therefore were satisfied with what they brought. those who call theirs the 'golden age of poetry,' have only this reason for it: that they were then content with acorns before they knew the use of bread," etc. * to show the world how william shakespeare _should_ have written, mr. dryden publishes his own improved version of "troilus and cressida," "with an abjectly fulsome dedication to the earl of sunderland, and a preface," ** in which he is obliging enough to say that the style of shakespeare being "so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure;" that, though "the author seems to have began it with some fire, the characters of 'pandarus' and 'troilus' are promising enough, but, as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or two, he lets 'em fall, and the latter part of the tragedy is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms. the chief persons who give name to the tragedy are left alive. 'cressida' is left alive and is not punished." * "works," edited by malone, vol. ii, p. . ** "troilus and cressida, or truth found too late." written by john dryden, servant to his majesty, london ( to) printed for abel small, at the unicorn at the west end of st. paul's, and jacob tonson, at the judge's head, in chancery lane, near fleet street. . "i have undertaken to remove that heap of rubbish.... i new-modelled the plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved { }those characters which were begun and left unfinished,... made, with no small trouble, an order and connection of the scenes, and... so ordered them that there is a coherence of 'em with one another,... a due proportion of time allowed for every motion,... have refined the language, etc." the same thing was done in , by ravenscroft, who produced an adaptation of "titus andronicus," and boasted "that none in all the author's works ever received greater alterations or additions; the language not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides most of the principal characters heightened, and the plot much increased." john dennis, a critic of that day, declares that shakespeare "knew nothing about the ancients, set all propriety at defiance,... was neither master of time enough to consider, correct, and polish what he had written,... his lines are utterly void of celestial fire," and his verses "frequently harsh and unmusical." he was, however, so interested in the erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered "the merry wives of windsor," and touched up "coriolanus," which he brought out in , under the title of "the invader of his country, or the fatal resentment." the play, however, did not prosper, and he attributed it to the fact that it was played on a wednesday. dean swift, in his "the narrative of dr. robert norris, concerning the strange and deplorable frenzy of john dennis," relates how the said dennis, being in company with lintot, the bookseller, and shakespeare being mentioned as of a contrary opinion to mr. dennis, the latter "swore the said shakespeare was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which gave mr. lintot a very ill opinion of the said shake{ }speare." lord shaftesbury complains, at about the same date, of shakespeare's "rude and unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit." * * mr. de quincy's painful effort to demonstrate that neither dryden nor shaftesbury meant what he said is amusing reading. see his "shakespeare" in the "encyclopaedia britannica." also knight, "studies of shakespeare," p. , as to dr. johnson. thomas rymer knows exactly how othello, which he calls "a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief," ought to have been done. in the first place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a-moor, and that the army should be insulted by his being a soldier. of "desdemona" he says: "there is nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen-maid--no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly." speaking of expression, he writes that "in the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, i may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights of shakespeare." he is indignant that the catastrophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. he would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the bridal couch, and, when othello was killing desde-mona, "the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. then might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, and admiring the beauty of providence freely and truly represented in the theater. then for the unraveling, of the plot, as they call it, never was old { }deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered and be doltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. what can remain with the audience to carry home with them? how can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and till our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the parish clerks in london could ever pretend to?" he then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they would a sermon." with regard to "julius cæsar," he is displeased that shakespeare should have meddled with the romans. he might be "familiar with othello and iago as his own natural acquaintances, but cæsar and brutus were above his conversation." to put them "in gulls' coats and make them jack-puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate--in mr. rymer's eyes. of the well-known scene between brutus and cassius, this critic remarks: "they are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. they are to play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering like two drunken hectors for a twopenny reckoning." rymer calls his book "a short view of tragedy, with some reflections on shakespeare and other practitioners for the stage." hume thought that both bacon and shakespeare showed "a want of simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste and elegance," and that "a reasonable propriety of { }thoughts he (shakespeare) can not at any time uphold." voltaire thought the shakespearean kings "not completely royal." pope (who declared that rymer, just quoted, was "a learned and strict critic"), to show that he was not insensible to the occasional merits of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, by inverted commas, such passages as he thought might be safely admired by the rest of mankind; while richard steele, in "the tatler," * borrows the story of the "taming of the shrew," and narrates it as "an incident occurring in lincolnshire," feeling, no doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing whatever was worth preserving from the clutches of such obscure and obsolete literature! and then came the period when scholars and men of taste were ravished with addison's stilted rhymes, and the six-footed platitudes of pope, and the sesquepedalian derivatives dealt out by old samuel johnson. the shakespearean plays are pronounced by mr. addison ** "very faulty in hard metaphors and forced expressions," and he joins them with "xat. lee," as "instances of the false sublime." * vol. vi, no. . he complains, in number , that the female characters in the play make "so small a figure." ** spectator, ; p. . samuel johnson is reported as saying that william shakespeare never wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it seven) without "making an ass of himself," (in which speech he seems to have followed his namesake without the "h," old ben, in the "discoveries")--backing up his assertion with some very choice specimens of literary criticism. let any one, interested enough in { }the matter to see for himself, take down dr. johnson's own edition of shakespeare, and read his commentaries on the shakespearean text. let him turn, for example, to where he says of "hamlet": _we must allow to the tragedy of "hamlet" the praise of variety. the incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would make a long tale. the scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity,... that includes judicious and instructive observations.... new characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. the pretended madness of hamlet causes much mirth;... the catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. a scheme might easily be formed to kill hamlet with the dagger and laertes with the bowl._ again, of "macbeth": _this play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fiction, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has no nice discriminations of character.... i know not whether it may not be said in defense of some parts which now seem improbable, that in shakespeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions._ again, of "julius cæsar": _of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of brutus and cassius is universally celebrated. but i have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc._ was "hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days when all england bowed at the feet of an unkempt and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of his literary judgment? and did hamlet's "pretended madness" cause "much mirth" to the age, or only to { }samuel johnson? people now-a-days do not sit and giggle over "the pretended madness of hamlet." but, waiving these questions, let him turn to the "rambler," * of this excellent lexicographer, and read him (patiently, if he can), citing the magnificent lines--= `````come thick night ```and pall thee in the dun nest smoke of hell; ```that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, ```nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark ```to cry "_hold, hold!"_= as an example of "poetry debased by mean expressions;" because "dun" is a "low" expression," seldom heard but in the stable;" "knife" an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employment; and asking "who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt _peeping_ through the blanket of the dark!" * no. . let the reader look on a little further, and find this fossil-scanning machine telling off the spondees and dactyls in the dramas (to ascertain if the cæsura was exactly in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and counting the unities up to three, to see if he could approve of what the ages after him were to worship! if, haply, this shakespeare (although he _might_ have devised a scheme to kill laertes with the bowl and hamlet with the dagger, or _might_ have thrown a little more fire into the quarrel with brutus and cassius) could be admitted to sit at the feet of addison, with his sleepy and dreary "campaign;" or pope, with his metrical proverbs about "man;" or even the aforesaid samuel johnson himself, with his rhymed dic{ }tionaries about the "vanity of human wishes," and so on. let him find the old lexicographer admitting, in his gracious condescension, that "the tempest" "is sufficiently regular;" of "measure for measure" that "the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the "midsummer night's dream" was "well written;" that the style of the "merchant of venice" was "easy:" but that in "as you like it" "an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson" is unhappily lost. the "winter's tale" is "entertaining;" in "king john" he finds "a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters," remarking that "the lady's grief is very affecting." of "troilus and cressida" the old formalist says, that it "is one of the most correctly written of shakespeare's plays;" of "coriolanus," that it "is one of the most amusing." but, he says, that "antony and cleopatra" is "low" and "without any art of connection or care of disposition." he dismisses "cymbeline" with the remark that he does not care "to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility; upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation." he is pleased to approve of "romeo and juliet," because "the incidents are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires" and, while on the whole, approving of "othello," he can not help remarking that, "had the scene opened in cyprus, and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity." and so on every-where! let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these mighty and deathless monographs to-day! let him { }imagine a better illustration, if he can, of what our johnson's friend pope called--in long meter--"fools rushing; in where angels feared to tread!" and let him confess to himself that these were not the times nor the men to raise the question. is it not the fact that, until our own century, the eyes of the world were darkened, and men saw in these shakespearean dramas only such stage plays, satisfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as might have been written--not by "the soul" of any age; not by a man "myriad-minded" not by a "morning-star of song," or a "dear son of memory," but--by a clever playwright? the sort of days when an addison could have been pensioned for his dreary and innocent "campaign," and a mr. pye made poet-laureate of the laud where an unknown pen had once written "hamlet were, consequently, _not_ the days for the discovery with which this century has crowned itself--namely, the discovery that the great first of poets lived in the age when england and america were one world by themselves, and that they must now draw together again to search for the master "who came"--to use, with all reverence, the words of judge holmes--"upon our earth, knowing all past, all present, and all future, to be leader, guide, and second gospel of mankind." but the fullness of time has come, and we now know that, whoever was the poet that he "kept," he was of quite another kidney than the manager of the theater, "william shakespeare, who employed him to write plays, and who wrote revelations and gospels instead. if we were interested to inquire what manner of man mr. manager shakespeare was, we have only to { }look about us among the managers of theaters in this latter half of our nineteenth century. let us take mr. wallack or mr. daly, both of whom arrange plays for the stages of their own theaters, for example; or, better yet, take mr. lion boucieault, who is an actor as well as a manager, and is, moreover, as successful in his day as was william shakespeare in his. mr. boucieault has, so far, produced about one hundred and thirty-seven successful plays. mr. william shakespeare produced about a hundred less. all of mr. boucicault's plays show that gentleman's skillful hand in cutting, expanding, arranging, and setting for the stage; and in the representation of them, mr. boucieault has himself often participated. in like manner, mr. shakespeare, the manager, we are told by tradition, often assisted at the representation of the dramas produced on his boards, playing the ghost in "hamlet," * and the king in "henry vi," which indicate very readily that his place in the "stock" was that of a "walking (or utility) gentleman." * and played it, it is thought by some, so wretchedly that he made "the gods" hoot. at any rate, in a pamphlet published by lodge, in , "witt's miserie and the world's madness; discovering the devil's incarnate of this age," a devil named "hate-vertue" is described as looking "as pale as the vizard of the ghost, which cried so miserably at the theatre like an oister-wife, 'hamlet--revenge.'" but perhaps shakespeare did not play the ghost that night. shakespeare also played "old knowell," jonson's "every man in his humor," "adam," in "as you like it," and, according to jonson, apart in the latter's "legacies," in . we happen to know, also, that mr. shakespeare rewrote for the stage what his unknown poet, poets, or friends composed, from the tolerable hearsay testimony of his fellow { }actor, ben jonson, who tells us that he remembers to have heard the players say that the stage copies of the plays were written in shakespeare's autograph, and were all the more available on that account, because he (shakespeare), was a good penman, in that "whatever he penned, he never blotted line." * mr. boucicault, while claiming the full credit to which he is entitled, is quite too clever, as well as too conscientious to set up for an original author or a poet, as well as a playwright. neither does shakespeare (as we have already said), anywhere appear to have ever claimed to be a poet, or even to have taken to himself--what we may, however, venture to ascribe to him--the merit of the stage-setting of the dramatic works, which, having been played at his theater, we collectively call the "shakespearean plays" to-day. why, then, to begin with, should we not conceive of mr. manager shakespeare discharging the same duties as mr. wal-lack, mr. daly, or mr. boucicault? as very much--from the necessities of his vocation--the same sort of man as either of them? * post, part iii, the jonsonian testimony. there is scarcely any evidence either way; but the fact that the actors were in the habit of receiving their fair copy of these plays from the manager's--william shakespeare's--own hand, seems to make it evident that he did not originally compose them. indeed, if shakespeare had been their author, well-to-do and bustling manager as he was, he would probably have intrusted their transcription to some subordinate or supernumerary; or, better yet, would have kept a playwright of experience to set his compositions for the { }stage, to put in the necessary localisms, "gags," and allusions to catch the ear of the penny seats. such a division of labor is imperative to-day, and was imperative then--or at least to suppose that it was not, is to suppose that of his dozen or so of co-managers, william shakespeare was the one who did all the work, while the others looked on. but, it is surmised that shakespeare was his own playwright; took the dramas and rewrote them for the actors; he inserted the requisite business, the exits, and entrances, and--when necessary--suited the reading to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, according as he happened to be fat or lean. * * it may be noted that the line, "he's fat and scant of breath," does not occur in the early and imperfect edition of "hamlet" of . was it added to suit burbadge? and was there a further change made also to suit mr. burbadge, the leading tragedian of the time? in the edition of , the grave-digger says of yorick's skull: looke you, here's a skull hath bin here this dozen year, let me see, ever since our last king hamlet slew fortenbrasse in combat, young hamlet's father, he that's mad. but in all subsequent editions, the grave-digger says: "here's a skull now; this skull has lain i' the earth three and twenty years." the effect of this alteration is to add considerably to hamlet's age. "alas, poor yorick!" he says, "i knew him, horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. here hung those lips that i have kissed, i know not how oft," etc. how old, then, was hamlet when yorick died? but hamlet's age is even more distinctly fixed by other lines which do not occur in the early edition of : _hamlet._--how long hast thou been a grave-maker? _first clown_.--of all the days of the year, i came to 't that day that our last king hamlet o'ercame fortenbras. _hamlet._--how long is that since? _first clown._--can not tell that? every fool can tell that; it was the very day that young hamlet was born; he that is mad and sent to england. and presently he adds: i have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years. mr. marshall writes: "it would appear that shakespeare added these details, which tend to prove hamlet to have been thirty years old, for much the same reason as he inserted the line, 'he's fat and scant of breath,' namely, in order to render hamlet's age and personal appearance more in accordance with those of the great actor, burbadge, who personated him." the edition of is generally accounted a piratical copy of the first sketch of the play.--_all the year found._ { }such was the employment which fell to the part of william shakespeare, in the division of labor among the management in which he was a partner, and the resulting manuscript was what ben jonson's friends told him of. for nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the poet, whoever he was, produced "hamlet" one evening, "macbeth" on another, and "julius cæsar" on another, without blotting or erasing, changing, pruning or tiling a line, and then handed his original drafts to the players next morning to learn their parts from! this is not the way that poems are written (nor, we may add, the way theaters are managed). the greater the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash their pens over the paper when the frenzy is in possession of them. and besides, the fact that there exist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and diverse readings of the shakespearean text, does very clearly show that their author or authors did, at different times, vary and alter the construction of the text { }as taste or fancy dictated, and, therefore, that the manuscripts ben jonson's friends saw and told him of (and heminges & condell, as far as their testimony is of any value, confirm jonson, for they assert that what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have received from him "scarce a blot in his papers", were the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of the shakespearean plays. with the exception of ben jonson (to whose panegyric we devote a chapter in its place further on), the contemporaries of william shakespeare, who celebrated his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have been the myriad-minded oceanic (to use coleridge's adjectives) genius which we conceive him now-a-days--which he _must_ have been to have written the works now assigned to him. let any one doubting this statement open the pages of dr. ingleby's "shakespeare's centurie of prayse," a work claimed by its compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment or criticism on shakespeare, which dr. ingleby has been able to unearth in print, dating anywhere within one hundred years of shakespeare's death. we have industriously turned every page of this work, and will submit to any other who will do the same, the question whether it contains a line which exhibits william shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful actor, a poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer of plays, or whether--when eulogistic of the plays called his seven years after his death (a very different list, by the way, than the one assigned him during his life), rather than biographical as to the man, they are of any more value as _evidence_ than gray's or milton's magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their { }only familiarity was through report, rumor, or impression derived from the ever immortal works. for, like gray, coleridge, emerson--all that john milton knew about william shakespeare was pure hearsay, derived from local report or perusal of the shakespearean plays ("a book invalued," he calls them). even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly conceive milton--a puritan, and a blind puritan at that--as much of a play-goer or boon companion of actors and managers. but we are not called upon to imagine any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact, john milton was exactly seven years and four months old when william shakespeare died. and so, what is called "the milton testimony," upon examination, proves to be no testimony at all, but only hearsay--venerable, perhaps--but hearsay, nevertheless; * as utterly immaterial as his "marbling his native wood notes wild"--a line that might be, not inaptly, applied to robert burns, but which suggests almost any thing except the stately and splendid pages of the shakespearean opera--to which we have before alluded as justifying us, indeed, in wondering if the puritan poet had ever gone so far, before formulating his opinion, as to open the book assigned to the shakespeare he wrote of. * milton was the enemy of all the ilk. "this would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rimers and playwriters be," he says in his essays "of education," in . and so, in the first place, there was no great call or occasion for discussion as to the authorship of the shakespearean dramas in the days when they first began to be known by the public; and, as for mr. manager shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, { }they testified to what they had heard, and, if they knew any thing to the contrary, they kept it to themselves. if his friends, jealous of his reputation, they were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if the "stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread at his hand, and were not eager to offend him. if--as we shall notice further on--a wise few did suspect the harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did not credit them. and so, in the second place, the times were not ripe for the truth to be known, because there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and nobody to whom it could be a revelation. to suppose that william shakespeare wrote the plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle was vouchsafed to the race of man in london in the course of certain years of the reign of elizabeth. if, however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to consider that men and managers and theaters in the age of elizabeth were very much the same sort of creatures and places that we find them now; that, among the habitues of the globe and blackfriars theaters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange for the entre of the green-room; and that managers in those days as in these, were always on the alert for novelties, and drew their material--in the crude, if necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they were so fortunate--from wherever they could find it; if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings who frequented master william shakespeare's side doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, { }at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, moreover, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the giants of his day--to say nothing of the theater-managers--did not and could not dream)--if, we say, we consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, but expect only the ordinary course of human events. if william shakespeare were an unknown quantity, like homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be different. for, just as homer's writings are so magnificent as to justify ascribing to him--so far as mere power to produce them goes--any other contemporary literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to william shakespeare are splendid enough to safely credit him with the compositions of any body else; of even so great a man as bacon, for example. but william shakespeare is no unknown quantity--except that we lose sight of him for the few years between his leaving stratford, and (as part proprietor of the largest london play-house) accepting ben jonson's play of "every man in his humour"--we know pretty well all about him. there are half a hundred biographies extant--new ones being written every day--and any one of them may be consulted as to the manner of life william shakespeare's was. the breakneck marriage bond, which waived all formalities, the consent of any body's parents, justification of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he could only be fast married; the beer-bouts, youthful and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, sir thomas lucy thought, to justify instructing a war{ }wick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all these are matter of record, amply photographing for-us william shakespeare in stratford. then the hiatus--and this same lad appears, prosperous, and in the great town; sending home money to his impoverished family--part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold estates in london--a grant of arms for his father--the great house in his native village for his own homestead; investing in the tithings of his county, and beginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his father--in his poverty--had allowed himself to forfeit by foreclosure. surely we will not go far astray if we set it down that some pretty hard work at what this rising lad found to do in london, and learned to do best, has filled up those unrecorded years! was all this money made by writing plays for the globe, or by working on bacon's novum organum, or by other literary labor? was that the hard work william shakespeare found to do, and laid up money at, in the interval between his last crop of wild oats at stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs in london? if it were, it is curious that no rumor or tradition of it comes from stratford. nothing travels quite so fast in rural neighborhoods as a reputation for "book learning," while the local worthy, who has actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in his vicinage. now, william shakespeare died one of the richest men--if not the richest--in all stratford. it is strange that the gossip and goodwives, who so loaded themselves with his boyish freaks and frailties, should never have troubled themselves about his manly pursuits and accomplishments. the only english compositions he is credited within stratford gossip are one { }or two excessively conventional epitaphs on elias james, john a coombe, and others--the latter of which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with warwickshire patois. he sprang from a family so illiterate that they could not write their own name; and, moreover, lived and died utterly indifferent as to how anybody else wrote it--whether with an "x" or a "g," a "c" or a "ks." and as he found them, so he left them. for, although william shakespeare enjoyed an income of $ , (present value of money) at his death, he never had his own children taught to read and write, and his daughter judith signed her mark to her marriage bond. that the rustic youth, whom local traditions variously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a student, a reader, a poet--as ever having been seen with a hook in his hand--driven by poverty to shift for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously given by mr. malone and mr. grant white, are exceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman about town, southampton, is almost incredible. but, it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhuman literary talents. southampton never was suspected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to make him forget the gulf between his nobility and that of a peasant lad--who (even if we disbelieve his earliest biographers as to the holding horses and carrying links) must necessarily have been employed in the humblest pursuits at the outset of his london { }career. but yet, according to the various "chronologies" (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works into william shakespeare's short life, so as to tally with the dates--when known--of their production, only vary inconsiderably after all), the stratford boy hardly puts in his appearance in london before he presents lord southampton, as the "first heir of his invention," with--if not the most mature--at least the most carefully polished production that william shakespeare's name was ever signed to; and, moreover, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of rhetoric as english letters has ever produced down to this very day. now, even if, in stratford, the lad had mastered all the latin and greek extant; this poem, dedicated to southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. the genius of robert burns found its expression in the _idiom_ of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. when _he_ came to london, and tried to warble in urban english, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. but william shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of warwickshire; without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of english, unmixed with the faintest trace of that warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke--the language of his own fireside! as a matter of fact, _english_, was a much rarer accomplishment in the days when thomas jenkins and thomas hunt were masters of stratford grammar school, than greek and latin. children, in those days, were put at their hic, hæc, hoc at an age when we { }send them to kindergartens. but no master dreamed of drilling them in their own vernacular. admitting william shakespeare to have been born a poet, he must also have been born a master of the arbitrary rules of english rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and prosody, as well, to have written that one poem. but, say the shakespeareans, even if william did not study english at the stratford grammar school, or read it in those crowded days when earning his bread by menial employment in stranger london, he had an opportunity to study lyly, nash, greene, peele, chettle, and the rest. but the shakespearean vocabulary--like the whole canon of the plays--is a thing apart--unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any of these. _these_ were satisfied to write for the stages of the barns called "play-houses," and for their audiences, which--according to all reports--were decidedly indifferent as to scholarship. _these_ might introduce a frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to make him french; or a scotchman, but they never stopped to make him scotch. but even if william shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, was author of that intellectual dane, over-refined in a german university of metaphysics, he called hamlet; or of that crafty italian, named iago; or of that roman iceberg, brutus--it is quite as difficult to conceive either the skylarking boy in stratford, where there were no libraries, and his father too poor (not daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest for debt) to buy books; or the self-made man toiling from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of fortune--with leisure to study the characteristics of race and nationality--as acquiring all the grandeur of dic{ }tion, insight into the human heart (which, at least, is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we call his to-day. even if we go no further than the "venus and adonis"--appearing at a date preluding a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might even assume--how could that poem have been written by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or the penniless lad earning his bread in stranger london, at the first shift at hand--with no entre to the great libraries, and no leisure to use one if he had it? ben jonson spent some years at cambridge before he was taken away and set at brickmaking--he is said to have been a very studious brickmaker, working, according to fuller, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other. as to his career as a soldier--a soldier, when not actually in the field or on the march, may find considerable opportunity for rumination; and, when lying in jail, he would certainly have ample leisure for his greek and roman. but jonson wrote for the elizabethan theaters; he lived and died hungry and poor, a borrower, over his ears in debt to the last. william shakespeare, his contemporary, loaned ben jonson money; rose rapidly from penury to affluence; made his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon; bought himself the most splendid house in stratford (so splendid as to be deemed worthy a royal residence by queen henrietta); invested in outlying lands; speculated in tithes, and lived, until his death--according to dominie ward--at the rate of $ , a year. we are familiar enough with these stories of self-made men (so-called) in our daily newspapers. let those who will, believe that william shakespeare accumulated this splendid fortune, _not_ by the success{ }ful management of the best appointed and affected theater in london, but by writing plays for its stage! and--at the same time--conceived, evolved from his own inner consciousness, all the learning which other playwrights (like ben jonson and the rest) were obliged--like ordinary mortals--to get out of books! the only efforts made to account for this wealth flowing into the coffers of a poet, have been mere surmises, like the story of southampton's munificence, and of the royal favor of king james, who wrote the manager a letter with his own hand. but neither of these stories happens to be contemporary with william shakespeare himself. the first was an afterthought of davenant, who was ten years old when shakespeare died; and who is not accepted as an authority, even as to his own pedigree, by the very commentators who most eagerly seize upon and swear to his southampton fiction. the other is not even hearsay, but the bold invention of bernard lintot, who published an edition of the plays in . doubtless, as has been the ambition of all the commentators, before mr. collier and since, lintot was bound to be at least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to invent that fact himself, he vouchsafes, as authority for this tale of the royal letter, however, the statement of "a credible person now living," who saw the letter itself in the possession of davenant: in the teeth of the certainty that, had davenant ever possessed such a letter, davenant would have taken good care that the world should never hear the last of it: and coyly preserves the incognito of the "credible person," whom, however, oldys conjectures must have been, if any body, the duke of buckingham. { }but, miracles aside, to consider william shakespeare as the author of the shakespearean drama--for that he has christened it, and that it will go forever by his name, we concede--involves us in certain difficulties that seem altogether insurmountable. in the first place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been open to the matchless message of the shakespearean text, and who found themselves drawn to conclude that such a man as william shakespeare once lived, were amazed to discover that the very evidence which forced them to that conclusion, also proved conclusively that that individual _could not_ have written the dramas since known by his name. coleridge, schlegel, goethe, jean paul richter, carlyle, palmerston, emerson, hallam, delia bacon, gervinus, and, doubtless, many more, clearly saw that the real shakespeare was not the shakespeare we have described. "in spite of all the biographies, 'ask your own hearts,' says coleridge--'ask your own common sense to conceive the possibility of this man being... the anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. what! are we to have miracles in sport? or (i speak reverently) does god choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?'" "if there was a shakespeare of earth, as i suspect," says hallam--alluding to the fact that all the commentators told him of the man shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master he was cited--"there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to learn more." * ** * "notes to shakespeare's works," iv., .--holmes "authorship of shakespeare," . ** "bacon and shakespeare," by w. h. smith, p. . { }this evidence was of three sorts: . official records and documents; . the testimony of contemporaries; and, . that general belief, reputation, and tradition, which, left to itself in the manner we have indicated, has grown into the presumption of nearly three hundred years. we will not recapitulate the well-thumbed records, nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which together gave rise to the presumption. but the dilemma presented to the student was in this wise: by the parish records it appeared that a man child was christened in stratford church april th, (old style) , by the name william. he was the son of one john shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by either, or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or glover--three not incompatible pursuits variously assigned him--was, at different times, a man of some means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one occasion, even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his son's birth, owner in freehold of two plots of ground in stratford village, on one of which plots a low-raftered house now stands, which has come to be a mecca to which pilgrims from the whole world reverently repair. the next official record of the son so born to john shakespeare is the marriage-bond to the bishop of worcester; enabling this son to wed one anne hathaway, his senior in years, which bond remains to this day on file in the office of the prerogative court of canterbury. later on, the son, having become a person of means, purchases for his father a grant of arms; and (the name being shakespeare) the heralds allot him an escutcheon on which is represented a shaking spear (symbolically treated)--a device which, under the circumstances, { }did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to any theory about ancestors at hastings or among the saracens. the increasing wealth of the son leaves its traces in the title-deeds to and records of purchase of freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment in meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits incidental to these. local tradition--which in like cases is perforce admitted as evidence--supplements all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms it, until we have an all but complete biography. this biography the world knows by heart. it does not esteem the boy william shakespeare the less because he was a boy--because--in the age and period reserved for that crop--he sowed and garnered his "wild oats." it has reason to believe him to have been much more than a mere wayward youth. aubrey ("old aubrey," "arch-gossip aubrey," the shakespeareans call him, probably because he wrote his sketch fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prodigy, that "he exercised his father's trade--but, when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech," etc., etc. nor is there anything in the record of his mature and latter years--of his investments in tithes, and messuages, and homesteads--of his foreclosures and suits for money loaned and malt delivered--of his begetting children and dying; leaving--still with finical detail and nice and exact economy--an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he tenderly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the { }mother of his children--any thing at which the world should sneer. if he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of it. besides such contracts and business papers as he must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his name to nothing except a declaration of debt against a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and a not over-creditable last will and testament. this is his own business, and who has any thing to say? but, when our biographers go a step further and demand that we shall accept this as the record of a demigod; of the creator of a "hamlet" and an "othello;" and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to london--worked himself up (as he must have worked himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in that business and calling earned money and kept it--as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the "hamlet," the ".julius cæsar," the "othello," and all the splendid pages of the shakespearean drama--some of us have been heard to demur! the scholar's dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by age, with these records, which are as authentic and beyond question as the internal evidence itself. and, once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the dilemma of the whole world. let any one try to conceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employment to-day--when the theater is at its best, and half the world play-goers--precarious for capital and industry; but in those days an experiment, in every { }sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in securing and saving not only a competency, but a fair fortune; in the mean time--while engaged in this engrossment of business--writing isabella's magnificent appeal to the duke's deputy, angelo; or cardinal wolsey's last soliloquy! or conceive of the man who gave the wife of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a neighbor for malt delivered, penning antony's oration above cæsar, or the soliloquy of macbeth debating the murder of duncan, the invocation to sleep in "king henry iv.," or the speech of prospero, or the myriad sweet, or noble, or tender passages that nothing but a human heart could utter! let him try to conceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurdity of the belief that these lines were written by the lessee and joint-manager of a theater, and he will examine the evidence thereafter for corroboration, and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind, at least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, probable, or safe to have presented itself. then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the will. this is by far the completest and best authenticated record we have of the man william shakespeare, testifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but to his character as a man; and--most important of all to our investigation--to his exact worldly condition. here we have his own careful and ante-mortem schedule of his possessions, his chattels real and chattels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety bedstead under his roof. and we may be pretty sure that it is an accurate and exhaustive list. but if he { }were--as well as a late theater-manager and country gentleman--an author and the proprietor of dramas that had been produced and found valuable, how about these plays? were they not of as much value, to say the least, as a damaged bedstead? were they not, as a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual source of his wealth? how does he dispose of them? does our thrifty shakespeare forget that he has written them? is it not the fact, and is it not reason and common sense to conceive, that, _not_ having written them, they have passed out of his possession along with the rest of his theatrical property, along with the theater whose copyrights they were, and into the hands of others? this is the greatest difficulty and stumbling-block for the shakespeareans. if their hero had written these plays, of which the age of elizabeth was so fond, and in whose production he had amassed a fortune--that he should have left a will, in items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them whatever should be made, even their most zealous pundits can not step over, and so are scrupulous not to allude to it at all. this piece of evidence is unimpeachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, chattels, chattel-interests, or things in action, william shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. tradition is gossip. records are scant and niggardly. contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, but here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with the foreshadowed solemnity of another world, is the calm, deliberate, ante mortem statement of the man himself. we perceive what becomes of his secondhand bedstead. what becomes of his plays? is it possible that, after all these years' experience of their { }value--in the disposition of a fortune of which they had been the source and foundation--he should have forgotten their very existence? but if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to the testimony of contemporaries, what do we find there? very little more of the man william shakespeare, but precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged authorship of the plays. we find that the country lad william, the village prodigy with whom the gossips concerned themselves, was no milksop and no joseph; that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal age; that he poached--shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned their owner when punished for the offense; went on drinking-bouts with his equals of the neighboring villages; and, finally---just as any clever, country lad, who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies over the calves he slaughtered might and probably would do to-day, and which is precisely what his earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, howe, asserts that he did do--wound up with following a company of strolling players to the metropolis; where he began his prosperous career by holding gentlemen's horses at the theater door, while the gentlemen themselves went inside to witness the performance. we turn to the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the beer-drinking, with relief. it is pleasant to think that the pennywise old man was--at least in his youth--human. a little poaching and a little beer do nobody any harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful reading than the record of a parsimonious freeholder taking the law of his poorer neighbor who defaults in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of malt. { }there is a village school in stratford, and mr. de-quincy, and all his predecessors and successors who have preferred to construct pretty romances, and call them "lives of william shakespeare," rather than to accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite in making their hero attend its sessions. their assertions are bravely seconded by the cicerones and local guides of stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show you the identical desk which shakespeare, the lad, occupied at that grammar school; and at shottery, the same guides show us the chair in which our hero sat while courting mistress anne; just as, in wittemburg, these same gentry point out the house where hamlet lived when a student in the university there; or, in scotland, the spot where fitz-james and roderick dhu fought. but, william could not have attended this school very perseveringly, since he turns up in london at about the age that country lads first go to school. in london, he seems to have risen from nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theater. here, just as young lords and swells take theater managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became intimate with greater men than himself, and so enlarged his skirts and his patronage, as it was the part of a thrifty man to do. at this time there were no circulating libraries in london, no libraries, accessible to the general public, of any sort, in fact; no booksellers at every corner, no magazines or reviews; no public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming with needy students; even the literature of the age was a bound-up book to all except professional readers. but, for all that, this william shakes-{ }peare--this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a term at stratford school (admitting that he went where the romancers put him), cuts off to london at the heels of a crew of strolling players--who begins business for himself somewhere (perhaps as "link-boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an humble end of some employment) and, by saving his pence, works up to be actually a part-proprietor in two theaters, and ultimately a rich man--begins to possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the past which, even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to acquire. he did the work of a lifetime. like mr. stewart, in new york, he began penniless, and by vigilance, shrewdness, and economy, rose to respectability, affluence, and fortune. but, as we could not imagine mr. stewart, gentleman as he was, writing all the tags and labels on his goods or making with his own hand every pen-stroke necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or poems or philosophical essays on the manufacture of the silks and linens and cottons he handled while slowly coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his overworked brain while overseeing the business that was evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of william shakespeare doing all the pen-work on the dramas he coins his money by producing on his boards. how much less can we conceive of this man composing, not only poems of his own, but a literature of his own--drawing his material from the classic writers (and notably from those greek plays not at that time translated, and only accessible in the originals and in { }manuscript), from legal works, "caviare to the general;" from philosophical treatises not known to have been available even for reference; writing of the circulation of the blood in the human system--a fact not discovered until years after his own death! let us find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all known wisdom; ascertaining the past, prophesying of the future; laying down off-hand the philosopher's, the lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the scholar's craft and art, which only these themselves, by long years of study, might attain to--and all this while coining a fortune in the management of two theaters; to have solved, in short, the riddle of the sphinx and all the as yet unspinning whirligigs of time! verily, a greater riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy--master shakespeare. thomas chatterton found his wealth in a musty chest in an old muniment room. but here the chest and imminent room were not in existence till years after the boy shakespeare has been a man, and traveled on to his grave. it is no solution of this riddle to say the lad was a genius, and that genius is that which soars, while education plods. * * this class of evidence can not be recapitulated in the space of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well to refer to the chapter on the attainments of the author of shakespeare, at pages - holmes's "authorship of shakespeare," third edition. genius itself can not account for the shakespearean plays. genius may portray, but here is a genius that not only portrayed that which after his death became fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten; the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, and whose records had slept sealed in dead languages, in manuscripts beyond his reach! genius, intuition, { }is beyond education indeed. it may prophesy of the future or conceive of the eternal; but only knowledge can draw record of the past. if the author of shakespeare had been a genius only, his "julius cæsar" might have been a masterpiece of tragedy, or pathos, or of rage; but it would have portrayed an ideal rome, not the real one. his "comedy of errors" might have been matchless in humor and sparkling in contretemps, but, three years afterward, on translating a hidden manuscript of plautus, the comedies would not have been found quite identical in argument. * * viz: with the menæchmiof plautus. in "pericles," allusion is made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussable class of cyprians, which it is fair to say could not be found mentioned in a dozen books of which we know the names to-day, and which, from its very nature, is treated of in no encyclopaedia or manual of information, or of popular antiquities. how could any one but an antiquarian scholar, in those days, have possessed himself--not in this alone, but in a thousand similar instances--of such minute, accurate, and occult information? the precocity of a child may be intuitive. but no babe learns its alphabet spontaneously or by means of its genius; but out of a book, because the characters are arbitrary. pascal, when a child, discovered the eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out in chalk upon the floor; but he did not know that the curved figures he drew were called "circles," or that the straight ones were called "lines;" so he named them "rounds" and "bars." he discovered what was immutable and could be found by the searcher, but his genius could not reinvent arbitrary language that had been invented before his birth. in short, to have possessed and to have written down, in advance, the learning and philosophy of three centuries to come, { }might have been the gift of prophecy (such a gift as has ere this fallen from we know not where upon the sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable, genius. but who can tell of more than he knows? second sight is not retrospective. and to have testified of the forgotten past, without access to its record, was as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing wealth of the shakespearean page is above the creation of an unlettered man of business in the age of elizabeth or of victoria. here is the dilemma with which the shakespear-eans struggle: that in those years the man william shakespeare _did_ live, and was a theatrical manager and actor in london; and precisely the same evidence which convinces us that this man did live in those days, convinces the world to-day--or must convince it, if it will only consent to look at it--that the dramas we call shakespearean were so called because they were first published from the stage of william shakespeare's theaters in london, just as we call certain readings of the classics the "delphin classics," because brought together for a dauphin of prance; or certain paintings "düsseldorf paintings," because produced in the düsseldorf school. if, however, in the course of ages it should come to be believed that the dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named düsseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time would come to set the world right. if there had been no dauphin and no düsseldorf, we might have assigned those names to a power which might have produced the poems or the pictures. if there had been no william shakespeare, we might easily have idealized one who could have written the plays. but, unhap{ }pily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in possession of that name, who declines to assign it to another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the shakespeareans want. and, moreover, once the presumption is waived and the question is opened again; there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic can not vault. but did none of william shakespeare's contemporaries suspect the harmless deception? there is no proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or to have ever pretended to have been, the original author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. let us hasten to do william shakespeare the justice to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his having asserted a falsehood. but, if he did so pretend to his intimates, and if the dramas we now call "shakespearean" were actually produced, in those days, on william shakespeare's own stage, under that pretension, certainly some of them must have wagged their heads in secret. surely, ben johnson, who bears testimony that his friend shakespeare had "small latin and less greek," must have queried a little within himself as to where certain things he read in the text of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that he did not know perfectly well where they _did_ come from. it seems more than probable, as we have already said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, that they were claimed as shakespeare's compositions { }--had more cue to wink at than to expose the humbug. we find, indeed, that one, robert greene, by name, did protest against "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, beeing an absolute johannes factotum, is in his owne conceyt the only shake-scene in a countrey." that is to say, in language more intelligible at this day, that, being a sort of jack-of-all-trades around the theater--holding horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors--he (shakespeare) came in time to consider himself a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. doubtless greene was inspired by jealousy--for he was a writer of plays for the stage himself--in making and publishing this sneer. but, as he was endeavoring to make his remarks so personal to shakespeare as to be readily recognized, he would not have alluded to him except by some well-known characteristic. so he calls him a "jack-of-all-trades," that is, a man who did a little of everything. is a jack-of-all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, and seer, who wrote the shakespearean drama--the ideal of the sliakespeareans? according to the chronicles and the record, then, one william shakespeare, a "general utility" actor, and _johannes factotum_, lived and thrived in london, some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. at about that date a book is likewise written. who are these who find this book, and make this man to fit it? { }verily, there are none so blind as those who are determined not to see! to have written that book one must needs have been, let us say--for he was at least all these--a philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a traveler, a student of bible history! strange to say, at the time this book--in portions--is making its appearance, there are two men living, each of whom is a poet, a philosopher, a student of laws and of physics, and a traveler over the by-ways of many lands beside his own. one of them is known to have read the bible, then what we understand to-day by a "current work." together, these two men possess in themselves about all of their age with which subsequent ages care to connect themselves. but it is not suggested that these two men, bacon and raleigh, might have written the book for which an author is wanted. we are to pass them by, and sift the dust at their illustrious feet, if haply we may find a fetich to fall down before and worship! must the man that wrote the dramas have visited italy? mr. halliwell and others inform us of shakespeare's visit to verona, venice, and florence. must shakespeare have been at the bar? my lord campbell writes us a book to show his familiarity with the science of jurisprudence. (that book has traveled far upon a lordly name. it is an authority until it happens to be read. once we open it, it is only to find that, the passages of the shakespearean dramas which stamp their author's knowledge of the common law are the passages his lordship does not cite, while over the slang and dialect which any smatterer might have memorized from turning the pages of an attorney's hornbook, his lordship gloats and postulates and re{ }lapses into ecstasy). must shakespeare have been a physician? there have not been wanting the books to prove him that. * and, crowning this long misrule of absurdity, comes an authority out of philadelphia, to assure us that the youth shakespeare, on quitting his virgin stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous to avoid the glittering temptations of london; that he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided the paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept himself at home, his only companion being the family bible, which he read most ardently and vigorously! ** * "the medical acquirement of shakespeare." by c. w. stearns, m. d. new york, . shakespeare's medical knowledge. by dr. bucknill. london. . ** "shakespeare and the bible." by john bees, etc., etc. philadelphia: claxton, remsen & haffelfinger, . we commend to readers of this paper this latest authority, and can not forbear noting a few of his "discoveries." mr. rees has found out (p. ) not only that william shakespeare wrote the lines-- "-------not a hair perished, on their sustaining garments not a blemish, but fresher than before." ("the tempest," i. ) but that he took them from deuteronomy viii. . and in acts xxvii. : there shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you. in which the parallelism is in the word hair!!! or, again (p. ) that the lines: though they are of monstrous shape,... their manners are more gentle, kind, than of our human generation you shall find many, nay, almost any ("the tempest," iii. ), are taken from the following: in the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, whose name was publius; who received us, and lodged us three days courteously,... who also honored us with many honors; and when we departed, they laded us with such things as were necessary.--(acts xxviii. - . in which--unless it be in the fact that one of these passages is in an act and the other in acts--the reader must find the parallelism for himself, without assistance from mr. rees. shakespeare, mr. rees tells us, never neglected his bible, because (p. ) "he was indebted to one whose love added a bright charm to the holy passages she taught him to read and study--to his mother was shakespeare indebted for early lessons of piety, and a reverence for a book from whose passages in afterlife he wove himself a mantle of undying fame!" it is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his latest authority has truth for his color and testimony { }for his oil. the picture has at least the freshness and charm of utter novelty! the work of shakespeare-making goes on. the facts are of record. we may ran as we read them! but rather let us, out of reverence for the errors of our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the ideal of malone, of halliwell and de quincy, of grant white, and of ten thousand more, who prefer to write their biographies of william shakespeare, not in the first person, like baron munchhausen, nor in the second person, like the memoirs of sully, but in the probable and supposititious person of "it is possible he did _this_," and "it is likely he did _that._" let those who will, disparage the boy and man william shakespeare, who married and made an honest woman of anne hathaway of shottery; left home to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the slender household store; used his first wealth to make a gentleman of his father; and who, with what followed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's { }banks, where--"procul negotiis"--in the evening of life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. but that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we call the shakespearean drama, let those bring proof who can. { } part ii. the appeal to history. [illustration: ] ut, having taken the liberty of doubting whether--as matter of record--one william shakespeare, of stratford town, in england, sometime part-proprietor of the globe and blackfriars theaters in london, could have very well been himself and the author of what are known popularly to-day as "the plays of shakespeare," although there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might have cast them into something of the acting form they possess as preserved to us; and having come to the conclusion that--once this presumption is lifted--all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of the actual william shakespeare is actually evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record: let us proceed to inquire whether--on review--a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted by those certain considerations and matters, by way of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface whenever these waters are troubled--which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of an extra shakesperean authorship of the dramas can so infallibly anticipate. granted that the shakespeare will does not prove the testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in the nature of copyrights; granted that the story of the deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely { }rejected by the shakespereans, because conceived to be unworthy of the image they set up; granted that the fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar fact in the days of william shakespeare; that the "menæchmi" of plautus; that iago's speech in "othello" and the stanza of berni's _orlando innamorato_ were mere coincidences; or, better yet, admit that there was an english version of the italian poem in shakespeare's day *--admit, if required--that the "hamlet" of saxo, had been translated; that the law in "the * when iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little variation, this stanza of the _orlando innamorato_ of which poem, to this day, there is no english version. "chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello e simil cose, ha qualcha discrezione, e patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello; ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione e de l'altrai patiehe si fa bello, si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone; e tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno?" as no english translation has been made of the orlando innamorato, i must ask the reader who can not command the original to be content with this rendering of the above stanza: "the man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring, or such a trifle, thieves with moderation, and may be justly called a robberling; but he who takes away a reputation and pranks in feathers from another's wing his deed is robbery--assassination, and merits punishment so much the greater as he to right and truth is more a traitor." shakespeare, by r. g. white, vol. i, p. . ** of saxo grammaticus, the danish historian from whom the plot of the "hamlet" was taken, whalley says, writing in , that "no translation hath yet been made," must have been read by the writer of "hamlet" in the original. "an enquiry into the learning of shakespeare," etc. by peter whalley, a. b., fellow of st. john's college, london. printed for j. waller at the crown and mitre, --and see a suggestion that the "hamlet" came from germany, in a pamphlet "on the double personality of the hamlet of saxo grammaticus, the hamlet of shakespeare. its relation to the german hamlet." by dr. latham, royal society of literature transactions. . also, "shakespeare in germany. alfred cohn. berlin and london. . { }"merchant of venice" was "venetian" instead of "crowner's quest" jaw; admit that william shakespeare "had the advantages in school of something more than the mere rudiments of learning;" admit that "his devotion to his family drove him forth from the rural seclusion of stratford into the battle of the great world;" that the immortal gift of the second-best bed was, (we quote from mr. grant white, who is apparently willing to sacrifice anybody's reputation if he can thereby prove his william to have been a prodigy of virtue no less than of genius), explained by the fact that, at the time of the hurried marriage, a husband had to be provided for mistress hathaway without loss of time, and that little susannah was as much of a surprise to william as to any body--in other words, that anne was "no better than she should be," (oblivious of the fact that "the premature susannah" was william shakespeare's favorite child; that he, at least, never doubted her paternity, for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will);or even that--according to steevens, that testamentary second thought was actually "a mark of rare confidence and devotion;" granted all these--if they have anything to do with the question--and a dozen more, and we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, { }the mountain of probability, nothing less than the complete dilapidation and disappearance of which could leave room for substitution, in the stead of the probability, the _possibility_ of such a suspension of the laws of nature as is required by the shakespearean theorists. for, as we have said, the evidence is cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived or disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment of, this or that or the other item--or disintegration of this or that or the other block--of evidence than the coliseum has been wiped away and disposed of because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some centuries, the petty roman princes built their palaces from its debris. and we may as well remark that, just here, it is always in order to mention archbishop whately's "historic doubts." we wish some of the gentlemen who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read that clever little book. it is a logical, not a whimsical effort. it was intended by its author as an answer to "hume's essay on miracles." hume's argument being, in the opinion of the archbishop, reducible to the proposition that miracles were impossible because they were improbable, his lordship wrote his little work to show that the history of napoleon was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned characters, would read like the most extravagant fable. surely it can not be necessary to reiterate the difference between the archbishop's brochure and the proposition of "the shakspearean myth!" the one was the argument from improbability, applied to facts in order to show its dangerous and altogether vicious character. the other is the demonstration { }that history--that the record--when consulted, is directly fatal to a popular impression, and directly contradictory of a presumption, born of mere carelessness and accident, and allowed to gather weight by mere years and lapse of time. but, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the discussion, for the moment, just where it stands, and take still bolder ground. instead of sifting evidence and counting witnesses, let us assume that, when we painted william shakspeare--who lived between the years and --as an easy-going rural wag, with a rural wit, thereafter to be sharpened by catering to the "gods" of a city theater; a poacher on occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, who chose the life of "a vagabond by statute"--i. e. a strolling player--but who turned up in london, and found his way into more profitable connection with a permanent play-house; and, in his advancing years, became thrifty, finally sordid--we had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like every other who ever wrote on a shakespearean theme, yet one more william shakespeare; so that, instead of ten thousand william shakespeares, no two of which were identical, there were now ten thousand and one! admitting _that,_ the next question would of necessity be--and such an investigation as the present must become utterly valueless if prosecuted with bias or with substitution of personal opinion for historical fact--whose william shakespeare is probably most a likeness of the true william shakespeare, who _did_ wander from stratford to london, who _did_ sojourn there, and who _did_ wander back { }again to stratford, and there was gathered to his fathers, in the year ? the popular william shakespeare, built to fit the plays, is a masterless philosopher, a matchless poet, a student of greek manuscripts and classic manners, of southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master of statecraft, and skilled in all the graces and amenities of courtly society! which of these two portraits is nearest to the life? let us take an appeal to history. there appears to be but one way to go about to discover; that way is to appeal to the truth of history; to go as nearly back as we can get to the lifetime of the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he was. how, it happens that the very nearest we can come to an eye-witness as to the personnel of william shakespeare is the reverend john ward, vicar of stratford, who wrote in that town a diary or memoranda, between february, , and april, , say forty-seven years after william shakespeare's death. the following meager references to his late fellow-townsman are all (except an entry to the effect that he had two daughters, etc.; and another memorandum, "remember to peruse shakespeare's plays, etc.,) thought worth while by dominie ward, viz: "i have heard that mr. shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days he lived at stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that he had an allowance so large that { }he spent at the rate of £ , a year, as i have heard." "shakespeare, drayton, and ben jonson had a merrie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted." next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman named aubrey. this mr. aubrey was himself a native of warwickshire; was born in --that is, eleven years after shakespeare died. he entered gentleman commoner of trinity college, oxford, and so, presumably, was no puritan. he was considerable of a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, a latin poet of no mean abilities, he was admitted a barrister of the inner temple in ; and so, a scholar, a poet, and a lawyer, might presumably know the difference between a wag and a genius. his manuscripts are preserved in the ashmolean museum. he gives an account of his fellow-countyman, and, coming as it does, next to dominie ward's, nearer to the lifetime of william shakespeare than any chronicle extant, (malone admits it was not written later than ), we give it entire: "mr. william shakespeare was born at stratford-upon-avon, in the county of warwick. his father was a butcher, and i have been told heretofore by some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. there was, at this time, another butcher's son in that towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young. this wm. being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to london, i guess about eighteen, { }and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (now b. jonson never was a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) he began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a verie redie and pleasant smooth witt. the humour of the constable in 'a midsummer night's dream,' he happened to take at gremlon, in bucks, * which is the road from london to stratford, and there was living that constable, about , when i first came to oxon. mr. jos. howe is of that parish, and knew him. * aubrey says, in a note at this place: "i think it was a midsummer's night that he happened there. but there is no constable in 'midsummer night's dream.'" aubrey probably intended reference to dogberry, in the "much ado." ben jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came. one time, as he was at stratford-upon-avon, one combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there this extemporary epitaph:= ```ten in the hundred the devil allows, ```but combes will have twelve, he swears and vows. ```if any one asks who lies in this tomb, ```"hoh," quoth the devil, "'tis my john a combe!"= he was wont to go to his native country once a year. i think i have been told that he left £ or £ a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. i have heard sir william davenant and mr. thomas shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. he was { }wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life; says ben jonson, 'i wish he had blotted out a thousand.' his comedies will remain witt as long as the english tongue is understood, for that he handles _mores hominum_: how our present writers reflect much upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty years hence they will not be understood. though, as ben jonson says of him, that he had but little latin and less greek, he understood latin pretty well, for he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in the country." * * aubrey's mss. was called "minutes of lives," and was addressed to his "worthy friend mr. anthony wood, antiquary of oxford." a letter to wood, dated june , , accompanied it, in which aubrey says: "'t is a task that i never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that i was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so well known. besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or societies, i might add that i come of a long-aevious race, by which means i have wiped some feathers off the wings of time for several generations, which does reach high." imagine this as the record of a real "shakespeare!" could we imagine it as the record of a milton? let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of john milton's, a college-bred man and a latin poet, saying of the author of "paradise lost;" "he was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to cromwell, or some of his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as i have heard; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." and conceive of this, a few years after milton's death being { }actually all the information accessible concerning him! but to continue our search in the vicinage. on the th day of april, (thirteen years later), a visitor to warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describing, among other points of interest, the village and church of stratford-upon-avon. and, as the letter was discovered among the papers of a well-known nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, and indorsed by this latter, "from mr. dowdall; description of several places in warwickshire"--as it bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above all, mentions william shakespeare, precisely in the same strain that it alludes to other worthies of the county--the beauchamps, the nevilles, etc.--it has always been accepted as authentic. after a description of the tomb and resting place of "our english tragedian, mr. shakespeare," the writer continues: "the clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. * he says that this shakespeare was formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to london, and there { }was received into the play-house as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. he was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. not one, for fear of the curse abovesaid, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him." * i.e. (more than "above" three years old when she died.) this letter was among the papers of lord declifford, which were sold by auction--and was purchased by mr. rodd, a well- known antiquarian bookseller, of great newport street, london, in . mr. rodd printed it in pamphlet form in (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year). it is dated "butler's merston in warwickshire, april, the th, ;" is signed, "your very faithful kinsman and most aff'te humble serv't till death, john at stiles," and is addressed, "these for mr. southwell, pr. serv't." this is mr. edward southwell, and the letter is indorsed in his handwriting, "from mr. dowdall. description of several places in warwickshire." mr. rodd says that the writer was "an inns'-of-court-man." next, chronologically, comes the contribution preserved to us by a reverend richard davies, rector of sapperton, * in gloucestershire. the reverend william fulman, who died in , bequeathed certain of his biographical collections to this reverend davies. davies died in , leaving many annotations to his friend's manuscripts. among these annotations he writes the following of william shakespeare: "william shakespeare was born at stratford upon avon, in warwickshire, about - , much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from sir lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some times imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement. but his revenge was so great that he is his 'justice clodpate' ** and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his arms. from an actor he became a composer. he died april , , aetat fifty-three, probably at stratford--for there he is buried, and hath a monument (dugd.) * his ms. additions to the mss. of the rev. william fulman (in which the allusion to shakespeare is made) are all in the library of corpus christ! college, oxford. ** probably a reference to justice shallow, in "merry wives of windsor." p. . { }on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his bones. he died a papist. whatever these may be worth--for, of course, like the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay--it is fair to include them in a collection of what the law calls "general reputation," "general report," or "common fame," and it is fair to offset this collection, at least, against that "common fame" and "common reputation" which has grown up during the last hundred years or so concerning william shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with a tradition, related by one john jordan, a townsman of stratford, (who was known in the days of malone and the ireland forgeries as "the stratford poet,") who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of shakespeare and others (as representing stratford) against the champions of pebworth, marston, hillborough, grafton, wixford, broom, and bidford, in which william was so worsted that his legs refused to carry him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, thereafter to come in for its share of worshipful adoration from the shakespearean sticklers. but the tradition is of no value except as additional testimony to the impression of his boon companions, associates, and contemporaries, that william shakespeare was a jolly dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his wench--was almost any thing, in short, except the student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no less than the scholar of his own times, that he has been created since by those who knew him not. nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we { }have remarked, than a reputation for "book-learning;" let us continue our search for shakespeare's. when an interest in the shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the rev. john ward, richard davies, and aubrey. at the outset they ran full against this village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, who worked down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and properties in london, and spent it royally in stratford, drinking himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the shakes-perean drama--first saw the light. perhaps dominie ward may have been dazzled by the open house of the richest man in town. a thousand pounds a year is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in stratford, than by the "two plays a year," in and about the days when from four to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to philip henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. the prodigality which dazed the simple stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with william shakespeare's own estimate of his worldly goods in his will. but the statement is the nearest and best evidence { }we have at hand, and so let it he accepted. and so, running up against this william shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. but there were the dramas, and there was the name "william shakespeare" tacked to them; it was william shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the william shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they straightway began to construct one more suitable. the marvelous silence of history and local tradition only stimulated them, they must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one. first (for rowe has only--in his eight honest pages of biographical notice--narrated certain gossip or facts, on the authority, perhaps, of betterton, and does not claim to be an explorer, and heminges and condell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical allusion whatever) came edmund malone. with the nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report--but in vain. the nearer he came to the stratford "shaughraun," the further away he got from a matchless poet and an all-mastering student. but, like those that were to come after him, instead of accepting the situation, and confessing the william shakespeare who lived at stratford not mentionable in the same breath with the producer of the august text which had inspired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. far from concluding that--because he finds no such name as william shakespeare in the national walhalla--{ }therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, rather, that the walhalla builders do not understand their business. he says: "that almost a century should have elapsed from the time of his [william shakespeare's] death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on the history of his life or literary career,... are circumstances which can not be contemplated without astonishment. *... sir william dugdale, born in , and educated at the school of coventry, twenty miles from stratford-upon-avon, and whose work, 'the antiquities of warwickshire,' appeared in , only thirty years after the death of our poet, we might have expected to give some curious memorials of his illustrious countryman. but he has not given us a single particular of his private life, contenting himself with a very slight mention of him in his account of the church and tombs of stratford-upon-avon. * malone's "life:" "plays and poems," london, , vol. ii, p. . * ibid., p. . the next biographical printed notice that i have found is in fuller's 'worthies,' folio, ; in 'warwickshire,' page --where there is a short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning him. and again, neither winstanley, in his 'lives of the poets,' vo, ; langbaine in ; blount in ; gibbon in --add anything to the meager accounts of bug-dale and fuller. that anthony wood, who was himself a native of oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the death of our author, should not { }have collected any anecdotes of shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. though shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 'athenæ oxoniensis,' that diligent antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done for many others not bred at oxford. the life of davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for such an insertion." the difficulty was, that mr. malone was searching among the poets for one by the name of william shakespeare, when there was no such name among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. he might with as much propriety have searched for the name of grimaldi in the poets' corner, or for homer's on the books of the worshipful society of patten-makers. to be sure, in writing up stratford church, sir william dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of shakespeare, any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of westminster abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of john smith. but in neither the case of dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of the abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. it is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and contemplate the anomaly the shakespeareans would have us accept--would have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut--namely, the spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were { }certain master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty--without making any impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had never been; and--except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church, finds his name on a stone--passed beyond the memory of a man in less than the years of a babe! the blind old homer at least was known as a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his song--though he might have begged his bread in their streets--at least did not take him for a tinker! it is not that the shakespearean dramas were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer that is the miracle; neither were the songs of homer. perhaps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. the miracle is, that in all the world of london and of england nobody knew that there _was_ any shakespeare, in the very days when the drama we hold so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and printed--as we shall come to consider further on--for the benefit of non-theater-goers! but, it is said, the great fire of london intervened and burned up all the records--that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal shakespeare. then, again, there is the lapse of time--the ordinary wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center of the world. but how { }about edmund spenser? that we have his poetry and the record of his life, is certain. or, how about chaucer? did the great fire of london affect his chronicle and his labors? the records of horace, and maro, of lucretius, of juvenal, and terence, had more than a great fire of london to contend with. but they have survived the ruin of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and the scraping of palimpsests. and yet the majesty and might of the shakespearean page, how greater than horatius or maro, than juvenal and terence! if it all were a riddle, we could not read it. but it is not a riddle. it is the simplest of facts--the simple fact that the compilers of the shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this nineteenth century. but to return to edmund malone. he is not deterred by his failure to find a poet of the name of shakespeare. determined that a poet of that name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds--and he has the credit of being the first to undertake the task--to construct an immortal bard. and a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!--one that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a standard immortal william all along. for they who seek will find. had mr. malone searched for the stratford "shaughraun," who ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other, for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who revis{ }ited his native haunts--on the lookout, not for king's and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes--but for clowns and drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the hamlets and othellos that passed under his adapting pen; * had he searched for the { }stratford' butcher's son, who was the stratford wag as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand. * it is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue and choruses of the "henry v." and "henry viii." are apologies for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly of the multitude they catered to. as to the internal testimony of the authorship of these compositions, any reader can judge for himself. we have expressed our own opinion as being that william shakespeare might be credited with the characters of nym and bar-dolph; especially of the corporal, whose part consists of the phrase, "there's the humor of it," intruded at each convenient interval; and it is possible that shakespeare, in fitting up the matter in hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the moment. there seems to be reason for believing that this expression did happen to be a favorite at about that time; and that shakespeare was not the only one who rang the changes on it as a season to stage material. witness the following: cob. nay, i have my rheum, and i can be angry as well as another, sir! cash. thy rheum, cob? thy humor, thy humor! thou mistak'st. cob. humor? mack, i think it be so indeed! what is that humor? some rare thing, i warrant. cash. marry, i tell thee, cob, it is a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by affectation, and fed by folly. cob. how must it be fed? cash. oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. didst thou never hear that? it's a common phrase, "feed thy humor." every man in his humor, iii. . couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable chiefly to such as had the happiness daily to see how the poor innocent word was racked and tortured. every man out of his humor. "humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and abused word of these times; just as for example "awful" might be said to be an over-used and abused word during our own times. but he was searching, not for a butcher's son, but for a poet--for a courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,= ````the expectancy and rose of the fair state, ````the glass of fashion and the mold of form, ````the observed of all observers"--= for "an amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance, and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be unknown;" * and his instinct should have assured him that.--however the works which such a genius had left behind him might travel under the name of the butcher's boy--it was not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them; that the composer of pages "from which, were all the arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," ** was { }no "jack-of-all-trades," and could not have lived and publicly presented his compositions nightly, year in and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded with courtiers, play-goers, and students--in the age and days of bacon and raleigh and elizabeth--unknown save to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from the memory of men, without the passing of an item in their mouths! * whalley. ** ibid. a curious instance of this familiarity--to be found in the shakespearean dramas--with the least noticed facts of science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped the critics, we might allude to here: in one of jules verne's realistic stories wherein he springs his romantic catastrophes upon scientific phenomena--"michael strogoff"-- he makes michael fall among enemies who sentence him to be blinded. the blinding is to be accomplished with a heated iron, but michael sees his mother at his side, and, tears suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is neutralized, and fails to destroy the sight. so, in "king john," act iv., scene , arthur says to hubert: the iron of itself, though heat red-hot, approaching near these eyes would drink my tears and quench his fiery indignation. this may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded with such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are marvelous. in either case, according to the shakespereans, we have only to go on, for the rest of time, in discovering new truths in nature and facts in science, only to find that the stratford butcher's boy knew all about them three hundred years ago--was familiar with all that we have yet to learn, and that to his unlettered genius our wisdom was to be sheer foolishness. most wonderful of all, this utter ignoring of william shakespeare among the poets, if unjust, provoked no remonstrance from the immediate family or any kin of the stratford lad. either the shakespeares, ardens, and hathaways were wonderfully destitute of family pride, or else the obscurity accorded their connection was perfectly just and proper. no voice of kin or affinity of william shakespeare (at least we may say this with confidence) ever claimed immortality for him; although it can not be said that they had no opportunity, had they wished to do so, for william shakespeare's granddaughter, lady barnard, was alive until ; his sister, joan hart, till ; and his daughters, susannah hall and judith queeny, until . so that dugdale, at least, if not wood and the rest of them, would not have had to go far to confirm any rumors they might have stumbled upon as to the { }acquirements and accomplishments of the man shakespeare; but it seems that not even the partiality of his own kin, nor family fame, nor pride of ancestry, ever conceived the idea of palming off their progenitor upon futurity as a giant of any build. if there is any exception to this statement, it would appear to be as follows: i. it is recorded by oldys that, one of his (shakespeare's) "younger brothers, who lived to a great age, when questioned, in his last days, about william, said he could remember nothing of his performance but seeing him 'act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried to a table at which he was seated among some company, and one of them sang a song.'" mr. fullom has demonstrated from the shakespeare family records, that oldys must have been mistaken as to any brother of william shakespeare's having furnished this reminiscence; but, admitting it as the statement of a surviving brother, it stands for what it is, and it certainly is not the record or tradition of one whose popular memory in men's minds was that of an immortal prodigy. * * we take this quotation from mr. grant white's article on shakespeare in appleton's "american cyclopoedia." mr. white's admirable contributions to our shakespearean literature entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted question as to william shakespeare; and we must confess that, in some portions, his paper we have just mentioned almost suggests him as agreeing with us as to his subject. mr. white says, in another place: "young lawyers and poets produced plays rapidly. each theatrical company not only 'kept a poet,' but had three or four, in its pay. at the time of his leaving stratford the drama was rising rapidly in favor with all classes in london, where actors were made much of in a certain way. and where there was a constant demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and the inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by supplying this demand." and again: "we are tolerably well informed by contemporary writers as to the performances of the eminent actors of that time, but of shakespeare's we read nothing." mr. white admits, a few lines below the sentence just quoted, that shakespeare's position in the stock at the blackfriars was "general utility." we should rather call it, from the evidence, "first old man." { }ii. an epitaph was placed over the remains of susannah hall, presumably by one of the family, which read:= ```"witty above her sex, but that's not all: ```wise to salvation was good mistress hall. ```something of shakespeare was in that, but this ```wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss."= whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant that either william shakespeare or mistress hall, or both, were "witty above their sex" or "wise to salvation," cannot, at this date, be determined: but it would seem that this is all the immediate family of william shakespeare have ever contributed to our knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contemporaries. but mr. malone--and, being the first investigator, he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has been, whatever the result of his inquiries--mr. malone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose { }pages he had recourse, not only assumed all he could not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the precise dates at which his stratford lad composed the plays themselves. among other achievements he constructed an admirable "chronology" of the shakespearean plays; which--with such fanciful variations as have been made to it from time to time since--is an authority with the sliakespeareans even to this day. to be sure, mr. malone did not rely entirely upon external evidence for this apochrypha. he often appeals to the text, as when, for example, he settles the date at which the "merchant of venice" was composed--as , because portia says:= ```"even as a flourish when true subjects bow ```to a new crowned monarch,"= referring of course, says mr. malone, (and this guesswork he not only called "commentary," but has actually succeeded in making all his successor "commentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of henry iv., of france! again, in the "merry wives of windsor" he finds the words, (act i, scene iii) "sail like my pinnace to these golden shores." "this shows," says mr. malone, "that this comedy must have been written after sir walter raleigh's return from guinia, in . and so on." we will not rehearse the scope and burden of mr. malone's painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from one instance of the credulity which, once it has overmastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value of his "discoveries." in , mr. malone published { }a pamphlet--"an account of the incidents from which the title and part of the story of 'the tempest' were derived, and the date ascertained." * * by edmond malone. london: printed by c. & r. baldwin, newbridge street, . the "tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of the shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it; that it is all real: the "magic island," a real island; the magician prospero, a real portrait; the "monster," a real, living curiosity, which happened to be on exhibition in england in the days when the play either was written or about to be written, (it makes no difference to these gentlemen which) and the storm at sea--as if the brain which conceived the play could not have conceived--what is not, now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon thing in the world-- a storm at sea!--a real historical hurricane! in , the reverend joseph hunter, following in the malone footsteps, published "a disquisition on the scene, origin. date, etc., of shakespeare's tempest," in which the magic island is the island of lampedusa: first, because it is uninhabited; secondly, because it is small; thirdly, because it lies on the route between naples and the coast of africa, so that had a prince been traveling from one to the other, and wrecked on an island between, he could have been conveniently wrecked on this one without going out of his course; fourthly, because it bore the reputation (mr. hunter does not say with whom) of being haunted; fifthly, because there was a cell upon it, which pros-pero might have found most opportune for his ghostly residence; and sixthly, that the island of malta gets fire-wood from it. this last fact being strongest in the way of proof, because we are told that prospero impressed ferdinand into his service and kept him piling logs of wood. but it was reserved for mr. edward dowden, in , to locate the island beyond the necessity of further conjecture, and to give us accurate sailing directions for reaching it. "prospero's island," he tells us, "was imagined by shakespeare as within two days' quick sail of naples," for "ariel is promised his freedom after two days" (act i, scene ii). "why two days? the time of the entire action of the tempest is only three hours. what was to be the employment of ariel during two days? to make the winds and seas favorable during the voyage." (dowden's shakespeare's mind and art. new york: harper & brothers. . p. .) it seems that mr. malone finds reference to a hurricane that once dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, one sir george somers, in july, , on a passage, with provisions, for the virginia colony; the above nobleman, and a sir thomas gates, having been wrecked on the island of bermuda. this discovery is warranty enough for mr. malone, and he goes on gravely to argue that william shakespeare not only wrote his "tempest" to commemorate this particular { }tempest--and, as will be seen by an examination of the premises, the relation between the occurrence and the play is confined merely to the word "tempest" and goes no further--but that he (shakespeare) did not place the scene of his shipwreck on the bermudas, "because he could spread a greater glamour over the whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the bermudas." mr. malone further remarks naively that, "without having read tacitus, he (shakespeare) well knew that 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est'!" without pausing to wonder how mr. malone knew that shakespeare of stratford had never read tacitus--(a slander, by the way, on the omniscient shakespeare, too--the man who studied plautus in greek manuscript, the author of "julius cæsar"--that he had not read a simple latin historian!)--or to dwell on the most marvelous coincidence between the wreck of sir george somers and that of prince ferdinand { }(the coincidence, according to malone, being, that one was wrecked on the bermuda and the other wasn't); or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an occurrence as to be easily identified; or to note that "the tempest" in the play of that name is an episode which covers only about a dozen lines of text, and which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the argument--without pausing for this, or to remark that mil malone might have taken to himself the 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est' of tacitus more appositely than heap-plied it either to sir george somers or the bermudas, had he reflected as generously as he took it for granted--it is as well to take our leave of mr. malone and his labors at this point, with a compliment to their zeal and impressment which must be withheld from their results. * * dequincy accepts this "origin" "with great alacrity." and the world would doubtless be as well off could we also here take leave of the rest of the shakespeare-makers. but we are not allowed to do so. from the time of malone onward, the shakespeare-making, shakespeare-mending, and shakespeare-cobbling have gone on without relaxation. each fresh rencontre with an emergency in the shakespearean text has necessitated at least one and often several new shakes-peares. and they have been prepared and forthcoming as fast as wanted. was it found that the bard had, of all his worldly goods, left the wife of his bosom no recognition save the devise of a ramshackle old bedstead? a score of gentlemen hurried to the front to prove that, by law, history, logic, custom, and every { }thing else, in those days a "second-best bed" was really the most priceless of possessions; of fabulous value, and a fortune in itself; and that in no other way could her immortal husband have so testified his tender regard and appreciation of mrs. shakespeare--the sweet ann hathaway of old, who had thrown herself away on a scapegrace butcher's son! the fact (as it appears, on inspection of the instrument itself, to be) that mrs. shakespeare was not even alluded to in the first draft of the testament--her name and the complimentary devise of the precious husband's precious "second-best bed" having been written in as "a poet's after-thought," and not appearing in the first draft at all--does not affect their statements in the least! they have even gone so far as to ascertain that william was no truant lord to willingly desert his lonesome lady. according to the very latest authority we are able to cite, the fault of the separation was wholly her own. we are assured by a very recent explorer that mrs. shakespeare "did not accompany her husband to london, objecting to the noise and turmoil of that city." * * "shakespeare and his contemporaries." by william tegg, f. r. h. s. london: william tegg & co., . chapter i., "sketch of the life of shakespeare," p. . as every circumstance connected with william shakespeare and stratford is of interest in the connection, we may as well note that, according to mr. grant white, when william shakespeare first went to london, he went into the office of a cousin of his, who was an attorney in that city. like mr. tegg, mr. white gives himself as an authority for this item. see his "shakespeare" in johnston's encyclopaedia. unless it be assumed, therefore, that investigation is reliable in proportion to the distance from its subject at which it works, it would seem to { }appear that, even if the william shakespeare we have portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actually a nearer resemblance to the william shakespeare known to those nearest to him in residence and time; than the inspired genius of the shakespeareans, who, from malone downward, have rejected every shred of fact they found at hand, and weaved, instead, their warp and woof of fiction (and that it is charming and absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a vision of their own. nor have the shakespeareans rested their labors here. having created a shakespeare to fit the plays, it was necessary to proceed to create a face to fit the shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works he ought to have written. this may, very fairly, be called "the young ladies' argument." * "look on his portrait," say the shakespeareans; "look at that magnificent head!"--and they point to the chandos portrait--"is not that the head of a genius?" * so the young ladies of new york were of opinion that stokes should not be hanged for the murder of fisk, "because he was so awfully good-looking." { }inspiration--the ideal of the artist, who conceives, in every case, his own "shakespeare;" and if we were called upon for proof that "shakespeare" is quite as much of an ideal to the most of us as a "hamlet," or a "lear," we could cite, perhaps, nothing more convincing than the latitude which is allowed to artists with any of the three--"shakespeare," "was there ever such a head?" we should say, yes, there might have been such another head created, even admitting the chandos portrait to be the very counterfeit head of william shakespeare. but it does not appear, on taking the trouble to look into the matter, either that the chandos picture is a portrait, or that--with one exception--any other of the pictures, casts, masks, busts, or statues of william shakespeare are any thing but works of art, embodying the individual "hamlet," or "lear," and the elaborate criticism to which a new "portrait" of either of them is subjected--criticism, which, in the case of a portrait of william shakespeare, in no case pretends to be historical, but is always romantic, or sentimental, or picturesque: as to the proper pose of a poet, or the correct attitude for a man receiving efflatus directly from the gods; never as to the stage manager of the blackfriars, or the husband of anne hathaway, or the son of john shakespeare, of stratford. it appears that, as a matter of fact, there never was but one picture of the elizabethan manager which ever enjoyed any thing in the semblance of a certification to its authenticity; and that certification was in the very unsatisfactory form of rhyme, in the shape of a set of verses said to have been written by ben jonson (and, as we propose to show, are quite as likely to have been placed under the particular picture without jonson's authority as with it); while, that they were written to fit the particular picture in question (for they are in the form of a sort of apostrophe to some picture or portrait, and will be hereafter quoted), there seems to be no information sufficient to form a belief either way. if they were written for that particular picture, and if that particular picture is a speaking likeness, then the phrenological, or at least the physiognomical, { }argument must droop away and die; for the person represented has as stupefied, stultified, and insignificant a human countenance as was ever put upon an engraver's surface; and, as a matter of fact, no shakespearean has yet been found to admit it as the image of his dream. but, of course, this is mere matter of personal opinion, and entitled to no weight whatever in the discussion. the question is--is there any authentic portrait of william shakespeare, as there is of elizabeth, bacon, raleigh, southampton, and other more or less prominent characters of the age in which william shakespeare is known to have lived and died? let us do the best we can toward investigating this question. we have before us a volume, "an enquiry into the authenticity of various pictures and prints, which, from the decease of the poet to our own times, have been offered to the public as portraits of shakespeare. containing a careful examination of the evidence on which they claim to be received; by which the pretended portraits have been rejected, the genuine confirmed and established," etc., etc. by james boaden, esq. * we must content ourselves with a simple review of mr. boaden's labors. he was a friend and disciple of malone's, and a shakespearean; a believer in the poet; and he writes under the shadow of the mighty name--the shadow out from under which we of this age have stepped, and so become able to inspect, not only the facts of history uncurtained by that shadow, but the shadow itself. * london. printed for robert triphook, old bond street, . but we will take every { }one of mr. boaden's statements for granted, nevertheless, and draw our opinions, when we venture on any, from the portraits which he has given in his book. at least mr. boaden is not a "baconian," and not a "raleigh man," and, whenever he finds it necessary to speak of shakespeare's history, he follows malone's own version. for convenience, we will change mr. boaden's numeration of the "portraits," preserving the designation, however, which he assigns them. no. . william shakespeare dies in stratford in . in , appears, on the title-page of heminges and condell's first folio of the plays, the portrait by martin droeshout. it is an engraving, and, mr. boaden believes, a good engraving, of some original picture from which it must have been taken; "for," he says, "there were good engravers in those days; for chapman's 'homer' was published in that year, with a very tine engraving of chapman." under this engraving is printed a copy of jonson's lines, as follows: to the reader. ````this figure that thou here seest put, ```it was for gentle shakespeare cut; ```wherein the graver had a strife * ````with nature to outdo the life: ````o, could he but have drawn his wit ````as well in brasse as he hath hit ````his face: the print would then surpasse ````all that was ever done in brasse. ````but, since he can not, reader, look, ````not on his picture, but his booke.= * look, when a painter would surpasse the life, his art's with nature's handiwork at strife. venus and adonis. { }in this picture the head of the subject is represented as rising out of an horizontal plain of collar appalling to behold. the hair is straight, combed down the sides of the face and bunched over the ears; the forehead is disproportionately high; the top of the head bald; the face has the wooden expression familiar in the scotchmen and indians used as signs by tobacconists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare that would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest establishment in that trade; and which we would be quite as unlikely to look for in the stratford scapegrace as in the immortal bard of the shakespeareans. it is of this picture that boaden quotes somebody's remark that "it is lucky these metrical commendations are not required to be delivered on oath." and steevens says, on the supposition that ben jonson, and not the engraver, put the copy of verses on the title-page beneath the effigy: "ben jonson might know little about art, care less about the resemblance, and, never having compared the engraving from the picture, have rested satisfied with the recollection that the original was a faithful resemblance; and that, no doubt, the engraver had achieved all that his art could perform." no. . the edition of the plays of is accompanied with what is known as "marshall's picture;" which so closely follows, as to face, forehead, hair, beard, and collar, the engraving above described, as to suggest that it was a copy either of that engraving, or of the unknown picture from which that was taken. but, if a copy, it is certainly, from a pictorial point of view, an improvement. it looks much more like a man. the simpleton stare around the eyes is toned down, and the wooden aspect is modified into some{ }thing like life. marshall has taken liberties with the dress of no. , throwing in a sort of tunic over the left shoulder, hitching on an arm with a gauntleted hand grasping a sprig of laurel, etc., etc. no. . the felton head.--"in the catalogue of the fourth exhibition and sale by private contract," says boaden, (page ),"at the european museum, king street, st. james square, ." this picture was announced to the public in the following words: "no. --a curious portrait of shakespeare, painted in ." on the st of may, , a mr. felton bought it for five guineas, and, on requiring its credentials, received the following letter: to mr. s. felton, drayton, shropshire--sir: the head of shakespeare was purchased out of an old house, known by the sign of "the boar," in eastcheap, london, where shakespeare and his friends used to resort; and report says was painted by a player of that time, but whose name i have not been able to learn. this letter was signed "j. wilson," who was the conductor of the european museum. this "j. wilson" appears to have been the original barnum. although prince hal and falstaff are said in the play to have affected "the boar's head in eastcheap," it does not appear, except from mr. "j. wilson," that "shakespeare and his friends" ever resorted thither. there was an old inn in eastcheap, but it was not called "the boar's head." there _was_ an inn by that name, however, in blackfriars, near the theater, from which the manager might have borrowed it. then, again, mr. "j. wilson" seemed to have forgotten the great fire in london in , which, "in a few hours, { }in a strong east wind, left the whole of eastcheap a mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants could think of saving nothing but their lives." mr. wilson subsequently amended his story so as to read that "it was found between four and five years ago at a broker's shop at the minories by a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed," etc., etc. mr. steevens, who scouted the other pictures as spurious, accepted this picture, for a time, as the original of the engravings we have called no. and no. ; but finally, the whole thing exploded and was forgotten. no. . the bust in stratford church.--this was carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it was cut by "gerard johnson," an amsterdam "tomb-maker," is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no historical source. says boaden (page ), "the performance is not too good for a native sculptor." in leonard digges alludes to it in a few verses well known. it seems to have been originally colored, but there is no testimony as to the original colors. in , one hundred and twenty-five years after digges, john hall, a stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. this was "a good enough" shakespeare for all practical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. but in came mr. malone. he caused the bust--in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense of churchly propriety--to be covered completely with a thick coat of white paint. * * while these pages are going through the press (april, ), however, we find a statement that within a year or two (and since the writer of these pages visited it) one simon colling has applied a bath to the bust--removing malone's whitewash, and revealing the identical auburn hair and hazel eyes which tradition had asserted to be underneath. { }from this bust, mr. boaden says, a mr. bullock once took a cast, which is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of the plays, in which case it is entitled "cast of the head of william shakespeare, taken after death," which may or may not--for mr. boaden can not tell us who this "mr. bullock" was--be the german "death mask" noticed further on, (at any rate the statement "taken after death"--"william shakespeare being unquestionably dead at the time--is literally true.) the bust represents its subject as possessing a magnificent head, admirably proportioned, with no protruding "bumps." the face is represented as breaking into a smile. according to this effigy, shakespeare must have had an extraordinarily long upper lip, the distance between the base of the nose and the mouth being remarkably out of proportion with the other facial developments; there seems to be a little difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into what appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, nevertheless, the stratford bust represents a fine, soldierly-looking man, with a fierce military mustache cocked up at the ends, and a goatee. if ben jonson--knowing his friend william shakespeare to have been the martial and altogether elegant-looking gentleman the stratford bust represents him--authorized the verses we have already quoted to be placed under the "droe-shout engraving," it was a deliberate libel on his part, and as gross as it was deliberate, and only perhaps to { }be explained by jonson's alleged secret enmity to, or jealousy of, william shakespeare, his rival playwright, which we shall be called to examine at length further on. * * post part iii. the jonsonian testimony. no. . "the chandos portrait." this picture, so termed because once the property of the duke of chandos, is the best known of all the so-called portraits--being, in fact, the one from which the popular idea of shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man is said to resemble shakespeare, it is meant to be conveyed that he bears a likeness to the chandos picture. mr. malone announced that it was painted in , but never gave any other authority than his own ipse dixit for the statement, not even taking the trouble to refer, like mr. j. wilson, to "a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed." mr. boaden lays (page ) that he once saw it, and compared it "with what had been termed a fine copy, i think by piamberg, and found it utterly unlike." "indeed," he continues, "i never saw any thing that resembled it." he also says (pages - ) that "the copies by sir joshua reynolds and mr. humphrey were not only unlike the original, but were unlike each other, one being smiling and the other grave." that is to say, that not only have the romancers constructed "biographies," but the artists have kept up with them; and we may, every one of us, select our own shakespeare to-day--poet or potman, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark; we may each suit our own tastes with a shakespeare to our liking. mr. boaden continues (page ): "it" (the chandos) "was very probably painted by burbage," { }the great tragedian, who is known to have handled the pencil; it is said to have been the property of joseph taylor, our poet's hamlet, who, dying about , at the advanced age of seventy, left the picture by will to davenant. at the death of davenant in , it was bought by betterton, the actor, and when he died mr. robert keck, of the inner temple, gave mrs. barry, the actress, forty guineas for it. from mr. keck it passed to mr. nichol, of southgate, whose daughter married the marquis of caernarvon. steevens, whom boaden quotes (page ), declined to be convinced by this genealogy, and said, "gossip rumor had given out that davenant was more than shakespeare's godson. * what folly, therefore, to suppose that he should possess a genuine portrait of the poet, when his lawful daughters had not one! mrs. barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry; as she received forty guineas for the picture, something more animated might have been included though not specified in the bargain," etc., etc. steevens was fond of calling this picture "the davenantico bet{ }tertono-barryan-keckian-hicolsian-chandosian portrait." * there is a story that once, on the occasion of one of shakespeare's visits to stratford, a villager, meeting young davenant in the street, asked him where he was going. "to the inn, to see my godfather shakespeare," said the lad. "beware how you take the name of god in vain, my lad," said the other. the allusions to william's gallantries are numerous. on the stratford parish records there is entry of the birth of one "thomas green, _alias_ shakespeare." the tale of the interrupted amour, at the theater, of "richard the third" and "william the conqueror," as is apt to be the case, is about the most widely familiar of the shakespearean stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. but davenant was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, and shakespeare for his father, to his dying day. "there are," says boaden (page ), "a few circumstances relating to the picture of which some notice should be taken in this examination. there is, it seems, a tradition that, no original picture of shakespeare existing, sir thomas clarges caused a" (i. e., this) "portrait to be painted from a young man who had the good fortune to resemble him" (i. e., shakespeare. query: how did sir thomas know that the young man resembled shakespeare?). mr. malone traced this story to "the gentleman's magazine" for august, , and called on the writer for his authority; but the writer, whoever he was, never gave it, any more than malone gave his authority for announcing its date to be ; but malone himself says that "most reports of this kind are an adumbration of some fact, and indication of something in kind or degree similar or analogous." no. . this is a portrait, so called, by zuccharo, which need not detain us, since mr. boaden himself demonstrates very clearly that it was not in any event painted from life, and, not improbably, did not originally claim to have been intended for shakespeare at all. mr. boaden's no. is the "cornelius jansen picture," and to this mr. boaden pins his earnest faith. he says this "is now in the collection of the duke of somerset;" but he appears to make no attempt to connect it with william shakespeare except as follows: cornelius jansen is said to have painted the daughter of southampton--ergo, he might have been southampton's family painter, and southampton might have been desirous to possess a portrait of his friend shakespeare done by his own painter--ergo, jansen might { }have had william shakespeare for a sitter! this is all the authority for the authenticity. but that it is--judging from the engraving in mr. boaden's book--a magnificent picture, we think there can be no question. on the supposition that the chandos is an authentic likeness of shakespeare, this jansen certainly bears a strong shakespearean resemblance. in it the hair is curling, as in the chandos, not straight, as in the droeshout and the marshall engravings. the mustache, which is cut tight to the face without being shaved, as in the droeshout, and strong and heavy, as in the bust, is lighter than the chandos, while the beard is fuller. there is nothing of the tremendous upper lip represented in the bust. mr. boaden (page ) describes it as an eye-witness, he having had access to it for the purposes of the book before us. he says: "it is an early picture by cornelius jansen, tenderly and beautifully painted. time seems to have treated it with infinite kindness, for it is quite pure, and exhibits its original surface.... the portrait is on panel, and attention will be required to prevent a splitting of the oak, in two places, if my eyes have not deceived me." as for earlom, who copied the picture, boaden says: "he had lessened the amplitude of the forehead; he had altered the form of the skull; he had falsified the character of the mouth; and, though his engraving was still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition of the poet, i found it would be absolutely necessary to draw the head again, as if he had never exercised his talent upon it" (page ). mr. boaden specifies further the picture laid to have once decorated the pair of bellows belonging to queen elizabeth's { }own private apartments, besides still one other, both of which he rejects as spurious. thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, engravers, and essayists to erect simple william shakespeare of stratford into the god he ought to have been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to make, and according to the shakespeareans themselves, there is only one picture of william shakespeare extant which has the even assumed advantage of having been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw william shakespeare himself in his (william shakespeare's) lifetime. even if--as mr. steevens surmises--this eye witness never saw the engraving, but only the original portrait from which it was copied, the droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by no other so-called likeness, and, if rejected--as it infallibly is by all devout shakespeareans--there remains nothing of certitude, nothing even of the certitude of conjecture, as to the features of the stratford boy, whoever he was, and whatever his works. one further effort was, however, made, so lately as , to clinch this "young lady's argument," by yet one more genuine discovery. this time it was a "becker 'death mask!'" a plaster mask of an anonymous dead face is found in a rubbish-shop in mayence, in . regarded as a mask of william shakespeare, it bears a certain resemblance to the stratford bust; and, regarded as a mask of count bismarck (for example), it would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to count bismarck. (we write from an inspection of photographs only, never having seen the mask.) having always been annoyed that a creature so immortal { }as they had created their shakespeare left no death-mask, the shakespeareans at once adopt this anonymous mask as taken from the face of the two-days defunct william shakespeare, who died in . _credat judams!_ either william shakespeare, at his death, was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. if he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of departed greatness be smuggled away from the land that was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and cry? if he was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask from the family who cared enough about the dead man's memory to go to the expense of it? but, at any rate, in it falls into the hands of jealous believers. they search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, and for the date of their hero's death, and they find both. had they made up their minds to find a scrap of shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have been there. professor owen, of the british museum, declared that, if the fact of the mask having originally come from england could be established, there was "hardly any sum of money which the museum would not pay for the mask itself." but the missing testimony has not been supplied, though doubtless it is incubating. for now and then we see a newspaper paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned up (in pawn-shops invariably) which "resemble the death-mask," thus accustoming us to the title, which, in time, we shall doubtless come to accept--as we have come to accept shakespeare himself--from mere force of habit. the last of these discoveries is in australia, farther off than even mayence, "said to resemble the { }becker death-mask." * the stratford portrait of shakespeare claims no authority further than a resemblance to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta bust in the possession of the garrick club was "found to order," and represents a man who, it would seem, bore not even a resemblance to the accepted shakespearean features. * see the "academy," london, may , , p. , we understand that the mask is at present in possession of the british museum. we should, perhaps, mention that mr. boaden surmises that the droeshout picture is a portrait of william shakespeare the actor, in the character of "old ivnowell," and that the stratford bust was caused to be executed by dr. hall, a son-in-law of its subject, and was the work of one thomas stanton, who followed a cast taken after death. but, as mr. boaden admits, this is his surmise only. however insuperable, therefore, in the run of cases, the "young ladies argument" to prove from the pictures that william shakespeare was not author of the plays is quite weak enough; but, as an argument to prove that he was such author, it is weakness and impotence itself. it now becomes necessary to ask the ordinary question which a court would be obliged to ask concerning any exhibit produced before it, and claimed as authentic or authoritative: namely, where did the plays called shakespeare's come from? how did they get into print? who, if anybody, delivered the "copy" to the printer, and vouched for its authorship? it is manifest that we have no business here with any question of criticism, or as to an authenticity between different editions of the { }same play; but the plays were written to be played; how did they come to be published so that millions of readers, who never entered a playhouse where they were performed, read and still read them? in order to arrive at any supposition as to these considerations which would be of value to our purpose in these papers, it will be necessary to glance at the state of literary property in the days between and . how, in those days, there was absolutely no legal protection for an author's manuscript. once it had strayed beyond the writer's hand it was practically "publici juris"--any body's property. the first law of copyright enacted in england was the act of anne, of april , , more than one hundred years after the last date at which commentators claim the production of a shakespearean play. even the first authoritative pronunciation of a competent tribunal as to literary property at common law (which preceded, of course, all literary property definable by statute) was not made until , fifty-nine years later. but the court of star chamber (of obscure origin, but known to have been of powerful jurisdiction in the time of henry vii.) was in the height of its ancient omnipotence in those years. and of the various matters of which it took cognizance, one of the earliest was the publishing, printing, and even the keeping and reading of books. under date of june , --the year that many commentators assign as that in which william shakespeare first turned up in london--this star chamber, which had already issued many such, issued a decree that none should "print any book, work, or copy, against the form or meaning of any restraint contained in any statute of laws of this realm," except, { }etc., etc. twenty-nine years before--in --philip and mary had erected ninety-seven booksellers into a body called "the stationers' company," who were to monopolize the printing of books, if they so chose. they had given them power and authority--and their second charter, in , confirmed them in it--to print such books as they obtained, either from authors' manuscripts or translations, and to see very carefully that nobody else printed them. their power was absolute--they had their "privilegium ad imprimendum solum," and in the pursuit of any body who interfered with it they were empowered to "break locks, search, seize," and, in short, to suppress any printed matter they did not choose to license, wherever they pleased. this the worshipful company of stationers did not fail to do; they pursued, and the star chamber convicted. the disgraceful record of infamous and inhuman prosecutions and punishments for reading, keeping, selling, or making books might well detain us here, did our scope permit. * whatever literature accomplished in those days it accomplished by stealth, in defiance of the implacable and omnipotent star chamber and its bloodhound, the stationers' company, who ran in its victims. it can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of those times, * that whatever literary property existed { }at common law then existed in the shape of a license to print a work under permission of the stationers' company; that no estate or property obtained in anything except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use them all together to make a book, and in the resulting volume; and that what we understand by "copyright" to-day--namely, an author's or a proprietor's right to demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other control over the work when once printed and published--was altogether unconceived and unclaimed. * see "omitted chapters of the history of england," by andrew basset, ** "the person who first resolved on printing a book, and entered his design on that register, became thereby the legal proprietor of that work, and had the sole right of printing it."--carte, quoted in "reasons for a further amendment of the act , george iii., c. ," london, . john camden hotten, "seven letters, etc., on literary property," london, hotten, , describes the modern stationers' company as entrusted with "a vested interest over somebody else's property, a prescriptive right to interfere with the future work of other people's hands." we are aware that this statement as to the condition of authors' rights in the days of elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; but a review of the reported cases, as well as the extant records of the stationers' company, will, we think, support our conclusion. the first reported case of piracy was in , when the master of the rolls enjoined publication of "the whole duty of man" (morgan's "law of literature," vol. ii., p. ). whatever compensation the author of a work was able to obtain, he doubtless obtained beforehand, by sale of his manuscript, and dreamed not of setting up a tangible property as against any one who had obtained the stationers' company's license to print it. the stationers' company, at the outset of their career, opened a record, in which it entered the name of every book it licensed--the date, and the name of the person authorized to print it. * it was not until , twenty-eight years after william shakespeare's death (so far as we can ever know) that john milton, in his "are-opagitica"--the greatest state paper in the republic { }of letters, the declaration of independence, and the bill of rights of the liberty of literature--asserted * ** for the first time "the right of every man" to "his several copy, which god forbid should be gainsayd." * for the text of the "areopagitica" and copious notes as to the history of the days which called it out, see edition of j. vv. hale's, clarendon press series, macmillan & co., oxford, . ** in a pamphlet, "the prayse of the red herring" cited by farmer, in his "learning of shakespeare," page . once in their hands, printers did what they pleased with a manuscript; abridged it if they found it too long, and lengthened it if they found it too short. thomas nashe says, that, in a play of his, called "the isle of dogs," four acts, without his consent "or the least guesse of his drifte or scope," were added by the printers. * the printers also assigned the authorship of the work to any name they thought would help sell the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. (just as the first printer of the sonnets we call shakespeare's, dedicated them to "w. h.," which two initials have supplied the shakespeareans with an excuse for at least as many dozen octavo volumes of conjecture as to who "w. h." was.) sometimes the author thus despotically assigned to the work rebelled. dr. heywood recognized two of his own compositions in a collection of verses called "the passionate pilgrim," printed by one jaggard, in , upon the title-page to which, this jaggard had placed the name of william shakespeare as author. hey-wood publicly claimed his own, but william shakespeare never denied or affirmed; his name, however, was removed by the printer from the title-page of the { }third edition of the book, in . * but, as a rule, the stationers' company were too powerful, and the author too poor, to bring the trick to exposure. * shakespeare, by r. g. white. vol. ., page lxxvii. it was under these circumstances, and in times like these, that the shakespearean plays began to appear in print. where did they come from? they were written to be played. according to all accounts they were very valuable to the theater which produced them. every personal and selfish interest of the proprietors, whether of the theater or of the manuscript plays, dictated that they should be kept in secret--least of all that they should be printed and made accessible to the public outside of the theater, who otherwise, to see them, must become patrons of the house where they were performed. that the author or authors of the plays could have made them of more profit by selling them to the printers than to the players is doubtful; that they personally entered them--or such of them as were entered--on the books of the stationers' company, is certainly not the fact; the only persons to whose interest it was to print them were the printers themselves, and, in all probability, it was the printers who did cause them to be printed. but where did these printers procure the "copy" from which to set up the plays they printed? the question will never be answered. the manuscripts might have been procured by bribing individual actors, each of whom could have easily furnished a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made up for the press. the fact that the plays never were printed without more or less of the stage directions or "business" included, lends probability to this theory: { }but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion would have resulted in any thing like what we possess to-day, we have considered further on. mr. grant white admits, * as must everybody who examines into the matter, that whatever the printers printed was unauthorized and surreptitious. but, having admitted this much, mr. white is too ardent a shakespearean not to make some effort to throw a guise of authenticity around the text he has so lovingly followed. in the article we have just quoted from in our foot-note, he says, "it is not improbable that, in case of great and injurious misrepresentation of the text of a play by" this surreptitious method of publication, "fair copies were furnished by the theatrical people at the author's request in self-defence." perhaps these plays might have found their way into print just as the comedy of "play" found its way into print in , ** or the play of "mary warner," *** at about the same date. at any rate the editors of the first folio speak of the "stolne and surreptitious copies" which had preceded them. * "such of his plays as were published during his lifetime seem to have been given to the press entirely without his agency; indeed, his interest was against their publication.... it was the interest of all concerned, whether as proprietors, or only as actors, or, like himself, as both, that the theaters should have the entire benefit of whatever favor they enjoyed with the public. but the publishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerly sought copies of them for publication, and obtained them surreptitiously: sometimes, it would seem, by corrupting persons connected with the theater, and sometimes, as the text which they printed shows, by sending short-hand writers to the performance." ** palmer v. dewitt, new york r. . *** crowe v. aiken. bissel r. . { }the first and second editions of "hamlet," says mr. white, "in and , might have been the result of such maneuvers on the part of the printers and the stenographers, or those who had access to the manuscripts of the author. however this may be, twenty of shakespeare's plays were published by various stationers during his lifetime; they are known as the quartos, from the form in which they are printed. they are most of them full of errors.... some of them seem to have been put in type from stage copies, or, not improbably, from an aggregation of the separate parts which were in the hands of the various actors." in other words, shakespeare's works were so imperfectly printed, against his will, during his lifetime, that he himself authorized _other imperfect_--mr. white says they were imperfect--versions to be likewise printed! mr. white might have looked nearer home to more purpose. nobody knows, nobody can know better than he, that what is called the "accepted" or "received" text of shakespeare (if there is, to speak minutely, any such to-day) has been arrived at and made up piecemeal, and in the course of time, by the commentators selecting from the folios, and other original editions, such "readings" as the judgment of scholarship or the taste of criticism has, on the whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the trouble to examine these original editions can see as much for himself. to suppose that this text, as it stands to-day, is the text as its author or authors wrote it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least ten thousand coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least, improbable. before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate { }the three historical certainties to which we have arrived. first, that the state of the law was favorable, (indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of a state more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. second, that nobody stands on record as claiming to know the authorship of these plays, except the printers, who were able to sell them by using the name of the manager of a popular theater; and, therefore, whose interest it was to affix that name to them; and, third, that there was never a period in which it was so reasonably an author's interest to be anonymous, or preserve his incognito, as these very years covered by the lifetime of william shakespeare; when, between the stationers' company and the star chamber, it was a fortunate author, printer or reader, who escaped hanging, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the loss of ears or liberty. who wrote these plays? london was full of playwrights, contemporary with william shakespeare, many of them his friends and familiars; possibly, all of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial eye. we have their works extant to-day. ben jonson was a poet and a pedant; greene, a university-bred man. and we may go through the list and verify the records of them all, and find in each some quality or training from which to reasonably expect fruitage. but nobody has ever ventured to hazard so wild a theory as that any of them wrote the anonymous immortal plays to which the best of their own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. but a butcher's boy, lately from stratford, happens to be manager of a contemporary theater. he, there{ }fore, must be the writer, and there can not be the slightest doubt of it. the story that this boy ever stole deer is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. but no evidence is required to prove his authorship of the topmost works in the history or the literature of england. we have seen the monopoly that overruled the press. we have seen that the stationers' company insisted upon recording the name and ownership of every printed thing; and their record-books are still extant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as william shakespeare. we have weighed the surmises of the shakespeareans as to these times, and seen their probable value; and have found it just as impossible to connect the immortal fragments we call the shakespearean plays to-day with william shakespeare, of stratford, as we have already found it to imagine him as having access to the material, the sealed records, and the hidden muniments employed in their construction. is there any more evidence to be examined? but were these plays, so printed _outside_, the same plays as those acted _inside_ the theater? when we recall the style of audiences that assembled in those days (m. taine says the spectators caroused and sang songs while the plays progressed; that they drank great draughts of beer; and, if they drank too much, burned juniper instead of retiring; anon, they would break upon the stage, toss in a blanket such performers as pleased them not, tear up the properties, etc., etc.)--when we recall this, it is not the easiest thing in the world to imagine this audience so very highly delighted, for instance, with wolsey's long soliloquy (which the actor of to-day delivers in a dignified, low, and unimpassioned monotone, without gesture), or { }hamlet's philosophical monologues, or isabella's pious strains. _some_ plays were highly popular inside those theaters. were these the ones? mr. grant white has all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded the manuscripts of the plays that were making its fortune; and that it would have been suicide in it to have circulated them outside, in print. but may not the echo of the popularity of certain plays called "hamlet," "king john," "macbeth," etc., have induced others, outside the theater, to have circulated plays, christened with these names (or with and under the popular name of shakespeare), for gain among the "unco guid" who would not, or the impecunious who could not, enter the theater door? there is no need of opening up so hopeless a speculation--a speculation pure and simple, that can never, in the nature of things, be confronted by data either way. but the fact does remain that these marvelous plays appeared in print contemporaneously with the professional career of an actor named william shakespeare, and in the same town where he acted; that, if they were his, it would have been to his interest to have kept them out of print; and that their appearance in print he most certainly did not authorize; and who can claim that one guess is not as good as another, where history is silent, and tradition askew, and the truth buried under the dust of centuries, overtopped yy the rubbish of conjecture? we repeat, we have no warrant to intrude upon the domain of criticism. the shakespearean text, as we possess it to-day, is too priceless, whatever its source, to be rudely touched. but, so far as is revealed by the record of its appearance { }among printed literature, there is no evidence, internal or external, as to william shakespeare's production of it, and as to its origin we are as hopelessly in the dark as ever. dubious as is the chronicle of those days as to other matters, it is singularly clear as to what was printed and what was not. for those were the sort of days when men whose names were not written in the books of the stationers' company printed at the peril of clipped ears and slit noses, or worse; and those books are still extant. but, by the fatality which seems to follow and pervade the name of william shakespeare, this record, like every other, national or local, yields nothing to the probe but disappointment and silence as to the man of stratford and the actor of blackfriars. we will, presently, consider as to whether the same intellect composed the "hamlet" at one sitting, and at another, located bohemia on the sea-coast; and whether, on inspection, it might not be strongly suggested that the two conceptions indicated geniuses of quite different orders and not one and the same person; that one showed the hand-marks of a poet and the other the hand-marks of the stage-manager, etc. if the limits of this work permitted, we believe the same hand-marks might be collected from the treatment of the text of every play. for instance, the "comedy of errors" is supposed to occur during the days when ephesus was ruled by a duke, and follows--as we have already shown--the unities of the menæchmi of plautus. but the ignoramus who doctored the paraphrase for the blackfriars stage found it convenient, to bring on his stage effect, to introduce a christian monastery into ephesus at about that time, { }with a lady abbess who could refuse admission to the duke himself, so inviolable and sacred was the sanctuary of consecrated christian walls! the monastery was as convenient to bringing all the befogged and befooled and sadly mixed up personages of the comedy face to face at the moment, as was the seashore and the bear, in "a winter's tale," to account for the princess perdita among the shepherds, and so in they all go. these, and the like brummagem and ruses de convenances, are simple enough to understand, and detract in no degree whatever from the value of the plays: they can be retired or retained at pleasure, and no harm done, if we only remember to whom and to what they are assignable. but, if we forget that, and insist that the very same pen which wrote the dialogue wrote the setting--wrote every entrance, exit, and direction to the scene-shifters and stage-carpenters, and, therefore, that every dot and comma, every call and cue, every "gag" and localism, is as sacred as holy writ, no wonder the scholars of the text are puzzled! for example, we find that mr. wilkes, and mr. harper, in the "american catholic review" for january, --who otherwise believe the author of the shakespearean plays to have been a roman catholic--are almost persuaded that he must have been a protestant, because he finds occasion to make mention of an "evening mass." but let us assure messrs. wilkes and harper that they need neither abandon nor adopt a theory on rencontre with so trivial a phenomenon. if william shakespeare felt the need of an "evening mass" at any time, we may be fairly sure, from our experience of that worthy, that he put one in. he had bolted too many camels { }in his day to hesitate at such a gnat as that! the creator of a convent in old ephesus and of a sea-coast to bohemia was not one to stick at a trifling "evening mass!" the gentlemen above mentioned, believe the author of the plays to have been a romanist, not because the reverend richard davies, writing soon after , distinctly says "he died a papist," (for any statement made anywhere within a hundred years of william shakespeare's lifetime is "mere gossip," and it is only the biographies we write now-a-days that are to be relied upon), but mainly because the liturgy and priesthood of that church are invariably treated with respect in the plays, while dissenting parsons are poked fun at without stint. doubtless, in the modern drama the same rule will be perceived to obtain. the imperious liturgy and priesthood of the roman or of the stately anglican church appear to be beyond the attempts of travesty; while the snivel and preach of mere puritanism has always been too tempting an opportunity for "aminadab sleek" and his type--to be resisted, and such a fact would justify very little conclusion either way. besides, there is no call to insist that the stage, in epitomizing life into the compass of an hour, shall preserve every detail; nothing less than a chinese theater could answer a demand like that. there is a dramatic license even broader than the license accorded to poetry, and we would doubtless find the drama a sad bore if there were not. william shakespeare, during his managerial career, appears to have understood this as well as any body; nor have the liberties he took with facts and chronology befogged any body, except the { }daily lessening throng of investigators, who believe him to be the original of the masterpieces he cut into play-hooks for his stage. but did william shakespeare ever try his hand at verse-making? there is considerable rumor to the effect that, during the leisure of his later life, no less than in the lampooning efforts of his vagrom youth, he did turn his pen to rhymes. and the future may yet bring forth a shakespearean honest enough to collect these verses--as they follow here--and to entitle them--= ````the complete poetical works `````of ```william shakespeare. ````epitaph on elias james. * ```when god was pleased, the world unwilling yet, ```elias james to nature paid his debt, ```and here reposeth; as he liv'd he dyde; ```the saying in him strongly verified-- ```such life, such death; then, the known truth to tell, ```he lived a godly lyfe, and dyde as well.= ```epitaph on sir thomas stanley. ** ```ask who lyes here, but do not weepe: ```he is not dead, he doth but sleepe; ```this stony register is for his bones, ```his fame is more perpetual than these stones, ```and his own goodness, with himself being gone, ```shall live when earthly monument is none.= * on the authority of "a ms. volume of poems by herrick and others, said to be in the handwriting of charles i., in the bodleian library. ** on the authority of sir william dugdale ("visitation book"), who says, "the following verses were made by william shakespeare, the late famous tragedian." this appears to be our author's longest and most ambitious work. { } ```not monumental stone preserves our fame ```nor skye aspyring pyramids our name; ```the memory of him for whom this stands ```shall outlive marble and defacer's hands, ```"when all to time's consumption shall be given; ```stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven.= ```epitaph ox tom-a-combe, otherwise thixbeard. * ```thin in beard and thick in purse, ```never man beloved worse; ```he went to the grave with many a curse, ```the devil and he had both one nurse.= ````whom i have drunken with. ** ```piping pebworth, dancing marston, ```haunted hillsborough and hungry grafton; ```with dancing exhall, papist wixford, ```beggarly bloom and drunken bidford.= ````david and goliath. *** ```goliath comes with sword and spear, ````and david with a sling; ```although goliath rage and swear ````down david doth him bring.= on john combe, a covetous rich man, mr. william shake-speare wright this att his request while hee was yett liveing for his epitaphe. ****= ```ten in the hundred lies here engraved; ```' tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved; ```if any one asks, "who lies in this tomb?" ```"hoi hoi" quoth the devil, "'tis my john a combe."---- * on the authority of peck, "memoirs of milton," to, ** on the authority of john jordan. there is a strong poetic license here--according to the well-known legend, william had really only drunk with bidford; the quantrain is probably the work of jordan and not shakespeare. *** on the authority of stratford local tradition. **** aslimolean ms., cited by halliwell. the pun is on the warwickshire pronunciation, "ho! ho!" quoth the devil, "'tis my john has come!" see aubrey's version: "ten in the hundred the devil allows, but coombs will have twelve he swears and vows," etc. { }----but being dead, and making the poor his heires, hee after wrightes this for his epitaphe. * ```howere he lived judge not, ```john combe shall never be forgott ```while poor hathe memmorye, for he did gather ```to make the poor his issue, be their father, ```as record of his tilth and seedes, ```did crown him in his later needes. `````_finis. w. shak_.= lampoon on sir thomas lucy. ** ```sir thomas was too covetous, ````to covet so much deer, ```when horns enough upon his head ````most plainly do appear. ```had not his worship one deer left? ````what then? he had a wife. ```took pains enough to find him horns ````should last him all his life. * ashmolean ms. same as preceding. both the above are given by mr. grant white. shakespeare, vol. i, p. ci. ** this is given to us by mr. s. w. fullom (history of william shakespeare, player and poet; with new facts and traditions. london: saunders, oatley & co., , p. ,) with the following note: "the manner in which this fragment was recovered is not different from that to which we owe so many local ballads, known only to the common people. about , joshua barnes, the greek professor at cambridge, was in an inn at stratford, when he heard an old woman singing these stanzas, and, discerning the association with shakespeare, offered her ten guineas to repeat the whole ballad. this, however, she was unable to do, having forgotten the remaining portion." mr. fullom says these verses "reveal the shakespearean touch," and alludes to a scandal touching lady lucy's infidelity to her husband. the following additional verses were furnished by john jordan, who altered the above stanza into the same meter, and asserted the whole to be shakespeare, as unearthed and restored by himself: he's a haughty, proud, insolent knight of the shire at home nobody loves, yet there's many that fear; if lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it-- synge lowsie luey, whatever befall it. to the sessions he went, and did lowdly complain his park had been robbed and his deere they were slain; this lucy is lowsie, as some volke miseall it-- synge lowsie luey, whatever befall it. he sayd it was a ryot, his men had been beat, his venison was stol'n and clandestinely eat: so lucy is lowsie as some volke miscall it-- synge lowsie luey, whatever befall it. so haughty was he when the fact was confessed he sayd 'twas a wrong that could not be redressed; so luey is lowsie, as some volke miseall it-- synge lowsie luey, whatever befall it. though luces a dozen he wear on his coat, his name it shall lowsie for luey be wrote; for luey is lowsie, as some volke miseall it-- we'll sing lowsie lucy, whatever befall it. if a juvenile frolic he can not forgive, we'll sing lowsie lucy as long as we live; and luey the lowsie a libel may call it-- we'll sing lowsie lucy whatever befall it. mr. collier (shakespeare, r. g. white, ed. , p. cciii), gives the following four verses as by william shakespeare: on the king. crown have their compass, length of days their date, triumphs their tomb, felicity her fate; of naught but earth can earth make us partaker, but knowledge makes a king most like his maker. but gives no other authority for it than "a coeval manuscript." the world has, very regrettingly, come to look with such suspicion on mr. jollier's discoveries, that this relic, until confirmed, will hardly be accepted as genuine. { }another version of the lampoon. * ```a parliament member, a justice of peace, ```at home a poor scarecrow, at london an asse; ```if lowsie is lucy, as some volke miscalle it, ```then lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it. ```he thinks himself greate, ````yet an asse is his state: ```we allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. ```if lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it, ```sing, o lowsie lucy, whate'er befalle it.= some lampoon was affixed by young william to sir thomas lucy's park gate, and enraged the baronet to such a degree that--according to capell--he directed a lawyer at warwick to commence a prosecution against the lad. the lucy note, however, makes no mention of the lawyer, only stating that young shakespeare deemed it prudent to quit stratford, "at least for a time." the long ballad of six stanzas (which we give in the foot-note) was written by john jordan, a harmless rustic who lived at stratford in the days of malone and ireland, i. e. in the last years of the eighteenth century, and went about claiming to have inherited the mantle of shakespeare. the "piping pebworth" verses, and perhaps the whole story was written by him. * according to capell, oldys, and grant white. (see mr. white's shakespeare, vol. i. p. xxxviii.) oldys leaves out the "o" in the fourth and eighth lines. mr. fullom (cited above) declares this version to be spurious. (see note , p. .) at any rate, he seems to have succeeded in obtaining immortality by mixing his own efforts so successfully with the shakespearean { }remains as to make them all one in the local traditions. the above, with the= ````inscription for his own tomb. ```good frend, for jesvs' sake forbeare, ````to digg ye dust encloased here. ```blesse be ye man yt spares thes stones, ````and cvrst be he yt moves my bones.= (which was originally placed on the stone over william shakespeare's vault in the chancel of trinity church, stratford--was recut in the new stone which was found necessary fifty years ago, and now appears with the verbal contractions as given above) are all the literary compositions which, according to the local traditions of stratford, his home, where he was born, lived, and died--where alone, for a century or more after his death his reputation was cherished--william shakespeare ever produced. there is nothing: in them inconsistent with the record of the man himself; and, so far as we know, have never been rejected by the shakespeareans themselves. it certainly would not be honest, in our present appeal to history, to insert in this edition--we may fairly call it "the stratford edition"--of master shakespeare's poetry, all that he edited for the stage; or, worse yet, borrowed and dressed up, and--according to robert greene--passed for his own. we are very far from desiring even to do justice to poor robert greene, if in so doing we shall detract a hair's weight from the merits of william shakespeare. but it is not impossible to say a good word even for greene. although his language is not within such bounds of propriety as the shakespeareans could wish, { }modern research has amply proved that he told the truth, and that william shakespeare borrowed, or rather seized upon and adopted, without compensation, the work by which greene earned his bread. for greene's language, chettle, greene's editor, makes haste, sometime afterward, when william shakespeare had been taken up by "divers of worship" to apologize, as far as an editor can apologize for an author. we shall see, further on, how william shakespeare was shrewd enough to make himself useful to these "divers of worship," and in those days, and for a century after, no slavery was so abject as the slavery of letters to patronage. so, of course, chettle hastened to make his peace with them too. but the truth remains, nevertheless, that poor greene told only the truth. it is fashionable with the shakespeareans to sneer at greene, because he was "jealous" of shakespeare. he appears to have had reason to be jealous! but no name is bad enough to bestow on him. mr. grant white says: "robert greene, writing from the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee, warns three of his literary companions to shun intercourse with," etc., "certain actors, shakespeare among the rest." if robert greene died from over-debauch, it is no more than shakespeare himself died of, according to the entry in the diary of the rev. john ward. "it is not impossible," says mr. white, "even that this piece of gossiping tradition is true." mr. white is right to call it "gossiping tradition," for it is piece and parcel of all the other mention of william shakespeare of stratford. if it were not for "gossiping tradition," we had never heard, and mr. white had never written, of that personage. but { }mr. white makes no reservation of "gossiping tradition" in the case of robert greene. greene dies "on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," because he was jealous of william shakespeare, and was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself as to call that "jack of all trades" an "upstart crowe, beautified with our feathers," etc. it seems that poor robert greene's dying words--if they were his dying words--were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. but they have not been heeded. his "upstart crowe" has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is arrayed each passing day with somebody's richer and brighter plumage. if robert greene could speak from the dust, he doubtless could tell us--as jonson and the rest might have told us in their lifetimes, if they only would--whose all this plumage really was and is. but all are dust and ashes together now--dust and ashes three centuries old--and, as miss bacon said, "who loses any thing that does not find" the secret of that dust? however, not a shakespearean stops to waste a sigh over the memory of poor robert greene, * who saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer of other men's brains, and who was too human to see * "robert greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry or rhetoric than his fellows (nash, peele, and william shakespeare), was, from his miscellaneous and discursive reading, a very useful man in his coterie." dr. latham speaks of his book as "a groats worth of rest, purchased with a million of repentance," which certainly makes better sense than "a groat's worth of wit," etc., as usually written. which is right? greene died in . { }and hold his peace; but over the drunken grave of the stratford pretender--who was vanquished in his cups at bidford and pebworth, and lay all night under the thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last--they weep as for one cut off untimely, as dame quickly over the lazared and lecherous clay of sir john falstaff: "nay, sure, he's in arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to arthur's bosom.'a made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child." but let us not assume the appearance of unkindness to william shakespeare. he lived a merry life; and, so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his own wife, poor robert greene, and perhaps the delinquent for malt delivered. he loved his own, but that is no wrong. and, we must not forget that, so far as the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save by his silence, the works a too flattering posterity has assigned him. the appeal to history not only declines to set aside, but affirms, with costs, the verdict rendered upon the evidence. and the sum is briefly this: if william shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle; every thing else being equal, the presumption is against a miracle; but, here, every thing else is not equal, for all the facts of history are reconcilable with history and irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, then miracle there was none--in other words, if there were one miracle, then there must have been two. if there had lived no such man as william shakespeare, that "william shakespeare" would be as good a name as any other to designate the authorship of the shakespearean page, who will consider it worth while to { }question? but to credit the historical man with the living page demands, in our estimation, either a willful credulity, or an innocence that is almost physical blindness! { } part iii. the jonsonian testimony. [illustration: ] ut what is the summing up on the other side? merely the following copy of verses: to the memory of my beloved, the author, master william shakespeare, and what he hath left us. ```to draw no envy, shakespeare, on thy name ```am i thus ample to thy book and fame; ```while i confess thy writings to be such ```as neither man nor muse can praise too much. ```'tis true and all men's suffrage. but these ways ```were not the paths i meant unto thy praise; ```for seeliest ignorance on these may light, ```which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; ```or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance ```the truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; ```or crafty malice might pretend this praise ```and think to ruin where it seemed to raise. ```these are as some infamous bawd or whore ```should praise a matron; what could hurt her more? ```but thou art proof against them, and, indeed, ```above the ill fortune of them, or the need, ```i, therefore, will begin: soul of the age, ```the applause, delight, and wonder of our stage! ```my shakespeare rise! i will not lodge thee by ```chaucer, or spenser, or bid beaumont lie ```a little further to make thee a room. ```thou art a monument without a tomb, ```and art alive still while thy book doth live ```and we have wits to read and praise to give. ```that i not mix thee so, my brain excuses. ```i mean with great but disproportioned muses.= { } ```for if i thought my judgment were of years, ```i should commit thee surely with thy peers, ```and tell how far thou didst our lyly outshine, ```or sporting kyd, or marlowe's mighty line; ```and though thou hadst small latin and less greek, ```from thence to honor thee i would not seek ```for names: but call forth thundering Æschylus, ```euripides and sophocles to us. ```pacuvius, accius, him of cordova dead, ```to life again to hear thy buskin tread ```and shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on ```leave thee alone for the comparison ```of all that insolent greece or haughty rome ```sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. ```triumph, my britain, thou hast one to show ```to whom all scenes of europe homage owe. ```he was not of an age, but for all time! ```and all the muses still were in their prime ```when, like apollo, he came forth to warm ```our ears; or like a mercury to charm. ```nature herself was proud of his designs, ```and joyed to wear the dressing of his lines! ```which were so richly spun and woven so fit ```as, since she will vouchsafe no other wit, ```the merry greek, tart aristophanes, ```neat terence, witty plautus, how not please, ```but antiquated and deserted lie ```as they were not of nature's family. ```yet must i not give nature all; thy art, ```my gentle shakespeare, must enjoy a part; ```for though the poets matter nature be, ```his art doth give the fashion; and that he ```who casts to write a living line must sweat ```(such as thine are), and strike the second heat ```upon the muse's anvil; turn the same ```and himself with it, that he thinks to frame, ```or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, ```for a good poet's made, as well as born; ```and such wert thou! look how the father's face { } ```lives in his issue, even so the race ```of shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines ```in his well-turned and true-filled lines: ```in each of which he seems to shake a lance ```as brandished at the eyes of ignorance. ```sweet swan of avon, what a sight it were ```to see thee in our waters yet appear, ```and make t-hose flights upon the banks of thames ```that did so take eliza and our james! ```shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage ```or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage, ```which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like `````night ```and despairs day, but for thy volume's light.= this is all there is of jonson's labored verses, of which very few shakespeareans care to quote more than isolated passages of a line or two each. but taking them either as a whole (with their involved metaphors and most execrable and inapposite pun about shakespeare's lines "shaking a lance at ignorance")--or in spots (whichever spots the shakespeareans prefer), what sort of historical proof does this poem afford? what sort of testimony is this as to a fact? is it the sort we accept in our own personal affairs--in our business--in our courts of justice--in matters in which we have any thing at stake, or any living interest? will any insurance company pay its risk on the ship dolphin, on being furnished, by the dolphin's owners, with a thrilling poem by mr. tennyson or mr. tup-per, describing the dreadful shipwreck of the dolphin, the thunderous tempest in which she went down--the sky-capping waves, rent sails, creaking cordage, etc., etc.? will any jury of twelve men hang a thirteenth man for murder on production, by the state, of a harrowing copy of verses, dwelling on midnight assassina{ }tion, stealthy stabs, shrieking victims, inconsolable widows, orphans, and the like? and shall we require less or more proof, in proportion as the fact to be proved is nearer or more remote? however, since the shakespeareans rest their case on these verses, (for any one who cares to examine for himself will find the residue of the so-called "contemporary testimony," which is usually in rhyme, to be rather criticism--that is to say _eulogy_, for we find very little of any other sort of literary criticism in those days--as to the compositions than chronicle as to the man) we can well afford to waive these questions, and cross-examine ben jonson and his verses without pressing any objection to their competency. for criticism of the works is what meres's * opinion that "the sweete wittie soul of ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued shakespeare; witness his "venus and adonis," his "lucrece," his sugared sonnets among his private friends...." as plautus and seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the latines, so shakespeare among the english is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.... * "palladis tamia." as epius stoio said that the muses would speake with plautus' tongue, if they would speake latin, so i say that the muses would speake with shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speake english, etc., etc., etc., amount to; and so weever's= ```"honey-tongued shakespeare, when i saw thine issue, ```i swore apollo got them, and none other"--= probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what it says, namely, that when he read the plays, he swore { }that they were certainly apollo's. and if the comments of henry chettle, sir john davies, leonard digges, hugh holland, and the rest, do not read to the same effect, they have a meaning beyond what they express. but panegyric is not history--at least it can not override history. between the affirmative theory of the stratfordian authorship, then, and the demonstration of its utter impossibility and absurdity, there actually remains but the single barrier of the jonsonian testimony, contained in the copy of verses entitled "to the memory of my beloved, the author, mr. william shakespeare, and what he hath left us," written by mr. ben jon-son, and prefixed to the famous folio of . if this testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, there would actually remain nothing except to lay the shakespearean hoax away, as gently as might be, alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of exploded fallacies. however, let it not be ruled out merely on the ground that it is in rhyme. we have no less an authority than littleton--"auetoritas philosopho-rum, medieorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan-dæ et tenendæ" *--to the effect that the testimony, even of poets, is sometimes to be received. it is to be ruled out rather by a process akin to impeachment of the witness--by its appearing that the witness, elsewhere in the same controversy, testifies to a state of facts exactly opposite. for the truth is that, whatever ben jonson felt moved to say about his "pal" william shakespeare, whenever, "as a friend, he { }dropped into poetry," he was considerably more careful when he sat himself down to write "cold prose." * "co. lit.," a. just as "bully bottom," fearing lest a lion should "fright the ladies," and "hang every mother's son" of his troupe, devised a prologue to explain that the lion was no lion, but only snug the joiner, "a man as other men are," so master ben jonson, however tropical and effusive as to his contemporary in his prosody, in his prologue in _prose_ was scrupulous to leave only the truth behind him. mountains--ossian piled on pelion--of hearsay and lapse of time; oceans of mere opinion and "gush" would, of course, amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged alongside of the testimony of one single, competent, contemporary eye-witness. no wonder the shakespeareans are eager to subpoena ben jonson's verses. but, all the same, they are marvelously careful _not_ to subpoena his prose. and yet this prose is extant, and by no means inaccessible. malien jonson died, in , he left behind him certain memoranda which were published in , and are well-known as "ben jonson's discoveries." one of these memoranda--for the work is in the disjointed form of a common-place book of occasional entries--is devoted to the eminent men of letters in the era spanned by its author's own acquaintance or familiarity. it runs as follows: _cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of rome had equaled to their empire. imperium par imperio. we have had many, and in their several ages (to take in the former sæculum), sir thomas more, the elder wiat, henry, earl of surry, chal-oner, smith, eliot, b. gardiner, were, for their times, admirable; and the more because they began eloquence with us. sir nich{ }olas bacon was singular and almost alone in the beginning of elizabeth's time. sir philip sidney and mr. hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. the earl of essex, noble and high, and sir walter raleigh not to be contemned, either for judgment or style. sir henry saville, grave and truly lettered. sir edwin sandys, excellent in both. lord egerton, a grave and great orator, and best when he was provoked. but his learned and able, but unfortunate successor, is he that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent greece or haughty rome. * in short, within this view, and about this time, were all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. now things daily fall; wits grow downward and eloquence grows backward. so that he may be so named and stand as the mark and -------- of our language_. ** * judge holmes ("authorship of shakespeare," third edition, p. ) italicises these words to point the allusion to bacon, and to notice that the passage in "the discoveries," immediately preceding the above, is a direct allusion to bacon, while the phrase "insolent greece and haughty rome" occurs in line thirty-nine of the verses eulogistic of william shakespeare. ** "timber, or discoveries made upon men and matter: as they have flowed out of his daily readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the time." by ben jonson. "works," by peter whalley, vol. vii., p. . only fourteen years before, this ben jonson had published the verses which _made_ william shakespeare. only fourteen years before he had asserted--what the world has taken his word for, and never questioned from that day to this--that his "best beloved" william shakespeare had been the "soul of the age"--"not for an age, but for all time"--and his works "such as neither man nor muse can praise too much!" we have no means of knowing the precise date at which ben jonson's grief for his dead friend cooled, { }and his feelings experienced a change. but he leaves behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoranda, this catalogue "of all the wits" living in his day, who, in his opinion, "could honour a language or help study," and in this catalogue he inserts no such name as william shakespeare; william shakespeare, the name--not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that--only, about fourteen years ago--he had deemed worth mentioning among men "born about this time;" but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! had the "discoveries" preserved an absolute silence concerning william shakespeare, the passage we have quoted might, perhaps, have been considered a studied and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on the part of jonson, made for reasons best known to jon-son himself. but they are not silent. they devote a whole paragraph to william shakespeare--but in the proper place; that is to say, not among "the wits who could honour a language or help study," but among the author's personal acquaintance. this is all there is of this paragraph as to the real william shakespeare: _i remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he never blotted out a line. my answer hath been, "would he had blotted out a thousand!" which they thought a malevolent speech. i had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. and to justify mine own candour (for i loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any). he was (indeed) honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. sufflaminan{ }dus erat, as augustus said of haterius. his wit was in his own power, would that the rule of it had been so too! many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he said in the person of cæsar--one speaking to him--"cæsar, thou dost me wrong;" he replied, "cæsar never did wrong, but with just cause," and such like; which were ridiculous. but he redeemed his vices with his virtues. there was ever more in him to be praised than pardoned._ * that is every word which a man who "loved him" could say of william shakespeare!--that he was a skilled and careful penman, "never blotting out a line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to be checked; that, in playing the part of cæsar on the stage, somebody interpolated the speech, "cæsar, thou dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response; ** and that he (jonson) wished he (shakespeare) had blotted out a thousand of his lines. blot out a thousand shakespearean lines!--a thousand of the priceless lines of the peerless book we call "shakespeare!" * "works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. . ** possibly this may have occurred in playing the very version of the "cæsar" we now possess, though there are, of course, no such lines to be found there. fancy the storm which would follow such a vandal proposition to-day! ben jonson does not specify _which_ thousand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of the writings of his "soul of the age," the man "not of an age, but for all time!" and yet it is on the uncorroborated word of this man jonson that we build monuments to the stratford lad, and make pilgrimages to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel about the spelling of his name! if there is not a { }strong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its flavor. very possibly the fact was that, so far from having been an admirer of william shakespeare, ben jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. for ben jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of the day (we have history as authority for that), was poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to shakespeare; he was a stock actor on the rich managers boards, and could not take the bread out of his own mouth. but the poor scholar, and still poorer actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert fling at the rich charlatan:= ```"though need make many poets, and some such ```as art and nature have not bettered much, ```yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage ```as he dare serve the ill customs of the age: ```or purchase your delight at such a rate ```as for it, he himself must justly hate. ```to make a child now swaddled, to proceed ```man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed-- ```past threescore years, or with three rusty swords ```and help of some few foot and half foot words-- ```fight over york and lancaster's long jars, ```and in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars! ```he [_that is, ben himself_] rather prays you will be pleased to see ```one such to-day, as other plays should be; `````[_that is, one he wrote himself _] ```where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas, ```nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please."= ben says this himself--in the prologue to his "every man in his humour." again, in the "induction" to his "bartholomew { }fair," he has this fling at "the tempest:" "if there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it," he says, "nor a nest of antiques? he is loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." * * "the tempest" of that day in william shakespeare's hands, then, was a "drollery." see some curious evidence going to prove that, while the titles of the plays always remain the same, the plays themselves may have been different at different times. 'post vi, "the new theory." dr. carl elze (essays on shakespeare. london. macmillans. ), thinks that jonson meant a hit at shakespeare when he says, in volpone, "all our english authors will steal." but that jonson never himself believed, or expressed himself as believing, that william shakespeare was a poet (except in this rhymed panegyric which heminges and condell prefixed to the first folio), there is still further and perhaps stronger proof. three years after william shakespeare's death, ben jonson paid a visit to william drummond of hawthornden, and spent with him the greater part of the month of april, (or, as some fix it, the month of january, in that year). drummond was a poet himself, and, it is said, his poetical reputation was what had attracted jonson to make the visit. at any rate, he did visit him, and drummond kept notes of jonson's conversation. these notes are in the form of entries or items, grouped under drummond's own headings or titles, such as: "his acquaintance and behavior with poets living with him." daniel was at jealousies with him. drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him. that francis beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses. { }that sir john roe loved him; and when they, too, were ushered by my lord sullblk from a mask, roe wrott a moral epistle to him which began: _that next to playes, the court and the state were the best. god threateneth kings, kings lords, (as) lords do us._ he beat marston and took his pistol from him. sir w. alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected him, because a friend to drayton. that sir r. aiton loved him dearly. nid field was his schollar, and he had read to him the satyres of horace, and some epigrames of martiall. that markam (who added his arcadia) was not of the number of the faithfull, (i. e), poets, and but a base fellow. that such were day and middleton. that chapman and fletcher were loved by him. overbury was first his friend, then turn'd his mortall enimie. etc., etc. there are, in all, between two and three hundred entries of a similar character. now, in one of these entries, jonson is represented as saying that he "esteemeth done the first poet in the world in some things;" but there is nothing put in jonson's month, in the whole category, about the "star of poets," save that, in another place, is the following item: "that shakspeer wanted arte," and, further on, the following: "shakespeare wrote a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in bohemia, when there is no see neer by some miles." * * works of ben jonson. by william gifford. edited by lt. col. francis cunningham. vol. iii., p. . london. i. c. hotten, & picadilly. these notes were first printed by mr. david laing, who discovered them among the manuscripts of sir { }robert sibbald, a well-known antiquary and physician of edinburgh. they were preserved in the form of a copy in sibbald's handwriting. sibbald was a friend of the bishop sage, who edited drummond's works in . these notes were believed by sir walter scott to be genuine, and, by his advice, were printed first in the "archaeological scotica," in or about . at any rate, they were never printed by sibbald himself, nor used by him in any way which suggested a motive for forgery, and, internally, they agree with ben jonson's own "discoveries," especially as to his (jonson's) estimate of william shakespeare. and yet ben johnson was the beneficiary and friend of william shakespeare--the "immortal shakespeare"--whom ben "honours _this side_ idolatry," but whom we are not fearful of passing the bounds of idolatry in worshiping to-day. ben johnson was an overworked rhymester, and made his rhymes do double and treble duty. the first couplet of the prologue just cited= ```" though need make many poets, and some such ```as art and nature have not bettered much"--= needs only a little hammering over to become the= ```"while i confess thy writings to be such ```as neither man nor muse can praise too much"--= of the mortuary verses which--as we say--made shakespeare shakespeare. when the rich manager's alleged works were to be collected, the poor scholar, who had borrowed money of him in his lifetime, was called upon for a tribute. but the poor scholar for{ }bore to draw on the storehouse of his wits, though willing: to hammer over some of his old verses for the occasion. he once assured posterity, in rhyme, that they must not "give nature all," but remember his gentle shakespeare's art, how he would "sweat and strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil" (in other words, bring by long toil the firstlings of his genius to artificial perfection). and yet he deliberately tells drummond, long years after, and puts it down in black and white over his own. signature, that this same shakespeare "wanted art," and that the great trouble with him was that he talked too much. is it possible that the ideal shakespeare, the mighty miracle-working demigod, is only the accidental creation of a man who was poking fun at a shadow? let us not proceed to such a violent surmise, but return to a serious consideration of mr. ben jonson's unimpassioned prose. if the paragraph from the "discoveries" last above quoted--which estimates william shakespeare precisely as history estimates him, namely, as a clever fellow, and a player in one of the earliest theaters in london--is not to be regarded as a confession that ben jonson's verses were written (or rewritten) more out of generosity to his late friend's memory--rather in the exuberance of a poetic license of apotheosis--than with a literal adherence to truth;* then it must be conceded that the result is such a facing both ways as { }hangs any jonsonian testimony in perfect equilibrium as to the shakespearean controversy, and entitles ben jonson himself, as a witness for anybody or to any thing, to simply step down and out. * a confession, say the baconians, that jonson, as long as bacon lived, was eager to serve him by shouldering on his incognito--in poetry--while he was under no compunction to do so in his own posthumous remains. see post v, the baconian theory. for, admitting that his poetry is just as good as his prose--and probably the shakespeareans would care to assert no more than that--it is a legal maxim that a witness who swears for both sides swears for neither; and a rule of common law no less than of common sense that his evidence must be ruled out, since no jury can be called upon to believe and disbelieve one and the same witness at the same time. and so we are relieved from accounting for the "jonson testimony," as did lord palmerston, by saying: "o, those fellows always hang together; or, its just possible jonson may have been deceived like the rest;" * or by asking ourselves if a score of rhymes by ben johnson, a fellow craftsman (not sworn to, of course, and not nearly as tropical or ecstatic as they might have been, and yet been quite justifiable under the rule nil nisi)--are to outweigh all historic certainty? if jonson had written a life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk," of william shakespeare, it might have been different. but he only gives us a few cheap lines of poetical eulogy; and fact is one thing, and poetry--unless there is an exception in this instance--is conceded to be altogether another. * frazer's magazine, november, , p. . but since numberless good people are suspicious of rules of law as applied to evidence, regarding them as over-nice, finical, and as framed rather to keep out truth than to let it in, let-us waive the legal maxim, { }and admit the jonsonian testimony to be one single, consistent block of contemporary evidence. but, no sooner do we do this, than we find ourselves straightway floundering in a slough of absurdities for greater, it seems to us, than any we have yet encountered. to illustrate: it is necessary to the shakespearean theory that in the days of elizabeth and james there should have been not only a _man_, but a genius, a wit, and a poet, of the name of william shakespeare; and that all these--man, genius, wit, and poet--should have been one and the same individual. taking all the jonsonian testimony, prose and poetry, together, such an individual there was, and his name was william shakespeare, as required. but--still following jonson's authority--at the same period and in the same town of london there was a certain gentleman named bacon, who was "learned and able," and who had, moreover, "filled up all numbers--and" in the same days "performed that which may be compared either to insolent greece or haughty rome." we have, then, not only a "wit and poet" named shakespeare, but a "wit and poet" named bacon; and, since jonson is nowhere too modest to admit that he himself was a "wit and poet," we have, therefore, actually not one but three of a kind, at each other's elbows in london, in the golden age of english literature. we have already seen that, of this trio, two--bacon and shakespeare, if we are to believe the shakespeareans--were personally unknown to each other. it is worth our while to pause right here, and see what this statement involves. they are all three--bacon, jonson, and shakespeare--dwelling in the same town at the same mo{ }ment; are, all three, writers and wits, earning their living by their pens. ben jonson is the mutual friend. he is of service to both--he translates bacon's english into latin for him, * and writes plays for william shakespeare's stage, and, as we have seen, he ultimately becomes the boswell of both, and runs from one to the other in rapture. * jonson assisted dr. hackett, afterward bishop of litchfield and coventry, in translating the essays of lord bacon into latin. (whalley, "life of ben jonson," vol. i. of works, cited ante.) jonson was at this time "on terms of intimacy with lord bacon."--(w. h. smith, "bacon and shakespeare," p. .) his admiration for bacon, on the one hand (according to his prose), amounts to a passion; his admiration for shakespeare, on the other hand (according to his poetry), amounts to a passion, he declares (in prose) that bacon "hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, which may be compared and preferred either to _insolent greece or haughty rome_." he declares (in poetry) of shakespeare that he may be left alone--= ````"....for comparison ```of all that insolent greece or haughty borne ```sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."= and yet he never, while going from one to the other, mentions shakespeare to bacon or bacon to shakespeare; never "introduces" them or brings them together; never gives his soul's idol bacon any "order" to his soul's idol shakespeare's theater, that this absolutely inimitable bacon (who has surpassed insolent greece and haughty rome) may witness the masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable shakespeare{ }(who has likewise surpassed insolent greece and haughty rome); this boswell of a jonson, go-between of two men of repute and public character, travels from one to the other, sings the praises of each to the world outside (using the same figures of speech for each), and, in the presence of each, preserves so impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the two public characters themselves each is absolutely ignorant of the other's existence! and yet they ought to have been close friends, for they borrowed each other's verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to any extent. persons there have been who asserted, as we shall see, on merely the internal evidence of their writings, that bacon and "shakespeare" were one and the same man, and that what appeared to be "parallelisms" and coincidences in bacon and "shakespeare" were thus to be accounted for. but, admitting their separate identity, it is certain either that the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from the comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright borrowed the speeches for his comedies from the natural philosopher; either of which looks very much like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. for, as we shall see further on, * some of these "parallelisms" are not coincidences, but something very like _identities_. * post, part v, the baconian theory. it will not lighten this new difficulty to rule out the prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not annihilate francis bacon nor yet william shakespeare from their places in history. if, however, the jonsonian poetry _were_ wiped out, the jonsonian prose would receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows: { }at the same time that bacon and shakespeare are living, unknown to each other respectively, in london, there also dwell there three other gentlemen--sir walter raleigh, edmund spenser, and sir tobie matthew. we, therefore, actually have four well-known gentlemen of the day in london, gentlemen of elegant tastes--poets, men about town, critics--who, if the town were being convulsed by the production at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as to the circumstance. we do not add to this list southampton, essex, rutland, montgomery, and the rest, because these latter have left no memorandum or chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript behind them. but the first four have left just precisely such memoranda of their times as are of assistance to us here. bacon, in his "apothegms," spenser in his poems, * and raleigh and matthew in their re{ }mains--especially matthew--who, like bacon, kept a diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as fond of playing at boswell to his favorites as jonson himself--appear to have stumbled on no trace of such a character as "shakespeare" in all their sauntering about london. * spenser's well-known lines in "colin clout's come home again," written in , are: and there, though last not least, is Ætion, a gentler shepherd may nowhere be found, whose muse, full of high thought's invention, doth--life himself--heroically sound." "Æton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in the verse for "shakespeare." but it is difficult to imagine how this can possibly be more than mere speculation, since spenser certainly left no annotation explanatory of the passage, and it does not identify itself as a reference to shakespeare. in "the tears of the muses," line , there is an allusion which on a first glance appears so pat, that the bard of avon has long been called "our pleasant willy" on the strength of it. it runs: "and ho, the man whom nature's self had made, to mock herself and truth to imitate with kindly counter under mimick shade, our pleasant willy, ah, is dead of late: with whom all joy and jolly merriment is also deaded, and in dolour dreut." but, since spenser died some seventeen years before shakespeare, and if--as must be supposed from their flippancy--these lines point to the enforced or voluntary retirement or silence of some writer, rather than to his death--they appear more nearly to refer to sidney than to shakespeare. and this now appears to be conceded. (see morley's "english men of letters: spenser," by dean church. american edition, harpers, new york, , p. .) besides, "the tears of the muses" was written in , when shakespeare was a lad of sixteen, holding horses at the theater door. "will," or "wib," appears to have been the ordinary nickname of a poet in those days.--r. gr. white's "shakespeare," vol. i., p. , note. especially on one occasion does sir tobie devote himself to a subject-matter wherein, if there had been any "shakespeare" within his ken, he could very properly--and would, we think, very naturally--have mentioned him. in the "address to the reader," prefixed to one of his works, * he says, speaking of his own date, "we have also rare compositions made among us which look so many fair ways at once that i doubt it will go near to pose any other nations of europe to muster out in any age four men who, in so many respects, should be able to excel { }four such us we are able to show--cardinal wolsey, sir thomas more, sir philip sidney, and sir francis bacon. for they were all a kind of monsters in their various ways," etc. * "a collection of letters made by sir tobie matthew, with a character of the most excellent lady lucy, countess of carlisle. to which are added many letters of his several persons of honour, who were contemporary with him." loudon, . besides, these four--or, dismissing spenser, who was a poet exclusively--then three, bacon, raleigh, and tobie matthew--however else dissimilar, were any thing but blockheads or anchorites. they were men of the court and of the world. they mingled among their fellow-men, and (by a coincidence which is very useful to us here) none of them were silent as to what they met and saw during their careers. they both live and move in the very town and in the very days when this rare poetry which emerson says "the greatest minds value most" was appearing. but, if william shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it possible to escape the conviction that not one of them all--not bacon, a man of letters himself, a student of antique not only, but of living and contemporary literature, and overfond of writing down his impressions for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the dramatic or poetic perception, the scholarship of the plays could not have escaped him; and had these plays been the delight and town talk of all london, as mr. grant white says they were, some morsel of them must have reached his ear or eye)--not raleigh, courtier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled darling," and every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid to go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals)--not tobie matthew, who was all this latter with less of responsibility and mental balance--ever so much as heard his (shakespeare's) name mentioned? that not one of these ever heard of a name that was in every{ }body's mouth--of a living man so famous that, as we shall presently consider, booksellers were using his name to make their wares sell, that his plays were fill-ins: the most fashionable theater in london from cockpit to the dome; whose popularity was so exalted that the great queen elizabeth herself stepped down from the throne and walked across his stage to do him honor, to whom in after days, her successor king was to write an autograph letter (for these must all be considered in the argument, though, as we have seen, the king james story is only one of the "yarns," * cooked for occasion by commentators, or the growth of rumor--in orthodox procession from "might have been" to "was"--and so, doubtless, is the other) is a trifle incredible to a mind not already adjusted to swallow any and every fable in this connection rather than accept the truth of history! to be sure, it is not absolutely impossible that these three men should have been cognizant of william shakespeare's existence without mentioning him in their favors to posterity. * the story of elizabeth's order for "falstaff in love," resulting in the production of "the merry wives of windsor" (which would prove that, whatever else she was, elizabeth was no anthony comstock), is, to our mind, another sample of the same procession. hazlitt (lit. of europe, part iii., chap. , sec. iii., note,) is especially incredulous as to the king james letter. the truth is that shakespeare, far from being flattered by james, was actually in disgrace, and not so much as to be mentioned in that monarch's hearing, from having permitted a representation of the sacred person of royalty on his stage, as is authenticated by the well- known lines of davies: "hadst thou not played some kingly parts in sport, etc., etc." but, under all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. at any rate, we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of { }three englishmen in london to-day, in --let us say mr. gladstone, mr. browning, and mr. swinburne--without collusion, writing down a list of their most illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them mentioning mr. tennyson! or, assuming that tennyson is the admitted first of poets of the victorian age (as mr. ben jonson and all the commentators at his heels, down to our own mr. grant white, tell us that "william shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of his contemporary elizabethan age), it would not be the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chroniclers--mr. gladstone, mr. browning, and mr. swinburne-sitting themselves down to an enumeration, not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first of poets of their day! either, then, it seems to us we are to infer that three such men as raleigh, bacon, (who, emerson says, "took the inventory of the human understanding, for his time,") and his satellite matthew, had never so much as heard that there was any shakespeare, in an age which we moderns worship as the age of shakespeare, or that there was no "shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "william shakespeare" was the name of an actor and manager in the globe and blackfriars play-houses, of a man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors and co-managers in those establishments, to enumeration among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious age, the stars of the golden age of english! of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere negative evidence; that not only three but three million of men might be found who had never mentioned { }or ever heard of shakespeare, without affecting the controversy either way. but, under the circumstances, in view of what the shakespearean plays _are_, and of what their author must have been, and of when and where these three men--bacon, raleigh, and matthew--lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these three men--bacon, raleigh, and matthew--constitute, at the very least, a "negative pregnant" not to be omitted in any review of our controversy that can lay the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and, moreover, a negative pregnant which--if we admitted all the ben jonson testimony, in prose and poetry, as evidence on the one side--could not be excluded as evidence on the other. in which event it is fairest to the shakespeareans to rule ben out altogether. ** * and we might add to these sir john davies, selden, sir john beaumont, henry vaughn, lord clarendon and others. ** it is fair to note that another "negative pregnant" arises here, to which the shakespeareans are as fairly entitled as the other side to theirs. sir tobie matthew died in . he survived shakespeare thirty-nine years, bacon twenty-nine years, and raleigh thirty-seven years! left in possession of the secret of the baconian authorship, how could such a one as matthew let the secret die with him? although we do not meet with it among the arguments of the shakespeareans, this strikes us as about the strongest they could present, except that the answer might be that at the date of matthew's death, , the shakespearean plays were not held in much repute, or that matthew might have reserved his unbosoming of the secret too long; but it is only one fact among a thousand. besides, ben is what the scotchmen call "a famous witness" (if the commentators, who enlarge on shakespeare's bounty and loans to him, can be relied upon), as being under heavy pecuniary obligation to the stage manager, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the { }greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his obligations to over-master him when writing the "discoveries." but, in any event, it would be easier to believe that ben jonson once contradicted himself for the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" by the memory of an old friend and unpaid creditor, than to swallow the incredible results of a literal version of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the bacon, raleigh, and matthew remains. and the conclusion of the matter, it seems to us, must be: either that the poetry was the result of his obligations to william shakespeare and to william shakespeare's memory, or that, having sworn on both sides, mr. ben jonson stands simply dehors the case--a witness for neither. it is not, then--it is very far from being--because we know so little of the man shakespeare that we disbelieve in his authorship of the great works ascribed to him. it is because we know so much. no sooner did men open their histories, turn up the records and explore the traditions and trace the gossip of' the elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in the face. long before any "baconian theory" arose to account for these anomalies: at the instant these plays began to be valued for any thing else than their theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the man to his verse" began to be troublesome. "to be told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 'lear,'" cried mr. hallam. * * "i laud," says hallam, "the labors of mr. collier, mr. hunter, and other collectors of such crumbs, though i am not sure that we should not venerate shakespeare as much if they had left him undisturbed in his obscurity.... if there was a shakespeare of earth, as i suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to know something." "every accession of in { }formation we obtain respecting the man shakespeare renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the poet," cries mr. william henry smith. * "i am one of the many," testifies mr. furness, "who have never been able to bring the life of william shakespeare and the plays of shakespeare within a planetary space of each other; are there any other two things in the world more incongruous?" ** * "bacon and shakespeare," p. . ** in a letter to judge holmes, printed at p. , third edition, of the latter's "authorship of shakespeare." it was necessary, therefore, in order to preserve a belief in the shakespearean authorship, either that william shakespeare should be historically known as a man of great mental power, a close student of deep insight into nature and morals--a poet, philosopher, and all the rest--or else that, by a failure of the records, history should be silent altogether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time have made it impossible to recover any details whatever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. in such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, which would, of course, prove him precisely the myriad-minded genius required. in other words, it was only necessary to so cloud over _the facts_ as to make the "shakespearean miracle" to be, _not_ that william shakespeare had written the works, but--that history should be so silent concerning a "shakespeare!" so long as the shakespeareans could cry, "behold a mys{ }terious dispensation of providence--that, of the two mightiest poets the world has ever held--homer and william shakespeare--we know absolutely nothing!"--so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name "william shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory a name as any other, and nobody could propose a better. but they can cry so no longer. it is not because we know so _little_, but because we know _so much_ about the stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the master we not only admire and love, but in whose pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery anticipated. as a matter of fact, through the accident of his having been a part-proprietor in one of the earliest english play-houses, we know pretty accurately what manner of man he was. we know almost every thing about him, in short, except--what we _do_ know about homer--that the words now attributed to him were _his_. homer, at least, we can trace to his "iliad" and his "odyssey," as he sang them in fragments from town to town. but neither to his own pen nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we shall see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays so long assigned to william shakespeare. let the works be placed in our hands for the first time anonymously; given the chronicles of the age of elizabeth and james in which to search for an author of these works, would any thing we found in either lead us to pronounce william shakespeare their author? and has any thing happened _since_ to induce us to set aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion to blindly and obediently believe that william shakes{ }peare was not the man he was, lest we should be "disrespectful to our birthright?" nothing whatever has happened since, except the labors of the commentators. by the most painfully elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingenious postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker--but, after all, a shakespeare. that the error, in the commencement, was the result of carelessness, there can be no doubt. but that, little by little--each commentator, either in rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to be one item ahead of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of hand), or being too indolent to examine for himself, or too subservient to authority to rebel--it grew to vast proportions, we have only to look at the huge "biographies" of the last half century to be assured. it will not detain us long, as an example of these, to briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid of the ilk to identify the traditional poet with the traditional man. in , thomas de quincy contributed to the "encyclopædia britannica" its article "shakespeare." that about the story of the prankish stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky-raftered cottage in stratford town and the snug little thatch at shottery trudged every sunset to do his courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love, and poetry, no patron of the "encyclopædia" would probably have doubted. but that a staid and solemn work, designed for exact reference, should have printed { }so whimsical a fancy sketch as mr. de quincy supplied to it, and that it should have been allowed to remain there, must certainly command surprise. there can surely be complaint as to the variety of the performance. mr. de quincy very ably and gravely speculates as to the size of the dowry old hathaway gave his daughter; as to whether old john shakespeare mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; and whether that gentleman received the patronage of stratford corporation when (as there is no direct authority for saying they did not) they had occasion to present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman (and this portion of the composition winds up with a history of gloves and glove-making which can not fail to interest and instruct the reader). and his speculations as to whether the messengers who sped to worcester for the "marriage-lines" did or did not ride in such hot haste, in view of an expected but premature susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies of the names "shakspeare" and "hathaway" to the aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially pretty reading. but--with facilities in for writing a history of the stratford lad, which the stratford lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hundred years and more before mr. de quincy, seem never to have possessed--mr. de quincy quite surpasses himself in setting us exactly right as to william shakespeare. and, first, as to the birthday. there has always been a sort of feeling among englishmen that their greatest poet ought to have had no less a birthday than the day dedicated to their patron saint. the stratford parish records certifying to the christening of william shakespeare on the th day of april, { } (which mr. de quincy forgets was "old style," and so, in any event, twelve days before the corresponding date in the present or "new style"), and the anniversary of st. george being fixed for celebration on the d of april, it had come to be unanimously resolved by the commentators that, in warwickshire, it was the custom to christen infants on the third day after birth, and that, therefore, william shakespeare was born on the anniversary of st. george, april , . to baptise a three-days-old baby, in an english april, a period five days earlier than, in the mild latitude of palestine, the israelites thought it necessary to circumcise their infants, seems a very un-english proceeding. so mr. de quincy, who would rather perish than mislead, thinks, after all, the birth might have been a day earlier. "after all," he says, "william _might_ have been born on the d. only one argument," he gravely proceeds, "has sometimes struck us for supposing that the d might be the day, and not the d, which is, that shakespeare's sole granddaughter, lady barnard, was married on the d of april, ten years exactly from the poet's death, and the reason for choosing this day might have had a reference to her illustrious grandfather's birthday, which, there is good reason for thinking, would be celebrated as a festival in the family for generations!" but even mr. de quincy appears to concede that, in writing history, we must draw the line somewhere; for he immediately adds, "still this choice may have been an accident" (so many things, that is to say, are likely to be considered in fixing a marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's birthday!), "or governed merely by reason of convenience. and, { }on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the old belief that shakespeare was born and died on the d of april. we can not do wrong if we drink to his memory both on the d and d." * * mr. de quincy's own estimate of this performance we take from a preface to the article itself, in the american edition of his collected works (boston: shepard & gill, ), vol. xv., p. : "no paper ever cost me so much labor; parts of it have been recomposed three times over." and again, "william shakespeare's article cost me more intense labor than any i ever wrote in my life and, i believe, if you will examine it, you will not complain of want of novelty." we should say not. mr. de quincy's proposition to drink twice instead of once ought to forever secure his popularity among englishmen; but it remains, nevertheless, remarkable that a ponderous encyclopaedia should admit this sort of work among its articles on sugar, snakes, sardinia, soap, savonarola, and its other references in s! like his fellow shakespeareans, mr. de quincy makes no use of aubrey, or the old clerk, or the rev. richard davies, or any one else who, having lived at dates inconveniently contiguous to the real william shakespeare, were awkward customers about whom it was best to say nothing. he cannot claim never to have heard of aubrey, because he quotes him as saying that william shakespeare was "a handsome, well-shaped man." but this is the only allusion he makes to aubrey or to any body else who lived within eyesight or ear-shot of the william shakespeare who (we admit), if a well-conducted person, _ought_ reasonably to have been the man mr. de quincy and his ilk turn him out, and not the man his neighbors, or any body who happened to be born within a hundred years { }of him, knew him. as to the difficulties coleridge, goethe, schlegel, richter, carlyle, palmerston, emerson, gervinius, hallam, holmes, william henry smith, furness, and delia bacon find so insurmountable--namely, as to where the material of the plays came from--mr. de quincy skips over these with his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on stratford high street! (the identical desk which william occupied during this period of attendance at that institution of learning was promptly supplied by the stratford guides, upon hearing mr. de quincy's discovery.) "old aubrey," two hundred years nearer his subject, was careful to give his school-master's story "for what it was worth," admitting that his authority for the statement that william shakespeare was a school-master was only a rumor, founded on the statement of one "beeston;" but who was "beeston?" some of our modern commentators have conjectured that possibly william, being a sort of model or head boy, was trusted to hear some of the little boys' lessons, which gave rise to the "school-master" story. but mr. de quincy allows no demurrer nor doubt to his assertions in the encyclopædia britannica. and for these "two terms" (of course), no further authority than himself being necessary, he vouchsafes none. such dry things as references are gracefully compensated for by favoring the reader in search for shakespearean data with two dissertations upon the loveliness of female virtue, one of which covers fourteen pages octavo. * his cue has had prolific fol{ }lowing. * of sheppard & gill's reprint (pp. , - ). but if mr. de quincy could have lived until november, , even he might have been taught something. the rev. john bayley, in an article on "the religion of shakespeare," in the "sunday magazine" (new york: frank leslie, november, , p. ), says of william shakespeare," "during the last years of his life it is stated that he and his family attended the parish church where the rev. richard byfield, an eminent puritan minister, and father of the distinguished commentator on the epistle to the colossians, commenced his ministry, a. d. ." of course, the reverend contributor to the "sunday magazine" does not in-form us where this fact "is stated," but concludes from the fact (he is sure it is a fact) that shakespeare was "during the last years of his life the constant hearer of this eminent and energetic preacher of the gospel," and that "we may reasonably hope for the best of consequences." so simple a process has shakespeare-making become! now-a-days our "biographies" of william shakespeare are huge tomes of elizabethan and other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture, argumentation; that stupefy us, as it were, by mere bulk and show of research, into accepting the whole rather than plunge into so vast and shoreless a sea of apparent labor, and, therefore, alleged learning. for such is the indolence of man, that the bulkier the book the less likely is it to be read or refuted. and so, in view of the great eye-filling books labeled "biographies" of william shakespeare--volumes commensurate with the idea of a life which might, in time at least, have compassed the mighty works--one need not doubt that "william shakespeare" was the name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays. but, when one left the fiction of mr. de quincy and his ilk, and was forced to confront the william shakespeare who wrote the lucy lampoon and the epitaph on elias james, who stuck calves and stole { }deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled emphasis. it is not, of course, because william stuck the calves and stole the deer, because he wrote the lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he was son (or apprentice, as some lay), to a butcher or a glover, a tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to have been unequal to the shakespearean authorship. there never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. george stephenson was a colliery-stoker, turner was the son of a barber, and faraday the son of a horseshoer. coleridge was a charity-lad, and the number of tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names history could not be written, is something amazing. we may trace the genius of turner from the first impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or described the edison phonograph. he knew and practiced what he was _taught_ (albeit he taught himself), and died quite contented to leave his own works behind him. robert burns was fully as unlettered and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove the mighty miracle of genius. his history, up to a certain point, is the very duplicate of the history of william shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy of stratford village. both were obscure, schoolless, and grammarless. but, in the case of robert burns, this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught pen to write of troy and egypt, of athens and cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civiliza{ }tions and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten, the very names of which were not dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade in mitylene, the anomalous status of a moorish mercenary in command of a venetian army, of a savage queen of britain led captive by rome, or a thane of scotland under one of its primitive kings--matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach! in the case of robert burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. let us be content if the genius of bobert burns could glorify the goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a venus! it were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this fire from heaven, at once and on the instant invest a letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten--with all the learning that the past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in libraries. and yet, if bobert burns had sung of the punic wars or the return of the heraclides, some malone or dequincy or charles knight would doubtless--with history staring him in the face--have arisen to put his index-finger upon the sources of his authority. judging by the record in the case of william shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty { }over which a malone or dequincy or charles knight can not easily clamber. if william shakespeare was a born genius, a true son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of the beauty of life and of love, land of all around him, we might expect to find his poems brimful of the sweet, downcast eyes of his anne, of sunny stratford fields, of shottery and the lordly oaks of charlecote--to find him, "fancy's child," warbling "his native wood-notes wild," indeed! but of troy, tyre, and epidamnium, of priam and cressid and cleopatra, of the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that "sweetest shakespeare, fancy's child" could sing in the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? or, again, john bunyan is a case in point. john bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as ever flourished in the days when "a tinker was rogue by statute." * and yet he, according to macaulay, produced the second of the two books of which england should be proudest. ** what was the miracle in the case of john bunyan? he produced a book which, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.... this is the highest miracle of art, that things which{ }are not should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. and this miracle the tinker has wrought." * cockayne vs. hopkins, lev., . ** "though there were many clever men in england during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. one of these minds produced the 'paradise lost,' and the other the 'pilgrim's progress.'" but this great praise was not abstracted from macaulay by wealth of antique learning, universal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of forgotten civilizations. there was no trace of bun-yan's perfect familiarity with plato and euripides, with galen, paracelsus, plautus, seneca, and the long line of authors down to boccaccio, rabelais, saxo-grammaticus, and the rest! the critic did not find in bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and punctilious norman of the court. "the bunyan vocabulary," says macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the common people. there is not an expression, if we except a few technical theological terms, which would puzzle the rudest peasant." in short, we need not pause, marvelous as are the pages of the "pilgrim's progress," to ask of john bunyan, as indeed we must ask of william shakespeare, the question, "how knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the writings of john bunyan which can not be accounted for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been obliged by the course of human experience to accept as not impossible) causes. "the years of bunyan's boyhood were those during which the puritan spirit was in the highest vigor over all england.... it is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. before he was ten, his sports { }were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and bis sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.... he enters the parliamentary army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner.... his 'greatheart,' his 'captain boanerges, and his 'captain credence' are evidently portraits of which the originals were among those martial saints* who fought and expounded in fairfax's army.... he had been five years a preacher when the restoration put it in the power of the cavaliers... to oppress the dissenters.... he was flung into bedford jail, with pen and paper for company, etc., etc. here are the school and the experience, and the result is writings which show a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the english bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience." ** moreover, here is a scholar like macaulay striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of a "pilgrim's progress" written by a village tinker. but in the case of the at least equally extraordinary phenomenon of the shakespearean drama, the creation of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born to the shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profitable to try his hand at any such investigation. "where did he get his material?" "oh, he picked it up around stratford, somehow!" "but his learning?" "oh, he found it lying around the theater somewhere!" * "bunyan," in "encyclopaedia britannica," by macaulay. ** ibid. { }probably there were encyclopaedias to be fished ont of the mad of the bank-side in those days, of which we can find no mention in the chroniclers! and so, although scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of this material, leading him on to vaster and more magnificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace the intellectual experience of the man who wrought it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. not one of them has paused to ask the scriptural question, "how knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" for, it can not be too incessantly reiterated, the question is not, "was shakespeare a poet?" but, "had he access to the material from which the plays are composed?" admit him to have been the greatest poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where did he get--not the poetry, but--the classical, philosophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, etc., etc., information--the facts that crowd these pages? and let us not be credited, in these pages, with a malignant rejection of every tradition or anecdote that works to william shakespeare's renown, and a corresponding retention of every tradition or anecdote to his disparagement. for example, if it is asked, why reject the story of king james's autograph letter, and retain the story of the trespass on sir thomas lucy's deer? the answer must be: first; because, while there is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of improbability in the former. king james was a king, and kings rarely write autograph letters to subjects. the lord chamberlain may give a sort of permission { }to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to queen victoria; but it would be vastly improbable that queen victoria should write an autograph letter to the haberdasher to that effect. second, because the poaching story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the memory of man runneth not to a time when it was not believed; whereas the king james story first appeared in the year , in a biographical notice affixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one bernard lintot. mr. lintot gave no authority for the statement whatever, except to say that it rested on the word of "a credible person then living." but everybody can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, struggle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and nobody will wonder that, after mr. lintot, no "biographer" omitted to mention it. as a matter of fact, the letter from king james and the letter from queen elizabeth, produced by young ireland, are equally genuine correspondence. but the stories of the latter class, while not beyond question, are at least not improbable, considering the record of the youth shakespeare at stratford, while those of the first are certainly improbable on their face, and can be in almost every case traced to their exact source. so the story of his holding horses, while by no means authentic, (mr white says it was not heard of until the middle of the last century), is by no means improbable, seeing that the lad ran away to london----and rowe and the old sexton both agree that he began--as self-made men do--at the bottom. the story of queen elizabeth's crossing the stage and dropping her glove, which shakespeare picked up and pre{ }sented with an impromptu, mr. white himself smiles at, with the remark that "the anecdote is plainly one made to meet the craving for personal details of shakespeare's life," * and he treats it as he does the "florio" in the british museum, supposed to have belonged to william shakespeare, because that name is written----after his mode--on a fly-leaf; with a pleasant wish that he were able to believe in it. * far from being of the class that kings delight to honor, it is simply impossible to turn one's researches into any channel that leads into the vicinity of stratford without noticing the fact that the shakespeare family left, in the neighborhoods where it flourished, one unmistakable trace familiar in all cases of vulgar and illiterate families; namely, the fact that they never knew or cared, or made an effort to know, of what vowels or consonants their own name was composed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronunciation. they answered--or made their marks--indifferently to "saxpir" or "chaksper;" or to any other of the thirty forms given by mr. grant white, ** or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of elegant leisure has been able to collect. *** * shakespeare's works. boston, . vol. l, p. , in, and see a note to the same volume, pp. - , as to ratzei's ghost, surmised to be an allusion to shakespeare. * ib., p. . ** shakespeare's scholar, pp. - . *** george russel french, shakespeareana geologicana. p. . { } in the records of the town council of stratford, of which john shakespeare was no unimportant part, the name is written in fourteen different forms, which may be tabulated as follows:---- ~ times written shackesper. times written shackespere. times written shacksper. times written shackspere. times written shakespere. time written shaksper. times written shakspere. ~~ times written shakspeyr. times written shakysper. times written shakyspere. times written shaxpeare. times written shaxper. times written shaxpere. times written shaxspeare. ~~~ in the marriage bond of november , , it is twice written, each time shagspere. on the grave of susanna, it is shakespere; and on the other graves of the family, shakespeare, except that under the bust it is shakspeare. that is to say, just as many orthographies as there are tombstones and inscriptions. any lawyer's clerk who has had occasion to search for evidence among the uneducated classes, knows how certainly a lower or higher grade of intelligence will manifest itself primarily in an ignorance of or indifference to one's own name or a corresponding zeal for one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accurately "taken down." whether this infallible rule obtained in the days of the shakespeares or not, or whether a family, that was so utterly stolid as not to know if their patronymic was spelled with a "c," a "k," or an "x," could have appreciated and bestowed upon their child a classical education (not to ring the changes upon politics, philosophy, etc., right here), is for the reader to judge for himself. mr. w. h. smith maintains that shakespeare, like the rest of his family, was unable to write, and had learned, by practice only, to make the signature which he was assured was his name. mr. smith founds his theory on the fact that, in the will the word "seale" (in the formula, "witness my seale," etc.) is erased, { }and the word "hand" substituted. in a letter to mr. shedding, * mr. smith claims that this erasure and substitution prove that the draughtsman who prepared the shakespeare will, knowing that the testator could not write, did not suppose that he would sign his name, and so prepared it for the superimposition of his seal. "i know," says mr. smith, "that you will ingeniously observe that that might have been his belief, but that the fact could better have been proved if '_hand_' had been erased and '_seale_' inserted. but shakespeare, being proud of his writing, and, as this would probably be his last opportunity, insisted on exhibiting his 'hand.'" according to mr. smith, therefore, ben jonson's speech about "never blotting out a line," was redundant. but, whether able to write, or, like his ancestors and descendants, signing with a mark, he clearly cared no more than they how people spelled his name. a mr. george wise, of philadelphia, has been able to compile a chart exhibiting one thousand nine hundred and six ways of spelling the stratford boy's name; ** a commentary on the efforts of mr. halliwell and others, to establish the canonical orthography, which might well reduce them to despair. the fact is, that there can no more be a canonical spelling of the name shakespeare than there can be a canonical face of the boy william. the orthography of shakespeare, as now accepted, and the face now accepted as belonging to william of that name, are both modern inventions. * see third edition holmes' "authorship of shakespeare," p. . ** philadelphia, . see essays on shakespeare, carl elze; translated by schmitz (london, macmillan's ), note to p. . even the { }"best of that family" (according to the old clerk), william, when called to sign his own last will and testament (obliged by law to sign each of the three sheets upon which it was engrossed) three times, spelled his name a different way each time. his daughter judith lived and died without being able to spell or write it at all; milton, spenser, sidney, even gower and chaucer (whom even our own artemus ward pronounced "no speller"), had but one way of writing their own names--and never dreamed of one thousand nine hundred and six. the name is now supposed to have been simply "jacques-pierre" (james peter), which had been mispronounced--as englishmen mispronounce french--for unnumbered generations. * this is the present mispronunciation of jacques prevalent in warwickshire. and, such being the true origin of the name, it is, of course, natural to find it as we do, written in two words "shake-speare," in those days. it is not william shakespeare's fault that he sprang from an illiterate family, but that--after growing so rich as to be able to enjoy an income of $ , a year, he should never send his children--especially his daughter judith--to school, so that the poor girl, on being married, on the th day of february, , should be obliged to sign her marriage bond with a mark, shows, we think, that he was not that immortal he would have been had he written the topmost literature { }of the world--the shakespearean drama! but, still, this most unsatisfactory person--this man who answers, like mr. carroll's skipper, to "hi, or to any loud cry"--= ```"to what-you-may-call-um or what-is-his-name ```but especially thing-um-a-jig,"= or to whatever the nearest actor or scene-shifter may happen to hit on when he wants the poor little "supernumerary," and "joannes factotum"--actually lived to clamber astride of the most immortal birthright of bis own or of any century, and has clung thereon like another old man of the sea on sinbad's shoulders, and been carried down through these three hundred years, and is being carried yet, down or up, to an undeterminate immortality of fame that is the true estate of somebody else! for, not only has the world not yet gotten its eyes half open, but it contumaciously refuses, to open them to the facts in the case, and prefers to hug as tightly as it ever did this stupendous hoax--("_shakespearean_" indeed, in that it has outlasted and outlived all the other hoaxes put together--the witchcraft hoax, the chatterton hoax, the ossian hoax, the moon hoax, and all the rest of them); that has carried all sorts of parasite hoaxes, like ireland's, collier's, and cunningham's upon its back, until their little day has been accomplished, and they have dropped off, just as, one of these days, the present hoax must drop off, and breathe its last, without a single mourner to stand by the coffin, and confess himself its disciple. { } part iv. extra shakespearean theories: the delia bacon theory. [illustration: ] here is a legal maxim to the effect that he who destroys should be able to build up. the anti-shakespeareans have not neglected to observe it. the days when william shakespeare first appeared in london, happened to be the days when the renaissance had reached england, and the drama which began then for the first time to be produced, was the english renaissant drama--just throwing off the crudities of the old miracle and mystery plays borrowed from the continent, and beginning to be english and original. moreover, letters and learning, so long exclusively confined to the rich and gentle, began to find expressions in other ranks. "the mob of gentlemen who write with ease" were, one and all, beginning to use their pens. there were no village newspapers with their "poet's corners," and these writers sent their manuscripts through the only channel at hand--the green-room door. as these scores of manuscripts came in, william shakespeare, of stratford, now mr. manager shakespeare of the blackfriars, read them over; took out a scene here and an act there; scissored them as he pleased; made this "heavy" for the low comedian, and that for the "first old man;" adjusted the "love business," made "practical" for his boards all the { }nature and humor, and cut out all that came flat, stale, and unprofitable from the amateur's hand; even took a little of each to make a new one, if necessary, (thus retaining the indicia that _this_ was written by a lawyer, _that_ by a physician, _this_ by a soldier, _that_ by a chemist, etc., etc.). he did what dumas, boucicault and daly do to-day; he was, in other words, the stage editor, not the author, of the shakespearean drama; though, that it should be called by his name, is, perhaps, the least unusual thing about it. besides the gentlemen who used their pens, the very recent dissolution of the monasteries had thrown multitudes of "learned clerks," (the "clerical" profession then including lawyers and physicians, and indeed all book-learned men) upon their own resources for daily bread, and there was only one depot for their work. not three, but three thousand men there were, other things being equal, more competent by education at least, than william shakespeare to write the shakespearean drama. but other things, as we shall see, were not equal. it is suggested, on the one hand, that william shakespeare wrote the plays; on the other hand, that francis bacon wrote them; and, again, that sir walter raleigh wrote them. so far as mere dates go, any one of the three might have written them. they were all three in london, and on the ground when the plays appeared. the truth is perhaps somewhere among the three. francis bacon was the most learned man of his time. he could and did read greek in the original, and he did have access to untranslated manuscripts, such as the "menæclnni" of plautus. he was a philosopher, and he _did_ come nearer to a prescience of the philosophy of ages to be, than any man who { }ever lived--as witness his own acknowledged works. sir walter raleigh was a wit and a poet, a gentleman, a man of elegant nonchalance, a very mercutio, to the day of his execution. he was liberally educated, cultured, and would have been all this in a more cultivated day than his own; moreover, he was idle and a scribbler of belles-lettres. perhaps he killed time by writing speeches for the obsequious manager to put into plays for his stage. anonymous or pseudonymic authorship has ever been a penchant of the gentle and idle. shakespeare, let us say, was a shrewd man of business, who kept up with his times, as do managers of theaters to-day; he was quick to perceive where a point might be made in his plays, and moreover he employed--or perhaps was fortunate enough to secure by way of friendship--a poet to turn his ideas into speech for the mouths of his players. that he used his pen to prepare the prompter's manuscript of the pieces performed at his theater, we have already seen there is reason to believe. that he ever composed, on his own account, we have only a sort of innuendo of certain of his brother actors and playwrights, and a stratford tradition, which we can trace to no other source than the source of the belief outside--that is to say, to the fact that the plays were produced under his management in london. the innuendo dubs him a poet; the stratford tradition makes him to have written doggerel verses. but some have ventured to disbelieve both the innuendo and the tradition. still, writing his life, as we do, from imagination, it is much easier to imagine the three men--bacon, raleigh, and shakespeare--producing between them "hamlet," "othello," or the "comedy of errors," { }than to imagine william shakespeare alone doing it. especially since, apart from the internal evidence of the plays, he "had his hands full" of work besides--the work in which he earned his competency. it can not be too clearly borne in mind that shakespeare, in a space of ten or twelve years, actually made what is a fair fortune to-day. that bacon and raleigh, whose ambitions did not lead them to seek renown as playwrights, should have contributed their share to the plays--the first for gold which he needed, and the second for pastime which he craved--is not remarkable; we can see hundreds of young lawyers scribbling for gold while waiting for practice, or young "swells" trying their hand at comedies for the sport of the thing, by opening our eyes to-day. that the shrewd and successful manager should carefully pick into presentable and playable shape for his stage, these productions of his young friends, is, likewise, the easiest thing in the world to conceive of, or to see managers doing to-day. possibly, william shakespeare, or some other skilled playwright, took the dialogues--let us say, for example--of bacon and raleigh, put them into the form of plays, introduced a clown here or a jade there, interpolated saws and localisms, gave the characters their names, looked out for the "business," arranged the tableaux--in short, did what mr. wal-lack, or mr. daly, or mr. boucicault would have to do to-day to fit a play for the stage. it is thought that shakespeare himself did it, because the plays are said to have been seen in his handwriting, and because, from that fact or otherwise, they went by his name in the days when they were first produced in london. this sort of joint authorship would not only explain { }away the antagonism which grew up between the evidence of the man shakespeare and the evidence of the shakespearean plays, but account for the difficulties of accepting any anti-shakespearean theory. this would explain the parallel passages in bacon's writings and in the plays which judge holmes has so painstakingly sorted out; the little inaccuracies of law and of grammar, of geography and of history, in the plays themselves; mr. greene's "sea-coast of bohemia," or the introduction of gunpowder at the seige of troy--absurdities which it is morally impossible to suppose of the portrayer of antiquity who wrote "julius cæsar," or the knowledge that framed the historical plays. if, however, we consider them as the interpolations of a stage-wright * aiming at stage effect, they are easily enough accounted for. * it is nothing less than marvelous that this simple explanation should not have occurred to the wise men who have been knocking their heads against "the sea-coast of bohemia" for the last hundred years. that this error is a part of the "business" and not of the play, is very evident from a casual reading of act iii., scene iii. the stage direction for that scene is simply, "scene--a desert country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage direction of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be sure that this was the proper stage setting of the piece. and to fit it, antigonus, the first speaker, says to the mariner: "art thou perfect, then? our ship hath touched the deserts of bohemia." bobert green makes the same mistake in his "dorastus and faunia." it was, if any thing, a vulgar error of the time. there is no further allusion to the troublesome geography in the play. so, too, the gunpowder used at the seige of troy is a part of the "business," and should be assigned where it belongs--to the playwright and not to the dramatist. not only did the stage editor put it in, but he took it out of green's "dorastus and faunia." the stagewright saw an opportunity for the introduction of a stage ship or shipwreck, hence { }he puts in the borrowed "sea-coast." he needs an alarum of guns to impress his audience on the coming evening with the fact that a tight is in progress. and even if it should occur to him to doubt if there were any guns at the siege of ilium, he is pretty certain that it will not occur to the groundlings or the penny seats, from whose pocket all is grist that comes to his mill, if he makes the guns and the cannon a part of the "business." so, again, we have only to understand this, and the characters of hym and bardolph--supposed to have puzzled the critics since critics first began to busy themselves with these dramas--is explained. bardolph is the walking comedian, inserted by the experienced manager to tickle the frieti ciceris et nucis emptor, with his fiery nose, and corporal nym to break in with his "there's the humor of it," just as rip van winkle dwells upon his favorite toast, and solon shingle upon his ancestor who "fitted into the revolution." and to many minds this accounts for the little dashes of obscene display, the lewd innuendo, which came never from the same pen as the masterstrokes, but which they prefer to conceive of an actor or manager interpolating to the delight of monsieur taine's audience, and for the stolen delectation of the maids of honor and city dames who went, in men's clothes, to mingle with them. this, too, might account for the poems dedicated to southampton. in the lax court and reign of the virgin queen, there was at least one man bold and reckless enough to stand patron to the "venus and adonis" and "the rape of lucrece"--the noble young libertine of nineteen, southampton. similarly, there may have been but one man available upon { }whom to father them, and so the joint or several productions of certain young men about town, "curled darlings" who affected shakespeare's green-room, were sworn upon the complacent manager, who doubtless saw his profit in it. we have rumor, indeed, that his profit was no less a sum than one thousand pounds. but, as we have seen, and shall see further, this thousand pounds story is not only without authority, but incredible: that southampton's means did not justify him in giving away any such sum--that shakespeare did not need it, and that none of southampton's coterie ever heard of it. whether bacon wrote these works or not (and we may say the same of raleigh), and whether the audiences before whom these shakespearean dramas were first presented could have estimated them as what we of this age recognize them to be or not; we may be sure that, had he chanced to light upon them, lord bacon could have appraised them, and the genius that created them, at their true worth. but while lord bacon's writings teem with mention of his own contemporaries (mr. w. ii. smith points out the fact that we owe about all we know of raleigh's skill in repartee to bacon's "apothegms"), he nowhere alludes to such a man as william shakespeare!--to william shakespeare--who, if popular belief is true, was his lordship's most immortal contemporary, the one mind mightier than bacon's, and yet not a rival or a superior in his own particular sphere, of whom he could have been jealous. the truth which makes this strange riddle plain is, according to the baconian theory, that (to use sir tobie matthew's words in his famous letter to his patron) "the most { }prodigious wit that ever i knew, of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another," in other words, that bacon was "shakespeare." and, indeed, sir tobie was fonder of nothing than of indulging in sly allusions to lord bacon's secret, of which he had become possessed. in another letter than that just quoted, he says again to his lordship: "i will not promise to return you weight for weight, but _measure for measure_....and there is a certain judge in the world, who, in the midst of his popularity toward the meaner sort of men, would fain deprive the better sort of that happiness which was generally done in that time." * ** * holmes's "authorship of shakespeare," second edition, p. . ** "bacon and shakespeare," by w. h. smith, p. . such considerations as these, as they came one by one to light, began to suggest to thinking minds that perhaps william shakespeare was enjoying, by default, estates belonging to somebody else. but it is curious to see how gradually. in , theobald, a competent and painstaking scholar of the text, declares that there were "portions of the plays which proved beyond a doubt that more than one hand had produced them." more than fifty years after came dr. richard banner (who wrote his famous letter on "the learning of shakespeare," in or about ), and appears to have been the first actual anti-shakespearean and unbeliever. dr. farmer sought--by demonstrating that much of the learning of the plays could have been, by sufficient research, procured at second-hand--to account for (what he could not overlook) the utter inadequacy of the historical man to the immortal work { }assigned him; just as if it were not, if any thing, an increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose a busy actor and manager rummaging england for forgotten manuscripts in the days when no public libraries existed, and when students lived in cloisters; or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum ever drawn from a classical source! and just as if the encyclopaedic learning required was lessened by the fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed or rewritten from an older drama of the same name! for example of farmer's argument, take the following. in the play of that name, timon says:= ```"the sun's a thief, and with his great attention ```robs the vast sea. the moon's an arrant thief, ```and her pale fire she snatches from the sun. ```the sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves ```the moon into salt tears. the earth's a thief ```that feeds and breeds by a composture stolen ```from general excrement: each thing's a thief."= now, exclaim the men who upho'd the stage manager's ability to read greek, the idea of this is from anacreon, and they give the ode in which william shakespeare found it. not so fast, says dr. farmer. he might have taken it from the french of ronsard, a french poet: because one puttenham, in his "arte of english poesie," published in , speaks of some one--of a "reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, finding certain of anacreon's odes very well translated by ronsard, the french poet--comes a minion and translates the same out of french into english," and "on looking into ronsard i find this very ode of anacreon among the rest!" { }letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims to prove that william shakespeare could not read greek by showing that he could reach french--or the observation, that the sum of dr. farmer's arguments (for the above is a sample of each and all of them) amounts simply to this, that: though the manager knew no greek--he knew where every thing contained in greek was to be obtained in translation: the question for us is simply, why should the stage-manager have recourse to either anacreon or ronsard for a meteorological episode? this, and a thousand like passages, are nothing but digressions, with nothing whatever to do with the action or by-play of the comedy or tragedy in which they occur, and not apposite to anything else in the part of the speakers who pronounced them. a scholar might be unable to keep them out; but why should a stage-manager--fitting a spectacle to the acting necessities of his boards or to the humor of his audience--put them in? whereas, if a scholar did write the manuscript play and sell it to a stage-manager, it is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut out the digression or why he left it in, for that was a mere matter of whim or circumstance, not worth our while to speculate over. dr. farmer went just far enough to see that, if the william shakespeare of history wrote the book, something must be done to account for his access to the material he wrought with. if the doctor had kept on a little further, the truth would have dawned upon him. but, as it was, he (without looking for them) observed traces of what he believed to be two hands in the plays, and so followed theobald. he says of hamlet, that he considered it "extremely probable that the french ribaldry in the { }last scene of hamlet was the work of another than the author of the body of the work"--but the hint was altogether lost on him. he looked no further, and so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth--namely, that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was william shakespeare's. the "without blotting a line" of ben jonson--not a mere form of speech, but a fact, confirmed by heminges and condell, the editors of the "first folio" of , who say in their preface, "we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers"--as we shall see further on, ought to have itself awakened suspicion. lope de vega, the spaniard, who supplied his native stage with upward of two thousand original dramas--who is computed to have written upward of , , verses, and who wrote so hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his intrigues, but cut them all open "with a knife" in the last act--probably did write "without blotting a line." at least so mr. hallam thinks, adding that, "nature would have overstepped her bounds, and have produced the miraculous, had lope de vega, along with this rapidity and invention, attained perfection in any department of literature." * but in the case of these marvelous shakespeare plays, it was preferred to believe that nature _had_ "produced the marvelous," rather than accept the simple truth that what hem-inges and condell and ben jonson saw, were the engrossed parts written out for each actor, and not the first drafts of the poet, improvising as he wrote. * literature of europe, part ii., ch. vi., § . except that mr. spedding, in the "gentleman's magazine" for february, , printed a paper "who wrote { }shakespeare's henry viii?"--in which he claimed to have found startling traces of two hands in that play, (and possibly some other floating papers which have escaped our search)--prior to the year it had occurred to nobody (except kitty, in "high life below stairs") to ask the question, "who wrote shakespeare?" but, in august of that year an anonymous writer, in chambers' "edinburgh journal," distinctly and for the first time discussed the question, "who wrote shakespeare?"--when, after going overmuch of the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his own "extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the conclusion), that william shakespeare "kept a poet." it is curious to find this anonymous writer dealing, as airily as lady bab herself, with the question: and (while unconscious of the elaborate network of evidence he might have summoned, and suggesting no probable author by name) actually foreshadowing the laborious conviction which, four years later, delia bacon was to announce. he surmises, indeed, that william shakespeare was a sort of showman, whose interest in the immortal plays was a purchased interest--precisely what the law at present understands by "proprietary copyright." "the plays apparently arise... as the series goes on; all at once shakespeare, with a fortune, leaves london, and the supply ceases. is this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any other supposition than the death of the poet and the survival of the employer?" of this supposititious hack-author, who dies, and leaves to william shakespeare the halo of his genius as well as the profit of his toil, this anonymous writer draws a picture { }that has something familiar in its coloring. "may not william shakespeare," he asks, "the cautious, calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret over-looking the 'silent highway of the thames,' some pale, wasted student... who, with eyes of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some cheap and speedy means of death? what was to hinder william shakespeare from reading, appreciating, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 'keeping his poet,' like mrs. packwood? with this view the disputed passages--those in which critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting--the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in--the occasional bad taste--in short, all the imperfections discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of shakespeare himself on his poet's works. * miss delia bacon, a remarkable lady, followed in a paper printed in "putnam's magazine," in its issue of january, , (and therefore must have written it in ), and was supposed therein to distinctly announce and maintain that lord bacon--her namesake by coincidence--was the "shakespeare" wanted--a supposition which, as we shall see, was erroneous. * chambers' "edinburgh journal,"'august , , p. . the audacity of the assertion, by a young woman, a school-teacher, in no way distinguished or anywise eminent, that the idol of these centuries, and of the english-speaking race, was a mere effigy of straw--a mere dummy for an unknown immortal, was too tremendous! men { }stood aghast. was it a chimera of a mind diseased! sneered at in her own country, she went to england, but found that--while at home she was treading only on adverse sentiment--_there_ she was openly tampering with vested rights, almost with the unwritten constitution of england. she made a few personal friends, and found some sympathizers, but all england was arrayed against her. she came back, heart-broken, and died eight months later. mr. william henry smith, of london, in september, , appeared with his "was lord bacon the author of shakespeare's plays? a letter to lord ellesmere," in which the baconian theory was very plainly and circumspectly laid down and admirably maintained. * the presumption once disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the well-worn track of the commentators, and the result has been, we think, a candid, rational, and patient attempt to study the shakespearean writings by the aid of contemporary history rather than by mere conjecture, and by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work, and gossip. * this "letter," which was reprinted in "littell's living age," (no. ), for november, , was, the following year ( ) elaborated into the valuable work on which we have so unsparingly drawn in these pages, and to which we acknowledge our exceeding obligation ("bacon and shakespeare: an inquiry touching players, playhouses, and play writers in the days of elizabeth. by william henry smith. london: smith, elder & co., "). in this work mr. smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date of his letter to lord ellesmere, he had never seen miss bacon's article in "putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no where claims to have been the originator of the "baconian theory." it is too early in the day--the time has been too short--for the reaction to have proved equal to the action, and verified the physical rule; but three well { }defined anti-stratfordian theories have offered themselves already, as substitutes for the mossy and venerable fossil remains of the commentators. these theories are: . the delia bacon theory; . the baconian theory; and . the new theory (as we are compelled, for want of a better name, to call it). the delia bacon theory. it was across no dethroned and shattered intellect that there first flashed the truth it has been the essay of these papers to rehearse. that delia bacon--who, earliest in point of time, announced to the world that "shakespeare" was the name of a _book_, and not the name of its author; and who, contenting herself with the bare announcement, soon passed on to the theory we are now about to notice--was pelted with a storm of derision, abuse, and merciless malice, until in poverty, sickness, and distress, but still in a grand silence, she passed out of sight for ever, is true enough. that in the midst of it all she still struggled on in what she believed to be "the world's work"--bearing more than it was ever intended a woman should bear--is not to overweigh any merit her scheme of the shakespearean plays may have possessed, however it may have eventuated in the "madness" so inseparably connected with her name. wherever delia bacon _died,_ she lived and moved in the conviction that she was a worker in the world's workshop. what to us is a mere cold, historical formulary, seems, however, we may smile at the absurdity, to have seized upon her whole life and being; and, as in a great crusade { }against a universal error, she seems to have struggled in loneliness and wretchedness, with a crusader's faith and a martyr's reward. in all her tragic life, delia bacon appears never to have paused to formulate the theory, for ever to be associated with her name, as to the actual authorship of the plays. the paper "william shakespeare and his plays," which appeared in "putnam's magazine" (and inaugurated the controversy, never thereafter to "down" at anybody's bidding), seems to treat the matter as already settled. it is rather sarcasm at the expense of those who rejected the theory of a non-shakespearean authorship than a formulation of the theory itself. that the sarcasm, as a sustained effort, has rarely if ever been equaled, there certainly can be no question. her indignation at the idea that the magnificent plays sprang from the brain of "the stratford poacher--now that the deer-stealing fire has gone out of him; now that this youthful impulse has been taught its conventional mental limits, sobered into the mild, sagacious, witty mr. shakespeare of the globe," is intense. "what is to hinder mr. shakespeare, the man who keeps the theater on the bank-side, from working himself into a frenzy when he likes, and scribbling out, unconsciously, lears, and macbeths and hamlets, merely as the necessary dialogues to the spectacle he professionally exhibits!" her allusion to bacon is equally impassioned: "we should have found, ere this, _one_ with learning broad enough and deep enough and subtle enough and comprehensive enough; one with nobility of aim and philosophic and poetic genius enough to be able to claim his own, his own immortal progeny, unwarped, un{ }blinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of that all-pervading reason that informs them--one who is able to reclaim them, even now, 'cured and perfected in their limbs, and absolute in full numbers as he conceived them!'" long before its appearance, as we shall proceed to narrate; and still longer before the world had well opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable anti-shakespearean proposition had been asserted, its author had left the proposition itself leagues behind, and was well along on her route to the fountain-head of its inspiration. the problem she proposed to herself was not, "did bacon and others write the plays?" but "why did bacon and others write the plays under the name of william shakespeare?" as the fruit of laborious study of the system and structure of the plays, she reached the answer--as she believed, and lived and died believing--hidden and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the tragedy of "hamlet." "hamlet," she maintained, was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnificent system. they were not plays, but chapters in a great treatise--links in a great chain of philosophy--a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as the lord hamlet caused certain strolling players, with the set speech he put into their mouths, to "catch the conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of all the golden age put into the mouths of the vagabond shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the whole world. but why should these great minds have chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and ciphers? miss bacon's answer was convincing: "it was the time when the cipher, in which one could { }write 'omnia per omnia,' was in request; when even 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. it was a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other uses than at present, and when a nomme de plume was required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. it was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles were not mere sport and child's play; when they had need to be close and solvable only to those _who should_ solve them. it was a time when all the latent capacities of the english language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling through all its length and breadth, with puns and quips and conceits and jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block." * this was the "delia bacon theory." this was the "madness" forever associated with her plaintive story, and _not_ the proposition that the author of the plays (whoever he might be--or they, if more than one) and william shakespeare were persons--as distinctly two as were the noble hamlet and the poor player who played "gonzago" in the "mousetrap" that day before the majesty of denmark. but, madness or not, miss bacon never wavered in her conviction that the appointed time to read the oracles had come, and that _she_, delia bacon, a namesake, possibly, of the real hamlet of the plays, had been raised in her appointed place to be the reader. alas for her! * "philosophy of shakespeare's plays unfolded," p. x. { }like cassandra, she announced her message only to be scorned and flouted in return! by what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays had grown to be known as "shakespeare's works," any more than burbage's works, or jonson's works, she never troubled herself to inquire; but with the details of lier mission she was careful to possess herself. she held that "the material evidence of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in shakespeare's grave." * she claims to have discovered, by careful study of lord bacon's letters, not only the key and clew to the whole mystery, but to an entire baconian cipher in these letters--there were over five hundred of them extant, and others have been discovered, we believe, since miss bacon's day--however, it still remains, for the secret of miss bacon's clew died with her. but she stoutly maintained that in these letters were "definite and minute directions how to find a will and other documents relating to the conclave of elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed in a hollow space in the under surface of shakespeare's gravestone.... the directions, she intimated, were completely and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of coming to the treasure, and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome consequences likely to arise from the interference of the parish officers.... there was the precious secret protected by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend." ** * hawthorne. ** id. delia bacon was born in new haven, in , and early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "the tales of the puritans" and "the bride of fort edward." she soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted the profession of a student and teacher of history, and began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of boston. her method was original with herself. she had models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her subject; and we are told by mrs. farrar ("recollections of seventy years," boston, ticknor & fields, ) that, being of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was successful and attracted large audiences. mrs. farrar says, "she looked like one of dante's sibyls, and spoke like. ** id. delia bacon was born in new haven, in , and early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "the tales of the puritans" and "the bride of fort edward." she soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted the profession of a student and teacher of history, and began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of boston. her method was original with herself. she had models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her subject; and we are told by mrs. farrar ("recollections of seventy years," boston, ticknor & fields, ) that, being of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was successful and attracted large audiences. mrs. farrar says, "she looked like one of dante's sibyls, and spoke like an angel." the original manu{ }scripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. these she believed the ignorant shakespeare to have scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had been taken; to have devoted to domestic purposes, or to have never concerned himself about farther. this was the gravamen of the charge she brought against "lord leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of stratford, and this the vandalism for which she never could forgive him. "this fellow," she cried, "never cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at their hands.... what is to hinder his boiling his kettle with the manuscripts... after he had done with them? he had those manuscripts--the original hamlet, with its last finish;... the original lear, with his own fine readings... he had them all--pointed, emphasized, corrected, as they came from the gods! and he has left us to wear out our youth and squander our life in poring over and setting right the old garbled copies of the play-house!... for is he not a private, economical, practical man, this shakespeare of ours, with no stuff and nonsense about him; a plain, true-blooded englishman, who minds his own { }business, and leaves others to take care of theirs?... what did he do with them? he gave them to his cook, or dr. hall put up potions in them, or judith--poor judith, who signified her relation to the author of lear and the tempest, and her right to the glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of 'mark' which she affixed to legal instruments--poor judith may have curled her hair with them to the day of her death.... what did you do with them? you have skulked this question long enough; you will have to account for them! the awakening ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the question, what did you do with them?" * this chain of dramas, so blindly perpetuated by william shakespeare, became, through miss bacon's unlocking process, a great system of political philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful bacon and his compeers, and locked up for the nineteenth century, against the blindness of the centuries between. but, of so startling a proposition, miss bacon confesses that the world would require something more than her own conviction. so she deliberately set out to _prove_, from the very crypt and silence of the grave itself, its truth. to st. albans, whence the mysterious letters were dated, to the lonesome tomb at old verulam and the vault in stratford chancel, she proposed a pilgrimage--thence to probe the secret, and lay it open to a doubting world. her friends regarded her theory as a delusion, and miss bacon as a monomaniac.... * "putnam's magazine," january, . { } "to her conversations on the subject, and peremptorily refused contributions to assist in her expedition. but, by her lectures, and the friend she enlisted in her project in new york city, she gathered together enough money to get to london." it was while in london, in abject poverty and friendlessness, that thomas carlyle, "upon whom she had called and whom she had impressed with respect for herself if not for her theory," says hawthorne, advised miss bacon to put her thoughts upon paper first, before proceeding to the overt act of proof she contemplated--namely, the opening of william shakespeare's grave. it was upon his advice that this most remarkable woman--sitting in bed in a garret to keep warm without a fire, without sufficient or wholesome food, "looking back," to use her own words, "on the joys and sorrows of a world in which i have no longer any place, like a departed spirit," and yet, doing "the world's work," and knowing "that i had a right to demand aid for it"--undertook to unfold out of the shakespearean plays their hidden system of philosophy." meanwhile, under a contract obtained for her by mr. p. w. emerson (though, it is presumed, more for temporary supply of funds than as rider to her great work), she furnished to "putnam's magazine" eighty pages of manuscript, which became the famous paper "william shakespeare and his plays," first announcing to the world the first anti-shakespearean theory of which it had ever heard. ** * mrs. farrar. ** this was contracted to be the first of a series of papers, but the arrangement for some reason, probably because miss bacon found it necessary to devote herself to the work to which she was to give her life, fell through, and no successive papers appeared in the magazine. they put their shakespeares out of sight when she approached, declined to listen{ }under such circumstances, and with such surroundings, this heroic woman accomplished the first half of the work she had marked out for herself--the reading of the sealed book, the unfolding of the philosophy of the shakespearean plays. her book was written, printed, published, and--damned! * * "the philosophy of shakespeare's plays unfolded. by delia bacon." london: sampson, low & co.; and boston: ticknor & fields, . the book lies before us, and certainly is the most difficult reading we ever attempted. even so competent and partial a critic as hawthorne says of it: "without prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that miss bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. every leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep a conviction of truth, as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. a practiced book-maker, with entire control of her material, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume, full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation--criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on shakespeare.... there was a great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would have shoveled out of the way. but miss bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. a few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud.... i believe that it has been the faith of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader. i myself am acquainted with it only in isolated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. but since my return to america, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doctrines. it belongs to him, therefore, and not to me, whom, in almost the last letter that i received from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work--it belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place miss bacon in her due position before the public." ("our old home.") the volume is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops and at such prices as the bookseller may choose to demand. it failed so utterly { }and miserably that nobody opened it, though that fact deterred nobody, of course, from laughing at it and its author to the utmost of their endeavor in ridicule and abuse. "our american journalists," says hawthorne, "at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the english press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved, and they never have known it to this day, and never will." but none the less did delia bacon persevere to the end. the philosophy was unfolded. if the world declined to receive the truth--"the truth," as she claimed, "that is neither yours nor mine, but yours _and_ mine"--it was not on her head, at least, that the consequences would fall. the second half of her work remained. she proceeded to stratford to crown her labors, by opening the vault in the chancel of the parish church, and exposing the secret she had already guessed, to the doubting thomasses who clamored for the tactual evidence so long entombed there. although on a mission so likely to be regarded as predatory--as even coming under police prohibition, miss bacon seems to have lived in open avowal of her purpose, under the very shadows of the church she meant to despoil, and to have made nothing but friends. the regard was mutual, and, says hawthorne, { }"she loved the slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that i ever knew her to bestow on shakespeare, the individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in selecting a residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a suitable retirement for a person of shy but genial temperament." she laid her plans before the vicar, who, so far as miss bacon ever was permitted to learn, never opposed them. * at least he did not hand her over to the first dogberry at hand--a most un-english omission on his part. he did, however, ask miss bacon's leave to consult a friend, "who proved to be legal counsel," and who, doubtless, advised inaction, for the matter was allowed, so far as the lady was concerned, to retain the form of a pending negotiation with the parish, never, as a matter of fact, broken off on its part. the rest is best told in mr. hawthorne's dramatic narrative: "the affair looked certainly very hopeful. however erroneously, miss bacon had understood from the vicar that no obstacle would be interposed to the investigation, and that he himself would sanction it with his presence. it was to take place after nightfall; and, all preliminary arrangements being made, the vicar and the clerk professed to wait only her word, in order to set about lifting the awful stone from its sepulchre... * i cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity with the events of shakespeare's life, and of his death and burial (of which she would speak as if she had been present at the the edge of the grave), and all the history, literature, and personalities of the elizabethan age, together with the prevailing power of her own belief, had really gone some little way toward making a convert of the good clergyman.--hawthorne. she examined the surface of the gravestone, and en{ }deavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of the elizabethan club. she went over anew the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in bacon's letters and elsewhere.... she continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the day-time, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a late hour at night. she went thither with a dark lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great, dusky edifice. groping her way up the aisle, and toward the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above shakespeare's grave. she made no attempt to disturb the grave, though, i believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between shakespeare's and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. she threw the feeble rays of her lantern up toward the bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof.... several times she heard a low movement in the aisle; a stealthy, dubious footfall prowling about in the darkness, now here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. by and by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been watching her ever since she entered the church. this was the nearest she came to the overt act, all thought of which was finally abandoned; for, meanwhile, worn out with the absorbing mental activity of these last years, and her physical privations (she had only ar{ }rived in stratford in a condition so feeble and prostrated as to have believed herself beyond any necessity of providing any further earthly sustenance; the failure of her book and the miscarriage of her plans did the rest), she finally consented to be borne back to her home to die peacefully at the last, among friends. her life and her "theory" are only to be discussed together, and both with tenderness. "was there ever a more wonderful phenomenon?" exclaims hawthorne--"a system of philosophy, growing up in this woman's mind, without her volition, contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition, and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew there! to have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays... it certainly came from no inconsiderable depth somewhere." this was, so far as she herself put it on paper, miss delia bacon's theory. it is to be carefully noticed, however, that it is a theory, not of a unitary but of a joint authorship. there is one passage in the "putnam's magazine" article (which at that time was announced by the publishers as the first of a series of papers, and was so intended by miss bacon) which points to bacon as the supposed sole author of the plays. but, in the book which followed it, these plays are repeatedly assigned to a conclave or junta of elizabethan courtiers and scholars, and such was the faith, we believe, in which miss bacon labored and died. the unitary theory, we believe not unfairly, may be assigned to messrs. smith and holmes; the latter of whom, in the preface to his work, most distinctly { }rejects miss bacon's "junta" authorship, and undertakes to maintain the proposition that bacon, and bacon alone, was the author of the whole canon of "shakespeare." according to judge holmes, bacon had reasons in plenty for concealing his authorship, and for "loving better to be a poet than to be accounted one." not only his personal safety:--dr. heywood was already in the tower for having incensed the queen by an unlucky pamphlet dedicated to essex; and "not long after this," says holmes, "and while essex is under arrest, and bacon in sundry interviews with the queen, is still interceding in his behalf, her majesty brings up against him this affair of dr. hoywood's book, and also, as it would seem, distinctly flings at bacon himself about 'a matter which grew from him, but went after about in other's names (in fact no other than the play richard ii. we have to-day)." but the development of his plans made concealment particularly desirable. political rivals were watching jealously his every utterance. he is known to be a "concealed poet," so he prepares a masque or two for the queen's own eye and audience; but he alone, according to judge holmes, writes "shakespeare." "had the plays (says mr. furness) come down to us anonymously--had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon future generations, we could have found no one of that day but francis bacon to whom to assign the crown. in this case it would have been resting now upon his head by almost common consent." it is well that this essential difference between the "delia bacon" and the "baconian" theories should be emphasized here. { } part v. the baconian theory. [illustration: ] he english renaissance drama seems naturally to group itself into two grand divisions: the elizabethan drama and--shakespeare. there is nothing in the first which surprises: which impresses us as too abrupt a departure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the middle age mummeries--"miracle plays" and "mysteries"--or as being too refined or elaborate for the groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the contemporary barns called "play-houses" in the days of elizabeth. but that the proprietor of one of these barns should have found it to his profit to have overshot the intelligence of his audience by creating a hamlet, a lear, brutus, and macbeth--the action of whose roles are intellectual rather than scenic--for his players, or an ophelia, isabella, or catharine for the small boys employed to render his female parts, is an incongruity--to put it mildly--which arrests our credulity at once. the utmost that the shakespeareans propose to do--the utmost they attempt--is to make out william shakespeare to have been an elizabethan dramatist. but the elizabethan dramatist was a man who catered to the elizabethan play-goer. greene, peele, lodge, nash, and the rest, were elizabethan dramatists. but { }their names are only a catalogue to-day. if we happen to buy a set of their works at a bargain, at some old book sale, we may put them on our shelves; but we are not equal to the laborious task of reading them. the shakespearean drama is a thing apart. its dramatic form seems only an incident; perfect as that incident is, there is so much more in it that we find appealing to our hearts and intellects to-day, that we hesitate to ascribe it even to an elizabethan dramatist. the baconian theory, as elaborated by holmes, we understand to be that this element apart from the dramatic, in these days is the key-note and explanation of the whole shakespeare mystery, and leads to the discovery that "shakespeare" was only a convenient name under which the popular ear was sought to be arrested by a philosopher, who wrote in cipher, as it were, for a great purpose of his own. the philosophical system contemplated by francis bacon--say the baconians--was divided into two grand divisions, the didactic and the historical. the first--its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernacular) locked up in the universal language of scholars, and left it by his testament to "the next ages." the other he chose to put into dramatic form. the spirit, motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena of english letters, synchronizing in date (the philosophical canon of bacon and the dramatic canon of "shakespeare,") are identical, and form together essentially one great body of philosophy and inductive science, and, therefore, must have had the one author. "it is a thing, indeed, if practiced professionally, of low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it { }is of excellent use--i mean stage playing." he says himself. and again: "dramatic poetry is as history made visible." this historical or preliminary division of the philosophy did not need a dead, but a living language--the language of his race. this he left in english: and when, at the end, a broken, weak, despised old man--knowing himself only too well to be the meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious of having, in a large sense, worked for the good of his fellow-men--he made no excuse or palliation, but only bespoke for himself and his life "men's charitable speeches." but, if there was but one author for these two contemporary works, why not william shakespeare as well as francis bacon? why not ask the question, "did william shakespeare write lord bacon's works?" * as well as, "did lord bacon write william shakespeare's work?" while not within our scope to demonstrate the identical philosophy of the novum organum and the shakespearean drama--(a work to which miss bacon devoted her life--and whose demonstration has been followed by judge holmes)--it is property within that scope to examine, from the outside, the question whether, as matter of fact, william shakespeare could have written either; or whether, from circumstantial evidence merely, lord bacon was thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually the author of the dramatic canon of "shakespeare." * see this question asked and answered affirmatively in "north american review." february, . new york. d. appleton & co. how, aside from any _opinion_ as to their value, beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of { }the shakespearean works which, under the calmest and most sternly judicial treatment to which they could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be beyond gainsay or neglect. these two characteristics are-- . the encyclopaedic universality of their information as to matters of fact; and, . the scholarly refinement of the style displayed in them. their claim to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peoples--as, for example, the zulus or the ashantees--impervious to any admiration for the shakesperean plays on that account. but this familiarity with what, at their date, was the past of history, and--up to that date--the closed book of past human discovery and research which we call learning; is an open and indisputable fact; and the new-zealander who shall sit on a broken arch of london bridge and muse over the ruins of british civilization, if he carry his researches back to the shakespearean literature, will be obliged to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the accumulated learning of the world down to his own actual day. moreover, this scholar would not be compelled to this decision only by a careful examination of the entire shakespearean opera. he will be forced to so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the most, of any given group of single plays. let him open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "julius cæsar." * * see in this connection "the english of shakespeare illustrated in a philological commentary on his 'julius cæsar.' by g. l. craik." london. chapman & hall. . even the artificial alexander pope (who, so far from being an over-estimator of the shakes{ }pearean works, only, from the heights of his superior plane, admits them very grudgingly to a rank beside the works of waller) was obliged to confess as much. "this shakespeare," says mr. pope, "must have been very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of antiquity. in 'coriolanus' and 'julius cæsar,' not only the spirit, but the manner of the romans is exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown between the manners of the romans in the time of the former and of the latter. no one is more a master of the poetical story, or has more frequent allusions to the various parts of it. mr. waller (who has been celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more learning in this way than shakespeare," * but, if the new-zealander be a philologist, he will scarcely need perusal of more than a shakespearean page to arrive at this judgment. wherever else the verdict of scholarship may err, the microscope of the philologist cannot err. like the skill of the chirographical expert, it is infallible, because, just as the hand of a writer, however cramped, affected, or disguised, will unconsciously make its native character of curve or inclination, so the speech of a man will be molded by his familiarity, be it greater or less, with the studies, learning, tastes, and conceits of his own day, and by the models before him. he cannot unconsciously follow models that are unknown to him, or speak in a language he has never learned. * smith, p. . { } corroboration of history, that they were only the forgeries of a precocious boy. to just as moral a certainty are the handiwork of the elohist and the jehovist discernible in the hebrew scriptures, and just as absolutely incapable of an alternative explanation are the ear-marks of the shakespearean text. hallam, whose eyes were never opened to the truth, and who lived and died innocent of any anti-shakespearean theory (though he sighed for a "shakespeare of heaven," turning in disgust from the "shakespeare of earth," of whom only he could read in history), noticing the phases, unintelligible and improper except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in the plays, proceeds to say: "in the 'midsummer-night's dream' these are much less frequent than in his later dramas; but here we find several instances. thus, 'things base and vile, holding no _quantity_' (for _value_) rivers that 'have overborne their _continents_' (the _continenti riva_ of-horace); '_compact_ of imagination;' 'something of great _constancy_' (for _consistency_); 'sweet pyramus _translated_ there;' 'the law of athens, which by no means we may _extenuate_,' etc. i have considerable doubts," continues mr. hallam, "whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of elizabeth's reign, which was less overrun with pedantry than that of her successor. could authority be produced for latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one who did not understand their proper meaning would have introduced them into poetry." * * "literature of europe," part ii, ch. vi, sec. . "to be told that he played a trick to a brother player in a licentious amour, or that he died in a drunken frolic.. does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote "lear." if there was a shakespeare of earth, as i suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of him that we desire to know something." id. part ii, ch. vi, sec. , note. young chatterton deceived the most profound scholars of his day, and his manuscripts stood every test but this; but under it they revealed the fact, so soon to receive the mournful { }social speech in those days, even in the highest walks of life--we happen to have very graphic accounts of queen elizabeth's sayings and retorts courteous (as, e. g., when she boxed essex's ears and told him to go and be hanged)--it requires considerable credulity to assign this classic diction to a rustic apprentice from stratford, who, at "about eighteen," begins his dramatic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no hiatus for a college course between. add to this the patent fact that the antique allusions in the plays "have not regard to what we may call 'school classics,' but to authors seldom perused but by profound scholars" * even to-day: and technical exploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumulative as to the result already obtained. but, if we pass from the technical structure to the material of the plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing discovery that, not only the lore of the past was at the service of their author, but that he had no less an access to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb of time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet distant future, were to immortalize their first _sponsors_. * smith, p. . ** though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. the late john elliotson declared that the circulation through the lungs had certainly been taught seventy years previously by servetus, who was burned at the stake in . dr. robert willis asserts, in his "life of harvey," that the facts he used were familiarly known to most of his predecessors for a century previous. izaak walton states that harvey got the idea of circulation from walter warner, the mathematician; and that eminent physician, john hunter, remarks that servetus first, and realdus columbus afterward, clearly announced the circulation of the blood through the lungs; and cisalpinus, many years before harvey, published, in three different works, all that was wanting in servetus to make the circulation complete. wotton says that servetus was the first, as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea of this matter. even the chinese were impressed with this truth some four thousand years before europeans dreamed of it. plato affirmed--"the heart being the knot of the veins, and the fountain from whence the blood arises and briskly circulates through all the members." this, however, rather adds to than lessens the strength of the argument drawn from finding the "discovery" in the plays. for example, dr. harvey does not announce--what is credited to him *--his discovery of the circulation of { }the blood in the human system--until (his book was not published until ), three years after william shakespeare's death. but why need dr. harvey have resorted to vivisection to make his "discovery"? he need only have taken down his "shakespeare." is there any thing in dr. harvey any more exactly definite than the following?= ```"i send it through the rivers of your blood, ```even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain, ```and, through the cranks and offices of man: ```the strongest nerves, and small inferior veins, ```from me receive that natural competency ```whereby they live." `````-- _coriolanus, act i, scene _.= ```"... had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick ```(which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins"). --_king john, act iii, scene ._= { } ```... as dear to me as are tlie ruddy drops ```that visit my sad heart." --_julius caesar, act it, scene ._= harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been the theory of galen, paracelsus, and hippocrates (who substituted the _liter_ for the _heart_), and to have been held also by rabelais. neither galen, paracelsus, hippocrates, nor rabelais was a text-book at stratford grammar-school during the two terms mr. de quincy placed william shakespeare as a pupil there--but william has them at his fingers' ends. there are said to be no less than seventy-eight passages in the plays wherein this fact of the circulation of the blood is distinctly alluded to; and, as to galen and paracelsus, they intrude themselves unrestrictedly all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or excuse:= ```"_parolles_. so i say; both of galen and paracelsus. ```_lafeu_. of all the learned and authentic fellows." ````--_all's well that ends well, act ii, scene ._= ```"_host of the garter inn_. what says my Æsculapius? my galen?" ````--merry wives of windsor, act ii., scene .= in king henry vi. part ii., act ii, scene , the erudite bardolph and falstaff's classical page make a learned blunder about althea, whom the page confounds with hecuba. and so on. are we to believe that this sometime butcher's boy and later stage manager has his head so brimming full of his old greeks and philosophers that he can not for a moment miss their company, and makes his very panders and public-cans prate of them? even if it were the commonest { }thing in the world, nowadays, in , for our mr. boucicault or mr. daly to write a play expressly to catch the taste of the canaille of the old bowery (or, for that matter, of the urbane and critical audiences of wallack's or the union square), and stuff all the low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion (for this is precisely what william shakespeare is said to have done for the unroofed play-house in the mud of the bankside in london, some three hundred years ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at)--even, we say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to imagine this sort of play writing to-day, would it be a wilder flight of fancy to suggest a pale student in london in the days of queen elizabeth, somewhere among the garrets of gray's inn, writing dialogues into which galen and paracelsus would intrude unbidden--and a stage manager letting them stay there as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names, of dogs or wenches--at any rate, as good, mouth-filling words, to be paid for at the lowest market price): * than to conceive a twelfth manager and proprietor of this home of the muses, and whilom sticker of calves, after the day's labor, shunning his cups and the ribald mirth-making of those sad dogs, his fellow { }managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same galen and paracelsus? * shakespeare married a woman older than himself. why-should he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity? see midsummer-night's dream," act i, scene --"o, spite, too old to be engaged to young!" etc. again--"too old, by heaven! let still the woman take an elder than herself." again--"then let thy love be younger than thyself," etc., etc. ("twelfth night," act ii., scene .) it is very difficult to suppose that shakespeare should have wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his passing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried perusal in the green-room."--chambers's journal, august , ,p. . newton, who was only born in --twenty years after shakespeare was laid away in his tomb--surely need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard at woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal the immutable truth of gravitation. he had but to take down his copy of "troilus and cressida" (printed in ) to open to the law itself, as literally stated as he himself could have formulated it:= ```"_cressida._... but the strong base and building of my love ```is as the very center of the earth, ```drawing all things to it." ````--_troilus and cressida, act iv., scene ._= are we called upon to tax our common sense to fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, after the play at the globe was over, snugly in his library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the circulation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing them "without blotting out a line," and sending the "copy" to the actors so that they could commit it to memory for the stage on the following evening? what a library it was--that library up among the flies (if they had such things) of the old globe theater! what an elihu burritt its owner must have been, to have snatched from his overworked life--from the interval between the night's performance and the { }morning's routine--the hours to labor over galen and paracelsus and plato in the original greek! it was miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his forge, in the nineteenth century--surrounded with libraries, and when books could be had for the purchasing--could have mastered all the known languages. but that william shakespeare, with only two terms at stratford school, (or, let us say, twenty years at stratford school, or at the university of oxford--for there is as much evidence that he was at oxford as that he was at stratford school) _without_ books, since there were no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was written in books! surely there never was such a miracle as this! "he was the prophet of geology," says fullom, "before it found an exponent in werner;" ```"o heaven! that one might read the book of fate; ```and see the revolution of the times ```make mountains level, and the continent ```(weary of solid firmness) melt itself ```into the sea! and, other times, to see ```the beechy girdle of the ocean ```too wide for neptune's hips." ** and yet william shakespeare had but two terms of hunt, jenkins and stratford school! and, mr. malone believed, had never even gone so far into the classics as to have read tacitus! *** * "history of william shakespeare, player and poet, with new facts and traditions." by w. s. fullom, london: saunders, otley & co., brook street, . ** "king henry iv.," part ii., act , scene i. *** see ante, p. . what was, or was not, taught at this marvelous { }stratford school, "two terms," of which--between his poaching and his beer-bouting--were all the schooling william shakespeare ever had, according to all bis biographies. (we say, all he ever had, because his father was so illiterate that he signed every thing with a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of william's family; and the boy william was too busy at skylarking--according to those who knew him--to have had much opportunity of private instruction at the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements been adequate.) were the theory and practice of the common law taught there? "legal phrases flow from his pen," says mr. grant white, "as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.... this conveyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been picked up by hanging around the courts in london, two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. and, besides, shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early plays, written in his first loudon years, as in those produced at a later period." * and not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of that mighty and abstruse science, the law of england," is he perfect. a chief justice of england has declared that "while novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." ** * memoir," p. . and see "was shakespeare a lawyer?" by h. t-------. london: longmans, green, reader a dyer, . ** "shakespeare's legal acquirements," lord campbell, p. . and see "shakespeare a lawyer," by w. l. rushton. london, . were medicine and { }surgery taught there? dr. bucknill * asserted in that it has been possible to compare shakespeare's knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the present day. and not only in the general knowledge of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in these days "medical jurisprudence," the man that wrote the historical play of henry iv. seems to have been an expert. mr. david paul brown ** says that in "frost's case" (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had committed suicide. a celebrated physician being on the stand as an expert on this question, was examined as follows: q. what are the general indications of death from violence? a. my knowledge will not enable me to answer so broad a question. and yet mr. brown points out that "william shakespeare's knowledge had enabled him" to answer so "broad a question:"= ```"_warwick_. see how the blood is settled in his face! ```oft have i seen a timely parted ghost ```of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless. **** ```but see, his face is black and full of blood; ```his eyeballs further out than when he lived, ```staring full ghastly, like a strangled man; ```his hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling;= * "medical knowledge of shakespeare." j. c. bucknill, m. d. london, . and see appendix i. ** the forum. by david paul brown. philadelphia, . { } ```his hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped ```and tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. **** ```it can not be but he was murdered here; ```the least of all these signs were probable." * = all the arts, sciences, and literatures must have been mastered by our sleepless shakespeare, either at stratford school, or in the midst of his london career, when operating two theaters, reading plays for his stage, editing them, engrossing the parts for his actors, and acting himself. (and mr. cohn will have it that in these unaccounted-for times, he had visited germany with his troupe and performed in all its principal cities, coining money as he went.) ** mr. brown, dr. bell, and others, announce that they believe that these travels of his extended to italy, and mr. thoms and mr. cohn, to some extent, account for shakespeare on the continent, by believing that, instead of going at once to london, when fleeing from stratford before sir thomas lucy, he enlisted under leicester for the netherlands in , but left the ranks for the more lucrative career of an actor. but these theories only crowd still more thickly the brief years in which the great works (which are, after all, what the world regards in these investigations), appeared. * henry vi., act , scene ii. ** "shakespeare in germany. by albert cohn. london and berlin: asher &co., . and see shakespeare's autographical poems, by charles armitage brown. essays on shakespeare, by karl elze. london, macmillan & co., . the suppose travels of shakespeare. three notelets on shakespeare. thoms: london, . either at stratford school, or in the blackfriars, or else by pure { }intuition, all this exact learning must have "been absorbed. the classical course conducted by hunt and jenkins must have been far more advanced than is common in our modern colleges, in columbia or harvard, for example. for not only did rowe and knight find traces in "shakespeare" of the electra of sophocles, colman of ovid, farmer of horace and virgil, steevens of plautus, and white of euripides, which are read today in those universities; but pope found traces of dares and phrygius, and malone of lucretius, status and catullus, which are not ordinarily used as textbooks to-day in our colleges. the name and character of "imogen" is derived from an italian novel not then--and perhaps not how--translated into english. tschischwitz finds in "hamlet" the philosophy of giordano bruno, professor at wittemberg in - . all these are no stumbling-blocks to those who adhere to the baconian authorship. but, spanish, italian, greek and latin aside, was english taught at stratford school? if it were, it would have been the most wonderful of all, for, as a matter of fact in those days, and for many long years thereafter, english was a much snubbed acquirement. the idea of education was to read, talk, and quote latin, greek, and the dead languages, the child was put to his "accidence." instead of his horn-book, and scholars scorned to spend much time on their own vernacular. but even should we concede that it was genius that made the village boy master of a diction the grandest of which his mother tongue was capable, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which { }the concession will not lift us. this difficulty has been so succinctly stated by mr. grant white, in his "essay toward the expression of shakespeare's genius," that we can not do better than quote his words. "it was only in london that those plays could have been written. london had but just before shakespeare's day made its metropolitan supremacy felt as well as acknowledged throughout england. as long as two hundred years after that time the county of each member of parliament was betrayed by his tongue..... northumberland, or cornwall, or lancashire might have produced shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from london, and written for his rural neighbors instead of for the audiences of the blackfriars and the globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology. his language would have been a dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern english ears." * as mr. white wrote these words, did it not occur to him that, by his own chronology, ** this warwickshire rustic came to london with "venus and adonis" in his pocket, and began, almost immediately, the production of plays, not in the warwickshire dialect, which he had grown up in from his birth, but in a diction that needs no translating "to be understood by modern english ears?" * shakespeare's works, vol. i., p. cxcvi. ** id., p. cxxi. robert burns became { }great in the dialect of his home, which he made into music through the alembic of his genius. when, later in life, he essayed to write in metropolitan english, says principal shairp, "he was seldom more than a third-rate--a common clever versifier." * but this uncouth warwickshire rustic writes, as his first essay in english composition, the most elegant verses the age produced, and which for polish and care surpass his very latest works! every step in the received shakespeare's life appears to have been a miracle: for, according to them, the boy shakespeare needed to be taught nothing, but was born versed in every art, tongue, knowledge, and talent, and did every thing without tuition or preparation. and in the long vacation of this precious school how much our worthy pupil--whose paternal parent was in hiding from his creditors so that he dare not be seen at church--supplemented its curriculum by feasts of foreign travel! for it is only the careful student of these plays who knows or conceives either their wealth of exact reference to the minutest features of the lands or the localities in which their actions lie, or the conclusions to be drawn therefrom. there were no guide-books or itineraries of venice published until after william shakespeare had ceased writing for the stage: and yet, while schoolboy facts--such as that venice is built in the sea, or that gondolas take the place of wheeled vehicles, or that there is a leaning tower at pisa, or a coliseum at verona or rome--are not referred to (the out-door action in "othello" or the "merchant of venice" is * * "english men of letters. robert burns. { }always in a street or open place in that city, canals and gondolas being never mentioned), the most casual, inadvertant, and trivial details of italian matters (such as a mere tourist, however he might have observed, would scarcely have found of enough interest to mention to his neighbors on returning home), are familiarly and incidentally alluded to, making the phenomena of all this familiarity with italy quite too prominent to be overlooked. a poet like samuel rogers writes a poem on italy. all that is massive, venerable, and sublime; all that touches his heart as pitiful, or appeals to his nature as sensuous and romantic, goes down in his poem. the scenes mr. rogers depicts are those which crowd most upon the cultivated tourist to-day--the past of history that must stir the soul to enthusiasm. but here are plays, written before the days of guide-books (and if there had been any such things, they would have enlarged upon the same features that mr. rogers did), which are at home in the unobserved details which the fullest murray or baedeker find it unnecessary to mention. portia sends her servant balthazar to fetch "notes and garments" of her learned cousin, bellario, and to meet her at the "common ferry which trades to venice." there are two characters named "gobbo" in the play--a frequent venetian name in a certain obscure walk, and one which a mere tourist would be most unlikely to meet with. othello brings desdemona from her father's house to his residence in the "sagittary." in "two gentlemen of verona," valentine is made to _embark_ at verona for milan, and in "hamlet," baptista is used as the name of a woman. both of these latter were sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, { }until one learned german discovers that baptista is not uncommonly used as a woman's name in italy, * and another learned german that, in the sixteenth century, milan and verona were actually connected by canals, ** with which the surface of italy was intersected! etc., etc. dr. elze was made a careful collation of these instances (which need not detain us here except by way of reference), in an essay on the supposed travels of shakespeare, wherein he, from the same internal evidence, regards it certain that the writer (william shakespeare he calls him), not only visited italy, but scotland, absorbing all he saw with the same microscopical exactness. and were the modern languages also taught by this myriad-minded jenkins? mr. grant white says emphatically, no! "italian and french, we may be sure, were _not_ taught at stratford school." *** and yet william shakespeare borrowed copiously from boccaccio, cinthio, and belleforest. ulrici **** says (quoting klein) that the author of "romeo and juliet" must have read "hadriana," a tragedy by an italian named groto, and mr. grant white points out that iago's speech, "who steals my purse, steals trash," etc., is a perfect paraphrase of a stanza in berni's "orlando innamorato," of which poem, says mr. white, to this day ( ) there is no english version. * a von beumont. allgemeine zeitung, oct. , . ** karl elze on shakespeare, p. . london. macmillan & co. . *** memoir. works, p. xxi. **** vol. i, p. . mr. white furnishes a translation of { }the stanza of berni, which is certainly startingly like. and yet mr. white clings to his stratford school, where "beeston" told aubrey that william shakespeare was once a school-master. perhaps mr. white refuses to be converted because he has discovered that dr. farmer discovered that, when, in the "taming of the shrew," tranio quotes terence, "he is inaccurate, and gives the passage, not as it appears in the text of the latin dramatist, but as it is misquoted in the latin grammar of william lily; a school-book in common use among our forefathers when william shakespeare was a boy." ** but (though somebody has suggested that william might have risen to be "head boy" at stratford grammar school; and been, in that capacity, intrusted with hearing the lessons of the smaller boys, whence the school-master story may have arisen), the beestou story has been rejected by all the commentators with a unanimity of which, we believe, it is the only instance, in case of a shakespearean detail. so far as we know, there has been but one effort to prove that william shakespeare was a university man. *** * ante, p. , note. ** id. p. xx. *** "some shakespearean and spenserian mss.," "american whig review," december, , but if, instead of going to school, or operating a theater, william had passed his days as a journeyman printer, he could hardly have been more at home to the mysteries of that craft. mr. blades, a practical printer, has found in the works so many terms, technical to and employed in the exact sense of the composing and press-rooms, that they seriously add to { }the enumeration of possible shakesperean vocations. for example:= `````"behold, my lords, ```although the print be little, the whole matter `````and copy of the father, ```the very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger."= witness, also, the following:= ````"you are but as a form in wax, by him imprinted. `````--_midsummer-night's dream, i, ._= ````"his heart, with your print impressed. `````--_lovés labours lost, ii, ._= a small type, called nonpareil, was introduced into english printing houses from holland about the year , and became admired and preferred beyond the others in common use. it seems to have become a favorite type with shakespeare, who calls many of his lady characters "nonpareils." prospero calls his daughter "a nonpareil." (tempest, act iii, scene d) olivia, in "twelfth night," is the "nonpareil of beauty" (act i, scene ), and in cymbeline, posthumous is made to call imogen the "nonpareil of her time" (act ii, scene ). when a certain number of pages of type have been composed they are placed in an iron frame called a "chase," laid upon an "imposing" stone, a piece of beveled wood, called a "sidestick," is placed beside the pages, and small wedges of beveled hard wood, called "coigns," or "quoins," are tightly driven in, holding the pages firmly in their places, and making a compact "form." surely there is an allusion to this in pericles iii, .= ````"by the four opposing coigns ````which the world together joins."= { }before tlie "form" is taken from the stone to be put on the press, the quoins are made very tight with a "mallet" to insure its "lifting" safely.= ```"there is no more conceit in him than there is in a mallet." `````--_ henry iv, ._= which process is called "locking-up," and when completed, the form is said, technically, to be "locked-up," or fast.= ````"fast locked-up in sleep." `````--_measure for measure, iv, ._= and to what but the care taken by a printer to make his forms "register" can we attribute the use of that word in anthony and cleopatra, act iv. scene .= ```"but let the world rank me in register-- ```a master leaver and a fugitive."= punctuation is a fruitful source of misunderstanding between an author and his printer. very few authors punctuate their manuscript as they would wish to see it in the print, and fewer yet are apt to be good natured and satisfied when the printer punctuates for them. william shakespeare may have remembered this when he wrote:= ````"wherefore stand you on nice points?" `````--_ henry vi, iv, _.= ````"stand a comma 'tween their amities." `````--_hamlet, v, ._= ````"my point and period,... ill or well." `````--_lear, iv ._= ````"points that seem impossible." `````--_pericles, v, ._= { } ````"puts the period often from his place." `````--_lucrece, line ._= ```"you find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent." ````"no levelled malice infests one comma." `````-- _timon, i, ._= ```"come we to full points here? and are et ceteras nothing?"= possibly a book-worm, or even a bookseller might draw as many similes as shakespeare did, from books--as for example:= ```"show me your image in some antique book." `````_--sonnet, . ix._= ```"has a book in his pocket with red letters in it." `````--_ henry vi, ix, ._= ````"my red dominical--my golden letter!" `````--_loves labours lost, v, ._= referring to the rubricated editions of books so common in the seventh century, or the golden letters used in the calendar; or again,= ```"to place upon the volume of your deeds ```as in a title-page, your worth of arms." `````--_pericles, , ._= ```"this man's brow, like to a title-leaf, ```foretells the nature of a tragic volume." `````--_ henry iv, i, ._= but in the following:= ```"the vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear." `````--_sonnet, . xxvii._= it is hard to be persuaded that direct allusion is not { }made to the english custom (which still obtains, as any body may see for himself by opening a book printed--wherever published--in england) of placing the typographer's imprint upon the vacant or extra leaf or leaves--where the text runs short, at the end of the volume; just as, if an american publisher, who buys a hundred copies of an english work, may stipulate to have his imprint put upon the title-page (or, perhaps, print his own title-page in this country), the last page of the book itself will invariably reveal whether the actual manufacture was in england or not; an analogy which implies technical information. an image employed by othello, who takes his wife's hand in his, and says,= ```"here's a young and sweating devil." `````--_othello, iii. ._= is, mr. blades thinks, misunderstood. if his wife's palm was the messenger, as othello suspected, of her desires to cassio, there would be some propriety--from a printer's standpoint--in calling it "a devil," for a printer's "devil" is his messenger or errand boy: though another meaning is not so far fetched in sound to a non-professional. we have mentioned that the stationer's company was a fraternity composed only of monopolists, each of whom had a monopoly, from the crown, of the printing of certain books. it was a part of their duty to give notice of this monopoly upon every impression of the book, precisely as the notice of copyright entry is obliged by law to be printed to-day upon copyrighted books. the entry was to be expressed, after the printer's name, or at least, conspicuously on the { }title-page, in the formula, "_cum privilégia ad imprimendum solum;_" and as the formula was to be incessantly used it was undoubtedly "kept standing" in the composing room. it is curious to notice, in the "taming of the shrew," act iv., scene , the recurrence of this formula in a speech of biondello: _bion._ i can not tell; except they are busied about a counterfeit assurance; take you assurance of her cum privilegio ad im-primendum solum to the church. it is to be noticed that the word "counterfeit" in the above speech, was a printer's term in those days; and, used in the printer's technical sense, would be applicable; for biondello is counseling lucertio to marry bianca out of hand, and without waiting for her father and his counselor who are discussing the marriage treaty. a "counterfeit" was a reprint (as we would say now, a "reprint in fac-simile"). * * marabren's parallel list of technical typographical terms--art., "counterfeit." we take the above from mr. blades' "shakespeare and typography." london, . again: it might be supposed that a country lad should know the ways of dogs and birds and beasts and creeping things. but it happens to be human experience that the country lad is the least likely person to turn out a naturalist. it is much more probable that some over-worked shoemaker, in some rare escape from his city garret, should find his thoughts awakened by watching an ant-hill, and succeed in years in making himself an entomologist; than that the farmer's boy, who catches bugs every day to bait his fish-hook, should turn out an entomolo{ }gist; just as it is not the farmer's daughter, but the fashionable young lady from town who tramps the fields and tears her hands for wild-flowers or wets her feet for the pond lilies. but whoever wrote the plays had found time to learn all the ways of these. says bottom, to cobweb, the fairy, in "midsummer wight's bream," "monsieur, get your weapons in your hand and kill me a red-hipped bumblebee on the top of a thistle." in the united states as well as england, there is no more likely place to find a bumblebee in midsummer than on a thistle. in "much ado about nothing," benedict says to margaret "thy wit is as quick as a greyhound's mouth. it catches." the peculiarity of a greyhound is that, unlike other dogs, it is able to catch game in its mouth as it runs; other hounds must stop to do this. in "as you like it," celia tells rosalind that monsieur le beau, who comes with his mouth full of news, will feed it to them "as pigeons feed their young," and rosalind replies, "then we shall be news crammed." pigeons bring food to their young in their crops, and cram it down their young ones' throats, as no other birds do. in "twelfth night" the clown tells viola that "fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings--the husband's the bigger." the pilchard closely resembles the herring, but is thicker and heavier, with larger scales. in the same play maria says of malvolio, "here comes the trout which must be caught with tickling." expert anglers know that by gently tickling a trout's sides and belly, it can be so mesmerized as to be taken out of the water with the hand. in "as you like it," we have the lines "for look where beatrice, like the lapwing, runs close by the ground to hear our confer{ }ence." the lapwing is a kind of plover which is very swift of foot and which, when trying to avoid being seen, keeps its head close to the ground as it runs. says lear's fool, "the hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that it had its head bit off by its young." the hedge-sparrow in england is a favorite bird for the cuckoo to impose its young upon. in "all's well that ends well," lafeu says of farolles "i took this lark for a bunting." the english bunting is a field bird of the same form and color as the lark, but inferior as a singer. and so the figures are always accurate, "the ousel-cock so black of hue," "the throstle with his note so true," "the wren with little quill," "the russet-pated chough, rising and cawing at the guns report." and so of flowers, as when perdita speaks of= `````--daffodils, ````that come before the swallow dares, and take ```the winds of march with beauty--= the writer knew that in england the daffodil blooms in february and march, while the swallow never appears until april. in none of the allusions to nature or natural phenomena in the plays, is there any such thing as guess work. * now, what was the necessity for all this technical, geographical, botanical, and occult learning, in a simple drama thrown off by an elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by catering to an elizabethan audience? it was not only unnecessary, but almost fatal to his success. the elizabethan audience did not want scientific treatises. * and see further "the natural history of the insects mentioned in shakespeare," by r. paterson. london: a. k. newman & co., leadenhall street, "the natural history of the insects mentioned in shakespeare," by r. paterson. london: a. k. newman & co., leadenhall street, . but { }nothing--from governmental polity to the stuffing of a fowl--from processes of the human mind to the management of kitchen gardens--was too small or rude for a philosopher's (let us say for francis bacon's) vast purposes. how otherwise are they to be accounted for? that shakespeare borrowed greene's famous "sea-coast" is a point either way. if he took it supposing that bohemia had a sea-coast, the omnipotent knowledge assigned him by his worshipers failed him at least once. and if he knew (as is now claimed, though on what authority we know not), that bohemia once possessed provinces on the adriatic, he knew, as usual, what the acute research of three hundred years has only just developed. and was agriculture taught at this stratford school, and politics and the art of war? and was there any thing that william shakespeare did not know? we are entitled to ask these questions, for it must be remembered that, before the appearance of the shakespearean dramas, there was practically no literature written in the english tongue. to use the words of macauley, "a person who did not read latin and greek could read nothing, or next to nothing.... the italian was the only modern language which possessed any thing that could be called a literature." ** one possessing, then, merely "small latin and less greek," could not have written "shakespeare." still less could he have written it out of gower and chaucer, and the { }shelf-full of english hooks that made up all there was in english letters. * see "was shakespeare ever a soldier?" three notelets on shakespeare, by wm. j. thoms, london. john russell smith, . ** essays. lord bacon. but if the stratford grammar-school confined its teachings to the pages of the english bible alone, it worked wonders, for bishop wadsworth goes so far as to declare, that "take the entire range of english literature--put together our best authors, who have written on subjects not professedly religious, and we shall not find, i believe, in them all, printed so much evidence of the bible being read and used, as in shakespeare alone." * yet william shakespeare had little opportunity for self-education, except these two terms at stratford school; he was a lad-of-all-work at the bankside theater, when a mere child. he was only fifty-two years old when he died. he was one of several partners in certain theatrical establishments in london, in the years when he must have put all this multitudinous learning, he had carried in his head so long, on paper. he was so active, industrious, and shrewd in those years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire with a fortune--to purchase lands and a grant of arms for his father (whence he himself might become an esquire by descent); and, in the years of leisure after his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs, which no other graduate of stratford school would probably have cared to claim. * shakespeare's use of the bible. by charles wadsworth, p. . london. smith elder & co., . it has only been within the last few years that hardy spirits--like nathaniel holmes--whose education has led them to look judicially backward from effects to causes--and whose experience had impressed { }them with the idea that most effects come in natural procession from causes somewhere--were courageous enough to seek the solution of this mystery--not in what is called the "internal evidence" of the plays themselves, but in the circumstances and surroundings, that is to say, in the external evidence of their date and production. the baconian theory is simply that, so far as the records of the elizabethan period are accessible, there was but one man in england, at the date at which this shakespearean literature appeared, who could have produced it. * the history of bacon's life, his massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambitious acquaintance with the court: and, joined to all, his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the dates of which, when collated, coincide with the dates at which the plays--tallying in matter with the circumstantial surroundings of bacon's life as, for example, shylock appeared at about the time when bacon was most helplessly in the toils of what he calls "the lombardo"):--all this need not be recapitulated here. he was born and bred in the atmosphere of libraries. while william shakespeare was poaching on avon banks, the little francis was impressed with the utter inadequacy of aristotle's method to grapple with { }modern needs, and meditating its superseding with labors of his own. * had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon after- generations, i think we could have found no one of that day but bacon to whom to assign this crown. in this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent."--(w. h. furness to judge holmes, third edition of "authorship of shakespeare," p. ). the gray-haired queen, who in youth had called him her little lord keeper, will not lift a hand to aid him in his poverty, or to advance him in the state, regarding him as a man of study rather than of practice and experience; and so bacon is known to have remained, bemoaning (as he himself says in a letter to burleigh, written in ) "the meanness of my [his] estate; for though i can not accuse myself that i am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get." * this is the very year, , in which robert greene "discovers that a new poet has arisen who is becoming the only shake-scene in a county;" and so far forgets himself as to become "jealous" of "william shakespeare, who, up to this time, has only been a "johannes factotum," of not much account until he borrows "our feathers." ** and so, until , bacon is driven to the jews. why should he not, in his pressing necessity for "lease of quick revenue," bethink him of the resources within himself, and seek a cover whereunder--without embarrassing his hope of future preferment--he may turn into gold his years of study and travel, by means of a quick pen? in , when he is suddenly created attorney-general, the shakespearean plays cease abruptly, to appear no more for ever. william shakespeare closes out his theatrical interest in london, and retires, to moneylending (as some say), in stratford. he dies in . * speckling, "letters and life of bacon," vol. i, p. . ** ante, p. lord bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, { }and falls, in . in , while bacon is again spending his time in the strictest privacy and retirement, there suddenly appears a folio, "the complete works of william shakespeare," amended, revised, enlarged, and improved, including at least seventeen (mr. smith says twenty-three) plays which had never appeared or been heard of in shakespeare's lifetime. few of us--outside the ranks of commentators, like mr. grant white, and others, who give their valuable lives to this study--dream how vast were the emendations and revisions, enlargements and corrections of the old shakespearean plays given to the world in this folio of . mr. white says that in the one play of "love's labours lost" there are inserted newlines in almost every speech. another, "the merry wives of windsor," according to knight, ** has double the number of lines it originally possessed in . the "henry v." has nineteen hundred new lines. the "titus andronicus" has an entire scene added, and the "much ado about nothing" and "the lear" are so altered and elaborated, with curtailment here and enlargement there, as to lead mr. knight to declare that "none but the hand of the master could have superadded them." *** but, if william shakespeare was the "master," how did his hand reach up out of the grave under stratford chancel, where it had rested seven years, to make these improvements? * cited by holmes, "authorship of shakespeare," third edition, p. . ** "studies of shakespeare," p. . *** id. and if william shakespeare in his lifetime made those revisions for heminges and condell (who appear on the title-page of this folio of as editors, and an{ }nounce in the preface that this edition is printed from the "true original copies") at stratford (where, according to his own inventory, he had neither library nor books--nor bookcase, nor writing table, for that matter), why did he not print them himself, for his own benefit, instead of performing all this labor of emendation for somebody else? he could not have been fearful lest he would lose money by them, for they had been the foundation and source of all his fortune. nor had he grown, in his old age, indifferent to gain (let the ghost of the poor "delinquent for malt delivered" assure us of that!). he could not have revised them for pure glory: for, in his previous career, while in london, he had shown no interest in them, permitting them to be surreptitiously printed by whoever, in the same town with himself, listed so to do. he had even allowed them to be mixed up with other people's trash, his name signed to all indifferently, and the whole made footballs of by the london printers, under his very nose, without so much as lifting a voice in protest, or to declare which were his and which were not. * besides, if he had revised them for the glory of his own name, why did he not cause them to be printed? nor can we suppose that he was employed to revise them, for pay, by heminges and condell, because, if they did so employ him, why did they carry the expense of the revision for seven long years, until he and his wife were both in their graves, before reimbursing themselves by printing the first folio for the market! * see post, "the new theory," where it appears that, at the time shakespeare was producing certain plays on his stage, certain others were being printed and circulated, as his, outside. last, and most wonderful { }of all, in this first folio are included all these entirely new plays which had never been heard of before! who wrote those, and why? the answer to these riddles, the baconians say, is that, when again at leisure, bacon bethought himself of his scattered progeny, and--whether proposing to publicly own them or not--whether to secure them for posterity or merely for his own pastime--he devoted that leisure to a revision of the works by means of which he had bridged the first long interval in his career. at any rate, when the revision appeared, it is matter of fact that william shakespeare was dead and in his grave, and speculation has nothing to do with that. besides the coincidence of the plays appearing during bacon's first retirement: ceasing altogether at his first elevation, and appearing in revised and improved form again after his final downfall, and during his second privacy, the baconians cite: i. contemporary statements, which include (a), sir tobie matthew's famous postscript: * "the most prodigious wit of these times is of your name, though he be known by another" (which mr. weiss ** explains, very lamely in our opinion, by arguing that the _other_ name by which bacon was known, and to which matthew alludes, was "_viscount st. albans_); (b), a letter from bacon * bacon was in the habit of sending certain of his lighter manuscripts to sir tobie, and this postscript was appended to a letter acknowledging the receipt of bacon's "great and esteemed favor of the th of april." ** "wit, humor and--shakespeare." by john weiss. boston. roberts brothers, . matthew writes this in a letter acknowledging receipt of a volume sent him by bacon. if that volume was a copy of the "first folio," the postscript would be intelligible. him{ }self, to sir john davies, who is going to meet the new king james (with whom bacon is striving for favor, looking to his own preferment), in which he commits to sir john's "faithful care and discretion" his interests at court, and adds, "so, asking you to be good to concealed poets, i continue," etc., etc.; * ii. evidence by way of innuendo, including another of matthew's postscripts (the one in which he writes to bacon, "i will not return you weight for weight, but measure for measure," etc.); also, perhaps, the injunctions of secrecy in bacon's own letters to matthew, to "be careful of the writings submitted to you, that no one see them." there is, besides, in many of bacon's preserved letters something suggestive of a "curious undermeaning, impressing the reader with an idea of more than appears on the surface." the idea of the stage, as a figure of speech, occurs in a letter to the queen: "far be it from me to stage myself," etc.; and in one to lady buckingham, "i do not desire to stage myself but for the comfort of a private life," etc. "dramatic poesy," he declares, "is as history made visible." writing to matthew, he refers to a "little work of my recreation;" and matthew, in return, banters him on writing many things "under another name." this is in , and no more "shakespeare" plays appear until othello, in . the jonson obituary verse--in which occur the encomiums so rung in our ears by the shakespeareans (and which we have--earlier in these pages--seen was all they really had behind them), which we have thought could be most easily explained on the "_nil mortuis nisi bonum_" theory--are also * holmes, "authorship of shakespeare," { }regarded, we believe, by the baconians, as innuendo. * iii. the parallelisms. that is to say, an almost identity of phraseology, found in both the baconian and shakespearean writings. the best list of these is to be found in judge holmes' book, covering some twenty-five closely-printed pages. ** of the value of this latter class of evidence, it is for every reader to judge for himself; but that a writer of exact science and moral philosophy should plagiarize from the theater, or the theater from the writer of exact science and moral philosophy; or (still more improbable) that two contemporary authors, in the full glare of the public eye, should select each other's works to habitually and regularly plagiarize upon, are altogether, it seems to the baconians, out of the question. * it is curious to find the baconians appealing to this "best evidence" for the other side. but they read it as an innuendo. for example, the verses-- "shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage or influence, cheer the crooping stage! which--since thy flight from hence, hath-mourned like night and despaired day--but for thy volume's light--" they say, do not and can not, refer to william shakespeare at all. for this was published in , and william shakespeare had been dead seven years. he could not "shine forth" again, except figuratively, in his volume, and this he already does by the publication of his works, and is admitted to do in the next line, where it is said that but for "thy volume's light" the stage would "mourn in night." the baconians, who believe that ben jonson himself was the "heminges and condell" who edited the first folio, regarded this whole poem as a sop to bacon, on ben jonson's part. ** pp. - . [ill ] [ill ] but even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as a political philosopher and playwright contracting together to mutually plagiarize from each other's writ{ }ings would hardly account for the coincidence between the cottage scene (act iv, scene ) in "a winter's tale," and bacon's "essay on gardens," in which he maintained that "there ought to be gardens for all the months of the year; in which severally things of beauty may be in their season," which he proceeds to suggest: { }were we assured that the prose in the left-hand column was the poet's first rough notes for the exquisite poetry in the second, would there be any internal evidence for doubting it? and when it appears that "the essay on gardens" was not printed until , nine years after william shakespeare's death and burial, and two years after an edition of his alleged plays, rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so deliberate a "steal" would hardly be profitable), the exoteric evidence seems at least to command attention. a coincidence between a passage in "the advancement of learning" and in the play of "troilus and cressida," act ii., scene (which, we shall see later on, first appeared in print, advertised as the work of a novice, in , thereafter, within a few months, to be reissued as by william shakespeare *--who was not, at the date of that edition, either a novice or a first appearance), is worth pausing to tabulate: that the manager of a theater, in dressing up a play for the evening's audience (and _such_ an audience) should tuck in an allusion to aristotle, to "catch the ** { }ear of the groundlings" * post, "the new theory." ** it is to be noticed that no similarity of style in these opposed extracts is alleged or relied upon. --or, finding it already in, should not have a sufficient acquaintance with aristotle to scent an impropriety and take it out--is no less or no more absurd than that a philosopher, in composing so profound and weighty an essay as the "advancement of learning," should go to a cheap play-house for his reference to the greek sage. if bacon _did_ attend the theater that night to learn the opinion of aristotle (whom he had criticised at college at the age of fifteen) on young blood and philosophy, he was misled, for aristotle said not that young men ought not to _hear moral_, but ought not to _study political_ philosophy. and the error itself is proof positive--it seems to the baconians--of an identical source for the two passages. it must not be forgotten, however, that the evidence from these coincidences is cited not to an anti-shakespearean case--which is purely historical--but as cumulative to the baconian case alone. and yet, though the evidence from the "parallelisms" is the least forcible of any presented by the baconians, so systematically do they occur that the ablest baconian writer (judge holmes) claims that he has been able to reduce them to an ordo, and to know precisely where to expect them, by reference merely to a history of the life of lord bacon, and the date of the production. "when i got your 'letters and life of bacon," he writes to mr. spedding, "and read that fragment of a masque; having the dates of all the plays in my mind, i felt quite sure at once in which i should find that same matter, if it appeared anywhere (as i expected it would) and went first straight to the 'midsummer-night's dream,' and there came upon it, in the second { }act, so palpably and unmistakably that i think nothing else than a miracle could shake my belief in it." the facts that lord bacon expressed himself to the effect that the best way of teaching history was by means of the drama; that there is a connected and continuous series of historical plays (covering by reigns the entire period of the war of the roses), in the shakespearean drama from 'king john,' by way of prelude--in which the legitimate heir to the throne is set aside, and the nation plunged into civil war--to 'richard iii.' where the two roses are finally united in one line in henry vi., and winding up with the reign of henry viii.--wherein, as a grand finale to the whole, the splendor of the new line is shown in its reunited vigor"--which (with but one hiatus, the missing reign of henry vii.) is one complete cycle of english history: and that, on searching among the remains of francis bacon, a manuscript "history of henry vii." is found, which might well be the minutes for a future drama (the opening paragraph of which seems to be a recapitulation of the last scene of the richard iii. of the dramas), is certainly startling. not necessarily connected with this discovery is the further fact that mr. spodding has found, in the library of northumberland house, among certain of bacon's manuscripts, a slip of paper, upon which is scrawled eight times, in a clerky hand (not bacon's), the name "william shakespeare," together with the names of certain of the known shakespearian historical plays, and of certain (as judge holmes conjectures) other plays not now * "authorship of shakespeare," third edition, p. . { }known. * but there is nothing in this discovery more startling than the numberless other coincidences--if they be nothing more--which judge holmes has massed in his scholarly work. henry chettle, in , in his "england's mourning garment (a rhyme)," wonders that "melicert does not drop a single sable tear" over the death of "our elizabeth." it might, indeed, seem strange had william shakespeare (supposing these lines to apply to him) been the favorite he is said to have been with elizabeth. but, while neither shakespeare nor bacon sing mortuary strains, of the two (if these stories about elizabeth's love for shakespeare are true) it is certainly not strange that bacon did not; for bacon, at least, had no cause to idolize his queen. ben jonson's eulogies of shakespeare, in verse, nowhere surpass, as we have seen, his eulogies of bacon, in prose. he calls lord bacon "the acme of our language," and, as mr. thompson suggests, "no pinnacle has two acmes." "on every variety of court enfolding," continues that writer, "was bacon daily employed, writing in others' names; and, if we do not think worse of plato for personating socrates, or of cicero for personating cato," neither should ill be thought of bacon for borrowing a name "to cover his aim," etc. meanwhile, "this acme of our language 'was poor and a borrower." in , is published an anonymous pamphlet, called "ratsei's ghost." * holmes' "authorship of shakespeare," d edition, pp. - - . *** the renascence drama, p. . in it, one ratsei, a highwayman, is about to be hung, and gives some parting advice to a strolling player; tells { }him to go to london, where he would learn to be frugal and thrifty; to feed upon all men, hut let none feed on him; make his hand stranger to his pocket, his heart slow to perform his tongue's promise; and when he felt his purse well lined, to buy some place of lordship in the country; that, growing weary of playing, his money may then bring him to dignity and reputation; that he need care for no man--no, not for them that before made him proud with speaking their words on the stage. "if this satirical passage," says mr. thompson, "plainly alludes to him who went to london very meanly, and came, in time, to be exceedingly wealthy, it confirms greene's saying, that shakespeare made his money by _acting_, not by writing, plays, and by usury." * as to miss bacon's question, "what did william shakespeare do with bacon's manuscripts?" mr. thompson ** seems to think that they may yet be brought to light. they "appear to have been so many times hypothetically burned, at stratford, in the globe theater, the london fire, by their owners (by purchase) at the play-house, to hinder rivals from using them," that mr. thompson argues that "it is probable they are still to the fore." bacon's will directs certain papers laid away in boxes, cabinets, and presses, to be collected, sealed up, and put away, "so as not to have them ready for present publication." * id., p. . * renascence drama, or history made visible. by "william thompson. melbourne, . he was "not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more luster and reputation to my name, than those other which i { }have in hand." they could bide their time, and, since william shakespeare and his fellows do not dispose of them, the inference is that they were not allowed to retain them. the baconian theory, it is to be noticed, is quite indifferent as to whether william shakespeare, on first turning up at london, found employment (as mr. grant white asserts) in his "cousin's law-office" or not: or whether, at any stage in his career, either in stratford or london, he was an attorney's clerk, hard 'prentice at the trade of "noverint." (by which slur mr. fullom believes that nash meant, not that shakespeare was a "noverint," but that the young "nove-rints" of the time were "shakespeare's;" that is to say, that they scribbled, out of hand, for the stage.) the shakespearean problem is neither increased nor diminished by the proposition; even an attorney's clerk could not have written all the shakespearean pages. should it be necessary, however, to find a law-student in london who could have managed some of them, why not allow francis bacon his claim among the rest? he has, at least, this advantage of his rival; that, while it is the general impression now-a-days that william shakespeare was not a law-student, as a matter of fact francis bacon _was_. * * and too good a law student, we think, to have written the law in the "merchant of venice." for, although lord bacon was apt to discover the public feeling, and quick to array himself on the right side (and spitting at jews has always been accounted of gentiles for righteousness), he must have seen that shylock had a standing in court on the merits of his case. but portia begins her extraordinary (according to common law at least) judgment by deciding for the jew in that, not having paid the principal sum, antonio must suffer in the foreclosure of the mortgage, as it were, upon his person. this is against the letter of any known law, which gives an equity of redemption to the debtor in all such cases. her next decision is, that the jew has his election between the principal sum and the penalty, and that, with his election, not the law itself can interfere. this, again, is not law; for the law abhors a penalty, and even in a foreclosure will not allow the debtor to be mulcted in more than the face of his debt, interest, and costs. but now, having decided, against all law, for the jew, portia begins deciding for the christian, and the first point she makes is that, when shylock takes his pound, he must not take a hair's weight more or less, nor yet one ounce of blood. this, again, is clearly not law, since it is an eternal principle of jurisprudence that, when the law grants any thing it also grants everything that is necessary to the conversion of that thing to possession (as, when it grants a farm, it likewise tacitly grants a right of way to that farm). so, if shylock had had any title to his pound of flesh, he would certainly have had a title to draw as much blood as it was absolutely necessary to draw in cutting out that pound, and such portions of flesh over and above a pound as it would be absolutely necessary to cut out, providing the cutting out was done by a skillful operator and not a bungler. astounded at this turn of the tide, shylock deliberates, and finally cries, "well, give me my principal and let me go!" portia thereupon renders her fourth decision, which is the most astounding of all--namely, that, having once refused a tender of the money in open court, the jew is not entitled to change his mind and take it! since the days of moses-- certainly since the days of littleton--a tender has never quite destroyed a debt, but only the interest and costs accruing upon it, after the tender! such a glaring and high- handed sacrifice of common law and common sense to stage effect might have been conceived of by a manager anxious for the plaudits and pence of a crowded house, scarcely by a future lord chancellor of england. { }as to the bibliography of the baconian theory, there are two volumes which will probably always remain its text-books, viz., judge holmes's book, of which the first edition appeared in ; and mr. smith's, printed in , which made a convert of { }lord palmerston. mr. wilkes's exceedingly fresh and readable work, "shakespeare from an american point of view," and mr. king's "bacon versus shakespeare; a plea for the defendant," as textbooks on the other side, could hardly be expected to produce much disorder in messrs. holmes and smith's stern and compact columns of facts and argument. mr. wilkes * decides off-hand against this baconian theory at the start, and then goes on, like his predecessors, to construct a shakespeare to suit himself. it is to his praise that he has endeavored to construct this shakespeare out of the shakespearean pages, rather than to have unreined his fancy. but he makes his own particular shakespeare, nevertheless. the wilkes shakespeare is a romanist. we consider this to william shakespeare's praise, for to be a good romanist is to be a good christian, and to be one in a protestant reign is to be a consistent christian as well. but this is all the good mr. wilkes's shakespeare is. beyond that he is base-born, a man despised of his equals, and a flunkey and tidewaiter at the knees of an aristocracy to which he can not attain--an obscene jester, etc., etc.--and this author he calls shakespeare. such a one, whoever he is, is neither bacon nor raleigh, at all events. in , mr. thompson, of melbourne, australia, published a volume, "renascence drama; or, history made visible," ** devoted to an accumulation of fact and argument--rather than to a presentation of the case already made--in favor of the baconian theory. * shakespeare from an american point of view. new york: d. appleton & co., . ** melbourne: sands & mcdougall, collins street, west, . mr. { }thompson aims to answer the more refined objections to that theory, by showing that bacon's mind and art rather overgrasped than undergrasped the matter and form of these shakespearean drama, and his work is an extremely valuable and charming contribution to the pro-baconian view. in his abounding zeal for "our shakespeare," mr. king * gives us much eulogy, very little argument, and remakes but one or two points, namely, that a large proportion of the shakespearean characters are made to bear warwickshire names, such as ford, page, evans, hugh, oliver, sly, marion hacket, the fat ale-wife of wincot, curtis, burton heath, fluellen, bar-dolph, and so on; and that certain expressions which have puzzled commentators, such as "make straight" (meaning "make haste"), "quoth" (meaning "went"), the use of the word "me" in place of "for me," "old" for "frequent," etc., are warwickshire expressions, and current in no other parts of england. but, as anybody can see, the majority of these are far from being uncommon names, and are quite as prevalent in new york, for example, as they are or were in warwickshire. and if, as has been suggested, mr. manager shakespeare dressed up his friends' dialogues for his own stage, and tucked in the clowns and jades, this usage of warwick names might well be accounted for. * bacon and shakespeare: a plea for the defendant. by- thomas king. montreal: lovell printing and publishing company, . four of these names are taken out of "the merry wives of windsor," and three of them from the induction to the "taming of the shrew"--matter in the composition of which shakespeare or { }any other playwright might have had the largest hand, without entitling himself to any olympus. and if, in the dressing up, shakespeare inserted a clown or a sot here and there, to make sport, what would be more natural than that he should put into their mouths the _argot_ he had grown up amid in his boyhood, and make the drunken turnkey in "macbeth" to say, with hiccoughs, "if a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have _old_ turning the key?" for, as mr. king can see for himself, the cardinals and kings do not use these phrases; nor, we may add, are the surnames he particularizes ever bestowed on them, but only on the low-comedy characters of the plays. surely, if william shakespeare ever were forced "upon the country," as the lawyers say, as against my lord bacon, he would wish his case to the jury rather without mr. king's "plea" than with it. as a "plea" on any side of an historical question, it is, to be sure, nothing, if not candid; but, as a personal appeal to posterity to, willy-nilly, believe that certain players and others in the age of elizabeth knew not guile, it is touching and beautiful in the extreme. "who shall, say heminges and condell lied?" * "could rare ben jonson, who is worthy of our love and respect, have lied?" ** * "bacon versus shakespeare: a plea for the defendant." by-thomas king. montreal, and rouse's point, new york: lovell printing, etc., company, , p. . ** ibid., p. . heminges and condell "profess that 'they have done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our shakespeare.' yet their utter negligence, shown in their fellow's volume, is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or their intelligence. the publication was not, i fear, so much an offering of friendship as a pretext to obtain the copyright.' (disraeli, "amenities of authors-- shakespeare.") did shakespeare practice a deceit upon his { }noble and generous patron? could _he_ be guilty of a lie?" * and so on. to much the same effect (the reverence due the name "shakespeare," the improbability of jonson and others telling an untruth, etc.) is an anonymous volume, "shakespeare not an impostor, by an english critic," ** published in ; and finally, in , was published a paper, read before the royal society of literature, by c. m. ingleby, m. a., ll.d., a vice-president *** of the same. dr. ingleby is severe upon all anti-shakespeareans, whose minds he likens to "macadam's sieves," which "retain only those ingredients which are unsuited to the end in view" (whatever that may mean), and thinks that "the profession of the law has the inevitable effect of fostering the native tendency of such minds." unlike the others, however, dr. ingleby does not confine himself to expressions of his interest in the anti-shakespeareans "as examples of wrong-headedness," but attempts an examination of the historical testimony. in favor of the shakespearean authorship, he names seven witnesses, viz., john harrison, francis meres, robert greene, henry chettle, heminges, condell, and ben jonson. john harrison was the printer (publisher) who published the "venus and adonis" in , and the "lucrece" in . * ibid., p. . ** george townsend (according to allibone), london: g. routledge & co., farringdon street, . *** "shakespeare: the man and the book." london: josiah adams, trubner & co., , part l, p. . "the authorship of the works attributed to shakespeare." each of these was without { }an author's name on the title-page, though each was dedicated to southampton, in an address dedicatory, signed "william shakespeare." this is all that the harrison evidence amounts to, except that dr. ingleby says, "it is to me quite incredible that harrison would have done this unless shakespeare had written the dedications, or at least had been a party to them." * as to meres, anybody can see by reading him that he wrote as a _critic_, and not as an historian. ** to subpoena greene as a witness to shakespeare's genius, is at least a bold stroke; for, as has been seen, greene is very emphatic to the effect that william shakespeare was a mere "johannes factotum," or jack-of-all-trades, who trained in stolen plumage, and the shakespeareans (dr. ingleby alone excepted) have universally exerted themselves to break the force of this testimony by proving greene a drunkard, jealous, etc. *** greene { }was a graduate of cambridge--a learned man--"one of the fathers," says lamb, "of the english stage." * ibid., p. . ** "palladis tamia, wit's commonwealth," . *** that robert greene was much more than a drunkard and a pretender, but that, to the contrary, he had many admirers who were not unaware of the effrontery of his debtor, shakespeare, a search among the old literature of the day would reveal. in a quarto tract, dated , "greene's funeralls, by r. b., gent.," is a copy of verses, the last stanza of which runs: "greene is the pleasing object of an eye greene pleased the eye of all that looked upon him; greene is the ground of every painter's dye, greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him: nay, more; the men that so eclipsed his fame, purloined his plumes, can they deny that same?" hallam believes that the last two lines are directed principally at william shakespeare. ("literature of europe," part ii., ch. vi., p. , note.) a selection of his poems, edited by lamb, is printed in bohn's standard library. but by far the most careful account of greene's career, as connected with "william shakespeare, is to be found in "the school of shakespeare," by richard simpson, london: chatto & windus, , vol. ii., p. . he does not seem to have approved of william shakespeare's borrowing his plumes; but the impression that he was a monster of debauchery and drunkenness is derived wholly from his own posthumous work, "the confessions of robert greene," etc., london, , which lays the black paint on so thickly that it should have put the critics on their guard. greene was probably no worse than his kind. henry chettle edited greene, and personally deprecated some of its hard sayings as to shakespeare, on account of his (shakespeare's) being a clever, civil sort of fellow, and of "his facetious grace in writing;" but more particularly, no doubt, because "divers of worship" had taken him up, and he (chettle) did not wish to appear as approving slander of a reigning favorite. heminges and condell were men of straw, whose names are signed to the preface to the "first folio," who otherwise bear no testimony one way or the other, but whose book, as will be demonstrated further on, is an unwilling witness against its purported author. and ben jonson, who brings up the rear of this precious seven, has been already disposed of. that theory must be pretty soundly grounded in truth, against which there is nothing but rhetoric to hurl, and, in our opinion, it would be entirely safe--if not for the baconians, for the anti-shakespeareans, at least--to rest their case on the arguments for the other side. and we believe the more { }thoughtful among shakespeareans are beginning to recognize it, and coming to comprehend that, if they are to keep their shakespeare they must re-write their "biographies;" spend less time in proving him to have been an epitome of the moral virtues--beyond the temptation of deer stealing, beer drinking, and skylarking, etc.--and devote more attention to his opportunities for acquiring the lore and technical knowledge his alleged pages so accurately handle. especially has mr. halliwell phillips, in his little book (in which he binds himself to cite no dates or authorities subsequent to ), * impressed us as endeavoring to meet this emergency. but we find that he has not met it. he has, indeed, developed many details of curious interest--as that john shakespeare was, in april, , fined twelve pence for throwing muck into the street in front of his house; and that he was several times a candidate for high bailiff of stratford (or mayor, as the office was afterward called) before finally arriving at that dignity in ; that july , , there was heard at worcester assizes a curious lawsuit, brought by dr. john hall, shakespeare's son-in-law, against a neighbor for slandering his wife (susannah shakespeare), which suit appears to have been "fixed" in some way before coming to trial. * outlines of the life of shakespeare. brighton. printed for the author's friends, . we should add to our list of hooks mr. o. follet's two able pamphlets on the baconian theory. sandusky, ohio, . mr. phillips brings much learning to prove that william may have been "pre-contracted" to anne hathaway--that his death may have been from malarial fever { }rather than inebriation--which have nothing at all to do with the question or the practical difficulties cited by the anti-shakespeareans, one way or the other. but as to those practical difficulties, he brings no light and has no word to say. { } part vi. the new theory--the sonnets--conclusion. [illustration: ] f a matter so indifferent as the number of pebbles in demosthenes' mouth when he practiced oratory on the beach, no effort of credulity can be predicated. but when a proposition is historical and capable of proving itself, it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. it would be interesting, for example, to compile a catalogue of the reasons why a, b, and c, and their friends, doubt the real shakespeare story, and cling to the manufactured tradition. a will tell us he believes it because somebody else (bacon will do as well as anybody) wrote enough as it was, and was not the sort of man who would surrender any of the glory to which he was himself entitled, to another. b, because, when somebody else wrote poetry (for example, bacon's "paraphrase of the psalms"), his style was quite another than the style of the dramas. c, because he is satisfied that william shakespeare spent some terms at stratford school, and was any thing but unkind to his wife. d, because the presumption is too old to be disturbed; as if we should always go on believing in william tell and the man in the moon, because our ancestors believed in them! and so on, through the alphabet. it is so much easier, for instance, to believe that miracles should appear by the page, or that universal wisdom should spring fully { }armed from the brain of a warwickshire clown, than that francis bacon, or somebody else, should write anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de plume the name of a living man, instead of inventing one de novo. now, say the new theorists, if at about that time, a living nomme de plume should happened to be wanted, whose name was more cheaply purchasable than that of a young "johannes factotum," of the blackfriars, who, by doing any thing and every thing that was wanted, and saving every honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever appears to have allowed himself out of his increasing prosperity) * and a county seat? four or five years before our historical william shakespeare had bethought himself of wandering to london, one james burbage, father of richard, the actor, had built the blackfriars theater, a plain, rough building on the site of the present publishing office of the "times." * we happen on traces of the fact that william shakespeare's particular weakness was his "noble descent" very often, in exploring the annals of these times, and that his fellow actors by no means spared his weakness. "it was then a current joke to identify shakespeare with 'the conqueror,' or 'rufus,' as if his pretensions to descent from the norman dukes were known" ("ben jonson's quarrel with shakspeare," "north british review," july, ). and certain lines in the "poetaster" are supposed to be a fling at this weakness of shakespeare, as the whole play is believed to be a hit at marlow (id.). we shall see how this weakness was fostered by the new set into which circumstances forced shakespeare, later on. before its door (for the blackfriars will answer as well as the globe) we may, perhaps, { }imagine a rustic lad--fresh from stratford, and footsore from his long tramp, attracted by the crowd and the lights, standing idle and agape. possibly, then, riding up, some gallant threw young william his horse's bridle, and william shakespeare had found employment in london. by attention to business, william, in time, may have, as rowe thinks, come to control the horse-holding business, and take his predecessors into his pay; until they became known as "shakespeare's boys," and the young speculator's name penetrated to the inside of the theater. in course of time he becomes a "_servitour_" (what we now call a "super," i. e., supernumerary) inside, and ultimately (according to rowe, an actor himself, and the nearest in point of time to william shakespeare to write his biography) "the reader" * of the establishment; and naturally, therefore, stage editor of whatever is offered. he has no royal road to learning at his command, nor does he want one. the "knack at speech-making," which had delighted the rustic youth of stratford, mellowed by the new experiences which surround him, is all he needs. not only the plays of greene and others, which he now remodeled (and improved, no doubt), but essays of his own, became popular. the audience (we shall see more of them further on) called for "shakespeare's plays," and his name came to possess a market value. * in this capacity he read and accepted ben jonson's "every man in his humour," which was the beginning of the intimacy which ended with their lives. the dramas we now call "shakespearean" surely did appear in his lifetime, and under his name. were { }they ever performed at his theater? let us glance at the probabilities. the "theaters" of this day are barely more than inclosures, with a raised platform for the performers, and straw for the audience to stand or go to sleep in, as they prefer. votton, in a letter to bacon, * says that the fire that destroyed the globe theater burned up nothing but "a little wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks." sir philip sidney, writing in , ridicules the poverty of the scenic effects and properties of the day in an often-quoted passage: "you shall have asia of the one side and afrieke of the other, and so many other under kingdomes that the plaier, when hee comes in, must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. now, you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then you must believe the stage to be a garden: by-and-by we have news of a shipwreck in the same place; and we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. upon the back of that comes a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, while, in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field!" ** * smith's "bacon and shakespeare," p. . ** "the defence of poesie," edition , p. . and m. taine has drawn a life-like picture of the audience which applauded this performance: "the poor could enter as well as the rich; there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats.... if it rained, and it often rained in london, the people in { }the pit, botchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain on their heads... they did not trouble themselves about it. while waiting for the pieces they... drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort to their lists: they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn the theater upside down. at other times they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding or toss him in a blanket,... when the beer took effect there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a receptacle for general use. the smell arises, and then comes the cry, 'burn the juniper!' they burn some in a plate in the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. certainly the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted at any thing, and can not have had sensitive noses. in the time of rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. remember that they were hardly out of the middle age, and that, in the middle age, man lived on a dunghill." mr. white assures us further, that pickpockets were apt to be plentiful among this audience, and when discovered, were borne upon the stage, pilloried in full view, * and there left, the play going on meanwhile around them; and, moreover, that the best seats sold were on the stage itself; where any of the audience, who could pay the price, could sit, recline, walk, or converse with the actors engaged in the performance," while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and---- * "kempe, the actor, in his 'nine days' wonder,' a. d. , compares a man to 'such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage for all the people to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.'" ("shakespeare," by richard grant white, vol. i., p. .) { }pipes of tobacco with which to regale themselves. * "practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest, was utterly unknown, ** and it is thought that the actors relied on barely more than the written action of the piece for their guidance. in the plays of this period we come continually on such stage directions as "here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "all speak "here they all talke," etc., *** which proves that much of the dialogue was trusted to the inspiration of the moment--to which inspiration the gallants and pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed. * ibid. ** whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, which supposes "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert with confidence, that the same was written in or after , up to which date there was no such thing as practicable machinery. in the original edition of "the tempest," for instance, there is no intimation, by way of stage direction, that the first scene occurs on shipboard. in the first edition of "as you like it" there is no mention of a forest in the stage direction. nor in the early quartos of "romeo and juliet" is there any intimation that juliet makes love in a balcony. "what child is there, that, coming to a play, and seeing thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is thebes?" says sidney, in his "defence of poesie."--(r. g. white's "shakespeare's scholar," p. , note.) trap-doors, however, were probably in very early use; at least, we find in a comedy by middleton and dekkar a character called "trap-door." there seems, also, to have been pillars that turned about, and a writer in the times of james i. mentions that "the stage varied three times in one tragedy." *** these stage directions are taken from greene's "tu quoque," a. d. , two years before shakespeare died, and long after, according to the commentators, he had ceased writing for the stage. the principal burden of entertaining the audience rested with the clown, who, unembarrassed by any { }reference to the subject-matter of the play, popped in and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon the stage. before an audience satisfied with this rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded with smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we are assured that hamlet and wolsey delivered their soliloquies, anthony his impassioned oratory, and isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and pot-wrestlers discoursed among themselves of athens and troy, and hecuba and althea, of galen and paracelus, of "writs of detainer," and "fine and recovery," and "præmunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia! "at this public theater," says mr. smith, "to which every one could obtain access, and the lowest of the people ordinarily resorted... we are called upon to believe that the wonderful works which we so greatly admire and feel we can only appreciate by careful private study--that not only englishmen like coleridge confess, in forty years of admiring study of greek, latin, english, italian, spanish, and german philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found bursting upon him with increased power, wisdom, and beauty in every step," * but foreigners like schlegel, jean paul, and gervinus, "have fallen down before in all but heathen adoration"--were performed. in , when we force a common-school education at state expense upon the people, the shakespearean plays are disastrous to managers. * bacon and shakespeare, p. . they "lose money on shakespeare," and unless "carpentry and french"--unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, are { }draped down to desolate houses and financial ruin. "shakespeare" is "over the heads" of -------- in these days of compulsory education. and yet we are calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that in and about the year , in london, these grave, intellectual, and stately dialogues are taking by storm the rabble of the bankside, and entrancing the tradesmen and burghers of the days when to read was quite as rare an accomplishment as serpent-charming is today--when, if sovereigns wrote their own names, it was all they could do--and when the government could not afford to hang a man who could actually write his name. * "and yet," to quote mr. smith again, "it was from the profit arising from this wretched place of amusement that shakespeare realized the far from inconsiderable fortune with which in a few years he retired to stratford-upon-avon." if not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of that day must have been the superiors in literary perception of some very eminent gentlemen who were to come after them, like, for example, fuller, evelyn, pepys, dryden, dennis, kymer, hume, pope, addison, steele, and jonson, whose comments on our immortal drama we have set forth in the first part of this work. ** only we happen to know they were not. * benefit of clergy was only abolished in england by acts and , george iv., c. , sec. , in , fifty-three years ago; in the united states it had been disposed of (though it had never been availed of) by act of congress, april , . ** ante, pp. - . { } as an alternative to believing that these pearls, over which this nineteenth century gloats, were cast before the swine of the sixteenth; the theory we are now considering offers, as less violent an attack upon common sense, the supposition that what we now possess under the name of "shakespeare's plays" were _not_ produced upon the stage of any play-house in those days, but were _printed_ instead, the name of william shakespeare having been attached to them as surety for a certain circulation. the well-attested fact that william shakespeare was a play-writer is not ignored by this supposition; for the new theorists believe that, although no fragment of the shakespeare work now survives, its character can be readily determined. from what knowledge we possess of the tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is not difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the plays. these were the formative days of audiences, and, therefore, the formative days of plays. sir henry wotton, in a letter from which we have just quoted, written to lord bacon in , refers to one of these plays called "the hog hath lost its pearl." says this letter: "now it is strange to hear how sharp-witted the city is; for they will needs have sir thomas swinnerton, the lord mayor, be meant by the hog, and the late lord treasurer by the pearl." there is no disputing the fact, at least, that the plays we call "shakespeare's" are cast in a mold by themselves, and have no contemporary exemplar. the student of these days knows the fact that dekker, webster, massinger, jonson, or any other who wrote in periods that are counted "literature," made no fortunes at their work. that such as this one alluded to by wotton--and one example will suffice--were what the town ran to see in those days, mere local sketches--{ }lampoons on yesterday's events; coarse parables, the allusions in which could be met and enjoyed by the actors themselves (were to the popular taste, that is to say), is much easier to conceive than that the "hamlet" and the "lear" were to the popular taste. one dr. ileywood (who, it is to be noted, is sometimes called the "prose shakespeare") is understood to have produced some two hundred and twenty of this sort of sketches alone; and, possibly, this was the sort of "early essays at dramatic poetry" which aubrey speaks of: this "the facetious grace in writing that approves his wit" which chettle assigns to william shakespeare--mere sketches in silhouette of the town's doings, such as would appeal, as this sort still do in cities, to a popular and local audience. there is some curious testimony on the subject, which looks to that effect. cartwright, * in his lines on fletcher, says:= ```"shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies ```i' th' ladies' questions, and the fools' replies, ```old-fashioned wit, which walked from town to town ```in turned hose, which our fathers called the clown; ```whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call, ```and which made bawdry pass for comical. ```naturk was all his art: thy vein was free ```as his, but without his scurrility."= * poems, , p. . one leonard ditrges--who, farmer says (in his essay on "the learning of shakespeare"), was "a wit of the town" in the days of shakespeare--wrote some verses laudatory of william shakespeare, which (farmer says again) "were printed along with a spurious edi{ }tion of shakespeare" in . in this copy of verses occur such lines as--= ```"nature only led him, for look thorough ```this whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow ```one phrase from greeks, nor latins imitate, ```nor once from vulgar languages translate."= a startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, concerning compositions which judge holmes has demonstrated are crowded with classical borrowings, imitations drawn from works untranslated from their originals at the date when quoted; so that it would be impossible to say that the quoter found them in english works and took them with no knowledge of their original source! * "nature itself was all his art," says fuller, and denham, again, asserts that "all he [shakespeare] has was from old mother witt." ** and dominie ward says, to the same effect, in his diary, "i have heard that mr. shakespeare was a natural witt, without any art at all;" *** though, of course, this was, and could have been, nothing more than matter of report. * see holmes's "authorship of shakespeare," third edition, p. . ** farmer, p. . *** "diary of rev. john ward, vicar of stratford, extending from to ," p. ; london, , p. . shakespeare took his "taming of the shrew" from greene's "taming of a shrew," there being no copyright to prevent. it is probable that, in the production of these plays, 'william shakespeare was not always scrupulous to compose "without blotting out a line" himself. that he was a reckless borrower, and scissored unconscionably from robert greene and others (so much so that { }greene wrote a whole book in protest), we have greene's book itself to testify. from its almost unintelligible pages we can glean some idea of the turgid english of the day. it was, of course, in the composition of this popular english that shakespeare, by surpassing greene, awakened the latter's jealousy. otherwise, there would have been no superiority in shakespeare over greene which greene could have perceived: or, at least, no cutting into greene's profits wherein greene could have found cause for jealousy. for, if greene had continued to earn money indifferently to whether shakespeare carried on his trade or not, he would not have been "jealous." but so fluent and clever a fellow as this william shakespeare of stratford, who could hold, when a mere boy, his rustic audience with a speech over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous rival among the hackney stock-playwrights of london, and would easily have made himself invaluable to his management by dashing off scores of such local sketches as "the hog hath lost his pearl," suggested by the current events of the day. but, even if "hamlet," "othello," "king lear," "macbeth," and "julius cæsar" could have been produced by machinery, and engrossed currente calamo, (so that the author's first draft should be the acting copy for the players), they could have hardly been composed, nowadays, without a library. and even had william shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia (such as were first invented two hundred years or so after his funeral) he would not have found it inclusive of all the reference he needed for those five plays alone. they can not be studied as they are capable of being { }studied--as they were found capable of being studied by coleridge and gervinus--without a library. and yet are we to be asked to believe they were composed without one?--in the days when such a thing as a dictionary even was unknown! who ever heard of william shakespeare in his library, pulling down volumes, dipping into folios, peering into manuscripts, his brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the expense of greece and rome and egypt; pillaging alike from tomes of norseman lore and southern romance--for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs and swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, and burned juniper and tossed his journey-actors in blankets? it is always interesting to read of the habitudes of authors--of paper-saving pope scribbling his "iliad" on the backs of old correspondence, of spenser by his fireside in his library at kilcolman castle, of scott among his dogs, of gibbon biting at the peaches that hung on the trees in his garden at lausanne, of schiller declaiming by mountain brook-sides and in forest paths, of goldsmith in his garrets and his jails. even of chaucer, dead and buried before shakespeare saw the light, we read of his studies at cambridge, his call to the bar, and his chambers in the middle temple. but of william shakespeare--after ransacking tradition, gossip, and the record--save and except the statement of ben jonson how he had heard the actor's anecdote about his never blotting his lines--not a word, not a breath, can be found to connect him with, or surprise him in any agency or employment as to the composition of the plays we { }insist upon calling his--much less to the possession of a single book! did william shakespeare own a library? had we found this massive draught upon antiquity in the remains of an immortal milton or a mortal tupper, or in all the range of letters between, we should not have failed to presume a library. why should we believe that william shakespeare needed none?--that, as his pen ran, he never paused to lift volume from the shelf to refresh or verify his marvelously retentive recollection? there was no astor or mercantile library around the corner from the globe or the blackfriars, in those days. and, as for his own possessions, he leaves in his will no hint of book or library, much less of the literature the booksellers had taken the liberty of christening with his name! where is the scholar who glories not in his scholarship? by universal testimony, the highest pleasure which an author draws from his own completed work, the pride of the poet in his own poem, is their chiefest payment. the simple fact--which stands out so prominently in the life of this man that nobody can gainsay it--that william shakespeare took neither pride nor pleasure in any of the works which passed current with the rest of the world as his, might well make the most casual student of those days suspicious of a claim that, among his other accomplishments, william shakespeare was an author at all. just here we are referred to a passage in fuller's "worthies:" "many were the wit combats," says fuller, "between shakespeare and ben jonson;... i beheld them," etc. but fuller was only eight years old when shakespeare died, and possibly spoke from hearsay, as it is hardly probable that an infant of such { }tender years was permitted to spend his nights in "the mermaid." besides, these "wit combats" at "the mermaid" are now said to be "_wet_ combats," i. e. drinking-bouts, by a long-adopted misprint. as a matter of fact, unless we are misled by a typographical error in the edition before us, * what fuller { }did actually say was, not "wit combats," but "wet combats." but even if they were "wit combats," and not friendly contests at ale-guzzling, like the early tournament at "piping pebworth" and "drunken bidford," the "wit" could not have been colossal, if we may judge from one example preserved in the ashmolean manuscripts at oxford, as stated by capell. "ben" (jonson) and "bill"' (shakespeare) propose a joint epitaph. * the history of the worthies of england. endeavored by thomas fuller, d.d. two volumes. (first printed in .) a new edition, with a few explanatory notes by john nichols, f. a.s. london, edinburgh, and perth. printed for f. c. & j. rivington and others. the reference to william shakespeare is at page of volume ii., and is as follows: "warwickshire "writers since the reformation. "william shakespeare was born at stratford-on-avon, in this county, in whom three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded. . martial in the warlike sound of his surname (whence some may conjecture him of a military extraction), hasli-vibrans or shake-speare. . ovid, the most naturall and witty of poets; and hence it was that queen elizabeth, coming into a grammar school, made this extemporary verse-- "persius a crab-staffe, bawdy martial, ovid a fine wag. " . plautus who was an exact commedian, yet never any scholar, as one shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself. adde to all these that, though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by his tragedies; so that heraclitus himself (i mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at his comedies, they were so merry; and democritus scarce forbear to sigh at his tragedies, they were so mournfull. "he was an eminent instance of the truth of that rule, poeta non fit sed nascitur, 'one is not made but born a poet.' indeed, his learning was very little, so that as cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, so nature itself was all the art which was used upon him. many were the wet-combates betwixt him and ben jonson; which two i beheld like a spanish great gallion and an english man of war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. he died anno domini... and was buried at stratford-upon-avon, the town of his nativity." ben begins:= ````"here lies ben jonson, ````who was once one--"= shakespeare concludes:= ```"that while he lived, was a slow thing, ```and now, being dead, is no-thing."= this being the sort of literature which william shakespeare's pen turned out during his residence in london, he could manage very well without a library. and it was the most natural thing in the world that, after retiring to the shade of stratford, it should have produced, on occasion, the famous epitaphs on his friends elias james and "thinbeard." at all events, this is a simpler explanation than the "deterioration of power," for which no one has assigned a sufficient reason," which halliwell * was driven to assume in order { }to account for this drivel from the pen which had written "hamlet." * "life of shakespeare," p. . london, . and, moreover, it is a satisfactory explanation of what can not be explained in any other way (and which no shakespearean has ever yet attempted to explain at all), of the fact that william shakespeare, making his last will and testament at stratford, in , utterly ignored the existence of any literary property among his assets, or of his having used his pen, at any period, in accumulating the competency of which he died possessed. had william shakespeare been the courtly favorite of two sovereigns (which mr. hallam doubts * ), it is curious that he never was selected to write a masque. masques were the standard holiday diversions of the nobles of the day, to which royalty was so devoted that it is said the famous inigo jones was maintained for some years in the employment of devising the trappings for them alone (though, of course, it is no evidence, either way, as to the matter we have in hand). but if william shakespeare was the shrewd and prosperous tradesman that we have record of (and, that he came to london poor and left it rich, everybody knows), was he not shrewd enough, as well, to see that his audiences did not require philosophical essays and historical treatises; that he need not waste his midnight oil to verify the customs of the early cyprians, or pause to explore for them the secrets of nature? we may assert him to be a "great moral teacher" to-day; but, had he been a "great moral teacher" then, he would have set his stage to empty houses. he could have earned the same money with much less trouble to { }himself. * "literature of europe," vol. iii., p. (note). the gallants would have resorted to his stage daily (as they would have gone to the baths if they had been in old home); and the ha'penny seats have enjoyed themselves quite as much had he given them the school of "the hog hath lost his pearl," or "the devil is an ass," or the tumbles of a clown. why should this thrifty manager have ransacked greek and latin and italian letters, the romance of italy and the sagas of the horth (or, according to dr. farmer, rummaged the cloisters of all england, to get these at second hand)? had these all been collected in a public library, would he have had leisure to sit down and pull them over for this precious audience of his, these gallants and groundlings--when his money was quite as safe if he merely reached out and took the nearest spectacle at hand (as he took his "taming of the shrew," "winter's tale," "sea-coast of bohemia," and all--from robert greene)? but, if we may be allowed to conceive that it was the _action_ (that is to say, the "business") of the shakespearean plays that delighted this shakespearean audience (that filled the cockpit, galleries, and boxes, while poor ben jonson's, according to digges, would hardly bring money enough to pay for a sea-coal fire), and that certain greater than the manager used this action thereafter as a dress for the mighty transcripts caused to be printed under voucher of the popular manager's name--if we may be allowed to conceive this--however exceptional, it is at least an accounting for the shakespearean plays as we possess them to-day, without doing violence to human experience and the laws of nature. southampton, raleigh, essex, rutland, and montgomery are young noblemen of wealth and leisure, { }who "pass away the time merely in going to plays every day." * we have seen that the best seats were on the stage, and these, of course, the young noblemen occupied. there were no actresses in those days--the female parts were taken by boys--but titled ladies and maids of honor were admitted to seats on the stage as well as the gallants, and a thrifty stage manager might easily make himself useful to both. if my lord southampton was bosom friend to william shakespeare (as rumor has it), their intimacy arose probably through some such service. a noble youth of nineteen, of proverbial gallantry and sufficient wealth (though, it must be remembered, as among the fortunes of his day, a comparatively poor man; not able to give away $ , at a time, for instance), was not at so great a loss for a friend and alter ego in london in (the date at which the "venus and adonis" is dedicated to him) as to be forced to forget the social gulf that separated him from an economical commoner (lately a butcher in the provinces), however popular a stage manager, except for cause; and it takes considerable credulity to believe that he did forget it (if he did), through being dazzled by the transcendent literary abilities of the economical commoner aforesaid. * "my lord southampton and lord rutland come not to the court, the one but very seldom; they pass away the time merely in going to plays every day."--(letter from rowland white to sir robert sidney, dated october , , quoted by kenny, "life and genius of shakespeare." london: longmans, . p. , note.) but it may be noted that southampton and raleigh were opposed to each other in politics. for southampton lived and died without ever being suspected of a devotion to literature or literary pur{ }suits; and, besides, the economical commoner had not then written (if he ever did write) the "hamlet" and "lear," and those other evidences of the transcendent literary ability which could seduce a peer outside his caste. that the gallants and stage managers of the day understood each other, just as they perhaps do today, there is reason to believe. dekker, in his "gull's horn-book," says that, "after the play was over, poets adjourned to supper with knights, where they in private unfolded the secret parts of their dramas to them." by "poets" in this extract is meant, as appears from the context, the writers of dramas for the stage; such as, perhaps, william shakespeare was. but whether these suppers after the play were devoted to intellectual and philosophical criticism is a question for each one's experience to aid him in answering. whether william shakespeare was admitted to this noble companionship, or was only emulous of the honor, we have no means of conjecture, as either might account for the fact that with his first savings he purchased a grant of arms for his father, thus obtaining not only an escutcheon, but one whole generation of ancestry; a transaction which involved, says dr. farmer, the falsehood aud venality of the father, the son and two kings at arms, and did not escape protest; * for if ever a coat was "cut from whole cloth," we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one. * a complaint must have been made from some quarter that this application had no sufficient foundation, for we have, in the herald's college, a manuscript which purports to be "the answer of garter and clarencieux, kings of arms, to a libellous scrowl against certain arms supposed to be wrongfully given in which the writers state, under the head "shakespeare," that "the person to whom it was granted had borne magistracy, and was justice of peace, at stratford- upon-avon; he married the daughter and heir of arden, and was able to maintain that estate." the whole of this transaction is involved in considerable, and, perhaps, to a great extent, intentional obscurity; and it still seems doubtful whether any grant was actually made in the year . in the year , the application must have been renewed in a somewhat altered form. under that date, there exists a draft of another grant, by which john shakespeare was further to be allowed to impale the ancient arms of arden. in this document a statement was originally inserted to the effect that "john shakespeare showed and produced his ancient coat-of-arms, heretofore assigned to him whilst he was her majesty's officer and bailiff of that town." but the words "showed and produced" were afterward erased, and in this unsatisfactory manner the matter appears to have terminated. it is manifest that the entries we have quoted contain a number of exaggerations, one even of positive misstatements. the "parents and antecessors" of john shakespeare were not advanced and rewarded by henry vii.; but the maternal ancestors, or, more probably, some more distant relatives of william shakespeare, appear to have received some favors and distinctions from that sovereign. the pattern of arms given, as it is stated, under the hand of clareneieux (cooke, who was then dead), is not found in his records, and we can place no faith in his allegation. john shakespeare had been a justice of the peace, merely ex officio, and not by commission, as is here insinuated; in all probability he did not possess "lands and tenements of the value of five hundred pounds;" and robert arden, of wilmecote, was not a "gentleman of worship."--(kenny, "life and genius of shakespeare," p. . london: longmans, .) { }whoever wrote hamlet's soliloquy and antony's oration might well have written the "venus and adonis" and the "lucrece," and was quite equal to the bold stroke of describing the former (the most splendidly sensuous poem in any language--a poem that { }breathes in every line the blase and salacious exquisite), as the first heir of the invention of a busy london manager and whilom rustic lothario among 'warwickshire milkmaids. the question as to the authorship of the one hundred and fifty-four "sonnets," which appeared (with the exception of two, printed in , in a collection of verses called for some un-suggested reason "the passionate pilgrim") in , need not enter into any anti-shakespearean theory at all. except that one francis meres, writing in --eleven years before--had reported william shakespeare to have circulated certain "sugared sonnets among his private friends;" * and that the one hundred and thirty-sixth of the series says the author's name is "will" (the common nickname of a poet of those days), ** there is nothing to connect them with william shakespeare except his name on the title-page--in the days when we have seen that printers put whatever name they pleased or thought most vendable, upon a title-page. (when the aforesaid "passionate pilgrim" was printed in --also as by william shakespeare--dr. ileywood recognized two of his own compositions incorporated in it, and promptly claimed them. "no evidence," says mr. grant white, *** in commenting on this performance, "of any public denial on shakespeare's part is known to exist. it was not until the publication of the third edition of the poem, in , that william shakespeare's name was removed.") * hallam does not think these are the sonnets mentioned by meres.--("literature of europe," vol. iii., p. , note. ** see ante, p. , note. *** "shakespeare's works," vol. iii., p. . but what involves the authorship of the sonnets in still { }deeper obscurity is the fact that their publisher, thomas thorpe, himself dedicates them to a friend of his own. he addresses his friend as "mr. w. h.," and signs the dedication with his own initials "t. t." perhaps it was just as the name "shakespeare" was fastened to the title-page of "the passionate pilgrim," and the plays to which, as we shall notice the shakespeareans declare it never belonged, that mr. thomas thorpe calls his book "shakespeare's sonnets, never before imprinted," and makes in the pages of the stationers' company the entry: " may, . tho. thorpe. a book called shake-speare's sonnets." they appear conjointly with a long poem entitled "a lover's complaint," and two of them (as we have said) had already been printed in "the passionate pilgrim," published by jaggard in . this unhappy dedication has been so twisted by the commentators to serve their turns, that the only safety is to print it as it stood in this first edition: "to. the. onlie. begetter. of these. insuing. sonnets. mr. w. h. all. happinesse. and. that. eternetie. promised. by. our. ever. living. poet. wisheth. the. well-wishing. adventurer. in. setting forth. { }for a dedication composed in the turgid fashion of nearly three hundred years ago, the above would seem to be peculiarly intelligible. all publications were ventures in those days. the printer might get his money back and he might not. but, until he did, he was an adventurer. so mr. thorpe, in setting forth on his adventure, wishes well to his publication and to some unknown patron whom he desires--as was the custom--to compliment with wishes of long life and happiness. at least this would seem to be the reading on the face of it. to be sure, there is a slight uncertainty as to whether "mr. w. h." is dedicator or dedicatee. but the moment the name of shakespeare appears this little trouble becomes insignificant--and, as usual, difficulties begin to crowd and multiply. the title reads: "shake-speares sonnets never before imprinted: at london, by g. eld, for t. t. and are to be sold by william apsley. ." at that name the commentators appear, and swarm like eagles around a carcass. mr. armitage brown, who flourished in or about the year , and appears to have been the first gentleman who ever took the trouble to read them, has demonstrated * that these sonnets are actually six poems of different lengths **--each poem having a consistent theme and argument (and he made this discovery by the simple process of reading them). * "shakespeare's autographical poems, being his sonnets clearly developed," etc. by charles armitage brown. london: james bohn, . ** we find, however, that coleridge had earlier advanced the same theory.--table talk (routledge's edition), p. . can any body believe that, if these six poems had been the work of the mighty shakespeare of the shakespear{ }eans, they would have waited until without a reader? and, most wonderful of all, that this mighty poet in his own lifetime would allow six of his poems to be torn up into isolated stanzas by a printer, stirred together and run into type hap-hazard, and sold as his "sonnets?" the shakespeareans tell us sometimes of their william's utter indifference to fame, but they have never claimed for him an imperturbability quite so stolid as this. and while we could not well imagine mr. tennyson regarding with complaisance a publisher who would print his "maud," "locksley hall," "lady clara," etc., each verse standing by itself, and calling the whole "mr. tennyson's sonnets," so we fancy even mr. shakespeare of the globe, had he been their author, would have thought the printers were going a little too far. but, all the same, the shakespeareans, mr. armitage brown among the rest, are determined that these sonnets shall be shakespeare's and nobody else's, and proceed to tell us who "mr. w. h." (to whom mr. thorpe, at william shakespeare's request--as if the the man who wrote the sonnets could not write a dedication of them--dedicated them) is. certain of them believe the letters "w. h." to be a transposition of "h. w.," in which case they might stand for "henry wriothesley," earl of southampton. mr. boaden and two mr. browns * read them, as they stand, to mean william herbert, earl of pembroke (in either case accounting for william shakespeare addressing in earl as "mr."--which may mean "mister" or "mas{ }ter"--on the score of earl and commoner having been the closest of "chums"). * shakespeare's autographical poems." by charles armitage brown. london, . "the sonnets of shakespeare solved," etc. by henry brown. london, . a learned frenchman, m. chasles, has conjectured that thomas thorpe wrote the first half of the dedication, including the "mr. w. h.," and william shakespeare the second half (including, perhaps, though m. chasles does not say so, the "t. t.") one equally learned german (herr bernsdorff) suggests that "w. h." means "william himself," and that the great shakespeare meant to dedicate these poems to his own personality (as george wither, in , dedicated his satirical poems, "g. w. wisheth himself all happiness;") and another supposes shakespeare to have been in love with a negress, "black but comely," like the lady of the canticles. yet another, that this dark lady typified "dramatic art," the roman catholic church, etc., etc. mr. dowden will have it that shakespeare and spenser, and mento that shakespeare and chapman were rivals for the lady's favor. and there have been other and even more puerile speculations put gravely forth by these same learned and venerable commentators: such as, since the word "hewes" (in the line, "a man in hewes all hewes in his controlling"), is spelled with a capital letter, that, therefore, "ay. h." is william hewes (whoever he might have been). wadsworth believes that these sonnets were the repository of the real emotions of william shakespeare, as a relief to long simulation of other people's emotions in his dramas; while mr. william thompson * believes them to be the sonnett, which bacon mentions writ{ }ing in or about , saying: "it happened a little before that time that her majesty had a purpose to dine at twickenham park, at which time i had (though i profess not to be a poet) prepared a _sonnet_, directly tending and alluding to draw on her majesty's reconcilement to my lord, which i remember i also showed to a great person," etc. * the renascence drama, or history made visible. by william thompson, f. r. c. s., f. l. s. melbourne: sands & me- dougal, collins street, west, , p. , et seq. now, mr. thompson believes that this "great person" was william herbert, who read them among the friends of the putative author--was, in short, the "w. h." mr. thompson points out that, if these sonnets are not bacon's _sonnet_, the latter has never been found, among bacon's papers or elsewhere. if these are the sonnets distributed by william shakespeare among his private friends--of which meres seems to have known in --there would be this historical difficulty in connecting them with lord herbert, afterwards earl of pembroke, viz: in the sydney papers * is preserved a letter from rowland white to sir robert sydney, in which the writer says: "my lord herbert hath, with much ado, brought his father to consent that he may live at london, but not before the next spring." this letter is dated april , . "the next spring" would be , the very year in which meres speaks of these sonnets as in existence among william shakespeare's friends. of course, they might have been afterwards collected and dedicated by their author. * vol. ii., p. . but at the time they were so collected, lord herbert was earl pembroke, and was surely not _then_, if he had ever been (which he had { }not), plain "mr. h." in other words, if the sonnets were william shakespeare's, he must either have dedicated them to a stranger--a boy at oxford--or have waited until that hoy had become of age and an earl, and then dedicated them to him in either case by a title not his own. in the absence of explanation., nowadays, we would be obliged to regard such a dedication an insult rather than a compliment. and men were at least no less punctilious about titles in the age of elizabeth than they are to-day. it is interesting, in this connection, to note that in , and while young lord herbert was at oxford, a play, "edward iii.," was entered in the register of the stationers' company. in both this play and in sonnett xciv. occur the line,= ```"lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."= were there _any_ means of ascertaining in which the line is original and in which quotation, it might be of aid in solving this question of authorship. but, unhappily, none are at hand. mr. hiel believes that "w. h." means "william hathaway," shakespeare's brother-in-law, and that "onlie begetter" of these sonnets means "only collector;" (going into considerable philology to make good his assertion), and that hathaway collected his broth-er-in-law's manuscripts and carried them to thorpe. mr. massey has, for his part, constructed a tremendous romance out of the sonnets, * in which "w. h." means { }william herbert, earl of pembroke. * shakespeare's sonnets, never before interpreted. london, . vide, a volume "remarks on the sonnets of shakespeare, showing that they belong to the hermetic class of writings, and explaining their general meaning and purpose." new york: james miller, . printed anonymous, but written by judge e. a. hitchcock. but all these commentators alike agree to ignore the fact that william shakespeare did not dedicate the sonnets to any body, or, so far as we know, procure thomas thorpe to do so for him. a poem, "the phoenix and the turtle," is sometimes bound up with these, described as "verses among the additional poems to love's martyr; or, rosalin's complaint," printed in , but nobody knows by what authority, except that publishers have got into the habit of doing so. then, again, anonymous authorship was a fashionable pastime among the gallants and the gentle of this elizabethan day, and joint authorship a familiar feature in elizabethan letters. it is said that the great dramas we call shakespeare's so persistently nowadays, and which began to appear unheralded at about this time, bear internal traces of courtly and aristocratic authorship. the diction is stately and sedate. no peasant-born author could have assumed and sustained so haughty a contempt for every thing below a baronet (for only at least that grade of humanity--it is said by those who have carefully examined the drama in this view *--does any virtuous or praiseworthy attribute appear in a shakespearean character: while every thing below is exceedingly comic and irresistible, but still "base, common, and popular"). * mr. wilkes' shakespeare from an american point of view. new york: appletons, , if certain noblemen of the court proposed amusing themselves at joint anonymous authorship, they were certainly right in concluding that the name of a living { }man, in their own pay, was a safer disguise than a pseudonym which would challenge curiosity and speculation. at least--so say the new theorists--such has turned out to be the actual fact. it is the new theory that, while in employment in the theater, william shakespeare was approached by certain gentlemen of the court. perhaps their names were southampton, raleigh, essex, rutland, and montgomery, and possibly among them was a needy and ambitious scholar named bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, maintained their society by secret recourse to the jews or to any thing that would put gold for the day in his purse. possibly they desired to be unknown, for the reasons given by miss bacon. in what they asked of him, and what he did for them, he found, at any rate, his profit. the story goes that the amount of profit he realized from one of these gentlemen alone was no less a sum than a thousand pounds. if so--considering the buying power of pounds in those days--it is not so wonderful that, at this rate, william shakespeare retired with a fortune. even at its most and its best, it is an infinitely small percentum of the world's wealth that finds its way into the poet's pocket; poetasters are sometimes luckier than poets. that william shakespeare's fortune came faster than the fortune of his fellows we do know. this was at once the most secure and the most lucrative use he could have made of his name. for, as we have seen, owing to the condition of the common law, while he could hardly have protected himself against any piracy of his name by injunction, he might have loaned it for value to the printers, or to any one desirous of employing it, the { }risk of piracy to be the borrower's. if these noble gentlemen desired to write political philosophy--as miss bacon believed, or belles lettres for their own pleasure--they had their opportunity now; and the new theory is not inconsistent, either with the delia bacon theory or with the baconian theory proper, as elaborated by judge holmes, who recognizes bacon's pen so constantly throughout the dramas. the same difficulties which those theories meet would still confront us if, as mr. boucicault and others have suggested, the plays were offered from lesser sources, and rewritten entirely by william shakespeare; for we should still be obliged to ask, how did he dare to retain in the plays the material which, unintelligible to him, he must have believed to be unintelligible to his audiences, as calculated to drive them away, rather than to attract them? any one of these schemes of assimilated authorship seems at least to tally with the evidence from what we know as the "doubtful plays." in , there appeared in london an anonymous publication--a play entitled "troilus and cressida." it was accompanied by a preface addressed, "a never writer to an ever reader," which, in the turgid fashion of the day, set forth the merit and attractions of the play itself. among its other claims to public favor, this preface asserted the play to be one "never stal'd with the stage, never claperclawed with the palms of the vulgar"--which seems (in english) to mean that it had never been performed in a theater. but, however virgin on its appearance in print, it seems to have very shortly become "staled with the stage," or, at any rate, with a stage name, for, a few months later, { }a second edition of the play (printed from the same type) appears, minus the preface, but with the announcement on the title-page that this is the play of "troilus and cressida, as it was enacted by the king's majesty his servants at the globe. _written by william shakespeare_." * now, unless we can imagine william shakespeare--while operating his theater--writing a play _to be published in print_--and announcing it as entitled to public favor on the ground that it had never been polluted by contact with so unclean and unholy a place as a theater, it is hard to escape the conviction that he was not the "never writer"--in other words, that he was not its author at all--but on its appearance in print, levied on it for his stage, underlined it, produced it, and--it proving a success--either himself announced it, or winked at its announcement by others, as a work of his own. again, in , a play wras printed in london entitled "sir john oldcastle" in , one entitled "the london prodigal" in , one entitled "the yorkshire tragedy" in , one entitled "pericles, prince of tyre;" and, at about the same time, certain others, viz: "the arraignment of paris;" "arden of fever-sham" (a very able work, by the way); "edward iii.;" "the birth of merlin "fair em, the miller's daughter;" "mucedorus;" "the merry devil of edmonton;" "the comedy of george a green;" and "the two noble kinsmen." all the above purported, and were understood to be, and were sold as being, works of william shakespeare, except "the merry devil of edmonton," which was announced as { }by shakespeare and rowley, and "the two noble kinsmen," as by shakespeare and fletcher. * holmes's "authorship of shakespeare," third edition, pp. - . now, it is certainly a fact that william shakespeare, from his box-office at the globe, or from his country-seat at stratford, never corroborated the printers by admitting, or contradicted them by denying his authorship of any of the above enumerated plays. the "hamlet" had been previously published in or about , and the "lucrèce" had made its appearance in . it is certainly a fact that none of these--from "hamlet" to "fair em," from "lucrece" to "the merry devil of edmonton"--did william shakespeare ever either deny or claim as progeny of his. he fathered them all as they came, "and no questions asked." and, had mr. ireland been on hand with his "vortigern," it might have gone in with the rest, with no risk of the scrutiny and the scholarship which exploded it so disastrously in . no plays, bearing the name of william shakespeare on their title-page, now appeared from to . but in the year , seven years after william shakespeare's death, a folio of _thirty-six_ plays is brought out by heminges and condell, entitled "the works of mr. william shakespeare." of the many plays which had appeared during his life, and been circulated and considered as his, or of which mention can (according to the shakes-peareans) be anywhere found, only twenty-six appeared in this folio, while ten plays are included which never appear to have been seen or heard of until their presence in this heminges and condell collection. the shakespeareans allow that this is "mysterious," but precisely the same "mystery" would have been discovered in the days of heminges and condell them{ }selves, if it had been worth the while of anybody then living to look into the question. nothing has happened, since, the death of william shakespeare, to make the shakespeare question any more "mysterious" than he left it himself. to make this apparent at a glance, let us present the whole in a tabulated statement, only asking the reader to observe that we have in every case given the shakespeareans the benefit of the doubt, and accepted the mention of a similar name of any play as proof positive of its being the play nowadays attributed to william shakespeare; and their own chronology everywhere. the following table shows the plays passing as william shakespeare's, in london, in the years when he resided in london, as part proprietor and concerned in the management of the globe and blackfriars theaters; the dates of their earliest mention or appearance, and which of them were included in the first folio, edited by heminges and condell, in : on the supposition that the plays mentioned by meres (of which, however, no other traces can be found, during william shakespeare's life), besides those names in manningham's and forman's diaries, and the "account of the levels at court," are the identical plays now included in the shakespearean drama. the dates are mr. grant white's. { } [illustration: ] * this play is put in between the histories and tragedies, as if received "too late for classification," as the newspapers say. its pages are not numbered, and so it does not disturb the pagination of the folio. part vi.--the new theory, { }a play called "duke humphrey," attributed to shakespeare, was amongst the dramatic manuscripts destroyed by the carelessness of warburton's servant, in the early part of the last century, as appears by the list preserved in the british museum--ms. lans-downe, . leaving out these plays mentioned by meres, we then have twenty-one entirely new plays, which never appeared in william shakespeare's life, first appearing in heminges and condell's edition. it appearing, then, that, of some forty-two plays credited to william shakespeare during his lifetime, heminges and condell selected only twenty-five, and printed and hound up with those twenty-five nine plays which nobody had ever heard of in print or on the stage or anywhere else, until william shakespeare had been dead and in his grave seven years, besides the "othello," which was first heard of five years after his death: it follows either that heminges and condell knew that william shakespeare was in the habit of allowing plays to be called by his name which he never wrote, or that heminges and condell's collection of "mr. william shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies, published according to the true original copies," is nothing more or less than a collection of plays written prior to the year , and not earlier than the reign of elizabeth. the shakes-peareans may take either horn of the dilemma they please. "pericles," one of the plays rejected by heminges and condell has since been restored to favor, and no editor now omits it. surely, under the circumstances, we are justified in asking the question: "if william shakespeare ever wrote any plays or { }poems, which of the above did he write, and which are 'doubtful? " 'whether the hand that wrote the "hamlet" also composed the "fair em;" or the classicist who produced the "julius cæsar" and the "coriolanus" at about the same time achieved "the merry devil" and "the london prodigal," is a question lying within that sacred, peculiar realm of "criticism" which has "established" and forever "proved" so many wonderful things about "our shakespeare"--a realm beyond our purview in these papers, and wherein we should be a trespasser. fortunately, however, the question has been settled for us by those to whom criticism is not ultra vies, and may safely be said to be at rest now and forever. the burden of the judgment of the whole critical world is of record that the only true canon of "william shakespeare" consists of the plays first brought together in one book by heminges and condell, plus the "pericles;" and that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to have been published under the name of william shakespeare are "spurious;" that, during the lifetime of william shakespeare, and in the city where he dwelt--under his very nose, that is to say--divers and sundry plays did appear from time to time which he did not write, but which he fathered. whether, in pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these as little japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying their abandoned and derelict condition, assumed their paternity, or, whether he took advantage of their bastardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the critical world find it unprofitable to speculate. but there can be no reasonable doubt that, in london in { }the days of elizabeth, in the name of "william shakespeare" there was much the same sort of common trade-mark as exists, in cologne, in the days of victoria, in the name "jean maria farina"--that it was at everybody's service. and if william shakespeare farmed ont his name to playwrights, just as the only original farina farms out his to makers of the delectable water of cologne, wherein shall we find fault? if, two hundred years after, a lesser sir walter of abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity in denying his fatherhood of "waverly," for the sake of the offspring, surely the elastic ethics of authorship, for the sale of the great book, will stretch out far enough to cover the case of a shakespeare, who neither affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace! william shakespeare, at least in the days when lord coke lays that a play-actor was, in contemplation of law, a vagabond and a tramp, * never had to shift for his living. he always had money to spend, and money to lend, in the days when we know many of his contemporaries in the theatrical and dramatic line were "in continued and utter extremity, willing to barter exertion, name, and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily dinner. ** of all the co-managers--and, among them, one burbage was the booth or forrest of his day--william shakespeare is the only one whose pecuniary success enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman with a purchased "esquire" to his name. * "the fatal end," he says, "of these fire is beggary--the alchiemyst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer, and the poetaster." a "play-actor," he elsewhere affirms, was a fit subject for the grand jury, as a "vagrant." ** "chambers's edinburgh journal," august , . p. . { }no wonder robert greene, a well-known contemporary actor, but "who led the skeltering life peculiar to his trade! and who had either divined or shared the secret of the "shakespearean" dramas, raised his voice in warning of the masquerade in borrowed plumes! was william shakespeare a shrewd masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that the search for a fragment of shakespearean manuscript or holograph, which has been as thorough and ardent as ever was search for the philosopher's stone, has been unable to unearth them? certainly no scrap or morsel has been found. the explanation of all this mystery, according to the new theory, is of very little value, except in so far as it throws light upon what otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that these magnificent philosophical dramas (which are more precious in our libraries as text-book and poems than as stage shows wherewith to pass an idle evening in our enlightened day) should have been popular with the coarse audiences of the times from which they date. rut, if, to conceal their real authors, these magnificent productions were simply sent out under a name that was at every body's disposal, the discovery is of exceeding interest. from the lofty masterpiece of the "hamlet" to what m. taine calls "a debauch of imagination... which no fair and frail dame in london should be without" *--the "venus and adonis"--it was immaterial what they printed as his, so this william shakespeare earned his fee for his silence. as for young southampton--then just turned of nineteen--his part in the covert work of the { }junta might, and, indeed, seems to have been, the accepting of the famous dedication. * crawley, quoted by taine, "english literature," book ii., chapter iv. that a rustic butcher-lad should, while holding horses at the door of a city theater, produce as "the first heir of his invention"--the very first thing he turned his pen to--so maturely voluptuous a poem as the "venus and adonis," would be a miracle, among all the other miracles, not to be lost sight of. we believe that historical and circumstantial evidence alone is adequate to settle or even to disturb this shakespearean question; for it appears to be the unanimous verdict of criticism that the style of bacon and the style of "shakespeare" are as far apart as the poles. experts have even gone so far as to reduce both to a "euphonic test," * and pronounce it impossible that the two could have been written by the same hand. but this is not very valuable as evidence; for never, we think, can mere expert evidence be of itself sufficient as to questions of forgery of authorship any more than of autograph. if mere literary style had been all the evidence accessible, our shakespeareans would have been making oath to the ireland forgeries to-day as stoutly as when, in the simplicity of their hearts, they swore the impromptus of a boy of eighteen surpassed any thing in "hamlet" or holy writ. even mr. spedding, who ignores any "baconian theory," in writing the life of bacon, admits that whenever a literary doubt has to be decided by the test of style, "the reader must be allowed to judge for himself." * wilkes's "shakespeare from an american point of view," part iii. it was only by just such circumstantial evidence as has been grouped in these papers (such as the { }elizabethan orthography and philology--the use of roman instead of arabic numerals! etc.) that the ireland imposture was exploded. forgery is the imitation of an original, and, if the original be inimitable, there can surely be no forgery. in the case of forgery of a signature, lawyers and experts know that the nearer the imitation, the more easy is it detectable; for no man writes his own name twice precisely alike, and, if two signatures attributed to the same hand are found to be _fac similes_, and, on being superimposed against the light, match each other in every detail, it is irrefutable evidence that one is intentionally simulated. * in the case of literary style, however, we are deprived of this safeguard, because, the more nearly exact the counterfeit, the more easily the critic is deceived. pope was not afraid to entrust whole sections of the paraphrase he called the "odyssy of homer," just as michael angelo did his frescoes, to journey-workmen--and not a critic has ever been able to pronounce, or even guess, which was pope and which was pope's apprentice; and not only the chatterton, ireland, and macpherson forgeries, but the history of merely sportive imitation and parody prove that literary style is any thing but inimitable; that, in fact, it requires no genius, and very little cleverness to counterfeit it. ** nor is--what is incessantly appealed { }to--"the internal evidence of the plays themselves" of any particular value to the end in view. * hunt versus lawless, new york superior court, november, . and see, also, moore versus united states, otto, united states, . criminal law journal, jersey city, n. j., march, . arty "calligraphy and the whittaker case." ** the curious reader is referred to "supercheries literaries, pastiches, etc.," one of the unique labors of the late m. delapierre. london, trubner & co., . were the question before us, "was the author of these works a poet, statesman, philosopher, lawyer?" etc., etc., this internal evidence would be, indeed, invaluable. but it is not. the question is not _what_, but _who_, was the author. was his family name "shakespeare," and was he christened "william"? the shakespearean has been allowed to confound these questions, and to answer them together, until they have become as inseparable as demosthenes and his pebble-stones. but, once separated, it is manifest that the internal evidence drawn from the works themselves, however satisfactory as to the one question, is utterly incompetent as to the other, and that it is by purely external--that is to say, by circumstantial evidence, by history, and by the record--that the question before us must be answered, if, indeed, it ever is to be answered at all. and, therefore, it is by circumstantial evidence alone, we think, that literary imposture can be satisfactorily exposed. neither can we trust to internal evidence alone; for an attempt to write the biography of william shakespeare by means of the internal evidence of the shakespearean plays, has inevitably resulted in the questions we have already encountered. was shakespeare a lawyer, was shakespeare a physician--a natural philosopher--a chemist--a botanist--a classical scholar--a student of contemporary life and manners--an historian--a courtier--an aristocrat--a biblicist--a journeyman printer, and the rest!--and in giving us the fairy stories of mr. knight and mr. de quincy in place of the truth we crave. for we can not close our eyes to the fact that history very decid{ }edly negatives the idea that william shakespeare, of stratford, was either a lawyer, a physician, a courtier, a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a soldier. moreover, while the internal evidence is fatal to the shakespearean theory, it preponderates in favor of the baconians: for, when we should ask these questions concerning francis bacon, surely the answer of history would be, yes--yes, indeed; all this was francis bacon. the minute induction of his new and vast philosophy did not neglect the analysis of the meanest herb or the humblest fragment of experimental truth that could minister to the comfort or the health of man. and where else, in the range of letters--except in the shakespearean works, where kings and clowns alike take their figures of speech from the analogies of nature--is the parallel of all this faithful accumulation of detail and counterfeit handwriting of nature? the great ex-chancellor had stooped to watch even the "red-hipped bumble-bee" and the "small gray-coated gnat." had the busy manager been studying them as well? his last act on earth was to alight from his carriage to gather handfuls of snow, to ascertain if snow could be utilized to prevent decomposition of dead flesh; and it is related that, in his dying moments--for the very act precipitated the fever of which he died--he did not forget, to record that the experiment had succeeded "excellently well." from these to lordly music, * and in all the range between, no science had escaped francis bacon. had the busy { }manager followed or preceded the philosopher's footsteps, step by step, up through them all? * ulrici, p. , book ii, chapter vi., refers to "two gentlemen of verona," act , sc. . as proving that the author of that play "possessed in an unusual degree the power of judging and understanding the theory of music." and did he pause in his conception or adaptation of a play, pen in hand, to take a trip to italy, or a run-up into scotland to get the name of a hostelry or the topography of a highway, to make it an encyclopaedia as well as a play as he went along? if the manager alone was the author of these works, there is, we have seen, no refuge from this conviction. but, if, as is the new theory, those plays were amplified for the press by a learned hand, perhaps, after all, he was the stage manager, actor, and human being that history asserts him to have been. if, as has been conjectured, william shakespeare sketched the clowns and wenches with which these stately dramas are relieved, it would account for the supposed warwickshire source of many of them. and if william shakespeare was pretty familiar with the constabulary along his route between home and theater, so often traveled by himself and jolly coetaneans with heads full of marian hackett's ale, and thought some of them good enough to put into a play, his judgment has received the approval of many audiences beside those of the bankside and blackfriars. the shakespearean plays, as now performed in our theaters, are the editions of cibber, garrick, kemble, kean, macready, booth, irving, and others, and, while preserving still the dialogues which passed, perhaps, through shakespeare's hands, retain no traces of his industry, once so valuable to the globe and blackfriars, but now rejected as unsuited to the exigencies of the modern stage, the "business" inserted in them by william shakespeare's editorship has long since been rejected. little as there is of the man of { }stratford in our libraries, there is still less of him in our theaters in . but the world still retains the honest dogberry, who lived at grendon, in bucks, on the road from london to stratfordtown, and doubtless many more of the witty manager's master strokes. at least, the "new theory" and the "delia bacon theory" coincide in this, that william shakespeare was fortunate in the manuscripts brought to him, and grew rich in making plays out of them and matching them to his spectacles. such, briefly sketched, are the theories concerning these glorious transcripts of the age of elizabeth, which, while two centuries of literature between is obsolete and moribund, are yet unwithered and unstaled, and the most priceless of all the treasuries of the age of victoria. and yet, there seems to be a feeling that any exploration after their authorship is a sacrilege, and that this particular historical question must be left untouched--as pythagoras would not eat beans, as parricidal--that william shakespeare is william shakespeare--and the doggerel curse of stratford hangs over and forefends the meddling with his bones. but no witch's palindrome for long can block the march of reason and of research. modern scholarship is every day dissolving chimera, and, if this shakespeare story has no basis of truth, it must inevitably be abolished along with the rest. if this transcendent literature had come down to us without the name, would it have been sacrilege to search for its paternity? and does the mere name of william shakespeare make that, which is otherwise expedient, infamous? { }or, is this the meaning of the incantation on the tomb--that cursed shall he be that seeks to penetrate the secret of the plays? such, indeed, was the belief that drove poor delia bacon mad. but we decline to see any thing but the calm historical question. it seems to us that, if we are at liberty to dispute as much as we like as to whether two a's or only one, or three e's or only two belong of right in the name "shakespeare," surely it can not be debarred us to ask of the past the origin of the thousand-souled pages we call by that name. we believe that, if the existence of these three theories--as to each of which it is possible to say so much--proves any thing, it proves that history and circumstantial evidence oppose the possibility of william shakespeare's authorship of the works called his, and that there is a reasonable doubt as to whether any one man did write, or could have written, either with or without a bodleian or an astor library at his elbow, the whole complete canon of the shakespearean works. but is there not a refuge from all these more or less conflicting theories in the simple canon that human experience is a safer guide than conjecture or miracle? in our own day, the astute manager draws from bushels of manuscript plays, submitted to him by ambitious amateurs or plodding playwrights, the few morsels he deems worthy of his stage, and, restringing them on a thread of his own, or another's, presents the result to his audiences. can we imagine a reason why the same process should have been improbable in the days of elizabeth and james? and if among these amateurs and playwrights there happened to be the same proportion of lawyers, courtiers, politicians, { }soldiers, musicians, physicians, naturalists, botanists, and the rest (as well as contributions from the hundreds of learned clerks whom the disestablishment of the monasteries had driven to their wits for support), that we would be likely to find among the corresponding class to-day, it would surely be a less violent explanation of "the myriad-minded shakespeare," than to conjecture the "shakespeare" springing, without an interval for preparation, at once into the finished crown and acme of each and all of these. in fact, is it not william shakespeare the editor, and not the author, to whom our veneration and gratitude is due? it almost seems as if not only the skepticism of the doubter but the criticism of scholarship has all along tended irresistibly to accept this compromise, as all criticism must eventually coincide with history, if it be criticism at all. the closest examination of the shakespearean plays has revealed to scholars traces of more than one hand. it is past a hundred years since theobald declared that, "though there are several master strokes in these three plays (viz.: the three parts of 'king henry vi.'), yet i am almost doubtful whether they were entirely of his (shakespeare's) writing. and unless they were wrote by him very early, i should rather imagine them to have been brought to him as a director of the stage, and so have received some finishing beauties at his hands. an accurate observer will easily see the diction of them is more obsolete, and the numbers more mean and prosaical than in the generality of his genuine composition." * * theobald's shakespeare ( ). vol. iv., p. . we have elsewhere shown { }that farmer stumbled upon the same difficulty. malone "wrote a long dissertation," says mr. grant white, "to show that the three parts of 'king henry vi.' were not shakespeare's, but had only been altered and enriched by him; and that the first 'part' was written by another person than the author of the second and third."* drake proposed that the "first part of 'king henry vi.' be excluded from future editions of shakespeare's works, because it offers no trace of any finishing strokes from the master bard." ** "it remains to inquire," says hallam (after a discussion of these plays, which he says shakespeare remodeled from two old plays "in great part marlowe, though greene seems to have put in for some share in their composition"), "who are to claim the credit of these other plays, so great a portion of which has passed with the world for the genuine work of shakespeare." *** and again, what share he (shakespeare) may have had in similar repairs of the many plays he represented, can not be determined. **** and dyee, halliwell, and all the others follow mr. hallam (whose authority' is greene's well-known complaint about the "johannes factotum, who struts about with his tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide;" *v which allusion to a line in the third part of henry the sixth, locates the particular "steal" which greene had most at heart when he complained). * an essay on the authorship of the three parts of king henry the sixth. by richard grant white. riverside press. h. o. houghton & go., cambridge, mass., . ** shakespeare and his times. vol. ii., p. . *** note to hallam's literature of europe. part ii., chap, vi., § . **** id., § . *v "o, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide."--iii. hen. vi. last of all comes mr. { }grant white, a most profound believer in shakespeare, and all that name implies! with "an essay on the authorship of the three parts of king henry the sixth," * to prove that william shakespeare, in plagiarizing from the earlier tragedies, only plagiarized from himself, he himself having really written all that was worth saving in them! mr. white labors considerably to fix the exact date at which marlowe, peale and greene--the most eminent play writers of the day--employed a raw stratford youth, just truanting in london, to kindly run over, prune, and perfect their manuscripts for them, and to clear mr. white's shakespeare from the stigma of what, if true, mr. white admits to have been a "want of probity on shakespeare's part, accompanied by a hardly less culpable indifference on the part of his fellows." ** this "indifference" can not be charged to one sufferer, at least, robert greene, who was not silent when he saw his work unblushingly appropriated: thus giving us assurance of one occasion, at least, upon which william shakespeare posed as editor instead of author. at any rate, we have seen the circumstantial evidence has been corroborated by the experts (for so, to borrow a figure, let us call them) aubrey, cartwright, digges, denham, fuller, *** and ben jonson. * cambridge, mass.: h. o. houghton & co. riverside press, ** id, p. . *** see the quotation from his "worthies of england," in the foot-note, ante, this chapter. all these assure us (ben jonson twice, once in writing and once in conversation) that william shakespeare was a nat{ }ural wit--a wag in the crude--but that he wanted art. old dominie ward made a note "to read shakespeare's plays to post him," but even he had heard that he was a wit, but that he wanted art. * this testimony may not compel conviction, but it is all we have; we must take it, or go without any testimony at all. at any rate, it sustains and is sustained by the circumstances, and these seven different witnesses, at least, testify, without procurement, collusion, or knowledge of the use to be made of their testimony, and opposed to them all is only the little elegiac rhyme by one of themselves:= ```"yet must i not give nature all thy art, ```my gentle shakespeare must enjoy a part."= only one single scrap of mortuary effusion on which to hang the fame of centuries! and if we exclude the circumstantial evidence and the expert testimony as false, and admit the one little rhyme as true, then our reason, judgment, and inner consciousness must accept as the author of the learned, laborious, accurate, eloquent, and majestic sheakespearean pages, a wag--a funny fellow whose "wit (to quote jonson again) was in his own power," but not "the rule of it," so much so, "that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." * ante, page . surely it is a much less violent supposition that this funny mr. shakespeare--who happened to be employed in the theater where certain masterpieces were taken to be cut up into plays to copy out of them each actor's parts--that this waggish penman, as he wrote out the parts in big, round hand, improved on or interpolated a palpable hit, a merry speech, the { }last popular song, or sketched entire a role with a name familiar to his boyish ear--the village butt, or sot, or justice of the peace, * may he; or, why not some fellow scapegrace of olden times by avon banks? he did it with a swift touch and a mellow humor that relieved and refreshed the stately speeches, making the play all the more available and the copyist all the more valuable to the management. but, all the same, how this witty mr. shakespeare would have roared at a suggestion that the centuries after him should christen by his--the copyist's--name all the might and majesty and splendor, all the philosophy and pathos and poetry, every word that he wrote out, unblotting a line, for the players! * he had not failed to see dogberry and shallow in the little villages of warwickshire--and the wonderful "watch." the "watch" of those days was indeed something to wonder at. in a letter of lord burleigh to sir francis walsingham, written in , the writer says that he once saw certain of them standing "so openly in pumps" in a public place, that "no suspected person would come nigh them;" and, on his asking them what they stood there for, they answered that they were put there to apprehend three men, the only description they had of them was that one of them had a hooked nose. "if they be no better instructed but to find three persons by one of them having a hooked nose, they may miss thereof," reflects burghley, with much reason. mr. halliwell phillips, in his "outline of the life of william shakespeare" (brighton, ), page , thinks that this is unlikely, because the magistrate mentioned by aubrey would have been too old in , if he had been the model sought. it must be conceded, say the new theorists: i. that the plays, whether in the shape we now have them or not, are, at least, under the same { }names and with substantially the same dramatis personæ. ii. that william shakespeare was the stage manager, or stage editor; or, at any rate, touched up the plays for representation. iii. that the acting copies of the plays, put into the hands of the players to learn their parts from, were more or less in the handwriting of william shakespeare, and that from these acting copies the first folio of was set up and printed. at least, the best evidence at hand seems to establish all three of these propositions. this evidence is meager and accidental, but, for that very reason, involuntary, and, therefore, not manufactured; and it establishes the above propositions, as far as it goes, as follows: i. in a volume, "poste, with a racket of madde-letters," printed in , a young woman is made to say to her lover: "it is not your liustie rustie can make me afraide of your big lookes, for i saw the plaie of ancient pistoll, where a craking coward was well cudgelled for his knavery; your railing is so near the rascall that i am almost ashamed to bestow so good a name as the rogue upon you." again, sharpham, in his "fleire," printed in , has this piece of dialogue: "_kni_.--and how lives he with 'am? "_fie_.--faith, like this be in the play, a' has almost killed himselfe with the scabbard!" the first author thus makes his young woman to have seen henry v., and the second alludes to the midsummer-night's dream, where the bumpkin is made to kill himself by falling on his { }scabbard instead of his sword. besides, in the imperfect versions of the plays which the printers were able to make up, from such unauthorized sources as best served them, it is thought that there are unmistakable evidences that one of the sources was the shorthand of a listener, who, not catching a word or phrase distinctly, would put down something that sounded enough like it to betray the sources and his copy. for example: in the spring of , a play called "the revenge of hamlet, prince of denmark." was presented at the globe theater. in , two booksellers, ling and trundell, printed a play of that title, put william shakespeare's name to it, and sold it. now, in this version, we have such errors as "right done" for "write down" (act i., scene ii.); "invenom'd speech" for "in venom steeped" (act i., scene i.); "i'll provide for you a grave" for "most secret and most grave" (act iii, scene iv.); "a beast devoid of reason" for "a beast that wants discourse of reason," and the like. ling and trundell, somehow or other, procured better copy, and printed a corrected edition in the following year; but the errors in their first edition were precisely such as would result from an attempt to report the play phonetically, as it was delivered by the actors on the stage. all the printers of the day seem to have made common piracy out of these plays, impelled thereto by their exceeding popularity. hash says that the first part of king henry vi., especially, had a wonderful run for those days, being witnessed by at least ten thousand people. * * we take all these references from "outlines of the life of shakespeare," by i. o. halliwell phillips (brighton. printed for the author's friends, for presents only. ), page , to which capital volume we acknowledge our exceeding obligation. mr. grant white in the atlantic monthly, october , believes that he is able to trace the surreptitious "copy" of this first hamlet to the actor who took the part of voltimand. the inference from mr. white's account of the transaction, is precisely that we have noted in the text. of { }this play a garbled version was put on the market by millington, who, soon after, did the same thing by the henry v. ii. davenant instructed betterton how to render the part of henry viii., assuring him that he (davenant) had his own instructions from lowin, and that lowin got them from william shakespeare in person. * (we have not accepted davenant's evidence as likely to be of much value, when assuming to be shakespeare's son, successor, literary executor, and the like, but this does not appear, on its face, improbable, and is no particular less if untrue.) ravens-croft, who re-wrote titus andronicus in , says, in his preface: "i have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it (this play) was not originally his (shakespeare's), but brought by a private actor to be acted, and he only gave some master touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters." ** "i am assured," says gildon, *** "from very good hands, that the person that acted iago was in much esteem as a comedian, which made shakespeare put several words and expressions into his part, perhaps not so agreeable to his character, to make the audience laugh, who had not yet learned to endure to be serious a whole play." * id. ** id. *** reflections on rymer's "short view of tragedy," quoted by mr. halliwell phillips, in his work cited in last note. (but if shakespeare put them in to "catch the ear of the groundlings," who took { }them out again for the folio of ? the baconians would probably ask: "did bacon, after shakespeare was dead?" and it could not have been a proofreader; for, if there was any proof-reader, he was the most careless one that ever lived. the folio of is crowded with typographical errors.) somebody--necessarily shakespeare--was in the habit of introducing into these shakespearean plays the popular songs of the day. for example, the song, "a lover and his lass," in "as you like it." was written by thomas morley, and printed in his "first book of ayres; or, little short songs," in . * and the ballad, "farewell, dear love," in "twelfth night," has previously appeared in , in the "book of ayres" of robert jones. ** it is probable, however, says mr. halliwell phillips, that william shakespeare had withdrawn from the management of the globe; at the date of its destruction during the performance of henry viii. (which mr. phillips calls the first play on the english stage in which dramatic art was sacrificed to stage effect. it is curious, this being the case, to find the new shakespeare society rejecting the henry viii. as not shakespearean on the philological evidence, and assuring us that wolsey's soliloquy is not shakespeare's, as did mr. spedding so many years before). * in the last issue of the "transactions of the new shakespeare society" is a copy of what purports to be a manuscript respecting the delivery of certain red cloth to shakespeare, on the occasion of a reception to james i., by the corporation of london, in , unearthed and guaranteed by mr. furnivall. ** folio, london, . the story of queen elizabeth's order for "falstaff in love" first appeared, in , in the { }preface to john dennis's "comicale gallant," from whom rowe quoted. although smacking of the same flavor as the southampton and king james "yarns"--it is worth noting that this story may possess, perhaps, some vestige of foundation. if these sounding plays, so full of religion, politics, philosophy, and statecraft, were presented at shakespeare's theater, it is only natural that it should come to elizabeth's ears. the lion queen did not care to have her subjects instructed too far. she liked to keep them well in hand, and was only--she and her ministers--too ready to "snuff treason in certain things that went by other's names." the run of comedies at other theaters were harmless enough (an adultery for a plot, and an unsuspecting husband for a butt. this was a comedy; plus a little blood, it was a tragedy). let the people have their fill of amusement, but it is better not to meddle with philosophy and politics. so there are things more unlikely to have happened than that elizabeth, through her lord chamberlain, should have intimated to manager shakespeare to give them something more in the run and appetite of the day. * the "merry wives of windsor" was, in due time, underlined. but, somehow or other, it was with a would-be adulterer, rather than an injured husband, for a butt; and, somehow or other, galen and esculapius and epicurius had intruded where there was no need of them. * collier--"lives of shakespeare's actors, introduction, page xv."--says that there were at least two, and perhaps three, other william shakespeares in london in these days. the salaciousness elizabeth wanted (if the story is true) was all there, as well as the transformation scene; but, at the end, there is a re{ }buke to lechery and to lecherous minds that is not equivocal in its terms. * but that any of this shakespeare fortune came, by way of gift or otherwise, from southampton, there is no ground, except silly and baseless rumor, for believing. if southampton had been the rothschild of his time--which he was very far from being--he would not have given a thousand pounds (a sum we have estimated as equaling $ , to-day, but which mr. grant white puts at $ , , and which mr. halliwell phillips, ** on account of the "often fictitious importance attached to cash, arising from its comparative scarcity in those days," says ought even be as high as twelve pounds for one) to a casual acquaintance. the mere passing of such a sum would seem to involve other relations; and if southampton knew shakespeare, or shakespeare southampton, let it be demonstrated from some autobiographical or historical source--from some other source than the "biographies of william shakespeare," written by those slippery rhapsodists, the shakespereans. if damon and pythias were friends, let it appear from the biographies of damon, as well as from the biographies of pythias. let us find it in some of southampton's papers, or in the archives or papers of some of his family, descendants, contemporaries, or acquaintances; in the chronicles of elizabeth, raleigh, cecil, essex, rutland, montgomery, camden, coke, bacon, tobie mathew, ben jonson, or of somebody alive and with open eyes in london { }at about that date, before we yield it historical assent, and make oath to it so solemnly. * perhaps, if the story were true, a rebuke to elizabeth personally in the line (act v., scene v.), "our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery." as a matter of fact, and as the industrious mr. lodge confesses, * there is no such trace or record. except from, the "biographers" of shakespeare, no note, hint, or surmise, connecting the two names, can be anywhere unearthed, and they only draw the suggestion on which they build such lofty treatises from a dedication printed in the days when printers helped themselves to any name they wanted without fear of an injunction out of chancery. that any sonnets were ever dedicated to southampton by anybody, is, we have seen, pure invention. iii. but that the famous first folio of was set up from piecemeal parts written for separate actors, and that these were in william shakespeare's handwriting, there seems to be contemporary circumstantial evidence. we have seen that, although ben jonson has, for two hundred and fifty years, been believed when he said in poetry that william shakespeare was not only the "star of poets" for genius, but that besides he would "sweat and strike the second heat upon the muses's anvil;" when he said in prose that "the players often mentioned it as an honor to shakespeare that in writing (whatever he wrote) he never blotted out a line," he was supposed to be using a mere figure of speech. but it seems that he was telling the truth. for, in --shakespeare having been dead seven years--heminges and condell--two "players" (i. e., { }actors), and the same that shakespeare in his will calls his "fellows"--publish the first edition of the plays we now call "shakespeare"--and, on the title-page of that edition, advertise them as "published according to the _true original copies_." * portraits, henry wreothlesey, earl of southampton, yol. iii., page . bohn's edition. further on in their preface, they repeat, almost in his very words, ben jon-son's statement, asserting that "we have scarce received from him (william shakespeare) a blot in his papers." what papers? what indeed, but "the true original copies" of these plays which were in william shakespeare's handwriting? what else could it have been that "the players" (according to ben jonson) saw? does anybody suppose that the poet's own first draft, untouched of the file and unperfumed of the lamp, went into "the players'" hands, for them to learn their parts from? and, even if _one_ player was allowed to study his part from the inspired author's first draft, his fellow "players" must have taken or received a copy or copies of their parts; they could not all study their parts from the same manuscript. the only reasonable supposition, therefore, is, that william shakespeare made it part of his duties at the theater to _write out_ in a fair hand the parts for the different "players" (and no wonder they mentioned it, as "an honor" to him, that he lightened their labors considerably by the legibility of his penmanship, by never blotting out a line) and that, in course of time, these "true original copies" were collected from their fellow-actors by heminges and condell, and by them published; they remarking, in turn, upon the excellence of the penmanship so familiar to them. there is only wanted to confirm this supposition, a piece of { }actual evidence as to what heminges and condell _did_ print from. now, it happens that, by their own careless proof reading, heminges and condell have actually supplied this piece of missing circumstantial evidence, as follows: naturally, in these true original copies of a particular actors part, the name of the actor assuming that part would be written in the margin, opposite to or instead of the name of the character he was to personate; precisely as is done to-day by the theater copyist in copying parts for distribution among the company. it happened that, in setting up the types for this first edition from these fragmentary actors' copies, the printers would often accidentaly, from following "copy" too closely, set up these real names of the actors instead of the names of the characters. and--as any one taking up a copy or fac-simile of this famous "first folio" can see for himself--the editors carelessly overlooked these errors in the proof, and there they remain to this day: "jacke wilson," for "balthazar," "andrew" and "cowley," for "dogberry;" "kempe," for "verges," and the like--the names of shakespeare's actors--instead of the parts they took in the piece. it seems superfluous to again suggest that these unblotted "copies" could not have been the author's first draft of a play, or that an author does not write his compositions in manifold, or that there had been many actors to learn their parts in the course of from sixteen to twenty years. besides--even if heminges and condell had not told us--it would have still been perfectly evident, from an inspection of the "first folio," that the "copy" it was set up from was never completely in their hands, but { }was collected piecemeal during the manufacture. for instance, we see where the printers left a space of twenty-nine pages, between "romeo and juliet" and "julius cæsar," in which to print the "timon of athens." but all the copy they could find of the "timon" only made _eighteen_ pages, and so--by huge "head pieces" and "tail pieces," and a "table of the actor's names" (given in no other instance) in coarse capitals--they eked out the "signature;" and, by omitting the whole of the next "signature," carried the pagination over from " " to " ." the copy for "troilus and cres-sida" seems not to have been received until the volume was in the binder's hands (which is remarkable, too, for that play had been in print for fourteen years). the play is not mentioned in the table of contents, but is tucked in without paging (except that the first five pages are numbered , , , , , whereas the paging of the volume had already reached ). "troilus and cressida," thus printed, fills two "signatures" lacking one page, and so somebody at hand wrote a "prologue" in rhyme--setting out the argument--to save the blank page, and the like. whatever "papers" heminges and condell "received from william shakespeare then, were fair, unblotted copies of the actor parts, made by him for their use. it appears then, that--minute scholarship and the records apart--the foreman of a printing-house would have been at any time in the past two hundred and fifty years, without assistance from the commentators, able to settle the great shakespearean authorship controversy. while--from one standpoint--this testimony of the types is strong circumstantial evidence against { }the baconian theory, taken from another standpoint it is quite as strongly corroborative. for on the one hand, bacon was alive when this folio was printed, and the man who rewrote his essays eleven times would scarcely have allowed his plays to go to the public so shiftlessly printed. but on the other hand, if the book was printed without consulting him, that insurmountable barrier--the fact that bacon never claimed these plays--is swept away at once. we have simply to assume that he always intended, at some convenient season, to acknowledge them: that he was not satisfied with them as they appeared in the heminges and condell edition, and proposed revising them himself before claiming them, (we know how difficult he found it to satisfy his own censorship) or that he purposed completing the series, (for which the sketch of the henry vii may have been placed among his private memoranda) at his leisure. we have then only to imagine that death overtook him suddenly (his death was sudden) before this programme had been completed, and his not acknowledging them; not leaving them--incomplete as he believed them--to "the next ages," was characteristic of the man. "if i go, who remains? if i remain, who goes?" said dante to the council of florence. take the shakespearean pages away from english literature, and what remains? detain them, and what departs? and yet are men to believe that the writer of these pages left no impress on the history of his age and no item in the chronicle of his time? that, in the intensest focus of the clear, calm, electric-light of nineteenth century inspection and investigation, their author { }stands only revealed in the gossip of goodwives or the drivel of a pot-house clientage? who is it--his reason and judgment once enlisted--who believes this thing? columbus discovered the continent we call after the name of another. where shall we find written the names of the genii whose fruit and fame this shakespeare has stolen. having lost "our shakespeare" both to-day and forever, it will doubtless remain--as it is--the question, "who wrote the shakespearean dramas?" the evidence is all in--the testimony is all taken. perhaps it is a secret that even time will never tell, that is hidden deep down in the crypt and sacristy of the past, whose seal shall never more be broken. in the wise land of china it is said that when a man has deserved well of the state, his countrymen honor, with houses and lands and gifts and decorations, not himself, but his father and his mother. perhaps, learning a lesson from the celestials; we might rear a shaft to the fathers and the mothers of the immortality that wrote the book of nature, the mighty book which "age can not wither, nor custom stale" and whose infinite variety for three centuries has been and, until time shall be no more, will be close to the hearts of every age and cycle of men--household words for ever and ever, the book--thank heaven!--that nothing can divorce from us. the end. index a. actors, names of shakespeare, printed by mistake in first folio, . actors, fellows of w. s. did they suspect imposition? . of shakespeare's day, expected to improvise, . actresses, none in shakespeare's day, . addison, joseph, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . alterations of the plays in st folio. see emendations. althea, classical error as to, . angling, knowledge of, displayed in plays, . anonymous authorship, . or pseudonymic, fashionable in those days, . anti-shakespearean theories-- a compromise of, suggested, . theobald anticipates, . areopagitica, milton's, first asserted author's rights, . aristotle, bacon and shakespeare misquote passage of, . arms, john shakespeare's, purchased by his son, . coat of, "cut from whole cloth," . obtained by falsehood, - , note. protest against them, , note. purchased with shakespeare's first earnings, . why shakespeare purchased, . article in chambers' journal first raises authorship question, . aubrey, his testimony, , - . expert evidence of, - . audiences. see plays. did not want scientific treatises, . formative days of, . not critical, . the shakespearean, - . author, his interest to be anonymous, . eights, what were, . compensation, how obtained, . author of the plays. see plays. his fidelity to national characteristics, . insight of, into the human heart, no guess work, . of text, did not write stage business, . authorship of henry vi., r. . white's idea of, . anonymous, . anonymous or pseudonymic authorship, prevalent, . see joint authorship. insecurity of. see author, copyright, nashe, printers, plays. insecurity of authorship. see star chamber. autographs of w. s. see "florio'" autograph. b. bacon, and shakespeare misquote passage of aristotle, . and shakespeare, unknown to each other, . appears in new theory, . believes in teaching history by drama, . could have appraised the s. drama . did william shakespeare write works of, , . directs certain ms. locked up, . driven to "the jews," . see "shylock." his acquirements, . his estimate of the theatre, . his letter to the queen, . his "northumberland ms.," . his reasons for concealment, , . his "sonnet" what may be, , . his youth compared with shakespeare's, . last act of, his memorandum concerning, . letter to sir john davies, , . may have brought together first folio, . neglected nothing, . no cause to mourn for elizabeth, . not mentioned to shakespeare by jonson, . bacon, often wrote in other's names, . or is he told of shakespeare by, . possesses the qualities assigned to author of the dramas, . silent as to william shakespeare, . surmised philosophical purpose, . when appointed attorney-general plays cease to appear, . bacon, delia, apparent audacity of announcement, . believed in a joint authorship, . believes "hamlet" to be key-note of the plays, . claims to have discovered bacon's clew, . death of, . estimate of her book, , note. extracts from her first paper, . her approach to an overt act, - . her belief as to the manuscripts, , . her poverty, - . her question as to the ms. answered, . history of her theory, . what it really was, . reception of her theory in america, . in england, . supposed to be mad, , . but her madness contageous, . visits stratford, - . old verulam, id. what her madness was, , . writes her first paper in , . "baconian" and "delia bacon" theories discriminated, . baconian theory, abstract of, . bibliography of the, . indifferent as to wm. s. being a law student, . in general, what, . preponderance for, . bailey, rev. john, invents a new shakespeare story, , note. "bartholomew fair," induction to. see jonson, ben, . becker death mask, the, . bed, the second best, . not explained by r. gr. white or by steevens, . "beeston," author of "schoolmaster story," . "beeston," who was he? . belleforest, borrowed from in the plays, . berni, paraphrased by iago, . best seats at theatres on the stage, . bible, shakespeare and the, , note, . bibliography of the baconian theory, . "biographies" of william shakespeare, modern, . de quincy's, . birthday of w. s. see st. george's day. blackfriars theater, james burbage builds, . blood, circulation of the, - . boaden, james, his summary of the portraits, . boccaccio, borrowed from in the plays, . bohemia. see sea-coast of bohemia. book-making, knowledge of, displayed in plays. see printing. botany, knowledge of, displayed in the plays. see flowers. boucicault, dion, a surmised example of what w. s. was, . his suggestion, . answer to, . boys, took female parts in shakespeare's day, . brother of w. s. see oldys. brown c. armitage, his discovery as to sonnets, . brown, henry, theory of the sonnets, . bunyan, john, analogy of life to shakespeare, , . illustrations of what genius can not do, . burbage, james, builds the blackfriars theater, . burbage, richard, lines interpolated in hamlet to suit, , note. said to have painted portraits of w. s., . burns, robert, an example of genius, . comparison between, and "shakespeare," . illustration of what genius can not do, . "business" of wm. shakespeare, now obsolete, . bust in possession of garrick club, . see garrick club bust. bust, the stratford, . see portraits. whitewashed, by malone, . byron, lord, his estimate of the shakespearean plays, . c. campbell, lord, his notice of the legal acquirements of w. s. . canon of the plays, first folio plus pericles, . capell, preserves specimens of shakespeare's wit, . carlyle, thomas, calls on delia bacon, . suggested her writing first paper, . cartwright, expert evidence as to, . testimony as to shakespeare's acquirements, . catholic, roman, was shakespeare a, . see papist. chandos portrait, the, . rumored to have been by burbage, . chatterton, thomas, difference between his case and shakespeare's, . chettle, wonders that shakespeare does not mourn elizabeth, . his apology for greene's expression, . christian monastery in ephesus in days of pericles, . chronologies of the plays, absurdity of the so-called, . "chronologies," where they all agree, . cinthio, borrowed from in the plays, . circumstantial evidence, corroborated, , passim. necessary to these questions, . classical knowledge, displayed in plays, , . difficulties suggested by, . clergy, benefit of, , note. included all learned professions, id. clown, the principal actor in shakespearean theaters, , . coat of arms, shakespeare's. see arms. cohn, albert, his theory as to shakespeare in germany, . coincidences, shakespearean's idea of the, , note. coleridge, his opinion as to authorship, . commentators, bore down upon the shakespearean text, . commentary, sample of the run of, . compromise theory, ; applied to henry vi., . theobald and others anticipate, , . condell, henry. see heminges & condell. contemporaries of w. s., why they did not suspect him, or silent if they did, . contemporary statements in baconian theory, . conversations of ben jonson with drummond of hawthorn-den, . copies, "true, original," identified, , , , . copyright, disraeli thinks first folio a scheme for, , note. first claimed years after w. s.'s death, . first english law of, . see author. cornelius, jansen, said to have been family painter of southampton, . court of star chamber, takes jurisdiction of matters literary, . curse of stratford, , . d. davies, rev. richard, his account of w. s., . davies, sir john, letter from bacon to, . davenant, sir william, owned the chandos portrait, . claimed illegitimate descent from w. s., , note. death mask, the becker, . dedication of the sonnets, . why insulting, . twisted out of shape, . simple explanation of, . "delia bacon" and "baconian" theories, discriminated, . delia bacon and new theories coincide, . see bacon, delia. denham, expert evidence of, , . testimony as to shakespeare's acquirements, . de quincy, thomas, his "biography" of w. s., . analyzed, . ignores authorities, . deer stealing, "rejected on insufficient evidence," . difficulty is that we know so much about w. s., rather than so little, . digges, expert evidence of , . testimony as to skakesperean acquirements, . "discoveries" of ben jonson, fatal to shakespearean theory, - . disraeli thinks first folio a scheme for copyright, , note. dogberry, prototypes of, . doubtful plays, the, , , . doubtful plays, tlie, never disowned by shakespeare, . not doubtful in shakespeare's day, - . one missing, . dowdell letter, the, . down, edward, locates proserpo's island, , note. drama, esteemed by bacon a form of teaching history, . droeshout portrait, - . not flattering to its subject. . only one ever "authenticated," . probably accurate likeness, . was faithfully engraved, . drummond of hawthornden, ben jonson's conversations with, . dryden, john, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . dugdale, his mention of shakespeare, . "duke humphrey," a missing, doubtful play, . dyce follows hallam, . e. earlom portrait, the, . elaborations of the plays. see emendations. elizabeth, queen. see queen elizabeth. elizabeth, the english of, . elizabethan dramatists, estimate of, . ellesmere, w. ii. smith's letter to, . elze, dr. carl, believes the s. was in germany and scotland, . emendations of the plays in first folio, extensiveness of, . english, a then neglected accomplishment, . a very rare accomplishment in elizabeth's day, . probably not taught in stratford grammar school, . purity of, used in plays, . the, of elizabeth, . the, of shakespeare, not derived from a study of contemporary writers, . english library, what was the, of shakespeare's day, . english renaissance drama. see renaissance drama, english. enlargements of the plays in first folio. see emendations. entomology, knowledge of, displayed in the plays, - . epitaph on shakespeare's tomb, . epitaphs, by william shakespeare, on elias james, john â coombe, and others, . epitaphs, how halliwell accounts for, . of w. s. not claimed by anybody else, . complete collection of, . essex connected with plays, .. evelyn, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . "evening mass," not necessarily indicative of shakespeare's creed, . evidence, internal, failure of, . of historical plays as to bacon, . poetry not competent of, a fact, . see typographical evidence, printing. expert evidence as to the plays, . f. fac similes. see forgery. "falstaff in love," order for, , . family of shakespeare, not zealous of their relative's reputation, . farmer, dr., his solution of the shakespearean difficulty, . specimen of, . his theory of shakespeare, quite as incredible as the other, . stops just short of the truth, . felton's portrait. . see portraits. female parts, taken by boys, . fire, great, of london, not accountable for dearth of shakespearean records, . first folio, contains only twenty-six known plays, ; dilemma presented by, . evidence of authorship from, , , , . inspection of, proves sources of, . printed from shakespeare's copies, - . see typographical evidence. time of appearance suggestive, . see emendations. "florio," the, in british museum, . flowers, knowledge of, displayed in plays, . forgery, fac simile is usually, . literary, not difficult, . of a signature, . french and italian, not taught at stratford school, . fuller, eight years old when shakespeare died. . expert evidence of, , . extract from, , note. his estimate of the shakespearean plays, . his mention of shakespeare, .. testimony as to shakespeare's acquirements, , , note. furness, w. ii., unable to accept shakespearean authorship, , . g. gallants, relations with managers, . garrick club bust, the, . see portraits. geography, knowledge of, displayed in plays, . geology, knowledge of, in the plays, . germany, shakespeare in, cohn's theory, . "good friend, for jesus's sake, forbear," etc., . grammar school of stratford. see stratford school. gravitation, law of, stated in the plays, . great fire of london. see fire. greene, robert, a father of the english stage, cited as a witness, contra, , . had his admirers, , note. his estimate of wm. shakespeare, . no worse than his kind, . only contemporary of w. s. who exposed the forgery, the "steal" he complained of, . title of his book, , note. contents of, . told the truth about wm. shakespeare, , , , note. "groat's worth of wit." see greene, . "groom, lord leicester's," delia bacon's name for s., . h. habitues of shakespeare's theaters, who were, . hallam, henry, doubtful as to accepting s.'s authorship, . his estimate of the plays, . opinion as to their philology, . halliwell, accounts for the epitaphs, . follows hallam, . halliwell-phillips, j. c., his "outlines." . does not dispel the difficulties, . hamlet, believed by delia bacon to be key-note of plays, , harrison, john, cited as a witness, . hawthorne, nathaniel, his narrative of delia bacon, , . hawthornden, drummond of. see drummond of hawthornden. heminges & condell, cited as witnesses, . corroborate jon son's testimony, . how procured emendations, , . their "copy" for first folio, . their reason for the first folio, , note. henry the sixth, grant white's idea of, . greene's complaint about, . not shakespeare's, . wonderful "run" of, . henry the seventh, curious evidence of bacon's, . heywood, author of portions of "passionate pilgrim," . writes plays of the period, . "historic doubt," the shakespearean myth not a, . historical evidence. see circumstantial evidence. passim. historical plays, evidence of, as to bacon, . history, bacon thinks taught by drama, . hume, david, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . hunter, rev. joseph, identifies proserpo's island, , note. i iago, a comedian's part, . speech of, a striking paraphrase of berni, . ideal shakespeare, every man may select his own, "imogen" name and character, whence taken, . imposture literary, state of the law favorable to, . ingleby, dr c. m., his plea for shakespeare, innuendo, evidence by way of, . supporting ben jonson , note. innuendoes, of sir tobie matthew, , . insecurity of authorship, . see authorship, copyright, printers, etc. nashe's, testimony as to, . heywood's, testimony as to, . internal evidence. see evidence, internal. italian and french, not taught at stratford school, . italy, knowledge of, displayed in plays, , . intricate acquaintance with manners and customs of, . j. "jacques-peter," probably original form of name "shakespeare,". . james, king. see king james. jansen, the s. portrait, . johnson, gerard, said to have made stratford bust, . johnson, samuel, his estimate of shakespearean plays, , , . specimens of his commentaries on plays, . joint authorship, miss bacon's theory was, . jones, inigo, devises trappings for court masques, . jonson, ben, a "famous witness," . an expert witness, , . applies same words and figure to bacon and to w. s. a university man, . cited as a witness, contra, . his conversations with drummond, . his "discoveries" fatal to shakespearean theory, - . his fling at shakespeare in prologue, etc., . his obituary verses, . his testimony, . analysis of, . his opinion of the droeshout likeness, - . why is libel on w. s., . his plays not popular, . never mentions bacon to w. s. or w. s. to bacon, . plays boswell to bacon and shakespeare alike, . studiously inclined, . wants to blot out , shakespearean lines, . jordan, john, . jordan, john, probable inventor of story and verses, . judith shakespeare, never taught to write her name. , . k. king james's letter, story of, when invented, , . king, thomas, his "plea" for shakespeare, . his argument, . l. ladies, seated on the stage, . lampoon on sir thomas lucy, two versions of, . latinisms, in the plays, . law in "merchant of venice," , note. lawyers. see young lawyers. learning contained in the plays, . no reason for its being there, . legal acquirements of author of the plays, , . libraries, public or circulating, none in london, . library. see english library. did he have a, , . plays can not be studied without a, . plays not composed without a, . shakespeare's, what it must have been, . license to print, meaning of a, . ling & trundell, procure copies in shorthand, . proof of fact, . lin tot, bernard, invented the king james letter story in , , . literary imposture. see imposture, literary. literature, persecuted if unlicensed, . see star chamber, copyright, . "lord leicester's groom." see "groom." "lover's complaint," appears with the sonnets, . "lucrece," of doubtful authorship, , . lucy, sir thomas, lampoon on, . m. macaulay, accounts for bunyan's works, , . maids of honor, seated on the stage, . malone, edmund, his "chronologies," , . his contributions to shakespearean biography, , et seq. his shakespearean labors, , , . whitewashes the stratford bust, . management, theatrical, no sinecure in th century, . manuscripts, bacon's will directs certain, locked up, . delia bacon's idea of their disposition, , . may yet come to light, . minute and constant search for, , . northumberland, discovered by spedding, . marshall's picture, . see portraits. masques, william shakespeare wrote none, . massey, gerald, makes a romance from sonnets, . matthew, sir tobie, banters bacon, . his postscripts, , , , . innuendos of, . knew bacon, but not shakespeare, . quotation from, to this effect, . why he did not reveal bacon's secret, , note. medicine, knowledge of, displayed in the plays, - . medico-legal knowledge, displayed in the plays, . merchant of venice, law in, , note. meres, francis, cited as a witness, . his testimony critical, not historical, . merry wives of windsor, story of order for, may be true, . rebuke to lechery in, . perhaps to elizabeth, , note. milton, john, first to claim author's copyright, . his areopagitica, . his estimate of shakespearean plays, , . value of his estimate, , . mitylene, curious custom prevalent in, alluded to in pericles, , note. monasteries, dissolution of the, . monastery, christian, in ephesus, . montgomery, perhaps connected with plays, . music, familiarity with, , note, n. nashe, thomas, his testimony to insecurity of authorship, . new and delia bacon theories, coincide, . new theory, alternative presented by, . further details of, . the, what is, . newton, his discoveries anticipated by plays, . northumberland mss., discovered by spedding, . "noverint," what nashe may have meant by, . o. oldys, story about a brother of william shakespeare, . orthography of name shakespeare, - . othello, appears seven years after shakespeare's death, . p. palmerston, lord, convert to baconian theory, . his idea of ben jonson, . papist, was w. s. a, , . parallelisms, argument from in baconian theory, . holmes's list of, . examples of, , . reduced to an ordo by holmes, . passionate pilgrim, not written by w. s., . shakespeare's name removed in d edition, . the, written partly by heywood, . pascal, difference between his case and shakespeare's, . pembroke, a dedication of sonnets to, insulting, . sonnets could not be dedicated to, . pepys, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . "pericles," allusion to a peculiar custom in, , note. rejected by first folio, but restored by shakespeareans, . phillips. see halliwell-phillips. philological test of shakespearean plays, - . pickpockets, pilloried on the stage, , note, plagiarism. see authorship, greene, heywood, plays, printers. plays, anachronisms not misleading, . audiences of the, not critical as to the dialogue, . plays, authorship of, revealed, , , , . boys took female parts in, . classical knowledge of the, . contemporary criticism of the character of, . doubt as to single authorship of, . dramatic license of these, . emendations of, in first folio. see emendations, first folio. forty-two credited to w. shakespeare, . how put into type, , , . manuscripts of, jealously guarded by theaters, manuscripts of the, how procured, . name of actors in, . name of author of, . need not have been didactic, , . not composed without a library, . no tradition connecting shakespeare with composition of, . ordinarily mere local sketches, , . passed with first audiences as shakespeare's, . printed instead of acted, . probable reason why called shakespeare's, . shakespearean, canon of, . sources of unauthorized reprints of, . tabulated, . taken down in shorthand, . the, a phenomenon in experience, . the "copyrights" of, . not mentioned in the will, . the doubtful. see doubtful plays. their action only used, . the masses not "up" to, to-day, . the philological test of, - . the present text made by piecemeal since w. s.'s death, the, were popular with their first audiences, . traces in, of aristocratic authorship, . typographical evidence of authorship of, , , , . use of warwickshire names in the, . use of warwickshire expressions in the, . plays, were performed, , , . where did the printers get hold of, , , . see printers, typographical evidence. why bacon may not have acknowledged, . written to be played, not printed, . poems, dedication of, to southampton, . fathered upon shakespeare, . the, see their various titles. "poetaster," the, a hit at shakespeare in, , note. poetical works of william shakespeare, complete collection, . poetry, not competent evidence of a fact, . pope, alexander, his apprentices write parts of, . his estimate of plays, . indicates portions to admire, . portraits, boaden's account of the, . bust in possession of garrick club, . criticised as if purely ideal, . droeshout, the only one that ever was authenticated, . earlom's copy, . one lately discovered in australia, . shakespearean argument from the, , . the chandos, . the felton head. the jansen, . the marshall. the stratford bust, . the zuccharo, . "practicable" scenery, unknown, . exceptions, , note. presumption, the, as to the shakespearean authorship, its value, . well disturbed in , . printed matter, most careful record of, in those days, . printers, assigned any name they pleased to literary work, . did what they pleased with literary work, . of first folio followed copy too closely, . where did they get "copy" for the plays, , . printing, knowledge of, displayed in plays, - . of the sonnets. see sonnets. prologue to "every man in his humour," . see jonson, ben. proof reader, of first folio, . prophesy, no such thing as a prophet of the past, . proserpo's island "located," by hunter, , note; by dowden, , note. pseudonymic authorship. see anonymous. putnam's magazine, article in, . see bacon, delia. q. queen elizabeth, her apochryphal correspondence with w. s., . her order for falstaff may be true, , . legend of her order for "merry wives," , note. queen elizabeth's glove, story of, . question of the authorship, why not raised earlier, . first raised in chamber's journal, . r. raleigh, knows nothing of william shakespeare, . perhaps connected with plays, . suggested as an author of the s. drama, . "ratsei's ghost," pamphlet of, . ravenscroft, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . readings, various, of the text of the plays, what they prove, . red cloth issued to shakespeare, , note. renaissance drama, english, , . reynolds, sir joshua, copies the chandos, . roman catholic, was shakespeare a, . "rosalin's complaint," not by w. s., . rowe, his life of w. s., probably honest, . rutland, perhaps connected with plays, . rymer, thomas, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . s. scenery. see practicable scenery, . "schoolmaster story." see beeston. scotland, dr. elze thinks shakespeare was in, . sea-coast of bohemia, . a part of the stage business, . a theory for, , note. second-best bed, explained by shakespeareans, . shaftesbury, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . shakespeare, john, ale-taster of stratford, . fined for throwing muck, . records of his life, . shakespeare, judith. see judith shakespeare. shakespeare, mrs. wm., why she did not live with her husband, . shakespeare, susanna. see susanna hall. slandered by a neighbor, . law suit for . shakespeare, the name, original form probably "jacques-peter," . shakespeare, "william, a good penman, . a reckless borrower, . authography of the name, . author, not editor, . a "utility" gentleman in the stock company, - . "autograph" in british museum, . a wag, not a worker, . born versed in all knowledge? . career in stratford, . covers his tracks well, . credited with forty-two plays in lifetime, . did he make emendations to plays, , , . did he write bacon's works, . did not write his first composition in his native patois, . difficulties presented by his will, . does not disclaim authorship of passionate pilgrim, . dramatic canon of, and bacon, editor, not author. - . expert evidence as to, . family. see family of shakespeare. "father" anything, willing to, . fortunate enough to secure a poet, , . funny mr., . his authorship disproved by first folio, , , . his birthday, . st. george's day selected for, . shakespeare, william, his "business" rejected, . his death bed, , . his income, in modern figures, $ , , . his income, perhaps exaggerated by ward, . his interest to keep plays out of print, if his, . his library. see library, . his literary acquirements, . his name a safe pseudonym, . his name discovered in northumberland mss., . his rapid accumulation of wealth, . a self-made man, . his supposed travels, . his weakness for pedigrees, , note. holding horses, story not improbable, . interpolates as he copies, . interpolates popular songs, . made his money by acting, . makes iago a comedian, . may have been pre-contracted to his wife, . name possesses market value, , . name removed from d edition of "passionate pilgrim," . natural that he should have followed players to london, . never suspected his reputation, . no pride of authorship in, . not a law student, . not solicitous or expectant of any posthumous fame, . no tradition connecting, with composition of plays, . no uncertainty as to his character, . nowhere met in tradition or history, as a school-boy, . one "biographer" of, . only one attempt to prove him a university man, . other duties, . out of favor with king james, , note. portraits of, . usually criticised as if purely ideal, . probably remodeled the plays, . records of his life, . retires to money lending in stratford, . rev. richard davie's life of, . shakespeare, william, r. g. white accuses him of "want of probity," . sketches dogberry, , . specimen of his wit, . speculations as to first employment, . "wanted art," . was he admitted to noble companionship? . was he a roman catholic? . was not lawyer, physician, etc., . was there any-thing he did not know? . where did he find his leisure? . where did he get his material? question never asked, , . who wrote. see who wrote shakespeare. passim, why he purchased arms, . wrote no masques, . shakespearean question, not what, but who? . shakespeare's poetical works, complete collection of, . sharpham, his evidence, . "shylock" appears at a suggestive time, . sidney, description of theatrical properties, . siege of troy, gunpowder at, . signatures, . see forgery. smith, w. h., can not accept s.'s authorship, . follows miss bacon, does not claim priority over her, . thinks that w. s. could not read or write, . songs, shakespeare introduces popular, . sonnets, authorship of, not involved in this question, . dedicated by their printer to friend of his own, . mr. bernsdorf's theory as to, . mr. boaden's theory of, . mr. brown's theory is of doubtful force, . m. chasles's theory as to, . mr. dowden's theory as to, . mr. massey,s theory as to, . mr. minto's theory as to, . mr. niel's theory as to, . mr. thompson's theory as to, . mr. wordsworth's theory as to, . sonnets, speculations as to meaning of, - . why assigned to shakespeare, . southampton, a comparatively poor man, , . dedication to, as "mr. w. h.,: insulting, . alleged acquaintance with shakespeare, , , . did he forget his caste? , . his gift to shakespeare incredible, , . how perhaps connected with plays, . never suspected of literary tastes, , . no evidence that he knew shakespeare, , . biographers find no trace of it, . story manufactured by shakespeareans, , . poems dedicated to, . story of his munificence, why probably a forgery, , , . supposed friendship for shakespeare, . why great doubt as to his being a companion of shakespeare, . spedding, james, believed in more than one author of henry viii., . spenser and chaucer, the great fire not fatal to records of, . spenser, his reference to "gentle willie," explained, , note. his reference to "Ætion," , note. stage, best seats were on the, . "business," probably not written by author of text, . see "business." modern, rejects the shakespearean "business" then only available depot for literary work, . star chamber, court of, . had jurisdiction of literary matter, id. stationers' company, the blood-hound of the star chamber, . the origin of, . steele, richard, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . st. george's day, selected as a birth-clay for w. s. . stratford bust, . see portraits. said to be by gerard johnson, . said to be by thomas stanton. . stratford grammar school, was w. s. a pupil of, . stratford portrait, the, . stratford school, speculations as to, , , , , , stratford, vicar of, treats miss bacon tenderly, . style, literary, not reliable evidence, . of bacon and shakespeare dissimilar, . of the shakespearean plays, . "reader must judge for himself as to, . "suppers after the play," . susanna hall, enigmatical epitaph over, . swift, dean, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . t. taine, his picture of shakespearean theaters, . of shakespearean audiences, . tate, nahum, his estimate of shakespearean plays, . "tempest," was a drollery in ben jonson's day, , note. theater, management of, a precarious livelihood in the th century, . theaters, best seats on the stage, . of shakespeare's day, description of, . shakespearean habitues of, . see audiences, plays. theobald and others, anticipate compromise theory, , theobald believed in more than one shakespearean author, . theories, compromise between, . shakespearean, three well defined, . see new theory, delia bacon, and baconian. who anticipated, . t. thompson, wm., his "renaissance drama," . thinks manuscripts may be safe, . thorpe, thomas, dedicates the sonnets to a friend, , . prints and copyrights the sonnets, . trade-mark, sort of common in name, . travels, wm. shakespeare's supposed, . treatises, scientific, the audiences did not want, . "troilus and cressida," . see doubtful plays. troy. see siege of troy. "true, original copies," proof of what they were, , . see copies, first folio, typographical evidence. typographical evidence of authorship, , , , , u. ulrici, opinion of, learning of plays, . unitary theory, property of smith and holmes. see bacon, delia, . v. vega, lope de, computed to have written , , verses, . writes "without blotting a line," . venice, knowledge of, displayed in plays, . venus and adonis, argument from that poem alone, . boldness of assignment to w. s., . popularity of, . why not a first production, . why of doubtful authorship, , . w. ward, dominie, hears about shakespeare, . testimony as to shakespeare's acquirements, . ward, rev. john, his account of w. s., . warwickshire, names, use of, in the plays, . expressions, use of in plays, . "watch," the, actual curiosities, . burghley's account of, , note. werner, anticipated by the plays, . "wet combats," wit combats were, . is it a misprint? . "w. h.," a friend of thorpe, dedicator or dedicatee? . theories as to meaning of, - . various translations of, . who was he? , , , . white, r. g., admits that managers "kept a poet," , note. his idea of henry vi., . opinion of english of plays, . who wrote shakespeare? passim. question first asked in , . wilkes, geo., his "american point of view," . will, difficulties of the, explained, . will, no mention of any plays in, . or of any theatrical property, . "wit combats," were "wet combats," . wood, anthony, his mention of w. s., . works, poetical, of w. s. see poetical works. wotton, description of a popular play, . description of theaters of his days, . y. "young ladies' argument," the, . young lawyers, wrote plays rapidly, , note. z. zuccharo, portrait, the, . see portraits. provided by the internet archive [illustration: ] [illustration: ] [illustration: ] the shakespeare myth by edwin durning-lawrence, halliwell-phillipps says: "it was not till the jubilee of that the tendency to the fabrication of shakespeare anecdotes and relics at stratford museum became manifest. all kinds of deception have since been practised there." the folio of the plays, . |it is now universally admitted that the plays known as shakespeare's are the greatest "birth of time," the most wonderful product of the human mind which the world has ever seen, that they evince the ripest classical scholarship, the most perfect knowledge of law, and the most intimate acquaintance with all the intricacies of the highest court life. the plays as we know them, appeared in the folio, published in , seven years after shakespeare's death in . this volume contains thirty-six plays. of this number only eight are substantially in the form in which they were printed in shakespeare's lifetime. six are greatly improved. five are practically rewritten, and seventeen are not known to have been printed before shakespeare's death, although thirteen plays of similar names are registered or in some way referred to. the following particulars are mainly derived from reed's "bacon our shakespeare," published . the spelling of the first folio of has, however, been strictly followed. the eight which are printed in the folio substantially as they originally appeared in the quartos are:-- . much ado about nothing. . loves labour lost. * . midsommer nights dreame. . the merchant of venice. . the first part of king henry the fourth. . the second part of k. henry the fourth. . romeo and juliet. . the tragedie of troylus and cressida. ** * note.--the scene of the play is navarre and one of the characters is biron. a passport given to bacon's brother anthony in from the court of navarre, is signed "biron." (british museum add. ms. ). ** note.--this has a new title and a prologue in the folio. this extremely learned play which we are told was "never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger.... or sullied with the smoaky breath of the multitude," has recently been shewn by mrs. hinton stewart to be a satire upon the court of king james i. the six which have been greatly improved are:-- . the life & death of richard the second. corrections throughout. . the third part of king henry the sixt. new title, new lines, and many old lines retouched. . the life & death of richard the third. new lines added, , lines retouched. . titus andronicus. one entire new scene added. . the tragedy of hamlet. many important additions and omissions. . king lear. new lines, lines retouched. the five which have been practically rewritten are:-- . the merry wives of windsor. , new lines, the text rewritten. . the taming of the shrew. new title, , new lines added, and extensive revision. . the life and death of king john. new title, , new lines including one entire new scene. the dialogue rewritten. . the life of king henry the fift. new title, the choruses and two new scenes added. text nearly doubled in length. . the second part of king hen. the sixt. new title, , new lines, and , old lines retouched. [the practice of false-dating books of the elizabethan period was not uncommon, instances of as much as thirty years having been discovered. it has been proved by mr. a. w. pollard, of the british museum; by mr. w. w. greg, librarian of trinity college, cambridge; and by prof. w. j. neidig, that four of these, viz., "a midsommer nights dreame," and "the merchant of venice," both dated , and "king lear," and "henry the fift," both dated , were in fact printed in , three years after shakespeare's death.] the thirteen which seem not to have been printed before shakespeare's death, although plays of somewhat similar names are registered or in some way referred to, are:-- . the tempest. . the first part of king henry the sixt. . the two gentlemen of verona. . measure for measure. . the comedy of errours. . as you like it. . all is well, that ends well. . twelfe-night, or what you will. . the winters tale. . the life and death of julius cæsar. . the tragedy of macbeth. . anthony and cleopater. . cymbeline king of britaine. the four which seem neither to have been printed nor referred to till after shakespeare's death are:-- * . the life of king henry the eight. . the tragedy of coriolanus. . timon of athens. . othello, the moore of venice. of the above plays, most of those which were printed in shakespeare's lifetime originally appeared anonymously; indeed, no play bore shakespeare's name until new place, stratford-on-avon, had been purchased for him and £ , given to him in . the first play to bear the name of w. shakespere was loves labors lost, which appeared in the following year-- . * note.--the above very strongly confirms mrs. gallup's reading of the cypher, viz.: that there are twenty-two new plays in the folio. the tempest, with timon of athens and henry viii., seems to be largely concerned with the story of bacon's fall from his high offices in , and emile montégut, writing in the "revue des deux mondes" of august, , says that the tempest is evidently the author's literary testament. stratford, to which shakespeare was sent in , was at that period much farther from london for all practical purposes than canada is to-day, and shakespeare did not go there for week ends, but he permanently resided there, only very occasionally visiting london, when he lodged at silver street with a hairdresser named mountjoy. it is exceedingly important and informing to remember that shakespeare's name never appeared upon any play until he had been permanently sent away from london, and that his wealth was simply the money--£ , --given to him in order to induce him to incur the risk entailed by allowing his name to appear upon the plays. such risk was by no means inconsiderable, because queen elizabeth was determined to punish the author of richard the second, a play which greatly incensed her; she is reported to have said, "seest thou not that i am richard the second?" there is no evidence that shakespeare ever earned so much as ten shillings in any one week while he lived in london. at stratford, shakespeare sold corn, malt, etc., and lent small sums of money, and indeed, was nothing more than a petty tradesman, a fact of which we are quite clearly informed in "the great assises holden at parnassus," printed in , where bacon is put as "chancellor of parnassus," i.e., greatest of the world's poets, and shakespeare appears as "the writer of weekly accounts." this means that the only literature for which shakespeare was responsible consisted of his small tradesman's accounts sent out weekly by his clerk; because, as will be shewn presently, <b>shakespeare was totally unable to write a single letter of his own name.</b> let us now return to the folio of shakespeare's plays, published in . on the title page appears a large half-length figure drawn by martin droeshout, which is known as the authentic (i.e., the authorised) portrait of shakespeare. martin droeshout, i should perhaps mention, is scarcely likely to have ever seen shakespeare, as he was only years of age when shakespeare died. on the cover of this pamphlet will be found a reduced facsimile of the title page of the folio of . it is almost inconceivable that people with eyes to see should have looked at this so-called portrait for years without perceiving that it consists of a ridiculous, "putty-faced mask," fixed upon a stuffed dummy clothed in a trick coat. * * note.--this stuffed dummy is surmounted by a mask with an ear attached to it not in the least resembling any possible human ear, because, instead of being hollowed, it is rounded out something like the back side of a shoehorn, so as to form a sort of cup to cover and conceal any real ear that might be behind it. the "tailor and cutter" newspaper, in its issue of th march, , stated that the figure, put for shakespeare, in the folio, was undoubtedly clothed in an impossible coat composed of the back and the front of the same left arm. and in the following april the "gentleman's tailor magazine," under the heading of a "problem for the trade," prints the two halves of the coat put tailor fashion, shoulder to shoulder, as shewn here on page , and says:-- "it is passing strange that something like three centuries should have been allowed to elapse before the tailor's handiwork should have been appealed to in this particular manner. "the special point is that in what is known as the authentic portrait of william shakespeare, which appears in the celebrated first folio edition, published in , a remarkable sartorial puzzle is apparent. "the tunic, coat, or whatever the garment may have been called at the time, is so strangely illustrated that the right-hand side of the forepart is obviously the left-hand side of the back part; and so gives a harlequin appearance to the figure, which it is not unnatural to assume was intentional, and done with express object and purpose. "anyhow, it is pretty safe to say that if a referendum of the trade was taken on the question whether the two illustrations shown above [exactly as our illustration on page ] represent the foreparts of the same garment, the polling would give an unanimous vote in the negative." facing the title page of the first folio of the plays, on which the stuffed and masked dummy appears, is the following description (of which i give a photo-facsimile), which, as it is signed b. i., is usually ascribed to ben jonson:--= `````to the reader. ```this figure, that thou here seest pur, ````it was for gentle shackspeare cut; ```wherein the grauer had a strife ````with nature, to out-doo the life: ```o, could he but haue drawne his wit ````as well in brasse, as he hath hit ```his face, the print would then surpasse ````all, that was cuer writ in brasse. ```but, since he cannot, reader, lookc ````not on his picture, but his booke. `````b.i.= [illustration: ] if my readers will count all the letters in the above, including the four v's, which are used instead of the two w's, they will find that there are letters, a masonic number often repeated throughout the folio. my book, "bacon is shakespeare," was published in (i.e., years after ), and tells for the first time the true meaning of these lines. b. i. never calls the ridiculous dummy a portrait, but describes it as "the figure," "put for" (i.e., instead of), and as "the print," and as "his picture," and he distinctly tells us to look not at his (ridiculous) picture, but (only) at his booke. it has always been a puzzle to students who read these verses why b. i. lavished such extravagant praise upon what looks so stiff and wooden a figure, about which gainsborough, writing in , says: "damn the original picture of him... for i think a stupider face i never beheld except d... k's... it is impossible that such a mind and ray of heaven, could shine with such a face and pair of eyes." to those capable of properly reading the lines, b. i. clearly tells the whole story. he says, "the graver had a strife with nature to out-doo the life." in the new english dictionary, edited by sir james murray, we find more than six hundred words beginning with "out." every one of these, with scarcely an exception, must, in order to be fully understood, be read reversed; outfit is fit out, outfall is fall out, outburst is burst out, etc. outlaw does not mean outside the law, but lawed out by some legal process. "out-doo" therefore must here mean "do out," and was continually used for hundreds of years in that sense. thus in the "cursor mundi," written in the thirteenth century, we read that adam was "out-done" [of paradise]. in drayton published his "barons' wars," and in book v. s. li. we read, ````for he his foe not able to withstand, ````was ta'en in battle and his eyes out-done. b. i. therefore tells us that the graver has done out the life, that is, covered it up and masked it. the graver has done this so cleverly that for years (i.e., from till ) learned pedants and others have looked at the dummy without perceiving the trick that had been played upon them. b. i. then proceeds to say:--"o, could he but have drawne his wit as well in brasse, as he hath hit his face." hit, at that period, was often used as the past participle of hide, with the meaning hid or hidden, exactly as we find in chaucer, in "the squieres tale," where we read, ii. , etc.,= ```right as a serpent hit him under floures ```til he may seen his tyme for to byte.= this, put into modern english prose, means, just as a serpent hid himself under the flowers until he might see his time to bite. i have already explained how b. i. tells the reader not to look at the picture, but at the book; perhaps the matter may be still more clear if i give a paraphrase of the verses.= `````to the reader. ```the dummy that thou seest set here ```was put instead of shake-a-speare; ```wherein the graver had a strife ```to extinguish all of nature's life. ```o, could he but have drawn his mind ```as well as he's concealed behind ```his face; the print would then surpasse ```all, that was ever writ in brasse. ```but since he cannot, do not looke ```on his mask'd picture, but his booke.= "do out" appears as the name of the little instrument something like a pair of snuffers, called a "douter," which was formerly used to extinguish candles. therefore, i have correctly substituted "extinguish" for "out-do." at the beginning i have substituted "dummy" for "figure" because we are told that the figure is "put for" (that is, put instead of) shakespeare. "wit" in these lines means absolutely the same as "mind" which i have used in its place, because i feel sure that it refers to the fact that upon the miniature of bacon in his eighteenth year, painted by hilliard in , we read:--"si tabula daretur digna animum mallem," the translation of which is--"if one could but paint his mind!" this important fact which can neither be disputed nor explained away, viz., that the figure upon the title page of the first folio of the plays in put to represent shakespeare is a doubly left-armed and stuffed dummy, surmounted by a ridiculous putty-faced mask, disposes once and for all of any idea that the mighty plays were written by the drunken, illiterate clown of stratford-on-avon, and shows us quite clearly that the name "shakespeare" was used as a left-hand, a pseudonym, behind which the great author, francis bacon, wrote securely concealed. in his last prayer, bacon says, "i have though in a despised weed procured the good of all men," while in the th "shakespeare" sonnet he says:-- ```why write i still all one, ever the same, ```and keepe invention in a noted weed. ```that every word doth almost sel my name ```shewing their birth, and where they did proceed. weed signifies disguise, and is used in that sense by bacon in his "henry vii.," where he says, "this fellow... clad himself like an hermite and in that weede wandered about the countrie." it is doubtful if at that period it was possible to discover a meaner disguise, a more "despised weed," than the pseudonym of william shakespeare, of stratford-on-avon, gentleman. bacon also specially refers to his own great "_descent_ to the good of mankind" in the wonderful prayer which is evidently his dedication of the "immortal plays."= ```this is the form and rule of our `````alphabet ```may god, the creator, preserver, and renewer of the universe, ``protect and govern this work, both in its ascent to his glory, and ``in its descent to the good of mankind, for the sake of his mercy ``and good will to men, through his only son (immanuel). _god `` us._= in the "promus," which is the name of bacon's notebook now in the mss. department of the british museum, bacon tells us that "tragedies and comedies are made of one alphabet." his beautiful prayer, described as the form and rule of our alphabet, was first published in in "certaine genuine remains of sir francis bacon, baron of verulam and viscount st. albans," where it appears as a fragment of a book written by the lord verulam and entituled, "the alphabet of nature." in the preface we are told that this work is commonly said to be lost. "the alphabet of nature" is, of course, "the immortal plays," known to us as shakespeare's, which hold "the mirror up to nature," and are now no longer lost, but restored to their great author, francis bacon. bacon shewn by contemporary title pages to be the author of the shakespeare plays. |i have shewn on pp. to that the title page of the folio of the plays known as shakespeare's is adorned with a supposed portrait of shakespeare, which is, in fact, a putty-faced mask supported on a stuffed dummy wearing a coat with two left arms, to inform us that the stratford clown was a "left-hand," a "dummy," a "pseudonym," behind which the great author was securely concealed. this fact disposes once and for all of the shakespeare myth, and i will now proceed to prove by a few contemporary evidences that the real author was francis bacon. i place before the reader on page a photographically enlarged copy of the engraved title page of bacon's work, the de augmentis, which was published in holland in . "de augmentis" is the latin name for the work which appeared in english as the advancement of learning. this same engraved title page was for more than one hundred years used for the title page of vol. i. of various editions of bacon's collected works in latin, which were printed abroad. the same subject, but entirely redrawn, was also employed for other foreign editions of the de augmentis, but nothing in any way resembling it was printed in england until quite recently, when photo-facsimile copies were made of it for the purpose of discussing the authorship of the "shakespeare" plays. in this title page we see in the foreground on the right of the picture (the reader's left) bacon seated with his right hand in brightest light resting upon an open book beneath which is a second book (shall we venture to say that these are the de augmentis and the novum organum?), while with his left-hand in deepest shadow, bacon is putting forward a mean man, who appears to the careless observer to be running away with a third book. let us examine carefully this man. we shall then perceive that he is clothed in a goat skin. the word tragedy is derived from the greek word tragodos, which means an actor dressed in a goat skin. we should also notice that the man wears a false breast to enable him to represent a woman; there were no women actors at the time of shakespeare's plays. the man, therefore, is intended to represent the tragic muse. with his left hand, and with his left hand only, he grips strongly a clasped sealed, concealed book, which by the crossed lines upon its side (then, as now, the symbol of a mirror) is shewn to be the "mirror up to nature," the "book of the immortal plays," known to us under the name of shakespeare, which, together with bacon's de augmentis and his novum organum, makes up the "great instauration," by which bacon has "procured the good of all men." [illustration: ] having very carefully considered this plate of the title page of the de augmentis, , let us next examine the plate on page , which is the title page that forms the frontispiece of bacon's henry vii. in the latin edition, printed in holland in . this forms, with the edition of the de augmentis, one of the series of bacon's collected works which were continually reprinted for upwards of a hundred years. in this title page of henry vii. we see the same "left-handed" story most emphatically repeated. on the right of the engraving--the reader's left--upon the higher level, francis bacon stands in the garb of a philosopher with grand rosicrucian rosettes upon his shoes. by his side is a knight in full armour, who, like himself, touches the figure with his right hand. on the "left" side of the picture upon the _lower level_ we see that the same francis bacon, who is now wearing _actor's boots_, is stopping the wheel with the shaft of a spear which, the "left-handed" actor grasps (or shall we say "shakes"), while with his "left hand" he points to the globe. this actor wears one spur only, and that upon his "left" boot, and his sword is also girded upon him "left-handedly." above this "left-handed" actor's head, upon the wheel which the figure is turning with her "left" hand, we see the emblems of the plays; the mirror up to nature (observe the crossed lines to which we called attention in reference to the crossed lines upon the book in the title page of the de augmentis, )--the rod for the back of fools--"the bason that receives your guilty blood" (see titus andronicus v. ) which is here the symbol for tragedy,--and the fool's rattle or bauble. that the man is not a knight, but is intended to represent an actor, is manifest from his wearing actor's boots, a collar of lace, and leggings trimmed with lace, and having his sword girded on the wrong side, while he wears but one gauntlet and that upon his "left" hand. that he is a shake-speare actor is also evident because he is shaking the spear which is held by bacon. he is likewise a shake-spur actor, as is shewn by his wearing one spur only, which is upon his "left" boot. in other emblematic writings and pictures we similarly get "shake-spur," meaning "shake-speare." the reader cannot fail to remark how perpetually it is shewn that everything connected with the plays is performed "left-handedly," that is, "underhandedly" and "secretly in shadow." on the right-hand side upon the higher level the figure with her right hand holds above bacon's head a salt box. this is in order to teach us that bacon was the "wisest of mankind," because we are plainly told in the "continuation of bacon's new atlantis" (which was published in , but of which the author who is called "r. h., esq.," has never been identified) that in "our heraldry" (which refers to the symbolic drawings that appear mostly as the frontispieces of certain books such as those before the reader) "if for wisdom she (the virgin) holds a salt." but the reader will perceive that in her right hand she also holds something else above bacon's head. [illustration: ] only a considerable knowledge of emblems and emblem books enables me to inform my readers what this very curious object represents. it is absolutely certain that what she holds above bacon's head is a "bridle without a bit," which is here put for the purpose of instructing us that the future age is not to curb and muzzle and destroy bacon's reputation. this emblem tells us that, as the ages roll on, bacon will be unmuzzled and crowned with everlasting fame. how do we know so much as this? in february, , the first edition of the most important of all emblem books, viz., "alciati's emblems," was published, and in that book there is shewn a hideous figure of nemesis holding a bridle in which is a tremendous "bit" to destroy "improba verba," false reputations. a little more than a hundred years later, viz., in , baudoin, who had translated bacon's essays into french, also published a book of emblems, a task which, he tells us in the preface, he was induced to undertake by "alciat" (printed in small letters) and by bacon (printed in capital letters). in this book of emblems baudoin puts opposite to bacon's name a fine engraving of nemesis, but which is, in fact, a figure of fame holding a "bridle without a bit," of exactly the same shape as that shewn in the title page of "henry vii.," which is now under the reader's eyes. i may perhaps here state that i possess books that must have belonged to a distinguished rosicrucian who was well acquainted with bacon's secrets, and that in my library there is a specially printed copy of baudoin's book in which this figure of fame that is put as the nemesis for bacon, is purposefully printed upside down; i do not mean bound upside down, but printed upside down, the printing on the back being reversed and so reading correctly. other books which i possess have portions similarly purposefully printed upside down to afford revelations of bacon's authorship to those readers who are capable of understanding symbols. this particular upside down drawing of the nemesis placed opposite to bacon's name in baudoin's book is so printed in order to emphasise the author's meaning that the nemesis for bacon is to unmuzzle him and spread his fame over all the world. this "specially printed" copy of baudoin's book is also "specially bound"--in contemporary binding--with rosicrucian emblems on the back. the figure which turns the wheel turns it with her "left" hand, while with her right hand she holds over bacon's head what the reader now knows to be the emblems of wisdom and of fame. streaming from her head is a long lock of hair which is correctly described as "the forelock of time," and this is to teach us that as time goes on so will bacon's reputation continually extend farther and farther. bacon in his will declared that he bequeathed his "name and memory... to foreign nations and the next ages." * bacon knew that much time must elapse before the world would begin to recognise how much he had done for its advancement, and there is considerable evidence that he fixed upon the year , which is years after the year , in which the folio edition of the immortal plays, known as shakespeare's, first appeared. * note.--the following story, related by ben jonson himself, shows how necessary it was for bacon to conceal his identity behind various' masks:--"he [ben jonson] was dilated by sir james murray to the king, for writing something against the scots, in a play eastward hoe, and voluntarly imprissonned himself with chapman and marston who had written it amongst them. the report, was that they should then [have] had their ears cut and noses. after their delivery, he banqueted all his friends; there was camden, selden, and others; at the midst of the feast his old mother dranke to him, and shew him a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prisson among his drinke, which was full of lustie strong poison, and that she was no churle, she told, she was minded first to have drunk of it herself." this was in , and it is a strange and grim illustration of the dangers that beset men in the highway of letters. with respect to bacon's remarkable reference to foreign nations, we must remember that the title pages here shown and numerous other striking revelations of his authorship of the plays were never printed or published in england, but appear only in editions printed in foreign countries. i will once more repeat that the title page of the "de augmentis" clearly tells us that bacon has secretly with his "left hand" placed his great work, the "immortal plays," "the mirror up to nature," in the hands of a mean actor, and that the title page of "henry vii." repeats the same "lefthanded" story, and tells us that, while the history of henry vii. is written in prose in bacon's own name, his other histories of the "kings of england" are set forth at the globe theatre by the shakespeare actor, concealed behind whom bacon stands secure. in other words, that bacon's other histories of england will be found in the plays to which is attached the name of his pseudonym, the doubly "lefthanded" and masked dummy, "william shakespeare." the shakespeare signatures (so-called). |no scrap of writing is in existence which can by any possibility be supposed to have been written by william shakespeare, excepting only the six (so-called) signatures. and, since every one of these supposed signatures is undoubtedly written by a law clerk, the inference that william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, was totally unable to write, seems to be incontrovertible. the first so-called signature in the order of date is the one last discovered, viz.: that at the record office, london. this is attached to "answers to interrogatories," dated may th, , in a petty lawsuit, in which it appeared that william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, had occasionally lodged in silver street at the house of a hairdresser named mountjoy. among the "answers to interrogatories" those which were signed very carefully by daniell nicholas, and the "answers to interrogatories" from william shakespeare, of stratford-upon-avon, gentleman, which are dated may th, , are both written in the handwriting of the same law clerk, who attached to the latter the name "wilm shaxpr" over a neat blot, which was probably the mark made by the illiterate "gentleman" of stratford, who was totally unable to write even a single letter of his own name. to those acquainted with the law script of the period it is abundantly evident that the "wilm shaxpr" is in the same handwriting as the body of the answers. the next (so-called) signatures in order of date are upon the purchase deed now in the london guildhall library, and upon the mortgage deed of the same property, which is in the british museum. the purchase deed is dated march th, , and the mortgage deed is dated march th, , but at that period, as at the present time, when part of the purchase money is left on mortgage, the mortgage deed was always dated one day after the purchase deed, and always signed one moment before it, because the owner cannot part with his property before he receives both the cash and the mortgage deed. about twenty-five years ago, i succeeded in persuading the city authorities to carry the purchase deed to the british museum, where by appointment we met the officials there, who took the mortgage deed out of the show-case and placed it side by side with the purchase deed from guildhall. after a long and careful examination of the two deeds, some dozen or twenty officials standing around, everyone agreed that neither of the names of william shakespeare upon the deeds could be supposed to be signatures. recently one of the higher officials of the british museum wrote to me about the matter, and in reply i wrote to him and also to the new librarian of guildhall that it would be impossible to discover a scoundrel who would venture to swear that it was even remotely possible that these two supposed signatures of william shakespeare could have been written at the same time, in the same place, with the same pen, and the same ink, by the same hand. they are widely different, one having been written by the law clerk of the seller, the other by the law clerk of the purchaser. one of the so-called signatures is evidently written by an old man, the other is written by a young man. the deeds are not stated to be signed but only to be sealed. next we come to the three supposed signatures upon the will, dated march th, . twenty or twenty-five years ago, on several occasions i examined with powerful glasses shakespeare's will at somerset house, where for my convenience it was placed in a strong light, and i arrived at the only possible conclusion, viz., that the supposed signatures were all written by the law clerk who wrote the body of the will, and who wrote also the names of the witnesses, all of which, excepting his own which is written in a neat modern looking hand, are in the same handwriting as the will itself. the fact that shakespeare's name is written by the law clerk has been conclusively proved by magdalene thumm-kintzel in the leipzig magazine, "der menschenkenner," of january, , in which photo reproductions of certain letters in the body of the will and in the so-called signatures are placed side by side, and the evidence is conclusive that they are written by the same hand. moreover, the will was originally drawn to be sealed, because the solicitor must have known that the illiterate householder of stratford was unable to write his name. subsequently, however, the word "seale" appears to have been struck out and the word "hand" written over it. people unacquainted with the rules of law are generally not aware that anyone can, by request, "sign" any person's name to any legal document, and that if such person touch it and acknowledge it, anyone can sign as witness to his signature. moreover the will is not stated to be signed, but only stated to be "published." in putting the name of william shakespeare three times to the will the law clerk seems to have taken considerable care to show that they were not real signatures. they are all written in law script, and the three "w's" of "william" are made in the three totally different forms in which "w's" were written in the law script of that period. excepting the "w" the whole of the first so-called signature is almost illegible, but the other two are quite clear, and show that the clerk has purposefully formed each and every letter in the two names "shakespeare" in a different manner one from the other. it is, therefore, impossible for anyone to suppose that the three names upon the will are "signatures." i should perhaps add that all the six so-called signatures were written by law clerks who were excellent penmen, and that the notion that the so-called signatures are badly written has only arisen from the fact that the general public, and even many educated persons, are totally ignorant of the appearance of the law script of the period. the first of the so-called signatures, viz., that at the record office, london, is written with extreme ease and rapidity. thus are for ever disproved each and every one of the writings hitherto claimed as "signatures" of william shakespeare, and as there is not in existence any other writing which can be supposed to be from his pen, it seems an indisputable fact that he was totally unable to write. there is also very strong evidence that he was likewise unable to read. bacon signed the shakespeare plays. |a careful examination of the first folio of "mr. william shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies," , which are generally known as "the plays of shakespeare," will prove that bacon signed the plays in very many ways. i will place a few examples before my readers, and when they have carefully studied these they may perhaps (if they can get access to a photographic facsimile copy of the first folio of shakespeare's plays, ), be able to discover additional traces of the great author's hand. for reasons which it is not now necessary to discuss, bacon selected as one of the keys to the mystery of his authorship of various works the number . the great folio of the plays of is divided into comedies, histories, and tragedies. each of these, although they are all bound in one volume, is separately paged. it follows therefore, that there must be three pages numbered in the folio volume of shakespeare's plays. i must also inform my readers that every page is divided into two columns, and it is absolutely certain that the author himself so arranged these that he knew in what column and in what line in such column every word would appear in the printed page. let us examine, in the first instance,= ````the first page = in the plays. the second column of this page commences with the first scene of the fourth act of the "merry wives of windsor" in this act a welsh schoolmaster, "evans," "dame quickly," and a boy named "william" appear. the object of the introduction of the welshman seems to have been that he might mispronounce "c" as "g," and so call "hic" "hig," and "hoc" "hog." william also is made wrongly to say that the accusative case is "hinc" instead of "hunc," and evans, the welsh schoolmaster, who should have corrected this error made by the boy, repeats the blunder with the change of "c" into "g," so as to give without confusion the right signature key-words which appear in the second column of the first page , as follow:-- _eva_. i pray you have your remembrance (childe) _accusative_, king, hang, hog. * * note.--in the folio ac-cusativo king, hang, hog are in italics as here printed. _qu_. hang-hog, is latten for bacon, i warrant you. observe that "bacon" is spelled with a capital "b," and also note that in this way we are told quite clearly that hang-hog means bacon. in very numerous instances a hog with a halter (a rope with a slip-knot) round its neck appears as part of some engraving in some book to which bacon's name has not yet been publicly attached. i shall again refer to "hang-hog" as we proceed. next, let us carefully examine= ````the second page = in the folio of the plays, which in the first column contains the commencement of the first scene of the second act of the first part of "king henry the fourth." two carriers are conversing, and we read:-- _car_. what ostler, come away, and be hangd; come away. _car_. i have a gammon of bacon, and two razes of ginger, to be delivered as farre as charing-crosse. observe that gammon is spelled with a capital "g," and bacon also is spelled with a capital "b." thus we have found bacon in the second page . but i must not forget to inform my readers that this second page is really and evidently of set purpose falsely numbered , because page is immediately followed by , there being no page numbered or in the histories, the second part of the plays. having found what appears to be a revelation in each of the first two pages numbered in the first folio, we must remember that a baconian revelation, in order to be complete, satisfactory, and certain, requires to be repeated "three" times. the uninitiated inquirer will not be able to perceive upon the third page , on which is found the beginning of "the tragedie of romeo and juliet," any trace of bacon, or hog or pig, or anything suggesting such things. the initiated will know that the great "master-mason" will supply two visible pillars, but that the third pillar will be the invisible pillar, the shibboleth; therefore, the informed will not expect to find the third key upon the visible page , but upon= ````the invisible page .= most of my readers will not fail to perceive that the invisible page must be the page that is , when we count not from the beginning, but from the end of the book of tragedies, that is, from the end of the volume. the last page in the folio is . this is falsely numbered , not by accident or by a misprint, but (as the great cryptographic book, by gustavus selenus [the man in the moon], published in , will tell those who are able to read it) because forms the word "baconus," a signature of bacon. let me repeat that the last page of the great folio of the plays is page , and deducting from we obtain the number , which is = ````the page from the end.= on this page, , in the first column, we find part of "the tragedie of anthony and cleopatra," and we there read, _enobar_. or if you borrow one another's love for the instant, you may when you heare no more words of _pompey_ returne it againe: you shall have time to wrangle in, when you have nothing else to do. _ anth_. thou art a souldier, onely speake no more. _enob_. that trueth should be silent, i had almost forgot. now here we perceive that "pompey," "in," and "got," by the manner in which the type is arranged in the column, come directly under each other, and their initial letters being p. i. g., we quite easily read "pig," which is what we were looking for. but on this "invisible" page , in which the key-word is found, other very important revelations may also be discovered, because it is the "shibboleth" page. if we count the headline title and all the lines that come to the left-hand edge of the column on this page , we find that "pompey" which begins the word, "pig" is upon= ``the rd line. (example .)= bacon very frequently signed with some form of cypher the first page of his secret books. let us, then, look at the first page of the great folio of , on which is the commencement of the play of "the tempest." in the first column of that first page we shall read= ``is perfect gallowes: stand fast good fate to his han ``ging, make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our ``owne doth little advantage: if he be not borne to bee ``hang'd, our case is miserable.= here, reading upwards from hang'd, we read hang'd, h. o. g., the "h" of hang'd being twice used. and just as "_pompey"_ the commencement of pig, is upon the rd line of page (the invisible page ), so here on page the commencing word "hang'd" is also upon= ```the rd line (example .)= counting all the lines without exception, including as before the head-line titles. observe, that it is only made possible for us to read "hang'd hog," because by the printer's "error" hanging is divided improperly as han-ging instead of hang-ing. this apparent misprint is a most careful arrangement made by the great author himself. i must once again repeat that there are no misprints or errors in the first folio, , because the great author was alive, and most carefully arranged every column in every page, and every word in every column, so that we should find every word exactly where we do find such particular word. hang'd hog is, therefore, clearly the signature of the great author upon the first page of the folio, just as is his signature upon the last page of the folio. but, as i have already said, in order to obtain a full, certain and complete revelation we must discover a third example. this we shall find in the second column of ```the first page . (example .)= wherein is the first scene of the second act of "the merry wives of windsor," where we read as follows:-- _mis. page_. what's the matter, woman? _mi. ford_. o woman: if it were not for one trifling respect, i could come to such honour. _mi. page_. hang the trifle (woman) take the honour. here, reading the initial letters of each line upwards from "hang," we get quite clearly s. o. w., and we perceive that "hang sow" is just as much bacon as is hang hog. thus, we get a triplet of no. , as we had a triplet of page , but we should also realise that we get a third triplet, because we find= ```hang hog (example .)= on page one in the comedies, the first portion of the plays, and we find= ```hang sow (example .)= which is practically the same thing as hang hog, upon page in the comedies, the first portion of the plays, and we find that= ```hang-hog is latten for bacon (example .)= is on page in the comedies, the first portion of the plays, and "hang-hog is bacon," gives the shibboleth, and affords the explanation of the two previous examples. thus we have a revelation of bacon's authorship in "three times three" forms, and the revelation is, therefore, "absolutely perfect."= `````the number .= there are thirty-six plays in the first folio. this is not accidental. thirty-six is a cabalistic number, and is used in several of bacon's works when he refers to the stage or to plays.= `````the th essay,= in the italian edition of bacon's "essays," published in london, in , is entitled "fattioni" (stage plays).= ````the th antitheta.= in the latin edition of bacon's "advancement of learning," published in , the same year in which the folio of the plays appeared, the xxxvi. antitheta commences "amorum multa debet scena (stage plays)," and when the english edition was brought out in , the xxxvi. antitheta commences with the word "the stage."= ````the th apophthegm.= in the collection of bacon's "apophthegms," printed in , apophthegm reads as follows, and fully explains the meaning of "hang-hog is latten for bacon, i warrant you." "sir _nicholas bacon_, being appointed a judge for the northern circuit, and having brought his trials that came before him to such a pass, as the passing of sentence on malefactors, he was by one of the malefactors mightily importuned for to save his life, which when nothing that he had said did avail, he at length desired his mercy on the account of kindred: prethee said my lord judge, how came that in? why, if it please you my lord, your name is _bacon_ and mine is _hog_, and in all ages _hog_ and _bacon_ have been so near kindred, that they are not to be separated. i [aye], _but_, replyed judge _bacon, you and i cannot be kindred except you be hanged; for hog is not bacon until it be well hanged_."= ````page .= at an early date bacon selected the number " " to give in numerous books revelations concerning his authorship. in florio's "second frutes," published in , on page we read:--= ``h. a slice of bacon, would make us taste this wine well. ``s. what ho, set that gammon of bakon upon the board.= florio was always a servant of bacon's, and received a pension for "making my lord's works known abroad." the above is inserted on page to inform us that bacon's name may be spelled in many different ways, as students of various books will find to be the fact. in the "mikrokosmos," * of which editions both in latin and in french were published at antwerp in , we find on page a picture of circe's island, which the intelligent reader will perceive represents "the stage." beneath it are the words from proverbs ix. , which in our english authorised version read, "stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant." examining this engraving, we perceive in the forefront bacon's boar, drawn exactly as it is heraldically portrayed in bacon's crest, but with a man's head surmounted by a "cap of liberty," and we should remember the words in shakespeare's play, "as you like it" (which means'"wisdom from the mouth of a clown"): "i must have liberty:... to blow on whom i please, for so fools have... invest me in my motley: give me leave to speak my mind, and i will through and through cleanse the foule bodie of th' infected world, if they will patiently receive my medicine." * note.--the title page is headed with the figure of a chameleon, which forms the " rd" of "alciati's emblems." the chameleon was supposed to assume various appearances, and is therefore used as an emblem for bacon, who assumed numerous masks in order to do good to all mankind, though in a despised weed." in bacon's "advancement of learning," , first edition in english, we find a first page " ." in the margin of this page we find "alexand": (bacon sometimes alluded to himself as alexander). but the page is misnumbered " ," and on this second and false page " " we read in the margin= `````s. fran `````bacon,= all in capital letters, almost the only marginal capital letters in the whole of the book, which is bacon's own book, and yet has this striking reference to himself on the false page " ." the number of pages " " (very frequently falsely paged " "), in which some reference to bacon or to the plays may be discovered, is very large. i will, however, now quote only two other instances. in , the third edition of shakespeare's plays, containing seven extra plays, was issued, and the editors, in order to mislead the initiated and pretend that they had bacon's authority for so adding some of his inferior plays to his revised selection of the thirty-six plays which formed the great folio of , numbered two pages , which they placed opposite to each other, and on each of these we find "s. albans" (bacon was viscount s. albans). in , the fifth edition was published by nicholas rowe, and in that edition there is a proper page , and also is misprinted (the only mispagination in the whole book of , pages), and this is made in the false page in order to afford a revelation if we carefully read both pages " " together. the northumberland manuscripts. |on page is shewn a type transcript of the cover or outside page of a collection of manuscripts in the possession of the duke of northumberland, which were discovered at northumberland house in london in three years later, viz.., in , james spedding published a thin little volume entituled "a conference of pleasure," in which he printed a full size facsimile of the original of the outside page, which is here reproduced in modern script on page . he also gave a few particulars of the mss. themselves. in , mr. frank j. burgoyne brought out a collotype facsimile of every page that now remains of the collection of mss. in an edition limited to copies, in a fine royal quarto at the price of £ s. each. of the mss. mentioned on the cover, nine only now remain, and of these, six are certainly by francis bacon; the first being written by him for a masque or "fanciful devise," which mr. spedding thinks was presented at the court of elizabeth in . the reader's attention is directed to this masque, which consists of "the praise of the worthiest vertue, &c," lower down we read: "speaches for my lord of essex at the tylt," "speach for my lord of sussex tilt," "orations at graies inne revells." we must remember that in numerous instances when masques were presented, reference is made to bacon having in some way countenanced them or assisted them by taking part in the arrangement of the "dumb shew." this teaches us how familiar bacon was with stage presentations. [illustration: ] further down on the page we find "rychard the second" and "rychard the third." mr. spedding declared himself satisfied that these were the (so-called) shakespeare plays. immediately above, we read "william shakespeare," which appears to be part of the original writing upon the page. it is not necessary here to refer to the remainder of these original writings, but there is a mass of curious scribblings all over the page. concerning these, mr. spedding says: "i find nothing in these later scribblings or in what remains of the book itself to indicate a date later than the reign of elizabeth." they are therefore written by a contemporary hand. for the purpose of reference i have placed the letters a b c d e outside of the facsimile. (a) "honorificabilitudine." this curious long word, when taken in conjunction with the words "your william shakespeare," which are found more than once upon the page, appears to have some reference to the longer word "honorificabili-tudinitatibus," which is found in "loves labors lost," printed in , the first play to which the name of shakespeare (spelled shakespere) was attached. i must repeat that upon no play appeared the name william shakespeare until that man had been sent permanently away to stratford in . the long word, as i shew in my book, "bacon is shakespeare," chapter x., page , gives us the masonic number , and really tells us with the most absolute mechanical certainty that the plays were francis bacon's "orphan" children. (b) "by mr. ffrauncis william shakespeare baco"---------- observe that ffrauncis is repeated "upside down," over these lines, and that _your/yourself_" also printed upside down, appears at the commencement of the lines. the reader will therefore not be surprised to read at (c) "revealing day through every crany peepes"; which seems to be a particularly accurate account of the object of the revelations afforded by the "scribblings" so called, viz., to inform us that "bacon was shakespeare." the same kind of revelation is again repeated at (d), when we find _your/william shakespeare_ and then above it "shak shakespeare" and "your william shakespeare." and the reader should remember that, as mr. spedding admits, all these so-called "scribblings" were contemporary and written before , the date of the death of queen elizabeth. i also call attention at (e) to the three curious scrolls, each written with one continuous sweep of the pen, which it would take a great deal of practice to succeed in successfully and easily writing. i myself am in a particularly fortunate position with regard to these scrolls, because i possess a very fine large-paper copy of "les tenures de monsieur littleton," . this work is annotated throughout in what the british museum authorities admit to be the handwriting of francis bacon, and, upon the wide large paper margin of the title page, eight similar scrolls appear, which have evidently some (shall we say rosicrucian) significance. * * note.--a few copies of my book, "bacon is shakespeare," published by gay & hancock, are still on sale at the price of s. ' d. no important statement contained therein has been or ever will be successfully controverted because the facts stated are derived from books contained in my unique library, which includes works that must have belonged to a distinguished rosicrucian who was well acquainted with the secrets of bacon's authorship. perhaps i should add that here, in this little book, before the reader's eyes, is the knowledge of this revealing page of the northumberland mss. given for the first time wide publicity. spedding's little book, which has been long out of print, was too insignificant to attract much notice, and mr. burgoyne's splendid work was too expensive for ordinary purchasers. bacon and the english language. |we owe our mighty english tongue of to-day to francis bacon and to francis bacon alone. the time has now come when this stupendous fact should be taught in every school, and that the whole of the anglo-saxon speaking peoples should know that the most glorious birthright which they possess, their matchless language,was the result of the life and labour of one man, viz.--francis bacon, who, when as little more than a boy, he was sent with our ambassador, sir amyas paulett, to paris, found there that "la pléiade" (the seven) had just succeeded in creating the french language from what had before been as they declared "merely a barbarous jargon." young bacon at once seized the idea and resolved to create an english language capable of expressing the highest thoughts. all writers are agreed that at the commencement of the reign of queen elizabeth, english as a "literary" language did not exist. all writers are agreed that what is known as the elizabethan age was the most glorious period of english literature. all writers are agreed that our language of to-day is founded upon the english translation of the bible and upon the plays of shakespeare. every word of each of these was undoubtedly written by, or under the direction of, francis bacon. max müller, in his "science of language," vol. i., , page , says: "a well educated person in england who has been at a public school and at the university... seldom uses more than about , or , words.... the hebrew testament says all that it has to say with , words, milton's poetry is built up with , , and shakespeare, who probably displayed a greater variety of expression than any writer in any language produced all his plays with about , words." does anyone suppose that any master of the stratford grammar school, where latin was the only language used, knew so many as , english words, or that the illiterate householder of stratford, known as william shakespeare, knew half or a quarter so many? but to return to the bible--we mean the bible of , known as the authorised version, which j. a. weisse tells us contains about , different words (i.e. the same number as used in the shakespeare plays). it was translated by men, whose names are known, and then handed to king james i. * it was printed about one and a half years later. in the preface, which is evidently written by bacon, we are told "we have not tyed ourselves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words." this question of variety of expression is discussed in the preface at considerable length (compare with max müller's references to shakespeare's extraordinary variety of expression) and then we read: "wee might also be charged... with some unequall dealing towards a great number of good english words... if we should say, as it were, unto certaine words, stand up higher, have a place in the bible alwaies, and to others of like qualitie, get ye hence, be banished for ever." this means that an endeavour was made to insert all good english words into this new translation of the bible, so that none might be deemed to be merely "secular." * note.--the forty-eight translators made use of "the bishops' bible," but no copy of this work, on which appear any annotations by the translators, can be discovered. see bishop westcott's "history of the english bible," , p. . is it possible that any intelligent person can really read the bible as a whole, not now a bit and now a scrap, but read it straight through like an ordinary book and fail to perceive that the majestic rhythm that runs through the whole cannot be the language of many writers, but must flow from the pen, or at least from the editorship, of one great master mind? a confirmation of this statement that the authorised version of king james i. was edited by one masterhand is contained in the "times" newspaper of march nd, , where archdeacon westcott, writing about the revised version of , says, the revisers "were men of notable learning and singular industry.... there were far too many of them; and successful literary results cannot be achieved by syndicates." yes, the bible and shakespeare embody the language of the great master, but before it could be so embodied, the english tongue had to be created, and it was for this great purpose that bacon made his piteous appeals for funds to bodley, to burleigh, and to queen elizabeth. observe the great mass of splendid translations of the classics (often second-hand from the french, as plutarch's "lives" by north) with which england was positively flooded at that period. hitherto no writer seems to have called attention to the fact that certain of these translations were made from the french instead of from the original greek or latin, not because it was easier to take them from the french, but because in that way the new french words and, phrases were enabled to be introduced to enrich the english tongue. the sale of these translations could not possibly have paid any considerable portion of their cost. thus bacon worked. thus his books under all sorts of pseudonyms appeared. no book of the elizabethan age of any value proceeded from any source except from his workshop of those "good pens," over whom ben jonson was foreman. in a very rare and curious little volume, published anonymously in , under the title of "the great assises holden in parnassus by apollo and his assessours," ben jonson is described as the "keeper of the trophonian denne," and in westminster abbey his medallion bust appears clothed in a left-handed coat to show us that he was a servant of bacon.= ```o, rare ben jonson--what a turncoat grown! ````thou ne'er wast such, till clad in stone; ```then let not this disturb thy sprite, ````another age shall set thy buttons right. ' `````stowe ii., p. - . in this same book, we see on the leaf following the title page the name of apollo in large letters in an ornamental frame, and below it in the place of honour we find francis bacon placed as "_lord_ verulan _chancellor of parnassus_." this means that bacon was the greatest of poets since the world began. this proud position is also claimed for him by thomas randolf in a latin poem published in , but believed to have been written immediately after bacon's death in . thomas randolf declares that phoebus (i.e., apollo) was accessory to bacon's death because he was afraid that bacon would some day come to be crowned king of poetry or the muses. george herbert, bacon's friend, who had overlooked many of his works, repeats the same story, calling bacon the colleague of sol, i.e., phoebus apollo. instances might be multiplied, but i will only quote the words of john davies, of hereford, another friend of bacon's, who addresses him in his "scourge of folly," published about , as follows:--= ```as to her bellamour the muse is wont; ```for, thou dost her embozom; and dost use, ```her company for sport twixt grave affaires.= bacon was always recognised by his contemporaries as among the greatest of poets. although nothing of any poetical importance bearing bacon's name had been up to that time published, stowe (in his annales, printed in ) places bacon seventh in his list of elizabethan poets. the shakespeare myth is dead. |in the shakespeare myth was mortally wounded by the curious collection of "may have beens," "might have beens," "could have beens," "should have beens," "must have beens," etc., collected in sir sidney lee's supposititious life of william shakespeare. in it was killed by the cambridge history of english literature, edited by dr. ward, master of peterhouse, and mr. waller, also of peterhouse, for in volume v., pages - - , we read: "we are not quite sure of the identity of shakespeare's father; we are by no means certain of the identity of his wife.... we do not know whether he ever went to school.. . . no biography of shakespeare, therefore, which deserves any confidence has ever been constructed without a large infusion of the tell-tale words 'apparently,' 'probably,' 'there can be little doubt,' and no small infusion of the still more tell-tale 'perhaps,' 'it would be natural,' 'according to what was usual at the time,' and so forth... john shakespeare married mary arden, an heiress of a good yeomanry family, but as to whose connection with a more distinguished one of the same name there remains much room for doubt." i should add that no letter addressed to shakespeare exists excepting one asking for a loan of £ ; and that no contemporary letter referring to him has been discovered excepting three which are about money. in appeared my own book, "bacon is shakespeare," which, placed in every library in the world, has carried everywhere the news of the decease of the myth. in mark twain's book, "is shakespeare dead?" which had been published in in england, was included in the tauchnitz collection, and therefore likewise carries the news of the decease of the myth all over the earth. mark twain describes shakespeare as just a "tar baby," and says: "about him you can find out nothing. nothing of any importance. nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly commonplace person... a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was cold in his grave.... * we can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned racehorse of modern times--but not shakespeare's! there are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture). . . but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself--he hadn't any history to tell. there is no way of getting round that deadly fact. and no sane way has yet been discovered of getting round its formidable significance." * note.--stratford owes all its glory to two of its sons, john, archbishop of canterbury, who built a church there; and hugh clopton, who built, at his own cost, a bridge of fourteen arches across the avon. translated from jean blaeu, . the shakespeare myth is now destroyed. does any educated person of intelligence still believe in the "tar baby," the illiterate clown of stratford, who was totally unable to write a single letter of his own name, and of whom we are told, if we understand what we are told, that he could not read a line of print. no book was found in his house, and neither of his daughters could either read or write. there exists no "portrait" of shakespeare. the significant fact that the figure put for shakespeare in the folio of the plays consists of a doubly left-handed dummy is alone sufficient to dispose of the shakespeare myth. i have printed in various newspapers all over the world about a million copies of articles demonstrating this fact, which none can successfully dispute. in modern times percy bysshe shelley--one of england's greatest poets (who knew nothing about the shakespeare controversy)--wrote as follows: "bacon was a poet. his language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect. it is a strain, which distends and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy." this statement by shelley, taken in conjunction with the testimony of "the great assises holden in parnassus," , and the words of thomas randolf, , and of bacon's friends george herbert and john davies, together with the contemporary evidence of stowe in , are sufficient to dispose, once and for all, of the absurd contention that is sometimes put forth that bacon did not possess sufficient poetical ability to have written his own greatest work, the immortal plays. lord palmerston said that he rejoiced to see the reintegration of italy, the unveiling of the mystery of china, and the explosion of the shakespeare illusions. lord houghton, the father of the present marquis of crewe, said that he agreed with lord palmerston. john bright said any man that believed that william shakespeare wrote "hamlet," or "lear," was a fool. prince bismarck said in : "he could not understand how it were possible that a man, however gifted with the intuitions of genius, could have written what was attributed to shakespeare unless he had been in touch with the great affairs of state, behind the scenes of political life, and also intimate with all the social courtesies and refinements of thought which in shakespeare's time were only to be met with in the highest circles." the "tempest" is over, the false crown of the island (the stage) has been torn from the head of the dummy that appeared to wear it. it seems difficult to imagine that people possessed of ordinary intelligence can any longer continue to believe that the most learned of all the literary works in the world was written by the most unlearned of men, william shakespeare of stratford, who never seems even to have attempted to write a single letter of his own name. it has been proved that the six so-called signatures of shakespeare were written by various law clerks, and it is now admitted that there exist no other writings which can even be supposed to be from his pen. e. d-l. the life of bret harte [illustration: bret harte] the gale library of lives and letters american writers series the life of bret harte with some account of the california pioneers by henry childs merwin with portraits and other illustrations boston and new york houghton mifflin company the riverside press cambridge republished by gale research company, book tower, detroit, copyright, , by henry childs merwin all rights reserved _published september _ library of congress card number: - to anne amory merwin this book is affectionately inscribed preface it is a pleasure for the author of this book to record his indebtedness to others in preparing it. mrs. t. edgar pemberton, and messrs. c. arthur pearson, limited, the publishers of pemberton's life of bret harte, have kindly consented to the quotation from that interesting book of several letters by mr. harte that throw much light upon his character. similar permission was given by mr. howells and his publishers, the messrs. harper and brothers, to make use of mr. howells' account of bret harte's visit to him at cambridge; and of this permission the author has availed himself with a freedom which the reader at least will not regret. professor raymond weeks, president of the american dialect society, professor c. alphonso smith, mr. albert matthews, and others whose names are mentioned on page , have lent their aid in regard to the pioneer language, and ernest knaufft, bret harte's nephew, has not only furnished the author with some information about his uncle's early life, but he has also read the proofs, and has made more than one valuable suggestion which the author was glad to adopt. it is only fair to add that mr. knaufft does not in all respects agree with the author's estimate of bret harte's character. another critic, prescott hartford belknap, has put his fine literary taste at the service of the book, and has saved its writer from some mistakes which he now shudders to contemplate. most of all, however, the author is indebted to his accomplished friend, edwin munroe bacon, who, though much engaged with important literary work of his own, has read the book twice, once in ms. and once in print,--a signal, not to say painful proof of friendship which the author acknowledges with gratitude, and almost with shame. h. c. m. contents i. bret harte's ancestry ii. bret harte's boyhood iii. bret harte's wanderings in california iv. bret harte in san francisco v. the pioneer men and women vi. pioneer life vii. pioneer law and lawlessness viii. women and children among the pioneers ix. friendship among the pioneers x. gambling in pioneer times xi. other forms of business xii. literature, journalism and religion xiii. bret harte's departure from california xiv. bret harte in the east xv. bret harte at crefeld xvi. bret harte at glasgow xvii. bret harte in london xviii. bret harte as a writer of fiction xix. bret harte as a poet xx. bret harte's pioneer dialect xxi. bret harte's style index illustrations bret harte (photogravure) _frontispiece._ from a photograph by hollyer taken in . bernard hart, bret harte's grandfather from a painting in the possession of messrs. arthur lipper & co., new york. san francisco, november, after a sketch by j. c. ward. bret harte in the facsimile of bret harte's handwriting is taken from the back of the photograph in the possession of miss elizabeth benton frémont. storeship apollo, used as a saloon after a drawing by w. taber. grand plaza, san francisco, from an old print. the first hotel at san francisco after a drawing by w. taber. miners' ball after a drawing by a. castaigne. the two opponents came nearer after a drawing by frederic remington illustrating "the iliad of sandy bar." sacramento city in from an old print. the post-office, san francisco, - after a drawing by a. castaigne. he looked curiously at his reflection after a drawing by e. boyd smith, illustrating "left out on lone star mountain." dennison's exchange, and parker house, december, , before the fire after a drawing by w. taber. main street, nevada city, from a photograph in the possession of colonel thomas l. livermore. the bells, san gabriel mission from a photograph. i thought you were that horse-thief after a drawing by denman fink, illustrating "lanty foster's mistake." the home of "truthful james," jackass flat, tuolumne county, california from a photograph. the life of bret harte bret harte chapter i bret harte's ancestry francis brett harte was born at albany in the state of new york, on august twenty-fifth, . by his relatives and early friends he was called frank; but soon after beginning his career as an author in san francisco he signed his name as "brett," then as "bret," and finally as "bret harte." "bret harte," therefore, is in some degree a _nom de guerre_, and it was commonly supposed at first, both in the eastern states and in england, to be wholly such. our great new england novelist had a similar experience, for "nathaniel hawthorne" was long regarded by most of his readers as an assumed name, happily chosen to indicate the quaint and poetic character of the tales to which it was signed. bret harte's father was henry hart;[ ] but before we trace his ancestry, let us endeavor to see how he looked. fanny kemble met him at lenox, in the year , and was much impressed by his appearance. in a letter to a relative she wrote: "he reminded me a good deal of our old pirate and bandit friend, trelawney, though the latter was an almost orientally dark-complexioned man, and mr. bret harte was comparatively fair. they were both tall, well-made men of fine figure; both, too, were handsome, with a peculiar expression of face which suggested small success to any one who might engage in personal conflict with them." in reality bret harte was not tall, though others beside mrs. kemble thought him to be so; his height was five feet, eight and a half inches. his face was smooth and regular, without much color; the chin firm and well rounded; the nose straight and rather large, "the nose of generosity and genius"; the under-lip having what mr. howells called a "fascinating, forward thrust." the following description dates from the time when he left california: "he was a handsome, distinguished-looking man, and although his oval face was slightly marred by scars of small-pox, and his abundant dark hair was already streaked with gray, he carried his slight, upright figure with a quiet elegance that would have made an impression, even when the refinement of face, voice and manner had not been recognized." mr. howells says of him at the same period: "he was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time could say to him, 'mr. harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars so recklessly when there is this scare about small-pox?' 'no! madam!' he said, in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, 'i bear a charmèd life.'" almost every one who met bret harte was struck by his low, rich, well-modulated voice. mr. howells speaks of "the mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other." his handwriting was small, firm and graceful. chance acquaintances made in england were sometimes surprised at bret harte's appearance. they had formed, writes mme. van de velde, "a vague, intangible idea of a wild, reckless californian, impatient of social trammels, whose life among the argonauts must have fashioned him after a type differing widely from the reality. these idealists were partly disappointed, partly relieved, when their american writer turned out to be a quiet, low-voiced, easy-mannered, polished gentleman, who smilingly confessed that precisely because he had roughed it a good deal in his youth he was inclined to enjoy the comforts and avail himself of the facilities of an older civilization, when placed within his reach." bret harte's knowledge of these disappointed expectations may have suggested the plot of that amusing story _their uncle from california_, the hero of which presents a similar contrast to the barbaric ideal which had been formed by his eastern relatives. the photographs of bret harte, taken at various periods in his life, reveal great changes, apart from those of age. the first one, at seventeen, shows an intellectual youth, very mature for his age, with a fine forehead, the hair parted at one side, and something of a rustic appearance. in the next picture, taken at the age of thirty-five or thereabout, we see a determined-looking man, with slight side-whiskers, a drooping mustache, and clothes a little "loud." five years afterward there is another photograph in which the whiskers have disappeared, the hair seems longer and more curly, the clothes are unquestionably "loud," and the picture, taken altogether, has a slight tinge of bohemian-like vulgarity. in the later photographs the hair is shorter, and parted in the middle, the mustache subdued, the dress handsome and in perfect taste, and the whole appearance is that of a refined, sophisticated, aristocratic man of the world, dignified, and yet perfectly simple, unaffected and free from self-consciousness. in a measure bret harte seems to have undergone that process of development which mr. henry james has described in "the american." the reader may remember how the american (far from a typical one, by the way) began with sky-blue neckties and large plaids, and ended with clothes and adornments of the most chastened, correct and elegant character. actors are apt to go through a similar process. the first great exponent of the "suppressed emotion" school began, and in california too, as it happened, by splitting the ears of the groundlings and sawing the air with both arms. bret harte had something of a hebrew look, and not unnaturally so, for he came of mixed english, dutch and hebrew stock. to be exact, he was half english, one quarter dutch, and one quarter hebrew. the hebrew strain also was derived from english soil, so that with the exception of a dutch great-grandmother, all his ancestors emigrated from england, and not very remotely. the hebrew in the pedigree was his paternal grandfather, bernard hart. mr. hart was born in london, on christmas day, or , but as a boy of thirteen he went out to canada, where his relatives were numerous. these canadian harts were a marked family, energetic, forceful, strong-willed, prosperous, given to hospitality, warm-hearted, and pleasure-loving. one of bernard hart's canadian cousins left behind him at his death no less than fourteen families, all established in the world with a good degree of comfort, and with a sufficient degree of respectability. now the impropriety, to say nothing about the extravagance, of maintaining fourteen separate families is so great that no reader of this book (the author feels confident) need be warned against it; and yet it indicates a large, free-handed, lordly way of doing things. it was no ordinary man, and no ordinary strain of blood that could produce such a record. bernard hart remained but three years in canada, and in moved to new york where, although scarcely more than a boy, he acted as the business representative of his canadian kinsfolk. the canadian harts had many commercial and social relations with the metropolis, and there was much "cousining," much going back and forth between the two places. bernard hart lived in new york for the rest of his life, and attained a high rank in the community. "towering aloft among the magnates of the city of the last and present century," writes a local historian, "is bernard hart." he was successful in business, very active in social and charitable affairs, and prominent in the synagogue. in he formed a partnership with leonard lispenard, under the name of lispenard and hart. they were commission merchants and auctioneers, and did a large business. in the firm was dissolved, and mr. hart continued in trade by himself. in he became secretary to the new york stock exchange board, and held that office for twenty-two years, resigning at the age of eighty-nine. in , the year of the yellow fever plague, bernard hart rendered heroic service, as is testified by a contemporary annalist. "mr. hart and mr. pell, who kept store at market street, a few doors from mr. hart, were unceasing in their exertions. night and day, hardly giving themselves time to sleep or eat, they were among the sick and dying, relieving their wants. they were angels of mercy in those awful days of the first great pestilence." bernard hart was also a military man, and in became quartermaster of a militia regiment, composed wholly of citizens of new york. that he was a "clubable" man, too, is very apparent. it was an era of clubs, and bernard hart founded the association known as "the friary." it met on the first and third sundays of every month at pine street. he was also president of the house of lords, a merchants' club, which met at baker's city tavern every week-day night, at o'clock, adjourning at o'clock. each member was allowed a limited quantity of liquor, business was discussed, contracts were made, and sociability was promoted. he was, too, a member of the st. george society, and is said, also, to have been a mason, belonging to holland lodge no. , of which john jacob astor was master in . bernard hart was a devout jew, and his name frequently appears in the records of the spanish and portuguese synagogue, known as the congregation shearith israel, the first synagogue established in new york. he lived in various houses,--at water street, at cedar street, at lispenard street, at varick street, and finally at white street. a picture of him still hangs in the counting-room of messrs. arthur lipper and co., in broad street. how came it that this orthodox jew, this pillar of the synagogue, married a christian woman? the romance, if there was one, is imperfectly preserved even in the family traditions. it is known only that in bernard hart married catharine brett, a woman of good family; that after living together for a year or less, they separated; that there was one son, henry hart, born february , , who lived with his mother, and who became the father of bret harte. a few years later, in , bernard hart married zipporah seixas, one of the sixteen children, eight sons and eight daughters, born to benjamin mendez seixas. these young women were noted for their beauty and amiability, and so strong was the impression which they produced that it lasted even until the succeeding generation. the marriage ceremony was performed by gershom mendez seixas, a brother of the bride's father, and rabbi of the synagogue already mentioned. from this marriage came numerous sons and daughters, whose careers were honorable. emanuel b. hart was a merchant and broker, an alderman, a member of congress in and , and surveyor of the port of new york from to . benjamin i. hart was a broker in new york. david hart, a teller in the pacific bank, fought gallantly at the battle of bull run and was badly wounded there. theodore and daniel hart were merchants in new york. [illustration: bernard hart bret harte's grandfather] one of bernard hart's sons by the hebrew wife was named henry. he was born in , and died of consumption in his father's house in white street on november , . he was unmarried. bernard hart himself died in , at the age of ninety-one. his wife was then living at the age of seventy-nine. none of his descendants on the hebrew side knew of his marriage to catharine brett or of the existence of his son, the first henry hart, until some years after bret harte's death. it seems almost incredible that this hebrew merchant, prominent as he was in business and social life, in clubs and societies, in the militia and the synagogue, should have been able to keep the fact of his first marriage so secret that it remained a secret for a hundred years; it seems very unlikely that a woman of good english birth and family should in that era have married a jew; it is highly improbable that a father should give to a son by a second marriage the same name already given to his son by a former marriage. and yet all these things are indisputable facts. there are members of bret harte's family still living who remember bernard hart, and his occasional visits to the family of henry hart, his son by catharine brett, whom he assisted with money and advice so long as he lived. bret harte himself remembered being taken to the new york stock exchange by his father, who there pointed out to him his grandfather, bernard hart. it may be added that between the descendants of bernard hart and catharine brett and those of bernard hart and zipporah seixas there is a marked resemblance. how far was the venerable jew from suspecting that the one fact in his life which he was so anxious to conceal was the very fact which would rescue his name from oblivion, and preserve it so long as english literature shall exist! even if the marriage to catharine brett, a christian woman, had been known it would not, according to jewish law, have invalidated the second marriage, but it would doubtless have prevented that marriage. what rendered the long concealment possible was, of course, the deep gulf which then separated jew from gentile. catharine brett had been warned by her father that he would cast her off if she married the jew; and this threat was fulfilled. thenceforth, she lived a lonely and secluded life, supported, it is believed, by her husband, but having no other relation with him. the marriage was so improbable, so ill-assorted, so productive of unhappiness, and yet so splendid in its ultimate results, that it seems almost atheistic to ascribe it to chance. is the world governed in that haphazard manner! but who was this unfortunate catharine brett? she was a granddaughter of roger brett, an englishman, and, it is supposed, a lieutenant in the british navy, who first appears in new york, about the year , as a friend of lord cornbury, then governor of the province. the coat of arms which roger brett brought over, and which is still preserved on a pewter placque, is identical with that borne by judge, sir balliol brett, before his elevation to the peerage as viscount esher. roger brett was a vestryman of trinity church from to . in november, , he married catharyna rombout, daughter of francis rombout, who was one of the early and successful merchants in the city of new york. her mother, helena teller, daughter of william teller, a captain in the indian wars, was married three times, francis rombout being her third husband. schuyler colfax, once vice-president of the united states, was descended from her. francis rombout was born at hasselt in belgium, and came to new amsterdam while it still belonged to the dutch. he was an elder in the dutch church, served as lieutenant in an expedition against the swedes, was schepen under the dutch municipal government, alderman under the reorganized british government, and, in , became the twelfth mayor of new york. francis rombout left to his daughter, roger brett's wife, an immense estate on the hudson river, which included the fishkills, and consisted chiefly of forest land. there, in , the young couple built for their home a manor house, which is still standing and is occupied by a descendant of roger brett, to whom it has come down in direct line through the female branch. a few years later, at least before , roger brett was drowned at the mouth of fishkill creek in the hudson river. catharyna, his widow, survived him for many years. she was a woman of marked character and ability, known through all that region as madame brett. she administered her large estate, leased and sold much land to settlers, controlled the indians who were numerous, superintended a mill to which both dutchess county and orange county sent their grist, owned the sloops which were the only carriers between this outpost of the colony and the city of new york, and was one of the founders of the fishkill dutch church. in that church, a tablet to her memory was recently erected by the rombout-brett association, formed a few years ago by her descendants. the tablet is inscribed as follows:-- _in memory of catharyna brett, widow of lieutenant roger brett, r.n., and daughter of francis rombout, a grantee of rombout patent, born in the city of new york , died in rombout precinct, fishkill, . to this church she was a liberal contributor, and underneath its pulpit her body is interred. this tablet was erected by her descendants and others interested in the colonial history of fishkill, a. d. ._ roger brett had four sons, of whom two died young and unmarried, and two, francis and robert, married, and left many children. whether the catharine brett who married bernard hart was descended from francis or from robert is not certainly known. francis brett's wife was a descendant of cornelius van wyck, one of the earliest settlers on long island. robert brett's wife was a miss dubois. such was the ancestry of bret harte's paternal grandmother. her son, henry hart,[ ] lived with her until, on may , , he entered union college, schenectady, as a member of the class of . he remained in college until the end of his senior year, and passed all his examinations for graduation, but failed to receive his degree because a college bill amounting to ninety dollars had not been paid. the previous bills were paid by his mother, "catharine hart." alas! the non-payment of this bill was an omen of the future. henry hart and his illustrious son were both the reverse of thrifty or economical. money seemed to fly away from them; they had no capacity for keeping it, and no discretion in spending it. unpaid bills were the bane of their existence. henry hart's improvidence is ascribed, in part, by those who knew him, to the irregular manner in which his father supplied him with money, bernard hart being sometimes very lavish and sometimes very parsimonious with his son. henry hart was a well-built, athletic-looking man, with rather large features, and dark hair and complexion. his height was five feet ten inches, and his weight one hundred and seventy pounds. he was an accomplished scholar, speaking french, spanish and italian, and being well versed in greek and latin. he passed his short life as school-teacher, tutor, lecturer and translator. on may , , he married elizabeth rebecca, daughter of henry philip ostrander, an "upstate" surveyor and farmer, who belonged to a prominent dutch family which settled at kingston on the hudson in . it will be remembered that the hero of bret harte's story, _two americans_, is major philip ostrander. the mother of elizabeth ostrander, henry hart's wife, was abigail truesdale, of english descent. henry hart was brought up by his mother in the dutch reformed faith, but soon after leaving college, owing to what influence is unknown, he became a catholic, and remained such until his death. his wife was an episcopalian, and his children were of that, if of any persuasion. in we find henry hart at albany, and there he remained until , the year of bret harte's birth. in and , he was instructor in the albany female academy, a girls' school, famous in its day, where he taught reading and writing, rhetoric and mathematics. early in he left the academy, and for two years he conducted a private school of his own at columbia street, but this appears not to have been successful, for he ceased to be a resident of the city in the latter part of , or early in . one event in henry hart's life at albany is significant. in december, , a meeting was held in the mayor's court room to organize a young men's association, which proved to be a great success, and which has played an important part in the life of the city down to the present day. henry hart, though a comparative stranger in albany, was chosen to explain the objects of the association at this meeting, and at the next meeting he was elected one of the managers. when bret harte came east from california, he went to albany and addressed the association, upon the invitation of its members. after leaving albany the family led an unsettled, uncomfortable life, going from place to place, with occasional returns to the home of an ostrander relative in hudson street in the city of new york. the late mr. a. v. s. anthony, the well-known engraver, was a neighbor of bret harte in hudson street, and played and fought with him there, when they were both about seven or eight years old. afterward they met in california, and again in london. from albany the henry hart family went to hudson, where mr. hart acted as principal of an academy; and subsequently they lived in new brunswick, new jersey; in philadelphia; in providence, rhode island; in lowell, massachusetts; in boston and elsewhere. a few years before her death mrs. hart read the life of bronson alcott, and when she laid down the book she remarked that the troubles and privations endured by the alcott family bore a striking resemblance to those which she and her children had undergone. some want of balance in henry hart's character prevented him, notwithstanding his undoubted talents, his enthusiasm, and his accomplishments, from ever obtaining any material success in life, or even a home for his family and himself. but he was a man of warm impulses and deep feeling. when henry clay was nominated for the presidency in , henry hart espoused his cause almost with fury. he gave up all other employment to electioneer in behalf of the whig candidate, and the defeat of his idol was a crushing blow from which he never recovered. it was the first time that a really great man, as clay certainly was, had been outvoted in a contest for the presidency by a commonplace man, like polk; and clay's defeat was regarded by his adherents not only as a hideous injustice, but as a national calamity. it is not given to every one to take any impersonal matter so seriously as henry hart took the defeat of his political chieftain; and his death a year later, in , may justly be regarded as a really noble ending to a troubled and unsuccessful life. chapter ii bret harte's boyhood after the death of henry hart, his widow remained with her children in new york and brooklyn until . they were supported in part by her family, the ostranders, and in part by bernard hart. there were four children, two sons and two daughters. eliza, the eldest, who is still living, and to whom the author is indebted for information about the family, was married in to mr. f. f. knaufft, and her life has been passed mainly in new york and new jersey. mr. ernest knaufft, editor of the "art student," and well known as a critic and writer, is her son. unfortunately, mrs. knaufft's house was burned in , and with it many letters and papers relating to her father and his parents, and also the mss. of various lectures delivered by him. the younger daughter, margaret b., went to california with bret harte, and preceded him as a contributor of stories and sketches to the "golden era," and other papers in san francisco. she married mr. b. h. wyman, and is still a resident of california. bret harte's sisters are women of distinguished appearance, and remarkable for force of character. bret harte's only brother, henry, had a short but striking career, which displayed, even more perhaps than did the career of bret harte himself, that intensity which seems to have been their chief inheritance from the hebrew strain. the following account of him is furnished by mrs. knaufft: "my brother henry was two years and six months older than his brother francis brett harte. henry began reading history when he was six years old, and from that time until he was twelve years of age, he read history, ancient and modern, daily, sometimes only one hour, at other times from two to three hours. what interested him was the wars; he would read for two or three hours, and then if a battle had been won by his favorite warriors, he would spring to his feet, shouting, 'victory is ours,' repeatedly. he would read lying on the floor, and often we would say ridiculous and provoking things about him, and sometimes pull his hair, but he never paid the slightest attention to us, being perfectly oblivious of his surroundings. his memory was phenomenal. he read froissart's chronicles when he was about ten years old, and could repeat page after page accurately. one evening an old professor was talking with my mother about some event in ancient history, and he mentioned the date of a decisive battle. henry, who was listening intently, said, 'i beg pardon, professor, you are wrong. that battle was fought on such a date.' the professor was astonished. 'where did you hear about that battle?' he asked. 'i read that history last year,' replied henry. "when the boy was twelve years old, he came home from school one day, and rushing into his mother's room, shouted, 'war is declared! war is declared!' 'what in the name of common sense has that got to do with you?' asked my mother. 'mother,' said henry, 'i am going to fight for my country; that is what i was created for.' "after some four or five months of constant anxiety, caused by henry's offering himself to every captain whose ship was going to or near mexico, a friend of my mother's told lieutenant benjamin dove of the navy about henry, and he became greatly interested, and finally, through his efforts, henry was taken on his ship. henry was so small that his uniform had to be made for him. the ship went ashore on the island of eleuthera, to the great delight of my brother, who wrote his mother a startling account of the shipwreck. i cannot remember whether the ship was able to go on her voyage, or whether the men were all transferred to commander tatnall's ship the 'spitfire.' i know that henry was on commander tatnall's ship at the bombardment of vera cruz, and was in the fort or forts at tuxpan, where the commander and henry were both wounded. commander tatnall wrote my mother that when henry was wounded, he exclaimed, 'thank god, i am shot in the face,' and that when he inquired for henry, he was told that he was hiding because he did not want his wound dressed. when the commander found henry, he asked him why he did not want his wound dressed. with tears in his eyes henry said, 'because i'm afraid it won't show any scar if the surgeon dresses it.' "when my brother returned from mexico, he became very restless. the sea had cast its spell about him, and finally a friend, captain of a ship, took henry on a very long voyage, going around cape horn to california. when they arrived at san francisco, my brother, who was then just sixteen, was taken in charge by a relative. i never heard of his doing anything remarkable during his short life. as the irony of fate would have it, he died suddenly from pneumonia, just before the civil war." bret harte was equally precocious, and he was precocious even in respect to the sense of humor, which commonly requires some little experience for its development. it is a family tradition that he burlesqued the rather bald language of his primer at the age of five; and his sisters distinctly remember that, a year later, he came home from a school exhibition, and made them scream with laughter by mimicking the boy who spoke "my name is norval." he was naturally a very quiet, studious child; and this tendency was increased by ill health. from his sixth to his tenth year, he was unable to lead an active life. at the age of six he was reading shakspere and froissart, and at seven he took up "dombey and son," and so began his acquaintance with that author who was to influence him far more than any other. from dickens he proceeded to fielding, goldsmith, smollett, cervantes, and washington irving. during an illness of two months, when he was fourteen years old, he learned to read greek sufficiently well to astonish his mother. if the hart family resembled the alcott family in the matter of misfortunes and privations, so it did, also, in its intellectual atmosphere. mrs. hart shared her husband's passion for literature; and she had a keen, critical faculty, to which, the family think, bret harte was much indebted for the perfection of his style. henry hart had accumulated a library surprisingly large for a man of his small means, and the whole household was given to the reading not simply of books, but of the best books, and to talking about them. it was a household in which the literary second-rate was unerringly, and somewhat scornfully, discriminated from the first-rate. when bret harte was only eleven years old he wrote a poem called _autumnal musings_ which he sent surreptitiously to the "new york sunday atlas," and the poem was published in the next issue. this was a wonderful feat for a boy of that age, and he was naturally elated by seeing his verses in print; but the family critics pointed out their defects with such unpleasant frankness that the conceit of the youthful poet was nipped in the bud. many years afterward, bret harte said with a laugh, "i sometimes wonder that i ever wrote a line of poetry again." but the discipline was wholesome, and as he grew older his mother took his literary ambitions more seriously. when he was about sixteen, he wrote a long poem called _the hudson river_. it was never published, but mrs. hart made a careful study of it; and at her son's request, wrote out her criticisms at length. it will thus be seen that bret harte, as an author, far from being an academic, was strictly a home product. he left school at the age of thirteen and went immediately into a lawyer's office where he remained about a year, and thence into the counting-room of a merchant. he was self-supporting before he reached the age of sixteen. in , as has already been mentioned, his older sister was married; and in his mother went to california with a party of relatives and friends, in order to make her home there with her elder son, henry. she had intended to take with her the other two children, margaret and francis brett; but as the daughter was in school, she left the two behind for a few months, and they followed in february, . they travelled by the nicaragua route, and after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in san francisco.[ ] no mention of their arrival was made in the newspapers; no guns were fired; no band played; but the youth of eighteen who thus slipped unnoticed into california was the one person, out of the many thousands arriving in those early years, whose coming was a fact of importance. chapter iii bret harte's wanderings in california bret harte and his sister arrived at san francisco in march, , stayed there one night, and went the next morning to oakland, across the bay, where their mother and her second husband, colonel andrew williams, were living. in this house the boy remained about a year, teaching for a while, and afterward serving as clerk in an apothecary's shop. during this year he began his career as a professional writer, contributing some stories and poems to eastern magazines. bret harte, like thackeray, was fortunate in his stepfather, and if, according to the accepted story, thackeray's stepfather was the prototype of colonel newcome, the two men must have had much in common. colonel williams was born at cherry valley in the state of new york, and was graduated at union college with the class of . henry hart's class was that of , but the two young men were friends in college. colonel williams had seen much of the world, having travelled extensively in europe early in the century, and he was a cultivated, well-read man. but he was chiefly remarkable for his high standard of honor, and his amiable, chivalrous nature. he was a gentleman of the old school in the best sense, grave but sympathetic, courtly but kind. his generosity was unbounded. such a man might appear to have been somewhat out of place in bustling california, but his qualities were appreciated there. he was the first mayor of oakland, in the year , and was re-elected the following year. colonel williams built a comfortable house in oakland, one of the first, if not the very first in that city in which laths and plaster were used; but land titles in california were extremely uncertain, and after a long and stubborn contest in the courts, colonel williams was dispossessed, and lost the house upon which he had expended much time and money. he then took up his residence in san francisco, where he lived until his return to the east in the year . his wife, bret harte's mother, died at morristown, new jersey, april , , and was buried in the family lot at greenwood, new york. the following year he went back to california for a visit to bret harte's sister, mrs. wyman, but soon after his arrival died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six. the san francisco and oakland papers spoke very highly of colonel williams after his death, and one of them closed an account of his life with the following words: "colonel williams had that indefinable sweetness of manner which indicates innate refinement and nobility of soul. there was a touch of the antique about him. he seemed a little out of time and place in this hurried age of ours. he belonged to and typified the calmer temper of a former generation. a gentler spirit never walked the earth. he personified all the sweet charities of life. his heart was great, warm and tender, and he died leaving no man in the world his enemy. colonel williams was the stepfather of bret harte, between whom and himself there existed the most affectionate relations." it was during his first year in california that bret harte had that gambling experience which he has related in his _bohemian days in san francisco_, and which throws so much light on his character that it should be quoted here in part at least:-- "i was watching roulette one evening, intensely absorbed in the mere movement of the players. either they were so preoccupied with the game, or i was really older looking than my actual years, but a bystander laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder, and said, as to an ordinary _habitué_, 'ef you're not chippin' in yourself, pardner, s'pose you give _me_ a show.' now, i honestly believe that up to that moment i had no intention, nor even a desire, to try my own fortune. but in the embarrassment of the sudden address i put my hand in my pocket, drew out a coin and laid it, with an attempt at carelessness, but a vivid consciousness that i was blushing, upon a vacant number. to my horror i saw that i had put down a large coin--the bulk of my possessions! i did not flinch, however; i think any boy who reads this will understand my feeling; it was not only my coin but my manhood at stake.... i even affected to be listening to the music. the wheel spun again; the game was declared, the rake was busy, but i did not move. at last the man i had displaced touched me on the arm and whispered, 'better make a straddle and divide your stake this time.' i did not understand him, but as i saw he was looking at the board, i was obliged to look, too. i drew back dazed and bewildered! where my coin had lain a moment before was a glittering heap of gold. "... 'make your game, gentlemen,' said the croupier monotonously. i thought he looked at me--indeed, everybody seemed to be looking at me--and my companion repeated his warning. but here i must again appeal to the boyish reader in defence of my idiotic obstinacy. to have taken advice would have shown my youth. i shook my head--i could not trust my voice. i smiled, but with a sinking heart, and let my stake remain. the ball again sped round the wheel, and stopped. there was a pause. the croupier indolently advanced his rake and swept my whole pile with others into the bank! i had lost it all. perhaps it may be difficult for me to explain why i actually felt relieved, and even to some extent triumphant, but i seemed to have asserted my grown-up independence--possibly at the cost of reducing the number of my meals for days; but what of that!... the man who had spoken to me, i think, suddenly realized, at the moment of my disastrous _coup_, the fact of my extreme youth. he moved toward the banker, and leaning over him whispered a few words. the banker looked up, half impatiently, half kindly,--his hand straying tentatively toward the pile of coin. i instinctively knew what he meant, and, summoning my determination, met his eyes with all the indifference i could assume, and walked away." in , being then twenty years old, young harte left colonel williams's house, and thenceforth shifted for himself. his first engagement was as tutor in a private family at alamo in the san ramon valley. there were several sons in the family, and one or two of them were older than their tutor. the next year he went to humboldt bay in humboldt county, on the upper coast of california, about two hundred and fifty miles north of san francisco. thence he made numerous trips as express messenger on stages running eastward to trinity county, and northward to del norte, which, as the name implies, is the extreme upper county in the state. the experience was a valuable one, and it was concerning this period of bret harte's career that his friend, charles warren stoddard, wrote: "he bore a charmed life. probably his youth was his salvation, for he ran a thousand risks, yet seemed only to gain in health and spirits." the post of express messenger was especially dangerous. bret harte's predecessor was shot through the arm by a highwayman; his successor was killed. the safe containing the treasure carried by wells, fargo and company, who did practically all the express business in california, was always heavily chained to the box of the coach, and sometimes, when a particularly large amount of gold had to be conveyed, armed guards were carried inside of the coach. for the stage to be "held up" by highwaymen was a common occurrence, and the danger from breakdowns and floods was not small. in the course of a few months between the towns of visalia and kern river the overland stage broke the legs of three several drivers. it was a frequent thing for the stage to cross a stream, suddenly become a river, with the horses swimming, a strong current running through the coach itself, and the passengers perched on the seats to escape being swept away.[ ] with these dangers of flood and field to encounter, with precipices to skirt, with six half-broken horses to control, and with the ever-present possibility of serving as a target for "road-agents," it may be imagined that the california stage-driver was no common man, and the type is preserved in the character of yuba bill. he can be compared only with colonel starbottle and jack hamlin, and jack hamlin was one of the few men whom yuba bill condescended to treat as an equal. their meeting in _gabriel convoy_ is historic: "'barkeep--hist that pizen over to jack. here's to ye agin, ole man. but i'm glad to see ye!' the crowd hung breathless over the two men--awestruck and respectful. it was a meeting of the gods. none dared speak." "yuba bill," writes mr. chesterton, "is not convivial; it might almost be said that he is too great even to be sociable. a circle of quiescence and solitude, such as that which might ring a saint or a hermit, rings this majestic and profound humorist. his jokes do not flow from him, like those of mr. weller, sparkling and continual like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and capriciously, like a crash of avalanche from a great mountain. tony weller has the noisy humor of london. yuba bill has the silent humor of the earth." then the critic quotes yuba bill's rebuke to the passenger who has expressed a too-confident opinion as to the absence of the expected highwaymen: "'you ain't puttin' any price on that opinion, air ye?' inquired bill politely. "'no.' "'cos thar's a comic paper in 'frisco pays for them things, and i've seen worse things in it.'" even better, perhaps, is yuba bill's reply to judge beeswinger, who rashly betrayed some over-consciousness of his importance as a member of the state assembly. "'any political news from below, bill?' he asked, as the latter slowly descended from his lofty perch, without, however, any perceptible coming down of mien or manner. 'not much,' said bill, with deliberate gravity. 'the president o' the united states hezn't bin hisself sens you refoosed that seat in the cabinet. the gin'ral feelin' in perlitical circles is one o' regret.'" "to be rebuked thus," mr. chesterton continues, "is like being rebuked by the pyramids or by the starry heavens. there is about yuba bill this air of a pugnacious calm, a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like that of dr. johnson at his best. and the effect is inexpressibly increased by the background and the whole picture which bret harte paints so powerfully,--the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge, dark form of yuba bill, a silent mountain of humor." after his service as expressman, bret harte went to a town called union, about three hundred miles north of san francisco, where he learned the printer's trade in the office of the "humboldt times." he also taught school again in union, and for the second time acted as clerk in a drug store. speaking of his experience in this capacity, mr. pemberton, his english biographer, gravely says, "i have heard english physicians express wonder at his grasp of the subject." one wonders, in turn, if bret harte did not do a little hoaxing in this line. "to the end of his days," writes mr. pemberton, "he could speak with authority as to the virtues and properties of medicines." young harte had a wonderful faculty of picking up information, and no doubt his two short terms of service as a compounder of medicines were not thrown away upon him. but bret harte was the last person in the world to pose as an expert, and it seems probable that the extent of his knowledge was fairly described in the story _how reuben allen saw life in san francisco_. that part of this story which deals with the drug clerk is so plainly autobiographical, and so characteristic of the author, that a quotation from it will not be out of place:-- "it was near midnight, the hour of closing, and the junior partner was alone in the shop. he felt drowsy; the mysterious incense of the shop, that combined essence of drugs, spice, scented soap, and orris root--which always reminded him of the arabian nights--was affecting him. he yawned, and then, turning away, passed behind the counter, took down a jar labelled 'glycyrr. glabra,' selected a piece of spanish licorice, and meditatively sucked it.... "he was just nineteen, he had early joined the emigration to california, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to his temperament.... a slight knowledge of latin as a written language, an american schoolboy's acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions. he knew the difference between acids and alkalis and the peculiar results which attended their incautious combination. but he was excessively deliberate, painstaking and cautious. there was no danger of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was possible that an urgent 'case' might have succumbed to the disease while he was putting up the remedy.... in those days the 'heroic' practice of medicine was in keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were 'record' doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their prescriptions with a modest query." [illustration: san francisco, november, j. c. ward, del.] it was doubtless bret harte's experience in the drug store which suggested the story of liberty jones, whose discovery of an arsenical spring in the forest was the means of transforming that well-made, but bony and sallow missouri girl into a beautiful woman, with well-rounded limbs, rosy cheeks, lustrous eyes and glossy hair. it has been a matter of some discussion whether bret harte ever worked as a miner or not; and the evidence upon the point is not conclusive. but it is hard to believe that he did not try his luck at gold-seeking, when everybody else was trying, and his narrative _how i went to the mines_ seems to have the ear-marks of an autobiographical sketch. it is regarded as such by his sisters; and the modest, deprecating manner in which the storyteller's adventures are related, serves to confirm that impression. of all his experiences in california, those which gave him the most pleasure seem to have been his several short but fruitful terms of service as schoolmaster and tutor. his knowledge of children, being based upon sympathy, became both acute and profound. how many thousand million times have children gone to school of a morning and found the master awaiting them, and yet who but bret harte has ever described the exact manner of their approach! "they came in their usual desultory fashion--the fashion of country school-children the world over--irregularly, spasmodically, and always as if accidentally; a few hand-in-hand, others driven ahead of or dragged behind their elders; some in straggling groups more or less coherent and at times only connected by far-off intermediate voices scattered over a space of half a mile, but never quite alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business in hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless détours--seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school!"[ ] bret harte realized the essential truth that children are not little, immature men and women, but rather infantile barbarians, creatures of an archaic type, representing a period in the development of the human race which does not survive in adult life. hence the reserve, the aloofness of children, their remoteness from grown people. there are certain things which the boy most deeply feels that he must not do, and certain other things that he must do; as, for example, to bear without telling any pains that may be inflicted upon him by his mates or by older boys. for a thousand years or more fathers and mothers have held a different code upon these points, but with how little effect upon their children! johnny filgee illustrated upon a truly californian scale these boyish qualities of reticence and endurance. when he had accidentally been shot in the duel between the master and cressy's father (the child being perched in a tree), he refrained from making the least sound, although a word or an outcry would have brought the men to his assistance. "a certain respect to himself and his brother kept him from uttering even a whimper of weakness." left alone in the dark woods, unable to move, johnny became convinced that his end was near, and he pleased himself by thinking that "they would all feel exceedingly sorry and alarmed, and would regret having made him wash himself on saturday night." and so, having composed himself, "he turned on his side to die, as became the scion of an heroic race!" then follows a sentence in which the artist, with one bold sweep of his brush, paints in nature herself as a witness of the scene; and yet her material immensity does not dwarf or belittle the spiritual superiority of the wounded youngster in the foreground: "the free woods, touched by an upspringing wind, waved their dark arms above him, and higher yet a few patient stars silently ranged themselves around his pillow." that other johnny, for whom _santa claus came to simpson's bar_, richelieu sharpe in _a phyllis of the sierras_, john milton harcourt in the _first family of tasajara_, leonidas boone, the _mercury of the foot-hills_, and john bunyan medliker, the _youngest prospector in calaveras_,--all illustrate the same type, with many individual variations. another phase of the archaic nature of children is their extreme sensitiveness to impressions. just as a squirrel hears more acutely than a man, and the dog's sense of smell is keener, so a child, within the comparatively small range of his mental activity, is more open to subtle indications. bret harte often touches upon this quality of childhood, as in the following passage: "it was not strange, therefore, that the little people of the indian spring school knew perhaps more of the real relations of cressy mckinstry to her admirers than the admirers themselves. not that the knowledge was outspoken--for children rarely gossip in the grown-up sense, or even communicate by words intelligent to the matured intellect. a whisper, a laugh that often seemed vague and unmeaning, conveyed to each other a world of secret significance, and an apparently senseless burst of merriment in which the whole class joined--and that the adult critic set down to 'animal spirits'--a quality much more rare with children than is generally supposed--was only a sympathetic expression of some discovery happily oblivious to older perceptions." this acuteness of perception, seen also in some men of a simple, archaic type, puts children in close relationship with the lower animals, unless, indeed, it is counteracted by that cruelty which is also a quality of childhood. when richelieu sharpe retired to rest, it was in company with a whole retinue of dependents. "on the pillow near him an indistinguishable mass of golden fur--the helpless bulk of a squirrel chained to the leg of his cot; at his feet a wall-eyed cat, who had followed his tyrannous caprices with the long-suffering devotion of her sex; on the shelf above him a loathsome collection of flies and tarantulas in dull green bottles, a slab of gingerbread for light nocturnal refreshment, and his sister's pot of bear's grease.... the sleeper stirred slightly and awoke. at the same moment, by some mysterious sympathy, a pair of beady bright eyes appeared in the bulk of fur near his curls, the cat stretched herself, and even a vague agitation was heard in the bottles on the shelf."[ ] that last touch, intimating some community of feeling between richelieu and his insects, is, as the reader will grant, the touch of genius. bridging the gulf impassable for an ordinary mind, it assumes a fact which, like the shape of donatello's ears, is true to the imagination, and not so manifestly impossible as to shock the reason. it is sometimes said that california in the fifties represented the american character in its most extreme form,--the quintessence, as it were, of energy and democracy. this statement would certainly apply to the california children, in whom the ordinary forwardness of the american child became a sort of elfish precocity. such a boy was richelieu sharpe. his gallantries, his independence, his self-reliance, his adult ambitions,--these qualities, oddly assorted with the primeval, imaginative nature of the true child, made richelieu such a youngster as was never seen outside of the united states, and perhaps never seen outside of california. the english child of the upper classes, as bret harte knew him in after years, made a strange contrast to the richelieu sharpes and john bunyan medlikers that he had learned to love in california. in a letter to his wife written from the house of james anthony froude, in , he said: "the eldest girl is not unlike a highly-educated boston girl, and the conversation sometimes reminds me of boston. the youngest daughter, only ten years old, told her sister, in reference to some conversation froude and i had, that 'she feared' (this child) 'that mr. bret harte was inclined to be sceptical!' doesn't this exceed any english story of the precocity of american children? the boy, scarcely fourteen, acts like a boy of eight (an american boy of eight) and talks like a man of thirty, so far as pure english and facility of expression go. his manners are perfect, yet he is perfectly simple and boy-like. the culture and breeding of some english children are really marvellous. but somehow--and here comes one of my 'buts'--there's always a suggestion of some repression, some discipline that i don't like."[ ] bret harte's last employment during this wandering life was that of compositor, printer's devil, and assistant editor of the "northern california," published at eureka, a seacoast town in humboldt county. here he met mr. charles a. murdock, who gives this interesting account of him: "he was fond of whist, genial, witty, but quiet and reserved, something of a 'tease'" (the reader will remember that mr. howells speaks of this trait) "and a practical joker; not especially popular, as he was thought to be fastidious, and to hold himself aloof from 'the general'; but he was simply a self-respecting, gentlemanly fellow, with quiet tastes, and a keen insight into character. he was no roisterer, and his habits were clean. he was too independent and indifferent to curry favor, or to counterfeit a liking." during a temporary absence of the editor bret harte was entrusted with the conduct of the paper, and about that time a cowardly massacre of indians was perpetrated by some americans in the vicinity. this was no uncommon event, and the usual attitude of the pioneers toward the indians may be gathered from the following passage in a letter written to a newspaper in august, , from rogue river: "during this period we have been searching about in the mountains, disturbing villages, destroying all the males we could find, and capturing women and children. we have killed about thirty altogether, and have about twenty-eight now in camp." at the stanislaus diggings, in , a miner called to an indian boy to help him catch a loose horse. the boy, not understanding english, and being frightened by the man's gestures, ran away, whereupon the miner raised his gun and shot the boy dead. nobody hated injustice or cruelty more than bret harte, and in his editorial capacity he scathingly condemned the murder of indians which occurred in the neighborhood of eureka. the article excited the anger of the community, and a mob was collected for the avowed purpose of wrecking the newspaper office and hanging or otherwise maltreating the youthful writer. bret harte, armed with two pistols, awaited their coming during an evening which was probably the longest of his life. but the timely arrival of a few united states cavalrymen, sent for by some peace-lovers in the town, averted the danger; and the young journalist suffered no harm beyond an abrupt dismissal upon the hasty return of the editor. this event ended his life as a wanderer, and he went back to san francisco. there is not the slightest reason to think that during this period bret harte had any notion of describing california life in fiction or otherwise; and yet, if that had been his object, he could not have ordered his movements more wisely. he had lived on the seacoast and in the interior; he had seen cities, ranches, villages, and mines; he had been tutor, school-teacher, drug clerk, express messenger, printer, and editor. the period was less than two years, and yet he had accumulated a store of facts, impressions and images sufficient to last him a lifetime. he was of a most receptive nature; he was at a receptive age; the world was new to him, and he lived in it and observed it with all the zest of youth, of inexperience, of health and genius. chapter iv bret harte in san francisco bret harte returned to san francisco in , and his first occupation was that of setting type in the office of the "golden era." to this paper his sister, mrs. wyman, had been a contributor for some time, and it was through her that bret harte obtained employment on it as a printer. the "golden era" had been established by young men. "it was," writes mr. stoddard, "the cradle and the grave of many a high hope. there was nothing to be compared with it on that side of the mississippi; and though it could point with pride--it never failed to do so--to a somewhat notable list of contributors, it had always the fine air of the amateur, and was most complacently patronizing. the very pattern of paternal patronage was amiable joe lawrence, its editor. he was an inveterate pipe-smoker, a pillar of cloud, as he sat in his editorial chair, an air of literary mystery enveloping him. he spoke as an oracle, and i remember his calling my attention to a certain anonymous contribution just received, and nodding his head prophetically, for he already had his eye on the fledgling author, a young compositor on the floor above. it was bret harte's first appearance in the 'golden era,' and doubtless lawrence encouraged him as he had encouraged me when, out of the mist about him, he handed me secretly, and with a glance of caution--for his business partner, the marble-hearted, sat at his ledger not far away--he handed me a folded paper on which he had written this startling legend! 'write some prose for the "golden era," and i will give you a dollar a column.'" [illustration: bret harte in ] it was not long before bret harte was promoted from the compositor's stand to the editorial room of the paper, and thus began his literary career. among the sketches which he wrote a few years later, and which have been preserved in the complete edition of his works, are _in a balcony_, _a boy's dog_, and _sidewalkings_. except for a slight restraint and stiffness of style, as if the author had not quite attained the full use of his wings, they show no indications of youth or crudity. _m'liss_ also appeared in the "golden era," illustrated by a specially designed woodcut; and some persons think that this, the first, is also the best of bret harte's stories. at all events, the early _m'liss_ is far superior to the author's lengthened and rewritten _m'liss_ which was included in the collected edition of his works. when it is added that the _condensed novels_, or at least the first of them, were also published in the "golden era," it will be seen with what astonishing quickness his literary style matured. he wrote at first anonymously; afterward, gaining a little self-confidence, he signed his stories "b," and then "bret." it was while engaged in writing for the "golden era," namely, on august , , that bret harte was married to miss anna griswold, daughter of daniel s. and mary dunham griswold of the city of new york. the marriage took place at san raphael. in he was appointed secretary of the california mint, an office which he held for six years and until he left california. for this position he was indebted to mr. r. b. swain, superintendent of the mint, a friend and parishioner of the reverend mr. king, who in that way became a friend of bret harte. mr. swain had a great liking for the young author, and made the official path easy for him. in fact, the position seems to have been one of those sinecures--or nearly that--which are the traditional reward of men of letters, but which a reforming and materialistic age has diverted to less noble uses. in san francisco, both before and after his marriage, bret harte lived a quiet, studious life, going very little into society. of the time during which he was secretary of the mint, mr. stoddard writes: "he was now a man with a family; the resources derived from literature were uncertain and unsatisfactory. his influential friends paid him cheering visits in the gloomy office at the mint where he leavened his daily loaves; and at his desk, between the exacting pages of the too literal ledger, many a couplet cropped out, and the outlines of now famous sketches were faintly limned. his friends were few, but notable. society he ignored in those days. he used to accuse me of wasting my substance in riotous visitations, and thought me a spendthrift of time. he had the precious companionship of books, and the lives of those about him were as an open volume wherein he read 'curiously and to his profit.'" of the notable friends alluded to by mr. stoddard, the most important were the reverend thomas starr king, and mrs. jessie benton frémont, daughter of senator benton, and wife of that captain, afterward general frémont, who became the first united states senator from california, and republican candidate for the presidency in , but who is best known as the pathfinder. his adventures and narratives form an important part of california history. mrs. frémont was an extremely clever, kind-hearted woman, who assisted bret harte greatly by her advice and criticism, still more by her sympathy and encouragement. bret harte was always inclined to underrate his own powers, and to be despondent as to his literary future. on one occasion when, as not seldom happened, he was cast down by his troubles and anxieties, and almost in despair as to his prospects, mrs. frémont sent him some cheering news, and he wrote to her: "i shall no longer disquiet myself about changes in residence or anything else, for i believe that if i were cast upon a desolate island, a savage would come to me next morning and hand me a three-cornered note to say that i had been appointed governor at mrs. frémont's request, at a salary of $ a year." how much twenty-four hundred a year seemed to him then, and how little a few years later! a pioneer who knew them both writes: "mrs. frémont helped bret harte in many ways. in turn he marvelled at her worldly wisdom,--being able to tell one how to make a living. he named her daughter's pony 'chiquita,' after the equine heroine of his poem." it was by mrs. frémont's intervention that bret harte first appeared in the "atlantic monthly," for, some years before he achieved fame, namely in , _the legend of monte del diablo_ was published in that magazine. the story was gracefully, even beautifully written, but both in style and treatment it was a reflection of washington irving, who at that time rivalled dickens as a popular author. many interesting letters were received by mrs. frémont from bret harte,--letters, her daughter thinks, almost as entertaining as his published writings; but unfortunately these treasures were destroyed by a fire in the city of new york. starr king, bret harte's other friend, was by far the most notable of the protestant ministers in california. the son of a universalist minister, he was born in the city of new york, but was brought up mainly in charlestown, now a part of boston. upon leaving school he became first a clerk, then a school-teacher, and finally a unitarian minister, preaching first at his father's old church in charlestown, and afterward at the hollis street unitarian church in boston. he obtained a wide reputation as preacher and lecturer, and as author of "the white hills," still the best book upon the mountains of new england. in , at the very time when his services were needed there, he became the pastor of a church in san francisco, and to him is largely ascribed the credit of saving california to the union. he was a man of deep moral convictions, and his addresses stirred the heart and moved the conscience of california. the southern element was very strong on the pacific slope, and it made itself felt in politics especially. nearly one third of the delegates to the constitutional convention, held in september, , were southern men, and they acted as a unit under the leadership of w. m. gwinn, afterward a member of the united states senate. the ultimate design of the southern delegates was the division of california into two states, the more southern of which should be a slave state. slavery in california was openly advocated. but the southern party was a minority, and the state constitution declared that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crime, shall ever be tolerated in this state." the constitution did, however, exclude the testimony of colored persons from the courts; and when, in , the negroes in san francisco presented a petition to the house of representatives asking for this right or privilege, the house refused to receive the petition, a majority of the members taking it as an insult. one member seriously proposed that it should be thrown out of the window. in may, , the "san francisco daily herald" declared that the delay in admitting california as a state was due to northern abolitionists, of whom it said, with characteristic mildness: "take the vile crowd of abolitionists from the canadian frontier to the banks of the delaware, and you cannot find one in ten thousand of them who from philanthropy cares the amount of a dollar what becomes of the colored race. what they want is office." it does not seem to have occurred to the writer that in espousing the smallest and most hated political party in the whole country, the abolitionists had not taken a very promising step in the direction of office-holding. there was even talk of turning california into a "pacific republic," in the event of a dissolution of the union. and that event was longed for by at least one california paper on the ground that "it would shut down on the immigration of these vermin," _i. e._ the chinese. how far southern effrontery went may be gathered from the fact that even the sacred institution of thanksgiving day was ridiculed by another california paper as an absurd yankee notion. from until the period of the civil war the democratic party ruled the state of california under the leadership of gwinn. northern men constituted a majority of the party, but they submitted to the dictation of the southerners, just as the democratic party in the north submitted to the dictation of the southern leaders. the only california politician who could cope with gwinn was broderick,--a typical irishman, trained by tammany hall. not without difficulty was california saved to the union; in fact, until the rebels fired upon fort sumter, the real sentiment of the state was unknown. bret harte has touched upon this episode. in _mrs. bunker's conspiracy_, the attempt of the extreme southern element to seize and fortify a bluff commanding the city of san francisco is foiled by a northern woman; and in _clarence_ we have a glimpse of the city as it appeared after news came of the first act of open rebellion: "from every public building and hotel, from the roofs of private houses and even the windows of lonely dwellings, flapped and waved the striped and starry banner. the steady breath of the sea carried it out from masts and yards of ships at their wharves, from the battlements of the forts, alcatraz and yerba buena.... clarence looked down upon it with haggard, bewildered eyes, and then a strange gasp and fulness of the throat. for afar a solitary bugle had blown the reveille at fort alcatraz." at this critical time, a mass meeting was held in san francisco, and, at the suggestion of starr king, bret harte wrote a poem to be read at the meeting. the poem was called _the reveille_, but is better known as _the drum_. the first and last stanzas are as follows:-- hark! i hear the tramp of thousands, and of armèd men the hum; lo! a nation's hosts have gathered round the quick alarming drum,-- saying, "come, freemen, come! ere your heritage be wasted," said the quick alarming drum. * * * * * thus they answered,--hoping, fearing, some in faith, and doubting some, till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming, said, "my chosen people, come!" then the drum lo! was dumb, for the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, "lord, we come!" as these last words were read, the great audience rose to its feet, and with a mighty shout proclaimed the loyalty of california. emerson, as mr. john jay chapman has finely said, sent a thousand sons to the war; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that bret harte's noble poem fired many a manly heart in san francisco. when the war began, starr king was active in establishing the california branch of the sanitary commission. he died of diphtheria in march, , just as the tide of battle was turning in favor of the north. it will thus be seen that his career in california exactly covered, and only just covered, that short period in the history of the state when the services of such a man were, humanly speaking, indispensable. _the reveille_ was followed by other patriotic poems, and after mr. king's death bret harte wrote in memory of him the poem called _relieving guard_, which indicates, one may safely say, the high-water mark of the author's poetic talent. in the year following mr. king's death bret harte's second son was born, and received the name of francis king. on may , , the first number of "the californian" appeared. this was the famous weekly edited and published by the late charles henry webb, and written mainly by bret harte, mark twain, webb himself, prentice mulford, and mr. stoddard. it was of "the californian" that mr. howells wittily said: "these ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted people, had established a literary newspaper in san francisco, and they brilliantly coöperated to its early extinction." it is an interesting coincidence that bret harte and mark twain both began their literary careers in san francisco, and at almost the same time. bret harte was engaged upon "the californian," and mark twain was a reporter for the "morning call," when they were introduced to each other by a common friend, mr. george barnes. bret harte thus describes his first impression of the new acquaintance:-- "his head was striking. he had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye--an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me--of an unusual and dominant nature. his eyebrows were very thick and bushy. his dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. barnes introduced him as mr. sam clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed under the signature of 'mark twain.' we talked on different topics, and about a month afterward clemens dropped in upon me again. he had been away in the mining districts on some newspaper assignment in the mean time. in the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. he said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and 'swop lies.' he spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. he went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. i asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for 'the californian.' he did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. it was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the sierras for an eastern reading. the story was 'the jumping frog of calaveras.' it is now known and laughed over, i suppose, wherever the english language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown twain himself on that morning in the san francisco mint." the first article that appeared in "the californian" was bret harte's _neighborhoods i have moved from_, and next his _ballad of the emeu_, but neither was signed. both of these are in the collected edition of his works. the _condensed novels_ were continued in "the californian," and bret harte also contributed to it many poems, sketches, essays, editorial articles and book reviews. some of these were unsigned; some were signed "b" or "bret," and occasionally the signature was his full name. [illustration: storeship apollo old ship used as a saloon copyright, century co.] no reader who appreciates the finished workmanship of bret harte will be surprised to learn that he was a slow and intensely self-critical writer. there is much interesting testimony on this point. mr. howells says: "his talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line.... when it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. he was of the order of literary men like goldsmith and de quincey and sterne and steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world, he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens." noah brooks wrote as follows: "scores of writers have become known to me in the course of a long life, but i have never known another so fastidious and so laborious as bret harte. his writing materials, the light and heat, and even the adjustment of the furniture of the writing-room, must be as he desired; otherwise he could not go on with his work. even when his environment was all that he could wish, there were times when the divine afflatus would not come and the day's work must be abandoned. my editorial rooms in san francisco were not far from his secluded den, and often, if he opened my door late in the afternoon, with a peculiar cloud on his face, i knew that he had come to wait for me to go to dinner with him, having given up the impossible task of writing when the mood was not on him. 'it's no use, brooks,' he would say. 'everything goes wrong; i cannot write a line. let's have an early dinner at martini's.' as soon as i was ready we would go merrily off to dine together, and, having recovered his equanimity, he would stick to his desk through the later hours of the night, slowly forging those masterpieces which cost him so dearly. "harte was reticent concerning his work while it was in progress. he never let the air in upon his story or his verses. once, indeed, he asked me to help him in a calculation to ascertain how long a half-sack of flour and six pounds of side-meat[ ] would last a given number of persons. this was the amount of provision he had allowed his outcasts of poker flat, and he wanted to know just how long the snow-bound scapegoats could live on that supply. i used to save for him the eastern and english newspaper notices of his work, and once, when he had looked through a goodly lot of these laudatory notes, he said: 'these fellows see a heap of things in my stories that i never put there.'" mr. stoddard recalls this incident: "one day i found him pacing the floor of his office in the united states mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy,--i wondered why. he was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. i suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer. thus he perfected his prose." in the sketch entitled _my first book_, printed in volume ten of his works, bret harte has given some amusing reminiscences concerning the volume of california poems edited by him, and published in . his selection as editor, he says, "was chiefly owing to the circumstance that i had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to the publisher my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect." after narrating his extreme difficulty in reducing the number of his selections from the numerous poets of california, he goes on to describe the reception of the volume. it sold well, the purchasers apparently being amateur poets who were anxious to discover whether they were represented in the book. "people would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly 'got a new book of california poetry out, haven't you?' purchase it, and quietly depart." "there were as yet," the editor continues, "no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. out of it the bolt fell;" and he quotes the following notice from a country paper: "'the hogwash and "purp" stuff ladled out from the slop-bucket of messrs. ---- and co., of 'frisco, by some lop-eared eastern apprentice, and called "a compilation of californian verse," might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. a club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of red dog, and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. but when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture "californian," it is an insult to the state that has produced the gifted "yellowhammer," whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the "jay hawk." that this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the docks and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to california's greatest bard is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.'" other criticisms, inspired by like omissions, followed, each one rivalling its predecessor in severity. "the big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. the book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but i am afraid that the public was disappointed. the fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection ... and i have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse, started by the first attacking journal.... it was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic western fashion." a year later, not, as bret harte himself states, in , but in , the first collection of his own poems was published. the volume was a thin twelvemo, bound in green cloth, with a gilt design of a sail on the cover, the title-page reading as follows: "the lost galleon and other tales. by fr. bret harte, san francisco. tame and bacon, printers, ." most of these poems are contained in the standard edition of his works. in the same year were published the _condensed novels_ and the _bohemian papers_, reprinted from "the bulletin" and "the californian," and making, as the author himself said, "a single, not very plethoric volume, the writer's first book of prose." he adds that "during this period," _i. e._ from to , he produced "_the society upon the stanislaus_, and _the story of m'liss_,--the first a dialectical poem, the second a californian romance,--his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic western american literature. he would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,--a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the 'overland monthly,' he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of _the luck of roaring camp_, and the poem of the _heathen chinee_." the "overland monthly" was founded in july, , by anton roman, a bookseller on montgomery street, and later on clay street. mr. roman was possessed of that enthusiasm which every new enterprise demands. "he had thought and talked about the magazine," he declared, "until it was in his bones." bret harte became the first editor, and it was he who selected the name. the "overland" was well printed, on good paper, and the cover was adorned by that historic grizzly bear who, standing on the ties of the newly-laid railroad track, with half-turned body and lowered head, seems prepared to dispute the right of way with the locomotive which might shortly be expected to come screaming down the track. there was originally no railroad track in the picture, simply the bear; and how the deficiency was supplied is thus explained by mark twain in a letter to thomas bailey aldrich: "do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through harte's brain? it was this: when they were trying to decide upon a vignette for the cover of the 'overland,' a grizzly bear (of the arms of the state of california) was chosen. nahl bros. carved him and the page was printed, with him in it, looking thus: [illustration] "as a bear, he was a success--he was a good bear.--but then, it was objected, that he was an _objectless_ bear--a bear that _meant_ nothing in particular, signified nothing,--simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing--and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. all hands said that--none were satisfied. they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no _point_ to him. but presently harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol of californian savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive civilization, the first overland locomotive! [illustration] "i think that was nothing less than inspiration itself." in the same letter mark twain pays the following magnanimous tribute to his old friend: "bret harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land,--and this grateful remembrance of mine ought to be worth its face, seeing that bret broke our long friendship a year ago without any cause or provocation that i am aware of." the editor had no prose article of his own in the first number of the "overland," but he contributed two poems, the noble lines about san francisco, which, with characteristic modesty he placed in the middle of the number, and the poem entitled _returned_[ ] in the "etc." column at the end. and now we come to the publication which first made bret harte known upon the atlantic as well as upon the pacific coast. the opening number of the "overland" had contained no "distinctive californian romance," as bret harte expressed it, and none such being offered for the second number, the editor supplied the omission with _the luck of roaring camp_. but the printer, instead of sending the proof-sheets to the writer of the story, as would have been the ordinary course, submitted them to the publisher, with a statement that the matter was so "indecent, irreligious and improper" that his proofreader, a young lady, had with difficulty been induced to read it. then followed many consultations between author, publisher, and various high literary authorities whose judgment had been invoked. opinions differed, but the weight of opinion was against the tale, and the expediency of printing it. nevertheless, the author--conceiving that his fitness as editor was now in question--stood to his guns; the publisher, though fearful of the result, stood by him; and the tale was published without the alteration of a word. it was received very coldly by the secular press in california, its "singularity" being especially pointed out; and it was bitterly denounced by the religious press as being immoral and unchristian. but there was a wider public to hear from. the return mail from the east brought newspapers and reviews "welcoming the little foundling of californian literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author."[ ] the mail brought also a letter from the editor of the "atlantic monthly" with a request "upon the most flattering terms" that he would write a story for the "atlantic," similar to the _luck_. it should be recorded, as an interesting contrast to the impression made by the _luck_ upon the san francisco young woman, that it was also a girl, miss susan m. francis, a literary assistant with the publishers of the "atlantic monthly," who, struck by the freshness and beauty of the tale, brought it to the attention of mr. james t. fields, then the editor of the magazine, with the result which bret harte has described. nor should the attitude of the california young person, and of san francisco in general, excite surprise. the pioneers could not be expected to see the moral beauty that lay beneath the rough outward aspect of affairs on the pacific slope. the poetry of their own existence was hidden from them. but california, though crude, was self-distrustful, and it bowed to the decision of the east. bret harte was honored, even if not understood or appreciated. the "overland" was well received, and the high character of the first two numbers was long maintained. aside from bret harte's work, many volumes of prose and verse have been republished from the magazine, and most of them deserved the honor. in the early fifties the proportion of really educated men to the whole population was greater in california than in any other state, and probably this was true even of the period when the "overland" was founded. scholarship and cultivation were concealed in rough mining towns, in lumber camps, and on remote ranches. among the women, especially, were many who, like the sappho of green springs, gathered from their lonely, primitive lives a freshness and originality which perhaps they never would have shown in more conventional surroundings. this class furnished numerous readers and a few writers. officers of the army and navy stationed in california contributed some interesting scientific and literary articles to the early numbers of the "overland." notwithstanding the success of his first story, bret harte was in no haste to rush into print with another. he had none of that disposition to make hay while the sun shines which has spoiled many a story-writer. six months elapsed before the _luck_ was followed by _the outcasts of poker flat_. meanwhile he was carefully and patiently discharging his duties as editor. mr. stoddard has thus described him in that capacity: "fortunately for me he took an interest in me at a time when i was most in need of advice, and to his criticism and his encouragement i feel that i owe all that is best in my literary efforts. he was not afraid to speak his mind, and i know well enough what occasion i gave him: yet he did not judge me more severely than i judged myself.... i am sure that the majority of the contributors to the 'overland monthly' profited as i did by his careful and judicious criticism. fastidious to a degree, he could not overlook a lack of finish in the manuscript offered to him. he had a special taste in the choice of titles, and i have known him to alter the name of an article two or three times in order that the table of contents might read handsomely and harmoniously." one of the most frequent contributors to the "overland" was miss ina b. coolbrith, author of many polished and imaginative poems and stories. in a recent letter miss coolbrith thus speaks of bret harte as an editor: "to me he was unfailingly kind and generous, looking out for my interests as one of his contributors with as much care as he accorded to his own. i can only speak of him in terms of unqualified praise as author, friend and man." the poem entitled _plain language from truthful james_, or the _heathen chinee_, as it is popularly known, and as bret harte himself afterward called it, first appeared in the "overland" for september, . within a few weeks it had spread over the english-speaking world. _the luck of roaring camp_ gave bret harte a literary reputation, but this poem made him famous. it was copied by the newspapers almost universally, both here and in england; and it increased the circulation of the "overland" so much that, two months after its appearance, a single news company in new york was selling twelve hundred copies of the magazine. almost everybody had a clipping of these verses tucked into his waistcoat pocket or carried in his purse. quotations from it were on every lip, and some of its most significant lines were recited with applause in the national house of representatives. it came at a fortunate moment when the people of this country were just awaking to the fact that there was a "chinese problem," and when interest in the race was becoming universal in the east as well as in the west. says that acute critic, mr. james douglas: "there is an element of chance in the fabrication of great poems. the concatenation comes, the artist puts the pieces into their places, and the result is permanent wonder. the _heathen chinee_ in its happy felicity is quite as unique as 'the blessed damozel.'" the _heathen chinee_ is remarkable for the absolutely impartial attitude of the writer. he observes the chinaman neither from the locally prejudiced, california point of view, nor from an ethical or reforming point of view. his part is neither to approve nor condemn, but simply to state the fact as it is, not indeed with the coldness of an historian but with the sympathy and insight of a poet. but this is not all, in fact, as need hardly be said, it is not enough to make the poem endure. it endures because it has a beauty of form which approaches perfection. it is hackneyed, and yet as fresh as on the day when it was written.[ ] truthful james himself who tells the story was a real character,--nay is, for, at the writing of these pages, he still lived in the same little shanty where he was to be found when bret harte knew him. at that time, in , or thereabout, bret harte was teaching school at tuttletown, a few miles north of sonora, and truthful james, mr. james w. gillis, lived over the hill from tuttletown, at a place called jackass flat. mr. gillis was well known and highly respected in all that neighborhood, and he figures not only in bret harte's poetry, but also in mark twain's works, where he is described as "the sage of jackass hill." it is a proof both of bret harte's remarkable freedom from vanity, and of the keen criticism which he bestowed upon his own writings, that he never set much value upon the _heathen chinee_, even after its immense popularity had been attained. when he wrote it, he thought it unworthy of a place in the "overland" and handed it over to mr. ambrose bierce, then editor of the "news letter,"[ ] a weekly paper, for publication there. mr. bierce, however, recognizing its value, unselfishly advised bret harte to give it a place in the "overland," and this was finally done. "nevertheless," says mr. bierce, "it was several months before he overcame his prejudice against the verses and printed them. indeed he never cared for the thing, and was greatly amused by the meanings that so many read into it. he said he meant nothing whatever by it." we have mark twain's word to the same effect. "in ," he writes, "i went to the sandwich islands, and when i returned, after several years, harte was famous as the author of the _heathen chinee_. he said that the _heathen chinee_ was an accident, and that he had higher literary ambitions than the fame that could come from an extravaganza of that sort." "_the luck of roaring camp_," mr. clemens goes on to say, "was the salvation of his literary career. it placed him securely on a literary road which was more to his taste." bret harte, indeed, frequently held back for weeks poems which he had completed, but with which he was not content. as one of his fellow-workers declared, "he was never fully satisfied with what he finally allowed to go to the printer." his position in san francisco was now assured. he had been made professor of recent literature in the university of california; he retained his place at the mint, he was the successful editor of the "overland," and he was happy in his home life. one who knew him well at this period speaks of him as "always referring to his wife in affectionate terms, and quoting her clever speeches, and relating with fond enjoyment the funny sayings and doings of his children." let us, for the moment, leave bret harte thus happily situated, and glance at that pioneer life which he was now engaged in portraying. said a san francisco paper in , "the world will never know, and no one could imagine the heart-rending scenes, or the instances of courage and heroic self-sacrifice which have occurred among the california pioneers during the last three years!" and yet when these words were penned there was growing up in the east a stripling destined to preserve for posterity some part, at least, of those very occurrences which otherwise would have remained "unrecorded and forgot." chapter v the pioneer men and women when bret harte first became famous he was accused of misrepresenting pioneer society. a california writer of great ability--no less a person than professor royce, the eminent philosopher--once spoke of the "perverse romanticism" of his tales; and after mr. harte's death these accusations, if they may be called such, were renewed in san francisco with some bitterness. it is strange that californians themselves should have been so anxious to strip from their state the distinction which bret harte conferred upon it,--so anxious to prove that its heroic age never existed, that life in california has always been just as commonplace, respectable and uninteresting as it is anywhere else in the world. but, be this as it may, the diaries, letters and narratives written by pioneers themselves, and, most important of all, the daily newspapers published in san francisco and elsewhere from to , fully corroborate bret harte's assertion that he described only what actually occurred. "the author has frequently been asked," he wrote, "if such and such incidents were real,--if he had ever met such and such characters. to this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. a few weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, _correcting some of the minor details of his facts_, and inclosing as corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper, wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful creation was recorded with a largeness of statement that far transcended his powers of imagination." even that bizarre character, the old frenchman in _a ship of ' _, was taken absolutely from the life, except that the real man was of english birth. his peculiarities, mental and physical, his dress, his wig, his residence in the old ship were all just as they are described by bret harte.[ ] this is not to say that everybody in california was a romantic person, or that life there was simply a succession of startling incidents. ordinary people were doing ordinary things on the pacific slope, just as they did during the worst horrors of the french revolution. but the exceptional persons that bret harte described really existed; and, moreover, they existed in such proportion as to give character and tone to the whole community. the fact is that bret harte only skimmed the cream from the surface. to use his own words again, "the faith, courage, vigor, youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as were the companions of jason." they were picked men placed in extraordinary circumstances, and how could that combination fail to result in extraordinary characters, deeds, events, and situations! the forty-niners,[ ] and those who came in the early fifties, were such men as enlist in the first years of a war. they were young men. never, since mediæval days when men began life at twenty and commonly ended it long before sixty, was there so youthful a society. a man of fifty with a gray beard was pointed out in the streets of san francisco as a curiosity. in the convention to organize the state which met at monterey, in september, , there were forty-eight delegates, of whom only four were fifty years or more; fifteen were under thirty years of age; twenty-three were between thirty and forty. these were the venerable men of the community, selected to make the laws of the new commonwealth. a company of california emigrants that left virginia in consisted wholly of boys under twenty.[ ] the pioneers were far above the average in vigor and enterprise, and in education as well. one ship, the "edward everett," sailed from boston in january, , with one hundred and fifty young men on board who owned both ship and cargo; and the distinguished gentleman for whom they had named their ship gave them a case full of books to beguile the tedium of the voyage around cape horn. william grey, who wrote an interesting account of california life,[ ] sailed from new york with a ship-load of emigrants. he describes them as a "fine-looking and well-educated body of men,--all young"; and he gives a similar description of the passengers on three other ships that came into the port of rio janeiro while he was there. he adds that on his ship there were only three bad characters, a butcher from washington market and his two sons. they all perished within a year of their arrival in california. the father died while drunk, one of the sons was hanged, and the other was killed in a street row. the pioneers were handsome men.[ ] they were tall men. of the two hundred grown men in the town of suisun, twenty-one stood over six feet high. many of the pioneers were persons for whom a career is not easily found in a conservative, sophisticated society; who, in such a society, fail to be successful as much because of their virtues as of their defects; men who lack that combination of cunning and ferocity which leads most directly to the acquisition of wealth; magnanimous, free-handed, and brave, but unthrifty and incapable of monotonous toil; archaic men, not quite broken in to the modern ideal of drudging at one task for six days in the week and fifty weeks in the year. who does not know the type! the hero of novels, the idol of mothers, the alternate hope and despair of fathers, the truest of friends, the most ideal and romantic, but perhaps not the most constant of lovers. from the western and southwestern states there came across the plains a different type. these men were pioneers already by inheritance and tradition, somewhat ignorant, slow and rough, but of boundless courage and industry, stoical as indians, independent and self-reliant. most of bret harte's tragic characters, such as tennessee's partner, madison wayne, and the bell-ringer of angel's, were of this class. many of these emigrants, especially those who crossed the mountains before the discovery of gold, were trappers and hunters,--stalwart, bearded men, clad in coats of buffalo hide, with faces deeply tanned and wrinkled by long exposure to wind and weather. perhaps the best known among them was "old greenwood," a tall, raw-boned, muscular man, who at the age of eighty-three was still vigorous and active. for thirty years he made his home among the crow indians, and he had taken to wife a squaw who bore him four handsome sons. his dress was of tanned buckskin, and one observer, more squeamish than the ordinary pioneer, noted the seeming fact that it had never been removed since first he put it on. his heroic calibre may be estimated from the fact that he was capable of eating ten pounds of meat a day. this man used to boast that he had killed more than a hundred indians with his own hand. but all that killing had been done in fair fight; and when a cowardly massacre of seven indians, captured in a raid led by greenwood's sons, took place near sacramento in ,--one of many such acts,--the greenwood family did their best to save the victims. after the deed had been done, "old greenwood," an eye-witness relates, "raved around his cabin, tossed his arms aloft with violent denunciation, and, stooping down, gathered the dust in his palms, and sprinkled it on his head, swearing that he was innocent of their blood." another hero of the pacific slope in those large, early days was peg-leg smith. he derived his nickname from a remarkable incident. while out on the plains with a wagon-load of supplies, smith--plain smith at that time--was accidentally thrown from his seat, and the heavy wheel passed over his leg below the knee, crushing it so that amputation became necessary. there was no surgeon within hundreds of miles; but if the amputation were not performed, it was plain that mortification and death would soon result. in this emergency, smith hacked out a rude saw from a butcher's knife which he had with him, built a fire and heated an iron bolt that he took from the wagon, and then, with his hunting knife and his improvised saw, cut off his own leg. this done, he drew the flesh down over the wound, and seared it with the hot iron to prevent bleeding. he recovered, procured a wooden leg, and lived to take part in many succeeding adventures. we owe california primarily to these hunters, trappers and adventurous farmers who crossed the mountains on their own account, or, later, as members of frémont's band: stern men, with empires in their brains. they firmly believed that it was the "manifest destiny" of the united states to spread over the continent; and this conviction was not only a patriotic, but in some sense a religious one. they were mainly descendants of the puritans, and as such had imbibed old testament ideas which justified and sanctioned their dreams of conquest. we have seen how the venerable greenwood covered his head with dust as a symbolic act. the reverend mr. colton records a significant remark made to him by a pioneer, seventy-six years old, who had four sons in frémont's company, and who himself joined the volunteers raised in california. "i asked him if he had no compunction in taking up arms against the native inhabitants, the moment of his arrival. he said he had scripture example for it. the israelites took the promised land of the east by arms, and the americans must take the promised land of the west in the same way." and mr. colton adds: "i find this kind of parallel running in the imagination of all the emigrants. they seem to look upon this beautiful land as their own canaan, and the motley race around them as the hittites, the hivites and jebusites whom they are to drive out."[ ] but, it need hardly be said, the biblical argument upon which they relied was in the nature of an afterthought--the justification, rather than the cause of their actions. what really moved them, although they did not know it, was that primeval instinct of expansion, based upon conscious superiority of race, to which have been due all the great empires of the past. many of these people were deeply religious in a gothic manner, and bret harte has touched lightly upon this aspect of their natures, especially in the case of mr. joshua rylands. "mr. joshua rylands had, according to the vocabulary of his class, 'found grace' at the age of sixteen, while still in the spiritual state of 'original sin,' and the political one of missouri.... when, after the western fashion, the time came for him to forsake his father's farm, and seek a new 'quarter section' on some more remote frontier, he carried into the secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of pioneer life--which has been the foundation of so much strong western character--more than the usual religious feeling." exactly the same kind of man is described in that once famous story, mr. eggleston's "circuit-rider"; and it is still found in the mountains of kentucky, where the maintenance of ferocious feuds and a constant readiness to kill one's enemies at sight are regarded as not inconsistent with a sincere profession of the christian religion. the reader of bret harte's stories will remember how often the expression "pike county" or "piker" occurs; and this use is strictly historical. as a very intelligent pioneer expressed it, "we recognize in california but two types of the republican character, the yankee and the missourian. the latter term was first used to represent the entire population of the west; but pike county superseded, first the name of the state, and soon that of the whole west." how did this come about? pike county, missouri, was named for lieutenant zebulon montgomery pike, the discoverer of pike's peak, and the officer who was sent by the united states government to explore the upper part of the mississippi river. he was killed in the war of . the territory was first settled in by emigrants from virginia, kentucky and louisiana; and it was incorporated as a county in . it borders on the mississippi river, about forty miles north of st. louis; and its whole area is only sixty square miles. it was and is an agricultural county, and in the population amounted to only thirteen thousand, six hundred and nine persons, of whom about half were negroes, mostly slaves. the climate is healthy, and the soil, especially on the prairies, is very fertile, being a rich, deep loam.[ ] pike county, it will thus be seen, is but a small part, both numerically and geographically, of that vast western territory which contributed to the california emigration; and it owes its prominence among the pioneers chiefly to a copy of doggerel verses. in , captain mcpike, a leading resident of the county, organized a band of two hundred argonauts who crossed the plains. among them was an ox-driver named joe bowers, who soon made a reputation in the company as a humorist, as an "original," as a "greenhorn," and as a "good fellow" generally. joe bowers was poor, he was in love, he was seeking a fortune in order that he might lay it at the feet of his sweetheart; and the whole company became his confidants and sympathizers. another member of the party was a certain frank swift, who afterward attained some reputation as a journalist; and one evening, as they were all sitting around the camp-fire, swift recited, or rather sang to a popular air, several stanzas of a poem about joe bowers, which he had composed during the day's journey. it caught the fancy of the company at once, and soon every member was singing it. the poem grew night by night, and long before they reached their destination it had become a ballad of exasperating length. the poet, looking forward in a fine frenzy, describes the girl as proving faithless to joe bowers and marrying a red-haired butcher. this bad news comes from joe's brother ike in a letter which also states the culminating fact of the tragedy, as the following lines reveal:-- it told me more than that, oh! it's enough to make me swear. it said sally had a baby, and the baby had red hair! [illustration: grand plaza, san francisco, ] upon their arrival in california, the two hundred men who composed this party dispersed in all directions, and carried the ballad with them. it was heard everywhere in the mines, and in it was printed in a cheap form in san francisco, and was sung by johnson's minstrels at a hall known as the old melodeon. joe bowers thus became the type of the unsophisticated western miner, and pike county became the symbol of the west. crude as the verses are they are sung to this day in the county which gave them birth, and "joe bowers" is still a familiar name in missouri, if not in the west generally. this ballad which came across the plains had its counterpart in a much better song produced by jonathan nichols, a pioneer who sailed on the bark "eliza" from salem, massachusetts, in december, . the first stanza is as follows:-- tune, _oh! susanna_. (key of g.) i came from salem city, with my washbowl on my knee, i'm going to california, the gold dust for to see. it rained all night the day i left, the weather, it was dry, the sun so hot i froze to death, oh! brothers, don't you cry, oh! california, that's the land for me! i'm going to sacramento with my washbowl on my knee. under the title of the "california song" these verses soon became the common property of every ship sailing from atlantic ports for san francisco, and later they were heard in the mines almost as frequently as "joe bowers." but, as hope diminished and homesickness increased, both ballads--so an old miner relates--gave place to "home, sweet home," "ole virginny," and other sad ditties. pike county seems to have had a natural tendency to burst into poetry. in the story called _devil's ford_, bret harte gives us two lines from a poem otherwise unknown to fame,-- "'oh, my name it is johnny from pike, i'm hell on a spree or a strike.'" in the story of _the new assistant at pine clearing school_, three big boys from pike county explained to the schoolmistress their ideas upon the subject of education, as follows: "'we ain't hankerin' much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don't want no boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo'nin'. we reckon to do our sums and our figgerin', and our sale and barter, and our interest tables and weights and measures when the time comes, and our geograffy when it's on, and our readin' and writin' and the american constitution in regular hours, and then we calkillate to git up and git afore the po'try and the boston airs and graces come round.'" the "sacramento transcript," of june , , tells a story about a minister from pike county which has a similar ring. "a miner took sick and died at a bar that was turning out very rich washings. as he happened to be a favorite in the camp, it was determined to have a general turn-out at his burial. an old pike county preacher was engaged to officiate, but he thought it proper to moisten his clay a little before his solemn duty. the parson being a favorite, and the grocery near by, he partook with one and another before the services began, until his underpinning became quite unsteady. presently it was announced that the last sad rites were about to be concluded, and our clerical friend advanced rather unsteadily to perform the functions of his office. after an exordium worthy of his best days, the crowd knelt around the grave, but as he was praying with fervency one of the party discovered some of the shining metal in the dirt thrown from the grave, and up he jumped and started for his pan, followed by the crowd. the minister, opening his eyes in wonder and seeing the game, cried out for a share; his claim was recognized and reserved for him until he should get sober. in the mean time, another hole was dug for the dead man, that did not furnish a like temptation to disturb his grave, and he was hurriedly deposited without further ceremony." bret harte's best and noblest character, tennessee's partner, might have been from pike county,--he was of that kind; and morse, the hero of the story called _in the tules_, certainly was:-- "the stranger stared curiously at him. after a pause he said with a half-pitying, half-humorous smile:-- "'pike--aren't you?' "whether morse did or did not know that this current california slang for a denizen of the bucolic west implied a certain contempt, he replied simply:-- "'i'm from pike county, mizzouri.'" to the same effect is the historian: "to be catalogued as from pike county seems to express a little more churlishness, a little more rudeness, a greater reserve when courtesy or hospitality is called for than i ever found in the western character at home."[ ] the type thus indicated was a very marked one, and was often spoken of with astonishment by more sophisticated pioneers. some of these missouri men had never seen two houses together, until they came to california, so that even a little village in the mines appeared to them as a marvel of civilization and luxury. their dress was home-made and by no means new or clean. over their shoulders they wore strips of cotton or cloth as suspenders, and their coats were tight-waisted, long-tailed surtouts such as were fashionable in the eighteenth century. their inseparable companion was a long-barrelled rifle, with which they could "draw a bead" on a deer or a squirrel or the white of an indian's eye with equal coolness and certainty of killing. bayard taylor describes the same type as he met it in the ship which carried him from new orleans to panama in ' . "long, loosely-jointed men, with large hands, and awkward feet and limbs; their faces long and sallow; their hair long, straight and black; their expression one of settled melancholy. the corners of their mouths curved downward, and their upper lips were drawn tightly over their lower ones, thus giving to their faces that look of ferocity which is peculiar to indians. these men chewed tobacco incessantly, drank copiously, were heavily armed with knives and pistols, and breathed defiance to all foreigners."[ ] these long, sallow-faced men were probably sufferers from that fever and ague, or malaria, as we now call it, which was rife in all the "bottom lands" of the western states; and the greater part of pike county was included in that category. much, indeed, of the emigration from missouri and illinois to california was inspired less by the love of gold than by the desire to escape from disease. bret harte, in many places, speaks of these fever-ridden westerners, especially in _an apostle of the tules_, where he describes a camp-meeting, attended chiefly by "the rheumatic parkinsons, from green springs; the ophthalmic filgees, from alder creek; the ague-stricken harveys, from martinez bend; and the feeble-limbed steptons, from sugar mill." "these," he adds, "might in their combined families have suggested a hospital, rather than any other social assemblage." but these sickly or ague-smitten people formed only a small part of the pioneers. the greater number represented the youth and strength of both the western and eastern states. in , an interior newspaper called the "san andreas independent" declared, "we have a population made up from the most energetic of the civilized earth's population"; and the boast was true. moreover, the pioneers who reached california had been winnowed and sifted by the hardships and privations which beset both the land and the sea route. thousands of the weaker among them had succumbed to starvation or disease, and their bones were whitening the plains or lying in the vast depths of the pacific ocean. there was scarcely a village in the west or south, or even in new england, which did not mourn the loss of some brave young gold-seeker whose unknown fate was a matter of speculation for years afterward. the length of the voyage from atlantic ports to san francisco was from four to five months, but most of the pioneers who came by sea avoided the passage around cape horn, and crossed the isthmus of nicaragua, or, more commonly, of panama. this, in either case, was a much shorter route; but it added the horrors of pestilence and fever, and of possible robbery and murder, to the ordinary dangers of the sea. all the blacklegs, it was noticed, took the shorter route, deeming themselves, no doubt, incapable of sustaining the prolonged ennui of a voyage around the cape. passengers who crossed the isthmus of panama disembarked at chagres, a port so unhealthy that policies of life insurance contained a clause to the effect that if the insured remained there more than one night, his policy would be void. chagres enjoyed the distinction of being the dirtiest place in the world. the inhabitants were almost all negroes, and one pioneer declared that a flock of buzzards would present a favorable comparison with them. from chagres there was, first, a voyage of seventy-five miles up the river of the same name to gorgona, or to cruces, five miles farther. this was accomplished in dugouts propelled by the native indians. thence to panama the pioneers travelled on foot, or on mule-back, over a narrow, winding bridle-path through the mountains, so overhung by trees and dense tropical growths that in many places it was dark even at mid-day. this was the opportunity of the indian muleteer, and more than one gold-seeker never emerged from the gloomy depths of that winding trail. originally, it was the work of the indians; but the spaniards who used the path in the sixteenth century had improved it, and in many places had secured the banks with stones. now, however, the trail had fallen into decay, and in spots was almost impassable. but the tracks worn in the soft, calcareous rock by the many iron-shod hoofs which had passed over it, still remained; and the mule that bore the american seeking gold in california placed his feet in the very holes which had been made by his predecessors, painfully bearing the silver of peru on its way to enrich the grandees of spain. bad as the journey across the isthmus was or might be, the enforced delay at panama was worse. the number of passengers far exceeded the capacity of the vessels sailing from that port to san francisco, and those who waited at panama were in constant danger of cholera, of the equally dreaded panama fever, and sometimes of smallpox. the heat was almost unbearable, and the blacks were a source of annoyance, and even of danger. "there is not in the whole world," remarked a contemporary san francisco paper, "a more infamous collection of villains than the jamaica negroes who are congregated at panama and chagres." in their eagerness to get away from panama, some pioneers paid in advance for transportation in old rotten hulks which were never expected or intended to reach san francisco, but which, springing a leak or being otherwise disabled, would put into some port in lower california where the passengers would be left without the means of continuing their journey, and frequently without money. both on the voyage from panama and also on the long route around cape horn, ship-captains often saved their good provisions for the california market, and fed their passengers on nauseous "lobscouse" and "dunderfunk." scurvy and other diseases resulted. an appeal to the united states consul at rio janeiro, when the ship touched there, was sometimes effectual, and in other cases the passengers took matters into their own hands and disciplined a rapacious captain or deposed a drunken one. in view of these uprisings, some new york skippers declined to take command of ships about to sail for california, supposing that passengers who could do such an unheard-of thing as to rebel against the master of a vessel must be a race of pirates. great pains were taken to secure a crew of determined men for these ships, and a plentiful supply of muskets, handcuffs and shackles was always put on board. but such precautions proved to be ridiculously unnecessary. there was no case in which the pioneers usurped authority on shipboard without sufficient cause; and in no case was an emigrant brought to trial on reaching san francisco. in the various ports at which they stopped much was to be seen of foreign peoples and customs; and not infrequently the pioneers had an opportunity to show their mettle. at santa catharina, for example, a port on the lower coast of brazil, a young american was murdered by a spaniard. the authorities were inclined to treat the matter with great indifference; but there happened to be in the harbor two ship-loads of passengers en route for san francisco, and these men threatened to seize the fortress and demolish it if justice was not done. thereupon the murderer was tried and hung. many south americans in the various ports along the coast got their first correct notion of the people of the united states from these chance encounters with sea-going pioneers. still more, of course, was the overland journey an education in self-reliance, in that resourcefulness which distinguishes the american, and in that courage which was so often needed and so abundantly displayed in the early mining days. independence in the state of missouri was a favorite starting-point, and from this place there were two routes, the southern one being by way of santa fé, and the northern route following the oregon trail to fort hall, and thence ascending the course of the humboldt river to its rise in the sierra nevadas. at fort hall some large companies which had travelled from the mississippi river, and even from states east of that, separated, one half going to oregon, the other turning westward to california; and thus were broken many ties of love and friendship which had been formed in the close intimacy of the long journey, especially between the younger members of the company. old diaries and letters reveal suggestions of romance if not of tragedy in these separations, and in the choice which the emigrant maiden was sometimes forced to make between the conflicting claims of her lover and her parents. in the year fifty thousand crossed the plains. in immigration fell off because even at that early date there was a business "depression," almost a "panic" in california, but in it increased again, and the plains became a thoroughfare, dotted so far as the eye could see with long trains of white-covered wagons, moving slowly through the dust. in one day a party from virginia passed thirty-two wagons, and during a stop in the afternoon five hundred overtook them. in after years the course of these wagons could easily be traced by the alien vegetation which marked it. wherever the heavy wheels had broken the tough prairie sod there sprang up, from the missouri to the sierras, a narrow belt of flowering plants and familiar door-yard weeds,--silent witnesses of the great migration which had passed that way. multitudes of horsemen accompanied the wagons, and other multitudes plodded along on foot. banners were flying here and there, and the whole appearance was that of an army on the march. at night camp-fires gleamed for miles through the darkness, and if the company were not exhausted the music of a violin or a banjo floated out on the still air of the prairies. but the fatigue of the march, supplemented by the arduous labors of camping out, was usually sufficient to send the travellers to bed at the earliest possible moment. the food consisted chiefly of salt pork or bacon,--varied when that was possible with buffalo meat or venison,--beans, baked dough called bread, and flapjacks. the last, always associated with mining life in california, were made by mixing flour and water into a sort of batter, seasoning with salt, adding a little saleratus or cooking soda, and frying the mixture in a pan greased with fat. men ate enormously on these journeys. four hundred pounds of sugar lasted four pioneers only ninety days. this inordinate appetite and the quantity of salt meat eaten frequently resulted in scurvy, from which there were some deaths. another cause of illness was the use of milk from cows driven along with the wagon-trains, and made feverish by heat and fatigue. many of the emigrants, especially those who undertook the journey in ' or ' , were insufficiently equipped, and little aware of the difficulties and dangers which awaited them. death in many forms hovered over those heavy, creaking, canvas-covered wagons--the "prairie-schooners," which, drawn sometimes by horses, sometimes by oxen, sometimes by mules, jolted slowly and laboriously over two thousand miles and more of plain and mountain,--death from disease, from want of water, from starvation, from indians, and, in crossing the sierras, from raging snow-storms and intense cold. rivers had to be forded, deserts crossed and a thousand accidents and annoyances encountered. some men made the long journey on foot, even from points east of the mississippi river. one gray-haired pioneer walked all the way from michigan with a pack on his back. another enthusiast obtained some notoriety among the emigrants of by trundling a wheelbarrow, laden with his goods, from illinois to salt lake city. bret harte, as we have seen, reached california by sea, and there is no record of any journey by ox-cart that he made; and yet in _a waif of the plains_ he describes such a journey with a particularity which seems almost impossible for one who knew it only by hearsay. thus, among many other details, he speaks of "a chalky taste of dust on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers, and an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle." and in the same description occurs one of those minute touches for which he is remarkable: "the hoofs of the draught-oxen, occasionally striking in the dust with a dull report, sent little puffs like smoke on either side of the track." often the cattle would break loose at night and disappear on the vast plains, and men in search of them were sometimes lost, and died of starvation or were killed by indians. simply for the sake of better grazing oxen have been known to retrace their steps at night for twenty-five miles. the opportunities for selfishness, for petulance, for obstinacy, for resentment were almost innumerable. cooking and washing were the labors which, in the absence of women, proved most vexatious to the emigrants. "of all miserable work," said one, "washing is the worst, and no man who crossed the plains will ever find fault again with his wife for scolding on a washing day." all the pioneers who have related their experiences on the overland journey speak of the bad effect on men's tempers. "the perpetual vexations and hardships keep the nerves in a state of great irritability. the trip is a sort of magic mirror, exposing every man's qualities of heart, vicious or amiable."[ ] the shooting affairs which occurred among the emigrants were usually the result of some sudden provocation, following upon a long course of irritation between the persons concerned. those who crossed the plains in the summer of , or afterward, might have passed a grave with this inscription: beal shot by bolsby, june , . and, a day's journey further, they would have noticed another grave thus inscribed: bolsby shot for the murder of beal, june , . this murder, to call it such, was the consequence of some insult offered to bolsby by the other. bolsby was forthwith tried by the company, and condemned to be shot the next morning at sunrise. he had been married only about a year before, and had left his wife and child at their home in kentucky. for the remainder of the day he travelled with the others, and the short hours of the summer night which followed were spent by him in writing to his wife and to his father and mother. of all the great multitude, scattered over the wide earth, who passed that particular night in sleepless agony of mind, perhaps none was more to be pitied. when morning came he dressed himself neatly in his wedding suit, and was led out to execution. with rare magnanimity, he acknowledged that his sentence was a just one, and said that he had so written to his family, and that he had been treated with consideration; but he declared that if the thing were to happen again, he would kill beal as before. he then knelt on his blanket, gave the signal for shooting, and fell dead, pierced by six bullets. the misfortunes of the donner party began with a homicide. this is the party whose sufferings are described by bret harte without exaggeration in _gabriel conroy_. it included robbers, cannibals, murderers and heroes; and one interesting aspect of its experience is the superior endurance, both moral and physical, shown by the women. in the small detachment which, as a forlorn hope, tried to cross the mountains in winter without provisions, and succeeded, there were twelve men and five women. of the twelve men five died, of the five women none died![ ] indians were often encountered on the great plains and in the valleys of the colorado and rio grande. they were well-disposed, at first, and soon acquired some familiarity with the ordinary forms of speech used by the pioneers. thus one traveller reports the following friendly salutation from a member of the snake tribe: "how de do--whoa haw! g--d d--n you!" on another occasion when a party of pioneers were inquiring of some indians about a certain camping-ground ahead of them, they were assured that there would be "plenty of grass there for the whoa haws, but no water for the g--d d--ns." later, however, owing chiefly to unprovoked attacks by emigrants, the indians became hostile and dangerous. many pioneers were robbed and some were killed by them. the western indian was a figure at once grotesque and terrible; and bret harte's description of him, as he appeared to the emigrant boy lost on the plains, gives the reader such a pleasant thrill of horror as he may not have experienced since robinson crusoe made his awful discovery of a human footprint in the sand. "he awoke with a start. a moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself between him and the horizon!... a human figure, but so dishevelled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and puerile in its extravagance that it seemed the outcome of a childish dream. it was a mounted figure, yet so ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar wandering circus. a tall hat, crownless and brimless, a castaway of civilization, surmounted by a turkey's feather, was on its head; over its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. in one hand it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of some distant point.... presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony's legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon. there was no mistaking it now! the painted hebraic face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted locks! it was an indian!"[ ] there were some cases of captivity among the indians the details of which recall the similar occurrences in new england in the seventeenth century. perhaps the most remarkable case was that of olive oatman, a young girl from illinois, who was carried off by one tribe of indians, was sold later to another, nearly died of starvation, and, finally, after a lapse of six years, was recovered safe and sound. her brother, a boy of twelve, was beaten with clubs by the indians, and left for dead with the bodies of his father and mother; but he revived, and succeeded in making his way back for a distance of seventy miles, when he met a party of pima indians, who treated him with kindness. forty-five miles of that lonely journey lay through a desert where no water could be obtained. abner nott's daughter, rosey, the attractive heiress of the pontiac, was made of the same heroic stuff. "the rosey ez i knows," said her father, "is a little gal whose voice was as steady with injuns yellin' round her nest in the leaves on sweetwater ez in her purty cabin up yonder." lanty foster, too, was of "that same pioneer blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, ... whose father's rifle had been levelled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy indian who prowled outside." it was from these western and southwestern emigrants that bret harte's nobler kind of woman, and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. the "great west" furnished his heroic characters,--california was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place. these people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as result from an out-door life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours and abundant sleep. the pioneer women did indeed lack education and inherited refinement, as bret harte himself occasionally points out. "she brushed the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling, and although this operation brought her so near to him that her breath--as soft and warm as the southwest trades--stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry as it was perhaps from educated delicacy."[ ] and yet it is very easy to exaggerate this defect. in most respects the wholesomeness, the democratic sincerity and dignity of bret harte's women, and of his men as well, give them the substantial benefits of gentle blood. thus he says of one of his characters, "he had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding;" and this remark might have been put in a much more general form. in fact, the essential similarity between simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole nature of bret harte's pioneers, and perhaps, moreover, explains some obscure points in his own life. be this as it may, the defects of bret harte's heroines relate rather to the ornamental than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the qualities in which they excel are those fundamental feminine qualities upon which, in the last analysis, is founded the greatness of nations. a sophisticated reader would be almost sure to underestimate them. even that english critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that bret harte "did not create a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman." no, but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very noble type. what type of woman is most valuable to the world? surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type bret harte's best women belong. they have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness which seems to be inseparable in man or beast from the capacity for deep affection. they have the independence, the innocent audacity, the clear common-sense, the resourcefulness, typical of the american woman, and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is rather primeval than american, which certainly is not a part of the typical american woman as we know her in the eastern states. perhaps the final test of nobility in man or woman is the capacity to value _something_, be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost anything, but to value something more than life itself; and this is the characteristic of bret harte's heroines. they are as ready to die for love as juliet was, and along with this _abandon_ they have the coolness, the independence, the practical faculty, which belong to their time and race, but which were not a part of woman's nature in the age that produced shakspere's "unlessoned girl." bret harte's heroines have a strong family resemblance to those of both tourgueneff and thomas hardy. in each case the women obey the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. there is no question with them of material advantage, of wealth, position, or even reputation. such considerations, so familiar to women of the world, never enter their minds. they love as nature prompts, and having once given their love, they give themselves and everything that they have along with it. there is a magnificent forgetfulness of self about them. this is the way of nature. nature never counts the cost, never hoards her treasures, but pours them out, to live or die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes the human by-stander--economical, poverty-stricken man--stand aghast. in russia this type of woman is frequently found, as tourgueneff, and to a lesser degree tolstoi, found her among the upper classes, which have retained a pristine quality long since bred out of the corresponding classes in england and in the united states. for women of the same type in england, thomas hardy is forced to look lower down in the social scale; and this probably accounts for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from the upper classes. women of this kind sometimes fail in point of chastity, but it is a failure due to impulse and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality. after all, chastity is only one of the virtues that women owe to themselves and to the race. the chaste woman who coldly marries for money is, as a rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives up everything for love. it is to be observed, however, that bret harte's women do not need this defence, for his heroines, with the single exception of the faithful miggles, are virtuous. the only loose women in bret harte's stories are the obviously bad women, the female "villains" of the play, and they are by no means numerous. joan, in _the argonauts of north liberty_, the wives of brown of calaveras and the bell-ringer of angel's, respectively, the cold-blooded mrs. decker, and mrs. burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman in _a mercury of the foot-hills_--these very nearly exhaust the list. on the other hand, in thomas hardy and tourgueneff, to say nothing of lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who falls from virtue. too much can hardly be made of the moral superiority of bret harte's stories in this respect. it is due, not simply to his own taste and preference, but to the actual state of society in california, which, in this respect as in all others, he faithfully portrayed. the city of san francisco might have told a different story; but in the mining and agricultural parts of the state the standard of feminine virtue was high. perhaps this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of the men reacting upon the women,--to that feeling which bret harte himself called "the western-american fetich of the sanctity of sex," and, again, "the innate far-western reverence for women." in all european societies, and now, to a lesser degree, in the cities of the united states, every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter is the enemy of his game. how vast is the difference between this attitude of men to women and that which bret harte describes! the california men, as he says somewhere, "thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives' superior fortune." they married for love and nothing else, and their love took the form of reverence. the complement of this feeling, on the woman's side, is a maternal, protecting affection, perhaps the noblest passion of which women are capable; and this is the kind of love that bret harte's heroines invariably show. no mother could have watched over her child more tenderly than cressy over her sweetheart. the cry that came from the lips of the rose of tuolumne when she flew to the rescue of her bleeding lover was "the cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub." bret harte's heroines are almost all of the robust type. a companion picture to the rose is that of jinny in the story _when the waters were up at "jules'."_ "certainly she was graceful! her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its characteristic southwestern indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were unconscious. she lifted the big molasses can from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of a greek water-bearer. she upheaved the heavy flour sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palm of an egyptian caryatid." trinidad joe's daughter, too, was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows and white teeth. it was of her that the doctor said, "if she spoke rustic greek instead of bad english, and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset, you'd swear she was a goddess." something more, however, goes to the making of a handsome woman than mere health and muscle. bret harte often speaks of the sudden appearance of beauty and refinement among the western and southwestern people. kitty, for example, as the reader will remember, "was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy commonplace father and her faded commonplace mother, in the dining-room of the boomville hotel, like some distinguished alien." in _a vision of the fountain_, bret harte, half humorously, suggested an explanation. he speaks of the hero as "a singularly handsome young fellow with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in western frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long, solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier."[ ] it seems more likely, however, that a fortunate environment is the main cause of beauty, a life free from care or annoyance; a deep sense of security; that feeling of self-respect which is produced by the respect of others, and, finally, surroundings which have either the beauty of art or the beauty of nature. these are the very advantages which, with many superficial differences, no doubt, are enjoyed alike by the daughters of frontiersmen and by the daughters of a nobility. on the other hand, they are the very advantages with which the middle class in cities, the cockney class, is almost always obliged to dispense, and that class is conspicuously deficient in beauty. perhaps no one thing is more conducive to beauty than the absence of those hideous creations known as "social superiors." imagine a society in which it would be impossible to make anybody understand what is meant by the word "snob"! and yet such was, and to a considerable extent still is, the society of the far west and of rural new england. bret harte himself glanced at this subject in describing the blue-grass penelope. "beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. there were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the county judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter." no less obvious is the connection of repose with beauty. beauty springs up naturally among people who know the luxury of repose, and yet are vigorous enough to escape the dangers of sloth. salomy jane was lazy as well as handsome, and when we first catch a glimpse of her she is leaning against a door-post, engaged in the restful occupation of chewing gum. the same repose, amounting indeed to indolence, formed the chief charm of mr. macglowrie's widow. whether or not the landscape plays a part in the production of womanly beauty is a question more open to dispute. not many persons feel this influence, but, as experience will show, the proportion of country people who feel it is greater than that of city people, although they have considerably less to say upon the subject. the wide, open spaces, the distant horizon, the gathering of storms, the changing green of spring and summer, the scarlet and gold of autumn, the vast expanse of spotless snow glistening in midwinter,--these things must be seen by the countryman, his eyes cannot escape them, and in some cases they will be felt as well as seen. whoever has travelled a new england country road upon a frosty, moonless night in late october, and has observed the northern lights casting a pale, cold radiance through the leafless trees, will surely detect some difference between that method of illumination and a kerosene lantern. a new england farmer whose home commanded a noble view of mountain, lake and forest was blessed with two daughters noted for their beauty. they grew up and married, but both died young; and many years afterward he was heard to say, as he looked dreamily out from his doorway, "i have often thought that the reason why my girls became beautiful women was that from their earliest childhood they always had this scene before their eyes." and yet he had never read wordsworth or ruskin! bret harte's heroines enjoyed all the advantages just enumerated as being conducive to beauty, and they escaped contamination from civilization. they were close to nature, and as primitive in their love-affairs as the heroines of shakspere. "who ever loved that loved not at first sight!" john ashe's betrothed and ridgeway dent had known each other a matter of two hours or so, before they exchanged that immortal kiss which nearly cost the lives of both. two brief meetings, and one of those in the dark, sufficed to win for the brave and clever young deputy sheriff the affections of lanty foster. in _a jack and jill of the sierras_, a handsome girl from the east tumbles over a precipice, and falls upon the recumbent hero, part way down, with such violence as to stun him. this is hardly romantic, but the dangerous and difficult ascent which they make together furnishes the required opportunity. ten minutes of contiguity suffice, and so well is the girl's character indicated by a few masterly strokes, that the reader feels no surprise at the result. and yet there is nothing that savors of coarseness, much less of levity, in these abrupt romances. when bret harte's heroes and heroines meet, it is the coming together of two souls that recognize and attract each other. it is like a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. the impression is as deep as it is sudden. what said juliet of the anonymous young man whom she had known something less than an hour? "go, ask his name: if he be marrièd my grave is like to be my wedding bed." so felt liberty jones when she exclaimed to dr. ruysdael, "i'll go with you or i'll die!" it is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of bret harte's love-affairs. genuine passion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop. "there they stood alone. there was no sound or motion in earth or woods or heaven. they might have been the one man and woman for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was created. and seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss." but this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. cressy and the schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other's presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in "an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone." could any country in the world except our own produce a cressy! she has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and class; and underneath she has the strong, primordial, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged. cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all bret harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. hiram mckinstry, compared with the masterful yuba bill, the picturesque hamlin, or the majestic starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others. it is characteristic, too, of bret harte that it is cressy's father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband's and her daughter's innovations. mrs. mckinstry, as the reader will remember, "looked upon her daughter's studies and her husband's interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger.... 'the old man's worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,' she had explained." mr. mckinstry, on the other hand, had almost as much devotion to "kam" as matthew arnold had to culture, and meant very nearly the same thing by it. thus he said to the schoolmaster: "'i should be a powerful sight more kam if i knowed that when i was away huntin' stock or fightin' stakes with them harrisons that she was a-settin' in school with the other children and the birds and the bees, listenin' to them and to you. mebbe there's been a little too many scrimmages goin' on round the ranch sence she's been a child; mebbe she orter know sunthin' more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.' "the master was silent. had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter's needs better than he?" alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the west, as hawthorne and mary wilkins and miss jewett have written the epic of new england! bret harte's stories of the western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them. they are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. cressy, like the other heroines of bret harte, flits across the scene a few times, and we see her no more. mrs. mckinstry is drawn only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure, of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than meg merrilies, and far more worthy of a permanent place in literature. chapter vi pioneer life to be successful and popular among the pioneers was something really to a man's credit. men were thrown upon their own resources, and, as in mediæval times, were their own police and watchmen, their own firemen, and in most cases their own judge and jury. there was no distribution of the inhabitants into separate classes: they constituted a single class, the only distinction being that between individuals. there was not even the broad distinction between those who worked with their heads and those who worked with their hands. everybody, except the gamblers, performed manual labor; and although this condition could not long prevail in san francisco or sacramento, it continued in the mines for many months. in fact, any one who did not live by actual physical toil was regarded by the miners as a social excrescence, a parasite.[ ] an old miner, after spending a night in a san francisco lodging house, paid the proprietor with gold dust. while waiting for his change he seemed to be studying the keeper of the house as a novel and not over-admirable specimen of humanity. finally he inquired of him as follows: "say, now, stranger, do you do nothing else but just sit there and take a dollar from every man that sleeps in these beds?" "yes," was the reply, "that is my business." "well, then," said the miner after a little further reflection, "it's a damned mean way of making your living; that's all i can say." even those who were not democratic by nature became so in california. all men felt that they were, at last, free and equal. social distinctions were rubbed out. a man was judged by his conduct, not by his bank account, nor by the set, the family, the club, or the church to which he belonged.[ ] all former records were wiped from the slate; and nobody inquired whether, in order to reach california, a man had resigned public office or position, or had escaped from a jail. "some of the best men," says bret harte, "had the worst antecedents, some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless, puritan pedigree. 'the boys seem to have taken a fresh deal all round,' said mr. john oakhurst one day to me, with the easy confidence of a man who was conscious of his ability to win my money, 'and there is no knowing whether a man will turn out knave or king.'" this, perhaps, sounds a little improbable, and yet here, as always, bret harte has merely stated the fact as it was. one of the most accurate contemporary historians says: "the man esteemed virtuous at home becomes profligate here, the honest man dishonest, and the clergyman sometimes a profane gambler; while, on the contrary, the cases are not few of those who were idle or profligate at home, who came here to be reformed."[ ] "it was a republic of incognitos. no one knew who any one else was, and only the more ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves living in south kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism."[ ] [illustration: the first hotel at san francisco copyright, century co.] "have you a letter of introduction?" wrote a pioneer to a friend in the east about to sail for california. "if you have, never present it. no one here has time to read such things. no one cares even to know your name. if you are the right sort of a man, everything goes smoothly here." "what is your partner's last name?" asked one san francisco merchant of another in . "really, i don't know," was the reply; "we have only been acquainted three or four weeks." a miner at maryville once offered to wager his old blind mule against a plug of tobacco that the company, although they had been acquainted for some years, could not tell one another's names; and this was found upon trial to be the case. men were usually known, as bret harte relates, by the state or other place from which they came,--with some prefix or affix to denote a salient characteristic. thus one miner, in a home letter, speaks of his friends, "big pike, little pike, old kentuck, little york, big york, sandy, and scotty." men originally from the east, and long supposed to be dead, turned up in california, seeking a new career. in fact, there seems to have been a general inclination among the pioneers to strike out in new directions. "to find a man here engaged in his own trade or profession," wrote a forty-niner, "is a rare thing. the merchant of to-day is to-morrow a doctor; lawyers turn bankers, and bankers lawyers. the miners are almost continually on the move, passing from one claim to another, and from the southern to the northern mines, or _vice versa_." bret harte was startled by meeting an old acquaintance in a strange situation. "at my first breakfast in a restaurant on long wharf i was haunted during the meal by a shadowy resemblance which the waiter who took my order bore to a gentleman to whom in my boyhood i had looked up as to a mirror of elegance, urbanity, and social accomplishment. fearful lest i should insult the waiter--who carried a revolver--by this reminiscence, i said nothing to him; but a later inquiry of the proprietor proved that my suspicions were correct. 'he's mighty handy,' said this man, 'and can talk elegant to a customer as is waiting for his cakes, and make him kinder forget he ain't sarved.'" bret harte relates another case. "an argonaut just arriving was amazed at recognizing in the boatman who pulled him ashore, and who charged him the modest sum of fifty dollars for the performance, a classmate at oxford. 'were you not,' he asked eagerly, 'senior wrangler in ' ?' 'yes,' said the other significantly, 'but i also pulled stroke against cambridge.'" a yale college professor was hauling freight with a yoke of oxen; a yale graduate was selling peanuts on the plaza at san francisco; an ex-governor was playing the fiddle in a bar-room; a physician was washing dishes in a hotel; a minister was acting as waiter in a restaurant; a lawyer was paring potatoes in the same place. lawyers, indeed, were doing a great deal of useful work in california. one kept a mush and milk stand; another sold pies at a crossing of the american river; a third drove a team of mules. john a. mcglynn, one of the best known and most successful forty-niners, began by hitching two half-broken mustangs to an express wagon, and acting as teamster. he was soon chosen to enforce the rules regulating the unloading of vessels and the cartage of goods. all the drivers obeyed him, except one, a native of chili, a big, powerful man, with a team of six american mules. mcglynn ordered him into line; he refused; and mcglynn struck him with his whip. in an instant both men had leaped from their wagon-seats to the ground. the chileno rushed at mcglynn, with his bowie-knife in his hand; but the american was left-handed, for which the chileno was not prepared; and with his first blow mcglynn stretched his antagonist on the ground. there he held him until the fellow promised good behavior. on regaining his feet the defeated man invited all hands to drink, and became thenceforth a warm friend of the victor. the judge of the court for santa cruz county kept a hotel, and after court adjourned, he would take off his coat and wait on the table, serving jurors, attorneys, criminals and sheriffs with the same impartiality which he exhibited on the bench. a brief term of service as waiter in a san francisco restaurant laid the foundation of the highly successful career of another lawyer, a very young man. one day a merchant upon whom he was waiting remarked to a companion: "if i only had a lawyer who was worth a damn, i could win that suit." "i am a lawyer," interposed the waiter, "and i am looking for a chance to get into business. try me." the merchant did so; the suit was won; and the former waiter was soon in full legal practice. acquaintances were formed, and the beginning of a fortune was often made, by chance meetings and incidents. men got at one another more quickly than is possible in an old and conservative society. one who became a distinguished citizen of california began his career by accepting an offer of humble employment when he stepped into the street on his first morning in san francisco. "look here, my friend," said a merchant to him, "if you won't get mad about it, i'll offer you a dollar to fill this box with sand." "thank you," said the young fellow, "i'll fill it all day long on those terms, and never become angry in the least." he filled the box, and received payment. "now," he said, "we'll go and take a drink with this dollar." the merchant acquiesced with a laugh, and thus began a life-long connection between the two men. there were some recognitions of old acquaintances as remarkable as the making of new friends. two brothers, englishmen from the society islands, met in a mining town, and were not aware of their relationship until a chance conversation between them disclosed it. a merchant from cincinnati arrived in san francisco with the intention of settling there. one of the first persons whom he met was a prosperous business man who had absconded some years before with ten thousand dollars of his money. he recovered the ten thousand dollars and interest, without making the matter public, and went back to ohio well satisfied. a lawyer of note in san francisco remarked, in , that the last time he saw ned mcgowan, previous to his arrival in california, mcgowan stood in the criminal dock of a philadelphia court where he was receiving a sentence to the state prison for robbery. subsequently he was pardoned by the governor of pennsylvania, on condition that he should leave the state. when this lawyer settled in san francisco, he was employed to defend some persons who had been arrested for drunkenness; and upon entering the court room he was thunderstruck by the appearance of the magistrate upon the bench. after a careful survey of the magistrate and a pinch of the flesh to make sure that he was not dreaming, he exclaimed:-- "ned mcgowan, is that you?" "it is," was the cool reply. "well, gentlemen," said the lawyer, turning to his clients, "you had better toll down heavy, for i can do you no good with such a judge." tolling down heavy was probably a practice which the judge encouraged, for, a year later, upon the organization of the vigilance committee, ned mcgowan fled from san francisco, if not from california. california, from to , was a meeting ground for all the nations of the earth. one of the first acts of the legislature was to appoint an official translator. the confusion of languages resulted in many misunderstandings and some murders. a frenchman and a german at moquelumne hill had a controversy about a water-privilege, and being unable to understand each other, they resorted first to pantomime, and then to firearms, with the unfortunate result that the german was killed. a trial which occurred at san josé illustrates the multiplicity of tongues in california. a spaniard accused a tartar of assaulting him, but as the tartar and his witnesses could not speak english the proceedings were delayed. at last another tartar, called arghat, was found who could speak chinese, and then a chinaman, called alab, who could speak spanish; and with these as interpreters the trial began. another difficulty then arose, namely, the swearing of the witnesses. the court, having ascertained that the tartar mode of swearing is by lifting a lighted candle toward the sun, adopted that form. the judge administered the ordinary oath to the english and spanish interpreters; the latter then swore arghat as tartar and chinese interpreter, and he, in turn, swore alab, by the burning candle and the sun, as chinese and spanish interpreter; and the trial then proceeded in four languages. the first newspaper was printed half in english, half in spanish. sermons were preached by catholic priests both in english and in spanish. the fourth of july was celebrated at san josé in by one oration in english and another in spanish. german and italian weekly papers were published in san francisco. the french population of the city was especially large. they made _rouge-et-noir_ the fashion. "where there are frenchmen," remarks a pioneer, "you will find music, singing and gayety." a french benevolent society was established at san francisco in . many of the best citizens of california were englishmen. there was a famous ale-house in san francisco, called the boomerang, where sirloins of beef could be washed down with english ale, and followed by stilton cheese; where the london "times," "punch" and "bell's life" were taken in. australia and new south wales contributed a considerable and by no means the best part of the population. the "sydney ducks" who infested the dark lanes and alleys of san francisco, and lurked about the wharves at night, lived mainly by robbery; and they often murdered in order to rob. an english traveller said of them: "i have seen vice in almost every form, and under almost every condition in the old world, but never did it appear to me in so repulsive and disgusting a shape as it exists among the lower orders of sydney, and generally in new south wales."[ ] but not all of the immigrants from english colonies were of this character. many were respectable men, and succeeded well in california. an australian cabman, for example, brought a barouche, a fine pair of horses, a tall hat and a livery coat all the way across the pacific, and made a fortune by hiring out at the rate of twenty dollars an hour. there were many jews in san francisco, but none in the mines;--they alone of all the nations gathered in california kept to their ordinary occupations, chiefly the selling of clothes, and never looked for gold. even their dress did not change. "they are," writes a pioneer, "exactly the same unwashed-looking, slobbery, slipshod individuals that one sees in every seaport town." but the jew prospered, and was a good citizen. another pioneer, who could look beneath the surface, said, "the jew does honor to his name here. the pressure which elsewhere bows him to the earth is removed."[ ] the variety and mixture of races in california were without precedent, and san francisco especially prided itself upon the barbaric aspect of its streets. perhaps the chinese were the most striking figures. the low-caste chinamen wore full jackets and breeches of blue calico, and on their heads a huge wicker-work hat that would have made a good family clothes-basket. the aristocratic chinaman displayed a jacket of gay-colored silk, yellow satin breeches, a scarlet skull-cap with a gold knob on top, and, in cold weather, a short coat of astrakhan fur. there was, of course, a chinese quarter, and a district known as little chili, where south americans of every country could be found, with a mixture of kanakas from the sandwich islands, and negroes from the south seas. in july, , there arrived a ship-load of hungarian exiles, and somewhat later a company of bayonnais from the south of france, the men wild and excitable in appearance, the women dark-skinned, large-eyed, and graceful in their movements. there was a spanish quarter where, as bret harte said, "three centuries of quaint customs, speech and dress were still preserved; where the proverbs of sancho panza were still spoken in the language of cervantes, and the high-flown allusions of the la manchian knight still a part of the spanish californian hidalgo's dream." the spanish women were usually attended by indian girls, and their dress was coquettish and becoming. their petticoats, short enough to display a well-turned ankle, were richly laced and embroidered, and striped and flounced with gaudy colors, of which scarlet was the most common. their tresses fell in luxuriant plaits down their backs; and, in all the little accessories of dress, such as earrings, and necklaces, their costume was very rich. its chief feature, the _reboso_, was a sort of scarf, like the mantilla of old spain. this was sometimes twined around the waist and shoulders, and at other times hung in pretty festoons about the figure. it was only in respect to their diversions that the spanish had any influence upon the americans. the gambling houses and theatres were largely in spanish hands at first, and the _fandango_ was the national amusement in which the american miners soon learned to join.[ ] and yet the fundamental gravity of the spanish nature, a gravity which is epitomized and immortally fixed in the famous portrait of admiral pareja by velasquez, was as marked in california as at home. it is thus that bret harte describes don josé sepulvida, the knight errant of the foot-hills: "the fading glow of the western sky through the deep, embrasured windows lit up his rapt and meditative face. he was a young man of apparently twenty-five, with a colorless, satin complexion, dark eyes, alternating between melancholy and restless energy, a narrow, high forehead, long straight hair, and a lightly pencilled mustache." one is struck by the resemblance between don josé sepulvida, and culpeper starbottle, the colonel's nephew, whose tragic death the reader will remember. bret harte thus depicts him: "the face was not an unprepossessing one, albeit a trifle too thin and lank and bilious to be altogether pleasant. the cheek-bones were prominent, and the black eyes sunken in their orbits. straight black hair fell slantwise off a high but narrow forehead, and swept part of a hollow cheek. a long, black mustache followed the perpendicular curves of his mouth. it was on the whole a serious, even quixotic face, but at times it was relieved by a rare smile of such tender and even pathetic sweetness, that miss jo is reported to have said that, if it would only last through the ceremony, she would have married the possessor on the spot. 'i once told him so,' added that shameless young woman; 'but the man instantly fell into a settled melancholy, and has not laughed since.'"[ ] [illustration: miners' ball a. castaigne, del.] there were, in fact, many things in common between the southerner and the spaniard. they lived in similar climates, and the fundamental ideas of their respective communities were very much the same. the southerner was almost as deeply imbued as the spaniard with extreme, aristocratic notions of government and society; and he, like the spaniard, was conservative, religious, dignified, courteous, chivalrous to women, brave, narrow-minded and indolent. in _the secret of sobriente's well_, this resemblance suddenly occurs to larry hawkins, who, in describing to colonel wilson, from virginia, the character of his spanish predecessor, the former owner of the _posada_ in which the colonel lived, said: "he was that kind o' fool that he took no stock in mining. when the boys were whoopin' up the place and finding the color everywhere, he was either ridin' round lookin' up the wild horses he owned, or sittin' with two or three lazy peons and injuns that was fed and looked after by the priests. gosh! now i think of it, it was mighty like you when you first kem here with your niggers. that's curous, too, ain't it?" the hospitality of the spanish californian was boundless. "there is no need of an orphan asylum in california," wrote the american alcalde at monterey. "the question is not who shall be burdened with the care of an orphan, but who shall have the privilege of rearing it. an industrious man of rather limited means applied to me to-day for the care of _six_ orphan children. he had fifteen of his own;" and when the alcalde questioned the prudence of his offer, the spaniard replied, "the hen that has twenty chickens scratches no harder than the hen that has one." a pioneer, speaking from his own experience, said: "if you are sick there is nothing which sympathy can divine which is not done for you. this is as true of the lady whose hand has only figured her embroidery or swept her guitar, as of the cottage-girl wringing from her laundry the foam of the mountain stream; and all this from the heart!"[ ] generosity and pride are spanish traits. "the worst and weakest of them," remarks an english pioneer, "has that indefinable something about him that lifts so immeasurably the beggar of murillo above the beggar of hogarth."[ ] the reader will remember how cheerfully and punctiliously don josé sepulvida paid the wagers of his friend and servant, bucking bob. a gambling debt was regarded by the spaniards in so sacred a light that if he who incurred it was unable to pay, then, for the honor of the family, any relative, a godfather, or even one who had the misfortune to be connected by marriage with the debtor, was bound to discharge the obligation. some americans basely took advantage of this sentiment; and, in one case, an old spanish lady was deprived of a vineyard, her only means of support, in order to preserve the reputation of a scapegrace nephew who had lost to an american at faro a greater sum than he possessed. some convenient and becoming articles of spanish dress were adopted by the americans, notably the sombrero and the serapé, or horseman's cloak. jack hamlin, as the reader will remember, sometimes went a little further. thus, when he started on his search for the sappho of green springs, he "modified his usual correct conventional attire by a tasteful combination of a roquero's costume, and in loose white bullion-fringed trousers, red sash, jacket and sombrero, looked infinitely more dashing and picturesque than his original." the profuse wearing of jewelry, even by men, was another foreign fashion which americans adopted in the early years; so much so, in fact, that to appear in a plain and unadorned state was to be conspicuous. the jewelry thus worn was not of the conventional kind, but a sort of miner's jewelry, significant of the place and time. ornaments were made from the gold in its native state by soldering into one mass many small nuggets, without any polish or other embellishment. everybody carried a gold watch, and watch-chains were constructed upon a massive plan, the links sometimes representing dogs in pursuit of deer, horses at full speed, birds in the act of flight, or serpents coiled and hissing. scarf-pins were made from lumps of gold retaining their natural form and mixed with quartz, rose-colored, blue-gray, or white, according to the rock from which they were taken. the big "specimen ring" worn by the hero of _a night on the divide_ was an example. some americans adhered to their usual dress which, in the eastern states, was a sober suit of black; but usually the pioneers discarded all conventional clothes, and appeared in a rough and picturesque costume much like that of a stage pirate. indeed, it was impossible for any man in ' to make his dress sufficiently bizarre to attract attention. the prevailing fashion included a red or blue flannel shirt, a "wide-awake" hat of every conceivable shape and color, trousers stuffed into a huge pair of boots coming up above the knee, and a belt decorated with pistols and knives. more than one pioneer landed in san francisco with a rifle slung on his back, a sword-cane in his hand, two six-shooters and a bowie-knife in his belt, and a couple of small pistols protruding from his waistcoat pockets. in the rainy season of ' , long boots were so scarce, and so desirable on account of the mud, that they sold for forty dollars a pair in san francisco, and higher yet in stockton. learning of this, eastern merchants flooded the market with top-boots a year later; but by that time the streets had been planked, the miner's costume was passing out of fashion, and long boots were no longer in demand. these changes were greatly regretted by unconventional pioneers, and even so early as they were lamenting "the good old times,"--just one year back,--before the tailor and the barber were abroad in the land. local celebrations were marked by more color and display than are usually indulged in by americans. in , on washington's birthday, there was a procession in san francisco headed by the mayor in a barouche drawn by four white horses. next came the fire engines of the city, each with a team of eight gray horses, and followed by a long train of firemen in white shirts and black trousers. then came a company of teamsters mounted on their draught horses, and carrying gay banners; and finally a delegation of chinamen, preceded by a chinese band and bearing aloft a huge flag of yellow silk. horsemen, more or less intoxicated, and shouting like wild indians, charged up and down the streets at all hours of the day and night, to the great discomfort of many and the fatal injury of some pedestrians. "on sundays especially, one would imagine," a local newspaper remarks, "that a horde of cossacks or tartars had taken possession of the city." "the spaniard," bret harte says, "taught the americans horsemanship, and they rode off with his cattle." the americans usually adopted the spanish equipment, consisting of a huge saddle, with cumbrous leather saddle-flaps, stirrups carved from solid oak, heavy metal spurs, a bridle jingling with ornaments, and a cruel curb bit,--the whole paraphernalia being designed to serve the convenience and vanity of the rider without the least regard to the comfort of his beast. the spanish manner of abrupt stopping, made possible by the severe bit, was also taken up by young americans who loved to charge down upon a friend, halting at the last possible moment, in a cloud of dust, with the horse almost upon his haunches. this was jack hamlin's habit. a popular figure in the streets of san francisco was a black pony, the property of a constable, that stood most of the day, saddled and bridled, in front of his master's office. the pony's favorite diversion was to have his hoofs blacked and polished, and whenever a coin was placed between his lips, he would carry it to a neighboring boot-black, put, first, one fore-foot, and then the other, on the foot-rest, and, after receiving a satisfactory "shine," would walk gravely back to his usual station. even the dumb animals felt that something unusual was expected of them in california. there were no harness horses or carriages in san francisco in the early part of ' ; and when they were introduced toward the end of that year, a touch of barbaric splendor marked the fashionable equipage of the hour. a pair of white horses with gilt trappings, drawing a light, yellow-wheeled buggy, was once a familiar sight in the streets of the city. the _demi-monde_ rode on horseback, in parties of two or three, and even of six or more, and the pace which they set corresponded with that of california life in general. the appearance of one of the most noted of these women is thus described by a pioneer, the wife of a sea-captain: "i have seen her mounted on a glossy, lithe-limbed race-horse, one that had won for her many thousands on the race-course, habited in a close-fitting riding-dress of black velvet, ornamented with one hundred and fifty gold buttons, a hat from which depended magnificent sable plumes, and over her face a short, white lace veil of the richest texture, so gossamer-like one could almost see the fire of passion flashing from the depths of her dark, lustrous eyes."[ ] even the climate, the dry, bracing air, the cool nights, the aromatic fragrance of the woods, tended to quicken the pulse of the argonauts, and to heighten the general exuberance of feeling. central california, the scene of bret harte's stories, is a great valley bounded on the west by the coast range of hills or mountains, which rise from two thousand to four thousand, and in a few places to five thousand feet, and on the east by the foot-hills. after the immigration, this valley furnished immense crops of wheat, vegetables and fruit; but in ' it was a vast, uncultivated plain, free from underbrush or other small growth, and studded by massive, spreading oaks, by tall plane trees, and occasionally by a gigantic redwood, sending its topmost branches two and even three hundred feet into the air. in the dry season, the surface was brown and parched, but as soon as the rains began, the wild grasses and wild oats gave it a rich carpet of green, sparkling with countless field flowers. the resemblance of the valley, in the rainy season at least, to an english park, was often spoken of by pioneers who found in it a reminder of home. on the eastern side this great central valley gradually merges into the foot-hills, the vanguards of the lofty mountain range which separates central california from nevada. the foot-hills form what is perhaps the most picturesque part of the state, watered in the rainy season by numerous rocky, swift-flowing streams, the tributaries of the sacramento and the san joaquin, and broken into those deep, narrow glens so often described in bret harte's poetry and prose. this was the principal gold-bearing region. the foot-hills extend over a space about five hundred miles long and fifty wide, and from them arise, sometimes abruptly, and sometimes gradually, the snow-crowned sierras. such is central california. a region extending from latitude ° ´ in the south to ° in the north, and rising from the level of the pacific ocean to mountain peaks fifteen thousand feet high, must needs present many varieties of weather; but on the whole the state may be said to have a mild, dry, breezy, healthy climate. except in the mountains and in the extreme northeast, snow never lies long, the earth does not freeze, and winter is like a wet spring during which the cattle fare much better than they do in summer. the passing of one season into the other was thus described by bret harte: "the eternal smile of the california summer had begun to waver and grow fixed; dust lay thick on leaf and blade; the dry hills were clothed in russet leather; the trade winds were shifting to the south with an ominous warm humidity; a few days longer, and the rains would be here." san francisco has a climate of its own. ice never forms there, and geraniums bloom throughout the winter; but during the dry season, which lasts from may or june until september or october, a strong, cold wind blows in every afternoon from the ocean, dying down at sunset. the mercury falls with the coming of the wind, the rays of the sun seem to have no more warmth than moonbeams, the sand blows up in clouds, doors and windows rattle, and the city is swept and scourged. but fifty miles inland the air is still and balmy, and residents of san francisco leave the city in summer not to escape unpleasant heat, but to enjoy the relaxation of a milder and less stimulating climate. "in the interior one bright, still day follows another, as calm, as dreamy, as disconnected from time and space as was the air which lulled the lotus-eaters to rest."[ ] this evenness of temperature was amazing and delightful to the weather-beaten pioneers from new england. the midsummer days are often intensely hot in the interior, but the nights are cool, and the atmosphere is so dry that the heat is not enervating. men have been seen hard at work digging a cellar with the thermometer at ° f. in the shade; and sunstrokes, though not unknown, are extremely rare. nothing decays or becomes offensive. fresh meat hung in the shade does not spoil. dead animal or vegetable matter simply dries up and wastes away. in the rains were uncommonly severe, to the great discomfort of the pioneers; and alvarado, the former spanish governor, explained the fact in all sincerity by saying that the yankees had been accompanied to california by the devil himself. this explanation was accepted by the natives generally, without doubt or qualification. the streets of san francisco, in that year, were like the beds of rivers. it was no uncommon thing to see, at the same time, a mule stalled in the middle of the highway, with only his head showing above the road, and an unfortunate pedestrian, who had slipped off the plank sidewalk, in process of being fished out by a companion. at the corner of clay and kearney streets there once stood a sign, erected by some joker, inscribed as follows,-- this street is impassable, not even jackassable! but the rainy season is usually neither long nor constant. the fall of rain on the pacific slope is only about one third of the rainfall in the atlantic states; and, before water was supplied artificially, the miner was often obliged to suspend operations for want of it. frequently a day's rain would have been cheaply bought at the price of a million dollars; and even a good shower gave an impetus to business which was felt by the merchants and gamblers of san francisco and sacramento. it was observed that after a long drought dimes took the place of gold slugs upon the roulette and faro tables. thus, even the weather was a speculation in pioneer times. and yet, notwithstanding the general mildness of the climate, extremes of cold, at high levels, are close at hand. snow often falls to a depth of one or two feet within fifty miles of san francisco. near the head-waters of the feather river the snow is sometimes twelve and even fifteen feet deep; and in december, , eighteen men out of a party of nineteen, and sixty-eight of their seventy mules froze to death in one night. a snow-storm came up so suddenly, and fell with such fury, that their firewood became inaccessible, and they were obliged to burn their cabin; but even that did not save them. bret harte has described a california snow-storm not only in _the outcasts of poker flat_, but in several other stories, notably in _gabriel conroy_, _snow-bound at eagle's_, and _a night on the divide_. it is interesting to know, as mr. pemberton tells us, that the description of the snow-storm in _gabriel conroy_ was written on a hot day in august. poker flat was in sierra county, and in march, , the snow was so deep in that county that tunnels were dug through it as a picturesque and convenient means of access to local saloons. the storm which overwhelmed the outcasts was no uncommon event. but when these storms clear off, the cold, though often intense, is not disagreeable, owing to the dryness of the air. "we are now working every fair day," wrote a miner in january, , "and have been all the winter without inconvenience. the long, sled-runner norwegian snow-shoes are used here by nearly everybody. i have seen the ladies floating about, wheeling and soaring, with as much grace and ease of motion as swans on the bosom of a placid lake or eagles in the sun-lit air." on the summit of the mountains the snow is perpetual, and on the easterly slopes it often attains the almost incredible depth, or height, of fifty feet. in _a tale of three truants_, bret harte has described an avalanche of snow, carrying the three truants along with it, in the course of which they "seemed to be going through a thicket of underbrush, but provy smith knew that they were the tops of pine trees." on the whole, the climate of california justified the enthusiasm which it aroused in the pioneers, and which sometimes found an amusing expression. the birth of twins to an immigrant and his wife, who had been childless for fifteen years, was triumphantly recorded by a san josé paper as the natural result of even a short residence on the pacific slope. large families and long life marked not only the spaniards, but also the mexicans and indians. families of fifteen, twenty, and even twenty-five children excited no surprise and procured no rewards of merit for the parents. in there was a woman living at monterey whose children, all alive and in good health, numbered twenty-eight. we read of an indian, blind but still active at the age of one hundred and forty; and of a squaw "very active" at one hundred and twenty-six. mr. charles dudley warner[ ] a speaks of "don antonio serrano, a tall, spare man, who rides with grace and vigor at ninety-three," and of an indian servant "who was a grown man, breaking horses, when don antonio was an infant. this man is still strong enough to mount his horse and canter about the country. he is supposed to be about one hundred and eighteen." this wonderful longevity was ascribed by mr. warner to the equable climate and a simple diet. ancient mexicans and indians figure occasionally in bret harte's stories. there is, for example, concepcion, "a wrinkled indian woman, brown and veined like a tobacco leaf," who acts as servant to the convert of the mission; and, at the mission of san carmel, sanchicha, in the form of a bundle, is brought in and deposited in a corner of the room. "father pedro bent over the heap, and distinguished in its midst the glowing black eyes of sanchicha, the indian centenarian of the mission. only her eyes lived. helpless, boneless, and jelly-like, old age had overtaken her with a mild form of deliquescence." but it was not length of days,--it was feverish energy that the climate produced in the new race which had come under its influence. the amount of labor performed by the pioneers was prodigious. "there is as much difference," wrote the methodist preacher, father taylor, "between the muscular action of the california miner and a man hired to work on a farm, as between the aimless movements of a sloth and the pounce of the panther." "we have," declared a san francisco paper, "the most exhilarating atmosphere in the world. in it a man can do more work than anywhere else, and he feels under a constant pressure of excitement. with a sun like that of italy, a coast wind as cool as an atlantic breeze in spring, an air as crisp and dry as that of the high alps, people work on without let or relaxation, until the vital cord suddenly snaps. few americans die gradually here or of old age; they fall off without warning." so late as it was often said that there were busy men in san francisco who had never taken a day's vacation, or even left the city to cross the bay, from the hour of their arrival in until that moment. even this record has been eclipsed. a pioneer of german birth, named henry miller, who accumulated a fortune of six million dollars, is said to have lived, or at least to have existed, in san francisco for thirty-five years without taking a single day's vacation. it was even asserted at first that the climate neutralized the effect of intoxicating liquor, and that it was difficult, if not impossible, to get really drunk in california. possibly a somewhat lax definition of drunkenness accounted in part for this theory. a witness once testified in a san francisco court that he did not consider a man to be drunk so long as he could move. but the crowning excellence of the california climate remains to be stated. it was observed by the pioneers,--and they had ample opportunity to make observations upon the subject,--that in that benign atmosphere gunshot wounds healed rapidly. with a climate exhilarating and curative; with youth, health, courage, and the prospect of almost immediate wealth; with new and exciting surroundings, it is no wonder that the pioneers enjoyed their hour. in san francisco, especially, a kind of pleasant madness seized upon every newcomer. "as each man steps his foot on shore," writes one adventurer, "he seems to have entered a magic circle in which he is under the influence of new impulses." and another, in a letter to a friend says, "as soon as you reach california you will think every one is crazy; and without great caution, you will be crazy yourself." still another pioneer wrote home even more emphatically on this point: "you can form no conception of the state of affairs here. i do believe, in my soul, everybody has gone mad,--stark, staring mad."[ ] to the same effect is the narrative of stephen j. field, afterward, and for many years, a justice of the supreme court of the united states. mr. field, who arrived in san francisco as a very young man, thus describes his first experience:-- "as i walked along the streets, i met a great many persons whom i had known in new york, and they all seemed to be in the highest spirits. every one in greeting me said, 'it is a glorious country!' or 'isn't it a glorious country?' or 'did you ever see a more glorious country?' in every case the word 'glorious' was sure to come out.... i caught the infection, and though i had but a single dollar in my pocket, no business whatever, and did not know where i was to get my next meal, i found myself saying to everybody i met, 'it is a glorious country!'"[ ] "the exuberance of my spirits," judge field continues, "was marvellous"; and the readers of his interesting reminiscences will not be inclined to dispute the fact when they learn that four days after his arrival, having made the sum of twenty dollars by selling a few new york newspapers, he forthwith put down his name for sixty-five thousand dollars' worth of town lots, and received the consideration due to a capitalist bent upon developing the resources of a new country. the most extravagant acts appeared reasonable under the new dispensation. nobody was surprised when an enthusiastic miner offered to bet a friend that the latter could not hit him with a shotgun at the distance of seventy-eight yards. as a result the miner received five shots, causing severe wounds, beside losing the bet, which amounted to four drinks. after the first state election, a magistrate holding an important office fulfilled a wager by carrying the winner a distance of three miles in a wheelbarrow. a characteristic scene in a chinese restaurant is described as follows in the "sacramento transcript" of october , :-- "one young man called for a plate of mutton chops, and the waiter, not understanding, asked for a repetition of the order. "'mutton chops, you chuckle head,' said the young gentleman. "'mutton chops, you chuckle head,' shouted the chinaman to the kitchen. "the joke took among the customers, and presently one of them called out, 'a glass of pigeon milk, you long-tailed asiatic.' "'a glass of pigeon milk, you long-tailed satic,' echoed the waiter. "'a barrel of homoeopathic soup, old smooth head,' shouted another. "'arrel homepatty soup, you old smooth head,' echoed the waiter. "'a hatful of bricks,' shouted a fourth. "'hatter bricks,' repeated the waiter. "by this time the kitchen was in a perfect state of confusion, and the proprietor in a stew of perplexity rushed into the dining-room. 'what you mean by pigeon milk, homepatty soup, and de brick? how you cooking, gentlemen?' "a roar burst from the tables, and the shrewd asiatic saw in a moment that they were hoaxing his subordinates. 'the gentlemen make you all dam fools,' said he, rushing again into the smoky recess of the kitchen." at a dinner given in san francisco a local orator thus discoursed upon the glories of california: "look at its forest trees, varying from three hundred to one thousand feet in height, with their trunks so close together [drawing his knife and pantomiming] that you can't stick this bowie-knife between them; and the lordly elk, with antlers from seventeen to twenty feet spread, with their heads and tails up, ambling through these grand forests. it's a sight, gentlemen"-- "stop," cried a newcomer who had not yet been inoculated with the atmosphere. "my friend, if the trees are so close together, how does the elk get through the woods with his wide-branching horns?" the californian turned on the stranger with a look of thorough contempt and replied, "that's the elk's business"; and continued his unvarnished tale, no more embarrassed than the sun at noonday. "there was a spirit of off-hand, jolly fun in those days, a sort of universal free and easy cheerfulness.... the california pioneer that could not give and take a joke was just no californian at all. it was this spirit that gives the memory of those days an indescribable fascination and charm."[ ] the very names first given to places and situations show the same exuberant spirit; such, for example, as murderer's alley, dead man's bar, mad mule cañon, skunk flat, whiskey gulch, port wine diggins, shirt-tail hollow, bloody bend, death pass, jackass flat, and hell's half acre. even crime took on a bold and original form. a scapegrace in sacramento stole a horse while the owner still held the bridle. the owner had stepped into a shop to ask a question, but kept the end of the reins in his hand, when the thief gently slipped the bridle from the horse's head, hung it on a post, and rode off with steed and saddle. bizarre characters from all parts of the world, drawn as by a magnet, took ship for california in ' and ' and became wealthy, or landed in the police court, as fate would have it. the latter was the destination of one murphy, an irishman presumably, and certainly a man of imagination, who described himself as a teacher of mathematics, and acknowledged that he had been drunk for the preceding six years. he added, for the benefit of the court, that he had been at the breaking of every pane of glass from vera cruz to san francisco, that he had smoked a dozen cigars in the halls of the montezumas, and that there were as many persons contending for his name as there were cities for the birth of homer. the court gave him six months. two residents of san francisco, one a frenchman, the other a dutchman, were so enthusiastic over their new and republican surroundings that they slept every night under the liberty pole on the plaza; and seldom did they fail to turn in patriotically drunk, shouting for freedom and equality. prize-fighters, as a matter of course, were attracted to a place where sporting blood ran so high. in june, , news came that tom hyer (of whose celebrity the reader is doubtless aware) was shortly expected with "his lady" at panama; and he must have arrived in due course, for in august, tom hyer was tried in the police court of san francisco for entering several saloons on horseback, in one case performing the classic feat of riding up a flight of steps. the defence set up that this was not an uncommon method of entering saloons in san francisco, and the court took "judicial notice" of the fact, his honor having witnessed the same thing himself on more than one occasion. however, as mr. hyer was somewhat intoxicated, and as the alleged offence was committed on a sunday, the judge imposed a small fine. in the same year, mr. t. belcher kay, another famous prize-fighter from the east, narrowly escaped being murdered while returning from a ball before daylight one sunday morning; and subsequently mr. kay was tried, but acquitted, on a charge of burglary. in that strange collection of human beings drawn from all parts of the earth, for the most part unknown to one another, but almost all having this fundamental trait in common, namely, that they were close to nature, it was inevitable that incidents of pathos and tragedy, deeds of rascality and cruelty, and still more deeds of unselfishness and heroism, should continually occur. some pioneers met good fortune or disaster at the very threshold. one young man, upon landing in san francisco, borrowed ten dollars, went immediately to a gambling saloon, won seven thousand dollars, and with rare good sense took the next steamer for home. another newcomer, who brought a few hundred dollars with him, wandered into the gambling rooms of the parker house soon after his arrival, won twenty thousand dollars there, and went home two days later. a pioneer who had just crossed the plains fell into a strange experience upon his arrival at placerville. he was a poor man, his only property being a yoke of oxen which he sold almost immediately for one hundred dollars in gold dust. shortly before that a purse containing the same quantity of gold had been stolen; and when, a few hours later, the newly-arrived teamster took out his pocket-book to pay for a small purchase, a man immediately stepped forward and accused him of the robbery. he was, of course, arrested, and a jury to try him was impanelled on the spot. the quality of the gold in his purse corresponded exactly with the quality of the stolen gold. it was known that he had only just arrived from the plains and could not have obtained the gold dust by mining. the man to whom he sold his cattle had gone, and he was unable to prove how he had come by the treasure. under these circumstances, the jury found him guilty, and sentenced him to receive thirty lashes on the bare back, which were thereupon administered, the unfortunate man all the time protesting his innocence. after he was whipped, he procured a pistol, walked deliberately up to the person who first accused him, placed the pistol at his head, and declared that he believed him to be the guilty man, and that if he did not then and there confess that he had stolen the money he would blow his brains out. the fellow could not stand the power of injured innocence. he became frightened, acknowledged that he was the thief, and drew the identical stolen money out of his pocket. the enraged crowd instantly set upon him, bore him to the nearest tree, and hung him. a subscription was then started, and about eighteen hundred dollars were raised in a few minutes for the sagacious teamster, who departed forthwith for his home in the east.[ ] of the many thousand pioneers at work in the mines very few reaped a reward at all commensurate with their toils, privations and sufferings,--much less with their expectations. the wild ideas which prevailed in some quarters as to the abundance of the gold may be gathered from the advice given to one young argonaut by his father, on the eve of his departure from illinois. the venerable man urged his son not to work too hard, but to buy a low chair and a small iron rake, and, taking his seat comfortably, to rake over the sand, pick up the nuggets as they came to view, and place them in a convenient box. in reality, the miners' earnings, after deducting necessary living expenses, are computed to have averaged only about three times the wages of an unskilled day-laborer in the east. few of them saved anything, for there was every temptation to squander their gains in dissipation; and men whose income is subject to wide fluctuations are notoriously unthrifty. the following is a typical experience: "our diet consists of hard bread, flour which we eat half-cooked, and salt pork, with occasionally a salmon which we purchase of the indians. vegetables are not to be procured. our feet are wet all day, while a hot sun shines down upon our heads, and the very air parches the skin like the hot air of an oven. our drinking water comes down to us thoroughly impregnated with the mineral substances washed through the thousand cradles above us. the hands and feet of the novice become painfully blistered and the limbs are stiff. besides all these causes of sickness, many men who have left their wives and children in far-distant states are homesick, anxious and despondent."[ ] many a family in the east was desolated and reduced to poverty by the untimely death of a husband and father; and in other cases long absence was as effectual in this respect as death itself. the once-common expression "california widow" is significant. some eastern men took informal wives on the pacific slope; others, who had succeeded, put off their home-coming from month to month, and even from year to year, hoping for still greater success; others yet, who had failed, were ashamed to go home in poverty, and lingered in california until death overtook them. this phase of pioneer life is treated by bret harte in the stories _how old man plunkett went home_, and _jimmy's big brother from california_. of those who were lucky enough to find gold in large quantities, many were robbed, and some of these unfortunates went home, or died, broken-hearted. but as a rule, the pioneers rose superior to every blow that fate could deal them. men met misfortune, danger, even death with composure, and yet without bravado. a traveller being told that a man was about to be lynched, proceeded to the spot and found a large gathering of miners standing around in groups under the trees, and quietly talking. seeing no apparent criminal there, he stepped up to one person who stood a little apart from the others, and asked him which was the man about to be hung. the person addressed replied, without the slightest change of countenance, "i believe, sir, it's me." half an hour later he was dead. there was a battle at sacramento in between a party of "squatters" on one side, and city officials and citizens on the other. among the latter was one j. f. hooper from independence in missouri. hooper, armed only with a pistol, discharged all his cartridges, then threw the weapon at his advancing opponents, and calmly faced them, crossing his hands over his breast as a protection. they fired at him, notwithstanding his defenceless situation, and one ball piercing his right hand inflicted a wound, but not a mortal one, in his side. four men were killed and several others badly wounded in this fight. when a father and son were arrested by a vigilance committee at santa clara for horse-stealing, and were sentenced to receive thirty-six lashes apiece, the son begged that he might take his father's share as well as his own. men died well in california. in november, , two horse-thieves were hung by a vigilance committee at stockton. one of them, who was very young, smoked a cigar up to the last moment, and made a little speech in which he explained that the act was not dictated by irreverence, but that he desired to die like a man. when stuart, a noted robber and horse-thief was being tried for his life by the vigilance committee in san francisco, he complained that the proceedings were "tiresome," and asked for a chew of tobacco. [illustration: the two opponents came nearer from "the iliad of sandy bar" frederic remington, del.] the death of this man was one of the most impressive scenes ever witnessed upon this blood-stained earth. sentence having been passed upon the prisoner the committee, numbering one thousand men, came down from the hall where they met and formed in the street, three abreast. they comprised, with some exceptions, the best, the most substantial, the most public-spirited citizens of san francisco. in the centre was stuart, handcuffed and pinioned, but perfectly self-possessed and cool. a gallows had been erected some distance off, and the procession moved up battery street, followed by a great throng of men. there was no confusion, no outcry, no apparent excitement,--not a sound, indeed, except the tread of many feet upon the planked streets, every footfall sounding the prisoner's knell. it was of this event that bret harte wrote in his _bohemian days in san francisco_: "under the reign of the committee the lawless and vicious class were more appalled by the moral spectacle of several thousand black-coated, serious-minded business men in embattled procession than by mere force of arms." when they reached the gallows, a rope was placed around the prisoner's neck, and even then, except for a slight paleness, there was no change in his appearance. amid the breathless silence of the whole assemblage stuart, standing under the gallows, said, "i die reconciled. my sentence is just." his crimes had been many, and he seemed to accept his death as the proper and almost welcome result of his deeds. he was a man of intellect, and, hardened criminal though he was, the instinct of expiation asserted itself in his breast. in july, , a spanish woman was tried and condemned by an impromptu vigilance committee for killing an american who, she declared, had insulted her. being sentenced to be hanged forthwith, she carefully arranged her dress, neatly coiled her hair, and walked quietly and firmly to the gallows. there she made a short speech, saying that she would do the same thing again if she were permitted to live, and were insulted in the same way. then she bade the crowd farewell, adjusted the noose with her own hands, and so passed bravely away. a few years later at moquelumne hill, a young welshman, scarcely more than a boy, met death in a very similar manner, and for a similar offence. on the scaffold he turned to one of the by-standers, and said, "did you ever know anything bad of me before this affair occurred?" the answer was, "no, jack." "well," said the youth, "tell those camp saco fellows that i would do the same thing again and be hung rather than put up with an insult." men like these died for a point of honor, as much as did alexander hamilton. but far higher was the heroism of those who suffered or died for others, and not for themselves. no event, not even the discovery of gold, stirred california more profoundly than did the death of james king. in , king, the editor of the "bulletin," was waging single-handed a vigorous warfare against the political corruption then rife in california, and especially against the supineness of the city officials in respect to gambling and prostitution. he had given out that he would not accept a challenge to a duel, but he was well aware of the risk that he ran. san francisco, even at that time, indulged in an easy toleration of vice, and only some striking, some terrible event could have aroused the conscience of the public. among the city officials whose hatred mr. king had incurred was james casey, a typical new york politician, and a former convict, yet not wholly a bad man. the two men, king and casey, really represented two stages of morality, two kinds of government. their personal conflict was in a condensed form the clashing of the higher and the lower ideals. casey, meeting king on the street, called upon him to "draw and defend himself"; but king, being without a weapon, calmly folded his arms and faced his enemy. casey fired, and king fell to the ground, mortally wounded. "it was expedient that one man should die for the people"; and the death of king did far more than his life could have done to purify the political and social atmosphere of california. on the day following the murder, a vigilance committee was organized, and an executive committee, consisting chiefly of those who had managed the first vigilance committee in , was chosen as the practical ruler of the city. it was supported by a band of three thousand men, distributed in companies, armed, officered and well drilled. for two months and a half the executive committee remained in office, exercising its power with marked judgment and moderation. four men were hung, many more were banished, and the city was purged. having accomplished its work the committee disbanded, but its members and sympathizers secured control of the municipal government through the ordinary legal channels, and for twenty years administered the affairs of the city with honesty and economy. the task in had been mainly to rid the city of australian convicts; in it was to correct the political abuses introduced by professional politicians from the east, especially from new york; and in each case the task was successfully accomplished, without unnecessary bloodshed, and even with mercy. nor was casey's end without pathos, and even dignity. on the scaffold he was thinking not of himself, but of the old mother whom he had left in new york. "gentlemen," he said, "i stand before you as a man about to come into the presence of god, and i declare before him that i am no murderer! i have an aged mother whom i wish not to hear that i am guilty of murder. i am not. my early education taught me to repay an injury, and i have done nothing more. the 'alta california,' 'chronicle,' 'globe,' and other papers in the city connect my name with murder and assassination. i am no murderer. let no newspaper in its weekly or monthly editions dare publish to the world that i am one. let it not get to the ears of my mother that i am. o god, i appeal for mercy for my past sins, which are many. o lord jesus, unto thee i resign my spirit. o mother, mother, mother!" the sinking of the steamer, "central america," off the coast of georgia, in , is an event now almost forgotten, and yet it deserves to be remembered forever. the steamer was on her way from aspinwall to new york, with passengers and gold from san francisco, when she sprang a leak and began to sink. the women and children, fifty-three in all, were taken off to a small brig which happened to come in sight, leaving on board, without boats or rafts, five hundred men, all of whom went down, and of whom all but eighty were drowned. though many were armed, and nearly all were rough in appearance, they were content that the women and children should be saved first; and if here and there a grumble was heard, it received little encouragement. never did so many men face death near at hand more quietly or decorously.[ ] and yet the critic tells us about the "perverse romanticism" of mr. bret harte's california tales! one incident more, and this brief record of california heroism, which might be extended indefinitely, shall close. charles fairfax, the tenth baron of that name,[ ] whose family have lived for many years in virginia, was attacked without warning by a cowardly assassin, named lee. this man stabbed fairfax twice, and he was raising his arm for a third thrust when his victim covered him with a pistol. lee, seeing the pistol, dropped his knife, stepped back, and threw up his hands, exclaiming, "i am unarmed!" "shoot the damned scoundrel!" cried a friend of fairfax who stood by. fairfax, holding the pistol, with the blood streaming from his wounds, said: "you are an assassin! you have murdered me! your life is in my hands!" and then, after a moment, gazing on him, he added, "but for the sake of your poor sick wife and of your children, i will spare you." he then uncocked the pistol, and fell fainting in the arms of his friend. all california rang with the nobility of the deed. chapter vii pioneer law and lawlessness california certainly contained what borthwick describes as "the élite of the most desperate and consummate scoundrels from every part of the world"; but they were in a very small minority, and the rather common idea that the miners were a mass of brutal and ignorant men is a wild misconception. an english writer once remarked, somewhat hysterically, "bret harte had to deal with countries and communities of an almost unexampled laxity, a laxity passing the laxity of savages, the laxity of civilized men grown savage." far more accurate is the observation of that eminent critic, mr. watts-dunton: "bret harte's characters are amenable to no laws except the improvised laws of the camp, and the final arbiter is either the six-shooter or the rope of judge lynch. and yet underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep law-abiding-ness which the late grant allen despised as being the anglo-saxon characteristic." the almost spontaneous manner in which mining laws came into existence, and the ready obedience which the miners yielded to them, show how correct is the view taken by mr. watts-dunton. what constituted ownership of a claim; how it must be proved; how many square feet a claim might include; how long and by what means title to a claim could be preserved without working it; when a "find" should become the property of the individual discoverer, and when it should accrue to the partnership of which he was a member,--all these matters and many more were regulated by a code quickly formed, and universally respected. thus a lump of gold weighing half an ounce or more, if observed before it was thrown into the cradle, belonged to the finder, and not to the partnership. [illustration: sacramento city in ] in the main, mining rules were the same throughout the state, but they varied somewhat according to the peculiar circumstances of each "diggings"; and the custom was for the miners to hold a meeting, when they became sufficiently numerous at any point, and make such laws as they deemed expedient. if any controversy arose under them it was settled by the alcalde. in respect to this office, again, the miners showed the same instinct for law and order, and the same practical readiness to make use of such means as were at hand.[ ] the alcalde (al cadi) was originally a spanish official, corresponding in many respects with our justice of the peace. but in the mining camps, the alcalde, usually an american, was often given, by a kind of tacit agreement, very full, almost despotic powers, combining the authority of a magistrate with that of a selectman and chief of police. the first alcalde of marysville was the young lawyer already mentioned, stephen j. field, and he administered affairs with such firmness that the town, although harboring many desperate persons,--this was in ,--gamblers, thieves and cut-throats, was as orderly as a new england village. he caused the streets and sidewalks to be kept clean and in repair; he employed men to grade the banks of the river so as to facilitate landing, and he did many other things for the good of the community, but really with no authority except that of common consent. sitting as a judge, he did not hesitate to sentence some criminals to be flogged. there was no law for it; but it was the only punishment that was both adequate and practicable, for the town contained no prison or "lock-up." and yet, so far as was possible, alcalde field observed the ancient forms with true anglo-saxon scrupulosity. "in civil cases," he relates, "i always called a jury if the parties desired one; and in criminal cases when the offence was of a high grade i went through the form of calling a grand jury, and having an indictment found; and in all cases i appointed an attorney to represent the people, and also one to represent the accused, when that was necessary." spanish and mexicans, as well as americans, reaped the benefit of the change in government. property, real estate especially, rose in value at once, and justice was administered as it never had been administered before. an entry in the diary of the reverend walter colton, chaplain in the united states navy, and alcalde of monterey, whose book has already been cited, runs as follows:-- "_september , ._ i empanelled to-day the first jury ever summoned in california. one third were californians, one third mexicans, one third americans. the trial was conducted in three languages and lasted six hours. the result was very satisfactory. the inhabitants who witnessed the trial said it was what they liked,--that there could be no bribery in it,--that the opinion of twelve honest men should set the case forever at rest. and so it did.... if there is anything on earth for which i would die, beside religion, it is the right of trial by jury." at first no one quite knew what laws were in force in california. the territory became a part of the united states by means of the treaty with mexico which was proclaimed on july , , but california was not admitted as a state until , and in the mean time it was a question whether the laws of mexico still prevailed, or the common law, or what. in this situation the alcaldes usually fell back upon common sense and the laws of the state from which they happened to come. others had recourse to an older dispensation. thus, on one occasion the alcalde of santa cruz had before him a man who was found guilty of shaving the hair from the tail of a fine american horse, and the sentence of the court was that the criminal should have his own head shaved. the young attorney who represented the defendant thereupon sprang to his feet, and, with great indignation, demanded to be told what law or authority there was for so unusual a punishment. "i base that judgment," said the alcalde with solemnity, "on the oldest law in the world, on the law of moses. go home, young man, and read your bible." in another case a spaniard was suing for a divorce from his wife on the ground of infidelity; but the alcalde, an american, refused it, inasmuch as the man was unable to swear that he had been faithful himself. "is that united states law?" asked the suitor in naïve amazement. "i don't know about that," replied the alcalde; "but it is the law by which i am governed,--the law of the bible, and a good law too." the alcalde of placerville very properly refused to marry a certain man and woman, because the woman was already married to a man who had been absent for three months. but another alcalde who happened to be present intervened. "any man in california," he declared, "who has a wife, and so fine looking a wife as i see here before me, and who remains absent from her for three months, must be insane, mr. alcalde, or dead; and in either case the lady is free to marry again. i am alcalde of santa cruz, and will with great pleasure make you man and wife. step forward, madam, step forward; i feel sure you will get through this trying occasion without fainting, if you make the effort, and do not give way to your natural shyness. step forward, my dear sir, by the side of your blushing bride, and i will make you a happy man." one other case that was tried in an alcalde's court is so illustrative of california life that the reader will perhaps pardon its insertion at length. "bill liddle, conductor of a mule train of eight large american mules, had just started from sacramento for a mining camp far in the interior. he was obliged to pass a dangerous trail about two miles long, cut in the side of a steep cliff overhanging the river. the trail was only wide enough for a loaded mule to walk on. in the lead was 'old kate,' a heavy, square-built, bay mule. bill always said that she understood english, and he always spoke to her as if that were the fact, and we were often forced to laugh at the wonderful intelligence she showed in understanding and obeying him. sometimes she broke into the stable, unlatching the door, went to the bin where the barley was kept in sacks, raised the cover, took out a sack, set it up on one end, ripped the sewing as neatly as bill could, and then helped herself to the contents. on such occasions bill would shake his head, and exclaim, 'i wonder who kate is! oh, i wish i knew, for of course she is some famous woman condemned to live on earth as a mule!' "the train had advanced about a quarter of a mile on the trail just described, bill riding behind, when he was startled by hearing a loud bray from kate, and all the mules stopped. ahead was a return train of fifteen californian mules, approaching on a jog trot. the two trains could not pass, and there was not space for bill's large and loaded mules to turn around. bill raised himself in his saddle and furiously called on the other conductor to stop. he did so, but refused to turn his mules around, although bill explained to him the necessity. at last, after much talk, the other conductor started up his mules, shouting and cracking his whip and urging them on. meanwhile old kate stood in the centre of the trail, her fore-legs well apart, her nose dropped lower than usual, and her long, heavy ears thrown forward as if aimed at the head mule of the other train, while her large bright eyes were fixed on his motions. seeing the danger, bill called out, 'kate, old girl, go for them; pitch them all, and the driver with them, to hell!' thereupon kate gave an unearthly bray, dropped on her knees with her head stretched out close along the rocks, her neck and lower jaw rubbing the trail, and received the leading mule across her neck. in a second more that mule was thrown into the air, and fell into the river far below. "two or three times the conductor of the other train made a similar attempt, urging his mules forward, and did not stop until five of his mules had gone into the river. then he said, 'well, i will go back, but when we get out of this trail you and i will settle accounts.' bill drew his revolver and his knife, made sure that they were all right, and as soon as they emerged from the cliff rode up to the other conductor with his revolver in his hand, and said, 'shall we settle this business here, or shall we go before the alcalde of the next diggings?' the man looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said, 'damn me if you don't look like that she-devil of a mule of yours that threw my mules down the cliff. are you and she any blood relation that you know of?' not at all offended, bill answered, 'i can't say positively that we are, but one thing i can say: i would rather be full brother to a mule that would act as kate did to-day, than a forty-second cousin to a man that would act as you did.' 'well,' said the other, 'put up your revolver, and let us settle matters before the alcalde.' "the mule-drivers found the alcalde working in the bottom of a shaft which he was sinking. they asked him to come up, but he said that was unnecessary, as he could hear and settle the case where he was. accordingly, he turned a bucket upside down, sat down on it, and lit a cigar, leaning his back against the wall of the shaft. the two conductors then kissed a bible which the alcalde had sent for, and swore to tell the truth; and they gave their testimony from the top of the shaft, the driver of the unloaded mules asking for six hundred dollars damages, five hundred dollars for his mules and one hundred dollars for the pack saddles lost with them. when they had finished, the alcalde said, 'i know the trail well, and i find for the defendant, and order the plaintiff to pay the costs of court, which are only one ounce.' thereupon the alcalde arose, turned up his bucket and began to shovel the earth into it. as he worked on, he told the plaintiff to go to the store kept by one meyer not far off, and weigh out the ounce of dust and leave it there for him. this was done without hesitation. bill went along, treated the plaintiff to a drink, and paid for a bottle of the best brandy that meyer had, to be given in the evening to the alcalde and his partner as they returned from work."[ ] california magistrates were somewhat informal for several years. on one occasion, during a long argument by counsel, the alcalde interrupted with the remark that the point in question was a difficult one, and he would like to consult an authority; whereupon, the clerk, understanding what was meant, produced a demijohn and glasses from a receptacle beneath the bench, and judge and counsel refreshed themselves. a characteristic story is told of judge searls, a san francisco magistrate who had several times fined for contempt of court a lawyer named francis j. dunn. dunn was a very able but dissipated and eccentric man, and apt to be late, and on one such occasion the judge fined him fifty dollars. "i did not know that i was late, your honor," said mr. dunn, with mock contrition; "i have no watch, and i shall never be able to get one if i have to pay the fines which your honor imposes upon me." then, after a pause of reflection, he looked up and said: "will your honor _lend_ me fifty dollars so that i can pay this last fine?" "mr. clerk," said the judge, leaning over the bench, "remit that fine: the state can afford to lose the money better than i can." but informality is not inconsistent with justice. the pioneers did not like to have men, though they were judges, take themselves too seriously; but the great majority of them were law-abiding, intelligent, industrious and kind-hearted. it was, as has been said already, a picked and sifted population. the number of professional men and of well-educated men was extraordinary. they were a magnanimous people. as the reverend dr. bushnell remarked, "with all the violence and savage wrongs and dark vices that have heretofore abounded among the pioneers, they seldom do a mean thing." an example of this magnanimity was the action of california in regard to the state debt amounting to five million dollars. it was illegal, having been contracted in violation of the state constitution, and the money had been spent chiefly in enriching those corrupt politicians and their friends who obtained possession of the california government in the first years. but the pioneers were too generous and too proud of the good name of their state to stand upon their legal rights. they were as anxious to pay this unjust debt as pennsylvania and mississippi had been in former years to repudiate their just debts. the matter was put to popular vote, and the bonds were paid. stephen j. field remarked in his old age, "i shall never forget the noble and generous people that i found in california, in all ranks of life." another pioneer, dr. j. d. b. stillman, wrote, "there are more intelligence and generous good feeling here than in any other country that i have ever seen."[ ] "the finest body of men ever gathered together in the world's history," is the declaration of another pioneer,[ ] and even this extreme statement is borne out by the contemporary records. that there was a minority equally remarkable for its bad qualities, is also unquestionable. moreover, many men who at home would have been classed as good citizens gave way in california to their avarice or other bad passions. whatever depravity there was in a man's heart showed itself without fear and without restraint. the very pioneer, dr. stillman, who has just been quoted to the effect that california had, on the whole, the best population in the world, gives us also the other side of the picture: "last night i saw a man lying on the wet ground, unknown, unconscious, uncared for, and dying. money is the all-absorbing object. there are men who would hang their heads at home at the mention of their heartless avarice. what can be expected from strangers when a man's own friends abandon him because he sickens and becomes an encumbrance!" mrs. bates, whose account of california is never exaggerated, tells us of a miner who, night after night, deserted his dying brother for a gambling house, leaving him unattended and piteously crying for water until, at last, he expired alone. it must be remembered, also, that the moral complexion of california changed greatly from year to year. the first condition was almost an idyllic one. it was a period of honesty and good-will such as never existed before, except in the imagination of rousseau. there were few doors, and no locks. gold was left for days at a time unguarded and untouched. "a year ago," said the "sacramento transcript," in october, , "a miner could have left his bag of dust exhibited to full view, and absent himself a week. his tools might have remained unmolested in any ravine for months, and his goods and chattels, bed and bedding might have remained along the highway for an indefinite period without being stolen." there was much drinking, much gambling, and some murders were committed in the heat of passion; but nowhere else in the world, except perhaps in the smaller villages of the united states, was property so safe as it was in california. "i have not heard," wrote dr. stillman in , "of a theft or crime of any sort. firearms are thrown aside as useless, and are given away on the road." grave disputes involving the title to vast wealth were settled by arbitration without the raising of a voice in anger or controversy. even in sacramento and san francisco, merchants left their goods in their canvas houses and tents, open to any who might choose to enter, while they went to church or walked over the hills on sundays. their gold was equally unguarded, and equally safe. "it was wonderful," said a pioneer early in the fifties, "how well we got on in ' without any sort of government beyond the universally sanctioned action of the people, and i have often since questioned in my own mind if we might not have got on just the same ever since, and saved all the money we have paid out for thieving legislation and selfish office-holders."[ ] the change came in the late summer and early autumn of , and was chiefly owing to the influx of convicts from australia and elsewhere,--"low-browed, heavy-featured men, with cold, steel-gray eyes." in a less degree the change was also due to the deterioration of a small minority of americans and europeans, whose moral stamina was not equal to life in a lawless community, although at first that community was lawless only in the strict sense of the word;--it had no laws and needed none. as one pioneer wrote, "there is no law regarded here but the natural law of justice." beginning with the autumn of , things went from bad to worse until february, , when robbery and murder in san francisco were stopped by the first vigilance committee; and in the mines the same drastic remedy was applied, but not always with the same moderation. a sacramento paper said in december, : "it is an undeniable fact that crime of almost every description is on the increase in california, especially horse-stealing, robbery, arson and murder. in the city of sacramento alone, since last april, we should judge there have been at least twenty murders committed, and we are not aware that any murderer has suffered capital punishment, or any other kind of punishment. we have got used to these things, and look upon it as a matter of course that somebody will be killed and robbed as often as once a week at least; and yet notwithstanding all this our people generally are composed of the most orderly, respectable citizens of the united states. the laws furnish us no protection because they are not enforced." but the reader may ask, why were the laws not enforced? the answer is that the pioneers were too busy to concern themselves with their political duties or to provide the necessary machinery for the enforcement of the laws. state officers, municipal officers, sheriffs, constables and even judges were chosen, not because they were fit men, but because they wanted the job, and no better candidates offered themselves. moreover, the pioneers did not expect to become permanent residents of california; they expected to get rich, off-hand, and then to go home, and why should they bother themselves about elections or laws? in short, an attempt was made to do without law, and, as we have seen, it succeeded for a year or so, but broke down when criminals became numerous. a letter from the town of sonora, written in july, , said: "the people are leaving here fast. this place is much deeper in guilt than sodom or gomorrah. we have no society, no harmony. gambling and drunkenness are the order of the day." in four years there were one thousand two hundred homicides in california. almost every mile of the travelled road from monterey, in the southern part of the state, to san francisco, was the scene of some foul murder in those eventful years. there was more crime in the southern mines than in the northern, because the mexicans were more numerous there. in sonora county, in , there were twenty-five murders in a single month, committed mainly by mexicans, chilians, and british convicts from the penal colonies. a night patrol was organized. every american tent had a guard around it, and mining almost ceased. murder and robbery had reached the stage at which they seriously interfered with business. this was not to be endured; and at a mass meeting held at sonora on august , the following resolution was passed: "resolved: that for the safety of the lives and property of the citizens of this portion of the country, notice shall be given immediately ordering all mexicans and south americans to remove from township no. in one week from this date." the consequence was a melancholy exodus of men, women and children, which included the just and the unjust. many of them were destitute, and, as respects the mexicans, many were being banished from the place of their birth. "we fear," remarked a contemporary citizen, "that the money-making, merry old times in sonora are gone forever." this was a characteristic pioneer remark. the "old times" meant were somewhat less than a year back; and their "merry" quality was, as we have seen, considerably modified by robbery and murder. the point of view is much like that of the landlord of a hotel in virginia city, where bret harte was once a guest. after a night disturbed by sounds of shouting, scuffling and pistol shots, mr. harte found his host behind the counter in the bar-room "with a bruised eye, a piece of court-plaster extending from his cheek to his forehead, yet withal a pleasant smile upon his face. taking my cue from this, i said to him, 'well, landlord, you had rather a lively time here last night.' 'yes,' he replied, pleasantly, 'it _was_ rather a lively time.' 'do you often have such lively times in virginia city?' i added, emboldened by his cheerfulness. 'well, no,' he said reflectively; 'the fact is we've only just opened yer, and last night was about the first time that the boys seemed to be gettin' really _acquainted_!'" the absence of police, and, to a great extent, of law, led to deeds of violence, and to duelling; but it also tended to make men polite. the civility with which cases were conducted in court, and the restraint shown by lawyers in their comments upon one another and upon the witnesses were often spoken of in california. the experience of alcalde field in this regard is interesting:--"i came to california with all those notions in respect to acts of violence which are instilled into new england youth; if a man were rude, i would turn away from him. but i soon found that men in california were likely to take very great liberties with a person who acted in such a manner, and that the only way to get along was to hold every man responsible, and resent every trespass upon one's rights."[ ] accordingly, young field bought a brace of pistols, had a sack-coat made with pockets appropriate to contain them, and practised the useful art of firing the pistols with his hands in his pockets. subsequently he added a bowie-knife to his private arsenal, and he carried these weapons until the summer of . "i found," he says, "that the knowledge that pistols were generally worn created a wholesome courtesy of manner and language." even the members of the state legislature were armed. it was a thing of every-day occurrence for a member, when he entered the house, to take off his pistols and lay them in the drawer of his desk. such an act excited neither surprise nor comment. at one time mr. field sent a challenge to a certain judge barbour who had grossly insulted him. barbour accepted the challenge, but demanded that the duel should be fought with colt's revolvers and bowie-knives, that it should take place in a room only twenty feet square, and that the fight should continue until at least one of the principals was dead. mr. field's second, horrified by these savage proposals, was for rejecting them; but field himself insisted that they should be accepted, and the result was what he had anticipated. judge barbour, of his own motion, waived, first the knives, then the small room, and finally declined the meeting altogether. but the very next day, when field had stepped out of his office, and was picking up an armful of wood for his stove, barbour crept up behind him, and putting a pistol to his head, called upon field to draw and defend himself. field did not turn or move, but spoke somewhat as follows: "you infernal scoundrel, you cowardly assassin,--you come behind my back, and put your revolver to my head, and tell me to draw! you haven't the courage to shoot,--shoot and be damned!" and barbour slunk away. shooting at sight, especially in san francisco and the larger towns, was as common as it is represented by bret harte. for the few years, beginning with and succeeding , the newspapers were full of such events. on november , , the "alta california" said: "another case of the influenza now in fashion occurred yesterday. we allude to a mere shooting-match in which only one of the near by-standers was shot down in his tracks." even so late as august, , the "san francisco call" was able to refer in a modest way to the "two or three shooting encounters per week" which enlivened its columns.[ ] duels were common, and in most cases very serious affairs, the battle being waged with destructive weapons and at close range. as a rule, they took place in public. thus, at a meeting between d. c. broderick, leader of the democratic party in the state, and one j. cabot smith, seventy or eighty persons were present. broderick was wounded, and would have been killed had not the bullet first struck and shattered his watch. these california duels must be ascribed mainly to the southern element, which was strong numerically, and which, moreover, exerted an influence greater than its numbers warranted. one reason, perhaps the main reason, for this predominance of the southerners was that the aristocratic, semi-feudal system which they represented had a more dignified, more dashing aspect than the plain democratic views in which the northern and western men had been educated. it made the individual of more importance. upon this point professor royce makes an acute remark: "the type of the northern man who has assumed southern fashions, and not always the best southern fashions, has often been observed in california life. the northern man frequently felt commonplace, simple-minded, undignified, beside his brother from the border or the plantation.... the northern man admired his fluency, his vigor, his invective, his ostentatious courage, his absolute confidence about all matters of morals, of politics, of propriety, and the inscrutable union in his public discourse of sweet reasonableness with ferocious intolerance." the extreme type of southerner, as he appeared in california, is immortalized in colonel starbottle. the moment when this strange planet first swam into bret harte's ken seems to have been seized and recorded with accuracy by his friend, mr. noah brooks. "in sacramento he and i met colonel starbottle, who had, of course, another name. he wore a tall silk hat and loosely-fitting clothes, and he carried on his left arm by its crooked handle a stout walking-stick. the colonel was a dignified and benignant figure; in politics he was everybody's friend. a gubernatorial election was pending, and with the friends of haight he stood at the hotel bar, and as they raised their glasses to their lips he said, 'here's to the coming event!' nobody asked at that stage of the canvass what the coming event would be, and when the good colonel stood in the same place with the friends of gorham, he gave the same toast, 'the coming event!'" this may have been a certain dr. ruskin, a southern politician, who is described by a pioneer as wearing "a white fur plug hat, a blue coat with brass buttons, a buff-colored vest, white trousers, varnished boots, a black satin stock, and, on state occasions, a frilled shirt front. he always carried a cane with a curved handle."[ ] this, the reader need not be reminded, is the exact costume of colonel starbottle,--the "low byronic collar," which bret harte mentions, being the only item omitted. from this person bret harte undoubtedly derived an idea as to the appearance and carriage of colonel starbottle, and it is not unlikely that in drawing the character he had also in mind the notorious judge david s. terry. terry, a native of texas, was a fierce, fighting southerner, a brave and honest man, but narrow, prejudiced, abusive, and ferocious. he was a leading democrat, a judge of the supreme court of the state, and a bitter opponent of the san francisco vigilance committee. he nearly killed an agent of the committee who attempted to arrest one of his companions, and was himself in some danger of being hung by the committee on that account. later, terry killed senator broderick, of whom mention has just been made, in a duel which seems to have had the essential qualities of a murder, and which was forced upon broderick in much the same way that the fatal duel was forced upon alexander hamilton. later still, terry became involved in the affairs of one of his clients, a somewhat notorious woman, whom he married,--clearly showing that mixture of chivalrous respect for women, combined with a capacity for misunderstanding them, and of being deluded by them, which was so remarkable in colonel starbottle. in the course of litigation on behalf of his wife, terry bitterly resented certain action taken by mr. justice field of the supreme court of the united states,--the same field who began his judicial career as alcalde of marysville. terry's threats against the justice, then an old man, were so open and violent, and his character was so well known, that, at the request of the court officials in san francisco, a deputy marshal was assigned as a guard to the justice while he should be hearing cases on the california circuit. at a railroad station, one day, terry and the justice met; and as terry was, apparently, in the act of drawing a weapon, the deputy marshal shot and killed him. it was judge terry who remarked of the san francisco vigilance committee, which was mainly composed of business men,--the lawyers holding aloof,--that they were "a set of damned pork-merchants,"--a remark so characteristic of colonel starbottle that it is difficult to attribute it to anybody else. colonel starbottle was as much the product of slavery as uncle tom himself, and he exemplified both its good and its bad effects. his fat white hand and pudgy fingers indicated the man who despised manual labor and those who performed it. his short, stubby feet, and tight-fitting, high-heeled boots conveyed him sufficiently well from office to bar-room, but were never intended for anything in the nature of a "constitutional." his own immorality did not prevent him from cherishing a high ideal of feminine purity; but his conversation was gross. he was a purveyor, bret harte relates, "of sprightly stories such as gentlemen of the old school are in the habit of telling, but which, from deference to the prejudices of gentlemen of a more recent school, i refrain from transcribing here." he had that keen sense of honor, and the determination to defend it, even, if need be, at the expense of his life, which the southern slave-holder possessed, and he had also the ferocity which belonged to the same character. one can hardly recall without a shudder of disgust the "small, beady black eyes" of colonel starbottle, especially when they "shone with that fire which a pretty woman or an affair of honor could alone kindle." the reader will remember that the colonel was always ready to hold himself "personally responsible" for any consequences of a hostile nature, and that by some irreverent persons he was dubbed "old personal responsibility." the phrase was not invented by bret harte. on the contrary, it was almost a catchword in california society; it was a southern phrase, and indicated the southerner's attitude. in a leading article published in the "san francisco bulletin" in , it is said, "the basis of many of the outrages which have disgraced our state during the past four years has been the 'personal responsibility' system,--a relic of barbarism." colonel starbottle's lack of humor was also a southern characteristic. the only humorists in the south were the slaves; and the reason is not far to seek. the southerner's political and social creed was that of an aristocrat; and an aristocrat is too dignified and too self-absorbed to enter curiously into other men's feelings, and too self-satisfied to question his own. dandies are notoriously grave men. the aristocratic, non-humorous man always takes himself seriously; and this trait in colonel starbottle is what makes him so interesting. "it is my invariable custom to take brandy--a wineglass-full in a cup of strong coffee--immediately on rising. it stimulates the functions, sir, without producing any blank derangement of the nerves." there is another trait, exemplified in colonel starbottle, which often accompanies want of humor, namely, a tendency to be theatrical. it would seem as if the ordinary course of human events was either too painful or too monotonous to be endured. we find ourselves obliged to throw upon it an aspect of comedy or of tragedy, by way of relief. the man of humor sees the incongruity,--in other words, the jest in human existence; and the non-humorous, having no such perception, represents it to himself and to others in an exaggerated or theatrical form. the one relies upon understatement; the other upon overstatement. colonel starbottle was always theatrical; his walk was a strut, and "his colloquial speech was apt to be fragmentary incoherencies of his larger oratorical utterances." but we cannot help feeling sorry for the colonel as his career draws to a close, and especially when, after his discomfiture in the breach of promise case, he returns to his lonely chambers, and the negro servant finds him there silent and unoccupied before his desk. "''fo' god! kernel, i hope dey ain't nuffin de matter, but you's lookin' mighty solemn! i ain't seen you look dat way, kernel, since de day pooh massa stryker was fetched home shot froo de head.' 'hand me down the whiskey, jim,' said the colonel, rising slowly. the negro flew to the closet joyfully, and brought out the bottle. the colonel poured out a glass of the spirit, and drank it with his old deliberation. 'you're quite right, jim,' he said, putting down his glass, 'but i'm--er--getting old--and--somehow--i am missing poor stryker damnably.'" this is the last appearance of colonel starbottle. he represents that element of the moral picturesque,--that compromise with perfection which, in this imperfect and transitory world, is universally craved. even emerson, best and most respectable of men, admitted, in his private diary, that the irregular characters who frequented the rum-selling tavern in his own village were indispensable elements, forming what he called "the fringe to every one's tapestry of life."[ ] such men as he had in mind mitigate the solemnity and tragedy of human existence; and in them the virtuous are able to relax, vicariously, the moral tension under which they suffer. this is the part which colonel starbottle plays in literature. chapter viii women and children among the pioneers the chief source of demoralization among the pioneers was the absence of women and children, and therefore of any real home. "ours is a bachelor community," remarked the "alta california," "but nevertheless possessing strong domestic propensities." most significant and pathetic, indeed, is the strain of homesickness which underlies the wild symphony of pioneer life. "i well remember," writes a forty-niner, "the loneliness and dreariness amid all the excitement of the time." the unsuccessful miner often lost his strength by hard work, exposure, and bad food; and then fell a prey to that disease which has slain so many a wanderer--homesickness. at the san francisco hospital it was a rule not to give letters from the east to patients, unless they were safely convalescent. more than once the nurses had seen a sick man, after reading a letter from home, turn on his side and die. in the big gambling saloons of san francisco, when the band played "home, sweet home," hundreds of homeless wanderers stood still, and listened as if entranced. the newspapers of ' and ' are full of lamentations, in prose and in verse, over the absence of women and children. in the "alta california" exclaimed, "who will devise a plan to bring out a few cargoes of respectable women to california?" on those rare occasions when children appeared in the streets, they were followed by admiring crowds of bearded men, eager to kiss them, to shake their hands, to hear their voices, and humbly begging permission to make them presents of gold nuggets and miners' curiosities. in the autumn of a beautiful flaxen-haired little girl, about three years old, was frequently seen playing upon the veranda of a house near the business centre of san francisco, and at such times there was always on the opposite side of the street a group of miners gazing reverently at the child, and often with tears running down their bronzed cheeks. the cry of a baby at the theatre brought down a tumultuous encore from the whole house. the chief attraction of every theatrical troupe was a child, usually called the "california pet," whose appearance on the stage was always greeted with a shower of coins. next to the pet, the most popular part of the entertainment was the singing of ballads and songs relating to domestic subjects. in ' a woman in the streets of san francisco created more excitement than would have been caused by the appearance of an elephant or a giraffe. once at a crowded sale in an auction room some one cried out, "two ladies going along the sidewalk!" and forthwith everybody rushed pell-mell into the street, as if there had been a fire or an earthquake. a young miner, in a remote mountain camp, borrowed a mule and rode forty miles in order to make a call upon a married woman who had recently arrived. he had a few minutes' conversation with her, and returned the next day well satisfied with his trip. at another diggings, when the first woman resident appeared, she and the mule upon which she rode, were raised from the ground by a group of strong-armed, enthusiastic miners, and carried triumphantly to the house which her husband had prepared for her. when the town where stephen j. field purchased his corner lots was organized, the first necessity was of course a name. various titles, suggested by the situation, or by the imagination of hopeful miners, were proposed, such as yubaville and circumdoro; but finally a substantial, middle-aged man arose and remarked that there was an american lady in the place, the wife of one of the proprietors, that her name was mary, and that in his opinion, the town should be called marysville, as a compliment to her. no sooner had he made this suggestion than the meeting broke out in loud huzzahs; every hat made a circle around its owner's head, and the new town was christened marysville without a dissenting voice. the lady, mrs. coullard, was one of the survivors of the donner party, and the honor was therefore especially fitting. doubts have been cast upon the story of the bar surmounted by a woman's sunbonnet, to which every customer respectfully lifted his glass before tossing off its contents; but the fact is substantiated by the eminent engraver, mr. a. v. s. anthony, who, as a young man, drank a glass of whiskey at that very bar, in the early fifties, and joined in the homage to the sunbonnet. there is really nothing unnatural in this incident, or in that other story of some youthful miners coming by chance upon a woman's cast-off skirt or hat, spontaneously forming a ring and dancing around it. in both cases, the motive, no doubt, was partly humorous, partly amorous, and partly a vague but intense longing for the gentle and refining influence of women's society. this feeling of the miners, roughly expressed in the incidents of the sunbonnet and skirt, was poetically treated by bret harte in the story called _the goddess of excelsior_,--another example of that "perverse romanticism" which has been discovered in his california tales. said the "sacramento transcript," in april, , "may we not hope soon to see around us thousands of happy homes whose genial influences will awaken the noble qualities that many a wanderer has allowed to slumber in his heart while absent from the objects of his affection!" in the same strain, but in the more florid style which was common in the california newspapers, another writer thus anticipated the coming of women and children: "no longer will the desolate heart seek to drown its loneliness in the accursed bowl. but the bright smiles of love will shed sunshine where were dark clouds and fierce tornadoes, and the lofty spire, pointing heavenward, will remind us in our pilgrimage here of the high destiny we were created to fulfil." this has the ring of sincerity, and yet, as we read it, we cannot help thinking that when the writer laid down his pen, he went out and took one more drink from the "accursed bowl"; and who could blame him! a loaf of home-made cake sent all the way around cape horn from brooklyn to san josé was reverently eaten, a portion being given to the local editor who duly returned thanks for the same. the arrival of the fortnightly mail steamer was always the most important event of those early years; and bret harte thus described it: "perhaps it is the gilded drinking saloon into which some one rushes with arms extended at right angles, and conveys in that one pantomimic action the signal of the semaphore telegraph on telegraph hill that a side-wheel steamer has arrived, and that there are letters from home. perhaps it is the long queue that afterward winds and stretches from the post office half a mile away. perhaps it is the eager men who, following it rapidly down, bid fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, and even five hundred dollars for favored places in the line. perhaps it is the haggard man who nervously tears open his letter, and falls senseless beside his comrade."[ ] thus far bret harte. in precisely the same vein, and with a literary finish almost equal, is the following paragraph from a contemporary newspaper: "this other face is well known. it is that of one who has always been at his post on the arrival of each steamer for the past six months, certain at each time that he will get a letter. his eye brightens for a moment as the clerk pauses in running over the yellow-covered documents, but the clerk goes on again hastily, and then shakes his head, and says 'no letter.' the brightened eye looks sad again, the face pales, and the poor fellow goes off with a feeling in his heart that he is forgotten by those who knew and loved him at home."[ ] anxious men sometimes camped out on the steps of the post office, the night before a mail steamer was due, in order that they might receive the longed-for letter at the earliest possible moment. the coming of three women on a steamer from new york in was mentioned by all the newspapers as a notable event. in may of that year the "sacramento transcript" contained an advertisement, novel for california, being that of a "_few_ fashionably-trimmed, florence braid velvet and silk bonnets." a month later a sydney ship arrived at san francisco, having on board two hundred and sixty passengers, of whom seventy were women. as soon as this vessel had anchored, there was a rush of bachelors to the bay, and boat-loads of them climbed the ship's side, trying to engage housekeepers. in women began to arrive in somewhat larger numbers, and the coming of wives from the east gave rise to many amusing, many pathetic and some tragic scenes. "you could always tell a month beforehand," said a pioneer, "when a man was expecting the arrival of his real or intended wife. the old slouch hat, checked shirt and coarse outer garments disappeared, and the gentleman could be seen on sunday going to church, newly rigged from head to foot, with fine beaver hat, white linen, nice and clean, good broadcloth coat, velvet vest, patent-leather boots, his long beard shaven or neatly shorn,--he looked like a new man. as the time drew near many of his hours were spent about the wharves or on telegraph hill, and every five minutes he was looking for the signal to announce the coming of the steamer. if, owing to some breakdown or wreck, there was a delay of a week or two, the suspense was awful beyond description."[ ] [illustration: the post-office, san francisco, - a. castaigne, del. copyright by the century co.] the great beards grown in california were sometimes a source of embarrassment. when a steamer arrived fathers might be seen caressing little ones whom they now saw for the first time, while the children, in their turn, were frightened at finding themselves in the arms of such fierce-looking men. wives almost shared the consternation of the children. "why don't you kiss me, bessie?" said a pioneer to his newly arrived wife. she stood gazing at the hirsute imitation of her husband in utter astonishment. at last she timidly ejaculated, "i can't find any place." in march, , forty four women and thirty-six children arrived on one steamer. the proportion of women pioneers in that year was one to ten. by , women were one in five of the population, and children one in ten. even so late as , however, marriageable women were very scarce. in november of that year the "calaveras chronicle" declared: "no sooner does a girl emerge from her pantalettes than she is taken possession of by one of our bachelors, and assigned a seat at the head of his table. we hear that girls are plenty in the cities below, but such is not the case here." the same paper gives an account of the first meeting between a heroine of the plains, and a calaveras bachelor. "one day this week a party of immigrants came down the ridge, and the advance-wagon was driven by a young and pretty woman--one of general allen's maidens. when near town the train was met by a butcher's cart, and the cart was driven by a young 'bach.' he, staring at the lovely features of the lady, neglected to rein his horse to one side of the road, and the two wagons were about to come in collision, when a man in the train, noticing the danger, cried out to the female driver, 'gee, kate, gee!' said kate, 'ain't i a-tryin', but the dog-gone horses won't gee!'" mrs. bates speaks of two emigrant wagons passing through marysville one day in , "each with three yoke of oxen driven by a beautiful girl. in their hands they carried one of those tremendous, long ox-whips which, by great exertion, they flourished to the admiration of all beholders. within two weeks each one was married." but it was seldom that a woman who had crossed the plains presented a comely appearance upon her arrival. the sunken eyes and worn features of the newcomers, both men and women, gave some hint of what they had endured.[ ] a letter from placerville, written in september, , describes a female pioneer who had not quite reached the goal. "on tuesday last an old lady was seen leading a thin, jaded horse laden with her scanty stores. the heat of the sun was almost unbearable, and the sand ankle deep, yet she said that she had travelled in the same way for the last two hundred miles." and then comes a figure which recalls that of liberty jones on her arrival in california: "by the side of one wagon there walked a little girl about thirteen years old, and from her appearance she must have walked many hundreds of miles. she was bare-footed and haggard, and she strode on with steps longer than her years would warrant, as though in the tiresome journey she had thrown off all grace, and had accustomed herself to a gait which would on the long marches enable her with most ease to keep up with the wagon." the long journey across the plains without the comforts and conveniences, and sometimes without even the decencies of life, the contact with rough men, the shock of hardships and fatigues under which human nature is apt to lose respect for itself and consideration for others,--these things inevitably had a coarsening effect upon the pioneer women. only those who possessed exceptional strength and sweetness of character could pass through them unscathed. as one traveller graphically puts it: "a woman in whose virtue you might have the same confidence as in the existence of the stars above would suddenly horrify you by letting a huge oath escape from her lips, or by speaking to her children as an ungentle hostler would to his cattle, and perhaps listening undisturbed to the same style of address in reply."[ ] the callousness which liberty jones showed at the death of her father was not in the least exaggerated by bret harte. and yet these defects shrink almost to nothing when we contrast them with the deeds of love and affection silently performed by women upon those terrible journeys, and often spoken of with emotion by the pioneers who witnessed them. a few of those deeds are chronicled in this book, many more may be found in the narratives and newspapers of the day, but by far the greater number were long since buried in oblivion. they are preserved, if preserved at all, only in the characters of those descended from the women who performed them. upon one thing the pioneer women could rely,--the universal respect shown them by the men. in the roughest mining camp in california an unprotected girl would not only have been safe, she would have been treated with the utmost consideration and courtesy. such was the society of which the english critic declared that "its laxity surpassed the laxity of savages!"[ ] in this respect, if in no other, the pioneers insisted that foreigners should comply with their notions. nothing, indeed, gave more surprise to the "greasers" and chilenos than the fact that they were haled into court and punished for beating their wives. as to the mexican and chilean women themselves, it must be admitted that they contributed more to the gaiety than to the morality or peacefulness of california life. "rowdyism and crime," remarked the "alta california" in october, , "increase in proportion to the increase in the number of señoritas. this is true in the mines as well as in the city." at a horse-race that came off that year in san francisco, we hear of the señoritas as freely backing their favorite nags with united states money, though how it came into their possession, as a contemporary satirist remarked, "is matter of surmise only." this species of woman is portrayed by bret harte in the passionate teresa, who met her fate, in a double sense, in _the carquinez woods_, finding there both a lover and her death. the spanish woman of good family is represented by doña rosita in _the argonauts of north liberty_, by enriquez saltello's charming sister, consuelo, and by concepcion,[ ] the beautiful daughter of the commandante, who, after the death of her lover, the russian envoy, took the veil, and died a nun at benicia. even before the discovery of gold a few americans had married into leading spanish families of los angeles, santa barbara, monterey and sonoma. the first house erected on the spot which afterward became san francisco was built in by jacob p. leese, an american who had married a sister of general vallejo. it was finished july , and on the following day was "dedicated to the cause of freedom." there is something of great interest in the union of races so diverse, and bret harte has touched upon this aspect of california life in the character of that unique heroine, maruja. "'hush, she's looking.' she had indeed lifted her eyes toward the window. they were beautiful eyes, and charged with something more than their own beauty. with a deep, brunette setting, even to the darkened cornea, the pupils were blue as the sky above them. but they were lit with another intelligence. the soul of the salem whaler looked out of the passion-darkened orbits of the mother, and was resistless." chapter and verse can always be given to confirm bret harte's account of california life, and even maruja can be authenticated. a lieutenant in the united states navy, who visited the coast in , gave this description of the reigning belle of california: "her father was an englishman, her mother a spanish lady. she was brunette, with an oval face, magnificent grey eyes, the corners of her mouth slightly curved downward, so as to give a proud and haughty expression to the face. she was tall, graceful, well-shaped, with small feet and hands, a dead shot, an accomplished rider, and amiable withal. i never saw a more patrician style of beauty and native elegance."[ ] california was always the land of romance, and bret harte in his poems and stories touched upon its whole history from the beginning. even the visit of sir francis drake in was not overlooked. in _the mermaid of light-house point_, bret harte quotes a footnote, perhaps imaginary, from an account of drake's travels, as follows: "the admiral seems to have lost several of his crew by desertion, who were supposed to have perished miserably by starvation in the inhospitable interior or by the hands of savages. but later voyagers have suggested that the deserters married indian wives, and there is a legend that a hundred years later a singular race of half-breeds, bearing unmistakable anglo-saxon characteristics, was found in that locality." this was the origin of the blue-eyed and light-haired mermaid of the story; and it is only fair to add that the tradition of which the author speaks was current among the nicasio indians who inhabited the valley of that name, about fifteen miles eastward of drake's bay. among the women who first arrived from the east by sea, there were many of easy virtue; but even these women--and here is disclosed a wonderful compliment to the sex--were held by observing pioneers to have an elevating influence upon the men. "the bad women," says one careful historian, "have improved the morals of the community. they have banished much barbarism, softened many hard hearts, and given a gentleness to the men which they did not have before."[ ] if this was the effect of the bad, what must have been the influence of the good women! let the same writer tell us: "soon after their arrival, schools and churches began to spring up; social circles were formed; refinement dawned upon a debauched and reckless community; decorum took the place of obscenity; kind and gentle words were heard to fall from the lips of those who before had been accustomed to taint every phrase with an oath; and smiles displayed themselves upon countenances to which they had long been strangers." and then the author pays a tribute to woman which could hardly be surpassed: "had i received no other benefit from my trip to california than the knowledge i have gained, inadequate as it may be, of woman's many virtues and perfections, i should account myself well repaid." in a ship-load of pioneers which sailed from new york around cape horn to san francisco in there was just one woman; and yet her influence upon the men was so marked and so salutary that it was often spoken of by the captain. the effect of their peculiar situation upon the married women was not good. they were apt to be demoralized by the attentions of their men friends, and they were too few in number to inflict upon improper females that rigid ostracism from society, which, some cynics think, is the strongest safeguard of feminine virtue. women in california were released from their accustomed restraints, they were much noticed and flattered; and, then, as a san francisco belle exclaimed, "the gentlemen are so rich and so handsome, and have such superb whiskers!" in a single issue of the "sacramento transcript," in july, , are the following two items: "a certain madam now in this town buried her husband, and seventy-four hours afterward she married another." "one of our fair and lovely damsels had a quarrel with her husband. he took the stage for stockton, and the same day she married another man." even those pioneers who were fortunate enough to have their wives with them did not always appreciate the blessing. being absorbed in business they often felt hampered by obligations from which their bachelor rivals were free, or perhaps, they chafed at the wholesome restraint imposed upon a married man in a community of unmarried persons. there was a dangerous tendency among california husbands to permit their friends to look after their wives. on this subject professor royce very acutely remarks: "the family grows best in a garden with its kind. when family life does not involve healthy friendship with other families, it is likely to be injured by unhealthy if well-meaning friendships with wanderers." this is a sentiment which brown of calaveras would have echoed. men with attractive wives were apt to be uncomfortably situated in california. it is matter of history how the bell-ringer of angel's protected his young and pretty spouse from dangerous communications: "when i married my wife and brought her down here, knowin' this yer camp, i sez: 'no flirtin', no foolin', no philanderin' here, my dear! you're young and don't know the ways o' men. the first man i see you talking with, i shoot.'" in , there was a man named crockett whose predicament was something like that of the bell-ringer, and still more like that of brown of calaveras, for he not only had a very handsome wife, but it was his additional misfortune to keep a tavern on the road between sacramento and salmon falls. it was not unusual for a dozen or more bearded miners to be gazing at mrs. crockett or watching for an opportunity to speak with her. this kept crockett in a continual state of jealous irritation. he was a very small man, and he carried ostentatiously a very large pistol, which he would often draw and exhibit. a guest who stopped at the tavern for breakfast at a time when miners along the road had been more numerous than usual, found crockett "charging around like a madman, and foaming at the mouth." however, he received the guest with hospitality, informed him that "he (crockett) was a devilish good fellow when he was right side up," and finally set before him an excellent meal. mrs. crockett presided at the table, "but in a very nervous manner, as if she were in expectation of being at almost any minute made a target of." if life in california during the earlier years was bad for women, it was still worse for children. in san francisco there was no public school until the autumn of . before that time there had been several small private schools, and one free school supported by charity, but in this was given up for want of funds. in the cities and towns outside of san francisco there was even greater delay in establishing public schools. in there were many children at marysville who were receiving no instruction, and others, fourteen years old and even older, were only just learning to read. horace greeley visited california in the year , and he wrote, "there ought to be two thousand good common schools in operation this winter, but i fear there will not be six hundred."[ ] partly in consequence of this lack of schools, partly on account of the general demoralization and ultra freedom of california society, boys grew up in the streets, and were remarkable for their precocious depravity. even the climate contributed to this result, for, except in the rainy season, the shelter of a house could easily be dispensed with by night as well as by day. "it was the voice of a small boy, its weak treble broken by that preternatural hoarseness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature self-assertion can give. it was the face of a small boy, a face that might have been pretty and even refined but that it was darkened by evil knowledge from within, and by dirt and hard experience from without."[ ] it was no uncommon thing, in san francisco especially, to see small boys drinking and gambling in public places. a pioneer describes "boys from six upward swaggering through the streets, begirt with scarlet sashes, cigar in mouth, uttering huge oaths, and occasionally treating men and boys at the bar." miners not more than ten years old were washing for gold on their own account, and obtaining five or ten dollars a week, which they spent chiefly on drinks and cigars. bret harte's youngest prospector in calaveras was not an uncommon child. an instance of precocity was the attempted abduction in may, , of a girl of thirteen by two boys a little older. they were all the children of sydney parents, and the girl declared that she loved those boys, and had begged them to take her away, and she thought it very hard to be compelled to return to her home. this incident may recall to the reader the precocious love affairs of richelieu sharpe, whose father thus explained his absence from supper: "'like ez not, he's gone over to see that fammerly at the summit. there's a little girl there that he's sparkin', about his own age.' "'his own age!' said minty indignantly, 'why, she's double that, if she's a day. well--if he ain't the triflinest, conceitedest little limb that ever grew!'" the son of a tavern-keeper at sacramento, a boy only eight years old, was described as a finished gambler. upon an occasion when he was acting as dealer, all the other players being men, one of them accused him of cheating. the consequence was a general fight: two men were shot, one fatally, and the man who killed him was hung the next day by a vigilance committee. even bret harte's "perverse romanticism" never carried him quite so far in delineation of the california child. the word "hoodlum," meaning a youthful, semi-criminal rough, originated in san francisco. but there is another side to this picture of childhood on the pacific slope, and we obtain a glimpse of it occasionally. there was a sunday-school procession at sacramento in july, , upon which the "sacramento transcript" remarked, "we have seen no sight here which called home so forcibly to our minds with all its endearments." three years later in san francisco, there was a may-day procession of a thousand children, each one carrying a flower. even bret harte's story of the adoption of a child by the city of san francisco[ ] had a solid foundation in fact, though perhaps he was not aware of it. in july, , the city fathers charged themselves with the support and protection of an orphan girl, and on the thirteenth of that month a measure providing for her maintenance was introduced in the board of aldermen. the scarcity, or rather, as we have seen, the almost total absence at first of women and children, of wives and sweethearts, led to the adoption by the pioneers of a great number and variety of pet animals. dogs and cats from all quarters, parrots from over-seas, canaries brought from the east, bears from the sierras, wolves from the plains, foxes and raccoons from the foot-hills,--all these were found in miners' cabins, in gambling saloons and in restaurants. they occupied the waste places in the hearts of the argonauts, and furnished an object, if an inadequate one, for those affections which might otherwise have withered at the root. one miner was accompanied in all his wanderings by a family consisting of a bay horse, two dogs, two sheep and two goats. these california pets had their little day, perished, and are forgotten,--all save one. who can forget the bear cub that bret harte immortalized under the name of baby sylvester! "he was as free from angles as one of leda's offspring. your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. to look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.... he takes the only milk that comes to the settlement--brought up by adams' express at seven o'clock every morning." chapter ix friendship among the pioneers in bret harte's stories woman is subordinated to man, and love is subordinated to friendship. this is a strange reversal of modern notions, but it was the reflection of his california experience,--reinforced, possibly, by some predilection of his own. there is a significant remark in a letter written by him from a town in kansas where he once delivered a lecture: "of course, as in all such places, the women contrast poorly with the men--even in feminine qualities. somehow, a man here may wear fustian and glaring colors, and paper collars, and yet keep his gentleness and delicacy, but a woman in glaring 'dolly-vardens,' and artificial flowers, changes natures with him at once." friendship between one man and another would seem to be the most unselfish feeling of which a human being is capable. the only sentiment that can be compared with it in this respect is that of patriotism, and even in patriotism there is an instinct of self-preservation, or at least of race-preservation. in modern times the place which the friend held in classic times is taken by the wife; but in california, owing to the absence of women and the exigencies of mining, friendship for a brief and brilliant period, never probably to recur, became once more an heroic passion. that there was no exaggeration in bret harte's pictures of pioneer friendship might be shown by many extracts from contemporary observers, but one such will suffice:--"two men who lived together, slept in the same cabin, ate together, took turns cooking and washing, tended on each other in sickness, and toiled day in and day out side by side, and made an equal division of their losses and gains, were regarded and generally regarded themselves as having entered into a very intimate tie, a sort of band of brotherhood, almost as sacred as that of marriage. the word 'partner,' or 'pard' as it was usually contracted, became the most intimate and confidential term that could be used."[ ] even in the cities friendship between men assumed a character which it had nowhere except in california. partners in business were partners in all social and often in all domestic matters. they took their meals and their pleasures together, and showed that interest in each other's welfare which, at home, they would have expended upon wives and children. the withdrawal of one member from a firm seemed like the breaking up of a family. the citizens of san francisco and sacramento were all newcomers, they were mostly strangers to one another; and every partnership, though established primarily for business purposes, became a union of persons bound together by a sense of almost feudal loyalty, confident of one another's sympathy and support under all circumstances, and forming a coherent group in a chaotic community. in the mines the partnership relation was even more idyllic. gold was sought at first by the primitive method of pan-mining. the miners travelled singly sometimes, but much more often in pairs, with knapsacks, guns and frying-pans; and they used a wooden bowl, or a metal pan, and sometimes an indian wicker basket for washing the gravel or sand which was supposed to contain gold. even a family bread-pan might be made to serve this purpose, and that was the article which the youthful miner, jack fleming, borrowed from beautiful tinka gallinger, and so became possessed in the end, not indeed of gold, but of something infinitely more valuable,--tinka herself, the treasure of the redwoods. the operation of washing was thus described by a pioneer: "the bowl is held in both hands, whirled violently back and forth through a half circle, and pitched this way and that sufficiently to throw off the earth and water, while the gold mixed with black sand settles to the bottom. the process is extremely tiresome, and involves all the muscles of the frame. in its effect it is more like swinging a scythe than any other labor i ever attempted." this work was much less laborious when the miner had access to a current of water, and in later times it was assisted by the use of a magnet to draw away the iron of which the black sand was largely composed. the bowl or pan stage was the first stage, and its tendency was to arrange the miners in couples like that of tennessee and his partner. next came the use of the rocker or cradle,--the "golden canoe," as the indians called it. the rocker was an oblong box, open at the lower end, the upper end being protected by a screen or grating. the screen intercepted all pebbles and gravel, and the finer material, earth and sand, was swept through the screen by the action of water thrown or directed against it. the same water carried the earth through the box, and out at the lower end; but the heavy sand, containing the gold, sank and was intercepted by cleats nailed across the inside of the box. a rough cradle, formed from a hollow log, would sell at one time for two hundred dollars. this process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it the miner ceased to be a vagrant. he acquired a habitation, more or less permanent, and entered into various relationships with his fellows, which finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. this is the life described by bret harte in _the luck of roaring camp_, _left out on lone star mountain_, and many other stories. the rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long. the necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was supplied by an artificial reservoir. it was the bursting of such a reservoir, as the reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in the life of the youngest miss piper. but the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. the next step was to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside. this was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and directing the water into a canal or flume prepared for it, thus leaving the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. these operations required the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. the dam could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. the coming of the rainy season in california is extremely uncertain, and river-bed mining was correspondingly precarious. sometimes, great perseverance in these attempts was rewarded by great success. in november, , the swett's bar company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and diverting the sonora river after fifteen days of extreme exertion. five hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. the following summer the same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger dam, which required sixty-nine days' labor. this also was swept away on the very day of its completion. but the miners did not give up. the next morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly shrieking with the contact. the dam was rebuilt as quickly as possible,--and, again, the river brushed it aside. the third year, a remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth time completed a dam. this time it stood fast, and before the rains set in the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich. men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and disappointments were bound by no common tie,--and the tie was a still closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partnership consisted of two members only. bret harte has devoted to friendship four of his best stories, namely, _tennessee's partner_, _captain jim's friend_, _in the tules_, _uncle jim and uncle billy_. the subject is touched upon also in the story called _under the eaves_. unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we should also set this down as the best of all bret harte's stories, we could not go far wrong. the author himself is said to have preferred it. it is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of an incident. there is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to change. the background of scenery that the story requires is touched in with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a peculiar trait of modern literature. the reader will remember that rough, mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. "and above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter, passionless stars." the pathos of _tennessee's partner_ consists chiefly in the fact that tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner's devotion. he was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run off with his partner's wife. had tennessee been a model of all the virtues, his partner's affection for him would have been a bestowal only of what was due. it would not have been, as it was in fact, the spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. whether we consider that the partner saw in tennessee something which was really there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the god who created and to the friend who loved him, or that in tennessee he beheld an ideal of his own creation, something different from the real man,--in either case his affection is equally disinterested and noble. those who do not give the first place to _tennessee's partner_ would probably assign it either to _the luck of roaring camp_ or _the outcasts of poker flat_; but in both of those stories the element of accident is utilized, though not improbably. it was more or less an accident that the luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the outcasts were banished on the eve of a storm. but in _tennessee's partner_, there is no accident. given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably. an acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, mr. james douglas, writing in the "bookman,"[ ] presents the case against the _luck_ and the _outcasts_ in its most extreme form: "there is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... in bret harte's best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... bret harte takes cherokee sal, an indian prostitute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. that is good art. he lets her die, while her child survives. that is not so good. it is the pathos of accident. he sends the miners in to see the child. that is good art. he makes the presence of the child work a revolution in the camp. strong men wash their faces and wear clean shirts in order to be worthy of the child. that is not good art." but here let us interrupt mr. douglas for a moment. it should be remembered that the clean faces and clean shirts were not spontaneous improvements. "stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired to the honor and privilege of holding the luck." moreover, the miners of roaring camp, like the miners generally in california, were no strangers to clean shirts or clean faces. with few exceptions, they had been brought up to observe the decencies of life, and if, in the wild freedom of the mining camp, some of those decencies had been cast off, it was not difficult to reclaim them. however, let us hear mr. douglas out: "finally he drowns the child and his readers in a deluge of melodramatic sentiment. that is bad art.... the _outcasts_ might be analyzed in the same way. the whole tableau is arranged with a barefaced resolution to draw your tears. you feel that there is nothing inevitable in the isolation of the outcasts, in the snow-storm, in the suicide of the card-sharper, or in the in-death-they-were-not-divided pathos of vice and virtue. and even miggles, i fear, will hardly bear a close examination. the assault and battery on our emotions is too direct, too deliberate. we like to be outflanked nowadays, and the old-fashioned frontal attack melts away before our indulgent smiles with their high velocity and flat trajectory. m'liss, alas! no longer moves us. we prefer 'what maisie knew' to what m'liss didn't know." but at this point the reader may become a little impatient. what attention should be paid to a critic who prefers the effeminate subtleties of henry james to the wholesome pathos of bret harte! and the man himself seems to be conscious of his degeneracy, for he concludes by saying, with admirable frankness, "perhaps, after all, the fault is ours, not bret harte's, and we ought to apologize for the sophisticated insidiousness of our nerves." one or two obvious remarks are suggested by mr. douglas's canon of romance against realism. if it were adopted without qualification, sad havoc would be made with established reputations. all the great tragedians from Æschylus to shakspere, and almost all the great story-tellers from haroun al raschid to daniel defoe would suffer. antigone, juliet and robinson crusoe were all the victims of accident. moreover, without the element of accident, or romance as mr. douglas calls it, life could not truly be represented. what might conceivably happen, and what occasionally does happen, are as much a part of life as is the thing which always happens. many a "kentuck" was swept away by floods in california. to perish in a snow-storm was by no means an unheard-of event. it was on the twenty-third of november, , that the outcasts were exiled, and on that very day, as the newspapers recorded soon afterward, a young man was frozen to death in the snow while endeavoring to walk from poor man's creek to grass valley. one week later a miner from virginia was frozen to death a few miles north of downieville; and poker flat and downieville are in the same county.[ ] to know a man, we must know how he acts in the face of death as well as how he appears in his shop or parlor; and therefore, unusual and tragic events, as well as commonplace events, have their place in good art. but the substratum of truth in mr. douglas's view seems to be this, that a tragedy which results from the character of the hero or heroine is, other things being equal, a higher form of art than the tragedy which results wholly, or in part, from accident. if human passion can work out the destiny desired by the author, without the intervention of fire, flood or disease, without the help of any catastrophe quaintly known in the common law as "the act of god," why so much the better. from this point of view, we may fairly place _tennessee's partner_ even above _the luck of roaring camp_ and _the outcasts of poker flat_. it only remains to add that like most of bret harte's stories, as we have seen, _tennessee's partner_ was suggested by a real incident, which, however, ended happily; and the last chapter of the true story may be gathered from a paragraph which appeared in the california newspapers in june, :-- "j. a. chaffee, famous as the original of _tennessee's partner_, has been brought to an oakland sanatorium. he has been living since in a small tuolumne county mining camp with his partner, chamberlain. in the early days he saved chamberlain from the vigilance committee by a plea to judge lynch when the vigilantes had a rope around the victim's throat. it was the only instance on record in the county where the vigilantes gave way in such a case. chamberlain was accused of stealing the miners' gold, but chaffee cleared him, as every one believed chaffee. the two men settled down to live where they have remained ever since, washing out enough placer gold to maintain them. professor magee of the university of california found chaffee sick in his cabin last week, and induced him to come to oakland for treatment. chamberlain was left behind. both men are over eighty." one who witnessed chaffee's rescue of his partner gives some details of the affair, which show how closely bret harte kept to the facts until he saw occasion to depart from them. chaffee had a donkey and a cart--the only vehicle in the settlement, and he is described as standing before the vigilance committee, "hat in hand, his bald head bare, his big bandanna handkerchief hanging loosely about his neck." of the four stories especially devoted to friendship, the second is _captain jim's friend_, published in the year . this is almost a _reductio ad absurdum_ of _tennessee's partner_, for captain jim's friend, lacy bassett, is a coward, a liar, and an impostor. in the end, captain jim discovers this, and he endeavors to wipe out the disgrace which, he thinks, bassett has brought upon him by forcing the latter, at the point of his pistol, to a more manly course of conduct. and yet, when bassett commits the dastardly act of firing at his life-long friend and benefactor, the heroic captain jim feels not only that his own reputation for "foolishness" is redeemed, but also, in his dying moments, he recurs to his old affection for the man who shot him; and thus the tinge of cynicism which the story would otherwise wear is removed. the third story, _in the tules_, is a recurrence to the theme of _tennessee's partner_, the two leading characters being almost a repetition of those in the earlier story. _in the tules_ has not the spontaneousness of its predecessor, not quite the same tragic reality; but it is a noble story, nevertheless, and the climax forms one of those rare episodes which raise one's idea of human nature. in the fourth story, _uncle jim and uncle billy_, published much later, bret harte takes the subject in a lighter vein. the sacrifice made to friendship is not of life, but of fortune; and though, unquestionably, some men would lay down their lives more easily than they would give up their property, yet the sacrifice does not wear so tragic an aspect. in _left out on lone star mountain_, among the very best of the later stories, we have a little group of miners held together, inspired, and redeemed from selfishness by the youngest of their number, affectionately spoken of as "the old man," one of those brilliant, fine, lovable natures, rare but not unknown in real life, to which all the virtues seem to come as easily as vice and weakness come to the generality of men.[ ] [illustration: he looked curiously at his reflection from "left out on lone star mountain" e. boyd smith, del.] the hero of this story plays a part much resembling that of the late james g. fair, united states senator from california, and a leading man in the state. mr. fair, who was of scotch-irish descent, crossed the plains in with a company of men who were demoralized by their privations and misfortunes. though the youngest of the party, being but eighteen years old, fair, by mere force of natural fitness, became their leader; and it was owing to his determined good nature, energy and high spirits that they finally reached the pacific slope. a member of the band afterward wrote: "my comrades became so peevish from the wear upon the system, and ... the absence of accustomed comforts, that they were more like children than men, and at times it was as much as the boy could do to keep them from killing one another."[ ] the moral of bret harte's stories, it has often been said, is that even bad men have a good side, and are frequently capable of performing noble acts. but this, surely, is only a small part of the lesson, or rather of the inspiration to be derived from his works. in fact most of his heroes are not bad men, but good men. would it not be far more true to say that the moral of bret harte's stories is very nearly the same as the moral of the new testament, namely, that the best thing a man can do with his life or anything else that he has, is to give it up,--for love, for honor, for a child, for a friend! chapter x gambling in pioneer times doubts have sometimes been cast upon bret harte's description of the gambling element in california life, but contemporary accounts fully sustain the picture which he drew. one reason for the comparative respectability of gambling among the pioneers was that most of the california gamblers came from the west and south, especially from states bordering upon the mississippi river, and in those quarters the status of the gambler was far higher than in the eastern or middle parts of the country. early in a whole ship-load of gamblers arrived from new orleans. they stopped, _en route_, at monterey, went ashore for a few hours, and, as a kind of first-fruits of their long journey, relieved the spaniards and mexicans resident there of what loose silver and gold they happened to have on hand. these citizens of monterey, like all the native californians, were inveterate gamblers; but an american who was there at the time relates that they were like children in the hands of the men from new orleans;--and thus we have one more proof of anglo-saxon superiority. nor does bret harte's account lack direct confirmation. "the gamblers," says a contemporary historian, "were usually from new orleans, louisville, memphis, richmond, or st. louis. not infrequently they were well-born and well-educated, and among them were as many good, honest, square-dealing men as could be found in any other business; and they were, as a rule, more charitable and more ready to help those in distress."[ ] a certain william thornton, a gambler from st. louis, known as "lucky bill," had many of the traits associated with bret harte's gamblers. he was noted for his generosity, and, though finally hanged by a vigilance committee, he made a "good end," for, on the scaffold, he exhorted his son who was among the spectators, to avoid bad company, to keep away from saloons, and to lead an industrious and honest life. no surprise need be felt, therefore, that in california a gambler like jack hamlin should have the qualities and perform the deeds of a knight-errant. bret harte himself records the fact that it was the generous gift of a san francisco gambler which started the sanitary commission in the civil war, so far at least as california was concerned. the following incident occurred in the town of coloma in the summer of . two ministers, a mr. roberts and a mr. dawson, preached there one sunday to a company of miners, and one of them held forth especially against the sin of gambling. when the collection had been made, a twenty dollar and a ten dollar gold piece were found, carefully wrapped in paper, and on the paper was written: "i design the twenty dollars for mr. roberts because he fearlessly dealt out the truth against the gamblers. the ten dollars are for mr. dawson." the paper was signed by the leading gambler in the town. the principal building in the new city, the parker house, a two-story, wooden affair, with a piazza in front, was erected in at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, and was rented almost immediately at fifteen hundred dollars a month for games of chance. almost everybody played, and in ' and ' the gambling houses served as clubs for business and professional men. as bret harte wrote in the introduction to the second volume of his works:--"the most respectable citizens, though they might not play, are to be seen here of an evening. old friends who, perhaps, parted at the church door in the states, meet here without fear and without reproach. even among the players are represented all classes and conditions of men. one night at a faro table a player suddenly slipped from his seat to the floor, a dead man. three doctors, also players, after a brief examination, pronounced it disease of the heart. the coroner, sitting at the right of the dealer, instantly impanelled the rest of the players, who, laying down their cards, briefly gave a verdict in accordance with the facts, and then went on with their game!" a similar but much worse scene is recorded as occurring in a sacramento gambling house. a quarrel arose in the course of which a man was shot three times, each wound being a mortal one. the victim was placed in a dying condition on one of the tables; but the orchestra continued to play, and the gambling went on as before in the greater part of the room. a notorious woman, staggering drunk, assailed the ears of the dying man with profane and obscene remarks, while another by-stander endeavored to create laughter by mimicking the contortions that appeared in his face, as he lay there gasping in his death agony upon a gambler's table.[ ] in san francisco the principal gambling houses were situated in the very heart of the city, and they were kept open throughout the whole twenty-four hours. at night, the brilliantly lighted rooms, the shifting crowd of men, diverse and often picturesque in costume and appearance, the wild music which arose now and then, and which, except for the jingling of gold and silver, was almost the only sound,--all this, as a youthful spectator recalled in after years, "was a rapturous and fearful thing." the rooms were gorgeously furnished, with a superabundance of gilt frames, sparkling chandeliers, and ornaments of silver. behind the long bar were more mirrors, gold clocks, ornamental bottles and decanters, china vases, bouquets of flowers, and glasses of many colors and fantastic shapes. the atmosphere was often hazy with tobacco smoke and redolent of the fumes of brandy; but perfect order prevailed, and in the pauses of the music not a sound could be heard except the subdued murmur of voices, and the ceaseless chink of gold and silver. it was the fashion for those who stood at the tables to have their hands full of coins which they shuffled backward and forward, like so many cards. the noise of a cane falling upon the marble floor would cause everybody to look up. if a voice were raised in hilarity or altercation, the by-standers would frown upon the offender with a stare of virtuous indignation. every gambling house, even the most squalid resort on long wharf, had its music, which might be that of a single piano-player or fiddler, or an orchestra of five or six performers. in the large gambling halls the music was often very good. two thousand dollars a month for a nightly performance was the sum once offered to a violin-player by a san francisco gambler; and, to the honor of the artist be it said, the offer was declined. all california, sooner or later, was seen in the gambling rooms of san francisco: mexicans wrapped in their blankets, smoking cigarettes, and watching the game intently from under their broad-brimmed hats; frenchmen in their blouses, puffing at black pipes; countrymen fresh from the mines, wearing flannel shirts and high boots, with pistols and knives in their belts; boys of ten or twelve years, smoking big cigars, and losing hundreds of dollars at a play, with the nonchalance of veterans; low-browed, villainous-looking convicts from australia; thin, glassy-eyed men, in the last stages of a misspent life, clad in the greasy black of a former gentility. the professional gamblers usually had a pale, careworn look, not uncommon, by the way, in california; but no danger or excitement could disturb their equanimity. in this respect the players strove hard to imitate them, though not always with success. the most popular games were _monte_, usually conducted by mexicans, and faro, an american game. the french introduced _rouge-et-noir_, _roulette_, _lansquenet_, and _vingt-et-un_. in the larger halls the custom was to rent different parts of the room to different proprietors, each of whom carried on his own game independently. most of the proprietors were foreigners, and many of them were women. these women included some of great beauty, and they were all magnificently attired, their rustling silks, elaborately dressed hair and glittering diamonds contrasting strangely with the hairy faces, slouch hats and flannel shirts of the miners. that gambling was looked upon at first as a legitimate industry is plain from the surprising fact that the local courts in sacramento upheld gambling debts as valid, and authorized their collection by process of law. but these decisions--almost sufficient to make blackstone rise from his grave--were reversed the following year. indeed, a healthy public opinion against gambling developed very soon. even in , the grand jury sitting at san francisco condemned the practice; and in gambling on sunday was forbidden in that city by an ordinance which the authorities enforced in so far that open gambling on that day was no longer permitted. in december, , an ordinance against gaming in the streets was passed by the city council of sacramento. by the end of there was a perceptible decrease in both gaming and drinking in all the larger towns of california. "gambling with all the attractions of fine saloons and tastefully dressed women is on the wane in marysville," a local observer reported; and the same thing was noticed in san francisco. the gambling house, as a general _rendez-vous_, was succeeded by the saloon, and that, in turn, by the club. gambling houses continued to be licensed in san francisco until , but public opinion against them steadily grew. "they are tolerated," said the "san francisco herald," "for no other reason that we know of except that they are charged heavily for licenses. almost all of them are owned by foreigners." by the end of the year , the "bulletin" was condemning the gamblers as among the worst elements of society; and the death of the "bulletin's" heroic editor in the following year marked the close of the gambling era in san francisco. when bret harte's first stories were written the type represented by john oakhurst and jack hamlin had begun to pass away, and those worthies would soon have been forgotten. but who can forget them now! "bret harte," said the "academy," after his death, "was the homer of gamblers. gamblers there had been before, but they were of the old sullen type." in making his gamblers good-looking, bret harte only followed tradition, and the tradition is founded on fact. the one essential trait of the gambler is good nerves. these are largely a matter of good health and physique, and good looks have much the same origin. it follows that gamblers having good nerves should also have good looks. it is natural, too, that they should have excellent manners. the habit of easy shooting and of being shot at is universally recognized as conducive to politeness, and, moreover, a certain persuasiveness of manner, a mingling of suavity and authority, is part of the gambler's stock-in-trade. an american of wide experience once declared that he had met but one fellow-countryman whose manners could fairly be described as "courtly," and he was a professional gambler of irish birth. good looks and good manners, the former especially, were very common among the california pioneers, and it is but natural that oakhurst and hamlin should have had an unusual share of these attractions. mr. oakhurst appears in only a few of the stories, but there is a certain intensity in the description of him which makes one almost certain that he, like most of bret harte's characters, was drawn from life. "there was something in his carriage, something in the pose of his beautiful head, something in the strong and fine manliness of his presence, something in the perfect and utter control and discipline of his muscles, something in the high repose of his nature--a repose not so much a matter of intellectual ruling as of his very nature,--that go where he would and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand." in this description one cannot help perceiving the author's effort, not quite successful perhaps, to lay his finger upon the essential trait of a real and striking personality. in two stories only does he play the part of hero, these being _a passage in the life of mr. john oakhurst_, and the immortal _outcasts of poker flat_. the former story closes with a characteristic remark. two weeks after the duel in which his right arm was disabled, mr. oakhurst "walked into his rooms at sacramento, and in his old manner took his seat at the faro table. 'how's your arm, jack?' asked an incautious player. there was a smile following the question, which, however, ceased as jack looked up quietly at the speaker. 'it bothers my dealing a little, but i can shoot as well with my left.' the game was continued in that decorous silence which usually distinguished the table at which mr. john oakhurst presided." it has been objected by one critic that oakhurst and jack hamlin are too much alike; but if we imagine one of these characters as placed in the situation of the other, we cannot help seeing how very different they are. jack hamlin could never have been infatuated, as oakhurst was, by mrs. decker,--or indeed by any woman. oakhurst was too simple, too solid, too grave a person to understand women. he lacked the humor, the sympathy, the cynicism, and the acute perceptive powers of hamlin. one of the best scenes in all bret harte is that in which oakhurst bursts in upon mrs. decker, recounts her guilt and treachery, and declares his intention to kill her and then himself. "she did not faint, she did not cry out. she sat quietly down again, folded her hands in her lap, and said calmly,-- "'and why should you not?' "had she recoiled, had she shown any fear or contrition, had she essayed an explanation or apology, mr. oakhurst would have looked upon it as an evidence of guilt. but there is no quality that courage recognizes so quickly as courage, there is no condition that desperation bows before but desperation; and mr. oakhurst's power of analysis was not so keen as to prevent him from confounding her courage with a moral quality. even in his fury he could not help admiring this dauntless invalid."[ ] jack hamlin's power of analysis was far more keen; and mrs. decker would never have deceived him. the two men were equally brave, equally desperate, but perhaps oakhurst was the more heroic. the simplicity of his nature was more akin to heroism than was the dashing, mercurial, laughter-loving temperament of jack hamlin. hamlin is almost always represented with companions, male or female, but oakhurst was a solitary man in life as in death. his dignity, his reserve, even his want of humor tended to isolate him. bret harte, it will be noticed, almost always speaks of him as "mr." oakhurst. though he was numbered among the outcasts of poker flat, he was far from being one of them. there is a classic simplicity, not only in bret harte's account of oakhurst, but in the whole telling of the story, and a depth of feeling which is more than classic. every line of that marvellous tale seems to thrill with anticipation of the tragedy in which it closes; and every incident is described in the tense language of real emotion. "mr. oakhurst was a light sleeper. toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. as he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave it,--snow!" then comes the catastrophe of the snow-storm. we may condemn oakhurst, on this or that ground, for his act of self-destruction, but we cannot regard it as weak or cowardly. to be capable of real despair is the mark of a strong character. a weaker man will shuffle, disguise the truth in his own mind, and hope not only against hope but against reason. oakhurst, when he saw that the cards were absolutely against him, having done all that he could do for his helpless companions, decorously withdrew, and, in the awful solitude of the forest and the storm, forever renounced that game of life which he had played with so much courage and skill, and yet with so little success. jack hamlin figures much more extensively than oakhurst in the stories, and he would probably be regarded by most readers of bret harte as the author's best creation, surpassing even colonel starbottle;--and, as mr. chesterton exclaims, "how terrible it is to speak of any character as surpassing colonel starbottle!" his traits are now almost as familiar as those of george washington; but the type was a new one, and it completely revolutionized the ideal of the gambler which had long obtained both in fiction and on the stage. as a london critic very neatly said, "with this dainty and delicate california desperado, bret harte vanquished forever the turgid villains of ainsworth and lytton." in his _bohemian days in san francisco_ bret harte gives an account of the real person who was undoubtedly jack hamlin's prototype. he speaks of his handsome face, his pale southern look, his slight figure, the scrupulous elegance and neatness of his dress,--his genial manner, and the nonchalance with which he set out for the duel that ended in his death. in the representation of jack hamlin there are some seeming discrepancies. such, for instance, is hamlin's arrogant treatment of the ostler in _brown of calaveras_, and still more his conduct toward jenkinson, the tavern-keeper, whom don josé sepulvida, with contrasting spanish courtesy, described as "our good jenkinson, our host, our father." the barkeeper in _a sappho of green springs_ fares no better at his hands; and in _gabriel conroy_, bret harte, falling into the manner of dickens at his very worst, represents jack hamlin as concluding a tirade against a servant by "intimating that he would forcibly dislodge certain vital and necessary organs from the porter's body." even less excusable is his retort to the country youth in _the convalescence of jack hamlin_; and in one story he is actually guilty of rudeness to a woman, the unfortunate heiress of red dog. in these passages bret harte might be accused of admiring jack hamlin in the wrong place. but was he not rather consciously depicting the bad points of what would seem to have been his favorite character? hamlin had several imperfections. bret harte does not even represent him as a gentleman, but only as an approach to one. in the story which first brings us face to face with him, the gambler is described as lounging up and down "with that listless and grave indifference of his class which was perhaps the next thing to good breeding." that there should be any doubt as to the author's attitude upon this point shows how carefully bret harte keeps his own personality in the background. he does not sit in judgment upon his characters; he seldom says even a word of praise or blame in regard to them. all that he leaves to the reader. moreover, he has a rare power of perceiving the defects of his own heroes and heroines. occasionally, in fact, the reader of bret harte is a little shocked by his admission of some moral or intellectual blemish in the person whom he is sketching; and yet, after a moment's reflection, one is always forced to agree that the blemish is really there, and that without it the portrait would be incomplete and misleading. a fine example of this subtlety of art is found in _maruja_, where the author frankly declares that his heroine could not quite appreciate the delicacy shown by captain carroll when he abstained from any display of affection, lest he should presume upon the fact that he had just undertaken a difficult service at her request. "maruja stretched out her hand. the young man bent over it respectfully, and moved toward the door. she had expected him to make some protestation--perhaps even to claim some reward. but the instinct which made him forbear even in thought to take advantage of the duty laid upon him, which dominated even his miserable passion for her, and made it subservient to his exaltation of honor, ... all this, i grieve to say, was partly unintelligible to maruja, and not entirely satisfactory.... he might have kissed her! he did not." bret harte did not describe perfect characters or mere types, destitute of individual peculiarities, but real men and women. let us, therefore, be thankful for maruja's lack of delicacy and for jack hamlin's petulance and arrogance. his failings in this respect were a part of the piquancy of his character, and in part, also, they resulted from his discontent with himself. [illustration: dennison's exchange, and parker house, december, , before the fire copyright, century co.] this discontent is hidden by his more obvious traits, his love of music and of children, the facile manner in which he charmed and subdued horses, dogs, servants, women, and all the other inferior animals, as bret harte somewhere puts it; his scorn of all meanness, his chivalrous defence of all weakness; his iron nerve; his self-confidence and easy, graceful assurance; his appreciation of the refinements and niceties of existence. these are his obvious qualities; but behind them all was something more important and more original, namely, an undertone of self-condemnation which ran through his life, and gave the last touch of recklessness and _abandon_ to his character. we never quite realize what jack hamlin was until we come to that scene in the story of his protegée where, grasping by the shoulders the two blackguards who had discovered his secret and were attempting to take advantage of it, he forced them beyond the rail, above the grinding paddle-wheel of the flying steamer, and threatened to throw himself and them beneath it. "'no,' said the gambler, slipping into the open space with a white and rigid face in which nothing seemed living but the eyes,--'no; but it's telling you how two d--d fools who didn't know when to shut their mouths might get them shut once and forever. it's telling you what might happen to two men who tried to "play" a man who didn't care to be "played,"--a man who didn't care much what he did, when he did it, or how he did it, but would do what he'd set out to do--even if in doing it he went to hell with the men he sent there.' he had stepped out on the guards, beside the two men, closing the rail behind him. he had placed his hands on their shoulders; they had both gripped his arms; yet, viewed from the deck above, they seemed at that moment an amicable, even fraternal group, albeit the faces of the three men were dead white in the moonlight." one might draw a parallel, not altogether fanciful, between those three figures standing in apparent quietude on the verge of what was worse than a precipice, and those other three that compose the immortal group of the laocoön. the tragedy of jack hamlin's life, that which formed a dark background to his gay and adventurous career, was his own deep dissatisfaction with his lawless and predatory manner of existence. in this respect, his experience was the universal experience intensified; and that is why one can find in hamlin something of that representative character which readers of many different races and kinds have found in hamlet. who that has passed the first flush of youth, and has ever taken a single glance at his own heart will fail to sympathize with jack hamlin's self-disgust! it is this feeling that goes as far as anything can go to reconcile a man to death, for death ends the struggle. there is no remorse in the grave. chapter xi other forms of business "two years ago," said the "alta california" in , "trade was a wild unorganized whirl." staple goods went furiously up and down in price like wild-cat mining stocks. there was no telegraph by which supplies could be ordered from the east or inquiries could be answered, and several months must elapse before an order sent by mail to new york could be filled. a merchant at valparaiso once paid twenty thousand dollars for the information contained in a single letter from san francisco. consignors in the east were almost wholly ignorant as to what people needed in california, and how goods should be stowed for the long voyage around the cape. great quantities of preserved food--it was before the days of canning--were spoiled _en route_. coal was shipped in bulk without any ventilating appliances, and it often took fire and destroyed the vessels in which it was carried. one unfortunate woman, the wife of a cape cod sea-captain, was wrecked thrice in this way, having been transferred from one coal-laden schooner to another, and later to a third, all of which were set on fire by the heating of the coal, and burned to the water's edge. in one of these adventures she was lashed to a chair on deck, where she spent five days, in a rough sea, with smoke and gas pouring from the ship at every seam. her final escape was made in a row-boat which landed at a desolate spot on the coast of peru. elaborate gold-washing machines which proved to be useless and ready-made houses that nobody wanted were among the articles shipped to san francisco. the rate of interest was very high, capital being scarce, and storage in warehouses was both insecure, from the great danger of fire, and extremely expensive. it was, therefore, nearly impossible for the merchants to hold their goods for a more favorable market. in july, , lumber sold at the enormous rate of five hundred dollars a thousand feet,--fifty times the new england price; but in the following spring, immense shipments having arrived, it brought scarcely enough to pay the freight bills. tobacco, which at first sold for two dollars a pound, became so plentiful afterward that boxes of it were used for stepping stones, and in one case, as bret harte has related, tobacco actually supplied the foundation for a wooden house. holes in the sidewalk were stopped with bags of rice or beans, with sacks of coffee, and, on one occasion, with three barrels of revolvers, the supply far exceeding even the california demand for that article. potatoes brought sixty dollars a bushel at wholesale in , but were raised so extensively in california the next year that the price fell to nothing, and whole cargoes of these useful vegetables, just arrived from the east, were dumped into the bay. in some places near san francisco it was really feared that a pestilence would result from huge piles of superfluous potatoes that lay rotting on the ground. saleratus, worth in new york four cents a pound, sold at san francisco in for fifteen dollars a pound. the menu of a breakfast for two at sacramento in the same year was as follows:-- box of sardines, $ . pound of hard bread, . pound of butter, . / pound of cheese, . bottles of ale, . ------ total, $ . flour in the mining camps cost four and even five dollars a pound, and eggs were two dollars apiece. a chicken brought sixteen dollars; a revolver, one hundred and fifty dollars; a stove, four hundred dollars; a shovel, one hundred dollars. laudanum was one dollar a drop, brandy twenty dollars a bottle; and dried apples fluctuated from five cents to seventy-five cents a pound. it is matter of history that a bilious miner once gave fifteen dollars for a small box of seidlitz powders, and at the stanislaus diggings a jar of raisins, regarded as a cure for the scurvy then prevailing, sold for their weight in gold, amounting to four thousand dollars. as showing the dependence of california upon the east for supplies, it is significant that even so late as six thousand tons of hard bread were imported annually from new york. wages and prices were high, but nobody complained of them. there was in fact a disdain of all attempts to cheapen or haggle. gold dust poured into san francisco from the launches and schooners which plied on the sacramento river, and almost everybody in california seemed to have it in plenty. "money," said a pioneer in a letter written at the end of ' , "is about the most valueless article that a man can have in his possession here." as an illustration of the lavish manner in which business was transacted, it may be mentioned that the stamp box in the express office of wells, fargo and company was a sort of common treasury. clerks, messengers and drivers dipped into it for change whenever they wanted a lunch or a drink. there was nothing secret about this practice, and if not sanctioned it was at least winked at by the superior officers. huge lumps of gold were exhibited in hotels and gambling houses, and the jingling of coins rivalled the scraping of the fiddle as the characteristic music of san francisco. the first deposit in the united states mint of gold from california was made on december , , and between that date and may , , there were presented for coinage gold dust and nuggets valued at eleven million four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. a lot of land in san francisco rose from fifteen dollars in price to forty thousand dollars. in september, , bricklayers receiving twelve dollars a day struck for fourteen dollars, and obtained the increase. the wages of carpenters varied from twelve dollars to twenty dollars a day. those who did best in california were, as a rule, the small traders, the mechanics and skilled workmen, and the professional men who, resisting the temptation to hunt for gold, made money by being useful to the community. "it may truly be said," remarked the "san francisco daily herald" in , "that california is the only spot in the world where labor is not only on an equality with capital, but to a certain extent is superior to it." women cooks received one hundred dollars a month, and chambermaids and nurses almost as much. washerwomen made fortunes and founded families. a resident of san francisco went to the mines for four weeks, and came back with a bag of gold dust which, he thought, would astonish his wife, who had remained in the city; but meanwhile she had been "taking in washing," at the rate of twelve dollars a dozen; and he was crestfallen to find that her gains were twice as much as his. it was cheaper to have one's clothes sent to china or the sandwich islands to be laundered, and some thrifty and patient persons took that course. a valuable trade sprang up between china and san francisco. the solitude became a village, and the village a city, with startling rapidity. in less than a year, twelve thousand people gathered at sacramento where there had not been a single soul. events and changes followed one another so rapidly that each year formed an epoch by itself. in men spoke of as of a romantic and half-forgotten past. an old citizen was one who had been on the ground a year. when stephen j. field offered himself as a candidate for the newly-created office of alcalde at marysville, the supporters of a rival candidate objected to field as being a newcomer. he had been there only three days. his opponent had been there six days. but in the material progress of california received a great, though only a temporary, check. as commerce adjusted itself to the needs of the community prices and wages fell. a drink cost fifteen cents (the half of "two bits"), instead of fifty cents, which had been the usual price, and the wages of day laborers shrank to five dollars a day. the change was thus humorously described by an editor, obviously of southern extraction: "about this time the yankees began to pour into san francisco, to invest in corner lots, and speculate in wooden gingerbread, framed houses and the like. prices gradually came down, and money which was once thrown about so recklessly has now come to be regarded as an article of considerable importance." in san francisco there was almost a commercial panic. the city was heavily in debt, many private fortunes were swept away, property was insecure, and robbery and murder were common events. delano relates that a young man of his acquaintance, a wild and daring fellow, was offered at this time a salary of seven hundred dollars a month, to steal horses and mules in a large, systematic and business-like manner.[ ] the tone of the san francisco papers in was by no means cheerful. the following is the description which the "alta california" gave of the city in december of that year: "our city is certainly an unfortunate one in the matter of public accommodation. her wharves are exposed to tempestuous northers and to the ravages of the worm; the piles that are driven into the mud for houses to rest upon are forced out of their perpendicular and crowded over by pressure of sand used in filling in other water lots against them; a most valuable portion of the city survey is converted into a filthy lake or salt water _laguna_ filled with garbage, dead animals and refuse matter from the streets; the streets are narrow and are constructed with sidewalks so irregular, miserable, and behampered as to drive off passengers into the middle of the street to take the chance of being ridden over and trampled under foot by scores of recklessly driven mules and horses; with drays, wagons and carriages without number to deafen, confuse and endanger the unfortunate pedestrian. a few thin strips of boards, pieces of dry-goods boxes or barrel staves constitute the sidewalks in some of our most important thoroughfares, and even this material is so irregularly and insecurely laid that the walks are shunned as stumbling places full of man-traps; more than all this, the sidewalks of the principal streets in the city are strewn and obstructed with shop wares." the first vigilance committee of checked crime and restored order for a short period, and the second vigilance committee of , together with the election which followed it, effected a most decided and lasting improvement in the government of san francisco, and especially in the management of its police. in the brief account already given of james king and his career, this episode in california life has been touched upon. the fires which successively overran the cities of california, and especially san francisco, were another source of disaster to the business world. there were many small fires in san francisco and six conflagrations, all within two years. the first of these occurred in december, ' , the loss being about one million dollars. a characteristic act at this fire was that of a merchant whose shop had been burned, but who had saved several hundred suits of black clothes. having no place for storing them, and seeing that they would be stolen or ruined, he gave them away to the bystanders. "help yourselves, gentlemen!" he cried. the invitation was accepted, and the next day an unusual proportion of the citizens of san francisco were observed to be in mourning. in may, and again in june, , there were large fires, and it was after these disasters that the use of cloth for the sides and roofs of buildings was prohibited by law. up to that time the shops of the city had been constructed very commonly of that highly inflammable material. in september, , there was another but less destructive fire, and on may , , occurred the "great fire," in which the loss of property was at least seven million dollars. it was estimated at the time at fifteen million dollars. this conflagration produced a night of horror such as even california had not seen before. the fire started at eleven p. m., and the flames were fanned by a strong, westerly breeze. the glow in the sky was seen at monterey,--one hundred miles distant. so rapidly did the flames spread that merchants in some cases removed their stock of goods four or five times, and yet had them overtaken and destroyed in the end. since the burning of moscow no other city had suffered so much from fire. delicate women, driven from their homes at midnight, were wandering through the streets, with no protection from the raw wind except their nightclothes. a sick man was carried from his bed in a burning house, and placed in the street, where, amid all the turmoil of the scene, the roaring of the flames, the shouts, cries and imprecations of men, amid falling sparks and cinders, and jostled by the half-frenzied passers-by, he breathed his last. among the brave acts performed at this fire was that of a clerk who picked up a burning box which contained canisters of powder, carried it a block on his shoulder, and threw it into a pool of water. it was during this fire, also, that an american flag, released by the burning of the cord which held it, soared away, above the flames and smoke, while a cry that was half a cheer and half a sob, burst from the throats of the crowd beneath it. but, great as this disaster was, the merchants rallied from it with true california courage. "one year here," wrote the reverend mr. colton, "will do more for your philosophy than a lifetime elsewhere. i have seen a man sit and quietly smoke his cigar while his house went heavenward in a column of flame." this was exemplified in the great fire. men began to fence in their lots although the smouldering ruins still emitted an almost suffocating heat. contracts for new stores were made while the old ones were yet burning; and in many cases the ground was cleared, and temporary buildings went up before the ashes of the burned buildings had cooled. lumber, fortunately, was abundant, and the morning after the fire every street and lane leading to the ruined district was crowded with wagons full of building tools and material. the city resembled a hive of bees after it has been rifled of its honey. the smaller cities suffered almost as severely from fire. sacramento was burned twice and flooded three times before the year . in _the reincarnation of smith_, bret harte describes the appearance of the city when the river upon which it is situated suddenly burst its banks and "a great undulation of yellow water" swept through the streets of the city. two other stories, _in the tules_ and _when the waters were up at "jules',"_ deal with the floods of and of , and in the first of these the escape of martin morse, the solitary inhabitant of the river-bank, is described. "but one night he awakened with a start. his hand, which was hanging out of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water. he had barely time to spring to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door fell out as from inward pressure, and his whole shanty collapsed like a pack of cards. but it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over his head like a withdrawn canopy; and he was swept from his feet against it, and thence out into what might have been another world! for the rain had ceased, and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable expanse of water! as his frail raft swept under a cottonwood he caught at one of the overhanging limbs, and, working his way desperately along the bough, at last reached a secure position in the fork of the tree." martin morse was saved eventually; but another victim of the same flood, and not a fictitious one, was found dead from exposure and exhaustion in the tree which he had reached by swimming. so close, even in small incidents, are bret harte's stories to the reality of california life! during this freshet a man and his wife, who occupied a ranch on the feather river, had an experience more remarkable than that of martin morse. they took refuge, first, on the roof of their house, and then, when the house floated off, they clung to a piece of timber, and so drifted to a small island. but here they found a prior occupant in the person of a grizzly bear, and to escape him they climbed a tree, whence they were rescued the next morning. what with fire and flood added to the uncertainties and vicissitudes of trade carried on thousands of miles from the base of supplies, with no telegraphic communication and only a fortnightly mail; what with land values rising and falling; with cities and towns springing up like mushrooms and often withering as quickly;--under these circumstances, and in a stimulating climate, it is no wonder that the californians lived a feverish, and often a reckless life. the pioneers could recount more instances of misfortune and more triumphs over misfortune than any other people in the world. but suicides were frequent,--they numbered twenty-nine in san francisco in a single year,--and one of the first public buildings erected by the state was an insane asylum at stockton. it was quickly filled. nevertheless, contemporary with the feverish life of the mining camp and the city was the life of the farm and the vineyard; and this, too, was not neglected by bret harte. the agricultural resources of california were beginning to be known even before the discovery of gold, and many of those who crossed the plains in ' and ' were bent not upon mining but upon farming. others, who failed as miners, or who were thrown out of business by the hard times of ' and ' , turned to the fertile valleys and hillsides for support. monterey, on the lower coast of central california, was the sheep county; and flocks of ten thousand from ohio and of one hundred thousand from mexico were grazing there before . in that year it was said to contain more sheep than could be found in any other county in the united states. tasajara was known as a "cow county." an immigrant from new jersey, in , brought thirty thousand fruit trees; and by the foot-hills in the counties of yuba, nevada, el dorado and sacramento were covered with vineyards, interspersed with vine-clad cottages, where, a few years before, there had been only the rough and scattered huts of a few miners. immense quantities of wheat were raised, especially in humboldt county on the northern coast of the state, where we hear of crops averaging sixty bushels to the acre. in the surplus of wheat, the quantity, that is, available for exportation, exceeded three million bushels; and the barley crop was still larger. the stanislaus and santa clara valleys, not far from san francisco, and southeast of the city, were also grain-growing districts, as is recorded in bret harte's story _through the santa clara wheat_. he describes his heroine as following her guide between endless rows of stalks, rising ten and even twelve feet high, like "a long, pillared conservatory of greenish glass." "she also discovered that the close air above her head was continually freshened by the interchange of lower temperature from below,--as if the whole vast field had a circulation of its own,--and that the adobe beneath her feet was gratefully cool to her tread. there was no dust; what had at first half suffocated her seemed to be some stimulating aroma of creation that filled the narrow green aisles, and now imparted a strange vigor and excitement to her as she walked along." so early as the newspapers began to publish articles about the opportunities for farming, and soon afterward the "california farmer," an excellent weekly, was started at sacramento, and supplied the community with news in general as well as with agricultural information. one can imagine the relief with which in those strenuous days the reader of the "farmer" turned from accounts of robbery, murder, suicide and lynching to gentle disquisitions upon the rearing of calves, the merits of durham steers, and the most approved method of fattening sheep in winter. the hubbard squash, then a novelty, was treated by the "farmer" as seriously as the constitutional convention, or the expulsion of foreigners from the mines. practical subjects, as for instance, subsoil ploughs, remedies for smut, and recipes for rhubarb wine, were carefully discussed by this pioneer agriculturist; and not infrequently he rose to higher themes, such as "the age of the earth," and "the influence of females on society." chapter xii literature, journalism and religion most of the newspaper men in the early days of california were southerners or under southern influence, as is plain from many indications. for example, duelling and shooting at sight were common editorial functions.[ ] bret harte, in _an episode of fiddletown_, gives an instance: "an unfortunate _rencontre_ took place on monday last between the honorable jackson flash, of the 'dutch flat intelligencer,' and the well-known colonel starbottle of this place, in front of the eureka saloon. two shots were fired by the parties without injury to either, although it is said that a passing chinaman received fifteen buckshot in the calves of his legs from the colonel's double-barrelled shotgun which were not intended for him. john will learn to keep out of the way of melican man's firearms hereafter." this fictitious incident can be paralleled almost exactly from the california papers of the day. in july, , a certain colonel johnston pulled the nose of the editor of the "marysville times," whereupon the editor drew a pistol, and the colonel ran away. in september of the same year the "alta california" announced that a duel between one of the proprietors of that paper and a brother to the governor of the state had been prevented by the police. in march, , two sacramento editors had a dispute in the course of which one endeavored to shoot the other. in may of the same year, the editor of the "calaveras chronicle" fought a duel with another citizen of that town, and was dangerously wounded. in november, , the editor of the "visalia delta" was killed in a street affray. in san francisco a duel took place between ex-governor mcdougall and the editor of "the picayune," "a. c. russell, esq." this use of "esquire," by the way, was an english custom imported to california by way of the south, and many humorous examples of it may be found in bret harte. thus, in the "star's" account of "uncle ben" dabney's sudden elevation to wealth and to a more aristocratic name, we read: "benjamin daubigny, esq., who left town for sacramento on important business, not entirely unconnected with his new interests in indian springs, will, it is rumored, be shortly joined by his wife, who has been enabled by his recent good fortune to leave her old home in the states, and take her proper proud position by his side.... mr. daubigny was accompanied by his private secretary, rupert, the eldest son of h. g. filgee, esq.,"--"h. g. filgee, esq." being a species of bar-room loafer. another indication of the southern origin of californian editors is the starbottlian lack of humor which they often display. in august, , the junior editor of the "alta california" published an extremely long letter in that paper describing his personal difficulties with two acquaintances, and concluding as follows: "i had simply intended in our interview to pronounce messrs. crane and rice poltroons and cowards, and spit in their faces; and had they seen fit to resent it on the spot, i was prepared for them."--nothing more. the "sacramento transcript" concluded the account of a funeral as follows: "she was buried in a neat mahogany coffin, furnished by mr. earle youmans at one half the established price." the "san francisco daily herald" of june , , contains a very long, minute, and extremely technical account of a prize-fight, written with evident relish, but concluding with a wholly unexpected comment as follows: "thus ended this brutal exhibition!" the editorial tone, especially in san francisco, was distinguished by great solemnity, but it was the assumed solemnity of youth, for the editors, like everybody else in california, were young. none but a youthful journalist could have written a leading article, published one monday in a san francisco paper, describing a sermon which the writer had heard on the preceding sunday, giving the name of the preacher, and complaining bitterly, not that he was heterodox or bigoted, but that he was stupid and uninteresting! in fact, the california editors, despite the solemnity of their tone, showed a decided inclination to deal with the amusing, rather than with the serious, aspects of life. the "sacramento transcript" in august, , contained a column letter, in large type, minutely describing "an alleged difficulty" which occurred at the american fork house, between mr. gelston of sacramento, and mr. drake, "who has been stopping at this place for his health,"--with poor results, it is to be feared. in another issue of the same paper two columns are devoted to an account of a practical joke played upon a french barber in san francisco. most of all, however, did the california journalists betray their youth, and their southern origin as well, by the ornate style and the hyperbole in which the early papers indulged, and which are often satirized by bret harte. an editorial article dealing with the prospects of california began as follows: "when the eagle, emblem of model republican liberty, winged its final flight westward from its home where atlantic surges chafe our shores, and sought the sunny clime of the mild pacific strand, it bore in its strong talons," and so forth for a sentence of one hundred and twenty words. but the california newspapers, though often crude and provincial, were almost wholly free from vulgarity. in this respect they far excelled the average newspaper of to-day. there was nothing of the philistine about them. they give the impression of having been written "by gentlemen and for gentlemen." these california writers were, indeed, very young gentlemen, as we have seen, and they often lacked breadth of view, self-restraint, and knowledge of the world, but they were essentially men of honor, and in public matters they took high ground. the important part played by the "bulletin" and its editor, james king, has already been described. nor did they lack literary skill, as is sufficiently shown by some of the passages from san francisco papers already quoted. a correspondent of the "sacramento transcript," writing in july, , from the northern mines, gives an account of the destruction by fire of a store and restaurant owned by a mr. cook, concluding as follows: "with the recuperative energy so peculiar to american character, mr. cook has already gone down to your city to purchase a new stock, having reëstablished his boarding-house before leaving. the son of ethiopia who conducts the culinary department is not the darker for 'the cloud which has lowered o'er our house,' and deprived him of many of the instruments of his office." the delicate humor of the last sentence does not seem out of place in the "sacramento transcript" of that date. the same paper published on the fourth of july, , a patriotic leader which closed with these words,--they appear far from extravagant now, but at that time they must have sounded like a rash and audacious prophecy: "'god save the queen' and 'yankee doodle' will blend in unison around the world." the first newspaper published in california was a small sheet called "the californian," started at monterey in the fall of , and printed half in english, half in spanish. needless to say, its conductors were americans.[ ] they had discovered in the ruins of the mission, and used for this purpose, an old press which the spaniards had imported in the day of their rule for printing the edicts of the governor. in the following year "the californian" was removed to san francisco. many other newspapers sprang into existence after the discovery of gold, especially the "alta california," which became the leading journal on the pacific slope. by the end of there were fifteen newspapers in the state, including six daily papers in san francisco, and that excellent home and farm weekly, the "california farmer." as for the buoyant, confident tone of these pioneer papers, exaggerated though it was, it only reflected the general feeling. so early as november, , a meeting was held in san francisco to advocate the building of a railroad which should connect the atlantic with the pacific. in june, , the "sacramento transcript" warned europe as follows: "the present is the most remarkable period the world has ever been called upon to pass through.... the nations are centering hitherward. europe is poor, california is rich, and equilibrium is inevitable. four years will pass, and ours will be the most popular state in the union. she is putting in the keystone of commerce, and concentrating the trade of the world." moreover, busy as the pioneers were, their reading was not confined to newspapers. bret harte said of them: "eastern magazines and current eastern literature formed their literary recreation, and the sale of the better class of periodicals was singularly great. nor was their taste confined to american literature. the illustrated and satirical english journals were as frequently seen in california as in massachusetts; and the author records that he has experienced more difficulty in procuring a copy of 'punch' in an english provincial town than was his fortune at 'red dog' or 'one-horse gulch.'" [illustration: main street, nevada city, from a photograph in the possession of colonel thomas l. livermore] this statement has been questioned, but it is borne out by the contemporary records and publications. the "atlantic monthly," for example, was regularly advertised in the california papers, and the "atlantic" at that time was essentially a literary magazine. in the list of its contributors published in the "california farmer" are the names of emerson, longfellow, lowell, holmes, parsons, whittier, prescott, mrs. stowe, motley, herman melville, c. c. felton, f. j. child, edmund quincy, j. t. trowbridge, and g. w. curtis. the london "illustrated news" had a particularly large sale among the pioneers, although the california price was a dollar a copy. the shifting character of the population, and the fact, already mentioned, that, almost to a man, the pioneers expected to return to the east within a few months, or, at the latest, within a year or two,--these reasons discouraged the founding of permanent institutions such as libraries and colleges; but even in this direction something was done at an early date. the rush of immigration began in the spring of , and within less than a year a meeting had been held at san francisco to establish a state college; a state library had been founded at san josé; mercantile library associations had been started both in san francisco and sacramento, and an auction sale of books had been held in the latter city. in september, , an audience gathered at stockton to hear a lecture upon so recondite a subject as the "state of learning from the fall of rome to the fall of constantinople." in june, , a san francisco firm advertised the receipt by the latest steamer of ten thousand new books, including the complete works of dickens and washington irving. in november, , a literary society called the california institute was organized in san francisco, and in april, , some one entertained a hall full of people by giving an account of a lecture which cardinal wiseman had delivered in london upon the perception of natural beauty by the ancients and moderns. before the close of numerous boarding-schools had been established, such as the alameda collegiate institute for young ladies and gentlemen, the stockton female seminary, the female institute at santa clara, the collegiate institute at benicia, the academy of notre dame at san josé. the "legitimate drama," and even shakspere, flourished in california. in the summer of charles r. thorne was playing at sacramento, and in the autumn "richard iii" and "macbeth" were on the boards there. in the fall of two theatres were open in san francisco, "othello" being the play at one, "ernest maltravers" at the other. in "the hunchback" was performed in the same city with miss baker, the once-famous philadelphia actress, in the leading part. there was no exaggeration in the remark made by the "sacramento transcript" in may, : "nowhere have we seen more critical theatrical audiences than those which meet nightly in sacramento.... every mind is wide awake, and the discriminating eye of an impartial public easily selects pure worth from its counterfeit." an amusing incident, which would have delighted charles lamb, and which shows the youthfulness, the humor, and, equally, the decorum of the california audience, is thus related by an eye-witness: "one night at the theatre a countryman from pike, sitting in the 'orchestra' near the stage, and becoming uncomfortably warm, took off his coat. thereupon the gallery-gods roared and hissed,--stopping the play until the garment should be resumed. some one touched the man on the shoulder and explained the situation. the hydra watched and waited. shirt-sleeves appeared to be refractory, and a terrific roar came from the hydra. shirt-sleeves, quailing at the sound, and at the angry looks and gestures of those who sat near him, started up with an air of coerced innocence, and resumed his _toga virilis_. the yell of triumph that arose from the 'gods' in their joyful sense of victory was beyond the description of tongue or pen."[ ] it was remarked at an early date that nothing really satisfied the pioneers unless it was the best of its kind that could be obtained, whether that kind were good or bad. thus san francisco, as many travellers observed, had the prettiest courtesans, the truest guns and pistols, the purest cigars and the finest wines and brandies to be found in the united states. the neatness and good style which marked the best hotels and restaurants prove the natural refinement of the people. bret harte has spoken of the old family silver which figured at a certain coffeehouse in san francisco; and the rev. dr. bushnell, who, being a minister, may perhaps be cited as an expert on this subject, was impressed by the good food and the excellent service which the traveller in california enjoyed:-- "passing hither and thither on the little steamers to marysville, to stockton, to the towns north of the bay, where often the number of passengers did not exceed thirty, we have seen again and again a table most neatly set, the silver bright and clean, the meals well prepared and good, without any nonsense of show dishes, the servants tidy, quiet and respectful,--the whole entertainment more rational and better than we have ever seen on mississippi steamboats, or on those of the atlantic coast."[ ] the steamers that plied up and down the sacramento were "fast, elegant, commodious." in july, , some one gave an aristocratic evening party in the heart of the mountains, fifty miles from marysville. a long artificial bower had been constructed under which were spread tables ornamented with flowers, and loaded with delicious viands, turkeys at twenty dollars apiece, pigs as costly, jellies, east india preserves, and ice cream. some of the guests came from a great distance, ten, twenty, and even thirty miles. "no gamblers were present," said the local paper which gave an account of the affair, thus showing how quickly the social line was drawn. but even if we regard the beginnings of education and literature in california as somewhat meagre, it is otherwise with religion. those who have looked upon the early california society as essentially lawless and immoral will be surprised to find how large and how potent was the religious element. churches sprang up almost as quickly as gambling houses. the baptists have the credit of erecting, in the summer of ' , the first church building; but father william taylor, the methodist, was a close second. father taylor set out to build a church with his own hands. every morning he crossed the bay from san francisco to san antonio creek and toiled with his axe in a grove of redwoods until he had cut down and hewn into shape the needed timber. this he transported in a sloop to the city, and then, with the aid of his congregation, constructed the church which was finished in october, ' . by september, , the following congregations had been formed in san francisco: one catholic, four methodist (one being for negroes), one presbyterian, one congregational, one baptist, one episcopal, one union church. three separate services were held at the catholic church, which was the largest, one in english, one in spanish, one in french. two years later a jewish synagogue was established. in july, , five episcopal clergymen met at san francisco to create the diocese of california, and in the following month dr. horatio southgate was elected bishop. in the same year the san francisco bible society was formed, and the next year, the "california christian advocate," a methodist paper, began publication. at sacramento, in the spring of , the episcopalians, methodists, baptists, congregationalists and presbyterians were holding regular services, and church building had begun. in july, , a methodist college at san josé was incorporated; and in the same month the san francisco papers have a long and enthusiastic account of a concert given by the children of the baptist church there. "it was like an oasis in the desert for weary travellers," remarked one of them. a sacramento paper speaking of a school festival in that city said: "no bull-fight, horse-race or card-table ever gave so much pleasure to the spectators." a miner, writing from stockton on a sunday morning in october, , says, "the church bell is tolling, and gayly-dressed ladies are passing by the window." the congregations at the early religious meetings were extremely impressive, being composed almost wholly of men, and of men young, vigorous and sincere. as professor royce remarks: "nobody gained anything by hypocrisy in california, and consequently there were few hypocrites. the religious coldness of a larger number who at home would have seemed to be devout did not make the progress of the churches in california less sure." and he speaks of the impression which these early congregations of men made upon his mother. "she saw in their countenances an intensity of earnestness that made her involuntarily thank god for making so grand a being as man." it has often been remarked that in times of unbelief and lax morality there is always found a small element in the community which maintains the standard of faith and conduct with a strictness wholly alien to the period. such was the case in the roman empire just before and just after the advent of the christian religion. so, in the english church, in its most idle, most worldly, most unspiritual days, as before the evangelical movement, and again before the tractarian movement, there was a small body of priests and laymen, chiefly, as in the roman empire, isolated persons living in the country, who preserved the torch of faith, humility and self-denial, and served as a nucleus for the new party which was to revive and reform the church. extremes can be met only by extremes. intense worldliness can be vanquished only by intense unworldliness; unbelief fosters faith among a few; and the more loose the habits of the majority, the more severe will be the practice of the minority. this was abundantly seen in california. as bret harte himself said: "strangely enough, this grave materialism flourished side by side with--and was even sustained by--a narrow religious strictness more characteristic of the pilgrim fathers of a past century than the western pioneers of the present. san francisco was early a city of churches and church organizations to which the leading men and merchants belonged. the lax sundays of the dying spanish race seemed only to provoke a revival of the rigors of the puritan sabbath. with the spaniard and his sunday afternoon bull-fight scarcely an hour distant, the san francisco pulpit thundered against sunday picnics. one of the popular preachers, declaiming upon the practice of sunday dinner-giving, averred that when he saw a guest in his best sunday clothes standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his host, he felt like seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from that threshold of perdition." an example of this narrow, not to say pharisaic point of view was commented upon as follows by the "san francisco daily herald" of february , : "of all countries in the world california is the least favorable to cant and bigotry.... it is not surprising that a general feeling of loathing should have been created by an article which recently appeared in a so-called religious newspaper having the title of the 'christian advocate,' commenting in terms of invidious and slanderous malignity on the fact of miss coad, recently attached to the american theatre, being engaged to sing in the choir of the pacific church." this is well enough, though put in an extravagant and rather boyish way; but the writer then goes on in the true colonel starbottle manner as follows: "with the conductors of a clerical press it is difficult to deal. under the cloak of piety they do not hesitate to libel and malign, and at the same time not recognizing the responsibility of gentlemen [colonel starbottle's phrase], and being therefore not fit subjects of attack in retort, one feels almost ashamed in checking their stupidity or reproving their falsehood." and so on at great length. nevertheless, the puritan minority, reinforced by the good sense of a majority of the pioneers, very quickly succeeded in modifying the free and easy life of san francisco, and later of the mining regions. gamblers of the better sort, and business men in general, welcomed and supported the churches as tending to the peace and prosperity even of the pacific slope. "i have known five men," wrote the reverend mr. colton, "who never contributed a dollar in the states for the support of a clergyman, subscribe here five hundred dollars each per annum, merely to encourage, as they termed it, 'a good sort of a thing in a community.'"[ ] the steps taken in and to prohibit or restrain gambling have already been noticed. in august, , the grand jury condemned bull-baiting and prize-fighting at any time, and theatrical and like exhibitions on sunday. in september of the same year, the "sacramento transcript" said, "the bull-fights we have had in this city have been barbarous and disgusting in the extreme, and their toleration on any occasion is disgraceful." this sentiment prevailed, and shortly afterward bull-fights in sacramento were forbidden by city ordinance. a year later gambling houses and theatres, both in san francisco and sacramento, were closed on sunday, and we find the "alta california" remarking on a monday morning in may, "yesterday all was like sunday in the east, as quiet as the fury of the winds would allow. two years ago under similar circumstances many hundreds of men would have forgotten the day, and the busy hum of business would have rung throughout the land." in the mines sunday, at first, was almost wholly disregarded; but abstention from work on that day was soon found to be a physical necessity. thus an english miner wrote home, "we have all of us given over working on sundays, as we found the toil on six successive days quite hard enough." men who stood by their principles in california never lost anything by that course. a merchant from salem, massachusetts, came up the sacramento river with a cargo of goods in december, . early on the morning after his arrival three men with three mules appeared on the bank of the river to purchase supplies for the mines. it being sunday, however, the man from salem refused to do business on that day, but, after the new england fashion, accommodated his intending customers with a little good advice. this they resented in a really violent manner, and went off in a rage, swearing that they would never trade with such a puritanical hypocrite. yet they came back the next morning, purchased goods then, and on various later occasions, and finally made the sabbath-keeper their banker, depositing in his safe many thousands of dollars. even a matter so unpopular as that of temperance reform was not neglected by the religious people. a temperance society was organized at sacramento in june, , addresses were made in the methodist chapel, and numerous persons, including some city officials, signed a total abstinence pledge. "the subject is an old one," the "sacramento transcript" naïvely remarked; "but this is a new country. temperance is rather a new idea here, and its introduction among us seems almost like a novel movement." in the same month and year a similar society was formed in san francisco, and arrangements were made to celebrate the fourth of july "on temperance principles." the most genuine, the most thorough-going kind of religion found in california was that of the western pioneers, who were mainly methodists and baptists of a rude, primitive sort. nothing could be further from bret harte's manner of thinking, and yet he has depicted the type with his usual insight, though perhaps not quite with his usual sympathy. joshua rylands, in _mr. jack hamlin's mediation_ (a story already mentioned), is one example of it, and madison wayne, in _the bell-ringer of angel's_, is another. of all bret harte's stories this is the most tragic, a terrible fate overtaking every one of the four characters who figure in it. madison wayne is a calvinistic puritan,--a new englander such as has not been seen in new england for a hundred years, but only in that far west to which new england men penetrated, and in which new england ideas and beliefs, protected by the isolation of prairie and forest, survived the scientific and religious changes of two centuries. in _a night at hays'_ we have the same character under a more morose aspect. "always a severe presbyterian and an uncompromising deacon, he grew more rigid, sectarian, and narrow day by day.... a grim landlord, hard creditor, close-fisted patron, and a smileless neighbor who neither gambled nor drank, old hays, as he was called, while yet scarce fifty, had few acquaintances and fewer friends." in _an apostle of the tules_ bret harte has described a camp-meeting of calvinistic families whose gloom was heightened by malaria contracted from the stockton marshes. "one might have smiled at the idea of the vendetta-following ferguses praying for 'justification by faith'; but the actual spectacle of old simon fergus, whose shotgun was still in his wagon, offering up that appeal with streaming eyes and agonized features, was painful beyond a doubt." as for bret harte's own religious views, it can scarcely be said that he had any. he was indeed brought up with some strictness as an episcopalian, his mother being of that faith; and when he returned from her funeral with his sisters, he seemed deeply moved by the beauty of the episcopal burial service, and expressed the hope that it would be read at his own grave. his friends in this country remember that he declined to take part in certain amusements on sunday, remarking that, though he saw no harm in them, he could not shake off the more strict notions of sunday observance in which he had been trained as a child. through life he had a horror of gambling, and always refused even to play cards for money. in san francisco he used to attend the church where his friend starr king preached, and in new york he was often present at another unitarian church, that of the reverend o. b. frothingham; but this seems to have been the extent of his church-going, and of his connection, external or internal, with any form of christianity. nor, so far as one can judge from his writings, and from such of his letters as have been published, was he one who thought much or cared much about those mysteries of human existence with which religion is supposed to deal. even as a child, bret harte had no sense of sin,--no sense of that hideous discrepancy between character and ideals, between conduct and duty, which ought to oppress all men, and which, at some period of their lives, does oppress most men. everybody, from the digger indian up, has a standard of right and wrong; everybody is aware that he continually falls below that standard; and from these two facts of consciousness arise the sense of sin, remorse, repentance, and the instinct of expiation. perhaps this is religion, or the fundamental feeling upon which religion is based. to be deficient in this feeling is a great defect in any man, most of all in a man of powerful intellect. in a letter, bret harte, speaking of "pilgrim's progress," says that he read it as a boy, but that the book made no impression upon him, except that the characters seemed so ridiculous that he could not help laughing at them. this statement gives a rather painful shock even to the irreligious reader. the truth is, bret harte had the moral indifference, the spiritual serenity of a pagan, and, as a necessary concomitant, that superficial conception of human life and destiny which belongs to paganism. benjamin jowett, speaking of the mediæval hymns, said, "we seem to catch from them echoes of deeper feelings than we are capable of." that mediæval, gothic depth of feeling, that consciousness of sin and mystery hanging over and enveloping man's career on earth, survives even in some modern writers, as in hawthorne, george eliot, tolstoi, and, by a kind of negation, in thomas hardy; and it gives to their stories a sombre and imposing background which is lacking in the tales of bret harte and of kipling. it is owing partly to this defect, and partly to the unfortunate character of most of the ministers who reached california before , that the clerical element fares but ill in bret harte's stories.[ ] his most frequent type is the smooth, oily, self-seeking hypocrite. such is the reverend joshua mcsnagley whose little affair with deacon parnell's "darter" is sarcastically mentioned in _roger catron's friend_, and who comes to a violent end in _m'liss_. the reverend mr. staples who meanly persecutes the youngest prospector in calaveras, is mcsnagley under another name; and the same type briefly appears again in the reverend mr. peasley, who greets the new assistant at pine clearing school "with a chilling christian smile"; in the reverend mr. belcher, who attempts the reform of johnnyboy; and still again in parson greenwood, who profits by the convalescence of jack hamlin to learn the mysteries of poker, and of whom the gambler said that, when he had successfully "bluffed" his fellow-players, "there was a smile of humble self-righteousness on his face that was worth double the money." a much less conventional and more interesting type is that of the jovial, loud-voiced hypocrite who conceals a cold heart and a selfish nature with an affectation of frankness and geniality. such are the reverend mr. windibrook in _a belle of cañada city_, and father wynn, described in _the carquinez woods_. it was father wynn who thus addressed the newly-converted expressman, to the great disgust and embarrassment of that youth: "'good-by, good-by, charley, my boy, and keep in the right path; not up or down, or round the gulch, you know, ha, ha! but straight across lots to the shining gate.' "he had raised his voice under the stimulus of a few admiring spectators, and backed his convert playfully against the wall. 'you see! we're goin' in to win, you bet. good-by! i'd ask you to step in and have a chat, but i've got my work to do, and so have you. the gospel mustn't keep us from that, must it, charley? ha, ha!'" james seabright, the amphibious minister who is responsible for the episode of west woodlands, is rather good than bad, and so is stephen masterton, the ignorant, fanatical, but conscientious pike county revivalist who, yielding to the combined charms of a pretty spanish girl and the catholic church, becomes a convert of the mission.[ ] of another protestant minister, the reverend mr. daws, it is briefly mentioned in _the iliad of sandy bar_ that "with quiet fearlessness" he endeavored to reconcile those bitter enemies, york and scott. "when he had concluded, scott looked at him, not unkindly, over the glasses of his bar, and said, less irreverently than the words might convey, 'young man, i rather like your style; but when you know york and me as well as you do god almighty, it'll be time enough to talk.'" but of all bret harte's protestant ministers the only one who figures in the least as a hero is gideon deane, the apostle of the tules. gideon deane, it will be remembered, first ventures his own life in an effort to save that of a gambler about to be lynched, and then, making perhaps a still greater sacrifice, declines the church and the parsonage and the fifteen hundred dollars a year offered to him by jack hamlin and his friends, and returning to the lonely farmhouse and the poverty-stricken, unattractive widow hiler, becomes her husband, and a father to her children. the story is not altogether satisfactory, for gideon deane is in love with a young girl who loves him, and it is not perfectly clear why her happiness, as well as that of the preacher himself, should be sacrificed to the domestic necessities of the widow and her children. nor is the hero himself made quite so real as are bret harte's characters in general. we admire and respect him, but he does not excite our enthusiasm, and this is probably because the author failed to get that imaginative, sympathetic grasp of his nature which, as a rule, makes bret harte's personages seem like living men and women. there is a rather striking resemblance in the matter of ministers between bret harte and rhoda broughton. both have the same instinctive antipathy to a parson that boys have to a policeman; both have the same general notion that ministers are mainly canting hypocrites; both, being struck apparently by the idea of doing full justice to the cloth, have set themselves to describe one really good and even heroic minister, and in each case the type evolved is the same, and not convincing. gideon deane has the slender physique, the humility, the courage, the self-sacrificing spirit, the melancholy temperament of the reverend james stanley, and, it may be added, the same unreality, the same inability to stamp his image upon the mind of the reader. bret harte's treatment of the spanish priest in california is very different. he pokes a little fun at his reverence, now and then. he shows us father felipe entering the _estudio_ of don josé sepulvida "with that air of furtive and minute inspection common to his order"; and in the interview with colonel parker, don josé's lawyer, there is a beautiful description of what might be called an ecclesiastical wink. "the padre and colonel parker gazed long and gravely into each other's eyes. it may have been an innocent touch of the sunlight through the window, but a faint gleam seemed to steal into the pupil of the affable lawyer at the same moment that, probably from the like cause, there was a slight nervous contraction of the left eyelid of the pious father." father sobriente, again, "was a polished, cultivated man; yet in the characteristic, material criticism of youth, i am afraid that clarence chiefly identified him as a priest with large hands whose soft palms seemed to be cushioned with kindness, and whose equally large feet, encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly--rather than to ostentatiously crush--the obstacles that beset the path of the young student.... in the midnight silence of the dormitory, he was often conscious of the soft, browsing tread and snuffy, muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor." but the simplicity, the unaffected piety, and the sweet disposition of the spanish priest are clearly shown in bret harte's stories. the ecclesiastic with whom he has made us best acquainted is padre esteban of the mission of todos santos, that remote and dreamy port in which the crusade of the excelsior ended. and yet even there the good priest had learned how to deal with the human heart, as appeared when he became the confidant of the unfortunate hurlstone. "'a woman,' said the priest softly. 'so! we will sit down, my son.' he lifted his hand with a soothing gesture--the movement of a physician who has just arrived at an easy diagnosis of certain uneasy symptoms. there was also a slight suggestion of an habitual toleration, as if even the seclusion of todos santos had not been entirely free from the invasion of the primal passion." the reader need not be reminded how often bret harte speaks of junipéro serra, the franciscan friar who founded the spanish missions in california. father junipéro was a typical spaniard of the religious sort, austere, ascetic,--a commissioner of the inquisition. he ate little, avoiding all meat and wine. he scourged himself in the pulpit with a chain, after the manner of st. francis, and he was accustomed, while reciting the confession, to hold aloft the crucifix in his left hand, and to strike his naked breast with a heavy stone held in his right hand. to this self-punishment, indeed, was attributed the disease of the lungs which ultimately caused his death. [illustration: the bells, san gabriel mission copyright, detroit photographic co.] each mission had its garrison, for the intention was to overcome the natives by arms, if they should offer resistance to holy church. but the california indians were a mild, inoffensive people, lacking the character and courage of the indians who inhabited the plains, and they quickly succumbed to that combination of spiritual authority and military force which the padres wielded. at the end of the eighteenth century there were eighteen missions in california, with forty padres, and a neophyte indian population of about thirteen thousand. but all this melted away when the missions were secularized. in mexico became independent of spain, and thenceforth california was an outlying, neglected mexican province. from that time the office-holding class of mexicans were intriguing to get possession of the mission lands, flocks and herds; and in they succeeded. the missions were broken up, the friars were deprived of all support; and many of the christian indians were reduced to a cruel slavery in which their labor was recompensed chiefly by intoxicating liquors. little better was the fate of the others. released from the strict discipline in which they had been held by the priests, they scattered in all directions, and quickly sank into a state of barbarism worse than their original state. but the missions were not absolutely deserted. in some cases a small monastic brotherhood still inhabited the buildings once thronged by soldiers and neophytes; and these men were of great service. they ministered to the spiritual needs of spanish and mexicans; they instructed the sons and daughters of the ranch-owners; they kept alive religion, and to some extent learning in the community; and, finally,--if one may say so without irreverence,--they contributed that mediæval element which, otherwise, would have been the one thing lacking to complete the picturesque contrasts of pioneer life. the missions had been the last expression of the instinct of conquest upon the part of a decaying nation; and the angelus that nightly rang from some fast-crumbling tower sounded the knell of spanish rule in america. chapter xiii bret harte's departure from california bret harte, as we have seen, was, for a few years at least, well placed in san francisco, but, as time went on, he had many causes of unhappiness. there were heavy demands upon his purse from persons not of his immediate family, which he was too generous to refuse, although they distressed, harassed and discouraged him. his own constitutional improvidence added to the difficulties thus created. mr. noah brooks, who knew bret harte well, has very truly described this aspect of his life: "it would be grossly unjust to say that harte was a species of harold skimpole, deliberately making debts that he did not intend to pay. he sincerely intended and expected to meet every financial obligation that he contracted. but he was utterly destitute of what is sometimes called the money sense. he could not drive a bargain, and he was an easy mark for any man who could. consequently he was continually involved in troubles that he might have escaped with a little more financial shrewdness." the theory, thus stated by mr. brooks, is supported by an unsolicited letter, now first published, but written shortly after mr. harte's death:-- ... after going abroad, mr. harte from time to time--whenever able to do so--sent through the business house of my husband and son money in payment of bills he was yet owing,--and this when three thousand miles removed from the pressure of payment,--which too many would have left unpaid. life was often hard for him, yet he met it uncomplainingly, unflinchingly and bravely. a kindly, sweet soul, one without gall, bitterness or envy, has gone beyond the reach of our finite voices, leaving the world to us who knew and loved him darker and poorer in his absence. mrs. charles watrous hague, n. y. may , . moreover, there was much friction between bret harte and the new publisher of the "overland," who had succeeded mr. roman; and finally, the moral and intellectual atmosphere of san francisco was uncongenial to him. the early, generous, reckless days of california had passed, and now, especially in san francisco, a commercial type of man was coming to the front. in _the argonauts of north liberty_, bret harte has depicted "ezekiel corwin, ... a shrewd, practical, self-sufficient and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later california emigration." more than once bret harte had run counter to california sentiment. as we have seen already, he was dismissed from his place as assistant editor of a country newspaper because he had chivalrously espoused the cause of the friendless indian. his first contribution to the "overland," as also we have seen, was that beautiful poem in which he laments the shortcomings of the city. had the same thing been said in prose, the business community would certainly have resented it. i know thy cunning and thy greed, thy hard, high lust, and wilful deed, and all thy glory loves to tell of specious gifts material. drop down, o fleecy fog, and hide her sceptic sneer and all her pride! and yet, with characteristic optimism, the poet looks forward to a time-- when art shall raise and culture lift the sensual joys and meaner thrift. later, but in the same year, bret harte incurred the enmity of some leading men in san francisco by his gentle ridicule of their attempts to explain away--for the sake of eastern capitalists--the destructive earthquake which shook the city in october, . an old californian thus relates the story: "as soon as the first panic at this disturbance had subsided, and while lesser shocks were still shaking the earth, some of the leading business men of san francisco organized themselves into a sort of vigilance committee, and visited all the newspaper offices. they strictly enjoined that the story of the earthquake be treated with conservatism and understatement;--it would injure california if eastern people were frightened away by exaggerated reports of _el temblor_; and a similar censorship was exercised over the press despatches sent out from san francisco at that time. "this greatly amused bret harte, and in his 'etc.' in the november number of the 'overland,' he treated the topic jocularly, saying that, according to the daily papers, the earthquake would have suffered serious damage if the people had only known it was coming. harte's pleasantry excited the wrath of some of the solid men of san francisco, and when, not long after that, it was proposed to establish a chair of recent literature in the university of california and invite bret harte to occupy it, one of the board of regents, whose word was a power in the land, temporarily defeated the scheme by swearing roundly that a man who had derided the dispute between the earthquake and the newspapers should never have his support for a professorship. subsequently, however, this difficulty was overcome, and harte received his appointment." san francisco was then a crude, commercial, restless town, caring little for art or literature, religious in a narrow way, confident of its own ideals, and as content with the stage through which it was passing as if human history had known, and human imagination could conceive, nothing higher or better. in _a jack and jill of the sierras_ bret harte makes the youthful hero reproach himself by saying, or rather thinking, "he had forgotten them for those lazy, snobbish, purse-proud san franciscans--for bray had the miner's supreme contempt for the moneyed trading classes." bret harte, whose view of life was mainly derived from eighteenth-century literature, shared that contempt, and expressed his own feeling, no doubt, in the sentiment which he attributes to the two girls in _devil's ford_. "it seemed to them that the five millionaires of devil's ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than the citizens who imitated a civilization which they were unable yet to reach." no wonder, then, that, with tempting offers from the east, harassed with debts, disputes, cares and anxieties, disgusted with the atmosphere in which he was living,--no wonder bret harte felt that the hour for his departure had struck. had he remained longer, his art would probably have suffered. a nature so impressionable as bret harte's, so responsive, would insensibly have been affected by his surroundings, and the more so because he had in himself no strong, intellectual basis. his life was ruled by taste, rather than by conviction; and taste is a harder matter than conviction to preserve unimpaired. of all the criticisms passed upon bret harte there has been nothing more true than madame van de velde's observations upon this point: "it was decidedly fortunate that he left california when he did, never to return to it; for his quick instinctive perceptions would have assimilated the new order of things to the detriment of his talent. as it was, his singularly retentive memory remained unbiassed by the transformation of the centres whence he drew his inspiration. california remained to him the mecca of the argonauts." bret harte left many warm friends in california, and they were much hurt, in some cases much angered, because they never had a word from him afterward. and yet it is extremely doubtful if he expected any such result. certainly it was not intended. kind and friendly feelings may still exist, although they are not expressed in letters. bret harte was indolent and procrastinating about everything except the real business of his life, and into that all his energy was poured. and there was another reason for the failure to communicate with his old friends, which has probably occurred to the reader, and which is suggested in a private letter from one of the very persons who were aggrieved by his silence. "he went away with a sore heart. he had cares, difficulties, hurts here, _many_, and they may have embittered him against all thoughts of the past." this, no doubt, is true. the california chapter in bret harte's life was closed, and it would have been painful for him to reopen it even by the writing of a letter. to say this, however, is not to acquit him of all blame in the matter. the night before he left california a few of his more intimate friends gave him a farewell dinner which, in the light of all that followed, now wears an almost tragic aspect. it is thus described by one of the company: "a little party of us, eight, all working writers, met for a last symposium. it was one of the veritable _noctes ambrosianae_; the talk was intimate, heart-to-heart, and altogether of the shop. naturally harte was the centre of the little company, and he was never more fascinating and companionable. day was breaking when the party dispersed, and the ties that bound our friend to california were sundered forever." bret harte left san francisco in february, . seventeen years before he had landed there, a mere boy, without money or prospects, without trade or profession. now he was the most distinguished person in california, and his departure marked the close of an epoch for that state. who can imagine the mingled feelings, half-triumphant, half-bitter, with which he must have looked back upon the slow-receding, white-capped sierras that had bounded his horizon for those seventeen eventful years! chapter xiv bret harte in the east before bret harte left california he had been in correspondence with some persons in chicago who proposed to make him editor and part proprietor of a magazine called the "lakeside monthly." a dinner was arranged to take place soon after his arrival in chicago at which mr. harte might meet the men who were to furnish the capital for this purpose. but the guest of the evening did not appear. many stories were told in explanation of his absence; and bret harte's own account is thus stated by mr. noah brooks:--"when i met harte in new york i asked him about the incident, and he said: 'in chicago i stayed with relations of my wife's, who lived on the north side, or the east side, or the northeast side, or the lord knows where, and when i accepted an invitation to dinner in a hotel in the centre of the city, i expected that a guide would be sent me. i was a stranger in a strange city; a carriage was not easily to be obtained in the neighborhood where i was, and, in utter ignorance of the way i should take to reach the hotel, i waited for a guide until the hour for dinner had passed, and then sat down, as your friend s. p. d. said to you in california "_en famille_, with my family." that's all there was to it.'" mr. pemberton, commenting on this explanation says, "i can readily picture bret harte, as the unwelcome dinner hour approached, making excuses to himself for himself and conjuring up that hitherto unsuggested 'guide.'" that mr. pemberton was right as to the "guide" being an afterthought, is proved by the following account, for which the author of this book is indebted to mr. francis f. browne, at that time editor of the "lakeside monthly": "i remember quite clearly mr. harte's visit to my office,--a small,[ ] rather youthful looking but alert young man of pleasing manners and conversation. we talked of the literary situation, and he seemed impressed with the opportunity offered by chicago for a high-class literary enterprise. a day or two after his arrival here mr. harte was invited to a dinner at the house of a prominent citizen, to meet the gentlemen who were expected to become interested in the magazine project with him. mr. harte accepted the invitation. there is no doubt that he intended going, for he was in my office the afternoon of the dinner, and left about five o'clock, saying he was going home to dress for the occasion. but he did not appear at the dinner; nor did he send any explanation whatever. there being then no telephones, no explanation was given until the next day, and it was then to the effect that he had supposed a carriage would be sent for him, and had waited for it until too late to start. a friend of the author tells me that he had previously asked mr. harte whether he should call for him and take him to the dinner; but harte assured him that this was not at all necessary, that he knew perfectly well how to find the place. the other members of the party, however, were on hand, and after waiting, with no little surprise, for the chief guest to appear, they proceeded to eat their dinner and disperse; but mr. harte and the project of a literary connection with him in chicago no longer interested them." it is evident that for some reason, unknown outside of his own family, bret harte could not or would not attend the dinner, and simply remained away. the result was thus stated by the author himself in a letter to a friend in california: "i presume you have heard through the public press how nearly i became editor and part owner of the 'lakeside,' and how the childishness and provincial character of a few of the principal citizens of chicago spoiled the project." bret harte, therefore, continued eastward, leaving chicago on february , "stopping over" a few days in syracuse, and reaching new york on february . his stories and poems--especially the _heathen chinee_--had lifted him to such a pinnacle of renown that his progress from the pacific to the atlantic was detailed by the newspapers with almost as much particularity as were the movements of admiral dewey upon his return to the united states after the capture of manilla. the commotion thus caused extended even to england, and a london paper spoke humorously, but kindly, of the "bret harte circular," which recorded the daily events of the author's life. "the fame of bret harte," remarked the "new york tribune," as the railroad bore him toward that city, "has so brilliantly shot to the zenith as to render any comments on his poems a superfluous task. the verdict of the popular mind has only anticipated the voice of sound criticism." in new york mr. harte and his family went immediately to the house of his sister, mrs. f. f. knaufft, at number fifth avenue; and with her they spent the greater part of the next two years. three days after their arrival in new york the whole family went to boston, mr. harte being engaged to dine with the famous saturday club, and being desirous of seeing his publishers. he arrived in boston february , his coming having duly been announced by telegrams published in all the papers. upon the morning of his arrival the "boston advertiser" had the following pleasant notice of the event. "he will have a hearty welcome from many warm friends to whom his face is yet strange; and after a journey across the continent, in which his modesty must have been tried almost as severely as his endurance by the praises showered upon him, we hope that he will find boston so pleasant, even in the soberest dress which she wears during the year, that he may tarry long among us." in boston, or rather at cambridge, just across charles river, bret harte was to be the guest of mr. howells, then the assistant editor of the "atlantic monthly," james russell lowell being the editor-in-chief. mr. howells' account[ ] of this visit is so interesting, and throws so much light upon bret harte's character, that it is impossible to refrain from quoting it here:-- "when the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for boston, while harte was still in san francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage fell, as if he perhaps had committed himself in too great an enterprise. who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this dear son of memory, great heir of fame, his guest, especially when he heard that in chicago harte failed of attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in san francisco? whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of cambridge afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the express to get him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest. "however it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the most winning in the world. the drive out from boston was not too long for getting on terms of personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two boys intensely interested in the novelties of a new england city and suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park and lawn. they found everything so fine, so refined, after the gigantic coarseness of california, where the natural forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with them. their host heard them with misgiving for the world of romance which harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the east, but a lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must always have felt california to be. it is different now, when people are every day being born in california, and must begin to feel it home from the first breath, but it is notable that none of the californians of that great early day have gone back to live amidst the scenes which inspired and prospered them. "before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked himself to his guest at his trepidations, and harte with burlesque magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less formidable than he had loomed afar. he accepted with joy the theory of passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as delightfully as it went on. from first to last cambridge amused him as much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. it has already been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him, he said, 'why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two-volumer,' and no doubt the pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild california he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented. "cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. pretty presences in the tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. the chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. "it cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that harte was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his clothes, and then into the carriage, where a good deal of final buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. he was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gayety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned. "of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. there was never a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. it was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another's word which goes far to establish for a man the character of born humorist. "it must be said of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid him, he took them modestly, and never by word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. it was fine to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that 'broke up the society upon the stanislaus.'" of his personal appearance at this time mr. howells says: "he was then, as always, a child of extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating forward thrust of the under-lip, its fine eyes and good forehead, then thickly covered with black hair which grew early white, while his mustache remained dark, the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dyeing." it can easily be imagined, although mr. howells does not say so, that the atmosphere of cambridge was far from being congenial to bret harte. university towns are notorious for taking narrow, academic views of life; and in cambridge, at least during the period in question, the college circle was complicated by some remnants of colonial aristocracy that looked with suspicion upon any person or idea originating outside of england--old or new. bret harte, as may be imagined, was not awed by his new and highly respectable surroundings. "it was a little fearsome," writes mr. howells, "to hear him frankly owning to lowell his dislike for something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'the cathedral.' but lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of things that harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink as he runs down a brook of laughter in the air. that, bret harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and lowell smoked, well content with the phrase. yet they were not men to get on well together, lowell having limitations in directions where harte had none. afterward, in london, they did not meet often or willingly." bret harte was taken to see emerson at concord, but probably without much profit on either side, though with some entertainment for the younger man. "emerson's smoking," mr. howells relates, "amused bret harte as a jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how emerson proposed having a 'wet night' with him, over a glass of sherry, and urged the wine upon his young friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar." "longfellow, alone," mr. howells adds, "escaped the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence. that gentle and exquisitely modest dignity of longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had that sense of longfellow's beautiful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness." bret harte and longfellow met at an evening party in cambridge, and walked home together afterward; and when longfellow died, in , bret harte wrote down at some length his impressions of the poet.[ ] it had been a characteristic new england day in early spring, with rain followed by snow, and finally clearing off cold and still. "i like to recall him at that moment, as he stood in the sharp moonlight of the snow-covered road; a dark mantle-like cloak hiding his evening dress, and a slouched felt hat covering his full silver-like locks. the conventional gibus or chimney-pot would have been as intolerable on that wonderful brow as it would be on a greek statue, and i was thankful there was nothing to interrupt the artistic harmony of the most impressive vignette i ever beheld.... i think i was at first moved by his voice. it was a very deep baritone without a trace of harshness, but veiled and reserved as if he never parted entirely from it, and with the abstraction of a soliloquy even in his most earnest moments. it was not melancholy, yet it suggested one of his own fancies as it fell from his silver-fringed lips 'like the water's flow under december's snow.' yet no one had a quicker appreciation of humour, and his wonderful skill as a _raconteur_, and his opulence of memory, justified the saying of his friends that 'no one ever heard him tell an old story or repeat a new one.'... speaking of the spiritual suggestions in material things, i remember saying that i thought there must first be some actual resemblance, which unimaginative people must see before the poet could successfully use them. i instanced the case of his own description of a camel as being 'weary' and 'baring his teeth,' and added that i had seen them throw such infinite weariness into that action after a day's journey as to set spectators yawning. he seemed surprised, so much so that i asked him if he had seen many--fully believing he had travelled in the desert. he replied simply, 'no,' that he had 'only seen one once in the _jardin des plantes_.' yet in that brief moment he had noticed a distinctive fact, which the larger experience of others fully corroborated." mr. pemberton also contributes this interesting reminiscence: "with his intimate friends bret harte ever delighted to talk enthusiastically of longfellow, and would declare that his poems had greatly influenced his thoughts and life. hiawatha he declared to be 'not only a wonderful poem, but a marvellously true descriptive narrative of indian life and lore.' i think he knew it all by heart." bret harte and his family stayed a week with mr. howells, and one event was the saturday club dinner which mr. howells has described. "harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. the truth is, there was nothing but careless stories, carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be." one of the guests, unused to the society of literary men, mr. howells says, had looked forward with some awe to the occasion, and bret harte was amused at the result. "'look at him!' he said from time to time. '_this is the dream of his life_'; and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion, and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal's mind." the "commensal," as appears from a subsequent essay by mr. howells, was mark twain, who, like bret harte, had recently arrived from the west. somehow, the account of this dinner as given by mr. howells leaves an unpleasant impression. the atmosphere of boston was hardly more congenial to bret harte than that of cambridge. boston was almost as provincial as san francisco, though in a different way. the leaders of society were men and women who had grown up with the bourgeois traditions of a rich, isolated commercial and colonial town; and they had the same feeling of horror for a man from the west that they had for a methodist. the best part of boston was the serious, well-educated, conscientious element, typified by the garrison family; but this element was much less conspicuous in than it had been earlier. the feeling for art and literature, also, was neither so widespread nor so deep as it had been in the thirty-five years preceding the civil war. moreover, the peculiar faults of the boston man, his worship of respectability, his self-satisfied narrowness, his want of charity and sympathy,--these were the very faults that especially jarred upon bret harte, and it is no wonder that the man from boston makes a poor appearance in his stories. "it was a certain boston lawyer, replete with principle, honesty, self-discipline, statistics, authorities, and a perfect consciousness of possessing all these virtues, and a full recognition of their market values. i think he tolerated me as a kind of foreigner, gently waiving all argument on any topic, frequently distrusting my facts, generally my deductions, and always my ideas. in conversation he always appeared to descend only halfway down a long moral and intellectual staircase, and always delivered his conclusions over the balusters."[ ] and yet, with characteristic fairness, bret harte does not fail to portray the good qualities of the boston man. the reader will remember the sense of honor, the courage and energy, and even--under peculiar circumstances--the capacity to receive new ideas, shown by john hale, the boston man who figures in _snow-bound at eagle's_, and who was of the same type as the lawyer just described. henry hart and his family spent a year in boston when bret harte was about the age of four, but, contrary to the general impression, bret harte never lived there afterward, although he once spent a few weeks in the city as the guest of the publisher, mr. j. r. osgood, then living on pinckney street, in the old west end. a small section of the north side of pinckney street forms the northern end of louisburg square; and this square, as it happens, is the only place in boston which bret harte depicts. here lived mr. adams rightbody, as appears from the brief but unmistakable description of the place in _the great deadwood mystery_. a telegram to mr. rightbody had been sent at night from tuolumne county, california; and its progress and delivery are thus related: "the message lagged a little at san francisco, laid over half an hour at chicago, and fought longitude the whole way, so that it was past midnight when the 'all-night' operator took it from the wires at boston. but it was freighted with a mandate from the san francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark, snow-bound streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered, rayless houses to a certain formal square, ghostly with snow-covered statues. here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob that, somewhere within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a stranger was waiting without--as he ought." that bret harte made no mistake in selecting louisburg square as the residence of that intense bostonian, mr. rightbody, will be seen from mr. lindsay swift's description in his "literary landmarks of boston." "this retired spot is the quintessence of the older boston. without positive beauty, its dignity and repose save it from any suggestion of ugliness. here once bubbled up, it is fondly believed, in the centre of the iron-railed enclosure, that spring of water with which first settler william blackstone helped to coax winthrop and his followers over the river from charlestown. there is no monument to blackstone, here or anywhere, but in this significant spot stand two statues, one to columbus and one to aristides the just, both of italian make, and presented to the city by a greek merchant of boston." after the week's stay in cambridge, with, of course, frequent excursions to boston, bret harte and his family returned to new york. the proposals made to him by publishing houses in that city were, mr. howells reports, "either mortifyingly mean or insultingly vague"; and a few days later bret harte accepted the offer of james r. osgood and company, then publishers of "the atlantic," to pay him ten thousand dollars during the ensuing year for whatever he might write in the twelve months, be it much or little. this offer, a munificent one for the time, was made despite the astonishing fact that of the first volume of bret harte's stories, issued by the same publishers six months before, only thirty-five hundred copies had then been sold. the arrangement did not, of course, require mr. harte's residence in boston, and for the next two winters he remained with his sister in new york, spending the first summer at newport. it has often been stated that the rather indefinite contract which the publishers made with bret harte turned out badly for them, and that he wrote but a single story, as it is sometimes put, during the whole year. but the slightest investigation will show that these statements do our author great injustice. the year of the contract began with july, , and ended with june, ; and the two volumes of the "atlantic" covering that period, no. and no. , contain the following stories by bret harte:-- _the poet of sierra flat, princess bob and her friends, the romance of madroño hollow, how santa claus came to simpson's bar_; and the following poems: _a greyport legend, a newport romance, concepcion de arguello, grandmother tenterden, the idyl of battle hollow_. surely, this was giving full measure, and it represents a year of very hard work, unless indeed it was partly done in california. one of the stories, _how santa clans came to simpson's bar_, is, as every reader of bret harte will admit, among the best of his tales, inferior only to _tennessee's partner_, _the luck_, and _the outcasts_. it is noticeable that all these "atlantic monthly" stories deal with california; and an amusing illustration of bret harte's literary habits may be gathered from the fact that in every case his story brings up the rear of the magazine, although it would naturally have been given the place of honor. evidently the manuscript was received by the printers at the last possible moment. one of the poems, the _newport romance_, seems to lack those patient, finishing touches which it was his custom to bestow. for the next seven years of bret harte's life there is not much to record. during the greater part of the time new york was his winter home. from his summer at newport resulted the poems already mentioned, _a greyport legend_ and _a newport romance_. hence also a scene or two in _mrs. skaggs's husbands_, published in . but the poems deal with the past, and neither in them nor in any story did the author attempt to describe that luxurious, exotic life, grafted upon the atlantic coast, over which other romancers have fondly lingered. two or three summers were spent by bret harte and his family in morristown, new jersey. here he wrote _thankful blossom_, a pretty story of revolutionary times, describing events which occurred at the very spot where he was living, but lacking the strength and originality of his california tales. "thankful blossom" was not an imaginary name, but the real name of one of his mother's ancestors, a member of the truesdale family; and it should be mentioned that before writing this story bret harte, with characteristic thoroughness, made a careful study of the place where washington had his headquarters at morristown, and of the surrounding country. one other summer the harte family spent at new london, in connecticut, and still another at cohasset, a seashore town about twenty miles south of boston. here he became the neighbor and friend of the actors, lawrence barrett and stuart robson, for the latter of whom he wrote the play called _two men of sandy bar_. this was produced in september, , at the union square theatre in new york, but, although not a failure, it did not attain permanent success. the principal characters were sandy morton, played by charles r. thorne, and colonel starbottle, taken by stuart robson. john oakhurst, the yankee schoolmistress (from _the idyl of red gulch_), a chinaman, an australian convict, and other figures taken from bret harte's stories, also appeared in the piece. the part of hop sing, the chinaman, was played by mr. c. t. parsloe, and with so much success that afterward, in collaboration with mark twain, bret harte wrote a melodrama for mr. parsloe called _ah sin_; but this, too, failed to keep the boards for long. mr. pemberton speaks of another play in respect to which bret harte sought the advice of dion boucicault; but this appears never to have been finished. it was a cause of annoyance and disgust to bret harte after he had left this country, that a version of _m'liss_ converting that beautiful story into a vulgar "song and dance" entertainment was produced on the stage and in its way became a great success. bret harte was unable to prevent these performances in the united states, but he did succeed, by means of a suit, threatened if not actually begun, in preventing their repetition in england. a very inferior theatrical version of _gabriel conroy_, also, was brought out in new york without the author's consent, and much against his will. bret harte had a lifelong desire to write a notable play, and made many attempts in that direction. one of them succeeded. with the help of his friend and biographer, mr. pemberton, he dramatized his story, _the judgment of bolinas plain_; and the result, a melodrama in three acts, called _sue_, was produced in new york in , and was well received both by the critics and the audience. afterward the play was successfully performed on a tour of the united states; and in it was brought out in london, and was equally successful there. the heroine's part was taken by miss annie russell, of whom mr. pemberton gracefully says, "how much the writers owed to her charming personality and her deft handling of a difficult part they freely and gratefully acknowledged." but even this play has not become a classic. of his experience as a fellow-worker with bret harte, mr. pemberton gives this interesting account. "infinite painstaking, i soon learned, was the essence of his system. of altering and re-altering he was never tired, and though it was sometimes a little disappointing to find that what we had considered as finished over-night, had, at his desire, to be reconsidered in the morning, the humorous way in which he would point out how serious situations might, by a twist of the pen, or by incompetent acting, create derisive laughter, compensated for double or even treble work. no one realized more keenly than he did that to most things there is a comic as well as a serious side, and it seemed to make him vastly happy to put his finger on his own vulnerable spots." mr. pemberton speaks of several other plays written by bret harte and himself, and of one written by bret harte alone for mr. j. l. toole. but none of these was ever acted. it is needless to say that bret harte loved the theatre and had a keen appreciation of good acting. in a letter to mr. pemberton, he spoke of john hare's "wonderful portrayal of the duke of st. olpherts in 'the notorious mrs. ebbsmith.' he is gallantly attempting to relieve mrs. thorpe of the tray she is carrying, but of course lacks the quickness, the alertness, and even the actual energy to do it, and so follows her with delightful simulation of assistance all over the stage, while she carries it herself, he pursuing the form and ignoring the performance. it is a wonderful study." bret harte had not been long in the east, probably he had not been there a month, before he began to feel the pressure of those money difficulties from which neither he, nor his father before him, was ever free. doubtless he would often have been at a loss for ready money, even if he had possessed the wealth of all the indies. he left debts in california, and very soon had acquired others in new york and boston. mr. noah brooks, who was intimate with bret harte in new york as well as in san francisco, wrote, after his death: "i had not been long in the city before i found that harte had already incurred many debts, chiefly for money borrowed. when i said to bowles[ ] that i was anxious on harte's account that a scandal should not come from this condition of things, bowles said, with his good-natured cynicism, 'well, it does seem to me that there ought to be enough rich men in new york to keep harte a-going.' "one rich man, a banker and broker, with an ambition to be considered a patron of the arts and literature, made much of the new literary lion, and from him harte obtained a considerable sum, $ perhaps, in small amounts varying from $ to $ at a time. one new year's day harte, in as much wrath as he was ever capable of showing, spread before me a note from our friend dives in which the writer, who, by the way, was not reckoned a generous giver, reminded harte that this was the season of the year when business men endeavored to enter a new era with a clean page in the ledger; and, in order to enable his friend h. to do that, he took the liberty of returning to him sundry i. o. u.'s which his friend h. had given him from time to time. 'damn his impudence!' exclaimed the angry artist. "'what are you going to do about it?' i asked, with some amusement. 'going to do about it!' he answered with much emphasis on the first word. 'going! i have made a new note for the full amount of these and have sent it to him with an intimation that i never allow pecuniary matters to trespass on the sacred domain of friendship.' poor dives was denied the satisfaction of giving away a bad debt." "once, while we were waiting on broadway for a stage to take him down town, he said, as the lumbering vehicle hove in sight, 'lend me a quarter; i haven't money enough to pay my stage fare.' two or three weeks later, when i had forgotten the incident, we stood in the same place waiting for the same stage, and harte, putting a quarter of a dollar in my hand, said: 'i owe you a quarter and there it is. you hear men say that i never pay my debts, but [this with a chuckle] you can deny the slander.' while he lived in morristown, n. j., it was said that he pocketed postage stamps sent to him for his autographs, and these applications were so numerous that with them he paid his butcher's bill. a bright lady to whom this story was told declared that the tale had been denied, 'on the authority of the butcher.' nobody laughed more heartily at this sally than harte did when it came to his ears." "never," says mr. howells, to the same effect, "was any man less a _poseur_. he made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself." and then mr. howells relates the following incident: "in the course of events which in his case were so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where harte dined, and in the ante-room at the lecture-hall, and on the platform where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. he was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, 'well, harte, this is the old literary tradition: this is the fleet business over again,' he joyously smote his thigh and cried out: 'yes; that's it; we can see it all now,--the fleet prison with goldsmith, johnson, and all the rest of the old masters in a bunch!'" it is highly probable that in his own mind, though perhaps half unconsciously, bret harte excused himself by the "old literary tradition" for his remissness in paying his debts. and for such a feeling on his part there would be, the present writer makes bold to say, some justification. it is a crude method of collecting from the community a small part of the compensation due to the author for the pleasure which he has conferred upon the world in general. the method, it must be admitted, is imperfectly just. the particular butcher or grocer to whom a particular poet is indebted may have a positive distaste for polite literature, and might naturally object to paying for books which other people read. nevertheless there is an element of wild justice in the attitude of the poet. the world owes him a living, and if the world does not pay its debt, why, then, the debt may fairly be levied upon the world in such manner as is possible. this at least is to be said: the extravagance or improvidence of a man like bret harte stands upon a very different footing from that of an ordinary person. we should be ashamed not to show some consideration, even in money matters, for the soldier who has served his country in time of war; and the romancer who has contributed to the entertainment of the race is entitled to a similar indulgence. soon after bret harte's arrival in the east his friends urged him to give public lectures on the subject of life in california. the project was extremely distasteful to him, for he had an inborn horror of notoriety,--even of publicity; and this feeling, it may be added, is fully shared by the other members of his family. but his money difficulties were so great, and the prospect held out to him was so flattering that he finally consented. he prepared two lectures; the first, entitled _the argonauts_, is now printed, with some changes, as the introduction to the second volume of his collected works. this lecture was delivered at albany, new york, on december , , at tremont temple in boston on the thirteenth of the same month, on december at steinway hall in new york, and at washington on january , . from washington the lecturer wrote to his wife: "the audience was almost as quick and responsive as the boston folk, and the committee-men, to my great delight, told me they made money by me.... i called on charlton at the british minister's, and had some talk with sir edward thornton, which i have no doubt will materially affect the foreign policy of england. if i have said anything to promote a better feeling between the two countries i am willing he should get the credit of it. i took a carriage and went alone to the capitol of my country. i had expected to be disappointed, but not agreeably. it is really a noble building,--worthy of the republic,--vast, magnificent, sometimes a little weak in detail, but in intent always high-toned, grand and large principled."[ ] the same lecture was delivered at pittsburgh, pennsylvania, on january , , and at ottawa and montreal in march of that year. from montreal he wrote to mrs. harte as follows:[ ]-- "in ottawa i lectured twice, but the whole thing was a pecuniary failure. there was scarcely enough money to pay expenses, and of course nothing to pay me with. ---- has no money of his own, and although he is blamable for not thoroughly examining the ground before bringing me to ottawa, he was evidently so completely disappointed and miserable that i could not find it in my heart to upbraid him. so i simply told him that unless the montreal receipts were sufficient to pay me for my lecture there, and a reasonable part of the money due me from ottawa, i should throw the whole thing up. to-night will in all probability settle the question. of course there are those who tell me privately that he is no manager, but i really do not see but that he has done all that he could, and that his only fault is in his sanguine and hopeful nature. "i did not want to write of this disappointment to you so long as there was some prospect of better things. you can imagine, however, how i feel at this cruel loss of time and money--to say nothing of my health, which is still so poor. i had almost recovered from my cold, but in lecturing at ottawa at the skating rink, a hideous, dismal damp barn, the only available place in town, i caught a fresh cold and have been coughing badly ever since. and you can well imagine that my business annoyances do not add greatly to my sleep or appetite. "apart from this, the people of ottawa have received me very kindly. they have vied with each other in social attention, and if i had been like john gilpin, 'on pleasure bent,' they would have made my visit a success. the governor-general of canada invited me to stay with him at his seat, rideau hall, and i spent sunday and monday there. sir john and lady macdonald were also most polite and courteous. "i shall telegraph you to-morrow if i intend to return at once. don't let this worry you, but kiss the children for me and hope for the best. i would send you some money but _there isn't any to send_, and maybe i shall only bring back myself.--your affectionate "frank. "p. s.-- th. "dear nan,--i did not send this yesterday, waiting to find the result of last night's lecture. it was a _fair_ house and ---- this morning paid me one hundred and fifty dollars, of which i send you the greater part. i lecture again to-night, with fair prospects, and he is to pay something on account of the ottawa engagement besides the fee for that night. i will write again from ogdensburg.--always yours, "frank." this lecture trip in the spring of was followed in the autumn by a similar trip in the west, with lectures at st. louis, topeka, atchison, lawrence, and kansas city. from st. louis he wrote to his wife as follows:-- "my dear anna,--as my engagement is not until the st at topeka, kansas, i lie over here until to-morrow morning, in preference to spending the extra day in kansas. i've accepted the invitation of mr. hodges, one of the managers of the lecture course, to stay at his house. he is a good fellow, with the usual american small family and experimental housekeeping, and the quiet and change from the hotel are very refreshing to me. they let me stay in my own room--which by the way is hung with the chintz of our th street house--and don't bother me with company. so i was very good to-day and went to church. there was fine singing. the contralto sang your best sentences from the _te deum_, 'we believe that thou shalt come,' &c., &c., to the same minor chant that i used to admire. "the style of criticism that my lecture--or rather myself as a lecturer--has received, of which i send you a specimen, culminated this morning in an editorial in the 'republic,' which i shall send you, but have not with me at present. i certainly never expected to be mainly criticised for being _what i am not_, a handsome fop; but this assertion is at the bottom of all the criticism. they may be right--i dare say they are--in asserting that i am no orator, have no special faculty for speaking, no fire, no dramatic earnestness or expression, but when they intimate that i am running on my good looks--save the mark! i confess i get hopelessly furious. you will be amused to hear that my gold studs have again become 'diamonds,' my worn-out shirts 'faultless linen,' my haggard face that of a 'spanish-looking exquisite,' my habitual quiet and 'used-up' way, 'gentle and eloquent languor.' but you will be a little astonished to know that the hall i spoke in was worse than springfield, and _notoriously_ so--that the people seemed genuinely pleased, that the lecture inaugurated the 'star' course very handsomely, and that it was the first of the first series of lectures ever delivered in st. louis." in a letter dated lawrence, kansas, october , , he relates an interesting experience. "my dear anna,--i left topeka--which sounds like a name franky might have invented--early yesterday morning, but did not reach atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o'clock at night--an hour before the lecture. the engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o'clock fifteen miles from atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight. but i got a saddle-horse--there was no vehicle to be had--and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back i gave my valise to a little yellow boy--who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure--with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards atchison. i got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after. "i make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted man who glared at that audience over his desk that night, and d----d them inwardly in his heart. and yet it was a good audience, thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. i was very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and i had been told that atchison was a rough place--energetic but coarse. i think i wrote you from st. louis that i had found there were only three actual engagements in kansas, and that my list which gave kansas city twice was a mistake. so i decided to take atchison. i made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for yourself, nan, to buy 'minxes' with, if you want, for it is over and above the amount eliza and i footed up on my lecture list. i shall send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are settled. "everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night i have one more to close kansas, and then i go on to st. joseph. i've been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which these western people seem to have for me. they seem to have read everything i have written--and appear to appreciate the best. think of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue shirt repeating to me _conception de arguello_! their strange good taste and refinement under that rough exterior--even their tact--are wonderful to me. they are 'kentucks' and 'dick bullens' with twice the refinement and tenderness of their california brethren.... "i've seen but one [woman] that interested me--an old negro wench. she was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but her laugh was so sweet and unctuous and musical--so full of breadth and goodness that i went outside and talked to her while she was scrubbing the stones. she laughed as a canary bird sings--because she couldn't help it. it did me a world of good, for it was before the lecture, at twilight, when i am very blue and low-tuned. she had been a slave. "i expected to have heard from you here. i've nothing from you or eliza since last friday, when i got yours of the th. i shall direct this to eliza's care, as i do not even know where you are. your affectionate "frank."[ ] the same lecture was delivered in london, england, in january, , and in june, . bret harte's only other lecture had for its subject _american humor_, and was delivered in chicago on october , , and in new york on january , .[ ] the money return from these lectures was slight, and the fatigue and exposure of the long journeys in the west had, his relatives think, a permanently bad effect upon bret harte's health. in the autumn of we find him at lenox, in the berkshire hills of western massachusetts. lenox has its place in literature, for hawthorne spent a year there, and in adjoining towns once lived o. w. holmes, catherine sedgwick, herman melville, and g. p. r. james. _gabriel conroy_, bret harte's only novel, and on the whole, it must be admitted, a failure, though containing many exquisite passages, was published in "scribner's magazine" in . the poems and stories which bret harte wrote during his seven years' residence in the eastern part of the united states did not deal with the human life of that time and place. they either concerned the past, like _thankful blossom_ and the newport poems, or they harked back to california, like _gabriel conroy_ and the stories published in the "atlantic." the only exceptions are the short and pathetic tale called _the office-seeker_, and the opening chapter of that powerful story, _the argonauts of north liberty_. north liberty is a small town in connecticut, and the scene is quickly transferred from there to california; but joan, the connecticut woman, remains the chief figure in the story. it is seldom that bret harte fails to show some sympathy with the men and women whom he describes, or at least some relenting consciousness that they could not help being what they were. but it is otherwise with joan. she and her surroundings had a fascination for bret harte that was almost morbid. the man or woman whom we hate becomes an object of interest to us nearly as much as the person whom we love. an acute critic declares that thackeray's wonderful insight into the characters and feelings of servants is due to the fact that he had almost a horror of them, and was abnormally sensitive to their criticisms,--the more felt for being unspoken. so joan represents what bret harte hated more than anything else in the world, namely, a narrow, censorious, hypocritical, cold-blooded puritanism. her character is not that of a typical new england woman; its counterpart would much more easily be found among the men; but it is a perfectly consistent character, most accurately worked out. joan combines a prim, provincial, horsehair-sofa respectability with a lawless and sensual nature,--an odd combination, and yet not an impossible one. she might, perhaps, be called the female of that species which hawthorne immortalized under the name of judge pyncheon. joan is a puzzle to the reader, but so she was to those who knew her. was she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world, or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable motives? her intimates did not know. one of the finest strokes in the story is the dawning of suspicion upon the mind of her second husband. "for with all his deep affection for his wife, richard demorest unconsciously feared her. the strong man whose dominance over men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to feel an indefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he loved. he had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental lapse of some bewildering word." new england people at their best did not attract bret harte. that miltonic conception of the universe upon which new england was built seemed to him simply ridiculous, and he did not appreciate the strength of character in which it resulted. moreover, the crudity of new england offended his æsthetic taste as much as its theology offended his reason and his charity. north liberty on a cold, stormy sunday night in march is described with that _gusto_, with that minuteness of detail which could be shown only by one who loved it or by one who hated it. and yet it would be unjust to say that bret harte had no conception of the better type of new england women. the schoolmistress in _the idyl of red gulch_, one of his earliest and best stories, is as pure and noble a maiden, and as characteristic of the soil, as hilda herself. the reader will remember the description of miss mary as she appeared playing with her pupils in the woods. "the color came faintly into her pale cheeks.... felinely fastidious and entrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collars and cuffs, she forgot all else, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until romping, laughing and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came ..." upon sandy, the unheroic hero of the tale. in the culminating scene of this story, the interview between miss mary and the mother of sandy's illegitimate boy, when the teacher consents to take the child with her to her home in the east, although she is still under the shock of the discovery that sandy is the boy's father,--in this scene the schoolmistress exhibits true new england restraint, and a beautiful absence of heroics. it was just at sunset. "the last red beam crept higher, suffused miss mary's eyes with something of its glory, nickered and faded and went out. the sun had set in red gulch. in the twilight and silence miss mary's voice sounded pleasantly, 'i will take the boy. send him to me to-night.'" one can hardly help speculating about bret harte's personal taste and preferences in regard to women. cressy and the rose of tuolumne were both blondes; and yet on the whole he certainly preferred brunettes. even his blue-eyed girls usually have black hair. the treasure of the redwoods disclosed from the recesses of her sunbonnet "a pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow." one associates a contralto voice with a brunette, and bret harte's heroines, so far as the subject is mentioned, have contralto voices. not one is spoken of as having a soprano voice. even the slight and blue-eyed tinka gallinger "sang in a youthful, rather nasal contralto." bret harte's wife had a contralto voice and was a good singer. as to eyes, he seems to have preferred them gray or brown, a "tender gray" and a "reddish brown." ailsa callender's hair was "dark with a burnished copper tint at its roots, and her eyes had the same burnished metallic lustre in their brown pupils." mrs. macglowrie was "a fair-faced woman with eyes the color of pale sherry." a small foot with an arched instep was a _sine qua non_ with bret harte, and he speaks particularly of the small, well-shod foot of the southwestern girl. he believed in breeding, and all his heroines were well-bred,--not well-bred in the conventional sense, but in the sense of coming from sound, courageous, self-respecting, self-improving stock. within these limits his range of heroines is exceedingly wide, including some that are often excluded from that category. he is rather partial to widows, for example, and always looks upon their innocent gayeties with an indulgent eye. can a woman be a widow and untidy in her dress, and still retain her preëminence as heroine? yes, bret harte's genius is equal even to that. "mrs. macglowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the shock of her heavy hair. for the widow had a certain indolent southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook-and-eye-less freedom of attire, which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. one sleeve-cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the vein of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really unconscious." [illustration: i thought you were that horse-thief from "lanty foster's mistake" denman fink, del.] red-haired women have been so popular in fiction during recent years that it was perhaps no great feat for bret harte in the _buckeye hollow inheritance_ to make a heroine out of a red-haired girl, and a bad-tempered one too; but what other romancer has ever dared to represent a young and lovely woman as "hard of hearing"! there can be no question that the youngest miss piper was not quite normal in this respect, although, for purposes of coquetry and sarcasm no doubt, she magnified the defect. in her memorable interview with the clever young grocery clerk (whom she afterward married) she begins by failing to hear distinctly the title of the book which he was reading when she entered the store; and we have this picture: "miss delaware, leaning sideways and curling her little fingers around her pink ear: 'did you say the first principles of geology or politeness? you know i am so deaf; but of course it couldn't be that.'" the one kind of woman that did not attract bret harte as a subject for literature was the conventional woman of the world. he could draw her fairly well, for we have amy forester in _a night on the divide_, jessie mayfield in _jeff briggs's love story_, grace nevil in _a mæcenas of the pacific slope_, mrs. ashwood in _a first family of tasajara_, and mrs. horncastle in _three partners_. but these women do not bear the stamp of bret harte's genius. his army and navy girls are better, because they are redeemed from commonplaceness by their patriotism. miss portfire in _the princess bob and her friends_, and julia cantire in _dick boyle's business card_, represent those american families, more numerous than might be supposed, in which it is almost an hereditary custom for the men to serve in the army or navy, and for the women to become the wives and mothers of soldiers and sailors. in such families patriotism is a constant inspiration, to a degree seldom felt except by those who represent their country at home or abroad. bret harte was patriotic, as many of his poems and stories attest, and his long residence in england did not lessen his americanism. "apostates" was his name for those american girls who marry titled foreigners, and he often speaks of the susceptibility of american women to considerations of rank and position. in _a rose of glenbogie_, after describing the male guests at a scotch country house, he continues: "there were the usual half-dozen smartly-frocked women who, far from being the females of the foregoing species, were quite indistinctive, with the single exception of an american wife, who was infinitely more scotch than her scotch husband." and in _the heir of the mchulishes_ the american consul is represented as being less chagrined by the bumptiousness of his male compatriots than by "the snobbishness and almost servile adaptability of the women. or was it possible that it was only a weakness of the sex which no republican nativity or education could eliminate?" chapter xv bret harte at crefeld the sums that bret harte received for his stories and lectures did not suffice to free him from debt, and he suffered much anxiety and distress from present difficulties, with no brighter prospects ahead. an additional misfortune was the failure of a new paper called "the capital," which had been started in washington by john j. piatt. there is an allusion to this in a letter written by bret harte to his wife from washington.[ ] "thank you, dear nan, for your kind, hopeful letter. i have been very sick, very much disappointed; but i'm better now, and am only waiting for some money to return. i should have, for the work that i have done, more than would help us out of our difficulties. but it doesn't come, and even the money i've expected from the 'capital' for my story is seized by its creditors. that hope and the expectations i had from the paper and piatt in the future amount to nothing. i have found that it is bankrupt. "can you wonder, nan, that i have kept this from you? you have so hard a time of it there, and i cannot bear to have you worried if there is the least hope of a change in my affairs as they look, day by day. piatt has been gone nearly a month, was expected to return every day, and only yesterday did i know positively of his inability to fulfil his promises. ---- came here three days ago, and in a very few moments i learned from him that i need expect nothing for the particular service i had done him. i've been vilified and abused in the papers for having received compensation for my services, when really and truly i have only received less than i should have got from any magazine or newspaper for my story. i sent you the fifty dollars by mr. d----, because i knew you would be in immediate need, and there is no telegraph transfer office on long island. it was the only fifty i have made since i've been here. "i am waiting to hear from osgood regarding an advance on that wretched story. he writes me he does not quite like it. i shall probably hear from him to-night. when the money comes i shall come with it. god bless you and keep you and the children safe for the sake of "frank." bret harte's friends, however, were aware of his situation, and they procured for him an appointment by president hayes as united states commercial agent at crefeld in prussia. the late charles a. dana was especially active in this behalf. bret harte, much as he dreaded the sojourn in a strange country, gladly accepted the appointment, and leaving his family for the present at sea cliff, long island, he sailed for england in june, , little thinking that he was never to return. crefeld is near the river rhine, about thirty miles north of cologne. its chief industry is the manufacture of silks and velvets, in respect to which it is the leading city in germany, and is surpassed by no other place in europe except lyons. this industry was introduced in crefeld by protestant refugees who fled thither from cologne in the seventeenth century in order to obtain the protection of the prince of orange. a small suburb of philadelphia was settled mainly by emigrants from crefeld, and bears the same name. the prussian crefeld is a clean, spacious place, with wide streets, substantial houses, and all the appearance of a dutch town. at this time it contained about seventy-five thousand inhabitants. bret harte arrived at crefeld on the morning of july , , after a sleepless journey of twelve hours from paris, and on the same day he wrote to his wife a very homesick letter. "i have audaciously travelled alone nearly four hundred miles through an utterly foreign country on one or two little french and german phrases, and a very small stock of assurance, and have delivered my letters to my predecessor, and shall take possession of the consulate to-morrow. mr. ----, the present incumbent, appears to me--i do not know how i shall modify my impression hereafter--as a very narrow, mean, ill-bred, and not over-bright puritanical german. it was my intention to appoint him my vice-consul--an act of courtesy suggested both by my own sense of right and mr. leonard's advice, but he does not seem to deserve it, and has even received my suggestion of it with the suspicion of a mean nature. but at present i fear i may have to do it, for i know no one else here. i am to all appearance utterly friendless; i have not received the first act of kindness or courtesy from any one, and i suppose this man sees it. i shall go to bavaria to-morrow to see the consul there, who held this place as one of his dependencies, and try to make matters straight."[ ] this letter shows that the craving for sympathy and companionship, which is associated with artistic natures, was intensely felt by bret harte, more so, perhaps, than would have been expected in a man of his self-reliant character. his despondent tone is almost child-like. the letter goes on: "it's been up-hill work ever since i left new york, but i shall try to see it through, please god! i don't allow myself to think over it at all, or i should go crazy. i shut my eyes to it, and in doing so perhaps i shut out what is often so pleasant to a traveller's first impressions; but thus far london has only seemed to me a sluggish nightmare through which i have waked, and paris a confused sort of hysterical experience. i had hoped for a little kindness and rest here.... at least, nan, be sure i've written now the worst; i think things must be better soon. i shall, please god, make some friends in good time, and will try and be patient. but i shall not think of sending for you until i see clearly that i can stay myself. if the worst comes to the worst i shall try to stand it for a year, and save enough to come home and begin anew there. but i could not stand it to see you break your heart here through disappointment, as i mayhap may do." the tone of this letter is so exaggerated that it might seem as if bret harte had been a little theatrical and insincere,--that he had endeavored to create an impression which was partly false. but such a conjecture would be erroneous, for under the same date, with the addition of the word "midnight," we find him writing a second letter to correct the effect of the first, as follows:-- "my dear nan,--i wrote and mailed you a letter this afternoon that i fear was rather disconsolate, so i sit down to-night to send another, which i hope will take a little of the blues out of the first. since i wrote i have had some further conversation with my predecessor, mr. ----, and i think i can manage matters with him. he has hauled in his horns considerably since i told him that the position i offered him--so far as the honor of it went--was better than the one he held. for the one thing pleasant about my office is that the dignity of it has been raised on my account. it was only a dependence--a consular agency--before it was offered to me.[ ] "i feel a little more hopeful, too, for i have been taken out to a 'fest'--or a festival--of one of the vintners, and one or two of the people were a little kind. i forced myself to go; these german festivals are distasteful to me, and i did not care to show my ignorance of their language quite so prominently, but i thought it was the proper thing for me to do. it was a very queer sight. about five hundred people were in an artificial garden beside an artificial lake, looking at artificial fireworks, and yet as thoroughly enjoying it as if they were children. of course there were beer and wine. here as in paris everybody drinks, and all the time, and nobody gets drunk. beer, beer, beer; and meals, meals, meals. everywhere the body is worshipped. beside them we are but unsubstantial spirits. i write this in my hotel, having had to pass through a mysterious gate and so into a side courtyard and up a pair of labyrinthine stairs, to my dim 'zimmer' or chamber. the whole scene, as i returned to-night, looked as it does on the stage,--the lantern over the iron gate, the inn strutting out into the street with a sidewalk not a foot wide. i know now from my own observation, both here and in paris and london, where the scene-painters at the theatres get their subjects. those impossible houses--those unreal silent streets all exist in europe." on one of those first, melancholy days at crefeld, the new consul, walking listlessly along the main street of the town, happened to throw a passing glance at the window of a bookseller's shop, and there he saw on the back of a neat little volume the familiar words "bret harte." it was a german translation of his stories, and it is easy to imagine how the sight refreshed and comforted the homesick exile. after that, he felt that to some extent, at least, he was living among friends. translations of bret harte's poems and stories had appeared before this in german magazines, and later his stories were reproduced in germany, in book form, as fast as they were published in england. in fact, his books have been printed in every language of europe, and translations of his stories have appeared in the "revue des deux mondes," in the "moscow gazette," and in periodicals of italy, spain, portugal, denmark and sweden. in a translation of six of bret harte's tales was published in the servian language, with an enthusiastic preface in german, by the translator, ivan b. popovitch. the impression that bret harte received from europe,--and it is the one that every uncontaminated american must receive,--may be gathered from a letter written by him to his younger son, then a small boy: "we drove out the other day through a lovely road, bordered with fine poplar trees, and more like a garden walk than a country road, to the rhine, which is but two miles and a half from this place. the road had been built by napoleon the first when he was victorious everywhere, and went straight on through everybody's property, and even over their dead bones. suddenly to the right we saw the ruins of an old castle, vine-clad and crumbling, exactly like a scene on the stage. it was all very wonderful. but papa thought, after all, he was glad his boys live in a country that is as yet quite _pure_, and _sweet_ and _good_; not in one where every field seems to cry out with the remembrance of bloodshed and wrong, and where so many people have lived and suffered, that to-night, under this clear moon, their very ghosts seemed to throng the road and dispute our right of way. be thankful, my dear boy, that you are an american. papa was never so fond of his country before, as in this land that has been so great, so powerful, and so very, very hard and wicked."[ ] bret harte, though disclaiming any knowledge of music, had a real appreciation of it, and wrote as follows to his wife who was a connoisseur: "i have been several times to the opera at dusseldorf, and i have been hesitating whether i should slowly prepare you for a great shock or tell you at once that musical germany is a humbug. my first operatic experience was 'tannhäuser.' i can see your superior smile, anna, at this; and i know how you will take my criticism of wagner, so i don't mind saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically hideous and stupidly monotonous performance i ever heard. i shall say nothing about the orchestral harmonies, for there wasn't anything going on of that kind, unless you call something that seemed like a boiler factory at work in the next street, and the wind whistling through the rigging of a channel steamer, harmony.... but what i wanted to say was that even my poor uneducated ear detected bad instrumentation and worse singing in the choruses. i confided this much to a friend, and he said very frankly that i was probably right, that the best musicians and choruses went to america.... "then i was awfully disappointed in 'faust,' or, as it is known here in the playbills, 'marguerite.' you know how i love that delicious idyl of gounod's, and i was in my seat that night long before the curtain went up. before the first act was over i felt like leaving, and yet i was glad i stayed. for although the chorus of villagers was frightful, and faust and mephistopheles spouted and declaimed blank verse at each other--whole pages of goethe, yet the acting was superb. i have never seen such a marguerite. but think of my coming to germany to hear opera badly sung, and magnificently acted!"[ ] having put the affairs of the consular office upon a proper footing, bret harte returned to england about the middle of august for a short vacation, which proved, however, to be a rather long one. his particular object was a visit to james anthony froude at his house in devonshire. bret harte had a great admiration for froude's writings; and when the two men met they formed a friendship which was severed only by death. from froude's home bret harte wrote to his wife as follows: "imagine, if you can, something between 'locksley hall,' and the high walled garden, where maud used to walk, and you have some idea of this graceful english home. i look from my windows down upon exquisite lawns and terraces, all sloping toward the sea wall, and then down upon the blue sea below.... i walk out in the long, high garden, past walls hanging with netted peaches and apricots, past terraces looking over the ruins of an old feudal castle, and i can scarcely believe i am not reading an english novel or that i am not myself a wandering ghost. to heighten the absurdity, when i return to my room i am confronted by the inscription on the door, 'lord devon' (for this is the property of the earl of devon, and i occupy his favourite room), and i seem to have died and to be resting under a gilded mausoleum that lies even more than the average tombstone does. froude is a connection of the earl's, and has hired the house for the summer. "but froude--dear old noble fellow--is splendid. i love him more than i ever did in america. he is great, broad, manly,--democratic in the best sense of the word, scorning all sycophancy and meanness, accepting all that is around him, yet more proud of his literary profession than of his kinship with these people whom he quietly controls. there are only a few literary men like him here, but they are kings. so far i've avoided seeing any company here; but froude and i walk and walk, and talk and talk. they let me do as i want, and i have not been well enough yet to do aught but lounge. the doctor is coming to see me to-day, and if i am no better i shall return in a day or two to london, and then to crefeld."[ ] bret harte's health seems at all times to have been easily upset, and he was particularly subject to colds and sore throats. this letter was written in august, but it was the first week in november before he was on his way back to crefeld. while in london he had arranged for a lecture tour in england during the next january ( ), and in that month a volume of his stories and poems was published in england with the following introduction by the author:-- "in offering this collection of sketches to the english public, the author is conscious of attaching an importance to them that may not be shared by the general reader, but which he, as an american writer on english soil, cannot fail to feel very sensibly. the collection is made by himself, the letter-press revised by his own hand, and he feels for the first time that these fugitive children of his brain are no longer friendless in a strange land, entrusted to the care of a foster-mother, however discreet, but are his own creations, for whose presentation to the public in this fashion he is alone responsible. three or four having been born upon english soil may claim the rights of citizenship, but the others he must leave to prove their identity with english literature on their own merits." the lecture on the argonauts, delivered the first time at the crystal palace, was very well received both by the hearers and the press; but financially it was a disappointment. bret harte was in england three weeks, lectured five times, and made only two hundred dollars over and above his expenses. a second lecture tour, however, carried out in march of the same year, was successful in every way. the audiences were enthusiastic, and the payment was liberal. it was during this visit to england that bret harte became involved in a characteristic tangle. he had received the compliment of being asked to respond for literature at the royal academy banquet in , and, with his constitutional unwillingness to give a point-blank refusal, had promised or half-promised to be present. meanwhile, he had returned to crefeld, and the prospect of speaking at the dinner loomed more and more horrific in his imagination, while the uncertainty in which he left the matter was a source of vexation in london. letters and telegrams from his friends remained unanswered, until finally, sir frederic leighton, the president of the academy, sent him a message, the reply to which was prepaid, saying, "in despair; cannot do without you. please telegraph at once if quite impossible." this at last drew from bret harte a telegram stating that the pressure of official business would render it impossible for him to leave crefeld. but the matter was not quite ended yet. in a day or two bret harte received a letter from froude, good-naturedly reminding him that a note as well as a telegram was due to sir frederic leighton. "the president of the royal academy," he wrote, "is a sacred person with the state and honors of a sovereign on these occasions." and after some further delay bret harte did write to sir frederic, and received in reply the following polite but possibly somewhat ironical note: "dear mr. bret harte,--it was most kind of you to write to me after your telegram. i fully understand the impossibility of your leaving your post, and sincerely regret my loss." a year later, however, in , bret harte answered the toast to literature at the royal academy dinner, and his brief speech on that occasion is included in the volume of lectures by him recently published.[ ] in october of this year, , bret harte wrote to washington stating that his health had suffered at crefeld, and requesting leave of absence for sixty days in order that he might follow the advice of his physician, and seek a more favorable climate. he also asked for a reply by telegraph; and in the same letter he made application for a better consular position, mentioning, as one reason for the exchange, that the business of the agency at crefeld had greatly increased during his tenure. his request for leave of absence was immediately granted, and in november he wrote to the state department acknowledging the receipt of its telegram and letter, but adding, "neither my affairs nor my health have enabled me yet to avail myself of the courtesy extended to me by the department. when i shall be able to do so, i shall, agreeably to your instructions, promptly inform you." he took this leave of absence in the following january and april. so far as can be judged from his communications to the state department, bret harte discharged the duties of the agency in a very business-like manner. for one thing, he reduced the time consumed in passing upon invoices of goods intended for exportation to the united states from twenty-four hours to three hours, greatly to the convenience of the crefeld manufacturers. the increase in the value of the silks and velvets shipped to this country during bret harte's term amounted to about two hundred thousand dollars quarterly; but perhaps the demands of trade had something to do with this. two of the reports to the state department from our agent at crefeld deserve to be rescued from their official oblivion. the first is dated, october , , and it accompanies a table showing the rainfall, snowfall, and thunderstorms occurring in the district from july , , to june , . the agent states:-- "the table is compiled from the observations of a competent local meteorologist. in mitigation of the fact that it has rained in this district in the ratio of every other day in the year, it may be stated that the general gloom has been diversified and monotony relieved by twenty-nine thunderstorms and one earthquake." the second communication, dated october , , is in response to an official inquiry. "in reference to the department circular dated august , , i have the honor to report that upon careful inquiry of the local authorities of this district i find that there is not now and never has been any avowed mormon emigration from crefeld, nor any emigration of people likely to become converts to that faith. its name as well as its tenets are unknown to the inhabitants, and only to officials through the department circular. "the artisans and peasants of this district--that class from which the mormon ranks are supposed to be recruited--are hard-working, thrifty, and home-loving. they are averse to emigration for any purpose, and as catholics to any new revealed religion. a prolific household with _one_ wife seems to exclude any polygamous instinct in the manly breast, while the woman, who works equally with her husband, evinces no desire to share any division of the affections or the profits. the like may be predicated of the manufacturers, with the added suggestion that a duty of per cent _ad valorem_ by engaging the fullest powers of the intellect in its evasion, leaves little room for the play of the lower passions. in these circumstances i did not find it necessary to report to the legation at berlin." the literary product of bret harte's two years at crefeld was _a legend of sammtstadt_, in which there is a pleasant blending of the romantic and the humorous, _the indiscretion of elsbeth_, the _views from a german spion_, and _unser karl_. _unser karl_, however, was not written, or at least was not published, until several years later. perhaps the most valuable impression which bret harte carried away from crefeld was that of the german children. children always interested him, and in prussia he found a new variety, which he described in the _views from a german spion_: "the picturesqueness of spanish and italian childhood has a faint suspicion of the pantomime and the conscious attitudinizing of the latin races. german children are not exuberant or volatile; they are serious,--a seriousness, however, not to be confounded with the grave reflectiveness of age, but only the abstract wonderment of childhood. these little creatures i meet upon the street--whether in quaint wooden shoes and short woollen petticoats, or neatly booted and furred, with school knapsacks jauntily borne on little square shoulders--all carry likewise in their round chubby faces their profound wonderment and astonishment at the big busy world into which they have so lately strayed. if i stop to speak with this little maid, who scarcely reaches to the top-boots of yonder cavalry officer, there is less of bashful self-consciousness in her sweet little face than of grave wonder at the foreign accent and strange ways of this new figure obtruded upon her limited horizon. she answers honestly, frankly, prettily, but gravely. there is a remote possibility that i might bite; and with this suspicion plainly indicated in her round blue eyes, she quietly slips her little red hand from mine, and moves solemnly away." the continental practice of making the dog a beast of burden shocked bret harte, as it must shock any lover of the animal. "perhaps it is because i have the barbarian's fondness for dogs, and for their lawless, gentle, loving uselessness that i rebel against this unnatural servitude. it seems as monstrous as if a child were put between the shafts and made to carry burdens; and i have come to regard those men and women, who in the weakest, perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying idle hands on the barrow behind, as i would unnatural parents.... i fancy the dog seems to feel the monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame for his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is _play_; and i have seen a little collie running along, barking and endeavoring to leap and gambol in the shafts, before a load that any one out of this locality would have thought the direst cruelty. nor do the older or more powerful dogs seem to become accustomed to it." and then comes an example of that extraordinary keenness of observation with which bret harte was gifted:--"i have said that the dog was generally sincere in his efforts. i recall but one instance to the contrary. i remember a young collie who first attracted my attention by his persistent barking. whether he did this, as the plough-boy whistled, 'for want of thought,' or whether it was a running protest against his occupation, i could not determine, until one day i noticed that, in barking, he slightly threw up his neck and shoulders, and that the two-wheeled barrow-like vehicle behind him, having its weight evenly poised on the wheels by the trucks in the hands of its driver, enabled him by this movement to cunningly throw the centre of gravity and the greater weight on the man,--a fact which the less sagacious brute never discerned.... i cannot help thinking that the people who have lost this gentle, sympathetic, characteristic figure from their domestic life and surroundings have not acquired an equal gain through his harsh labors." of his consular experiences at crefeld the following is the only one which found its way into literature: "the consul's chief duty was to uphold the flag of his own country by the examination and certification of divers invoices sent to his office by the manufacturers. but, oddly enough, these messengers were chiefly women,--not clerks, but ordinary household servants, and on busy days the consulate might have been mistaken for a female registry office, so filled and possessed it was by waiting mädchen. here it was that gretchen, liebchen, and clarchen, in the cleanest of gowns, and stoutly but smartly shod, brought their invoices in a piece of clean paper, or folded in a blue handkerchief, and laid them, with fingers more or less worn and stubby from hard service, before the consul for his signature. once, in the case of a very young mädchen, that signature was blotted by the sweep of a flaxen braid upon it as the child turned to go; but generally there was a grave, serious business instinct and sense of responsibility in these girls of ordinary peasant origin, which, equally with their sisters of france, were unknown to the english or american woman of any class." bret harte remained nearly two years at crefeld, but his wife did not join him there, and, so far as the world knows, they never met again. in may, , he was transferred to the much more lucrative and more desirable consulship at glasgow. it was one of the last cases in which government bestowed public office as a reward for literary excellence,--a custom so hallowed by age and association that every lover of literature will look back upon it with fond regret. chapter xvi bret harte at glasgow after a month in london, bret harte took possession of the consulate at glasgow in july, , and remained there five years. his annual salary was three thousand dollars. in september he wrote to a friend: "as i am trying to get up a good reputation here, i stay at my post pretty regularly, occasionally making a cheap excursion. this is a country for them. the other day i went to staffa. it was really the only 'sight' in europe that quite filled all my expectations. but alas! that magnificent, cathedral-like cave was presently filled with a howling party of sandwich-eating tourists, splashing in the water and climbing up the rocks. one should only go there alone, or with some sympathetic spirit."[ ] how far the consul's good intentions were fulfilled it is difficult to say. london attracted bret harte as it attracts everybody of anglo-saxon descent. that vast and sombre metropolis may weary the body and vex the soul of the visitor, but, after all, it remains the headquarters of the english-speaking race, and the american, as well as the canadian or the australian, returns to it again and again with a vague longing, never satisfied, but never lost. another reason for the absenteeism of the consul was that he lectured now and again in different parts of england, and that he paid frequent visits to country houses. mr. pemberton quotes a letter from him which contains an amusing illustration of the english boy's sporting spirit:-- "my dear pemberton,--don't be alarmed if you should hear of my nearly having blown the top of my head off. last monday i had my face badly cut by the recoil of an overloaded gun. i do not know yet beneath these bandages whether i shall be permanently marked. at present i am invisible, and have tried to keep the accident a secret. when the surgeon was stitching me together, the son of the house, a boy of twelve, came timidly to the door of my room. 'tell mr. bret harte it's all right,' he said, '_he killed the hare_.'" however, the reports made by the consul to the state department seem to indicate more attention to his duties than has commonly been credited to him. one of these communications, dated may , , gives a detailed account of the peculiar glasgow custom according to which the several flats or floors of tenement houses are owned by separate persons, usually the occupants, each owner of a floor being a joint proprietor, with the other floor-owners, of the land on which the building stands, of the roof, the staircase and the walls. another letter states, in answer to a question by the department, that there were at the time probably not more than six american citizens resident in glasgow, and that only one such was known to the consul or to his predecessor. this, in an english-speaking city of six hundred thousand people, seems extraordinary. the most interesting of bret harte's communications to the state department is perhaps the following:-- "on a recent visit to the island of iona, within this consular district, i found in the consecrated ground of the ruined cathedral the graves of nineteen american seamen who had perished in the wreck of the 'guy mannering' on the evening of the st of december, , on the north coast of the island. the place where they are interred is marked by two rows of low granite pediments at the head and feet of the dead, supporting, and connected by, an iron chain which encloses the whole space. this was done by the order and at the expense of the lord of the manor, the present duke of argyle. * * * * * "i venture to make these facts known to the department, satisfied that such recognition of the thoughtful courtesy of the duke of argyle as would seem most fit and appropriate to the department will be made, and that possibly a record of the names of the seamen will be placed upon some durable memorial erected upon the spot. * * * * * "in conclusion i beg to state that should the department deem any expenditure by the government for this purpose inexpedient, i am willing, with the permission of the department, to endeavor to procure by private subscription a sufficient fund for the outlay." it is a pleasure to record that these suggestions were adopted by the state department. a letter of acknowledgment and thanks was sent to the duke of argyle, and a shaft or obelisk with the names of the seamen inscribed thereon was erected by the united states government in the latter part of the year . bret harte's consular experiences with seamen recall those of hawthorne at liverpool, and he appears to have acted with an equal sense of humanity. in one case he insisted that two sailors who had been convicted of theft should nevertheless receive the three months' pay due them, without which they would have been penniless on their discharge from prison. he took the ground that conviction of this offence was not equivalent to desertion, and therefore that the wages were not forfeited. he adds: "the case did not appear to call for any leniency on the part of the government toward the ship-owners. the record of the ship's voyage was one of unseaworthiness, brutality and inefficiency." in another case, the consul supplied from his own pocket the wants of a shipwrecked american sailor, and procured for him a passage home, there being no government fund available for the purpose. a glimpse of his consular functions is given in the opening paragraph of _young robin gray_:-- "the good american bark skyscraper was swinging at her moorings in the clyde, off bannock, ready for sea. but that good american bark--although owned in baltimore--had not a plank of american timber in her hulk, nor a native american in her crew, and even her nautical 'goodness' had been called in serious question by divers of that crew during her voyage, and answered more or less inconclusively with belaying-pins, marlin-spikes, and ropes' ends at the hands of an irish-american captain and a dutch and danish mate. so much so, that the mysterious powers of the american consul at st. kentigern[ ] had been evoked to punish mutiny on the one hand, and battery and starvation on the other; both equally attested by manifestly false witness and subornation on each side. in the exercise of his functions, the consul had opened and shut some jail doors, and otherwise effected the usual sullen and deceitful compromise, and his flag was now flying, on a final visit, from the stern sheets of a smart boat alongside. it was with a feeling of relief at the end of the interview that he at last lifted his head above an atmosphere of perjury and bilge-water and came on deck." when the consul reached the deck he saw, for the first time, ailsa callender, one of the most charming of his heroines, and as characteristically scotch as m'liss was characteristically western. the reader will not be sorry to recall the impression that ailsa callender subsequently made upon the young american, robert gray:-- "'she took me to task for not laying up the yacht on sunday that the men could go to "kirk," and for swearing at a bargeman who ran across our bows. it's their perfect simplicity and sincerity in all this that gets me! you'd have thought that the old man was my guardian, and the daughter my aunt.' after a pause he uttered a reminiscent laugh. 'she thought we ate and drank too much on the yacht, and wondered what we could find to do all day. all this, you know, in the gentlest, caressing sort of voice, as if she was really concerned, like one's own sister. well, not exactly like mine,'--he interrupted himself grimly,--'but, hang it all, you know what i mean. you know that our girls over there haven't got _that_ trick of voice. too much self-assertion, i reckon; things made too easy for them by us men. habit of race, i dare say.' he laughed a little. 'why, i mislaid my glove when i was coming away, and it was as good as a play to hear her commiserating and sympathizing and hunting for it as if it were a lost baby.' "'but you've seen scotch girls before this,' said the consul. 'there were lady glairn's daughters whom you took on a cruise.' "'yes, but the swell scotch all imitate the english, as everybody else does, for the matter of that, our girls included; and they're all alike.'" the shrewd, solid, genial, even religious sir james macfen, in _the heir of the mchulishes_, and the porter in _a rose of glenbogie_, are native to the soil, and have no counterparts in america, east or west. these three stories dealing with scotch scenes and people prove the falsity of the assertion sometimes made that bret harte could write only about california:--he could have gone on writing about scotland all his life, had he continued to live there, and the tales would have been as readable, if not so nearly unique, as those which deal with california. he liked the scotch people, and was received by them with great kindness and hospitality. "on my birthday," he wrote, "which became quite accidentally known to a few friends in the hotel, my table was covered with bouquets of flowers and little remembrances from cigar-cases to lockets." at this period bret harte made the acquaintance of william black and walter besant, and with the former he became very intimate. in the life of william black by his friend, sir wemyss reid, there are many references to bret harte. the two story-writers first met as guests of sir george wombwell, who had invited them and a few others, including mr. shepard, the american vice-consul at bradford, to make a driving trip to the ruined abbeys of eastern yorkshire. the party dined together at the yorkshire club in york, which was the meeting point. "i remember few more lively evenings than that," writes sir wemyss reid. "black and bret harte, whose acquaintance he had just made, vied with each other in the good stories they told and the repartees they exchanged." shortly afterward black wrote to reid, "bret harte went down to us at brighton, and if we didn't amuse him he certainly amused us. he is coming again next week." later he wrote again from the reform club in london, to reid: "in a few weeks' time don't be surprised if bret harte and i come and look in upon you--that is, if he is not compelled for mere shame's sake to go to his consular duties ( ! ! ! ) at once. he is the most extraordinary globule of mercury--comet--aerolite gone drunk--flash of lightning doing catherine wheels--i ever had any experience of. nobody knows where he is, and the day before yesterday i discovered here a pile of letters that had been slowly accumulating for him since february, . it seems he never reported himself to the all-seeing escott [the hall porter], and never asked for letters when he got his month's honorary membership last year. people are now sending letters to him from america addressed to me at brighton! but he is a mystery and the cause of mystifications." in the following july there is another mention of bret harte in one of black's letters. "bret harte was to have been back from paris last night, but he is a wandering comet. the only place he is sure not to be found in is the glasgow consulate." but the consul's wanderings were not so frequent as mr. black supposed. bret harte had almost a monomania for not answering letters; and his absence from glasgow could not safely be inferred from his failure to acknowledge communications addressed to him there. a rumor as to the consul's prolonged desertion of his post had reached the state department at washington, and in november, , the department wrote to him requesting a report on the subject. he replied that he had not been away from glasgow beyond the usual limit of ten days,[ ] at any one time, except on holidays and sundays. this report appears to have been accepted as satisfactory, and the incident was closed. at one time bret harte was to have dined with sir wemyss reid and william black at the reform club; "but in his place," says the biographer, "came a telegram in which i was invited to ask black and lockyer, who had just spent a few days with him in scotland, their opinion of the game of poker--evidence that they had not spent all their time in scotland in viewing scenery." the damp climate of glasgow did not agree with bret harte, and so early in his residence there as july, , he wrote to the state department requesting leave of absence for three months, with permission to visit the united states, on the ground that the state of his health was such that he might require a complete change of scene and air. the request was granted, but the consul did not return to his native country. in march, , bret harte wrote to black as follows:-- "my dear black,--i was in the far south, trying to get rid of an obstinate cold, when your note reached me, and haven't been in london for some time. i expected you to drop in here on your way up to 'balnagownie's arms'--whoever she may be. i'm afraid i don't want any 'ardgay' in mine, thank you. why any man in this damp climate should want to make himself wetter by salmon-fishing passes my comprehension. is there no drier sport to be had in all great britain? i shudder at the name of a river, and shiver at the sight of any fish that isn't dried. i hear, too, that you are in the habit of making poetry on these occasions, and that you are dropping lines all over the place. how far is that place--anyway? i shall be in glasgow until the end of march, and if you'll dry yourself thoroughly and come in and dine with me at that time, i'll show you how 'the laboring poor' of glasgow live. yours always, "bret harte." but, alas for bret harte! when this letter was written, his labors at glasgow were about to cease. in the year a new administration entered upon its duties at washington, and many consuls were superseded, perhaps for good cause. bret harte was removed in july, and another man of letters, mr. frank underwood of boston, reigned in his stead. chapter xvii bret harte in london in , during one of his many visits to london, bret harte made the acquaintance of m. arthur and mme. van de velde, who were already enthusiastic readers of his works, and it was not long before they became his most intimate friends in england if not in the world. from , when he went to london to live, until the death of m. van de velde in , he was an inmate of their house for a great part of the time. afterward, bret harte took rooms at number lancaster gate, which remained his headquarters for the rest of his life; but he was often a guest at mme. van de velde's town house, and at her country home, the red house at camberley in sussex. m. van de velde was a belgian whose life had been spent in the diplomatic service of his country. for many years he was councillor of legation in london. mme. van de velde, his second wife, is of italian birth, an accomplished woman of the world, and a writer of reputation. she translated many of bret harte's stories into french, and is the author of "random recollections of court and society," "cosmopolitan recollections," and "french fiction of to-day." a quotation has already been made from her discriminating essay on bret harte. her influence upon him was an important factor in the last twenty years of his life. mme. van de velde led him to take himself and his art more seriously than he had done since coming to england. he settled down to his work, put his shoulder to the wheel, and kept it there during the remainder of his life. for a man naturally indolent and inclined to underrate his own writings, this well-sustained industry was remarkable. bret harte was always more easily influenced by women than by men. he showed his best side to them, and they called out the gentleness and chivalry of his nature. no woman ever spoke ill of him, and among his most grateful admirers to-day are the california women who contributed to the "overland monthly," and who testify to the uniform kindness and consideration with which he treated them. bret harte's habits were regular and simple. he smoked a good deal, drank very little, and took exercise every day. at one time he played golf, and at another he was somewhat interested in amateur photography. but his real recreation, as well as his labor, was found in that imaginary world which sprang to life under his pen. he was often a guest at english country houses, and was familiar with the history of english cathedrals, abbeys, churches, and historical ruins. he made a pilgrimage to macbeth's country in scotland and to charlotte brontë's home in yorkshire. he loved byron's poetry, and was once a guest at newstead abbey. he frequently visited lord compton, later marquis of northampton, at compton wyngates in warwickshire near the battleground of edgehill, and at castle ashby at northampton. reminiscences of these visits may be found in _the desborough connections_ and _the ghosts of stukeley castle_. he belonged to various clubs, such as the beefsteak, the rabelais, the kinsmen; but during the last few years of his life he frequented only the royal thames yacht club. "this selection seemed to me so odd," writes mr. pemberton, "for he had no love of yachting, that i questioned him concerning it. 'why, my dear fellow,' he said, 'don't you see? i never use a club until i am tired of my work and want relief from it. if i go to a literary club i am asked all sorts of questions as to what i am doing, and my views on somebody's last book, and to these i am expected to reply at length. now my good friends in albemarle street talk of their yachts, don't want my advice about them, are good enough to let me listen, and i come away refreshed by their conversation.'"[ ] so hawthorne, it will be remembered, cared little for the meetings of the saturday club in boston, and was often an absentee, but he delighted in the company of the yankee sea-captains at mrs. blodgett's boarding-house in liverpool. "captain johnson," he wrote, "assigned as a reason for not boarding at this house that the conversation made him sea-sick; and indeed the smell of tar and bilge-water is somewhat strongly perceptible in it." the truth is that an aversion to the society of purely literary men should naturally be looked for in writers of a profound or original stamp of mind. something may be learned and some refreshment of spirit may be obtained from almost any man who knows almost anything at first hand,--even from a market-gardener or a machinist; and if his subject is what might be called a natural one, such as ships, horses or cows, it is bound to have a certain intellectual interest. but the ordinary, clever, sophisticated littérateur is mainly occupied neither with things nor with ideas, but with forms of expression, and consequently he is a long way removed from reality. it may be doubted if any society in the world is less profitable than his. mr. moncure conway, in his autobiography, gives an amusing reminiscence of bret harte's proneness to escape from what are known as "social duties." mrs. conway "received" on monday afternoons, and bret harte had told her that he would be present on a particular monday, but he failed to appear,--much to the regret of some persons who had been invited for the occasion. "when chancing to meet him," writes mr. conway, "i alluded to the disappointment; he asked forgiveness and said, 'i will come next monday--_even though i promise_.'" he had a constant dread that his friendship or acquaintance would be sought on account of his writings, rather than for himself. a lady who sat next to him at dinner without learning his name, afterward remarked, "i have always longed to meet him, and i would have been so different had i only known who my neighbor was." this, unfortunately, being repeated to bret harte, he exclaimed, "now, why can't a woman realize that this sort of thing is insulting?... if mrs. ---- talked with me, and found me uninteresting as a man, how could she expect to find me interesting because i was an author?" during the last ten or fifteen years of his life, bret harte seldom went far from home. he never visited switzerland until september, , and even then he carried his manuscript with him, and devoted to it part of each day. he took great delight in the swiss mountains, often spoke of his vacation there, and was planning to go again during the summer of his death. from lucerne he wrote to a friend[ ] as follows: "strangest of all, i find my heart going back to the old sierras whenever i get over three thousand feet of swiss altitude, and--dare i whisper it?--in spite of their pictorial composition, i wouldn't give a mile of the dear old sierras, with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for one hundred thousand kilometres of the picturesque vaud." of geneva he wrote to the same correspondent: "i thought i should not like geneva, fancying it a kind of continental boston, and that the shadow of john calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of rousseau, and the de staëls and mme. de warens still lingered there." but he did like geneva; and of the lake, as he viewed it from his hotel window, he wrote, "ask him if he ever saw an expanse of thirty miles of water exactly the color of the inner shell of a mother-of-pearl oyster." of geneva itself he wrote again: "it is gay, brilliant, and even as _pictorial_ as the end of lake leman; and as i sit by my hotel window on the border of the lake i can see mont blanc--thirty or forty miles away--framing itself a perfect vignette. of course i know the whole thing was arranged by the grand hotel company that run switzerland. last night as i stood on my balcony looking at the great semi-circle of lights framing the quay and harbor of the town, a great fountain sent up a spray from the lake three hundred feet high, illuminated by beautifully shaded 'lime lights,' exactly like a 'transformation scene.' just then, the new moon--a pale green sickle--swung itself over the alps! but it was absolutely too much! one felt that the hotel company were overdoing it! and i wanted to order up the hotel proprietor and ask him to take it down. at least i suggested it to the colonel,[ ] but he thought it would do as well if we refused to pay for it in the bill." the same correspondent, by the way, quotes an amusing letter from bret harte, written in , from stoke pogis, near windsor castle: "i had the honor yesterday of speaking to a man who had been in personal attendance upon the queen for fifty years. he was naturally very near the point of translation, and gave a vague impression that he did not require to be born again, but remained on earth for the benefit of american tourists." bret harte's reasons for remaining so long in england have already been explained in part. the chief cause was probably the pecuniary one, for by living in england he was able to obtain more from his writings than he could have obtained as a resident of the united states. he continued to contribute to the support of his wife, although after his departure from this country mrs. harte and he did not live together. the cause of their separation was never made known. on this subject both mr. harte and his wife maintained an honorable silence, which, it is to be hoped, will always be respected. a few years before her husband's death, mrs. harte came to england to live. the older son, griswold harte, died in the city of new york, in december, , leaving a widow and one daughter. the second son, francis king harte, was married in england some years ago, and makes his home there. he has two children. bret harte was often a visitor at his son's house. the older daughter, jessamy, married henry milford steele, an american, and lives in the united states. the younger daughter, ethel, is unmarried, and lives with her mother. beyond the pecuniary reason which impelled bret harte to live in england were other reasons which every american who has spent some time in that country will understand, and which are especially strong in respect to persons of nervous temperament. the climate is one reason; for the english climate is the natural antidote to the american; and perhaps the residents of each country would be better if they could exchange habitats every other generation. england has a soothing effect upon the hustling american. he eats more, worries less, and becomes a happier and pleasanter animal. a similar change has been observed in high-strung horses taken from the united states to england. and so of athletes--the english athlete, transported to this country, gains in speed, but loses endurance; whereas our athletes on english soil gain endurance and lose speed. the temperament and manners of the english people have the same pleasant effect as the climate upon the american visitor. why is john bull always represented as an irascible animal? perhaps he is such if his rights, real or assumed, are invaded, or if his will is thwarted; but as the stranger meets him, he is civil and good-natured. in fact, this is one of the chief surprises which an american experiences on his first visit to england. more important still, perhaps, is the ease of living in a country which has a fixed social system. the plain line drawn in england between the gentleman and the non-gentleman class makes things very pleasant for those who belong to the favored division. it gives the gentleman a vantage ground in dealing with the non-gentleman which proves as convenient, as it is novel, to the american. the fact that it must be inconvenient for the non-gentleman class, which outnumbers the other some thousands to one, never seems to trouble the englishman, although the american may have some qualms. furthermore, strange as it may seem, the position of an author, _per se_ is, no doubt, higher in london (though perhaps not elsewhere in england) than it is in the united states. with us, the well-to-do publisher has a better standing in what is called "society" than the impecunious author. in london the reverse would be the case. new york and boston looked askance upon bret harte, doubting if he were quite respectable; but london welcomed him. bret harte was often asked to lecture in england, and especially to speak or write upon english customs or english society; but he always refused, being unwilling, as thackeray was in regard to the united states, either to censure a people from whom he had received great hospitality, or to praise them at the expense of truth. nor was his belief in america and the american social system weakened in the least by his long residence in england or by his enjoyment of the amenities of english life. an english author wrote of him, while he was yet living: "time has not dulled bret harte's instinctive affection for the land of his birth, for its institutions, its climate, its natural beauties, and, above all, the character and moral attributes of its inhabitants. even his association with the most aristocratic representatives of london society has been impotent to modify his views or to win him over to less independent professions. he is as single-minded to-day as he was when he first landed on british soil. a general favorite in the most diverse circles, social, literary, scientific, artistic, or military, his strong primitive nature and his positive individuality have remained intact. always polite and gentle, neither seeking nor evading controversy, he is steadfastly unchangeable in his political and patriotic beliefs." another english writer relates that "at the time when there was some talk of war between britain and america, he, while deploring even the suggestion of such a catastrophe, earnestly avowed his intention of instantly returning to his own country, should hostilities break out." no two men could be more opposed in many respects than hawthorne and bret harte. nevertheless they had some striking points of resemblance. both were men who united primitive instincts with consummate refinement; and different as is the subject-matter of their stories, the style and attitude are not unlike. they had the same craving for beauty of form, the same self-repression, the same horror of what is prolix or tawdry, the same love of that simplicity which is the perfection of art. long residence in england seems to have had much the same effect upon both men. it heightened their feeling for their native country almost in proportion as it pleased their own susceptibilities. hawthorne's fondness for england was an almost unconscious feeling. when he returned to america, there to live for the remainder of his days, he did not find himself at home in the manner or to the degree which he had expected. "at rome," his son writes, "an unacknowledged homesickness affected him, an old-homesickness, rather than a yearning for america. he may have imagined that it was america that he wanted, but when at last we returned there, he still looked backward toward england." that a man should find it more agreeable to live in one country, and yet be firmly convinced that the social system of another country was superior, is nothing remarkable. it is the presence of equality in the united states and its absence in england which make the chief difference between them. even that imperfect equality to which we have attained has rendered the american people the happiest and the most moral in the world. to the superficial visitor, indeed, who has seen only a few great cities in the united states, it might seem that equality is not much more prevalent here than it is in england; but let him tarry a while in the smaller cities, in the towns and villages of the union, from the atlantic to the pacific, and he will reach a different conclusion. an english writer of unusual discernment speaks of "that conscious independence, that indefinable assertion of manhood, which is the key to the american character." one result of bret harte's long residence in england was the circulation in this country of many false reports and statements about him which galled his sensitive nature. he had many times declined to be "interviewed," and probably made enemies in that way. "but when," writes mme. van de velde, "in a moment of good nature he yielded to pressing solicitations, and allowed himself to be questioned, the consequences were, on the whole, to his disadvantage. from that moment the door was opened to a flood of apocryphal statements of various length and importance; sometimes entirely false, sometimes tinged with a dangerous verisimilitude; often grotesque, occasionally malicious, but one and all purporting to be derived from unquestionable sources." mr. pemberton hints at more serious troubles which afflicted bret harte's last years. "if he, in common with many of us, had his deep personal disappointments and sorrows, he bore them with the chivalry of a bayard and a silence as dignified as it was pathetic. to a man of his sensitive nature, the barbed shafts of 'envy and calumny and hate and pain' lacerated with a cruelty that at times must have seemed unendurable. under such torments he often writhed, but he suffered all things with a quiet patience that afforded a glorious example to those friends who, knowing of his wounds, had to be silent concerning them, and could offer him no balm." during the year bret harte's health was failing, although he still kept at work. his disease was cancer of the throat. he hoped to go abroad the following summer, and he had written in a letter to a friend, "alas! i have never been light-hearted since switzerland." but early in his condition became serious, and he went to stay with mme. van de velde at camberley. the spring was cold and sunless, and he grew worse as it advanced. nevertheless he was engaged in writing a play with mr. pemberton, and was meditating a new story which should reintroduce that favorite of the public, colonel starbottle. in march a surgical operation was performed on his throat, but the relief was slight and temporary; and from that time forward bret harte must have known that his fate was sealed, although he said nothing to his friends and with them appeared to be in good, even high spirits. april , feeling somewhat better, he sat down to begin his new tale. he headed it, "a friend of colonel starbottle's," and wrote the opening sentence and part of another sentence. dissatisfied with this beginning, he tried again, and taking a fresh sheet of paper, he wrote the title and one sentence. there the manuscript ends. he was unable to continue it, although after this date he wrote a few letters to friends. on may he was sitting in the morning, at his desk, thus engaged, when a hemorrhage of the throat suddenly attacked him. he was put to bed, and doctors were sent for. he rallied from this attack, but a second hemorrhage, late in the afternoon, rendered him partly unconscious, and soon afterward he died peacefully in the presence of mme. van de velde and her attendants. there is something sad in the death of any man far from home and country, with no kith or kin about him, though ministered to by devoted friends. even bret harte's tombstone bears the name of one who was a stranger to his blood and race. we cannot help recalling what tennessee's partner said. "when a man has been running free all day, what's the natural thing for him to do? why, to come home." alas! there was no home-coming for bret harte; and if, as may have been the case, he felt little or no regret at his situation, the sadness of it would only be intensified by that circumstance. some deterioration is inevitable when a husband and father foregoes, even unwillingly, those feelings of responsibility and affection which centre in the family,--feelings so natural that to a considerable degree we share them even with the lower animals. that bret harte's separation from his family was in part, at least, his own fault seems highly probable from his character and career. he abhorred sentimentality in literature, and the few examples of it in his writings may be ascribed to the influence of dickens. nevertheless, with all his virility, it must be admitted that his nature was that of a sentimentalist. a sentimentalist is one who obeys the natural good impulses of the human heart, but whose virtue does not go much beyond that. he has right feelings and acts upon them, but in cases where there is nothing to provoke the right feeling he falls short. he is strong in impulse, but weak in principle. when we see a fellow-being in danger or distress our instinct is to assist him. if we fail to do so, it is because we hearken to reason rather than to instinct; because we obey the selfish, second thought which reason suggests, instead of obeying the spontaneous impulse which nature puts into our hearts. but suppose that the person to be succored makes no appeal to the heart: suppose that he is thousands of miles away: suppose that one dislikes or even hates him: suppose that it is a question not of bestowing alms, or of giving assistance or of feeling sympathy, but of rendering bare justice. in such cases the sentimentalist lacks a sufficient spur for action: he feels no impulse: his heart remains cold: he makes excuses to himself; and having no strong sense of duty or principle to carry him through the ordeal, he becomes guilty of an act (or, more often, of a failure to act) which in another person would excite his indignation. in this sense bret harte was a sentimentalist. he would have risked his life for a present friend, but was capable of neglecting an absent one. this contradiction, if it be such, affords a clue to his character. in spite of his amiability, kindness, generosity, there was in bret harte an element of cruelty. even his natural improvidence in money matters can hardly excuse him for selling the copyright of all his stories as they came out, leaving no income to be derived from them after his death. the sentimentalist, being a creature of impulse, gets in the habit of obeying his impulses, good or bad, and is apt to find some difficulty at last in distinguishing between them. he easily persuades himself that the thing which he wishes to do is the right thing for him to do. this was a trait of bret harte's character, and it naturally accompanies that lack of introspection which was so marked in him. there was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his nature. he was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others. even his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. it was very seldom that bret harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract sentiment or idea; he was concerned wholly with the concrete; and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real conviction. the note of sincerity is wanting. an instance will be found in the _general introduction_ which he wrote for the first volume of his collected stories, where he answers the charge that he had "confused recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness and often criminality with a single, solitary virtue." after describing this as "the cant of too much mercy," he goes on to say:-- "without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a great poet who created the parables of the prodigal son and the good samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his generation are forgotten. and he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of this from the housetops." this is simply dickens both in manner and substance, and the tone of the whole passage is insincere and exaggerated, almost maudlin. lamentable, but perhaps not strange, that in the one place where bret harte explained and defended what might be called the prevailing moral of his stories, he should fall so far short of the reader's expectation! the truth is that bret harte took nothing seriously except his art, and apparently went through life with as little concern about the origin, nature, and destiny of mankind as it would be possible for any member of that unfortunate species to feel. and yet there was a noble side to his character. he possessed in an unusual degree what is, perhaps, the most rare of all good qualities, namely, magnanimity. no man was ever more free from envy and jealousy; no writer was ever more quick to perceive and to praise excellence in others, or more slow to disparage or condemn. he used to say, and really seemed to believe, that mr. john hay's imitations of his own dialect poems were better than the originals. all the misconstruction and unkind criticism of which he was the subject never drew from him a bitter remark. he had a tenderness for children and dumb animals, especially for dogs, and his sympathy with them gave him a wonderful insight into their natures. who but bret harte could have penned this sentence which the reader will recognize as occurring in _the argonauts of north liberty_: "he [dick demorest] had that piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many charming women,--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference which it has learned to expect." in breadth and warmth of sympathy for his fellow-men bret harte had what almost might be described as a substitute for religion; what indeed has been described as religion itself. long ago, an author who afterward became famous, touched with the fervor of youthful enthusiasm for his vocation, declared that "literature fosters in its adherents a sympathy with all that lives and breathes which is more binding than any form of religion." a more recent thinker, mr. henry w. montague, has finely said that "the most important function of christianity is not to keep man from sinning, but to widen the range and increase the depth of his sympathies." judged by these standards, bret harte could not be described as an irreligious writer. who, more than he, has warmed the heart and suffused the eyes of his readers with pity for the unfortunate, with admiration for the heroic? "a kind thought is a good deed," remarked an oriental sage. the doctrine is a dangerous one; but if it is true of any man, it is true of an author. his kind thoughts live after him, and they have the force and effect of deeds. bret harte's stories are a legacy to the world, as full of inspiration as of entertainment. it was not by accident or as the result of mere literary taste that he selected from the chaos of california life the heroic and the pathetic incidents. those who know california only through his tales and poems naturally think that the aspect of it which bret harte presents was the only aspect; that the pioneer life would have impressed any other observer just as it impressed him, the single difference being that bret harte had the ability to report what he saw and heard. but such is not the case. bret harte's representation of california is true; there is no exaggeration in it; but there were other aspects of life there which would have been equally true. if we were to call up in imagination the various story-writers of bret harte's day, it would be easy to guess what features of life on the golden slope would have attracted them, had they been there in the days of the pioneers: how the social peculiarities of san francisco, with its flamboyant _demi-monde_ and its early appeal to the divorce court, would have interested one; how the adventures of outlaws and robbers would have filled the mind of another; and how a third would have been content to describe the picturesque traits of the spanish inheritors of the soil. bret harte does indeed touch upon all these points and upon many others,--not a phase of california life escaped him,--but he does not dwell upon them. his main theme is those heroic impulses of loyalty, of chivalry, of love, of pure friendship, which are strong enough to triumph over death and the fear of death, and which, nevertheless, are often found where, except to the discerning eye of sympathy, their existence would be wholly unsuspected. for this selection the world owes bret harte a debt of gratitude; and none the less because it was made instinctively. the actions of a really perfect character would all be instinctive and spontaneous. in such a man conscience and inclination would coincide. his taste and his sense of duty would be one and the same thing. a mean, an unkind, an unjust act would be a solecism as impossible for him as it would be to eat with his knife. the struggle would have been over before he was born, and his ancestors would have bequeathed to him a nature in harmony with itself. the credit for his good deeds would belong, perhaps, rather to his ancestors than to himself, but we should see in him the perfection of human nature, the final product of a thousand imperfect natures. something of this spontaneousness and finality belonged to the character of bret harte. if he was weak in conviction and principle, he was strong in instinct. if he yielded easily to certain temptations, he was impregnable to others, because he was protected against them by the whole current of his nature. it would be as impossible to imagine bret harte taking sides against the oppressed, as it would be to imagine him performing his literary work in a slovenly manner. both his good and bad traits were firmly rooted, and, it may be, inextricably mingled. mr. howells said of him that "if his temperament disabled him from certain experiences of life, it was the sure source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent." bret harte's stories are sufficient proof that he was at bottom a good man, although he had grave faults. his faults, moreover, were those commonly found in men of genius, and for that reason they should be treated with some tenderness. when one considers that the whole progress of the human race, mental and spiritual, as well as mechanical, is due to the achievements of a few superior individuals, whom the world has agreed to designate as men of genius,--considering this, one should be slow to pronounce with anything like confidence or finality upon the character of one who belongs in that class. we know that such men are different from other men intellectually, and we might expect to find, and we do find that they are different from them emotionally, if not morally. a certain egotism, for example, is notoriously associated with men of genius; and a kind of egotistic or unconscious selfishness was bret harte's great defect. popular opinion, a safe guide in such matters, has always recognized the fact that the genius is a species by himself. it is only the clever men of talent who have discovered that there is no essential difference between men of genius and themselves. writers of this description might be named who have summed up bret harte's life and character with amazing condescension and self-assurance. meagre as are the known facts of his career, especially those relating to his private life, these critics have assigned his motives and judged his conduct with a freedom and a certainty which they would hardly feel in respect to their own intimates. the very absence of information about bret harte makes misconstruction easy. why he lived apart from his family, why he lived in england, why he continued to draw his subjects from california,--these are matters as to which the inquisitive world would have been glad to be informed, but as to which he thought it more fitting to keep silence; and from that silence no amount of misrepresentation could move him. mr. pemberton has recorded the congenial scorn with which bret harte used to repeat the motto upon the coat of arms of some scottish earl. _they say! what say they? let them say!_ and yet, if a writer has greatly moved or pleased us, we have a natural desire, especially after his death, to know what manner of man he was. most of all, we long to ask that familiar question, the only question which, at the close of a career, seems to have any relevance or importance,--was he a good man? in the present case, such answer as this book can give has already been made; and if any reader should be inclined to a different conclusion, let him weigh well the peculiar circumstances of bret harte's life, and make due allowance for the obscurity in which his motives are veiled. upon one aspect of his career there can be no difference of opinion. his devotion to his art was unwavering and extreme. pagan though he may have been in some respects, in this matter he was as conscientious a puritan as hawthorne himself. every plot, every character, every sentence, one might almost say, every word in his books, was subjected to his own relentless criticism. the manuscript that bret harte consigned to the waste-basket would have made the reputation of another author. no "pot-boiler" ever came from his hand, and, whatever his pecuniary difficulties, he never dreamed of escaping from them by that dashing-off of salable stories which is a common practice among popular writers of fiction. such he was at the beginning, and such he continued to be until the end. six months elapsed, after the publication of his first successful story, before bret harte made his second appearance in the "overland monthly." his friends in california have given us a picture of him, a youthful author in his narrow office at the mint, slowly and painfully elaborating those masterpieces that made him famous. it was the same forty years afterward when the fatal illness overtook him at his desk in an english country-house. the pen that dropped from his reluctant fingers had been engaged in writing and re-writing the simple, opening sentences of a story that was never to be finished. bret harte was one of that select band to whom the gods have vouchsafed a glimpse of perfection. all his life, from mere boyhood, he was inspired by a vision of that ideal beauty which is at once the joy and the despair of the true artist. whoever realizes that vision, even though in an imperfect manner, has overcome the limitations of time and space, and has obtained a position among the immortals which may be denied to better and even greater men. chapter xviii bret harte as a writer of fiction bret harte's faculty was not so much that of imagining as of apprehending human character. some writers of fiction, those who have the highest form of creative imagination, are able from their own minds to spin the web and woof of the characters that they describe; and it makes small difference where they live or what literary material lies about them. even these authors do not create their heroes and heroines quite out of whole cloth,--they have a shred or two to begin with; but their work is mainly the result of creation rather than perception. the test of creative imagination is that the characters portrayed by it are subjected to various exigencies and influences: they grow, develop, yes, even change, and yet retain their consistency. there is a masterly example of this in trollope's "small house at allington," where he depicts the slow, astounding, and yet perfectly natural disintegration of crosby's moral character. the aftermath of love-making between pendennis and blanche amory is another instance. this has been called by one critic the cleverest thing in all thackeray; but still more clever, though clever is too base a word for an episode so beautifully conceived, is that dawning of passion, hopeless and quickly quenched, between laura pendennis and george warrington, the two strongest characters in the book. only the hand of creative genius can guide its characters safely through such labyrinths of feeling, such back-eddies of emotion. a few great novels have indeed been written by authors who did not possess this faculty, especially by dickens, in whom it was conspicuously lacking; but no long story was ever produced without betraying its author's deficiency in this respect if the deficiency existed. _gabriel conroy_, bret harte's only novel, is so bad as a whole, though abounding in gems, its characters are so inconsistent and confused, its ending so incomprehensible, that it produces upon the reader the effect of a nightmare. in fact, the nearer bret harte's stories approach the character of an episode the better and more dramatic they are. of the longer stories, the best, as everybody will admit, is _cressy_, and that is little more than the expansion of a single incident. as a rule, in reading the longer tales, one remembers, as he progresses, that the situations and the events are fictitious; they have not the spontaneous, inevitable aspect which makes the shorter tales impressive. _tennessee's partner_ is as historical as robinson crusoe. bret harte had something of a weakness for elaborate plots, but they were not in his line. plots and situations can hardly be satisfactory or artistic unless they form the means whereby the characters of the persons in the tale are developed, or, if not developed, at least revealed to the reader. the development or the gradual revelation of character is the _raison d'être_ for the long story or novel. but this capacity our author seems to have lacked. it might be said that he did not require it, because his characters appear to us full-fledged from the start. he has, indeed, a wonderful power of setting them before the reader almost immediately, and by virtue of a few masterly strokes. after an incident or two, we know the character; there is nothing more to be revealed; and a prolongation of the story would be superfluous. but here we touch upon bret harte's weakness as a portrayer of human nature. it surely indicates some deficiency in a writer of fiction if with the additional scope afforded by a long story he can tell us no more about his people than he is able to convey by a short story. the deficiency in bret harte was perhaps this, that he lacked a profound knowledge of human nature. a human being regarded as material for a writer of fiction may be divided into two parts. there is that part, the more elemental one, which he shares with other men, and there is, secondly, that part which differentiates him from other men. in other words, he is both a type of human nature, and a particular specimen with individual variations. the ideal story-writer would be able to master his subject in each aspect, and in describing a single person to depict at once both the nature of all men and also the nature of that particular man. shakspere, sterne, thackeray have this power. other writers can do the one thing but not the other; and in this respect hawthorne and bret harte stand at opposite extremes. hawthorne had a profound knowledge of human nature; but he was lacking in the capacity to hit off individual characteristics. arthur dimmesdale and hester, even miriam and hilda, are not real to us in the sense in which colonel newcome and becky sharp are real. hawthorne's figures are somewhat spectral; they lack flesh and blood. his forte was not observation but reflection. he worked from the inside. bret harte, on the other hand, worked from the outside. he had not that faculty, so strong in hawthorne, of delving into his own nature by way of getting at the nature of other men; but he had the faculty of sympathetic observation which enabled him to perceive and understand the characteristic traits that distinguish one man from another. _barker's luck_ and _three partners_, taken together, illustrate bret harte's limitations in this respect. each of these stories has barker for its central theme, the other personages being little more than foils to him. in the first story, _barker's luck_, the plot is very simple, the incidents are few, and yet we have the character of the hero conveyed to us with exquisite effect. in _three partners_ the theme is elaborated, a complicated plot is introduced, and barker appears in new relations and situations. but we know him no better than we did before. _barker's luck_ covered the ground; and _three partners_, a more ambitious story, is far below it in verisimilitude and in dramatic effect. in the same way, _m'liss_, in its original form, is much superior to the longer and more complex story which its author wrote some years afterward, and which is printed in the collected edition of his works, to the exclusion of the earlier tale. in one case, however, bret harte did succeed in showing the growth and development of a character. the trilogy known as _a waif of the plains_, _susy_, and _clarence_, is almost the same as one long story; and in it the character of clarence, from boyhood to maturity, is skilfully and consistently traced. upon this character bret harte evidently bestowed great pains, and there are some notable passages in his delineation of it, especially the account of the duel between clarence and captain pinckney. not less surprising to clarence himself than to the reader is the calm ferocity with which he kills his antagonist; and we share the thrill of horror which ran through the little group of spectators when it was whispered about that this gentlemanly young man, so far removed in appearance from a fire-eater, was the son of hamilton brant, the noted duellist. the situation had brought to the surface a deep-lying, inherited trait, of which even its possessor had been ignorant. in this character, certainly in this incident, bret harte goes somewhat deeper than his wont. we have his own testimony to the fact that his genius was perceptive rather than creative. in those scotch stories and sketches in which the consul appears, very much in the capacity of a greek chorus, the author lets fall now and then a remark plainly autobiographical in character. thus, in _a rose of glenbogie_, speaking of mrs. deeside, he says, "the consul, more _perceptive_ than analytical, found her a puzzle." this confirms bret harte's other statement, made elsewhere, that his characters, instead of being imagined, were copied from life. but they were copied with the insight and the emphasis of genius. the ability to read human nature is about the most rare of mental possessions. how little do we know even of those whom we see every day, and whom, perhaps, we have lived with all our lives! let a man ask himself what his friend or his wife or his son would do in some supposable emergency; how they would take this or that injury or affront, good fortune or bad fortune, great sorrow or great happiness, the defection of a friend, a strong temptation. let him ask himself any such question, and, in all probability, he will be forced to admit that he does not know what would be the result. who, remembering his college or schoolboy days, will fail to recognize the truth of thoreau's remark, "one may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public"! these surprises occur not because human nature is inconsistent,--the law of character is as immutable as any other law;--it is because individual character eludes us. but it did not elude bret harte. he had a wonderful faculty both for understanding and remembering its outward manifestations. his genius was akin to that of the actor; and this explains, perhaps, his lifelong desire to write a successful play. mr. watts-dunton has told us with astonishment how bret harte, years after a visit to one of the london music halls, minutely recounted all that he had heard and seen there, and imitated all the performers. that he would have made a great actor in the style of joseph jefferson is the opinion of that accomplished critic. the surprising quickness with which he seized and assimilated any new form of dialect was a kind of dramatic capacity. the spanish-english, mixed with california slang, which enriquez saltello spoke, is as good in its way as the immortal costigan's irish-english. "'to confer then as to thees horse, which is not--observe me--a mexican plug. ah, no! you can your boots bet on that. she is of castilian stock--believe me and strike me dead! i will myself at different times overlook and affront her in the stable, examine her as to the assault, and why she should do thees thing. when she is of the exercise i will also accost and restrain her. remain tranquil, my friend! when a few days shall pass much shall be changed, and she will be as another. trust your oncle to do thees thing! comprehend me? everything shall be lovely, and the goose hang high.'" bret harte's short stay in prussia, and later in scotland, enabled him to grasp the peculiarities of nature and speech belonging to the natives. peter schroeder, the idealist, could have sprung to life nowhere except upon german soil. "peter pondered long and perplexedly. gradually an explanation slowly evolved itself from his profundity. he placed his finger beside his nose, and a look of deep cunning shone in his eyes. 'dot's it,' he said to himself triumphantly, 'dot's shoost it! der rebooplicans don't got no memories. ve don't got nodings else.'" what character could be more scotch, and less anything else, than the porter at the railway station where the consul alighted on his way to visit the macspaddens. "'ye'll no be rememberin' me. i had a machine in st. kentigern and drove ye to macspadden's ferry often. far, far too often! she's a strange, flagrantitious creature; her husband's but a puir fule, i'm thinkin', and ye did yersel' nae guid gaunin' there.'" mr. callender, again, ailsa's father, in _young robin gray_, breathes scotch calvinism and scotch thrift and self-respect in every line. "'have you had a cruise in the yacht?' asked the consul. "'ay,' said mr. callender, 'we have been up and down the loch, and around the far point, but not for boardin' or lodgin' the night, nor otherwise conteenuing or parteecipating.... mr. gray's a decent enough lad, and not above instruction, but extraordinar' extravagant.'" even the mysteries of franco-english seem to have been fathomed by bret harte, possibly by his contact with french people in san francisco. this is how the innkeeper explained to alkali dick some peculiarities of french custom: "'for you comprehend not the position of _la jeune fille_ in all france! ah! in america the young lady she go everywhere alone; i have seen her--pretty, charming, fascinating--alone with the young man. but here, no, never! regard me, my friend. the french mother, she say to her daughter's fiancé, "look! there is my daughter. she has never been alone with a young man for five minutes,--not even with you. take her for your wife!" it is monstrous! it is impossible! it is so!'" the moral complement of this rare capacity for reading human nature was the sympathy, the tenderness of feeling which bret harte possessed. sympathy with human nature, with its weaknesses, with the tragedies which it is perpetually encountering, and above all, with its redeeming virtues,--this is the keynote of bret harte's works, the mainspring of his humor and pathos. he had the gift of satire as well, but, fortunately for the world, he made far less use of it. satire is to humor as corporal punishment is to personal influence. a satire is a jest, but a cutting one,--a jest in which the victim is held up to scorn or contempt. humor is a much more subtle quality than satire. like satire, it is the perception of an incongruity, but it must be a newly discovered or invented incongruity, for an essential element in humor is the pleasurable surprise, the gentle shock which it conveys. a new jersey farmer was once describing in the presence of a very humane person, the great age and debility of a horse that he had formerly owned and used. "you ought to have killed him!" interrupted the humane person indignantly. "well," drawled the farmer, "we did,--almost." satire is merely destructive, whereas sentiment is constructive. the most that satire can do is to show how the thing ought _not_ to be done. but sentiment goes much further, for it supplies the dynamic power of affection. becky sharp dazzles and amuses; but colonel newcome softens and inspires. there is often in bret harte a subtle blending of satire and humor, notably in that masterpiece of satirical humor, the _heathen chinee_. the poet beautifully depicts the naïve indignation of the american gambler at the duplicity of the mongolian,--a duplicity exceeding even his own. "'we are ruined by chinese cheap labor!'" another instance is that passage in _the rose of tuolumne_, where the author, after relating how a stranger was shot and nearly killed in a mining town, records the prevailing impression in the neighborhood "that his misfortune was the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger." so, in _the outcasts of poker flat_, when the punishment of mr. oakhurst was under consideration, "a few of the committee had urged hanging him as a possible example and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the money he had won from them. 'it's agin justice,' said jim wheeler, 'to let this yer young man from roaring camp--an entire stranger--carry away our money.' but a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from mr. oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice." even in these passages humor predominates over satire. in fact,--and it is a fact characteristic of bret harte,--the only satire, pure and simple, in his works is that which he directs against hypocrisy. this was the one fault which he could not forgive; and he especially detested that peculiar form of cold and calculating hypocrisy which occasionally survives as the dregs of puritanism. bret harte was keenly alive to this aspect of new england character; and he has depicted it with almost savage intensity in _the argonauts of north liberty_. ezekiel corwin, a shrewd, flinty, narrow yankee, is not a new figure in literature, but an old figure in one or two new situations, notably in his appearance at the mining camps as a vender of patent medicines. "that remarkably unfair and unpleasant-spoken man had actually frozen hanley's ford into icy astonishment at his audacity, and he had sold them an invoice of the panacea before they had recovered; he had insulted chipitas into giving an extensive order in bitters; he had left hayward's creek pledged to burne's pills--with drawn revolvers still in their hands." even here, however, the bitterness of the satire is tempered by the humor of the situation. but in joan, the heroine of the story, we have a really new figure in literature, and it is drawn with an absence of sympathy, of humor and of mitigating circumstances which is very rare, if not unique, in bret harte.[ ] one other example of pure satire may be found in his works, and that is parson wynn, the effusive, boisterous hypocrite who plays a subordinate part in _the carquinez woods_.[ ] with these few exceptions, however, bret harte was a writer of sentiment, and that is the secret of his power. sentiment may take the form of humor or of pathos, and, as is often remarked, these two qualities shade off into each other by imperceptible degrees. some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache. a consummate example of this blending of humor and pathos is found in the story _how santa claus came to simpson's bar_. the boy johnny, after greeting the christmas guests in his "weak, treble voice, broken by that premature harshness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature self-assertion can give," and after hospitably setting out the whiskey bottle, with crackers and cheese, creeps back to bed, and is thus accosted by dick bullen, the hero of the story:-- "'hello, johnny! you ain't goin' to turn in agin, are ye?' "'yes, i are,' responded johnny decidedly. "'why, wot's up, old fellow?' "'i'm sick.' "'how sick?' "'i've got a fevier, and childblains, and roomatiz,' returned johnny, and vanished within. after a moment's pause he added in the dark, apparently from under the bedclothes,--'and biles!' "there was an embarrassing silence. the men looked at each other and at the fire." how graphically in this story are the characters of the old man and his boy johnny indicated by a few strokes of humor and pathos! perhaps this is the greatest charm of humor in literature, namely, that it so easily becomes the vehicle of character. sir roger de coverley and the vicar of wakefield are revealed to us mainly by those humorous touches which display the foibles, the eccentricities, and even the virtues of each. wit, on the other hand, being a purely intellectual quality, is a comparatively uninteresting gift. how small is the part that wit plays in literature! personality is the charm of literature, as it is of life, and humor is always a revelation of personality. the essays of lamb amount almost to an autobiography. goldsmith had humor, congreve wit; and probably that is the main reason why "she stoops to conquer" still holds the stage, whereas the plays of congreve are known only to the scholar. california was steeped in humor, and none but a humorist could have interpreted the lives of the pioneers. they were, in the main, scions of a humorous race. democracy is the mother of humor, and the ideal of both was found in new england and in the western states, whence came the greater part of the california immigration. in passing from new england to the isolated farms of the far west, american humor had undergone some change. the pioneer, struggling with a new country, and often with chills and fever, religious in a gloomy, emotional, old-fashioned way, leading a lonely life, had developed a humor more saturnine than that of new england. yuba bill, in all probability, was an emigrant from what we now call the middle west. upon this new england and western humor as a foundation, california engrafted its own peculiar type of humor, which was the product of youth, courage and energy wrestling with every kind of difficulty and danger. the pioneers had something of the mark tapley spirit, and triumphed over fate by making a jest of the worst that fate could do to them. nothing short of great prosperity could awe the miner into taking a serious view of things. his solemnity after a "strike" was remarkable. in ' and ' a company of miners had toiled fruitlessly for fourteen months, digging into solid rock which, from its situation and from many other indications, had promised to be the hiding-place of gold. at last they abandoned the claim in despair, except that one of their number lingered to remove a big, loose block of porphyry upon which he had long been working. behind that block he found sand and gravel containing gold in such abundance as, eventually, to enrich the whole company. the next day happened to be sunday, and for the first time in those fourteen months they all went to church. a "find" like this was a gift of the gods, something that could not be depended upon. it imposed responsibilities, and suggested thoughts of home. but hardship, adversity, danger and sudden death,--these were all in the day's work, and they could best be endured by making light of them. california humor was, therefore, in one way, the reverse of ordinary american humor. in place of grotesque exaggeration, the california tendency was to minimize. the pioneer was as euphemistic in speaking of death as was the greek or roman of classic times. "to pass in his checks," was the pacific slope equivalent for the more dignified _actum est de me_. this was the phrase, as the reader will remember, that mr. oakhurst immortalized by writing it on the playing card which, affixed to a bowie-knife, served that famous gambler for tombstone and epitaph. he used it in no flippant spirit, but in the sadly humorous spirit of the true californian, as if he were loath to attribute undue importance to the mere fact that the unit of his own life had been forever withdrawn from the sum total of human existence. of this california minimizing humor, frequent also in the pages of mark twain and ambrose bierce, there is an example in bret harte's poem, _cicely_:-- i've had some mighty mean moments afore i kem to this spot,-- lost on the plains in ' , drownded almost and shot; but out on this alkali desert, a-hunting a crazy wife, was r'aly as on-satis-factory as anything in my life. there is another familiar example in these well-known lines by truthful james:-- then abner dean of angels raised a point of order, when a chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen, and he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor, and the subsequent proceedings interested him no more. this was typical california humor, and bret harte, in his stories and poems, more often perhaps in the latter, gave frequent expression to it; but it was not typical bret harte humor. the humor of the passage just quoted from _how santa claus came to simpson's bar_, the humor that made bret harte famous, and still more the humor that made him beloved, was not saturnine or satirical, but sympathetic and tender. it was humor not from an external point of view, but from the victim's point of view. the californians themselves saw persons and events in a different way; and how imperfect their vision was may be gathered from the fact that they stoutly denied the truth of bret harte's descriptions of pioneer life. they were too close at hand, too much a part of the drama themselves, to perceive it correctly. bret harte had the faculty as to which it is hard to say how much is intellectual and how much is emotional, of getting behind the scenes, and beholding men and motives as they really are. that brilliant critic, mr. g. k. chesterton, declares that bret harte was a genuine american, that he was also a genuine humorist, but that he was not an american humorist; and then he proceeds to support this very just antithesis as follows: "american humor is purely exaggerative; bret harte's humor was sympathetic and analytical. the wild, sky-breaking humor of america has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities,--reverence and sympathy. and these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of bret harte's humor. mark twain's story ... about an organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the parable of the prodigal son, and who proceeded to play with great spirit, 'we'll all get blind drunk when johnny comes marching home' is an instance.... if bret harte had described that scene it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the scene. you would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the prodigal son was funny." no excuse need be offered for quoting further what mr. chesterton has to say about the parodies of bret harte, for it covers the whole ground: "the supreme proof of the fact that bret harte had the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist. mere derision, mere contempt, never produced or could produce parody. a man who simply despises paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable imitation of his particular touch on the piano. if a man wishes to parody paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically go through one process first: he must admire it and even reverence it. bret harte had a real power of imitating great authors.... this means and can only mean that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of dumas and victor hugo and charlotte brontë. in his imitation of hugo, bret harte has a passage like this: 'm. madeline was, if possible, better than m. myriel. m. myriel was an angel. m. madeline was a good man.' i do not know whether victor hugo ever used this antithesis; but i am certain that he would have used it and thanked his stars for it, if he had thought of it. this is real parody, inseparable from imitation." the optimism for which bret harte was remarkable had its root in that same sympathy which formed the basis of his humor and pathos. the unsympathetic critic invariably despairs of mankind and the universe. this is apparent in social, moral, and even political matters. a typical reformer, such as the late mr. godkin, gazing horror-struck at tammany and the tammany politician, discerns no hope for the future. but the tammany man himself, knowing the virtues as well as the vices of his people, is optimistic to the point of exuberance. after all, there is something in the human heart, amid all its vileness, which ranges mankind on the side of the angels, not of the devils. the sympathetic critic perceives this, and therefore he has confidence in the future of the race; and may even indulge the supreme hope that from this terrible world we shall pass into another and better state of existence. chapter xix bret harte as a poet whether bret harte will make his appeal to posterity mainly as a poet or as a prose writer is a difficult question, upon which, as upon all similar matters relating to him, the critics have expressed the most diverse opinions. there is perhaps more unevenness in his poetry than in his prose, and certainly more facility in imitating other writers. _cadet grey_ is, in form, almost a parody of "don juan." _the angelus_ might be ascribed to longfellow (though he never could have written that last stanza), _the tale of a pony_ to saxe or barham, a few others to praed, one to campbell, and one to calverley. even that very beautiful poem, _conception de arguello_, a thing almost perfect in its way, strikes no new note. and yet who could forget the picture which it draws of the deserted maiden, grieving,-- until hollows chased the dimples from her cheeks of olive brown, and at times a swift, shy moisture dragged the long sweet lashes down. hardly less pathetic is the description of the grim commander, her father, striving vainly to comfort the maid with "proverbs gathered from afar," until at last ... the voice sententious faltered, and the wisdom it would teach lost itself in fondest trifles of his soft castilian speech; and on "concha," "conchitita," and "conchita," he would dwell with the fond reiteration which the spaniard knows so well. so with proverbs and caresses, half in faith and half in doubt, every day some hope was kindled, flickered, faded, and went out. few, indeed, are the poets who have surpassed the tender simplicity and pathos of these lines; and yet there is nothing very original about them either in form or substance. but there are several poems by bret harte, perhaps half a dozen, which do bear the mark of original genius, and which, from the perfection of their form, seem destined to last forever. the _heathen chinee_, little as bret harte himself thought of it, is certainly one of these. this poem, says mr. james douglas, "is merely an anecdote, an american anecdote, not more deeply humorous than a hundred other american anecdotes. but it is cast in an imperishable mould of style.... mr. swinburne's noble rhythm sang itself into his soul, and he gave it forth again in an incongruously comic theme. the rhythm of a melancholy dirge became the rhythm of duplicity in the garb of innocence. the sadness and the sighing of meleagar became the bland iniquity of ah sin, and the indignantly injured depravity of bill nye. it was a miracle of humorous counterpoint, a marvel of incongruously associated ideas." too much, however, can easily be made of the part played by the metre of the _heathen chinee_. _artemis in sierra_ is as good in its way as the _heathen chinee_, and the very different metre employed in that poem is made equally effective as the vehicle of irony and burlesque. mr. douglas goes on to say that the atalanta metre failed in the poem called _dow's flat_, "because there was no exquisite discord between the sound and the sense, between the rhyme and the reason." but did it fail? let these two specimen stanzas answer:-- for a blow of his pick sorter caved in the side, and he looked and turned sick, then he trembled and cried. for you see the dern cuss had struck--"water?"--beg your parding, young man,--there you lied! it was _gold_,--in the quartz, and it ran all alike; and i reckon five oughts was the worth of that strike; and that house with the coopilow's his'n,--which the same isn't bad for a pike. almost all of bret harte's dialect poems have this same perfection of form, and in the whole range of literature it would be difficult to find any verses which tell so much in so small a compass. the poems are short, the lines are usually short, the words are short; but with the few strokes thus available, the poet paints a picture as complete as it is vivid. the thing is so simple that it seems easy, and yet where shall we find its counterpart? these poems not only please for the moment, but they are read with pleasure over and over again, and year after year. perhaps their most striking quality is their dramatic quality. they tell a story, and often depict a person. truthful james, for example, is known to us only as the narrator of a few startling tales; and yet even by his manner of telling them he gives us a fair notion of his own character. the opening lines of _the spelling bee at angels_ are an example:-- waltz in, waltz in, ye little kids, and gather round my knee, and drop them books and first pot-hooks, and hear a yarn from me. i kin not sling a fairy tale of jinnys fierce and wild, for i hold it is unchristian to deceive a simple child; but as from school yer driftin' by, i thowt ye'd like to hear of a "spelling bee" at angels that we organized last year. as for miss edith, her character is shown in every line. you think it ain't true about ilsey? well, i guess i know girls, and i say there's nothing i see about ilsey to show she likes you, anyway! i know what it means when a girl who has called her cat after one boy goes and changes its name to another's. and she's done it--and i wish you joy! [illustration: the home of "truthful james," jackass flat, tuolumne county, california copyright, century co.] but these dramatic poems of bret harte are surpassed by his lyrical poems,--surpassed, at least, in respect to that moral elevation which lyrical poetry seems to have in comparison with dramatic poetry. lyrical poetry strikes the higher note. it is the fusion in the poet's own experience of thought and feeling;--it is _his_ experience; a first-hand report of one man's impression of the universe. whereas dramatic poetry, with all the splendor of which it is capable, is, after all, only a second-hand report, a representation of what other men have thought or felt, or said or done. not shakspere himself has so elevated mankind, raised his moral standard, or enlarged his conceptions of the universe, as have the great lyrical poets. bret harte cannot, of course, be ranked with these; nor, in saying that his lyrical poems are his best poems, do we necessarily assert for him any high degree of lyrical power. perhaps, indeed, the chief defect in his poetry is an absence of the personal or lyrical element. he gives us exquisite impressions of human character and of nature, but there is little of that brooding, reflective quality, which affords the deepest and most lasting charm of poetry. his poetry lacks atmosphere; it lacks the pensive, religious note. bret harte, one would think, must have been a romantic and imaginative lover, and yet in his poetry there is little, if anything, to indicate that he was ever deeply in love. of romantic devotion to a woman, as to a superior being, we find no trace either in his stories or in his poetry. how far removed from bret harte is that mingled feeling of love and veneration which, originating in the middle ages, has lasted, in poetry at least, almost down to our own time, as in these lines from a writer who was contemporary with bret harte:-- when thy cheek is dewed with tears on some dark day when friends depart, when life before thee seems all fears and all remembrance one long smart, then in the secret sacred cell thy soul keeps for her hour of prayer, breathe but my name, that i may dwell part of thy worship alway there. bret harte was cast in a different mould. no doubts or fears distracted him. so far as we know, he asked no questions about the universe, and troubled himself very little about the destiny of mankind. he was essentially unreligious, unphilosophic, true to his own instincts, but indifferent to all matters that lay beyond them. and yet within that range he had a depth and sincerity of feeling which issued in real poetry. bret harte, with all the refinement, love of elegance, reserve and self-restraint which characterized him, was a very natural man. he possessed in full degree what one philosopher has called the primeval instincts of pity, of pride, of pugnacity. he loved his fellow-man, he loved his country, he loved nature, and these passions, curbed by that unerring sense of artistic form and clothed in that beauty of style which belonged to him, were expressed in a few poems that seem likely to last forever. it was not often that he felt the necessary stimulus, but when he did feel it, the response was sure. of these immortal poems, if we may make bold to call them such, probably the best known is that on the death of dickens. this is the last stanza:-- and on that grave where english oak and holly and laurel wreaths entwine, deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, this spray of western pine![ ] still better is the poem on the death of starr king. it is very short; let us have it before us. relieving guard thomas starr king. obiit march , . came the relief. "what, sentry, ho! how passed the night through thy long waking?" "cold, cheerless, dark,--as may befit the hour before the dawn is breaking." "no sight? no sound?" "no; nothing save the plover from the marshes calling, and in yon western sky, about an hour ago, a star was falling." "a star? there's nothing strange in that." "no, nothing; but above the thicket, somehow it seemed to me that god somewhere had just relieved a picket." what impresses the reader most, or at least first, in this poem is its extreme conciseness and simplicity. the words are so few, and the weight of suggestion which they have to carry so heavy, that the misuse of a single word,--a single word not in perfect taste, would have spoiled the beauty of the whole. long years ago the "saturday review"--the good old, ferocious saturday--sagely remarked: "it is not given to every one to be simple"; and only genius could have achieved the simplicity of this short poem. "the relief came" would have been prose. "came the relief" is poetry, not merely because the arrangement of the words is unusual, but because this short inverted sentence strikes a note of abruptness and intensity which prepares the reader for what is to come, and which is maintained throughout the poem;--had it not so been maintained, an anti-climax would have resulted. moreover, short and simple as this poem is, it seems to contain three distinct strands of feeling. there is, first, the personal feeling for thomas starr king; and although he was a minister and not a soldier, there is a suitability in connecting him with the picket, for, as we have seen, it was owing to him, more than to any other man, that california was saved to the union in the civil war. secondly, there is the national patriotic feeling which forms the strong under-current of the poem, nowhere expressed, but unmistakably implied, and present in the minds of both poet and reader. possibly, we may even find in "the hour before the dawn" an allusion to the period when mr. king died and the poem was written; for that was the final desperate period of the war, darkened by a terrible expenditure of human life and suffering, and lightened only by a prospect of the end then slowly but surely coming into view. thirdly, there is the feeling for nature which the poem exhibits in its firm though scanty etching of the sombre night, the lonely marshes, and the distant sky. the poem is a blending of these three feelings, each one enhancing the other;--and even this does not complete the tale, for there is the final suggestion that the death of a man may be of as much consequence in the mind of the creator, and as nicely calculated, as the falling of a star. the truth is that bret harte's national poems, with which this tribute to starr king may properly be classed, have a depth of personal feeling not often found elsewhere in his poetry. in common with all men of primitive impulses, he was genuinely patriotic. "america was always 'my country' with him," writes one who knew him in england; "and i remember how he flushed with almost boyish pleasure when, in driving through some casual rural festivities, his quick eye noted a stray american flag among the display of bunting." this patriotic feeling gave to his national poems the true lyrical note. among the best of these is that stirring song of the drum, called _the reveille_, which was read at a crowded meeting held in the san francisco opera house immediately after president lincoln had called for one hundred thousand volunteers. in this poem the student of american history, and especially the foreign student, will find an expression of that national feeling which animated the northern people, and which sanctified the horrors of the civil war,--one of the few wars recorded in history that was waged for a pure ideal,--the ideal of the union. with these poems may be classed some stanzas from _cadet grey_ describing the life of the west point cadet, and this one in particular:-- within the camp they lie, the young, the brave, half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame, pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave; bred to fear nothing but reproach and blame, ascetic dandies o'er whom vestals rave, clean-limbed young spartans, disciplined young elves, taught to destroy, that they may live to save, students embattled, soldiers at their shelves, heroes whose conquests are at first themselves. it has been said that one function of literature, and especially of poetry, is to enable a nation to understand and appreciate, and thus more completely to realize, the ideals which it has instinctively formed; and in the lines just quoted bret harte has done this for west point. the poem on san francisco glows with patriotic and civic feeling, and it expressed a sentiment which, at the time when it was written, hardly anybody in the city, except the poet himself, entertained. san francisco in was dominated by that cold, hard, self-satisfied, commercial spirit which bret harte especially hated, and which furnished one reason, perhaps the main reason, for his departure from the state. drop down, o fleecy fog, and hide her sceptic sneer and all her pride! wrap her, o fog, in gown and hood of her franciscan brotherhood. hide me her faults, her sin and blame; with thy gray mantle cloak her shame! and yet it was impossible for bret harte, with his deep, abiding faith in the good instincts of mankind, not to look forward to a better day for san francisco, when art shall raise and culture lift the sensual joys and meaner thrift, and all fulfilled the vision we who watch and wait shall never see. there is also a strong lyrical element in bret harte's treatment of nature in his poetry, as well as in his prose. what he always gives is his own impression of the scene, not a mere description of it, although this impression may be conveyed by a few slight touches, sometimes even by a single word. the opening stanza of the poem on the death of dickens is an illustration:-- above the pines the moon was slowly drifting, the river sang below; the dim sierras, far beyond, uplifting their minarets of snow. ruskin somewhere analyzes the difference between real poetry and prose in a versified form, and quoting a few lines from byron, he points out the single word in them which makes the passage poetic. in the lines just quoted from bret harte, the word "sang" has the same poetic quality; and no one who has ever heard the sound which the poet here describes can fail to recognize the truth of his metaphor.[ ] this is always bret harte's method. he reproduces the emotional effect of the scene upon himself, and thus exhibits nature to the reader as she appeared to him. emotion, it need not be said, is transmitted much more effectively than ideas or information. in fact, an objective, detailed description of a landscape, however accurate or exhaustive, will leave the reader almost as it found him; whereas a single word which enables him to share the emotion inspired by the scene in the breast of the writer will transport him at a bound to the spot itself. the charm of life in california consisted largely in this, that it was lived in the open air. it was almost a perpetual camping out, made delightful by the mildness of the climate and the beauty of the surroundings. even the cheerful fires of pine or of scrub oak which burn so frequently in the cabins of bret harte's miners, are kindled mainly to offset the dampness of the rainy season; and though the fire blazes merrily on the hearth the door of the hut is usually open. the reader knows how "union mills" indolently left one leg exposed to the rain on the outside of the threshold, the rest of his body being under cover inside. bret harte in his poems and stories availed himself of this out-door life to the fullest extent. when the rose of tuolumne was summoned from her bedroom, at two o'clock in the morning, to entertain her father's guest, the youthful poet, she met him, not in the stuffy sitting-room of the house, but in the moonlight outside, with the snow-crowned sierras dimly visible in the distance, and "quaint odors from the woods near by perfuming the warm, still air." the young englishman, mainwaring, and louise macy, the phyllis of the sierras, could not help being confidential sitting in the moonlight on that unique veranda which overhung the great cañon, two thousand feet deep, as many wide, and lined with tall trees, dark and motionless in the distance. if the outcasts of poker flat had met their fate in ordinary surroundings, victims either of the machinery of the law or of man's violence, we should think of them only as criminals; but with nature herself as their executioner, and the scene of their death that remote, wooded amphitheatre in the mountains, they regain their lost dignity as human beings. how vast is the difference between john oakhurst shooting himself in a bedroom at some second-class hotel, and performing the same act at the head of a snow-covered ravine and beneath the lofty pine tree to which he affixed the playing card that contained his epitaph! in _tennessee's partner_, the whole tragedy is transacted in the open air, excepting the trial scene; and even the little upper room which serves as a court house for the lynching party is hardly a screen from the landscape. "against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft above the express office stood out staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of tennessee. and above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars." nature, thank god, does not share our emotions, and, so far as we know, is swayed by no emotions of her own. but she inspires certain emotions in us, and is a visible, tangible representation of strength and serenity. those who delight in nature are a long way from regarding her as they would a brick or a stone. a certain pantheism, such as wordsworth was accused of, can be attributed to everybody who loves the landscape. there is a mystery in the beautiful inanimate world, as there is in every other phase of the universe. "a forest," said thoreau, "is in all mythologies a sacred place"; and it must ever remain such. let anybody wander alone upon some mountain-side or hilltop, and watch the wind blowing through the scanty, unmown grass, and it will be strange if the vague consciousness of some presence other than his own does not insinuate itself into his mind. he will begin to understand how it was that the ancients peopled every bush and stream with nymphs or deities. richard jeffries went even further than wordsworth. "though i cannot name the ideal good," he wrote, "it seems to me that it will be in some way closely associated with the ideal beauty of nature." bret harte did not trouble himself much about the ideal good; but he had in full degree the modern feeling for nature, and found in her a mysterious charm and solace,--"that profound peace," to use his own language, "which the mountains alone can give their lonely or perturbed children." in one of the stories, _uncle jim and uncle billy_, he describes the unlucky and unhappy miner going to the door of his cabin at midnight. "in the feverish state into which he had gradually worked himself it seemed to him impossible to await the coming of the dawn. but he was mistaken. for even as he stood there all nature seemed to invade his humble cabin with its free and fragrant breath, and invest him with its great companionship. he felt again, in that breath, that strange sense of freedom, that mystic touch of partnership with the birds and beasts, the shrubs and trees, in this greater home before him. it was this vague communion that had kept him there, that still held these world-sick, weary workers in their rude cabins on the slopes around him; and he felt upon his brow that balm that had nightly lulled him and them to sleep and forgetfulness. he closed the door, crept into his bunk, and presently fell into a profound slumber." this kind of communion with nature depends upon a certain degree of solitude, and the mere suggestion of a crowd puts it to flight at once. even the magnificence of the swiss mountains is almost spoiled for the real lover of nature by those surroundings from which only the skilled mountain-climber is able to escape. mere solitude, on the other hand, provided that it be out of doors, is almost always beautiful and certainly beneficent in itself. he who lives in a desert or in a wood, on a mountain top, like the twins of table mountain, or in an unpeopled prairie, may have many faults and vices, but there are some from which he will certainly be free. he will be serene and simple, if nothing more. "it is impossible," as thomas hardy remarks, "for any one living upon a heath to be vulgar"; and the reason is obvious. vulgarity, as we all know, is merely a form of insincerity. to be vulgar is to say and do things not naturally and out of one's own head, but in the attempt to be or to appear something different from the reality. there can be no vulgarity on the heath, on the farm, or in the mining camp, for there everybody's character and circumstances are known; there is no opportunity for deceit, and there is no motive for pretence. moreover, the primitive simplicity of the mining and the logging camp, or even that of an isolated farming community, is not essentially different from the cultivated simplicity of the aristocrat. the laboring man and the aristocrat have very much the same sense of honor and the same ideals; and those writers who are at home with one are almost always at home with the other. sir walter scott and tolstoi are examples. but between these two extremes, which meet at many points, comes the citified, trading, clerking class, which has lost its primitive, manly instincts, and has not yet regained them in the chastened form of convictions. it is no exaggeration to say that the society which bret harte enjoyed in london was more akin to that of the mining camp than to that of san francisco. in both cases the charm which attracted him was the charm of simplicity; in the mining camp, the simplicity of nature, in london the simplicity of cultivation and finish. chapter xx bret harte's pioneer dialect occasionally bret harte uses an archaic word, not because it is archaic, but because it expresses his meaning better than any other, or gives the needed stimulus to the imagination of the reader. thus, in _a first family of tasajara_ we read that "the former daughters of sion were there, _burgeoning_ and expanding in the glare of their new prosperity with silver and gold." often, of course, the employment of an archaic expression confers upon the speaker that air of quaintness which the author wishes to convey. johnson's old woman, for example, "'lowed she'd use a doctor, ef i'd fetch him." the verb to _use_, in this sense, may still be heard in some parts of new england as well as in the west. "i never use sugar in my tea" is a familiar example. many other words which bret harte's pioneer people employ are still in service among old-fashioned country folk, although they have long since passed out of literature, and are never heard in cities. thus salomy jane was accused by her father of "honeyfoglin' with a hoss-thief"; and the blacksmith's small boy spoke of louise macy as "philanderin'" with captain greyson. these good old english words are still used in the west and south. in the same category is "'twixt" for between. dick spindler spoke of "this yer peace and good-will 'twixt man and man." "far" in the sense of distant is another example: "the far barn near the boundary." "mannerly" in the sense of well-mannered has the authority of shakspere and of abner nott in _a ship of ' _. one of bret harte's western girls speaks of hunting for the plant known as "old man" (southernwood), because she wanted it for "smellidge." "smellidge" has the appearance of being a good word, and it was formerly used in new england and the west, but it is excluded from modern dictionaries. some expressions which might be regarded as original with bret harte were really pioneer terms of western or southern use. "johnson's old woman," for "johnson's wife" was the ordinary phrase in missouri, indiana, alabama, and doubtless all over the west and south. thus a missouri farmer is quoted as saying: "my old woman is nineteen years old to-day." "you know fust-rate she's dead" is another quaint expression used by bret harte, but not invented by him, for this use of "fust-rate" in the sense of very well was not uncommon in the west. in the poem called _jim_, there are two or three words which the casual reader might suppose to be inventions of the poet. what makes you star', you over thar? can't a man drop 's glass in yer shop but you must r'ar? this use of r'ar or rear, meaning to become angry, to rave, was frequent in arkansas and indiana, if not elsewhere. the next stanza runs:-- dead! poor--little--jim! why, thar was me, jones, and bob lee, harry and ben,-- no-account men: then to take _him_! "no-account" in this sense was a common western term; and so was "ornery," from ordinary, meaning inferior, which occurs in the next and final stanza. when richelieu sharpe excused himself for wearing his best "pants" on the ground that his old ones had "fetched away in the laig," he was amply justified by the dialect of his place and time. so when little johnny medliker complained of the parson that "he hez been nigh onter pullin' off my arm," he used the current illinois equivalent for "nearly." mr. hays' direction to his daughter, "ye kin put some things in my carpet-bag agin the time when the sled comes round," was also strictly in the vernacular. no verbal error is more common than that of using superfluous prepositions. "to feed up the horses," for instance, may still be heard almost anywhere in rural new england. on the same principle, mr. saunders, in _the transformation of buckeye camp_, ruefully admits that he and his companion were thrown out of the saloon, "with two shots into us, like hounds ez we were." this substitution of into for in, though common in the west, is probably now extinct in the eastern states; but a purist, writing in the year , quoted the following use as current at that time in new york: "i have the rheumatism into my knees." a few words were taken by the pioneers from the spanish. "savey," a corruption of _sabe_, was one of these, and bret harte employed it. "hedn't no savey, hed briggs." the wealth of dialect in bret harte's stories is not strange, considering that it was culled from pioneers who represented every part of the country. but, it may be asked, how could there be such a thing as a california dialect:--all the pioneers could not have learned to talk alike, coming as they did from every state in the union! the answer is, first, that, in the main, the dialect of the different states was the same, being derived chiefly from the same source, that is, from england, directly or indirectly; and, secondly, the dialect of what we now call the middle west--of missouri, indiana, ohio, and illinois--tended to predominate on the pacific slope, because the pioneers from that part of the country were in the majority. it is almost impossible to find a dialect word used in one western state, and not in another. there are, however, some western, and more especially some southern words which never became domiciled in new england. the word allow or 'low, in the sense of declare or state, is one of these, and bret harte often used it. "then she _'lowed_ i'd better git up and git, and shet the door to. then i _'lowed_ she might tell me what was up--through the door." and here is another example:-- "rowley meade--him ez hed his skelp pulled over his eyes at one stroke, foolin' with a she-bear over on black mountain--_allows_ it would be rather monotonous in him attemptin' any familiarities with her." ("rowley meade," by the way, is an example of bret harte's felicity in the choice of names. no common fate could be reserved for one bearing a name like that.) lowell employs the word allow in its corrupted sense in the "biglow papers"; but he adds in a footnote that it was a use not of new england, but of the southern and middle states; and to prove the antiquity of the corruption he cites an instance of it in hakluyt under the date of . "cahoots" is another example. when the warlike jim hooker said to clarence, "young fel, you and me are cahoots in this thing," he was using a common western expression derived remotely from the old english word cahoot, signifying a company or partnership, but not known, it is believed, in new england. "when we rose the hill," "put to" (_i. e._ harness) the horse, "cavortin' round here in the dew," and "what yer yawpin' at ther'?" are found in almost every state, east or west. but "i ain't kicked a fut sens i left mizzouri" is a southern expression. "blue mange" for _blanc mange_ is probably original with bret harte. one of bret harte's most effective dialect words is "gait" in the sense of habit, or manner. "he never sat down to a square meal but what he said, 'if old uncle quince was only here now, boys, i'd die happy.' i leave it to you, gentlemen, if that wasn't jackson wells's gait all the time." and rupert filgee, impatient at uncle ben dabney's destructive use of pens, exclaimed, "look here, what you want ain't a pen, but a clothes-pin and split nail! that'll about jibe with your dilikit gait." "gait" is a very old term in thieves' lingo, meaning occupation or calling, from which the transition to "habit" is easy; and it is interesting to observe that in one place bret harte uses the word in a sense which is about half-way between the two meanings. thus, when mr. mckinstry was severely wounded in the duel, he apologized for requesting the attendance of a physician by saying, "i don't gin'rally use a doctor, but this yer is suthin' outside the old woman's regular gait." bret harte's adoption of the word as a pioneer expression is confirmed by richard malcolm johnston, the recognized authority on georgia dialect, for he makes one of his characters say:-- "after she got married, seem like he got more and more restless and fidgety in his mind, and in his gaits in general." the ridiculous charge has been made that bret harte's dialect is not californian or even american, but is simply cockney english. the only reason ever given for this statement is that bret harte uses the word "which" in its cockney sense, and that this use was never known in america. which i wish to remark, and my language is plain, is the most familiar instance, and others might be cited. thus, in _mr. thompson's prodigal_ we have this dialogue between the father of the prodigal and a grave-digger:-- "'did you ever in your profession come across char-les thompson?' "'thompson be damned,' said the grave-digger, with great directness. "'which, if he hadn't religion, i think he is,' responded the old man." this use of "which" is indeed now identified with the london cockney, but it may still be heard in the eastern counties of england, whence, no doubt, it was imported to this country. though far from common in the united states, it is used, according to the authorities cited below, in the mountainous parts of virginia,[ ] in west virginia,[ ] in the mountain regions of kentucky,[ ] especially in eastern kentucky,[ ] and in the western part of arkansas.[ ] professor edward a. allen of the university of missouri says that this use of "which" is "not southern, but western." moreover, upon this point also we can cite the authority of richard malcolm johnston, for the cockney use of "which" frequently occurs in his tales of middle georgia; as, for instance, in these sentences:-- "and which i wouldn't have done that nohow in the world ef it could be hendered." "which a man like you that's got no wife." "howbeever, as your wife is nancy lary, which that she's the own dear sister o' my wife." "and which i haven't a single jubous doubt that, soon as the breath got out o' her body, she went to mansion _in_ the sky same as a bow-'n'-arrer, or even a rifle-bullet." another authority on this point is the well-known writer of stories, alfred henry lewis, a native of arkansas. in his tales we find these expressions:-- "which his baptismal name is lafe." "which if these is your manners." "which, undoubted, the barkeeps is the hardest-worked folks in camp." "which it is some late for night before last, but it's jest the shank of the evening for to-night." no writer ever knew virginia better than did the late george w. bagby, and he attributes the cockney "which" to a backwoodsman from charlotte county in that state. "and what is this part of the country called? has it any particular name?" "to be sho. right here is brilses, _which_ it is a presink; but this here ridge ar' called 'verjunce ridge.'" mark twain's authority on a matter of western dialect will hardly be questioned, and this same use of "which" is not infrequent in his stories. here, for instance, is an example from "tom sawyer": "we said it was parson silas, and we judged he had found sam cooper drunk in the road, which he was always trying to reform him." finally, that well-known pioneer, mr. warren cheney, an early contributor to the "overland," testifies that "which" as thus used "is perfectly good pike."[ ] the rather astonishing fact is that bret harte uses dialect words and phrases to the number, roughly estimated, of three hundred, and a hasty investigation has served to identify all but a few of these as legitimate pioneer expressions. a more thorough search would no doubt account satisfactorily for every one of them. however, that dialect should be authentic is not so important as that it should be interesting. many story-writers report dialect in a correct and conscientious form, but it wearies the reader. dialect to be interesting must be the vehicle of humor, and the great masters of dialect, such as thackeray and sir walter scott, are also masters of humor. bret harte had the same gift, and he showed it, as we have seen, not only in pioneer speech, but also in the spanish-american dialect of enriquez saltello and his charming sister, in the scotch dialect of mr. callender, in the french dialect of the innkeeper who entertained alkali dick, and in the german dialect of peter schroeder. for one thing, a too exact reproduction of dialect almost always has a misleading and awkward effect. the written word is not the same as the spoken word, and the constant repetition of a sound which would hardly be noticed in speech becomes unduly prominent and wearisome if put before our eyes in print. in the following passage it will be seen how bret harte avoids the too frequent occurrence of "ye" (which tinka gallinger probably used) by alternating it with "you":-- "'no! no! ye shan't go--ye mustn't go,' she said, with hysterical intensity. 'i want to tell ye something! listen!--you--you--mr. fleming! i've been a wicked, wicked girl! i've told lies to dad--to mammy--to you! i've borne false witness--i'm worse than sapphira--i've acted a big lie. oh, mr. fleming, i've made you come back here for nothing! ye didn't find no gold the other day. there wasn't any. it was all me! i--i--_salted that pan_!'" bret harte's writings offer a wide field for the study of what might be called the psychological aspect of dialect, especially so far as it relates to pronunciation. what governs the dialect of any time and place? is it purely accidental that the london cockney says "piper" instead of paper, and that the western pioneer says "b'ar" for bear,--or does some inner necessity determine, or partly determine, these departures from the standard pronunciation? this, however, is a subject which lies far beyond our present scope. suffice it to say that it would be difficult to convince the reader of bret harte that there is not some inevitable harmony between his characters and the dialect or other language which they employ. who, for example, would hesitate to assign to yuba bill, and to none other, this remark: "i knew the partikler style of damn fool that you was, and expected no better." chapter xxi bret harte's style in discussing bret harte, it is almost impossible to separate substance from style. the style is so good, so exactly adapted to the ideas which he wishes to convey, that one can hardly imagine it as different. some thousands of years ago an eastern sage remarked that he would like to write a book such as everybody would conceive that he might have written himself, and yet so good that nobody else could have written the like. this is the ideal which bret harte fulfilled. almost everything said by any one of his characters is so accurate an expression of that character as to seem inevitable. it is felt at once to be just what such a character must have said. given the character, the words follow; and anybody could set them down! this is the fallacy underlying that strange feeling, which every reader must have experienced, of the apparent easiness of writing an especially good conversation or soliloquy. the real difficulty of writing like bret harte is shown by the fact that as a story-teller he has no imitators. his style is so individual as to make imitation impossible. and yet occasionally the inspiration failed. it is a peculiarity of bret harte, shown especially in the longer stories, and most of all perhaps in _gabriel conroy_, that there are times when the reader almost believes that bret harte has dropped the pen, and some inferior person has taken it up. author and reader come to the ground with a thud. mr. warren cheney has remarked upon this defect as follows:-- "with most authors there is a level of general excellence along which they can plod if the wings of genius chance to tire for a time; but with mr. harte the case is a different one. his powers are impulsive rather than enduring. ideas strike him with extraordinary force, but the inspiration is of equally short duration. so long as the flush of excitement lasts, his work will be up to standard; but when the genius flags, he has no individual fund of dramatic or narrative properties to sustain him." but of these lapses there are few in the short stories, and none at all in the best stories. in them the style is almost flawless. there are no mannerisms in it; no affectations; no egotism; no slang (except, of course, in the mouths of the various characters); nothing local or provincial, nothing which stamps it as of a particular age, country or school,--nothing, in short, which could operate as a barrier between author and reader. but these are only negative virtues. what are the positive virtues of bret harte's style? perhaps the most obvious quality is the deep feeling which pervades it. it is possible, indeed, to have good style without depth of feeling. john stuart mill is an example; lord chesterfield is another; benjamin franklin another. in general, however, want of feeling in the author produces a coldness in the style that chills the reader. herbert spencer's autobiography discloses an almost inhuman want of feeling, and the same effect is apparent in his dreary, frigid style. on the other hand, it is a truism that the language of passion is invariably effective, and never vulgar. grief and anger are always eloquent. there are men, even practised authors, who never write really well unless something has occurred to put them out of temper. good style may perhaps be said to result from the union of deep feeling with an artistic sense of form. this produces that conciseness for which bret harte's style is remarkable. what author has used shorter words, has expressed more with a few words, or has elaborated so little! his points are made with the precision of a bullet going straight to the mark, and nothing is added. how effective, for example, is this dialogue between helen maynard, who has just met the one-armed painter for the first time, and the french girl who accompanies her: "'so you have made a conquest of the recently acquired but unknown greek statue?' said mademoiselle renée lightly. "'it is a countryman of mine,' said helen simply. "'he certainly does not speak french,' said mademoiselle mischievously. "'nor think it,' responded helen, with equal vivacity." possibly bret harte sometimes carries this dramatic conciseness a little too far,--so far that the reader's attention is drawn from the matter in hand to the manner in which it is expressed. to take an example, _johnson's old woman_ ends as follows:-- "'i want to talk to you about miss johnson,' i said eagerly. "'i reckon so,' he said with an exasperating smile. 'most fellers do. but she ain't _miss_ johnson no more. she's married.' "'not to that big chap over from ten mile mills?' i said breathlessly. "'what's the matter with _him_,' said johnson. 'ye didn't expect her to marry a nobleman, did ye?' "i said i didn't see why she shouldn't,--and believed that she _had_." this is extremely clever, but perhaps its very cleverness, and its abruptness, divert the reader's interest for a moment from the story to the person who tells it. one other characteristic of bret harte's style, and indeed of any style which ranks with the best, is obvious, and that is subtlety. it is the office of a good style to express in some indefinable manner those _nuances_ which mere words, taken by themselves, are not fine enough to convey. thoughts so subtle as to have almost the character of feelings; feelings so well defined as just to escape being thoughts; attractions and repulsions; those obscure movements of the intellect of which the ordinary man is only half conscious until they are revealed to him by the eye of genius;--all these things it is a part of style to express, or at least to imply. subtlety of style presupposes, of course, subtlety of thought, and possibly also subtlety of perception. certainly bret harte had both of these capacities; and many examples might be cited of his minute and sympathetic observation. for instance, although he had no knowledge of horses, and occasionally betrays his ignorance in this respect, yet he has described the peculiar gait of the american trotter with an accuracy which any technical person might envy. "the driver leaned forward and did something with the reins--rose never could clearly understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to _lengthen herself_ and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into one long, continuous, shimmering green hedge. so perfect was the mare's action that the girl was scarcely conscious of any increased effort.... so superb was the reach of her long, easy stride that rose could scarcely see any undulations in the brown, shining back on which she could have placed her foot, nor felt the soft beat of the delicate hoofs that took the dust so firmly and yet so lightly."[ ] equally correct is the description of the "great, yellow mare" jovita, that carried dick bullen on his midnight ride:[ ] "from her roman nose to her rising haunches, from her arched spine hidden by the stiff _manchillas_ of a mexican saddle, to her thick, straight bony legs, there was not a line of equine grace. in her half-blind but wholly vicious white eyes, in her protruding under lip, in her monstrous color, there was nothing but ugliness and vice." jovita, plainly, was drawn from life, and she must have been of thoroughbred blood on one side, for her extraordinary energy and temper could have been derived from no other source. such a mare would naturally have an unusually straight hind leg; and bret harte noticed it. as to his heroines, he had such a faculty of describing them that they stand before us almost as clearly as if we saw them in the flesh. he does not simply tell us that they are beautiful,--we see for ourselves that they are so; and one reason for this is the sympathetic keenness with which he observed all the details of the human face and figure. thus julia porter's face "appeared whiter at the angles of the mouth and nose through the relief of tiny freckles like grains of pepper." there are subtleties of coloring that have escaped almost everybody else. who but bret harte has really described the light which love kindles upon the face of a woman? "yerba buena's strangely delicate complexion had taken on itself that faint alpine glow that was more of an illumination than a color." and so of cressy, as the schoolmaster saw her at the dance. "she was pale, he had never seen her so beautiful.... the absence of color in her usually fresh face had been replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual. he could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw." the forehead, the temples, and more especially the eyebrows of his heroines--these and the part which they play in the expression of emotion, are described by bret harte with a particularity which cannot be found elsewhere. even the eyelashes of his heroines are often carefully painted in the picture. flora dimwood "cast a sidelong glance" at the hero, "under her widely-spaced, heavy lashes." of mrs. brimmer, the fastidious boston woman, it is said that "a certain nervous intensity occasionally lit up her weary eyes with a dangerous phosphorescence, under their brown fringes." the eyes and eyelashes of that irrepressible child, sarah walker, are thus minutely and pathetically described: "her eyes were of a dark shade of burnished copper,--the orbits appearing deeper and larger from the rubbing in of habitual tears from long wet lashes." bret harte has the rare faculty of making even a tearful woman attractive. the ward of the golden gate "drew back a step, lifted her head with a quick toss that seemed to condense the moisture in her shining eyes, and sent what might have been a glittering dewdrop flying into the loosened tendrils of her hair." the quick-tempered heroine is seen "hurriedly disentangling two stinging tears from her long lashes"; and even the mannish girl, julia porter, becomes femininely deliquescent as she leans back in the dark stage-coach, with the romantic cass beard gazing at her from his invisible corner. "how much softer her face looked in the moonlight!--how moist her eyes were--actually shining in the light! how that light seemed to concentrate in the corner of the lashes, and then slipped--flash--away! was she? yes, she was crying." there is great subtlety not only of perception but of thought in the description of the two americans at the beginning of their intimacy:-- "oddly enough, their mere presence and companionship seemed to excite in others that tenderness they had not yet felt themselves. family groups watched the handsome pair in their innocent confidence and, with french exuberant recognition of sentiment, thought them the incarnation of love. something in their manifest equality of condition kept even the vainest and most susceptible of spectators from attempted rivalry or cynical interruption. and when at last they dropped side by side on a sun-warmed stone bench on the terrace, and helen, inclining her brown head toward her companion, informed him of the difficulty she had experienced in getting gumbo soup, rice and chicken, corn cakes, or any of her favorite home dishes in paris, an exhausted but gallant boulevardier rose from a contiguous bench, and, politely lifting his hat to the handsome couple, turned slowly away from what he believed were tender confidences he would not permit himself to hear." without this subtlety, a writer may have force, even eloquence, as johnson and macaulay had those qualities, but he is not likely to have an enduring charm. subtlety seems to be the note of the best modern writers, of the oxford school in particular, a subtlety of language which extracts from every word its utmost nicety of meaning, and a subtlety of thought in which every faculty is on the alert to seize any qualification or limitation, any hint or suggestion that might be hovering obscurely about the subject. yet subtlety, more perhaps than any other quality of a good style, easily becomes a defect. if it is the forte of some writers, it is the foible, not to say the vice, of others. the later works of henry james, for instance, will at once occur to the reader as an example. bret harte himself is sometimes, but rarely, over-subtle, representing his characters as going through processes of thought or speech much too elaborate for them, or for the occasion. there is an example of this in _susy_, where clarence says: "'if i did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet woman, i should believe you were trying to insult me as you have your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both in _her_ house by leaving it now and forever.'" and again, in _a secret of telegraph hill_, where herbert bly says to the gambler whom he has surprised in his room, hiding from the vigilance committee: "'whoever you may be, i am neither the police nor a spy. you have no right to insult me by supposing that i would profit by a mistake that made you my guest, and that i would refuse you the sanctuary of the roof that covers your insult as well as your blunder.'" and yet the speaker is not meant to be a prig. there is another characteristic of bret harte's style which should perhaps be regarded as a form of subtlety, and that is the surprising resources of his vocabulary. he seems to have gathered all the words and idioms that might become of service to him, and to have stored them in his memory for future use. if a peculiar or technical expression was needed, he always had it at hand. thus when the remorseful joe corbin told colonel starbottle about his sending money to the widow of the man whom he had killed in self-defence, the colonel's apt comment was, "a kind of expiation or amercement of fine, known to the mosaic, roman and old english law." and yet his reading never took a wide range. his large vocabulary was due partly, no doubt, to an excellent memory, but still more to his keen appreciation of delicate shades in the meaning of words. he had a remarkable gift of choosing the right word. in the following lines, for example, the whole effect depends upon the discriminating selection of the verbs and adjectives:-- bunny, thrilled by unknown fears, raised his soft and pointed ears, mumbled his prehensile lip, quivered his pulsating hip. depth of feeling, subtlety of perception and intellect,--these qualities, supplemented by the sense of form and beauty, go far to account for the charm of bret harte's style. he had an ear for style, just as some persons have an ear for music; and he could extract beauty from language just as the musician can extract it from the strings of a violin. this kind of beauty is, in one sense, a matter of mere sound; and yet it is really much more than that. "words, even the most perfect, owe very much to the spiritual cadence with which they are imbued."[ ] a musical sentence, made up of words harmoniously chosen, and of sub-sentences nicely balanced, must necessarily deepen, soften, heighten, or otherwise modify the bare meaning of the words. in fact, it clothes them with that kind and degree of feeling which, as the writer consciously or unconsciously perceives, will best further his intention. style, in short, is a substitute for speech, the author giving through the medium of his style the same emotional and personal color to his thoughts which the orator conveys by the tone and inflections of his voice. hence the saying that the style is the man. if we were looking for an example of mere beauty in style, perhaps we could find nothing better than this description of maruja, after parting from her lover: "small wonder that, hidden and silent in her enwrappings, as she lay back in the carriage, with her pale face against the cold, starry sky, two other stars came out and glistened and trembled on her passion-fringed lashes." no less beautiful in style are these lines:-- above the tumult of the cañon lifted, the gray hawk breathless hung, or on the hill a winged shadow drifted where furze and thorn-bush clung.[ ] and yet, so exact is the correspondence between thought and word here, that we find ourselves doubting whether the charm of the passage lies in its form, or in the mere idea conveyed to the reader with the least possible interposition of language; and yet, again, to raise that very doubt may be the supreme effect of a consummate style. bret harte was sometimes a little careless in his style, careless, that is, in the way of writing obscurely or ungrammatically, but very seldom so careless as to write in a dull or unmusical fashion. to find a harsh sentence anywhere in his works would be almost, if not quite, impossible. a leading english review once remarked, "it was never among mr. bret harte's accomplishments to labor cheerfully with the file"; and again, a few years later, "mr. harte can never be accused of carelessness." neither statement was quite correct, but the second one comes very much nearer the truth than the first. beside these occasional lapses in the construction of his sentences, bret harte had some peculiarities in the use of english to which he clung, either out of loyalty to dickens, from whom he seems to have derived them, or from a certain amiable perversity which was part of his character. he was a strong partisan of the "split infinitive." a chinaman "caused the gold piece and the letter to instantly vanish up his sleeve." "to coldly interest price"; "to unpleasantly discord with the general social harmony"; "to quietly reappear," are other examples. the wrong use of "gratuitous" is a thoroughly dickens error, and it almost seems as if bret harte went out of his way to copy it. in the story of _miggles_, for example, it is only a few paragraphs after yuba bill has observed the paralytic jim's "expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity," that his own features "relax into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness." "aggravation" in the sense of irritation is another dickens solecism which also appears several times in bret harte. beside these, bret harte had a few errors all his own. in _the story of a mine_, there is a strangely repeated use of the awkward expression "near facts," followed by a statement that the new private secretary was a little dashed as to his "near hopes." diligent search reveals also "continued on" in one story, "different to" in another, "plead" for "pleaded," "who would likely spy upon you" in an unfortunate place, and "too occupied with his subject" somewhere else. this short list will very nearly exhaust bret harte's errors in the use of english; but it must be admitted, also, that he occasionally lapses into a dickens-like grandiloquence and cant of superior virtue. there are several examples of this in _the story of a mine_, especially in that part which relates to the city of washington. the following paragraph is almost a burlesque of dickens: "the actors, the legislators themselves, knew it and laughed at it; the commentators, the press, knew it and laughed at it; the audience, the great american people, knew it and laughed at it. and nobody for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circumstances, might be different." still worse is this description of the supreme court, which might serve as a model of confused ideas and crude reasoning, only half believed in by the writer himself: "a body of learned, cultivated men, representing the highest legal tribunal in the land, still lingered in a vague idea of earning the scant salary bestowed upon them by the economical founders of the government, and listened patiently to the arguments of counsel, whose fees for advocacy of the claims before them would have paid the life income of half the bench." that exquisite sketch, _wan lee, the pagan_, is marred by this dickens-like apostrophe to the clergy: "dead, my reverend friends, dead! stoned to death in the streets of san francisco, in the year of grace, eighteen hundred and sixty-nine, by a mob of half-grown boys and christian school-children!" in the description of an english country church, which occurs in _a phyllis of the sierras_, we find another passage almost worthy of a "condensed novel" in which some innocent crusaders, lying cross-legged in marble, are rebuked for tripping up the unwary "until in death, as in life, they got between the congregation and the truth that was taught there." bret harte has been accused also of "admiring his characters in the wrong place," as dickens certainly did; but this charge seems to be an injustice. a scene in _gabriel conroy_ represents arthur poinsett as calmly explaining to doña dolores that he is the person who seduced and abandoned grace conroy; and he makes this statement without a sign of shame or regret. "if he had been uttering a moral sentiment, he could not have been externally more calm, or inwardly less agitated. more than that, there was a certain injured dignity in his manner," and so forth. this is the passage cited by that very acute critic, mr. e. s. nadal. but there is nothing in it or in the context which indicates that bret harte admired the conduct of poinsett. he was simply describing a type which everybody will recognize; but not describing it as admirable. bret harte depicted his characters with so much _gusto_, and at the same time was so absolutely impartial and non-committal toward them, that it is easy to misconceive his own opinion of them or of their conduct.[ ] from another fault, perhaps the worst fault of dickens, namely, his propensity for the sudden conversion of a character to something the reverse of what it always has been, bret harte--with the single exception of mrs. tretherick, in _an episode of fiddletown_--is absolutely free. it should be remembered, moreover, that bret harte's imitations of dickens occur only in a few passages of a few stories. when bret harte nodded, he wrote like dickens. but the better stories, and the great majority of the stories, show no trace of this blemish. bret harte at his best was perhaps as nearly original as any author in the world. on the whole, it seems highly probable--though the critics have mostly decided otherwise--that bret harte derived more good than bad from his admiration for dickens. the reading of dickens stimulated his boyish imagination and quickened that sympathy with the weak and suffering, with the downtrodden, with the waifs and strays, with the outcasts of society, which is remarkable in both writers. the spirit of dickens breathes through the poems and stories of bret harte, just as the spirit of bret harte breathes through the poems and stories of kipling. bret harte had a very pretty satirical vein, which might easily, if developed, have made him an author of satire rather than of sentiment. who can say that the influence of dickens, coming at the early, plastic period of his life, may not have turned the scale? that dickens surpassed him in breadth and scope, bret harte himself would have been the first to acknowledge. the mere fact that one wrote novels and the other short stories almost implies as much. if we consider the works of an author like hawthorne, who did both kinds equally well, it is easy to see how much more effective is the long story. powerful as hawthorne's short stories are--the "minister's black veil," for example--they cannot rival the longer-drawn, more elaborately developed tragedy of "the scarlet letter." the characters created by dickens have taken hold of the popular imagination, and have influenced public sentiment in a degree which cannot be attributed to the characters of bret harte. dickens, moreover, despite his vulgarisms, despite even the cant into which he occasionally falls, had a depth of sincerity and conviction that can hardly be asserted for bret harte. dickens' errors in taste were superficial; upon any important matter he always had a genuine opinion to express. with respect to bret harte, on the other hand, we cannot help feeling that his errors in taste, though infrequent, are due to a want of sincerity, to a want of conviction upon deep things. and yet, despite the fact that dickens excelled bret harte in depth and scope, there is reason to think that the american author of short stories will outlast the english novelist. the one is, and the other is not, a classic writer. it was said of dickens that he had no "citadel of the mind,"--no mental retiring-place, no inward poise or composure; and this defect is shown by a certain feverish quality in his style, as well as by those well-known exaggerations and mannerisms which disfigure it. bret harte, on the other hand, in his best poems and stories, exhibits all that restraint, all that absence of idiosyncrasy as distinguished from personality, which marks the true artist. what the world demands is the peculiar flavor of the artist's mind; but this must be conveyed in a pure and unadulterated form, free from any ingredient of eccentricity or self-will. in bret harte there is a wonderful economy both of thought and language. everything said or done in the course of a story contributes to the climax or end which the author has in view. there are no digressions or superfluities; the words are commonly plain words of anglo-saxon descent; and it would be hard to find one that could be dispensed with. the language is as concise as if the story were a message, to be delivered to the reader in the shortest possible time. one other point of much importance remains to be spoken of, although it might be difficult to say whether it is really a matter of style or of substance. nothing counts for more in the telling of a story, especially a story of adventure, than the author's attitude toward his characters; not simply the fact that he blames or praises them, or abstains from doing so, but his unspoken attitude, his real feeling, disclosed between the lines. too much admiration on the part of the author is fatal to a classic effect, even though the admiration be implied rather than expressed. this is perhaps the greatest weakness of mr. kipling. that a man should be a gentleman is always, strangely enough, a matter of some surprise to that conscientious author, and that he should be not only a gentleman, but actually brave in addition, is almost too much for mr. kipling's equanimity. his heroes, those gallant young officers whom he describes so well, are exhibited to the reader with something of that pride which a showman or a fond mother might pardonably display. mr. kipling knows them thoroughly, but he is not of them. he is their humble servant. they are, he seems to feel, members of a species to which he, the author, and probably the reader also, are not akin. now, almost everybody who writes about fighting or heroic men in these days,--about highwaymen, cow-boys, river-drivers, woodsmen, or other primitive characters,--imitates mr. kipling, very seldom bret harte. partly, no doubt, this is because mr. kipling's mannerisms are attractive, and easily copied. that little trick, for example, of beginning sentences with the word "also," is a familiar earmark of the kipling school. but a stronger reason for imitating mr. kipling is that the attitude of frank admiration which he assumes is the natural attitude for the ordinary writer. such a writer falls into it unconsciously, and does not easily rise above it. the author is a "tenderfoot," discoursing to another tenderfoot, the reader, about the brave and wonderful men whom he has met in the course of his travels; and the reader's astonishment and admiration are looked for with confidence. vastly different from all this is the attitude of bret harte. he takes it for granted that the pioneers in general had the instincts of gentlemen and the courage of heroes. his characters are represented not as exceptional california men, but as ordinary california men placed in rather exceptional circumstances. brave as they are, they are never brave enough to surprise him. he is their equal. he never boasts of them nor about them. on the contrary, he gives the impression that the whole california pioneer society was constructed upon the same lofty plane,--as indeed it was, barring a few renegades. when edward brice, the young expressman, "set his white lips together, and with a determined face, and unfaltering step," walked straight toward the rifle held in snapshot harry's unerring hands, the incident astonishes nobody,--except perhaps the reader. certainly it does not astonish the persons who witness or the author who records it. it evokes a little good-humored banter from snapshot harry himself, and a laughing compliment from his beautiful niece, flora dimwood, but nothing more. we have been told that shakspere cut no great figure in his own time because his contemporaries were cast in much the same heroic mould,--greatness of soul being a rather common thing in elizabethan days. for a similar reason, the heroes of bret harte are accepted by one another, by the minor characters, and, finally, by the author himself, with perfect composure and without visible surprise. bret harte makes the reader feel that he is describing not simply a few men and women of nobility, but a whole society, an epoch, of which he was himself a part; and this gives an element of distinction, even of immortality, to his stories. had only one man died at thermopylæ, the fact would have been remembered by the world, but it would have lost its chief significance. the death of three hundred made it a typical act of the spartan people. the time will come when california, now strangely unappreciative of its own past, and of the writer who preserved it, will look back upon the pioneers as the modern greek looks back upon sparta and athens. the end footnotes: [ ] the final _e_ was added to henry hart's name in the last years of his life, and the family tradition is that this was done to distinguish him from another henry hart who, like himself, was very active in the political campaign of the year . [ ] for the spelling of henry hart's name, see the footnote on page . [ ] the _crusade of the excelsior_ contains some reminiscences of the voyage. [ ] the following account of a ride in a california stage is given by borthwick: "all sense of danger was lost in admiration of the coolness and dexterity of the driver as he circumvented every obstacle without going one inch farther out of his way than was necessary to save us from perdition. with his right foot he managed a brake, and, clawing at the reins with both hands, he swayed his body from side to side, to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the right pair of wheels, now on the left, he cut the outside edge round a stump or a rock; and when coming to a spot where he was going to execute a difficult manoeuvre on a slanting piece of ground, he trimmed the wagon, as we would a small boat in a squall, and made us all crowd up to the weather side to prevent a capsize." [ ] _cressy._ the paragraph quoted is only a part of the description. [ ] _a phyllis of the sierras._ [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] side-meat is the thin flank of a pig, cured like a ham. it was the staple article of food in the southwest. [ ] this poem is included in the author's collected poems under the title, _the return of belisarius_. [ ] bret harte in the general introduction to his works. [ ] the proof-sheets of the _heathen chinee_ are preserved in the university of california, and they show many changes in bret harte's writing. see "bret harte's country," an interesting illustrated article by will. m. clemens, in "the bookman," vol. xiii, p. . [ ] _the society upon the stanislaus_ first appeared in the "news letter." [ ] see hittell's "history of california." this book, the best and fullest on the subject, contains ample evidence of our author's accuracy. [ ] a forty-niner, as defined by the california society of pioneers, is an immigrant who, before midnight of december , , was within the state of california, or on shipboard within three miles of the coast, that being the extent of the maritime jurisdiction of the state. [ ] there was, however, a miner of seventy at sonoma who had left a wife and six children at home in the east; and on october , , there arrived in sacramento a veteran of the revolutionary war, ninety years of age. he had come all the way from illinois to seek the fortune which fate had hitherto denied him. unfortunately, he was so feeble that it became necessary to send him to a hospital, and history does not record his subsequent career, if indeed he survived to have one. [ ] "pioneer times in california." [ ] mr. kipling, who visited california in the year , speaks of "the remarkable beauty" of the women of san francisco,--descendants in most cases of the pioneers. [ ] the reverend walter colton, "three years in california." [ ] just across the river, in the state of illinois, is another pike county, similar in soil and population; and this illinois county was the scene of john hay's "pike county ballads." [ ] eliza w. farnham, "california, indoors and out." [ ] bayard taylor, "el dorado." [ ] edwin bryant, "california." [ ] see thornton's "oregon and california in ." [ ] _a waif of the plains._ [ ] _when the waters were up at "jules'."_ [ ] in _a first family of tasajara_ he gives the same explanation for the beauty of clementina, which is described as "hopelessly and even wantonly inconsistent with her surroundings." [ ] "the coarse, the horny-handed, the bull-throated were the most successful. they set the fashion, those great men of the pickaxe and the pistol, and a fine, fire-eating, antediluvian, reckless fashion it was."--w. m. fisher, "the californians." [ ] how long this continued to be the california point of view is shown by an interesting reminiscence of professor royce's. "i reached twenty years of age without ever becoming clearly conscious of what was meant by judging a man by his antecedents, a judgment that in an older and less isolated community is natural and inevitable, and that, i think, in most of our western communities grows up more rapidly than it has grown up in california, where geographical isolation is added to the absence of tradition." [ ] d. b. woods, "sixteen months at the gold diggings." [ ] g. k. chesterton, in "the critic." [ ] "perils, pastimes and pleasures of an emigrant," by j. w. [ ] eliza w. farnham, "california, indoors and out." [ ] dancing was a common amusement among the miners even when there were no women to be had as partners. "it was a strange sight to see a party of long-bearded men, in heavy boots and flannel shirts, going through all the steps and figures of the dance with so much spirit, and often with a great deal of grace; hearty enjoyment depicted on their dried-up, sun-burned faces, and revolvers and bowie-knives glancing in their belts; while a crowd of the same rough-looking customers stood around, cheering them on to greater efforts, and occasionally dancing a step or two quietly on their own account."--borthwick's "three years in california." [ ] _the romance of madroño hollow._ [ ] the reverend walter colton, "three years in california." [ ] w. m. fisher, "the californians." [ ] mrs. d. b. bates, "incidents on land and water." [ ] j. m. letts, "california illustrated." [ ] "our italy." [ ] this quality seems to have persisted, if we can trust mr. rudyard kipling, who wrote in the year : "san francisco is a mad city.... recklessness is in the air. i can't explain where it comes from, but there it is. the roaring winds off the pacific make you drunk, to begin with." [ ] stephen j. field, "personal reminiscences of california." [ ] william grey, "pioneer times in california." [ ] see the san francisco "herald" of may , . [ ] d. b. woods, "sixteen months at the gold diggings." [ ] the captain calmly directed the transfer of the women and children, kept his place on the paddle-box, and went down with the others. he was james lewis herndon, a commander in the united states navy, and the explorer of the amazon. a monument to his memory was erected by brother officers in the grounds of the naval academy at annapolis. the steamer was bringing $ , , in gold, and the loss of this treasure increased the commercial panic then prevailing in the atlantic states. [ ] baron fairfax of cameron in the peerage of scotland. many stories are told of his adventures in california. [ ] bayard taylor, who visited the mining camps in the winter of ' , found them well organized under the rule of an alcalde. "nothing in california," he wrote, "seemed more miraculous to me than this spontaneous evolution of social order from the worst elements of anarchy." [ ] william grey, "pioneer times in california." [ ] "seeking the golden fleece." [ ] shucks, "bench and bar of california." [ ] william grey, "pioneer times in california." [ ] s. j. field, "personal reminiscences of early days in california." [ ] journalistic affrays were frequent. see page _infra_. [ ] c. w. haskins, "the argonauts of california." [ ] "emerson in concord," page . [ ] introduction to volume ii of bret harte's works. [ ] "alta california" of july , . [ ] the reverend william taylor, "california life." [ ] in one day two women, crazed by the sufferings of their children, drowned themselves in the humboldt river. [ ] e. w. farnham, "california indoors and out." [ ] before the civil war, the treatment of women, even in the eastern cities, was almost invariably courteous and respectful. it was the exception, in new york or boston, when a man neglected to give up his seat in a public conveyance to a woman; whereas, nowadays the exception is the other way. profound respect shown to woman as woman is incompatible with a society founded upon an aristocratic, plutocratic, or caste system. it was never known in england. it is the product of a real democracy and of that alone; and in this country, as we become more and more plutocratic, the respect for women diminishes. the great cities of the united states are fast approaching, in this regard, the brutality of london, paris and berlin. [ ] in the poem, _concepcion de arguello_. [ ] h. a. wise, "los gringos." [ ] h. r. helper, "the land of gold." [ ] horace greeley, "an overland journey from new york to san francisco." [ ] _how santa claus came to simpson's bar._ [ ] _a ward of the golden gate._ [ ] s. c. upham, "scenes in el dorado." [ ] volume xv, page . [ ] see also page , _supra_. [ ] the late sherman hoar of concord, whose name is inscribed on the tablet in memorial hall devoted to those harvard graduates who lost their lives in the spanish war, was almost exactly such a character as bret harte described,--long to be remembered with affection. [ ] h. h. bancroft, "chronicles of the builders." [ ] c. w. haskins, "the argonauts of california." [ ] benton, "the california pilgrim." [ ] _a passage in the life of mr. john oakhurst._ [ ] delano, "life on the plains." [ ] "the virginia editor is a young, unmarried, intemperate, pugnacious, gambling gentleman."--george w. bagby, "the old virginia gentlemen and other sketches." [ ] they were the reverend walter colton, chaplain in the united states navy, and alcalde, as already mentioned, and dr. robert semple, a well-known pioneer politician. [ ] "men and memories of san francisco," by barry and patten. [ ] "california: its characteristics and prospects." [ ] see also _supra_, p. . [ ] it must be admitted that the ministers were placed in a difficult situation, being obliged to cope with the hardy, humorous materialism of pioneer life. the following dialogue is an authentic illustration:-- "mr. small, do not you believe in the overruling providence of god?" "which god?" "there is but one god." "i don't see it, parson. on this yere pacific coast gods is numerous--chinee gods, mormon gods, injin gods, christian gods, _an' the bank o' californy_!"--"the californians," by w. m. fisher. [ ] a traveller passing through dolores in mexico was the witness of a marriage like that of stephen masterton: "whilst stopping here i saw a smart-looking yankee and a spanish girl married by the priest, whose words were interpreted to the bridegroom as the ceremony proceeded. the lady was of rather dark complexion but extremely pretty; and although she knew scarcely a word of english, and the bridegroom knew still less of spanish, it was evident from the eloquence of the glances which passed between them, that they were at no loss to make themselves understood."--"personal adventures in upper and lower california," w. r. ryan. [ ] mrs. kemble, on the other hand, as the reader may remember, described him as "tall." his real height, already mentioned, was five feet, eight inches. [ ] w. d. howells, "literary friends and acquaintance." [ ] see pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] _my friend the tramp_, written in . [ ] samuel bowles, famous as editor of the "springfield republican." [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," pp. - . [ ] these lectures, with a short address delivered in london, have recently been published in a volume entitled "the lectures of bret harte," by charles meeker kozlay, new york. [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," pp. - . [ ] it was now a commercial agency, the grade next below that of a consulship. [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] see footnote on page , _supra_. [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," p. . [ ] st. kentigern established a bishopric in the year in the place which afterward became glasgow, and thus he is regarded as the founder of the city. his monument is shown beneath the choir of the cathedral where his body was interred a. d. . [ ] by the regulations then in force consuls were forbidden to be absent from their posts for a period exceeding ten days, without first obtaining leave from the president. [ ] pemberton's "life of bret harte," page . [ ] mary stuart boyd. see "harper's magazine," vol. , page . [ ] his friend and travelling companion, colonel arthur collins. [ ] see _ante_, page . [ ] see _ante_, page . [ ] when news of the death of dickens reached bret harte he was camping in the foot-hills, far from san francisco, but he sent a telegram to hold back for a day the printing of the "overland," then ready for the press, and his poem was written that night and forwarded the next morning. a week or two later bret harte received a cordial letter from dickens, written just before his death, complimenting the california author, and requesting him to write a story for "all the year round." [ ] a miner, writing in august, , from the middle fork of the american river, said: "when i came up here, the river was a roaring torrent, and its _sombre music_ could plainly be heard upon the tops of the mountains rising to a height of about three thousand feet." [ ] g. h. denny, president of washington and lee university. [ ] thomas e. cramblet, president of bethany college. [ ] gerard fowke, author of the "archæological history of ohio." [ ] r. h. crossfield, president of transylvania university. [ ] j. i. d. hinds, dean of the university of nashville. [ ] for the meaning of "pike," see _supra_, page . [ ] _through the santa clara wheat._ [ ] _how santa claus came to simpson's bar._ [ ] r. l. stevenson. [ ] the author had described this scene before in prose, though he may have forgotten it. in the story called _who was my quiet friend?_ he wrote: "the pines in the caftan below were olive gulfs of heat, over which a hawk here and there drifted lazily, or, rising to our level, cast a weird and gigantic shadow of slowly moving wings on the mountain-side." [ ] see page , _supra_. index "abner nott," , . "academy," the london, on bret harte's portrayal of gamblers, . "ah sin," a play by bret harte and mark twain, . "ailsa callender," , , , . alamo, . albany, birthplace of bret harte, ; henry hart's occupations in, ; young men's association, ; ; lecture by bret harte in, . albany female academy, henry hart an instructor in, . alcaldes, the, duties of, ; decisions by, , , - . alcott, bronson, . alcott family, resemblance of the harte family to, , . aldrich, thomas bailey, . "alkali dick," . allen, edward a., . "allow," "'low," in the sense of declare or say, . "alta california," the, cited, , , , , , - , , , , . alvarado, spanish governor, . _american humor_, . _angelus, the_, . anthony, a. v. s., boy-neighbor of bret harte in hudson street, new york, - ; after-meetings with in california and in london, ; recollections of california in the ' s, . _apostle of the tules, an_, , . archaic words in bret harte, , , . argonauts, , , , . "argonauts, the," bret harte's lecture on, , . "argonauts of california, the," cited, , . _argonauts of north liberty, the_, , , , , , . argyle, duke of, , . arnold, matthew, . "art student," . _artemis in sierra_, . "arthur poinsett," . astor, john jacob, . atchison, bret harte's lecture in, . "atlantic monthly," the, bret harte's first appearance in, , ; sale of in early california, ; ; bret harte's contributions to, , , . _autumnal musings_, . "baby sylvester," . bagby, george w., ; his "the old virginia gentlemen and other sketches," cited, _n._ baker's city tavern, new york, . _ballad of the emeu_, . bancroft, h. h., his "chronicles of the builders," cited, . barbour, judge, . _barker's luck_, , . barnes, george, . barrett, lawrence, . barry and patten, their "men and memories of san francisco," cited, , . bates, mrs. d. b., her "incidents on land and water," cited, , , . beauty, in women, its development, ; of bret harte's women, , ; beauty in literary style, . beefsteak club, london, . _bell-ringer of angels, the_, , , , . _belle of cañada city, a_, . "bench and bar of california," cited, . benicia, , . besant, walter, bret harte's acquaintance with, . bierce, ambrose, , . "biglow papers," . black, william, bret harte's intimacy with, ; first meeting of the two, ; , . blondes, among bret harte's women, . "blue-grass penelope, a," . _bohemian days in san francisco_, , , . _bohemian papers_, . "bookman, the," _n._, . borthwick, j. d., his "three years in california," cited, _n._, , . boston, ; bret harte in, , , , , , ; its characteristics, - ; lecture by bret harte in, . "boston daily advertiser," the, . bowers, joe, , . bowles, samuel, , _n._ boy gamblers, . _boy's dog, a_, . boyd, mary stuart, paper of, cited, . "bret harte's country," cited, _n._ bret harte's gamblers, . bret harte's women, . see also "women." brett, sir balliol, later viscount esher, . brett, catharine. see hart, catharine (brett). brett, catharyna (rombout), grandmother of catharine (brett) hart, ; estate of on the hudson river, ; sketch of, ; a founder of the fishkill dutch church, ; tablet to her memory, . brett, francis, , . brett, robert, , . brett, roger, grandfather of catharine (brett) hart, , . broderick, david c., ; duels of, , . brontë, charlotte, . brooks, noah, , , , , . broughton, rhoda, her treatment of ministers, . "brown of calaveras," , , . browne, francis f., editor of "lakeside monthly," . brunettes, preferred by bret harte, . bryant, edwin, his "california," cited, . _buckeye hollow inheritance, the_, . "bucking bob," . bull-fights, , . "burgeoning," . bushnell, the rev. dr., his "california: its characteristics and prospects," cited, , , . byron, lord, . _cadet grey_, , . "cahoots," . "calaveras chronicle," the, cited, ; editor of in a duel, . california, at the outbreak of the civil war, , , ; climate of, - ; society of, , ; precocity of the early california boy, ; the gambling element in, - ; lavish manner of transacting business in the early days, - ; "trade a wild unorganized whirl," ; soaring prices, - ; "washerwomen made fortunes and founded families," ; reaction in , with quick fall in prices, ; losses by fire and flood, - , - ; first public building erected in, an insane asylum, ; life of the farm and the vineyard, ; dealt with in bret harte's stories, ; literature, journalism, and religion of, - ; newspaper men of, ; churches in, - ; california children, ; bret harte's representation of true, , , ; open-air life in, - . "california," cited, . "california: its characteristics and prospects," cited, . "california christian advocate," the, , . "california farmer," the, , . "california illustrated," cited, . "california indoors and out," cited, , , . "california life," cited, . california newspapers, early. see newspapers. "california pet," the, . california pets, ; the bear cub "baby sylvester," . california pioneers. see pioneers. california saloons, the bar surmounted by a woman's sunbonnet, . "california song, the," . "californian, the," , , , . "californians, the," cited, _n._, , _n._ camberley, sussex, the red house at, , . cambridge, mass., bret harte in, , , , , ; , . canada, relatives of bret harte in, ; bernard hart in, . canadian harts, the, . cape horn, voyage around, , , , , , . "capital, the," failure of, . "captain carroll," . _captain jim's friend_, , . _carquinez woods, the_, , , . casey, james, career and death of, , - . "cass beard," . castle ashby, . "cavortin'," . "central america," the, sinking of, . central california, , , . chaffee, j. a., the original of _tennessee's partner_, - . chagres, , . chamberlain, partner of chaffee, the original of _tennessee's partner_, . chapman, john jay, . cheney, warren, , . "cherokee sal," . chesterfield, lord, his style, . chesterton, g. k., on yuba bill, - ; , ; on bret harte's humor, , ; on colonel starbottle, ; on bret harte's parodies, . chicago, bret harte in, , , , ; lectures in, . children, bret harte's, , ; his impression of english children, ; california children, - , ; his impression of german children, , . chilenos, . chinese in california, . chinese restaurant, scene in, . "chronicles of the builders," cited, . churches in early california, - . _cicely_, - . "circuit-rider, the," cited, . civil war, california's part in, , ; bret harte's poems relating to, , . _clarence_, , . clemens, samuel l. see mark twain. clemens, will. m., _n._ "clementina," . climate of california, - , . clubs, london, to which bret harte belonged, . cohasset, mass., bret harte in, . colfax, schuyler, . collins, col. arthur, _n._ coloma, traits of gamblers of, . "colonel newcome," . "colonel starbottle," , , - , , ; reintroduced in bret harte's last, unfinished tale, ; . "colonel wilson," . colton, the rev. william, his "three years in california," cited, , , , , ; conductor of first newspaper in california, _n._ commercial agent, bret harte as, at crefeld, , - . compton wyngates, . "concepcion," , . _conception de arguello_, , , . concord, mass., . _condensed novels_, the, , , , . congregation shearith israel, new york, . "consuelo," . consul, bret harte as, at glasgow, - ; the consul in bret harte's stories, . contraltos, preferred by bret harte, . _convalescence of jack hamlin, the_, . convicts, english, , . conway, moncure, on bret harte's avoidance of "social duties," . coolbrith, miss ina b., . cornbury, lord, . coullard, mrs., for whom marysville was named, . cramblet, thomas e., . crefeld, ; bret harte at, - , - . "cressy," , , , , , , , . crime in california, increase in, , . "critic, the," . crossfield, r. h., . cruces, , . _crusade of the excelsior, the_, , . "culpeper starbottle," the nephew, . dana, charles a., . del norte, . delano, a., his "life on the plains," cited, . _demi-monde_ in san francisco, . denny, g. h., . _desborough connections, the_, . _devil's ford_, , . dialect, bret harte's dialect poems, ; his pioneer and other dialect, - ; masters of, ; humor essential to, ; psychology of, . _dick boyle's business card_, . "dick demorest," . dickens, charles, his influence on bret harte, , , , - ; his letter to bret harte, _n._; bret harte's poem on, ; compared with bret harte, , . dogs, as beasts of burden, - ; bret harte's tenderness for, . "don josé sepulvida," , , , . donner party, the, , . "doña rosita," . douglas, james, , - , . _dow's flat_, - . downieville, . "dr. ruysdael," . drake, sir francis, . drake's bay, . drama, the, in pioneer california, . "drum, the," . dubois, miss, . duels, , , , , . dumb animals, in pioneer california, , ; bret harte's tenderness for, . earthquake in san francisco, . editors, in pioneer california, southern origin of, , . education in pioneer california, , , . "edward brice," . "edward everett," ship, . eggleston, edward, his "the circuit-rider," cited, . "el dorado," cited, . el dorado county, vineyards in, . emerson, ralph waldo, , ; bret harte's meeting with, . "emerson in concord," cited, . england, , ; bret harte's lectures in, , _n._, ; publication of his stories in, ; visiting country houses in, ; his last years in, - . english, the, in pioneer california, . english children, . english convicts, . "enriquez saltello," , , . episcopalianism in early san francisco, . _episode of fiddletown, an_, paralleled in contemporary newspapers, ; . "episode of west woodlands," the, . "esquire," the use of, in pioneer california, ; bret harte's humorous examples of, . eureka, . everett, edward, . expulsion of mexicans and south americans, . eye-lashes, and eye-brows, bret harte's description of, , . "ezekiel corwin," , . fair, james g., . fairfax, charles, heroism of, ; _n._ "far," in the sense of distant, . farnham, eliza w., her "california indoors and out," cited, , , . "father felipe," . "father pedro," . "father sobriente," . "father wynn," . feather river, , . "fetched away," for torn, . field, stephen j., ; his "personal reminiscences of early days in california," cited, , , , , ; first alcalde of marysville, ; ; his duelling experience, ; his experience with terry, ; at the beginning of marysville, , . fields, james t., . firearms, carrying of, , . _first family of tasajara, a_, , _n._, , . fisher, w. m., his "the californians," cited, _n._, , _n._ fishkill dutch church, . "flora dimwood," , . foot-hills, , , ; foxes and raccoons from the, as pets, ; . fort hall, . "forty-niner," definition of, , _n._ see also pioneers. fowke, gerard, . francis, miss susan m., . franklin, benjamin, his style, . frémont, mrs. jessie benton, , . frémont, john c., , , . french, the, in california, . friary, the, club, new york, . _friend of colonel starbottle's, a_, bret harte's last ms., - . frontiersmen, the, . see also pioneers. frothingham, the rev. o. b., . froude, james anthony, his daughter, ; bret harte's visit to, , . "fust-rate," for very well, . "gabriel conroy," , , , , , , , , , . "gait," in the sense of habit or manner, . gamblers, boy gamblers, ; bret harte's gamblers, . see also gambling in california. gambling in california, , , - ; bret harte's pictures of and contemporary accounts, - ; the gambling era in sacramento, , ; in san francisco, - ; development of public opinion and laws against, . george eliot, . german children, , . _ghosts, the, of stukeley castle_, . "gideon deane," , . gillis, james w., , . see also "truthful james." glasgow, bret harte appointed consul at, ; his five years in, - ; his reports, - ; his friendships in ; departure from, . _goddess of excelsior, the_, . godkin, e. l., . golden canoe, the, . "golden era," the, , , . _grandmother tenterden_, . grass valley, . "gratuitous," . "greasers," . _great deadwood mystery, the_, . greeley, horace, his "overland journey from new york to san francisco," cited, . grey, william, his "pioneer times in california," cited, , , , . _greyport legend, a_, , . griswold, miss anna, her marriage to bret harte, . griswold, daniel s., . griswold, mary dunham, . gwinn, w. m., , . hardy, thomas, , , , . hare, john, . "harper's magazine," . hart, benjamin i., . hart, bernard, paternal grandfather of bret harte, - ; career of, - ; secretary to the new york exchange board, ; prominent in the synagogue, , ; in the militia, ; member of clubs and societies, ; homes of , ; portrait of, ; marriage of, to catharine brett, ; marriage of, to zipporah seixas, ; family of, - ; death of, ; , . hart, catharine (brett), paternal grandmother of bret harte, ; marriage of, to bernard hart, ; the marriage kept a secret by bernard hart, ; her lonely and secluded life, ; her ancestry and family connections, - . hart, daniel, . hart, david, . hart, elizabeth rebecca (ostrander), mother of bret harte, ; her religious faith, , ; life of, after henry hart's death, ; her passion for literature, ; moves to california, ; death of, at morristown, n. j., ; . hart, emanuel b., . hart [harte], henry, father of bret harte, ; final _e_ added to name of, _n._; birth of, ; ; at union college, , ; description of, ; career of, , ; marries elizabeth ostrander, ; ; homes of, in new york city, ; brought up in the dutch reformed faith, becomes a catholic, ; principal of an academy in hudson, n. y., ; other places of residence, ; ardently espouses the cause of henry clay, ; death of, ; his library and its use by his household, ; . hart, henry, son of bernard hart by his hebrew wife, . hart, theodore, . hart, zipporah (seixas), hebrew wife of bernard hart, ; her marriage and family, ; . harts, the, in canada, . harte, francis brett, birthplace of, ; ancestry of, , ; father of, , ; evolution of his signature as an author, ; descriptions of, - , ; his voice, ; his handwriting, ; pictures of, ; paternal grandfather of, - ; numerous relatives of, in canada, ; mother of, - , , , ; boyhood homes of, in new york city, ; in various places, , ; boyhood life after his father's death, ; his precocity, ; his early studies and writings, ; arrival in california, , ; begins his career as a professional writer, ; gambling experience, ; as express messenger, ; as tutor and schoolmaster, , , ; as druggist's clerk, , ; as printer, , , ; as editor, , , ; appointed secretary of the mint, ; marriage, ; his manner of working, - ; editor of book of poems, - ; his first published book, ; first editor of the "overland monthly," ; the publication that first made him known on the atlantic coast, - ; his _heathen chinee_ makes him famous, - ; professor in the university of california, ; accuracy of his account of pioneer life, - , , , , , , ; fidelity of his pictures of pioneer friendship, ; four stories devoted to friendship, - ; moral of his stories, ; his portrayal of gambling in pioneer california sustained by contemporary accounts, ; his gamblers, a new type in fiction, ; john oakhurst and jack hamlin compared, - ; his attitude toward his characters, ; his religious views, , ; departure from california, , , , ; in chicago, - ; his eastern reception, ; visit to boston and mr. howells, - , ; meeting with lowell, - , with longfellow, , with emerson, ; in boston, - ; his contract with james r. osgood & co., ; at newport, ; his literary habits, ; as a playwright, - ; his money troubles, , , , , ; his lectures, , , ; his letters to his wife, - , , , , , ; impression of western people, ; his health, , , ; his dislike of new england, ; his women characters, - ; his patriotism, ; appointed u. s. commercial agent at crefeld, ; translations of his works, , ; his impressions of german music and acting, ; visit to froude, ; his lectures in england, ; publication of his stories in england, ; as commercial agent, , , ; impressions of german children, , ; as consul, , , , , , ; in glasgow, - ; his reports, ; causes the erection of a memorial over the graves of wrecked sailors, ; glimpse of his consular functions given in _young robin gray_, ; his stories dealing with scotch scenes and people, ; his friendships with william black and walter besant, ; his monomania for not answering letters, ; granted leave of absence, ; superseded in the glasgow consulship, ; last years in london, - ; his friendship with m. and mme. van de velde, ; mme. velde's influence upon his work, ; his later rooms at no. lancaster gate, ; membership in various london clubs, ; his habits in later life, ; his real recreations, ; his proneness to escape "social duties," , ; visits switzerland, - ; reasons that impelled him to live in england, - ; yet ever a devoted american, ; false reports about him circulated in america, ; his disinclination to be "interviewed," ; his character, - ; was he a sentimentalist? - ; his separation from his family in his latter years, ; at work until the end, ; his last ms., ; his last illness, ; his last letters, ; death, at camberley, may th, , ; his faults and his good qualities, , ; his devotion to his art, ; the manner of man he was, , , ; as a writer of fiction, - ; his knowledge of human nature, ; his dialect, ; his humor, ; his satire, - ; his optimism, , ; his poetry, - ; his poem on dickens, , ; influence of dickens on him, - ; compared with dickens, - ; his poem on starr king, ; his patriotic poems, - ; his treatment of nature, - ; his style, , - ; his style in poetry, , , - ; defects of his style, , , ; virtues of his style, , - , - ; his vocabulary, - ; his attitude toward his characters, , . harte, mrs. francis brett, her marriage, ; her voice, ; removes to england before bret harte's death, . harte, eliza. see knaufft, eliza (harte). harte, ethel, bret harte's younger daughter, . harte, francis king, bret harte's second son, , . harte, griswold, bret harte's elder son, . harte, henry, bret harte's brother, - , . harte, jessamy. see steele, jessamy (harte). harte, margaret b. see wyman, margaret b. (harte). haskins, c. w., his "the argonauts of california," cited, , . hawthorne, nathaniel, , , , , , , , , . hawthorne and bret harte compared, , . hay, john, , . hayes, president, appoints bret harte as u. s. commercial agent at crefeld, . _heathen chinee, the_, , , , _n._, , , , . _heir, the, of the mchulishes_, , . "heiress of red dog," the, . "helen maynard," . helper, h. r., his "the land of gold," cited, . "herbert bly," . herndon, james lewis, _n._ heroines, bret harte's, - , - , . hinds, j. i. d., . hittell's "history of california," cited, . hoar, sherman, his resemblance to the hero in _left out on lone star mountain_, _n._ "honeyfoglin'," . "honorable jackson flash, the," . hoodlum, . hooper, j. f., . horses, in san francisco, ; bret harte's description of, . house of lords, the, club, new york, . _how i went to the mines_, . _how old man plunkett went home_, . _how reuben allen saw life in san francisco_, . _how santa claus came to simpson's bar_, , , , , , , . howells, william dean, his account of bret harte, , , , , - ; , - , . hudson, n. y., home of the hartes in, . _hudson river, the_, . humboldt bay, . humboldt county, , ; wheat crops, . humboldt river, , _n._ "humboldt times," . humor and pathos, ; california humor, , ; western and new england humor, . hyer, tom, . _idyl of battle hollow, the_, . _idyl of red gulch, the_, , . _iliad of sandy bar, the_, . "illustrated news," london, sale of, in pioneer california, . imagination, creative, , . _in a balcony_, . _in the tules_, , , , . "incidents on land and water," cited, , . independence, in missouri, . indians, , , , ; bret harte's description of, ; the californian, , , - . _indiscretion of elsbeth, the_, . insane asylum, an, the first public building erected by the state of california, . "into," for in, . irving, washington, . "j. w.," "perils, pastimes and pleasures of an emigrant," by, cited, . "jack fleming," . "jack hamlin," , ; his dress, ; ; , , ; compared with "john oakhurst," - ; his prototype, ; his character, - . _jack and jill of the sierras_, a, , . jackass flat, . james, henry, , ; his style, . "james seabright," . _jeff briggs's love story_, . jeffries, richard, . jewelry, miners', . jewett, sarah o., . jews in pioneer california, . _jim_, . _jimmy's big brother from california_, . "jinny," . "joan," , , , . "joe corbin," . "john ashe," . "john bunyan medliker," . "john hale," . "john milton harcourt," . "john oakhurst, mr.," , , ; compared with "jack hamlin," ; , , . "johnny," . johnson, samuel, . _johnson's old woman_, , , . johnston, richard malcolm, , . "joshua rylands," , . "jovita," - . jowett, benjamin, . _judgment of bolinas plain, the_, . "julia cantire," . "julia porter," , . jury, the first in california, . "kam," . kansas, bret harte's lectures in, , , . kay, t. belcher, . kemble, fanny, her description of bret harte, ; , _n._ "kicked a fut," . king, james, career and tragic death of, - , , . king, the rev. thomas starr, , , - , , , ; bret harte's poem upon him, , . kingston-on-the-hudson, . kinsmen club, london, . kipling, rudyard, , _n._, , , . "kitty," . knaufft, eliza (harte), bret harte's sister, , , , . knaufft, ernest, . knaufft, f. f., . kozlay, charles m., publisher of bret harte's lectures, _n._ "lacy bassett," . "lakeside monthly," the, bret harte's connection with, , , . "land of gold, the," cited, . "lanty foster," , . "larry hawkins," . lawrence, ks., bret harte's lecture in, , . lawyer, the boston, . lectures, by bret harte, , - ; edited by kozlay, _n._; in england, . leese, jacob p., . _left out on lone star mountain_, , . _legend of monte del diablo, the_, . _legend of sammtstadt, a_, . leighton, sir frederic, . lenox, mass., ; bret harte's stay there, . "leonidas boone," . letters by bret harte, to his wife, - , , , , , ; letter to his son, ; to mr. pemberton, ; from switzerland, . letts, j. m., his "california illustrated," cited, . lewis, alfred henry, . "liberty jones," , , , . "life on the plains," cited, . lipper, arthur & co., new york, . lispenard, leonard, . lispenard & hart, merchants, in new york, . "literary friends and acquaintances," cited, . "literary landmarks of boston," cited, . literature among the pioneers, , , , . london, bret harte in. see england. longevity, of spanish californians, ; of indians, . longfellow, h. w., bret harte's meeting with, - ; bret harte's opinion of, , . los angeles, . "los gringos," cited, . _lost galleon, the, and other tales_, . louisburg square, in boston, . love, for women, , , . "'low," in the sense of declare or say, . lowell, james russell, , , . lowell, mass., home of the hartes in, . lower california, . _luck of roaring camp, the_, , , , , , , , , . macaulay, his style, , . mcdougall, ex-governor, duel with a san francisco editor, . mcglynn, john a., , . mcgowan, "ned," . mcpike, capt., . "madison wayne," , . _mæcenas of the pacific slope, a_, . magee, prof., . magistrates, california, - . "major philip ostrander," . "mannerly," . mark twain, bret harte's first meeting with, , ; , , , , , , , . "martin morse," , . "maruja," , , . marysville, alcalde of, , , ; origin of name of, ; , ; gambling in, . "marysville times, the," . "men and memories of san francisco," cited, _n._ _mercury of the foot-hills, a_, , . _mermaid of light-house point, the_, . mexicans, expulsion from the mines, . mexican and chilean women in early california, . "miggles," , , , . mill, john stuart, his style, . miller, henry, . miners, the, ; their gains, , ; their laws, , ; the miners of roaring camp, . see also pioneers. mining, primitive methods of, - . see pan-mining; rocker, the; sluce, the; river-bed mining. mining laws, , . ministers, in pioneer california, , ; bret harte's ministers, - , . mint, the u. s., california, bret harte as secretary of, ; , , , . "miss edith," . "miss jo," . "miss mary," , . missions, the spanish, , . missouri, its emigrants to california, , , . "m'liss," , , , , , . montague, henry w., . monterey, , , , , . monterey county, the sheep county, . montreal, bret harte at, , . morristown, n. j., ; bret harte at, , , . "mr. adams rightbody," . "mr. callender," , . _mr. jack hamlin's mediation_, . "mr. john oakhurst." see "john oakhurst." "mr. mckinstry," . _mr. thompson's prodigal_, . "mrs. brimmer," . _mrs. bunker's conspiracy_, . "mrs. burroughs," . "mrs. decker," , . "mrs. macglowrie," , . "mrs. mckinstry," , . _mrs. skaggs's husbands_, . mulford, prentice, . murders, frequency of, - . murdock, charles a., . _my first book_, . _my friend the tramp_, . nadal, e. s., . nature, as treated by bret harte, , - ; influence of, , . _neighborhoods i have moved from_, . nevada county, vineyards in, . _new assistant of pine clearing school, the_, . new brunswick, n. j., home of the hartes in, . new england, , ; its humor, . new london, conn., bret harte at, . new orleans, ship-load of gamblers from, arrive in california, . new york city, bernard hart in, - ; the congregation shearith israel in, ; homes of bernard hart in, ; sons of in, , ; ; boyhood home of bret harte, ; bret harte in, , ; lectures in, , . new york state, , . new york stock exchange board, bernard hart secretary to, , . "new york sunday atlas," . new york "tribune," . newport, r. i., bret harte in, . _newport romance, a_, , . "news letter," the, , _n._ newspapers, the first in california, , ; editors of the early, , , , ; tone of, , , . see under their respective titles. newstead abbey, bret harte a guest at, . nicaragua, , . nicasio indians, the, . nichols, jonathan, . "nigh onter," for nearly, . _night at hays', a_, . _night on the divide, a_, , , . "no-account," . "north liberty," , . "northern california," the, . "notorious mrs. ebbsmith, the," . oakland, cal., , , . oatman, olive, . _office-seeker, the_, . "old greenwood," , , . "old personal responsibility," . "old virginia gentlemen, the, and other sketches," cited, _n._ "old woman," for wife, . oregon, . "oregon and california in ," cited, . oregon trail, . "ornery," . osgood, james r., ; contract with bret harte, . ostrander, elizabeth rebecca. see hart, elizabeth rebecca. ostrander, henry philip, . ostranders, home of, in new york, , . ottawa, bret harte's lecture and stay there, . "our italy," cited, . _outcasts of poker flat, the_, , , , , , , , , . "overland journey from new york to san francisco," cited, . "overland monthly," the, , ; bret harte its first editor, , , , , ; its bear, ; , , , , _n._, . oxford school of writers, . padre esteban, . pan-mining, - . panama, , , . "pard," . parody in bret harte, . parsloe, c. t., . "parson wynn," . _passage in the life of mr. john oakhurst, a_, , . pathos, . peg-leg smith, . pell, mr., merchant, new york, . pemberton, t. edgar, on bret harte, , ; his account of bret harte as a playwright, , ; letter of bret harte to him, ; collaborates with, as a dramatist, . pemberton's "life of bret harte," extracts from, , , , , , - , , , , - , , . "pendennis," . "perils, pastimes and pleasures of an emigrant," cited, . "personal adventures in upper and lower california," cited, . "personal reminiscences of early days in california," cited, , , , , . "peter schroeder," , . philadelphia, home of the hartes in, . "philandering," . _phyllis of the sierras, a_, , , , . piatt, john j., . "picayune," the, editor of in a duel, . pike, lieut. zebulon m., . pike county, "piker," , , - . "pike county ballads," . "pioneer times in california," cited, , , , . pioneers, the, , , , - ; their youthfulness, ; their good looks, ; their intelligence, ; their descendants, _n._; their sufferings _en route_, ; crossing the plains, , - ; by sea, - ; their food, ; their quarrels, , ; their women and children, - , , - ; varied employments of, - ; multiplicity of tongues among, ; dress of, - ; energy of, ; exuberance of, - ; misfortunes of, - ; courage of, - ; law-abidingness, - ; magnanimity, , ; long beards of, ; friendships among, - ; good manners common among, - ; literature among, - ; good taste of, ; their humor, , ; their dialect, - . pioneer women, - ; beauty in, ; small feet of, . pittsburgh, bret harte's lecture in, . placerville, , , . _plain language from truthful james_, . plains, the, crossing them, , , , , , , , , ; a heroine of, ; effect of the long journey upon women, , ; wolves from the, as pets, . _poet of sierra flat, the_, . poker flat, , , . poor man's creek, . prairie schooners, . prepositions, superfluous, . priests, the spanish, , . _princess bob and her friends, the_, , . prize-fights, and prize-fighters, . providence, r. i., home of the hartes in, . publishers, bret harte's relations with, . "punch," . puritanism in california, , . "put to," for harness, . rabelais club, london, . rain, fall of, . rainy season, , . "r'ar," . reform club, london, , . reid, sir wemyss, ; references to bret harte in his life of william black, , . _reincarnation, the, of smith_, . _relieving guard_, , . religion among the pioneers, - , , - , . _return of belisarius, the_, _n._ _returned_, , _n._ "rev. mr. daws, the," . _reveille, the_, , , . "richelieu sharpe," , , ; the precocious love affairs of, . "ridgway dent," . river-bed mining, - . "rise," for ascend, . road-agents, . robson, stuart, . rocker, or cradle, the, in mining, . _roger catron's friend_, . rogue river, . roman, anton, , , . _romance of madroño hollow, the_, , . rombout, francis, , . rombout, helena (teller), . rombout-brett association, . _rose of glenbogie, a_, , , . "rose of tuolumne," the, , , , . "rosey nott," . "rowley meade," . royal academy banquet, bret harte's speech at, , . royal thames yacht club, london, . royce, josiah, prof., , _n._, , , . ruskin, . "russian envoy, the," . ryan, w. r., his "personal adventures in upper and lower california," cited, . sabe, savey, . sacramento, , , , , ; gambling in, , ; fires and floods in, , ; fighting editors of, ; literature in, . sacramento county, vineyards in, . sacramento river, , . "sacramento transcript," the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , . st. george society, . st. kentigern, , _n._ st. louis, "lucky bill," a gambler from, ; bret harte in, , . salmon falls, . "salomy jane," , . san francisco, at the outbreak of the civil war, , ; bret harte in, ; processions in, ; animals in, ; climate of, , ; politics in, , ; scarcity of women in, in ' , ; the "hoodlum," ; early citizens, ; the gambling era in, - ; early development of public opinion and laws against gambling, - ; panic of in, ; increase of crime in, ; vigilance committees of and in, ; great fires in, and incidents of, - ; suicides in a single year, ; its later atmosphere, , ; bret harte's representation of, true, ; bret harte's poem upon, , . "san francisco bulletin," the, , , , ; tragic death of its editor, - , . "san francisco call," the, , . "san francisco daily herald," the, , _n._, , , , . san francisco gambling saloons, , . san francisco horse races, . san francisco hospital, . san josé, , , , , . san ramon valley, . san raphael, . sanitary commission, ; the, and the gambler, . santa barbara, . santa clara, . santa clara valley, . santa cruz, . santa cruz county, . santa fé, route to california, . _sappho of green springs, a_, . "sarah walker," . satire, . saturday club, the boston, dinner, , , . "saturday review," the, . "scenes from el dorado," cited, . scotch characters of bret harte, . scott, sir walter, , . "scribner's magazine," . sea cliff, long island, . searls, judge, . _secret of sobriente's well, the_, . _secret of telegraph hill, a_, . "seeking the golden fleece," cited, , . seixas, benjamin mendez, . seixas, gershom mendez, rabbi, . seixas, zipporah. see hart, zipporah (seixas). semple, dr. robert, _n._ señoritas, . "sepulvida, don josé," , . serra, father junipéro, . shakspere, in california, ; his apprehension of human nature, ; . shepard, vice-consul, at bradford, . _ship of ' , a_, , . shuck, o. t., his "bench and bar of california," cited, . _sidewalkings_, . sierra county, . sierras, the, , ; bears from the, as pets, , ; . simplicity, ; compared with cultivation, . "sir james mac fen," . "sixteen months at the gold diggings," cited, , . slavery, prohibited in california, . sluce, the, in mining, . "smellidge," . smith, j. cabot, . "snapshot harry," . snow in california, , , . _snow-bound at eagle's_, , . _society upon the stanislaus, the_, , _n._ solitude, , . sonora, . sonora county, . sonora river, . sopranos, absence of, among bret harte's heroines, . south-western girl, the, . southerners in california, , ; resemblance to spanish, , ; , , . southgate, dr. horatio, elected bishop, . spanish in california, , ; gravity of, ; resemblance to southerners, , ; qualities of, ; their longevity, ; horsemanship, ; the spanish priest, , , . _spelling bee at angels, the_, . spencer, herbert, his style, . split infinitive, the, . "springfield republican," the, _n._ squatters, . stage-coaching in california, , , _n._ stanislaus diggings, . stanislaus valley, the, . starbottle, col. see colonel starbottle. steele, henry milford, . steele, jessamy (harte), bret harte's older daughter, . "stephen masterton," , _n._ sterne, lawrence, . stevenson, r. l., . stillman, dr. j. d. b., his "seeking the golden fleece," cited, , . stockton, , , , , , . stoddard, charles w., , , , , , . _story of m'liss, the_, . _story of a mine, the_, . stuart, the robber, death of, - . style, bret harte's, - ; defects of, , , , ; virtues of, - , - ; his subtlety, - ; his style in poetry, , , - ; beauty in style, . subtlety, as a quality of style, - ; bret harte's, - ; over-subtlety, , . _sue_, produced in new york, . sunday in california, . supreme court, bret harte's description of, . _susy_, , . swain, r. b., . swett's bar company, . swift, frank, . swift, lindsay, his "literary landmarks of boston," cited, . swinburne, his metre copied by bret harte, . "sydney ducks," . _tale of a pony, the_, . _tale of three truants, a_, . tasajara county, the "cow county," . tatnall, commander, letter from to bret harte's mother, . taylor, bayard, his "el dorado," cited, , . taylor, the rev. william, his "california life," cited, . tearful women, as described by bret harte, . telegraph hill, ; pioneers watching from for the fortnightly mail-steamer, . teller, william, . temperance in early california, . "tennessee," , - , . _tennessee's partner_, , , , , , ; the story suggested by a real incident, ; , , , , . "teresa," . terry, judge david s., . thackeray, , ; his creative imagination, , ; . _thankful blossom_, , . theatres in california, , . _their uncle from california_, . thoreau, henry d., , . thorne, charles r., . thornton, william, alias "lucky bill," gambler, . thornton, j. quinn, his "oregon and california in ," cited, . _three partners_, , , . "three years in california," borthwick's, cited, _n._, , ; colton's, cited, , , , , . _through the santa clara wheat_, , . "tinka gallinger," , , , . tolstoi, , , . toole, j. l., collaborates with bret harte, . topeka, bret harte's lecture at, . tourgueneff, , . _transformation of buckeye camp, the_, . _treasure of the redwoods, a_, . "trinidad joe's" daughter, . trinity church, new york, . trinity county, . trollope, anthony, . truesdale, abigail, . "truthful james," , , . tuolumne county, . tuttletown, . "'twixt," for between, . _two americans, the_, , . _two men of sandy bar_, produced in new york, . "uncle ben dabney," . _uncle jim and uncle billy_, , , . underwood, francis h., . union, . union college, henry hart at, , . "union mills," . university of california, , . _unser karl_, . upham, s. c., his "scenes in el dorado," cited, . "use," in the sense of employ, . vallejo, gen., . van de velde, arthur, . van de velde, mme., - ; her view of bret harte's departure from california, ; in london, ; translator of bret harte's stories, ; her influence upon him and his art, ; ; her country seat at camberley where he died, , . van wyck, cornelius, . _views from a german spion_, , . vigilance committees, , , , , , , , , , . virginia city, . "visalia delta, the," editor of, killed in street affray, . _vision of the fountain, a_, . vocabulary, bret harte's, , . voices, of bret harte's women, ; his own voice, . voyage to california, , . vulgarity, definition of, . _waif of the plains, a_, , , . _wan lee, the pagan_, . _ward of the golden gate, a_, , . warner, charles dudley, his "our italy," cited, , . washington, bret harte lectures in, ; his account of the capitol at, . watrous, mrs. charles, letter from, . watts-dunton, theodore, , . webb, charles henry, . west, the, its humor, . western people, bret harte's impressions of, . west point, . _when the waters were up at "jules',"_ , , . "which," in the cockney sense, as used by bret harte, - . _who was my quiet friend?_ _n._ widows in bret harte's stories, . wilkins, mary, . williams, col. andrew, bret harte's stepfather, - . wise, h. a., his "los gringos," cited, . wombwell, sir george, . women, the pioneer, - , - ; respect for women in america, , , ; development of beauty among the pioneer, ; bret harte's literary treatment of, - ; his conventional women, ; his army and navy women, ; snobbishness of women, ; bret harte's keen observation of, - ; his descriptions of beauty in, , . woods, d. b., his "sixteen months at the gold diggings," cited, , . wyman, margaret b. (harte), bret harte's sister, , , , . "yawpin'," . "yerba buena," . yorkshire club, york, eng., first meeting of bret harte and william black at, . young men's association in albany, . _young robin gray_, , , . "youngest miss piper," the, , . "youngest prospector in calaveras," the, ; not an uncommon child, ; . "yuba bill," , , , , , . yuba county, vineyards in, . transcriber's notes: passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. punctuation has been corrected without note. the following misprints have been corrected: "newpapers" corrected to "newspapers" (page ) "fremont" standardized to "frémont" (page ) "beside" corrected to "besides" (page ) other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. transfer point by anthony boucher illustrated by paul piérre [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from galaxy science fiction november . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] it was a nasty plot vyrko was involved in. the worst part was that he constructed it himself--and didn't get the end right! there were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands. the great kirth-labbery himself had constructed the retreat and its extraordinary air-conditioning--not because his scientific genius had foreseen the coming of the poisonous element, agnoton, and the end of the human race, but because he itched. and here vyrko sat, methodically recording the destruction of mankind, once in a straight factual record, for the instruction of future readers ("if any," he added wryly to himself), and again as a canto in that epic poem of man which he never expected to complete, but for which he lived. lavra's long golden hair fell over his shoulders. it was odd that its scent distracted him when he was at work on the factual record, yet seemed to wing the lines of the epic. "but why bother?" she asked. her speech might have been clearer if her tongue had not been more preoccupied with the savor of the apple than with the articulation of words. but vyrko understood readily: the remark was as familiar an opening as p-k in chess. "it's my duty," vyrko explained patiently. "i haven't your father's scientific knowledge and perception. your father's? i haven't the knowledge of his humblest lab assistant. but i can put words together so that they make sense and sometimes more than sense, and i have to do this." from lavra's plump red lips an apple pip fell into the works of the electronic typewriter. vyrko fished it out automatically; this too was part of the gambit, with the possible variants of grape seed, orange peel.... "but why," lavra demanded petulantly, "won't father let us leave here? a girl might as well be in a ... a...." "_convent?_" vyrko suggested. he was a good amateur paleolinguist. "there is an analogy--even despite my presence. _convents_ were supposed to shelter girls from the perils of the world. now the whole world is one great peril ... outside of this retreat." "go on," lavra urged. she had long ago learned, vyrko suspected, that he was a faintly over-serious young man with no small talk, and that she could enjoy his full attention only by asking to have something explained, even if for the _n_th time. * * * * * he smiled and thought of the girls he used to talk _with_, not _at_, and of how little breath they had for talking now in the world where no one drew an unobstructed breath. it had begun with the accidental discovery in a routine laboratory analysis of a new element in the air, an inert gas which the great paleolinguist larkish had named _agnoton_, the unknown thing, after the pattern of the similar nicknames given to others: _neon_, the new thing; _xenon_, the strange thing. it had continued (the explanation ran off so automatically that his mind was free to range from the next line of the epic to the interesting question of whether the presence of ear lobes would damage the symmetry of lavra's perfect face) it had continued with the itching and sneezing, the coughing and wheezing, with the increase of the percentage of agnoton in the atmosphere, promptly passing any other inert gas, even argon, and soon rivaling oxygen itself. and it had culminated (no, the lines were cleaner without lobes), on that day when only the three of them were here in this retreat, with the discovery that the human race was allergic to agnoton. allergies had been conquered for a decade of generations. their cure, even their palliation, had been forgotten. and mankind coughed and sneezed and itched ... and died. for while the allergies of the ancient past produced only agonies to make the patient long for death, agnoton brought on racking and incessant spasms of coughing and sneezing which no heart could long withstand. "so if you leave this shelter, my dear," vyrko concluded, "you too will fight for every breath and twist your body in torment until your heart decides that it is all just too much trouble. here we are safe, because your father's eczema was the only known case of allergy in centuries--and was traced to the inert gases. here is the only air-conditioning in the world that excludes the inert gases--and with them agnoton. and here--" * * * * * lavra leaned forward, a smile and a red fleck of apple skin on her lips, the apples of her breasts touching vyrko's shoulders. this too was part of the gambit. usually it was merely declined. tyrsa stood between them. tyrsa, who sang well and talked better; whose plain face and beautiful throat were alike racked by agnoton.... this time the gambit was interrupted. kirth-labbery himself had come in unnoticed. his old voice was thin with weariness, sharp with impatience. "and here we are, safe in perpetuity, with our air-conditioning, our energy plant, our hydroponics! safe in perpetual siege, besieged by an inert gas!" vyrko grinned. "undignified, isn't it?" kirth-labbery managed to laugh at himself. "damn your secretarial hide, vyrko. i love you like a son, but if i had one man who knew a meson from a metazoon to help me in the laboratory...." "you'll find something, father," lavra said vaguely. her father regarded her with an odd seriousness. "lavra," he said, "your beauty is the greatest thing that i have wrought--with a certain assistance, i'll grant, from the genes so obviously carried by your mother. that beauty alone still has meaning. the sight of you would bring a momentary happiness even to a man choking in his last spasms, while our great web of civilization...." he absently left the sentence unfinished and switched on the video screen. he had to try a dozen channels before he found one that was still casting. when every erg of a man's energy goes to drawing his next breath, he cannot tend his machine. at last kirth-labbery picked up a nyork newscast. the announcer was sneezing badly ("the older literature," vyrko observed, "found sneezing comic...."), but still contriving to speak, and somewhere a group of technicians must have had partial control of themselves. "four hundred and seventy-two planes have crashed," the announcer said, "in the past forty-eight hours. civil authorities have forbidden further plane travel indefinitely because of the danger of spasms at the controls, and it is rumored that all vehicular transport whatsoever is to come under the same ban. no rocklipper has arrived from lunn for over a week, and it is thirty-six hours since we have made contact with the lunn telestation. yurp has been silent for over two days, and asia a week. "'the most serious threat of this epidemic,' the head of the academy has said in an authorized statement, 'is the complete disruption of the systems of communication upon which world civilization is based. when man becomes physically incapable of governing his machines....'" * * * * * it was then that they saw the first of the yellow bands. it was just that: a band of bright yellow some thirty centimeters wide, about five meters long, and so thin as to seem insubstantial, a mere stripe of color. it came underneath the backdrop behind the announcer. it streaked about the casting room with questing sinuosity. no features, no appendages relieved its yellow blankness. then with a deft whipping motion it wrapped itself around the announcer. it held him only an instant. his hideously shriveled body plunged toward the camera as the screen went dead. that was the start of the horror. vyrko, naturally, had no idea of the origin of the yellow bands. even kirth-labbery could offer no more than conjectures. from another planet, another system, another galaxy, another universe.... it did not matter. precise knowledge had now lost its importance. kirth-labbery was almost as indifferent to the problem as was lavra; he speculated on it out of sheer habit. what signified was that the yellow bands were alien, and that they were rapidly and precisely completing the destruction of mankind begun by the agnoton. "their arrival immediately after the epidemic," kirth-labbery concluded, "cannot be coincidence. you will observe that they function freely in an agnoton-laden atmosphere." "it would be interesting," vyrko commented, "to visualize a band sneezing...." "it's possible," the scientist corrected, "that the agnoton was a poison-gas barrage laid down to soften earth for their coming; but is it likely that they could _know_ that a gas harmless to them would be lethal to other life? it's more probable that they learned from spectroscopic analysis that the atmosphere of earth lacked an element essential to them, which they supplied before invading." vyrko considered the problem while lavra sliced a peach with delicate grace. she was unable to resist licking the juice from her fingers. "then if the agnoton," he ventured, "is something that they imported, is it possible that their supply might run short?" kirth-labbery fiddled with the dials under the screen. it was still possible to pick up occasional glimpses from remote sectors, though by now the heart sickened in advance at the knowledge of the inevitable end of the cast. "it is possible, vyrko. it is the only hope. the three of us here, where the agnoton and the yellow bands are alike helpless to enter, may continue our self-sufficient existence long enough to outlast the invaders. perhaps somewhere on earth there are other such nuclei, but i doubt it. we are the whole of the future ... and i am old." * * * * * vyrko frowned. he resented the terrible weight of a burden that he did not want but could not reject. he felt himself at once, oppressed and ennobled. lavra went on eating her peach. the video screen sprang into light. a young man with the tense, lined face of premature age spoke hastily, urgently. "to all of you, if there are any of you.... i have heard no answer for two days now.... it is chance that i am here. but _watch_, all of you! i have found how the yellow bands came here. i am going to turn the camera on it now ... _watch_!" the field of vision panned to something that was for a moment totally incomprehensible. "this is their ship," the old young man gasped. it was a set of bars of a metal almost exactly the color of the bands themselves, and it appeared in the first instant like a three-dimensional projection of a tesseract. then as they looked at it, their eyes seemed to follow strange new angles. possibilities of vision opened up beyond their capacities. for a moment they seemed to see what the human eye was not framed to grasp. "they come," the voice panted on, "from...." the voice and the screen went dead. vyrko covered his eyes with his hands. darkness was infinite relief. a minute passed before he felt that he could endure once more even the normal exercise of the optic nerve. he opened his eyes sharply at a little scream from lavra. he opened them to see how still kirth-labbery sat. the human heart, too, is framed to endure only so much; and, as the scientist had said, he was old. * * * * * it was three days after kirth-labbery's death before vyrko had brought his prose-and-verse record up to date. nothing more had appeared on the video, even after the most patient hours of knob-twirling. now vyrko leaned back from the keyboard and contemplated his completed record--and then sat forward with abrupt shock at the thought of that word _completed_. there was nothing more to write. the situation was not novel in literature. he had read many treatments, and even written a rather successful satire on the theme himself. but here was the truth itself. he was that most imagination-stirring of all figures, the last man on earth. and he found it a boring situation. kirth-labbery, had he lived, would have devoted his energies in the laboratory to an effort, even conceivably a successful one, to destroy the invaders. vyrko knew his own limitations too well to attempt that. vrist, his gay wild twin, who had been in lunn on yet another of his fantastic ventures when the agnoton struck--vrist would have dreamed up some gallant feat of physical prowess to make the invaders pay dearly for his life. vyrko found it difficult to cast himself in so swash-buckling a role. he had never envied vrist till now. _be jealous of the dead; only the living are alone._ vyrko smiled as he recalled the line from one of his early poems. it had been only the expression of a pose when he wrote it, a mood for a song that tyrsa would sing well.... it was in this mood that he found (the ancient word had no modern counterpart) the _pulps_. * * * * * he knew their history: how some eccentric of two thousand years ago (the name was variously rendered as trees or tiller) had buried them in a hermetic capsule to check against the future; how tarabal had dug them up some fifty years ago; how kirth-labbery had spent almost the entire hartl prize for them because, as he used to assert, their incredible mixture of exact prophecy and arrant nonsense offered the perfect proof of the greatness and helplessness of human ingenuity. but vyrko had never read them before. they would at least be a novelty to deaden the boredom of his classically dramatic situation. he passed a more than pleasant hour with _galaxy_ and _surprising_ and the rest, needing the dictionary but rarely. he was particularly impressed by one story detailing, with the most precise minutiae, the politics of the american religious wars--a subject on which he himself had based a not unsuccessful novel. by one norbert holt, he observed. extraordinary how exact a forecast ... and yet extraordinary too how many of the stories dealt with space- and time-travel, which the race had never yet attained and now never would.... and inevitably there was a story, a neat and witty one by an author named knight, about the last man on earth. he read it and smiled, first at the story and then at his own stupidity. he found lavra in the laboratory, of all unexpected places. she was staring fixedly at one corner, where the light did not strike clearly. "what's so fascinating?" vyrko asked. lavra turned suddenly. her hair and her flesh rippled with the perfect grace of the movement. "i was thinking...." vyrko's half-formed intent toward her permitted no comment on that improbable statement. "the day before father ... died, i was in here with him and i asked if there was any hope of our escaping ever. only this time he answered me. he said yes, there was a way out, but he was afraid of it. it was an idea he'd worked on but never tried. and we'd be wiser not to try it, he said." "i don't believe in arguing with your father--even post mortem." "but i can't help wondering.... and when he said it, he looked over at that corner." * * * * * vyrko went to that corner and drew back a curtain. there was a chair of metal rods, and a crude control panel, though it was hard to see what it was intended to control. he dropped the curtain. for a moment he stood watching lavra. she was a fool, but she was exceedingly lovely. and the child of kirth-labbery could hardly carry only a fool's genes. several generations could grow up in this retreat before the inevitable failure of the most permanent mechanical installations made it uninhabitable. by that time earth would be free of agnoton and yellow bands, or they would be so firmly established that there was no hope. the third generation would go forth into the world, to perish or.... he walked over to lavra and laid a gentle hand on her golden hair. * * * * * vyrko never understood whether lavra had been bored before that time. a life of undemanding inaction with plenty of food may well have sufficed her. certainly she was not bored now. at first she was merely passive; vyrko had always suspected that she had meant the gambit to be declined. then as her interest mounted and vyrko began to compliment himself on his ability as an instructor, they became certain of their success; and from that point on she was rapt with the fascination of the changes in herself. but even this new development did not totally rid vyrko of his own ennui. if there were only something he could _do_, some positive, vristian, kirth-labberian step that he could take! he damned himself for having been an incompetent aesthetic fool, who had taken so for granted the scientific wonders of his age that he had never learned what made them tick, or how greater wonders might be attained. he slept too much, he ate too much, for a brief period he drank too much--until he found boredom even less attractive with a hangover. he tried to write, but the terrible uncertainty of any future audience disheartened him. sometimes a week would pass without his consciously thinking of agnoton or the yellow bands. then he would spend a day flogging himself into a state of nervous tension worthy of his uniquely dramatic situation, but he would always relapse. there just wasn't anything to do. now even the consolation of lavra's beauty was vanishing, and she began demanding odd items of food which the hydroponic garden could not supply. "if you loved me, you'd find a way to make cheese ..." or "... grow a new kind of peach ... a little like a grape, only different...." it was while he was listening to a film wire of tyrsa's (the last she ever made, in the curious tonalities of that newly rediscovered mozart opera) and seeing her homely face, made even less lovely by the effort of those effortless-sounding notes, that he became conscious of the operative phrase. "if you loved me...." "have i ever said i did?" he snapped. he saw a new and not readily understood expression mar the beauty of lavra's face. "no," she said in sudden surprise. "no," and her voice fell to flatness, "you haven't...." and as her sobs--the first he had ever heard from her--traveled away toward the hydroponic room, he felt a new and not readily understood emotion. he switched off the film wire midway through the pyrotechnic rage of the eighteenth-century queen of darkness. * * * * * vyrko found a curious refuge in the _pulps_. there was a perverse satisfaction in reading the thrilling exploits of other last men on earth. he could feel through them the emotions that he should be feeling directly. and the other stories were fun, too, in varying ways. for instance, that astonishingly accurate account of the delicate maneuvering which averted what threatened to be the first and final atomic war.... he noticed one oddity: every absolutely correct story of the "future" bore the same by-line. occasionally other writers made good guesses, predicted logical trends, foresaw inevitable extrapolations. but only norbert holt named names and dated dates with perfect historical accuracy. it wasn't possible. it was too precise to be plausible. it was far more spectacular than the erratic nostradamus often discussed in the _pulps_. but there it was. he had read the holt stories solidly through in order a half-dozen times, without finding a single flaw, when he discovered the copy of _surprising stories_ that had slipped behind a shelf and was therefore new to him. he looked at once at the contents page. yes, there was a holt and--he felt a twinge of irrational but poignant sadness--one labeled as posthumous. this story, we regret to tell you, is incomplete, and not only because of norbert holt's tragic death last month. this is the last in chronological order of holt's stories of a consistently plotted future; but this fragment was written before his masterpiece, the _siege of lunn_. holt himself used to tell me that he could never finish it, that he could not find an ending; and he died still not knowing how _the last boredom_ came out. but here, even though in fragment form, is the last published work of the greatest writer about the future, norbert holt. the note was signed with the initials m. s. vyrko had long sensed a more than professional intimacy between holt and his editor, manning stern; this obituary introduction must have been a bitter task. but his eyes were hurrying on, almost fearfully, to the first words of _the lost boredom_: there were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands. the great kirth-labbery himself had constructed.... vyrko blinked and started again. it still read the same. he took firm hold of the magazine, as though the miracle might slip between his fingers, and dashed off with more energy than he had felt in months. * * * * * he found lavra in the hydroponic room. "i have just found," he shouted, "the damnedest unbelievable--" "darling," said lavra, "i want some meat." "don't be silly. we haven't any meat. nobody's eaten meat except at ritual dinners for generations." "then i want a ritual dinner." "you can go on wanting. but look at this! just read those first lines!" "vyrko," she pleaded, "i _want_ it." "don't be an idiot!" her lips pouted and her eyes moistened. "vyrko dear.... what you said when you were listening to that funny music.... don't you love me?" "no," he barked. her eyes overflowed. "you don't love me? not after...?" all vyrko's pent-up boredom and irritation erupted. "you're beautiful, lavra, or you were a few months ago, but you're an idiot. i am not in the habit of loving idiots." "but you...." "i tried to assure the perpetuation of the race--questionable though the desirability of such a project seems at the moment. it was not an unpleasant task, but i'm damned if it gives you the right in perpetuity to pester me." she moaned a little as he slammed out of the room. he felt oddly better. adrenalin is a fine thing for the system. he settled into a chair and resolutely read, his eyes bugging like a cover-monster's with amazed disbelief. when he reached the verbatim account of the quarrel he had just enjoyed, he dropped the magazine. it sounded so petty in print. such stupid inane bickering in the face of.... he left the magazine lying there and went back to the hydroponic room. lavra was crying--noiselessly this time, which somehow made it worse. one hand had automatically plucked a ripe grape, but she was not eating it. he went up behind her and slipped his hand under her long hair and began stroking the nape of her neck. the soundless sobs diminished gradually. when his fingers moved tenderly behind her ears, she turned to him with parted lips. the grape fell from her hand. "i'm sorry," he heard himself saying. "it's me that's the idiot. which, i repeat, i am not in the habit of loving. and you're the mother of my twins and i do love you...." and he realized that the statement was quite possibly, if absurdly, true. "i don't want anything now," lavra said when words were again in order. she stretched contentedly, and she was still beautiful even in the ungainly distortion which might preserve a race. "now what were you trying to tell me?" * * * * * he explained. "and this holt is always right," he ended. "and now he's writing about us!" "oh! oh, then we'll know--" "we'll know everything. we'll know what the yellow bands are and what becomes of them and what happens to mankind and--" "--and we'll know," said lavra, "whether it's a boy or a girl." vyrko smiled. "twins, i told you. it runs in my family--no less than one pair to a generation. and i think that's it--holt's already planted the fact of my having a twin named vrist, even though he doesn't come into the action." "twins.... that _would_ be nice. they wouldn't be lonely until we could.... but get it quick, dear. read it to me; i can't wait!" so he read norbert holt's story to her--too excited and too oddly affectionate to point out that her long-standing aversion for print persisted even when she herself was a character. he read on past the quarrel. he read a printable version of the past hour. he read about himself reading the story to her. "now!" she cried. "we're up to _now_. what happens next?" vyrko read: the emotional release of anger and love had set vyrko almost at peace with himself again; but a small restlessness still nibbled at his brain. irrelevantly he remembered kirth-labbery's cryptic hint of escape. escape for the two of them, happy now; for the two of them and for their ... it had to be, according to the odds, their twins. he sauntered curiously into the laboratory, lavra following him. he drew back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. it was hard to see the control board that seemed to control nothing. he sat in the chair for a better look. he made puzzled grunting noises. lavra, her curiosity finally stirred by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green button. * * * * * "i don't like that last thing he says about me," lavra objected. "i don't like anything he says about me. i think your mr. holt is a very nasty person." "he says you're beautiful." "and he says you love me. or does he? it's all mixed up." "it is all mixed up ... and i do love you." the kiss was a short one; lavra had to say, "and what next?" "that's all. it ends there." "well.... aren't you...?" vyrko felt strange. holt had described his feelings so precisely. he was at peace and still curious, and the thought of kirth-labbery's escape method did nibble restlessly at his brain. he rose and sauntered into the laboratory, lavra following him. he drew back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. it was hard to see the control board that seemed to control nothing. he sat in the chair for a better look. he made puzzled grunting noises. lavra, her curiosity finally stirred by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green button. * * * * * vyrko had no time for amazement when lavra and the laboratory vanished. he saw the archaic vehicle bearing down directly upon him and tried to get out of the way as rapidly as possible. but the chair hampered him and before he could get to his feet the vehicle struck. there was a red explosion of pain and then a long blackness. he later recalled a moment of consciousness at the hospital and a shrill female voice repeating over and over, "but he wasn't there and then all of a sudden he was and i hit him. it was like he came out of nowhere. he wasn't there and all of a sudden...." then the blackness came back. all the time of his unconsciousness, all through the semi-conscious nightmares while doctors probed at him and his fever soared, his unconscious mind must have been working on the problem. he knew the complete answer the instant that he saw the paper on his breakfast tray, that first day he was capable of truly seeing anything. the paper was easy to read for a paleolinguist with special training in _pulps_--easier than the curious concept of breakfast was to assimilate. what mattered was the date. --and the headlines refreshed his knowledge of the cold war and the impending election. (there was something he should remember about that election....) he saw it clearly. kirth-labbery's genius had at last evolved a time machine. that was the one escape, the escape which the scientist had not yet tested and rather distrusted. and lavra had poked the green button because norbert holt had said she had poked (would poke?) the green button. how many buttons could a wood poke poke if a wood poke would poke.... "the breakfast didn't seem to agree with him, doctor." "maybe it was the paper. makes me run a temperature every morning, too!" "oh, doctor, you do say the funniest things!" "nothing funnier than this case. total amnesia, as best we can judge by his lucid moments. and his clothes don't help us--must've been on his way to a fancy-dress party. or maybe i should say fancy-_un_dress!" "oh, _doctor_!" "don't tell me nurses can blush. never did when i was an intern--and you can't say they didn't get a chance! but this character here ... not a blessed bit of identification on him! riding some kind of newfangled bike that got smashed up.... better hold off on the solid food for a bit--stick to intravenous feeding." * * * * * he'd had this trouble before at ritual dinners, vyrko finally recalled. meat was apt to affect him badly--the trouble was that he had not at first recognized those odd strips of oily solid which accompanied the egg as meat. the adjustment was gradual and successful, in this as in other matters. at the end of two weeks, he was eating meat easily (and, he confessed, with a faintly obscene non-ritual pleasure) and equally easily chatting with nurses and fellow patients about the events (which he still privately tended to regard as mummified museum pieces) of . his adjustment, in fact, was soon so successful that it could not continue. the doctor made that clear. "got to think about the future, you know. can't keep you here forever. nasty unreasonable prejudice against keeping well men in hospitals." vyrko allowed the expected laugh to come forth. "but since," he said, gladly accepting the explanation that was so much more credible than the truth, "i haven't any idea who i am, where i live, or what my profession is--" "can't remember anything? don't know if you can take shorthand, for instance? or play the bull fiddle?" "not a thing." vyrko felt it hardly worth while to point out his one manual accomplishment, the operation of the as-yet-uninvented electronic typewriter. "behold," he thought, "the man of the future. i've read all the time travel stories. i know what should happen. i teach them everything kirth-labbery knew and i'm the greatest man in the world. only the fictional time travel never happens to a poor dope who took for granted all the science around him, who pushed a button or turned a knob and never gave a damn what happened or why. here they're just beginning to get two-dimensional black-and-white short-range television. we had (will have?) stereoscopic full-color world-wide video--which i'm about as capable of constructing here as my friend the doctor would be of installing electric light in ancient rome. the mouse of the future...." the doctor had been thinking, too. he said, "notice you're a great reader. librarian's been telling me about you--went through the whole damn hospital library like a bookworm with a tapeworm!" vyrko laughed dutifully. "i like to read," he admitted. "ever try writing?" the doctor asked abruptly, almost in the tone in which he might reluctantly advise a girl that her logical future lay in port saïd. this time vyrko really laughed. "that does seem to ring a bell, you know.... it might be worth trying. but at that, what do i live on until i get started?" "hospital trustees here administer a rehabilitation fund. might wangle a loan. won't be much, of course; but i always say a single man's got only one mouth to feed--and if he feeds more, he won't be single long!" "a little," said vyrko with a glance at the newspaper headlines, "might go a long way." * * * * * it did. there was the loan itself, which gave him a bank account on which, in turn, he could acquire other short-term loans--at exorbitant interest. and there was the election. he had finally reconstructed what he should know about it. there had been a brilliant wheel-of-if story in one of the much later pulps, on _if_ the republicans had won the election. which meant that actually they had lost; and here, in october of , all newspapers, all commentators, and most important, all gamblers, were convinced that they must infallibly win. on wednesday, november third, vyrko repaid his debts and settled down to his writing career, comfortably guaranteed against immediate starvation. a half-dozen attempts at standard fiction failed wretchedly. a matter of "tone," editors remarked vaguely, on the rare occasions when they did not confine themselves to the even vaguer phrases of printed rejection forms. a little poetry sold--"if you can call that selling," vyrko thought bitterly, comparing the financial position of the poet here and in his own world. his failures were beginning to bring back the bitterness and boredom, and his thoughts turned more and more to that future to which he could never know the answer. _twins._ it had to be twins--of opposite sexes, of course. the only hope of the continuance of the race lay in a matter of odds and genetics. odds.... he began to think of the election bet, to figure other angles with which he could turn foreknowledge to profit. but his pulp-reading had filled his mind with fears of the paradoxes involved. he had calculated the election bets carefully; they could not affect the outcome of the election, they could not even, in their proportionately small size, affect the odds. but any further step.... vyrko was, like most conceited men, fond of self-contempt, which he felt he could occasionally afford to indulge in. possibly his strongest access of self-contempt came when he realized the simplicity of the solution to all his problems. he could write for the science fiction pulps. the one thing that he could handle convincingly and skilfully, with the proper "tone," was the future. possibly start off with a story on the religious wars; he'd done all that research on his novel. then.... it was not until he was about to mail the manuscript that the full pattern of the truth struck him. soberly, yet half-grinning, he crossed out kirth vyrko on the first page and wrote norbert holt. * * * * * manning stern rejoiced loudly in this fresh discovery. "this boy's got it! he makes it sound so real that...." the business office was instructed to pay the highest bonus rate (unheard of for a first story) and an intensely cordial letter went to the author outlining immediate needs and offering certain story suggestions. the editor of _surprising_ was no little surprised at the answer: ... i regret to say that all my stories will be based on one consistent scheme of future events and that you must allow me to stick to my own choice of material.... * * * * * "and who the hell," manning stern demanded, "is editing this magazine?" and dictated a somewhat peremptory suggestion for a personal interview. the features were small and sharp, and the face had a sort of dark aliveness. it was a different beauty from lavra's, and an infinitely different beauty from the curious standards set by the films; but it was beauty and it spoke to norbert holt. "you'll forgive a certain surprise, miss stern," he ventured. "i've read _surprising_ for so many years and never thought...." manning stern grinned. "that the editor was also surprising? i'm used to it--your reaction, i mean. i don't think i'll ever be quite used to being a woman ... or a human being, for that matter." "isn't it rather unusual? from what i know of the field...." "please god, when i find a man who can write, don't let him go all male-chauvinist on me! i'm a good editor," said she with becoming modesty (and don't you ever forget it!), "and i'm a good scientist. i even worked on the manhattan project--until some character discovered that my adopted daughter was a spanish war orphan. but what we're here to talk about is this consistent-scheme gimmick of yours. it's all right, of course; it's been done before. but where i frankly think you're crazy is in planning to do it _exclusively_." norbert holt opened his briefcase. "i've brought along an outline that might help convince you...." an hour later manning stern glanced at her watch and announced, "end of office hours! care to continue this slugfest over a martini or five? i warn you--the more i'm plied, the less pliant i get." and an hour after that she stated, "we might get some place if we'd stay some place. i mean the subject seems to be getting elusive." "the hell," norbert holt announced recklessly, "with editorial relations. let's get back to the current state of the opera." "it was paintings. i was telling you about the show at the--" "no, i remember now. it was movies. you were trying to explain the marx brothers. unsuccessfully, i may add." "un ... suc ... cess ... fully," said manning stern ruminatively. "five martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. but i try to explain the marx brothers yet! look, holt. i've got a subversive orphan at home and she's undoubtedly starving. i've _got_ to feed her. you come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?" "good. fine. always like to try a new dish." manning stern looked at him curiously. "now was that a gag or not? you're funny, holt. you know a lot about everything and then all of a sudden you go all man-from-mars on the simplest thing. or do you...? anyway, let's go feed raquel." and five hours later holt was saying, "i never thought i'd have this reason for being glad i sold a story. manning, i haven't had so much fun talking to--i almost said 'to a woman.' i haven't had so much fun talking since--" he had almost said _since the agnoton came_. she seemed not to notice his abrupt halt. she simply said "bless you, norb. maybe you aren't a male-chauvinist. maybe even you're.... look, go find a subway or a cab or something. if you stay here another minute, i'm either going to kiss you or admit you're right about your stories--and i don't know which is worse editor-author relations." * * * * * manning stern committed the second breach of relations first. the fan mail on norbert holt's debut left her no doubt that _surprising_ would profit by anything he chose to write about. she'd never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. or rather you could hardly say _rise_. holt hit the top with his first story and stayed there. he socked the fans (guest of honor at the washinvention), the pros (first president of science fiction writers of america), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best seller list). and never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) but just being with him, talking about this, that and those.... raquel, just turning sixteen, was quite obviously in love with him--praying that he'd have the decency to stay single till she grew up and "you know, manningcita, i _am_ spanish; and the mediterranean girls...." but there _was_ this occasional feeling of _oddness_. like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night at scwa.... "i've got a story problem," norbert holt announced there. "an idea, and i can't lick it. maybe if i toss it out to the literary lions...." "story problem?" manning said, a little more sharply than she'd intended. "i thought everything was outlined for the next ten years." "this is different. this is a sort of paradox story, and i can't get out of it. it won't end. something like this: suppose a man in the remote year x reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine. so he works the time machine and goes back to the year x minus --let's say, for instance, our time. so in 'now' he writes the story that he's going to read two thousand years later, telling himself how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he read the story which he wrote because--" manning was starting to say "hold it!" when matt duncan interrupted with, "good old endless-cycle gimmick. lot of fun to kick around, but bob heinlein did it once and for all in _by his bootstraps_. damnedest tour de force i ever read; there just aren't any switcheroos left." "ouroboros," joe henderson contributed. norbert holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per evening was joe's maximum contribution. austin carter picked it up. "ouroboros, the worm, that circles the universe with its tail in its mouth. the asgard serpent, too. and i think there's something in mayan literature. all symbols of infinity--no beginning, no ending. always out by the same door where you went in. see that magnificent novel of eddison's, _the worm ouroboros_; the perfect cyclic novel, ending with its recommencement, stopping not because there's a stopping place, but because it's uneconomical to print the whole text over infinitely." "the quaker oats box," said duncan. "with a quaker holding a box with a quaker holding a box with a quaker holding a...." it was standard professional shop-talk. it was a fine evening with the boys. but there was a look of infinitely remote sadness in norbert holt's eyes. that was the evening that manning violated her first rule of editor-author relationships. * * * * * they were having martinis in the same bar in which norbert had, so many years ago, successfully said _unsuccessfully_. "they've been good years," he remarked, apparently to the olive. there was something wrong with this evening. no bounce. no yumph. "that's a funny tense," manning confided to her own olive. "aren't they still good years?" "i've owed you a serious talk for a long time." "you don't have to pay the debt. we don't go in much for being serious, do we? not so dead-earnest-catch-in-the-throat serious." "don't we?" "i've got an awful feeling," manning admitted, "that you're building up to a proposal, either to me or that olive. and if it's me, i've got an awful feeling i'm going to accept--and raquel will _never_ forgive me." "you're safe," norbert said dryly. "that's the serious talk. i want to marry you, darling, and i'm not going to." "i suppose this is the time you twirl your black mustache and tell me you have a wife and family elsewhere?" "i hope to god i have!" "no, it wasn't very funny, was it?" manning felt very little, aside from wishing she were dead. "i can't tell you the truth," he went on. "you wouldn't believe it. i've loved two women before; one had talent and a brain, the other had beauty and no brain. i think i loved her. the damnedest curse of ouroboros is that i'll never quite know. if i could take that tail out of that mouth...." "go on," she encouraged a little wildly. "talk plot-gimmicks. it's easier on me." "and she is carrying ... will carry ... my child--my children, it must be. my twins...." "look, holt. we came in here editor and author--remember back when? let's go out that way. don't go on talking. i'm a big girl, but i can't take ... everything. it's been fun knowing you and all future manuscripts will be gratefully received." "i knew i couldn't say it. i shouldn't have tried. but there won't be any future manuscripts. i've written every holt i've ever read." "does that make sense?" manning aimed the remark at the olive, but it was gone. so was the martini. "here's the last." he took it out of his breast-pocket, neatly folded. "the one we talked about at scwa--the one i couldn't end. maybe you'll understand. i wanted somehow to make it clear before...." the tone of his voice projected a sense of doom, and manning forgot everything else. "is something going to happen to you? are you going to--oh, my dear, _no_! all right, so you, have a wife on every space station in the asteroid belt; but if anything happens to you...." "i don't know," said norbert holt. "i can't remember the exact date of that issue...." he rose abruptly. "i shouldn't have tried a goodbye. see you again, darling--the next time round ouroboros." she was still staring at the empty martini glass when she heard the shrill of brakes and the excited up-springing of a crowd outside. * * * * * she read the posthumous fragment late that night, after her eyes had dried sufficiently to make the operation practicable. and through her sorrow her mind fought to help her, making her think, making her be an editor. she understood a little and disbelieved what she understood. and underneath she prodded herself, "but it isn't a _story_. it's too short, too inconclusive. it'll just disappoint the holt fans--and that's everybody. much better if i do a straight obit, take up a full page on it...." she fought hard to keep on thinking, not feeling. she had never before experienced so strongly the i-have-been-here-before sensation. she had been faced with this dilemma once before, once on some other time-spiral, as the boys in scwa would say. and her decision had been.... "it's sentimentality," she protested. "it isn't _editing_. this decision's right. i know it. and if i go and get another of these attacks and start to change my mind...." she laid the posthumous holt fragment on the coals. it caught fire quickly. * * * * * the next morning raquel greeted her with, "manningcita, who's norbert holt?" manning had slept so restfully that she was even tolerant of foolish questions at breakfast. "who?" she asked. "norbert holt. somehow the name popped into my mind. is he perhaps one of your writers?" "never heard of him." raquel frowned. "i was almost sure.... can you really remember them all? i'm going to check those bound volumes of _surprising_." "any luck with your ... what was it...? holt?" manning asked the girl a little later. "no, manningcita. i was quite unsuccessful." ... _unsuccessful_.... now why in heaven's name, mused manning stern, should i be thinking of martinis at breakfast time? fiction writers on fiction writing fiction writers on fiction writing _advice, opinions and a statement of their own working methods by more than one hundred authors_ edited, with notes, by arthur sullivant hoffman _author of_ fundamentals of fiction writing [illustration] indianapolis the bobbs-merrill company publishers copyright, by the bobbs-merrill company _printed in the united states of america_ press of braunworth & co. book manufacturers brooklyn, n. y. this book is dedicated to the one hundred and sixteen authors who wrote it and to every author who may profit from their writing. authors whose replies to the questionnaire make up the body of this book: bill adams samuel hopkins adams paul l. anderson william ashley anderson h. c. bailey edwin balmer ralph henry barbour frederick orin bartlett nalbro bartley konrad bercovici ferdinand berthoud h. h. birney, jr. farnham bishop algernon blackwood max bonter katharine holland brown f. r. buckley prosper buranelli thompson burtis george m. a. cain robert v. carr george l. catton robert w. chambers roy p. churchill carl clausen courtney ryley cooper arthur crabb mary stewart cutting elmer davis william harper dean harris dickson captain dingle louis dodge phyllis duganne j. allan dunn walter a. dyer walter prichard eaton charles victor fischer e. o. foster arthur o. friel j. u. giesy george gilbert kenneth gilbert louise closser hale holworthy hall richard matthews hallet william h. hamby a. judson hanna joseph mills hanson e. e. harriman nevil g. henshaw joseph hergesheimer robert hichens r. de s. horn clyde b. hough emerson hough a. s. m. hutchinson inez haynes irwin will irwin charles tenney jackson frederick j. jackson mary johnston john joseph lloyd kohler harold lamb sinclair lewis hapsburg liebe romaine h. lowdermilk eugene p. lyle, jr. rose macaulay crittenden marriott homer i. mceldowney ray mcgillivray helen topping miller thomas samson miller anne shannon monroe l. m. montgomery frederick moore talbot mundy kathleen norris anne o'hagan grant overton sir gilbert parker hugh pendexter clay perry michael j. phillips walter b. pitkin e. s. pladwell lucia mead priest eugene manlove rhodes frank c. robertson ruth sawyer chester l. saxby barry scobee r. t. m. scott robert simpson arthur d. howden smith theodore seixas solomons raymond s. spears norman springer julian street t. s. stribling booth tarkington w. c. tuttle lucille van slyke atreus von schrader t. von ziekursch henry kitchell webster g. a. wells william wells ben ames williams honore willsie h. c. witwer william almon wolff edgar young fiction writers on fiction writing fiction writers on fiction writing how this book came into being since this book is not only written for the most part by others than myself and since, for a second reason, its coming into being is the result of an accident, not of any inspiration on my part, there is no reason why i should not state frankly my opinion of its practical value and exceptional interest. the mere statement of that value is its own proof:--there have been hosts of books, classes and correspondence courses claiming to teach the writing of fiction, but in all but a handful of cases these teachers have been eminently unqualified for the work. the majority have no sound right to speak at all, lacking sufficient accomplishment or even experience of their own and showing in their attempt the lack of ability as critic or teacher often evidenced by those who are themselves unable to create. of the remainder a very few have proved any considerable ability as creators of fiction and these, as a group, are inclined to proceed on the dangerous principle that what is good for one case, their own, is therefore good for all other cases. another few, with some editorial experience (though generally almost none) and, therefore, at least some understanding of the general field, are mostly barren of accomplishment as creators and so unable to enter satisfactorily into the inner problems of those who do create. still another few, while versed in the academic requirements of literature are unfamiliar with both the actual magazine and book field and the actual work of creating. all of them are sadly handicapped in their undertaking by an obsession for reducing the art of writing to a performance almost altogether governed by general formulas and ironclad rules for universal application. but here is a book written not by an author of negligible standing, an editor who can not create, a college professor speaking from the outside, or any other theorist whatsoever, but _by the successful writers themselves_, each telling in detail his own processes of creation. no one else in the world can bring us so quickly to the real heart of the matter or come so close to speaking the final word. while the words of any one of them are of value, the contrasted and collective cases of one hundred and sixteen of them are beyond estimate of value. for either the beginner or the established writer. even for each of these one hundred and sixteen themselves. as to the accident that brought the book into being, my own justification for venturing to act as collector and summarizer, and the reason for choice of the particular lines of investigation: having been a magazine editor for twenty years (_adventure_, _romance_, _delineator_, _smart set_, _transatlantic tales_, _watson's_, _chautauquan_), i had become more and more rebellious against present methods of teaching fiction writing, for year by year their fruits poured across my desk by the thousands--stories often technically correct but machine-like, artificial, lacking in real individuality. american fiction as a whole is characterized by this result of the curse of formula and, until that curse is removed, american fiction can never attain the place to which native ability entitles it. many who attempt to write can never succeed. some succeed despite all obstacles. but in between are a great number with varying degree of ability, many of them appearing in books or magazines, some of them attaining a fair degree of real success, some of them failing of print, but no one of them who could not do far better if he would shake himself free from the influence of machine-like methods and give opportunity to whatever of individuality may lie within him. a long procession of possibilities unrealized, regrettable because of the loss to american fiction, pathetic if one looks behind the manuscripts at vain struggles and hopes unfulfilled. the only chance for remedy seemed a direct attack upon the school of formula and rule itself, followed by whatever could be done in a constructive way. a lone editor could accomplish little by himself, but he could accomplish even less than that if he didn't try. he was not the only editor grumbling over the situation and among experienced writers were many in agreement as to the evils of too much formula; perhaps, once the challenge were definitely made-- as equipment, besides editorial experience, i had been "a contributor of fiction to our leading magazines" sufficiently to appreciate creative problems from the other side of the editorial desk, and at two universities and elsewhere had absorbed sufficient of the academic for foundation and background. there had been, too, sufficient rebellion against general editorial precepts and precedents to keep me from falling so deep into the editorial rut that i couldn't at least see over the edges. most of all, i was sick and tired of seeing the formula-worshippers doing all they could to increase the flood of fiction that, however perfect by formula and however skilfully polished, is inevitably and forever hack. so i wrote a book in protest and in the hope that it might to some degree serve those who were willing to turn from formalism to individual expression if only they could find some small guide-posts along the way. in _fundamentals of fiction writing_ i tried to give them, instead of rules, an understanding of the facts of human nature upon which art and its rules must be based, so that they might see their own way and walk upon their own feet. to drive home the point it was necessary to show them beyond chance of doubt that rules applied without understanding were unsafe guides. the simplest and most effective way of proving this was to show them that the writers who had actually succeeded did not blindly follow general rules but chose among them each according to his own needs and bent, and that what was one writer's meat was another writer's poison. so, to prove that rules must be subject to individuality, i sent out a questionnaire to writers, planning to use the answers as an appendix to _fundamentals_. some questions were added to gather further data on facts of human nature, and still others were suggested by writers (william ashley anderson and l. patrick greene) with whom i consulted, answers to these last questions being sought as data of interest to writers in general. the answerers, of course, had not seen my book, though the body of it was already in the publisher's hands, and in the questionnaire i took pains that there should be no hint of any points i hoped to see established. while the effort to keep the wording of the questions from tending in any way against entirely uninfluenced answers made some of them less definite and more banal than i should have liked, there was more than compensation in the resulting wealth of data that had not been even hoped for. when the answers began coming in, it became at once apparent that here was material far too valuable to be tucked away in the appendix of any book. the questionnaire had gone to only those writers who had contributed to my own magazine, _adventure_, some of them beginners, some of them established writers appearing in all our magazines and between book-covers. it was then sent to a general list of authors and their answers were added to those first received. the result is a broadly representative list of authors almost perfect for the purpose. it includes the tyro and the writer of life-long experience, those little known along with our best and our most popular. there are those who write avowedly for money returns alone; those who make literary excellence their single goal. they come to authorship by various roads from all walks in life, from england as well as america. they run the whole gamut of difference in schooling, method, aim, ability, experience and success. the value of their symposium to the beginner is beyond easy calculation. if there is an experienced writer who can not find profit as well as interest in these ideas and methods of his fellow craftsmen, considered both individually and collectively, i can not at the moment guess his identity. if other editors can learn from it as much as i have, they will find it difficult to name any other one thing from which they have learned so much of value in so short a time. if literary critics will bring to it a consideration of fundamentals and of facts, that their general type is none too prone to exercise, there will be a gain both to them and to the standards of criticism and valuation they so largely control. to readers of fiction it is the opening up of a fascinating world hitherto seen only in detached glimpses. and if the average writer of text-books or teacher of class expounding the art of writing fiction will let go of formulas and theories handed to him by others and consider the actual laboratory facts of what he is trying to teach, the gain to american fiction will be tremendous. if my summaries and discussions of the answers group by group leave much to be desired, i plead the difficulty of exactness in dealing with matters of infinite variations and subtle shadings, the impossibility of covering even sketchily all the points that arise, the limitation imposed on entirely free discussion of material furnished one through courtesy and good will, and the fact that in any case my comments are of extremely minor importance in comparison with the answers themselves. the answers have in most cases been given in full. what cutting was necessary in places has been done, i think, with as little bias as is shown in the questions. where specific teachers, books, authors and so on were mentioned, there have been some omissions, nearly always of those unfavorably mentioned. if specific instances seem ill-chosen for either cutting or exceptions, i can plead only good intent and the best judgment i could summon. i have been editing copy for more than twenty years and have found few cases offering greater difficulties to consistency and intelligent handling. the specific difficulty mentioned is, naturally, far from being the only one. my sincere thanks go to the authors whose kindness furnished the material for this book. while some of them were personal friends or acquaintances, there were others upon whom i had no shadow of claim and who responded only through an innate spirit of helpfulness--helpfulness not just to the asker but to the host of aspiring writers who they knew would profit from the information experienced writers could give. my thanks, too, for the good will of those authors who were prevented from answering by circumstances beyond their control. i have dealt with writers most of my life and, as in any other group of people, there are disagreeable, trying, ridiculous and even criminal exceptions, but as a whole i have found them very kindly, human folk. perhaps it is because the material of their life-work is human nature, or because their natural bent is such as to make them choose that life-work. it would, i think, be a vastly kinder, gentler world if all who live in it were equally ready with the helping and friendly hand. questionnaire answers to which constitute the body of this book i. what is the genesis of a story with you--does it grow from an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, setting, a title, or what? that is, what do you mean by an idea for a story? ii. do you map it out in advance, or do you start with, say, a character or situation, and let the story tell itself as you write? do you write it in pieces to be joined together, or straightaway as a whole? is the ending clearly in mind when you begin? to what extent do you revise? iii. when you read a story to what extent does your imagination reproduce the story-world of the author--do you actually see in your imagination all the characters, action and setting just as if you were looking at an actual scene? do you actually hear all sounds described, mentioned and inferred, just as if they were real sounds? do you taste the flavors in a story, so really that your mouth literally waters to a pleasant one? how real does your imagination make the smells in a story you read? does your imagination reproduce the sense of touch--of rough or smooth contact, hard or gentle impact or pressure, etc.? does your imagination make you feel actual physical pain corresponding, though in a slighter degree, to pain presented in a story? of course you get an intelligent idea from any such mention, but in which of the above cases does your imagination produce the same results on your senses as do the actual stimuli themselves? if you can really "see things with your eyes shut," what limitations? are the pictures you see colored or more in black and white? are details distinct or blurred? if you studied geometry, did it give you more trouble than other mathematics? is your response limited to the exact degree to which the author describes and makes vivid, or will the mere concept set you to reproducing just as vividly? do you have stock pictures for, say, a village church or a cowboy, or does each case produce its individual vision? is there any difference in behavior of your imagination when you are reading stories and when writing them? have you ever considered these matters as "tools of your trade"? if so, to what extent and how do you use them? iv. when you write do you center your mind on the story itself or do you constantly have your readers in mind? in revising? v. have you had a class-room or correspondence course on writing fiction? books on it? to what extent did this help in the elementary stages? beyond the elementary stages? vi. how much of your craft have you learned from reading current authors? the classics? vii. what is your general feeling on the value of technique? viii. what is most interesting and important to you in your writing--plot, structure, style, material, setting, character, color, etc.? ix. what are two or three of the most valuable suggestions you could give to a beginner? to a practised writer? x. what is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind? xi. do you prefer writing in the first person or the third? why? xii. do you lose ideas because your imagination travels faster than your means of recording? which affords least check--pencil, typewriter or stenographer? question i _what is the genesis of a story with you--does it grow from an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, setting, a title, or what? that is, what do you mean by an idea for a story?_ answers =bill adams=: usually three words with a bit of a slideway to them, thus, "there was once a ship"--or "the sun of morning shone upon the water"-- i don't know how it grows, or whether it grows--it sort of occurs, as it were. =samuel hopkins adams=: genesis--usually from an incident, sometimes from a single phrase which illuminates a character; never from a title. in my entire experience i have found so-called "true stories" available only once or twice, and then in greatly modified form. life is dramatic, but it isn't fictional until interpreted and arranged by the fictional mind. =paul l. anderson=: the genesis of a story with me may be any of the things you mention, or something else, entirely different; a newspaper item, a picture, a story some one else has told (i mean i get a suggestion from another yarn, not that i take some one else's story and tell it as my own). for example, the genesis of one prehistoric animal story, was a picture in henry fairfield osborn's book, _the origin and evolution of life_; of another, a group in the american museum of natural history; of one story, the fact that a man will do more and suffer more for his loved ones than for himself. the genesis of the best story, by far, that i ever wrote, which has been consistently rejected by magazine after magazine because it is too gruesome, was this: lying in bed one morning, on the borderland of waking, i dreamed i heard some one say these words: "far above us in the darkness i heard a trap-door shut with a clang." the memory of those words carried over into waking, and the story grew from that. the genesis of another yarn was a trip i once made in my flivver, which involved crossing a railroad track laid along a side-hill. etc., etc. "all's fish that comes to the net." =william ashley anderson=: no definite principle can be laid down as to the inspiration of a story. it may be based on an actual occurrence; a striking tradition; a strange custom. or an argument may suggest a point to be proved by a story. an extraordinary character, an unusual scene, an atmosphere even (fog, storm, scorching heat). i think one of the basic principles is the desire to tell something unusual about things that are commonplace, or to tell something commonplace about things that are extraordinary. =h. c. bailey=: nearly always in my mind a story begins with a character or characters. this holds good though the main interest of the story may be incident or the surprise of its plot. making the story is with me the process of providing these people with things to do and say which will express them. i never began with a title (they are my plague), or a setting. once or twice with a situation. occasionally with a sentence which came into my mind from heaven knows where. =edwin balmer=: the genesis of a story is decided, i think, by the writer's age and experience. as a story is usually the writer's reaction to that which at the time is of most interest to him, it used to be that a story started with me with a situation. i started writing when i was eighteen when i was in college, and i then caught at a situation which established suspense. that struck me as the best start for a story. gradually, situation became less the whole thing and a definite increase in concern for the characters came. i never started with a title, but sometimes with a setting, or rather, a setting creating a situation--such as the alps suggesting a mountain-climbing story. now though i never really start with a character, the situation does not mean much to me until it has a character in it. =ralph henry barbour=: an idea for a story is anything upon which a story may be built, and story ideas come from as many sources as do ideas of any other sort. the inspiration that provides the idea may be generated by an incident, a person, a situation, a locality, even, i think, by a condition of mind, or by two or more of these in combination. to me a title does not very often suggest an idea for a story; it merely suggests the idea to write a story; there's a difference! in my case the genesis of a story is more frequently a situation. after that a character, an incident, a locality, in the order given. =frederick orin bartlett=: a story may grow from any of the sources you suggest--even from that mysterious "or what?" something serves as a spark to fire the dry kindling of your imagination. the two essentials are that the spark shall be hot enough and that you shall have kindling. =nalbro bartley=: it, the genesis of a story, could spring from any of the suggested things--an idea for a story to my mind suggests a theme such as capital versus labor, love versus money, etc. =konrad bercovici=: i will be hanged if i know what the genesis of a story is. i only know i do not sleep well a few nights before i write one. and after a headache or two a story comes. as a boy, it broke my heart never to be able to see the actual breaking through of a plant. i always found it broken through in the morning,--if you get what i mean. and then pictures begin to rise before me. pictures of things i have seen and others that i wanted to see. and then the men and women in my stories walk through those pictures and stay where they like and see what they want and i stand by and watch them and agree most of the time with each one of them and sometimes say what i would say under similar circumstances. but, like "mr. saber" of _if winter comes_, i can see his point of view. when the whole thing has come to an end in my mind, i sit down and write. =ferdinand berthoud=: i usually pick on an incident from some actual happening to myself or to one of my old-time friends. then tack on other incidents of which i have heard. once or twice a story has come from a peculiar expression or the manner or speaking of some man i have known. or some man's way of looking at life. =h. h. birney, jr.=: ideas. some situation or idea possessing possible dramatic value will come to me; i will lie awake the best part of a night or two nights thinking it over, and put it on paper the next day. sometimes the whole story seems to unfold itself instantaneously before me; again i will work it out detail after detail mentally. some ideas for stories have come from remarks of friends, from some anecdote, or an experience that was personal and of which the dramatic value was unrecognized at the time. =farnham bishop=: the wedding of a newly-discovered fact to something already in mind, followed by the swift begetting, birth and growth of a story. example: "carranza to blockade mazatlan. mexican navy to be sent through panama canal, against stronghold of revolution" (newspaper head-line, sometime in summer of ). that, plus british naval officer's book (which i had recently read) containing description of the _scooter_ or c. m. b., developed within ten minutes into fairly complete mental outline of _the rest cure_. =algernon blackwood=: the genesis of a story with me is invariably--an emotion, caused in my particular case by something in nature rather than in human nature: a scrap of color in the sky, a flower, a sound of wind or water; briefly, an emotion produced by beauty. =max bonter=: anything that stirs my emotions is likely to furnish the idea for a story. it may be an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, a setting, a title. it may be any one of them, a combination of several of them, or all of them. an idea embodying all of them, of course, would really be more than an idea; it would be practically the story itself--either a true story in which i had figured, or one that i had heard related--and would require at my hands little else besides an amalgamation of the attributes specified. pure fiction, in my case, seems to have its inception in a contrast, or in a sudden break of continuity--something irregular or freakish that draws a quick focus of the mental faculties and demands of them why, how? my mind immediately struggles to paint the significance of the contrast, or to splice the broken threads of circumstance into a tissue of normality. in other words, it is my mind's tendency to give balance to unbalanced or opposing conditions or things. for example: in a quiet little community of soft-spoken, well-civilized males i find an old barbarian--the boss stevedore of a freight dock--who chews, swears, drinks, and lives with a common-law wife. their little household is practically in a state of ostracism. my emotions are aroused; my sympathies enlisted in an endeavor to place in a better light this old pariah whose chief fault seems to be the carelessness wherewith he persists in being human. i bring the opposing standards together and after the clash the stevedore's chief detractor--a prominent church-goer--is found to be a sly old rake; whereas the dockman's tough hide covers a heart that had kept him true even to an unsanctified union. that is what i would call an "idea" for a story. around it i would build plot, detail, incident, characterization, etc. =katharine holland brown=: once in a long while a story begins as a situation: as a tangle, a conflict, to be unwound, fought out. but almost always the story arrives as a whole--without any planning whatever, the story is suddenly _there_, a big blurry mass of pictures and incidents and action, that must be splattered down in black and white as fast as you can possibly write. it goes racing by like a runaway movie film and the best you can do is to snatch at the most significant moments, before they escape. therefore the idea for a story is not an idea; it is the story itself. (with a serial, which must have a succession of ascending climaxes, a rough outline is made and followed, _after_ the big scenes and the principal action are jotted down.) =f. r. buckley=: the genesis of a story with me is likely to be anything. occasionally a character; more often a title; more often still, a good basic situation, up to and from which the story can lead; most frequently, an ending. story i liked best, _archangel in steel_, deduced from setting and period: florence, xvi century; connoted an age of plotting and intrigue; since plots were villainous, hero must be anti-plotter. history supplied the conspiracies; the story consisted of the hero's counter-actions. =prosper buranelli=: my first idea is always an incident or a situation, sometimes several to be combined. or a generic situation in some phase of life--such as an opera singer's being at the mercy of the orchestra conductor. =thompson burtis=: i have had stories come to me as a result of all the things mentioned in your question, except a title. and i'm about to try to construct a story around a title. the most usual starting-points for stories with me are either incidents or characters. in a large percentage of cases i start with an incident and then work my main character into it with regard to his particular traits. =george m. a. cain=: a story almost always takes its genesis with me from a situation, sometimes suggested by an incident, character, trait, setting, title, anything. unless any other feature can shape itself readily into a situation for me, there is no story. but the situation may not mean the beginning of the story as told. i may write the whole story to get that situation. =robert v. carr=: the question involves, at least to my understanding, chemistry, heredity, environment, psychological wounds, tricks of memory, and a thousand and one mysteries. no doubt there will be writers who will cleverly announce that they know exactly where they secure their ideas, but it is beyond me. the writers of motion-picture scenarios should be able to tell you in a few words where they get their ideas. for my part i do not know the true genesis of any idea. =george l. catton=: a story with me may grow from, to begin with, the merest trifle. sometimes i start with a character only; other times perhaps it is a title, or a peculiar characteristic of a character, a situation or a setting. but the big start for me, the start i always try to get, is a theme. it's a poor story i'll write if i can't put down the title before i write a word. i never wrote a story yet that didn't have a theme, and i never will. a story without a theme is a story without a soul, and is just about as much use as a man in the same predicament. an idea for a story with me, then, is a theme. =robert w. chambers=: from an incident. =roy p. churchill=: most of my story ideas come from what i call a "condition" for want of better expression. that is, affairs of life in a certain setting, with certain characters, assume a "condition" which makes for the unusual. =carl clausen=: an idea for a story always means to me an incident. =courtney ryley cooper=: a story always starts with me at the finish--i write the rest of my story to a climax. in other words, i get the big punch of a story, and build up the rest of the structure to fit it. in a mystery story, i always get the explanation of a thing, then fit my incidents to this. =arthur crabb=: it seems to me that a story may grow from an incident or a character, or even a trait of character or situation, which it seems to me are other ways of saying the first two. =mary stewart cutting=: the genesis of a story with me usually grows from some small incident or the reverse of the incident. but in an autobiographical story the character is the main theme. =elmer davis=: the genesis of a story, with me, is a situation--invariably the same. i see financial obligations falling due. my salary is fixed; my credit distended to the bursting point. no way to meet the bills but by writing fiction.... whereupon i grab anything that looks as if it might start a story; usually a character in a situation. =william harper dean=: the genesis of a story with me sometimes is a single word, the title, which strikes the motif of the story; sometimes a character, sometimes a situation, or a setting. but most frequently the beginning is the climax, from which i work backward through the middle and to the beginning. =harris dickson=: any of these, or a combination. more usually, perhaps, it is a story, or an incident that i hear or see. for instance, _the trapping of judge pinkham_, in _the saturday evening post_, is approximately true, and happened not long ago at the very place described. real incidents, however, generally begin "up in the air" and end the same way. better beginnings and climaxes must be worked out. it is quite rare with me that i deliberately devise a story out of the whole cloth. i live in the south. it is a country that has attracted the attention of much enthusiastic ignorance on the part of philanthropists, and many attacks. sometimes i do a story for the purpose of showing some particular phase of life that is not understood at the north, and try to make it so convincing as to silence these long-distance reformers who haven't an idea as to how we live, and why. for this purpose i believe temperately-stated truth, rubbed in with humor, is the most effective vehicle. =captain dingle=: in general my story comes from a vision of a character and a situation. sometimes only the situation. then i make a character to fit it--usually out of material i know. =louis dodge=: with me, the genesis of a story is usually a character, perhaps coupled with a characteristic action. i like to imagine what the logical destiny of that character would be. and so i try to work it out. =phyllis duganne=: ideas for short stories usually come to me through something i actually see or hear about; sometimes a person is interesting or romantic enough so that i begin to make up things that might happen to him--and discover i have a plot on my hands. or sometimes a situation is a good beginning or ending for a story, and i try to evolve the rest. sometimes i do and sometimes i don't--i suppose every one has loads of fascinating situations that he can not quite whip about into story form. sometimes it is just a romantic spot--a house that should have a story about it. and once in a great while i just discover myself with a perfectly formed story on my hands, not there one minute and utterly there the next. that's real magic--and doesn't happen so often as i wish it did. =j. allan dunn=: it varies. i am, of course, deliberately setting aside such stories as are suggested by the needs of editors, expressed by themselves. but i think the genesis of many stories is hard to trace. they are evolved in the brain cortex by that comprehensive and all too liberal phrase "subconsciousness." i mean by that process that every writer is perforce somewhat of a dramatist, somewhat of an artist, and that his mind, inclined and, later, trained to observe, does this continually until an idea is born. not necessarily, not probably is this idea complete. occasionally a short story that works out delightfully is thus conceived and will project itself into the conscious mind upon the proper stimulus--perhaps after a walk or during it, perhaps while hearing music. sometimes i read a story that a man has written down as news, the skeleton of a yarn that needs flesh about it, a heart and soul added. very often i endeavor to work out some particular trait or character, with its weakness and strength. sometimes a character i know suggests the story. but i believe the genesis is born very much as is the theme of a musician, the desire of an artist to portray a certain mood or key, the inspiration of a poet. i believe that the story-teller's profession is one of the most ancient. i believe it may well have antedated the artist--as animated in the cave-carver or the painter of skins. that it may have prefaced the musician in the drum-beater or the blower of a conch. i think there was always a tale-teller about the fires of the wildest, earliest tribes, one who stimulated their imaginations, touched their pride, bolstered their bravery. there are such to-day in almost every wild tribe that i have met. and, as the modern musician, the modern artist, have evoluted from their primitive forebears, so i think that the spark, the flicker of story-telling, has come down in the cell together with the ear for music, the eye for color and proportion. add to that your technique--use of action, color, suspense, opposing forces, laughter, tears, tragedy and the results of experience and observation--and your story appears. i do not mean to say we are all genuises but that the story-teller, as the poet, is made, that the impulse is engendered with his ego. =walter a. dyer=: formerly i used to try to manufacture a plot as the starting point for a story, but always found it very difficult, my mind usually being ready to stop with a situation. sometimes such a situation would make a story, sometimes it wouldn't. i have found it comparatively easy to get color into the settings and to do the thing up in some sort of style, but my mind isn't inventive in the field of complete and more or less intricate plots. of late i have had better success in beginning with character. and i have heard that others have reached the same conclusion. first visualize a real person or persons, with distinctive and out-of-the-ordinary characteristics (consistent and plausible, of course), and get them to function like human beings. then throw them into the situations and settings that come easiest and see what will happen. sometimes a real story grows out of it, and when it does it is likely to be a better story than one in which lay figures are fitted into a ready-made plot. this, however, does not apply to the requirements of all editors. =walter prichard eaton=: a story comes in a dozen different ways. sometimes a title waits two years or more for a plot to plot it. sometimes a character comes and grows. sometimes a situation. i find i am most successful when it is a _character_, however, which comes first, and dictates the rest. the hardest unit is to start with a general thesis (problem) and then get a plot and people to seem natural. =charles victor fischer=: i am writing a story that has to do with little rock, arkansas. sitting at the eats this evening (two hours ago), i had little rock buzzing round in my up-stairs. my sister spoke of an old black mule she'd seen during the afternoon; how sorry she was for the poor animal--skin and bone were the only things he didn't have anything "else but." on top of that my father pipes up about a diamond ring theft. see the point? i'm thinking about little rock. (i was there about two years ago, shortly after i came out of the navy.) and whenever i think of little rock i think of coons. the mule--the diamond ring. and all of a sudden i had a story. =e. o. foster=: the genesis of a story with me generally grows from an incident which i have observed, around which i weave a plot taking the characters from people whom i have known. =arthur o. friel=: it differs. it may be any one of these things. sometimes hits me suddenly, like an electric spark forming contact, and the wheels begin to buzz. if i keep them buzzing, i have a story. =j. u. giesy=: genesis with me is generally either from an incident heard or read, or from a title which suggests a parallel or divergent train of thought. =george gilbert=: all depends upon the story; some grow out of single incidents or characters; some out of several. =kenneth gilbert=: my stories seem to spring from three sources: ( ) a strange and interesting fact or incident that apparently has never been touched upon. one story had its genesis in a piece of newspaper miscellany, which stated that marconi was experimenting with wireless apparatus that would keep out eavesdroppers. that was new, so far as fiction was concerned. using it as the basis of a plot, i wove around it color from my own store of wireless knowledge, decided on the title, and proceeded to transcribe it. ( ) an interesting character. one of my animal stories illustrates this point. it was about a raccoon, which i selected because he is a highly interesting animal; very intelligent, and with traits that approach the human at times. moreover, he had not been "written out," as would seem to be the case of the dog. i had written stories about nearly all of the menagerie except _procyon lotors_; therefore, why not a 'coon story? the setting i supplied from life; the incident from study and experience, and the "atmosphere"--a vital component of an animal story--took care of itself. ( ) a title. a snappy title always suggests a story, and while i have utilized this method several times, i prefer a plot germ in other form. =holworthy hall=: to date i have written perhaps two hundred short stories. the basic ideas arrived approximately as follows: from titles, not over ten--notably _the six best cellars_, _henry of navarre, ohio_, _you get what you want_, etc. from a situation, at least one hundred and fifty. from characters or traits of character, the balance. incidentally i have never yet written a story in which the basic idea was not fundamentally serious and a part of my personal philosophy; nor would i have any interest in writing a story in which the basic idea did not seem to see or partake of a certain universality of thought or conduct. =r. m. hallet=: as to (i) i think the characters and the action reciprocally contribute to the growth of the story. hardly anything but action will really illustrate character, it seems to me. the further you develop the characters, the better glimpses you get of the plot; and if you have an idea for a plot, that will usually thicken character for you. as to which comes first, it's probably the old problem of the hen and the egg. either might, logically. =william h. hamby=: there is no rule with me. sometimes i start a story with a character, and, all things considered, that makes the best story. sometimes the plot comes first; again a situation or an incident will start the mind to weaving a story. the series of stories, _the adventures of a misfit_, which one of my friends assures me were the worst stories i ever wrote, was suggested merely by a name. _red foam_, which other of my friends claim is the best story i have written so far, was written from a motif--i had a strong feeling that i wanted to visualize that frothy shallowness of judgment which is so easily mislead by a little palaver. =joseph mills hanson=: the genesis with me is usually an incident, situation or setting. i always have in mind a lot of provocative events in the history of the northwest or elsewhere, and hang my stories on to them. i try to make my characters appropriate to the time, the place, the atmosphere, the special problem that has to be solved. =e. e. harriman=: i usually think of an incident, a situation, and roll it over like a snowball until it accumulates enough to make it a story. =nevil g. henshaw=: i've no fixed rule, although, in a long piece of work, i try to present a certain section with its corresponding inhabitants and industries. with short stories i either work from a single plot idea, or propound a certain phase of human character and set out to prove it by means of the story--(as in _madame justice_ i endeavored to give certain conditions under which a mother would kill her well-beloved son). =joseph hergesheimer=: it grows from the emotion caused by a place or an individual. =robert hichens=: usually some big situation arising from the clash of two characters. =r. de s. horn=: the genesis of a story with me is generally an incident, a situation, or a character or trait of character, with the incident predominant. i have some settings tucked away in my note-book, but i expect they will be used only when i've got a situation, character or incident idea to go with them. the title is the last thing i write usually, and it generally comes hardest. however sometimes i stumble on it in the middle of the story. every idea that suggests a story possibility i immediately enter in my note-book. =clyde b. hough=: my story ideas generally grow out of a phrase or a sentence and this phrase or sentence most often takes its place in the story, either as the core, the hinging base or the climax. this sort of plot germ is generated in various ways. sometimes by a scene, sometimes by a spoken word and sometimes by a man's action. =emerson hough=: some big motive or period. not a peeping tom incident. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: character entirely. =inez haynes irwin=: it is very difficult for me to tell you what i mean by the idea for a story. there is so much to say that i would like to answer this question in a book. that idea may come from anywhere or grow from anything. it may be as you suggest "an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, a setting, a title." it may come through a conversation, by analogy, out of the very air itself. in my experience a single scene has suddenly amplified to a whole story, a whole novel has suddenly diminished to a story. parts of stories, quite disconnected, have suddenly sprung together and made one complete story. i have had the experience of having two or three stories develop in successive instants from a single germ; sometimes i have waited years before writing because i could not decide which one of them was the best. mere ideas that i have carried in my mind for years have suddenly developed into stories. mere phrases and titles have spawned stories. interiors, empty houses, geographical situations have exploded stories. stories, full grown, have sprung without any warning into my consciousness; and apparently with no spiritual or psychological _raison d'etre_. i have even had stories, all complete, hurtle out at me from life itself. reading the stories of other authors sometimes brings stories into my mind; their first paragraphs are occasionally exceedingly stimulating. certain ideas have always been highly stimulating to me--uninhabited islands, ghosts, fourth dimension, murder, they have engendered numberless stories. in brief stories come in every way and through every medium. everything on earth, under the earth and above the earth is fish to the creative artist's net. i would like to illustrate every one of the above statements but it would make the answer to your first question interminable. =will irwin=: the genesis of a story is with me usually a situation. to give an example from a piece of fiction which i have recently finished, a friend with much experience of the underworld mentioned in conversation a case where a convict just released struck his girl who was waiting for him at the door of the prison. speculation on what circumstances might lead to such an act gave me my story. sometimes, however, the story grows from contemplation of an interesting character and speculation as to what he would do if placed in unusual or dramatic circumstances. =charles tenney jackson=: the genesis of a story with me is more likely to spring from a single incident, a situation--perhaps even a phrase--one might say, a mental gleam that seems unique--and then appears to gather to itself the characters which lead on to a plot that slowly evolves. but always the urge of it is the first suggestion. =frederick j. jackson=: with me stories grow from incidents, characters, situations, settings _and_ titles. give me a good title: i don't ask more. for example, six years ago, in new york, one popped into my mind from a clear sky. down she went in my note-book. last spring i felt the urge to work. not an idea in the world. out came the old note-book. i thought about it for a day, then batted out the story that the title suggested. the title and nothing more to start things moving. for one story--the skipper who could always cross humboldt bar when other master mariners were helplessly bar-bound. give me a good parody or take-off on a well-known phrase or quotation and i seem to ask nothing more. the first story of one series evolved from the character i conceived. the genesis of one story was a vivid picture that occurred to me of an outlaw coming over a hill to the cemetery outside a western town and finding four fresh graves. three of them were occupied, the fourth empty, significantly so, since the other three were filled by the outlaw's pals on their last raid. a pleasing picture, and i made it more so by placing three sticks of wood at the heads of the filled graves, pieces split from a wooden box. the sticks were upright in the fresh earth. the top of each stick had a slit in it, and into each slit was placed an epitaph. the three epitaphs were the knaves of hearts, diamonds and clubs. in town the outlaw learns that the sheriff is carrying the knave of spades and an earnest intention to place it at the head of the fourth grave. this much just came to me. the rest of the story is a matter of mechanics. setting? the origin of the idea for one tale was a matter of setting, the kelp-beds along the coast south of cape mendocino. small vessels--fishing-boats--sometimes put into the kelp for shelter from high seas and gales. the heavy kelp has much the effect of oil on breaking seas. with this in mind, the story was a matter of mechanics. a steamer leaving eureka for san francisco, a run of twenty hours, and then disappearing for eleven days, given up for lost. she had lost her propeller, her deckload, her boats and all loose deck-gear. all this came ashore _north_ of cape mendocino--sure sign she had gone down, with a southwest gale raging. but her skipper had managed to get her into the kelp--he knew the kelp--and there piled all his cargo forward until the propeller shaft was above water. he shipped a new propeller right there in the open sea. the vessel lay against a background of cliff, the country back of it is deserted, isolated; steamers passing there were at least fifteen miles out to sea to get around blunt's reef; there was no wireless aboard. therefore she remained undiscovered, given up for lost, until one morning, battered, smashed, burning her lumber cargo for fuel, she limped into san francisco bay. fine! an editor wanted a series about the character--the nervy, never-at-a-loss young skipper. the skipper was pure accident. i had given no thought at all to characterization. the story, the situations, his grasping a slim chance for life when his older officers could see no chance at all, were what i thought made the story. but upon close analysis it was he who made the story. in the story i had unconsciously used the same combination of characters as in another series--the young sea captain, the ship owner and his daughter. more stories wanted. not an idea in the world. but a lot of promised money will make ideas come. i squared off at the underwood and started in with the ship owner. conjured up a pleasing picture of him seated in his private office with wrath oozing from every one of his pores. what will make a ship owner mad? loss of money was the answer. how could he lose money? by one of his steamers being bar-bound. so the largest steamer of the fleet is bar-bound in gray's harbor--has been for three weeks. empty, she went over the bar all right. with a couple of million feet of lumber aboard she couldn't get out. "martin" to the rescue. he gets her over the bar--all this is deliberately manufactured with not a single idea one paragraph ahead of my fingers on the keys. then, with the steamer at sea, ideas come galloping. it is very seldom that i start a yarn with not even a title to work on, not an idea in the world as to what is going to happen. but i finished up with a real story which brought a bigger check than any i had received up to that time for any story. the third of the series came easier. in _the saturday evening post_ i read a story by byron morgan called _the elephant parade_, a tale of motor-trucks. into my mind popped the idea of using caterpillar tractors in a sea story. by this time i had "martin" firmly in hand, well-trained. the fourth story went over nicely. but in the fifth one i made the mistake of bringing some war stuff in. editor said nix. i got disgusted with "martin" right there and left him flat. now in your question you have omitted the word "theme," which might be included. for instance one was the growth of something that can not be called a definite idea. it was hazy, vague, when i started it. all i had in mind was the traits of blondes (feminine) as i have known them, especially movie blondes. my working title on the story was _the cussedness of blondes_. i changed that to _press agents' paradise_, and wound up with _a million dollars' worth_. the working title changed as i got into the thing and began to see sunshine ahead. the only thing i had in mind with which to end the story was a beautiful double-cross on the part of the blonde girl. i ended it that way. i had many a laugh at the situations i had conjured up and slapped into the story. laughing at my own stuff. read it and weep. =mary johnston=: sometimes one, sometimes another. but usually a character or a situation, or an idea that seems to have ethical or evolutionary value. to see the idea for a story means to see the story. =john joseph=: the genesis of a story? the _idea_ for a "red-blooded" story comes from my own experience. that is, things i have actually seen. such stories are, as a matter of fact, fictionized facts. some stories are based on a peculiarity of human nature. that is, they arise from a study of human nature. =lloyd kohler=: of course, the idea for a story may spring from almost anything. with me, however, the idea for the story usually springs from an incident in actual life. quite often, too, the story grows from a very brief newspaper article. incidents from my own life and the sharp brief stories of the daily press have furnished all the ideas for my stuff. =harold lamb=: the genesis of a story is most often some happening that comes into the fancy, followed by the impulse to draw character in connection with that happening. =sinclair lewis=: varies. usually from a character. =hapsburg liebe=: my best stories grow from a character; then a situation to fit in with the character. i have had most of my failures, i think, from inventing a situation and sticking doll-like characters in it. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: with me, the good stories originate around a character. as the characters are supposed to seem real and be interesting to the reader i feel that they, as the actors, are more vital than their doings. when i have my characters in mind i choose one upon whom to center interest and one for humor unless i can combine the two. around this character (or characters) i work out action that i think true to their natures and the setting to which they are native. it takes considerable thought to think up a series of incidents leading to some definite end or some theme, but then that's the writer's business. he's got it to do! given a character you can make yourself acquainted with, you can write a story around him, and the more commonplace the character the more likely you are to hit on a story that reads true to life among a majority of readers. sometimes i write from situation, setting or incident, but usually go back to the beginning and find the character who, when properly used, seems to work out most of the story himself. the title is my stumbling-block. i never find a title until after the story is done, and then only after great effort and generally at the suggestion of some of my family who act as "critics" on the completed work. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: the genesis of a story, with me, may be any bit of mental detritus lodged in the flow of thought long enough to collect about it enough flotsam to round into a missile to throw at an editor. the "bit" may be any of those you have listed, but i like best an idea, or a theme. given an idea, i like to try to translate it into life--_i. e._, fiction. ideas, though, are scarce. but whatever the story germ is, it has to bite hard, else the story is not likely to be much. =rose macaulay=: i usually start from some idea i have in my head about the world or life or people and illustrate it with the particular plot and character that seem to suit it. =crittenden marriott=: the climax; i always start with it--and write up to it. i begin anywhere, and half the time i have to begin again and perhaps again till i find a beginning that lets the story run smoothly. i keep the false beginnings and work some of them into the story. =homer i. mceldowney=: the idea of a story with me has been of varied origin--a name, a situation, a character, or a plot. i have only written four yarns thus far, and i have used four different methods. perhaps the next will be still different. and i wonder, when the various methods have been exhausted, if i'll be, too--at the end of my rope! =ray mcgillivray=: two people at cross-purposes, two or more opposed forces, or a person and a conflicting force, usually give a yarn of mine initial impulse--at least of consideration. i sketch a plan or synopsis, then dictate it straight through from beginning to end. my steno hands me a result which--because of her garbling, my smoke-clouded diction and incomplete ideas--resembles a finished story somewhat less than a plate of steak and idaho baked potatoes with pan gravy resembles a fat man. i chew away at the script, and return to the girl a mess of pages upon which there is more pencilling than ink. being human and slightly myopic, she does not turn out a final draft--yet. the third typing finishes a script, though--unless it be part of a novel, or an editor asks rewriting done. given the right sort of quarrel, dilemma or unconscious conflict between interesting persons or forces, however, i believe that setting, incidents of development, and atmosphere traipse right into the yarn without being paged. =helen topping miller=: my stories usually begin with titles. often i carry a title in my mind for years before i am able to find the story to go with it. occasionally i begin a story with only a character, but i must have my title before i can write. having got my characters i devise the "conflict" which is to develop those characters, and then build the plot around that. =thomas samson miller=: there are stories which have their genesis in an author's rage at an inhumanity or injustice. we writers all start out being missionaries, i think, and only slack up when we discover that readers delighted in the jam--the story--and missed the pill. i have to be moved by a strong desire to expose some wrong to get across a really strong story. but my commercial success (if i may claim success) falls along adventure stories for young men and boys. in such stories incident is of the first importance. the incident has to dovetail into a plot, all the action flowing to a logical climax. the second importance is a hero--a manufactured hero, whose best traits only are shown, for character is complex--the admirable traits always associated with less admirable. =anne shannon monroe=: i believe a story almost always grows with me from a character; a certain kind of a person who always gets into trouble--or out--because he does certain sorts of things. =l. m. montgomery=: the genesis of my stories is very varied. sometimes the character suggests the story. for instance, in my first book, _anne of green gables_, the whole story was modeled around the character of "anne" and arranged to suit her. most of my books are similar in origin. the characters seem to grow in my mind, much after the oft-quoted "topsy" manner, and when they are fully incubated i arrange a setting for them, choosing incidents and surroundings which will harmonize with and develop them. with short stories it is different. there i generally start with an idea--some incident which i elaborate and invent characters to suit, thus reversing the process i employ in book-writing. a very small germ will sometimes blossom out quite amazingly. one of my most successful short stories owed its origin to the fact that one day i heard a lady--a refined person usually of irreproachable language--use a point-blank "cuss-word" in a moment of great provocation. again, the fact that i heard of a man forbidding his son to play the violin because he thought it was wicked furnished the idea for the best short story i ever wrote. =frederick moore=: the genesis of a story with me may be any of the things mentioned, but generally i find it is some incident upon which a plot may be built. and frequently the plot in its final form has no bearing whatever on the original incident which gave birth to the plot. =talbot mundy=: with me, the genesis of a story is too often the need for money; or at any rate, the need for money generally has too much to do with it. i disagree totally from the accepted theory that it does a writer good to be "hard up." it is true that i wrote some of my best stories when i was frightfully "broke"--_the soul of a regiment_ for instance; but the idea of selling that story never entered into the conception or construction of it; had nothing to do with it, in fact. it was an idea and an incident that took hold of me and thrilled me while i wrote it. it was based on a tale that my father told me one sunday morning at breakfast when i was about eight years old. he told it to me all wrong, but contrived to put across the spirit of the thing, and it seems that that part stuck. ideas, i am afraid, are no good unless pinned down in the very beginning to a character and one main incident. i can live in a world of ideas; in fact, i generally do, dreaming along without much reference to "hard" facts. i see pretty clearly the necessity to make ideas concrete by turning them into persons, things and incidents. a plot is otherwise a mere conundrum without much interest to the reader, however appealing to the writer it may be. thus, an idea for a story (in my case) may be an incident, a trait of character, a situation, setting, title or almost anything; and the temptation, which i fall for much too often, is to go dancing along with the idea, letting it will-o'-the-wisp me all over the place. whereas the true process is to pin that idea down and make it so concrete that the reader doesn't recognize it as an idea, but does recognize a sort of familiar friend--concrete as a sidewalk. this is a counsel of perfection; but it's the nearest i can get, after a dozen years of trying, to an answer to your question. be concrete. get away from the abstract by making it concrete. with that proviso, anything whatever is an idea for a story. =kathleen norris=: the genesis of a story with me is usually a situation; the feeling that such and such a relationship between persons of such and such ideals or ideas would make for human interest. a servant girl who holds a baby above a flood all night--a boy who hates his father's second wife, etc., etc. =anne o'hagan=: the stories that i have taken the most pleasure in writing and that have seemed to me the most successful have grown out of speculation upon a character in a situation. if i may use an illustration, _wings of healing_, a short serial published last year in _mccall's_, grew out of speculation upon a character, proud, resentful, out-of-joint with the world, returned to the environment which had embittered her, brought back face to face with all that she thought she most hated in the world. of course, being a professional writer i have written many stories without any such genesis, stories based on an incident or even a setting. but with me, this is not my serious method of trying to write a good story. =grant overton=: with me, a story may begin with a background, an incident, a character, a situation or a title. my idea of a story is simply something arising in the first place from any one of these sources. i should not say that a trait of character was sufficient for me in the beginning. my first novel arose from a particular background; my second novel was originated by an unusual situation, which i heard of; my third novel (in point of writing) was suggested by a place; my fourth novel arose from a character, walt whitman. the only two short stories i ever did that are of any account whatever, were both inspired by houses with "atmosphere." =sir gilbert parker=: character always. =hugh pendexter=: dramatic situation. a flashlight picture of a climax with no explanation. then technique of going back and building up to it. =clay perry=: to me it has been a character, a situation, an incident, a title, striking enough to set imagination at work. =michael j. phillips=: out of nowhere at all an idea comes into my head. it may consist of a novel association of two apparently unrelated ideas; it may be a picturesque phrase or it may be an out-of-the-ordinary incident. i think to myself: "that might make a story." immediately the other side of me pops its head out and says: "you poor boob, there's nothing in that at all but grief and hard work and disappointment. there isn't a story there and if there is, you can't write it. that isn't your style at all, so forget it." consciously i forget it. but the next day as i am walking to the office--most ideas come while i am hiking,--the first half of my mind says apologetically: "of course we know that was a fool idea we had yesterday and there's nothing to it and we can't do anything with it, and we don't intend to, but--if it was any good and we expected to use it and if we had enough talent to make a readable story out of it, here is a little incident which would tag along with it." then the germ and the incident are rudely thrust back into limbo. this sort of thing happens for about three or four days, the story taking form until i know the story and the finish and most of the incidents before i consciously accept it and start to polish it off in my mind. the story is complete, or practically so, before i set it down on paper. the only story which didn't come to me that way hit me all of a heap and convinced both sides of my mind at once, taking the citadel by storm. it was the real, authoritative goods, and i knew it, and glowed over it. i have rewritten it twice, and it's still unsold. while others, which were dragged on to my door-step by my unwilling brain working under compulsion, but which i wrote more or less easily, with my tongue in my cheek, have been pronounced good by hard-headed gents who pay money for fiction. =walter b. pitkin=: a story may grow from anything with me. most commonly, though, from a big critical situation, then from a setting (atmosphere); less often from a character trait; and still less from a complete character in real life. the four best stories i have written, judging quality exclusively by the approval of editors and readers, grew out of a combination of an _idea_ and an odd situation. a story idea sometimes starts with a title; but i find that the title never carries me very far, though it may start something going. =e. s. pladwell=: i can not answer. sometimes it just grows out of random thoughts. again, it comes from stories i have heard, or personal experiences. an idea for a story grows out of a setting, a character and a climax. the three combined make the finished job. =lucia mead priest=: i should say that the genesis of what stories i have written have never been twice alike. a situation, a phase of character, a setting, some other fellow's adventure or one of my own, have furnished the kernel around which the matter has concreted. now and then it has meant immediate germination but more often the corm has been tucked away on a mental shelf to ripen or desiccate. i do not know whether that is the usual process of a mentality or the working of an irregular one. =eugene manlove rhodes=: how would a given character react to a given situation? answer is a story. character, situation. =frank c. robertson=: the world is full of interesting situations and unusual characters. i think i always carry around some of these somewhere in the back of my head. every once in a while one of the unusual characters will accidentally get into one of these interesting situations and the story begins to crawl. these two, character and situation, always seem to come simultaneously and demand to be written about. =ruth sawyer=: generally from an incident or character. primarily it is the human appeal which decides. =chester l. saxby=: a story with me grows out of any kind of seed, but most frequently from an incident or a situation. the character is essentially a part of that incident. the character is the shaper of the idea in my mind; without him and apart from him it does not exist. but the dramatic possibility of the idea is the thing. =barry scobee=: it may be any one of these, or from an idea that pops into my mind as i read or watch a movie, but mostly the genesis starts with a situation or a _condition_. by situation i mean, of course, the position a character is in. by condition i mean a dramatic, novel, puzzling or pathetic theme or phase of life, somebody or group of somebodies. to illustrate, the remote, isolated big-ranch people of southwest texas. they are in a _condition_ from which rises the dramatic or novel. after all is said, an idea for a story, with me, is a situation--even if it be the mental situation brought about by a man's own state of mind. it is that more than character or the other things. =r. t. m. scott=: to some extent the genesis of a story comes to me from all the things which you mention. more particularly it comes to me from a character or a title. all my "smith" stories are from character with the exception of the first of the series. one came from the title out of the "nowhere." there is one source, however, which you have not mentioned and which has had significant results for me. i refer to dreams. if i can get to my typewriter before the atmosphere of a dream has vanished the story is sold. a case of this kind occurred with _such bluff as dreams are made of_, the first of the "smith" series. i crawled out of bed to my typewriter and wrote the thing straightaway without an alteration. it sold at once and, as soon as it appeared in print, _cassel's magazine_ of london wanted it and i was asked to cable my reply. i dreamed both of the dreams described in this story. selling dreams is clear profit. =robert simpson=: the idea for a story has, with me, no specific method of birth. it may be derived from any of the sources you refer to, or it may, as sometimes happens, spring out of nowhere, practically complete from introduction to climax. most frequently, however, and particularly with short stories, i merely sit down and write. a sentence of some sort finds its way on to the paper, then another and another, and ultimately a story begins to take shape. a number of these "germ sentences" may have to be removed from the finished product, but most of them remain. when i have evolved a story idea by this method, i go just so far and no farther until i have decided on a climax. if i can't create a climax that satisfies me, i allow the idea to rest for a while, and usually, when i am not consciously thinking about it at all, a fitting climax comes along and the story is written. with book-length stuff, however, i generally begin with four things--a character who sounds a decided key-note, the setting, and, however vaguely, a conception of the beginning and the end. until i have these ingredients fairly well fixed in my mind, i don't attempt to "write them into existence." generally speaking, the principal character is suggested to me first by name. i can't write about anybody whose name doesn't "fit." =arthur d. howden smith=: sometimes a situation; sometimes a character or group of characters. =theodore seixas solomons=: "story germ," though a trite expression, hits it with me as to what a yarn grows from. but it may be a situation or a very odd trait of character in what would otherwise be a not uncommon situation. sometimes an incident, if it seems a germinal one; rarely or never a setting or title. =raymond s. spears=: generally speaking, i have a personal interest in some subject or other. i begin to collect information about it, as pearls, trapping, mississippi river, shanty-boaters, etc. perhaps a news clipping starts me off, or a book, or a fiction story. after a while, perhaps i have a hundred, a thousand clippings, books, etc. then i go to the scene; thus i went to muscatine, iowa, on a motorcycle to spend half a day in a button factory, and a few days around that button-making town, buttons and pearls going together! then i went on into the bad lands of western south dakota, and spent a month on the prairies in homestead country. later i rolled thousands of miles in homestead countries, to get "the big viewpoint." sometimes the story comes ready made in the material. sometimes it comes divested of environment--atmosphere--and i have to dress it up in a desert, then a river, then a green timber environment, or facts, to find which fits. often a story idea appears as a character of certain tendencies, and this character i bring up by hand, sometimes for years. i gather my material of all kinds, and each group of material has characters, plots, ideas, themes, etc., wandering and wallowing around in the wilderness, and gradually a group of all sorts of things that go to make up a story is precipitated by conditions, and if i'm in too much of a hurry, i write too soon; the way through is invisible, and i run into a blind cañon. =norman springer=: in all of these ways, incident, title, etc., but most often (say four times out of five) i visualize a character, and the story grows about him. (this character, by the way, is never dragged out of real life, and i don't try to make him a type. he is--at least while the yarn is in the making--a distinct individual, with individual characteristics. though i do find that, as the story progresses, he acquires little habits of mind and manner of people i know or have known. if i don't guard against it, the character in the last story is likely to carry over and intrude his personality into the next story, where he isn't wanted.) the genesis of the story is something like this: i think of the character. i try him in this situation and that. perhaps he fits, and the plot grows naturally to its completion. perhaps he doesn't fit, or the material is only half a story--then i shove the whole matter into the back of my mind. weeks or months later additional situations, or maybe new incidents, occur to mind. out trots the character from his seclusion, bringing his story with him. stories that come _via_ the title route are nearly always of the "fate" variety. if the plot is imagined first, and then the characters, i find that the latter are likely to be wooden and lifeless, and the story very hard to write. =julian street=: sometimes a situation. practically always, however, the situation grows out of _character_. _never_ a title. that's always cheap, i think. the more i work and (i hope) ripen, the more i believe that the basis of most good stories is character. character makes plot. =t. s. stribling=: i have derived stories from incidents, characters, tales told me by traveling companions, but my longer and more serious stories are nearly always something rather larger than a "setting"; i would say a social condition. i like to select a people whose form of life has the possibility of great drama. then i enjoy studying that people, seeing how they live, get as nearly at their psychology as i can--customs, habits. then i take their country and pick out spots where i will have a scenic background that best suits the mood of the story i propose to write. for example just at this moment i am interested in venezuela. i lived down there a year, i learned enough spanish to talk and read intelligibly, and i expect to read venezuelan books, histories, etc., for about three years more before i do a novel i have in mind on the country. naturally, this sort of work must be planned for years in advance, and usually while i am working up a big story, i can get a bunch of smaller ones on the same theme. otherwise i would starve between drinks. =booth tarkington=: i shall have to leave this pretty indefinite. the answer differs with every story. =w. c. tuttle=: usually the title is the last thing to be printed on my manuscript, and i pride myself on the fact that i have only had one title changed in seven or eight years of writing. it may sound queer to you, but it is a fact that a certain character bothers me until i write a story around that character. crazy, eh? still it is a fact. somehow i can see and feel that personality and a strong urge comes to me to put him in print. the strange part of it is that i worry about that mythical character until i put him on paper. =lucille van slyke=: story genesis with me is usually some very insignificant object that i see in a half-light--or blurred--or far off when i am not thinking about writing at all. example: listening to a second-rate opera company give _lohengrin_ my eyes note very idly that one fat chorus lady has very shabby black street shoes. my eyes travel--her face is deadly serious. somewhere the back of my brain clicks off a story somebody told me about henrietta crossman's early struggles--how she nursed her infant son between acts while she played "rosalind"--on the way out of the theater i hear a laughing feminine voice say "chiffon is warmer and stronger than you think--" these things i scribbled in my plot-book when i reached home. but it was at least two years before i wrote the story these things suggested--_but the impetus was undoubtedly a pair of shabby shoes_--and the story was about a fragile, gay little chorus lady, the very antithesis of the fat lady with the shoes. (nor were shoes ever mentioned in that story!) example: i pass a brownstone house, very swanky one. on the basement window-sill is a battered tin luncheon-tray with a soiled napkin, a wilted salad and some scraggly bits of lamb. i am on my way for a holiday, in an i-shall-never-write-again mood. but the little old nervous ganglia that serve as brains begin "what a rotten lunch--must have been for the dressmaker--and maybe the dressmaker was a dear--a princess in disguise effect"--and i find myself humming an old hymn, _oh, happy day_--"felicia day would be a good name," saith my tune. so i jot it down in the back of my commutation-book and forget it. it's three years later that i _write a book around that luncheon tray_. the funny part of all this is that i didn't know until your letter arrived that in almost every instance of either short story, serial or book i saw a definite object in the beginning. i tried to bunk myself into believing that i didn't, that a person or a character did it or a plot, but it's a thing--usually in half-light--so i see it rather blurry. why? =atreus von schrader=: a story may grow from anything; an incident, a character or trait, a setting, a title, a situation. it is my own experience that more stories develop from situations than any other course. i wonder if this would be true of a writer of character stories? by "situation" i mean a preconceived inter-relation of the dramatis personæ. =t. von ziekursch=: genesis of a story.--i have little idea where the ideas for stories come from. they merely seem to be dreams in which the characters become clearer and clearer until i live through the incident with them in an existence that is very real. i always have regrets when a story is finished; then the characters seem to fade out like old friends, gradually becoming hazier until they are lost. in my animal stories i believe incidents that i have seen and animals that i have studied form the stem about which i build the branchings. perhaps the same thing occurs with the human characters. =henry kitchell webster=: my theory of the genesis of a story is a dynamic one. the motive power behind any story is furnished by the setting up in some life, or group of lives, of a condition of strain or disequilibrium, and the story itself is the sequence of events by which equilibrium is sought to be established. i never started a story from a title, but i fancy i have started at least once from each of the other items of your list. =g. a. wells=: story ideas occur to me in flashes. as a rule it is no more than an idea, very brief and not, in most cases, sharply drawn. most ideas come to me while reading the work of others, whether of fiction or fact, and it may be peculiar that the idea as it occurs is never similar to the story or article as a whole or any part of it that i chance to be reading at the time. to name a case in point, i distinctly remember that the idea for one story came to me while reading the third book of dryden's translation of virgil's _Ã�neid_. the idea hit me so hard that i dropped everything else and began the story at once. i don't attempt to explain it. i have never deliberately set about to invent a story idea. that is beyond my mental capacity. ideas occur to me unwilled or not at all. but, given the idea, i will with confidence contract to work it out in any manner suggested. =william wells=: anything gives me the idea for a story; my head is full of them all the time. =ben ames williams=: it is quite impossible to answer generally any such question as this. some of my stories grow out of incidents observed or imagined; some are transcribed almost literally from experiences related to me; some grow up around a character, or an apt title, or a trait of character; some are built up as a play is built up, to put forward a definite dramatic situation; some put in the form of fiction a philosophic or religious idea which has appealed to me; some are merely whimsical studies in contrast. the only general statement i can make is that george polti's book on dramatic situations has been of great help to me, not so much in suggesting stories as in assisting me to see more clearly what effect i want to produce. =honore willsie=: i always start with some bit of human philosophy that i want to get over. =h. c. witwer=: i'm afraid i must answer this one rather generally. that is, i mean the genesis of a story with me grows from not one, but all the elements you mention, _viz._, character, situation, setting, title. sometimes i hit upon a good title and write around that; sometimes i spend days on the proper title after the yarn is finished. a chance remark of an individual, quaint, funny, philosophic, etc., may furnish a story and so with the other ingredients above. i would say, though, that the majority of times the first thing i get to work on is a situation. next title. after that, i go to it! =william almon wolff=: if i go back i can find that stories have grown out of all the things you mention. but the actual making of the story never begins until one or more persons are in my mind. i have to deal with people, and the real planning and building of the story nearly always begins with speculation as to what this person or that would do in a certain situation. here is a concrete example: my friend, robert rudd whiting, gave me, years ago, this, as an idea for a story. repairs to a post road in connecticut made him, for several days, take a detour; a little, lonely sort of road. and he used to pass an old house, where two old ladies sat, looking out eagerly at all the bustling life that had so suddenly come along their road. bob had tried to write the story, and failed. the idea fascinated me, too. my notion was to try to work something out and do it with bob--i know, of course, that, if only he kept on, he could do the story, and do it better than i could ever hope to do it. but the war came along, and it took bob. he was killed in action as truly as any man who died in france, although the records don't show that. so i felt that i was doubly obliged to write that story. but it eluded me until, at last, i saw in my mind exactly the right man, troubled, oppressed, sick of heart and mind and body, lured from the great road, with its rushing motors, by the peace of the little road. from that moment i was on the way to doing the story. what ailed that man? what had gone wrong? what would he find when he came to the house and the two old ladies? and wouldn't the little road, in the end, if he followed it so far as it went, take him back, refreshed and strengthened, to the road and the life he had abandoned? =edgar young=: a story usually starts, in my case, with an idea--some truth that i wish to prove, some fact that i wish to demonstrate, or some effect i wish to show. this, to my estimation, is what a story writer means when he speaks of "an idea" for a story. summary answering, . by a rough system of tabulating, allowing two points for a subject when it is usually or always the genesis of a story, and one point when it is sometimes or rarely the genesis, we get the following general view: character, ; character and action, ; character and situation, ; situation, ; incident, ; titles, ; setting, ; purpose, ; phrase, ; "just born," ; emotion, ; miscellaneous, ; varying as to genesis, ; don't know, . the miscellaneous include such as: contrast, condition of mind, problem, motive, period, tales, a name, a view of life, news, period. these statistics from the data given can serve merely to give a general survey and to indicate, at least approximately, the relative frequency of use. that character, situation and incident should head the list was rather to be expected, though hardly in that order. that titles should rank next seems surprising. the interest in these data is chiefly for the beginner. probably the best place to get an idea for a story is wherever you can get it and be satisfied with it, but this data may show the beginner sources not previously considered. perhaps the best service to him is the demonstration that creative minds do not all work alike and that general rules are to be regarded with suspicion until found really applicable to the particular case. aside from service, these data may be of some passing interest to writers, critics and editors in general. question ii _do you map it out in advance, or do you start with, say, a character or situation, and let the story tell itself as you write? do you write it in pieces to be joined together, or straightaway as a whole? is the ending clearly in mind when you begin? to what extent do you revise?_ answers =bill adams=: it writes itself--nothing to do with me. i never read stories--or very, very, very rarely. most stories, though not quite so poisonous as my own, are indigestible. never have the slightest idea what the end, and rarely what the next paragraph will be. revise a great deal afterward, in small ways. =samuel hopkins adams=: as a rule the story is pretty well worked out in advance; always in the case of a novel. it does happen, however, that a character upon which a story is built will take the bit in his or her teeth and run away with the whole show--even to the extent of ditching it! i have had a short story turn out disconcertingly different from my original intention because one of the characters got out of control. after i write passages, particularly bits of dialogue before going at the story as a whole, i always revise and rewrite; sometimes i wholly recast a story. =paul l. anderson=: a story is mapped out in advance, often to the very language, the actual words to be put down on paper. revision is chiefly a matter of improving the wording, though it sometimes takes the form of shifting the action around; sometimes even of rebuilding the whole yarn, from start to finish. =william ashley anderson=: no, i don't deliberately map out a story; though, generally, the theme of the story is in mind when i start, and the chief problem is to hit on the best point of departure. the ending is not clearly in mind when i start, though i am inclined to think that, as a rule, this is a distinct defect, because without an ending clearly in mind a story must start off without limits and the author can have no measure by which to judge the value of his characters. this applies particularly to the short story. in longer stories the characters must develop logically; and there should be no limits whatever for a novel. my usual method is to write a story as the ideas present themselves or the characters move in their relation to the general theme. then i rewrite, pruning freely. after that i often rewrite again. on the other hand i have written very clear, sharp stories at one writing; and very vague stories after several rewritings. but i firmly believe that no story is so good that it won't be improved by a second writing; and there are innumerable evidences in literature to sustain this. often a story changes while i am writing it. starting with a vague idea, a strong idea may suddenly obtrude itself. many times the "kick" in a story has come into mind when the story was already half done. thackeray noted the fact that when a man starts to set his ideas on paper he is surprised at how much more he knows than he thought he knew. this, i think, is characteristic of an experienced writer, while the opposite holds true of a novice. =h. c. bailey=: i always plan the whole thing before i begin to write, in considerable detail; every chapter of a book, every phase of a short story and often the key phrases of dialogue and narrative are in my private synopsis. but i hardly ever find that it all goes according to plan. characters won't do as they are told. they turn out to be different from what i had imagined. minor people become important. and so the characters work out their plots sometimes in ways of their own. i always work straight on from beginning to end. once the manuscript is finished i only revise details, but the writing itself is a process of revision and rewriting page by page and line by line. =edwin balmer=: sometimes i map out the whole story in advance and i usually try to, but i think the best stories are those where i have merely started with a general idea and with a fairly definite conception of the outcome and then have followed the "hunches" which seemed of themselves to work through the story. i usually write straightaway as a whole until about two-thirds through a short story, when i fully revise at least once and then write to the end. =ralph henry barbour=: i do not "map out" a story in advance. i might fare better if i did so. i don't know, and i probably never shall know since it is something i am apparently incapable of doing. my start is made with a situation or with certain characters. sometimes with even less. whatever the start is, the characters at once take matters into their own hands, and while i may sometimes use a feebly restraining rein they generally end by taking the bits into their teeth. the end is clearly in my mind when i begin. that is, to return to metaphor, the goal is known to me. what isn't known is the road that is to lead to the goal, nor what is to happen on the way. infrequently i find that i have arrived at a destination other than the one toward which i started. but that occurs only infrequently for the reason that, given my characters, i can usually tell how they are going to behave; or, rather, where, having behaved--or misbehaved--they are going to fetch up. from this it may be gathered that i let the story tell itself to a great extent. i do not write a story in pieces, but take it as it comes. i revise very little. almost not at all. perhaps my stuff would be better if i revised more. but i don't like revising. something is going to be lost when that is begun. it is better, i think, to revise before you write. =frederick orin bartlett=: i never map out anything. for me nothing is more dangerous. my story as a whole is clearly in mind, but the details work themselves out as i write. that is true of my ending; i must know, of course, in a general way where i am going or i have no story, but that is as far as i commit myself except very rarely when the last sentence bobs into my head all made. even then i may not know the preceding sentence or paragraph. =nalbro bartley=: i write a story straightaway as a whole--the ending clearly in mind when i start. i always have it mapped in advance--and then, having started, i let the characters take the action in their own hands while i keep the characters in mine. it is like building a house with a plan--so many rooms, porches, etc.,--and letting the people who are to live in it furnish it as they please and live their own life as a family unit. =ferdinand berthoud=: i map the story out wholly in my mind--practically see it finished as an artist sees a picture--before i begin to write. however, one or other of my characters is often likely to say some fool thing i hadn't previously thought of and slightly to change the trend of the yarn. in writing i do the first two or three thousand words, then go for a long walk next morning and think up the exact wording of the next slab of misery. all i have to do then is practically to copy the stuff down. yes, i have the ending and the exact last words before i do a thing. am ashamed to say i revise very little. always keep my finished typed copy just two or three pages behind the original draft. =h. h. birney, jr.=: story is _loosely_ mapped out in advance and written straight through--frequently at a single sitting. i do very little revision--little compared to what i understand some authors do. at times i will type a copy, single-space and carelessly, from my original pen and ink draft, do some revision as i proceed, and then prepare my final, double-spaced copy from this. =farnham bishop=: many of my stories start with things, rather than human beings: out-of-the-way ships, guns, primitive locomotives, what not. but as kipling points out: "things never yet created things, once, on a time, there was a man." therefore i must create the man who creates or uses the thing. also his opponent or opponents, and the other people who more or less "go with the situation." try to humanize every one of them, even if he only walks on to speak a line or carry a spear. my usual written outline is a neatly typed list of all names of people, ships and places. make this before i begin writing the story, to avoid being held up later. spend a great deal of time trying to pick effective names. finding the right one helps me visualize the character. pick them out of the phone book, old histories, etc. almost invariably have the ending in mind before i begin. in fact, often begin by setting aside a strong ending and then work up to it. brodeur and i wrote our first story about the fall of knossos. all we did was to fake up a plausible explanation of why the durned place fell. as for revision, i write the whole yarn, read it, pencil it full of corrections, and then type a fair copy with carbon, revising it again in the process. =algernon blackwood=: an emotion produces its own setting, usually bringing with it a character who shall interpret it. the emotion dramatizes itself. the end alone is clearly in my mind. i never begin to write until this is so. then i write fragments, scenes, fragments of the psychology, fitting them in later. occasionally, however, when the emotion is strong, the story writes itself straightaway. revision is endless. often the story, when finished, is put aside and forgotten. the revision that comes weeks later, on reading over the tale as though it had been written by some one else, is the most helpful of all. =max bonter=: formerly i used to sit down and begin writing at random, letting the story tell itself as i wrote. i have at last decided that it is a most pernicious practise. if, when i begin writing, i haven't a fairly clear idea of what i am going to write, how can i bestow on each phase or angle of my subject an appropriate measure of importance? how can i obey the law of proportion? the result of such procedure was nearly always a lopsided story. as a theme gradually developed under my hand and neared its objective, i discovered that the text was full of clots and excrescences that had no part in the climax and had to be cut out. my straightaway rush therefore availed me little, because it was succeeded by hash, slash and revision. it was too much like stumbling into a story. mathematics being the foundation of everything, including chemistry, which is life, and correspondingly of creativeness, which is a phase of life, should, it seems to me, enter directly into the building of a story. it is a vast field for an untechnical brain like mine to browse in, but i hope to get something out of it before i quit. in the meantime i am striving to organize a simple but effective scheme of work, somewhat as follows: . be sure an idea is worth developing, from a "human interest" standpoint. . develop the climax first. . start off the characters like a bunch of obstacle racers and bring them to the climax as quickly, but as logically, as possible. . write tersely at first, expanding where advisable--rather than write voluminously and chop out. . write nothing that won't put at least a grain of weight into the final wallop. =katharine holland brown=: the story tells itself as it is being written: or rather, it is fairly visible as a whole before i begin to write at all. the climax and ending are usually written first. the rest is written down in very concise fragments, just as these fragments present themselves. the story isn't written consecutively the first time. only the high lights. then, of course, it has to be rewritten, sometimes three or four times; sometimes only once. =f. r. buckley=: i combine mapping ahead and letting a character move the story. method depends on mode of conception (see above). roughly speaking, the average story is planned thus--i conceive either the beginning, the middle, or the end, to start with. if the end, then i work backward and decide what shall be the high spot of the middle: and, from that, backward and figure out just where and with what attention-gripping incident i can start the story. these three high points established, i take the main character and start him from the beginning toward the middle. he decides very largely how he gets there--his character does, i mean. and when he's reached the middle, i start him off again in the general direction of the end. i always have these three high points established before i begin. i write straightforward; revise little, except for redundancies and literals, except in the case of long stories and complicated shorts. then i go very carefully over the thing for errors of fact or probability: _e. g._, i examine each situation to see whether it could have been resolved in any simpler way than i have resolved it; whether i have made my characters make a wide detour when they could, and would, have cut across lots, as it were. since, however, the character of the hero or principal character dictates the minutiæ of action, i rarely (have never done so yet) find a mistake of this kind. this is the great advantage of having a strong character to dictate action, of course. =prosper buranelli=: i have everything but small details in my mind when i begin writing. =thompson burtis=: my stories are all mapped out in advance--the exact ending is in sight. even some of the dialogue is in mind when i start. i write straightaway as a whole. i revise very little. most rewritten pages are the result of my believing that the original page, after the inked-in corrections, was too messy. due to the completeness with which i have blocked out the story in advance, there is no necessity for me to do any important revision. i may occasionally overlook some important point in the story and have to put it in, but in no case have i ever made a radical change in a character or description after the first draft. what you get from me is the story as i originally wrote it, with perhaps one or two pages rewritten to make them neater. =george m. a. cain=: advance mapping with me is of the vaguest character. everything shapes itself toward or from the situation originally conceived. i write straightaway, but very rarely without a clear notion of a possible ending, having found that to do otherwise is to introduce useless or troublesome incidents and make heavy revisions necessary. my greatest difficulty is in getting a story started to suit me. here is done almost all my revising, and i frequently write a dozen beginnings before suiting myself. once started, i write straight on, unless i find, in the development of my hitherto vague ideas of the plot, that i can get my results better by change. in that case, i simply chuck out whatever i wish to replace, or insert the needed new incident. i have rarely found that i improved a story by revising it as a whole. unless i am trying to please a new editor by nice copy, i usually submit the first and only complete draught of the story, with an occasional alteration of a word in pencil. typing is the bane of my existence. =robert v. carr=: blind groper. feeling my way through a strange country. =george l. catton=: it all depends on the length whether i map it out first or not. if it is one of those little fellows, the ones that i am best at, the story is all "there" waiting to be written down, start--finish. if it is a long one i let it write itself. that is, i get the best start i can think of and go ahead. then when i reach the right starting-place i begin all over again. occasionally, in a long story, the ending, in a general and vague way, may be in sight, but it very seldom ends as i planned at the start--something better turns up before i get to the end. i write it straightaway as a whole, go back often and make revisions, and often rewrite the whole thing after it is all finished. =robert w. chambers=: map it out in advance. write it straightaway as a whole. ending clearly in mind from the start. revise murderously. =roy p. churchill=: i have a working plan to begin with, end in view, characters named, setting selected; then write straight along as a whole. often the working plan is radically changed, but never abandoned completely. the plan is not detailed painstakingly, but left open on purpose to change as the feel of the story develops. revision with me is a second writing of the story, nothing less. this is where i proportion the coloring of the story and get the tones blended. =carl clausen=: i always have the ending in mind. i write slowly, revise very little. =courtney ryley cooper=: my story is as clear as a bell before i ever start to write, characters outlined, action ready, ending clear and often i write the finish of my story first. i revise very little--when i have to revise i am worried to death about the yarn as i feel there is something fundamentally wrong about it that i can't put my finger on. my story is usually _written_ in my head before i ever touch a finger to the typewriter. i often will spend six months _framing_ a story. the actual writing of it is the smallest part of the job. =arthur crabb=: i certainly do map out in advance. no hard and fast rules can be laid down. it is undoubtedly true that every writer may do one thing with one story and one with another. i think that most of mine are thought out completely before i start; any changes after the first draft are minor. =mary stewart cutting=: i do map it out in advance but not in detail. i write it straightaway as a whole. the middle part of a story is the least definite and has to be worked out. the ending is so clearly in mind when i begin that i have to write the last sentence of the story. a story, to me, is like a musical theme. it has to end on the same keynote on which it was begun. but if my mind vividly depicts some part of the story not in the proper sequence, i write it out in full as i see it and interpolate it where it belongs. i revise after the first writing, i revise before the final typewriting--mostly as regards minor sentences. but sometimes after it has gone to typewriter my mind will see where sentences should be inserted, usually to make the action clearer. =elmer davis=: if i mapped it out in advance, i would sell more. starting (usually) with a character in a situation, i map out six or eight chapters. by that time old native indolence is getting in its heavy work; the ideas are coming hard, bright thoughts and lines for the early chapters slip away while i am trying to think out and diagram the catastrophe; so i fall to writing, always easier than thinking. write till i get stuck; then sit down and think some more; which of course usually entails considerable revision of the earlier chapters. not much of the latter part. =william harper dean=: most frequently i have the ending in mind and work definitely to develop plot sequence which will enable me logically and directly to reach that end. i do not map out--such a practise would throw too many restrictions about the sweep of my imagination; i want full elasticity to that. revise? ah, there's the whole story! i revise and rebuild, strengthening here, eliminating there. recently i started out with an idea for a short story and when i finished revising and rebuilding i had written a serial which sold at once for a most satisfactory price. =harris dickson=: after i get some crude idea of a story i put down on a big sheet everything i can think of, generally without logical arrangement. this may be developed in a sort of scenario form. from this no. sheet i begin to write, in longhand, in shorthand or a combination. you will note that sheets , and show progressive stages of the same material. the value of the big sheet, to me, lies in the fact that i can _visualize an entire_ story at one glance, without having to search through a mass of tiny scraps. and it is so easy to rewrite in one column while looking at the other. when i get my material pretty well in hand it is dictated to a dictaphone, from which the typist gives it back, with lines far apart and a wide margin. this is then scratched up, rearranged, and redictated. frequently a story pretty well tells itself, and sometimes the ending is clearly in mind. sometimes not. sometimes one kind makes the better yarn, sometimes the other. i've done a good story in three days, and struggled for three months over a bad one. =captain dingle=: the story is pictured as a whole, with one ending clearly in view before a word is written. i do not--can not--plan a story or map it out; it has to write itself or it fails; and sometimes the ending i saw first has to give place to one more fitting to the developed story. i do not revise, except to correct noted errors of spelling and grammar (which are apt to slip anyhow, since i know damn little about 'em). whenever i have revised a story it has proved a failure. the stuff, such as it is, must come spontaneously. =louis dodge=: in the main i see my story to the end before i write it--or at least i try to do this. but largely i let the development--the secondary episodes--suggest themselves, or grow, as they will. i go straight through with a manuscript, and then i revise and revise and revise. i mean i write it entirely two or three or more times. this, perhaps, shows a lack of clear-mindedness, or of definite theories; but it is the best i can do. =phyllis duganne=: i used to let stories tell themselves as i wrote them, but i've come to the conclusion that it saves more time to sit down with a pencil and paper and make a row of nice neat roman numerals and letters and letters in parentheses, and make a diagram of the plot. that's mainly because, once i start writing, i can write on and on without getting anywhere in my story, and wasting loads of time and good paper. i write it as a whole with the general idea of the ending clearly in mind; i never know precisely where or how the tale will end. sometimes i think i do, but the characters are likely to be ornery and not do at all what i wanted them to do. and if i make them follow a rigid plan, the story doesn't sound true. revising depends. sometimes hardly at all; sometimes i find that i have gone off on a tangent and have to cut out pages. most frequently i find that i have to go through a story, individualizing and characterizing my people more. i know what they are like, but frequently i find on reading the story that i have kept most of my knowledge to myself. =j. allan dunn=: here is a hard question, how does the story grow? when it comes into your mind it has various stages of completion. preferably i would let my story tell itself. no matter how carefully i may have outlined, gone over and over each next chapter, the thing amplifies when one sits down at the typewriter. the characters change, the situations demand things not thought of, you see a better way, the yeast ferments and rises unevenly. seldom is my ending clearly in mind. an editor desiring certain breaks for serial publication will cause me to plan more carefully. sometimes certain parts of a story obtrude themselves but not to such an extent with me as to make me break the straightaway development of the tale in due order. i may reach them with delight, look forward to them, find them in the forefront of my mind whenever i think of the yarn outside of working hours. and what are working hours? you carry your story as a cow packs its cud. at least, i do. and i go over and over and over it, consciously and subconsciously. i take my next chapter to bed with me and automatically employ every spare minute, on the street even, to revolving the next phase of the plot. sometimes details will blur, but the main plot extends itself far ahead. i like to try to plan a story with a purpose, but i decidedly prefer to try so to create my characters that they are alive and have certain wills of their own. as a rule i revise once--direct on the typed copy. and most of the errors are in typing. if i polish too much i am apt to overdo it, i find. =walter a. dyer=: partly answered above. i find it necessary to have some fairly clear conception of the destination of my story movement, or i find i have gone off at half-cock and the result is disappointing. the details, as a rule, come as i write. i try to have a telling ending in mind. then i write the thing straight through and try to brace up the weak spots in revision. i sometimes have to change important portions of the story to get it right, but usually it is a matter of polishing. each story seems to present its own particular problem as to the matter of revision. i have no rule. =walter prichard eaton=: i always like to know, before i write, around just where i am going and coming out. it is almost essential to me. otherwise i would write far too much. often the story in detail, sometimes in actual plot, etc., changes itself as i go along. then i have to stop and look ahead and see a new finish. =e. o. foster=: owing to newspaper training, i mull over a story in my mind until i have it fairly complete before i begin to write. then i write the story with the beginning of the plot and ending clearly in my mind, after which by means of "inserts" and "adds" i enlarge it. =arthur o. friel=: i let the story tell itself. straightaway as a whole. ending not clearly in mind. revise comparatively little. sometimes i rewrite a section, but usually not. my main revision is with the idea of compression and compactness. in writing, i don't lay out my story and get it all nicely framed up before starting to write. i start with a general idea which comes to me from god-knows-where, and soon i'm marching along with my characters without any very clear idea of where we're all going to wind up. we get into swamps and cut our way through the bush and clamber up on to a hill and maybe find something on the other side; one thing leads to another, and eventually we make a good finish. then we review our course, see where we went up a box-canyon which got us nowhere, and delete that place from the record of our trip; that's our "revision." this, of course, is all wrong from the view-point of folks who love to systematize everything; but it's my way of traveling through a story, and i get there just the same. i have tried, on a number of occasions in the past, to make my characters and events fit a more-or-less definite idea of mine as to what they were to do, but it didn't work; they just took matters into their own hands and did all kinds of things i never meant them to, and all i could do was to trail along; and, darn 'em, they made a far better yarn of it than i'd ever have made if i'd clubbed them into submission. so now i've learned to let them do as they will, after i've brought them together in a certain place and started them on their way. =j. u. giesy=: taking the germ, the "seed" of mental possibilities, i, as it were, plant it and proceed to cultivate it many times for months, letting it grow subconsciously, save for intervals when i water it by objective examination and conscious reviewing. in this way i "rough it in"--gain a general outline of the plot and action from first to last, with the ending always indicated at least. i then write it, filling in details on the main framework as i go along. =george gilbert=: never map out, unless a little on novelettes and serials. ending always in view. never revise plot; sometimes revise diction materially, always some. =kenneth gilbert=: all the mapping in advance is done in my mind, and i write the story straightaway. of course, the tale develops and fills out as i write. i write carefully, and i find that i have but little revising to do; usually none at all. newspaper training, whereby the first draft must be the last, may account for this care in preparing the manuscript. i always have a good general idea of the ending in my mind before i begin, and i have never been able to understand how others can go along without knowing what the next paragraph will be, unless they are willing to rewrite the story several times. i have always proceeded on the assumption that a good short story is "a dramatic tale objectively told." how may it be "objectively told" without the object in mind? =holworthy hall=: i plan a story in advance only in so far as the development of the main situation is concerned. the ending, however, _must_ be clearly in mind. i usually take as much time to write the first two paragraphs as to write all the rest of the first draft. ordinarily i complete a first draft in a day or two--and a revision in _ten_ days; but the time taken in revision is generally for style, and not for treatment. that is because, in the first draft, the sequence must be right, or i make it right before going ahead. i ought to say here that by a "day" i mean a working day of ten to sixteen hours. =richard matthews hallet=: i have to have a pretty definite scheme, a sequence of events with a denouement very clearly in mind, before doing much writing. this probably comes from being a cripple in the art. scott certainly didn't. he wrote _the bride of lammermoor_ when he was so nearly out of his head with pain that when the proofs came in he read them, he asserts, as if they were the work of another hand altogether. william de morgan, to give a late instance, said he let the story drip off his pen-point. if i did this, it would drool, not drip. i revise a great deal, three or four times, often, of next door to complete rewriting. too much probably. take a warning from balzac's _unknown masterpiece_. =william h. hamby=: if the story is based on character, i let it work itself out. if it is to be a plot story made up largely of action, i outline it ahead. =joseph mills hanson=: i usually map a story in advance and write it straightaway as a whole, but revise it a great deal after finishing and on reading it over, chiefly to improve the style and polish it up. i have the ending pretty well in mind at the start, though it often changes considerably in detail by the time i reach it. =e. e. harriman=: i start my central character out and make him live the story. follow him all the way through and get so darned anxious about him that i can hardly knock off work to eat. the end is oftenest clearly defined before i begin, but at times turns out differently, as the gaul-darned central figure takes the story out of my hands and does as he pleases. i revise from one to four times. =nevil g. henshaw=: i generally have the story pretty well in mind before i start it, and write it straight through to the preconceived climax. details, of course, shift about throughout, often changing the story materially, but usually the ending is clearly in my mind. i make one draft in ink very slowly and carefully, correcting as i go, and then do the final revising when typing on a visible machine. i always cut, but seldom if ever add. =joseph hergesheimer=: it is planned wholly emotionally and partly in detail, and written straightaway. i revise interminably. =robert hichens=: i do not map a book out in advance, except to some extent in my head. i have the end in my mind when i begin. this, i consider, is essential. i write straight on from the beginning to the end. naturally i have to revise some passages. i usually write slowly and carefully and try to set down my exact meaning as i write, therefore i do not have to revise very much. =r. de s. horn=: i invariably map my story out in advance, although i don't always go to the trouble of writing out the plot diagramatically. generally i have had the story in the back of my head for weeks or months. it starts with the story germ, and at odd times i find myself thinking about it unconsciously. ideas, incidents and complications begin to collect around it and before i know it almost i feel that i have got a complete story. then i sit down and write it at a single sitting if possible, without trying to exercise any great amount of word selection or any other consideration of technique. what i'm after in this first script is to get my story or rather expanded plot down on paper where i can look it over. i write in longhand and don't worry about fine considerations of sentence or paragraph structure. the ending is always in my mind before i begin, though i frequently change it before i am through with the final draft. but at any rate i have an ending which at that time seems to me to be the desirable ending. i find that in this first draft i usually write about three thousand or four thousand words. then i revise--and revise--and revise. i study my characters, dialogues, incidents, everything, with a view toward the demands of unity and consistency and, most of all, dramatic effect. i type my second draft because i find it necessary to be able to read exactly at the same rate as the reader if i am going to get my reader's impressions and reactions. i finish one revision, type it and start another one. my story mounts up to six, seven, nine thousand words. i sail into it, looking for non-essentials. i cut it down to five thousand or so. then in my final drafts i bring it to the proper length; it is always easier to write in than to cut out. my revisions number as high as a dozen sometimes. in fact the enthusiasm with which i started the first draft has greatly abated before i finish and i grow very tired of the thing; so much so that i sometimes set the thing away to cool before making my final draft. but i believe that it is this cold critical attitude toward the end that really does more for the story than anything else. in other words i believe that the story-writing ability is mainly the ability to recognize some germ as having the story possibility, then the imagination to expand it, and lastly the will to work at it until it is improved to the readable state. germ recognition ten per cent., imagination ten per cent. and hard work eighty per cent. =clyde b. hough=: i do map out my stories ahead. one of the first things that i must have after the plot germ has reached maturity is the climax. after that, and of second importance only, is the title. all that i need to know then is the high lights, the points along the way on which the story makes its various turns. then i sit down and write the beginning, say the first typewritten page, three or four times. next i dictate straightaway from the title to the climax, creating the minor situations and the action as i go. thus you see the ending is clearly in mind when i begin. "to what extent do i revise?" always twice. mostly three times and often four. the first revision is devoted strictly to cutting, compressing. =emerson hough=: i see it clear in advance and revise but little. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: i start with the character, and he or she, and the friends they assemble, do the rest. straightaway from the first word to the last. what i would call the ultimate goal is, when i start, at the end of a long passage. it is the characters' business (they having suggested it) somehow to get there. my second novel i rewrote almost entirely. normally, i revise scarcely at all. =inez haynes irwin=: i map out a story as carefully as possible in advance. the beginning and ending and the thread of the psychological development are ordinarily perfectly clear when i start. it is the middle or developing portion which is most difficult for me to write. it is difficult because it is always vague in my mind. i work my stories out on paper and make several versions. i write my first ten pages three or four times and the whole story at least twice before it goes to the stenographer. =will irwin=: i can not begin writing on a story until i see its framework pretty clearly in mind. getting that framework ready involves several days of beating my brains in agony. recently i have found it helpful to try to write out from time to time a synopsis. especially must i see the end--know toward what i am working. the incidents which develop the situation, i invent as i write. usually, i begin at the beginning and write straight through. however, i sometimes find after a few days that i have begun in the wrong place. that happened to my latest story. having finished a scene with which i intended originally to lead off, i realized that i had begun too far along in the action. getting in the background of previous events made the writing awkward, clogged the action. i went back therefore and began with a previous event. then i patched these two fragments together, and proceeded to the next scene. as concerns the main structure and method of a story, usually i revise very little. when the first draft is finished, i spend two or three days in "tightening up" the english and enriching the conversations and descriptions. i am impatient of rewriting--probably a lingering trace of old newspaper habits. however, i am married to a fiction writer, who reads my first drafts. quoting "merton of the movies," "she is more than a wife, she is a pal and, i may add, my severest critic." once or twice, when i have told my story awkwardly, she has sent me back to my desk to write it all over again from another angle of approach. =charles tenney jackson=: as for "mapping out a story in advance," that is done as far as may be. a very good thing, indeed, but not indispensable. very often the ending is not in sight. and i revise but little. i start a story with a lead pencil, write a few hundred words, and invariably turn to the typewriter to go on with it. that first hurried dig may be ignored entirely thereafter, but the thread of this beginning is in my mind all through. very often i set down the incidents, numbering them in order as they seem to fit in, and this stamps the scheme in mind for work, although i rarely turn to it. in fact, the yarn goes on to succeeding impressions, keeping always the first idea that was its genesis. =frederick j. jackson=: do i map it out in advance? often. just as often i don't. if i map out a story in advance, have a regular skeleton laid out, the story is apt to be stilted. i'd rather have just a hazy idea of what i'm leading up to, or, better still, a definite climax, nothing more. when i can just ramble on and write snappy stuff that interests myself it will be a good yarn. if it interests me, it will interest the editor. i'm rather cold-blooded about my own stuff. i have a jaundiced eye when i look at it. i like a story about a character like "mr. conway." i never write a story in pieces to be joined together. always straightaway. make one continuous first draft--slow work at times--and then copy it over. typing over my original draft is about the total extent of my revision, except for a word here and there. about the ending clearly in mind. i wrote about a dozen stories--most of them had the same plot--the old "perfect crime" that proves decidedly imperfect--and in every one of these i always had the ending clearly in mind. that's all i had to work on. i'd build up a story to fit the climax. a different method here from that which i usually employ. =mary johnston=: i usually see it in advance, see the whole more or less completely. i do not mean, of course, in full detail. usually it is written straight through from beginning to end. the type of ending is in mind from the first. not necessarily the detail. in revision i excise a good deal. =john joseph=: the story begins always with a character; then a plot is conceived to "fit" that character. after the main plot is outlined (always mentally) situations or episodes, and dialogue to fit, are studied out in the rough. the typewriter now comes into play and the story is written "straightaway," with the ending always in sight. it runs to five thousand words perhaps. frequently i roll the paper back and write between the lines. i pay some attention to phraseology, but am not particular. at page ten, perhaps, an idea comes which belongs on page five, so i turn back and jot it down between the lines with a pencil. when the first draft is finished there are always several pages that are a perfect mess of scribbling between the lines, so i rewrite these pages and renumber on through to the end. i have then perhaps a six-thousand-word story. i begin then at page one and rewrite the entire story, paying pretty careful attention to the phrasing. this copy will be nearly as badly scribbled and double-lined as the first, so it has all to be written again. this time very careful attention is paid to phrasing. certain episodes may be rewritten many times, independently. (a recent page was written fifteen times--and then it didn't suit me.) with the third draft the story is complete except for a more careful typing and an occasional minor change. =lloyd kohler=: until recently i always mapped a piece, as a carpenter puts up a house. then, when i was sure that i had the whole story well in mind, the actual writing was begun. this, in my mind, is the only reasonable way for the beginner to proceed, who has his hands full without worrying along as to how it will all end. it should be understood that i only plan the main trend of the story--the situations--in advance; the smaller details, most of the conversation, etc., must be left for the actual writing of the story. the reason for this is easily seen: if everything, even the smaller details, were figured out in advance the result would likely be a fearfully dull story--heaven knows it's hard enough to keep a breath of real life in them, anyway. but although i'm strong for mapping a story out in advance, i'll confess that there are even drawbacks to this method. the writer who said that he wrote the first word of a story and trusted to the lord for the next withheld, consciously or not, the real reason for his use of this method. the reason, or at least one of the reasons, was that the fellow who writes half or two-thirds of a story without knowing what the end will be has at least the big advantage that he can be assured his interest in his story is not going to flag before it is finished. and as long as the writer's first enthusiasm in a story can be kept fresh and vigorous, the story will not likely be dull. i want to admit, right here, that regardless of the good points, the author who is bold enough to follow this method is flirting with danger. i always start at the beginning of a story and plug away until the last word is written. may the lord help me if i ever attempt to write a story in pieces to be finally joined together--it's hard enough to keep something akin to artistic proportion without doing the thing up in bits and then splicing the pieces. now the ending of the story is different. although i know, generally speaking, how the story is going to end before it is ever begun, i rarely know just _exactly_ what the ending is going to be until it is reached. that sounds like a paradox, but it isn't, and i know you'll understand what i'm getting at. i don't do a great deal of revising--even though i am well aware that i am far from being a master hand at fiction writing. i believe that there is a danger of revising being carried so far as to take the life out of a story. personally, i'd much rather see a few grammatical mistakes than a dreadfully dull story. =harold lamb=: usually the story is thought out fully in advance (and as often changed from beginning to end in the telling). the telling of it is straightaway, with an ending tucked away somewhere in the back of the brain. as to revision, very, very little, except of wording and often an accident altered after story is finished. =sinclair lewis=: map it out in advance. straightaway as a whole. i revise enormously--five or six times with great care. =hapsburg liebe=: i try to map it out in advance, but i never write it as it has been mapped out, unless i'm working to one of those darned mechanical things called a surprise climax--and even then i often have to change everything but the climax. usually i begin to write when i have my situation. when i've finished this, the rest is apt to come naturally. a lot of my stories have fallen flat at the end, however, with this method. but if i mull the story over in my head too long before i begin to write it, it _dies_. how much do i revise? in the case of any of my best stories, i know the thing by memory when it is finished. i revise that much--over and over and over. i've wondered if i wasn't in too big a hurry in the first writing; it sets, perhaps, like cement. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: i map out in advance. the ending is in sight. but...! the map constantly changes as i go along. the ending advances or retreats or dissolves and changes completely as new angles creep in. but i must have the map and the definite goal before i start. i can, and sometimes do, "let the story tell itself as i write," but the result is appalling. i must set a goal and make each paragraph and each incident carry the action along toward that definite end. i do, sometimes, write the last two pages, and a few pages here and there in the body, or work out a choice incident, or one that presents the most difficulties in the way of brief expression, before beginning. it is like collecting material. i get it together and fit it in where it seems best suited. anyway, when i get the whole thing down on paper, all jumbled as it may be, i rewrite--on the typewriter--trying to use my brain as i go along, and then view the result. usually i mark, cut and interline every page, using a system of proof-reading all my own, then--rewrite. i do this three or four times. then comes the final draft. how careful i am to get this exactly right! no erasures, no vague sentences, no misspelling, no "wrong" words. then, when it is done i read it over. alas! there is a mistake on every page and gross writing everywhere. i check, mark and interline that lovely last copy until it looks like all the rest. then i flop the carbon copy over and make a new draft using the backs of the second sheets for the carbon so as to preserve both versions in case an editor suggests changes. and i usually find the first version the better! upon reading this final and hard-boiled edition i am no better satisfied with it than with any of the others and could go on cutting and revising forever, but i call it quits and lay it in the laps of the gods of the editorial offices. most of my stories so far have been sent back for some change before final acceptance. i certainly do appreciate that and i take great pleasure in the revising. for then, and then only, do i know how the story is striking the editors and, when i know that, i can revise like a bear-cat. at last i am on solid ground, whereas before i have been groping on quicksand. i like to revise and when i know exactly what an editor wants i have always been able to deliver the goods. it is not only inspirational, but i work with a surety i do not feel when fighting along with the preliminaries. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: lord, yes--i have to map it out in advance. then there's a rough draft. this may be pretty fully written out in parts, and other parts be sketchy, which have to be filled out later. there may be pieces--merely notes--which are later joined into the whole. the ending is nearly always in my mind when i begin--at least _some_ ending, though this may be later changed as the actual writing develops the story. i revise and revise and revise. =rose macaulay=: i map it roughly out in advance, altering as i go along. =crittenden marriot=: i revise as i write; that is, i go back from any place and rework till i catch up again. finally, i go over the whole thing _once_, have it typed and go over it again. =homer i. mceldowney=: i map out my story before i actually begin writing--doping out a skeleton, complete, and with the conclusion determined. then when i write, i write it as a whole. my revision is of diction and mechanical make-up, not plot. =ray mcgillivray=: with slight modifications--usually the requirements of taste or demand of the market i wish to please--i have the struggle, main developing incidents, plan for character portrayal, and the climax in mind--or in a note-book--before i begin. a few times i have started with a situation and handful of characters, giving both factors free rein in naming their own destiny. invariably such a story shoots off at a tangent--and is laid to rest, after much travel, in an old steamer trunk, my potter's field for rejects. =helen topping miller=: my stories work themselves out. sometimes i know what the denouement is to be, oftener it works itself out very differently from what i had intended. i write the story as a whole, and very seldom revise my original version very much. =anne shannon monroe=: the story is pretty well in my mind from beginning to end before i begin to write it, but it always follows out little by-paths in coming to its end, of which i had no knowledge: i am as interested as any reader could be to see how it is going to work its way through. i follow the story, try to keep up with it, but never dictate to it, never interfere. after it's well started my hands are off. i revise four and five times,--sometimes more: the longer i write, the more i revise. =l. m. montgomery=: i map everything out in advance. when i have developed plot, characters and incidents in my mind i write out a "skeleton" of the story or book. in the case of a book, i divide it into so many "sections"--usually eight or nine--representing the outstanding periods in the story. in each section i write down what characters are necessary, what they do, what their setting is, and quite a bit of what they say. when the skeleton is complete i begin the actual writing, and so thoroughly have i become saturated with the story during the making of the skeleton that i feel as if i were merely describing and setting down something that i have actually seen happening, and the clothing of the dry bones with flesh goes on rapidly and easily. this does not, however, prevent changes taking place as i write. sometimes an incident i had thought was going to be very minor assumes major proportions or _vice versa_. sometimes, too, characters grow or dwindle contrary to my first intentions. but on the whole i follow my plan pretty closely and the ending is very often written out quite fully in the last "section" before a single word of the first chapter is written. i revise very extensively and the "notes" with which my completed manuscript is peppered are surely and swiftly bringing down my typist's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. but these revisions deal only with descriptions and conversation. characters, plot and incidents are never changed. =frederick moore=: i map it out in advance, but i rarely follow the first planning. however, the ending is most vital--and it is only now and then that i use the end i started with; for instance, i once plotted a short story which i expected would not run more than three thousand words--and wound up with a novel a year later which totaled one hundred thousand words. i revise to the extent that i feel a story is never done. i had eight drafts of the novel referred to above by the time i thought it fit to submit to an editor. six drafts on a short story gets the job into workmanlike condition--but the editor sees only the few pages of complete story. =talbot mundy=: i hardly ever map out in advance. my right hand hardly ever knows what the left is doing. but i'm not convinced that this is good. just as an artist usually maps out his canvas in advance, without actually seeing the finished picture, so i believe that it will usually pay the writer to fix at least certain definite landmarks for his guidance. order is heaven's first law. i write the story straightaway as a whole. the end is never in view (or almost never) when i first begin. but i am beginning to believe that (for me at any rate) that is an important formula--visualize the end of the story first. it is certainly a prime essential of drama to provide a clear view of the main character just at the close; and i think that principle underlies story-writing. the writer should have in mind throughout a clear view of his main character as he will be at the story's end. the point had not occurred to me until i commenced this answer; but the more i study it the more strongly it convinces. that, and _be concrete_ all through the piece. =kathleen norris=: i map it out completely in advance, even to the words, and write it almost as rapidly as i could read it. my hard work is done while walking alone, or while playing patience, over which game the whole story unrolls in orderly sequence, as a rule. but frequently after beginning a story i find a better way to do it, and i have destroyed as much as sixty thousand words and then gone back to my solitaire and planned it afresh. =anne o'hagan=: i map it out more or less before i begin to write. not on paper, but in my mind. that is, i have a pretty clearly defined notion of what i believe the outcome of the experiences they will undergo will have upon my chief characters. i never write a story in pieces to be joined together, although once or twice, when i have laid aside a story because it wouldn't live at all, i have found after a time that i needed either an introductory chapter or an interjected one to make my characters real. i do a good deal of revision, more in verbal detail than in arrangement. =grant overton=: i do not map the story out in advance. i let it tell itself as i write it. i write it, beginning at the beginning and work it out to the end. the end may not be at all in mind when i begin. i do all my work, practically, on the first draft and revise only once and then _very_ lightly. i aim to get it right the first time, even if that means going slowly. =sir gilbert parker=: character, then plot, then as a whole, and the end is always in my mind from the first. constant revision. =hugh pendexter=: often; but never follow the outlined plot, as it is impossible for me to vision what will emanate from the result of the first dialogue or incident. in book-lengths i have my background thoroughly in mind, decide on the time of the story and have for stimulus of the action something pivotal in the history of our country. i write, say, fifty thousand words, then rewrite to eliminate and interpolate according to the need of late developments; then finish in one or two installments, and rewrite. the ending usually is the moment when the accumulation of conditional causes causes the hinge to turn, in other words, the big climax. revise very little. the story unfolds in clear-cut pictures that are as real to me as if i were seeing the incidents take place. therefore, aside from correcting mechanical errors, it has to go as written. =clay perry=: in general i make an effort to map out the story so that it has at least one big incident, one big character, and usually begin to write to see what will happen to them. i write it straightaway. sometimes the ending is clearly in mind, sometimes not; if the characters develop strongly, often they furnish the ending, even when i have one in mind, and often different from the one i had in mind. i revise always, once, sometimes twice, and have revised four and five times. =michael j. phillips=: i find i have answered most of this in the above. i can't start with a character or a situation and wander. i have to see it through, except that perhaps in a long story the characters rather take the bits in their teeth and give me a ride. new incidents are interjected that way in a long story; in a short one, almost never. i revise like this. i write the story without searching too closely for the right word or phrase, preferring to go over it afterward and correct and fit and cut. i read the whole thing in the rough draft, then revise carefully. then write for the editor, and revise that somewhat, occasionally to the extent of rewriting a page or two. usually, rewriting is cold potatoes to me--that is, after the story is finished and ready and has been turned down, and some one, an editor or other, suggests i do something to it. i haven't any luck with rewriting. i want to go on with something else. that is a closed incident, more or less, like a yesterday's newspaper story. i note that a good many unsuccessful writers carefully write one thing, and then agonize over it, polishing and shining it and changing it and anxiously trying to reach and satisfy all objections, possible and impossible. thus they waste a lot of time, use up a lot of creative faculty on a dead horse, and get nowhere in the end. i feel that there was a good idea in the story, but i can evolve as good a one or better to-morrow; and if i can't, i have no place in the writing game. ideas are the bricks with which we build. if you have but one idea, or one idea a year, we won't get many houses constructed. i don't write in pieces to be joined together. i start and go right through to the finish. i know the opening sentence, perhaps the whole opening paragraph almost word for word, and the closing paragraph before i touch the typewriter. =walter b. pitkin=: i have to map a story well in advance--though some of the minor details shape themselves as i sketch in the first draft. i have never written in pieces and joined these together. and i simply can not imagine how anybody can pick up a pen and start writing without knowing where he is headed. (i know a few authors who do this though.) i revise every story at least twice, clean through. and i deliberately avoid trying to make my first draft a piece of good writing. i treat a first draft precisely as a painter treats his canvas and his subject-matter at the first blocking in; it is nothing but a rough shaping-up of the major features. all the minor details are ignored for the sake of the deeper structure. i see the main ending pretty clearly when i start. =e. s. pladwell=: always mapped out in advance. mentally, not on paper. sometimes i drive for a hundred miles, thinking as the motor purrs. i write a story on the accordeon system--write everything in sequence and then condense. _the ending must be clearly in mind._ this is my one rule. if i know where i am going, it makes little difference what road i take. =lucia mead priest=: there is no hard and fast method of working for me. i should judge by this last winter's action that my mind does a vast amount of milling before my thoughts are concrete enough for a writing-pad. usually i draft, sketchily. i have a skeleton plan of what i hope to do. i live much in what i am trying to create. a thought--an action, a phrase or a word will pop out at me and i write it down. but as a rule i write the story straightaway as a whole even though i make patchwork of it later. =eugene manlove rhodes=: map it out in advance. either in pieces or straightaway. ending clearly in mind from the start. revise endlessly. =frank c. robertson=: having the genesis of the story as above, i usually map out the rest of it in my mind in a general way, leading characters, an inciting motive, a crisis and a climax. i may do this in ten minutes or i may stew over it for that many days; then i begin to write it out as completely as i can. i never attempt to block out a story in outline on paper. this, i read, is all wrong; but if i make a skeleton draft of a story, a skeleton it remains until the end. it seems to tie me down, and the story lacks the buoyancy that comes from spontaneous thinking as i go along, with the characters living their own lives, so to speak. i know my characters and my setting, so i have no fear of the story becoming inconsistent. however, the ending is usually in my mind when i start and the characters go logically to it. when the first draft is finished i let it cool off while i write something else, and then i go over it again, pruning and padding as the case demands and changing the structure when needed. the more i write the more i find that it pays to revise, and now a story usually gets three or four rewritings. before i began to sell any it only got one. =ruth sawyer=: my stories are pretty well mapped out before i start writing. but there is always a time in the process of writing when the character or plot, whichever dominates, gets a firmer control of the story than i do; and for this reason the story is quite likely to end differently than i originally intended. =chester l. saxby=: i used to write on little definite plot and seek the development as i went. that, i have come to find, is a poor way to get results and usually makes for wandering and uncertainty in the writing. one does not hold a reader's mind by maundering. the blind can't lead the blind. one does not even tell a story that way, but rather potters. i get the plot idea strongly in mind and lay in the detail that will give the most vivid _feeling_ of the point that otherwise will be merely seen, not felt at all. that's character stuff. i do not outline; i can not hold myself down to that. often the story takes a turn of its own, but i believe that changed plot development is in my mind, too, or it would not come out. i revise very little. it is hard for me to revise on my own criticism. an editor is indispensable for that purpose. he can actually jerk you out of a warped perspective into which you've hypnotised yourself past comprehending. =barry scobee=: really, no. i must have the ending, the climax, the conclusion--usually one and the same thing, with me--clearly in mind before i start to write. once or twice i have written the last page of my story before any other part. i get an idea, a situation or condition and look it over or let it browse in my mind a month or a year, or three years, and when i wish to use it i figure out what the logical, or illogical, ending would naturally be, and that is my situation. i must have it before i begin to write. i must know what my destination is before i start on the journey, but i do not need to know what all i shall see on the trip. that develops as i write. having the conclusion in mind, i write the title--and seldom change it afterward--then begin on my story. i have written the first three or four hundred words of stories as many as fifteen times, and usually three or four times. by then i am launched and i go ahead rapidly--one thousand eight hundred words in four hours or so. sometimes i get checked up. it is because interest is lagging, due to my getting in stuff that doesn't properly support that conclusion i have in mind, or something of that sort. then i go back to the point where it seems to have got started wrong and write, and write, perhaps, until i get on the right track again. it may be that the mistake is because i am getting out of character, or dwelling too long on an insignificant phase. anyhow, i am developing a hunch as to when the story interest is beginning to lag. then when i have written through--the copy pencilled and scribbled until i can scarcely read it myself--i clean copy. there i exercise great care, then send it to the editors. the revising and plot arrangement and the like are all accomplished in that first slow-going piece of work. in clean copying i do just what is signified--clean up the manuscript. =r. t. m. scott=: i usually let the story tell itself. sometimes i map it out in advance but, if i follow the map, i have a devil of a time to sell the story. i write the story straightaway. the quicker i write the quicker it sells. when i begin i seldom have the slightest idea of the ending. i have almost come to the conclusion that it is better to write a new story than to revise--except when i receive an editorial request for certain changes. =robert simpson=: nowadays, when i am reasonably satisfied that i have a story to write, i try to map it out roughly before going ahead. as a rule, however, i have more trouble with the first paragraph than any other part of the story or book. for the greater part the story proper writes itself, and i write straight through from beginning to end, revising, chapter by chapter, as i go along. in some instances i have to go back and revise bits of the earlier chapters, nearly always with a view to boiling them down. only the roughest conception of the ending is in mind when i begin, but i always have an eye on the possible climax at almost every paragraph. revision is at once the curse and the blessing of my writing life. i don't like it, yet i get more satisfaction out of it than from any other angle of writing. in a recent story of mine a certain dramatic "moment" occupied nearly three pages. when i finished revising the "moment"--and it cost me a day and a half to do it--it looked more like a moment and consisted of just three lines. i can still exult over that little bit of revision; but i always begin the job by threatening to use an ax on the typewriter or murdering my family or something. =arthur d. howden smith=: always map it out in advance, but sometimes alter plot as i go along. always revise and finish a chapter definitely before i go to the next. =theodore seixas solomons=: i map it out in advance, mentally only; later recording the mentally conceived synopsis of plot and action development, or only recording a part. in respect to this main development--the general architecture of the fictional structure--this is prearranged, cold-bloodedly, though i am hot-blooded and interested enough and enjoy enough the coming to me of the lines of plot. but i record them mentally or on paper and thenceforward follow them cold-bloodedly. but the detail, the filling in, and sometimes much of the general action, especially in longer stories and novels, is a matter of creation and determination as i proceed with the writing. sometimes i change considerably, but never radically, the structure lines at certain critical junctures in a long story. i write it straightaway, as a whole, unless i happen (rarely) to find my mind going ahead and interesting itself creatively in some important future part of the story, possibly my main, or a minor, crisis. then i do not hesitate to skip ahead and write it while it's hot. the end is not clearly in mind in these mental and written synopses (the latter, by the way, are usually brief; even for a novel, referring to plot and story movement alone, rarely exceed a thousand words). but the _theme_ end always is. i know in the larger, better sense how my story is to end simply because it has formed itself to me from nearly the beginning of the plotting as a single entity--à la text work insistences. it can't change at the end organically without making of the whole a monstrosity. ordinarily i have a rotten memory, even for my own cogitations. but fictionally i possess a jewel. it works this way. i have mr. plot-germ--the odd character confronting some appropriate situation, or the situation or incidents without any special character, and i say to myself, now how shall i get the story out of this embryo that i know is in it? then plot material is drawn into my mind from somewhere in the fancy and squared and fitted into and around my foundation and ascertained by my critical faculties to be appropriate or inappropriate, more or less. an idea comes and goes--useless. another comes and looks propitious, but not unless something else, provisionally retained, can be modified to suit it. a lot of material comes on to the lot, one way, one time or another, and some is hustled off, some immediately purchased and marked, and some left to one side, or, tentatively permitted to stay where it _may_ finally lodge, _if_ other things fit into it, later. now all this would be rather cumbersome, complicated, and altogether impossible to such a poor memory as mine if it were not for what seems to be my peculiar faculty for retaining a grasp of what i have conceived directly in proportion to its degree of promise of utility. my memory doesn't let go of any plot or incident--nor of any detail matter, either--that is cognized as utilizable, in other words, that is either outright purchased and designed surely for use, or that has been tentatively held, in the thought that before i get my problem worked out these, or some of them, may be the very things needed in the structure. though i make notes, more or less, as i say, i find i seldom have to refer to them. i always do as a precaution, but it almost invariably transpires that i have forgotten nothing. in this preconstruction of a model for the story that is to be written i concern myself, however, only with essentials. i do not inhibit the flow into my mind of little bits of almost-text--detail, expressions, description and the like. i receive these as a listener might, approvingly or disapprovingly, and i usually retain them (but not so surely as true plot material). but my main creative business, which is the only thing i attempt to spur, is in finding, out of the trial suggestions of my fancy, the right main timbers for the structure that satisfies the possibilities of the foundation plot-germ, grown now into something like a theme or fiction thesis. thus the ghost of the story is born, the better part of it, the complete theme and spirit of it. then i'm ready to write it--when i feel like it, which is usually soon after the conception, though i can go weeks or months without losing anything of what i have prefigured. the discarded material has mostly vanished, to be recalled with difficulty or not at all. the material that had been more promising, and yet discarded, remains, in proportion to the degree of suitability it had shown. the really suitable--and adopted--remains forever clear in my mind. seemingly, with the recognition by my critical or creative judgment of that suitability, i have, as it were, nailed them into the structure, and thenceforward they remain, visually almost! therefore i can not forget them, for i can almost see them. as to revision, it is a process that takes usually twice the time that the original consumed, and, in the case of a short story, probably three times. =raymond s. spears=: i have written half a million words to get eighty thousand words completed. revision is generally according to my wife's ideas, or, if i don't agree at first, we work over till both are satisfied. i have written a seventy-thousand-word serial without knowing what the next paragraph would contain till more than half-way through. this, i know, is wretched and time-wasting practise--but once in a dozen times this method brings my best stories. =norman springer=: i always map the story out in advance and write straightaway from beginning to a definite ending. sometimes, though, when half-way through the yarn, a new complication, or a better ending is thought of and the whole story is changed. but there is always a definite end in view. revision. i hate it, and do it--sometimes. not nearly to the extent that i should. i write very slowly and previse. that is, i carefully think over each situation and think out each paragraph before i write it down. =julian street=: i map it out. talk it out, and make notes on outline. the more sharply i have it outlined in my mind, the less trouble i am likely to have in execution. revision, with me, consists chiefly in polishing, eliminating awkwardness of phrase, undesirable repetitions of the same word, and cutting. =t. s. stribling=: no, i don't exactly map it out, "i" don't seem to have much to do with it. i simply sit around and presently an incident will bob up, or a character or a scene or a bit of scenery and, if the thing strikes me as funny or pathetic or containing human interest, i sort of accept it mentally. if i am afraid of losing it i make a note of it--and i usually do lose the note, but not the incident. then i stick about and wait for more characters, more incidents, more of everything. all this time i have a theme i want all these incidents and characters to illustrate, and naturally i want all my bits arranged in a climax. and the things apparently arrange themselves. i am sure none of my readers can ever be so surprised at what turns up in my stories as i myself. it is so much more exciting than reading a novel that i almost never read one. no, the ending is not clearly in mind. i have a vague notion of what i want--i know the mood i want to leave my reader in and usually when i get him in that mood i just quit writing. i write every story three times, once with a pencil, twice with a typewriter. my pencil draft doesn't make any sense at all, my first typed copy is the story roughly told with endless unnecessary ramifications, my third copy i send to the editors. =booth tarkington=: the answer differs with every story. =w. c. tuttle=: i have never mapped out a story in my life. i do not bother about plots nor situations. a typewriter and some paper seem to be all i require, and i let the story tell itself. when my lead character gets bothersome enough to worry me i know he is ready to tell me the story. =lucille van slyke=: i start with character every time on a story, but i never let the story tell itself. nor do i ever write in pieces, as you call it, on a short story. in working in book-length or serial-length things i work in chapter lengths at a time. ending is so clearly in mind when i begin to write that it sometimes very much hampers me; i have a petulant feeling that i wish i didn't know so positively how it ends. i mean that i resent having to build up a plausible reason for an ending that is so clear for me that it's inevitable whether logical or not! i revise much too much--short stories i write not less than four and sometimes as many as twenty times. and every time i am less satisfied. always find myself wishing i could give my situation or plot to somebody who knew how to write--the idealized story of my beginning seems so many miles ahead of what i can get on paper. =atreus von schrader=: i have found by cruel experience that unless i have my entire story clearly in mind i am apt to make a mess of it; chiefly because some character in the yarn picks it up and runs away with it. i write what amounts to a very rough copy of the whole piece, from which i rewrite the finished copy. i have heard of many writers who never revise, their tales springing full-fledged and polished from their minds. can this, if true, be explained as resulting from an unusually clear connection between their conscious and subconscious mentalities? =t. von ziekursch=: i simply can not map out a story in advance. the whole thing seems to start in a haze and work nearer until it bursts out full and ready. i can not write them fast enough, it is always so clear. in four or five hours a five-thousand-word story is written. only once has it been necessary to revise anything other than the punctuation, and that story was a failure. =henry kitchell webster=: i must see my objective, in general terms, before i can begin a story, but i am careful not to commit myself to any predetermined mechanical devices. these must spring, seriatim, out of the situations which the characters themselves create. i am obliged, sometimes, to do a great deal of revising with an ax, but i don't do much of it with the smaller implements. =g. a. wells=: my chief pleasure is walking. i find greater satisfaction in taking the roads and paths as i come to them than in having previously fixed upon a route and destination. the same way with a story. i let it choose its own route, though i do dictate the general direction. i think most stories tell themselves anyhow. if the characters and situations do not occur logically, automatically, the writer should not force them. at least not too much. it is one of the rules of mechanics never to try to force a nut on a bolt. it strips the threads. forcing characters and events in a story strips it of spontaneity. when i read a good story i am satisfied that the writer merely recorded what happened instead of making things happen himself. unless one has a good memory, however, it is a good rule in the longer stretches to have some plan of work. at least the principal characters and the events should be set down on paper. new ideas are occurring and being incorporated all the time during building. while writing a long story--fifty thousand words or more, say--if new characters and incidents don't pop up it is a sure sign that the story is not moving properly. at present i have on hand six stories that i have been writing over a period of about three years. they run from fifty to eighty thousand words. they are all complete in the first draft, though none of them has ever been submitted for the reason that i am not satisfied with them yet. one of these stories in particular was planned carefully from start to finish and a detailed synopsis made. when i had written about thirty thousand words of it an eccentric old gentleman popped in and demanded a part. and the funny part of it is that he "belongs." i don't understand how i planned the story without him in the beginning. therefore i would say that it is essential that a plot be kept elastic. it should be like a pot of vegetable soup simmering on the back of the stove--one never knows when one may find an extra potato or a lump of meat to add. generally i write straightaway from start to finish, though there are exceptions. more often than not the end of a story is vague when i begin. i would rather have it so and let the story work itself out to arrive in a neighborhood near that which was vaguely conceived. i began a story only last night and have no idea what it's to be. my imagination pictured a cowboy riding into a small town, whistling. he came to that town for a purpose, but he hasn't told me yet what it is. i am letting him go his own gait and he is. revision never hurt a story. "revise, revise, revise" is one of the best rules ever offered writers. i don't follow it as i should because i haven't the patience for it. i nearly always revise twice from the first draft, however, and at times as much as eight revisions follow the first draft. i have a story in my desk that must have been revised at least fifty times. the first draft ran about ten thousand words. it now stands at about thirty-five hundred words. this story is not intended for sale, though i may eventually sell it if i can. i am writing it simply for my own pleasure and practise in revision. i hope to bring it down to two thousand words. the work i have put in on it has done me good. i once tried an experiment. i took my time and wrote the first draft of a story in manuscript. it sold the first time out. i have tried to duplicate that performance several times since and failed each time. =william wells=: i have a very good idea of what the outline and main incidents of the story are to be before i set down a word and write the climax first, then build up to it. i sketch out scenes and incidents in skeleton form, but in no regular order, then arrange them to make a connected whole, start at the beginning and write the story, filling in and rounding out as i go along. most of the story comes to me as i write. that is, when i sit down i haven't the slightest idea of just what words i shall use or of many of the scenes or incidents; they just appear. and i revise to beat the band, two or three times. =ben ames williams=: save in one or two rare cases, i have always outlined my stories in advance. the exceptions were novelettes in which i knew in a general way what i wanted to do--a trend of character--and let this trend develop as i went along. i write from the beginning to the end. the end is usually as clearly in mind as though it were already written, before i begin to write. i revise until i can no longer discover ways to improve the story. =honore willsie=: i block the whole story out to the end before i begin the actual writing. then i write it straight through, long hand, let it rest for a while, write it through long hand again and turn it over to a stenographer. i do very little revising. the story is too clearly planned before i begin to need much of that. =h. c. witwer=: i always map a story out very carefully in advance, having all my ingredients well in hand. i never let the story "write itself." i write it straightaway, as a whole, with the climax always in mind when i start. revise once. revising being cutting anywhere from two thousand to five thousand words out of what must be a short story, i. e., five to six thousand words. that's my greatest trouble, cutting 'em. when i first began to write fiction in i had a great deal of difficulty stretching a story out to four thousand words. now my first draft will run anywhere from ten thousand to twelve thousand words! =william almon wolff=: to some extent i map out a story--sometimes. i can't follow a rigidly prepared scenario, though; all sorts of things happen, in the writing, to upset such plans as i do have. i write a story whole, always. as to revision my method is, i suppose, wasteful and inefficient, but i have no choice. i really can't separate first writing and revision, because they go on together. i begin by writing as if there were to be no revision--good paper, carbon, everything. understand--i _know_ i'm going to revise, but if i admit that, if i try to economize by using cheap paper, or to save the trouble of making a carbon, i can't write a line. well, i go on until i say to myself--"this won't do!" then i start over--usually from the beginning. i may have done two or six or a dozen pages; it doesn't matter. and i may do that twenty times. as a result what is, technically, my first draft, is a pretty thoroughly revised story. as a rule all except the last page or two will have been written from three to six or seven times. and then, very often, i rewrite the whole story, from the start, although some pages won't be changed at all and on some there will be only a few trivial changes. =edgar young=: map it out ahead, seeing the climax very clearly, although many details that come up now and then make changes necessary and often help and sometimes cause a man to quit a story. summary of answering there are who map out a story in advance-- of these very carefully, somewhat, generally, a little, the remainder habitually. those mapping out only in general number , while let the story tell itself, a few of the latter being included also among the . who is sufficiently rash to venture a general rule on the subject? each mind must find its own best method and only experience can be the teacher. there are who write a story a piece here and a piece there, one of them writing two-thirds and then revising; write straightaway, of these qualifying with "usually" and with "sometimes." having the end clearly in mind when they begin, , qualifying with "usually," with "in general," with "sometimes," with "fairly definitely." as to extent of revision answer. omitting those mentioning the number of revisions, the remainder may be classed: much revision, ; some, ; little, ; very little, ; none, . the record where number of revisions is specifically given runs somewhat as follows: to times ( ); time ( ); to ( ); to ( ); to ( ); times ( ); or more ( ); to ( ); to ( ); to ( ); times ( ); to ( ); to ( ); to ( ); to ( ); to ( ); to ( ); up to times ( ). all the way from none to much, from to or possibly more. there can be no rule. there are some who ruin their work if they give it more than a revision for details; some whose first draft is too crude to serve as more than foundation for the completed structure. there is only one sound teacher in each case--experience. question iii . _when you read a story to what extent does your imagination reproduce the story-world of the author--do you actually see in your imagination all the characters, action and setting just as if you were looking at an actual scene? do you actually hear all sounds described, mentioned and inferred, just as if they were real sounds? do you taste the flavors in a story, so really that your mouth literally waters to a pleasant one? how real does your imagination make the smells in a story you read? does your imagination reproduce the sense of touch--of rough or smooth contact, hard or gentle impact or pressure, etc.? does your imagination make you feel actual physical pain corresponding, though in a slighter degree, to pain presented in a story? of course you get an intelligent idea from any such mention, but in which of the above cases does your imagination produce the same results on your senses as do the actual stimuli themselves?_ . _if you can really "see things with your eyes shut," what limitations? are the pictures you see colored or more in black and white? are details distinct or blurred?_ . _if you studied solid geometry, did it give you more trouble than other mathematics?_ . _is your response limited to the exact degree to which the author describes and makes vivid, or will the mere concept set you to reproducing just as vividly?_ . _do you have stock pictures for, say, a village church or a cowboy, or does each case produce its individual vision?_ . _is there any difference in behavior of your imagination when you are reading stories and when writing them?_ . _have you ever considered these matters as "tools of your trade"? if so, to what extent and how do you use them?_ this question received in the questionnaire as much space as all the other questions combined because it was designed to open up a field that is practically new ground. when a student under professor j. v. denney at ohio state university twenty-five years ago, our class was much surprised to learn that people vary tremendously in their ability to respond to the descriptions or imagery of an author. i, as an example, had taken it for granted that everybody saw, in his imagination, everything mentioned in a story, was much surprised to learn that some saw little or nothing and still more surprised to learn that some people had a similar ability, almost entirely lacking in myself, to hear, taste and smell as vividly as i saw. in the years that followed i questioned a great many writers and found that practically none of them was aware of this difference and that none at all had considered it a matter that might have decided bearing upon their own writing--their effort to convey to the reader what was present in their own consciousness. until the subject was brought up in a book of my own a year ago i had chanced never to see it mentioned in print or hear it referred to again by an author, editor or anybody else, yet during twenty years as an editor case after case has arisen in which ignorance of this simple phenomenon has proved a serious stumbling-block to a writer's progress. an author, for example, with vivid powers of imaginative visualization deems it a waste of words to describe what he believes every one will, on the mere mention, see as vividly and fully as he himself does, and as a result his stories when they reach his readers are not at all what he thought they were. to many his story-world is a mere land of ghosts moving in fog, without detail, color, individuality or reality. another writer, himself lacking visual imagination, in the effort to put on paper a story-world capable of giving him a sense of reality uses so many brush-strokes that a large part of his readers, needing only a suggestion, are bored and read no more. a third writer, his own imagination insensitive to appeals to the senses of hearing, taste and smell, makes no such appeals in his writing and thereby fails to approximate full response from many readers. another, with an imagination particularly sensitive to sound stimuli, gives to a story the appeal strongest to himself, neglects visual and other appeals and bores part of his audience with appeals that can not reach them while he gives to others not enough stimuli to keep them interested. what, then, should be the general rule of procedure? there can't be any, but since readers vary so radically and fundamentally in ability to respond to sense appeals, any author, new or established, who in ignorance of this fact attempts to reach them on the theory that the responses of all of them are identical with his own is going to fall far short of his potential success as a writer. the following answers from more than a hundred writers will show that most of them are working without knowledge of this basic variation in imagination response of readers. the part of the questionnaire bearing on imagination was designed to bring out ( ) the differences of readers in natural ability to respond, ( ) the resultant differences in effect upon readers of the presence, degree or absence of certain sets of stimuli in a story--in other words, the extent to which a story is dependent for success upon the use of such stimuli, ( ) a general idea of the relative importance of stimuli to the various senses, ( ) the extent to which the imagination differences were recognized by writers and allowed for in their work, and ( ) since there seemed no available data on any part of the subject, the securing of any chance information that might shed new light. as elsewhere in the questionnaire the desire to make the questions entirely unprejudiced in form, so that they would in no way tend to shape answers toward what i wished to see established, made them less definite and direct than they could have been made at the time--and very much less than they could be made now that the answers have shown the infinity of variations in imagination responses, the many interesting points not systematically brought out or previously considered, and the great difficulty, for any one analyzing his reactions for the first time, in giving clear-cut answers. the answerers, remember, received only the bare questions without even a hint of the explanation and purpose as fully stated here. with such explanation the questions probably seem sufficiently definite. they did to the several authors and editors to whom i turned for aid in compiling them. but the answers will show how much more definiteness would be needed for absolutely definite results. more definite results should be secured from a questionnaire framed for that purpose. but the following answers, partly because of the very fact of comparative indefiniteness in the questions, are so richly suggestive, so stimulating and illuminating in a hundred ways, that their value transcends any mere tabulation of specific results. also, for all practical purposes, they give sufficiently definite data for satisfactory conclusions on the points aimed at. it is to be noted that in all but the last two questions on imagination the authors were being asked as to their reactions, not as writers, but as readers only, though in some cases this distinction has not been maintained. the first two questions may be considered as one. the third, as to solid geometry, was partly to ascertain whether those lacking visual imagination encountered unusual difficulty in a study demanding ability to imagine a third dimension in a figure drawn in only two dimensions; partly, i confess, as a check on some who might, in all good faith, analyze their abilities incorrectly; partly to show the importance of securing proper imagination stimuli in order to get complete understanding. indeed, the answers to these questions on visual imagination, no matter who gives them, are bound to be incorrect in a very appreciable number of cases. surely of all subjects the imagination is one of those that least lend themselves to hard and fast analysis and iron-clad definition. also there can be no fixed standard or basis of comparison. add to these difficulties the similar ones connected with the various sense impressions. no group of answers, however truthful in intent, could be expected to provide absolutely reliable data, yet very practical results can be obtained and writers, as a class dealing particularly with the imagination, are unusually equipped to furnish valuable analyses. if some of those who answer have failed entirely to grasp some of the essential distinctions, others have been unfailingly clear-sighted and have given all that could be asked in the way of nicety of analysis. for example, some of them, like theodore s. solomons, draw the most important distinction much more satisfactorily than i was able to do in my questionnaire even after years of considering the general subject, and the reader is referred to them if my statement of this distinction is not sufficiently clear. the chief stumbling-block to any one attempting to answer the first two questions is the demand to draw a definite line between an actual sense impression through the imagination and a mere intellectual concept of that sense impression. it is not so easy and simple as it may seem. for example, if i may illustrate from my own case, i find that my imagination gives me very good visual impressions but none at all from the other senses. i can, with eyes shut or open, look at any thing, person or place i have seen and again _see_ in my imagination any part or detail that i am capable of remembering intellectually in any way--can even see what i have never seen with my eyes, though of course no one can imagine anything that is not built of parts familiar to him through some kind of actual experience. but do i see things as clearly as if they were before my physical eye? it is easy to answer either yes or no, with long arguments to support either side. if imagination gives me blurred pictures, i can focus on any part of them and make it so clear it almost hurts, yet the fact remains that most of the picture is blurred. on the other hand, that is exactly the case with the physical eye. but isn't the field of exact vision smaller in one case than in the other? and so on endlessly. but to bring out the main distinction, consider my case as to the other senses. at the mention of the luscious taste of a pear i at once get a highly individualized memory of the pear taste with no possible chance of confusing it with the taste of anything else. it may make me long for a pear. i can see a pear, the teeth biting into it, the juice gushing from the broken, tooth-marked flesh, and i think of the pleasure that taste brings. but i can not taste the pear. not to even the faintest degree. i can almost feel its contact to my fingers, teeth, tongue, mouth, even the contact of the extracted juice--so much so that i'm tempted to say i have a little touch-imagination. but i can not taste that pear. i am equally negative as to smells. i am so sensitive to contact that i almost shrink from the imagined grating of a rough surface over my clothes. but i can not really _feel_ that grating. for touch, smell and taste i have only intellectual concepts. (yet with me these actual senses themselves are all rather more than normally acute.) but i can undoubtedly _see_ things through the eyes of my imagination. as to hearing, frankly i am unable to answer. i can not persuade myself i really hear sounds with my imagination, yet i can imagine to myself any tune i know, note for note. probably i have an abortive sound-imagination that could be developed to an easily recognizable degree by practise and concentration. you will get from the above at least a general idea of the necessary distinction--a far better idea than my bare questions could give to those who answered them. you will get, also, an idea of the difficulty in giving definite answers. analyze your own imagination responses, refusing to be satisfied with snap judgments. try out some of your friends. and bear this distinction in mind when reading and weighing the answers that follow. incidentally, please extend to me a little sympathy over my task of trying to classify and tabulate the data from these answers and remember that any such tabulation must be more or less arbitrary. if you doubt it, try to tabulate them! another distinction that some answerers failed to make (and thereby added to the scope and value of our data) is that between sense impressions and emotions. just as one can hear a real sound without emotion, so can one hear an imaginary sound without emotion, or feel emotion in either case. nor, of course, is emotion dependent upon any sense impression, since a thought, idea or bare concept can bring it into being. the data on emotion is of decided interest, but is to be considered quite apart from sense impressions through the imagination, though an investigation as to the effect of one upon the other might prove worth while. the fourth question concerns the actual effect on the reader of the kind of sense stimuli the author puts into his writing, or of the absence of stimuli. here a distinction must be very carefully drawn in considering the answers. the real point is not whether an author in general or a story as a whole interests or fails to interest, but whether, all other factors aside, the descriptions (of places, things, people, etc.,)--the stimuli to sensory imagination--interest and why. the fifth question on the imagination (as to stock pictures instead of individualized ones) is of comparatively little importance, except as it shows that some readers will resort to stock pictures if the author fails to paint individualized pictures that interest them. the sixth question proves of minor importance and the seventh will be taken up after the answers. as many of the answers would lose in value if their continuity were broken, there has been no attempt to separate them into the seven divisions. each of the seven, however, has been separately tabulated, though any tabulation of them must to some degree be arbitrary. answers =bill adams=: yes--imagination's the whole thing. i hear the sounds, feel the roughness (ice on the ropes). i shudder when it's cold and sweat when it's hot; if the story runs as it should. the pictures are colored in my mind as the actual coloring would be. gray in the sky--dull waters; red in the west--crimson on the wave-tops--the sails reflecting the lights of each. don't talk to me about geometry or math--damnable things, all. haven't any stock pictures--the world too big and numerous. everything keeps hopping right along. my trade is not writing stories as yet. therefore i've no tools for that trade (stories). =samuel hopkins adams=: the people, if they are well presented, i see definitely; they move and breathe and change expression. upon considering your question, i find that i do not hear them as plainly and definitely as i see them. although i have an unusually acute sense of smell--perhaps because i am not a smoker--i do not react particularly to odor-motifs in fiction; nor to taste. i certainly do not feel physical pain reactions, nor am i specially sensitive to imaginary contacts. as for setting i occasionally find myself helping out my author by imparting into his story some actual scene, more or less vividly recalled. if i do undertake to create a _mise en scène_ out of his material, i am likely to find upon examination that it is a memory-picture of some half forgotten place. such pictures as i see are of full form and hue; people more vividly featured than places. solid geometry was not worse than other forms of mathematical martyrdom. if i understood this question, the mere concept will often give me enough to go on; but i might work out a picture totally different from the author's intent. the risk is his, if he _will_ supply only frame-work! no stock pictures. my gallery is more productive than that. no! let 'em go as far as they like. of course. there is also a difference between being favored and perspiring! here you have rung in a change of venue. you have been asking about reactions to other people's writings; abruptly you demand details as to one's own artisanship. anything is a tool of my trade which i find suitable to my purposes, and i will use it fully or in outline as fits the special situation. =paul l. anderson=: it depends on how well the author has done his work. if he has done it well, i live the story i'm reading; if not, i don't finish the story. i do not see details clearly; the vision is broad, and i do not feel physical pain--the pain i feel is sympathetic. the pictures i see are in black and white, this fact, together with the breadth of vision, being traceable to the fact that for many years i worked at pictorial photography, where the effort was to see things broadly, without niggling detail, and to see them without color. trigonometry, analytic geometry, and solid geometry were my favorite forms of mathematics; probably because more concrete than algebra, calculus, and analytic mechanics. i have a stock picture for a barroom and gambling hall, and curiously enough it doesn't in the least resemble any barroom i ever was in, though i have a secondary stock picture of one which does. no other stock pictures. the imagination is more vivid in writing than in reading; i live the story with more force. sure they're tools of the trade. how can you make another man see a thing if you don't see it yourself? =william ashley anderson=: this depends entirely upon the power of the author to make vivid the scenes and actions he describes. in direct proportion to the genius of the author do i feel the force of his impressions. the aim of writing--as of all art--is to reproduce and idealize nature. its aim, therefore, is to make everything seem real. it approaches reality, but it can never attain reality, because it is all illusion. it stirs the senses, therefore, as illusion stirs the senses, and has the power to make things as clear and vivid as in dreams--but never as sharp and poignant as in reality. the impress of nature is direct. the impress of literature is by means of metaphor. for its effect, metaphor must depend upon awakening the memory. for this reason, a sensitive, imaginative, experienced person appreciates best the works of higher genius which employ a greater variety of metaphor than mediocre works. it is beyond the power of art to describe a new color--though it might not be beyond the power of the optic nerve to receive the impression of a new color if it actually appeared before the eye. it is beyond the power of an author to describe a flavor which no one has ever tasted, and which has no resemblance whatever to any known flavor--though such a flavor is possible, and the tongue would recognize it as new. this is evident by the fact that from childhood on many foods come to us as distinctly new and strange in flavor. it is beyond the power of the written word in itself to satisfy lust; but the desire for lust is so easily aroused that the poorest kind of writer can easily excite the dullest imagination. it is beyond the power of print to start a vibration that will beat against the ear-drum--and it is hopeless for a writer to attempt to describe a sound which has no effect upon the human ear; but a great composer can create harmonies in his head without even humming, and can record them accurately upon paper with a pencil without a sound being heard. so can an author, by the use of words, arouse memory. it is equally beyond the power of words to describe a wholly unfamiliar odor; though smell is probably the strongest of all senses, and has probably the greatest power to awaken memory. memory, however, is so important an element in an understanding of literature that by exciting a recollection of things (through the employment of familiar metaphor) a fine author can make me feel a reaction in all the senses. i can "hear," "taste," "feel," "see," "smell" the things he describes to such an extent that i can close my eyes and imagine music or the sounds of wild beasts; my appetite is stimulated (though never appeased! for here the actual craving of the body is stronger than any illusion--though description may inspire a disgust for food); i mentally recoil from an unpleasant sensation; i can visualize scenes--though not, i am sure, exactly as the author intends them to be described; and i can imagine odors, if the metaphors are clear. it is as difficult to describe the exact limitations of visualization as it is to find a standard by which to measure all painting. some stories bring out a single striking point which is very vivid, with a background obscure and dim; others have an equally strong central idea, with every detail worked out in exquisite particular; others are a confused hodge-podge, vague, unreal, unsatisfactory. both plane and solid geometry were the clearest branches of mathematics to me. the others were disproportionately difficult. reading stories written by others often suggests stories or reminiscences of my own; but in these cases i think the authorship is defective, because with a really great writer i get "lost" in the book. i have no stock pictures. there is a distinct difference between reading and writing. the difference is comparable with attending a well-acted drama and playing in a keenly contested ballgame. in the case of the former you know perfectly well the events will sweep along to a logical or at least ordained conclusion without arousing any very violent feelings in your own heart; but in the latter case you are taking part in and helping to shape a drama whose limitations are only roughly cast, and whose events are actually unknown up to the very moment they happen. i have never given these things much thought in connection with my own writing. =h. c. bailey=: i should say that while the vividness with which my mind realizes a story i read varies very greatly, the purely physical sensations are limited. horror, for instance, the "blood runs cold" feeling, i get. i see many scenes clearly and hear some sounds, like the rattle of the arrows in the _odyssey_. but i don't remember my mouth watering over any feast in fiction, though i enjoy them, or actually smelling physical scents. a general feeling of physical pleasure, excitement or disgust i know. my imagination is more interested in the physical facts of the stories i write than of those i read. i have often found myself cutting out stuff about the sensations of my characters because it seemed too intimate or too trivial for outsiders. i certainly see things which are not actual both when consciously working at them and when i am not. in color and in action--salient features if i look for them. this applies to both reading and writing. if i see an imaginary thing at all it is individual. i have always tried to give a story a sensuous appeal--i mean to make the story suggest to the reader what it is suggesting to the physical senses of the characters. solid geometry and all mathematics are a mystery to me. the artistic quality of an author's work is not always the cause of a vivid reproduction of his scenes in my mind, though of course it is potent. i would rather not be told too much. =edwin balmer=: i certainly follow with senses acute the sensations in any story i read where i can feel that the author himself felt his story. the mental type of story makes no such impression on me, nor does the machine-made rot which is altogether too common. i believe that a writer can not make others really feel unless he himself actually feels when writing. i can see colors as well as black and white, and details when i am thinking about them. i studied solid geometry and liked it and therefore had no trouble at all with it. i have no stock pictures. i like to have a writer suggest graphically as kipling always did, but god spare me from the tiresome minutiæ of the ultra realists. yes. yes. =ralph henry barbour=: whether i visualize a story while reading it depends entirely on the skill of the author. generally, i do. if i don't, i am likely not to like the story, and to stop reading it. probably there are exceptions to this. i am trying to say that whether i react to a writer's description of scenes, sounds, flavors, odors and so on depends on how skilfully the writer presents them to me. perhaps that is begging the question, but what else can i say? certainly i have read stories in which i have been constantly at the elbow of the character, have heard what he heard, saw what he saw, smelled what he smelled, felt joy or pain with him. equally certainly i have utterly missed doing any of these things in reading other stories. i can not make any distinction between the effect on my imagination of action, scene, sound, flavor, odor, touch. there may exist a distinction, but if so i am not aware of it. i am very susceptible to color, yet i think that the pictures i get from reading are black and white; certainly in very low tones. i would say i see details distinctly. i can not recall having more trouble with solid geometry than with other mathematics. i believe i found more appeal there. my response is limited to the degree in which an author describes, yes; or, rather, to the degree to which he succeeds in describing. a mere concept will, of course, set me to reproducing, but i won't get as far. if the author tells me it's a rainy day, i can picture a rainy day. but i'm not going to bother to see the reflected light in the pools or the glints on varnished surfaces or the gray mists in the woods. if he's satisfied, i am, and i go ahead. i had rather, though, have him make it a rainy day to remember instead of just one of a thousand. of course a writer can overdo description, but just as certainly he can underdo it. something should be left to the reader's imagination, but not everything. one writer tells us "it was raining." another tells us "it was raining softly, insistently. in the park the naked trees were clothed in a pearl-gray mist. a hurrying cab gave back the white light from its dripping varnished roof as from burnished silver." and so on. from the first description i get the picture of a rainy day; from the last, a description of _that particular_ rainy day. the first makes no appeal to my powers of imagination. the second does. from the second i can go ahead and see a hundred other details that the author doesn't mention. not only can, but do. he's given me the stimulus. this seems to contradict my opening statement in this paragraph, and i'll change it. thus: my response is limited to the degree to which an author provides stimuli. as a reader i do not use stock pictures. i do not resent having many images formed for me. i can not possibly know so well as the author what he wishes me to see. yes, there is a difference in the behavior of my imagination when writing and when reading. in reading my imagination sort of loafs on the job. it sits back and says, "let the other fellow do it. i'll help, of course, but this isn't my job." in writing it gets infernally busy and digs into details in a way that's positively annoying and wearying. i don't think i have ever "considered these matters as 'tools of my trade.'" of course they must be. i mean by that that no writer can write fiction without making an appeal to one or more of the five senses. being conscious of it is different. i am not. (the query presents an idea. why not go in for "olfactory fiction"? specialize on stories concerned almost entirely with smells? i have made a note of that.) =frederick orin bartlett=: when i read a good story by some one else, i do not read it--i live it. when i see things with my eyes shut i see them as distinctly as when my eyes are open. in both cases they are sometimes distinct and sometimes blurred, depending a good deal upon my interest. a feature of my own particular way of thinking which has always interested me is my ability in a story to recall vividly a great many details of scenes i thought i had forgotten. in other words my subjective memory is more reliable and of better capacity than my objective memory. i don't remember anything at all about my troubles with solid geometry. i have a notion they were just average. i respond to an author with all he gives me and all i have myself. i recognize considerable variation in the architecture of my village churches but my cowboys are a good deal alike. i resent nothing an author may do except to be dull. when i write i leave out a great deal more than i do when i read. i do not consciously use any tools when i write. i depend upon a sense of form partly instinctive and partly cultivated--that and the emotions. =nalbro bartley=: i seldom read fiction because i always see the machinery of it (or think i do). but when i read history, i let my imagination vividly picture every incident and struggle. i often feel the actual pain or mental suffering described. i see mental pictures in their actual colors--with very clear-cut details. solid geometry and trigonometry both helped me as a fiction writer--i was hopeless with algebra or arithmetic. i can't explain the former unless it was a sort of mathematical phantasy--anyway, it taught me to construct. i never have "stock pictures" for scenes--each one has some minute difference as the case may warrant. yes, i think every reader likes to have "tribute" paid to his imagination--he likes to have the author paint a vivid outline but not crowd it with unnecessary detail. when i read a story, which is seldom, it is usually a classic or a well-established piece of fiction and i think i am reading it because of its excellent technique and very little because of imaginative pleasure. when i write stories i have the unbounded egotism of the creative mind--my people and their troubles and triumphs are so real and so very acute that i am on mental tiptoes until they are out of the depths and on to the heights! no. =konrad bercovici=: i am hard put to answer. the more i write the less i read. i find it interferes with my work. reading a story carefully takes out of me quite as much as if i were to write a story. and except in rare cases i have not found any story worth while enough to allow it to do that to me. it is all a question of intensity, i suppose, but my ears actually do ache after a concert. not because my ears are too weak, but because i listen with such intensity. i read in the same way as i listen to music. i never studied solid geometry or other mathematics. i have no stock pictures for anything. i would become crazy if i did because i hate to see the same thing twice. my imagination never behaves properly either when reading or writing a story. i suppose if the imagination were an independent individual and it actually acted instead of imagined, it would be kept in prison for the rest of its natural life! tools of trade? my god, i have never considered them such. i consider myself as belonging to the minstrel class, born about five hundred to six hundred years too late. otherwise i should enjoy nothing better than traveling from market-place to market-place and telling stories to the assembled peasantry or at some inn. all story-tellers,--as a matter of fact, all artists, are modern minstrels. just born to amuse the people who toil and work. =ferdinand berthoud=: i read so little of other men's work that it is hard to say. i suppose i do see the actual happenings and actors, and not the printed words as printed words. of course in my own writing i live the story and am actually a part of it. live in another world as i write it. in each of my small few stories so far i am in either a large or small part one of the actors. i see myself and see and hear the other men--always personal friends or men i have lived with and quarreled with. i see the grass waving, can hear the horses' footfalls and smell the sweet clear air. the peculiar scentless smell of the open african veldt is always there. i feel so much a part of the thing that when i finish my stint and come back to myself and look at the walls of the room where i write i am in a state of semi-collapse. no, i don't feel the actual pain in other men's stories or my own, but more than once in describing scenes of torture the impressions have been so vivid that they've turned my stomach and i've had to lie down for half an hour or so to get right again. i've seen the "remains" after torture, so perhaps that accounts for it. the pictures i see are in their natural colors. details distinct and solid--not flat as in a moving picture. what i mean to say is that they are firm and rounded, like a picture by millet. no, i have no stock pictures of cowboys and such things, particularly village churches. in the course of years of wandering i've seen so many places that no one is ever uppermost in my mind. no, there is no difference in behavior of my imagination when reading and writing stories, because i don't read them. don't read a story a month, and never read a novel. only read trade, finance, astronomy, travel, research and such stuff. incidentally i am continually having a very curious experience. time and again i read books in my sleep--books i have never before seen. they are always old books, printed a hundred years or more ago, i should say. i go through page after page of them and they're wonderful stuff--stuff that i'd almost give my very soul to be able to write--but try as i will when i wake i can't remember a single word of them. yet the dream comes again and again, and always a different book. =h. h. birney, jr.=: i have read so much and so omnivorously all my life that i can not say i "lose myself" in any work of fiction to the extent that a description of the agonies of a man dying of thirst would send me hunting for a pitcher of ice-water. i am much more likely to be emotionally stirred in reading an account that i know is true than by some work of fiction. for instance, i feel no shame in admitting that i broke down and cried like a baby in reading the account of scott's tragical expedition to the antarctic--their final defeat by the cold when only eleven miles from a cache of food, and the heroic self-sacrifice of the doctor. in reading fiction i am constantly making comparisons. should i read of thirst i compare the written sensations with my recollection of my own when i went fifty-two hours without water in northern arizona. does friel write of the amazon jungle i make mental comparisons between his account and algot lange's or others i have read. am constantly seeking for conviction that the author "knows what he's talking about." that's why i await so eagerly a yarn by thompson burtis or talbot mundy. _they know!_ react to a greater extent to descriptions of scenery--desert, mountain or river--than to descriptions which cater to the senses, taste, smell, etc. have smelt some ungodly stinks and eaten most unholy messes in my time--the kind that can't be written about! find a keener emotional reaction in sorrow or pathos than in "love scenes." have been in love myself and never missed a meal, but--i stuck to the end with my best friend when he went over the pass with meningitis, and then had to tell his folks about it when they got there an hour too late. solid gave me more trouble than plane geometry, but i always was a dumbbell at all mathematics. can understand your question, however. intelligent reading, or writing, is in many ways a third- if not a fourth-dimensional business. no. i strive to make each case a distinct, separate, individual entity. i have known mighty few "types" of particular occupations or pursuits. i read largely for recreation and, lately, to get ideas as to style. main factor of my imagination when writing is impatience. do not write with particular swiftness and usually know just what i want to say long before my pen gets there. once i start i want to get it over with. creation is to me a task, not a joy. i take my pleasure in the finished product. as tools? not as much as i should, but i'm getting to use them more and more. remember, i am one of the "youngest of the entered apprentices." =farnham bishop=: depends entirely on how well the author makes his mind meet mine. most of 'em never make me see anything but the printed page. too much description blinds my mental eyes every time. suggested or connoted scenes and actors, sketched in with a line or two, are much more plain. see better than i hear--taste too darned well if i'm hungry and broke when somebody describes a good camp dinner, for instance. smells? most odors are nothing but empty names to me, for in real life it takes a healthy onion or a whole garden of roses to rouse my olfactory nerves. (probably that's why i've never felt any desire to smoke). feel what i've felt in reality, when a happy bit of description brings it back; too vivid descriptions of suffering make me wince. mostly black and white, sometimes crudely colored. vary from mere suggestive blobs to--say, once when i was a kid, i "saw" an extra illustration for a story in _st. nicholas_, that reginald birch might have drawn, and it puzzled me no end when i failed to find that one among the others that he did draw, when i reread the yarn. but i've never reached that particular height since then. plane geometry was as far as i ever traveled along that trail. a good concept or connotation starts my imagination hitting on all eight. usually, the stock picture, formed in early life, pops up and has to be modified. when somebody says "soldier," i see a clean-shaven young man in civil war blue, with the little forage-cap that our army wore until . then i have to shift his costume and make-up to suit the story, but i can't get away from the impression made on my infant mind back in the eighteen-nineties. the difference between work and play. have to force the darned thing when i'm writing, but she rambles gay and care-free when i'm reading. consider these things "tools of my trade"? i do and i've tried herein to explain how i try to use them. =algernon blackwood=: the visualization of a story i read depends entirely on its degree of actuality according to the evocative power of the writer. i prefer a suggestion that enables me to form my own pictures of scenes and characters described, rather than to have these formed for me in detail by the author. a description of house or room or garden i invariably skip. with his first vital adjective the scene flashes into my mind. his subsequent detail bores me. =max bonter=: an author can make me see his story-world with a vividness strictly in proportion to the degree of his skill. my senses register sound, smell, flavor, touch, etc.,--although less acutely than in the world of actuality. as an example of vividness, let me cite henry leverage's _the shell-back_. i could almost swear that i got a whiff of "old marlin's" unwashed hide; i saw the slime in his eyes and the kinks in his matted old beard. i would not consider these allusions disgusting. the author dispassionately sketches a piece of humanity--that's all. it's truth--and my heart rather warms to "old marlin" on account of it. i can see plenty of color with my eyes shut, although the details of the pictures are not perfectly distinct. when i studied mathematics my brain was not sufficiently mature or systematic to grasp all the fundamentals of any branch. i had not much success with geometry. my response to an author's description is usually limited to his degree of vividness; although it often happens that a theme or a situation, _per se_, so interests me that i leave the author's world and reproduce one of my own. shame on the pen-prostituting varlet who uses stock pictures for his scenes and characters! i would almost as lief see an author plagiarize. what imagination, what regard for the ethics of his craft must a man have who sells his wares over and over again? can art be as lazy, as unscrupulous as that? to my mind, if a writer be not indefatigable in his distinctions, discriminations and demarcations, he is not sincere--if he be not sincere, he is not an artist. he reminds me of the barroom cripple who fares forth to his station on the street corner with half a dozen lead pencils to sell; who returns to the saloon with his pocket full of pennies, but his stock of pencils still intact. these may be harsh words, but--must the dollar taint _everything_ in this world? writing and reading affect my imagination in two distinct ways. when i begin reading, my faculties are relaxed and receptive; my muscular system is in repose. my eyes flash the printed symbols to my brain; my brain translates them and projects them kaleidoscopically upon the screen of my imagination. the pictures immediately generate enthusiasm or otherwise. if they generate enthusiasm my faculties prime themselves and become more acute; my muscular system acquires a certain tension. my brain is receiving food, stimulant--in other words i'm "being entertained." if the pictures generate no enthusiasm, however--if they evoke only a yawn--my faculties remain torpid. my brain is neither being fed nor entertained nor stimulated. in other words, i'm "being bored." thus the function, or behavior, of my reading imagination would seem to be largely passive--merely displaying the author's pictures and leaving their value to be passed upon by my reason. the function, or behavior, of my writing imagination, is vastly different. before i can start, it must initiate a fund of enthusiasm of its own. this enthusiasm must be sufficiently keen to tune up my faculties and make them aggressive and openly demonstrative. this enthusiasm must stiffen my backbone and give tension to my muscles. i must be thoroughly alert to capture and express every passing thought and idea. in other words, i must "feel in the humor to write." my imagination must still take the initiative. it must proceed to throw picture after picture upon its screen--not merely drawing them according to well-defined descriptions as in the case of my reading self--but _initiating_ them for my creative self, being guided in the task only by a hint, a haunting fancy, a lurking impression of the long ago. reason--the critic--stands constantly beside imagination and ruthlessly picks flaws in its pictures, rejecting many as unnatural, uninteresting, overdrawn, etc. such pictures as are passed by the critic are then translated by brain into words that rush out of my finger tips to the keyboard of the typewriter. that is about as near as i can get to it. at any rate my writing imagination must be enthusiastic, stubborn, tireless, inventive and wholly active in its function. i am just beginning to consider these matters as tools of my trade; hope to be able to use them more skilfully by and by. =katharine holland brown=: the keenest impressions, from reading stories, are gained from sight and touch and sense of smell. sense of touch, perhaps strongest. no appeal to the senses in my case is as strong as that declared to exist by many people. can not really "see with my eyes shut" with the vividness that many writers describe. instead, i get a mass-impression instead of one in detail. undoubtedly the requirement of solid geometry, by universities, was sponsored by torquemada. detailed description is not essential. if the story is vivid, the locale shapes itself without effort. no stock pictures. each new story has its own images. one of the great charms of certain authors lies in their lapidary-accuracy of detail. so, in case of the real artist, there is no question of "too many images." i can not answer the next inquiry--have never analyzed so far. nor have i considered any of these matters as "tools of the trade." =f. r. buckley=: this is a very big question: i can't answer it more exactly than by saying that when i read or write i have a _subliminal self_ which feels, tastes and smells, so that i get the effect of stimuli quite vividly without any semblance of reaction on the actual physical senses. this is extremely difficult to explain. i might say that when there is a smell or a sight or a sound before me, either in my writing or some one else's, i rather _know_ it, than feel it. it is rather as though (i am now thinking of a revolver-shot in a small room) the essence of the roar, denatured of the qualities which appeal to the physical ear, had been poured into my consciousness by some other channel. until i started to answer this questionnaire i should have said i heard the crash; of course, i don't; i don't even--i think--imagine it. yet the effect of it certainly impinges on me; an exciting passage of action will even speed up my heart, and fast action will make me work the keys of the typewriter faster. normally one doesn't keep tab of reactions, but it seems to me i've caught myself grinning with pain when somebody was getting hurt. but the speeding-up and the grin are not, i think, direct action--such as i should experience from actually going through the action or watching it with my eyes. i think they are the manifestations of the imagined action's impact on the subconscious, duplicate me, whose sole business it is to receive them. and this duplicate self's control of my own person is only partial; which is why my mouth doesn't actually water when my hero eats lemons. i can see pictures with my eyes shut; in full color but they are still pictures--not movies. i can't shut my eyes and see action; but before describing it i can close them and see the picture of its effect; see the man who's just been shot and how he lies and how his garments hang and where his hands are and how his feet look. i have actually seen a good many men after violent deaths. this may help. and i can see every detail of the man who fired the shot--his attitude, what he's doing with the revolver now he's fired; also, i can see the room and feel it. you know that there is a distinct feel about a room when something abnormal's happening. a pretty gilt clock you've always liked will look entirely different--tawdry, pitiful, cold-hearted, if a dead man's lying in front of the fireplace. i get all this, and i couldn't write if i didn't. as for solid geometry, all mathematics were abomination and to pick on solid geometry would be invidious. i haven't any stock pictures at all. in reading, if the author doesn't give me a picture, i use shakespearean scenery--blank space with "this is a church" written on it. writing, i invent quite definite and different "sets" and so on, for each story. big difference between imagination reading and writing. very, very rarely does reading speed heart-beat and so on; writing, comparatively frequently. =prosper buranelli=: the chief pleasure i get from a story is an intellectual gratification, the perception of some irony, the astonishment which comes from some development, unusual with respect to current ideas, but reasonable when submitted to clear thinking. a good story to my mind is a piece of thinking, of rational building up. i see in anatole france's _procurator of judea_ a rigorous deduction of what could have happened under the circumstances. the seeming truth of the colors and sounds of the setting has for its purpose the heightening of the plausibility with which the close is reasoned out. it is much like the paleontologist who builds the idea of an animal by reasoning on a couple of bones and a set of tracks in prehistoric mud. i am never absorbed, save by the author's ideation. i can see things with my eyes shut, but don't, often. i have an "ear mind." i hear things. my imaginings take place in words or in music. in adolescence i saw things, but not now. solid geometry and spherical trigonometry trouble me. i have enough trouble constructing, in phantasy, in two dimensions. if the concepts are disposed in provocative arrangement, i can supply the vestments, at least such as i need. but the fuller and more persuasive the coloring, the more powerful the logic of the concepts. if an author places a civilized man among cannibals and carries him through well analyzed mental processes to cannibalism, it will be all the more plausible if he complete his reasoning with fully colored and convincing pictures. any story which either gives or suggests stock pictures, such as cowboys or village churches, save in most acrid mockery, is to my mind immeasurably rotten. in the best stories, i think, reading one and writing one would be much alike. reading a beautifully reasoned story would be much like writing a beautifully reasoned story. if you watch a very well played game of chess, it is like playing along with the player. it is something like playing the game yourself. you know what is in the player's head, why he makes a move. with bad players playing, it is merely a spectacle. you can't tell what they are about most of the time and, when you can, you are entirely out of sympathy with the rational processes, which, you understand, are contemptible. tools of trade, presumably text-books and other forms of instruction, i have found, are useful, but only if they give you bases upon which to erect further meditations of your own. =thompson burtis=: my imagination causes me to react to all the stimuli you mention if the writer has any vividness at all about his writing. i taste the flavors, sniff the odors, feel pain, etc. i will except none of the cases mentioned. perhaps my reaction to the description of good or bad food is the strongest. i can get hungry at the mention of a delightful meal, and mentally nauseated, so to speak, at a description of bad food on shipboard or something like that. in the pictures i see with my eyes shut most details are blurred. most often the pictures are black and white, but in especially vivid cases, such as a tropic night or something of that sort, my mental pictures are in color. the limitations are usually in the case of scenes with which i am totally unfamiliar, and because of the number of unfamiliar details mentioned i am often totally at sea in an attempt to visualize a scene or a happening. yes, solid geometry did. my response is not limited to the exact degree of the author's vividness, but it is affected by his descriptive power. a mere concept will make me see something, but not as much as a good description would. each case produces its own picture. no difference. yes. i have made an effort--am making, i hope, a constantly more persistent effort--to use them in this way: by striving through proper word selection, even if it be only one adjective, to make every noun, so to speak, in my stories, mean something. i am trying to make the most minor of my characters have a scraggly moustache, a hump on his back, or some tiny detail which will set him apart in the reader's mind and make him distinctive. in the same manner, food, a room, a scene, a tool--i am trying to incorporate some brief, flash-like description which will make that thing vivid and give it individuality. the more i write the more i am growing able to look at my writing as a trade or craft and comprehend the mechanics of it, and that attitude, i believe, will constantly tend to make a writer consider the tiny details and put them in with deliberation rather than inspiration as the stimulus. =george m. a. cain=: in reading a story, i think my imagination aims to reproduce the picture naturally attaching to it. to what degree this is clear in detail or color depends entirely on the interest evoked by the story. often the images are so real as to produce physical reactions. i have grown actually ill over a description of some repulsive disease. but i can not say that any mere suggestion of pain in any form has induced an actual like pain in, _e. g._, some given part of my body. the distress of imagining pain with me is entirely mental, capable of reacting in physical lassitude, inducing nausea only as it becomes repulsive in its manifestations to other senses than feeling. suppurations are really the only things which i can not imagine without the physical reactions becoming local in my stomach. as for tastes and smells, these have few keenly attractive reactions with me in actual life, and i am affected by imaginations of them only adversely. i can read the _cardinal's snuff-box_ without sneezing. but i am pretty apt to reach for my pipe, if i read much about smoking. solid and plane geometry were the only mathematics i ever found so absolutely easy that a glance was sufficient for almost any proposition. i think response is more or less determined by the degree to which the author dwells on description. as a matter of fact, in answering this and the following question, i would say that it is my opinion that we all form our pictures from things we have actually seen. stage settings, drawings, faces--i believe we conjure entirely from memory. if the author goes into details, we correct our memory pictures to make them correspond with his stage directions. this i have sometimes found capable of actual interference with really writing. in one or two instances i have had so vivid a picture in my mind of the relative positions of certain actors or furnishings, when, say, a character had to use his right hand in the action, and could not have done so in the picture--that i have had to stop and draw diagrams to straighten things out and be sure of avoiding what some reader might instantly see as impossible. i rather think the images i create in my own writing are clearer to my mind. i have to stay with them longer. some months ago my wife asked me in startled tones what was the matter with my face. i had to admit that i was just up from writing of the appearance of an insane man in a cabin door and was unconsciously trying to look like him in my efforts to chalk off his most noticeable features for the readers' benefit. i have considered these things as trade tools only to the extent of being careful to have very clear images before me in writing. sometimes i have found them almost a disadvantage. my own picture was so clear, i took for granted the reader's seeing what i saw, without my telling him what he could not guess. =robert v. carr=: paragraph iii is another set of questions involving, to my limited comprehension, heredity, environment, physical condition, psychological wounds, racial memories and the power of intelligence far beyond that possessed by my little finite mind. who can tell where matter merges into spirit? who can tell where the imagination of the writer leaves off and the imagination of the reader begins? when i think of the infinite, i think only of a word. wise cuckoos, ready to be interned in some asylum, assert that they can imagine the infinite. what man can imagine a million objects? it is an unusual man who can imagine ten thousand. it makes me hunt for comparisons to imagine a thousand. i have to remember how my regiment looked in line, or its length in a column of fours. what man, then, can imagine thought? he can babble words, he can mumble words, but, after all, he can not imagine thought. he can shovel a lecture on divine intelligence into a set of open-billed morons, but, when he is through and has drained the pitcher of water, hasn't he merely put in an evening shoveling words? stock pictures? how do i know that my ideas are not all stock ideas? how does any writer know but what his dearest thoughts--thoughts he fondly fancied were his own little, bright-eyed children--may have been fathered by some tribal psychological wound? his most cherished idea may be the offspring of some hereditary weakness. he may write sex poetry because his grandfather was a roué. his little ideas he considers so wonderfully original, may be little stock ideas born of racial stock ideas, family stock ideas, environment stock ideas. the heavy-domed scientists claim the anglo-saxon habit of meat-eating has produced a certain set of stock ideas. i consider myself merely a human animal who, when he bumps into something he can not comprehend, gives it an impressive name and lets a gaudy word stand for the gap in his intelligence. there are men who have a ready answer for every question; congress and the asylums are full of them. difference in imagination when reading and when writing? involving, so far as i can see, heredity, racial memories, acquired physical weaknesses, mental quirks, tricks of egotism, and a multitude of mysteries i have never been able to solve. i give this up with scarcely a struggle. =george l. catton=: yes; if the characters are distinctly drawn and the setting correctly planned and the action natural under the circumstances, i can see it as fast as i can read it. if it is not, i skip over what i can't see immediately as not worth wasting time over. and i might just mention, by the way, to a student of such things as characters, action and setting, some of the characters and setting and action in fiction are so impossible as to be ludicrous. no, i can't say that i can become so immersed in the atmosphere of a story that i can "hear" and "smell" and "feel" and "taste" with the characters in the story; that is, the characters in a story that i am reading. but with the characters in a story that i am writing--well, that is something else again. if i want to i can weep with my characters and laugh with them and run the whole gamut of the human emotions with them, but that is something i seldom allow myself. i go too far then, with the emotions of my characters. yes, i can really see things with my eyes shut, or open, in the dark or in the daylight. and there are no limitations whatever. green grass is green, a pine tree is a darker green, and a forest lake is yet a darker shade. colors, and black and white, reproduce themselves in their natural shade when i am picturing in my mind's eye a scene to be put down in words on paper. also the characteristics of a character. i can see a broken nose just as plainly as a straight one, and a hare-lip as plainly as a cupid's bow. details stand out as distinctly, or even more so, than the whole. continuity writing for the movies is, to me, one of the easiest and most fascinating tasks i ever tackled. never had an opportunity to study any other geometry or mathematics. if the author of a story i am reading fails to picture a scene or character or bit of action so that it can be understood and "seen" as fast as i can read his picture, i supply what is lacking myself to make it up and save time. in fact, in lots of cases i find that the pictures the author drew were never needed at all, as far as i was concerned; certain things will happen under certain circumstances, inevitably, and the ground under a knot of pine trees will be bare of grass without any one telling me that. never have stock pictures. each setting is built up to conform to the necessities of the action and the characters and the theme. stock pictures and characters, etc., savor too much of a manufactured article and kill the personality of a story. only in one thing is there any difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading or writing a story. if i am reading a story by another author my imagination pictures for me only what is absolutely necessary to make the story interesting. if i am writing a story my imagination brings me a thousand pictures, incidents, etc., to choose from. or, to put it another way, in reading a story my imagination is localized to the restrictions of the story; while if i am writing my imagination knows no boundaries. yes, i have long considered these matters as tools of my trade; so long in fact that a consideration of them now is unnecessary. in fact, to think of them now when working on a story is to restrict their working. =robert w. chambers=: it depends on the story. no limitations to "seeing." colors. distinct. all mathematics annoy me. response depends upon the author. no stock pictures. do not resent many images if they are well done. difference when reading and writing? of course. as tools? have given it no thought. =roy p. churchill=: i have never thought of this before, but believe that in my own case my responses through the senses are governed by what i have actually done myself. for instance, i know how a six-inch gun sounds, the noise of the shell, the impact of the explosion. i can see the splash at the target, follow the birdlike flight of the shell, smell the powder, taste the smoke. for i have done these things, _experienced_ them, and when they are in a story my senses respond. yet i have not been a jockey in a horse race. i can't get near as vividly the feel of the saddle, the smell of sweating horses, hear the shouts of the crowd, the taste of churned dust on the track. so in a story the writer's experiences must be real, it seems to me, to give anything like a second-hand impression on the senses of the reader. yet i do enjoy prize-fight stories, and never did them, love horse-race stories and never rode in a race. it must be that the authors of such stories had a very, very clear picture to give it to me at all. in stories of places i have not seen, telling of experiences i have not gone through, imagination fits in somewhat blurred details, but often more enjoyably than stories of things i already knew. for instance, i have confused ideas of just what passes are made in a duel in _the three musketeers_, but it does not detract from the charm of the story. i have no stock pictures of scenes, rather try to make them fit what the characters need. my imagination works more freely in reading stories than in writing them. =carl clausen=: i feel all of these things if the story is done well enough. actual colors, i think. always distinct. did not study geometry to any extent. limited to the author's description. no stock pictures so far as i am conscious. difference when reading and writing? can't answer this. don't know for sure. i write by "ear." if these are tools, i don't know it. =courtney ryley cooper=: unless i can see the story clearly and _know_ the characters, the thing falls short with me. i feel that there is something either wrong with the author or myself. black and white. never got as far as solid geometry. arithmetic was bad enough! i reproduce myself and often "help" the author. if i don't like his setting, i make one of my own and go merrily on. individual. i don't like description that is too minute. i feel like a kindergarten pupil. a great deal. in writing, i am so terribly concentrated that i actually see nothing. everything seems to be working out from my subconscious brain, whatever that is. no. =arthur crabb=: this is a bit too highbrow for me. it seems to me that a great many writers try to make an undue appeal to the senses and too little to the common sense of the reader. for instance, if a tale is laid at the seashore i am not particularly interested in having the writer explain to me that the air is salt and the sea is green and the sand is white, and so on. what i am interested in is knowing what the character thinks of it, that is, if the heroine has lived all her life at the seashore, the salt air and the green sea and the white sand probably do not interest her any more than the back of the brick building i see out of my office window interests me. if the heroine comes from an inland farm then the effect of the sea on her is decidedly different. the same thing in general applies to all the rest of human emotions. the idea of making a little shop girl, of no antecedents, go through the range of emotions that would put a prima donna to shame, is, it seems to me, unnecessary and undesirable. i recently started a story in which the author plastered on so many colors my only impression was a kaleidoscopic paint shop. the characters in the story never saw any of the colors at all. i, like every other human being, can see things with my eyes shut, if i get what you mean. i can make imaginary characters act and picture imaginary scenes in complete detail. that, it seems to me, is absolutely necessary if one is to write at all. i studied mathematics two or three years beyond calculus. naturally solid geometry gave me more trouble than plane geometry or trigonometry. it is a far more complex proposition. i think the two are comparable to learning to ride a bicycle and learning to walk on a slack wire. incidentally i think there is a catch in this question, but i am dodging it. it depends on the author. without checking myself up by compiling statistics i think the really great authors cut out what you call vivid description. do you realize that the probability is that nothing in this world exists at all except in an individual's inner consciousness? the reader can not be, certainly ought not to be, particularly interested in some writer's own picture of something or other except as his characters are affected. i certainly do not have stock pictures of anything. i do resent. my answer as to difference when reading and writing is "of course." my idea of a story is people; the description, plot, etc., are the frame of the picture. i am for instance not so much interested in who committed a murder as why the murderer did it. my general answer is, no. =mary stewart cutting=: it entirely depends on the power with which the story is written. as a rule, my imagination does not produce the same results on my senses as do the actual stimuli themselves. but, on the other hand, if i may give an instance from booth tarkington's _alice adams_, the dinner party given by alice to her apparent suitors is so vivid to me in every detail that i can never get over the feeling of being actually there in the heat and the murkiness and the smell of the brussels-sprouts. there are no limitations to the pictures seen with your eyes shut. i think we have stock pictures in our minds, unless they are described. there is a great difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading them and when writing them. one has to use continued effort to keep the proper proportions in one's imagination. when you are reading stories it is simply a relaxation. everything is a tool of one's trade. =elmer davis=: depends on how good an author he is. as a matter of fact, my senses respond in detail much less than i had imagined till i tried it with your questions in mind. usually i have a mere intellectual response to sensory images in a story, though on occasions, with especially good writers or in stories of unusual interest, i feel them. _e. g._ i get no feeling of smooth contact or gentle pressure from _cytherea_ or _the sheik_, though those stories are full of this item. but i do from certain poets--catullus, donne, author of the song of songs which is solomon's. a. dumas and your mr. gordon young can generally give me an impression of rough contact or hard impact. i taste food described in a story when i am hungry. but in the main my senses don't respond--sight and hearing come across more often than the others. i assimilate the scene described to the nearest like it that i have known--very generally, of course, and following the author's descriptions in principal details. i believe i incline to see them in black and white except when other colors are mentioned. details blurry unless set down. (note for argument. yet i much prefer stories which leave details to my own imagination in the main. the curse of hergesheimer is his overloading with minutiæ of interior decorating. the great value of most oriental stuff, notably the _arabian nights_ and herodotus, is their use of stock phrases "fair as a moon on the fourteenth night," etc., which let you make your own picture.) no more trouble. largely answered above. the creation of atmosphere and suggestion is of course a delicate business, as you know. when it is done right i much prefer the suggestive concept. stock pictures drawn from recollections of childhood (mainly) for most things. country church, barnyard, i have from the age of three. with variations, of course, to fit the particular case. most images fall into certain types based roughly on things i have seen. yes, i do resent, as said above. works better and more freely when i am writing them. no, haven't used them as tools, but, believe me, i will hereafter. my wife, just reading _mcteague_, calls my attention to frank norris's overdeveloped tendency to use the olfactory image. for example, he pictures the beginning of marital disillusionment by "mcteague's" consciousness of the smell of his wife's hair-brush. maybe i have the details wrong, but anyway "mct." on entering the bedroom is conscious of the smell of the hair-brush where one of our modern heroes would smell the fragrant powder on her palpitant flesh, etc. also in a mob scene in _the octopus_, where some thousands of the californian peasantry get together to hunt jackrabbits on a hot summer day, norris speaks of the "strong ammoniacal odor." now i think the average reader doesn't feel with his nose unless the author, as in these cases, deliberately calls his attention. that is, if you write "a sweating crowd" most of us would think of the glistening brow rather than the animal odor. probably that was in the ordinary practise, the naturalist school, but there seems to be evidence that norris ran more naturally to the smell-image than most of them. =william harper dean=: when i read a story i must live through it with the characters. if this is impossible i will not stay with it. if i can not suffer and rejoice with the characters, laugh with them, hate with them, the story lacks the power to produce that reaction in me which my own stories must produce in me. if the style grates or lumbers along i become disgusted--the fine charm is lacking. yes, i see things with my eyes shut--place my characters in a situation, then stand off, as it were, and watch them react, then record what they do and say. i _can't_ ram words down their throats, neither can i drag them about like dummies and think they are acting. solid geometry to me was always more immediately assimilated in its logic than analytical geometry or calculus. the former made pictures, the latter nebulous nothings. an author who can, like knut hamsun, write one line describing a situation, then pass on to the next stage of plot development, gives me that delightful privilege of placing my own interpretation to the line and, in my mind, reading several chapters while i let my eyes follow into his next paragraph. and that's writing. not everybody can do it, for not every author is a writer. the reader deserves latitude for exercising his interpretative powers--if an author sets about to argue out every situation down to the orthodox _quod erat demonstrandum_, he not only clutters up the story with words but he cheats the reader and the reader resents it. i might go a step beyond and say he is casting reflections upon the reader's intelligence. i have no stock pictures for any setting or any character. i construct them as i need them from life. i always can produce a prototype for anything i use, for i don't attempt to write about any setting or any character with which i have never made contact. it's no trouble to scent out inventions in a story; they grate and make the story squeak and clank. i am running a series of stories in _the ladies' home journal_ built around a boy character of the twelve-year age. he is my own son. where he plays, i know every nook and cranny of that great woodland park, i know the code of ethics held by his clan, i know how his mind reacts under certain stimuli. when i need a character like the ogre which every boy his age has, i find him in the neighborhood, or, failing, go back and resurrect one which i knew in my boyhood. no, when i read a story, my imagination works in the same channels followed as when i write one. i do not consider these things "tools of the trade"; subconsciously i use them as such, but i try to divorce from creative writing any and all "rules," "tools" and "formula." good writing is nothing more than good thinking--if we thought by rule and formula, what a world this would be! =harris dickson=: these things depend, i believe, upon the skill of the writer and perhaps as much upon the reader's present mood. sometimes and in some stories, all the incidents, settings, characters, smells, sounds and sights are just as clear as if i were actually present. sometimes i do not get them at all. for instance, many years after i still feel the gruesome atmosphere that conan doyle created in his _hound of the baskervilles_, remember passages from _the lord of the isles_, and smell the deep dark medieval woods in _the forest lovers_. books with me are like people--some i see once and remember always; some i see every day and fail to register them at all. i shouldn't know solid geometry if i saw it coming down the big road with a bell on it. i am not conscious of having stock pictures in mind; the end of loch katrine (_lady of the lake_) is very different from lake geneva (_prisoner of chillon_). and the battle of waterloo (_vanity fair_) does not resemble the battle of omdurman (_with kitchener to khartoum_). i don't know whether too many pictures should be given a reader. the writer should, in this day and time, remember that "the tale's the thing." and pictures of setting, etc., perform precisely the same function as sets in a drama. sometimes a too-elaborate setting detracts from and holds up a story--as in a very gorgeous recent film of nazimova, called _the red lantern_, the perfection of the actress herself was largely obscured by distracting scenery. to my mind the art is just as bad if you have too much of this--perhaps worse--as it is if you have too little. to me there is much difference between reading and writing; in reading i must follow what is told me; in writing, what imagination i have roams on a loose halter. sure, some of these matters are tools of the trade, a trade that in many respects is just as mechanical as carpentering--secure foundations, body of edifice, and climax roof. =captain dingle=: depends of course on the artistry of the author in that particular story. some stories read to me like the monotonous dirge of a praying revivalist's convert. but when the story is well written and is a story after mine own heart, i can generally see, taste, smell, feel with the author, though i never recall feeling physical pain. of the senses, i think sense of smell gets to me most vividly. (no, that isn't any wallop at anybody's stuff. my own stinks sometimes.) i have to "see" my own work, though not necessarily with eyes shut. when i visualize a story it is like seeing a fleet of ships coming out of a fog. when the fog clears, the bell rings for "full ahead." i never had a chance to study anything deeply. to pass any of my nautical exams i was simply crammed with rules and never learned the roots. so far as i remember, of any studies i suffered at school, what we called plain ordinary "sums" gave me as hard a hammering as anything. i never could learn to do more than add and subtract and blunder through division. salt hoss and hardtack and rope-ends constituted my curriculum after the age of fourteen and a half. sometimes an author's mere phrase will give me a clear picture, but not often. i can't recall a writer of recent date who can do that for me. i have a fresh vision, usually, for each picture i form myself, except where i am using a character or a scene over and over again, as in a series. i mean, i don't see any building as a mere pattern, nor any man as a type altogether. oh, yes! my own imagination works like a pre-war non-union artisan when i am writing: smoothly, without strikes, and never kicking at a bit of overtime. when reading, unless the stuff grips extra hard, the imagination is like one of the post-war scum who never work except to fight up to the pay window, then strike till next pay-day. no, i don't think so. perhaps i ought. =louis dodge=: when i read a story i consider it an excellent or a poor story just in proportion as i see it and realize it--and all the characters--clearly, as if i were participating in it. i like swift strokes which make things vivid and real. for example, in _the master of ballantrae_, stevenson, wishing to indicate the deterioration of a man's character, pictures him as he walks with his little son. "mackellar" is speaking: "it was pretty to see the pair returning, full of briers, and the father as flushed and sometimes as bemuddied as the child; for they were equal sharers in all sorts of boyish entertainment, digging in the beach, damming of streams, and what not; _and i have seen them gaze through a fence at cattle with the same childish contemplation_." that last phrase (the italics are mine)--does it leave anything invisible? the real masters _do_ make me see colors and smell odors and feel beaten down by forces. when i was a boy i took the writer's word for it; but now he has to show me. that, perhaps, is the test of a "rattling" story--that it shows us instead of telling us. i can see things clearly with my eyes shut, but only the major colors appear; the blue of the sea and sky, the red and black of fire and smoke, the green of grass. when i see human faces i see only expressions. i can now see the face of "barnaby rudge's" mother, with the expression of mysterious and hidden terror in it. solid geometry was easier to me than plane geometry--perhaps because it came afterward, perhaps because the additional dimension made the thing more tangible. i don't like stock figures; yet i confess that when i think of school-masters i think of dear old professor lane of quitman college, a bent old man with calm dark eyes and a meek manner and an iron-gray mustache; and when i think of western sheriffs i always think of bob dowe of maverick county, texas, who spoke softly and "went and got 'em." i _try_ not to use stock figures. i would rather write stories than read them. making a story is my own adventure; reading one is following another man. i don't like to think of "the tools of my trade." i think dickens' best book is _the pickwick papers_--a book in which the author plainly didn't know where he was going or what he was going to do. the greatest books are formless: _les miserables_, _jean christophe_. perhaps little folk ought to have tools and think about them. the result may be a good job, but never, i think, a great story: and i like to hitch my poor wagon to a star. =phyllis duganne=: depends on the author whether i visualize his story-world or not. some writers can make me see and believe people and places and action that i'd be inclined not to believe--and some writers can make a perfectly ordinary living-room scene look more like a cardboard set than a house. same with sounds and tastes and smells and touches and feelings. i think that in the average short story i find the people more real than the settings and action. and it depends a great deal, too, on my mood. if i'm interested in the story as a piece of work--the sort of job i'm doing myself--it's more an interesting laying of words end-to-end to make a piece of fiction that's convincing and readable than anything else. but if i'm not thinking of the story as work--but just as a tale--i can be righteously indignant with the villain and thrilled with the hero. there aren't any limitations to "seeing things with my eyes shut"--if the writer can make me see them. a writer i like and enjoy--and i like a good many--can make me see things and people and places quite as though i were there; every detail and color and sound and smell and noise as distinct as though it were before me. i didn't study solid geometry, but i'm sure it wouldn't have given me as much trouble as plain every-day arithmetic. nothing could have. again it depends on the author. i think that usually my response is more than the exact description of the author. i think i haven't any stock pictures; perhaps i have for a cowboy. if images really are formed, i don't resent it. but when a writer tries so hard that he merely spoils the image i've already formed without giving me anything else, i do. stories that i write are more vivid to me than the average story i read. but i think that must always be true; it's the thing that makes me feel my limitations most: that people and places can be so vivid and real to me and that i can't make them so vivid and real to other people. edna ferber in her _old man minick_ made the old man as real as any one i've ever seen or imagined or written about--but i suppose he is much more real to her--and probably different--than he is to me. yes, i've considered these things as "tools of my trade." a story isn't much good unless it's real to the reader, and reality comes through making a person forget it's a story and actually see and hear and feel. =j. allan dunn=: all emotions come to us through the senses. and the sense of sight is the key to memory. as smell is akin to taste, so that one may barely distinguish, i think it is hard to say how the memory of what one sees may stimulate the other senses. i can see plainly many of the characters of other authors, they are as distinct as if i had met them. i recognize them partly by the masonry of our craft. so too i can see the setting if i stop to connect up. but i think it is largely the difference between being able to think in a foreign language when we read it, or to pause--however connectedly--and translate. i can force my reading mind to translate more vividly for me if i want it to. color i can see best. vaguely i can taste. sense of rough or smooth contact, no. nor of pain. but i can get exhilarated by the pleasure of the characters, depressed by their sorrow, react to bravery, patriotism, sacrifice, sorrow. my lachrymal glands will work, my emotions are on the _qui vive_, but the sense impressions are in the main hazy. i can see things with my eyes shut without a question. i can conjure up places i have seen or that are well described. i can see color, i can see details, _if i stop to think_. don't believe i can read and do it nearly as vividly, unless experience of my own is coincident. i had no trouble with solid geometry. i got my mathematical degree at oxford. an author will stimulate me far beyond the exact degree of description. i try to avoid all stock pictures as i would the plague. i conjure up an individual vision. i endeavor to see plainly every character and every bit of scenery i use. often the characters and scenes are taken entire from life. it is my general plan to write of no phases of life, no places, that i have not known at first hand. my imagination is highly stimulated when writing stories that i start upon with special enthusiasm, but the work of a fine craftsman urges me to better effort for myself and gives me enormous satisfaction. i don't know how far i use such matters as tools of my trade. certainly the ability to conjure up my scenes and characters is most essential. i am afraid of plagiarism. i acknowledge the reaction to write something in the style or upon the lines of an author i admire and i have to fight it. =walter a. dyer=: in reading i visualize, particularly the setting. atmosphere in a story always appeals to me. thus i see the town of middlemarch as a real place, and egdon heath in _the return of the native_ is very vivid to me, while the salient points of the characters have faded. i react to sound, taste and smell less readily. tenseness of dramatic passages i feel physically, but not pain very acutely. stories by conrad have left me physically weary as though i had taken part in the action, but not every author affects me in this way. i believe i visualize color as well as outline, and motion is included, even the passing of wind, in the picture. i always found solid geometry easy. i do not have stock pictures. probably i am a bit sophisticated and react to the suggestiveness of so-called literary description more than the average. my mind works much the same way when i am writing. i believe i succeed in getting atmosphere into my stories, but i do not find it has the most telling element in making them salable. i might add that in reading i am not so much carried away by pure action as by vividness of detail and the dramatic element that is psychological. beyond that, humor in presentation and color in description appeal to me. stevenson, for example, and to a large extent kipling and hardy, combine these to my liking. =walter prichard eaton=: i certainly see in imagination, as clearly as in reality, when my mind is concentrated. i couldn't write anything if i didn't see as i wrote. a person without strong visual imagination may be a great philosopher, but he can never enter fiction. i never studied solid geometry. plane was the only mathematics i ever could do, though! i have, as a reader, stock pictures only for stock stories. if a writer can not compel an individual image in me, i throw away his manuscript. i resent description that is a mass of detail, when my picture is formed at a sentence. most american magazine writers sin this way. i skip the second half of nearly all their description. the french never sin this way. they select _few_, but the salient details. of course one's imagination differs in the acts of reading and creating--_i. e._ the process of employment differs. in reading it is passive and follows a lead, in creating, it is active. that is why it is more fun to create--and why it tires you quicker. the imagination _itself_ is the same in the two processes, but in the second it has a sense of freedom. artists have _initiative_ of imagination. i don't know what you mean by considering these matters as tools of your trade. i have had always an interest in psychology, especially the psychology of esthetics. but it never occurred to me that anybody could possibly write creative literature without the ability to reassemble sensory impressions and hold them steadily by the power of the imagination. if i hadn't possessed to some extent this power, i should never have tried to write. the stronger one has it, the more inevitably he becomes an artist. =e. o. foster=: having been a copy reader i am afraid that when i read a story i do not allow my imagination the play it should have and i fear that this probably reacts in my own composition. for me to get the full benefit of a story it must be off the ordinary track, for instance--f. st. mars' stories of animal life appeal to me. i could see and sense the different animals in their habitat. talbot mundy's stuff appeals to me but in a different way. i think it is by association, for i have lived a great deal of my life in foreign countries. i can not see things with my eyes shut, but if i concentrate my memory will bring back details i can write down. for instance in one of my stories i spoke about an "obscene lizard." this particular lizard, a "gecko," was perched on top of a broken bamboo a short distance in front of one of our trenches in manila. he was making the night hideous. i threw a club at him just as he started his "yammer." the club hit the bamboo and he went sailing into the air to land ultimately on the ground. i can feel as plainly to-day as i could then my astonishment when, with the sound of his impact, came the "you-you-y-o-u," with which he always ended his call. you could not page him. scenery to me comes back in its color, as do paintings, but a house--even the house in which i was born and reared--does not seem to me to have color. i have not studied solid geometry, therefore i can not answer this question. my response is not limited to the exact degree to which the author's description makes vivid, for i frequently find myself trying to add to an author's conception. i think possibly that when i visualize a church it is possibly the little one in which i first attended divine service, but i have seen so many cowboys and so many soldiers that i imagine each case produces individual vision. i have not been inside many churches lately. there is a decided difference in the behavior of my imagination when i am reading a story and when i am writing one. nor have i considered these methods as tools of my trade. =arthur o. friel=: my imagination does not reproduce any of these sense impressions, or pain. if the writer has made these things vivid they register strongly, but i do not actually see, hear and smell them as in real life. didn't study geometry. am limited virtually, though not actually, to the writer's portrayal. no stock pictures. reading vs. writing? yes. when writing a story i _live_ it. have not considered these as tools of my trade. =j. u. giesy=: personally in reading a story my imagination reproduces the scene of the author only as tinctured by my own characteristic bent, i suspect. i actually see the characters and settings--i mentally appreciate the sounds, flavors, tastes, smells and tactile impressions described, but wholly in a comparative rather than any other sense. the pain sense in a physical way, i can not say i have ever felt--on a mental plane, as applying to pathos, grief, etc., i have always been keenly responsive. in writing i have at times laughed heartily at some humorous situation or wept at the emotion i sought to convey by the situation and cause for grief expressed. in "seeing things with my eyes shut" i believe that the pictures take on the mentally pre-recorded tints resulting from past experiences of life. details with me are exceedingly distinct--a setting or locale is as clearly apprehended as though it for the moment was actually existent in a physical state. geometry never troubled me. it probably would now as i haven't tried to demonstrate a theorem for years. i am very apt to carry on the author's concept along my own lines--or to diverge from it at times to an entirely different result. i have no stock pictures in the sense you mean. each setting grows as applying to the story in hand. at the same time there is no doubt that each is in a sense the result of past knowledge of such settings, many of them having come down from childhood, and each being modified for the case in hand to suit. i read in a more or less passive state, trying to get the meat of the author's thought. i write in a state of tense concentration trying to force my thought on the reader. the processes are very different i think. i fear i have never thought of this as fully as i have since the question was asked by you. as you know, my writing is an avocation and pleasure--a relaxation from a professional life. =george gilbert=: if the story is good, i live it as i read; if it is without appeal to me enough to compel me to live it, i throw it aside. in regard to seeing "things with your eyes shut," this question evades a square answer, for who can analyze the limitations of his own imagination, when he must use it for the analysis? who else can do it for him? the imagination, in its workings, is the one power that is inalienable, non-delegateable. do i "have stock pictures for church, cowboy," etc.? i hope not. reading vs. writing? no one can tell; certainly i can't. tools? no; not; none. if an author kept all that in mind, he'd write, not stories, but a text-book on them. =kenneth gilbert=: to a great degree i have spoiled myself as a reader; in other words, i have for years taught myself to be always looking for the mechanics of a story. i ask myself: why did the author do this? and i am not satisfied until the question is answered. occasionally, however, i read a story that by its smoothness and charm stirs my admiration and imagination, and i find myself being carried along, reacting the same as the average reader, in just the way the author wished. then indeed do i hear the sounds described and taste the flavors of the story. imagination does not reproduce smells very markedly, but the sense of touch is very real. physical pain is felt; more keenly when sympathies are deeply stirred. a poignant sense of sympathy is the keenest emotion i feel, it seems to me. in addition i would say that clever dialogue in dialect, such as a negro--if he is funny--is most realistic. i can hear the words spoken. i "see things with my eyes shut," but sketchily, only the high lights being visible, therefore the details, unless i focus my attention on them, are blurred. in colors. solid geometry proved far more interesting than arithmetic, which was very distasteful to me. i have stock pictures, unless the author has troubled to depict objects otherwise. i prefer to see them through his eyes rather than resort to my familiar scenes. decidedly there is a difference in the behavior of my imagination when i am writing, as compared to reading, stories. reading a story never keys me up until i am oblivious to all but my immediate surroundings, while i fairly _live_ a dramatic scene in my own story. i consider these matters "tools of the trade." for example, i try to test impartially my own description, to see if i have gone far enough, or too far. if i feel that it is graphic enough for the reader to "get" its highlights, his own imagination will supply the rest. (i'm taking kipling's word for that, and i think it is correct, as i have proved it to my own satisfaction by questioning discerning friends who read my stories.) a sentence which carries imaginative stimuli, and therefore a flavor, is one of my constant aims. =louise closser hale=: i know that good reading makes good writing, develops style, polishes our sentences and gives us an unconscious measure for us to go by. i know that i have often written down a word and, after writing it, realize that i had no clear idea what that word meant, but upon digging at my dictionary i have found it to be absolutely the word for the definition of my thought. that comes from good reading. how beautiful it is that, like acting, we can learn and enjoy at the same time! is there any difference in the workings of my imagination when i am reading and when i am writing? well, i generally read authors who write better than i do and my imagination makes pictures of every situation of their story. but i resent any great description of the characters. i can make my own pictures; and i am impatient when i myself am writing if there seems any compelling necessity for going into the delineation of features and coloring and what they wear. the reader can make my people look just the way he wants to. i don't care--it's enough to be read. i might say more than that. as kate douglas wiggin said once to me, teasingly: "i've bought your last book. i don't suppose you care whether i have read it or not." perhaps it is just enough to be bought. =holworthy hall=: unfortunately, when i read a contemporary story i am always seeing the machinery, especially if i know the author personally. if, however, i read the work of an author unknown to me personally or an author no longer living or a so-called "classic," i am much more subject to my own imagination. it is only once in a hundred instances that any writer can make me forget the methods by which he has attempted to produce his effect. when this happens, i know that i have read something genuine. nevertheless, even if a story is bad and even if the wheels creak, i am very receptive of any appeal to any specific sense, primarily the visual sense. with "my eyes shut" i have no limitations in color or in detail. i took honors in solid geometry. generally i am offended by a wealth of description and detail which prevents me from independent thinking; i much prefer to receive a vivid suggestion and to be allowed to ferment it myself. as a reader i have no "stock pictures." i put it up to the author to show me what he has; if he fails to convince me, i walk out. i decline to substitute my own conceptions for those which he impliedly guaranteed to provide me. next question answered already--above. obviously, after what i have already said, there is all the difference in the world between the state of my imagination when i read and when i write. never. if i had, i should be too self-conscious to write. =richard matthews hallet=: the trend of the questions on imagination seems to be to discover what type of imagination mine is, auditory, visual or motor. these i believe are the psychological divisions. i think mine is auditory. i get things i hear better than things i see. a word or two may mean more to me than a whole landscape. words collect values round themselves in some queer way and they provide you with an imaginary world not so sharp as the real one--that is my case at least--but to which my emotional reaction is vastly keener. i wonder if the imaginations of most writing men are not chiefly auditory, with a good infusion of the motor type where there is a knack of swift flowing narrative. certainly the chief preoccupation of the writer is with words and not things. does he have the same grasp of detail as the practical-minded man? i doubt it, even where his writing is all made up of detail. he husbands the details he does grasp, that is all. they are precious and astonishing to him for the very reason that he is weak on that side. lafcadio hearn's writing is a gorgeous mass of color and of sensuous appreciation; yet the man was half blind, i believe. his sight was certainly defective. this may have helped him. beethoven's symphonies were none the worse for their composer being deaf. obstacles may be the very things that compel genius to extend itself. mathematics hits me on my blind side entirely. i do not resent having images formed for me, i demand it. i dislike sketchy writing. i'm not speaking of the enormous suggestiveness which words of course have in themselves, but of a habit of leaving the reader to fill in the picture. if most stories were of the _lady or the tiger_ type, they would fall flat, in my opinion. a story, to ring the bull's eye, should be self-contained. as to behavior of my imagination when reading and when writing, it differs as the behavior of a man loafing differs from that of a man slaving under the lash. this is a large difference. i don't write easily; not apparently because i like it. and yet any other job would certainly suit me less. so where are we? =william h. hamby=: it all depends on the writer. if he has seen what he is describing and does it interestingly and convincingly i see it too. if he doesn't--i skip to the next story. i do not bring up in my mind sounds described in a story nearly so vividly as i do tastes or smell. the description of an odor comes very vividly to me. i do not feel physical pain as i read of it--with the exception of cold or fatigue. i have a very vivid sense of touch and any mention of coldness, smoothness or the like is felt as i read. i see things with my eyes shut and i often see them in colors. at times they are misty and again i see the picture in very vivid details. solid geometry was very easy for me. i started in solid geometry before i had studied plane geometry and demonstrated every proposition in the text. i usually see most vividly that which is merely suggested or very briefly described. a detailed description kills the picture with me. i have no stock pictures. if a picture comes at all, it is a new one. naturally one's imagination works more definitely when he is writing than when reading. in order to write at all one must bring his mind into a state of intense activity. but he can read almost passively--often passing over long stretches merely to get to what he hopes is coming. no, i never have. =joseph mills hanson=: when i read a story i see everything vividly, provided it interests me; characters, action and setting. i do not hear sounds; merely realize them. yes, i believe i do taste flavors. not much doing on smells. sense of touch also rather somnolent (hope i'm not getting atrophied!). but i _do_ feel actual, physical pain, if it is feelingly depicted. often "see things with my eyes shut"; it comes naturally. things seem in natural colors and distinct. thank goodness, i never studied solid geometry. algebra was bad enough. however, i liked plane geometry better than other mathematics--which isn't saying much. if i become absorbed in a story, my imagination runs away ahead of the author; though not always, of course, nor often, to his conclusions. i usually get different pictures for every church or cowboy, or dog or barnyard, or anything else. there is, i believe, a difference in the conduct of my imagination when reading or writing a story. it acts more slowly, perhaps less logically, when writing; i have to ponder situations a good deal before deciding and going ahead. yes, i have thought of them as tools of my trade. the sub-divisions have not occurred to me in that light. =e. e. harriman=: in reading a story i see every, smallest detail and if the author is chary of descriptions i fill in unconsciously. one reason why i am at times short on descriptions--i see it so plainly myself that i am liable to forget that others can not. my imagination carries me into a field of action so completely that i am often under a strain that tires me out. i have, in writing a gunfight scene, jumped nearly out of my chair when a neighbor slammed a board down on another one. i am often so affected by pathos of my own composition that i have to pause and assure myself that it is fiction, before i can finish. in reading payson terhune's dog story in the last _ladies' home journal_ last night i got so worked up that i wanted to hammer hell out of that speed maniac who killed the dog. i feel, see, hear, smell, anything vividly represented by a good writer. seeing in the dark--the colorings are there, to the last gradation. every detail is clear cut and distinct. i can see things i saw fifty years ago, in just that way. as i think of my dog that died forty-two years ago, i can see the shadings that ran down from his reddish back to his light yellow belly. i can see the color and expression of his eyes and the way he would cock his head on one side when listening to me. never studied solid geometry, though i made the drawings in the university of minnesota. enjoyed them immensely and took a high mark. if a writer hints at anything, my mind pictures it instantly. if his description is stopped shy of completion, i finish it. i have no stock pictures, though my memory is full of scenes. any style or kind is built up instantly by a phrase or sentence. i think that there is a marked difference in imaginative vision when writing or reading. in reading i feel that i am looking at a photograph or watching action by others. in writing i feel that i am in the scene--a part of it--helping in the action. i use these "tools of my trade" daily. often i start with a man or boy as my central character. before long he gets into a scrape. at once i become that character and have to live the situation in order to learn what he would or could do to get out of a fix. =nevil g. henshaw=: this is rather hard to answer, but in reading a book or story that i'm genuinely interested in i react far beyond the written page in all the senses you enumerate. i imagine i feel most the emotions of the characters, fear, hate, desire, pain, etc. also taste hits me hard. smell not so much. sound still less. touch last of all. a scene well done i see perfectly and i delight in the little touches that make real and set off the whole, trifles like a puddle in a road, a rock on a hillside, an odd piece of furniture or ornament in a room. in writing unless i can see what i'm writing about i can't get it on paper. the picture is perfectly clear to the last detail no matter how fanciful. this applies to any picture i try to conjure up. i see the colors also. being a dub at all mathematics, i never studied geometry. if an author gives me a good hint i can generally go beyond it. i've no stock pictures, especially in my own work. a place will give me an idea even quicker than a person. but then i've always thought that there was a great deal in that ancient expression "ain't nature grand." there is, of course, a big difference though it's hard to explain. perhaps i can get at it best by saying that writing is work, reading play. these matters are most certainly tools of the trade, and i use them all i can. =joseph hergesheimer=: my reaction to a story is partly to the fineness of its writing and partly to the depth of its humanity--its pity and understanding. i see no mental pictures--again all this is simply the emotion of recognition. solid geometry? i have never studied anything. stock pictures or individual vision? if it isn't the latter it's nothing! resent too many images? this is not clear. "behavior of the imagination" escapes me. tools of trade? this, too, is complicated. i think i am centered on the main thing, and the rest follow subconsciously. =robert hichens=: i can not answer this. =r. de s. horn=: i certainly consider these matters as tools of the trade. perhaps this comes from the peculiar situation i find myself in; _viz._, having to write or do nothing. i had always liked to write; did a lot of it at the naval academy and afterward as a side line mostly for the pure fun of it. but when i was smashed up and rendered unfit for most occupations i took to writing with deliberate intent to make it my one profession. writing is in mind at all times, whatever i do, wherever i go. and with such in view i try to make everything useful and subservient to the end in view. i find that my imagination is quite vivid, and it immediately interests itself in every story i read. i smell smells, see sights, hear sounds, taste tastes and feel emotions provided the author himself has done so and thus has handed them on to me. in other words i quite enter into the atmosphere of the stories i read. more than this, i sometimes find myself seized with a new solution to the story and thinking it out to see if possibly the story wouldn't have been better that way. generally the pictures i see in my imagination are black and white; silhouettes, you might say, though i still see the colors. the idea is that it is the outlines that strike me most forcibly, sort of like cardboard outlines of mountains, for instance, that show the bold characteristics rather than the tiny details. by focussing i am able to bring out the details better, however, after a bit. but the first impression is usually silhouette-like. solid geometry and spherical trigonometry did give me considerably more trouble than the plane branches of mathematics. however by the time i had finished calculus and a few more like that i seemed to have acquired the knack of it. the author's words frequently set my imagination off in its own and sometimes quite different channels. i don't believe i have stock pictures. it seems to me that every story should have its own distinctive characters and settings. however i have not written sufficiently to say for certain that i don't use them unconsciously. i think my imagination works differently when writing than when reading. in the first case i direct it myself and deliberately put it to work in most cases after the story actually begins to take form. but when reading it works purely subconsciously. =clyde b. hough=: the mere printed word does not and never can present the picture in the fulness of its maturity. the best that the printed word can hope to do is to suggest graphically, so graphically that the imagination of the dullest reader will experience no difficulty in rounding out the picture, in clothing it with all the splendor, emotion, etc., that the author has suggested. it is my belief that any author's success will be measured according to the extent that he succeeds in achieving this goal. when i read other men's stories, or to be accurate i should say when i study other men's stories, i see their characters. i am enthralled by their action which expresses their sensations. my subconscious mind is aware of the tastes, the flavors and the smells or anything else that goes to round out a given setting, but i do not physically experience these things. my imagination does not reproduce the sense of touch, nor does it cause me to feel pain. i account for this by the fact that all the rounding out of the story, as a reader supplying what the author suggests, is left to my subconscious mind, because my conscious mind is solely occupied with studying the story from the craftsman's standpoint. to put the whole matter in a nut shell, i do not read for entertainment, but solely to study the other fellow's craftsmanship in order that i myself may acquire more craft. yes, i can "see things with my eyes shut" and the limitations are, allowing for the ratio of imagination, in proportion to the number and variety, or the sum total of all the actual concrete things i have ever seen. these pictures and objects in my mind automatically take on the color that is appropriate to themselves. the details are not distinct unless i make a special effort in concentration. but by an effort of the will i can generally straighten out the kinks. i have not studied any form of higher mathematics. i do not think that i elaborate on other men's work in a creative sense, although many stories have started me thinking on certain lines which ultimately rewarded me with a plot germ. but in all such cases i have been extremely alert to avoid allowing any similarity between such a story and the other author's story which fathered the embryo thought. i do not believe that i have stock pictures for either pirates, preachers or church steeples. i make this statement because i am never surprised at meeting people differently garbed or at seeing things differently shaped from what i have been accustomed to see them. when i am reading, my imagination works, i believe, just about as much as the suspense, thrill, emotion, etc., recorded in what i'm reading requires--no more than that. but when i'm writing my imagination is brought under the pressure of my will and driven to its uttermost capacity--with the guiding hand of judgment at the reins always of course. some of the phases of the writing craft thus far touched upon i have considered and used consciously. some i have missed automatically. this laboratory test will be of inestimable worth to any author. =emerson hough=: i have no mental contortions. my mouth never waters. just see the pictures clear, as nearly as i can tell. geometry? you are getting too deep. all mathematics troubled me plenty. as to response, i don't savvy this. no, i don't think any writer has stock pictures who has resources of his own. i don't resent; sometimes i don't read. reading _vs._ writing? i'll say there is! tools? i never throw fits. i am a very plain, ordinary person. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: when reading a story my imagination is entirely and most vividly with the persons of the story. when one of them is about to become the victim of a misunderstanding i find myself simply longing that he will somehow escape it, and this never mind whether the story is good, bad or indifferent. limitations depend entirely on the extent to which my interest is aroused. no, far less trouble from solid geometry. response depends entirely on how much the thing described, well or ill, interests me. each its own picture. not a bit, unless i resent them as images. but suggestion, leaving me to do the rest, is what i most enjoy. i do not know. as tools? no. =inez haynes irwin=: i would say _yes_ to all these questions. i enjoy fiction intensely. all my life i have been the easy prey of fiction writers. allowing that sometimes the mind gets fatigued and ceases to register impressions (although i do not remember ever to have had this experience) i would say that i saw, heard, tasted, smelled and felt all the things the author wanted me to see, hear, taste, smell and feel. i do seem in imagination actually to feel physical pain when the author wishes me to do so. recently while suffering from an attack of grippe i had to stop reading a novel, dorothy speare's _dancers in the dark_, because the opening chapters described the fatigue of a group of girls who had danced all night. their fatigue added so much to my weakness that i could not go on with the story. i remember once reading an essay by john burroughs on _the apple_. when i had finished it, i had to go out and buy an apple to eat, although ordinarily i don't care for apples. i am particularly susceptible to color in writing; and i find that i enjoy particularly the work of those writers who have studied art or have been artists. du maurier's books were a great joy to me and if hergesheimer had nothing else to interest me, i think i should read him for the wonderful color arrangements in his descriptions. _java head_ is remarkable in this respect. robert chambers has some of this color quality too; so, of course, to an extraordinary degree, has conrad. the pictures i see in my imagination are always colored as the author directs me to color them. i do not think details are blurred in my imagined version of the author's picture--except when i have read too hurriedly or skipped. i have studied arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry and solid geometry. the higher the mathematics the better i liked it. i was exceptionally stupid in arithmetic but i enjoyed plane and solid geometry enormously. it appealed to my imagination. i am not quite sure that i understand what this question means. of course highly imaginative writers--especially if they have the great technical gift of connotative writing--can start your imagination with a broken phrase, can keep it working long after their words have stopped. it is as though they left echoes in one's mind. i think h. g. wells makes this magic in my mind more often than any other writer that i know. although i am half inclined to say that henry james--who can also involve me in a maze of obscurity--is his equal if not his superior in this respect. i am sure that each case produces its individual vision. i don't remember ever formulating this while reading; but of course i realize that an author may have a too explicit style. as to reading _vs._ writing. i think not, because it has never occurred to me that there could be any such difference. in writing description, i always do try to appeal to the five senses of my reader. perhaps this is so because in the writing courses which i took at radcliffe college the instructors impressed it on us to do that. =will irwin=: answering generally the complex questions under the head: in reading writers who are "my men," as stevenson, wells, anatole france, i find myself seeing the scenes in my imagination. the fight in _david balfour_, the meeting of "pontius pilate" and "laelius lamia" in _le procurateur de judée_, are to me as though i had witnessed them. i hear the sounds, but i can not say with truth that i taste the flavors or experience the smells. that doubtless is a matter of individual peculiarity. i have almost no sense of smell. on the other hand, i often see the colors most vividly. that again comes from individual peculiarity--i take the greatest delight in color. in a treatise on dreams which i have read recently the author says that dreams are like photographs; that they have no color, only one low tone and white. if that is so, i must be a freak. i am always dreaming in colors--as a few nights ago of seeing a procession in russet brown carrying rose-colored banners. sometimes my imagination, in reading, reproduces the sense of touch, and occasionally the sense of pain. when i "see things with my eyes shut," i think the image is usually blurred and lacking in detail except for one central figure. but i do usually see such pictures in colors. i perceive what you are driving at in your question about solid geometry. i run true to form. other mathematics did not interest me. i loathed arithmetic and algebra and i quit trigonometry from absolute boredom. but i was a sharp at geometry, both plane and solid. i think that the mere concept of an author whom i recognize as one of my men will often set me to imagining things beyond those which he has described. by the same token i am sometimes bored by over-detailed description. i can not say, however, that i have stock pictures for persons and things which come within the limits of my experience. i do, however, for categories of persons and things which i have not seen--as a cavalier, a zulu chief or a king on his throne. the visual faculty of my mind works in the same manner when i am reading a story as when i am writing one. in both cases i have a succession of color-pictures. certainly i use these things as tools of my trade--especially the picture faculty. one analytical passage in barrett wendell's treatise on shakespeare has been very useful to me. he shows that shakespeare's magic consists largely in creating a succession of haunting pictures in the mind. since i absorbed that principle i have analyzed other magic styles and found this their secret. i have tried to follow in my poor way. i also try to use the tactile style. as it is a thing generally beyond me, i avoid dragging in the sense of smell. i do use sounds a great deal, however. =charles tenney jackson=: as to reading a story my imagination goes more to an author's pictures than his plot. i am rather coldly critical about plots and most of them show their ragged spots to me, lapses, improbabilities and negligences. but i like to have the chap show me a setting that seems real. if it's the sea islands, i want their colorful warmth; the yukon, i want its snows and grim menace to the human actors. people are so much alike that a story does not move me because a writer attempts to show me their differences in different settings. my idea is that human nature reacts exactly the same everywhere. in other words, answering query iii if an author gives me a hurricane i want that vivid, smashing, either by description or suggestion, and i don't give a durn who lives through it to rescue the girl. i know to start with that she'll be pulled out. there are certain banal things in either reading or writing fiction that you can't get away from; so i slide past 'em to see how the minor keys can be played. =frederick j. jackson=: when i read a story i live it, that is, if the author has a sureness of touch with his characters and action that is convincing to me. some authors i can not read at all. i won't read them. it's a waste of time. they don't get over with me. what i consider a perfect story is one in which the author can make me suffer with his characters, laugh with them, play with them, make my eye look through the sights of an aimed rifle, let my finger be on the trigger. to the things i "see with my eyes shut" there are few limitations, the pictures are colored, real, the details are distinct. my response is not limited to the degree with which the author describes and makes vivid. a mere hint suffices to draw a really definite picture in my mind. if the author doesn't spoil my own picture with too damned many cloying details i'm better satisfied. i dislike wading through paragraph after paragraph of detailed description, unless an accurate picture is necessary in order to give a complete understanding of certain action or certain moves made by a character. i carry that dislike for detailed description into my own work. if i use more than one sentence of description i wince. i like to convey a picture, a real picture in as few words as possible. i like to put action into my description, into my picture of a setting. i never have stock pictures. a village church? immediately before my mind passes a parade of all the village churches i have ever seen, in villages or movie lots. my dislike for description applies to characters as well as scenery. a hint here and there, characterization--things that will make each reader furnish the details he likes best. i might have described them in detail--mere words to tell how they appear in my picture. really now, when you read about characters, doesn't your mind supply a picture of the physical man? a man to your liking, unhampered by clogging, useless words? didn't characterization do that? if you have a leaning toward dark heroes, you conceive him to be dark. if to your mind a guy with red hair is the real peruvian gooseberry as the main character, red headed he'll be in your mental picture. etc., etc. is there any difference in behavior of your imagination when you are reading stories and when writing them? i live with my characters both in reading and writing, but _oh!_ what a difference. in writing, i have to work out the problems; in reading, the problems have been worked out by the author. it's traveling with a sled, but one is going up-hill and the other down-grade. =mary johnston=: impossible to answer this fully. sometimes there is a high degree of reality, at other times less. depends upon the amount of energy that is functioning, energy and attention. yes, it is possible to see things with your eyes shut. i see them colored, in the round, and at times in motion. not always in minute detail. often only a general impression. no more trouble from solid geometry. as to response, if you have the concept, you can produce the appropriate phenomena. individual pictures usually. sometimes a composite or an idealization. prefer things to be suggested rather than minutely described. probably a difference as to reading and writing. they are tools of life--therefore of one's work also. =john joseph=: if it is a really _good_ story my imagination reacts to all the emotions and sensations mentioned except "physical pain." very few stories belong to this class, however. the author's "pictures" (in good stories) are reproduced in every detail, and distinctly. my mental pictures often go far beyond anything the author has actually described. i have no "stock" pictures; every "cowboy" and "village church" differs from all the others. there is little difference in "behavior of imagination" whether reading or writing. i think that all these points are valuable to the writer. =lloyd kohler=: in reading a story i am very apt to puzzle out in my own mind the outcome of the story long before the end is reached. often the author's ending of the story, however, is radically different from what my own imagination had planned. sometimes i can't overcome the idea that my own solution would have bettered the story; at other times i can easily see that the author's solution was vastly superior to my own. in writing a story, or planning a story to write, my imagination generally runs--well, we'll say "wild." for instance: i may carefully plan a certain climax--and then find when the story is finally written that the first climax has been substituted for a more fitting one which flew into my mind during the last stages of the writing. i don't want to commit myself on this question--i can't even agree with myself regarding the different angles of it. but i will say that when reading a story generally i do see in my imagination the characters, action and setting, though perhaps not so clearly as if looking at the actual scene. the vividness of the picture, of course, depends upon the clearness and vividness of the author. it depends also on just how familiar i am with the picture presented by the author. the pictures described by an author which "i see with my eyes shut" are more in black and white. the details are very apt to be indistinct. plane geometry was exceedingly easy for me, but with another restless spirit i put to sea, consequently i can't say how i would have fared with the solid variety. my response is not necessarily limited to the exact degree to which the author describes. it depends on how familiar i am with that which the author attempts to make vivid. the very thought of some things would set me to producing as vividly, perhaps, even more vividly, than the author himself. on the other hand, if the description were unfamiliar the response would likely be limited. i don't believe that i have stock pictures for anything. if i have, some bit of description is bound to stick to me that will allow the thing to be individualized. two cowboys are no more apt to be alike than two business men. =harold lamb=: yes, the imagination reproduces the story-world completely. although not so fully with sounds as with sight, touch, smell. perhaps the fact that i am nearly half deaf may have something to do with this. about sensations it is hard to find the right word. of course reading of a slashed finger does not give a resultant pain in any finger. it may give, however, a vivid mental image of pain in _some finger_. this is apt to be more annoying and enduring than a thumb actually cut by a knife. the strength of the imagery is, logically, in proportion to the skill of the writer in creating his story-world. reading knut hamsun's _hunger_ caused a more active mind distress than _les miserables_. _les miserables_ was worse (that is, stronger) than _quo vadis_. by this last i do not mean to raise the standard of scandinavia over poland. knut hamsun's tale was fashioned to reproduce the imagery of hunger completely, and it was marvelously done. as compared with the actual sensation it was more painful. i mean retrospectfully painful. at certain times i have been rather hungry. but a full meal always banished the distress. no after-impress of pain remained. but, walking the streets of copenhagen in the person of knut hamsun's young man, i never had any satisfaction from gorging after starving. he--i--always threw up. so with other sensations. but the most vivid sensations received from the printed word are those that have been experienced in life. such as pain from frostbite, suffocation under water, drowsiness. as to limitations of imagination, i do not know of any. images are distinct. colored as in the story. when color is lacking, i seem to supply it. brown, green, gray are always present. (an artist explains that these are the neutral tints.) white, blue and red come into place as described, but less often volunteer. black, yellow and purple almost never volunteer and when the printed word summons are sketched hastily. poor in all mathematics, least deficient in plane and solid geometry. seem to reproduce more in imagination than the author sets forth and have always thought that most readers did likewise. i find that continually i am snubbed back by a fresh word as to setting in the course of a story. no stock pictures. as to reading _vs._ writing, the cart before the horse, and behind. tools of trade? i have not puzzled about the psychology of a reader. =sinclair lewis=: my imagination reproduces thus occasionally. in colors, details distinct. less trouble with solid geometry. a mere concept will set me to reproducing just as vividly. no stock pictures. do not resent abundant images. imagination is more active in writing than in reading. =hapsburg liebe=: if a story really interests me, i feel everything, see everything, clearly. reading of a man on a desert makes me thirsty. writing of the same thing makes me thirsty. i cuss, cry and fight with the hero. i did not study geometry. never could study anything much. if i read "he found himself in a dense woodland," my imagination makes the rest; i see pines, oaks, etc., as well as the woods. i think most other readers are like this; that's why they don't like detail. unless i'm careful, i have stock pictures for such things as logging-camps, etc. often i catch myself and make myself see it differently, make the creek run the other way, and so on--and it's harder than you'd think. the last camp i worked in (there was a sawmill in connection) is always coming back to me, and i've had a devil of a time putting a thicket of laurel where the mill stood. this sounds crazy, but i'm trying to answer your questions. there is little, if any, difference in my behavior when reading stories and writing them. i get "all het up" in either case, if there's any reason for it. "tools of the trade?" i forget everything like that when at work, i regret to say, though sometimes i take pains to see how some real author has got his effects. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: i actually imagine--envisage--everything that goes on. if the writer has told it at all clearly i see and hear everything. i smell or taste nothing--my imagination does not go so far. i feel no pain nor sense of touch except in very familiar things like bitter cold, tropical heat, ropes, gun-shot in the leg and the like. the scenes i see are all in "black and white" much like the illustrations in magazines, or rather more like a memory of an actual happening. i see bright sunlights and deep shades, but seldom see colors even though the heroine wears a yellow waist. the main details are distinct, the rest merely passing impressions. sometimes an especially vivid story brings out a lasting remembrance and i have it as almost an actual happening. solid geometry gave me no more trouble than any of my mathematics, but, at that, it is a terrible arraignment to numbers. my response is generally limited to just about what the author describes. naturally i do not know what is coming and so do not give much room to imaginings. the only thing that peeves me is to go through a lot of fine description only to find that it had nothing whatever to do with the progress of the story; was just slung there by the author for the sake of more words, words, words! but description in line with the action, or used to bring out the story more clearly, is a delight. i have stock pictures only for that with which i am not familiar, like the interior of a submarine. all sub-sea stories to me might well be written around the same old boat, as that is the boat i see. but cowboys, cattle, people, village churches or vaudeville theaters all are individual. sometimes even i find a writer who seems to know his subject well enough to give me a description exactly fitting some place i know. then i read him with great interest. in my own writing i have an individual in mind whether i write a description or not. i never write of things i must needs use a "stock" illustration for--only of course as for brief mention. if my hero had once been caught undersea in a submarine i might mention that incident, but to write a story about it--never. which brings me to my own imagination when writing. indeed there is a great difference! when i write i see everything. i see all my characters in their widely separated haunts, and right in the "center" so to speak is a bright spot like a spot-light and seemingly my characters come out of the semi-darkness and enter that light for the moment of their action. it is somewhat like rehearsing a play, only far more vivid to me, for the scene is constantly changing; instead of the scene changing under the spotlight, the light moves over the story-stage and spots first one location and then another. i have difficulty sometimes deciding which characters to put on or to deal with next and sometimes withdraw one who has done much and fire him completely. then, too, when i hit certain scenes i have so many thoughts and things crowd so swiftly i whack away, hitting any old letter and spacing weirdly for the sake of speed. in some scenes i weep. if i try to stifle my emotion my thoughts falter. often in the reading i wonder what there was to sniffle over when i wrote, but sometimes the best part of the story is right there. often i soberly type off something that makes me laugh, real sudden humor, when i come to read it. often it is something i didn't realize was funny when i put it down. usually, like the sob-stuff, it requires considerable revision to make it presentable. i am glad i can feel the emotions so strongly and hope it will stay with me. i consider it a valuable "tool" and try not to abuse it. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: writing stories keeps my imagination alert. reading stories, the keeping of my imagination alert depends on the stimuli--the art of the author. in one case the imagination is in harness; in the other it is loose in a pasture, and may be asleep. a story has to be pretty vivid to react on my physical senses. zola's novels, for example. i rarely visualize, see with my eyes shut, except by conscious effort or intention. then i can, easily. solid and spherical geometry gave me less trouble than algebra. i had to think _hard_ to work out some of the original problems, though, but it was a satisfying experience. the mere concept is sufficient for a vivid impression, but provided it impinges on something in my emotional make-up that is already susceptible or sensitive. for instance, the thought of a keen knife drawn across the palm of the hand--you don't have to go any farther; you don't have to describe it. but something else you might, and even then it might leave me cold. i think the personal equation figures in here tremendously. no, i don't think i have stock pictures, not as a rule, unless some particular thing in my experience has made a deep impression. if you say cathedral, i'm likely to see the one at cologne, while i wouldn't think of notre dame at all. the latter is _sui generis_--not a cathedral. it's notre dame. say notre dame and i get it. =rose macaulay=: depends entirely on how well and forcibly the story is written. most stories convey no impression of any kind to me. my imagination pictures are just like what i see with my eyes open, i think. no solid geometry. my response limited by the author. having stock pictures depends on the description. resentment as to images depends on whether described well or tediously. a great deal of difference when reading and writing. as to tools, don't quite follow this question. =crittenden marriott=: i taste through imagination to some extent. as to pain presented in fiction, i "choke up" on some stories--mrs. abbott's for instance. can see images with eyes either open or shut. details blurred. solid geometry easier. response limited by the author. i don't describe much, except when i am trying to please the women with meteorologic disquisitions; then i sling words. as to tools, no. =homer i. mceldowney=: it depends more or less upon the ability of the author, i should say. i have a pretty fair imagination and if the writer gives me half a chance, i believe that i see just about what he saw--or sets down in print. that, i think, applies quite as truly to taste, sound and smell, as to sight. i've read yarns that gave me an odd tightening through the chest and which, if they didn't actually "raise my hair on end," did produce a fine stand of "goose flesh" at the back of my neck. i've caught myself with the palms of my hands moist and cold. if these are sound indications of inner turmoil, then i'm getting all the kick there is in a yarn--with no transformer reducing the voltage. nope, solid geometry didn't give me any more trouble than other mathematics--and a damned sight less than a five-hour course in algebra that i just plugged through with a weak-kneed d! i don't believe in stock pictures. i haven't them, and hope i'm never turning out stuff at such a rate that i actually have to employ them. i get a lot of fun out of my characters and scenes. to me they have individuality. i have never tried it, but i suspect that my use of a stock picture or character would result in a lightly veneered but wooden yarn. i believe that for the most part i really get into the stories i write rather more deeply than into those i read,--with some exceptions, perhaps. =ray mcgillivray=: to some degree imagination supplies an adumbrance of all the sensations you mention. with me auditory imagery is strongest. anything appealing through any sense to my notion of the dramatic, curious or interesting i remember in fairly accurate (often exaggerated, i'll admit) detail. solid geometry was my shark subject in mathematics. calculus was where i resigned. my greatest handicap to pleasure in reading fiction lies in the fact that unless characters are ( ) left automatons, or ( ) portrayed vividly like hamsun's "isak," hardy's "tess," or stribling's "birdsong,"--my concepts and the author's get to quarreling from the drop of the hat. stating it briefly, my favorite authors are hamsun, turgenieff, dickens and nick carter. in dime novels i write my own story as i read. stock types of characters hang on a writer only when he is trying to vivify a setting or situation with which he is not thoroughly familiar--or when he never has taken the pains to look closely at people in the endeavor to form constructive estimates of them. of course weariness of body and mind, too--but _then_ the chap behind the pencil or chatterbox no. is not a writer but merely a dumb will-to-work. the only difference in the way imagination works when reading and writing--so far as i know--lies in the fact that in reading every ascending step in the flight of story development opens a whole new gamut of conjecture, questioning and hope; in writing the imagination has to cross and recross, mount and descend the same space too often for any such tremendous scope. i verily believe a wide-awake writer of adventure fiction actually reads three novels every time he completes the perusal of seventy thousand words of an interesting story written by some one else. vice versa, he crosses his own steps three times or more--three hundred might be a better figure--on his own _pièce de resistance_. =helen topping miller=: reading is to me a sort of orgy of the imagination. i see, feel, hear, smell and experience every sensation written into the story--more keenly, i think sometimes, than the author who writes it. naturally, i supply my own pictures for the setting--if a writer describes a country road i see--not his road, but the roads i knew as a child back in rural michigan. i do not know whether i "see things with my eyes shut" or not. i know that when any idea is presented my imagination gives one leap and is gone. i live, walk, see, feel and hear the scene, experience the emotions of the characters, sense everything distinctly. there is no blurring, rather the impression is painfully keen. mathematics were an abomination to me. i scrambled through them as easily as possible and forgot them with cheerful alacrity. i certainly consider my ability to experience every sensation imaginatively as my most important tool. it seems to me the most valuable and essential factor in trying to write fiction--the thing the canny irishman called the "ability to get inside other people's skins." =thomas samson miller=: imagination and visualization: i _feel_ location--the very hue of the sky, feel of the air, the scents and sounds of nature. i am less vivid on human actions and sayings. i am not so closely in sympathy with human beings as with nature. it is my greatest drawback in fiction writing. i do not carry mental "stock pictures"; that would be reducing novelizing to bookkeeping. certain authors do it, just as the same keep to one successful form of story and repeat, even in time-worn phraseology, so that one finds "of a sudden" five to ten times in a single short story. behavior of imagination in _reading_ and _writing_ stories: the stories i read are so utterly beyond my art that there is no comparison. in _writing_ the imagination is intense; one _lives_ in the story, which one can not do in another story, any more than a violinist can reach the depths and heights of feeling of the composers whose composition he plays. no reader gets out of a story a tenth part of the feeling and visualization the author puts into it, or, perhaps, thought he put into it. =anne shannon monroe=: if the story i am reading "gets" me at all, i swing full into it, become absorbed and follow breathlessly through; if it doesn't "get" me, i don't go on.... i see the characters, the place--it is all as if it had been an actual experience. sounds, tastes, odors,--it's all real in my mind, _if_ the writer has made it real on paper.... i think the atmosphere of the story gets into my sense more keenly than anything else,--the feeling of it--beauty of scene if beauty is created on the page--as in hudson's writing. pictures i see in imagination are as they are pictured by the creator of them: the intense glare of a desert under sun--it's blinding just to think about: the deep rich purple-green of heavy old forests--it's almost suffocating: some writers make me feel these things just as if i had seen them. all mathematics were impossible to me, solid geometry no more so than that whole idiocy, from the multiplication table up. if the presentation is true, the mere concept starts my mind off on jaunts of its own. i do _not_ have stock pictures; each character, scene, place is new, fresh--a creation. i _do_ resent too many images. i could not wade through all of _main street_: while _lulu bett_ was a delight. difference in behavior of imagination when reading or writing stories? well, in one way, no: if my imagination is not fired, i do not read and neither do i write. often when i start to read a story it suggests one of my own, and i am off on my own adventure, instead of following the one the author has put before me. but if he has put it so as to catch my interest, i follow him with the same enthusiasm with which i write. =l. m. montgomery=: yes, when i read a story i _see_ everything, exactly as if i were looking at an actual scene. i _hear_ the sounds and _smell_ the odors. when i read _pickwick papers_ i have to make many an extra sneak to the pantry, so hungry do i become through reading of the bacon and eggs and milk punch in which the characters so frequently revel. i never feel _physical_ pain when i read a story, no matter how intense the suffering described may be. but i feel _mental_ pain so keenly that sometimes i can hardly bear to continue reading. yet i do not dislike this sensation. on the contrary i like it. if i can have a jolly good howl several times in a book i am its friend for life. yet, in every-day existence, i am the reverse of a tearful or sentimental person. no book do i love as i love _david copperfield_. yet during my many re-readings i must have wept literal quarts over david's boyish tribulations. and ghost stories that make me grow actually cold with fear are such as my soul loveth. i can "see things," with eyes shut or open, colors and all. sometimes i see them mentally--that is, i realize that they are produced subjectively and are under the control of my will. but very often, when imagination has been specially stimulated, i seem really to see them objectively. in this case, however, i never see landscapes or anything but _faces_--and generally grotesque or comical faces. i never see a beautiful face. they crowd on my sight in a mob, flashing up for a second, then instantly filled by others. i always enjoy this "seeing things" immensely, but i can not do it at will. the very name of geometry was a nightmare to me. i decline to discuss the horrible subject at all. yet i loved algebra and had a mild affection for arithmetic. these things are predestinated. i have no "stock pictures" as a reader. i generally see things pretty much as the writer describes them--though certainly not as the "movie" people seem to see them! this is especially true of places and things. but very few writers have the power to make me visualize their characters, even where they describe them minutely. illustrations generally make matters worse. i detest illustrations in a story. it is only when there is some peculiarly striking and restrained bit of description attached to a character that i can _see_ it. for example: when r. l. stevenson in _dr. jekyll_ says that there was something incredibly evil about "hyde"--i am not quoting his exact words--i can see "hyde" as clearly as i ever saw anything in my life. as a rule, i think the ability to describe characters so that readers may see them as clearly as they see their settings is a very rare gift among writers. yes, as a reader i _do_ resent having too many images formed for me. i don't want too much description of anything or too many details in any description. when i _read_ a story, i _see_ people doing things in a certain setting; when i _write_ a story i _am_ the people myself and _live_ their experiences. =frederick moore=: my imagination reproduces the story-world of the author to the extent that the author has given me pictures or has suggested them to me. i actually--mentally--see and hear all given to me in the story. i can not say i smell or taste, except the reference is to something already in my memory. for instance, if an author refers to the smell of a whaling-ship, or a bilge-water forecastle, i smell it in memory--that is, i know it. but i doubt if i could create the smell that might be referred to in filling a helium-gas balloon, because that is beyond my ken. if it should smell like, say, rotten oranges, i might get a reaction that would be fairly accurate. i can not say that i feel pain presented in a story in any degree. the strength of the suggestion on my imagination depends largely on the skill of the writer in transmitting his idea to me. of course, i suffer more mental pain in seeing a cat injured than i do in reading of how several men were killed. in the latter case shock is missing, yet i have seen more men killed than i have cats hurt. there is a difference in the behavior of imagination when reading and when writing--while reading, my imagination is being spoon-fed; in writing, it is on "high," climbing a hill and watching the road carefully. and there is a difference in concentration, for in writing i am emptying my subconscious reservoir, while in reading i am refilling it. after finishing a story, i find that a lapse of time is necessary to allow the subconscious (or what i presume to be the subconscious) to refill. i couldn't write stories on an eight-hour basis--if i wanted to. i really see things with my eyes shut, in the colors which i may desire to give them. details are distinct if i care to turn the "spot-light" on them, so to speak--in other words, to the point on which i want to concentrate for description. the detail i am working on is distinct, but if i want to hold the image long enough for extended use i do not attempt to hold it steadily. i find that impossible. but i can make the image repeat itself without limit. i doubt if anybody can hold an image, even of something that has just been looked at, longer than a very small fraction of a second. and by this i don't mean a succession of "flashes" but a fixed image. solid geometry gave me less trouble than other mathematics, because i could visualize it better. however, i have been able to copy from mental images of a problem i have seen written out, or printed on a page, a problem required in an examination. that is, i have found it easier to recall that problem as i saw it in figures, and copy it, than i have to attack the problem and work it to the required answer. i presume everybody else can do the same. in examinations in artillery i have been able to recall images of cross-sections so readily as to be able to reproduce them in rough sketches or to give the required description. but if the question related to something that i had _heard_ in a lecture, i might well miss the question entirely. i show very poor results in written examinations relating to book matter--unless the questions relate to pages with such type arrangement or sub-heads that i can recall the entire page mentally and pick out of the image what i want. i may know a thing very well practically, and not be able to pass as high in it, as something i have acquired wholly from a book. i believe text-books on all subjects should be more visual. the response of my imagination in some cases is dependent on the skill at description of the writer, especially in things or scenes with which i am not familiar. but a mere concept will set me reproducing if the matter deals with something with which i am familiar. by this i do not mean to say that my imagination will not work except with things with which i am familiar--i am referring to degree of response. no, i do not have stock pictures for anything. i may think first of some picture in memory, and from that basis create the character, the place and the events. however, imagination probably requires something in the nature of a "feeder." what the imagination of a person blind from birth does would be most interesting. if a person had been blind up to, say, twenty and then recovered sight, it should be interesting to know what kind of mental picture he had had of, for instance, a full-rigged ship. i have considered all these matters as tools of my trade. without them, i doubt if it is possible to have the trade. =talbot mundy=: if i pick up a book, say, on india, and provided the book is sufficiently well written not to "get my goat," i am in india instantly. i see, smell, hear and taste india. sometimes i almost touch it. the same with any other country or place. india merely serves as an illustration. i have to be brought back to my surroundings with a wrench. sound is perhaps the least real of the sensations. i get the effect of the sound without the sound itself. the louder the sound, the less real, i rather think. for instance, if a gun goes off i don't jump out of my skin, and i don't think i hear the report--or, if so, i rather see than hear it. colors are absolutely real, although rather more beautiful than in actual experience. this is a very difficult question to answer, however. the world of imagination and ideas seems to me to be a separate world in which we experience all the sensations above referred to, but experience them differently. the sting--the element of personal suffering--to use the christian formula, the cross--seems to be missing in this world of imagination; so that, although the cross and its consequences--a strong smell and its discomfort, pain and its distress--may all be present in the story, they are seen objectively and have practically no physical reaction except that of conscious pleasure. on the other hand, ideas, emotions, contrasts between right and wrong do have a pronounced physical effect. i frequently sweat or grow angry or get prodigiously excited while reading--but always because of an idea that is concretely presented. perhaps i can put it best this way: suppose that we torture the heroine. the most blood-curdling description of her agonies would probably excite my curiosity and might perhaps tickle a sadistic vein, but would certainly not cause me physical distress nor even mental disturbance. but the question whether she shall be tortured or not--the right and the wrong of it--the low-down arguments used on the one side, the high standards raised on the other, would arouse me almost to frenzy, and the blood would go coursing through my veins twice as fast as usual. i don't have to shut my eyes to "see things." i see them more easily with eyes wide open. possibly because i am short-sighted, the imaginary things that i see in that way are often more "real" than the real world. the pictures are invariably colored. never black and white. my response is not limited by any means to the degree in which the author describes and makes vivid. as often as not, too much description has the reverse effect. i never studied solid geometry. i think that in most instances vision is individual and new; but i rather suspect that things i have seen at different times and in different places form the store from which i draw apparently fresh illustrations as required. this, however, is another very hard question to answer correctly and really could not be answered without keeping tabs on one's self for a month or two. reading is better fun than writing. therefore, when reading, the imagination is less rebellious and does its work more swiftly and easily. otherwise i think there is little if any difference. =kathleen norris=: i can't say that i ever get an actual sense emotion from what i write, that is, in taste or smell, but i have felt my mood very definitely affected by the experiences my characters are experiencing, and i frequently confuse them with real persons for an hour or two, and will find myself saying at lunch, (say) "oh, a woman told me this morning ..." forgetting that the woman is of my own creating. one would see things in this way pretty much as one would remember a meeting with somebody close and vital, or anticipating such a meeting. it would be natural to imagine the room, the sunshine, the gowns, etc., etc. i never even finished grammar school. no, it seems to me the only books worth while (that is, in the sense of popular fiction, etc.,) are the books that stimulate fresh imaginings of one's own. i hate to read a book that does _not_ produce an individual vision and so add to one's stock, as it were. the chief delight of reading seems to me exploratory. on the contrary, a writer who can form images is a great writer. but having images distorted or ill-formed is merely tiresome, and annoys one with a sense of wasting time. yes, all the difference between eating a meal and cooking it. (incidentally i would always prefer the cooking.) my brother-in-law, frank norris, once said that when he really wished carefully to depict a scene, he appealed to each of the five senses in turn; and to a greater or lesser degree i don't think any picture can be painted without one or more of these "tools." =anne o'hagan=: it seems to me that the only possible answer to this question is: "it depends upon the genius of the author." there are villages in england i could find my way about in, there are drawing-rooms in which i perfectly see the furnishings, because of jane austen and thackeray. i have grown hungry reading dickens' meals. i suffered utter fatigue, misery and coldness crawling back to the farm with "hetty" in _adam bede_; and i think i had something the same actual feeling of physical exhaustion in reading the italian home scenes in _the lost girl_. but for the most part the impressions are impressions only, not experiences. pictures are colored when i actually have them, and details distinct. all mathematics gave me trouble, but i think that the climax of despair was reached in calculus instead of solid geometry. response follows vivid suggestion as well as detailed description--when there is response. i suppose that if the author of the village church or the cowboy did not cause me to see a definite creation, i have a property-room church or cowboy which my imagination would fit into the story. but i think with a little help i am able to construct a new one for the story in question. probably yes. that is, i should be bored by not being allowed to use my own imagination a little. yes. only the masters of literature can absorb my mind with their characters, create a world which takes the place of the actual one for the time being; but when i am writing (with most pleasure and most of the feeling of creation, i mean--most successfully) i can be absorbed in my characters and can live in their world without for a moment believing that i am a master of literature. i mean by this that i know from my own experience how much _real_ creation is involved in the production of that which is not great or fiction. no. =grant overton=: i often see the people, the action and above all the setting. i do not know that i hear the sounds or taste the flavors or smell the smells or feel any impacts. i do feel what the people of the story feel, at least in the more emotional moments. i have suffered exquisite pangs along with my characters, have been thrilled with them, have despaired with them. to me fiction is merely a form of communicating feeling. i do not see things with my eyes shut but with them open. i seldom notice details. what i see i can not describe, except as an effect. that is why i can not write descriptions full of physical detail. plane geometry is the only mathematical subject that gave me trouble. i don't think i ever studied solid geometry, but i undoubtedly passed an examination in it. my response is wholly determined by the emotional content of the narrative and the emotional activity of the characters though conditioned by the skill of the author in verbal presentation. i should probably image the village church from one i had seen. i should have no picture of the cowboy unless emotionally i found myself akin to him. i do not mind how many images are formed for me but i resent nothing but images. i want, above all, to feel something. yes, my imagination when writing and when reading is totally different, but i do not know whether i can say how. in writing my imagination labors often painfully. in reading--but i suppose it is the difference between listening to music and playing some instrument yourself. i can not answer as to tools. the five senses mean little to me when it comes to writing or reading. i should say that the appeal was to my intellectual senses if there is such a thing. =sir gilbert parker=: everything is seen clearly. better at geometry than anything else. each case has its own vision. do not resent multiplicity of images. it is the duty of the author to command my vision. =hugh pendexter=: i get all the drama very clearly or else i quit. i must have the geography of the story in mind and often post myself on the locale with use of a map. i respond thoroughly to the comedy or tragedy of a story and read myself into it. i react more quickly to pathos than to the infliction of physical pain. torture of a victim does not torture me. a child saving pennies to buy a garish, impossible tie for his old grandfather probably would bring tears. if a road or river is pictured, i must see it as though walking over or along it. i do not believe my imagination goes much beyond what the writer supplies, as then it becomes my story and not his and i can finish it without bothering to finish the book. i really see things with my eyes _open_. the details are as distinct as any my physical vision can reveal. they are not outlines, nor black and white studies, but as they actually would exist as to form and color. i see most clearly those scenes i write about. mathematics never intrigued me. my recollection of solid geometry is that it was to me the delirium tremens of plane geometry. my two sons find mathematics absorbing. i abhor mathematics. as to degree of my response, that is explained above. much difference. when writing a story my imagination supplies a wealth of detail that does not appear in the yarn. if i have to supply overmuch for the other fellow's yarn, i quit, as noted above. the next query is rather blind to me. my best "tool of trade" is my immediate vision of what i wish to put into type. =clay perry=: i visualize very much; in reading a story as well as in writing it. a story in which i am unable to visualize clearly annoys me. i want to go around the corners and see what the author sees. i suspect that an author who does not furnish the locale, color and plan which will enable me to see his story is careless. this goes for the characters, double. they should be seen clearly, i believe. sounds, i "hear," also, in the inner ear and taste the flavors with the tongue of imagination and sometimes my mouth waters to a pleasant flavor well pictured. to smells, being supersensitive anyway, the reaction is strong. to touch the reaction is not so strong, except in rare instances, mostly unpleasant suggestions, pain. i feel the pain if in sympathy with the character who suffers it, more than otherwise. "seeing things with my eyes shut" amounts to re-creation, through the stimuli of description, of a more or less familiar scene; or at least with a familiar scene the nucleus of the image built upon the stimuli. details are distinct if description is vivid and, again, if the stimuli call up something which i have actually seen or experienced in the past that is akin to the scene or incident described. solid geometry gave me less trouble than any other mathematics and lord knows the others gave me trouble! i believe the concept stimulates me to imaging "what lies over the hill" in many cases, the "behind the scenes," perhaps because of a habit in my own writing of trying to set a stage "solid," not with mere "drops." stock pictures for stock "sets"? for a village church--a composite picture of the several dozen i had to attend when a boy, none of them the same exactly. for a cowboy, different stock pictures in different context. i think this depends largely on the manner and setting in which the object of character is _first_ introduced. yes, there is a difference in the behavior of my imagination when i am reading stories and when writing them. in reading, one has only to accept the author's concept; in writing, one has to consider and reject several and decide upon one. (there is, however, in reading, the tendency to look behind the scenes, which is perhaps a fainter manifestation of the selective impulse or artistic judgment habitual in the creation of a picture myself.) i have thought of my reading constantly in connection with my writing. if a book or story is good, i get a stimulation from it, perhaps an inspiration, which, mingled with the profusion of other impulses and ideas, emerges, some time, as a part, or a tendency, in my own work. more often, however, i am astonished, when well started on a story of my own or when completing it, to run across another with a curious similarity of thought or philosophy--or perhaps, a contradictory philosophy in similar setting. =michael j. phillips=: i try hard to visualize in important scenes. if i get stuck in a description i stop and visualize--hard. i don't see all the characters, but only the principal ones. i don't imagine the sounds unless i want to conjure up the effect of a sudden, alarming sound, like a shot, on the man or woman who hears it. i do not taste the flavor of a story. i do not get rough or smooth contact nor physical pain. rarely a story moves me to laughing aloud, and equally rarely, say twice a year in each case, does a story bring tears. my response to a good story--and it must be good--is the prickle down your back when he really puts it over. this may be at the finish or when one of the characters does an admirable or a clever thing in a way wholly admirable and noteworthy, and what is done is described by a master. too much sophistication to get the kick that once i did, i suppose. a duel of words between two men in a love story over the girl, a battle of wits in which breeding and good sportsmanship are displayed, will produce the prickle down my spinal column quicker than exciting physical action. i can not see the scenes with my eyes shut readily. it is only by effort, and they are in black and white. i can not visualize the faces of all my friends and relatives. the degree of nearness and dearness does not enter into visualization at all. some strangers impress themselves on my mental retina, and i can not recall by shutting my eyes how some relative, perhaps in the next room, looks. i have a lot of fun visualizing a horse race with the jockeys wearing different colored jackets. this i use in the rare attempts i make to get to sleep when i do not fall instantly asleep on going to bed. i can't make it stick much. the colors get all mixed up. i have to keep telling myself which color my favorite wears. i went to high school only a month or two in the second year, then quit to paint little white coffins in a casket factory, so you see solid geometry is a sealed book to me. algebra was bone labor to me, but i was quite proud of myself when i solved a problem, and in some degree it was an attraction on that account. i think i prefer the author not to clutter the picture with too many words. i don't want too much detail painted in, but i do want him to make his primary and essential characters and objects plain and clear. if it's a man and a horse, i don't want any impressionistic or cubist daubs that leave me in doubt whether it's a monkey and a rhinoceros. if he'll just show me plainly it's a man and a horse, i'll dress them up to suit myself. he makes me tired when he goes meticulously into detail, unless he's an artist--and they are damn few. each case produces its individual vision, i think. to me, the reading of stories and the writing of them are not related at all. in reading, the imagination wanders where it wills; in writing, it is an imagination harnessed and doing its work. they are tools of the trade and i use them steadily, though perhaps not so much as i should. =walter b. pitkin=: i see colors and details pretty well with my eyes shut. since i turned forty this function has noticeably weakened. when in my twenties and early thirties i could look at a piece of white paper and see, in faint, swimmy colors projected on it, the things i was imagining. my capacity to visualize has been unusually intense, as psychological tests have repeatedly shown. at the end of a day's work i can see the minutest details of the objects i have dealt with; the grain in the wood of my desk, the shadows on my office floor, the colors and forms in the street. i can see these at night just before going to sleep; and i used to get myself to sleep by watching the parade of visions! all mathematics was extremely difficult for me in school, but chiefly because i had poor teachers. geometry still is almost a black art to me, although higher mathematics is fairly easy. my response to what i read is uncomfortably excessive. in handling the manuscripts of other writers i am constantly seeing more in the scenes than the writers themselves saw; and they have often told me this. i have no stock visions of types. but i do tend to reproduce a series of real persons or objects from my experience, when i read about a similar one. i do not resent the presence of many images and pictures in a story. my imagination behaves very differently when reading from its manner when writing. but i confess that i can not adequately describe the difference. so much can be said of it. when i read i "follow the leader" and do not run off into my own channels; but when i am writing my fancy runs wild and i think of the most preposterous and remote things which--as later analysis often shows--have indirect and obscure connections with the idea i am working over. when reading i am passive, more or less; when writing, i am active. there is a curious difference, over and above this, in the nature of my emotional responses; and this rather stumps me to set down on paper. it seems as if i give deeper and surer emotional reactions to the content of what i read than i do to what i am fancying when in the midst of writing. i find that calculating and constructing makes me deliberate and a degree cool toward the subject-matter. this is the result of deliberate intellectualizing, of course. i have always considered the functions of imagination as the basic "tools of the trade." =e. s. pladwell=: this question is too broad. it is all according to the author. some can make me see, feel, taste, smell. others merely glue my attention to the action. others bore me. under some authors i will say that i see the people and action, subconsciously, not as in real life. my response is with one kind of author limited to the exact degree that he describes things, while with others i am able to wander all over. a concrete example: kipling in a few lines can intimate things which will make me lay down the book and think. o. henry, on the other hand, keeps one so busy keeping up with his sparkling action that there is no time for another thought. kipling's mere concept, or hint, can produce unlimited mental pictures; but o. henry has to draw them line for line. i believe that the concept or hint is best. i never studied solid geometry, being fired from college just in time to avoid it. all mathematics bore me; and yet i can draw a ship or a city in perfect proportion and perspective. i suppose it's instinct or something. have no stock pictures for church or cowboy. each individual case is interesting in itself. imagination to me is clearer when reading than writing. when reading i can sit back and let things flow by in easy sequence. when writing i must labor, taking various imaginings as a bricklayer picks up bricks, and then selecting those which are useful and rejecting those which are not. when i get a new idea my imagination is vivid; but in writing it i fade the picture, for my mind is occupied with means for putting the picture over, rather than the picture itself. the picture is still there; but it is subordinated. =lucia mead priest=: if a writer is master of his craft he can do what he will with my imagination. my senses are alert, particularly those of sight, taste, smell. oh, yes, my mouth waters. dickens used to make me hungry till i sampled his edibles. "'am and weal pie" is a sordid delusion, a menu snare. this is guess-work, but i should say i do respond to the various stimuli to the senses. not in the same measure to all. when i read the death of "nancy sikes" i see her in the ghastly light of a london morning, see the grimy curtain with "bill," and the horror under it, but i feel no quiver of flesh when he beats down the upturned face. i respond to mental hurts not to physical--not _as_ physical. when impressed i find i carry a mental pain--even for years. it depends entirely on the author's designs on me. if he paints his sunset clearly, i see it in color. i think i must see details, for descriptions, bits of books, here and there, stand out from the main story often. i fancy the color of them is ephemeral. i have no remembrance of any thing in mathematics from the multiplication table to trigonometry that didn't spell _trouble_ for me with a monster t. my response to an author who interests me is evidently helpful. i have found, often, that in rereading something i have liked i have built on many additions, colored it with my imagining. sorry, but i'm afraid my "stock room" is bare. maybe i would find owen wister's or a stage cowboy in it, never having seen a live one. my pictures come from original locations--geography i have covered myself. no great difference in the working of the imagination between writing and reading. if so, one of degree. by the looks of my hair, when "genius" (?) has burned, i should judge i may get greater emotional depths when creating. =eugene manlove rhodes=: visual imagination, yes. hearing, no. taste, smell, touch, pain, thirty to fifty per cent. colors: distinct. no solid geometry. concept is as good as three volumes--better; want to roll my own. no stock pictures. reading _vs._ writing, no difference. as to tools, yes. =frank c. robertson=: my imagination reproduces the story-world of an author, though with limitations. that is, i see a story-world when reading but i frequently realize later that it is not just the same as the author's. this, of course, is not the fault of the author, but comes from my own peculiar reactions. for instance: the author says "the lion roared." i don't hear the roar, i see a lion open his mouth in the motions of roaring. he says: "the gurgling brook." i don't hear it gurgle--i see it cascading over stones and know that it is gurgling. but if he forces me to it like "out in the darkness there sounded a strange, droning noise," i actually hear a strange, droning noise. in lesser measure this holds true with all the senses. the author speaks of his starving hero eating luscious fried bananas. i can see those bananas and my mouth waters, but to save my life i can not taste them. my sense of sight predominates. but where acute physical pain or mental agony is described i think i actually feel. at every blow of the lash my flesh shrinks and my nerves recoil. and i am as easily moved to tears as the veriest schoolgirl--which is why i write he-man stuff. cold, callous and indifferent. the mental pictures that i see are usually clear-cut and the coloring very much as i see the same objects in real life. my response is not limited to the exact degree to which the author describes. i frequently seize upon a mere impression left by the author and from it build up a whole chain of pictures. i find this a decided handicap in my own writing for i am prone to leave a mere impression of the setting, and the scenes which are so clear to me are blurred in the mind of the reader. in rewriting i find that i always have to make the setting and atmosphere more vivid. in these mental pictures each case, or object, has a distinct individuality. my imagination is never so active when reading a story as when writing it. in reading i am content to float along with the author, analyzing what has gone before rather than probing continually into the future as i do when writing. to the extent that structure, appeal and atmosphere are necessary to the story i have considered these things as "tools of the trade." just recently i have begun to realize the value of appealing to all of the reader's senses to get him more fully into the spirit of the story. =ruth sawyer=: if a story is strongly and convincingly written i generally see characters and action developing with the same degree of reality that one sees a motion picture. sounds, flavors, smells--in fact all sense perceptions become extremely acute. i should say the relationship to the actual stimuli is comparable with a vivid dream. i rarely see color. for the most part things are black and white but with sharp detail. i studied solid geometry and flunked it. the only examination in mathematics i ever flunked. a suggestive concept will start me picturing endless detail provided the suggestion is true to type and locality. no, i do not have stock pictures for village churches. i think that depends largely on the condition of mind when one takes up a story. i find if i am tired i want the work of detail picturing done for me provided it is not overdone to the point of weariness. also i think if one is generally familiar with the atmosphere the writer is creating that one enjoys filling in a large part of the picture with one's own imagination. yes. i should say when i read stories my imagination was passive and receptive; that when i wrote stories it was active and creative. not consciously. =chester l. saxby=: in reading, my imagination functions in exactly the same manner as in writing. i write as i read, trying for the story-world, trying for reality. i think this explains why with me the atmosphere is the biggest thing, sometimes too big, bigger than the story. i write as if i were reading, not creating. i have that feeling. =barry scobee=: i believe my imagination reproduces the story in almost minute detail, if it is interesting. i am a slow reader, the slowest i know, too unutterably slow ever to sit in on the newspaper copy desk. i've tried it to my sorrow. i will see the scenes minutely--the details of the grove or lot or room or barn--the vast expanse of desert or prairie or sea or mountains. i will see the out-of-doors or the things with which i am familiar. i will see all this without effort. but as to hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, i will not catch them nearly so minutely or accurately, unless the author is impressing them with emphasis. if they are impressed emphatically, i take them in fairly well. as to whether the story-pictures in my mind are black and white--shadowy--or colored, well, it depends on what the author says or whether i have seen places similar to what is being described. i prefer to read, and write, where there is a splash and promise of color and description so that i can form my own pictures or let my reader do it for himself. a "big man with uncombed hair and in his sock feet" is likely to be better than a detailed description. it lets the imagination of the reader work, which is one of the technicalities the author should take advantage of. however, sometimes the dramatic can be enhanced by minute description. if i have seen something close to what the author describes or hints at i can see it in all its color. solid geometry, as i recollect--i am nearly thirty-seven--gave me just the same trouble as all other mathematics, which was trouble indeed, from addition to trigonometry. it may be clear in the foregoing that a hint from the writer sets me to reproducing, if the description is anything at all within the compass of my experience or previous reading and comprehension. i do not have a single stock picture in mind, so far as i am aware of now. when i write my imagination behaves differently from when i read--it goes more slowly, because i must ponder and weigh and try out. but otherwise it brings in the material with clarity, if i have my mind well on what i am doing. as tools of your trade? i don't quite savvy. all the thousands of quirks of technique, all the tricks of the trade, certainly are "tools of the trade." (and it's funny i can't think of a blooming one right now with which to illustrate.) =r. t. m. scott=: when i read a story my imagination reproduces the story-world of the author very vividly. if it does not, the story does not interest me and i pass on to the next. i do not hear sounds in connection with a story which i am reading except upon rare occasions. taste, on the other hand, is very acute. smells, too, are acute although not quite so acute as tastes. the sense of touch is not so pronounced, though i feel it to a certain extent. i feel no actual pain corresponding to the physical pain described in the story. in the case of taste my imagination produces the same result upon my sense as does the actual stimulus itself. (if the above proves me to be weak-minded or a degenerate please give me a chance to argue the matter with the fellow who says so.) limitations with the "eyes shut" need not exist. pictures may be colored, in black and white, blurred or distinct. you are the master or a child wandering in fairy land. it rests with you if you will but practise regularly for short intervals of time. five minutes every day at the same hour will be sufficient for a starter. seat yourself in a chair with your back to the door and with your eyes closed. imagine yourself rising from the chair and walking around behind your back toward the door. see the door and feel the knob so vividly that you have forgotten that you are sitting in the chair. open the door and pass out, closing it behind you. enter the room again and look at the back of your own head as you sit in the chair. open the door and pass out, closing it behind you. enter the room again and look at the back of your own head as you sit in the chair. sounds silly, but try it once a day for six months. if you have made no progress in three weeks, give it up. if you do make progress, however, you will reach marvels at the end of half a year or earlier. there will be no limits and you will be able to visit any place that you ever heard of or never heard of as you please to be the master or the child. london or cairo, the center of the earth or the opposite side of the moon await you while something unconscious sits in your chair with its back to the door. proof? there is no proof for the man of science such as the counting of beans in a closed box. the reason for proof is doubt and, with doubt, the trick vanishes. solid geometry gave me more trouble than other mathematics. you can't prove me a maniac on this, however, for i fooled away my time at the commencement of the study and a weak foundation may have been to blame. i am not quite sure that i "get" your next question. perhaps i can not answer definitely. sometimes i follow the author pretty closely and sometimes i leave the author in my lap while something sits in the chair with its back to the door. i have no stock pictures. each case produces its own vision. in reading stories my imagination usually follows. in writing a story it leads or is led. you will say that, if it is led, it follows. yes, but not in the same way. in reading it follows the plot. in writing it follows something altogether apart from the story and the result of that following is the story. what is this something which the imagination follows--which leads the imagination? it is, i think, that which makes us think at certain times when our thoughts are not lazily centered upon heat and cold or food and drink--the cravings and sensations of the body. there is something beyond all selfish desires and emotions and that _something_ should be master of our thoughts if we are to function to the best advantage. if there is nothing on the other side of the grave, then all these ideas are nonsense. if we do continue to "live" after death, however, then that permanent self is not likely to be born at death. it is much more probable that we have it now or even that we may have had it for millions of years--perhaps always. if such should be the case it might well be that thought or imagination is sometimes influenced by the contact of our work-a-day mind with that real self which never dies and which may be a vast store-house of knowledge and high ideals. i have considered these matters as "tools of my trade" and i try, very falteringly, to use them. the best theory upon which to work is, to my mind, the theory of reincarnation. perhaps, however, that must be proved by each man for himself. i have studied it and i do believe that it gives results. =robert simpson=: when i read a story and can't _see_ the whole business--people, places, things--i don't go on reading. it is at once a lifeless thing--inchoate--a blur. i don't try to see and feel and taste and smell and so forth, if the story is getting over to me. if i don't experience these sensations in a greater or lesser degree, it is possible, of course, that i may have dyspepsia, but it is more likely that the story has a flat tire. the pictures i see "with my eyes shut" are generally only half formed. the people are real and distinct enough--too distinct, i think, because i am tempted, in writing about them, to mark every trivial expression. their positions in the pictures are most exact. but the furnishings or surrounding buildings or landscapes are not very clear, unless a chair or a house or a tree or several or all of these are absolutely necessary to the story. the whole scene, in other words, i see clearly. the details are blurred until they become specific. then they stick out like a sore finger. the pictures are black and white for the most part. red, yellow and green i can also see with fair distinctness. the finer shades are blurred. they fade in and fade out in an unsettled kind of way, as if i were having a hard time holding them there. i never studied geometry or mathematics and i'm not going to. i was supposed to study them, but all i ever got out of them was a headache. when the author of a story has set his stage, i generally see the setting in my own way. most folks, i think, are guilty of this crime against the author's good intentions; particularly artists. i have no stock pictures of anything i am reading or writing. some scenes and things are more or less built to a pattern, but i like to "see" them differently whether they are or not. when i am reading my imagination is naturally to a large extent subservient to the dictates of the printed page. i can make my own pictures out of the author's words, but i have to keep my imagination within bounds or i'd lose track of "what came next." when i'm writing, i'm the boss. i can go where i please and do what i please. it's a different thing and a different sensation. the first is a receptive mood that may kind o' tug on the reins, but always goes docilely or cheerfully on; the other is a creative one that gropes hopefully through a maze of plot and counterplot, scenes, people who are never where they ought to be when one wants them, and, finally and tediously and most importantly, technique. i have always considered vizualization as the most valuable tool of my trade. without it i couldn't write a line. this will indicate how much i use it. =arthur d. howden smith=: when i am working at my best i _live_ the story literally. color and distinctness depend on my physical condition, i think--mental states of the moment have something to do with it. as to solid geometry, don't know what you mean--it never meant anything to me. response is up to the author. the question of stock pictures is up to the author. reading _vs._ writing--you bet. as to tools, it would take a book to tell you, principally because my reactions are different at different times. =theodore seixas solomons=: i am a visualizer in writing and reading. psychologically there is little difference with me in the two processes, except that in reading i visualize little besides what the author describes, while in writing i visualize all the attacks i make in the creation besides the one that stands--is adopted. that is, at every point where i hesitate between proposed actions, before i adopt one of them, i visualize each as i think of it. conceiving it in fancy being itself a visualizing process. i do not hear, smell or taste _anything_. i can see their action, as they talk, see their lips move, if there is any point in the manner of enunciation--but no sounds. the bear meat may be frying, but i do not hear it hiss or get mentally the aroma. nor do i get the sense of touch. in fine, beyond visualization of the main picture and its immediate surroundings from point to point in the narrative--my own or that which i read--my mental activities are conceptual only and never sensory. but i do _feel_. my mind flames to sympathetic feeling. i have a weak replica of all the emotions appropriate to the course of the story. this is far stronger, usually, in writing my own stuff than in reading the fiction of others. i do not attribute this to any superiority of fancy in myself, but only to the fact that the act of imagination may be so much more complete when exercised in the creation of my own fiction than when stimulated by the fiction of another that it moves me correspondingly more. when my story is down the stimuli are, of course, no more numerous for the other person than another writer's have been to me in _his_ story, but in the process of writing that which forms the text of my story i have lived through so very much more concerning the people in it than i have selected to be written that i am beset emotionally and mentally with many times as many effects--and am affected proportionally. to sum up my answer to this question--when i have pictured physically the scene and people, either in writing or reading, it is my intellect alone that works as to what takes place in the sense world among them. just as in a cinema we imagine by the action of the mind alone sounds, touches, smells, so my stories (and those i read) are cinemas in which i imagine, mentally only, the rest of the action. the mental physical picture--if you get me--is data enough, stimulation enough to suggest to my mind all other sense perceptions in their _effects_. that is, if i see the bear-meat frying, i can readily supply smells and touches and sounds without experiencing any imagined sense impressions of smells, touches or sounds. i see things as well with my eyes open, if moving objects do not sidetrack my attention, as with them shut. in fact, i can not plot or write without seeing things, any more than i can describe the route to my place in the mountains without visualizing it as i describe. i see things in their natural colors. necessary details are distinct. the picture, however, is hazy "off the main trail." that is, my visualizing apparatus is economical--or penurious--enough to refuse to draw and color in areas beyond the main trend of the story i'm conceiving or writing. solid geometry was pretty easy to me, because of my ready concrete visualization. i go beyond the description of the author in some cases. for instance, in mr. dunn's castaway story of the eight or ten men i took his description of the island as he gave it from time to time and filled in a lot of details. and i imagined quite a little action besides that which he narrated. i never changed his descriptions, i merely filled them out. i have not exactly stock pictures, but if i am called on imaginatively to see a village church or a cowboy i am likely to revert visually to some particular church or particular man that has made a great impression on me. but with the stimulus of the slightest description that doesn't fit, my mind facilely makes the necessary modification. tools? no. i just "write" as i tend to and can. =raymond s. spears=: some of my characters are as real, and even more real, than most people i know. they are usually distinct personalities that i know better than living people. in writing them i am often quite unable to give them the bitterness of experiences i have in mind because i hate to abuse them so! that's a fact, too, and has spoiled some of my--to me--most interesting ideas and stories. my feeling toward my characters does not include physical pain, for i can cut or shoot a hero without compunction, but i hate to embarrass a man or woman, probably because i am rather sensitive myself. i hear the music i write about better than i hear the reality; thus the lapping of wavelets along the hull of a shanty-boat, the ringing of a bell or gobble of a turkey in a fog is more audible in my imagination than in fact--for i am hard of hearing. but i have _heard_ these things at some time or other, and the memory is direct, whether hearing, seeing, smelling, etc. what i see is environment i actually know, which i have seen and studied. i see characters in action. sometimes i go myself through a whole story, as one of the characters; then go back and put down the imaginary episodes with myself as one or other of the characters, but usually a minor or spectator character. i read others' fiction nearly as i form my own. i never studied solid geometry. poor health kept me out of school, so i had only two years and a half in a grammar school, after brief period in a country district school. i had, however, a great working library for a boy, in my father's collection, to which advantage i later added a four-years course as _sun_ reporter in new york, and wide-range reading. but i do not recall that i ever read anything or studied anything the need of which i did not acutely feel. thus in reading fiction it satisfies some longing as for experience, information, a view-point, etc. i can overlook errors of statement obviously outside a writer's own knowledge or experience, if he puts in good things within the scope of his own data. in writing, details come into focus if i look at them. that is, if i describe a trapper's cabin, if it is of logs i see the moss chinking and the spruce, balsam or other "banking up." i ask the equivalent of this accuracy of knowledge in what i read and take delight, for instance, in the minute knowledge of equipment displayed by pendexter or the desert flora by harriman or tuttle's fine cowboy exaggeration and faithfulness to a habit or frame of mind. my stock in trade is a vast junk yard, properties more varied than a motion-picture lot's, and i seldom see the same thing twice. if i read, for example, a western, i may know its exact location (as i do my own story-atmospheres). in that case i see as i remember, and if i don't remember very well, i get out a map, note-books, etc., and find out what's wrong. i read stories for amusement and information, and often i write stories to give information--hoping to amuse as well. =norman springer=: it depends on the story and the author. in a romantic story i'm always chiefly interested in the characters. in a realistic story i am often more interested in the setting, or background, than in the characters. sounds, smells, feels, pictures--if the tale is artfully written, these are quite real, though, of course, in a subdued or diluted sense. suggestion makes these things more real than elaborate description. pain, i think, is usually met by the reader with feelings of anger and pity. suggestions of smells are, i think, most vivid to me. if i visualize a picture, it is in color. the distinctness of details depends on the intensity of the scene, or my interest in it. characters are usually distinct; scenery blurred. no geometry. the response, i think, is often killed by too much description. suggestion, particularly sensory suggestion, does the work best with me--and i think with most people. if the author outlines the picture and sets my five senses--or any of them--to work, i get a much more vivid and "real" impression than if he spent pages in meticulous description. if the characters are alive and the setting interesting, the mental pictures of a story are individual. otherwise, i suppose they are stock pictures. a great deal of difference. in reading i can allow my imagination free play. in writing i must discipline it, keep it within the bounds of the story. i find it hard to do. yes. i think all writers consider them as tools. they have to be considered in every story, as it is being written. there is the general style of the story to be considered, and following that, each situation. i think, "now how can i get this effect or that; how can i make this fellow behave like a real man?" in fact, my stories so far have been a series of experiments. i nearly always try something new in each story, something i haven't tried before. something that i hope will make the story more real and readable. quite often the result is a rotten failure; but sometimes it isn't. =julian street=: it depends on the author's ability to transmit the pictures he wishes me to see. i am always ready to do my share. my mouth does not literally water, except possibly over exceptionally fine descriptions of fine food and drink--which are rare. i do not think, however, that i get physical pain. my reactions are intellectual and emotional. tarkington, for instance, can make me happy or unhappy or worried about his characters. he presses the buttons--we do the rest. the work of inferior observers and inferior writers of course reaches me less and less. i am fastidious in these matters. when writing a scene, i "see" things vividly in color. in reading less so, though to a considerable extent if the author has the picture-making power. no, thank god, i don't have standard stock pictures of scenes and persons. i depend on the author to give me his pictures, and if he is any good, he can do it. if he can't give me pictures, i don't want to read him. i resent _not_ having sufficient images made for me. i also resent images made in a conventional trite way--written out of the author's reading rather than out of his observation. i want my author to be a keen observer and artful interpreter. i want him, as tarkington says, to "flush me with colors." yes, my imagination is most vivid when i am _writing_ stories. the characters i read, however real to me, are never quite so real as those i create. because those i read are other people's children, whereas those i create are my own. i love my children more than i love those of others, even though the others may be in every way better products. it amuses me that this should be so and i am a little ashamed to confess it. =t. s. stribling=: as i said, i almost never read a story. they bore me to death. it seems to me there are few things in this world as stupid as fiction. when i am writing i see everything i write about. i never try to remember anything; i am simply looking at the thing and it is no more effort to describe it than it would be to describe the typewriter under my fingers now. pictures are always in color, and the details are blurred except at the point i am describing and that is just as clear-cut as if i were looking at the real thing, not at a picture. yes i studied solid geometry; mathematics never gave me any trouble at all. no, i don't have stock pictures for anything or at least i am not conscious of it. if i say a village church i will then have to decide what sort of village church i want. however when i get clear out of my experience, say into the eskimo, the word eskimo simply calls up a little fur-covered man; however if i should start writing about them, this generalization would instantly dissolve into scores of individuals. when i read stories my imagination sinks into a profound stupor. everything seems too dull and tame; when i write, everything picks up, life grows gay again, and i have the deuce of a good time. no, i don't consider them "tools of my trade." i don't consider i have a trade nor any tools. the first novel i ever wrote was because i couldn't find a novel that i enjoyed reading; the last one i write will be written for the same reason. =booth tarkington=: i shall have to leave these answers pretty indefinite. the answer to each differs with every story. as a reader every one, i imagine, has, when a village church is mentioned, the image of some village church he has seen--or i should say, more probably, that is, a thin haze of a _fragment_ of some village church. an author forming too many images of course fatigues the reader. =w. c. tuttle=: i have always been afraid of paying too much attention to other authors' work, for fear that i might absorb some of their traits. a few years ago i was a newspaper cartoonist and i have often found myself unconsciously using another artist's technique. it was not because i desired to do this, but because i admired his style. perhaps we are all copyists, as far as that is concerned, and i believe it would be easy to adopt some favorite author's style of writing. there are certain kinds of stories which lure me on to long periods of reading. give me a tale of the days of old, with plumed knights, stage-coaches drifting over muddy roads, tavern brawls, etc., and i'm useless until the end of the story. i can fairly smell the tap-room, hear the rattle of dice and the clash of swords. it is more like a moving picture than a tale of fiction. i often envy the writers of these tales. to me this is "real" fiction. my mind sometimes flashes back to the author and i wonder if he enjoyed the writing as i did the reading. i think that in many cases i improve upon the author's description. if it is a coach team i can see in a flash just the size and color of the horses, the general appearance of the coach, the contour of the road. it appears like a moving picture, if you know what i mean. such detail as the jolting of the coach, the creaking of harness; little details that no author would stop to describe, i see and hear them in my own story, but would never think to burden the reader with such small detail. yet, i wonder if it isn't the little detail that makes a good story. somehow i always draw a mental picture of the author at work on that certain story, and i wonder if he planned it all out before putting it on paper. did he know what the ending would be? where and how did he get the idea in the first place? it appears to me that an author _must_ see things in color, with detail clear, in order to convince the reader. a blurred image will not reproduce clear. i have managed to cover a bad piece of drawing with technique, but i have never seen a bad piece of writing that could be concealed in a mass of words. when my mental picture becomes foggy i quit writing until it clears. at times i have two or more stories under way, and when one gets blurred i take another. i have never found them all out of focus, and it has saved me hours of waste time. things are pretty much the same when i read a story, and it does not take me long to feel whether the author knew his characters, locale, etc. some of them actually live, while others are merely lay figures, with labels instead of souls. i can accept bad description, but when the dialogue is stilted, unreal, i lose interest. perhaps it is my imagination that hampers me in writing. i can see every detail so clearly that i forget that the reader must at least have a diagram of what i see in order to understand. and i have no stock picture for anything. it is not a case of "a rock is a rock and a tree is a tree." i suppose i absorb a certain amount from reading, although i would be unable to point out just what benefit it has been to me. the handling of a story has always interested me, even if the characters were unreal, and i believe that a well-written story is a "tool of the trade" to any author, if he will consider it in that light. =lucille van slyke=: may i add that when i read a story by laura jean libbey types of writers that i never see anything they write as real--abject apology: i never saw anything the lady wrote--it is exactly like watching a play that is so poor that the eye registers scenery and grease paint every minute. things i see with my eyes shut are never black and white--always sharply colored. some one detail will be distinct--from which i edge through blurred ones. example. recently in a story i had to strand a boat on a sand-bar at twilight. i sit back, shut my eyes and try to remember where i have got the sand-bar idea. i saw an old coat, plaid, wet, lying on sand, a basket next to the coat--basket had food in it--tomatoes--red tomatoes. all this can have nothing to do with my story, you understand, but i'm back five years ago on a real sand-bar with a stranded picnic party waiting for tide to come up. zip, i'm off! don't have to imagine it, it's there! hate "math" of all kinds but had less trouble with solid geometry than with any other kind of mathematics. yet i had the same teacher that i had for algebra and plane--think perhaps i was a bit older and could concentrate better. if my concept were limited to the exact degree to which the author makes vivid i'd have to quit reading! again, if he's a real writer man he sets me tingling--if he isn't i quit reading! if i'm not getting a real "kick" out of the thing, i stop. nope, haven't any stock pictures for anything. much resent having every _t_ crossed and every _i_ dotted. think you are using the wrong word when you say imagination, anyway the question is not clear to me. it's like the difference between watching somebody else work and working myself. if it's going right i enjoy watching it--if it isn't i want to take off my coat and show the other fellow how i think it ought to be done. i consider these matters very much tools of my trade. the most helpful thing any editor ever said to me was this: always pretend to yourself that your reader can not think at all--but always remember that he can feel--_and make him feel all that you can_. when i read a story by a--oh, say a conrad--i think my imagination is swept along with his to such an extent that i see the thing as an actual scene. sounds i never hear consciously, except music. tastes i do not get. but smells i do get, distinctly. touch i think i get because i find my fingers often move as i read. that "pain" part of the question so fascinates me that i hope every writer you sent it to is equally intrigued by it. i have never been able to feel in any degree any pain that a writer talks about. neither have i ever been able, even a day or two after acute pain, to make myself remember how it felt. i can remember where i felt it and that i was acutely miserable, but i can not refeel it. i have repeatedly questioned scores of persons in all walks of life to describe how they felt "the day after"--i always get bromidic expressions--"like a toothache"--or "sharp"--or "dull"--or something that indicates very clearly that the pain itself is obliterated, gone. i've doped it out this way--that it is nature's kind provision--that we couldn't any of us exist very long actually facing prolonged acute pain--we'd be pretty brave for a while but we'd give up eventually. even doctors and nurses can't feel the pain they are assuaging. _but_, this seems to me an extraordinary thing--i have repeatedly noted many young mothers whose faces unconsciously reflect pain that a very young child is enduring. and i can not resist adding this very personal note. i am sometimes subject to that type of headache that is i believe called migraine--for which i believe physicians have no known reason. it may not occur for years in my case--then i may have several blinding attacks of it--strangely enough when i am quite well otherwise. and i'm a fairly husky animal. and nothing helps it. i literally fight it for days, finally submerge--the thing works to its two- or three-hour horrible climax--and as i begin to feel the pain ooze out--possibly after two or three days or so of illness--i am suddenly aware that every sense is working clearly--literally with an after-the-thunder-storm clearness. i am still too weakened from pain to have any inclination to do anything--i begin to grow drowsy after many nights of insomnia--but half-way to the sleep--click, it goes--possibly a half dozen or more things that have bothered me solve themselves--maybe a story plot that i've toiled over years before and abandoned and forgotten--possibly something i was working on when the thing hit me. or a perfectly new thing may suggest itself. or i will know exactly what was the matter with the unsatisfactory spot in the story i had been reading (by somebody else!). find myself wanting to change the endings of plays i may have seen years before and been disappointed in. this period lasts sometimes twenty or thirty minutes--sometimes nearly fifty but usually goes in less than ten--when i fall asleep. note this--if i am too weak or not near a pencil--these curious things are washed out forever--just like dashing a sponge over a slate. for years i was too lazy or stupid to understand that i must grab at those amazing few moments and grab hard. yet i can not anticipate it--nor can i say that i'm very keen about paying hours of pain in advance for a few ideas! i call it blasting out of solid ivory--eh? but i do wonder if it happens to other writer persons and if so, if they consider it has any significance. =atreus von schrader=: the extent to which my imagination reproduces the story-world of the author depends, i believe, both on the author's skill and the degree of my interest in what he happens to be writing about, as well as my familiarity with the same story-world. i hear, see, smell and taste kipling; poe i only hear. i do not feel actual physical pain presented in a story; my feeling is rather that of a man in a warm room looking through the window at a raging storm; he gets the effect, and is glad he's not out in it. the pictures i see are colored; their clearness again depends on the skill of the author and my interest in the tale. i studied solid geometry; it was the only subject in which i failed, twice, to pass my college entrance examinations. i do not suffer from stock pictures of physical things or people; i find it necessary to guard against stock characteristics for certain types of people; the too heroic hero, the too villainous villain, etc. this is a common error of certain editors, who insist upon story-heroes being all white and villains all black. were it not for the libel laws, i should like to cite one or two experiences of my own in this connection. when reading a story the imagination is at liberty to cavort without restriction. when writing, it is not. but in the latter case i see and feel with far greater vividness as long as my story is developing; if i have to stop to feel my way, the picture fades; to reappear as soon as the thank-you-marm has been passed. =t. von ziekursch=: if an author has written into his or her story enough of the color of the setting (for instance, if it is a desert scene the author has got to picture a desert for me as i have seen them, or the woods as i have lived in them) then my imagination carries me along with the characters. i believe that just enough of the actual local color of the story either makes or breaks it, and must confess i detest these yarns that are merely written around action and incident and plot. they are cheap and fail utterly to have any value. in their wake they leave nothing of pleasant memories. if the author has painted the scene and skilfully laid the settings then i can drift contentedly with the tale, seeing the characters, the action, hearing the sounds and smelling pleasant odors in my imagination. unpleasant odors are much more difficult to get over with me. i can not taste, but my imagination has frequently reproduced the sense of touch. here is a curious thing. i can only feel pains which i have experienced. for instance i was badly injured breaking a horse once; i have been shot four times. now i can feel it when a character is injured by a horse or shot. details of coloring are usually somewhat indistinct unless the author has achieved them with abruptness that is very skilful. do not ask me what i think of mathematics--and that includes both plane and solid geometry, trigonometry, logs, algebra and all their brood. i have formed the opinion that every reader inevitably strides beyond the scenes laid in the story to develop broader vistas, provided the author has painted his scenes skilfully enough. to me there are innumerable little by-paths that the author merely sketches the openings of--and allows the reader to wander down them at will, formulating his own vague scenes. as an example--a character in a story is following a trail in the forest; the author draws the picture of the distant mountains as the character sees them and perhaps puts in a little touch more. in reading that story i subconsciously explore those mountains, looking down on the whole scene almost like a resident of olympus, and a deal of the fun and enchantment of the story is in that by-play, i am confident. as to the stock pictures in my mind i should say that depends entirely on the author. if he is writing "plot and action" stories with nothing else, how could the reader help having anything else but stock pictures mentally--the kind that have been foisted on the public so long? in regard to the difference in behavior of the imagination in reading and writing i am not competent to judge. i have read very, very little modern american fiction. my imagination holds me an absolute slave when writing--far more so than when reading. i can honestly say that i do not remember ever having given any of these matters a moment's thought. in fact i am greatly surprised that i am able to tell you as much as i am now doing. i have never thought of the "tools of my trade." i merely write. =henry kitchell webster=: my most vivid sensational reactions are to sound, touch, taste and smell. i would hesitate to say that i can see things with my eyes shut. i don't remember ever feeling any actual physical pain, even in the slightest degree, to correspond with the pain presented in a story. i found solid geometry rather easy, and analytical geometry, which for the first time gave a meaning to algebra, was a revelation and a delight. my response to description and suggestion in what i'm reading or seeing on the stage or in the movies is variable. i have phases in which i get nothing but the bare fare that is offered me, and others in which i run out and amplify enormously. i haven't, so far as i know, any stock pictures for village churches or cowboys. i don't resent too many images being formed for me; if there are too many, i simply ignore them. there's an enormous difference in the behavior of my imagination when i am reading stories and when i am writing them. i do indeed consider these matters as important "tools" of my trade. =g. a. wells=: sad to relate, very few stories carry me along with them into the very thick of things. that comes of being too darned hypercritical. it is hard for me to get away from the author. i believe i am too much interested in the mechanics and not enough in the result, always admiring or condemning the author for what he does. with the exception of a few cases which i will mention the author, like the poor, "is always with me." james connelly's earlier stories--those to be found in the book of the title _deep sea toll_ especially--carry me with them. pendexter and mundy have this power over me, but not in every case. also jack london's stories, particularly those of the north. tarkington's _alice adams_ and hutchinson's _if winter comes_ brought me out of myself to a certain extent. that story of bill adams', _the bosun of the goldenhorn's yarn_, was a gem and affected me very much. no play i have seen for the past twenty years has made me forget that it was merely a play i was seeing. the writer whose work has the greatest power over me is lord macaulay. i forget i am alive when i read his essays or history. i can see and hear characters, scenes and colors, and taste the flavors of a story, but they are never genuine. when a character is struck with a club i do not feel it; i simply stand back and watch his reaction to the blow. scenery more nearly produces the same results on my senses as do the actual stimuli. the things that originate in my own imagination i can see with my eyes shut as plainly as if they were realities, and things in a story to a lesser degree of vividness. i can imagine an old hag beating a child and actually work up tears. the same thing in a story does not have the same effect by a good deal. the things in stories are to me merely animated word photographs. i am not strongly susceptible to illusion as it appears in a story or a play. but the realities of actual, living life affect me powerfully. i once saw a man--a beast, rather--kick a dog. if he had kicked me i could not have felt it more. in a story i would not have felt the kick the least bit. it would have been a kick on paper. it is my great loss that i am unable in most cases to get the desired fictional effect. paintings, however, act otherwise on me. in the corcoran gallery at washington there is a large painting depicting a body washed ashore on a beach, and nearby stands a policeman taking the names of a man and woman in a note-book. the first time i glanced at that picture it gripped me and in my imagination at this moment i see it in actual detail and feel the strength of it. i have gone a hundred miles out of my way purposely to look at that picture. one morning i sat before it from about nine until noon without scarcely ever taking my eyes from it. the paintings in the metropolitan gallery in new york would never tire me. i am devoted to etchings. the pictures an author presents to me are never blurred. nor are they black and white. they are always without exception distinct and in natural colors. when pendexter mentions a british soldier i see a man with a flaming red coat. when dingle or dunn shows me a pirate i see a man with swarthy face and black eyes. trees and grass are always green unless otherwise stated. solid geometry was he--ll! it gave me more trouble than all other studies combined. my response to the author is nearly always abstract. i have no stock pictures for anything i read. i let the author paint his picture by direct description and accept it as he shows it, or form or paint it for myself from the various hints he scatters through his story. if his story is laid in the west all he need say for me is that the incidents occurred on a ranch. i'll paint my own ranch in. if his story is of the mountains he can say so briefly and depend on me to picture the mountains. i have two imaginations--one for reading and the other for writing. the former is _better_ than the latter. imagination is, in my opinion, the chief tool of trade of the writer. it counts for about ninety per cent. without that all the other tools in his chest are worthless. =william wells=: the nearest that i can come to answering this is to say that both in reading a well-told story and in building one from my imagination the scenes are as real as if i were watching them thrown on the screen. i am oblivious to all else, but detached, take no part myself. but i possess the faculty of making the scenes reproduce themselves as often as i wish--in my own stories--or of changing them and making the characters act as i want them to. i really "see things" with my eyes shut--or open, for that matter--perfect in every detail, see the flame of fire or the smoke from firearms, but my only sensation is that of the onlooker, although i get quite excited. never studied geometry. the concept sets me to reproducing. no stock pictures; all different. only as i have noted. i can make my own characters do as i wish. just starting to use these "tools of my trade." =ben ames williams=: reading usually awakens in me only an appreciation of the author's ability--or a criticism of his lack of it. i get more pleasure out of discovering how an author has done this or that than in reading his story as a story. an example within the past fortnight, in tolstoi's _war and peace_. he describes a banquet and gives a paragraph to the state of mind of a german tutor who had not appeared previously and does not appear thereafter. after you have read the dozen lines you know the tutor. that passage gave me more pleasure than anything in the book. in like fashion, the bit of paper fluttering to the floor when they opened the long-closed bungalow in conrad's _victory_; the derby hat rolling on its crown after the murder in his _secret agent_. these things delight me. rarely any emotional reaction. an exception; in _saint teresa_, when the lady tried to rip off the gentleman's lip i had a moment of actual physical nausea. these statements apply only to my reading to myself; if i read aloud, i laugh, cry, tremble, shudder or adore as the author intended. =honore willsie=: a whole lot depends on who wrote the story. robert louis stevenson stimulates my imagination to such a degree that as regards one of his tales i can answer yes to this group of questions. joseph conrad, ditto. lesser writers in less degree. yes, i see things with my eyes shut in vivid detail and in full color. solid geometry was my favorite form of mathematics and i did well in it. all depends on the skill of the author in choice of words. as a reader i have no stock pictures. i read _lorna doone_ and _if winter comes_ with equal pleasure. one paints, the other suggests, pictures. but both are presented by masters. much less concentrated effort of imagination in reading than in writing. no. =h. c. witwer=: in reading a story my imagination _does_ reproduce the story-world of the author, or else i can not finish his yarn. i see his characters, the action and setting, as well as if i were there. usually when i get real interested in a story--and i generally do--i find my mind wandering between the lines and wondering what the author is going to do with his characters. what will his climax be? if he fools me without stretching the long arm of mr. coincidence too far, or without a grotesque improbability, i am that author's greatest fan and will read him assiduously, thinking, "ah, if _i_ could write like that!" mere trick endings or endings that i have grasped on page two of the story arouse my honest indignation. in a well-written yarn all my senses will react to those described. i have been drenched with spray by conrad; starved, fought and shed blood with couzens, young and, most of all the latter, arthur o. friel. i would offer one of his south american jungle tales as a typical story to which all my senses reacted. i would say the "pictures i see with my eyes shut" are colored approximately to the scene and rather clear-cut than blurred. i never studied solid geometry--at the time i might or should have been, i was studying left hooks and straight rights! on some things my response is limited to the degree in which the author describes them. on others the mere concept will set me to reproduce just as vividly. in this class i would put mention of the sea, jungle, a prize-fight, indian warfare, gambling, chinese settings, and other things that have a strong appeal to my imagination. in the first class i would put things that have no appeal to me and with which i have had no acquaintance. i'm afraid, as a reader, i do have "stock pictures" for village churches, cowboys and other things with which i'm not familiar. (no reflection on the village church--or the cowboy either, for that matter.) as a reader i do resent too many images, too much description, particularly the latter. a paragraph by a good author is more stimulating to the imagination, more interesting and less of a "drag" on the action of the story, than pages by others. i loathe this sort of thing: "he sat down at his frugal meal of fried eggs, hash browned potatoes, wheat bread, coffee, condensed milk, creamery butter and salt and pepper. the potatoes were a bit crisp. the eggs, turned over once, etc." and i don't care _who_ writes it. it has always irritated me and always will! there is a great deal of difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading stories and when writing them. when reading, my imagination is joy-riding, when writing it has entered an endurance contest. i have never considered these matters as tools of my trade, but i do not doubt that they are. =william almon wolff=: i'm afraid i don't react that way at all--or to a very limited extent. it seems to be my mind that's active, when i read. i'm much more sensitive to music than to words, so poetry and such prose as conrad's move me. but, even so, it's what i read, rather than what moved the writer, that engages me. in other words, i'm more interested in the writer's emotions and reactions than in what stimulated them. my imagination isn't a visual one. i don't see things with my eyes shut at all, so far as i know. no. i was a frightful dub at mathematics, but i didn't begin to take even the foggiest interest in them until i got into trigonometry and solid geometry. decidedly it's the concept that i want. individual visions, every time. i prefer, on the whole, to fill out details for myself. that depends. if i'm satisfied, i surrender to the author. if i'm not, i start writing the story as i would have done it myself. the answer to the last paragraph of this question is that i really don't know. i think the answer is no, though. =edgar young=: i am unable to put myself in the mood of a casual reader, but watch closely how another man works, although a real artist can make me forget my critical attitude and sway me so that i feel the emotions he expresses. when i am really interested i am unable to say which of the five senses is most affected. a reaction from another writer is not a normal reaction. can easily call up mental pictures of places i have seen with most of the main and many of the smaller details distinct. solid geometry never bothered me much. i ate it alive. my responses are mainly governed by verisimilitude. i have been so many places that when a place is out of gear with the real place, a character not a character of the place he is supposed to be--just a few paragraphs and i am in the "where in hell do you get that stuff" mood and end up by roundly swearing at the poor fellow who wrote the story. imagine a rubber worker in brazil using the words of handsome harry of old diamond dick fame (actual words), a mexican using barcelona spanish, a peruvian speaking of things by mexican names, a central american reckoning in old spanish coins, a brazilian speaking spanish and local rio de janeiro all balled up. how would you like to read one about some place you knew intimately and find it all mixed up? summary all or part of the iii questions were answered by writers. _question ._ each of the five senses and pain are tabulated separately. _questions and _, dealing with visual imagination, are included under "sight." . _sight._ of answering, can see without using their physical eyes, have this ability to some degree and generally have it-- in all. only lack this power entirely; generally-- in all. two can not tell and are not easily tabulated on this point. out of the with at least some visual imagination answer specifically as to whether their mental pictures are in colors-- fully; somewhat; a little; no; untabulated. as to distinct detail answer-- yes; some; a little; no. analysis of the actual answers on the above will show that "yes" often means "some," though it is tabulated at its face value. it is to be regretted that specific data were not asked for on visualization of motion and on comparative ability to visualize characters and setting. _geometry._ answered as having had solid geometry. found it more difficult than other mathematics, ; the same, ; easier, ; one, who found it more difficult but attributed the fact to a bad start, is not tabulated. in support of the theory that it would be more difficult for those lacking visual imagination and easier for those possessing this ability, , to which should probably be added at least some of the who found it the same; in contradiction of the theory, -- who can not visualize found it easier and who could visualize found it more difficult. in all cases other factors must have had bearing; on the whole, the theory seems sufficiently established. two people i know, both high-school valedictorians and both unable to visualize at all, were entirely helpless over solid geometry until they solved the difficulty by cutting up raw potatoes to represent the problem. _hearing._ answers. the remaining can probably be counted as lacking auditory imagination. of the there are answering yes; somewhat or a little; no; untabulated. we may say that out of possess the ability to at least some degree, while lack it entirely. in two cases the imagination in this sense is more vivid than in any of the others; in three cases less vivid than in any of the others. curiously enough, one has the ability for music but for no other sounds--perhaps as a result of systematic training and development in music. _taste._ answers. yes, ; somewhat, ; no, ; untabulated, . out of , claim this ability, while lack it. with one this imagination sense is more acute than any of the others except sight; in another case, very acute. _smell._ answers. yes, ; somewhat, ; no, ; untabulated, . out of , possess it to at least some degree, while are without it. in two cases it is the most vivid of the senses; in two cases it ranks next to sight and taste. _touch._ answers. yes, ; somewhat, ; no, ; untabulated, . out of , possess and lack it. in one case it is the only sense reproducing through the imagination. _pain._ answers. yes, ; somewhat, ; no, ; untabulated, . out of , claim it and do not. _all the senses._ as to their relative commonness, the five senses and pain rank as follows: sight-- yes; somewhat; total. hearing-- yes; somewhat; total. smell-- yes; somewhat; total. taste-- yes; somewhat; total. touch-- yes; somewhat; total. pain-- yes; somewhat; total. i believe that if the answerers were to subject themselves to a more rigid analysis, the number of those answering "yes" and "some" would in each of the six cases be very materially reduced, but the relative frequency of the six cases as shown above would seem fairly dependable, except that the temptation to "yes" or "some" in the case of sight is probably stronger than in the other cases. . _response limited by author._ answers. tabulation is complicated and difficult. of these , can visualize, not, and since the two preceding questions, and most of the one before that, centered on visualization, the sense of sight is probably to be considered the chief criterion in the present test. naturally the possession or lack of visualization determines the real value of an answer here. in the following, those possessing only slight power of visualization are included under "can't visualize." if you attempt tabulation you will find that an answer sometimes has to be recorded under several heads two of which, when considered in some aspects, give contradictory evidence, so that your total of answers does not always divide, on some points, into parts whose sum equals the whole. imagination response limited by an author's description, ; somewhat limited, ; by certain authors only, . total, . along with these consider who are limited by the general skill of an author, description not specified and sometimes indicated as a minor consideration. not limited by author's description, . of these, can visualize, not. of the , state their ability to go beyond the author's description, filling in and coloring for themselves. of the who can't visualize, definitely state inability to go beyond the printed description. of the (out of the total ) who can visualize, go or can go in their imagination beyond the author's printed words; can not; doesn't know. these , roughly speaking, prefer an approximation of mere suggestion or concept rather than full description. getting at this last point from another angle, who visualize state definite objection to full description; visualizers and non-visualizers resent "too much"; visualizers and non-visualizers state preference for suggestion only. total against description, , of them merely objecting to "too much"--an amount difficult to define. there are visualizers and non-visualizer who do not resent description. these, with visualizer and non-visualizer satisfied with either method, make neutrals. on the other hand, visualizers want full description and resent mere suggestion. total, . definitely against description, . against "too much," . neutral, . for full description, . only a questionnaire carried into minute detail and answered by large numbers could warrant, in a subject of so many factors, any nicety of conclusion and, also, it is not to be forgotten that the answerers are not mere readers but readers who are also writers. on the other hand, they are in these matters trained and sensitive observers. in any case we are fairly safe in concluding that there exists in readers a tendency to dislike too full description as found in the fiction of to-day. probably a prime cause of the dislike, in the case of visualizers, the majority, is the violence done to the reader's own instantaneous imagery by the almost necessarily different imagery the author's full description forces upon him, while to non-visualizers the author's imagery is not a picture at all. this violence to the visualizer is akin to that often furnished by an artist's illustrations of fiction. an extraneous element demands consideration here. fiction, largely because of its imitative tradition, does not develop so fast as the world it lives in. there is warrant for holding the classics as models, but only those elements of them that are universal in their appeal, that are good for all time. the mistake lies in swallowing them whole, or in admitting to their ranks fiction keyed too markedly to its own time alone. in particular, fullness of description is characteristic of certain past times whose fiction is often cited as a model. but meanwhile the world itself has ceased to travel in stage-coaches or on horseback and has taken to railroads and motors. certainly ours is not so leisurely an age. telephone, telegraph, steam, electricity, gasoline have geared our generation to a far faster speed. we lack our forefathers' happy patience over long descriptions. try your boy on the stories you liked at his age. and do not forget the tremendous influence of the motion pictures for speed of narrative and quick description. but, whatever the element of time, human beings remain human beings and when you paint a word-picture satisfying only your own desire of imagery you will not only surely fail to please all, but your imagery may be such that only a small minority find in it any satisfaction. you can not chart the world of readers as to the exact proportions of its imaginative responses to sense appeals, but your technique is either shaky or happily haphazard if you have no general idea of relative imagination responses and of your own responses in relation to those of the majority. . _stock pictures._ none of the answering confess to them as habitual, though have them to some degree or in certain circumstances. if the author fails to stimulate to special images, resort to them. . _imagination when reading vs. when writing._ of answering, note no difference, don't know, is untabulated, while note a difference. in most cases, however, the difference is only that the imagination is more active, vivid, concentrated, etc., though there are some notable exceptions. from the answers to this experimental question i am unable to draw any conclusions that seem worth consideration. . _the above as "tools of your trade."_ out of , answer yes, somewhat, no, doubtful, find the question too complicated, uses no tools at all. of the answering yes in any degree, some have stated in answer to another question that they do not consider the reader at all when writing and only a few of these make an exception of the work preliminary to the actual writing or of revision. these must therefore obviously be counted out under one question or the other, probably here, leaving a considerably reduced number with a claim to conscious attention in their work to the imagination differences of readers. the questions on imagination were answered in whole or part by , this particular question by . general knowledge of human nature would seem to give fairly good ground for concluding that most of the not answering as to tools would have answered "no" if at all. in any case there are only a small number of the whom we are warranted in listing under "yes." of these few there were still fewer whose answers on the imagination questions as a whole left me unconvinced that their "yes" was to the real question at issue, though in their work they may well consider the necessity of appealing to all five senses. even the remaining few give no single scrap of definitely conclusive proof that their "yes" means a weighing on their part of imagination differences among readers, but proof that they do not is equally lacking, with one probable exception. allowing for failures to tabulate properly in all cases, it is shown that only a small minority of these writers allow for the varying imagination powers of their readers or for their own imagination equations in relation to those of the majority. is it not mere common sense to say that an understanding of these differences and relations should be assimilated into an author's unconscious technique or, failing that, be applied consciously in revision? it is all very well to say an author should just be himself and think not at all of those to whom he expresses himself, but as an artist it should be part of his art to see to it that his "himself" is in communication with those to whom he is trying to communicate, whether through his "other self" as their representative or directly. it is not art to talk to a deaf man or to persist in showing pictures to a blind man. nor would it seem unassailably intelligent to talk in french to people who understand only italian. of what good is imagery if it can not be seen? what point in trying to interest picture-lovers or sound-lovers by refusing to give them pictures or sounds? mention may be made of a few of the many stray points of interest made here and there in the answers. heat and cold were not included in the question, but fortunately crop out in some of the answers. it might be possible to divide authors into two classes--intellectual and sensory. the former, unless they sacrificed individuality, would have comparatively little need of sensory appeal, their natural audience being beyond its reach. the latter class, however, would have acute need of every device for developing and furthering sensory appeal. frequently the dependence of imagery upon actual personal experience is emphasized in the answers. since imagination is incapable of constructing anything whatever except from elements familiar through experience, there is opportunity for a preachment on the value of getting as much personal experience of one's material as possible before attempting to mold it into fiction. i can not resist pointing out that at least one writer who demands much description in what he reads gives almost none in what he writes. one writer gives us a definite method for developing sight imagination. if others can also obtain results from it, the value of the suggestion is tremendous, and it opens the way into a comparatively unexplored field of immense possibilities. there is involved a study of the relation between keenness of sensory imagination and keenness of the corresponding senses themselves. also the variation of both actual and imagination senses in correspondence to variation in physical or general nervous condition. also, note that one answerer has observed a marked weakening of sight imagination after the age of forty, an age at which eyesight is likely to weaken markedly, while another says the ability to visualize through the imagination has been almost lost since adolescence. at least two writers, one of them a friend, and i myself have laid aside glasses after years of use by following the directions of an oculist whose method of cure for most eye troubles is based largely upon direct practise with visual imagination. by developing and strengthening that, improvement is brought about in physical eyesight. it is the reverse of the method used by mr. scott for developing visual imagination and serves to illustrate the intimate connection between the senses and imagination. the connection between visual imagination and actual eyesight is comparatively unexplored territory, as is the similar connection in the four other senses. to what degree is a writer's power of imagery, of sense stimulation in general, dependent on his own powers of imagination? to what extent is his imagination sense-power related to his physical sense-power? can the one be developed through the other? question iv _when you write do you center your mind on the story itself or do you constantly have your readers in mind? in revising?_ "thinking of the reader" is a phrase subject to many interpretations and there is no doubt that the answers to the question containing it are not based upon a common understanding of its exact meaning. to have given it, in the questionnaire, any definite one of its several interpretations would have limited the answers in scope and robbed them of much of the valuable suggestiveness and information they contain. and by this more comprehensive approach we shall come to a clearer understanding of that vague thing called "technique." perhaps the interpretation most commonly made was: "have you cheapened your work by allowing a consideration of popularity to set aside what you knew your art demanded?" if we take the more usual phrase, "do you write down to your readers?" or, "do you write for money or for art?" the reaction, in perhaps most cases, to this interpretation of the question would be, "no, i do not consider the reader when writing," and many of the negative answers given are undoubtedly the expressions of this natural reaction, given without further analysis. on the other hand some writers do write for money, primarily for money, and quite honestly say so. with a discretion born of experience i promptly avoid any opinion on the broad subject of whether what they write is therefore a calamity to art, and retire hurriedly on the fact that said writers do do it. as a class, their reply to question iv is more likely to be a yes than a no. but remember that so far as we are here concerned with them, both those writers who do and who do not write primarily for money, all write for publication involving at least the expectation of money. that is no reason for a cry of hypocrisy against those who claim not to write for money; there is an entirely justifiable line between writing primarily for money and writing one's best and then getting what one can for that best. in the case, also, of those who admit writing primarily for money, a similar distinction can be drawn; in the long run there is no surer way of making money than by doing one's best and plenty of writers recognize this fact. there are also those, dependent on their pens for daily living, who make a deliberate but temporary business of quantity and popularity as the only possible way to reach a position where they can write without regard for these factors. some of our acknowledged best reached their goal by this path and would answer our question yes or no according to the time of its asking. there are those, too, who write primarily for fame, or for mere popularity, and to whom money may be an entirely negligible consideration. these, writing for a consideration other than art itself, may be, for all purposes of this book, classified along with those who write for money. and there are those who write for no consideration except self-expression or the "joy of the working," acknowledging no object except art alone. the fact remains that all of our answerers alike are having their work published, whatever motives may be involved. before they put a word on paper they know the story is meant for publication. they know it from the first inkling of the idea that is to give it birth. they know that it will fail of publication unless in creating it they make it such that readers (editors) will be not only reached by its expression but favorably reached and that publication chances for later stories will be endangered or impaired if in the present one their expression fails to reach favorably the general reading public. some of them are dependent on publication success for their living; some are not; some are more interested in the creating than in its results; some are not. but all of them alike do publish. in saying that they never think of the reader, then, some of them must mean only that they do not think of him during the actual process of putting the story together on paper. otherwise they must maintain that when weighing the value of an idea or a bit of material for use in fiction they never consider whether that idea or material would be liked by the reading public or whether it might be of such nature that no magazine would publish it. if they do so maintain, either they should be able to support their claim, at least in part, by having for exhibit a very goodly number of unsalable stories that in their judgment are fully as good as the published ones, or else they must be recognized as individuals whose points of view, reactions and methods happen to be so identical with those of the reading public or of part of it that without thought, guidance or effort their stories invariably find public favor. there are, beyond doubt, writers who write equally good but unpublishable stories, but i imagine most of them would tell us that said stories are unpublished solely because editors are lacking in discriminating judgment or have prostituted art to business, and that few of these writers would claim, however rigidly they had held to art alone, that they had not written the great majority of these stories with the intention or hope of publication. there are, beyond doubt, also writers who at least approximate in themselves a fortunate reflection of the reading public's likes and dislikes. this identity of point of view and interest is either a happy accident involving no credit to them as craftsmen--it may be even a misfortune from the point of view of art, or else it has been attained unconsciously yet by a very definite pursuit of technique. this last point, however, is best left for discussion until after the answers to question iv. but if some of the answers were negative because the answerers were considering only the time of actual drafting, not the preparatory work or even the revision, there are still distinctions that must be applied, still further obstacles to accepting negative answers as final, and these too must be left until the end of the chapter. if my question had carried with it all these analyses and distinctions there is, i think, little doubt that many who answered "no" would have answered "yes." as one writer puts it, "the distinction between thinking of a story and thinking of a reader is difficult. i suppose my mind is chiefly concerned with making the words express what is real in my imagination--but that implies considering a reader." there is extremely good reason to weigh these various distinctions before reading the answers given and before concluding--or believing these writers conclude--that the reader can or should be excluded from the artist's mind. are the answers, then, valueless? so far as the face value of the question is concerned, partly so. but the insight into various actual working methods is extremely valuable, and the answers to that undefined query, not in their mere yes or no but in their fullness and taken as a whole, open an unequaled path to an understanding of the nature, purpose and use of _technique_, a thing that even the dictionary defines haltingly and that among writers, editors and critics is only a term as vague as it is much used. before turning to the answers it must be noted that through a clerical error the words "in revising" appeared in only half the copies of the questionnaire that were sent out. answers =bill adams=: i never think of the reader--not even when the story is in print. if i do, i think it is a remarkably odd world to contain such queer ducks. =samuel hopkins adams=: damn the readers. i'm too busy with the immediate people of my imagination to worry about the dim and distant thousands. =paul l. anderson=: the story only, when writing; consideration of the reader comes in the preliminary planning. =william ashley anderson=: i think only of the story without regard to readers, on the assumption that a good story will never fail to find readers. =h. c. bailey=: a distinction between thinking of the story itself and of the reader is to me difficult. i suppose my mind is chiefly concerned to make the words express what is real in my imagination--but that implies considering a reader. of course it is necessary sometimes in revising to simplify. =edwin balmer=: on the story. when revising, somewhat on the readers. =ralph henry barbour=: in writing, my mind does its own centering, and it centers on the story. the reader gets a mighty small look-in. in revising, the reader is considered. but, as i've already said, i don't revise much. =frederick orin bartlett=: i never have my readers in mind either in writing or revising. it is extremely difficult for me to visualize a reader of any sort until the story is actually in print. then i feel my audience only as individuals write to me or in some other way respond. =nalbro bartley=: when i write, i think of only the story--never whether anybody is going to read it--or pay for it, for that matter. but when, after it has been cold-in-a-drawer for about a week, i revise, i try to think of the nature of the story which the editor originally ordered--whether or not it hits any forbidden spots and if the average reader is going to respond or not. i think impersonal revision is the most valuable sort. =konrad bercovici=: i never have the reader in mind when i write. i do not want him to have me in his mind either. it is the story. nothing else. =ferdinand berthoud=: i'm afraid that in my amateurish way i center my mind wholly on my story--laugh and cry with my characters. however, now i'm learning and getting a little more experienced i am trying to be less selfish and to think of the readers. =h. h. birney, jr.=: on the story. =farnham bishop=: write for the story, revise for the reader. except that, whenever explaining anything, i keep trying to be clear enough for the layman, accurate enough for the expert, and interesting enough for both. (result of ten years lecturing on semi-technical subjects to general audiences.) =algernon blackwood=: i never give the reader a single thought. to some imaginary reader, sitting at a desk inside my own mind, i tell my story. it is written to express--to relieve--an emotion in my own being. it is never written to please other readers or any imaginable public. =max bonter=: as closely as i have been able to come to it, i am a dual personality when i write. my imagination invents, but reason checks. reason seems in my case to represent prospective readers. =katharine holland brown=: first, write down all the story before it gets away. with no regard for any reader. second, revise, and try to make the story intelligible and to make it march. =f. r. buckley=: i center my mind on the story. i have thought of the readers beforehand, that is, i know what will go and what won't: have generally studied the magazine i'm writing for and got general atmosphere of the stuff it uses; can't get more than that. in this atmosphere i have framed the story as previously detailed. that's all i have to do with the readers. =prosper buranelli=: i never think of readers--am never too sure i shall have any. you don't think of a third party, whom to convince, when you are working out a proof in geometry. =thompson burtis=: i center myself on the story. occasionally the readers enter the picture when i am using technical stuff which i realize i must write down to them. =george m. a. cain=: am not clear about this. i endeavor to tell the reader enough to guide him to so much of my vision as is vital to the story. i think he seldom escapes my consciousness. i think of him as reading what i tell. if i am writing for public speech, i think of myself as saying the words to an audience imagined before me while i write. =robert v. carr=: when i want to sell my story, i write with the reader in mind. when i want to enjoy writing, i forget the reader. i am not sufficiently egotistical to want to reform the reader, neither do i desire to uplift him or to change his prejudices and superstitions to fit my mold. i believe that intelligence decreases with numbers; therefore i am not a democrat. it has been my observation that nothing arouses the hatred of the average man so much as the power to do him good. if one has the power to hurt him, to destroy him, he will erect a statue in honor of the possessor of that power. but if one has the power to do him good, and he lacks that power, he will, sooner or later, fly at the possessor of the power to do good like a mad dog. pessimistic? it is no more logical to hope for the best than to hope for the worst. why should i bounce a stone off the reader's head when all he asks from me is a shot of literary hop to make him forget the next installment on his tin canary, the ever-increasing double chins of his wife, his children who no longer make him feel a glow of pride by their resemblance to him, or his late patriotic debauch from which he is now recovering with a door-mat tongue and a general feeling of seediness? why should i attempt to make a reader think, when i know so little myself? i should try to amuse him and let it go at that. =george l. catton=: it all depends. tastes differ. personally i don't care a penny for "blood and thunder" stories, all action to no end and without a theme or soul. but the vast majority of readers to-day want that kind of story and if an author wants to keep eating he's got to kill his own likes and dislikes for his stomach's sake. i like stories with action of brains, not brawn, but money talks. i have to keep my mind on my readers' likes and dislikes when i'm writing to keep my bread basket from blowing away. otherwise i'd write what i liked myself, never think about my readers, and do better work--from a literary viewpoint. =robert w. chambers=: the story only. in revising, the story alone. =roy p. churchill=: my best stories come when i center on the story, but it is very hard when the readers' so-called limitations are so borne in upon you. for instance, terms and expressions of sailors seem to need some explanation when told to a landsman. yet, do they? my most enjoyable reading is when the writer fires on regardless and lets you understand or not. makes you work your own mind just a trifle to "get" what he is driving at. =carl clausen=: always on the story. =courtney ryley cooper=: absolutely on the story. in revising, or rather editing, i watch the things that i know a reader will look for. but the story comes first. because if it isn't a story--there won't be any readers! =arthur crabb=: i think that when i write i have the story in mind and not the reader. the same is true in revising. =mary stewart cutting=: i center my mind on the story itself. i have my reader in mind in so far as i wish to write it clearly; in the vernacular "to get it over." =elmer davis=: i used to center on the story itself, but they didn't sell. now i center on the editor at whom i am aiming it. yes, i know you will say that is all wrong. it is, for tolstoy, balzac, etc. but not for the sort of writers who make their living out of checks. =william h. dean=: my god! never on the reader! that's fatal. if one tries to write to or for an audience, his work is worse than mediocre. i think of my characters and their destinies, think only of them--do my best to interpret, never to invent. if my readers like what i write, they agree with my interpretations. if any beginner should ask me to give him a single rule to observe, i should say, "always write to interpret; you will go down in defeat if you ever deliberately set about to please any reader." =harris dickson=: don't think i ever have the reader in mind, except when in matters of local coloring i must consider viewpoints outside of the south and remember to make myself clear. frequently i do not employ certain forms of colloquialism because the outside reader may not comprehend--and explanations are generally bad. in public speaking, however, this is different. there you face your audience and get a response. many times the speaker practically follows his audience, falling into the same vein of thought and traveling along in harmony. over and over again i felt this on the platform during our wartime publicity campaigns. again, the speaker may feel a hostility or lack of comprehension in his audience, that he must go further, explain more clearly, hammer in a fact. or he may feel that his audience has "got" his slightest gesture, that they comprehend fully, and no more is needed. =captain dingle=: i never think of the reader. i lose myself in the story. i am my characters, in turn, within limits. =louis dodge=: i think of my story, not of my readers, when i write; however, i try to finish my story--to put on paper what i have in mind, to make things fairly plain. =phyllis duganne=: i don't think of readers when i'm writing. at least, i suppose i do in a way--i try to make people and things in a story convincing, and as i'm convinced at the start, i must be considering readers. but i don't think of them consciously; it's just the story i'm consciously considering. in revising, i think frequently of editors--after all, they're rather important. =j. allan dunn=: i do not think i have my readers largely in the forefront of my mind, save as i know they are apt to clamor, through the editor, for the satisfactory ending. which is one reason why i like to write for ----. there i am practically untrammeled. i am unconscious of an audience and i want to be. =walter a. dyer=: i become preoccupied, when writing, with the story rather than with my readers, and i am afraid i too often leave the editors entirely out of account. i have, however, in the case of stories for boys, had to keep my audience in mind. =walter prichard eaton=: i never have my readers in mind when i write. my one job is to get into words the idea in my head. alas! _before i begin_ i consider whether it is an idea which will sell. that is because we all feel we have to live. in revising, i try only to make what i have written correspond more closely with the idea i set out to convey--and also, i try, often, to make my sentence rhythms more attractive to the ear. =e. o. foster=: when i write i center my mind on the story itself and i am ashamed to say that i do not have my readers in mind, except as i write i know there are over four million ex-service men in the united states who are probably watching to catch me in an inaccuracy. i also consider that i am writing about the time of the spanish-american war and that the tactics and military evolution have changed considerably in these years. fortunately i was also in the world war and know what the changes are. =arthur o. friel=: the story excludes everything else. =j. u. giesy=: mainly on the story, the scene and action i wish to paint. =george gilbert=: i think only of the story. after it is written i think of selling it. but although this answer seems to exclude the readers, it puts them first, for i have confidence enough in what i write to make me think that if it is printed readers will like it. if i did not, i would not write anything. =kenneth gilbert=: when i write, my mind is centered on the story itself, but the reader is not forgotten, merely crowded back a bit. =holworthy hall=: i never think of the reader at all. in the first place, i think of the story itself--and afterward if i ever consider any one else, it is the editor and not the reader. we are all constantly selling stories to editors, but never to subscribers. it is the editor's job and not mine--to consider what he imagines his subscribers want to read. during the actual writing of a story i think of nothing but the urgency of translating into words the ideas which are in my mind. =richard matthews hallet=: when writing i certainly think first of pleasing myself in the effects i fight for; but a habit of stepping out of your own skin and into the skin of a reader should be a healthy one and indeed is three-parts, if not the whole of self-criticism, without a wholesome infusion of which i doubt if much real work gets done. but don't start by trying to please other people. please yourself first. as walter pater says of "that principle axiomatic in literature," that, "to know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people." i have gone astray before now by deluding myself into thinking i was interested in a given story simply because i had decided to write it. =william h. hamby=: on the story itself. i never think of the reader unless it is some point that it occurs to me might be misunderstood. =a. judson hanna=: i seldom thought of the reader, merely writing a story as it came to me, until i began receiving the circulars sent to contributors by ----. when writing now i try to consider the effect of a story on the reader. i always have the editor in mind as i write. =joseph mills hanson=: i think of the story; very seldom of the readers of it. =e. e. harriman=: i center my mind on the story--try to make it natural--vivid--strong. the reader may go to hades for all i care then. all i am thinking of is the responsibility i have to bring this character out unblemished and with the affectionate regard of the public or to save that one alive and in possession of his claim. =nevil g. henshaw=: in making the first draft i think only of the story. in revising of the reader. =joseph hergesheimer=: never the reader! =robert hichens=: when i am writing, i do not think about readers, only about my subject, my characters and how i am expressing myself. =r. de s. horn=: when i write i consider the story alone, until it is almost finished or rather until the final corrections are ready to be made. then i consider my readers only so much as to correct with an eye to avoiding technicalities which they might fail to understand. every story in my opinion has one particular style prescribed by the story itself as visualized by the author. if he allows himself to be swayed by considerations of the people who will read it or the magazines that may buy it, he is playing himself false and i believe the story will show it. the thing to do is to write the story as your consciousness tells you it should be written and then leave it to the literary agent to find the magazine and class of readers that it will best fit. i think the best illustration of this fact is that invariably our best authors' biggest works have come before the magazines have had a chance to subsidize him and buy his output in advance, thereby purchasing the right to "advise" what form his work should take. =clyde b. hough=: when i write i am not aware of the fact that there are to be readers. a standard is hung up somewhere in the back of my mind as a sort of goal to drive it, but my mind is really concentrated on the characters and their action, particularly their action. =emerson hough=: i never think of my readers. poor people! =a. s. m. hutchinson=: most emphatically no. i never give a thought to the reader. the idea of doing so is extraordinary to me. it is impossible and ridiculous. how can you tell a story if you are thinking about its effect on the people? =inez haynes irwin=: i do not think i ever think of my readers at all. in writing i am always thinking of my own impressions of my work. i have to bear in mind certain limitations of subject which publication in magazines involves. that of course is another story. revising is a work i revel in--and i think only of my own pleasure. =will irwin=: in writing the story i have only the story in mind. in revising, i think of the reader. for by now i have the succession of events and pictures so clearly established in my imagination that i am likely to take too many things for granted. =charles tenney jackson=: the story alone. i have never given the reader much thought. now and then i wonder what the devil's the matter with an editor! =frederick j. jackson=: in writing i center my mind on the story itself; the same fellow who takes the hindmost can take the readers. if my story can interest a critical reader like myself, it's a cinch it will interest others. i have a large number of partly completed stories. they were never finished because they did not interest _me_. if they have failed in this initial test they are too dead to have much chance with others. =mary johnston=: the story. in revising, the same. =john joseph=: i am quite sure that i never write a paragraph without pausing to consider the reader's probable reaction to it. lately i have been learning to keep one eye on the editor too. =lloyd kohler=: i think that as a rule i constantly keep my readers in mind while writing a story. at any rate, the stories which i have really wanted to write i have never written--because i know it would be dangerous to try to "get them over." =harold lamb=: think only of story. =sinclair lewis=: both, inextricably mixed. =hapsburg liebe=: i don't have anything in mind but the story itself when writing a story. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: i center on the _story_ alone in the first draft. thereafter i keep the reader in mind as i revise. especially do i try to make each sentence and paragraph clear. i try to be merciful as well as lucid and say what i have to say as clearly and as entertainingly as i can without artificial means of tricking for interest. though i do resort to sustained suspense in the body of the tale as well as bring in obstacles and the like much as we encounter them every day in our efforts. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: i'm afraid my mind is centered mostly on the story itself and i'm not thinking of the reader. get a good story clearly told and you needn't bother about the reader; he'll do the reading all right. =rose macaulay=: both. =crittenden marriott=: on the story. i write a lot to "get it off my chest." =homer i. mceldowney=: when i write i center my mind rather intently on the story itself, with my reader, however, parked on the side-lines. i don't forget that he is there. i believe that i am coming to give him a thought more often as i write more. undoubtedly i take him into greater consideration in my revision of detail, reference and diction than i did at first. =ray mcgillivray=: i do all my deciding in regard to market, and all the work of reconciling recalcitrant characters to the dictates of good taste (as best i can guess both) before a word is written. never was there a fiction horse which ran well with either of these check-reins on his neck. =helen topping miller=: when i write i do not consider my reader at all. i am concerned with my characters; i live, move, think and feel with them. even in revising i do not think of my reader. i work hard for a true picture, and usually i find the reader gets it, if i have felt it strongly enough. =thomas samson miller=: center the mind on the story, of course; but never let the reader--_and_ editor--out of sight. keep in mind certain peculiarities of editors, taboos of magazines, and, above all, take care to avoid offending popular tastes and prejudices, and keep in mind the average stupidity and that average human beings are non-visual and non-imaginative. at least i do so when writing with dollars in view. sometimes--quite often, in fact--i indulge in truth and in beauty--in _art_, that is to say. =anne shannon monroe=: i never think of my readers: when i write i am galloping ahead on a lively good time of my own: and when it is all finished, i hope it will mean a good time to some one else--but i am not particular about that. =l. m. montgomery=: in writing a story i do not think of all these things--at least consciously. i never think of my readers at all. i think of myself. does this story i am writing interest _me_ as i write it--does it satisfy _me_? if so, there are enough people in the world who like what i like to find it interesting and satisfying too. as for the others, i couldn't please them anyhow, so it is of no use to try. i revise to satisfy myself also--not any imaginary literary critic. =frederick moore=: when i write i center my mind on the story--i live it and sleep it until it is done. it exists wholly, just as much as the grand central station exists. it has to. i do not think of the reader then, with the exception of what result i want to get with every word, every phrase, every sentence. but when i see it in type, then i think actually of the reader--and shiver. =talbot mundy=: the story. hardly ever conscious of the reader. =kathleen norris=: in both writing and revising i never have anything in mind but the story itself, and the struggle to preserve consistency and verisimilitude. =anne o'hagan=: my mind centers upon the story and i forget about the readers until the story begins to come back from the editors. =grant overton=: i do not think i ever think of my readers when actually writing. afterward in reading it over i may think of them. i do not think of them very much anyway. i think of how i like it myself. =sir gilbert parker=: on the story itself always, never on the reader. =hugh pendexter=: i never have the reader in mind while writing a story. the story is as real as any news assignment i covered when a newswriter. =clay perry=: i believe the "readers" are absent when i write, unless a dim nebulous sort of personality in the back of my head which might be called "one," and represent my idea of the composite taste and judgment of an average, well-educated person, could be called "mr. average reader" (or perhaps a little above the average). if a story is worth writing, it seems to me, it must absorb the writer, he must live in it, become familiar with his characters. =michael j. phillips=: i think the reader is pretty constantly at the back of my mind. he is always, though sometimes unconsciously, being taken into consideration. =walter b. pitkin=: when i write my first draft, i think only of the story i am telling. when i go to the second draft i tend to think of both editor and reader. this is only roughly and broadly true. =e. s. pladwell=: my mind is centered on the story itself. if the story is good the reader will read. i wish to cater to the reader's taste only in a general way; that is, i know that all the mainsprings of human life and drama are the same to reader and writer alike, and therefore a story which appeals to the humanity of a writer must automatically appeal to the humanity of a reader, in a general way, always provided that the other elements of a good story are present, such as plot, technique, etc. =lucia mead priest=: i seem to have about all i can do to keep my story folk where they belong. it is perhaps unfortunate, but "readers" are a negligible quantity--seldom in the count. =eugene manlove rhodes=: center on the story itself. think of readers when revising. =frank c. robertson=: my mind is always centered upon the story i am writing, except where some question of probability or plausibility arises. right there i stop and work it out from an imaginary reader's viewpoint. of course, in rewriting i have the reader constantly in mind. =ruth sawyer=: on the story itself. =chester l. saxby=: i do not have the reader in mind. i write stories that nobody wants because they don't come out pleasantly, or for some other reason. that's because anything worth writing gets a hold on me as a subject for thought and i want to express it for my own satisfaction. =barry scobee=: on the story. never think of the reader, unless now and then in difficult passages i wonder if the reader will grasp the meaning. =r. t. m. scott=: i have my readers always in the back of my mind, but just sufficiently to keep away from things like the war which editors are fed up on. (perhaps the editors and not the readers are in the back of my mind.) otherwise i forget the world or all of it which lies beyond the story. =robert simpson=: i center my mind on the story only. subconsciously, i suppose, my future audience is being considered while i labor strenuously over revision. =arthur d. howden smith=: try to think only of the story. =norman springer=: my tendency is, of course, to think only of the story while writing it. this query uncovers a curious thing. now, when i write a story, i have a tendency to ramble. the trouble usually is that i am too much interested in my character. i like to investigate his feelings and thoughts at much too great length. well, i have developed a critic in the mind who works while i write. it is as though some faculty were standing quite aloof from me and the story, watching. when i wander into by-paths it checks me. sometimes it doesn't, and i get into a mess. it is a faculty that is constantly getting stronger, and, like the fond mother, i have great hopes of it. i've talked this thing over with other fiction writers and i find it's a rather common experience. several of them told me that throughout their careers as writers they have been conscious of this slowly developing faculty for self-criticism while at work. =julian street=: i don't have my readers in mind at all until after the story is done--save that i always try to make things _clear_ to a vague some one to whom i am telling my story. but in writing the story--the people in the story--are everything. i don't think of editors, either. i write to the severest critic i have inside me. =t. s. stribling=: a "reader" never enters my mind. i never give a hang whether anybody reads it or not, or what they think about it so long as i can get past the editor and get a check. i want the check because i can't live in idleness without it. =booth tarkington=: i don't have _readers_ in mind--only myself as a reader. =w. c. tuttle=: i suppose that a writer should consider the reader, but i have never done so; it has always been a case of story first; feeling that, if the story is good, the reader gets the real consideration. =lucille van slyke=: your question hits upon the greatest snag in my attempt to write. i find it bothers me excessively to have to keep any reader in mind; it's a mental hazard to me to think of anybody that i know personally reading what i am writing--a perfectly childish stage fright. (i qualify this--i dearly love writing a story for a child.) i am scared to submit a story to an editor after i have met him--don't mind at all having it slammed at fifty editors i have never met. realize it's foolish and feminine and illogical, but it's so. but i do try to visualize a sort of composite reader when i am revising. example--just now i am doing a year's ghastly potboiling--a thousand words a day six days a week for a newspaper syndicate. each day is a separate short story, all hinge together--climax each sixth--larger climax each month with a bang at the end of six months. this is the most disagreeable writing task that i have ever tackled. it's plain deadly. but i never sit down to it that i do not lay aside my usual writing method. remind myself of this: whoever reads what i am writing now is a person in a hurry. i will have the attention at the most for not more than two minutes. scattered or tired attention. i must literally jab. short sentences, short paragraphs. few adjectives and always the same ones when i mention a character already mentioned, so that i can save my regular reader's time. and i must write very carefully with extra clearness. this rubberstamping must be neatly done. nobody has issued such orders to me but myself and i may be wrong, all wrong! but if i could visualize my magazine reader or book reader as clearly, i dare say it would be a very good thing for me as a writer. only, i forget the reader entirely when i'm working on the thing that really interests me. =atreus von schrader=: when i write i do not have my readers in mind. but i have considered them carefully beforehand ... also the editor to whom i hope to sell the piece. =t. von ziekursch=: when i write the reader is an outsider and never has a chance. it is one of my biggest hopes to bring some fun and joy, some touches of life, some deeper thoughts to any who may read my stories; but i certainly never have and probably never shall give these possible readers a thought. i would write if i never sold a word of it. i wanted to for years when i never had an outside opportunity to get within gunshot of a paper and pencil; i could pour out a lot of those yearnings right here, but what's the use? now i am in a place where i can write, i am fairly young and, believe me, i'm going to it with both spurs working hard. my mind is unequivocally centered on what i want to write. i hope to find markets for it and readers who'll like it, but i'd write it just the same if i didn't. =henry kitchell webster=: this question is answered, better than i can answer it here, in my contribution to _the new republic_ symposium on the novel, entitled, "a brace of definitions and a short code." =g. a. wells=: i consider nothing but the story. it is there to be told and i try to tell it to the best of my rather poor ability. the reader for me does not exist. it doesn't make any difference whether anybody reads it, other than a continual complaint of unworthiness of my stories would soon put me _persona non grata_ with publishers. =william wells=: center too much on the story. am breaking myself of that bad habit. =ben ames williams=: when i write, my mind is on the job of writing. i never consciously consider either reader or editor. i try to tell the story in an appealing way. but if you ask me who i am trying to appeal to, i can't answer you! =honore willsie=: in writing or revising i never think of the reader. =h. c. witwer=: in writing, i have nothing in mind but the story. a wandering mind is fatal to good work. i think of the readers when i see my yarn printed and--when i get the mail. =william almon wolff=: on the story, emphatically and always. i take the reader into account, in revision, to this extent: my final revision follows a reading by a friend. i'm interested in whether he likes the story, but only academically--i can't do anything about that. but i want to know whether everything is clear. i will take infinite pains in revision if a comment indicates that i haven't explained something fully; if my meaning has eluded this reader. on that point i'm always wrong and my reader is always right--the fact that i can explain the confusion doesn't count. you can't follow your story, explaining every point readers don't understand. =edgar young=: i center on the story. summary a general tabulation of the above shows that of writers ( of whom are tabulated) give no thought to readers at any time and that do so for selling but not for artistic purposes, a total of . only state flatly that they bear the reader in mind habitually during the first writing of the story; do so to some extent, to less degree, for clearness only, for technical material only. a total of . those who do not consider the reader when writing but do so at other times number -- when revising, during preliminary work. those who consider the reader at any time--during writing, revision or preliminary work--number . during the actual writing those who do not consider the reader at all number against who do to at least some degree. during revision those who do not consider reader number ( + ) against ( + ) who do. remember that, through my error, to only approximately half the answers was revision made a specific part of the question. during preliminary work there were ( + ) who do not against ( + ) who do. (it is reasonable to believe that if the preliminary work had been specifically mentioned in the question there would have been more replies on this point and, since all those who do mention it answer affirmatively, that a fair proportion, perhaps a majority, of the replies would have been affirmative.) the answers as a whole seem to leave the question largely one of individual taste or method. a more careful consideration, however, will discover a common underlying principle for all and, in doing so, go far toward clarifying our concept of "technique." literature is an expression: of what you please, but an expression. to "express" inevitably implies some one to whom you express. as one answerer puts it, one must always write to "interpret." no interpreting is done unless it is done to some one. to interpret or express with no thought of those to whom you interpret or express, without knowing whether your message reaches them or considering means of insuring its reaching them, is a completely idiotic performance. to say that art is self-expression answers the above by making the artist himself the person to whom he expresses or interprets. such a performance, if established, seems rather unimportant in itself. literature, or art, however you may define these terms, should be a thing of world importance. the self-expression of a lone individual, reaching no one but himself, would seem a mere ephemeral atom by comparison. nor is it credible that most of our writers would continue to write if they knew no one would ever read what they wrote. would any of them? yes. and if what an artist writes solely for self-expression, being found good in its creator's eyes, is then passed on to others, it was none the less written for self-expression alone. if he has written entirely uninfluenced by the thought or expectation of popularity, fame, money or any other consideration except the impulse to create artistically, he has undoubtedly written with no thought of other readers. that is, with no conscious thought of other readers. but the fact remains that he has expressed himself, or interpreted, to some human understanding. by recognized human symbols, in accordance with commonly accepted human standards. in this case it happened that the human understanding to which he interpreted was his own, but that does not alter the essentials of the act. he himself is a representative of the human race and he can not interpret or express to himself without interpreting or expressing to their representative. he is, however little he may think of himself as such, merely their proxy. you will have noticed in the answers that many of those who do not consider the reader state that they make their own judgment the test, constitute themselves the sole critics, develop another self to serve as critic. in other words, this "other self" is made the judge of their success in interpreting to human understanding by recognized methods in accordance with commonly accepted standards. it is the writer's very own, yet it reduces to nothing more than his individual knowledge and application of human understanding in general--and of general human reactions, standards and valuations. it is altogether individual to himself, yet, like himself, it can be composed of nothing but the elements common to the human race in general, however they may be transmuted by his individuality. a proxy for the race, it is, in fact, "the reader." however strongly individualized, it is still a representative, a composite, a standard. the writer divides into self and other self, into the writer in his strictly creative capacity and the writer in his critical capacity as adapter of his creations to the demands of the common human standards of expression and understanding. the two, of course, are inextricably combined and never twice combined alike. the writer may be conscious of their working hand in hand during creation, or may be altogether oblivious to his critical self until the creative outpouring is finished. but whether he be conscious or unconscious of the fact, the two are always present. for the creative self can create out of nothing except human elements and his critical self is his knowledge of human elements; the creative self can express to human understanding only through the critical self's knowledge of human understanding. and the methods by which the creative self interprets and expresses those elements to that understanding are not known to it from birth but are taught to it gradually by the critical self as the latter absorbs them from life. his self creates, expresses; his other self tells him how to express, is the adapter of his creations to the demands of the common human standards of expression and understanding--is his guide as to technique. his _technique_ is his knowledge, or applied knowledge, of all that perfects expression, and his technique is altogether in charge of his other self, the proxy for readers in general. _technique is wholly based on consideration of readers._ the other self, to serve as critic, guide and test, must be master of all principles, rules, formulas and methods that facilitate and perfect expression so far as the writer knows them--must be master of all the technique at his command. the other self can function without the creative self's being aware that it is functioning, but only if technique has been so thoroughly absorbed and assimilated that the other self can apply it automatically, working in perfect unison with the creative self or, if you like, having become identified with the creative self or taught its knowledge thoroughly to the creative self. to just the degree that his technique is not thoroughly assimilated, to that degree will the creative self be conscious of it--and, probably, distracted and slowed up by it. it is impossible that all technique should be thus thoroughly assimilated and unconscious. a writer might as well claim to have assimilated all human knowledge of art, of human nature and, for that matter, of nearly everything else. he can not be entirely unconscious of even all the technique at his command, unless he has ceased to develop and fallen into using only what technique has become automatic through long usage. if he is really an artist he will know that, no matter how great his artistry, there is always more technique for him to learn and there will always be in his store of technique bits newly added and not yet unconscious. and technique is wholly based on consideration of readers. a writer can learn from other writers, but they in turn must, however little they may have realized the process, have built their technique, through their "other selves," their proxies for readers in general, from their knowledge of readers and of how to convey their ideas to them. dividing writers roughly into two classes, one class considers the reader more than he considers his art, playing for the reader's attention and favor directly, consciously, baldly. still roughly speaking, that class may attain great popularity, but it is not likely to create literature. its attention is on its tools rather than on its creating. the other class holds first to art. it insists upon making its tools so much a part of the artist that he is not conscious of them. it shuts its eyes to other matters, concentrates on creating and produces most of what we call literature. but this latter class must, of course, have its tools. to have them it must get them from somewhere, make them of something. the amazing thing is that, for the most part, it doesn't really know where it gets them, doesn't really know from what they are made nor the fundamental principles in accordance with which they are constructed. the proof of this lies in the answers to this question concerning the reader and to the questions concerning the imagination and technique. the genius knows, whether or not he knows that he knows. but there are few geniuses. the average first-class writer does not know. it is impossible to compute the degree to which their art suffers in consequence. it may be a great deal. it may, in some cases, be very little, for after all, being human beings, they must have some kind of subconscious understanding of the general fundamental nature and purpose of their tools. but certainly their art does suffer, in degree varying with the individual, as a result of their lack of definite, clear-cut, conscious understanding of both their tools and their process. for they are working blindly to this extent. if a writer adopts a piece of another man's technique or finds one for himself and if it proves to suit his case, there may be no loss in that transaction itself, but he has added nothing to his ability to select a next piece of technique with understanding discrimination. whatever the degree of damage to the experienced writer, the harm is tremendous in the case of the beginner or comparative beginner. he looks at the work of others and finds many tools; he turns to books, teachers and courses for specific instructions and has tools handed to him, generally by the clothes-basketful. each is for a specific purpose and neither the tools nor the purposes are correlated in accordance with any fundamental principle. no one can tell the specific purpose of any tool of technique with sufficient fullness and discrimination to cover its use in all cases, and the poor beginner is given no fundamental understanding whereby he can make intelligent application as the varying cases arise in his work. the results, registered in the unceasing flow of manuscripts across the editorial desks of magazines and book houses, are pathetic. what would be the results in law or medicine or teaching if they were practised without conscious and very definite knowledge of the fundamental principles upon which their rules are based? the present chief obstacle to successful teaching of the art of writing is lack of correlation of the rules of technique to fundamental basic principles. the rules of technique have no other purpose than to facilitate and perfect expression. there can be no test of the success of expression except the person to whom one expresses--the reader. technique will remain a rather vague and chaotic matter, with a corresponding difficulty in learning it, until the reader-test is applied to its rules to prove their soundness and to refer them back to the fundamental principles which alone can give the writer an understanding that will enable him really to assimilate his technique and to apply and modify a rule to fit each one of the myriad cases that will arise. the answers to the next question and to some later questions of the questionnaire will give further insight into the nature and practical use of technique. question v _have you had a classroom or correspondence course on writing fiction? books on it? to what extent did this help in the elementary stages? beyond the elementary stages?_ answers =bill adams=: no course of any sort. =samuel hopkins adams=: no technical course of any kind. such books as i have looked into only served to befog my mind. =paul l. anderson=: no course in fiction writing; stringent course in the handling of words, in prep. school, college and since. =william ashley anderson=: i have never "studied" short story or fiction writing in any popular form. =h. c. bailey=: i know nothing of any course of instruction. =edwin balmer=: i was in short story writing classes both at northwestern university and at harvard, and i do not think they did me any good; in fact, in neither university was my writing approved. the teachers encouraged models of the past; i was writing after present-day models and therefore was criticized. it did not worry me because i used to sell to newspapers my classroom themes, and i thought the newspaper editors knew more about writing than the professors. =ralph henry barbour=: i have had no classroom or correspondence course in writing fiction. i was born too early for either. i have not read--through--any books on the subject. i am not, therefore, able to judge any of these. i have my own ideas, though, on the subject of being taught to write fiction. being of little value, i'll keep them to myself. =frederick orin bartlett=: i never, thank god, took any course in writing fiction. it might help some but i am sure from my experience with college english that it would have only made me self-conscious. =nalbro bartley=: no. i'm very much against courses in writing, schools for authorship, journalism, etc.,--even if people do live them down. from what i have seen, it produces a sort of professional-amateur and we have so many of them just now and so few people doing the things which would, if they were inclined that way, make them ultimately write. i mean--you can't write unless you know what you are writing about and technique is a thing belonging to a desk job, something which can be acquired after you have either vicariously or otherwise been in the arena. personally, i found being a cub reporter on a paper for two years, a special writer for two years and then--just going to it with rejection-slips as my own teacher and life my classroom the most satisfactory route. =konrad bercovici=: no, no, no, no. =ferdinand berthoud=: _no!_ i don't think even god himself could write a decent story from any classroom or correspondence-school course if he hadn't the background. i know a man who is a critic for the ---- correspondence school, and, from what i can see of it, the sole end and aim of his organization is to string the poor, deluded aspiring writer along and soak him for all he is worth. he tells me that out of over a thousand stories he went over during last year _not one_ was good enough to hit a magazine. =h. h. birney, jr.=: no course of any kind in writing. am considering one. =farnham bishop=: wrote my first school "composition" at the age of ten, my last one at eighteen, all in the same school, under the same teachers, who encouraged creative work, criticized sanely, and banged english grammar into me in the good old-fashioned way. wrote for and later edited the school paper. also turned out a lot of wild kid stuff in collaboration with another chap, and illustrated by dwight franklin, for private circulation only. my pal died just as we were about to enter harvard together. his death, and a douse of purely negative and rather supercilious criticism from an overworked instructor in freshman english took all the fun out of writing. by the time i began to find myself at harvard, i was in the law school. failed there, swung over into the graduate school, took english under dean briggs, english (shakespeare) under professor kittredge, and a course on milton under professor nielson--all three the livest of live wires. worked my way through an extra year just to take professor baker's english --the course on playwriting. the school and graduate school courses helped me much more than the undergraduate work in college, mainly, i think, because of the difference in the personality of the teachers. i learned much more from the men--the pick of the men--who taught me than i did from the textbooks. =algernon blackwood=: no. i began writing at the age of thirty-six because i could not keep it back. i preferred an evening thus engaged to any pleasure, social, theatre, music or anything else. after a day of hard, uncongenial business, the imaginative release on paper was my real recreation. =max bonter=: i have never read any literature on fiction writing. =katharine holland brown=: some classroom work, which was very valuable in elementary work. and, too, the classroom insistence on system and unity and all the virtues has always been valuable--when it has been heeded. =f. r. buckley=: i once took half a course (at the age of eighteen)--in short story writing (at a university). i had already written and sold several yarns. that half-course killed me dead for five years. i was self-conscious, and instead of telling a story i was inclined to wonder whether the climacteric was all right, or if the anti-climax had been put out-of-doors for the night. i now avoid anybody who wants to talk nomenclature as being much more harmful than the devil, and inexpressibly worse company. =prosper buranelli=: i read two books on short story writing. got a couple of very elementary ideas. got practical training writing sunday stories under a discerning editor. that counted. if a plumber serves an apprenticeship to learn his trade--is a writer's craft any less exacting in the matter of skill? =thompson burtis=: i have never had a course on writing fiction. i have read one book on it. all the help i ever got from it, as far as i can remember, is to have it impressed on my mind that a story must build up to a climax, which i believe i knew before. i had sold stories before i ever read the book. however, i believed it helped me a little at the start. beyond the elementary stages, i can not see how it has helped me at all. =george m. a. cain=: never took any such courses. never learned anything from a book on the subject. i am strong for the idea of a correspondence school of writing, financed by publishers, free to pupils, handled by a man or men of real editorial experience or wide variety in authorship, ready and willing to be brutally frank with the hopeless, and capable of pointing out certain technical facts to those who can submit something of promise. such a fact i am going to mention under xi. i do not see how any outside help can carry beyond the most elementary stages of actual writing for publication, unless it might be in the "trade journal" line of market information. =robert v. carr=: little schooling, no course of any kind on writing. =george l. catton=: have had two correspondence courses in writing fiction, but they did me little good. to tell the truth, i have never read either of them through, and yet i have the diplomas that were given for the final lesson answers. my own private opinion is that a man may be taught to write, but if he hasn't a talent for "telling" a story he might better never tackle it. too much "rules and you-must and you-mustn't" are plain murder to talent. the only training a man needs is training in what he doesn't know; all other is waste of time and sand on his fire. the only sane course of training for a writer is to find out first what he doesn't know and then give him just that and not another damn thing! it's a lot harder to forget than to learn, and the "rules" of yesteryear are the mistakes of to-day. the world do move! have read several books on authorship and found that there was little in them that i didn't already know. sounds egotistical, but it's a fact nevertheless. no, i can't say that courses or books ever helped me. corrections made on a manuscript or two and a bit of advice slammed at me with a curse behind it was all i needed. =robert w. chambers=: rot! =roy p. churchill=: part of a correspondence course. a number of books. these were a great help in elementary stages. some help later on. =carl clausen=: never had any. =courtney ryley cooper=: i have had very little education of any kind, except a varied experience and a lot of adventures and a long apprenticeship on a newspaper which prided itself on its literary excellence. =arthur crabb=: i never had any education in fiction writing except from literary agents and editors. =mary stewart cutting=: i have never had any tuition at all on story writing. =elmer davis=: no. probably need it. =william harper dean=: no courses in writing. i have some books purchased years ago--i'll swear i never got a thing from them. i am hopelessly confused when i try to follow such things. of course that's because of my own type of mind--others, i know, get a great deal from books on technique and the like. =harris dickson=: as a very young boy i started to write poetry. and did you ever think how much this may help? how it leads one to cast about for the exact word, for a word that balances with the sentence both in thought and rhythm? well, it does. after that i wrote a few rotten short stories, one of which brought me five dollars. then several historical novels, because i had read so much of our southwestern colonial history until i came to know the people. and i also knew the country. out of this grew several pioneering sword and cloak novels of louisiana and mississippi. my first magazine work was a special article which dealt with my criminal experiences in the city court. then i began to write short stories of southern life, largely of negro life. =captain dingle=: neither course nor books. lacking the educational furniture of a writer, it has always seemed to me that the sort of stuff i turn out must come bluntly from me, and that no amount of study will help, except the study of men. =louis dodge=: alas, i have had no classroom or correspondence aids. there's a knot to unravel. things can be taught, certainly; but shall we learn to do a thing as others would do it? did columbus? gallileo? buddha? shakespeare? lincoln? marconi? i suspect rules are like clothes: you ought to get good ones and then forget all about them. =phyllis duganne=: no courses or books in writing. but i've had advice from older authors, which is immensely valuable. if teachers of writing fiction were authors themselves, i think they would be very helpful. =j. allan dunn=: i have had no classroom or correspondence course nor have i read entirely any book on writing fiction. i have received considerable help in the beginning from advice given by an editor. certain of his suggestions are strong with me to-day, such as his simile for making a true rope of the story and tucking in all the ends. i was greatly indebted also in the beginning to an agent of mine--since retired--helen gardenhire, who taught me to keep my characters moving when they were on the stage, to take them off when they were not needed and not to let my hero stray up back-stage too often. in other words, continued and precise action. for myself i conceive my story as a play. i try not to destroy the illusion or halt the action, not to take my audience round back of the scenes and never to let down the curtain and come out in front to make talk. i don't say i live up to this. i try to. but my first two yarns were accepted, i am sure, with all their faults of technique because they had been done over and over and over--because i had no real technique those days. it is hard to apply, to set down, this psychology of the art of writing. jack london used to say "you've got to learn the tricks, old man, then it will go easily." i try to regard a rejected story as i would any article of merchandize refused by customers--and find out what is the matter with it. i do not believe in correspondence schools for writers. the greatest advance lies in keeping at it and trying to find out what's wrong. =walter a. dyer=: i never had any sort of instruction in fiction writing. =walter prichard eaton=: no, to this. =e. o. foster=: i have had no classroom or correspondence course in writing fiction. i have read one or two books on it and have not found they helped me to any great extent in short story writing. =arthur o. friel=: studied rhetoric, composition, etc., in school and college, but made no particular study of fiction work and such. highly important as fundamentals. =j. u. giesy=: no. =george gilbert=: took no course. =kenneth gilbert=: i've read books on short story writing and found that they helped somewhat in the elementary stages, but i have yet to find one that is other than elementary. recently, a set of volumes was sent to me on approval, after i had been assured that they were just what i had been looking for. i returned them when it dawned on me that i knew more about technique than the man who wrote them. =holworthy hall=: no classroom or correspondence course. i buy every book on "fiction writing" i can find. the majority of them are classed in my library as "humor." that is why i buy them. in the last ten years, only six books of this sort have emerged from that class; generally, they are funny without being short enough. =richard matthews hallet=: i did not fall to writing fiction until i had left the classroom; and i never took a correspondence course in same. i think there is a big field for a book on certain practical features, such as you hint at. i have a shelf full of books on rhetoric and etymology, but nothing on how to write fiction. after all, it's a process. if it goes on in you at all, you can chip and file at it; if it doesn't go on, you have to seek other trades. i'm a border-line case. =william h. hamby=: in the beginning i took a three months' correspondence course and had real benefit from it. =a. judson hanna=: no, all around. =joseph mills hanson=: never have had any course on fiction writing other than in english courses at school. i have, however, taken magazines for writers and read books on the subject, and do still. i believe both to have been helpful in the early stages of writing for publication, and that they are still helpful. it is stimulating to read of the experience of others in one's own craft and to digest their suggestions and the suggestions of those who endeavor to be instructors in the art of narration, whether or not one attempts to follow their pronouncements. =e. e. harriman=: never had a correspondence course or classroom training in writing. read a book and spent two hours over one by ----. these helped me some in the elementary stages. got most help in plot writing or making from a little sheet published by willard hawkins, denver, in one page written by him. he concentrated the whole thing and made it as plain as a pikestaff. epitomized it. =nevil g. henshaw=: i've never taken any kind of course in writing, although at first i read a book or two on the subject. they helped in telling me what not to do. but, if i've learned anything at all, it is due almost entirely to the criticism and counsel of kindly editors. =joseph hergesheimer=: nothing--none! =robert hichens=: i spent a year in a school of journalism in london. i haven't specially studied many books on writing, but i have studied many of the best prose writers. =roy de s. horn=: i had a correspondence course in writing, but i never finished it. i finished twenty-eight of the forty lessons and then went at the game directly. but i still buy and study books on it whenever i can find a new one. and i frequently sit down and study a current story just as i was taught to do in the old course. i believe that both the course and the books were and are of incalculable assistance. the great thing to the beginner of a course is that they are short cuts. they give him other authors' experiences and deductions in concentrated form. they make him get a clear idea of what he is about. and most of all they tell him what not to write, thus saving him the trouble and delay of finding out by personal experiment. =clyde b. hough=: i have had no course of any sort on writing fiction. have read a few text-books and the greatest impression they made on me was that i must work hard, must expect many disappointments, but that i must never holler "'nough." they, the text-books, are agreed, and they're right, that the time to holler "'nough" is before you start at the game. =emerson hough=: thank god, no, i never did. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: (first and second questions) no. =inez haynes irwin=: i took writing courses in my early twenties for two years at radcliffe college. i think these courses were an enormous help _then_, because it was so stimulating to be writing in a group. also it developed my taste and strengthened my ambition. it helped me to acquire the habit of writing. beyond these elementary stages, i think it was of no special assistance. and in the case of a girl like my niece, phyllis duganne, it would be, i am sure, utterly unnecessary. she grew up in a household in which there were always three writers and, when visitors came, sometimes six. she acquired her technique painlessly as artists' children learn to paint. she can not remember when she began to write and i am sure she has no memories of difficulties in learning to write. her first short story was accepted when she was sixteen and her first novel was published before she was twenty-one. no course in writing could have helped her much. =will irwin=: i never had any formal instruction in story writing except the expert coaching of gellett burgess in collaboration with whom i wrote my first two books of fiction, and later the criticisms of my wife who is a better technician than i. =charles tenney jackson=: as to "classroom, correspondence, text-books on writing," i am innocent of all of 'em. never had any, read any. =frederick j. jackson=: no classroom course on writing fiction. no books. correspondence course, yes. in a complete course from an editor. i sent him thirty or forty stories. he returned them all and had so little to do in those days that he sent a letter criticizing or commenting upon each story. he made a bull's eye with each shot of criticism. i made a hell of a lot of mistakes, but never made the same one twice. the letters of this bird kept me interested in writing, made me keep on, thereby ruining the makings of a live-wire press agent or advertising man. i sold a lot of the stories he returned, mostly due to the hints he dropped. did this help beyond the elementary stages? it did. it made me determine to learn the writing game so that some day i could make the above-mentioned editor apologize when returning a story. something over one hundred and sixty magazine and picture stories sold is his pupil's record so far. the said pupil considers that he is still serving an apprenticeship in the writing game. if he works hard enough he may be able to graduate by the time he's thirty-five. =mary johnston=: no. =john joseph=: have had no "classroom" or other instruction, except such as i have received from kindly disposed editors. and these little notes are highly prized, believe me. =lloyd kohler=: about four or five years ago i subscribed to the ---- course of the ---- correspondence school. however, i don't believe that i sent in over two or three of the lessons. i was in the navy at the time, and whoever has been in the "outfit" knows that the average sailorman is lucky if he can write a letter home occasionally. however, i think that i digested pretty thoroughly ----'s book on the short story. since that time i have read a great number of books on fiction writing. there is no doubt but what they serve a very great purpose, but there must be a natural talent for the work first--of that i am satisfied. a word as to genius and talent. one chap has said that genius is hard work, or words to that effect. i don't agree. for instance: i might study music for fifty years and at the end of that period i'm well satisfied that i wouldn't even be able to extract a harmonious note from a jew's-harp. on the other hand, i believe that if there is such a thing as genius, it is merely a combination, or the result of a combination, of _talent_ (every-day natural talent) and a capacity for _hard work_. if a fellow has a natural talent, plus a capacity for darned hard work, he's got the "makin's" for genius. =harold lamb=: one classroom course in short story-writing, after i had had a good deal published--and filled space for the newspapers, bless 'em, and been part editor of a trade journal. i could not hear anything the professor said, but at the time his book was good reading. beyond the elementary stages it helped a good deal. in clearing up ideas before beginning work, and following the thread when a story was begun. (i think i missed a lot by not studying it more closely, being certain at the time that i knew more than editors or professors.) =sinclair lewis=: yes, classroom in yale--that _only_ (no books, etc.). classroom of no value at all. =hapsburg liebe=: i dickered a little (dabbled, rather) with some so-called story doctors along at the beginning. i don't believe it helped much. i've always had to do things my own way (very likely it's usually the wrong way). =romaine h. lowdermilk=: i don't know whether to be sorry or glad to admit i have had no special training. i suppose i am still in the elementary stage to a certain extent. i have purchased some books on story writing and the like and have long taken the ---- [magazine] but can sum the results as more inspirational than anything else. i have learned more about the actual wants of editors from chance notes they have sent with rejected or semi-accepted manuscripts. the actual building of the story is more common sense than anything else and i have done what i have done by plain "bare-handed writing." still, there is something wrong with this system, i know, for my best stories--those that appeal most to me and the ones i put the most into--have been rejected everywhere. why is that? to me they are far better than many i have sold, still they don't suit any editor. the story is surely there and possibly if the editors knew how i love to revise they would mention what seemed the matter. still, they haven't the time and don't care that much, i suppose. possibly a professional critic could spot the trouble, but i doubt it. i haven't tried it. but i suppose each writer has the same trouble. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: outside of college rhetoric, i've had no instruction in fiction writing beyond the helpful letters of editors. nor books, until after i had been writing for years. i can see that the books would have been a great help, possibly, had i had them in the elementary stages. but i was abroad and didn't happen to know about them. =rose macaulay=: never had them. =crittenden marriott=: no to everything. twelve years' newspaper work all over the world before i tried fiction. =homer i. mceldowney=: i have had a couple of courses in the short story, under a mighty fine scout--doc weirick, one of the best in the english department here at illinois--a good-natured, long suffering, able critic, and a fertile source of interesting information. i've got a lot out of the past year of hobnobbing with him. the course helped considerably, first, because it made us get down with nose to the key-board and knock out words, great stacks of them; and second, because there was a good man in charge, with ready and worth-while criticism of yarns submitted, and a real knowledge of what to read in the course. we "learned the way to promotion and pay," as kipling has it, not fundamentally from the pages of a book, but from writing. =ray mcgillivray=: i took aboard huge hunks of literary fodder in college, going the pace that killed--originality--through every course, from old english to a postgrad with barrett wendell. then, after applying this undigested knowledge to such pursuits as manual labor at sears, roebuck's, mixing ruby champagne cocktails at mouquin's, and cutting up a cadaver at medical school (ugh!), i reached, by devious byways of labor and loafing, a post as sub-sub-editor on one of the most unconventional national-circulation magazines in the world. i had contributed a few personal narrative articles, and needed a job.... the editor, a spunky irishman (gosh, come to think of it, i believe he claimed to be english!) jumped all over my "lit'ry allusions." he appeared abruptly before me one day, thrust two photos under my nose, and bade me assimilate an eyeful. i obeyed. one picture showed a japanese trench outside port arthur. headless bodies, detached limbs and blobs of entrails were festooned about the broken entanglements. it was brutal, terrible, but it depicted war and death. the second photo also dealt with death, but differently. six men were carrying a draped coffin, in which rested a man who in his lifetime had won a way into the heart of a nation. there was nothing in the picture save the varied expressions of restrained, sincere sorrow on the faces of the dead man's six friends. "this trench picture," quoth my boss, "is journalism. this other is art. now, _to hell with art_!" by that he meant that henceforth i was to tie a jingling can to my aristophanes, my tacitus--yea, even my bullfinch and my finchless bull. and i did. you never would have suspected how many miles of galley-proof a socrates-six could cover with five cylinders stripped out of the chassis! =helen topping miller=: i had been selling short stories for about twelve years before i read any books on the subject. i have never found a book from which i felt that i received any material benefit. many books have inspired me--but none of them ever helped me in the actual work of writing. =thomas samson miller=: never had a lesson of any kind from any one in story writing. don't believe in them. one's got to learn how to write by writing; to learn what not to do and what to do by experience. my only study was to take a short story that appealed to me in a magazine and _live_ with it; cut out all other reading. analyzed its plot, its characterization. wrote out every word written in it about a certain character to see just how the author got the character across. wrote the story from memory. read it so far, put it down, then tried to write the rest out of my head. =anne shannon monroe=: i have had neither classroom nor correspondence work in writing fiction. have read no books on the subject that i can remember, save a few stray passages from flaubert--seems to me he knew how. =l. m. montgomery=: i never took any kind of a course in writing fiction. such things may be helpful if the real root of the matter is in you, but i had to get along without them. i was born and brought up in a remote country settlement, twenty-four miles from a town and ten from a railway. there i wrote my first stories and my first four books. so no beginner need feel discouraged because of remote location or lack of literary "atmosphere." =frederick moore=: no. there may be people who can teach story writing--that is, stimulate to endeavor. the old hand can give tips to the beginner that keep him from getting off the track, but the writer must actually do his own creating. the creative impulse must exist to create, though technique is another thing. i believe everybody has the creative impulse in some degree. if it is weak, technique will avail nothing. the experts on technique are generally deficient in creative ability. if they had both, their expertness in technique would be smothered--that is, not apparent--while their creative ability would make them rich and famous. to put it another way, the mass of readers are not conscious of technique and simply say, "that writer writes fine stories." but the expert, or the novelist, says: "he is a wizard at creation, and good at technique." of course, technique may come as naturally to a writer as his creative ability--he or she may know how to handle the story so as to get the strongest effect, and we get, say, another _robinson crusoe_. but it is very apparent, in reading the complete story by defoe that he did not know where he was going when he set out. he flopped all over the shop until he got to his island, and i am convinced that at that point he struck his gait and knew what he was about. every story presents its own problem in technique--that is, merely the best way to tell that kind of a story. and there is a best way for every story--a way that fits the environment, the characters, and the happenings in that particular combination. once in a dog's age it is done, like _ethan frome_, or _the red badge of courage_, or _the call of the wild_. i regard every story as an experiment in chemistry. it is possible to blow yourself up, so to speak, or discover an elixir of life. most writers are known for one piece of work, though they have done many others. defoe wrote volumes and is known for _robinson crusoe_, while _lorna doone_ was the work of a novelist who wrote other volumes; also, consider _uncle tom's cabin_. and i believe that each of these three books was written at just the right moment to insure success: _crusoe_, when the english were fired with foreign exploration, _lorna doone_ when a peaceful life in the english countryside had become the ideal, and _uncle tom_ when the nation needed its arguments on slavery focussed into a tract which could be handed out with a kind of "here! read this, and see what you think of slavery _then_!" also, empey's _over the top_ came when the men getting ready for war needed something in the way of a text-book on war--"this is the sort of thing we can expect to get into." to me, one of the most discouraging things (but not personally) is that the higher the art in fiction, the less the number of appreciative readers. of course, i mean by that the kind of novels in which little actually happens outside the minds of the characters. i do not say such novels are best, but most critics do. and why do critics always criticize from a "trade standpoint," that is, as if novels were written for other novelists? the story that is most violently attacked by critics generally sells best. i am not saying that stories are written to sell, but that they are written to entertain, to arouse emotions, to give an experience in life that is likely to be missing in the life of the reader. the reader likes to see himself in the condition described and to wonder how he would react. and most great books have had difficulty in reaching print. so many editors are shouting for original stories, but they are actually afraid of stories that are too original--until that type of story has proved successful. then they all want something like it, and we develop another "school of fiction." but don't blame the editor for that--the public must be trained to that type, and an editor has to be a practical man if he wants to continue to edit. merely because a story is bizarre does not make it necessarily original, and if original, not necessarily desirable. what editors mean when they say "originality" is a new angle on an old idea or an old plot--but the age not apparent. i believe that the best fiction written in this country today is being published in the so-called "cheap magazines." that is, magazines devoted to fiction alone. they actually cost more than many of the "better magazines," and they are free of "jazz," degeneracy and sex. coated paper and good illustrations do not give quality to fiction. the bible printed on news stock would still be the bible, and the same is true of all other fiction, from shakespeare to date. there can be just as much art used in telling an adventure story as in any other kind--and as a matter of fact, more is needed in that kind of story than in the story which depends on sex for its interest. the fiction magazines have to deliver the goods, and many of them have a higher manuscript-account for their material than the fancier looking products. the so-called "cheap fiction" magazines have really developed our best american writers, generally speaking. these magazines have provided a market for the beginners and have encouraged them during their apprenticeship. if the same writers had to wait until they were able to sell to the "highbrows," many writers famous to-day would never have struggled on. many a person who has paid two dollars for a book held up as a fine piece of work is unaware that the chauffeur read the same story as a serial in a "cheap magazine." and _treasure island_ was sold as a serial to a "boy's shocker" and published under the name of _captain john north_. most people know _robinson crusoe_ as a classic, in spite of the fact that it has shipwreck, cannibalism, and killings galore. so "blood and thunder" comes nearer to representing life than many a devious study of some maniac's brain written in russia, for all the loud cries of the critics and others. for several years past the world has been all "blood and thunder" and many woke up to the fact that the human animal is given to violence and murder. this must all be considered by the person who sets out to write--and that person must remember that art is not always done with deliberation. sometimes it just happens. =talbot mundy=: no. =kathleen norris=: i had some college work in "daily themes," a sort of primary fiction work, for some six months, and i think it did me incalculable good. (this was before i ever wrote a line.) =anne o'hagan=: no. =grant overton=: i have never had any training in writing except what i have learned or sensed myself. i have read books about it but none of them amounts to a great deal. =sir gilbert parker=: never. fiction can't be taught! =hugh pendexter=: no. =clay perry=: at the age of fifteen years i subscribed to a combination course in journalism and short-story writing. it was absurd. in college i took a course in "the study of the novel" which helped steer my course toward a liking for good fiction ... perhaps. i have never read anything on fiction writing which helped me, that i know of, either in the elementary stages or beyond them. one friend who writes helped me more by a few suggestions and criticisms than anything i have ever read on the subject of writing. =michael j. phillips=: no. =walter b. pitkin=: i never studied writing under any teacher. i dodged all writing courses in college because they bored me to death and seemed to be engaged in unutterable piffle. i never read any text-books on rhetoric or style or story writing until i had been a professional journalist and writer for nearly ten years! =e. s. pladwell=: i have never studied anything in books or classrooms about fiction. i have glanced over one or two books on writing, but have not found them simplified enough. they start off with their arguments and then ramble away into the realms of theories, technique and other things which tend to becloud the mind away from the few broad general rules. =lucia mead priest=: i have had a not very thorough classroom training, with whatever books were prescribed--hill, wendell, etc., etc. i found them necessary, mildly stimulating. they brought me to the realization that literature was work of a profound character. everything has helped. i have not gone beyond the elementary stage. it is a big, big craft, a long, long trail. =eugene manlove rhodes=: none. =frank c. robertson=: i have had no classroom nor correspondence course and have read not to exceed a half dozen text-books on the subject, though i have long been a subscriber to the _editor_ magazine and more recently to the _writer's monthly_. such reading as i have done has helped, yet i am rather glad that i did not read enough at the start to become rule-bound. now i think i have literary poise enough that i can discard what is inapplicable to my own needs, and so i am constantly adding to my collection of books on the art of writing. also, within the last two months, i have formed the habit of sending my stories to a capable critic before offering them to magazines. i wish now that i had adopted this method long ago. the resulting self-analysis of my own work has been of more value to me than any other one factor. =ruth sawyer=: neither. =chester l. saxby=: i have read books on writing, but i found all of them vague and general or else too elementary. i have had a fair education in english, and i have the rudiments of an imagination for the english to work upon. the link between is for the most part a judgment of values (such as it is) gleaned in the college of hard knocks and nine danged slaving years of schooling in that institution, slaving and heart-rupture. but in beginning, books on writing and even courses certainly have their value. i've had the correspondence drill--with editors who've stood me up and knocked me down. but that's rough on the editors, if everybody does it. =barry scobee=: before i was twenty, or about that time, i took a course in short-story writing and newspaper also. don't remember what school of correspondence. i may have acquired a few basic principles; it probably did me some good. i never had classroom instruction in writing. i have studied a dozen books on the subject of fiction writing. at first, for a year or two, i struggled along without even knowing there was such a thing as books on the subject, or without ever talking to a single person in the world who knew the first thing about writing. then _the editor_ began to help me, and various books, especially on plot and, i think, price on the drama. these were a tremendous help to me in the preliminary stages. a fuller answer will be found under vii. =r. t. m. scott=: i have never taken a course of any kind in fiction writing. i have breezed through a few books on short stories but i have never studied them. most of the stories which i have sold have violated the rules laid down in these books. i am still in the elementary stage, however, and perhaps, some day, i shall be able to stick to the rules and still sell the stories. =robert simpson=: i have had no classroom or correspondence course. neither, as it happens, have i ever read any books on writing fiction. this was more a matter of chance than anything else. i've learned most of what i know of the technique of story writing from writing "bad ones" and finding out why they were bad; from the good advice of an editor or two, and from simple, cold-blooded analysis of my own and other men's work. this is a long and tedious process, but it has the advantage of being thorough if one is built for it. if i may say so, the method of study is largely up to the make-up of the individual, but, in agreement with a certain advertisement, "there are no short-cuts to quality." =arthur d. howden smith=: no. =theodore seixas solomons=: i never had a course. i have studied, or rather carefully read, one or two books on writing, and numerous articles. i think that the idea of unity has been the main derivative to me. the rest i usually saw to be true enough, almost axiomatically, from general considerations of art, but i do not think they helped--probably more because i did not actually study such writings than because they are incapable of lending real help. i do not see how a proper study of them in connection with exercise in writing can fail to be beneficial. yet such works, for the most part, are analyses of the reasons for things which must be understood instinctively and by experience, and then acquired, before the reasons make such appeal. =raymond s. spears=: no literary course except reading, deliberately undertaken for certain purpose, as reading ruskin to learn how to describe. i've read and tried to profit by practical books, handbooks, books on authorship, writers' biographies, etc. but i find my own view-point and methods are nowhere described or much helped by experience of others. =norman springer=: no. i once tried a university extension course in play writing. it was silly. of course, i read all the books i could find on the subject of story writing. they didn't help much. they told me something about the mechanics of a story (though even this information was usually buried beneath mountains of pompous academic phraseology), but they never gave me a clue to the solution of the more important question that worries the beginner--"how can i infuse spirit into the story; how can i make it live?" this questionnaire is really the first attempt i have encountered to _get behind the mechanics_. being of the "self-raised" variety of writer, i've had some experience with the "how to write a story" books, and i confess they harmed rather than helped me. all those i opened merely told me in technical, often almost unintelligible language just what my story sense was telling me in simple language. i didn't find a single book that took me behind the mechanics of the story. that is where the beginner is always trying to get to. about the hardest thing he has to learn is how to weigh, select and subdue thoughts. memorizing all the rules and learning all of o. henry's tricks by heart won't help him. but access to information such as your third query will bring out will help him. so will the news that he must discipline his imagination and make it obedient. think how we run wild and waste ourselves in the beginning. =julian street=: no courses. i've read, written and in my early stages been criticized by abler men--men like tarkington and harry leon wilson. i think it well for the absolute greenhorn to read and learn everything he can about the art, but he must have the power to discriminate between good and bad advice; and he must know whether he himself wishes to aim high or aim low--whether he wishes to run the risk of trying to produce something that may possibly live, always facing the great danger of failing in that aim, or whether he wishes to write popular truck. that will be determined ultimately, i think, by the character and tastes of the aspirant, but the sooner he acquires a definite aim, the better for him. =t. s. stribling=: have never had classroom or correspondence course in fiction. i did pay a dollar once to have a story criticized. afterward i wrote to the man and offered him his criticism back if he would return my dollar, but he wouldn't do it. =booth tarkington=: no course or books on writing fiction, ever. =w. c. tuttle=: i have never had any instructions on story writing, beyond the kindly help of a certain editor. once upon a time i bought some books on short-story writing. after reading them i ached from the reaction. i understood that i was all wrong. but there seemed to be no help for it; so i hid the books and went back to work. =lucille van slyke=: very superficial daily theme course in college my freshman year. very bad for me, i think, because i did it easily, got good marks and took no pains whatever. took me years to live that down! i have read and continue to read every book on fiction writing that i can find. in the elementary stages they helped a very little--oh, very little. not their fault, but mine, because i did not see how to apply them to my case. beyond the elementary stage i found that polti's _thirty six dramatic situations_ helped me to straighten out the plot difficulty i already mentioned. ----'s _short story writing_ did me good this way--i disagreed with it so violently that it cleared my ideas on many points--but i found myself singing, "now mother has a sausage machine and to-day she said to me, tom, tom, hurry back home, there'll be sausages for your tea--" =atreus von schrader=: i put in the winter of working with walter b. pitkin at columbia; i had written, without success, for some time. his genius, for that is what it amounts to, gave me a foundation and understanding that have been invaluable. general formulas and methods can be used to great advantage; to the greatest advantage when practise has made their use instinctive. =t. von ziekursch=: never had anything in that line. was introduced to a teacher of how to write fiction once and he bored me. =henry kitchell webster=: i've never had a classroom course or a correspondence course on writing fiction. i have read books on it, some of which interested me because i agreed with the writers and some of which interested me because i disagreed with them altogether. i am not conscious that the first sort ever caused me to cry out, "eureka!" though i may have decided, over an item in the second, "this is what i never do." =g. a. wells=: i have had no classroom course in story writing and deplore that fact a great deal. correspondence courses are valuable to this extent--they urge one to work and study by the reflection that he will have thrown away his money if he doesn't. the same results may be obtained by investing in a few good books on the subject of writing. i would strongly advise the beginner to let the correspondence schools alone. i have had much experience with them. none of them can possibly do what they so boldly assert in their literature. not so long ago i paid ninety dollars cash for a course in picture play writing. for that sum i received two thin books of instruction, three detailed synopses of plays produced (all of them rotten!) and twelve pamphlets of lectures. i learned nothing that i had not previously learned from text-books got from the public library. never again: (right hand up and left on heart.) it is of interest that most of these correspondence schools can't cite students who have been successful. one school cited me ---- ----. her stories appear in the ---- but nowhere else that i have ever noticed. i do not call that success. that is the only school of correspondence of about a dozen i have investigated that can cite a student who has had anything published in a reliable magazine, and i think that unless such a school can show such graduates it is scarcely worth bothering about. i attach great importance to books on the art of fiction writing. they have been of great value to me. the chief fault i find with these books is that they refer the student for examples to stories that are not easily available to a great many people. too, they incline too much toward citation of the classics, such as poe, dickens, thackeray and others. the student should have for his examples kipling, o. henry, london, melville post and the modern writers. current magazine fiction is as a rule out of the question. but after all the only way to learn to write fiction is to write fiction. i am of that number who contend that fiction writing can't be taught. it must be learned. but first of all one must have talent for it. that talent can't be acquired, though, given that, it can be cultivated. if one hasn't a talent for writing fiction all the teaching of all the teachers won't make one a writer of fiction. education alone will not suffice, though i have had people say to me, "he should be able to write stories, he is so highly educated." it is to laugh. i say that the man with the gift or knack for writing fiction will turn out a writer in the end if he applies himself, regardless of schools and books teaching the method and art. in this town is a woman, very highly educated, who studied two years in the classes of dr. ---- at columbia. she has tried time and again to sell stories she has written, but up to date without success. from time to time i have had people come to me for information on the business of writing. the first thing i ask for is some of their stuff. not an editor in the country would print such truck. this is rather unseemly in one who himself turns out a great deal of worthless truck, but i can see the faults of others better than my own. i can't see my own at all. the best text books on the subject are to be found on the news-stands--_adventure_, _american_, _saturday evening post_, _harper's_, etc. these should come first because they show the finished product of people who are actually succeeding at what the student aspires to do. it is the whole machine that can be taken down to learn how it was assembled in the first place. text-books, i think, are valuable to the student in proportion to their relationship to him. are they really prepared for the student, or written because the author had certain views he wished to publish about a certain subject? i think they should suggest rather than dictate. the author should say, "let's try this and see what happens," and not "do this or you are damned." in short, i have found most text-books far too dictatorial. detailed laws and rules should be avoided. the student should get the general impression, but be left free to modify his performances to suit existing needs or to satisfy his individual point of view. of course there are certain laws of story writing that preclude dispute by their very obviousness. i don't pay any more attention to the rules of story writing than i do to a fly on a chinaman's nose in canton. it therefore galls me to have a text-book author tell me that i must do thus and so. all i want him to do is to give me the platform to stand on. i'll make and speak my own piece in my own way. if he is going to write and make my speech i'll step down. =william wells=: no. =ben ames williams=: i've never taken any "course" in story writing. i once read a book on it. it helped me not at all. the books that have helped me most in the technical work of writing are books of criticism. any of the standard works. =honore willsie=: neither. =h. c. witwer=: i have never had any course of any kind in short story writing, or, i should say, in writing. nor have i read or studied books on the art, gift, trade, profession, crime, or whatever it may be. i have about me at all times as working tools, a dictionary, roget's _thesaurus_, shakespeare, _encylopedia brittanica_, bartlett's _familiar quotations_. find all invaluable. =william almon wolff=: no courses at all. the best book i know is not about narrative fiction at all--it's william archer's _play making_. that has been and remains, invaluable to me. i think, incidentally, that it's helpful to think of a story in "scenes." =edgar young=: no classroom course. wrote several stories before i ever knew there was such a thing as a book on the subject. must have learned something by reading current magazines but was where i couldn't get them for years when in south america. since being here in new york have read many of the books concerning writing. summary of answering, have used neither class, course or book, have tried one or more of these, and , saying only that they took no course, are probably to be included with those having tried none of the three. of the who have tried one or more of the three, give definite reply as to whether, in the elementary stages, they derived benefit, as follows: much benefit, ; benefit, ; some benefit, ; total . no benefit, ; some harm, ; harm, ; much harm, ; total, . there are who state they derived "little benefit" and this presumably is to be taken as a negative answer. in any case, out of there are who derived little or no benefit in the elementary stages of learning their art, and of the state that they derived actual harm instead of benefit. add the fact that if the remaining of the who have used one or more of the three derived any benefit they did not take the trouble to say so, which would indicate that, if there were any benefit at all, it was not a considerable one. add the additional damning fact that of the answering the general question (probably ) have not found it necessary to success to use any of the three. out of writers only claim any benefit, in even the elementary stages, from classes, courses or books purporting to teach the writing of fiction! ninety-eight against fifteen! that testimony fills me with joy. yes, i've written a book myself on fiction writing, but it had not been published when this questionnaire was answered, it was written largely as an earnest protest against present methods of teaching fiction and a chief purpose of this questionnaire and of this present book giving its results was to get proof in facts from a final source that present teaching methods, as practised in all but a tiny handful of cases, are badly in need of revolutionary revision. my feeling in the matter was not due to theorizing. for twenty years my life-business has been the handling of the results of those methods as they pour in in the form of submitted manuscripts across the editorial desk. for twenty years it has been my business to deal with the authors and would-be authors who write those manuscripts, to try to find their strong points and their weak points and to ferret out the causes and the remedies. they have worked with me to this end and have talked frankly. even if there had been only the manuscripts themselves to look at, it would have been evident enough that there was some general cause, other than the writers' inabilities, for the wide-spread and persistent weaknesses that were making most of those manuscripts unavailable or at least far below the standards possible to their authors. if only half of our successful writers have been touched by these methods, remember that the successful writers are only some ten per cent. of those who write and that the remaining ninety per cent. are more prone to turn to formal books and teaching. the man or woman with pronounced native ability is more likely to hew his own way or go to first courses, particularly after examining the outside helps available. do not forget, too, that these prevalent weaknesses in manuscripts are due not only to positive faults in teaching methods, but to the lack of really helpful, constructive advice and guiding. a chief bad result of these teaching methods will be taken up in our consideration of the question on the value of technique. to take up all the bad results in detail would fill more space than the nature of this volume warrants its devoting to the subject. while only derived benefit from these methods in the elementary stages, still fewer-- --found benefit in the more advanced stages. one might expect the falling off to be still more pronounced until one remembers that these books and courses, whatever their general faults, do cover a vast number of specific points and that in the discussion of these points a writer who has already built his own foundations can often find suggestion and information of decided value to him without suffering from the general faults. none of our answerers reports harm, in advanced stages, from these methods and none reports failure to get benefit in the advanced stages specifically, though many simply give a "no" to the general question of benefit. considering class, course and book separately, of reporting definitely on class experience state benefit of varying degree in elementary stages, though one of these expresses doubt; , "little"; , none, of these reporting harm. only one reports on advanced stages--no benefit. on correspondence courses, state experience; , benefit; , probably some; , "little"; , none. this as to elementary stages. on advanced stages only reports--some benefit. on books report. on elementary stages, ; benefit, ; possibly, ; little, ; no benefit, ; harm, . on advanced stages, , including some of the reporting also on elementary stages; benefit, ; little, ; no benefit, . tabulating negatively, of the specifically report no class experience; no correspondence course; no book. as already stated, --or --make a blanket report of using none of the three. unfortunately the questionnaire did not include a specific question on benefit derived from magazines devoted to writers and their art. in spite of this omission three or four voluntarily reported benefit therefrom in elementary stages and no one volunteered to report harm or lack of benefit. if reports had been asked for on these magazines, i believe it would have been far more favorable than on books, classes or courses. these magazines use many articles by writers telling their own experiences, difficulties, solutions. the people best equipped to teach others are those who have themselves learned how--who have accomplished, not merely theorized. each is handicapped as a teacher by the facts that his methods and principles are naturally those he has found best adapted to his own individual case, that the needs of no two individuals are exactly alike and that his methods may be for some others altogether useless or even harmful. but in these magazines where many writers are heard from these very differences appear and the intelligent reader can pick and choose with profit. most of all, he learns that no one rule applies to all writers alike. question vi _how much of your craft have you learned from reading current authors? the classics?_ answers =bill adams=: i have to admit that i know no current authors--i _never_ read a magazine story, and exceedingly seldom a book. used to read a great deal twenty to twenty-five years ago. =samuel hopkins adams=: how can one tell? i might guess at half and half. =paul l. anderson=: mostly the classics: that's one reason i haven't sold more stuff--too old-fashioned. =william ashley anderson=: not much--if any--from current writers, with a few isolated examples--except for those who have already become standard: kipling, and authors of similar standing in various countries. i believe strongly in the classics and regret very much that they were not very deeply ingrained in me when i was at school, as they were fundamental in literature. i believe just as strongly in the standard works of literature. but i believe a professional author wastes time reading current authors, unless the work has distinct and special merit and is brought to his attention. =h. c. bailey=: i should put the classics (using the word in the widest sense, say from homer and the bible to maupassant and mark twain) first. good models are of any time and all time. from good models living and dead and what i know of their methods i learned any craftsmanship i have. =edwin balmer=: when i began writing i considered kipling and richard harding davis and sophocles about the best writers in the world. i had taken a great deal of greek in college and took an m. a. at harvard in greek and when i finished i could read classical greek almost as readily as english. i remember consciously admiring and trying to put into my writing some of the sense of quantity which the greeks used. the first story i ever sold to a magazine was certainly strongly influenced in its wording by greek models. i still think greek literature second to none. =ralph henry barbour=: who knows the answer to this question? not i! =frederick orin bartlett=: i have absorbed, rather than learned, a great deal from current authors--especially english authors. the classics i feel to be an invaluable background--a background that too many american authors lack. =nalbro bartley=: from the classics, i think i have learned much--also from the daily newspapers but not from current authors. =konrad bercovici=: reading current authors i have learned what not to do. i have only learned something about writing from the bible, a little more from balzac, and if writing were a trade and i were a young man, i should apprentice myself now to anatole france. =ferdinand berthoud=: none. don't read current authors. have never read the classics. i wrote my first story for my own amusement and without knowing that it was a story, and without any single thought of how other people wrote. =h. h. birney, jr.=: can't honestly say i've gained a great deal from either. try to read current authors to learn, if possible, the secret of just how they "put it over." have read most of the "classics" and have doubtless, though unconsciously, benefitted from them. =farnham bishop=: i've read everything from diamond dick to marcus aurelius, beginning early and sitting up late, mixing my reading till now it is utterly hopeless for me to disentangle the results and reactions. there are huge gaps in it, and some rather odd specializations. how much have i learned from homer and vergil, and how much from kipling and conan doyle? blessed if i know the exact proportions! but i think that varying your reading is a safeguard against writing pseudo-kiplingese and diluted o. henry. =algernon blackwood=: none. i read little fiction. as a boy i missed the classics, and have only made up a little of this leeway since. i never read a story without feeling how completely otherwise my own treatment of his idea would have been--probably, that is, how much better his treatment is than mine. =max bonter=: whatever i may have learned from contemporaries has been acquired unconsciously and without design. i studied milton intensively with the idea of letting some of his wonderful construction sink into me--particularly the first two books of _paradise lost_. have never regretted the time so spent. =katharine holland brown=: hard to answer. reared on the classics,--by the simple device of keeping them on the top shelves, with the grave command, "not to be read till you grow up." will admit to an extreme preference for the most recent of the current fiction. =f. r. buckley=: hard to say how much i got from classics and so on. a great deal. rough guess--should say rudyard kipling and an english author named neil lyons were my best teachers. =prosper buranelli=: reading current literature does nothing but harm. read sophocles. =thompson burtis=: i should say that all the superficialities of the craft i have learned from current authors. fundamentals, such as vocabulary and characterization, i believe i learned from the classics. as a young and green writer, i believe i am picking up tricks of the trade constantly from my contemporaries. =george m. a. cain=: how much i owe to reading current or classic authors i have not the slightest idea. i have not consciously studied the work in half a dozen stories. and i have not, within my memory, read a story without a certain critical attitude which unconsciously noted its structural features. for all the readiness with which my mind conjures settings for what i read, i don't think i have ever read anything without constant consciousness of the man who wrote it, or ever forgotten to watch the writing. though i was late in putting my efforts to actual use, my desire to write fiction goes back of my memory. at twelve years of age i was habitually putting into words every emotion and situation and scene i saw, experienced or felt. i shall never know in this world to what degree that has reacted upon me to make me everlastingly the actor of what i imagined i should be rather than the natural doer of what i was. perhaps i should put it that the expression of things has always assumed entirely undue importance. in that attitude, i have unconsciously studied everything i have read. and here i might mention that, for me, the greatest difficulty of the relation between reading and writing is the avoidance of unconscious imitation. i can not read ten pages of addison or irving, still less of gibbon or macaulay, without having my writing run into sonorous cadences that frequently are as out of place as a gregorian hymn-tune for a coon-song's words. writers of striking idiosyncrasy, like o. henry, or samuel blythe in his humorous sketches, wodehouse, or harry leon wilson, or anything in slang or dialect, are completely fatal to the straightaway putting of what i want to say which is my only notion of a style of my own. =robert v. carr=: i might imagine some writer helped me, when he merely salved my prejudice or put into words certain racial memories that harmonized with mine. =george l. catton=: consciously, little. subconsciously, it is hard to say; perhaps all of it. from the classics, ancient classics, none. never had the patience to wade through a lot of explanatory matter and minute detail i found in the so-called classics--to get at a fact or truth that could have been put in one sentence to stand out in the clear. classics? not to my way of thinking! i don't have to be told one thing twenty different ways to get the guts of it. classics? old-fashioned expositions of old-fashioned views and ideas, most of which have been exploded long ago. =robert w. chambers=: current authors, nothing. classics, much. =roy p. churchill=: both are necessary. the classics for vocabulary. people and current writers for modern styles. one is as valuable as the other to me. =carl clausen=: a great deal. =courtney ryley cooper=: none from current authors. a lot from the classics, all devoured by the time i was sixteen. i had read everything from dickens to gautier by that time. =arthur crabb=: i think i have learned very little from reading current authors, if you mean by current authors the average writer for the popular magazines. i used to read a great many stories, but of late years have practically stopped doing it. i have read and am reading constantly classics, if by that you mean great books written in the last three or four hundred years. i think that one of the reasons i am not more successful is that i try to write, as i see it, along the lines of the great novelists and haven't the goods. if i aimed at a less pretentious mark i would probably do a great deal better. =mary stewart cutting=: i have read everything classic and current that i could lay my hands on from the age of six. =elmer davis=: haven't learned it. =william harper dean=: my work is influenced greatly from reading current authors. little through the classics, unless you include dickens among the latter. from him i have absorbed an invaluable conception of what the true meaning of atmosphere is, the weight of the short sentence and the power of the long one. but i am inspired in many ways when i read hall caine or hutchinson or hamsun or conrad. i aspire to the easy, forceful style of hutchinson, i want to be able to handle my characters with that charming grace which characterizes conrad. =harris dickson=: i read spasmodically current fiction, browse among the classics and naturally pick up ideas. these pick-ups are not, as a rule, conscious. things just soak in, as water soaks into the ground and a spring comes out somewhere else. =captain dingle=: impossible for me to say. if i have learned from anybody it has been unconsciously. had i taken a master, i suspect i might have got farther. =louis dodge=: i get enthusiasm from reading current authors and the classics; but i try to find my own stories among people and tell them in my own way. to me a good book is like a preacher (the "ungracious pastor" of shakespeare): it says to me "be good"--but it doesn't show me how. =j. allan dunn=: i don't know. don't believe much until i had myself acquired a certain amount of technique and could recognize the cleverness of others. =phyllis duganne=: i've learned a great deal from reading current authors. it's interesting to read a story and like it, and then pick it to pieces to see how its writer made me feel as he did, how he made scenes so vivid and people so real, how he took an ancient plot and made it worth reading even when i knew after the first paragraph what the end would be. and it's instructive. and i suppose the same thing holds more or less in the classics. i'm much more interested in the modern school, so far as my own work is concerned. =walter a. dyer=: i have read studiously both modern authors and the classics, and have got more inspiration from the latter. =walter richard eaton=: nobody can say for me, i'd answer. one learns much of his "craft" (in both senses!) from a study of his market, the magazines. that is, he adapts the size (length) of his story, etc., to the editorial demands. =e. o. foster=: i have been an "omnivorous reader" all my life, the dictionary and encyclopedia being my favorite works. =arthur o. friel=: nearly all from current writers. =j. u. giesy=: all of it except what i have worked out myself. have been a somewhat omnivorous reader all my life. =george gilbert=: no author can answer that, for he does not know himself. =kenneth gilbert=: current authors have been very helpful; classics scarcely at all. =holworthy hall=: if i have learned anything at all about any "craft," i have learned it from leonard merrick, mary rinehart and theophile gautier. =richard matthews hallet=: i've probably learned a lot from reading current authors. couldn't quite say how or what; and people who read me may doubt the above proposition. the danger of watching the tricks of a contemporary consists in liability to ape him in your own stuff, especially if he is a powerful contemporary. we have with us all the time young shadow-forms of kipling, o. henry, etc. i dogged conrad nearly to my undoing. a man with some writing instinct can pick up the mannerisms of another writer as easily as butter absorbs a taint. the danger from reading the classics is less, and such reading is probably worth more to a man. =william h. hamby=: not consciously from either: although i know i must have benefited from both, especially modern writers. =a. judson hanna=: i can not say that reading the classics has helped me to write a story which will sell to an american magazine. i have received much valuable help by reading current authors. for instance, a story appearing in ---- has passed the test. by studying it i get an idea of what makes a short story. however, the most help i have ever received i gained from criticisms, by magazine editors, of rejected stories. =joseph mills hanson=: it seems to me difficult to estimate how much of one's craftmanship in writing has been gained from reading the work of others and how much from his own impelling instincts and impulses. if he feels the necessity of expressing himself in writing, his natural abilities and limitations in narration probably govern his craftsmanship in greater degree than any reading. i believe, however, that my own _style_ has been influenced at different times by different writers who aroused my admiration, both current authors and classic ones. such influence i think is detrimental to one's individual style and should be guarded against. even a poor individual style is better than a poor imitation of another's style. but the _general effect_ of reading good authors can not but be elevating and improving to one's own imagination and narrative ability. =e. e. harriman=: have developed more disgust than delight in reading current authors, because i find so much that is rotten-incorrect-ridiculous and out of reason in them. for instance ---- ---- telling us that when on skiis, crossing snow five feet deep, he found a bird sitting on its eggs in a nest. and ---- ---- giving a grizzly bear a round track. the classics help me most. for clearness in composition--shakespeare and the bible. drummond's poems aid me. being foolish enough to do some versifying myself helps me in prose writing. =nevil g. henshaw=: i've got a lot from both, possibly more from current authors. =joseph hergesheimer=: all my early and important reading was in the english lyrical poets. =robert hichens=: i have learned, i think, a great deal by reading certain authors, but not current authors. a book that has helped me is tolstoy's _author's art_. =r. de s. horn=: after the beginner has got the fundamentals of writing straight in his mind the greatest assistance he can get anywhere is from reading current authors and the classics. the classics show him the art at its highest form: the models of technique. the current authors show him the popular style and the trend of the times. neither one should be studied to the exclusion of the other. a fifty-fifty ration is best, i think. =clyde b. hough=: "how much of your craft have you learned from reading current authors?" absolutely all that i know. "from the classics?" none. i don't strive to write classics, so why study them? the classics of today, most of them, were not considered classics when they were written. and the good human stories of to-day will be the classics of to-morrow. =emerson hough=: i hope i never imitated any current author. could not any classic. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: i don't know; but i think wide reading (not necessarily, or even at all, fiction) is necessary to good writing. =inez haynes irwin=: i do not think i have gained anything technically from reading the classics--with the exception of the elizabethan dramatists. and i can not say exactly that they helped me technically--they delighted, thrilled and inspired me. i suppose, to be perfectly fair, i ought to say that the russian novelists, who also dominated my girlhood, gave me my taste for realism. i have learned more than i can tell from the work of my contemporaries. when i was at radcliffe college, following i think the example of stevenson, my harvard instructor had the class write themes in imitation of the bible, dryden, walton, addison, johnson, goldsmith, etc., etc. i believe now it would have had infinitely more value if we had been studying the short stories which were appearing in _mcclure's magazine_ at that period--a great period in american short-story writing. i can not overestimate how much i have gained from the short fiction of such writers as o'henry, percival gibbons, edna ferber, fanny hurst, joseph hergesheimer, willa cather, and of course henry james and joseph conrad. =will irwin=: i suppose that i have learned a great deal of my craft from both current authors and the classics. how much, it would be hard to say. one absorbs such training unconsciously. =charles tenney jackson=: as to "current authors and the classics" i read the former very little; and the latter seem to be part of a past curiosity which left me with a certain vague, large respect much as you would give to a ninth-century cathedral or a tapestry. i reckon they did their durndest in their time, but i could wish that some athenian philosopher had stopped a moment to record what he ate for breakfast, how the family wash was handled, what he shaved with ... all about the life about him, in fact; the picture, the color, the motives of folk about him. my imagination turns from the temples to what possibly housed the cobbler who mended caesar's sandals, and where his children played. the guesses of the classic writers as to the riddle of life are not of interest, for i have my own; but i would like to know the flavor of the common life about them. =frederick j. jackson=: i can't say how much technique i have learned from reading current authors. the classics is an easier question. the answer is about nothing, net, plus war tax. =mary johnston=: i do not know. =john joseph=: have been a tremendous reader and student of both current and classic literature, and if i know anything at all about writing i must have picked it up in this manner. =lloyd kohler=: i think that it's safe to say that i've learned a good half of my craft from reading and _studying_ current authors and the classics. there is a danger in this, especially if one follows a certain current author too closely. it's best to read them all. as to the classics, there is little danger of ever getting too much of them--i'd venture that the average of us don't get enough of the classics. i know that i don't. =harold lamb=: current authors, no. i read them very little as a boy, and hardly at all as an author. the classics, yes, if you let me name my own classics. they were my friends. they still are my friends. i refer to the coterie gathered together in the libraries of my grandfather and uncle. messrs. gustave doré, Ã�sop, the nibelungs, roland and oliver--the song, you know--pierrot, prince of tatary, the apostles, dante in purgatory, plato, rider haggard, napoleon, don quixote de la mancha (but sancho panza was a better chum). a host of others. but these had the finest pictures--an artist's library, and a poet's. so they were my earliest friends. i had others. especially francois villon, catullus, henry, babur, li po, macdonald, robert burns. =sinclair lewis=: i don't know. =hapsburg liebe=: since i never had any schooling, i guess i learned the little i know from reading, both modern authors and classics--i haven't read enough of the classics; they seem wordy to me. the average magazine, i guess, wouldn't buy or publish half the classics now if they were new. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: can't say. more from current authors, anyway. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: can't say, but doubtless i've learned a great deal from reading current authors (for technique in current fiction) and from the classics for the basic fundamentals. =rose macaulay=: a great deal. =crittenden marriott=: mighty little. =homer i. mceldowney=: thus far, i should say that current authors have had more influence upon my writing than have the classics, due to the fact that i read rather for amusement than for any lasting good which i might derive. =ray mcgillivray=: in so far as any one must be blamed, i believe the classics--if you'll stretch the definition to include also nick carter, old sleuth and the dalton boys--are responsible. _i_ set the onus of responsibility at the door of my own general cussedness, the trait which makes me lay off _any_ labor any time a bunch of good pals takes a notion to drift from here to helangon, taking as equipment a deck of cards, a few well-hidden quarts, a couple of rifles and shotguns, a camera and some merry songs of the road as cargo for the old gas-buggy. such a guy _must_ write; it's about the only excuse he's got to live--except the living, which is joy. =helen topping miller=: i read all the classics when i was very young. how much of my ability to write i owe to those early associations i am not able to judge. of late i have naturally studied the craft of successful current authors. from modern novels i do not feel that i gain anything; indeed it is very rarely that i am able to finish a book without being dismally bored. on the other hand, scientific and historical works, especially ancient history and religious history, fascinate me. travel also forms a large part of my reading. =thomas samson miller=: impossible to say how much i am indebted to current authors and the classics. this is all subjective. =anne shannon monroe=: i do not read many current authors--haven't the time. i know many are good and i miss a great deal, but out on our coast we just have twenty-four hours a day, the same as in new york, and some of them must be spent in the open, when the open is such an enchanting wonderland. i read the classics in school-days--had bookish parents who drove them down our throats--but not since. =l. m. montgomery=: i think i owe considerable to my greedy reading and rereading of standard fiction--the old masters--scott, dickens, thackeray, hawthorne. occasionally, too, a well-written modern magazine story has been helpful and illuminating. but, as a rule, i think aspiring authors will not reap much benefit from current fiction--except perhaps from a purely commercial point of view in finding out what kind of stories certain magazines take! most writers, except those of absolute genius, are prone to unconscious imitation of what they read and that is a bad thing. =frederick moore=: i can not gauge what the classics have done for me. there is some "bunk" about classics. but i believe that behind every writer there is the inherited tendency to write. this trait seems to well up, even if several generations have been skipped in the art. the creative urge does not always show itself in the same _metier_--for instance, it will crop out as music in one generation, as painting or sculpture in another, or as invention. =talbot mundy=: god knows. i haven't read much. kipling has given me more pleasure than any other writer. have only just begun to read. had no particular education, beyond the usual grounding in latin, greek and "english"--all worked into me with a stick and with all the useful parts left out. =kathleen norris=: the best modern authors, and all the classics one can assimilate, seem to me indispensable. but unless one can read them in their own languages it is obvious that the only gain would be in plot, construction and character work. but every one, from milton to galsworthy, for _style_. =anne o'hagan=: i can't answer this, but i should say that i had learned most of my craft from reading the english classics. =grant overton=: in the beginning i really learned everything from reading. i do not think one learns his writer's craft directly from reading either current authors or the classics. i think he gets from good reading a mental elevation and impetus. the rest must come out of himself. =sir gilbert parker=: nothing. i have always gone my own way, good or bad. =hugh pendexter=: i am not conscious of being helped by current fiction, which i read for entertainment purely. i studied and taught latin and greek but could never discover my work in those subjects has helped me any in my work of writing. =clay perry=: i am afraid it is impossible to answer such a question. undoubtedly the reading of the classics when i was a boy has had a more lasting influence upon me than the reading of current authors in the past few years. if by "classics" is meant recognized craftsmanship by modern authors, i should say that i had learned a great deal from such writers as jack london, edith wharton, hall caine and a score of modern writers whose style and craftsmanship is good. (one or both.) =michael j. phillips=: i have not read the classics extensively. i can't see dickens nor shakespeare. i consider charles reade, the _cricket on the hearth_ fellow, and blackmore, who wrote _lorna doone_, great artists and i suppose they influenced me. of course i have been taught very largely by my job, which has practically always been newspaper work. in the shortest newspaper item there must be a certain construction. it must have a beginning, tell its story in orderly fashion, and an end. in my formative newspaper days i had the advantage of being trained by a metropolitan newspaper man who was the best judge of news values i ever knew. he taught me unerringly, or nearly unerringly, to put my finger on the novel, the dramatic, the leading feature of a newspaper article, or "story," and play it up. i think that this has been of great assistance to me in fiction writing; that is, i believe it has taught me selection and emphasis--what to write and what was the more important. =walter b. pitkin=: what i have learned about writing has definitely come from little reading, much observation, and an irresistible tendency to write about all sorts of things. nobody ever urged me to write. i began it when i was a schoolboy, kept elaborate journals, sold a story when i was about ten years old for ten dollars, wrote essays, treatises, fantasies, poems, everything but plays, in fact; and have probably written in my life, in one way or another, at least twenty million words of copy. i have never liked the classics; have read very little in them; know only three of dickens, four of thackeray, never a novel of george eliot, and so on. am bored to death by things that are not contemporary and verifiable in my own life. (this is probably a violent reaction against too much study of ancient philosophy and literature when a youth.) =e. s. pladwell=: classics and current authors have their reflective influence upon the mind; but i have refrained from trying to study any of them with one exception. kipling's magnificent condensation i believe to be worthy of emulation. as for o. henry, i think he is the curse of american writers. the person who reads one of his stories can not help but try, unconsciously, to ape the brilliant gallop of his style, and they all come to grief. the other authors have their styles, but to me they give little that is remarkable. with them it is the story that counts. =lucia mead priest=: i have always been a reader; i can not answer you. may be all i have ever done has come out of the reservoir of many years' storage. i should say it is a toss-up between the classics and modern literature. creative power is low and i have been a great reader; there you are! may be all of me is somebody else. can you unravel that? =eugene manlove rhodes=: current authors, none. the classics, all. =frank c. robertson=: i should say that i have learned about seventy-five per cent. of my craft from reading current authors, and about one per cent. from the classics. perhaps this is because i have devoted about the same proportion of time to reading each. =ruth sawyer=: everything i know has been gained through contact with authors--and these largely the so-called classical. coupled with these, the most helpful stimuli i have had have come from the constructive criticisms given by kindly and humane editors. =chester l. saxby=: the classics are mainly barren stuff for me--labored writing, involved presentation, devious and unnecessary description and reference, slag-heaps of introspection. i've learned from them--what not to do. but from current authors i have gained everything. i could say i have my little saints: mary johnston, booth tarkington, jack london, margaret deland, ben ames williams, richard harding davis. =barry scobee=: tee-totally nothing, unless it might be for a few minor--what shall i say, tricks of technique? this in the current story. i seem to have been unable to get anything from reading other writers, except in the instance of one or two i have come to know. =r. t. m. scott=: so far as current authors are concerned--and even the classics--i find that, when i try to derive benefit from them, i imitate and fall down. in other words i fail to be myself and a man can be nobody as well as he can be himself. of course a man may derive knowledge and inspiration from all good authors, but he takes those qualities and builds them into himself so that they are part of himself. in this way all good reading is beneficial and i have benefitted. one thing might be pointed out. the classics stick in my memory much more than does the work of modern authors. =robert simpson=: i have learned a great deal from studying how "the other fellow" did it. this applies to all sorts of writing from that of the rawest novice to scott and boccaccio. but dumas, hugo, balzac, dickens, stevenson, kipling, o. henry, addison, swift, lamb, newman, carlyle, emerson and several others of the big guns among fictioneers and essayists have had most influence on whatever style and technique i've achieved in twenty years of trying to learn how to write. =theodore seixas solomons=: i have no idea how much current authors have taught me. mighty little that is useful, i believe, in comparison with the dangers to imitation they have constituted. the classics, however, read largely in youth, must have been of tremendous influence, but chiefly, i think, in the matter of expression. i think the story-telling art is a thing antecedent to any influence of stories or story-tellers, common or classic. =arthur d. howden smith=: most of it, i should say, in about equal proportions. =raymond s. spears=: i read magazines rather than authors, for i find that magazines generally group authors rather sharply--perhaps i should say magazines group moods of authorship. i read what i like, and i have five feet of bandits, badmen, desperadoes above fifteen feet of mississippi river; and ten feet of outdoor hand-books and information, including pearls, formulas, wild animals, under six feet of classics, including borrow, plutarch, poe, ruskin, emerson, etc. i am not conscious of playing any favorites among classics, dime novels, hand-books, government documents, poetry, history, natural history, etc. =norman springer=: practically all i have learned about story writing. i've tackled the living and the dead both, with good results. =julian street=: i've read both--that is in english. i believe that latin and greek (languages i don't know) tend to increase one's vocabulary and beautify one's style. i know some french and italian and i think languages help. it is good to read french--for delicacies of expression and grace of style. "the style is the man." =t. s. stribling=: i think i picked up most of my ideas on how to write from the russians. =booth tarkington=: learned nothing from reading current authors; all from authors now dead. from the classics, i don't know what proportion. =w. c. tuttle=: at the risk of being called a "low-brow" i must admit that i do not enjoy the classics. i have only read a few, which is another "low" admission. i feel toward them as i do toward the old masters in art--admit that they are wonderful--and change the subject. =lucille van slyke=: i ar'n't larned me my craft and never expect to. i don't want to be either a deliberate or unconscious copy cat. but i'll tell you this--it sounds funny but it isn't--mother goose is actually the biggest help i have as a writer. almost any situation in life or books or plays will sum itself up in a mother goose rhyme, plot and all. and if any writer knows a better 'ole--let him go to it! =atreus von schrader=: with rare exceptions i find that i very much prefer the classics, using that term in its broader sense, to current writers. this is true only of the longer forms of fiction. the short story, in its present state, has been developed within the last decade or two. jack london, for example, is of another period; tremendously colorful, but too often lacking in plot. upon rereading your question, i find i have only half answered it. i believe the modern american short story is in a class by itself for neatness and finish of plot. but for color and substance, for care and matured thought, the older writers are our masters. =t. von ziekursch=: do not believe i have learned anything much from reading current authors. do not know about the classics. like the greeks, the latins, the french and russians. thoreau, anatole france, etc. am at a loss to answer this. john t. mcintyre, who to me is a master of technique, has probably done more than anything else for me by pointing out faulty tendencies to be guarded against. =henry kitchell webster=: i don't know. =g. a. wells=: what i have was gained both from moderns and the classics in about equal proportions. i would say that the classics taught me style, the moderns structure. the two writers most responsible for what style i may show are macaulay and emerson, though i would feel guilty did i fail to mention lowell, stevenson, addison, carlisle, fenimore cooper. there are others i can't call at the moment. to me, macaulay is the peer of all writers, whether modern or classic, and i attribute my style to him. for structure i would earnestly recommend post, o. henry, kipling, mrs. rinehart in the novel, and de maupassant; and more intimately, gordon young, mundy, solomons and pendexter, to mention a few. a student should not study the classics for structure, provided he wishes to write modern fiction. and to even matters, he should not study the moderns for style. moderns have style, but it is not the quality of the classics. =william wells=: don't know; have read very widely, some translations of the classics, am familiar with nearly all that is best in both american and english literature. =ben ames williams=: i'm unable to recall having learned anything about writing from reading modern authors. what i have learned from them has been acquired unconsciously. i've read comparatively little written by living writers, except that for four years i read all the magazines, every issue, all the way through. i had never read conrad at all till some fatuous reviewer compared one of my stories to his work; the same is true of hardy. i am entirely at odds with the play-in-the-dirt school of modern writers. they may be right; but the things that seem to them ugly and depressing seem to me beautiful and even glorious. they, i think, look at them from the outside. but as the fellow said, many an honest heart beats under a ragged jacket. i'm not talking about sex stories. i've no quarrel with them. i'm talking about the _main street_ school. if a man tries to take care of his family and help them forward, i don't care whether he appreciates dunsany or not; and if a woman loves her husband and her children, she doesn't lose caste in my eyes by failing to appreciate amy lowell. there are other tests of manhood and womanhood besides a razor-edge taste in literature; and one of the most valorous and admirable men i know, a guide in the maine woods, who loves his neighbors, speaks not uncharitably, helps when he can and tells the truth, can not even read his own name. there is a splendor in the commonplace life which most of us live, even though the only novel in the house may have been written by harold bell wright, and the only poetic works may be the _book of job_ and the _song of songs_. the assumption that when fine men die they must pass an examination on art before entering the pleasant ways that wait for them seems to me utterly unsound. but this is beside the point; a digression. to the second head of the question: i get a distinct inspirational stimulus from reading the more-or-less classics. kipling, de maupassant, poe and some parts of o. henry; all the frenchmen with whom i am familiar except balzac; fielding, _the tale of two cities_, _the way of all flesh_. balzac is over my head. dickens, outside of the novel named, seems to me a caricaturist rather than a novelist. _the growth of the soil_ i hold to be the finest novel i ever read. no need of prolonging the list. reading them over and over, the books which most appeal to me, i always put them down full of a brave determination to write something as fine. that the resultant effort dwindles out discourages me only until i have read the book again. i know no better way to put yourself in the mood for trying to write good stuff than by reading good stuff. =honore willsie=: i have read and studied current and classic writers constantly as training for my work. =h. c. witwer=: nothing from either. =william almon wolff=: i don't know that i can distinguish between classics and modern authors. i've learned most of what i know that way, i suppose. =edgar young=: can't say. have read many of the modern authors and most of the classics. also have read rather widely in spanish. summary "classics," of course, is a variable term, but even when not specifically defined it serves the general purposes of the question. of answering, found the classics useful to their craft; current authors, . some benefit: classics, ; current, . yes: classics, ; current, . much: classics, ; current, . all: classics, ; current, . little: classics, ; current, . none: classics, ; current, . waste of time: classics, ; current, . harm: classics, ; current, . don't know: . not classified: . the tabulation is on both influence and value. from the answers one gathers that the classics are read for: the fundamentals, highest art, clearness, vocabulary, characterization, style; current authors for vocabulary, what not to do, modern style, popularity, short-story structure. while allowance must be made for those deriving benefit from both, the who found benefit from reading other authors contrast strongly with the who stated either elementary or advanced benefit from classes, courses and books (all or any) on how to write. it must be borne in mind that what some consider benefit would be considered a loss by others. a rough checking up of the answers shows that, while some authors or books were mentioned, no one of them was mentioned often:--kipling ; the bible, dickens and o. henry, ; maupassant, conrad, jack london, ; milton, emerson, scott, homer, sophocles, hall caine, balzac, anatole france, the russians, poe, gautier, mary roberts rinehart, richard harding davis, . since no general expression as to particular books or authors was called for, these chance expressions are not indicative of anything except that no particular ones seem found sufficiently valuable to bring about much spontaneous mention. among the manuscripts (the total submitted, not merely the accepted ones) coming in to my own particular magazine the writers whose influence seems most marked are kipling, o. henry, conan doyle, jack london, stevenson. the list would vary at other editorial desks, but at most of them these five would probably be included. only of our answers warn against the dangers of imitation. the warning is badly needed, particularly by beginners. the essence of style is expression of self, not of some one else, yet the manuscript world is tragically full of writers who are straining every nerve--and killing or drugging the individuality that alone can get them to any place really worth reaching--in a silly effort to write like some one else. they can't, for the simple reason that they can't be this some one else. and meanwhile, instead of expressing themselves, they are burying themselves. possibly o. henry, kipling and doyle produce the greatest numbers of imitators, but current fiction provides many ephemeral models that produce noticeable waves of imitation. even with successful writers, who can say where the benefit from studying other authors ends and harm begins? of what value is technique if gaining it has suppressed any of the individuality whose expression is technique's only warrant for existence? few indeed are the writers who can not profit from a study of good models, yet few are they who can unerringly reap the undoubted benefit without paying for it in some loss of individuality. perhaps those most safe against the danger are those least in need of the benefit. there can be no question of the benefit to be derived, but to every beginner--and to most writers on the highway of success--there is need to shout a warning against letting the models absorb him instead of his absorbing the models. question vii _what is your general feeling on the value of technique?_ in the following each writer naturally answers according to his own particular definition of technique, only a small minority expressing any doubts as to its exact meaning, but the general conception is sufficiently common to all for the purposes of our questionnaire: answers =bill adams=: i do not know what technique is. i have bronchial asthma. =samuel hopkins adams=: that it is one writer's meat and another writer's poison. =paul l. anderson=: an author can not have too fine a technique, any more than a machinist can have too fine tools; technique is a tool, and the better it is the better the work that can be done with it. but either artist, author or mechanic can become so interested in his tools that he over-elaborates his work--authors and artists do this more often than machinists! =william ashley anderson=: an author ought constantly to try to master his technique in the hope of reaching a point where his ideas may be put into form without hesitating or wasting effort over the means of expression. =h. c. bailey=: i rate technique high but second to knowledge of men and the world. =ralph henry barbour=: technique is something you ought to have and not be aware of the fact. when you know you have it you become a pest. it's like happiness. being happy is fine, but when you make a cult of it and become "glad, glad, glad!" folks will run away from you. to the beginner i'd say, "don't worry." write your story and let technique take care of itself. let it go hang, for that matter. paraphrasing a chap who could write pretty good fiction himself, "the story's the thing." =frederick orin bartlett=: technique to be valuable should be unconscious. the best way to get it is to be born with it. the next best way is to absorb it through the work of those already masters of it. the poorest way is to study it deliberately and practise it consciously. =nalbro bartley=: it is essential and a most admirable thing to possess it, but to my mind, technique can be dispensed with if one has to choose between the red-blooded story and the purely mechanical perfection of transcribing it. =konrad bercovici=: a little technique does not hurt. it is like salt and pepper in a dish, but who wants a dish of salt or a dish of pepper? =ferdinand berthoud=: i don't quite understand. do not feel enough of an authority to have an opinion on the subject. =h. h. birney, jr.=: almost impossible to answer. just what do you mean by "technique"? webster's definition, summarized, is "artistic execution." taking it as such, technique is almighty important. to sell, a story must "read well." it must be smooth, finished, plot must be well developed, interest sustained, etc. all of this can be classed as literary technique. =farnham bishop=: technical training is good in so far that it teaches a man to use the tools of his trade. but unless he was born to the trade, he'll never master it. creative ability is as the creator is pleased to bestow it. the very small quantity that i possess has been much more helped than hindered by my teachers. the more a man writes, the better his technique should become. to tell a good tale plainly is better art and harder work than jig-sawing and bedecking a poor little bungalow of an idea to make it look like a palace. =algernon blackwood=: i have never consciously studied technique. up to a point technique must be instinctive. but it can be over-stressed. it can overlay an idea, especially a thin idea. its value, of course, can not be over estimated. it is essential. but no text-book has ever helped me much. =max bonter=: wish i knew more about technique. am trying to learn. =katharine holland brown=: profoundly valuable--if the story _lives_, too. =f. r. buckley=: technique is essential: technicalities (as above) seem to me murderous. most important point of technique (to me) is tempo--taking the two extremes of dull legato and fatiguing staccato and hitting the exact point between them, using the exact combination of them, you need to produce the particular effect you want. never saw anybody try to teach this. doubt if it could be taught. =prosper buranelli=: technique is everything. a writer who can not write is an illiterate. the trouble with letters in this country is that its literary men are illiterates--i mean even fellows like dreiser and sherwood anderson. =thompson burtis=: i am somewhat uncertain as to what technique means, to be truthful. if it means skilful construction, well-turned phrases, proper handling of suspense, etc., as my instinct leads me to believe, i am strongly of the belief that it is very important. i read so many good stories that interest me not at all--so many others which, boiled down, have nothing much to them but which through the skill and facility of the writer are charming and interesting to me. i have read stories where the young fellow met the girl, they liked each other and got engaged, which pleased. others with colorful background, unusual characters and rapid-fire events have been murdered for me because i sat back and watched the green author botch them, annoy me with missed opportunities, prick me with unfortunate phrasing, harass me with clumsy construction, etc. there are a fluency, an inevitable, logical interest and a sense of complete satisfaction in a sound, properly constructed, skilfully written yarn told by a master of his craft which are unmistakable, i believe. tricks of the trade, many of which i see through, nevertheless add life and personality to a story for me. take talbot mundy and his trenchant by-passages on everything in general. i enjoy them, and yet i can see him sticking them in, sometimes. and i couldn't read a page without knowing it was mundy writing. =george m. a. cain=: in that attitude, technique has become so much a habit of feeling that i can not tell where it begins or leaves off in my own construction of a story. where i consciously resort to technical tricks of writing, such as deliberately arranged shifts from one to another view-point for the sustaining of suspense, i am always hampered with a sense of cheapening the work by the introduction of a mechanical device. =robert v. carr=: i am insensible to technique. i know what the dictionary says about it, but the dictionary is full of words. a lot of things that many discuss glibly are just words to me. =george l. catton=: am in doubt of your use of the word. my dictionary says: "manner of artistic performance," which would be, in this case, style. and in this age of a used up supply of plots and themes and characters and incidents, style must be about everything. an author's personality is the only new thing possible to-day in fiction. =robert w. chambers=: it is an essential part of all creative work. =roy p. churchill=: frankly, technique is something i have never seen a synonym for. it is evasive. perhaps you might say that technique is the life of the story. without it a story is dead. with it alive. and there are a great many kinds of life. some pleasant and some ugly. some appealing to one person and some to another. for me this thing called technique must be in a yarn to make it live, and the more of it the stronger. that's why just polish isn't technique. =carl clausen=: if over-emphasized, it kills the spontaneity of the story. =courtney ryley cooper=: technique is excellent, but it is like the frosting on pie. sometimes we would like to scrape it aside and find something real underneath. =arthur crabb=: i think it is at least one of the most important things in writing. some genius may get along without it, some isolated individual may evade the issue for a while, but not for long. =mary stewart cutting=: i think technique has great value. =elmer davis=: it can be overdone, but most of us are in no danger. =william harper dean=: i feel that technique is the leaven in a story--you can ruin the possibilities in a situation in its development if your technique is poor. illogical sequence in the development, the stressing of minor situations, the slighting of the weightier ones, the faltering in the forward march to the climax--these things mean poor technique and a poor story. =harris dickson=: technique, it would seem to me, is the handling of a story in harmony with its matter. naturally the method of handling a detective story is different from that of a treatise on esoteric buddhism. a negro story violates every known rule of white technique to follow a rambling and garrulous illogical method of its own--which becomes logical when applied to our brother in black, for that is the process of the african mind. he's a curiously devious oriental. =captain dingle=: i don't understand exactly what this question means. in fact, except in the matter of plot, i scarcely know what "technique" means. as for plot, i believe that far more stress is put upon this as an essential than any audience or readers demand. =louis dodge=: as for technique, i like the technique of jack dempsey, who hits first and hardest. i don't mean that he hasn't any technique: i mean simply that he is jack dempsey. =phyllis duganne=: my general feeling is that technique saves time and labor--and that you get it only through much previous time and labor. =j. allan dunn=: the value of technique in story writing is, i think, in exactly the same ratio as technique is to the painter, the singer, the musician, the sculptor, the architect. it is more elusive in writing, but it must be acquired. the world is full of chaps who mistook an ear for music, an eye for color, a faculty for mimicry and a desire to write as a token of genius that would flow like buttermilk out of a jug. technique constitutes the difference between the amateur and the professional in every profession. =walter a. dyer=: if i did not still retain a belief in the value of technique i should be in despair. =walter prichard eaton=: without technique not one in a hundred can get by--and the one exception who does will be found to have created a new technique! =e. o. foster=: my training in newspaper writing is that technique is a most valuable asset. with the proper technique a man can make even an ordinary newspaper story interesting. =arthur o. friel=: a minor consideration. subordinate to the actual story. a "tool" only. =j. u. giesy=: i admire a good technique--just as i admire any finished work by a finished workman. i would not however damn a virile and entertaining bit of plot or narrative because of faulty technique unless hopelessly defective, i think. =george gilbert=: technique is merely a means to an end. many of the world's biggest stories are weak in technique, but go big because of their theme. =kenneth gilbert=: i have a high regard for technique. nothing disgusts me more than serious technical flaws, yet i try to be temperate about it because i realize that i may be more alert for such faults than is the average reader. i firmly believe that unless technique can be supplanted by really worth-while originality, it should always be observed in a general way, at least. =holworthy hall=: you might as well ask my general feeling on the subject of "technique" in art or music. technique constitutes the only difference between what is good and what is bad. but if you ask me what technique is--i should have to write you a book about it, because the expression itself is a paradox. =richard matthews hallet=: i am a little suspicious of the word "technique" as applied to writing. fiction has two parts, form and essence, or matter. technique, i take it, runs to the form and governs the method of presentation. if the matter is there, it will carry nearly any natural kind of presentation with it. technique is too liable to be synonymous for complexity and subtlety. technique ruined henry james. few candid people will say that his later work is even half as good as the simpler _roderick hudson_. the earlier stuff of conrad and kipling is better than the later, for the same reason. the fact is that generally speaking, animal spirits and a living zest in the things of this earth are a big element in fiction, and as a man's senses dull and his experiences get more commonplace, his matter crumbles through his fingers, and then he resorts to technique to cloud the issue, much as a cuttle-fish squirts ink. a little technique is as good as a lot. =william h. hamby=: i don't think much about it. i do not believe a writer who is a clear thinker and has mastered the rudiments of expression need spend much time thinking of his style. =a. judson hanna=: technique, if striking enough, seems to give a writer a strong, but temporary, vogue. for instance, the technique of o. henry and ring lardner and george ade. the only striking technique i recall at the moment which, i believe, will become classic, is the technique of kipling. =joseph mills hanson=: good technique undoubtedly will help a mediocre story to "get across"; but if a story is inherently unique and forceful, it will get across whether it is technically excellent or not. =e. e. harriman=: i feel that too much emphasis is placed upon technique by many, to the exclusion of clearness and simplicity. yet a certain amount is essential. =nevil g. henshaw=: to my mind technique is invaluable. it will save a poor story when nothing else will. =joseph hergesheimer=: naturally, one must write well. =robert hichens=: i do not believe in writing at haphazard. the best writers take infinite pains. joseph conrad and george moore are examples of this. guy de maupassant, one, i think, of the most perfect story tellers who ever lived, was trained by flaubert in the art of writing. young writers should not hurry or think that anything will do. i believe in writing with enthusiasm and then considering the result with critical coldness. =r. de s. horn=: technique is a word that always brings stevenson promptly to my mind. because technique is the part of the art that comes from long and careful study and practise alone, and stevenson is the shining light along these lines. he set out deliberately to be an author and put weary years in at the task before he ever tried to capitalize it. but look what a master he became. technique is the polish on both the diamond and the paste jewel. it enhances the real thing and makes the imitation salable. a story may sell that is naturally strong in itself even though it be weak in technique; but this is no argument for neglecting technique. just think how much more wonderful it would have been with the extra luster added. and this much is certain: no master of any art ever lived who had not added to his natural gifts the added technique acquired by long practise and study. =clyde b. hough=: in my opinion technique is second only to plot. =emerson hough=: more thought and less technique would be better for the country. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: i never think about it. =inez haynes irwin=: this is a very difficult question to answer. technique is highly valuable of course--necessary. some writers give one the impression that they have more technique than matter. as between the two, i would rather have a great deal to say, even if i said it awkwardly, than nothing to say even if i said it exquisitely. i suppose the perfection for which most writers aim is fullness and originality of matter, plus a beautiful technique. =will irwin=: naturally an author, like a painter, must have technique. the best of thought and feeling must remain private thought and feeling unless the writer learns how to put it into a form which is pleasing and convincing to the reader. naturally, too, technique may be overdone; and it can not conceal barrenness of thought imagination and feeling. =charles tenney jackson=: as to your question on technique, i assure you, in reading, it is everything to me. i will lose interest in any tale at once when i see it is not well written. plots seem so dolefully commonplace, they are all ragged to tatters; and if an author can not present his stuff with some attempt, at least, to distinction, to personality, i can't go him much. the setting, the color, the style and material are more than plot, which will wander away into unrealities and commonplaceness in no time if not worked upon by sincere discrimination. a plot is no more than a dead dog which a good taxidermist can make to stand up stuffed so artfully that you believe it might wag its tail. if you can get it to bark--good! you're a genius, but after all the bark and not the dog is the important thing, and the art of it. =frederick j. jackson=: i don't know. i have known brainier men than i hope to be fail dismally when tackling the fiction game because they had stuffed themselves so full of technique that it stuck out all over their stuff. university fiction course professors hold technique up as a sort of bogy. they overemphasize its importance, in my estimation. the word itself scares many beginners. why don't the profs come down out of the clouds and use a simpler word, namely, mechanics? i look upon a story as a matter of mechanics. certain set elements make a story. conjunction of these elements, plastered up with new stuff, or a new way of portraying them, makes a salable story. i have made speeches before journalism classes, classes in short story writing, one of them the extension course of the university of california. i quoted to this effect: "a story is never so dead as when buried in words." i emphasized it. i scandalized several admirers of certain well known writers, one sonorous, heavy, wordy gentleman in particular when his name was mentioned, by stating frankly that even while i envied his vocabulary, his characterization, his color, i always passed up his stuff because it wandered too far afield, because he lacked plot, or because the plot was submerged so deep in words that i could not pump it out. a story with me is a matter of mechanics, but i do my best to eliminate visible traces, and above all to make the story human. =mary johnston=: it has great value, but content comes first. =john joseph=: generally speaking i divide all stories into two classes. one class i call a painting, the other a mechanical drawing. the painting will _live_ and be read from generation to generation. the other will be read and thrown aside and forgotten. you can't lay off a painting with compass and try-square. for that reason the more rules a writer is compelled to keep his eye on, the less able he will be to express the thing he wants to express, the less chance he will have to achieve that elusive, intangible, subtle something that distinguishes the story that is a painting from the one that is merely a mechanical drawing. one of the greatest afflictions of mankind is his tendency to jump to conclusions, and to _assume_ something to be true when he does not, as a matter of fact, know whether it is true or not. theorizing is perhaps the principal avocation of mankind, and to the chronic theorizer facts mean nothing. add to this the curse of precedent and the getting into ruts which is often miscalled "policy," and you have the cause of half the failures in every walk of life. too, independent thinking is the rarest of all achievements. all of which means that in my opinion the editor who will get out in the highways and byways and find out who is reading magazines and why they read a particular magazine will get the surprise of his life. i have had this writing bug in my bonnet ever since i was a kid. never till lately have i had time, or tried to write for publication, but i have made a very careful study of _readers_ during all these years. i am quite certain that i have quizzed at least five thousand persons as to their likes and dislikes in the matter of fiction, always with the view to some day having a try at it myself. i think that the value of "structure" or "technique" is vastly overrated by the editor generally. that is, if he is trying to please the _largest possible number of readers_. of course if he is merely trying to get out a perfect magazine, from a literary standpoint, that is a different matter. the reader--the general reader--cares not a whoop about these things. he demands just _one thing_ in his fiction, and _no more_: the story must _absorb_ him, and that's all there is to it. =lloyd kohler=: a knowledge of technique is essential. =harold lamb=: technique? it must be all-important, but if you think about it too much, you are apt to make a mess of things. =sinclair lewis=: i don't know what this question means. =hapsburg liebe=: my general feeling as to the value of technique? one should study and cultivate it. i haven't been able to do it, so far. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: fortunately for fiction, technique can not ride it to death. good fiction, especially adventure and humor, are to a certain extent immune from technique. of course technique, properly applied, is necessary and used in every story whether knowingly or not. still, it is nothing in itself, to my notion. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: technique is so often over-stressed that beginners are in danger of thinking manner comes first and forgetting matter entirely. have something to say first; then try to say it. if you don't get it said, then go to a technician to find out what's wrong. so, little by little, you will get the technique, and in a way that it becomes a part of you. like hydrogen in the air, technique can't be rated too highly, but taken alone it's dangerous--to the beginner. a natural born story teller intuitively tells his yarns without knowing a single rule of technique. but natural born or not, i'm in two minds if it would not be as advantageous for all beginners to tell stories a year or two before they tackle technique at all. then, when they do, technique will help them, and may not hurt them at all. =rose macaulay=: technique means, to me, the whole art of writing, so of course i regard it as valuable to writers. =crittenden marriott=: wish i had it. =homer i. mceldowney=: perhaps i overrate the importance of technique, but i believe that it is the fundamental factor in success. in my mind, it comes before plot. i have read a good many stories with next to no plot at all--but they were "put across," and i enjoyed them. and i have read half through more stories and chucked them aside--even though their plots might have been regular knockouts, had i stuck around to see. =ray mcgillivray=: i believe technique strictly a minor consideration--after true interest and sympathy and punch are achieved. and of these, punch is most important. no one i know--and rascoe, mencken, fanny butcher and some others drop into this honored (?) class--so far has stopped to pick to pieces _growth of the soil_ to find out whether or not it violates rules of novel technique. no boxer lately has made more than a four-round study of the question as to whether mr. dempsey utilizes crude or polished technique in his art. champions, both. both have the punch, and a thoroughgoing sincerity about landing it at precisely the right place. technique, you say? perhaps, but if so, technique is a quality inherent in worth and can not be achieved at all in a story which simply is written according to a ruled line drawn on graph paper. for my reading or my writing give me sincerity, sympathy and punch, and i'll let the french fiction fans worry about the mold into which any tale is cast. =helen topping miller=: as a teacher of technique, i realize the value of it to the beginner in arriving early at a certain mechanical facility in writing. too devoted a study of methods, however, i think has a tendency to weaken the self-confidence of a writer and to hamper and stifle the imagination. i have never studied technique, except in teaching it to others. i had become a contributor to _the saturday evening post_ before i had ever studied the subject at all. my advice to beginners is to learn technique--and then forget it. =thomas samson miller=: it can be overdone, but lord spare us the eeny meeny miney moists. some stories read like turkish prayer wheels. conrad has an english that entrances, but has no idea at all of plot construction. browning--robert browning--wrote the best short stories, in monologue. _fra lippo lippo_, _andrea del sarto_, etc., are perfect short stories of the _theme_ kind--theme and human interest. =anne shannon monroe=: there's a right way to do everything, and the wrong isn't worth doing. i believe in revising till you sweat blood--but i can't afford the time always to do it. one must live. when one realizes what it means to put a piece of matter before the eyes of the world--the typing, reading by editors, setting up, proof-reading--hammering and pounding a thing into a fixed place, it seems nothing short of criminal to do all this work--and make a place for a thing that has not reached its highest point of perfection--to materialize a lot of crudity. every writer should go through the printing trades, know the publishing business from a to izzard,--and then i think he would feel more keenly the actual crime in putting out something that isn't worth all this putting into form and shape. imagine setting up, in the composing room, all the mistakes of the careless writer--deliberately setting up mistakes! it's a fright! =l. m. montgomery=: i feel that its value is great up to a certain point. but when you become conscious of a writer's technique that writer has reached the point of danger. when you find yourself getting more pleasure from the way a writer says a thing than from the thing itself, that writer has committed a grave error and one that lessens greatly the value of his story. carried too far, technique becomes as annoying as mannerisms. =frederick moore=: there isn't any authorship without technique. it may be natural, that is, unconscious--but it must be there. the title of a story is part of the technique. =talbot mundy=: its importance can hardly be exaggerated, although i have ignored it consistently and without excuse. technique is as important to the writer as it is to a swordsman or a boxer or a diplomat, but it is rarely to be found in hand-books. it varies limitlessly with the individual. certainly the knowledge of how other men achieved particular effects can do no harm. but to make technique anything more than a means to an end would be fatal. =kathleen norris=: that technique is merely interpreted personality, and personality is the most fascinating thing in the world. =anne o'hagan=: i feel that the value of technique is enormous. =grant overton=: i do not think the value of technique can be exaggerated, but i know of no method of directly acquiring it. =sir gilbert parker=: vastly important, but the story is everything. =hugh pendexter=: this query is blind (for me). =clay perry=: i believe that technique is something that comes absolutely last in the consideration of creating a story. =michael j. phillips=: i have to be restrained when technique is mentioned. any person who deliberately strives to say things in fiction in an impressive manner, to roll out sonorous sentences and use nice, long, mouth-filling words, is either a wonderful stylist or an ass. if he is a wonderful stylist, well and good; his stuff will be worth reading for the gorgeous riot of word-pictures on which one may feast his inner vision. if the writer is not a wonderful stylist, he is an ass. also a hypocrite, intellectually speaking, because he is trying to be what he is not. he is trying to set himself up as a magnificent fellow who is to the manner born and tosses big words about in the air as a juggler does oranges. to me ideal technique is the manner of writing which best expresses the character, personality and flavor of the person who is writing while at the same time it permits him to tell his story in the clearest, simplest and most understandable manner. any pretentious style says: "i'm a devil of a fellow, but my story may be rotten." simple, natural expression says: "here's my story, told as best i can tell it." =walter b. pitkin=: my early classical training, especially my long study of aristotle, gave me an insight into the fundamental worth of technique and, i think, enabled me, fairly early, to distinguish between technique and the humbug recipe-formula stuff which half of the college teachers and the correspondence quacks peddle. technique in the greek sense is the basis of all good art, even the most lyrical. for all great art is communicative in some degree; and technique is the science of effective communication. no more, no less. =e. s. pladwell=: i know nothing of technique except in a general and hazy way. technique to me means three words: tell the story. =lucia mead priest=: i should think technique is as essential to the writer as the foundation of a house is to a builder. as i think of it, the art of the writer is like the history of italy's painters. her old masters had great stories to tell but they were minus technique. they had no perspective, no anatomy. hampered by these limitations, there came a day when their intelligence was aroused. every man was so interested in the new things he was learning--the technique, he entirely forgot his _story_. then came the giants, they whose hearts were full of grand themes, whose minds and hands were trained to the doing. unhampered by the machinery of their art, they gave forth masterly interpretations of great stories. this is, i think, the evolution of the individual worker, whatever the craft. most particularly is this true of the writer's. =eugene manlove rhodes=: nothing worth while without endless labor. =frank c. robertson=: my feeling in regard to technique is that it is something that must be mastered before any real success can be achieved. but i feel that a writer should to a certain degree master a technique that is peculiar to his own personality. that is why i am skeptical about a too rigid adherence to the rules laid down in the text-books. the first consideration, in my estimation, is to write the story, then smooth it over with the shining gloss of technique. then you will have used no more technique than is necessary; but try writing the story according to the rules and it is liable to be cramped and artificial. =ruth sawyer=: i think there always must be technique. it is something that must be mastered in the beginning and then allowed to drop into the subconscious mind and stay there. i can not imagine a good story being written by any author who is conscious of his technique. =chester l. saxby=: i put too much store by it. i warm to a delicately sculptured story, a thing of shape and beauty apart from the plot. but i strive to break myself of this weakness. the true technique is directness almost crude, restraint of emotion, fullness of fact with scant explanation. "look into your heart and write" is a mistake of which i'm the victim. heart serving mind--that's writing. jack london had the secret. =barry scobee=: technique is certainly necessary for any writer. it is the letter, and of course the letter of itself avails nothing. there must be the spirit. but the spirit must have technique. in my elementary work i learned something of technique. i am not aware any more of how much i do use, until, as on only two or three occasions, i have looked over a raw beginner's manuscript. but the book learning on fiction writing is a part of me despite my unawareness of it. and i learn more all the time, but i haven't studied short story writing in three or four years. but in my opinion technique is as essential in this as in any trade or profession. =r. t. m. scott=: i just looked up "technique" in four dictionaries:--worcester's ( ), collins' (not dated), murray's ( ) and hill's vest pocket french-english ( ). the word wasn't there. what does it mean? =robert simpson=: technique, to my mind, is of the first importance. true, a man may write a perfectly good story without an ounce of real dyed-in-the-wool technique in his system, but the same story, technically correct, would be a much bigger and better story in every way. no artist can possibly do justice to his art without a practical understanding of technique. =arthur d. howden smith=: i find myself constantly valuing it more and more. =theodore seixas solomons=: my feeling on technique is that, like those bodies of it, so to speak, which make up text works on the subject, it is "after the fact." like grammar, they undertake to examine writing (speech) and tell us facts they ascertain about its structure. but the structure--the story, the english speech--antedates the analysis, having been formed unerringly in adjustment to the laws of receptivity and response in the auditor. both grammar and expositions of literary technique have been too empirical to be of much assistance in guiding the formation of speech practises and fiction practises. something more fundamentally psychological must be devised before either will be of much actual help. =raymond s. spears=: two things are indispensable in my stories: a certain group of data and a certain form of technique. editors usually look for technique, and often don't know it when they see it; i refer, of course, to _simple plot_, (aristotle's definition), requiring _complex plot only_. the truest, highest, broadest things i do are commonly _simple plot_, with beginning, continuity, end, but without complexity. most editors say "fine--but no plot!" of this type. so, to live, i have to complicate. of course, technique is utterly indispensable though it may be unconscious. =norman springer=: i think the writer must learn how to use "the tools of his trade." if he is to make the most of his material, he must study technique; or acquire it in some way, by absorption, or anyhow. from my own observation, i believe there is a danger in technique--it lies in worshiping it, in placing it before the story, in making the form assume more importance than the substance. the oldest error in the world, i suppose. think of all the writers who are masters of technique, wonderful technicians of language, and who are empty, with nothing to say. they've lost their guts getting a style. certainly a writer must acquire technique--just as a painter acquires skill with a brush, or a bricklayer with a trowel. =julian street=: there must be technique, but technique is not so important as character or story. joseph conrad is a wretched technician, but is a big _man_ with a big sense of character and story and a powerful picture-maker. but he is clearly always tangled up in _method_. his trick of having a man tell his story instead of telling it himself is a great error--an error into which the author of _if winter comes_ fell, in that book, when he did not take the reader to the court-room for his "big scene" but had a character tell about it. that is like the horse race that occurs "off stage" in the theater. the actors pretend to look through glasses and shout "now they're at the quarter!"--"salvatan wins!" but we--the audience--don't see the horses running. true, that method is sometimes inescapable, but conrad could often avoid it, and hutchinson could easily have avoided it in his delightful novel. _if winter comes_ deserves its success, but it would have been a much finer book but for certain revelations of absolute ineptitude. =t. s. stribling=: without technique a writer is lost, but i think it should be subconscious, just as one's feeling for english rhythm and the picturesque effect of words is subconscious. =booth tarkington=: the same as tennyson's: "it's not what we say, but _how_ we say it; but the fools don't know that." =w. c. tuttle=: i believe that technique is the greater part of a fiction story--and the hardest to master. =lucille van slyke=: if by technique you mean facility--i'd say it was immensely valuable to those who can grab it--i never could--writing gets harder and harder the older i get. =atreus von schrader=: technique is valuable in that it does away with hit-or-miss writing. the author who knows his technique will know when a story is a story, and why. =t. von ziekursch=: i am hardly competent to judge. =henry kitchell webster=: if there is such a thing as a positive technique, i do not know it. i have been writing stories for the past quarter-century, and i don't know how to do it. i have learned, in that twenty-five years, an immense number of ways not to do it. i can sit all day rejecting seductive-looking devices as they occur to me,--sometimes because i can see just what the snare is that they are spreading for me; sometimes because nothing more than instinct bids me beware of them--and when a real, honest, eighteen-carat, sound-to-the-core story comes along i think i have learned to recognize it three times, perhaps, in five. what technique i have managed to acquire, then, after laborious years, is almost wholly negative, and i've learned to be thankful even for that. =g. a. wells=: many writers (the majority of them it seems to me) get by without technique. that is, they are not consciously aware of the fact that they have technique. that is, in the highest form. walpole, galsworthy and perhaps richard washburn child, are deliberate technologists. that is to say (as their work appears to me) they are purposely aware of the rules of writing during the entire process of writing. technique shows in every line they set down. the contrary of this is what i mean when i say that most writers are unaware of the fact that they have technique. galsworthy never forgets the rules. he would never wittingly express himself in a manner that did not conform with the highest form of technique. gilbert chesterton and, i think, h. g. wells are of like caliber. i think the writer who leaves conscious consideration of technique out of the question predominates. but there is this much about it--no writer can produce first-class work (literature as the term is strictly applied) until he has fully mastered technique. the better the architect the better the structure. the architect who does not understand wind pressures, tensile strengths, compression, torque, weight stress and the other values of construction can never design a perfect structure. the same way with a writer. a low grade of technique produces a low grade of literature. i rank technique very high. possibly my respect for it comes of the lack. =william wells=: oh, lord! =ben ames williams=: i rate technique highly. it seems to me a generalization from which there are few exceptions that with perfect technique any subject-matter can be transformed into a classic tale. my note-books are almost as full of articles of faith in my technical creed as they are of incident or description for later use in stories. the most important single element of technique seems to me to be the introduction at every opportunity of commonplace details of daily life. to tell your reader that your characters get up at seven fifteen, take a shower, a shave, sing while they shave, put on their shoes, go down to breakfast.... these things lend, i think, a similitude of life to a story which can be had in no other way. it is the ability to do this in the highest degree, i think, which makes tarkington's work so fine. if your hero and heroine wash dishes together, tell how they do it; hot water, soap-shaker, dry cloths. the reader will nod and say: "exactly; i've done that myself. this fellow knows what he's writing about." and believe whatever else you have to tell. =honore willsie=: i think technique is as valuable to the author as to the musician. it is to the story what the steel structure is to the sky-scraper. =h. c. witwer=: my feeling on technique is that it must obviously be present in some degree in all well-told stories, or let us say, in all stories acceptable to the better magazines. but _i_ could not teach it and i doubt if it can be successfully taught. how many _famous_ writers are graduates of such a course? =william almon wolff=: the important thing to keep in mind about technique, it seems to me, is that it is a means to an end. too many people think of it as an end in itself, which it can not be. these are the people who say that a writer who has broken their rules has not technique, or a bad technique. rot! his technique is right if he has accomplished his purpose, which is to tell his story clearly and convincingly. what does it matter how he tells it? technique is essential, indispensable--but its test must be a pragmatic one. i think the reason for most failures though, is not technical but this--that the writer has nothing to tell. i remember what freeman tilden once told me: "very often i think a story is frightfully difficult, in a technical sense. i can't seem to get it done. and then i find out that the trouble is that i haven't a story--never did have one." =edgar young=: in the widest meaning of the word technique is of great value. summary tabulating the above, out of answerers we find attaching extreme importance to technique, taking a sort of middle ground, and assigning it little or no importance. to the last may be added who don't know the exact nature of technique but indicate that they assign slight value to it. unclassified, ; venturing no opinion, . to say that technique is not important in writing is to say that it is not important to know how. one can not write fiction at all without knowing how, without technique. do of our writers therefore not know how and do of them consider not knowing how to be not extremely important? no, and as a matter of fact investigation would probably show that some of the possess more technique than do some of the who attach most importance to it. it is evident that at least some of those belittling technique are thinking of technique in its most formal sense--of books of rules, of strictly academic instructions, of hours spent in intensive study of abstract ways and means. bear in mind that while naturally no one is born in possession of technique there are some who, perhaps before they even begin to write, have unconsciously absorbed from reading fiction a good many principles of construction and general method, while to others reading has brought little understanding of technique and when they begin authorship they must make deliberate study of methods before they can produce anything resembling well constructed fiction. any editor can point to authors whose earliest stories were written with sufficient technique to warrant publication, and to many more whose early efforts had great faults and who acquired technique only by slow development through practise and study. this book has utterly failed of a main purpose if, through the answers of the writers themselves, it has not shown vividly and forcefully that writers vary in methods, principles and purpose fully as much as in natural ability and results. if all had agreed as to the exact definition of technique or as to its exact place in the scale of importance, it would have been a miracle. nor can i, or any one else, step in and definitely fix its relative importance or give it an iron-clad definition that will entirely satisfy all writers. but if we turn back to the discussion of technique in the chapter on thinking of the reader when writing we can find a definition of technique that will at least explain the differences of opinion that may now confuse us. technique is applied knowledge of all that facilitates and perfects expression. literature is an expression or interpretation. no expressing or interpreting can be done unless it is done to some one. even when writing is solely self-expression the writer must constitute his "other self," his critical self, the representative of human minds in general and the judge of whether he has succeeded in reaching human minds with his message by recognized human symbols and in accordance with generally accepted human standards. his other or critical self is the adapter of his creations to the demands of a common human standard of expression and understanding--is his guide as to technique and the repository of all he knows concerning technique. during creation he may or may not be conscious of this critical self, but he can be unconscious of it only if technique has been so thoroughly absorbed and assimilated that the critical self can apply it automatically, working in perfect unison with the creative self or, if you like, having become identified with the creative self or passed its knowledge on to the creative self until that knowledge has become a part of the creative self. of all technique that has not yet been thus thoroughly assimilated he will be conscious; the less assimilated, the more conscious; the more conscious, the more distracted and hampered by these tools that demand attention for themselves instead of fitting unnoticed into the creative hand. in other words, technique so thoroughly assimilated that it is unconscious is mastered technique. no other kind is. so long as any bit of technique is still so strange to the creative hand that it has not become an unnoted part of it, that bit of technique may even then be a useful tool but it has not been thoroughly mastered. and to the extent that it is not mastered it will distract the creator's attention from the creating to itself. unmastered technique is therefore both bad and good. good, because it is on its way to becoming mastered technique and because even in the process it has some value. bad, because it distracts from the real creating, hampers and cripples it. if a writer, whether beginning or experienced, adds new technique too rapidly, he will be too much distracted and slowed up and his individuality, upon which the value of all his creating is wholly dependent, is too much held back from free expression--blocked, cramped, suppressed and atrophied. there can be no general rule as to how much new technique a writer can take up and assimilate at one time any more than there can be a general rule as to how much a man can eat and assimilate during a given time, but in either case there is a line beyond which lie indigestion and harm. a man can kill himself by eating too much. the creative self can be crushed under too great a mass of technique fed to it in too short a time. because of this i do not hesitate to indict the entire present system of teaching the writing of fiction. that system, common to practically all colleges, correspondence courses, special teachers and books dealing with the subject, consists of seizing the beginner or comparative beginner, leading him to the dining-table and forcing down his throat at one sitting more food than he can digest in ten weeks. naturally, acute and often chronic indigestion results. in a few months or a year they feed him more technique than he will be able to digest in five years, if ever. the result is an appalling injury to his creative possibilities--an injury from which in the large majority of cases there is never a complete recovery and too often never even a partial one. the workman is crushed by his tools. individuality is killed or aborted by the mere means for its expression. sometimes they talk to him about "preserving his individuality," but they kill it just the same. i do not base my charge on a theory. for more than a score of years as editor on half a dozen fiction magazines i've had the results of this teaching thrust under my eyes in an unending flow of its results--stories often perfect as to the formal rules of technique, but all merely mechanical constructions without a breath of life. as one writer has expressed it, these stories are an endless procession of fords, each complete in all its parts, well built according to a plan, but all of them only collections of machinery and all exactly alike. no individuality, no expression of anything not expressed a million times before, no art. just mechanics. the cause is evident--more technique gobbled down than can be assimilated, so many tools piled on that individuality is crushed beneath the load. if proof is needed it can be found by applying the remedy. when one of these crushed, aborted writers discovers the seeming cause or has it shown to him, casts overboard all his hampering technique and creates freely, the results prove the diagnosis correct. he can not afford permanently to abandon technique or the acquisition of technique, any more than a man can afford permanently to give up eating, but he can give up biting off more than he can digest. omitting from consideration writers who lack sufficient ability ever to succeed, most writers who fail do so because they write under a strain, artificially, mechanically. they write this way because, from instructions or from fiction itself, they have taken on more technique than they can digest or master. self-expression becomes impossible. individuality itself is stunted, buried alive or killed outright. experienced writers too often suffer from the same trouble. how many writers can you recognize from their stories if their names are covered up? so pronounced an individuality in their work may not be considered a necessity of good art, but, to present the situation more liberally, do you not find the book and magazine fiction of to-day for the most part very much cut from the same monotonous pattern or half-dozen patterns? give to all writers the same material and plot and the resulting stories will for the most part be so much alike that any one of them would serve fairly well for all. only the minority will turn out stories with real individuality. a distinction should be drawn, of course, between really individualized creations and stories individualized only by mannerisms or affectations of style, which may or may not be really individual but are only surface phenomena. american present-day fiction reeks with these surface tricks--to the detriment of real art and of appreciation of real art. one very particularly marked tendency toward degeneracy in our literature is the growing tendency to decorate a story with purely surface cleverness. instead of expressing his material in the language that best conveys its meaning and spirit, a writer pretty well lets his real material shift for itself and seeks for language that in itself will allure and charm the reader. to him style means only an opportunity for parading his ability for quaint or taking phrase, glittering aphorism, cynical superiority, general sophistication. all these are useful tools if used in proper place, but writers of this type use them without discrimination. the result is a paste jewel that pleases many readers, but the result is nothing that even approximates literature. ignore this glittering tinsel and look beneath. generally you will find no characterization, no real portrayal of life, no anything that makes real literature. sometimes a plot and often a situation, but the rest is emptiness. often the glitter is a true product of individuality, but the individuality isn't worth putting on paper as literature. these writers should be essayists, not fictionists. as fictionists they are only vaudeville artists. yet they are a real menace to american literature, for they appear regularly in most of our best magazines and between covers issued from our best book houses. of this last type one good thing can be said--they are not suffering from too much real technique. for writers in general there can be no such thing as too much technique, provided it is really assimilated. nor can there be anything more harmful than a stomachful of technique undigested. question viii _what is most interesting and important to you in your writing--plot, structure, style, material, setting, character, color, etc.?_ in going over the answers to various parts of this questionnaire there has again and again risen the speculation as to what would be the effect upon literary criticism in general, particularly professional literary criticism, if such facts as are here presented direct from the actual desks of the writers themselves were read and seriously studied by the critics. and applied not only to the writings of the authors here speaking, but to fiction in general. to how much more just assessment would it lead, to how much more real an understanding of actual and comparative values, to how much clearer a grasp of fundamentals? there are good critics, to be sure, some very good, but many very bad ones. professional literary criticism in america, including both the smallest local mediums and those of most repute, is, generally speaking, perfunctory, superficial, casual, over-sophisticated, sub-understanding, hereditary, hack, and a long list of other uncomplimentary adjectives. perhaps the gravest indictment is that of being hereditary, for this is more or less the root fault. critics, however inhuman their victims may consider them, are entirely human and therefore subject to the human failing of accepting the dicta of the past, not as merely the best the past has been able to hand on to the present, but as the final word that neither the present nor the future can improve upon and that neither should dare to question. if the past itself had acted wholly on this theory a century or five centuries ago, its bequest to the present would be lacking in a century or five centuries of accomplishment and progress. the development of this speculation has little place here and less in connection with this question than with those concerning the imagination, but it has clamored for a hearing all through the compiling of this book. so now it's had it. reader as well as writer will find interest in the preferences shown in the following answers. to know a writer's "taking off place" is illuminating in any appreciation or understanding of his work. to writers there is here again further proof of the futility of general rules, and from the actual experiences of a hundred writers it is impossible that a beginner or even a writer of experience should not glean information that otherwise would come only through time, work and experiment. answers =bill adams=: character and color, (when i've got 'em i say, "hang you, jack--_i'm_ all right.") =samuel hopkins adams=: it depends largely upon the nature of the stories. in my "our square" stories, setting, color, style and atmosphere. in my more serious works such as _success_ and _the clarion_, character, plot, structure and the interplay of living forces which partake of and fuse all of these elements. =paul l. anderson=: character, material, color, style, structure, setting, roughly in the order given (not invariably; it depends on the story). plot is essential; it's the skeleton on which the living thing is built. to my mind, the greatest of fiction writers, in the order given, are shakespeare, sienkiewicz, defoe, and hugo. the setting is, properly speaking, a part of the plot. =william ashley anderson=: material, setting, character, and color. but this is accidental, and the result of personal and unusual experience. all these elements ought to be of value, and relative importance. =h. c. bailey=: character is far most interesting and important to me, then style, and construction comes in the third place. =edwin balmer=: answered under i. =ralph henry barbour=: i hold character the most important in writing. if you've got that, you've got the rest. =frederick orin bartlett=: material. =nalbro bartley=: character development. =konrad bercovici=: all the things put together make a story. =ferdinand berthoud=: setting. my old africa always. i couldn't write a story of anything outside of africa to save my miserable life. then i like fooling with the various men i've known and making the poor beggars laugh and suffer. those who are alive of my characters would murder me if they caught hold of me. =h. h. birney, jr.=: to me, plot and material are the most interesting, but i consider structure and style by far the most important. setting is of minor value if style and structure are good. witness arnold bennett! a man who has solved the secrets of style and structure can write about _anything_ and make it salable and interesting. =farnham bishop=: plot, probably, at present. i feel the story first, as a whole. then i begin to see the men who are behind it and ready to begin living it--character. perhaps i should have put material before plot, as the latter usually springs from the former. setting and color i find very easily, after i have dug up all the available facts, which is much more fun than setting them down, for i write slowly and laboriously, forming each sentence carefully in my mind before i set down a word of it. therefore my style is terse and bare. =algernon blackwood=: material, style, setting, character, color. =max bonter=: style, i don't bother about. i just try to make my lingo appropriate for the thoughts i want to express. material, setting, character and color always interested me more than plot and structure. i am just now beginning to realize the importance of plot and structure and to pay to them the attention that they require. =katharine holland brown=: most interesting--and most difficult--the translation of the story, from an image (very much scrambled, but clear to myself,) to one that will be clear to others. therefore, the structure, and the pointing-up of the plot. =f. r. buckley=: most important ingredient to me? color! with five exclamation points. =prosper buranelli=: structure and style. the rest are easy. =thompson burtis=: in order of interest: characterization, plot, structure, material, color, setting. style means nothing whatever to me as yet. it never occurs to me. i write as naturally and with as little trouble as i talk. consequently i have no style, probably. =george m. a. cain=: i can not answer this at all. plots are my chief difficulty. structure comes next. style is unconscious. material comes easily after a plot. settings present difficulty or interest to me, only when some peculiar market requirement demands fitting stories to them rather than them to the stories. my early ministerial experience fastened my attention upon characters, and i find them without effort. on the question of character in fiction i shall say more under x. color interests me only when i have to get it from outside my own experience. to me the supreme interest is always the reaction between situation and character. =robert v. carr=: i do not know. =george l. catton=: theme first, then style, then characters; the rest about equal in importance, with color last. =robert w. chambers=: fifty-fifty. =roy p. churchill=: plot and character first with all the rest trailing after. =carl clausen=: in their order named: character, plot, structure, color and setting. =courtney ryley cooper=: all these ingredients are necessary, with plot, structure, material, and one which you haven't mentioned, _accuracy_, very much to the fore. =arthur crabb=: mind. or if you prefer character. next to that is style. the structure is, of course, taken for granted. the plot, setting, color, etc., seem to me to be, as i said before, frames of the picture. one of my greatest weaknesses is my inability, or possibly unwillingness, to make the plot strong enough. =mary stewart cutting=: i think that structure, style, material and character are important in the order mentioned. =elmer davis=: character, feeling. (if you've ever seen any of my stuff you won't believe this, but you ought to see the stuff i haven't sold.) =william harper dean=: to me plot is the most interesting and important. the rest of it--style, color, setting, etc., can be sweated into keeping with the demands of the plot. but if plot is illogical or non-gripping (i do not mean exciting), then all the polishing and retouching in the world will not make a story of the piece. =harris dickson=: in my own work this differs greatly. i have just finished a story that deals with the building of a levee. as levee construction is little known outside of this river country, i devoted much pains to the setting and color. besides this, the background of this story wields a very strong effect on the characters themselves. sometimes a story is a character story, and incidents are chosen to develop that character--as in the first "old reliable" story. sometimes it may be the story of a single adventure in which the characters may be subordinated to the events. =captain dingle=: material, setting, character. =louis dodge=: the first consideration in writing a story should be to tell a story, i suppose; but that should go without saying, and certainly style comes second, and your style ought to be you, and not something you got out of a book. in other words, a story is wearisome if it isn't original, if it hasn't got something of the author in it. =phyllis duganne=: i am more interested in character, its development and peculiarities than anything else, in either reading or writing. i like style and good structure, but i think that real people--real people in fiction, i mean--who interest me and make me either like or hate them, are most interesting. =j. allan dunn=: i should be inclined to state that character drawing was the most important thing to me in my writing. it is very likely my weakest point but it is to me the most essential thing, the delineation of character and its working under certain circumstances. i try for style. try hard to recognize of what my style may consist. i like to write a story through one pair of eyes, if possible, and that calls for an ingenuity that is interesting. plot comes next to character, then style, then color and setting. i enjoy recalling local conditions, i revive the thrill of certain atmospheres, i get a thrill from trying not to let them run away with me and to use atmosphere and color only where they tie up with action. and i continually realize that i do not follow my own few rules. =walter a. dyer=: leaving out the question of what i believe to be the requirements of editors, i find the elements in writing most interesting to me in about this order: style, color, character, setting, structure, material, plot. probably i've just reversed the needed order. =walter prichard eaton=: "character is plot"--galsworthy. he said it of plays, but it is true of stories. character is always most important. =e. o. foster=: plot, style and setting are to me the most interesting things in writing. =arthur o. friel=: material, setting, character. =j. u. giesy=: plot first, character drawing. structure is a part of plot, don't you think? =george gilbert=: the whole story is important; when i try, consciously, to pay any attention to the elements you mention, the story escapes; i have only rubbish left. =kenneth gilbert=: the most interesting and important elements in fiction to me are plot, style and color. plot above all others; style that by itself may "put over" the story when the plot is not what it should be, and color that the story may grip the reader. without color a plot is merely harsh charcoal strokes on a white background, and without style the story has no charm. structure, of course, is important, and material, setting and character will serve to attract attention, but i hold the three first-named to be vital. =holworthy hall=: first--always--the story; second, the style; third, there is no third. =richard matthews hallet=: i would sell my soul at any time for a good plot, but it must be one for which i can furnish background and foreground out of my own experience. a plot attracts facts and characters as a magnet attracts iron filings. if it is really a plot, and not a pseudo-plot or theme, which is the amateur's usual conception of a plot, you will be conscious of a quickening all along the line, and all opposition dissolves as you go along. if it is not really a plot, the obstacles will look big, the talk will lag and the characters will have paper legs and vacant faces. touch a match to it and look for another one. =william h. hamby=: of importance in the order named: character, plot, color. =a. judson hanna=: the most interesting feature of my work is setting and color. all else--plot, movement, "punch" and "kick,"--is a rather weary necessity. =joseph mills hanson=: in practise, though perhaps not in theory, the most interesting and important to me of the elements mentioned by you in the writing of a story, are, in their order; plot, setting, character, material, color, style, structure. =e. e. harriman=: the most important items in story writing to me are--the appeal to a reader's sympathies--local color--character--and the work it will do in strengthening moral qualities, such as honesty, truthfulness, courage. =nevil g. henshaw=: first and most of all character. then plot, setting, structure and style. (i've lumped color with setting.) =joseph hergesheimer=: humanity! understanding! =robert hichens=: everything's important. =r. de s. horn=: a question difficult to answer. it depends pretty much on the type of story. a character story would naturally depend hugely on the handling of character. i always have an instinctive feeling as to which is the most important in the story i am planning to write, and i try to capitalize it accordingly. wouldn't it be better to say that plot, character and atmosphere should be considered of primary importance in the building of a story? =clyde b. hough=: i'm interested most intensely of all in the action and humanness, that is to say the human action, realistic emotions, desires and ambitions of my characters which i strive to express in terms of action. next is plot and next is structure. material and setting are incidental. style, characters and color should be adopted to suit the occasion. =emerson hough=: the story. the period. the thing itself. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: character. =inez haynes irwin=: all these things intrigue me but if i must make a choice, i will say i am interested in character first; atmosphere, which i think includes color and setting, second; style third. of course i am assuming that i start with a plot but after all i should, i suppose, say plot first because until there is a plot, there is no writing. =will irwin=: i am most interested in character, next in style, and next in color. =frederick j. jackson=: plot and material most important. characterization vitally necessary to make the story real. structure and style the most interesting, principally because i let them take care of themselves, if they will. setting and color? use a camel hair brush, not a shovel. =mary johnston=: i can't say. all are so inwound. =lloyd kohler=: the plot probably gets the most consideration; style is also an important consideration. =harold lamb=: this is a knotty kind of question. are not character and setting part of material, and color of setting? chasing one's imagination, as it were, around a vicious circle? just now, at least in tales based on history or folk-lore, i give most thought to material, least to structure. =sinclair lewis=: how can one segregate them? =hapsburg liebe=: the most interesting and important things to me in writing are--first character, then situation and setting, then--well, maybe structure. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: character. the characters must be individuals, not mere types. oh, how i hate the hero, tall and handsome, a swift-roping, hard-riding cowboy! characters must be human and have mannerisms and act natural! plot is next. i must have plot or i haven't a story. "style" stories are a bore to the kind of people i write to. all the rest--material, color, setting, structure and so on depend on the sort of story and the characters. i want ( ) people, ( ) action, ( ) spots of humor, ( ) plot--unless you call action the plot. i don't. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: plot--that is, characters acting and acted upon--is the most interesting and important to me in writing. all the rest is incidental. =rose macaulay=: style, on the whole. but all of them. =crittenden marriott=: mostly plot; sometimes all color. =homer i. mceldowney=: character and color--with a hope that some day style may be the most important. =ray mcgillivray=: character, plot. see previous answers. =helen topping miller=: character and setting interest me most. =thomas samson miller=: i put _material_ first, character next, then structure; that is, i would prefer to put them so, but commercially, _plot_ is first, puppet characterization next (editors have insistently congratulated me on characters who were not characters at all). =anne shannon monroe=: it is difficult to say what are the most interesting and important things to me in writing, for every bit of it interests me intensely. i even love to read proof--it's a thrill to look at a galley proof. but the characters, i believe, are of keenest interest--just as people are more interesting than trees or landscapes. =l. m. montgomery=: in my own writing character is by far the most interesting thing to me--then setting. in the development of the one and the arrangement of the other i find my greatest pleasure and from their letters it is evident that my readers do, too. this, of course, is because my _flair_ is for these things. in another writer something else--plot, structure or color would be the vital thing. only the very great authors combine all these things. for the rank and file of the craft, i think a writer should find out where his strength lies and write his stories along these lines. in my own case i would never attempt to handle complicated plot or large masses of material. i know i should make a dismal failure of them. =frederick moore=: plot comes first, structure next, characters third. if these three are handled skilfully, that is style. setting and color not important. a good story is--a good story. =talbot mundy=: i am afraid that abstract ideas are the important points of a story to me. i don't care so much about a character as _why_ he does so and so. i like to know his mental arguments and all about his motives. but i'm afraid that is heterodoxy. setting and color certainly mean a great deal. =kathleen norris=: setting is the most fascinating type of writing, to me. i should suppose character drawing to be by far the most important and the most difficult. =anne o'hagan=: character development, then setting, then style. =grant overton=: it depends on the story. on the whole, the material seems to me the most important thing. i have seen all the excellences wasted on stuff that was simply not worth writing about. =sir gilbert parker=: all are important. =hugh pendexter=: drama, material, structure, atmosphere and character. =clay perry=: character, plot, philosophy, style, material, color, setting, structure. this is the order of importance in which i would place them. as to their interest, to me, i place character first, always; philosophy second, plot third and so on. =walter b. pitkin=: the following order of interest holds in my case: , the thought of the story; , the plot; , the character (or revelation of human nature in action); , the setting; , the color (which merges, for me, with the setting). =e. s. pladwell=: plot, character, color. =lucia mead priest=: "they are all like one another as half pence are." if you ask me which gives me the greatest pain i shall confess to plot and structure. =eugene manlove rhodes=: character, plot, color. =frank c. robertson=: the most interesting things to me in writing are character, material and plot. the most important, because i have to work the hardest upon them, are setting, structure and color. =ruth sawyer=: plot--and its necessary structure; character--and its necessary setting. =chester l. saxby=: can only say what i've already said on this point: that development is the thing. it's like saying, though, who is most necessary on a baseball team. where would you be if one of them was lacking? material is the most often slighted in writing, i believe. stories are thin through lack of it. =barry scobee=: all equally, i believe. if my story lacks any one in proper portion and keeping with the others it will drag with me, and when a story drags in the writing it makes me wonder, makes me feel something is wrong with it. however, a story will drag and bore sometimes when it is good, so one must be careful about self-hunches. but i must have plot, a puzzle, a frame to hang the story on to get from crisis to crisis. to me, the plot lends the essential puzzle and drama arrangement. structure tells it properly. style--well, after all, i don't pay the slightest attention to style, if by that is meant "the writer's style." i don't know whether i have any style or not, or what it is like. no one ever told me. material--that, after all, is the big thing. but i love the setting if it is in my beloved southwest, or where i know every detail--blade of grass, or quirk of human, or smile of woman--that is, what's back of 'em. character--well, i have found if i don't pal with my characters and know all their thoughts, the story doesn't appeal to the editors. color? i don't know. maybe i don't have much color. the word doesn't stir my thought much. local color, do you mean? i'd get that in the setting. =r. t. m. scott=: plot, structure, style, etc., are all equally interesting to me and equally difficult. perhaps clearness, suspense and the surprise ending interest me the most. if there is anything else--all the better! =robert simpson=: the most interesting thing about a story to me is the keynote. that decided upon, character, structure, style, plot and so on follow naturally. they can't help themselves. the keynote is struck, of course, in or about the chief character. as he or she is, the other "chords and discords" sound accordingly. i try never to write two stories alike. each story, of course, may have a fairly general resemblance to all of the others from the reader's standpoint, but the note each strikes is as different as i can make it. i am referring now particularly to book length yarns, although my notion applies in a lesser degree to short stories as well. =arthur d. howden smith=: in order: plot, structure, character, color, material, setting, style. =theodore seixas solomons=: structure and character. structure will make or break any story, because the reader's fiction curiosity or interest is not to be satisfied unless you rigidly adhere to certain laws of interest by which he is governed. and character is the vitalizing principle that gives snap and satisfaction to his reading. to put it metaphorically, if the structure is not right he simply can't swallow the story, because it opposes corners and angles to the form of his mental gullet. but even given a proper structure, the story is insipid to the taste unless the people are real and enough out of the ordinary--have enough "character"--to be interesting. the other elements you enumerate, especially plot and style, are great aids, merely. =raymond s. spears=: i find material, characters, setting (atmosphere "color"), the most interesting; but this betrays, of course, my lack of scholarship. =norman springer=: i think in about the following order--character, color, style, structure, plot, material. but not always. =t. s. stribling=: i am simply delighted with every one of the elements of a story which you mention. take any one out and it is like taking the tires off an auto. to me it is not a rational question. for instance, which do you like best, the tires, seats, engine or chassis of an auto? sure i like them best. =booth tarkington=: i don't make your subdivisions. =w. c. tuttle=: it is rather difficult to say which part of the story is of the most importance to me in writing. the character has always been foremost, i believe; because style, structure, setting and color must follow in order to complete the characterization. =lucille van slyke=: something you left out of your list! something barrie calls "that damned thing called charm!" ohee! if i could put on paper _that_--i'd let any old body have the plot and character and the rest! but trying to get it there is like walking on a tightwalker's rope over niagara--you're liable to slip off and get drowndededededededead! end as plain mush. =atreus von schrader=: of all these, color is most important to me; _i. e._, purposeful characters in colorful settings. i prefer stories wherein people do things to those in which nothing moves but the wheels in the characters' heads. =t. von ziekursch=: structure, material, color. =henry kitchell webster=: the most important and interesting thing to me, in writing fiction, is character. =g. a. wells=: i consider character the most interesting feature of a story. a story without character is minus. plot also interests me. however, not too much should happen. about two years ago i read a story of about forty thousand words. in every line something happened, and when i had finished the story i was decidedly tired, both mentally and physically. there is such a thing as having too much action in a story. i don't care for a story that lacks structure and style, though if the plot is strong and the character-drawing good, structure and style can go hang. setting is important. =william wells=: oh, lord! =ben ames williams=: under these various heads: plot in a short story is often the most important element; in a longer story it is interesting chiefly for its effect on the characters of the characters. structure always of first importance. a story can be made, or ruined, by using narration instead of a scene; by inverting the order of incidents; by neglecting "sign-posts"; by cheating the reader out of the big moment he expected; by putting your climax too early--or too late. or by many another structural coup or mistake. style is essential--and various. i try to tell my story, produce my effect in the simplest possible way. material not important except in the negative sense that some themes are taboo. setting not important in a short story, though it may be made so. always important in a novel. in a short story you may lift your characters out of their background and deal only with them. in a novel you must set them against their proper surroundings. character: the more definite, the better. or in other words, the more the better. color: i see no difference between color and setting. in this paragraph i assume to express only my own views, of course. i've stated these views dogmatically for the sake of brevity. =honore willsie=: i could not differentiate. all are essential to the finely rounded tale. =h. c. witwer=: style and plot. =william almon wolff=: well, you have to have a story first of all. so, i suppose, plot comes first. but you have to have people, too, so character can be bracketed with plot. after that the importance of various elements depends, it seems to me, on the particular story. =edgar young=: style highly important, verisimilitude, plot. with style and verisimilitude a man can go far in story writing. by style i mean manner of narration in connection with the particular story being written. summary by assigning seven points to a first choice, six to a second choice, etc., we get a general perspective on the trend of these answers as a whole. where several elements are named without indicating order of preference all are scored as first choice unless the order of the group is otherwise located. of answerers were unable to assign relative values, were not tabulated, stated only that importance varies with each particular story and replied, "i don't make your subdivisions." tabulating the remaining answers we have a roughly formulated score as follows: character plot style structure setting color material all action atmosphere situation development abstract ideas clearness suspense surprise drama keynote humanity thought charm theme verisimilitude feeling philosophy period humor punch the seven elements specifically mentioned in the question were merely the stock names commonly used in the profession that happened to mind and were of course intended only to suggest the general purpose of the question. neither the seven nor the twenty-one other elements mentioned in the table are all mutually exclusive and on some there is no agreement of definition. this is of no moment. we are not compiling a dictionary or a mathematical table, though some of these summaries may give that impression. we are seeking only to discover general trends. any deductions must be of a general, not a final, nature, and most emphatically there must always be allowance for the individual case, which on occasion can and should defy all general rules and trends. the value of such laboratory tests as these lies in our using as a basis, not theories, but facts, our real purpose being not to prove or disprove accepted theories but to draw whatever conclusions the facts dictate. there is, god knows, little enough of this kind of work being done. instead, the writing world is littered with thousands of hereditary rules, arbitrary dicta, theoretical conclusions and unsound generalities. here are facts; let us get from them what suggestions we may, each after his own fashion and according to his own needs. i could fill pages with my deductions and conclusions from these answers, some of them perhaps very good for my own case and perhaps very bad for the next person. it may be that the experienced writer can profit more from the presentation of these facts than can the beginner. just as i with twenty years of editorial experience can profit from them infinitely more than i could have done five, ten, twenty years ago. we are all prone to conclude that we have solved a matter for all time, when in reality we have only become a little weary of learning and a little "sot" in our beliefs. on the other hand, a little learned in the beginning may be more effective than much learned later by experience, for experience means vanished years. that writers in general can and do learn from one another as to problems and methods there is no doubt, and here are writers by the score instead of by ones and twos. these tabulations serve only toward a general perspective, the more specific values being in the answers themselves. a more general classification of the elements considered in this section of the questionnaire may be worth while, grouping them roughly as to general nature: plot, structure, action, situation, development, suspense, surprise, drama, punch-- . character-- . setting, color, atmosphere, period-- . style, clearness, accuracy, charm, verisimilitude-- . material-- . abstract ideas, keynote, humanity, thought, theme, feeling, philosophy-- . question ix _what are two or three of the most valuable suggestions you could give to a beginner? to a practised writer?_ answers =bill adams=: in the matter of hints--to beginners--don't begin yet. wait till you've had a chance to learn a bit more. to practised writers, "for god's sake don't talk so _much_." =samuel hopkins adams=: to a beginner: to learn to look at men and things directly, not obliquely, to write what you want to write, not what others want you to write; to adopt and cling to their creed, abominated or considered heretical by most non-writers, that fiction is and always must be more interesting and compact than life, or it is not fiction. as for advising a practised writer: why invite one to practise an impertinence toward those who know as much of the craft as i myself do? =paul l. anderson=: to read _analytically_. to write. =william ashley anderson=: a beginner ought to read voraciously, learning to distinguish the real from the false. he ought to study both history and literature. and he ought to start off with the thorough realization that the great writers were great thinkers, regular men and hard workers. he ought never make a pose of writing, but go at it, rather, as though it were a real job. there is nothing to say to a practised writer except that he ought to have an ideal and set high standards for himself, otherwise he will inevitably become hack. a writer must sooner or later show his personality in his works, and if he has no personality (it may be a personality formed by his brain and character; his physical appearance has nothing to do with it) he can never hope for continued success. =h. c. bailey=: to a beginner--know people and sympathize with them. to a practised writer--don't use the same characters. =edwin balmer=: to try it on editors and get their real reactions. not to think you're good. =ralph henry barbour=: suggestions to the beginner? nothing new, certainly. make your stories real, though. have real characters, let them act naturally in natural scenes and talk natural talk. don't strive for a "style." that comes. or doesn't come. it doesn't matter in either case. i'm one of the old-fashioned sort who believe that writing is something that can't be learned as you learn china painting or bridge or how to conduct one's self in good society. i have a hunch that the ability to write anything any one else wants to read is somewhere inside one when one lets out the first infantile squall. i may be wrong. writing, after all, is just a method of self-expression, like painting, music, sculpture. successful musicians are not _made_. they may be perfected. that is likewise true of painters and sculptors. however, there are all grades of musicians, and likewise there are many grades of writers. even a little natural ability will get you somewhere if you cultivate it. any one who wants to write has my sympathy and good wishes. i say go to it. only, if you're taking up writing merely because it looks like an easy path to affluence or because you're tired of gas-fitting or selling automobiles or doing housework, don't be disappointed if editors seem hard-hearted. to the practised writer i have no suggestions to make. i'm not that cheeky. =frederick orin bartlett=: my advice to a beginner would be to write all the time; to a practised writer, not to write all the time. =nalbro bartley=: don't write anything you are not familiar with. if you haven't worked on a newspaper, do so. don't be afraid to revise if an editor says to do so--the "art" of your story is not likely to be imperiled! keep moving--in the way of getting new angles and fresh copy. a practised writer so many times writes a story which is hailed as his best, his masterpiece, and then he settles back into turning out endless echoes of the same, without realizing that he is retrograding. don't mix too much with inky people--you will do nothing but talk shop and get into a deadly rut. stay where you can see life--because authors are not going to buy or read your stories and the fiction reading public does not want to read about authors--they want to read what authors write about the fiction reading public. =konrad bercovici=: if one feels it is the only thing he wants to do; if he feels within himself the call of the minstrel; if he can enjoy a good meal or a tall glass of wine one day and dry bread the next, a soft downy bed one night and the cold ground the following: if he feels he can live that haphazard life without any desire to equalize it, by spreading out his pennies so that he may have a little more than dry bread every day instead of affluence one day and misery the following: if he has had a manuscript returned sixty times and still invests the next twelve cents (borrowed from a friend) for a postage stamp to mail same manuscript for the sixty-first time, then there is some hope that some day he may become a writer. every one writing is really an apprentice. it is the most difficult and the most impossible of all the arts, for none of us can really write. =ferdinand berthoud=: don't try to write of something you don't know about or have not experienced. don't get the impression that copying the style and structure of any successful writer will be a sure stepping stone to immediate success. pretty clothes are not much use unless you have something good to wrap them round. don't get the mistaken idea that writers become sudden millionaires by sitting down and pounding the keys a couple of hours a day. as to giving advice to a practised writer--i haven't the nerve. =h. h. birney, jr.=: to a beginner i can only say that the way to learn to write is to write. no one ever learned to swim on dry land. write all the time. make yourself your own merciless critic. make up your mind you're rotten and figure how to improve. take some incident from the daily paper. write a story from it--not over two thousand five hundred words for a starter. lay it aside till it's "cold" and then go over it, thinking only "here's a poor story by some one i don't know. how can i make a good, readable yarn out of it?" realize that you can't be a kipling or an o. henry, but you can become successful just the same. as soon as you are suited with a story send it to a magazine for which it is suited. ask for a criticism of it. frequently you'll get one, as editors really want to help writers. don't get discouraged. remember that, as far as _sales_ are concerned, you're really writing for just one or two men--the readers on the staff of that particular magazine. what one reader doesn't like another might. read _martin eden_ but don't let your ego get too big for your cosmos as "martin" did. remember that jack london had been severely bitten by the bacillus of socialism, and make allowances accordingly. i'll wait until i am a practised writer before i attempt to offer advice to one. =farnham bishop=: feed your fiction with facts. never cheapen your name and your self-respect by writing a pot-boiler. have only one grade: the best. if you can't make a living at first by writing, enlist or take a regular job--and learn about human beings and human nature in the barracks or the shop, till you have something real to write about. learn to use a typewriter and always keep a carbon copy until the story appears in print. to the practised writer: join the authors' league and the authors' guild. build up your own staff of technical advisers; an astronomer to coach you in the ways of the moon, a retired sea-captain or naval officer, doctors, lawyers, engineers, buck-privates and other experts in all walks of life. =algernon blackwood=: to a beginner--don't write unless you simply can not keep it back. write to please yourself. never think of a public. reduce your first attempts to the briefest possible length. see in how few words you can make your idea or plot intelligible. to a practised writer--feel dissatisfied with everything completed, put it aside and forget it entirely, then read it over months later--and revise. =max bonter=: i am only a beginner myself. naturally i wouldn't be idiotic enough to offer suggestions to anybody. i have often wondered, however, what my fate would have been if i had followed the line of least resistance. looking at my first story after twenty-two years of rough house, i see that it was nothing but cub bunk. nevertheless at that time the editor told me that i had "promise," etc., and advised me to keep going. what would have happened to me if i had started to swell up at the tender age of eighteen and could have found a market for the stuff? why, at that time i fancied that a swallow-tail coat represented the ne plus ultra of social advancement! i must have had a grain or two of sense under my callowness. now, after twenty-two years of real life, i feel justified in making a beginning. i think that maybe, if i work faithfully, i can say something before i quit. =katharine holland brown=: don't write unless you are profoundly convinced that you will be miserable in any other occupation. then, if you have determined that you will write, tramp straight over everything and everybody that gets in your way. remember that to be a writer will cost everything you have got, and more too. but go up to the counter and pay. it's worth all you can pay. after winning a certain amount of recognition, don't imagine that you can afford to lean back and relax. there isn't any back to a writer's chair. =f. r. buckley=: to beginner, read kipling and write regularly without trying to imitate him. to old hand, don't tell your plots before they're written. not because they're liable to be stolen, either. =prosper buranelli=: i don't know of any suggestion--save don't write unless you can't do anything else. if you have the consciousness of genius, become a hobo, because you are feeble-minded. =thompson burtis=: as from one beginner to another, without elaboration, i should say that the first dozen suggestions would all be comprised in one: write about the scenes, characters and events you know best and don't describe a single thing or type on which you have to use your imagination too much. society girls writing about the untrammeled west and a kankakee newspaperwoman writing about reginald vandervere are sad, and i think all people who want to write whom i have known have inevitably believed that their own actual experience and acquaintance provided nothing interesting. the other two suggestions i would make would be: go at writing as you would learning any trade--study published stories in detail; learn proper technical procedure from books or experienced writers, and _work_ at it, forgetting for the moment to consider it an art instead of a business. having decided to write about something one knows about, and having mastered technique enough to know that in plot, construction and material the embryo story is salable, do not let your wild desire to sell it and be a writer cause you to revise, revamp and change your story so much that it will lose its personality--its power of reflecting you yourself. the best story, i firmly believe, which i ever conceived finally ended up at half a cent a word after many weary hours of work on it because i had revised it until three prominent editors coincided in the judgment that it was "manufactured." it was woodenly written. i believe the first draft of a lot of stories beat the final one. of course the newer the writers the harder they must work, but i believe stage fright often makes them as stiff as an amateur actor. =george m. a. cain=: my first nineteen suggestions to a beginner would be punch's celebrated advice to those about to marry--_don't_. literature is an art. if one can conceivably be happy outside it, he had much better stay there. as a lucrative profession it is simply a gamble. if a man is free of all dependents and can stay so indefinitely, he can afford to yield to the urge of the muse of fiction. even then, better not. if he has dependents, no circumstance or artistic urge or anything else should lead him to engage in literature at the expense or to the exclusion of some other sufficient employment for a livelihood. needs demanding a source of income half that of a plumber's helper will prove sufficient to hamper his advance in his art, turn his life into a rack of financial worries, spoil for him all natural affections, wreck his nerves, weaken his mental powers, break his health. i know. almost every editor for whom i have ever written has insisted that my best stuff was worthy of a much better market than he could give me. the constant need of money to keep the family together has compelled me to sell my best with my worst, where i knew it would bring quick cash. it has driven me to make a nuisance of myself to editors who would be kind and quick; it has kept me from trying editors who could not render such prompt service. it has tied me to the cheapest and poorest markets. it has caused me to fill these to overflowing, only to the eventual loss even of them. for the man who can not or will not take this advice, i know of no qualification i possess to give any other. =robert v. carr=: i can think of no suggestions that would equal what a man finds out for himself. =george l. catton=: write a story, doing your very best on it and paying no attention to any rules, and submit it to a reliable, cold, disinterested critic. then when he has read it, ask him if he thinks you could ever make good in the field. if he says no, stop right there and forget it. if he says yes, go to it and stick to it in spite of hell! but first, before you go any farther, get that critic to point out to you your mistakes, and correct them. after that pay no more attention to critics, or to courses of study. then write. write! write! write! laugh--and write. weep--and write! get mad--and write! and write! and laugh at rejection slips; they don't mean anything. to a practised writer i would say: if you want to be a "big boy" in the game, and you have the money to invest, spend ten thousand dollars in an extensive advertising campaign of your work. that's the big secret and the only secret. and inside of a year or so you'll get back your ten thousand with a thousand per cent. interest. and i'm willing to prove it anytime. =robert w. chambers=: to a beginner, be sure you have something to say, then learn how to say it. to a practised writer, work and pray. =roy p. churchill=: to a beginner "learn to express your observations." to an oldtimer, "learn to repress your observations." that is, the beginner is afraid to write fully about his characters, or does not know how. the oldtimer does know how, and preaches too long without selection. =carl clausen=: don't give up. don't get conceited. =courtney ryley cooper=: know your subject. make your story live. stay away from the plaudits of your friends and treasure every bit of criticism you can get from persons who know. for the practised writer, this motto: "i've just got a hunch for a story. it's going to be the _best_ thing i ever did in my life." for, i don't care how poor that story may be when it is finished, it is the enthusiasm that will make and keep making a writer. when he sits down coldbloodedly just to write a story--that's about the time they're beginning to grease the toboggan. =arthur crabb=: to beginners: have an independent income, no troubles, and a whole raft of experience. far be it from me to make suggestions to a practised writer except from a commercial point of view. from that point of view i should say find out what an editor wants and give it to him, no matter how distasteful the job may be. as i see it, current fiction writers are divided into two classes, those who know thoroughly what they are writing about and those who don't know anything at all what they are writing about. so far as i can discover there does not seem to be much middle ground. =mary stewart cutting=: one of the most valuable experiences i ever had was that of manuscript reader for two months. i found that every two out of three stories that failed did so on account of unbalanced construction. an architect does not build a house with all the windows at the top and none at the bottom. a woman does not make a dress with the sleeves put in back and front instead of at the sides. but people write stories with apparently no idea of relative proportion such as would apply to anything else which they undertook. =elmer davis=: to a beginner, take the keeley cure and try to get the infection out of your system before it is too late. to a veteran, none. =william harper dean=: to the beginner i would say, "write about the things that strike deeply into your sense of emotion and damn the rest." to the practised writer: "for god's sake don't prostitute your ability for any editor--don't write to order. go hungry and suffer the pangs of near-failure (you will do both at times!) if needs be, but hang on to what you know is life! don't let go for the easy money of the tailor-made story--these have made it necessary for us to import stories to america. easy money from story writing buys a ticket through the primrose path to--obscurity! be a writer, not a hack!" =harris dickson=: personally my most valuable suggestion to myself is to _write the thing that i know_. for instance, i did three or four historical novels that might have been done by anybody that was able to read certain books in which the material lay. any hack writer can do such stories in any library. naturally they have no particular value. but the man's story of his own back yard, of his own neighbors, of his own town, of _the conditions that he knows the best, has more or less value as a contribution to current history_. like the journals of st. simon, pepys, _the jesuit relations_, etc., from which later histories are written. the young writer as well as the old must bear in mind that he offers his work, not in competition with his next-door neighbor, nor in competition with his town, his state, his country or his own generation, but in competition with the best that has ever been produced by the best brains of the world. therefore he _must_ do his level best, at whatever cost of time and labor. he simply can not afford to let a story leave his hand when a better word will improve it. =captain dingle=: to a beginner: write only of what you know from personal contact; write your stories as you would write your letters; avoid a multiplicity of advisers. write with your soul as well as with your pen, and the first real editor who sees your stuff will either encourage you to go on or send you a printed slip. if that comes, go back to work. to a practised writer: write your best, even after you have arrived. don't let an editor down by giving him trash just because you believe he will take it for your name's sake. =louis dodge=: my suggestion to a writer, practised or otherwise, would be: be yourself--but be yourself developed to the highest possible degree. and i should want it understood that development is something that comes more largely from within than without. to educate is to lead out, or draw out--not to fill up. =phyllis duganne=: i suppose a beginner ought to learn just what he needs to put into a story to make it convincing; his good plot is nothing at all unless he knows how to make his people alive. that's about the most valuable thing i've been learning. and if he's inclined to use too many words, he ought to learn not to do that--words can get so in the way of a story. i'm not advising practised writers yet; maybe i will some day. =j. allan dunn=: i have suggested with good results to several beginners that they should try to write in dramatic form entirely before they start a story. that they should write about what they know at first hand. that they should leave the psychological alone. i think i can assimilate advice myself but i don't know for sure and i don't want to attempt to advise a practised writer. i don't want to give an opinion on what is wrong with his yarn. i was an editor once. =walter a. dyer=: i would advise beginners to practise restraint in writing and to seek to be sincere. also to cultivate the imaginative qualities in the development of character and the making of pictures. to a practised writer i have no right to advise anything, but i admire independence and a devotion to the highest ideals of style and structure; i despise the tendency to fall in with the crowd and devote the greater energy to the invention of the plot and emotions that "the public wants." =walter prichard eaton=: to a beginner--remember that the book of ruth is told in three thousand words and guy de maupassant's _price of string_ in three thousand words. =e. o. foster=: the most valuable suggestions i would give to a beginner are: first, to write; second, to write and third, to write. to a practised writer i could say first a big mailing list, such as technical, sporting magazines out of the ordinary line, so that "pot-boilers" could be adding to the regular income, second to originate a style of your own. =arthur o. friel=: having admitted that i can't boss my own work, i'm hardly in position to tell another writer how to do it. since you ask for suggestions to beginners, however, here are one or two for which there wasn't room on the questionnaire: study words. they're the bricks with which you build your story-house and you should know how to lay them right. learn just what they mean. you can not correctly express your ideas without the requisite vocabulary. avoid using long or unusual words or complicated sentences, so far as possible. you should know what the long and unusual words mean, for occasions may arise when no others will express your exact meaning; but usually you can, and should, use simple words and simple sentences. this makes your stuff easy to read. the reader doesn't want to be forced to consult the dictionary in order to find out what you're trying to say. read as much as you can. reading will help greatly to give you the hang of writing. but, in writing, don't try to model your stuff on something you have read. develop it in your own way. don't be a copy-cat. keep trying; that is, keep writing. if your first stories don't "land" with editors, don't quit. consider these rejected stories as practise work, and write new ones. you will gain in ease and power with every new tale written. as for suggestions to a practised writer, the best and only one i can give is this: pick your field and then specialize in that field. learn all you can about it--you never can know too much. if you can, develop a new field; then you'll be its master, not merely a follower of the trails laid down by others. the beaten paths are always crowded with other folks who are trying to do the same thing you're doing. if you can't be a pioneer, then try to make yourself the best man in whatever line you've chosen--the sea, the mountains, the jungle, the city, the small town, or what-not. "knowledge is power" is an ancient bromide, but absolutely true. =j. u. giesy=: complete interest in work, dogged perseverance, a study of language and its shades of meaning--a study of dialogue with a view to both virility and naturalness--a painting of descriptions broadly and concisely rather than in detail (for a beginner). i'd hesitate to advise a practised writer till i got into his class myself. =george gilbert=: write; peddle your stuff through the mails. keep away from editors; you can't influence them; do not let them influence you. especially keep away from the editor who wants you to "write something like the last," or "string that idea into a series or a serial." _be yourself_ and let all else not matter. do not write to order or to please any editor or set of readers. =kenneth gilbert=: to the beginner i would say: be _sure_ your plot is strong, dramatic and not commonplace; start the action quickly, never let up on the suspense, and end it with a twist. (the so-called "surprise" story, but the safest with which to make the first landing.) modesty forbids me to suggest anything to the practised writer. ---- writers require no such advice from me, and i wouldn't care to set down on paper any suggestions to the ladies and gentlemen who over-write many of our other magazines. =holworthy hall=: study latin, forget o. henry and manage to have a rich relative or an independent income in order to avoid the necessity of gambling with good ideas and turning them into bad stories for immediate cash. to a practised writer without identity, i should hardly venture to offer suggestions. =richard matthews hallet=: i would say to a beginner that after eight years in this game i was forced to hold up a spanish miner for food; and yet for seven years after that i have made a living at least and paid up debts. if the beginner is like me, he will need patience. if not this year, next, and if not then, perhaps five years hence. _respice finem._ i think i would also advise him not to set out to be an author, but if he has an itch to write, let him remember that and do it on the side, but let him also have another trade or profession and plug at that for his actual contacts. a spectator pure and simple will give a pretty thin interpretation of things, usually. a lawyer grows better as a lawyer by the mere exercise of his profession, and so a doctor; but an author by sitting at a desk can improve nothing but his technique--that thing at which i look aslant. he must go elsewhere for his matter. he must charge himself if he is to discharge. and this is not done too easily by strolling among his fellow-citizens and pestering them with questions. unless you have some ground-knowledge, you can not even put the right questions. let him do something. let him look to his personality, in other words. in my opinion it will not tower much over what it is when he leaves everything for writing. =william h. hamby=: the most interesting thing in the world is human life. real fiction is life interestingly told. of all artists the writer is the greatest, for in creating a living, acting human being he comes nearest exercising the power of a god. a beginning writer should be intensely interested in many things, the more the better. his mind should be eternally curious. he must love life and people, especially people of simple human qualities. then he must discover which of these interests he can portray most vividly and give his stories or articles a background of his greatest liking. at first it is hard to tell whether a thing is merely of personal interest to the writer or of general interest to the public. many things are interesting or funny purely because we know the characters to which they happen. the writer must first make us acquainted with the character before we can become interested in the details of their lives. advice, like medicine, is usually more profitable to give than to take, but here is the sum of the advice i would give a new writer; like your chief character tremendously, make him want something terribly, give him the dickens of a time getting it, but let him get it. =a. judson hanna=: this may sound cynical, but goes. to the beginner: there seems to be little opportunity in the field of fiction for originality. follow the herd. to the practised writer: you know how you got there. keep going along the same track and you'll go farther. which sounds like an irish bull. in explanation--the very fact that an editor will tell you just what he wants and what he does not want seems to prove that a writer must manufacture his stories according to system. the only chance for originality that i have discovered is in variety of plot. =joseph mills hanson=: to a beginner, unless he be of the unusual type of poe, jules verne or h. g. wells:--adhere to familiar subjects; personally familiar if the subject be of the present time; historically familiar if of the past. know ten times as much about your subject as you can possibly impart to the reader in the story in hand. tell your story in as few words as possible (i wish i could practise that precept myself!). write naturally; do not strive for dramatic eloquence. to a practised writer:--do not become self-opinionated and over-confident in your own abilities. either tendency spoils the freshness of view and the simplicity of statement that is the charm of the best writing. =e. e. harriman=: i have given written advice to a number of beginners, which can be condensed thus--concentrate interest upon one figure--maintain interest unbroken--provide continuity of incident--give central figure an obstacle or obstacles to overcome by individual grit, wit and perseverance--have a plotted, dramatic ending, with very short denouement. in addition i tell them--short words--short sentences--short paragraphs. accuracy without detailed measurement, et cetera. forceful quiet english. wit, humor and pathos in proper proportions. dramatic suspense. clearness of expression that will inform the most obtuse without wearying the clear-minded quick thinkers. to the practised writer i would say--be sure, since a writer looks like a fool when he makes ridiculous statements. ---- makes a judge deny the right of appeal, when all he could do was to deny a new trial. i would tell the writer to avoid, as he would the plague, a too free use of words requiring a dictionary at the reader's elbow. i would tell him to remember that america needs sanity, not ravings of a madhouse, and to write such things as would help her stand four square and solid before the whole of creation. =nevil g. henshaw=: in all humility i'd say to the beginner--write about what you _know_ of with simplicity and repression. =joseph hergesheimer=: there are none but the need of honesty. =robert hichens=: try to write each page as if it were the only page you would ever write. make each page as good as you can. don't give yourself up to some special effort later on in your book. put forth your best powers. don't be niggardly. many writers are lazy-minded. that is fatal. you must be ready to take any amount of trouble over your book. never think of money rewards or of the opinions of critics when writing. try only to satisfy yourself thoroughly and don't worry about what others will think or say. never imitate another writer. =r. de s. horn=: to the beginner i would say: remember that writing is as much a profession as banking or engineering; therefore don't try it unless you are prepared to give it the same study and effort that you would have to give these others to make anything of a success. carry a note-book always and note anything that suggests a story. write at least four hours every day, whether you feel inspired or not; the ideas will come after a little while. don't get discouraged; success came to the biggest authors only after the most discouraging failures. revise--and revise--and _revise_! _and stick to the people, the things, that you know._ to a practised writer i would say: _please_ don't write on your reputation. write every new story just as carefully and conscientiously as though you were trying your first story on your first editor. it's so disappointing to pick up a poor story by a good author. =clyde b. hough=: read, study, absorb and dissect current fiction, take it apart sentence by sentence, word by word, even dissect the words and see why some other word would not have done better. as a suggestion to the practical writer--still study current fiction. =emerson hough=: to the beginner--don't! to the practised writer--quit! =a. s. m. hutchinson=: no practised writer wants suggestions--not my suggestions anyway. to a beginner--read all you can of the best stylists, write all you can, and when you have started a thing always finish it, never abandon it. =inez haynes irwin=: i have only one suggestion to the beginner--getting into the habit of writing every day. i have no suggestion to make to the practised writer. =will irwin=: to the beginner. get the writing habit. train yourself to write every day, whether you feel like it or no. write only about the life you know. try to be yourself. avoid the habit of abandoning a piece of work half-way through. finish what you have begun, no matter how bad it seems to you. to practised writers--i humbly withhold advice! =charles tenney jackson=: as to suggestions to new writers, i should think, whether of any value or not, they are given above. =frederick j. jackson=: to a beginner? first, second and fourth sentences in viii. to a practised writer the same. =mary johnston=: feel and think. continue to feel and think. =lloyd kohler=: to the beginner i would advise that, after he has studied the numerous books on fiction writing, he forget about them entirely when he begins the story. the minute he attempts to write a story according to rule, he is playing with fire. he should study form and technique, study the masters, and then, when the story is actually begun, forget everything but the story itself. without doubt the greatest number of rejected stories are rejected because of either the weakness or triteness of the plots used. beginners should always keep uppermost in mind the fact that "the story's the thing." get the story first; technique and style are secondary--but always very important also. =harold lamb=: to a very beginner, to make friends with some one who knows a great deal more about writing than he does. (this is the only school open to the beginner. there is no academy for the would-be writer, no night course or laboratory. they say the world is the university of the story teller. but, after all, is not that only another way of saying he must learn to crawl by himself, unless some one wiser than he will instruct him?) and then to make friends with those who have told stories in other languages. to read them in their own speech. the most valuable to me are french, chinese, scandinavian, russian, persian. (no, i do not read russian or scandinavian. translations do, for these.) and to write poetry. it is a good idea to burn it all up afterward. that is a very valuable suggestion. not just emotional poetry, or that slip-shod thing, free verse. but i think the beginner will learn that most of the masters of his craft know both the music and the mechanism of language. all the early masters did. to-day, i wonder if the tools of the masters of the craft cut as deep as then? well, _non sequitur_. to the experienced writer, to follow every whim. and to do a lot of work. he should know how to go about that. and a most valuable suggestion, if some one else will make it, too, would be keep away from dictionaries, encyclopedias, fiction magazines, literary clubs. =sinclair lewis=: work, work, work. =hapsburg liebe=: to both the beginner and the practised writer i would say: get something to write about, and know your subject, before you write; and write that one story as though it were to be the best story in the world--and don't throw away time on little stuff--try for the biggest, always, and damn the wishwash and slush (as j. london called it, and i will add) gush, mush and tango. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: i can think of nothing but the trite. work! work! write! write! count each story that you finish--even if you fail to sell--as an exercise in which you learn something. think of the tight-rope performer or opera singer. they have spent months, years, at expense learning their business before being able to turn a penny. the writer can at least consider the story-writing as an avocation until he becomes proficient. he can turn out a story once in a while though his days be spent over the ribbon-counter. so to a beginner i suggest cutting out the night dances, pool, cards and the like and spending from seven to eleven each night at the typewriter--practising! don't get the idea story writing is easy money. be willing to give effort for each dollar received and you're more likely to get the dollar. it's hard, hard work and when ideas refuse to come it's even harder. and when editors seem for a while to turn the cold shoulder to stories you have poured your very life into you begin to wonder if there isn't some pull being exercised by the authors whose punk--very, very punk--stories you see in the "big noise" magazines. but don't quit. stay with it. that is cold food but the only kind i have to offer. keep writing and try to learn something every day about the trade. editors can't haul you along if you refuse to follow their lead. they can't teach you. to the practised writer i can only beg him to stick to the things he knows. nothing pains me more than to read western stories written by persons who know nothing of the west. oh, the rope-tricks and the cactus and the wild-horses and the cowboys they so glibly sling into a story! one writer told of gathering armfuls of sun-dried cholla (cactus)! another told, lightly, of horseplay in which one puncher heaved another into a clump of cholla! now see, i am going to write of a new york editor: john jones, editor of one of the big, down-town magazines, finished his breakfast while his charming little wife, mary, packed his lunch-bucket. then he arose from the table and, with a brief kiss upon her ruby lips, he ran down the steps and out across the bottle-strewn lawn and down along the maple lined street. mary stood in the door and waved as he turned the last corner.... john whistled gaily as he strode into the editorial office, punched the time-clock and set his lunch-bucket in the cloak room. he removed his coat and put on the long, black cloth cuffs that mary had made; he climbed briskly to his stool and, as the whistle blew, turned to the papers that littered his desk and began to write rapidly.... now, then. that's as near right as most of the cowboy stories that appear in any magazine except ----. you hate to read of that lunch-bucket as much as i do to read of wearing the chaps into the denver hotel, or using a hair-rope for a riata! and all the rest. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: to a beginner, see vii and xi. to a practised writer: repent, brother! =rose macaulay=: do not begin. very few beginners will come to any good. to practised writers: stop. very few practised writers have not already written too much. =crittenden marriott=: choose one type of story and stick to it. otherwise you'll lose on all styles. facility is a curse. if you want to write in several styles, have a _nom de plume_ for each. =homer i. mceldowney=: (see also under answer to v.) one suggestion--the all-fired importance of taking the old pen in hand often and as regularly as may be, and of batting out lines, scads of them. and let it be the writer himself that flows with the ink, not zane grey, thackeray or o. henry. =ray mcgillivray=: to a beginning writer: read much of the best of the sort of writing you wish to do. suit your own abilities and interests in the choice--and your abilities depend upon what you have seen, felt, lived and learned. study every person as a human character. live as full a life as your typewriter will let you. write like a demon--and don't let up until your yarn satisfies you and at least one editor. to experienced professional writers i wouldn't say a word. my questions, on the other hand, would keep them humping. =helen topping miller=: my suggestion to beginning writers is: first, learn people. know as many people from every walk of life as possible. learn their lives, their troubles, their problems, the joys they have--their outlook on the rest of the world. having acquired a strong sincerity in dealing with humanity, the writer must inevitably produce work which will ring true. in my opinion, giving convincing and appealing character plot becomes more or less a matter of mechanics and the employment of the dramatic sense. second: learn the language. study poetry, the psalms, songs, the gospels--every form of tuneful, rhythmic writing. to make words sing is to my mind the supreme gift in writing english. and i can give no better advice to the practised writer than this. =thomas samson miller=: _never force_ yourself, for the stuff then comes from the head instead of from the heart. it doesn't ring true. quit before you are tired and you'll be more eager to get at the work on the morrow. =anne shannon monroe=: i would suggest to a beginner that he first be sure he has something to say: then put it every bit on paper; then find the main thread and eliminate everything that does not make it stand out; to read it aloud, and get the sound of his stuff; to read it to other people and get their reactions; to lay it aside till he forgets it, and then go over it again--maybe half a dozen times. to eliminate every word he can eliminate and still tell his story clearly and convincingly. and then to copy it beautifully--and send it to an editor. one more point: to pay not an iota of attention to praise of his work, when he reads it to his friends, but to note their actual reaction--their interest, curiosity, enjoyment of his story. what they say has no value; how they enjoy it is everything. =l. m. montgomery=: as to advising beginners--why, i love to do it. advice is so cheap and easy. first, i always tell them what an old lady used to say to me: "don't marry as long as you can help it, for when the right man comes along you can't help it." so--don't write if you can help it; because if you ought to write and have it in you to make a real success of writing you can't help it. if you are _sure_ you can't help it, then go ahead. write--write--write. revise--revise--revise. prune--prune--prune. study stories that are classed as masterpieces and find out _why_ they are so classed. leave your stories alone after they are written long enough to come to them as a stranger. then read them over as a stranger; you'll see a score of faults and lacks you never noticed when they came hot from your pen. rewrite them, cutting out the faults and supplying the lacks. i would advise beginners to cultivate the note-book habit. jot down every idea that comes to you as you go on living--ideas for plots, characters, descriptions, dialogue, etc. it is amazing how well these bits will fit into a story that wasn't born or thought of when you set them down. and they generally have a poignancy that is lacking in deliberate invention. for example, i was once washing the dinner dishes when a friend happened to quote to me the old saying: "blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed." i retorted, "i think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed." then i dropped my dish cloth and rushed to "jot it down." it lay in my note-book unused for ten years and then it motivated one of the best chapters in my first book. this illustrates what i mean by the note-book habit. practised writers should try to avoid mannerisms and stereotyped style. they won't succeed, of course, but they should try. also, they shouldn't presume on their success and think that anything goes because they write it. =frederick moore=: read and labor. don't get out of practise. =talbot mundy=: . _write._ . _rewrite._ the beginner can learn to write only by writing, just as you can learn to run only by running, or to ride by riding. i believe that _rewriting_ is almost the most important thing of all. "go over a story again and again and again" may be a counsel of unattainable perfection, but i know it's good. it has never failed in my own case. when i have failed to satisfy it has been because, for financial reasons, i have neglected this essential. it may rarely happen that because of long forethought or peculiar skill or familiarity with a certain subject, a writer may be able to dash off a story without pause. perhaps pause is a bad thing anyway. but reconsideration--polish--elimination of unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs and even chapters--these are almost as important as the plot. for of what use is a story if it gives the reader no pleasure to read? each story should be a _finished job_. there ought to be a law against writing more than one book a year. in fact there is a law against it. i'm going to reform and obey the law. one book or its equivalent in twelve months would pay ninety-nine out of a hundred writers (in the end) vastly better than the novelette a month that i have been attempting. =kathleen norris=: write as freely as you would bake if you meant to be a baker. imagine that your seventeenth story is going to be your first success, and move steadily and indifferently through the discouragements that meet the first sixteen. live, in loving and giving, to the full; and think of your work as a sort of overflow. th to th rule. _write._ =anne o'hagan=: the usual one--know enough about your story, your characters, their lives and experiences, to be in a way possessed by them when you are working with them. otherwise you can't write with any profit. do things not connected with the business of writing now and then--study unrelated topics, travel, farm, get into movements, etc., etc., not for the purpose of getting material but for the purpose of getting _fertilizers_; as the good agriculturist plows, cultivates and seeds a field every now and then, not in order to reap a crop, but in order to plow under his crop for the enrichment of his soil. =grant overton=: there is no suggestion of a concrete sort that one can make which will be of any value to a beginner--that is, a general suggestion. he must work it all out for himself. he will get it with all his intellectual five or six or seven senses from reading and from following writers and other people in general. the work of synthesis is his job. the creative emergence is his genius if he has it. a practised writer is not in need of suggestions, or, if he is, they have nothing to do with his actual writing but with his qualities as a man and a thinker, his general outlook upon life, his philosophy, etc. =sir gilbert parker=: none. =hugh pendexter=: to the beginner: write what you know. be interesting. to the practised writer: have nothing happen beyond the plane of human possibilities. it is better to keep to the plane of probabilities. truth may take such grotesque shapes as to surpass the wildest fiction, but fiction should always be truthful. =clay perry=: to a beginner i would say: get into a writing game, newspaper work, if possible, and you will soon find out whether you really want to write as a career. use raw life as a study. mix with the common herd and get to know them. be of the people and you will be for the people and they will be for you; it will reflect in your work. to a practised writer: keep close to the source, human nature. don't go away and hide for long periods at a time. try to turn out in each successive story something better than the last. let each one be your current masterpiece. =walter b. pitkin=: i can not give two or three suggestions to a beginner, for every beginner is an individual, having his own peculiarities of interest, perception, bent and instinctive expressiveness. all i can say is that all beginners, irrespective of individual differences, must achieve three things: insight into and enthusiasm over some aspect of life that is capable of being dramatized or similarly portrayed in narrative; secondly, a sense of effective presentation, be it of drama or character or what not; and, lastly, some kind of original touch, which obviously can not be defined except in some useless negative way. each of these three achievements involves both native ability and training. the training need not come from schools or teachers; it may come from the worker's own resolve to observe, analyze and practise. ability alone gets only a little way. training alone gets nowhere. a word on the second achievement mentioned. effective presentation involves much more than a command of english. it involves, over and above that, skill in selecting episodes, angles of approach, phases of character and action which stress the significant in your story and blur or wholly remove the trivial and irrelevant. in this department of your work, nothing succeeds so well as patience, elaborate observation and practise in "thumb-nail sketches" and persistent revision. =e. s. pladwell=: there is only one valuable suggestion: know your own story. know where it is going to end. if the climax is clear any road can lead to the climax. i never had trouble except when i ignored that rule. if one knows the climax there need be no rambling to get there. give me a snappy climax and i can build any story to it. =lucia mead priest=: i do not feel competent to suggest in this, but i will venture to state what i feel is a sad lack in our current literature--it is a loss in moral values. why has the story of a. s. m. hutchinson swept the english reading people off its feet? because he has given us something for which we were hungry--a decent, whole-souled, high thinking man. "mark sabre" is not impossible, nor a namby-pamby. he is real. the fact that the world has responded is reassuring. we are not dead to honor or clean thinking after all. for one, i am deadly weary of flaunting naked bodies and the coarse souls that meet us on every printed page. let us turn the leaf. let us, every last man of us, get down into himself, into his decencies, and turn his pen their way. he will reap his _reward_, i believe. ask the publishers about _if winter comes_. =eugene manlove rhodes=: never read book reviews or "literary" magazines--books about books. =frank c. robertson=: to the beginner, and i would not presume to advise any other kind, i would say that, if there is the innate ability to write, adherence to three simple rules should bring success. think, work, revise. but above all _think_. and realize right at the beginning that bluffs won't work. don't pretend to be a writer until you are one. the instant you stop to pose you lose some of the momentum that is carrying you along toward success. the woods are so full of posers that there is no longer any distinction even in being a good one. =ruth sawyer=: for a beginner i should say write simply, write of the best and the most inspirational things and people that you know. test the value of what you do by the quality of human appeal that is in it and remember that the finest and most lasting influences in any art are those that build toward something and not those that pull down. to the practised writer i have nothing to offer. he knows what he wants to do and how he wants to do it better than i can tell him. =chester l. saxby=: to a beginner: read! read! read! anything, everything--and discuss it. nobody can tell a beginner what to write or how to write--in the way of style or type of story, i mean. let him go, and then be fair enough to his future to find fault. of course, a beginner should seek the society of a practised writer, and a practised writer should seek the society of the beginner. the beginner needs insight into methods, and the practised writer, god wot, gets as jaded and blasé and scrawny as anything if he doesn't forever look behind him. to the practised writer: quit thinking of the reading public. be inspired once more. look _back_. =barry scobee=: for the beginner: know you _want_ to and _will_ write. then learn technique. then get something out of your _own_ experience to write about--in other words, have something to write about. don't flounder as i did because i had nothing to write about. as soon as i found something to write about i began to sell. by something to write about i mean something you love, understand, are sincere about. advice, hints to the practised writer? nothing doing! i'll try to listen, though. one more thought here: it seems to me, after all, that sincerity is the great need and essential of the writer. i saw in the _metropolitan_ five or six years ago that of two thousand stories submitted not one seemed to be sincere. (that may not have been the precise statement, but it is the impression i got then.) and the statement set me to thinking, and has kept me at it now and then ever since. sincerity! the editors of ---- sent a story back to me recently. it wasn't sincere writing and i knew it. there's no use; i can't bluff or four-flush or give short measure in my fiction and get away with it. =r. t. m. scott=: my best advice to a beginner is to write one hundred stories. i would not advise a practised writer. he would not be a practised writer if he accepted any advice that did not come from within himself. =robert simpson=: to a beginner i should say above all things, write incessantly, write simply, and revise without end. learn to appreciate the true value of criticism. all criticism is good, however incompetent or unjust some of it may be, if only because it expresses a point of view. study the stories of the recognized masters, then those of the rank and file, and finally the clumsy tricks of other beginners. lots of beginners have ideas and tricks of writing that are worth knowing and mastering and applying to your own particular style. finally, always remember that in a story, no matter what its class or nature, three things are absolutely essential. these three are interest, suspense and climax--the beginning, the middle and the end. i won't split straws about the possible overlapping of interest and suspense, because i don't allow myself to become confused about their meanings. in beginning a story one must write with a view to taking hold of the reader's interest. as the story progresses it must develop suspense to retain that interest more firmly, and, when the climax is reached, one must be sure that it _satisfies_ that interest. of these three the climax is the most important, largely because it is the final impression the reader has of the story. he takes that final impression away with him. what went before is more or less of a blur, and no matter how brilliantly the climax may have been led up to, if it does not satisfy the interest of the reader, his impression of the story is going to be flat and unprofitable. therefore, _try to get the climax first_. to the practised writer i should say--practise some more. simplify. make one word grow where a dozen grew before. there is no graduation day in the school of writing. do not be tempted by success into the worship of false gods. keep your work clean and honest and remember that it is your public's only conception of _you_. the man who doesn't put all of the god that is in him into the stuff he writes isn't an author at all. he's only a parasitic imitation. and he who does--well, he doesn't have to be reminded that it is a long and dusty road to the throne. =arthur d. howden smith=: simplicity of language. simplicity of plot. clear-cut characterization. they apply to new and experienced writers. =theodore seixas solomons=: on plot, or the "story" factors, i would tell a beginner to be sure it's a story. if, boiled down to a few sentences, it interests a person, particularly a young person, and elicits, naturally, the remark or the question "now what do you think of that!" it will mean it has that beginning and end and curve between which distinguishes it from a mere piece of life or a mere tale, or a mere unorganized, disunified thing which, no matter what skill may be used in the handling of it, can never be a story. next i would tell him to beware of excerpts from life, so-called "true stories," as he would avoid rattlesnakes. finally, that as to the language content of his story, his expression, to begin with _natural_ expression, to write as he would write in a letter to a pal, and learn dignity and "style," gradually, by a series of modifications and buildings upon that natural speech of his. as to grammar and rhetoric, they will give him little trouble if he builds up from his own speech. by this means he will always remain clear and always retain his own individuality; he will avoid imitation and avoid "fine" writing. as to all the rest--everything--as to technique, i would tell him constantly and always to consider himself as a reader and not as a writer, and rigidly adhere to all his prejudices and whims _as a reader_, while learning to become a writer. that's all. to a practised writer i'd merely omit that middle advice about working up a style from his common speech in writing letters or talking, for the practised writer has gone beyond the possibility of doing that. but the rest of my advice to the beginner i would repeat to the practised writer, for depend upon it, whatever his faults are, they may be corrected by following that advice. i wish somebody was around me to make _me_ do it! =raymond s. spears=: work on a newspaper, and learn how to gather facts. formulate a habit of recognizing literary technique--as sentence structure, paragraphic, chapter, etc. and weigh everything in a scales that shows habit of mind regarding moral rectitude or obliquity. i think every writer owes it to the public to use his talents, say for an average of one hour a day, in unselfish public service. for clean politics, help along education, drive out criminal practises, as sale of narcotics, contract swindling, etc. this is just a notion. =norman springer=: for a beginner: learn to take criticism. even if it hurts. especially if it hurts. that's the kind that helps. don't waste your time inventing fancy plots--they've all been done before. don't take your ideas of life from the movies. and beware of the inspirational story, that one that comes rushing full clad out of your mind and just dribbles from your finger-tips. every writer gets these stories occasionally; they are never as good as you imagine them to be, they always need careful revision, and--this is important--it is this sort of story that sometimes turns out to be an unconscious plagiarism. so don't be too proud of the "easy to write" story. the practised writer: well, i don't know. i'm not practised enough myself. but judging from observation, the chief danger to the practised, and successful, writer lies in the fact that he may catch egotitis. =julian street=: the beginner should read good stuff, but should not imitate. he should study life around him, not life out of books. at least he should not write out of what he has read, but out of his experience. the experienced writer frequently needs cutting. =t. s. stribling=: beginners should study the dictionary, look up at least five thousand synonyms for the verb "say," talk to everybody, love thieves, oil stock salesmen and book agents as well as he does the cook, the banker and the home-run slugger on his home-town team; read everybody's stuff and resolve to do better; look at sunsets and flappers, listen to sermons for amusement and go to the vaudeville for thoughts of depth and gravity. have no advice for professional writers--their habits are fixed. =booth tarkington=: i don't know how to make a suggestion to a beginner without knowing that beginner; same applies to a practised writer. =w. c. tuttle=: giving advice to beginners is like trying to teach a novice to shoot. you can hand 'em the gun, point out the target and explain about notching the sights. a typewriter for a gun, paper for ammunition and the editor for the target. seriously, i should tell them to write only of things of which they "know." do not copy any one, try to stick to their own vocabulary, and be human. after they grow past writing only of things they know, perhaps they might expand. i never have. =lucille van slyke=: i'd say to a beginner--"don't do it! not unless you just can't help yourself, not unless you can't stop yourself!" and i'd say to a practised writer, "stop, unless you can keep singing, 'i, too, have lived in arcady and have never forgotten the way back!'" incidentally, the way i wedged in might interest a very beginning writer. my first paid job at writing was book reviewing. i was less than twenty and utterly unqualified for such a task, but it was the only job i could get. it was probably hard on the chaps whose books i reviewed, but very good for me. i did it for about a year and in that time began to understand that the wretched books in the lot by unknowns (why any publisher risked time on them i couldn't see) were by persons who knew nothing about what they were writing. so i registered a vow within me that i would never insult any editor by sending him anything that i wasn't as sure as i could possibly be contained all that i could find out about its subject. that a beginning writer better tackle children because it was the only age she could possibly have anything like a perspective for. that everybody else had done american children so well that i'd better tackle foreign ones. i had just pulled through a classical course at college and decided i'd like to try greek children. i couldn't go to greece, so i prowled about new york trying to find a greek colony. stumbled on a syrian one. fell head over heels in love with 'em. pretty nearly lived with 'em for three years. spent all the time i could in the oriental room at the library, dragging out all the history and legend and poetry, good, bad or indifferent, that i could corral. spent another year struggling with dialect and pondering over whether i'd dare risk it--or risk reproducing the effect i wanted without it. in all it was nearly four years before i had a single story on paper--and it took me about two years to write just fifteen stories--all of which were sold. then i stopped quick while the stopping was good, because i didn't want to get into a rut. _this can be of no possible use to any writer with genius or talent_ but it might help a person like myself who had nothing to begin with but an inclination to write. and it was a way into finding out that i could earn money while i was learning to write--i mean trying to learn to write! (again i realize that it was a _thing_ that started the first story--a queer-shaped loaf of bread in a syrian baker's shop--the kind of bread that is sold to be used at the party given when a little syrian cuts his first tooth.) =atreus von schrader=: to the beginner; don't write a story unless you know and understand both your characters and your setting. to a practised writer; find a group of characters and stick to them. this makes for better writing and for cumulative value until, as is almost invariably the case, the thing is overdone. =t. von ziekursch=: to spin the tale in such a way that the reader must live through it. =henry kitchell webster=: the best advice i have to give a beginner is that he write, and keep on writing; that, when he has told his story, he despatch it to an editor, or a series of editors, and forget it, telling a new story, if he has a new one to tell, instead of trying to improve an old one. =g. a. wells=: the advice to the beginner to condense is important. most stories printed will stand pruning, many of them to a considerable extent. i would also impress upon the tyro the absolute necessity of work. _work!_ he can't observe union hours. twelve hours a day is about right; fifteen if possible. read anything and everything. one class of literature is likely to make a parrot of him. only those who have the grace to see good in a rejection slip belong in the game. the beginner must make up his mind that possibly (very likely) he will have to struggle years before he breaks through. far too many aspiring young men and women go into the game of authorship with a guess-i'll-write-a-story-and-sell-it-for-a-thousand-dollars spirit. first stories do get across now and then, but they are the exceptions and not the rule. i sold my first story six years after i began to write, and in the meantime accumulated a bale of rejection slips. i am still at it. most aspirants quit cold after a few rejections. they haven't the guts (pardon) to stick it out. there are a number of would-be authors in this town. one by one they crop up, bloom a while in the sun of anticipation, then the vitriol of disappointment withers them and they fade again into the soulless clerks and truck drivers of yore. too much stress can not be placed upon persistence. persistence alone may mean the difference between success and failure. i would advise the practised writer to turn out less and better work. he should forget money and write for the sake of art. he should not depend too much upon past performances, for even laurel withers. most important of all, he should quit while the quitting is good, and not go on and on until his work shows that he has lost his grip. mark twain went too far. london also. ----'s later stuff is insipid. ---- is beginning her second childhood in authorship. ---- used to write good stories. it is perhaps a blessing that o. henry died before he ruined himself with "serious stuff." i admit that later work has a finish, a polish that early work lacks; but very seldom does later work show the fire, the vigor, the enthusiasm, the freshness that early work does. so it is a good idea for the practised writer not to make a marathon of what should be no more than a dash. =william wells=: oh, lord! =honore willsie=: study story structure every day. use a dictionary and thesaurus constantly. practise the forming of sentences and paragraphs as constantly as you would practise scales were you a musician. i have no suggestions for the practised writer. =h. c. witwer=: to a beginner i would suggest a thorough reading of the popular magazines, a shot at the newspaper game if possible, plenty of clean white paper, a typewriter, and a resolution to take punishment in the form of hard work and rejections. the first time an editor says or writes, "... but your work interests me, and i would like to have a talk with you," all will be forgotten! to a practised writer i would say this--apologizing for what might be thought patronization--don't forget they are coming up from the depths every year, just as you came up. editors, as a whole, crave "discoveries," new names, fresh viewpoints, etc. don't think of attempting to rest on past laurels. don't keep a once popular character too long before your readers, work harder now than you did before you landed. look around you, the biggest "names" are the biggest producers, year after year. you're a writer--all right, _write_. =william almon wolff=: for the beginner: be sure you have something to say. retain a single point of view in a short story. know--and make clear--exactly why people do what they do, and see to it that they never do anything simply to help the plot along. who am i to suggest things to the practised writer? but those three things, and, especially, the third, are pretty good things for any one to keep in mind, i should say. =edgar young=: write what you know about; do not take other men's underlying ideas and try to make a story from them, for the result will be weaker than the original; do not lose faith in your own values of your work. summary obviously little comment is needed from a compiler. here both the beginner and the practised writer have the best advice from those best qualified to give it--those who have proved their theories by success. the road to that success is no more a common one than it is a royal one. what serves one writer best, serves another little, not at all or very ill. the beginner's own intelligence must choose for him among all these offerings of advice the ones best adapted to his own particular case. taken as a whole, the advice given is invaluable--stimulative and soundly helpful. but the test of its value to any writer must lie in his own discriminating judgment based on a sure knowledge of his own gifts, weaknesses and habits. since it is brought out so forcefully in one of the answers and forcefully enough in so many others, one point deserves notice. an answerer gives, as his advice to experienced writers, "for god's sake don't talk so _much_!" it may sound flippant. it may sound presumptuous, since to some experienced writers this man may be unknown. almost certainly it will not be taken seriously by those who most need to heed the advice. knowing the man, i know it is not flippant; knowing his work, i know it is not presumptuous, for he has gifts of expression that most of our best known writers can never attain. there can be no doubt of the soundness of his advice or of the need of it. that it should be given so many times in these answers is particularly significant. there is frequent discussion of the difference between literature and "magazine fiction" including what is found between book-covers. it is a hardy analyst who would attempt drawing a definite and final line of demarkation between the two, but one easy distinction may be made. literature expresses what needs to be expressed; the greater part of our magazine fiction expresses too largely for the sake of hearing itself talk prettily and a great deal, or because its authors have found they can get money and popularity and standing from a gift of cultured, or mere taking, gab. this is perhaps even more true of established authors--yea, even some of our most famous--than it is of our beginners. i do not mean that all of them analyze the situation and follow the method as conscious policy. it would be more hopeful if this were the case. the bulk of them are proudly content under the amazing delusion that what they write has literary quality. it hasn't. the best that can be said of it is that it is fool's gold, for it glitters exceedingly despite its lack of worth. it is, for the most part, words only. generally beautiful words or amusing words or very scholarly words, all skilfully and pleasingly joined together, sprinkled heavily with a cheap cologne giving off a strong smell suggestive of literary quality and interspersed with modest little cries of "note the genius in this turn of phrase! and, prithee, do not miss the scholarly distortion of this simple sentence or the very literary vagueness in the expression of this elementary and commonplace idea! behold, too, how the really skilled hand can stretch this infinitesimal atom of material into pages of exquisite and delightful reading! how crudely would one lacking literary gift have set it forth in a few plain words! and, pardon, reader, but you haven't been so dull as to miss noting the heights of sophistication from which your author looks contemptuously down upon the puppets he moves with careless skill upon his board, upon the board and even upon the very moving?" or perhaps such cries are omitted and the reader merely confronted with an army of words marching impressively in literary formation without worthwhile distinction, carrying no baggage and with no literary reason for marching at all. yes, i'm bitter. and very, very sick at the stomach. for most critics call this procession of words literature, and most of the public meekly accept the dictum. worse, it becomes a model for other writers. and all the time it builds up the ruinous idea that literature is something apart from life and reality, incompatible with simplicity and naturalness, an inorganic thing of exotic plumage, something not everlastingly dependent upon the anxiously exact adaptation of expression to something worth expressing. in our answers above i have in more than one place omitted the name of one of the best known american magazines because of unfavorable mention. in one case part of an answer was omitted bodily because its whole point was the advice to practised writers not to read that magazine or the work of a certain well-known writer not included among our answerers. the reasons for that advice were not stated, but that magazine is perhaps the chief exponent of the surface-glitter and infinitely wordy type of story, shaped editorially with no consideration of real literary worth or anything else except large popular sales and adherence to a formal morality rather lacking in ethics. yet it is a strong factor in providing standards for critics lacking any of their own, in influencing both editors and writers toward similar material and in lowering the tastes and standards of the general reading public. unfortunately it is not the only exponent of the over-written story. you find them in most of our best magazines, in the school of realism as well as that of idealism or romanticism. if you doubt, analyze one of them. remove the word-wrappings and search beneath. you will find, quite often, incident, sometimes a great deal of it; sometimes a real plot, though generally a threadbare and slight one. but in most cases you will find little structure worthy of the name, sometimes because there is nothing much with which to construct and sometimes because if the author had ability for structure he would not prostitute himself on that kind of story. you may find caricature, even characterization done with a clumsy brush in gaudy colors and jutting outline, but no characterization that warrants the story's existence on that score. color very probably--a whole box of colors melted under a forced draft. probably so much setting that the photography of it contributes much of the illusion of the story's being literature. other things, of similar quality and degree. but literature? not even a chemist's trace. i am heartily glad some of our answerers turned the light where it is needed. probably the chief weaknesses in present-day american fiction are three in one: . wordiness . lack of simplicity . surface tinsel teachers of fiction might contribute a worthy service by compelling all students to gaze upon, say, the relentless brevity and simplicity of de maupassant that yet gives more and more subtle shadings, even in translation, than most of the wordy ones can give in five times the space. or flaubert's exquisite nicety in word selection, not for the mere sensual sound of the word but for the word's real office in expression. perhaps such frank expression may seem out of place in this volume. but being a magazine editor and the compiler of this book does not free me from all other obligations. and there is need of every voice that can be raised in outcry against the tidal wave of words that is drowning so much of american fiction. as to good taste, i am less interested in it than in trying to help against this increasing evil. the advice of our answerer ought to be nailed to the wall above the desk of--what per cent.?--of our established writers: "for god's sake don't talk so _much_!" question x _what is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind?_ answers =bill adams=: life pitched against death; and man the master. =samuel hopkins adams=: "the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow." =paul l. anderson=: the inherent necessity for excitement, which, despite the puritans and the high-brows, is as much an elemental need as food. =william ashley anderson=: it is a mental stimulant. like every other stimulant, the doses vary, and it affects various tastes in various ways. it has the power of frightening, amazing, inspiring, amusing, enraging--in fact working upon all the human emotions. it has the power to derange human minds; it has also the power to soothe them. its appeal rests directly upon the curiosity of man, i. e., the insatiable desire of man to hear something unusual he has not already heard. =h. c. bailey=: tell me a story. =ralph henry barbour=: the satisfaction of a craving for romance in a civilization that is more and more coming to look on it as sinful. =frederick orin bartlett=: the desire for emotional reactions greater than those the average life affords. =nalbro bartley=: the opportunity to phantasy in a harmless fashion. the average person occupied with average tasks demands a release from monotony which wholesome fiction supplies. they want to see the commonplace glorified--even if it is between the pages of a book. =konrad bercovici=: the human mind has never held anything else but fiction. it is the only real thing in life. science is a myth. it has been invented by fiction writers. =h. h. birney, jr.=: fiction takes the reader out of the drab monotony of life into a new world of color and action and romance. he finds there what jack london calls his "purple passages." that's why the shop-girl reads _three weeks_ and _the sheik_ which bore most men to tears. most women cherish, unknowingly perhaps, a suppressed eroticism. sex-interest and sex-emotions are to her the greatest factors in existence. the average man takes his sex-emotions casually. woman is essentially monogamous, man polygamous. (gosh, i didn't mean to get in that deep! my wife would run me ragged if she read it. sounds like i've been reading friend freud, doesn't it?) o. henry covered the appeal of fiction to the average individual when he described the tired clerk who would remove his shoes, place his aching feet against the cold radiator, and read clark russell! =farnham bishop=: story-hunger, which is as strong as any of the other natural appetites. =algernon blackwood=: i do not know. =max bonter=: fiction seems to take the reader over the hill--beyond the horizon. the mind takes a voyage into the mysterious, reveling in strange scenes, characters and situations. then it swings back from exoticism with renewed zest for the commonplace. fiction is the "holiday spirit" in literature. it is an orgy in which we spend our emotions. we feel better afterward. =katharine holland brown=: the fact that we all like to dramatize ourselves,--and the story-writer helps us do it? (this is a question, not a reply.) =f. r. buckley=: i do not know. guess--vicarious adventure. =prosper buranelli=: the arab spinning tales before a fire, or the drummer telling a nasty story. shocking the boobs and pleasing the scapegraces with accounts of marvels either small or great, in which the narrator would like to have figured--only he has a broken backbone. =thompson burtis=: the fascination of overcoming, by proxy, through the personalities of hero or heroine, difficulties, dangers and problems, and of temporarily feeling with one's self the greatnesses of the storied person. particularly in fiction of more adventurous type, i believe john smith's kick comes from perceiving how much like daring dave devere he really is. =george m. a. cain=: i believe it is love of the more intense emotional states. fiction provides these by proxy for those whom circumstances or indolence prevents from actual experience in sufficient frequency. others seek in artificial stimulants the heightening of emotions not normally excited by circumstance itself. a few go after the actual experiences. the trouble with this is the rarity of really thrilling experiences, even for men or women able to spend their lives in hunting for them, and the fact that no experience can hold its grip on the emotions through repetitions. the actually thrilling experiences readiest to hand for everybody are those of animal appetites, and these are the most dangerous. gambling, a little higher in the quality of its thrills, is hardly to be recommended. yet a certain amount of excitement is really wholesome, necessary to save the mind from rusting in grooves too well worn to call forth its activities. personally, i believe that mild alcoholic stimulants have always been a benefit to the race, all their after reactions notwithstanding. but the raising of emotional states through imaginary experiences offers what, in these days, is as readily obtainable stimulant as alcohol has ever been, and one freer from the objections of after reactions and of peril in excess. hence the value of fiction in inducing exalted moods. and this leads to my ideas of character drawing. on the assumption that the first appeal of fiction is as an opportunity for proxy experience of emotions, it seems obvious to me that extreme character drawing is generally a mistake. the reader can not imagine himself as a hero whose characteristics are extremely different from his own, as any extreme characteristics will surely be. even when a character is so well drawn as to arouse strong feeling of liking or dislike, i doubt if the ordinary reader can take the interest in him or his imagined experiences that he will instantly feel in himself as placed in the same series of events. it is certainly difficult to acquaint a reader with any one in the limits of a short story, for whose fate his interest can be aroused to equal his good old love for himself. for this reason i rarely draw a strikingly marked character for the hero of a story. =robert v. carr=: perhaps a desire to escape the commonplace, or, perhaps, mental laziness and the desire to ride on the imagination of another. =george l. catton=: to be amused. eight-tenths of the population of to-day are too cowardly to think and want nothing but full guts and to be amused. comedy will sell to-day, and slapstick comedy at that, faster and quicker than anything else. and that rotten sex stuff--who but a moron would read it? =robert w. chambers=: amusement. =roy p. churchill=: voyage into new seas. the elemental pull toward new experiences. =carl clausen=: ask a college professor who teaches fiction writing but does not write himself. =courtney ryley cooper=: fiction is the world of our dreams come true. for the clerk in the store, his dream is adventure. for the girl in love, it is the prince charming. for the discouraged man, it is the yarn of the fellow who fights past obstacles. we like fiction because in that we see the things we would like to do become realities in the person we easily can imagine ourselves to be. did you ever see a reader wanting to be the villain of a story? hardly. =arthur crabb=: among the upper classes, a means of passing away an otherwise unoccupied hour or two; to the middle and lower classes it is either a stimulant to a poor imagination or takes the place of imagination entirely. =mary stewart cutting=: it expresses what we would like to express. =elmer davis=: relief from troubles. this, i think, is as true of realism as of the so-called "literature of escape." realism at least turns your attention from your own worries to other people's. =william harper dean=: the elemental hold of fiction, if i get your point, is through humanity's inner craving to see itself mirrored, to have its tragedies and triumphs interpreted, so that each of us may say, "oh, that's me--my life! i have lived that, felt it. i'm glad some one understands." =harris dickson=: perhaps, that each of us is his brother's keeper and likes to hear what bud is doing. some of us love small-town gossip, some crime yarns, some revel in the poetic, the romantic, the imaginative. but from the dawn of time the teller of tales has been a force--like the troubadour whose songs were legal tender for his welcome everywhere. =captain dingle=: wonder, i imagine. =louis dodge=: that it enables an individual to go places and do things (vicariously) and utter sayings which would otherwise be beyond him. a reader is a man with a score of eyes and hands and feet. =phyllis duganne=: interest, i suppose. the main object of most people's lives is not to be bored--and fiction can help them attain that grand end considerably. and for people whose lives are dull and rather empty, i suppose fiction offers an outlet; the reader can become hero or heroine and do grand and noble things. just like the movies. =j. allan dunn=: in an attempt to be brief, i think it is a conjuration of what he or she would like to have been if their lots had been cast differently. i think it sometimes stimulates to adventures, to a struggle against the commonplace. that it can undoubtedly mold opinion and create a recognition of the virtues. that it can show--if the fiction is painted with the colors from the palette of life itself, excellent example. that it is the poor man's purse and the stay-at-home's vicarious romance. it is aladdin's lamp--the magic carpet. =walter a. dyer=: this is rather too deep for me. fiction is, in a measure, in its relation to life, what massage is to exercise. mighty useful sometimes. =walter prichard eaton=: say--have a heart! well, in one word--"escape." =e. o. foster=: to my own mind fiction is as necessary as food to the body. the tired man or woman may throw themselves out of the ordinary routine returning refreshed to take up again the "hum-drum" labors of life. =arthur o. friel=: entertainment; refreshment by substituting new pictures for those of every-day life. =j. u. giesy=: the spirit of play--make-believe--the element of the "might have been"--relaxation, change. the mind reaches out to contact other than routine experience. =george gilbert=: its power to lift the reader out of himself and make him live in another realm. =kenneth gilbert=: a sincere desire to escape if but momentarily from the commonplaces of life. if we have imagination at all we are adventurers; we have a curiosity to see the odd and unusual; to possess a helmet of invisibility and the power of levitation; to have the under-currents of human impulse that we sense yet can not describe run before us as we would have them do. =holworthy hall=: love--success--youth. =richard matthews hallet=: a good yarn carries you out of yourself. it's a red wishing-carpet, a transporting cloud, nothing more or less. makes you forget for a time the "everlasting, tormenting" ego. =william h. hamby=: answered in above. =a. judson hanna=: i believe that suspense is the elemental hold in fiction, having in mind the average reader, and the editors' demands. speaking personally, the elemental hold is character and development. i have a sort of cynical contempt for happy endings because they do not ring true. events and episodes in real life so rarely end happily, in my experience. =joseph mills hanson=: the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind i take to be the fascination of uncertainty. =e. e. harriman=: to me it seems that it lies in its power to reveal to one the minds of hundreds, to show in brief how other people live and think and act, and to cultivate in the mind of the reader wholesome ambitions. =nevil g. henshaw=: granting that you read what you like, i should say that it is the enjoyment of imagining some one's doing what you would like to do yourself. =joseph hergesheimer=: the story! =r. de s. horn=: the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind is deep-rooted. it began in the make-believe days of childhood; it continues to death. it is hope, it is appreciation; it is akin to invention and progress. without the imagination--and what is fiction but molded imagination?--life would be a pretty hopeless, sordid existence. =clyde b. hough=: it is exactly in proportion to the humanness of the fiction. humans are enthralled by fiction because it reproduces thrills, emotions, desires, etc., which they have experienced or can understand and which by the help of their imagination they re-live temporarily without any aftermath disadvantages. =emerson hough=: maybe bread and butter, and love. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: being "told a story." =inez haynes irwin=: it offers release and escape from whatever burdens life has brought and it extends experience. =will irwin=: it satisfies the social desire--the human love of knowing and, if possible, of liking, other people. and it gives the illusion of widened experience. =charles tenney jackson=: the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind appears to be that it is the last adventure, the last romance, the bringing of novelty, of charm, of forgetfulness. life for men has become so standardized, so propagandized, chucked into routines by civilization, that his primal stirrings--which, primitively, he satisfied by clubbing his dinner out of the jungle or swiping a woman from his neighboring tribe--must now be soothed in reading about it in its modern phases. that's why you sell magazines--sure! =frederick j. jackson=: principally, i think, the chance it affords a person to get outside of himself, to be for the time being, while he reads, something he is not, something he wants to be, to live vicariously life and action that he has no chance to live in the flesh, but would like to live. then again, to learn, to laugh--w. c. tuttle's stuff holds more laughs to the page than that of any other writer, to me, at least. but what's the use? some analytical guy will answer in a thesis on psychology that will "knock" 'em cold. i can't or won't. =mary johnston=: it is a mode of truth. =john joseph=: it is based on the almost universal passion to see the _triumph_ of the _right_. and a story in which everything seems likely to go to pot and then suddenly straightens out _right_ will always hold the reader provided it is plausibly told. sympathy for the underdog is a phase of this point, too. too, every human is more or less of a hero worshiper, and has also a tremendous urge to get into the limelight himself. and if he can't actually get in, the next best thing is to imagine himself there. hence there is always more or less of a tendency to picture himself as the hero. this urge for the limelight is a fundamental trait of human nature, and a very necessary one. it is simply a desire to appear well in the sight of his fellowman; and it is really the driving-power behind all human endeavor beyond satisfaction of the purely animal desires. hence, a story should 'rouse something in the reader that will make him want to get busy and take a hand himself, so to speak. that is my idea of a really good story--one that will hold the reader from start to finish--and no mere mechanical perfection or nicety of literary diction can possibly take the place of it. i read lots of stories, (they seem to be published literally by the tens of thousands) and after i have finished them i sit and wonder why in heaven's name they were published. and the only answer i can find is "technique, structure and literary polish." too _much_ insistence on these points has a tendency not only to handicap the writer, but to standardize style, and i read magazines the subject-matter of which might every word of it have been written by the same author, as far as i could tell. curiosity is another powerful element. perhaps the most potent of all, in a certain sense. a mystery story intrigues all classes of people. of course it must have the other qualities mentioned, too. =harold lamb=: to be honest, i don't know. a child likes a story because it opens a door that the child can not open of itself. it pleases a child to have imaginary experiences, giving pleasure, the stimulus of danger, and the satisfaction of curiosity. a grown-up is pretty much the same. except that a child desires especially to have curiosity satisfied, and a grown-up likes to forget things. =sinclair lewis=: it affords an "escape"--the reader or hearer imagines himself in the tale. =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: imagining yourself in the same fix. =homer i. mceldowney=: the impulse, weak or dominant, that is in all mankind--to be what he is not, to have what he has not, and to see that which he has not seen. that, i think, is the elemental hold of fiction on the human mind. =ray mcgillivray=: the hypnotizing grasp it exerts upon imagination--persuading, _compelling_ the reader to project himself, his likes and dislikes, his sympathies and his ambitions into the story he peruses. =helen topping miller=: the withdrawing of the reader from his own world, transporting him into an imaginary place where he is able to picture things as he wishes them rather than as they are. every reader has more or less yearning for the dramatic. in reading fiction he sees himself the hero, fights the conflicts and achieves the reward which the author supplies. =thomas samson miller=: sentiment, curiosity, heroism. =anna shannon monroe=: the story hold--the love of a story, whether a crisp anecdote or a novel; the thing that lifts one out of his surroundings into another world for a little while. =l. m. montgomery=: the deep desire in every one of us for "something better than we have known." in fiction we ask for things, not as they _are_, but as we feel they _ought_ to be. this is why the oft-sneered-at "happy ending" makes the popular novel. fairy tales are immortal--in some form or other we _must_ have them or we die. fiction redresses the balance of existence and gives us what we can't get in real life. this is why "romance" is, and always will be, and always should be more popular than "realism." =frederick moore=: it is in the joy of make-believe. animals have the same trait in some degree. also, "let george do it." that is, let the other fellow get shot while i enjoy the thrill but know all the time that my slippers are on and i'm safe enough. =talbot mundy=: it reveals himself to every reader. =kathleen norris=: might it be that life disappoints most of us, and we like to lose ourselves in dreams where things come just a little nearer comedy, tragedy, retribution, revenge and achievement? =grant overton=: on the part of the writer, a desire to make some one else feel what he has felt; on the part of the reader, the craving to understand something that one does not fully understand, even though one feels it and has felt it often. =hugh pendexter=: to entertain. once it captures the reader's interest its power is unlimited. it can teach and preach and direct the trend of national thought provided it continues to entertain. christ taught his great truths by parables. =clay perry=: stimulation of the imagination; creation of a fairer, cleaner, or at least a different and more romantic world than that of every day. =michael j. phillips=: good fiction is a journey, all too brief, into fabled araby--to lands of sandalwood and frankincense and myrrh and spikenard and all those other wonderful, glowing words of which i don't know the exact meaning but which lift us out of ourselves. =lucia mead priest=: we know nothing, truly, of mind and heart of even our nearest. the writer plays the part of omniscience. we like to know how the other fellow feels; we like to see him messing about in situations in which we, too, have been lost--or found. it is human interest in the virtues and weaknesses of our kind. fiction is as old as man. read it on the tomb of ti or the more-up-to-date "beowulf." is it not curiosity? perhaps interest in the affairs of the other fellow, for we all love gossip--? yes, all of us. =eugene manlove rhodes=: putting yourself in his place. =frank c. robertson=: it satisfies the longing for change. the body at best is a slow and cumbersome thing, and practically stationary compared to the flights of mind. in fiction we live thousands of lives--without it we live but one. =ruth sawyer=: i should say the same hold that folk tales have had since man developed a mind. the desire for idealizing; the enjoyment of seeing his own human activities re-created for him and the everlasting appeal of adventure. i believe that the adult quite as much as the child reader likes to picture himself as the hero or main actor in the stories. i suppose one could sum this all up in terms of imagination stimuli. =chester l. saxby=: i can't answer this one, unless you mean the selfish desire in each one of us to picture ourselves as heroes--and the thing called sympathy that we can't disown. but perhaps evolution makes us crave these indirect experiences in lieu of direct ones. =barry scobee=: have ideas but i could hardly express them yet. might be, "a feller wants company." might be, it suggests strength, success, victory; contains warning. how's this for a theory? the human mind is eternally seeking harmony. a perfect story, or a well done story, gives a subtle sense of harmony, like music but more subtle. i think the answer goes still deeper, and i shall find it sometime. =robert simpson=: conflict--the clashing of forces, or the pursuit by one force of another that does not want to be caught. conflicts may appear in many guises, from a young love interest to a mastodonic fight between prehistoric brutes, but in some form or another conflict must predominate. =theodore seixas solomons=: we are immensely curious about life, and in a way that mere description of it from the point of view of psychology, history, past and current, geography, industry and the like, wholly fails to satisfy. for it is man's specific reaction to his environment in his efforts to accomplish his urges in which we are principally interested, and in order that we may make comparison of our own reactions with those of others about us, we crave not those dry, statistical texts setting forth systematically acquired knowledge but instances of actual men's and women's reactions to environment--actual life itself. thus any narratives of parts of the ordinary life of others are more interesting to us, essentially, than text knowledge, but since life is so largely routine and monotony, since there is so little in any given actually true narrative that is likely to be in the least novel or to afford us the comparisons which we crave, our appetite has been wont to seek satisfaction in narratives specially selected to pretend the exceptional and unusual; and those who satisfy this desire are the story-tellers. the impulse of the story-teller, then, is to present life in its exceptional and therefore interesting phases and happenings--interesting just in proportion to the degree in which it presents for our personal comparison men and women in situations, and engaged in actions, which lift them--and hence ourselves--out of the common routine. thus, vicariously, we slake our thirst for varied, high tension living, with its emotional tests and thrills. the fictional element is accidental, depending only upon the circumstance that actual life fails, usually, to furnish the story-teller with a completely satisfying narrative of strange and unusual reactions. actual life is so conditioned by the usual and routine that even when the unusual thrusts up its head and people get into unusual situations, the routine and the usual quickly submerge the unusual--in fine, the story fails consistently to maintain our exaltation to a logical end. hence the story-teller finds that in order completely to satisfy his hearers he must thwart this tendency of actuality by continually substituting and supplying. he does not take anything not found in life--else at once his art is defective. but he uses materials of life that never were actually found together in life, so far as he knows. he may find two-thirds of a story ready to hand in an actual life story, and then he needs to supply from his mind's storehouse of general-life happenings (_i. e._, things that are so natural that they either have happened or may happen at any time) enough to form the remaining third. the aim is merely to carry out as well as possible the aim of the story-desire he seeks to allay which is to experience vicariously sorts of life and living which, either because of their novelty to us, or because of special urgings and aptitudes, are grateful and satisfying to us. fiction, then, in the sense of its elemental hold on us, is that conscious modification of the actual occurrences of life by rearrangement of them so that they present to us _complete_ experiences of the sort for which we yearn. the more perfectly we are enabled to visualize ourselves as actually going through these experiences--and to visualize the characters going through them amounts precisely to this--the stronger the hold of the fiction because the more completely and perfectly it satisfies the desire to which it is directed. hence the vital necessity of naturalness, whether the matter be of realism or romanticism. =raymond s. spears=: fiction is an adventure to the mind. =norman springer=: an escape from reality, or, at least, from environment; and in fiction the reader realizes in a sense the wishes and ambitions that are thwarted in life. it is the power to make-believe. =t. s. stribling=: i think the main hold fiction has on human beings is that it gives them imaginary experiences which they could neither get nor think by themselves. it is first aid to the mentally lazy and dull. as proof of this, take the "movies." these are even more obvious and require less concentration than fiction, so they are correspondingly more popular. i am speaking now of the appeal of popular fiction. it is the same thing to the public that the leg show is to the tired business man--born tired. however, one should differentiate the stages of the human mind. children read fiction out of curiosity about the world they are to enter, grown-ups read it to escape from the world they have entered, old age reads it to recall the world they have left behind. =lucille van slyke=: oh, but you've asked a mouthful! what are yonkers, anyhow? if you knew the answer to that you wouldn't be an editor and if i did, i'd weave it so hard into everything i write that even the most blasé editor in christendom--or out of it--would be walking about waving the manuscript with sheer joy when he got to the end of it! but i'll venture a guess--that it's the same thing that made e. nibble the apple. =atreus von schrader=: it is probably the same hold as that of liquor or drugs; it takes the addict away from himself, his troubles and his ennui. =t. von ziekursch=: perhaps to entertain, but i believe it goes further than this; the average person's life is a narrow thing--not what that person would choose at all probably. fiction to the mass offers the opportunity to lift out of that close circle of existence, to live, to see, to mingle with the world, to do the things which they are physically, mentally or morally unable to do. =henry kitchell webster=: it is so elemental that it is pretty hard to get back to. i suppose it springs from human gregariousness. we feel enough alike, enough a part of all mankind, each of us, to feel that what has happened to another might happen to us. reading fiction stimulates us, therefore, and exalts us with a sense of our own infinite possibilities. =g. a. wells=: fiction is to the mind an antidote for the mental aches and ills of reality. it is in part a recompensation for living. it transports us from what is to what we would wish. it carries us back to the days of 'tend-like and restores the illusions of fancy. it is the oasis in the dry desert of life. it provokes and at the same time in a measure satisfies the spirit of adventure that we inherit from the race. we crawl as babies from the crib to see "what's around the corner." most of us incessantly long for adventure. and, as we can not have adventures, we soothe ourselves by watching others at their adventures. life for most of us is rather colorless, a routine made up of meals, beds, offices and shops, with now and then a dash of pleasure to make it all endurable. we move in grooves. we complain that nothing ever happens to us. we are discontented that nothing ever does. we may wish to march out with a gun and kill somebody. the law forbids. but there is that desire, so to satisfy it we turn to fiction and see other men march out with a gun and kill somebody. we want to go to alaska and dig for gold and have all sorts of scrapes. we can't. so we let jack london or rex beach tell us of more fortunate people who did what we wished to do. fiction is a safety valve. =ben ames williams=: people read fiction, i suppose, for the sake of the emotions which it awakes in them. i'm speaking of the highest form of fiction, which we call art. to stimulate emotion is the function of art in any form; people enjoy this stimulant as they do any other, because it is a part of human nature to enjoy being stimulated. volstead to the contrary notwithstanding. =honore willsie=: the romantic appeal to the imagination. =h. c. witwer=: the reader's enjoyment in being a hero or heroine by proxy, _i. e._, the reader, for the time being, is the hero or heroine of the tale and rejoices or weeps according to the action of the yarn. when they are gripped by a story they stop for the moment wishing they were rich, beautiful, brave, famous, strong, clever, etc. while reading, they are all or any of those things, in the degree the leading character is. =william almon wolff=: its power to entertain. that is a statement of enormous implications, and much less simple than it sounds. =edgar young=: arousing memories of sights, feelings, etc., etc., from the subconscious mind above the threshold of consciousness, so that a re-experience takes place. where no such experiences have taken place, sympathy from similar experiences of the reader. summary the following state they do not know or don't understand the question--one that it is "an academic question": edwin balmer, ferdinand berthoud, algernon blackwood, robert hichens, lloyd kohler, hapsburg liebe, rose macaulay, e. s. pladwell, r. t. m. scott, julian street, booth tarkington, william wells. here again the answers need no tabulation or extensive comment. their greatest value lies in forcing upon beginners a general knowledge of the real nature of fiction. to a majority of them it is merely a game played by somebody's rules, a pastime with no rules at all, a chance of making money, an opportunity to pour out on the world a rather uncomfortable and obstreperous something inside them, a serious business of imitation, all these and more, but never a thing eternally based on the fundamentals of human nature. formal rules concerning it can mean nothing except as those rules are justified by fiction's human-nature fundamentals. and the beginner, buried under thousands of rules made by all kinds of people, most of them unequipped for the making of rules, has no way of telling an unsound rule from one worth observing unless he can test it by some fundamental principle that is adequate and satisfying to his intelligence. nor, having found an equipment of rules to meet his needs, can he reconcile or even understand seeming conflicts among them, or make fully intelligent use of any one of them, when it comes to their practical application in the thousands of varying cases that will arise in his work. no rule or collection of rules can cover the infinite number of those cases with fineness and nicety, or even cover them at all, unless back of those rules there is an understanding of the fundamental principles upon which those rules are based. if the writer is to stand and march upon his feet, he can not lean his weight upon crutches handed him by others. it is not possible to make all the crutches he will need. he must learn to do his own walking and he must himself know his direction and his path. question xi _do you prefer writing in the first person or the third? why?_ though this matter is of far less importance than those thus far considered, it serves to settle a question that has been much discussed, probably even more by readers than by authors. that is, it settles the question in the only way it should or can be settled--by showing that there can be no definite answer. not only must each writer decide according to his own individual case, but, unless his natural bent and ability lie very strongly in one direction or the other, he must--or at least should--make a separate decision as to each story he undertakes. on various phases touched upon in even this simple matter there is flat contradiction of opinion. this wholesome difference again brings out the point that generalities, particularly when shaped into general rules, are not likely to be safe guidance. the everlasting value to beginners in the writing game is that they themselves and their material, not definite, unyielding rules laid down by any writer or by anybody else, should be the deciding factors in their work of conveying to the reader what they have to say. answers =bill adams=: never tried the first. =samuel hopkins adams=: the third. because i am prone to find myself hampered by self-consciousness in the first person, though not invariably. =paul l. anderson=: the third; you can swing a wider loop. it is admitted, though, that the first person gives a more intense effect, and i sometimes use it. =william ashley anderson=: it is immaterial, and depends upon the nature of a story. but i think a story is most naturally told in the first person. this also insures the action being continuous. it also adds an illusion of authenticity. =h. c. bailey=: in the third person. the first person, apart from technical difficulties, seems to me to encourage diffuse writing on the insignificant. =edwin balmer=: i occasionally write in the first person. it is a more limited way of writing than in the third person because, among other reasons, continued use of the first person in many stories of different character certainly breaks down the sense of illusion. i think a man should never write in the first person as a woman and vice versa. =ralph henry barbour=: i prefer writing in the first person. nearly every writer does, and will say so if he's truthful. i write in the third person because editors believe, correctly or incorrectly, that readers prefer it. i prefer the first person because it is easier. =frederick orin bartlett=: i prefer the first person because it offers a more direct way of telling a story. the public, i think, prefers the third person because this form permits a wider range of sympathies. =nalbro bartley=: i prefer the third person for writing because it is more impersonal and one can get into the swing of the story in a more intense way. =konrad bercovici=: no particular preference. =ferdinand berthoud=: third--for many reasons. one is that i know editors and the public prefer stories in the third person, and another is that it is easier and more convincing. a third reason is that i've never tried the first person. =h. h. birney, jr.=: depends entirely on the particular story. first person is ordinarily easier, but your hero can be made much more heroic if some one else is talking about him. =farnham bishop=: in the third. when i try telling a story in the first person it makes me too self-conscious and gums up the action. =algernon blackwood=: third person. the use of the first person tends to remind a writer of himself, whereas fiction should mean an escape from one's tiresome self--a projection into others. =max bonter=: i seem to have no preference in this regard. =katharine holland brown=: the first person. easier. besides, i like to be in it myself. =f. r. buckley=: used to prefer first person. now equally at home in both. natural instinct when telling a pleasant lie is to have yourself in it. later--third person gives you greater scope. the "i" doesn't have to be carried from place to place to report things. =prosper buranelli=: i would rather be hanged than write in the first person. a fellow who can't thrust himself forward without the use of "i" doesn't know even how to brag. =thompson burtis=: i have no choice. humorous stuff i like to write first person, because of the latitude in language. ordinary stuff, on second thought, i believe i would rather write third person, the reason being that i can then draw the character that "i" would represent more fully. another great plot advantage is that by not tying one's self down to a first-person story he can present the mental reactions and innermost thoughts of both hero and villain. this adds a great deal to the opportunities of a story. the first person story is limited to the scenes and thoughts of "i" alone. =george m. a. cain=: i think i rather enjoy first-person writing best. but that is a matter i regard as entirely to be determined by the nature of the story. the first person carries a degree of conviction not so easily obtained in the third person. i really think it has no effect in the matter of the reader's ability to put himself in the hero's place. he reads it as "i." that is just as near him as "he." obviously the first person can not be used ( ) where the suspense concerns the life of the hero, who could not have died and told the tale; ( ) where the mental processes of more than one character must be brought in, since the personal introduction of the writer himself precludes knowledge of the thoughts of others; ( ) where the hero's acts are such that to tell them would be boastful. my own rule as to persons is this: where the character fitted to my general aim in the story is essentially too weak to hold the sympathy of the reader, i use the first person, even at the cost of straining to show others' mental processes by actions. i can not escape the conviction that there is a man-to-man-ness about the first person which commands sympathy. i should give up trying to write a story with a hero guilty of any real weakness, if i found it could not be done in the first person. for a story in which a striking character is introduced as hero, i particularly like the use of the first person for a secondary character in the position of a witness. it affords easier conviction of truth as in its use for the hero. it provides instant opportunity to present the hero in attractive light. i should use this method to the limits of its possibilities but for the fact that it is the one which makes it most difficult for the reader to put himself in the hero's place. that fact relegates its use with me to stories of characters so strongly marked as to require the reader's friendship for, rather than his self-identification with, the hero. which indicates the place i give the third person by elimination. it becomes, after all, the one of principal use interfering with no manner of suspense, allowing for presentation of the reasoning of any or all characters of the story, commanding sufficient sympathy for any character from dead neutral up, if at all properly handled. =robert v. carr=: according to mood. =george l. catton=: immaterial. all depends on the requirements of the particular story. in the first person there is less explanatory matter needed; that's the only difference. =robert w. chambers=: it makes no difference. =roy p. churchill=: i would rather be an observer than an actor, if i am to tell the story. =carl clausen=: third. first limits my view-point. =courtney ryley cooper=: it depends entirely on the story. i use the third person mostly, but there are times in stories of great sympathy when it is impossible to use anything but the first. third person preferred, however. =arthur crabb=: it depends on the theme to be developed; generally i should say in the third person. by that i mean that the author does not appear at all. a writer can do a whole lot more if he keeps himself out of it and then if he restricts himself to what he could see and know himself. =mary stewart cutting=: i prefer writing in the third person, though in two or three of my favorite stories i have written in the first person. usually the third person gives you more scope. =elmer davis=: depends on the story. obviously in an "i" story there are things you can't tell the reader without introducing the old expedient of the messenger or something like it. but it has its merits if the plot permits. =william harper dean=: i seldom write a finished story in the first person. but (and here's something) did you ever write a story in the first person and then go through it and change it to the third person and inspect the result? i can write a much better story in the first person--a more spontaneous one than in the third. for in the first person i say what i would say under certain circumstances in the plot, feel what i would feel--whereas writing "he thought--," makes me stop and think--now what _would_ he think? and right there you are in danger of inventing instead of interpreting as you should be doing. =harris dickson=: i began writing in the first person. don't know why i have abandoned it. i do believe, however, a tale in the first person, well told, takes a stronger hold on the imagination. perhaps because, like every child who asks "daddy, is it true?" we seem to get an atmosphere of verity from the fellow who says, "this happened to me." for the same reason the teller of anecdotes prefers to lay them on himself, or his friend. =captain dingle=: first person, though it seems unpopular, so i don't indulge often. this way i fall into my characters' boots easier. =louis dodge=: i like to write in the third person chiefly for convenience. the first person must go in at a door; the third may go in at a keyhole or through a wall. =phyllis duganne=: i much prefer writing in the third person. the first person seems to have so many limitations; if the first person is your hero or heroine, there are so many things he can not tell about himself that have to be told in other ways. i don't like to read stories in the first person, as a rule; i don't find them so convincing. this "i" person is always getting in the way of the story. first-person stories are easier to write; i mean that they flow more easily, though i think they are harder to make convincing. i think people usually resent this "i" who thinks he knows so much, and talks at such great length. it makes a story out of it--an unreal thing--while a story in the third person has no one, ever present, to remind you that it's only a tale and may not be true anyway. =j. allan dunn=: i enjoy writing in the first person but do not believe it attracts the majority. it smacks of conceit, for one thing, but if one writes of a character in which one can project one's own thoughts, character, successes, failures, hopes and despair, the intimacy is a stimulus. it has limitations because the hero, if he sees everything, condenses the narrative. and he is only a translator for the other characters. so i prefer the third for sheer craftsmanship. to write a first person narrative through the eyes of a third person, who may be a minor character but a shrewd observer, is one of my preferences. =walter a. dyer=: it all depends. i usually write in the third person, because in that form a character can be handled more freely, but i have written stories in a frame of mind that demanded only the first-person treatment. =walter prichard eaton=: it is easier to write in the first, because the process of thinking "i" identifies you with the character. also, it is more dangerous, because the same process identifies the character with you. (this is really quite wise and intelligent.) =e. o. foster=: i prefer writing in the third person so as to have as little of my own personality enter into the story as is possible. =arthur o. friel=: no preference. depends on the story. some are told more naturally in first person; others in third. =j. p. giesy=: the first, i think, since in it i may, as it were, vicariously live the part exactly as the actor lives his part for the time being and consequently enter very nearly into the thing. however, i very frequently choose the third because of the very nature of the subject in hand. =george gilbert=: some stories can only be told in the first; some only in the third person. the story itself decides the person, not the author. if the story is one that can only be told best by one person's having knowledge of all the incidents, the first person becomes permissible, not mandatory. if the story is such that no one person could have had knowledge of all the details without recourse to the receipt of letters, telephone calls, confidences given in such a way as to interrupt the thread of the tale, the story calls for other treatment than first-person telling. the limitation on the first-person story, when the narrator is the hero, is this: it is plain that the narrator lived to tell the story, so no matter what peril he gets into during the tale, the reader must know he survived, unless it is a tale of a manuscript found buried or in family archives, etc. the first-person-narrator story is most effective when the narrator is not the hero, yet some fine tales have been written that violate this rule of mine. in any event, the author must look into his story at the beginning and decide this point. another author might have an entirely different idea on it, and succeed at a given tale where i would fail using my rule. =kenneth gilbert=: while writing in the first person is the easiest way to tell a story, i prefer the third for the freedom of description it permits. many stories, however, would fall flat if not written in the first person. =holworthy hall=: third person. generally more convincing and less conceited. =richard matthews hallet=: i have written both ways. the first person makes an easier narrative, but makes it harder to develop a plot. and i find, curiously, by asking the question a great many times and from being criticized myself, that there is among a great body of readers an odd aversion to a story in the first person. i've never heard even the semblance of a reason for it, but no matter, it exists and will certainly work against the popularity of a story in the first person. there is also a considerable group of persons who profess unwillingness to read a story with the faintest touch of dialect in it; in spite of this dialect stories thrive. so do some stories written in the first person. =william h. hamby=: really prefer writing in the first person, but rarely do. =a. judson hanna=: this is a matter governed by circumstances. by far the majority of my published stories have been written in the first person. as a rule, i prefer to write them so because it allows so much freedom of expression and creates an informality between writer and reader that appeals to the reader. it is the personal touch. =joseph mills hanson=: i prefer to write in the first person because it gives me a sense of more intimate grasp of the motions of the characters and a more vivid realization of the situations. nevertheless, i have written more often in the third person; perhaps because the former seems, also, egotistic. =e. e. harriman=: in the third person, because writing in the first gives a feeling of indecent exposure of the intimate corners in my soul. =nevil g. henshaw=: in short stories i've no particular preference, although i think it a trifle easier to use the first person. in long work i find the first person much the harder, as then a vast number of facts and ideas must be presented from the single point of view. i also find the transition more difficult. =joseph hergesheimer=: third, for obvious reasons. =robert hichens=: i prefer writing in the third person. i like to tell a story, not to tell about myself. as a rule, i dislike a novel written in the first person and i very much dislike a story told in the form of letters. i scarcely know why. =r. de s. horn=: i generally prefer writing in the third person. in this case i can go anywhere, describe anything. i am omnipotent; i can see through walls, read minds, experience emotions unlimited. in the first person i am narrowly proscribed. i can only represent my own emotions and what i can know through the medium of my five senses. the only advantage of the first person is that stories thus told have an air of veracity, of plausibility, that is particularly desirable at times. furthermore, they can the more strongly enlist the reader's emotions and sympathies. =clyde b. hough=: i prefer to write in the third person. it gives me more scope. =emerson hough=: i don't know--as it chances. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: in the third. i feel my own individuality would get in the way if i wrote in the first. =inez haynes irwin=: i think writing in the first person is infinitely easier than writing in the third because inevitably one _dramatizes_ more when writing in the third person and _describes_ more when writing in the first person. dramatizing is more difficult than describing. perhaps that is why i prefer the third person--the other seems too easy. yet there's an ease about first-person writing, an informality.... it goes swiftly, breezily, directly. =will irwin=: when i began, i liked best to write in the first person. now i prefer the third. why, i can not say exactly. probably because your interests increase with years, and when writing in the first person you have limited yourself to the interests, experiences and observations of but one character. =frederick j. jackson=: third person. simpler, usually more effective, is easier for me. have written only two stories in first person. =mary johnston=: depends on what you're doing. =john joseph=: i very much prefer writing in the third person, but when it comes to an old-time western story--well, i have lived these things and the detached third person doesn't seem to belong, nor conventional english. i have heard these people talk every day for too many years, have heard too many camp-fire tales, i suppose, and the more a writer polishes his story the less real it seems. =lloyd kohler=: the third person. i don't like that eternal "i." still, i have read many authors who could handle that very same "i" convincingly. more power to them! =harold lamb=: the first person is a little more fun. because it gives a freer hand in description and more play to emotion. =sinclair lewis=: third, less (obviously) egotistical. =hapsburg liebe=: i prefer writing in the third person because in the first i can't keep the perpendicular pronoun sufficiently down. =e. p. lyle, jr.=: in the first person. comes easier, less formal, your reader not a reader but seemingly a friend on the other side of the hearth. i'd recommend it to a beginner. also tell him to forget he is writing literature, and to keep in attitude of writing a letter. =rose macaulay=: third. because i dislike reading stories told in the first. =crittenden marriott=: third. in the first the quotation marks are such a bother. =homer i. mceldowney=: the third person. it is easier, for me, and, i think, more effective. =ray mcgillivray=: fifty-fifty with me. first person is easier. the third person style has been responsible for most of the best literature ever written. not all, but most. =helen topping miller=: i have never written anything in the first person--it intrudes the personal idea and hampers my view-point. i prefer to see my characters impersonally. =thomas samson miller=: the first person always seemed to me the more plausible, for in the third person the author often relates actions and happenings that occurred thousands of miles apart at the same time. i can never forget that _some one is telling me the story_ and that some one couldn't be--say in the heroine's bedroom, if he is a man author. =anne shannon monroe=: it is easier to write in the first person--more easily made real; but i prefer the third. the third is less personal, more the spectator's account of the whole. writing in the first, there are many things you can't tell, because you, as one of the characters, can't know it all; as a spectator--a sort of on-looking creator--you can know it all. =l. m. montgomery=: personally i prefer writing in the first person, because it then seems easier to _live_ my story as i write it. since editors seem to have a prejudice against this, i often write a story in the first person and then rewrite it, shifting it to the third. as a reader, i enjoy a story written in the first person far more than any other kind. it gives me more of a sense of reality--of actually knowing the people in it. the author does not seem to _come between_ me and the characters as much as in the third-person stories. wilkie collins's _woman in white_ is a fine example of the use of the first person. it could not have been half so effective had he told it in the third. and _jane eyre_ simply couldn't have been written in any but the first. =frederick moore=: i like to write in the third person, because then i'm a god--all seeing, all knowing, all controlling--so far as the characters are concerned. =talbot mundy=: on the whole, i think, the third person. it is easier to keep things concrete, and to keep off the paper the mental actions and reactions of number one. =kathleen norris=: a story in the first person is limited because the teller of it is presumably the hero, and consequently he has to _imply_ his own merit, beauty or intelligence. more than that, he must be present at every scene related and the plot must move in spite of him, as it were. this sort of story was enormously popular in dickens' day, but it does not fit the new american type of novel. =anne o'hagan=: i don't know. it's easier in the first person, but i don't think the results are apt to be so clear cut. =grant overton=: i have, as it happens, never written anything except certain passages in the first person. i think i have no preference. it is all a matter of technical advantage in presentation. =hugh pendexter=: i have no preference and use both first and third person as the story demands. i have started more than one story in the first person and found it impossible; perhaps because of plot demands. a story that walked lamely in the third person behaved well when told in the first. if i desire to show a young man, neither whig nor tory, but leaning toward the latter and his gradual turning to the former, the first person affords for me the only vehicle. if plot is accentuated, the third person becomes the vehicle. =clay perry=: i prefer writing in the third person rather than in the first because, personally, i have always been more or less self-conscious and i have the same feeling in writing. just to use the word "i" as now is hard work for me. =michael j. phillips=: i despise first-person writing. i quarrel with the prig who is telling the story. he is either too wise or too ignorant. he either knows too much or doesn't know enough. if he is an actor in the story who really is deserving of a lot of credit and admiration, i can neither give him credit nor admire him. if he values himself as truly as a swashing, swaggering fellow who would be likable if some one else wrote of him, he becomes a hopeless braggart. and if he is modest, he does not glow sufficiently bright and i think: "well, how did this fathead ever stumble into this delightfully distinguished, daring, lawbreaking group of real folks?" =e. s. pladwell=: third person. the "i" becomes monotonous in print. nobody can avoid it when the first person is used. =lucia mead priest=: i do not prefer the first person, in fact i do not approve of it, save for a certain type of writing. but when i write in the third i find myself growing stiff and formal. i am less direct, inclining to consciousness and pomposity. i don't know why. =eugene manlove rhodes=: either, according to circumstances. =frank c. robertson=: depends on the nature of the story. as a rule i think the third person gives the writer more latitude for the development of character and material. =ruth sawyer=: the third person. unless the story needs the direct confession of an autobiographical treatment, i think the intrusion of the first person as eye-witness or teller of the tale makes for complexity rather than simplicity. personally it has the same effect on me that my neighbor makes when she says, "my sister's husband told me that his friend, etc." =chester l. saxby=: i like writing in the first person for the pleasure of dwelling intimately with the hopes and fears of the character. i like writing in the third person for that strong, austere impersonalness--like a laboratory investigation. all in the mood, i presume. we're not always the same. it explains the rejection of much good stuff by editorial offices. i think, on the whole, i prefer the first-person story. it's the story of me then; i'm putting forth effort as the story proceeds; i feel the reality more. but it's a difficult metier. =barry scobee=: i prefer writing in the first- or third-person according to the story. no other reason. =r. t. m. scott=: i prefer the third person because editors prefer the third person and i have grown accustomed to the way of least resistance so far as editors are concerned. besides, that "i" is hard to use genuinely in reference to all kinds of characters. =robert simpson=: i prefer writing in the third person because it is, constructionally speaking, the simplest. =arthur d. howden smith=: first is easier. it's more convincing. =theodore seixas solomons=: i prefer, for celebrity (it's _easier_ and quicker) and humanness, writing in the first person. its handicaps are, of course, that the omniscience of the third person is wanting and it is impossible to describe the characters and action in terms of the author's best philosophy when the character telling the story is almost always unable to achieve such philosophy. i therefore use the first person only when the action is such as not to require the peculiar advantages of third-person narration. but i much prefer the first person, because of its naturalness and humanness, when the nature of the story permits its use. =raymond s. spears=: some of my best work is under assumed name in first person--an adventure of the imagination. =norman springer=: i like the first person best. i seem to be able to get under the skins of the characters better. =julian street=: the third person is less easy but is generally the method of the best writers. the first person is (with some exceptions) the refuge of the tyro. as a writer learns his job, he is likely to write more and more in the third person--especially if he is a person of taste. =t. s. stribling=: i have no preference as to the person. i find the first person good for rapidity of relation and the elision of endless detail; the third person is best for expansiveness. =booth tarkington=: of course writing in the first person is infinitely easier. (that's one reason it should rarely be done.) the reason that writing in the first person is easier is this: the writing is supposed to be done by a fictitious person; the author, therefore, does not feel so responsible, _himself_, for the "quality of his prose." =w. c. tuttle=: a great majority of my stories have been written in the first person. in fact, i began writing that way because i could tell a story better than i could write one, and because, in the first person, there are fewer threads to carry. characterizations are easier to depict in the third person, i believe, except in a humorous story, when i would rather describe a character in the first person. =lucille van slyke=: third person. because it seems to me that not one person in a thousand can successfully keep up the illusion of being another person very long. first person writing is a sort of lie as soon as it leaves personal experience behind, and most of us do not have a great many thrilling experiences personally. (i happen to adore writing in second person and do a great deal of that for sheer amusement. i wouldn't be so silly as to submit it to any editor, for i am aware of the well-known aversion to it--but, admitting that it presupposes a highly imaginative reader, think what fun it is for both writer and reader. i have been awfully interested in louise dutton's stories about an adolescent girl in which she uses second person a great deal but lapses to third--or indirect discourse--so often that she much breaks her continuity which makes me feel as though i were jumping in and out of a punch and judy box--i love the minutes i'm being judy but get rather mixed when i am trying to be punch!) =atreus von schrader=: i prefer writing in the third person, because i believe the use of the first person distracts, nearly always, from the illusion of reality. nine times out of ten the first person is used because it is easier, and for no other reason. =t. von ziekursch=: have no choice. =henry kitchell webster=: i seldom write in the first person, but there is a certain kind of story where the mechanical advantages it offers are great enough to more than compensate for its limitations. =g. a. wells=: i prefer writing in the first person, though seldom do so because i am not enough the craftsman to subdue my egotism. i like first person better because i get closer to the story. it is the personal equation. when one writes first person he goes on the stage and acts; no matter how large or small his part, he is in the show. in the third person he sits with the audience and merely records what happens. his readers have the same advantages he has and he can't show a superior air. i often write a story in the first person, and when finished strike out the big "i's" and substitute the name of the principal character. that way i get direct contact with the story. =william wells=: third. too darned bashful; seems like bragging. =ben ames williams=: i prefer writing in the manner best calculated to produce the effect i desire. this is a technical question, to be answered differently in different cases. =honore willsie=: i prefer third-person writing, for, while it is more difficult than first-person writing, it is less apt to have an egotistical effect on the reader. =h. c. witwer=: i prefer writing in the third person, but have written two hundred fifty short stories in the first, because my readers seem to prefer that. i find writing in the first person much easier than any other. =william almon wolff=: the third. there is, for me, a certain artificiality about first person writing; a certain seizing upon illicit aids. it's great fun to write in the first person, and, sometimes, of course, it's the right thing to do. but not often, i think. you dig deeper when you're interpreting life through your description of people seen objectively. =edgar young=: writing in the first person used to come natural to me, due to the fact that for years as a traveler i told many tales in this fashion to amuse friends and was an adept at it. at present i prefer third person work. summary an analysis of the general trend of these answers shows that the first person is preferred and generally used by , the third person by , while may be classed as neutral. of this only are entirely neutral; , while using both, prefer the third, and , while using both or for various reasons using the third, prefer the first. some of the answers speak not only as writers but as readers and doubtless most of the others in their preference as writers voice also their preference as readers. on this rough assumption we might say that of readers prefer stories in the first person to preferring the third. two, as writers now preferring the third, originally preferred the first and, by free and easy analysis, might be assumed to have, as readers, rather a preference for the first. if so, the score becomes to : again, quite a number among both classes and also neutrals consider first person easier and therefore--perhaps--more natural and therefore--perhaps--more pleasing. a much smaller number give the third person as easier. this highly suppositional reasoning would bring the score for first person considerably nearer that for third. all of which has no value except as a straw indicating the truth of the generally accepted theory that most readers prefer third-person narratives to those told in first person, and as indicating that the proportion may be anywhere from to on down to to . rather pathetic as information, isn't it? but not half so pathetic as the fact that writers and editors really _know_ so little as to the reading public's preference on this point that even such weak-kneed conclusions as the above are of some small value because they are at least drawn from a few data of fact. nor one-tenth so pathetic as the fact that, while this commonly accepted theory seems justified by the above straw, there are quite a few other theories commonly accepted by writers, editors and critics that lack the support of even so slender a fact-straw as this. as stated at the beginning of the chapter, the real value of the investigation is the answers' proof that the question of first person versus third is wholly a matter to be decided according to each writer's individuality and the nature of each particular story he takes up. not by anybody's general rule. question xii _do you lose ideas because your imagination travels faster than your means of recording? which affords least check--pencil, typewriter or stenographer?_ this question, like the preceding one, was added to the questionnaire at the suggestion of several experienced writers with whom i consulted. as is pointed out in some of the answers, the choice of means of recording would seem a matter to be decided wholly in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of each particular writer. but human nature is somewhat prone to settle down upon one method without trying all and it may well be that some writers now wedded to one method may, on learning the experiences of over a hundred others, try some new method and find it advantageous. certainly the answers as a whole give an interesting and full presentation of the practical arguments for and against the various methods, and, as in all the answers to the questionnaire, there are various bits of information not always bearing directly on the particular issue that will be found illuminating and valuable. answers =bill adams=: never lose an idea while i'm writing. (be nothing left if i did, m'lad.) god help poor sailors. =samuel hopkins adams=: yes; but i catch a lot in the act of escaping by keeping a reserve sheet of paper close at hand while writing, and i will break off in the middle of a sentence if necessary to pin the fugitive down. pen or pencil. you can't head off an escaping idea with a typewriter. i've never tried a stenographer for fiction; if i did, she would lead a wild-goose chase sort of existence, for my mind constantly courses ahead of my plot and brings in small game to be attended to while the main chase proceeds. =paul l. anderson=: no, because i have the whole thing planned beforehand. sometimes, if i have an unusual idea, which seems likely to get away, i note down a word or two on a scrap of paper and keep it by me while writing. this happens oftener with a turn of words than with a fundamental idea. the fastest mode of production, by far, is dictating to a s'nog'f'r, as they are usually called in conversation. next, the typewriter; next, the pen; last, the pencil--the blame thing keeps getting dull and you have to stop to sharpen it! i can seldom afford a stenographer, but when i can, and have a good one, composition is unalloyed bliss; i can light a cigarette, put my feet up, and live the whole story, without distractions. joy! =william ashley anderson=: with a typewriter of light touch i can write most clearly and sharply, because, i think, i feel the restraint of the appearance of words actually in type. the most agreeable tool to me is a goose quill. i only used quills a little while, in england, where they are still in use even in government offices. there is practically no friction between the quill and paper, and no noise. the effect is complete privacy and smoothly flowing words. i do sometimes lose ideas which get away from me. =h. c. bailey=: i never lost ideas by forgetting them. i write in pencil and slowly. dictation or typewriting would be impossible to me for any imaginative work. =edwin balmer=: typewriter. =ralph henry barbour=: i don't think my imagination ever gets so far ahead of my means of recording that i lose ideas. as to those means i prefer a typewriter. i have never tried to dictate--to a stenographer. i don't believe that i'd like it. or maybe the stenographer wouldn't. anyway, i intend to keep on pounding it out myself. =frederick orin bartlett=: i use a typewriter and find that travels fast enough for me--as long as i don't worry particularly over what keys i hit. =nalbro bartley=: no--i do all my stuff on a typewriter. i revise it personally--i make the final copy myself. =konrad bercovici=: i never lose any ideas. i never begin to put them down until they are rounded out in my mind. one never loses anything except what he does not care to possess. =ferdinand berthoud=: yes, i do, but i mostly pick them up again unexpectedly, perhaps months afterward. always write my draft in pencil, as it is easier to make instant alterations. also the clicking and mechanism of a typewriter are liable to bring me suddenly back from out of my dream world. =h. h. birney, jr.=: no; i don't think so. story is pretty well outlined in my mind before i start writing. i personally write entirely with a fountain pen. dislike the "scratching" of a pencil and the lack of permanency of penciled notes. have tried doing my work direct from brain to typewriter, but find that the purely mechanical strain of using ten fingers, returning carriage, watching right-hand margins, etc., tends to hamper thought. tried stenographer only once, so am not qualified to express opinion there. =farnham bishop=: i always compose mentally before i begin to write. conceived the plot of _malena_ while walking post, outlined the whole novel and held it in my head until i came off guard. often come back from a walk with one or two long paragraphs composed and memorized, ready to be set down. i have held ideas and worked them over mentally for months and years, before writing a word on the subject. that being the case, i almost never write except on my trusty corona, h. & p. method. =algernon blackwood=: imagination invariably travels faster than power of recording it. i use shorthand to jot down bits that flash ahead of the words i am actually typing at the moment. these flashes otherwise prove irrecoverable. with a stenographer beside me i could not think of a single sentence. i compose straight on to my own machine. =max bonter=: typewriter seems to afford me least check in recording thoughts. i write pitmanic shorthand two hundred words a minute, but seldom use it in composition. in this case my hand is speedier than the flow of ideas. moreover, ideas that would flow as fast as that would not seem to be reliable. such a flow of bull would have to be edited very carefully afterward--so why be so precipitate? better take it easier and pay more attention to logic than verbosity. the clatter of a typewriter does not disturb my train of thought. i don't need a sound-proof cell when i write. when i feel in the mood for writing my spine is stiff and i sit straight in my chair and punch hard. i like to feel the keys bounce back from the platen. it makes me feel as if i'm punching something and getting somewhere. =katharine holland brown=: yes. either the typewriter or a pen. never a stenographer. =f. r. buckley=: never lost an idea that way yet. i write extremely fast, and without conscious effort, on the typewriter--up to ninety words a minute. i used to write in pencil and pen when on english newspapers; now i'm used to the typewriter, i find it and the hand-methods' check equal. i mean, typewriter used to check me, now hand-writing does. just what you're used to. typewriter for me. =prosper buranelli=: it seems to me that a writer is a person with the gift of gab, but whose gift of gab is slower than the jawbone. slow typewriting is about the speed of my gabble. =thompson burtis=: yes. i have never used any other means of writing than a typewriter. i do not believe that i would be effective through a stenographer, and i'm damn certain that i'd never write a line unless i was starving if i had to depend on pen or pencil. =george m. a. cain=: i do lose ideas before i can catch up to them with the recording. i have never done any writing for publication otherwise than directly upon the typewriter. any handwriting entirely confuses me. i can use a typewriter blindfolded. i can write with it twice or three times as fast as with the pen or pencil. without having tried it, i imagine that the presence of a stenographer would greatly bother me at first. i have always thought that i might possibly get better results by using a dictaphone and then cutting out about two-thirds of what i said to it. heaven knows i am prolix enough on a typewriter. i hesitate to credit heaven with any generally distributed knowledge of what i would do, if it involved no greater effort than talking. =robert v. carr=: when manufacturing literary sausage i naturally want to grind it out rapidly. but if i am working on what seems to be a good story, i can get my ideas down with a pencil. =george l. catton=: lots of ideas are lost that way, though they generally come back. pencil, with me, affords the least check on loss. =robert w. chambers=: do not lose ideas thus. pencil and eraser. =roy p. churchill=: i believe the mind can be trained to construct with the means at hand. i have seldom lost any real valuable ideas by having the spirit run away with the physical construction of some sort of record. at first i wrote with pencil, which is slow, then on a machine, which is faster, and now dictate to a rapid stenographer. i have had to get the habit of each method, and time would be lost if i had to change again. =carl clausen=: sometimes. pencil. =courtney ryley cooper=: that depends also. i use every possible style of writing. i have started a story by pen, switched to pencil, gone to the typewriter and dictated the climax, the reason being this: i must write character slowly. i must do action as swiftly as it is possible for me to put it down. and when the action becomes too fast for my typewriter, i dictate. in other words, although it is bromidic, i know, i live my stories to a great extent. i personally go just as slow or as fast as the story itself--there are times when i can not write swiftly to save my life--because i am in a maze of slow characterization. then again, i have to go like an express train to keep up with my story. =arthur crabb=: to some extent, but not seriously. i sometimes have trouble in retaining ideas that come when i am off the job. pencil. =mary stewart cutting=: no, as i said before, when i imagine anything, i write it down and so do not lose my ideas. a fountain pen in my hand greatly facilitates thought and expression. =elmer davis=: yes, but still worse because i sit around and think about the damn thing before i start writing at all, and most of the good stuff is gone by the time i drag out the old mill and get to work. never tried anything but typewriter, though i have seen stenographers who would take a man's mind off the fleeting thought and the evanescent phrase. =william harper dean=: no, i can keep up with my ideas, because i can write fast on a typewriter. i seldom leave it until the story is done in its first draft--an eight-thousand-word story will go down in the rough before i leave the machine. then come the long careful hours of revision and rewriting, the thumbing of my thesaurus. but i must get it down in black and white while i am hot with it--that's why i'll never write a book. i couldn't write a thousand words to-day and a thousand to-morrow. no, when i'm full of the thing it must be written. =harris dickson=: no. i am an expert typewriter and stenographer, and have so few ideas that i can not afford to let one get away. =captain dingle=: i can only write one way--typewriter--straight out from my imagination. neither pen nor pencil helps, nor any amount of notes, except such as are necessary to avoid errors of date or place. imagination seems to keep up. when it slows, i know it's time to clew-up for a spell. =louis dodge=: if i get a good idea--conceding that i ever do--it never gets away from me permanently. it'll come back. but i get along better with a typewriter. it's easier, that's all. =phyllis duganne=: i don't lose ideas because my imagination travels faster than my means of recording while i'm actually working. i can lose them through being interrupted before i've finished. a typewriter affords least check; it's almost impossible for me to write with a pencil. and my own typewriter is so well trained that it can write just about as fast as i can put my thoughts into words. =j. allan dunn=: i find that my own typing keeps up fairly well with my imagination, a little behind, far enough to look over the situation ahead and amend or alter it. but then i have usually thought out my day's typing beforehand, probably several times over. the machine is less check than any other medium, but it was not until i had acquired a certain speed. if my technique bothers me i can sometimes dictate very rapidly. i find, however, that the matter of proper punctuation, dialect and unusual spelling suffers at the hand of another--this includes a dictaphone. i had a hard fight getting away from pencil to the typewriter, but i don't want to go back. =walter a. dyer=: i write pretty rapidly, and so i seldom lose ideas. when i find my mind running ahead it is usually a warning that what i am doing is dull. if an idea jumps into my mind that i am afraid i shall forget, i sometimes stop and jot down a note of it. usually the best stuff comes when the mind and the typewriter are well synchronized. i used to write with a lead pencil, but i have learned to use a typewriter with less effort and so with better results. =walter prichard eaton=: i lose ideas because i quit to play golf. when i am writing i should certainly feel sore if i couldn't hold one till i got it down. i never use a typewriter--never found one that could spell. when i use a pen i write so badly that nobody can tell whether it can spell or not. i can't dictate. i at once begin to write like daniel webster's bunker hill oration. =e. o. foster=: i lose ideas because my imagination travels faster than my typewriter. of the four channels--pen, pencil, typewriter and stenographer, the typewriter affords the least check to my imagination. =arthur o. friel=: yes. pencil. =j. u. giesy=: at times. the typewriter serves me best. =george gilbert=: i use the typewriter, because i am skilled on it to the point where i can write two thousand four hundred words an hour. i once wrote ten thousand words at one sitting, averaging two thousand an hour. the story was not revised materially. i gained this skill transcribing one hundred million words during my long career as an associated press code operator, taking twelve thousand to fifteen thousand words a night for many years. i can think on the machine easily. =kenneth gilbert=: while i do not lose ideas because of mechanical inability to set them down rapidly, i lose enthusiasm for them, and, perhaps, some of the precious fire that would make them glow stronger. i find a typewriter the least check on my imagination. i have never tried a stenographer, but i have long felt that a dictating machine would be very helpful. =holworthy hall=: not yet. pencil. =richard matthews hallet=: my imagination does not travel at better than a snail's pace. i could do a cuneiform inscription without the sacrifice of a single idea. sometimes i compose on a typewriter and sometimes with a pen. if you write fast on the typewriter, if you really do bring the speed dogs into play, and you are a fast thinker, you gain momentum, i should think. but i always gain momentum at the expense of nearly everything else. i do at most two thousand words a day, even on re-write stuff, and going at this pace, you can see that my imagination does not feel the lag of the writing instruments. a friend of mine leans into the horn of a dictaphone every morning and sprays vocal folly there; but i never got courage for that. that horn would follow me in dreams. =william h. hamby=: yes. to me the pen. =a. judson hanna=: i certainly would lose ideas because my imagination travels faster than my means of recording had i not adopted a plan for nailing down these fugitive ideas. when an advance idea comes to me i break off composition instantly, even in the middle of a sentence, and record the advance idea. later i run back over the rough draft, pick out the fugitive ideas and insert them where they are most effective. i began by writing with a pen, slowly; discarding the pen for the typewriter, and finally settling down to the use of the pencil on any scrap of paper that is at hand when the thoughts come, writing so swiftly that i have trouble in deciphering my writing if i allow it to become "cold." as my mind works now, i could not use a stenographer. in fact, the mere presence of another person in the room where i am writing disconcerts me and disorganizes my train of thought. =joseph mills hanson=: my imagination seldom travels faster than my means of recording. i find it easiest to do original writing with a pencil. the next easiest method is with a typewriter. =e. e. harriman=: at times my ideas seem to run down a smooth chute at lightning speed and no stenographer or human tongue could keep up with them. i lose some on the way. the machine for me every time. =nevil g. henshaw=: i often lose ideas by not being quick enough to get them down. for first draft i can't go beyond a pen or pencil. =joseph hergesheimer=: pen. =robert hichens=: no. i write always with a pen and not very fast. =r. de s. horn=: yes; that is one of the most provoking things about writing. the imagination so far outspeeds all methods of recording that i can command. =clyde b. hough=: i am able to express ideas as fast as i can compose them. dictation to a stenographer is the easiest method in writing for me. =emerson hough=: i never have any ideas to lose. sometimes i write in longhand, sometimes on the typewriter. i dictated about half of _the mississippi bubble_ direct on the machine in my business office. wrote the rest at home between ten o'clock at night and four in the morning. if you _think_ the medium does not matter, does it? i don't really see much use in trying to get at these things. every fellow writes in his own way, or ought to do so. so far as these things helping other writers may be concerned, i really don't think there is much in it. it's a hard enough game, and so far as i can get at it, experience is the only teacher in it that is worth a cuss. sometimes not even experience is worth that much. advice is nearly always worth a great deal less. =a. s. m. hutchinson=: not, i think, when i am actually writing. =inez haynes irwin=: my husband, will irwin, believes that difficulty in the mechanical means of expression makes for lucidity and elegance of style. he always uses pen or pencil. i think this is only partly true. i think there are times when it is impossible to get things down with enough speed. i am sure that sometimes i lose ideas and expressions when imagination is flowing free and i can not register its outpouring quickly enough. i can of course get my ideas expressed more quickly when i dictate to a stenographer. there is no doubt in my mind that a story gains _directness_, a certain fluency, fluidity and plasticity--and a quality, which comes from the spoken word alone--in dictation. perhaps equally it loses in precision and compression. i started writing with a pencil; rejected the pencil for the typewriter; the typewriter for dictation to a stenographer. now i am writing with the pencil again. next month, i may revert to the typewriter. in my opinion an ideal way to compose would be to dictate the story first and then rewrite the dictated version with a pencil. =will irwin=: i can not remember ever losing an idea because my means of recording was not fast enough. in writing fiction, and generally in writing journalism, i use a pen or lead pencil. i have a tendency to be diffuse, and a slow and difficult means checks this. i regard the typewriter and dictaphone as the enemies of style. =frederick j. jackson=: my imagination travels fast, but i get a death clutch on my ideas. typewriter is my favorite: cleaner, more effective copy. pen next. pencil too mussy. stenographers are the bunk. haven't found one who can take my stuff right. =mary johnston=: there are ideas too swift for our catching--as yet. i prefer a soft, black pencil. =john joseph=: yes, my pencil lies beside the machine and i make a great many notes, otherwise i'd lose many good (?) ideas. the typewriter affords the least check to the imagination. =lloyd kohler=: yes, i have often lost ideas because my imagination travels faster than my means of recording. a pencil or fountain pen affords the least check. i have never tried the stenographer plan--i'm afraid i'd be a little self-conscious; gun-shy, you know. =harold lamb=: no, when the imagination travels over a bit of ground it is always able to return. as for ideas, a penciled note, a word or so, will bring them back a typewriter gives least check, probably due to habit. _tamen shud!_ =sinclair lewis=: rarely. typewriter. =hapsburg liebe=: my imagination often travels too fast, and then i make notes. i use a pencil for writing names of characters and the situation roughly; the rest i do on a typewriter; _it makes a better, clearer picture for me to see as i go along_. =romaine h. lowdermilk=: i do lose ideas that way. i can get them down better with pencil, for it gives opportunity for quick substitution and marking-out. still, i do most of the work on a typewriter, as it is more convenient when it comes to revision (double space). i can't always read what i write by hand. my imagination works best at night; criticism in the morning. i do best thinking in hot weather. i don't get up at night to write but have lost good ideas by not doing so. and i hope there's something useful in the foregoing! =eugene p. lyle, jr.=: not often--not often enough. ideas are slow travelers. i wish they could keep up with my fingers on the typewriter. typewriter affords the least check, or about the same as a pencil. =rose macaulay=: yes. waterman's safety fountain pen. =crittenden marriott=: pen and stenographer about the same. =homer i. mceldowney=: i have a skeleton of my entire story. it is simply scribbled in a hurry and i keep the pen moving fast enough to prevent the ideas from getting away before i can rope and hog-tie them. =ray mcgillivray=: stenographer. often she interjects ideas into the scripts i never even imagined. still, she's not bad, though a letter like this would burn out her bearings. =helen topping miller=: my stories are usually fairly complete in my mind before i begin to write them. usually the first thousand words are so completely formulated that i could recite them before i put a line on paper. no matter what i am doing--traveling, teaching, going about my domestic tasks, i am "making up" stories "in my head," as the children say. i write on a typewriter, usually, though i am able to work as rapidly with a fountain pen on rough paper. i can not use a pencil. =thomas samson miller=: i use pen, and sometimes an idea slips in memory, but nothing of great importance, and if it is best work--work done over and over--the idea is picked up again. =anne shannon monroe=: yes, i am never able to keep up with my ideas; often i have to stop typing and make a note on a scrap of paper, of something on ahead, fearful lest i forget it when i come up with it. i use a typewriter altogether. =l. m. montgomery=: i don't think many ideas ever get away from me by reason of slowness of recording. my aforesaid note-book habit has been of tremendous value here. i write with a pen and couldn't write with anything else--at least, as far as prose is concerned. when i write verse i always write on an ordinary school slate, because of the facilities for easy erasure. but for prose i want a waverly pen--this is not an advertisement--i just can't write with any other! a smooth unlined paper and a portfolio i can hold on my knee. then i can sail straight ahead and keep up with any ideas that present themselves. but these are only personal idiosyncrasies and have nothing to do with a writer's success or non-success. so no aspiring beginner need despair because his or her stationer is not stocked up with waverly pens! =frederick moore=: i sometimes lose ideas because my imagination travels too fast. it may be that those ideas are like the fish that got away--not so big. but just the right angle on a situation will sometimes slip away and won't come back for days. then it is not wise to chase it too hard, for it seems to get out of reach entirely if pressed too close. it frequently comes back under the queerest circumstances and when least expected. the writer works all the time--at the theater, walking, and sometimes when talking with another person on other subjects. my own hands on the typewriter beat everything in the way of creating. i have tried all others. the other person, in dictating, seems to act as a barrier with me. i find myself watching the effect of what i dictate on that person, or the secretary makes faces or looks bored, or makes a noise when he breathes, or looks at me. so i have to do it myself to avoid assault and battery. and i won't allow machine copying, for i find that if i copy myself, i change the turn of a sentence or add to something that makes an improvement. and a stretch of writing is more exhausting than a similar period at the hardest of labor. only the writer knows what a sapping, wearing job writing a story happens to be. that is what makes 'em so cranky. =talbot mundy=: the typewriter seems best, but i am going to try a dictaphone by way of experiment. as regards the losing of ideas, "when found make a note of" is probably the remedy. then the only difficulty is to force yourself to consult your note-book and, having consulted it, to link up again the hurriedly made note with the wonderful winged idea that inspired it. the only stuff really worth writing is poetry, although i'd hate to have to read nothing else! the stuff i enjoy reading most of all is philosophy and metaphysics. next after which, good books of travel and treatises on finance and bee-keeping hold the board. i believe that the apex of exquisite enjoyment is, for instance, reading kant or john wesley and shooting their arguments all to pieces. but i can't afford to enjoy myself. =kathleen norris=: to "lose ideas" seems to me to imply an untidy sort of brain. the imagination needed for a story should not be a spasmodic, incoherent, impulsive sort of business, but an orderly production. a person who would lose ideas would also lose her purse, her friends, her petticoat, and eventually, i should suppose, her mind. =anne o'hagan=: i think i'll answer this the other way around, naming the things that oppose the _most_ check in their order--pen, stenographer, typewriter, pencil. =grant overton=: i always compose on the typewriter. i should lose ideas if i had to write by hand, but i generally sit down to a day's work of possibly three concentrated hours with only a vague idea of what i shall write about. i may know a sentence or two. i let it build itself up from moment to moment. all the ideas and most of the pictures grow out of the moment before. =sir gilbert parker=: i could not dictate a word, and i never used a typewriter. all i do is written by hand with a pen. =hugh pendexter=: often. but they usually come back to me without any conscious effort to reclaim them. the typewriter is my best medium for setting down the story. i never use pen, pencil, or dictate. but there is no medium ever invented that can keep up with a man's imagination and preserve all the coloring and minutiæ of effects. =clay perry=: i used to lose ideas because of being unable to get them on paper fast enough, but since i educated my two forefingers to the hunt and touch system on the typewriter that happens very seldom. having done practically all my fiction work for the past five years on a "mill" and never through dictation, i can not say whether dictation would help more. a pen or pencil would "cramp my style" very badly, now. i've synchronized my mind to the "mill." however, i believe this is purely an artificial, mechanical condition which could be worked out, one way or another, in necessity. =michael j. phillips=: newspaper training has disciplined my mind so i lose nothing through failure of speed to transcribe. it is all right for some, but i would be afraid of a yarn that forced me to such speed. the thing would be impossible when i had finished it. usually use typewriter and copy all of my own short manuscripts, having longer ones copied by stenographer. the newspaper game has taught me to dictate either over the phone or to stenographer; to typewrite; and to write with pencil with equal freedom. i wouldn't care for a pen. under the circumstances, the typewriter is the most practicable, so i use it almost exclusively. =walter b. pitkin=: i lose much through inability to record fast enough. i work best when typing myself; next best with a pen or pencil. i am totally unable to dictate anything but the deadest form-letter stuff to even the most sympathetic stenog! i have two utterly distinct styles and manners, one when writing freely and one when talking to a secretary or stenog. the latter is simply awful. =e. s. pladwell=: no. my imagination travels fast but i do not lose ideas because of it. out of a hundred ideas, five are good. those five, if good, need not be forgotten. it works out automatically. i remember a good idea. the rest can go hang. being a newspaper man, i use the typewriter constantly and now i can not write longhand without a cramp in two minutes. =lucia mead priest=: sometimes my thoughts get ahead of me. if they are not nailed down they are likely never to come again. i can keep up fairly well--if i do not have to _decipher_ the _next day_, i am safe. i do not use the typewriter for several reasons. mechanical things are irksome; i am lazy. i use a pencil and a stenographer does the rest. =eugene manlove rhodes=: yes. pencil. =frank c. robertson=: i find it pays to turn the imagination loose until the story is well outlined in the mind before touching paper. then it is comparatively easy to concentrate upon the immediate problem before you when you sit down to write. i compose only on the typewriter. =ruth sawyer=: yes. i prefer typewriter. and when the material is definitely clear and fresh in my mind i prefer dictating. =chester l. saxby=: pen or pencil is a greater drag on me than a typewriter is. due to habit, no doubt. i have never dictated. oh, yes, ideas crowd on at times; but with a pencil i should find the crowding rushed my writing into chicken-tracks i couldn't read afterward. the very fact that typewriting holds me back i regard as an advantage; the first impulse must too frequently be rejected. literature should be cooked up in hot blood--and then written _cold_. =barry scobee=: i would lose ideas because my imagination travels faster than my typewriter, but i jot down points for my story, even pages ahead, as i go along and they come to mind. typewriter affords least check for me. never tried a story with any other tool. =r. t. m. scott=: i lose a few ideas because my imagination travels faster than my means of recording but i usually pick up others, equally good, which i would have missed had my recording kept pace with my thoughts. the typewriter affords me the least check, but i believe that to be a matter of habit. one thing about a typewriter is that you get a better look at your stuff as it goes down. =robert simpson=: i don't lose many ideas owing to a rapid fire imagination. i haven't got one. frequently it goes wandering off into bypaths, but the only thing i lose then is time. everything i write is first written and revised in pen and ink. i detest a typewriter. =arthur d. howden smith=: no. typewriter. =theodore seixas solomons=: i seldom lose ideas in that way. from my answer to ii you will see that even if i happen to think faster than i can write, if the thought is a useful one it automatically attaches itself to my memory. as to the mechanism of writing, i am only now abandoning the pen and using, for almost all composition, the typewriter. but for the greater legibility and the quickness, when quickness is needed, of the machine, i should continue with the pen, for with me it is most conducive to careful first expression. i write with widely separated lines--about twice the usual spacing, or even three times. this, either with the pen or on the machine. my purpose is to avoid the necessity of making a new draft on new paper when i come to revise. i now use but the one manuscript draft, making all my changes on that. occasionally i am obliged to prepare some new sheets, but ninety-five per cent. or more of the original sheets are retained. if i happen to be in my stride, or, what is more likely, if the matter happens to be easy to write, a page or two may escape with little correction. again, i may line and interline, but i have the space and by using a fine script, which comes easy to me, i am able to make great changes and additions while retaining the original page. the advantages of this will be manifest when one considers the value of having before one constantly, in his revisings, all his past thought and expression. here, in my way of working, i have before me always the complete history of the fashioning of the thought--the sentence or paragraph. often i later resume the original form, having found, by the lapse of time, that the improvement i sought and fancied i had achieved involved some objection greater than that i strove to remedy. this and many other advantages of this method would be impossible if a completely new copy were made, for one would never think to go back to the old, and if he did it would be difficult and cumbersome. incidentally, it is a time-saver. when my first draft is a typed one i revise with the pen on the same sheets. =raymond s. spears=: i can keep up with my typewriter, when writing stories. if my mind jumps ahead too fast, i make a pencil note to recall the look into the future of the story. =norman springer=: the mind always runs ahead of the work. it plays around the sides of the story, so to speak. but i don't think there is any loss. if an idea isn't used, it sinks back into the mind and some day it pops up again. i compose on a typewriter. it is a plodding business. but fast enough, for i find myself pausing only too often. this query brings up another item. it is the difference between _thinking_ a story and writing it. and i find that this too is a common experience among writers i know. thinking up the story is fine work, pleasant and exhilarating. when you have your materials and your characters you think out the yarn from beginning to end. everything seems crystal clear, every detail in its proper place, every difficulty solved. it appears to you to be a very good story indeed and ridiculously easy to write. you begin to write, and alas, the story that seemed so clear in your mind turns out to have been not clear at all, but nebulous. as you thought it, it was beautiful; as you write it, it is a mess. no matter how hard you try, you can never get down upon paper the wonderful story you _thought_. the best you achieve is a caricature. another common experience is what i call "bumping into the stone wall." there comes a time in every story, usually toward its end, when you get stumped. by this time, anyway, you are usually pretty well disgusted with the tale. it is so inferior to what you planned, so different from the fine story you saw when you thought it out. your mind is also eager to be at new work. so you bump into the stone wall. this wall is usually some little hitherto unconsidered detail that suddenly assumes huge proportions. it seems to have wrecked your story. there is nothing to do then but plug, and pretty soon the difficulty is surmounted. i mention this because i've noticed that the "stone wall" is the place where the new writer is apt to throw up the sponge. =julian street=: i have that tendency but have trained myself to catch the ideas as they come by. the fancies that come when one is writing i have often called "butterflies of thought." one must be ready always with the net and _get_ them before they fly out of the window again. =t. s. stribling=: i never lose my ideas if i catch any. anything will do except a stenographer; i can't bear to have another person in the room while i work; they disturb me just as much sitting silent and motionless as if they were raising bedlam. =booth tarkington=: sometimes. the pencil is best for me. =w. c. tuttle=: i have never dictated any copy. i am not fast on a typewriter--using only two fingers and profanity--but i am never more than two chapters behind my imagination. seriously, i never know what the next paragraph is going to contain. =lucille van slyke=: i'd like to kid myself along by thinking i lose heaps of ideas that way, but common sense tells me they aren't very impressive or i wouldn't lose them. typewriter. except at those heavenly, rare--awfully rare--moments when i get a faint inkling (no pun intended!) of how it must feel to be an inspired writer instead of a bungling, struggling tortoise of a scribbler who is handicapped by being a trifle softheaded and by having to carry a beloved house around on her back as she crawls. at those times i like a big fat pencil, a whole box of big fat pencils. =atreus von schrader=: no. typewriter. =t. von ziekursch=: find the typewriter most satisfactory. occasionally have stopped to jot down a note on some touch that i know i wanted to add later in the story and might forget in the fever of the story. =henry kitchell webster=: i don't think i ever lost an idea because my imagination had outrun the means of recording. i sometimes dictate, sometimes write on the typewriter; i think the difference is unimportant. =g. a. wells=: my imagination would move miles ahead of my writing instrument if i let it. i therefore adjust the tempo of my imagination to keep pace with the recording instrument. i think the use of a recording instrument depends upon the mood. i have trouble using a typewriter in artificial light. can not use a pen during the day with the same facility as at night. i detest a pencil and very seldom use one. my mind is more free with a pen than with a machine, though most of my writing is done altogether on the machine. =william wells=: no, because i can call them back. typewriter; can't dictate, get all balled up; maybe lack of practise. =ben ames williams=: i use a typewriter and find it satisfactory; to use pen or pencil for more than a few minutes tires me, physically, and my handwriting becomes entirely illegible. =honore willsie=: sometimes. soft pencil. =h. c. witwer=: i have lost many ideas, plots, titles, bits of dialogue, etc., because my imagination has traveled faster than the means of recording it. it has not always been convenient to make notes. for example, i might be working on a story and later be at a theater or almost anywhere, and an idea for a funny or dramatic scene in this particular yarn will strike me. by the time i get back to my story, intervening events may have driven the idea entirely out of my mind. yet weeks afterward it will crop up again most unexpectedly, apropos of nothing at all, and i'll think, "darn it, i should have used that in such and such a story!" i find the typewriter affords least check and work on it exclusively. =william almon wolff=: i can keep up with my imagination when i use a typewriter; i can't with pen or pencil. i can't dictate at all. that is, i suppose, a matter of habit and custom. =edgar young=: write directly on a typewriter by touch system and rewrite from another person's reading where i catch many inconsistencies and change them as i write. i consider composing on a typewriter a very poor method and wish i had always used a pencil, marking out swiftly when the wrong word or sentence was put down. this letter is a fair sample of what i compose at a first draft. summary total answering, . losing ideas through too slow means of recording, ; of these prevent a final loss by making notes. not losing, . in tabulating the means of recording affording least check or preferred for general reasons, in several instances where a writer habitually still uses more than one, a score has been given for each. the heavy predominance of the typewriter was rather surprising to the tabulator, as was also the greater use of pencil than of pen. typewriter ; pencil ; pen ( of these specified fountain pen and a goose quill); longhand (neither pen nor pencil specified) ; dictation to stenographer ; any ; any but stenographer . no dictaphone except prospect. this tabulation, like all others in this book, though carefully made, can not be exact, some answers not lending themselves to definite or even entirely satisfactory tabulation. this is of little moment, since in all cases the only purpose to be served is that of ascertaining general tendencies and drawing general comparisons. the end transcriber notes: passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_. passages in bold were indicated by =equal signs=. small caps were replaced with all caps. errors in punctuations, inconsistent hyphenation, and inconsistent were italics were not corrected unless otherwise noted. on page , "etc?" was replaced with "etc.?". on page , "propellor" was replaced with "propeller". on page , "told it me all wrong" was replaced with "told it to me all wrong". on page , the period after r. t. m. scott was replaced with a colon. on page , " receive these" was replaced with "i receive these". on page , "whether logical or no" was replaced with "whether logical or not". on page , "it's aim," was replaced with "its aim,". on page , "that is too minute.." was replaced with "that is too minute.". on page , "mary stuart cutting" was replaced with "mary stewart cutting". on page , "subconciously" was replaced with "subconsciously". on page , "dicken's" was replaced with "dickens'". on page , a period was put after "(hope i'm not getting atrophied!)". on page , a period was put after "it is a terrible arraignment to numbers". on page , a period was put after "otherwise i think there is little if any difference". on page , a period was put after "i had been reading (by somebody else!)". on page , "as i want them too" was replaced with "as i want them too". on page , "imagaination" was replaced with "imagination". on page , "mauspassant" was replaced with "maupassant". on page , "gilbert chesterson" was replaced with "gilbert chesterton". on page , "anna o'hagan" was replaced with "anne o'hagan". on page , "attention to style, if by that" was replaced with "attention to style, if by that". on page , "begining" was replaced with "beginning". on page , "a a" was replaced with "a". on page , "corrall" was replaced with "corral". on page , "chapter xi" was replaced with "question xi". on page , "colliers'" was replaced with "collins's". on page , "paul k. anderson" was replaced with "paul l. anderson". on page , the period after holworthy hall was replaced with a colon. on page , "ann o'hagan" was replaced with "anne o'hagan". on page , the period after e. s. pladwell was replaced with a colon. available by internet archive (https://archive.org) more: images of the original pages are available through internet archive. see https://archive.org/details/loveincloudcomed bate love in a cloud a comedy in filigree by arlo bates boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company the riverside press, cambridge copyright, , by arlo bates all rights reserved to mrs. e. l. homans contents chapter page i. the mischief of a maid ii. the madness of a man iii. the babble of a tea iv. the tickling of an author v. the blazing of rank vi. the mischief of a widow vii. the counsel of a mother viii. the test of love ix. the mischief of a gentleman x. the business of a clubman xi. the game of cross-purposes xii. the wasting of requests xiii. the wile of a woman xiv. the concealing of secrets xv. the mischief of a letter xvi. the duty of a son xvii. the business of a lover xviii. the mischief of men xix. the cruelty of love xx. the faithfulness of a friend xxi. the mischief of a fiancÉ xxii. the cooing of turtle-doves xxiii. the business of a muse xxiv. the mischief of a cad xxv. the waking of a spinster xxvi. the wooing of a widow xxvii. the climax of comedy xxviii. the unclouding of love love in a cloud i the mischief of a maid "no, my dear may, i positively will not hear another word about 'love in a cloud.' i am tired to death of the very sound of its stupid name." "oh, mrs. harbinger," may calthorpe responded, eagerly defensive, "it isn't a stupid name." mrs. harbinger settled herself back into the pile of gay cushions in the corner of the sofa, and went on without heeding the interruption:-- "i have heard nothing but 'love in a cloud,' 'love in a cloud,' until it gives me a feeling of nausea. nobody talks of anything else." may nodded her head triumphantly, a bright sparkle in her brown eyes. "that only shows what a perfectly lovely book it is," she declared. mrs. harbinger laughed, and bent forward to arrange a ribbon at may's throat. "i don't care if it is the loveliest book ever written," she responded; "i won't have it stuffed down my throat morning, noon, and night. why, if you'll believe it, my husband, who never reads novels, not only read it, but actually kept awake over it, and after that feat he'll talk of it for months." pretty may calthorpe leaned forward with more animation than the mere discussion of an anonymous novel seemed to call for, and caught one of her hostess's hands in both her own. "oh, did mr. harbinger like it?" she asked. "i am so interested to know what he thinks of it." "you never will know from me, my dear," was the cool response. "i've forbidden him to speak of it. i tell you that i am bored to death with the old thing." may started up suddenly from the sofa where she had been sitting beside mrs. harbinger. with rather an offended air she crossed to the fireplace, and began to arrange her hat before the mirror over the mantel. mrs. harbinger, smiling to herself, gave her attention to setting in order the cups on the tea-table before her. the sun of the april afternoon came in through the window, and from the polished floor of the drawing-room was reflected in bright patches on the ceiling; the brightness seemed to gather about the young, girlish face which looked out from the glass, with red lips and willful brown hair in tendrils over the white forehead. yet as she faced her reflection, may pouted and put on the look of one aggrieved. "i am sorry i mentioned the book if you are so dreadfully against it," she observed stiffly. "i was only going to tell you a secret about the author." mrs. harbinger laughed lightly, flashing a comical grimace at her visitor's back. "there you go again, like everybody else! do you suppose, may, that there is anybody i know who hasn't told me a secret about the author? why, i'm in the confidence of at least six persons who cannot deny that they wrote it." may whirled around swiftly, leaving her reflection so suddenly that it, offended, as quickly turned its back on her. "who are they?" she demanded. "well," the other answered quizzically, "mrs. croydon, for one." "mrs. croydon! why, nobody could dream that she wrote it!" "but they do. it must have been written by some one that is inside the social ring; and there is a good deal in the style that is like her other books. i do wish," she went on, with a note of vexation in her voice, "that graham would ever forget to mix up my two tea-services. he is a perfect genius for forgetting anything he ought to remember." she walked, as she spoke, to the bell, and as she passed may the girl sprang impulsively toward her, catching both her hands. "oh, mrs. harbinger!" she cried breathlessly. "i must tell you something before anybody comes." "good gracious, may, what is it now? you are as impulsive as a pair of bellows that could blow themselves." the butler came ponderously in, in reply to her ring as she spoke, and the two women for the moment suspended all sign of emotion. "graham," mrs. harbinger said, with the air of one long suffering and well-nigh at the end of her patience, "you have mixed the teacups again. take out the tray, and bring in the cups with the broad gold band." graham took up the tray and departed, his back radiating protest until the portière dropped behind him. when he was gone mrs. harbinger drew may down to a seat on the sofa, and looked at her steadily. "you evidently have really something to tell," she said; "and i have an idea that it's mischief. out with it." may drew back with heightened color. "oh, i don't dare to tell you!" she exclaimed. "is it so bad as that?" "oh, it isn't bad, only--oh, i don't know what in the world you will think!" "no matter what i think. i shan't tell you, my dear. no woman ever does that." may regarded her with a mixture of curiosity and wistfulness in her look. "you are talking that way just to give me courage," she said. "well, then," the other returned, laughing, "take courage, and tell me. what have you been doing?" "only writing letters." "only! good gracious, may! writing letters may be worse than firing dynamite bombs. women's letters are apt to be double-back-action infernal-machines; and girls' letters are a hundred times worse. whom did you write to?" "to the author of 'love in a cloud.'" "to the author of 'love in a cloud'? how did you know him?" miss calthorpe cast down her eyes, swallowed as if she were choking, and then murmured faintly: "i don't know him." "what? don't know him?" her friend demanded explosively. "only the name he puts on his book: christopher calumus." "which of course isn't his name at all. how in the world came you to write to him?" the air of mrs. harbinger became each moment more judicially moral, while that of may was correspondingly humble and deprecatory. in the interval during which the forgetful graham returned with the teacups they sat silent. the culprit was twisting nervously a fold of her frock, creasing it in a manner which would have broken the heart of the tailor who made it. the judge regarded her with a look which was half impatient, but full, too, of disapproving sternness. "how could you write to a man you don't know," insisted mrs. harbinger,--"a man of whom you don't even know the name? how could you do such a thing?" "why, you see," stammered may, "i thought--that is--well, i read the book, and--oh, you know, mrs. harbinger, the book is so perfectly lovely, and i was just wild over it, and i--i--" "you thought that being wild over it wasn't enough," interpolated the hostess in a pause; "but you must make a fool of yourself over it." "why, the book was so evidently written by a gentleman, and a man that had fine feelings," the other responded, apparently plucking up courage, "that i--you see, i wanted to know some things that the book didn't tell, and i--" "you wrote to ask!" her friend concluded, jumping up, and standing before her companion. "oh, for sheer infernal mischief commend me to one of you demure girls that look as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouths! if your father had known enough to have you educated at home instead of abroad, you'd have more sense." "oh, a girl abroad never would dare to do such a thing," may put in naïvely. "but you thought that in america a girl might do what she pleases. why, do you mean to tell me that you didn't understand perfectly well that you had no business to write to a man that you don't know? i don't believe any such nonsense." may blushed very much, and hung her head. "but i wanted so much to know him," she murmured almost inaudibly. mrs. harbinger regarded her a moment with the expression of a mother who has reached that stage of exasperation which is next halting-place before castigation. then she turned and walked vehemently up the drawing-room and back, a quick sprint which seemed to have very little effect in cooling her indignation. "how long has this nonsense been going on?" she demanded, with a new sternness in her voice. "for--for six weeks," answered may tearfully. then she lifted her swimming eyes in pitiful appeal, and proffered a plea for mercy. "of course i didn't use my own name." "five or six weeks!" cried mrs. harbinger, throwing up her hands. "but at first we didn't write more than once or twice a week." the other stared as if may were exploding a succession of torpedoes under her very nose. "but--but," she stammered, apparently fairly out of breath with amazement, "how often do you write now?" may sprang up in her turn. she faced her mentor with the truly virtuous indignation of a girl who has been proved to be in the wrong. "i shan't tell you another word!" she declared. mrs. harbinger seized her by the shoulders, and fairly pounced upon her in the swoop of her words. "how often do you write now?" she repeated. "tell me before i shake you!" the brief defiance of may vanished like the flare of a match in a wind-storm. "every day," she answered in a voice hardly audible. "every day!" echoed the other in a tone of horror. her look expressed that utter consternation which is beyond any recognition of sin, but is aroused only by the most flagrant breach of social propriety. again the culprit put in what was evidently a prayer for pity, couched in a form suggested by instinctive feminine cunning. "oh, mrs. harbinger, if you only knew what beautiful letters he writes!" "what do i care for his beautiful letters? what did you want to drag me into this mess for? now i shall have to do something." "oh, no, no, mrs. harbinger!" cried may, clasping her hands. "don't do anything. you won't have to do anything. i had to tell you when he is coming here." mrs. harbinger stared at the girl with the mien of one who is convinced that somebody's wits are hopelessly gone, and is uncertain whether they are those of herself or of her friend. "coming here?" she repeated helplessly. "when?" "this afternoon. i am really going to meet him!" may ran on, flashing instantly from depression into smiles and animation. "oh, i am so excited!" mrs. harbinger seized the girl again by the shoulder, and this time with an indignation evidently personal as well as moral. "have you dared to ask a strange man to meet you at my house, may calthorpe?" the other cringed, and writhed her shoulder out of the clutch of her hostess. "of course not," she responded, taking in her turn with instant readiness the tone of just resentment. "he wrote me that he would be here." the other regarded may in silence a moment, apparently studying her in the light of these new revelations of character. then she turned and walked thoughtfully to a chair, leaving may to sit down again on the sofa by which they had been standing. mrs. harbinger was evidently going over in her mind the list of possible authors who might be at her afternoon tea that day. "then 'love in a cloud' was written by some one we know," she observed reflectively. "when did you write to him last?" "when i was here yesterday, waiting for you to go to the matinée." "do you expect to recognize this unknown paragon?" asked mrs. harbinger with an air perhaps a thought too dispassionate. a charming blush came over may's face, but she answered with perfect readiness:-- "he asked me to give him a sign." "what kind of a sign?" "he said he would wear any flower i named if i would--" "would wear one, too, you minx! that's why you have a red carnation at your throat, is it? oh, you ought to be shut up on bread and water for a month!" may showed signs of relapsing again into tears. "i declare, i think you are just as horrid as you can be," she protested. "i wish i hadn't told you a word. i'm sure there was no need that i should. i--" the lordly form of graham the butler appeared at the drawing-room door. "mrs. croydon," he announced. ii the madness of a man while mrs. harbinger was receiving from may calthorpe the disjointed confession of that young woman's rashness, her husband, tom harbinger, was having a rather confused interview with a client in his down-town office. the client was a middle-aged man, with bushy, sandy hair, and an expression of invincible simplicity not unmixed with obstinacy. tom was evidently puzzled how to take his client or what to do with him. he had, as they talked, the air of being uncertain whether mr. barnstable was in earnest, and of not knowing how far to treat him seriously. "but why do you come to me?" he asked at length, looking at his client as one regards a prize rebus. "of course 'love in a cloud,' like any other book, has a publisher. why don't you go there to find out who wrote it?" the other shook his head wearily. he was a chunky man, seeming to be made largely of oleaginous material, and appearing to be always over-worn with the effort of doing anything with muscles and determination hopelessly flabby despite his continual persistence. "i've been to them," he returned; "but they won't tell." "then why not let the matter pass? it seems to me--" the other set his square jaw the more firmly amid its abundant folds of flabby flesh. "let it pass?" he interrupted with heavy excitement. "if something isn't done to stop the infernal impudence of these literary scribblers there will be no peace in life. there is nothing sacred! they ought to be punished, and i'll follow this rascal if it costs me every dollar i'm worth. i came to you because i thought you'd sympathize with me." mr. harbinger moved uneasily in his chair like a worm on a hook. "why, really, barnstable," he said, "i feel as you do about the impudence of writers nowadays, and i'd like to help you if i could; but--" the other broke in with a solemn doggedness which might well discourage any hope of his being turned from his purpose by argument. "i mean to bring suit for libel, and that's the whole of it." "perhaps then," the lawyer responded with ill concealed irritation, "you will be good enough to tell me whom the suit is to be against." "who should it be against? the author of 'love in a cloud,' of course." "but we don't know who the author of that cursed book is." "i know we don't know; but, damme, we must find out. get detectives; use decoy advertisements; do anything you like. i'll pay for it." mr. harbinger shrugged his shoulders, and regarded his client with an expression of entire hopelessness. "but i'm not in the detective business." the other gave no evidence of being in the least affected by the statement. "of course a lawyer expects to find out whatever is necessary in conducting his clients' business," he remarked, with the air of having disposed of that point. "there must be a hundred ways of finding out who wrote the book. an author ought not to be harder to catch than a horse-thief, and they get those every day. when you've caught him, you just have him punished to the extent of the law." harbinger rose from his chair and began to walk up and down with his hands in his pockets. the other watched him in silence, and for some moments nothing was said. at length the lawyer stopped before his client, and evidently collected himself for a final effort. "but consider," he said, "what your case is." "my case is a good case if there is any justice in the country. the man that wrote that book has insulted my wife. he has told her story in his confounded novel, and everybody is laughing over her divorce. it is infamous, harbinger, infamous!" he so glowed and smouldered with inner wrath that the folds of his fat neck seemed to soften and to be in danger of melting together. his little eyes glowed, and his bushy hair bristled with indignation. he doubled his fist, and shook it at harbinger as if he saw before him the novelist who had intruded upon his private affairs, and he meant to settle scores with him on the spot. "but nobody knew that you had a wife," harbinger said. "you came here from chicago without one, and we all thought that you were a bachelor." "i haven't a wife; that's just the trouble. she left me four years ago; but i don't see that that makes any difference. i'm fond of her just the same; and i won't have her put into an anonymous book." harbinger sat down again, and drew his chair closer to that in which the other seethed, molten with impotent wrath. "just because there's a divorced woman in 'love in a cloud,'" he said, "you propose to bring a suit for libel against the author. if you will pardon me, it strikes me as uncommon nonsense." barnstable boiled up as a caldron of mush breaks into thick, spluttering bubbles. "oh, it strikes you as uncommon nonsense, does it? damme, if it was your wife you'd look at it differently. isn't it your business to do what your clients want done?" "oh, yes; but it's also my business to tell them when what they want is folly." "then it's folly for a man to resent an insult to his wife, is it? the divorce court didn't make a pawnee indian of me. my temper may be incompatible, but, damme, harbinger, i'm human." harbinger began a laugh, but choked the bright little bantling as soon as it saw the light. he leaned forward, and laid his hand on the other's knee. "i understand your feelings, barnstable," he said, "and i honor you for them; but do consider a little. in the first place, there is no probability that you could make a jury believe that the novelist meant you and your wife at all. think how many divorce suits there are, and how well that story would fit half of them. what you would do would be to drag to light all the old story, and give your wife the unpleasantness of having everything talked over again. you would injure yourself, and you could hardly fail to give very serious pain to her." barnstable stared at him with eyes which were full of confusion and of helplessness. "i don't want to hurt her," he stammered. "what do you want to do?" the client cast down his eyes, and into his sallow cheeks came a dull flush. "i wanted to protect her," he answered slowly; "and i wanted--i wanted to prove to her that--that i'd do what i could for her, if we were divorced." the face of the other man softened; he took the limp hand of his companion and shook it warmly. "there are better ways of doing it than dragging her name before the court," he said. "i tell you fairly that the suit you propose would be ridiculous. it would make you both a laughing-stock, and in the end come to nothing." the square jaw was still firmly set, but the small eyes were more wistful than ever. "but i must do something," barnstable said. "i can't stand it not to do anything." harbinger rose with the air of a man who considers the interview ended. "there is nothing that you can do now," he replied. "just be quiet, and wait. things will come round all right if you have patience; but don't be foolish. a lawyer learns pretty early in his professional life that there are a good many things that must be left to right themselves." barnstable rose in turn. he seemed to be trying hard to adjust his mind to a new view of the situation, but it was evident enough that his brain was not of the sort to yield readily to fresh ideas of any kind. he examined his hat carefully, passing his thumb and forefinger round the rim as if to assure himself that it was all there; then he cleared his throat, and regarded the lawyer wistfully. "but i must do something," he repeated, with an air half apologetic. "i can't just let the thing go, can i?" "you can't do anything but let it go," was the answer. "some time you will be glad that you did let it be. take my word for it." barnstable shook his head mournfully. "then you take away my chance," he began, "of doing something--" he paused in evident confusion. "of doing something?" repeated harbinger. "why, something, you know, to please--" "oh, to please your wife? well, just wait. something will turn up sooner or later. speaking of wives, i promised mrs. harbinger to come home to a tea or some sort of a powwow. what time is it?" "yes, a small tea," barnstable repeated with a queer look. "pardon me, but is it too intrusive in me to ask if i may go home with you?" harbinger regarded him in undisguised amazement; and quivers of embarrassment spread over barnstable's wavelike folds of throat and chin. "of course it seems to you very strange," the client went on huskily; "and i suppose it is etiquettsionally all wrong. do you think your wife would mind much?" "mrs. harbinger," the lawyer responded, his voice much cooler than before, "will not object to anybody i bring home." the acquaintance of the two men was no more than that which comes from casual meetings at the same club. the club was, however, a good one, and membership was at least a guarantee of a man's respectability. "i happen to know," barnstable proceeded, getting so embarrassed that there was reason to fear that in another moment his tongue would cleave to the roof of his mouth and his husky voice become extinct altogether, "that a person that i want very much to see will be there; and i will take it as very kind--if you think it don't matter,--that is, if your wife--" "oh, mrs. harbinger won't mind. come along. wait till i get my hat and my bag. a lawyer's green bag is in boston as much a part of his dress as his coat is." the lawyer stuffed some papers into his green bag, rolled down the top of his desk, and took up his hat. the visitor had in the meantime been picking from his coat imaginary specks of lint and smoothing his unsmoothable hair. "i hope i look all right," barnstable said nervously. "i--i dressed before i came here. i thought perhaps you would be willing--" "oh, ho," interrupted harbinger. "then this whole thing is a ruse, is it? you never really meant to bring a suit for libel?" the face of the other hardened again. "yes, i did," was his answer; "and i'm by no means sure that i've given it up yet." iii the babble of a tea the entrance of mrs. croydon into mrs. harbinger's drawing-room was accompanied by a rustling of stuffs, a fluttering of ribbons, and a nodding of plumes most wonderful to ear and eye. the lady was of a complexion so striking that the redness of her cheeks first impressed the beholder, even amid all the surrounding luxuriance of her toilet. her eyes were large and round, and of a very light blue, offering to friend or foe the opportunity of comparing them to turquoise or blue china, and so prominent as to exercise on the sensitive stranger the fascination of a deformity from which it seems impossible to keep the glance. mrs. croydon was rather short, rather broad, extremely consequential, and evidently making always a supreme effort not to be overpowered by her overwhelming clothes. she came in now like a yacht decorated for a naval parade, and moving before a slow breeze. mrs. harbinger advanced a step to meet her guest, greeting the new-comer in words somewhat warmer than the tone in which they were spoken. "how do you do, mrs. croydon. delighted to see you." "how d' y' do?" responded the flutterer, an arch air of youthfulness struggling vainly with the unwilling confession of her face that she was no longer on the sunny side of forty. "how d' y' do, miss calthorpe? delighted to find you here. you can tell me all about your cousin alice's engagement." miss calthorpe regarded the new-comer with a look certainly devoid of enthusiasm, and replied in a tone not without a suggestion of frostiness:-- "on the contrary i did not know that she was engaged." "oh, she is; to count shimbowski." "count shimbowski and alice endicott?" put in mrs. harbinger. "is that the latest? sit down, mrs. croydon. really, it doesn't seem to me that it is likely that such a thing could be true, and the relatives not be notified." she reseated herself as she spoke, and busied herself with the tea-equipage. may rather threw herself down than resumed her seat. "certainly it can't be true," the latter protested. "the idea of alice's being engaged and we not know it!" "but it's true; i have it direct," insisted mrs. croydon; "miss wentstile told mr. bradish, and he told me." may sniffed rather inelegantly. "oh, miss wentstile! she thinks because alice is her niece she can do what she likes with her. it's all nonsense. alice has always been fond of jack neligage. everybody knows that." mrs. croydon managed somehow to communicate to her innumerable streamers and pennants a flutter which seemed to be meant to indicate violent inward laughter. "oh, what a child you are, miss calthorpe! i declare, i really must put you into my next novel. i really must!" "may is still so young as to be romantic, of course," mrs. harbinger remarked, flashing at her young friend a quick sidewise glance. "besides which she has been educated in a convent; and in a convent a girl must be either imaginative or a fool, or she'll die of ennui." "i suppose you never were romantic yourself," put in may defensively. "oh, yes, my dear; i had my time of being a fool. why, once i even fell violently in love with a man i had never seen." the swift rush of color into the face of miss calthorpe might have arrested the attention of mrs. croydon, but at that moment the voice of graham interrupted, announcing:-- "mr. bradish; mr. neligage." the two men who entered were widely different in appearance. that mr. bradish was considerably the elder was evident from his appearance, yet he came forward with an eager air which secured for him the first attention. he was lantern-jawed, and sanguine in color. near-sight glasses unhappily gave to his eyes an appearance of having been boiled, and distorted his glance into an absurd likeness to a leer. a shadow of melancholy, vague yet palpable, softened his face, and was increased by the droop of his don quixote like yellow mustaches. the bald spot on his head and the stoop in his shoulders betrayed cruelly the fact that harry bradish was no longer young; and no less plainly upon everything about him was stamped the mark of a gentleman. jack neligage, on the other hand, came in with a face of irresistible good nature. there was a twinkle in his brown eyes, a spark of humor and kindliness which could evidently not be quenched even should there descend upon him serious misfortune. his face was still young enough hardly to show the marks of dissipation which yet were not entirely invisible to the searching eye; his hair was crisp and abundant; his features regular and well formed. he was a young fellow so evidently intended by nature for pleasure that to expect him to take life seriously would have seemed a sort of impropriety. an air of youth, and of jocund life, of zest and of mirthfulness came in with jack, inevitably calling up smiles to meet him. even disapproval smiled on jack; and it was therefore not surprising if he evaded most of the reproofs which are apt to be the portion of an idle pleasure-seeker. he moved with a certain languid alertness that was never hurried and yet never too late. this served him well on the polo-field, where he was deliberately swift and swiftly deliberate in most effective fashion. he came into the drawing-room now with the easy mien of a favorite, yet with an indifference which seemed so natural as to save him from all appearance of conceit. he had the demeanor of the conscious but not quite spoiled darling of fortune. "you are just in time for the first brewing of tea," mrs. harbinger said, when greetings had been exchanged. "this tea was sent me by a russian countess who charged me to let nobody drink it who takes cream. it is really very good if you get it fresh." "to have the tea and the hostess both fresh," mr. bradish responded, "will, i fear, be too intoxicating." "never mind the tea," broke in mrs. croydon. "i am much more interested in what we were talking about. mr. bradish, you can tell us about count shimbowski and alice endicott." jack neligage turned about with a quickness unusual in him. "the count and miss endicott?" he demanded. "what about them? who's had the impertinence to couple their names?" mrs. croydon put up her hands in pretended terror, a hundred tags of ribbon fluttering as she did so. "oh, don't blame me," she said. "i didn't do it. they're engaged." neligage regarded her with a glance of vexed and startled disfavor. then he gave a short, scornful laugh. "what nonsense!" he said. "nobody could believe that." "but it's true," put in bradish. "miss wentstile herself told me that she had arranged the match, and that i might mention it." neligage looked at the speaker an instant with a disbelieving smile on his lip; and tossing his head went to lean his elbow on the mantel. "arranged!" he echoed. "good heavens! is this a transaction in real estate?" "marriage so often is, mr. neligage," observed mrs. harbinger, with a smile. bradish began to explain with the solemn air which he had. he was often as obtuse and matter-of-fact as an englishman, and now took up the establishment of the truth of his news with as much gravity as if he were setting forth a point of moral doctrine. he seemed eager to prove that he had at least been entirely innocent of any deception, and that whatever he had said must be blamelessly credible. "of course it's extraordinary, and i said so to miss wentstile. she said that as the count is a foreigner, it was very natural for him to follow foreign fashions in arranging the marriage with her instead of with alice." "and she added, i've no doubt," interpolated mrs. harbinger, "that she entirely approved of the foreign fashion." "she did say something of that sort," admitted bradish, with entire gravity. mrs. harbinger burst into a laugh, and trimmed the wick of her tea-lamp. neligage grinned, but his pleasant face darkened instantly. "miss wentstile is an old idiot!" said he emphatically. "oh, come, mr. neligage," remonstrated his hostess, "that is too strong language. we must observe the proprieties of abuse." "and say simply that she is miss wentstile," suggested mrs. croydon sweetly. the company smiled, with the exception of may, whose face had been growing longer and longer. "i don't care what she says," the girl burst out indignantly; "i don't believe alice will listen to such a thing for one minute." "perhaps she won't," bradish rejoined doubtfully, "but miss wentstile is famous for having her own way. i'm sure i shouldn't feel safe if she undertook to marry me off." "she might take you for herself if she knew her power, mr. bradish," responded mrs. croydon. "no more tea, my dear, thank you." "for heaven's sake don't mention it then," he answered. "it's enough to have jack here upset. the news is evidently too much for him." "what news has upset my son, mr. bradish?" demanded a crisp voice from the doorway. "i shall disown him if he can't hide his feelings." past graham, who was prepared to announce her, came a little woman, bright, vivacious, sparkling; with clear complexion and mischievous dimples. a woman trimly dressed, and in appearance hardly older than the son she lightly talked of disowning. the youthfulness of mrs. neligage was a constant source of irritation to her enemies, and with her tripping tongue and defiant independence she made enemies in plenty. her gypsyish beauty and clear skin were offenses serious enough; but for a woman with a son of five and twenty to look no more than that age herself was a vexation which was not to be forgiven. some had been spiteful enough to declare that she preserved her youth by being entirely free from feeling; but since in the same breath they were ready to charge the charming widow with having been by her emotions carried into all sorts of improprieties, the accusation was certainly to be received with some reservations. certainly she was the fortunate possessor of unfailing spirits, of constant cleverness, and delightful originality. she had the courage, moreover, of daring to do what she wished with the smallest possible regard for conventions; and it has never been clearly shown how much independence of conventionality and freedom of life may effect toward the preservation of a woman's youth. she evidently understood the art of entering a room well. she came forward swiftly, yet without ungraceful hurry. she nodded brightly to the ladies, gave bradish the momentary pleasure of brushing her finger-tips with his own as she passed him, then went forward to shake hands with mrs. harbinger. without having done anything in particular she was evidently entire mistress of the situation, and the rest of the company became instantly her subordinates. mrs. croydon, almost twice her size and so elaborately overdressed, appeared suddenly to have become dowdy and ill at ease; yet nothing could have been more unconscious or friendly than the air with which the new-comer turned from the hostess to greet the other lady. there are women to whom superiority so evidently belongs by nature that they are not even at the trouble of asserting it. "oh, mrs. neligage," mrs. croydon said, as she grasped at the little glove which glanced over hers as a bird dips above the water, "you have lived so much abroad that you should be an authority on foreign marriages." "just as you, having lived in chicago, should be an authority on un-marriages, i suppose. well, i've had the fun of disturbing a lot of foreign marriages in my day. what marriage is this?" "we were speaking of miss wentstile's proposing to marry alice to count shimbowski," explained mrs. harbinger. "then," returned mrs. neligage lightly, "you had better speak of something else as quickly as possible, for alice and her aunt are just behind me. let us talk of mrs. croydon's anonymous novel that's made such a stir while i've been in washington. what is it? 'cloudy love'! that sounds tremendously improper. my dear, if you don't wish to see me fall in a dead faint at your feet, do give me some tea. i'm positively worn out." she seated herself near mrs. croydon, over whose face during her remarks had flitted several expressions, none of them over-amiable, and watched the hostess fill her cup. "come, mrs. neligage," protested bradish with an air of mild solicitation. "you are really too bad, you know. it isn't 'cloudy love,' but 'love in a cloud.' i didn't know that you confessed to writing it, mrs. croydon." "oh, i don't. i only refuse to deny it." "oh, well, now; not to deny is equivalent to a confession," he returned. "not in the least," mrs. neligage struck in. "when you are dealing with a woman, mr. bradish, it isn't safe even to take things by contraries." iv the tickling of an author the entrance of miss wentstile and her niece alice endicott made the company so numerous that it naturally broke up into groups, and the general conversation was suspended. miss wentstile was a lady of commanding presence, whose youth was with the snows of yester year. she had the eye of a hawk and the jaw of a bulldog; nor was the effect of these rather formidable features softened by the strong aquiline nose. her hair was touched with gray, but her color was still fresh and too clear not to be natural. she was richly dressed in dark green and fur, her complexion making the color possible in spite of her years. she was a woman to arouse attention, and one, too, who was evidently accustomed to dominate. she cast a keen glance about her as she crossed the room to her hostess, sweeping her niece along with her not without a suggestion that she dragged the girl as a captive at her chariot-wheel. jack neligage stepped forward as she passed him, evidently with the intention of intercepting the pair, or perhaps of gaining a word with alice endicott. "how do you do, miss wentstile," he said. "i am happy to see you looking so well." "there is no reason why i should not look well, mr. neligage," she responded severely. "i never sit up all night to smoke and drink and play cards." neligage smiled his brightest, and made her a bow of mock deference. "indeed, miss wentstile," he responded, "i am delighted to know that your habits have become so correct." she retorted with a contemptuous sniff, and by so effectually interposing between him and her niece that miss endicott could only nod to him over her aunt's shoulder. jack made a grimace more impertinent than courtly, and for the time turned away, while the two ladies went on to mrs. harbinger. "well, alice," mrs. harbinger said, "i am glad you have come at last. i began to think that i must appoint a substitute to pour in your place." "i am sorry to be so late," miss endicott responded, as she and her hostess exchanged places. "i was detained unexpectedly." "i kept her," miss wentstile announced with grim suddenness. "i have been talking to her about--" "aunt sarah," interposed alice hurriedly, "may i give you some tea?" "don't interrupt me, alice. i was talking to her about--" mrs. harbinger looked at the crimsoning cheeks of alice, and meeting the girl's imploring glance, gave her a slight but reassuring nod. "my dear miss wentstile," she said, "i know you will excuse me; but here are more people coming." miss wentstile could hardly finish her remarks to the air, and as mrs. harbinger left her to greet a new arrival the spinster turned sharply to may calthorpe, who had snuggled up to alice in true school-girl fashion. "ah, may," miss wentstile observed, "what do you settle down there for? don't you know that now you have been brought out in society you are expected to make your market?" "no, miss wentstile," may responded; "if my market can't make itself, then it may go unmade." the elder turned away with another characteristic sniff, and alice and may were left to themselves. people were never tired of condemning miss wentstile for her brusque and naked remarks; but after all society is always secretly grateful for any mortal who has the courage to be individual. the lady was often frank to the verge of rudeness; she was so accustomed to having her own way that one felt sure she would insist upon it at the very judgment seat; she said what she pleased, and exacted a deference to her opinions and to her wishes such as could hardly under existing human conditions be accorded to any mortal. miss wentstile must have been too shrewd not to estimate reasonably well the effect of her peculiarities, and no human being can be persistently eccentric without being theatrical. it was evident enough that she played in some degree to the gallery; and undoubtedly from this it is to be argued that she was not without some petty enjoyment in the notoriety which her manners produced. should mankind be destroyed, the last thing to disappear would probably be human vanity, which, like the grin of the cheshire cat in "alice," would linger after the race was gone. vanity in the individual is nourished by the notice of others; and if miss wentstile became more and more confirmed in her impertinences, it is hardly to be doubted that increase of vanity was the cause most active. she outwardly resented the implication that she was eccentric; but as she contrived continually and even complacently to become steadily more so, society might be excused for not thinking her resentment particularly deep. dislike for notoriety perhaps never cured any woman of a fault; and certainly in the case of miss wentstile it was not in the least corrective. the relations between miss wentstile and alice endicott were well known. alice was the doubly orphaned daughter of a gallant young officer killed in a plucky skirmish against superior force in the indian troubles, and of the wife whose heart broke at his loss. at six alice was left, except for a small pension, practically penniless, and with no nearer relative than miss wentstile. that lady had undertaken the support of the child, but had kept her much at school until the girl was sixteen. then the niece became an inmate of her aunt's house, and outwardly, at least, the mere slave of the older lady's caprices. miss wentstile was kind in her fashion. in all that money bought she was generous. alice was richly dressed, she might have what masters she wished, be surrounded by whatever luxuries she chose. as if the return for these benefits was to be implicit obedience, miss wentstile was impatient of any show toward herself of independence. if alice could be imagined as bearing herself coldly and haughtily toward the world in general,--a possibility hardly to be conceived of,--miss wentstile might be pictured glorying in such a display of proper spirit; but toward her aunt the girl was expected to be all humility and concession. as neither was without the pride which belonged to the wentstile blood, it is easy to see that perfect harmony was not to be looked for between the pair. alice had all the folly of girlhood, which is so quick to refuse to be bullied into affection; which is so blind as not to perceive that an elder who insists upon its having no will of its own is providing excellent lessons in the high graces of humility and meekness. clever observers--and society remains vital chiefly in virtue of its clever observers--detected that miss wentstile chafed with an inward consciousness that the deference of her niece was accorded as a courtesy and not as a right. the spinster had not the tact to avoid betraying her perception that the submission of alice was rather outward than inward, and the public sense of justice was somewhat appeased in its resentment at her domineering treatment by its enjoyment of her powerlessness either to break the girl's spirit or force her into rebellion. the fondness of alice for jack neligage was the one tangible thing with which miss wentstile could find fault; and this was so intangible after all that it was difficult to seize upon it. nobody doubted that the two were warmly attached. jack had never made any effort to hide his admiration; and while alice had been more circumspect, the instinct of society is seldom much at fault in a matter of this sort. for miss wentstile to be sure that her niece favored the man of all others most completely obnoxious, and to bring the offense home to the culprit were, however, matters quite different. now that miss wentstile had outdone herself in eccentricity by boldly adopting the foreign fashion of a _mariage de convenance_, there was every reason to believe that the real power of the spinster would be brought to the test. nobody doubted that behind this absurd attempt to make a match between alice and count shimbowski lay the determination to separate the girl from jack neligage; and it was inevitable that the struggle should be watched for with eager interest. the first instant that there was opportunity for a confidential word, may calthorpe rushed precipitately upon the subject of the reported engagement. "oh, alice," she said, in a hurried half-whisper, "do you know that miss wentstile says she has arranged an engagement between you and that horrid hungarian count." alice turned her long gray eyes quickly to meet those of her companion. "has she really told of it?" she demanded almost fiercely. "they were all talking of it before you came in," may responded. her voice was deepened, apparently by a tragic sense of the gravity of the subject under discussion; yet she was a bud in her first season, so that it was impossible that there should not also be in her tone some faint consciousness of the delightfully romantic nature of the situation. an angry flush came into the cheek of miss endicott. she was not a girl of striking face, although she had beautiful eyes; but there was a dignity in her carriage, an air of birth and breeding, which gave her distinction anywhere. she possessed, moreover, a sweet sincerity of character which made itself subtly felt in her every tone and movement. now she knit her forehead in evident perplexity and resentment. "but did they believe it?" she asked. "oh, they would believe anything of miss wentstile, of course," may replied. "we all know aunt sarah too well not to know that she is capable of the craziest thing that could be thought of." she picked out a fat bonbon as she spoke, and nibbled it comfortably, as if thoroughly enjoying herself. "but what can i do?" demanded alice pathetically. "i can't stand up here and say: 'ladies and gentlemen, i really have no idea of marrying that foreign thing aunt sarah wants to buy for me.'" whatever reply may might have made was interrupted by the arrival of a gentleman with an empty teacup. the new-comer was richard fairfield, a young man of not much money but of many friends, and of literary aspirations. as he crossed the drawing-room mrs. neligage carelessly held out to him her cup and saucer. "as you are going that way, richard," she said without preface of salutation, "do you mind taking my cup to the table?" "delighted, of course," he answered, extending his hand for it. "if mrs. neligage will permit me," broke in mr. bradish, darting forward. "i beg ten thousand pardons for not perceiving--" "but mrs. neligage will not permit you, mr. bradish," she responded brightly. "i have already commissioned richard." fairfield received the cup, and bore it away, while bradish cast upon the widow a glance of reproach and remonstrance. "you women all pet a rising author," he said. "i suppose it's because you all hope to be put in his books." "oh, no. on the contrary it is because we hope to be left out." "i don't see," he went on with little apparent relevancy, "why you need begrudge me the pleasure of doing you a small favor." "i don't wish you to get too much into the habit of doing small favors," she responded over her shoulder, as she turned back to the group with which she had been chatting. "i am afraid that if you do, you'll fail when i ask a great one." fairfield made his way to the table where alice was dispensing tea. he was by her welcomed cordially, by may with a reserve which was evidently absent-minded regret that he should break in upon her confidences with her cousin. he exchanged with alice the ordinary greetings, and then made way for a fresh arrival who wished for tea. may responded rather indifferently to his remarks as he took a chair at the end of the sofa upon which she was seated, seeming so absorbed that in a moment he laughed at some irrelevant reply which she gave. "you did not understand what i said," he remarked. "i didn't mean--" "i beg your pardon," she interrupted, turning toward him. "i was thinking of something i was talking about with alice, and i didn't mind what you did say." "i am sorry that i interrupted." "oh, everybody interrupts at an afternoon tea," she responded, smiling. "that is what we are here for, i suppose. i was simply in a cloud--" fairfield returned her smile with interest. "is that an allusion?" may flushed a little, and put her hand consciously to the carnation at her throat. "oh, no," she answered, with a little too much eagerness. "i can talk of something beside that book. though of course," she added, "i do think it is a perfectly wonderful story. there is so much heart in it. why, i have read it so much that i know parts of it almost word for word." "then you don't think it is cynical?" "oh, not the least in the world! how can anybody say that? i am ashamed of you, mr. fairfield." "i didn't mean that i thought it cynical; but lots of folk do, you know." may tossed her hands in a girlish gesture of disdain. "i hate people that call everything cynical. it is a thing that they just say to sound wise. 'love in a cloud' is to me one of the truest books i ever read. why, you take that scene where she tells him she cares for him just the same in spite of his disgrace. it brings the tears into my eyes every time i read it." a new light came into the young man's face as she spoke in her impulsive, girlish fashion. he was a handsome fellow, with well-bred face. he stroked his silky mustache with an air not unsuggestive of complacency. "it is delightful," said he, "to find somebody who really appreciates the book for what is best in it. of course there are a great many people who say nice things about it, but they don't seem to go to the real heart of it as you do." "oh, the story has so much heart," she returned. then she regarded him quizzically. "you speak almost as if you had written it yourself." "oh, i--that is--why, you see," he answered, in evident confusion, "i suppose that my being an embryo literary man myself makes it natural for me to take the point of view of the author. most readers of a novel, you know, care for nothing but the plot, and see nothing else." "oh, it is not the plot," may cried enthusiastically. "i like that, of course, but what i really care for is the feeling in the book." jack neligage, with his eyes on alice endicott, had made his way over to the tea-table, and came up in time to hear this. "the book, miss calthorpe?" he repeated. "oh, you must be talking of that everlasting novel. i wish i had had the good luck to write it." "oh, i should adore you if you had, mr. neligage." "by jove, then i'll swear i did write it." fairfield regarded the girl with heightened color. "you had better be careful, miss calthorpe," he commented. "the real author might hear you." she started in pretty dismay, and covered with her hand the flower nestling under her chin. "oh, he is not here!" she cried. "how do you know that?" demanded jack laughingly. she sank back into the corner of the sofa with a blush far deeper than could be called for by the situation. "oh, i just thought so," she said. "who is there here that could have written it?" "why, dick here is always scribbling," neligage returned, with a chuckle. "perhaps you have been telling him what you thought of his book." the face of fairfield grew suddenly sober. "come, jack," he said, rising, "that's too stupid a joke to be worthy of you." he was seized at that moment by mrs. harbinger, who presented him to miss wentstile. fairfield had been presented to miss wentstile a dozen times in the course of the two winters since he had graduated at harvard and settled in boston; but since she never seemed to recognize him, he gave no sign of remembering her. "miss wentstile," the hostess said, "don't you know mr. fairfield? he is one of our literary lights now, you know." "a very tiny rushlight, i am afraid," the young man commented. miss wentstile examined him with critical impertinence through her lorgnette. "are you one of the baltimore fairfields?" she asked. "no; my family came from connecticut." "indeed!" she remarked coolly. "i do not remember that i ever met a person from connecticut before." the lips of the young man set themselves a little more firmly at this impertinence, and there came into his eyes a keen look. "i am pleased to be the humble means of increasing your experience," he said, with a bow. miss wentstile had the appearance of being anxious to quarrel with somebody, a fact which was perhaps due to the conversation which she had had with her niece as they came to the house. alice had been ordered to be especially gracious to count shimbowski, and had respectfully but succinctly declared her intention to be as cold as possible. miss wentstile had all her life indulged in saying whatever she felt like saying, little influenced by the ordinary restraints of conventionality and not at all by consideration for the feelings of others. she had gone about the room that afternoon being as disagreeable as possible, and her rudeness to fairfield was milder than certain things which were at that very moment being resented and quoted in the groups which she had passed. she glared at the young man now as if amazed that he had dared to reply, and unfortunately she ventured once more. "thank you," she said. "even the animals in the zoo increase one's experience. it is always interesting to meet those that one has heard chattered about." he made her a deeper bow. "i know," he responded with a manner coolly polite. "i felt it myself the first half dozen times i had the honor to be presented to you; but even the choicest pleasures grow stale on too frequent repetition." miss wentstile glared at him for half a minute, while he seemed to grow pale at his own temerity. then a humorous smile lightened her face, and she tapped him approvingly on the shoulder with her gold lorgnette. "come, come," she said briskly but without any sharpness, "you must not be impertinent to an old woman. you will hold your own, i perceive. come and see me. i am always at home on wednesdays." miss wentstile moved on looking less grim, but her previous sins were still to be atoned for, and mrs. neligage, who knew nothing of the encounter between the spinster and fairfield, was watching her opportunity. miss wentstile came upon the widow just as a burst of laughter greeted the conclusion of a story. "and his wife is entirely in the dark to this day," mrs. neligage ended. "that is--ha, ha!--the funniest thing i've heard this winter," declared mr. bradish, who was always in the train of mrs. neligage. "i think it's horrid!" protested mrs. croydon, with an entirely unsuccessful attempt to look shocked. "i declare, miss wentstile, they are gossiping in a way that positively makes me blush." "so you see that the age of miracles is not past after all," put in mrs. neligage. "mrs. neligage has lived abroad so much," miss wentstile said severely, "that i fear she has actually forgotten the language of civility." "not to you, my dear miss wentstile," was the incorrigible retort. "my mother taught me to be civil to you in my earliest youth." and all that the unfortunate lady, thus cruelly attacked, could say was,-- "i wish you remembered all your mother taught you half as well!" v the blazing of rank the usual mass of people came and went that afternoon at mrs. harbinger's. it was not an especially large tea, but in a country where the five o'clock tea is the approved method of paying social grudges there will always be a goodly number of people to be asked and many who will respond. the hum of talk rose like the clatter of a factory, the usual number of conversations were begun only to end as soon as they were well started; the hostess fulfilled her duty of interrupting any two of her guests who seemed to be in danger of getting into real talk; presentations were made with the inevitable result of a perfunctory exchange of inanities; and in general the occasion was very like the dozen other similar festivities which were proceeding at the same time in all the more fashionable parts of the city. as time wore on the crowd lessened. many had gone to do their wearisome duty of saying nothing at some other five o'clock; and the rooms were becoming comfortable again. the persons who had come early were lingering, and one expert in social craft might have detected signs that their remaining so long was not without some especial reason. "if he is coming," mrs. neligage observed to mr. bradish, "i wish he would come. it is certainly not very polite of him not to arrive earlier if he is really trying to pass as the slave of alice." "oh, he is always late," bradish answered. "if you had not been in washington you would have heard how he kept miss wentstile's dinner waiting an hour the other day because he couldn't make up his mind to leave the billiard table." mrs. neligage laughed rather mockingly. "how did dear miss wentstile like that?" asked she. "it is death for any mortal to dare to be late at her house, and she does not approve of billiards." "she was so taken up with berating the rest of us for his tardiness that when he appeared she had apparently forgotten all about his being to blame in anything." "she loves a title as she loves her life," mrs. neligage commented. "she would marry him herself and give him every penny she owns just to be called a countess for the rest of her life." a stir near the door, and the voice of graham announcing "count shimbowski" made them both turn. a brief look of intelligence flashed across the face of the widow. "it is he," she murmured as if to herself. "do you know him?" demanded bradish. "oh, i used to see him abroad years ago," was her answer. "very likely he will have forgotten me." "that," bradish declared, with a profound bow, "is impossible." the count made his way across the drawing-room with a jaunty air not entirely in keeping with the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes. he was tall and wiry, with sandy hair and big mustaches. he showed no consciousness that he was being stared at, but with admirable self-possession saluted his hostess. "how do you do, count?" mrs. harbinger greeted him. "we began to think you were not coming." "ah, how do, mees harbeenger. not to come eet would be to me too desolate. _bon jour_, my deear mees wentsteele. i am so above-joyed to encountair you'self here. my deear mees endeecott, i kees your feengair." "beast!" muttered jack neligage to fairfield. "i should like to cram a fistful of his twisted-up sentences down his snaky throat!" "he must open his throat with a corkscrew in the morning," was the reply. miss wentstile was smiling her most gracious. "how do you feel to-day, count?" she asked. "does our spring weather affect you unpleasantly?" the count made a splendid gesture with both his hands, waving in the right the monocle which he more often carried than wore. "oh, what ees eet de weder een one land w'ere de peoples so heavenly keent ees?" he demanded oratorically. "only eet ees mees endeecott do keel me wid her so great cheelleeness." miss endicott looked up from her seat at the tea-table beside which the group stood. her air was certainly sufficiently cold to excuse the count for feeling her chilliness; and she answered without a glimmer of a smile. "i'm not cruel," she said. "i wouldn't hurt a worm." "but," the count responded, shaking his head archly, "eet ees dat i be not a worm." "i thought that all men were worms of the dust," mrs. harbinger observed. the count bowed his tall figure with finished grace. "and all de weemens," he declared, "aire angles!" "it is our sharpness, then, that is to be admired," alice commented. "of course, alice," miss wentstile corrected vixenishly, "the count means angels." "so many men," alice went on without showing other sign of feeling than a slight flush, "have turned a woman from an angel into an angle." "i do comprehend not," the count said. "it is no matter, count," put in the hostess. "she is only teasing you, and being rude into the bargain. you will take tea? alice, pour the count some tea." alice took up a cup. "how many lumps?" she asked. "loomps? loomps? oh, eet weel be sugaire een de tea. tree, eef you weel be so goot weedeen eet." just as the count, with profuse expressions of overwhelming gratitude to have been permitted so great an honor, had received his tea from the hand of miss endicott, and miss wentstile was clearing her throat with the evident intention of directing toward him some profound observation, mrs. neligage came briskly forward with outstretched hand. "it would be generous of you, count," she said, "to recognize an old friend." he stared at her with evident astonishment. "_ciel!_" he exclaimed. "ah, but eet weel be de _belle_ madame neleegaze!" she laughed as she shook hands, her dark eyes sparkling with fun. "as gallant as ever, count. it is good of you to remember me after so many years." the count regarded her with a look so earnest that he might easily be supposed to remember from the past, whatever and whenever it had been, many things of interest. miss wentstile surveyed the pair with an expression of keen suspicion. "louisa," she demanded, "where did you know the count?" the count tried to speak, but mrs. neligage was too quick for him. "it was at--where was it, count? my memory for places is so bad," she returned mischievously. "yees," he said eagerly. "eet weel have been paris _certainement_, ees eet not?" she laughed more teasingly yet, and glanced swiftly from him to miss wentstile. she was evidently amusing herself, though the simple question of the place of a former meeting might not seem to give much opportunity. "that doesn't seem to me to have been the place," she remarked. "paris? let me see. i should have said that it was--" the remark was not concluded, for down went the count's teacup with a splash and a crash, with startings and cries from the ladies, and a hasty drawing away of gowns. miss endicott, who had listened carefully to the talk, took the catastrophe coolly enough, but with a darkening of the face which seemed to show that she regarded the accident as intentional. the count whipped out his handkerchief, and went down on his knee instantly to wipe the hem of miss wentstile's spattered frock; while mrs. neligage seemed more amused than ever. "oh, i am deesconsolate forever!" the count exclaimed, in tones which were pathetic enough to have made the reputation of an actor. "i am broken een de heart, mees wentsteele." "it is no matter," miss wentstile said stiffly. a ring of the bell brought graham to repair the damage as far as might be, and in the confusion the count moved aside with the widow. "that was not done with your usual skill, count," she said mockingly. "it was much too violent for the occasion." "but for what you speak of monaco here?" he demanded fiercely. "de old mees wentsteele say dat to play de card for money ees villain. she say eet is murderous. she say she weel not to endure de man dat have gamboled." "and you have gamboled in a lively manner in your time, count. it's an old pun, but it would be new to you if you could understand it." "i don't understand," he said savagely in french. "no matter. it wasn't worth understanding," she answered, in the same tongue. "but you needn't have been afraid. i'm no spoil-sport. i shouldn't have told." "she is an old prude," he went on, smiling, and showing his white teeth. "if she knew i had been in a duel, she would know me no more." "she will not know from me." "as lovely and as kind as ever," he responded. "ah, when i remember those days, when i was young, and you were just as you are now--" "old, that is." "oh, no; young, always young as when i knew you first. when i was at your feet with love, and your countryman was my rival--" mrs. neligage began to look as if she found the tables being turned, and that she had no more wish to have the past brought up than had the count. she turned away from her companion. then she looked back over her shoulder to observe, still in french, as she left him:-- "i make it a point never to remember those days, my friend." vi the mischief of a widow there were now but ten guests left, the persons who have been named, and who seemed for the most part to be lingering to observe the count or alice endicott. may calthorpe had all the afternoon kept near alice, and only left her place when the sopping up of the count's tea made it necessary for her to move. mrs. harbinger took her by the arm, and looked into her face scrutinizingly. "well," she asked, "did your unknown author come?" "nobody has come with a carnation. oh, i am so disappointed!" "i am glad of it, my dear." "but he said he would come if i'd give him a sign, and i wrote to him while i was waiting for you yesterday." "so you told me." "well," may echoed dolefully; "i think you might be more sympathetic." "what did you do with the letter?" asked mrs. harbinger. "i gave it to graham to post." "then very likely no harm is done. graham never in his life posted a letter under two days." "oh, do you think so?" may asked, brightening visibly at the suggestion. "you don't think he despised me, and wouldn't come?" mrs. harbinger gave her a little shake. "you hussy!" she exclaimed, with too evident an enjoyment of the situation to be properly severe. "how was it addressed?" "just to christopher calumus, in care of the publishers." "well, my dear," the hostess declared, "your precious epistle is probably in the butler's pantry now; or one of the maids has picked it up from the kitchen floor. i warn you that if i can find it i shall read it." "oh, you wouldn't!" exclaimed may in evident distress. "um! wouldn't i, though? the way you take the suggestion shows that it's time somebody looked into your correspondence with this stranger." may opened her lips to protest again, but the voice of graham was heard announcing mr. barnstable, and mrs. harbinger turned to greet the late-coming stranger. the gentleman's hair had apparently been scrubbed into sleekness, but had here and there broken through the smooth outer surface as the stuffing of an old cushion breaks through slits in the covering. his face was red, and his air full of self-consciousness. when he entered the drawing-room mr. harbinger was close behind him, but the latter stopped to speak with bradish and mrs. neligage, and barnstable advanced alone to where mrs. harbinger stood with may just behind her. "heavens, may," the hostess said over her shoulder. "here is your carnation. i hope you are pleased with the bearer." barnstable stood hesitating, looking around as if to discover the hostess. on the face of mrs. croydon only was there sign of recognition. she bowed at him rather than to him, with an air so distant that no man could have spoken to her after such a frigid salutation. the stranger turned redder and redder, made a half step toward mrs. croydon, and then stopped. fortunately mr. harbinger hastened up, and presented him to the hostess. that lady greeted him politely, but she had hardly exchanged the necessary commonplaces, before she put out her hand to where may stood watching in dazed surprise. "let me present you to miss calthorpe," she said. "mr. barnstable, may." she glided away with a twinkle in her eye which must have implied that she had no fear in leaving the romantic girl with a lover that looked like that. may and barnstable stood confronting each other a moment in awkward silence, and then the girl tossed her head with the air of a young colt that catches the bit between his teeth. "i had quite given you up," she said in a voice low, but distinct. "eh?" he responded, with a startled look. "given me up?" "i have been watching for the carnation all the afternoon." "carnation?" he echoed, trying over his abundant chins to get a glimpse of the flower in his buttonhole. "oh, yes; i generally wear a carnation. they keep, don't you know; and it was always the favorite flower of my wife." "your wife?" demanded miss calthorpe. her cheeks grew crimson, and she drew herself up haughtily. "yes," barnstable replied, looking confused. "that is, of course, she that was my wife." "i should never have believed," may observed distantly, "that 'love in a cloud' could have been written by a widower." barnstable began to regard her as if he were in doubt whether she or he himself had lost all trace of reason. "'love in a cloud,'" he repeated, "'love in a cloud'? do you know who wrote that beastly book?" her color shot up, and the angry young goddess declared itself in every line of her face. her pose became instantly a protest. "how dare you speak of that lovely book in that way?" she demanded. "it is perfectly exquisite!" "but who wrote it?" he demanded in his turn, growing so red as to suggest awful possibilities of apoplexy. "didn't you?" she stammered. "are you running it down just for modesty?" "i! i! i write 'love in a cloud'?" cried barnstable, speaking so loud that he could be heard all over the room. "you insult me, miss--miss calthump! you--" his feelings were evidently too much for him. he turned with rude abruptness, and looking about him, seemed to become aware that the eyes of almost everybody in the room were fixed on him. he cast a despairing glance to where mrs. harbinger and mrs. croydon were for the moment standing together, and then started in miserable flight toward the door. at the threshold he encountered graham the butler, who presented him with a handful of letters. "will you please give the letters to mrs. harbinger?" graham said, and vanished. barnstable looked after the butler, looked at the letters, looked around as if his head were swimming, and then turned back into the drawing-room. he walked up to the hostess, and held out the letters in silence, his fluffy face a pathetic spectacle of embarrassed woe. "what are these?" mrs. harbinger asked. he shook his head, as if he had given up all hope of understanding anything. "the butler put them in my hands," he murmured. "upon my word, mrs. harbinger," spoke up mrs. croydon, seeming more offended than there was any apparent reason for her to be, "you have the most extraordinary butler that ever existed." mrs. harbinger threw out her hands in a gesture by which she evidently disclaimed all responsibility for graham and his doings. "extraordinary! why, he makes my life a burden. there is no mistake he cannot make, and he invents fresh ones every day. really, i know of no reason why the creature is tolerated in the house except that he makes a cocktail to suit tom." "dat ees ver' greet veertue," count shimbowski commented genially. "i do not agree with you, count," miss wentstile responded stiffly. the spinster had been hovering about the count ever since his accident with the teacup, apparently seeking an opportunity of snubbing him. "oh, but i die but eef mees wentsteele agree of me!" the count declared with his hand on his heart. mrs. croydon in the meanwhile had taken the letters from the hand of barnstable, and was looking at them with a scrutiny perhaps closer than was exactly compatible with strict good-breeding. "why, here is a letter that has never been posted," she said. mr. harbinger took the whole bundle from her hand. "i dare say," was his remark, "that any letter that's been given to graham to mail in the last week is there. why, this letter is addressed to christopher calumus." may calthorpe moved forward so quickly that mrs. harbinger, who had extended her hand to take the letters from her husband, turned to restrain the girl. mrs. croydon swayed forward a little. "that is the author of 'love in a cloud,'" she said with a simper of self-consciousness. mrs. neligage, who was standing with bradish and alice at the moment, made a grimace. "she'll really have the impudence to take it," she said to them aside. "now see me give that woman a lesson." she swept forward in a flash, and deftly took the letter out of tom harbinger's hand before he knew her intention. flourishing it over her head, she looked them all over with eyes full of fun and mischief. "honor to whom honor is due," she cried. "ladies and gentlemen, be it my high privilege to deliver this to its real and only owner. count," she went on, sweeping him a profound courtesy, "let your light shine. behold in count shimbowski the too, too modest author of 'love in a cloud.'" there was a general outburst of amazement. the count looked at the letter which had been thrust into his hand, and stammered something unintelligible. "_vraiment_, madame neleegaze," he began, "eet ees too mooch of you--" "oh, don't say anything," she interrupted him. "i have no other pleasure in life than doing mischief." mrs. croydon looked from the count to mrs. neligage with an expression of mingled doubt and bewilderment. her attitude of expecting to be received as the anonymous author vanished in an instant, and vexation began to predominate over the other emotions visible in her face. "well," she said spitefully, "it is certainly a day of wonders; but if the letter belongs to the count, it would be interesting to know who writes to him as christopher calumus." mrs. harbinger answered her in a tone so cold that mrs. croydon colored under it. "really, mrs. croydon," she said, "the question is a little pointed." "why, it is only a question about a person who doesn't exist. there isn't any such person as christopher calumus. i'm sure i'd like to know who writes to literary men under their assumed names." may was so pale that only the fact that everybody was looking at mrs. harbinger could shield her from discovery. the hostess drew herself up with a haughty lifting of the head. "if it is of so great importance to you," she said, "it is i who wrote the letter. who else should write letters in this house?" she extended her hand to the count as she spoke, as if to recover the harmless-looking little white missive which was causing so much commotion, but the count did not offer to return it. tom harbinger stood a second as if amazement had struck him dumb. then with the air of a puppet pronouncing words by machinery he ejaculated:-- "you wrote to the count?" his wife turned to him with a start, and opened her lips, but before she could speak a fresh interruption prevented. barnstable in the few moments during which he had been in the room had met with so many strange experiences that he might well be bewildered. he had been greeted by may as one for whom she was waiting, and then had been hailed as the author of the book which he hated; the eccentric graham had made of him a sort of involuntary penny-post; he had been in the midst of a group whisking a letter about like folk in the last act of a comedy; and now here was the announcement that the count was the anonymous libeler for whom he had been seeking. he dashed forward, every fold of his chins quivering, his hair bristling, his little eyes red with excitement. he shook his fist in the face of the count in a manner not often seen in a polite drawing-room. "you are a villain," he cried. "you have insulted my wife!" bradish and mr. harbinger at once seized him, and between them he was drawn back gesticulating and struggling. the ladies looked frightened, but with the exception of mrs. croydon they behaved with admirable propriety. mrs. croydon gave a little yapping screech, and fell back in her chair in hysterics. more complete confusion could hardly have been imagined, and mrs. neligage, who looked on with eyes full of laughter, had certainly reason to congratulate herself that if she loved making mischief she had for once at least been most instantly and triumphantly successful. vii the counsel of a mother if an earthquake shook down the house in which was being held a boston function, the persons there assembled would crawl from the ruins in a manner decorous and dignified, or if too badly injured for this would compose with decency their mangled limbs and furnish the addresses of their respective family physicians. the violent and ill-considered farce which had been played in mrs. harbinger's drawing-room might elsewhere have produced a long-continued disturbance; but here it left no trace after five minutes. mr. barnstable, babbling and protesting like a lunatic, was promptly hurried into confinement in the library, where mr. harbinger and bradish stood guard over him as if he were a dangerous beast; while the other guests made haste to retire. they went, however, with entire decorum. mrs. croydon was, it is true, a disturbing element in the quickly restored serenity of the party, and was with difficulty made to assume some semblance of self-control. graham, being sent to call a carriage, first caught a forlorn herdic, which was prowling about like a deserted tomcat, and when the lady would none of this managed to produce a hack which must have been the most shabby in the entire town. the count was taken away by miss wentstile, who in the hour of his peril dropped the stiffness she had assumed at his recognition of mrs. neligage. she dragged alice along with them, but alice in turn held on to may, so that the count was given no opportunity to press his suit. they all retired in good order, and however they talked, they at least behaved beautifully. as neligage took his hat in the hall fairfield caught him by the arm. "jack," he said under his breath, "do you believe mrs. harbinger wrote me those letters?" "of course not," jack responded instantly. "not if they are the sort of letters you said. letty harbinger is as square as a brick." "then why did she say she did?" jack rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "the letter was evidently written here," he said. "she must know who did write it." "ah, i see!" exclaimed the other. "she was shielding somebody." jack regarded him with sudden sternness. "there was nobody that it could be except--" he broke off abruptly, a black look in his face, and before another word could be exchanged mrs. neligage called him. he went off with his mother, hastily telling his friend he would see him before bedtime. mrs. neligage was hardly up to her son's shoulder, but so well preserved was she that she might easily have been mistaken for a sister not so much his senior. she was admirably dressed, exquisitely gloved and booted, to the last fold of her tailor-made frock entirely correct, and in her manner provokingly and piquantly animated. "who in the world was that horror that made the exhibition of himself?" she asked. "i never saw anything like that at the harbingers' before." "i know nothing about him except that his name is barnstable, and that he came from the west somewhere. he's joined the calif club lately. how he got in i don't understand; but he seems to have loads of money." "he is a beast," mrs. neligage pronounced by way of dismissing the subject. "what did mrs. harbinger mean by thanking you for arranging something with the count? what have you to do with him?" "oh, that is a secret." "then if it is a secret tell it at once." "i'll tell you just to disappoint you," jack returned with a grin. "it is only about some etchings that the count brought over. mrs. harbinger has bought a couple as a present for tom." "she had better be careful," mrs. neligage observed. "tom thinks more of the collection now than he does of anything else in the world. but what are you mixed up in the count's transactions for?" "she asked me to fix it, and besides the poor devil needed to sell them to raise the wind. i'm too used to being hard up myself not to feel for him." "but you wrote me that you detested the count." "so i do, but you can't help doing a fellow a good turn, can you, just because you don't happen to like him?" she laughed lightly. "you are a model of good nature. i wish you'd show it to may calthorpe." her son looked down at her with a questioning glance. "she is always at liberty to admire my virtues, of course; but she can't expect me to put myself out to make special exhibitions for her benefit." the faces of both mother and son hardened a little, as if the subject touched upon was one concerning which they had disagreed before. the change of expression brought out a subtle likeness which had not before been visible. jack neligage was usually said to resemble his father, who had died just as the boy was entering his teens, but when he was in a passion--a thing which happened but seldom--his face oddly took on the look of his mother. the change, moreover, was not entirely to his disadvantage, for as a rule jack showed too plainly the easy-going, self-indulgent character which had been the misfortune of the late john neligage, and which made friends of the family declare with a sigh that jack would never amount to anything worth while. mother and son walked on in silence a moment, and then the lady observed, in a voice as dispassionate as ever:-- "she is a silly little thing. i believe even you could wind her round your finger." "i haven't any intention of trying." "so you have given me to understand before; but now that i am going away you might at least let me go with the consolation of knowing you'd provided for yourself. you must marry somebody with money, and she has no end of it." he braced back his shoulders as if he found it not altogether easy not to reply impatiently. "where are you going?" he asked. "oh, to europe. anywhere out of the arctic zone of the new england conscience. i've had as long a spell of respectability as i can stand, my boy." something in her manner evidently irritated him more and more. she spoke with a little indefinable defiant swagger, as if she intended to anger him. he looked at her no longer, but fixed his gaze on the distance. "when you talk of giving up respectability," he remarked in an aggrieved tone, "i should think you might consider me." her eyes danced, as if she were delighted to see him becoming angry. "oh, i do, jack, i assure you; but i really cannot afford to be respectable any longer. respectability is the most expensive luxury of civilization; and how can i keep it up when i'm in debt to everybody that'll trust me." "then you might economize." "economize! ye gods! this from you, jack! where did you hear the word? i'm sure you know nothing of the thing." he laughed in evident self-despite. "we are a nice pair of ruffianly adventurers," he responded; "a regular pair of genteel paupers. but we've both got to pull up, i tell you." "oh, heavens!" was his mother's reply. "don't talk to me of pulling up. what fun do i have as it is but quarreling with miss wentstile and snubbing harry bradish? i've got to keep up my authority in our set, or i should lose even these amusements." jack flashed her a swift, questioning look, and with a new note in his voice, a note of doubt at once and desperation, blurted out a fresh question. "how about flirting with sibley langdon?" mrs. neligage flushed slightly and for a brief second contracted her well-arched eyebrows, but in an instant she was herself again. "oh, well," she returned, with a pretty little shrug, "that of course is a trifle better, but not much. sibley really cares for himself so entirely that there's very little to be got out of him." "but you know how you make folks talk." "oh, folks always talk. there is always as much gossip about nothing as about something." "but he puts on such a damnable air of proprietorship," jack burst out, with much more feeling than he had thus far shown. "i know i shall kick him some time." "that is the sort of thing you had better leave to the barnstable man," she responded dryly. "sibley only has the air of owning everything. that's just his nature. he's really less fun than good old harry bradish. but such as he is, he is the best i can do. if that stuffy old invalid wife of his would only die, i think i'd marry him out of hand for his money." jack threw out his arm with an angry gesture. "for heaven's sake, mother," he said, "what are you after that you are going on so? you know you drive me wild when you get into this sort of a talk." "or i might elope with him as it is, you know," she continued in her most teasing manner; but watching him intently. "what in the deuce do you talk to me like that for!" he cried, shaking himself savagely. "you're my mother!" mrs. neligage grew suddenly grave. she drew closer to her son, and slipped her hand through his arm. "so much the worse for us both, isn't it, jack? come, we may as well behave like rational beings. of course i was teasing you; but that isn't the trouble. it's yourself you are angry with." "what have i to be angry with myself about?" "you are trying to make up your mind that you're willing to be poor for the sake of marrying alice endicott; but you know you wouldn't be equal to it. if i thought you would, i'd say go ahead. do you think you'd be happy in a south end apartment house with the washing on a line between the chimneys, and a dry-goods box outside the window for a refrigerator?" jack mingled a groan and a laugh. "you can't pay your debts as it is," she went on remorselessly. "we are a pair of paupers who have to live as if we were rich. you see what your father made of it, starting with a fortune. you can't suppose you'd do much better when you've nothing but debts." "i think i'll enlist, or run away to sea," jack declared, tugging viciously at his mustache. "no, you'll accept your destiny. you'll like it better than you think, when you're settled down to it. you'll stay here and marry may calthorpe." "you must think i'm a whelp to marry a girl just for her money." "oh, you must fall in love with her. any man is a wretch who'd marry a girl just for her money, but a man's a fool that can't fall in love with a pretty girl worth half a million." jack dropped his mother's hand from his arm with more emphasis than politeness, and stopped to face her on the corner of the street. "the very old boy is in you to-day, mother," he said. "i won't listen to another word." she regarded him with a saucy, laughing face, and put out her hand. "well, good-night then," she said. "come in and see me as soon as you can. i have a lot of things to tell you about washington. by the way, what do you think of my going there, and setting up as a lobbyist? they say women make no end of money that way." he swung hastily round, and left her without a word. she went on her way, but her face turned suddenly careworn and haggard as she walked in the gathering twilight toward the little apartment where she lived in fashionable poverty. viii the test of love one of the distinctive features of "good society" is that its talk is chiefly of persons. less distinguished circles may waste precious time on the discussion of ideas, but in company really select such conversation is looked upon as dull and pedantic. one of the first requisites for entrance into the world of fashion is a thorough knowledge of the concerns of those who are included in its alluring round; and not to be informed in this branch of wisdom marks at once the outsider. it follows that concealment of personal affairs is pretty nearly impossible. humanity being frail, it frequently happens that fashionable folk delude themselves by the fond belief that they have escaped the universal law of their surroundings; but the minute familiarity which each might boast of all that relates to his neighbors should undeceive them. that of which all the world talks is not to be concealed. everybody in their set knew perfectly well that jack neligage had been in love with alice endicott from the days when they had paddled in the sand on the walks of the public garden. the smart nursery maids whose occupation it was to convey their charges thither and keep them out of the fountains, between whiles exchanging gossip about the parents of the babies, had begun the talk. the opinions of fashionable society are generally first formed by servants, and then served up with a garnish of fancifully distorted facts for the edification of their mistresses; and in due time the loves of the public garden, reported and decorated by the nursery maids, serve as topics for afternoon calls. master jack was known to be in love with miss alice before either of them could have written the word, and in this case the passion had been so lasting that it excited remark not only for itself as an ordinary attachment, but as an extraordinary case of unusual constancy. society knew, of course, the impossibility of the situation. it was common knowledge that neither of the lovers had anything to marry on. jack's handsome and spendthrift father had effectually dissipated the property which he inherited, only his timely death preserving to mrs. neligage and her son the small remnant which kept them from actual destitution. alice was dependent upon the bounty of her aunt, miss wentstile. miss wentstile, it is true, was abundantly able to provide for alice, but the old lady seriously disapproved of jack neligage, and of his mother she disapproved more strongly yet. everybody said--and despite all the sarcastic observations of that most objectionable class, the satirists, what everybody says nobody likes to disregard--that if jack and alice were so rash as to marry they would never touch a penny of the aunt's money. jack, moreover, was in debt. nobody blamed him much for this, because he was a general favorite, and all his acquaintance recognized how impossible it was for a young man to live within an income so small as from any rational point of view to be regarded as much the same thing as no income at all; but of course it was recognized also that it is not well in the present day to marry nothing upon a capital of less than nothing. it has been successfully done, it is true; but it calls for more energy and ingenuity than was possessed by easy-going jack neligage. in view of all these facts, frequently discussed, society was unanimously agreed that jack and alice could never marry. this impossibility excited a faint sort of romantic sympathy for the young couple. they were invited to the same houses and thrown together, apparently with the idea that they should play with fire as steadily and as long as possible. the unphrased feeling probably was that since the culmination of their hopes in matrimony was out of the question, it was only common humanity to afford them opportunities for getting from the ill-starred attachment all the pleasure that was to be had. society approves strongly of romance so long as it stops short of disastrous marriages; and since jack and alice were not to be united, to see them dallying with the temptation of making an imprudent match was a spectacle at once piquant and diverting. on the evening of the day when the news of alice's pseudo-engagement had been discussed at mrs. harbinger's tea, jack called on her. she received him with composure, coming into the room a little pale, perhaps, but entirely free from self-consciousness. alice was not considered handsome by her friends, but no one could fail to recognize that her face was an unusual one. the count, in his distorted english, had declared that miss endicott "have een her face one madonna," and the description was hardly to be bettered. the serene oval countenance, the dark, clear skin, the smooth hair of a deep chestnut, the level brows and long lashes, the high, pure forehead, all belonged to the madonna type; although the sparkle of humor which now and then gleamed in the full, gray eyes imparted a bewitching flavor of humanity. to-night she was very grave, but she smiled properly, the smile a well-instructed girl learns as she learns to courtesy. she shook hands in a way perhaps a little formal, since she was greeting so old an acquaintance. "sit down, please," she said. "it is kind of you to come in. i hardly had a chance to say a word to you this afternoon." jack did not return her greeting, nor did he accept her invitation to be seated. he stooped above the low chair into which she sank as she spoke. "what is this amazing story that you are engaged to count shimbowski?" he demanded abruptly. she looked up to him with a smile which was more conventional than ever. "what right have you to ask me a question like that?" she returned. he waved his hand as if to put aside formalities. "but is it true?" he insisted. "what is it to you, jack, if it were?" she grew visibly paler, and her fingers knit themselves together. he, on the contrary, flushed and became more commanding in his manner. "do you suppose," he answered, "that i should be willing to see a friend of mine throw herself away on that old roué? he is old enough to be your father." "but you know," said she, assuming an air of raillery which did not seem to be entirely genuine, "that the proverb says it's better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave." jack flung himself into a chair with an impatient exclamation, and immediately got up again to walk the floor. "i wouldn't have believed it of you, alice. how can you joke about a thing like that!" "why, jack; you've told me a hundred times that the only way to get through life comfortably is to take everything in jest." "oh, confound what i've told you! that's good enough philosophy for me, but it's beneath you to talk so." "what is sauce for the goose--" "keep still," he interrupted. "if you can't be serious--" "you are so fond of being serious," she murmured, interrupting in her turn. "but i am serious now. haven't we always been good friends enough for me to speak to you in earnest without your treating me as if i was either impertinent or a fool?" he stopped his restless walk to stand before her again. she was silent a moment with her glance fixed on the rug. then she raised her eyes to his, and her manner became suddenly grave. "yes, jack," she said, "we have always been friends; but has any man, simply because he is a friend, a right to ask a girl a question like that?" "you mean--" "i mean no more than i say. there are other men with whom i've been friends all my life. is there any one of them that you'd think had a right to come here to-night and question me about my engagement?" "i'd break his head if he did!" jack retorted savagely. "then why shouldn't he--whoever he might be--break yours?" he flung himself into his chair again, his sunny face clouded, and his brows drawn down. he met her glance with a look which seemed to be trying to fathom the purpose of her mood. "why, hang it," he said; "with me it's different. you know i've always been more than a common friend." "you have been a good friend," she answered with resolute self-composure; "but only a friend after all." "then you mean that i cannot be more than a friend?" she dropped her eyes, a faint flush stealing up into her pale cheeks. "you do not wish to be; and therefore you have no right--" he sprang up impulsively and seized both her hands in his. "good god, alice," he exclaimed, "you drive me wild! you know that if i were not so cursedly poor--" she released herself gently, and with perfect calmness. "i know," she responded, "that you have weighed me in the balance against the trouble of earning a living, and you haven't found me worth the price. in the face of a fact like that what is the use of words?" he thrust his empty hands into his pockets, and glowered down on her. "you know i love you, alice. you know i've been in love with you ever since i began to walk; and you--you--" she rose and faced him proudly. "well, say it!" she cried. "say that i was foolish enough to love you! that i knew no better than to believe in you, and that i half broke my heart when you forced me to see that you weren't what i thought. say it, if you like. you can't make me more ashamed of it than i am already!" "ashamed--alice?" "yes, ashamed! it humiliates me that i should set my heart on a man that cared so little for me that he set me below his polo-ponies, his bachelor ease, his miserable little self-indulgences! oh, jack," she went on, her manner suddenly changing to one of appeal, and the tears starting into her eyes, "why can't you be a man?" she put her hand on his arm, and he covered it affectionately with one of his while she hurried on. "do break away from the life you are living, and do something worthy of you. you are good to everybody else; there's nothing you won't do for others; do this for yourself. do it for me. you are throwing yourself away, and i have to hear them talk of your debts, and your racing and gambling, and how reckless you are! it almost kills me!" the full sunniness of his smile came back as he looked down into her earnest face, caressing her hand. "dear little woman," he said; "are you sure you have got entirely over being fond of me?" "i couldn't get over being fond of you. you know it. that's what makes it hurt so." he raised her hand tenderly, and kissed it. then he dropped it abruptly, and turned away. "you must get over it," he said, so brusquely that she started almost as if from a blow. she sank back into her seat, and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, while he walked back to his chair and sat down with an air of bravado. "it's no use, alice," he said, "i'm not worth a thought, and it isn't in me to--well, the fact is that i know myself too well. i know that if i promised you to-night that to-morrow i'd begin better fashions, i'm not man enough to live up to it. i couldn't involve you in--oh, don't, don't!" he broke off to turn to toy with some of the ornaments on the table. in a moment alice had suppressed her sobs, and he spoke again, but without meeting her look. his voice was hard and flippant. "you see i have such a good time that i wouldn't give it up for the world. i think i'd better keep on as i'm going. the time makes us, and we have to abide by the fashion of the time." "if that is the way you feel," she said coldly, "it is i who have presumed on old friendship." he shrugged his shoulders, and laughed harshly. "we have both been a little unnecessarily tragic, it seems to me," was his rejoinder. "love isn't for a poor man unless he'll take it on the half-shell without dressing; and i fancy neither of us would much care for it that way. my bank-account is a standing reason why i shouldn't marry anybody." "the sentiment does credit to mr. neligage's head if not to his heart," commented the sneering voice of miss wentstile, who at that moment came through the portières from the library. "i hope i don't intrude?" "certainly not," alice answered with spirit. "mr. neligage was giving me a lesson in the social economics of matrimony; but i knew before all he has to tell." "then, my dear," her aunt said, "i trust he will excuse you. it is time we went to mrs. wilson's. i promised the count that we would be there early." ix the mischief of a gentleman the goddess of misfortune sometimes capriciously takes a spite against an entire family, so that all of its members are at the same time involved in one misadventure or another. she shows a malicious impulse to wreak her disfavor on all of a connection at once, apparently from a knowledge that misery begets misery, and that nothing so completely fills to overflowing the cup of vexation as the finding that those from whom sympathy would naturally be expected are themselves in a condition to demand rather than to give it. she apparently amuses herself in mere wantonness of enjoyment of the sufferings of her victims when no one of them is in a condition to cheer the others. she illustrated this unamiable trait of her celestial character next day in her dealing with the neligages, mother and son. it was a beautiful spring day, not too warm in the unseasonable fashion which often makes a new england april so detestable, but with a fresh air full of exhilaration. even in the city the cool, invigorating morning was refreshing. it provoked thoughts of springing grass and swelling buds, it suggested the marsh-marigolds preparing their gold down amid the roots of rushes, it teased the sense with vague yet disquieting desires to be in the open. the sun called to mind the amethystine foliage, half mist and half leaves, which was beginning to appear in the woods, as if trailing clouds had become entangled among the twig-set branches. the wind brought a spirit of daring, as if to-day one could do and not count the cost; as if adventures were the normal experience of man, and dreams might become tangible with the foliage which was condensing out of the spring air. it was one of those rare days which put the ideal to shame. the windows of mrs. neligage's little parlor were open, and the morning air with all its provoking suggestions was floating in softly, as she rose to welcome a caller. he was not in the first springtime of life, yet suggested a season which was to spring what indian summer is to autumn. a certain brisk jauntiness in face, dress, and manner might mean that he had by sheer determination remained far younger than his years. he had a hard, handsome face, with cleanly cut features, and side whiskers which were perhaps too long and flowing. his hair was somewhat touched with gray, but it was abundant, and curled attractively about his high, white forehead. his dress was perfection, and gave the impression that if he had moral scruples--about which his hard, bright eyes might raise a doubt--it would be in the direction of being always perfectly attired. his manner as he greeted mrs. neligage was carefully genial, yet the spring which was in the air seemed in his presence to be chilled by an untimely frost. "how bright you are looking this morning, louise," mr. sibley langdon said, kissing her hand with an elaborate air of gallantry. "you are really the incarnation of the spring that is upon us." she smiled languidly, drawing away her hand and moving to a seat. "you know i am getting old enough to like to be told i am young, sibley," was her answer. "sit down, and tell me what has happened in the month that i've been in washington." "nothing can happen while you are away," he responded, with a smile. "we only vegetate, and wait for your return. you don't mind if i smoke?" "certainly not. how is mrs. langdon?" he drew out a cigarette-case of tortoise-shell and gold, helped himself to a cigarette, and lighted it before he answered. "mrs. langdon is as usual," he replied. "she is as ill and as pious as ever." "for which is she to be pitied the more?" "oh, i don't know that she is to be pitied for either," langdon responded, in his crisp, well-bred voice. "both her illness and her piety are in the nature of occupations to her. one must do something, you know." mrs. neligage offered no reply to this, and for half a moment the caller smoked in silence. "tell me about yourself," he said. "you cruelly refuse to write to me, so that when you are away i am always in the dark as to what you are doing. i've no doubt you had all washington at your feet." "oh, there were a few unimportant exceptions," mrs. neligage returned, her voice a little hard. "i don't think that if you went on now you'd find the capital draped in mourning over my departure." langdon knocked the ashes from his cigarette with the deliberation which marked all his movements. then he looked at his hostess curiously. "you don't seem to be in the best of spirits this morning, louise," he said. "has anything gone wrong?" she looked at him with contracting brows, and ignored his question as she demanded abruptly:-- "what did you come to say to me?" "to say to you, my dear? i came as usual to say how much i admire you, of course." she made an impatient gesture. "what did you come to say?" she repeated. "do you think i don't know you well enough to see when you have some especial purpose in mind?" sibley langdon laughed lightly,--a sort of inward, well-bred laugh,--and again with care trimmed his cigarette. "you are a person of remarkable penetration, and it is evidently of no use to hope to get ahead of you. i really came for the pleasure of seeing you, but now that i am here i may as well mention that i have decided to go abroad almost at once." "ah," mrs. neligage commented. "does mrs. langdon go with you?" he laughed outright, as if the question struck him as unusually droll. "you really cannot think me so selfish as to insist upon her risking her fragile health by an ocean voyage just for my pleasure." "i suspected that you meant to go alone," she said dryly. "but, my dear child," he answered with no change of manner, "i don't mean to go alone." she changed color, but she did not pursue the subject. she took up from the table a little japanese ivory carving, and began to examine it with close scrutiny. "you do not ask whom i hope to take with me," langdon said. she looked at him firmly. "i have no possible interest in knowing," she responded. "you are far too modest, louise. on the contrary you have the greatest. i had hoped--" he half hesitated over the sentence, and she interrupted him by rising and moving to the open window. "it is so nice to have the windows open again," she said. "i feel as if i were less alone when there is nothing between me and the world. that big fat policeman over there is a great friend of mine." "we are all your slaves, you see," langdon responded, rising languidly and joining her. "by the way, i had a letter from count marchetti the other day." mrs. neligage flushed and paled, and into her eye came a dangerous sparkle. she moved away from him, and went back to her seat, leaving him to follow again. she did not look at him, but she spoke with a determined manner which showed that she was not cowed. "before i go to bed to-night, sibley," she said, "i shall write to the countess the whole story of her necklace. i was a fool not to do it before." he smiled indulgently. "oh, did i call up that old unpleasantness?" he observed. "i really beg your pardon. but since you speak of it, what good would it do to write to her now? it would make no difference in facts, of course; and it wouldn't change things here at all." she sprang up and turned upon him in a fury. "sibley langdon," she cried, "you are a perfect fiend!" he laughed and looked at her with admiration so evident that her eyes fell. "you have told me that before, and you are so devilish handsome when you say it, louise, that i can't resist the temptation sometimes of making you repeat it. come, don't be cross. we are too wise if not too old to talk melodrama." "i shall act melodrama if you keep on tormenting me! what did you come here for this morning? say it, and have done." "if you take it that way," returned he, "i came only to say good-morning." his coolness was unshaken, and he smiled as charmingly as ever. "tell me," he remarked, flinging his cigarette end into the grate and taking out his case again, "did you see the kanes in washington?" he lighted a fresh cigarette, and for half an hour talked of casual matters, the people of their set in washington, the new buildings there, the decorations, and the political scandals. his manner became almost deferential, and mrs. neligage as they chatted lost gradually all trace of the excitement which she had shown. at length the talk came round to their neighbors at home. "i met count shimbowski at the club the other day," langdon remarked, "and he alluded to the old days at monte carlo almost with sentiment. it is certainly amusing to see him passed round among respectable boston houses." "he is respectable enough according to his standards," she responded. "it is funny, though, to see how much afraid he is that miss wentstile should know about his past history." "i suppose there's no doubt he's to marry alice endicott, is there?" "there is alice herself," mrs. neligage answered. "i should call her a pretty big doubt." "at any rate," her companion observed, "jack can't marry her. miss wentstile would never give them a penny." "i have never heard jack say that he wished to marry her," mrs. neligage responded coolly. "you are quite right about miss wentstile, though; she regards jack as the blackest sheep imaginable." langdon did not speak for a moment or two, and when he did break silence his manner was more decided than before. "what line do you like best to cross by?" he asked. "i have been on so many," she answered, "that i really can't tell." "it is safe to say then that you like a fast boat." she made no reply, and only played nervously with the clever carving in her hand, where little ivory rats were stealing grain with eternal motionless activity. "of course if you were going over this spring," langdon said, "we should be likely to meet somewhere on the other side; paris, very possibly. it is a pity that people gossip so, or we might go on the same steamer." she looked him squarely in the face. "i am not going abroad this summer," she said distinctly. "oh, my dear louise," returned he half mockingly, half pleadingly, "you really can't mean that. europe would be intolerably dull without you." she looked up, pale to the eyes. "my son would be dull here without me," she said. "oh, jack," returned the other, shrugging his shoulders, "he'll get on very well. if you were going, you know, you might leave him something--" she started to her feet with eyes blazing. "you had better go," she said in a low voice. "i have endured a good deal from you, sibley; and i've always known that the day would come when you'd insult me. it will be better for us both if you go." he rose in his turn, as collected as ever. "insult you, my dear louise? why, i wouldn't hurt your feelings for anything in the world. i give you leave to repeat every word that i have said to any of your friends,--to miss wentstile, or letty harbinger, or to jack--" "if i repeated them to jack," she interrupted him, "he'd break every bone in your body!" "would he? i doubt it. at any rate he would have to hear me first; and then--" mrs. neligage, all her brightness quenched, her face old and miserable, threw out her hands in despairing supplication. "go!" she cried. "go! or i shall do something we'll both be sorry for! go, or i'll call that policeman over there." he laughed lightly, but he moved toward the door. "gad!" he ejaculated. "that would make a pretty item in the evening papers. well, if you really wish it, i'll go; but i hope you'll think over what i've said, or rather think over what i haven't said, since you haven't seemed pleased with my words. i shall come at one to drive you to the county club." he bade her an elaborate good-morning, and went away, as collected, as handsome, as debonaire as ever; while mrs. neligage, the hard, bright little widow who had the reputation of being afraid of nothing and of having no feelings, broke down into a most unusual fit of crying. x the business of a clubman the first game of polo for the season at the county club was to be played that saturday. the unusually early spring had put the turf in condition, and the men had had more or less practice. it was too soon, of course, for a match, but there was to be a friendly set-to between the county club team and a team from the oracle club. it was not much more than an excuse for bringing the members out, and for having a mild gala, with fresh spring toilettes and spring buoyancy to add to the zest of the day. amusement is a business which calls for a good deal of brains if it is to be carried on successfully. of course only professionals can hope to succeed in a line so difficult, and in america there are few real professionals in the art of self-amusement. most men spoil their chances of complete success by dallying more or less with work of one sort or another; and this is fatal. only he who is sincere in putting amusement first, and to it sacrifices all other considerations, can hope for true preëminence in this calling. jack neligage was one of the few men in boston entirely free from any weakness in the way of occupation beyond that of pleasure-seeking; and as a consequence he was one of the few who did it well. all forms of fashionable play came easily and naturally to jack, and in them all he bore a part with tolerable grace. he was sufficiently adept at tennis in its day; and when that had passed, he was equally adroit in golf and in curling; he could lead a german better than anybody else; nobody so well managed assemblies and devised novel surprises in the way of decorations; nobody else so well arranged coaching trips or so surely made the life of a house party. all these things were part of his profession as a pleasure-seeker, and they were all done with a quick and merry spirit which gave to them a charm not to be resisted. it was on the polo-field, however, that jack was at his best. no man who hopes to keep up with the fashions can afford to become too much interested in any single sport, for presently the fad will alter, and he must perforce abandon the old delights; but polo held its own very well, and it was evidently the thing in which jack reveled most. he was the leading player not of his club only, but of all the clubs about. his stud of polo-ponies was selected with more care than has often gone to the making of a state constitution, for the matters that are really important must be attended to with zeal, while public politics may be expected more or less to take care of themselves. his friends wondered how neligage contrived to get hold of ponies so valuable, or how he was able to keep so expensive an outfit after he had obtained it; but everybody was agreed that he had a most wonderful lot. the question of how he managed might have been better understood by any one who had chanced to overhear a conversation between jack and dr. wilson, which took place just before luncheon that day. dr. wilson was chairman of the board of managers of the club. he was a man who had come into the club chiefly as the husband of mrs. chauncy wilson, a lady whose stud was one of the finest in the state, and he was somewhat looked down upon by the men of genuine old family. he was good-humored, however; shrewd if a little unrefined; and he had been rich long enough to carry the burden of his wife's enormous fortune without undue self-consequence. to-day it became his duty to talk to jack on an unpleasant matter of business. "jack," he said, "i've got to pitch into you again." "the same old thing, i suppose." "same old thing. sometimes i've half a mind to resign from the club, so as to get rid of having to drub you fellows about your bills." jack gnawed his mustache, twisting his cigar in his fingers in a way that threatened to demolish it altogether. "i've told you already that i can't do anything until--" "oh, i know it," wilson broke in. "i'm satisfied, but the committee is getting scared. the finances of the club are in an awful mess; there's no denying that. some of the men on the committee, you see, are afraid of being blamed for letting the credits run on so." jack did not take advantage of the pause which gave him an opportunity to speak, and the other went on again. "i'm awfully sorry, old man; but there's got to be an end somewhere, and nobody's been given the rope that you have." "i can resign, of course," jack said shortly. "oh, dry up that sort of talk! nobody'd listen to your resigning. everybody wants you here, and we couldn't spare you from the polo team." "but if i can't pay up, what else can i do?" "but you can't resign in debt, man." jack laughed with savage amusement. "what the devil am i to do? i can't stay, and i can't leave. that seems to be about the size of it." dr. wilson looked at his companion keenly, and there was in his tone some hesitation as he replied. "you might sell--" "sell my ponies!" broke in neligage excitedly. "when i do i'll give up playing." "oh, nonsense! don't be so infernally stubborn. harbinger'll buy one, and i'll buy a couple, and the others it doesn't matter about. you've always had twice as many as you need." "so you propose that i shouldn't have any." "you could use them just the same." jack swore savagely. "thank you," he returned. "i may be a beggar, but i won't be a beat." wilson laughed with his oily, chuckling laugh. "i don't see," he observed with characteristic brusqueness, "why it is any worse to take a favor from a friend that offers it than to get it out of a club that can't help itself." jack's cheeks flushed, and he began an angry reply. then he restrained himself. "i won't quarrel with you for doing your official duty, wilson," he said stiffly. "i'll fix things somehow or get out." "oh, hang it, man," returned the doctor good-naturedly, "you mustn't talk of getting out. i'll lend you what you need." "thank you, but you know i can't pay you." "that's no matter. something will turn up, and you may pay me when you get ready." "no; i'm deep enough in the mire as it is. i won't make it worse by borrowing. that's the only virtue that i ever had,--that i didn't sponge on my friends. i'm just as much obliged to you; but i can't do it." they had been sitting in the smoking-room before the fireplace where a smouldering log or two took from the air its spring chill. jack as he spoke flung the stub of his cigar into the ashes, and rose with an air of considering the conversation definitely ended. wilson looked up at him, his golden-brown eyes more sober than usual. "of course it is just as you say, old man," he remarked; "but if you change your mind, you've only to let me know." jack moved off with a downcast air unusual to him, but by the time he had encountered two or three men who were about the club-house, and had exchanged with them a jest or a remark about the coming game, his face was as sunny as ever. people were now arriving rather rapidly, and soon the stylish trap of sibley langdon came bowling up the driveway in fine style, with mrs. neligage sitting beside the owner. jack was on the front piazza when they drove up, and his mother waved her hand to him gayly. "gad, jack," one of the men said, "your mother is a wonder. she looks younger than you do this minute." "i don't think she is," jack returned with a grin; "but you're right. she is a wonderfully young woman to be the mother of a great cub like me." not only in her looks did mrs. neligage give the impression of youth, but her movements and her unquenchable vivacity might put to a disadvantage half of the young girls. she tripped up the steps as lightly as a leaf blown by the wind, her trim figure swaying as lithely as a willow-shoot. as she came to jack she said to him in a tone loud enough to be heard by all who were on the piazza:-- "oh, jack, come into the house a moment. i want to show you a letter." she dropped a gay greeting here and there as she led the way, and in a moment they were alone inside the house. mrs. neligage turned instantly, with a face from which all gayety had vanished as the color of a ballet-dancer's cheek vanishes under the pall of a green light. "jack," she said hastily, "i am desperate. i am in the worst scrape i ever was in, in my life. can you raise any money?" he looked at her a moment in amazed silence; then he laughed roughly. "money?" he retorted. "i am all but turned out of the club to-day for want of it. this is probably my last game." "you are not in earnest?" she demanded, pressing closer to him, and putting her hand on his arm. "you are not really going to leave the club?" "what else can i do? the committee think it isn't possible to let things go any longer." she looked into his face, her own hardening. she studied him with a keen glance, which he met firmly, yet with evident effort. "jack," she said at length, her voice lower, "there is only one way out of it. last night you wouldn't listen to me; but you must now. you must marry may calthorpe. if you were engaged to her it would be easy enough to raise money." "you talk as if she were only waiting for me to say the word, and she'd rush into my arms." "she will, she must, if you'll have her. you wouldn't take her for your own good, but you've got to do it for mine. you can't let me be ruined just through your obstinacy." "ruined? what under the canopy do you mean, mother? you are trying to scare me to make me go your way." "i'm not, jack; upon my word i'm not! i tell you i'm in an awful mess, and you must stand by me." jack turned away from her and walked toward the window; then he faced her again with a look which evidently questioned how far she was really in earnest. there had been occasions when mrs. neligage had used her histrionic powers to get the better of her son in some domestic discussion, and the price of such success is inevitably distrust. now she faced him boldly, and met his look with a nod of perfect comprehension. "yes, i am telling you the truth, jacky. there is nothing for it but for us both to go to smash if you won't take may." "take may," he echoed impatiently, "how you do keep saying that! how can i take her? she doesn't care a straw about me anyway, and i've no doubt she looks on me as one of the old fellows." "she being eighteen and you twenty-five," his mother answered, smiling satirically. "but somebody is coming. i can't talk to you now; only this one thing i must say. play into my hands as you can if you will, and you'll be engaged to may before the week's over." he broke into a roar of laughter which had a sound of being as much nerves as amusement. "is this a comic opera?" he demanded. "yes, dear jacky," his mother retorted, resuming her light manner, "that's just what it is. don't you miss your cue." she left him, and went gayly forward to greet the new-comers, ladies who had just driven up, and jack followed her lead with a countenance from which disturbance and bewilderment had not entirely vanished. xi the game of cross-purposes mrs. neligage escaped from her friends speedily, with that easy swiftness which is in the power of the socially adroit, and returned to the piazza by a french window which opened at the side of the house, and so was not in sight from the front of the club. there she came upon count shimbowski comfortably seated in a sunny corner, smoking and meditating. "ah, count," she said, as he rose to receive her, "this is unexpected pleasure. are you resting from the strain of continual adulation?" "what you say?" he responded. then he dropped into his seat with a despairing gesture. "dis eengleesh," he said; "eet ees eemposseeble eet to know. i have told mees wentsteele dat she ees very freesh, and--" he ended with a groan, and a snug little hungarian oath under his breath. "fresh!" echoed mrs. neligage, with a laugh like a redbird whisking gayly from branch to branch. "my dear count, she is anything but fresh. she is as stale as a last year's love-affair. but she ought to be pleased to be told she is fresh." "oh, i say: 'you be so freesh, mees wentsteele,' and she, she say: 'freesh, count shimbowski? you result me!' den day teel me freesh mean fooleesh, _sotte_. what language ees dat?" "oh, it isn't so bad as you think, count. it is only _argot_ anyway, and it doesn't mean _sotte_, but _naïve_. besides, she wouldn't mind. she is enough of a woman to be pleased that you even tried to tell her she was young." "but no more ees she young." "no more, count. we are all of us getting to be old enough to be our own grandmothers. miss wentstile looks as if she was at the flood and forgot to go in when it rained." the count looked more puzzled than amused at this sally, but his politeness came to his rescue. a compliment is always the resource of a man of the world when a lady puzzles him. "eet ees only madame neleegaze to what belong eemortal youth," he said with a bow. she rose and swept him a courtesy, and then took from her dress one of the flowers she was wearing, which chanced to be very portly red carnations. "you are as gallant as ever, count," she said, "so that your english doesn't matter. besides that, you have a title; and american women love a title as a moth loves a candle." she stuck the carnation into his buttonhole as she spoke, and returned to her seat, where she settled herself with the air of one ready for a serious chat. "it is very odd to see you on this side of the atlantic, count," she remarked. "tell me, what are you doing in this country,--besides taking the town by storm, that is?" "i weell range my own self;--say you een eengleesh 'arrange my own self'?" "when it means you are going to marry, count, it might be well to say that you are going to arrange yourself and derange somebody else. is the lady miss endicott?" "eet ees mees endeecott. ees she not good for me?" "she is a thousand times too good for you, my dear fellow; but she is as poor as a church mouse." "ah, but her aunt, mees wentsteele, she geeve her one _dot_: two thousand hundred dollar. eet weell be a meellion francs, ees eet not?" "so you get a million francs for yourself, count. it is more than i should have thought you worth." "but de teettle!" "oh, the title is worth something, but i could buy one a good deal cheaper. if i remember correctly i might have had yours for nothing, count." the count did not look entirely pleased at this reminiscence, but he smiled, and again took refuge in a compliment. "to one so _ravissante_ as madame all teettles are under her feet." "i wish you would set up a school for compliments here in boston, count, and teach our men to say nice things. really, a boston man's compliments are like molasses candy, they are so home-made. but why don't you take the aunt instead of the niece? miss wentstile is worth half a million." "dat weell be mouche," responded the count with gravity; "but she have bones." the widow laughed lightly. the woman who after forty can laugh like a girl is one who has preserved her power over men, and she is generally one fully aware of the fact. mrs. neligage had no greater charm than her light-hearted laugh, which no care could permanently subdue. she tossed her head, and then shook it at the count. "yes," she responded, "you are unfortunately right. she has bones. by the way, do you happen to have with you that letter i gave you at mrs. harbinger's yesterday?" "yes," he answered, drawing from his pocket the note addressed to christopher calumus, "i have eet." "i would like to see it," mrs. neligage said, extending her hand. the count smiled, and held it up. "you can see eet," said he, "but eet ees not permeet you weedeen de hand to have eet." she leaned forward and examined it closely, studying the address with keen eyes. "it is no matter," was her remark. "i only wanted to make sure." "do you de handwrite know?" he demanded eagerly. "and if i do?" "you do know," he broke out in french. "i can see it in your face. tell me who wrote it." she shook her head, smiling teasingly. then she rose, and moved toward the window by which she had come from the house. "no, count," was her answer. "it doesn't suit my plan to tell you. i didn't think quickly enough yesterday, or i wouldn't have given it to you. it was in your hands before i thought whose writing it was." the count, who had risen, bowed profoundly. "after all," he said, "i need not trouble you. mrs. harbinger acknowledged that she wrote it." mrs. neligage flashed back at him a mocking grimace as she withdrew by the window. "i never expected to live to see you believe a thing because a woman said it," she laughed. "you must have been in strange hands since i used to know you!" left alone, the count thoughtfully regarded the letter for a moment, then with a shrug he restored it to his pocket, and turned to go around the corner of the house to the front piazza. sounds of wheels, of voices, of talking, and of laughter told of the gathering of pleasure-seekers; and scarcely had the count passed the corner than he met mr. bradish face to face. there were groups of men and women on the piazza and on the lawn, with the horses and dogs in sight which are the natural features in such a picture at an out-of-town club. the count heeded none of these things, but stepped forward eagerly. "ah, count, you have come out to the games like everybody else, i see," bradish said pleasantly. "eet ees extreme glad to see me, mr. bradeesh," the count returned, shaking him by the hand. "do you weelleengly come wid us a leettle, for dat i say to you ver' particle?" bradish, with his usual kindly courtesy, followed the count around the corner of the house, out of sight of the arriving company. "something particular to say to me, count?" he observed. "you do me too much honor." "eet weell be of honor dat i weell to you speak," the count responded. "weell you for myself de condescension to have dat you weell be one friend to one _affaire d'honneur_?" bradish stared at him in undisguised amazement. "an _affaire d'honneur_?" he echoed. "surely you don't mean that you are going to fight? you can't mean a duel?" "oh, _oui, oui_; eet weell be a duel dat eet calls you." bradish stared harder than ever, and then sat down as if overcome. "but, my dear count, you can't fight duels in america." "for what weell not een amereeca fight? he have result me! me, count ernst shimbowski! weell i not to have hees blood?" "i'm afraid you won't," bradish responded, shaking his head. "that isn't the way we do things here. but who is it has insulted you?" the count became more and more excited as he spoke of his wrongs, and with wide gestures he appealed to the whole surrounding region to bear him out in his rage and his resolution. he stood over bradish like an avenging and furious angel, swaying his body by way of accent to his words. "you deed see! de ladies day deed see! all de world weell have heard dat he result--he eensult me! de shimbowski name have been eensult'! deed he not say 'veelaine! veelaine!' oh, _sacré nom de mon père_! 'veelaine! veelaine!' eet weell not but only blood to wash dat eensult!" how an american gentleman should behave when he is seriously asked to act as a second in a duel in this land and time is a question which has probably never been authoritatively settled, and which might be reasoned upon with very curious arguments from different points of view. it is safe to say that any person who finds himself in such a position could hardly manage to incur much risk of running into danger, or even of doing violence to any moral scruples with which he may chance to be encumbered. he must always feel that the chances of a duel's actually taking place are so ridiculously small that the whole matter can be regarded only as food for laughter; and that no matter how eager for fight one or both of the possible combatants might be, the end will be peace. so far from making the position of a second more easy, however, this fact perhaps renders it more difficult. it is harder to face the ridiculous than the perilous. if there were any especial chance that a duel would proceed to extremes, that principals would perhaps come to grief and seconds be with them involved in actual danger, even though only the ignoble danger of legal complications, a man might feel that honor called upon him not to fail his friend in extremity. when it is merely a question of becoming more or less ridiculous according to the notoriety of the affair, the matter is different. the demand of society is that a gentleman shall be ready to brave peril, but there is nothing in the social code which goes so far as to call upon him to run the chance of making himself ridiculous. society is founded upon the deepest principles of human nature, and if it demanded of man the sacrifice of his vanity the social fabric would go to pieces like a house of cards in a whirlwind. bradish might have been called upon to risk his life at the request of the count, although they were in reality little more than acquaintances; but he certainly cannot be held to have been under any obligations to give the world a right to laugh at him. bradish regarded the count with a smile half amused and half sympathetic, while the hungarian poured out his excited protest, and when there came a pause he said soothingly:-- "oh, sit down and talk it over, my dear count. i see you mean that stupid dunce of a barnstable. you can't fight him. everybody would laugh at the very idea. besides, he isn't your equal socially. you can't fight him." "you do comprehend not!" cried the count. "de shimbowski name weell eet to have blood for de eensult!" "but--" the count drew himself up with an air of hauteur which checked the words on bradish's lips. "eet ees not for a shimbowski to beg for favors," he said stiffly. "eef eet ees you dat do not serve me--" "oh, i assure you," interrupted bradish hastily, "i am more than willing to serve you; but i wanted to warn you that in america we look at things so differently--" "een amereeca even," the count in his turn interrupted with a superb gesture, "dare weell be gentlemans, ees eet not?" in the face of that gesture there was nothing more to be said in the way of objection. time and the chapter of accidents must determine what would come of it, but no man of sensibility and patriotism, appealed to in that grand fashion in the name of the honor of america, could have held out longer. least of all was it to be expected that harry bradish, kindest-hearted of living men, and famous for never being able to refuse any service that was asked of him, could resist this last touch. he rose as if to get out of the interview as speedily as possible. "very well then," he said, "if you persist in going on, i'll do what i can for you, but i give you fair warning once more that it'll come to nothing more than making us both ridiculous." the count shook hands warmly, but his response was one which might be said to show less consideration than might have been desired for the man who was making a sacrifice in his behalf. "de shimbowski name," he declared grandiloquently, yet with evident sincerity, "ees never reedeeculous." there followed some settling of details, in all of which bradish evinced a tendency to temporize and to postpone, but in which the ardor of the count so hurried everything forward that had barnstable been on the spot the duel might have been actually accomplished despite all obstacles. it was evident, however, that one side cannot alone arrange a meeting of honor, and in the end little could be done beyond the count's receiving a promise from bradish that the latter would communicate with barnstable as soon as possible. this momentous and blood-curdling decision having been arrived at, the two gentlemen emerged from their retirement on the side piazza, and once more joined the gay world as represented by the now numerous gathering assembled to see the polo at the county club. xii the wasting of requests the exhilaration of the spring day, the pleasure of taking up once more the outdoor life of the warm season, the little excitement which belongs to the assembling of merry-makers, the chatter, the laughter, all the gay bustle combined to fill the county club with a joyous atmosphere. before the front of the house was a sloping lawn which merged into an open park, here and there dotted with groups of budding trees and showing vividly the red of golf flags. the driveway wound in curves of carefully devised carelessness from the country road beyond the park to the end of the piazza, and all arrivals could be properly studied as they approached. the piazza was wide and roomy, so that it was not crowded, although a considerable number of men and women were there assembled; and from group to group laughter answered laughter. mrs. harbinger in the capacity of chaperone had with her alice endicott and may calthorpe. the three ladies stood chatting with dick fairfield, tossing words back and forth like tennis-balls for the sheer pleasure of the exercise. "oh, i insist," fairfield said, "that spring is only a season when the days are picked before they are ripe." "you say that simply in your capacity of a literary man, mr. fairfield," alice retorted; "but i doubt if it really means anything." "i am afraid it doesn't mean much," he responded laughing, "but to insist that an epigram must mean something would limit production dreadfully." "then we are to understand," mrs. harbinger observed, "that what you literary men say is never to be taken seriously." "oh, you should make a distinction, mrs. harbinger. what a literary man says in his professional capacity you are at liberty to believe or not, just as you choose; but of course in regard to what is said in his personal capacity it is different." "there, i suppose," she retorted, "he is simply to be classed with other men, and not to be believed at all." "bless me, what cynicism! where is mr. harbinger to defend his reputation?" "he is so absorbed in getting ready for the game that he has forgotten all about any reputation but that of a polo-player," mrs. harbinger returned. "and that reminds me that i haven't seen his new pony. come, alice, you appreciate a horse. we must go and examine this new wonder from canada." "we are not invited apparently," may said, seating herself in a piazza chair. "it is evidently your duty, mr. fairfield, to stay here and entertain me while they are gone." "i remain to be entertained," he responded, following her example. mrs. harbinger and alice went off to the stables, and the pair left behind exchanged casual comments upon the day, the carriages driving up, the smart spring gowns of the ladies, and that sort of verbal thistledown which makes up ordinary society chit-chat. a remark which fairfield made on the attire of a dashing young woman was the means of bringing the talk around again to the subject which had been touched upon between them on the previous afternoon. "i suppose," miss calthorpe observed, "that a man who writes stories has to know about clothes. you do write stories, i am sure, mr. fairfield." he smiled, and traced a crack in the piazza floor with his stick. "which means, of course," he said, "that you have never read any of them. that is so far lucky for me." "why is it lucky?" "because you might not have liked them." "but on the other hand i might have liked them very much." "well, perhaps there is that chance. i don't know, however, that i should be willing to run the risk. what kind of a story do you like?" "i told you that yesterday, mr. fairfield. if you really cared for my opinion you would remember." "you said that you liked 'love in a cloud.' is that what you mean?" "then you do remember," she remarked with an air of satisfaction. "perhaps it was only because you liked the book yourself." "why not believe that it was because i put so much value on your opinion?" "oh, i am not so vain as that, mr. fairfield," she cried. "if you remember, it was not on my account." he laughed without replying, and continued the careful tracing of the crack in the floor as if the occupation were the pleasantest imaginable. may watched him for a moment, and then with the semblance of pique she turned her shoulder toward him. the movement drew his eyes, and he suddenly stopped his occupation to straighten up apologetically. "i was thinking," he said, "what would be the result of your reading such stories of mine as have been published--there have been a few, you know, in the magazines--if you were to test them by the standard of 'love in a cloud.' i'm afraid they might not stand it." she smiled reassuringly, but perhaps with a faint suggestion of condescension. "one doesn't expect all stories to be as good as the best," she observed. fairfield turned his face away for a quick flash of a grin to the universe in general; then with perfect gravity he looked again at his companion. "i am afraid," he said, "that even the author of 'love in a cloud' wouldn't expect so much of you as that you should call his story the best." "i do call it the best," she returned, a little defiantly. "don't you?" "no," he said slowly, "i couldn't go so far as that." "but you spoke yesterday as if you admired it." "but that isn't the same thing as saying that there is nothing better." miss calthorpe began to tap her small foot impatiently. "that is always the way with men who write," she declared. "they always have all sorts of fault to find with everything." "have you known a great many literary men?" he asked. there are few things more offensive in conversation, especially in conversation with a lady, than an insistence upon logic. to ask of a woman that she shall make only exact statements is as bad as to require her to be always consistent, and there is small reason for wonder if at this inquiry miss calthorpe should show signs of offense. "i do not see what that has to do with the matter," she returned stiffly. "of course everybody knows about literary men." the sun of the april afternoon smiled over the landscape, and the young man smiled under his mustache, which was too large to be entirely becoming. he glanced up at his companion, who did not smile in return, but only sat there looking extremely pretty, with her flushed cheeks, her dark hair in pretty willful tendrils about her temples, and her dark eyes alight. "perhaps you have some personal feeling about the book," he said. "you know that it is claimed that a woman's opinion of literature is always half personal feeling." she flushed more deeply yet, and drew herself up as if he were intruding upon unwarrantable matters. "i don't even know who wrote the book," she replied. "then it is only the book itself that you admire, and not the author?" "of course it is the book. haven't i said that i don't even know who the author is? i can't see," she went on somewhat irrelevantly, "why it is that as soon as there is anything that is worth praising you men begin to run it down." he looked as if he were a trifle surprised at her warmth. "run it down?" he repeated. "why, i am not running it down. i said that i admired the novel, didn't i?" "but you said that you didn't think it was one of the best," she insisted. "but you might allow a little for individual taste, miss calthorpe." "oh, of course there is a difference in individual tastes, but that has to do with the parts of the story that one likes best. it's nothing at all to do with whether one isn't willing to confess its merits." he broke into a laugh of so much amusement that she contracted her level brows into a frown which made her prettier than ever. "now you are laughing at me," she said almost pouting. "it is so disappointing to find that i was deceived. of course i know that there is a good deal of professional jealousy among authors, but i shouldn't have thought--" she perhaps did not like to complete her sentence, and so left it for him to end with a fresh laugh. "i wish i dared tell you how funny that is!" he chuckled. she made no reply to this, but turned her attention to the landscape. there was a silence of a few moments, in which fairfield had every appearance of being amused, while she equally showed that she was offended. the situation was certainly one from which a young author might derive a good deal of satisfaction. it is not often that it falls to the lot of a writer to find his work so sincerely and ardently admired that he is himself taken to task for being jealous of its success. such pleasure as comes from writing anonymous books must be greatly tempered by the fact that in a world where it is so much more easy to blame than to praise the author is sure to hear so much more censure of his work than approbation. to be accused by a young and pretty girl of a fault which one has not committed and from which one may be clear at a word is in itself a pleasing pastime, and when the imaginary fault is that of not sufficiently admiring one's own book, the titillation of the vanity is as lively as it is complicated. the spirit which miss calthorpe had shown, her pretty vehemence, and her marked admiration for "love in a cloud" might have seemed charming to any man who had a taste for beauty and youthful enthusiasm; upon the author of the book she praised it was inevitable that they should work mightily. the pair were interrupted by the return of mrs. harbinger and alice, who reported that there were so many men about the stables, and the ponies were being so examined and talked over by the players, that it was plainly no place for ladies. "it was evident that we weren't wanted," mrs. harbinger said. "i hope that we are here. ah, here comes the count." the gentleman named, fresh from his talk with harry bradish, came forward to join them, his smile as sunny as that of the day. "see," may whispered tragically to mrs. harbinger as the hungarian advanced, "he has a red carnation in his buttonhole." "he must have read the letter then," mrs. harbinger returned hastily. "hush!" to make the most exciting communication and to follow it by a command to the hearer to preserve the appearance of indifference is a characteristically feminine act. it gives the speaker not only the last word but an effective dramatic climax, and the ever-womanly is nothing if not dramatic. the complement of this habit is the power of obeying the difficult order to be silent, and only a woman could unmoved hear the most nerve-shattering remarks with a manner of perfect tranquillity. "ah, eet ees so sweet loovly ladies een de landscape to see," the count declared poetically, "where de birds dey twatter een de trees and things smell you so mooch." "thank you. count," mrs. harbinger responded. "that is very pretty, but i am afraid that it means nothing." "what i say to you, madame," the count responded, with his hand on his heart, "always eet mean mooch; eet ees dat eet mean everyt'ing!" "then it is certainly time for me to go," she said lightly. "it wouldn't be safe for me to stay to hear everything. come, girls: let's walk over to the field." the sitters rose, and they moved toward the other end of the piazza. "it is really too early to go to the field," may said, "why don't we walk out to the new golf-holes first? i want to see how they've changed the drive over the brook." "very well," mrs. harbinger assented. "the shortest way is to go through the house." they passed in through a long window, and as they went alice endicott lingered a little with the count. that part of the piazza was at the moment deserted, and so when before entering the house she dropped her parasol and waited for her companion to pick it up for her, they were practically alone. "thank you, count," she said, as he handed her the parasol. "i am sorry to trouble you." "nodings what eet ees dat i do for mees endeecott ees trouble." "is that true?" she asked, pausing with her foot on the threshold, and turning back to him. "if i could believe it there are two favors that i should like to ask." "two favors?" he repeated. "ah, i weell be heavenlee happee eef eet ees dat i do two favors." "one is for myself," she said, "and the other is for miss wentstile. i'm sure you won't refuse me." "who could refuse one ladee so loovlaie!" "the first is," alice went on, paying no heed to the count's florid compliments, "that you give me the letter mrs. neligage gave you yesterday." "but de ladee what have wrote eet--" "the lady that wrote it," alice interrupted, "desires to have it again." "den weell i to her eet geeve," said the count. "but she has empowered me to receive it." "but dat eet do not empower me eet to geeve." "then you decline to let me have it, count?" "ah, i am desolation, mees endeecott, for dat i do not what you desaire; but i weell rather to do de oder t'ing what you have weesh." "i am afraid, count, that your willingness to oblige goes no farther than to let you do what you wish, instead of what i wish. i only wanted to know where you have known mrs. neligage." "ah," he exclaimed, "dat is what mees wentsteele have ask. my dear young lady, eet ees not dat you can be jealous dat once i have known madame neleegaze?" she faced him with a look of astonishment so complete that the most simple could not misunderstand it. then the look changed into profound disdain. "jealous!" she repeated. "i jealous, and of you, count!" her look ended in a smile, as if her sense of humor found the idea of jealousy too droll to admit of indignation, and she turned to go in through the window, leaving the count hesitating behind. xiii the wile of a woman before the count had recovered himself sufficiently to go after miss endicott despite her look of contempt and her yet more significant amusement, jack neligage came toward him down the piazza, and called him by name. "oh, count shimbowski," jack said. "i beg your pardon, but may i speak with you a moment?" the count looked after miss endicott, but he turned toward neligage. "i am always at your service," he said in french. "i wanted to speak to you about that letter that my mother gave you yesterday. she made a mistake." "a mistake?" the count echoed, noncommittally. "yes. it is not for you." "well?" "will you give it to me, please?" jack said. "but why should i give it to you? are you christopher calumus?" "perhaps," answered jack, with a grin. "at least i can assure you that it is on the authority of the author of 'love in a cloud' that i ask for the letter." "but i've already refused that letter to a lady." "to a lady?" "to miss endicott." "miss endicott!" echoed jack again, in evident astonishment. "why should she want it?" "she said that she had the authority of the writer, as you say that you have the authority of the man it was written to." "did you give it to her?" "no; but if i did not give it to her, how can i give it to you?" neligage had grown more sober at the mention of miss endicott's name; he stood looking down, and softly beating the toe of his boot with his polo mallet. "may i ask," he said at length, raising his glance to the count's face, "what you propose to do with the letter?" the other waved his hands in a gesture which seemed to take in all possible combinations of circumstances, while his shrug apparently expressed his inner conviction that whichever of these combinations presented itself count shimbowski would be equal to it. "at least," he returned, "as mrs. harbinger has acknowledged that she wrote it, i could not give it up without her command." neligage laughed, and swung his mallet through the air, striking an imaginary ball with much deftness and precision. "she said she wrote it, i know; but i think that was only for a lark, like mother's part in the play. i don't believe mrs. harbinger wrote it. however, here she comes, and you may ask her. i'll see you again. i must have the letter." he broke into a lively whistle, and went off down the walk, as mrs. harbinger emerged through the window which a few moments before she had entered. "i decided that i wouldn't go down to the brook," she said. "it is too warm to walk. besides, i wanted to speak to you." "madame harbeenger do to me too mooch of _honneur_," the count protested, with his usual exuberance of gesture. "eet ees to be me at her sarveece." she led the way back to the chairs where her group had been sitting shortly before, and took a seat which placed her back toward the only other persons on the piazza, a couple of men smoking at the other end. "sit down, count," she said, waving her hand at a chair. "somebody will come, so i must say what i have to say quickly. i want that letter." the count smiled broadly, and performed with much success the inevitable shrug. "you dat lettaire weesh; madame neleegaze dat lettaire weesh; mr. neleegaze dat lettaire weesh; everybody dat lettaire weesh. count shimbowski dat lettaire he keep, weell eet not?" "mrs. neligage and jack want it?" mrs. harbinger exclaimed. "what in the world can have set them on? did they ask you for it?" "eet ees dat they have ask," the count answered solemnly. "i cannot understand that," she pursued thoughtfully. "certainly they can't know who wrote it." "ees eet not dat you have said--" "oh, yes," mrs. harbinger interrupted him, with a smile, "i forgot that they were there when i confessed to it." the count laid his hand on his heart and rolled up his eyes,--not too much. "i have so weesh' to tell you how dat i have dat beauteous lettaire adore," he said. "i have wear de lettaire een de pocket of my heart." this somewhat startling assertion was explained by his pushing aside his coat so that the top of a letter appeared peeping out of the left pocket of his waistcoat as nearly over his heart as the exigencies of tailoring permitted. "i shouldn't have let you know that i wrote it," she said. "but eet have geeve to me so joyous extrodinaire eet to know!" she regarded him shrewdly, then dropping her eyes, she asked:-- "was it better than the other one?" "de oder?" he repeated, evidently taken by surprise. "ah, dat alone also have i treasured too mooch." mrs. harbinger broke out frankly into a laugh. "come," she said, "i have caught you. you know nothing about any other. we might as well be plain with each other. i didn't write that letter and you didn't write 'love in a cloud,' or you'd know about the whole correspondence." "ah, from de eden_garten_," cried the count, "de weemens ees too mooch for not to fool de man. madame ees for me greatly too clevaire." "thank you," she said laughingly. "then give me the letter." he bowed, and shrugged, and smiled deprecatingly; but he shook his head. "so have mees endeecott say. eef to her i geeve eet not, i can geeve eet not to you, desolation as eet make of my heart." "miss endicott? has she been after the letter too? is there anybody else?" "madame neleegaze, mr. neleegaze, mees endeecott, madame harbeenger," the count enumerated, telling them off on his fingers. "dat ees all now; but eef i dat lettaire have in my heart-pocket she weell come to me dat have eet wrote. ees eet not so? eet ees to she what have eet wrote dat eet weell be to geeve eet. i am eenterest to her behold." "then you will not give it to me?" mrs. harbinger said, rising. he rose also, a mild whirlwind of apologetic shrugs and contortions, contortions not ungraceful, but as extraordinary as his english. "eet make me desolation een de heart," he declared; "but for now eet weell be for me to keep dat lettaire." he made her a profound bow, and as if to secure himself against farther solicitation betook himself off. mrs. harbinger resumed her chair, and sat for a time thinking. she tapped the tip of her parasol on the railing before her, and the tip of her shoe on the floor, but neither process seemed to bring a solution of the difficulty which she was pondering. the arrivals at the club were about done, and although it still wanted some half hour to the time set for the polo game, most of those who had been about the club had gone over to the polo-field. the sound of a carriage approaching drew the attention of mrs. harbinger. a vehicle easily to be recognized as belonging to the railway station was advancing toward the club, and in it sat mr. barnstable. the gentleman was landed at the piazza steps, and coming up, he stood looking about him as if in doubt what to do next. his glance fell upon mrs. harbinger, and the light of recognition flooded his fluffy face as moonlight floods the dunes of a sandy shore. he came forward abruptly and awkwardly. "beg pardon, mrs. harbinger," he said. "i came out to find your husband. do you know where i can see him?" "he is all ready to play polo now, mr. barnstable," she returned. "i don't think you can see him until after the game." she spoke rather dryly and without any cordiality. he stood with his hat in his two hands, pulling nervously at the brim. "you are very likely angry with me, mrs. harbinger," he blurted out abruptly. "i ought to apologize for what i did at your house yesterday. i made a fool of myself." mrs. harbinger regarded him curiously, as if she could hardly make up her mind how such a person was to be treated. "it is not customary to have scenes of that kind in our parlors," she answered, smiling. "i know it," he said, with an accent of deep despair. "it was all my unfortunate temper that ran away with me. but you don't appreciate, mrs. harbinger, how a man feels when his wife has been made the subject of an infamous libel." "but if you'll let me say so, mr. barnstable, i think you are going out of your way to find trouble. you are not the only man who has been separated from his wife, and the chances are that the author of 'love in a cloud' never heard of your domestic affairs at all." "but he must have," protested barnstable with growing excitement, "why--" "pardon me," she interrupted, "i wasn't done. i say that the chance of the author of that book knowing anything about your affairs is so small as to be almost impossible." "but there were circumstances so exact! why, all that scene--" "really, mr. barnstable," mrs. harbinger again interrupted, "you must not go about telling what scenes are true. that is more of a publishing of your affairs than any putting them in a novel could be." his eyes stared at her from the folds and undulations of his face like two remarkably large jellyfish cast by the waves among sand heaps. "but--but," he stammered, "what am i to do? how would you feel if it were your wife?" she regarded him with a glance which gave him up as incorrigible, and half turned away her head. "i'm sure i can't say," she responded. "i never had a wife." barnstable was too much excited to be restrained by the mild jest, and dashed on, beginning to gesticulate in his earnestness. "and by such a man!" he ran on. "why, mrs. harbinger, just look at this. isn't this obliquitous!" he pulled from one pocket a handful of letters, dashed through them at a mad speed, thrust them back and drew another handful from a second pocket, scrabbled through them, discarded them for the contents of a third pocket, and in the end came back to the first batch of papers, where he at last hit upon the letter he was in search of. "only this morning i got this letter from a friend in new york that knew the count in europe. he's been a perfect rake. he's a gambler and a duelist. there, you take it, mrs. harbinger, and read it. you'll see, then, how i felt when that sort of a man scandaled my wife." "but i thought that you received the letter only this morning," suggested mrs. harbinger, with a smile. her companion was too thoroughly excited to be interrupted, and dashed on. "you take the letter, mrs. harbinger, and read it for yourself. then you show it to your friends. let people know what sort of a man they are entertaining and making much of. damme--i beg your pardon; my temper's completely roused up!--it makes me sick to see people going on so over anything that has a title on it. why, damme--i beg your pardon, mrs. harbinger; i really beg your pardon!--in america if a man has a title he can rob henroosts for a living, and be the rage in society." mrs. harbinger reached out her hand deliberately, and took the letter which was thus thrust at her. she had it safe in her possession before she spoke again. "i shall be glad to see the letter," she said, "because i am curious to know about count shimbowski. that he is what he pretends to be in the way of family i am sure, for i have seen his people in rome." "oh, he is a count all right," barnstable responded; "but that doesn't make him any better." "as for the book," she pursued calmly, "you are entirely off the track. the count cannot possibly have written it. just think of his english." "i've known men that could write english that couldn't speak it decently." "besides, he hasn't been in the country long enough to have written it. if he did write it, mr. barnstable, how in the world could he know anything about your affairs? it seems to me, if i may say so, that you might apply a little common sense to the question before you get into a rage over things that cannot be so." "i was hasty," admitted barnstable, an expression of mingled penitence and woe in his face. "i'm afraid i was all wrong about the count. but the book has so many things in it that fit, things that were particular, why, of course when mrs.--that lady yesterday--" "mrs. neligage." "when she said the count wrote it, i didn't stop to think." "that was only mischief on her part. you might much better say her son wrote it than the count." "her son?" repeated barnstable, starting to his feet. "that's who it is! why, of course it was to turn suspicion away from him that his mother--" "good heavens!" mrs. harbinger broke in, "don't make another blunder. jack neligage couldn't--" "i see it all!" barnstable cried, not heeding her. "mr. neligage was in chicago just after my divorce. i heard him say he was there that winter. oh, of course he's the man." "but he isn't a writer," mrs. harbinger protested. she rose to face barnstable, whose inflammable temper had evidently blazed up again with a suddenness entirely absurd. "that's why he wrote anonymously," declared the other; "and that's why he had to put in real things instead of making them up! oh, of course it was mr. neligage." "mr. barnstable," she said with seriousness, "be reasonable, and stop this nonsense. i tell you mr. neligage couldn't have written that book." he glared at her with eyes which were wells of obstinacy undiluted. "i'll see about that," he said. without other salutation than a nod he walked away, and left her. she gazed after him with the look which studies a strange animal. "well," she said softly, aloud, "of all the fools--" xiv the concealing of secrets where a number of persons are in the same place, all interested in the same matter, yet convinced that affairs must be arranged not by open discussion but by adroit management, the result is inevitable. each will be seeking to speak to some other alone; there will be a constant shifting and rearranging of groups as characters are moved on and off the stage in the theatre. life for the time being, indeed, takes on an artificial air not unlike that which results from the studied devices of the playwright. the most simple and accurate account of what takes place must read like the arbitrary conventions of the boards; and the reader is likely to receive an impression of unreality from the very closeness with which the truth has been followed. at the county club that april afternoon there were so many who were in one way or another interested in the fate of the letter which in a moment of wild fun mrs. neligage had handed over to the count, that it was natural that the movements of the company should have much the appearance of a contrived comedy. no sooner, for instance, had barnstable hastened away with a new bee in his bonnet, than mrs. harbinger was joined by fairfield. he had come on in advance of the girls, and now at once took advantage of the situation to speak about the matter of which the air was full. "i beg your pardon," he said, "but i left the young ladies chatting with mrs. staggchase, and they'll be here in a minute. i wanted to speak to you." she bestowed the letter which she had received from barnstable in some mysterious recess of her gown, some hiding-place which had been devised as an attempted evasion of the immutable law that in a woman's frock shall be no real pocket. "go on," she said. "i am prepared for anything now. after mr. barnstable anything will be tame, though; i warn you of that." "mr. barnstable? i didn't know you knew him till his circus last night." "i didn't. he came to me here, and i thought he was going to apologize; but he ended with a performance crazier than the other." "what did he do?" asked fairfield, dropping into the chair which barnstable had recently occupied. "he must be ingenious to have thought of anything madder than that. he might at least have apologized first." "i wasn't fair to him," mrs. harbinger said. "he really did apologize; but now he's rushing off after jack neligage to accuse him of having written that diabolical book that's made all the trouble." "jack neligage? why in the world should he pitch upon him?" "apparently because i mentioned jack as the least likely person i could think of to have written it. that was all that was needed to convince mr. barnstable." "the man must be mad." "we none of us seem to be very sane," mrs. harbinger returned, laughing. "i wonder what this particular madman will do." "i'm sure i can't tell," answered fairfield absently. then he added quickly: "i wanted to ask you about that letter. of course it isn't you that's been writing to me, but you must know who it is." she stared at him in evident amazement, and then burst into a peal of laughter. "well," she said, "we have been mad, and no mistake. why, we ought to have known in the first place that you were christopher calumus. how in the world could we miss it? it just shows how we are likely to overlook the most obvious things." fairfield smiled, and beat his fist on the arm of his chair. "there," he laughed, "i've let it out! i didn't mean to tell it." "what nonsense!" she said, as if not heeding. "to think that it was you that may wrote to after all!" "may!" cried fairfield. "do you mean that miss calthorpe wrote those letters?" the face of mrs. harbinger changed color, and a look of dismay came over it. "oh, you didn't know it, of course!" she said. "i forgot that, and now i've told you. she will never forgive me." he leaned back in his chair, laughing gayly. "a roland for an oliver!" he cried. "good! it is only secret for secret." "but what will she say to me?" "say? why should she say anything? you needn't tell her till she's told me. she would have told me sometime." "she did tell you in that wretched letter; or rather she gave you a sign to know her by. how did you dare to write to any young girl like that?" the red flushed into his cheeks and his laughter died. "you don't mean that she showed you my letters?" "oh, no; she didn't show them to me. but i know well enough what they were like. you are a pair of young dunces." fairfield cast down his eyes and studied his finger-nails in silence a moment. when he looked up again he spoke gravely and with a new firmness. "mrs. harbinger," he said, "i hope you don't think that i meant anything wrong in answering her letters. i didn't know who wrote them." "you must have known that they were written by a girl that was young and foolish." "i'm afraid i didn't think much about that. i had a letter, and it interested me, and i answered it. it never occurred to me that--" "it never occurs to a man that he is bound to protect a girl against herself," mrs. harbinger responded quickly. "at least now that you do know, i hope that there'll be no more of this nonsense." fairfield did not reply for a moment. then he looked out over the landscape instead of meeting her eyes. "what do you expect me to say to that?" he asked. "i don't know that i expect anything," she returned dryly. "hush! they are coming." he leaned forward, and spoke in a hurried whisper. "does she know?" he demanded. "of course not. she thinks it's the count, for all i can tell." the arrival of alice and may put an end to any further confidential discourse. fairfield rose hastily, looking dreadfully conscious, but as the two girls had some interesting information or other to impart to mrs. harbinger, he had an opportunity to recover himself, and in a few moments the party was on its way to the polo-field. with the game this story has nothing in particular to do. it was not unlike polo games in general. the playing was neither especially good nor especially bad. jack neligage easily carried off the honors, and the men pronounced his playing to be in remarkable form for so early in the season. fairfield sat next to miss calthorpe, but he was inclined to be quiet, and to glance at mrs. harbinger when he spoke, as if he expected her to be listening to his conversation. now and then he fixed his attention on the field, but when the game was over, and the clever plays were discussed, he showed no signs of knowing anything about them. to him the game had evidently been only an accident, and in no way a vital part of the real business of the day. there was afternoon tea at the club-house,--groups chatted and laughed on the piazza and the lawn; red coats became more abundant on the golf links despite the lateness of the hour; carriages were brought round, one by one took their freights of pleasure-seekers, and departed. fairfield still kept in the neighborhood of miss calthorpe, and although he said little he looked a great deal. mrs. harbinger did not interfere, although for the most part she was within ear-shot. fairfield was of good old family, well spoken of as a rising literary man, and may had money enough for two, so that there were no good grounds upon which a chaperone could have made herself disagreeable, and mrs. harbinger was not in the least of the interfering sort. before leaving the county club mrs. harbinger had a brief talk with mrs. neligage. "i wish you'd tell me something about the count's past," she said. "you knew him in europe, didn't you?" "yes, i met him in rome one winter; and after that i saw a good deal of him for a couple of seasons." "was he received?" "oh, bless you, yes. he's real. his family tree goes back to the tree in the garden of eden." "perhaps his ancestor then was the third person there." mrs. neligage laughed, and shook her head. "come, letty," she said, "that is taking an unfair advantage. but really, the count is all right. he's as poor as a church mouse, and i've no doubt he came over here expressly to marry money. that is a foreign nobleman's idea of being driven to honest toil,--to come to america and hunt up an heiress." mrs. harbinger produced the letter which she had received from barnstable earlier in the afternoon. "that crazy mr. barnstable that made an exhibition of himself at my house yesterday has given me a letter about the count. i haven't read much of it; but it's evidently an attack on the man's morals." "oh, his morals," mrs. neligage returned with a pretty shrug; "nobody can find fault with the count's morals, my dear, for he hasn't any." "is he so bad then?" inquired mrs. harbinger with a sort of dispassionate interest. "bad, bless you, no. he's neither good nor bad. he's what all his kind are; squeamishly particular on a point of honor, and with not a moral scruple to his name." mrs. harbinger held the letter by the corner, regarding it with little favor. "i'm sure i don't want his old letter," she observed. "i'm not a purveyor of gossip." "why did he give it to you?" "he wanted me to read it, and then to show it to my friends. he telegraphed to new york last night, tom said, to find out about the count, and the letter must have come on the midnight." "characters by telegraph," laughed mrs. neligage. "the times are getting hard for adventurers and impostors. but really the count isn't an impostor. he'd say frankly that he brought over his title to sell." "that doesn't decide what i am to do with this letter," mrs. harbinger remarked. "you'd better take it." "i'm sure i don't see what i should do with it," mrs. neligage returned; but at the same time she took the epistle. "perhaps i may be able to make as much mischief with this as i did with that letter yesterday." the other looked at her with serious disfavor expressed in her face. "for heaven's sake," she said, "don't try that. you made mischief enough there to last for some time." xv the mischief of a letter the meditations of mrs. neligage in the watches of the night which followed the polo game must have been interesting, and could they be known might afford matter for amusement and study. it must be one of the chief sources of diversion to the father of evil to watch the growth in human minds and hearts of schemes for mischief. he has the satisfaction of seeing his own ends served, the entertainment of observing a curious and fascinating mental process, and all the while his vanity may be tickled by the reflection that it is he who will receive the credit for each cunningly developed plot of iniquity. that the fiend had been agreeably entertained on this occasion was to be inferred from the proceedings of mrs. neligage next morning, when the plans of the night were being carried into effect. as early in the day as calling was reasonably possible, mrs. neligage, although it was sunday, betook herself to see may calthorpe. may, who had neither father nor mother living, occupied the family house on beacon street, opposite the common, having as companion a colorless cousin who played propriety, and for the most part played it unseen. the dwelling was rather a gloomy nest for so bright a bird as may. respectability of the most austere new england type pervaded the big drawing-room where mrs. neligage was received. the heavy old furniture was as ugly as original sin, and the pictures might have ministered to the puritan hatred for art. little was changed from the days when may's grandparents had furnished their abode according to the most approved repulsiveness of their time. only the brightness of the warm april sun shining in at the windows, and a big bunch of dark red roses in a crystal jug, lightened the formality of the stately apartment. when may came into the room, however, it might have seemed that she had cunningly retained the old appointments as a setting to make more apparent by contrast her youthful fresh beauty. with her clear color, her dark hair, and sparkling eyes, she was the more bewitching amid this stately, sombre furniture, and in this gloomy old lofty room. "my dear," mrs. neligage said, kissing her affectionately, "how well you look. i was dreadfully afraid i should find you worried and unhappy." may returned her greeting less effusively, and seemed somewhat puzzled at this address. "but why in the world should i look worried?" she asked. mrs. neligage sat down, and regarded the other impressively in silence a moment before replying. "oh, my dear child," she said dramatically, "how could you be so imprudent?" may became visibly paler, and in her turn sank into a chair. "i don't know what you mean," she faltered. "if you had lived in society abroad as much as i have, may," was the answer, delivered with an expressive shake of the head, "you would know how dreadfully a girl compromises herself by writing to a strange gentleman." may started up, her eyes dilating. "oh, how did you know?" she demanded. "the count thinks the most horrible things," the widow went on mercilessly. "you know what foreigners are. it wouldn't have been so bad if it were an american." poor may put her hands together with a woeful gesture as if she were imploring mercy. "oh, is it the count really?" she cried. "i saw that he had a red carnation in his buttonhole yesterday, but i hoped that it was an accident." "a red carnation?" repeated mrs. neligage. "yes; that was the sign by which i was to know him. i said so in that letter." it is to be doubted if the recording angel at that moment wrote down to the credit of mrs. neligage that she regretted having by chance stuck that flower in the count's coat at the county club. "you poor child!" she murmured with a world of sympathy in her voice. the touch was too much for may, who melted into tears. she was a simple-hearted little thing or she would never have written the unlucky letters to christopher calumus, and in her simplicity she had evidently fallen instantly into the trap set for her. she dabbed resolutely at her eyes with her handkerchief, but the fountain was too free to be so easily stanched. "it will make a horrid scandal," mrs. neligage went on by way of comfort. "oh, i do hate those dreadful foreign ways of talking about women. it used to make me so furious abroad that i wanted to kill the men." may was well on the way to sobs now. "such things are so hard to kill, too," pursued the widow. "everybody here will say there is nothing in it, but it will be repeated, and laughed about, and it will never be forgotten. that's the worst of it. the truth makes no difference, and it is almost impossible to live a thing of that sort down. you've seen laura seaton, haven't you? well, that's just what ruined her life. she wrote some foolish letters, and it was found out. it always is found out; and she's always been in a cloud." mrs. neligage did not mention that the letters which the beclouded miss seaton had written had been to a married man and with a full knowledge on her part who her correspondent was. "oh, mrs. neligage," sobbed may. "do you suppose the count will tell?" "my dear, he showed me the letter." "oh, did he?" moaned the girl, crimson to the eyes. "did you read it?" "read it, may? of course not!" was the answer, delivered with admirable appearance of indignation; "but i knew the handwriting." may was by this time so shaken by sobs and so miserable that her condition was pitiful. mrs. neligage glided to a seat beside her, and took the girl in her arms in a fashion truly motherly. "there, there, may," said she soothingly. "don't give way so. we must do something to straighten things out." "oh, do you think we could?" demanded may, looking up through her tears. "can't you get that letter away from him?" "i tried to make him give it to me, but he refused." it really seemed a pity that the widow was not upon the stage, so admirably did she show sympathy in voice and manner. she caressed the tearful maiden, and every tone was like an endearment. "somebody must get that letter," she went on. "it would be fatal to leave it in the count's possession. he is an old hand at this sort of thing. i knew about him abroad." she might have added with truth that she had herself come near marrying him, supposing that he had a fortune to match his title, but that she had luckily discovered his poverty in time. "but who can get it?" asked may, checking her tears as well as was possible under the circumstances. "it must be somebody who has the right to represent you," mrs. neligage responded with an air of much impressiveness. "anybody may represent me," declared may. "couldn't you do it, mrs. neligage?" "my dear," the other answered in a voice of remonstrance, "a lady could hardly go to a man on an errand like that. it must be a man." may dashed her hands together in a burst of impatience and despair. "oh, i don't see what you gave it to him for," she cried in a lamentable voice. "you might have known that i wouldn't have written it if i'd any idea that that old thing was christopher calumus." "and i wouldn't have given it to him," returned mrs. neligage quietly, "if i'd had any idea that you were capable of writing to men you didn't know." may looked as if the tone in which this was said or the words themselves had completed her demoralization. she was bewitching in her misery, her eyes swimming divinely in tears, large and pathetic and browner than ever, her hair ruffled in her agitation into tiny rings and pliant wisps all about her temples, her cheeks flushed and moist. her mouth, with its trembling little lips, might have moved the sternest heart of man to compassion and to the desire at least of consoling it with kisses. the more firm and logical feminine mind of mrs. neligage was not, however, by all this loveliness of woe turned away from her purpose. "at any rate," she went on, "the thing that can't be altered is that you have written the letter, and that the count has it. i do pity you terribly, may; and i know count shimbowski, so i know what i'm saying. i came in this morning to say something to you, to propose something, that is; but i don't know how you'll take it. it is a way out of the trouble." "if there's any way out," returned may fervently, "i'm sure i don't care what it is; i'm ready for it, if it's to chop off my fingers." "it isn't that, my dear," mrs. neligage assured her with a suggestion of a laugh, the faint suggestion of a laugh, such as was appropriate to the direful situation only alleviated by the possibility which was to be spoken. "the fact is there's but one thing to do. you must let jack act for you." "oh, will he, mrs. neligage?" cried may, brightening at once. it has been noted by more than one observer of life that in times of trouble the mere mention of a man is likely to produce upon the feminine mind an effect notably cheering. whether this be true, or a mere fanciful calumny of those heartless male writers who have never been willing to recognize that the real glory of woman lies in her being able entirely to ignore the existence of man, need not be here discussed. it is enough to record that at the sound of jack's name may did undoubtedly rouse herself from the abject and limp despair into which she was completely collapsing. she caught at the suggestion as a trout snaps at the fisherman's fly. "he will be only too glad to," said mrs. neligage, "if he has the right." she paused and looked down, playing with the cardcase in her hands. she made a pretty show of being puzzled how to go on, so that the most stupid observer could not have failed to understand that there was something of importance behind her words. may began to knit her white forehead in an evident attempt to comprehend what further complication there might be in the affair under discussion. "i must be plain," the widow said, after a slight, hesitating pause. "what i have to say is as awkward as possible, and of course it's unusual; but under the circumstances there's no help for it. i hope you'll understand, may, that it's only out of care for you that i'm willing to come here this morning and make a fool of myself." "i don't see how you could make a fool of yourself by helping me," may said naïvely. the visitor smiled, and put out a trimly gloved hand to pat the fingers of the girl as they lay on the chair-arm. "no, that's the truth, may. i am trying to help you, and so i needn't mind how it sounds. well, then; the fact is that there's one thing that makes this all very delicate. whoever goes to the count must have authority." "well, i'm ready to give jack authority." "but it must be the authority of a betrothed, my dear." "what! oh, mrs. neligage!" may sat bolt upright and stiffened in her chair as if a wave of liquid air had suddenly gone over her. "to send a man for the letters under any other circumstances would be as compromising as the letters in the first place. besides, the count wouldn't be bound to give them up except to your _fiancé_." "that horrid count!" broke out may with vindictive irrelevancy. "i wish it was just a man we had to deal with!" "now jack has been in love with you for a long time, my dear," pursued jack's mother. "jack! in love with me? why, he's fond of alice." "oh, in a boy and girl way they've always been the best of friends. it's nothing more. he's in love with you, i tell you. what do you young things know about love anyway, or how to recognize it? i shouldn't tell you this if it weren't for the circumstances; but jack is too delicate to speak when it might look as if he were taking advantages. he is furious about the letter." "oh, does he know too?" cried poor may. "does everybody know?" her tears began again, and now mrs. neligage dried them with her own soft handkerchief, faintly scented with the especial eastern scent which she particularly affected. doubtless a mother may be held to know something of the heart and the opinions of her only son, but as jack had not, so far as his mother had any means of knowing, in the least connected may calthorpe with the letter given to count shimbowski, it is perhaps not unfair to conclude that her maternal eagerness and affection had in this particular instance led her somewhat far. it is never the way of a clever person to tell more untruths than are actually needed by the situation, and it was perhaps by way of not increasing too rapidly her debit account on the books of the recording angel that mrs. neligage replied to this question of may's with an evasion,--an evasion, it is true, which was more effective than a simple, direct falsehood would have been. "oh, may dear, you don't know the horrid way in which those foreign rakes boast of what they call their conquests!" the idea of being transformed from a human, self-respecting being into a mere conquest, the simple, ignominious spoils of the chase, might well be too much for any girl, and may became visibly more limp under it. "the simple case is here," proceeded the widow, taking up again her parable with great directness. "jack is fond of you; he is too delicate to speak of it, and he knows that this is a time when nobody but a _fiancé_ has a right to meddle. if you had a brother, of course it would be different; but you haven't. something must be done, and so i came this morning really to beg you, for jack's sake and your own, to consent to an engagement." "did jack send you?" demanded may, looking straight into the other's eyes. mrs. neligage met the gaze fairly, yet there was a little hesitation in her reply. it might be that she considered whether the risk were greater in telling the truth or in telling a lie; but in the end it was the truth that she began with. before she had got half through her sentence she had distorted it out of all recognition, indeed, but it is always an advantage to begin with what is true. it lends to any subsequent falsifying a moral support which is of inestimable value. "he knows nothing of it at all," she confessed. "he is too proud to let anybody speak for him, just as under the circumstances he is too proud to speak for himself. besides, he is poor, and all your friends would say he was after your money. no, nothing would induce him to speak for himself. he is very unhappy about it all; but he feels far worse for you than for himself. dear jack! he is the most generous fellow in the world." "poor jack!" may murmured softly. "poor jack!" the widow echoed, with a deep-drawn sigh. "it frightens me so to think what might happen if he hears the count boasting in his insolent way. foreigners always boast of their conquests! why, may, there's no knowing what he might do! and the scandal of it for you! and what should i do if anything happened to jack?" perhaps an appeal most surely touches the feminine heart if it be a little incoherent. a pedant might have objected that mrs. neligage in this brief speech altered the point of view with reckless frequency, but the pedant would by the effect have been proved to be wrong. the jumble of possibilities and of consequences, of woe to jack, harm to may, and of general inconsolability on the part of the mother finished the conquest of the girl completely. she was henceforth only eager to do whatever mrs. neligage directed, and under the instigation of her astute counsellor wrote a note to the young man, accepting a proposal which he had never heard of, and imploring him as her accepted lover to rescue from the hands of count shimbowski the letter addressed to christopher calumus. it is not every orator, even among the greatest, who can boast of having achieved a triumph so speedy and so complete as that which gladdened the heart of mrs. neligage when, after consoling and cheering her promised daughter-in-law, she set out to find her son. xvi the duty of a son simple were this world if it were governed by frankness, albeit perchance in some slight particulars less interesting. certainly if straightforwardness ruled life, mrs. neligage would have fared differently in her efforts that morning. she would have had no opportunity in that case of displaying her remarkable astuteness, and she would have left the life-threads of divers young folk to run more smoothly. knots and tangles in the lives of mortals are oftener introduced by their fellows than by the unkindly fingers of the fates, although the blame must be borne by the weird sisters. the three might well stand aghast that forenoon to see the deftness with which mrs. neligage wrought her mischief. a fisherman with his netting-needle and a kitten playing with the twine together produce less complication of the threads than the widow that day brought about by the unaided power of her wits. jack neligage had chambers with fairfield in a semi-fashionable apartment-house. both the young men had a certain position to maintain, and neither was blessed with means sufficient to do it without much stretching. fairfield was industrious and neligage was idle, which in the end was more favorable to the reputation of the former and to the enjoyment of the latter. jack fared the better in material things, because the man who is willing to run into debt may generally live more expensively than he who strives to add to an inadequate income by the fruit of his toil. on this particular morning dick had gone to church in the vain hope of seeing may calthorpe, while jack was found by his mother smoking a cigarette over the morning paper. he had just finished his late breakfast, and opened his letters. the letters lay on the uncleared breakfast table in various piles. the largest heap was one made of bills torn to bits. jack made it a matter of principle to tear up his bills as soon as they came. it saved trouble, and was, he said, a business-like habit. the second heap was composed of invitations to be answered; while advertisements and personal letters made the others. jack received his mother with his usual joyous manner. it had been said of him that his continual good nature was better than an income to him. it certainly made him a favorite, it procured for him many an invitation, and it had even the effect of softening the hard heart of many a creditor. he was in appearance no less cheerful this morning for his talk with wilson at the county club or for the mysterious hints of ill which his mother had given him. it was all confoundedly awkward, he had commented to fairfield before retiring on the previous night, but hang it, what good would it do to fret about it? "good-morning, mater," he greeted her. "you must have something mighty important on your mind to come flying round here at this time in the day." "i have," she said, "and i want you to try for once in your life to take things seriously." "seriously!" was his answer. "don't i always take things seriously? or if i don't, it can't be in me, for i'm sure i have enough to make me serious. look at that pile of bills there." mrs. neligage walked to the table, inspected first the invitations, which she looked over with truly feminine attention, and then began to pick up pieces of the torn-up bills. "how in the world, jack, do you ever know what you owe?" she asked. "know what i owe? gad! i wouldn't know that for the world. sit down, and tell me what disagreeable thing brought you here." "why is it necessarily disagreeable?" she demanded, seating herself beside the table, and playing with the torn paper. "you said yesterday that you were in a mess." "yes," she replied slowly; "but that was yesterday." "does that mean that you are out of it? so much the better." mrs. neligage clasped her hands in her lap, and regarded her son with a strong and eager look. "jack," she began, "i want you to listen to me, and not interrupt. you must hear the whole thing before you begin to put in your word. in the first place, you are engaged to may calthorpe." the exclamation and the laugh which greeted this piece of information were so nearly simultaneous that jack might be given the benefit of the doubt and so evade the charge of swearing before a lady. "why in the world, mother," he said, "must you come harping on that string again? you know it's of no use." "you are engaged now, jack, and of course that makes a difference." "oh, bother! do speak sensibly. what are you driving at?" the widow regarded him with a serene face, and settled herself more comfortably in her chair. "i came to congratulate you on your engagement to miss may calthorpe," she said, with all possible coolness and distinctness. "indeed? then i am sorry to tell you that you have wasted your labor. i haven't even seen may since we left the county club yesterday." "oh, i knew that." "what in the world are you driving at, mother? perhaps you don't mind telling me who told you of the engagement." "oh, not in the least. may told me." "may calthorpe!" it was not strange that jack should receive the announcement with surprise, but it was evident that there was in his mind more bewilderment. he stared at his mother without further word, while she pulled off her gloves and loosened her coat as if to prepare herself for the explanation which it was evident must follow. "come, jack," she remarked, when she had adjusted these preliminaries, "we may as well be clear about this. i made an offer in your name to may, and she has accepted it." jack rose from his seat, and stood over her, his sunny face growing pale. "you made an offer in my name?" he demanded. "sit down," she commanded, waving her hand toward his chair. "there is a good deal to be said, and you'll be tired of standing before i tell it all. is there any danger that mr. fairfield may come in?" jack walked over to the door and slipped the catch. "he is not likely to come," he said, "but it's sure now. fire away." he spoke with a seriousness which he used seldom. there were times when lazy, good-tempered jack neligage took a stubborn fit, and those who knew him well did not often venture to cross him in those moods. the proverb about the wrath of a patient man had sometimes been applied to him. when these rare occasions came on which his temper gave way he became unusually calm and self-possessed, as he was now. it could not but have been evident to his mother that she had to do with her son in one of the worst of his rare rages. perhaps the vexations of the previous days, the pile of torn bills on the table, the icy greeting alice endicott had given him yesterday, all had to do with the sudden outbreak of his anger, but any man might have been excused for being displeased by such an announcement as had just been made to jack. "i'm not going into your financial affairs, jack," mrs. neligage remarked, with entire self-possession, "only that they count, of course." "i know enough about them," he said curtly. "we'll take them for granted." "very well then--we will talk about mine. you've hinted once or twice that you didn't like the way i flirted with sibley langdon. i owe him six thousand dollars." if the widow had been planning a theatrical effect in her coolly pronounced words, she had no reason to be disappointed at the result. jack started to his feet with an oath, and glared at her with angry eyes. "more than that," she went on boldly, though she cast down her glance before his, "the money was to save me from the consequences of--" her voice faltered and the word died on her lips. jack stood as if frozen, staring with a hard face and lips tightly shut. "oh, jack," she burst out, "why do you make me shame myself! why can't you understand? i'm no good, jack; but i'm your mother." actual tears were in her eyes, and her breath was coming quickly. it is always peculiarly hard to see a self-contained, worldly woman lose control of herself. the strength of emotion which is needed to shake such a nature is instinctively appreciated by the spectator, and affects him with a pain that is almost too cruel to be borne. jack neligage, however, showed no sign of softening. "you must tell me the whole now," he said in a hard voice. the masculine instinct of asserting the right to judge a woman was in his tone. she wiped away her tears, and choked back her sobs. a little tremor ran over her, and then she began again, speaking in a voice lower than before, but firmly held in restraint. "it was at monte carlo five years ago," she said. "i was there alone, and the countess marchetti came. i'd known her a little for years, and we got to be very intimate. you know how it is with two women at a hotel. i'd been playing a little, just to keep myself from dying of dullness. count shimbowski was there, and he made love to me as long as he thought i had money, but he fled when i told him i hadn't. well, one day the countess had a telegram that her husband had been hurt in hunting. she had just half an hour to get to the train, and she took her maid and went. of course she hadn't time to have things packed, and she left everything in my care. just at the last minute she came rushing in with a jewel-case. her maid had contrived to leave it out, and she wouldn't take it. the devil planned it, of course. i told her to take it, but she wouldn't, and she didn't; and i played, and i lost, and i was desperate, and i pawned her diamond necklace for thirty thousand francs." "and of course you lost that," jack said in a hard voice, as she paused. "oh, jack, don't speak to me like that! i was mad! i know it! the worst thing about the whole devilish business was the way i lost my head. i look back at it now, and wonder if i'm ever safe. it makes me afraid; and i never was afraid of anything else in my life. i'm not a 'fraid-cat woman!" he gave no sign of softening, none of sympathy, but still sat with the air of a judge, cold and inexorable. "what has all this to do with sibley langdon?" he asked. "he came there just when the countess sent for her things. i was wild, and i went all to pieces at the sight of a home face. it was like a plank to a shipwrecked fool, i suppose. i broke down and told him the whole thing, and he gave me the money to redeem the necklace. he was awfully kind, jack. i hate him--but he was kind. i really think i should have killed myself if he hadn't helped me." "and you have never paid him?" "how could i pay him? i've been on the ragged edge of the poorhouse ever since. i don't know if the poorhouse has a ragged edge," she added, with something desperately akin to a smile, "but if it has edges of course they must be ragged." few persons have ever made a confession, no matter how woeful the circumstances, without some sense of relief at having spoken out the thing which was festering in the secret heart. shame and bitter contrition may overwhelm this feeling, but they do not entirely destroy it. mrs. neligage would hardly have been likely ever to tell her story save under stress of bitter necessity, but there was an air which showed that the revelation had given her comfort. "has he ever spoken of it?" asked jack, unmoved by her attempted lightness. "never directly, and never until recently has he hinted. jack," she said, her color rising, "he is a bad man!" he did not speak, but his eyes plainly demanded more. "the other day,--jack, i've known for a long time that it was coming. i've hated him for it, but i didn't know what to do. it was partly for that that i went to washington." "well?" mrs. neligage was not that day playing a part which was entirely to be commended by the strict moralist. certainly in her interview with may she had left much to be desired on the score of truthfulness and consideration for others. hard must be the heart, however, which might not have been touched by the severity of the ordeal which she was now undergoing. jack's clear brown eyes dominated hers with all the force of the man and the judge, while hers in vain sought to soften them; and the pathos of it was that it was the son judging the mother. "i give you my word, jack," she said, leaning toward him and speaking with deep earnestness, "that he has never said a word to me that you might not have heard. silly compliments, of course, and fool things about his wife's not being to his taste; but nothing worse. only now--" ruthless is man toward woman who may have violated the proprieties, but cruel is the son toward his mother if she may have dimmed the honor which is his as well as hers. "now?" he repeated inflexibly. "now he has hinted, he has hardly said it, jack, but he means for me to join him in europe this summer." the red leaped into jack's face and the blaze into his eyes. he rose deliberately from his chair, and stood tall before her. "are you sure he meant it?" he asked. "he put in nasty allusions to the countess, and--oh, he did mean it, jack; and it frightened me as i have never been frightened in my life." "i will horsewhip him in the street!" she sprang up, and caught him by the arm. "for heaven's sake, jack, think of the scandal! i'd have told you long ago, but i was afraid you'd make a row that would be talked about. when i came home from europe, and realized that all my property is in the hands of trustees so that i couldn't pay, i wanted to tell you; but i didn't know what you'd do. i'm afraid of you when your temper's really up." he freed himself from her clasp and began to pace up and down, while she watched him in silence. suddenly he turned to her. "but this was only part of it," he said. "what was that stuff you were talking about my being engaged?" she held out to him the note that may had written, and when he had read it explained as well as she could the scene which had taken place between her and may. she did not, it is true, present an account which was without variations from the literal facts, but no mortal could be expected to do that. she at least made it clear that she had bargained with the girl that the letter should be the price of an engagement. jack heard her through, now and then putting in a curt question. when he had heard it all, he laughed angrily, and threw the letter on the floor. "you have brought me into it too," he said. "we are a pair of unprincipled adventurers together. i've been more or less of a beat, but i've never before been a good, thorough-paced blackguard!" she flashed upon him in an outburst of anger in her turn. "do you mean that for me?" she demanded. "the word isn't so badly applied to a man that can talk so to his mother! haven't i been saving you as well as myself? as to may, any girl will love a husband that has character enough to manage her and be kind to her." he was silent a moment, and when he spoke he waived the point. "do i understand," he said, "that you expect me to go to count shimbowski and announce myself as may's representative, and demand her letter?" "not at all," she answered, a droll expression of craftiness coming over her face. "sit down, and let me tell you." she resumed her own seat, and jack, after whirling his chair around angrily, sat down astride of it, with his arms crossed on the back. "there are letters and letters," mrs. neligage observed with a smile. "when mrs. harbinger gave me this one last night i began to see that it might be good for something. you are to exchange this with the count. you needn't mention may's name." jack took the letter, and looked at it. "this is to barnstable," he said. "yes; he gave it to letty to be shown to people. barnstable is the silliest fool that there is about." "and you think the count would give up that letter for this?" "i am sure he would if he thought there was any possibility that this might fall into the hands of miss wentstile." "if it would send the damned adventurer about his business," growled jack, "i'd give it to miss wentstile myself." "oh, don't bother about that. i can stop that affair any time," his mother responded lightly. "i've only to tell sarah wentstile what i've seen myself, and that ends his business with her." "then you'd better do it, and stop his tormenting alice." "i'll do anything you like, jack, if you'll be nice about may." he got up from his seat and walked back and forth a few turns, his head bowed, and his manner that of deep thought. then he went to his desk and wrote a couple of notes. he read them over carefully, and filled out a check. he lit a cigarette, and sat pondering over the notes for some moments. at last he brought them both to his mother, who had sat watching him intently, although she had turned her face half away from him. jack put the letters into her hand without a word. the first note was as follows:-- dear may,--my mother has just brought me your note, and i am going out at once to find the count. i hope to bring you the letter before night. i need not tell you that i am very proud of the confidence you have shown in me and of the honor you do me. until i see you it will, it seems to me, be better that you do not speak of our engagement. very sincerely yours, john t. neligage. the second note was this:-- sibley langdon, esq. _sir_,--i have just heard from my mother that she is indebted to you for a loan of $ . i inclose check for that amount with interest at four per cent. as mrs. neligage has doubtless expressed her gratitude for your kindness i do not know that it is necessary for me to add anything. john t. neligage. "you are right, of course," he said. "i can't show him that i know his beastly scheme without a scandal that would hurt you. he'll understand, though. but why in the world you've let him browbeat you into receiving his attentions i cannot see." "i felt so helpless, jack. i didn't know what he would do; and he could tell about the necklace, you see. he's been a millstone round my neck. he's never willing i should do anything with anybody but himself." jack ground his teeth, and held out his hand for the letters. "but, jack," mrs. neligage cried, as if the thought had just struck her. "you can't have $ in the bank." "i shall have when he gets that check," jack returned grimly. "if father hadn't put all our money into the hands of trustees--" "we should neither of us have anything whatever," his mother interrupted, laughing. "it is bad enough as it is, but it would have been worse if we'd had our hands free." her spirits were evidently once more high; she seemed to have cast off fear and care alike. "well," she said, rising, "i must go home. you want to go and find the count, of course." she went up to her son, and put her hands on his shoulders. "dear boy," she said, "i'm not really so bad as i seem. i was a fool to gamble, but i never did anything else that was very bad. oh, you don't know what a weight it is off my shoulders to have that note paid. of course it will be hard on you just now, but we must hurry on the marriage with may, and then you'll have money enough." he smiled down on her with a look in which despite its scrutiny there was a good deal of fondness. worldly as the neligages were, there was still a strong bond of affection between them. "all right, old lady," he said, stooping forward to kiss her forehead. "i'm awfully sorry you've had such a hard time, but you're out of it now. only there's one thing i insist on. you are to tell nobody of the engagement till i give you leave." she studied his face keenly. "if i don't announce it," she said frankly, "i'm afraid you'll squirm out of it." he laughed buoyantly. "you are a born diplomat," he told her. "what sort of a concession do you want to make you hold your tongue?" "jack," she said pleadingly, changing her voice into earnestness, "won't you marry may? if you only knew how i want you to be rich and taken care of." "mr. frostwinch has offered me a place in the bank, mater, with a salary that's about as much as i've paid for the board of one of my ponies." "what could you do on a salary like that? you won't break the engagement when you see may this afternoon, will you? promise me that." "she may break it herself." "she won't unless you make her. promise me, jack." he smiled down into her face as if a sudden thought had come to him, and a gleam of mischief lighted his brown eyes. "the engagement, such as it is," he returned, "may stand at present as you've fixed it, if you'll give me your word not to mention it or to meddle with it." "i promise," she said rapturously, and pulled him down to kiss him fervently before departing. then in the conscious virtue of having achieved great things mrs. neligage betook herself home to dress for a luncheon. xvii the business of a lover jack's first care, after his mother had left him, was to dispatch a messenger to may with his note. then he set out in search of dr. wilson. after a little hunting he discovered the latter lunching at the club. jack came straight to his business without any beating about the bush. "wilson," he said, "i've come on an extraordinary errand. i want you to lend me $ on the spot." the other whistled, and then chuckled as was his good-humored wont. "that's a good round sum," he answered. "i know that a deuced sight better than you do," neligage returned. "i've had more experience in wanting money. i'm in a hole, and i ask you to help me out of it. of course i'm taking a deal of advantage of your good nature yesterday; and you may do as you like about letting me have the money. all the security i can give is to turn over to you the income of the few stocks i have. they 're all in the hands of trustees. my father left'em so." "gad, he knew his son," was the characteristic comment. "you are right. he did. can you let me have the money?" the other considered a moment, and then said with his usual bluntness:-- "i suppose it's none of my business what you want of it?" jack flushed. "it may be your business, wilson, but i can't tell you." the other laughed. "oh, well," he said, "if you've been so big a fool that you can't bear to tell of it, i'm not going to insist. i can't do anything better than to send you a check to-morrow. i haven't that amount in the bank." jack held out his hand. "you're a trump, wilson," he said. "i'd tell you the whole thing if it was my secret, but it isn't. of course if you lose anything by moving the money, i'll be responsible for it. besides that i want you to buy starbright, if you care for him. of course if you don't i can sell him easily enough. he's the best of the ponies." "then you're going to sell?" "clean out the whole thing; pay my debts, and leave the club." "oh, you mustn't do that." "i'm going into a bank, and of course i shan't have any time to play." wilson regarded him with an amused and curious smile, playing with his fork meanwhile. wilson was not by birth of jack's world, having come into social position in boston by his marriage with elsie dimmont, the richest young woman of the town. he and jack had never been especially intimate, but jack had always maintained that despite traces of coarseness in manner wilson was sound at heart and essentially a good fellow. perhaps the fact that in times past neligage had not used his opportunities to patronize wilson had something to do with the absence of anything patronizing in the doctor's manner now. "well," wilson said at length, "don't do anything rash. your dues for the whole year are paid,--or will be when you square up, and you might as well get the worth of them. we need you on the team, so you mustn't go back on us if you can help it." matters being satisfactorily arranged both in relation to the loan and to the sale of the pony, jack left wilson, and departed in search of count shimbowski. him he ultimately found at another club, and at once asked to speak with him alone on business. "count," he began when they were in one of the card-rooms, "i want to add a word to what i said to you yesterday." "each one word of mr. neleegaze eet ees treasured," the count responded with a polite flourish of his cigarette. "since you wouldn't give me that letter," pursued jack, acknowledging the compliment with a grin and a bow, "perhaps you'll be willing to exchange it." "exchange eet?" repeated the hungarian. "for what weell eet be exchange'?" jack produced barnstable's letter. "i thought that you'd perhaps be willing to exchange it for this letter that's otherwise to be read and passed about. i fancy that the person who got it had miss wentstile particularly in mind as likely to be interested in it." the touch showed jack to be not without some of the astuteness of his mother. "what weell eet be?" inquired the count. "i haven't read it," answered jack, slowly drawing it from the envelope. "it is said to contain a full account of the life of count shimbowski." "_sacré!_" "exactly," acquiesced jack. "it's a devilish shame that things can't be forgotten when they're done. i've found that out myself." "but what weell be weetheen dat lettaire?" jack ran his eye down a page. "this seems to be an account of a duel at monaco," he returned. "on the next page--" the count stretched out his hand in protest. "eet ees not needed dat you eet to read," he said. "eet ees leeklie lees." "oh, very likely it is lies. no story about a fellow is ever told right; but the worst things always get believed; and miss wentstile is very particular. she's deucedly down on me for a lot of things that never happened." "oh, but she ees extr'ordeenaire particle!" exclaimed the count, with a shrug and a profane expletive. "she does not allow dat money be play for de card, she have say eet to me. she ees most extr'ordeenaire particle!" "then i am probably right, count, in thinking you wouldn't care to have her read this letter?" the count twisted his silky mustache, looking both angry and rather foolish. "eet ees not dat eet ees mooch dat i have done," he explained. "you know what eet ees de leefe. a man leeves one way. but she, she ees so particle damned!" jack burst into a laugh that for the moment threatened to destroy the gravity with which he was conducting the interview; but he controlled his face, and went on. "since she is so damned particular," said he, "don't you think you'd better let me have the other letter for this? of course i hate to drive you to a bargain, but i must have that other letter. i don't mind telling you that i'm sent after it by the one who wrote it." "den you weell know who have wrote eet?" "yes, of course i know, but i'm not going to tell." the count considered for a moment, and then slowly drew out the letter addressed to christopher calumus. he looked at it wistfully, with the air of a man who is reluctantly abandoning the clue to an adventure which might have proved enchanting. "but eet weell look what i was one great villaine dat fear," he said. "nonsense," returned neligage, holding out the letter of barnstable for exchange. "we know both sides of the business. all there is to it is that we both understand what a crochety old maid miss wentstile is." count shimbowski smiled, and the exchange was effected. jack turned may's letter over in his hand, and found it unopened. "you're a gentleman, count," he said, offering his hand. "of de course," the other replied, with an air of some surprise. "i am one shimbowski." "well, i'm obliged to you," observed jack, putting the letter in his pocket. "i'll try to keep gossip still." "oh, eet ees very leek," shimbowski returned, waving his hand airily, "dat when i have read heem i geeve eet to mees wentsteele for one's self. eet ees very leekly." "all right," jack laughed. "i'd like to see her read it. so long." with the vigor which belongs to an indolent man thoroughly aroused, jack hunted up tom harbinger before the day was done, and sold to him his second best pony. then he went for a drive, and afterward dined at the club with an appetite which spoke a conscience at ease or not allowed to make itself heard. he did not take the time for reflection which might have been felt necessary by many men in preparation for the interview with may calthorpe which must come before bedtime. indeed he was more than usually lively and busy, and as he had a playful wit, he had some difficulty in getting the men at the club to let him go when soon after eight in the evening he set out for may's. he had kept busy from the moment his mother had left him in the morning, and on his way along beacon street, he hummed to himself as if still resolved to do anything rather than to meditate. may came into the sombre drawing-room looking more bewitchingly pretty and shy than can be told in sober prose. she was evidently frightened, and as she came forward to give her hand to neligage the color came and went in her cheeks as if she were tremblingly afraid of the possibilities of his greeting. jack's smile was as sunny as ever when he stepped forward to take her hand. he simply grasped it and let it go, a consideration at which she was visibly relieved. "well, may," jack said laughingly, "i understand that we are engaged." "yes," she returned faintly. "won't you sit down?" she indicated a chair not very near to that upon which she took her own seat, and jack coolly accepted the invitation, improving on it somewhat by drawing his chair closer to hers. "i got the letter from the count," he went on. she held out her hand for it in silence. he took the letter from his pocket, and held it as he spoke again, tapping it on his knee by way of emphasis. "before i give it to you, may," he remarked in a voice more serious than he was accustomed to use, "i want you to promise me that you will never do such a thing again as to write to a stranger. you are well out of this--" she lifted her eyes with a quick look of fear in them, as if it had flashed into her mind that if she were out of the trouble over the letter she had escaped this peril only to be ensnared into an engagement with him. the thought was so plain that jack burst into a laugh. "you think that being engaged to me isn't being well out of anything, i see," he observed merrily and mercilessly; "but there might be worse things than that even. we shall see. you'll be awfully fond of me before we are through with this." the poor girl turned crimson at this plain reading of her thought. she was but half a dozen years younger than jack, but he had belonged to an older set than hers, and under thirty half a dozen years seems more of a difference in ages than appears a score later in life. it was not to be expected that she would be talkative in this strange predicament in which she found herself, but what little command she had of her tongue might well vanish if jack was to read her thoughts in her face. she rallied her forces to answer him. "i know that for doing so foolish a thing," she said, "i deserved whatever i get." "even if it's being engaged to me," responded he with a roar. "well, to be honest, i think you do. i don't know what the count might have done if he had read the letter, but--" "oh," cried may, clasping her hands with a burst of sunshine in her face, "didn't he read it? oh, i'm so glad!" "no," jack answered, "the count's too much of a gentleman to read another man's letters when he hasn't been given leave. but what have you to say about my reading this letter?" "oh, you can't have read it!" may cried breathlessly. "not yet; but as we are engaged of course you give me leave to read it now." she looked for a moment into his laughing eyes, and then sprang up from her chair with a sudden burst of excitement. "oh, you are too cruel!" she cried. "i hate you!" "come," he said, not rising, but settling himself back in his chair with a pose of admiring interest, "now we are getting down to nature. have you ever played in amateur theatricals, may?" she stood struck silent by the laughing banter of his tone, but she made no answer. "because, if you ever do," he continued in the same voice, "you'll do well to remember the way you spoke then. it'll be very fetching in a play." the color faded in her cheeks, and her whole manner changed from defiance to humiliation; her lip quivered with quick emotion, and an almost childish expression of woe made pathetic her mobile face. she dropped back into her chair, and the tears started in her eyes. "oh, i don't think you've any right to tease me," she quavered in a voice that had almost escaped from control. "i'm sure i feel bad enough about it." jack's face sobered a little, although the mocking light of humor did not entirely vanish from his eyes. "there, there," he said in a soothing voice; "don't cry, may, whatever you do. the modern husband hates tears, but instead of giving in to them, he gets cross and clears out. don't cry before the man you marry, or," he added, a fresh smile lighting his face, "even before the man you are engaged to." "i didn't mean to be so foolish," may responded, choking down her rebellious emotions. "i'm all upset." "i don't wonder. now to go back to this letter. of course i shouldn't think of reading it without your leave, but i supposed you'd think it proper under the circumstances to tell me to read it. i thought you'd say: 'dearest, i have no secrets from thee! read!' or something of that sort, you know." he was perhaps playing now to cheer may up, for he delivered this in a mock-heroic style, with an absurd gesture. at least the effect was to evoke a laugh which came tear-sparkling as a lark flies dew-besprent from a hawthorn bush at morn. she rallied a little, and spoke with more self-command. "oh, that was the secret of a girl that wasn't engaged to you," she said, "and had no idea of being; no more," she added, dimpling, "than i had." jack showed his white teeth in what his friends called his "appreciative grin." "perhaps you're right," he returned. "by the way, do you know who christopher calumus really is?" she colored again, and hung her head. "yes," she murmured, in a voice absurdly low. "mrs. harbinger told me last night. he told her yesterday at the county club." "does he know who wrote to him?" her cheeks became deeper in hue, and her voice even lower yet. "yes, he found out from mrs. harbinger." "well, i must say i thought that letty harbinger had more sense!" "she didn't mean to tell him." "no woman ever meant to tell anything," he retorted in good-humored sarcasm; "but they always do tell everything. then if you and dick both know all about it, perhaps i had better give the letter to him." he offered to put the letter into his pocket, but she held out her hand for it beseechingly. "oh, don't give it to anybody else," she begged. "let me put it into the fire, and be through with it. it's done mischief enough!" "it may have done some good too," he said enigmatically. "i hope nothing worse will ever happen to you, may, than to be engaged to me. i give you my word that, as little as you imagine it, it's your interest and not my own i'm looking after. however, that's neither here nor there." he put the letter into his pocket without farther comment, disregarding her imploring look. then he rose, and held out his hand. "good-night," he said. "some accepted lovers would ask for a kiss, but i'll wait till you want to kiss me. you will some time. good-night. you'll remember what i wrote you about mentioning our engagement." she had at the mention of kisses become more celestial rosy red than in the whole course of that blushful interview, but at his last word her color faded as quickly as it had come. "oh, i am so sorry," she said, "i had told one person before your note came. she won't tell though." "being a 'she,'" he retorted mockingly. "oh, it was only alice," may explained, "and of course she can be trusted." it was his turn to become serious, and in the cloud on his sunny face there was not a little vexation. "good heavens!" he exclaimed. "of all the women in boston why must you pick out the one that i was most particular shouldn't know! you girls have an instinct for mischief." "but i wrote to her as soon as your note came; besides, she has promised not to say anything. she won't tell." "no; she won't tell," he echoed moodily. "what did she say?" may cast down her eyes in evident embarrassment. "oh, it's no matter," jack went on. "she wouldn't say half as hard things as she must think. however, it's all one in the end. good-night." with this abrupt farewell he left his betrothed, and went hastily out into the spring night, with its velvety darkness and abundant stars. the mention of alice endicott had robbed him of the gay spirits in which he had carried on his odd interview with may. the teasing jollity of manner was gone as he walked thoughtfully back to his chambers. he found fairfield in their common parlor. "dick," he said without preface, "congratulate me. i'm engaged." "engaged!" exclaimed the other, jumping up and extending his hand. "congratulations, old fellow. of course it's alice endicott." "no," his friend responded coolly; "it's may calthorpe." "what!" cried fairfield, starting back and dropping his hand before neligage had time to take it. "miss calthorpe? what do you mean?" "just as i say, my boy. the engagement is a secret at present, you understand. i thought you'd like to know it, though; and by the way, it'll show that i've perfect confidence in you if i turn over to you the letter that may wrote to you before we were engaged. that one to christopher calumus, you know." "but," stammered his chum, apparently trying to collect his wits, scattered by the unexpected news and this strange proposition, "how can you tell what's in it?" "tell what's in it, my boy? it isn't any of my business. that has to do with a part of her life that doesn't belong to me, you know. it's enough for me that she wrote the letter for you to have, and so here it is." he put the envelope into the hands of dick, who received it as if he were a post-box on the corner, having no choice but to take any missive thrust at him. "good-night," jack said. "i'm played out, and mean to turn in. thanks for your good wishes." and he ended that eventful day, so far as the world of men could have cognizance, by retiring to his own room. xviii the mischief of men barnstable seemed bound to behave like a bee in a bottle, which goes bumping its idiotic head without reason or cessation. on monday morning after the polo game he was ushered into the chambers of jack and dick, both of whom were at home. he looked more excited than on the previous day, and moved with more alacrity. the alteration was not entirely to his advantage, for mr. barnstable was one of those unfortunates who appear worse with every possible change of manner. "good-morning, mr. fairfield," was the visitor's greeting. "damme if i'll say good-morning to you, mr. neligage." jack regarded him with languid astonishment. "well," he said, "that relieves me of the trouble of saying it to you." barnstable puffed and swelled with anger. "damme, sir," he cried, "you may try to carry it off that way, but--" "good heavens, mr. barnstable," interrupted fairfield, "what in the world do you mean?" "is it your general custom," drawled jack, between puffs of his cigarette, "to give a wild west show at every house you go into?" dick flashed a smile at his chum, but shook his head. "come, mr. barnstable," he said soothingly, "you can't go about making scenes in this way. sit down, and if you've anything to say, say it quietly." mr. barnstable, however, was not to be beguiled with words. he had evidently been brooding over wrongs, real or fancied, until his temper had got beyond control. "anything to say?" he repeated angrily,--"i've this to say: that he has insulted my wife. i'll sue you for libel, damme! i've a great mind to thrash you!" jack grinned down on the truculent barnstable from his superior height. barnstable stood with his short legs well apart, as if he had to brace them to bear up the enormous weight of his anger; jack, careless, laughing, and elegant, leaned his elbow on the mantle and smoked. "there, mr. barnstable," fairfield said, coming to him and taking him by the arm; "you evidently don't know what you're saying. of course there's some mistake. mr. neligage never insulted a lady." "but he has done it," persisted barnstable. "he has done it, mr. fairfield. have you read 'love in a cloud'?" "'love in a cloud'?" repeated dick in manifest astonishment. "you must know the book, dick," put in jack wickedly. "it's that rubbishy anonymous novel that's made so much talk lately. it's about a woman whose husband's temper was incompatible." "it's about my wife!" cried barnstable. "what right had you to put my wife in a book?" "pardon me," neligage asked with the utmost suavity, "but is it proper to ask if it was your temper that was incompatible?" "shut up, jack," said dick hastily. "you are entirely off the track, mr. barnstable. neligage didn't write 'love in a cloud.'" "didn't write it?" stammered the visitor. "i give you my word he didn't." barnstable looked about with an air of helplessness which was as funny as his anger had been. "then who did?" he demanded. "if mr. barnstable had only mentioned sooner that he wished me to write it," jack observed graciously, "i'd have been glad to do my best." "shut up, jack," commanded dick once more. "really, mr. barnstable, it does seem a little remarkable that you should go rushing about in this extraordinary way without knowing what you are doing. you'll get into some most unpleasant mess if you keep on." "or bring up in a lunatic asylum," suggested jack with the most unblushing candor. barnstable looked from one to the other with a bewildered expression as if he were just recovering his senses. he walked to the table and took up a glass of water, looked around as if for permission, and swallowed it by uncouth gulps. "perhaps i'd better go," he said, and turned toward the door. "oh, by the way, mr. barnstable," jack observed as the visitor laid his hand on the door-knob, "does it seem to you that it would be in good form to apologize before you go? if it doesn't, don't let me detain you." the strange creature turned on the rug by the door, an abject expression of misery from head to feet. "of course i'd apologize," he said, "if it was any use. when my temper's up i don't seem to have any control of what i do, and what i do is always awful foolish. this thing's got hold of me so i don't sleep, and that's made me worse. of course you think i'm a lunatic, gentlemen; and i suppose i am; but my wife--" the redness of his face gave signs that he was not far from choking, and out of his fishy eyes there rolled genuine tears. jack stepped forward swiftly, and took him by the hand. "i beg your pardon, mr. barnstable," he said. "of course i'd no idea what you were driving at. will you believe me when i tell you something? i had nothing to do with writing 'love in a cloud,' but i do know who wrote it. i can give you my word that the author didn't have your story in mind at all." "are you sure?" stammered barnstable. "of course i'm sure." "then there is nothing i can do," barnstable said, shaking his head plaintively. "i've just made a fool of myself, and done nothing for her." the door closed behind barnstable, and the two young men looked at each other a moment. neither laughed, the foolish tragedy of the visitor's last words not being mirth-provoking. "well, of all the fools i've seen in my life," jack commented slowly, "this is the most unique specimen." "i'm afraid i can't blame the divorced mrs. barnstable," responded dick; "but there's something pathetic about the ass." it seemed the fate of barnstable that day to afford amusement for jack neligage. in the latter part of the afternoon jack sauntered into the calif club to see if there were anything in the evening papers or any fresh gossip afloat, and there he encountered the irascible gentleman once more. scarcely had he nodded to him than tom harbinger and harry bradish came up to them. "hallo, jack," the lawyer said cordially. "anything new?" "not that i know of," was the response. "how are you, bradish?" "how are you?" replied bradish. "mr. barnstable, i've called twice to-day at your rooms." "i am sorry that i was out," barnstable answered with awkward politeness. "i have been here since luncheon." "i'm half sorry to find you now," bradish proceeded, while harbinger and jack looked on with some surprise at the gravity of his manner. "i've got to do an errand to you that i'm afraid you'll laugh at." "an errand to me?" barnstable returned. bradish drew out his pocket-book, and with deliberation produced a note. he examined it closely, as if to assure himself that there was no mistake about what he was doing, and then held out the missive to barnstable. "yes," he said, "i have the honor to be the bearer of a challenge from the count shimbowski, who claims that you have grossly insulted him. will you kindly name a friend? there," he concluded, looking at harbinger and neligage with a grin, "i think i did that right, didn't i?" "gad!" cried jack. "has the count challenged him? what a lark!" "nonsense!" harbinger said. "you can't be serious, bradish?" "no, i'm not very serious about it, but i assure you the count is." "challenged me?" demanded barnstable, tearing open the epistle. "what does the dago mean? he says--what's that word?--he says his honor ex--expostulates my blood. of course i shan't fight." bradish shook his head, although he could not banish the laughter from his face. "blood is what he wants. he says he shall have to run you through in the street if you won't fight." "oh, you'll have to fight!" put in jack. "the count's a regular fire-eater," declared tom. "you wouldn't like to be run through in the street, barnstable." barnstable looked from one to another as if he were unable to understand what was going on around him. "curse it!" he broke out, his face assuming its apoplectic redness. "curse those fellows that write novels! here i've got to be assassinated just because some confounded scribbler couldn't keep from putting my private affairs in his infernal book! it's downright murder!" "and the comic papers afterward," murmured jack. "but what are you going to do about it?" asked tom. "you might have the count arrested and bound over to keep the peace," suggested bradish. "that's a nice speech for the count's second!" cried jack with a roar. "what am i going to do?" repeated barnstable. "i'll fight him!" he struck himself on the chest, and glared around him, while they all stood in astonished silence. "my wife has been insulted," he went on with fresh vehemence, "and i had a right to call the man that did it a villain or anything else! i owe it to her to fight him if he won't take it back!" "gad!" said jack, advancing and holding out his hand, "that's melodrama and no mistake; but i like your pluck! i'll back you up, barnstable!" "does that mean that you'll be his second, jack?" asked harbinger, laughing. "there, tom," was the retort, "don't run a joke into the ground. when a man shows the genuine stuff, he isn't to be fooled any longer." bradish followed suit, and shook hands with barnstable, and harbinger after him. "you're all right, barnstable," bradish observed; "but what are we to do with the count?" "oh, that ass!" jack responded. "i'd like to help duck him in a horse-pond; but of course as he didn't write the book, mr. barnstable won't mind apologizing for a hasty word said by mistake. any gentleman would do that." "of course if you think it's all right," barnstable said, "i'd rather apologize; but i'd rather fight than have any doubt about the way i feel toward the whelp that libelized my wife." jack took him by the shoulder, and spoke to him with a certain slow distinctness such as one might use in addressing a child. "do have some common sense about this, barnstable," he said. "do get it out of your head that the man who wrote that book knew anything about your affairs. i've told you that already." "i told him too," put in harbinger. "i suppose you know," barnstable replied, shaking his head; "but it is strange how near it fits!" bradish took barnstable off to the writing room to pen a suitable apology to the count, and jack and harbinger remained behind. "extraordinary beggar," observed jack, when they had departed. "yes," answered the other absently. "jack, of course you didn't write 'love in a cloud'?" "of course not. what an idiotic idea!" "fairfield said barnstable had been accusing you of it, but i knew it couldn't be anything but his crazy nonsense. of course the count didn't write it either?" jack eyed his companion inquiringly. "look here, tom," he said, "what are you driving at? of course the count didn't write it. you are about as crazy as barnstable." "oh, i never thought he was the man; but who the deuce is it?" "why should you care?" harbinger leaned forward to the grate, and began to pound the coal with the poker in a way that bespoke embarrassment. suddenly he turned, and broke out explosively. "i should think i ought to care to know what man my wife is writing letters to! you heard her say she wrote that letter to christopher calumus." jack gave a snort of mingled contempt and amusement. "you old mutton-head," he said. "your wife didn't write that letter. i know all about it, and i got it back from the count." "you did?" questioned harbinger with animation. "then why did letty say she wrote it?" "she wanted to shield somebody else. now that's all i shall tell you. see here, are you coming the othello dodge?" tom gave a vicious whack at a big lump which split into a dozen pieces, all of which guzzled and sputtered after the unpleasant fashion of soft coal. "there's something here i don't understand," he persisted. jack regarded him curiously a moment. then he lighted a fresh cigarette, and lay back in his chair, stretching out his legs luxuriously. "it's really too bad that your wife's gone back on you," he observed dispassionately. "what?" cried tom, turning violently. "such a nice little woman as letty always was too," went on jack mercilessly. "i wouldn't have believed it." "what in the deuce do you mean?" tom demanded furiously, grasping the poker as if he were about to strike with it. "do you dare to insinuate--" jack sat up suddenly and looked at him, his sunny face full of earnestness. "what the deuce do you mean?" he echoed. "what can a man mean when he begins to distrust his wife? heavens! i'm beastly ashamed of you, tom harbinger! to think of your coming to the club and talking to a man about that little trump of a woman! you ought to be kicked! there, old man," he went on with a complete change of manner, "i beg your pardon. i only wanted to show you how you might look to an unfriendly eye. you know you can't be seriously jealous of letty." the other changed color, and looked shame-facedly into the coals. "no, of course not, jack," he answered slowly. "i'm as big an idiot as barnstable. i do hate to see men dangling about her, though. i can't help my disposition, can i?" "you've got to help it if it makes a fool of you." "and that infernal count with his slimy manners," tom went on. "if he isn't a rascal there never was one. i'm not really jealous, i'm only--only--" "only an idiot," concluded jack. "if i were letty i'd really flirt with somebody just to teach you the difference between these fool ideas of yours and the real thing." "don't, jack," tom said; "the very thought of it knocks me all out." xix the cruelty of love what might be the result of such a match as that of may calthorpe and jack neligage must inevitably depend largely upon the feelings of one or the other to another love. if either were constant to a former flame, only disaster could come of the _mariage de convenance_ which mrs. neligage had adroitly patched up. if both left behind forgotten the foolish flares of youthful passion, the married pair might arrange their feelings upon a basis of mutual liking comfortable if not inspiring. what happened to jack in regard to alice and to may's silly attraction toward the unknown christopher calumus was therefore of much importance in influencing the future. since alice endicott knew of the engagement of may and jack it was not to be supposed that the malicious fates would fail to bring her face to face with her former lover. the meeting happened a couple of days after. jack was walking down beacon street, and alice came out of may's just in front of him. he quickened his steps and overtook her. "good-morning," he said; "you've been in to may's, i see. how is she to-day?" the tone was careless and full of good-nature, and his face as sunny as the bright sky overhead. alice did not look up at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the distance. to one given to minute observation it might have occurred that as she did not glance at him when he spoke she must have been aware of his approach, and must have seen him when she came out from the house. that she had not shown her knowledge of his nearness was to be looked upon as an indication of something which was not indifference. "good-morning," she answered. "may didn't seem to be in particularly good spirits." "didn't she? i must try to find time to run in and cheer her up. i'm not used to being engaged, you see, and i'm not up in my part." he spoke with a sort of swagger which was obviously intended to tease her, and the heightened color in her cheeks told that it had not missed the mark. "i have no doubt that you will soon learn it," she returned. "you were always so good in amateur theatricals." he laughed boisterously, perhaps a little nervously. "'praise from sir hubert,'" he quoted. "and speaking of engagements, is it proper to offer congratulations on yours?" she turned to him with a look of indignant severity. "you know i am not engaged, and that i don't mean to be." "oh, that's nothing. i didn't mean to be the other day." "i am not in the market," she said cuttingly. "neither am i any more," jack retorted coolly. "i've sold myself. that's what they mean, i suppose, by saying a girl has made her market." alice had grown more and more stern in her carriage as this talk proceeded. jack's tone was as flippant as ever, and he carried his handsome head as jauntily as if they were talking of the merriest themes. his brown eyes were full of a saucy light, and he switched his walking-stick as if he were light-heartedly snapping off the heads of daisies in a country lane. the more severe alice became the more his spirits seemed to rise. as they halted at a corner to let a carriage pass alice turned and looked at her companion, the hot blood flushing into her smooth cheek. "there is nothing in the world more despicable than a fortune-hunter!" she declared with emphasis. "oh, quite so," jack returned, apparently full of inward laughter. "theoretically i agree with you entirely. practically of course there are allowances to be made. the count has been brought up so, and you mustn't be too hard on him." "you know what i mean," she said, unmoved by the cunning of his speech. "yes, of course i can make allowances for you. you mean, i suppose, that as long as you know he's really after you and not your money you can despise public opinion; but naturally it must vex you to have the count misjudged. everybody will think miss wentstile hired him to marry you." she parted her lips to speak, then restrained herself, and altered her manner. she turned at bay, but she adopted jack's own tactics. "you are right," she said. "i understand that the count is only acting according to the standards he's been brought up to. may hasn't that consolation. i'm sure i don't see, if you don't mind my saying so, on what ground she is going to contrive any sort of an excuse for her husband." "she'll undoubtedly be so fond of him," jack retorted with unabashed good-nature, "that it won't occur to her that he needs an excuse. may hasn't your puritanical notions, you know. really, i might be afraid of her if she had." it was a game in which the man is always the superior of the woman. women will more cleverly and readily dissemble to the world, but to the loved one they are less easily mocking and insincere than men. alice, however, was plucky, and she made one attempt more. "of course may might admire you on the score of filial obedience. it isn't every son who would allow his mother to arrange his marriage for him." "no," jack responded with a chuckle, "you're right there. i am a model son." she stopped suddenly, and turned on the sidewalk in quick vehemence. "oh, stop talking to me!" she cried. "i will go into the first house i know if you keep on this way! you've no right to torment me so!" the angry tears were in her eyes, and her face was drawn with her effort to sustain the self-control which had so nearly broken down. his expression lost its roguishness, and in his turn he became grave. "no," he said half-bitterly, "perhaps not. of course i haven't; but it is something of a temptation when you are so determined to believe the worst of me." she regarded him in bewilderment. "determined to believe the worst?" she echoed. "aren't you engaged to may calthorpe?" he took off his hat, and made her a profound and mocking bow. "i apparently have that honor," he said. "then why am i not to believe it?" he looked at her a moment as if about to explain, then with the air of finding it hopeless he set his lips together. "if you will tell me what you mean," alice went on, "i may understand. as it is i have your own word that you are engaged; you certainly do not pretend that you care for may; and you know that your mother made the match. you may be sure, jack," she added, her voice softening a little only to harden again, "that if there were any way of excusing you i should have found it out. i'm still foolish enough to cling to old friendship." his glance softened, and he regarded her with a look under which she changed color and drew away from him. "dear alice," he said, "you always were a brick." she answered only by a startled look. then before he could be aware of her intention she had run lightly up the steps of a house and rung the bell. he looked after her in amazement, then followed. "alice," he said, "what are you darting off in that way for?" "i have talked with you as long as i care to," she responded, the color in her cheeks, and her head held high. "i am going in here to see mrs. west. you had better go and cheer up may." before he could reply a servant had opened the door. jack lifted his hat. "good-by," said he. "remember what i said about believing the worst." then the door closed behind her, and he went on his way down the street. that the course of true love never ran smooth has been said on such a multitude of occasions that it is time for some expert in the affections to declare whether all love which runs roughly is necessarily genuine. the supreme prerogative of young folk who are fond is of course to tease and torment each other. alice and jack had that morning been a spectacle of much significance to any student in the characteristics of love-making. youth indulges in the bitter of disagreement as a piquant contrast to the sweets of the springtime of life. true love does not run smooth because love cannot really take deep hold upon youth unless it fixes attention by its disappointments and woes. smooth and sweet drink quickly cloys; while the cup in which is judiciously mingled an apt proportion of acid stimulates the thirst it gratifies. if jack was to marry may it was a pity that he and alice should continue thus to hurt each other. xx the faithfulness of a friend the friendship between jack neligage and dick fairfield was close and sincere. for a man to say that the friendships of men are more true and sure than those of women would savor of cynicism, and might be objected to on the ground that no man is in a position to judge on both sides of the matter. it might on the other hand be remarked that even women themselves give the impression of regarding masculine comradeship as a finer product of humanity than feminine, but comparisons of this sort have little value. it is surely enough to keep in mind how gracious a gift of the gods is a genuine affection between two right-hearted men. the man who has one fellow whom he loves, of whose love he is assured; one to whom he may talk as freely as he would think, one who understands not only what is said but the things which are intended; a friend with whom it is possible to be silent without offense or coldness, against whom there need be no safeguards, and to whom one may turn alike in trouble and in joy--the man who has found a friend like this has a gift only to be outweighed by the love of her whose price is far above rubies and whose works praise her in the gates. such a friendship is all but the most precious gift of the gods. to evoke and to share such a friendship, moreover, marks the possession of possibilities ethically fine. a man may love a woman in pure selfishness; but really to love his male friend he must possess capabilities of self-sacrifice and of manliness. it is one of the charms of comradeship that it frankly accepts and frankly gives without weighing or accounting. in the garden of such a friendship may walk the soul of man as his body went in eden before the fall, "naked and not ashamed." he cannot be willing to show himself as he is if his true self have not its moral beauties. it may be set down to the credit both of dick and of jack that between them there existed a friendship so close and so trustful. even in the closest friendships, however, there may be times of suspension. perhaps in a perfect comradeship there would be no room for the faintest cloud; but since men are human and there is nothing perfect in human relations, even friendship may sometimes seem to suffer. for some days after the announcement of jack's engagement there was a marked shade between the friends. jack, indeed, was the same as ever, jolly, careless, indolent, and apparently without a trouble in the world. dick, on the other hand, was at times absent, constrained, or confused. to have his friend walk in and coolly announce an engagement with the girl whose correspondence had fired dick's heart was naturally trying and astonishing. dick might have written a bitter chapter about the way in which women spoiled the friendships of men; and certain cynical remarks which appeared in his next novel may be conceived of as having been set down at this time. more than a week went by without striking developments. the engagement had not been announced, nor had it, after the first evening, been mentioned between the two friends. that there should be a subject upon which both must of necessity reflect much, yet of which they did not speak, was in itself a sufficient reason for a change in the mental atmosphere of their bachelor quarters, which from being the cheeriest possible were fast becoming the most gloomy. one morning as dick sat writing at his desk, jack, who since breakfast had been engaged in his own chamber, came strolling in, in leisurely fashion, smoking the usual cigarette. "i hope i don't disturb you, old man," he said, "but there's something i'd like to ask you, if you don't mind." dick, whose back was toward the other, did not turn. he merely held his pen suspended, and said coldly:-- "well?" jack composed himself in a comfortable position by leaning against the mantel, an attitude he much affected, and regarded his cigarette as if it had some close connection with the thing he wished to say. "you remember perhaps that letter that i gave you from may?" dick laid his pen down suddenly, and sat up, but he did not turn. "well?" he said again. "and the other letters before it?" "well?" "it has occurred to me that perhaps i ought to ask for them,--demand them, don't you know, the way they do on the stage." dick said nothing. by keeping his back to his chum he missed sight of a face full of fun and mischief. "of course i don't want to seem too bumptious, but now i'm engaged to miss calthorpe--" he paused as if to give fairfield an opportunity of speaking; but still dick remained silent. "well," observed jack after a moment, "why the dickens don't you say something? i can't be expected to carry on this conversation all alone." "what do you want me to say?" fairfield asked, in a tone so solemn that it was no wonder his friend grinned more than ever. "oh, nothing, if that's the way you take it." "you knew about those letters when i got them," fairfield went on. "i read them to you before i knew where they came from." "oh, my dear fellow, hold on. you never read me any but the first one." "at any rate," rejoined dick, obviously disturbed by this thrust, "i told you about them." "oh, you did? you told me very little about the second, and nothing about the third. i didn't even know how many you had." fairfield rose from his seat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and began to pace up and down the room. jack smoked and watched. "look here, jack," dick said, "we've been fencing round this thing for a week, and it's got to be talked out." "all right; heave ahead, old man." fairfield stopped in his walk and confronted his friend. "are you really fond of miss calthorpe, jack?" "oh, i don't object to her; but of course the marriage is for purely business reasons." "you're not in love with her?" "not the least in the world, old man," jack responded cheerfully, blowing a ring of smoke and watching it intently as it sailed toward the ceiling. "but then she doesn't love me, so there's no bother of pretending on either side." the color mounted in dick's cheeks. "do you think it's the square thing to marry a young girl like that, and tie her up for life when she doesn't know what she's doing?" "oh, girls never know what they are doing. how should they know about marriage in any case? the man has to think for both, of course." "but suppose she shouldn't be happy." "oh, i'll be good to any girl i marry. i'm awfully easy to live with. you ought to know that." "but suppose," dick urged again, "suppose she--" "suppose she what?" "why, suppose she--suppose she--she liked somebody else?" jack looked shrewdly at dick's confused face, and burst into a laugh. "i guessed those letters were pretty fair," he burst out, "but they must have been much worse than i even suspected!" "what do you mean?" stammered dick. "mean? oh, nothing,--nothing in the world. by the way, as the matter relates to my _fiancée_, i hope you won't mind my asking if she's written to you since our engagement." "why--" "then she has written," pronounced jack, smiling more than ever at the confusion of his friend. "you haven't the cheek to bluff a baby, dick. i should hate to see you try to run a kelter through." "she only wrote to say that she was glad the count didn't write 'love in a cloud,' and a few things, you know, that she wanted to say." jack flung the end of his cigarette away and stepped swiftly forward to catch his chum by the shoulders behind. he whirled dick about like a teetotum. "oh, dick, you old fool," he cried, "what an ass you are! do you suppose i'm such a cad as really to propose to marry may when she's fond of you and you're fond of her? it doesn't speak very well of your opinion of me." dick stared at him in half-stupefied amazement for an instant; then the blood came rushing into his cheeks. "you don't mean to marry her?" he cried amazedly. "never did for a minute," responded jack cheerfully. "don't you know, old man, that i've sold my polo ponies, and taken a place in the bank?" "taken a place in the bank!" exclaimed dick, evidently more and more bewildered. "then what did you pretend to be engaged to her for?" "confound your impudence!" laughed jack, "i was engaged to her, you beast! i am engaged to her now, and if you're n't civil i'll keep on being. you can't be engaged to her till i break my engagement!" "but, jack, i don't understand what in the deuce you mean." "mean? i don't know that i meant anything. i was engaged to her without asking to be, and when a lady says she is engaged to you you really can't say you're not. besides, i thought it might help you." "help me?" "of course, my boy. there is nothing to set a girl in the way of wishing to be engaged to the right man like getting engaged to the wrong one." dick wrung his friend's hand. "jack," he said, "i beg your pardon. you're a trump!" "oh, i knew that all the time," responded jack. "it may comfort you a little to know that it hasn't been much of an engagement. i've been shamefully neglectful of my position. now of course an engaged man is supposed to show his ardor, to take little liberties, and be generally loving, you know." dick grew fiery red, and shrank back. jack laughed explosively. "jealous, old man?" he demanded provokingly. "well, i won't tease you any more. i haven't so much as kissed her hand." dick's rather combative look changed instantly into shamefacedness, and he shook hands again. he turned away quickly, but as quickly turned back again once more to grasp the hand of his chum. "jack neligage," he declared, "you're worth more than a dozen of my best heroes, and a novelist can't say more than that!" "gad! you'd better put me in a novel then," was jack's response. "they won't believe i'm real though; i'm too infernally virtuous." a knock at the door interrupted them, and proved to be the summons of the janitor, who announced that a lady wished to see mr. fairfield. "don't let her stay long," jack said, retreating to his room. "i can't get out till she is gone, and i want to go down town. i've got to order the horses to take my _fiancée_ out for a last ride. it's to break my engagement, so you ought to want it to come off." xxi the mischief of a fiancÉ the lady proved to be alice endicott. she came in without shyness or embarrassment, with her usual air of quiet refinement, and although she must have seen the surprise in dick's face, she took no notice of it. alice was one of those women so free from self-consciousness, so entirely without affectations, yet so rare in her simple dignity, that it was hard to conceive her as ever seeming to be out of place. she was so superior to surroundings that her environment did not matter. "good-morning, mr. fairfield," she said. "i should apologize for intruding. i hope i am not disturbing your work." "good-morning," he responded. "i am not at work just now. sit down, please." she took the chair he offered, and came at once to her errand. "i came from miss calthorpe," she said. "miss calthorpe?" he repeated. "yes. she thought she ought not to write to you again; and she asked me to come for her letters; those she wrote before she knew who you were." "but why shouldn't she write to me for them?" "you forget that she is engaged, mr. fairfield." "i--of course, i did forget for the minute; but even if she is, i don't see why so simple a thing as a note asking for her letters--" alice rose. "i don't think that there is any need of my explaining," she said. "if i tell you that she didn't find it easy to write, will that be sufficient? of course you will give me the letters." "i must give them if she wishes it; but may i ask one question first? doesn't she send for them because she's engaged?" "isn't that reason enough?" "it is reason enough," dick answered, smiling; "but it isn't a reason here. she isn't engaged any more. that is, she won't be by night." alice stared at him in astonishment. "what do you mean?" she demanded. "i mean that jack never meant to marry her, and that he is going to release her from her engagement." "how do you know that?" "he told me himself." they stood in silence a brief interval looking each other in the face. fairfield was radiant, but miss endicott was very pale. "i beg your pardon," she said presently. "is mr. neligage in the house?" "yes; he's in his room." "will you call him, please?" fairfield hesitated a little, but went to call his chum. "miss endicott wants to speak to you," he said abruptly. "what does she want?" "i haven't any idea." "what have you been telling her?" the necessity of answering this question dick escaped by returning to the other room; and his friend followed. "jack," alice cried, as soon as he appeared, "tell me this moment if it's true that you're not to marry may!" he faced her stiff and formal in his politeness. "pardon me if i do not see that you have any right to ask me such a question." "why, i came to ask mr. fairfield for may's letters because she is engaged to you, and he told me--" she broke off, her habitual self-control being evidently tried almost beyond its limit. "i took the liberty, jack," spoke up fairfield, "of saying--" "don't apologize," neligage said. "it is true, miss endicott, that circumstances have arisen which make it best for may to break the engagement. i shall be obliged to you, however, if you don't mention the matter to her until she brings it up." alice looked at him appealingly. "but i thought--" "we are none of us accountable for our thoughts, miss endicott, nor perhaps for a want of faith in our friends." she moved toward him with a look of so much appeal that dick discreetly turned his back under pretense of looking for something on his writing-table. "at least," she said, her voice lower than usual, "you will let me apologize for the way in which i spoke to you the other morning." "oh, don't mention it," he returned carelessly. "you were quite justified." he turned away with easy nonchalance, as if the matter were one in which he had no possible interest. "at least," she begged, "you'll pardon me, and shake hands." "oh, certainly, if you like," answered he; "but it doesn't seem necessary." her manner changed in the twinkling of an eye. indignation shone in her face and her head was carried more proudly. "then it isn't," she said. "good-morning, mr. fairfield." she went from the room as quickly as a shadow flits before sunlight. the two young men were so taken by surprise that by the time dick reached the door to open it for his departing caller, it had already closed behind her. the friends stared a moment. then jack made a swift stride to the door; but when he flung it open the hall without was empty. "damn it, dick," he ejaculated, coming back with a face of anger, "what did you let her go off like that for?" "how in the world could i help it?" was all that his friend could answer. jack regarded dick blackly for the fraction of a second; then he burst into a laugh, and clapped him on the shoulder. "i beg your pardon, old man," he said, as cheerily as ever. "i'm going off my nerve with all these carryings on. if you hadn't written that rotten old novel of yours, we shouldn't have had these continual circuses." he went for his hat as he spoke, and without farther adieu took his way down town. men in this peculiar world are to be envied or pitied not so much for their fortunes as for their dispositions; and if outward indications were to be trusted, jack neligage was one of those enviable creatures who will be cheerful despite the blackest frowns of fate. from indifference or from pluck, from caring little for the favors of fortune or from despising her spite, jack took his way through life merrily, smiling and sunny; up hill or down dale as it chanced he followed the path, with a laugh on his lip and always a kindly greeting for his fellow travelers. this morning, as he walked out into the sunlight, handsome, well-groomed, debonaire, and jocund, certainly no one who saw him was likely to suspect that the world did not go smoothly with him. least of all could one suppose that his heart or his thought was troubled concerning the favor or disfavor of any woman whatsoever. jack in the afternoon took may for a drive. the engagement had thus far been a somewhat singular one. jack had been to see may nearly every day, it is true, but either by the whimsical contrivance of fate or by his own cunning he had seldom seen her alone. she either had callers or was out herself; and as no one but mrs. neligage and alice knew of the engagement there was no chance for that sentiment which makes callers upon a lady feel it necessary to retreat as speedily as possible upon the appearance of her acknowledged lover. so well settled in the public mind was the conviction that jack was in love with alice endicott, that nobody took the trouble to notice that he was calling on may calthorpe or to get out of his way that he might be alone with her. this afternoon, in the face of all the world, in a stylish trap, on the open highway, they were at last together without other company. had not the mind of may been provided with an object of regret and longing in the person of fairfield, there might have been danger that jack would engage her fancy by sheer indifference. any girl must be puzzled, interested, piqued, and either exasperated or hurt according to her nature, when the man to whom she is newly betrothed treats her as the most casual of acquaintances. if nothing else moved her there would be the bite of unsatisfied curiosity. to be engaged without even being able to learn by experience what being engaged consists in may well wear on the least inquisitive feminine disposition. the _fiancé_ who does not even make pretense of playing the lover is an object so curious that he cannot fail to attract attention, to awake interest, and the chances are largely in favor of his developing in the breast of his fair the determination to see him really aroused and enslaved. many a woman has succumbed to indifference who would have been proof against the most ardent wooing. "well, may," jack said, smiling upon her as they drove over the mill dam, "how do you like being engaged?" she looked at him with a sparkle in her eyes which made her bewitching. "i don't see that it's very different from not being engaged," she said. "it will be if you keep on looking so pretty," he declared. "i shall kiss you right here in the street, and that would make folks talk." the color came into her cheeks in a way that made her more charming still. "now you color," jack went on, regarding her with a teasing coolness, "you are prettier yet. gad! i shall have to kiss you!" his horses shied at something at that instant, and he was forced to attend to them, so that may had a moment's respite in which to gather up her wits. when he looked back, she took the aggressive. "it is horrid in you to talk that way," she remarked. "besides, you said that i needn't kiss you until i wanted to." "well, i didn't promise not to kiss you, did i?" "how silly you are to-day!" she exclaimed. "isn't there anything better to talk about than kissing?" jack regarded her with a grin; a grin in which, it must be confessed, there was something of the look with which a boy watches a kitten he is teasing. "anything better?" repeated he. "when you've had more experience, may, perhaps you won't think there is anything better." may began to look sober, and even to have the appearance of feeling that the conversation was becoming positively improper. "i think you are just horrid!" she declared. "i do wish you'd behave." he gave her a respite for some moments, and they drove along through the sunlight of the april afternoon. the trees as they came into the country were beautiful with the buds and promise of nearing summer; the air soft with that cool smoothness which is a reminder that afar the breeze has swept fragments of old snowdrifts yet unmelted; the sky moist with the mists of snow-fields that have wasted away. all the landscape was exquisite with delicate hues. the supreme color-season of new england begins about the middle of march, and lasts--at the very latest--until the middle of may. its climax comes in late april, when pearly mists hover among the branches that are soon to be hidden by foliage. glowing tints of amethyst, luminous gray, tender green, coral, and yellow white, make the woods a dream of poetic loveliness beside which the gorgeous and less varied hues of autumn are crude. something dreamlike, veiled, mysterious, is felt in these tints, this iridesence of the woods in spring; as if one were looking at the luminous, rosy mists within which, as venus amid the rainbow-dyed foam of the sea, is being shaped to immortal youth and divine comeliness the very goddess of spring. the red of the maple-buds shows from afar; the russet leaflets of the ash, the vivid green, the amber, the pearl, and the tawny of the clustering hardwood trees, set against the heavy masses of the evergreens, are far more lovely than all the broad coloring of summer or the hot tints of autumn. under the afternoon sun the woods that day were at their best, and presently may spoke of the colors which spread down the gentle slopes of the low hills not far away. "isn't it just too lovely for anything!" she said. "just look at that hill over there. it is perfectly lovely." jack glanced at the hill, and then looked at her teasingly. "that's right," he remarked. "of course spoony people ought to talk about spring, and how perfectly lovely everything is." "i didn't say that because we're engaged," returned may, rather explosively. "i really meant it." "of course you did. that shows that you are in the proper frame of mind. now i'm not. i don't care a rap to talk about the whole holy show. it's pretty, of course; but i'm not going in for doing the sentimental that way." she looked up with mingled indignation and entreaty. "now you are going to be horrid again," she protested. "why can't you stop talking about our being engaged?" "stop talking about it? why, good heavens, we're expected to talk about it. i never was engaged before, but i hope i know my business." "but i don't want to talk about it!" "oh, you really do, only you are shy about owning it." "but i won't talk about it!" "oh, yes, you will, my dear; for if i say things you can't help answering 'em." "i won't say another word!" "i'll bet you a pair of gloves that the next thing i say about our being engaged you'll not only answer, but you'll answer in a hurry." "i'll take your bet!" cried may with animation. "i won't answer a word." jack gave a wicked chuckle, and flicked his horses into a brisk run. in a moment or two he drew them down to an easy trot, and turned to may with a matter-of-fact air. "of course now we have been engaged a week," he said, "i am at liberty to read that letter you wrote to christopher calumus?" "read it!" she cried. "oh, i had forgotten that you kept it! oh, you mustn't read it! i wouldn't have you read it for the world." "would you have me read it for a pair of gloves?" inquired jack wickedly. "you've lost your bet." "i don't care anything about my bet," she retorted, with an earnestness so great as to suggest that tears were not so far behind. "i want that letter." "i'm sorry you can't have it," was his reply; "but the truth is, i haven't got it." "haven't got it? what have you done with it?" "delivered it to the one it was addressed to,--christopher calumus." "delivered it? do you mean you gave it to mr. fairfield?" "just that. you wrote it to him, didn't you?" poor may was now so pale and miserable that a woman would have taken her in her arms to be kissed and comforted, but jack, the unfeeling wretch, continued his teasing. "i didn't want you to think i was a tyrant," he went on. "of course i'm willing you should write to anybody that you think best." "but--but i wrote that letter to mr. fairfield before i knew who he was!" gasped may. "well, what of it? anything that you could say to a stranger, of course you could say to a man you knew." for reply may put up one hand to her eyes, and with the other began a distressing and complicated search for a handkerchief. jack bent forward to peer into her face and instantly assumed a look of deep contrition. "oh, i say," he remonstrated, "it's no fair to cry. besides, you'll spoil your gloves, and now you've got to pay me a pair you can't afford to be so extravagant." the effect of this appeal was to draw from may a sort of hysterical gurgle, a sound indescribably funny, and which might pass for either a cry of joy or of woe. "i think you are too bad," she protested chokingly. "you know i didn't want mr. fairfield to have that letter when i was engaged to you!" "oh, is that all?" he returned lightly. "then that's easily fixed. let's not be engaged any more, and then there'll be no harm in his having it." apparently astonishment dried her tears. she looked at him in a sort of petrified wonder. "i really mean it, my dear," he went on with a paternal air which was exceedingly droll in jack neligage. "i'll say more. i never meant for a minute to marry you. i knew you didn't want to have me, and i'd no notion of being tied to a dragooned wife." "a dragooned wife?" may repeated. she was evidently so stupefied by the turn things had taken that she could not follow him. "a woman dragooned into marrying me," jack explained, with a jovial grin; "one that was thinking all the time how much happier she would be with somebody else." "and you never meant to marry me? then what did you get engaged to me for?" "i didn't. you wrote me that you were engaged to me, and of course as a gentleman i couldn't contradict a lady, especially on a point so delicate as that." may flushed as red as the fingers of dawn. "your mother--" she began; but he interrupted her. "isn't it best that we don't go into that?" he said in a graver voice. "i confess that i amused myself a little, and i thought that you needed a lesson. there were other things, but no matter. i never was the whelp you and alice thought me." "oh, alice!" cried may, with an air of sudden enlightenment. "well, what about her?" jack demanded. "nothing," replied may, smiling demurely to herself, "only she will be glad that the engagement is broken. she said awfully hard things about you." "i am obliged to her," he answered grimly. "oh, not really awful," may corrected herself quickly, "and anyway it was only because she was so fond of you." to this he made no reply, and for some time they drove on in silence. then jack shook off his brief depression, and apparently set himself to be as amusing as he could. he aroused may to a condition of mirth almost wildly joyous. they laughed and jested, told each other stories, and the girl's eyes shone, her dimples danced in and out like sun-flecks flashing on the water, the color in her cheeks was warm and delightful. not a word more was said on personal matters until jack deposited her at her own door once more. "i never had such a perfectly lovely ride in my life!" she exclaimed, looking at him with eyes full of animation and gratitude. "then you see what you are losing in throwing me over," he returned. "oh, you've had your chance and lost it!" she laughed brightly, and held out her hand. "but you see," she said mischievously, "the trouble is that the best thing about the ride was just that loss!" "i like your impudence!" he chuckled. "well, you're welcome. good-by. i'll send fairfield round to talk with you about the letter." and before she could reply he was away. xxii the cooing of turtle-doves there is nothing like the possibility of loss to bring a man to his bearings in regard to a woman. dick fairfield had told jack that of course he was not a marrying man, that he could not afford to marry a poor woman, and that nothing would induce him to marry a rich one; he had even set down in his diary on the announcement of jack's engagement that he could never have offered his hand to a girl with so much money; what his secret thought may have been no sage may say, but he had all the outward signs of a man who has convinced himself that he has no idea of trying to secure the girl he loves. now that the affair had shaped itself so that may was again free, he hurried to her with a precipitation which had in it a choice flavor of comedy. may always told him afterward that he did not even do her the honor to ask her for her hand, but that he coolly walked in and took up the engagement of jack neligage where it had been dropped. it was at least true that by nine o'clock that very evening they were sitting side by side as cosy and as idiotically blissful as a young couple newly betrothed should be. however informally the preliminaries had been conducted, the conclusion seemed to be eminently satisfactory. "to think that this is the result of that little letter that i found on my table one rainy night last february," dick observed rapturously. "i remember just how it looked." "it was horrid of me to write it," may returned, with a demure look which almost as plainly as words added: "contradict me!" "it was heavenly of you," dick declared, rising to the occasion most nobly. "it was the nicest valentine that ever was." some moments of endearments interesting to the participants but not edifying in narration followed upon this assertion, and then the little stream of lover-talk purled on again. "oh, mr. fairfield," may began with utter irrelevancy, "i--" "you promised not to call me that," he interrupted. "but it's so strange to say dick. well, dick, then--" the slight interruption of a caress having been got over, she went on with her shattered observation. "what was i going to say? you put me all out, with your 'dick'--i do think it's the dearest name!--stop! i know what i was going to say. i was frightened almost to death when mrs. neligage said the count wrote 'love in a cloud.' oh, i wanted to get under the tea-table!" "but you didn't really think he wrote my letters?" "i couldn't believe it; but i didn't know what to think. then when he wore a red carnation the next day, i thought i should die. i thought anyway he'd read the letter; and that's what made me so meek when mrs. neligage took hold of me." "but you never suspected that i wrote the book?" fairfield asked. "oh, i don't know. sometimes it seems to me as if i really did know all the time. don't you remember how we talked about the book at mrs. harbinger's tea?" "that's just your intuition," dick returned. "i know i didn't suspect you, for it troubled me tremendously that i cared so much for you when i thought i was in love with my unknown correspondent. it didn't seem loyal." "but of course it was, you know, because there was only one of us." dick laughed, and bestowed upon her an ecstatic little hug. "you dear little paddy! that's a perfect bull!" she drew herself away, and pretended to frown with great dignity. "i don't care if it is a bull!" protested she. "i won't be called a paddy!" dick's face expressed a consternation and a penitence so marked that she burst into a trill of laughter and flung herself back into his arms. "i was just teasing," she said. "the truth is that jack neligage has teased me so awfully that i've caught it like the measles." the tender follies which make up the talk of lovers are not very edifying reading when set down in the unsympathetic blackness of print. they are to be interpreted, moreover, with the help of many signs, trifling in themselves but essential to a correct understanding. looks, caresses, sighs, chuckles, giggles, pressures and claspings, intonations which alter or deny the word spoken, a thousand silly becks, and nods, and wreathèd smiles, all go to make up the conversation between the pair, so that what may be put into print is but a small portion of the ecstatic whole. may calthorpe and dick fairfield were not behind in all the enchanting idiocy which belongs to a wooing, where each lover, secure in being regarded as perfection, ventures for once in a lifetime to be frankly childish, to show self without any mask of convention. "oh, i knew you were a man of genius the very first time i saw you," may cried, in an entirely honest defiance of all facts and all evidence. "i wish i were for your sake," dick replied, with an adoring glance, and a kiss on the hand which he held. "and to think that this absurdly small hand wrote those beautiful letters." "you didn't suppose i had an amanuensis, did you?" laughed may. then dick laughed, and together they both laughed, overpowered by the exquisite wit of this fine jest. "really, though," dick said, "they came to me like a revelation. i never had such letters before!" may drew away her hand, and sat upright with an air of offended surprise. "well, i should hope you never did!" she cried. "the idea of any other woman's daring to write to you!" "but you were writing to a stranger; some other woman--" "now, richard," declared may resolutely, "this has got to be settled right here. if you are going to twit me all my life with having written to you--" he effectually stopped her speech. "i'll never speak of it again," he said; "or at least only just often enough so that it shan't be entirely forgotten." "you are horrid!" declared she with a pout. "you mean to tease me with--" "tease you, may? heavens, how you mistake! i only want all my life to be kept your slave by remembering--" the reader is at liberty from experience to supply as many hours of this sort of talk as his taste calls for. there were, however, some points of real interest touched upon in the course of the evening. dick confided to may the fact that jack neligage had sold his ponies, was paying his debts, and had accepted a place in a bank. mr. frostwinch, a college friend of jack's father, had offered the situation, and although the salary was of course not large it gave neligage something to live on. "oh, i'll tell that to alice to-morrow," may said. "she will be delighted to know that jack is going to do something. alice is awfully fond of him." the conversation had to be interrupted by speculations upon the relative force of the attachment between alice and jack and the love which may and dick were at that moment confirming; and from this the talk drifted away to considerations of the proper manner of disclosing the engagement. may's guardian, mr. frostwinch, dick knew well, and there was no reason to expect opposition from him unless on the possible ground of a difference of fortune. it was decided that dick should see him on the morrow, and that there should be no delay in announcing the important news. "it will take us two or three days to write our notes, of course," may said, with a pretty air of being very practical in the midst of her sentiment. "we'll say next wednesday." dick professed great ignorance of the social demands of the situation, and of course the explanation had to be given with many ornamental flourishes in the way of oscular demonstrations. may insisted that everything should be done duly and in order; told him upon whom of her relatives he would have to call, to whom write, and so many other details that dick accused her of having been engaged before. "you horrid thing!" she pouted. "i've a great mind to break the engagement now. i have been engaged, though," she added, bursting into a laugh of pure glee. "you forget that i woke up this morning engaged to one man and shall go to sleep engaged to another." "dear old jack!" fairfield said fervently. "well, i must go home and find him. i want to tell him the news. heavens! i had no idea it was so late!" "it isn't late," may protested, after the fashion of all girls in her situation, both before and since; but when dick would go, she laughingly said: "you tell jack if he were here i'd kiss him. he said i'd want to some time." and after half an hour of adieus and a brisk walk home, dick delivered the message. xxiii the business of a muse the decadence of literature began insensibly with the invention of printing, and has been proceeding ever since. how far it has proceeded and whether literature yet exists at all are questions difficult if not impossible to answer at the present time, because of the multitude of books. no living man can have more than a most superficial knowledge of what is being done in what was formerly the royalty and is now the communism of letters. a symphony played in the midst of a battle would stand much the same chance of being properly appreciated as would to-day a work of fine literary worth sent forth in the midst of the innumerous publications of the age. men write, however, more than ever. there is perhaps a difference, in that where men of the elder day deluded themselves or hoped to delude others with impressive talk about art and fame and other now obsolete antiquities, the modern author sets before him definite and desirable prizes in the shape of money and of notoriety which has money's worth. the muse of these days is confronted on the door of the author with a stern "no admittance except on business," and she is not allowed to enter unless she bring her check-book with her. the ideal of art is to-day set down in figures and posted by bankers' clerks. men once foolishly tried to live to write; now they write to live. if men seek for pegasus it is with a view to getting a patent on him as a flying-machine; and the really progressive modern author has much the same view of life as the rag-picker, that of collecting any sort of scraps that may be sold in the market. dick fairfield had much the attitude of other writers of his day and generation. he had set out to make a living by writing, because he liked it, and because, in provincial boston at least, there is still a certain sense of distinction attached to the profession of letters, a legacy from the time when the public still respected art. fairfield had been for years struggling to get a foothold of reputation sufficiently secure to enable him to stretch more vigorously after the prizes of modern literary life, where notoriety commands a price higher than genius could hope for. he had done a good deal of hack work, of which that which he liked least, yet which had perhaps as a matter of training been best for him, had been the rewriting of manuscripts for ambitious authors. a bureau which undertakes for a compensation to mend crude work, to infuse into the products of undisciplined imagination or incompetency that popular element which shall make a work sell, had employed fairfield to reconstruct novels which dealt with society. in this capacity he had made over a couple of flimsy stories of which mrs. croydon claimed the credit, on the strength of having set down the first draught from events which had happened within her own knowledge. so little of the original remained in the published version, it may be noted in passing, that she might have been puzzled to recognize her own bantlings. the success of these books had given dick courage to attempt a society novel for himself; and by one of those lucky and inexplicable flukes of fortune, "love in a cloud" had gained at least the success of immediate popularity. fairfield had published the novel anonymously partly from modesty, partly from a business sense that it was better to have his name clear than associated with a failure. he had been deterred from acknowledging the book after its success by the eagerness with which the public had set upon his characters and identified each with some well known person. if the scene of a novel be laid in a provincial city its characters must all be identified. that is the first intellectual duty of the readers of fiction. to look at a novel from a critical point of view is no longer in the least a thing about which any reader need concern himself; but it would be an omission unpardonably stupid were he to remain unacquainted with some original under the disguise of every character. a single detail is sufficient for identification. if a man in a tale have a wart on his nose, the intelligent reader should not rest until he think of a dweller in the town whose countenance is thus adorned. that single particular must thenceforth be held to decide the matter. if the man in the novel and the man in the flesh differ in every other particular, physical and mental, that is to be held as the cunning effort of the writer to disguise his real model. the wart decides it, and the more widely the copy departs in other characteristics from the chosen person the more evident is it that the novelist did not wish his original to be known. the more striking therefore is the shrewdness which has penetrated the mystery. the reader soddens in the consciousness of his own penetration as the sardine, equally headless, soaks in oil. fairfield was now waiting for this folly of identification to pass before he gave his name to the novel, and in the mean time he was tasting the delight of a first literary success where the pecuniary returns allowed his vanity to glow without rebuke from his conscience. fairfield was surprised, one morning not long after the polo game, by receiving a call from mrs. croydon. he knew her slightly, having met her now and then in society, and his belief that she was entirely ignorant of his share in her books might naturally invest her with a peculiar interest. she was a western woman who had lived in the east but a few years, and her blunders in regard to eastern society as they appeared in her original manuscripts had given him a good deal of quiet amusement. why she should now have taken it upon herself to come to his chambers could only become evident by her own explanation. "you are probably surprised to see me here, mr. fairfield," she began, settling herself in a chair with the usual ruffling of rag-tag-and-bobbery without which she never seemed able to move. "i naturally should not have been vain enough to foresee that i should have such an honor," he responded, with his most elaborate society manner. she smirked, and nodded. "that is very pretty," she said. "well, i'll tell you at once, not to keep you in suspense. i came on business." "business?" repeated he. "yes, business. you see, i have just come from the cosmopolitan literary bureau." fairfield did not look pleased. he had kept his connection with that factory of hack-work a secret, and no man likes to be reminded of unpleasant necessities. "they have told me," she went on, "that you revised the manuscript of my novels. i must say that you have done it very satisfactorily. we women of society are so occupied that it is impossible for us to attend to all that mere detail work, and it is a great relief to have it so well done." fairfield bowed stiffly. "i am glad that you were satisfied," he replied; "but it is a violation of confidence on the part of the bureau." "oh, you are one of us now," mrs. croydon observed with gracious condescension. "it isn't as if they had told anybody else. they told me, you see, that you wrote 'love in a cloud.'" "that is a greater violation of confidence still," fairfield responded. "indeed, it was a most un-gentlemanly thing of mr. cutliff. he only knew it because a stupid errand boy carried him the manuscript by mistake. he had no right to tell that. i shall give him my opinion of his conduct." mrs. croydon accomplished a small whirlwind of ribbon ends, and waved her plump hand in remonstrance. "oh, i beg you won't," she protested. "it will get me into trouble if you do. he especially told me not to let you know." fairfield smiled rather sardonically. "the man who betrays a confidence is always foolish enough to suppose his confidence will be sacred. i think this is an outrageous breach of good faith on mr. cutliff's part." mrs. croydon gave a hitch forward as if she were trying to bring her chair closer to that of fairfield. "as i was saying," she remarked, "we society women have really so little time to give to literature, and literature needs just our touch so much, that it has been especially gratifying to find one that could carry out my ideas so well." the young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. as a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. whether fairfield ever tried his hand at painting mrs. croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, mrs. croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go. "it is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely. "oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "you are really one of us now, as i said; and i always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild." "the guild owes you a great deal," fairfield observed blandly. mrs. croydon waved her hand engagingly in return for this compliment, incidentally with a waving of various adornments of her raiment which gave her the appearance in little of an army with banners. "i didn't come just for compliments," she observed with much sweetness. "i am a business woman, and i know how to come to the point. my father left me to manage my own property, and so i've had a good deal of experience. when i see how women wander round a thing without being able to get at it, it makes me ashamed of them all. i don't wonder that men make fun of them." "you are hard on your sex." "oh, no harder than they deserve. why, in chicago there are a lot of women that do business in one way or another, and i never could abide 'em. i never could get on with them, it was so hard to pin them down." "i readily understand how annoying it must have been," fairfield observed with entire gravity. "did you say that you had business with me?" "yes," she answered. "i suppose that i might have written, but there are some things that are so much better arranged by word of mouth. don't you think so?" "oh, there's no doubt of it." "besides," she went on, "i wanted to tell you how much i like your work, and it isn't easy to express those things on paper." it would be interesting to know whether to fairfield at that moment occurred the almost inevitable reflection that for mrs. croydon it was hard, if her manuscripts were the test, to express anything on paper. "you are entirely right," he said politely. "it is easy enough to put facts into words, but when it comes to feelings such as you express, it is different, of course." he confided to jack neligage later that he wondered if this were not too bold a flout, but mrs. croydon received it as graciously as possible. "there is so complete a difference," she observed with an irrelevance rather startling, "between the mental atmosphere in boston and that i was accustomed to in chicago. here there is a sort of--i don't know that i can express it exactly; it's part of an older civilization, i suppose; but i don't think it pays so well as what we have in chicago." "pays so well?" he repeated. "i don't think i understand." "it doesn't sell so well in a book," she explained. "i thought that it would be better business to write stories of the east for the west to buy; but i've about made up my mind that it'll be money in my pocket to write of the west for the eastern market." fairfield smiled under his big mustache, playing with a paper-knife. "pardon my mentioning it," he said, "but i thought you wrote for fame, and not for money." "oh, i don't write for money, i assure you; but i was brought up to be a business woman, and if i'm going to write books somebody ought to pay for them. now i wanted to ask you what you will sell me your part in 'love in a cloud' for." whether this sudden introduction of her business or the nature of it when introduced were the more startling it might have been hard to determine. certain it is that fairfield started, and stared at his visitor as if he doubted his ears. "my part of it?" he exclaimed. "why, i wrote it." "yes," she returned easily, "but so many persons have supposed it to be mine, that it is extremely awkward to deny it; and you have become my collaborateur, of course, by writing on the other novels." "i hadn't realized that," dick returned with a smile. "you've put so much of your style into my other books," she pursued, "that it's made people attribute 'love in a cloud' to me, and i think you are bound now not to go back on me. i don't know as you see it as i do, but it seems to me that since you took the liberty of changing so much in my other stories you ought to be willing to bear the consequences of it, especially as i'm willing to pay you well." "but as long as you didn't write the book," dick observed, "i should think you'd feel rather queer to have it said you did." "i've thought of that," mrs. croydon said, nodding, with a flutter of silken tags, "but i reason that the ideas are so much my own, and the book is so exactly what i would have written if social duties hadn't prevented, that that ought not to count. the fact that so many folks think i wrote it shows that i might have written it." "but after all you didn't write it," fairfield objected. "that seems to make it awkward." "why, of course it would have been better if i had given you a sketch of it," mrs. croydon returned, apparently entirely unmoved; "but then of course you got so much of the spirit of 'love in a cloud' out of my other books--" this was perhaps more than any author could be expected to endure, and least of all a young author in the discussion of his first novel. "why, how can you say that?" he demanded indignantly. "do you suppose," she questioned with a benign and patronizing smile, "that so many persons would have taken your book for mine in the first place if you hadn't imitated me or taken ideas from my other books?" dick sprang to his feet, and then sat down, controlling himself. "well," he said coldly, "it makes no difference. it is too late to do anything about it now. an edition of 'love in a cloud' with my name on the title-page comes out next wednesday. if folks say too much about the resemblance to your books, i can confess, i suppose, my part in the others." she turned upon him with a burst of surprise and indignation which set all her ribbon-ends waving in protest. "that," she said, "is a professional secret. no man of honor would tell it." she rose as she spoke, her face full of indignation. "you have not treated me fairly," she said bitterly. "you must have seen that the book was attributed to me, and you knew the connection between 'love in a cloud' and my other books--" "other books!" exclaimed dick. mrs. croydon waved him into silence with a magnificent gesture, but beyond that took no notice of his words. "you saw how everybody looked at me that day at mrs. harbinger's," she went on. "if you were going to give your name to the book why didn't you do it then?" "i didn't think of you at all," was his answer. "i was too much amused in seeing that absurd barnstable make a fool of himself with count shimbowski. did you know that the count actually challenged him?" wrath of celestial goddesses darkened the face of mrs. croydon as a white squall blackens the face of the sky. her eyes glared with an expression as fierce if not as bright as the lightning. "what do you say?" she screamed. "challenge my husband?" "your husband!" ejaculated dick, a staring statue of surprise. "yes, my husband," she repeated vehemently. "he didn't make a fool of himself that day! a man can't come to the defense of a woman but you men sneer at him. do you mean that that beastly foreign ape dared to challenge him for that? i'd like to give him my opinion of him!" when a man finds himself entertaining a wildcat unawares he should either expel the beast or himself take safety in flight. dick could apparently do neither. he stood speechless, gazing at the woman before him, who seemed to be waxing in fury with every moment and every word. she swept across the short space between them in a perfect hurricane of streamers, and almost shook her fists in his face. "i understand it all now," she said. "you were in it from the beginning! i suppose that when you worked on my books you took the trouble to find out about me, and that's where your material came from for your precious 'love in a cloud.' oh, my husband will deal with you!" fairfield looked disconcerted enough, as well he might, confronted with a woman who was apparently so carried away by anger as to have lost all control of herself. "mrs. croydon," he said, with a coldness and a dignity which could not but impress her, "i give you my word that i never knew anything about your history. that was none of my business." "of course it was none of your business!" she cried. "that's just what makes it so impertinent of you to be meddling with my affairs!" fairfield regarded her rather wildly. "sit down, please," he said beseechingly. "you mustn't talk so, mrs. croydon. of course i haven't been meddling with your affairs, and--" "and not to have the courage to say a word to prevent my husband's being dragged into a duel with that foreigner! oh, it does seem as if i couldn't express my opinion of you, mr. fairfield!" "my dear mrs. croydon--" "and as for erastus barnstable," she rushed on to say, "he's quick-tempered, and eccentric, and obstinate, and as dull as a post; he never understood me, but he always meant well; and i won't have him abused." "i hadn't any idea of abusing him," dick pleaded humbly. "really, you are talking in an extraordinary fashion." she stopped and glared at him as if with some gleam of returning reason. her face was crimson, and her breath came quickly. women of society outside of their own homes so seldom indulge in the luxury of an unbecoming rage that dick had perhaps never before seen such a display. any well-bred lady knows how to restrain herself within the bounds of personal decorum, and to be the more effective by preserving some appearance of calmness. mrs. croydon had evidently lacked in her youth the elevating influence of society where good manners are morals. it was interesting for dick, but too extravagantly out of the common to be of use to him professionally. "i hope you are proud of your politeness this morning," mrs. croydon ended by saying; and without more adieu she fluttered tumultuously to the door. xxiv the mischief of a cad the fierce light of publicity which nowadays beats upon society has greatly lessened the picturesqueness of life. there is no longer the dusk favorable to crime, and the man who wishes to be wicked, if careful of his social standing, is constantly obliged to be content with mere folly, or, if desperate, with meanness. it is true that from time to time there are still those, even in the most exclusive circles, who are guilty of acts genuinely criminal, but these are not, as a rule, regarded as being in good form. the days when the borgias invited their enemies to dinner for the express purpose of poisoning them, or visited nobles rich in money or in beautiful wives and daughters with the amiable intent to rob them of these treasures, are over, apparently forever. in the sixteenth century--to name a time typical--success made an excuse more than adequate for any moral obliquity; and the result is that the age still serves thrillingly the romantic dramatist or novel-writer. to-day success is held more than to justify iniquity in politics or commerce, but the social world still keeps up some pretext of not approving. there is in the best society really a good deal of hesitation about inviting to dinner a man who has murdered his grandmother or run away with the wife of his friend. society is of course not too austere in this respect; it strives to be reasonable, and it recognizes the principle that every transaction is to be judged by the laws of its own class. in the financial world, for instance, conscience is regulated by the stock market, and society assumes that if a crime has been committed for the sake of money its culpability depends chiefly upon the smallness of the amount actually secured. conservative minds, however, still object to the social recognition of a man who has notoriously and scandalously broken the commandments. he who has not the skill or the good taste to display the fruits of his wickedness without allowing the process by which they were obtained to be known, is looked at askance by these prudish souls. in all this state of things is great loss to the romancer, and not a little disadvantage to bold and adventurous spirits. were the latter but allowed the freedom which was enjoyed by their forerunners of the sixteenth century, they would do much to relieve the tedium under which to-day the best society languishes. this tendency of the age toward the suppression of violent and romantic transgressions in good society was undoubtedly largely responsible for the course taken by sibley langdon. foiled in his plan of blackmailing mrs. neligage into being his companion on a european tour, he attempted revenge in a way so petty that even the modern novelist, who stops at nothing, would have regarded the thing as beneath invention. mr. langdon had sent mrs. neligage her canceled note, with a floridly worded epistle declaring that its real value, though paid, was lost to him, since it lay in her signature and not in the money which the document represented. this being done, he had called once or twice, but the ignominy of living at the top of a speaking-tube carries with it the advantage of power to escape unwelcome callers, and he never found mrs. neligage at home. when they met in society mrs. neligage treated him with exactly the right shade of coolness. she did not give rise to any gossip. the infallible intuition of her fellow women easily discovered, of course, that there was an end of the old intimacy between the widow and mr. langdon, but nobody had the satisfaction of being able to perceive anything of the nature of a quarrel. they met one evening at a dinner given by mrs. chauncy wilson. the dinner was not large. there were mr. and mrs. frostwinch, mrs. neligage, alice endicott, count shimbowski, and mr. langdon. the company was somewhat oddly assorted, but everybody understood that mrs. wilson did as she pleased, leaving social considerations to take care of themselves. she had promised miss wentstile, who still clung to the idea of marrying alice to the count, that she would ask the pair to dinner; and having done so, she selected her other guests by some principle of choice known only to herself. the dinner passed off without especial incident. the count took in alice, and was by her treated with a cool ease which showed that she had come to regard him as of no consequence whatever. she chatted with him pleasantly enough at the proper intervals, but more of her attention was given to mr. frostwinch, her neighbor on the other side. she would never talk with the count in french, although she spoke that tongue with ease, and his wooing, such as it was, had to be carried on in his joint-broken english. the engagement of may calthorpe and dick fairfield, just announced, and the appearance of "love in a cloud" with the author's name on the title-page, were the chief subjects of conversation. the company were seated at a round table, so that the talk was for the most part general, and each person had something to add to the little ball of silken-fibred gossip as it rolled about. mr. frostwinch was may's guardian, and a man of ideas too old-fashioned to discuss his ward or her affairs in any but the most general way; yet even he did now and then add a word or a hint. "they say," mrs. wilson observed, "that there's some kind of a romantic story behind the engagement. mrs. neligage, you ought to know--is it true that richard fairfield got jack to go and propose for him?" "if he did," was the answer, "neither you nor i will ever know it from jack. he's the worst to get anything out of that i ever knew. i think he has some sort of a trap-door in his memory to drop things through when he doesn't want to tell them. i believe he contrives to forget them himself." "you can't conceive of his holding them if he did remember them, i suppose," chuckled dr. wilson. "of course he couldn't. no mortal could." "that's as bad as my husband," observed mrs. frostwinch, with a billowy motion of her neck, a movement characteristic and perhaps the result of unconscious cerebration induced by a secret knowledge that her neck was too long. "i tried to get out of him what mr. fairfield said when he came to see him about may; and i give you my word that after i'd worn myself to shreds trying to beguile him, i was no wiser than before." "i tell you so entirely all my own secrets, anna," her husband answered, "that you might let me keep those of other people." "indeed, i can't help your keeping them," was her reply. "that's what i complain of. if i only had a choice in the matter, i shouldn't mind." "if jack neligage is in the way of proposing," langdon observed in his deliberate manner, "i should think he'd do it for himself." "oh, bless you," mrs. neligage responded quickly, "jack can't afford to marry. i've brought him up better than to suppose he could." "happy the man that has so wise a mother," was langdon's comment. "if you don't believe in marriages without money, mrs. neligage," asked mrs. wilson, "what do you think of ethel mott and thayer kent?" "just think of their marrying on nothing, and going out to live on a cattle ranch," put in mrs. frostwinch. "i wonder if ethel will have to milk?" dr. wilson gave a laugh full of amusement. "they don't milk on cattle ranches," he corrected. "she may have to mount a horse and help at a round-up, though." "well, if she likes that kind of a burial," mrs. neligage said, "it's her own affair, i suppose. i'd rather be cremated." "oh, it isn't as bad as that," mr. frostwinch observed genially. "they'll have a piano, and that means some sort of civilization." "i suppose she'll play the _ranz des vaches_ on the piano," mrs. wilson laughed. "of course it's madness," langdon observed, "but they'll like it for a while. i can't understand, though, how miss mott can be so foolish. i always supposed she was rather a sensible girl." "does this prove that she isn't?" asked alice. "don't you think a girl that leaves civilization, and goes to live in the wilderness just to follow a man, shows a lack of cleverness?" the seriousness of the tone in which alice had asked her question had drawn all eyes in her direction, and it might easily be that the knowledge of the interest which she was supposed to have in penniless jack neligage would in any case have given to her words especial mark. "that depends on what life is for," alice answered now, in her low, even voice. "if she is happier with thayer kent on a cattle ranch than she would be anywhere else without him, i think she shows the best kind of sense." "but think what a stupid life she'll lead," langdon persisted. "she doesn't know what she's giving up." "eet ees _très romanesque_," declared the count, "but eet weel to be _triste_. weell she truthfully ride de cow?" politely veiled laughter greeted this sally, except from dr. wilson, who burst into an open guffaw. "she'll be worth seeing if she does!" he ejaculated. mrs. frostwinch bent toward alice with undulating neck. "you are romantic, of course, alice," she remarked, "and you look at it like a girl. it's very charming to be above matter-of-fact considerations; but when the edge is worn off--" she sighed, and shook her head as if she were deeply versed in all the misfortunes resulting from an impecunious match; her manner being, of course, the more effective from the fact that everybody knew that she had never been able to spend her income. "but what is life for?" alice said with heightened color. "if people are happy together, i don't believe that other things matter so much." "for my part," mrs. wilson declared, "i think it will be stunning! i wish i were going out to live on a ranch myself, and ride a cow, as the count says. chauncy, why don't we buy a ranch? think how i'd look on cow-back!" she gave the signal to rise, and the ladies departed to the drawing-room, where they talked of many things and of nothing until the gentlemen appeared. mr. langdon placed himself so that he faced mrs. neligage across the little circle in which the company chanced to arrange itself. "we've been talking of adventures," he said, "and mr. frostwinch says that nobody has any nowadays." "i only said that they were uncommon," corrected mr. frostwinch. "of course men do have them now and then, but not very often." "men! yes, they have them," mrs. wilson declared; "but there's no chance nowadays for us poor women. we never get within sight of anything out of the common." "you're enough out of the common to do without it, elsie," laughed her husband. "madame weelson ees an adventure eetself," the count put in gallantly. mr. langdon raised his head deliberately, and looked over to mrs. neligage. "you could tell them differently, mrs. neligage," he said. "your experience at monte carlo, now; that was far enough out of the common." her color went suddenly, but she met his eyes firmly enough. "my adventures?" she returned. "i never had an adventure. i'm too commonplace a person for that." "you don't do yourself justice," langdon rejoined. "you haven't any idea how picturesque you were that night." telepathy may or may not be established on a scientific basis, but it is certain that there exists some occult power in virtue of which intelligence spreads without tangible means of communication. there was nothing in the light, even tones of langdon to convey more intimation than did his words that mischief was afoot, yet over the group in mrs. wilson's drawing-room came an air of intentness, of alert suspense. no observer could have failed to perceive the general feeling, the perception that langdon was preparing for some unusual stroke. the atmosphere grew electric. mr. frostwinch and his wife became a shade more grave than was their wont. they were both rather proper folk, and proper people are obliged to be continually watching for indecorums, lest before they are aware their propriety have its fine bloom brushed away. the count moved uneasily in his chair. the unpleasant doubts to which he had been exposed as to how his own past would affect a boston public might have made him the more sympathetic with mrs. neligage, and the fact that he had seen her at the tables at monte carlo could hardly fail to add for him a peculiar vividness to langdon's words. doctor and mrs. wilson were both openly eager. alice watched mrs. neligage intently, while the widow faced langdon with growing pallor. "madame neleegaze ees all teemes de peecture," declared count shimbowski gallantly. "when more one teeme eet ees de oder?" "she was more picturesque that time than another," laughed langdon, by some amazing perception getting at the count's meaning. "i'm going to tell it, mrs. neligage, just to show what you are capable of. i never admired anything more than i did your pluck that night. it's nonsense to say that women have less grit than men." "less grit!" cried mrs. wilson. "they have a hundred times more. if men had the spunk of women or women had the strength of men--" "then amen to the world!" broke in her husband. "don't interrupt. i want to hear langdon's story." alice endicott had thus far said nothing, but as langdon smiled as if to himself, and parted his lips to begin, she stopped him. "no," she said, "he shan't tell it. if it is mrs. neligage's adventure, she shall tell it herself." mrs. neligage flashed a look of instant comprehension, of gratitude, to alice, and the color came back into her cheeks. she had been half cowering before the possibility of what langdon might be intending to say, but this chance of taking matters into her own hands recalled all her self-command. her eyes brightened, and she lifted her head. "it isn't much to tell," she began, "and it isn't at all to my credit." "i protest," interpolated langdon. "of course she won't tell a story about herself for half its worth." "be quiet," alice commanded. the eyes of all had been turned toward mrs. neligage at her last words, but now everybody looked at alice. it was not common to see her take this air of really meaning to dominate. in her manner was a faint hint of the commanding manner of her aunt, although without any trace of miss wentstile's arrogance. she was entirely cool and self-possessed, although her color was somewhat brighter than usual. the words that had been spoken were little, yet the hearer heard behind them the conflict between herself and langdon. "i am not to be put down so," he persisted. "i don't care much about telling that particular story, but i can't allow you to bully me so, miss endicott." "go on, mrs. neligage, please," alice said, quite as if she were mistress of ceremonies, and entirely ignoring langdon's words except for a faint smile toward him. "my adventure, as mr. langdon is pleased to call it," mrs. neligage said, "is only a thing i'm ashamed of. he is trying to make me confess my sins in public, apparently. he came on me one night playing at monte carlo when i lost a lot of money. he declares he watched me an hour before i saw him, but as i didn't play more than half that time--" "i told you she would spoil the story," interrupted langdon, "i--" "you shall not interrupt, mr. langdon," alice said, as evenly and as commandingly as before. "oh, everybody he play at monte carlo," put in the count. "not to play, one have not been dere." "i've played," mrs. wilson responded. "i think it's the greatest fun in the world. did you win, mrs. neligage?" "win, my dear," returned the widow, who had recovered perfectly her self-command; "i lost all that i possessed and most that i didn't. i wonder i ever got out of the place. the truth is that i had to borrow from mr. langdon to tide me over till i could raise funds. was that what you wanted to tell, mr. langdon? you were the real hero to lend it to me, for i might have gone to playing again, and lost that too." langdon was visibly disconcerted. to have the tables so turned that it seemed as if he were seeking a chance to exploit his own good deeds left him at the mercy of the widow. mrs. neligage had told in a way everything except the matter of the necklace, and no man with any pretense of being a gentleman could drag that in now. it might have been slid picturesquely into the original story, whether that were or were not mr. langdon's intention; but now it was too late. "i don't see where the pluck came in," pronounced dr. wilson. "oh, i suppose that was the stupid way in which i kept on losing," mrs. neligage explained. "i call it perfect folly." "again i say that i knew she'd spoil the story," langdon said with a smile. the announcement of carriages, and the departure of the frostwinches brought the talk to an end. when mrs. neligage had said good-night and was leaving the drawing-room, langdon stood at the door. "you got out of that well," he said. she gave him a look which should have withered him. "it is a brave man that tries to blacken a woman's name," she answered; and went on her way. in the dressing-room was alice, who had gone a moment before. mrs. neligage went up to her and took her by the arms. "how did you know that i needed to have a plank thrown to me?" she demanded. "did i show it so much?" alice flushed and smiled. "if i must tell the truth," she answered, "you looked just as i saw jack look once in a hard place." mrs. neligage laughed, and kissed her. "then it was jack's mother you wanted to help. you are an angel anyhow. i had really lost my head. the story was horrid, and i knew he'd tell it or hint it. it wasn't so bad," she added, as alice half shrank back, "but that i'll tell it to you some time. jack knows it." xxv the waking of a spinster miss wentstile was as accustomed to having her way as the sun is to rising. she had made up her mind that alice was to marry count shimbowski, and what was more, she had made her intention perfectly plain to her friends. it is easily to be understood that her temper was a good deal tried when it became evident that she could not force her niece to yield. miss wentstile commanded, she remonstrated, she tried to carry her will with a high hand by assuming that alice was betrothed, and she found herself in the end utterly foiled. "then you mean to disobey me entirely," she said to alice one day. "i have tried all my life to do what you wanted, aunt sarah," was the answer, "but this i can't do." "you could do it if you chose." alice was silent; and to remain silent when one should offer some sort of a remark that may be disputed or found fault with or turned into ridicule is one of the most odious forms of insubordination. "why don't you speak?" demanded miss wentstile sharply. "haven't i done enough for you to be able to get a civil answer out of you?" "what is there for me to say more, aunt sarah?" "you ought to say that you would not vex and disobey me any more," declared her aunt. "here i have told everybody that i should pass next summer at the count's ancestral castle in hungary, and how can i if you won't marry him?" "you might marry him yourself." her aunt glared at her angrily, and emitted a most unladylike snort of contempt. "you say that to be nasty," she retorted; "but i tell you, miss, that i've thought of that myself. i'm not sure i shan't marry him." alice regarded her in a silence which drew forth a fresh volley. "i suppose you think that's absurd, do you? why don't you say that i'm too old, and too ugly, and too ridiculous? why don't you say it? i can see that you think it; and a nice thing it is to think, too." "if you think it, aunt sarah," was the demure reply, "there's no need of my saying it." "i think it? i don't think it! i'm pleased to know at last what you think of me, with your meek ways." the scene was more violent than usually happened between aunt and niece, as it was the habit of alice to bear in silence whatever rudeness it pleased miss wentstile to inflict. not that the spinster was accustomed to be unkind to the girl. so long as there was no opposition to her will, miss wentstile was in her brusque way generous and not ill-natured. now that her temper was tried to the extreme, her worst side made itself evident; and alice was wise in attempting to escape. she rose from the place where she had been sewing, and prepared to leave the room. "go to your room by all means," the spinster said bitterly, regarding her with looks of marked disfavor. "all i have to say is this: if i do marry the count, and you find yourself without a home, you'll have nobody but yourself to thank for it. i'm sure you've had your chance." whether the antique heart of the spinster had cherished the design of attempting to glide into the place in the count's life left vacant by the refusal of her niece is a fact known only to her attendant angels, if she had any. certain it is that within twenty-four hours she had summoned that nobleman to her august presence. "count," she said to him, "i can't express to you how distressed i am that my niece has put such a slight on you. she is absolutely determined not to marry." the count as usual shrugged his shoulders, and remarked in mangled english that in america there was no authority; and that in his country the girl would not have been asked whether she was determined to marry or not. her determination would have made no difference. "that is the way it should be here," miss wentstile observed with feeling; "but it isn't. the young people are brought up to have their own way, no matter what their elders wish." "then she weell not to marry wid me?" he asked. "no, there's no hope of it. she is as obstinate as a rock." there was a brief interval of silence in which the count looked at miss wentstile and miss wentstile looked at the floor. "count shimbowski," she said at last, raising her eyes, "of course it doesn't make much difference to you who it is you marry if you get the money." he gave a smile half of deprecation, and spread out his hands. "one shimbowski for de _dot_ marries," he acknowledged, "but eet ees not wid all weemeens. dat ees not honor." "oh, of course i mean if your wife was a lady." "eet ees for de _dot_ only one shimbowski would wid all amereecans marry," he returned with simple pride. miss wentstile regarded him with a questioning look. "i am older than my niece," she went on, "but my _dot_ would be half a million." the whole thing was so entirely a matter of business that perhaps it was not strange that she spoke with so little sign of emotion. most women, it is true, would hardly come so near to proposing to a man without some frivolous airs of coquetry; but miss wentstile was a remarkable and exceptional woman, and her air was much that in which she might have talked of building a new house. "ees eet dat de wonderful mees wentsteele would marry wid me for all dat _dot_?" miss wentstile took him up somewhat quickly. "i don't say that i would, count," she returned; "but since you've been treated so badly by my niece, i thought i would talk with you to see how the idea struck you." "oh, eet weell be heavenly sweet to know what we weell be mine for all dat _dot_," the count asserted, bowing with his hand on his heart. she smiled somewhat acidly, and yet not so forbiddingly as to daunt him. "if we are yours what is there left for me?" she asked. "ah," the count sighed, with a shake of his head, "dat engleesh--" "never mind," she interrupted, "i understand that if i do marry you i get the name and not much else." "but de name!" he cried with fervor. "de shimbowski name! oh, eet ees dat de name weell be older dan dere was any mans een dees country." "i dare say that is true," she responded, smiling more pleasantly. "my sentiments for the name are warm enough." "de _sentiments_ of de esteemfully mees wentsteele ees proud for me," he declared, rising to bow. "ees eet dat we weell marry wid me? mees wentsteele ees more detracteeve for me wid her _dot_ dan mees endeecott. eet ees mooch more detracteeve." "well," miss wentstile said, rising also, "i thought i would see how the idea struck you. i haven't made up my mind. my friends would say i was an old fool, but i can please myself, thank heaven." the count took her hand and bowed over it with all his courtly grace, kissing it respectfully. "ah," he told her, echoing her words with unfortunate precision, "one old fool ees so heavenly keend!" miss wentstile started, but the innocence of his intention was evident, and she offered no correction. she bade him good-by with a beaming kindness, and for the rest of the day carried herself with the conscious pride of a woman who could be married if she would. for the next few days there was about miss wentstile a new atmosphere. she snubbed her niece with an air of pride entirely different from her old manner. she dropped hints about there being likely to be a title in the family after all, and as there could be no mystery what she must mean she attempted mystification by seeming to know things about the count and his family more magnificent than her niece had ever dreamed of. she sent to a school of languages for an instructor in hungarian, and when none was to be found at once, she purchased a grammar, and ostentatiously studied it before alice. altogether she behaved as idiotically as possible, and whether she really intended to go to the extreme of marrying count shimbowski and endowing him with her fortune or not, she at least contrived to make her friends believe that she was prepared to go to any length in her absurdity. the announcement of the engagement of dick fairfield and may calthorpe, which was made at once, of course produced the usual round of congratulatory festivities. may, as it is the moral duty of every self-respecting bostonian to be, was related to everybody who was socially anybody, and great were the number of dinners which celebrated her decision to marry. it was too late in the season for balls, but that was of little consequence when she and her betrothed could have dined in half a dozen places on the same night had the thing been physically possible. the real purpose of offering multitudinous dinners to a couple newly engaged has never been fully made clear. on first thought it might seem as if kindness to young folk newly come to a knowledge of mutual love were best shown by letting them alone to enjoy the transports inevitable to their condition. society has decided otherwise, and keeps them during the early days of their betrothal as constantly as possible in the public eye. whether this custom is the result of a fear lest the lovers, if left to themselves, might too quickly exhaust their store of fondness, or of a desire to enhance for each the value of the other by a display of general appreciation, were not easy to decide. a cynic might suggest that older persons feel the wisdom of preventing the possibility of too much reflection, or that they give all publicity to the engagement as a means of lessening the chances of any failure of contract. more kindly disposed reasoners might maintain that these abundant festivities are but testimony to the truth of emerson's declaration that "all the world loves a lover." philosophy, in the mean time, leaning neither to cynicism on the one hand nor to over-optimism on the other, can see in these social functions at least the visible sign that society instinctively recognizes in the proposed union a contract really public, since while men and women love for themselves they marry for the state. alice endicott and jack neligage were naturally asked to many of these dinners, and so it came about that they saw a good deal of each other during the next few weeks. their recent disagreement at first bred a faint coolness between them, but jack was too good-natured long to keep up even the pretense of malice, and alice too forgiving to cherish anger. the need, too, of hiding from the public all unpleasantness would in any case have made it necessary for them to behave as usual, and it is one of the virtues of social conventions that the need of being outwardly civil is apt to blunt the edge of secret resentments. of course a healthy and genuine hate may be nourished by the irksomeness of enforced suavity, but trifling pique dies a natural death under outward politeness. alice and jack were not only soon as friendly as ever, but either from the reaction following their slight misunderstanding or from the effect of the sentimental atmosphere which always surrounds an engaged couple, their attitude became more confidential and friendly than ever. they sat side by side at a dinner in which the harbingers were officially testifying their satisfaction in the newly announced engagement. jack had been doing his duty to the lady on the other side, and turned his face to alice. "what is worrying you?" he asked, his voice a little lowered. she looked at him with a smile. "what do you mean by that?" she asked. "i was flattering myself that i'd been particularly frolicsome all the evening." "you have; that's just it." "what do you mean by that?" "i mean that you've had to try." "you must have watched me pretty closely," she remarked, flushing a little, and lowering her glance. "oh, i know you so well that i don't need to; but to be sure i have kept my eyes on you." she played with her fork as if thinking, while his look was fixed on her face. "i didn't think i was so transparent," she said. "do you suppose other people noticed me?" "oh, no," he responded. "you don't give me credit for my keenness of perception. but what's the row?" "nothing," was her answer, "only--well, the truth is that i've had a talk with aunt sarah that wasn't very pleasant. jack, i believe she's going to marry the count." "i'm glad of it," was his laughing response. "he'll make her pay for all the nasty things she has done. he'll be a sort of public avenger." alice became graver. she shook her head, smiling, but with evident disapproval. "you promised me long ago that you wouldn't say things against aunt sarah." "no, i never did," he declared impenitently. "i only said that i'd try not to say things to you about her that would hurt your feelings." "well, weren't you saying them then?" "that depends entirely upon your feelings; but if they are so sensitive, i'll say i am delighted that the 'venerated mees wentsteele,' as the count calls her, is at last to be benefited by the discipline of having a master." alice laughed in spite of herself. "she won't enjoy that," she declared. "poor aunt sarah, she's been very kind to me, jack. she's really good-hearted." "you can't tell from the outside of a chestnut burr what kind of a nut is inside of it," retorted he; "but if you say she is sound, it goes. she's got the outside of the burr all right." the servant with a fresh course briefly interrupted, and when they had successfully dodged his platter jack went back to the subject. "is it proper to ask what there was in your talk that was especially unpleasant,--not meaning that she was unpleasant, of course, but only that with your readiness to take offense you might have found something out of the way." alice smiled faintly as if the question was too closely allied to painful thoughts to allow of her being amused. "she is still angry with me," she said. "for giving her a husband? she's grateful." "no, it isn't that. she can't get over my not doing what she wanted." "you've done what she wanted too long. she's spoiled. she thinks she owns you." "of course it's hard for her," alice murmured. "hard for her? it's just what she needed. what is she going to do about it i'd like to know?" alice looked at him with a wistful gravity. "if i tell you a secret," she said in a low tone, "can i trust you?" "of course you can," was the answer. "i should think that by this time, after may's engagement, you'd know i can keep still when i've a mind to." jack's chuckle did not call a smile to her face now. she had evidently forgotten for the moment the need of keeping up a smiling appearance in public; her long lashes drooped over cheeks that had little color in them, and her mouth was grave. "she was very severe to-night," alice confided to her companion. "she said--oh, jack, what am i to do if she goes away and leaves me without a home? she said that as of course i shouldn't want to go with her to hungary, she didn't know what would become of me. she wanted to know if i could earn my living." "the infernal old--" began jack; then he checked himself in time, and added: "you shall never want a home while--" but an interruption stopped him. "jack," called tom harbinger from the other end of the table, "didn't the count say: 'stones of a feather gather no rolls'?" the society mask slipped in a flash over the faces of alice and jack. the latter had ready instantly a breezy laugh which might have disarmed suspicion if any of the company had seen his recent gravity. "oh, tom," he returned, "it wasn't so bad as that. he said: 'birds of one feder flock to get eet.' i wish i had a short-hand report of all his sayings." "he told me at the club," put in mrs. harbinger, improving on the fact by the insertion of an article, "that miss wentstile was 'an ext'rdeenaire particle.' i hope you don't mind, alice?" "nothing that the count says could affect me," was the answer. having the eyes of the ladies in her direction, mrs. harbinger improved the opportunity to give the signal to rise, and the talk between alice and jack was for that evening broken off. xxvi the wooing of a widow "jack," mrs. neligage observed one morning when her son had dropped in, "i hope you won't mind, but i've decided to marry harry bradish." jack frowned slightly, then smiled. probably no man is ever greatly pleased by the idea that his mother is to remarry; but jack was of accommodating temper, and moreover was not without the common sense necessary for the acceptance of the unpalatable. he trimmed the ashes from the cigarette he was smoking, took a whiff, and sent out into the air an unusually neat smoke-ring. he sat with his eyes fixed upon the involving wreath until it was shattered upon the ceiling and its frail substance dissolved in air. "does bradish know it?" he inquired. "oh, he doesn't suspect it," answered she. "he'll never have an idea of such a thing till i tell him, and then he won't believe it." jack laughed, blew another most satisfactory smoke-ring, and again with much deliberation watched it ascend to its destruction. "then you don't expect him to ask you?" he propounded at length. "ask me, jack? he never could get up the courage. he'd lie down and die for me, but as for proposing--no, if there is to be any proposing i'm afraid i should have to do it; so we shall have to get on without." "it wouldn't be decorous for me to ask how you mean to manage, i suppose." "oh, ask by all means if you want to, jacky dear; but never a word shall i tell you. all i want of you is to say you aren't too much cut up at the idea." "i've brought you up so much to have your own way," jack returned in a leisurely fashion, "that i'm afraid it's too late to begin now to try to control you. i wish you luck." they were silent for some minutes. mrs. neligage had been mending a glove for her son, and when she had finished it, she rose and brought it to him. she stood a minute regarding him with an unwonted softness in her glance. "dear boy," she said, with a tender note in her voice, "i haven't thanked you for the money you sent langdon." he threw his cigarette away, half turning his face from her as he did so. "it's no use to bring that up again," he said. "i'm only sorry i couldn't have the satisfaction of kicking him." she shook her head. "i've wanted you to a good many times," returned she, "but that's a luxury that we couldn't afford. it would cost too much." she hesitated a moment, and added: "it must have left you awfully hard up, jack." "oh, i'm going into the bank. i'm a reformed man, you know, so that doesn't matter. if i can't play polo what good is money?" his mother sighed. "i do wish providence would take my advice about giving the money round," she remarked impatiently. "things would be a great deal better arranged." "for us they would, i've no doubt," he assented with a grin. "when do you go into that beastly old bank?" she asked. "first of the month. after all it won't be so much worse than being married." "you must be awfully hard up," she said once more regretfully. "oh, i'm always hard up. don't bother about that." she stooped forward and kissed him lightly, an unusual demonstration on her part, and stood brushing the crisp locks back from his forehead. he took her hand and pulled her down to kiss her in turn. "really, mater," he observed, still holding her hand, "we're getting quite spoony. does the idea of marrying harry bradish make you sentimental?" she smiled and did not answer, but withdrew her hand and returned to her seat by the window. she took up a bit of sewing, and folded down on the edge of the lawn a tiny hem. "when i am married," she observed, the faint suspicion of a blush coming into her cheek, "i can pay that money back to you. harry is rich enough, and generous enough." jack stopped in the lighting of a fresh cigarette, and regarded her keenly. "mother," he said in a voice of new seriousness, "are you marrying him to get that money for me?" "i mean to get it for you," she returned, without looking up. again he began to send rings of smoke to break on the ceiling above, and meanwhile she fixed her attention on her sewing. the noise of the carriages outside, the profanity of the english sparrows quarreling on the trees, and the sound of a distant street-organ playing "cavalleria" came in through the open window. "mother," he said, "i won't have it." "won't have what?" "i won't have you marry harry bradish." "why not?" "do you think," he urged, with some heat, "that i don't see through the whole thing? you are bound to help me out, and i won't have you do it." the widow let her sewing fall into her lap, and turned her face to the window. "how will you help it?" she asked softly. "i'll stop it in one way or another. i tell you--" but she turned toward him a face full of confusion and laughter. "oh, jack, you old goose, i've been fond of harry bradish for years, only i didn't dare show it because--" "because what?" "because sibley langdon was so nasty if i did," she returned, her tone hardening. "you don't know," she went on, the tone changing again like a flute-note, "what a perfect dear harry is. i've teased him, and snubbed him, and bullied him, and treated him generally like a fiend, and he's been as patient, and as sweet--why, jack, he's a saint beside me! he's awkward, and as stupid as a frog, but he's as good as gold." jack's face had darkened at the mention of langdon, but it cleared again, and his sunny smile came back once more. he sent out a great cloud of smoke with an entire disregard of the possibilities of artistic ring-making which he sacrificed, and chuckled gleefully. "all right, mater," he said, "if that's the state of things i've nothing more to say. you may even fleece him for my benefit if you want to." he rose as he spoke, and went over to where his mother was sitting. with heightened color, she had picked up her sewing, and bent over it so that her face was half hidden. "who supposed there was so much sentiment in the family," he remarked. "well, i must go down town. good-by. i wish you joy." they kissed each other with a tenderness not customary, for neither was much given to sentimental demonstrations; and jack went his way. it has been remarked by writers tinged with cynicism that a widow who wishes to remarry is generally able to do a large part of whatever wooing is necessary. in the present case, where the lady had frankly avowed her intention of doing the whole, there was no reason why the culmination should be long delayed. one day soon after the interview between mrs. neligage and her son, the widow and harry bradish were at the county club when they chanced to come into the parlor just in time to discover may calthorpe and dick fairfield, when the lover was kissing his lady's hand. mrs. neligage was entirely equal to the situation. "yes, mr. bradish," she observed, looking upward, "you were right, this ceiling is very ugly." "i didn't say anything about the ceiling," he returned, gazing up in amazement, while dick and may slipped out at another door. she turned to him with a countenance of mischief. "then you should have said it, stupid!" she exclaimed. "didn't you see dick and may?" "i saw them go out. what of it?" "really, harry," she said, falling into the name which she had called him in her girlhood, "you should have your wits about you when you stumble on young lovers in a sentimental attitude." "i didn't see what they were doing. i was behind you." "oh, he had her hand," explained she, extending hers. bradish took it shyly, looking confused and mystified. the widow laughed in his face. "what are you laughing at?" he asked. "what do you suppose he was doing?" mrs. neligage demanded. "now you have my hand, what are you going to do with it?" he dropped her hand in confusion. "i--i just took it because you gave it to me," he stammered. "i was only going--i was going to--" "then why in the world didn't you?" she laughed, moving quickly away toward the window which opened upon the piazza. "but i will now," he exclaimed, striding after. "oh, now it is too late," she declared teasingly. "a woman is like time. she must be taken by the forelock." "but, mrs. neligage, louisa, i was afraid of offending you!" "nothing offends a woman so much as to be afraid of offending her," was her oracular reply, as she flitted over the sill. all the way into town that sunny april afternoon harry bradish was unusually silent. while mrs. neligage, in the highest spirits, rattled on with jest, or chat, or story, he replied in monosyllables or in the briefest phrases compatible with politeness. he was evidently thinking deeply. the very droop of his yellow mustaches showed that. the presence of the trig little groom at the back of the trap was a sufficient reason why bradish should not then deliver up any confidential disclosures in regard to the nature of his cogitations, but from time to time he glanced at the widow with the air of having her constantly in his thoughts. bradish was the most kindly of creatures, and withal one of the most self-distrustful. he was so transparent that there was nothing surprising in the ease with which one so astute as mrs. neligage might read his mood if she were so disposed. he cast upon her looks of inquiry or doubt which she gave no sign of perceiving, or now and then of bewilderment as if he had come in his thought to a question which puzzled him completely. during the entire drive he was obviously struggling after some mental adjustment or endeavoring to solve some deep and complicated problem. the day was enchanting, and in the air was the exciting stir of spring which turns lightly the young man's fancy to thoughts of love. whether bradish felt its influence or not, he had at least the air of a man emotionally much stirred. mrs. neligage looked more alert, more provoking, more piquant, than ever. she had, it is true, an aspect less sentimental than that of her companion, but nature had given to harry bradish a likeness to don quixote which made it impossible for him ever to appear mischievous or sportive, and if he showed feeling it must be of the kindly or the melancholy sort. the widow might be reflecting on the effectiveness of the turnout, the fineness of the horses, the general air of style and completeness which belonged to the equipage, or she might be ruminating on the character of the driver. she might on the other hand have been thinking of nothing in particular except the light things she was saying,--if indeed it is possible to suppose that a clever woman ever confines her thoughts to what is indicated by her words. bradish, however, was evidently meditating of her. when he had brought the horses with a proper flourish to mrs. neligage's door, bradish descended and helped her out with all his careful politeness of manner. he was a man to whom courtesy was instinctive. at the stake he would have apologized to the executioner for being a trouble. he might to-day be absorbed and perplexed, but he was not for that less punctiliously attentive. "may i come in?" he asked, hat in hand. "by all means," mrs. neligage responded. "come in, and i'll give you a cup of tea." bradish sent the trap away with the satisfactory groom, and then accompanied his companion upstairs. they were no sooner inside the door of her apartment than he turned to the widow with an air of sudden determination. "louisa," he said with awkward abruptness, "what did you mean this afternoon?" he grasped her hands with both his; his hat, which he had half tossed upon the table, went bowling merrily over the floor, but he gave it no heed. "good gracious, harry," she cried, laughing up into his face, "how tragic you are! pick up your hat." he glanced at the hat, but he did not release her hands. he let her remark pass, and went on with increasing intensity which was not unmixed with wistfulness. "i've been thinking about it all the way home," he declared. "you've always teased me, louisa, from the days we were babies, and of course i'm an old fool; but--were you willing i should kiss your hand?" he stopped in speechless confusion, the color coming into his cheeks, and looked pathetically into her laughing face. "lots of men have," she responded. he dropped her hands, and grew paler. "but to-day--" he stammered. "but what to-day?" she cried, moving near to him. "i thought that to-day--louisa, for heaven's sake, do you care for me?" "not for heaven's sake," she murmured, looking younger and more bewitching than ever. some women at forty-five are by providence allowed still to look as young as their children, and mrs. neligage was one of them. her airs would perhaps have been ridiculous in one less youthful in appearance, but she carried them off perfectly. bradish was evidently too completely and tragically in earnest to see the point of her quip. he looked so disappointed and abashed that it was not strange for her to burst into a peal of laughter. "oh, harry," she cried, "you are such a dear old goose! must i say it in words? well, then; here goes, despite modesty! take me!" he stared at her as if in doubt of his senses. "do you mean it?" he stammered. "i do at this minute, but if you're not quick i may change my mind!" then harry bradish experienced a tremendous reaction from the excessive shyness of nearly half a century, and gathered her into his arms. xxvii the climax of comedy society has always a kindly feeling toward any person who furnishes material for talk. even in those unhappy cases where the matter provided to the gossips is of an iniquitous sort, it is not easy utterly to condemn evil which has added a pleasant spice to conversation. it is true that in word the sinner may be entirely disapproved, but the disapproval is apt to be tempered by an evident feeling of gratitude for the excitement which the sin has provided to talkers. in lighter matters, where there is no reason to regard with reprobation the course discussed, the friendliness of the gossips is often covered with a sauce piquant of doubtful insinuation, of sneer, or of ridicule, but in reality it is evident that those who abuse do so, like lady teazle, in pure good nature. to be talked about in society is really to be awarded for the time being such interest as society is able to feel; and the interest of society is its only regard. the engagement of mrs. neligage to harry bradish naturally set the tongues of all their acquaintances wagging, and many pretty things were said of the couple which were not entirely complimentary. the loves of elderly folk always present to the eyes of the younger generation an aspect somewhat ludicrous, and the buds giggled at the idea of nuptials which to their infantine minds seemed so venerable. the women pitied bradish, who had been captured by the wiles of the widow, and the men thought it a pity that so gifted and dashing a woman as mrs. neligage should be united to a man so dull as her prospective husband. the widow did not wear her heart on her sleeve, so that daws who wished to peck at it found it well concealed behind an armor of raillery, cleverness, and adroitness. bradish, on the other hand, was so openly adoring that it was impossible not to be touched by his beaming happiness. on the whole the match was felt to be a suitable one, although mrs. neligage had no money; and from the mingled pleasure of gossiping about the pair, and nominally condemning the whole business on one ground or another, society came to be positively enthusiastic over the marriage. the affairs of jack neligage might in time be influenced by his mother's alliance with a man of wealth, but they were little changed at first. it is true that by some subtile softening of the general heart at the thought of matrimony in the concrete, as presented by the spectacle of the loves of mrs. neligage and bradish, his social world was moved to a sort of toleration of the idea of his marrying alice endicott in spite of his poverty. people not in the least responsible, who could not be personally affected by such a match, began to wonder after all whether there were not some way in which it might be arranged, and to condemn miss wentstile for not making possible the union of two lovers so long and so faithfully attached. society delights in the romantic in other people's families, and would have rolled as a sweet morsel under its tongue an elopement on the part of jack and alice, or any other sort of extravagant outcome. the marriage of his mother gave him a new consequence both by keeping his affairs in the public mind and by bringing about for him a connection with a man of money. miss wentstile was not of a character which was likely sensitively to feel or easily to receive these beneficent public sentiments. she was a woman who was entirely capable of originating her own emotions, a fact which in itself distinguished her as a rarity among her sex. no human being, however, can live in the world without being affected by the opinions of the world; and it is probable that miss wentstile, with all her independence, was more influenced by the thought of those about her than could be at all apparent. mrs. neligage declared to jack that she meant to be very civil to the spinster. "she's a sort of cousin of harry's, you know," she remarked; "and it isn't good form not to be on good terms with the family till after you're married." "but after the wedding," he responded with a lazy smile, "i suppose she must look out." mrs. neligage looked at him, laughing, with half closed eyes. "i should think that after the marriage she would do well to remember her place," was her reply. "i shall have saved her from the count by that time, too; and that will give her a lesson." but providence spared mrs. neligage the task of taking the initiative in the matter of the count. one day in the latter part of april, just before the annual flitting by which all truly patriotic bostonians elude the first of may and the assessors, the widow went to call on her prospective relative. miss wentstile was at home in the drawing-room with alice and the count. tea had been brought in, and alice was pouring it. "i knew i should be just in time for tea," mrs. neligage declared affably; "and your tea is always so delicious, miss wentstile." "how do you do, louisa," was miss wentstile's greeting. "i wish you'd let me know when you are at home. i wouldn't have called yesterday if i'd supposed you didn't know enough to stay in to be congratulated." "i had to go out," mrs. neligage responded. "i was sorry not to see you." "there was a horrid dog in the hall that barked at me," miss wentstile continued. "you ought not to let your visitors be annoyed so." "it isn't my dog," the widow replied with unusual conciliation in her manner. "it belongs to those stearnses who have the apartment opposite." "i can't bear other people's dogs," miss wentstile declared with superb frankness. "fido was the only dog i ever loved." "where is fido?" asked the widow. "i haven't heard his voice yet." miss wentstile drew herself up stiffly. "i have met with a misfortune. i had to send dear fido away. he would bark at the count." whatever the intentions of mrs. neligage to conciliate, providence had not made her capable of resisting a temptation like this. "how interesting the instinct of animals is," she observed with an air of the most perfect ingenuousness. "they seem to know doubtful characters by intuition." "doubtful characters?" echoed miss wentstile sharply. "didn't fido always bark at you, louisa?" "yes," returned the caller as innocently as ever. "that is an illustration of what i was saying." "oh, madame neleegaze ees so continuously to be _drôle_!" commented the count, with a display of his excellent teeth. "so she have to marry, ees eet not?" "do you mean those two sentences to go together, count?" alice asked, with a twinkle of fun. he stood apparently trying to recall what he had said, in order to get the full meaning of the question, when the servant announced mrs. croydon, who came forward with a clashing of bead fringes and a rustling of stiff silk. she was ornamented, hung, spangled, covered, cased in jet until she might not inappropriately have been set bodily into a relief map to represent whitby. she advanced halfway across the space to where miss wentstile sat near the hearth, and then stopped with a dramatic air. she fixed her eyes on the count, who, with his feet well apart, stood near miss wentstile, stirring his tea, and diffusing abroad a patronizing manner of ownership. "i beg your pardon, miss wentstile," mrs. croydon said in a voice a little higher than common, "i will come to see you again when you haven't an assassin in your house." there was an instant of utter silence. the remark was one well calculated to produce a sensation, and had mrs. croydon been an actress she might at that instant have congratulated herself that she held her audience spellbound. it was but for a flash, however, that miss wentstile was paralyzed. "what do you mean?" exclaimed the spinster, recovering the use of her tongue. "i mean," retorted mrs. croydon, extending her bugle-dripping arm theatrically, and pointing to the count, "that man there." "me!" cried the count. "the count?" cried miss wentstile an octave higher. "ah!" murmured mrs. neligage very softly, settling herself more comfortably in her chair. "he tried to murder my husband," went on mrs. croydon, every moment with more of the air of a stage-struck amateur. "he challenged him!" "your husband?" the count returned. "eet ees to me thees teeme first know what you have one husband, madame." "i thought your husband was dead, mrs. croydon," miss wentstile observed, in a voice which was like the opening of an outside door with the mercury below zero. mrs. croydon was visibly confused. her full cheeks reddened; even the tip of her nose showed signs of a tendency to blush. her trimmings rattled and scratched on the silk of her gown. "i should have said mr. barnstable," she corrected. "he was my husband once when i lived in chicago." the count, perfectly self-possessed, smiled and stirred his tea. "ees eet dat de amiable mrs. croydon she do have a deeferent husband leek a sailor mans een all de harbors?" he asked with much deference. mrs. neligage laughed softly, leaning back as if at a comedy. alice looked a little frightened. miss wentstile became each moment more stern. "mr. barnstable and i are to be remarried immediately," mrs. croydon observed with dignity. "it was for protecting me from the abuse of an anonymous novel that he offended you. you would have killed him for defending me." the count waved his teaspoon airily. "he have eensult me," he remarked, as if disposing of the whole subject. "then he was one great cowherd. he have epilogued me most abject." mrs. neligage elevated her eyebrows, and turned her glance to mrs. croydon, who stood, a much overdressed goddess of discord, still in the middle of the floor. "that is nonsense, mrs. croydon," she observed honeyedly. "mr. barnstable behaved with plenty of pluck. the apology was jack's doing, and wasn't at all to your--your _fiancé's_ discredit." miss wentstile turned with sudden severity to mrs. neligage. "louisa," she demanded, "do you know anything about this affair?" "of course," was the easy answer. "everybody in boston knew it but you." the count put his teacup on the mantelpiece. he had lost the jauntiness of his air, but he was still dignified. "eet was one _affaire d'honneur_," he said. "but why was i not told of this?" miss wentstile asked sharply. "you?" mrs. croydon retorted with excitement. "everybody supposed--" mrs. neligage rose quickly. "really," she said, interrupting the speaker, "i must have another cup of tea." the interruption stopped mrs. croydon's remark, and miss wentstile did not press for its conclusion. "count," the spinster asked, turning to that gentleman, who towered above her tall and lowering, "have you ever fought a duel?" the count shrugged his shoulders. "all shimbowski ees _hommes d'honneur_." she made him a frigid bow. "i have the honor to bid you good day," she said, with a manner so perfect that the absurdity of the situation vanished. the count drew himself up proudly. then he in his turn bowed profoundly. "you do eet too much to me honor," he said, with a dignity which was worthy of his family. "ladies, _votre serviteur_." he made his exit in a manner to be admired. mrs. croydon feigned to shrink aside as he passed her, but mrs. neligage looked at her with so open a laugh at this performance that confusion overcame the dame of bugles, and she moved forward disconcerted. she had not yet gained a seat, when miss wentstile faced her with all her most unrestrained fashion. "i shouldn't think, mrs. croydon, that you, with the stain of a divorce court on you, were in position to throw stones at count shimbowski. he has done nothing but follow the customs to which he's been brought up." "perhaps that's true of mrs. croydon too," murmured mrs. neligage to alice. "if you wanted to tell me," miss wentstile went on, "why didn't you tell me when he was not here? no wonder foreigners think we are barbarians when a nobleman is insulted like that." "i didn't mean to tell you," mrs. croydon stammered humbly. "it just came out." "why didn't you mean to tell me?" demanded miss wentstile, whose anger had evidently deprived her for the time being of all coolness. "why, i thought you were engaged to him!" blurted out mrs. croydon, fairly crimson from brow to chin. "engaged!" echoed miss wentstile, half breathless with indignation. mrs. neligage came to the rescue, cool and collected, entirely mistress of herself and of the situation. "really, mrs. croydon," she suggested, smiling, "don't you think that is bringing western brusqueness home to us in rather a startling way? we don't speak of engagements until they are announced, you know." "but miss wentstile told me the other day that she might announce one soon," persisted mrs. croydon, into whose flushed face had come a look of baffled obstinacy. mrs. neligage threw up her hands in a graceful little gesture. she played private theatricals infinitely better than mrs. croydon. there was in their art all the difference between the work of the most clumsy amateur and a polished professional. "there is nothing to do but to tell it," she said, as if appealing to miss wentstile and alice. "the engagement was that of miss endicott and my son. miss wentstile never for a moment thought of marrying the count. she knew from me that he gambled and was a famous duelist." alice put out her hand suddenly, and caught that of the widow. "oh, mrs. neligage!" she cried. the widow patted the girl's fingers. the face of miss wentstile was a study for a novelist who identifies art with psychology. "of course i ought not to have told, alice," mrs. neligage went on; "but i'm sure mrs. croydon is to be trusted. it isn't fair to your aunt that this nonsensical notion should be abroad that she meant to marry the count." mrs. croydon was evidently too bewildered to understand what had taken place. she awkwardly congratulated alice, apologized to miss wentstile for having made a scene, and somehow got herself out of the way. "what an absolutely incredible woman! with the talent both she and mr. barnstable show for kicking up rows in society," observed mrs. neligage, as soon as the caller had departed, "i should think they would prevent any city from being dull. i trust they will pass the time till their next divorce somewhere else than here." xxviii the unclouding of love miss wentstile sat grimly silent until they heard the outer door downstairs close behind the departing guest. then she straightened herself up. "i thank you, louisa," she said gravely; "you meant well, but how dared you?" "oh, i had to dare," returned mrs. neligage lightly. "i'm coming into the family, you know, and must help keep up its credit." "humph!" was the not entirely complimentary rejoinder. "if you cared for the credit of the family why didn't you tell me about the count sooner? is he really a fast man?" "he's been one of the best known sports in europe, my dear miss wentstile." "why didn't you tell me then?" "why should i? i wasn't engaged to harry then, and if the count wanted to reform and settle down, you wouldn't have had me thwart so virtuous an inclination, would you?" "i thought you wanted him to marry alice!" "i only wanted alice out of the way of jack," the widow confessed candidly. "why?" miss wentstile asked. the spinster was fond of frankness, and appreciated it when it came in her way. "because i hated to have jack poor, and i knew that if alice married him you'd never give them a cent to live on." alice, her face full of confusion and pain, moved uneasily, and put her hand on the arm of mrs. neligage once more, as if to stop her. the widow again patted the small hand reassuringly, but kept her eyes fixed full on those of the aunt. "you took a different turn to-day," the spinster observed suspiciously. "i had to save you to-day," was the ready answer; "and besides i can't do anything with jack. he's bound to marry alice whether you and i like it or not, and he's going to work in a bank in the most stupid manner." to hear the careless tone in which this was said nobody could have suspected that this speech was exactly the one which could most surely move the spinster, and that the astute widow must have been fully aware of it. "so you are sure i won't give alice anything if she marries jack, are you?" miss wentstile said. "well, alice, you are to marry jack neligage to save me from the gossips." "it seems to me," alice said, blushing very much, "that if i can't have any voice in the matter, jack might be considered." "oh, my dear," returned mrs. neligage quickly, "do you suppose that if i made an alliance for jack, he would be so undutiful as to object?" alice burst into a laugh, but miss wentstile, upon whom, in her ignorance of the engagement between jack and may, the point was lost, let it pass unheeded. "well," she said, "i think i'll surprise you for once, louisa. if jack will stick faithfully to his place in the bank for a year, i'll give him and alice the _dot_ i promised the count." mrs. neligage got away from miss wentstile's as soon as possible, leaving alice to settle things with her aunt, and taking a carriage at the next corner, drove to jack's lodgings. she burst into his room tumultuously, fortunately finding him at home, and alone. "oh, jack," she cried, "i didn't mean to, but i've engaged you again!" he regarded her with a quizzical smile. "matchmaking seems to be a vice which develops with your age," he observed. "i got out of the other scrape easily enough, and i won't deny that it was rather good fun. i hope that this isn't any worse." "but, jack, dear, this time it's alice!" "alice!" he exclaimed, jumping up quickly. "yes, it's alice, and you ought to be grateful to me, for she's going to have a fortune, too." with some incoherency, for she was less self-contained than usual, mrs. neligage told him what had happened. "see what it is to have a mother devoted to your interests," she concluded. "you'd never have brought miss wentstile to terms. you ought to adore me for this." "i do," he answered, laughing, but kissing her with genuine affection. "i hope you'll be as happy as alice and i shall be." "i only live for my child," returned she in gay mockery. "for your sake i'm going to be respectable for the rest of my life. what sacrifices we parents do make for our children!" * * * * * late that evening jack was taking his somewhat extended adieus of alice. "after all, jack," she said, "the whole thing has come out of the novel. we'll have a gorgeously bound copy of 'love in a cloud' always on the table to remind us--" "to remind us," he finished, taking the words out of her mouth with a laugh, "that our love has got out of the clouds." * * * * * the riverside press printed by h. o. houghton & co. cambridge, mass. u.s.a. * * * * * books by arlo bates. love in a cloud. a novel. the puritans. a novel. the philistines. a novel. the pagans. a novel. patty's perversities. a novel. prince vance. the story of a prince with a court in his box. by arlo bates and eleanor putnam. a lad's love. under the beech-tree. poems. talks on writing english. talks on the study of literature. houghton, mifflin & co. boston and new york. a few suggestions to mcgraw-hill authors a few suggestions to mcgraw-hill authors details of manuscript preparation, typography, proof-reading and other matters involved in the production of manuscripts and books mcgraw-hill book company, inc. new york: seventh avenue london: & bouverie st., e. c. copyright, , by the mcgraw-hill book company, inc. introduction the mcgraw-hill book company was formed on july , , by a consolidation of the book departments of the mcgraw publishing company and the hill publishing company, then separate publishers of engineering journals and books. for over twenty years, prior to the formation of the mcgraw-hill book company, the several journals controlled by mr. mcgraw and mr. hill (now published by the mcgraw-hill company, inc., a separate organization) had been producing books in their special fields; but the publication of technical books had not been brought to the high standard of technical journals. from the beginning we adopted the slogan, _better books in text and manufacture_. it was evident to the men who had brought the leading technical journals of the country from comparative insignificance to positions of influence that there was need of a new technical literature--a literature for classroom and reference which should adequately supplement their periodicals. our first efforts were largely in the field of engineering, but presently we set new goals for ourselves. by processes which seemed natural to us, we have extended our publishing not only into the fields of chemistry, physics, mathematics and english, with a view always of supplying better fundamental textbooks for students, but also into the fields of agriculture, business administration and economics. similarly our range of publishing has broadened from the somewhat restricted field of _applied science_, to include numerous works of high standard dealing with _pure science_. in all these fields the aim has been, not only to produce a better grade of text and reference book, but to put behind each book a selling organization so competent that the maximum market, both in this country and abroad, would be reached. without this the possibility of persuading important men, in all branches of science, to produce textbooks seemed futile, for the author's return must always be in proportion to the distribution. the association with the journals of the mcgraw-hill company, which we represent in all matters pertaining to the production of books, brings us into close contact with the widest range of engineering and industrial activities. the circulations of these journals include the leading engineers and executives of the world. the list follows: _american machinist_ _electric railway journal_ _electrical world_ _engineering and mining journal-press_ _coal age_ _engineering news-record_ _power_ _chemical and metallurgical engineering_ _electrical merchandising_ _industrial engineer_ _bus transportation_ _journal of electricity_ _ingenieria internacional_ from these journals we draw both editorial guidance and marketing power. they are the "natural resources" which simplified the problems of our early years and made possible our rapid development and growth, until today, by the application of the same editorial standards and marketing methods, in broader fields, we are able to offer to the author of technical books a highly developed machinery of publication and distribution. table of contents page i. uniformity and standards ii. preparing the manuscript typing--numbering the pages--copy for footnotes--copy for illustrations--subdividing the text--some details of typography--bibliographies--tables of contents-- indexes--some details of style--copyright infringements --shipping the manuscript. iii. illustrations line drawings--halftone illustrations--wax cuts--in general--the number of illustrations. iv. manufacturing the book sample galleys--galley proofs--page proofs--answering queries--proof-reading--author's corrections. v. when the book is published marketing a book--corrections and revisions--translations --prompt publication. a few suggestions to mcgraw-hill authors i uniformity and standards the purpose of these suggestions is fourfold: ( ) to assist our authors in preparing their manuscripts and in understanding the general process of publication. ( ) to lighten the burden of the editors, typesetters, and proof-readers in securing uniformity and adherence to high standards. ( ) to avoid complications and delays and--worst of all--the item of author's corrections. ( ) to obtain a standard of editorial details as uniformly high as that of the subject-matter of our books. let it be understood, first of all, that these are suggestions, not rules. although we endeavor to maintain high standards, we do not insist upon uniformity of style or consistency throughout the books in our widely diversified list. the editor of a periodical or the proceedings of a society properly insists upon uniformity, generally issues a style sheet to guide his contributors, and edits all manuscript to fixed standards. but since our books cover nearly all branches of science, we feel that absolute uniformity would accomplish no good purpose. throughout a single manuscript, however, in details of punctuation, spelling, abbreviation, compounding of words, side- and center-headings, notation, bibliographic references, etc., we do ask for the adoption of a conservative, well-recognized standard. even uniformity throughout a manuscript seems, curiously enough, most difficult to secure, although the lack of it leads to misunderstandings, delays and author's corrections, with their attendant avoidable expenses. we have used the phrase "conservative, well-recognized standard" advisedly. departure from such standards, either in spelling, punctuation, systems of notation or otherwise, is not advisable, for whatever convictions the author and the publisher may have it is quite certain that the majority of the readers of any given book will be conservative and more often annoyed than otherwise by any radical departures from common practice. without reference to our own views on simplified spelling, for example, we are confident that the radical simplified speller is neither surprised nor disturbed to find in a book what he would term old-fashioned spelling. the conservative speller, on the other hand, is shocked even at _tho_ and _thru_, and the book suffers accordingly. nevertheless, we have no quarrel with _sulfur_ in our manuscripts on chemical subjects, or with any other spelling which has been approved officially by the leading technical society in the particular field of the manuscript. to secure consistency in details throughout his manuscript it is best for an author to adopt as his guides, at the very beginning of his work, some standard unabridged dictionary and an authoritative writer's manual, and to stick to these alone until his book is on the market. by this method he will give his book not only a high standard but uniformity in details. ii preparing the manuscript the first requisite of good manuscript is obviously legibility. to this end we suggest the following: =typing.=--manuscript should be typewritten in black on one side of white paper, uniform in size and preferably - / × inches. a paper of reasonable thickness and toughness is desirable. thin, "manifold" paper should not be used for the publisher's copy. the same spacing should be used as far as practicable on each sheet to facilitate estimates as to the number of words in the complete manuscript. a margin of at least an inch should be left at top, bottom, and left-hand side. single spacing should be avoided. a carbon copy should invariably be made and retained by the author, both for his reference and to protect him against possible loss of the original. the original or ribbon copy should be sent to the publisher. =numbering the pages.=--sheets should be numbered consecutively in the upper right-hand corner from beginning to end and arranged in order of their numbers. interpolated pages may be marked a, b, and so forth, in accordance with the number of the preceding page. if any pages are removed from the manuscript for any reason, the preceding page should be double numbered, as, for example: & or - . =copy for footnotes.=--footnotes, if used, should be put into the body of the manuscript immediately following the reference and separated from the text by parallel lines above and below. the number referring to the footnote should be placed in the text and before the footnote. generally speaking, we prefer the use of arabic numerals for footnotes,[ ] which should be carried out consecutively through each chapter, when the footnotes are numerous, with a new series for each chapter. in cases where footnotes are relatively few, the numerals may be repeated without risk of confusion from page to page as the footnotes occur. [footnote : this footnote is to show the size of type ( point) which we generally use for footnotes. incidentally this booklet is set up in point, and in the general typographical style of our reference and textbooks, as distinguished from handbooks. the dimensions of the type page and the trimmed size of the page are those we usually adopt for the standard × -inch book.] =copy for illustrations.=--drawings and photographs, which are discussed more fully later, should not be inserted in the manuscript, because illustrations are sent to the engraver at the same time that the manuscript is sent to the printer. small drawings should be pasted on separate sheets of paper, one drawing to the sheet, but large drawings and photographs should not be treated in this manner. mounted photographs are entirely satisfactory, but unmounted photographs should not be pasted on sheets or mounted, except by an expert. all illustrations should be referred to by figure numbers in the text and numbered correspondingly for identification on the copy. we prefer to have illustrations numbered consecutively from the beginning to the end of the manuscript. =subdividing the text.=--in modern textbooks and scientific works the tendency is toward clearly marked subdivisions of the text. to this end center-headings, side-headings, and subheadings are constantly used. it is in general advisable that all manuscripts be prepared in this way. as far as is possible the divisions should be of reasonable length in order that the text may be broken up sharply into its subdivisions. in the case of textbooks intended for classroom use, we find that teachers generally prefer divisions of approximately equal size and not over a page in length. where the division is longer than a page, subdivisions with side-headings in italics may be used. bold-face headings may be indicated in the manuscript either by the letters =b. f.= or by underlining with a wavy line. italics may be indicated by underlining with a straight line. if bold-face capitals are required, mark =b. f. caps=. in the designation of headings and subheadings particular care should be taken to follow a consistent and easily understood plan. some of our editors strongly recommend that every chapter should begin with an uncaptioned introductory paragraph to avoid the bald-headed appearance that results if a chapter begins immediately with a bold-face caption. if a text is designed for one of the numerous series which we publish, the author should consult the editor of the series for his preference in this and similar matters. =some details of typography.=--for classroom use the majority of teachers seem to prefer to have the side-headings numbered consecutively throughout the book. tables and illustrations should be numbered consecutively throughout the book but in separate series. tables should have an appropriate caption above, and, generally speaking, illustrations should have a descriptive legend below. tables should be arranged, if possible, so that they can be printed across the page. when equations and formulas are numerous, and especially in books designed for classroom use, it is often advantageous to number them consecutively throughout the text. for chapters and tables roman numerals should be used; for all other series, arabic. excerpts from the works of other authors (when they are more than a phrase or sentence), problems, examples and test questions are generally set in smaller type than the body of the text itself. accordingly they should be clearly marked. =bibliographies.=--bibliographic references by footnotes serve in most books. bibliographies of greater extent should be arranged alphabetically at the end of each chapter of the book, or numbered serially and referred to by numbers in the text. the custom is to print the titles of books in roman and the titles of periodicals in italics. abbreviations should conform to the well-established style sheets of technical societies. we recommend particularly the abbreviations of: { issued by the american society of engineering index { mechanical engineers, west th { street, new york. { issued by the american chemical chemical abstracts { society, g street, n. w., { washington, d. c. { issued by the board of control of { botanical abstracts, dr. donald botanical abstracts { reddick, business manager, cornell { university, ithaca, n. y. { issued by the zoological society of the zoological record { london, regent's park, london. the international catalogue { issued by the royal society of of scientific literature { london. the extent of the bibliography will vary, of course, with the nature of the subject and the treatment. the tendency to-day appears to be toward rather excessive bibliographies, which do not seem to us generally to be justified. for a simple rule, we recommend "bibliographies of easily accessible sources." =tables of contents.=--detailed tables of contents to run in the front of the book serve a useful purpose. they should, however, be kept down to reasonable limits. there are three forms of contents used in our books: ( ) a simple list of chapter headings. in many cases this is sufficient. ( ) chapter headings with all articles or sub-headings given underneath. these may either be listed or "run in." with a good index, such a full table of contents seems hardly to serve a useful purpose. ( ) the chapter headings with the outstanding sub-headings listed or "run in" underneath. when these headings are selected carefully they give a quick but comprehensive picture of the contents. lists of illustrations are nowadays generally regarded as unnecessary in a technical book, and should be prepared only for the guidance of the author and the publisher. =indexes.=--a good subject index is necessary in all technical works. a widely-read periodical in new york at one time published regularly the following notice of subject books which were submitted to it for review and found to be without indexes: the publisher and the author did not think well enough of this book to supply it with a suitable index. we feel, therefore, that it is hardly worthy of a review in our columns. a good index is one which enables the reader or student to locate readily the subject or item which he seeks. it is usually best for an author to make his own index. a professional indexer is inclined to overload an index; the author, with his knowledge of the subject and a little study, will generally produce a better working index. our usual style of index is two columns to the page, set in -point type, with not more than two indentions. the following example shows the use of the single and double indentions: index a acetylene starters, air cooling, valve, auxiliary, dashpot, alcohol, heating value, use in radiator, alignment of wheels, alternating current generator, simple, ammeter, method of connecting, operation of, ampere, definition of, anti-friction bearings, armature type magneto, arm, torque, atwater-kent ignition systems, , b battery, effect of overcharging, overfilling, undercharging, freezing temperature of, ignition systems, care of, timing, jars and covers, markings, necessity of pure water in, operation of, rundown, causes, sediment, specific gravity, change in, sulphation, testing with hydrometer, , with voltmeter, voltage, serious objection is properly made to numerous page references under a single heading. for example, in a book on petroleum, references to every page on which the word _petroleum_ appears would obviously be valueless. the solution lies in concise qualifications of the main titles to reduce to the minimum the actual number of page references opposite each heading. in the preparation of an index the use of × -inch cards, or paper of sufficient weight to be handled easily and of similar dimensions, is advisable. this enables the author to arrange his subject matter alphabetically and assemble his duplicate references easily. the single and double indentions should be marked on these cards, and the guide words stricken out when indentions are indicated. for single indentions use this mark [sq]. for double indentions use [sq][sq]. if, after the cards are so arranged and marked, it is possible for the author to have the index typewritten in manuscript form, the risk of mixing and loss of cards is minimized and the work of the printer is facilitated. =some details of style.=--because we do not seek uniformity throughout our entire list of books but ask only for uniformity within a manuscript itself, with adherence to any conservative and well-recognized standard, we do not issue a style sheet. the periodicals with which we are associated (the publications of the mcgraw-hill company, inc., tenth avenue and th street, new york) have a sheet which is excellent, and which may well serve as a guide to the author who is undertaking the preparation of a manuscript. or the author may use as his guide any good writer's manual. at the risk of monotonous repetition, however, we urge once more the importance of uniformity throughout the manuscript itself. to this end, we suggest the following: _spelling._--follow any one of the standard and well-recognized dictionaries, but follow it consistently. we encounter difficulties especially in the matter of hyphenated words; in using hyphens follow the dictionary. _abbreviations._--again, any well-recognized standard will satisfy us. dictionaries do not, in general, cover the abbreviations of scientific words to a satisfactory extent. we would suggest, therefore, that the author secure the style sheet of one of the leading technical societies in the field in which he works. for chemistry american chemical society for civil engineering american society of civil engineers for electrical engineering american institute of electrical engineers for mechanical engineering american society of mechanical engineers for mining and metallurgy american institute of mining and metallurgical engineers for economics and business american economic association all of these technical societies have not only worked out their style sheets with care, but they have, in general, accustomed their numerous members to the details of these style sheets. =copyright infringements.=--all publishers have noted in recent years a great increase in the number of copyright infringement cases. many of these appear to spring from the habit of first preparing lecture notes, which are compiled or dictated from various sources without thought of publication. by the time the plan to produce a book matures, the source of the original material is often entirely forgotten. no question is more common in the technical publishing field than "how far can i make excerpts, with credit but without permission, from the writings of other authors?" to this question no definite and entirely satisfactory answer can be given. certainly, where illustrations, tables, or important abstracts are to be made, the author should ask permission of the publisher or author from whose work he wishes to quote. in addition he should take special pains to see that full credit is given in the form required by the author or publisher from whom he has secured permission. the copyright law and the penalties for infringement of copyright are drastic, but the decisions which have been rendered in cases that have gone to trial do not furnish any particularly safe guide. in our experience the safest guide is a simple rule of courtesy. neither the author nor the publisher of a work will refuse any reasonable request, though he may greatly resent borrowing without the courtesy of a request. it is safer, therefore, to obtain permission from author or publisher before borrowing from another work. =shipping the manuscript.=--manuscript should invariably be shipped flat, not folded or rolled. manuscript and drawings should be sent together and not in instalments. except in rare instances, we do not undertake piecemeal manufacture of a book. in our experience such publication methods save little or no time and more often result in confusion and expense. manuscript, before it has been set up in type, should be shipped by express with a suitable valuation placed thereon. after the manuscript has been set up in type, the manuscript and proof may best be sent by parcel post, special delivery. iii illustrations in technical work such as ours the illustrations are of two classes: ( ) line drawings; ( ) photographic or halftone illustrations. =line drawings.=--copy for line drawings should be made two to three times the dimensions of the completed illustration. the weight of line, and especially the lettering, should be carefully worked out to give desired results. the following illustrations, taken from "engineering drawing," by thomas e. french, will serve as a guide to the draftsman preparing these illustrations. we suggest, however, that when the completed copy for a few characteristic illustrations is ready, the author send the samples to us in order that we may determine their suitability or even, if desirable, reproduce the samples in order that the author may examine the results with us. when difficulty is encountered in securing suitable lettering, which will give a finished appearance to the illustrations, we are willing to accept the drawings with the lettering penciled in. we, in turn, engage draftsmen, who are experienced in lettering for reproduction, to finish the work. as this often leads to errors, however, we prefer the completed drawings ready for reproduction. line drawings from periodicals, catalogues and other publications can be reproduced direct without material reduction in size, when the copy is suitable for the book, and, of course, when permission to reproduce has been secured by the author. =halftone illustrations.=--halftone illustrations can be made satisfactorily only from photographs or wash drawings. photographs on a high-finish or glossy paper produce the best results. we cannot produce good results by making a halftone from a halftone print. a halftone engraving is photographed through a screen, and when we undertake to reproduce a halftone from a halftone print we throw one screen upon the other. in rare cases passable results can be obtained in this way, but such copy should be used most sparingly. [illustration: drawing for one-half reduction.] [illustration: one-half reduction.] if photographs are unmounted, they should not be mounted or pasted on sheets of paper. smoothly mounted photographs present no difficulties to the engraver. numbers, letters or marks should not be placed on the face of photographic prints or wash drawings. if numbers or letters are called for, they should be indicated in pencil at the proper point on the back of unmounted prints. this can be done easily by holding the print against a window facing a strong light. in the case of mounted photographs, a fly leaf of thin paper pasted on the back of the photograph at the top and folded over the face of the photograph, can be used for the numbers or letters. in both cases the engraver adds the numbers or letters on the print in the manner best suited to reproduction. [illustration: drawing for two-thirds reduction.] [illustration: two-thirds reduction.] manufacturers' cuts can sometimes be used when the nature of the text calls for them. if possible the manufacturer should be asked to supply the original photograph or drawing. if this is not available, then the original cut--not an electrotype--should be secured. electrotypes can often be used, but the results are not of the standard which we like to maintain. =wax cuts.=--formerly many textbooks were illustrated by engravings made by the wax process. this is the process ordinarily used for the production of maps. the cost of these engravings has risen, however, to a point which makes them now practically out of the question for the average book. they may be used in special cases. their chief advantage is that they can be made from rough pen or pencil sketches and do not call either for finished lines or careful lettering. =in general.=--wherever possible illustrations to occupy a full page should stand vertically on the page. this is, we think, obviously more satisfactory to the user of the book. folded plates and charts should be avoided as far as possible, not only because they involve an unreasonable expense, but because american readers, at least, do not like them. furthermore any considerable number of inserted charts weakens the binding of the book. color plates and maps in color are prohibitively expensive for most technical books, but systems of shading and cross-hatching can be employed as a substitute for colors in many forms of illustration. =the number of illustrations.=--the cost of engravings of all types has risen out of all proportion to the costs of other details of book manufacture, and there is no present prospect of a reduction in the scale of prices. this proves to be especially burdensome to the publishers of technical and scientific books where the texts generally contain a large number of illustrations. accordingly we ask authors to consider carefully the possibilities of reducing the number of illustrations. in books of the character of ours illustrations are essential, and wherever they aid the reader in grasping the subject or are essential to the understanding of the subject, they cannot be eliminated. but we do not believe in illustrations that are merely "pictures" and are not essential to the understanding of the text. wherever they can be dispensed with, without injury to the text, they should be eliminated in order that the retail price of the book may be kept within reasonable limits. iv manufacturing the book =sample galleys.=--when the manuscript has been prepared in our offices for the printer, and the time has come to undertake the manufacture of the book, we ask the printer, first, to set a few pages of the manuscript and submit them to us in galley proofs. these are in turn submitted to the author in order that he may study the typography and inform us if we have in any way misunderstood his manuscript and the marks on it. this step is, of course, dispensed with if a definite agreement has been reached in advance as to the typographical details of the book. when the author has looked over these first galleys, not with the idea of proof-reading but of determining upon the style, we instruct the printer to proceed with the typesetting. =galley proofs.=--these proofs in duplicate (one set is for the author's files) are first submitted to the author, and accompanying these is a cut dummy which shows the illustrations reproduced as they will appear in the book. galley proofs should be read with extreme care, and wherever possible the author should call in some associate or assistant to read them as well, for it is our experience that the author who has spent a great deal of time in the preparation of a manuscript often reads with his memory rather than his eyes and passes the most obvious errors. when the author returns the galleys with his corrections marked thereon, he should at the same time return the original manuscript. at this time also figure numbers and captions should be added to the illustrations, and an indication should be made by number in the margin of the galleys of the approximate location of the illustrations. illustrations are inserted in the pages by the printer as near the point of reference as the limitations of make-up will permit. if, as happens in rare cases, an illustration must be inserted in a given paragraph, this should be clearly indicated on the galley proof. =page proofs.=--the printer then proceeds to make the book up into pages, and duplicate page proofs are forwarded to the author. these again should be read carefully to make sure that all corrections which were indicated in the galleys have been properly made, and returned to us for final casting into plates. changes, and additions other than typographical corrections, which involve the overrunning and rearranging of lines or pages, often mean the remake-up of many pages of type and an expense that is usually out of all proportion to the good accomplished. corrections and changes should, therefore, always be made in the galley proofs, to avoid the difficult question of author's corrections, which is discussed on page . the duplicate set of page proofs should be retained by the author for use in preparing his index, in order that the copy for the index may be forwarded as soon after the final shipment of page proofs as possible. =answering queries.=--frequently the proof-readers query certain points in the manuscript on the galley or page proofs. it is important that the author note these queries in all cases and indicate his decision regarding the questions so raised. =proof-reading.=--in technical books especially, good proof-reading is essential. we use every effort to submit proofs which follow closely the original copy, but the experienced author knows that he himself cannot exercise too much care in proof-reading. the amount of damage which has been done to the reputation and sales of many otherwise excellent technical books, by carelessness in proof-reading, would astound the inexperienced author. one set of galley and one set of page proofs which the author receives are marked with the printer's corrections, generally in green or red ink. the set containing the printer's marks should be returned with the author's corrections added. the duplicate set the author should keep for his own files. for the guidance of those who are inexperienced in proof-reading, we give herewith a reproduction of a sheet showing the ordinary proof-reading marks. it is helpful if the author follows this general system in marking his proofs. it is essential that the corrections be clearly marked. proofreader's marks [symbol] insert the letter, word or punctuation mark indicated. [symbol] insert or substitute a period at the place indicated. [symbol] insert an apostrophe. [symbol] insert quotation marks. [symbol] insert a hyphen. [symbol] make a space at the point indicated. [symbol] close up or join separated letters or words. [symbol] delete or take out. [l.c.] change from capital to small letter. [cap.] change to capital letter. [s.c.] change to small caps. [ital.] change to italics. [rom.] change to roman type. [w.f.] wrong font letter. [tr] transpose. [symbol] words or letters inclosed by line should change places. [¶] paragraph here. [no ¶] no paragraph here. [stet or ... ] restore word or sentence mistakenly marked out. [? or qy.] is this right? [x] broken letter. [symbol] move to left. [symbol] move to right. [symbol] push down space. in preparing copy for the printer the writer should underline: _one line_, words to be put in italics. _two lines_, words to be put in small caps. _three lines_, words to be put in large caps. _wave line_ (~~~~~~), words to be put in heavy face type. [illustration: a corrected proof-sheet] =author's corrections.=--no problem in the publishing of technical books gives the publisher and the author more trouble than the question of author's corrections. the term "author's corrections" covers, technically, changes made in content, arrangement or typographical style, or additions to the manuscript, after the type has been set. the publisher, to protect himself against the author who practically rewrites his manuscript after it has been set up in type, usually provides in his contract that corrections in excess of a certain percentage of the cost of composition shall be charged to and paid for by the author. the printer makes a careful distinction between printer's corrections and author's corrections. corrections marked in galley and page proofs of a book where the printer has not followed copy are printer's corrections. author's corrections are changes and additions made in the proof. obviously, where these changes make a distinct improvement in the text--that is, a better book--the publisher takes a sympathetic attitude; but when the item of author's corrections runs to a total of twenty-five or fifty per cent or more of the cost of setting up the book, there is clear indication that the author did not complete his book in the manuscript but in the proof. for a general rule it should be kept in mind that corrections in the galley proofs cost much less than corrections in the page proofs where remake-up of pages involving a large expense may result from the addition of a single line, or even a few words. but it is most important of all for the author to realize that every correction made after the manuscript has been set up in type is time-consuming and expensive, and that such delay and expense are reduced to a minimum when the author submits a clean, carefully prepared manuscript which embodies his final judgment of content and style. v when the book is published within a short period after the author returns the proofs of the index, the book is ready for publication. the author's work is then practically done. immediately upon the arrival of the bound books from the bindery, the publisher places the work upon the market, copyrights it in this country and abroad, and undertakes campaigns for its distribution. this section of the _suggestions_ is intended to show the author how he can help in this work and to answer certain questions which are asked constantly. =marketing a book.=--we take pride in the thoroughness with which we seek the market for all books bearing our imprint. the spirit of the agreement which we make with the author is that each book is a separate business venture into which we have entered as a partner of the author. in marketing his book the author can be of material assistance to us. he knows the subject better than we can ever know it, and he knows the type of man to which he intends his book to appeal. for these reasons we always welcome the assistance and suggestions of the author. at the time when the author begins to receive page proofs of the book, we are outlining our campaign for its distribution. at that time we like to receive from the author, first, a brief but exact definition of the scope and purpose of the book. this we use, not for our advertising, but as the basis of our advertising. second, we find distinctly helpful a list of points to emphasize in our circular and periodical advertising, and for such a list we look to the author. a cut-and-dried table of contents often fails to give as good a picture of a book as do a few well-selected points. at the same time the author's suggestions of special periodicals to which copies should be sent for review, and of special lists which may well be circularized, will also be helpful. these we generally know about, but sometimes we overlook obvious points of attack in our campaigns. =corrections and revisions.=--in practically every instance our books are printed from electrotype plates. consequently the first printings are rarely large, because we are able to produce further copies, from our electrotype plates, as needed. before a book is reprinted the author is given an opportunity to send in corrections of typographical and other errors which have escaped notice in the earlier printing or printings. such reprints, however, are not called new editions nor is the title page date of the book changed. we follow strictly the policy of designating as new editions only books which have been more or less thoroughly revised, and the title page date of one of our books is an indication of the date of the text--not of the reprint. when, in the author's opinion or our own, the text requires revision, we discuss the details with the author and arrange for as complete a revision as the condition of the text calls for. since the printings of our books are rarely large, we are able to arrange for the production of a new edition in normal cases as soon as the author feels that it is required and can complete his portion of the work. =translations.=--we arrange, where possible, for translations of books into foreign languages, dividing the proceeds with the author. the underlying theory of this division is that, with the publication of a translation, both the author and the publisher suffer from the loss of sales of the edition in english. the foreign publisher generally has to pay to his translator about the royalties usually paid to an author, and accordingly the amount which can be charged to a foreign publisher for rights of translation is, except in rare cases, small. translations must be regarded as a by-product. our attempts to market books in foreign languages from new york, or from one of our foreign agencies, have not been encouraging. accordingly, the first question, when we are endeavoring to arrange for a translation, is for us to find a publisher in the country selected who will undertake the work of securing a translator and publishing the book. when a translator offers his services, we find it necessary to ask him first to interest a publisher in his own country in the venture. =prompt publication.=--from the standpoint of both the author and the publisher it is desirable that a book should be put on the market as soon as possible after the manuscript is completed. from the moment the publisher undertakes to manufacture a book he has an investment which grows rapidly and yields nothing until the sales of the book begin. the production of technical books is delayed, generally, by one of the following causes: ( ) the author wishes to submit his material to his associates or to specialists in the field. except for purposes of proof-reading such submission should be made in manuscript. ( ) the author fails to return his proofs and manuscript copy promptly. the prompt reading and return of proofs is of the greatest importance. ( ) the copy for the index does not follow closely upon the return of the final batch of page proofs. the printer, the engraver, the paper manufacturer, the binder or the publisher may also interfere with prompt publication; but if the author's end of the work is handled systematically and promptly, we are generally able to control the manufacturing details. * * * * * transcriber's note _ _ indicates italic script; = = indicates bold script; [sq] indicates a hollow square. sundry missing or damaged punctuation has been repaired. page , etc.: 'sub-headings', and 'subheadings' both appear in this book, as do 'proof-reader' and 'proofreader', and some other instances of hyphenated and non-hyphenated words. as it is a book of suggestions on layout and style from a respected publishing house, it can be assumed they knew what they intended, so both hyphenated and non-hyphenated words have been retained. page : 'instalments'. from webster's dictionary, edition (http: //www. bibliomania.com/ / / /frameset.html): installment (in*stall"ment) n. [written also instalment.] 'instalments' has therefore been retained. the ultimate salient by nelson s. bond brian o'shea, man of the future, here is your story. read it carefully, soldier yet unborn, for upon it,--and upon you--will one day rest the fate of all mankind. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] _he glanced at me slowly, and a bit sadly, i thought. "i'm sorry, clinton," he said, "but that won't do. it won't do at all. it will have to be written. you see--you won't be here then...."_ i thought at first he was the census-snoop, returning to poke his proboscis into whatever few stray facts he might have overlooked the first time. my wife was out, and when i saw him coming up the walk, that bulky folder under his arm, i answered the door myself--something i seldom do--sensing a sort of reluctant duty toward the minions of uncle sam. * * * * * he was a neat and quiet person. one of those drab, utterly commonplace men who defy description. neither young nor old, tall nor short, stout nor slender. he had only one outstanding characteristic. an eager intensity, a _piercingness_ of gaze that made you feel, somehow, as if his ice-blue eyes stared ever into strange and fathomless depths. he said, "mr. clinton?" and i nodded. "_eben_ clinton?" he asked. then, a trifle breathlessly i thought, "mr. clinton, i have here something that i know will prove of the greatest interest to you--" i got it then. i shook my head. "sorry, pal. but we don't need some." i started to close the door. "i--i beg your pardon?" he stammered. "some?" "shoelaces," i told him firmly, "patent can-openers or fancy soaps. weather-vanes, life insurance or magazines." i grinned at him. "i don't _read_ the damned things, buddy, i just write for them." and again i tried to do things to the door. but he beat me to it. there was apology in the way he shrugged his way into the house, but determination in his eyes. "i know," he said. "that is, i _didn't_ know until i read this, but--" he touched the brown envelope, concluded lamely, "it--it's a manuscript--" well, that's one of the headaches of being a story-teller. strange things creep out of the cracks and crevices--most of them bringing with them the great american novel. it was spring in roanoke, and spring fever had claimed me as a victim. i didn't feel like working, anyway. no, not even in my garden. especially in the turnip patch. hank cleaver isn't the only guy who has trouble with his turnips. i sighed and led the way into my work-room. i said, "okay, friend. let's have a look at the masterpiece...." his first words, after we had settled into comfortable chairs, made me feel like a dope. i suppose i'm a sort of stuffed shirt, anyway, suffering from a bad case of expansion of the hatband. and i'd been treating my visitor as if he were some peculiar type of bipedal worm. it took all the wind out of my sails when he said, by way of preamble, "if i may introduce myself, mr. clinton, i'm dr. edgar winslow of the psychology department of--" he mentioned one of our oldest and most influential southern universities. i said, "omigawd!" and broke into an orgy of apologies. but he didn't seem to be listening to me; he was preoccupied with his own explanation. "i came to you," he said, "because i understand you write stories of--er--pseudo-science?" i winced. "science-_fiction_," i corrected him. "there's quite a difference, you know." "is there?" he frowned. "oh, yes. i see. please forgive me. well, clinton--" the professorial stamp was upon him; quite unconsciously he addressed me as if i were one of his students. "well, clinton, i came to ask a favor of you. i want you to transmit a message to a certain man. i want you to write the message in such a form that it will not be lost--in the form of a fictional narrative." it takes all kinds to make a world. i gazed at him thoughtfully. i said, "don't look now, but isn't that doing it the hard way? i'll be glad to help you out. but putting a simple message into story form is--well, why not just let me _tell_ the guy? by word of mouth?" "i'm afraid," he said soberly, "that is impossible. you see, the person to whom this message must go will not be born until the year ." "nineteen--!" it worked. it threw me off balance for a minute. then came the dawn. it _was_ a gag, after all. my pal ross being funny from out chicago way, maybe? or palmer, deserting tark long enough to joyride me over the well-known hurdles? i chuckled. i said, "that's all right, professor. i'm young; i can wait. just tell me the name of this unsprouted seedling, and i'll stick around till he gets old enough to talk to. only the good die young; i expect to live to a ripe old age." he glanced at me slowly, and a bit sadly, i thought. "i'm sorry, clinton," he said, "but that won't do. it won't do at all. it will have to be written. you see--you won't be here then...." * * * * * you know, it should have been funny. uproariously, screamingly funny. i should have laughed my crazy head off, given my obviously screwy visitor a smoke and a drink and a clap on the back and said, "okay, pal. you win the marbles. come clean, now. who put you up to this crystal ball stuff? what's the payoff?" but i didn't, because somehow it wasn't funny after all. there was a deadly seriousness to my visitor's manner; the knuckles of his hands were white upon his knees, his icy blue eyes burned with a tortured regret that was like a dash of water to my mirth. "i'm sorry, clinton," he said. "i'm really dreadfully sorry." i lit a cigarette carefully. in as even a voice as i could muster, i said, "perhaps you'd like to tell me more? perhaps you'd better start from the beginning?" "yes," he said. "yes, i think that would be best." he fingered the thick brown envelope nervously. "the story begins," he said, "and ends--with this manuscript...." * * * * * "as i have already told you," said dr. winslow, "my profession is teaching. psychology is my field. recently i have given much of my time to research into the lesser-known faculties of the human mind. experimental psychical research such as that investigated by prof. j. b. rhine of duke. you are undoubtedly familiar with his work?" "extra-sensory perception?" i nodded. "yes. most fascinating. the results are far from satisfactory, though. and some of his conclusions--" "you make a common error," said my visitor gravely. "dr. rhine has not assumed to draw any conclusions--as yet. he offers only a few, and completely logical, presumptions. "dr. rhine's studies to date, however, have been in the field of extra-sensory perception only. there are other fields of psychical research quite as untouched, and, i have reason to believe, even more important and--fruitful. "it is in one of these companion fields that i have been laboring. i have been investigating the phenomenon you may know as 'telaesthesia.'" "you mean," i asked, "telepathy?" "there is a difference between the two. telepathy, as defined by myers in , is 'the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense.' it implies a deliberate, recognized contact between two minds existent at one time. "telaesthesia is a more complex meeting of entities. if a, let us say, reaches out and helps himself to the contents of b's mind _without_ the knowledge or assistance of b, that process will be called 'telaesthesia.' unlike telepathy, it knows no barriers of time. there are hundreds of recorded case histories from which we learn of men of our time who have established telaesthetic contact with former forgotten eras. "and of days to come, as well!" here winslow's eyes literally gripped me. "but never, until now, has anyone succeeded in gaining more than a fleeting glimpse into the time stream of the future. never before has a man established a contact so deep, so strong, that he could read not one sentence or one paragraph of that which is to be--but an entire chapter, decades long...!" * * * * * it was spring in roanoke. outside, warm april sunshine poured down luxuriant gold upon the faint, green buds. my place, _sans sou_, lies in a quiet fold between two rolling hills. there was nothing to disturb that quiet now save the boastful warble of a redbird, "purty! purty!" and the petulant complaint of a chipmunk in the sycamore. the sky was a pale, soft blue, cloudless and serene. there were no clouds, and even the delicate fronds of the weeping willow drooped motionless. so it could not have been a storm i heard. yet as he spoke, a dark shadow seemed to scud across the sky, veiling the sunlight, and the gods made portent in the swell of distant thunder. i felt the short hairs stiffen on my neck, and despite the warmth i shivered. i said, and why i spoke in a whisper i cannot tell, "never before ... until ... _now_?" "until now!" he repeated. and suddenly his fingers were swift with eagerness, he fumbled with the flap of the envelope while words raced from his lips. "several months ago i began to experiment with automatic writing, one of the means by which telaesthetic contact is authenticated. "at first the results were--as might be expected--faulty. from the autohypnotic syncopes into which i was able to project myself, i woke to find nothing on the sheets before me but meaningless scribbles. "and then, suddenly, i woke one day to find that in my period of subliminal usurpation i had achieved a definite result. i--or someone--had written four full pages. the first four pages of this manuscript!" here he handed the manuscript to me. i had time to notice that the writing was full-bodied, flowing. then dr. winslow's words claimed my attention again. "that was but the beginning. once having established contact, it was as though i became the _alter ego_ of this mysterious correspondent. from that time on my experiments were graced with success. whenever i resumed contact, pages were added to the manuscript. by the periodicity of these, i am led to believe that brian o'shea is a diarist, and that through some inexplicable phenomenon, it is given to me to be able to set down, telaesthetically, the very words he writes in his diary--" "you said," i interrupted, "brian--?" "o'shea," nodded winslow. "brian o'shea. a soldier in the army of the americas, clinton--in the year a.d.! his diary is a history of the things to come!" * * * * * what i would have said then, i do not know. maybe i would have said something bitingly scurrilous--which i most certainly would have regretted later. or perhaps, as is most likely, i was momentarily stunned into speechlessness. but i was spared the necessity of speaking. dr. winslow had risen; eyes glowing strangely, he touched my shoulder. "i am going to leave you now, so you may read this manuscript in peace. when you have finished, you will understand why i came, and know that which must be done. "you will find that the manuscript begins abruptly at the moment when first i 'contacted' o'shea. it ends with equal abruptness. there are fragments missing; these may be filled in or rounded out as you consider necessary for the purpose of story-telling. i have made a few slight changes in spelling. whether o'shea was--or should i say 'will be?'--a poor scholar, i do not know. the spelling of some words may have changed over a period of trouble-swept decades.... "but whatever surprises lie in store for you, whatever conclusions you draw from the manuscript you are about to read, i beg of you that you play the game of caution. if you end by doubting o'shea's story, _still_ you must convey to him the message the manuscript demands. it is the only way. we must take no chances. i will leave my address--" here he scribbled a few words on his card; i noted subconsciously that his own handwriting was tiny, crabbed, angular. "when you have finished reading, get in touch with me. no, don't get up!" for a long moment i stared after him. is there any way i can tell you how i felt? i, who have written fantasies woven of thin air, now thus to be suddenly thrust into a fantasy beyond my own wildest imaginings? even more important, is there a way i can make you believe that this is not merely another amusing tale, to be read today and forgotten soon? the structure of this narrative is mine. i supplied the story form. but is there any way i can convince you that the words which follow are not my own? _i did not write this story!_ it is the story of a man who is not yet born, who will not live these happenings for twenty years. here is the story of brian o'shea, soldier.... ii --stumbled and pitched to his knees. i ran to his side and would have carried him, but he shook me off. "it's too late, o'shea," he said. "my number's up. take over. and--" he hiccoughed convulsively and his lips drooled red. "and for lord's sake, brian, get the men out of this trap!" his eyes glazed, then, and his head dropped forward to his chest. someone tugged at my shoulder. it was ronnie st. cloud; he was screaming, above the splatter of shrapnel, "the hills, o'shea! they've cut us off from the river. the hills are our only way out!" danny wilson was beside him, and knudsen, and a few more. about us milled a shrieking, terrified throng; it was impossible to tell soldier from civilian. our uniforms were anything but uniform. we wore whatever serviceable garments we could salvage. i still had--though i suppose it was unrecognizable beneath a layer of caked sweat and mud--an old khaki campaign shirt, but my breeches were a corduroy pair i had found in a demolished farm house near sistersville. st. cloud wore the horizon-blue jacket of a _poilu_ beside whom he had fought in belgium. knudsen looked least military of all in whipcord riding breeches commandeered from the tack rooms of the greenbriar inn at white sulphur. st. cloud was right, of course; we might have known from the beginning we couldn't hold huntington. it was open to the west, and that entire sector, from chicago to detroit and spearheading southward to akron, cincinnati, zanesville, was occupied by von schuler's death's head brigade. but captain elmon, who had whipped our tiny company into some semblance of order after the debacle at pittsburgh and had brought us safely down the river through parkersburg and gallipolis, had believed we might be able to defend this west virginia river town until reinforcements could reach us from the fort knox garrison. * * * * * there was a school here, a marshall college, with a layout ideal for our purposes. the buildings were more than a hundred years old, sturdily built; there were dormitories, kitchens, private power plants for heat and light. the campus was encircled by a waist-high brick wall which, sandbagged, made a perfect first-line defense against infantry. the rugged, mountainous terrain made it impossible for the toties to bring up mechanized units. nor could they bring pressure to bear from the ohio river which, here, was not only shallow but bedded with rubble from the locks and dams we had blown up. but--the old, old story. they got us from the air. their messerschmitts and junkers descended on us like a host of locusts, bombed the town ruthlessly; small pursuit planes strafed the fleeing populace with merciless persistence. we couldn't do anything about that, of course. captain elmon told me once--he saw volunteer service in sweden before our country got into it--that in the early days of the war, aircraft confined its operations to military objectives. but i laughed; i knew he was just leading me on. he was a great one for joking, was the captain, even in the darkest hour. now elmon lay dead at my feet; his final command had been that i take over. get the men out of this trap. there was no time to waste in bootless grieving. already the sharp bite of sidearms augmented the scream of shellfire ... which meant the toties were up to their old trick of parachuting an army of occupation into the beleaguered town. i shouted swift orders to the others, bade them pass the word around to "take to the hills." there were viaducts under the railroad at th and th streets; we used these as our ports of egress. it wasn't a matter of minutes. we gave ground slowly, fighting off the enemy advance from street to street, alley to alley, house to house. by the old football stadium, now an ammunition dump, i found bruce macgregor, the canadian, and the roly-poly hollander, rudy van huys. they had impressed the services of a dozen scared civilians, were loading trucks, vans, anything with our meager store of ammunition. macgregor glanced at me sharply. "where's the old man, o'shea?" "dead," i told him. "we're on our own. mac, do you think you can handle this job alone?" "why?" "i want van huys to forage. we're retreating to the hills. use the th street underpass, cut south to the big sandy, then west at louisa. rudy, get all the food-stuffs you can lay hands on. we're heading for hungry country." they grunted understanding and i went on. they were two good men. the chubby dutchman could smell out provisions like a beagle. our men wouldn't starve immediately, anyway. that moment's delay was the only thing that saved my life. i was but a half block away from the underpass when a totie bomber spotted the stream of refugees flooding out of the city through that viaduct. my ears sang to the screaming whine of his power dive, concussion threw me to the pavement as he loosed his entire rack full of bombs into the heart of the fleeing throng. they never had a chance. those who did not die instantly in the explosion were buried a split-second later in the tons of twisted steel and concrete that cascaded down upon them. there was one moment of dreadful cacaphony, hoarse screams of fear mingling with the thunderous roar of the explosion--then a dull, unearthly silence, punctuated only by the muted whimper of a few charred bodies that could not die and the grating slither of broken masonry filling the chinks of the funereal mound. * * * * * i rose, shaken, nauseated. others had come up behind me; among them was devereaux. there were tears in the young frenchman's eyes. he lifted his head blindly toward the sky, shook an impotent fist. "_les sales cochons!_ will it never end, o'shea, the triumph of these devils? are honor and mercy dead? is god dead? my country ... all of europe ... now yours...." "they haven't taken america," i told him savagely, "yet! come on. we're leaving town through the th street viaduct. is that you, ronnie? what's the news?" "they've consolidated position along fifth avenue, thrown a defense line from four pole creek to the river, infantry advancing north along the river bank to the college. thompson and a foray squad are trapped in the first national, no use trying to save them. we blew the toties' brains out, though." st. cloud grinned ghoulishly. "we had city hall plaza groundmined. they chose that spot to set up general headquarters." "where's frazier?" "dead. blue cross." "janowsky?" "same thing." "wilson?" "he's all right. or was. he went back toward the college. said something about having an ace up his sleeve, whatever that means." i didn't tell him. i didn't have to, for at that moment danny came racing toward us. he waved his hand at me in a sort of vague salute or greeting, yelled, "if you're ready to get goin', _git_! there'll never be a better time." "why?" "because the toties are goin' to have their hands full in a minute. with something too hot to handle. i just happened to remember that college we were bunked in had its own heating plant. a natural gas pipe-line. since it was the toties' objective, i thought maybe i'd warm house before they got there. hold your hats, folks! there she goes!" there came a sudden, terrific blast of sound. even at that distance we felt the shuddering repercussion, felt a breath of superheated air fan our cheeks as the natural well danny had set off let go with a thunderous detonation. into the gathering dusk shot a writhing spiral of white-hot flame ... the jagged outlines of oft-bombed houses looked black and ugly against the searing screen. the flames leaped higher, higher, spread. an oily pall blotted the dying rays of the sun; from afar came to us the crackling agony of a city destroying itself. i watched, spellbound for a moment, then turned to the others. "danny is right. this is our chance. let's go!" * * * * * maccregor and rudy van huys were waiting for us in the hills beyond the city. we paused to take stock of equipment, count noses, and plan our next move. of our company--which had numbered six hundred before pittsburgh, and had been one hundred and sixty-odd at yesterday evening's rollcall--now there remained but fifty-seven men. twelve recruits joined us from the clamoring mob of civilian refugees. these were, of course, either graybeards, striplings, or men of dubious value as soldiers. all men of fighting age and caliber had long ago been called to the colors by wave upon wave of government drafts. we were a pitiful collection, poorly fed, inadequately armed, raggedly clad. even so, the civilians were loud in their demand that we remain with them to "protect" them. but this i could not agree to do. "you'll be safer," i told them, "hiding here in the hills than marching with us. we'll try to contact preston's brigade at fort knox. you have food, water, radios, medical supplies. hide out, keep living and--keep hoping!" and so we left them. they must have numbered three thousand, mostly women and children. a few tried to follow, but i quickened the pace. the last weeping woman abandoned the pursuit after five miles; i saw her fall to earth, beating the insensate soil with weary, hopeless fists. beside me marched danny wilson. he was a reckless, devil-may-care lad, was danny. even in the thick of battle his ruddy features were habitually wreathed in a grin. but it had deserted him now. he said soberly, "maybe we should have stayed with them, brian, boy. it's a hard row to hoe." "we can't fight a war in small detachments," i told him grimly. "you know that. mexico tried it, and now their country is under totie rule. nova scotia tried it, and now the swastika flies there. our only hope is to concentrate, meet them somewhere in one decisive battle." "i suppose you're right. we go to join preston?" "yes. it's the general concentration point. elmon got instructions by radio just before he went west. jackson is bringing up his army from the gulf, davies is marching in from springfield. they say three flights are taking off from fort sill; we'll have a small air force. if we can beat the toties off at louisville, we'll cut their communications line from pittsburgh to cincinnati, hold the ohio." that night we slept along the big sandy. before we bivouacked i broke our little company into six squads, each of eleven men, each headed by a veteran on whom i knew i could depend. i appointed danny wilson and ronnie st. cloud as my lieutenants. in arranging the squads, i tried to place the men according to nationality under one of their own race. raoul devereaux led one of the french squads, while anatole lebrun the other. that would have been funny a few years ago, when the army was still organized under the caste basis, because devereaux used to be a captain and lebrun a common private. but that old "officer and gentleman by act of congress" stuff had gone overboard a long time ago. now we picked our leaders by their leadership ability. ian pelham-jones, the britisher, and bruce macgregor headed two english-speaking squads; rudy van huys commanded a group of dutch and belgians; the tall norwegian, ingolf knudsen, led a collection of assorted scandinavians. norwegians, swedes, finns, danes--lord, there was a tough outfit! and so we hit the trail. there's not much use telling about the days that followed. we marched and slept and ate and marched again. we were spotted once by a totie spyplane; he came down to do a little plain and fancy strafing but we had the advantage of broken terrain. we took to cover and turned his crate into a colander before he decided he'd had enough. lars frynge, the swedish sharpshooter, claims he punctured the pilot as well as the plane, but i wouldn't know about that. though it's true that he did wobble as he flew away. * * * * * we avoided lexington, cutting south through campton and irvine. we picked up a railroad at lancaster. joe sanders, a native of these parts, said it was a part of the old louisville & nashville. if it were in operation, he said, it would take us right to our destination. but that was like saying if we had wings we could fly. the rails were twisted ribbons of steel; in some places the roadbed had been so completely eradicated you would never know it had been there. we saw people from time to time, but mostly in the small towns. they came out to cheer us as we marched through, offered us what little they had in the way of fresh water, barley bread, clothing that would never be used, now, by sons, husbands, brothers, who had fought their final battle. i got a fine new sweater in one village. in another we had an odd experience. a white-haired granddame insisted we accept a flag she had sewn for us. a funny-looking red flag with blue diagonal cross-bars and thirteen white stars. we used it later to bury johnny grant. he died of a delayed gas hemorrhage. the larger towns were deserted. we saw only one man in danville. a scrawny, long-haired weasel skulking through the ruins of what had once been an a & p supermarket. bruce macgregor took a shot at him, but i knocked his rifle up. the bullet whistled over the man's head, and he scurried away like a sick, desperate rabbit. i knew there was a g.o. to shoot all looters on sight, but the time had passed, i told mac, to concern ourselves with such trivialities. ammunition was too precious. and, anyway, if he didn't find the buried provisions, maybe the enemy would. the seventh night out, we camped in the woods north of bardstown, just a few yards off what had once been a main highway. i was beginning to smell smoke. tomorrow we would join the main garrison, get fresh clothing and equipment and be assigned our duties in the projected offensive. that is, i suppose, why i was sleepless. we had stumbled across a deserted tobacco shed the day before. the brown leaves were old, parched, crumbling, but it was better than the hay-and-alfalfa mixture they had given us up north. i rolled myself a cigarette and was sitting by the side of the road when suddenly i heard it. the sound of an approaching automobile. a moment later moonlight glinted on metal; i saw it picking its slow, lightless way over the cracked asphalt. my heart leaped. this must be a car from louisville. i ran down to the road, stood waiting eagerly. it approached at a snail's pace, but in the gloom the driver must have had all he could do to watch the road without keeping an eye peeled for vagabond troops, for when, as it came beside me, i cried a greeting and reached for the door, there came a startled sound from within, the motor roared stridently, and the car leaped forward, almost wrenching my arm from its socket. somehow i managed to hold on, though the automobile bounced and jarred crazily as it struck deep ruts in the roadbed. my head glanced metal and i saw whirling stars. "hey!" i yelled. "what the almighty hell are you trying to do! take it easy!" brakes squealed; the car jolted to a stop. and from the interior a voice, high-pitched with relief, cried: "you--you're an american! thank heaven!" then a slim form collapsed suddenly over the wheel. i yanked the door open, dragging the unconscious driver from the cab. he must be, i thought, wounded. he must be-- but it wasn't a "he" at all. as the body fell back limply over my arm, a campaign hat tumbled earthward. soft brown hair cascaded from beneath it. the driver was a girl! i had ammonia tubes in my first-aid kit. i snapped one beneath her nose, jolted her back to awareness. and she proved her femininity by coming out of it with a question on her lips. "who--who are you?" "o'shea," i said, "commanding a detachment from the army of the upper ohio. marching to join preston's brigade at louisville. but never mind that. who are _you_? where do you think you're going?" she said, "louisville!" in the darkness her face was a white blur, drab, expressionless, but there was a touch of hysteria to her voice. "louisville! but haven't you got a radio? didn't you know--" we hadn't. it didn't make sense. as she faltered, i snapped, "know what? go on!" "louisville has fallen. the toties have taken fort knox. our troops are destroyed, the government has fled, and the army of the democracies is in utter rout!" i stared at her numbly. in the black of the woods a nightjar screamed a single, discordant taunt.... iii the commotion had roused most of the others. quiet forms in the midnight, they had drifted to the road. wilson spoke now. he said, "that's the end, then. if she's right, brian, the war is over. and we've lost." i said to the girl, "how about it?" she shook her head. "i'm afraid so. the last reports i heard, they had seized the mississippi, cut all contact between our eastern and western armies. the japs control california and nevada. there was a terrific battle being waged at albuquerque. the russian navy holds the great lakes. everywhere you hear the same story." pelham-jones demanded harshly, "st. louis? did you hear anything about--?" "wiped out to a man. it was caught in a vise. the germans from the east, the italians from the north." pelham-jones said, "i see," quietly. he turned away. his shoulders looked heavy. he had a younger brother at st. louis. van huys looked at the girl suspiciously. "how do we know she's telling the truth, o'shea? it may be more lies. she may be a totie spy." i said, "you have your dent?" she nodded and handed it to me. i flashed my light on it. it was authentic, all right. the picture on the tiny metal identification tag was an image of her; the name beneath was _maureen joyce_. she was tagged as a waif, a member of the women's auxiliary intelligence force. i gave it back to her. "very good, miss joyce. sorry. we can't afford to take chances, though. you understand, i'm sure. but--" my curiosity made me exceed my authority. "but what are you doing here? surely you wouldn't be attempting to escape the toties in this direction? if they hold the east?" she hesitated for a moment. then, carefully, "i am acting under orders, captain o'shea. they were supposed to be _secret_ orders. but in view of what has happened--" she made up her mind. "it would be better for more than one to know. in case--in case anything should happen to me. "you've heard of dr. mallory?" "thomas mallory?" i said. "the physicist? the one who pestered the daylights out of the government about some crack-brained invention during the early days of the war? is he the one you mean?" "yes. the government isn't too sure, now, that it acted wisely in refusing to listen to his plan. but you know how it was for a while. miracle men flooded the war department with fantastic ideas for 'smashing the enemy.' "only, in this last extremity, the war department decided to investigate mallory's claim. as a last resort. i was commissioned to find him, bring him to louisville. but now--" uncertainly. "now i don't know just what i ought to do. even if he has a plan, and a good one, there is no one to whom we can communicate it." * * * * * surprisingly, it was danny wilson who interrupted. "except," he said suddenly, "us!" he turned to me. "brian, it would be suicide for us to go on to louisville--and there's no place else to go. we might as well make this our job. we have everything to gain, nothing to lose." "do you," i asked the girl, "know where mallory is?" "only roughly. somewhere in the hills of the upper cumberland. i plan to comb the neighborhood--" the kentuckian, joe sanders, edged forward. "don't need to do no combin'," he drawled. "reckon i c'n help. this yere mall'ry--he a big man? white hair? red complected?" "why--why, yes. i believe so." "mmm. figgered it'd be the same one. i know him. usta fish near his place when i was a colt. he come there in the summertime, big house in cleft canyon on mount rydell. i 'member we usta call him the 'devil doc,' 'count of there was alluz queer goin's-on at his place. well, cap'n?" he squinted at me. i weighed the chances briefly. it was probably a wild goose chase. on the other hand, it was useless, as danny had pointed out, to throw our little force against the might of the toties who now held fort knox. and there was a faint, insane possibility that dr. mallory had a 'plan'--an invention, maybe--that would enable us to form the nucleus of a new army that, reorganized, would sweep the invaders from our land.... "we'll do it!" i said. "we'll march at dawn!" we had to leave the car there on the road and strike out across country. it was the shortest and safest way to cleft canyon. now that the toties had made a clean sweep of the east, the roads were no longer open to us. as in mexico five years ago, as in ontario, the maritimes, the new england states year before last, as in illinois last year, floods of totie scavengers were pouring through the conquered land in a series of "mop up" operations. time and again aircraft droning over our heads sent us scurrying to cover. once a flight surprised us in an open field. that's when we lost johnny grant and three other men. nearby woods saved the rest of us. before we abandoned the car, i had the men strip it of everything we could possibly use. upholstery, tires, all electrical accessories, including the televise. it was this last that kept us going, kept our spirits aflame with determination, even when the trail was hardest. wherever we spun the dial we found the ether crackling with the boasts of the enemy; each scene pictured on the plate was one calculated to tighten the already grim jaws of my men. the totie banner floated everywhere. it was a blood-red flag; in the center was a quartered circle. in each of these segments was a symbol of one of the four totalitarian states that had welded to form the totie army. swastika and crimson sun, side by side with the italian fasces and soviet hammer-and-sickle. the big four that, irresistibly combined, had ground the principles of democracy under foot. it made me bitter, but it made me heart-sick, too. i could not help wondering how, or why, my father and those of his generation had been so blind as not to see the shadow of the inevitable creeping toward them. surely they must have known, as early as , that sweden would not be the last neutral to be drawn into the conflict? even then there must have been rumblings in the balkans, on the mediterranean? did they not guess that italy and russia were just waiting until the hour was ripe, that japan's leisurely conquest of china was a mere military exercise to keep nippon warmed up until the day should arrive for a blow at the pacific islands? my own country was perhaps the worst offender. had it not been told by a wise man, centuries before that, "in union there is strength?" yet america, like switzerland and portugal, greece and egypt, played ostrich. hoping against all sane hope that each succeeding conquest would so weaken the toties that the few actively fighting democracies could win out in the end. i remember, as a child, the gleeful shouting in the streets of america when news reached us across the atlantic that hitler had been assassinated. i remember my father saying to a neighbor, "that's the last of the mad dogs. stalin and mussolini are gone; now hitler. there'll be an armistice within a month. after that--" i wonder if dad ever thought of that when he fought with his regiment at buffalo. the true facts must have come to him as a series of staggering blows. the sudden collapse of the franco-british union when russia and italy, selecting their moment with diabolic accuracy of timing, threw their support to germany. the three mad dogs were dead, yes, but four younger, madder dogs took their place. himmler, ciano, molotov, and kashatuku. the crushing of india, the rape of africa, the shadow of the crimson banner stretching across the atlantic ocean to touch brazil. it was too late then to evoke the monroe doctrine. too late to throw defenses about our own shore line. canada owned but a shell of its former man power, mexico was a hotbed of totie sympathizers. our militia was unready, theirs fired for twelve years in the flaming crucible of war. these were not pleasant memories i had as our small band marched toward mallory's hide-out in the hills. but i could not escape them. i, myself, had witnessed the siege of new york, had seen philadelphia blown to shards by the mighty armada that swept up the delaware, had heard the last, defiant cry of the defenders of los angeles-- * * * * * _unfortunately, here a portion of the manuscript is missing. to brian o'shea the events mentioned must have been so commonly known as to render unnecessary the mentioning of specific dates. dr. winslow places the probable date of the invasion of the united states at , but this may vary as much as two years, one way or the other._ "--low!" warned sanders. "i don't think he's seen us!" danny's eyes had widened; he was pointing eastward. "he's not looking for us! there's what he's waiting for. look! an american plane!" i was soaked to the skin, cold and miserable. the damned totie scout might, i found myself thinking unreasonably, have waited just five more minutes before sneaking up over the horizon. five more minutes and we would have finished fording this stream, would be up the rise and through the tangle of elm that joe sanders claimed concealed the place that was our destination. beside me, maureen sneezed. the poor kid was wet, bedraggled. i don't know how she contrived to still appear beautiful under such circumstances. somewhere behind me, i heard the snick of a breech-bolt. i turned in time to find lebrun raising his rifle. i slapped it down. "no, you idiot!" he looked sulky. "he's low, o'shea. i can lay one in his gas tank." "and if you miss," i hissed, "you'll have the whole damned totie army down around our ears. we've come this far without being caught. we'll take no risks now." still, i knew how he felt. it was rotten to crouch there, knee-deep in icy mountain water, concealed by a vault of foliage, watching one of our planes--one of what must be a very, very few of our planes--drive blindly into the path of a hedge-hopping totie fighter that had spotted its prey and was now waiting for it. then, suddenly, there was the roar of motors. the american plane had come within range. the totie plane broke from concealment, spun skyward in a swift, dizzying burst of motion. white puffs broke from its nose seconds before our ears caught the spiteful chatter of machine-gun fire. it caught the american flyer off guard. something broke from his left wing, flapped crazily in the wind, as he jammed his plane--more by instinct than anything else--into a dive. the totie was on his tail in an instant. and we stood there, helpless, watching a sweet, if one-sided, air battle. the totie plane was superior, of course. but our pilot was a master. time and again he wriggled out from under the other's nose just as it seemed he would be riddled into fragments. once he managed to climb high enough to try a few shots of his own, but the totie immelmanned, was back on his tail before he could even get his sights trained. it ended as suddenly as it had begun. one minute they were spiraling for position, whirling around each other like a pair of strange, snarling dogs. the next there came a thin streamer of smoke from the tail of the american plane; a streamer that thickened to a cloud as we watched, became flame-shot black, choking, menacing. the totie fired a final burst into the damaged plane. it went into a spin. something dark appeared from a gap over the fuselage, it was the pilot climbing free. for what seemed an endless moment he poised there, then he was a brown chip on the blue breast of the sky, a chip that hurtled headlong to earth. beside me maureen gasped; i felt her shoulder tense against mine. then a white mushroom blossomed suddenly; i choked a word of profanity that somehow i didn't mean to be profane. the parachute, bloated with air, zigzagged languidly to the ground. the pilot was halfway down when his plane crashed. flames leaped in a wooded thicket across the rise. the totie airman circled several times. then, apparently content, he gunned his ship, disappeared northward. macgregor frowned. "they must be confident. first totie i ever saw who didn't gun a parachuter." * * * * * we left our hiding place, then; broke into the open where the caterpillar could see us. he was a good flyer. he sighted us, played his cords expertly, and landed less than an eighth of a mile from where we had gathered. a couple of our men helped him fight down the still-struggling 'chute; he kicked himself loose from the straps and approached me. "won't have any more use for that," he said ruefully. "you're the leader here? my name's krassner. jake krassner. fourth aerial combat." i introduced him around. danny wilson said eagerly, "did you say the fourth? i knew a guy flew with them. name of tommy bryce. from hoboken. you know him?" krassner shook his head. he had hard, black eyes, a little close. crisp hair. broad shoulders. he was a good-looking chap. a little haughty, maybe. but airmen are like that, especially to ground-huggers. "i'm sorry. our personnel has changed a lot. lately," he added grimly. he looked at me. "i seem to have picked a hell of a place to get shot down, captain. what on earth are you doing in this desolate spot?" van huys chuckled, and joe sanders grinned. "don't look like much from topside, eh, krassner? i figgered it wouldn't. the old man's a fox. he spent more than twenty years givin' this hide-out the damnedest coat of natch'ral camouflage you ever seen." "old man?" said krassner curiously. "camouflage?" maureen touched my arm. she whispered, "maybe you had better not tell him, brian. it's our secret--" i started to tell her what the hell. he was one of us, and there were mighty few of us left. we needed all the men we could get. and krassner looked like a man. i didn't get a chance to say any of this, though. for as we talked, we had continued to follow sanders. joe was now picking his way confidently through an opening in the tangle of foliage. sunlight dimmed as we entered a huge, cleared space entirely roofed by an interwoven network of boughs. in this space was a wide, rambling, one-story house, adjoined by a number of inexplicable sheds. and on the veranda of the house stood a man i recognized instantly. it was dr. thomas mallory. iv mallory made us welcome. more than that, he seemed positively delighted that we had come. he showed anxiety on only one point. "no one saw you come here, captain? you're sure of that?" "positive," i told him. "good!" he called, and assistants came from inside to lead my men to quarters. i was surprised, as well as a little shocked and disappointed, to discover the number of women attached to dr. mallory's household. there were a few men, but for the most part he seemed to have surrounded himself with girls. not only that, but with young and pretty girls! but this was no time to sit in judgment on a man's morality. we had an important mission. maureen broached the subject as soon as we three were rid of the others. "you must know why we're here, dr. mallory. we did not find this place by chance. we came because you are the last hope of our country. too late, the government realizes it needs the invention you offered it five years ago." mallory shook his head sadly. "i'm sorry, my child--" "you can't refuse, doctor!" i broke in. "don't you understand? the toties overrun all the americas. democracy is dead unless--" he raised a weary hand. "then democracy is dead, o'shea. not even i can restore its life. i can say only one thing; i am glad from the bottom of my heart that the government refused to listen to me when first i approached the war department with my plan." "glad? why?" "because i was guilty of that which a scientist must ever dread. i jumped to a hasty conclusion, based on insufficient evidence. my conclusion was wrong, my plan--" he sighed, turned toward a door. "but come. i will show you." * * * * * he led the way from his office into an adjoining room; a laboratory, spotless, white-gleaming. about the walls of the laboratory were a number of cages. in some of these were small animals; i saw monkeys, guinea pigs, a squirrel, rabbits. some were active, eating, shuffling about, looking at us with bright, inquisitive eyes. others lay apparently asleep. but these i noticed with some remote part of my mind. for the focal point of attention was a glass-walled case in the center of the room; a topless case in which lay the body of a man. maureen started. she said, "dead, doctor?" "he is not dead," replied mallory somberly. "he is the result of my dreadful error of judgment. these others--" he nodded toward the cages. "--were the experiments that misled me. this man, one of my assistants who trusted me and was daring enough to become my first human experiment, sleeps. how long he will continue to sleep, i cannot guess. but it may be for one, two, or even more decades!" "sleeps!" i said. but maureen, with a flash of that swift intuition i had seen before, guessed the answer. she said, "anaesthesia! that was your plan, dr. mallory!" "yes, my child. that was my plan. i am a scientist, but five years ago i was sociologist enough to recognize that the united states could not match the power of the totalitarians. i realized, even then, that the ending we have seen come to pass was inevitable. i set myself the task of finding a way to meet the impending menace. "i found the answer in a new form of anaesthetic. i will not tell you its formula. it is a dismal failure--but that i did not know. i thought it was a great success. when i permitted small animals--those you see before you--to inhale some of the delicate granules--" "granules, doctor?" "yes. it was a revolutionary means of inducing unconsciousness. when i permitted the animals to inhale these granules, they fell into a soft, deep, harmless slumber. i timed their periods of sleep carefully, discovered the anaesthetic rendered them senseless over periods ranging from one to two weeks. "it was then, heady with success, i offered my plan to the government. it was, i thought, so simple. our planes would scatter the granules over enemy terrain--" he laughed shortly, mirthlessly. "--and the enemy would fall into deep slumber. while they were thus incapacitated, our men, garbed in specially constructed suits, wearing protective masks, could walk amongst them, disarm them, imprison them. the war would be ended bloodlessly--" i stared at him incredulously. i said, "but--but if it really works that way, dr. mallory, that is the weapon we need!" "yes, my boy. but it doesn't work that way. i have told you i made an error in judgment. i assumed that man, being a higher animal than those on which i experimented, would experience the same, or a slightly less drastic reaction than that experienced by the animals. i did not take into consideration the fact that man is also a more highly integrated animal. that he is weaker, in some respects. "when williamson, here, volunteered to become a human guinea pig, i accepted his offer. i exposed him to the granules. he breathed deeply, fell asleep--" dr. mallory shook his head. "and that was more than four years ago. he still sleeps!" * * * * * i said, "i understand now, doctor, why you consider your plan a failure. but you speak as a scientist and a humanitarian who would shudder at seeing thousands of men sleep for a decade. i am a soldier. i have met war face to face, and have learned, by bitter experience, that there is no weapon too dreadful to use if the results are satisfactory. "what if your granules _do_ put the toties to sleep for years instead of days? isn't that better than seeing our countrymen die beneath the sword of the aggressor? unless we act swiftly, this war is over. freedom, liberty, equality of men, all the things we believe in, are doomed. but there is yet time to equip a few of our troops with the suits and masks you speak of, turn loose your slumber-granules to the winds. "even though thousands of our own men share the sleep of the enemy, we can go through with the disarmament program you planned. when our foes awaken, a decade hence, they will have lost their leaders and their war. when our friends waken we will take them, triumphantly, to the homes and cities we have rebuilt while they slumbered." dr. mallory said, "i wish it were as simple as that, o'shea. but there is one other thing you do not know. the granules that are my anaesthetic are more than mere granules. they are spores. worse--they are self-propagating spores!" he pointed to a trebly barred and locked door opening on one wall of the laboratory. for the first time there was nervousness in his voice. "there is a storeroom beyond that door, o'shea. in that storeroom, quiescent in sterile containers, lie spores. countless thousands, millions of them. they are the granules i made for the government before i discovered their real nature. there lies beyond that door a weapon potent enough to end this war immediately--" he paused suddenly. we had all heard it, the squeak of a worn hinge, the shuffle of a footstep. i motioned mallory to silence, tiptoed to the office door and flung it open. the aviator, krassner, stood there. he was smiling. he said, "ah, there you are, captain! i was looking for you. i wanted to ask if--" "how long have you been here?" i asked angrily. "how long? why--just a minute or so. i--" "were you listening to our conversation?" he stiffened; a flush highlighted his cheek bones. "i beg your pardon, sir!" he said. "because, if you were--" dr. mallory was beside me, his hand was on my arm. i hesitated. there was no sense in being so violently suspicious. i said, "well, never mind. go back to your quarters, krassner. i'll be with you shortly." "very good, sir!" he saluted, turned and stalked from the office, a picture of affronted honor and dignity. i felt somewhat ashamed of myself. mallory said, "it really doesn't matter whether he heard us or not, o'shea. what i was about to say is, there lies beyond that door a weapon potent enough to end the war immediately--but it must never be used. for once loosed to the winds, those abominable spores would not only end this war, they would still all animal life on the face of earth. i have said they were self-propagating. each new generation of spores would deepen the slumber into which mankind had been soothed by the first--" i said, "but why keep them, doctor?" "i don't quite know, o'shea. perhaps i have done so because i am, at heart, more emotional than a true scientist should be. perhaps i have a secret fear that there may come a day when i shall be forced to play god, give mankind its release from the chains of the tyrant." maureen shuddered. "no, doctor! you mustn't even think of that. things look black now, but they can't go on like this forever. right and truth and liberty will prevail in the end. there must be some other way to escape--" "there is," said dr. mallory quietly. "there is another way. a plan i have been working on ever since the failure of my first. there is one last refuge to which they cannot follow us." i said, "i don't understand, doctor. do you mean antarctica?" his grave eyes captured, held mine. "no," he said. "a place more remote than even that. i mean, o'shea--the moon!" * * * * * i knew, then, suddenly and with a great, overwhelming despair, that our journey to cleft canyon had been a vain one. as a last resort we had sought the hidden laboratory of one who had been a great scientist. we had found a madman. i said, "maureen--" and i suppose there was regret in my voice. but mallory stopped me. "a moment, o'shea. i'm not insane. nor is my plan--as you undoubtedly think--impossible. did you ever hear the name of frazier wrenn?" the name was vaguely familiar, but i couldn't place it. maureen could, and did. she said, curiously, "isn't he the traitor who disappeared from earth with a group of followers? years ago? from a laboratory out west somewhere?" "yes, my dear. in . from arizona. but whether he and his tiny band were traitors is something future generations must decide. wrenn hated war; foresaw what must come of earth's second armageddon. he fled earth, his destination was the planet venus, his purpose to maintain, on that wild colony, a vestige of culture and civilization until earth's feverish self-destruction should end." mallory sighed. "we do not know what has become of wrenn's expedition. there has been no remotest sign, no signal--" i said, "venus! but, doctor, that means _spaceflight_!" "yes, brian. i was to have been a member of that gallant party. but i was delayed in reaching their arizona rendezvous, and their departure was hastened by an unexpected attack. they left without me. but, fortunately, wrenn had confided in me the plans for his spaceship. for years, now, with what scraps of metal i could steal from a war-ridden, metal-hungry humanity, i have been secretly building a small duplicate of the _goddard_. "you wonder where it is hidden? our kentucky hills conceal great caverns, brian. there is one beneath the hill on which this house stands. below us--as i will show you shortly--is a gigantic cave. in it is my almost completed craft." i had not noticed that maureen's hand was in mine until i felt its soft whiteness tense within my grasp. she cried, "but why the moon, dr. mallory? why not follow the wrenn expedition--?" "you ignore a major factor, my dear. celestial mechanics. wrenn's flight was planned for a time when venus and earth were in conjunction. such is not the case now. earth approaches the sun, while venus is at aphelion. and my craft is, as i have said, but a small copy of wrenn's. moreover, i have been able to collect only a small amount of fuel. "there is only one body within our cruising range--earth's moon. it is my dream that we shall go there--" i had been listening silently, stunned. now i came to my senses. "no, doctor! i can listen to no more. you forget i am a soldier of the united states army." "the government has fallen; the last of the democracies is crushed beneath the conqueror's heel, brian, lad." "it will rise again. in the hinterlands--" "--are totalitarian troops." "there are still eighty million americans--" "and a hundred million aggressors!" he put a hand on my shoulder. "don't you see, brian, this is how you can best serve your country? make this flight with me. we will take your men and my followers--two score men and the women you have already seen--and form a colony on the moon. "we will return, then, secretly, for more americans. and more, and more. we will transfer our democracy to a new soil, there grow in strength and power and wisdom until some day we can reclaim our heritage." despite my training, i could not help but be convinced. i said, shaken, "but astronomers tell us the moon is a barren, lifeless world?" "for the most part, it is. but the caltech telescope indicates that air still lingers in the depths of the hollow craters. and in underground caverns. water can be synthesized. it will be no easy existence, but it will be--" "the ultimate salient!" breathed maureen at my side. "the last line of defense for freedom's children! brian, dr. mallory is right! we must do this thing!" he looked at me hopefully. "well, brian o'shea?" i took a deep breath. "when does our flight depart?" v at dr. mallory's suggestion, i did not tell my men too much about our plans. "with so much at stake, o'shea," he said, "the less they know the better it will be." but they did not ask to know much. they were good men; they trusted me. and if they chafed a little at the enforced idleness of the next week, the rest must have been a welcome surcease from months of fighting. only one man failed to share their calm acceptance of my orders. krassner. he told me, sulkily, "there's something going on around here, o'shea. and, damn it, i have a right to know what it is. as a fellow officer--" "i respect your brevet, krassner," i told him somewhat curtly, "but for the present i must ask you to remember that you are attached to this division through courtesy only, and have no authority. in a few more days, now, i will be at liberty to explain everything." he had to be satisfied with that. though it was the nature of the man to be snoopy; several times he was observed prowling around the grounds, searching some clue as to doctor mallory's well-concealed secret. he was chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, of course. a man might have searched for months without finding the entrance to mallory's underground workshops. mallory admitted wilson and st. cloud, my lieutenants, to his confidence. he took us to the cavern wherein was being constructed the spaceship. the gateway to the depths was that which appeared to be a photographer's dark-room. once inside, mallory pressed certain carved ornaments, the entire farther wall slid back, and there stretched before us a smooth, well-lighted passage leading downward at a gentle incline. we must have followed this more than a half mile before we debouched into the main cavern; a mighty, vaulted chamber, a huge bubble of emptiness blown in the solid mountain centuries ago when earth was in the travail of making. but it was not this natural wonder that made me gasp. i had seen others; i had, indeed, once taken refuge for four weeks with the ninth artillery in luray. that which brought an exclamation to my lips was the shimmering monster braced on an exoskeleton of girders in the middle of the chamber. a gigantic, tear-shaped rocketship, stern jets lifted some feet off the ground, streamlined nose pointing at the roof of the cave. about it, in and around it, sweating men fretted, worried, labored, like so many restless bees. here the brief chatter of a riveting machine woke snarling echoes as a final plate was welded into place; there a master electrician wove an intricate network of wires into some obscure purpose. in still another place, a strong-thewed gang trundled seemingly endless trains of supplies into the ship's capacious holds. dr. mallory smiled at the expressions on our faces, and there was pardonable pride in his smile. "there, my friends," he said quietly, "is the _jefferson_." "_jefferson?_" repeated maureen wonderingly. "named for him who, in our country's infancy, wrote down in blazing words the principles on which all democracy is based. the inherent right of men to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. once his words showed us the way. now his name shall lead us to a new civilization." "amen!" said danny wilson piously. then, "now can we have a look at her? i mean _him_, doctor?" knowing every nook and cranny, berth and hold, turret and gun-chamber of the _jefferson_ as i do now, it is hard to remember my feelings on that day when first i strode her permalloy decks. even so, i can recall the vast wonder that engulfed me as dr. mallory led us through the ship, pointing out the engines, the control-rooms, the spartan simplicity of the living quarters, the well-equipped kitchen and compact storage bins. there was much i did not understand until long afterward. permalloy itself was a novelty to me. the metal had been invented, mallory said, by a german scientist. one of the old school. a doktor eric von adlund. "i do not know what has become of him. perhaps he, like the other peace-loving great of his race, has long since been liquidated by the totalitarians." * * * * * so said dr. mallory sadly. and he tried to explain the operation of the small, inconceivably powerful, atomic motors, the invention of frazier wrenn. it was a concept so novel, yet so simple, that it staggered us all. but i could see how, without first having a knowledge of the heretofore unknown element _inektron (the spelling of this important word seems to have confused brian o'shea. in the manuscript it is incomprehensibly scribbled. dr. winslow suggests the philological similarity of such words as_ "inertron" _and_ "inactron"? _nsb_) man might never have discovered the long-sought power of the atom. st. cloud, frankly at sea as regarded scientific matters, was delighted with the military efficiency of the ship. i could see his fingers yearning for the lanyard of one of the rotor-guns installed in the fore and aft turrets. he liked, too, the foreman who came over to meet us. "how many men have you working here below?" he asked. myers, the supervisor, told him twenty-three. "and there are twenty women topside," he grinned. "doc says we're going to a brutal frontier. but if the women can stand it, we can. a man can do lots of impossible things with his wife at his side." i understood, then, the number of girls i had seen above ground, and regretted my hasty judgment of dr. mallory's character. i might have realized that he did nothing without purpose. he had seen--as i saw now--that without something, some_one_, to fight for, the men of our little colony-to-be could easily lose heart. he was assuring our venture against all eventualities. i was glad, suddenly, that maureen was beside me. i wondered if she felt the same way. danny wilson voiced a problem that had puzzled me. "but this cavern, doctor? aren't you like the man who, in his spare time, built a yacht in his cellar? how are we ever going to get this monster out of here?" mallory said placidly, "when the hour comes, we will burst from this cavern like a moth from its chrysalis. you have not yet witnessed the power of our atomic beams. "one thrust of blinding energy from the forward jets and we will shear an exit through the tons of solid rock and earth that now conceal us. before we leave--" he looked at me significantly. "--we will destroy the buildings above ground. including that one, sealed chamber that no man must ever open. "the totalitarians will have no way of guessing who we were, what we did here, or where we have gone. and even if they should guess, they would be powerless to follow us." his voice was low, vibrant, anticipatory. "your men and mine, brian o'shea, we hundred odd will establish the first base on luna. then there will be other trips to earth, gathering more converts to our cause. the day will come when we will match our conquerors in strength. and then--" i said thoughtfully, "one more thing, doctor. the _jefferson_ is supplied with water and provisions, yes. but if our number grows, we will need our own farms and granaries. how are we to grow food in the lightless grottoes of the moon?" he nodded sagely. "all that has been provided for, brian, lad. i have overlooked nothing. chemical culture is possible. trust me to take care of that problem when it arises." danny wilson coughed apologetically. he said, "we do, doc. but--but i think i know what's in the back of brian's mind. suppose something should--i mean--if anything might happen to you--?" "that, too, i have considered. there is a complete scientific library in the aft turret. science is no secret to the man who can read and think." danny's face lighted. he said beautifully, "a library! golly! books! i haven't seen a book for nigh onto fifteen years. except field code manuals. there hasn't been much time for reading lately." "and that," said mallory darkly, "is perhaps the greatest catastrophe of this war. reading men, thinking men, are happy men. they are not concerned with the lust for conquest of anything save the unknown. yes, wilson, there are books. and for those who seek light entertainment there are even volumes of fiction. magazines for amusement." "magazines?" i said, puzzled. "magazines for amusement? i don't see anything funny in an armament warehouse." mallory sighed. "forgive me, o'shea. i had forgotten your youth. there was a time, when you were a toddling child, when 'magazines' were not always ammunition bins. publishers used to issue monthly periodicals, printed on paper, bound in bright jackets, filled with stories. exciting adventures in sports, the west, tales of crime and its detection, fictionized hazards as to the future of the world-- "ah, but that was long ago. that was when paper was cheap and common. when the vast mills of norway and denmark and canada poured endless rolls of pulp into our country." danny said eagerly, "i'd like to see some of these here 'magazines,' doc. could i?" "you may. myers will help you select some from the storage bin, wilson. and now, my friends, if you are ready to return to the surface--?" * * * * * that, as i recall, was on the th day of july, . yes, i know it was that day, because that was the date of the fall of santa fé. we watched that battle through our televises; it was triumphantly broadcast--a braggart deed in keeping with their boastful ways--by the toties. albuquerque having fallen, general bornot, commander of the army of the west, had withdrawn his forces to the old capital of new mexico, there to make a last, desperate stand. it was a valiant, but doomed, defense. the very fact that intimate details of the battle were televised shows how vastly superior the totie forces were; their airplanes could fly without hindrance over our lines, spying out resources, reserves, and the pitifully weak remnants of our army. like our own demolished eastern army, the westerners were a motley crew. i saw french, english, scandinavian and canadian uniforms; loyal sikhs from india fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with kilted scots; swarthy refugees from totie mexico and guatemala defending futile breaches beside blonde, fair-skinned icelanders. the main body of attackers stormed up from captive albuquerque to the south; these were the trained warriors of japan, the yellow horde that had ravaged california, arizona and utah and pressed eastward to meet kievinovski's command. the russians came down from the north, cutting off any avenue of escape through taos. ("once," dr. mallory told us sadly, "taos was the artistic center of the united states. now but one pigment flows there; the red of blood.") and schneider's army of the mississippi had swept westward through arkansas and oklahoma, leaving nothing but waste and desolation behind them, to meet the other armies at this last defense post of democratic gallantry. it was no battle at all, really; it was a slaughter. our army had refortified old fort marcy, earthworks built by general kearny more than a hundred years ago. two divisions were quartered in the garita, the old spanish headquarters. thus they lay, more than four thousand democratic troops--waiting behind breastworks of earth and 'dobe for the attack of armies whose artillery was built to blast steel and concrete pill-boxes out of existence. even so, the gallantry of their defense turned the blood in my veins to electricity. they did not wait for the toties to attack; they carried the fight to the enemy. with the first, tentative shot from the besiegers there came an answering blast from the besiezed. then the bedlam was on. stream upon endless stream, the toties flooded into the city. as they did so, we--and the enemy--discovered that the spying televise had not told the whole story. windows opened to expose spitting, snarling machine guns. doorways gaped to expose light fieldpieces that poured fiery death into the toties. fake walls split miraculously, from them charged concealed troops of americans, faces grim, guns flaming, roaring, bayonets flashing. guerrilla warfare became the order of the day. at street barricades powder and flame were forgotten as men met face to face, looked with stark eyes upon dripping steel. americans and their allies fell, but for each of them fell two, three, a half dozen of the invaders. the scream of explosives was deafening, the street pictured on the metallic screen before us was a shambles of blood; bodies lay asprawl like the forgotten toys of a careless child. and--the televise screen went blank! danny wilson loosed a great cry of joy. "they're licked!" he roared. "the dog-whelped cowards are licked! i never knew of them to turn off a televised victory--" for five glorious minutes we shared his hope. then the broadcast was resumed, after a murmured comment about a "technical difficulty in transmission"--and when again our eyes looked upon the streets of santa fé, the picture had changed. once more it was aircraft that had won the day. in the face of impending disaster, the toties had loosed the full power of their air armada against the beleaguered forces. it did not matter to them that their thermite bombs fell amongst their men as well as ours; that was a hazard their hirelings had been trained to accept. burst after flaming burst rocked the streets of old santa fé, broken bodies were flung brutally against shattered walls, doorways and windows emptied--and there were no more defenders. only fresh, unending troops of toties filling the gaps left by their fellows. * * * * * i saw the garita fall, a flaming shambles; i saw an airplane swoop low over breastworks hastily flung up at the _puenta de los hidalgos_ and wipe out a company of americans. i heard the biting rasp of machine gun fire, the staccato bark of anti-aircraft; once the visiplate before us whirled giddily for an instant as the plane in which our broadcaster rode narrowly escaped disaster. i saw the last great moment of fort marcy; the fall of the gates and the horde of snarling toties that rushed in, bayonetting all before them; i saw the bayonet wielded that slashed the rope holding the american flag to the flagpost. i saw the man who turned and raced to that flagpost, grasped the ropes and held them taut as, for a moment longer, the tattered ensign whipped out through the smoke and flame. then i saw the bullet that found this unknown hero's breast; saw him cough and loose his grasp, slip earthward as the flag above him tumbled to the dirt. there was a look of hurt surprise in his eyes. then i saw no more, because my eyes were wet. and dr. mallory said, "there is nothing more to see--" and turned off the televise. * * * * * yes, that was the th day of july, . i remember it well. for it was after that i asked mallory, "do we go now? there is no reason to delay." and he said, "we will leave in five days. by that time all will be in readiness. and the third of august will be a day of good omen. it was on that day, centuries ago, that a humble portuguese sailorman with a great dream sailed westward to the indies and found a new world. "like chistofero colon, we will select that date to set our course for new america--" maureen's hand tightened on mine. krassner, who had been watching the televise silently, gaped at us. "new course? go? go where?" "skip it--!" i began. but dr. mallory stopped me. "no, i think it is well the men should be told now, o'shea. my helpers know. your men, who must be the fighters of our party, should be told where they are going." and he told them. it came as a stunning blow. some of them looked frightened; some, to be quite truthful, simply did not understand. others were openly incredulous. among these was krassner. he epostulated, "but--but, o'shea, this old fool must be insane! flight to the moon! absurd!" his eyes narrowed. "there's more to it than that. this is a trick of some kind i'll bet it's tied up with that mysterious invention you've got hidden in your closet--" i grasped him by the shoulder, whirled him about. "then you _did_ hear us that day?" "sure. i heard you. is there anything wrong in that? i couldn't help hearing you say you had a weapon that would end the war. if that's what you've got, trot it out! that's a lot better than dying like rats on a fool's expedition to the _moon_! "luna! pah! i, for one, won't have anything to do with it--" i said hotly, "you damned fool, we can't open that closet. don't you realize--?" "brian!" snapped dr. mallory. i shut up suddenly. krassner looked at me, then at the old man suspiciously. he snarled, "you reminded me once that i had no authority over your command, o'shea. well, now i remind you that you have no authority over me. i'm pulling out of here. i've had enough of this insane secrecy and--" he started for the door. i said only one word. "lars!" lars frynge, the towering swede, had his revolver at krassner's midsection. he said amiably, "ay tank maybe you batter lissen to captain, hey?" krassner's face purpled. he bellowed, "this is the last straw, o'shea. insulting an officer and an equal! by the gods, i'll--" he was right. he was an officer and an equal. but i was determined of one thing. go with us he would, whether he liked it or not. but in the meanwhile-- "all right, lars," i said. "krassner, i'm sorry. i wasn't just trying to throw my weight around. but think it over carefully, man. this means a lot to all of us. you're at liberty to do what you will." he snorted and strode from the room. danny wilson cocked an eyebrow at me; i nodded. danny followed him. maureen said nervously, "he's a trouble-maker, brian. i don't think we should trust him out of our sight." "that's why danny left us," i grinned. "and when we go, we should leave without him." "that," said mallory, "is impossible. when we go, there must remain no one behind to know where we have gone." * * * * * and there were five days left in which to finish all that had to be done before our departure. those were days of feverish excitement and activity for all of us. having been let into the secret, my men were shown the way to the underground cavern. there they labored, side by side with mallory's helpers, to load the cargo, put the last finishing touches on the _jefferson_. we stripped the house; we gathered all forage from the barns and silos and bins. we rolled cask upon cask of fresh spring water into the holds. we locked and sealed the holds, one by one. danny raised a fuss about that. he had found something new and wonderful--something i meant to investigate myself as soon as the opportunity permitted. the joy of reading fiction. "it--it's swell, brian!" he told me. "boy, i wish i'd lived in them days when magazines was common. you ought to read some of them stories. sports and detective stories and--" he looked sort of sheepish. "the ones i like best are science stories. gosh, you'd be surprised, brian. them old writers guessed sometimes pretty near what was going to happen. "there was a guy named bender, or binder, or something like that, who guessed 'way back in ' , at the start of this war, that we'd get into it. and there was another guy named clinton who said the same thing--he was nuts, though. he said the women would bust loose from the men and set up their own government. "and those others, they predicted things like the spaceship we'll soon be riding in. and television, and--" i said, "those magazines must be plenty old." "they are. ancient. but they're still fun. brian, can't i sneak a few of them into my berth instead of sealing them up in the library? do you think doc would mind?" "i guess not," i told him. so he did just that. by the time he'd finished robbing the library, it looked moth-eaten and there was scarcely enough room in his berth for him to turn around in.... those were full days and exciting ones, but pleasant. it is hard to realize that we were living on the bright edge of grave calamity. nor did we know it until the eve of the day on which we were to take off. it started with a thin, high droning to the north. the familiar drone of aircraft. as always, under these circumstances, dr. mallory sounded the "take cover!" signal, and everyone scurried to the shelter of the camouflaged grove, there to wait until the danger should pass. but it did not pass. the droning came nearer, deepened in tone. and we saw, through the leafy veil that concealed us, that it was not a single plane that was approaching, nor a single flight--but a solid phalanx of enemy aircraft! even then we did not guess the dreadful truth. it was not until they had come directly over us, swung into an involute loop and began concentrating upon us, that we knew what was happening. then we saw something dark and ominous loose itself from the rack of one bomber; a thin screaming filled the air--and in the woods to our right there came a frightful blast! earth shook beneath us, maureen screamed needless words in my ear. "they're bombing _us_, brian! they've found our refuge!" vi there was only one thing that spared all of us in those next few minutes. that was the fact that the toties did not know _exactly_ where we were. somehow they had learned the approximate location of dr. mallory's mountain hide-away, but not in vain had the aged scientist spent twenty years nurturing plant life to form a perfect barricade of concealment about the dim, squat buildings. from above, the wooded dell that hid his laboratory must have looked like one of thousands such. therefore they scattered their shots. one bomb exploded a quarter mile from mallory's house; i learned afterward that it killed two workmen who had been laying in cordwood. others exploded as far as five miles away as the hive of lethal wasps eddied back and forth, bombing the entire countryside with abandon. a thousand questions seethed through my brain, but there was no time now to ponder the answers. no time to ask why, or how, the toties had learned of this place. i seized maureen's elbow, half-led, half-dragged her toward the laboratory. above the crashing din i howled in her ear, "to the cavern! that's the only safe--" the rest was lost in an ear-splitting thunderbolt. but she knew what i meant. we were not the only ones who fled to the security of the house. the lab was the lodestone toward which all we tiny, helpless motes gravitated. by the time we reached it, the shaking walls were jammed with soldiers, workers, women, who had sought refuge there. a few of these were itching for action. such a one was danny wilson. he was pleading with mallory, "how about it, doc? just one of them anti-craft guns? we can get it up here in no time." "no. they don't know just where we are, wilson. a shot would locate us definitely. we must remain silent and take our chances against a lucky placement." krassner, his handsome face oddly pale, clutched at mallory's arm. "this cavern you were talking about, mallory. take us there! we'll all be blown to bits--" joe sanders' nose wrinkled, he looked at the airman disgustedly, and spat. mingled with my own contemptuous reaction to krassner's demand, i felt a warming glow of pride in my men. each of them had realized, as had maureen and i, that the only safe place was the underground shelter. but each of them had wanted, before we took to that refuge, at least one vengeful poke at the enemy. quivering capitulation like this rubbed them the wrong way. but mallory, serene as ever, had already led the way to the secret entrance. he pressed the knobs, the door swung open. i was beside krassner as he did so; i saw the look of surprise on the aviator's face as he saw the long tunnel that fed to the depths beneath. i couldn't restrain the taunt. "thought mallory was insane, eh, krassner? does this look like the work of a madman?" he muttered something incoherent. then pelham-jones, whose squad had been quartered farthest from the main house, burst into the room excitedly. "they're landing foray parties, brian! how long will it take to get everyone out of here?" i glanced at mallory. he said, "fifteen or twenty minutes, at least." "and to get the _jefferson's_ motors started?" "another ten." "then," i snapped, "you'll need protection for a half hour. that's what we're here for. bruce, rudy, raoul, split your squads. send half below; have the others throw a cordon about the laboratory. if they're dropping infantry, they'll have to stop bombing. by the time they find us, the others will be below. then we'll take to the cavern--" "very good, sir!" they sprang into action. * * * * * the women continued to file singly into the small dark-room, pass through the doorway into the tunnel. maureen clutched my arm. "brian, you don't have to stay up here. you're too important. you're the leader. you've got to--" "--to stay with my men!" i told her quietly. and i did what i had been wanting to do, but had never before dared. i took her, unresisting, into my arms; kissed her. her lips were warm against mine. then i pushed her toward the doorway. "get down there. don't worry about us. if we hold our fire it will take them a long time to locate us. danny, where did krassner go?" danny grimaced. "that yellow mutt? don't ask me. he's probably down there by now, hugging a stalactite." "well, to hell with him. let's get going. and don't forget--don't fire a shot unless they actually see us. we don't want to give our position away." mallory said quietly, "i'll herd them below as fast as i can, brian. when you hear the signal, bring your men on the double. but before you leave the laboratory, you know what must be done?" he nodded significantly toward the inner room, toward the trebly-barred door that contained a world's fate. i nodded. "i know." the steady evacuation continued. i went outside again. as pelham-jones had reported, the tories were parachuting infantry to the ground. more planes had reached the scene; the sky swarmed with them. and a mass occupation was in progress; from each transport rumbled a steady stream of dark figures that, like strange, winged insects, plunged out of their humming cocoons, hurtled headlong toward earth for a moment--then suddenly grew filmy, white umbrellas that lowered them gently to the ground. it was a random, haphazard occupation for the toties _still_ had not solved the secret of our exact location. but many--too many--were dropping near our sheltered grove. it would not take them long, i knew, to find us. happily, the aerial bombardment had ceased with the dropping of the infantry. that was good. no chance explosion would find the heart of our refuge, destroy the lab and cut us off from the underground cavern. approximately twenty of us remained above ground as defenders. i told macgregor, "encircle the house. defend it at all costs until you hear mallory's call--then hightail it for the tunnel. i've got something to do inside." i went back to the door beyond which were concealed the lethal anaesthetic spores. there were two barrels of oil there; we had placed them there for the purpose i now carried out. i broke them open, spilled their contents every which way. now a single match would set the house ablaze, destroy forever the danger mallory had feared. i would strike that match just before ducking into the tunnel myself-- a single, explosive crack sounded outside! a rifle had spoken! * * * * * that ripped it! with that shot there came a moment of macabre silence; then the air was alive with an answering volley from the hills and woods surrounding us. i raced out of the house, found rudy van huys. i roared angrily, "who fired! why? good god, man, don't you realize--" his pink, chubby cheeks shook with anger to match my own. he said, "i don't know, brian. they hadn't spotted us until then. but now--" he didn't need to point to the forest; i could see the grey-green uniforms sifting through the trees, closing in on us. the _spang!_ of a wentzler shrilled in my ears, spent lead splattered against the wall behind me. all about us, now, rifle fire rasped and spat; i saw an advancing totie soldier stop short in his tracks, stagger, spin, and fall, clutching his stomach with red hands that clawed. i heard a grunt from one of the men beside me, saw his mouth form an astonished o and an ugly, purple-black third eye appear magically in the middle of his forehead. the back of his head.... then came a welcome sound, a cry from mallory. "all clear, o'shea! bring your men!" they came on the double. not all of them. half of them, maybe. those few minutes of gunfire, raking our fearfully exposed position, had cost us. macgregor, huge bear of a man, staggered around an ell of the house carrying a still figure. danny wilson. i cried, "mac, is he--?" "bad, brian! mighty bad." macgregor lumbered into the house with his burden; the rest of the men followed him, lingering to throw last shots into the advancing force before they disappeared. there remained, still, my most important task. now the toties had apparently brought up several pieces of light artillery, for mingled with the snap of musketry i heard the familiar coughing bark of ordnance. once the house shuddered and quaked, concussion deafened my ear drums as a shell found us. but i sped down the empty corridors toward the lab. time was precious. all too soon the toties would close in on the house; before that i must toss my flame, race back to the tunnel entrance. i burst into the room, at last, and-- --and stood aghast! i had only presence of mind to throw a shielding arm across my face, hold my breath. for no longer was the closet sealed. the bars had been smashed inward, the lock was a shard of broken metal, the door a heap of splinters. the gods of chance had tossed a die for our enemies. that shell i had heard--had found its way into the granary of death! i had a momentary glimpse of the inside of the closet. i saw grey, fungoid granules sifting through the broken door; a cloud whirled and eddied toward me. to breathe that cloud meant oblivion. beating at my clothes, my hair, with suddenly frenzied fingers, i turned and fled from the room. in the hallway i stopped, ignited the box of matches i carried, tossed the blazing brand onto the oil-soaked floor. flame licked hungrily along those stained boards; the bright fire-flower grew before my eyes. even so, i knew my effort was in vain. the shell had entered through the walls of the house, and even now i could see those spores of slumber sifting out to float with the winds. an agonized cry brought me to my senses. mallory's voice, "brian! brian, lad--where are you!" i turned and fled toward the secret portal. i made it just in time. the aged doctor and i were the last to enter the tunnel as the first totie set foot in the laboratory. stumbling, panting, we raced down that smooth slope to where the _jefferson_ awaited us. a dull throbbing wakened echoes in the hollow depths; eager hands helped us into the air-lock. i heard mallory gasp, "take off! _now!_" the humming deepened to a frightful roar, the niagara of powers beyond comprehension. i was dimly aware of a cascade of broken rock smashing down about the _jefferson's_ permalloy casing, of an unearthly sheet of flame mirrored through quartzite windows. then a tremendous tug pulled me to my knees, my lungs strained for precious air, blood danced before my eyes and there was agony in my bones.... vii earth was a tremendous disc, swaddled in lacy veils of gleaming white, when next i looked upon it from the control turret of the _jefferson_. i did not look for long. i had, when i turned my gaze upon it, some vague idea of being able to determine (if nothing else) broad continental outlines of the sphere from which we were roaring at a speed which mallory had told me was approximately , miles per hour. but the sheen was so terrifically blinding that i had to shut my eyes. dr. mallory, no longer so intent over his instruments now that he had checked his course and found it satisfactory, noticed the movement, reached over and turned the pane through which i had been looking a quarter-turn in its grooved frame. immediately the burning radiance dimmed into murky grayness. "earth-shine, brian," he answered my unspoken query. "our mother planet is a great reflecting body. at this distance it is even more painful to look upon with the naked eye than is the sun." maureen said, "but the moon, doctor? we don't seem to be moving toward it?" "we aren't. it's moving toward us. or perhaps i should say both it and we are moving toward a mutual point in space where our paths will intersect in--" he glanced at a chronometer and at his calculations. "in a little less than eight and a half hours. "before that, however. brian," he turned to me seriously, "there will be a few minutes that i am afraid will be rather uncomfortable for our party. the period of absolute weightlessness when we reach the 'dead spot'; the spot where the gravitational forces of earth and its moon are completely nullified by each other. "you might go below and warn everyone that this is to be expected. bid them not to be alarmed." someone coughed apologetically at the turret door. it was st. cloud. his face was granitelike, but his eyes were haggard. he said, "brian--" "yes?" "it's danny." "danny? is he--?" he nodded. "i'm afraid so. he'd like to see you." * * * * * i followed him swiftly down the ramp, through the corridors, and into the sick bay. there were a half dozen of the men in there receiving first aid treatment from one of dr. mallory's assistants. wilson was in one of the private wards off the main hospital room. he turned his head slowly as i entered, essayed a grin that froze, suddenly, as a spasm shook him. but he said, in a low, husky voice, "hyah, cap!" i said, "hayah, yourself, soldier!" and motioned the others to get out. the door closed softly behind them. "got a blighty one, did you?" i said. he said laboriously, "you wouldn't kid a guy, would you, brian? i got a west one this time." his hands plucked at the sheet covering him, drew it down. even the bandages had not been able to staunch that slow, staining seepage. i drew the cover back again. "you're tough, irish," i told him. "you'll get over that one before breakfast." but i had a hard time saying it; the words rang false from my lips. i was lying, and he knew it as well as i. he shook his head. "i don't much give a damn, brian. i got the guy who done it, and a couple others for good measure. there's only one thing i'm sorry about." "yes, irish?" "that story. it was about a guy named kinniston. a lensman. he was in a hell of a jam. i'd like to have known if he got out." he said plaintively, "i can't lift my hands, brian, boy. they're so damned weak...." i said, "one of those magazines? where is it?" he nodded to the chair beside his bed. i picked the thing up, found the place where he'd left off. i started reading to him the story that had captured his fancy. it wasn't easy. i hadn't read much of anything since i left military training school at the age of thirteen. a lot of the words were unfamiliar, and i guess i made pretty heavy weather of it. but he seemed to be enjoying it. he lay back on the pillows, breathing hard, so intent on the adventures of this "gray lensman," printed in an old and yellowed fiction book, that he almost forgot the icy fingers closing in upon him. he only interrupted me once. that was to say suddenly, "brian--it was krassner, you know." "what?" "he fired ... the shot." the shot that had betrayed us! i was reminded, forcibly, that i hadn't seen krassner aboard ship. i didn't know whether he'd made it or not. but if he had-- "go on ... brian. get him out of trouble before...." so i read on. it was weirdly strange, sitting there reading a story of spaceflight adventure written twenty years ago. while we, ourselves, soared the void in a craft bound for earth's satelite. but i read on. and it must have been ten minutes before i sensed something wrong. at first i couldn't figure what it was. then, suddenly, i realized. it was the fact that danny's breathing no longer rasped beside me.... i rose and closed the magazine. i hope that somehow he knows, now, how the lensman fought his way out of that jam. * * * * * i went back to the turret, then. but on the way i sought out ronnie and mac and rudy. i asked them about krassner. they hadn't seen him. "but we will! if he's aboard this ship, we'll dig him out!" they were gathering their squads into search parties as i left. in the control room, dr. mallory had just completed another check-up and minor course revision. he was jubilant because the _jefferson_ was reacting so beautifully. "another six hours, brian, and we'll be there. i've been teaching maureen to operate the ship. she's an apt pupil." maureen flushed with pleasure. mallory continued, "i'm glad we have another pilot. now she can make the next trip back to earth, pick up more colonists while we build our lunar colony--" i started, and looked at him swiftly. then he didn't know! i said, "doctor--those spores. how swiftly do they propogate?" "with drastic swiftness, brian, lad. that's why i kept them in a sealed, sterile chamber. had they ever been loosed, within two month's time all earth would have succumbed to their somnivorous power. but why do you ask--?" a sudden look of fear swept his features; his voice rose. "brian! you destroyed the spores? i saw flames leaping before you entered the tunnel--" and then i told him. it took him a good while to speak again. and when he spoke, his voice was deep with sorrow. he glanced at the dim shadow of earth outlined on the polaroid window, and his hands made a yearning gesture. "that which i feared most has come to pass. we are powerless to prevent it. we might have time for two, three, a half dozen trips to earth to save a few refugees from the sleep to come--but even that is unsafe. were a single spore to get into the ship, be borne back to luna, our colony, too, would be stilled in centuries, aeons of slumber. you're _sure_ the spores escaped, brian?" "i'm sure." "then soon we will be the last of earth's waking children. our responsibility is graver than ever. now must we not only keep alive the spirit of liberty, but all man's dreamed-of future is in our hands." maureen cried desperately, "but the responsibility is too great, dr. mallory. surely you, who invented the spores, know some way to counteract their action? isn't there some way to effectively destroy them?" "none, my dear. none ... except ..." his eyes dimmed uncertainly. "i don't know. maybe. there's a faint, far possibility. once, as i was experimenting, i happened to expose certain of the spore-plasm to synthetic chlorophyll. a reaction took place, a sloughing of the spore cell. i was not interested in that at the time, so i didn't pursue the experiment. but it is remotely possible...." "we must try, then," i told him. "as soon as we get to luna, you must try that experiment again. try it on your sleeping assistant, williamson. better he should die now than slumber on forever in his glass coffin. "and if the antidote works, we'll be in a position to reclaim earth. sweep away the plague, and while doing so, end the war in the very fashion you once planned." "i'll do it!" he cried excitedly. "chlorophyll must be the answer! as soon as we reach--" he stopped abruptly. footsteps were pounding up the runway; breathless men were tumbling into the room. big mac was at their head, his brow was red with unbridled rage. he yelled at me, "brian! we've found him! we've found the dirty, skulking rat!" "krassner, you mean?" i thought again of danny, and of those others who had died because of krassner's revealing gun shot. my anger flared to match macgregor's. "where is he? bring him in!" "we've got to take him. he's barricaded himself in the aft storage compartment and threatens to blow the ship to hell if we make a move!" viii for a moment, everything before my eyes was outlined in crimson. as from afar i heard my own voice gritting, "get your men together! follow me--" then dr. mallory's sharp command, "no, brian! don't move hastily. he has the upper hand. he can do just what he threatens. those aft storage bins are loaded with explosive, inflammable substances. maybe we can reason with him--" he turned to maureen. "hold the ship to its course, my dear. i will be back in a few minutes." we moved aft. mallory and myself, macgregor and ian pelham-jones, devereaux. we passed through the bulkhead that sealed the forward from the aft portion of the ship, hurried down a long corridor, and came to the carriage lock beyond which lay the storage bins, the engineers' berths, the recreation room and the library. this door was closed; before it, tense, nervous, uncertain, hovered a dozen of my men. van huys headed them; he looked up at me, his pale blue eyes troubled. "he's in there, brian. i think the man's gone mad!" mallory raised his voice, called mildly, "krassner?" there was a shuffling sound from behind the lock. a moment's silence, then krassner, suspiciously, "well?" "what's the matter, my friend? you mustn't act like this. what is it you want?" "turn the ship back to earth!" "but we can't do that." mallory's voice was soothing, persuasive. "we've set our course. we can't return." "you must, damn you!" i couldn't restrain myself any longer. i brushed by mallory, cried, "krassner, you're acting like an idiot! come out of there immediately!" again there was a brief instant of stillness. then krassner's tone altered subtlely, became half-mocking. "is that you, o'shea?" "yes." "the gallant captain of a drag-tailed company. you want to save your command, don't you, captain? then make the old fool turn this ship back, and do it _now_!" wrath inflamed me; i stepped forward and hammered on the metal door. there came the sound of swift, frightened movements inside. krassner yelled sharply, incisively, "don't try to come in here, o'shea. i can blast this ship to shards, and by the banner, i'll--" he stopped abruptly, aware that in his excitement he had finally given himself away. but if he was startled, i was even more so. suddenly, now, it all made sense. i wondered why i had not guessed the truth before. but i am not a clever man; i am just a soldier. and we had met krassner under circumstances that favored his deceit. i said slowly, "so you're not one of us, after all, krassner? you're one of them?" he had recovered his aplomb. he laughed stridently. in my mind's eye i could see his face, thin lips drawn in a tight smile, those too-close eyes lifted at the corners with mockery. his voice was a taunt. "congratulations, o'shea, on having played the dupe so long and so excellently. allow me to introduce myself in my proper character. captain jacob krassner of the imperial german army--at your service!" it was all too clear, now. i remembered the day we had met krassner, seen him "shot down" by an enemy plane. i remembered macgregor's comment at the time. "damned funny. first totie i ever saw who didn't gun a parachuter." and that day i had caught him listening to us from mallory's outer office. his restless wanderings around the laboratory grounds; now i knew he had been seeking the hide-away of the _jefferson_. and the betraying rifle-shot-- "you americans are a naïve race," krassner was saying amusedly. "it never occurred to you, did it, o'shea, that i might have concealed on me a portable transmitter? it was i who exposed the location of the laboratory to our gallant forces. we had suspected for some time that strange things were brewing near cleft canyon. that is why i--shall we say 'dropped into the picture'? to learn the meaning of certain things that puzzled us." he was a braggart, like the rest of them. now that he had given himself away--only toties swore "by the banner"--he was gloating triumphantly. and he held the upper hand. we could not even tell him that which we knew; that earth was doomed, that already hundreds of thousands of his compatriots as well as ours by quiescent in dreadful, sleeping undeath. if he discovered the totie cause was lost--well, they were ever ones for the heroic, the vainglorious gesture. and his hand controlled forces that would blast us all into nothingness. * * * * * i glanced about me nervously. the faces of the men mirrored my anxiety, mallory's brow was heavy with fear, van huys gnawed his full lower lip savagely. only the gleaming metalwork of the corridor was impassive; that and the heavy door that barred us from a traitor and an enemy. a grilled square, high in the walls of the corridor, was like a great, fanged, laughing mouth. i stared at it. "mallory!" i whispered the name. "what is that?" "eh?" he followed my glance. "oh--that? part of the ventilation system. but, why--?" then he grasped the reason for my sudden eagerness. "yes, brian. it feeds into every chamber. we'll give you a hand. bruce--" krassner's voice came to us, suspicious. "what are you whispering about out there? i warn you, don't attempt to enter this room. if you do, we'll all die together!" mallory somehow managed to keep his tone steady. "krassner, you're an intelligent man. listen--" "keep him talking, doctor!" i whispered. i nodded to macgregor; his huge hands cupped to give me a hand-up to the grill. my fingers tore at the four studs that bolted it into position. one came out. another. all eyes were upon me as i lifted the heavy grill from its position, lowered it into the outstretched hands. only mallory continued talking, pleading, arguing, reassuring. stalling for precious time. i nodded, macgregor's shoulders heaved, and i was scrambling into the smooth bore of the ventilating system. it was narrow, but not too narrow; the air was cool, clean-smelling. i crept from the opening, was lost in darkness. a native sense of direction, keen-edged by years of guerrilla warfare, aided me in threading that black labyrinth. how long the creeping journey took, i had no way of knowing. it seemed endless, for i moved slowly, cautiously, dreading the revelatory scrape of clothing upon metal, the sound that might send krassner suddenly into action. a turn, a rise, a descent, and another turn. then before me loomed a networked square of light. and the sound of krassner's voice was no longer muffled; it reached my ears loudly. "--fine organization, o'shea, where the soldiers address their 'captain' by his first name. but we will teach you obedience, you yankee up-starts! we--" i was at the grill. there was no way to unscrew it from the inside. what could be done must be done--and in a single, sure move--from here. krassner stood a few yards from the barred and bolted door. he had not been bluffing. he had prepared the way for the destruction of the _jefferson_ in the event his demands were refused, his scheme went awry. the end of a coiled fuse lay beside him, he toyed nervously with an electro-lighter as he talked. but now his patience was wearing thin. he said, "but enough of this conversation! are you, or are you not, going to turn about? your answer now, or by the banner--" mallory answered reluctantly, "krassner, once more i beg of you to listen to reason." "the time for reason is past. i want action. you, o'shea! speak to me! are you going to turn the ship?" silence. i eased my revolver from its bolster with infinite slowness. i saw a puzzled look appear on krassner's features, turn to a look of sudden doubt. "o'shea! where are you? speak to me!" my gun spoke for me. * * * * * krassner never suffered for the misery he brought on others. he never knew what struck him. my shot crashed into his brain like a jovian bolt. without a word, a whimper, a groan, he collapsed where he stood, his lips still parted in the question he had been hurling at the door upon which, now my comrades were battering. but even in death, krassner was destined to throw a last blow amongst us. my cavernous eyrie echoed with a roaring blast; when my deafened ears could hear again they heard a sizzling crackle. the stench of burning powder stung my nostrils. i craned to look down through the grill; saw there that which damped my forehead coldly. krassner's weapon had been the hand flame-thrower of our enemy. the stricken convulsion of his fist had shot a withering blast of flame upon the fuse. now a charred line of fire was racing to the charge krassner had prepared. in frantic haste i screamed this knowledge to those beyond the door. "you've got to get in somehow! stop that fuse!" their efforts redoubled. i heard the ringing crash of metal upon metal which meant they had brought up a pry, then came a hissing sound, and at the doorjamb, by the hinges, metal warmed, turned orange, glowed cherry red. a blowtorch! i could do no good behind this grill. it was the act of a contortionist to turn in that meager space, but somehow i accomplished it, scrambled desperately toward the corridor grill through which i had entered the air-duct. it was just as i gained the opening that the hinges of the lock finally gave way, the door burst open. even i was not prepared for that which appeared through the frame. the entire aperture was one solid sheet of flame. despite their eagerness, no one could blame my men for falling back, horrified, from the scorching fingers that leaped out to grasp them. all but one! and that one was dr. thomas mallory. perhaps it was because he alone realized the vital necessity of jerking that fuse from its charge before everything ended in one coruscant moment. arms locked before his face, head lowered, he dashed recklessly into that flaming hell! i fell--or dropped, i know not which--from my outlet, found myself on my feet, heard myself bellowing, "water! we've got to stop that fire before--" but they knew that. already someone had raced to the jets, another was tugging desperately at a reel of fire hose. i suppose what i did next was heroic. either that or damned, blind foolishness. it could not have been deliberate heroism, for there was no time to measure the chances, weigh the consequences. i leaped through the doorway, followed dr. mallory. and even so, there was another figure at my side. that of burly bruce macgregor. we found him at the same time. he lay face down on the floor, arms outstretched before him. but in one blistered hand was--the end of the fuse. scant inches from its charred end stood piled boxes of triple-x, most deadly of all explosives. the flames had not yet quite reached it, but in another moment-- then the water came! like a solid fist it caught me in the middle of the back, shot me, sprawling, forward. the breath shot from my lungs before that impact--but never had i been more grateful for a bruising blow. macgregor, a sorry sight with his blistered cheeks, scorched hair, spark-charred garments, bent his brute strength against the flood, roared directions. "here! on these boxes first! soak them, ruin them! we can fight the fire later...." * * * * * we got dr. mallory out of that furnace. how long we battled the fire after that is hard to say. at least an hour. krassner had planned his coup with deadly teutonic thoroughness. not only had he arranged the fuse and explosive charge; he had also soaked walls, drapes, furniture, with gasoline. against this, our water was useless. we had no sand. men labored to drag the lethal crates of explosive out of the danger zone; after that we went back at the ever-spreading fire. chemicals did the trick finally. the last blaze succumbed to the stifling blanket of carbon dioxide, a clean-up crew methodically swept up the last of the charred débris. thus died krassner--but at what a cost! ten of my men in the hospital, at least two of them seriously burned. three whole bins of provisions gone forever, devoured by the hungriest of all foes. a binful of linens, clothing, blankets, burned to cinders. and every other room that had been in that aft section of the ship gutted! all these disasters paled into insignificance when, bandaged, cleaned, reclad, i went to visit dr. mallory. one look at his face and i knew that here was the heaviest price we were to pay for the destruction of our last mortal foe. only mallory's eyes were visible under the swaddling mask of bandage, and these were raw and bloodshot. but the ghost of a smile lighted these fine old eyes, and his voice, sieved through a layer of gauze, said weakly: "i ... reached there in time ... brian, lad." "you did that," i told him huskily. "you saved us all, doctor." "not only us, but ... mankind. we _had_ to live, brian. you must lead ... our people ... out of the wilderness." i said, "not i, doctor. _you._ you are the only man who can save us, reclaim the sleeping world--" he said, as though not hearing me, "it's a good ... thing i showed maureen ... how to run the ship. isn't it? now she can take us to luna. "brian, boy ... find the notes ... in my desk. they'll help you. i believe ... you'll find the crater of copernicus ... the best place to land. there will be air there. thin, maybe. but air. in the underground grottoes ... should be ... water...." * * * * * a spasm shook him; his eyes closed for a moment in pain, then opened again. they were febrilely bright. "most important of all ... brian ... the spores. you must find a way ... to destroy them. go back to earth ... and awaken man ... to a new, a peaceful, world." he was silent so long that i cried out, "doctor!" i couldn't say more. but he spoke again, and for the last time. "i am sure now ... brian ... you will find the answer ... in chlorophyll. keep after it. the fate of all ... mankind ... is in only your...." and that was all. his eyes closed, then, as if they had finally found peace. i turned away. maureen covered his face tenderly. she came to my side, and her voice was soft. "he was right, brian. you are our leader now. it is up to you to find the antidote for earth's illness." i stared at her long and bitterly. my voice must have been harsh. "i! i, maureen? tell me--do you know the formula for chlorophyll? do i? does anyone aboard this ship, now _he_ is gone?" "don't be upset, brian. no, we don't--but there's no cause for despair. it, and everything else you need know, is at our disposal. that's why he went to such pains to provide a scientific library for the ship. all man's knowledge lies there, waiting for us to seek it out." i took a deep breath. i said, "that's just it, maureen. i couldn't bring myself to tell him. but--" "but, brian--?" "the library is gone! the books that meant life or death for mankind are a pile of crumbled ashes!" * * * * * i suppose i should be grateful that we are here. i should be thankful that maureen's quick intelligence made it possible for us to land here at the crater of copernicus. i look from the window of my little shack. i see shanties like my own arranged in a crude circle here at the base of towering mountains. dr. mallory was right. we have air here, and water. we have enough provisions to last us for years. by the time those are exhausted, we will be independent of our earthly supplies, for already sanders and van huys have set soil into cultivation; they claim, gleefully, that this thick, rich, lunar soil flowers like a desert when watered. and we have set up plants for the synthesis of water. strange how quickly we have adapted ourselves. we even laugh sometimes, nowadays. there have been marriages; i suppose that means that in a little while there will be births. imagine that! the first earth child to be born on the moon. i, too, should be happy. at times i am--comparatively. for i have maureen beside me; our love is a great, sustaining force in a desperate existence. but i cannot be completely happy, for night or day i am reminded of the great, impossible burden that weighs my shoulders low. the earth, a massive, glowing globe, lights our sky. occasionally i think i can glimpse the gleaming ocean waters of earth; once, on a clear night, the familiar outline of our lost homeland, america, was crystal clear to our eyes. yet all life on that nearby mother planet is, must be, now deep in everlasting sleep. everlasting because i am powerless to interrupt it. because mallory's library is no more; because i am a stupid soldier, not a clever man. only recently there came a wan ray of hope. it was as we were transferring the last pieces of furniture from the _jefferson_ to our shacks. in the berth that had been danny wilson's--gay, laughing danny!--i found pile upon pile of those amusing, colorful "magazines" that danny loved. they are old and ragged; many of them are coverless. but most of them--for such was danny's preference--are the kind which mallory once called "science fiction." dreams of the world-to-be, pathetic in the face of that which now confronts us. but it is my only ray of hope, these magazines. i brought them to my shack. i am culling them carefully, one by one. there is a faint, and oh! so faint, chance that.... yet i fear it is a hopeless search. there is so much of fancy in these little books, so little simple fact. had but _one_ of those imaginative writers of years ago thought to include in one of his stories that which must have been, to him, a commonplace formula--that for chlorophyll--i could yet do that which mallory demanded of me. here we are rich with ores, the soil teems with every element known to man. we have a well-equipped laboratory, we could synthesize _anything_. but we cannot create this "chlorophyll" because we do not know what it is, nor what elements combine to form it. hope dwindles as i read. there remains but one more slim pile of magazines before me. if the answer is not in one of them, then we must perish. i turn pleading eyes to the past, to the year , before i was born. but there is no one to hear my plea. unless, in one of these remaining-- (_here the manuscript ends._) * * * * * postscript common sense tells me there can be little doubt but that this "manuscript," purported to be written by one brian o'shea, a soldier in the army of the democracies in the year , a.d., is a deliberate and painstaking hoax. who is responsible for it, i cannot begin to guess. somehow i can't bring myself to believe that dr. edgar winslow (whom i have investigated and found to be exactly what he claimed, a fellow in the psychology department of one of our nearby southern universities) would lend himself to such a fantastic trick. but it is hard to believe, also, that winslow could and did achieve the perfect telaesthetic rapport evidenced by the foregoing pages. but--there was an earnestness about winslow that stirred me strangely. he did not have the air of a man perpetrating a fraud. he asked me, you will remember, to "play the game of caution," even if i did not believe that which i found in the manuscript. i should, perhaps, dismiss the whole thing with a shrug; heave the "story" back at winslow with the advice that if he wants to become a science-fiction writer he should do so honestly, not try to insinuate his way into print on the byline of another. yet--it is a queer manuscript. it is quiet here in roanoke today. as i write, i look from my office windows to see the rolling hills, now sweet-breasted with fresh green, misted with the soft white of dogwood. the sky is blue and clear, the sun a warm beneficence. still, the morning papers tell of the desperate plight of the allies. again they have lost ground to a grim, mechanized totalitarian army. finland, norway, belgium, holland,--the list grows. mussolini has sent his restless legions to battle; japan makes overt gestures toward the indies. russia, the patient bear, crouches in the north, watches ... and waits.... i don't know. i honestly don't know. the manuscript is probably a hoax. and yet ... and yet.... anyway, here it is, brian o'shea. here is what you asked for. you'll find it on the cover of this magazine. if this magazine is one of those through which you still have to search, the world you mourn may yet blossom anew. and because covers, like man's freedom and dreams and hopes, too often crumble into dust, the formula you want is printed here again, man of the future. c_{ }h_{ }o_{ }n_{ }mg is the empirical formula for chlorophyll, brian o'shea! c_{ }h_{ }o_{ }n_{ }mg! helena brett's career by desmond coke author of the books on the page opposite [transcriber's note: this list has been moved to the end of this etext] new york e. p. dutton & co. , west twenty-third street to arthur waugh, critic, publisher, and friend, who started me as novelist and has never failed since with encouragement, i dedicate this book in gratitude. prefatory postscript in these thin-skinned days when the words libel and traitor drift on every breeze, it may be "wise" (i am told at the last), to make it plain that my author, publisher, and artist do not represent real people! so be it, then: the men, as also women, in this unromantic comedy of married life are all imagined; but in declaring them not to be individuals, i would not be thought to admit that they are non-existent ... or universal. such men have been and will be--self-centred authors, unscrupulous publishers, vulgar-minded artists--nor does a paragon make the best food for fiction: but there are also others. logic still permits one to avoid libel without confessing treachery, and i am little likely to "attack" my own profession or two others from which i draw some of my nearest friends. we are told that there are black sheep in every fold; but it is still possible that a few among the others may be white. it pleases some of us to think so. desmond coke contents part i how it happened chapter i. advice ii. "why men marry" iii. "why women wed" iv. hymen part ii hubert brett's wife v. routine vi. growth vii. the cult of uselessness viii. a scene in the home ix. cinderella x. honour xi. pink papers and st. anthony xii. devils xiii. secrets xiv. was it worth while? xv. discoveries xvi. a matter of sales xvii. the tempter part iii helena brett's career xviii. zoË xix. business xx. pleasure xxi. exposure xxii. the iron in the soul xxiii. secret number two xxiv. battle royal xxv. the broken triangle xxvi. tact xxvii. the two ways xxviii. woman proposes xxix. helena brett's career part i how it happened helena brett's career chapter i advice "of course," said kenneth boyd, with the abrupt conviction of one whose argument is off the point at issue, "it's absolutely obvious. you ought to marry." the man who ought to marry was no more pleased to hear it than most of his kind. he scowled angrily: then smiled, as though contempt were a more fit reply. he was tall, broad, firm-looking, with smooth dark hair still low upon his forehead, and certainly looked in no need of drastic remedies. he knocked his pipe out on the grate before he answered, but when the words came, they burst forth like an explosion. "you married men," he cried, turning the attack, "are just like parrots. you can only say one thing. you're worse than parrots: you're gramophones--or parrots with a gramophone inside. you're always saying one thing, 'marry!' and you say it jolly long. i honestly believe you've got a trades union, unless it's merely nasty feeling! that probably is it. you hate to see others as happy as you used to be!" whereat, comforted, he stretched his long legs and lay back on the deep chair in a better humour. "no," said the other gently. "we hate to see them miserable and know they'll never realise man's one chance of happiness till it's too late." he spoke in very earnest tones and looked almost anxiously across at his friend, now quite happy again with the flushed sensation of having achieved something at any rate not too far from an epigram. a peaceful smile played round the big mouth which alone betrayed weakness in his pale, clear-cut face. how young he was in some ways, kenneth boyd reflected--in self-complacency, for one! and yet, in others, how much too settled and fixed for his years. here he was, a ten-year resident of these rooms--comfortable enough, yes--looked after by a sister; turning out his yearly novel, no worse but no better than the one before; an old bachelor at thirty-five, and yet too young to speak of marriage as anything except a rather tasteless joke! he watched him anxiously, as he might watch his patients at the hospital, and wondered whether he was beyond helping. hubert brett said nothing. he was angry. why, he was wondering, had he telephoned for boyd to come along at all? he always _had_ asked boyd, of course, even in the dear old oxford days, when he was in a difficulty. boyd's great forehead, thick chin, and deep voice gave him a sort of solid, comfortable air: and he was never sympathetic.... probably his medical work--it was not nice, quite, to think of it like that--made him a restful person to consult? he always smoothed you down and made you feel that what you meant to do would be entirely for the best. but he had been off form to-night.... marry, indeed! why, that had nothing to do with the case at all. it was ruth's maddening stupidity that had made him ask kenneth in. these rows with one's sister were horrible--and bad for work.... besides, they used to be such pals as kids: it wasn't nice, now, to be quarrelling like any costermonger and his wife. yet each absurd quarrel was followed by one more absurd. what had it been all about to-night? he had forgotten that already. the actual row was a surprise. ruth had started this one. he had not seen it coming, even, till they were both on their feet. she was so maddening, you see! he didn't mind an egoist. he sometimes thought, in moments of depression, he was one himself (but he did not believe in introspection). it was an egoist who claimed to be a martyr that aroused his anger. ruth was always claiming to have sacrificed herself. _she_ didn't matter. no one must consider her. she hadn't married. she gave her life up willingly to her dear brother. if he trod on her sometimes, she only liked to feel that he was free to wing his way to fame. and all that sort of stuff ... when all the while, she never did a single thing he wanted, but in the most selfish way made everything as hard as it could be for his work, when she herself was doing nothing! what a fuss if he was half an hour or so late for their lonely meal! how could it matter? he was in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes: and what did she do after dinner, anyhow? nothing but play patience, while he went back to work! how could it make any difference at what hour she dined?... probably to-night had been some trifle of that sort: he had forgotten, really; but at the end of it she had stood up and said, for the first time: "well, i can always be turned out. there's no real reason why we should live together." "the first sensible remark you've made," he had replied, made elementary by anger, and gone out to telephone to boyd. why, after all, _did_ they live together? would he be happier without her? or would a cook-housekeeper be worse? how did other men get on? most of them, somehow, seemed to marry.... boyd would know, though--he went to so many homes. but boyd might say that it was not quite fair on ruth.... that was nonsense, though. brothers weren't ever meant or bound to keep their sisters, and thirty-eight was not too old for women to get married. it was the fashionable age. nobody now cared for girls. only ruth never wanted to go out, or, if she did, it was to some quite silly show where he could not be seen.... well, he would see what boyd said. that was the best way. and boyd, having listened to the passionate recital in an owlish silence, had answered: "it's quite obvious. you ought to marry!" just what those idiots of doctors always said. marriage and golf were their only two ideas, even for any one with liver. "_why_ ought i to marry?" he blazed out suddenly, to the surprise of his friend, who could not follow his thought during the long pause. "why, my dear fellow? because you're stagnating--because it is life's second stage--because you've got beyond the first--because each of your books is exactly like the last----" this ceased to be theory. hubert was in arms at once. "i don't see that," he said in a hard voice, almost sulkily. "as a matter of fact, several of the critics went out of their way to call _the bread of idleness_ new, original, etcetera." "yes," replied kenneth boyd, who secretly enjoyed wounding just deeply enough his friend's self-esteem; "the plot was different, but its heroine the same. you had her in _wandering stars_; you had her in _life_; you've had her in them all. there is a hubert brett type no less than a gibson girl." "i still don't see, even so," hubert icily replied, "exactly why i have to marry." kenneth boyd smiled unseen. "because to widen your art, you must widen your idea of woman. if you really know one woman, they say, then you can know them all." a good deal of the author's self-esteem returned. he looked relieved. so that was all, was it? "if you know them all, as i do, by study," he answered, "you don't _want_ to know one." and now indeed kenneth boyd peered at him seriously, as at a patient very critical. "that sort of remark," he said, "just shows that you know nothing about women and ought to marry one." hubert laughed. "dear old kenneth!" and there was pity in his voice. "perhaps i should, if i knew nothing of them really. but i'm afraid i know too much." his counsellor made no reply. he always knew when he had failed. he also knew, from long experience, the only weapon that availed when once the hard line came round brett's weak lips. he waited prudently, while they both smoked, and then he grasped it firmly. "well, it's a pity, hubert," he said gaily, as though he had abandoned his attempt and could afford by now to laugh at it, "because you'd not only solve the sister problem but--look at the advertisement! 'famous author weds.' 'mr. hubert brett, the novelist, who is to be married this week. photo by bassano.' 'mr. brett's beautiful young wife.' 'mrs. brett, wife of the celebrated author, opens a bazaar.'" "oh, shut up," cried hubert quite youthfully, and made some pretence at throwing a tobacco-pouch, but did not seem displeased. "then," went on the remorseless friend, "she is at parties every day, and universally admired. who is she? everybody naturally asks. why, the wife of hubert brett. have you read his new novel? if not, do." "you must think me a conceited fool," hubert put in, "if you imagine i swallow all that." sometimes he suspected boyd of sneering. mrs. boyd, he knew, disliked him. she had often tried a snub. she was a very brainless woman.... kenneth boyd dropped his manner of burlesque. "all the same," he said, falling back into the old vein, "a wife _does_ a lot in one's career, you know. she has so much more time for making friends. i always look on mine as my best canvasser! why, man" (and now he shamelessly threw off the mask), "you simply don't know what you're missing. when i look back on my old single days, i hardly can believe that it was me or how i could have been such an almighty ass as to have wasted all those ghastly years. perhaps, though, i shouldn't enjoy our life now so much, if i'd not had a good mouthful of the other. good lord--the discomfort; the loneliness; the want of any one who really cares; the feeling that there's nothing _permanent_; the frantic writing round to make sure you won't have a lonely evening; the sick despair when some one fails and you sit moping by your fire or wander out among a crowd of laughing couples, damnably alone; the lack of any purpose in life; the constant cadging round for somebody to save you from a soho restaurant. good lord, it simply can't be true i had five years of it, and now...! of course, hubert, i know what you'll say. we're all different; you're not that sort; you never feel all this; you wouldn't feel as i do, if you married. but you do--you would. we're all utterly the same, deep down. you novelists forge little differences to help out your stories, but i tell you, deep down, men are all the same. we all get lonely, we all get sad and hopeless as the years go on, we want just _one_ who values us more than the rest, who cares for our success, who smoothes away our failures. we can't, any one of us, get on alone. you're only shy, that's all. you funk proposing--you'd feel such a fool! but what's all that? there must be lots of jolly girls about. just you fix on one, get married, and then come and settle down near us, out hampstead way. think of it! no climbing back into a grimy lodging--sorry, old man, but i mean the fogs. if you could just see hampstead in a winter sunset! then a nice little home, all new and clean; tea all put ready for you by your wife; the kiddies keen to see you; that's the one way, i tell you, for _all_ men to come home. we're not different, a bit. we all want--_you_ want--love and comradeship; we want another thing beside ourselves, in whose success we can feel proud; we want our wife, our children, and we want our home. and that's exactly what you want, my boy!" carried along midway, he suddenly became self-conscious and collapsed with the last sentence. hubert ironically clapped his hands. "splendid, splendid! you ought to write advertisements; i'm sure the garden city would pay a big premium. title, 'the new home!'" he was much too absorbed to notice the hurt look that came over the other's face. kenneth boyd had been expensively educated, as a boy, in all english ideals. he never had dared, until just now, to show his self to any one except his wife. now, when it was mocked at, he felt a hideous shame, a terrible resentment. and he had only wished to help his friend! hubert contentedly passed on to the analysis of his own state, a plea for his own attitude. "i am different, though," he said, "all the same. you can't understand. my job, for one thing, is so different. i must be left alone to do it. i _don't_ 'come home,' as you so poetically put it; i'm there all the time. so would your 'kiddies' be, and they'd be a damned bore. just when i was dying to get on with my new book, they'd be what you call 'keen to see me' and squall if i wouldn't. oh, i can see it all. i've too much imagination, far, to need to marry; i've been through it all a thousand times, without. i can see my dear wife, as you call her, filthily jealous of my work and grudging every minute that i took for it. it's all so different for you fellows who go off to work. you've got your hours of solitude all free for business and then you come back to tea, if you're a slacker, as you've just described. but nobody ever believes that novelists do any work; it's just their hobby in spare moments! any one may interrupt and there is no harm done. my dear wife would buzz in and out and ask me what i liked for lunch.... oh, yes, i can see it all." "you've no idea of it at all," said kenneth boyd almost passionately in his deep, sincere-sounding voice. "and as to loneliness," hubert went on, utterly ignoring him, "i see too many people as it is. i'm always booked. i absolutely curse them sometimes when i feel i haven't seen them for a century and they'll be getting huffy. constant companion and all that stuff, indeed? no, thanks! shall i tell you _my_ idea of bliss?" "this, i suppose?" the other asked, waving his pipe-stem pitilessly around the untidy room, where school football-groups mingled with burne-jones survivals from the oxford age; where books usurped chairs, sofa, floor, piano-top; where no intrusive female hand was suffered, clearly, with methodic duster. "no," answered hubert, "though i'm fond of it. it's good enough for me as home. no, my idea of bliss is just an afternoon when i've no teas, appointments, duties, anything; when i am really free. then i put on my very oldest suit and get out right along the river, richmond way--kew, putney, anywhere--and stretch my lungs and look at the old book-shops and enjoy the river. that's when _i_'m happy, you see! i look at the river, out by richmond bridge, broad and festive and the sun upon it; everything all full of life; and i feel free, and that's the time i take a deep breath in--or by the sea, of course--and say, 'thank god that i'm alive!'" "and thank god you're alone?" his friend enquired. he looked across at him, no longer by now as at a patient, but as he might have at a curious specimen inside a labelled bottle. hubert was quite pleased to have this opportunity for self-analysis thrust on him. he liked to be thought peculiar but wished to be sincere. he reflected a little, then slowly blew out a funnel of smoke with energy behind it. "yes," he said, "and thank god i'm alone." chapter ii "why men marry" hubert shut the door after his visitor with no deep feeling of regret. he managed to refrain from slamming it. he was angry still. men are peculiar about their troubles. woman, popularly thought to be a sieve with secrets, will crush a worry down, grapple silently and fight with it, nor ever let her very nearest know that it is there. perhaps heroic centuries of motherhood have taught her to endure her own pain with a smile, where she can scarce bear to conceal another's folly? the man, in any case, is different. tell him what mrs. tomkins stupidly said about the vicar: he will not breathe it to a living soul. quite possibly he will not even listen to the end.... but let him have some small upset, some crisis where decision must be made, not a big choice--nothing like those he makes off-hand each day up in his city office--and you shall see him stripped of his pretence to all reserve or strength. long time, like homeric heroes, he sits tossing thought hither and thither. nothing emerges from this exercise: it is a mere convention. he must think a little: people always do; but he knows well enough that not this way lies decision. he takes other steps. if he is a man of few friends, he will risk everything upon a coin's fall. "heads i do, and tails i don't," he mutters weakly, groping in his pocket. up spins the penny. heads it is! "heads i do," he murmurs once again; and adds, pathetically firm, "but all the same, i don't think i will." he has been helped to his decision. if he has friends, he will use one of them in place of the penny. every man, almost, has one trusted friend whose advice he does not take in all moments of perplexity. kenneth boyd stood, so to speak, as hubert's penny. he always sat and listened stolidly to his friend's trouble: then he answered "heads" or "tails," as it seemed best to him; went back, braced by the contrast, to his hampstead home; and left hubert to decide whether or no he would take the spin as final. in this case, as he sat down, hubert said to himself with vehemence, poking the fire fiercely, that he would not. he had asked kenneth whether it would be mean to turn ruth out, as she herself suggested--and he had at once embarked on a long rigmarole about dear wives, winter sunsets, kiddies, teapots, and all sorts of things.... with a last jab at the fire he dismissed the interview just over from his mind and settled down to think. he never ought to have asked that monomaniac along. he might have guessed what he would say. ruth was a nuisance, frankly; she jarred upon him constantly: their life was one long quarrel nowadays; but--how would solitude affect his work? that was the big question. to hubert brett his work was life, and nothing much else counted. he was a man who valued success less for its achievement than for its reward. he liked to be pointed out as one who wrote (he often was, in little country places); he enjoyed meeting men and women whose names were famous far and wide; he loved press-cuttings, revelled in his photograph when reproduced, and was almost physically upset when he received a real old-fashioned, slashing review. to anything of this sort he always replied, quoting the opinions of some other papers, and "relying on the editor's sense of justice to give his letter publicity." papers, in fact, that liked neither his novels nor his letters, had ceased to notice the first-named, hoping to avoid the last: and he was glad of this decision. letters from unknown readers were shown to all his friends, who also had the privilege of reading the longest reviews, left out upon his mantel-piece; though when they took them up he would always protest, "oh, that'll bore you: it's only a few stray press-cuttings." he liked at dinner-parties to sit next women who had read his books (the dear, kind, tactful sex!), and asked him how he wrote. he had, in fact, published his first book under a pseudonym (his father, as a clergyman, naturally objecting to the real name being used), but found that no one recognised him as the author under his own different name. he therefore, on his father's death, had paid some pounds and taken the name brett permanently as his own for ordinary use. his sister, who was like most women in being petulant as to trifles but mild about the things that matter, had submitted from being ruth brettesley to become mere ruth brett. now, when he dined out, hubert often found that women next him would ask if he was "the author." it never had occurred to him, of course, that they were coached by an ideal hostess. it may be well imagined, then, that he now hesitated before taking any step that might affect his very methodical arrangements about writing. his sister, once thrown over (he told himself), would never return. she would marry or something. women were like cats: they always did. she would not stray about uncomfortably until he wanted her again. no; she would make a home: and he, as the years went on, would find himself alone.... he had lit a pipe, and drew at it mechanically, but he was far too rapt to taste it. kenneth boyd's words on that one point had certainly gone home. his eyes fixed on a glowing cavern of red embers, he saw unroll before him a grisly panorama of the days to be. he could see himself, bereft of ruth's care, moving to a bachelor flat where they "did for" one; happy enough perhaps, at first, in solitude, and working well--happy and working until illness came. then he saw the change. ruth, he admitted, had been quite splendid--like her old self--when he had been ill. that was when you wanted a woman about.... then, as kenneth had said, he would grow older. he could see himself climbing, more and more shakily each year, the long flight to his flat; too settled far by now to move even to a lower floor. he could see the porters and people saluting--oh, so respectfully!--till he was past, and then imitating his old, broken shuffle. he could see himself turning on with fumbling hands the light he used to switch on so gaily as he dashed in thirty years ago. he could see himself all alone at night, when it was too cold for an old man to walk about and no one wanted him; sitting there with weary eyes tight closed, thinking of the friends that he would like to see, the friends all dead or--married.... and finally he could see himself climb those stairs, so full of memories, for the last time, and stagger in for the last time to that small room where he had had such jolly parties in the years gone by, and ring and have just strength to gasp out, "i must have a doctor." yes, and that old wreck lying there, alone but for a nurse he hated, longing for sympathy, love--even ruth's!--yes, that too would be him. and then---- for one moment the knock on his door startled him. he was like a small child who, waked suddenly, continues a bad dream. he thought that they had come with that cheap, humble coffin which he had just seen borne up the long stairs.... he very nearly cried out, "bring it in," not realising that he was the corpse. "why, it's you, ruth!" he cried in vague annoyance. "of course it is," she laughed. "who else would it be, you stupid boy? perhaps you mean, though, you don't want me?" "of course i always want you, old girl." this hideous geniality, he felt, was the worst part of their whole constant warfare, recalling by an empty mockery that they had once been such devoted chums; still could be, possibly, if they were only parted. "i'm not working," he added almost grudgingly, as though he wished he had got that excuse. but ruth, indecision personified, still hovered restlessly in mid-carpet. "are you quite sure you're not, hugh?" she said. "if you _are_, do say so. i've been alone all the evening till now, so it won't hurt me to go on like that till bedtime. i am used to it, you see!" and she smiled patiently. hubert looked at her, wondering why she possessed this curious gift of annoying him. did she try, or was she really meaning to be kind? her face, set and hard already, gave no hint. she smiled with her lips but her eyes did not light up. there was something tragic in her looks. she was not ugly, yet she meant absolutely nothing. she was just a passable statue, into which the artist had failed somehow to put any life. she smiled doggedly with her lips, and she clearly was not happy. she had never lived. she went on wanly smiling reassurance at him, as one who should say, "i am not to be considered," till he schooled his voice to answer. whatever happened, he would not have another scene on this night which seemed in some way big with a decision. "it'll be nice to have a little chat, old girl," he said genially. "sit down and make yourself comfy." she moved timidly towards an armchair with the mien of a scolded, nervous child. "if you're quite, quite sure?" she quavered. "i wish i felt certain you hadn't been just thinking you would settle down, now mr. boyd had gone. i should be absolutely happy with my patience." "boyd was in great form," hubert answered. he could not trust himself to assure her further. "what did he say then?" and she let herself down into the chair staidly. she was not like a woman of thirty-eight. women of thirty-eight nowadays are young, almost unfashionably young, and ruth was pathetically old. she had given her youth to her mother: she was prepared to lavish the rest of life upon her brother, asking in return nothing except that he would not be what she tearfully and often called unkind to her. "say?" answered hubert, far more comfortably. "what didn't he say? my dear ruth, i've had a classic homily on marriage!" ruth stiffened visibly. "marriage? then i suppose you asked him in to give you his advice?" "really," said hubert in another voice, "i imagine you can't object, now, to what i ask my pals in for?--supposing that i did." she smoothed all that kind of thing away with a restful gesture. "my dear boy, you know i've no objection, as you call it, to anything at all you do. you are a man. i'm only your guest. i've no right to object. but i am naturally interested. of course, though, if you'd rather not tell me what mr. boyd said"--she paused, "we'll talk of something else." "no we won't," cried hubert, with a sudden passion. "i'm sick to death of all this constant friction." "friction!" and she raised her eyebrows ever so slightly. otherwise her sad face remained expressionless, but her hands clasped each other tensely under an old-fashioned shawl. "yes, friction. that's the only word. you know, ruth, i don't want to be a brute. you know what pals we were as kids, what pals we still are" (he forced the words out), "and that's why i intend to have it out. it isn't good enough. you know what a row we had over dinner. _that's_ why i asked boyd along. how do you expect a man to write when he's just had a row that's brought his soul red-hot into his throat? and you weren't very cheery company! so naturally i asked boyd in. i often do that or go out myself or else pretend to work, because i simply can't endure your company a moment longer." and now his sister leapt up to her feet. when she came to life it was always sudden. "hubert!" she cried in tearful reproach. she only called him hubert at such moments. he signalled her down without any ceremony. "for goodness' sake," he said, and it was nearly stronger, "don't let's have a row." he took a moment to calm himself and then said levelly, "look here, old girl, i want to thrash this matter out once and for all. it's no use killing love in this world, is it? it's rare enough, god knows. we've been such good pals, you and i, and now we are--like this." he pointed at her, and she fell back dully on her chair. "we don't mean it really," she said, fumbling for her handkerchief. hubert spoke seriously. "we do, though. anyhow, we should in time. it's just like other habits. it grows. it grows quickly, too. we never used to fight at all, you know." "_i_ never fight now," she protested, very near to tears. "i've always given in." poor, timid, self-sacrificing ruth never could understand what her brother's tempers were about. she tried so hard not to stand up against him! "oh, damn!" cried hubert, and strode madly up and down the room. it was all very futile, quite familiar. she looked as pained as usual. "what is it, hugh?" she gently asked. "of course you've given in," he flung at her. "you always do. you're always in the right: you are so keen to be! you wouldn't make me cross for worlds! it's just your damned humility i can't endure. no man on earth could possibly endure it." "i can't help my nature," she sobbed into her handkerchief. "i do my best to please you. i try to fall into your ways, i'm sure." hubert came up to her presently and touched her on the shoulder. "i'm sorry, ruth," he said. "it was my fault. i lost my temper. i was a cad to swear but somehow--oh, i don't know," and he sank down upon the chair again. "i suppose really it's just what boyd has often said, brother and sister weren't ever made to live together. he says all relatives have a natural antipathy to one another and----" "i'm sure _i_ haven't," interrupted ruth. this time he ignored her. "it's all so difficult," he said in a new tone, as though embarking upon an analysis. "i know you're wanting just to please me, ruth; you are an awfully good sort; you'll make somebody a splendid wife some day; but just because you are my sister, i suppose, i get annoyed when you begin asking whether you can come in and saying you don't want to if----" "you'd be much more annoyed if i came in without," said ruth, with an unwonted spirit. hubert rose to the attack. "you mean it's just my nature, and not you? i'd get annoyed whichever way it was? i'm just a selfish sort of cross-grained swine?" "i didn't say so, you _know_ i didn't; you're simply twisting my words round." grown men and women, by some odd irony, are never nearer childhood than when in a temper. hubert realised abruptly how ridiculous it was. once more he dropped his voice and dragged the conversation with a wrench back to the point at issue. "i was only telling you," he said with dignity, "what boyd said, as you asked to know. he said all this"--once more he waved his hand--"was a mistake, and that i ought to marry." he threw it out at her like a threat at a naughty child. she would not like it if he took her at her word and really turned her out. but even sisters can surprise a man. "oh hugh," she cried, forgetting all their differences, "do you mean you are really thinking----? only, do let it be some one really nice, who'll make you as happy as you deserve to be." he was too flustered to feel touched. "but wouldn't you mind?" he asked; and in spite of his efforts, surprise appeared in it. "mind?" she came across to him, sat on his chair-arm, and took his hand in hers. "how little you know me, old boy, really! of course i shouldn't mind. you must never, never consider me at all! do you imagine i expect you to remain a bachelor your whole life long, just to look after me? i shall find work to do or something; and anyhow, what is my life by the side of your career?" hubert at moments felt a brute, and this was one of them. he knew that he should thank her, kiss her, yet he could do neither. he found himself wondering in a dazed, abstract way, as often in these past years, whether she was really genuine or whether it was just a woman's bluff to make him feel his shaft had fallen short. if she was quite sincere, he felt almost aggrieved. the end of their long life together seemed to mean so little to her.... "no," he said automatically, not realising how inadequate it was; and then, "well, old girl, i really think perhaps _now_ i ought to work." he patted her hand in a perfunctory way as he released his own from it. "we've had our little chat and it's your bedtime, i am sure." "yes," answered ruth, and hesitated. "hugh," she said presently, "aren't i to know who it is?" her tone was more patient than aggrieved, but he read something of the other into it. "who what is?" he replied, although he guessed her meaning. "who you think of marrying. who's suddenly put the idea into your head." she waited a few moments; then, as he said nothing, she added almost slyly, "well, i think i know! i've not forgotten devonshire yet, and what a lot there was in your letters about miss--miss--i forget her name." "oh, that miss hallam, you mean," came the icy answer. it chilled even her exuberance. her rare gaiety died quickly, and she looked the martyr once again. "i see you don't mean to tell me," she said. "very well. of course i had no right to ask. i thought you'd like to let me know." she sighed. "i wish men weren't so terribly reserved." "and i wish," he retorted, "that women weren't so horribly imaginative." but she had shut the door. she always went abruptly, never said good night. he had told her, long ago, that those words broke up his evening and made him think of bed instead of work. to-night indeed, after her going, although he had said he must do some writing, he sat quietly where he had been and gazed into the fire. he was not, however, thinking about bed. he was wondering whether all women were so crude and vulgar with their brothers. ruth was the last person who would ever have said that about miss hallam to anybody else. just because he chanced to write and say that he had met a jolly sort of girl...! it is a stale truism about good advice, that most natures must reject it before they see their way to its acceptance. self-pride demands that it shall be their own idea. just as hubert had scoffed at his friend's idea of loneliness, which now indeed seemed such a ghastly spectre, so did he next work slowly back to the very words of his sister that had angered him the most. for by now his mental questioning had spread across a chasm dreaded for long years and flaunted itself gaily in a narrow field. the first step was so clear by now. of course he had sworn always that he would not marry, but that was true of the past only. one changed every now and then.... he was at the age when one grew lonely, when one naturally married. sisters were a big mistake. he could not endure year after year of silly quarrels like the one just past. with a wife he would start fresh. she wouldn't irritate him like ruth: he wouldn't see through all her motives; they need not fight for years.... besides, he must find some one less irritating, less selfish, than ruth.... and as to ruth, she said herself that she was game to go. she probably preferred it. the whole thing was her own suggestion.... yes, she was right; they certainly could not go on like this. yet if she went--that loneliness when he got old, was ill...! kenneth had talked a lot of drivel but he probably was right about stagnation. he found, himself, his work was getting stale.... and then the help that she---- but who? hubert flung himself across the chasm, refusing doggedly to see it, and found himself, flushed and excited, in the little field beyond. who could he marry, possibly? the question lent quite a new thrill to life. it was a big adventure, even if one never did it.... he hated clever women. he was sure of that. hated them, at any rate, as wives. mrs. kenneth boyd was one, and when he dined with them, she always waited till he had thrown out a theory, quite impromptu, possibly exaggerated rather, about something, and then said, "really, mr. brett? but how unusual!" or something of the sort. no, he could not bear that. he thought that type an insult to his sex. he liked a woman to be rather silly--well, not that quite--no, but shallow. he liked her to have not too many views herself: he hated suffragettes and things, of course; but just to have the brains to understand one's own ideas. that was where the girl ruth had mentioned was so splendid. she saw the fun of things; she even saw the fun of her name, helena hallam; but also she could enter into the plot of a book directly you had told it her, and be immensely interested in hearing about people you met at the authors' club. she was almost too ignorant, of course--knew nothing about life--but her naïve remarks amused him: so what did it matter? that really was the sort of woman he would like to marry. some one who would be interested in his work but know she hadn't got the brain to interfere; some one who'd look on his work-hours as sacred, because given to a thing she couldn't do to save her very life. ruth was annoying about that, and silly. if he read her out a chapter, she would usually say, "i think it's quite good, old boy; but i never feel you're made for fiction. i suppose essays never sell, though, and plays are quite impossible?" it was too stupid. she had said that even about _wandering stars_, which had sold close upon five thousand copies! not--of course--that he valued his novels according to their sales.... the girl in devonshire had been so different. he smiled, recalling her simplicity. she had thought him so clever to write, even before she had seen a word of it! and when he read her out a chapter, she wanted to know just how long it had taken him, asked to see how much he had corrected, and clearly looked upon the whole thing as a miracle. thinking of her now he had a curiously vital image of her personality. she was so fresh, so natural, so unspoilt, so splendidly a thing of life. she had never been to london. how she would love to see it; how gorgeous it would be to show! how different from taking out ruth, who always said that the streets smelt of petrol and she had neuralgia and wished they could live in the country, but of course _he_ must choose! how different altogether! how different when the lights were lit and curtains drawn! he still remembered how she sat, with one foot underneath her body, and smiled through those curiously bright eyes, as though always contentedly awaiting the next jolly thing that life could not possibly fail to bestow upon her. ruth was so hideously gloomy and apologetic. she expected the worst but she never minded. yes, there was no doubt that was just the sort of sensible, unsloppy, cheerful girl that he would like to marry. she would be nice to have about the house. she wouldn't want the vote or anything. she thought so much of his work that she would never grumble, like ruth, if he had a long bout at it. she'd take up needle-work or something. she had such a happy nature. and then at nights they'd sit and have great, jolly, sociable talks beside the fire, and he'd read out his books to her. possibly, now and then, she would see some mistake--not in the book itself, but in a woman's dress or something: women were so good at details--and he would learn a lot, as kenneth said, from seeing how her refreshingly simple mind regarded things. and then--she was a child--they would play games and laugh and roast chestnuts and all that sort of thing. he could imagine quite a jolly evening. the past hour seemed like a nightmare by the side of it. he got up and mixed a whisky and soda. really by now he wished he had thought of all this in devonshire! he had said to himself then, watching her, that somebody someday would be a lucky man--the girl was so herself, somehow. but it had not occurred to him that he could be the man. now, probably, he would never see the hallams again. mrs. hallam, of course, had said they must meet soon in london, but every one always said that and it was five weeks now since his return. he had not, naturally, ever written. of course--there was another thrill in this idea--he could go down to devonshire again with any false excuse trumped up; but even as this came into his head, his fatally quick fancy, over-exercised, saw him proposing to miss hallam, pouring out the sentimental stuff that a love-scene demanded; perhaps--who knows?--even feeling bound to kneel in the manner beloved of conventional romance! then, with a swift gesture, he suddenly drained his whisky and soda to its dregs, put the glass down jauntily as men do on the stage, and walked, feeling younger than for ten whole years, to his writing-desk. he gave a happy laugh as he took out some paper. for he had got a great idea. he was going to propose to miss hallam on paper! he was going to write it all down and see if it looked awful rubbish.... he was enjoying himself to-night in a quite new way. "dear miss hallam," he began and added "my" in front. then as he saw the meaning that might bear he laughed again. he knew it was not right just now to laugh, and marked it as an interesting fact. then, nervous of detection, he took a new sheet and started-- "my dear miss hallam, "you will be surprised to hear from me. "the fact of the matter is--i find myself getting very bald now that i really have to use my pen for something that matters!--i have been thinking a lot of my jolly days in devonshire, the tennis, the sea-walks, the picnics, everything with all of you, and (if i'm allowed to say it) especially with _you_ yourself." here he leant back and read what he had written. it was not literature but he felt satisfied. he took up his pen again and wrote-- "i don't know that it's usual, but i am rather reserved and not too romantic, so that i am _writing_ to ask whether you could think of being my wife. there has never been any one in my whole life of whom i have thought as i have thought of you these last five weeks. i could never tell you how i feel in words, and i see now that i can't on paper, but if you think in any way that you could grow fond of me, i am convinced that we could be immensely happy. i don't know that i have much to offer you; but if you talk to your mother about this, as no doubt you will, you must assure her that i can give you a comfortable home and that i hope, as the years go by, to make myself something of a name. "i will say no more now. i shouldn't have dared say so much, if i had not thought that we got on rather well last month, and that if you did not welcome this letter, you would at any rate be able to forgive it. "yours, "hubert brett." it was not certainly at all like any of the love-letters that he had written in fiction or read in the police-reports; but he had not inwardly approved of either. this seemed to him quite adequate. she was the sort of girl who wouldn't care for sentiment. he honestly believed she would write back sensibly and just say "yes." it is to be remarked that no question remained as to posting the letter or not, so soon as it was finished. he had begun it to see how it looked: now he felt that it was something fated. he must see what happened. without waiting even to put on a hat, he hurried out to an adjacent pillar-box and dropped the letter in with hardly more emotion than if it had been an ordinary bill. * * * * * going up to bed, without repentance for the night's wild work, and in fact oddly calm for any one in his position, he heard a curious noise inside his sister's room. he stopped and listened at the door. she was obviously sobbing. hubert suddenly felt softened towards her. so she cared, after all! she felt the separation after these long years! had he sometimes wronged her? had he been impatient? was she really fond of him; trying to consult his wishes and not to irritate him? was he growing selfish?... he very nearly tapped and went in to console her. then he reflected that she almost certainly would engineer another scene, and that always gave him a bad night. chapter iii "why women wed" helena had never thought much about marriage. there was no reason indeed why she should, for she was young and to her it still appeared, like death to a small child, as something she was sure to reach some day but need not worry with just now. she was, in fact, nineteen, but her ideas were those of nineteen fifty years ago or of fourteen to-day. devonshire, for one thing, has slept on in its soft air, not much disturbed by any modern turmoil; and for another, helena's mother had ideas. these, briefly put, consisted in not letting her daughter have any. it is, however, only human, from eve downwards, to defy authority and search for knowledge. helena, knowing that it was her lot to marry, naturally felt some interest in the habit. whenever she came on allusions to it, she stocked them in her brain, all in a healthy and quite natural way, wondering in an abstract manner whether it would be thus or thus with her. she never dared to talk about it to her mother. she had once mentioned her own hypothetic marriage, only to be told that girls did not speak of such things in fun, and it would be quite time enough when the occasion rose, and had she given the canary its clean water? mrs. hallam was a loving mother with stern theories. her own childhood had been a season of repression, yet she was satisfied enough with her morals as opposed to those of many round her. she intended, therefore, to repeat the process. she had no patience--this was her favourite expression--with the licence of young girls to-day: the manner in which they read any novel, went to any play. she had no patience with this rubbish about ignorance not being innocence. of course it was; or if it wasn't, it had very much the same result, and that was everything. girls read these trashy novels and got a notion that grown men and women spent their whole lives falling in and out of love. they naturally tried it and began flirtation as a sort of duty. if a girl knew nothing, she did not know what to do. if she had no notion what flirtation meant, she clearly couldn't do it--especially if she saw no men till she was safely beyond her teens. in any case, till she was twenty, helena had no plays, novels, or man-friends. her reading was all lives, histories, and comic papers. her days were spent with relatives or younger friends, when she was not alone. she grew up an oddly fine tribute to the system, thus underlining the depressing axiom which comes at length to all who study education: that those who are going to be nice will turn out nice, whatever way you train their youth, and much the same about the nasty. she was simple, healthy, buoyant, cheerful, natural; everything that hubert thought. and who shall blame her if she was a little immature? hubert's letter was a real excitement in her cloistered life. she had enjoyed her meeting with him. men were a novelty, and to her an author was still that thing of wonder which he appeared to a suburban hostess twenty years ago. she thought him marvellously clever at first sight, and rather alarming. later, she thought him easy to get on with and amusing. he played tennis well, liked finding crabs, and mother did not seem to mind them talking. it was quite a jolly change. she finally thought him a dear and missed him when he left for town. and now--this letter! nothing ever could be less expected. she read it and re-read, not knowing really what she ought to do. she was just as excited and laughed as gaily as he one day before--vaguely infected, no less, with a thrill of irresponsible adventure. now, indeed, was the moment to collect all the vague tit-bits she had garnered as to marriage and fit them into a connected whole. she knew so little, really, of this thing that he suggested, and mother, she knew, would not help her. the comic papers were curious about it. they looked on all men who married as fools, sure to repent; all women who didn't as ludicrously tragic. the old maid was a figure to be as much mocked and pitied as the old bachelor was to be envied. well, if this were so, it must be jolly hard for women to find a man who would marry! (logic teaches that absurd premises will often lead to sensible conclusions.) she knew vaguely that one asked mamma. there was a book even called that in the old locked case in the big library. she also knew, however, that she must battle this thing out herself. her mother would say no; what nonsense! of that she felt sure. it was for her, then, to decide. lock up your danäe, stern mothers, in all the towers that man's wit may devise; yet if she is born with a strong resolve knit on her pudgy, slobbered, baby face, you cannot possibly prevail. you battle with the forces of uncounted time. mrs. hallam sat happily in her white drawing-room and read the new _queen_, while helena, up in her bedroom, wrestled with the letter which her mother luckily had not seen arrive. of course it would be a big change, she supposed? home was a bit dull, but she had got quite used to it and one knew what to do. having a house must be an awful business, and yet--rather thrilling! probably mr. brett would make a big name; he was so immensely clever; and then they'd have a great big house, and she'd ask mother as a guest and give her all the things she liked and said she never got in her own house! she laughed at the idea. the whole thing was tremendously amusing. as hubert had thought, she was laudably unsloppy. mrs. hallam had never let her guess that there was any sentiment in the whole world beyond maternal love. that was the heart's whole duty for a girl who was an only child that had not even seen her father. yes, summing it all up, she really felt the chief thing was about women having to marry or else be a joke, whereas men were a huge lark if they did. imagine if, in all her life, she never met another man who would be fool enough! home was very nice, of course, but horribly monotonous. she might read novels now, oh yes; the ones that mother chose; but it was just the others that she longed to read. she felt vaguely (for self-development is among the instincts natural to man), that there was something being _kept_ from her. she had not been meant, ever, to remain so ignorant. she felt that mr. brett would not wish to keep her back in the way mother had. besides, if she remained at home, some day her mother would die, and she be left--that dreaded thing--an old maid, all alone, for every one to mock. nobody would want her then! wouldn't it be awful to feel you had thrown away a chance that lots of women, she had gathered, never got? fancy being helena hallam, that absurd name, all your life! h. h., one of her uncles had called her stupidly, and she had said then that it sounded like poor miss jowett in the village, whom everyone called "old j. j.," because her name was jane. oh yes, she would end at last as old h. h.--poor old h. h.--pottering about in her prim little garden with an antiquated, rat-like dog dragging itself crookedly along behind her. all the village poor would be so sorry when she died. she shuddered at the thought. she always wanted to put poor j. j.'s old dog, the one with the pink satin bow, out of its misery. it would be kind, she knew. she could with the air-gun, but mother had seemed really shocked. she suddenly decided at this point that her thoughts had become depressing and not really helpful towards a decision. without giving herself time to feel alarmed, she rose abruptly and went to the drawing-room. she knew instinctively she must be firm. this was the first thing ever that had really mattered, mattered to _her_ as a separate person with a life to live, and she believed she knew already what she ought to do. she would listen, of course, to mother's views--she owed that from a real love and gratitude--but she would not be bullied any longer. she entered the room feeling herself in some way on a different footing. the latent, undeveloped thing that would be helena had surged towards birth at a mere spark from the outer world. "mother," she began, quite simply, "i've had a letter from mr. brett. he has asked me to marry him and i think i rather shall." mrs. hallam dropped her _queen_. she did not often find herself surprised. "you've what, dear?" she asked blankly. then not waiting for any reply, "what do you know about marriage, my dear child? what do you know about mr. brett?" "i don't want to be an old maid," answered helena, playing her best card at once. mrs. hallam met it with a scornful laugh. "old maid!" she cried. "that is a preposterous idea you've got out of your comic papers." "they're all i've ever read, histories and them," helena said mildly; raising who shall say how many bitter doubts in the breast of a theorist. "you're nothing but a child, my darling girl," the mother said more gently; "and even if you weren't, there's no disgrace in being what you call an old maid. some of the world's best women have been that. you've got to think of far more serious matters than that before you can possibly decide on such a step as marriage;" and searching frantically for objections which she felt sure must exist, she fell back on her first thought. "what do you know about mr. brett?" "i liked him better than any of the men i've met." "you've not met _any_ yet," snapped mrs. hallam; she had no patience with this nonsensical idea. then, as her girl was silent, she realised that here too she had flung out a taunt mainly against her own theories. mrs. hallam loved helena with real devotion, and it was a torture now to feel that possibly her care had all been a mistake; had all been shipwrecked by the unexpected action of an extraordinary man. she knew for a fact--she had taken care--that she and he had not indulged in any sentimental rubbish. mr. brett had seemed to hate all that, and she had for this very reason asked him round so often. helena and he had been like boy and girl, brother and sister, playing games or finding their dear jelly-fish and crabs together, whilst he had talked to her in just the way to broaden her views out a bit yet not stretch them too far. and now----! it really was provoking. the silly girl--all girls were silly--would of course exalt him into the fine figure of her first love, the real man for her, the man that she was not allowed to marry.... mrs. hallam, always frail and white, seemed to shrink visibly beneath this trouble. she held out a thin hand to the puzzled helena, and drew her down beside her on the sofa. "look here, dear," she said gently; "i want to talk seriously to you. life isn't so easy as you think. i've kept you here, safe from all worries and responsibilities and guarded you so that everything has seemed quite simple; but there _are_ worries and responsibilities. you've got to live your life now, you see, helena, and you will have to learn the habit of making quick choices whether you go this way or that. life is full of cross-roads, you will find, and not all of them lead right. you can't marry the first man you meet just because he asks you to. later on you might meet some one who, you would then see, is the man you ought to have married.... i don't want to put such terrible ideas into your head, dear child; i've never spoken to you of them, but such things have occurred and may occur again." helena was really quite excited. this was the first, almost, she had ever heard of life and it seemed utterly tremendous. she was tired of having choices made for her. she felt a call to the cross-roads. she waited silently for more. "you see, dear," went on mrs. hallam, pressing her child to her as though she could not at all afford to let her go and be left all alone, "you're young, very young, and though i've never told you, very beautiful. you need not fear about being an old maid!" whereat, half laughing and half crying, she kissed helena, too dazed almost to respond. "that will be possibly life's most important choice. don't make it, darling child, until you're fit for it. stay with me," and there was a pathetic appeal in her words, "stay with me till i've taught you how to be reliant. you are a child still; i've kept you young; i hope i have been right; you're not fit to go out and grapple with the world. stay with me, helena; tell mr. brett that he must wait, and stay here, in your home, until i've made you strong enough to take your part in life." "stay here?" helena repeated automatically. for one brief moment the barred gates had swung open and she had gained a glimpse at life, its dangers and responsibilities perhaps, but all its splendid thrill and glorious chance. the few cold words from her prim mother had conjured up a rich glowing picture to this girl, who for years had chafed at the narrow round, longing for something--she knew not what, but something broader, something where she could be much more herself--longing, she knew now, for freedom and for life. mrs. hallam looked at her with pain in her eyes. "aren't you happy, haven't you been happy here?" she asked. "why of course i have, you dearest of dear old mums," cried helena, and pressed her lips against her mother's cheek; "but----," and she hesitated. "but----?" asked her mother, smiling sadly. how ridiculous, how almost tragic, it all was! she threw back her mind to her own first romance and wondered where the man was now. "but----? tell me, dear. i shall quite understand and i am sure you need not feel afraid of me!" helena thought deeply. words were so difficult. "but----," she said once again; and then, suddenly inspired, she started rapidly; "well, it is what you said just now. i--i _must_ live my own life. i want--i want to grow. i've not grown since i was fifteen. i felt so silly, like a child, when i was talking to--to mr. brett, and i am twenty now." she said this most imposingly. "and so," said mrs. hallam, trying not to smile, "you want to marry mr. brett because he made you feel so silly when you talked to him?" helena flushed, still sensitive to ridicule. "i want to marry mr. brett," she said with dignity, "because he is clever, and being a fool, i admire cleverness more than anything in the whole world, and i believe _he'd_ let me expand." "do you mean i have kept you back?" asked her mother, in low, earnest tones. she had accused herself. "no, you've been splendid." helena patted her hand. "no girl ever had such a good mother.... and now you are going to be good about this too, and not be troublesome and try to keep me here!" she jumped up and stood facing her, excitement and expectancy. mrs. hallam was suddenly conscious of her weakness. it had been so easy to be strong when she was dealing with a child--and she had kept helena a child. now, in this moment, she realised that she was dealing with a woman, a woman of a stronger will. something, mr. brett perhaps, had altered helena. even her way of talking had changed in an instant. "expand" and "troublesome"----! she looked up and saw before her no longer an obedient child, but a girl almost bursting with the desire to live at nearly any cost. mrs. hallam was naturally alarmed. she knew that any contest of the wills was useless. she fell back upon pathos. "helena dear," she said weakly, "you're twenty now. i don't want to dictate to you, to treat you as a child. you have the right, as you say, to live your own life. but do you think it right," and now her voice grew very feeble, very plaintive, "after i've done all i have for you, not to think of me at all?" "what do you mean?" asked helena with quite an emphasis upon the second word. she felt a dim mistrust of this new tone. she had been kindlier to opposition, for indeed at the moment she almost longed to fight. mrs. hallam, anxious to explain, to justify once and for all, began again at the beginning. "all these years, dear child, though you did not, could not of course guess it, i've been moulding you according to a theory of my own; not a new theory but what is far better, one that has stood the test of centuries. i wanted to form your character, your will, before you were brought face to face with life. that process is not quite complete yet, although you seem to think it is." she spoke the last words rather bitterly, then with a sudden change to gentleness, went on, "but even if it had been, do you think that when i've given up the best years of my life to you, it is fair for you to dash away, leaving me alone, and not to give me the reward of spending a few pleasant years with the dear child i have helped to form?" she smiled lovingly, but helena looked coldly back at her. it was the other's point of view, to her, which was not fair. "i don't see that," she answered almost fiercely, surprised at her own words, oddly unlike herself of one hour ago and many years before. "_that's_ not living your own life a bit. _you_ didn't give those best years of your life to your mother. i shall often see you, and i expect you did yours. you gave the best years of your life to your daughter, you say, and i want to give my best years to mine." mrs. hallam loathed excitement, thinking it bad form; but now she raised her voice. "my dear!" she cried. "where did you get these most extraordinary notions? was it from this mr. brett?" "you said you liked all his ideas so much," laughed helena, "and yet you're shocked because i want to marry him!" "there is a difference, dear," retorted mrs. hallam, her calmness regained, "between liking a man's ideas and caring for him as a son-in-law." helena, however, in her new mood wanted something more direct than generalities. "what have you got against him then?" she flashed. mrs. hallam spread her thin hands soothingly. "nothing, dear, absolutely nothing. do not let us have a scene. i thought him a charming man; possibly rather self-centred, but clever, cultured, and with, i am sure, good motives. i feel certain he will do extremely well. if you had wished to marry him in five years--but at twenty----!" she spoke as though it were fourteen. "well," remarked helena slowly, as though reviewing the whole situation from impartial ground, "i suppose the wedding won't be to-morrow. don't you usually wait a bit?" her mother noticed that there was no hypothesis--no "wouldn't be"--about it. she saw no good in a conflict. the girl was twenty, the man probably twelve or more years older; there was nothing, she almost regretfully admitted, to be said against him; they had seemed good chums. most mothers would have been delighted, for he was making himself a name as a novelist. yet she was not, for he had come with this preposterously worded letter to wreck all her plans. she had thought him so safe, from the mere fact that he had no romance or sentiment about him. he was so safe, yes, for helena; a real platonic friendship; opening her eyes a little to the bigger world outside, but altogether to be trusted not to put ridiculous ideas into her head. he was the first man with whom she had ever trusted helena at all alone, and now----! "mother," laughed helena, suddenly clasping her fondly round the neck, "i can see from your cross face you _do_ mean to be troublesome! now just be good instead and say that we may be at any rate engaged? it will be such fun, and we can see then how we feel about it." mrs. hallam by now knew with all certainty that she was weak. she felt a vague sense of relief that helena had asked permission; at one moment she had not expected that.... if she refused it, what would be the end? possibly elopement, suicide, or some other of those awful means that modern girls employed so freely.... whereas if she said yes, she still retained her grip as mother and might use what authority she had to disillusion slowly this girl, who looked on her engagement as mere fun. "very well, my own dear daughter," she said and suddenly found herself crying. to helena also things had turned out otherwise than she expected. she had not ever thought that she would get her mother's leave. for one moment it was almost a shock! she felt suddenly thrust out beyond recall upon a journey all mysterious to her. she was not sure, now, that she ever meant to do more than assert her right to do just as she wanted. did she want to marry hubert brett? she was not really sure. she wanted certainly to get away from home.... five more years of this--that was what her mother hinted at--five more years of being ignorant, of seeing no one, knowing nothing about anything that mattered, being just your mother's daughter--five more wasted years!... so that, after having dried her mother's tears and told her, very truly, how much she had always and would always love her, she hurried upstairs to her writing-desk with quite a new sensation of life being a most vital and palpitating thing. her days had been all terribly alike: this was so different and thrilling! the only thing was--how did one begin? she wished she had asked mother. she couldn't very well go down and ask her now. besides, she might just change her mind. "mr." looked so stiff like that; yet she did not like, quite, to call him hubert yet. she gave a little laugh of excitement. what fun it all was! she wondered if other people felt like this, when they were getting married. they probably knew all about it? oh yes, of course; she'd go by his letter.... but no; because when _he_ wrote they were not engaged! so finally she thought it best to leave a blank and start straight off-- "i really don't know at all what i ought to say. i am no good at letters and this is very difficult, but i too enjoyed all our walks and things, and if you really want to marry me i don't see why we shouldn't be engaged. i liked you very much down here and hope i shall make you happy. mother doesn't seem very keen about it, i think she thinks i am too young though i am twenty, but she has given her consent and will, i am sure, come round to it, so don't worry. "i'm afraid you'll think this letter very stupid, but you know how ashamed i always was of my ignorance. i seem to know nothing! it is very nice indeed of any one like you to care for me. "yours, "helena hallam. "p.s.--you won't be able to tease me any more about my name, afterwards!" perhaps to any real anthologist or expert of love-letters this would seem but little better than the attempt it answered; yet if success must be judged by results, it cannot have been much amiss, since for the first time in his life hubert brett was melted to a display of ridiculous emotion. "dear little girl!" he murmured aloud and kissed the last words before her signature. as for helena, having run out to the village and posted the letter unread by her mother--a cause of yet further misgiving to the theorist--she began to wonder ever so little whether she had done quite wisely. from somewhere (who can say whence, since some things are inborn in man?) she had got the notion, possibly ridiculous, that courting and proposals were quite different from this. even in the lives and comic papers men knelt and that sort of thing. she felt she had been cheated rather of romance. as things were, with her so ignorant and mother like that, it was all a little of a worry. but it was also a way out.... chapter iv hymen if hubert had known how difficult a job it was to get married, he would never have attempted it. or so at least he told himself. all boyd's advice, all his own misgivings about lonely age, all ruth's scenes, would not have driven him to so much real hard work that had no definite connection with his mapped and beloved life-career. he always had imagined that the thing took half an hour, and even then was managed by some luckless friend you roped in as best man. and here he was, worried all day about presents, relatives, guests, leases, settlements, and heaven itself even probably could not say what else, till he despaired about his autumn work. ruth, in particular, drove him almost frantic. he was absolutely certain she loathed his marrying, and yet to judge from the outside, nothing in the whole world could have pleased her more than making the arrangements. she would talk for forty minutes about buying six new pairs of socks. her air of willing service maddened him. when she had nothing else to do, she would divide her time between telling him that he was a cold lover and assuring him that there was no need whatsoever to worry about her. _she_ would be all right. he mustn't think of _her_.... "i don't," he would hurl back at length, firmly convinced of her hypocrisy (he was a great believer in his intuitions), at which point she usually cried. then he would go out and shake the pictures crooked by slamming the door. at their next meeting, all forgiveness, ruth would take up again the subject of those socks. finally he abandoned all idea of finishing his novel. this would be the first blank autumn since he started writing. he felt cross with fate. in all this, romanticists will no doubt be gratified to hear, helena was the sole consolation. he was pleased with her--and he was pleased with his own cleverness in having lit upon her. if marriage was essential to him, he felt sure she was just the very girl to be a wife who wouldn't get upon his nerves. the more he saw of her, the more he liked her; and that, too, was encouraging. she had, of course, come up to london with her mother, no less busy than himself, and her delight with the great shapeless place--its crowds, its fogs, its lights--was beautiful to see. she never wanted to be taken to theatres or show-places; the spectacle of london being london was enough for her, as it should be, indeed, for any one. she loved the ceaseless motion, the sense of something getting done; the whole feeling of energy massed in a little space seemed to inspire this girl used only to the sleepy, uneventful fields. "well, and how do you like it? how does it strike you?" he asked, as from an omnibus he showed her, for the first time, that thrilling crowd which passes, ant-like, this way and that, seemingly purposeless yet always full of purpose, past the bank of england. he loved to hear her quaint, unformed ideas. helena thought for a moment. "it makes me feel so _useless_," she replied. she was a delightful child, hubert told himself--unspoilt, original, and modest. when he forgot about his ruined novel, he certainly was happy. his unhid admiration helped a little to melt mrs. hallam, who was still looking pathetically for the absolute objection which she felt sure she ought at last to find. and all this while the day was coming near. mrs. hallam had rather naturally planned that the wedding should take place in devonshire; but the bridegroom had been so hideously shocked, and helena thought a london wedding so much better "fun," that mrs. hallam, already feeling nobody, had given in to them with a weak smile. she did not mind where it took place, so long as they were happy and it was really for the best. besides, she had a brother who lived in a big house in langham place. he always had been very mean, and was a bachelor, and it was time altogether that he did something for the family.... on the last night, however, before the wedding-day, she tuned herself at bedtime to a final effort. she was sad and depressed: they had talked long downstairs; her own instinct would have been to cry or go to sleep; but she decided that, for her own later peace of mind if for no higher motive, she must do something far less pleasant. so along she went to the second-best spare-room in the mean brother's house. "helena dear," she said, to meet her daughter's startled look, "i've come along, although we've had our talk downstairs, because i feel i can't sleep till i have asked you a question." helena was not greatly reassured. she had not really understood a lot of what her mother had sobbed out to her downstairs, and now when she had thought it all over and had been feeling very sorry for the poor lonely dear, there was to be another question! "why, what?" she asked, trying to put away unseen her going-away hat, which she had been trying on. she was afraid her mother might think it unfeeling. "a very important question," answered mrs. hallam, dropping frailly on the sofa. "and i'm afraid you may think it an extraordinary one. do you really love hubert? do you really want to marry him?" helena let go of the hat, which fell very gently on the floor beside the dressing-table; then she went across and put her arms around her mother. "why, you curious old dear," she said. "what on earth makes you ask that? i _do_ call it extraordinary!" and she laughed. but her mother was serious. "don't think it would be wrong or wicked to say no if you do not. it would be very wicked not to...." she paused, and as helena said nothing, she went on; "you see, darling child, i feel responsible. you are so young, and mr. brett being almost the first man you ever spoke to, except just at at homes and so on---- it's not too late, my dear girl, although perhaps i should have spoken sooner if i could have brought myself to it. girls often see more clearly at the last. we can easily announce that the wedding is postponed, and then you could come down home for a few months and see--if you're not sure----" she spoke almost keenly by now, questioning with a hope quite pathetic. the world for her held nothing but her daughter. in helena, however, the words raised a depressing vision. home--devonshire--the lanes and muddy fields--the vicar--the farmyard--the illustrated papers--the picked novels--the dull people--her dear, good mother's absurd care of her.... and then, flashing and dazzling by its contrast, london--its crowds and mystery--its freedom--hubert, so brilliant and kind--those jolly times with him beside the sea or on the 'bus-tops--the talks on art and life and all the things she couldn't understand but longed to--the liberty to cease being a fool and ignorant--the open gate to real existence.... "i _am_ sure," she answered, with a passion that surprised herself. "quite sure." she was not sure about love, but she wished to marry.... hubert, in fact, wanted to escape his fond sister and a lone old age; helena desired to get away from a loving home and her own ignorance. it is quite possible to fall in love with even negative abstractions. at any rate they were very fond of one another, and practised wedding-goers were able to make their usual remark: "how utterly devoted they seem! it is so nice to see them look at one another!" everybody said too, of course, that helena had never looked so pretty. she had been arranging presents until one o'clock and not left time to get her hair in order, besides having been dog-tired for a week, and the wedding-veil is seldom becoming, but all the guests seemed pleased. certainly, with bright eyes sparkling ever so gaily behind the old veil of argentan lace, and little wisps of hair exuding everywhere, helena, if not at her best, looked natural and young. hubert, on the other hand, looked old for his age and self-conscious as only a man can look at his own wedding, but yet unusually handsome. he had not recovered from the dismal farce of a bachelor dinner, where nobody had liked the champagne, the idea of speeches had fizzled out, and every one had gone home before ten o'clock. he was pale and nervous. yet helena's relatives decided quite honestly, and in fact unexpectedly, that he was a good-looking man, and even helena was quite surprised. his new sunday coat revealed a slim, tall figure generally hidden by old, well-loved tweeds, for he was not a london-dresser. a stiff collar made the greatest change in him, and (had he but guessed!) so soon she decided he must always wear one. his very agony improved his looks. of the dark, clear-cut type, he was spoilt usually by a too erratic mouth, which rambled on his face and lent a look of weakness to the stern contour. to-day his lips were pressed and firm. he felt a fool and told himself that the whole business was astounding rubbish. if only she had liked it, he would have been married at a registrar's--or down in devonshire!... he went about with an air of doom among the revellers, and all of them said once again, if with more truth than about helena, that they had never seen him look so well. "only shows," whispered mrs. boyd, who did not love him or any author over-much, "that those artistic people could easily look gentlemen. it's nothing but a pose." none the less, it was a genuine enough relief to hubert when the time came at which he was able to go upstairs and shed his fair raiment. true, they were not his old tweeds that he was allowed to don, nor was the collar soft; but still he felt more himself as he hastily descended one flight and then waited ten minutes, with all of a new husband's still untamed impatience, for his wife to be ready. at last, when he was within four minutes of being able to feel justified in shouting out that they would miss their train, helena appeared: full of amused excitement, still thinking it all the greatest of great fun and very sweet in a quite married-looking velvet gown, with the most colossal muff that matched a very cloud of furs, and over all of it a plume that waved above her never steady hat until it looked like a pillar of thin smoke. hubert, all impatience, quite forgot to say that she looked charming. it was really lucky she had not been taught yet to expect it. "come along," he said instead. "we're getting a bit late. i rather dread this part!" "oh, i don't know," she laughed. she had loved all of it. they went down to the lower flight, where all the guests were pitilessly ranged on each side of the broad georgian stairs. of course there was the funny man, who will happen even in the best-born families. perhaps he has some use at such a time as this. ruth and mrs. hallam, both united in feeling tearful yet mutually hostile, found amusement in his constant parrot-cry of "here they are!" or when he felt specially inspired, even "here they aren't!" it was a relief to have any excuse at all to laugh. and there at length they were, smiling gaily, shaking countless hands, quailing under genial pats, avoiding silver horseshoes and gold slippers. (rice and confetti were vetoed by the mean brother.) and so into the car, with ruth and mrs. hallam smiling crookedly through tears, until the funny man, dutifully fumbling with string and an old slipper, was lost in a vast cloud of steam or something white let out by the fresh-started engine, which sent the couple off amid a bellow of good-omened laughter, and every one surged in with relief to say good-bye and to agree they should have gone away much earlier. it had been hideously long, but weddings always were. helena, as a corner blotted out the house, came back into the car with a gay laugh. "got your camera, my dear?" asked hubert. it is odd how soon a man acquires the air of a proprietor. "i _wish_ i'd thought of taking them as we went off," said helena. "they looked so funny." he made no reply. he seemed to be thinking. she wondered what about. then, as he sat silent, she began to be afraid to interrupt his thoughts. besides, she did not know quite what to say. it was so curious! she realised, with rather a shock, how little really she knew about this man, and here she was going away alone with him for life!... but probably brides always felt like that? it was a biggish thing to do, anyhow, getting married. she expected it would feel a bit funny with any one. probably the man made very little difference.... and presently he spoke--if it is speaking to say, "ah!" they were at charing cross. they had agreed to take old baggage and look a very long-established couple, but somehow porters and people were nudging each other with sympathetic joy long before they reached the first-class carriage with its wickedly big label marked "engaged." helena, embarrassed if amused, sat on the far side. hubert leaned out of the window and bought all the evening papers. he knew that there had been reporters. "may as well see what they put," he said, almost as though in apology. she could not understand his tones, but mother had told her last night that men were funny things with curious ideas. he took up one after another and flipped through them all. "solemnised--langham place--écru lace," he read from the first; and then more hurriedly, "reception--residence--numerous and costly--happy couple--riviera." judging from his extracts, helena thought, they were all very much alike. she wondered if one man had written the whole lot, and if so, what all the rest of the reporters did. her husband's face grew blacker as he reached the last. he threw it down with a contemptuous laugh. "why, what is it?" she asked. "don't you like them?" she still felt oddly shy about using his name. "are you disappointed?" "one doesn't expect much from journalists," he said. "one's never disappointed." but he was. one account said that he was "a" novelist, but that was all: no adjective before it, not even "well-known." the others didn't mention that he _was_ an author. they might have been just ordinary people. part ii hubert brett's wife chapter v routine it was something of a career, helena soon learnt, to be the wife of hubert brett. gradually, however, she got a grip of the rough lines of her whole duty. at first it had been difficult, for she was not methodical by nature; but now it all seemed natural, the ordinary thing. when you got into it, the day ran smoothly. she never even had to think by now. she had the housemaid's mind. everything in the little garden suburb home--for hubert, capitulating to kenneth boyd all along the whole line, had settled out at hampstead--every smallest detail was ordered to one end: the work. this, he reminded her so soon as they returned to england, was not just his pride or hobby: it was their existence. she had her three hundred pounds a year, which he wished her to keep, whilst his fixed income was a trifle less--his father had been that fatal sort of mongrel, half a cleric, half a city man--and for the rest they must depend upon his writing. how important then, but how essential, that he should be left free to do his very best. "you're my little housekeeper," he told her playfully the first evening, always loving to treat her as a child. "you'll get new cooks about every other day and try new dishes out of shilling books with them, and i shall say: 'my dear, this isn't edible'--like that--and then you'll cry----" "oh no, i shan't!" she laughed back, for they got on extremely well in an unsentimental way. it was almost as though hubert had merely exchanged his sister for a younger one. "well, i like to think you will," he answered. "i shall be hurt if you don't mind in the least when i'm cross.... but what i was going to say is: whatever domestic tragedies there are--and kitchens are the last home in england of poor tragedy--don't bring them round to me. i don't mind _what_ i eat, i'm very tame that way really; but i don't want to know who cooked the chop or where the large woman who cooked the last one is. those details don't inspire an author, even with a realistic novel!" the which she thought great fun. she loved to hear him talk. none the less, it was not easy just at first. there was a hideous lot to remember for any one not good at lessons. the kitchen with its rows of plates, and all the currants and things you served out from tins--this was quite splendid. the hours and what you mustn't do were the real worries. hubert brett, in the old days of city life, had never breakfasted till half-past nine. "they sleep in the city, and more is the pity, but you on the hills, awake!" exhorts the harrow song. but hubert did not see it in that light at all. nine-thirty had been his hour down in london; nine-thirty seemed quite good enough up on the hampstead hills. so nine-thirty it was--when it was not nine-forty-five. this was the one fixed meal of the day.... now work put in its claim. at breakfast, he told people, was the only time that he could skim the daily; he was so intensely busy; and certainly he propped the _telegraph_ before him on the table every morning (this shocked helena at first, for she had not seen any farces and had no notion it was ever done); but somehow or other he appeared never to have quite finished just the paragraph that he was reading when the meal concluded. there was an armchair temptingly near alike to table, fire, and cigarettes. helena's first important duty was to steer him tactfully from this chair to the harder one whereon he sat to write. she must not jar him, must not hurry him, or he lost every one of his ideas, and it was all her fault at lunch.... but, on the other hand, she must not let him sit there, gazing at a thrice-read page--"thinking out my day's work," he called it--till too late. this she certainly did not desire to do, for lily never was allowed to come and clear the meal away till he had gone into his study (that upset him, too), so that delay bred chaos in the household. when once, however, he was safely at his writing-table, all was quiet, must be, until lunch-time. these were his best hours for work. the small house brooded under a funereal silence. lunch was a movable affair. hubert could not endure clocks in his working-room. their sound, which he declared was just not regular, got on his nerves, and he found himself on days when his inspiration would not flow, gazing at the dial with growing despair, like a bad sleeper who begins to count the hours which strike at ever lessening intervals, until he knows at last that now he will not sleep at all. the writer's estimate of time varied largely with the amount of his success. when he was writing well, the hours would speed away and he would then emerge at half-past two or even--once--at three, full of a joy so intense as to ignore, or even to melt, the iciness of helena and lily. at other times, when his pen dragged itself along the paper sleepily or idly drew vague circles on the blotting-pad, he would get tired and hungry. on these days lunch was punctual at one o'clock. after lunch, which was a meal solid almost to the limits of bad art, he would subside on the tempting armchair again and helena be asked to bring him the weekly reviews. not only the literary pages were digested; hubert read the music, art, even the drama columns--everything except the science meetings in the _athenæum_. this took, roughly, half-an-hour each day and the lonely time so occupied, he told helena when he explained his ways to her, was devoted to "keeping in touch with the modern movements." there is no one english word for the italian _siesta_. then came the part of the day to which helena looked forward; the afternoon, when they took ever such long tramps with spook, the small white aberdeen, across the wide free heath, and so home to tea beside a comfortable fire. helena could almost hate his work when at the stroke of five he would get up, more stern by now than in the sleepy morn, and leave her with the statutory kiss. and when it rained, so that this jolliest part of the day was lost and he said in a masculine way that it would be a chance to do some letters (instead of having fun indoors!), she would sit by the drenched windows and look out through the jerky raindrops with all the pathetic grievance against fate of children in a seaside lodging on wet holidays. this was a shorter bout of work and dinner was generally not later than half-past seven, though there were times of course when it had to be later. this led to hubert's prophecy about the change of cooks not being too far from inspired. after dinner was the other jolly time, if hubert had worked well. if things had gone badly, he would mope and say that he was going to grow cabbages instead and silly things like that, which worried her because she knew he never would; but if a good sheaf of written paper was in his hand, he would read it to her, while she sat against his legs upon the hearthrug, and when she had said how good it was, they talked of other things--he talked so well--and it was all as comfy as could be in their own little home, and, oh, so different from devonshire! sometimes she felt guilty about her poor mother, down there all alone among those stodgy people; but she wrote to her every sunday, and sometimes on other days if hubert was silent and gloomy (without of course letting her know why she wrote). his moods puzzled her a good deal in those first days, but she supposed all really clever men were a bit odd or they would not be clever. certainly it was curious that hubert, who was so strong and splendid in most ways, was so awfully easily pleased or upset by anything about his books. any success made him as cheery as could be and they would go to kew or somewhere and he'd say; "blow the evening work!" although she always said she was not sure they ought. once, a few months after the wedding, a reader wrote to him from surbiton and thanked him for a book of his he had just read, because he thought it beautiful and full of inspiriting ideas. of course she had been immensely pleased, but hubert had been more. he had shown it to every one who called for three weeks, and kept on wondering what sort of person could have written it, and left it about on tables, and she was sure the servants read it, and he told mr. alison about it twice, until she really began to wonder whether people wouldn't laugh at him, but didn't say so because he was so sensitive. it was always the same, about a good review or anything. sometimes, after one, he would ask in a thoughtful, puzzled way; "why don't we ever go to a theatre, dear?" but by the next night something had probably upset him or he forgot, and she never reminded him because he _did_ work hard--and, as he said, for _her_--and she was really very happy in their little home, so long as he was not at work. and then, he was so easily upset. a bad review had just the opposite effect. he got so violent about the critics, saying they were men who had failed to create, and any ass could say that elephants were rotten things but it took god to make one, and other awful things like that; or else he'd begin thinking who of his pals read the paper where the criticism was and sometimes even--if she couldn't stop him--write and tell them why the critic was so down on him, which she was half afraid they must think very silly; unless, perhaps, they were clever too, so understood. once, too, at the end of the first year, he quite frightened her. among their wedding presents, duly numerous and costly--perhaps extreme in both respects for a suburban home--the one that helena prized and used most was an enamelled watch. it was the size, roughly, of a shilling: deep translucent blue, decked with tiny pearls, and hung from an appropriate brooch by a thin golden chain. too thin possibly, for on arrival home one morning from what she called her marketing, the little gewgaw, valued for ornament and use alike, was gone. a few links of the chain hung desolately from a brooch that, robbed of its purpose, now looked almost vulgar. without thinking, without reflecting that no one was allowed to interrupt him before lunch-time, she found her thoughts turning restfully, in quite a wifely way, to hubert. she knocked at his door. there was no answer but she had not waited for one. she burst in. the room was full of industry. the very air seemed heavy with a wished-for silence. a clock would have been overpowering. hubert swung slowly round, with an expression on his face that made it clear he was attempting not to lose touch with some great idea. he kept a finger on the sheet before him. helena was rather alarmed. she had not seen his study in its present state, and as she stood there at the door a moment, her eyes took in the litter of loose paper; all the open books on table, chairs, and floor; the derelict type-writer, long abandoned as fatal to all inspiration; the velvet coat; and most of all, the worried look. her plaint shrank instantly to an excuse. "oh hugh," she said (she never could quite manage "hubert"), "i _am_ so sorry, but what do you think?" "i can't imagine," he said in a cold voice so unlike his own. "what? is your mother dead?" even helena, so bad at scenting irony, could guess that he did not mean that. "of course she isn't," she replied; "but i've lost the lovely little watch she gave me, and i did love it so." she tried not to let too much sorrow come into her voice. he always looked upon her as a baby, anyhow. surely he was sorry? he said nothing. he looked at her so oddly that she grew alarmed. "isn't it awful?" she added uneasily. hubert rose slowly to his feet. "really, helena," he said, "you don't mean you've broken my whole morning's work just to tell me you've lost some silly trinket? you might have waited until lunch-time. now, my whole chapter--well, it simply means i've got to start it all again." he took up a sheet of paper, tore it dramatically through, and let the two halves fall upon the carpet. helena, full of an astounded guilt, looked down to see how much of his work her thoughtlessness had wasted. but all the writing must have been upon the under side.... "oh, hugh dear," she said, longing to touch him yet not daring quite; he looked so cross and tall. "i _am_ sorry. it was stupid of me. but i thought you'd be sorry and could--could do something." she ended lamely and he was not touched by her faith in him. "of course," he said bitterly, "i shall at once scour the heath, like a police dog, on my hands and knees. i shall watch the termini. i shall telephone----" "oh, i _am_ sorry," she broke in, "awfully. i never thought all that of course. i simply felt it was so terrible and you might help, because you always know about things, somehow." that touched him at last. he melted suddenly. "well," he said quite cheerily, "it's done now, so bother the old work. we'll see if we can't find the thing and save a reward. that's another way of making money, eh?" so after cross-examination as to routes and so on, out they went, and he it was who found the watch, exactly where--she now remembered--she had felt hot and pulled hard at the stiff clip of her chinchilla stole. "tally-ho!" he shouted gaily, holding it aloft and waving it; then as she ran delightedly across from her own line of search, "so i've not wasted my day's work in vain!" she felt that more apologies must take the place of thanks. she also wished that she had never spoilt his work but paid five pounds reward instead. and she resolved that nothing short of thieves or fire would take her into his room before lunch again. bad news, hereafter, she obediently kept till dinner. his day's work was over, and he had recovered by next morning's bout. other things, too, she learnt. when possible, she would suppress a bad review or lose the paper until evening. unluckily, he had them all sent by an agency and she did not often succeed. she always said, however, that nobody went by that paper.... she never praised a writer who was younger and more famous than himself. she was conveniently blind if envelopes arrived addressed in his own writing. she always saw that his room was left properly untidy--all except the flowers, which must never show the slightest sign of age. she came to avoid the word "reliable" and after six months never once split an infinitive at meals. hubert at such moments would throw down his knife with a grimace of pain. he said it was a physical sensation, like cut corks, and spoilt his appetite, which she could never understand. and sometimes if it happened early in the day, she found at night that she had spoilt his work as well.... such was the routine of hubert brett, ex-bachelor at thirty-five and writer of repute; all sacred and to be taken as an earnest matter--even that half-hour wherein he kept in touch with modern movements. helena learnt this, too, early. there had been great excitement in the suburb after lunch. an aeroplane had passed upon its way to hendon, and passed very low. the noise had been colossal, like six motorcycles. every one, used as the place was to aeroplanes, had dashed out to the garden--every one but hubert. helena, even in her disappointment, could admire his self-restraint. he seemed quite ignorant about it, too, when she made jokes upon the noise, as they set out for their tramp on the heath. "what time about?" he said. "before lunch?" "why, hugh," she laughed. "you must have heard! it sounded like a motor having its teeth drilled." "no," he said. "i shouldn't have missed that. it is a sound i've never struck!" she thought a moment. "why, i know," she said. "you wouldn't have heard. of course it was just after two and you were still keeping in touch with the movements." to her surprise he stopped short, and looking up, she saw his cheeks were flushed below the eyes. "my dear girl," he said pompously. "i enjoy your humourous way of looking at life, but it's a quite impossible position if a wife's going to be funny at the expense of her husband's ideals." with which he strode onward and she fell in, a model wife, behind. but she, of her simplicity, had meant it. she had always admired his powers of concentration on those dull old literary weeklies. she had not even thought of sleep. every wife, perhaps, should be able to see through her husband the exact distance that he sees himself. chapter vi growth helena, when a year's passing had worn away the novelty of keeping house and made its process slower, was naturally rather bored at times, when hubert was shut up with his work. no one could have been happier so long as she was with her husband; she still thought him immensely clever, which is most good for married happiness; still found their walks and treats the very greatest fun; but in the winter especially, there were so many gaps of idle loneliness. luckily the remedy was near at hand. to a girl almost bursting with the ashamed desire for self-development a garden suburb must be paradise indeed. there is a natural connection between new art cottages with gardens round, and (let us say) enthusiasms. the ordinary man--that tame myope who gratefully accepts life as it is--contentedly exists in squares, crescents and straight lines; breathing the common air and never worrying at all whether his house, which may be number , has individuality or not. but the enthusiast, whom others call by a less noble title, is of a different sort. he holds that what we see and breathe, especially when young, we are. his children, then, must have a quite uncommon setting; not grown like the sordid brats in "desirable villas" adjoining. no, they must live where there is air and a big back-yard patch; where the word garden throws a soft glamour over muddied and unfinished roads; where everything is beautiful and man himself is not so vile. for, after all, he asks, what really wicked man would ever trouble to live out at a tube's end? no! vice ever lurks among the fogs and shrubless rabbit-warrens of mid-london. it would not flourish in a garden suburb. so out he goes, and sees to it that his house shall have something different from all the other small white dwellings round about him. an architect might say that there was neither use nor fitness in his timbered turret at the north-east corner, but he himself knows just why it is there. he knows that he has flung his little pebble, all he can avail, upon the heap that some day, we all hope, will crush the soul-destroying isms out of life, and make of man, not a type in monotone, but a great hive of multi-coloured individuals. so far, so good; but more remains to tell. he settles proudly underneath his turret and waits for the great change to start. the neighbours call and he discovers they are cultured. they are very cultured. and he--with a sick horror he knows at length that he is not. all these people here have something different, not a mere turret--something different about themselves. menzies believes that eating sheep is murder in the sight of heaven, and the same with cows. du cane will not let his children wear boots, because the notion is not greek. farren is convinced that you must sleep with your feet to the south and your head, of course, in the opposite direction. blythe-egerton believes in ghosts but says they can't have clothes. jerningham lives next the golf club house, an envied site, and holds success in games has always been the first precursor of a nation's downfall. escott knows exactly who should marry what; whilst ferguson can quite explain the post-impressionists, but fails to understand the royal academy--peculiar in a scotchman. yes, every single one of them has some outstanding gift or knowledge, making him a pleasant man to meet. so out he goes, post-haste, to search a quality, and wishes now that he had not spent all that extra money upon his symbolic turret. he knows a better secret, now, of how real individuality is gained. it consists not in bricks and mortar nor in any latticed garden-work--though these may be its outward signs--but in a being different. he hurries out and buys the works of chesterton and bernard shaw as a beginning. helena, of course, was predisposed to it since devonshire. she did not long to become different, so much: she hankered to cease being ignorant. hubert was so clever, but that discouraged more than it helped her. he talked quite brilliantly about such deep things, but he would not explain. he laughed and said she was a jolly child. he always treated her rather as one and certainly they had great fun together, but she longed to be clever without getting old, and when she had told him so, he simply laughed and said she ought to be content to have such quaint ideas. "it's far better," he added, "to be original than clever. don't you worry your dear little head with dull ideas and facts." but helena did worry. she had now, apart from her old desire for self-development and knowledge about life, all these dull lonely hours to fill; and as she went about, slowly getting to know the people near, she found like our enthusiast that every one of them was full of something--some vital, all-absorbing topic, if nothing more than golf or their own handicap. and that, she saw at once, was what she had to have if she wished ever to make her life really full. she could not go to matinées, like some, or hubert missed her all the afternoon; and if they went to an at home, he always dashed away at five, which looked so rude, and people--she felt sure--said afterwards that she could not have much hold over him, so soon. she tried novels, but these she really could not understand. hubert watched cynically her attempts to get at grips with a sex-novel more sexual than is expected even in these days of censorships and free advertisement. "but, hubert," she said finally, "why did she do that? wasn't she fond of her husband? he seems quite nice. do these terrible things really happen?" "oh no," he answered, as one would speak to a child. "of course they never happen really." helena looked puzzled. "then why do people write or read them?" she asked. "my dear girl," he answered in the heavy-father manner that gave him such pleasure, "if you could answer that, you would have solved one of the most interesting problems about human nature!" so then she was puzzled again and laid aside the book half read, before she got even to the chapter that was really censured and commonly read first. not that way, she saw, lay illumination. at last she tried another road. "you know," she said reflectively one night, during those long hearthside chats that neither really would have changed for any other social form, "i like all the people here and so on, but they're terribly busy, aren't they, and i always feel i've sort of come too late." "how sort of?" he replied indulgently. "well, i've got no real friends and you're busy so much with your dull old work. don't you know anybody?--really know, i mean--old friends, who aren't too far away?" hubert thought for a few moments. "it sounds absurd," he said at last, "but i was such a hermit till i met you that i don't believe i've got a single woman friend." helena, he noticed, was not flattered in the least degree. that sort of thing was what made her so splendid. he told himself that a woman who was womanly would be a bore about the house, and smiled adoringly on his own child-like specimen, who waited silently, as though quite sure that he would find a friend in the same way that after some time he had found her brooch. but there was a long pause and he made no suggestions. "well, what about men then?" she added simply. "i don't mind." and he was once again enchanted by her naïveté. "you shall have the pick of all my man-friends," he said, and then puzzled her by laughing. "what is it?" she asked. "oh, you're so perfect, dearest!" he said, and got up and kissed her. it needed some thought, none the less. of his old pals--he suddenly remembered that he had been married over a year now, and not seen any one of them or wanted to--there were not many who lived near, and some of these ... well, they were all right in their way, but vaguely he felt they were not quite fit to introduce to any one so sweet as his girl-wife.... marriage frequently turns cynics into sentimentalists. (the converse can be well ignored.) "i know," he cried suddenly. "i felt sure you would," she said. it was just these remarks that made her such an excellent companion. "who is it then?" "old boyd--old kenneth boyd. he's just the very man you'd like. one feels so awfully at home with him, he's restful you know; old-friend-in-five-minutes sort of fellow. oh and," he added, "i forgot just for the moment! there is a wife too." "i think i'm almost sorry," said helena reflectively. "i don't think he sounds the sort of person who'd be much good unless alone. but i'm so silly with words. i never can explain and i expect i'm wrong." there seemed, at any rate, some wisdom in her cryptic estimate. the dinner-party was not a success. helena was so charming to kenneth boyd that hubert, almost beyond himself with pride and refraining with difficulty from kissing her when she was too especially delicious, wondered why on earth he had so long delayed showing his old friends how sweetly original a little simpleton he had secured in spite of all their jeers. kenneth, over a glass of port from the local grocer, was absolute enthusiasm and delighted his host till he turned suddenly and said; "now own that i was absolutely right?" with the wives, however, it was different. mrs. boyd said afterwards to her husband: "just the poor little undeveloped fool one would expect any one so conceited to take as his wife!" whilst helena thought her a rude pig, and neither was too subtle in concealing her opinion. this instinct of hostility was fatal to any real union between the households. hubert noted with amusement how, at each fresh encounter, the two wives became more and more affectionately cold, and soon kissed on meeting. he turned, with helena still urging him, to other possibilities. it was then that he thought of geoffrey alison. "geoffrey alison," exclaimed hubert with far more conviction than about kenneth boyd. "he really _is_ the man! amusing, clever, full of energy, and too young to be really busy." this in a condescending way. "why, how old is he?" she enquired. "i want some one, you know, who is cleverer than me and can tell me things at galleries and places." he smiled at her. "well, i think he could tell you things, he must be twenty-nine by now. besides, i was able once to do him a good turn, he is a sort of protégé; so he'd be only too glad to take you about and as you call it, tell you things at galleries and places. he's pretty good on art." the word protégé was rolled upon his tongue; the episode of geoffrey alison had pleased him a good deal; but helena did not seem reassured. "oh, thank you!" she said, girlishly for these days when she had begun duly to expand as wished. "if he'd think he was doing it as a great favour, just to pay you back, i'd rather look at pictures and things by myself and puzzle out their meaning. it's only i've begun so late." she paused for a moment, and then without enthusiasm, almost sulkily; "what did you do for him?" hubert embarked on it with gusto. "why, it wasn't really very much. it was just after my first book came out, when i was twenty-six or so and he was at the varsity or somewhere. i suppose he read a notice or heard the book was selling or something. anyhow, he wrote me a most charming letter, the first i ever had from any stranger, congratulating me on my success and asking, if you please, how i had managed it as he heard i was young and he wanted to become an author too! i answered all the usual stuff about hard work and so on, which i see now he must have thought astounding twaddle if he really was at oxford, and told him when he came to town i'd like to meet him and perhaps could give him a few introductions. as a matter of fact," he went on after brief reflection, "i never did the last because i don't believe in it; but he came round at nights and talked to me and always said i had encouraged him a lot just when a little bucking-up was needed." "and did he?" was helena's sole comment. hubert at times could not follow her mind, fledgeling though it was, in all its flights. "did he what, dear?" "why, did he become an author?" answered helena, with that impatient tolerance which women keep for these occasions. "oh no," he said, vaguely annoyed, now, that he had not guessed it. "rather not! he's an artist now. not terribly successful, you know, but getting along. i don't think you would care much for his pictures, though." secretly, within his mind he reconstructed alison, remembering now some not too pleasant drawings that he had brought along one night; wondering if he had mentioned him too soon. but he saw only a keen, harmless youth of the artistic type; a white man, certainly, who, even if he had a morbid side, would never show it to a girl--or to his benefactor's wife. yes, it was excellent. he had feared sometimes that she must be lonely in the mornings or from five to seven, and alison, he knew, was of the work-when-i-feel-in-the-mood brigade (yes, it had certainly been oxford), for he had finally been forced to tell him he was absolutely never free till after dinner-time. he was the very man indeed. he spent his days in galleries, museums, theatres; wanted not only something new, like the athenians, but every blessed new thing going; and if a heretic therefore on art, was full of knowledge and when he cared to, could be very nice. helena thought him very nice indeed. of course he was ever so much cleverer than she was; she need not have feared that; and yet he did not seem to mind how elementary the thing was that she wished to see. he came with her and would explain it all. and he was nearly always free. hubert had said that he was too young to be busy, and yet she felt slightly puzzled. if geoffrey alison could be so nice to friends, of whom he must have several, it did seem odd that hubert never could afford a morning for his wife, when he had only one! but maybe mr. alison had not got many friends as yet or wasn't as nice to them all? at any rate life up at hampstead was far less boring now. sometimes on days when there was not much house-keeping to do, they would go by tube or 'bus to trafalgar square and spend long hours in the national gallery or twenty minutes in the tate to see the watts room and three of the statues. at other times they would just ramble on the heath, and prim mrs. herbertson, the vicar's wife, amused helena one day enormously by thinking mr. alison was hubert. "oh, i'm so sorry, dear mrs. brett!" she exclaimed, when helena laughingly told her the mistake; "but seeing you two about upon the heath so often in the mornings, i quite thought----! you must forgive my stupidity, please?" and she smiled a false smile. helena thought this delicious, considering that hugh was tall and broad and dark and looked like a celebrity at once, whilst mr. alison was rather short and slim, not one half so good-looking--funny-looking, somehow, even when quite serious--with fair hair always a wee bit too long! "won't hugh be convulsed?" she asked. "i don't think i should tell him," he said, to her absolute surprise. "but why on earth not?" she enquired. he would not tell her. in other things he was so kind; unlike her husband, he would try to fill her gaps in education; but here he was quite firm. he only let her force him to say that hubert was a splendid fellow but a curious sort of devil--which she had learnt already, although she did not think that mr. alison should say so. he added that you never knew. and finally she gave it up, quite angry. but she said nothing to her husband and mrs. herbertson might easily have made the same mistake again, except that she learnt hubert was not a church-goer--an atheist, she called him--and cut helena entirely. this left the young couple free, without social remorse, to make the most wonderful excursions on hubert's one free day. all sunday; the afternoon walk; meal-times; after dinner--such was what hubert gave her, and for the rest, always half-conscious of his selfishness, he felt delighted to think whilst working that helena would not be bored. she was so busy, dear little simpleton, with this chimæra of her education! it was geoffrey alison who first took her to causeries and lectures (she learnt almost at once to recognise a causerie, because the seats cost more), which took place at the institute, conveniently after tea. surprisingly good men came down--or up?--to speak, and spoke on a variety of subjects. helena, always too nervous to air her knowledge before hubert who was so clever and looked upon her (she knew) as a child, gradually began to juggle chaotically in her brain with such terms as ethics, syndicalism, molecules, collectivism, and eugenics. it was all most difficult, she told herself, but frightfully worth while. "odd of her, this thirst for culture, isn't it?" said hubert smilingly to kenneth boyd, on one of their rare meetings away from the hostile wives; "but it's quite harmless and it keeps them quiet." kenneth boyd spoke gloomily. "not always," he said. perhaps he knew more of woman, even though he never wrote about her. "sometimes it has the opposite effect." "oh, i know what you mean," hubert replied, not caring to be patronised; "but helena is not that sort. she doesn't want the vote. she's such a charming little innocent," and he laughed, half love but half pity. "really?" said the enigmatic boyd. his thoughts had taken a far ampler sweep, and he spoke almost darkly. hubert did not answer. he was still thinking of the vote. most men persistently whittle down woman's whole platform to a mere splinter convenient for smashing. "why," he elaborated, "if she were given it, she wouldn't know what she had got to do with it." chapter vii the cult of uselessness helena certainly had small ambition towards the life political, even as anything no more exalted than a latch-key voter. she had been compelled to read politics in devonshire but like a schoolboy who is forced to chapel, found it very dull, and took another course at the first opportunity. she could not think, she said, to hubert's joy, how grown men even took the trouble of electing members who had no influence over their own party and spent most of the time in childishly hindering the other. she did, however, wish to gain her self-respect. she met, now, people vastly cleverer than those who had made her feel ignorant at home, so that her growing knowledge in no way kept pace with her aspirations. those old vague yearnings for something which she used to call being herself were stronger now and in a form more definite. she had learnt, in the first year of her married life, all that a woman could learn about keeping house, but she still felt a fool. she knew that this was not enough for her, whatever it might be for others. she still loved to hear hubert talking when he embarked on art or some really big subject; but she wished to do more than listen. and she was learning, too. those who give their time to that most wonderful and noblest of all trades, the making of a man, have lately come by the belief that children have been taught quite wrongly. they have been stuffed with knowledge before their bodies were grown to receive it. a deluge of facts has been poured upon them, seated at their little desks, and most of it has gone out through the open window into god's fresh air, where they ought to have been themselves. they have almost burst with learning--and never learnt to learn. they have known all euclid at thirteen: forgotten everything by thirty-one. they have been specialists at seventeen and city clerks at twenty-three. mrs. hallam, that crusted theorist and advocate of the old way, unconsciously had done a curiously modern thing. she had kept her daughter back, given her a healthy body, a mind anxious to expand and able. now, at twenty-two, helena began to specialise--in learning and in life. she had been kept back: now she leapt forward the better. contemptible enough perhaps to a superior eye, the salad of quite disconnected lectures, random talks with a young artist-friend, and pencilled passages from mudie books, that formed this home curriculum; but as in health, contentment, as with life itself, the will to be is almost everything, and helena was quite resolved to learn. her sole worry, in all the excitement of this onward surge into a fuller life whose endless spaces thrilled and terrified, was that her husband would not bear her company. oh, he was much too clever. she knew that. she never blamed him. he had no need for all her causeries and things. she would be dull to argue with; and yet---- yet it is only human, only feminine, when one has got a clever husband and is adventuring on the long road of art, to wish that he should take one's hand. and she was proud of him. her simple mind had not yet probed the inwardness of mrs. herbertson's "mistake." it did not seem peculiar to her that mr. alison should be seen always, and he only, as her companion at the institute. it merely was that she wished it might sometimes have been hubert. she longed to hear his views on all of it, and it would be nice, too, to show him. it looked so odd that he would never come, when quite old-looking women brought husbands triumphantly along! at length, when fifteen months of lectures gave her a new confidence, she tackled him point-blank one afternoon while they were walking on the heath. he looked at her reproachfully, as though he were a master who had just been asked for a half-holiday. "my dear girl," he said, "is that quite logical?" she knew at once that hope was dead. it always was when logic once appeared. she never had a chance. "i don't know why not," she said gaily, for nowadays she did not go back to her kennel quite so easily. they had been married for two years. hubert was forced to put the thing in words. "well you see, my dear," he started, slowly, "i dare say other husbands have got their work finished by six o'clock. in fact"--and he brightened visibly--"that is really why they fixed that hour, i dare say. city men are back. but it's my best work-hour, you know." "_is_ it?" laughed helena, and looked at him. then, as he did not seem to see the joke, "the _morning_ is, you know, if i ask you to come out shopping. i'm afraid, hugh, you're just a little naughty!" and she shook her finger. "no," he said shortly, still not very much amused, for once, at her nice childish ways. "they _both_ are.... it's not much for a man to work, just two short goes at it, and i simply can't spare the time, however much i'd like to. i mustn't go out between tea and dinner when i'm on a book." "you used to, though," persisted helena, "in devonshire." it is a rash wife who recalls to her husband the days of single life. "very likely," he answered impatiently; "but we weren't married then. i can't afford it now." the rash wife had it, full between the eyes; a brutal blow provoked by her incaution; and she reeled. "can't afford it, hugh?" she repeated, with a vague sense of being accused. "why, do i cost so much? do i cost more than ruth?" he had not looked for anything quite as direct as that. he had blurted it out and now, as often, felt ashamed. he laughed and said in a much kinder tone: "don't you worry your dear head about things like that. we shall be all right. you won't find the man in possession by our fireside yet, when you come home from market!" now it was her turn not to be amused. "no, but tell me," she said. "i'd much rather know. are we honestly hard up?" "what a practical little thing it's getting," he said, patting her on the back as they strode onward, always heralded by the long white dog with its straight tail, as proud as a drum-major. "well, if you really want to know," he went on, "we are and have been, but we shan't be. listen!" he turned about and about, his finger to his mouth, upon the empty spaces, clearly once more in the best of spirits. "never tell a soul--and least of all the high-art alison--but i am doing a pot-boiler!" "what, something worse than you need?" she blurted out in her astonishment. he laughed at that. "yes, if you put it so! anyhow, something to make money." "but won't the critics hate that?" she asked seriously. hubert brett, for a man who had been almost too kindly reviewed, was always very hard on critics. "now listen," he said, "and i'll tell you something. the public has a natural suspicion of literary criticism. it only reads the stuff to see what to avoid. if it sees some book is called sincere, painstaking, artistic, a masterpiece, or anything like that, it passes on until it comes to something labelled crude and elementary. then it gets out its library list. think of the two best-selling novelists to-day, and then think what the critics say of them! they are a journalistic joke. yes, the more the dear critics hurl abuse, the more the darling public rushes out to boot's. i'm sick of good reviews and rotten sales. i'm not doing it because i married you, not i; but i want columns of abuse and half a million copies!" she loathed it, always, when he talked like this. she never knew quite what he meant. she hoped he was not really writing a pot-boiler. "no, but honestly," she said, "why are things worse than in the old days? your books sell just as well. do tell me or i shall ask ruth." "well," he said, but this time without rancour, merely telling her what she had asked, "you see a house, even a hen-run like ours, always costs ever so much more than rooms--rates and things like servants, don't you see--and then ruth used to make a bit with curious bazaar stuff all gummed on to tins." it was a mere backwash of his thought, as he drew the question out to a solution--nothing more. he never thought of a comparison. why, if the thing had ever come to that, helena had her allowance.... but it went home to her, whose early days had bred a diffidence to die only with the years. ruth had helped him, then! "i wish _i_ could do something," she said. "i feel so useless!" she had forgotten her bold attack with which this dialogue had started, and her whole mind was filled now with its self-reproach. hubert felt a sudden shame. the words threw back his memory to those first hours in london when the vast city crowd had made her say; "it makes me feel so useless!" dear little girl, what happy, jolly days she had brought to his life since then! and yet she thought that she was useless.... she seemed so upset. his one idea was consolation. she must not think he longed for ruth again, in even one respect! perhaps at a less flustered time he might have thought of all that she did in the house; those charming little meals, hot always at however variable times; the pretty bowls of flowers; everything so dainty--green and white--so different from the grimy lodgings. but now he did not think of that. he took her arm instinctively in his and spoke what came into his mind. "dear little girlie," he said kindly, "i love you to be useless." but she was not consoled. chapter viii a scene in the home hubert brett could never quite escape from business; he analysed himself too much. his action sprung from impulse, education, ancestry, whatever source philosophers may choose to say, but it was followed by a sequel due to his own introspection. he tended in this way to set up something like a chain--a sequence of states which might almost be expected after any given act. he might have owned, found in a candid vein, that selfishness was his besetting fault. it had been so--this would be his excuse, if he indeed admitted what certainly he knew--it had been so from birth; at any rate since he recalled himself an only son and younger than his only sister, pampered and indulged so far as even a small child could wish. he always _had_ got what he wanted. hence naturally sprang a sort of self-centredom, a tendency to think first of what _he_ desired, something which, well, hang it all, no, it wasn't selfishness, but merely that self-confidence which all men who meant to get things done must first of all possess.... none the less, every now and then (he noticed it more, since helena had been with him), he did, he knew, do things no doubt quite justifiable if one were thinking only of success, efficiency, and so forth; but rather beastly from the other person's--from helena's--standpoint. it was so easy, when defending your own interests (and otherwise you'd get no work done ever), to be thoughtless, irritable, mean. about those lectures or whatever they were of the poor little girl's, for instance.... ought he, came the doubt when he was back in his own den at one minute past five o'clock--ought he to have given in to her for once, if she was really so immensely keen to take him? after all there often were days when he had finished work easily by six o'clock; whole months, even, between books, when he did no work after tea; but there was such a thing as system, and though a married man, he was quite bachelor enough to love this time of solitude with pipe and books. helena was sweet; no man could ever have been luckier about his wife; but he saw her for much more than one-half the day and all of it on sundays. yes really, he could not see that she had any right to look for more. perhaps those city men took their wives to these precious causeries, but they were ever so much more away. oh yes, he saw a lot of her and however much she might complain, he knew that she was really lucky.... all the same, as he never had and the dear child wanted it, perhaps----? whereat hubert, having worked comfortably around his usual circle--selfishness, remorse, ample self-excuse, and noble expiation--got up, feeling very light of heart, and went back to the drawing-room. helena was startled. she never thought of tragedies, she had known none in her well-sheltered days, or she might easily have feared that there was something wrong. never in these two years and more had he come back, once gone, till dinner-time. many modern wives might have resented such a sudden entry. luckily this specimen was in no more compromising a position than that of eating the last jam sandwich, a thing she never could resist before lily came and took away the tea. she waved it at him without shame. "hullo!" she said. "why what's brought you back?" he smiled indulgently. he liked her to be young. "look here, helena," he said, "i've been feeling i was a bit of a brute about those causeries of yours. i could easily spare an evening some day, if you'd like me to. let's see the list and then we'll fix on one." many modern wives, again, might have been tiresome about an amende honourable indeed but so obviously planned. not helena, however. she leapt to get the circular, all thrilled excitement and babbling gratitude. hubert ran a proud finger down the list. "hullo," he said in unflattering surprise. "they've got some quite good men." he had always utterly ignored her ventures in self-education. he did not, for one thing, approve of them; and he had vaguely thought they were connected with the parish church, pleasant sunday evenings, and everything like that. "i'm so glad you're pleased," she put in, quite without irony. "that's the one we'll do together," he said, and read out--"'january : art as a religion.--g. k. shaw.' and only ten days off, too!" it was the best, far, on the list; he would perhaps be called on, as a local author, to make some remarks; and he might meet the lecturer.... "oh, but how splendid!" she cried, duly grateful. "just the very one i wanted you to come to. you really _are_ a dear! and that's a late one too, at eight o'clock, because the lecturer objected, so your old work won't suffer after all!" she talked of it for days to come, what great fun it would be, till hubert felt even more guilty. he had never realised how much she felt the fact of his not coming. he had not ever heard, you see, dear mrs. boyd say: "what! no husband again? i don't think you keep him in at _all_ good order; does she, kenneth?"--as one who should say, "you have no power over him, at all!" he did not guess how lonely she had felt sometimes when geoffrey alison could not escort her. still he saw her great keenness now and told himself he would have gone to these lectures before--if only he had known they were not university extension. he was distinctly flattered by the way she harped upon this small concession. little things like that had a curious power of making hubert brett well satisfied with life. she could see that afresh, six mornings later. he was opening his letters, a process which made breakfast quite a nervous time for her, because one small reverse--no more than an unflattering review--upset him so and sometimes ruined his whole morning's work, which meant he would be silent and depressed at lunch-time. to-day, however, having opened first the only letter in an unknown hand as promising the most adventure, he said with real exhilaration: "ah, that's encouraging. that bucks one up!" "what, good news, hugh dear?" she inquired, delighted. "yes, the kit kat club has asked me as its guest of honour." inwardly she was a little disappointed; she had hoped it would be some money. "how excellent!" she said, good wife; and then, "what _is_ the kit kat club?" "why, it's a well-known literary club," he answered, slightly hurt. "they meet"--he read the card again--"at lewisham." "capital!" she said: not because she had ever heard of lewisham as a great literary centre, but because he was so terrifically pleased. "and when is it to be?" "very short notice," he said, looking once more at the invitation. "this very tuesday, january th. lucky we never dine out!" "but hugh," she began, oh so disappointed, and then stopped. she had told every one--well, mrs. boyd--that she was bringing hugh this time.... he understood. "why, it's the lecture or debate," he said. "i _am_ sorry." there clearly was no question which should go. then, much more gently, remembering her keenness: "never mind, little girl: we'll find another nice debate. let's see the list and we will pick one now." treats, of course, are seldom a success the second time. helena, now, did not dash for the list. in fact hubert, looking up, saw that great tears were rolling down her cheeks. she could have killed herself for shame. it only proved how difficult it was to be grown up, if you began too late! and hubert was not even touched by it. the silly action had no sanction in success. he got up angrily, without a word, but making it clear that he had thought her selfish. he sat on the armchair and took up the _spectator_. this announced that breakfast was now over. helena felt that his rebuke was thoroughly deserved. what must he think of her, when they took place each week and he had offered to come to another? of course he didn't know about that rude pig, mrs. boyd! "hugh dear," she said, also getting up, "i am so sorry; i feel such a beast. it's only i was disappointed. of course my meeting's simply nothing. i ought to have been glad about the kit kats, and i am." some men, after that, would possibly have changed their minds and taken her to her dear meeting; but to hubert nothing came before success. "that's a dear unselfish little wife," he answered soothingly and gave her a forgiving kiss. the episode was closed. "you're sure it is the twenty-ninth of this month?" she therefore angered him by asking. helena could not believe in fate being so brutal. "well, there's the card," he answered brusquely. she took it up, filled with an abrupt, unchristian desire to tear it into fragments. it had a silly black cat in silhouette upon it and she _had_ thought he would come at last.... "why klub with a k?" she did allow herself to ask. "just a literary conceit, i suppose," he answered, trying to control his voice; and that silenced her, because she had no theories as to what a literary conceit might be. but hubert could not quite allow the matter to rest there. he felt that she was thinking he had acted selfishly and he must prove to her that everything would be all right. what odd disguises can remorse assume! "you can get alison to take you," he threw out. "he's sure to be going." "oh no," answered helena. "i told him you were coming. he'll be booked. no, i shan't go at all." face mrs. boyd exultant? no, not she. afterwards, if needed, some excuse. but anyhow not that! she had said she was bringing hubert. "that's silly, my dear." he did not often call her that. "alison will take you gladly, i know, or if not you can go alone. you often have before." "yes," she retorted, "but not when i've told every one that you were taking me. i have a little pride." he shut his paper and got up. he never could bear scenes. "just as you like," he said, trying to speak evenly. "it's your concern. i was only thinking of your comfort. whatever you do won't hurt _me_." * * * * * a man can escape everything except himself; and so it chanced that hubert brett felt a brute twice, repented twice, about one causerie. he felt it most acutely in his little room. he very nearly went back to her now, a second time, and said so; but then he remembered what a nasty scene it had been, about nothing. of course in the old anti-marriage days it had been his pet theory that every wedded pair inevitably--by force of nature, which meant every one to dwell apart--ended in continued rows; but it had seemed so quite impossible with helena. perhaps it always did!... so sweet and pliable and ignorant of life she had been--yes, this was a new helena and more like the old ruth! no, he would not go back. he would be hanged if he encouraged her. chapter ix cinderella helena tried not to look as though she minded when hubert came down, glorious in evening dress at six o'clock. "it _is_ an early start," she said cheerfully. "yes," he replied; "but that means i shall be home all the earlier. the dinner begins at seven and i shan't make a long speech--trust me--so you can expect me back not later than half past ten or eleven at the very latest." he just restrained himself from saying once more that he thought her stupid not to go across to the institute instead of moping all alone till then. even so his farewell was a little cold for, though he kept silence, he could not help feeling she had been selfish over the whole business. her air of martyrdom had rubbed some gilt off the occasion's splendour. as for helena, having waved him gaily out of sight, she did not return and give way to a natural sorrow, as he imagined, typically penitent so soon as he had parted from her. she looked, it is true, hard and thoughtful for a moment. then she laughed almost happily. what did it matter really? it would only be one evening alone, one lecture missed;--and who was mrs. boyd? why of course any one really nice would be glad that her husband had been honoured by these beastly kit kats, whoever they might be. she sat down and wrote a long letter--about everything else in the world--to her lonely mother, who after all never had any one at all to dine with her, unless you counted clergymen. that finished, it was dinner-time and that was fun because she had ordered or brought in all her pet kickshaws--shrimps, dough-nuts and so forth--which hubert always vetoed, describing them expansively as dirty feeding. men, she decided, got so little out of life; always beef and cabbages and yesterday to-morrow.... it was really quite a philosophic meal. she often was alone, for some big part indeed in every day, but there was something in this first lonely dinner that made a curious break and gave, as the french say, to think. she thought of her old life in devonshire; she thought of her ambitions towards self-development when she decided upon marriage; she thought without pride of herself as she was at present; and she thought of hubert. she had reached the dough-nut course, and also the conclusion that they were an odd couple but probably most couples were, when the front door bell sounded, as it always did, through the whole little house. helena looked at the clock. ten minutes to eight! no parcel-post. what could it be, possibly? not hubert back? she felt a quick shame of the dough-nut. it was beneath the table safely before lily entered. "please'm," said the maid, "it's mr. alison wants to speak to you." helena went out into the hall. "hullo," she said, hoping he had not expected dinner. "have you been to the institute? what was it like?" "been," he laughed. "no! it's only ten to eight. this is an eight-o'clocker, you know. g. k. s. will never stand things at the ordinary time!" this was a blow. helena, not letting herself think of all that she was missing, had yet fancied that it was safely over. and it had not even begun... "oh," was all that she said. "i went along," geoffrey alison proceeded quickly, as though every instant counted, "because i am a steward so had to be early, and asked just out of curiosity where you were sitting. they said, so to speak, you weren't! i knew you both intended coming so i ran across. i've got two tickets just returned, so if----" "how very kind of you," said helena, feeling that she could almost slay him; "but it wasn't that we couldn't get in. hubert at the last moment found that he wasn't free, so we sent our seats back. he suddenly remembered he was dining out." she tried to make it sound as though there had not been a tiff. "dining out?" repeated geoffrey alison, "well then, you're free to come along like all the other ones?" "oh no, thank you; i don't think i will," said helena. she had not forgotten about mrs. boyd. "but you simply _must_," replied the other, pulling out his watch. "they'll be beginning if we don't make haste. you couldn't miss this possibly; it's far the best of the whole series. old dr. kenyon, too, thinks art is a disease and intends asking questions. it will be tremendous. come along or you will make us late." "but i'm not tidy or anything," said helena. definite objections are the first steep steps down from refusal to complaisance. he recognised this. "so much the better," he cried in prompt triumph. "unprepared things are always the best sport. you don't need wraps; it's like a summer night and you look very smart. come on! your husband won't object. it will be simply grand. we'll have a picnic causerie!" helena was swept away. bother mrs. boyd and every one! it really would be fun and she would be so bored at home. hubert had told her she should go. besides--did she feel dimly, ever so little even, that she was somehow getting even with him? let us pass quickly on, with all the charity that we can muster.... the institute was packed. this was clearly a great night. helena, directly she entered the room, full of an excitement that had almost the sensation of magnetic waves, was glad that she had come. and as they found their seats, the chairman and the speaker entered. that evening, as mr. alison had promised, was the jolliest of the whole of the series. she even enjoyed merely looking at this g. k. shaw. he was ever such a big man, who swelled genially outward and then ended unexpectedly in quite a savage beard. he looked so comfortable and friendly that she felt certain all the nice things he meant to say (you could tell from his eyes) got somehow twisted all wrong in that horrid beard. certainly, to judge by mere words, there was a lot with which she could not sympathise and some she could not understand. if only hubert had been free! he said, for instance, that conventional religion was man's excuse to the almighty: that faith was the power of believing what we could not prove untrue: and that churches should possibly be built, because of unemployment, but left empty for the glory of their maker. all this puzzled her, and mr. alison would only chuckle, while most others grunted. then the lecturer got round to art and said that life was the creator's masterpiece. he roughly defined art as that which never found its way to paper. he admitted the existence of a body of literature and paintings. he did not for a moment wish to conceal the existence of the royal academy. one corn-crake, however, did not cause a winter: and he wished to-night to speak only about art. the modern out-look was parochial and men failed to see even the parish for looking at the clergymen. an artist had no fatherland. he had the key of the world: for paint was thicker than blood. no two nations had ever agreed on armaments or treaties: but all admitted that farnese was greater than phil may. the worry with the world to-day was not that it was old: it was a million years too young. no man troubled with the future, because he knew that it must some day be the past. religion hinted at the future: art alone interpreted the present. five thousand years had thrown mud at the workman: brangwyn proved him the sole dignified thing left in a dead-level age. for centuries they had destroyed old ruined tenements, and bone had shown them to be the only kind that ought to be allowed. art dealt with the beautiful and live; the church with what was gloomy and decayed. you could not make people wicked by act of parliament; the plain man was an artist when he shaved his face. art was to the english what death had been to the egyptians, but london was full of things that no one ever spoke about. there was, for instance, the imperial institute. it was better to be beautiful than dead. some of those he met were neither. he wished that they were both. he should be glad if any one would raise objections, for their mutual advantage. every one was right and nobody was ever wrong. there had been ever so much more than that, she knew; but this was all she could recall when finally he took his seat, and now, already, she was not altogether sure how it had been connected. she was not by any means convinced but she was tremendously encouraged. new vistas of an unsuspected length and freshness opened out from a drab world, whilst the fat, bearded man was speaking. sometimes she supposed he must be very funny? "capital, capital," murmured mr. alison, and only that. he usually had such a lot to say, too! she was disappointed. but now grimly and deliberately there uprose an elderly man of stern broad face and a respectable frock-coat. he must apologise for letting his heavy periods drop on the top of the last speaker's brilliant flippancies, but truth, he regretted to say, was truth. "that's old kenyon," her neighbour whispered gleefully. the doctor, having said so much of calm preface as due to a visitor, suddenly blazed out into a quicker time and a more violent mood. so far, he said, from art being a religion, it was a disease. (sensation.) he proved this at some length, largely in the dead languages, with extracts read from small pamphlets which (he announced) he had the honour to have contributed to various of the famous monthlies. the soldier-type, he argued, was the most essentially male, 'and it was furthest-moved from the artistic. he went so far, in conclusion, as to say that literary creation was only possible to a hybrid creature half-male and half-female, of whichever sex. the general feeling was that this was rude to mr. g. k. shaw. the famous author rose, however, blandly and swung his body round to dr. kenyon. "now there'll be some fun," said geoffrey alison. "i consider," said mr. g. k. shaw quite gravely, holding his beard steady, "that the last speaker's mongrel theory of literature is plausible and valuable. i am, however, puzzled as to how he accounts for his own admirable pamphlets?" which certainly was fun and everybody laughed, to the annoyance of old dr. kenyon, who was thenceforth nicknamed "mongrel" and shortly after moved to wimbledon. but beyond all this, helena found a vague excitement in the evening. it was not like those other causeries at six o'clock; she wished they always could take place at eight. the mere fact, too, of having come so on the moment's spur lent quite a new attraction. as geoffrey alison had hinted, picnics are more romantic than a dinner-party and this had bulked into almost an adventure. he saw her home. the speeches had been long and it was half-past ten already, but all was darkness in the little house. helena had quite a feeling of nervousness at the idea of switching on light after light, alone. "come along in," she said simply. "hubert'll be here in half a moment. then he'll give you a drink, and we will all exchange experiences!" all rancour had gone; yet--well, she would rather like to show hugh that his absence didn't mean she merely sat and cried! women _are_ human--and women. "no, i don't think i will, thanks very much," he said. his face and tone puzzled her. "don't say _you_'re busy, now!" she cried. "it's a regular disease." "oh no, i never work at night," he answered. "artists can't very well. that is the one advantage of our job!" "well don't be tiresome then, and come on in," she said, holding the door open. "hugh will be furious if he knows you're just gone. so don't be stupid. _i_ was tame, just now!" "if you really mean it," he replied almost solemnly and entered. "of course i do," she laughed. "should i invite you, otherwise? how curious you are! come into the dining-room and then when hugh comes, he can give you--oh no, let's come into here!" she hastily pointed to the drawing-room. geoffrey alison went in, puzzled, thinking. he did not know, and she had only just remembered, about that dough-bun. chapter x honour hubert meanwhile was enjoying quite another sort of artistic evening. on first arrival, indeed, at the club (which proved to meet in a hotel coffee room), he found himself wondering whether he might not have been wiser in keeping to the old arrangement. the lewisham kit kats, on entry to their circle, did not promise so much intellectual reward as g. k. shaw and the scorned institute. they had not the exotic charm of their great prototype. he had imagined, always, a band of young enthusiasts in literature, fresh maybe from the 'varsity, who would be glad to hear what he had got to say and welcome him to their--it might be--weekly dinner. but here were no evening suits except his own, of which he grew now only too aware. the common dress was dark suit, bow-tie, and moustache; or with the women--for it was "mixed"--what he imagined would be blouse and skirt. they were a frowsy-looking lot, he told himself; horribly genial; and he more than suspected them of being bohemian. there was a tortured look of gladness upon every face. they bowed elaborately and shook hands with fervour, until the whole room buzzed with brotherly salutes. and hubert, in his dress-suit, stood among them. one by one the members were brought up and all of them shook hands. not one among the sixty who failed to be very proud to meet him. hubert sighed for helena and g. k. shaw, finding his only means of consolation in elaborating it as a good story. he wished that he could say with truth that they had not an _h_ among them, but this was not so. he would have liked them better, he decided, if that had been true. they were snobs in their own way, he felt confident, and their gentility was an affair of effort. they were that trying set, the in-betweens.... it was with genuine relief he heard that dinner was now served, and in they trooped: he first with his allotted woman; the rest, all apologetic smiles, falling in anyhow behind. they settled at the tables in a hungry silence. hubert could see the waiters smiling at his evening dress,--or thought he could, which was equally unpleasant. he turned hurriedly to his neighbour, whose name he had failed to catch in his agitation. he only remembered the friendly president murmuring in his ear: "her brother is a book-reviewer," as though that gave her a niche all apart. "how often do you have these dinners?" he decided to begin. she aimed a toothy smile straight at him. hubert had never noticed how unusually fat she was before, and tried hard not to seem as though he had observed it now. he looked doggedly at her light yellow hair, and then looked down again when he saw that it was not real. "i'm not a kit kat, you know, mr. hubert brett," she answered coyly. "they meet every tuesday, but we ladies are only asked when there is some special attraction, so you see you should feel very honoured! i find it most interesting" (she laid the accent upon the third syllable), "because you see, my brother is a book reviewer, so i naturally take a special interest." "naturally," answered hubert. "we always say," she went on, very animated, "just for a joke, you know, only among ourselves, that the kit kats have a far gayer time when we ladies are not admitted: we see them on their best behaviour!" "yes?" hubert said absently, forgetting to smile or to live up in any way to this pet joke amongst the ladies. he was thinking. "what does your brother review for?" he enquired as a result. the big lady looked on him a little sternly, not at all sure whether he had not intended to be rude. he had been very short with her pleasantry, and now was he doubting about harold? he ought to know the name. "for several books," she said with dignity, and turned to the man on her other side, who might not be a famous author but was the mayor's cousin and far less stuck-up. hubert knew that he had failed, and his other neighbour proved unhappily to be deaf on the near side. he spent the rest of a long and essentially british meal in trying to appease the critic's sister. it was all rather difficult, and he was glad now that he had told the president he must leave early, as his wife was nervous and he had a long way to go. he could escape a little before half-past nine and they would be much happier without him. he wished now that he had refused the whole thing. still, it _was_ something to be chosen as the guest of honour.... and, indeed, when all the meal had gone except its odour and the president had facetiously announced that the ladies might now smoke, it proved to be a very big thing indeed to be the kit kats' guest of honour. even hubert brett's tried capacity for absorbing flattery was strained when mr. president, as everybody called him always, spoke minute after minute in praise of his books: recalling their names (from a list propped up on his cigar-tray), although he was sure kit kats would not need reminding. these sterling merits which he had just enumerated had won, he said, for hubert brett, if he might drop the mr. in art's fellowship (applause), a big following in lewisham, and to-night's event, he felt confident, would render it yet bigger. frankly, as president, when he thought of this fixture he had felt pleased. (applause.) of the distinguished novelist's affability in acceding to their desire in spite of the many calls upon his time and recent marriage (laughter), he intended to say nothing. (some applause.) he here read out, he confessed with a certain pride, the names of distinguished authors who had so acceded formerly, and hubert was half disappointed yet half flattered to find himself able to agree with the president's remark that none of them was so popular or well-known an author as their guest to-night. "he has told me," slyly concluded the orator, "that the trains home are bad and that his wife is sitting up for him. (laughter.) those of us who are married men will understand." (loud laughter and a high-voiced "shame," then female tittering.) "i only pull aside the veil in this way so as to let you realise why i draw my remarks short to-night and call upon our guest of honour, hubert brett, for the pleasure of a few words upon the literature of to-day, in which he plays so considerable a part." enormous applause greeted this conclusion and to it was added the clapping of white gloves (for all the ladies wore them), as hubert rose and stood behind his chair. even the lady whose brother reviewed, possibly melted by hearing that her neighbour was a genius to whom much always is forgiven, smacked him playfully on the back as he got up to speak. he was not a good speaker and prudently had written out the headings of his speech and a few epigrams that might pass as impromptu after wine. there had not, unluckily, been any wine and all the early epigrams passed quite unnoticed. a speech devised for 'varsity enthusiasts was not of the true kit kat bouquet. hubert had so far got the instincts of an orator that he could realise this fact. the chilly aspect of his listeners told him that he had not gripped them; a swift ranging back to the last speech supplied the cause. he was not broad enough in his effects. they did not care for theories on writing; they wanted something personal. they wanted reminiscences. their welcome, when he first got up, had shown they took him seriously. nobody of his own set was there! what harm? hubert brett's speech (for no one ever used the mr. of him afterwards) is still remembered as the most enjoyable of all the kit kats ever heard. such interesting people had he met and known, known well; such vivid lights he threw upon the full life of a famous literary man. no single member who got up to join in the discussion afterwards but started with an eulogy of their guest's work and speech. hubert was very pleased. he had warmed to the kit kat manner. he should not tell it as a comic story; it would not be fair. after all, perhaps they were not an artistic set, but then not everybody could belong to that, and they were very genial. you only had to get to know them. they were the public anyhow, the class for whom one wrote, and possibly they might have influence, some few of them. this woman next door, now so affable, had got a brother who reviewed for several papers. all of this must help. it was absurd to be exclusive when one came to art. he looked upon this evening as one of the most encouraging in his whole life. wouldn't helena be pleased to hear it all? and that reminded him. with a hot shame he drew out his watch. his speech had been long and one of many after a full dinner. it was very nearly half-past ten and a long journey home.... full of guilt, he pulled himself together, to make his excuses. there was a gap now. no one seemed to volunteer as speaker. he---- but mr. president was on his feet. he must not interrupt. "gentlemen--_and_ ladies!" said the president amid appreciative laughter, "all the volunteers now being exhausted, i shall proceed in accordance with kit kat tradition to call out the reserve and ask them to speak, whether they wish it or no. and the first gentleman i think we all feel we should like to hear speak is our old valued friend and excellent critic, mr. henry jenks." this met with such general applause that hubert felt it would be ridiculous to get up now. it also would be rude and pointed. besides, "critic"--did he mean professional? it might be silly to offend him. after all, these people who were asked to speak would surely be better, their estimate of his work more worth while, than those who simply wanted to hear their own voice? helena wouldn't mind. she was so easy-going, bless her. she would love to hear. to the flattered relief of a vigilant president, who had observed the guest of honour's restless movement, hubert settled once more in his chair. he would stay ... just a little. chapter xi pink papers and st. anthony it is both easy and comforting to divide men simply into opposites. honest, dishonest; truthful, lying; clean, dirty;--what a lot of worry it undoubtedly prevents. you trust one person all the way, another nowhere; you tell your secrets to the first and to the second nothing; it is so simple that few people can resist it, when they come to life. and it is good enough for working purposes. but in reality it is not so. a man all white or all black is but rarely met: the last is soon removed, the first impossible for common use. man was devised from a more subtle palette; and if in all the millions of faces no two are alike, that is yet truer, said about the heart. the man you trust so freely has his see-saw moments, like anybody else, and if as a rule he lands the right end down, it may have been your very confidence that lent him weight. it is the same with all. they must be entered for convenience beneath the colour which they most display, but every one of them is a true moral rainbow and much more. take it all in all, we humans are the most mixed thing that any one has ever yet invented: the reason why some scorn all other hobbies or amusements, so long as there is man. geoffrey alison was an especially odd mixture--all of course kept rigidly inside. to the mere eye he was, like most, quite simple, almost to the point of dulness. oh yes; i see, yes; the artistic type; a gentleman though; trustworthy but slack; quite modest although jolly clever; pretty much of a white man... but inwardly he was a thing to watch because his types conflicted, and that ends with fireworks. he joined the artist's soul--a real love for the beautiful and noble--to what perhaps may be most easily described as a pink-paper mind. he could sit and gaze happily for hours at a corregio, forgetting the plush benches and the noisy tourists, utterly absorbed; he found a joy that was almost physical in a sudden landscape or the moon which breaks loose from its clouds and gleams on a rough sea; he would watch with a smile of pleasure the way of a woman with her child or a child with its toy; he shrank with loathing from all that was ugly, sordid--the sight of needless misery or the sound of a woman's oath; and yet--and yet he could not rid himself of the idea that there was something palpitating, wicked, spicy, about a shop-girl who held up her skirt to cross a muddy road. there was a thrill for him each time that he passed a stage-door. garters--champagne (always known as fizz)--corsets--chorus girls--these all held for him a brimming measure of romance. he was convinced that there was something specially cryptic and alluring about bar-maids, though he would never enter bars as he did not like other people's glasses. paris to him stood for a riot of continued orgies shaming a white dawn. he was of those who for peculiar reasons can thoroughly enjoy a really english ballet. the thought of studios and models had half consciously affected the choice of his career; and if he now knew that to be illusion, so far as his experiences went, he still liked--well, one half of him--to read the old exciting fairy-tales. perhaps they happened somewhere, still. at times, when he was on a holiday or anywhere except at his own news-shop, he would buy, half-ashamed and furtive, those strange, elemental papers whose main task it is to tickle the broad tastes of city youths or army officers. and he thoroughly enjoyed them--until afterwards. army men, in fact, who had glared at him all through a long dinner-party, often revised their estimate when coffee had come in and their wives departed; if, be it understood, the conversation drifted into a right channel. on the way home, should their wives say; "i liked that mr. alison, so clever!" they would reply: "m'yes? rather an affected ass, my dear: i can't stand those artistic johnnies. still, he came out a bit over the wine and showed he _had_ got something in him. not a bad fellow i dare say; bit of a sportsman possibly--in spite of his long hair. but i'm not sure we want to have him calling?" which only shows how useful it may be for any man to have two sides. you never can please all the world with one! of course the one in question was entirely abstract. geoffrey alison would never have even dreamt of doing all the things he liked to read on paper. it would perhaps have been more healthy if he had; but no, he realised, himself, that it was only an idea. it was an idea, too, that he shared with no one. his friends--artists and authors--somehow were not amused by anything of that sort, although the papers he enjoyed were read by millions. it was curious! he kept it to himself, and that was bad as well. to hubert he had raised the curtain for one moment, with those sketches of his own, but the audience had not seemed keen for more. and as for helena--well, inwardly geoffrey alison was an odd mixture; but he remained a gentleman outside. all the same, to-night was trying him a little hard. helena's friendliness had thrilled him from the day they met. he had never met a woman--anyhow not young and pretty--who had taken to him like that from the first. he never had regarded himself as a lady's man; he was too small and timid; yet she had seemed to find nothing wrong with him. she had adopted him as her guide and philosopher in art; gone about with him more, almost, than with that absurdly busy fellow brett; until the cattish vicar's wife----! and now----! of course he knew that she was just a girl, and jolly innocent and all that sort of thing (brett liked to keep her back), but even so, any one surely would admit that it was a little bit exciting and peculiar. the way she asked him in; and then he could not make out why she changed her mind about the dining-room and came into the drawing-room where she sat down upon the sofa and looked simply ripping. it was all very odd! of course she was innocent and jolly, but he believed that she was fond of him and some day he would love--when they were all alone like this--if only half in fun--to give her just one kiss. she surely couldn't mind? it would be splendid and exciting. (it may be added that geoffrey alison thought more of its excitement than its splendour.) the very idea made being with her like this so difficult and trying. he could not think of anything to say. it all sounded wrong. even helena noticed, at last. "how dull you are to-night!" she said peevishly, for they were old friends and she never troubled to sort out her words. "i believe you _did_ want to work or else had something else to do." "of course not," he protested, feeling horribly wronged in the circumstances. "this is awfully jolly." why couldn't he be natural? helena was not so confident about the jollity. "hugh _must_ be here soon," she remarked rather wearily. "why do you call him hugh?" he asked, jumping at a topic. "surely that's not really short for hubert? it ought to be bert!" "oh, how dare you?" she asked gaily; she felt that they had got back on to the old easy paths. "bert indeed--for him! i wonder how you----" and she clapped her hands excitedly. "yes," she said, her boredom all forgotten, "that's it! i always thought that mr. alison was far too stiff; i've got a name for you." "for _me_?" that silly blood was jumping in his brain. "yes," she cried. "ally! i shall call you ally, just like ally sloper! that's better than bert." ally. it was not romantic, no; but still---- gad, what a ripping little girl she was! he wished to goodness he hadn't ever thought about that kiss. he could have been ever so much more amusing, make her like him more, if only he hadn't got that possibility before him. and yet ... perhaps it was worth while. but helena had no such abstract thrill to keep her eyes open and it was well after eleven. she wished now that mr. alison had not come in. when hubert got back, they'd sit and have drinks. she wished that he would go. and how she longed to yawn! if only he would even be amusing.... "have you seen my snap-shot album?" she asked. in their two years of friendship, it had never come to this before. "no," he said. "may i?" feeling very young. he knew that he was being entertained. she leant down wearily to get it from the bookshelfs lower row. her smooth white neck stretched in a rounded slope before him. by gad! his hands moved restlessly towards her. this was his great chance. she might not even ever know! and then--she was so innocent. suppose she boxed his ears or anything like that? supposing she told brett?... "no, don't worry with it," he said, finding it quite hard to speak. "i think i'd better go. it's too late for snap-shots! he must have missed his train." "he'll be here any moment now," she felt compelled to say. "i know," he answered meaningly, as though that explained his going. she did not notice of course, was just puzzled for a moment, but it gave him another thrill. as he passed through the hall, with her beside him, he saw the minute hand was nearer to midnight than to any other hour; a very dissipated time.... and outside, in the little garden, he drew a long breath, as though to set free the vanquished evil thoughts. he felt he had been very good to-night in face of opportunities for other things. st. anthony himself could not have felt much more complacent. chapter xii devils hubert groped his way homewards along the ill-lit road, filled by a certain shame but also nearly chuckling to himself. what a splendid, encouraging night it had been! those last and most important speakers were if anything even more enthusiastic about all his novels. it was nice to get into touch with those for whom you wrote and know that they are pleased. it took away the great drawback of a writer's job as compared with the vocalist's or actor's; that you never heard the clapping. (he did not, of course, think about the hisses.) wouldn't helena be glad to hear it all! he had forgotten by now that there had been any trouble as to this evening's fixture, remembering only how delighted she was always, bless her, with his least success. imagine, now, if he were going back to lonely digs--or ruth! by this time he had reached the crossroads whence the house is visible, and now his bubbling pleasure suddenly went flat. he could see their bedroom windows from here, and there was no light.... he had told her not to sit up, certainly, but he had naturally thought that she would read in bed and keep awake to hear about the evening. of course he was a little late; but still, he thought resentfully, she might---- then he remembered. how feminine! she wished to spite him for deserting her in favour of the kit kats! she was asleep, or anyhow pretending, and thought to punish him, like comic-paper husbands, by making him fumble his way into bed in a considerate darkness! he smiled at her simplicity. how like her! she knew nothing about anything. he'd soon show her how childish she had been. he meant to turn the light on and bang drawers and then--it really would be rather comic to see her, like the child she was, pretending to awake. in this grim mood of resolution, creditable to a bullied sex, he turned into his gate and as he moved slowly out into the dark garden from under the thick ivy arch, was conscious of a male figure not three feet away. instantly his trained imagination nimbly leapt from point to point. he understood now why there was no light up there; he could fancy the poor frightened girl listening to a scraping noise; the useless, snoring servants; possibly a struggle, she was so brave---- god, if anything had happened to her! in a second flash he had seen, for the first time possibly, how much she meant to him. we moan our tragedies and scarcely notice blessings till they go. and whilst his brain sped along those twin paths, his arm sprang out and gripped the fellow by the throat. "i say, brett," cried a strangled voice, "it's me." "who is it?" asked hubert. "alison?" and he released his hold. "yes," said the other, making sure that all his throat was there. brett, he ruefully reflected, was one of those big devils and big devils never knew their strength. "i've been taking your wife to the causerie." "oh!" answered hubert. perhaps it was excitement only, but he felt of a sudden as though he could resume his grip with pleasure. "it must have been a long affair." the sneer was obvious. he never had been jealous about helena before--but things were happening to-night. "oh," laughed the other apologetically: and hubert realised what an ass he was, wondered why he had ever got to know him, "we've been in some time." "i see," said hubert. "well, good-night." he could not trust himself much longer. it was so dark, and that grip had been vaguely satisfying to some primæval side of him.... geoffrey alison returned the greeting and slid away with definite relief. he had not liked the way that brett said that "i see." it was so obvious he did. and then about the causerie having been long----! when he grew cooler, sitting in the tube, he began to wonder nervously how this would affect his friendship with helena (he always thought of her as that), and looked rather doubtfully along the future. well, he should see. he wouldn't call again until she wrote. only one thing was certain. her husband suspected him--and he felt wickeder than ever.... hubert meanwhile let himself into the dark hall and merely throwing down his hat, without taking off his coat, strode full of war into the drawing-room. helena had just finished the postponed yawn with some luxuriance and decided that mr. alison must get up very early and do all his work then, and that made him so dull at night. she turned delightedly as the door opened. good: hugh already! "helena," he said, storming in, "why did you pretend you weren't going to the show to-night?" "what _do_ you mean, hugh?" she asked, utterly surprised. "i wasn't." she hoped that he had not been drinking. men, she believed, mostly did when they got out alone. "you must think me a fool," he said. "but i don't intend to have an argument about it. i only want to say at once that i think it would be far better if you saw less of your friend mr. alison. i meant to say it anyhow. people are talking." "but i don't understand," she faltered, almost as a question. he laughed scornfully. "i know you're ignorant but you are not a fool, so don't pretend you are. of course married women don't need chaperons, i know all that, but a mere girl like you and that young ass and almost midnight--but don't let's go into all that." he calmed himself, swallowing his wrath, and said more gently; "i know it's all right really, dear, don't think i don't, it's only--well, you know what people say." "_what_ do they say?" she asked indignantly. "as you ask," he answered, letting the words out coldly, "i heard one man telling another at the golf club yesterday that mrs. herbertson was saying she had not yet found out whether alison or i was mr. brett, but thought _he_ was as you saw more of him. that's a local joke! it's jolly, isn't it?" "_i_ think it's disgusting," she answered oddly calm. "i shouldn't ever care what people with that sort of mind think." "well _i_ do," he almost shouted at her, "and i want you to understand as my wife that i forbid you to see that young alison again. i don't know anything about him except that i did him a favour once. and i don't mean to have it." "i think you're excited," she said calmly, not at all like the child that he had always known. she gathered new strength from his sudden weakness. one of them must have reserve. "excited!" he mocked. "well, who wouldn't be? a dirty-minded little cad like that!" "hubert," she said roused at last, "you've got no right to call him that. it's you and mrs. herbertson and every one that have the dirty minds. i don't know what you think. he's not a cad. he's _your_ friend and i like him. he's been nice to me." a devil tempted her, urging her on beyond the point of a good friend's defence. "i'm very fond of him," she said, provocatively. and then that devil entered into hubert brett. it had been a full night and excitement all the way. he had not yet recovered from that garden scene. and now, listening to her words, hearing his rival praised, he felt again as he had felt when he thought that some harm had come to her. he seized her in his arms with an unreasoning passion; held her there, resisting; kissed her furiously on lips, eyes, everywhere; laughing and saying: "you are mine, mine. you belong to me, i tell you. you're all mine!" "let me go, hubert," she cried terrified. she could not understand. he let her go, at that. she moved away and stood behind the table, as though that gave her protection. he gazed at her smiling, panting. "i'm sorry," he said presently. "it was your fault: you were so maddening. you don't see what it means to me." the little gods of comedy laughed out upon the tragic spectacle of a man released by oddly joined emotions from his chains of self and a wife who wondered in fear whether kit kats drank champagne.... "and how did the dinner go off?" she asked soon, in her usual tones. chapter xiii secrets helena came to the conclusion that her mother had been right in one point: life was difficult. she decided further that it was the mrs. herbertsons who caused the trouble. things would be all right if no one ever thought about them! but she had consolations beyond this philosophy. for one thing, hubert almost instantly relented, the next day to be precise, about poor mr. alison. she, giving way in turn, had said she would appease the vicar's wife and golfers by seeing less of him. so all that stupid fuss was over. this, however, was not the real consolation. no, she had a secret. helena brett's secret was not a typically wifely one. it was based, rather, on her childish games. every little girl has secrets--to the scorn of boys--and when, like helena, she is an only child, she has them to herself. of course it is less satisfactory, because although by its nature even a pretending secret needs but one, the whole fun lies in telling it to some one else. helena told no one about hers. and it was much more thrilling than those early devonshire affairs, which largely hinged on the exact position of a fast-decaying mole. the secret differed too from those of many wives in this, that it was all about a woman; a woman she had never met, a woman she could never meet. for over a year now, since causeries and lectures on assorted topics began to fit into a shapeless enough whole--a something that explained or might explain what helena called "things"--she had put stray thoughts down into a shilling diary. at first they had been merely sentences that touched her or inspired, things heard and read. then as her mind began to feel its way, she wrote these extracts down, and half ashamed at first, though nobody would ever see them, added her comments on their theories. how elementary the first had been! she blushed, re-reading them. "'the best pilots are ashore'" (ran one on page two). "then are they really pilots?" soon, as was to be expected, she could not endure these accusing words, even herself; and throwing the slim volume pell-mell in the fire, bought and embarked upon a more ambitious tome. then indeed began the proper secret, for up till now though nobody had ever known, (she could hear hubert laughing at her and calling her "so refreshing" ...) it had not been tremendously exciting. now it was, however, for the new book, started ambitiously enough as a sort of brief record of her daily moods--she had so much time now that she saw less of geoffrey alison--gradually burgeoned into something even more colossal. they never had been quite her own sensations in this second volume. those were so extremely dull! no, they had been those of some one like herself: a young wife with a busy husband, some one who felt a fool and wanted not to, wanted very much, but he quite liked it really----oh yes, sometimes, the first day or two, she felt a cad. hubert really wasn't the least bit like that; it was all over-done; but she supposed that it was easier--he always said it was--if you exaggerated than if you just kept to the truth. it all seemed rather horrid, somehow. she thought about tearing up the book. and then--just about the time of the kit kat affair--began the real, astounding, secret. virginia, as she called the wife inwardly (for it was all in the first person)--virginia began to grow! it was not helena's own moods and feelings now that went upon the paper: something endlessly more thorough, more intense, more--well, helena's own word was "sloppy." frankly she despised virginia. that scene about the kit kats came into her diary (it was not helena's), quite different, about a different thing in fact, and more hysterical. she hoped she would not end up like virginia! yet in a way she saw herself there too, just as beneath the husband she could detect ever so cruel a parody of hubert in his most naughty moments.... but oh, what fun it was! when hubert got up nowadays with some remark like; "well, _i_ must do my work!" she no longer felt lonely or out in the cold or inferior or anything. she just said to herself: "and so must i." it was too splendid, having secrets. she told nobody; not even ally, who liked her to be ambitious. no, it was her secret. chapter xiv was it worth while? love in a cottage is admittedly no failure, quite delightful; but those who have tried it usually end by owning that love in comfort would be no less charming. so it was with hubert. nobody, he told himself, could be a better little housekeeper than helena, no little home more fresh and dainty than their own: but though she never worried him, cleverly adapting their ways to a variable income, he was always faced by the uncomfortable thought: "if this book fails--" or "unless i write some short stories--" and after a while these things begin to tell. within two years from marriage they had told upon hubert brett. and so had come into being that pot-boiler, confessed to helena with such solemnity on the wide, prudent, spaces of the heath. at first he had thought that it would be a hardship to exchange his own realistic method, his studies of character, for those banalities of plot and action independent of all motive, which wearied him even when read, boiled down, in a magazine. but slowly his mood of cynical disdain changed to a real enjoyment, for any task is splendid so soon as a man gets at firm grips with it. he began to see that when once you had got rid of the idea that action must proceed from character, there was a certain joy in letting wild event pile up on wild event and then be rapidly forgotten under even wilder. when once you had abandoned all reserve, there was a fierce delight in splashing pages with unfettered sentiment; making frank puppets think, love, and renounce as they had thought, loved, and renounced since the old fruity days of the three-volume novel. of course it was all footle, balderdash, but still (he told himself with pride) it was good footle, splendid balderdash. he had bought some of the most "popular" of recent novels in six-penny editions, novels that had brought fortunes to their authors, and by comparison with his, they did the same thing in a bungling manner. no able novelist, he cynically told his wife, had ever tried till now to write a really good bad novel! helena loathed the whole enterprise, not only because she vaguely felt that it was marriage with her which had made it needful, but because she thought it so unworthy. and not least unworthy, not least loathsome, did she find his way of talking. it had been so splendid to hear him speak about his work in the old days: and now it was so horrible. "i've found a title at last," he said, emerging at lunch-time one day when the book was in its revision-stage, and coming to her in the drawing-room as usual. "hooray!" she cried, genuinely pleased because he had been worried as to that and this would mean a cheery walk. "what is it? is it good?" "couldn't be better," he replied, and as usual she missed the irony. he paused and then; "_was it worth while?_" "oh, hugh," she could not help exclaiming. "that _isn't_ the title?" "don't you like it?" he enquired sardonically and let himself down cheerily upon the sofa. helena of late had begun to express quite elaborate opinions even to hubert, who somehow always terrified her, rather, when it came to intellect. he was so much cleverer, she knew, and never seemed to take her views as anything except a joke. she always spoke a little timidly. he would have been surprised to hear how cleverly she talked to alison and others. but that is true of many married couples. "no," she began slowly. "it's so--i don't know, but--well, so cheap. all your others were so dignified and simple; i think _wandering stars_ was simply excellent; but this--it sort of reminds me of those plays with names like _did she do it?_ you know what i mean!" hubert smiled grimly. "you seem to think i'm trying to be dignified. not a bit of it: we're out for money! money, my dear helena: no more worry about bills, and our own motor-car!" she could not bring herself to be amused and he went on more moodily: "do you imagine any woman wants novels with titles that are dignified? and men aren't fools enough to read them. of course you picked out my best seller for your argument; but look at _the bread of idleness_. that was dignified enough and splendidly reviewed and sold two thousand copies; just about a hundred pounds for me for one year's work! no thanks, i've done with dignity, _pro tem_. there may be just about two thousand women with a taste in dignity, but i want all the shop-girls this time: i'm out for my hundred thousand! i want them when they go to the seaside library and pay their twopences to notice _was it worth while?_ in big letters on a purple ground. that'll make them think! no more dignity for me: you want to make them think, to make them wonder "why?" i'd call the book _why smith left home_, if only it was new." she did not answer for a few moments: then she said very gently but with a new firmness; "hugh dear, is it really necessary to do all this? can't we just go on as we have been doing? i dare say i could manage better, really, and i've often told you i simply don't know what to do with my allowance: it's eating its head off in the bank! surely we're not so hard up as all that? i hate the whole idea." "what whole idea?" he asked coldly. one did look for encouragement from one's own wife. he got up to leave her. "this pot-boiler, as you call it; the title; the way you talk about it; everything. it's all so different, and i've been so proud of the others." she gathered courage and went on: "look here, hugh, why not give it up; start on a really good one that'll help your name; and we'll live meanwhile on all that from my allowance in the bank?" she rose and took him by the arm persuasively. "my dear child," he said with condescension, "you seem to think it's all just money. tear the whole book up? don't worry your little head with such things, but just go and see if lily can't give us some early lunch and then we'll go to kew for tea!" helena, released with a kiss, went out feeling oddly rebellious in spite of the kew treat; and as for him, he was annoyed. give it up, indeed! she talked as though "all this" (for she had called it that) were something criminal, instead of merely a book that was bound to sell! he certainly had no idea of sacrificing all his work for her absurd dislikes.... even the best artists do not so much object to popularity, when they reach thirty-eight. hubert brett, indeed, was more excited over this novel's birth than over that of any other. almost every day he had to go up to see agent, publisher, or editor. he told helena, as his excuse for leaving her so much, that it was most important this book, as a "popular" one, should be widely advertised and publishers were such eternal fools about that sort of thing. they always spent all their money upon other people's trash and then said they could not afford to help on your own books! as the day for publishing drew nearer, this theory bulked almost into an obsession. helena came to dread the paper boy's arrival. hubert would tear the dailies open, dash by instinct to the literary page, and then give a discordant laugh of scorn or anger. "of course not," he would say. "they won't tell any one till it's been out a week! they mean to keep it dark, trust them!" "i dare say they're saving up for later on, dear," was her soothing reply. it was not always she, by now, who was the child. but he would not be soothed. helena was glad when the day arrived, although it was a nervous time. he had been full, the night before, of how amusing it would be to hear the critics slang him for a change, instead of finding all those dull superlatives that put the public off: but remembering his past fury with those few reviews which found some blemish in his work, she had her misgivings. "only i expect," she said, "it may seem rather curious at first--having bad notices, i mean." she looked across at him covertly and anxiously. she had begun, by now, to knit waistcoats for him and felt as though they had been married for eternity. hubert, lounging idly in the other armchair, merely laughed. "curious? well, amusing.... it'll certainly be something new to be slated by the critics and rushed after by the libraries. it's usually been the other way about!" he knew, himself, that he would feel the blame from critics who had liked his work, but then---- after all, if the readers liked it and were thousands where they had been hundreds----! and there was the money.... next morning the paper boy delivered a specially large roll of papers and hubert flung himself upon them with unusual vigour. helena, her eyes fixed on a letter where the words all flickered, was anxious to what might seem an unjustified extent. she could just see him with one corner of her eye. paper after paper was torn open; his gaze ran greedily along the columns; but he never paused to read. at length he flung the last one down with a fierce gesture. "it's a boycott," he cried petulantly. "i've always had at least two notices, for years, upon the day. we sent them out early on purpose. it's nothing but a boycott." he seemed to find some consolation in that word with its historical immensity. "how too bad, dearest," murmured helena, in duty and with a sinking heart. she saw no cause for any boycott. and she knew that his other novels had better deserved any privilege. on four dreary mornings the same tragic farce took place, and also with the evening papers. then on the fifth day hubert's fast-travelling eyes stopped abruptly, he said "ha!" and then read out with a naïve joy "_was it worth while?_" "good," exclaimed helena, still doubtful. suddenly he gave a wild laugh. "i like that," he said. "that is rich." he put the paper down very gently on the table. then he raised the cover from the buttered eggs. "what is it, dear?" she compelled herself to ask. "they say," announced hubert in extremely level tones, "this habit of publishing a well-known author's early works as new is one that has grown far too common." then, letting himself go; "early works? i'll show them! it is libellous. i can prove my case to the hilt." "i shouldn't worry with them," she said, feeling inadequate. "perhaps it will just make the book sell? we expected them to be all nasty, didn't we?" she tried to speak brightly. then an inspiration came to her. "perhaps there are some better ones?" she said. the great thing would be to divert his mind. a law-case would be terrible. nobody got anything, ever, except the barristers. he passed the heap of unopened papers scornfully across to her. "you look at them," he said. "i don't know why i do or why one cares. they're just a pack of failures. i always despise myself for looking at their stuff at all." he opened a letter with unneeded violence. with slow unpractised fingers helena began to search for reviews. "no, no," she said at each, until she thought (he was so quiet), that this might be annoying him and went on with her task in silence. then her hands suddenly clutched the paper tightly, symbolic of her effort to say nothing, for her eyes had caught the heading, _was it worth while?_ the notice ran to half a column and this was an important paper. she blessed her cleverness in having looked. one moment later, she was blessing her forethought in not saying anything. for this was the review: "_was it worth while?_ "for some time now it has been an interesting question, with those who can find any interest at all in the popular novels of to-day, as to what exactly may be the peculiar touchstone of popularity. we can most of us recall the names of two or three books which have run into their quarter of a million copies, according to advertisements: and in reading them hungrily for a solution of the problem, we have been more than a little astounded by the crudeness of the fare submitted. we have been unwilling, as good optimists of human nature, to believe that mere literary vices can account for any library demand. "mr. hubert brett, perhaps unconsciously, has done us a good service. we do not, let it be premised at once, refer to our gratitude for his latest novel. some of mr. brett's work, notably _splendid misery_ and _the bread of idleness_, has been praised in these columns for the sincere attempt which the author made in it to get at grips with the problems of real life, forgetting (as few authors can) the fictionists who went before him. in _was it worth while?_ he seems to have thought, for a change, of almost nothing else. the book is a weird salad of remembered scenes, an olla podrida of episodes we wish we could forget. it would be wasting time and space indeed to attempt synopsis of mr. brett's astounding tale--for it is not a novel, however one define that vaguest of all literary products. by lumping together the worst and cheapest portion of all the bad and clap-trap tales which have seen light since printing was unhappily invented, one may arrive at a far better notion of this book than can be gained by wading through its crowded pages. the process, let us add, is also less fatiguing. "but this is where mr. brett has done us, we repeat, a service. _was it worth while?_ (the name alone is symptomatic) has all the qualities of its successful predecessors: the well-worn types, that call for no brain-effort after work; the utterly untrammelled sentiment; the shapeless slices of religion: he has put into his salad all the right ingredients, except one, which he, less lucky than the other cooks, did not possess. and that ingredient, we now believe, is no less than sincerity. the other writers have done this sort of thing well, because they could do no better; and whilst the large public applauded, we have pitied. mr. brett has done this sort of thing, although he can do better; and whilst the public will see through him, we despise his effort. into his motives it would be impertinent to enquire. perhaps, after all, the book is a mere literary squib. mr. brett, it well may be, has no desire to gull the public into a belief in his weak sentiment and crude religion: he wishes to deride those qualities in others. if so, we congratulate and thank him once again: we understand at last the essential quality (and it is, we confess, a fine one) in the library big-seller. on any other ground, however, it certainly was not _worth while_." helena did not dare to read all down the column. she read the last words and she bit her lips to keep back tears of which she was ashamed. she knew that it was true--and she hated, loathed the man or woman who had written it. she would give anything, all she possessed, all that poor hubert had thought he would make from the horrid book, to spare him this review: to shield him from the pain that she knew it was bound to give him. "found one?" he asked. her hands almost dropped the paper. "no," she said. "there don't seem any more, unless i've managed to miss one. now i'm seeing what has happened!" and she contrived to laugh. he appeared to feel relief rather than disappointment. "you don't often do that," he said cheerily enough. "i thought you despised politics and everything like that?" "i don't often get the chance to read them," she said and hurriedly turned on to the next page, "considering you always cling firmly to the d.t. till i've got to begin my housework!" this last was her name for what he, in a yankee spirit, nicknamed "chores." so for the moment that danger was averted, but helena knew it was really no more than postponed, and long before the day was over, wished that she had faced it instantly. when he came in to her just before dinner she knew that he had seen before he spoke a word. he drew the notice, neatly cut out, from his pocket, and she made a pretence of reading it. "it's merely spite," was all he said. "how dare they call me insincere? they know it's a good seller and that's just what they can't stand. i've written to the editor and i hope i get that swine the boot." "is that very kind, dear?" she asked. "it's his job, you know, and you said bad reviews would sell the book." he gave an angry snort. "yes, i dare say, but not this kind. no plot, nothing except that its fatiguing and _may_ be a burlesque. english people hate being puzzled even more than they hate being bored." this saying had the effect, she thought, of cheering him a little, for he gave a sardonic laugh and said: "well, no matter, let them do their worst. trust the public later on to find out that the novel's bad! ... when's dinner?" chapter xv discoveries an ethical society might pass a winter's evening in this debate: does it need more strength to endure failure or to bear success? the dangers upon either road stand out easily, for all but the actual wayfarer. by the one he may fall into the slough of bitterness, whilst the other, far more pleasant as it draws him on, may lead to no more than the pitiable, luxurious cities of arrogance and meanness. the problem certainly needs no elaboration in this place, since hubert's path lay all too clearly towards failure. "i fear," wrote his publisher as an old friend, "it is no use concealing the fact that people do not want the book. there have as yet been no repeat orders from libraries or booksellers. we can only face the fact and hope to do better with the next. as you know, in my opinion the book was not up to your usual high level." "who wants his damned opinion?" growled hubert out loud, though alone, and crumpled up the letter. why, publishers weren't even critics! as to these last, their unanimity for once was wonderful. there are ingenious authors who amuse themselves by printing excerpts from reviews of their last novel, alternately conflicting, thuswise; "an able novel: _tooting sentinel_. weak and formless: _times_. an arresting piece of work, whoever by: _stafford news_. an amateur affair: _standard_;"--thinking in this manner to have blackened for evermore the ancient art of criticism in any decent-minded person's eyes. they scarcely realise, poor injured souls, that the thing is an art. were it but a machine, it doubtless would attain the same result from each book, whether put before it by a fleet street expert or a stafford tyro. because it is an art, however, and all art is merely the expression of an individual emotion, it follows that each book must react on every critic in a different way. these notices, so pompous with _the times_ or _stafford news_ above them, are not worked out with prayer by the whole paper's staff; they stand for one opinion, no less--and no more--than the opinion of a woman-reader over the tea-tray. opinions, moreover, vary; praise to god! how fresh and hopeful, what a message, seems this story to the un-read staffordian; how stale and hopeless, what an ancient dish, it appears to him of printing house square, who has read more than he can hope ever to forget! and yet beneath it all there is a principle. bad of its sort is bad, whatever sort one likes; which is all plato's ideas in a convenient nutshell. and every one agreed that _was it worth while?_ was bad of its sort. it tried to be something it was not, and what can be more shocking? hubert, then, had an admirable chance of showing what effect a failure, after some years of moderate success, had on his character; and took it to the full. as the reviews came in, he grew more and more violent. it was not many days before he countermanded all the extra papers, but his faithful press-cutters sent in the notices religiously and he could not help reading them. helena would come down first (she always did) at breakfast time and hide the small green envelopes, which then arrived by the last post and were brought in at p.m. by the complaisant lily. then what a flow of words! poor critics, publishers, and readers; what a set they were, how blind, how asinine, how spiteful! sometimes he would at once go to his study and write a reply, which helena did not in every case succeed in rescuing before it got into the pillar-box, though certainly her score was bigger. it was a trying month and he did not spare even her. when there were no reviews to tear verbally--and sometimes other ways--in fragments, he would moan plaintively that this meant he would never get another sou out of the book beyond the small advance already paid, and nobody would want to read the next one either, and heaven knew how they would pay the house-bills. "i don't suppose any one will even publish it," he would say, almost gloating, like a schoolboy probing his cut finger. "oh, hugh!" she cried, believing him, "it does seem awful. and to think you were so successful till you married me and had to write this terrible pot-boiler. oh, how i wish you'd never done it!" "what, married you?" he asked, suddenly laughing. "bother shop! come along out and see if we can't find a good stick to throw for the hound;" and as he passed, he kissed her on the hair and drew her up on to her feet. his moods were so abrupt, just now, that sometimes she grew frightened. it was lucky, then, that she had got her consolation; the great secret. geoffrey alison was far less frequent in the house these days, not having totally forgotten yet that grip upon his throat, and she would have been very desolate when hubert was locked in with his work if she could not have flown excitedly to hers. absorbed entirely in the opinion and career of the increasingly contemptible virginia, she found herself free for a while from all the worries of real life, returning to them with a mind refreshed as by the most luxurious of sleep; the reason why there will be always writers, even when cinemas and cheap editions have made it not a paid, but an extravagant, profession. so utterly absorbed was she, indeed, about six weeks after the fatal day of publication, that the drawing-room door was open before she had noticed any warning noise outside. helena realised that it was far too late by now to hide the sheets of manuscript and substitute a letter, as she always did. any attempt like that would only make detection certain--and far worse. to her relief it was not hubert, only mr. alison, with lily holding the door open. she would not so much mind his knowing--he was so encouraging--supposing that he noticed. and this of course he promptly did. "hullo!" was in fact his very first remark. "are you too among the authors?" he waved his hand towards the little pile of manuscript that should have been inside a drawer. "yes," she said, hoping that she was not blushing. "but not too loud as it's an awful secret. hubert doesn't know." he tip-toed at it with exaggerated caution. "oh-ho!" he whispered. "then i guess: it's all about him! it is a safety-valve." this was a little joke: they were devoted, he knew, though he could never understand what she saw in the great, conceited, selfish brute: but helena felt sure now that the blush was there. "no," she was bound to answer, and when he asked, "fiction?" in surprise, it must be "yes." and so it was, by now, she argued. a safety-valve at first perhaps, because hugh seemed to loathe her having even the most usual ideas, but fiction certainly by now, for the ideas of virginia were not her own ideas; the silly, sloppy thing! "i'm going to read it please," he said and began collecting the loose pages (the book had long ago been cast aside). "certainly not," she answered, very dignified, and trying to forget that they were the words of a comic song she had heard on the gramophone. "oh, but yes," he answered. "give it to me," she said, turning now to melodrama for her catch-phrase. he held the prize by sitting on it. "listen," he began, as staidly argumentative as though he had been drunk: and then he paused. "if you let me read it," he said presently, "i'll tell you what i think of it and i bet it's original. if you don't let me read it, i shall tell--your husband!" "you wouldn't be such a cad," she answered. she never knew when he was serious, because he often looked most funny then. "i'm not so sure," he said. "anyhow let me? i'll begin to-night." "you won't do that," she retorted laughingly, "because the first bit's in a volume, locked away upstairs." he whistled. "what! an opus? tut! now don't be selfish. when you first wanted to know about art, i told you all i could, and now you're doing things, i think it's only fair that i should be the first to see." he looked so funny, leaning forward eagerly yet taking care to keep his weight still on the manuscript, that she laughed heartily. he surely wasn't serious now? he looked extremely hurt. "very well," he said, getting up. "if you think it's so funny, that's all right. i suppose, now, you've done with me: you've got all out of me you needed: so now you don't even tell me that you're trying to create." he got up from the bureau with much dignity and moved towards the door. one sheet of the manuscript stuck to his clothes until he reached the centre-table. she was just wondering what to do about this, when it fluttered downward. that broke her inaction. "oh, no," she said, "don't be stuffy. i never meant it. i thought you were being ironical about my 'art' and i can't ever see it. please don't be offended, ally." in spite of her announced resolve she hardly ever called him that, and now she said it with a slight burr, dwelling on it till the name became a thing of beauty, almost a caress. he wavered at the door; but he was shrewd in business by heredity. "well, will you let me read it?" he said firmly. "yes, if you really want to," she replied. "i'll fetch the other half." secretly she longed for an opinion, and she would never dare to ask for hubert's. "promise not to look at this bit," she said, coy as a young singer. "i couldn't bear you to see it till you are right away." he promised and she left him to his thoughts, which were of an expectant nature. she was a girl that he had never really understood (in actual practice he had very small experience of girls), and he knew well enough that first books, even when all fiction, are half true. he was amused inwardly at her simplicity in lending him the manuscript. she came back with something like a baby scrap-book in her hand. "i got bored with writing in this," she said. "it was so uncomfortable, the edges cut my hand." then, as though half repenting; "you must promise not to look at it till you get home and never to tell hubert." "is that likely?" he asked, referring to the last condition. it made the business far more thrilling. he had the common sense, however, to see that she was already doubtful of her wisdom: so that as soon as volume and loose sheets were in his hand, he changed the subject tactfully. "well," he asked, "and how is the new book going?" "oh, isn't it awful?" helena replied. "i don't know if i ought to tell you, but it's not sold at all: not, i mean, except those sold before publication and i never understand quite how that happens." "then i expect it's good," said geoffrey alison a trifle cheaply. helena replied with emphasis, as though rebutting a grave charge. "_no_, not at all. that's just it: it's much worse than his other ones. he's in an awful way. i don't believe he's sold a thousand copies!" "my dear mrs. brett," he said (he always hated calling her that, but he dared not embark on "helena"), "comfort yourself with the idea that a thousand copies is a very good sale for any decent novel. each copy, after all, is read by twenty people in these days of libraries, so that means twenty thousand readers. of course if hubert wrote for shop-girls, he might find a million: but do you think that any really serious study of real life--the sort of book that simply gets at character and doesn't fuss with plot: the real, artistic novel--is going to find more than twenty thousand people in dull old england who can understand it? and that's your thousand-copy sale! i don't mind betting no really 'artistic' novel--it's a beastly word--ever sells more than that." his one idea in all this had been to console her, for he guessed a little what it meant when hubert brett was "in an awful way"; but now she seemed if anything more troubled. she sat in dazed silence, looking like a small child who has seen something which it absolutely cannot understand at all. "but _wandering stars_," she said presently, "i've often heard, sold quite five thousand." "oh yes, i dare say," came the unthinking answer. had she forgotten about her ms.? "well, wasn't that artistic?" there was a note of battle in her voice. he saw now where he had drifted. "oh yes," he began. "but not quite in the way i meant. that was a good story, very, and was popular. i meant, really, quite a different sort of book." he floundered in excuses. "what sort?" she asked pitilessly. "better ones?" "oh no," he said, more and more embarrassed. "not that exactly. you can't say that. you can't compare different kinds in art. you've got to judge a man by his success in what he has attempted. a good caricature is much better than a bad madonna," and firmly upon art with the feeling of a mariner safe in port after a storm, he drew her mind away--or so he thought, this man who knew so little about women--and after a while, sooner than usual, made his excuses and departed. outside he got as near to saying "whew!" as any live man ever has. he had jolly nearly put his foot in it! he wouldn't for millions let that little girl suspect that really artistic people--his own set--did not think so much of brett's work as brett did himself. what a lumbering idiot he had been! the fact was, he had thought she meant to get that writing of hers back and he had wanted to distract her mind. in that, anyhow, he had succeeded. on the way back, he could not resist dipping into the book as he walked. he skimmed a page and chuckled fiction? he recognised himself already! chapter xvi a matter of sales long after geoffrey alison had gone, helena sat motionless at her desk, biting a pen-holder; looking out into the garden and thinking. she was not thinking, as he would have imagined, about her manuscript. she was thinking about hubert's work. in one sense she had no great opinion of geoffrey alison, although she liked to have him as her friend. she did not respect him, did not think him manly, would never be swayed by his estimate of her: he was an odd, amusing, clever, little thing and she was never altogether sure when he was serious. but in another way she thought more of his words than even she had ever admitted to herself. hubert had never taken her development as serious at all; had made it clear he thought her stupid, as he said once, "to burden her dear little head with brains, when she was so original already"; so that it had been mr. alison (who must be really very kind, at any rate) that had initiated her into the thrilling mysteries of art. he had taken her round galleries, to lectures; told her this was bad or that good, then tried to show her why; and though they argued nowadays, her basic views were his: she judged things by the touchstone he had given her. what then more natural than that she should value his ideas on art? and now--now he had told her (oh, without meaning it, she knew, but that made it no better)--told her that hubert's novels were not thought artistic really, they were good stories but no more, and not in the same class as vague others which sold always badly. she had been so proud of them, until _was it worth while?_ appeared; and now it seemed that all the others had belonged to a class of no merit, too. they were good of their sort--like a caricature...! hubert had always spoken with such scorn of novels which were "popular": and now she had heard mr. alison joining that fatal adjective to his pet _wandering stars_.... it may be thought peculiar that helena should have believed so easily; but as she sat there and gazed out through unseeing eyes, nothing of any weight stood in the other balance. when she had married him, proud of his name, she was a simple girl. she had not read a word of his until she was engaged: and how could she judge after that, if she had been the best of critics? then, once his wife--well, who would tell her anyhow? ally, she knew, had never meant to and she liked him better than she had, for it. hubert was so contemptuous about his paintings, that she knew he must have often felt the obvious temptation to revenge. hubert, in fact, had been so scornful about everybody else's work. in literature--she now recalled--she had relied entirely on his estimates. mr. alison, till now, had said he really was no judge of books and told her she must ask her husband.... she had got the idea that hubert's work was of the best sort, the most properly artistic, and when she wondered why it did not make more money, he had said that it was too good.... now with a shock that somehow loosened far more than merely her ideas on books, this young wife learnt that the great hubert brett, with all his endless moods--the house revolving round his inspiration--only created novels which were "popular" in class, yet nearly always failed to sell! she had not of course got the matter quite so definite as that in her own mind, when there came to her ears the warning sound of his door opening. there were no sheets of manuscript to hide to-day, but she put down a cedar pen-holder which had grown very ragged at the top in a half-hour. "well," she said, leaping up and forcing herself, like a trained wife, to be cheery, "what success to-day?" she always asked him that. he liked it. hubert was not satisfied to-day. "rotten," he said; "absolutely rotten. that idiot lily had put all the candle-sticks and things the wrong way round on my writing-desk and i'd to move them all, just when i got there feeling in the mood to work." "oh, i'm so sorry, dear," she answered humbly. "i will tell her." she knew, you see, the whole of a wife's duty now. "don't worry about that, my dear," he said without much conviction; "but these housemaids seem to think an artist is a sort of navvy who only wants a pen and everything's all right. they don't seem to understand that when you're doing work like mine, the least thing out of its accustomed place catches your eye and absolutely breaks the inspiration: you get up to move it. i never worked back to the proper state at all this morning. i might as well have played a round of golf." helena, with a curious sensation that was almost fear--fear, it may be, of herself--realised that his plaint, oft-heard, left her cold this morning. till now she had always thought how wonderful he was, how different from her dull self, how sensitively made. to-day she felt--she felt that it was all a needless fuss! this last half-hour had crystallised thoughts vaguely growing during a whole year. she could not trust herself to any comment. she felt that probably all writers had these affectations, and yet there _was_ this sudden lack of sympathy about the candlesticks.... "but i hope," she merely said, "the new book's working out all right?" hubert dropped upon the sofa, a dead weight of hopelessness. "i don't believe," he said, "i'm meant for an author--not in these days anyhow, when it's a trade. you know, my dear, it's too absurd but i can _not_ forget those beastly critics! they've put me off entirely. every line i write, i think that such and such a paper won't like that: just as though i was writing for them and not for the public!" he took up a magazine and flung it down violently on the sofa. "i tell you though," he said confidently, as though that changed his mood, and rose to go: "i jolly well mean to get at the public, _this_ time." "hugh," she said, ludicrously horror-struck, "it's not another pot-boiler?" she had not dared to ask and he had vouchsafed literally nothing yet. he smiled grimly, standing by the door. "you'll see," he said. "i'm nearly through with the synopsis now and i'll read you the first chapter soon. it's not like the last, anyhow. it's called _eternity_. and there's one thing," he went on with a kind of brutal joy, "if it's a frost, we shall absolutely have to pack up and move off into cheaper quarters: i can't afford to keep you here!" "but, hugh," she began in sympathetic protest. but he had closed the door, outside. chapter xvii the tempter helena did not possess the vice of introspection. conscious as she was that something had changed in her attitude towards her husband's moods and work, those tyrants of her married life to which till now she had bowed down so humbly, she told herself in a general way that things would soon shake down again, that it was probably her fault, and that she must make sure what mr. alison had really meant. this time she would keep him to it and not let him drift off to madonnas. she wished he would make haste and call. why had she lent him all that stuff about virginia? he was probably wondering what on earth to say to her about it and that was why he did not call. what a nuisance he was! she longed to ask him definitely what people really thought of hubert's work and whether he had meant all that. you never really knew, with him.... when, however, he finally arrived, it was with such an air of mysterious excitement that she was forced to wait a moment. he stood in silence until lily's heavy steps had died away and then, in a stage whisper: "is hubert safely out of hearing?" "yes," she laughed. he always amused her when he was funny like this. "he always works, you know quite well, from five till seven. i suppose all this 'sshing is because you want to give me back my silly manuscript. where is it?" she was glad, in a way, that he was going to be stupid over it. "ah," he replied, "that's it," and raised a cryptic finger. "you _are_ funny," she said lazily from her armchair, like some one who claps in the stalls. he looked slightly hurt. "you always say that if i'm serious," he protested. then less plaintively, as though heartened by what was to come: "as a matter of fact though, i've done you a very good turn." "me?" asked helena, as he made an effective pause and there seemed nothing else to say. she couldn't thank, in case it really was a joke. "yes, you. your silly manuscript, as you like to call it, is good--jolly good. i don't suppose you realise that, do you? it's something original, these days, and that is everything. it's----" "i'm glad it amused you," helena said, thinking that he had quitted himself well and now she must help him out; "but----" "but where's the good turn?" he broke in, interpreting her wrongly. "well, i'll tell you. i showed it--i knew you wouldn't mind----" (and here he looked a little timidly at her sideways), "i showed it to a publisher i've met about, a very decent fellow----" "how dare you?" helena flashed out youthfully, just as though they were playing interruptions. "i lent it you to read and i think----" he kept up the game. "listen," he said with a firmness rare in him, confident of what he had to tell. "he said it was new and vital and had money in it: those are his exact words; and he wants to publish it if you can think of a good ending. there!" at last it was out and he stood complacent, waiting for her thanks: but she was not even appeased. "i don't care _what_ he said," she cried, and for this moment of her childish anger it was true. "i only know i lent it you and not to him; do you think i want everybody reading all my diaries?" "but it was not a diary," he answered, keeping his head clear, "and he had no idea of course who wrote it." "he would, though, if he published it." she thought that she had crushed him; but he merely gained fresh hope, seeing her dally thus with the idea. "never," he replied dramatically. "nobody will ever know except yourself and me." before that masterly touch, "will," she crumpled up, and fell back on a new line of defence. "i can't believe," she said, more peaceable, "he's serious. i know quite well, and so do you, it's nothing: just to make the time go while i was alone. i took no trouble: wrote it any odd old time." "you surely don't imagine," he said, "writers really have to wait for times and seasons and the proper mood? they could work ten to six like anybody else, except it wouldn't be artistic. do you imagine nothing's good unless it's written with a lobelia in front of you and all that sort of thing? some of the world's best stuff has come out of an attic. the whole thing's nothing but a pose." she had her answer about hubert, without asking. geoffrey alison, two years discreet, had suddenly begun to throw bricks in this happy home, and never even heard the crash. "oh," she said, lingering on the syllable till it grew into three. he did not understand. he saw her hesitate and he threw all his weight to drive her the way he desired. "after all," he said, using that most persuasive of openings to a temptation or a fallacy, "what right have you, artistically, to keep to yourself a thing that may please and help millions? you especially, who don't even approve of private art galleries because you can't see them! ... i know what it is, exactly; you're thinking of your husband, naturally; but he need never know. i'll do the business, all of it, and show you any notices and no one else will ever guess at all. think what fun it would be!" (he saw her eyes light up and knew that he had won.) "besides there'll be the money too and any one can do with that." "yes," said helena, clinging to an earlier sentence, as women will, "but the manuscript gives it away hopelessly that i'm an author's wife, on almost every page." "well, how many authors do you think there are?" he said; then with the tempter's fluency, "and they notoriously marry more than any one. who in the world could guess? every one would think that it was by a man. they always do if anybody writes a very intimate peep at a woman's soul." he smiled, remembering how intimate the peep in question sometimes was. "fancy reading all their silly guesses! come on! you can't be so selfish!" her eyes glistened and she moved on to an earlier point. "it wouldn't really bring much money, would it?" she asked. "books don't seem to, ever." "blatchley--that's the publisher--thinks it would sell like anything: he says it's new. that's why he wants it. there isn't any sentiment in blatchley. he's right, too: people love these human documents. i dare say it'd bring in several hundred pounds." helena gasped. he had offered her the proper fruit at last, this worried little child of eve, who, feigning to cut down the household bills, had long time satisfied a husband intolerant of change by drawing on her bank account, now perilously near its end. "what should i call myself?" she answered simply. several hundred pounds--and all the fun as well! he thought a moment. "not helena," he said with firmness. "they'd guess. besides no authoress could ever be called helena: it sounds like eleanor after a careless housemaid's accident." "joan is my second name," she answered humbly. "joan," he repeated, and she felt quite ashamed already: he made it sound so long and flat. "no, no; not joan. that is like jones with the last letter dropped. it must be something literary. i know." he hesitated, as though weighing the discovered nugget: then, satisfied; "we'll call you zoë baskerville." "splendid!" she laughed. already this was a new interest in life. then a doubt struck her. "_are_ those literary names? who were they both?" "i'm blest if i know," he confessed; "but i've seen both in catalogues." so that was settled. "i never liked helena for you," he said. "zoë is just the name. i shall always think of you as zoë." then, greatly daring, with a swift rush; "may i call you zoë?" he felt as though he were upon the absolute edge of his chair, but she seemed to think nothing of his question. "if you like it," she said, off-hand. "you want some revenge for ally! but not in front of hugh or he'll guess when the book comes out, and that would be too terrible." "no," he said with feeling, "that shall be our secret," and leant slightly forward. "when will it appear?" she asked excitedly: and he was as near cursing the book, now, as he had been to blessing it, a moment earlier. he left the house, however, shortly before seven o'clock, stepping upon air. he had never expected to get her consent. old blatchley would think him no end of a clever devil and blatchley was a useful man. besides, the comedy and excitement of it all! and, best of all, it was a new bond with--zoë! gad, fancy having a ripping little girl like that as pal; and a secret between them absolutely, from her husband even; and calling her zoë, which he knew in some odd greek way was a jolly daring sort of name, though he forgot quite how.... yes, geoffrey alison was satisfied. and as for helena, with certain shapeless misgivings and fears there mingled a most natural exaltation: since whether one writes for fame or mere "fun," what can be more exciting than the acceptance of one's first book by the first publisher who sees it? she still could not understand it. she did not realise of course how fresh her view of married life had been: she did not guess perhaps in quite what sense her new-appointed agent had used the word "intimate"; she did not realise that the book's very blemishes were its chief claim to truth. she could see nothing in the thing at all. but it was all exciting, very. she would just end it up: make poor virginia, who was zoë now, work her way round to happiness, as ally had said that she must not kill her; then send it up to him and he had vowed she should not even get a single letter; he literally would "do the rest." then if it failed, no harm was done and she had made her secret yet more thrilling: whilst if in some mad way the book caught on and she received those hundreds--well what a blessing they would be just now with bills, and hubert who was so silly with practical affairs like that would merely imagine that she was running things more cheaply. (every woman, deep down, thinks every man a child.) besides--if geoffrey alison stepped lightly homewards upon air, helena too felt that the grey world stretched a little softer under her. that shapeless longing for development of a real self, that almost morbid shame of her own ignorance, had issued finally in something tangible. she was an authoress! no doubt her book was not like hubert's, built up carefully on scientific scaffolding; but still--it had pleased mr. alison and it had satisfied a publisher! small wonder, then, if totally forgetful though she was of her new theories on hubert's mode of work--immersed by now in the palpitating thrill of her new secret--she yet sat opposite to him this night at dinner with a less feeling of abasement, a new confidence. she found it hard at moments to attend to him and throw in, as she usually did, appreciative comments now and then. "of course," he was saying now, criticising a review, "all this about 'painting' with a pen is rubbish. the two arts have no resemblance. the painter used to be a monk--and is a mountebank! he never yet has been a writer." "oh, i don't know. what about rossetti? or even whistler?" she put in absently, just as though it had been geoffrey alison. hubert was brought up with a jerk. he hated people who corrected one. it was like mrs. boyd, exactly. of course he knew that she was right and he wrong, handsomely--although he'd no idea _she_ knew--but it would be so dull if every one was accurate! "my dear," he said coldly, "i know all about that, but do you think you need interrupt my argument to tell me? i shall be afraid to speak at all if i am going to be heckled!" he waved the thing aside with a short laugh, as though to say she was forgiven. but something in his manner had annoyed helena to-night. "i wasn't 'heckling'," she said, trying to speak lightly; "but you know, hugh, it's a bit mediæval if i know things and mayn't say anything!" hubert gaped at her. mediæval! that was a real mrs. boyd idea. he made no answer, but he was more than vaguely annoyed. this was his simple little helena no longer. it was those damned lectures.... he felt that from this moment they stood on a new footing. part iii helena brett's career chapter xviii zoË helena unfolded the slip, pasted on its blue half-sheet, and began to read it, thoroughly engrossed. she seemed forgetful of geoffrey alison, who in turn watched her with hardly less attention, more anxiety. he knew the thing by heart. "_confessions of an author's wife_ (blatchley & co.) is by its name confessed as of the human document category, and this sort of book is never without its attraction. the present volume, chastely bound in green appropriately virginal, recounts the growth of a young girl married to a more or less successful author. zoë baskerville, who on one page lets somebody call her virginia (a lapse not making for conviction), tells in the first person her laudable efforts to develop an ego in the face of a husband who has enough of it for ten. his selfish absorption in his own moods and the conditions suitable to his own labours not unnaturally create in zoë a feeling of thwarted ambition, which results in a watered, girlish, form of cynicism about man and woman. this, however, passes off in the last chapter, where for some reason not easy of access to the mere reader zoë suddenly sloughs her despondency and bursts into an exultant credo: 'i believe that life, all in all, is the most splendid gift a kind god could give to his children. i believe that man'--and so on for the last four pages. "it will be seen that subtlety and cohesion are not the strongest points in these confessions, which we hope we have taken seriously enough. about their popularity there can be no doubt. the book possesses pathos, humour, freshness; a mixture beyond failing; and moreover, impinges on life, married life, at moments with a frankness more essentially french than english. this fact may induce those still in zoë's earlier mood of cynicism to suspicion a male, fleet street, author: but for our part, remembering the naïveté of female youth and that incriminating name virginia, we are quite ready to accept the volume's authenticity, if we misdoubt somewhat the end's sincerity. "taken thus, as a real document, the book has a persuasive charm. pathetic little zoë is a figure as real as her selfish husband, who emerges in some way as less great than has been actually stated. (perhaps we were wrong in denying the book any subtlety.) we can foresee a long and lucrative discussion as to the author's identity. for our part, we make a gift of the discovered clue 'virginia,' and shall wait patiently until the publisher, as a good man and true, duly announces the authorship before issuing a cheap edition. till that day we shall hope to live our lives in much the same round as before." helena stared so long at the narrow slip, obviously deep in thought, that geoffrey alison found his anxiety turn to a nervous guilt. of course, he told himself, he knew the part that worried her in this, her first review. he would have kept it back if he had been quite sure that she would never see it. he rather wished now that he had. it was that stupid bit of course about more french than english. he only hoped they wouldn't all be like that--and none of them worse. he recalled, as moment joined past moment, his own amusement at some of the passages. they had solved all his problems about helena. no one but a really innocent girl could be so frank, because to the impure all truth is suspicious. it was only after reading these delicious passages two or three times that geoffrey alison, getting a tardy view of the whole book, realised how it might interest the world at large and seem worth while to that shrewd devil blatchley. now, when still she sat impassive, looking at that notice with a slight frown on her forehead, he began to suspect that possibly he had been just a little of a cad. he ought perhaps to have warned her that some of it, though absolutely all right if everybody had pure minds,---- yet after all, how could he have told her that? it would be jolly awkward, you know, and only putting ideas into her head. besides, of course, with those bits cut out, blatchley would probably have called it tame and struck.... his silence had been really for her good. at last these alternate surges of guilt and self-justification grated on his nerves. he could endure her silence not a moment longer. "that's only the first one," he said; "and it's not much of a paper." now for the reproaches! better to turn the tap on than to shiver, waiting. but not for the first time he had misjudged her. it was not that part of the review which had struck home to her so different mind. "do you really think the husband stands out as such a brute as all that?" she surprised him by asking. "no. i thought it exactly like hubert," was his answer. he could not read her mind; he said the first thing that came into his. he could not have said a worse. it strengthened all her doubts, fears, and regrets. she really had forgotten, almost, what was in the book. it had been written in such hot excitement and she had scarcely read it since. ally would not let her see the proofs; he said it wasn't safe, with hubert there.... she had imagined that the wife was far more silly than herself, the husband altogether different from hubert. now, reading that synopsis, she saw (for the first time), how truly that summed up their married life: she _had_ wished to "develop an ego," he _had_ thwarted her. he would read it too, that or another, and suspect. then he would get the book--and know. and he would think she meant it all, meant all the wild complaints of zoë, zoë whom at first she used to think of as "sloppy" virginia! it was too horrible. she loathed the stupid book, she wished that she had never shown it. she loathed geoffrey alison. if poor old hubert ever saw...! "i suppose we can't possibly suppress the book?" she jerked out suddenly. her conversation was more startling than ever to the male brain, to-day. "suppress it on the strength of the first notice? when it's been out two days? and when the notice says there can't be any doubt about its popularity? suppress it, indeed! what about friend blatchley?" helena gave a little sigh of absolute despair. it had been so exciting until now: the little green book, locked away upstairs, and libraries actually buying it before it was out, just in the weird way they did hubert's and real people's! now she loathed the book and feared it. there was terror indeed in her very tones. "but you don't think," she said, "they really can ever find out who the writer was? they seem to think it's only a question of time. mr. blatchley couldn't be so mean." "my dear zoë" (he felt bound to soothe her and it was so thrilling to say), "how can they possibly? there isn't any 'they' about it. i'm the only person in the world who knows and i suppose you can trust _me_?" he got up from the sofa whilst speaking and struck an attitude quite close to her, at the last words. "of course i do, ally; you're a splendid pal and i know you will never breathe a word. it means a lot to me you see;" and she just pressed his hand. it was not much perhaps, but it meant a great deal to him. _he_ did not loathe the book. chapter xix business helena's oppression, as of some impending blow, refused to disappear. she could not believe, whatever geoffrey alison might say, that their secret could be kept until the end. every fresh notice of the book caused fresh alarm. with one accord reviewers harped upon the authorship, some of the less reputed papers embarking upon guesses. that, to mr. blatchley's genuine delight, began denials. he eagerly collected all of them, and not a month had passed before geoffrey alison arrived full of importance and excitement. he came, now, almost daily after five; as often, quite, as in the old days before the garden-scene with hubert; his mind full of the need to cheer this poor sad zoë who got no joy at all from her success. surely as it grew and there was still no prospect of detection, she would begin to think of all the money she was earning and enjoy the praise? he hoped so. "look at this," he said keenly, waving an extract at her. her tones were dull. "what is it? another review?" "no, an advertisement. awfully clever and suits our game too!" he held it out to her. in bold print it ran thus: "who? "already the wives of the following famous authors have publicly declared that they did not write _confessions of an author's wife._" (here followed a list of eight names.) "ah! but who did? who?" "i don't see it suits us at all," she said without enthusiasm. "why, it's putting people on the wrong track," he tried to argue. she would not have it. "it's making people want to know when they don't really care a bit," she said with a ripe worldly wisdom quite beyond her years. and soon, to mr. blatchley's yet greater delight, people did begin to care. they cared so much, in fact, that they all read the book in order to find out. and nobody knew even then. it was, however, something to discuss at boring dinner-parties; so every one was pleased. every one but helena. reading the book afresh, she was astounded, terrified, to see how near it was to life. she had thought it all altered beyond recognition: fiction merely based on fact. but now she realised that all the parts of it which mattered--zoë's ambitions, her husband's repression--were true, truer than she ever knew indeed: whilst all the variations--names, place, ages, children, work--made no real difference at all. in all life it is the soul alone that matters, for there lies happiness and all those others are mere accidents. and the soul of zoë was the soul of helena; the life of helena, the life of zoë. reading her book, she realised for the first time her life. daily the thing became more of a nightmare. hubert, of course, noticed nothing: but geoffrey alison grew weary of her constant admonitions as to silence. "oh, for heaven's sake, zoë," he cried at last (for he was getting almost husbandly in his remarks, encouraged by their common secret), "do try and get rid of the idea that 'all is discovered' and i'm a silly ass or else a beastly cad!" "it isn't that," she answered with a gloomy petulance; "but something might easily happen and i simply don't know how i should face hubert." "hubert? why, i expect he would be jolly proud of you." "proud?" she repeated bitterly; "when he has been so splendid to me always, and here i am making him out a selfish brute who sacrifices his wife's happiness to his career and me a poor little bullied creature who goes upstairs and cries. he'd never believe that it was all exaggerated--and nor, of course, would anybody else. proud, indeed? i do like that!" indeed, when she thought of what an awful thing she had done, helena very often could have gone upstairs like flabby zoë (_née_ virginia) and wept. geoffrey alison at length got thoroughly impatient with her. _he_ was enjoying it all hugely and he failed to see why she should not enjoy it too. every day he opened his paper eagerly to see what new scheme the resourceful blatchley had devised to spur a public interest which as yet showed no signs of flagging. helena, in sympathy with her whole scheme, had much exaggerated the eminence of the husband's position. it was not a case of any back-street kit kats here: he was away, night after night, delivering most brilliant lectures to exclusive west end literary clubs or even travelling four hundred miles to unveil well-earned lapidary tributes of great authors who had actually managed to be dead now for a hundred years. this husband, who deserted his wife and was jealous if she went to anything with any other man, was not an author of the hubert brett class, so that big names were thrown about at parties where in very truth the problem soon became a topic. each had it on the best authority that so-and-so, the celebrated author, or mrs. so-and-so, had said this or the opposite; and nobody believed the other's story. nothing sells a book like talk. the printed word, paid or unpaid, is only useful to set tongues a-wagging. and as the authorship was bandied here and there, editions trickled slowly from the press. mr. blatchley was delighted. his firm was not among the old-established, and this could rank as his first great success; but it was very great. the book was only three-and-six; people actually bought it; the libraries roared out for more. journalists, hot upon dinner-table topics as vultures after flesh, interviewed him, each hoping to be in the office at that crucial moment when he decided the book's sale would gain by an announcement of the much-debated name. but even when the interest began to wane--for nothing lasts londoners more than a fortnight--mr. blatchley to every one's surprise was adamant. he still persisted in the stupid lie that he had not found out, himself.... "look here, alison," he said one day, when geoffrey alison had called in at his little office off the strand, "you're not playing cricket, quite." he was a podgy little alien man, fattened beyond his years, and he said this with all a british sportsman's sternness. "oh come, you know; don't say that," exclaimed the other, naturally shocked. (his life average in the game itself would be a decimal.) "i do, though," said the publisher and offered him a cigar. the artist did not care for that especial form of smoke, but felt that this was not the moment to be firm. he must not lose further prestige. he would leave soon and throw it away. there was a pause of some seconds, broken only by a crossing of "thanks" as they got things in order; then blatchley lay back in his office chair and blew out the first whiff of smoke. "i certainly do," he said more definitely. "look at it this way. _the confessions_ has been out eight weeks and we have sold just over thirty thousand copies. that is pretty good, i know, and i'm extremely grateful to you. but that is the past. now look at the present. by careful advertising i've induced the public to be really interested in the question as to zoë's real identity. that's not going to last, my son. somebody will do a murder or find out a home cure for corpulence. in half a week the chatty columns of the daily will be full of something else. every one who wants to has read zoë and decided who she is. very well, then. now," and here he raised a podgy but dramatic finger, "this is the moment when we must say officially, 'the author-husband is dash blank.' in a moment the whole thing revives; every one is saying, 'i say, it _was_ dash blank. i knew you were wrong. but what a show-up! what, not read it? well, then, do.' the sales will leap up to the fifty thousand and nobody can say where they will stop. without it, the book's dead." he stopped, dramatically sudden. these were the only times when geoffrey alison shared helena's ideas about the volume. "i'm very sorry if so," he said wearily, "but it's sold like anything and i expect it will. i still don't see why it's not cricket?" (he spoke more warmly now.) "i always warned you that i couldn't tell you who had written it." "bah!" the publisher waved that aside with a smooth fat hand which left a trail of smoke. "that's always so in the beginning, it's part of the game, but now it's in my interest, the book's, your friend's, your own as her adviser--i shall see you're mentioned as discoverer of the diary's great merits--in everybody's interest...." geoffrey alison stood up abruptly. each of these points had been emphasised by that fat hand; the office was the tiniest of rooms; and he disliked the smell more almost than the taste. "i'm sorry, blatchley," he said, as though bored with the whole affair, "but as i've told you half a dozen times...." the man of business never fights a losing battle. "of course, of course, my dear fellow. i understand. the feeling does you credit. don't imagine i'm ungrateful. not at all." he smoothed him with a diplomatic hand. his zoë might write other books. "oh no, i don't," said the other dully. "look here," the publisher exclaimed, putting his cigar between protruding lips and drawing a note-book from a no less prominent waistcoat. "why not dine with me one night to show there's no ill-will? i'm sure i owe you some commission! a little dinner somewhere gay, then the empire or a supper--well, no details!--but what of something like that? monday?" "thanks very much," said geoffrey alison more warmly. this was the sort of evening he liked, when some one else would pay. then, suspiciously, in the old tones; "so long as you'll swear not to worry me any more about zoë." the publisher seemed hurt at this idea. "my dear fellow," he said, patting him again upon the back in a most soothing way, "what do you imagine? business is business, yes," (he waved the hand once more expressively around his little office), "but pleasure's pleasure. monday then: my flat: at eight." chapter xx pleasure thomas blatchley (which downright english names his mother and father did not give him in his baptism) was accustomed to boast that he was not an old-fashioned publisher. he wished of course to uphold the fine traditions of literature and so forth, but he believed in modern methods. he did not see that book-production had any essential connection with fine-panelled ante-rooms where authors waited in upholstered pomp. the modern plan was not to keep them waiting. it may therefore be perhaps set down to his modernity of business spirit that he prepared to entertain his benefactor, geoffrey alison, with so much thoroughness. here (he may be imagined to have said) was a man who had done him a good turn in business. every care, then, must be taken to provide him with an evening exactly to his taste. then, maybe, he might do him another. however that may be, geoffrey alison was thoroughly delighted. everything was just how he would have arranged it for himself, had he been a millionaire and not a struggling artist. when blatchley, whom he really hardly knew, had first suggested this evening together, the programme mapped out had appealed to him; but safely home again, he had repented and been within an inch of cancelling. yet was it wise to risk offending this man, a hard business devil, who already thought he was not playing cricket? ... so out he had come, mistrustful of the other's hospitality; with visions of soho, and half expecting he would pay the bill. yet blatchley, without any of that awkward "where shall we dine?" business common to bad hosts, had instantly said; "shall we try the ritz?" as quite the natural thing. to this he had assented no less instantly, only regretting that he had decided against a white waistcoat. then blatchley had proposed the actual champagne he liked. then there had come the empire: two half-guinea stalls, in which they hardly sat, for blatchley (who turned out to be a very decent sort) said he always liked the promenade much better than the programme. so they had sat about and had a drink or two, and laughed, and debated which of the beautiful ladies around them they should introduce themselves to without finally deciding upon any (exactly his own pet routine), and so on to the café de l'europe, where they had merely had a kümmel and looked round a bit. and now here they were at the savoy, the proper end for any festive evening; with people, music, food, wine, light and everything exactly as it should be, and peace inside the soul of geoffrey alison. blatchley was a dam good sort and not a business swine at all. it would be untrue to say that geoffrey alison was drunk. no one is ever drunk at the savoy. he was inanely genial. blatchley was a dam good fellow.... "well," said his host, as half the lights suddenly went out, obedient to a grandmaternal law of his adopted and free fatherland, "i think we must toast the lady to whom we owe this very pleasant evening!" he raised his glass, (they had worked back through brandy to champagne), and cried, mock-heroically: "to the unknown zoë." "my word, yes," answered geoffrey alison with a fat laugh, "i'll drink that!" he raised his glass and drank it off: no heeltaps. the publisher had merely sipped the brim of his, but he filled up his guest's. "i dare say, my boy!" he laughed cheerily. "i dare say you will. i've my suspicions about you and zoë." "no, no," warmly retorted the other. he was so genial as to be nearly truculent. "i won't let you say that." he was not quite so sure now about blatchley. "that's not right. she's a dam nice girl is zoë, and she's as innocent as anybody makes 'em. i'm very fond of her, i tell you, and she's fond of me too." he pulled himself together in a very doggy way. "but that's all there is. i won't have you having suspicions. she doesn't know what all that means. i won't let you say that, blatchley. she never thinks of anybody but her husband, damn him!" he looked very fierce indeed for a very few seconds: then he chuckled feebly. dam conceited idiot, that ass brett.... "i see," answered his host vaguely. he was waiting. the other's swiftly-changing moods veered, the next moment, to suspicion. he gave a discordant laugh. "you're a clever swine, blatchley," he said, with a sudden longing to strike this man flickering across the table. "you thought i was tight! you thought i should give zoë away. you want to know who she is, don't you? but not much! i'm less of an ass than you think, old man! yes, that was it," he added in a sudden mood of contemplative depression; "you thought i was tight." all his anger had evaporated. it was a mere statement. "take more than that to make _you_ tight," said his host, relapsing upon flattery as a safe weapon. he could afford to wait. they would not be turned out yet for a while and he had learnt already that zoë was quite young, a girl. that ruled out many authors' wives.... but geoffrey alison was on his guard. an air of watchful cunning settled on him. he saw the game now, in his own fuddled way, and he did not mean to be drawn. "give it up, blatchley, old man," he said so happily as not to be offensive. "give it up. you won't get anything from me. i'm less of an ass than you think. you won't get anything from me." he had flung his cards, bang! upon the table. the other took them up. "i hope you don't mean to imply, alison," he said in injured tones, "i've stood you this evening just to pump your secret out of you." "my dear fellow, my dear fellow," crooned geoffrey alison, stretching out a shaky hand to reassure the other's sleeve. the publisher withdrew his arm with dignity, as one who did not intend to be patted by a man with those ideas. "it looks extremely like it," he said coldly. "i look on your remarks as damned offensive. here have i stood you a pleasant evening--at least i hope so--from gratitude, and you attribute it to the most disgusting motives." "my dear fellow," continued the other, who had listened to this with an open mouth suspended in the act of speech, "you misunderstand me." it came out with a rush, like one long syllable. "you misunderstand me entirely. we're gentlemen, both gentlemen. there isn't any question about anything like that. you utterly misunderstand me." but thomas blatchley was not so easy to console. "it was rather hard, alison, to understand what you said any other way." "look here, blatchley old man: it's like this," said the artist, embarked now upon self-defence. "you're a good fellow, dam good fellow; very pleasant evening indeed; and i want to help you. but there's zoë, you see; zoë!" he laughed happily; then, more gloomy, "and there's zoë's husband." he sat gazing fixedly before him, as though content with having thus explained everything at last. the great room was almost empty and yet more nearly dark, by now. a waiter who had stood anxiously close by, stepped forward eagerly, thinking that this pause would give him his chance. the publisher waved him impatiently aside with an oath easy to read from the lips. "i don't see," he said, friendly once more, to his guest, "that zoë's husband matters much." geoffrey alison looked very wise. "oh, but he does, you know," he answered. "he does matter. mind you, i dislike him. dam conceited ass. but he does matter," and he wagged his head. "how?" asked the other, who saw the head waiter approaching. it was all or nothing. geoffrey alison found that the question needed thought. "well," he said very slowly, and there was only one more table-full for the head waiter to dislodge, "well, put yourself in his place, you know. all the dam papers with their headlines. oh yes, he does matter." "how headlines?" he could kill the stubborn ass. he knew that it was luck, not cleverness. his guest, unconscious of all this emotion, aimlessly drew headlines high up in the air. "'zoë mystery solved. selfish swine discovered. hubert brett the author.' all that sort of stuff," he said, chuckling at his own journalistic readiness. "oh yes, he does matter. dam unpleasant for him." "well, i suppose so," answered thomas blatchley with resignation. "ah, here's the chucker-out!" he pointed facetiously towards the splendid person now close on them. "we must go." "a very pleasant evening, blatchley old boy," his guest murmured without rancour, as he got up with excessive dignity and walked, grimly intent, towards the door. he was not drunk. just genial.... as he undressed that night, he laughed suddenly, aloud. that swine blatchley had thought he was going to pump him and in the end he had done nothing except pay the bill! betray helena, dear little girl? not he! he fell asleep, chuckling and with one sock on. people said artists were dam fools, but he had scored off a business man and got the better of a publisher.... as to thomas blatchley, he was far more calm. success had long ago become a habit. he merely felt a little scorn for geoffrey alison. this was by no means his first good stroke of business over two glasses--one full and one empty--of champagne. he was not a believer in mere whisky: stale, and not making towards confidence. no, a good dinner and then, at the end, quite conversational; "you know, your books don't get one half the booming they deserve. you made a mistake in not coming to _me_! i'd make an offer now; i would have long ago, if it was only cricket. and even now, old man, if ever...." of course it ran one into money. to-night, no doubt, had run him generously into double figures: but what might that sum not produce in interest? business was bound to be expensive. you either went about or else you sat in a huge office. he merely spent on drinks what other publishers spent on glass-doors. he wished, as he got comfortable for a well-earned night's rest, it had been some one better known than hubert brett. chapter xxi exposure "both for you, sir!" said lily with the air of an old friend, entering the drawing-room at nine o'clock two evenings later. she held out on a silver tray, the wedding gift of kenneth boyd, two letters. one was from ruth and had been left, now, by the postman; the other, in the familiar green of the press-cutter, had lain in her pantry since the early post. "ah, a press cutting!" ejaculated hubert. "splendid. how exciting!" helena replied, as though delighted and surprised. lily went out. she did not even really want to smile by now. she had been in three places before this, and in each of them the husband had needed humouring in one way or another. she probably would never marry. "it's very late," said hubert expectantly. two months had passed since the last straggling notice of _was it worth while?_ and after this gap he could open his green envelopes without a sense of irritation; yes, even with excitement. "the last one is sometimes the best, isn't it?" helena threw the hope out soothingly, but from the corner of her eyes she watched him with a little nervousness. certainly the most restful times were those like the last weeks, when there were no reviews. they did seem to upset him so. she wished now that she had opened this--except that she would never dare to give it him if it chanced to be good. she wished this wicked wish a thousand times more strongly, half a minute later. never, in these three years, had she seen hubert so affected by a notice. great veins swelled out on his forehead, till she was really terrified. she could pretend no longer not to notice. "what is it, hubert?" she asked as he said nothing. "i hope not a bad one?" "this is too scandalous," he cried, half choked and speaking like a pompous old man in his anger. "where will the newspapers ever stop?" "what have they said now, dear?" he missed the tragic resignation in that one word "now." "read it," he said and thrust it almost roughly at her, as though blaming the whole world. it did not seem, however, as though he could wait for her opinion. "newer," "practically unknown," he fired out at intervals, and other adjectives. but she heard none of them. the paper swam before her eyes and every dim word filled her with a sick dread, a resentful wonder, an absolute despair, for this is what she saw: "author's wife fiasco "official revelations "suburban tea-tables need buzz no more with questions as to the identity of that now famous author's wife whose recent confessions have raised such a pother. a representative of this paper found mr. blatchley, this morning, at last in an unbending mood. "'the secret is out,' said the publisher, 'the author in question is mr. hubert brett. the book, i may add, is naturally by his wife. there were reasons till now why her identity should not be divulged.' "those reasons will perhaps be guessed by all who remember the fierce controversy that raged recently and the big names that were thrown about, also the big sales. whether these last will be helped by this official revelation will remain to be seen. the context had certainly prepared us for the wife-sacrificing author to be some one slightly better known. mr. hubert brett is of the newer school of novelists, whose work is practically unknown to the bigger public. from _who's who_ we learn that he has written some fourteen novels since , and of these _wandering stars_ is possibly the most familiar to library-readers. "in this rather disappointing manner the mystery of the author's wife leaves the select company of the man in the iron mask, jack the ripper, shakespeare, the lady and the tiger and other insolubles, to rank for ever with the mango tree, fiona macleod, the englishwoman, and other mysteries which stupidly got solved." her eyes somehow deciphered the main points, and then she sat looking at the thin slip, seeing nothing. "practically unknown," suddenly came to her ears; "considering that _wandering stars_ sold close upon six thousand!" then she heard herself speaking. "it's only a rag, not one of the real evening papers." she dared not say what she had got to say. she dared not face the storm. hate, now, that was what ruled in her chaotic brain, hate and loathing for that treacherous, mean, little mr. alison. she knew she always had despised him, now--but he had been so kind.... why had she trusted a weak man like him? why had she ever written--married--been born--anything? oh, what would happen now? her husband got up suddenly. that broke her tortured reverie, broke her inaction. "well, i shall write at once," he stormed. "let's have the filthy thing." she rose weakly to her feet and held it out to him. "what will you say?" she asked, still feebly trying to gain time, like men faced by a rope that they cannot possibly avoid. "say?" he repeated scornfully. "tell them what they are and contradict the whole thing as a lie." she almost staggered and caught hold of his arm. "no," she said. "listen. you--you mustn't." "mustn't?" he looked curiously at her. she suddenly burst into tears, clinging to him there as if for pity. "hubert," she sobbed out, "don't take it as real. you're the best husband there could ever be. i wrote like you do. it was only----" "my god!" he cried, clutching her arms roughly. "you _didn't_ write it? you didn't----" he broke off and let go of her, holding her one moment at arm's length. she never could forget his eyes. he stooped and picked up the cutting. he read it slowly through, as if that might help--or possibly to calm himself. helena fell limply on the sofa. minutes seemed to pass in silence. suddenly he crumpled up the little roll of paper and hurled it in the fireplace. then he laughed and that alarmed her more than anything. "well," he said, trying to speak naturally, "that's that, then. it's no use having scenes, is it?" he stood very still, looking vacantly before him as though not realising what it meant. "hubert," she began again, as though in some way his name was a shield, and went to him, "let me explain----" but he waved her aside. "what's the use?" he said gloomily. "it's all so obvious. the gutter press has let itself go over me for weeks as the mysterious, self-centred husband; the man who sacrificed his wife! i don't see why you should explain. it only makes things worse." "but you don't see," she answered. "the husband wasn't you, any more than people in your novels. i wrote it--wrote it just for fun" (he snorted with an irony that even she observed), "never meaning the press or any one--and then one day mr. alison----" "oh, _he_ was in it?" hubert asked with a swift passion. the old antipathy revived. that young ass always _had_ been in it, somehow. "he promised never to tell any one," said helena. "you know, we wanted money so." he laughed scornfully. "oh yes, we wanted money. money's everything. so long as we have money, what does it matter everybody knowing you think me a selfish brute or that----?" he broke off abruptly. it was clear that he mastered himself only with an effort. "have you _got_ the book?" he asked with an icy calmness, presently. "i suppose as your husband i've the right to read it?" she could not answer. somehow she got to the door, to her own room; unlocked her jewel-case and took from it the loathsome little book in its clean, innocent, green cover: then she went down and handed it without a word to him. "so this is it?" he said with all scorn in the words. he opened it at random. "'i am the background,'" he read in slow, cold tones as to a child; "'the background for _his_ work no less than the wall-paper of the one room where he can write; and i must be as quiet.'" she stood there, thrown back fifteen years, a girl again before her governess: and he little suspected that with those words he was killing all her penitence and injuring her love. "anything sounds rubbish if you read it out," she suddenly blazed at him in quite another mood. he shut the little book with a mild glance of surprise. "don't let's have any scenes," he said once more. "this has just happened. it's pretty ghastly; don't let's make it worse. you'd better go to bed when you feel tired; i shall just sit and read--i want to know the worst. don't wait up for me. it'd be rather a mockery to wish each other good-night!" he moved towards the door. it was the time they always spent together, the best of her day. she stood by the mantel-piece, leaning for support on it, wondering how any one could be so cruel--and feeling she deserved his cruelty.... it was so awful, put as he had put it: yet she had never meant---- his hand was on the door. she moved a few steps forward. "hugh," she cried, as though the name must surely explain everything: but he did not turn, even. he shut the door, quietly. helena threw herself face downwards on the sofa, but she could not cry. chapter xxii the iron in the soul to helena the most terrible part about her husband's attitude was his astounding calmness. if he had but raged and stormed, she could have endured it. she might even have explained. what she could not bear was this chill resignation. "we had better talk as usual in front of lily," was all he said, coldly, before breakfast the next morning. "there's no reason why she should guess that anything is different." "must it be different?" she brought herself to say, though even that was difficult, with him like this. as usual, he laughed contemptuously. "do you expect it to be just the same, when i know, everybody knows----" he broke off. "well," he said, "i suppose _most_ married couples spend their time living up to their domestics. it's only we were lucky for a bit...." they talked about the weather, then, and the day's news till lily had gone out; he even called her "dear," but she could not live up to that: and when they were alone again, he gave a sigh which she interpreted to mean relief and finally retired behind his propped-up morning paper. when he had finished breakfast--she ate nothing--he moved silently into his accustomed chair. she moved across as usual to light a match for his after-breakfast pipe. "no thanks," he said brutally. "i don't want to smoke. and i shan't work to-day of course." she went out, hardened against such a foul attack, and half a minute later, from the next room, heard him strike a match.... soon after eleven, when he had gone--work or no--into his own room, lily announced mr. alison. "yes, i suppose so," she said dully. he came in, very different from his late jaunty self, and threw a rapid glance at her, limp on the sofa. her red eyes told their tale. "you know then?" he asked. it was in some ways a relief. she waited until she judged lily to be safely through the swing-door: then she got up, by a natural instinct, and confronted him. "i wonder," she said, "you dare come at all." he looked anxiously about him. "tell me," he asked almost in a whisper, "is he very sick?" it was her turn to laugh contempt. "oh, of course you think of yourself first! you're safe, though, here; trust him not to come near _me_!" "no," said the other with an absurd dignity, "you wrong me. i meant, is he jealous?" "jealous?" she retorted in bewilderment. "no, why should he be? of what?" geoffrey alison suddenly found this difficult to answer and whilst he hesitated, feeling justly hurt, the storm was on him with its utmost force. "i wonder," she said once again, for man flies to a tag in moments of emotion, "i wonder you dare come and see me. i trusted you with all my happiness--with everything; you swore you'd never fail me; and now----" she spread her arms in a pathetic gesture; then suddenly inadequate, a girl: "it really is too bad of you." "oh, come i say," he started. he had arrived full of shame and dread, realising from his newspaper that he had been tricked into a betrayal; but now that her onslaught was so tame--merely "too bad,"--he visibly regained his courage. "i think," he went on, almost aggrieved, "you might give me a chance of clearing myself. it's not my fault at all, it's that swine blatchley. i dined with him three nights ago and utterly refused to say a word about it, but he tricked me somehow. i still don't see how the cad did it, but he must have because nobody else knew. i'm awfully sorry, zoë----" that roused her. "don't call me that," she broke in fiercely. "never call me that again. as though i didn't loathe the name and everything it stands for! you wouldn't understand. it's wrecked everything, spoilt my whole life." "oh, come i say," he repeated automatically in a half-dazed manner. "i hate it," she said, working herself up; "hate the book, hate everything to do with it, hate you. i wish to goodness i had never met you; then this never would have happened." "oh, come i say," he said a third time, still standing close beside the door, "i don't think that's fair. i only did it as a good turn to you. i thought it would be a new interest; you'd always so much time to spare; and then it might be useful too, the money----" "oh, i know," she interrupted. "you meant well. people always do." it was an old cynicism new to her. she saw life wrecked before her feet--and here was the fool who had tried to help her. "well," he mildly summed up the whole case, "i can't do more, can i, than say i'm very sorry." she could not even gain the relief of a real scene with this flabby nerveless creature. she turned upon him with contempt. "no," she said, "you can't do anything of course! how could you? it's a great pity that you ever _did_. people like you aren't meant to--and i trusted you!" "well, what _can_ i do then?" he enquired in hurt, plaintive tones. "go away," she blazed out, getting something like her chance; "go right away and never come near here again. leave me alone to try and put the thing straight without your silly meddling. that's what you can do." she sank upon the sofa and took up a magazine with very shaky fingers. "all right then," he said, recovering his dignity, "i will." he had a kind of feeling that brett was sure to come in soon if this went on, and he should hate a scene.... "i will go," he repeated at the door, "and i'll tell blatchley, now, to act direct with you." with this reminder of all that he had done for her, he went out very stiffly. she did not call him back, although so soon she felt half sorry for the silly little man. he had meant well and he was fond of her.... no woman finds it too hard to forgive a man whose sins are due to those two causes. helena, not so comforted by this scene as she should have been, sat with the magazine held limply in her fingers and wondered with a numb brain whether there was no way out of her life's labyrinth. hugh would not listen. that was the whole difficulty. if only he would let her speak, she knew she could explain. she loved him; they had had such jolly times; he wasn't in the least like zoë's husband; she hadn't realised, till that first review came, that life in the two homes had been even similar; and if---- suddenly she gave a little happy laugh, the first for hours that seemed already months, then leapt up girlishly and ran to her bureau. of course! it was the very thing. speaking was difficult, and somehow he always made her feel so young and nervous. but this was easy and he always loved things just a little different--what he called her "odd little ways." feverish with excitement, she sat down and wrote her apologia:-- "my own dearest hugh "(i _can_ call you that on paper and in my own heart, whatever you say about speaking.) "let me explain. if you can bear how things are now, i can't, and i feel so terrible because although i meant absolutely nothing, i know it's all my fault. i _am_ sorry, do believe that, go on reading, but not a word of zoë is _me_, really honestly. it's just fiction like your books, but it's the only sort of life i knew. surely you can't believe i think of you like that? the husband was imaginary, and i only did it in the winter, to pass all the hours while you were working. i never called it _the confessions of an author's wife_ at all, that was the publisher and people, and they never let me see it again till it was printed or i should have cut out a lot. "really, my own darling husband, _it was not my fault_. it's all very awful and i am so sorry for you, but don't let's make it worse by quarrelling ourselves. i'm sure we can live it down and nothing will be worse than if we're seen to have quarrelled. we will write a note together to the papers saying it was fiction. "hugh, let me be forgiven and help you through this horrid time my _stupidity_, and that's all, has brought you to. you don't know how already i long to hear your laugh and just one kind word. we've not been sloppy, have we? but no one could be fonder or prouder of her husband, and i see so little of you anyhow. don't rob me even of that. come and tell me i'm forgiven and be your dear old comfy self again. i can't stand this. "your loving and oh so sorry, "h." she read it over again, laughing through tears, for now everything would be all right. then, when she had sealed it and was about to write his name, another idea came to her. he might tear it up, unread! on the outside she wrote: to a very dear husband from a very sorry wife. _quite short._ read it! by now she felt almost on the old terms--and how dear they had been, she could see now--with him. this was the sort of thing he always liked so much. it made him call her "child." she had sent notes before, when she had to go out or something. very quietly she went to his door, slipped the note silently beneath it, then with her bent finger gave it a good flick. she heard it whizz across the polished floor. he could not fail to see or hear it, as he always did. with a new sense of peace she went back to the drawing-room and waited. she was ashamed to notice, in the glass, how red her eyelids were. did other wives spend awful hours like this or was it just that she was silly? minutes passed; the hour struck; the quarter; the half-hour. he was not coming, then, till lunch time. what a slave of habit;--or was he trying to punish her by this suspense?... she fought that last idea: it would not be like hugh. possibly he had written and left it in the hall? she went out. there was nothing there. one o'clock struck, and almost instantly she heard his door open. she half rose, then she decided to sit where she was. would he never come? ... he was pottering about in the hall! tapping the glass now! ... how could men be so curious? ... at last the handle turned. what were resolves? she could not help getting up, after all; but he must speak first. there was no need, really. his set face told her everything. he did not come beyond the door. "helena," he said sternly, in a low voice that obviously considered lily, "i think it'll be better if we don't discuss this matter any further. we may possibly forget. anyhow, it's no time for childish games. i'd already written, as you suggest to the newspapers. we won't speak of this at all in front of lily." it was clearly a message learnt by heart, and with its last word the door shut. he had never let go the handle. helena stood gazing after him with a face no less set than his own. chapter xxiii secret number two three days passed, seeming like a year, and everything was just the same. each felt in the wrong, each had a grievance; and that is fatal for a settlement. helena, rebuffed, was quite determined to make no more appeals: and he was silent, that mockery of talk in front of lily over, except that now and then he would throw out questions--with the hard air of counsel cross-examining--questions that showed upon what string his mind was harping, questions to do always with the hated book. these she answered patiently, as one who knows she has deserved her punishment. what she had not deserved, what she would not endure, helena decided, was his whole treatment of her. each afternoon he had an agent, publisher, friend, somebody that took him into london; each night he had some work to do--and this although he told her brutally that she had fatally wrecked his new novel. it was a fresh routine. helena found herself sentenced--apparently for life--to solitary confinement in a new-art cottage. callers arrived, suspicious in their frequency, but she said, "not at home" to all, caring but little to feed their taste for a tit-bit of scandal. letters came too from dear friends who congratulated her ... but these she tore up, unanswered. others came from mr. blatchley--unctuous, consoling, full of the glad news that sales were leaping up as a result, and sending a big cheque as a polite advance. helena loathed herself for not destroying this as well; but she had sold her happiness, so why not take the price? besides, if hubert's new book had really had to be abandoned,----! "i hope to get some reviewing work," he said at the end of the fourth ghastly lunch. "that will be something. i am off to town about it but shall be back to dinner." she forced herself to speak in the same level tones that he adopted. "doesn't it occur to you," she asked, "that it's not very pleasant for me, just now, to be always left alone? i can't go out like that, with everybody saying that we've quarrelled." "are you blaming me, now?" he asked in icy surprise. she refused to argue this; she felt that it was mean. "what am i to do," she said, "all these lonely afternoons?" "i should send for your good friend alison," he answered with a grim humour, and went out to his own room. helena sighed, a sigh of despair; then she got up with more energy than during all these days, buoyed by a resolve. anything was better than inaction. even a row would not be so awful as this freezing calmness! she would do something--must! she took his advice. she went to the telephone and left a message with the studio porter. she asked mr. alison to tea. then she went back to the drawing-room, and as she tidied the neglected flowers there was on her tight-pressed lips the whole eternal mystery of the sphinx-woman. he arrived punctually to the moment--one second after the tea-urn--secretly nervous but outwardly full of a relieved delight. "i am forgiven then?" he cried, and she felt cheered already. it was something to talk. besides, he really _did_ look funny.... he laid on the table some roses he had bought and now had not the courage to present. "i'm afraid i was a pig," she answered, nobly. one feud was quite enough for her. "i know you never meant to do it and you were awfully good about it all till then. you helped me such a lot." "and i hope to do the same again," he said with an absurd little bow. "not give me away again?" she asked, mainly as a good excuse for smiling. but really she felt happier already. tea smelt almost good again! he looked at her with the reproachful eyes of a whipped hound. "you know i shouldn't, you know i never meant to. and i'm afraid you'll never trust me any more." he sighed cavernally. "that's just what i'm going to do," she said, and then she could not refrain from laughing, for he looked so alarmed at new responsibility. "oh, nothing like the other," she went on gaily, "this is a most harmless secret." "what is it?" he answered keenly. "tell me?" he hoped that brett was teaing out somewhere. "well," said helena, giving him his tea, "you know you said i ought to follow up the other with a second book and i said no? well, now i think i will." she felt heroic and excited, merely saying it. it was her new resolve. "hooray!" cried geoffrey alison, catching some of the great moment's fire. "blatchley _will_ be bucked. he was immensely keen." "bother blatchley," answered helena. "i think he has behaved disgracefully and it is all his fault. but i can't stand this any longer; hugh won't even speak to me; besides, if i write other books about quite different husbands, nobody can say they are all us." "excellent," said the other, grasping the involved idea at once, "and so----" helena laughed. "so now i'm going to write one about a woman married to an artist, and you must give me all the local colour." "shall _i_ be zoë's husband?" he asked eagerly. it still pleased him to say things like that. "oh no," she said, unconsciously ruthless, "no more than hugh was the first; but i mean you must tell me what--well, what artists do." "they paint," he answered gravely; and that made her laugh again. ally was not a man to trust; she had been a real fool; but he was splendid company. he told her everything that artists did. he made her laugh a lot. those endless hours of misery seemed nightmares of the past--until she was alone again. but when business released hubert brett conveniently in time for their silent meal, he found in the hall a wife somehow less broken and submissive; less the girl-penitent serving a long sentence, much more a woman with secret laughter playing round the hard lines of her mouth. "i'm glad you've got back," she said in the usual tone. "i took your advice and asked mr. alison to tea." he had the sense to make no answer. but back in his study, he was weak enough to slam the door. and she was glad to hear it. chapter xxiv battle royal geoffrey alison felt very well content as he rang the bell and hastily fluffed out his hair. he was the bringer of good tidings and everything in general was going as it ought to go. zoë was quite her old self again (would even let him call her that), had recovered from her silly temper, seen that he was not to blame, and now looked like making a bit of a stand against the conceited swine brett, whom she had seen through finally. he beamed on lily, who remained impassive. there were, to her expressed mind, men and men. mr. alison, she had told cook, was of the second kind. "is mrs. brett at home?" he asked. "mr. brett, did you say, sir?" asked lily. humour is a wonderful assistance to those whose work is with the daily round. "no; _mrs._," he replied, dwelling upon the sibilants in a way to delight an elocution-tutor. he certainly did not want to see brett, he told himself as lily finally held the door open. he had not seen him since the crash, and fellows who had met him in the tube said that he was pretty surly. geoffrey alison did not like surly people--nor had he quite forgotten that scene in the garden. now whether it was that in his general delight with life he rang the bell with more than customary vigour and so brought out the owner of the house, or whether (as seems probable) there is some devilish telepathy that always tinkles into people's heads the exact thought one most wishes to avoid--whatever the cause, as in lily's wake geoffrey alison stepped quietly past the study door this morning, it opened and hubert looked out with something between suspicion and alarm upon his worried features. geoffrey alison instinctively took a step backward. the owner of the house, however, merely looked at him as though he had been dirt. "oh, it's you, alison," he said, not holding out his hand; and then with an obvious sneer, "as busy as ever?" with which he put his head back and promptly shut the door. he might have acted thus if it had been the plumber--and he had wanted to change plumbers. the other, naturally upset, poured this out instantly to helena. "just like him, isn't it?" he said. helena would not be drawn to disloyalty, even about trifles. "hugh's such a worker," she said. "he thinks of nothing but his writing." the artist, who was never busy, snorted. "he certainly does not think much about his wife," he answered. extraordinary how a hog like brett could keep the respect of a dear little girl like this! "well, what news have _you_ got?" she enquired, to change the subject. that reminded him. that scene with the great beast brett had quite thrown the good news out of his head; but now, remembering, he won back his complacency. "capital!" he said, sitting down happily and pulling up his trousers to show light grey socks. life was itself again. "couldn't be better. what do you think? guess." "it might be anything at all, you see," she said with desolating common sense. "i never guess; it's only wasting time; so tell me." "well," began geoffrey alison, a little crushed, "i called along yesterday, after our talk, to tell blatchley he had acted like a common cad." "i don't see that's so very splendid," she objected. "you might have done it sooner, and anyhow he must have known that all the time. he only did it to get money, and he's getting it." the other sighed, such a sigh as man has ever sighed when arguing with woman. "you women _will_ interrupt," he said loftily. yes, they were quite on their old terms again.... "if you would only let me finish, i was going to tell you that he said he knew he had acted too hastily but that he hoped you would believe--and then he told a pack of lies, but here's the point." he spoke impressively. "if you'll let him have the new book, he'll pay you two hundred pounds down, only as a first dab of the royalties of course, and boom it better than ever, and he guarantees a still greater success, providing it's one half as good. so there, miss zoë, what do you think of your agent now?" she did not exhibit the delirious gratitude which he clearly had expected. she sat, obviously thinking; and he for his part reflected that women were odd devils, however well you knew them. surely nobody could know a woman better than he knew little zoë; he saw more of her now than brett did; talked to her with the direct ease of a husband--said just what he thought. hadn't he just told her not to interrupt? well, that meant knowing a girl pretty well; yet if any one had told him that she wouldn't be delighted about this book she wanted to write so much---- "i shall have to ask hugh," she said very slowly, breaking in upon his thoughts. this was the last word.... ask hugh! ask brett, who had behaved like a damned swine about the other book, who wouldn't speak to her except to snub her, who thought of nothing except his own rotten work! the girl must be mad! "ask him?" he said in amazement. "i ought to have asked him about the other," she merely replied. "then everything would have been quite all right." "yes," he assented, mocking; "then you'd have never had your book out, never had all this success. everything would have been quite all right." "yes," she said, seriously. after this there was no argument. he could not bring himself to stay. it was so asinine. people must go mad when once they married! oh yes, he could stay no longer. ask hugh, indeed, when she had got the chance of her whole lifetime! he could guess what hugh, dear hugh, would say. "well," she said, "if you must really go so early?" she had no suspicion of his mental turmoil. "and i'll let you know to-morrow about the new book, when i've asked hugh." but he had clapped his green hat on impatiently and strode away. he knew she would not listen to anything against her husband; she had such young ideas about that sort of thing; but really!---- helena, meanwhile, still innocent of the rage she had stirred up in him, spent the time till lunch in wondering how best to attack her not easy task. before hugh came in, she must have the book in its rough lines all in her head, so as to convince him that it was mere fiction and would make people believe at last the other had been meant for nothing more. then he would surely not object, and be pleased; or if not--well, why worry about that? a row, she had decided, could not hurt like his cold silence. it would be human, anyhow. and what an outlet, what a boon for lonely evenings, the new book would be! if war it must be, then let it be war; but she would do her best for peace. when he duly entered, however, all her good natural openings and deprecating explanations were mere labour lost. he fired the first shot--and in quite a different campaign. "look here, helena," he said, coming into the drawing-room and actually sitting down, though not, of course, near her, "all this alison nonsense must cease." he clutched the chair-arm firmly. "what exactly do you mean by that?" she asked, very calm; but inwardly her spirit veered decisively to war. "what do _i_ mean?" he snorted. "surely it's quite obvious! most husbands would be jealous, but i'm not like that. i know it's mere stupidity; i couldn't be jealous of a knock-kneed ass like alison; but all the same----" in spite of himself he relaxed his hold of the chair-arm and got up, pacing hurriedly about the little room. "look here, helena," he said once again, more calmly, "i see through it all; don't fancy not, for half a moment. you women are so obvious. i know you think you've only got to make us jealous for everything to be all right, but it's not going to work here." "i don't know even what you mean," she answered, rather as though he had just made a dirty joke. "well, _i_ do," he thundered, "and i mean it, too. this has got to stop, i tell you. i asked you long ago, when--when things were different, to see less of this fellow. i don't trust him. i ran across him just now, and he cringed. grrrr!" (and here he made a gesture as of one who washes hands). "it's bad enough that you and he should be about together, day and night, till everybody talks; but when it comes to a cad like that calling you zoë and----" "so you've been listening," she said. it seemed so easy to keep calm, now that hubert was excited. he laughed scornfully. "that's likely, isn't it? i heard him bellowing it out in the hall.... no, this has got to stop. it's bad enough to have the boyds and all our friends here sniggering, but when the servants----" she got up abruptly, and he sat down; the room was too small for two rovers. "perhaps," she began icily, "you'll let me say a word. you haven't let me for a week." he spread his arms, hopeless, and sat down. "i'm glad you're not jealous," she went on slowly, as to a child. "that'd be stupid. you know quite well that mr. alison is nothing but a friend. i couldn't respect him as----" but no, she wouldn't seem to beg for mercy; she broke off and spoke again in a much fiercer tone. "perhaps though, as you've told me what i mustn't do, you'll tell me what i can. _you_ won't come out with me, you shun me like a criminal, you only talk to me in front of lily. do you think i can live like that? do you really think i'm going out alone, alone with the dog, and everybody saying: 'there's poor mrs. brett; she's in disgrace; he's punishing her'? no, i'd rather let them see me with mr. alison and let them think it's i who am avoiding you!" he looked at her as at some strange being in his house. "helena," he said, "this can't be you who's speaking." "isn't it?" she laughed. then calming herself, "perhaps then," she added, borrowing some of his irony, "if i'm not to go out with mr. alison, you'll tell me what i _am_ to do." "what do most wives do," he asked, "whose husbands are away? they don't rush about everywhere with artist-wasters; they do some work or something." it was a vague ending, but it lent helena her chance. "exactly what i wanted you to say," she cried. "i don't want to do anything again without your leave; but now i _will_ do some work. i'll live my own life, if you don't want me to share yours." "what do you mean, helena?" he asked. this was a new mood. "i mean," she said surprised at her own calmness, "that blatchleys have offered me two hundred pounds advance for my new novel. i said i must ask you first, but now i shall accept it." "i utterly forbid it," he cried wildly and leapt to his feet. they were both standing now. "what?" she exclaimed. "forbid? what do you forbid? how can you forbid? you could have, in the old days; i wouldn't have done anything if you had asked me not; but now--how can you forbid?" "i do," he cried excitedly. "i utterly forbid it." he was gaining time to think. there was a pause while they stood facing one another. "do you think," he said presently, "apart from all that's happened, this horrible publicity, my friends all chaffing me, i ever would have married the sort of woman you propose becoming? i wanted a wife to look after me, to be a nice companion; i didn't want a woman-writer. i hate that type of woman. you were a simple, jolly girl when i first married you, and now--writing this popular clap-trap!--you must see, helena, it isn't fair?" his stern air melted almost to appeal. she would not allow herself to listen but forced the argument on to a safer plane. "this one," she said, "has nothing to do with an author at all, there can't be all those terrible misunderstandings. oh, don't you see, hubert," she cried, "that if i wrote another book, all obviously fiction, these horrid gossips may believe at last the other was all like that too? besides, it's stupid to refuse two hundred pounds just when you say things are so bad and we may have to move." she had not meant it so, but this was her worst cut of all. hubert remembered his own failure; was reminded of her huge success. a wife selling her books ten times as well as his own--a wife who wrote "for fun" in idle hours--a wife whom he had treated as a silly child.... "this one'll fail," he said almost fiercely, "it's bound to. you're nothing but an amateur, _i_'ve been at the job fifteen years. two hundred's all you'll get, and much good may it do you!" full of conflicting moods; sullen yet ashamed; aware of his unworthy jealousy yet hardly able to endure the thought; sorry for her yet sick with his own wound; he turned away before the better side in him should win and he implore the pardon of this woman that he would always love, however much he hated her. "hubert," she began, aghast at his excitement. "we won't argue," he said, back at the safe level of those days just past, and moved towards the door. she hesitated, not sure who had won. at the door he turned. "oh, by the way," he said, as to a servant. "i shall want a room for ruth to-morrow. she's coming down before teatime." helena gave a short bitter laugh, which he just heard as the door closed. she saw the issue of the tussle now. he had failed to subdue the disobedient wife, and he was asking down his sister! chapter xxv the broken triangle geoffrey alison, bursting with anxiety for helena's decision, found her next morning in exultant readiness. "i accept," she cried excitedly, almost before he had got inside the door. "i accept blatchley's offer. the book is growing splendidly. i've done two chapters and i see it all." he thought he had never seen her in such good form, and he wondered. she had been so cold about it yesterday. he did not, of course, know about the meals between.... she could not, however, help telling him a little of it. "oh," she cried, "you don't know how glorious it'll be, having some work to do again; i've missed virginia, i mean zoë, horribly! it seems so endless, the day, now that hubert's cross." "is he still sick?" the other asked. he only knew till now what people said. he was dying to hear, but she was so funny. "sick," she laughed mirthlessly. "that is a lovely word for it! he seems to be entirely different. i knew directly it came out, i had done something awful, but i thought he would understand and see i hadn't meant him really and forgive. but he gets worse and worse. i think his friends keep teasing him, and then he can't get on with his book in the least. it's sickening." the artist was encouraged to a blow at his old enemy. "i expect really he's jealous of your success. he's always sensitive. he hates anybody his own age succeeding better." it was the first time she had ever said, or listened to, anything against her husband. helena was silent for a moment, dazed. did this explain his harshness? was he really jealous? "oh, i don't think so," she said, not letting herself think, for all the puzzling little bits began to fit, now, with a deadly ease. "i don't think it's that. he's naturally--'sick'!" and she forced out a laugh. "i'm so sorry," he said. it was his first attempt at sympathy. their talk had been on flippant lines. she did not dare to look at him, remembering how funny he was when quite serious. "thank you, ally," she said gently. he was a good sort. "_i_'m sorry," he repeated. "you know that, zoë, don't you? i'm your pal, whatever hubert is." "hubert's splendid," she said, childishly inadequate; and with these words, she who had been a hard woman for long days--melted perhaps by fatal sympathy or her own noble lie--suddenly found hot tears streaming down her cheeks. she turned away, ashamed, and hoped he would not see. but he had seen. what they had said just now had been enough--and this was far too much. dear little zoë--pretty little girl, too--married to that great swine brett--in trouble--crying--wanting to be cheered. the worst, of course, of keeping harmless vices as tame pets is that for years they only come out when needed and are very pleasant. then, however, as time makes them stronger, comes the fatal moment when they gain the mastery, turn on their former owner and drag him where they will. this was such a moment for geoffrey alison. all those nice exciting stories, laudably abstract, bulked suddenly into the real. here was a girl, crying--pretty too; dam pretty--and everybody knew that when dam pretty girls cried--why, they expected it.... "zoë," he cried, surging forward, "why do you stand it? why do you let him treat you like that? you're too good for him; i wish that i had half the trust, the love you give to him. i've done so much for you--the book and everything--and you're so hard to me." an automatic thrill came in his voice, he leant a little forward; he stretched out timid arms towards her, ready to protect. there was no need to think; it came so easily. he had read the whole scene so often. the blood throbbed in his veins. "my god!" he said, unthinking what it meant. they always did. but helena quite failed to play her part. she got up hurriedly as his protective arms swayed over her; she backed and stared at him. he wasn't serious? she never knew.... her tears had ceased. she felt a stupid terror. it was all so vulgar. he dropped his arms slowly, chilled by her stare, and stood with his mouth ludicrously open. "oh!" she said at length, as though realising what the whole past had meant. "i thought you liked me--and it was only this." they never had said that at all. he had no answer ready. "oh, come," he replied presently, "don't be so serious about it." she spoke very seriously. "it was _my_ fault," she said. "i ought to have seen. people told me. i thought you just liked me, and i suppose i was flattered. if only i had guessed! but i was always such a fool. you see, i never really had a chance. _you_ taught me all i knew of art or anything. and that's why it's so terrible." the crisis over, she sank limply on a chair. she had never thought that anything like this could happen, ever. she knew it did in those books that she couldn't finish; but mr. alison----! he had been so amusing always; she had thought him a funny and kind little man. she had not even thought of any one but hubert.... "oh, come, you know," he was saying again. "don't go on as though there had been a tragedy! that's the worst of you awfully innocent women; you always think any one means so much worse than he does. why you'd imagine i 'd suggested--well, almost anything; and all i wanted, just as my reward, was nothing but a kiss!" somehow, as he drew to an end of his halting apology, he realised how great the fall had been. was this the man who had been almost throttled by a jealous husband? he felt, with a surge of self-contempt, that he had reached the level of a river-side tea-garden. and to helena, although far less consciously, the same feeling. it would have been better almost, less sordid, if he had meant something worse. a kiss--as his reward!... she understood why hubert said "grrrr!" and then washed his hands when he spoke about mr. alison. he was "funny" no longer; merely vulgar--vulgar and horrible. "please go," she said, more voicing her thoughts than meaning to speak. then having started, she explained. "i don't want to be nasty; you've always been so kind; but it will be much better if we don't meet again. hubert had asked me, anyhow ... and then, you see, i couldn't ever feel the same, quite, with you. oh, i'm so sorry," she said, noticing his look--"but you do understand, don't you?" "oh yes, i understand," he answered, very deep down, and serious for once without seeming comic; "i've been a fool, a swine. he'd kick me if he knew--and he'd be right. but look here" (he could not keep away from his excuses), "do try to see it wasn't very much. lots of women----" then he caught her eye and said; "but you're so different and that's why i feel such a cad. good-bye." "good-bye," she said and as he turned miserably away, she held her hand out to him, "and thank you all the same for what you've done. you've been a real good friend to me." he had not looked for this and it was the worst part to bear. "i wish to god," he said passionately, "i'd been more worthy of your friendship. it's been the best thing in my life so far," and he turned hurriedly away, cursing himself for the damned fool he was. he had thrown everything away just for a moment that could never have meant anything. he had seen his real self in her contemptuous eyes. helena stood, now, as the front door slammed, with eyes full of an emotion very different from contempt. she felt sorry--till her mind ranged swiftly back over all she had ever said to him, over the meanings he, a man like that, might read in it; and then she felt ashamed. but all the while, unaccountably, she felt more alone than ever. she seemed so utterly thrown back on hubert, now.... presently, unable to bear the room's stillness, she went upstairs, mechanical as any housemaid, and busied herself needlessly about ruth's room. chapter xxvi tact hubert at lunch made no reference whatever either to their own drawn battle or to that other, of which the sounds, she feared, might easily have reached him. his one remark, indeed, beyond the usual polite abstractions for lily's benefit, was "ruth will be here at four o'clock. i want to see her before tea." "very well," was her submissive answer. but this life of a housekeeper--how could she endure it after what had been? hubert's only comments were aroused by letters, which his humorous friends still continued to send, quizzing him about his author-wife or sometimes facetiously alluding to some of the peculiarities of down-trodden zöe's husband. "this i owe to you," he would say, throwing it across; or, "_you'll_ enjoy this better," if a press-cutting contained nothing more pleasing to his vanity than a reference to himself as the notorious husband. helena dreaded anything of this sort in front of his sister. she dreaded her visit entirely and hoped that it would not be long. who could tell whether ruth were not to be installed as her perpetual guardian, to watch over the wicked child? if so--but why make plans until things happened? the present was enough, and her chief wisdom lay in making the situation seem, to a third party, as easy as she could. she would _force_ hugh to speak. there was a little fun in this idea, formed during lunch: and glancing across at his sullen face, with the too active mouth now tightly enough pressed, she only just restrained a laugh. it would have been the first during these ghastly and interminable meals. so soon as he had got up, with his horribly polite; "finished?" and the usual sigh, she ran almost lightly to the baize-door and called lily. "lily," she asked, trying to compromise between an obvious whisper and a voice too audible, "were there any press-cuttings this morning?" "yes, mum," answered the always respectful conspirator. "you kept them, i hope?" "oh _yes_, mum,"--almost hurt. "well, lily," and she hesitated, the coward of conscience; "i think i'll have them now and not to-night. miss brett will be here then." lily retreated and came back with the small envelope. her eyes glistened sympathetically in the half-darkness. perhaps she guessed--but she knew her own favourite among the bretts. helena with that delicious thrill which makes crime so popular a hobby among those unable to afford sport or collecting, went into the drawing-room and boldly tore open the envelope addressed to "hubert brett, esq." she did not want unpleasantness in front of ruth. she spread the cutting out, to read. he had not published a book now for months, so it was certain to refer to hers. it did. it was from _people and paragraphs_, (which its admirers call by its initials,) and it ran, in the crisp, breezy, style which makes that sheet so popular: "turning the tables. "many a woman finds herself socially snuffed out by being wedded to a luminary: she is mr. dash blank's wife _et voila tout_. there have been cases exactly opposite; but hist! they say the lady herself is now touchy on the point. it cannot often have happened, however, that the tables have been turned so neatly as in the case of the hubert bretts. as a novelist, he has for a decade of years formed one of the small and essentially select _coterie_ that largely exists, like the ladies who lived on each other's washing, by patting one another's backs. his reputation has been large, his notices extremely good; but neither adjective would fit his sales. any librarian (librarians, _en passant_, are interesting men) could throw an odd light upon the curious relations between reviews and royalties "now mark the sequel. pretty little mrs. hubert, bored with her husband's neglect, indites a diary, which a keen-sighted publisher gives to the world. hey presto! as dear old 'bertie' zoda used to say at the never-to-be-forgotten pen-pushers' saturday nights (or were they sunday mornings? tush!), in a moment all is changed. she sells fifty copies to her husband's one; the book is in everybody's hands and mouth; the next is eagerly awaited--and poor hubert finds himself, after all these years of manly efforts, as nothing more glorious than zoë brett's husband. rough luck, bertie, very!" with a feeling of almost physical sickness helena realised how narrow had been the escape. if he had read that, with his sister there----! she tore it viciously across and across, until no hand could ever piece it back to its vile self again. she felt the very action a relief. in future, so long at any rate as ruth was with them, she would open and destroy all cuttings. they could refer to nothing but her book. she went along and told the still impassive lily to keep them all for her. she waited, this done, for ruth brett's arrival with far more complacency. at any rate her eyes weren't red.... it is typical of hubert brett's peculiar temperament that he had never thought of ruth--at any rate as guest--until he needed her. he had marked her birthday down in his small pocket-diary, so soon as he bought it each year, and never failed to send a cheery note, however busy; and the same at christmas. also, when she had written letters filled with endless details about people he had never met and clearly should dislike, even if he had not read them all, he left no single one unanswered. but for the rest, she had her little cottage on the norfolk coast and he his little home; so why should either trouble with the other? many people sacrificed their life to relatives! when, however, helena grew so defiant over this affair which had been her own fault entirely, he thought at once of ruth. she had been always full of doctrines of submission--almost maddeningly so; _she_ saw that women who lived with men who were busy should be considerate, unselfish. she would not, he knew, approve of helena's idea that she should be an author too, neglect her wifely duties and become a rival to himself. ruth had been tiresome, certainly, in her persistent martyrdom, but she had never done a thing like that. as for ruth brett herself, she did not question her brother's command. there is a lot in habit; besides, she happened to be fond of him. she took the train, directly she received his wire, and came. she hoped that it was nothing serious. he might have told her--but he wouldn't think.... she had met helena so few times; hubert had kept them apart in the old days; but now, so soon as the young wife stepped out into the hall, she flung herself upon her and cried, "what is it? is he ill? what has happened? quick!" helena was overwhelmed. she had rehearsed so many meetings--always with one idea: to seem at ease in an united home--and none of them of course was right. "oh no, he's all right," she said in confusion. how could she explain? "he wants to see you first. in there!" and the bewildered ruth, scarce entered, still with her umbrella, was thrust at once towards another door; leaving helena with the reflection that after all things had not turned out too badly, even though all the rehearsals had been absolutely useless. hubert jumped up from his table with a cry of welcome. "but ruth!" he said, holding her by both arms, "what's happened? i should not have known you." he did not realise the difference which changed environment can make in the chameleon, woman. "well, it's three years," she explained. "but you look ten years younger!" he cried, laughing. just for a moment he forgot his troubles. it was incredible, this new ruth with firm cheeks and bright colour; gayer even of costume. he could not understand--and he was little used to that. "i know!" he said; and then accusingly; "ruth, you're in love." at once a little of the old-time pathos crept into her face. "no," she replied, "i think i've left all that too late." "what is it, then?" persisted he, manlike. "it's norfolk," she said. not for a million pounds would she have told him it was freedom.... "tell me, hugh," she added quickly, "what has happened? why did you wire for me? everything seems quite all right!" "everything is utterly all wrong," answered hubert, finding some consolation in a saying so tremendous; "it couldn't possibly be worse," and he poured the whole story forth with the accumulated passion of a week's not easy silence. how many times he had rehearsed his grievance to himself--when he felt any danger of relenting! she listened to the end, attentively, in silence, and as she listened, it occurred to her too that these three years had wrought a miracle of change in her. all this, that he was hurling forth indignantly, seemed to her now so tragically small. she realised the pathos of a life in which--as with her, in the days gone by--one sense of wrong after another would always wreck his happiness and wreck the life of any one he loved. it had been her; now it was helena; there always would be, must be, a victim to his tragical self-centred brooding. and he would not be happy, ever. he would stand alone upon the dignity of his achievement; alone, he would distress himself that nobody considered his work, him; alone, upon his deathbed, he would understand too late that he had never lived at all. she looked at him with pity as he ended, the tempest lulled by its own blown-out fury. "well," he said presently, as she was silent. "i can't understand," ruth answered slowly. "can't understand?" "i haven't read the book," she said, "our village library does not believe in modern fiction, but--well, what i don't understand is this. you say _she_ swears the husband wasn't meant for you. well, then, from what you tell me of his character in the book--weak, selfish, bloated with conceit, a little man who thinks he's great, full of absurd cranks about 'atmosphere' and so on, cruel to his wife--i wonder _you_ can ever pretend, or care to pretend to think that it was meant for you! you surely don't think three years have made you like _that_?" and she gave a laugh as at some absolute absurdity, confident in her own knowledge of how splendid a man he had always been. he looked up swiftly. he suspected her. but she did not flinch, for this was a new ruth indeed. she looked straight at him--puzzled innocent surprise--and it was his gaze that fell after all. he knew what she meant--and she knew also that he knew. the woman's tact had conquered in a sentence. "anyhow," he answered sulkily, acknowledging defeat in that one word, "you must see _she_ is in the wrong? i know you women always hold together, but you must see that it's not--well, not exactly pleasant for me to be paragraphed in every rag as the selfish author-husband, whether i was meant or not. she had no right to publish it without my knowing." "oh yes," assented ruth, "i see that, quite. she has been very silly, but i'm sure she meant nothing and perhaps----" then she stopped abruptly and repeated; "but she has certainly been silly." hubert, oddly full of guilt and humiliation, was glad to leave this interview at such an end. he had planned it in a way very different. "well," he said decisively, as he got up, "i can do nothing with her. she persists that she will bring another book out now, and so revive the whole unpleasant business! tea will be ready and you must want it, but afterwards" (he touched her lovingly upon the arm), "i know you'll want to help me, dear old girl. you'll go and talk to her quite firmly, won't you?" "i'll go and talk to her, yes," said ruth, pressing his arm no less fondly. he did not notice that she dropped the adverbs. chapter xxvii the two ways it was not a comfortable meal, this tea, and though helena no less than ruth knew it to be the prelude to a scene, neither could feel much regret when hubert with clumsy ill-ease said; "well, it is five o'clock, i'll leave you two to a chat," and so out, colliding with the door. they were left staring at each other, the wife and the sister. helena, although she knew the object of this chat and the whole visit, could not work herself up to the pitch of feeling so much resentment as she had intended. this was such a different woman, who looked across at her with bright understanding eyes, from the one she remembered: shrivelled, worthy, with a hint of tracts to come. helena looked back across the fireplace at her almost with a smile. it was ruth who spoke first. "well," she said, "of course you know i've been asked down to make peace." it was so unexpected that helena did actually smile. "to make me a good girl," she emended. "i'm afraid," laughed ruth, "as usual with children, you are both to blame." it all seemed easy in a moment. helena suddenly felt the thick clouds of misery lift from her soul. she believed in ruth. the whole air of the little room appeared to change from stiff hostility to friendly hope. tea seemed a thousand years ago. she gave a cheery little laugh. "look here," said ruth, encouraged, "i'm so glad you're taking it like this; i hated coming down. i know how people feel about in-laws and i thought you'd think i had come down to side with hubert blindly. i've not, a bit. i'm very fond of him, but i see all his faults. i only want him to be happy. i'm forty, you know, and i've seen a good deal of things, so possibly----" she broke off and said, by an abrupt change; "you see, i lived with him for years and years so i can understand. he's difficult, i know, when you're with him, but when you get away--isn't he a dear?" she smiled. "he's _more_ than that," said helena, suddenly wanting to cry. she had said it unthinking, moved by the other's appeal, but to ruth it was everything, for it meant that her task was easy. she embarked with confidence. "when i first lived with him," she began, "i met a lot of well-known writers, artists, actors. he used to go out more then, and it flattered him to meet men who were famous. well, i came to the conclusion that the greatest men are the most tragic, the most pathetically childish. i suppose you _have_ to be self-centred to succeed; and then somehow, they can't get used to the little things. you know how press-notices upset poor hubert? well, they're all like that about something or other. you see, you married a man of that sort and you must make allowances." "oh, i do," said helena, leaping at self-defence. "i always did. it's _him_. he won't forgive me, won't believe i'm sorry, won't let me put things right. you don't know what this week has been. i can't endure it, really." "and so," asked ruth, "you mean to write another book?" helena for just one moment scented battle and replied more stiffly. she would not throw her arms down till she knew there was to be no fighting. "what do you expect me to do, otherwise? he won't allow me to see other men, won't talk to me himself. a little house like this is nothing. what am i to do? it isn't even as though i'd a child." ruth answered very slowly. "hugh is just a child," she said with a great tenderness. helena laughed. "a child indeed? if you could have heard him this week!" she suddenly grew hostile. "why," she demanded passionately, "should everything in the house hinge round _his_ career? why am i not to write another book? is it because i am a woman? mine has sold better than all his put together and yet i'm not to do another! i'm just to sit at home, here in this tiny room, while _he_ works and says we've no money! no, i utterly refuse. i've got an offer and i mean to take it." ruth looked troubled, feeling that she had been confident too soon. "helena," she said very gently, thrusting the name forward to make peace, "i'm not going to ask you to give up your career; i'm asking you to spare hugh his illusions." "i don't see," answered helena, suspicious. "no," said the other, and then paused. helena thought that she had finished, when she suddenly began again. "i've been alone a good deal these three years, and i have thought a lot about marriage. oh, not for myself, no" (she spoke so sadly that helena relented for a moment); "but because my life now is so different from the one i spent with hubert, and that makes one think. you know, if i'd my life to live again, i'd live it all alone--i'm afraid, yes, i'd sacrifice hubert: men are born to marry, not to live with sisters!--but i'd have my life-work." "and yet," swiftly interrupted helena in triumph, "you ask me to give up mine?" "i don't." she spoke decisively. "i only ask you not to sacrifice hubert's to it." "i still don't understand." her voice was almost resentful. "hubert married you," began ruth expansively, "because he is the sort of man who needs encouragement. he wanted some one who'd think his work wonderful and ask him how he did it. you surely see the difference? imagine his life now, for any one like him: your bigger sales, your long reviews, your photographs, his own eclipse. it is impossible." helena remembered the press-notice and spoke more obediently. "what are you asking me to do then?" "leave him." the words dropped out like heavy weights. "leave him?" cried helena, and by a natural dramatic instinct she rose from her chair. "leave him when i'm fond of him?" ruth looked very earnest. "leave him," she said again, "unless you're fond enough of him to give up your career. i tell you--i _know_--you can not have both, with hubert." "you cannot serve god and mammon," murmured helena. she did not know that she had said it. she sank down into her chair again and forced her numb brain to thought. "don't break all his illusions," she heard ruth saying, miles away. "be gentle with him if you're fond of him. you know how sensitive he is. your books, you say, sell better. how do you think he could ever endure that, he who--i tell you--is nothing but a child? it would be agony, a life-time agony; disgrace. he lives upon success, on admiration, on being the centre even of a little house. how could a man like that endure to be just helena brett's husband? ... oh no, you won't do it, you can't be so brutal. no one can forbid you your career, but go away and work it out alone. _i_ will look after hubert, if he needs me." that struck home, among these words that came dully to helena through the chaos of her thought. "so that's it," she said with a bitter laugh, longing to hurt somehow. "you're thinking of yourself." "god knows," said ruth solemnly, "i wouldn't come back willingly for half the world, fond as i am of hugh. i've _lived_ since i got right away alone beside the sea. he always trampled on me; i lay down; i haven't got your courage. i often cried myself to sleep--and he not even guessing he had been unkind! it was hideous, i see now; hideous every day of it. but i'd go through it all again, and worse, sooner than expose him to this agony." there was conviction in her tones. helena tried to arouse herself. "leave him?" she said dully. "surely there's some other way? even if he didn't mind, think of---- you talk about agony, but how can you advise me to do this, when you know how his friends----" "nothing would hurt him," said ruth earnestly, "nothing in all the world--that is the awful part--so much as this blow to his pride, this shattering of all his life-work. he thinks--he told me so--he thinks this book of yours was just a fluke, an amateur attempt; that you can never do another. oh, don't you see?" (she cried impatiently): "must i put it in words? he thinks that _he_ is a real author, you just nobody; that _he_ has studied, he has nerves and everything an artist has, but you are just a woman. he lives upon his self-conceit.... oh yes, i've said it now; i had to. it's not disloyalty. i'm fond of hubert too--everybody is, because he is so thorough in it, such a perfect child. and everybody spares him too. men of his sort are never told; everybody pities them the shock. they smile on him and like to see him so contented. they call him 'dear old hubert.' it's half pity, yes--but also it's half love. i've seen it all so clearly since i got away. i've sometimes told myself that if i had those years again, i should let him have the whole truth; but i know that i shouldn't. and _you_ won't either, helena. nobody ever does. they dream on happily, and all we others seem the selfish ones to them. it's all a comedy, when you're not near enough to see the tragedy. i've thought a lot about it, and i'm so glad now i was gentle. and _you_'ll be gentle too, i know. you'll either go away or you won't write: it's not for me to settle which; but you'll be gentle. you said just now you hadn't got a child. you have. no married woman is without a child. you won't be hard, i know, will you, because your child has been a little spoilt and things have suddenly gone wrong, and--just for a little bit--he loves to hurt his toys?" "i--i never thought of it like that," said helena, an odd look in her eyes. "i thought him so splendid and clever, so terribly above me. it all seemed so hopeless." for answer ruth went across and kissed this girl who made her feel so old. "i wish we had known each other sooner," she said. "i must go and unpack." but outside in the hall she stood for a few moments, dabbing at her eyes with a quite fashionably small handkerchief. chapter xxviii woman proposes ruth had abandoned her pleading at a clever moment, for she had left helena with a sense of pity, and pity means more to a woman than conviction. poor old hubert! she was glad now, oh so glad, that she had spared him. it had been on her tongue yesterday, when he was so contemptuous about her book being popular claptrap, herself an amateur, to answer: "well, i have found out about your own work too: it tries to be popular and isn't,"--to tell him she had also learnt that one could write without upsetting the whole household by one's fads and poses.... but in the end she hadn't. perhaps it was as ruth had said: every one would always spare him. something, in any case, had held her back, and now she was glad; for that once said, it would have been too late. she felt that ruth had spoken truly: he never could have cared for her again. poor old hugh! buoyed by this feeling, crushing under it all others, she went to her bureau and unlocked the drawer where she kept her secret manuscript. there were three chapters. she would destroy them before her mood changed. then she would go to him and say that he was right, she was not clever in the way that he was--she was an amateur. he would take days perhaps, yes even weeks, before he could forgive her quite; but it was as ruth had just said. the rivalry gone, he would soon learn to bear the rest. he would have won back his self-sufficiency, ... poor hugh! she took out the written sheets with all the feelings of a mother who sacrifices her own son, touching them gently as if even in this last hour they had been something sacred. then--weak if you will, but do not be too hard upon the-mother-soul--then she began to read.... just a few sentences. and as she read, the whole thing leapt to instant life; began to grow, as poor virginia had grown. she saw the painter, strong in a way--not geoffrey alison at all--but with a fatal vanity. yes, that would be his fall, of course. he would be all right with the women he admired; there were so many, he was safe enough: but when he met the woman who admired him----! she had not thought of it like that before. she did not know where the idea had come from now. before it went she hurriedly seized up her pen, to add a note to the confused synopsis. then she remembered. what was the use if she was just going to destroy it? if----! and its constant sequel: why? _why_ should she destroy her work? it was her work no less than hubert's work was his, however much more easily she worked. that hers came to her brain, she knew not whence, whilst he hammered out his from formulæ, was very likely nothing much against it. why had he said this second book would never sell? it interested her: why should it not interest others? how could he possibly know, when he had never seen it? it was mere jealousy of course. ruth had said practically that. she had said that he could not endure rivalry; he must be supreme, if only in a little house. he knew that her book had sold better, ever so much better than any of his own, and that was what he really minded. yes, she saw it all now; all from the beginning. he had not minded in the least that she should think him (as he still believed) self-centred, cruel, or neglectful; that had not pained him in the least, he had not really minded her publishing the book. no, what had really hurt him always--she saw now--was the book's success; what ruth had called his own eclipse. he had worked, as he said, for fifteen years; he had called it a "job"; and in one moment she had cut him out! that, helena decided in a rapid flash, was the whole mainspring of his anger. and was she to sacrifice her work to satisfy the petty vanity of such a man? was she to admit her failure, to feign life-long admiration for his work, when she knew that with practice she could almost certainly do better? no! the answer came decisively. as if to clinch it, she thrust the manuscript back in its drawer and turned the key with a decisive twist. she would not sacrifice her own career to his conceit. he had spoilt ruth's life, used her as a housekeeper until she was too old for anybody else; then turned her out--and now he thought he could spoil hers. and every one would spare him, because they were sorry! why should she spare him? why should she be sorry? helena stood with her fingers still upon the key, transfixed by the enormity of this new thought. why should she either smother her ambition or else creep away, sparing him the reason; leaving ruth to be his victim once again?--poor ruth, emerging into life again, escaped from this vampire who had left her an old withered woman at the age of forty. no, she would not. others might spare him; _she_ would tell the truth. she would go now, whilst ruth was upstairs, and would tell him what she, what ruth, what everybody thought. she would tell him that he was murdering the love of those who loved him by his own selfish blindness; that all this nonsense about moods and inspiration was mere pose, that you could write quite well wherever your two candlesticks were put; that every one saw through him but himself; that he should be proud of his wife's success, not jealous, if he had a spark of decent feeling in him; would tell him she too was ambitious, though a woman, she too had a life to live; that she was bored all day, with him at work, and now she meant to have her own work too; that zoë had been right--yes, had been helena, helena not then but helena as she was now; that she saw now, as zoë had declared, she had been nothing but a background to his work. now that was over and she would sacrifice herself no longer. oh yes, and she would tell him the rest too--that she was fond of him, would always be; admired him for his strength as much as she despised the flabby mr. alison of whom he had been jealous; that she would try to make him happy, comfortable and happy, not neglect the house; and they would be proud of each other's work, and even if she was not a success, her little earnings would all help to pay those horrid bills. and if this did not satisfy him, if he could not live like that--well, then, there was what ruth had said.... when he had heard the truth, the choice should lie with him! he might choose then between the sister and the author-wife. but they must have the truth. she would not sacrifice poor ruth to him again. he had been spared enough already. the truth would make him happier. what could a man so selfish know of happiness? poor ruth, contented with her mission, laying on her bed a dress that would astonish hubert by contrast with the prim grey horrors of old time, little guessed how too thoroughly she had let in the light to helena's young eyes! helena released the key and moved with firm resolve into the hall. she dared not stop to think. she strode across the narrow carpet and boldly turned the handle of his sacred room at this forbidden hour. she did not even knock. there is much courage in a symbol. chapter xxix helena brett's career helena stood at the door, as on the day when she had lost her watch; and now again each detail stamped itself instantly upon her brain. but this time hubert was not working. he sat at his desk, his hands stretched forward to hold open a paper laid before him. helena even observed the wrapper from which it had come, rolled up quite tight beside the blotting-pad. she saw hubert's air of rapt attention and noticed that he had not heard her enter. she saw two letters unopened on the table, and she thought how like him it was to open first a paper almost certainly sent him because it had some mention of himself. yes, she could see now the blue pencil marks beside the paragraphs that he was reading. and they were exclamation marks.... then, last of all, she recognised the paper. it was _people and paragraphs_--and he was reading that comment on the hubert bretts! she had destroyed the cutting; never thought of his dear friends. in one moment all the words rehearsed died on her tongue. afterwards perhaps, but for the moment she must comfort him. she could not hurt him more just now. "oh, hubert," she cried, running to him and putting her hand impulsively upon his shoulder, all forgotten save the instinct to console, "they haven't sent you that?" he turned round with quite a dazed look, apparently not in the least surprised to see her there. "oh yes," he said in a hard voice, "there'll be lots of those. it's only just beginning." he stared dully at the spiteful, vulgar, words. she knew what they must mean to him and once again her soul veered round to ruth's mood of pity--pity and regret. it was her fault, this, she knew that; he had been right all through. he was so right and strong, and that was partly where her anger lay. she could have forgiven a weak idiot like ally better. she looked down at him; wavering, torn by two instincts, doubtful. she looked. she could not see his face, but on the blotting-pad there dropped two tears. she had not known that men could cry. those two damp spots that spread on the green pad beneath her fascinated eyes told her of what his agony of tortured pride must be--and brought back to her memory those words of ruth's; "he's nothing but a child: be gentle." he was _not_ strong and right. he did _not_ have a soul of iron, this man: _not_ despise her as a weakling. he was weak himself. he was a child and wanted sympathy.... some other words of his came drifting back to her as she stared blankly at those spots of darker green and he sat with his head averted--was it in anger or in shame? he never would have married a woman who wrote: hated clever women! all that came back to her. had she played fair? he wanted somebody to help, encourage; could she be his rival? for better, for worse---- suddenly she found herself talking. "hugh," she was saying, back on the words of a yet earlier rehearsal, "i'm so sorry. i've been such a beast, and i _have_ wanted so to do the proper thing. i've been a beastly wife to you, and now i've come to say you're right. i can't finish the new book; i can't get on at all." she paused and said deliberately; "i'm just an amateur." and in one moment, before she had finished, he was on his feet. he had his arms round her with all of his old love, and held her at arms' length, and looked at her with pride, as though she had just spoken of anything except her failure. "darling little girl," he said, "don't, don't, you make me feel so bad. don't say you've been a beast. do you think _i_ don't know what i've been to you? do you think i don't know how true the whole book was?" she smiled back at him, and he never saw the little bitterness or pathos there was in it, as she heard his old word of tolerant affection--"little." he had not used that word for ages.... he drew her to him and kissed her very lovingly. "oh, helena," he murmured, close beside her ear, "if only you knew how i've missed you, how miserable i've been, how i have loathed myself. you splendid people think we horrid selfish beasts don't realise our vices. oh yes, we do though, those of us who think, but we hope no one else observes them. i knew that i had bullied ruth, sacrificed her life to mine, and i vowed when i married you--but what's the use? you never change your nature, and i'm just a selfish swine." "don't say such awful things, hugh," she said gently. he laughed. "i'd say them for ten years as penance if it did any good. but now you've told me, now i know you know, it's easier. when i get selfish, when i begin forgetting _your_ side of the thing, you'll have to tell me; see? and if you don't, well i've still got your copy of _the confessions of_----" but she stopped his mouth with a kiss. "hugh," she cried, going to the table and taking up the paper which had changed their lives, "we'll never mention that vile book again, and as for those who do"--she tore the paper savagely across. "and you must _not_ say you are selfish. it's only that your work----" "my work!" interrupted hubert, with a discordant laugh. "i've done none this last week. i've thought--thought about myself, and that's good when you're forty but it isn't pleasant. do you know what is wrong with me?" "nothing," she said gaily, for he spoke with a cavernal gloom and she desired to change his mood. he utterly ignored her. "i took a long time finding myself out," he answered. "that's all. everybody starts, about eighteen, thinking he's a genius and bound to end up on olympus; then about twenty-five, we settle we're just common fools and take a city job. but i did not. i've gone on in what they call a fool's paradise; feeding upon praise and threatening those who did the other thing, until i really thought that i was some one great! boyd always _said_ that i was undeveloped; there was something lacking.... but i've got it now. i think i got it when you cut me out as author!" "don't, please," she cried, "you mustn't talk like that." "i must," he answered gloomily. "i've given half my life to writing--and only just found out that i can't write!" she came to him then. "look here, dear," she said, taking his arm in quite a mother's way, "you're just beginning your success. men never _do_ succeed till forty. you've just found yourself. you're going to do splendid things and you will let me help." "what? you and i collaborate?" was there a tinge of the old-time suspicion? "no," she said quickly. "i shan't ever write again; that's done with; we'll just talk the stories over when we're out upon our dear old rambles, and then, you see, you'll get the woman's view as well. and possibly i may get plots sometimes, although i couldn't write them." "then we'll sign helena and hubert brett," he said in swift penitence, forcing himself to nobility. "that really does sound excellent!" "no," she replied slowly, "you must always sign. you see your name is known. helena brett has never written anything, and zoë baskerville is dead--thank goodness!" she forced herself to smile. she must remain the amateur! that touch of pity, she knew, must be there if things were ever to be right again.... perhaps he guessed a little, for suddenly he clasped her in his arms again. "my god, helena," he cried passionately, "how insignificant and mean you make me feel! you women can forgive, and we're so obstinate. you've spared me such a lot, i know. if you had told me all i know you could, i never should have cared for you again! it's pretty damnable, that, isn't it? but swine like me go on repenting and repenting, and then we're twice as bad again. we're cursed, i think; we----" she put her hand over his mouth. "it's over now," she said: "time up," and laughed, herself again. he looked at her as at some miracle beyond his understanding. "and you won't ever long to--well, to be zoë again?" she looked him full in the face, and her eyes smiled happiness. "no," she said, "_i_'ve found myself out as well. i'm nothing but a woman after all!" "the dearest woman in the whole world," he replied and kissed her. ruth knocked at the door. the end printed by william clowes and sons, limited, london and beccles. _books by desmond coke_ novels the comedy of age the call the pedestal the golden key beauty for ashes studies of boy nature the bending of a twig wilson's humour (_ex hypothesi_) sandford of merton the dog from clarkson's the cure stories for boys the house prefect the school across the road the bending of a twig (_revised edn._) of the digital library@villanova university (http://digital.library.villanova.edu/)) the fiction factory by john milton edwards ¶ being the experience of a writer who, for twenty-two years, has kept a story-mill grinding successfully.... the editor company ridgewood, new jersey copyright by the editor company. the fiction factory contents of chapters. page. i. aut fiction, aut nullus ii. as the twig is bent iii. methods that make or mar iv. getting hooked up with a big house v. nickel thrills and dollar shockers vi. making good by hard work vii. inspiration alias industry viii. the wolf on the sky line ix. raw material x. the wolf at the door xi. when fiction is stranger than truth xii. fortune begins to smile xiii. our friend the t. w. xiv. fresh fields and pastures new xv. from the factory's files xvi. growing prosperity xvii. ethics of the nickel novel xviii. keeping everlastingly at it xix. love your work for the work's sake xx. the lengthening list of patrons xxi. a writer's reading xxii. new sources of profit xxiii. the injustice of it xxiv. what shall we do with it xxv. extracts grave, gay, wise and otherwise xxvi. patrons and profits for twenty-two years the writer to the reader it was in that john milton edwards (who sets his hand to this book of experiences and prefers using the third person to overworking the egotistical pronoun) turned wholly to his pen as a means of livelihood. in this connection, of course, the word "pen" is figurative. what he really turned to was his good friend, the typewriter. for two years previous to this (to him) momentous event he had hearkened earnestly to the counsel that "literature is a good stick but a poor crutch," and had cleaved to a position as paymaster for a firm of contractors solely because of the pay envelope that insured food and raiment. spare hours alone were spent in his fiction factory. in the summer of , however, when his evening and sunday work brought returns that dwarfed his salary as paymaster, he had a heart to heart talk with mrs. john milton edwards, and, as a result, the paymaster-crutch was dropped by the wayside. this came to pass not without many fears and anxieties, and later there arrived gray days when the literary pace became unsteady and john milton turned wistful eyes backward in the direction of his discarded crutch. but he never returned to pick it up. from then till now john milton edwards has worked early and late in his factory, and his output has supported himself and wife and enabled him to bear a number of other financial responsibilities. there have been fat years and lean--years when plenty invited foolish extravagance and years when poverty compelled painful sacrifices--yet john milton edwards can truly say that the work has been its own exceeding great reward. with never a "best seller" nor a successful play to run up his income, john milton has, in a score and two years of work, wrested more than $ , from the tills of the publishers. short stories, novelettes, serials, books, a few moving picture scenarios and a little verse have all contributed to the sum total. industry was rowelled by necessity, and when a short story must fill the flour barrel, a poem buy a pair of shoes or a serial take up a note at the bank, the muse is provided with an atmosphere at which genius balks. true, genius has emerged triumphant from many a grub street attic, but that was in another day when conditions were different from what they are now. in these twentieth century times the writer must give the public what the publisher thinks the public wants. although the element of quality is a _sine qua non_, it seems not to be incompatible with the element of quantity. it is hoped that this book will be found of interest to writers, not alone to those who have arrived but also to those who are on the way. writers with name and fame secure may perhaps be entertained, while writers who are struggling for recognition may discover something helpful here and there throughout john milton edwards' twenty-two years of literary endeavor. and is it too fair a hope that the reader of fiction will here find something to his taste? he has an acquaintance with the finished article, and it may chance that he has the curiosity to discover how the raw material was taken, beaten into shape and finally laid before his eyes in his favorite periodical. john milton edwards, in the pages that follow, will spin the slender thread of a story recounting his successes and failures. extracts of correspondence between him and his publishers will be introduced, and other personal matters will be conjured with, by way of illustrating the theme and giving the text a helpful value. this slender thread of narrative will be broken at intervals to permit of sandwiching in a few chapters not germane to the story but _en rapport_ with the work which made the story possible. in other words, while life goes forward within the factory-walls it will not be amiss to give some attention to the factory itself, to its equipment and methods, and to anything of possible interest that has to do with its output. and finally, of course john milton edwards is not the author's real name. shielded by a _nom de plume_, the author's experiences here chronicled may be of the most intimate nature. in point of fact, they will be helpful and entertaining in a direct ratio with their sincerity and frankness. "a little gift" a little gift i have of words, a little talent, lord, is all, and yet be mine the faith that girds an humble heart for duty's call. where genius soars to distant skies, and plumes herself in proud acclaim, o thou, let plodding talent prize the modest goal, the lesser fame. let this suffice, make this my code, as i go forward day by day, to cheer one heart upon life's road, to ease one burden by the way. i would not scale the mountain-peak, but i would have the strength of ten to labor for the poor and weak, and win my way to hearts of men. a little gift thou gavest me, a little talent, lord, is all, yet humble as my art may be i hold it waiting for thy call. september , . john milton edwards. the fiction factory i. aut fiction, aut nullus. "well, my dear," said john milton edwards, miserably uncertain and turning to appeal to his wife, "which shall it be--to write or not to write?" "to write," was the answer, promptly and boldly, "to do nothing else but write." john milton wanted her to say that, and yet he did not. her conviction, orally expressed, had all the ring of true metal; yet her husband, reflecting his own inner perplexities, heard a false note suggesting the base alloy of uncertainty. "hadn't we better think it over?" he quibbled. "you've been thinking it over for two years, john, and this month is the first time your returns from your writing have ever been more than your salary at the office. if you can be so successful when you are obliged to work nights and sundays--and most of the time with your wits befogged by office routine--what could you not do if you spent all your time in your fiction factory?" "it may be," ventured john milton, "that i could do better work, snatching a few precious moments from those everlasting pay-rolls, than by giving all my time and attention to my private factory." "is that logical?" inquired mrs. john milton. "i don't know, my dear, whether it's logical or not. we're dealing with a psychological mystery that has never been broken to harness. suppose i have the whole day before me and sit down at my typewriter to write a story. well and good. but getting squared away with a fresh sheet over the platen isn't the whole of it. the happy idea must be evolved. what if the happy idea does not come when i am ready for it? happy ideas, you know, have a disagreeable habit of hiding out. there's no hard and fast rule, that i am aware, for capturing a happy idea at just the moment it may be most in demand. there's lightning in a change of work, the sort of lightning that clears the air with a tonic of inspiration. when i'm paymastering the hardest i seem to be almost swamped with ideas for the story mill. query: will the mill grind out as good a grist if it grinds continuously? if i were sure--" "it stands to reason," mrs. edwards maintained stoutly, "that if you can make $ a month running the mill nights and sundays, you ought to be able to make a good deal more than that with all the week days added." "provided," john milton qualified, "my fountain of inspiration will flow as freely when there is nothing to hinder it as it does now when i have it turned off for twelve hours out of the twenty-four." "why shouldn't it?" "i don't know, my dear," john milton admitted, "unless it transpires that my inspiration isn't strong enough to be drawn on steadily." "fudge," exclaimed mrs. edwards. "and then," her husband proceeded, "let us consider another phase of the question. the demand may fall off. the chances are that it will fall off the moment the gods become aware of the fact that i am depending on the demand for our bread and butter. whenever a thing becomes absolutely essential to you, fate immediately obliterates every trail that leads to it, and you go wandering desperately back and forth, getting more and more discouraged until--" "until you drop in your tracks," broke in mrs. edwards, "and give up--a quitter." "quitter" is a mean word. there's something about it that jostles you, and treads on your toes. "i don't think i'd prove a quitter," said john milton, "even if i did get lost in a labyrinth of hard luck. it's the idea of losing you along with me that hurts." "i'll risk _that_." "this is a panic year," john milton went on, "and money is hard to get. it is hardly an auspicious time for tearing loose from a regular pay-day." john milton and his wife lived in chicago, and the firm for which john milton worked had managed to keep afloat by having an account in two banks. when a note fell due at one bank, the firm borrowed from the other to pay it. thus, by borrowing from peter to pay paul, and from paul to pay peter, the contractors juggled with their credit and kept it good. times were hard enough in all truth, yet they were not so hard in chicago as in other parts of the country. the world's columbian exposition brought a flood of visitors to the city, and a flood of cash. "bother the panic!" jeered mrs. edwards. "it won't interfere with your work. pleasant fiction is more soothing than hard facts. people will read all the more just to forget their troubles." "i'm pretty solid with the firm," said john milton, veering to another tack. "i'm getting twelve hundred a year, now, with an extra hundred for taking care of the colonel's books." "is there any future to it?" "there is. i can buy stock in the company, identify myself with it more and more, and in twenty or thirty years, perhaps, move into a brownstone front on easy street." "no, you couldn't!" declared mrs. edwards. "why not?" "why, because your heart wouldn't be in your work. ever since you were old enough to know your own mind you have wanted to be a writer. when you were twelve years old you were publishing a little paper for boys--" "it was a four-page paper about the size of lady's handkerchief," laughed john milton, "and it lasted for two issues." "well," insisted his wife, "you've been writing stories more or less all your life, and if you are ever a success at anything it will be in the fiction line. you are now twenty-six years old, and if you make your mark as an author it's high time you were about it. don't you think so? if i'm willing to chance it, john, you surely ought to be." "all right," was the answer, "it's a 'go.'" and thus it was that john milton edwards reached his momentous decision. perhaps you, who read these words, have been wrestling soulfully with the same question--vacillating between authorship as a vocation or as an avocation. edwards made his decision eighteen years ago. at that time conditions were different; and it is doubtful whether, had he faced conditions as they are now, he would have decided to run his fiction factory on full time. "=an eye for an eye.=" a writer whose stories have been used in the munsey publications, _pearson's_ and other magazines, writes: "how is this as an illustration of timeliness, or the personal element in writing?--i went in to see mr. matthew white, jr., one day with a story and he said he couldn't read it because he had a sore eye. i had an eye for that eye as fiction, so i sat down and wrote a story in two hours' time about an editor who couldn't read any stories on account of his bum lamp, whereby he nearly missed the best story for the year. mr. white was interested in the story mainly because he had a sore eye himself and was in full sympathy with the hero. i took the story down and read it aloud to him, selling it, of course. the story was called, 'when the editor's eye struck.'" (talk about making the most of your opportunities!) * * * * * _the bookman_, somewhere, tells of a lady in the middle west who caught the fiction fever and wrote in asking what price was paid for stories. to the reply that "$ a thousand was paid for good stories" she made written response: "why, it takes me a week to write one story, and $ for a thousand weeks' work looks so discouraging that i guess i'd better try something else." * * * * * _poeta nascitur; non fit._ this has been somewhat freely translated by one who should know, as "the poet is born; not paid." ii. as the twig is bent edwards' earliest attempt at fiction was a dramatic effort. the play was in three acts, was entitled "roderigo, the pirate chief," and was written at the age of . the young playwright was roderigo, the play was given in the loft of the edwards barn, and twenty-five pins was the price of admission (thirty if the pins were crooked). the neighborhood suffered a famine in pins for a week after the production of the play. the juvenile element clamored to have the performance repeated, but the patrons' parents blocked the move by bribing the company with a silver dollar. it was cheaper to pay over the dollar than to buy back several thousand pins at monopoly prices. in "simon girty; or, the border boys of the west" was offered. the first performance (which was also the last) was given in ottawa, kansas, and the modest fee of admission was cents. the play was very favorably received and might have had an extended run had not the mothers of the "border boys" discovered that they were killing indians with blank cartridges. gathering in force, the mothers stormed the barn and added a realistic climax to the fourth act by spanking simon girty and disarming his trusty "pards." shortly after this, the musty records show that edwards turned from the drama to narrative fiction, and endeavored successfully to get into print. the following, copied from an engraved certificate, offers evidence of his budding aspirations: frank leslie's boys' and girls' weekly. award of merit. this is to certify that john milton edwards, ottawa, kansas, has been awarded honorable mention for excellence in literary composition. new york, oct. , . frank leslie. this "honorable mention" from the publisher of a paper, which young edwards looked forward to from week to week and read and re-read with fascination and delight, must have inoculated him for all time with the fiction virus. forthwith he began publishing a story paper on a hektograph. saturday was the day of publication, and the office of publication was the loft of the edwards' barn. even at that early day the author understood the advantage of holding "leave-offs"[a] in serial work. he was altogether too successful with his leave-offs, for his readers, gasping for the rest of the story and unable to wait for the next issue of the paper, mobbed the office and forced him, with a threat of dire things, to tell them the rest of the yarn in advance of publication. after that, of course, publication was unnecessary. it was a problem with young edwards, about this time, to secure enough blank paper for his scribbling needs. two old ledgers, only partly filled with accounts fell into his hands, and he used them for his callow essays at authorship. he has those ledgers now, and derives considerable amusement in looking through them. they prove that he was far from being a prodigy, and reflect credit on him for whipping his slender talents into shape for at least a commercial success in later life. consider this: scene iii. j. b.--we made a pretty good haul that time, jim. b. j.--yes, i'd like to make a haul like that every night. we must have got about $ , . j. b.--now we will go and get our boots blacked, then go and get us a suit of clothes, and then skip to the west indies. here a $ , robbery had been committed and the thieves were calmly discussing getting their boots blacked and replenishing their wardrobe (one suit of clothes between them seems to have been enough) before taking to flight. shades of sherlock, how easily a boy of makes business for the police department! or consider this gem from act ii. the aforesaid "j. b." and "b. j." have evidently been "pinched" while getting their boots blacked or while buying their suit of clothes: j. b.--we're in the jug at last, jim, and i'm afraid we'll be sentenced to be shot. b. j.--don't be discouraged, bill. enter sleek, the detective. sleek.--we've got you at last, eh? j. b.--you'll never get the money, just the same. sleek.--we'll shoot you if you don't tell where it is like a dog. then here's something else which seems to prove that young edwards occasionally fell into rhyme: oh, why cut down those forests, our forests old and grand? and oh, why cheat the indians out of all their land? enclosed by civilization, surrounded they by towns, calmly when this life is done they seek their hunting-grounds! john milton edwards has always had a place in his heart for the red man, and another for his country's vanishing timber. he is to be congratulated on his youthful sentiments if not on the way they were expressed. in the edwards family removed to chicago. there were but three in the family--the father, the mother, and john milton. the boy was taken from the ottawa high school and, as soon as they were all comfortably settled in the "windy city," john milton made what he has since believed to be the mistake of his career. his father offered him his choice of either a university or a business education. he chose to spend two years in bryant & stratton's business college. his literary career would have been vastly helped had he taken the other road and matriculated at either harvard or yale. he had the opportunity and turned his back on it. he was writing, more or less, all the time he was a student at bryant & stratton's. the school grounded him in double-entry bookkeeping, in commercial law, and in shorthand and typewriting. when he left the business college he found employment with a firm of subscription book publishers, as stenographer. there came a disagreement between the two partners of the firm, and the young stenographer was offered for $ , the retiring partner's interest. the elder edwards, who would have had to furnish the $ , , could not see anything alluring in the sale of books through agents, and the deal fell through. two years later, while john milton was working for a railroad company as ticket agent at $ a month, his old friend of the subscription book business dropped in on him and showed him a sworn statement prepared for dun and bradstreet. _he had cleared $ , in two years!_ had john milton bought the retiring partner's interest he would have been worth half a million before he had turned thirty. the fiction bee, however, was continually buzzing in john milton's brain. he had no desire to succeed at anything except authorship. leaving the railroad company, he went to work for a boot and shoe house as bill clerk, at $ a week. the death of his father, at this time, came as a heavy blow to young edwards; not only that, but it brought him heavy responsibilities and led him seriously to question the advisibility of ever making authorship--as he had secretly hoped--a vocation. his term as bill clerk was a sort of probation, allowing the young man time, in leisure hours, further to try out his talent for fiction. he was anxious to determine if he could make it a commercial success, and so justify himself in looking forward to it as a life work. the elder edwards had been a rugged, self-made man with no patience for anything that was not strictly "business." he measured success by an honorable standard of dollars and cents. for years previous to his death he had been accustomed to see his son industriously scribbling, with not so much as a copper cent realized from all that expenditure of energy. naturally out of sympathy with what he conceived to be a waste of time and effort, edwards, sr., did not hesitate to express himself forcibly. on one occasion he looked into his son's room, saw him feverishly busy at his desk and exclaimed, irascibly, "damn the verses!" young edwards' mother, on the other hand, was well educated and widely read; indeed, in a limited way, she had been a writer herself, and had contributed in earlier life to _harper's magazine_. she could see that perhaps a pre-natal influence was shaping her son's career, and understood how he might be working out his apprenticeship. thus she became the gentle apologist, excusing the boy's unrewarded labors, on the one hand, and the father's _cui bono_ ideas, on the other. _the chicago times_, in its sunday edition, used a story by young edwards. it was not paid for but it was published, and the elder edwards surreptitiously secured many copies of the paper and sent them to distant friends. thus, although he would not admit it, he showed his pride in his son's small achievement. from the boot and shoe house young edwards went back to the railroad company again; from there, when the railroad company closed its chicago office, he went to a firm of wholesalers in coke and sewer-pipe; and, later, he engaged as paymaster with the firm of contractors. between the coke and sewer-pipe and the pay-rolls he wedged in a few days of reporting for _the chicago morning news_; and on a certain friday, the last of february, he got married, and was back at his office desk on the following monday morning. the first story for which edwards received payment was published in _the detroit free press_, sept. , . the payment was $ . in april, the same year, the _free press_ inaugurated a serial story contest. edwards entered two stories, one under a _nom de plume_. neither won a prize, but both were bought and published. for the first, published in , he was paid $ on feb. , ; and for the second, published a year later, he was paid $ . with the opening installment of the first serial the _free press_ published a photograph of the author over a stickful of biography. on another page appeared a paragraph in boldface type announcing the discovery of a new star in the literary heavens. the spirit of john milton edwards swelled within him. he feasted his eyes on his printed picture (the rapid newspaper presses had made a smudge of it), he read and re-read his lean biography (lean because not much had happened to him at that time) and he gloried over the boldface type with its message regarding the new star (he was to learn later that many similar stars are born to blush unseen) and he felt himself a growing power in the world of letters. verily, a pat on the back is a thing to conjure with. it is more ennobling, sometimes, than a kingly tap with a swordpoint accompanied by the words, "i dub thee knight." to the fine glow of youthful enthusiasm it opens broad vistas and offers a glimpse of glittering heights. even though that hand-pat inspires dreams never to be realized, who shall say that a little encouragement, bringing out the best in us, does not result in much good? and in this place john milton edwards would make a request of the reader of fiction. if you are pleased with a story, kindly look twice at the author's name so you may recall it pleasantly if it chances to come again under your eye. if you are a great soul, given to the scattering of benefactions, you might even go a little farther: at the expense of a postage stamp and a little time, address a few words of appreciation to the author in care of his publisher. you wist not, my beloved, what weight of gold your words may carry! from the summer of ' to the summer of ' edwards wrote many stories and sketches for _the detroit free press_, _puck_, _truth_, _the ladies' world_, _yankee blade_, _frank leslie's popular monthly_, _chatter_, _saturday night_, and other periodicals. in he was receiving $ a month for contributions to a little chicago weekly called _figaro_; and, during the same year, he found a market which was to influence profoundly a decade of work and his monetary returns; james elverson paid him $ for a serial to be used in _saturday night_. undoubtedly it was this serial that pointed edwards toward the sensational story papers. a second serial, sold to _saturday night_, oct. , , brought $ ; while a third, paid for july , , netted a like amount. these transactions carried the true ring of commercial success. apart from myth and fable, there is no more compelling siren song in history than the chink of silver. edwards, burdened with responsibilities, gave ear to it. the serial story, published in the _free press_ in , had made friends for edwards. among these friends was alfred b. tozer, editor of _the chicago ledger_. through mr. tozer, edwards received commissions for stories covering a period of years. the payment was $ . a thousand words--modest, indeed, but regular and dependable.[b] from to edwards was laboring hard--all day long at his clerical duties and then until midnight in his fiction factory. the pay derived from his fiction output was small, (_the ladies' world_ gave him $ for a , -word story published march , , and _the yankee blade_ sent him $ on jan. , , for a story of , words), but edwards was prolific, and often two or three sketches a day came through his typewriter. early in , however, he saw that he was at the parting of the ways. he could no longer serve two masters, for the office work was suffering. he realized that he was not giving the contracting firm that faithful service and undivided energy which they had the right to expect, and it was up to him to do one line of work and one only. "=slips and tips=" one of mr. white's authors who had never been in europe set out to write a story of a traveller who determined to get along without tipping. the author described his traveller's horrible plight while being shown around the paris bastille--which historic edifice had been razed to the ground some two centuries before the story was written! the author received a tip from mr. white on his tipping story, a tip never to do it again. footnotes: [a] "leave-off"--the place where a serial is broken, and the words "to be continued in our next" appear. mr. matthew white, jr., editor of the =argosy=, is supposed to have coined the expression. at any rate, mr. white has a great deal to do with "leave-offs" and ought to know what to call them. [b] in these later times, with other hands than those of mr. tozer at the helm, =the chicago ledger= seems to have become the sargasso sea of the popular fictionist--a final refuge for story derelicts. the craft that grows leaky and water-logged through much straining and wearisome beating about from port to port, has often and often come to anchor in the columns of the =ledger=. iii. methods that make or mar. edwards has no patience with those writers who think they are of a finer or different clay from the rest of mankind. genius, however, may be forgiven many things, and the artistic temperament may be pardoned an occasional lapse from the conventional. this is advertising, albeit of a very indifferent sort, and advertising is a stepping-stone to success. the fact remains that true genius does not brand with eccentricity the intelligence through which it expresses itself. the time has passed when long hair and a windsor tie proclaim a man a favorite of the muses. edwards knows a young writer who believes himself a genius and who has, indeed, met with some wonderful successes, but he spoils an otherwise fine character by slovenliness of dress and by straining for a so-called bohemian effect. bohemia, of course, is merely a state of mind; its superficial area is fanciful and contracted; it is wildly unconventional, not to say immoral; and no right-thinking, right-feeling artist will drink at its sloppy tables or associate with its ribald-tongued habitues. the young writer here mentioned has been doped and shanghaied. as soon as he comes to himself he will escape to more creditable surroundings. there is another writer of edwards' acquaintance who, by profane and blasphemous utterance, seeks to convince the public that he has the divine fire. his language, it is true, shows "character," but not of the sort that he imagines. a writer, to be successful, must humble himself with the lowly or walk pridefully with the great. for purposes of study he may be all things to all men, but let him see to it that he is not warped in his own self-appraisal. never, unless he wishes to make himself ridiculous, should he build a pedestal, climb to its crest and pose. if he is worthy of a pedestal the public will see that it is properly constructed. a writer is neither better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. he is a manufacturer. after gathering his raw product, he puts it through the mill of his imagination, retorts from the mass the personal equation, refines it with a sufficient amount of commonsense and runs it into bars--of bullion, let us say. if the product is good it passes at face value and becomes a medium of exchange. any merchant or professional man who conducts his business with industry, taste and skill is the honorable and worthy peer of the man who writes and writes well. every clean, conscientious calling has its artistic side and profits through the application of business principles. nowadays, for a writer to scribble his effusions in pale ink with a scratchy pen on both sides of a letter-sheet is not to show genius but ignorance. if he is a good manufacturer he should be proud of his product; and a good idea is doubly good if carefully clothed. edwards counts it a high honor that, in half a dozen editorial offices, his copy has been called "copperplate." "i always like to see one of your manuscripts come in," said mr. white, of _the argosy_. "here's another of edwards' stories," said mr. harriman of _the red book_,[c] "send it to the composing room just as it is." such a condition of affairs certainly is worth striving for. as a rule the young writer does not give this matter of neatness of manuscript the proper attention. is he careful to count the letters and spaces in his story title and figure to place the title in the exact middle of the page? it is not difficult. when a line is drawn between title, writer's name and the body of the story, it is easy to set the carriage pointer on " " and touch hyphens until you reach " ." it is easy to number the pages of a manuscript in red with a bichrome ribbon, and to put the number in the middle of the sheet. nor is it very difficult to turn out clean copy--merely a little more industry with a rubber eraser, or perhaps the re-writing of an occasional sheet. after a manuscript is written, the number of words computed, and a publication selected wherewith to try its fortunes, a record should be made. very early in his literary career edwards devised a scheme for keeping track of his manuscripts. he had a thousand slips printed and bound strongly into two books of slips each. each slip consisted of a stub for the record and a form letter, with perforations so that they could easily be torn apart. record of ms., no. ...... title.......................... class.......................... no. words...................... sent to........date............ returned......condition........ sent to........date............ returned......condition........ sent to........date............ returned......condition........ sent to........date............ returned......condition........ accepted....................... am't paid......date............ remarks........................ ............................... blank street, chicago, ill.,........ .. editor............. ................. .................. dear sir: the inclosed ms., entitled.. ............................... containing about.........words, and signed..................... is offered at your usual rates. if not available please return. stamped and addressed envelope inclosed. very truly yours, john milton edwards. every manuscript was numbered and the numbers, running consecutively, were placed in the upper right-hand corners of the stubs. this made it easy to refer to the particular stub which held the record of a returned story. edwards used this form of record keeping for years. even after he came to look upon a form letter with a manuscript as a waste of effort, he continued to use the stubs. about the year card indexes came into vogue, and now a box of cards is sufficient for keeping track of a thousand manuscripts. it is far and away more convenient than the "stub" system. each story has its card, and each card gives the manuscript's life history; title, when written, number of words, amount of postage required for its going and coming through the mail, when and where sent, when returned, when accepted and when paid for, together with brief notes regarding the story's vicissitudes or final good fortune. after a story is sold the card serves as a memorandum, and all these memoranda, totalled at the end of the year, form an accurate report of the writer's income. in submitting his stories edwards always sends the serials flat, between neatly-cut covers of tarboard girded with a pair of stout rubber bands. this makes a handy package and brings the long story to the editor's attention in a most convenient form for reading. with double-spacing edwards' typewriter will place words on the ordinary - / by sheet. serials of , words, covering sheets, and even novelettes of half that length, travel more safely and more comfortably by express. short stories, running up to --or in rare instances, to --pages are folded twice, inclosed in a stamped and self-addressed no. , cloth-lined envelope and this in turn slipped into a no. cloth-lined envelope. both these envelopes open at the end, which does not interfere with the typed superscription. by always using typewriter paper and envelopes of the same weight, edwards knows exactly how much postage a story of so many sheets will require. in wrapping his serial stories for transportation by express, edwards is equally careful to make them into neat bundles. for cents he can secure enough light, strong wrapping paper for a dozen packages, and cents will procure a ball of upholsterer's twine that will last a year. another helpful wrinkle, and one that makes for neatness, is an address label printed on gummed paper. edwards' name and address appear at the top, following the word "from." below are blank lines for name and address of the consignee. in his twenty-two years of work in the fiction field edwards has made certain of this, that there is not a detail in the preparation or recording or forwarding of a manuscript that can be neglected. competition is keen. big names, without big ideas back of them, are not so prone to carry weight. it's the _stuff_, itself, that counts; yet a business-like way of doing things carries a mute appeal to an editor before even a line of the manuscript has been read. it is a powerful appeal, and all on the writer's side. is it necessary to dwell upon the importance of a carbon copy of every story offered through the mails, or entrusted to the express companies? edwards lost the sale of a $ serial when an installment of the story went into a railroad wreck at shoemaker, kansas, and, blurred and illegible, was delivered in new york one week after another writer had written another installment to take its place. in this case the carbon copy served only as an aid in collecting $ from the express company. at another time, when the _woman's home companion_ was publishing a short serial by edwards, one complete chapter was lost through some accident in the composing room. upon receipt of a telegram, edwards dug the carbon copy of the missing chapter out of his files, sent it on to new york, and presently received an extra $ with the editor's compliments. "=my brow shall be garnished with bays.=" america editorial rooms, chicago. aug. , . dear mr. edwards:-- in regard to the enclosed verse, we would take pleasure in publishing it, but before doing so we beg to call your attention to the use of the word "garnish" in the last line of the first verse, and the second line of the second. the general idea of "garnish" is to decorate, or embellish. we say that a beefsteak is "garnished" with mushrooms, and so it would hardly be right to use the word in the sense of crowning a poet with a wreath of bays. you will pardon us for calling attention to this, but you know that the most serious verse can be spoiled by just such a slip, which of course is made without its character occurring to the mind of the writer. yours respectfully, slason thompson & co. footnotes: [c] mr. harriman is now with =the ladies' home journal=. iv. getting "hooked up" with a big house. it was during the winter of - that edwards happened to step into the editorial office of a chicago story paper for which he had been writing. his lucky stars were most auspiciously grouped that morning. we shall call the editor amos jones. that was not his name, but it will serve. edwards found jones in a very exalted frame of mind. before him, on his desk, lay an open letter and a bundle of newspaper clippings. after greeting edwards, jones turned and struck the letter triumphantly with the flat of his hand. "this," he exclaimed, "means ten thousand a year to yours truly!" he was getting $ a week as editor of the story paper, and a sudden jump from $ , to $ , a year was sufficiently unsettling to make his mood excusable. edwards extended congratulations and was allowed to read the letter. it was from a firm of publishers in new york city, rated up in the hundreds of thousands by the commercial agencies. these publishers, who are to figure extensively in the pages that follow, will be referred to as harte & perkins. they had sent the clippings to jones, inclosed in the letter, and had requested him to use them in writing stories for a five-cent library. jones' enthusiasm communicated itself to edwards. for four years the latter had been digging away, in his humble fiction factory, and his literary labors had brought a return averaging $ a month. this was excellent for piecing out the office salary, but in the glow of jones' exultation edwards began to dream dreams. when he left the editor's office edwards was cogitating deeply. he had attained a little success in writing and believed that if jones could make ten thousand a year grinding out copy for harte & perkins he could. edwards did not ask jones to recommend him to harte & perkins. jones was a good fellow, but writers are notoriously jealous of their prerogatives. after staking out a claim, the writer-man guards warily against having it "jumped." edwards went about introducing himself to the new york firm in his own way. at that time he had on hand a fairly well-written, but somewhat peculiar long story entitled, "the mystery of martha." he had tried it out again and again with various publishers only to have it returned as "well done but unavailable because of the theme." this story was submitted to harte & perkins. it was returned, in due course, with the following letter: new york, march , . mr. john milton edwards, chicago, ills. dear sir:-- we have your favor of march the th together with manuscript of "the mystery of martha," which as it is unavailable we return to you to-day by express as you request. we are overcrowded with material for our story paper, for which we presume you submitted this manuscript, and, indeed, we think "the mystery of martha" is more suitable for book publication than in any other shape. the only field that is open with us is that of our various five and ten cent libraries. you are perhaps familiar with these, and if you have ever done anything in this line of work, we should be pleased to have you submit the printed copy of same for our examination, and if we find it suitable we think we could use some of your material in this line. mr. jones, whom you refer to in your letter, is one of our regular contributors. yours truly, harte & perkins. here was the opening! edwards lost no time in taking advantage of it and sent the following letter: chicago, march , ' . messrs. harte & perkins, publishers, new york city. gentlemen:-- i have your letter of the d inst. in reply would state that i have done some writing for beadle & adams ("_banner weekly_") although i have none of it at hand, at present, to send you. i also am a contributor to "_saturday night_," (james elverson's paper) and have sold them a number of serial stories, receiving from them as much as $ for , words. it is probable that material suitable to the latter periodical would be out of the question with you; still, i can write the kind of stories you desire, all i ask being the opportunity. inclosed please find chapter i of "jack o' diamonds; or, the cache in the coteaux." perhaps western stories are bugbears with you (they are, i know, with most publishers) but there are no indians in this one. i should like to go ahead, write this story, submit it, and let you see what i can do. i am able to turn out work in short order, if you should desire it, and feel that i can satisfy you. all i wish to know is how long you want the stories, what price is paid for them and whether there is any particular kind that you need. i have an idea that the thrun case would afford material for a good story. at least, i think i can write you a good one with that as a foundation. please let me hear from you. yours very truly, john milton edwards. to this edwards received the following reply, under date of march : we have your favor of march th together with small installment of story entitled "jack o' diamonds." our careful reading of the installment leads us to believe that you write easily, and can probably do suitable work for our ten-cent library, though the particular scene described in this installment is one that can be found in almost any of the old time libraries. it is a chestnut. a decided back number. what we require for our libraries is something written up-to-date, with incidents new and original, with which the daily press is teeming. i inclose herewith a clipping headed, "thrun tells it all," which, used without proper names, might suggest a good plot for a story, and you could work in suitable action and incident to make a good tale. if you will submit us such a story we shall be pleased to examine same, and if found suitable we will have a place for it at once. we pay for stories in this library $ ; they should contain , words, and when issued appear under our own _nom de plume_. installment "jack o' diamonds" returned herewith. thus it was up to edwards to go ahead and "make good." such a climax has a weird effect on some authors. they put forth all their energy securing an order to "go ahead" and then, at the critical moment, experience an attack of stage fright, lose confidence and bolt, leaving the order unfilled. years later, in new york, such a case came under edwards' observation. a young woman had besieged a certain editor for two years for a commission. when the coveted commission arrived, the young woman took to her bed, so self-conscious that she was under a doctor's care for a month. the story was never turned in. edwards, in his own case, did not intend to put all his eggs in one basket. he not only set to work writing a ten-cent library story (which he called "glim peters on his mettle") but he also wrote and forwarded a five-cent library story entitled, "fearless frank." "fearless frank"--galloped home again bearing a request that edwards make him over into a detective. on april edwards received the following: we have your favor of april , and note that the insurance story, relating to thrun, is nearly completed, and will be forwarded on monday next. i hope you have not made the hero too juvenile, as this would be a serious fault. the stories in the ten-cent library are not read by boys alone but usually by young men, and in no case should the hero be a kid, such as we fear would be your idea of a chicago newsboy. we note that you have considered our suggestions, and also that you will fix up the "fearless frank" manuscript with a view of making it a detective story. for your information, therefore, we mail you under separate cover nos. , , and of the five-cent library, which will give you an idea of the character of this detective. we hope you will give us what we want in both these stories. on april edwards received a long letter that delighted him. he was "making good." i have carefully read your story, "glim peters on his mettle," and, as i feared, find the same entirely too juvenile for the ten-cent library, though quite suitable for the five-cent library, had it not been double the length required. i first considered the question of asking you to make two stories of it for this library, but finally decided that this would be somewhat difficult and unnecessary, as we shall find a place for it later in the columns of our _boy's story paper_, to be issued under _nom de plume_, and will pay you $ for same. the chief point of merit in the story is the excellent and taking dialogue between glim peters, his chum and the detectives. this boy is a strong character, well delineated and natural. the incident covered by clairvoyant visits, the scene at the world's fair and the chinese joint experience were all excellent; but the ghost in the old willett house, and indeed the whole plot, is poor. judging from this story and the previous one submitted, the plot is your weak point. in future stories make no special effort to produce an unusual plot, but stick closer to the action and incident, taken as much as possible from newspapers, which are teeming with material of this character. we shall now expect to receive from you at an early date, the detective story, and to follow this we will forward you material, in a few days, for a ten-cent library story. we forward you to-day, under separate cover, several numbers to give you an idea of the class of story that is suitable for the ten-cent library. such scenes in your last story as where glim peters succeeded in buying a mustang and defeated the deacon in so doing, are just the thing for the ten-cent library; the same can also be said of the scene in which meg, the girl in the bar, stands off the detectives in a vain attempt to save the villains. that is the sort of thing, and we feel that you will be able to do it when you know what we want. i forward you, also, a copy of ten-cent library no. , which i would like you to read, and let me know whether you could write us a number of stories for this particular series, with the same hero and the same class of incidents. if so, about how long would it take you to write , words? it is possible i may be able to start you on this series, of which we have already issued a number. about may edwards sent the first detective story. on may he received a letter, of which the following is an extract: we are in a hurry for this series (the series for the ten-cent library) but after you have finished the first one, and during the time that we are reading it, you can go ahead with the second detective story, "the capture of keno clark," which, although we are in no hurry for it, we may be able to use in about six weeks or two months. you did so well with the first detective story that i have no doubt you can make the second a satisfactory one. however, if we find the series for the ten-cent library o. k., we will want you to write these, one after the other as rapidly as possible until we have had enough of them. as to our method of payment, would say that it is our custom to pay for manuscripts on thursday following the day of issue, but, agreeably with your request, we mail you a check tomorrow in payment of "glim peters on his mettle," and will always be willing to accomodate you in like manner when you find it necessary to call upon us. so edwards made good with the publishing firm of harte & perkins, and for eighteen years there have been the pleasantest of business relations between them. courteous always in their dealings, prompt in their payments to writers, and eager always to send pages and pages of helpful letters, harte & perkins have grown to be the most substantial publishers in the country. is it because of their interest in their writers? certainly not in spite of it! for them edwards has written upwards of five hundred five-cent libraries, a dozen or more serials for their story paper, many serials for their boys' weekly, novelettes for their popular magazines, and a large number of short stories. for these, in the last eighteen years, they have paid him more than $ , . nor, during this time, was he writing for harte & perkins exclusively. he had other publishers and other sources of profit. as an instance of helpfulness that did not help, edwards once attempted to come to the assistance of howard dwight smiley. smiley wrote his first story, and edwards sent it on to _the argosy_ with a personal letter to mr. white. such letters, at best, can do no more than secure for an unknown writer a little more consideration than would otherwise be the case; they will not warp an editor's judgment, no matter how warmly the new writer is recommended. the story came back with a long letter of criticism and with an invitation for smiley to try again. he tried and tried, perhaps a dozen times, and always the manuscript was returned to the patient smiley by the no less patient editor. at last smiley wrote a story about a tramp who became entangled with a cyclone. the "whirler," it seems, had already picked up the loose odds and ends of a farm yard, along with a churnful of butter. in order to escape from the cyclone, smiley's tramp greased himself with the butter from the churn and slid out of the embrace of the twisting winds. "chuck it," said edwards; "i'm surprised at you, smiley." smiley did "chuck it"--but into a mail-box, addressed to mr. white, and mr. white "chucked" a check for $ right back for it! whereupon smiley chuckled inordinately--and came no more to edwards for advice. v. nickel thrills and dollar shockers. the word "sensational" as applied to fiction has been burdened with an opprobrium which does not rightfully belong to it. ignorance and prejudice and hypocrisy have conspired to defame a very worthy word. certain good but misguided people will turn shudderingly from a nickel novel and complacently look for thrills in a "best seller." often and often the "best seller" is to be had for cents or $ at the department stores. not infrequently it spills more blood than the nickel thriller, but the blood is spilled on finer paper, and along with it are idealized pictures of heroine and hero done by the best artists. as a matter of course the dollar dreadful is better done. the author probably took six months or a year to do it, and if it is well advertised and proves a success he reaps a modest fortune. on the other hand, the nickel novel is written in three days or a week and brings the author $ . why shouldn't the dollar book show a higher grade of craftmanship? but is it less vicious than the novel that sells for five cents? to draw the matter still finer, is either form of fiction vicious? if we turn to webster and seek a definition of "sensational" we find: "suited or intended to excite temporarily great interest or emotion; melodramatic; emotional." this does not mean that sensational writing is vicious writing. it is wrong to classify as vicious or degrading the story of swift action and clean ethics, or to compare it with that prurient product of the slums which deals with problems of sex. the tale that moves breathlessly but logically, that is built incident upon incident to a telling climax with the frankly avowed purpose to entertain, that has no questionable leanings or immoral affiliations--such a tale speeds innocently an idle hour, diverts pleasantly the harrassed mind, freshens our zeal for the duties of life, and occasionally leaves us with higher ideals. we are all dreamers. we must be dreamers before we are doers. if some of the visions that come to us in secret reverie were flaunted in all their conceit and inconsistency before the world, not one of us but would be the butt of the world's ridicule. and yet, out of these highly tinted imaginings springs the impulse that carries us to higher and nobler things. a difference in the price of two commodities does not necessarily mark a moral difference in the commodities themselves. _the century magazine_ sells for cents, while _the argosy_ sells for cents. you will be told that _the century_ is "high class" and with a distinct literary flavor, perhaps that it is more elevating. even so; yet which of these magazines is doing more to make the world really livable? ask the newsdealer in your town how many _centuries_ he sells, and how many _argosies_. readers are not made for the popular magazines, but the popular magazines are made for the people. unless there was a distinct and insistent demand for this sort of entertainment, so many all-story magazines, priced at a dime, could not exist. nickel thrillers cater largely to a juvenile clientele. taking them by and large--there are a few exceptions, of course--they are as worthy of readers as the dime magazines; and many a serial in a dime magazine has been republished in cloth and made into a "best seller."[d] why is it that, if a lad in his teens robs a jewelry store and is apprehended, almost invariably the newspaper report has a bundle of nickel libraries found in his pocket? why a nickel library and not a "yellow" newspaper? the standard of judgment which places a nickel novel in the heart-side pocket of the young degenerate, harks back to a period when "yellow-back" literature was really vicious; it is a judgment by tradition, unsupported by present-day facts. the world moves, and as it moves it grows constantly better. reputable publishers of cheap fiction have elevated the character of their output until now some of the weekly stories they publish are really admirable; in many instances they are classics. a few years ago, at a convention of sunday school teachers at asbury park, n. j., a minister boldly praised the "diamond dick" stories. he declared that while action rattled through the pages of these tales like bullets from a gatling, he had found nothing immoral in them, nothing suggestive, nothing to deprave. the lawless received their just reward and virtue emerged triumphant. it was his thought that a few "diamond dick" stories might, with benefit, take the place, in sunday school libraries, of the time-honored book in which the boy goes a-fishing on sunday and falls into the river. one of the "frank merriwell" stories tells of a sensitive, shrinking lad at an academy who was hazed into a case of pneumonia from which he died. the hero breaks the news of the boy's death to his widowed mother and comforts her in her bereavement. from beginning to end the story is told with a sympathy, and such a thorough understanding of boy-nature, that the hold on the juvenile reader is as strong as the theme is uplifting. this is not "trash." it is literature sold at a price which carries it everywhere, and the result is untold good. the fact remains, however, that not every publisher of nickel novels has so high a standard. the paternal eye, in overseeing the fiction of the young, must be discriminating. blood-and-thunder has had its day; but, if the rising generation is not to be a race of mollycoddles, care must be exercised in stopping short of the other extreme. the life of today sets a pattern for the fiction of to-day. the masses demand rapid-fire action and good red brawn in their reading matter. their awakened moral sense makes possible the muck-raker; and when they weary of the day's evil and the day's toil, it is their habit to divert themselves with pleasant and exciting reading. and it must be clean. footnotes: [d] "dan quixote," for instance published in =the all-story magazine=, and republished as "the brass bowl." vi. making good by hard work. with the beginning of the year edwards was learning the knack of the nickel novel and its ten-cent brother, and making good with his new york publishers. during the work he turned in was of fair quality, but he was not satisfied with that and labored to improve. each succeeding story came nearer and nearer the high mark. believing that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well, he was constantly asking himself, "how can i make my next story better than the one i have just finished?" the publishers helped him. every manuscript submitted was read personally by mr. perkins, and brought a letter dissecting the story and stating which incidents were liked, and why, and which incidents were not liked, and why. edwards feels that he can never be sufficiently grateful to mr. perkins for this coaching in the gentle art of stalking a reader's elusive interest. had edwards remained a paymaster in the employ of the contracting firm, he would have received $ , for his services in . he severed his connection with his paymaster's salary in june, and at the end of the year his fiction factory showed these results: five-cent library stories at $ each $ . juvenile serial . juvenile serial . ten-cent library stories at $ . each . serial for saturday night . --------- total $ . in other words, edwards had taken out of his fiction factory $ more than his salary as paymaster would have amounted to for the year. he felt vastly relieved, and his wife laughingly fell back on her woman's prerogative of saying "i told you so." this was a good beginning, and edwards felt sure that he would be able to do even better during . he was coming along splendidly with the ten-cent library work. on jan. mr. perkins paid this tribute to his growing powers: "i have just finished reading your story, 'dalton's double,' which i find to be as good as anything you have given us. i must compliment you upon the varied incident which you cram into these stories, of a nature that is well suited to them." it was edwards' custom to forward a ten-cent library story every two weeks, and there were months in which he wrote three stories, taking ten days for each one. as these stories were , words in length, three in thirty days were equivalent to , words. during he wrote his stories twice: first a rough draft and then the printer's copy. in he began making his first copies clean enough for the compositor. had he not done this he could never have accomplished such a large amount of work. on april , when everything was going swimmingly and he was taking in $ a month for the library work, he was brought up short in his career of prosperity. mr. perkins wrote him to finish the story upon which he was engaged and then to stop the library work until further orders. it had been decided to use "re-prints" in the series. this could very easily be done as the library had been published for years and some of the earlier stories could be brought out again without injuring the sale. the letter, which was a profound disappointment to edwards, closed as follows: "i regret the necessity of curtailing your work, for i am entirely satisfied with it, and if we did not find it necessary to adopt the measure referred to above, with a view to decreasing expenses during the summer months and dull season, i should have wished to have you continue right along. i have no doubt that you will be able to find a place for your material in the meantime." this fell upon edwards like a bolt from a clear sky. he began to regret his "paymaster crutch" and to imagine dire things. he had been giving his time almost exclusively to harte & perkins, and had lost touch with publications for which he had been writing previous to . where, he asked himself, was he to place his material in the meantime? there is little sentiment in business. harte & perkins, whenever they find a line of work is not paying, will cut it off at an hour's notice, by telegraph if necessary. the man receiving the telegram, of course, can only make the best of it. this is a point which edwards has always disliked about the work for publishers of this class of fiction: the writer, no matter how prosperous he may be at any given time, is always in a state of glorious uncertainty. but edwards fell on his feet. it so happened that he had sent to harte & perkins, some time before, copies of _saturday night_ containing two of his stories. he had done this in the attempt to prove to them that he could write for _the weekly guest_, their story paper. this little incident shows how important it is for a writer to get as many anchors to windward as possible. eight days after being cut off from the library work, edwards received a letter from mr. harte. mr. perkins had left new york on business, but had turned over the printed work in _saturday night_ for mr. harte's inspection before leaving. mr. harte wrote, in part: "i like your work in _saturday night_, and think we shall be able to give you a commission for a _weekly guest_ story, provided you can lend yourself successfully to our suggestions as to style, etc., and give us permission to publish under any of the pen names we use in the office. we want a story of the stella edwards type. we send you to-day one or two samples of the class of work desired, so that you may be able to see just what it is. if you can do the work, we shall be pleased to send you a title and plot, with synopsis. you can then write us two installments for a trial, and, if satisfactory, i have no doubt we could arrange to give you a quantity of work in this line. i feel, after reading the samples you submitted, that you will be able to meet our requirements in this class of story. the two stories we send you are the work of a masculine pen, and though not so easy to lose one's identity in literary work, this class of story does not seem to present the ordinary difficulties; at least, that is the testimony of our authors who have tried it." edwards was booked to attempt a gushing love story, to follow a copy and make it appear as though a woman had done the writing! quite a jump this, from a rapid-fire ten-cent library story for young men to a bit of sentimental fiction for young women. however, he went at it, and he went at it with a determination to make good. it was either that or go paymastering again. on april he received title, synopsis and plot of "bessie, the beautiful blind girl," and began charging himself with superheated sentiment preparatory to beginning his work. the popular young lady authoress, "stella edwards," whose portrait in a decollete gown had been so often flaunted in the eyes of "her" public, was a myth. the "stuff" supposedly written by the charming "stella edwards" was ground out by men who were versatile enough to befool women readers, with a feminine style. edwards, it transpired, was able to do this successfully for a time, but ultimately he failed to round off the rough corners of a style too decidedly masculine for "miss edwards." but this is anticipating. on may he had sent the two trial installments, and from new york came the word: "we like the two opening installments of 'bessie, the beautiful blind girl.' the style is good, the action brisk and sensational and of a curiosity-arousing character. it is our belief that you are capable of presenting a desirable variation from the former stella edwards' stories, by introducing romantic incidents of a novel and more exalted character. in most of the other stella edwards' yarns there was little plot and the action was rarely varied. the action comprised the pursuit and capture, the recapture and loss of the heroine, she being constantly whirled, like a shuttle-cock, from the hero to the villain, then to the female villain, then back again to the hero for a few tantalizing moments, and so on to the end. you can readily improve upon this by introducing scenes a little more fresh, and far more interesting. it is about time for stella to improve, and we believe you are just the man to make her do better work. go on with the story and force our readers to exclaim, 'well, that's the best story stella has written!'" while edwards was deep in the sorrows of "bessie, the beautiful blind girl," he received from his publishers on may orders which hurled him headlong into another "stella edwards" yarn. "owing to a change in our publishing schedule of guest stories, it will be necessary to anticipate the issue of 'bessie, the beautiful blind girl' by another story of the same type, sixteen installments, same as the one you are now working on. the title of this new story will be 'the bicycle belle,' and will deal with the bicycle as the matter of central interest in the first installment or two. i send you a synopsis of the story prepared by one of our editors. this will simply give you an idea of one way of developing the theme. it does not, however, suit our plans, and we will ask you to invent something quite different." always and ever harte & perkins kept their fingers on the pulse of their reading public. the safety bicycle was the fashion, in those days, and harte & perkins were usually first to exploit a fashion or a fad in their story columns. whenever they had a story with a particularly popular and striking theme, it was their habit to flood the country with sample copies of _the weekly guest_, breaking off a generous installment of the serial in such a breathless place that the reader was forced to buy succeeding issues of the _guest_ in order to get the rest of the story. so that is what the change in their publishing schedule meant. they wanted to boom the circulation of the _guest_ with a bicycle story. edwards shelved bessie the beautiful at the th installment and threw himself into the tears, fears and chivalry of "the bicycle belle." this was on may . three days later, on may , he forwarded two installments of the bicycle story for harte & perkins' inspection. on may , before these installments had reached the publishers, edwards was requested as follows: "as we shall not be able to begin, in the guest, your story, 'bessie, the beautiful blind girl,' until after january the first, next, it will be well to change the scene to a winter setting. this can be very easily done in the two installments that we have on hand, if you will make a note of it and keep it up for the balance of the story. in the first installment we will show the girl leaping into the river with a few cakes of ice floating about, and in the scene where she is expelled from the house there will be plenty of snow. it will make a more effective picture and be more seasonable for the story." more trouble! harte & perkins had two installments, and did not seem to know that edwards had five more installments on hand, pending the completion of the bicycle yarn. but he was ready to turn summer into winter, or day into night, in order to make good. on may he received a report on the two installments of the bicycle story. "the two installments of 'the bicycle belle' have been read and approved by our editor, who says that the story opens very well, with plenty of animated action, briefly yet graphically pictured. you seem to have caught our idea exactly, and we would be pleased to have you go ahead with the story, finishing it before you again take up 'bessie, the beautiful blind girl.'" on june edwards sent installments three to sixteen of the bicycle story, which was the complete manuscript. ten days later he was informed: "'the bicycle belle' is crowded with dramatic action and is just what we want. in the next it would be well to have a little more of the female element just to demonstrate that 'stella edwards' is up-to-date." none the less pleasant was this news, contained in a letter dated june : "we have placed to your credit, upon our books, the sum of three hundred dollars in payment for 'the bicycle belle,' which will be the figure for all this class of stories from your pen which are accepted for _the weekly guest_." up to that time this was the most money edwards had ever received for a serial story, and very naturally he felt elated. under date of june he wrote harte & perkins and told them that he was planning a trip east as soon as he had finished with "bessie, the beautiful blind girl." he received a cordial invitation from the publishers to come on as soon as possible as they had something which they particularly wanted him to do for them. the story of the blind girl was forwarded on june . a flaw was discovered in it and several installments were returned for correction--not a serious flaw, indeed, but one which necessitated a little revision. the revision made, the story passed at once to acceptance. in july edwards was in new york and called personally upon harte & perkins. he found them pleasant and capable gentlemen--all that his fancy had pictured them through months of correspondence. inasmuch as it was edwards' first visit to the metropolis, he studied the city with a view to using it in some of his fiction. the special work which mr. harte wanted edwards to do for the firm was a story of which he gave the salient features. it was to be written in the best archibald clavering gunter style. as edwards had imitated successfully the mythical "stella edwards," he was now confronted with the more trying task of imitating the style of a popular living author. he read gunter from "barnes of new york" down; and then, when completely saturated with him, turned off two installments of "the brave and fair" and sent them on. he was visiting in michigan, at the time, and a letter under date of august , reached him while he was still in that state. "i have just finished reading the two installments of 'the brave and fair.' i think you have made a very good opening indeed. it reads smoothly and seems to me to be very much in gunter's light narrative style, which is what we are after. it remains to be seen whether you can get as close to gunter in what might be called his tragedy vein as opposed to the comedy vein, which you have successfully worked up in these two installments." "the brave and fair," going forward to the publishers piece by piece, seemed to arouse their enthusiasm. "we have read up to installment eight. it is fine! full of heroic action! bristling with exciting scenes!" when the completed manuscript was in the publishers' hands, on october , there came another complimentary letter. "'the brave and fair' bristled with exciting action to the close. the best incidents in it are those descriptive of chub jones' heroic self-sacrifice. in our opinion, this stands out as the gem of the story, because it makes the reader's heart bound with admiration for the little hero." hundreds of thousands of sample copies of _the weekly guest_, with first chapters of this story, were scattered all over the land. later, the book was issued in paper covers. harte & perkins paid the author $ for the story, then ordered another of the same type for which he was given $ . these stories were written under a _nom de plume_ which harte & perkins had copyrighted. the _nom de plume_ was their property and could not be appropriated by any other publisher. edwards wrote three of the yarns, and a friend of his wrote others. all the year edwards had been patted on the back. on dec. came a blow between the eyes. he had been commissioned to write another "stella edwards" rhapsody, but was overconfident and did not take time to surround himself with the proper "stella edwards" atmosphere. two installments went forward, and this letter came back: "i have just finished reading 'two hearts against the world.' i regret to say that the story will not do, and it would be as well for you not to attempt to remodel it. in other words, the way you are handling the subject is not satisfactory to us and is not a question of minor detail. we shall be obliged to give this work into other hands to do. the story, as far as it goes, is wildly improbable and has a lack of cohesion in the incident. i think you wrote it hurriedly, and without mature thought. these stories have to seem probable even if they deal with unusual events." there was bitterness in that, not so much because edwards had lost $ but because he had failed to make good. his pride suffered more than his pocket. later, however, he wrote some more "stella edwards" stories for harte & perkins and they were highly praised; but that type of fiction was not his forte. the year closed with harte & perkins giving edwards a chance at a new five-cent weekly they were starting. it was merely a shift from _the weekly guest_ back to the libraries again. his work for harte & perkins, during the year, showed as follows: ten-cent libraries at $ each $ . two "stella edwards" stories at $ each . "the brave and fair" . "the man from montana" . five-cent libraries at $ each . juvenile serial . --------- total $ , . the work tabulated above approximates , words, and takes no account of work sold to other publishers. by industry alone edwards had secured a fair income. w. bert foster, a friend of edwards', who for twenty-five years has kept a story-mill of his own busily grinding with splendid success, has this to say about a slip he once made in his early years: "when i was a young writer i sold a story to a juvenile paper. it was published. and not until the boys began to write in about it did either the editor or i discover that i had my hero dying of thirst _on a raft in lake michigan_!" vii. inspiration alias industry. jack london advises authors not to wait for inspiration but to "go after it with a club." bravo! it is not intended, of course, to lay violent hands on the happy idea or to knock it over with a bludgeon. mr. london realizes that, nine times out of ten, happy ideas are drawn toward industry as iron filings toward a magnet. the real secret lies in making a start, even though it promises to get you nowhere, and inspiration will take care of itself. there's a lot of "fiddle-faddle" wrapped up in that word "inspiration." it is the last resort of the lazy writer, of the man who would rather sit and dream than be up and doing. if the majority of writers who depend upon fiction for a livelihood were to wait for the spirit of inspiration to move them, the sheriff would happen along and tack a notice on the front door--while the writers were still waiting. more and more edwards' experience, and the experience of others which has come under his observation, convinces him that inspiration is only another name for industry. when he was paymaster for the firm of contractors, he went to the office at o'clock in the morning, took half an hour for luncheon at noon, and left for home at half-past . when he broke away from office routine, he promised himself that he would give as much, or more, of his time to his fiction factory. what he feared was that ideas would fail to come, and that he would pass the time sitting idly at his typewriter. in actual practice, he found it almost uncanny how the blank white sheet he had run into his machine invited ideas to cover it. after five, ten or fifteen minutes of following false leads, he at last hit upon the right scent and was off at a run. with every leap his enthusiasm grew upon him. a bright bit of dialogue would evoke a chuckle, a touch of pathos would bring a tear, an unexpected incident shooting suddenly out of the tangled threads would fill him with rapture, and for the logical but unexpected climax he reserved a mood like caesar's, returning from the wars and celebrating a triumph. in the ardor of his work he forgot the flight of time. he balked at leaving his typewriter for a meal and went to bed only when drowsiness interfered with his flow of thought. whether he was writing a five-cent library, a serial story or a novel which he hoped would bring him fame and fortune, the same delight filled him whenever he achieved a point which he knew to be worth while. and whenever such a point is achieved, my writer friend, there is something that rises in your soul and tells you of it in words that never lie. no matter what you are writing, unless you can thrill to every detail of excellence in what you do, unless you can worry about the obscure sentence or the unworthy incident until they are sponged out and recast, it is not too much to say that you will never succeed at the writing game. love the work for its own sake and it will bring its inspiration and its reward; look upon it as a grind and melancholy failure stalks in your wake. there can be no inspiration without industry, and no industry without inspiration. start your car on the batteries of industry and it will soon be running on the magneto of inspiration. drive yourself to your work, and presently interest will be aroused and your eager energies will need a curb instead of a spur. edwards has written two , -word stories a week for months at a time; he has written one , -word story and one , -word serial in one week; he has begun a five cent library story at o'clock in the morning and worked the clock around, completing the manuscript at the next morning; and he has done other things that were possible only because industry brought inspiration, and inspiration takes no account of time. edwards knows a writer of short stories who is like a crazy man for days while he is frantically groping for an idea. when the idea comes, he figuratively sweats blood for a week in pulling it through his typewriter; and then, when the story is in the mails, he takes to his bed for a week from physical exhaustion. result: three weeks, one story, and anywhere from $ to $ . he is conscientious, but his method is wrong. instead of storming through the house and tearing his hair while the idea eludes him, he should roll in a fresh sheet, sit calmly down in front of the keys, look out of the window or around the room and start off with the first object that appeals to him. there are writers who will have a billikin for inspiration, or some other fetich that takes the place of a billikin. edwards has an elephant tobacco-jar that has occasionally helped him. sometimes it is a pipeful of the elephant's contents, and sometimes it is merely a long look at the elephant that starts the psychology to working. of course it isn't really the billikin, or the elephant, or the tobacco that does the trick. they merely enable us to concentrate upon the work in hand: from them we gather hope that work will produce results, so we get busy and results come. the main thing is to break the shackles of laziness and begin our labors; then, after that, to forget that we are laboring in the sheer joy of creation with which our labor inspires us. new york, sept. , . my dear mr. edwards: you fairly have me stumped. with the greatest pleasure in the world i would give you what you ask for your book, but i am not certain that i can recall any humorous anecdotes; and as for "quips," i look the word up and discover that it means: "a sneering or mocking remark; gibe; taunt." and i am afraid i am not equal to evolving any of these.... all i can recall now is that in my early days an editor of the _new york herald_ wanted to kick me down the editorial stairs because i asked pay for amusement notes they had been printing for nothing. i fled, leaving my last ms. behind me--which they also printed gratis. now this wasn't humorous to anybody at the time, and if there was any 'quip,' that editor uttered it, and i don't remember now just the language he used. very truly yours, matthew white, jr., editor _the argosy_. viii. the wolf on the sky-line. for edwards, the year dawned in a blaze of prosperity and went out in the gathering shadows of impending disaster. spring found him literally swamped with orders, and he tried the experiment of hiring a young man stenographer and typist to assist him. the young man was an expert in his line and proved so efficient an aide that edwards hired another who was equally proficient. two stenographers failing to help him catch up with his flood of orders, he secured a third. one assistant put in his time copying manuscripts and cataloguing clippings, to another the library work was dictated, and the third was employed on "stella edwards" material. edwards was versatile, and he experienced no difficulty in passing from one class of work to another. he was able to chronicle the breathless adventures of the hero of the five-cent library to one stenographer, then turn to the other and dictate two or three chapters of a serial of the class written by laura jean libby, and then fill in the gaps between dictation with altogether different work on his own machine. although edwards kept these three stenographers for several months, and although he has since frequently availed himself of the services of an amanuensis, yet he is free to confess that he doubts the expediency of such help. successful dialect cannot be wrapped up in a stenographer's "pothooks," and so much dialect was used in the library stories that the young man at work on them had to familiarize himself with the contorted forms and write them down from memory. it took him so long to do this, and required so much of edwards' time making corrections, that the profit on his work was disappointing. with such an office force grinding out copy, during the early months of the fiction factory was a very busy place. during january and february the cash returns amounted to $ , . this, edwards discovered later, was no argument in favor of stenographer assistance, for he has since, working alone, earned upward of $ , in a month. in february edwards was requested by harte & perkins to submit a story for a new detective library which they were starting, and of which they were very choice. the work was as different as possible from the two or three detective yarns edwards had written in . he wrote and submitted the story, and mr. perkins' criticisms are given below by way of showing how carefully the stories were examined. the letter from which the excerpt is taken was written feb. , . the mythical detective, who has become known throughout the length and breadth of the land, shall here be referred to as "joe blake." "there is one point to which i would call your attention. on page , chapter ii opens in this way: 'a young man to see dr. reynolds; no card.' joe blake, otherwise 'dr. reynolds,' told the boy to show the visitor in. the place was chicago. scene in room in prominent hotel the second day after joe blake had had an interview with abner larkin, o'clock in the evening. this is too trite and not easily expressed. such references to time, place, etc., impress the reader with the fact that he is reading a romance and not a real story of joe blake's experiences. this particular point should be kept in mind. we want these stories to appear as natural as possible. in the opening of the installment, where mr. larkin presents himself to joe, you have duplicated the common-place method of most writers. there should be more originality in the way joe blake's attention is called to various cases and not a continual repetition of calls at his office, which, though natural enough, become tiresome to the reader. in this same opening there is not enough detective flavor, and here, as well as in other places, joe does not appear to be the man of authority, which he is usually found to be. these are little things, but i believe if you will take care of them they will help the story greatly." this will illustrate the care with which harte & perkins looked over the manuscripts submitted to them, to the end that they might be made to reflect their ideas of what good manuscripts should be. if a writer could not do their work the way they wanted it done he was not long in getting his _conge_. in the case of the story mentioned above, it was returned, rewritten, and made to conform to mr. perkins' ideas. on jan. harte & perkins had written edwards: "it is more than apparent that the library business is not very flourishing, and hereafter we shall only be able to pay $ for these stories. i think this will be satisfactory to you, for i know you can do this class of work very rapidly." this meant a loss of $ a week, and edwards endeavored to make up for it by increasing his output. particularly he wanted a chance to write another "stella edwards" story, just to show the firm that he could do the work. mr. harte gave him an order for the serial, stating that the new story was to follow "the bicycle belle," then running in _the weekly guest_. the story was to be in twelve installments of , words each, totalling some , words. for this edwards was to receive $ . this hint was given him: "have plenty of romance, without too great extravagance, and make sure of at least one wedding and that in the beginning of the story." with the order came a picture which it was desired to use in illustrating the opening installment. edwards was to write the installment around the picture. he completed the story, called it "little bluebell," and received the following commendation after two installments had been received and read: "i have just finished reading the first two installments of your story, 'little bluebell,' and i have to say that the same is entirely satisfactory, unquestionably the best thing you have given us in this line of work." although he was turning out five-cent libraries, stella edwards serials, short sketches for _puck_ and stories for other publishers than harte & perkins, edwards was constantly on the alert for more work in order to keep his stenographers busy. he asked mr. perkins for orders for the ten-cent library, and for juvenile serials for the boys' paper. he was allowed to send in some "gentlemen jim" stories for the dime publication. the pay was not munificent, however, being only $ for , words. the "little bluebell" story was followed by another "stella edwards" serial entitled "a weird marriage." this yarn hit the bull's-eye with a bang. in fact, it was said to be the best thing ever done by "stella edwards." and then, after scoring these two successive hits, edwards tripped on a third story called "beryl's lovers," and he fell so hard that it was ten years before the firm ever asked him to do any more writing in that line. in the fall of edwards discovered that he had been working too hard. a doctor examined his lungs, declared that he was threatened with tuberculosis and ordered him to the southwest. in november he and his wife left chicago, edwards carrying with him his typewriter and a plentiful supply of typewriter paper. he transformed a stateroom in the compartment sleeper into his fiction factory, finishing two installments of the ill-fated "beryl's lovers" while enroute. these installments, forwarded from phoenix, arizona, by express, went into a wreck at shoemaker, kansas, and were delivered to harte & perkins, torn and illegible, two weeks after the story had been taken over by another writer. edwards filed a claim against the express company for $ , and then compromised for $ --all the express people were liable for by the terms of their receipt. from november, , until april, , edwards was located on a ranch near phoenix, arizona, writing five-cent libraries for harte & perkins and sketches and short stories for other publishers. his health was steadily declining, and he could bring himself to his work only by a supreme effort of the will and at the expense of much physical torture. in may, , he was told that he must get farther away from the irrigated districts around phoenix and into the arid hills. to this end he interested himself in a gold mine, and went east to form a company and secure the necessary capital to purchase and develop it. about the middle of july he returned to phoenix, still writing but hoping for golden rewards from the mining venture which would ultimately make his writing less of a business and more of a pastime. his health continued to decline and he was ordered to give up writing entirely and exercise constantly in the open. he at once telegraphed harte & perkins to this effect. on oct. they wrote: "we have heard nothing from you since receipt of your telegram to take all work out of your hands. this, of course, we attended to at once, but on your account, as well as our own, we were very sorry to learn that you found it necessary to give up the work, and trust that the illness from which you are suffering will not be lasting.... if, in future, you should be able to write again, we shall try to find a place for your work." so the old firm and edwards parted for a time. a few weeks proved the mining venture a failure, and $ , which edwards had put away out of the profits of his writing had vanished--gone to make the failure memorable. nor had his health returned. in some desperation, just before new year's of ' , mr. and mrs. edwards entrained for new york, edwards pinning his hopes to harte & perkins. he had less than $ to his name when he and his wife reached the metropolis. one hundred dollars will not carry a man and his wife very far in new york, even when both are in good health and the man can work. ambition alone kept edwards alive and gave him hope for the future. the factory out-put for : five-cent libraries at $ each $ . five-cent libraries at $ each . detective stories at $ each . ten-cent library stories at $ each . "little bluebell," serial . "a weird marriage," . --------- $ . detroit free press, contributions . --------- total $ . for : five-cent libraries at $ each $ . short fiction . -------- total $ . for cold brutality perhaps the rejection slip worded as below is unequalled: we are sorry to return your paper, but you have . respectfully yours, the editor. * * * * * before mr. karl edwin harriman, of the red book, had ventured into the editorial end of the writing trade, he wrote an article on an order from a certain eastern magazine. later, that magazine decided that it could not use the article, although it had been paid for, and, with mr. harriman's permission, turned it over to an agent to market elsewhere. the agent, not knowing mr. harriman had associated himself with a certain magazine, sent the manuscript to that publication, in the ordinary way. it was up to mr. harriman, then, to consider it in an editorial capacity. he was unable to purchase the manuscript, and returned it to the agent with a reproof for having submitted such an article, and indicating that the author had a great deal to learn before he could feel justified in seeking a market among the best known magazines. ix. raw material where does the writer get his plot-germs, the raw material which he puts through the mill of his fancy and finally draws forth as a finished and salable product? life is a thing of infinite variety, and the plot-germ is a thing of life or it is nothing. being a mere basic suggestion of the story, the germs must come from the author's experience, or from the experiences of others which have been brought to his attention. unconsciously the germ lodges in his mind, and his ingenuity, handling other phases of existence, works out the completed plot. it follows that the richer an author's experience and the more ardent his imagination the better will be the plot evolved, providing his fine sense of values has been adequately cultivated. but no matter how adventurous and varied a personal experience, or how warm the fancy, or how highly cultivated the mind in its adaptation of fact to fiction, the experience of others compels attention if a writer's work is to be anything more than self-centered. newspapers, chronicling the everyday events of human existence, have not only suggested countless successful plot-germs but have likewise helped in the rounding out of the plot. an editor wrote edwards, as long ago as march , : "what we require in our stories is something written up to date, with incidents new and original. the daily press is teeming with this raw material." this fact is universally recognized, so that very few authors neglect to avail themselves of this source of inspiration. as a case in point, a few years ago one noted author was accused of appropriating the work of another noted author. plagiarism was seemingly proved by evoking the aid of the deadly parallel. nevertheless the evidence was far from being conclusive. each author had done no more than build a similar story upon the same newspaper clipping! neither was in the wrong. no one writer has a monopoly of the facts of life, or of the right to use those facts as they filter through columns of the daily press. fortunately for edwards, he realized the value of newspaper clippings very early in his writing career. twenty-five years ago he began to scissor and to put away those clippings which most impressed him. until late in the year his clipping collection was either pasted in scrap-books or thrown loosely into a large box. during the winter of - he felt the necessity of having the raw material of his factory stored more systematically. the services of an assistant were secured and the work was begun. large manila envelopes were used. the envelopes were lettered alphabetically, and each clipping was filed by title. on the back of each envelope was typed the title of its contents. this method was found to be wholly unsatisfactory. frequent examination had given edwards a fair working knowledge of his thousands of clippings, but he was often obliged to go through a dozen or more envelopes before finding the particular article whose title had escaped him. in he bought a loose-leaf book and tried out a new system on an accumulation of several thousand magazines. this indexing was done in such a way as to suggest the character of the clipping (written in red), and the title of the article, the page number and number of the magazine (written in black). all the magazines had been numbered consecutively and placed on convenient shelves. the first page of "w," for instance, appeared as shown below: _washington_ "a job in the senate" - _wild animal story_ "the rebellion of a millionaire" - _washington, booker t._ "riddle of the negro" - _white cross_ "work of the american w. c." - _waitress_ "diary of an amateur w." - _wall street_ "the shadow of high finance" - _woman suffrage_ "worlds half-citizens" - _woman_ "how to make money" - the above is only part of one of many pages of w's, and will serve to exemplify the advantages and disadvantages of the system in practical use. for instance, if it was desired to find out something about booker t. washington, all that was necessary was to take down old magazine no. and turn to page . this manifestly was an improvement over the old envelope method of indexing, but still left much to be desired. to illustrate, if edwards wished to exhaust his material on booker t. washington it was necessary for him to hunt through all the pages under "w," and then examine all the magazines containing the articles in which he was mentioned. it is patent that if the indexing were properly done, every reference having to do with booker t. washington should follow a single reference to him in the index; and, further, the various articles should be grouped together. two years later, edwards discarded the loose-leaf for the card system. this, he found, was as near perfection as could be hoped for. his first step was to buy a number of strong box letter-files. these he numbered consecutively, just as he had numbered the manila envelopes. articles are cut from magazines, the leaves secured together with brass fasteners, and on the first page margin at the top are marked the file number and letter of compartment where the article belongs. thus, if the article is kept out of the file for any length of time it can be readily returned to its proper place. newspaper clippings are handled in precisely the same way. the card index has its divisions and sub-divisions. cards indexing articles on various countries have a place under the general letter, and another place in the geographical section under the same letter. so with articles concerning noted personages, astronomy, antiquities, etc. below, for the benefit of any one who may wish to use the system, is reproduced a card from the file: army, u. s. hand bill used to secure enlistments "a" army story "knew it" "k" army story "a philippine romance" "p" army story "he is crazy jack" "c" army story "their very costly meal" "t" army story "siege of bigbag" "s" "fighting life in the philippines" "f" pay of soldiers "young man--" "y" in this system the character of the material is first indicated, as _pay of soldiers_. if there is a title it follows in quotation marks. where the title suggests the character of the material sufficiently, the title comes first, in "quotes." then follows the letter under which the article is filed, and the number of the file. suppose it is desired to find out what soldiers of the united states' army are paid for their services: file no. is removed from the shelf, opened at letter "y" and the information secured under title beginning, "young man--." as a saver of time, and a guard against annoyance when fancies are running free, edwards has found his card-index system for clippings almost ideal. a friend of edwards' is what the comic papers call a "jokesmith." recently he concocted the following: "you must be doing well," said jones the merchant to quill the writer, meeting him in front of his house. "you seem to be always busy, and you look prosperous." "so i am, jones," answered quill, "busy and prosperous. come into the basement with me and i'll show you the secret of my prosperity." they descended into the basement and quill rang up the curtain on a ragman weighing three big bags of rejection slips. "my stories all come back," confessed quill, triumphantly, "and i get three cents a pound for the rejection slips that come with them." this, of course, was not much of a joke, but the perpetrator sent it to _judge_. _judge_ sent it back with about twenty blank rejection slips inclosed by a rubber band. on the top slip was written: "here are some more.--ed. _judge_." x. the wolf at the door perhaps very few men in this life escape a period as black and dispiriting as was the year for edwards. if not in one way, then in another, it is the fate of a man to be chastened and subdued so thoroughly, at least once in his career, that a livid remembrance of it remains always with him. edwards has always been an optimist, but those blows of circumstance of the year found many weak places in the armor of his philosophy. in tangling and untangling the threads of a story plot edwards had become tolerably proficient, but in straightening out the snarls fate had made in his own life he was crushed with a feeling of abject helplessness. there is a vast difference, it seems, in dealing with the complications of others and those that beset ourselves. the impersonal attitude makes for keener analysis and wiser judgment. in a story, the poverty stricken hero and his wife may exist for a week on a loaf of bread, ten cents' worth of potatoes and a twenty-cent soup-bone; but let the man who creates such a hero attempt to emulate his fictional fancies and stark realism plays havoc with the equation. the wolf at our own door is one sort of animal, and the wolf at our neighbor's is of an altogether different breed. the thermometer in southern arizona was "eighty in the shade" when mr. and mrs. edwards, during the christmas holidays, set their faces eastward. new york city, the shrine of so many pilgrims seeking prosperity, was their goal; and the metropolis, on that bleak new year's day that witnessed their arrival, was shivering in the grip of real, old-fashioned winter. the change from a balmy climate to blizzards and ice and a below-zero temperature brought edwards to his bed with a vicious attack of rheumatism. for days while the little fund of $ melted steadily away, he lay helpless. the great city, in its dealings with impecunious strangers, has been painted in cruel colors. edwards found this to be a mistake. on the occasion of their first visit to new york he and his wife had found quarters in a boarding house in forty-fourth street. a pleasant landlady was in charge and the edwards had won her friendship. here, forming one happy family, were actors and actresses, a salesman in a down-town department store, a stenographer, a travelling man for a bicycle house, and others. all were cheerful and kindly, and took occasion to drop in at the edwards' third floor front and beguile the tedious hours for the invalid. fourteen years have brought many changes to forty-fourth street between broadway and sixth avenue. the row of high-stoop brownstone "fronts" has that air of neglect which precedes demolition and the giving way of the old order to the new. the basement, where the pleasant landlady sat at her long table and smiled at the raillery and wit of "beaney," and sam, and "smithy," and ruth, and ina and the rest, has fallen sadly from its high estate. a laundry has taken possession of the place. and "beaney," the light-hearted one who laughed at his own misfortunes and sympathized with the misfortunes of others, "beaney" has gone to his long account. a veil as impenetrable has fallen over the pleasant landlady, sam, "smithy," ruth and ina; and where-ever they may be, edwards, remembering their kindness to him in his darkest days, murmurs for each and all of them a fervent "god bless you!".... before he was compelled to take to his bed edwards had called at the offices of harte & perkins. his interview with mr. perkins impressed upon him the fact that, once a place upon the contributors' staff of a big publishing house is relinquished it is difficult to regain. others had been given the work which edwards had had for three years. these others were turning in acceptable manuscripts and, in justice to them, harte & perkins could not take the work out of their hands. mr. perkins, however, did give edwards an order for four five-cent libraries--stories to be held in reserve in case manuscripts from regular contributors failed to arrive in time. on feb. he received a letter from the firm to the following effect: "when we wrote you day before yesterday asking you to turn in four five-cent libraries before doing anything else in the library line for us, we were under the impression that the gentleman who has been engaged upon this work for some time would not be able to turn the material in with usual regularity on account of illness, but we hear from him today that he is now in better health, and will be able to keep up with the work, which he is very anxious to do, and somewhat jealous of having any other material in the series so long as he can fill the bill. on this account it will be well for you to stop work on the library. when you have completed the story on which you are now engaged, turn your attention to the ten-cent library work, which we think you will be able to do to our satisfaction." this will illustrate the attitude which some authors assume toward the "butter-in." all of a certain grist that comes to a publisher's mill must be _their_ grist. if the mill ground for another, and found the product better than ordinary, the other might secure a "stand-in" that would threaten the prestige of the regular contributor. in seeking to keep his head above water financially, edwards attempted to sell book rights of "the astrologer," the serial published in in _the detroit free press_. he had written, also, pages of a present-tense gunteresque story which he hoped would win favor as had his other stories in that style. this yarn he called "croesus, jr." both manuscripts were submitted to harte & perkins. on jan. , when the edwards' exchequer was nearly depleted, "croesus, jr.," was returned with this written message: "it might be said of the story in a way that it is readable, but it does not promise as good a story as we desire for this series. 'most decidedly,' says the reader, 'it lacks originality, novelty and strength.' this criticism, which we consider entirely competent, must deter us from considering the story favorably." this was blow number one. blow number two was delivered feb. : "we have had your manuscript, 'the astrologer,' examined, and the verdict is that it would not be suitable for any of our regular publications, and it is not in our line for book publication. the reader states that it very humorous in parts but rather long drawn out.... we return manuscript." two five-cent libraries at $ each were accepted and paid for; also four sketches written for a small magazine which harte & perkins were starting.[e] although he grew better of his rheumatism, edwards failed to improve materially in health, and late in march he and his wife returned to chicago. they rented a modest flat on the north side, got their household effects out of storage, and faced the problem of existence with a courage scarcely warranted by their circumstances. edwards was able to work only half a day. the remainder of the day he spent in bed with an alternation of chills and fever and a grevious malady growing upon him. during this period he tried syndicating articles in the newspapers but without success. he also wrote for harte & perkins a "_guest_" serial, the order for which he had brought back with him from new york. he made one try for this by submitting the first few chapters and synopsis of story which he called "a vassar girl." these were returned to him as unsuitable. he then wrote seven chapters of a serial entitled, "a girl from the backwoods," and--with much fear and trembling be it confessed--sent them on for examination. under date of july this word was returned: "the seven chapters of 'a girl from the backwoods' read very good, and we should like to have you finish the story, and should it prove satisfactory in its entirety, we should consider it an acceptable story." here was encouragement at a time when encouragement was sorely needed. but how to keep the factory going while the story was being finished was a difficult question. there were times when twenty-five cents had to procure a sunday dinner for two; and there was a time when two country cousins arrived for a visit, and edwards had not the half-dollar to pay an expressman for bringing their trunks from the station! pride, be it understood, was one of edwards' chief assets. he had always been a regal spender, and his country cousins knew it. how the lack of that fifty-cent piece grilled his sensitive soul! it was during these trying times that the genius of mrs. edwards showed like a star in the heavy gloom. on next to nothing she contrived to supply the table, and the conjuring she could do with a silver dollar was a source of never-failing wonder to her husband. edwards remembers that, at a time when there was not even car-fare in the family treasury, a check for $ . arrived in payment for a , -word story that had been out for several years. during the latter part of july the demand for money pending the completion of "a girl from the backwoods" became so insistent, that edwards wrote and submitted to harte & perkins a sketch for their magazine. it contained , words and was purchased on aug. for $ . . "a girl from the backwoods" was submitted late in september, and was returned on oct. for a small correction. the following letter, dated oct. , was received from the editor of the "guest:" "the manuscript of 'a girl from the backwoods', also the correction which you have made, have been duly received. the correction is very satisfactory. in regard to your suggestion about the heroine's name being that of a well known writer, we would say that inasmuch as the name is rather appropriate and suits the character we do not see that the lady who already bears it would in any way find fault with your use of it, and at present we think it may be allowed to stand." as showing edwards' pecuniary distress, the following paragraph from a letter from harte & perkins, dated oct. , may be given: "in response to your favor of the th and your telegram of yesterday,[f] we enclose you herewith our check for $ in full for your story 'a girl from the backwoods.' this is the best price we can make you for this and other stories of this class from your pen, and it is a somewhat better one than we are now paying for similar material from other writers. we believe this will be satisfactory to you." the price was not satisfactory. edwards and his wife had counted upon receiving at least $ for the story, and they needed that amount sorely. a respectful letter at once went forward to harte & perkins, appealing to their sense of justice and fairness, which edwards had never yet known to fail him. on nov. came an additional check for $ , and these words: "replying to your favor of nov. st, at hand today, we beg to state that we shall, agreeably with your request and especially as you put it in such strong terms, make the payment on 'a girl from the backwoods' $ . the story is much liked by our reader and we do think it is worth as much if not more than the stella edwards material which, however, in the writer's judgement was much overpaid. we shall take this into account when considering the acceptance of other stories from your pen, and while we do not say positively that we will not pay $ for the next one, as we wrote you in our last letter this is a high price for this class of material and we will expect to pay you according to our views as to the value of the manuscript." the year closed with an order from harte & perkins for another story of the stella edwards sort; a very dismal year indeed, and showing factory returns as follows: two five-cent libraries at $ $ . four magazine sketches at $ . one magazine sketch . "a girl from the backwoods," . --------- total $ . perhaps, after all, this was not doing so badly; for during this year, and the year immediately following, edwards was to discover that he had had one foot in the grave. but his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. with they were to begin taking an upward turn. some one said that some one else, by using ignatius donnelly's cryptogram, proved that the late bill nye wrote the shakespeare plays. this, of course, is merely a reflection on the cryptogram; but if shakespeare's publishers had not been so slovenly with that folio edition of his plays, there would never have been any hunt for a cipher, nor any of this bacon talk. * * * * * "in the early days, when i lived on the plains of western kansas on a homestead," says john h. whitson, well and favorably known to dozens of editors, "i was nosed out by a correspondent for a kansas city paper, who thought there was something bizarre in the fact that an author was living the simple life of a western settler. the purported interview he published was wonderful concoction! he gave a descriptive picture of the dug-out in which i lived, and filled in the gaps with other matter drawn from his imagination, making me out a sort of literary troglodyte; whereas, as a matter of fact, i had never lived in a dug-out. on top of it, one of my homesteading friends asked me in all seriousness how much i had paid to get that write-up and picture in the kansas city paper, and seemed to think i was doing some tall lying when i said i had paid nothing." footnotes: [e] this magazine, by the way, which had an humble beginning, has grown into one of the high class "populars" and has a wide circulation. [f] telegram sent on same day letter was received saying story was satisfactory. xi when fiction is stranger than truth. we are told that "fiction hath in it a higher end than fact," which we may readily believe; and we may also concede that "truth is stranger than fiction," at least in its occasional application. nevertheless, in the course of his career as a writer edwards has created two fictional fancies which so closely approximated truth as to make fiction stranger than truth; and, in one case, the net result of imagination was to coincide exactly with real facts of which the imagination could take no account. perhaps each of these two instances is unique in its particular field; they are, in any event, so odd as to be worthy of note. in the early 's, when a great deal of edwards' work was appearing, unsigned, in _the detroit free press_, he wrote for that paper a brief sketch entitled, "the fatal hand." the sketch was substantially as follows: "the northern pacific railroad had just been built into helena, montana, and i happened to be in the town one evening and stepped into a gambling hall. burton, a friend of mine, was playing poker with a miner and two professional gamblers. i stopped beside the table and watched the game. cards had just been drawn. burton, as soon as he had looked at his hand, calmly shoved the cards together, laid them face-downward in front of him, removed a notebook from his pocket and scribbled something on a blank leaf. 'read that,' said he, 'when you get back to your hotel tonight.' the play proceeded. presently the miner detected one of the professional gamblers in the act of cheating. words were passed, the lie given. all the players leaped to their feet. burton, in attempting to keep the miner from shooting, received the gambler's bullet and fell dead upon the scattered cards. an hour later, when i reached my hotel, i thought of the note burton had handed me. it read: 'i have drawn two red sevens. i now hold jacks full on red sevens. it is a fatal hand and i shall never leave this table alive. i have $ , in the first national bank at bismarck. notify my mother, mrs. ezra j. burton, louisville, kentucky.'" this small product of the fiction factory was pure fiction from beginning to end. in the original it had the tang of point and counterpoint which caused it to be seized upon by other papers and widely copied. this gave extensive publicity to the "fatal hand"--the three jacks and two red sevens contrived by edwards out of a small knowledge of poker and the cabala of cards. yet, what was the result? a month later the chicago papers published an account of a police raid on a gambling room. as the officers rushed into the place a man at one of the tables fell forward and breathed his last. "heart disease," was the verdict. but note: a police officer looked at the cards the dead man had held and found them to be _three jacks and two red sevens_. a week later _the new york recorder_ gave space to a news story in which a man was slain at a gaming table in texas. when the smoke of the shooting had blown away some one made the discovery that he had held the fatal hand. from that time on for several months the fatal hand left a trail of superstition and gore all over the west. how many murders and hopeless attacks of heart failure it was responsible for edwards had no means of knowing, but he could scarcely pick up a paper without finding an account of some of the ravages caused by his "jacks full on red sevens." query: were the reporters of the country romancing? if not, will some psychologist kindly rise and explain how a bit of fiction could be responsible for so much real tragedy? in this instance, fancy established a precedent for fact; in the case that follows, the frankly fictitious paralleled the unknown truth in terms so exact that the story was recognized and appropriated by the son of the story's hero. while edwards was in arizona he was continually on the alert for story material. the sun, sand and solitude of the country "god forgot" produce types to be found nowhere else. he ran out many a trail that led from adobe-walled towns into waterless deserts and bleak, cacti-covered hills to end finally at some mine or cattle camp. it was on one of these excursions that he was told how a company of men had built a dam at a place called walnut grove. this dam backed up the waters of a river and formed a huge lake. mining for gold by the hydraulic method was carried on profitably in the river below the dam. one night the dam "went out" and a number of laborers were drowned. with this as the germ of the plot edwards worked out a story. he called it "a study in red," and it purported to show how a lazy maricopa indian, loping along on his pony in the gulch below walnut grove, gave up his mount to a white girl, daughter of the superintendent of the mining company, and while she raced on to safety he remained to die in the flood from the broken dam. the story was published in _munsey's magazine_. _six years later_ the author received a letter from the maricopa indian reservation, sent to new york in care of the f. a. munsey company. the letter was from a young maricopa. "i have often read the account of my father's bravery, and how he saved the life of the beautiful white girl when the walnut grove dam gave way. i have kept the magazine, and whenever i feel blue, or life does not go to please me, i get the story and read it and take heart to make the best of my lot and try to pattern after my father. i have long wanted to write you, and now i have done so. i am back from the indian school at carlisle, on a visit to my people, and am impelled to send you this letter of appreciation and thanks for the story about my father." now, pray, what is one to think of this? the letter bears all the earmarks of a _bona fide_ performance and was written and mailed on the reservation. edwards' fiction, it seems, had become sober fact for this young maricopa indian. or did his father really die by giving up his pony to the "beautiful young white girl?" and was edwards' prescience doing subliminal stunts when he wrote the story? john peter, should this ever meet your eyes will you please communicate further with the author of "a study in red?" it has been some years now since a letter, sent to you at the reservation, failed of a reply. and the letter has not been returned. xii fortune begins to smile edwards' literary fortunes all but reached financial zero in ; with they began to mount, although the tendency upward was not very pronounced until the month of april. during the first quarter of the year he wrote and sold one stella edwards serial entitled "lovers en masque." his poor health continued, and he was able to work only a few hours each day, but the fact that he could drive himself to the typewriter and lash his wits into evolving acceptable work gave him encouragement to keep at it. early in april, with part of the proceeds from the serial story for expenses, he made a trip to new york. "prospecting trips" is the name edwards gives to his frequent journeys to the publishing center of the country. he prospected for orders, prospected for better prices, prospected for new markets. no fiction factory can be run successfully on a haphazard system for disposing of its product. there must be some market in prospect, and on the wheel of this demand the output must be shaped as the potter shapes his clay. edwards made it a rule to meet his publishers once a year, secure their personal views as he could not secure them through correspondence, and keep himself prominently before them. in this way he secured commissions which, undoubtedly, would otherwise have been placed elsewhere. with each succeeding journey edwards has made to new york, his prospecting trips have profited him more and more. this is as it should be. there is no "marking time" for a writer in the fierce competition for editorial favor; for one merely to "hold his own" is equivalent to losing ground. the writer must _grow_ in his work. when he ceases to do that he will find himself slipping steadily backward toward oblivion. edwards found that in reaching new york in early april , he had arrived at the psychological moment. harte & perkins, already described as keeping tense fingers on the pulse of their reading public, had discovered a feverish quickening of interest for which the klondike gold rush was responsible. the prognosis was good for a new five-cent library; so the "golden star library" was given to the presses. edwards, because he was on the spot and urging his claims for recognition, was chosen to furnish the copy. during the year he wrote sixteen of these stories. for half of april and all of may and june, edwards and his wife were at their old boarding place in forty-fourth street. during this time, along with the writing of the golden star stories, a juvenile serial and a stella edwards serial were prepared. the title of the stella edwards rhapsody was "a blighted heart." on july , owing to the excessive heat in the city and a belief on edwards' part that the country would benefit him, the fiction factory was temporarily removed to the catskill mountains. comfortable quarters were secured in a hotel near cairo, and the work of producing copy went faithfully on. edwards' health improved somewhat, although he was still unable to keep at his machine for a union day of eight hours. under date of aug. , harte & perkins wrote edwards that on account of the poor success of the golden star library they would have to stop its weekly publication and issue it as a monthly. mr. perkins write: "i do not think that the quality of the manuscript is so much at fault as the character of the library itself, though it is very difficult always to know just what the boys want." edwards was depending upon this library to support himself and wife, and the weekly check was a _sine qua non_. summer-resorting is expensive, and he had not yet had his fill of the historic old catskills. he wrote the firm and requested them to send on a check for "a blighted heart." the blight did not confine itself to the story but was visited upon edwards' hopes, as well. harte & perkins did not respond favorably. the serial was not to begin in "_the weekly guest_" until the latter part of september, and upon beginning publication was to be paid for in weekly installments of $ . wrote mr. perkins: "this is a season when, with depressed business and the many accounts we have to look after, it is difficult for us to make advanced payments on manuscripts. you may rest assured that, if conditions were otherwise, i should have been glad to meet your wishes." this meant an immediate farewell to the stamping grounds of good old rip van winkle. forthwith the edwards struck their tent and boarded a night boat at catskill landing for down river. in their stateroom that night, with a fountain pen and using the wash-stand for a table, edwards completed no. of the ill-fated golden star library. he had begun this manuscript before the notification to stop work on the series had reached him. in such cases, harte & perkins never refused to accept the complete story. december found edwards again settled on the north side, in chicago. he had consulted a physician regarding his health, and after a thorough examination had been told that it would require at least a year, and perhaps a year and a half, to cure him. the physician was a young man of splendid ability, and as he had just "put out his shingle" and patients were slow in rallying "round the standard," he threw himself heart and soul into the task of making a whole man out of edwards. the writer helped by leasing a flat within half a block of his medical adviser and faced the twelve or eighteen months to come with more or less equanimity. edwards, of course, could not recline at his ease while the work of rehabilitation was going forward. the family must be supported and the doctor paid. forty dollars a month from the golden star library would not do this. it was necessary to run up the returns somehow and another stella edwards story was undertaken. the title of this story was "won by love," and harte & perkins acknowledged receipt of the first two installments on dec. . inasmuch as "won by love" came very near being the death of its author, it may be interesting to consider the story a little further. the letter of the th ran: "we have received the first two installments of 'won by love' and like them very much indeed, but before giving you a definite answer we would like to have four more instalments on approval, making six in all. kindly send these at your earliest convenience and oblige." the four installments were sent and nothing more was heard from them until a telegram, dated jan. , , was received: "please send more of 'won by love' as soon as possible. must have it monday." owing to the fact that the writer of the old five-cent library, for which edwards had furnished copy some years before, had been taken seriously ill, this work had been turned over to edwards on dec. , . at this time edwards was confined to his bed, and there he worked, his typewriter in front of him on an improvised table. he had just finished several hours' work on a library story when the telegram regarding "won by love" was received. this was saturday. edwards wired at once that he would send two more installments on the following monday. these , words went forward according to schedule, and on the night they were sent the doctor called and found his patient in a state of collapse. cause, too much "won by love." the young physician took it more to heart than edwards did. "i'm afraid," said he gloomily, "that you have ended your writing for all time." "you're wrong, doctor," declared edwards; "i'm not going to be removed until i've done something better than pot-boilers." "i want to call a specialist into consultation," was the reply. the specialist was called and edwards was stripped and his body marked off into sections--mapped out with one medical eye on the "undiscovered country" and the other on this lowly but altogether lovely "vale of tears." when the examination was finished, the preponderance of testimony was all in favor of the promised land. "i should say, mr. edwards," said the specialist, in a tone professionally sympathetic, "that you have one chance in three to get well. your other chance is for possibly seven or eight years of life. the third chance allows you barely time to settle your affairs." settle his affairs! what affairs had edwards to settle? there was the next library to be written and "won by love" to finish, but these would have netted mrs. edwards no more than $ . and the smallest chance would not suffer edwards to leave his wife even this pittance. since his disastrous arizona experience edwards had not been able to save any money. he was only just beginning to look ahead to a little garnering when the doctors pronounced their verdict. he had not a dollar of property, real or personal, if his library was not taken into account, and not a cent of life insurance. after turning this deplorable situation over in his mind, he decided that it was impossible for him to die. "i'm going to take the first chance," said he, "and make the most of it." he did. the young physician gave up more of his time and worked like a galley slave to see his patient through. now, thirteen years after the specialist spoke the last word, edwards is in robust health--the monument of his own determination and the young doctor's skill. nothing succeeds--sometimes--like the logic of _nil desperandum_. to regain a foothold with his publishers, following the disastrous year of , had cost edwards so much persistent work that he would not cancel a single order. he hired a stenographer and for two weeks dictated his stories, then again resumed the writing of them himself, in bed and with the use of the improvised table. success awaited all his fiction, even when turned out in such adverse circumstances. this, perhaps, was the best tonic he could have. he improved slowly but surely and was able, in addition to his regular work, to write a hundred-thousand word novel embracing his arizona experiences. this novel he called "he was a stranger." the title was awkward, but it had been clipped from the quotation, "he was a stranger, and they took him in." the story was submitted to harte & perkins, but they were not in the mood for taking in strangers of that sort. but the year following the novel secured the friendly consideration of mr. matthew white, jr., and introduced edwards into the munsey publications. another novel, "the man from dakota," was returned by harte & perkins after they had had it on hand for a year. it was declined in the face of a favorable report by one of their readers because, "we have so many books on hand that must be brought out during the next year that we cannot consider this story." the year closed with fortune's smile brightening delightfully for edwards, and the new century beckoning him pleasantly onward with the hope of better things to come. the returns for the two years, standing to the credit of the fiction factory, are summarized thus: : "lovers en masque," $ . "golden star library," at $ each, . boys serial, . "a blighted heart," . -------- total $ . : "won by love," $ . "golden stars" at $ each, . five-cent libraries at $ each, . -------- total $ . edwards lives in the outskirts of a small town, on a road much travelled by farmers. two honest tillers of the soil were passing his home, one day, and one of them was heard to remark to the other: "a man by the name of edwards lives there, jake. he's one of those fictitious writers." * * * * * edwards has few friends whom he prizes more highly than he does col. w. f. cody, "buffalo bill," and major gordon w. lillie, "pawnee bill." while the wild west and far east show, of which cody and lillie are the proprietors was making its farewell tour with the last of the scouts, major lillie had this to tell about colonel cody: "you'd be surprised at the number of people who try to beat their way into the show by stringing the colonel. the favorite way is by claiming acquaintance with him. a stranger will approach buffalo bill with a bland smile and an outstretched hand. 'hello, colonel!' he'll say, 'guess who i am! i'll bet you can't guess who i am!' cody will give it up. 'why,' bubbles the stranger, 'don't you remember when you were in ogden, utah, in nineteen-two? remember the crowd at the depot to see you get off the train? why, i was the man in the white hat!'" "just this afternoon," laughed the major, "cody came up to where i was standing. he was wiping the sweat from his forehead and his face was red and full of disgust. 'what's the matter?' i inquired. 'oh,' he answered, 'another one of those d-- guessing contests! why in blazes can't people think up something new?'" xiii. our friend, the t. w. in some localities of this progressive country the pen may still be mightier than the sword; but if, afar from railroad and telegraph, holed away in barbaric seclusion, there really exists a community that writes with a quill and uses elderberry ink and a sandbox, it is safe to say that this community has never been heard of--and the cause is not far to seek. just possibly, however, it is from such a backwoods township that the busy editor receives those rare manuscripts whose chirography covers both sides of the sheet. in this case the pen is really mightier than the sword as an instrument for cutting the ground out from under the feet of aspiring genius. just possibly, too, it was from such a place that a typewritten letter was returned to the sender with the indignant scrawl: "you needn't bother to print my letters--i can read writin'." nowadays penwork is confined largely to signing letters and other documents and indorsing checks; to use it for anything else should be named a misdemeanor in the statutes with a sliding scale of punishments to fit the gravity of the offense. it is not to be inferred, of course, that a man will dictate his love letters to a stenographer. here, indeed, "two's company and three's a crowd." every man should master the t. w., and when he confides his tender sentiments to paper for the eyes of the one girl, his own fingers should manipulate the keys and the t. w., should be equipped with a tri-chrome ribbon--red and black record and purple copying. black will answer for the more subdued expressions, red should be switched on for the warmer terms of endearment, and purple should be used for whatever might be construed as evidence in a court of law. even _billets-doux_ have been known to develop a commercial value. when a serviceable typewriter may be bought for $ what excuse has anyone for side-stepping the inventive ingenuity of the day which makes for clearness and speed? how much does progress owe the typewriter? who can measure the debt? how much does civilization owe the telephone, the night-letter, the fast mail and two-cent postage? even more than to these does progress owe to that mechanism of springs, keys and type-bars which makes plain and rapid the written thought. in the edwards fiction factory the t. w., comprises the entire "plant." the "hands" employed for the skilled labor are his own, and fairly proficient. his own, too, is the administrative ability, modest enough in all truth yet able to guide the factory's destiny with a fair meed of success. since the t. w., is so important, edwards believes in always keeping abreast of improvements. the best is none too good. a typed script, no less than a stereotyped idea, is damned by mediocrity. if a typewriter appears this year which is a distinct advance over last year's machine, edwards has it. keeping up-to-date is usually a little expensive, but it pays. in the early days of his writing edwards used the old caligraph. it was a small machine and confined itself to capital letters. whenever he wished to indicate the proper place for a capital he did it thus: his name was caesar, and he lived in rome. if he lost a letter--and letters in those days were not easily replaced--he allowed the unknown quantity "x" to piece out: hix name wax caexar--. in due time he came to realize the importance of neatness and traded his first caligraph for a later model equipped with letters from both "cases." during twenty-two years he has purchased at least twenty-five typewriters, each the last word in typewriter construction at the time it was bought. at present he has two machines, one a "shift-key" and the other with every letter and character separately represented on the key-board. there are many makes of typewriters, and operators are of many minds regarding the "best" makes. edwards has favored the full key-board as being less of a drain upon the attention than the "shift-key" machine. for the writer who composes upon his machine the operating must become a habit, otherwise an elusive idea may take wings for good while the one who evolved it is searching out the letters necessary to nail it hard and fast to the white sheet. edwards has recently discovered that he can change from his full key-board to a shift-key and back again without materially interrupting his flow of ideas. the characters of the key-board used for ordinary business purposes and those in demand by the writer are somewhat different. not always, on the key-board designed for commercial use, will the exclamation point be found. this, if wanted, must be built up out of a period and a half-ditto mark,--"." plus "'" equals "!" such makeshifts should be tabooed by the careful writer. whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and _once_. three motions, two at the key-board and one at the back-spacer, are two too many. by all means have the real thing in exclamation points--! another makeshift with which edwards has little patience is the custom of using ditto marks for quotation marks, and semi-dittos for semi-quotes. these, and other characters, may be added to most machines by eliminating the fractions, the oblique mark or the per cent. sign. it seems poor policy, also, to use a hyphen, or two hyphens, to indicate a dash. why not have the underscore raised to the position of a hyphen and so have a dash that _is_ a dash? the asterisk, "*," is a character valuable for indicating footnotes, and the caret is often useful in making typewritten interlineations. all these characters edwards has on his full key-board machine. on the shift-key machine he must still struggle with the built-up exclamation point, the ditto quotes and the hyphen dash. no wonder he prefers a smith premier! even the best and most up-to-date typewriter cannot answer all the demands made upon it by writers, however. some day the growing army of authors will receive due attention in this matter, and the manuscript submitted to editors will compare favorably with the printed story. in "habits that help," a very instructive article by walter d. scott, professor of psychology at northwestern university, published in _everybody's magazine_ for september, , appears this paragraph: "some time ago i could pick out the letters on a typewriter at a rate of about one per second. writing is now becoming reduced to a habit, and i can write perhaps three letters a second. when the act has been reduced to the pure habit form, i shall be writing at the rate of not less than five letters per second." the "pure habit form" is one for those who compose on the typewriter to acquire. it not only means ease of composition, but speed in the performance and perfect legibility. until a few years ago, edwards always carried his typewriter with him on his travels. the machine was large and heavy and had to be handled with care, so its transportation was no easy matter. in course of time, and pending the invention of a practical typewriter to fit the pocket, he became content to leave his machine at home and rent one wherever he happened to be. during one of his eastern "prospecting" trips, edwards and his wife left new york for a few summer weeks in the berkshire hills. the t. w., remained temporarily in the city to be overhauled and forwarded. for a fortnight edwards slaved with a pen, _writing four manuscripts of , words each_. he appreciated then, as he had never done before, the value of the typewriter in his work. late in the first week he began writing and telegraphing for his machine to be sent on. about the hotel it was known that edwards expected a typewriter by every stage from great barrington. he had fretted about the non-arrival of the typewriter, and in some manner had let fall the information that his typewriter weighed sixty pounds. speculation was rife as to whether the t. w., had blue eyes or gray, and as to what manner of dwarf or living skeleton could fulfill the requirements at sixty pounds. when the machine finally arrived and the square packing case was unloaded, a host of curious ladies received the surprise of their lives. "typewriter," commonly used as a generic name for the machine that prints, as well as for the person who operates it, should have its double meaning curtailed. the young lady of pleasing face and amiable deportment, whose deft fingers hover over the keys of a senseless machine, is entitled to something more appropriate in the way of a professional title. let it be "typist," after the english fashion; and instead of saying "the typist typewrote the letter," why not say she "typed" it? an editor once returned a manuscript with a note like this: dear sir:--put it into narrative form. yours truly, "the editor." i did so. a week later came this: "dear sir:--a little mystery would help. we like your style very much. yours truly, "the editor." i put in the mystery. a week later,-- "dear sir:--you send us good verse. why not turn the marked paragraphs into verse, with strong influence on story? well written. "yours truly, etc." it was a good idea. the verse was acceptable. it was so acceptable that the editor sent back the story and a check for $ in payment for the verse--which was all he kept! xiv fresh fields and pastures new so far in his writing career harte & perkins had been the heaviest purchasers of edwards' fiction. they had given him about all he could do of a certain class of work, and he had not tried to find other markets for the factory's product. pinning his hopes to one firm, even though it was the best firm in the business, was unsatisfactory in many respects. for various reasons, any one of which is good and sufficient, a writer should have more than one "string to his bow." harte & perkins, jealously watching the tastes of their reading public, were compelled to make many and sudden changes in the material they put out. this directly affected the writers of the material, and edwards was often left with no prospects at all, and perhaps at just the time when he flattered himself that his prospects were brightest. in preceding chapters mention has been made of two serial stories in which edwards had vainly endeavored to interest harte & perkins. one of these was "the man from dakota," and the other, "he was a stranger." these, and another entitled "a tale of two towns," written late in , were ultimately to open new markets. in a diary for the year , edwards has this under date of tuesday, jan. : "mr. paisley called to see me this morning on a business matter. it appears that the proprietor of _the western world_ had ordered a serial from opie read and was not satisfied with it.[g] as _the western world_ goes to press in a few days they must have another story at once. later in the day i talked with mr. underwood the (as i suppose) proprietor, and he asked me to get 'the man from dakota' from mr. kerr, of _the chicago ledger_. i did so and took the manuscript over to mr. paisley. if it is acceptable they are to pay me $ for it." mr. paisley was a gentleman with whom mrs. edwards had become acquainted while attending frank holme's school for illustration, in chicago. he was a man of much ability. under thursday, jan. , the diary has a memorandum to this effect: "mr. paisley came out to see me at noon. they like 'the man from dakota' and will pay me $ for it, divided into three payments of $ , $ and $ ." so, finally, "the man from dakota" got into print. while it was still appearing in _the western world_; mr. underwood conceived the idea of booming the circulation of his paper by publishing a mystery story--one of those stories in which the mystery is not revealed until the last chapter, and for the solution of which prizes are offered. he asked edwards if he would write such a story. why should edwards write one when he already had on hand the mystery story unsuccessfully entered in the old _chicago daily news_ contest? he offered this to mr. underwood. he read it and liked it. mr. paisley read it and liked it. what was the very lowest figure edwards would take for it? mr. underwood, in getting around to this point, told how he had sent for stanley waterloo and asked him to write the mystery story. "what will you pay?" inquired mr. waterloo. "i'll give you $ ," said mr. underwood. whereupon mr. waterloo arose in awful majesty and strode from the office. he did not even linger to say good-by. "now," said mr. underwood to edwards, with a genial smile, "don't you do that if i offer you seventy-five dollars for 'what happened to the colonel.'" "cash?" asked edwards. "on the nail." "give me the money," said edwards; "i need it." now that the diary has been quoted with a reference to opie read, perhaps another reference to the same genial and talented gentleman may be pardoned: jan. , .--"opie read made his 'first appearance in vaudeville' this week, and gertie (mrs. edwards) and i went to the chicago opera house this afternoon to hear him. he was very good, but i would rather read one of his stories than hear him tell it." later in the year edwards "broke into" the papers served by the mcclure syndicate with "a tale of two towns." after using this serial in metropolitan papers, the mcclure people sold it to the kellogg newspaper union to be used in the "patents" sent out to country newspapers. the story was later brought out in cloth by the g. w. dillingham co., new york. the third novel, "he was a stranger," had already been refused by harte & perkins. late in may, , edwards again went "prospecting" to new york. feeling positive that harte & perkins had missed some of the good points in the story, he carried the manuscript with him and once more submitted it. again it was refused, but mr. hall, editor of the "_guest_," informed edwards that he had an excellent story but that it was impossible for harte & perkins to consider its purchase. edwards asked if he knew of a possible market. "mr. munsey," was the reply, "is looking for stories for _the argosy_, and i'd suggest that you take the story over there and show it to mr. white, _the argosy's_ editor." edwards tucked the novel under his arm and strolled up fifth avenue to the offices of the frank a. munsey company. there, and for the first time, he met mr. matthew white, jr. the impression of power, tremendous ability and a big, two-handed grasp of _argosy_ affairs which the editor made upon edwards, at this time, has deepened with the passing years. an author, as well as a keen dramatic critic, mr. white brings to bear on his editorial duties an intuition that closely approximates genius. he has proved his remarkable fitness for the post he occupies by making _the argosy_, since mr. munsey "divested it of its knickerbockers," the most widely read of all the purely fiction magazines. and withal he is one of the most pleasant editors whom a writer will ever have the good fortune to meet. mr. white was glad to consider "he was a stranger." he thumbed over the pages, noted the length, and asked what price edwards would put upon the manuscript in case it was acceptable. edwards named $ , and told of "the brave and fair" which harte & perkins, a few years before, had bought at that figure. mr. white replied that _the argosy_, as yet, was unable to pay such prices, but that he would read the story and, if he liked it, make an offer. a few days later he offered $ for serial rights. edwards took into consideration the fact that the story would establish him in the columns of a growing magazine and, with an eye to the future, accepted the offer. he has never had occasion to regret his decision. from the beginning of the year edwards had been doing a large amount of five-cent library work for harte & perkins. a new weekly had been started, the writer who furnished the copy failed to get his manuscript in on time, and edwards was given a story to finish and, a few days afterward, the entire series to take care of. at the time he sold the serial to mr. white, he was supplying weekly copy for two libraries--the old five-cent library and the new weekly, which shall here be referred to as the circus series. on the proceeds from the sale of "he was a stranger" edwards and his wife had a little outing at atlantic city. they returned to new york for a few days, and then went on to boston. here, comfortably quartered in a hotel, edwards devoted his mornings to work and his afternoons to seeing the "sights" with mrs. edwards. they haunted old cambridge, they made pilgrimages to salem, to plymouth and to other places, and they enjoyed themselves as they had never done before on an eastern trip. later they finished out the summer near monterey, in the berkshire hills. during all these travels the fiction factory was regularly grinding out its grist of copy--so many pages a day, so many stories a week. two libraries, together with a sketch each month for a trade paper published by harte & perkins, kept edwards too busy to prepare any manuscripts for _the argosy_. much of his work, while in the berkshires, was done in longhand. on this point mr. perkins wrote, july : "i should think you would miss your typewriter. i fear that i shall miss it, too, when i read your manuscript, although i find your writing easier to read than that of any of our other writers." in august the edwards went west, visited for a time in michigan and then in wisconsin, finally returned to the former state and, in the little country town where edwards was born, bought an old place and settled down. as with the golden star library, misfortune finally overtook the circus series. a telegram was received telling edwards to hold no. of the circus series pending instructions by letter. the letter instructed him to close up finally the adventures of the hero and his friends and bring their various activities to an appropriate end. the series was continued, for a while longer, with a brand-new hero in each story; but edwards was requested to write but three of the stories in the new form. the year, which opened auspiciously and proved a banner year financially, closed with a discontinuance of all orders from harte & perkins. re-prints were being used in the old five-cent library--stories that had been issued years before and could now be republished for another generation of boy readers. under date of dec. , , mr. perkins wrote: "i know of nothing, just at present, which you can do for us, but should anything develop i shall be very glad to inform you." this left edwards with a sketch a month for the trade paper, for which he was paid $ each. that "misfortunes never come singly" is an old saying, and one which edwards has found particularly true in the writing profession. a letter of dec. , informed him: "we have decided to dispense with the sketches in our trade paper for the present, at least; therefore the february sketch we have in hand will be the last we will want unless we give you further notice." in a good many cases the tendency of a writer, when fate deals hardly with him in the matter of a demand for his work, is to take his rebuffs too seriously. often he will lock up his factory, leaving a placard on the door: "closed. proprietor gone to halifax. nothing in the fiction game anyhow." edwards used to feel in this way. as he grew older he learned to take his disappointments with more or less equanimity, and to keep the factory running. he thought, now, of mr. white and _the argosy_. here was a good time to prepare an _argosy_ serial. he wrote it, sent it, and on feb. , , received this terse letter: "my dear mr. edwards: we can use your story, 'the tangle in butte,' in _the argosy_ at $ . very truly yours, matthew white, jr." this was less than the price paid for "he was a stranger," but the story ran only , words, while the other serial had gone to , . the acceptance went to mr. white by return mail. on the day following there came a letter from harte & perkins ordering work in the old five-cent library--work that would keep edwards busy for the rest of the year. ten of the old stories which edwards had written were to be revised and lengthened by , words. for this work he was to be paid $ for each story. when the ten numbers had been revised and lengthened, he was to go on with the stories, writing a new one each week. fifty dollars apiece was to be paid for the new stories. there was an order, too, for more sketches for the trade paper, to be done in another vein. on aug. the length of the five-cent library stories was cut from , words to , , and the remuneration was cut from $ to $ . another juvenile paper was started and edwards was asked to submit serials for it. in fact, might be called a "boom" year for the fiction factory, although the returns, while satisfactory, were not of the "boom" variety. perhaps the reader may remember the serial, "a vassar girl," referred to in a previous chapter as having been submitted to harte & perkins and rejected. edwards had faith in this story and offered it to mr. white. mr. white's judgment, however, tallied with that of harte & perkins. under date of june mr. white wrote: "i am sorry that 'a vassar girl' has not borne out the promise of the opening chapters. the interest in it is not sufficiently _sustained_ for serial use. the story might be divided into several incidents, which do not grow inevitably the one out of the other. for this reason it has, as a whole, proved disappointing and i am returning the manuscript by express. we should be glad, however, to have you continue to submit work to us." with faith undiminished, edwards forwarded the story to mcclure's newspaper syndicate. it was returned without an explanation of any kind. again he prevailed upon harte & perkins to consider it. it came back from them on sept. , with this message: "i am sorry to say that we do not feel inclined to revise our judgement with reference to your manuscript story, 'a vassar girl.' i am inclined to think from looking over the review of the story that it would be well for you to sell it just as it is, and we hope you will be able to find a market for it somewhere. it would not pay us to publish." edwards knew that the story, wrought out of his arizona experiences, was true in local color and good of its kind, and he failed to understand why it was not appreciated. then, on sep. , came this from the s. s. mcclure company: "during july we had under consideration a story of yours entitled, 'a vassar girl.' on july we wrote you from the syndicate, informing you that we hoped to be able to use the story as a serial in the very near future. the serial was taken back for consideration in the book department by one of the readers who wished again to examine it, and from there it was erroneously returned to you. now if you have not disposed of the serial rights of 'a vassar girl' we should like you again to forward the story to us, and we will submit it to some of our papers as we had always intended to do. we will then give you a prompt decision." the story was purchased, and edwards' faith in it was confirmed. it was during this year of that edwards had a fleeting glimpse of fortune as a playwright. his story, "the tangle in butte," had been read by an actor, a leading man in a kansas city stock company, who wanted dramatic rights so that he might have a play taken from it and written around him. edwards proposed to write the play himself. he did so, and was promptly offered $ , for the play, payable in installments after production. following a good deal of correspondence it was decided to put on the piece for a week's try-out in kansas city. edwards waived his right to royalties for the week, models of the scenery were made, rehearsals began--and then the actor was suddenly stricken with a serious illness and the deal was off. when he had recovered sufficiently to travel he went east, taking the play with him. for several months he tried to interest various managers in it, but without effect. the year closed for edwards with the sketches for the trade paper no longer in demand; but, otherwise, he faced a steadily brightening prospect for the fiction factory. : circus series, @ $ each $ . circus series, completing unfinished story . five-cent library, @ $ each . trade paper sketches, @ $ each . "he was a stranger," . "the man from dakota," . "what happened to the colonel," . --------- total $ . : five-cent library, rewritten @ $ each $ . five-cent library, @ $ each . five-cent library, @ $ each . four boys' serials @ $ each . "the tangle in butte," . "tale of two towns," . "a vassar girl," . trade paper sketches, @ $ each . --------- total $ . =very often.= _poeta nascitur; non fit._ this has been somewhat freely translated by one who should know, as "the poet is born; not paid." footnotes: [g] what do you think of _that_! xv. from the factory's files a letter of commendation from the reader of a story to the writer is not only a pleasant thing in itself but it proves the reader a person of noble soul and high motives. _noblesse oblige!_ the writer who loves his work is not of a sordid nature. the check an editor sends him for his story is the smallest part of his reward. his has been the joy to create, to see a thought take form and amplify under the spell of his inspiration. a joy which is scarcely less is to know that his work has been appreciated by others. a letter like the one below, for instance, not only gives pleasure to the recipient but at the same time fires a writer with determination never to let his work fall short of a previous performance. this reader's good will he _must_ keep, at all hazards. "wayland, n. y., march nd, . mr. john milton edwards, care the f. a. munsey co., new york. my dear sir: i read the story in this last _argosy_, entitled 'fate and the figure seven,' and was in a way considering if it were possible that a man could act in the subconscious state you picture. deem my surprise, last night, when i read of a similar case in the report of the brockton accident. in case you should have failed to notice this item, i send you a clipping from a buffalo paper. i wish incidentally to thank you for your share in making life pleasant for me. i have enjoyed your works immensely from time to time on account of their decidedly original ideas. they are always refreshingly out of the ordinary rut. yours truly, a. f. v----." there is one sentence in this letter which edwards has put in capitals. if possible, he would have written it in letters of gold. in this little world, so crowded with sorrow and tragedy, what is it worth to have had a share in making life pleasant for a stranger? to edwards it has been worth infinitely more than he received for "fate and the figure seven." another letter carries an equally pleasant message: "livingstone, montana, sep. , . mr. john milton edwards, care the argosy, new york city. dear sir: having read your former stories in _the argosy_ on arizona, and last night having commenced 'the grains of gold,' i trust you will pardon my expression of appreciation of said stories. i lived ten years in arizona as private secretary to several of the federal judges, and also lived in mexico, and am still familiar with conditions in that section. i have enjoyed most keenly your handling of thrilling scenes on arizona soil. it is an exasperation that they appear in serial form, as i dislike the month's interval. my only purpose in writing is to express my admiration of your plots and local color, and i remain, sincerely yours, richard s. s----." edwards has always prided himself on keeping true to the actual conditions of the country which forms the screen against which his plot and characters are thrown. this is a gratifying tribute, therefore, from one who knows. a letter which rather startled edwards, suggesting as it did the maricopa indian incident which trailed upon the heels of "a study in red," is this: "colorado springs, colo., - -' . mr. john milton edwards, dear sir: through the kindness of the editor of the _blue book_ i received your address. i am very much interested in your story entitled, 'country rock at kish-kish,' and know the greater part of it to be true to life, but would like to know if it is all true. did sager have a daughter? and where did sager go when he left arizona? or is that just a part of the story? i am very much interested in that character, sager. can you tell me if he is still living, and where? any information that you may be able to give me will be more than appreciated. thanking you in advance for the favor, i am, yours respectfully, mrs. james r. s----." edwards answered this letter--he answers promptly all such letters that come to him and esteems it a privilege--and received a reply. it appeared that mrs. s-- was the grand-daughter of a man whom "sager" had robbed of a large amount of money. "country rock at kish-kish" was built on a newspaper clipping twenty years old. this clipping edwards forwarded to mrs. s-- in the hope that it might help her in her quest for "sager." the letter was returned as uncalled for. should this ever fall under the eye of mrs. s-- she will understand that edwards did everything in his power to be of assistance to her. now and again a letter, which compliments an author indirectly, will chasten his mounting spirit with the reminder of a "slip:" "rochester, n. y., nov. , . mr. john milton edwards: dear sir:--will you please tell me where i can get more of your stories than in the _argosy_; and also, in reference to your story which concludes in december _argosy_, how many large autos were in use in new york in ? yours respectfully, howard z----." carelessness in a writer is inexcusable. it is the one thing which a reader will not forgive, for it is very apt to spoil his pleasure in what would otherwise have been a good story. this is a sublimated form of the "gold-brick game," inasmuch as the reader pays his money for a magazine only to find that he has been "buncoed" by the table of contents. if there is a flaw in the factory's product, rest assured that it will be discovered and react to the disadvantage of everything else that comes from the same mill. many readers will be found whose interest in a writer's work is so keen that they are tempted to offer suggestions. such suggestions are not to be lightly considered. magazines are published to please their readers, and they are successful in a direct ratio with their ability to accomplish this end. naturally, the old doggerel concerning "many men of many minds" will apply here, and a single suggestion that has not a wide appeal, or that fails to conform to the policy of the magazine, must be handled with great care. "cincinnati, ohio, oct. , . mr. john milton edwards, care frank a. munsey co., new york. dear sir: because of the increasing interest in socialism, would it not be a good idea to write a story showing under what conditions we should live in, say, the year , , if the socialists should come into power? you might begin your story with the united states under a socialistic form of government, and later on socialize the rest of the world. your imaginative stories are the ones most eagerly sought in the pages of _the argosy_, and i think that a story such as i have suggested would serve to increase your popularity among the readers of fiction. sincerely yours, j. h. s----." it frequently happens that a comedian will get after a writer with a stuffed club or a slapstick. some anonymous humorist, upon reading a story of edwards' in _the argosy_, labored and brought forth the following: "november , . john milton edwards, care frank a. munsey co., new york. my dear john:-- i have read with much pleasure and delight the first six chapters of your latest story, 'at large in terra incognita,' as published in the december number of _the argosy_. i cannot understand why you failed to send me the proof-sheets of this story for correction, as you did with 'there and back.' it is evident so far as i have read the person who corrected your proof-sheets was as ignorant as yourself. where you got the material for this story is not within my memory, retrospective though it is, and i am sure you must have been on one of your periodical drunks, otherwise the flights of fancy you have taken would have been more rational and not so far removed beyond the pale of the human intellect. now, my dear john, i beg of you to give up going on these habitual tears, because you are not only ruining your constitution but your reputation as a writer is having reflections cast upon it. i trust you will not take this letter as a sermon but rather in a spirit of friendly counsel. i hope you will send me at once the remaining chapters of this great 'at large in terra incognita.' your nemesis, theo. roosenfeldt, pres't trust-busters' asso." readers have usually the courage of their convictions and not many anonymous letters find their way into the office of the fiction factory. edwards remembers one other letter which was signed "biff a. hiram." at that time edwards did not know mr. biff a. hiram from adam, but he has since made the gentleman's acquaintance, and discovered how wide is his circle of friends. if praise from a reader has a tendency to exalt, then how much more of the flattering unction may a writer lay to his soul when approval comes from a brother or sister of the pen? with such a letter, this brief symposium from the factory files may be brought to a close. "mr. john milton edwards, dear sir:-- allow me to congratulate you upon your success with the novelette in a recent issue of the _blue book_. it is to my mind the best short story of its kind i have ever read. as i try to write short stories i see its merits doubly. the modelling is splendid. will you pardon my display of interest? very truly yours, k. b----." =rules for authors.= dr. edward everett hale, author of "the man without a country," and other notable books, gives a few rules which are of interest to the author and the journalist. dr. hale's success in the literary world makes these rules, gleaned from the field of experience, especially valuable to young writers: . know what you want to say. . say it. . use your own language. . leave out all fine phrases. . a short word is better than a long one. . the fewer words, other things being equal, the better. . cut it to pieces--which means revise, revise, revise. xvi. growing prosperity the years and were busier years than ever for the fiction factory. nineteen-two is to be remembered particularly for opening a new departure in the story line in _the argosy_, and for placing the first book with the g. w. dillingham company. nineteen-three claims distinction for seeing the book brought out and for boosting the factory returns beyond the three-thousand-dollar mark. but it must not be inferred that the book had very much to do with this. edwards' royalties for the year were less than $ . in september, , edwards made one of his customary "prospecting" trips to new york. if there was anything in omens his stay in the city promised dire things. on the second day after his arrival he went to coney island with a friend. together they called on the seventh son of a seventh son and had their palms read. the dispenser of occult knowledge assured edwards that the future was _very_ bright, that tuesday was his lucky day and that spring was the best time for him to consummate his business undertakings. that day, as it happened, was tuesday. in the teeth of this promising augury, and within ten minutes after leaving the palmist's booth, some coney island "dip" shattered edwards' confidence in tuesday by annexing his wallet. the wallet, as it happened, contained all the money edwards had brought from home, with the exception of a little loose change. this was the second time edwards had been all but stranded in the metropolis, and this time the stranding was more complete. when he cast up accounts that evening he found himself with a cash balance of $ . . fortunately mrs. edwards was not along. he had left her at home with the understanding that she was to come on later. when a writer has come within hailing distance of the bread line there remains but one thing to do, and that is to start the factory going with day and night shifts. edwards called on mr. white, of _the argosy_, and outlined a serial story. he was told to go ahead with it. for five days edwards hardly stirred from his room. at the end of that time he had completed "the desperado's understudy," and had sold it to mr. white for $ , spot cash. after completing this serial, edwards outlined to mr. white a novelette which would furnish _the argosy_ with something new in the fiction line. the plot was based on a musical extravaganza which he had written, several years before, in collaboration with mr. eugene kaeuffer, at one time connected with _the bostonians_. nothing had ever come of this ambitious effort, although book and musical score were completed and offered to mr. mcdonald of _the bostonians_ and to mr. thomas q. seabrooke. mr. white liked the idea of the story immensely and gave edwards _carte blanche_ to go ahead with it. this story, "ninety, north," paved the way for other fantastic yarns which made a decided hit in _the argosy_ and so pointed edwards along a fresh line of endeavor which proved as congenial as it was profitable. several months before he visited new york edwards had sold to the mcclure syndicate, a juvenile serial which may be referred to here as "the campaign at topeka." for this he had been offered $ , which offer he promptly accepted. he had not received a check, however, and was at a loss to understand the reason. to this day the reason remains obscure, although later events pointed to a misunderstanding of some kind regarding the story between the syndicate and one of its readers. before edwards left new york he was paid the $ . more than a year afterward he was informed that the serial had been sold to the century company for _st. nicholas_, and that after publication in that magazine it was to be brought out in book form. it was mr. t. c. mcclure who put edwards in touch with the dillingham company and referred him to them as prospective publishers, in cloth, of the successful syndicate story, "a tale of two towns." edwards submitted galley proofs of the serial to mr. cook of the dillingham company, and ultimately signed a contract to have the book published on the usual royalty basis of ten per cent. for harte & perkins, during the year, the factory ground out nickel novels, juvenile serials, one sketch for the trade paper and a few detective stories. on nov. , after he had returned home from new york, he was notified: "much as i regret to inform you of it, by a recent purchase of copyright stories we are placed in a position where we will not require any further material for any of our five-cent libraries for some time to come, so we must discontinue orders to you for all this material." edwards, in a way, had become hardened to messages of this kind. _the argosy_ was an anchor to windward, and he resolved to give his attention to serials for mr. white. in december, , and january and february, , he wrote and forwarded "ninety, north," a second fantastic story called "there and back," and the arizona serial "grains of gold." all three of these stories were sold at once, bringing in $ . in a letter dated oct. , , mr. white had this to say about "there and back:" "thanks for letting me see the enclosed letter regarding 'ninety, north.' i am equally pleased with yourself at its significance. i am wondering whether you have heard much about your story 'there and back?' my impression is that that has been one of the most popular stories you have ever written for _the argosy_. when i see you i will tell you an odd little circumstance that occurred in connection with its run in the magazine." the circumstances referred to by mr. white took place in paris. one of _the argosy's_ readers happened to be in a café, looking over proofs of a forthcoming installment of "there and back" while at her luncheon, when she heard the story being discussed, in complimentary terms, by a number of frenchmen at an adjoining table. strange indeed that frenchmen should be interested in an american story, and stranger still that _the argosy's_ reader should be reading an installment of the very same story while men in that foreign café were discussing it! the first installment of "there and back," mr. white informed edwards, had increased _the argosy's_ circulation _seven thousand copies_.[h] on march harte & perkins requested edwards to continue work on the old five-cent library. by taking up this work again he would be diminishing the factory's serial output, but he reflected that his fertility in the matter of serials would soon have mr. white over-supplied. therefore edwards decided to go on with the nickel weeklies. in march, as mr. maclean of _the popular magazine_ once put it, edwards "came out in cloth," the dillingham company issuing "a tale of two towns" on st. patrick's day. what are the feelings of an author when he opens his first book for the first time? if you, dear reader, are yet to "get out in cloth" for the first time, then some day you will know. but, if you value your peace of mind, do not build too gorgeous an air castle on the foundation of this printed thing. printed things are at the mercy of the reviewers and, in a larger sense, of the great reading public. the reviewers, in nearly every instance, were kind with "a tale of two towns." in many quarters it was praised fulsomely, but the book did not strike that fickle sentiment called popular fancy. in six months, mr. cook, of the dillingham company, wrote edwards that "a tale of two towns" was "a dead duck." in the december settlement, however, the remains yielded royalties of $ . . for two or three years the royalties trailed along, and finally the edition was wound up with a payment of $ . . _sic transit gloria!_ during january, , a theatrical gentleman requested edwards to dramatize a book which messrs. street & smith had issued in paper covers. "you can change the title," the gentleman suggested, "and slightly change the incidents. in that way it won't be necessary to write street & smith for permission or, indeed, to let them know anything about it." edwards knew, however, that nothing will so surely wreck a writer's prospects as playing fast and loose with editors and publishers. he refused to consider the theatrical gentleman's proposition. instead, he forwarded his _argosy_ story, "the desperado's understudy," upon which mr. white had given him dramatic rights, and offered to make a stage version of it. the offer was accepted and a play was built up from the story. the theatrical gentleman was pleased and said he would give $ , for the dramatization. then, alas! the theatrical gentleman's company went on the rocks at the alhambra theatre, in chicago, and edwards had repeated his former playwriting experience. the two years' work figured out in this wise: : five-cent libraries @ $ each $ . detective stories @ $ each . juvenile serials @ $ each . sketch for trade paper . "the desperado's understudy," . "the campaign at topeka," . short stories . -------- total $ . : five-cent libraries @ $ each $ . detective stories @ $ each . "ninety, north," . "there and back," . "a sensational affair," short story, . "grains of gold," . "fate's gamblers,"[i] . "the morning star race," short story, . "a game for two," . royalties on book, "a tale of two towns," . "the point of honor," . -------- total $ . as several gentlemen in these times, by the wonderful force of genius only, without the least assistance of learning, perhaps without being able to read, have made a considerable figure in the republic of letters; the modern critics, i am told, have lately begun to assert, that all kind of learning is entirely useless to a writer, and indeed, no other than a kind of fetters on the natural sprightliness and activity of the imagination, which is thus weighed down, and prevented from soaring to those high flights which otherwise it would be able to reach. this doctrine, i am afraid, is at present carried much too far; for why should writing differ so much from other arts? the nimbleness of a dancing-master is not at all prejudiced by being taught to move; nor doth any mechanic, i believe, excercise his tools the worse by having learnt to use them.--_fielding_, "tom jones." footnotes: [h] "there and back" went through the fiction factory in twelve days. [i] this story sold through kellogg newspaper company, chicago. the two short stories sold to the late lamented _wayside tales_, detroit, mich. xvii. ethics of the nickel novel is the nickel novel easy to write? the writer who has never attempted one is quite apt to think that it is. there are hundreds of writers, the would-be-goods, making less than a thousand a year, who would throw up their hands in horror at the very thought of debasing their art by contriving at "sensational" five-cent fiction. so far from "debasing their art," as a matter of fact they could not lift it to the _high plane_ of the nickel novel if they tried. of these would-be-goods more anon--to use an expression of the ante-bellum romancers. suffice to state, in this place, writers of recognized standing, and even ministers, have written--and some now are writing--these quick-moving stories. there's a knack about it, and the knack is not easy to acquire. no less a person than mr. richard duffy, formerly editor of _ainslee's_ and later of the _cavalier_, a man of rare gifts as a writer, once told edwards that the nickel novel was beyond his powers. so far as edwards is concerned, he gave the best that was in him to the half-dime "dreadfuls," and he made nothing dreadful of them after all. he has written hundreds, and there is not a line in any one of them which he would not gladly have his own son read. in fact, his ethical standard, to which every story must measure up, was expressed in this mental question as he worked: "if i had a boy would i willingly put this before him?" if the answer was no, the incident, the paragraph, the sentence or the word was eliminated. in edwards wrote his last nickel novel, turning his back deliberately on three thousand dollars a year (they were paying him $ each for them then), not because they were "debasing his art" but because he could make more money at other writing--for when one is forty-four he must get on as fast as he can. the libraries, as they were written by edwards, were typed on paper - / " by ", the marginal stops so placed that a typewritten line approximated the same line when printed. eighty of these sheets completed a story, and five pages were regularly allowed to each chapter. thus there were always sixteen chapters in every story. first it is necessary to submit titles, and scenes for illustration. selecting an appropriate title is an art in itself. alliteration is all right, if used sparingly, and novel effects that do not defy the canons of good taste should be sought after. the title, too, should go hand in hand with the picture that illustrates the story. this picture, by the way, has demands of its own. in the better class of nickel novels firearms and other deadly weapons are tabooed. the picture must be unusual and it must be exciting, but its suggested morality must be high. the ideas for illustrations all go to the artist days or even weeks in advance of the stories themselves. it is the writer's business to lay out this prospective work intelligently, so that he may weave around it a group of logical stories. usually the novels are written in sets of three; that is, throughout such a series the same principal characters are used, and three different groups of incidents are covered. in this way, while each story is complete in itself, it is possible to combine the series and preserve the effect of a single story from beginning to end. these sets are so combined, as a matter of fact, and sold for ten cents. each chapter closes with a "curtain." in other words, the chapter works the action up to an interesting point, similar to a serial "leave-off," and drops a quick curtain. skill is important here. the publishers of this class of fiction will not endure inconsistency for a moment. the stories appeal to a clientele keen to detect the improbable and to treat it with contempt. good, snappy dialogue is favored, but it must be dialogue that moves the story along. an apt retort has no excuse in the yarn unless it really belongs there. a multitude of incidents--none of them hackneyed--is a prime requisite. complexity of plot invites censure--and usually secures it. the plot must be simple, but it must be striking. one author failed because he had his hero-detective strain his massive intellect through , words merely to recover $ that had been purloined from an old lady's handbag. if the author had made it a million dollars stolen from a lady like mrs. hetty green, probably his labor would have been crowned with success. these five-cent heroes are in no sense small potatoes. they may court perils galore and rub elbows with death, now and then, for nothing at all, but certainly never for the mere bagatelle of $ . the hero does not drink. he does not swear. very often he will not smoke. he is a chivalrous gentleman, ever a friend of the weak and deserving. he accomplishes all this with a ready good nature that has nothing of the goody-good in its make-up. the hero does not smoke because, being an athlete, he must keep in constant training in order to master his many difficulties. for the same reason he will not drink. as for swearing, it is a useless pastime and very common; besides, it betrays excitement, and the hero is never excited. the old-style yellow-back hero was given to massacres. he slew his enemies valiantly by brigades. not so the modern hero of the five-cent novel. rarely, in the stories, does any one cross the divide. and whenever the villain is hurt, he is quite apt to recover, thank the hero for hurting him--and become his sworn friend. the story must be _clean_, and while it must necessarily be exciting, it must yet leave the reader's mind with a net profit in all the manly virtues. is this easy? please note this extract from a letter written by harte & perkins dec. , --it covers a point whose humor, edwards thought, drew the sting of dishonesty: "your last story, no. , opened well, had plenty of good incidents and was interesting, but there are several points in which it might have been improved. your description of two spot's scheme of posing dutchy as a petrified boy is amusing, but the plan was dishonest and a piece of trickery. it was all right, perhaps, to let the boys go ahead without the knowledge of the hero, but when he learned of it he should have put a stop to the plan immediately. it was all right to have him laugh at it, but at the same time he should have spoken severely to the boys about it and ordered them to return the money they had received through their trick. he did not do this in your story and it was necessary for me to alter it considerably in the first part on that account. the hero is supposed to be the soul of honor, and in your story he is posed as a party to a deception practised on the citizens of ouray, by which they were defrauded of the money they paid for admission to see the supposed "petrified boy." such conduct on his part would soon lose for him the admiration of the readers of the weekly, as it places him on a moral level, almost, with the robbers whom he is bringing to justice." consider that, you would-be-goods, who are not above putting worse things in your "high-class" work. and can you say "i am holier than thou" to the conscientious writer who turns out his , or , words a week along these ethical lines? handsome is as handsome does! somebody is going to write these stories. there is a demand for them. the writer who can set hand to such fiction, who meets his moral responsibilities unflinchingly, is doing a splendid work for young america. and yet, as stated in a previous chapter, there are nickel novels _and_ nickel novels--some to read and some to put in the stove unread. high-minded publishers, however, are not furnishing the careful head of the family with material for his kitchen fire. it costs you nothing to think, but it costs infinitely to write. i therefore preach to you eternally that art of writing which boileau has so well known and so well taught, that respect for the language, that connection and sequence of ideas, that air of ease with which he conducts his readers, that naturalness which is the true fruit of art, and that appearance of facility which is due to toil alone. a word out of place spoils the most beautiful thought.--_voltaire to helvetius_, a young author. xviii keeping everlastingly at it edwards had not visited new york in , but he landed there on friday, jan. , ,--literally storming in on a train that was seven hours late on account of the weather. a cab hurried him and his wife to the place in forty-fourth street where the pleasant landlady used to hold forth, but they found, alas! that the old stamping ground was in the hands of strangers. it was like being turned away from home. where should they go? edwards remembered that, on one of his previous visits to new york, mr. perkins had recommended the st. george hotel, over in brooklyn. the st. george was within a few blocks of the south end of the bridge and the offices of harte & perkins were in william street, close to the north end. so edwards and his wife went to the brooklyn hotel and there established their headquarters. on jan. edwards called on the patrons of his factory. the result was not particularly encouraging. harte & perkins instructed him to stop work on the five-cent library, but said that in about two months they would have a new library for him to take care of. edwards had brought with him to the city his dramatic version of "the tangle in butte," the play which had come so near turning $ , into the factory's strong-box. it was edwards' hope that he might be able to dispose of the play, but the hope went glimmering when he learned that there were , actors stranded in new york, and that things theatrical were generally in a bad way. during edwards had corresponded with mr. h. h. lewis, editor of _the popular magazine_, a recent venture of messrs. street & smith's. he had submitted manuscripts to mr. lewis but they had not proved to be in line with _the popular's_ requirements. it is difficult, through correspondence, to discover just what an editor wants. the only way to get at such a thing properly is by personal interview. if the would-be contributor does not then get the editor's needs clearly in mind it is his own fault. edwards called on mr. lewis and had a pleasant chat with him. the assistant editor was mr. a. d. hall, a capable gentleman who had been with messrs. street & smith for many years, and with whom edwards was well acquainted. at that time louis joseph vance was writing for _the popular magazine_, among others, and edwards met him in mr. lewis' office. as edwards was leaving, after outlining a novelette and receiving a commission to write it, he paused with one hand on the door-knob. "i'll turn in the story, mr. lewis," said he, "and i hope you'll like it and buy it." "of course he'll like it and buy it," called out vance. "you're going to write it for him, aren't you?" "why, yes," returned edwards, "but--" "you're not a peddler," interrupted vance, "to write stuff and go hawking it about from office to office. we're writers, and when we know what a man wants _we deliver the goods_." this was before the days of "the brass bowl" and "_terence o'rourke_," but already vance had found himself and was striking the key-note of confidence. _confidence_--that's the word. back it up with fair ability and the writer will go far. from _the popular's_ editorial rooms edwards went up fifth avenue for a call on the editor of _the argosy_. much to his disappointment mr. white was out of town for new year's and would not return until the following week. the story which edwards had presented to mr. lewis in its oral and tabloid form was one that had been written in and turned down by mr. white. before offering the manuscript to _the popular_, edwards intended to rewrite it and strengthen it. a typewriter was ordered sent over to the st. george hotel, and on jan. the rewriting of the novelette was begun. the story was called "the highwayman's waterloo," or something to that effect. on the following day twenty-four pages of the manuscript were submitted to mr. lewis, won his approval, and the rewriting proceeded. two chapters of a serial were also offered to mr. white for examination. the story was called "the skirts of chance," and had been begun before edwards left home. during and ' edwards had worked, at odd times, on what he designed to be a "high-class" juvenile story. it was , words in length, when completed in the summer of , and in september he had submitted it to dodd, mead & company. not having heard from the story, on this january day that saw him passing out fragments of manuscripts to _the popular_ and _the argosy_ he went on farther up fifth avenue and dropped in to ask d., m. & co., how "danny w.," was fareing at the hands of their readers. he was told that five readers had examined the story and that it was then in the hands of the sixth! some of the readers--and this came to him privately--had turned in a favorable report. because of this, the author of "danny w.," went back to brooklyn considerably elated. it would be an honor indeed to have the book break through such a formidable brigade of readers and get into the catalogue of the good old house of dodd, mead & company. the "highwayman" novelette was finished and submitted in its complete form on jan. . on the same day mr. white informed edwards that he was well pleased with the two chapters of "the skirts of chance" and told him to proceed with it. fortune was on the upward trend for edwards, and he was sent for by dodd, mead & company, on jan. , and informed that they would either bring out "danny w.," on a royalty or pay a cash price for the book rights. edwards, remembering his disastrous publishing experience with "a tale of two towns," accepted $ in cash. mr. lewis bought the novelette for $ , and harte & perkins, on the same day, gave edwards a new library to do-- , words in each story at $ . complete manuscript of "the skirts of chance" was submitted to mr. white on jan. , and on jan. edwards received $ for it. by feb. edwards had written and sold to mr. lewis another novelette entitled, "the duke's understudy," for which he received $ . on feb. he and his wife returned to michigan. edwards had been in new york forty days and had gathered in $ . he left new york with orders for _argosy_ serials and with the new library, "sea and shore," to be turned in at the rate of one story every two months. in may he was requested to go on with the old five-cent library. these stories were forwarded regularly one each week, until november, when orders were again discontinued. in september, "danny w.," appeared. as with "a tale of two towns," the reviewers were more than kind to "danny w.," and there is just a possibility that they killed him with kindness. the idea obtains, in supposedly well-informed circles, that the only way for reviewers to help a book is to damn it utterly. be this as it may, although illustrated in color and put out in the best style of the book-maker's art, "danny w.," did not prove much of a success. a california paper bought serial rights on the story for $ , and thus the book netted the author, all told, the modest sum of $ . during this year, also, the a. n. kellogg newspaper company sold serial rights on "fate's gamblers" for $ , took per cent. as a commission and presented edwards with what was left. a short story, "the camp coyote," was sold to mr. titherington, for _munsey's_; and edwards had opened a new market in street & smith's magazines. thus was brought to a close a fairly prosperous year. in the returns slid backward a little. during this year, and the year preceding, some stories which had failed with mr. white were received with favor by mr. kerr, of _the chicago ledger_--at the _ledger_ price, ranging from $ upward to $ . the _woman's home companion_, to which edwards had vainly tried to sell serial rights on "danny w.," accepted a two-part story entitled, "the redskin and the paper-talk," and paid $ for it. this is the story of which a chapter was lost in the composing room, and edwards received an honorarium of $ for having a carbon duplicate of the few missing pages. in , also, the american press association did business with edwards to the amount of $ . another market for the edwards' product--worth mentioning even though the amount of business done was not large. the returns for the two years were as follows: : "the highwayman's waterloo," $ . "danny w.," . "danny w.," serial rights . "the skirts of chance," . "the duke's understudy," . "at large in terra incognita," . "the man from the stone age," short story . "the honorable jim," . "fate's gamblers," serial rights . "a deal with destiny," . "the enchanted ranch," . "the camp coyote," . "under the ban," . "a master of graft," . five-cent libraries @ $ each . sea and shore libraries @ each . -------- total $ . : "cornering boreas," short story $ . "the redskin and the paper-talk," . "the redskin and the paper-talk," additional pay't . "mountebank's dilemma," short story . "helping columbus," . "the edge of the sword," . "yellow clique," . "a mississippi snarl," . "the black box," . "a wireless wooing," short story . "the freelance," . "the luck of bill lattimer," . "machine-made road-agent," short story . "the man from mars," . sea and shore stories @ $ each . -------- total $ . good, philosophical ras wilson once said to a new reporter, "young man, write as you feel, but try to feel right. be good humored toward every one and everything. believe that other folks are just as good as you are, for they are. give 'em your best and bear in mind that god has sent them, in his wisdom, all the trouble they need, and it is for you to scatter gladness and decent, helpful things as you go. don't be particular about how the stuff will look in print, but let'er go. some one will understand. that is better than to write so dash bing high, or so tarnashun deep, that no one understands. let'er go." * * * * * there was once a poor man hounded to death by creditors. ruin and suicide vied for his surrender. but he was a man of the twentieth century, and flippantly but with unbounded faith he collected a few odd pennies and hied him to a newspaper office. stopping scarcely to frame his sentence he inserted a "want" advertisement, stating his circumstances and declaring he would commit suicide unless aid was proffered. within twenty-four hours he had $ ; before another sun his employer advanced as much more. carefully advising the newspaper to discontinue the advertisement, he paid off his creditors--and lived happily ever afterward! no, this is not a fairy tale. the time was a few weeks ago, the city chicago and the newspaper, _the tribune_. the moral is, that originality in writing, coupled with a fresh idea, brings a check. xix. love your work for the work's sake the sentiment which edwards has tried to carry through every paragraph and line of this book is this, that "writing is its own reward." his meaning is, that to the writer the joy of the work is something infinitely higher, finer and more satisfying than its pecuniary value to the editor who buys it. material success, of course, is a necessity, unless--happy condition!--the writer has a private income on which to draw for meeting the sordid demands of life. but this also is true: a writer even of modest talent will have material success in a direct ratio with the joy he finds in his work!--because, brother of the pen, when one takes pleasure in an effort, then that effort attracts merit inevitably. if any writing is a merciless grind the result will show it--and the editor will see it, and reject. there are times, however, when doubt shakes the firmest confidence. a writer will have moods into which will creep a distrust of the work upon which he is at that moment engaged. if necessity spurs him on and he cannot rise above his misgivings, the story will testify to the lack of faith, doubts will increase as defects multiply and the story will be ruined. the writer must have faith in his work quite apart from the money he expects to receive for it. if he has this faith he reaches toward a spiritual success beside which the highest material success is paltry indeed. when a writer sits down to a story let him blind his eyes to the financial returns, even though they may be sorely needed. let him forget that his wares are to be offered for sale, and consider them as being wrought for his own diversion. let him say to himself, "i shall make this the best story i have ever written; i shall weave my soul into its warp and whether it sells or not i shall be satisfied to know that i have put upon paper the best that is in me." if he will do this, he will achieve a spiritual success and--as surely as day follows night--a material success beyond his fondest dreams. but he must keep his eye single to the true success and must have no commerce in thought with what may come to him materially. to some, all this may appear too idealistic, too transcendental. there are natures so worldly, perhaps even among writers, as to scoff at the idea of spiritual success. they are overshadowed by the material, and when the spiritual, which is the true source of their power, is no longer the "still, small voice" of their inspiration, they will be bankrupt materially as well. a writer cannot hide himself in his work. his individuality is written into it, and he may be read between the lines for what he is. a creation reflects the creator, and that the work may be good the writer should have spiritual ideals and do his utmost to live up to them. let him have a purpose, be it never so humble, to benefit in some way his fellow-man, and let him hew steadily to the line. love your work for the work's sake and material benefits "will be added unto you." years ago edwards found an article in a newspaper that appealed to him powerfully. he clipped it out, preserved it and has made it of great help in his writing. it is a wonderful "doubt-destroyer." in the hope that it may be an inspiration to others, he reproduces it here: standards of success. at a time when material success is so generally regarded as the chief goal of human effort it is interesting to find a man in professor hadley's position presenting arguments for a broader view of the question. in his baccalaureate sermon the president of yale offered the graduates some advice which at least they should find stimulating. he does not discredit or discourage the ambition for practical success but he makes it plain that in his view there is danger in measuring success in life "by the concrete results with which men can credit themselves." "we should value life," he declares, "as a field of action." we should care for the doing of things quite as much as for the results. tried by this standard, aspiration and effort are to be more highly prized than achievement itself. the man who sincerely strives for a great object has succeeded, whether or not the object is attained or its attainment brings any tangible reward. it is no novelty, of course, to hear a college president upholding ideal standards and rejecting utilitarian views of success, but few of the educators have cared to follow their theories, as president hadley does, to their logical conclusion. probably a majority of them would applaud nansen's courage in attempting to reach the north pole but would question the utility of the attempt. president hadley admires nansen simply "because he succeeded in getting so much nearer the pole than anybody before him ever did," and thinks it is one of the most discouraging testimonies to the false standards of the nineteenth century that nansen feels compelled to justify himself on the basis of the scientific results of his expedition. furthermore, a man who tries to get to the pole is engaged in a glorious play, "which justifies more risk and more expenditure of life than would be warranted for a few miserable entomological specimens, however remote from the place where they had previously been found." the young man of to-day has no lack of exhortations to lead the life of strenuous effort. it is as well that he should be taught also that the reward for this effort will be barren if the whole object sought be material benefit to himself. life is something to be used. whether or not it has been successfully used depends not on the results so much as on the object sought and the earnestness of the seeking. it is somewhat novel to find an american college president expounding this philosophy to his students, but the philosophy is, on the whole, helpful. it will spur to effort in crises where the desire for more material success fails to provide a sufficient incentive. a certain new york author is fond of his own work, and robert w. chambers is responsible for the story that he called at one of the libraries to find out how his latest book was going. he hoped to have his vanity tickled a little. "is ---- in?" he said to the librarian, naming his book. "it never was out," was the reply. * * * * * what is a great love of books? it is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. books, it is true, are silent as you see them on your shelves; but, silent as they are, when i enter a library i feel almost as if the dead were present, and i know if i put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fullness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.--_john bright._ * * * * * the spring poet has been much exploited in the comic papers. the would-be novelist has been plastered with signs and tokens until one could not fail to recognize him in the dark. but the ordinary, commonplace, experienced writer has been so shamefully neglected that few realize his virtues. the editor recognizes his manuscript as far off as he can see it, and seizes upon it with joy. the manuscript is typewritten and punctuated. it bears the author's name and address at the top of the first page. it is signed with the author's name at the end. it is not tied with a blue ribbon. no, the blue ribbon habit is not a myth. it really exists in every form from pale baby to navy no. and in every shape from a hard knot to an elaborate rosette--_munsey's._ xx. the lengthening list of patrons during the year the patrons of the fiction factory steadily increased in number. _the blue book_, _the red book_, _the railroad man's_, _the all-story_, _the people's_--all these magazines bought of the factory's products, some of them very liberally. the old patrons, also, were retained, harte & perkins taking a supply of nickel novels and a stella edwards' serial for _the guest_. edwards' introduction to _the blue book_ came so late in the year that the business falls properly within the affairs of . the first step, however, was taken on aug. , , and was in the form of the following letter: "my dear mr. edwards: why don't you send me, with a view to publication in _the blue book_, as we have renamed our old _monthly story magazine_, one or more of those weird and fantastic novelettes of yours? if you have anything ready, let me see it. i can at least assure you of a prompt decision and equally prompt payment if the story goes. anything you may have up to , words i shall be very glad to see for _the red book_. yours very truly, "karl edwin harriman." here was a pleasant surprise for edwards. he had met mr. harriman the year before in battle creek, michigan. at that time mr. harriman was busily engaged hiding his talents under a bushel known as _the pilgrim magazine_. when the red book corporation of chicago, kicked the basket to one side, grabbed mr. harriman out from under it and made off with him, the aspect of the heavens promised great things for literature in the middle west. and this promise, by the way, is being splendidly fulfilled. when you take down your "who's who" to look up some personage sufficiently notorious to have a place between its red covers, if you find at the end of his name the words, "editor, author," you may be sure that there is no cloud on the title that gives him a place in the book. you will know at once that he must have been a good author or he would never have been promoted from the ranks; and having been a good author he is certainly a better editor than if the case were otherwise, for he knows both ends of the publishing trade. having been through the mill himself, mr harriman has a fellow-feeling for his contributors. he knows what it is to take a lay figure for a plot, clothe it in suitable language, cap it with a climax and put it on exhibition with a card: "here's a peach! grab me quick for $ . ." harriman's "peaches" never came back. the author of "ann arbor tales," "the girl and the deal," and others has been successful right from the start. no request for material received at the edwards' factory ever fails of a prompt and hearty response. a short story and a novelette were at once put on the stocks. they were constructed slowly, for edwards could give them attention only during odd moments taken from his regular work. the short story was finished and submitted long in advance of the novelette. this letter, dated sept. , will show its success: "my dear old man: why don't you run on here and see me, now and again. oh, yes, new york's a lot better, but we're doing things here, too. about 'cast away by contract,' it's very funny--such a ridiculously absurd idea that it's quite irresistible. how will $ be for it? o. k.? it's really all i can afford to pay for a story of its sort, and i do want you in the book. let me hear as soon as possible and i will give it out to the artist. very truly yours, "k. h." and so began the business with mr. harriman. he still, at this writing ( ), has a running account on the factory's books and is held in highest esteem by the proprietor. a letter, written may , , (a year dealt with in a previous chapter), is reproduced here as having a weighty bearing on the events of . it was edwards' first letter from a gentleman who had recently allied himself with the munsey publications. as a publisher mr. f. a. munsey is conceded to be a star of the first magnitude, but this genius is manifest in nothing so much as in his ability to surround himself with men capable of pushing his ideas to their highest achievement. such a man had been added to his editorial staff in the person of mr. r. h. davis. mr. davis, like mr. bryan, hails originally from nebraska. although he differs somewhat from mr. bryan in political views, he has the same powers as a spellbinder. he's western, all through, is "bob" davis, bluff, hearty and equally endowed with stories, snap and sincerity. "dear sir: we would like to have a few pictures of those writers who have contributed considerably to our various magazines. it is obvious that this refers to you. therefore, if you will send us a portrait it will be greatly appreciated. very truly yours, "r. h. davis." mr. davis got the picture; also a serial or two and some short stories for new publications issued by the munsey company of which he was editor. late in he called for a railroad serial, and he wanted a particularly good one. edwards had never tried his hand at such a story. he knew, in a general way, that the "pilot" was on the front end of a locomotive, and that the "tender" was somewhere in the rear, but his technical knowledge was hazy and unreliable. the story, if accepted, was to appear in _the railroad man's magazine_, would be read by "railroaders" the country over, and would be damned and laughed at if it contained any technical "breaks." here was just the sort of a nut edwards liked to crack. the perils of the undertaking lent it a zest, and were a distinct aid to industry and inspiration. he resolved that he would give mr. davis a story that would bear the closest scrutiny of railroad men and win their interest and applause. to this end he studied railroads, up and down and across. he absorbed what he could from books, and the rest he secured through personal investigation. when the story was done, he submitted the manuscript to a veteran of the rails--one who had been both a telegraph operator and engineer--and this gentleman had not a change to suggest! mr. davis took the story aboard. while it was running in the magazine a reader wrote in to declare that it must have been written by an old hand at the railroad game: the author of the letter had been railroading for thirty-five years himself, and felt positive that he ought to know! "the red light at rawlines" scored a triumph, proving the value of study, and the ability to adjust one's self to an untried situation. edwards had imbibed too much technical knowledge to exhaust it all on one story, so he wrote another and sent it to mr. white. the latter informed him: "i turned 'special one-five-three' over to _the railroad man's magazine_ at once, without reading it, and they are sending you a check for it this week, i understand. this does not mean that i did not care to consider it for _the argosy_. i certainly have an opening for more of your stories, but when you took the railroad for your theme and treated it so intelligently, i think it better that you give _the argosy_ some other subject matter." another story, written this year to order, also serves to show that facility in handling strange themes or environments does not always depend upon personal acquaintance with the subject in hand. intelligent study and investigation can many times, if not always, piece out a lack of personal experience. blazing a course through _terra incognita_ in such a manner, however, is not without its dangers. harte & perkins wished to begin the yearly volume of _the guest_ with a stella edwards serial. this story was to have, for its background, the san francisco earthquake. nearly the whole action of the yarn was to take place in the city itself. edwards had never been there. he had vague ideas regarding the "golden gate," oakland and other places, but for accurate knowledge he was as much at sea as in the case of the railroad story. he set the wheels of industry to revolving, however, and familiarized himself so thoroughly with the city from books, newspapers and magazines that the editor of _the guest_, an old san francisco newspaper man, had this to say about the story: "it will please you to learn that we think 'a romance of the earthquake' a very interesting story, with plenty of brisk action, picturesque in description, and displaying a thorough knowledge of california's metropolis and vicinity." although these are interesting problems to solve, yet edwards, as a rule, prefers dealing with material that has formed a part of his own personal experiences. his "prospecting" trip for the year brought him into new york on monday, nov. . on tuesday (his "lucky day," according to the coney island seer of fateful memory), he called on mr. white, and mr. white took him across the hall and introduced him to mr. davis. the latter gentleman ordered four serials and, for stories of a certain length, agreed to pay $ each. next day edwards dropped in at the offices of street & smith and submitted a novelette--"the billionaire's dilemma"--to mr. maclean, editor of _the popular magazine_ (mr. lewis having retired from that publication some time before). mr. maclean carried the manuscript in to mr. vivian m. moses, editor of _people's_ and the latter bought it. this story made a hit in the _people's_ and won from mr. george c. smith, of the firm, a personal letter of commendation. result: more work for _the people's magazine_. about the middle of december, edwards and his wife left for their home in michigan. they had been in the city a month, and during that time edwards had received $ for his factory's products. the year, financially, was the best edwards had so far experienced; but it was to be outdone by the year that followed. during a great deal of writing was done for mr. davis. among other stories submitted to him was one which edwards called, "on the stroke of four." regarding it mr. davis had expressed himself, may , in characteristic vein: "my dear colonel: send it along. the title is not a bad one. i suppose it will arrive at a quarter past five, as you are generally late.... now that spring is here, go out and chop a few kindlings against the canning of the fruit. this season we are going to preserve every dam thing on the farm. in the meantime, put up a few bartletts for little willie. we may drop in provided the nest contains room." he received an urgent invitation to "drop in." but he didn't. he backed out. possibly he was afraid he would have to "pioneer it" in the country, after years of metropolitan luxury in the effete east. or perhaps he was afraid that edwards might read some manuscripts to him. whatever the cause, he never appeared to claim the "bartletts," made ready for him with so much painstaking care by mrs. edwards. but this was not the only count in the indictment. he sent back "on the stroke of four!" and this was his message: "up to page this story is a peach. after that it is a peach, but a rotten peach, and i'd be glad to have you fix it up and return it." after edwards has finished a story he has an ingrained dislike for tampering with it any further. however, had he not been head over ears in other work, he would probably have "fixed up" the manuscript for mr. davis. in the circumstances, he decided to try its fortunes elsewhere. mr. moses took it in, paid $ for it, and pronounced it better than "the billionaire's dilemma." at a later date, mr. davis wanted another sea story for _ocean_ which, at that time, was surging considerably. "on the stroke of four" had been designed to fill such an order. inasmuch as it had failed, edwards wrote a second yarn which was accepted at $ . the sea, and the people who go down to it in ships, to say nothing of the ships themselves, were all out of edwards' usual line. he prepared himself by reading every sea story he could lay hands on, long or short. he bought text-books on seamanship and navigation, and whenever there were manoeuvers connected with "working ship" in a story, edwards puzzled them out with the help of the text-books. with both deep-water serials he succeeded tolerably well. he is sure, at least, that he didn't get the spanker-boom on the foremast, nor the jib too far aft. harte & perkins again favored the factory with an order for a "stella edwards" to begin another volume of _the guest_. this was an automobile story, "the hero of the car," and was accepted and highly praised. another novelette, "an aerial romance," was bought by mr. moses for _the people's magazine_. beginning in march, edwards had written some more nickel novels for harte & perkins--not the old five-cent weekly, for that he was never to do again--but various stories, in odd lots, to help out with a particular series. on july he was switched to another line of half-dime fiction, and this work he kept throughout the remainder of the year. for the two years the factory's showing stands as follows: : nickel novels @ $ each $ . royalties on book, dillingham . "the world's wonder," . "a romance of the earthquake," . "the sheriff who lost and won," . "the reporter's scoop," . "the deputy sheriff," . "the red light at rawlin's," . "cast away by contract,". . "special one-five-three," . "the disputed claim," . "fencing with foes," . "the billionaire's dilemma,". . -------- total $ . : "under sealed orders," $ . "the pacific pearlers," . "call of the west," . "wilderness gold-hunter," . "dupes of destiny," . "on the stroke of four," . "the hero of the car," . "an aerial romance," . "west-indies mix-up," . nickel novels @ $ each . -------- total $ . in that remarkable group of authors who made the dime novel famous, the late col. prentiss ingraham was one of the giants. these "ready writers" thought nothing of turning out a thousand words of original matter in an hour, in the days when the click of the typewriter was unknown, and of keeping it up until a novel of , words was easily finished in a week. but to col. ingraham belongs the unique distinction of having composed and written out a complete story of , words with a fountain pen, between breakfast and breakfast. his equipment as a writer of stories for boys was most varied and valuable, garnered from his experience as an officer in the confederate army, his service both on shore and sea in the cuban war for independence, and in travels in mexico, austria, greece and africa. but he is best known and will be most loyally remembered for his buffalo bill tales, the number of which he himself scarcely knew, and which possessed peculiar value from his intimate personal friendship with col. cody. xxi. a writer's reading that old egyptian who put above the door of his library these words, "books are the medicines of the soul," was wise indeed. but the wise, ever since books have been made, have harped on the advantage of good literature, and have said all there is to be said on the subject a thousand times over. if one has any doubts on this point let him consult a dictionary of quotations. no intelligent person disputes the value of books; and it should be self-evident that no writer, whose business is the making of books, will do so. to the writer books are not only "medicines for the soul" but tonics for his technique, febrifuges for his rhetorical fevers and prophylactics for the thousand and one ills that beset his calling. a wide course of general reading--the wider the better--is part of the fictionist's necessary equipment; and of even more importance is a specializing along the lines of his craft. "omniverous reader" is an overworked term, but it is perfect in its application to edwards. from his youth up he has devoured everything in the way of books he could lay his hands on. the volumes came hap-hazard, and the reading has been desultory and, for the most part, without system. if engaged on a railroad story, he reads railroad stories; if a tale of the sea claims his attention, then his pabulum consists of sea-facts and fiction, and so on. the latest novel is a passion with him, and he would rather read a story by jack london, or rex beach, or w. j. locke than eat or sleep--or write something more humble although his very own. he is fond of history, too, and among the essayists he loves his emerson. nothing so puts his modest talents in a glow as to bring them near the beacon lights of genius. edwards has a library of goodly proportions, but it is a hodge-podge of everything under the sun. thomas carlyle "keeps company" with mary johnston on his bookshelves, marcus aurelius rubs elbows with frank spearman, "france in the nineteenth century" nestles close to "the mystery" from the firm of white & adams, and four volumes of thackeray are cheek by jowl with harland's "the cardinal's snuff-box." a most reprehensible method of book keeping, of course, but to edwards it is a delightful confusion. to him the method is reprehensible only when he wants a certain book and has to spend half a day looking for it. some time, some blessed time--he has promised himself for years and years,--he will catalogue his books just as he has catalogued his clippings. books that concern themselves with the writer's trade are many, so many that they may be termed literally an embarrassment of riches. if a writer had them all he would have more than he needed or could use. books on the short story by j. berg eisenwein and james knapp reeve, edwards considers indispensable. they are to be read many times and thoroughly mastered. "roget's thesaurus" is a work which edwards consulted until it was dogeared and coverless; he then presented it to an impecunious friend with a well-defined case of _writeritis_ and has since contented himself with the large "thesaurus dictionary of the english language," by f. a. march, ll. d. this flanks him on the left, as he sits at his typewriter, while webster's "unabridged" closes him in on the right. the standard dictionary is also within reach. dozens and dozens of books about writers and writing have been read and are now gathering dust. after a writer has once charged himself to the brim with "technique," he should cease to bother about it. if he has read to some purpose his work will be as near technical perfection as is necessary, for unconsciously he will follow the canons of the art; while if he loads and fires these "canons" too often, they will be quite apt to burst and blow him into that innocuous desuetude best described as "mechanical." he should exercise all the freedom possible within legitimate bounds, and so acquire individuality and "style"--whatever that is. no sane man in any line of trade or manufacturing will attempt to do business without subscribing to one or more papers or magazines covering his particular field. he wants the newest labor-saving wrinkle, the latest discoveries, tips on new markets, facts as to what others in the same business are doing, and countless other fresh and pertinent items which a good trade paper will furnish. a writer is such a man, and he needs tabulated facts as much as any other tradesman or manufacturer. periodicals dealing with the trade of authorship are few, but they are helpful to a degree which it is difficult to estimate. from the beginning of his work edwards has made it a point to acquire every publication that dealt with the business of his fiction factory. in early years he had _the writer_, and then _the author_. when these went the way of good but unprofitable things, the editor fortunately happened along, and proved incomparably better in every detail. from its initial number the editor has been a monthly guest at the factory, always cordially welcomed and given a place of honor. guide, counsellor and friend--it has proved to be all these. edwards subscribes heartily to that benevolent policy known as "the helping hand." furthermore, he tries to live up to it. what little success he has had with his fiction factory he has won by his own unaided efforts; but there were times, along at the beginning, when he could have avoided disappointment and useless labor if some one who knew had advised him. realizing what "the helping hand" might have done in his own case, he has always felt the call to extend it to others. assistance is useless, however, if a would-be writer hasn't something to say and doesn't know how to say it. another who has had some success may secure the novice a considerate hearing, but from that on the matter lies wholly with the novice himself. if he has it in him, he will win; if he hasn't, he will fail. edwards' first advice to those who have sought his help has invariably been this: "subscribe to the editor." in nearly every instance the advice has been taken, and with profitable results. this same advice is given here, should the reader stand in need of a proper start along the thorny path of authorship. nor is it to be construed in any manner as an advertisement. it is merely rendering justice where justice is due, and is an honest tribute to a publication for writers, drawn from an experience of twenty-two years "in the ranks." xxii. new sources of profit the out-put of the fiction factory brought excellent returns during the years and . industry followed close on the heels of opportunity and the result was more than gratifying. the product consisted of forty-four nickel novels for harte & perkins, two novelettes for _the blue book_, four serials for the munsey publications, and one novelette for _the people's magazine_. this work alone would have carried the receipts well above those of the preceding year, but new and unexpected sources of profit helped to enlarge the showing on the factory's books. the rapidity with which edwards wrote his serial stories--sometimes under the spur of an immediate demand from his publishers, and sometimes under the less relentless spur of personal necessity--seemed to preclude the possibility of profit on a later publication "in cloth." only a finished performance is worthy of a durable binding. realizing this, edwards had never made a determined effort to interest book-publishers in the stories. in the ordinary course of affairs, and with scarcely any attention on his part, two serials found their way into "cloth." "danny w.," accepted and brought out by dodd, mead & co., was written for book publication, and serialized after it had appeared in that form. it fell as far short of a "best seller" as did the two republished serials. nevertheless, in spite of the fact that additional profit through publication in cloth seemed out of the question, edwards wondered if there were not something else to be gained from the stories besides the serial rights. his stories were dramatic and, in several instances, had appealed to play-writers. for a time he had hopes that dramatic rights might prove a source of additional income. his hopes, in this respect, have not been completely dashed, inasmuch as competent hands are at this date (september, ) fitting some of his stories for the stage. something may come of it, but his experience has made him wary and he is not at all sanguine. eliminating book and dramatic rights from the equation, and what remained? a letter from waltham, mass., dated april , , uncovered possibilities of which edwards had never dreamed. most of these possibilities, as it transpired, _were_ a dream, but, as in the matter of dramatic rights, some day the dream may come true in a large and substantial manner. here is the letter: "dear sir: if you have not yet disposed of the sole and unrestricted rights of translation into the german language of your books: 'the billionaire's dilemma' and 'the shadow of the unknown,' will you permit me to submit them to my german correspondents--some of the best known german publishers--with the idea of effecting a sale? i shall require a single copy of 'the billionaire's dilemma,' but not of 'the shadow of the unknown' having preserved the story as it appeared first in the popular,[j] to send abroad, with a statement of the best terms you will make for the _cash out-right purchase of both book and serial rights_. if the serial rights of translation in german belong to the popular, you will have to come to a satisfactory understanding with them, in order to legally assign to me the serial, as well as your own individual, book-rights, because all german publishers insist on serial rights, although they seldom or never use them, as magazines are not good and little used there. my experience has been, that the magazine companies are very broad in their treatment of their writers, and usually willing to re-transfer their serial rights of translation, in order to facilitate a sale, and make them universally known. of course less is paid for translation rights of stories that have only appeared in serial form in the states. if any of the publishers i represent purchases your stories, you have the best possible guarantee of perfect translation and speedy publication. awaiting the courtesy of an early reply and the necessary copy of 'the billionaire's dilemma,' i have the honor to be, dear sir, yours very truly, "eugene niemann."[k] several guns were fired during this invasion of germany, but only one shell "went home." this was not the fault of mr. niemann. in edwards' brief experience with him he found him always a scholar and a gentleman. sincerity and courtesy were his never-failing traits. the pleasant little twists he gave his english, and the occasional naive expression that struggled through his typewriter, along with the prodigal use of "caps," will perhaps excuse a further offering from the correspondence. here is the shot that hit the mark: "may , . "dear sir:-- before i have even had time to forward 'the billionaire's dilemma' and 'on the stroke of four', and to await your other announced stories, a letter comes from one of my german correspondents, saying he had run through your short story: 'the shadow of the unknown' and would purchase the rights of translation if you will accept an offer of forty dollars. perhaps you will say, "such an offer is absurd," but first let me state to you, that the best books placed in germany bring at the most one hundred dollars, and oftener anywhere from fifty to one hundred, that the chief profit, is not a monetary one, rather the spreading of the writer's name and fame. 'the shadow of the unknown,' writes the publisher, is a very short story, and if you will be guided by my long experience, dear sir, you will accept the offer, in order to make our name popular and facilitate a better sale of your following stories, which i shall take double pleasure in forwarding, feeling surer of a good offer. were i guilty of business indiscretion, you would be surprised to know the names of the already published 'books' i have sold and am daily selling the german rights of, for hardly a monetary consideration at all, and yet the literary satisfaction quite out-balances all other considerations, does it not? i enclose the customary form of assignment, which you can sign and have duly witnessed by a notary public, if you see fit to accept the offer, and which you will please then send me per american express c. o. d. subject to examination to avoid every possible chance of error. the personal receipt need not be signed before the notary public, your signature without witness suffices. hoping to do much better for you with your other fine stories and appreciating your confidence, i remain, dear sir, very truly yours, "eugene niemann." after the dust had settled, and the invasion was finally completed, $ had been added to the year's receipts of the fiction factory; but edwards clings to the hope that some day more of his "fine stories" may be greedily bought by the german publishers. these german publishers are honorable enough to buy, where they might pirate, and there are a few american publishers who might take lessons from them in business probity. with a small tidbit from a letter of may , the pleasant mr. niemann will be dismissed: "later, with your permission, i will take up the stories i sell in germany for sale in france, denmark, norway and sweden? the monetary remuneration in the scandinavian countries is yet smaller than in germany, but the people are fine readers, and that for all, who truly love their art is the chief standpoint i take it?!" during the latter part of july and the earlier part of august edwards was in new york for a couple of weeks. as usual when in the city he worked even harder than he did at home. two nickel novels were written, a serial was put through the factory for mr. davis, and he collected $ for a novelette which he sold to _people's_. there was an interesting, almost a humorous, circumstance connected with the serial. edwards called the story "the man who left." when the manuscript was completed he took it in to mr. davis, and two or three days later called again to learn its fate. the munsey offices are up close to the roof in the flatiron building. the lair of the editor who presides over the destinies of _the all-story magazine_, _the railroad man's magazine_ and _the scrap book_[l] is flanked on one side by a prospect of space that causes the occasional caller to hang on to his chair. across from this dizzy void is a partition hung with framed photographs of contributors--a rogues' gallery in which edwards, when he last saw the collection, had a prominent place. north of an imaginary line drawn between the window and the partition sits the editor, grimly prominent against a motto-covered wall. as the caller faces the editor he is, of course, confronted by placards reminding him that "this is my busy day--cut it short," and "find a man for the job not a job for the man," and others cunningly calculated to put him on tenterhooks. to this place, therefore, came edwards, proffering inquiries about "the man who left." he read fateful things in the august countenance, and he was not surprised when mr. davis handed him a lemon, but he _was_ surprised when he took the lemon back. "rotten," said mr. davis, "r-r-rotten! when i'm out for peaches, edwards, i side-step the under-ripe persimmons. 'the man who left' ought to have made his get-away along about line one, paragraph one, chapter one; and then if he had staid out plumb to the place where you have written 'finis' this gorgeous but unconvincing tale would have been vastly improved. am i a jasper that you seek thus to inveigle me into purchasing a gold-brick? here, take it away! now let me have it again. i am going to give you three hundred for it and tuck it away in the strong-box. later you are to evolve, write and otherwise put upon paper a fictional prize for which 'the man who left' will be returned to you in even exchange. do you get me? 'nuff said. i think you're out of mazuma, and that's why i'm doing this. my friends'll ruin me yet!" now the humor, if there is any, fits in about here: edwards went back to michigan and wrote a serial which he sent on to replace "the man who left." here is the letter in reply: my dear edwards: while i was away on my vacation, some one spilled a pitcher of milk. in other words, they put "the man who left" to press for _the all-story magazine_, and it is now too late to yank it back. that's the trouble of leaving anything in the safe that should not be there. you and i, however, being practical men, can understand the facility with which the yarn was nabbed up. now, the point is, i can use the "mydus" yarn and get a check off to you next week, provided i have some basis on which to operate. what's the lowest price for which you will give me 'mydus,' call all previous arrangements equal, and let things stand as they are. the way to trim me and square accounts is to come back with a quick, short, sharp, cheap reply, and let it go at that. hurry up this 'mydus' business and we'll see what we can do. sincerely yours, "r. h. davis." the spilling of that "pitcher of milk" while mr. davis was away on his vacation had netted edwards just an even $ . another source of profit from the serial stories which the fiction factory had been turning out for years was revealed to edwards in a letter dated nov. , . this, like the matter of translation rights, came to edwards as a pleasant surprise; but, unlike the "german invasion," it was to prove vastly more profitable. here is the letter: "dear sir: upon looking over the files of _the argosy_ we find that you have written the following serial stories. are the book rights of these your property? if not, can you get mr. munsey to give them to you? if you can, and will lengthen the stories to about , words, we will pay you $ each for the paper book rights of same. we cannot offer you more, as we would put these out in cheap paper edition, but this publication would do a great deal toward popularizing your name and work with the class of readers who buy _the argosy_ and other fiction magazines. the stories are as follows: (here were listed the titles of seven _argosy_ serials.) very truly yours, "street & smith." edwards caught at this opportunity. he failed to realize, at the time, just how much work was involved in lengthening the stories for paper-book publication. in his reply to street & smith he offered a list of forty-five serials, and promised others if they could use so many. he was requested, on dec. , to forward copies of all the stories for reading. the same letter contained this paragraph: "i note that your letter is dated december nd and that you state you expect to be in new york inside of three weeks. i think it might be to our mutual advantage if you could come on in a week or ten days, for there is a new line of work which i think you could do for us about which i would like to talk with you." just before christmas edwards and his wife arrived in new york. on some of the serials which had appeared in the munsey magazines edwards owned all but serial rights, but there were many more wherein all rights were held by the publishers. the folly of a writer's selling all rights when disposing of a story for serial publication dawned upon edwards very strongly, at this time. the conviction was driven "home" at a little dinner which edwards tendered to several editors and readers. during the course of the dinner one of the guests--an editor in charge of a prominent and popular magazine--averred bluntly that "any writer who sells all rights to a story to a magazine using the story serially, is a fool." with edwards this sale of all rights had resulted from carelessness more than anything else, and had he not been dealing with friends like mr. white and mr. davis he might have suffered financial loss because of his folly. two or three interviews with mr. davis secured the paper-book rights, but with the understanding that if any of the lengthened stories were brought out in cloth, one-half of the royalties were to go to the munsey company. in the whole list there were only seven stories long enough for immediate issue in paper-book form. these were paid for, at once. the other stories fell short of the required number of words all the way from , to , words. there was no profit to edwards in lengthening the stories at the price of $ each. what benefit he derived--and is now deriving, for the work continues--was in the advertising which the wide circulation of the paper-covered books afforded him. also, edwards considered the value of cementing his friendship with the old-established publishing house of street & smith, a house noted for the fairness of its dealings with contributors and for the prompt payment for all material upon acceptance. "making good" with publishers of such high standing is always of inestimable value to a writer. one of street & smith's editors, at this time, was st. george rathborne, author of "dr. jack" and dozens of other popular stories that have appeared in paper covers. here was another author who had become an editor, bringing to his duties an experience and ability that made for the highest success. mr. c. a. maclean, another member of the street & smith editorial staff, was also a gentleman with whom edwards had occasional dealings. mr. maclean, beginning at the lowest rung of the ladder, had mounted steadily to the post of editor of _the popular magazine_ and _smith's magazine_, by sheer force of his own merit pushing those publications to the forefront of magazines of their class. to these gentlemen, and particularly to mr. rathborne,[m] edwards is indebted for unfailing kindness and courtesy, and takes this means to acknowledge it. the special work which was mentioned in street & smith's letter of nov. consisted of a new weekly publication for which edwards was to furnish the copy. seventy-five dollars each was to be paid for these stories. with all this work ahead of the fiction factory, the year dawned in a blaze of prosperity. during edwards found himself so busy with the paper-books and the other publication that he had no time for serial stories. after thirty-four issues the new publication was discontinued, and edwards went back to writing novels for harte & perkins, at $ each. during edwards tried his hand at moving pictures. the alluring advertisements under the scare-head, "we pay $ to $ for picture plays," caught his eye and fired his ambition. he wrote a scenario, sent it in, and waited expectantly for his $ . he had been only two hours preparing the "photoplay" and it looked like "easy money." when the check arrived it was for $ ! he wrote in to ask what had become of the remaining $ ? thus answered the vitagraph company of america, oct. , ' : "in regard to the payment for a manuscript of this character, we never give more than ten dollars, for two or three reasons. in the first place, we only use the idea. the manuscript has to be revised in almost every instance in order to put it in practical shape for the directors. again, they contain an idea which is more or less stereotyped or conventional and cannot be claimed as entirely original only as applied to the action of the play. regarding your own idea, i will frankly say that the same idea has often been embodied in other plays, but the general suggestion of it gives a new phase to the action of the idea. the editor merely surmises, or so we think, that a thoroughly original manuscript in practical shape would be worth at least $ , but we seldom get one of that kind. we would welcome one at any time and would pay its full value. the members of our staff, who are obliged to write practical working scenarios, appreciate the above facts because they know what it means to perfect a scenario with the synopsis of the story, the properties, settings, &c., &c. we merely state these things so you will understand that we are thoroughly fair in your case and will certainly be so in every instance. ideas, if they are entirely original, would be worth more than ten dollars, but they are scarcer than hen's teeth at any price. we find most of the ideas which we receive, and we receive hundreds of them, are nothing but repetition or old ones in new guises. again we will say, if we can get original ideas we will pay their full value." another case of _sic transit_--this time, _sic transit mazuma_. here follows a transcript from the factory's books for the two years with which this chapter has dealt: : dillingham, last royalties on "tales of two towns" $ . nickel novels @ $ each . "the shadow of the unknown" . "the shadow of the unknown," translation rights . "parker & o'fallon" . "in the valley's shadow" . "the man who left," . "trail of the mydus," . "just a dollar," . "frisbie's folly," . "the man called dare," . "the streak of yellow," . paper-book rights at $ each, . -------- total, $ . : issues "motor boys" @ $ each $ . paper-book rights @ $ each . nickel novels @ $ each, . "the stop on the 'scutcheon," short story . moving-picture, . "breaking even," short story . "divided by eight," short story . ------- total $ . the following advertisement from an english paper, which is vouched for, once more illustrates the truth of the statement that fact is stranger than fiction. the owner of the houses, it may be mentioned, was ill in bed, far away, and the neighbors evidently did not question the right of the men to do as they did. the advertisement is as follows: lost.--three fine cottages have mysteriously disappeared from the property nos. , and high road, willesden green, london. please communicate with j. m. godwin, bank street, london, w. c. * * * * * o. henry told a whimsical tale of what he considered unfair competition in the short story field. he was in the office of a big magazine, when he witnessed the return to a dejected looking young fellow of a couple of manuscripts. "i am sorry for that fellow," said the editor. "he came to new york from new orleans a year ago, and regularly brings some stories to our office. we can never use them. he doesn't make a dollar by his pen, and he is getting shabby and pale." a month or so later o. henry saw the same writer in the same office, and the editor was talking to him earnestly. "you had better go back to new orleans," said that gentleman. "why?" said the young man. "some day i may write a story you may want." "but you can do that just as well in new orleans," said the editor, "and you can save board bills." "board bills," ejaculated the young man. "what do i care about board bills! i have an income of twenty thousand a year from my father's estate." footnotes: [j] a mistake, the story appeared in =the blue book=. [k] edwards uses a fictitious name for this correspondent. [l] now no more as =the cavalier=, the former monthly, now a weekly has "absorbed" =the scrap book=. [m] mr. rathborne has recently given up his editorial duties and has retired to what seems to be the ultimate goal of writers and editors--a farm. he is somewhere in new jersey. xxiii. the injustice of it the commercial world may hearken sentimentally to that plaintive ballad, "silver threads among the gold," as it floats into the emporium from a street organ, but the commercial world never allows sentiment to interfere with business. when a man presents himself and asks for a job, he is examined for symptoms of decrepitude before his mental abilities are canvassed. the wise seeker for place, before making the rounds of the want column, will see to it that his hair is of a youthful color, for there is nothing so damned by the octopus of trade as hoary locks. a bottle of walnut juice, carefully administered, may bridge the gap and lead from failure to success. "new blood!" that's the cry. "age is too conservative, too partial to the old and outworn standards, too apt to keep in a rut. give us the mop of black hair and the bright, snappy eye! give us energy and brilliant daring and a fresh view-point! we'll be taking a few chances, but what of that? we must follow the fashion." some of the publishers have gone to the extreme of the prevailing mode. the yearling from the football field, if he happens to have been sporting editor of the college journal, is brought to the sanctum, shoved into the chair of authority, and given $ a week and the power to go ahead and be ruthless. he rarely disappoints his employer. whenever he does, his employer is to be congratulated. usually, however, he sticks to his schedule. he thinks he is somebody, and attempts to prove it by kicking all the old contributors out of the office and forwarding invitations for manuscripts to every member of the class of ' . there is no writer of experience who has failed to meet this sort of editor. for years a publishing house may have steadily increased in power and prestige through the loyalty and labor of the old contributor, only to give some darling of the campus a desk and the authority to begin oslerizing faithfulness and ability. this injustice would be humorous were some of its aspects not so tragic. the smug publishers themselves may have something to answer for. they have wrung their ratings in dun and bradstreet from the old contributor, and when they abandon a policy that has brought success they are steering through troubled waters and into unknown seas. for anything short of incompetence this casting aside of the old in order to try out the new is reprehensible. to weather a decade or two of storm and stress a writer must have been versatile. versatility increases with his years, and he is as capable of brilliant daring and a fresh viewpoint as any youth in the twenties. times out of number this has been made manifest. stories disguised with a pen-name and a strange typewriter have won welcome and success where the old name and the old typewriter would have insured rejection. note this from one who has been twenty-five years at the game: "in the near-humorous line i may mention the fact that i once tried to get the editor of a certain paper to let me furnish him a serial, but he didn't think i could write it. soon afterward a friend who had been contributing serials to that particular paper was asked by the editor to furnish a serial. as it chanced, the writer happened to be engaged in other work. so he came to me and wanted to know if i could not write the desired serial. when i informed him that the editor had turned my offer down, he then suggested that i write the serial and let him send it in under his own name. it was a chance to try the sagacity of that particular editor. i salved my conscience, wrote the serial, and my typewritten copy was submitted to the editor under the name of my friend. the serial was accepted, with medals thrown all over it--my literary friend being informed that it was just the thing the editor wanted, and that he had hard work to get authors who could suit his view as to what was available for his particular publication. my friend got the honor, if there was any, of seeing the serial run under his name; and i got the money for doing the work." if an author ever suffers an editor's contempt, what must the editor suffer on being caught red-handed in such a way as this? it is the worm's prerogative to turn whenever it finds the opportunity. illustrating this point, and several other points with which this chapter is concerned, the following letter from another writer, who has been turning out successful manuscripts for upward of twenty years, is reproduced: "dear bro. edwards: you certainly do put a poser to me. at the present time i have difficulty in seeing anything that has happened to me in the twenty-odd years of my following the literary game in anything but a tragic light. i believe my success, such as it was, was tragic. at least, it has rivetted my reputation to a certain class of literature--heaven save the mark!--and makes it almost impossible for me to sell anything of a better quality. i might tell you of plenty of cruel things that have been done to me by publishers and editors when they knew or suspected that i was hard up; and plenty of silly things done to me by the same folk when they thought i didn't particularly need their money. but funny things----? it's the point of view makes the thing funny. the child pulling the wings off a fly to see the insect crawl over the window pane is amused; but i don't suppose the fly sees the humor of the situation. i could tell you tales of submitting the same manuscript three times to an editor whom we both know well, having it shot through with criticism the first two times and then having it accepted and paid for at extra rates within two years of the first submission, and without even a word of the title changed! is that the kind of an incident you want? one of the funniest things that ever happened to me was that an editor of a popular magazine used to say that my stuff resembled dickens, and when i wrote half-dime novels the readers used to write in and say the same. the quality of mind possessed by the scholarly editor and the street boys who read 'bowery billy' must be somewhat the same--eh? there was once a magazine that bore as its title the name of a publisher as famous as any american ever saw, and the editor bought a story of me at the rate of half a cent a word, and owed me two years for it. finally, one time when i was very hard up i went to the office and hung around until i could see the 'boss' and put it up to him to pay me. he did. he knocked off - per cent for 'cash.' pretty good, eh? i tell you, edwards, there's nothing funny in the game that i can see--not for the so-called literary worker. the gods may laugh when they see a man with that brand of insanity on him that actually forces him to write. but i doubt if the writer laughs--not even if he writes a 'best seller.' for success entails turning out other successes, and that is hard work. excuse me! i am going back to the farm. i will write only when i have to, and only as long as my farm will not support me. i've got hold of a pretty good place cheap, down here with the outlook of making a good living on it in time. no more the great white way, with the dirty black alley behind it, in mine! i am not going to carry my hat in my hand around to editors' offices and take up collections for long. besides, most of the editors blooming now are just out of college and are not dry behind the ears yet. they think that johnny go-bang, who edited the sporting page in the podunk university screamer, knows more about writing fiction than the old fellows who have been at it a couple of decades. and i reckon they are right. they are looking for 'fresh' material; some of it is pretty 'raw' as well as fresh. i fooled an editor the other day by sending a manuscript on strange paper, written on a new typewriter, and with an assumed name attached. sold the story and got a long letter of encouragement from the editor. great game--encouraging 'new' writers! about on a par with the scheme some rum sellers have of washing their sidewalks with the dregs of beer kegs. the spider and fly game. now, if i told that editor what an ass he had made of himself, would he ever buy another manuscript of me again? i fear not! perhaps i am pessimistic, brother edwards. there's no real fun in the writing game--not for the writer, at least. not when he is forty years old and knows that already he is a 'has-been.' good luck to you. hope your book is a success, and if i really knew just what you wanted i'd try to whip something into shape for you. for you very well know that, if other fiction writers give you incidents for your book, they'll mostly be fiction! that is the devil of it. if a fiction writer cuts a sliver off his thumb while paring the corned beef for dinner, he will make out of the story a gory combat between his hero and a horde of enemies, and give details of the carnage fit to make his own soul shudder. i hope to meet up with you again some time. but pretty soon when i go to new york i'll wear my chin-whiskers long and carry a carpet-bag; and you bet i'll fight shy of editors' offices." another example of injustice to writers which, however, happened to turn out well for the writer: "i offered a short serial to a certain newspaper syndicate. soon i received a letter saying they could pay me $ for the serial rights. before my letter accepting the offer reached them, i had another letter from the syndicate withdrawing the offer. the editor stated pathetically that the proprietor had returned and had asked him to withdraw it. i then sent the serial to a chicago newspaper, which paid me $ for serial rights--but never published the story. finally i rewrote the story, had it published as a book by a leading eastern publishing house, and it sold well." here, again, is injustice of another kind: "once a certain eastern magazine authorized me to go to santa fe, new mexico, and write a description of a pueblo dance and of pueblo life, and send the manuscript on with photographs for illustration. i did the work. and i was rewarded by the generous editor with a check for $ ! you can imagine how profitable that particular stunt was, for i took a week's time and paid my own expenses. but not out of that twenty. there wasn't enough of it to go 'round." xxiv. what shall we do with it? edwards wrote only one serial story during , and turned his hand to that merely to bring up the financial returns and leave a safe margin for expenses. nickel novels, a few short stories, a novelette for _the blue book_ and the lengthening of two stories for paper-book publication comprised the year's work. he "soldiered" a little, but when a writer "soldiers" he is not necessarily idle. edwards' thoughts were busy, and the burden of his reflections was this: heaven had endowed him with a small gift of plot and counter-plot, and a little art for getting it into commercial form; but were his meager talents producing for him all that they should? was the purely commercial aim, although held to with a strong sense of moral responsibility, the correct aim? after a score of years of hard work did he find himself progressing in any but a financial direction? forgetting the past and facing the future with eyes fixed at a higher angle, how was he to proceed with his "little gift of words?" what should he do with it? in the bright summer afternoons edwards would walk out of his fiction factory and make a survey of it from various points. he was always so close to his work that he lost the true perspective. he was familiar with the minutiae, the thousand and one little details that went to make up the whole, but how did it look in the "all-together," stripped of sentiment and beheld in its three dimensions? paradoxically, the work appeared too commercial in some of its aspects, and not commercial enough in others. the sordid values were due to the demand which came to edwards constantly and unsolicited, and which it was his unvarying policy always to meet. "all's fish that comes to the writer's net" was a saying of edwards' that had cozzened his judgment. he was giving his best to work whose very nature kept him to a dead level of mediocrity. and within the last few years he had become unpleasantly aware that at least one editor believed him incapable of better things. this was largely edwards' fault. orders for material along the same old lines poured in upon him and he hesitated to break away from them and try out his literary wings. years before he had faced a similar question. the same principal of breaking away from something that was reasonably sure and regular for something else not so sure but which glowed with brighter possibilities, was involved. vaguely he felt the call. he was forty-four, and had left behind him twenty-odd years of hard and conscientious effort. as he was getting on in years so should he be getting on with some of his dreams, before the light failed and the fiction factory grew dark and all dreaming and doing were at an end. one evening in christmas week, , he mentioned his aspirations to a noted editor with whom he happened to be at dinner. the book that was to bring fame and fortune, the book edwards had always been going to write but had never been able to find the time, was under discussion. "write it," advised the noted one, "but not under your own name." edwards fell silent. what was there in the work he had done which made it impossible to put "john milton edwards" on the title page of his most ambitious effort? were the nickel novels and the popular paper-backs to rise in judgment against him? he could not think so then, and he does not think so now. "why don't you write up your experiences as an author?" inquired the editor a few moments later. "you want to be helpful, eh? well, there's your chance. writers would not be the only ones to welcome such a book, and if you did it fairly well it ought to make a hit." this suggestion edwards adopted. having the courage of convictions directly opposed to the noted editor's, the other one he will not accept. the reflections of began to bear fruit in . with the beginning of the present year edwards gave up the five-cent fiction, not because--as already stated in a previous chapter--he considered it debasing to his "art," but because he needed time for the working out of a few of his dreams. presently, as though to confirm him in his determination, two publishing houses of high standing requested novels to be issued with their imprint. he accepted both commissions, and at this writing the work is well advanced. if he fails of material success in either or both these undertakings, by the standards elsewhere quoted and in which he thoroughly believes, the higher success that cannot be separated from faithful effort will yet be his. and it will suffice. even in edwards had been swayed by his growing convictions. almost unconsciously he had begun shaping his work along the line of higher achievement. during he has been hewing to the same line, but more consistently. edwards has demonstrated his ability to write moving picture scenarios that will sell. but is the game worth the candle? is it pleasant for an author to see his cherished western idea worked out with painted white men for indians and painted buttes for a background? of course, there are photoplays enacted on the southwestern deserts, with real cowboys and red men for "supers," but somewhere in most of these performances a false note is struck. one who knows the west has little trouble in detecting it. this, however, is a matter of sentiment, alone. the nebulous ideas most scenario editors seem to have as to rates of payment, and the usually long delay in passing upon a "script," are important details of quite another sort. and, furthermore, it is unjust to throw a creditable production upon the screen without placing the author's name under the title. of right, this advertising belongs to the author and should not be denied him. in a moving picture concern secured a concession for taking pictures with buffalo bill's wild west and pawnee bill's far east show, and edwards was hired to furnish scenarios at $ each. he furnished a good many, and of one of them major lillie (pawnee bill) wrote from butte, montana, on sep. ; "friend edwards: i saw one of the films run off at a picture house a few days ago and i think they are the greatest western scenes that i have ever witnesed--that is, they are the truest to life. i had a letter from mr. c---- yesterday, and he thinks they are fine. your friend, g. w. lillie." for a time edwards thought his faith in the moving picture makers was about to be justified. but he was mistaken. he received a check for just $ , which probably escaped from the film men in an unguarded moment, and no further check, letter or word has since come from the company. the proprietors of the show had nothing to do with the picture people, and regretted, though they could not help the loss edwards had suffered. when the moving picture writers are assured of better prices for their scenarios, of having them passed upon more promptly and of getting their names on the films with their pictures, the business will have been shaken down to a more commendable basis. possibly the film manufacturers borrow their ideas of equitable treatment for the writer from some of the publishing houses. the "hack" writer, in many editorial offices, is looked down upon with something like contempt by the august personage who condescends to buy his "stuff" and to pay him good money for it. perhaps the "hack" is at fault and has placed himself in an unfavorable light. writers are many and competition is keen. among these humble ones there are those who have suffered rebuff after rebuff until the spirit is broken and pride is killed, and they go cringing to an editor and supplicate him for an assignment. or they write him: "for god's sake do not turn down this story! it is the bread-line for me, if you do." did you ever walk through the ante-room of a big publishing house on the day checks are signed and given out? men with pinched faces and ragged clothes sit in the mahogany chairs. they have missed the high mark in their calling. they had high ambitions once--but ambitions are always high when hope is young. they are writing now, not because they love their work but because it is the only work they know, and they must keep at it or starve (perhaps _and_ starve). a taxicab flings madly up to the door in front, and a stylishly clad gentleman floats in at the hall door and across the ante-room to the girl at the desk. they exchange pleasant greetings and the girl punches a button that communicates with the private office of the powers that be. "mr. oswald hamilton brezee to see mr. skinner." delighted mumblings by mr. skinner come faintly to the ears of the lowly ones. the girl turns away from the 'phone. "go right in, mr. brezee." she says. "mr. skinner will see you at once." mr. brezee's "stuff" has caught on. dozens of magazines are clamoring for it. mr. brezee vanishes and presently reappears, tucking away his check with the careless manner of one to whom checks are more or less of a bore. he passes into the hall, and in a moment the "taxi" is heard bearing him away. the lowly ones twist in their chairs and bitterness floods their hearts. like the author of "childe harold," brezee awoke one morning to find himself famous. these others, with the dingy windsor ties and the long hair and pinched faces never awake to anything but a doubt as to where the morning meal is to come from. after hours of waiting in the ante-room, checks are finally produced and passed around to the lowly ones and they fade away into the haunts that know them best. next pay-day they will be back again, if they are alive and have been given anything to do in the meantime. is _this_ game worth the candle? what shall these men do with their "little gift" but keep it grinding, merciless though the grind may be? they cannot all be oswald hamilton brezees. before a young man throws himself into the ranks of this vast army of writers, let him ponder the situation well. if, under the iron heel of adversity, he is sure he can still love his work for the work's sake and be true to himself, there is one chance in ten that he will make a fair living, and one chance in a hundred that he may become one of the generals. the factory returns for and for part of are given below. edwards believes that, in its last analysis, will offer figures close to the ten-thousand dollar mark--but it is a guess hedged around with many contingencies. : nickel novels @ $ each, $ . short story for munsey's, . short story for the blue book, . novelette for the blue book, . moving picture, essanay co, . short story for gunter's, . short story for columbian, . paper-book rights, . serial story for scrap book, . moving picture, . -------- total $ . part of : paper-book rights, $ . serial for all-story, . novelette for adventure, . serial for the argosy, . novelette for the blue book, . short stories for the blue book, . short story for harper's weekly, . serial for "top-notch," . -------- total, $ . george ade asked an actress, who was one of the original cast of "the county chairman," to whom he had just been introduced, "which would you rather be--a literary man or a burglar?" it is related that the actress, who was probably as excited as ade, answered, "what's the difference?" and this is supposed to be a humorous anecdote! * * * * * the man who tells stories, sometimes fiction and sometimes stories, about the harper publications, evolves the following realistic story about "the masquerader," originally published in _the bazaar_. well, it seems that one morning, the editor sat her down and found the following letter, which is truly pathetic and possibly pathetically true: "you may, and i hope you have, some little remembrance of my name. but this will be the very oddest letter you have ever received. i am reading that most clever and wonderfully well-written novel, 'the masquerader.' i have very serious heart trouble and may live years and may die any minute. i should deeply regret going without knowing the general end of that story. may i know it? will be as close as the grave itself if i may. i really feel that i may not live to know the unravelling of that net. if i may know for reason good and sufficient to yourself and by no means necessary to explain, may i please have the numbers as they come to you, and in advance of general delivery?" the editor sent on the balance of the story, but it was never revealed whether it made the person well again or not. edwards imagines that the whirl of action in books would not be good for the heart--or, for the matter of that, the soul. xxv. extracts grave and gay, wise and otherwise cigars on the editor: "the berth check came to me this morning. i suppose the cigars are on me. at the same time, there is another kind of check which you get when you buy your pullman accomodation at the pullman office in the station. it was that which i had in mind. i suppose the one you enclosed is the conductor's check. i don't believe i ever saw one before." how "bob" davis hands you a lemon: "the first six or seven chapters of 'hammerton's vase' are very lively and readable--after which it falls off the shelf and is badly shattered. everybody in the yarn is pretty much of a sucker, and the situations are more or less of a class. i think, john, that there is too much talk in this story. your last thirty pages are nothing but. what struck me most was the ease with which you might have wound the story up in any one of several places without in anyway injuring it. that is not like the old john milton of yore. you used to pile surprise upon surprise, and tie knot after knot in your complications. but you didn't do it in 'hammerton's vase'--for which reason i shed tears and return the manuscript by express." how mr. white does it: "i am very sorry to be obliged to make an adverse report on 'the gods of tlaloc.' for one thing the story is too wildly improbable, for another the hero is too stupid, and worse than all the interest is of too scrappy a nature--not cumulative. you have done too good work for the argosy in the past for me to content myself with this.... when i return aug. , i shall hope to find a corking fine story from your pen awaiting my perusal. i am sure you know how to turn out such a yarn." a tip regarding "dual-identity": "the story opens well, and that is the best i can say for it. i put up the scheme to mr. davis and he expressed a strong disinclination for any kind of a dual-identity story."--matthew white, jr. how mr. davis takes over the right stuff: "we are taking the sea story. will report on the other stuff you have here in a day or two. in the meantime, remember that you owe me an , -word story and that you are getting the maximum rate and handing me the minimum amount of words. you raised the tariff and i stood for it and it is up to you to make good some of your threats to play ball according to hoyle. it is your turn to get in the box and bat 'em over the club-house. and remember, i am always on the bleachers, waiting to cheer at the right time." how mr. white lands on it: "'helping columbus' pleases me very much, and on our principle of paying for quality i am sending you for it our check for $ ." during the earlier years of his writing edwards made use of an automatic word-counter which he attached to his caligraph--the machine he was using at that time. he discovered that if a story called for , words, and he allowed the counter to register that number, the copy would over-run about , words. at a much later period he discovered by actual comparisons of typewritten with printed matter just the number of words each page of manuscript would average in the composing-room. from his publishers, however, he once received the following instructions: "to enable you to calculate the number of words to write each week, we make the following suggestions: type off a long paragraph from a page of one of the weeklies that has been set solid, so that the number of words in each line will correspond with the same line in print. when you have finished the paragraph you can get the average length of the typed line as written on your machine, and by setting your bell guard at this average length you will be able to fairly approximate, line for line, manuscript and printed story. a complete story should contain , lines. calculating in this way, you will be able to turn in each week a story of about the right length. our experience shows us that the calculated length of a story based on a roughly estimated number of words usually falls short of our requirements, and although to proceed in the manner suggested above may involve a little extra work--not above half an hour at the outside and on one occasion only--by it alone are we convinced that you will strike the right number of words for each issue." "along the highway of explanations": "i cannot see 'the yellow streak' quite clear enough. you whoop it up pretty well for about three-quarters of the story, and then it begins to go to pieces along the highway of explanations."--mr. davis. concerning the "rights" of a story: "unless it is otherwise stipulated, we buy all manuscripts with full copyright."--f. a. munsey co. and again: "the signing of the receipt places all rights in the hands of the frank a. munsey company, but they will be glad to permit you to make a stage version of your story, only stipulating that in case you succeed in getting it produced, they should receive a reasonable share of the royalties." the last word on the subject: "mr. white has turned over to me your letter of october , as i usually answer letters relating to questions of copyright. i think, under the circumstances, if you want to dramatize the story we ought to permit you to do so without payment to us. the only condition we would make would be that if you get the play produced, you should print a line on the program saying,--'dramatized from a story published in _the argosy_,' or words to that effect."--mr. titherington, of _munsey's_. paragraphing, politics and puns: "your paragraphs are pretty good, so far. but shun politics and religion in any form, direct or indirect, as you would shun the devil. and please don't pun--it is so cheap."--mr. a. a. mosley, of _the detroit free press_. climaxes, snap and spontaneity: "we don't like to let this go back to you, and only do so in the hope that you can let us have it again. the sketch is capitally considered, the character is excellent, the way in which it is written admirable, the whole story is very funny, and yet somehow it does not quite come off. the climax--the denouement--seems somewhat labored and lacks snaps and spontaneity. can't you devise some other termination--something with more 'go?' this is so good we want it to be better."--editor _puck_. novelty and exhilarating effect: "we have no special subject to suggest for a serial, but would cheerfully read any you think desirable for our needs. the better plan always is to submit the first two installments of about four columns each. novelty and exhilarating effect are desirable."--editor _saturday night_. saddling and bridling pegasus: "we are very much in need of a short xmas poem--from to lines--to be used at once. knowing your ability and willingness to accomodate at short notice, i write you to ask if you can get one to us by saturday of this week, or monday at latest. i know it is a very short time in which to saddle and bridle pegasus, but i am sure you can do it with celerity if any one can."--editor _the ladies' world_. carrying the thing too far: "we regret that we cannot make use of 'the brand of cain,' after your prompt response to our call, but the title and story are just a little bit too sensational for our paper, and we think it best to return it to you. it is a good story and well written, but we get so much condemnation from our subscribers, often for a trifle, that we are obliged to be very careful. only a week or two ago we were severely censured because a recipe in household dep't called for a tablespoonful of wine in a pudding sauce, and the influence of the writer against the paper promised if the offense were repeated."--from the editor of a woman's journal. and, finally, this from mr. davis: "we are of the non-complaining species, ourself, and aim only to please the mob. rush the sea story. if it isn't right, i'll rush it back, by express.... believe, sir, that i am personally disposed to regard you as a better white man than the average white man because you a larger white man, and, damnitsir, i wish you good luck." xxvi. patrons and profits for twenty-two years on the th of this month (september, ) it will be just twenty-two years since edwards received payment for his first story. on sept. , , _the detroit free press_ sent him a check for $ . on that $ the fiction factory was started. who have been the patrons of the factory for these twenty-two years, and what have been the returns? a vast amount of work has been necessary in order to formulate exact answers to these questions. papers and other memoranda bearing upon the subject were widely scattered. during edwards' travels about the country many letters and records were lost. the list that follows, therefore, is incomplete, but exact as far as it goes. more work was realized upon, by several thousands of dollars, than is here shown. for every item in the record edwards has a letter, or a printed slip that accompanied the check, as his authority. the errors are merely those of omission. titles of the material sold will not be given, but following the name of the publication that purchased the material will be found the year in which it was either published or paid for. adventure, the ridgway company, spring & macdougal streets, new york city, -- novelette. $ . all-story magazine, the f. a. munsey co., fifth ave., new york city, -- serial. . -- short stories, serial. . -- serials. . -- serials. , . american press association, & park place, new york city, -- short stories. . the argosy, f. a. munsey co., fifth ave., new york city, -- serial. . -- serial. . -- serial. . -- novelette, serials. , . -- short story, novelette, serials. . -- serials, novelette. . -- serials. . -- serial. . boston globe, boston, mass., -- short story. . boyce's monthly, chicago, ills., -- short story. . banner weekly, the, beadle & adams, new york city, -- short story. . blue book, the, chicago, ills., -- novelette. . -- novelettes. . -- short story, novelette. . -- novelette, short stories. . chips, frank tousey's publishing house, new york city, -- short story. . chatter, beekman st., new york, -- short story. . -- short story. . chicago inter-ocean, chicago, ills., -- article, space rates. . chicago record, chicago, ills., -- short story. . -- short story. . -- short story. . -- short story. . chicago daily news, chicago, ills., -- short story. . -- short story. . -- short stories. . -- short story. . chicago blade, chicago, ills., -- articles, space rates, short story. . chicago ledger, chicago, ills., -- serials. . -- serials. . -- serial. . -- serial. . -- serials. . -- serials. . -- serial. . columbian magazine, new york city, -- short story. . demorest's monthly, new york city, -- article. . dillingham co., g. w., new york city, --royalties. . --royalties. . --royalties. . --cloth book rights. . detroit free press, the, detroit, michigan. -- short story. . -- short story. . -- serials. . -- short stories. . -- short story, space rates. . -- short stories. . -- short story. . -- space rate. . -- space rate. . -- short story. . -- short stories. . -- short story. . essanay film manufacturing company, chicago, illinois. --m. p. scenario. . figaro, madison st., chicago, -- space rate. . -- space rate. . -- space rate. . frank leslie's popular monthly, fifth ave., new york city. -- short story. . gunter's magazine, street & smith, new york city. -- short story. . harper's weekly, new york city. -- short story. . illustrated american, broadway, new york city. -- verses. . kellogg newspaper co., the a. n., - w. adams st., chicago. -- serial. . life, new york city. -- short story. . ledger monthly, ledger building, n. y. -- short story. . lubin mfg. co., philadelphia, pa. --m. p. scenario . ladies' world, the, new york city. -- short stories. . -- verse. . -- verse. . -- verses. . -- verse. . -- short story. . mcclure's newspaper syndicate, the, nassau st., new york city. -- short stories, serials. . -- serial. . mcc's monthly, detroit, michigan, -- short stories. . munsey's magazine, new york city, -- short story. . -- short story. . -- short story. . new york world, new york city, -- short story. . -- short stories. . -- short story. . -- short story. . overland monthly, montgomery st., san francisco, -- short story. . ocean, f. a. munsey co., new york city, -- serial. . people's magazine, the, street & smith, new york city, -- serial. . -- serial. . -- serials. . popular magazine, the, street & smith, new york city, -- novelettes. . -- serial. . puck, keppler & schwartzmann, puck building, new york city, -- short stories. . -- short story. . -- short stories, verse. . -- short story. . -- short stories, verse. . -- short stories. . railroad man's magazine, f. a. munsey co., new york, -- serials. . -- serial. . -- serials. . -- short stories. . red book, chicago, ills., -- short story. . -- short story. . scrap book, f. a. munsey co., n. y. c., -- serial. . -- serial. . -- serial. . -- serial. . saturday times, the, chicago, ills., -- serial. . southern tobacco journal, winston, n. c., -- verse. . short stories, current literature pub. co., new york city, -- short story. . -- short stories. . -- short stories. . san francisco chronicle, san fran., -- short story. . saturday night, james elverson pub. philadelphia, pa., -- serial. . -- serial, short stories. . -- short stories. . -- serial, short stories. . truth, broadway, new york city, -- short story. . -- short stories. . top-notch magazine, street & smith, new york city, -- serial. . translation rights, . . vitagraph company of america, the, brooklyn, n. y., --m. p. . wayside tales, detroit monthly publishing co., detroit, mich., -- short stories. . -- short stories. . -- short story. . white elephant, frank tousey's pub. house, new york city, -- short stories. . western world, chicago, ills., -- serials, short stories, space rates. . woman's home companion, new york, -- serial, space rate. . yankee blade, boston, mass., -- short stories. . -- short stories, verses. . -- short story. . -- short story. . powers company, new york city, --m. p. . street & smith, new york city, -- issues "motor boys" , . -- paper-book rights. . -- paper-book rights. , . -- paper-book rights. . -- paper-book rights. . dodd. mead & co., new york city, --cloth book rights. . harte & perkins, new york, nickel novels: $ , . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. , . completing story. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. , . ten-cent novels: -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. , . -- @ $ each,. . serials for "guest:" -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ & $ . -- . . -- @ $ & $ . . -- @ $ . . -- . . -- . . -- . . juvenile serials: -- @ $ & $ . . -- . . -- . . -- @ $ each,. . -- @ $ each,. . miscellaneous: -- magazine sketches. . -- magazine sketches. . -- trade-paper sketches. . -- trade-paper sketches. . -- trade-paper sketch. . ----------- total $ , . the finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelf of books on the opposite wall. every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.--_james lane allen._ * * * * * when william dean howells occupied an editorial chair in harper's office, a young man of humble and rough exterior one day submitted personally to him a poem. mr. howells asked: "did you write this poem yourself?" "yes, sir. do you like it?" the youth asked. "i think it is magnificent," said mr. howells. "did you compose it unaided?" "i certainly did," said the young man firmly. "i wrote every line of it out of my head." mr. howells rose and said: "then, lord byron, i am very glad to meet you. i was under the impression that you died a good many years ago." advertisements announcement in addition to "the fiction factory," the editor company are publishers at ridgewood, new jersey, of the editor, (the journal of information for literary workers), which has been published solely in the interests of writers for eighteen years, and of the following books: the writer's book $ . _compiled by william r. kane._ practical authorship . _by james knapp reeve._ places to sell mms . (_the american writer's, artist's and photographer's year book_) _in its ninth edition_. points about poetry . _by donald g. french._ rhymes and meters . _by horatio winslow._ the fiction writer's workshop . _by duncan francis young._ how to write a short story . the editor manuscript record (loose leaf) . essays on authorship . the way into print . the editor company ridgewood, new jersey the editor if you write, or if you have an itching to write, we want to talk to you. the editor, we may explain, is "the journal of information for literary workers." it is not at all pretentious, and not at all dull. it is a matter-of-fact little magazine, always filled with good, readable articles on the technique of writing. sometimes they are contributed by authors and sometimes by editors. we aim to show our patrons, so far as such things may be taught, how to write fiction, poetry, articles and the like, and then how to sell them, provided they are up to the standard demanded by editors. we have been assured so many times that it wearies us, that our magazine has been the lever that pried open the editorial doors of pretty nearly every publication in the country. in addition to our articles we present our literary market department in which we list monthly the complete report of editorial needs, announcements, policies, changes, prize-contests, etc. this enables the writer to keep his finger on the magazine pulse; he knows what to write, when to write it, how to write it, when to submit it, what payment will be made, and countless other points. authors such as george allan england, who is selling regularly to _mcclure's_, _red book_, _bohemian_, etc., have been good enough to say that this department alone is worth the subscription price. now add to the foregoing a spice of good verse, bright editorial comment, and you'll know why every editor and very nearly every author of note sends his writer-friends to us. why you can't write and do without the authors' trade-journal! you will always find something between the covers of the magazine that drives you to work, that spurs you to greater efforts, that puts you on the high road to success. we pride ourselves on the fact that the editor is a good, live text-book. it is a pretty sort of a teacher, you know, who never sees an educational journal; new methods and systems are cropping out constantly. and no writer--we leave this to you--likes to send a manuscript to a magazine that suspended a few months ago; nor allow an article to go unread that may cover just the point on which his or her rejections cling. the writer wants hints, helps, and as many of them as possible; everybody does. there is no magazine that better meets this want than the editor. we've succeeded in pleasing and making famous the promising writer-folk of this country since . mayn't we have you? cents a copy $ . a year the editor company ridgewood, new jersey transcriber's notes: italics are represented with _underscores_, bold with =equal signs=. inconsistent and occasionally inaccurate capitalization/italicization of publication titles are retained from the original. retained some archaic/unusual spellings from the original (e.g. "grevious," "omniverous"). retained inconsistent spellings from the original where different writers used different word variations (e.g. "installment" in the main text vs. "instalment" in a quoted letter). inconsistent spellings within the same context have been normalized as noted in detail below. retained some inconsistent hyphenation from the original (e.g. viewpoint vs. view-point). the original text contained several instances of "he" / "be" confusion. these have been corrected and are noted below. they are not the result of ocr errors; they are present in the original typography. page , normalized indentation before "the modest goal, the lesser fame." page , changed double to single quotes around "when the editor's eye struck" and added missing end double quote. page , changed "ocassion" to "occasion." normalized second appearance of "sewer-pipe" to include hyphen. changed "ewards" to "edwards" ("first story for which edwards"). page , removed duplicate "by" from "spoiled by just such a slip." page , italicized _nom de plume_ (in sentence about _boy's story paper_) for consistency with all other appearances in the text. page , added missing colon to paragraph above "we are in a hurry for this series." page , changed double to single quotes around "dalton's double." page , changed two instances of "villian" to "villain" for consistency with the rest of the text (in sentence including "female villain"). page , changed "pubilc" to "public" ("their reading public") and "succeding" to "succeeding" ("succeeding issues"). page , changed "be felt elated" to "he felt elated." page , removed stray single quote after " o'clock in the evening." page , changed "decended" to "descended" and "prepetrator" to "perpetrator." page , changed "rememberance" to "remembrance" for consistency ("livid remembrance"). page , changed "for day's while" to "for days while." page , there appears to be a missing word in "that it very humorous" but this error comes from the original. page , changed "entirely" to "entirety" ("satisfactory in its entirety") and "word was deturned" to "word was returned." page , changed "saticfactory" to "satisfactory" ("price was not satisfactory"). page , changed "responisble" to "responsible" ("it was responsible for"). page , "mr. perkins write:" appears to be an error, but it comes from the original. changed "manusccript" to "manuscript" ("quality of the manuscript"). page , changed "installemnts" to "installments" ("first two installments"). page , if there is supposed to be special formatting in the example following "he did it thus," it is not present in the original book; nothing unusual has been lost in translation to digital format here. page , changed "is seems poor policy" to "it seems poor policy." page , changed "lettters" to "letters" ("letters on a typewriter"). page , changed double to single quotes around "the man from dakota." page , added missing open quote before "misfortunes never come singly." page , changed "be" to "he" in "he faced a steadily brightening prospect". page , added missing space after comma in "november , ." page , moved comma from before " to after " in ". changed "must he high" to "must be high." page , added missing open quote before "your last story, no. ." page , changed "particluarly" to "particularly" in "not particularly encouraging." changed "edward's hope" to "edwards' hope." page , changed "damm" to "damn" in "damn it utterly." page , changed "edward's product" to "edwards' product." page , removed unnecessary apostrophe after "edwards" in "to edwards it is a delightful confusion." page , added missing apostrophe to "edwards' first advice" and removed unnecessary apostrophe from "which edwards consulted." page , changed "dilema" to "dilemma" in "i shall require a single copy of 'the billionaire's dilemma.'" page , changed open double quote to single quote in "your short story: 'the shadow of the unknown.'" changed "ficticious" to "fictitious" in footnote. page , changed open double quote to single quote in "'the shadow of the unknown,' writes the publisher." page , changed "royalities" to "royalties" ("dillingham, last royalties"). page , changed "bettter" to "better" ("anything of a bettter quality"). page , changed "lettter" to "letter" ("letter saying they could pay"). page , added some commas to table for consistency. page , changed "sometmes" to "sometimes" ("sometimes stories, about the harper"). changed double to single quotes around "the masquerader." page , added missing colon after "how "bob" davis hands you a lemon:" page , added missing close quote after "reasonable share of the royalties." page , corrected chapter number from xxii to xxvi and corrected double comma after "sept. , ." pages - , normalized some punctuation within the table of publications (but still retained some inconsistencies). deleted partial totals and "brought forward" entries at page boundaries. did not attempt to correct some apparent mathematical errors. changed "philadeljhia" to "philadelphia" and corrected "senario" to "scenario" in entry for lubin mfg. co. advertisements, changed "auhorship" to "authorship" in "essays on authorship." the lure of the pen a book for would-be authors by flora klickmann editor of "the girl's own paper and woman's magazine" who has written "the flower-patch among the hills," "between the larchwoods and the weir," and other works g. p. putnam's sons new york and london copyright, , by g. p. putnam's sons dedicated to mr. james bowden who has few equals, either as a publisher, or as a friend preface to the american edition in sending out this new book to the american public, i feel i am addressing a sympathetic audience, since other volumes that have preceded it have been most cordially received, and have added considerably to my long list of friends on the western side of the atlantic. at first glance it may seem as though the difference between the writings of american and british authors is too marked to allow of a book on authorship proving useful to both countries--but in reality the difference is only superficial, and is largely confined to methods of newspaper journalism, or connected with mannerisms and topical qualities. fundamentally, both nations work on the same lines and acknowledge the same governing laws in literature. american authors, no less than british, derive their inspirations from european classics. and magazine editors and publishers in both countries are only too grateful for good work from either side. no one can teach authors how or what to write; but sometimes it is possible to help the beginners to an understanding of what it is better not to write. for the rest i hope the book explains itself. flora klickmann fleet street, london. contents page part one: the mss. that fail why they fail three essentials in training part two: on keeping your eyes open a course in observation the assessment of spiritual values part three: the help that books can give the bane of "browsing" reading for definite data reading for style the need for enlarging the vocabulary the charm of musical language analysing an author's methods part four: points a writer ought to note practice precedes publication the reader must be interested form should be considered right selection is important when writing articles suggestions for style the ubiquitous fragment concerning local colour creating atmosphere the method of presenting a story fallacies in fiction some rules for story-writing about the climax the use of "curtains" on making verse the function of the blue pencil part five: author, publisher, and public when offering goods for sale the responsibility index part one the mss. that fail in the business of making literature, the only quality that presents itself in abundance is entirely untrained mediocrity. the lure of the pen why they fail in the course of a year i read somewhere about nine thousand stories, articles and poems. these are exclusive of those read by others in my office. of these nine thousand i purchase about six hundred per annum. the remainder are usually declined for one of three reasons; either, they are not suited to the policy and the requirements of the publishing house, or the periodicals, for which i am purchasing. or, they tread ground we have already covered. or, they have no marketable value. the larger proportion of the rejected mss. come under the last heading. they are of the "homing" order, warranted to return to their starting point. the number that i buy does not indicate the number that i require. in normal times i could use at any rate double the number that i purchase. i never have an overstock of the right thing. i never have more than i can publish of certain-to-sell matter. no publisher or editor ever has. in the business of making literature (and throughout these chapters i use the word literature in its widest sense) genius is rare. nearly-genius is almost as rare. the only quality that presents itself in abundance is entirely untrained mediocrity. it may be thought that this applies equally to all departments of the world's work; but it is not so. while genius is scarce wherever one looks, i know of only one other vocation where the candidates expect good pay at the very start without any sort of training, any experience, any specialised knowledge, or any idea of the simplest requirement of the business from which they hope to draw an income--the other vocation being domestic service. for example: though thousands of paintings and sketches are offered me in the course of the year, i cannot recall one instance of an artist announcing that this is his, or her, first attempt at drawing; all the work submitted, even the feeblest, shows previous practice or training of some sort, be it ever so elementary. yet it is no uncommon thing to receive with a ms. a letter explaining, "this is the first time i have ever tried to write anything." then again, no one expects to be engaged to play a violin solo at a concert, when she has had no training, merely because she craves a public appearance and applause. yet many a girl and woman writes to an editor: "this is my first attempt at a poem. i do so hope you will publish it, as i should so like to see myself in print." and no one would expect to get a good salary as a dressmaker by announcing that, though she has not the most elementary knowledge of the business, she feels convinced that she could make a dress. yet over and over again people have asked me to give them a chance, explaining that, though they were quite inexperienced, they felt they had it in them to write. nevertheless, despite this prevailing idea that we all possess heaven-sent genius, which is ready to sprout and blossom straight away with no preparatory work--an idea which gains added weight from the fact that there are no great schools for the student who desires to enter the literary profession, as there are for students of art and music--some training is imperative; and if the would-be writer is to go far, the training must be rigorous and very comprehensive. but unlike most other businesses and professions, the novice must train himself; he can look for very little help from others. the art student gains information and experience by working with others in a studio; it gives him some common ground for comparisons; where all are sketching from the same model, he is able to see work that is better, and work that is worse, than his own; and probably he is able to grasp wherein the difference lies. the music student who is one of several to remain in the room while each in turn has a pianoforte lesson, hears the remarks of the professor (possibly a prominent man in his own profession) on each performance, and can learn a large amount from the criticisms and corrections bestowed on the others, quite apart from those applying to her own playing. but for the would-be author there is no college where the leading literary lights listen patiently, for an hour or two at a stretch, while the students read their stories and poems and articles aloud for criticism and correction. here and there ardent amateurs form themselves into small literary coteries for this purpose; but often these either develop into mutual admiration societies, or fizzle out for lack of a guiding force. [sidenote: literature is the most elusive business in the world] the difficulty with literature is this: it is the most elusive business in the world. no one can say precisely what constitutes good literature, because, no matter how you may classify and tabulate its characteristics, some new genius is sure to break out in a fresh place; and no one can lay down a definite course of training that can be relied on to meet even the average requirements of the average case. you can set the instrumentalist to work at scales and studies for technique; the dressmaker can practise stitchery and the application of scientific measurement; the art student can study the laws governing perspective, balance of design, the juxtaposition of colour, and a dozen other topics relative to his art. and more than this, in most businesses (and i include the professions) you can demonstrate to the students, in a fairly convincing manner, when their work is wrong. you can show the girl who is learning dressmaking the difference between large uneven stitches and small regular ones; the undesirability of having a skirt two inches longer at one side than it is at the other. you can indicate to the art student when his subject is out of drawing, or suggest a preferable choice of colours. and though these points may only touch the mechanical surface of things, they help the student along the right road, and are invaluable aids to him in his studies. true, such advice cannot make good a lack of real genius, yet it may help to develop nearly-genius, and that is not to be despised. but with literature, there is so little that is tangible, and so much that is intangible. beyond the bare laws that govern the construction of the language, only a fraction of the knowledge that is necessary can be stated in concrete terms for the guidance of the student. and because it is difficult to reduce the art of writing to any set of rules, the amateur often regards it as the one vocation that is entirely devoid of any constructive principles; the one vocation wherein each can do exactly as he pleases, and be a law unto himself, no one being in a better position than himself to say what is great and what is feeble, since no one else can quote chapter and verse as authority for making a pronouncement on the merits--and more particularly the demerits--of his work. and yet, nearly all the english-speaking race want to write. the craving for "self-expression" is one of the characteristics of this century; and what better medium is there for this than writing? hence the lure of the pen. it is partly because so many beginners do not know where to turn for criticism, or an opportunity to measure their work with that of others, that some send their early, crude efforts to editors, hoping to get, at least, some opinion or word of guidance, even though the ms. be declined. yet this is what an editor cannot undertake to do. think what an amount of work would be involved if i were to set down my reasons for declining each of those eight thousand and more mss. that i turn down annually! it could not be done, in addition to all the other claims on one's office time. [sidenote: why the mss. are rejected] but though life would be too short for any editor to write even a brief criticism on each ms. rejected, certain defects repeat themselves so often that it is quite possible to specify some outstanding faults--or rather, qualities which are lacking--that lead to the downfall of one ms. after another, with the automatic persistency of recurring decimals. speaking broadly, i generally find that the ms. which is rejected because it has no marketable value betrays one or more of the following deficiencies in its author:-- lack of any preliminary training. " " specialised knowledge of the subject dealt with. " " modernity of thought and diction. " " the power to reduce thought to language. " " cohesion and logical sequence of ideas. " " ability to get the reader's view-point. " " new and original ideas and themes. " " the instinct for selection. " " a sense of proportion. the majority of such defects can be remedied with study and practice; and even though the final result may not be a work of genius, it will be something much more likely to be marketable than the ms. that has neither knowledge nor training behind it. three essentials in training "how am i to set about training for literary work?" is a question that is put to me most days in the year. training comes under three headings: observation, reading, and writing. the majority of beginners make the mistake of putting writing first; but before you can commit anything to paper, you must have something in your head to write down. if you have but little in your brain, your writing will be worthless. [sidenote: we get out of life what we put into it] just as a plant requires special fertilisers if it is to develop fine blossoms and large fruit, so the mind requires food of exceptional nourishment if it is to produce something out of the ordinary, something worth reading. it is one of the great laws of nature that, as a general rule, we get out of life about what we put into it. if a farmer wants bumper crops, he must apply manure liberally to his land; if a man wants big returns from his business, he must devote much time and thought and energy to it. and in the same way, if you want good stuff to come out of your head, you must first of all put plenty of good stuff in. but--and this is very important--it is not supposed to come out again in the same form that it went in! this point beginners often forget. when sweet peas are fed with sulphate of ammonia, they don't promptly produce more sulphate of ammonia; they utilise the chemical food to promote much finer and altogether better flowers. the same principle governs the application of suitable nourishment to all forms of life--the recipient retains its own personal characteristics, but transmutes the food into the power to intensify, enlarge, and develop those personal characteristics. in like manner, the food you give your mind must be used to intensify and enlarge and develop your individuality; and what you write must reflect your individuality (not to be confused with egoism); it should not be merely a paraphrase of your reading. all this is to explain why i put observation and reading before writing. they are the principal channels through which the mind is fed. and, in the main, the value of your early literary work will be in direct ratio to the keenness and accuracy of your observation, and the wisdom shown in your choice of reading. you think this sounds like reducing writing to a purely mechanical process, in which genius does not count? not at all. it is merely that the initial stages of training for any work involve a certain amount of routine and repetition, until we have acquired facility in expressing our ideas. in any case, very few of us are suffering from real genius. ability, talent, cleverness, are fairly common; but genius is rare. if you possess genius, you will discover it quite soon, and, what is more important, other people will likewise discover it. as some one has said, "genius, like murder, _will_ out!" you can't hide it. meanwhile, it will save time and argument to pretend that you are just an ordinary being like the rest of us, with everything to learn; you will progress more rapidly on these lines than if you spend time contemplating, and admiring, what you think is a heaven-sent endowment that requires no shaping. part two on keeping your eyes open one of the drawbacks of an advanced civilisation is the fact that it tends to lessen the power of observation. a course in observation begin your observation course by noting anything and everything likely to have a bearing on the subject of your writing, and jot down your observations in the briefest of notes. no matter if it seem a trifling thing, in the early part of your training it will be well worth your while to record even the trifles, since this all helps to develop and focus the faculty for observation. one of the drawbacks of an advanced civilisation is the fact that it tends to lessen the power of observation. the average person in this twentieth century sees next to nothing of the detail of life. we have no longer the need to cultivate observation for self-protection and food-finding as in primitive times. everything is done for us by pressing a button or putting a penny in the slot, till it is fast becoming too much of an effort for us even to look (or it was, before the war); and the ability to look--and to see when we look--is, consequently, disappearing through disuse. you will be surprised how much there is in this practice of observation, once you get started. [sidenote: study human characteristics] for example: if you intend to write a story, you will need to study the various types of people figuring therein; the distinguishing characteristics, the method of speaking, and the mental attitude of each. the amateur invariably states the colour of a girl's eyes and hair, and the tint of her complexion, with some sentences about her social standing and her clothes, and then considers her fully equipped for her part in the piece. whereas, in reality, these items are of no importance so far as a story goes. we really do not mind whether dinah, in _adam bede_, had violet eyes or grey-green; it is the soul of the woman that counts. neither do we trouble whether portia wore a well-tailored coat and skirt, or a simple muslin frock lavishly trimmed with valenciennes; it is her ready wit, her resourcefulness, and her deep-lying affection that interest us. next in importance to the human beings are the circumstances involved. does your heroine decide to leave her millionaire-father's palatial home and hide her identity in slum-work and a room in a tenement? you will have to do a fair amount of first-hand observation to get the details and general "atmosphere" appertaining to a millionaire's residence and mode of living, and contrast these with the conditions that represent life in the squalid quarters of a city. [sidenote: environment and circumstances offer wide scope] perhaps you will tell me that it is impossible for you to make these observations, as you do not know your way about any real slum, or you are not on visiting terms with and any millionaire. that raises another important question that i hope to deal with later, when we come to the subject of story-writing. here i can only say, don't attempt to write upon topics you are unable to study at near range. after all, there are unlimited subjects that are close to everybody's hand. you may be including a dog in your story. is he to be a _real_ dog, or that dear, faithful old creature, who has been leading an active life (in fiction) for a century or more, rescuing the heir when he tumbles in a pond; apprising the sleeping family upstairs of the fact that the clothes-horse by the kitchen fire has caught alight; tracking the burglar to his lair; re-uniting fallen-out lovers by sitting up beseechingly on his hind legs, and in a hundred other ways making himself generally useful? i am fond of dogs, and i never grudge them literary honours; but i sometimes wish we could get a change of descriptive matter where they are concerned. what are _you_ proposing to say about the dog? "he ran joyfully to meet his master, wagging his tail the while"? something like that? i shouldn't wonder. that is the beginning and the end of so many amateur descriptions of a dog; and, judging by the number of times i have read these words, his poor tail must be nearly wagged off by now. instead of being content with this, start making careful observations, and you will soon have something else to write about. notice how a dog talks--with his ears; he can tell you almost anything, once you learn to read his ears. and when you have noted all the points you can in this direction, and mastered this part of his language, see what you can learn from his walk; you can estimate a dog's temper and feelings, his sorrow, his joy, and the state of his health, by noticing the variations in his walk. why, any one dog can provide you with a book full of observations. you may say, however, that as your story is to be a short one, you could never use up a book full of observations if you had them. [sidenote: you need a score of facts in your head for each one you put on paper] very likely; but always remember that you need to have a score of facts in your head for every one you put down on paper. you must be thoroughly saturated with a subject before you can write even a brief description in a telling and convincing manner. therefore, never be afraid of making too many notes in your observation-book. many of these entries you will never refer to again; the very act of writing them down will so impress them on your memory that they become a matter-of-course to you. this in itself is valuable training; it is one of the processes by which a person may become "well-informed"--an essential qualification for a good writer. while over-elaboration of detail in your writing is seldom desirable, apart from a text-book or a treatise, knowledge of detail is imperative if that writing is to conjure up situations in the reader's mind and make them seem vividly real. in describing scenery, for instance, you do not need to give the name of every bit of vegetation in sight, till your ms. looks like a botanical dictionary; but it is useful to know those names, you may require some of them; and until your work is actually shaping, you cannot tell exactly what you will use and what omit. [sidenote: keen observation will save you from pitfalls] the habit of keen observation will save you from a legion of pitfalls. the more you train your eyes to see, and your mind to retain what you have seen, the less chance there is of your putting down inaccuracies. i have been reading a ms. wherein the heroine--a beautiful girl with a face like a haunting memory (whatever that may look like)--spent a whole afternoon lying full-length on the grass, the first sunny day in february, revelling in the scent of violets near by, and watching the swallows skimming above her. if the writer had no opportunity to observe the comings and goings of swallows, she might at least have turned up an encyclopædia, when she would have found that swallows do not arrive in england till well on into april. then, after more pages, the beautiful girl finally died of a broken heart--obviously absurd! in real life she would have died on the very next page of rheumatic fever and double pneumonia, after lying on the wet grass all that time! frequently, when i point out similar errors to the novice, i get some such reply as this, "of course, that reference to swallows was only a slip of the pen"; or, "after all, it is merely a minor point whether she lay on the grass or walked along the road; it doesn't really affect the story as a whole." true, such discrepancies may be only minor details; but, on the other hand, they may not. i have noticed, however, that the writer who is inaccurate on small points is equally liable to inaccuracy where the main features of the story are concerned; and the writer who does not know enough about his subject to get his details right seldom knows enough about it to get any of it right. the assessment of spiritual values there is one aspect of life that can only be learnt by observation; a phase of your training where books and lectures can be of but little assistance to you. important as it is that you should note the material things relating to your subject, it is still more important that you should train yourself to note the psychological bearings and the spiritual values of life, since these are often of far more vital consequence to a story than the plot. by "spiritual values" i do not necessarily mean anything of a directly religious quality. i use the term to signify the revelation of mind and heart and soul of the various characters that a writer presents, as distinct from a catalogue of externals; the reading of motives, and the recognition of the forces that are within us, as distinguished from the chronicling of superficial items. [sidenote: the unseen that counts] so often in the world of men and women around us it is the unseen that counts. just below the surface life is teeming with motives and aims and ideals and personality; with problems that involve mixed feelings, and produce paradox and misjudgment, and apparently irreconcilable qualities. these may show scarcely a ripple on the outside, and yet be the real factors that are shaping lives, and influencing the world for better or for worse, and, incidentally, affecting the whole trend of a story. to gauge these abstract qualities and their consequences accurately is the biggest task of the writer; and according to the amount of such insight that he brings to bear on his subject, will be the durability of his work, since this alone is the part that lives. fashions and furniture, scenery and architecture, maps and dynasties, laws and customs, even language and the meaning of words, all change; and the older grows the world, the more rapid are the changes. the only things that remain unaltered are the laws of nature and the longings of the soul. hence the only writings that last beyond the changing fashions of the moment are those that centralise on these fundamental things, giving secondary place to ephemeral details. if you want your work to live, it is useless to make the main interest centre in something that will be out-of-date and passed beyond human memory within a very little while. this insight as to the subtleties of life is the quality that gives vitality to your writing. without it your characters will be no more alive than a wax figure in a draper's window, no matter how handsomely you may clothe them in descriptive matter. have you ever read a story wherein the heroine seemed about as real and alive as a saw-dust-stuffed doll, and the hero had as much "go" in him as a wooden horse? i have, alas! thousands of them! and the reason for the lifelessness was the lack in the author of all sense of "spiritual values." a knowledge of the inner workings of the mind and heart and soul can only be acquired by close and constant observation. you may remember in _julius cæsar_, where cæsar tells antonio that if he were liable to fear, the man he should avoid would be cassius; he describes him thus: "he is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men." it is just this power that the writer needs--the ability to look past the actions themselves to the motives that prompted them. it is so easy to record the obvious. what we need to look for is the truth that is not obvious. for instance, at first sight it may seem quite easy for us to decide why a person did a certain thing. a woman makes an irritable remark. why did she make that irritable remark? bad temper! we promptly reply. but perhaps it wasn't bad temper; it may have been due to ill-health--a bad tooth can generate as much irritability in half an hour as the worse temper going. or it may have been caused by insomnia; or by nerves strained to the breaking-point with trouble and anxiety. or the speaker may have been vexed with herself for some action of her own, and her vexation found vent in this way. if you were writing a story, the cause of her irritability might be an important link in the chain of events. and in scores of other directions, the cause of an action might be infinitely more important in the working out of your plot than the action itself. moreover, if you want your work to appeal to a wide and varied audience, you must take as your main theme something that is understood by all conditions of people; something that makes a universal appeal. that is why the greatest writers make the human heart the pivot of their stories, as a rule. readers are primarily interested in the doings of, and the happenings to, certain people; and very particularly the motives that led up to the doings and happenings, and the reasons why certain things were said and done, and the psychological results of the sayings and doings. [sidenote: the main theme should make a universal appeal] in the main, it is not of paramount importance to you, when you are engrossed in a story, whether the scene is laid in japan among decaying buddhist temples, or in a devonshire village. it is the personality of the characters, their sorrows and joys, their struggles and love affairs, and the solution of their human problems that make the chief claim on your interest. certainly, the scenery and "local colour" and inanimate surroundings may influence you favourably or otherwise--backgrounds and the general "setting" of a story are valuable, more valuable than the amateur realises; nevertheless, they are not the main features, and should never be made the main features in fiction. once you grasp the importance of the "spiritual values," in life itself no less than in writing, you will understand why it is that some books survive centuries of change and social upheaval, and appeal to all sorts and conditions of temperaments. when we study shakespeare at school, we invariably wonder in our secret heart (even though we daren't voice such heresy!) what on earth people can see in him. to our immature intelligence he can be dulness itself, while his style seems long-winded, and many of his plots appear most feeble affairs beside our favourite books of adventure. we are not sufficiently developed and experienced in our school days to be able to understand and appreciate his greatness, which lies in his amazing knowledge of the human heart and his grasp of "spiritual values." [sidenote: life is ever offering new discoveries] one of the fascinating things about life is the way it is for ever offering us new discoveries. we never need get to the end of anything. there are always heights beyond heights, depths below depths, further recesses to penetrate, fresh things to find out. and nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than when we come to the study of human nature itself. the writer who strives to depict men and women as they really are is always coming on new surprises; he never arrives at the end of his observations. and he soon realises how infinitely more important are the subtle workings of the heart and mind than all the material things that crowd the outside surface of life. [sidenote: to write convincingly one needs sympathy] to be able to write convincingly about people, we must know them; to know them we must live among them, and sympathise with them--for there is no other way to know and understand the human heart. it is very easy to ridicule people's weakness, and make cheap sarcasm over their failings; but it is useless to make your observations with a cynic's smile. the cynic really gets nowhere; he merely robs life of much of its beauty, giving nothing in its place. to write about people so that we grip the hearts of all who read, it is necessary to look beyond the superficial weaknesses, and below the temporary failings, to that part of humanity that still bears the image of the divine creator. and you need sympathy to accomplish this. would-be authors often tell me that they are sick of their everyday routine--office work, teaching, nursing, home duties, or whatever it may be--and long to throw it all up so that they may devote all their time to writing. [sidenote: to know people, we must live and work among them] but you cannot devote all of your time to writing! the beginner never understands this. a great deal of an author's time is taken up with the study of people, and a general quest for material for his books. while you are in the early stages of your writing, it is absolutely necessary for you that you should be doing some sort of other work in company with your fellow-creatures, and experiencing the ordinary routine of life, else how can you possibly get your writing properly balanced and true to life? if you try to isolate yourself from the everyday happenings of normal existence, avoiding the tiresome duties and the irksome routine, merely keeping your eyes on your ms., or on yourself, or on only the things that appeal to you, how can you ever expect your work to be in right perspective? under such conditions what you write would be bound to give an incomplete, incorrect view of life, one-sided, and out of all proper proportion, and--the result could be nothing but a dire failure. stay where you are, and make your corner of the universe your special study. [sidenote: how much do you know of those who are nearest to you?] perhaps you think you know everything that is to be known about people around you. but do you, i wonder? do they know everything about you--your ideals and inner struggles, and aims and aspirations? i doubt it. experience shows that very often the people we know least of all are those with whom we come into daily contact. we take them for granted. we do not even trouble to try to understand them. that they should have doubts and difficulties, heart-aches and hopes and high aspirations, even as we have, sometimes comes as a surprise to us. begin your observations just where you are now. see if you can find the glint of gold that is always somewhere below the surface in every human being, if we can but strike the right place. try to sort out the reasons and the motives that are thick in the air around you. see if you can discern another side to a person's character than the one you have always accepted as a matter of course. and write down your discoveries and your observations. you will need them later on. here, then, is the first step in training yourself for authorship. it is only one step, i admit; but you will find it can be made to cover a good deal of ground. part three the help that books can give steady, quiet, consecutive reading is necessary if we are to do steady quiet, consecutive thinking; and, without such thinking, it is impossible for writers to produce anything worth while. the bane of "browsing" while a wide range of reading, and a general all-round knowledge of standard literature are essential, if you hope to become a writer, there are three directions in which you can specialise with great advantage--reading for definite data, reading for style, and reading for the study of technique, _i.e._ to find out how the author does it. with such matters as reading for recreation we have nothing to do here. training for authorship means work, regular work, stiff mental work. some amateurs seem to think that a course of desultory dipping into books is a guarantee of literary efficiency, or an indication of literary ability. "i am never so happy as when i am curled up in an armchair surrounded by books"; or "i do so love to browse among books," girls will tell me, when they are asking if i can find them a post in my office, or on the staff of one of my magazines. it is so difficult for the uninitiated to understand that the business of writing and making books is one that entails as much close, monotonous work as any other business; and the mere fact that any one spends a certain amount of time in reading a bit here and a bit there, picking up a book for a half-hour's entertainment and throwing it down the minute it ceases to stimulate the curiosity, is no more preparation for literary work than an occasional tinkling at a piano, trying a few bars here and there of chance compositions, would be any preparation for giving a pianoforte recital or composing a sonata. [sidenote: nature's revenge for the misuse of the brain] i have nothing to say against dipping into books as a recreation--refreshing one's memory among old friends, or looking for happy discoveries in new-comers--i have passed hosts of pleasant half-hours in this way myself when my brain was too tired to work, and i wanted relaxation. but such reading is not work; neither is it training in any sort of sense--it is merely a pastime; and, as such, must only be taken in moderation. it should be the exception, not a habit. if you allow yourself to get into this way of haphazard reading, in time you lose the ability to do any consecutive reading, and, as a natural consequence, it would be utterly impossible for you to do any consecutive thinking,--an essential for connected writing. the reason for this is quite clear, if you think it over. when you persistently skim a legion of books, or dip into them casually, and live mentally on a diet of snippets--a form of reading that has been the vogue of late years--you are giving yourself mental indigestion that is wonderfully akin to the indigestion that would follow a food diet on similar lines. if your meals always consisted of snacks taken at all sorts of odd times--fried fish followed by rich chocolates, with a nibble at a mince tart, a few spoonfuls of preserved ginger, a trifle of roast duck, some macaroni cheese, a little salmon and cucumber, some grouse, oyster patties, and ice-cream on top of that--your stomach wouldn't know what to do with it all, and---- i need say no more about it! in the same way, when you read first one thing and then another, piling poems on love scenes, then adding a motley, disconnected selection of scraps of information (of doubtful use in most cases) with sensational episodes and pessimistic outpourings, irrespective of any sort of sequence or logical connection, your mind doesn't know what to do with the conglomeration; for no sooner has your thinking machine set one series of thoughts in motion, than it has to switch off that current and start on something else. eventually the brain gives up the struggle; the thoughts cease to work; you lose the power to remember--much less to assimilate--what you read. in the end, you can't read! nature is bound to take this course in sheer self-defence; the only alternative would be lunacy! [sidenote: why so many want books that shriek] you can see all this exemplified, pitifully, in the present day. with the great rush of cheap books (and still cheaper education) that flooded the country at the beginning of this century, the masses simply gorged themselves with indiscriminate reading-matter--of a sort, (and so did many who ought to have known better). gradually they lost the taste for straight-forward simple stories of human life as it really is; things had to be blood-curdling and highly sensational. the type of reading-matter that had formerly been associated solely with the "dime novel" and depraved youths of the criminal class, found its way into all sorts and conditions of bindings, and all sorts and conditions of homes. people's minds were getting so blunted that they simply could not follow anything unless it was punctuated with lurid lights; they could not grasp anything unless it was crude and bizarre and monstrous; they could not hear anything of the still small voice that is the essence of all beauty in literature, art or nature. everything had to be in shouts and shrieks to arrest their attention. finally, the masses lost the power to read at all, and we are now living in an age when everything must be presented in the most obvious medium--pictures. few people can concentrate on reading even the day's news--it has to be given in pictures. the picture-palace and the music-hall _revue_ (which is another form of spectacular entertainment) stand for the mental stimulus that is the utmost a large bulk of the population are equal to to-day. we delude ourselves by saying that we live in such a busy age, we have not _time_ to read. but it is not our lack of time so much as our lack of brain power that is the trouble; and that brain power has been dissipated, primarily, by over-indulgence in desultory reading that was valueless. all this is to explain why a course of indiscriminate "browsing" is no recommendation for the one who wishes to take up literary work. steady, quiet, consecutive reading is necessary if we are to do steady, quiet, consecutive thinking; and, without such thinking, it is impossible to write anything worth whiles. let your reading extend over a wide range, certainly--the wider the better, so long as you can cover the ground thoroughly--for an author should be well-read. but take care that you do _read_; don't mistake "nibbling" for reading. far better know but one poem of browning thoroughly and understandingly, than have on your shelves a complete set of his works into which you dip at random, when the mood seizes you, with no clear idea as to what any of it is about. reading for definite data turning from reading in general to the specialised reading i have suggested--the first heading explains itself. many subjects that you write upon will require a certain amount of preliminary reading--some a great deal--in order that you may accumulate facts, or get the details of climate and scenery correct, or the mode of life prevalent at a specified time. such a book as mrs. florence barclay's novel, _the white ladies of worcester_--with the scene laid in the twelfth century--must have necessitated a great deal of research among the historical and church records of that era, and the reading of books bearing on that period, in order to get all the details accurate, and to conjure up as convincingly as the author has done, an all-pervading feeling of the spirit of those times. all stories dealing with a bygone period require much preliminary reading, in order that one may become imbued with the spirit of that particular age, as well as familiarised with its manners and customs and mode of speech. most amateurs seem to think that a plentiful sprinkling of expletives about the pages, with the introduction of a few historic names and events, are sufficient to produce the required old-world atmosphere. i could not possibly count the number of mss. i have read where the rival suitor for the hand of "mistress joan" says "gadsook" in every other sentence, while the estimable young man who, like her father, is loyal to the king, is hidden away in the secret-panel room. but tricks such as these do not give the story an authentic atmosphere. you can only get this by systematic study of the literature relating to the period. and others, besides novelists, find it advantageous to study historical records. i remember when mr. william canton (the author of those charming studies of child life, _w. v._, _her book_, and _the invisible playmate_) was engaged on the big history of the british and foreign bible society, and was writing the account of the society's bible work in italy, not only did he read all their official reports, and the correspondence bearing on the subject, but, in order to get the work in its right perspective as regards the events of the times, he re-read italian history for the period he was dealing with. thus he enabled himself to gauge much more comprehensively the significance of the bible society's work in that country when viewed in relation to national happenings, public thought, and the attitude of mind of the italian people. [sidenote: preliminary reading helps you to judge the worth of your information] the writer of articles or books on general subjects (as distinct from fiction) must obviously do a good deal of research. and such reading for definite information has one value that is not always recognised by the amateur--it may let him know whether it is worth while to write the article at all! suppose, for example, that you have decided to write an article on "the evolution of the chimney-pot." it is a foregone conclusion that you think you have a certain amount of exclusive information in your own head about chimney-pots, else there would be no call for you to write on this subject, since the public does not want articles containing nothing more than what has been published already. you have collected some facts and information about chimney-pots, however, that you think are interesting and quite new. so far, good. nevertheless, you will be wise to ascertain what has already been written on the subject; it may throw fresh light on your own gleanings. first, you will probably look up the subject in a good encyclopædia--failing one of your own, consult one at a public library. if there is anything at all under this heading, it is just possible there may be cross-references that will be useful, and allusions to other works on the subject, which it would be well for you to get hold of if you can. then you will also remember that ruskin has written "a chapter on chimneys" in his _poetry of architecture_, with some delightful illustrations. and in the course of your explorations, some one may be able to direct you to other works on the subject, one book so often leads on to another. in this way you find you are absorbing quite a large amount of interesting information. yet presently you may make the very important discovery that what you were intending to say has already been said by others, and possibly said in a better and more authoritative manner than you could pretend to at present! on the other hand, you may still consider that you have exclusive information; in that case do your best with it, and you will find your reading has given you a quickened interest and wider grasp of your subject. but if, in absolute honesty to yourself, you know you have nothing new to contribute to the information that has already been published, then do not attempt to offer your article for publication. write it up, by all means, as a journalistic exercise for your own improvement; it will be helpful if you try how far you can seize, and sum up concisely, the important points that you came across in your various readings on the subject. _but don't attempt to pass off writing of this description as original matter._ such methods never get you far. even though the editor may not have studied chimney-pots in detail, and does not recognise that your "copy" is practically a _réchauffé_ of other people's writings, some of the readers will know that it contains nothing original, and will lose no time in telling him so. there is one cheery thing about the public, no matter how busy it may be with its own personal affairs, and preoccupied with a war, or labour troubles, a presidential election, or little trifles like that, it most faithfully keeps an editor informed if anything printed in his pages does not meet with its entire approval! and when an editor finds he has been taken in with stale material, he naturally marks that contributor for future remembrance. it is well to bear in mind that one of the most valuable assets in a writer's outfit is a reputation for absolute reliability. smart practice, trickery, clever dodges, may get a hearing once, even twice--but they have no future whatever. let it become a recognised thing that whatever you offer for publication is new matter resulting from your own personal knowledge and investigation, and matter that is sure to interest a section of the general public; that you have verified every detail, and have ascertained, to the best of your ability, that the subject has not been dealt with in this particular way before;--then you are sure of a place somewhere in a mild atmosphere, if not actually in the sun! also, common sense should tell you that you are checking the development of your own ability, when you let yourself down (no less than the publisher) by trying to pass off other people's brain-work as your own. it doesn't pay either way. reading for style reading for the improvement of style will involve various types of literature. in order to know what you should read, you need to know in which particular direction you are weakest. in the main, however, i find that all amateurs require to cultivate-- . a simple, clear, direct mode of expression. . modern language and idiom--in the best sense. . a wide vocabulary. . an ear for musical, rhythmic sentences. and equally they need to avoid-- . other people's mannerisms. . long paragraphs and involved sentences. . pedantry and a display of personal learning. . hackneyed phrases. . modern slang. you may not be able to detect any corresponding weaknesses in your own writings; but, if you have had no special training in literary work, i can safely assure you they are there--some of them, possibly all of them! in any case, no particular harm will result if you assume that your writing will stand a little improvement under each of these headings, and start to work accordingly. [sidenote: the beginner seldom uses simple, modern english] in the first chapter i mentioned a lack of modernity in style as a frequent defect in the mss. declined by publishers; unless you handled stories and articles all day long as an editor does you would never credit how widespread is the failing. it is a curious fact that only a very small proportion of people can write as they actually speak; those who do so usually belong to the poorest of the uneducated classes, or they are experienced literary craftsmen. the large majority of people are so self-conscious when they take pen in hand to write a story or an article, that they cannot be natural. they do not realise that they should write as ordinary human beings; they invariably feel they should write as famous authors; and they promptly drop the language they use as ordinary human beings in every-day life, and adopt an artificial, stilted style which they seem to think the correct thing for an author. and this artificial phraseology is invariably archaic or early victorian, because the books people see labelled "good literature" or "the classics" are chiefly by dead-and-gone writers, who wrote in a style that sometimes sounds old-fashioned in these days, even though their english was excellent. [sidenote: every generation shows special characteristics of speech] our mode of speech and of writing in this twentieth century is not precisely that of shakespeare or milton, even though the fundamentals are the same. we live in a nervous, hurrying age, and our language is more nervous, more terse than it was even twenty years ago. we "speed up" our sentences, just as we "speed up" our stories and our articles. we have not time for lengthy introductions that arrive nowhere, and for ornate perorations that are superfluous. "labour-saving" and "conservation of energy" are prominent watchwords of this present age, and are being applied to our language no less than to our work. in order to get through all we must get through in a day (or, at any rate, all that we imagine we must get through!) it has become an unwritten law that the same thing must not be done twice over; more than this, we try to find the shortest cut to everywhere. as one result, we do not use two words where one will suffice; only the undisciplined, untrained mind employs a string of adjectives where one will convey the same idea, or repeats practically the same thing several times in succession. of course, all this curtailment can be--and often is--carried to excess, till only a few essential words are left in a sentence, and these are clipped of half their syllables; we find much of this in the newspapers and the periodicals of an inferior class. and it could be pushed so far, till at length we got to communicate with one another by nothing more than a series of grunts and snaps and snarls! [sidenote: modernity of style is desirable] but i am not dealing with the forms of speech used by the illiterate or the half-educated; i am referring to the language used by the most intelligent of the educated classes, and i want the amateur to remember that this is not necessarily the language of shakespeare, even though the same words be employed. there is a subtle difference in the placement of words, in the turn of phrases, in the strength and even the meaning of words, in the shaping of sentences, and that difference is what, for want of a better word, i term "modernity," and it is a quality that the amateur requires to cultivate. this lack of modernity is noticeable in amateurs of all types. it is a marked feature in the writings of teachers and those who have had a university education, or purely academic training; and equally it is conspicuous in the mss. of the one who leads a very quiet, retired existence, or has a restricted view of life. at first sight it may seem strange to the 'varsity girl, who considers herself the last word in modernity, that i classify her early literary attempts with those of a middle-aged invalid, let us say, who knows very little of the world at large. but those who concentrate exclusively on one idea, or have their outlook narrowed to one particular groove--whether that groove be church-work, or housekeeping, or hockey, or reading for a degree--drop into an antiquated mode of expression, as a rule, the moment they start to write anything apart from a letter to an intimate. the rôle of author looms large before them. the mind instantly suggests the style of those authors they have been in the habit of reading--and more particularly those they would like other people to think they were in the habit of reading--the books that are accepted classics, and, consequently, must be beyond all question. it matters not whether amateurs are shaping themselves according to cowper and miss edgeworth, or striving to live up to the elizabethan giants, they arrive at an old-fashioned style for which there is no more call in the world of to-day than there is for a crinoline or a roman toga. and this, despite the greatness of their models. here are a few sentences taken at random from the pile of mss. waiting attention here in my office:-- [sidenote: instances of antiquated expressions] "let us ponder awhile at the shrine of nature." this is from an article on "a country walk," written by a high school teacher. now, would she have said that, personally, either to a friend or to a class, if they were going out for a country walk? of course not! you see at once how antiquated and stilted it is when you subject it to the test of natural, present-day requirements. in another ms. i read, "king sol was seeking his couch in the west." why not have said, "the sun was setting"? "he was her senior by some two summers," writes a would-be novelist, in describing hero and heroine. why "some" two summers, i wonder? and would it not be more straightforward to say, "he was two years older than she"? "they were of respectable parentage, though poor and hard-working withal." needless to say this occurs in a story of rustic life. why is it that the amateur so often describes the cottager in this "poor but pious" strain? "we saw ahead of us her home--to wit, a rose-grown, yellow-washed cottage." and a very pretty home it was, no doubt; but why spoil it by the introduction of "to wit"? "he was indeed a meet lover for such an up-to-date girl." the word "meet" is not merely antiquated and unsuited to a story of present-day life; it seems particularly out of place when used in close connection with so modern a term as "up-to-date." the two expressions are centuries apart, and both should not have been included in the same sentence. one ms. says, "i would fain tell you of the devious ways in which the poor girl strove to earn an honest livelihood and keep penury at bay; but, alas! dear reader, space does not avail." on the whole, one is thankful that it didn't avail, all things considered! in a letter accompanying another ms. the author explains, "you won't find any slang in _my_ writing. i revel in the rich sonority of the english language." that is all right; but some people confuse "rich sonority" with artificiality. a word may be richness itself if rightly applied, but if used in a wrong connection, or employed in an affected or unnatural manner, it will lose all its richness and become merely old-fashioned, or else absurd. i have not the space to spare for further instances, but i notice one phrase that is curiously popular with the beginner, who frequently lets you know the name of some character in these words, "mary jones, for such was her name----" etc. i cannot understand what is the charm of that expression, "for such was her name"; but it is one of the amateurs' many stand-bys. common sense will tell you that the surest way to gain a good modern style is to read good modern stuff. [sidenote: and now for a remedy] begin with a special study of the editorials in the best type of newspapers. this is reading that i strongly advocate for the amateur in order to counteract archaic tendencies; though i wish emphatically to point out that by the "leading articles" i do not mean the average "woman's gossip," or whatever other name is given to the column of inanities that is devoted to feminine topics; for in some newspapers this is about as futile and feeble, and as badly written as it is possible for a newspaper column to be. unfortunately, the average person does not read the best part of the newspaper. he, and more particularly she, reads the headlines, skims the news, and runs the eye over anything that specially appeals, looks down the births, marriages and deaths, and not much more. but this will not improve anyone's english. take a paper like the _spectator_. here you have modern journalistic writing at its best. read the leading articles carefully each week. read also the paragraphs summarising the news on the opening pages. read aloud, if you can; this will help to impress phrases and sentences on your mind. observe how clear and concise and straightforward is the style. of course, the articles will vary; they are not all written by the same pen; but those that follow immediately after the news paragraphs are always worth the student's attention. you will notice that the writer has something definite to say, and he says it plainly, in a way that is instantly understood. the words used will be to the point; there will be a good choice of language, yet never an unnecessary piling on of words. you may, or may not, agree with everything that is said; but that is not of paramount importance at the moment, as in this case you are reading in order to acquire a clear, easy style of writing rather than to gain special information. nevertheless, you will be enlarging your mental outlook considerably. in the same way, study the editorials in any of the daily or weekly papers of high standing and reputation, avoiding the papers of the "sensational snippet" order. you will soon get to recognise whether the style is good or poor. the _british weekly_ (london) is celebrated for its literary quality. it will be a gain if you read regularly the article on the front page, and "the correspondence of claudius clear," which is a feature every week. this is to start you on a course of reading that will give modernity to your style, and help to rid you of the antiquated expressions and mannerisms that are so noticeable in amateur work. mere "newspaper reading" may seem to you a disappointing beginning to the programme. "the newspaper is read by everybody every day," you may tell me, "and what has it done for their style?" but i am not advocating that type of "newspaper reading." this isn't a question of reading some murder case, or imbibing the exhilarating information that some one met mrs. blank on fifth avenue the other day, and she looked sweet in a pale blue hat. leave all that part of the paper severely alone. study the editorials as you would study a book, since the writings of first-class journalists are excellent models for the amateur, a fact that is curiously overlooked by the student. read a fixed amount each day, instead of relying on a haphazard picking up of a paper and a careless glance over its contents. then, as a useful exercise, take the subject-matter of a paragraph, or an article, and see how _you_ would have treated it; try if you can improve on it (after all, most things in this world can be improved upon if the right person does the improving). you will be surprised to find how interesting a study this will become in a very little while. do not misunderstand me: i am not advocating newspaper reading _in place_ of classical works, but as a necessary and valuable addition to a writer's literary studies. the need for enlarging the vocabulary equal in importance to the cultivation of a modern style in writing, is the necessity for having a wide selection of words at your command, and a keen sense of their value. some people think the chief thing in writing is to have ideas in one's head. ideas are essential, but they are not everything. your brain may be crammed full of the most wonderful ideas, but they will be useless if they get no farther than your brain. it is one thing to see things yourself, and quite another to be able to make an absent person see them. it is one thing to receive impressions in your own mind from your surroundings, or as the product of imagination, and quite another to record those impressions in black and white. tens of thousands of people are conscious of vivid mental pictures, for one who is able to reproduce them in such a form that they become vivid pictures to others. and one reason for the inability of the majority to express their thoughts in writing is the paucity of their vocabulary, and their lack of the power to put words together in a convincing and accurate manner. girls often write to me, "i think such wonderful things in my brain; i'm sure i could write a book, if only people would give me a little encouragement," or, "if only i had time." but if they had all the encouragement and all the time in the world, they could not transfer those wonderful thoughts from their brain to paper unless they had practice, the right words at their command, and the experience that comes from hard regular working at the subject. what people do not realise is this: wonderful thoughts are surging through thousands of brains. they are fairly common _inside_ people's heads; the difficulty is in getting them out of the head--as most of us soon find out when we start to write! i shall refer to this later on. if you wish to write down your thoughts--no matter whether they are concerned with the emotions, or religion, or nature, or cookery--you must employ words; and the more subtle, or elevated, or complex the subject-matter of your thoughts, the greater need will there be for a wide choice of words, in order to express exactly the various grades and shades of meaning that will be involved. if your vocabulary be small--_i.e._ if you only know the average words used by the average person--there is every chance that your writings will be flat and colourless, and no more interesting, or exciting, or instructive, or entertaining than the ordinary conversation of the average person. hence the necessity for enlarging your vocabulary, so that you have the utmost variety to choose from in the way of suitable words, expressive words, and beautiful words, (this last the modern amateur is apt to overlook). [sidenote: the average person's vocabulary is meagre] the smallness of the vocabulary used by the average person to-day is partly due to the mass of feeble reading-matter with which the country was flooded in the years immediately preceding the war. in addition to this, life had become very easy for the majority of folk in recent times; money was supposed to be life's sole requisite. work of all kinds was "put out" as much as possible; we shirked physical labour; lessons were made as easy as they could be; games were played for us by professionals while we looked on; effort of every sort was distasteful to us. it has been said, that as a nation we were becoming flabby and inert, and were fast drifting into an exceedingly lazy, commonplace mental attitude. we boasted that we couldn't think (even though with many this was merely a pose); we seemed quite proud of ourselves when we proclaimed our indifference to all serious reading, and our inability to understand anything. that pre-war period, given over to money-worship, not only curtailed our choice of words by its all-pervading tendency to mind-laziness, but it had its vulgarising effect upon our language, just as it had upon our dress, our mode of living, and our amusements. [sidenote: the dull monotony of english slang] not only did we cease to take the trouble to speak correctly, but we almost ceased to be lucid! we made one word--slang or otherwise--do duty in scores of places where its introduction was either senseless or idiotic, rather than exert our minds to find the correct word for each occasion. many people appeared to think that the use of slang was not only "smart," but quite clever; whereas nothing more surely indicates a poor order of intelligence. my chief objection to a constant use of slang is not because it is outside the pale of classical english, but because it is so ineffective and feeble. as a rule, slang words and phrases are, in the main, pointless and weak, for the simple reason that we use one word for every occasion when it happens to be the craze; and before long it comes to means nothing at all, even if it chanced to mean anything at the start--which it seldom does. our grandmothers objected to their own set using slang on the ground that it was "unladylike." the modern girl smiles at the term. "who desires to be 'ladylike'?" inquires the advanced young person of to-day. yet our grandmothers were right fundamentally; with their generation, the word "lady" implied a woman of education, intelligence, and refinement. the user of slang is the person who lacks these qualifications; she has neither the wit nor the knowledge to employ a better and more expressive selection of words. [sidenote: slang indicates ignorance] slang indicates, not advanced ideas, but ignorance--any parrot can repeat an expression, it takes a clever person always to use the right word. many people who constantly employ any word that happens to be current, do not really know what they are saying, neither do they attach any weight to their words; they merely repeat some inanity, because they have not the brains to say anything more intelligent, or they are too indolent to use what brains they have. notice how a set of big schoolgirls will, at one time, use the word "putrid," let us say, and apply it to everything, from a broken shoe-lace to examinations. and women will call everything "dinkie," or "ducky," or something equally enlightening and artistic, working the word all day long until it is ousted by another senseless expression. what power of comparison has a girl, such as one i met recently, who, in the course of ten minutes described a hat as "awf'ly niffy," a man as "awf'ly sweet," a mountain as "awf'ly rippin'," and another girl as an "awful cat"? what does it all amount to, this perversion of legitimate words or introduction of meaningless ones? nothing--actually nothing. that is the pity of it. if these "ornaments of conversation" enabled one to grasp a point better, to see things more clearly, or to arrive at a conclusion more rapidly, i, for one, would gladly welcome them, as i welcome anything that will save time and labour. but, unfortunately, they only tend to dwarf the intelligence and to lessen the value of our speech. i have enlarged on the undesirability of slang, because many amateurs think it will give brilliance, or smartness, or up-to-date-ness to their work. but it doesn't. it obscures rather than brightens; it tends to monotony instead of smartness. the beginner will be wise to avoid it, unless it is required legitimately in recording the conversation of a slangy person. [sidenote: some books that will enlarge your vocabulary] to enlarge your selection of words, you must read books of the essay type rather than fiction, as these usually give the widest range of english. two authors stand out above all others in this connection--ruskin and r.l. stevenson. both men had an extraordinary instinct for the right word on all occasions--the word that expressed exactly the idea each wished to convey. read some of stevenson's essays slowly and carefully. don't gobble them! you want to impress the words, and the connection in which they are used, on your mind. it is an effort to most of us to read slowly in these hustling times; yet nothing but deliberate, careful reading will serve to teach the correct use of words and their approximate values. and i need not remind you to look up in a dictionary the meaning of any word that is new to you. ruskin's _sesame and lilies_ you will have read many times, i hope; if not, get it as soon as ever you can. his _poetry of architecture_ will make a useful study; also _queen of the air_ and _praeterita_ (his own biography). his larger works, while containing innumerable passages of great beauty, are so often overweighted with technical details and principles of art (some quite out-of-date now) that they become tedious at times. yet there is so much in all of his writings to enlarge your working-list of words, that you will benefit by reading any of his books. among present-day writers i particularly recommend sir a. quiller-couch, dr. charles w. eliot; dr. a.c. benson, dr. edmund gosse, coulson kernahan, and augustine birrell, whose volumes of essays will not only enlarge your vocabulary, but will prove particularly instructive in suggesting the right placing of words, and in giving you a correct feeling for their value. of course this does not exhaust the list of authors with commendable vocabularies; but it gives you something to start on. [sidenote: it is the value of a word, not its unusuality, that counts] notice that the writers i have suggested do not necessarily use extraordinary words, or uncommon words, or very long-syllabled words, or ponderous and learned words. one great charm of their writings lies in the fact that they invariably use the word that is exactly right, the word that conveys better than any other word the thought or sensation they wished to convey. sometimes it is an unusual word; sometimes it is a familiar word used in an unfamiliar connection; but in most cases you feel that the word used could not have been bettered--it sums up precisely, and conveys to your mind instantly, the thought that was in the author's mind. many amateurs fall into the error of thinking that an uncommon word, or a long word, or a word with an imposing sound, gives style to their writings, and they despise the simple words, considering them common-place. i heard an old clergyman in a small country church explain to the congregation, in the course of a sermon, that the words "mixed multitude" meant "an heterogeneous conglomeration"; but i think his rustic audience understood the simple bible words better than they did his explanatory notes. i remember seeing an examination paper, wherein a student had paraphrased the line-- "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea," as, "the bellowing cattle are meandering tardily over the neglected, untilled meadow land." this is an instance of the wrong word being used in nearly every case; and as a complete sentence it would have been difficult to construct anything, on the same lines, that conveyed less the feeling gray wished to convey when he wrote the poem! good writing is not dependent upon long or ornate or unusual words; it is the outcome of a constant use of the right word--the word that best conveys the author's idea. if there be a choice between a complex word and a simple word, use the simple one. remember that the object of writing is not the covering of so much blank paper, nor the stringing together of syllables; it is the transference from the author's brain to other people's brains of certain thoughts and situations and sensations. and the best writing is that which conveys, by the simplest and most direct means, the clearest reproduction of the author's ideas. the charm of musical language there is a very special and distinct charm about literature that is musical to the ear--words that are euphonious, phrases that are rhythmic, sentences that rise and fall with definite cadence. unfortunately, the twentieth century, so far, has been primarily concerned with the making of noise rather than music. even before the war, we lived in a welter of hideous jarring sound, to which every single department of life has added its quota. outdoors the vehicles honk and rattle and roar; in business life the clack and whirr of machinery drowns all else; in the home doors are banged, voices are raised to a raucous pitch, children are permitted to shout and clatter about at all times and seasons--indeed, it is the exception rather than the rule, nowadays, to find a quiet-mannered, well-ordered household. when strauss put together his sound monstrosities, which he misnamed music, he was only echoing the general noise-chaos that had taken possession of the universe, permeating art and literature no less than everyday life. the nightmares of the cubists and futurists were merely undisciplined blatancy and harshness rendered in colour instead of in sound, and were further demonstrations of the crudity to which a nation is bound to revert when it wilfully discards the finer things of the soul in a mad pursuit of money. [sidenote: sound--refined and otherwise] the sounds produced by a people are invariably a direct indication of the degree of their refinement; the greater the blare and clamour attendant upon their doings, and the more harsh and uncultivated their speaking voices, the less their innate refinement. bearing all this in mind, it is easy to understand why so much of our modern literature became tainted with the same sound-harshness that had smitten life as a whole. some writers would not take the trouble to be musical; some maintained that there was no necessity to be melodious; some regarded beauty of sound as synonymous with weakness; others--and these were in the majority--had lost all sense of word-music and the captivating quality of rhythm. and yet few things make a greater or a more general appeal to the reader. [sidenote: the dangers of the "rough-hewn" method] there is no doubt but what the idea that rough, unpolished work stood for strength, while carefully-finished work implied weakness, was due to the fact that several of our great thinkers adopted the "rough-hewn" method. such men as carlyle and browning were sometimes irritatingly discordant and unshapely in style--occasionally giving the idea, as a first impression, that their words were shovelled together irrespective of sound or sense. said the lesser lights, "this seems a very easy way to do it! and they are undoubtedly great men. why shouldn't we do likewise? it must save a deal of trouble!" but there is one difficulty that we lesser lights are always up against: whereas genius, in its own line, can do anything it likes, in any way it likes, and the result will be of value to the world, those of us who are not in the front rank of greatness cannot work regardless of all laws and traditions; or, if we do, our work is not worth much. it was not that carlyle and browning were permitted to write regardless of laws and traditions because they were great; certainly not. they were great because they could write regardless of laws and traditions, and yet write what was of value to the world. so few of us can do that. parenthetically, i am not saying that browning was never musical; the lyrics in _paracelsus_, for instance, are beautiful; but often he went to the other extreme. it no more follows that beautiful language is weak, than that uncouth language is strong. the rough and often clumsy phraseology sometimes used by the two men i have named was their weakness; and the fact that the world was willing to accept the way they often said things, for the sake of what they had to say, is an immense tribute to the worth of their ideas. [sidenote: to use pleasing language is good policy] there are invariably two ways of saying the same thing, and, all else being equal, it is more advantageous to say what we have to say in a pleasant rather than an unpleasant manner. we know the wisdom of this in everyday life; equally it is the best policy in writing. i could name books that are moderately thin in subject-matter and yet have had a large sale, and this, primarily, because of the charm of their style and the music of their language. while there should be ideas behind all that is written, if those ideas are presented in language that captivates the ear, the book has a double chance, since it will appeal through two channels instead of only one--the ear as well as the mind. it must never be forgotten that the object of our reading is sometimes--very often, indeed--recreation and recuperation. we are not always seeking information; the mind is not always equal to profound or involved thought; but it is always susceptible to beauty and harmony (or it should be, if we keep it in a healthy condition, and do not damage it with injurious mental food). and whether we are seeking information or recreation, there is a great fascination in reading matter that has rhythm, melody, and balance in its sentences. i consider that the power to write on these lines is very largely a matter of training. though, obviously, some ears are more keenly alive than others to the comparative values of sound, and some are born with a certain instinct for good expression, there is no doubt but what practice will do much to induce a graceful, melodious style of writing, and study will help us to detect these qualities in the works of others. [sidenote: write verse if you want to write good prose] with regard to training: i strongly advise those who aim for a good prose style to practise writing verse. when you start, you will probably find that your early attempts are nothing more than a series of lines with jingling rhymes at stated intervals. nevertheless, even such productions as these are of definite use in your training. you have had to find words that rhymed. you have had to compress your ideas within a set limit; this in itself is a check on the long-winded wandering tendencies of the amateur. you have had to consider the respective weight of syllables--which is worth an accent, and which is not, and so on. in short, you have had to give some discriminating thought to what you were writing, and how you were writing it, and that is what the beginner so seldom does. he more often sits down and goes on and on and on--words, words, words--with no feeling for their respective values, or the proportion of the sentences and incidents as a whole. viscount morley, in his _recollections_, writes: "at cheltenham college, i tried my hand at a prize poem on cassandra; it did not come near the prize, and i was left with the master's singular consolation, for an aspiring poet, that my verse showed many of the elements of a sound prose style." but the master's consolation was not so singular after all. it is quite possible for one to write verse that may be excellent training for prose writing, and yet that is not poetry in the most exclusive sense of the word. [sidenote: read poetry aloud to cultivate a sense of musical language] in addition to writing verse, i urge all students who wish to cultivate a sense of music in their writing to read good poetry, and, whenever possible, to read it aloud. when reading aloud, the ear helps as well as the eye; whereas, when reading silently, the eye is apt to run on faster than the ear is able--mentally--to take in the sounds; and you are bound to miss some of the finer shades of movement and melody. when you say the words aloud, the sound and the beat of the syllables are more likely to be impressed upon your mind. you cannot do better than tennyson to begin with--one of the most musical of our poets. read "the lotos-eaters," the lyrics in "the princess," "the lady of shallott," "come into the garden, maud." in "the idylls," and "in memoriam," are many exquisite passages. read "guinevere," and "the passing of arthur," for example, noting the lines that are conspicuous for their charm of wording, or balance, or sound. turning to other writers: i select a few instances at random, and am only naming well-known poems that are within the reach of most students:-- christina rossetti: the chant of the mourners, at the end of "the prince's progress," beginning "too late for love," is worth reading many times. jean ingelow has, in a marked degree, a musical quality in her verse which compensates in some measure for its slightness. her habit of repeating a word often gives a lilt and a cadence to her lines that is very pleasing, as for instance in "echo and the ferry," and "songs of seven." as an example by another poet, this repetition of a word is used with delightful effect in "sherwood," by alfred noyes. other poems you might read are: "the forsaken merman," matthew arnold; "the cloud," shelley; "kubla khan," coleridge; "the burial of moses," mrs. alexander; and "the recessional," kipling. "the forest of wild thyme," alfred noyes, contains much in the way of music. after you have studied these--and they will give you a good start--search for yourself. to make your own discoveries in literature is a valuable part of your training. [sidenote: anthologies are valuable text-books] the student will find it very helpful to have at hand one or two small volumes of selected poems by various authors. such anthologies often give, in a compact form, some of the choicest of the writers' verses; and this saves the novice's time in wading through some work that may be indifferent in search of the best. moreover, a little volume can be slipped into the pocket, and will provide reading for odd moments. do not content yourself with a mere reading of the poems. try to decide wherein lies the charm (or the reverse) of each. explain, if you can, why, for instance, the following, by swinburne:-- "yea, surely the sea like a harper laid hand on the shore as a lyre," appeals to one more than longfellow's lines:-- "the night is calm and cloudless, and still as still can be, and the stars come forth to listen to the music of the sea." compare poems by various writers dealing with somewhat similar themes; note wherein the difference lies both in thought and workmanship. mrs. browning's "sonnets from the portuguese" could be studied side by side with christina rossetti's "monna innominata"; longfellow's "the herons of elmwood" with bryant's "lines to a waterfowl"; christina rossetti's "the prince's progress" with tennyson's "the day dream." such exercises will enlarge your ideas as well as your vocabulary; they will help to give you facility in expressing yourself, and also that genuine polish which is the result of close familiarity with good writing. analysing an author's methods it is not possible to suggest any definite course of reading for the study of technique (or methods of authorship). the ground is too wide to be covered by any prescribed set of books. in order to understand, even a little bit, "how the author does it," you need to study each book separately, as you read it--deciding, if you can, what was the author's central idea in writing it; disentangling the essential framework of the story from the less important accessories; analysing the plot; assigning to the various characters their degree of importance; accounting for the introduction of minor episodes; noting how the author has obtained a fair proportion of light and shade, and secured sufficient contrast to ensure a well-balanced story; and how all the main happenings combine to carry one forward, slowly it may be, but surely, to the climax the author has in view. these are a few of the points you should observe. now look at them in detail, and at the same time apply them to your own work. [sidenote: one central idea should underlie every story] every author of any standing has one central idea at the back of his mind when he sets out to write a novel; this is the pivot on which the plot turns--it may be called the keynote of the book, sometimes the author's "idea" is obvious or avowed, as in the case of much of dickens's works, and _uncle tom's cabin_. sometimes it is so deftly concealed that you may not realise a book is giving expression to any one special idea, so absorbing is the general interest. one great advantage of this keynote is the way it gives cohesion to a story as a whole, a motive for the plot, a bed-rock reason for the story's existence. the central idea which is invariably behind a well-written story must not be confused with the "moral" that adorned all the praiseworthy books of our grandmothers' day. the idea may be a very demoralising one, and anything but a wholesome pill administered in a little jam, as was the "moral" of by-gone story-books. but the point i want you to notice is this: every author who is an experienced worker starts out with a definite object in mind--good or bad, or merely dull, as the case may be; he does not sit down and write haphazard incidents with nothing more in view than the stringing together of conversations and happenings that arrive nowhere, and illustrate nothing in particular, and reach no climax other than a wedding. [sidenote: a wedding need not be the chief aim of a novel] possibly it will come as a surprise to many amateurs when i tell them that the inevitable uniting of the lovers (or their disuniting, as the case may be) in the last chapter, is not necessarily the chief object of an experienced writer; often it is merely incidental. the average beginner--more especially the feminine beginner--has but one aim when she embarks on fiction, viz., the marrying of her hero and heroine. that the wedding bells ringing on the last page may be an episode of secondary importance, so far as a book is concerned, seldom occurs to her. the result is the monotonous character of thousands of the mss. offered for publication; and the weary reams of paper that are covered with pointless, backboneless fiction, that amounts, all told, to nothing more than the engagement (or the estrangement) of two colourless, nondescript individuals! [sidenote: the ideas behind books are as varied as human nature] sometimes the author aims to show you either the inhabitants and manners and customs and scenery of some definite locality! or one particular class of society; or the virtues or failings of an individual type; or the beauty of an abstract virtue; or the pitiful side of poverty; or vice decorated with gloss and glamour. but whatever the idea may be, one of some sort lies behind every novel of recognised standing. begin your study of a book, therefore, by looking for its central idea; then observe how this permeates the whole, and how the author utilises his characters and his incidents to demonstrate the idea. some writers explain themselves in the title they give to a book. _the egoist_ tells you at once what to expect. but whether the motif of a book be obvious or not at first apparent, it is important so far as the staying quality of a story is concerned. and it is not until you have studied standard authors, with this particular matter in mind, that you realise how much more important it is that a book should have a keynote, than that the hero should be handsome, or that the heroine should be dressed in some soft clinging material that suits her surpassing loveliness to perfection. [sidenote: look for the framework of the story] having decided what is the central idea behind the book you are studying (i am not suggesting any particular book; choose any work of recognised merit by a dead or a modern writer and it will serve), next try to find the framework of the story--the plot if you like, though the framework is not always the plot. each complete story is composed of an essential skeleton, with a certain amount of secondary matter added to it to take away from its bareness. it is well to notice that with the greatest writers the framework is usually something fairly solid and substantial that will stand the addition of other matter; and it often deals with some great human truth that is world-old. it is not much good to have a framework composed of trivialities. but suppose the framework be something like this-- worthy john jones becomes engaged to good mary smith; they quarrel, and become disengaged. j. j. falls a temporary prey to the sirenical wiles of elsienoria brown; m. s. lends a temporary ear to the insidious suggestions of adolphus robinson. elsienoria brown inadvertently listens to the innocent prattle of a little orphan child, and forthwith mends her wicked ways and dies of consumption; adolphus robinson is condemned to penal servitude for life after absconding with the smith family plate. j. j. and m. s. are finally restored to each other through the kind offices of the same innocent orphan child. it may take you a little thought and time to detach this framework from the author's wealth of additional incidents or secondary matter. there may be talk about the lovely old tudor mansion, mary's home; the life history of each of mary's ancestors, whose portraits hang in the long gallery; the eccentricities of mary's grandfather; the spartan temperament of mary's mother, with details about the perfection of her servants, and the thoroughness of her spring-cleaning activities; digressions as to non-successful aspirants for mary's hand prior to the advent of john; mary's work among the poor; mary's love of nature, and her exquisite taste in garden planning; mary's patience with a gouty father; the sordid history of the late parents of the prattling orphan child whom mary recently adopted; mary's stay in cairo (after the quarrel), and her meeting there with adolphus; details of cairo natives; measurements of the pyramids; a nocturne on moonlight over the desert; a dissertation on flies; prices and descriptions of bazaar curios; sidelights on hotel visitors, their tongues, their flirtations, and their fancy-work---- and much more concerning mary. then there will be elsienoria; her stage career; her intrigues; her eyes; her interest in bull-terriers and bridge; a descriptive catalogue of her jewels, and the furnishings of her palatial yacht; and a vignette of her poor old mother taking in washing in milwaukee. in like manner there will be copious data concerning john, and ditto concerning adolphus, with all sorts of entanglements to be straightened out, and a legion of simple happenings that lead to confusions. it is from a mass of incidents such as these that you will have to eliminate the framework, the part that cannot be dispensed with without the rest falling to pieces. practice in analysing stories will soon make the framework of each clear to you. [sidenote: assess the value of each character in the story] the characters should be studied individually, in order to find out why the author brought them on the scene; what position each occupies in relation to the whole; who are the most important folk, and who are brought in merely to render some useful but unimportant service to the story. then note how the author keeps the circumstances that surround each character directly proportionate to his or her place in the story. the great deeds are invariably performed by the hero--not by some odd man who appears only in one chapter and is never heard of again. the most striking personality is never assigned to some woman who only has a minor part given her, and who vanishes in the course of a dozen pages, with no further explanation. in this way assess the value of each character to the story as a whole. next study the matter that seems non-essential to you, and decide, if you can, why each episode was introduced. [sidenote: the use of secondary matter] at first glance you may think that much of it could be done without, and would make no difference whatever to the story, beyond shortening it, if it were omitted altogether. this is perfectly true of poor work. the unskilled writer will pad out a ms. with all manner of stuff that has no direct bearing on the plot. there will be conversations that reveal nothing, that throw no lights on the characteristics or the motives of anybody, and are obviously introduced merely to fill up a few pages. there will be incidents that in no way affect the movement of the story, that add no particular excitement or interest, and carry you no nearer to the climax than you were in the previous chapter. but the good craftsman wastes no space on unnecessary talk, even though certain scenes and episodes may be of less importance than others. he knows that secondary matter, such as descriptive passages, dialogues, interludes and digressions are necessary in order to "dress" the framework and give it something more than bare bones; they are also needed to give variety and balance to a book. some incidents that may not appear to be vital to the story, are introduced to break what would otherwise have been a monotonous series of events; or they are put in for the purpose of giving brightness and a picturesque element as a contrast to some sorrowful or gloomy occurrence. [sidenote: minor details can be made to serve two purposes] if the book be written by a master, each character, each conversation, each incident, each descriptive passage, each soliloquy is introduced for a specific purpose; nothing is haphazard, nothing is merely a fill-up. moreover, the expert novelist is not content to put his secondary matter to one minor use only; he frequently makes it contribute something to the main issues of the story--and in this case it serves a double purpose. for instance, take the imaginary story i sketched out just now. let us suppose that, half-way through the story, there occurs a stormy chapter, in which john and mary quarrel and part in a scene that is red-hot with temper and emotion. it will be desirable to secure a decided contrast in the next chapter, to give every one--readers as well as lovers--time to cool down a little; besides, you do not follow one emotional scene with another that is equally overwrought, or they weaken each other. the author would, therefore, aim for something entirely different in the chapter following the one that ended with john violently slamming the hall door, and mary drowning the best drawing-room cushion in tears. we will assume that the author transports mary to cairo for change of air; and, in order to restore the atmosphere to normal, he decides on an interlude, entitled "moonlight over the desert"; this will serve as a soothing contrast to the preceding upset. but he will not necessarily describe the moonlight himself. if he makes mary describe it in a letter to a friend, or to her father who remained at home, he will be killing two birds with one stone; he will be administering a pleasant sedative, after the turmoil of the lovers' quarrel; also he will be showing you how mary's temperament responds to the beauties of nature, and how appreciative she is of all that is good and pure and lovely. in this way he will be helping you to understand mary better, and thus the "moonlight over the desert" chapter will be contributing definitely to the main trend of the book. then, again, the author may wish to bring the reader back to the everyday happenings in a light and whimsical manner, and he may give you a scene showing the various ladies who are staying at the same hotel with mary in cairo, retailing their conversation, with the usual oddities and humours and irresponsibilities that are to be found in the small-talk of a mixed collection of women at an hotel. in this way he can introduce brightness and a light touch among more sombre chapters. but in all probability he will make the conversation serve a second purpose; mary may, on this occasion, hear the name of adolphus robinson for the first time, little realising that he is to play an important part in her life later on; or an american visitor may chance to give details of her old charwoman in milwaukee, elsienoria's mother, little knowing that elsienoria is the evil star in mary's horizon, etc. these are indications of the way an experienced author can make every incident in the story dovetail with something else, as well as serve an "atmospheric" purpose, _i.e._, to change the air from grave to gay, or from mirth to tragedy. he never writes merely for the sake of covering paper, or bridging time; whereas the amateur only too often introduces digressions and irrelevant matter with very little reason or apparent connection, apart from a desire to cover paper, or, perhaps, because the episode came into his mind at that moment, and he thought it was interesting in itself, or that it would help to lengthen the story. [sidenote: never lose sight of the climax] notice, too, how the clever author keeps his eye on the climax; how ingeniously he will make everything lead towards that climax; and how he puts on pace as he gets nearer and nearer the goal, instead of hurrying on events at a terrific rate at the beginning, then getting suddenly becalmed part-way through, and making the tragedy painfully long-drawn-out at the end--as is the method of many amateurs! [sidenote: the main rules apply to all stories, irrespective of length] you may tell me that all this does not apply to you personally, as you are not so ambitious as to try your hand at a book; you only write short stories. the same rules apply to all stories, whether , or , words in length, the difference being that with a short story greater condensation is necessary. instead of devoting a chapter to some contrasting episode, you would give a paragraph to it; and instead of having a dozen or so secondary characters, you would be content with only two or three besides the hero and heroine, and this in itself would reduce your number of minor episodes and your descriptive matter. whatever the length of your story, it is well to remember that there should be one main idea at the back of all (apart from the wedding); also a framework, to which is added a certain amount of secondary matter that is well-balanced and introduced with a definite object in view; the characters must bear a fixed relation to the whole; and there must be a climax, concealed from the reader, so far as possible, till the last moment, but ever-present in the writer's mind as the goal towards which every incident, indeed every paragraph, in the story trends. you will find it very useful to study the short stories of rudyard kipling, sir james barrie, and mrs. flora annie steel. [sidenote: the necessity for careful planning] studying fiction in this way is exceedingly interesting, and wonderfully instructive. obviously every author has his own individual methods, and no two work in exactly the same way. but if you examine these main features, which are common to most, you begin to realise something of the careful planning and forethought that go to the making of a story that is to grip its readers, and live beyond its first publication flush. perhaps you may be inclined to think that the bestowal of such minute care on the details of a book would tend to make it artificial and stilted; there are those who argue that the rough, slap-dash style is the only method by which we can catch the fine frenzy of genius in its unadulterated form! but all art calls for attention to detail; anything that is to last must be the product of painstaking thought. life itself is a mass of detail carefully planned by the master-mind. if you study your own life, you will be amazed to find, as you look back upon the past, how every happening seems to be part of a wonderful mosaic, that nothing really stands quite alone with no bearing whatever on after events. that the slap-dash method is much easier than the careful, thoughtful working-out of a story, i admit. but it does not wear--why? because there is really no body in the work; it is all on the surface, and therefore quickly evaporates. that which costs you next to nothing to produce, will result in next to nothing. of course, you can elaborate your work, and add a multitude of details all apparently bearing on the story, till the readers (and also the main features of the story) are lost in a mass of small-talk and unimportant events. but the secret of all good art is to know what to take and what to leave; and the genius of a writer is evidenced in the way he knows just what incidents to put down in order to gain the object he has in view, and what to omit as redundant, or unnecessary to the direct working out of his theme. [sidenote: the application] i am not analysing any novel to give you concrete examples of the points i have named. my object in writing these chapters is not so much to set down facts for you to memorise, as to help you to find out things for yourself. our own discoveries are among the few things of life that we manage to remember. having dissected a novel, and made notes on the way it was constructed, turn to your own work (whether a long or a short story), and see what you have to show in the way of a main idea, a good framework, a purpose for each character, a reason for each incident, well-balanced secondary matter, with a steady _crescendo_ and _accelerando_ leading to a good climax. i need not point out the application. it is for you to make your own stories profit by your study of the methods of the great writers. part four points a writer ought to note beautiful and striking thoughts are a common everyday occurrence; the uncommon occurrence is to find the person who can reduce those thoughts to writing in such a manner as to convey, exactly to another mind the ideas that were in his own. practice precedes publication when you sit down pen in hand with the intention of writing something--write! this may seem unnecessary advice to lead off with; but it is surprising how much time one can spend in not writing, when one is supposed to be engaged in literary work (no one knows this better than i do). it is so easy to gaze out of the window in pleasant meditation, letting the thoughts wander about in a half-awake, half-dreaming state of mind. girls often sit and think all kinds of romantic things, weaving one strand of thought with another, letting the mind run on indefinitely into space and roam about aimlessly among pleasant sensations. such girls sometimes think this an indication that they have the ability to write a novel; whereas it is doubtful whether they could draft a possible plot for the simplest of stories; their brain is not sufficiently disciplined to consecutive thought. others are possessed of high, noble impulses; or they feel a sudden overwhelming sense of the beautiful in life; or a desire to attain to some lofty ideal; and forthwith they conclude this indicates a poetic gift of unusual calibre. all such experiences are good, they are also plentiful (fortunately, for the uplifting of human nature); but they do not imply the ability to write good poetry, even though they prove exceedingly useful to a poet. [sidenote: beautiful thoughts do not guarantee beautiful writing] most beginners think that the main essential for a writer is a fair-sized stock of beautiful or striking thoughts; but it is quite as important to know how to write down those thoughts. as a matter of fact, beautiful and striking thoughts are of common, everyday occurrence; the uncommon occurrence is to find the person who can reduce those thoughts to writing in such a manner as to convey, exactly, to another mind the ideas that were in his own. "but how ought i to start with writing?" the novice sometimes asks. "there seems so much to say, yet it is difficult to know where to begin." when a student commences the study of art he does not begin with the painting of some big, involved subject, such as "a scene from hamlet." he spends some years working at little bits and making studies. he practises on a profile, or a hand, or the branches of a tree; he will sketch and re-sketch a child's head, or one figure; he will work away at a few rose-petals or an apple--always endeavouring to render small pieces of work well, rather than large pieces indifferently. when a great artist starts work on an academy picture, he does not commence at one side of the canvas and work right across to the other side till the picture is finished. he does not necessarily begin his masterpiece by painting on the canvas at all. as a rule, he makes a rough-out of his idea (more than one, very often), merely blocking in the figures, arranging and re-arranging the position of the main items, then assigning the details to their proper places, till he gets all properly balanced, and to his liking. then he dissects the picture-that-is-to-be, making separate studies of the figures, sometimes making several drawings of an arm, or a piece of drapery, or a bit of foreground, expending infinite care and work on fragments, and making dozens of sketches before a stroke is put on the canvas itself. thus you see both the novice and the master specialise on detail before they tackle a piece of work as a whole. some of the "studies" made by famous artists for their important pictures are positive gems, and help us to understand something of the immense amount of thought and preparation that go to the making of any work of art that is to live. the student who is training for authorship must work on the same lines. all too often the amateur starts by putting down the first sentence of a story or an article, and then writes straight on to the very end, without any preliminary rough-out or separate study of detail; and the result is a shapeless mass of words, lacking balance and variety, and either without any climax, or with two or three too many. [sidenote: "it simply came!"] when offering a ms. for publication, the writer will often tell me--as though it were something to be proud of--"i merely sat down, and without any previous thought, wrote the whole of this story from beginning to end. it simply came." one can only reply: "it reads like it!" i have before me a letter and ms. from a would-be contributor, who writes: "i just dashed this off as it first came into my head. i do so love scribbling, and i simply can't help jotting things down when the fit takes me." this is very well to a limited extent. there are times when all authors just dash things off when the fit takes them; but, if they have any sense (and no one succeeds as a writer if they have not) they do not regard the dashed-off scribble as the final product, and rush with it to a publisher. much ability may be evidenced in a hurried "jot-down" of this type; and if written by a master hand, it may be useful as an object lesson, showing how a clever author makes his preliminary studies; but as a finished piece of work it is of little value, for the simple reason that it is not finished. of course, the greater the writer the less revision will his dashed-off-scribble need, because experience and practice have taught him to know almost by instinct what to put down and what to omit. nevertheless, he is certain to go over it again, making alterations and additions, before sending it out to the reading public. before you can hope to write anything worth publication (much less worth payment), you will require considerable practice in actual writing. directly a beginner puts on paper a little study in observation, or collects some facts from various already-published books, or induces twelve or sixteen lines of equal lengths to rhyme alternately (rhymes sometimes omitted, however, in which case the lines are styled "blank verse"), that beginner invariably sends along the ms. to an editor, and is surprised, or grieved--according to temperament--when it is not accepted. few would-be authors realise that what may be good as a study or an exercise, is not necessarily of the slightest use to the general public. and, after all, the final test of our work is its use to the public. if the public will not take it, it may just as well remain unwritten (unless we are willing to regard it as practice only), for it is certain our acquaintances will not listen while we read our "declined" mss. aloud to them! "but why shouldn't the public buy my first attempt?" some one will ask. [sidenote: why "first attempts" have rarely any market value] the public seldom is willing to pay some one else for what it can do quite as well itself. and most people have made first attempts at writing. rare indeed is the person who has not laboured out an essay, or dreamed a wonderful love story, or put together a few verses. in the main, all first attempts bear a strong family likeness one to the other, and though the general public may not stop to analyse its own motives, the truth is, it will not buy immature work as a rule, because it feels it can produce writing equally immature. for this reason (among other things) first attempts have rarely any market value--unless you have been dead at least fifty years and have acquired fame in the interval! of course there is always the remote chance that a genius may arise, whose first attempt eclipses everything else on the market; but as i have said before, we need not worry about that exceptional person, since some one has estimated that not more than two are born in any generation. and even these two have to be divided between a number of arts and sciences; they are not devoted exclusively to literature! the average writer whose books have made his name famous, had to write much by way of practice, before any of it found a paying market. and we humbler folk must not be above doing likewise. begin to train yourself in writing by making studies, in words, just as the art student makes them in line or wash. make studies of character, of scenery, of temperament, of dialogue--of anything that comes to your notice and interests you. to make a character study of someone you know intimately, or with whom you are in daily contact, is a useful exercise--but i don't advise you to read it to them afterwards, that is if you feel you have been quite frank in your writing, and you value their friendship! aim to make each study a little word-picture, embodying some idea, or reproducing some trait, or conversation, or incident. but do not be in too great a hurry to embark on a lengthy or involved piece of work. [sidenote: the style of writing should vary according to the subject-matter] practise various styles of writing--serious, conversational, gay, didactic, colloquial, etc.; and see that the style corresponds with your subject-matter. watch good authors with this latter point in view. for example, the style of writing in kipling's "barrack room ballads" is not the style he used when writing "the recessional." often several styles of writing are necessary in one story, if we are introducing contrasts in characters or in scenes. and though we may think that one style is peculiarly our own, it is most desirable that we should write just as readily in any style. this gives variety and colour to our work; also it reduces the risk of our acquiring mannerisms, which are generally tiresome to other people, though we are blandly unconscious of them ourselves. but be sure that you do not appear to force an effect; do not make an effort to be light-hearted, for instance, or overdo the sombre tone one would use at a funeral. sincerity should underlie all your writings; they should carry the conviction with them that what you say happened, actually _did_ happen, and was not invented by you merely to heighten the gaiety or deepen the gloom, as the case may be. in order to make your style sincere and convincing, you must study life itself, not take your models from other people's books. if you are to write in a joyous style that will infect others with your cheeriness, you must enjoy much of life (if not all of it) yourself, and be able to enter into other people's enjoyment. if you are to make your readers feel the grief that surrounded the funeral of which you write in your story, you must have shared in sorrow and sympathised with others in theirs. once you enter into the very spirit of each happening, you will find your style will soon shape itself according to the situation. you will use the right words and expressions just as you would were you facing the situation in real life, without having to stop to think out what is best suited to the occasion. but the beginner has to learn to be natural when writing; that is one of his hardest tasks, i often think; and he sometimes needs considerable practice before he acquires the power to write exactly as he thinks and speaks, and convey precisely what he himself feels. therefore practise your pen particularly in this direction if you find it an effort to be natural on paper. [sidenote: the need for condensation] all beginners need to practise condensation; our tendency while we are inexperienced is to be diffuse, and to over-load our subject with unimportant explanations or irrelevant side-issues. it will help you if, after a finished piece of writing has been put aside for a few days, you go over it with a fresh mind, and delete everything--single words or whole sentences--that can be omitted without lessening the force or the picturesque quality of your writing, or blurring your meaning. for example:--if the hero's grandfather has no bearing on the development of the story (and you are not seeking to prove hereditary tendencies), spare us his biography. do not tell the reader, "it is impossible to describe the scene," if you straightway proceed to describe it. it is waste of space to write, "it was a dull, gloomy, cheerless november day"; one takes it for granted that a gloomy november day is dull, likewise cheerless. if the colour of the heroine's eyes and the tint of her hair are immaterial to her career, omit such hackneyed data. of course these matters may be important--if the lady is the villainess, for instance. i have noticed that it seems essential the wicked female should have red hair and green eyes, while the angel has violet (or grey) eyes, with long sweeping lashes--in novels, at any rate. i cannot be so certain about real life, for i have never met an out-and-out villainess in the flesh; though i have known several really nice girls, who were a joy to their aged and decrepit parents, and who married the right man into the bargain--and all this on mere mouse-coloured hair, nondescript eyebrows, and complexions verging on sallow! if, after consideration, you are bound to admit that it will make no difference to the working out of the story, nor to its general interest, if you omit some such trivial description, or a word or a phrase, take it out; its deletion will probably improve the ms. in such a matter, however, it is very difficult for us to judge our own work. [sidenote: the quest of the right word] as a useful exercise in the art of condensation, practise describing incidents as forcefully as you can, using the fewest possible sentences. this will also train you to select the word that best describes your idea. you will soon realise that the one right word (and there is always one right word for every occasion) carries more conviction with it than half-a-dozen words when neither is exactly "it." the able writer is not the one who uses many words, but he who invariably uses the exact word. it is safe to say that, as a general rule, the more you increase your adjectives, and qualifying or explanatory phrases, the more you decrease the strength and vividness of your writing. [sidenote: making plots] the student should practise sketching out plots. this is a very fascinating occupation, and all seems to go easily here--until you examine them! then you may be less elated. when you have completed the plot to your own satisfaction, look at it carefully in order to discover if you have, by any chance, used an idea or a theme that has been used by some one else before you. this is a painful process, for, as a rule, one's most admired plot crumbles to nothing under this test! if you are quite honest about it, you will be obliged to confess--until you have had a fair amount of practice--that your plots are nothing more than other people's plots re-shuffled. do not delude yourself by saying that you will "treat it differently." perhaps you will; but you will stand more chance of success if you determine to get a new plot that has not been used before, and treat _that_ differently. the lack of any new idea or originality in the plot is the cause of thousands of mss. being turned down each year. many amateurs seem to think that the plot is of next to no importance, whereas it is the foundation upon which you raise the superstructure; if there is no strength in the foundation, the upper part is likely to be tottery. [sidenote: learning and cleverness must not be obtrusive] until you start to scheme out plots, you have no idea how much there can be (but often is not!) in this part of an author's business. do not regard your writing as a medium for the exhibition of your own cleverness. never try to show off your own learning or to impress the reader with your own brilliancy. early amateur efforts often bristle with quotations, foreign words, stilted phrases, pedantic remarks, or references to classical personages. the reason for this is clear; when the amateur writes he invariably sees himself as the chief object of interest in the foreground, rather than his subject-matter. almost unconsciously the back of his mind is filled with the thought, "what will the public think of me when they read this?" consequently he does all in his power to impress the public, and his relations and friends (and by no means forgetting his enemies) with his attainments and unusual knowledge. we are all of us like this when we start. but as we gain experience--not merely experience in writing, but that wide experience of the world and human nature, which is such a valuable asset to the writer--we come to realise that the public pay very little heed to a writer personally (until he or she becomes over-poweringly famous); it is the subject-matter of a book that they trouble about, and the way that subject-matter is treated. readers do not care in the least if an author can read hafiz in the original (unless he is actually writing about persian poetry, of course); but they do care if he has written a bright, absorbing story that holds their interest from first to last, or a helpful illuminating article on some topic that appeals to them. therefore, why make a special opportunity to drag in hafiz, or some one equally irrelevant, when he is but vaguely related to the subject in hand, or possibly is quite superfluous? do not think i mean by this that a knowledge of languages and the classics is immaterial or unnecessary for the writer. quite the reverse. the more knowledge we acquire of everything worth knowing (and standard literature is the great storehouse of knowledge) the better equipped we are for work, and the greater our chance of success. [sidenote: the well-informed man does not use his learning for show purposes] but remember this: the really well-informed man does not use his learning for show purposes. knowledge should not be employed for superficial ornamentation. it must be so woven into the strands of our everyday life, that it becomes as much a part of us as the food we eat and the air we breathe. our reading should not be made to advertise our intellectual standing. we do not read plato and shakespeare and dante that we may be able to quote them, and thus let others know we are familiar with them. we read them in order to get a wider outlook on life; to see things from more than one point of view; to look into minds that are bigger than our own; to learn great facts and problems of life that might not otherwise come our way, yet are necessary for us to know, if we are to see human nature in right perspective. in short, we study great authors in order to arrive at a better understanding of our neighbour; some take us farther than this, and help us to a better understanding of god and his universe. if we are reading the classics with any lesser aim, we are missing a great deal. the knowledge we absorb from such reading should work out to something far greater than a few quotations! it should affect our thoughts and our life itself (which obviously includes our writing), because it has helped us to clearer, altogether larger ideas of this world of ours and the people who are in it. such knowledge will make its mark on our writing in every direction, giving it depth and breadth--_i.e._, we shall see below the surface instead of only recording the obvious; and take big views instead of indulging in puerilities and pettiness. likewise it should make us more tolerant and sympathetic and large-minded, knowing that life is not always what it seems. and it may help us to accuracy--a virtue of priceless worth to the writer. of course, the knowledge acquired from the reading of great books does not take the place of the knowledge we gain by mixing with living people; we need the one as much as the other. but it is a wonderful help in enlarging our power of thinking, and the scope of our thoughts; and it opens our eyes to much in the world around us that we might otherwise miss. so much by way of precept. now for an example of the type of writing that is overloaded with learning. some years ago, when i was assistant-editor of the _windsor magazine_, a girl, who had taken her b.a., came to me with an urgent request that i would help her to a start in journalism. if only i would give her the smallest opening, she was sure she would get on; she was willing to try her hand at anything, if only--etc. at the moment we were proposing to publish an article on the nearly extinct london "cabby." i had already arranged with some typical cabmen to be at a certain cab-shelter on a given day, to be interviewed. as this girl was so keen to try her hand at writing up a given subject, i asked her if she would care to tackle the "cabmen" article, explaining that we wanted a simple straightforward account of their work and experiences, the various drawbacks of the profession, any curiosities in the way of passengers they had come across, and similar particulars calculated to arouse public interest in the men. she was charmed with the idea, and grateful for the chance to get a start. and she said she quite understood the simple, chatty style of article i wanted. a week later the article arrived. and oh, how that girl had slaved over it, too; it seemed to me she had tried to include in it everything she knew! it started with an eight-line greek quotation. it gave historical details of the city of london; there were references to roman charioteers and the olympic games, extracts from chaucer and other authors equally respectable. indeed, there seemed to be something of everything in the article--excepting information about the cabmen. what little she had written about them, poor men, was swamped by the display of her own knowledge. yet it was difficult to make her understand that there was something incongruous in the association of broken-down old cabmen with a greek extract; that the one topic created a false atmosphere for the other; while equally it was unsuitable to introduce greek into a general magazine, seeing that the larger proportion of the grown-ups among the reading public had forgotten all the greek they ever knew. unpractised journalists are apt to overload their articles with data that has no immediate connection with the subject in hand, even though it may be distantly related. such inclusions often weaken the whole, as they confuse rather than enlighten the reader. one other caution is necessary. avoid quoting from other people's writings. with some amateurs this amounts to a most irritating mania. now and then, an apt quotation may serve to enforce a point, but the beginner should be sparing in their use. remember that people, as a rule, do not care to pay for what they have already read elsewhere! also, a publisher only reckons to purchase original matter (apart from books that are avowedly compilations). in any case, you are not gaining practice in original writing if you are merely copying out what some one else has written. the reader must be interested the first essential in any publication is that it shall interest people, especially the people who, it is hoped, will buy it. every book does not appeal to the same type of reader; but every book should appeal to _some_ type of reader, and it should interest that type of reader, or it will prove a failure. this does not necessarily mean that it must keep the reader wrought up to a high pitch of excitement, or squirming with laughter, or bathed in tears--though a judicious mixture of these things may contribute much to the success of your work. it means that what you propose to tell people must be something they will want to hear; and when you start to tell it to them, you must tell it in such a way that they will be keen for you to continue. beginners often think the main point is their own interest in what they write. it is certainly desirable that we ourselves should be interested in what we write, otherwise the chances are it will not be worth reading; but it is still more important that what we write should interest other people. i have known a book to sell well, though the author was thoroughly bored when writing it; but i have never known a book to sell well if the public were thoroughly bored when trying to read it! [sidenote: if your writings do not grip, they will not sell] and this necessity for interesting the reader applies to every class of writing. it is useless to write a scientific treatise in such a dull way that the student is not sufficiently attracted to read the second chapter; it is useless to write a religious article in such a stereotyped, conventional manner that nobody gets beyond the second paragraph, and everybody is quite willing to take the rest as read; it is useless to write such vague insipid verse that the reader does not even take the trouble to find out what it is all about; and it is useless to write feeble fiction that lands the reader nowhere in particular, at the end of several chapters. if you cannot grip, and then hold, the reader's attention, your writings will not be read. and if they are not read, they will not sell. you may think this last remark a backward way of putting it, and that a book must sell before it can be read. but several people read it before a copy is actually sold, and often a good deal depends on the verdict of these people. it is read by the publisher, or his editor (sometimes several of them); if they decide that it does not interest them, and that it is not likely to interest the public--where are you? even if you determine, after your ms. has been declined by a few dozen publishers, to pay for its publication yourself, and in this way get it into print, there are the reviewers to be thought of; should they be of the same opinion as the publishers who declined it, and find it so lacking in interest that they never trouble to finish it, and ignore it entirely in their review columns--that, again, is unfortunate for you! among other people who may read it, there are the publisher's travellers. if it fails to interest them they can hardly grow so enthusiastic over it, when displaying it to the bookseller, as they do over another book that kept them sitting up all night to finish it! more than this, a keen, intelligent bookseller reads many of the books on his counter, in order that he may know what to recommend his customers when they ask him for a book of a definite type. indeed, he is often supplied with "advance copies" by the publisher. if he finds a volume engrossing, you may rely on his introducing it to his customers; and if the purchasers of the earliest copies are captivated by it, they will certainly talk about it and urge their acquaintances to read it, and send it to their friends on dates when gifts are due. thus you see a book really must be read before it has a chance of any sale. beginners often think the all-important thing is to get their ms. set up in type; that once it is published the public will buy it and read it as a matter of course. but the public won't, unless it interests them. and no matter how much money an author may be able to expend on the production of a book, it will bring him little satisfaction if that book does not sell, and he sees the major portion of the edition eventually cleared out as a "remainder," or dumped in stacks on his door-step, when the publisher can give it shelf-room no longer. [sidenote: the personal outlook must be taken into account] to interest people you must write on subjects of which they know something, or subjects which in some way make an appeal to them. you seldom succeed in interesting them if you write of things quite outside their usual range of thought or ideals or aspirations. to ensure some attention from your audience, it is imperative that this matter of personal outlook be taken into account. a subject may be of enthralling interest to you, but if it is not in any way likely to interest your readers from a personal standpoint--if it has no connection with their spiritual or material life, if it makes no appeal to them on the score of beauty, if they cannot by any stretch of imagination see themselves in a leading part--then it is risky to make that the subject of an early article or book. when you are well-established, and recognised as a capable writer, you can take your chance with any exotic subject you please; but i do not advise it at the beginning of your career. this does not mean that out-of-the-way subjects should never be chosen. obviously life would be deadly monotonous if we were always trotting round the same circle. novelty is most desirable; monotony is fatal to success. but it must be novelty that is linked in some way with the reader's life. let us suppose you are absorbed in the study of a certain new germ--a germ that is responsible for much mortality among tadpoles. not only have you discovered the existence of this germ but you have taken its name and address, inspected its birth certificate, secured its photograph, insisted on knowing its age and where the family go to school, ascertained its average food ration, noted its climatic preferences, and many other useful facts. all this would be very interesting to persons who are rearing frogs; but as such people are few in number, it would scarcely attract the bulk of the reading public, hence you could not expect a book on the subject to have a large sale; nor would an article be likely to find a resting place in a magazine or newspaper that aimed to attract the general public. the subject would have no interest for the majority of people, because once we have left our unscientific youth behind, tadpoles are generally as remote from our life as the north pole. but, suppose you suddenly discover that these same germs are communicated by tadpoles to water-cress, and therefore directly responsible for hay fever or whooping-cough (or something equally conclusive); you will find the general public all attention in an instant, since water-cress and whooping-cough make a personal claim on most of us. and in that case your writings would find a market at once. [sidenote: a novel must have "grit" somewhere in its composition] the same ruling applies to fiction. study any successful novelist, and you will see how his knowledge of the things that appeal to men and women guided him in the choice of a subject, and his manner of presenting it. some beginners think a peculiar plot, or a bizarre background, or an eccentric subject is more likely to command attention than familiar topics; but that depends entirely on what there is in it likely to appeal to the reader and rivet his attention. mere eccentricity or peculiarity will not in itself ensure the reader's permanent interest; behind the externals there must be something with more "grit" in it. while newness of idea is much to be desired, and a breaking-away from hackneyed scenes and types should be aimed for, there must be a strong underlying link to connect the unusual idea with the reader's sympathies and mental attitude. you may lay the scene of your story in the stone age, or make your hero and heroine some never-heard-of-before dwellers in the moon; but unless you can interweave some fundamental human trait, or some soul longing that will make such a story understandable to ordinary humanity, it will not interest average readers, since they know very little about the tastes and manners and customs of the folks who lived in the stone age; neither are they likely to be at all convinced, nor particularly excited, because you tell them certain circumstances about beings, said to be in the moon, who could never possibly come their way. [sidenote: mere eccentricity will not hold the public] even though a few people may at first be attracted by some eccentricity on your part (and, after all, if we only shriek loud enough, some one is certain to turn round and look at us), there is no lasting quality in such methods of catching attention. a troupe of pierrots at the seaside may get themselves up in a garb bizarre enough to give points to the cubists; but unless they also provide a fair programme, they will not retain an audience. after the first glance at their peculiarities, the public will stroll farther along the parade to the much plainer-looking company, if that company provide a better entertainment. there must be "body" in the goods you offer the public, apart from qualities that are only superficial, such as a weird or unusual setting. in some cases an author's strong appeal to human interest has even borne him aloft over actual defects. [sidenote: why fame has sometimes overlooked defects] the verses of ann and jane taylor could never be called poetry; yet most of the incidents recorded touch a sympathetic chord in every child's life, and each "moral" emphasises exactly the claims of justice that are recognised with surprising clearness by even the youngest; hence the poems have a personal interest for any normal, healthy-minded child. and, in consequence, they have lived for over a hundred years. in certain of his books ruskin wrote much about pictures--pictures that could only interest a small proportion of the general public, because so few are able to go and see the pictures in the continental churches and galleries. moreover, some of his art criticism is considered worthless by many artists. yet ruskin has been, and still is, universally read. why? because, in addition to his erroneous estimate of certain artists, and his prejudices against others, and his remarks about unfamiliar pictures many of his readers have never seen, he continually touched on matters in which we all have a very personal interest--our duty to god, our relations to our fellow-men, the inner workings of our mind, the problems of the soul, the beauties and messages of nature, and scores of other topics that are of the keenest interest to every thoughtful person. ruskin himself complained that people did not read him for what he had to say, but for the way in which he said it. yet he was not quite correct in this. people read him for something besides his style; they often read him for the side issues, the comments by the way, the little vignettes and pen-pictures of scenery, the great truths embodied in a few sentences--matters that strike home to us all, even when the main purport of a book may appeal only to a few. having recognised the need for interesting the reader, decide next the means by which you hope to do this. [sidenote: decide the means by which you will endeavour to interest] it may be a merry jingle nonsense rhymes that you intend shall please by their very absurdity; or it may be the voicing of some tragedy haunting many human lives that you rely on to touch the human heart; or the description of some scene of beauty that you feel will be the main attraction of your writing; or perhaps it is the unselfishness of the hero, the strong courage of the heroine, or the ingenuity of the villain that is to be its outstanding feature. whatever it may be--keep it well in view, and always work up to it. the trouble with so many amateurs is their tendency to forget, before they are half-way through their ms., the ideas with which they started! [sidenote: settle on your audience] the class of reader whom you hope to attract is another point to be taken into consideration. the literature that appeals to the factory girl is not the type calculated to enthuse the business man; the book that delights the nature lover might be voted "insufferably dull" by the woman who likes to fancy herself indispensable to smart society. while we do not, as a rule, write only for one small section of society, there are certain divisions, nevertheless, that must be recognised; and the beginner who is not sufficiently versed in his craft to be able to work in broad sweeps on a big canvas that can be seen and understood by all, is wise to observe definite limitations, and work within a clearly-marked area. you must decide whether a story is for the schoolgirl or her mother; whether you are writing for those who crave sensation, or for those who like quiet, thoughtful, restrained reading; whether your article is for the student who already knows something about the matter, or for the general reader whom you wish to interest in your theme. having settled who are to be your readers--do not let them slip your memory while you address several other conflicting audiences from time to time. writers of books for children are especial sinners in this respect, frequently introducing passages that are quite outside the child's purview, and obviously better suited to adults. [sidenote: be sure of your object] your object in writing should be definitely settled before you start on your ms. is it to instruct, or to help, or to entertain? is it to provide excitement, or to act as a soothing restorative to tired nerves and brain? is it to expose some social wrong, or to enlist sympathy for suffering and misfortune? is it to make people smile, or to make them weep? is it to induce a light-hearted and care-free frame of mind, or to make the reader think? is it to pander to a vicious taste, or to foster clean ideals? inexperienced writers often seem to think there is no need for any defined purpose in their work, unless they are issuing an appeal for charity, or writing an article that is to combat some special evil. yet everything we write should have a purpose. unfortunately, we have dropped into a habit of ticketing a work "a book with a purpose" when it deals particularly with religious or social propaganda; whereas every book should be a book with a purpose, or it will not be worth the paper it is written upon. you must have some reason for what you write, or some object which you keep in view, if you are to make any impression on the reader. many of you who are beginners will probably explain that your object in writing is solely to entertain (and a very good object it is). in that case, see to it that your writing _is_ entertaining. don't let it be flat and colourless and tepid for pages at a stretch. but you must remember that every book should be entertaining. this is as much a primary necessity as that every book should be grammatical. it is another way of saying that every book must interest people. yet how few amateurs stop to consider whether what they write is really entertaining? ask yourself, after your ms. is completed, "if i saw this in print, should i be so impressed with it that i should write off at once to my friends and urge them to buy it, and mention it to all my acquaintances as something well worth their getting and reading?" if not--why not? if you can criticise your own work dispassionately in this way, it will help you to detect some of your own weak points. but, unfortunately, so few of us can look dispassionately upon the children of our own brain! form should be considered form which plays a very important part in the construction of literature, means shape and order; it means also definite restrictions. though we do not realise it at first, these restrictions are particularly desirable. without them, we might go writing on and on, till no one could follow us in our meanderings, the brain would be worn-out with the attempt. yet these same restrictions are what the novice most resents, or at any rate is inclined to flout. nevertheless, you must abide by certain rules if your work is to be readable and profitable. [sidenote: established rules save our wasting time on experiments] you may regard all rules as arbitrary. i know how inclined one is, when only just beginning to feel one's feet, to kick down every sort or prop and barrier and sign-post and ledge, in order to run riot, without let or hindrance, over all the earth. but we cannot do this when we are only learning to walk, without tumbling down and acquiring bruises; and then we lose a certain amount of time in picking ourselves up and getting our bearings again. while the thought of starting out on brand-new adventure, without any one's advice or dictation, is very enticing, the wise person is he who first of all avails himself of the discoveries already made by other folk (a time-saving policy to say the least of it). then, when he has assimilated as much as he can of what others before him have found out, he can experiment on his own, and start on a voyage of discovery into truly unknown lands. but it is sheer waste of energy to go pioneering over land that has already been thoroughly investigated, and mapped out, by men and women who have gone before us. and although we may consider the limitations of form in art as quite superfluous in our own particular case, it is well to get thoroughly acquainted with them, bearing in mind the fact that thousands of writers for centuries past have been handling the subject, experimenting along these same lines, often asking the same questions that we are asking. and all whose opinions were worth anything came to the same conclusion, viz:--that strict attention to form is necessary in all creative work, if that work is to have lasting value. therefore you might as well accept this at the outset, at any rate until you have reached the stage where you can do exactly as you please and still command the attention of an admiring universe. [sidenote: the three-part basis] all the master-minds seem to agree that a story, whether long or short, should consist of three main parts. indeed most of the art-products of the brain are constructed on a three-part basis. experience has shown that this form is the most satisfying to the mind--and remember, one of the essentials of a work of art is that it shall satisfy the mind with that sense of fitness and completeness and appropriateness, so very hard to define exactly in words, and yet so necessary to our enjoyment of anything. a painting has foreground, middle distance and background. a musical composition, if short, has generally a first part in one key, a second part in the minor or a related key, and a third part that is often an amplification of the first part with additional matter that brings it to a satisfactory conclusion. if the composition be lengthy, such as a sonata or symphony, its first movement, slow movement and finale are labeled for all to understand. the three-volume novel of our grandmothers' day was a recognition of the desirability of definite division. and although we do not now spread our stories over so much paper, nor trim them with such wide margins and three sets of covers, the three parts are still there, and in many cases the author still marks them plainly for the reader, by dividing his work into specified sections. sometimes we find a th act, and a th, in a play, just as we sometimes have four movements in a sonata; but in most cases the extra act is really only an episode, not a main division in itself, and usually belongs to the second part. [sidenote: the divisions of a story] broadly speaking, the divisions of a story may be ticketed-- . starting things. . developing things. . accomplishing things. the first part is devoted to introducing the characters; starting them to work, according to some pre-arranged scheme in the author's mind; laying in the background, and generally "getting acquainted." in the second part, the scheme or plot is developed; complications and side issues, contrasting episodes and by-play may be introduced. this is the place for the author to exercise all his ingenuity in seeming to wander farther and farther from the solution of the problem of the story, while in reality he is ever drawing the reader towards it. the third part is concerned with the actual solution of the problem, and shows how all the previous happenings helped to bring about the climax with which the story should end. [sidenote: length must be taken into consideration] the three parts may, or may not, be about equal in length; but if one is longer than the other, it should be the middle part. it is never well to introduce delays in the first part, nor are they desirable in the last part. to be complex or episodical at the start is unwise; the reader likes to get well under way moderately early, to know who everybody is and what they are after. when your story is fairly launched, you can lengthen it with diversions, descriptions, dialogues, and episodes, and, granted they are interesting and have a direct bearing on the story, the reader will not complain. but once you reach the third part, and start to gather up the scattered characters and far-flung incidents, in order to unite them all into one convincing conclusion, you must not dally, nor divert the reader's attention from the main issue. you will see from the foregoing that it is necessary to fix the length of your story before you start to work--otherwise you will not get it properly balanced. i do not mean that you must tie yourself down to an exact number of words for each part, any more than for the whole; but you should settle, before you start, an approximate estimate of the amount of space you will allow to each part, and then see that you keep somewhere near it. for instance, the probability is that, unless you keep an eye on yourself, you will overdo the detail in the first part. so many novices start writing their story before they have half thought it out in all its bearings; the result is that all sorts of new ideas come to them, and fresh developments, and different aspects of the plot; and they add to their original plan, work in fresh characters, amplify those that are already there, till all sense of proportion is gone. or they may have a special liking for one particular character (invariably it is the one who, they secretly think, represents their own tastes and aspirations), and they will overdo this one with detail, and unduly spin out that portion of the book. then again, when we are fresh, and only starting a work, we are more inclined to stroll leisurely among voluminous particulars, and write all that comes into our head, than we are when we have written forty thousand words, and are wishing we could get the rest of it out of our brain, and down on the paper, with less physical, as well as less mental, effort! therefore, when you eventually revise your ms. as a whole, overhaul the first section very thoroughly, cutting it down ruthlessly if you find you have been unduly diffuse. nowadays a story that drags at the outset is doomed. [sidenote: form as applied to articles] but fiction is not the only class of writing ruled by form; articles, essays, verse are all subject to a certain order of presentation, and certain restrictions, which no writer can ignore without lessening the effectiveness of his work--and in the main the threefold basis applies to all. when writing an essay or an article, it is useful to make your divisions as follows-- . state your theme and your reasons for its choice. (in other words: make it quite clear to your readers what you are going to write about, and why you decided to write about it.) . say what you have to say about it. . give the conclusions to be drawn therefrom. here, as in the case of fiction, it is desirable to get right into your subject quickly, never "side-tracking" the readers' mind on to a subsidiary topic until they have a firm hold of your main theme. ruskin was particularly tiresome in the way he would turn off at a tangent, and start talking about some minor matter, before the reader had grasped what subject he was proposing to deal with. after you have turned your theme inside out, in the second part, and told all the points about it that you think will be new to your reader, make your third part a climax, in that it works up to a definite conclusion. it does not matter what the subject of your article, broadly speaking it should be built on these lines, since this is the form in which the human mind seems best able to take in information. you cannot expect people to follow your descriptions, your arguments, or your objections, if they do not know what you are talking about; hence the need for a very clear presentation of your subject at the beginning. and, in order to leave your reader in a satisfied frame of mind, _i.e._ with a sense of certainty that things were brought to their logical conclusion--also an essential in a work of art--the third section must be primarily occupied with the reasons for, or the outcome of, or the deductions to be drawn from, that which has gone before. this leaves the middle section of the article for digressions, side issues, or any other form of amplification. once the student recognises how desirable are the laws of form, how they give shape and proportion and cohesion to matter that would otherwise be void and hopeless, he will realise how impossible it is to do good work without preliminary thought, and careful planning. and he will also understand how it is that mss. which are merely "dashed off" without any preparatory work, those that "just came of their own accord," as the authors sometimes boast, invariably fail to arouse a spark of enthusiasm in the soul of an editor. right selection is important the mere fact that the sun never sets on the british empire does not necessitate our including the whole of it in one ms. yet some beginners seem most industriously anxious to do this. amateurs may be divided roughly into two classes: those who tell too little, and those who tell too much. the majority come under the latter heading. the literary artist is he who knows exactly what to select from the mass of material before him (in order to make the reader see what he himself sees); and what to discard as non-essential. i am inclined to think that the instinct for selection is largely born, not made. it is one of the channels through which genius betrays itself. very few great artists can explain why they chose one particular set of items for their canvas, or their book, and ignored others; or why that particular set conveys a sense of beauty to the observer, when another set would make no such appeal. yet the sense or instinct can be cultivated to some extent, and the first step is to recognise the necessity for careful selection. few beginners give a thought to the matter. they imagine that all they have to do, when they set out to tell a story, or describe some incident or scene, is to say all they can about it--the more the better. "i never spare myself where detail is concerned," a would-be contributor wrote when offering a magazine article. unfortunately she did not spare me either; there were fifty-seven pages of close, nearly illegible writing, describing the tombs of some long-dead unknowns in an out-of-the-way continental church. to enumerate every single item is not art; it is cataloguing. slight themes require but few details. [sidenote: training yourself in the matter of selection] look your subject well over before you write a line; decide what are its outstanding features, which are its most prominent characteristics, and what it is absolutely necessary to say about it, in order to give a clear presentment. at the same time, note what is irrelevant to the main purport of your writing, and what is comparatively unimportant. after all, the mind can only take in a certain amount of detail, a certain number of facts; and as it cannot absorb everything, a limit has to be placed somewhere. common sense tells us that since something must be left out, it is well to omit the colourless, unimportant data that never will be missed! in every scene there are always definite points that arrest the attention and give character to the whole, and many other points that really do not make very much difference one way or the other. the artist (whether he be making word-pictures or colour-pictures) selects those points that give the most character to the scene, those incidents which convey the most comprehensive idea of the place and the people and their doings, in the fewest words. if you are writing a story, it is seldom necessary to describe every thing appertaining to, and every one connected with, the heroine, for example--at any rate, not on her first appearance. her home, her relations, her dress, can often be dealt with in a few sentences; but those sentences must contain just the facts that give the key to the whole situation. probably it will not throw any vivid light on the lady if you state that her drawing-room was upholstered in old rose, and she herself devoted to chocolate; because the virtuous no less than the wicked, the most advanced feminist as well as the silliest bundle of vanity, might all have equal leanings toward old rose and be addicted to chocolate. but if you state, either that she was reading a first edition of dante, or cutting out flannelette undergarments for the sewing meeting, or powdering her chalky nose in public--the reader will have some sort of clue as to your heroine's personality. an instinct for selection will tell you which item will characterise a person most accurately. in the same way some incidents will directly affect the whole trend of a story, others leave the main issues untouched. select the incidents that matter, and leave those that merely mark time without taking the reader any further. [sidenote: caricature is not characterization] but while it is desirable to record outstanding features, it is not wise, as a rule, to emphasise mere peculiarities, as this only tends to stamp one's writing as unnatural, exaggerated, or caricature. far better seize on general topical characteristics, only select those that are prominent, colourful, and vigorous, rather than neutral, insipid traits or happenings. people reading kipling's story, "the cat that walked by itself," invariably exclaim, "that's just like _our_ cat!" yet in all probability kipling's cat was not at all like either of their cats. he merely chose the typical characteristics common to all cats, and each person immediately sees his own individual pussy in the picture. a lack of an instinct for selection is one of the commonest failings in amateurs, and is responsible for the rejection of an endless stream of mss. for this reason it is desirable that the beginner should pay special heed to the subject, and note to what extent he is making actual selection, or whether he is merely jotting down all and sundry in haphazard unconcern. when writing articles there are two main difficulties in writing an article; one is to get a good beginning, the other is to get a good ending. if you know your subject well (and it is useless to write on a subject you do not know well), it is wonderful how the middle portion takes care of itself in comparison with the care that has to be bestowed on the entrance and exit. i have seen amateurs write and write and re-write their opening paragraphs (with intervals of perplexed pen-nibbling in between), crossing out a sentence as soon as they put it down, interpolating fresh ideas that ran off at a tangent, suddenly jumping back a hundred years or so in their anxiety to start at the very beginning of the subject--and finally tearing up their by-now-unreadable ms., and commencing all over again. here are two methods by which you may more easily get under way--and the great thing is to get under way, and write _something_, then you at least have a concrete ms. to pull to pieces and re-arrange and hammer into shape. it is the blank paper, or the page you have crossed out and then torn up in despair, that is so irritatingly non-productive! [sidenote: settle your chronological starting-point--and stick to it] decide, before you write a line, the exact point in the life-story of your subject at which you will start. remember that it is impossible to say _everything_ about it, or give the whole of its history; therefore settle quickly what can safely be left out concerning its antecedents and early childhood without detriment to the subject as a whole. once you have made up your mind as to the precise chronological starting point, stick to it (half the initial trouble of getting into your subject will be over if you do); and do not in the course of a few paragraphs hark back to some previous happening or era, because you have suddenly remembered something that might be made to bear on the subject. the way anxious writers will endeavour to tell every mortal thing that can be told regarding the most distant prehistoric family connections of their subject, is on a par with a certain type of chairman at a meeting, who will persist in dilating on the sayings and doings of his great-grandfather instead of dealing with the topic in hand. if i ask the untrained amateur to write me an article on "the use of pigeons in war," the chances are all in favour of his starting with the ark, and talking for several paragraphs round the dove with the olive branch. by a natural and easy transition, he would presently be quoting, "oh for the wings of a dove!" pliny's doves would have an innings, the london pigeons of st. paul's have honourable mention, the ornithological significance of the botanical term _aquilegia_ might be touched upon, with other equally irrelevant or far-fetched allusions to the _columbæ_ as a whole; and all this before any really serviceable information is forthcoming under the heading specified. this is no exaggerated picture; it is the type of article frequently submitted, and is due to a writer's lack of an instinct for selection, and his determination to leave nothing unsaid. in the end, he of course leaves a great deal unsaid, because the inevitable limitations of an article make it impossible to give so much past history and still find room to say what should be said about the present-day aspect. the space is gone before the writer has barely got there! and because of this tendency to expend too much ink at the beginning on details that are too far removed from the central point of interest to be worth recording, i will give another hint that may occasionally prove useful. [sidenote: when in doubt--begin in the middle] when in doubt where to start, begin in the middle; _i.e._ attack the subject where the interest seems to focus; or launch out without any preliminary whatever, into the very heart of the matter. it is quite possible it may prove to be the beginning! the desirability of shaping an article according to the definite rules of form was dealt with on page . a careful planning of the form beforehand will help the writer to keep his article properly balanced, and to avoid over-weighting it unduly with unimportant data at the outset. [sidenote: when you have finished--leave off] with regard to the wind-up of an article, here again the writer has much in common with the speaker, and happy is he who knows instinctively just when to leave off. so few do! failing an instinctive perception of the right ending, or the desirable climax, the writer can deliberately plan one and then work up to it. and it is well to plan it fairly early, in order to make the whole of the article gravitate toward this finale. [sidenote: it is the final impression that counts] in writing, as in so many other things, it is the final impression that counts. the reader's attitude of mind, when he comes to the end of the last page, is a powerful factor in settling your success as a writer. if you end lamely, with non-effective sentences, or with pointless indecision--if, in short, the reader does not feel he has got somewhere or achieved something by reading the article, he will not be remarkably keen on anything else you may write. the beginner seldom pauses to inquire: what is my object in writing this article? if i were to put the question to a number of would-be authors, and they replied truthfully, they would say, "to see myself in print," or, "to make money"; yet i cannot reiterate too often that what we write must have more in the way of backbone than this. the reason that thousands of mss. are returned to the senders every year is because those senders had no other object in view, apart from money-making or getting into print. decide therefore on a more useful object--useful, that is, from the reader's point of view. the reader does not care one iota whether you are going to make money, or whether you now see yourself in print for the first time. the point _he_ is concerned with is what he himself gets out of his reading--whether he has been amused and entertained, or has gained information, or a new light on an old subject, or a spiritual uplift, or useful facts, or some fresh interest, or a soothing narcotic for an anxious brain. and you must have some such object in mind, when you plan the shortest article, no less than when you scheme out a novel. in writing the article on "the use of pigeons in war" your object might be the giving of information that would be fresh to the public (and we never need trouble to tell them that which they know already); information calculated to increase their knowledge of the ways in which we waged the great war for the world's freedom, and also to give them a new interest in these wonderful birds. bearing all this in mind, it will be seen at once that the preamble about the ark would be quite unnecessary, since it would convey no new information whatever. mere recapitulation of ancient well-known facts is never desirable, outside a text-book. [sidenote: keep an eye on topicality] topicality has often much to do with the acceptance of an article; but the beginner seldom takes this point into consideration. the finest article one could write would be turned down if the subject were out of date--and twenty-four hours make all the difference. we move at such express speed, and events hurry past at such a rapid rate, that the article an editor would jump at to-day may be useless to him to-morrow; the book that would be marketable this season may be unsaleable next. of course this does not apply to every ms., but it does to a good many, and particularly in regard to articles for periodicals. if you think your subject will have special interest for the public at the moment--send it at once, and if it is the burning question of the day, send it to a newspaper rather than to a magazine, remembering that magazines have to go to press some weeks before the date of publication. if a magazine editor receives your ms. january st, the very earliest he could get it into his magazine would probably be april, and the chances are he would have everything planned and set up until may. in the _girls' own paper and woman's magazine_, for instance, the final sheet of the september number has to be passed for press the first week in june. bearing these facts in mind, you will realise that it is useless to send an article on a christmassy subject to an editor in november. his christmas number was probably put together in august, and by november it is travelling by train or steamer, bullock-wagon or native carrier, to distant parts of the world. [sidenote: articles that are not wanted] and i must mention another fault common with beginners. it is useless to offer articles that are nothing more than a _réchauffé_ of encyclopædic facts. any schoolboy can string together text-book information, and compile facts from other people's works. if your article is on an old-established theory, or some well-known theme, you must contribute some new personal experience, if it is to be of any worth. readers will not pay for books or articles that contain nothing but what they could write themselves, given the time and the works of reference. then, again, it is useless to choose a subject merely because it appeals to you personally; if there is no likelihood of its appealing to the majority of the readers, it is valueless to an editor. [sidenote: study the readers' preference no less than your own] the business of writing is like every other business in that self-effacement may contribute much to success. the good business man does not spend his time talking about his own tastes and achievements and preferences; he keeps an eye on what interests his customers and talks about that. the good writer does not write merely to air his own likes and dislikes and grievances, or to impress people with his own attainments and good fortune; he keeps his eye on what interests his readers (who are his customers) and follows this up in some degree in his writings. this need not mean any relinquishing of personal ideals, or pandering to cheap tastes. the readers' ideals may be as high--or even higher--than yours; their tastes may be quite as refined--but they are not necessarily the same as yours. therefore, study what will interest them to read rather than what it will interest you that they should read. think it out, and you will find there may be a world of difference between the two. [sidenote: send suitable articles to likely magazines] writers are often told to study the type of articles appearing in the magazine in which they are anxious to see their own work published. this is very sound advice. the unsuitabilities that are offered at times are past counting. a man wrote recently to the editor of a prominent missionary monthly: "i notice you have no chess columns in your paper. i could supply one regularly, and i assure you it would help your circulation considerably." for the _woman's magazine_ i have been offered murder stories of the most lurid and revolting character; articles on "seal-hunting in the arctic as a sport," "curiosities in kite-flying," "the making of modern motor roads," and others equally outside the range of women's activities even in these days of wide-flung doors. [sidenote: editors do not want repeat-subjects as a rule] avoid offering articles on subjects that have already been dealt with in a periodical. unless you have unique and valuable information to add to that already given, space cannot be spared to repeat matter. moreover, the public does not want to pay twice for the same thing--and that is what it would amount to. it is no recommendation to write to an editor, "i see you have an article on 'glow-worms as a hat-trimming' in your last issue; i am therefore sending you another article on the same subject." unless you have some new and really informing data to contribute, the probability is that you would only be covering the same ground as the previous writer. neither are you likely to get your ms. accepted if you write, "i have read the article on 'glow-worms' in your last issue, and disagree with many of the statements made therein. far from glow-worms being things of elusive beauty and suggestive of fairyland, as your contributor calls them. i regard them as noxious pests. i have written my views in detail, and hope you will be able to publish the article in your next issue to counteract the wrong impression that the other one conveyed." now, an editor to a large extent identifies himself with the views expressed in the pages of the paper he edits. and had he not approved of the statements made, he would not have been inclined to print them in an ordinary non-controversial paper. is it likely, then, that he would want another contribution calmly informing his readers that the previous article was entirely wrong and unreliable? [sidenote: on the subject of "how to----"] most editors are overdone with the usual "how to--" articles. the public has by now been told "how to" do everything under the sun, i am inclined to think; but if you feel it laid upon your soul to impart still further instruction--try to find a fresh form of title. do not choose too big a subject. "heaven," "human nature," "eternity," and kindred themes are beyond the powers of any mortal--much less the beginner. get right away from hackneyed phrases and allusions. so many mss. are peppered throughout with such expressions as "all sorts and conditions"; "common or garden"; "let us return to our muttons"; "tell it not in gath"; "but we must not anticipate." if you feel drawn to write an essay on "friendship," it is not necessary to start with david and jonathan; they have already been mentioned--more than once, in fact--in this connection. neither is it desirable, when writing about jerusalem to quote, "a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." variety is always pleasing, and editors do like to come upon something, occasionally, that they have not read more than a dozen times before. suggestions for style if you are writing with the object of giving information, avoid the indefinite style. either make a clear, decided statement (if you are competent to do so), or leave the matter alone. you not only weaken the force of your statements, and smudge your meaning, by beating about the bush and walking round your subject, but you cast doubts in the reader's mind as to whether you are fully qualified to write about it at all. here is an extract from an article sent to me on "the cultivation of broad beans." speaking of blight, the writer says: "i would not presume to dictate to the experienced gardener, who doubtless has his own method of dealing with the black blight that is so common on these plants; but for the benefit of the novice i would say that, personally, i always find it a good plan to nip off the tops of the beans so soon as the black fly appears. and, failing a better plan, the amateur might try this." articles written in this strain are fairly common, and are often the outcome of modesty on the part of a writer who does not wish to appear too dogmatic, or "to take too much upon himself." but from the utility point of view they are poor stuff, and are suffering as much from "blight" as the unfortunate beans, since each statement seems to be disparaged in some way by the over-diffident author! either the remedy suggested for the black fly _is_ a remedy, or it isn't. if it is a remedy, then it is as applicable to the bean owned by the experienced gardener as to the one owned by the novice. in short--if it be advantageous to nip off the tops of blighted broad beans, the writer should have said so in simple english, without apologising for his temerity in making the statement, and thereby discounting all he says. [sidenote: ambiguity must not be allowed to pass] aim at writing with accuracy, clearness and precision. ambiguity should never be allowed to pass. any sentence that you feel to be in the slightest degree uncertain, or obscure, as to meaning should be reworded so as to leave no doubt whatever as to your meaning. if, on re-reading your article, you are not quite sure what you meant when you wrote any passage, take it out altogether. do not leave it in to puzzle the reader, even though you add a footnote--as ruskin did--explaining that you have no idea what you meant when you wrote it. in order to avoid an ambiguous style, two things are necessary: the ability to think clearly and concisely, and the ability to write down exactly what one thinks. [sidenote: the subject should regulate the choice of words] the choice of words should be influenced by the subject of your writing. a dignified subject calls for dignified language. a racy subject calls for racy language; and so on. if your theme be a lofty one, do not "let down" the train of lofty thought it should engender, by introducing some word or phrase that induces a much lower--or a different--plane of thought and ideas. it is a backward policy, to say the least of it, to weaken, or obliterate, by ill-chosen language, the ideas you set out to foster in the reader. it is no extenuation to plead that the jarring phrase is particularly expressive; if it actually counteracts the ideas you seek to convey, it cannot be expressing your meaning. the beginner often gets himself tied up in a knot with negatives; and even if he steer clear of actual error, he is apt to overdo himself with double negatives. it is better to make a direct statement in the affirmative if possible, than to involve it in negatives. instead of saying "a not uncommon fault," it is clearer at first sight if you say "a common fault," or "a fairly common fault." i know it does not always follow that the exact reverse fulfils the purpose of the double negative; a fault may be "not uncommon" and yet not exactly common. nevertheless it is always possible to get the precise shade of meaning in the affirmative; and until a writer is quite fluent, it is better not to risk confusing the reader's mind by the introduction of too many negatives. [sidenote: the tendency to use involved sentences] in the praiseworthy desire to use fine english, the beginner is very apt to get a sentence such a mixed-up maze of words that there seems little hope of the meaning ever getting out alive at the other end! i take this from a ms. just to hand:-- "not that her parents would have entirely agreed with the supposition that there might have been that in his character which, had he not felt himself unequal to the task which affected him not a little in its apparent issue, even though actually simple in its ultimate object, it would have been possible for him to utilise to such an extent that he might not have entirely disappointed their none too sanguine estimate of his ability." i admit that all amateurs do not rise to such cloud-wrapped heights; but many are nearly as bad! then, again, i have known the idea the author had in view when he started a paragraph, to get lost half-way through! this is due to the fact that the mind has not been trained to sustain consecutive thinking, but is permitted to veer round to all points of the compass like a weather-cock. [sidenote: "every why hath a wherefore"] if you enunciate a problem, see that you give the solution. if you start to elucidate some theory (or the reader is led to believe that you are going to elucidate it), do not forget all about it, and switch off to something else. if you have no solution to offer, it is wiser and more satisfactory, as a general rule, not to put forward a problem at the close. a sense of incompleteness--or of something still awaiting fulfilment--is as disastrous to the success of an article as it is to the success of a book. [sidenote: undesirables] beware of labouring a thought. if your point is only a slight one, do not reiterate it in various forms or over-embellish it. if no big idea lies behind your sentences, no amount of impressive, ornate language will make your writing great. people sometimes think that a fanciful style of writing will hide defects; whereas, on the contrary, it often emphasises them. avoid using many quotation marks and italics; they make a page look fidgety. also they indicate weakness. if your remarks are not strong enough to stand alone, without words or phrases being propped up by quotes or underlinings, they are no better when so decorated. a lavish use of extracts from other people's writings is undesirable. as i have said elsewhere, neither the publisher nor the reader is keen to pay for what they can read--and probably have already read--elsewhere. a pedantic style of phraseology, and a desire to let other people see how much one knows, are amateur failings. some beginners go to the other extreme, and adopt a slangy, purposely-ungrammatical style, with the beginnings and finals of words clipped away, and a cultivated slovenliness that they imagine gives a picturesque quality, or an ultra up-to-dateness, to their writing. but no good work is ever built on such foundations. the first thing to aim for is clarity, and the ability to express yourself in an easy, natural and concise manner, always using the fewest and the best words for the purpose, and employing them according to modern methods. [sidenote: improbabilities, misnamed "imaginative writing"] amateurs often lean towards the improbable--calling it imaginative work--partly because they fancy they are less hampered by rules and restrictions than if they take everyday, mundane subjects. yet--paradox though it may seem--the improbable must be bounded by probability in its own sphere; and imagination must be kept within definite limits and work according to definite forms--else it is no better than the gibberings of an unhinged mind. beginners frequently choose the moon, the stars, or the ether as the background for their imaginary characters; or they revel in after-death scenes that are supposed to represent the next world--either of suffering or of happiness. and a favourite ending is something like this, "suddenly i awoke, and lo, it was only a dream," etc. avoid all these hackneyed themes, and obvious tricks. it takes a dante to lead us convincingly through the mazes of an unknown world. perhaps you feel that you are a dante? possibly you are: greatness must make a start somewhere. but in that case, there will be no need for you to strain after effect; genius can be evinced in the treatment of the simplest subjects. therefore experiment at the outset with everyday themes, and perfect your style in this direction before embarking on a very ambitious programme: we must learn to walk before we can run. the airman does not start turning somersaults the first time he goes aloft (or, if he does, that is the last time we hear of him, poor fellow). it is a mistake to think that the undisciplined wanderings of an untrained mind betoken imaginative genius. it is the way one handles the commonplace that reveals the true artist; and style plays an important part in this, though it is by no means everything! the question of imaginative work is big enough to deserve a volume to itself: much has already been written on the subject, and much remains to be said--too much to make it possible to do it justice in a book of this description. but i mention it here, in passing, to warn the beginner against spending much time on work that is not imaginative but merely impossible, until thoroughly grounded in the rudiments of his craft. [sidenote: pecularity is not originality] literature seldom gains by peculiarities of style or marked mannerisms, even though these are to be found in the works of certain writers who are of unquestionable ability. such devices tend to become monotonous, and as a rule the public will only tolerate them when the subject matter of a book is so good that it is worth while to plough through the writer's mannerisms to get at it--_i.e._ mannerisms are put up with only when the writer is great in spite of them: no one is great because of his mannerisms; they are only superficial disturbances. i am not saying this to discourage any attempt at originality of style; real originality is usually most desirable; what i am anxious to impress on the beginner is the fact that mere peculiarity is not originality. nor will it benefit anyone's work to copy the mannerisms of great writers--since these are often their defects. [sidenote: mannerisms are soon out of date] it must also be remembered that many mannerisms are nothing more than fashions of the moment, just as most slang is; and in these rapid times they quickly become out of date, whereupon they give a book an antiquated touch. and few things are more difficult to survive than an atmosphere that is merely old-fashioned and nothing more. it will be quite time enough, when you are expert at writing clear, understandable english, to decide whether your genius can best find expression in long and complicated sentences as used by henry james, or in such cynical scintillations as those favoured by bernard shaw, of in the paradoxical methods of g. k. chesterton, or what you will. no limit need be set once a person has ideas to give the world, and can write them down in simple, direct, well-chosen language. the ubiquitous fragment amateurs often think it is much easier to write a "fragment" than to write a complete anything. the one who hesitates as to whether he has the ability to write a long story, is quite sure he is capable of writing a fragmentary bit of fiction--one of those vague scraps with neither beginning nor ending that are always tumbling into the editor's letter-box--and he feels that all vagueness, and lack of finish, and the fact that the ms. gets nowhere, are sanctioned because he adds, as a sub-title some such qualification as "an episode," or "a character study," or "a glimpse." in the same way a writer who is too diffident to attempt a volume of essays, will feel perfect confidence in sending out a ms. labelled "a reverie," or "a meditation," even though it be nothing more than a rambling collection of platitudes on the sunset. in most cases it is a distrust of his own powers that inclines the amateur to embark on writing of this type. [sidenote: a fragment may be incomplete, but it should not be formless] fragments may be exceedingly beautiful; they are really most acceptable in this hurrying age when life often seems too crowded with work-a-day cares to leave us much leisure for sustained reading. but they must embody the fundamental principles of form; and they must be constructed with even more attention to artistic presentment, (or the means used to captivate the reader), than would be necessary for a lengthier work. also, though they are but fragmentary, they must appear to be portions of a desirable whole, sections of a well-finished piece of work. their apparent incompleteness should seem due to the author having insufficient time--not insufficient knowledge--to finish them. what is set down must not only be good work in itself, but it must suggest other good work as a completion. you have probably seen some reproduction of a fragmentary pencil or pen-and-ink sketch, by an experienced artist, showing only a portion of a figure or a building; yet so suggestive that the onlooker instinctively fills in the remainder, and constructs out of the artist's unfinished drawing a picture complete and beautiful. i have several such sketches before me on my study wall. one shows a corner of a quadrangle in the precincts of a cathedral. in the background there is a gothic west window, a buttress, and a piece of a tower; while a flight of steps in a corner of the quadrangle, a bit of old-world stone-work around a doorway and window, a fragment of roof and a cluster of chimneys, with half a dozen lines indicating an ancient flagged walk, comprise the remainder. only a few inches of paper and a few pen-strokes--nevertheless instinctively the mind runs on, and sees the whole of the cathedral in the shadowy background; the side of the quadrangle past the old doorway; even the street beyond with its cobble stones and market women. indeed, you can visualise all the life of the quaint sleepy, french town if you look long enough at the little fragment; not because it is all indicated by the artist and left in an incomplete state, but because what he did put down is so vital, so suggestive, so fraught with possibilities, that the mind fills in all the blanks, and fills them in with beauty corresponding with the specimen he has shown us. and while we are studying the sketch, it may be noticed that though this is but an unfinished fragment, it is perfectly balanced, and shapely and proportionate as it stands. the patch of light on the flagged path is balanced by the shadow in the doorway. the flight of crumbling stone steps, the most conspicuous feature in the foreground, has been drawn with the utmost pains in every detail. even the cathedral window looming in the background has its exquisite tracery carefully drawn, no scamping the work because it was only the background of an incomplete sketch. in the same way, a fragmentary word picture should be properly constructed, and absolutely accurate in detail (so far as that detail goes), well proportioned, carefully balanced, containing distinct charm in itself. the background may be only lightly indicated, but even so, it should contain possibilities--(the cathedral may be in misty shadow, but you must be able to see enough of it to know that it _is_ a cathedral, and a great cathedral at that). the central idea must be placed well in the foreground, it should be clearly stated, and be something worth calling an idea. the points you mention, but leave unamplified should be something more than windowless, blank walls, or blind alleys leading nowhere; they should open up fresh vistas of thought, and send the reader's mind out and beyond the limits of your sentences. your word-picture must be satisfying in itself, even though one realises that it is but a small part of a much larger whole that might have been written, had time and space permitted. certain literary fragments extant are probably portions of large works the authors had in view but did not finish; coleridge's "kubla khan," for instance. the type of fragment i am talking about in this chapter, however, is actually finished, so far as the author's handling is concerned; but unfinished in detail and setting, or with only a vignetted background. some writers have set down a few lines with neither introduction nor development plot, yet such is the force and the revealing quality of the sentences they put down, and the accuracy of their sense of selection, that they have conveyed as much, and suggested as much, to the mind of the reader as if they had written pages. the following verse of william allingham is an example here is a volume of suggestion in seven lines. four ducks on a pond, a grass bank beyond, a blue sky of spring, white clouds on the wing:-- what a little thing to remember for years-- to remember with tears! tennyson wrote some beautiful fragments. "flower in a crannied wall" contains a world of thought, and could easily furnish a theme for a row of ponderous books; "break, break, break," has poignant possibilities. william sharp, as "fiona macleod," wrote some charming prose fragments; but behind each you will invariably find a complete idea, and an idea that suggests others. practise writing fragments by all means, but see that they are shapely, and suggestive of greater space and a bigger outlook than can be measured by the number of sentences. above all, let each embody some idea--and let there be no uncertainty as to the whereabouts of that idea, no ambiguity as to what you are driving at. to produce a good fragment you must do some intensive thinking, because you have not space to spread yourself out. this will be a gain to all your writing. the rambling, formless habit of thinking is the bane of the amateur, and the type of mss. resulting therefrom is the bane of the editor. concerning local colour local colour can be a powerful factor in enhancing the charm of a story or article. it may be introduced as the background against which the scene is laid; or as a sidelight on the scenery, customs, and types of people peculiar to a district. anything can be utilised that conjures up in the reader's mind the idiosyncrasies of a definite locality--only it must be something that _will_ conjure up the scene. one advantage of local colour is the opportunity it gives the writer of a double hold on the reader's interest--he may captivate by the setting of his theme no less than by the theme itself. also it enables him more effectually to take the reader "out of himself," and place him in a new environment--an essential point if that reader is to become absorbed in what he is reading. mere verbatim description of scenery is not the best way to work in local colour; it is liable to become guide-booky. neither is a catalogue of the beauty spots of a locality any better. usually the most advantageous method is a judicious, illuminating touch here and there, revealing outstanding characteristics, and emphasising the material things that give "colour," _i.e._, variety and vivid distinction, to a scene. they may be topographical characteristics or they may be personal characteristics. beginners think that local colour is primarily a matter of hills and hedgerows, sunbonnets and smocks--the picturesque element that we look for in the countryside. but conversation can give local colour to a story without a single descriptive sentence. pett ridge can transport you in an instant to the heart of hoxton or the walworth road, by means of some bit of cockney dialect. w. w. jacobs will give a salty, far-sea-faring flavour to the most untravelled public-house in poplar, in merely recounting a trifling difference of opinion between some of the customers! local colour has justified the existence of more than one book that is thin both in literary quality and in plot; _the lady of the lake_ is an instance. but i do not advocate a writer aiming for success on similar lines. some words and expressions open up a much wider vista to the mind's eye than do others. consider your descriptive passages critically, and see if, by a different choice of words, you can, in the same length of sentence, give the reader a larger outlook. [sidenote: american writers excel in the handling of local colour] some british writers appreciate to the full the artistic value of local colour (rudyard kipling and mrs. f. a. steel can make one feel as well as see india; blackmore's books breathe devonshire; lafcadio hearn--if one can call him british!--envelops one in the oriental odour of japanese temples; shan f. bullock's stories are ireland herself); but many ignore its possibilities and set the scene with a nondescript society background, or an equally non-commital rural haze. american writers make rather more use of local colour. and the reason is clear: no other country presents so great a variety in the way of climate, scenery, and human types as does the united states. an american author need only sit down and write of what he sees immediately around him, and, so long as he keeps away from such modern items as the ubiquitous commercial traveller and advertisement signs, and devotes his attention to natural objects and local paraphernalia (human and otherwise), he is certain to be recording what is novelty to a large proportion of his fellow-countrymen. moreover americans are more given to dealing with things in a straightforward, unconventional manner than are the british writers, writing of what they actually know and see around them, unhampered by classical traditions and age-old literary usages. hence, there is often a freshness, a vividly-alive quality in their descriptions, that can only be obtained by writing with a subject red-hot in the mind. the author who merely rushes into the country for a few days, or spends a couple of weeks on the continent, or sprints through the european ports of china, to obtain local colour, for a story, usually gets about as "stagey" and artificial a result as does the home-keeping, middle-class girl, who has her heroine presented at the court of st. james, and draws the local colour from the society columns of a daily paper! you must know your "locality" well yourself if you are to make the local colour real to your readers; second-hand or hastily collected data are no good. the would-be author will do well to study typically-american authors, with a view to observing their use of local colour--particularly those who wrote some of their best work before the motor-car and telephone exercised their levelling and linking-up influences. to name one or two: mary e. wilkins and sarah orne jewett have specialised on new england village life; charles egbert craddock (miss murfree) on the great smoky mountains of tennessee; george cable on louisiana; james lane allen on kentucky; amélie rives, in her earlier books, on virginia; etc. and it is worth while noting that such writers give, not only pictures of the scenery about them, but also an insight into the native character. thus both mary e. wilkins and sarah orne jewett depicted the rigid pride of the new englanders, as well as the poor but picturesque quality of the soil. george cable showed the temperament of the southerner as well as the tropical glamour of the southern states. owen wister has made us love the large-hearted, child-like, primitive cowboy, as well as feel the vastness and the very air of the plains and the mountains of wyoming. such work is local colour at its best, since it gives us the human traits as well as the scenic conditions predominating in a locality, and enables us to form a mental picture of the people and the place as a whole. closely allied to this, is that most fascinating study--the effect of climate, scenery, and general environment on character. but as that subject is outside the purview of this book, i merely suggest it to the student as something well worth following up, if there be an opportunity for first-hand observation. for the novelist who specialises on temperamental delineation, it has wide possibilities. creating atmosphere have you ever seen a landscape painting that was one expanse of correctness in detail, and yet seemed either utterly dead, or to walk out of the canvas at every point and hit you violently in the eye? such a painting often has a bright-red tiled roof--every tile visible and in its proper place; a violently blue sky decorated here and there with solid masses of apparently unmeltable snow; grass an acute green; trees emphatic as to outline, every branch clearly defined in its appointed place; sheep standing out like pure-white snowflakes on the acute grass; the smoke from the cottage chimney a thick grey mass suggesting a heavy bale of wool; each brick, each window frame, each paling emphasised with careful exactness. the amateur who produces a painting after this style is usually very pleased with it, and attributes any adverse criticism, that a competent artist may pass upon it, to professional jealousy! "what is wrong with it?" i have heard a student ask, when a master has condemned such a canvas. "it was all there, every detail, exactly as i have painted it." yes, it may have been all there, but something else was there which the artist omitted to include, and the something else was "atmosphere." the artist may put in every twig and tile, every plant and pane of glass; but if he omit the play of light, the glamour of haze, the mystery of shadow, the marvellous suggestiveness of the undefined, his painting will be lifeless and wooden, or altogether unbalanced, no matter how accurate the drawing. equally, the author needs atmosphere if his writing is to rise above the dead level of the uninspired; but while one can define to some extent (though not entirely) what is atmosphere in a painting, it is next to impossible to give an exact definition of atmosphere in writing. it is an elusive quality difficult to describe off-hand. so intangible is it that you can seldom put your finger on a passage and say, "here it is!" yet all the while you may be fully conscious of there being--back of the writing--something more than plot, or purpose. the atmosphere of a book may appertain to matters moral or material; it may affect the mind or the emotions; it may be beneficial or baneful; it may give colour or glamour, light or shade; it may be mysterious or mesmeric. but whatever its trend, in the main it lies in suggestiveness rather than in definite statement. like its prototype, "atmosphere" in writing is an unseen environment, yet it permeates and influences the whole, giving it character and even vitality. [sidenote: "atmosphere" is invaluable as a time saver] in writing it is possible to suggest a great deal that could not be described in detail within the limits imposed on you by the length of your book and the consideration of balance. moreover, the things suggested may be of secondary importance beside the main action of the story, and yet be very useful in furthering the idea you have in mind, or in helping to convey a particular impression. in such cases the introduction of atmosphere may do much for you. while you give only a hint here and there, or a few sidelights in passing, you may yet manage to convey to the readers a "feeling" that carries them beyond the cut-and-dried facts you may be handling, or lifts them above the mere working-out of a plot. it is the haze that may hide, and yet indicate, a something in the distance, just beyond the range of sight--and the suggestion of something still beyond is always alluring; the infinite within us rebels against finite limitations, and welcomes anything that points to further ideas, further possibilities. thus atmosphere is invaluable as a time saver. life is too short (and the publisher too chary of his paper and printing bill) to allow any of us, save the truly famous, to describe minutely the whole background of our writing, spiritual, mental, or material. if we can, by a few expressive words, or phrases, create an atmosphere that shall reproduce in the reader's mind the train of thought, or the scene, that was in our own mind as we wrote, we shall, obviously, be spared the making of many sentences, and the covering of much paper with descriptive matter and soul analyses, that might otherwise overweight our main theme. [sidenote: abstract qualities are usually suggested] atmosphere usually suggests some abstract quality rather than a concrete item. we say that a work has an outdoor atmosphere or an old-world atmosphere or a healthy atmosphere; or we may merely say "it has atmosphere," meaning a subtle over- (or under-) current that clothes the framework of the narrative with a glamour or a spiritual quality that will help to reinforce, or mellow, or illuminate the author's picture. but we do not say a book has a millionaire atmosphere, or a detective atmosphere, even though the book be about these people. they correspond with the solid objects in the landscape, and are quite distinct from the atmospheric effects that can do so much to enhance the charm, or subdue the sordidness, of these solid objects. it does not necessarily follow that the atmosphere of a book is a wholesome one. there are some writers who create a positively poisonous atmosphere for the mind; but, fortunately, the trend of humanity is in the direction of clean thought and wholesome living, even though our progress be slow and we encounter set-backs; and vicious books are seldom long-livers, while those the public call for again and again are invariably books with a healthy atmosphere. the student might make a special note of this! atmosphere in a well-written book is often so unobtrusive that the reader fails to recognise it as a specific element in the make-up of the story that did not get there by accident. it is so easy to fall into the error of thinking that this or that characteristic or ingredient is due to the author's style, or temperament, or genius; certainly it may be due to either or all of these things, but if it is worth anything it is also due to a well-thought-out scheme on the part of the writer. in other words, atmosphere only gets into a work if it is put there. it does not merely "happen along," and if you want your writing to be imbued with atmosphere, you must supply it; it won't come of itself. and before you can supply it, you must first think out what you want that atmosphere to be and then decide how best you can secure it. [sidenote: "atmosphere" covers a wide range of suggestion] it may have to do with spiritual aspects of life--high ideals, faith, healthy thought, right living. ruskin's _sesame and lilies_ comes under this head, even though the subject-matter is not religious according to our ordinary use of the word. from beginning to end one is thinking on a higher plane than that of material consideration; one's thoughts are continually branching out beyond the actual purport of the book as set forth by the author. an old-world atmosphere has a special charm for many readers. we find it in _cranford_, jane austen's books, and many others of a bygone period--though it should be noticed that in these cases the authors did not purposely incorporate it in their work. they put atmosphere, certainly; but it has only become an "old-world" atmosphere by the courtesy of father time: in their own day, these books were quite up-to-date productions. certain modern books have an old-world atmosphere--_the broad highway_ and _our admirable betty_, by jeffery farnol; _when knighthood was in flower_, by charles major (and many others will occur to the mind); but in each case the old-world atmosphere had to be put there very carefully by the author. the hysterical atmosphere needs no description. we know too well the type of book that keeps its characters (and aims to keep its readers), from the first chapter to the last, keyed up to an unnatural pitch of emotionalism, with copious details about everybody's soulful feelings and temperaments and lingerie. books with this atmosphere were constantly striving to get their heads above water in the years of this century preceding the war. they are interesting from one, and only one, point of view: they indicate the diseased mentality that has always come to the surface in periods of the world's history prior to some great human upheaval. a pessimistic atmosphere is fairly common--especially does it seem to find favour with young writers. one of the best examples of a book with a really pessimistic atmosphere is the _rubáiyát_ of omar khayyám. atmosphere has sometimes transformed the commonplace into something rare and delightful. _our village_, by miss mitford, is an instance. here you have the most ordinary of everyday events described in such a way that they are invested with a halo of charm. [sidenote: to create an atmosphere] to create the atmosphere you desire, you must be thoroughly imbued with it yourself--you cannot manufacture it out of nothing. it must so possess you while you are at your work that it is liable to tinge all you write. you will never make other people sense what you do not sense yourself. for instance, it would not be possible for an out-and-out pagan to write a book with a sympathetic evangelical atmosphere, any more than the kaiser could write a book imbued with the spirit of true democracy. then you must insinuate your atmosphere at times and seasons when it will make the most impression on the reader without interfering with, or hindering, the development of the story; remembering that it is always better to suggest the atmosphere than to put it in with heavy strokes. you may wish to make a story the very breath of the out-doors. but in order to do this, it would not be necessary to stop all the characters in whatever they were saying or doing, while you describe scenery and sunsets, or explain to the reader how "out-doory" everything and everybody is! this would easily spoil the continuity and flow of the whole, by switching the reader's mind off the plot and on to another train of thought. instead, you would make the whole book out-doory without any pointed explanation--"setting the stage" in the open air as much as possible, emphasising the features of the landscape rather than boudoir decorations, mentioning the sound of the soughing trees or the surging sea, rather than the tune the gramophone was playing; introducing the scent of the larches in the spring sunshine rather than the odour of tuberoses and stephanotis in a ballroom. in each case the one would suggest freedom in the open air, while the other would suggest conventionalities indoors. in some such way, you would rely on touches in passing to produce the desired effect, always bearing in mind the importance of getting these touches as telling as possible. such allusions (often merely hinted at, rather than spoken) should be equal in effectiveness to long paragraphs of detailed description; therefore, choose carefully the means by which you hope to secure your end. your touches must be so true and so sure that they instantly convey to the reader's mind your own mental atmosphere. in this, as much as in any other phase of writing, you need an instinct for the essentials, _i.e._ a feeling that tells you instantly what will contribute most surely to the making of the atmosphere you desire, and what is relatively unimportant. atmosphere is the element in your work that can least of all be faked without detection--or cribbed from other writers. it must permeate the whole of your story whether long or short, and be something beyond the mere words you write down. the readers must feel, when they finally close the book, that they have got more from you than what you actually said; that you led their thoughts in directions that carried them off the highway of the obvious, giving them visions of things that were unrecorded. the method of presenting a story the method of presenting the story needs a little consideration. the most common, and the most desirable as a rule, is the narrative, told in a third person; _i.e._ the writer relates a story about certain people, but does not himself pose as a character involved in the story. beginners will do well to adhere to this type of story, until they have attained to a certain amount of fluency with their ideas. [sidenote: writing in the first person] another popular method is the narrative told in the first person, _i.e._ the writer relates a story about certain people, in which he also plays a more or less important part. if well written, this form makes a pleasant change from the story written in the third person; but it necessitates a certain amount of experience on the part of the writer, if it is to be saved from dulness. moreover, its limitations are hampering to the beginner. if you are writing in the third person, you, as the author, are allowed (by that special concession granted to makers of fiction) to know everything that every character in your story thinks or does. you may relate in one paragraph what the hero was thinking and doing in san francisco, and in the next what the heroine was thinking and doing at the same moment in new york. but if you are writing in the first person, you have not the same licence to roam all over the universe, penetrating the deepest recesses of people's lives and laying bare their secret thoughts to the glare of day. you are supposed to stick to your own part and mind your own business. if you manage to find out other people's business as the story proceeds, there must be some sort of circumstantial evidence as to how you found it out; it will not be enough merely to state that it is so, as you could do were you writing in the third person. for instance, in a ms. i pick up from the pile on my table i read: "he paused when he reached the drawing-room door and glared at her, livid with rage. she returned his look with one of haughty indifference. then he left the house, and as he walked along the cheerless streets, he clenched his fists and hissed between his teeth, 'you shall suffer for this.' she, meanwhile, rang the bell for tea and resumed the novel upon which she had been engaged when he arrived." told in the third person, it is easy to let the reader know what he and she were thinking and saying and doing at the same moment. but supposing you were writing all this in the first person with yourself as the heroine, it would not be so easy to convey the same information to the reader. you could write: "he paused when he reached the drawing-door and glared at me, livid with rage. i returned his look with one of haughty indifference. then he left the house, and i rang the bell for tea and resumed the novel upon which i had been engaged when he arrived." but if you wished to let the reader know how the bad-tempered creature clenched and hissed, you would have to get at it by some round-about means--your dearest friend might call at the moment and tell you that she had just passed him in the cheerless street clenching and hissing; or some other such device could be employed. but all this involves extra thought and care in the construction of the story. [sidenote: a stumbling-block to the amateur] amateurs are much given to story-writing in the first person; it seems such an easy method (when they know nothing about it); they invariably see themselves in a leading part, and make the hero or heroine do and be all they themselves would like to do and be. but they never go far before they trip up against this block of stumbling--the impossibility of the first person singular "i" being in two places at the same time, and seeing inside people's hearts and brains, to say nothing of their locked cupboards and secret drawers. also, the beginner is apt to forget the _rôle_ he is supposed to be playing when he puts himself into a story, and he lapses, at intervals, into the third person. sometimes, in order to dodge the difficulties, an author will write one part in the form of a diary, thus enabling a character to talk about herself (it is usually a feminine character who keeps a diary!). then, when the limitations of the first person singular hamper the progress of the story, the diary is dropped for a time, while the author revels in the all-embracing freedom of writing in the third person. this is a weak method, however, and plainly a subterfuge; being practically an announcement that the author could not or would not take the trouble to work the story through in correct form. it is also bad from an artistic standpoint; it does not hang together well; past and present tenses are apt to get mixed; it produces an unsatisfactory feeling in the mind of the reader, who so often is in doubt as to whether the author is writing as a character in the story or merely as the author--and anything that leaves a confused, unsatisfactory feeling in the reader's mind is poor art. [sidenote: writing a story in the form of a diary] a story written entirely in the form of a diary is sometimes attempted. and closely allied to this is the story written as a series of letters. both methods are popular with amateurs. most people regard a diary as the simplest type of writing, requiring neither style nor sequence, nor even the thinnest thread of connection running through the whole, unless the author so desires. moreover, though every one does not feel competent to write a book or even a short story, we all feel competent to keep a diary--most of us _have_ kept one at some time in our career. what can be easier therefore than to write a story in diary form? and we proceed to write our story as we wrote our own diary, with this difference that we put into the fiction diary the sort of happenings we used to deplore the lack of, when we wrote down our own daily experiences. until we have given some study to the subject we do not recognise that, while a series of somewhat disconnected sentences and brief entries may be very useful as records for future reference, likewise may be moderately serviceable as safety-valves for overwrought, self-centred temperaments, they are seldom of interest to any one save the writer, and if put forward as recreational reading, may easily prove uninteresting in the extreme, even with the addition of a love episode! a story in diary form needs to be written by an experienced pen if it is to resemble a genuine diary, and yet hold the reader's interest throughout, and culminate in a good climax. [sidenote: a story told in letters] a story told in a series of letters can easily be the dullest thing imaginable. what is an excellent letter seldom makes an excellent chapter in a novel. a letter, if it is to seem a real letter, should be discursive; and this is the very thing the amateur needs to guard against when writing a story, if that story is to show force and action; he is prone to be too discursive as it is. in any case, unless it is remarkably well done, the reader chafes at the delay inevitably caused by the irrelevant small talk that is the hallmark of most letters. some writers have managed to handle the "letter-form" in an interesting manner, by relying on descriptive narrative, rather than any striking plot, to hold the reader. _the lady of the decoration_ by frances little, is a good example. [sidenote: the introduction of dialect] dialect should be approached with caution. it is so easy to be tedious and unintelligible in this direction. remember that you are writing in what is almost a fresh language to most people, when you employ a dialect that is purely local; hence you are imposing an extra mental strain on the reader; and in order to compensate for the additional demand you make on his brain, you must give him something above the average in interest. no one, in these days of hustle, is going to take the trouble to wade through a species of unknown tongue, and wrestle with weird spelling and unfamiliar idiom, unless there is something remarkably worth while to be got out of it. and for one who will spare the time to fathom the mysteries of the dialect, there are thousands who will give it up. [sidenote: the object of writing a book is not to befog the reader's mind] if it be necessary to write in a particular dialect, avoid so far as possible the use of expressions that in no way explain themselves, and crowding the pages with the more obscure colloquialisms of the district. the object of writing a book is not to befog the reader's mind. one knows that dialect is sometimes imperative in order to create the right atmosphere and to state things as they actually occurred. in such cases it is usually best to use it only in small quantities--as where a native strolls across very few pages, and is on view for only a short while. yet you must see that your dialect is correct. merely to write a few words phonetically, and put a "z" in place of an "s" (as is sometimes done, for instance, when making a native of somerset speak), is not convincing. to write a story throughout in dialect calls for exceptional skill; and, as a rule, it can only be done successfully by those who have known a dialect from childhood, or at any rate have spent some years in its company. the names of sir james barrie and s. r. crockett naturally come to one's mind in this connection. [sidenote: "an honest tale speeds best being plainly told"] the beginner will be wise to write his early experiments in plain english and in the third person. fiction that is free from confusion of style, mixed methods, and uncertainty of handling always does the best. the story that is related in a clear direct manner is most popular with the public--likewise, it is the most difficult to write well, though few beginners believe this: it looks so very simple! fallacies in fiction i have come to the conclusion that the contrariness of human nature is largely responsible for the rejection of many of the mss. that never get into print; but not the contrariness of the editor (as the unsuccessful writer generally thinks when he sees his ms. back once more in the bosom of his family). most of us, at one period or another, feel we could shine much more brilliantly in some other environment than the one in which we find ourselves. it has been described as "a divine discontent." there is plenty of discontent about it, i allow; but i am not so sure that it is divine. while it may be, and often is, the expression of a real need for a little more growing space, it is sometimes the outcome of mere restlessness, or a lazy, selfish desire to escape the irksome things that are in our own surroundings, vainly imagining that we can find some pathway in life where there are no disagreeables to be faced. but whatever the motive may be, there is a universal idea among the inexperienced that some other person's job is preferable to their own; some one else's circumstances more interesting and romantic and dramatic and enthralling than theirs could ever be. and the result is--much wasted opportunity. [sidenote: the amateur so seldom has first-hand knowledge of his subject] now the sum-total of this, in regard to story-writing, is the fact that fully per cent. of the fiction submitted to editors deals with situations of which the writer has practically no first-hand knowledge; as a natural consequence it is unconvincing and often incorrect. the schoolgirl who has never travelled beyond folkestone or boulogne, and whose knowledge of fearsome weapons is limited to a hockey-stick, riots one across the continent on a "prisoner of zenda" chase, directly she starts to write. the girl of twenty, living a quiet, useful life in some small provincial town, in close attendance upon a kindly invalid aunt, devotes the secret midnight candle to writing the life-story of a heartless butterfly of a faithless wife: while the kindly invalid aunt is surreptitiously writing decorous mid-victorian stories of very, _very_ mild wickedness coming to a politely bad end, and oppressively good virtue arriving at the top (with more moral advice than plot, or anything else). the niece imagines she is writing just the type of story that the public craves; and the aunt is under the delusion that hers is just the sort of literature that is wanted for distribution among factory girls. the maiden of high degree writes of the lily-white beauty of the girl in the grimy garret. the democratic daughter of the colonies invariably sprinkles a few titles about her ms. before the war, the anæmic young man in a city office, who spent most of the year in a crowded suburb and his short vacation at some crowded seashore resort, persistently wrote of the exploits of a marvellous detective who ran sleuth-hound bill to earth in gory gulch. since , he (the young man) has sent me many mss.--from france, salonika, egypt, india, and flanders--and these are generally love stories, and seldom bear a trace of battle-smoke or high adventure. (i am speaking of amateur work, remember.) i have nothing to say against a desire for new horizons; it is a legitimate part of our development. and i can understand that for a certain type of weakly and rather starved personality there is a slight compensation for the lack of change they crave, in putting down on paper their longings and ideals, and in writing romance in which they secretly see themselves in the leading part. but this is not saleable matter; neither is it particularly readable matter, as a general rule (though there are occasional exceptions, of course). because in such cases the writers are invariably dealing with situations the inwardness of which they know really nothing. or else all their knowledge has been obtained from the writings of others; they are merely repeating other people's ideas and other people's descriptions. [sidenote: choose your topic from your own environment] you cannot write convincingly on topics about which you know little. you can cover reams of paper--amateurs are doing it every day of the year!--with descriptions of people, and houses, and scenes, and walks of life with which you have only a hearsay acquaintance; but such writing is scarcely likely to be worth printing and paying for. if the schoolgirl, instead of wasting her time on something that reads like a washedout _réchauffé_ of _the scarlet pimpernel_, would try her hand at a story of schoolgirl life, she might produce something really bright and alive, even though it lacked the symmetry and finish that years of practice bring to a writer. and though the ms. did not find a market at the time, on account of immaturity of style, it might prove valuable later on when the writer had gained experience. it would give her data she had forgotten in the intervening years. and the girl who spends her ink on the philanderings of the faithless wife (a species, by the way, that she has probably never set eyes on, having been brought up like most of the rest of us in a decent circle of sane relations and friends) might, perhaps, have done some charming pictures of domestic life, as did the authors of _cranford_ and _little women_ in their day. if the aunt, instead of hoping to influence factory girls of whom she knows absolutely nothing, and whose conversation, could she but hear it, would be an unintelligible language to her, had turned her invalidism to practical account, and passed on useful hints and ideas to other invalids, she might have written something that would have been welcomed by others similarly handicapped. and so on, down to the city clerk, who never can be made to realise that a type of story most difficult to lay hands on is the one that deals, accurately, with the inside of that world peopled by the bankers and stockbrokers and money magnates. the detective tracking sleuth-hound bill has the tamest walk-over in comparison with the daring, and tense excitement, surrounding some financial deals. [sidenote: original work is rare: the universal tendency is to copy] i do not say that these writers would necessarily have placed their mss. had they written on the lines suggested; it takes something besides the theme and background to make a good story. but i do say that they would have been many degrees nearer publication, had they dealt with types and circumstances that had come within their personal cognisance, rather than with those they only knew by hearsay. the outsider would scarcely credit how rare it is for an editor to receive a piece of really original work; the universal tendency is to copy other people's productions rather than trouble to discover original models. the schoolgirl, studying water-colour drawing, prefers to work from a "copy," showing some other person's painting of a vase of flowers, rather than have her own vase filled with real flowers before her. some one else's work saves the inexperienced the responsibility of selection--and selection is always a difficult point for the beginner, who finds it hard to decide what to include in, and what to leave out of, a picture. [sidenote: beginners are seldom aware that they are copying others] in the same way, inexperienced fiction writers find it easier to copy other people's stories; though, unlike the schoolgirl and her painting-copy, they are quite unconscious that they are doing so; they usually imagine that what they have written is entirely original. it is difficult to get the novice to distinguish between writing anything down on paper, and creating it in his own brain. so many think the mere passing of thoughts through the brain, and the transmitting of those thoughts to paper, are indications of their ability to write; and that what they write must be original. and yet in most beginners' mss. scarcely any of the incidents, or situations, or plots ever came within the writer's own purview; the majority are hashed up from the many stories one reads nowadays--though the author has no idea that he is only stringing together selected ideas that originated in other people's brains. there are many reasons to account for this. for one thing, the novice feels safe in using the type of material that has already been published. the world is wide, human nature is varied, and it is not easy to decide what to take; therefore the writer who plans his story on time-honoured lines is relieved of the responsibility of selection. then, again, if a particular type of story has been accepted and published, it has received a certain hall-mark of approval, and forthwith others tread the same path; there is less uncertainty here than in breaking new ground. there is yet another reason: to evolve anything that is new and unhackneyed necessitates our taking trouble; and some amateurs will not take any more trouble than they can possibly help; they do not recognise that writing stands for hard work. [sidenote: tried old friends we have met before] i cannot spare the space to touch on well-worn plots, but here are a few of the sentences and expressions that haunt amateur mss. have you ever read a story that opened, "it was a glorious day in june," followed by a page of blue sky, balmy breezes, humming bees, not a leaf stirred, and scent of roses heavy on the air? of course you have. we all have. that glorious day in june is one of the most precious perennials of the story-writer's stock-in-trade. you know at once that twenty summers will have passed o'er _her_ head, and that _he_ is just round the corner waiting to come upon her all unawares, so soon as the author can quit cataloguing nature's beauties. and have you ever read a story that opened with "a dripping november fog enveloped the city"? of course you have; and you know at once, before you get to the next line, which describes its denseness and the slippery pavements, and a host of other discomforts, that you are going to be ushered into an equally dismal city boarding-house, and introduced to a lovely-complexioned girl whose frail appearance is only enhanced by her deep mourning, and hear the sad story of the pecuniary straits that necessitated her bringing her widowed mother (often fractious), or it may be a younger sister (always sunny and the lodestar of her life), from their lovely old home in the country, while she earned a living in town. and, without fail, she has always imagined that they were well provided for, till the family lawyer (always old) broke the news after the funeral that the place was mortgaged up to the hilt, and even her father's life insurance had been allowed to lapse. you know all the rest--the dreary tramp round in search of work, and the way she irons out her threadbare garments to make them last as long as they can (irrespective of the fact that the mourning was new only a few weeks before, and she presumably had a good stock of underwear in her prosperous days), and a host of other harrowing experiences until--it comes right in the end. and all because the story opened with a dripping november fog! why, i believe the average amateur would consider it almost improper to start a desolate orphan on a quest for work in the metropolis in anything other than a dense november fog! and yet--how much more cheerful for her, poor dear, could she but begin her career on a dry day--and some november days in london are quite sunny and bright--so much better for her in the thin jacket she always wears on such occasion, and her worn-out shoes! it would be such a blessed thing if we need not start with the weather, nor the number of summers that had floated over the sweet young heroine's head (or winters, if the central figure be an old man). but the amateur clings to these openings. then take "the boudoir." after the weather i don't think anything haunts me more persistently than the boudoir. "lady gwennyth was sitting reading a letter in her luxurious (or cosy, or dainty) boudoir, when----" etc. now why is it that the girl who starts out to write fiction loves to introduce her heroine in this wise? it is most unlikely that the amateur knows much about a boudoir--few of us do. it is a room that appertains solely to the rich, and to only a small proportion of the rich at that. i know many wealthy women and many well-born women who haven't a boudoir, simply because the cramped conditions of modern living seldom leave them a room to spare for this purpose. the fact is the boudoir proper does not really belong to this purposeful age. it is a relic of the more leisurely victorian times and the ease-loving, well-to-do frenchwoman of pre-war days. most modern women have very little time to spend in a boudoir if even they need one; nevertheless it appears with unfailing regularity in stories dealing with the richer ranks of life, till you would think it was as necessary to a woman's entourage as--an umbrella! why is it that the heroine has usually refused a couple (if not more) offers of marriage, before she is brought to our notice, with yet another offer looming on the horizon? in real life, as we know it in this twentieth century, it is most unusual for a girl to be constantly turning down offers of marriage like applications for charity subscriptions though there are exceptions here and there, certainly. yet i scarcely open a love-story that does not state that the heroine had already refused "every eligible man in her circle"; though the reader can seldom see why _one_ man should have proposed to the damsel, much less a crowd! the heroine presented to us by the amateur is invariably a most ordinary young person, often quite uninteresting, and lacking the faintest streak of distinctiveness. and then the question arise--why should all the eligible men in the town have proposed to her? perhaps one explanation is the fact that inexperienced writers have not learnt the art of depicting character; as they do not know how to convey an idea of her attractiveness, they think if they state that she was attractive that is sufficient. but statements are not sufficient; she must be attractive. * * * * * the youthful heroine and the aged grandmother may also be quoted as evergreen types that long ago had become monotonous. whether girls married in their teens as a matter of course, a couple of generations ago, i do not know, as i was not there; but the youthful heroine was a _sine quâ non_ in victorian fiction. she is not a _sine quâ non_ now, however; anything but; the seventeen-year-old bride is by no means the rule in these times; there is practically no limit nowadays to the age at which a woman may receive offers of marriage. nevertheless, the amateur persistently follows bygone models, and still clings to the very young heroine; no more than eighteen summers are, at the outside, allowed to pass over her lovely head before she is introduced to our notice. * * * * * and certain traditions are still followed in regard to other details. her complexion is always of the rose-petal order, her hair is always escaping in a series of stray curls about her neck and forehead (and, by the way, these "stray curls" of fiction are sadly responsible for many of the untidy lank locks of to-day!). if you read as many mss. as i do, you would think that no straight-haired, ordinary complexioned girl had the least chance of a personal love-story, despite the fact that most of the girls one knows in real life, who have married and lived "happy ever after," have been either sallow or sunburnt or colourless, or just healthy-looking. if you doubt whether a successful heroine can be evolved out of a woman no longer in her teens, and with a complexion that would not stand pearls, remember the hon. jane, in _the rosary_. * * * * * in addition to the youthful heroine, the aged grandmother needs to be given a long rest. when the young wife who married in her teens visits her old home in company with her one-year-old infant, it is invariably the dearest old lady who comes forward to embrace her first grandchild; and from her own conversation and the description of her general appearance, the sweet old soul must be at least eighty, despite all that nature might rule to the contrary, to say nothing of the dressmaker! tradition has it that grandmothers must have white hair, and spectacles, voluminous skirts, and knitting in their hands as they sit in an easy-chair with comfortably slippered feet on a hassock; and that is the sort of grandmother the amateur brings on the scenes, irrespective of the fact that the grandmother of to-day is skipping about in girlish skirts and high-heeled shoes, with hair and complexion as youthful as she likes to pay for. * * * * * nothing in the way of fiction is more difficult to write than a thoroughly good love story. and yet the beginner invariably starts with a love story, and continues with love-stories, as though there were no other possible selection. i do not think it is often possible to write a good love-story until one has had some experience of life. it is so easy to mistake neurotic imaginings and over-strung emotionalism for love; and it is still easier to fall back on the conventional things that the conventional hero and heroine do and say in the conventional novel, and imagine that we are recording our own ideas and experiences. there are several reasons why the love-story appeals to the girl who is starting out to write. she is looking forward to a love-story of her own, if she be a normal girl, and has already seen herself in the part of her favourite heroine. naturally it is not surprising that love-stories are of absorbing interest to her. and a girl usually sees herself as the heroine of her own early love-stories; and she invariably makes her heroine do and say what she would like to do and say under the circumstances, and at the same time she makes the hero do and say what she would like her own lover to do and say--but it does not follow that this is true to life; or that her lover would say the things she credits him with in her story. very few proposals in real life ever resemble the proposals in fiction! a girl will often introduce her heroine in a picturesque pose against some lovely background of hills, or woods, or garden flowers; and the hero coming upon her suddenly is made to pause, lost in admiration of the exquisite picture she makes. the girl writes this because--unconsciously, perhaps--she sees herself in the part, and likes to think she would make a very attractive picture that would rivet a man's attention. but it is not true to life. in reality, the average man seldom notices the scenic fittings under such circumstances. he either sees the girl--or he doesn't. unless he is an artist looking for useful subjects for his pictures, the background is not often seen in conjunction with the girl. i merely give this as an instance of the way amateurs are apt to see themselves in an imaginary part that in reality is at variance with "things as they are"; and their writings become artificial in consequence. there is another reason why the love-story is the beginner's choice: it calls for so few characters. the simplest ingredients are--a nice, beautiful girl and a strong, manly, deserving masculine. of course, you can vary the flavour by making them rich or poor, misunderstood, down-trodden, capricious, and what not. and you can amplify it by introducing the bold, bad rival (masculine); the superficial, fascinating butterfly rival (feminine); the irate forbidding parent (_his_, if he is rich and she is poor; _hers_, if he is poor and her mother is ambitious and money-grabbing); the designing mischief-maker (a black-eyed brunette, or a brassy-haired blonde); and a host of other well-worn familiar types. but when all is said and done, you need have but two characters to delineate, if you do not feel equal to more--and there is a distinct save of brain in this! when you reach the climax in any other than a love-story, you are expected to make the _dénouement_ something of a slight surprise at any rate, if no more; and we all know that surprises--slight or otherwise--are not altogether easy to manufacture for purposes of fiction. it is simple work to go on talking and describing and making the people talk--about nothing--for pages and pages; but by no means simple to lead it all up to a definite point of culmination. there must be some sort of point to a story; and that point is the trouble as a rule! but with a love-story, the amateur thinks he need not worry about hunting for a climax--every one knows what the climax must be. "all you have to do is to bring them along the road of life to a suitable spot where they can fall into each other's arms"--thus the novice argues, and proceeds to do it. another save of brain wear and tear! in any other situation the _dramatis personæ_ are bound to do at least a little talking, to explain how the thing has worked out, or to let you know how matters finally adjusted themselves. but not so our happy lovers! about the longest sentence he is called upon to construct is, "at last!" as he clasps her to him; while her contribution to the duologue need only be, "darling!" which she whispers, resting her head on his shoulder. and they need not say even this much: for one very favourite method of conclusion, with inexperienced authors, is to bring the hero and heroine suddenly face to face with some such final sentence as, "what they said need not be recorded here: such words are too sacred to be repeated"--a finale that always annoyed me in my young days! amateurs are generally very weak in character-drawing, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in love-stories. there is a time-honoured notion that the chief requisites in the heroine are youth and beauty, as i have already said, while the hero must of equal necessity be clean-cut, manly and masterful. with these ideas already fixed in his head, the novice seldom sees any necessity for character-delineation. he explains that the heroine is lovely and the hero in every way a desirable young man, and leaves it at that; forgetting that the mere statement that she is "winsome," or "wistful," or possessed of "clear grey eyes that are the windows of her soul," does not necessarily make her all these things. in the majority of amateur mss. the heroine, as she depicts herself by word and deed, is a most colourless, stereotyped nonentity; and by no means the glowing, fascinating thing of originality and beauty that the author's adjectives would have us believe; and the hero is frequently no more animated, no more human, than the elegant dummy in a tailor's window. this may be taken as a fairly safe ruling: if it be necessary for you to label your characters with their chief characteristics, your writing is unconvincing and weak. their actions should speak louder than your adjectives. one of the prominent novelists of to-day--who is clever enough and experienced enough to know better--has a trick of letting some one of his characters make a semi-witty remark; after which he adds, "and everybody laughed." this last should be quite unnecessary. if the remark be sufficiently laugh-at-able, it will be self-evident that people smiled; if it is not sufficiently witty to suggest a laugh to the reader, no amount of ticketing will raise a smile, either in the book or out of it. the same principle should be applied to the presentation of one's characters. if they are to have anything more than a mere walk-on part, they should very quickly explain themselves. the bald statement that the hero is a fine, manly fellow means nothing in reality. what is important is whether his actions and speech suggest a fine, manly character. if they do not, no amount of descriptive matter on the part of the author will conjure up a fine, manly fellow in the reader's imagination. some rules for story-writing in presenting a story it is essential that the reader shall have some idea as to what it is about. to start by keeping the reader roaming along for a page or two among unintelligible remarks, and references to unknown or unexplained events, is to give him strong encouragement to shut up the book without troubling to go any further. there is something very exasperating about a writer who gives no clue as to who anybody is or what anything is; he is every bit as irritating as the one who goes to the other extreme, and drags the reader through the babyhood and school days of the hero's parents. these are the opening paragraphs of a ms. offered to me. it is quite a short story, hence there was every reason why space should not have been wasted on unintelligible preamble. "it happened in this way: through the lions. no, that isn't exactly right though; the lions didn't really do it, would never have thought of doing such a thing; but if i had not gone to see them, it would never have happened. so, you see, they were to some extent responsible. "i expect you are saying to yourself, 'what was it that happened?' well that is what i'm going to write about. but first i must tell you that one of my failings from childhood upwards has been the habit of starting to tell my story right in the very middle; and then i always feel so annoyed when, after i've been chattering away for i don't know how long, people look at me and say, 'perhaps you will try and be lucid and explain what you are talking about!' it never seems to occur to them that it is they who are so stupid. but i will tell you at once about 'me' and then tell you about 'it.' i'll begin at the very beginning, and try to tell you everything in proper orthodox style." after much more of this description, it turns out at last that the lions were celebrities at a dinner-party where the narrator met the man she ultimately married. that was all! it is foolish to keep the reader dangling in suspense, unless the subsequent revelations are to be sufficiently striking to warrant the suspense. a long explanatory deviation from the actual theme is seldom satisfactory or desirable, in a short story, even when the theme is a big one (unless it be absolutely necessary, in order to elucidate some important detail): but it is inexcusable when the subject is trivial and obvious. the more "body" there is in your ms. the more it will stand digressive or dilutive passages; the lighter your main theme, the less can you afford to allow the reader's interest to be dissipated over extraneous matter before you reach the main theme. * * * * * until you are an experienced craftsman, introduce the important characters as early as possible. the reader should know them as long as possible if he is to take a keen personal interest in them. it is better not to describe your characters more than is necessary for actual identification; they should describe themselves by their actions and conversation, as the story proceeds. to save the monotony of long descriptive passages, that always hamper the movement of a story, it is often possible to make one of the characters, in the course of conversation, give the information that the author is anxious to convey to the reader. but in order to effect this, do not fall into the error of making a character say things that in real life there would be no reason for his saying. you may want to convey the information to the reader that the heroine's ancestors were eminently respectable; but it would be bad art to make her remark to her own parent (or a relative): "as you know, mother dear, grandfather was a distinguished general." * * * * * beginners imagine that the strength of a story is in direct proportion to the way they crowd together incidents, or multiply their characters. but this entirely depends on the quality of the incidents and the importance of the characters. the whole is greater than a part--always has been and always will be; and if each individual character is weak, and each episode is feeble, no matter how you may elaborate your story, the whole will be weaker than each part. * * * * * it is time-saving, when writing a story, to lay the scene in some locality you know well, even though you change the name and preserve its incognito. it is most useful to have a fixed plan of the streets and lanes and buildings and railway station in your mind when writing. * * * * * try to distinguish between a longing to voice your own pent-up emotions, and a desire to give the world something that you think will interest or instruct them. three-quarters of the love-stories girls write are merely outlets for their own emotions; and picture what they wish would happen in their own lives--with no thought whatever as to whether the ms. contains anything likely to interest the outsider. * * * * * short sentences and short paragraphs are usually an advantage in stories as well as in articles; they give crispness and brightness to the whole. whereas long sentences and long paragraphs are both stodgy to read and uninteresting to look at, (and it must not be forgotten that the look of a page sometimes counts a good deal with the public). i know that instances can be cited where celebrated people have written long sentences and ungainly paragraphs, and yet have been read. president wilson, in his most famous note to germany, led off with a sentence of one hundred and seventy-one words, while there were only twelve full-stops in the whole message. but president wilson, at that particular date, scored heavily over every other writer, in that the whole world was eagerly willing to read anything he wrote--even though he had omitted all stops and capital letters!--whereas the majority of us, alas, have to persuade or coax or beguile the public into looking at our words of wisdom, and we have to make the reading as easy for people as we can. otherwise they will not bother their heads about us! people were willing to put up with president wilson's diffuse and "trailing" manner of writing, because at the moment he was the mouthpiece of the inhabitants of the united states. any one who is the mouthpiece of over ninety millions of people can cease to worry about style--some one is sure to read him no matter how he expresses himself. but so long as we manage to avoid having positions of such greatness thrust upon us, we shall do well to keep our sentences terse and short, and our mss. broken up into paragraphs. [sidenote: the question of polish] there is much divergence of opinion as to how far it is desirable to polish one's work. personally i think it all depends upon the work. some authors put down their ideas in a very rough form, and seem unable to realise the possibilities of those ideas and their development, till they see them on paper. others are able to think in minute detail before they put a line on paper. some people can never leave anything alone, and will tinker with half a dozen fresh proofs (if they can induce the publisher to supply them). others are more sure of themselves, or disinclined to alter what they have written. the late guy boothby used almost to re-write his stories, after they were set up in type; the margins of most of the slip proofs being so covered with new matter and alterations that they had often to be entirely reset. so expensive did this become, that at last i decided to keep his typed ms. in a drawer for a week or two, and then send it back to him, asking him to do whatever rewriting was necessary before it was set up. of course, writers may alter a good deal in their first ms., before ever it gets to the publisher; but my experience has been that the author who worries his proof is the one who has previously worried his ms. (and sometimes his family too)! it is primarily a matter of mind-certainty, combined with the question of temperament. one thing is undeniable: some writers will polish their mss. into things of beauty; others will polish all the individuality and life out of theirs. in the latter case, however, i am inclined to think there was not much individuality and life to start with! so far as the beginner is concerned, my advice is polish; most of us can stand a good deal of this without losing anything worth keeping, or coming to a bad end! [sidenote: to get under way, start where you are] do not waste time in waiting for something extraordinary or sensational to turn up, in the way of a plot, or you may have to wait a long while. begin with some everyday happening and invest it with personality. if you can, avoid making your early mss. love stories. the _dénouement_ of a love story is so obvious: try to write something on less obvious lines; it will be better practice for you. study some of the many delightful books that have been written in other than love motifs, yet dealing with events of ordinary life; such as _the golden age_, and _dream days_, by kenneth graham; _a window in thrums_, by sir james barrie; _the country of the pointed firs_, by sarah orne jewett; _timothy's quest_, by kate douglas wiggin. genius is shown in the ability to take simple themes, and treat them greatly. about the climax the most important part of a story should be the climax (i use the word climax in its modern sense, meaning the terminal point where all is brought to a conclusion, the _dénouement_, the final catastrophe). the climax must be in the author's mind from the very first sentence, and everything he writes should be with this in view--_i.e._, his own view, not that of the reader; it must be his aim throughout the story to conceal the climax from the reader till the last moment. nothing with an obvious solution will hold the reader's interest. every piece of writing should have some sort of a conclusive ending--a satisfactory one if possible. writers sometimes make their fiction terminate in an abrupt, unsatisfactory manner, which is no real finish, and leaves the reader wishing it had not all ended like that, and wondering if there is more to come. when such defects are pointed out, the amateur invariably replies, "but it must end like that, because that is what actually happened." they forget that the fact a circumstance actually happened is no guarantee that it was worth recording; nor is the circumstance necessarily the symmetrical finish to the story,--and a piece of writing should be symmetrical, and in well-balanced design. you cannot always detach an incident from contingent happenings, and then say it is complete. the larger proportion of our actions are linked with, and interdependent upon, other actions. therefore see to it that your story terminates in a satisfactory manner. that which apparently ends in failure to-day, may take a new lease of life to-morrow and prove to be merely a stepping-stone to new developments. it is not bound to be a happy ending (though if there be a choice, happy endings are by far the best, in a world that has enough of sorrow in its work-a-day life); but it must be an ending leaving a sense of right completion with the reader--the conviction that this is the logical conclusion of the whole. all great works of art leave behind them a sense of fulfilment, the "something attempted, something done," that is always the desirable finale to the human heart and mind. we hate to be left in a state of never-to-be-satisfied suspension; and we invariably reject and condemn to oblivion the work that deliberately leaves us thus. some people have an idea that it is "artistic" to leave a story in a half-finished condition, or with a disappointing ending, or a general feeling of blankness. a few years ago there was a mania for this type of story among small writers: those who were not clever enough to produce originality of idea, and at the same time get their work logical, symmetrical and conclusive, would seize on some miserable, or at any rate uncomfortable, ending--drown one of the lovers the day before the wedding; part husband and wife irrevocably, and possibly kill their only child in a railway accident in the last chapter--anything in fact that would produce what one might call a "never-more" finale. and then a certain section of the public (who really did not like it at all, but feared to say so lest they should appear to be behind the times!) would exclaim, "so artistic!" yet it was anything but artistic; three-quarters of the time it was logically and morally bad; logically bad because it was seldom the true and natural conclusion that one would have seen in real life; morally bad because it is actually wrong to manufacture and circulate gloom unnecessarily. i repeat again i would not imply that all endings must be happy; great tragedies need tragic conclusions; suffering is as much a part of real life as joy; a certain course of action must inevitably lead to a sorrowful ending, and there is no getting away from the unalterable truth, "the wages of sin is death." but the type of story to which i am alluding is seldom great or tragic: it is not even painful; it is more often weak and washy, and ends with unsatisfactory incompletion because the author fancied it was brilliantly original! always work steadily towards the climax, speeding up the movement as you near the end. make big events come closer and closer together, with less detail between, the nearer you are to the conclusion. do not anticipate your climax, and get there too soon, and then try to make up the book to the required length by adding on an after-piece. the climax should be such that it leaves in the reader's mind a sense of absolute fitness, a certainty that it was after all the one right ending--even though it came as a great surprise. the use of "curtains" when a story is presented in sections, as in a serial or a play, it is advisable to make each section end--so far as possible--in such a manner that the reader is set longing for the next part. thus, while the climax is generally the solution of a problem, a "curtain" is usually a problem needing solution (literally, a good place for ringing down the curtain, since the audience will be on tenterhooks to know what happens next). this arrangement is sound business as well as a good mental policy. it is wise to make an instalment leave some final, incisive mark on the mind of the readers, if there is to be an interval before the story is resumed, otherwise it may be difficult for the public to recollect what went before, and the thread of continuity will be lost. more than this, an editor, despite the usual backwardness of his intelligence, realises the desirability of securing readers for subsequent issues of his periodical, no less than for the current number. if each instalment of the serial terminate with some mystery unsolved, or some hopeless entanglement needing to be straightened out, or some problem that baffles everybody (most of all the readers), it is much more likely that people will rush to secure the next number to see how things turn out, than if the instalment merely ends with the hero indulging in a tame, lengthy soliloquy on artichokes, and leaves nothing more exciting to be settled than whether these same artichokes shall, or shall not, be cooked for the heroine's lunch. on more than one occasion i have had readers write protestingly because an instalment of a serial has left off cruelly "just when one was frightfully anxious to know what would happen next!" but that is the very place for an instalment to end: good "curtains" are worth as much to a serial as a good plot; and if a story lack good "curtains," an editor thinks twice before purchasing it for serial publication, even though it has undoubted literary merit and will make a good volume. inexperienced writers overlook this necessity for holding the reader's attention from section to section, and sometimes offer an editor serial stories without sufficient backbone or dramatic interest to hold the readers' attention from the first instalment to the second, much less for twelve or more detachments. or they crowd several excitements into a couple of chapters, and then run on uneventfully for a dozen or so. this does not mean that problems must crop up mechanically at stated intervals, and the serial be produced on a mathematical basis of one murder, or mystery to so many words! but it does mean that the author must see to it that his important incidents are fairly distributed throughout the work as a whole, and that each chapter ends at the psychological moment. this gives an editor a chance to break the story at places where the excitement runs highest. careful attention to balance will help the writer to get the action fairly distributed. if the ms. be examined as a whole, with this question of balance in mind, the writer will be able to detect if too much movement has been concentrated in one part, with undue expanses of uneventfulness stretching between. [sidenote: dickens was an adept at "curtains"] no one knew better than charles dickens how to keep the reader on the _qui vive_ for the next chapter. joseph h. choate says in his memoirs: "as dickens' books came out they were eagerly devoured in america. _dombey and son_ came out in numbers long before the laying of the first atlantic cable, and several numbers went over in fort-nightly steamers, the most frequent communication of that day. in an early part of the story little paul was brought to the verge of the grave, the last number to hand leaving him hovering between life and death, and all america was anxious to know his fate. when the next steamer arrived bringing decisive news, the dock was crowded with people. the passengers imagined some great national or international event had happened. but it was only the eager reading public who had hurried down to meet the steamer, and get the first news as to whether little paul was alive or dead." the late dr. s. g. green has told how, at the day school he attended as a boy, "work was suspended once a month on the publication of the instalment of _pickwick papers_, which the head master read aloud to the assembled and eager boys. when mr. pickwick was released from the fleet prison, a whole holiday was given, to celebrate the event!" this is the type of serial story an editor yearns for: one that will end with so dramatic a "curtain" each month, that the public suspend all employment in order to secure copies of the following issue, and learn what happened next! even the final sentences of an instalment with a good "curtain" can be made to do wonders in whetting the reader's appetite for more. but it is advisable to see how they read in connection with the words that inevitably follow. for instance, there was a lurid serial in a daily paper which ended one day with the words: "'cat,' she cried, 'vile, odious, contemptible cat.' to be continued to-morrow." "but," commented _punch_, "could she do any better than that even after she _had_ slept on it?" on making verse most of us break out into verse at one period of our life. youth starting out to explore a world that seems teeming with new discoveries, generally tries to voice his emotions in poetry--not because youth has any special aptitude for this form of literature, but because the poet has expressed, as no other writer has done, the hopes and ideals, the craving for romance and the thirst for beauty, that are among the characteristics of our golden years. and youth, wishing to voice his own emotions, naturally selects the literary form in which such emotions have already been enshrined. verse-writing is a very useful exercise for the student--as i have already stated in a previous chapter; but until we are fairly advanced, it is well to avoid regarding our efforts too seriously. to string together certain sets of syllables with rhymes in couples, is an exceedingly simple matter; but to write poetry is the highest and the most difficult form of literary art. it is hard to convince the beginner that the verses he has put together are not poetry--even though they may be technically correct as to make-up, which is by no means always the case. he is inclined to argue that he has dreamed dreams, and seen visions, and travelled far from the prose of life; what he writes, therefore, must be scintillating with star dust, if with nothing more heavenly. for the making of poetry, the dreams of youth are valuable; take care of them, they are among the precious things of life, and they vanish with neglect or rough handling; but something more than dreams is needful. [sidenote: study the laws governing metrical composition] if you feel you can best express yourself in verse, make a comprehensive study of the laws governing metrical composition. such knowledge not only enables you to write in a shapely, orderly, pleasing form, but it may also help you to ascertain what is wrong, when something you have written seems jarring, or halting, or lacking at any point. to many amateurs, laws and rules suggest a cramping influence; they feel sure they could do far better work if unhampered by any restrictions. in reality, however, the limitations such laws impose are a gain to the poet, since they compel him to sort out his ideas, to differentiate between essentials and non-essentials, to condense his thoughts and measure his words. and if properly carried out, all this should result in the reduction of verbosity to the minimum, and a moderately clear presentation of a subject--it does not always, i know, but it ought to do so. i am neither enumerating nor discussing these laws in this volume, since excellent books on the subject have been published. i merely wish to point out to the student the necessity for giving the matter attention. some people think the fact that the idea embodied in their verse is good and ennobling, should condone weak or faulty workmanship. but, alas! in this callous world it doesn't, as a rule. the ideal verse is that which presents beautifully a great thought in a small compass. [sidenote: ideas are more important than rhapsodies] a poem should centralise on some special thought or idea. rhapsodies, no matter how intense, do not constitute poetry; every poem, be it ever so short, should suggest some definite train of thought. haphazard statements or description are no more permissible in a poem than in a novel. all nonsense verse, even, must have an underlying semblance of a sensible idea, though when you come to analyse it, it may turn out to be the height of absurdity. [sidenote: moreover the ideas should be poetic] not only must a poem contain a definite idea, it must be a poetic idea, something that will lift the reader above the prose of life. try to make him see beauty if you can; and to hear beauty in the music of your words. poetry should be beautiful and suggest loveliness, whenever possible. however simple and ordinary the subject of your verse, try to carry the reader beyond superficialities, to the wonderful and the unordinary that so often give glory to life's commonplaces. take a well-worn subject like the incoming tide; how many people have been moved to write on this topic! i could not possibly reckon up the number of times i have seen "ocean's roar" rhyming with "rocky shore." the writer who is nothing more than a versifier is content with a description of the sights and sounds of the beach; but the poet looks further than this. read mrs. meynell's "song," and you will better understand my meaning when i say that the poet must endeavour to show us, through the substance of things material, the shadow of things spiritual. song by alice meynell as the unhastening tide doth roll, dear and desired, upon the whole long shining strand, and floods the caves, your love comes filling with happy waves the open sea-shore of my soul. but inland from the seaward spaces, none knows, not even you, the places brimmed at your coming, out of sight --the little solitudes of delight this tide constrains in dim embraces. you see the happy shore, wave-rimmed, but know not of the quiet dimmed rivers your coming floods and fills, the little pools, 'mid happier hills, my silent rivulets, over-brimmed. what, i have secrets from you? yes. but, o my sea, your love doth press and reach in further than you know, and fill all these; and when you go, there's loneliness in loneliness. _by courtesy of the walter scott publishing co., ltd._ [sidenote: amateur verse usually falls under these headings] putting on one side religious verse (which one does not wish to dissect too brutally, since one recognises and respects the spirit underlying it, despite its sometimes poor technique), amateur verse usually falls under one of four headings: . lovers' outpourings. . baby prattle. . nature dissertations. . stuff worth reading. the first of these explains itself, and includes perennial poems entitled "blue eyes"; "parted"; "to daphne" (or muriel, or gladys, or some other equally nice person); "absence"; "my lady"; "twin souls," etc. in these the following are generally regarded as original and delightful rhymes: love and dove; mourn and forlorn; girl and curl; moon and june; eyes and skies. without wishing to hurt any sensitive feelings, truth compels me to state that it is rare for such productions to have any literary value. the verses coming under the second heading are frequently written by young girls, unmarried aunts, and very new fathers; occasionally mothers give vent to their maternal affection in this way, but more often they find their time fully occupied in attending to the little ones' material needs. such poems (often entitled "lullaby") are usually characterised by an entire lack of anything that could possibly be called an idea. they will apostrophise the infant, and tell it how lovely it is, begging it to go to sleep, and assuring it that mother will keep watch the while--which no up-to-date mother would dream of doing in these busy, servantless days! but as to any concrete reason why the verses were penned, one looks for it in vain. i do not think such effusions serve any useful purpose. they are not even desirable as an outlet for the feelings, since there are better ways in which one can work out one's affection for a child--woolly boots, pinafores, personal attention, and the like. nevertheless every woman's paper is deluged with mss. of this type. the nature dissertation is a trifle better than the preceding, because it does offer a little scope for looking around and noting things. but the weakness here is this: the writers do not always look around; they as often sit at a comfortable writing-table indoors and amalgamate other people's observations; and the outcome is a recital of the obvious, with oft-repeated platitudes. the following are well-worn titles: "a spring song"; "bluebells"; "twilight calm"; "sunset"; "autumn leaves"; occasionally they take a wordsworthian turn, "lines written on the shore at atlantic city" or "thoughts on seeing stratford-on-avon for the first time" (such a poem naturally beginning "immortal bard, who--" etc.). at best, the majority of nature poems, as written by the untrained, contain little beyond descriptive passages. this again results in a pointless production that seldom embodies any idea worth the space devoted to it. you may record the fact that the sun is setting in a blaze of colour; but there is nothing sufficiently remarkable about this to warrant its publication: most people know that the sun occasionally sets in this fashion. if the beauty of the sunset affected you strongly, lifting you above earthly things, and giving you a vision--dim perhaps, but nevertheless a vision--of the glory that shall be revealed, then it is for you so to describe the beauty of the sunset that you convey to your readers the same feelings, the same uplifted sense, the same vision of the yet greater glory that is to be. when you can do this, the chances are that you will be writing poetry. but until you can do this, you may be writing nothing better than fragments of a rhyming guide-book. you may argue that not only did you feel an uplift when you gazed on the sunset, but you re-experience it as you read the poem you wrote upon it. [sidenote: you see the scene you are describing: the reader does not] possibly so; because to you the lines conjure up the whole scene; _i.e._ they serve to remind you of much that is not written down. one word may be enough to recall to your mind the overwhelming grandeur of the sundown in every detail; but it will not be sufficient to spread it out before the eyes of those who did not see the actual occurrence; neither will it reveal to them the uplift of the moment. the novice so often forgets that his own mind fills in the details of what he has seen, and makes a perfect picture out of an imperfect description. but the reader cannot do this; he has nothing to help him beyond the written words. therefore the writer must take care to omit nothing that is essential, nothing that will enforce the mental and spiritual conception of a scene. and in order to do this, he must analyse the scene, and ascertain (if he can) what it was that aroused such deep emotion within him. if he can tabulate these items (sometimes it is possible to do so, sometimes it is not), then he must give them special emphasis in his description, no matter what else is omitted. whether you are writing descriptive matter in verse or prose, it is well to bear in mind that memory helps _you_ to visualise the whole scene, whereas the reader will have no such additional aid. [sidenote: poetry should voice worldwide, rather than individual, need] the primary object of the beginner, in writing verse, is often to voice his own heart's longing; whereas, if his verse is to be of interest to others besides himself, it must voice the longings of other people, poetry of the "longing" kind should touch on world-wide human need, not merely on an individual want, if it is to waken response in the reader. of course the individual want may be a world-wide human need: it very often is; but it is not wise to trust to chance in this particular. look about you, and see if your experiences are likely to be those of your fellow-creatures. if so, there is more probability that your work will appeal to others than if you take no count of their requirements and centre on your own. the poet, among other qualifications, has the ability to recognise what humanity wants to say but cannot, and is able to set it down in black and white, so that when the world reads it, it exclaims: "why, that is just what i think and feel! only i could never put it into words!" when elizabeth barrett browning wrote the "sonnets from the portuguese," she was writing of her own love for one particular man. so far she was dealing with her own experiences; and if that had been all, the matter might have ended there. but because uncountable women in every land have loved in that same way, have thought those thoughts, and experienced those identical emotions, though they were not able to write of them as mrs. browning did, her "sonnets" found an echo in hearts the world over: they voiced a great human experience, a universal human longing. [sidenote: the so-called "new poetry"] one modern phase of verse-making has had a very demoralising effect on the amateur. i refer to the outbreak of shapeless productions--devoid of music, beauty, rhythm, and balance, and often lacking the rudiments of sense--that developed before the war, and has been with us ever since. the followers of this cult advocate the abolition of all law and order: each goes gaily on his own way, writing whatsoever he pleases, no matter how crude, or banal, or incoherent, or loathsome; lines any and every length; unlimited full stops, or none at all; just what is in his brain--and what a state of brain it reveals! this so-called "new poetry" resembles nothing in the world so much as the mss. an editor occasionally receives from inmates of lunatic asylums! literary effusions of this type are on a par with the cubist and futurist monstrosities that have tried to imagine themselves a new form of pictorial art. unfortunately, the desire to kick over all laws and rules, and everything that betokens restraint and discipline, is no new one. periodically the world has seemed to be attacked with wholesale madness, as history shows; and a pronounced feature of each upheaval has been the attempt of certain deranged imaginations to abolish that order which is heaven's first law (and which cannot be abolished without wide-spread ruin), and in its place to exalt the deification of self. the years preceding every outbreak have invariably been marked by excesses, licence and extravagance of all kinds; while real art, wholesome living, serious thinking, and steady, well-regulated work, have been at a discount. do not be misled by high-sounding statements, that all the incoherency and carelessness and indifferent workmanship exhibited in recent travesties of art was a groping after better things, the breaking of shackles that chained the free heaven-born spirit of man to miserable mundane convention. it was nothing of the sort. rather, it was a form of hysteria that was the outcome of the "soft" living, the feverish quest of pleasure, the craving for notoriety at the least expenditure of effort, the longing to be perpetually in the limelight, and the absence of self-discipline that was all too noticeable in the earlier years of this century. the limitations of youth by eugene field i'd like to be a cowboy an' ride a fiery hoss way out into the big and boundless west; i'd kill the bears an' catamounts an' wolves i come across, an' i'd pluck the bal-head eagle from his nest! with my pistols at my side, i would roam the prarers wide, an' to scalp the savage injun in his wigwam would i ride-- if i darst; but i darsen't! i'd like to go to afriky an' hunt the lions there, an' the biggest ollyfunts you ever saw! i would track the fierce gorilla to his equatorial lair, an' beard the cannybull that eats folks raw! i'd chase the pizen snakes, an' the 'pottimus that makes his nest down at the bottom of unfathomable lakes-- if i darst; but i darsen't! the "new" poetry was a manifestation of the decadence undermining pre-war art. do not be deluded into thinking that the aberrations of ill-trained minds that sometimes flaunt themselves before your bewildered eyes, in some very "thin" volume of verse, or in some freakish periodical, are art, or even worth the paper they are printed on. they are not. very probably they would never have got into print at all, but for the fact that those who affect the cult are, for the most part, people with more money than discrimination, who can afford to pay for publicity. just as a certain type of eccentricity of action may be the precursor of mental disease, so a certain type of eccentricity of thought may be the forerunner of moral and spiritual disease. avoid unnecessary abbreviations: _th'_ for the, _o'_ for of, and similar curtailments. these are often mere mannerisms, and introduced with the idea that they are distinctive: but they are not. [sidenote: some general hints worth noting] long lines are better for descriptive verse than short ones. a stately metre, with well-marked cadence, is best suited to a lofty theme. this is illustrated in "the valley song," by the late mable earle, which we reprint by courtesy of the _american sunday school times_. a valley song by mable earle _"because the syrians have said, the lord is god of the hills, but he is not god of the valleys."_ god of the heights where men walk free, above life's lure, beyond death's sting; lord of all souls that rise to thee, white with supreme self-offering; thou who hast crowned the hearts that dare, thou who hast nerved the hands to do, god of the heights! give us to share thy kingdom in the valleys too. our eyes look up to those who stand vicegerents of thy stainless sway, heroes and saints at thy right hand, thy priests and kings of glory they. not ours to tread the path they trod, splendid and sharp, still reaching higher; not ours to lay before our god the crowns they snatched from flood and fire. yet through the daily, dazing toil, the crowding tasks of hand and brain, keep pure our lips, lord christ, from soil, keep pure our lives from sordid gain. come to the level of our days, the lowly hours of dust and din, and in the valley-lands upraise thy kingdom over self and sin. not ours the dawn-lit heights; and yet up to the hills where men walk free we lift our eyes, lest faith forget the light which lighted them to thee. god of all heroes, ours and thine, god of all toilers! keep us true, till love's eternal glory shine in sunrise on the valleys too. short lines, irregular metre and unusual construction, are best for light or whimsical subjects. "the limitations of youth," by eugene field, is an example. to put it another way: when the subject is dignified, the lines should roll along; when the subject is light and airy, the lines should ripple past. the more peaceful the subject, the more need for mellifluent treatment. stern or tragic subjects can stand rugged wording and shape. verses written for children, or on childish themes, should be simple in construction, with rhymes near together, and lines of not more than eight syllables as a rule. . 's, rhyming alternately, are the easiest to memorise, and therefore the most popular with children. examine the poems in stevenson's _a child's garden of verses_, and note the simplicity of their construction, the music of their rhymes, and their clear, direct method of statement--the latter an essential if children are to be interested. one of the reasons for the appeal that "hiawatha" makes invariably to children is its direct form of statement, with few involved sentences; and its eight-syllable lines. eugene field's poems on childhood themes, and some of the passages in "the forest of wild thyme," by alfred noyes, are delightful examples of the possibilities of . lines with alternate rhymes. * * * * * merely to break up prose into lines of irregular length, is not to produce poetry. there must not only be beauty in individual lines and phrases, but there must be beauty of idea and form in the verses as a whole. at the same time, never sacrifice sense to sound. young writers sometimes say to me, "i see so much, and feel so much, yet i cannot put it into words: the thoughts are beautiful while they are inside my brain, but there seem no words adequate to express them; i am baffled directly i try to put them down on paper." don't despair. every poet has felt the same: but let it encourage you to recollect that many have got the better of the feeling, by hard work and sheer determination. after all you have all the words there are, and the most famous of poets had no more than this to work with. we sometimes forget that in the end, the greatest writer that ever lived had to reduce everything to the same words you and i are free to use. you may remember that mark twain once went to a well-known preacher, who had delivered a magnificent sermon, and, after extolling it and thanking him for it, the humourist added, "but i have seen every word of it before, in print!" the astonished preacher asked, indignantly, "where?" "in the dictionary," replied mark twain. the function of the blue pencil just as we all know that a king would be no king without a crown, and the lord mayor of london would be but a mere mortal man without his mace and his gorgeous gilt coach, so no self-respecting editor is supposed to exist apart from a blue pencil. and i admit it is a serviceable article, but, personally, i prefer that it should be used by the contributor. i do not want to have to spend time in revising a ms., to get it into publishable shape; neither does any other editor. the blue pencil stands for deletion. practically every writer needs to cut down the first draft of a story or article. some prune more severely than others, but all experienced workers reduce and condense before they finally pass a ms. for publication. it is not until a ms. is completed--roughly--that one can actually tell where it is balanced, and where it is light-weight or top-heavy. things expand in unexpected directions as we go along; developments suggest themselves temptingly when we are halfway through, and then throw the earlier chapters quite out of proportion to the story as a whole; matters that seemed of great moment when we were in chapter have toned down to the very ordinary by the time we have piled on ten more chapters of stress and thrills and emotion. one cannot stop to adjust it as one goes along, because no one can say whether the re-adjustment itself may not be out of gear by the time the finale is reached. consequently, the best way is to go right on, letting everything fall as it happens (but keeping as near as you can to your original plan, unless there is just cause for a departure therefrom). when you have written "finis," overhaul the ms. from beginning to end, sparing neither your blue pencil nor your feelings, if common sense, and knowledge of your craft, tell you that certain portions or sentences would be better omitted. it is neither an easy nor a pleasing task--especially to the novice. the early children of our brain seem of such priceless worth, that we regard them with a certain sense of awe. "did _i_ write that beautiful passage about the moon silvering the tree-tops? then it _must_ belong just where i put it. cut it out? certainly not! i consider it the most exquisite paragraph in the whole story." this is the way we look at our work when we have not many published items to our name. later, experience and the training that comes from practice, teach us to arm ourselves as a matter of course with a blue pencil, ignore personal sentiment, and look at our mss. with a coldly critical eye. then we may discover that a sentence or paragraph, though of undoubted merit and beauty--(we need not deny it that much!)--does not quite fit in where we originally placed it. possibly it is superfluous, in view of what follows later; or redundant, in view of what went before; or it may have lost life and colour with the passage of time; or it may seem hackneyed, or weak, (though we do not use such insulting words to our own writings till we are fairly advanced). but whatever the reason, if on examining a sentence, it does not appear to serve any vital purpose, take it out. if you think there is worth in it, save it for a possible use at a later date in some other ms., though, personally, i do not believe in any sort of _réchauffé_ of old matter, simply because as time goes on we change in our style of writing as we do in our tastes and preferences in neckties. and what you write this year, will not necessarily dovetail in with what you write in a few years' time. still, if you feel it would be wasting flashes of genius to destroy it, and it would be any comfort to you to hoard it--do so; the main thing is to delete it from the ms. you are revising, if there be any doubt about its value. a beginner's ms. usually needs to be cut down to about half its original length. hard luck, for the beginner, i know, considering the way he will have laboured lovingly over every sentence. [sidenote: mss. need to be "pulled together"] nevertheless, it pulls the work together if the blue pencil be applied generously. some articles and stories appear to sprawl all over the place (sprawl is not a pretty word, but it is expressive). the writer does not seem able to follow up any idea to a logical conclusion, without interpolating so much irrelevant matter that the main theme is nearly smothered by the extraneous items, and the reader gets only a confused impression of what it is all about. such work needs "pulling together," _i.e._ the essential portions that should follow each other in natural sequence need to be brought closer together; and this can only be done by clearing away the non-essentials that separate them. [sidenote: the way phil may made his sketches] the late phil may once showed me how he drew his inimitable sketches, that always looked so simple, oh _so_ simple! to the uninitiated. first he made a sketch full of detail, with everything included, much as other people make sketches. when this was finished to his satisfaction, he started to take out every line that was not actually necessary to the understanding of the picture. finally he had left nothing but a few strokes--yet, such was his genius for seeing what to delete and what to leave, the picture had gained rather than lost in character, force, and comprehensiveness. the secret of the matter is this. by removing everything that is not of vital importance to the whole, (whether in painting or in writing), there is less confusion of vision, less to distract the mind, or switch it off to side issues. this does not mean that everything is better for being given in bare outline. undoubtedly certain additions and decorations and descriptions can be made to emphasise the author's meaning, to impress a scene more vividly on the mind. we do not want all our pictures to be modelled on the lines of phil may, clever as his work was. there is room for endless variety. the author should remember, however, that it is better to err on the side of drastic deletion, rather than leave in matter that is no actual gain to the picture, and only serves to distract and confuse and overload the reader's mind. [sidenote: beware the plausible imp] there is a plausible imp who perches on the top of every beginner's inkstand, and passes his wicked little time assuring them all that they are too clever to need hedging about by rules, that their work cannot be improved upon, and would only be spoilt if it were altered in any way. don't heed him! the beginner's work is never spoilt by condensation; rather it is invariably improved by cutting down. in the main, every writer's work needs pruning, until he has had sufficient practice to know what is not worth while to put down in the first place--and one needs to be exceptionally gifted to know this. if, on reading your ms. after its completion, you feel your work is so good that it needs no blue pencil--beware! you have not got there yet! part five author, publisher, and public everything resolves itself down, in the publisher's mind, to the one simple question: "is this ms. what the public wants?" when offering goods for sale supposing--that when you go into the fishmonger's, he offers you a cod that is slightly "off"; and, while apologising for its feebleness, begs you to take it, as he has an invalid daughter suffering from spinal complaint, who needs a change at the seaside. or--that the assistant in the men's hosiery shop begs you to take half a dozen extra neckties, as he is anxious to buy the baby a much-needed pram, and his salary depends primarily on his commissions. or--that the sewing-machine agent, when sending around circulars, adds a devout hope, as a p.s., that you will purchase a machine, since he is anxious to increase his subscription to foreign missions. or--that the incompetent dressmaker beseeches you to take a garment that would fit nobody and suit nobody, because she has a widowed mother to support. "preposterous!" you say. "such things would never occur." and yet this is precisely what is happening every day of the year in the literary business! here are some sentences from letters accompanying mss. sent to my office the week i am writing this. "i should esteem it a great kindness if you could stretch a point in favour of my story, even though it may not be quite up to your standard (and i can see, on re-reading, that it has defects); but i am anxious to make some money in order to take a friend in whom i am deeply interested to the seaside for a much-needed change. she is an invalid, and----" here follow copious details about the friend. another writes: "i must ask you to give this every consideration, as i devote all the money i make by my writings to charity." a third says frankly, "you really _must_ accept this story, as i need money badly." and for a truly nauseating letter, i think the following is as objectionable as any i have received in this connection: "my dear wife has recently passed away, after years of acute and protracted suffering. my heart was rent with sympathy for her while she lived, and now the blank caused by her death is almost intolerable. how i shall face life without her i do not know; for she was indeed a help-meet in every sense of the word, in order to divert my mind from this well-nigh insurmountable sorrow, i have written a story 'the forged cheque,' which i feel is just the thing for your magazine. i ask you to regard it leniently, remembering that it is written with a breaking heart," etc. [sidenote: the problem of youth] then there are other reasons advanced why the editor should accept a ms., the youthfulness or the inexperience of the author being frequently mentioned. while it is no crime to be young, it is no particular advantage when one is seeking to place a story. inexperience, on the other hand, might be regarded as a distinct drawback. but in any case, the editor does not purchase mss. merely because they are the writers' first attempts. however good they may be for first attempts, or however promising they may be considering the age of the writer, all that has practically nothing to do with the editor's decision, unless he is running any pages in his periodical for the exploitation of immature work or juvenile effort. and in these days of high-priced paper and expensive production, very few papers do this. [sidenote: the way phil may made his sketches] it is hard to make the amateur understand that a magazine is first and foremost a business proposition, as much as a shop or a factory. the editor must make it pay; and in order to do this, he must publish the type of matter that his readers are willing to purchase. each magazine appeals to a definite section of the public (or it should do so, if it is to be a success). no one magazine appeals to every human being. some want sensation, some want art, some want fashions, and so on. and as it is impossible to include everything in any one publication, each editor aims to please a certain class of tastes--good, bad or indifferent, according to the policy of his paper. and he knows to a fraction almost, what will suit his public, and what they will not care about. how does he know? it is part of his mental and business equipment: the knowledge often costs him years of study and observation; and it is one of the qualifications for which he is paid his salary. and because he knows what his public will buy, and what they do not want, he purchases mss. accordingly. it is immaterial to him whether the writer needs money for charity, or to support an aged relative, or merely to soothe a bereaved soul: the only question he considers is whether the public will want a certain ms. or not. he is not engaged by the proprietors to aid charity, or to minister to the necessitous; his work is to provide goods that the public will buy--just like any other business man. and he is unmoved, therefore, by irrelevant appeals. of course he has other matters to look to as well as the providing of goods the public will buy; he helps to shape public opinion, for instance, and raises, or lowers, the public taste. but so far as the amateur is concerned, the point to remember is the fact that an editor is in no way influenced by the writer's need for pecuniary assistance. if he were, his post-bag would be a hundred times heavier than it is already, and it is quite heavy enough as it is! [sidenote: a publisher is not an agent for philanthropy] in the same way, only more so, a publisher is concerned with the selling qualities of a ms. rather than with the writer's private affairs. he is running a business concern with a view to some margin of profit. presumably he has a wife and family to support, rent, rates and taxes to meet (in addition to helping to pay for the war)--like any other man. and he spends his days in the dim, fusty airlessness of a publisher's office for the purpose of making a living out of the books he publishes. therefore, he is not likely to be inclined to bring out a book, which his business experience tells him the public will never buy, merely because (as one sender of a ms. recently put it) "the moral of my essays is really beautiful, and it will do people good to read them, if even they do not bring in profit. read them yourself and you will see that i am not exaggerating." possibly the moral of a ms. is quite good: but it may not be the particular brand of goodness that the public is willing to purchase at the moment; and the publisher knows it is hopeless to put it on the market in that case. equally it is useless to expect him to be influenced favourably simply because your earnings are ear-marked for charity. at the end of the year, should he see that the money he paid for a certain item was a dead loss, it would be no consolation to him to remember that the author had devoted the cash to a "seaside holiday home for men on strike" in which she was interested. therefore spare him all such data. the less you add to what he has to read daily, the better. an accompanying letter is really unnecessary--only it is useful to affix the stamps to, for the return of the ms. if rejected. profuse explanations are all beside the mark, and give an amateurish, unbusiness-like look to a communication. whatever you may write about yourself on your ms., in praise thereof, or in extenuation, everything resolves itself down--in the publisher's mind--to the one simple question: is this what the public wants? [sidenote: we think we can judge the value of our work better than a publisher can] many a beginner is convinced his ms. would sell, if only it were printed. it is natural that we have a certain amount of belief in our own work, more especially if we have given much time and thought to it. moreover, _we_ possibly see points in it that no one else can; _we_ see what a we meant to put down, without in any way realising how far our actual writing falls short of the ideas that were in our brain. the outcome of this partiality for our own writing, is a certainty that people are not able to do us justice if they do not think as highly of it as we do. but the publisher is better able to judge of the selling possibilities of a work than the author; it is his business; he is at it all day long. he has no personal feelings involved, his main concern being to make a book a profitable concern; and his experience teaches him pretty accurately what the public will buy and what it will leave on his hands. he may occasionally make a mistake (though it is surprising how seldom an expert publisher does make a wrong estimate, considering how various are the mss. that pass through his office); but when he does, he more often errs on the side of being over-sanguine, and giving the author the benefit of the doubt, than in the direction of turning down anything that might have made his, and the author's, fortune. [sidenote: a consoling thought--no doubt] some writers are convinced that the style of their ms. was too good for the editor who rejected it, and altogether above his intelligence. this is a consoling thought, no doubt; but unfortunately it does not take one any further. i know that instances are occasionally quoted (always the same instances, by the way), where books that ultimately achieved some success were declined by several publishers before they were finally landed. but in some of these cases the books in question were so very much off the beaten track as to be verging on freakishness--and no one living can guarantee a forecast of how the public will receive a freak! here and there one finds a publisher who enjoys a gamble, and will risk a little on such uncertainties; (sometimes he gets his reward, more often he doesn't); but the majority prefer a safer, even though less exciting, course! one other matter may have contributed to the refusals these mss. met with--possibly they were offered to publishers who did not handle that particular type of work. publishers usually specialise in fixed directions, just as magazine editors do. no one attempts to cover the whole range of reading; a glance at any publisher's catalogue will show this. a ms. turned down by one, as being useless to the section of the public in which he is interested, may be taken by another, who reaches a totally different class of reader. therefore do not despair, if your story does not get accepted the first time of asking. there may be a variety of reasons why that particular publisher or editor did not want that particular ms. but in any case, don't sit down at the first rebuff and say, "what's the good of anything? a genius has no chance nowadays any more than poor chatterton had!" (by the way, i have heard several desperate, would-be authors mention chatterton and liken their own predicament to his, but not one has ever chanced to be able to quote me a line of his work!) there is no need to feel that the bottom has dropped out of the universe, because your ms. has been returned. try elsewhere. if it is declined by five or six different publishers, then you may safely conclude that it is not the kind of work the public will buy at the moment; or it may be that your writing is not sufficiently mature. in that case, put that ms. aside, and tackle another, something quite fresh. i never think it is worth while to try and re-write or re-construct the rejected ms.--at any rate, not till you are tolerably advanced. it really takes no more time to write something entirely new. "if only i could get an introduction to an editor, i am sure i could get my work taken." one often hears this said. yet there never was a greater delusion than this idea that introductions work the oracle. it would be a different matter if an editor, or publisher, had a surfeit of good work, and really did not know what to discard: in such circumstances (which won't occur this side of the millennium!) an introduction might help to secure attention for an individual writer. but as it is, the editor is only too anxious to purchase good work when it comes his way; he does not wait for any introduction. if a ms. strays into his office that possesses the qualities he is looking for, he writes the author forthwith, his one desire being to purchase the ms. still, if you really feel you must be armed with some such document, it is as well to be quite sure that the introduction is a desirable one. here are two letters that reached me by the same post. the first was from miss blank, a stranger, who said-- "my friend mr. dash, who thinks _very_ highly of my work, has _urged_ me to let you see some of it, as he thinks it is just the sort of thing you will be glad to have for your magazine. he is writing a letter of introduction. i shall be glad if you will name a time for a personal interview, as i can better explain"--etc. the second was from mr. dash, an acquaintance of long standing, who said-- "there is a certain miss blank who is anxious i should write her a letter of introduction to yourself--which i do herewith. i know nothing whatever about her, save that she seems to be a first-class nuisance. i have never seen her, haven't a ghost of a notion if she can write: probably she can't. but she happens to be the sister of the fiancé of the daughter of my mother-in-law's dearest and oldest friend; and any man who values the peace and happiness of his home endeavours to propitiate his mother-in-law, especially when she has mentioned the matter six times already. therefore i trust this introduction is in order." [sidenote: personal interviews are seldom desirable as a preliminary] the desirability of a personal interview with an editor is another delusion to which the amateur clings. as a rule nothing is gained (but a good deal of time is lost) by talking a contribution over before the preliminary ms. is read. after all, the ms. is the item by which the author stands or falls. if it is good, and what the editor wants, he will take it--and take it only too gladly; if it is not good, or not what he wants, no amount of preliminary conversation will secure its acceptance; for no matter how delightful the conversation may have been, he does not print that; it is the ms. itself that decides the crucial question of publication or no publication. in some cases a preliminary letter is desirable: it may be advisable to ascertain beforehand whether an editor is open to consider an article on a doubtful subject. but if you wish to avoid inducing a sense of irritation in his soul, do not ask for a personal interview, since in all probability, if he is as rushed as most editors are nowadays, he will turn down the matter forthwith, rather than spend time on talk that may lead nowhere. it must always be borne in mind that these are overworked, understaffed, hustling times in a very complex age; and the newspaper and magazine office feels this more keenly than any other branch of the business world, simply because periodicals must reflect the spirit of their day and generation, and keep the readers in touch with all that is going on,--and "all" is a large, and constantly changing, order at present. this means that the editorial offices are always more or less in a state of tension; there is no time to spare for interviews that may prove fruitless; the day is seldom long enough to get in all that is certain to be profitable to the paper. therefore, say what you have to say by letter--and say it clearly and briefly. the editor forms his judgment by what you say, and if he wants to talk the matter over with you, he will soon let you know. "but i always feel i can explain myself so much better in a conversation--no matter how brief--than in a letter." this is a frequent plea. the public, however, will judge you by what you write, not by what you say; if you cannot express yourself well in writing, you may speak with the tongues of men and of angels yet it will avail you nothing where the publication of your ms. is concerned. if you cannot write about it so that the editor can understand, the public are not likely to be able to comprehend it any better. women are particularly prone to ask for an interview, and this because they instinctively rely to some extent on the appeal of their personality in most of their business transactions. by far the wiser course, however, is for a woman to express herself so well in her writing that the office simply tumbles over itself in its anxiety to make her personal acquaintance. and i have known this to happen on more than one occasion. [sidenote: the irrepressible caller] nevertheless, men can also distinguish themselves when making calls. the card of a stranger, bearing a nebraska address, was brought to me one afternoon. he urged that his business was of great importance. finally i saw him. he was a most intelligent-looking american, and, like the majority of his countrymen, was not long in coming to the point. he said he had written some poems, and promptly placed before me a sheaf of ms. i told him i would look at them if he would leave them. "just you run your eye down these," he said. i protested that i could not possibly do his work justice if i skimmed it in any such manner. then he explained that these were not poems--the masterpieces would come later--these were press notices of some poems he had had printed in a nebraska paper. i read a few; i had never even heard of the majority of the papers that reviewed his work; but he seemed to take himself very seriously, one had not the heart to shatter his illusions. then he produced the bales of poems. he watched me so eagerly i was obliged to read some. i besought him to leave the rest with me, as i could not decide so important a matter hurriedly. "oh, but just read this one," he persisted. "mr. blank of our city--never heard of him? you _do_ surprise me!--he says he considers it as fine as anything your percy b. shelley ever wrote." in a moment of abject weakness i said the poem was fair. then the heart of that man warmed towards me; he told me of his hopes, his plans and his aspirations, and i tried to sympathise with them. i could not do less, since i owe america much for kindness and hospitality it has shown me on many occasions. when at last he rose, reluctantly (he had stayed an hour and a quarter), i offered him my hand. he took it with a hearty grip. "well, i'm real glad to have known you," he said. "it's been a genuine pleasure to have this talk with you, for you are, without exception, the most informed and intellectual person i've met since i've been in your country." i felt immediately remorseful that i had grudged him the little chat; he was evidently a discerning young man. "the pleasure has been mine," i assured him, and inquired how long he had been in england? "i landed at southampton at ten o'clock this morning," was the response. i smilingly tried to disguise the sudden lapse of my enthusiasm. i must have succeeded, for he next said: "and now i guess i'll go down and fetch up my wife. she's been waiting in the street outside while i came up to see what you were like. i size it she'll just enjoy making a little visit with you." [sidenote: mss. cannot always be read as soon as they are received] it is only natural that an author should be keen to know the verdict on his work, once he has sent it out to try its fortune. but it is useless to get impatient because no news of it is forthcoming next day. sometimes weeks elapse, sometimes months, before a ms. can be read. but since the publisher makes no charge for reading a ms. (and the reading costs money: some one's time has to be paid for, and it is some one who draws a fair salary, too), he must be allowed to do it at his own convenience. if he has not asked you to send a ms., you cannot exactly dictate how soon it should be read. naturally, it is read as quickly as possible; this is to every one's interest; but this does not mean that it can be read the next day, or even the next week. other authors may have preceded you. the amateur who sends letters of inquiry before one has scarcely had time to open the envelope, is doomed to have his work rejected. no office has time to write and explain that "the matter will be considered in due course," etc., so the ms. is merely returned. it seems impossible to make the average beginner understand that his is not the only story offered, and that things have to take their turn. moreover, it is as difficult to please everybody as it was for the old man with the donkey in the fable. if mss. are not returned immediately, the editor is bombarded with complaints from one set of aggrieved authors; if he is able to read them at once, and he returns them quickly, he is the recipient of uncharitable letters accusing him of having discarded the mss. unread. there is an interesting story of a suspicious lady who prided herself on laying traps for the negligent editor--pages put in the wrong order, others upside down, and suchlike devices with which every magazine office is familiar. at last she succeeded in proving that the monster who sat at the receipt of mss. in one particular publishing house was a consummate rascal. "sir," she wrote, "i have long suspected that you basely deceive the public into believing that you read their works, while in reality you return them unread. but at last i have caught you hot-handed in the very act. it will doubtless interest you to know that i purposely gummed together pages and , very slightly, in the top right-hand corner. had you fulfilled your duty and done the work for which your employer pays you a salary, you would have discovered this and detached the pages in question." the editor replied: "dear madam,--if you will take a sharp pen-knife, and remove the fragment of gum between pages and , in the top right-hand corner, it may interest you to discover my initials underneath." "should all mss. be typed?" is a question often asked. [sidenote: if you wish your ms. to be read: make the reading easy] it is advisable to have them typed if possible, as this enables them to be read more quickly than if sent untyped. remember that your object in sending a ms. to a publisher, or editor, is to get it read: therefore it is policy to do all in your power to facilitate the reading. owing to the widespread interest in literature, and the universal desire to see oneself in print, the number of mss. that reach the office of any general periodical of good standing, is immense; and the eye-strain entailed in reading is very great. it has therefore become necessary to ask for mss. to be typed when possible; though anything that was clearly written, in a bold readable hand, would never be turned down because it was not typed. what is desired is that a ms. shall be legible, so that it can be read with the least amount of detriment to the eyesight. whereas some of the untyped work that is sent is a positive insult. i have seen tiny, niggling writing, crossed out and re-crossed out, till even the compositor (who is a perfect genius for reading the utterly illegible) could scarcely have made it out. and in all probability, such a ms. would be not over-clean, and would be _rolled_ to go through the post. [sidenote: why editors do not criticise] "if you are unable to make use of my ms., i shall be glad if you will kindly criticise it, and tell me exactly what you think of it." this request is frequently made by senders of ms. and when they receive back their work without any comment they will write and say, "at least you might have sent one word by way of criticism. if you had only written 'good' or 'bad,' i should have some idea why you declined it." i sympathise heartily with those who want advice; i know how very difficult it is to get any guidance or criticism that can be relied upon to be disinterested. nevertheless, i wish the student could see the number of queries, and the amount of work, and the heap of mss. that arrive at the office of any prosperous periodical; he would then begin to realise how utterly impossible it would be for mss. to be criticised in writing. it would entail an extra staff, and an expensive staff at that, since such criticism is not work, like card indexing, that can be relegated to a junior clerk. indeed, the sender of the ms. would probably be highly indignant if any one but the editor did this work! when i explain to beginners that we have no time to write criticisms on rejected work they say, "but it wouldn't take a _minute_ to write down a few words, seeing that the ms. has already been read." unfortunately, it would take a great many minutes. in any case it takes some time (if only a little) to sum up concisely the merits and defects of anything. more than that, experience has proved again and again that one little word of criticism will lead to more letters from the writer. and one has not time to read them! the children of our brain are very dear to us; and so sure as any one passes an adverse criticism on them, our feathers stand on end, and we prepare to defend our one little chick like the most devoted hen that ever lived. neither is it wise, i have found, to suggest a little alteration with a promise of publication attached. two years ago i wrote to some one who had only had one short story published, indicating a new ending that would have improved her ms. immensely, and made it possible for me to take it. "my temperament requires that it shall end as i have written it. kindly return my ms. if you cannot use it," replied the lady loftily. i did so. last week the same ms. came back to me--much aged and the worse for wear--with a note that the author did not mind if i altered the ending as i had suggested. but two years is two years. and in the interval, while the ms. was travelling round to every other office, the subject-matter had got out of date. it is never politic to be touchy if by chance some misguided editor does offer a word of criticism! if you want your work published, and there is no loss of principle involved, conform to the publisher's requirements as gracefully as you can, even though, in your heart of hearts, you consider him woefully lacking in discernment. and you can comfort yourself, meanwhile, with the thought that when you are safely ensconced upon olympian heights, you will even things up a little, and get back all of your own. i know one proprietress of several rejected mss. who vows that whenever she "gets there," she will sit on the topmost pinnacle, and make all publishers and editors (including myself) walk up to her on their knees, dropping curtsies all the way! [sidenote: a popular delusion] i was making for my office one day when a sportive-looking girl stopped me on the stairs. "just give this story to the editor will you, please?" she began. "give it right into her hands, won't you; don't let any underling get hold of it." i agreed. "and--i say--just tell her from me that she's to read it _herself_, every word of it; i won't be put off with some assistant tossing it aside half read. i know their tricks." one very popular delusion is that there is a conspiracy among the assistants in an office to keep mss., and especially good mss., from the eye of the chief! people will resort to all sorts of devices with the idea of ensuring mss. reaching the editor's own hands. they are marked "personal," and "strictly private," or "please forward, if away"; and i had one endorsed, "not to be opened by any one but the editor." yet what is gained by all this, save a definite amount of delay? in any well-organised office, work has to follow a certain routine; mss. have to be entered up by clerks as received, the stamps sent for return postage have to be checked and duly noted by the proper department, etc. why delay the handling of the ms. for a few weeks by having it so addressed that it may follow the editor to the north pole, and back, before it is opened, if the endorsements were obeyed?--which of course they are not. let a ms. take its proper course. no one in the office desires to suppress genius; on the contrary, great indeed is the elation of any member of the staff who discovers something worth publishing. it is one great object of our business lives. [sidenote: a little tact and how much it is!] if you feel you must call at an office in person, remember that the display of a little tact is a desirable accomplishment. when seeking a post on his paper do not start by telling the editor that his magazine is poor stuff, and will soon be on the rocks,--as i once heard a lady tell the editor of one of the most famous monthlies in existence. when he inquired as to her experience, it transpired that she had had one story--and one only--printed, and it had appeared in a child's magazine. and it was another tactful caller who said, on leaving, after having absorbed five and twenty minutes of a busy assistant's time: "well, perhaps you'll explain these suggestions of mine to the editor; though it would have been so much more satisfactory if i could have talked to some properly qualified individual." occasionally, however, a caller contributes something to the gaiety of nations, as in the case of the lady who came to inquire after the welfare of a ms. she had left with some one in our building only the day before. (and, incidentally, she wanted to alter a word in it, as she had thought of one she liked better). i was passing through the inquiry office as she entered, and she straightway explained to me her mission. "i will find out who took it," i said, "i do not think you left it with me." "oh no! it wasn't you," she replied emphatically. "i left it with quite a nice-looking person!" the responsibility the responsibility attached to the business of writing is greater than in any other department of work. the influence of the printed page is so far reaching, that no writer can gauge to what extent he may be furthering good (or harm), when he puts pen to paper. you can calculate exactly an author's cash value by his sales: but this does not give an equally accurate estimate of his moral value. who would dream of measuring the influence of _punch_, for instance, by the figures of its circulation? no one can say how many people will handle one single copy, or how many people will find in that single copy bracing laughter and healthy humour. the numbers printed each week can only represent a fraction of its actual readers. and the same applies to a good many books: they pass from one to another, are borrowed from libraries, borrowed from friends (often without being returned, alas!), and by varied routes they penetrate to out-of-the-way corners of the world where the authors would least expect to be able to reach the inhabitants. the most famous preacher living has not the possibilities of power that lie in the hands of a popular writer; and the gravity of this responsibility cannot be over-estimated. while this does not mean that we must take ourselves too seriously, it does mean that we must take our work seriously, and recognise that it stands for something more than money-making, even though money-making is not to be despised. to the beginner this may seem a weighty subject and rather outside his orbit. but in reality this point needs to be taken into consideration from the very earliest of our literary experiments. we must induce a certain attitude of mind, and keep definite ideals before us, if our work is to shape in any particular direction. and the probability is that you will have to choose between good and ill when selecting the theme for your first story. you will naturally look around and study the type of fiction that seems to be selling well, and perhaps you may light on something peculiarly noxious, since there is an assortment of such books being published nowadays. the book in question may have been designated "strong" (the word reviewers often fall back upon, when they cannot find any adjective sufficiently truthful without being libellous, to convey an idea of a book's malodorous qualities!); or you may have heard the book lauded by people who make a boast of being modern, up-to-date, or advanced. and as we none of us aim at being weak, or old-fashioned, or behind the times, it is not surprising if the beginner feels that he, too, had better try his hand at something "strong," if he is to get a reputation for ultra-modernity. quite a number of novices choose unpleasant topics because, and only because, they fancy such themes show advanced, untrammelled thought, and "a knowledge of the world." they forget that of far greater importance than the extent of the writer's ability to defy the conventions, is the moral effect of a book on those who read it. [sidenote: wider views are needed when characterising literature] i use the word "moral" in its widest sense. it is unfortunate that we have got into the habit of pigeon-holing literature--and especially fiction--in very narrow compartments. when we speak of a book as "good," or "helpful," or "uplifting," we usually mean that it contains specific religious teaching in one form or another. yet a book may be very good and helpful and uplifting without a single sermonic sentence, or anything approaching thereunto. in the same way, when we say that a novel is undesirable or immoral, we generally mean that it deals with one particular form of evil: yet there are books having little or nothing to do with promiscuous sex relationships that are pernicious and unhealthy in the extreme, and possibly all the more dangerous because their immorality is not of the kind that is definitely ticketed for all to see, and beware of, if need be. everything tending to lower the tone of the soul is immoral; everything that debases human taste is unhealthy; everything that gloats on unpleasantness, for the mere pleasure of gloating, is as devastating as poison gas; everything that preaches a doctrine of hopelessness, that spreads the black miasma of spiritual doubt over the mind is bad--fiendishly bad. but do not misunderstand me: i would not seem to imply that only fair things should be chronicled. there are certain facts of life that must be faced: sin cannot be ignored--but it must be recognised as sin, not be touched up with tinsel, and placed in the limelight, to look as attractive as possible. poverty, grime, sickness, gloom cannot be banished from every horizon; but they need not be dwelt upon exclusively without any alleviation, to the shutting out of all else. the wave of so-called "realism" that has swept over fiction of recent years has been a very injurious element in modern literature. it is bad from an artistic point of view, since it is one-sided, unbalanced, and not true to life itself, which invariably provides that compensations go hand in hand with drawbacks. some people speak of "realism" as though the only realities were sordidness and crime; whereas the earth teems with lovely realities--beauty of spirit, beauty of character, beauty of thought, no less than beauty of form and colour. the slum at first glance does not look a pre-possessing subject; yet read "angel court": the writer who is a real artist can find gold even here! angel-court by austin dobson in angel-court the sunless air grows faint and sick; to left and right the cowering houses shrink from sight huddled and hopeless, eyeless, bare. misnamed, you say? for surely rare must be the angel-shapes that light in angel-court! nay! the eternities are there. death at the doorway stands to smite; life in its garrets leaps to light; and love has climbed that crumbling stair in angel-court. _from "london lyrics," by permission._ those who acclaimed these recent books of so-called "realism" as works of exceptional genius, did not see that, far from being any such thing, they were, in most cases, preliminary manifestations of a hideous malady, which has since culminated in all we understand by the word bolshevism. to dilate on ugliness, coarseness, harshness, without showing the counteracting forces at work, and to dabble continuously in dirt without showing the way to cleanliness, is not art, no matter how accurately every detail may be portrayed: it is merely systematised brutishness. even themes with a rightful motive may be exceedingly harmful under some circumstances. studies of dipsomaniacs, drug-victims, and the like, may be necessary as matters of psychological or medical research, just as studies of any other diseases are necessary; but they should be issued as such, and not put forward in the guise of fiction intended for all and sundry among the general public. i have enlarged on this matter, because there has been a great tendency on the part of amateurs lately to revel in descriptions of crudity and repulsiveness, with never a thought as to the effect of such literature on the reader. at no time is it desirable to circulate indiscriminately, much less as fiction, reading matter that can only induce morbidity, neuroticism, depravity, doubt, or depression. but in an age like the present, when most of the civilised world is bowed beneath an overwhelming weight of sorrow, shattered nerves and physical weakness, it is positively criminal to manufacture pessimism, gloom and horrors, and scatter this type of literature broadcast without any sense of the appalling responsibility attaching thereunto. [sidenote: qualities which cannot be dispensed with] there are three qualities which all authors should aim to incorporate in their writings if they are to be a blessing rather than a curse to humanity: these are cleanness, healthiness and righteousness. they may be introduced in many and various forms; and are often to be found in wholesome laughter, spontaneous gaiety, good cheer, breathless adventure, revelations of beauty, as well as in direct appeals to the higher nature. anything that will arouse sane emotions, and divert the mind from self, is to be welcomed as a benefaction in this world of many sorrows. the late charles heber clarke--better known to the public as "max adeler"--enjoyed great popularity at one time as a humorist. he was a man of strong religious convictions; and there came a day when he ceased to write his humorous pleasantries, seeming inclined to regard them as so much wasted opportunity. on one occasion however, a clergyman whom he met while travelling, on discovering his identity, grasped his hand and said, "you have made me laugh when there seemed nothing left to laugh about; you have helped me to get over some of my darkest days. i owe you more than i owe any other man in the world." "and when he had finished pouring out his gratitude," said "max adeler," (who told me this himself), "i began to wonder whether, after all, one might not be doing as much good in the world by making people smile and forget their troubles, as by preaching at them." to help humanity god-ward is the greatest privilege we can aspire to; but this can be done by other means besides the writing of hymns and commentaries. everything that tends to lift humanity from the low-lands of sorrow or sordidness or suffering, and to point them to the great hope; everything that will aid them to live up to the best that is in them, and to strive to recapture some long-lost vision of the highest, will be helping in the great work of human regeneration that was set on foot by the one who came to give beauty for ashes. while only a few are entrusted with the message of the prophet or the seer, we all can specialise on whatsoever things are lovely and pure and of good report; and we shall be of some use--if only in a quiet way--to our day and generation if we can help others also to think on these things. [sidenote: goodness does not excuse dulness] but one point must not be overlooked--and in saying this i am summing up most that has gone before: if a book is to succeed, it must be well written. because a certain number of highly unpleasant books have succeeded, and a certain number of highly moral books have failed, beginners sometimes consider this as an indication of public preference. what they forget, or do not know, is this: the nasty book succeeded, in spite of its nastiness, because it was well and brightly written; while the moral book failed, in spite of its goodness, because it was badly written and superlatively dull. if the moral book that failed had been as well written as the nasty book that succeeded, it would not only have done as well as the nasty book, _it would have done a great deal better_. all but a small degenerate section of the public prefer wholesome to vicious literature--but nobody wants a dull book! and the amateur writer of good books often overlooks this latter fact. therefore, bear in mind that it is not sufficient that you make a book clean and healthy and good; you must endeavour to make cleanness as attractive as it really is, and healthiness as desirable as it really is, and god-ordained righteousness the most satisfying of all the things worth seeking. when you can do this, you will find a fair-sized public waiting, and anxious, to buy your books. you will not know what good you may be doing--it is never desirable for any of us to hear much on this score, humanity is so sadly liable to swelled head! but occasionally some one in the big outside world may send you a sincere "thank you." when this comes you will suddenly realise, though you cannot explain why, that there are some things even more worth while than the publisher's cheque. index a abbreviations to be avoided in verse, abstract qualities to be gauged, alexander, mrs., _burial of moses_, allen, james lane, and local colour, allingham, wm., poem by, allusions, hackneyed, amateurs, what they need to cultivate and avoid, amateurs, two classes of, amateurs copying unawares, amateurs and marriage offers in stories, amateurs' lack of first-hand knowledge, ambiguity, avoid, american writers and local colour, , ancient facts undesirable except in text-book, _angel court_, austin dobson, anthologies, verse, , antiquated expressions, arnold, matthew, article, settle object in writing it, articles that are not wanted, ; big subjects to be avoided, ; "how to ----," editors overdone with, ; which fail, ; useful divisions, ; ruled by form, ; on subjects already dealt with, ; study type of, in magazine you are writing for, ; must be sent to editors in time, ; must be topical, ; starting in the middle, artist and detail, artist's fragments, an, artistic atmosphere, artistic training and literary first attempts, , - "atmosphere," healthy and otherwise, ; as a time saver, atmospheric purpose of story writer, audience, settle on your, austen's, jane, old-world "atmosphere," author's aim to help readers god-ward, authors must have something in their heads to write down, authorship compared with dressmaking, , b baby prattle in amateur verse, barclay, mrs., _white ladies of worcester_, ; _the rosary_, barrie, sir j., and dialect, barrie, sir j., short stories, ; _window in thrums_, beautiful thoughts do not guarantee beautiful writing, begin in the middle, be natural, , benson, dr. a. c., big subjects to be avoided, birrell, augustine, blackmore and local colour, blue pencil to be used by writer rather than editor, "body," needed in writing, bolshevism in literature, booksellers as readers, books that shriek, books which survive. why? boothby, guy, and proof corrections, boudoir stories, brain misuse, nature's revenge for, _british weekly_, for style, _broad highway, the_, "atmosphere" of, browning, mrs. and christina rossetti, browning, mrs., "sonnets from the portuguese," browning's _paracelsus_, ; "rough-hewn" method, bryant and longfellow, , bullock, shan f., and local colour, by-gone models of amateurs, c cable, george, cabmen, article on, callers on editors, canton, william, caricature is not characterisation, carlyle's "rough-hewn" method, cataloguing instead of art, causes of actions to be studied, central idea, necessary to story, character delineation needed in love-stories, characterisation is not caricature, characters in story, values of, ; should not be multiplied unduly, ; should explain themselves, , ; to be introduced early, chatterton, cheap books, the flood of, chesterton, g. k., paradoxes of, children, mistakes of writers for, chimney-pot, evolution of the, chimney-pots, ruskin's chapter on, choate, joseph h., on dickens, choose topic from your own environment, clarity, aim for, classics, our purpose on reading them, , clarke, charles heber, cleanness should be made attractive, cleverness must not be obtrusive, climax, do not anticipate, climax in article, climax, never lose sight of, coleridge's _kubla khan_, , colloquialisms, avoid, condensation, need of, condensation never spoils beginner's work, contrasts, incidents inserted in stories as, copy, universal tendency to, copying unrecognised by amateurs, _country of the pointed firs, the_, craddock, chas. egbert, and local colour, _cranford_, , creating an "atmosphere," creation and copying, criticise your own work, criticism, editors have no time for, crockett, s. r., and dialect, curtailment of sentences may be carried to excess, "curtains" are sound business, "curtains," dickens', "curtains" necessary for serial publication, cut down your mss., cynic really gets nowhere, d dante, why we read, , david and jonathan, defects overlooked by fame, delay in editorial decision on mss., delete superfluities in your ms., _dénouement_ as a surprise, , detail, knowledge of, imperative, ; study of, ; too much, , devices to reach editors, dialect an extra mental strain on reader, ; requires exceptional skill, diary form of story, dickens, charles, an adept at "curtains," dickens, central ideas of, diffusiveness, divine discontent, dobson, austin, _angel court_, does the public want it? the publisher's question, dog, the real, doll heroines, _dombey and son_ in u. s. a., _dream days_, kenneth graham, dreams of youth valuable, dressmaking and authorship, , dull book not wanted by anyone, dulness not necessary to goodness, e earle, mabel, _valley song_, eccentricity will not secure permanent interest, editorial routine, editors do not purchase ms. because first attempt, ; have no time to criticise and advise, ; only buy what pays to publish, ; take time to read mss., ; unmoved by irrelevant appeals, emotionalism, emotions of author not always interesting, ending, a happy one best, entertaining, every book should be, environment and circumstances to be studied, environment, your own, as your subject, every generation allows special characteristics of speech, exclusive information necessary, extracts, lavish use undesirable, expressions, antiquated, f facts, ancient, to be omitted, facts needed, fame overlooking defects, farnol, jeffrey, and old-world "atmosphere," feeding the brain with snippets, fiction, monotonous character of mss., fiction, "strong," field, eugene, _limitations of youth_, "fiona macleod," first attempts rarely acceptable, first attempts in literature compared with art and music, first-hand knowledge, need of, first-person limitations, _forest of wild thyme_, alfred noyes, form as applied to articles, formless fragments, fragments, framework of story, freak writings cannot be forecasted, g _garden of verses, a child's_, r. l. stevenson, genius, mistaken ideas of, genius scarce, gloom manufacture is wrong, glow-worms as a hat-trimming, god-ward help in literature, _golden age_, kenneth graham, goodness does not excuse dulness, gosse, dr. edmund, graham, kenneth, _golden age_ and _dream days_, grandmothers in amateur fiction, gray's _elegy_, green, dr. s. g., and _pickwick papers_, "grip" needed for selling, "grit" necessary in a novel, h hackneyed phrases, healthiness, authors should aim at, healthiness should be made desirable, hearn, lafcadio, and local colour, heroine, the rose-petal, _hiawatha's_ appeal to children, "how to ----" articles overdone, human characteristics to be studied, human heart, pivot of great stories, hysterical "atmosphere," i idea, original, lost, ; ornate language cannot cover lack of, ; starting, forgotten by amateurs, ; the central, , ideas and words, ; as varied as human nature, ; more important than rhapsodies, "imaginative writing," immoral fiction, improbabilities, inaccuracy in detail fatal to success, incidents should not be crowded, income expected without training, indefinite style to be avoided, ingelow, jean, inner workings of mind and heart to be studied, interest readers, the need to, interviews with editors undesirable, introductions to editors useless, _invisible playmate_, involved sentences, isolation foolish for an author, j jacobs, w. w., and local colour, james, henry, long sentences of, jewett, sarah orne, ; _country of pointed firs_, journalists as models for the amateur, k kernahan, coulson, keynote of story, kipling, rudyard, and local colour, ; short stories, ; "the recessional," kipling's "cat that walked by itself," ; varied styles, know your characters, "kubla khan," , l _lady of the decoration_, _lady of the lake_, landscape painting, language, pleasing, learning must not be obtrusive, leave off when finished, length of story must be considered, letters, story in the form of, life ever offering new discoveries, literary student at disadvantage compared with students of arithmetic, literature, an elusive business, ; good, what constitutes it, ; intangible, little, frances, _lady of the decoration_, _little women_, local colour and american authors, local colour subordinate to personality, locality should be known to story writer, longfellow, bryant and swinburne, , lovers' outpourings in amateur verse, love-story difficult for amateur, , love-story, need for character delineation, love-stories outlets for girls' emotions, m magazine is a business proposition, main theme should make universal appeal, major, charles, mannerisms not tolerated, "mark twain" and preacher, marriage offers in amateur stories, "max adder's" humour helpful, men and women as they really are, mental "atmosphere," conveying our own, mental food needed, mental indigestion, metrical composition, laws to be studied, meynell, alice, "song," minor details in stories, two purposes of, mitford, miss, _our village_, modern english seldom used by amateur, modern style gained by reading modern stuff, modernity of style desirable, money-making should not alone be object in writing, monotony fatal to success, moral books should be as well-written as nasty ones, morley, viscount, and prize poem, motif important, motives that prompt actions, , mss., proportion of accepted, mss. rejected, reasons why, , , mss. should be typed, music and art compared with literature, , , , n nature dissertations in amateur verse, nature and mind, effects of nutriment, nature's revenge for misuse of brain, negatives, double, new reliable matter will find acceptance, newspaper leading articles for style, notes of observations, , , novel, "grit" necessary for, novel, three-volume, novel, wedding need not be chief aim of, novelty desirable, novice must train himself, noyes, alfred, , o object, be sure of your, observation saves from pitfalls, observation to begin just where you are now, obvious not the whole of the story, the, old-fashioned style not wanted to-day, old-world "atmosphere," omar khayyám, pessimistic "atmosphere" of, one-sided view of life due to isolation, other people's brain-work not acceptable, originality necessary, originality not peculiarity, original work is rare, _our admirable betty_, "atmosphere" of, _our village_, miss mitford, out-doory "atmosphere," p padding stories, painting, three-part basis of, peculiarity not originality, peculiarity will not secure permanent interest, pedantic style, avoid, people, study of, needed, "personal" marking does not carry to editor, personal outlook of readers, pessimism manufacture is criminal, pessimistic "atmosphere," pett ridge and local colour, phil may's methods, _pickwick papers_ and school holiday, picture palaces _versus_ reading, pigeons in war, amateur article on, , plato, why we read, , plausible imp, the, plots, making, plots, well-worn, poems for comparison, poems should have some definite thought, poetic idea in every poem, poetry anthologies, , poetry leads to good prose, poetry, reading aloud, poetry, the so-called "new," point, necessary to a story, polish, preliminary studies for perfect work, press dates are long before publication, proposals in fiction and real life, psychological bearings to be noted, publisher better judge than author, ; not a philanthropic agent, publisher's requirements must be conformed to, publishers specialise in fixed directions, "pull together" your ms., _punch_ and a "curtain," _punch_, influence of, purpose, all writing should have a, q quiller-couch, sir a., quotation marks, r reader's choice, rather than yours, for the reader, , reading, aloud, , ; helps you to judge the worth of information, ; loss of the power of, ; and nibbling, ; necessary for historical stories, read only what you can read thoroughly, "realism" in fiction, reliability essential, return of mss., reviewers, rhapsodies do not constitute poetry, "rich sonority," righteousness, authors should aim at, rives, amélie, and local colour, _rosary, the_, heroine of, rossetti, christina, ; and mrs. browning, and tennyson, , "rough-hewn" method, routine in editors' offices, _rubáiyát_, pessimistic "atmosphere" of the, rules, established, save our wasting time, ruskin's "chapter on chimney-pots," ; defects overlooked, ; _poetry of architecture_, _queen of the air_, _preterita_, ; _sesame and lilies_, , ; tangents, s schools for literature needed, scott's _lady of the lake_, secondary matter in story, seeing yourself in print should not be alone the object in writing, selection, instinct for, , self-expression, craving for, selling, the essential of book production, sensational, the demand for, sentences should be short, serial publication necessitates "curtains," _sesame and lilies_, settle your chronological starting point, shakespeare language not necessary to amateur, shakespeare and spiritual values, , ; why we read, , sharp, wm., shaw, bernard, cynical scintillations of, shelley's _cloud_, short sentences an advantage, short stories need same rules as long ones, shrieking books, skimming, danger of, slang indicates ignorance, slang, monotony of, slangy style, avoid, smile, making people, snippets of reading, _sonnets from the portuguese_, mrs. browning, sound, refined and otherwise, _spectator_ articles for style, speeding up our sentences, spiritual values to be noted, spiritual values and shakespeare, , stale material, start where you are, starting-point, chronological, to be settled, steel, mrs. f. a., , stevenson, r. l., _essays_, ; _garden of verses_, story, "atmospheric" purpose of author, ; balance of, ; assessing values of characters, ; climax never to be lost sight of, ; contrasts, examples of, ; cut out irrelevant particulars, ; dovetailing incidents, ; framework of, ; get well under way early in, ; historical reading necessary for, ; keynote of, ; length of, ; the minor details, ; the three-part basis, ; incidents, select those that matter, ; in form of diary, ; in form of letters, ; over-crowding with detail, ; "slap dash" method of writing, ; told in clear manner most popular, ; written in first person, limitations of, ; written in third person usually best, ; secondary matter in, stories by masters, nothing merely a "fill-up," stories, short, need same rules as long ones, strauss' sound monstrosities, "strong" fiction, style, avoid indefinite, style of writing should vary, subjects must be of interest to readers, ; not repeated by editors, ; unable to be studied should be avoided, successful books must be well-written, swinburne and longfellow, sympathy needed to write convincingly, , t tact necessary to contributors, taylor, ann and jane, tennyson and christina rossetti, tennyson's "break, break, break," ; "flower in a crannied wall," tennyson's poems for reading aloud, thinking, formless, third-person narrative usually best, thought transference, thought, beware of labouring a, thoughts, difficulty of writing them down, three-part basis of story, _timothy's quest_, topicality, keep an eye on, training for authorship imperative, training yourself, travellers, publishers', as readers, typed mss. most likely to be read, u ugliness is not art, _uncle tom's cabin_, central idea of, unpleasant topics, unseen that counts, the, using two words where one will suffice, v _valley song_, by mabel earle, verse, abbreviations to be avoided in, verse, amateur, verse anthologies, , verse-making, laws of, to be studied, verse must voice world-wide need, verse, worth reading, amateur, verse-writing a useful exercise, ; leads to good prose, vocabulary of average person, w wax-figure characters, wedding need not be chief aim of novel, well-worn plots, _when knighthood was in flower_, "atmosphere" of, wholesome literature preferred by public, why, every, hath a wherefore, why some books survive, , wiggin, kate douglas, wilkins, mary e., and local colour, , wilson, president, -word sentence, _window in thrums, a_, wister, owen, and local colour, _woman's magazine_ offered unsuitable subjects, _woman's magazine_ at press some weeks before publication, wooden-horse heroes, word, value of a, word-picture, fragmentary, word-picture study, word-pictures, need to select incidents for, words, greatest writers had no more than we, words, subject should regulate choice, words, use simple, words, using two when one will suffice, write as you actually speak, writing difficult to reduce to set of rules, writing is hard work, writer's influence greater than preacher's, writing a serious responsibility, writing that lasts, * * * * * transcriber's note: obvious misprints and punctuation errors have been corrected silently. note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) transcriber's note: text in italics is surrounded by _underscores_. text in large bold font is surrounded by =equals=. superscripted characters are shown as {^x} with "x" representing the superscripted letter. a broken bar character "¦" has been used in place of the feminine caesura, which resembles a vertical ellipsis "...". [+!] is used for the stress syllable symbol, which resembles an upside-down subscripted capitol v. footnotes have been moved collectively to the chapter ends. anchors and footnotes have been renumbered sequentially. detailed notes about spelling variations, and other transcriber notes are located at the end of this e-text. [illustration: by permission of the right hon. lord sackville, g. c. m. g. portrait of francis beaumont from the original painting at knole park] francis beaumont: dramatist a portrait with some account of his circle, elizabethan and jacobean, and of his association with john fletcher by charles mills gayley, litt.d., ll.d. _professor of the english language and literature in the university of california_ [illustration: desormais] london duckworth & co. henrietta street, covent garden copyright, , by the century co. published, february, to my wife preface in this period of resurgent dramatic creativity when once more the literature of the stage enthralls the public and commands the publisher, it is but natural that playwright, play-lover, and scholar alike should turn with renewed and enlightened interest to the models afforded by our elizabethan masters of the age of gold, to the circumstances of their production and the lives of their imperishable authors. very close to shakespeare stood beaumont and fletcher; but, though during the past three centuries books about shakespeare have been as legion and studies of the "twin literary heroes" have run into the hundreds, to fletcher as an individual but one book has been devoted, and to beaumont but one. a portrait of either beaumont or fletcher demands indeed as its counterpart, painted by the same brush and with alternating strokes, a portrait of his literary partner and friend. but in spirit and in favour the twain are distinct. in this book i have tried to present the poetic and compelling personality of francis beaumont not only as conjoined with, and distinguished from, the personality of fletcher, but as seen against the background of historic antecedents and family connections and as tinged by the atmosphere of contemporary life, of social, literary, and theatrical environment. no doubt the picture has its imperfections, but the criticism of those who know will assist one whose only desire is to do beaumont justice. i take pleasure in expressing my indebtedness to the authorities of the bodleian library and the british museum, to those of the national portrait gallery (especially mr. j. d. milner), to our own librarian of the university of california, mr. j. c. rowell, for unfailing courtesy during the years in which this volume has been in preparation; to mr. j. c. schwab, librarian of yale university, for the loan of rare and indispensable sources of information, and to my colleague, professor rudolph schevill, for reading proof-sheets and giving me many a scholarly suggestion. i deplore my inability to include among the illustrations carefully made by emery walker, of clifford's inn, a copy of the portrait of beaumont's friend, elizabeth, countess of rutland, which hangs at penshurst. on account of the recent attempt to destroy by fire that time-honored repository of heirlooms as precious to the realm as to the family of sidney, the lord de l'isle and dudley has found it necessary to close his house to the public. charles mills gayley. berkeley, california, december , . contents part one beaumont's life, his acquaintances, and his career as poet and dramatist chapter page i the castor and pollux of elizabethan drama ii beaumont's family; his early years: grace-dieu, oxford iii at the inns of court and chancery; the poems assigned to these earlier years iv the vaux cousins and the gunpowder plot v fletcher's family, and his youth vi some early plays of beaumont and of fletcher vii the "banke-side" and the period of the partnership viii relations with shakespeare, jonson, and others in the theatrical world ix the "masque of the inner temple": the pastoralists, and other contemporaries at the inns of court x an intersecting circle of jovial sort xi beaumont and sir philip sidney's daughter; relations with other persons of note xii beaumont's marriage and death; the surviving family xiii the personality, and the contemporary reputation of beaumont xiv tradition, and traditional criticism xv a few words of fletcher's later years part two the collaboration of beaumont and fletcher chapter page xvi statement of the problem; critical apparatus xvii the delimitation of the field xviii the versification of fletcher and of beaumont xix fletcher's diction xx fletcher's mental habit xxi beaumont's diction xxii beaumont's mental habit xxiii the authorship of three disputed plays xxiv "the woman-hater," and "the knight" xxv the five central plays xxvi the last play xxvii the dramatic art, principally of beaumont xxviii did the beaumont "romance" influence shakespeare? xxix conclusion appendix table a " b " c " d " e index list of illustrations portrait of francis beaumont _frontispiece_ facing page the ruins of grace-dieu nunnery ruins of grace-dieu a priory, ulveston, extant in thomas sackville, first earl of dorset the temple the globe theatre, with st. paul's in the background ben jonson francis bacon george villiers, first duke of buckingham, and family john selden the beaumont of the nuneham portrait michael drayton john fletcher john earle, bishop of worcester and salisbury don diego sarmiento, count gondomar beaumont, the dramatist part one beaumont's life, his acquaintances, and his career as poet and dramatist. beaumont, the dramatist chapter i the castor and pollux of elizabethan drama "among those of our dramatists who either were contemporaries of shakespeare or came after him, it would be impossible to name more than three to whom the predilection or the literary judgment of any period of our national life has attempted to assign an equal rank by his side. in the argo of the elizabethan drama--as it presents itself to the imagination of our own latter days--shakespeare's is and must remain the commanding figure. next to him sit the twin literary heroes, beaumont and fletcher, more or less vaguely supposed to be inseparable from one another in their works. the herculean form of jonson takes a somewhat disputed precedence among the other princes; the rest of these are, as a rule, but dimly distinguished." so, with just appreciation, our senior historian of the english drama, to-day, the scholarly master of peterhouse. sir adolphus ward himself has, by availing of the inductive processes of the inventive and indefatigable fleay and his successors in separative criticism, contributed not a little to a discrimination between the respective efforts of the "twin literary heroes" who sit next jason; and who are "beyond dispute more attractive by the beauty of their creations than any and every one of shakespeare's fellow-dramatists." but even he doubts whether "the most successful series of endeavours to distinguish fletcher's hand from beaumont's is likely to have the further result of enabling us to distinguish the mind of either from that of his friend." just this endeavour to distinguish not only hand from hand, but mind from mind, is what i have had the temerity to attempt. and still not, by any means, a barefaced temerity, for my attempt at first was merely to fix anew the place of the joint-authors in the history of english comedy; and it has been but imperceptibly that the fascination of the younger of them, of frank beaumont, the personality of his mind as well as of his art, has so grown upon me as to compel me to set him before the world as he appears to me to be clearly visible. in broad outline the figure of beaumont has been, of course, manifest to the vision of poet-critics in the past. to none more palpably than to the latest of the melodious immortals of the victorian strain. "if a distinction must be made," wrote swinburne as early as , "if a distinction must be made between the dioscuri of english poetry, we must admit that beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. only as pollux was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than castor can it be said that on any side beaumont was a poet of higher and purer genius than fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a difference. few things are stranger than the avowal of so great and exquisite a critic as coleridge, that he could trace no faintest line of demarcation between the plays which we owe mainly to beaumont and the plays which we owe solely to fletcher. to others this line has always appeared in almost every case unmistakable. were it as hard and broad as the line which marks off, for example, shakespeare's part from fletcher's in _the two noble kinsmen_, the harmony would of course be lost which now informs every work of their common genius.... in the plays which we know by evidence surer than the most trustworthy tradition to be the common work of beaumont and fletcher there is indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture as leaves the greatest example of romantic tragedy ... an unique instance of glorious imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly and other than heavenly breed, disproportioned and divine. but throughout these noblest of the works inscribed generally with the names of both dramatists we trace on every other page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every turn the note of a deeper voice, than we can ever recognize in the work of fletcher alone. although the beloved friend of jonson, and in the field of comedy his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his freshest bays were gathered beaumont was the worthiest and the closest follower of shakespeare.... the general style of his tragic or romantic verse is as simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity of outline as that of fletcher's is by comparison lax, effusive, exuberant.... in every one of the plays common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of beaumont, but to detect the touch of fletcher. throughout the better part of every such play, and above all of their two masterpieces, _philaster_ and _the maid's tragedy_, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has not to do with the author of _valentinian_ [fletcher] and _the double marriage_ [fletcher and massinger]. in those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more fluid, more feminine.... but in those tragic poems of which the dominant note is the note of beaumont's genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper key of emotion is touched, than ever was struck by fletcher. the lighter genius is palpably subordinate to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the impression of a loftier spirit. it is true that this distinction is never grave enough to produce a discord; it is also true that the plays in which the predominance of beaumont's mind and style is generally perceptible make up altogether but a small section of the work that bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true that within this section the most precious part of that work is comprised." the essay in which this noble estimate of beaumont occurs remains indeed "the classical modern criticism of beaumont and fletcher," and although recent research has resulted in "variety of opinion concerning the precise authorship of some of the plays commonly attributed to those writers" its value is substantially unaffected. the figure as revealed in glorious proportions to the penetrative imagination and the sympathy of poetic kinship, remains, but by the patient processes of scientific research the outlines have been more sharply defined and the very lineaments of beaumont's countenance and of fletcher's, too, brought, i think, distinctly before us. though swinburne attributes, almost aright, to beaumont alone one play, _the woman-hater_, and ascribes to him the predominance in, and the better portions of _philaster_ and _the maid's tragedy_, and the high interest and graduated action of the serious part of _a king and no king_, and also justly associates him with fletcher in the composition of _the scornful lady_, and gives him alone "the admirable study of the worthy citizen and his wife who introduced to the stage and escort with their applause _the knight of the burning pestle_," and implies his predominance in that play, he does not enumerate for us the acts and scenes and parts of scenes which are beaumont's or fletcher's, or beaumont's revised by fletcher, in any of these plays; and consequently he points us to no specific lines of poetic inspiration, no movements distinctively conceived by either dramatist and shaped by his dramatic pressure, no touchstone by which the average reader may verify for himself that "to beaumont his stars had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour," and that "to fletcher had been allotted a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness of bright exuberant speech." though he is right in discerning in the homelier emotion and pathetic interest of _the coxcombe_, and of _cupid's revenge_ the note of beaumont's manner, he couples with the former _the honest man's fortune_ in which it is more than doubtful whether beaumont had any share. to speak of arbaces in _a king and no king_ as beaumont's, is mainly right, but not wholly, and to assign to him the keen prosaic humour of bessus and his swordsmen, is to assign precisely the scenes that he did not compose. to speak of beaumont's _triumph of love_ is perhaps defensible; but, with grave reluctance, we now question the attribution. he is justified in withdrawing "the noble tragedy of _thierry and theodoret_" from the field of beaumont's coöperation and ascribing it to fletcher and massinger; but he is undoubtedly wrong when he fails to couple the latter's name with that of fletcher as author of _valentinian_. writing as swinburne did after a study of fleay's first investigations into the versification of fletcher, beaumont, and massinger, the wonder is not that once or twice, as a critic, he makes an incorrect attribution, but that his poetic instinct so successfully defied the temptation to enumerate in detail the respective contributions of beaumont and fletcher on the basis of metrical tests _par excellence_,--so surprisingly novel and seductively convincing were the tests then recently formulated. swinburne's mistakes are of sane omission rather than of supererogation. by his judgments as a critic one can not always swear; but here he is, in the main, marvelously right, and a thousand times rather to be followed than some of the successors of fleay who have swamped the personality of beaumont by heaping on him, foundered, sods from a dozen turf-stacks which he never helped to build. but the _chorizontes_--those who would separate every scene and line of the one genius from those of the other--are not lightly to be spoken of. it is only by combining their methods of analysis with the intuitions of the poet-critics that one may hope to see frank beaumont plain: "the worthiest and closest follower of shakespeare in the tragic field; the earliest as well as ablest disciple of ben jonson in pure comedy, varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody." the labour is well bestowed if by its means lovers of poetry and the drama, while not ceasing to admire the elder dramatist, fletcher, may be led to accede at last to the younger his due and undivided honour, may come to speak of him by unhyphenated name--a personality of passion and of fire, a gracious power in poetry, of effulgent dramatic creativity;--if, like the ancients, they may protest occasionally in the name of pollux alone. chapter ii beaumont's family; his early years: grace-dieu, oxford francis beaumont, the dramatist, came of the younger line of an ancient and distinguished family of anglo-norman descent in which there had been barons de beaumont from the beginning of the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. they lived, as did the dramatist later, in the forest of charnwood in leicestershire,--part of the old forest of arden. and it is of a ride to their family seat that john leland, the antiquary, speaks when in his itinerary, written between and , he says: "from leicester to brodegate, by ground well wooded three miles.... from brodegate to loughborough about a five miles.... first, i came out of brodegate park into the forest of charnwood, commonly called the waste. this great forest is a twenty miles or more in compass, having plenty of wood.... in this forest is no good town nor scant a village; ashby-de-la-zouche, a market town and other villages on the very borders of it.... riding a little further i left the park of beau manor, closed with stone walls and a pretty lodge in it, belonging of late to beaumonts.... there is a fair quarry of alabaster stone about a four miles from leicester, and not very far from beau manor.[ ]... there was, since the bellemonts [beaumonts], earls of warwick, a baron [at beaumanoir] of great lands of that name; and the last of them in king henry the seventh's time was a man of simple wit. his wife was after married to the earl of oxford."[ ] these barons "of great lands," living in charnwood forest,--where, as another old writer tells us, "a wren and a squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles; and in summer time a traveler could journey from beaumanoir to burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun,"--these barons are the de beaumonts, from the fourth of whom, john, lord beaumont, who died in , our dramatist was descended. the barony ran from father to son for six generations of alternating henries and johns, _c._ to . john, fourth baron; was grandson of alianor, daughter of henry, earl of lancaster, and so descended from henry iii and the first kings of the house of plantagenet. the second baron, husband of alianor of lancaster, was through his mother, alice comyn, descended from the scotch earls of buchan, and thus connected with the balliols and the royal house of scotland; through his father, henry, the first baron de beaumont, who died in , he was great-grandson of john de brienne, titular king of jerusalem, - .[ ] in a quaint tetrastich in the church of barton-upon-humber, the memory of these alliances is thus preserved: rex hierosolymus cum bellomonte locatur, bellus mons etiam cum baghan consociatur, bellus mons iterum longicastro religatur, bellus mons ... oxonie titulatur.[ ] the sixth baron became, in , the first viscount of english creation; he married a granddaughter of the lord bardolph of shakespeare's _ henry iv_; but with his son "of simple wit," who died in , the viscounty died out. beaumanoir to the east of charnwood is seven miles north of leicester and nine from coleorton where, west of the forest, an older branch of the beaumont family of which we shall hear, later, continued to live and is living to-day; and the old barony was revived, in , in a descendant of the female line, miles thomas stapleton, as ninth baron beaumont. the grandfather of the dramatist, john beaumont, was in the third generation from sir thomas beaumont, the younger son of the fourth lord beaumont. john evidently had to make his way before he could establish himself near the old home in leicestershire; but he must have had some competence and position from the first, for he was admitted early, in the reign of henry viii, a member of the inner temple; in and he performed the learned and expensive functions of reader, or exponent of the law in that society, and later was elected treasurer or presiding officer of the house. he started brilliantly in his profession. in he was counsellor for the corporation of leicester; and, by , he had means or influence sufficient to secure for himself the old nunnery of grace-dieu in charnwood forest, which, as an ecclesiastical commissioner he had four years earlier helped to suppress. that he entered into possession, however, only with difficulty, is manifest from a letter which he wrote in to lord cromwell, enclosing £ as a present and beseeching his lordship's intercession with the king that he may be confirmed in his ownership of the "demenez" as against the cupidity of george, first earl of huntingdon, who "doth labour to take the seyd abbey ffrom me; ... for i do ffeyre the seyd erle and hys sonnes do seeke my lyffe."[ ] he occupied various important legal and administrative positions in the county, and, shortly before the death of edward vi, was appointed to the high office of master of the rolls, or judge of the court of appeal. a year or two later, however, early in , he was removed from his seat on the bench, for defalcation and other flagrant breach of trust. he was imprisoned and fined in all his property, and died the next year. his vast estates were bestowed on francis, earl of huntingdon, by edward vi, but soon afterward, as a result of legal manoeuvre and by the assistance of that earl and his eldest son, the widow of the master of the rolls contrived to retain the manor of grace-dieu; and it long continued to be the country seat of the beaumonts.[ ] this prudent, strenuous, and high-born lady, elizabeth hastings, was the daughter of sir william hastings, a younger son of the incorruptible william, lord hastings, whom in richard of gloucester had decapitated. her grandmother, catherine nevil, was daughter to the earl of salisbury, who died at pomfret, and sister to richard, earl of warwick, the king-maker. elizabeth's aunt, anne hastings, was the wife of george talbot, fourth earl of shrewsbury, and her uncle, edward, was the second lord hastings. edward's children, our elizabeth's first cousins, were anne, countess to thomas stanley, second earl of derby, and that george, first earl of huntingdon, whom, with certain of his five sons, the master of grace-dieu "ffeyred."[ ] we may conjecture that the feud expired with the marriage of elizabeth hastings and john beaumont, or with the death of the first earl in ; and that the policy of his successors, francis and henry, in securing to the huntingdon family the reversion of the forfeited estates of the master of the rolls and, later, releasing a portion of them to elizabeth, was dictated by cousinly affection. the great francis, second earl of huntingdon, lived in the castle of ashby-de-la-zouch, about an hour's walk from mistress beaumont's, and had, in , allied himself to royalty by marrying katherine pole, niece of the cardinal, and great-granddaughter of that george, duke of clarence (brother to edward iv), who was "pack'd with post-horse up to heaven" by the cacodemon of gloucester. when edward vi died, francis declared for lady jane grey and was for a time imprisoned. his daughter was the beautiful lady mary hastings who, being of the blood royal, was wooed for the czar, and might have been "empress of muscovy" had she pleased. from the huntingdon family elizabeth hastings introduced at least one new christian name into that of the beaumonts. for the second earl, she named her oldest son francis. one of her daughters, elizabeth, became the wife of william, third lord vaux of harrowden, in the adjoining county of northampton; and thus our dramatist, through his aunt, was connected with another of the proudest norman families of england,--one of the most devoted to the catholic faith and, as we shall see, active in jesuit interests that during the dramatist's life in london assumed momentous political proportions. aunt elizabeth, lady vaux, died before our frank beaumont was born; and her son henry died when frank was but ten years of age,--but in an entry in the state papers of concerning "the entail of lord vaux's estates on his children by his first wife [john] beaumont's daughter,"[ ] several "daughters" are mentioned. these, his cousins of harrowden, frank knew from his youth up. in all england was to be ringing with their names. john and elizabeth were succeeded at grace-dieu by their son, francis. he was a student at peterhouse, cambridge; afterwards, at the inner temple, where like his father before him, he proceeded reader and bencher. in he sat in parliament as member for aldborough; in he was made sergeant-at-law; and in was appointed one of the queen's justices of the court of common pleas. his method of trying a case, technical and merciless, may be studied in the minutes of the lent assizes of at which the unfortunate jesuit priest, henry walpole, was sentenced to death for returning to england.[ ] his career on the bench was both successful and honourable; and he is described by a contemporary, william burton, the author of the _description of leicestershire_, as a "grave, learned, and reverend judge." he married anne, the daughter of a nottinghamshire knight, sir george pierrepoint of holme-pierrepoint; and their children were henry, born ; john, born about ; francis, the subject of this study, born in or ; and elizabeth, some four years younger than francis.[ ] that we know nothing of the life or personality of this mother of poets, is a source of regret. her family, however, was of a notable stock possessed, immediately after the conquest, of lands in sussex under earl warren. their estate of holme-pierrepoint in nottinghamshire they had inherited from michael de manvers during the reign of edward i. anne's ancestors had been knights banneret, and of the carpet and the sword, for generations. her brother, sir henry pierrepoint, born , married frances, the eldest daughter of the sir william cavendish who began the building of chatsworth, and his redoubtable lady, bess of hardwick, who finished it. this aunt of the young beaumonts of grace-dieu, lady pierrepoint, was sister to william cavendish, first earl of devonshire in and forefather of the present dukes,--to henry cavendish, the friend of mary, queen of scots, and son-in-law of her kindly custodian, george talbot, sixth earl of shrewsbury,--to sir charles cavendish, whose son, william, became earl, and then duke of newcastle,--to elizabeth cavendish, countess of lennox, the wife of henry darnley's brother, charles stuart, and the mother of james i's hapless cousin, lady arabella stuart,--and to mary cavendish, countess of shrewsbury, wife of gilbert, seventh earl. the son of sir henry and lady pierrepoint, robert, born in the same year as his cousin, francis beaumont, the dramatist, married a daughter of the talbots, became in due time viscount newark and earl of kingston, and was killed in during the civil war. from him descended marquises of dorchester and dukes of kingston, and the earls manvers of the present time. through their mother, anne pierrepoint, the beaumont children of grace-dieu were, accordingly, connected with several of the most influential noble families of england and scotland; and in their comradeship with the cousins of holme-pierrepoint they would, as of the common kin, be thrown into familiar acquaintance with the children of the various branches of these and other houses that i might mention.[ ] holme-pierrepoint is seventeen miles northeast of grace-dieu, near the city of nottingham, in the red sand-stone country along the river trent. the park is but a two or three hours' drive from charnwood, and the old house to which anne used to take her children to see their grandparents still stands, altered only in part from what it was in . it belongs to the earl manvers of to-day. in the church is the tomb of the poet's uncle, sir henry pierrepoint, who died the year before francis. since no entry of francis' baptism has been discovered it is uncertain whether he was born at grace-dieu. the probabilities are, however, in favour of that birth-place, since his father was not continuously occupied in london until a later date. as to the exact year of his birth, there is also uncertainty but i think that the records indicate . the matriculation entry in the registers of oxford university describes him as twelve years of age at the time of his admission, february , (new style), which would establish the date of his birth between february and february . the funeral certificate issued at the time of his father's death, april , , speaks of the other children, henry, john, and elizabeth as, respectively, seventeen, fourteen, and nine, years of age, "_or thereaboutes_"; but of francis as "of thirteen yeares _or more_." justice beaumont was a squire of considerable means. when, in , he qualified himself to be bencher by lecturing at the inner temple upon some statute or section of a statute for the space of three weeks and three days, his expenses for the entertainment at table or in revels, alone, must have run to about £ , in the money of to-day. he held at the time of his death landed estates in some ten parishes of leicestershire, between sheepshead on the east and and coleorton three miles away on the west, and scattered over some seven miles north and south between belton and normanton. in derby, too, he had two or three fine manors. his will shows that he was able to make generous provision for many of his "ould and faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing specifically a handsome sum in money to his daughter elizabeth. he was a considerate and careful man, too, for the morning of his death he added a codicil to his will: "i have left somewhat oute of my will which is this, i will that my daughter elizabeth have all the jewells that were her mother's." his sons are not mentioned, for naturally the heir, henry, would make provision for john and francis.[ ] his chief executor was henry beaumont of coleorton, his kinsman,--worth mentioning here; for at coleorton another cousin, maria beaumont, the mother of the great duke of buckingham, had till recently lived as a waiting gentlewoman in the household. grace-dieu where the youth of these children was principally spent, was "beautifully situated in what was formerly one of the most recluse spots in the centre of charnwood forest," within a little distance of the turn-pike road that leads from ashby-de-la-zouch to loughborough. it lies low in a valley, near the river soar. in his _two bookes of epigrammes and epitaphs_, , thomas bancroft gives us a picture of the spot: grace-dieu, that under charnwood stand'st alone, as a grand relicke of religion, i reverence thine old, but fruitfull, worth, that lately brought such noble beaumonts forth, whose brave heroicke muses might aspire to match the anthems of the heavenly quire: the mountaines crown'd with rockey fortresses, and sheltering woods, secure thy happiness that highly favour'd art (tho' lowly placed) of heaven, and with free nature's bounty graced. and still another picture of it is painted, a hundred and seventy years later by wordsworth, the friend of the sir george beaumont who in his day was possessed of the old family seat of coleorton hall, within half an hour's walk of grace-dieu:-- beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound, rugged and high, of charnwood's forest ground stand yet, but, stranger! hidden from thy view, the ivied ruins of forlorn grace-dieu,-- erst a religious house, which day and night with hymns resounded, and the chanted rite: and when those rites had ceased, the spot gave birth to honourable men of various worth: there, on the margin of a streamlet wild, did francis beaumont sport, an eager child: there, under shadow of the neighboring rocks, sang youthful tales of shepherds and their flocks; unconscious prelude to heroic themes, heart-breaking tears, and melancholy dreams of slighted love, and scorn, and jealous rage, with which his genius shook the buskined stage. communities are lost, and empires die, and things of holy use unhallowed lie; they perish;--but the intellect can raise, from airy words alone, a pile that ne'er decays.[ ] so far as the "youthful tales of shepherds" go, wordsworth is probably thinking of the verses of francis' brother, sir john, which open: a shepherdess, who long had kept her flocks on stony charnwood's dry and barren rocks,-- written long after both brothers had left boyhood behind; indeed after francis was dead; or he is attributing to our beaumont a share in fletcher's _faithfull shepheardesse_. francis, himself, has given us nothing of the pastoral vein, save sweet snatches in the dramas "with which his genius shook the buskined stage." there is no doubt that from childhood up, the brothers and, as i shall later show, their sister elizabeth breathed an atmosphere of literature and national life. at an early age john was sufficiently confessed a versifier to be assigned the prelude to one of the nobly patronized michael drayton's _divine poems_, and there is fair reason for believing that the younger brother francis was writing and publishing verses in , when he was barely eighteen years of age. their father was going to and fro among the great in london who made affairs. the country-side all about them was replete with historic memories and inspirations to poetry. in the grey friars' at leicester, eleven miles south-east, simon de montfort allied by marriage to the first anglo-norman de beaumonts, earls of leicester, lay buried. there, too, until his ashes were scattered on the waters of the soar, king richard the third. in the blue boar inn of that "toune,"--in our young beaumont's day, all "builded of tymbre,"--this last of the plantagenets had spent the night before the battle of bosworth. the field itself on which the battle was fought lies but eight miles west of leicester and about nine south of grace-dieu. no wonder that francis beaumont's brother john in after days chose bosworth field as the subject of an heroic poem: the winter's storme of civill warre i sing, whose end is crown'd with our eternall spring; where roses joyn'd, their colours mixe in one, and armies fight no more for england's throne. the beaumonts were living in the centre of the counties most engaged. three of their predecessors had fallen fighting for the red rose, john beaumont of coleorton and john, viscount beaumont, at northampton in , and a henry beaumont at towton in . in his description of the battle, john introduces by way of simile a reference to what may have been a familiar scene about grace-dieu: here stanley and brave lovell trie their strength.... so meete two bulls upon adjoyning hills of rocky charnwood, while their murmur fills the hollow crags, when striving for their bounds, they wash their piercing homes in mutuall wounds. lovell, himself, was a beaumont on the mother's side. and the poet takes occasion to pay tribute, also, to his own most famous ancestor on the grandmother's side, the "noble hastings," first baron, whose cruel execution in _richard iii_, shakespeare had dramatized more than twenty years before john wrote. [illustration: steel engraving by w. finden the ruins of grace-dieu nunnery] just south of charnwood forest stood, in the day of john and francis, the manor house in bradgate park where lady jane grey was born, and where she lived from to while she was being educated by her ambitious father and mother, the marquis and marchioness of dorset, "to occupy the towering position they felt assured she would sooner or later be called to fill"--that of protestant queen of england. here it was that roger ascham, as he tells us in his _schoolmaster_, after inquiring for the lady jane of the marquis and his lady who were out hunting in charnwood forest, came upon the twelve-year old princess in her closet "reading the _phædon_ of plato in greek, with as much delight as gentlemen read the merry tales of boccaccio." the grandmother of the young beaumonts, who was still alive in , may have lived long enough to take our francis on her knee and tell him of the hopes her protestant kinsmen of ashby-de-la-zouch had fixed upon the lady jane, and of how her cousin, the earl, francis of huntingdon, had been one of those who in royal council in june , abetted the dukes of northumberland and suffolk in the scheme to secure the succession of lady jane to the throne, and how, with these dukes and the archbishop of canterbury, and other lords and gentlemen (among them a certain sir john baker of sissinghurst, kent, whose family later appears in this narrative), he had signed the "devise" in accordance with which jane was proclaimed queen. and the old lady would with bated breath tell him of the cruel fate of that nine-days' queen. of how francis of huntingdon was sent to the tower with queen jane, she also would tell. but perhaps not much of how he shortly made his peace with queen mary, hunted down the dead jane's father, and brought him to the scaffold. and either their grandmother or their father, the judge, could tell them of the night in on which their cousin, henry, third earl of huntingdon, had entertained in the castle "rising on the very borders" of the forest to the east, mary, queen of scots, when she was on her way to her captivity in the house of another connection of theirs, henry cavendish, at tutbury in the county of stafford, just east of them. in the history of culture not only john and francis, but the beaumonts in general are illustrious. in various branches and for generations the poetic, scholarly, and artistic vein has persisted. john beaumont's son and heir, the second sir john, edited his father's poems, and lived to write memorial verses on ben jonson, and on edward king, milton's "lycidas"; and another son, francis, wrote verses. a relative and namesake of the dramatist's father,--afterwards master of charterhouse,--wrote an epistle prefixed to speght's _chaucer_, ; and still another more distant relative, dr. joseph, master of peterhouse, and author of the epic allegory, _psyche_, was one of the poetic imitators through whom spenser's influence was conveyed to milton. the sir george beaumont of wordsworth's day to whom reference has already been made was celebrated by that poet both as artist and patron of art. and, according to darley,[ ] lady mary wortley montagu was of the race and maiden name of our dramatist's mother, anne pierrepoint. from which coincidence one may, if he will, argue poetic blood on that side of the family, too; or from grosart's derivation of jonathan edwards from that family, polemic blood, as well. the three sons of justice beaumont of grace-dieu were entered on february , , at broadgates hall, now pembroke, which at that time was one of the most flourishing and fashionable institutions in oxford. these young gentlemen-commoners were evidently destined for the pursuit of the civil and common law, since, as dyce informs us, their hall was then the principal nursery for students of that discipline. but one cannot readily visualize young frank, not yet thirteen, or his brother john, a year or so older, devoting laborious hours to the _corpus juris_ in the library over the south aisle of st. aldate's church, or to their euclid, strabo, aristotle, cicero, quintilian. we see them, more probably, slipping across st. aldate's street to wolsey's gateway of christ church, and through the, then unfinished, great quadrangle, past wolsey's tower in the southeast corner, and, by what then served for the broad walk, to what now are called the magdalen college school cricket grounds, and so to some well-moored boat on the flooded meadows by the cherwell. and some days, they would have under arm or in pocket a tattered volume of ovid, preferably in translation,--turberville's _heroical epistles_, or golding's rendering of the _metamorphoses_,--or painter's _palace of pleasure_, or fenton's _tragical discourses_ out of bandello, dedicated to the sister of sir philip sidney--sir philip, whose daughter young francis should, one day, revere and celebrate in noble lines. or they would have harington's _orlando furioso_ to wonder upon; or some cheap copy of _amadis_ or _palmerin_ to waken laughter. and, other days, fresh quartos of _tamburlaine_ and _edward ii_ and _dido_, or kyd's _spanish tragedy_ and lyly's _gallathea_, or greene's _frier bacon_ and _james iv_, or shakespeare's _richard ii_, and _richard iii_, and _romeo and juliet_, and _love's labour's lost_. these, with alternate shuddering and admiring, mirth or tears, to declaim and in imagination re-enact. and certainly there would be mellow afternoons when the _songs and sonnettes_ known as _tottel's miscellany_ and _the paradyse of daynty devises_, with their poems of love and chivalry by thomas, lord vaux,--of which they had often heard from their cousins of harrowden,--and chapman's completion of _hero and leander_ or shakespeare's _venus and adonis_, and drayton's fantastic but graceful _endimion and phoebe_ would hold them till the shadows were well aslant, and the candles began to wink them back to the cardinal's quadrangle and the old refectory, beyond, of broadgates hall. for the char and the boats were there then, and all these el dorados of the mind were to be had in quarto or other form, and some of them were appearing first in print in the year when frank and his brothers entered oxford. [illustration: view taken by buck in ruins of grace-dieu note: after buck's time the ruins were "carried away to mend the roads." see john throsby, _select views of leicestershire_, vol. ii, .] [illustration: taken by buck a priory, ulveston, extant in ] we may be sure, that many a time these brothers and sworn friends in literature, and henry, too, loyal young elizabethans,--and with them, perhaps, their cousin, robert pierrepoint, who was then at oriel,--strolled northwest from the cherwell toward yarnton, and then woodstock with its wooded slopes, to see the island where queen elizabeth, when but princess, had been imprisoned for a twelvemonth, and, hearing a milk-maid singing, had sighed, "she would she were a milkmaid as she was"; and that they took note of fair rosamund's well and bower, too. they may have tramped or ridden onward north to banbury, and got there at the same cakeshop in parsons street the same cakes we get now. or, some happy michaelmas, they would have walked toward the fertile vale of evesham, north, first, toward warwickshire where at compton scorpion sir thomas overbury, the ill-fated friend of their future master, ben jonson, was born, and on by the village of quinton but six miles from shakespeare's stratford, toward mickleton and the malvern hills; and then, turning toward the cotswolds, to winchcombe with its ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south of it sudely castle where henry viii's last wife, the divorced catherine parr, had lived and died,--where giles, third baron chandos, had entertained queen bess, and where in their time abode the lord william. with this family of brydges, barons chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in at any rate after , when the fifth baron, grey, succeeded to the title. for, writing _teares_ on the death of that hospitable "king of the cotswolds," which occurred in , john beaumont describes him with the admiration begotten of long intimacy,--"the smoothnesse of his mind," "his wisdome and his happy parts," and "his sweet behaviour and discourse." or,--and how could any young oxonian fail of it?--they started from broadgates, down the high, crossed magdalen bridge, where the boats were lazily oaring below them, and set out for the climb to rose hill; then down by sleepy ways to littlemore, and to sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents to nuneham,--where now, in the fine old manor house, hangs frank's own portrait in oils,--one of the two contemporary likenesses of him that exist to-day. footnotes: [ ] leland's _itinerary_, ed. l. t. smith, vol. i, - . [ ] leland's _itinerary_, ed. l. t. smith, vol. iv, . [ ] collins, _peerage of england_, ix, . [ ] j. nichols, _collections toward the history of leicestershire_ (_biblioth. topogr. brit._, vii, ). see, below, appendix, a. [ ] _letters relating to the suppression of the monasteries_, pp. - , camden society, . the editor, thos. wright, describes the petitioner as of thringston, co. leicester. [ ] j. m. rigg, _dict. nat. biog._ art., _john beaumont_; and nichols's _history of leicestershire_, iii, ii, , _et seq._ [ ] collins, _peerage_, vi, , _et seq._; h. n. bell, _the huntingdon peerage_, . see also, below, appendix, table b. [ ] _calendar of state papers_ (_domestic_), , p. . [ ] challoner, _missionary priests_, i, . [ ] for the preceding details, and some of those which follow, see the respective articles in the _dictionary of national biography_; dyce's _works of beaumont and fletcher_, vol. i, _biographical memoir_; grosart, _sir john beaumont's poems_, and the sources as indicated. see also, below, appendix, table c. [ ] see shaw's _knights of england_; collins, _peerage_; and articles in _d. n. b._ under names. [ ] dyce says that the judge was knighted; so rigg (_d. n. b._) and others. the _inner temple records_ speak of him thirty times, but only once, nov. , , as "sir," though others in memoranda running to which mention him are given the title. in the codicil to his will he is plain "mr. beaumont"; and he is not included in shaw's _knights of england_. [ ] _for a seat in the groves of coleorton._ [ ] _works of b. and f._, xvi. chapter iii at the inns of court and chancery; the poems assigned to these earlier years. the career of the beaumonts at the university was shortened by the death of their father, some fourteen months after their admission. henry had been entered of the inner temple, november , , at his father's request. some say with john, but i do not find the latter in the records. francis may have remained at oxford until . on november of that year, he, also, was admitted a member of the inner temple, his two brothers acting as sponsors for him. we notice from the admission-book that he was matriculated _specialiter_, _gratis_, _comitive_,--because his father had been a bencher,--was excused from most of the ordinary duties and charges, and was permitted to take his meals and to lodge outside the inn of court itself. i gather that, like other young students at the time, he lodged and pursued his studies in one of the lesser inns, called inns of chancery, attached to the inner temple and under its supervision: clifford's inn across fleet street; or, across the strand, lyon's inn,--or, let us hope, by preference, clement's inn; where had lain jack falstaff in the days when he was "page to thomas mowbray, duke of norfolk," and was seen by lusty shallow to "break skogan's head at the court-gate when 'a was a crack not thus high;" where had boozed shallow himself and his four friends--"not four such swinge-bucklers in all the inns of court again"; and where, no doubt, they were talking in beaumont's day "of mad shallow yet." in , the inns of chancery lodged about a hundred students each, and served as preparatory schools for the inns of court. at one of these lesser inns[ ] beaumont would acquire some elementary knowledge of civil procedure by copying writs of the clerks of chancery, would listen to a reader sent over by the inner temple to lecture, and would be "bolted," or sifted, in the elements of law by the "inner" or junior barristers; and he would attend "moots" over which senior or "utter" barristers presided. at the end of about two years or earlier, if he proved a promising scholar, he would be transferred to the inn of court, itself. we may assume that about , beaumont would be sitting in clerks' commons in the hall of the inner temple. bread and beer for breakfast,--provided on only four days of the week. at o'clock he would be summoned to dinner by the blowing of a horn,--"thou horne of hunger that cal'st the inns a court to their manger." for his mess of meat,--in lent, fish,--on other occasions, loins of mutton, or beef,--he would make himself a trencher of bread. at or o'clock would come supper,--bread and beer again. after dinner, and again after supper, he would enjoy bolts and exercises conducted by the utter barristers, day in and day out through nearly the whole year. as he advanced in proficiency he would appear as a "moot-man" in the arguments presented before the benchers, or governing fellows, seated as judges. and perhaps he resigned himself, meanwhile, to the proper wear within the inn, which was cap and gown, "but the fashion was to wear hats, cloaks or coats, swords, rapiers, boots and spurs, large ruffs and long hair. even benchers were found to sit in term time with hats on."[ ] whether beaumont gave promise or not we are ignorant. the routine of the inn was impeccable; but students and benchers were not. there were not infrequently other exercises than "moots" after supper: cards and stage-plays, revels and sometimes riots. this much we know, that before young frank could have fulfilled his seven or more years as student and "moot-man," he was already in the rank of poets and dramatists. but, that by no means precludes his continuance for several years, perhaps till , in the juridical university, or his intimate association with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of what would be his college,--the inner temple. and for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere was as poetic as juridical. the young man's fancy was fired by the poetry and the drama that for centuries had enlivened the graver pursuits of the gothic halls that rose between fleet street and the thames, whitefriars and paget place,--"the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as ben jonson calls them in his dedication[ ] to the inns of court of _every man out of his humour_, first published in the year when beaumont entered. according to aubrey, while the garden-wall of lincoln's inn, close by, was building, a bencher of that society "walking thro' and hearing" a young bricklayer "repeat some greek verses out of homer, discoursed with him, and finding him to have a witt extraordinary gave him some exhibition to maintaine him at trinity college, cambridge." that young bricklayer was, later, beaumont's friend and master, ben jonson. lincoln's inn had long been a nursing mother to dramatic effort. at the beginning of queen elizabeth's reign it was one of its members, richard edwardes, who, as master of the chapel children, produced the "tragicall comedie" _damon and pythias_, and the tragedy of _palamon and arcite_, to the great edification of the queen, and the permanent improvement of the senecan style of drama by the fusion of the ideal and the commonplace, of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous in an appeal to popular interest. "he was highly valued," this edwardes, "by those that knew him," says anthony wood, "especially his associates in lincoln's inn." and it was in the middle temple, just fourteen months after beaumont joined the inns of court, that manningham, one of the barristers, witnessed the performance for the reader's feast on candlemas day of shakespeare's _twelfth night_. if beaumont of the inner temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more than the applause, he was not our frank beaumont. we may be sure that he had sauntered through the temple gardens many an afternoon, and knew the spot immortalized by marlowe and that same shakespeare, as the scene of the quarrel between plantagenet and somerset when the white and red roses were plucked, and that he would hear shakespeare when he could. but much as the middle temple and lincoln's favoured the drama and costly entertainments on the major feast-days, they were outdone in christmas revels and masques and plays by the closely affiliated societies of gray's inn and the inner temple. between these houses, says mr. douthwaite, the historian of the former, "there appears anciently to have existed a kindly union, which is shown by the fact that on the great gate of the gardens of the inner temple may be seen to this day [ ] the 'griffin' of gray's inn, whilst over the great gateway in gray's inn square is carved in bold relief the 'wingèd horse' of the inner temple." the two societies had long a custom of combining for the production of theatrical shows; and as we shall see, they combined some thirteen years after beaumont entered the inner temple in the production at court of one of the most glorious and expensive masques ever presented in london, beaumont's own masque for the wedding of the elector palatine and the princess elizabeth. they were influential as patrons of the early drama, and as producers of amateur dramatists. for centuries gray's inn had permitted "revels" after six o'clock supper of bread and beer; and when beaumont was of the inner temple close by, there was a grand week at gray's in every term. "they had revels and masques some of which," as a member of that society has recently said, "have never been forgotten, and i think cannot be forgotten while english history lasts."[ ] from a very early date, perhaps not long after the society was established in edward the third's reign in the old manor of portpool, "they were addicted at the christmas season to a great outburst of revelry of every kind. the revelings began at all hallows; at christmas a prince of portpoole was appointed; who was also lord of misrule, and he kept things gaily alive through christmas and until toward the end of january." these and other disguises, masques, and mummeries, are lineal descendants of the mummings of the ancient order of the coif, such as regaled king richard ii at christmas ; and, amalgamated with st. george plays and other folk-shows and even with sword-dances, they influenced the course of rural drama throughout the realm. it may be a bow drawn at a venture but i cannot withhold the suspicion that the lord of pool of the _revesby sword-play_ and of other popular compositions derives from the historic prince of misrule of the gray's inn christmas revels. it was george gascoigne of gray's inn who by a translation from ariosto introduced the renaissance treatment of the greek new comedy and the latin comedy into england with his _supposes_ in , and in the same year, with francis kinwelmersh, produced at gray's inn an english rendering of ludovico dolce's _giocasta_, a tragedy descended from euripides' _phoenissae_ by way of a latin version. "altogether," remarks professor cunliffe,[ ] "the play must have provided a gorgeous and exciting spectacle, and have produced an impression not unworthy of gray's inn, 'an house', the queen said on another occasion, 'she was much beholden unto, for that it did always study for some sports to present unto her.'" to this house and to gascoigne, shakespeare, too, was beholden, for from the _supposes_ proceeds more or less directly the minor plot of _the taming of the shrew_. in , gray's inn figures prominently again in the career of the pre-shakespearian drama, with the production by one of its gentlemen, thomas hughes, of a tragedy of english legend and senecan type, _the misfortunes of arthur_, played by the society before the queen at greenwich. and, in , gray's inn connects itself with the shakespearian drama directly by witnessing in the great hall in the christmas season a play called _a comedy of errors_, "like to plautus his _menaechmus_." it is diverting to note that on the eve of just that season of , a very pious woman, the second wife of sir nicholas bacon, and the mother of anthony and francis, is writing to the elder brother "i trust that they will not mum nor sinfully make revel at gray's inn." anthony was not a very strict puritan, francis still less so; and francis, who had been of gray's inn since , was, till his fall from power, the keenest devotee and most ardent and reckless promoter of masquing that gray's inn or, for that matter, england, had ever known. according to spedding,[ ] the speeches of the six councillors for the famous court of the prince of purpoole in were written by him and him alone. he furnished the money and much of the device for gorgeous masques before queen elizabeth; and under her successor he was prime mover in many a masque, like that of the _flowers_, presented by the gentlemen of gray's inn, in , which, alone, cost him about £ , as reckoned in the money of to-day. the masques by the four inns, in honour of the elector palatine's marriage, the year before, are said to have cost £ , ,--five hundred thousand dollars in the money of to-day! and it would appear that much of this expense was assumed by sir francis bacon, who in the years of his greatness as solicitor-general and attorney-general retained intimate relations with the life of gray's inn, and whom our beaumont during the years of studentship before , when the gallant sir walter raleigh was consigned to the tower, must many times have seen strolling with sir walter in the walks that bacon himself had laid out for his fellow-benchers of the inn. if beaumont's family had deliberately set about preparing him for his career of poet and dramatist, especially of dramatist who, with john fletcher, should vividly reproduce the life, manners and conversation of young men of fashion about town, they could not have placed him in a community more favourable to these ends than that of the inns of court. as the name itself implies the members were gentlemen of the court of the king. they must be "sons to persons of quality"; they must be trained to the possibility of appearance before the king at any time; they must be ready not merely as a privilege, but as a function, to entertain royalty upon summons. as gray's inn had its flavour of romance, its literary and dramatic history, its sidney, its bacon, its gascoigne; so also the "anciently allied house" of the inner temple. there lingered the tradition, to say the least, of chaucer's stirring poetry; there the spirit of sir francis drake,--stirring romances of the spanish main; there the memory of the christmas revels of at which was first acted the _gorboduc_ of thomas sackville (afterwards earl of dorset, and connected by marriage with the fletchers), and thomas norton,--whose "stately speeches and well sounding phrases, clyming to the height of seneca his stile," whose national quality, romantic illumination of classical form, impressive, and novel dramatic blank verse were to influence imperishably the course of elizabethan tragedy. there, too, had been produced, by five poets of the house, in , "the first english love-tragedy that has survived,"[ ] _gismond of salerne_, a distant but unmistakable forerunner in tempestuous passion and pathos of plays in which young beaumont was to compose the major part, _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_. here, in the intervals between moots and bolts in the day time or during the long evenings about the central fire in hall or in chambers, a young man of poetic proclivities would find ample opportunity to indulge his genius. and, even after he ceased to be an inmate, the inner temple would still be for him a club, in which by the payment of a small annual fee he might retain membership for life. and membership in one 'college' of this pseudo-university implied an honorary 'freedom' of the others. beaumont would know not only william browne, the poet of the inner temple from on, and all browne's poetic fellows in that house, but browne's less poetic friend, christopher brooke, counsel for shakespeare's company of king's players, who earlier in the century had entered lincoln's inn; and, also, brooke's chamber-fellow, john donne, whose secret marriage with the daughter of the lieutenant of the tower, in , got the young scapegraces into jail. and at gray's inn beaumont would be even more at home. it was the 'house' of his kinsman, henry hastings of ashby,--in earl of huntingdon,--two years younger than frank, and admitted as early as ; and of robert pierrepoint, who had come down with frank from oxford and was entered of the inns at the same time; and, two years later, of robert's cousin, william cavendish, afterwards second earl of devonshire. * * * * * if we could be sure that a poem called _the metamorphosis of tabacco_, a mock-ovidian poem of graceful style and more than ordinary wit, published in , and ascribed by some one writing in a contemporary hand upon the title-page, to john beaumont, was john's we might regard the half dozen verses in praise of "thy pleasing rime," signed f. b., and beginning, my new-borne muse assaies her tender wing, and where she should crie, is inforst to sing,-- as young francis' earliest effort in rhyme. the dedication of the _metamorphosis_ to "my loving friend, master michael drayton," favours the conjectured composition by john, for he is writing other complimentary poems to drayton in the years immediately following . but, though f. b.'s lines prefatory to the _metamorphosis_ are not unworthy of a fanciful youngster, they are negligible; as is the evidence of their authorship. certain flimsy love-poems included in a volume published forty years later, twenty-four years after beaumont's death, as of his composition, have also been attributed to his boyhood at the university, or at the inner temple. most of them have been definitely traced to other authors, and of the rest of this class still unassigned there is no reason to believe that he was the author. in the same volume, however, there appears as by beaumont a metrical tale based upon ovid, called _salmacis and hermaphroditus_, of which we cannot be certain that he was not the author. the poem was first published, without name of writer, in ,[ ] and was not assigned to francis beaumont until , when lawrence blaiklock included it among the _poems_: by francis beaumont, gent., entered on the stationers' registers, september , and published, . blaiklock evidently printed from john hodgets's edition of , carelessly omitting here and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical mistakes. either because he had private information that beaumont was the author, or because he wished to profit by beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as to sign the initials, f. b., to the verse dedication, _to calliope_, and to alter the signature, a. f., appended to an introductory sonnet, _to the author_, so as to read i. f. (suggesting john fletcher). these licenses, in addition to the reckless inclusion in the volume of several poems by authors other than beaumont, vitiate blaiklock's evidence. on the other hand, the original publisher, hodgets, was the publisher also, in , of _the woman-hater_, a play now reasonably accepted as by beaumont, originally alone; and, in hodgets's edition of the _salmacis and hermaphroditus_, one of the introductory sonnets is signed j. b., and another w. b. the 'j. b.' sonnet is not unworthy of beaumont's brother john. and if the w. b. of the other verses, _in laudem authoris_, is william basse,--who in a sonnet, written after beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare beaumont,"--there is further justification for entertaining the possibility of beaumont's authorship of the _salmacis_. for basse was one of the group of pastoralists to which francis' friend drayton, and drayton's friend, william browne, belonged,--a group with which francis must have been acquainted. but of that we shall have more to say when we come to consider beaumont's later connection with drayton, and with the dramatic activities of the inner temple at a time when browne and other pastoralists were members of it. for the present it is sufficient to say that basse was himself issuing a pastoral romance in the year of _salmacis_, ; and that he was by way of subscribing himself simply w. b. the external evidence for beaumont's authorship of this metrical tale is, at the best, but slight. as regards the internal, however, i cannot agree with fleay and the author of the article entitled _salmacis and hermaphroditus not by beaumont_.[ ] both diction and verse display characteristics not foreign to beaumont's heroic couplets in epistle and elegy, nor to the blank verse of his dramas,--though they do not markedly distinguish them. the romantic-classical and idyllic grace may be the germ of that which flowers in the tragicomedies; and the joyous irony is not unlike that of _the woman-hater_ and _the knight of the burning pestle_. the poem is a voluptuous and rambling expansion of the classical theme "which sweet-lipt ovid long agoe did tell." the writer, like many a lad of , has steeped himself in the amatory fable and fancy of marlowe, chapman, and shakespeare; and the passionate imaginings are such as characterize poetic lads of seventeen in any period. it is not impossible that here we have francis beaumont's earliest attempt at a poem of some proportions, and that he was stirred to it by exercises like _the endimion and phoebe_ of drayton, probably by that time the friend of the grace-dieu family. francis, indeed, need not have been ashamed of such a performance, for in spite of the erotic fervour and the occasional far-fetched conceits, the poet has visualized clearly the scenes of his mythological idyl, and enlivened the narrative with ingenuous humour; he has caught the figured style and something of the winged movement of his masters; and every here and there he has produced lines of more than imitative beauty: looke how, when autumne comes, a little space paleth the red blush of the summer's face, searing the leaves, the summer's covering, three months in weaving by the curious spring,-- making the grasse, his greene locks, go to wracke, tearing each ornament from off his backe; so did she spoyle the garments she did weare, tearing whole ounces of her golden hayre. the earliest definite indication that i have found of beaumont's literary activity, and of his recognition by poets, connects him with his brother john, and is highly suggestive in still other respects. john had already written, in or , verses prefatory to drayton's poetic treatment of _moyses in a map of his miracles_, published in june of the latter year; and also, in , to drayton's revision of the _barrons wars_. on april , , drayton issued a volume entitled _poems lyrick and pastoral_, which included with other verses a revision, under the name of _eglogs_, of his _idea, the shepheard's garland_, first published in . in the eighth eclogue of this new edition, drayton, writing of the ladies of his time to whom "much the muses owe," adds to his praise of sidney's (elphin's) sister mary, countess of pembroke, an encomium upon the two daughters of his early patron, sir henry goodere, frances and anne (lady ramsford); then he celebrates a "dear sylvia, one the best alive," and then that dear nymph that in the muses joys, that in wild charnwood with her flocks doth go, mirtilla, sister to those hopeful boys, my lovèd thyrsis and sweet palmeo; that oft to soar the southern shepherds bring, of whose clear waters they divinely sing. so good she is, so good likewise they be, as none to her might brother be but they, nor none a sister unto them, but she,-- to them for wit few like, i dare will say: in them as nature truly meant to show how near the first, she in the last could go. the "golden-mouthed drayton musical" had spent his youth not many miles from "wild charnwood," at polesworth hall, the home of the gooderes, in warwickshire. the dear nymph of charnwood is elizabeth beaumont, in a lass of eighteen,--and the "hopeful boys" who bring the southern shepherds (jonson, perhaps, and young john fletcher, as well as drayton) to their grace-dieu priory by the river soar, are john, then about twenty-three, and the future dramatist, about twenty-two.[ ] under the pastoral pseudonym of mirtilla, elizabeth is again celebrated by drayton twenty-four years later, in his _muses elizium_. since these pastorals are in confessed sequence with those of "the prime pastoralist of england," and the pastoral thyrsis and young palmeo have already sung divinely of the clear waters of their native stream, it would appear that they too are disciples at that time of master edmund spenser in his _shepheards calender_. and since these brothers, so like in wit and feature, and in charming devotion to their sister, are all the brothers that she has, it is evident that this portion of the _eglog_ was written after july , ; for up to that date, the eldest of the family, henry, was still living, and at the manor house of grace-dieu. this friendship between drayton and the "hopeful boys" continued through life; for, as we shall later note and more at length, in , the year of john's death, and many years after that of francis, the older poet still celebrates the twain as "my dear companions whom i freely chose my bosome-friends." when james i made his famous progress from edinburgh to london, april to may , , "every nobleman and gentleman kept open house as he passed. he spent his time in festivities and amusements of various kinds. the gentry of the counties through which his journey lay thronged in to see him. most of them returned home decorated with the honours of knighthood, a title which he dispensed with a profusion which astonished those who remembered the sober days of elizabeth."[ ] one of those thus decorated was the poet's brother henry, who was dubbed knight bachelor at worksop in derbyshire, on the same day as his uncle, "henry perpoint of county notts," and william skipwith of cotes in the beaumont county--who appears later as a friend of fletcher. two days afterwards, thomas beaumont of coleorton received the honour of knighthood at the earl of rutland's castle of belvoir.[ ] sir henry of grace-dieu did not long enjoy his title. he died about the tenth of july , and was buried on the thirteenth. by his will, witnessed by his brother francis, and probated february , sir henry left half of his private estate to his sister, elizabeth "for her advancement in marriage," and the other half to be divided equally between john and francis. he was succeeded as head of the family by john,[ ] who later married a daughter of john fortescue--also of a poetic race--and left by her a large family. the sister, elizabeth (mirtilla) probably continued to live at grace-dieu until her marriage to thomas seyliard of kent. and that francis occasionally came home on visits from london we have other proof than that afforded by drayton. the provision of a competence made by sir henry's will leads us to conjecture that the subsequent dramatic activity of the younger brother was undertaken for sheer love of the art; and that, while his finances may have been occasionally at low ebb, the association in bohemian _ménage_ with john fletcher, which followed the years of residence at the inner temple, was a matter of choice, not of poverty. footnotes: [ ] _inns of court and chancery_ (lond., ), p. ; w. r. douthwaite, _gray's inn, its history and associations_ (lond., ), pp. , , . for the beaumonts, and what follows, see, also, inderwick, _inner temple records_ (lond. ), i, ; ii, ; introductions, and subjects as indexed. [ ] _inns of court, etc._, p. . [ ] the dedication first appears in the folio of . [ ] h. e. duke, k. c., m. p., _gray's inn in six lectures on the inns of court and of chancery_, . [ ] _early english classical tragedies_, introduction, p. lxxxvi. [ ] letters and life of francis bacon, i, . [ ] cunliffe, _e. e. class. tragedies_, p. lxxxvi. [ ] reprinted by _dramaticus, sh. soc. pap._ iii, ( ). [ ] _dramaticus_, (as above). [ ] on these identifications, see fleay, _chron. eng. dr._, i, - ; elton, _michael drayton_, pp. , ; child, _michael drayton_ (in _camb. hist. lit._, iv, , _et seq._). [ ] gardiner, _hist. engl._ - , p. . [ ] shaw's _knights of engl._, vol. ii, under dates. [ ] grosart (_d. n. b._ art. _john beaumont_) says that john had been admitted to the inner temple with henry. john does not appear in inderwick. chapter iv the vaux cousins and the gunpowder plot certain political events of the years to must have occasioned the young beaumonts intimate and poignant concern. their own family was, of course, protestant, but it was closely connected by blood and matrimonial alliance with some of the most devoted and conspicuous catholic families of england. some of their hastings kinsmen, sons of francis, earl of huntingdon, were catholics; and their first cousins, the vauxes, whose home at great harrowden near by had been for over twenty years the harbourage of persecuted priests, were active jesuits. after the death of his first wife,--beaumont's aunt elizabeth, who left four children, henry, eleanor, elizabeth, and anne,--william, lord vaux, had married mary, the sister of the noble-hearted and self-sacrificing catholic, sir thomas tresham of rushton in northamptonshire; and this lady had brought up her own children, george and ambrose, as well as the children of the first marriage, in strict adherence to the roman faith and practice. henry, the heir to the title, had been one of that zealous band of young catholic gentlemen who received fathers campion and persons on their arrival in england in .[ ] before , henry, "that blessed gentleman and saint," as father persons calls him, had died, having resigned his inheritance of the barony to his brother george some years earlier in order to spend his remaining days in celibacy, study, and prayer. in , george, the elder son by the second marriage, had taken to wife, elizabeth roper, also an ardent catholic, the daughter of the future lord teynham. she was left a widow in with an infant son, edward, whom she educated to maintain the catholicity of the family. in , the old baron, beaumont's uncle, died--"the infortunatest peer of parliament for poverty that ever was" by reason of the fines and forfeitures entailed upon him for his religious zeal. meanwhile, in , we find the daughters of the first marriage, eleanor, whose husband was an edward brookesby, of arundel house, leicestershire, and anne vaux, concealing in a house in warwickshire, the well-known father gerard and his superior, father garnet, from priest-hunters, or pursuivants. these two cousins of beaumont are described in father gerard's _narrative_[ ] as illustrious for goodness and holiness, "whom in my own mind i often compare to the two women who received our lord." the younger, anne, "was remarkable at all times for her virginal modesty and shamefacedness, but in the cause of god and the defence of his servants, the _virgo_ became _virago_. she is almost always ill, but we have seen her, when so weakened as to be scarce able to utter three words without pain, on the arrival of the pursuivants become so strong as to spend three or four hours in contest with them. when she has no priest in the house she feels afraid; but the simple presence of a priest so animates her that then she makes sure that no devil has any power over her house." in the years that follow to , the vauxes are identified as recusants and as sympathizers with the untoward fortunes of fathers southwell, walpole, garnet, and others. in , their kinsman and frank beaumont's, henry hastings, nephew to george, fourth earl of huntingdon, has joined the ranks and in , we find him in a list of jesuits "to be sought after" by the earl of salisbury,--"john gerard with mrs. vaux and young mr. hastings." father gerard's headquarters in fact are from to with mrs. vaux and her son edward, the young baron, at great harrowden, and there others of the fifteen jesuit fathers in england at that time, and prominent catholics, such as sir oliver manners, brother of roger, earl of rutland, sir everard digby, and francis tresham, a first cousin of mrs. vaux, were wont to foregather. when james i came to the throne, the catholics had hope of some alleviation of the penalties under which they laboured. disappointed in this hope, the discontented, led by two priests, watson and clarke, embarked upon a wild scheme to kidnap the king and set as the price of his liberty the extension to catholics of equal rights, religious, civil, and political, with the protestants. the plot was betrayed, the priests executed, and the other leaders condemned to death,--then reprieved but attainted. among those thus reprieved were lord grey de wilton and "a confederate named brookesby." this brookesby was bartholomew, the brother of eleanor vaux's husband. when new and more stringent measures were immediately adopted for the repression of priests and recusants, the indignation of the catholics reached a climax. "they saw," says gardiner, "no more than the intolerable wrong under which they suffered; and it would be strange if there were not some amongst them who would be driven to meet wrong with violence, and to count even the perpetration of a great crime as a meritorious deed."[ ] in father gerard took a new house in london in the fields behind st. clement's inn,--just across the strand from the inner temple where francis beaumont was living at the time. "this new house," says gerard, "was very suitable and convenient and had private entrances on both sides, and i had contrived in it some most excellent hiding-places; and there i should have long remained, free from all peril or even suspicion, if some friends of mine, while i was absent from london, had not availed themselves of the house rather rashly."[ ] these friends were robert catesby, a cousin of the vauxes of harrowden; his cousin, thomas winter; winter's relative, john wright, and thomas percy, a kinsman of henry, ninth earl of northumberland,--all gentlemen of distinguished county families. in may , these men with one guy fawkes of york and scotton, a soldier of fortune and "excellent good natural parts," and, like the rest, fanatic with brooding over the wrongs of the catholic church, met at father gerard's house behind st. clement's inn, swore to keep secret the purpose of their meeting, received in an adjoining room the sacrament from father gerard, an unwitting accomplice, in confirmation of their oath; and then, retiring, learned from catesby that the project intended was to blow up the parliament house with gunpowder when the king and the royal family next came to the house of lords. within a few days "thomas percy hired a howse at westminster," says fawkes in his subsequent confession, "neare adjoyning parlt. howse, and there wee beganne to make a myne about the xi of december, ." the rest of the story is too well-known to call for repetition. how the gunpowder was smuggled into a cellar running under the parliament house; how, when parliament was prorogued to november th, , the conspirators, running short of money to equip an insurrection, added to their number a few wealthy accomplices,--most significant to our narrative, that old friend of the vauxes, sir edward digby, and francis tresham, cousin of catesby and the winters, and as i have said of the vauxes themselves.[ ] how tresham, recoiling from the destruction of innocent catholic lords with the detested protestants, met catesby, winter, and fawkes at white webbs, "a house known as dr. hewick's house by enfield chace," and laboured with them for permission to warn their friends, especially his brothers-in-law, lord stourton and monteagle; and how, when permission was refused, he wrote an anonymous letter to monteagle, begging him "as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this parliament; for god and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time." how monteagle informed the council and the king. how guy fawkes was discovered among his barrels of gunpowder, and on the fourth of november arrested as "john johnson," the servant of thomas percy, one of the king's gentlemen pensioners. how "on the morning of the fifth, the news of the great deliverance ran like wildfire along the streets of london," and catesby and wright, percy and the brothers winter, were in full flight for lady catesby's house in ashby st. legers, northamptonshire, not far from harrowden. with the rest of the world francis beaumont would gasp with amazement. but what must have been his concern when on the first examination of "john johnson," november th, the identity of that conspirator was established not by any confession of his, but from the contents of a letter found upon him, written by--beaumont's first cousin, anne vaux![ ] as intelligence oozed from the lords of council, beaumont would next learn that anne's sister-in-law, mrs. [elizabeth] vaux of harrowden had expected something was about to take place, and that father gerard and "walley" [garnet, the father superior of the english jesuits] "made her house their chief resort"; and then that fawkes had confessed that catesby, the two winters, and francis tresham--all of the vaux family connection--and sir everard digby of their close acquaintance, were implicated in the plot; and that the conspiracy was not merely to blow up the older members of the royal family but to secure the princess elizabeth, place her upon the throne, and marry her to an english catholic,[ ]--therefore, an enterprise likely to implicate his catholic cousins, indeed. his friend, ben jonson, is meanwhile blustering of private informations, and francis would be likely to hear that ben has written (november ) to lord salisbury offering his services to unravel the web "if no better person can be found," and averring that the catholics "are all so enweaved in it as it will make gent. lesse of the religion within this weeke." then he is apprised that john wright, catesby, percy, etc., have been seen at "lady" vaux's on the eighth. the next day, that these three and christopher wright have been overtaken and slain; and then that, on the ninth, fawkes has confessed that they have been using a house of father garnet's at white webbs as a rendezvous. perhaps white webbs means nothing to francis just yet, but it soon will. three days later, tresham under examination acknowledges interviews with his cousins, catesby and thomas winter, and with fathers garnet and gerard; but says he has not been at mrs. vaux's house at harrowden for a year. soon afterwards, december , the inner temple itself is shaken to the foundations by the intelligence that jesuit literature has been discovered by sir edward coke in tresham's chamber,--a manuscript of blackwell's famous treatise on _equivocation_, destined to play a baleful rôle in the ensuing examination of certain of the suspects. meanwhile, francis would observe with alarm that his vaux cousins are from day to day objects of deeper suspicion. on november , lord vaux's house at harrowden is searched; his mother gives up all her keys but no papers are found. she and the young lord strongly deny all knowledge of the treason; the house, however, is still guarded. on the eighteenth, elizabeth, mrs. vaux, is examined and says that she does not know "gerard, the priest"[!]; but among the visitors at her house she mentions catesby, digby, and "greene" [greenway] and "darcy" [garnet], priests. she acknowledges having written to lady wenman, the wife of sir richard, last easter, saying that "tottenham would turn french," but fails to explain her meaning. from other quarters, however, it is learned that she bade that lady "be of good comfort for there should soon be toleration for religion," adding: "fast and pray that that may come to pass which we purpose, which yf it doe, wee shall see totnam turned french." and sir richard, examined concerning the contents of mrs. vaux's letter to his wife, affirms that he "disliked their intercourse, because mrs. vaux tried to pervert his wife." on december , catesby's servant, bates, acknowledges that he revealed the whole plot to greenway, the priest, in confession, "who said it was a good cause, bade him be secret, and absolved him." from henry huddleston's examination, december , it appears that mrs. vaux has not been telling the whole truth about harrowden, for not only were the two other priests most suspected, garnet and greenway, there sometimes, but also gerard, whom huddleston has met there. on january , bates definitely connects gerard and garnet with the proceedings; and all three priests are proclaimed. gerard cannot be found, but from his own _narrative_ it appears that he had been hiding at harrowden before, that now he is concealed in london, and elizabeth vaux knows where.[ ] when she is brought again before the lords of council and threatened with death if she tell not where the priest is, we may imagine the interest of the beaumonts. francis, though no sympathizer with the plot, cannot have failed to admire the bearing of elizabeth during the examination: "as for my hostess, mrs. vaux," writes father gerard, "she was brought to london after that long search for me, and strictly examined about me by the lords of the council; but she answered to everything so discreetly as to escape all blame. at last they produced a letter of hers to a certain relative, asking for the release of father strange and another, of whom i spoke before. this relative of hers was the chief man in the county in which they had been taken, and she thought she could by her intercession with him prevail for their release. but the treacherous man, who had often enough, as far as words went, offered to serve her in any way, proved the truth of our lord's prophecy, 'a man's enemies shall be those of his own household!' for he immediately sent up her letter to the council. they showed her, therefore, her own letter, and said to her, 'you see now that you are entirely at the king's mercy for life or death; so if you consent to tell us where father gerard is, you shall have your life.' "'i do not know where he is,' she answered, 'and if i did know, i would not tell you.' "then rose one of the lords, who had been a former friend of hers, to accompany her to the door, out of courtesy, and on the way said to her persuasively, 'have pity on yourself and on your children, and say what is required of you, for otherwise you must certainly die.' "to which she answered with a loud voice, 'then, my lord, i will die.' "this was said when the door had been opened, so that her servants who were waiting for her heard what she said, and all burst into weeping. but the council only said this to terrify her, for they did not commit her to prison, but sent her to the house of a certain gentleman in the city, and after being held there in custody for a time she was released, but on condition of remaining in london. and one of the principal lords of the council acknowledged to a friend that he had nothing against her, except that she was a stout papist, going ahead of others, and, as it were, a leader in evil." what follows of elizabeth's devotion to the cause, would not be likely to filter through; but the beaumonts may have had their suspicions. according to father gerard:-- "immediately she was released from custody, knowing that i was then in london, quite forgetful of herself, she set about taking care of me, and provided all the furniture and other things necessary for my new house. moreover, she sent me letters daily, recounting everything that occurred; and when she knew that i wished to cross the sea for a time, she bid me not spare expense, so that i secured a safe passage, for that she would pay everything, though it should cost five thousand florins, and in fact she sent me at once a thousand florins for my journey. i left her in care of father percy, who had already as my companion lived a long time at her house. there he still remains, and does much good. i went straight to rome, and being sent back thence to these parts, was fixed at louvain."[ ] so much at present of elizabeth. we shall hear of her, as did beaumont, during the succeeding years. in the tribulations of anne vaux, his own first cousin, francis must have been even more deeply interested. that she was in communication with fawkes had been discovered, november . she was apprehended, committed to the care of sir john swynerton, but temporarily discharged. when fawkes confessed, november , that the conspirators had been using a house of father garnet's at white webbs, in enfield chace, the house called "dr. hewick's" was searched. "no papers nor munition found, but popish books and relics,--and many trap-doors and secret passages." garnet had escaped but, on examination of the servants, it developed that under the pseudonym of "meaze" he had taken the house "for his sister, mrs. perkins,"--[and who should "mrs. perkins" turn out to be but anne vaux!] the books and relics are the property of "mrs. jennings,"--[and who should she be but anne's sister, eleanor brookesby!] "mrs. perkins spent a month at white webbs lately;" and "three gentlemen [catesby, winter, and another] came to white webbs, the day the king left royston" [october ]. on november , sir everard digby's servant deposes concerning garnet that "mrs. ann vaux doth usually goe with him whithersoever he goethe." on january , as we have seen, warrants are out for the arrest of garnet. on january , he is taken with another jesuit priest, father oldcorne, at hindlip hall, in worcestershire, where for seven days and nights they have been buried in a closet, and nourished by broths conveyed to them by means of a quill which passed "through a little hole in a chimney that backed another chimney into a gentlewoman's chamber." true enough, the deposition, that whithersoever her beloved father superior "goethe, mrs. ann vaux doth usually goe"; for she is the gentlewoman of the broths and quill,--she with mrs. abington, the sister of monteagle. garnet and oldcorne are taken prisoners to the tower; and three weeks later anne is in town again, communicating with garnet by means of letters, ostensibly brief and patent, but eked out with tidings written in an invisible ink of orange-juice. on march , garnet confesses that mrs. anne vaux, alias perkins, he, and brookesby bear the expenses of white webbs. on march , anne being examined says that she keeps the place at her own expense; that catesby, winter, and tresham have been to her house, but that she knew nothing of the plot; on the contrary, suspecting some mischief at one time, she had "begged garnet to prevent it." examined again on march , she says that "francis tresham, her cousin, often visited her and garnet at white webbs, erith, wandsworth, etc., when garnet would counsel him to be patient and quiet; and that they also visited tresham at his house in warwickshire." garnet's trial took place at guildhall on march , sir edward coke of the inner temple acting for the prosecution. garnet acknowledged that the plot had been conveyed to him by another priest [greenway] in confession. he was convicted, however, not for failing to divulge that knowledge, but for failing to dissuade catesby and the rest, both before and after he had gained knowledge from greenway. he was executed on may . of anne's share in all that has preceded, beaumont would by this date have known. one wonders whether he or his brother, john, ever learned the pathetic details of the final correspondence between anne and the father superior. how, march , she wrote to him asking directions for the disposal of herself, and concluding that life without him was "not life but deathe." how, april , he replied with advice for her future; and as to oldcorne and himself, added that the former had "dreamt there were two tabernacles prepared for them." how, the next day, she wrote again asking fuller directions and wishing father oldcorne had "dreamt there was a third seat" for her. and how, that same day, with loving thought for all details of her proceedings, and with sorrow for his own weakness under examination, the father superior sends his last word to her,--that he will "die not as a victorious martyr, but as a penitent thief,"--and bids her farewell. all this of the harrowden cousins and their connection with catholicism and the gunpowder plot, i have included not only because it touches nearly upon the family interests and friendships of beaumont's early years, but also because it throws light upon the circumstances and feelings which prompted the satire of his first play, _the woman-hater_ (acted in ), where as we shall see he alludes with horror to the plot itself, but holds up to ridicule the informers who swarmed the streets of london in the years succeeding, and trumped up charges of conspiracy and recusancy against unoffending persons, and so sought to deprive them, if not of life, of property. it is with some hesitancy, since the proof to me is not conclusive, that i suggest that the animus in this play against favourites and intelligencers has perhaps more of a personal flavour than has hitherto been suspected. an entry from the docquet, calendared with the state papers, domestic, of november , , may indicate that john beaumont, the brother of francis, though a protestant, had in some way manifested sympathy with his catholic relatives during the persecutions which followed the discovery of the gunpowder plot:--"gift to sir jas. sempill of the king's two parts of the site of the late dissolved monastery of grace-dieu, and other lands in leicester, in the hands of the crown by the recusancy of john beaumont." at first reading the john beaumont would appear to be francis' grandfather, the master of the rolls. but the master lost his lands not for recusancy (or refusal on religious grounds to take the oath of allegiance, or attend the state church), but for malfeasance in office, and that in - , while the protestant edward vi was king. he had no lands to lose after mary mounted the throne,--even if as a protestant he were recusant under a catholic queen. the recusancy seems to be of a date contemporaneous with james's refusal, october , , to take fines from recusants, the king, as the state papers inform us, taking "two-thirds of their goods, lands, etc., instead." the "two-thirds" would appear to be the "two parts" of grace-dieu and other lands, specified in the gift; and that the sufferer was francis beaumont's brother is rendered the more likely by the fact that the beneficiary, sir james sempill, had been distinguishing himself by hatred of roman catholics from november , , on; and that on july , , he is again receiving grants "out of lands and goods of recusants, to be convicted at his charges." there is nothing, indeed, in the career of beaumont's brother, john, as commonly recorded, or in the temper of his poetry to indicate a refusal on his part to disavow the supremacy of rome in ecclesiastical affairs, or to attend regularly the services of the protestant church. his writings speak both loyalty and protestant christianity. but it is to be noted that not only many of his kinsmen but his wife, as well, belonged to families affiliated with roman catholicism, and that his eulogistic poems addressed to james are all of later years,--after his kinsman, buckingham, had "drawn him from his silent cell," and "first inclined the anointed head to hear his rural songs, and read his lines"; also that it is only under james's successor that he is honoured by a baronetcy. it is, therefore, not at all impossible that, because of some careless or over-frank utterance of fellow-feeling for his catholic connections, or of repugnance for the unusually savage measures adopted after the discovery of the gunpowder plot, he may have been accused of recusancy, deprived of part of his estate, and driven into the seclusion which he maintained at grace-dieu till or thereabout. footnotes: [ ] john morris, _life of father john gerard_, p. , _et seq._ [ ] morris, _op. cit._, p. . see below, appendix, table d. [ ] gardiner, _hist. engl._ - , i, . [ ] morris, p. . see also, below, appendix, table d. [ ] fletcher's connections, also, the bakers, lennards, and sackvilles were interested in the fortunes of francis tresham; for he had married anne tufton of hothfield, kent, granddaughter of mary baker who was sister of sir richard of sissinghurst and of cicely, first countess of dorset.--collins, iii, ; hasted, vii, . see below, appendix, tables d, e. [ ] the facts as here presented are drawn from the _calendar of state papers (domestic)_, the _gunpowder plot book_, and father gerard's _narrative_ (in morris), in the order of dates as indicated. [ ] nov. - . [ ] morris, _life of father gerard_, p. . [ ] morris, pp. - . chapter v fletcher's family, and his youth the friendship between francis beaumont and john fletcher may have commenced at any time after francis became a member of the inner temple, in ,--probably not later than , when beaumont was about twenty-one and fletcher twenty-six. the latter was the son of "a comely and courtly prelate," richard, bishop, successively of bristol, worcester, and london. richard's father, also, had been a clergyman; and richard, himself, in his earlier years had been pensioner and scholar of trinity, cambridge ( ), then fellow of bene't college (corpus christi), then president of the college. in he married elizabeth holland at cranbrook in kent, perhaps of the family of hugh holland, descended from the earls of kent, who later appears in the circle of beaumont's acquaintance; became, next, minister of the church of rye, sussex, about fifteen miles south of cranbrook; then, chaplain to the queen; then, dean of peterborough. while he was officiating at rye, in december , john the fourth of nine children, was born. this john, the dramatist, is probably the "john fletcher of london," who was admitted pensioner of bene't college, cambridge, in , and, as if destined for holy orders, became two years later a bible-clerk, reading the lessons in the services of the college chapel. at the time of his entering college, his father had risen to the bishopric of bristol; and, later in , had been made lord high almoner to the queen; he had a house at chelsea, and was near the court "where his presence was accustomed much to be." by the bishop had been advanced to the diocese of worcester; and we find him active in the house of lords with the archbishop of canterbury in the proposal of severe measures against the barrowists and brownists.[ ] the next year he was elected bishop of london,--succeeding john aylmer, who had been tutor to lady jane grey,--and was confirmed by royal assent in january . from sir john harington's unfavourable account[ ] it would appear that the bishop owed his rapid promotion to the combination of great mind and small means which made him a fitting tool for "zealous courtiers whose devotion did serve them more to prey on the church than pray in the church." but his will, drawn in , shows him mindful of the poor, solicitous concerning the "chrystian and godlie education" of his children and confident in the principles and promises of the christian faith,--"this hope hath the god of all comforte laide upp in my breste." we have no record of john's proceeding to a degree. it is not unlikely that he left cambridge for the city when his father attained the metropolitan see. from early years the boy had enjoyed every opportunity of observing the ways of monarchs and courtiers, scholars and poets, as well as of princes of the church. since , his father had "lived in her highnes," the queen's, "gratious aspect and favour." _præsul splendidus_, says camden. eloquent, accomplished, courtly, lavish in hospitality and munificence, no wonder that he counted among his friends, burghley, the lord treasurer, and burghley's oldest son, sir thomas cecil, anthony bacon, the brother of sir francis, and that princely second earl of essex, robert devereux, who had married the widow of sir philip sidney, and with whom the lame but clever anthony bacon lived. sir francis drake also was one of his friends and gave him a "ringe of golde" which he willed to one of his executors. another of his "loveinge freindes," and an assistant-executor of his will, was the learned and vigorous dr. richard bancroft, his successor as bishop of london and afterwards archbishop of canterbury. as for immediate literary connections, suffice it here to say that the bishop's brother, dr. giles fletcher, was a cultivated diplomat and writer upon government, and that the sons of dr. giles were the clerical spenserians, phineas, but three years younger than his cousin the dramatist,--whose fisher-play _sicelides_ was acting at king's college, cambridge, in the year of john's _chances_ in london, and whose _brittain's ida_ is as light in its youthful eroticism as his _purple island_ is ponderous in pedantic allegory,--and giles, nine years younger than john, who was printing verses before john wrote his earliest play, and whose poem of _christ's victorie_ was published, in , a year or so later than john's pastoral of _the faithfull shepheardesse_. bishop fletcher could tell his sons stories of royalty, not only in affluence, but in distress; for when john was but eight years old the father as dean of peterborough was chaplain to mary, queen of scots, at fotheringay, adding to her distress "by the zeal with which he urged her to renounce the faith of rome." it was he who when mary's head was held up after the execution cried, "so perish all the queen's enemies!"[ ] he could, also, tell them much about the great founder of the dorset family, for at fotheringay at the same time was thomas sackville, lord buckhurst, afterwards first earl of dorset, who had come to announce to mary, queen of scots, the sentence of death. from on, the bishop was experiencing the alternate "smiles and frowns of royalty" in london; about the time that john left college more particularly the frowns. for, john's mother having died about the end of , the bishop had, in , most unwisely married maria (daughter of john giffard of weston-under-edge in gloucestershire), the relict of a few months' standing of sir richard baker of sissinghurst in kent. the bishop's acquaintance with this second wife, as well as with the first, probably derived from his father's incumbency as vicar of the church in cranbrook, kent, which began in and was still existing as late as . the young richard would often have shuddered as a child before bloody baker's prison with its iron-barred windows glowering from the parish church, for sir john hated the primitive and pious anabaptists who had taken up their abode about cranbrook, and he hunted them down;[ ] and richard would, as a lad, have walked the two miles across the clayey fields and through the low-lying woods with his father to the stately manor house, built by old sir john baker himself in the time of edward vi, and have seen that distinguished personage who had been attorney-general and chancellor of the exchequer under henry viii,--and who as may be recalled was one of that council of state, in , which ratified and signed edward vi's 'devise for the succession' making lady jane grey inheritress of the crown. and when young richard returned from his presidency of bene't college, in , to cranbrook to marry elizabeth holland, he would have renewed acquaintance with sir richard, who had succeeded the "bloody" sir john as master of sissinghurst, sixteen years before. he may for all we know have been present at the entertainment which that same year sir richard made for queen elizabeth. maria giffard was twenty-four years old, then. whether she was yet lady baker we do not know--but it is probable; and we may be sure that on his various visits to cranbrook, the rising dean and bishop had frequent opportunity to meet her at sissinghurst before his own wife's death, or the death of sir richard in . since the sister of sir richard baker, cicely, was already the wife of thomas sackville, lord buckhurst, when, in - , buckhurst and richard fletcher, dean of peterborough, were thrown together at fotheringay, it is not unlikely that the closer association between the fletchers and lady buckhurst's sister-in-law of sissinghurst grew out of this alliance of the sackvilles with the bakers. [illustration: thomas sackville, first earl of dorset from the portrait in the possession of lord sackville, at knole park] lady baker was in in conspicuous disfavour with queen elizabeth, and with the people too; for, if she was virtuous, as her nephew records,[ ] "the more happy she in herself, though unhappy that the world did not believe it."[ ] certain it is, that in a contemporary satire she is thrice-damned as of the most ancient of disreputable professions, and once dignified as "my lady letcher." though of unsavoury reputation, she was of fine appearance, and socially very well connected. her brother, sir george giffard, was in service at court under elizabeth; and in sackville, lord buckhurst, she had a brother-in-law, who was kinsman to the queen, herself. but not only did the queen dislike her, she disliked the idea of any of her prelates, especially her comely bishop of london, marrying a second time, without her express consent. for a year after this second marriage the bishop was suspended from his office. "here of the bishop was sadly sensible," says fuller, "and seeking to lose his sorrow in a mist of smoak, died of the immoderate taking thereof." sir john harington, however, tells us that he regained the royal favour;--"but, certain it is that (the queen being pacified, and hee in great jollity with his faire lady and her carpets and cushions in his bed-chamber) he died suddenly, taking tobacco in his chaire, saying to his man that stood by him, whom he loved very well, 'oh, boy, i die.'" that was in . the bishop left little but his library and his debts. the former went to two of his sons, nathaniel and john. the latter swallowed up his house at chelsea with his other properties. the bishop's brother and chief executor of the will, giles, the diplomat, is soon memorializing the queen for "some commiseration towards the orphans of the late bishopp of london." he emphasizes the diminution of the bishop's worldly estate consequent upon his translation to the costly see of london, his extraordinary charges in the reparation of the four episcopal residences, his lavish expenditure in hospitality, his penitence for "the errour of his late marriage," and concludes:--"he hath left behinde him poore children, whereof divers are very young. his dettes due to the quenes majestie and to other creditors are _li._ or thereaboutes, his whole state is but one house wherein the widow claimeth her thirds, his plate valewed at _li._, his other stuffe at _li._" anthony bacon, who sympathized with the purpose of this memorial, enlisted the coöperation of bishop fletcher's powerful friend and his own patron, the earl of essex, who "likewise represented to the queen the case of the orphans ... in so favourable a light that she was inclin'd to relieve them;" but whether she did so or not, we are unable to discover.[ ] what john fletcher,--a lad of seventeen, when, in , he was turned out of fulham palace and his father's private house in chelsea, with its carpets and cushions and the special "stayre and dore made of purpose ... in a bay window" for the entrance of queen elizabeth when she might deign, or did deign, to visit her unruly prelate,--what the lad of seventeen did for a living before we find him, about or , in the ranks of the dramatists, we have no means of knowing. perhaps the remaining years of his boyhood were spent with his uncle, giles, and his young cousins, the coming poets, or with the aunt whom his father called "sister pownell." the stepmother of eighteen months' duration is not likely with her luxurious tastes and questionable character to have tarried long in charge of the eight "poore and fatherless children." she had children of her own by her previous marriage, in whom to seek consolation, grisogone and cicely baker, then in their twenties, and devoted to her.[ ] and with one or both we may surmise that she resumed her life in kent, or with the heir of sleepy sissinghurst, making the most of her carpets and cushions and such of her "thirds" as she could recover, until--for she was but forty-seven--she might find more congenial comfort in a third marriage. her permanent consoler was a certain sir stephen thornhurst of forde in the isle of thanet; and he, thirteen years after the death of her second husband, buried her in state in canterbury cathedral, . in her sister-in-law, cicely (baker) sackville, now countess of dorset and the earl, her husband, that fine old dramatist of beaumont's inner temple, and former acquaintance at fotheringay of john fletcher's father, had taken possession of the manor of knole, near sevenoaks in kent, where their descendants live to-day. before , fletcher's stepsister cicely, named after her aunt, the countess, had become the lady cicely blunt. grisogone became the lady grisogone lennard, having married, about , a great friend of william herbert, earl of pembroke, and of his countess (sir philip sidney's sister), sir henry, the son of sampson lennard of chevening and knole. the lennard estate lay but three and a half miles from that of their connections, the dorsets, of knole park. if young fletcher ever went down to see his stepmother at sissinghurst, or his own mother's family in cranbrook, he was but twenty-six miles by post-road from chevening and still less from aunt cicely at knole. beaumont, himself, as we shall see, married the heiress of sundridge place a mile and a half south of chevening, and but forty minutes across the fields from knole. his sister elizabeth, too, married a gentleman of one of the neighbouring parishes. the acquaintance of both our dramatists with bakers and sackvilles was enhanced by sympathies literary and dramatic. a still younger sir richard baker, cousin to john fletcher's stepsisters, and to the second and third earls of dorset, was an historian, a poet, and a student of the stage--on familiar terms with tarleton, burbadge, and alleyn. and the literary traditions handed down from thomas sackville, the author of _gorboduc_ and _the mirror for magistrates_ were not forgotten by his grandson, richard, third earl of dorset, the contemporary of our dramatists,--for whom, if i am not mistaken, their portraits, now hanging in the dining-room of the baron sackville at knole, were painted.[ ] * * * * * i have dwelt thus at length upon the conditions antecedent to, and investing, the youth of beaumont and of fletcher, because the documents already at hand, if read in the light of scientific biography and literature, set before us with remarkable clearness the social and poetic background of their career as dramatists. when this background of birth, breeding, and family connection is filled in with the deeper colours of their life in london, its manners, experience, and associations, one may more readily comprehend why dryden says in comparing them with shakespeare, "they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen [of contemporary fashion] much better; whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet before them could paint as they have done." footnotes: [ ] _cal. state papers (dom.)_, april , . [ ] _briefe view of the state of the church._ [ ] nichols's _progresses of queen elizabeth_, ii, - . [ ] see the story in _camden miscellany_, iii ( ). [ ] sir richard baker, in his _chronicle of the kings of england_. [ ] fuller's _worthies_, as cited by dyce, i, x, xi. [ ] the materials as furnished by dyce, _b. and f._, i, xiv-xv, from birch's _mem. of elizabeth_, and the bacon papers in the lambeth library are confirmed by _cal. st. papers_ (_dom._), june , july , , _etc._ [ ] as her monument in canterbury would indicate. hasted, _hist. kent_, xi, . [ ] for the bakers and their connections, see hasted, _hist. kent_, iii, ; iv, , _et seq._; vii, - ; for the sackvilles.--hasted, iii, - ; for the lennards,--hasted, iii, - ; the _peerages_ of collins, burke, etc., and the articles in _d. n. b._ see also, below, appendix, table e. chapter vi some early plays of beaumont and of fletcher beaumont and fletcher may have been friends by or ,--in all likelihood, as early as when, as we have seen, drayton and other "southern shepherds" were by way of visiting the beaumonts at grace-dieu. in that year jonson's _volpone_ was acted for the first time; and one may divine from the familiar and affectionate terms in which our two young dramatists address the author upon the publication of the play in that they had been acquainted not only with jonson but with one another for the two years past. we have no satisfactory proof of their coöperation in play-writing before or . according to dryden,--whose statements of fact are occasionally to be taken with a grain of salt, but who, in this instance, though writing almost sixty years after the event, is basing his assertion upon first-hand authority,--"the first play that brought 'them' in esteem was their _philaster_," but "before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully." _philaster_, as i shall presently show, was, in all probability, first acted between december , and july , . before , however, each had written dramas independently, beaumont _the woman-hater_ and _the knight of the burning pestle_; fletcher, _the faithfull shepheardesse_, and maybe one or two other plays. our first evidence of their association in dramatic activity is the presence of fletcher's hand, apparently as a reviser, in three scenes of _the woman-hater_, which was licensed for publication may , , as "lately acted by the children of paul's." from contemporary evidence we know, as did dryden, that two of these plays, _the knight_ and _faithfull shepheardesse_ were ungraciously received; and richard brome, about fourteen years after fletcher's death, suggests that perhaps _monsieur thomas_ shared "the common fate." _the woman-hater_ was the earliest play of either of our dramatists to find its way into print. drayton's lines, already referred to, about "sweet palmeo" imply that beaumont was already known as a poet, before april . a passage in the prologue of _the woman-hater_ seems, as professor thorndike has shown, to refer to the narrow escape of jonson, chapman, and marston from having their ears cropped for an offense given to the king by their _eastward hoe_. if it does, "he that made this play," undoubtedly beaumont, made it after the publication of _eastward hoe_ in . the title-page of says that the play is given "as it hath been lately acted." the ridicule of intelligencers emulating some worthy men in this land "who have discovered things dangerously hanging over the state" has reference to the system of spying which assumed enormous proportions after the discovery of the gunpowder plot in november . an allusion to king james's weakness for handsome young men, "why may not _i_ be a favourite in the sudden?" may very well refer, as fleay has maintained, to the restoration to favour of robert ker (or carr) of ferniehurst, afterwards earl somerset,--a page whom james had "brought with him from scotland, and brought up of a child,"[ ] but had dismissed soon after his accession. it was at a tilting match, march , , that the youth "had the good fortune to break his leg in the presence of the king," and "by his personal activity, strong animal spirits," and beauty, to attract his majesty anew, and on the spot. the beauty, beaumont emphasizes as a requisite for royal favour. "why may not _i_ be a favourite on the sudden?" says the bloated, hungry courtier, "i see nothing against it." "not so, sir," replies valore; "i know you have not the _face_ to be a favourite on the sudden." the fact that james did not make a knight bachelor of carr till december of that year, would in no way invalidate a fling at the favour bestowed upon him in march. indeed beaumont's slur in _the woman-hater_ upon "the legs ... very strangely become the legs of a knight and a courtier" might have applied to carr as early as , for on july of that year james had made him a knight of the bath,--in the same batch, by the way, with a certain oliver cromwell of huntingdonshire.[ ] without violating the plague regulations, as laid down by the city, _the woman-hater_ could have been acted during the six months following november , . a passage in act iii, ,[ ] which i shall presently quote in full, is, as has not previously been noticed, a manifest parody of one of antony's speeches in _antony and cleopatra_[ ] which, according to all evidence, was not acted before . it would appear, therefore, that beaumont's first play was completed after january , , probably after march , when carr regained the royal favour, and was presented for the first time during the two months following the latter date. _the woman-hater_ affords interesting glimpses of the author's observation, sometimes perhaps experience, in town and country. "that i might be turned loose," says one of his _dramatis personae_, "to try my fortune amongst the whole fry in a college or an inn of court!" and another, a gay young buck,--"i must take some of the common courses of our nobility, which is thus: if i can find no company that likes me, pluck off my hat-band, throw an old cloak over my face and, as if i would not be known, walk hastily through the streets till i be discovered: 'there goes count such-a-one,' says one; 'there goes count such-a-one,' says another; 'look how fast he goes,' says a third; 'there's some great matters in hand, questionless,' says a fourth;--when all my business is to have them say so. this hath been used. or, if i can find any company [acting at the theatre], i'll after dinner to the stage to see a play; where, when i first enter, you shall have a murmur in the house; every one that does not know, cries, 'what nobleman is that?' all the gallants on the stage, rise, vail to me, kiss their hand, offer me their places; then i pick out some one whom i please to grace among the rest, take his seat, use it, throw my cloak over my face, and laugh at him; the poor gentleman imagines himself most highly graced, thinks all the auditors esteem him one of my bosom friends, and in right special regard with me." and again, and this is much like first-hand knowledge: "there is no poet acquainted with more shakings and quakings, towards the latter end of his new play (when he's in that case that he stands peeping betwixt the curtains, so fearfully that a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks somebody hisses), than i am at this instant." and again,--of the political spies, who had persecuted more than one of beaumont's relatives and, according to tradition, trumped up momentary trouble for our young dramatists themselves, a few years later: "this fellow is a kind of informer, one that lives in ale-houses and taverns; and because he perceives some worthy men in this land, with much labour and great expense, to have discovered things dangerously hanging over the state, he thinks to discover as much out of the talk of drunkards in tap-houses. he brings me information, picked out of broken words in men's common talk, which with his malicious misapplication he hopes will seem dangerous; he doth, besides, bring me the names of all the young gentlemen in the city that use ordinaries or taverns, talking (to my thinking) only as the freedom of their youth teach them without any further ends, for dangerous and seditious spirits." much more in this kind, of city ways known to beaumont; and, also, something of country ways, the table of the leicestershire squire--the beaumonts of coleorton and the villierses of brooksby,--and the hunting-breakfasts with which grace-dieu was familiar. the hungry courtier of the play vows to "keep a sumptuous house; a board groaning under the heavy burden of the beast that cheweth the cud, and the fowl that cutteth the air. it shall not, like the table of a country-justice, be sprinkled over with all manner of cheap salads, sliced beef, giblets and pettitoes, to fill up room; nor shall there stand any great, cumbersome, uncut-up pies at the nether end, filled with moss and stones, partly to make a show with, partly to keep the lower mess [below the salt] from eating; nor shall my meal come in sneaking like the city-service, one dish a quarter of an hour after another, and gone as if they had appointed to meet there and mistook the hour; nor should it, like the new court-service, come in in haste, as if it fain would be gone again [whipped off by the waiters], all courses at once, like a hunting breakfast: but i would have my several courses and my dishes well filed [ordered]; my first course shall be brought in after the ancient manner by a score of old blear-eyed serving-men in long blue coats."--and not a little of life at court, and of the favourites with whom king james surrounded himself:--"they say one shall see fine sights at the court? i'll tell you what you shall see. you shall see many faces of man's making, for you shall find very few as god left them; and you shall see many legs too; amongst the rest you shall behold one pair, the feet of which were in past times sockless, but are now, through the change of time (that alters all things), very strangely become the legs of a knight and a courtier; another pair you shall see, that were heir-apparent legs to a glover; these legs hope shortly to be honourable; when they pass by they will bow, and the mouth to these legs will seem to offer you some courtship; it will swear, but it will lie; hear it not." keen observation this, and a dramatist's acquaintance with many kinds of life; the promise of a satiric mastery, and very vivid prose for a lad of twenty-three. the play is not, as a dramatic composition, of any peculiar distinction. beaumont is still in his pupilage to the classics, and to ben jonson's comedy of humours. but the humours, though unoriginal and boyishly forced, are clearly defined; and the instinct for fun is irrepressible. the woman-hater, obsessed by the delusion that all women are in pursuit, is admirably victimized by a witty and versatile heroine who has, with maliciously genial pretense, assumed the rôle of man-hunter. and to the main plot is loosely, but not altogether ineffectually, attached a highly diverting story which beaumont has taken from the latin treatise of paulus jovius on roman fishes, or from some intermediate source. like the tamisius of the original, his lazarillo,--whose prayer to the goddess of plenty is ever, "fill me this day with some rare delicates,"--scours the city in fruitless quest of an umbrana's head. finally, he is taken by intelligencers, spies in the service of the state, who construe his passion for the head of a fish as treason aimed at the head of the duke. the comedy abounds in parody of verses well known at the time, of lines from _hamlet_ and _all's well that end well_, _othello_[ ] and _eastward hoe_[ ] and bombastic catches from other plays. to me the most ludicrous bit of burlesque is of the moment of last suspense in _antony and cleopatra_ (iv, and ) where antony, thinking to die "after the high roman fashion" which cleopatra forthwith emulates, says "i come my queen,"-- stay for me! where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand, and with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. dido and her aeneas shall want troops, and all the haunt [of elysium] be ours. so lazarillo, in awful apprehension lest his love, his fish-head, be eaten before he arrive,-- if it be eaten, here he stands that is the most dejected, most unfortunate, miserable, accursed, forsaken slave this province yields! i will not sure outlive it; no, i will die bravely and like a roman; and after death, amidst the elysian shades, i'll meet my love again. shakespeare's play was not entered for publication till may , , but this passage shows that beaumont had seen it at the globe before may , . i have no hesitation in assigning to the same year, , although most critics have dated it three or four years later, beaumont's admirable burlesque of contemporary bourgeois drama and chivalric romance, _the knight of the burning pestle_. evidence both external and internal, which i shall later state, points to its presentation by the children of the queen's revels at blackfriars while they were under the business management of henry evans and robert keysar, and before the temporary suppression of the company in march . the question of date has been complicated by the supposed indebtedness of the burlesque to _don quixote_; but i shall attempt to show, when i consider the play at length, that it has no verbal relation either to the original ( ) or the translation ( ) of cervantes' story. _the knight of the burning pestle_ is in some respects of the same boyish tone and outlook upon the humours of life as _the woman-hater_, but it is incomparably more novel in conception, more varied in composition, and more effervescent in satire. it displays the beaumont of twenty-two or -three as already an effective dramatist of contemporary manners and humours, a master of parody, side-long mirth, and ironic wit, before he joined forces with fletcher and developed, in the treatment of more serious and romantic themes, the power of poetic characterization and the pathos that bespeak experience and reflection,--and, in the treatment of the comedy of life, the realism that proceeds from broad and sympathetic observation. the play, which as the publisher of the first quarto, in , tell us was "begot and borne in eight daies," was not a success; evidently because the public did not like the sport that it made of dramas and dramatists then popular; especially, did not stomach the ridicule of the bombast-loving and romanticizing london citizen himself,--was not yet educated up to the humour; perhaps, because "hee ... this unfortunate child ... was so unlike his brethren." at any rate, according to walter burre, the publisher, in , "the wide world for want of judgement, or not understanding the privy marke of ironie about it (which showed it was no ofspring of any vulgar braine) utterly rejected it." and burre goes on to say in his dedication of the quarto to maister robert keysar:--"for want of acceptance it was even ready to give up the ghost, and was in danger to have bene smothered in perpetuall oblivion, if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not bene moved both to relieve and cherish it: wherein i must needs commend both your judgement, understanding, and singular love to good wits." the rest of this dedication is of great interest as bearing upon the date of the composition of the play; but it has been entirely misconstrued or else it gives us false information. that matter i shall discuss in connection with the sources and composition of the play.[ ] suffice it to say here that _the knight_ followed _the travails of three english brothers_, acted. june , , and that the robert keysar who rescued the manuscript of _the knight_ from oblivion had, only in or , acquired a financial interest in the queen's revels' children, and was backing them during the last year of their occupancy of blackfriars when they presented the play, and where only it was presented. in the same year, , both young men are writing commendatory verses for the first quarto of ben jonson's _volpone_, which had been acted in . beaumont, with the confidence of intimacy, addresses jonson as "dear friend," praises his "even work," deplores its failure with the many who "nothing can digest, but what's obscene, or barks," and implies that he forbears to make them understand its merits purely in deference to jonson's wiser judgment,-- i would have shewn to all the world the art which thou alone hast taught our tongue, the rules of time, of place and other rites, deliver'd with the grace of comic style, which only is far more than any english stage hath known before. but since our subtle gallants think it good to like of nought that may be understood ... ... let us desire they may continue, simply to admire fine clothes and strange words, and offensive personalities. fletcher in a more epigrammatic appeal to "the true master in his art, b. jonson," prays him to forgive friends and foes alike, and then, those "who are nor worthy to be friends or foes." * * * * * concerning fletcher's beginnings in composition the earliest date is suggested by a line of d'avenant's, written many years after fletcher's death ( ), "full twenty years he wore the bays."[ ] it has been conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists was in the field as early as , with his comedy of _the woman's prize_ or _the tamer tamed_,--a well contrived and witty continuation of shakespeare's _taming of the shrew_,--in which maria, a cousin of shakespeare's katherine, now deceased, marries the bereaved petruchio and effectively turns the tables upon him. if acted before , _the woman's prize_ was a paul's boys' or queen's revels' play. but while the upper limit of the play is fixed by the mention of the siege of ostend, , other references and the literary style point to , even to , as the date of composition or revision.[ ] it is likely that fletcher was writing plays before , but what we do not know. in that year was acted the pastoral drama of _the faithfull shepheardesse_, a composition entirely his own. this delicate confection of sensual desire, ideal love, translunar chastity, and subacid cynicism regarding "all ideas of chastity whatever,"[ ] was an experiment; and a failure upon the stage. it has, as i shall later emphasize, lyric and descriptive charm of surpassing merit, but it lacks, as does most of fletcher's work, moral depth and emotional reality; and following, as it did, a literary convention in design, it could not avail itself of the skill in dramatic device, and the racy flavour which a little later characterized his _monsieur thomas_. the date of its first performance is determined by the combined authority of the stationers' registers (from which we learn that the publishers of the first quarto, undated, but undoubtedly of ,[ ] were in unassisted partnership only from december , to july , ), of a statement of jonson to drummond of hawthornden that the play was written "ten years" before , and of commendatory verses to the first quarto of , by the young actor-dramatist, nathaniel field. if we may guide our calculations by the plague regulations of the time, it must have been acted before july , . on the appearance of the first quarto, in , jonson sympathizing with "the worthy author," on the ill reception of the pastoral when first performed, says: i, that am glad thy innocence was their guilt, for the rabble found not there the "vices, which they look'd for," i-- do crown thy murder'd poem; which shall rise a glorified work to time, when fire or moths shall eat what all these fools admire. and francis beaumont writing to "my friend, master john fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted wit," and "art," and rejoices that, if they should condemn the play now that it is printed, your censurers must have the quality of reading, which i am afraid is more than half your shrewdest judges had before. in the first quarto two commendatory poems are printed, the first by n. f., the second by the homeric scholar and well known dramatist, george chapman. the latter writes "to his loving friend, master john fletcher," in terms of generous encouragement and glowing charm. your pastoral, says he, is "a poem and a play, too,"-- but because your poem only hath by us applause, renews the golden world, and holds through all the holy laws of homely pastoral, where flowers and founts, and nymphs and semi-gods, and all the graces find their old abodes, where forests flourish but in endless verse, and meadows nothing fit for purchasers; this iron age, that eats itself, will never bite at your golden world; that other's ever lov'd as itself. then like your book, do you live in old peace, and that for praise allow. if jonson, chapman, and beaumont suspected the undercurrent of satire in this pastoral, and they surely were not obtuse, they concealed the suspicion admirably. as for fletcher he continued to "live in old peace." "when his faire shepheardesse on the guilty stage, was martir'd between ignorance and rage.... hee only as if unconcernèd smil'd." an attitude toward the public that characterized him all through life. the admiration of younger men is shown in the respectful commendation of n. f. this is nathaniel field. he was acting with the blackfriars' boys since the days when jonson presented _cynthia's revels_, and, as one of the queen's revels' children, he had probably taken part in _the faithfull shepheardesse_ when the undiscerning public hissed it. field came of good family, had been one of mulcaster's pupils at the merchant taylors' school, and was beloved by chapman and jonson. he was then but twenty-two,--about three years younger than fletcher's friend, beaumont,--but for nine years gone he had been recognized as a genius among boy-actors. that the verses of so young a man should be accepted, and coupled with those of the thunder-girt chapman, was to him a great and unexpected honour; and the youth expresses prettily his pride in being published by his "lov'd friend" in such distinguished literary company,-- can my approovement, sir, be worth your thankes, whose unknowne name, and muse in swathing clowtes, is not yet growne to strength, among these rankes to have a roome? now he is planning to write dramas himself; and it is pleasant to note with what modesty he touches upon the project: but i must justifie what privately i censur'd to you, my ambition is (even by my hopes and love to poesie) to live to perfect such a worke as this, clad in such elegant proprietie of words, including a morallitie,[ ] so sweete and profitable. he is alluding to his not yet finished comedy, _a woman is a weather-cocke_. the youth must have been close to beaumont as well as to fletcher; he soon afterwards, - , played the leading part in their _coxcombe_,--which, i think, was the earliest work planned and written by them in collaboration; and when, a little later, his own first comedy was acted by the queen's revels' children no auditor of literary ear could have failed to detect, amid the manifest echoes of chapman, jonson, and shakespeare, the flattering resemblance in diction, rhythm, and poetic fancy to the most characteristic features of beaumont's style. this is very interesting, because in another dramatic composition _foure playes in one_, written in part by fletcher, certain portions have so close a likeness to beaumont's work, that until lately they have been mistakenly attributed to that poet and assigned to this early period of his career. the portions of _the foure playes_ not written by fletcher were written by no other than nat. field. and since in field's _address to the reader_ of the _weather-cocke_, licensed for publication november , , he still speaks as if the _weather-cocke_ were his only venture in play-writing, we may conclude that _the foure playes in one_ was not put together before the end of , or the beginning of . that series need not, therefore, be considered in the present place; all the more so, since beaumont had in all probability nothing directly to do with its composition.[ ] of the other dramas written by fletcher alone and assigned by critics to his earlier period, that is to say before , or even , the only one beside _the faithfull shepheardesse_ that may with any degree of safety be admitted to consideration is a comedy of romance, manners, and humours, _monsieur thomas_. the romance is a delightful story of self-abnegating love. the father, valentine, and the son francisco, supposed to have been drowned long ago, and now known (if the texts had only printed the play as fletcher wrote it) as callidon, a guest of valentine, love the same girl, the father's ward. this part of the play is executed with captivating grace. it shows that fletcher had, from the first, an instinct for the dramatic handling of a complicated story, an eye for delicate and surprising situations, an appreciation of chivalric honour and genuine passion, and a fancy fertile and playful. in the subplot the manners are such as would appeal to a fletcher not yet thirty years of age; and the humours are those of a student of the earlier plays of ben jonson, and of marston--who ceased writing in . it has indeed been asserted, but without much credibility, that "the notion of the panerotic hylas," who must always "be courting wenches through key-holes," was taken from a character in marston's _parasitaster_, of .[ ] the name of this captain, hylas, was in the mouth of fletcher in those early days; he uses it again in his part of the _philaster_, written in or , and elsewhere. the snatches of song and the names of ballads are those of contemporary popularity between and ; and in two instances they are those of which beaumont makes use in his _knight of the burning pestle_ of . the play was acted, too, apparently by the same company, the queen's revels' children, and in the same house as was beaumont's. it could not have been played by them at "the private house in black fryers" later than march , unless they squeezed it into that last month of which serves as a telescope basket for so many of the plays which critics cannot satisfactorily date. for my present purpose, which is to show how fletcher, not assisted by beaumont, wrote during his youth, it makes little difference whether _monsieur thomas_ was written as early as or only before . the fact is, however, that a line in the last scene, "take her, francisco, now no more young callidon," shows clearly that callidon, a name not occurring elsewhere in the play, and necessary to the dramatic complication, had been used by fletcher in his first version; and when we put the names callidon and cellidée together (she is francisco's belovèd) we are pointed at once to the source of the romantic plot--the _histoire de celidée, thamyre, et calidon_ at the beginning of the second part of the _astrée_ of the marquis d'urfé.[ ] the first part of this voluminous pastoral romance had been published, probably in , in an edition which is lost; but a second edition, dedicated to henri iv, who died may , , appeared that year. some of fletcher's inspiration, as for the name and general characteristic of hylas, was drawn from the first part. the second part was not printed till later in . it would, therefore, appear that fletcher could not have written _monsieur thomas_ before the latter date. on the other hand, as dr. upham[ ] has indicated, the _astrée_ had been read as early as february , , by ben jonson's friend, william drummond, who, on that day, writes about it critically to sir george keith. if the first part had been circulated in manuscript, and read by an englishman, in , it is not at all unlikely that the second part, too, of this most leisurely published romance, which did not get itself all into covers till , had been read in manuscript by many men, french and english, long before its appearance in print, ;--may be by fletcher himself, as early as . or he may have heard the story, as early as that, from some one who had read it. the fact that he alters some of the names, follows the plot but loosely, characterizes the personages not at all as if he had the original before him, and uses none of their diction, would favour the supposition that he is writing from hearsay, or from some second hand and condensed version of the story. no matter what the exact date of composition, _monsieur thomas_ is the one play beside _the faithfull shepheardesse_ from which we may draw conclusions concerning the native tendencies of the young fletcher. the subplot of thomas, concocted with clever ease, and furnished with varied devices appropriate to comic effect--disguisings, mouse-traps, dupers duped, street-frolics and mock sentimental serenades, scaling-ladders, convents, and a blackamoor girl for a decoy-duck,--is conceived in a rollicking spirit and executed in sprightly conversational style. sir adolphus ward says that "as a picture of manners it is excelled by few other elizabethan comedies." i am sorry that i cannot agree; i call it low, or farcical comedy; and though the 'manners' be briskly and realistically imagined, i question their contemporary actuality,--even their dramatic probability. amusing scapegraces like the hero of the title-part have existed in all periods of history; and fathers, who will not have their sons mollycoddles; and squires of dames, like the susceptible hylas. but manners, to be dramatically probable, must reflect the contacts of possible characters in a definite period. and no one can maintain that the contact of these persons with the women of the play is characterized by possibility. or that these manners could, even in the beginning of james i's reign, have characterized a perceptible percentage of actual londoners. thomas, whose humour it is to assume sanctimony for the purpose of vexing his father, and blasphemy for the purpose of teasing his sweetheart--racking that "maiden's tender ears with damns and devils,"--is no more grotesque than many a contemporary embodiment of 'humour.' but what of his contacts with the "charming" mary who "daily hopes his fair conversion," and has "a credit," and "loves where her modesty may live untainted"; and, then, that she may "laugh an hour" admits him to her bed-chamber, having substituted for herself a negro wench? and what of the contacts with his equally "modest" sister, dorothy, who not only talks smut with him and with the "charming" mary, but deems his fornication "fine sport" and would act it if she were a man? i fear that much reading of decadent drama sometimes impairs the critical perception. in making allowance for what masquerades as historical probability one frequently accepts human improbabilities, and condones what should be condemned--even from the dramatic point of view. i have found it so in my own case. with all its picaresque quality, its jovial 'humours' and its racy fun, this play is sheer stage-rubbish: it has no basis in the general life of the class it purports to represent, no basis in actual manners, nor in likelihood or poetry. its basis is in the uncritical and, to say the least, irresponsible taste of a theatre-going rump which enjoyed the spurious localization, and attribution to others, of the imaginings of its own heart. the characters are well grouped; and the spirit of merriment prevails. the reversals of motive and fortune, the recognitions and the dénouement are as excellently and puerilely absurd as could be desired of such an amalgam of romance and farcical intrigue. richard brome, writing in praise of the author for the quarto of , implies that the play was not well received at its "first presenting,"--"when ignorance was judge, and but a few what was legitimate, what bastard knew." that first presenting was between and ; and the few might have cared more for jonson's _every man in his humour_ or _volpone_, or something by shakespeare, or soon afterwards for beaumont and fletcher's _philaster_ or _a king and no king_. but, as brome assures us, "the world's grown wiser now." that is to say, it had learned by "what was legitimate," and could believe that in fletcher's _monsieur thomas_ and the like, "the muses jointly did inspire his raptures only with their sacred fire." but even as transmogrified by d'urfey and others the play did not survive its century. no better example could be afforded of the kind of comedy that fletcher was capable of producing in his earlier period. it shows us with what ability he could dramatize a romantic tale; with what license as a realist imagine and portray an unmoral, when not immoral, semblance of contemporary life. that was either before beaumont had joined forces with him; or when beaumont was not pruning his fancy; was not hanging "plummets" on his wit "to suppress its too luxuriant-growing mightiness," nor persuading him that mirth might subsist "untainted with obscenity," and "strength and sweetness" and "high choice of brain" be "couched in every line." i am not claiming too much for beaumont. in his later work as in his earlier there is the frank animalism, at times, of elizabethan blood and humour; but one may search in vain his parts of the joint-plays as well as his youthful _knight of the burning pestle_ and those portions of _the woman-hater_ which fletcher did not touch, for the jacobean salaciousness of fletcher's _monsieur thomas_ and the carnal cynicism which lurks beneath the pastoral garb of innocence even in _the faithfull shepheardesse_;--characteristics that find utterance again, untrammeled, in the dramas written after the younger poet was dead,--and fletcher could no longer, as in those earlier days, wisely submit each birth to knowing beaumont e're it did come forth, working againe untill _he_ said 'twas fit; and make him the sobriety of his wit.[ ] during the years of beaumont's apprenticeship to poetry cloaked as law things had changed but little in his world of the inner temple. in its parliament, sir edward coke, judicial, intrepid, and devout is still most potent. the chamber, lodging, and rooms which his father, mr. justice beaumont, and his uncle henry had built and occupied near to ram alley in the north end of fuller's rents are still held by richard daveys, who as treasurer moved into them in . dr. richard masters is still master of the temple; and in the church, where francis was obliged to receive the sacrament at stated times, he, sitting perhaps by his uncle henry's tomb, would hear the assistant ministers, richard evans and william crashaw. the sacred place was still the refuge of outlaws from whitefriars who claimed the privilege of sanctuary. if beaumont wished to steal, after hours, into the alsatia beyond fuller's rents, he must skirt or propitiate in as in the same cerberus at the gates,--william knight, the glover. outside awaited him the hospitality of the mitre inn, or of barrow at the "cat and fiddle," or of the slovenly anthony gibbes in his cook's shop of ram alley.[ ] footnotes: [ ] the king's letter to salisbury (undated, but of ). gardiner, _hist. engl._ - , ii, - . [ ] this much more distinguished favour has been overlooked by thorndike and other critics. but it is possible that shaw, _knights of england_, i, , may be confounding him with another carr, a favourite of queen anne's. [ ] dyce, _b. and f._, vol. i, p. . [ ] act iv, , - . [ ] _cf._, lazarillo's _farewells_, act iii, . [ ] see chap. xxiv, below. [ ] prologue, for a revival, in , of _the woman-hater_, which d'avenant mistakenly attributes to fletcher. [ ] reasons for dating an earlier version of the play about are given by oliphant, _engl. studien_, xv, - , and thorndike, _infl. of b. and f._, - . in its present form, however, the play dates later than jonson's _epicoene_, . see gayley, _rep. eng. com._, iii, _introd._, § . [ ] i heartily concur with w. w. greg's interpretation, _pastoral poetry and pastoral drama_, p. . [ ] see fleay, _chron. eng. dr._, i, , and thorndike, _infl. of b. and f._, . [ ] folio, , 'mortallitie'; a misprint. [ ] see chap. xxiii, below. [ ] see guskar, _anglia_, xxviii, xxix. [ ] stiefel, _zeitschr. f. vergl. litt._, xii ( ), ; _engl. stud._, xxxvi; hatcher, _anglia_, feb. ; and macaulay, _c. h. l._, vi, . [ ] _french influence in english literature_, pp. , . [ ] adapted from cartwright in the _commendatory poems_, folio of _b. and f._, . [ ] details in inderwick, _op. cit._, vols. i and ii, passim. chapter vii the "banke-side" and the period of the partnership as we shall presently see, beaumont during his career in london retained his connection with the inner temple, which would be his club; and it may be presumed that up to or , his residence alternated between the temple and his brother's home of grace-dieu. about , however, he was surely collaborating with his friend, fletcher, in the composition of plays. and we may conjecture that, in that or the previous year, our castor and pollux were established in those historic lodgings in southwark where, as aubrey, writing more than half a century later, tells us, they lived in closest intimacy. that gossipy chronicler records the obvious in his "there was a wonderfull consimility of phansey between him [beaumont] and mr. jo. fletcher, which caused that dearnesse of friendship between them";[ ] but when he proceeds "they lived together on the banke-side, not far from the play-house, both batchelors; lay together (from sir james hales, etc.); had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire, the same cloaths and cloake, etc., between them," we feel that so far as inferences are concerned the account is to be taken with at least a morsel of reserve. aubrey was not born till after both beaumont and fletcher were dead; and, as dyce pertinently remarks, "perhaps aubrey's informant (sir james hales) knowing his ready credulity, purposely overcharged the picture of our poets' domestic establishment." to inquire too closely into gossip were folly; but it is only fair to recall that sixty years after fletcher's death, popular tradition was content with conferring the "wench," exclusively upon him. oldwit, in shadwell's play of _bury-fair_ ( ) says: "i myself, simple as i stand here, was a wit in the last age. i was created ben jonson's son, in the apollo. i knew fletcher, my friend fletcher, and his maid joan; well, i shall never forget him: i have supped with him at his house on the banke-side; he loved a fat loin of pork of all things in the world; and joan his maid had her beer-glass of sack; and we all kissed her, i' faith, and were as merry as passed."[ ] it is hardly necessary, in any case, to surmise with those who sniff up improprieties that the admirable services of the original "wench," whether joan or another, far exceeded the roasting of pork and the burning of sack for her two "batchelors." to the years and may be assigned with some show of confidence beaumont and fletcher's first significant romantic dramas _the coxcombe_ and _philaster_. the former was acted by the children of her majesty's revels, i think before july , . if at blackfriars, before january , ; if at whitefriars, after january . there are grounds for believing that it was the play upon which fletcher and beaumont were engaged in the country when beaumont wrote a letter, justly famous, probably toward the end of , to ben jonson; and, since the play was not well received, that it was one of the unsuccessful comedies which as dryden says preceded _philaster_. _philaster_ was acted at the globe and blackfriars by the king's men, for the first time, it would appear, between december , and july , . my reasons in detail for thus dating both of these dramas are given later. but a word about the _letter to ben jonson_ may be said here. [illustration: the temple from ralph agas's map of london, about ] it was first printed at the end of a play called _the nice valour_ in the folio of . owing to a careless acceptance of the rubric prefixed to it by the publishers of that folio, historians have ordinarily dated its composition at too early a period. the poem itself mentions "sutcliffe's wit," referring to three controversial tracts of the dean of exeter, printed in ; but beaumont might jibe at the dean's expense for years after . the rubic inscribed a generation after the death of both our dramatists, and therefore of but secondary importance, tells us that the _letter_ was "written, before he [beaumont] and master fletcher came to london, with two of the precedent comedies, then not finish'd, which deferr'd their merry meetings at the mermaid." we know that the young men had been in london for years before . if the rubric has any meaning whatever, it is merely that the customary convivialities at the mermaid, as described in the _letter_, had been interrupted by a visit to the country during which they were finishing two of the comedies which precede _the nice valour_ in the folio; and it indicates a date not earlier than , for the writing of the letter, and probably not later than july . for only three of the fifteen plays which appear in the folio before _the nice valour_ could have been completed during the career of beaumont as a dramatist, and none of the three antedates . in two of these beaumont had no hand: _the captaine_, which may have been composed as late as , and _beggars' bush_,[ ] which shows the collaboration of massinger, but fletcher's part of which may have been written in . the only one of the "precedent comedies" in which we may be sure that beaumont collaborated is _the coxcombe_. if, as i believe, it was acted first between december and july [ ] it may well have been written in the country during the latter half of , while the plague rate was exceptionally high in london. both _beggars' bush_ and _the coxcombe_ abound in rural scenes; but the latter especially, in scenes that might have been suggested by grace-dieu and its neighborhood. the rubric prefixed to the _letter_ by the publishers is of negligible authority. the 'me' and 'us' of the _letter_ itself do not necessarily designate fletcher as the companion of beaumont's rustication: they stand at one time for country-folk; at another for the mermaid circle, jonson, chapman, fletcher, probably shakespeare, drayton, cotton, donne, hugh holland, tom coryate, richard martin, selden (of beaumont's inner temple), and other famous wits and poets; at another for jonson and beaumont alone. the date of the poem must be determined from internal evidence. it is written with the careless ease of long-standing intimacy. it is of a genial, jocose, and fairly mature, epistolary style. it betrays the literary assurance of one whose reputation is already established. beaumont is in temporary banishment from london, for lack of funds--therefore, considerably later than , when he was presumably well off; for in that year he had just come into a quarter of his brother, sir henry's, private estate. he longs now for the stimulus of the merry meetings in bread-street, as one whose wit has been sharpened by them for a long time past: methinks the little wit i had is lost since i saw you; for wit is like a rest held up at tennis, which men do the best with the best gamesters; ... up here in leicestershire "the countrey gentlemen begin to allow my wit for dry bobs." "in this warm shine" of our hay-making season, soberly deferring to country knights, listening to hoary family-jests, drinking water mixed with claret-lees, "i lye and dream of your full mermaid wine": what things have we seen done at the mermaid! heard words that have been so nimble, and so full of subtill flame, as if that every one from whence they came had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, and had resolv'd to live a foole, the rest of his dull life. then, when there hath been thrown wit able enough to justifie the town for three daies past,--wit that might warrant be for the whole city to talk foolishly till that were cancell'd,--and, when that was gone, we left an aire behind us, which alone was able to make the two next companies right witty; though but downright fooles, more wise. when he remembers all this, he "needs must cry," but one thought of ben jonson cheers him: only strong destiny, which all controuls, i hope hath left a better fate in store for me thy friend, than to live ever poore, banisht unto this home. fate once againe bring me to thee, who canst make smooth and plaine the way of knowledge for me, and then i, who have no good but in thy company protest it will my greatest comfort be to acknowledge all i have to flow from thee. ben, when these scaenes are perfect, we'll taste wine; i'll drink thy muses health, thou shalt quaff mine. the _letter_ was written after beaumont's muse had produced something worthy of a toast from jonson,--the _woman-hater_ and the _knight_, for instance (both marked by wit and by the discipline of jonson); but not later than the end of , for during most of jonson was traveling in france as governor to sir walter raleigh's "knavishly inclined" son; and after february of that year beaumont wrote so far as i venture to conclude but one drama, _the scornful ladie_; and that does not precede this _letter_ in the folio of ; is not printed in that folio at all. nor was this _letter_ of a disciple written later than the great beaumont-fletcher plays of - , for then jonson was praising beaumont for "writing better" than he himself. if there is any truth at all in the rubric to the _letter_, the "scenes" of which beaumont speaks as not yet "perfect" were of _the coxcombe_; and evidence which i shall, in the proper place, adduce convinces me that that was first acted before march , , perhaps before january . the play would, then, have been written about the end of . i do not wonder that, as the prologue in the first folio tells us, it was "condemned by the ignorant multitude," not only because of its length, a fault removed in the editions which we possess, but because the larger part of the play is written by fletcher, and in his most inartistic, and irrational, licentious vein. beaumont, though admitted to the partnership, had not yet succeeded in hanging "plummets" on his friend's luxuriance. he contented himself with contributing to a theme of boccaccian cuckoldry the subplot of how ricardo, drunk, loses his betrothed, and finds her again and is forgiven,--a little story that contains all the poignancy of sorrow and poppy of romance and poetry of innocence that make the comedy readable and tolerable. as to the first production of the _philaster_ a word must be said here, because the event marks the earliest association, concerning which we have any assurance, of the young dramatists with shakespeare. until about they appear to have written for the paul's boys, who acted, probably in their singing-school, until ; and for the queen's revels' children who, under various managements, had been occupying richard burbadge's theatre of blackfriars since . their association with the paul's boys would of itself have brought them into touch with other paul's dramatists, dekker, webster, middleton, and chapman. in their association with the queen's revels' children they had been thrown closely together with chapman again, with jonson, and with john day, all of whom wrote for blackfriars; and with marston, who not only wrote plays for the children but had a financial interest in the company. some of these dramatists,--jonson, for instance, and webster,--had occasionally written for shakespeare's company during these years; but we have no proof that beaumont and fletcher had any connection with the king's players of shakespeare's company, as long as the children's companies continued in their usual course at st. paul's singing-school and blackfriars. after , however, the paul's boys were on the wane. perhaps they are to be indentified with the new children of the king's revels, and an occupancy of whitefriars, in ; but that clue soon disappears. and as to the queen's revels' children, we find that in april they were suppressed for ridiculing royalty upon the stage.[ ] their manager, henry evans, to whom with three others richard burbadge had let blackfriars in , now sought to be set free from the contract; and in august , the burbadges (richard and cuthbert), shakespeare, heming, condell, and slye of the king's company, took over the lease which still had many years to run.[ ] shakespeare's company had been acting at the burbadges' theatre of the globe since ,--as the lord chamberlain's till ; after that, as his majesty's servants. now shakespeare's company took charge of blackfriars, as well; and, under their management, for about a month between december , and january , the queen's revels' children, being reinstated in royal favour, resumed their acting at blackfriars. on the latter date, the children as reorganized, opened at whitefriars under the management of philip rossiter and others; and among the first plays presented by them, there, were jonson's _epicoene_ and, i believe, beaumont and fletcher's _the coxcombe_. but, in the process of readjustment at blackfriars, our young partners in dramatic production must have been drawn into professional relationship with the members of shakespeare's company and undoubtedly with shakespeare himself. from the first quarto of _philaster, or love lies a-bleeding_, published in , we learn that this, the earliest of their great tragicomedies, was acted not by the queen's revels' children, but by the king's players, and at the globe. from the second quarto, of , we learn that it was acted also at blackfriars: it may indeed have been first presented there. our earliest record of the play shows that it was in existence before october , . _the scourge of folly_ by john davies of hereford, entered for publication on that date, contains an epigram to "the well deserving mr. john fletcher," which runs-- _love lies a-bleeding_, if it should not prove her utmost art to show why it doth love. thou being the _subject_ (now), it raignes upon, raign'st in _arte, judgement, and invention:_ _for this i love thee; and can doe no lesse_ _for thine as faire, as faithfull_ sheepheardesse. since there is nothing in _philaster, or love lies a-bleeding_, to indicate a date of composition earlier than , and since this is the first of beaumont and fletcher's dramas to be performed by shakespeare's company, we may be fairly certain that the performance followed the readjustment of affairs between the globe and blackfriars in august of that year. now, there had been regulations for years past of the city authorities and the privy council in accordance with which theatre in the city proper and the suburbs of surrey and middlesex were closed whenever the number of deaths by plague exceeded a certain limit per week. in and after this limit was set at forty; and it is probable that, in accordance with a still older regulation, the ban was not lifted until it was evident that the decrease in deaths was more than temporary.[ ] that actors sometimes performed at court while the plague rate was still prohibitive in and about the city, does not by any means justify us in assuming that they were ever allowed at such times to play in theatres thronged by the public.[ ] between august , and october , , the only continuous period in which plays might have been presented by shakespeare's company at the globe or blackfriars, without violating the plague law, was from december , to july , ; and we therefore conclude that it was during those months that beaumont and fletcher's _philaster_ was first acted. the only other abatement of the plague that might have given promise of continuance was between march and , ; but on march the rate of deaths rose again above forty, and it is not likely that the authorities would have permitted the theatres to resume operations during those three weeks.[ ] [illustration: the globe theatre, with st. paul's in the background from vischer's long view of london, ] with _philaster_ beaumont and fletcher leaped into the foremost rank as dramatists. i have so much to say of this tragicomedy in my discussion of the authorship of its successive scenes, that but a word may here be said concerning the reasons for its success. hitherto, practically shakespeare alone had written for the king's servants romantic comedies of a serious cast; and they were generally based upon some well-known story. here was a comedy of serious kind with a romantic and original plot, by authors comparatively new to the general public, written in a style refreshingly unhackneyed, and played in the best theatres and by the best company that london possessed. the hamlet-like hero seeking his kingdom and his princess--the daughter of the usurper--and, through misunderstandings and misadventures, tragic apprehensions, swiftly succeeding crises, bloodshed, riot, and surprising reversals of fortune, attaining both birth-right and love; the pathetic innocence and nobly futile devotion of his girl-page; the triangular affair of the affections; the humour of the secondary characters; the allurements of spectacle and masque; the atmosphere of the palace, heroic,--of the country, idyllic,--of mile-end and its roarers of the borough, somewhat burlesque,--the diapason of the poetry from bourdon to flute,--all combined to win immediate and long continuing favour, both of the city and the court. beaumont had, here, become to some extent "the sobriety of fletcher's wit"; he had restrained "his quick free will,"--not, however, so much by pruning what fletcher wrote as by admitting him to but one-quarter of the composition. something of the intrigue, the bustle, the spectacle, the easy conversation are fletcher's; and his, such sexual vulgarity--very little--as stamps a scene or two. the rest is beaumont's. as in the two great romantic dramas which followed, and in beaumont's subplot of _the coxcombe_, the story is of the authors' own invention. it is not necessary to trace the girl-page and her devotion to the diana of montemayor, or to bandello, or even to sidney's _arcadia_. the girl-page was a commonplace of fiction at the time; and the differences in the conduct of this part of the story are greater than the resemblances to any one of those sources. much more evidently is the devoted euphrasia-bellario a younger sister of shakespeare's viola. but, in general, external influences bear upon details of character, situation, and device, not upon the construction of the play as a whole. toward the end of or early in , the partner-dramatists gave shakespeare's company another play,--in many respects their greatest,--_the maides tragedy_. here, again, the novelty of the plot attracted, in a degree heightened even beyond that of _philaster_. the terrible dilemma of the duped husband between allegiance to the king who has wronged him and assertion of his marital honour, the astounding effrontery of his adulterous wife, her gradual acquirement of a soul and her attempted expiation of lust by murder, the mingled nobility and unreason of her brother and her husband, and the pathetic devotion and self-provoked death of the hero's deserted sweetheart, will be sufficiently discussed elsewhere. this was the highly seasoned fare that the jacobean public desiderated, served in courses, if not more novel, at any rate of more startling variety than even shakespeare had offered--whose devices, restrained within limit, these young dramatists were exaggerating to the _n_-th degree. as four-fifths of the composition of this tragedy was beaumont's, so, too, we may be sure, four-fifths of the conception and invention of the plot.[ ] i have remarked, incidentally, that none of the great beaumont-fletcher plots is borrowed. nearly every play, on the other hand, which fletcher contrived alone, or in company with others than beaumont, borrows its plot, major and minor, from some well known source, classical, historical, french, spanish, or italian. mr. g. c. macaulay states the bare truth, when he says that "in constructive faculty, at least, beaumont was markedly superior to his colleague." here there are traces, indeed, of external suggestion: something of aspatia's career in relation to amintor, who has deserted her, may be an echo of parthenia's in the _arcadia_; and the quarrel of melantius and amintor reminds one of that between brutus and cassius in _julius cæsar_; but the plot has no definite source. the characterization and the poetry, "the strength and sweetness, and high choice of brain" are beaumont's; so, too, the marvelous subtlety of dramatic device. save in that one-fifth to which fletcher was admitted. there fletcher, in beauty and in tragic power, is giving us the best that he has so far produced: over-histrionic, to be sure, but of victorious excellence. and that one-fifth, for the first and almost only time in fletcher's career as a dramatist is "untainted by obscenity." in an anecdote preserved by fuller, who was seventeen years of age when fletcher died, we may fancy that we catch a glimpse of our bachelors at work upon this very play. the dramatists "meeting once in a tavern to contrive the rude draught of a tragedy, fletcher undertook to _kill the king_ therein; whose words being overheard by a listener (though his loyalty not to be blamed herein) he was accused of high treason, till the mistake soon appearing, that the plot was only against a drammatick and scenical king, all wound off in merriment."[ ] history and fable have fastened similar stories upon famous men; but if this one is authentic it undoubtedly refers to the writing of _the maides tragedy_, for, as we shall see, the killing of its king was one of the few scenes contributed by fletcher. and the story adds colour to the ridicule which beaumont in had heaped upon the intelligencer that lives in ale-houses and taverns; ... "and brings informations picked out of broken words in men's common talk." the connection thus formed with shakespeare's company was continued by beaumont, at any rate, until , and by fletcher as long as he lived. before the end of the king's players had presented to the public the last of this trio of dramatic masterpieces, _a king and no king_. in terrible fascination, this story of a man and woman struggling against love because they think they are brother and sister is as powerful as _the maides tragedy_. in poetry and in characterization, as well as in humour, it is grander than _philaster_. but in beauty and pathos its subject did not permit it to equal either; and in dénouement, tragicomic and perforce somewhat strained, it is surpassed by the _tragedy_. of its defects as well as merits, i have so much to say later, that i must refrain now. the plot is as striking an example of constructive invention as those that had preceded. some of the names are to be found in xenophon's _cyropædeia_ (books iii-vi) and in herodotus (book vii); and hints for situation and characterization may have been derived from these sources, and the passion of arbaces for his supposed sister from fauchet's account of thierry of france,--but such indebtedness is naught.[ ] three-quarters of the play is beaumont's; and that large portion includes the majestic passion and conflict, the tragic irony and suspense, of _a king and no king_; in fact,--the whole serious plot, and part of the humorous by-play. fletcher's slight contribution is principally of complementary scenes and low comedy. in these the curb upon his fanciful rhetoric and hilarious wit has been somewhat relaxed. in the character of the roaring bessus, beaumont himself gives rein with the _élan_ of the comic artist; for the bessus of beaumont's scenes would have gone on a strike if he had not been suffered to "talk bawdy" between brags. beaumont for all his sobriety and clean mirth was not a prude; and he wasn't writing the psalms of robert wisdom. this play was as popular as those that had preceded. the king's players acted it at court in december of the year in which it had been first performed. and between october and march , assisting in the festivities for the marriage of the princess elizabeth with the elector palatine, they presented before royalty all three of the great beaumont-fletcher plays. these were numbers in a series of thirteen that included, as well, the _much ado_, _tempest_, _winter's tale_, _merry wives_, _othello_, and _julius caesar_ of shakespeare. they also presented about the same time, in a series of six acted before the king (including _i henry iv_, _much ado_, and _the alchemist_), one of fletcher's comedies of manners and intrigue, _the captaine_, and a play utterly lost, called _cardenna_, in which it is supposed that fletcher collaborated with the master himself. that our dramatists, however, after their association was formed with shakespeare and his company, by no means severed their connection with the company for which they had written in their younger days, the children of the queen's revels, appears from the fact that during the same festivities a tragedy written by them about , _cupid's revenge_, was played by the children three times, and their romantic comedy, _the coxcombe_ twice; and that, in or the beginning of , the children presented at the new blackfriars what was, probably, the last product of the beaumont-fletcher partnership, _the scornful ladie_. neither _cupid's revenge_ nor _the scornful ladie_ (though the latter, at least, was very popular and had a long life upon the stage) is a drama of high distinction. the former is a blend of two stories from sidney's _arcadia_,--the story of the vengeance of cupid upon the princess erona (hidaspes in the play) who caused to be destroyed the images and pictures of cupid, and was consequently doomed to an infatuation for a base-born man,--and the painful career of plangus (leucippus in the play) who, having an intrigue "with a private man's wife" (the monstrous bacha of the play) gave her up to his father, swearing to her virtue, only to find that she should attempt to renew her _liaison_ with him and, failing, scheme his downfall. the dramatists made considerable alteration, and added to the sources. but though the main plot--that of leucippus and bacha--offered magnificent possibilities, they fail of realization. beaumont wrote about one-half of the play, and it is in his scenes that whatever there is of moral struggle and sublimity, of pathetic irony and of poetry, appears. _the scornful ladie_, which i assign to this late date partly because of an allusion to the negotiations for a spanish marriage, - , is principally of fletcher's composition. it is of the type of his earlier and later comedies of intrigue. like most of them it is extremely well contrived for presentation upon the stage and it was, as i have said, most successful. the merit of the play lies, not in any element of poetry or vital romance, but in humorous and realistic characterization, easy dialogue, and clever device. the dramatists deserve all credit for the ingenious invention, for here again there is no known source. beaumont's contribution, about one-third, is distinguished by the observation and the _vis comica_ already displayed in the _woman-hater_ and the _knight of the burning pestle_ and _king and no king_. but he is not dominating the details. when they wrote a comedy of intrigue, fletcher sat at the head of the table. it is possible, however, that some of the "rules and standard wit" which francis was so soon to leave to his friend "in legacy" were here applied; for the play is less exuberantly reckless in tone than several which fletcher wrote alone. the three masterpieces of romantic drama, beaumont controlled in composition, and revised. of this play he did not finish the revision. it was written about or , after he had settled in the country with his wife, and not long before his death.[ ] footnotes: [ ] aubrey's _brief lives_, ed. clark, i, - . [ ] dyce, _b. and f._, i, xxvi, _n_. [ ] based upon dekker's _bellman of london_, . acted at court, . [ ] see chapter xxv, below. [ ] despatch of the french ambassador in london, april , , quoted by collier, _hist. eng. dram. poetry_, i, . [ ] answer of heming and burbadge to kirkham's complaint, , _greenstreet papers_ in fleay, _hist. stage_, p. . [ ] see murray, _eng. dram. comp._, ii, - . [ ] as suggested by thorndike, _infl. b. and f. on shakespeare_, - . see murray, _engl. dram. companies_, ii, . [ ] further discussion of the _philaster_ date will be found in chapter xxv, below. [ ] see chapter xxv, below. [ ] dyce, as above, _b. and f._, i, xxxii. [ ] see alden's edition, p. (_belles lettres_), and thorndike's citation of fauchet, _les antiquitez et histoires gauloises, etc._ ( ), _infl. of b. and f._, p. . [ ] see below, chapter xxvi. chapter viii relations with shakespeare, jonson, and others in the theatrical world though the young poets did not begin to write for the king's men before , it is impossible that they should not have met shakespeare, face to face, earlier in the century, whether at the mermaid in bread-street, cheapside, where perhaps befel those "wit-combates betwixt him and ben jonson," or about the globe in southwark or the theatre in blackfriars,--which, though leased to the revels' children, belonged to shakespeare's friend richard burbadge,--or at the lodgings with mountjoy the tiremaker, on the corner of silver and monkwell streets, where the master had lived from to , and where, for anything we know to the contrary, he continued to live for several years more.[ ] they would pass the house on their way from the bankside north to st. giles, cripplegate, when they wished to observe what juby and the rest of the prince's players were putting on at the fortune, or on their way back to take ale with jonson at his house in blackfriars, or to follow nat. field or carey, acting in one of their own or jonson's plays at the private theatre close by. that the young poets, even during their discipleship to jonson were familiar with the poetry and dramatic methods of shakespeare the most cursory reader will observe. their plays from the first, whether jointly or singly written, abound in reminiscences of his work. but more particularly is he echoed by beaumont. the echo is sometimes of playful parody, as in the "huffing part" which the grocer's prentice of the _knight of the burning pestle_ steals from hotspur:-- by heaven, methinks it were an easie leap to pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon, or dive into the bottom of the sea, where never fathome line toucht any ground, and pluck up drownèd honour from the lake of hell; or as in _the woman-hater_, where it looks very much as if this stylist of twenty-two was poking fun at the circumlocutions of shakespeare's helena in _all's well that ends well_. labouring to say "two days" in accents suitable to a monarch's ear, she had evolved: ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring their fiery torches his diurnal ring, ere twice in murk and accidental damp moist hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp; or four and twenty times the pilot's glass hath told the thievish minutes how they pass, what is infirm from your sound parts shall fly. in terms strikingly reminiscent of this, beaumont's courtier valore instructs the gourmand of _the woman-hater_, how to address royalty: you must not talk to him [the duke] as you doe to an ordinary man, honest plain sence, but you must wind about him. for example: if he should aske you what o'clock it is, you must not say, "if it please your grace, 'tis nine"; but thus, "thrice three aclock, so please my sovereign"; or thus, "look how many muses there doth dwell upon the sweet banks of the learned well, and just so many stroaks the clock hath struck." and when the duke asks lazarillo, thus instructed, "how old are you?" we can imagine with what mirth the graceless beaumont puts into his mouth: full eight and twenty several almanacks have been compiled all for several years, since first i drew this breath; four prentiships have i most truly served in this world; and eight and twenty times hath phoebus' car run out his yearly course since--. duke. i understand you, sir. lucio. how like an ignorant poet he talks! is it possible that associating with the literary school of the day, his brother john, drayton, chapman, and ben jonson, the young satirist, here vents something like spleen? or is this purely dramatic utterance? like parodies of phrases in _hamlet_, _antony and cleopatra_, and other shakespearean plays ripple the stream of beaumont's humour. they are, however, always good-natured. but if beaumont laughs when shakespeare exaggerates, he also pays him in his later plays the tribute of imitation in numerous poetic borrowings of serious lines and telling situations: as where the king in _philaster_ tries to pray but, like the kneeling claudius, despairs-- how can i looke to be heard of gods that must be just, praying upon the ground i hold by wrong?-- or "in the hamlet-like situation and character of philaster" himself; as, for instance, when to the usurping king who has said of him, "sure hees possest," philaster retorts: yes, with my fathers spirit. its here, o king, a dangerous spirit! now he tells me, king, i was a kings heire, bids me be a king, and whispers to me, these are all my subjects. tis strange he will not let me sleepe, but dives in to my fancy, and there gives me shapes that kneele and doe me service, cry me king: but i'le suppresse him: he's a factious spirit, and will undoe me. the resemblance of the controversy between melantius and amintor to that of brutus with cassius has already been noticed; and everyone will acknowledge the resemblance of the "quizzical reserve" of his scornful lady to olivia's, of aspatia's melancholy in the _maides tragedy_ to ophelia's, and of bellario's situation in _philaster_ to that of viola in _twelfth night_.[ ] this last play, indeed, acted, as we have seen, in the middle temple when beaumont was a freshman in the inns of court, affects beaumont's method and style, more than any other save the _pericles_ ( , or january to may ), which prepared the way for the more important later romantic dramas of shakespeare himself as well as for those of beaumont and fletcher. during the years when shakespeare's company was producing their romantic dramas, they were breathing, with shakespeare, burbadge, and heming, the atmosphere of the globe and blackfriars; and, after shakespeare had taken up a more continuous residence at stratford, in , fletcher, at any rate, not only kept in touch with the remaining shareholders and actors of the globe but with the master himself, and conversed and wrote with him on various occasions. these may have fallen either at the new place at stratford, where the now wealthy country gentleman was wont to entertain his friends, or when shakespeare came to town--as in may . at that time his former host, mountjoy's, son-in-law was suing the tiremaker for his wife's unpaid dower, and "william shakespeare of stratford upon avon in the countye of warwicke, gentleman" who had helped to make the marriage, was summoned as a witness.[ ] or between july and november of that year, when the "base fellow" kirkham was bringing against burbadge and heming a suit concerning the profits of the blackfriars theatre, in which as a shareholder shakespeare, too, must have been interested; and when christopher brooke of the pastoral poets in beaumont's inns of court was of the "councell" for shakespeare's company.[ ] or in march , when shakespeare was negotiating for the house in blackfriars which he bought that month from henry walker. in the latter year the king's players performed two plays in the writing of which there is reason to believe that shakespeare and fletcher participated: _the two noble kinsmen_, first published as "by the memorable worthies of their time, mr. john fletcher and mr. william shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of ; and a lost play licensed for publication as the "_history of cardenio_ by fletcher and shakespeare," in . of the former, critics are generally agreed that fletcher wrote about a dozen scenes and that shakespeare in all probability wrote others. maybe, however, fletcher, and perhaps later massinger, merely revised and completed shakespeare's original draft of the play left in the company's hands. that _the two noble kinsmen_ borrows its antimasque from our friend beaumont's _maske of the inner temple_, which was presented in february , may be construed as indicating that he, too, still had some connection with shakespeare's company. but it is more likely that he was now happily married and settled in kent, and didn't care what they did with his plays. probably the shakespeare-fletcher play was acted soon after beaumont's, and in the same year. with regard to the authorship of the _cardenio_ we have nothing but the publisher's statement; but we know that the play was written after the appearance, in , of the story upon which it is based, in shelton's english translation of the first part of _don quixote_; and that it was acted at court by shakespeare's and fletcher's company in may and june . the partnership of fletcher and shakespeare in the writing of these two plays has been questioned, but as to their collaboration in a third, _henry viii_, there is not much possibility of doubt. in the conception of the leading characters shakespeare is present, and in many of their finest lines, and specifically in at least five scenes; while fletcher appears in practically all the rest. the play was acted by the king's men at the globe on june , , and was included as shakespeare's by his judicious editors and intimate friends, heming and condell, in the folio of . [illustration: ben jonson from the miniature belonging to mr. evelyn shirley] during these years of fruition the friendship with jonson, who was writing at the time for both the companies to which our young dramatists gave their plays, continued apparently without interruption. it is attested by commendatory verses written by beaumont for _the silent woman_, which was acted early in , and by verses of both fletcher and beaumont prefixed to jonson's tragedy of _catiline_, published in . on the latter occasion beaumont commends jonson's contempt for "the wild applause of common people," and declares that he is "three ages yet from understood;" while fletcher even more enthusiastically avers,-- thy labours shall outlive thee; and, like gold stampt for continuance, shall be current where there is a sun, a people, or a year. the generous and graceful response of ben to the reverence of the younger of the twain appears in a tribute the date of which is uncertain, but which was included by the author among his _epigrams_, entered in the stationers' registers, . _to francis beaumont._ how i doe love thee, beaumont and thy muse, that unto me dost such religion use! how i doe feare my selfe, that am not worth the least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth! at once thou mak'st me happie, and unmak'st; and giving largely to me, more thou tak'st. what fate is mine, that so it selfe bereaves? what art is thine, that so thy friend deceives? when even there, where most thou praisest mee, for writing better, i must envie thee. since jonson was not given to indiscriminate laudation of his contemporaries in dramatic production, we may surmise that this tribute to the art of beaumont follows rather than precedes the appearance of _philaster_, and of perhaps both _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_. and whether there is any basis or not for the tradition handed down by dryden[ ] that beaumont was "so accurate a judge of plays that ben jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots,"--there is here evidence, sufficiently convincing, of the high esteem in which "the least indulgent thought" and the large "giving" of the brilliant and independent gentleman-dramatist were held by the acknowledged classicist and dictator of the stage. from the various sources already indicated and from contemporary testimony, later to be cited, it is easy to derive a definite conception of the world of dramatists and actors in which beaumont and fletcher moved. they knew, and were properly appraised by, drayton, jonson, chapman, shakespeare, webster, dekker, heywood, massinger, field, daborne, marston, day, and middleton,--with all of whom they were associated either in combats of poetry and wit or in the presentation of plays at blackfriars, whitefriars, or the globe. among actors their acquaintance included field, taylor, carey, and others of the queen's revels' children, and richard burbadge, heming, condell, ostler, cook, and lowin of the king's company. in what esteem they were held during these years we have evidence in the verses already quoted from drayton, jonson, chapman, and field. in the generous dedication of _the white devil_ by john webster, in , we find them ranked with the best: "detraction," says he, "is the sworne friend to ignorance. for mine owne part i have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy labours, especially of that full and haightened stile of maister _chapman_: the labour'd and understanding workes of maister _jonson_: the no lesse worthy composures of the both worthily excellent maister _beamont_ and maister _fletcher_: and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of m. _shake-speare_, m. _decker_, and m. _heywood_, wishing what i write may be read by their light: protesting that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, i know them so worthy, that though i rest silent in my owne worke, yet to most of theirs i dare (without flattery) fix that of _martiall--non norunt, haec monumenta mori_." footnotes: [ ] wallace, _new shakespeare discoveries, harper's maga._, march, . [ ] for these and other reminiscences of shakespeare, see alden's edition of beaumont (_belles lettres series_), xvi; macaulay's _beaumont_; leonhardt in _anglia_, viii, ; oliphant in _engl. studien_, xiv, - , koeppel's _quellen-studien_ in _münchener beiträge_, xi. [ ] wallace, _new shakespeare discoveries_ (_harper's maga._, march, ). [ ] see the _greenstreet papers_, in fleay, _hist. stage_, , . [ ] _an essay of dramatick poesie._ chapter ix the "masque of the inner temple": the pastoralists, and other contemporaries at the inns of court of royal patronage we have had evidence in the fact that during the festivities of october , to march , , no fewer than five of the beaumont-fletcher plays were presented at court, by the king's servants and the queen's revels' children,--some of them two and even three times. our poets are accordingly regarded by the great as dramatists of like distinction with shakespeare, jonson, and chapman, the authors of most of the other plays then performed. of the esteem in which beaumont individually was held, not only at court but by his fellows of the inner temple, evidence is afforded by the fact that when they were called upon, in company with the gentlemen of gray's inn, to celebrate the marriage, february , , of the princess elizabeth to the elector palatine, with a masque, they did not, like the middle temple and lincoln's inn, go out of their own group of poets for a dramatist, but chose him. the selection was but natural: he had already contributed to _the maides tragedy_ a masque of the very essence of dreams, executed with singular grace and melody. the subject decided upon for the present gorgeous spectacle was the "marrying of the thames to the rhine." the structure and stage machinery were invented by inigo jones, who was, also, stage architect for chapman's rival masque of _plutus_, presented on february , by the gentlemen of the middle temple and lincoln's inn. to the success of beaumont's production, that patron of masques, sir francis bacon, then his majesty's solicitor-general, contributed in large measure: "you, sir francis bacon, especially," says the author in his dedication of the published copy, "as you did then by your countenance and loving affection advance it, so let your good word grace it and defend it, which is able to add value to the greatest and least matters." in a contemporary letter of john chamberlain to mistris carleton, bacon is called "the chief contriver" of the spectacle; an attribution which leads us to infer that he "advanced" it not solely by "loving affection" but by funds for the tremendous expense. for, as we have already observed, in other cases, as of the masque of flowers, presented for a noble marriage in by gray's inn, bacon is not only patron but purse, permitting no one to share expenses with him: "sir francis bacon," writes chamberlain, "prepares a masque to honour this marriage, which will stand him in above £ , ." beaumont's masque, which was to have been performed at whitehall on tuesday evening, the th, had ill fortune on the first attempt. the gentlemen-masquers, desiring to vary their pomp from that of lincoln's inn and the middle temple, which had been on horse-back and in chariots, made a progress by water from winchester-house to whitehall, seated in the king's royal barge, "attended with a multitude of barges and galleys, with all variety of loud music, and several peals of ordnance; and led by two admirals." the royal family witnessed their approach; and, as chamberlain in the letter mentioned above says, "they were receved at the privie stayres: and great expectation theyre was that they shold every way exceed theyre competitors that went before them both in devise daintines of apparell and above all in dauncing (wherein they are held excellent) and esteemed far the properer men: but by what yll planet yt fell out i know not, they came home as they went with out doing anything, the reason whereof i cannot yet learne thoroughly, so but only was that the hall was so full that yt was not possible to avoyde yt or make roome for them; besides that most of the ladies were in the galleries to see them land, and could not get in, but the worst of all was that the king was so wearied and sleepie with sitting up almost two whole nights before that he had no edge to yt. whereupon s{^r} fra: bacon adventured to interest his maiestie that by this disgrace he wold not as yt were burie them quicke; and i heare the king shold aunswer that then they must burie him quicke for he could last no longer, but with all gave them very goode wordes and appointed them to come again on saterday: but the grace of theyre maske is quite gon when theyre apparell hath ben already shewed and theyre devises vented, so that how yt will fall out, god knows, for they are much discouraged, and out of countenance; and the world sayes yt comes to passe after the old proverb--the properer men the worse lucke."[ ] on that day, accordingly, the masque was presented, "in the new banketting-house which for a kind of amends was granted to them"; and with marked success. "at the entrance of their majesties and their highnesses," writes the venetian ambassador to the doge and senate, may , , "one saw the scene, with forests; on a sudden half of it changed to a great mountain with four springs at its feet. the subject of the masque was that jove and juno desiring to honour the wedding and the conjunction of two such noble rivers, the thames and the rhine, sent separately mercury and iris, who appeared; and mercury then praised the couple and the royal house, and wishing to make a ballet suitable to the conjunction of two such streames, he summoned from the four fountains, whence they spring and which are fed by rain, four nymphs who hid among the clouds and the stars that ought to bring rain. they then danced, but iris said that a dance of one sex only was not a live dance. then appeared four cupids, while from the temple of jove, came five idols and they danced with the stars and the nymphs. then iris, after delivering her speech, summoned flora, caused a light rain to fall, and then came a dance of shepherds. then in a moment the other half of the scene changed, and one saw a great plateau with two pavilions, and in them one hundred and fifty knights of olympus,--then more tents, like a host encamped. on the higher ground was the temple of olympian jove all adorned with statues of gold and silver, and served by a number of priests with music and lights in golden candelabra. the knights were in long robes of silk and gold, the priests in gold and silver. the knights danced, their robes being looped up with silver, and their dance represented the introduction of the olympian games into this kingdom. after the ballet was over their majesties and their highnesses passed into a great hall especially built for the purpose, where were long tables laden with comfits and thousands of mottoes. after the king had made the round of the tables everything was in a moment rapaciously swept away."[ ] beaumont had introduced innovations--two antimasques, or "subtle, capricious dances" accompanied by spectacular or comic dumb-show, instead of one, and new and varied characters in each, instead of the stereotyped witches, satyrs, follies, etc. his nymphs, hyades, blind cupids, and half vivified statuas from jove's altar, of the first antimasque occasioned great amusement, so that the king called for them again at the end--"but one of the statuas by that time was undressed." and the may-dance of the second, with its rural characters--pedant, lord and lady of the may, country clown and wench, host and hostess, he-baboon and she-baboon, he-fool and she-fool--stirred laughter and applause that drowned the music. the main masque was stately, and fitly symbolic of the occasion. and one at least of the songs, that sung by the twelve white-robed priests, each playing upon his lute, before jupiter's altar, has the rare lyrical quality of beaumont's best manner,-- shake off your heavy trance, and leap into a dance, such as no mortals use to tread, fit only for apollo to play to, for the moon to lead, and all the stars to follow! we may be sure that the poet received his meed of praise from king, princess, and elector, and from officials of the court--the earl of nottingham, lord privy seal, and bacon, "the chief contriver"; and that he sat high at the "solemn supper in the new marriage-room" which the king made them on the sunday,--maybe "at the same board" with the king who doubtless jested much at the expense of prince charles and his followers. for they had to pay for the feast, "having laid a wager for the charges, and lost it in running at the ring."[ ] if it had not been customary for members of the inns of court to retain connection with the society to which they belonged, even after they had ceased to be in residence, especially if still living in the city, we might infer from his authorship of this masque that beaumont had kept in touch with the inner temple. though he had not professed the law, the quiddities of its parlance enliven various passages of his _woman-hater_ and of the plays which he later wrote with fletcher. whether he kept his name on the books or not, the inner temple was in a social sense his club for life; and it was to "those gentlemen that were his acquaintance there" that the publisher mosely turned for help when searching for his portrait in . the students of his generation were by , many of them, utter barristers, ancients, and benchers: he would affiliate with them; and that he should be acquainted with the "gentlemen who were actors" in his masque goes without saying. this was an occasion of tremendous moment to the members of the allied houses. they were conferring the highest honour upon their poet, and every man on the books of each inn knew him by name and face. one of the fellows, john, afterwards sir john, fenner provides a messenger "to fetch m{^r} beaumont," and advances _li._ "toward the mask business." another, lewis hele is twice paid _li._ toward the same business. from chamberlain's letter, we learn that the passage by water to whitehall "cost them better than three hundred pound,"--from two thousand to twenty-four hundred pounds, in the money of to-day. from the records of the societies for "the th of king james," we find that "the charge in apparell of the actors in that great mask at white-hall was supported" by each society; "the readers at gray's inn being each man assessed at _l._, the ancients, and such as at that time were to be called ancients, at _l._ _s._ apiece, the barristers at _l._ a man, and the students at _s._"; and that on may , , the inner temple is still indebted over and besides the contribution of the house "for the late show and sports ... not so little as _li._,"--that is to say, from seven to nine thousand pounds according our present valuation.[ ] beaumont in his dedication of the quarto (published soon afterwards) to the worthy sir francis bacon and the grave and learned bench of the anciently-allied houses of gray's inn and the inner temple, is addressing friends when he says "yee that spared no time nor travell in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this masque ... will not thinke much now to looke backe upon the effects of your owne care and worke: for that whereof the successe was then doubtfull, is now happily performed and gratiously accepted. and that which you were then to thinke of in straites of time, you may now peruse at leysure." of the gentlemen-masquers, and "the towardly yoong, active, gallant gentlemen of the same houses," who, as their convoy "set forth from winchester-house which was the _rende vous_ towards the court, about seven of the clock at night," on that occasion, the most directly interested in the event would be a group of literary friends of which the central figure was william browne of tavistock. he had been at clifford's inn, one of the preparatory schools for the inner temple, on the other side of fleet street, since about , had migrated to the inner temple in november , and had been admitted a member in march . he was some five years younger than beaumont, and, like beaumont, was at just that time on intimate terms of friendship with the last of the elizabethan pastoralists, michael drayton,--on terms of reciprocal admiration and friendship also with beaumont's dramatic associates, jonson and chapman; and he had himself, in , been engaged for three years upon the composition of the charming _first book_ of his _britannia's pastorals_. in a letter written some years later to a lover of the pastoral,--the translator of tasso's aminta, _henery reynolds, esq.,--of poets and poesy_, and published in , drayton couples william browne so closely with sir john and francis beaumont that even if the trio were not, in various ways, affiliated with the same legal society we could not escape the conclusion that the brothers were near and dear to browne. "then," writes drayton, after mentioning other literary acquaintances,-- then the two beaumonts and my browne arose, my deare companions whom i freely chose my bosome friends; and in their severall wayes, rightly borne poets, and in these last dayes, men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts,-- such as have freely tould to me their hearts, as i have mine to them. we may proceed upon the assumption that it would have been impossible for these bosom friends of drayton, members of the same club, not to have known each other. especially, if we recall that browne was a literary disciple of fletcher in pastoral poetry, between and , and that he had beaumont's masque and poetic fame in mind when, in the dedication of his own _masque of ulysses and circe_, presented by the same society of the inner temple not quite two years later, january , , he said, "if it degenerate in kind from those other our society hath produced, blame yourselves for not seeking to a happier muse." i am at pains thus to emphasize the acquaintance of browne and beaumont, because our acquaintance with the latter is enriched if we may regard him as familiarly associated with the literary coterie of the inns of court. browne and beaumont had friends in common beside drayton, chapman, and jonson. to, and of, elizabeth, the daughter of sir philip sidney, beaumont writes, as we shall presently notice, in terms of admiration and intimacy. and it is for mary, the sister of sir philip, that william browne composes, in or after , the immemorial epitaph, underneath this sable hearse lies the subject of all verse: sydney's sister, pembroke's mother; death, ere thou hast slain another, fair, and learn'd, and good as shee time shall throw his dart at thee. to this pembroke, william herbert, third earl, browne dedicates the _second book_ of the _pastorals_, , which contains the beautiful tribute to sidney and his _arcadia_; and pembroke shows his regard for the young poet by appointing him tutor to a wealthy ward, and later taking him into the service of his own family at wilton. in john davies of hereford wrote the third eclogue appended to browne's _shepherd's pipe_, in which he figures as old wernock, and browne as willy; and, in , commendatory verses to the _second book_ of browne's _pastorals_,--beginning "pipe on, sweet swaine." he had already in , addressed "the most ingenious mr. francis beaumont" in an epigram of like familiarity and devotion: some that thy name abbreviate, call thee franck: so may they well, if they respect thy witt; for like rich corne (that some fools call too ranck) all cleane wit-reapers still are griping it; and could i sow for thee to reape and use, i should esteeme it manna for the muse.[ ] another of this little group of late spenserian pastoralists was, as we shall later see, an admirer of beaumont. this is william basse, probably the composer of the lines _in laudem authoris_, signed w. b., and prefixed to the edition of _salmacis and hermaphroditus_. with the commendatory verses of davies, george wither, thomas wenman, and others in browne's _second book_ of the _pastorals_, appear some again signed w. b. "it is just possible," according to the most recent editor of browne's poems,[ ] "that basse and browne were kinsmen." it is certain that basse was a retainer in the family of the poetic thomas wenman who was browne's contemporary at the inner temple. basse, himself, had published three pastoral elegies in , and he was still writing pastorals half a century later. another of this group, george wither, had since been of one of the adjoining inns of chancery. he is the roget, thyrsis, philarete of this pastoral field. in , he wrote the third eclogue supplementary to browne's _shepherd's pipe_; and in he was a neighbor of the inner temple poets, at lincoln's inn. in that eclogue he speaks of a valentine on "the wedding of fair thame and rhine" which he had composed on the occasion of the royal marriage; and in the first _epithalamium_ of the valentine, he refers explicitly to the masques of chapman and beaumont. he must have known both those "heliconian wits." "i'm none," he says with self-depreciation,-- i'm none of those that have the means or place with shows of cost to do your nuptials grace; but only master of mine own desire, am hither come with others to admire. i am not of those heliconian wits, whose pleasing strains the court's known humour fits, but a poor rural shepherd, that for need can make sheep music on an oaten reed. this "faithful though an humble swain" was of distinctive repute among beaumont's associates by : no less for the lyric ease of his _shepherd's hunting_, or of his shall i wasting in despair die because a woman's fair?-- than for the "plain, moral speaking" of the _abuses stript and whipt_ that in - had brought him a year's imprisonment in the marshalsea. jonson later "personates" him as chronomastix, or whipper of the times, in a masque at court; and beaumont's, and fletcher's friend, massinger, introduces him by allusion, in his _duke of milan_, about , "i have had a fellow," says the officer in act iii, ii, of that play-- that could endite forsooth and make fine metres to tinkle in the ears of ignorant madams, that for defaming of great men, was sent me threadbare and lousy. still another member of this circle of poets associated with the inns of court is the cuddy of the pastoral poems, the intimate friend of wither and browne,--christopher brooke, who, though he does not cut much of a figure in his _elegies_, or in his _ghost of richard iii_, was a lovable and hearty friend, and a distinguished bencher of lincoln's inn. that brooke was intimate with shakespeare's company of the king's servants, at just the period that beaumont and fletcher were most closely associated with that company, we have already noticed. as one of the barristers who, in , defended burbadge and heming against the bill of complaint brought by kirkham for recovery of profits in the blackfriars theatre, he had much to do with having the "plaintiff's bill cleerly and absolutely dismissed out of this courte."[ ] this community of friendship with browne and browne's circle gives us, by inference, a clue to an extended list of the gentlemen of london with whom beaumont cannot have altogether failed to be acquainted. browne succeeded beaumont as poet of the inner temple, and the friends of the former in that society would be known to the latter. among those who wrote verses laudatory of browne's _pastorals_ between and , was his "learned friend," john selden, the jurist and antiquary, whose "chamber was in the paper buildings which looke towards the garden." he kept, says aubrey, "a plentifull table, and was never without learned company": frequently that of jonson, drayton, and camden; and, we may be certain, of john fletcher, too; for on his mother's side, selden as his coat of arms and epitaph prove, and as hasted tells us in his _history of kent_, was of the "equestrian" family of bakers to which fletcher's stepsisters belonged. selden was of beaumont's age to a year, and had been of the society since . for browne's book edward heyward, also, wrote verses,--selden's most "devoted friend and chamber-fellow,"--to whom (aubrey again) "he dedicated his _titles of honour_," . heyward came from norfolk and was admitted to the inner temple in . and with selden must be also bracketed, thomas wenman, of oxfordshire; for so suckling brackets him in the _session of the poets_: the poets met the other day, and apollo was at the meeting, they say.... 'twas strange to see how they flocked together: there was selden, and he stood next to the chaire, and wenman not far off, which was very faire. wenman came to the inner temple in ; he expresses in his complimentary verses to browne his wonder that the pastoralist can frame such worthy poetry while as yet "scarce a hair grows up thy chin to grace." wenman was the son of that sir richard whose wife was implicated in the gunpowder plot by mrs. [elizabeth] vaux. he succeeded to an irish peerage in . there was, also, thomas gardiner, the son of a rector in essex. he came to the inner temple in , and in was knighted for his loyalty to king charles. there was, though not of the inner temple, browne's favourite companion, william ferrar, the alexis of the pastoral circle. ferrar was admitted to the middle temple in , and died young. he must have been a graceful and lovable youth, if we may judge from wither's and browne's tributes to him. through his father, "an eminent london merchant, who was interested in the adventures of hawkins, drake, and raleigh," browne and beaumont might, if in no other way, have met with sir richard and sir walter. there were, also, writing praises to browne, the brothers croke, sons of sir john croke of the king's bench. they were both of christ's church, oxford, charles and unton; and they became students of the inner temple in . charles was something of a poet. in he was professor of rhetoric at gresham college; he took orders, and became a fellow of eton college; and during the civil war fled to ireland. unton rose at the bar, became a member of parliament, "aided the parliamentarians during the civil war and enjoyed the favour of cromwell." and there was browne's dear friend, thomas manwood, who had entered the inner temple in , and whose early death by drowning browne bewails in the fourth eclogue of the _shepherd's pipe_,--an elegy somewhat fantastic but beautifully sincere, and, in one or two of its fundamental concepts, decidedly reminiscent of beaumont's elegy written the year before on the death of the countess of rutland. these are a few of the members of this society whom beaumont met whenever he visited the inner temple. it was such as they and their companions, many more of whom are mentioned in the _inner temple records_, and described by mr. gordon goodwin in his edition of browne's _poems_, who set forth, ordered, and furnished beaumont's _masque of the inner temple_; and who, as gentlemen-masquers, sailed with him in the royal barge to whitehall, and happily performed the masque before the king and queen, the princess elizabeth, and the count palatine, on saturday, the twentieth day of february . beaumont's friends were fletcher's; and fletcher must have known browne. it has always seemed strange to me that, when enumerating in his _britannia's pastorals_ the pastoral poets of england,--half a dozen of them, his personal acquaintances,--browne should have omitted fletcher to whom he was deeply indebted for literary inspiration. between and he had, in his _first book of britannia's pastorals_ (song , end; song , beginning), borrowed the story of marina and the river-god, as regards not only the main incident but also much of the poetic phrase, from the _faithfull shepheardesse_--the scene in which fletcher's god of the river rescues amoret and offers her his love. the borrowing is not at all a plagiarism, but an elaboration of the amoret episode; and, as such, the imitation is indirect homage to the quondam pastoralist living close by in southwark. i hesitate to enter upon quest of literary surmise. but some young lion of research might be pardoned if he should undertake to prove that the description of the shepherd remond which browne introduces into his first song just before this borrowing from fletcher's pastoral drama is homage to fletcher, pure and direct: remond, young remond, that full well could sing, and tune his pipe at pan's birth carolling: who for his nimble leaping, sweetest layes, a lawrell garland wore on holidayes; in framing of whose hand dame nature swore that never was his like nor could be more.[ ] conjectural reconstruction of literary relationships is perilously seductive. but it is only fair to apprise the young lion of the delightful certainty that though the trail may run up a tree, it abounds in alluring scents. he will find that no sooner has browne's marina concluded the adventure borrowed from fletcher than she falls in with remond's younger companion, "blithe doridon," who, in the _second book_ of the _pastorals_, written in - , swears fidelity to remond-- entreats him then that he might be his partner, since no men had cases liker; he with him would goe-- weepe when he wept and sigh when he did so;[ ] and that, in the second song of the _first book_,[ ] doridon, who also is a poet, is described at a length not at all necessary to the narrative, and in terms that more than echo the description of the beauty of hermaphroditus in the poem of that name which has been traditionally attributed to beaumont. this doridon is a genius: upon this hill there sate a lovely swaine, as if that nature thought it great disdaine that he should (so through her his genius told him) take equall place with swaines, since she did hold him her chiefest worke, and therefore thought it fit, that with inferiours he should never sit.... he is "fairest of men"; when he pipes "the wood's sweet quiresters" join in consort--"a musicke that would ravish choisest eares." he is, as i have said, a poet,-- and as when plato did i' th' cradle thrive, bees to his lips brought honey from their hive; so to this boy they came; i know not whether they brought, or from his lips did honey gather.... he is also a master in the revels, his buskins (edg'd with silver) were of silke.... those buskins he had got and brought away for dancing best upon the revell day. browne, by the way, wrote the _prefatory address_ to this book of _britannia's pastorals_, june , , only three months after beaumont's masque upon the "revel day" was acted; and the book was licensed for printing, the same year, november . returning to our young lion, he will, i fear me, exult (with lust of chase or laughter?) when in the third song of this book, he notes that doridon, overhearing the love-colloquy of remond and fida, can find no other trope to describe their felicity than one drawn from ovid, and from the so-called beaumont poem of , _salmacis and hermaphroditus_,-- sweet death they needs must have, who so unite that two distinct make one hermaphrodite.[ ] lured by such scents as these, our beast of prey may pounce--upon a shadow, or not?--when, having tracked the meandering browne to the second song of the second book, he there hears him rehearse the names of what shepheards on the sea were seene to entertaine the ocean's queene,-- the poets of england: astrophel (sidney), "the learned shepheard of faire hitching hill" (chapman), all loved draiton, jonson, well-languag'd daniel, christopher brooke, davies of hereford, and wither, many a skilfull swaine whose equals earth cannot produce againe, but leave the times and men that shall succeed them enough to praise that age which so did breed them,-- and then, _without interim_, proceed: two of the quaintest swains that yet have beene failed their attendance on the ocean's queene, remond and doridon, whose haplesse fates late sever'd them from their more happy mates.[ ] browne, who had dropped these companion shepherds of the "pastoral and the rural song" three songs back, now needs them to scour the forests for the vanished fida of his fiction. if he had not needed them for the narrative here resumed, might they not have attended the ocean's queen with the other poets of england,--all, but sidney, his personal friends,--as fletcher and beaumont? this is precisely the way in which masaccio, ghirlandajo, and rafael introduced into their frescoes the tornabuoni and medici of their time. we may leave the inquisitive to follow them to that realm where, forsaking mythical and pastoral romance, many weary dayes they now had spent in unfrequented wayes. about the rivers, vallies, holts, and crags, among the ozyers and the waving flags, they merely pry, if any dens there be, where from the sun might harbour crueltie: or if they could the bones of any spy, or torne by beasts, or humane tyranny. they close inquiry made in caverns blind, yet what they look for would be death to find. right as a curious man that would descry, led by the trembling hand of jealousy, if his fair wife have wrong'd his bed or no, meeteth his torment if he find her so.[ ] i cannot, however, refrain from pointing the venturesome researcher,--with irony--may be not mephistophelian, but merely pyrrhonic,--to the dramatic misfortunes of bellario, aspasia, and evadne, and other heroines of the dramatized romances in which beaumont and fletcher's theatre of the globe was indulging at the time. and i would ask him after he has read the sage advice of remond to the disconsolate shepherd, some two hundred lines further down, to turn to fletcher's poem of _upon an honest man's fortune_, and decide whether the poet-philosopher of the one is not very much of the same opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other.[ ] footnotes: [ ] john chamberlain to mris. carleton, february, - , in _state papers (domestic) james i_, lxxii, no. . quoted by miss sullivan, _court masques of james i_, p. ( ). [ ] foscarini in _calendar of state papers, venetian_, xii, no. . quoted by miss sullivan, _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _calendar state papers (domestic)_, - , pp. , , . [ ] dugdale's _origines juridicales_, as cited by dyce, _b. and f._, ii, . inderwick, _op. cit._, ii, xxxix-xlii, , , etc. douthwaite, _op. cit._, . nichols's _progresses of king james_, ii, , . [ ] _to worthy persons_, in the volume entitled _the scourge of folly_. [ ] gordon goodwin, in _the muses' library_, , p. . [ ] see _greenstreet papers_, viii, fleay, _hist. stage_, . [ ] _brit. past._, i, , . [ ] _ibid._, ii, , . [ ] li. - . [ ] _ibid._, i, , - . [ ] _ibid._, ii, , - . [ ] _ibid._, ii, , - . [ ] cf. especially _brit. past._, ii, , - , with fletcher's defiance of poverty and independence of criticism in his poem, _upon an honest man's fortune_. chapter x an intersecting circle of jovial sort christopher brooke of lincoln's inn enters the circle of beaumont's associates not only as the advocate to whom beaumont's friends in shakespeare's company of actors turn for counsel in an important suit at law, and as the encomiast of shakespeare himself a year or two later: he that from helicon sends many a rill, whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men,[ ] but as one of the pastoralists of the inns of court. he was also a friend of beaumont's older associates, jonson, drayton, and davies of hereford. from an unexpected quarter comes information of brooke's intimacy with still others who at various points impinged upon beaumont's career,--with inigo jones, for instance, who designed the machinery for beaumont's _masque_, and with sir henry nevill, the father of the sir henry who, a few years later, supplied the publisher walkley with the manuscript of beaumont and fletcher's _a king and no king_. when we let ourselves in upon the elder sir henry carousing at the mitre with brooke and jones, and others known to beaumont as members of the mermaid, in a famous symposium held some time between and september , we begin to feel that it was not by mere accident that the manuscript _of a king and no king_ fell into the hands of the nevill family. sir henry the elder, of billingbear, berkshire, was a relative of sir francis bacon, and a friend of davies of hereford, and of ben jonson, who dedicated to nevill about one of his most graceful epigrams; probably, also, of francis beaumont's brother john, who wrote a graceful tribute to the memory of one of the gentlewomen of the family, mistress elizabeth nevill. this sir henry was an influential member of parliament, a statesman, a courtier, and a diplomat, as well as a patron of poets. he came near being secretary of the realm. it is his name that we find scribbled with those of bacon and shakespeare, about , possibly by davies of hereford, the admirer of all three, over the cover of the _northumbrian manuscript_ of "mr. ffrauncis bacon's" essays and speeches. sir henry did not die till , and it is more than likely that the play, _a king and no king_, which was acted about , and of which his family held the manuscript, had his "approbation and patronage" as well as that of sir henry the younger "to the commendation of the authors"; and that both father and son knew beaumont and fletcher well. the mitre inn, a common resort of hilarious templars, still stands at the top of mitre court, a few yards back from the thoroughfare of fleet street. [illustration: francis bacon from the portrait by paul van somer in the national portrait gallery, london] the symposium to which i have referred is celebrated in a copy of macaronic latin verses, entitled _mr. hoskins, his convivium philosophicum_;[ ] and i may be pardoned if i quote from the contemporary translation by john reynolds of new college, the opening stanzas, since one is set to wondering how many other of the jolly souls "convented," beside brooke and jones and nevill, our beaumont knew.-- whosoever is contented that a number be convented, enough but not too many; the _miter_ is the place decreed, for witty jests and cleanly feed, the betterest of any. there will come, though scarcely current, christopherus surnamèd _torrent_ and john yclepèd _made_; and arthur _meadow-pigmies'-foe_ to sup, his dinner will forgoe-- will come as soon as bade. sir robert _horse-lover_ the while, _ne let_ sir henry _count it vile_ will come with gentle speed; and _rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows_ and john surnamèd _little-hose_ will come if there be need. and richard _pewter-waster_ best and henry _twelve-month-good_ at least and john _hesperian_ true. if any be desiderated he shall be amerciated forty-pence in issue. hugh the _inferior-germayne_, nor yet unlearnèd nor prophane inego _ionicke-pillar_. but yet the number is not righted: if coriate bee not invited, the jeast will want a tiller. in his edition of aubrey's _brief lives_, dr. clark supplies the glossary to these punning names. _torrent_ is, of course, brooke. johannes _factus_, or _made_, is brooke's chamber-fellow of lincoln's inn, john donne; and donne is the great friend and correspondent in well known epistles of henry _twelve-month-good_, the sir henry goodere, or goodeere, who married frances (drayton's panape), one of the daughters of "the first cherisher of drayton's muse." _ne-let_ sir henry _count it vile_ is the elder nevill under cover of his family motto, _ne vile velis_. inigo jones, _ionicke-pillar_ is even more thinly disguised in the latin original as ignatius _architectus_, hugh holland (the _inferior-germayne_) was of beaumont's mermaid club, the writer--beside other poems--of commendatory verses for jonson's _sejanus_ in , and of the sonnet _upon the lines and life_ of that other frequenter of the mermaid, "sweet master shakespeare." holland's "great patronesse," by the way, was the wife of sir edward coke of beaumont's inner temple, whose daughter married beaumont's kinsman, sir john villiers; and it was by the great villiers, duke of buckingham, that holland was introduced to king james. also, of the mermaid in beaumont's time was tom coryate, the "legge-stretcher of odcombe" without whose presence this convivium philosophicum would "want its tiller." of the mermaid, too, was richard martin (the _pewter-waster_). he was fond of the drama; had organized a masque at the middle temple at the time of the princess elizabeth's marriage; and it is to him that ben jonson dedicates the folio of _the poetaster_ ( ). in , as recorder of london, he was the bosom friend of brooke, holland, and hoskins: he died of just such a "symposiaque" as this, a few years later, and he lies in the middle temple. last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic latin verses of the mitre, john hoskins himself (surnamed _little-hose_). he had been a freshman of the middle temple in the year when beaumont was beginning at the inner. he was an incomparable writer of drolleries, over which we may be sure that beaumont many a time held his sides,--a wag whose "excellent witt gave him letters of commendacion to all ingeniose persons," a great friend of beaumont's jonson, and of raleigh, donne, selden, camden, and daniel. of the participants in serjeant hoskins's _convivium philosophicum_, we find, then, that several were of those who came into personal contact with beaumont, and that of the rest, nearly all moved in the field of his acquaintance. concerning a few, arthur _meadow-pigmies'-foe_ (cranefield), sir robert _horse-lover_ (phillips), _rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows_ (conyoke or connock), and john _hesperian_ (west), i have no information pertinent to the subject. footnotes: [ ] _the ghost of richard iii_, i, viii ( ). [ ] in _cal. state papers (dom.)_, under sept. , , i find "description by ralph colphab [thomas cariat] of brasenose college, oxford, of a philosophical feast the guests at which were chris brook, john donne," and others in exactly the order given below, save for one error. "in latin rhymes." dr. a. clark in his aubrey's _brief lives_, ii, - , gives the latin verses from an old commonplace book in lincoln college library, "authore rodolpho calsabro, aeneacense"; but prefers the attribution of another old copy, owned by mr. madan of brasenose, "per johannem hoskyns, london." the translation by reynolds, who died in , is also given by dr. clark. chapter xi beaumont and sir philip sidney's daughter; relations with other persons of note glimpses of the more personal relations of beaumont with the world of rank and fashion, and to some extent of his character, are vouchsafed us in the few non-dramatic verses that may with certainty be ascribed to him. unfortunately for our purpose, most of those included in the _poems_, "by francis beaumont, gent.," issued by blaiklock in and printed again in , and among _the golden remains_ "of those so much admired dramatick poets, francis beaumont and john fletcher, gents.," in , are, as i have already said, by other hands than his: some of them by his brother, sir john, and by donne, jonson, randolph, shirley, and waller. of the juvenile amatory lyrics, addresses, and so-called sonnets in these collections, it is not likely that a single one is by him; for in an epistle to sidney's daughter, the countess of rutland, written when he was evidently of mature years and reputation,--let us suppose, about , beaumont says: i would avoid the common beaten ways to women usèd, which are love or praise. as for the first, the little wit i have is not yet grown so near unto the grave but that i can, by that dim fading light, perceive of what or unto whom i write. let others, "well resolved to end their days with a loud laughter blown beyond the seas,"--let such write love to you: i would not willingly be pointed at in every company, as was that little tailor, who till death was hot in love with queen elizabeth. and for the last, in all my idle days i never yet did living woman praise in prose or verse. a sufficient disavowal, this, of the foolish love songs attributed to him by an uncritical posterity. as for this "strange letter," as he denominates it, from which i have quoted, the sincere, as well as brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaintance with, and genuine admiration of, elizabeth, the poetic and only child of sir philip sidney. the countess lived but twenty-five miles north-west of charnwood, and in the same country of leicestershire. one can see the towers from the heights above grace-dieu. the beaumonts undoubtedly had been at belvoir, time and again. "if i should sing your praises in my rhyme," says he to her of the "white soul" and "beautiful face," i lose my ink, my paper and my time and nothing add to your o'erflowing store, and tell you nought, but what you knew before. nor do the virtuous-minded (which i swear, madam, i think you are) endure to hear their own perfections into question brought, but stop their ears at them; for, if i thought you took a pride to have your virtues known, (pardon me, madam) i should think them none. many a writer of the day agreed with beaumont concerning elizabeth sidney,--"every word you speak is sweet and mild." she, said jonson to drummond of hawthornden, "was nothing inferior to her father in poesie"; she encouraged it in others. but her husband, roger, fifth earl of rutland, though a lover of plays himself, does not appear to have favoured his countess's patronage of literary men. he burst in upon her, one day when ben jonson was dining with her, and "accused her that she kept table to poets." of her excellence jonson bears witness in four poems. most pleasantly in that epistle included in his _the forrest_, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he says: with you, i know my off'ring will find grace: for what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit, were it to think, that you should not inherit his love unto the muses, when his skill almost you have, or may have, when you will? wherein wise nature you a dowrie gave, worth an estate treble to that you have. beauty, i know is good, and blood is more; riches thought most: but, madame, think what store the world hath scene, which all these had in trust, and now lye lost in their forgotten dust. and in an epigram[ ] _to the honour'd ---- countesse of ----_, evidently sent to her during the absence of her husband on the continent, he compliments her conduct,-- not only shunning by your act, to doe ought that is ill, but the suspition too,-- at a time when others are following vices and false pleasures. but "you," he says, admit no company but good, and when you want those friends, or neare in blood, or your allies, you make your bookes your friends, and studie them unto the noblest ends, searching for knowledge, and to keepe your mind the same it was inspired, rich, and refin'd. among other admirers of the countess of rutland was sir thomas overbury, who, according to ben jonson, was "in love with her." beaumont would have known the brilliant and ill-starred overbury, of compton scorpion, who was not only an intimate of jonson's, but a devoted admirer of their mutual friend, sir henry nevill of billingbear. and if beaumont was on terms of affectionate familiarity with sidney's daughter, he could not but have known sidney's sister, the countess of pembroke, as well, the idol of william browne's epitaph, and of his old friend drayton's eulogy, on the "fair shepherdess," to whom all shepherds dedicate their lays, and on her altars offer up their bays. "in her time wilton house," says aubrey, "was like a college; there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. she was the greatest patronesse of witt and learning of any lady in her time." and if beaumont knew the mother, then, also, william herbert, third earl of pembroke, the son, to whom his master, jonson, dedicates in , the tragedy of _catiline_, prefaced, as we have already observed, by verses of beaumont himself. whatever rutland's objection may have been to his countess's patronage of poets, we may be sure that that lady's attitude toward beaumont and his literary friends was seconded by her husband's old friend the earl of southampton, with whom in earlier days rutland used to pass away the time "in london merely in going to plaies every day." southampton had remained a patron of burbadge, shakespeare, and the like. and when he died in , we find not only beaumont's acquaintance, chapman, but beaumont's brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his memory. "i keep that glory last which is the best," writes sir john, the love of learning which he oft express'd in conversation, and respect to those who had a name in arts, in verse, in prose. since southampton was "a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves"[ ] we may figure not only the two beaumonts but their beloved countess participating in such discussion of noble themes,--if not in london, then at belvoir castle or titchfield house or grace-dieu priory. if at belvoir, leland, the traveler, helps us to the scene. the castle, he says "standyth on the very knape of an highe hille, stepe up eche way, partely by nature, partely by working of mennes handes, as it may evidently be perceived. of the late dayes [ ], the erle of rutland hath made it fairer than ever it was. it is straunge sighte to se be how many steppes of stone the way goith up from the village to the castel. in the castel be faire gates, and its dungeon is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a place to walk yn, to se at the countery aboute, and raylid about the round [waull, and] a garden [plot] in the middle."[ ] one sees francis toiling up the "many steps," received by his countess and the rest, and rejoicing with them in the view of the twenty odd family estates from the garden on the high tower. * * * * * returning to francis beaumont's epistle to the countess of rutland, we observe that it concludes with a promise: but, if your brave thoughts, which i must respect above your glorious titles, shall accept these harsh disorder'd lines, i shall ere long dress up your virtues new, in a new song; yet far from all base praise and flattery, although i know what'er my verses be, they will like the most servile flattery shew, if i write truth, and make the subject you. the opportunity for "the new song" came in a manner unexpected, and, alas, too soon. in august , but a brief month or so after she had been freed by her husband's death from the misery of an unhappy marriage, she was herself suddenly carried off by some mysterious malady. according to a letter of chamberlain to sir r. winwood, "sir walter raleigh is slandered to have given her certaine pills that despatch'd her." that, sir walter, even with the best intent in the world, could not have done in person, for he was in the tower at the time. perhaps the medicine referred to was one of those "excellent receipts" for which raleigh and his half-brother, adrian gilbert, were famous. the chemist gilbert was living in those days with the countess of rutland's aunt, at wilton. three days after the death of the lady whom he so revered, beaumont poured out his grief in verses justly praised as a monument that will then lasting be when all her marble is more dust than she. that is what john earle, writing after beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of the _elegy on the death of the virtuous lady, elizabeth, countess of rutland_. and so far as the elegy proper is concerned,--that is to say, the first half of the poem, ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians who helped the countess to her grave,--i fully agree with earle. here is poetry of the heart, pregnant with pathos, not only of the untimely event--she was but twenty-seven years old,--but of the unmerited misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy,-- ere thou knewest the use of tears sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years; sorrow in her wedded life,-- as soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief, there were enough to meet thee; and the chief blessing of women, marriage, was to thee nought but a sacrament of misery. and then, why didst thou die so soon? oh, pardon me! i know it was the longest life to thee, that e'er with modesty was call'd a span, since the almighty left to strive with man. in this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence, we have our most definite revelation of beaumont's personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage (jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome husband); his admiration of the chivalric great--as of the hero whose life was ventured and generously lost at zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the decree of "the wise god of nature"; his acceptance of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning mercy: i will not hurt the peace which she should have by looking longer in her quiet grave,-- the consummation that all his heroines of tortured chastity, the bellarios, arethusas, aspasias, pantheas, uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. and as a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence as exists outside of beaumont's dramatic productions. it displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from fletcher: his preference in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,-- sorrow can make a verse without a muse; and "thou art gone,"-- gone like the day thou diedst upon, and we may call that back again as soon as thee. in still another way the lines on the death of sidney's daughter are instructive. its noble tribute to sidney's _arcadia_ is payment of a debt manifest in more than one of the dramas to which beaumont had contributed. of sir philip, beaumont here writes: he left two children, who for virtue, wit, beauty, were lov'd of all,--thee and his writ: two was too few; yet death hath from us took thee, a more faultless issue than his book, which, now the only living thing we have from him, we'll see, shall never find a grave as thou hast done. alas, would it might be that books their sexes had, as well as we, that we might see this married to the worth, and many poems like itself bring forth. the _arcadia_ had already brought forth offspring: in prose, greene's _menaphon_ and _pandosto_, and lodge's _rosalynde_; in verse, day's _ile of guls_. it had fathered, immediately, the subplot of shakespeare's _king lear_,--and, indirectly, portions of the _winter's tale_, and _as you like it_, and of other elizabethan plays.[ ] within the twelve months immediately preceding august , it had inspired also, as we have already observed, beaumont and fletcher's _cupid's revenge_, the finest scenes in which are beaumont's dramatic adaptation of romantic characters and motives furnished by sir philip. and from that same "faultless issue," the _arcadia_, virtue, art, and beauty, loved of all, had earlier still been drawn by beaumont, certainly for _the maides tragedy_, and, perhaps, for _philaster_ as well. the acquaintance with the rutland family was continued after the death of francis by his brother john, and his sister elizabeth. the nymph "of beauty most divine ... whose admirèd vertues draw all harts to love her" in john's poem, _the shepherdess_, is lady katharine manners, daughter of francis, sixth earl of rutland, and now the wife of george villiers, marquis of buckingham; and the shepherdess herself "who long had kept her flocks on stony charnwood's dry and barren rocks," the country dame "for singing crowned, whence grew a world of fame among the sheep cotes," is elizabeth beaumont of grace-dieu, back on a visit from her seyliard home in kent. she had wandered into the summer place of the rutlands and buckinghams near the grace-dieu priory--"watered with our silver brookes," and had been welcomed and had sung for them. and now john repays the courtesy with indirect and graceful compliment. with the villiers family, as i have earlier intimated, the beaumonts were connected not only by acquaintance as county gentry but by ties of blood. sir george villiers, a leicestershire squire, had married for his second wife, about , maria beaumont, a relative of theirs, who had been brought up by their kinsmen of coleorton hall to the west of them on the other side of the ridge. it will be remembered that one of those coleorton beaumonts, henry, was an executor of judge beaumont's will in . the father of the maria, or mary, beaumont whom henry beaumont nurtured as a waiting gentlewoman in his household, was his second cousin, anthony beaumont of glenfield in leicestershire. while maria was living at the hall, the old knight, sir george villiers of brooksby, recently widowed, visited his kinswoman, eleanor lewis, henry's wife, at coleorton, "found there," writes a contemporary, arthur wilson, "this young gentlewoman, allied, and yet a servant of the family," was fascinated by her graces and made her lady villiers. this sir george villiers was of an old and distinguished family. leland mentions it first among the ten families of leicestershire, "that be there most of reputation."[ ] and he says "the chiefest house of the villars at this time is at brokesby in leicestershire, lower by four miles than melton, on the higher ripe [bank] of wreke river. there lie buried in the church divers of the villars. this villars [of ] is lord of hoby hard-by, and of coneham in lincolnshire.... he is a man of but two hundred marks of land by the year." this "villars" was the father of the sir george who married maria beaumont. brooksby, near melton mowbray, is only two or three hours' drive from coleorton. [illustration: george villiers, first duke of buckingham, and family from the painting by honthorst in the national portrait gallery] the children of this marriage, john, george, and christopher, were but a few years younger than the young beaumonts of grace-dieu; and there would naturally be some coming and going between the villiers children of brooksby and their beaumont kin of coleorton and grace-dieu. george, the second son, born in , through whom the fortunes of the family were achieved, was introduced to king james in august . this youth of twenty-two had all the graces of the beaumont as well as the villiers blood. "he was of singularly prepossessing appearance," says gardiner, "and was endowed not only with personal vigour, but with that readiness of speech which james delighted in." it was his mother, maria, now the widowed lady villiers, who manoeuvred the meeting. her husband's estates had gone to the children of the first marriage: george was her favourite son and she staked everything upon his success. james took to him from the first; the same year he made him cup-bearer; the next, gentleman of the bed-chamber, and knighted him and gave him a pension. we may imagine that francis beaumont and his brother john watched the promotion of their kinsman with keen interest. but his phenomenal career was only then beginning. in , a few months after francis had died, sir george villiers was elevated to the peerage as viscount villiers. by this devoted "steenie" of his "dear dad and gossop," king james, is earl of buckingham, and now,--that somerset has fallen,--the most potent force in the kingdom; in he is marquis, and in , duke,--and for some years past he has been enjoying an income of £ , a year from the lands and perquisites bestowed upon him. meanwhile his brother, john, has, in , married a great heiress, the daughter of sir edward coke of beaumont's inner temple, and in has become viscount purbeck; his mother, the intriguing maria, has been created countess of buckingham, in her own right; in due time his younger brother, the stupid christopher, is made earl of anglesey. and buckingham takes thought not for his immediate family alone: in "villiers' kinsman [hen] beaumont was to have the bishopric of worcester, but failed";[ ] in his cousin, sir thomas beaumont of coleorton, the son of the sir henry[ ] who cared for villiers' mother in her indigence, is created viscount beaumont of swords; and in , john beaumont of grace-dieu is dubbed knight-baronet. in , the marquis of buckingham had married katharine manners, the daughter and sole heiress of francis, earl of rutland. it was a love match; and john beaumont celebrated it with a glowing epithalamium, praying for the speedy birth of a son who may be worthy of his father's stile, may answere to our hopes, and strictly may combine the happy height of villiers race with noble rutland's line. soon afterwards and before , john beaumont's _shepherdesse_, spoken of above, was written. beside the nymph, the marchioness of buckingham, those whom the poem describes as living in "our dales,"--and welcoming elizabeth beaumont,--are the father of the marchioness, the earl of rutland, "his lady," cicely (tufton), the stepmother of katharine manners,--and another lady, in whose brest true wisdom hath with bounty equal place, as modesty with beauty in her face: she found me singing flora's native dowres and made me sing before the heavenly pow'rs, for which great favour, till my voice be done, i sing of her, and her thrice noble son. this other lady, so wise, and bounteous to john beaumont, is the countess of buckingham, who when john and our francis were boys, was poor cousin maria of the coleorton beaumonts. to the marquis of buckingham, "her thrice-noble sonne," john writes many poetic addresses in later years: of the birth of a daughter, mall, "this sweete armefull"; of the birth and death of his first son; of how in his "greatnesse," george villiers did not forget him: you, onely you, have pow'r to make me dwell in sight of men, drawne from my silent cell; and of how villiers had won him the recognition of the king: your favour first th' anointed head inclines to heare my rurall songs, and read my lines. george villiers, is "his patron and his friend." in writing to the great marquis and duke, john beaumont never recalls the kinship; but in writing to the less distinguished brother, the viscount purbeck, he delicately alludes to it. in the fortunes of the vauxes of harrowden, the beaumonts would naturally have continued their interest. anne, imprisoned after the gunpowder plot, was released at the end of six months. the family persisted in its adherence to the catholic faith and politics. as late as feb. , , "mrs. vaux, lord (edward) vaux's mother, is condemned to perpetual imprisonment, for refusing to take the oath of allegiance"; and we observe that on march , of the same year, "lord vaux is committed to the fleet" for a like refusal.[ ] young lord vaux got out of the fleet, in time married, and lived till . others of kin or family connection,--and of his own age,--with whom francis would be on terms of social intercourse or even intimacy during his prime, were his cousin, robert pierrepoint, who by was in parliament as member for nottingham, and in was high sheriff of the shire; henry hastings, born in , who since had been fifth earl of huntingdon, and in may was to be of those appointed for the trial of the earl and countess of somerset; huntingdon's sister, catherine (who was wife of philip stanhope, earl of chesterfield), and his brother, edward, a captain in the navy, who the year after beaumont's death made the voyage to guiana under sir walter raleigh; huntingdon's cousin, and also beaumont's kinsman, sir henry hastings, of whom we have already heard as one of father gerard's converts (a first cousin of mrs. elizabeth vaux, and husband of an elizabeth beaumont of coleorton); sir william cavendish, of the pierrepoint connection, a pupil of hobbes, an intimate friend of james i, and a leader in the society of court, who was knighted in , and in strengthened his position greatly by marrying christiana, daughter of lord bruce of kinloss; and that other young cavendish, sir william of welbeck, county notts., who in was on his travels on the continent under the care of sir henry wotton. with at least three of these scions of families allied to the beaumonts, francis had been associated, as i have already pointed out, by contemporaneity at the inns of court. neither the epistle to elizabeth sidney nor the elegy on her death was included by blaiklock in his foolish book of so-called beaumont poems. from the elegy on lady markham's death, in , there included, we learn little of the poet's self--he had never seen the lady's face, and is merely rhetoricizing. from the elegy, also included by blaiklock, "on the death of the lady penelope clifton," on october , , almost as artificial, we learn no more of beaumont's personality,--but we are led to conjecture some social acquaintance with the distinguished family of her father, lord rich, afterwards earl of warwick, and of her husband, sir gervase clifton, who had been specially admitted to the inner temple in ; and the conjecture is confirmed by the perusal of lines "to the immortal memory of this fairest and most vertuous lady" included in the works of sir john beaumont. he writes as knowing lady penelope intimately,--the sound of her voice, the fairness of her face, her high perfections,--and as regretting that he had neglected to utter his affection in verse "while she had lived": we let our friends pass idly like our time till they be gone, and then we see our crime. these poems on lady penelope clifton forge still another link between the beaumonts and the sidneys, for penelope's mother, the lady penelope devereux, daughter of walter, first earl of essex, was sidney's _innamorata_, the stella to his astrophel. one may with safety extend the list of beaumont's acquaintances among the gentry and nobility by crediting him with some of fletcher's during the years in which the poets were living in close association; not only with fletcher's family connections, the bakers, lennards, and sackvilles of kent, but with those to whom fletcher dedicates, about , the first quarto of his _faithfull shepheardesse_: sir william skipwith, for instance, sir walter aston, and sir robert townshend. of these the first, esteemed for his "witty conceits," his "epigrams and poesies," was admired and loved not only by fletcher but by beaumont's brother as well--to whom we owe an encomium evidently sincere: ... a comely body, and a beauteous mind; a heart to love, a hand to give inclin'd; a house as free and open as the ayre; a tongue which joyes in language sweet and faire, ... and more of the kind. sir william was a not distant neighbour of the beaumonts, and was knighted, as we have seen, at the same time and place as henry of grace-dieu; one may reasonably infer that his "house as free and open as the ayre" at cotes in leicestershire harboured fletcher and the two beaumonts on more than one occasion. sir walter aston of tixall in staffordshire, the diplomat, of the inner temple since , had been, since ,[ ] the patron also of francis beaumont's life-long friend, drayton. and that poet keeps up the intimacy for many years. writing, after when sir walter, now baron aston of forfar, was sent on embassy to spain, he says of lady aston that "till here again i may her see, it will be winter all the year with me." in sir walter is a "true lover of learning," in whom "as in a centre" fletcher "takes rest," and whose "goodness to the muses" is "able to make a work heroical." of sir robert townshend's relation to our dramatists we know nothing save that fletcher says: "you love above my means to thank ye." he came of a family that is still illustrious, and for a quarter of a century he sat in parliament. fletcher's closest friend, if we except beaumont, seems to have been charles cotton of beresford, staffordshire, "a man of considerable fortune and high accomplishments," the son of sir george cotton of hampshire. he owed his estates in staffordshire, and in derbyshire as well, to his marriage with the daughter of sir john stanhope. to him in , as "the noble honourer of the dead author's works and memory," richard brome dedicates the quarto of fletcher's _monsieur thomas_. "yours," he says, "is the worthy opinion you have of the author and his poems; neither can it easily be determined, whether your affection to them hath made you, by observing, more able to judge of them, than your ability to judge of them hath made you to affect them deservedly, not partially.... your noble self (has) built him a more honourable monument in that fair opinion you have of him than any inscription subject to the wearing of time can be." to this charles cotton, his cousin, sir aston cockayne, writes a letter in verse after the appearance of the first folio of beaumont and fletcher's plays, , speaking of fletcher as "your friend and old companion" and reproaching him for not having taken the pains to set the printers right about what in that folio was fletcher's, what beaumont's, what massinger's,--"i wish as free you had told the printers this as you did me." and it is apparently to cotton that cockayne is alluding when, upbraiding the publishers for not giving each of the authors his due, he says, "but how came i (you ask) so much to know? fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so." elsewhere cockayne describes fletcher and massinger as "great friends"; but the "bosome-friend" mentioned above cannot be massinger, for massinger is one of those concerning whose authorship "the bosome-friend" gives information. cotton was a friend of ben jonson, donne, and selden, also. to him it is, as a critic, and not to his son, who was a poet, that robert herrick, born seven years after beaumont, writes: for brave comportment, wit without offence, words fully flowing, yet of influence, thou art that man of men, the man alone, worthy the publique admiration: who with thine owne eyes read'st what we doe write, and giv'st our numbers euphonie and weight; tell'st when a verse springs high, how understood to be, or not, borne of the royall-blood. what state above, what symmetrie below, lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show.--[ ] and it is likely that cotton did the same for fletcher and beaumont. of cotton, fletcher's and, therefore, beaumont's friend, lord clarendon gives us explicit information: "he had all those qualities which in youth raise men to the reputation of being fine gentlemen: such a pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness and gentleness of nature, and such a civility and delightfulness in conversation, that no man in the court or out of it appeared a more accomplished person; all these extraordinary qualifications being supported by as extraordinary a clearness of courage, and fearlessness of spirit, of which he gave too often manifestation." in later life he was less happy in fortune and in disposition, "and gave his best friends cause to have wished that he had not lived so long." he passed through the civil war and died at the end of cromwell's protectorate, . and of robert herrick, we may say that he, too, was surely an acquaintance of our poets. he writes many poems to ben jonson. to their other friend, selden, fletcher's connection by the baker alliance, and beaumont's associate in the inner temple, he writes appreciatively: whose smile can make a poet, and your glance dash all bad poems out of countenance.[ ] and of our dramatists themselves, he writes about the same time that he is writing to selden, in his verses _to the apparition of his mistresse, calling him to elizium_,-- amongst which glories, crown'd with sacred bayes and flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies-- beaumont and fletcher, swans to whom all eares listen while they, like syrens in their spheres, sing their evadne.[ ] [illustration: john selden from the painting in the national portrait gallery, london] the bohemian life on the bankside, such as it was, must have been brought to an end by beaumont's marriage, about . by that time beaumont had written _the woman-hater_, _the knight of the burning pestle_, _the maske_, and several poems; fletcher, _the faithfull shepheardesse_ and three or four plays more; the two in partnership, at least five plays; and fletcher had meanwhile collaborated with other dramatists in from eight to eleven plays which do not now concern us. as to the remaining dramas assigned to this period and attributed by various critics to beaumont and fletcher in joint-authorship, we shall later inquire. suffice it for the present to say that i do not believe that the former had a hand in any of them, except _the scornful ladie_. footnotes: [ ] _underwoods_, xlviii. [ ] thomas nashe, _dedication of the life of jack wilton_. [ ] _itinerary_, ed. l. t. smith, vol. i, . [ ] see greg's _pastoral poetry and the pastoral drama_, and my former pupil, h. w. hill's, _sidney's arcadia and the elizabethan drama_. [ ] _itinerary_, vol. i, . see also, below, appendix, table a. [ ] _cal. state papers, domestic_, chamberlain to carleton, jan. , . the villiers descent is given in collins, _peerage_, iii, . [ ] sir henry had petitioned ineffectually for the revival of the viscounty at an earlier date. _cal. st. pa., dom._, nov. , ; see, also, reference in . see also, below, appendix, table a. [ ] _calendar of state papers_ (domestic), - , under dates. [ ] elton, _drayton_, p. . [ ] _hesperides_, aldine edition of _herrick_, ii, . [ ] _hesperides_, aldine edition, _herrick_, i, . [ ] _op. cit._, i, . chapter xii beaumont's marriage and death; the surviving family in the edition of the "poems; by francis beaumont, gent." there is one, ordinarily regarded as of doubtful authorship, which, in default of information to the contrary, i am tempted to accept as his and to attach to it importance, as of biographical interest. it purports to bear his signature "fran. beaumont"; it bears for me the impress of his literary style. writing before august , to the countess of rutland, beaumont had, as we have remarked, disclaimed ever having praised "living woman in prose or verse." in _the examination of his mistris' perfections_, the poem of which i speak, the writer praises with all sincerity the woman of his love: stand still, my happinesse; and, swelling heart,-- no more! till i consider what thou art. like our first parents in paradise who "thought it nothing if not understood," so the poet of his happiness-- though by thy bountious favour i be in a paradice, where i may freely taste of all the vertuous pleasures which thou hast [i] wanting that knowledge, must, in all my blisse, erre with my parents, and aske what it is. my faith saith 'tis not heaven; and i dare swear, if it be hell, no pain of sence, is there; sure, 't is some pleasant place, where i may stay, as i to heaven go in the middle way. wert thou but faire, and no whit vertuous, thou wert no more to me but a faire house hanted with spirits, from which men do them blesse, and no man will halfe furnishe to possesse: or, hadst thou worth wrapt in a rivell'd skin, 't were inaccessible. who durst go in to find it out? for sooner would i go to find a pearle cover'd with hills of snow; 't were buried vertue, and thou mightst me move to reverence the tombe, but not to love,-- no more than dotingly to cast mine eye upon the urne where lucrece' ashes lye. but thou art faire and sweet, and every good that ever yet durst mixe with flesh and blood: the devill ne're saw in his fallen state an object whereupon to ground his hate so fit as thee; all living things but he love thee; how happy, then, must that man be whom from amongst all creatures thou dost take! is there a hope beyond it? can he make a wish to change thee for? this is my blisse, let it run on now; i know what it is. the poet of this tribute is not wooing, but worshiping the woman won; reverently striving to comprehend an ineffable joy. the poem is not of praises such as beaumont in his epistle _ad comitissam rutlundiae_ contemns, praises "bestow'd at most need on a thirsty soul." the writer, here, purports to examine into his mistress's perfections, but, like the author of the epistle to the countess, he examines not at all,--he observes the reticence for which beaumont there had given the reason,-- nor do the virtuous-minded (which i swear madam, i think you are) endure to hear their own perfections into question brought, but stop their ears at them. when the lines of the _examination_ are set beside the undoubted poems of beaumont, they appear, in rhetoric, metaphor, and sentiment, to be of a type with the two tributes to lady rutland; in vocabulary, rhyme, and run-on lines, also, to be of one font with them, and with the letter to ben jonson and the elegy to lady clifton. when the lines are set beside those of beaumont's own phrasing in the dramas, one finds that in their brief compass they echo the metaphor of his amintor, "my soul grows weary of her house,"--the hyperbole of his philaster, "i will sooner trust the wind with feathers, or the troubled sea with pearl,"--the passionate ecstasy of his arbaces, "here i acknowledge thee, my hope ... a happinesse as high as i could thinke ... paradice is there!" the tribute is a variant of those closing lines in _a king and no king_, i have a thousand joyes to tell you of, which yet i dare not utter, till i pay my thankes to heaven for um. i date this poem, then or , a year or two after the play just mentioned and the epistle to lady rutland; and i imagine with some confidence that it was written by beaumont for ursula isley, whom he married about this time. ursula's father, henry isley, belonged to a family of landed gentry which had been seated since the reign of edward ii in the parish of sundridge, kent. the manor came to them from the de freminghams in . in sir harry isley and his son, william, who were prominent upholders of the reformed religion, had joined hands with the gallant young sir thomas wyatt of allington castle--about seventeen miles from sundridge--in the rebellion which he raised in protest against the proposed marriage of queen mary with philip of spain. at blacksole field, near wrotham, half-way between sundridge and allington, the isley contingent was met and routed by sir robert southwell and lord abergavenny; and the vast isley estates were confiscated. a considerable part was restored to william within a year or two. but he falling into debt had to sell the larger portion; and for the manor of sundridge itself, he appears to have paid fee farm rent to the crown. by will, probably september , , william's son, henry, left all his "manners, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, in the countie of kent or else where within the realme of england, unto jane my lovinge wief in fee simple, viz{^t} to her and her heires for ever, to the end and purpose that she maye doe sell or otherwise dispose at her discretion the same, or such parte or soe much thereof as to her shall seeme fitt, for the payement of all my just and true debts ... and also for the bringing up and preferment in marriage of ursula and una, the two daughters or children of her the said jane, my lovinge wief." that the children were not, however, stepdaughters of henry, is pointed out by dyce, who quotes the manuscript of vincent's _leicester_, : "ursula, the daughter and coheir [evidently with una] of henry isley."[ ] in fact, henry had named ursula after his mother, the daughter of nicholas clifford. it will be remembered that beaumont's sister elizabeth became the wife of a thomas seyliard of kent. the seyliards were one of the oldest families in the vicinity of sundridge; and thomas would be of brasted, which adjoins sundridge westward, a quarter of a mile from sundridge place and near the river darenth; or of delaware at the south of the parish; or of gabriels about a mile from there and seven miles south of sundridge; or of chidingstone close by; or boxley.[ ] if elizabeth was married before , it is easy to surmise that during some visit to her, beaumont was brought acquainted with ursula isley of sundridge place. if not, we may refer the acquaintance to sojournings with his friend, fletcher, at cranbrook or at the kentish homes of fletcher's stepsisters, or with their cousins, the sackvilles. we have no proof that francis beaumont wrote more than one drama after the whitehall festivities of february . two plays in which he is supposed by some to have had a hand with fletcher, _the captaine_ and _the honest man's fortune_, were acted during that year; but i find no trace of francis in the latter and but slight possibility of it in the former. we must conclude that from he lived as a country gentleman. he would be much more likely to take up his abode at sundridge, which, as we have seen, belonged to his wife and her sister, than at grace-dieu manor; for that was occupied by john beaumont who had four sons to provide for. it is, of course, barely possible that one of his father's properties in leicestershire or derby may have fallen to him,--cottons, for instance, in the latter county, or that "manner house of normanton, and a close ther called the parke" mentioned in the judge's will and in which house-room was given by him to a "servaunte ... for the tearme of eleaven yeares" beginning . but the probabilities all point to the manor house in kent as the scene of beaumont's closing years.[ ] sundridge place lies, as we know, just south of chevening and west of sevenoaks. the old manor house in which, we may presume, beaumont and ursula lived, and where his children were born, has long since disappeared. but the old church, just north of the place, with its early english and perpendicular architecture still stands much as in their day. the old brass tablets to the isleys of two centuries are there, and the altar-tomb of the john isley and his wife who died a century before beaumont was born. near this memorial we may imagine that beaumont and ursula sat of a sunday; and through this same picturesque graveyard, breathing peace, they would pass home again. some days they would take the half-hour stroll across the forks of the darenth, by combebank in the chalk hills and through the woods, to chevening house, and drink a cup with old sampson lennard and his son, sir henry, and fletcher's stepsister chrysogona (grisogone), now lord and lady dacre, and make merry with their seven youngsters; and, coming back by the pilgrim's road that makes for the shrine of the "holy blissful martir," beaumont would quote, from speght's edition of chaucer which had appeared but thirteen years before, something merry of the well nyne and twenty in a companye, of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle in felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, that toward caunterbury wolden ryde. or sometimes they would tramp across to squerries and fish in the darenth for the bream of which spenser had written; perhaps, visit their sister seyliard that same evening. another summer day, francis would ride the ten miles north toward chislehurst (ashes of napoleon _le petit_!), and turn aside to pay his compliments to the proprietor of camden place, ben jonson's friend the antiquary. but we may suppose that more gladly and frequently than to any other spot, this dramatist-turned-squire, and settled down for health and leisure, would head his horse for knole; and, galloping the hills through chipstead and sevenoaks up to the old church that crowns the height, would steady to a trot along the stately avenue of the park amid its beeches and sycamores,--resting his eye on broad sweeps of pasture-land and distant groves, and thinking poetry,--to be greeted within one short half-hour from the time he left the place, by that most hospitable nobleman of the day, the noblest patron of poetry and art, richard sackville, third earl of dorset. they would pace--these two lovers of ben jonson, and worshippers of the first dramatist-earl--the great hall, together, talking of plays, of the burning of the globe while _henry viii_ was on the boards, or of the opening of the new blackfriars, or of overbury's poisoning, and the scandalous marriage of rochester and lady essex, or of sir henry nevill's chances in the matter of the secretaryship, or of winwood's appointment, or of raleigh's grievances, or of the new favourite, young villiers of brooksby, or of the long existing grievance of beaumont's catholic cousins, in and after all the more acute because of the hopes and fears thronging that other subject of discussion which doubtless would occupy a place in any conversation, the negotiations of don diego sarmiento for a spanish marriage. perhaps they would stretch their legs out to the fire before the old andirons that had once been henry viii's, and talk of the tragic romance of young william seymour and lady arabella stuart, the cousin alike of robert pierrepoint and his majesty, james i; or of the indictment and fall of somerset. or they would stroll to the chapel, and decipher the carvings of the crucifixion which mary, queen of scots, had given to the earl's brother, now dead. or the earl would point out some new portrait of that wonderful collection, then forming, of literary men in the dining-room, and beaumont would pass judgment upon the presentment of some of his own contemporaries. then down the drive by which the sheep are browsing and the deer, like agag delicately picking their way, and back to sundridge of the isleys, and to ursula; maybe to an afternoon of lazy writing on scenes that fletcher has called for--perhaps the posset-night of sir roger and abigail for the beginning of _the scornful ladie_. in or , the poet's first child, a daughter, was born and was appropriately named after the two elizabeths who had touched most closely upon his life. but the days of wedded happiness--"this is my blisse, let it run on now!"--were brief. on march , , he died,--only thirty-one years of age.[ ] the lines written to lady rutland, some five years before, what little wit i have is not yet grown so near unto the grave, but that i can, by that dim fading light, perceive of what, or unto whom i write, may have been conceived merely in humorous self-depreciation. but when we couple them with the epitaph written by john of grace-dieu "upon my deare brother, francis beaumont,"-- on death, thy murd'rer, this revenge i take: i slight his terrour, and just question make, which of us two the best precedence have-- mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave. thou shouldst have followed me, but death to blame miscounted yeeres, and measur'd age by fame: _so dearely hast thou bought thy precious lines; their praise grew swiftly, so thy life declines._ thy muse, the hearer's queene, the reader's love, all eares, all hearts (but death's), could please and move;-- when we couple the dramatist's own words of his "wit not yet grown so near unto the grave" with these of his brother which i have italicized, and reflect that for the last three years francis seems to have written almost nothing, we are moved to conjecture that his early death was not unconnected with an excessive devotion to his art, and that his health had been for some time failing. as darley long ago pointed out,[ ] the lines of bishop corbet "on mr. francis beaumont (then newly dead)" may intend more than a poetical conceit; and they would confirm the probability suggested above. he that hath such acuteness and such wit, as would ask ten good heads to husband it; he that can write so well, that no man dare refuse it for the best, let him beware: beaumont is dead; _by whose sole death appears, wit's a disease consumes men in few years_.-- and this conjecture is borne out by the portrait of the weary beaumont that now hangs in nuneham. three days after his death the dramatist was buried in that part of westminster abbey which, since spenser was laid there to the left of chaucer's empty grave, had come to be regarded as the poets' corner. beaumont lies to the right of chaucer's gray marble on the east side of the south transept in front of st. benedict's chapel. in what honour he was held we gather from the consideration that, of poets, only chaucer and spenser had preceded him to a resting place in the abbey; and that of his contemporaries, only four writers of verse followed him: his brother, sir john, who died some eleven years later, and lies beside him; his old friend, michael drayton, in ; hugh holland, in ; and that friend of all four, ben jonson, in . on the "learned" or "historical" side of the transept, across the way from the poets, lie also only three of beaumont's generation: casaubon the philologist, hakluyt the voyager, and ben jonson's master and benefactor--"most reverend head, to whom i owe all that i am in acts, all that i know,"--camden the antiquary. "in the poetical quarter," writes addison, a hundred years later, "i found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets." of the former category is beaumont; of the latter, the alabaster bust of drayton whose body lies under the north wall of the nave, and the monument to jonson, who, having no one rich enough to "lay out funeral charges upon him," stands, in accordance with his own desire, on his "eighteen inches of square ground" under a paving-stone in the north aisle of the nave,--and the figure of their associate, shakespeare, who, though there was much talk of transporting his body from stratford in the year of his death and beaumont's, did not, even in "preposterous" effigy, join his compeers of the poets' corner till more than a century had elapsed. upon beaumont's grave dryden's lofty pile encroaches. above the grave rises the bust of longfellow; and not far from beaumont, tennyson and browning were lately laid to rest. the verses, _on the tombs in westminster_, attributed to our poet-dramatist, are of doubtful authorship, but in diction and turn of thought they are paralleled by more than one of the poems which we have found to be his:-- mortality, behold, and feare, what a change of flesh is here! thinke how many royall bones sleep within these heap of stones: here they lye, had realmes and lands, who now want strength to stir their hands; where from their pulpits, seal'd with dust, they preach "in greatnesse is not trust." here's an acre sown, indeed, with the richest, royall'st seed that the earth did e're suck in since the first man dy'd for sin: here the bones of birth have cry'd, "though gods they were, as men they dy'd"; here are sands, ignoble things, dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings. here's a world of pomp and state buried in dust, once dead by fate. if the lines are not by francis, they still preach the calm, deterministic spirit of his poems and his tragedies; and they are worthy of him. beaumont's surviving brother of grace-dieu continued for many years to write epistolary, panegyric, and religious poems, which won increasing favour among scholars and at court. they were collected and published by his son, in . of his _battle of bosworth field_, which contains some genuinely poetic passages, i have already spoken. in his lines to james i _concerning the true forme of english poetry_, composed probably the year of francis' death, or the year after, he desiderates regularity of rhyme, pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober care of metaphors, descriptions cleare, yet rare, similitudes contracted, smooth and round, not vex't by learning, but with nature crown'd,-- strong and unaffected language, and noble subject. they made an impression upon his contemporaries in verse; and, though he was but a minor poet, he has come to be recognized as one of the "first refiners" of the rhyming couplet,--a forerunner, in the limpid style, of waller, denham, and cowley. his translations from horace, juvenal, persius, and prudentius are done with spirit. his later poems set him before us an eminently pious soul, kindly, courtly, and cultivated. his greatest work, the _crowne of thornes_, in eight books, is lost. it was evidently dedicated to shakespeare's earl of southampton, for in his elegy on the earl, , he says: shall ever i forget with what delight he on my simple lines would cast his sight? his onely mem'ry my poore worke adornes, he is a father to my crowne of thornes: now since his death how can i ever looke without some tears, upon that orphan booke? that this poem was printed we gather also from the elegy of thomas hawkins upon sir john. i have already said that john was raised by charles i, undoubtedly through the influence of the duke of buckingham, to the baronetcy in . he died only a year or two later,[ ] and was lamented in verse by his sons, and by poets and scholars of the day. on the appearance of his poetical remains, jonson wrote "this booke will live; it hath a genius," and "i confesse a beaumont's booke to be the bound and frontire of our poetrie." and drayton-- there is no splendour, which our pens can give by our most labour'd lines, can make thee live like to thine owne. in the commendatory poems, his friend, thomas nevill,[ ] praises his goodness, his knowledge and his art. sir thomas hawkins of nash court, kent,--connected through hugh holland and edmund bolton with the circle of sir john's acquaintances,--emphasizes the modesty, regularity, moral and religious devotion no less of his life than of his poetry. his sons rejoice that "his draughts no sensuall waters ever stain'd." his brother-in-law, george fortescue of leicestershire, and others swell the chorus of affection. he was, says the historian of leicestershire who knew him well,--william burton, the brother of that rector of segrave, near by, who wrote the _anatomy of melancholy_,--he was "a gentleman of great learning, gravity, and worthiness." sir john was succeeded at grace-dieu by john, his oldest son, who fought during the civil war for king charles, and fell at the siege of gloucester, in . other sons were gervase, who died in childhood, francis, who became a jesuit, and thomas, who succeeded in to the family title and estates. the manor of grace-dieu passed finally to the philips family of garendon park, about four miles from grace-dieu and half a mile from old judge beaumont's property of sheepshead. the founder of this family at garendon in was sir ambrose philips,[ ] the father of the ambrose who wrote the _pastorals_ and _the distrest mother_. from the philipses the present owners of garendon and grace-dieu, the phillipps de lisles, inherited. the old house is no longer standing. but below the new manor may be seen the ruins of the nunnery from which the master of the rolls almost four centuries ago evicted catherine ekesildena and her sister-nuns. it is interesting to note that the name de lisle, or lisle, is but a variant of that of francis beaumont's wife isley (de insula); and that the present family came from the isle of wight and kent, ursula isley's native county. i have not, however, yet been able to establish any direct connection between the sundridge isleys and the phillipps de lisles who came into the grace-dieu estates in . the sister of the beaumonts, elizabeth, was about twenty-four years old at the time of francis' marriage to ursula isley of kent. the date of her wedding to thomas seyliard does not appear; but before she was settled in the same county, and within a few miles of chevening, sundridge, and knole. of the events of her subsequent life we know nothing. that she cultivated poetry and the poets, however, may be inferred, from various passages in drayton's _muses elizium_. in the third, fourth, and eighth _nimphalls_, written as late as , the old poet introduces among his nymphs,--singing in the "poets paradice," which, i surmise, was terrestrially knole park,--the same "mirtilla" who in his eighth eglog of was "sister to those hopeful boys, ... thyrsis and sweet palmeo." only a year before the appearance of these _nimphalls_ drayton composed for the publication of her elder brother's poems, a lament "to the deare remembrance of his noble friend, sir john beaumont, baronet." mirtilla had outlived both thyrsis and palmeo, but not the affection of their life-long admirer and boon companion. the widow of the dramatist bore a child a few months after the father's death, and named her frances. in ursula administered her husband's estate;[ ] and she probably continued to live with her children at the family seat in sundridge. the elder daughter, elizabeth, was married to "a scotch colonel" and was living in scotland as late as . frances was never married. she seems to have cherished her father's fame as her richest possession. it was, indeed, probably her only possession, save a packet of his poems in manuscript which, we are told, she carried with her to ireland, but unfortunately "they were lost at sea"[ ] on her return. in she was "resident in the family of the duke of ormonde," then lord-lieutenant of ireland.[ ] she appears to have attended the high-spirited and capable duchess, or other ladies of the butler family, at the castle in dublin, or the family seat in kilkenny, as companion. under the protection of that loyal cavalier and christian statesman, james, duke of ormonde, whose prayer was ever "for the relieving and delivering the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed,"[ ] she must have known happiness, for at any rate a few years. she was retired by the duke, apparently after the death of the duchess, in , on a pension of one hundred pounds a year; and this competence we learn that she still enjoyed in , when at the age of eighty-four she was living in leicestershire,--let us hope in her father's old home of grace-dieu. she may have survived to see the accession of queen anne. we know merely that she died before . her life bridges the space from the day of her father, shakespeare's younger contemporary, to that of her father's encomiast, dryden, and further still to that of congreve, vanbrugh, farquhar, and addison; and we are thus helped to realize that in the arithmetic of generations beaumont's times and thought are after all not so far removed from our own. two more such spans of human existence would link his day with that of tennyson, browning, and swinburne. footnotes: [ ] _works of b. and f._, i, ii-iii. [ ] hasted's _history of kent_ ( ), ii, ; iii, , , . [ ] for sundridge and the isleys, see hasted's _kent_, ii, - ; iii, - , - ; and _cal, s. p._ (_dom._) jan. , feb. , . [ ] jonson's statement to drummond "ere he was thirty years of age" is incorrect, or was misreported. [ ] _introduction to the works of b. and f._, ed. , i, xviii. [ ] according to the register of burials in westminster abbey, ; but some authorities say . see dyce, i, xxi; chalmer's _english poets_, vi, , and grosart's edition of his poems. [ ] this is certainly not the master of trinity college, cambridge, as grosart opines,--for the simple reason that the master died thirteen years before sir john. [ ] nichols, _coll. hist., leic.,-bibl. top. britt._, viii, , . [ ] a. b. grosart, in _d. n. b._, art. _francis beaumont_. [ ] preface to _b. and f.'s works_, ed. , p. . [ ] dyce, vol. i, p. , from _ms., vincent's leicester_, . [ ] james wills, _lives of illustrious and distinguished irishmen_, , vol. iii, pt. ii, p. . chapter xiii the personality, and the contemporary reputation of beaumont our poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of my scholarly friends, professor herford, judging apparently from the crude engraving of ,[ ] or from that of , sees him, "of heavy and uninteresting features," but as swinburne saw him, probably in robinson's engraving of , "handsome and significant in feature and expression alike ... with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely-curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and the imperial head, with its 'fair large front' and clustering hair, set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation";[ ] as we see him to-day in the soft and speaking photogravure[ ] recently made from the portrait at knole park or in the reproduction of [ ] of the portrait which belongs to the rt. hon. lewis harcourt at nuneham,--a courtly gentleman of noble mien, of countenance dignified, beautiful, and mobile, and of dreamy eyes somewhat saddened as by physical suffering, or by sympathetic pondering on the mystery of life. the original at knole was already there, in the time of lionel, seventh earl of dorset, , and in default of information to the contrary we may conclude that it has always been in the possession of the sackville family, and was painted for beaumont's contemporary, and i have ventured to surmise friend as well as neighbour, richard, third earl of dorset,--who had succeeded to the earldom in --about the year of _philaster_. i have already shown that the sackvilles were connected with the fletchers by marriage. they were also patrons of beaumont's friends, jonson and drayton. while the third earl was still living, poor old ben writes to son, edward sackville, a grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. and to the same edward, as fourth earl,[ ] drayton dedicated, , the _nimphalls_ of his _muses elizium_, and to his countess, mary, the _divine poems_, published therewith. if, as others have conjectured, the earl is himself the dorilus of the _nimphalls_, the exquisite _description of elizium_ which precedes, may be, after the fashion of the poets and painters of the renaissance, an idealized picture of knole park, where drayton probably had been received: a paradice on earth is found, though farre from vulgar sight, which, with those pleasures doth abound, that it elizium hight,-- of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon the "cleeves," its ripening fruits: the poets paradice this is, to which but few can come; the muses onely bower of blisse, their deare elizium. it was the widow of the third earl, anne (clifford), countess of dorset and, afterwards, of pembroke and montgomery,[ ] who erected the monument to drayton in the poets' corner. that beaumont was acquainted with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore, in every way more than probable; and there is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family still retains, in the house which beaumont probably often visited, this noble presentment of the dramatist. the portrait at nuneham, which i have mentioned above, is not so life-like as that at knole: it lacks the shading. but it is for us most expressive: it is that of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow, higher cheek-bones, and face falling away toward the chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent of illness. it is the likeness of beaumont approaching the portals of death. [illustration: by permission of mr. lewis harcourt. the beaumont of the nuneham portrait] of the personality of beaumont we have already had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic poems. his letter to ben jonson has revealed him chafing in enforced exile from london, amusedly tolerant of the "standing family-jests" of country gentlemen, tired of "water mixed with claret-lees," "with one draught" of which "man's invention fades," and yearning for the mermaid wine of poetic converse, "nimble, and full of subtle flame." other verses to jonson and to fletcher express his scorn of "the wild applause of common people," his confidence in sympathetic genius and time as the only arbiters of literary worth. in still other poems, lyric, epistolary, and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour,--unsophisticated, somewhat ammoniac; and from them have caught his habit of emotional utterance, frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or indignation. we have grown acquainted with his reverence for womanly purity; with his religion of suffering, his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave. an amusing side-light is thrown upon his character by jonson who told drummond of hawthornden, that "francis beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses." we are glad to know that a man of jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic superiority; that even this "great lover and praiser of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for whom spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his matter, and "shakespeare wanted art,"--that even this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in literature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even he could not bully out of him. but we must not be harsh in our judgment of drummond's ben jonson, for though he "was given rather to lose a friend than a jest and was jealous of every word and action of those about him," this is not the ben who some seven years earlier had written "how i do love thee, beaumont, and thy muse"; this is ben as drummond saw him in --ben talking "especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth." that beaumont's affection and geniality of intercourse were reciprocated not only by jonson, but by others, we learn from lines written to, or of, him by men of worth. his judgment as a critic was recognized by his contemporaries, as well as the poetic brilliance of the dramas which he was creating under their eyes. his language, too, was praised for its distinction while he was yet living. in the manuscript outline of the _hypercritica_, which appears to have been filled in at various times between and , bolton says: "the books out of which wee gather the most warrantable english are not many to my remembrance.... but among the cheife, or rather the cheife, are in my opinion these: sir thomas moore's works; ... george chapman's first seaven books of iliades; samuell danyell; michael drayton his heroicall epistles of england; marlowe his excellent fragment of hero and leander; shakespeare, mr. francis beamont, and innumerable other writers for the stage,--and [they] presse tenderly to be used in this argument; southwell, parsons, and some few other of that sort." in the final version of the _hypercritica_, prepared between and ,[ ] bolton omits the later dramatists altogether;[ ] but that is not to be construed by way of discrimination against shakespeare and beaumont. there is no doubt that bolton knew the beaumonts personally, and appreciated their worth, and as early as ;--for to his _elements of armories_ of that year, he prefixes a "letter to the author, from the learned young gentleman, i. b., of grace-dieu in the county of leicestershire, esquier,"[ ] who highly compliments the invention, judicial method, and taste displayed in the _elements_, and returns the manuscript with promise of his patronage. further information of the esteem in which francis was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect, written soon after his death by those who were near enough to him in years to have known him, or to assess his worth untrammeled by the critical consensus of a generation that knew him not. the tender tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, dr. corbet, successively bishop of oxford, and of norwich, have already been quoted. a so-called "sonnet," signed i. f., included in an harleian manuscript between two poems undoubtedly by fletcher, may not have been intended for the dead poet; but i agree with dyce, who first printed it,[ ] that it seems "very like fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate":-- come, sorrow, come! bring all thy cries, all thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes! burn out, you living monuments of woe! sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow! virtue is dead; o cruel fate! all youth is fled; all our laments too late. oh, noble youth, to thy ne'er-dying name, oh, happy youth, to thy still-growing fame, to thy long peace in earth, this sacred knell our last loves ring--farewell, farewell, farewell! go, happy soul, to thy eternal birth! and press his body lightly, gentle earth! what the young readers of contemporary poetry at the universities thought of him is nowhere better expressed than in the lines written immediately after the poet's death by the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old john earle;--he who was later fellow of merton; and in turn bishop of worcester, and of salisbury. the ardent lad is gazing in person or imagination on the new-filled tomb in the poets' corner, when he writes: beaumont lyes here; and where now shall we have a muse like his, to sigh upon his grave? ah, none to weepe this with a worthy teare, but he that cannot, beaumont that lies here. who now shall pay thy tombe with such a verse as thou that ladies didst, faire rutlands herse? a monument that will then lasting be, when all her marble is more dust than she. in thee all's lost: a sudden dearth and want hath seiz'd on wit, good epitaphs are scant; we dare not write thy elegie, whilst each feares he nere shall match that coppy of thy teares. scarce in an age a poet,--and yet he scarce lives the third part of his age to see, but quickly taken off, and only known, is in a minute shut as soone as showne.... why should nature take such pains to perfect that which ere perfected she shall destroy?-- beaumont dies young, so sidney died before; there was not poetry he could live to, more: he could not grow up higher; i scarce know if th' art it self unto that pitch could grow, were 't not in thee that hadst arriv'd the hight of all that wit could reach, or nature might.... the elegist likens beaumont to menander, whose few sententious fragments show more worth than all the poets athens ere brought forth; and i am sorry i have lost those houres on them, whose quicknesse comes far short of ours, and dwelt not more on thee, whose every page may be a patterne to their scene and stage. i will not yeeld thy workes so mean a prayse-- more pure, more chaste, more sainted than are playes, nor with that dull supinenesse to be read, to passe a fire, or laugh an houre in bed.... why should not beaumont in the morning please, as well as plautus, aristophanes? who, if my pen may as my thoughts be free, were scurrill wits and buffons both to thee.... yet these are wits, because they'r old, and now being greeke and latine, they are learning too: but those their owne times were content t' allow a thriftier fame, and thine is lowest now. but thou shall live, and, when thy name is growne six ages older, shall be better knowne; when thou'rt of chaucers standing in the tombe, thou shall not share, but take up all his roome.[ ] a panegyric liberal in the superlatives of youth but, in view of passages to be quoted elsewhere, one of the sanest as well as earliest appreciations of beaumont's distinctive quality as a dramatist; an appreciation such as the historian might expect from a collegian who, a dozen years later, was not only one of the most genial and refined scholars of his generation but, perhaps, the most accurate observer and epitomist of the familiar types and minor morals of his day,--a writer who in is still championing the cause of contemporary poetry. in his characterization of the vulgar-spirited man "that is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses anything too deep for him; that cries, chaucer for his money above all our english poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none," the earle of the _microcosmographie_ is but repeating the censure of his elegy on beaumont in . about , we find a contemporary of altogether different class from that of the university student acknowledging the fame of beaumont, the thames waterman, john taylor. this self-advertising tramp and rollicking scribbler mentions him in _the praise of hemp-seed_ with chaucer, spencer, shakespeare, and others, as of those who, "in paper-immortality, doe live in spight of death, and cannot die." and not far separated from taylor's testimonial in point of time is william basse's prediction of a prouder immortality. basse who was but two years older than beaumont, and, as we have seen, was one of the pastoral group with which beaumont's career was associated, is writing of "mr. william shakespeare" who had died six weeks after beaumont,--and he thus apostrophizes the westminster poets of the corner: renownèd spencer, lye a thought more nye to learnèd chaucer, and rare beaumont lye a little neerer spencer, to make roome for shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold tombe. to lodge all foure in one bed make a shift untill doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift, betwixt this day and that, by fate be slayne for whom your curtaines may be drawn againe. the date of the sonnet of which these are the opening lines can be only approximately determined. it must be earlier, however, than ; for in that year jonson alludes to it in verses presently to be quoted. and it must be later than the erection of the monument to shakespeare's memory in trinity church, stratford, in or soon after , for in the lines which follow those given above the writer apostrophizes shakespeare as sleeping "under this carvèd marble of thine owne." the sonnet contemplates the removal of shakespeare's remains to westminster, and arranges the poets already lying there not in actual but chronological order.[ ] to these verses jonson, as i have said, alludes in the series of stanzas prefixed to the shakespeare folio of ,--_to the memory of my beloved, the author, mr. william shakespeare and what he hath left us._ ben jonson intends, however, no slight to beaumont and the other poets mentioned by basse, when, in his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the peers of shakespeare. on the contrary this lover at heart, and in his best moments, of beaumont, bestows a meed of praise: they are "great muses,"--chaucer, spenser, beaumont,--but merely "disproportioned," if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as are, indeed, lyly, kyd, and marlowe. not these, but "thundering Æschylus," euripides, and sophocles, pacuvius, accius, "him of cordova dead," must be summoned to life againe to heare thy buskin tread and shake a stage. therefore it is, that jonson calls-- my shakespeare rise; i will not lodge thee by chaucer, or spenser, or bid beaumont lye a little further to make thee a roome: thou art a moniment without a toombe, and art alive still, while thy booke doth live, and we have wits to read, and praise to give. that i not mixe thee so, my braine excuses; i meane with great, but disproportion'd muses. that beaumont was regarded by his immediate contemporaries not as a professional, but literary, dramatist,--a poet, and a person of social eminence,--appears from drayton's _epistle to henery reynolds, esq., of poets and poesy_, published , from which i have earlier quoted. here the writer, appraising the poets "who have enrich'd our language with their rhymes" informs his "dearly loved friend" that he does not meane to run in quest of these that them applause have wonne upon our stages in these latter dayes, that are so many; let them have their bayes, that doe deserve it; let those wits that haunt those publique circuits, let them freely chaunt their fine composures, and their praise pursue; and thus, we may conjecture, he excuses the omission of such men as middleton, fletcher, and massinger. beginning with chaucer, "the first of ours that ever brake into the muses' treasure, and first spake in weighty numbers," drayton pays especial honour to "grave, morall spencer," "noble sidney ... heroe for numbers and for prose," marlowe with his "brave translunary things," shakespeare of "as smooth a comicke vaine ... as strong conception, and as cleere a rage, as any one that trafiqu'd with the stage," "learn'd johnson.... who had drunke deepe of the pierian spring," and "reverend chapman" for his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom he had loved, alexander and drummond, and concludes the roll-call with his two beaumonts and his browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and "men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts." this letter not only speaks the opinion of drayton concerning the standing of the two beaumonts in poetry, but incidentally asserts the popularity of their work, for the author informs his correspondents that he "ties himself here only to those few men" whose works oft printed, set on every post, to publique censure subject have bin most. by all of the dramas in which francis had an undoubted share, except _the coxcombe_ had been printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early as in a little volume that included also drayton's elegies on lady penelope clifton and the three sons of lord sheffield, and verses by 'n. h.' [illustration: michael drayton from the portrait in the dulwich gallery] this volume is henry fitzgeffrey's _certayn elegies done by sundrie excellent wits_ (fr. beau., m. dr., n. h.), with _satyres and epigrames_. fitzgeffrey, by the way, was of lincoln's inn in beaumont's time; and so were others connected with this volume, by dedications or commendatory verses: fitzgeffrey's "chamber-fellow and nearest friend, nat. gurlin"; thomas fletcher, and john stephens, the satirist, who had been entered member of the inn in . they must all have been known by beaumont when he was writing his elegies. the 'n. h.' thus posthumously associated with our dramatist was, i think, the mathematician, philosopher, and poet, nicholas hill[ ] beaumont could not have failed to know him. he was of st. john's college, oxford; he wrote and published a _philosophia epicurea democritiana_ to which, mentioning him by name, ben jonson alludes in his epigram (cxxxiv) _of the famous voyage_ of the two wights who "at bread-streets _mermaid_ having dined and merry, propos'd to goe to holborne in a wherry." he was the secretary and favourite of edward de vere, earl of oxford, was a good deal of a wag, and well acquainted with our old friend serjeant hoskyns of the _convivium philosophicum_. he died in . whether the anonymous writer on _the time poets_[ ] was a personal acquaintance of beaumont we cannot tell. the definite qualities of the poet which he emphasizes are, however, as likely to be drawn from life and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas. the lines, apparently composed between and , begin, one night, the great apollo, pleas'd with ben, made the odde number of the muses ten; the fluent fletcher, beaumont rich in sense, in complement and courtship's quintessence; ingenious shakespeare, massinger that knows the strength of plot to write in verse or prose,-- and continue with "cloud-grappling chapman" and others, as of the ten muses. that thomas heywood, the dramatist, was a personal friend,--we may be sure,--the kind of friend who having a sense of humour did not resent beaumont's genial satire in _the knight of the burning pestle_ upon his bourgeois drama of _the foure prentises_ of london. writing as late as , he remembers francis as a wit: excellent bewmont, in the formost ranke of the rarest wits, was never more than franck.-- the touch of familiarity with which heywood[ ] causes that whole row of poets, many of them then dead, robin green, kit marlowe, the toms (kyd, watson and nashe), mellifluous will, ben, and the rest, to live for posterity as human, and lovable, gracefully heightens the compliment for one and all. we may surmise that one more eulogist of beaumont, his kinsman,[ ] sir george lisle, a marvellously gallant cavalier, who distinguished himself at newberry, and was shot by order of fairfax about the end of the civil war, was old enough in to have known our poet. though sir george, in his verses for the beaumont and fletcher folio of , lays special stress upon the close-woven fancy of the two playwrights, he seems to have a first-hand information, not common to the younger writers of these commendatory poems, concerning beaumont's share in at least one of the tragedies. he ascribes to him, not to fletcher,--as we know by modern textual tests, correctly,--the nobler scenes of "brave mardonius" in _a king and no king_. one attaches, therefore, more than mere literary, or hearsay, significance to his selection for special praise of beaumont's force, when he says, thou strik'st our sense so deep, at once thou mak'st us blush, rejoyce, and weep. great father johnson bow'd himselfe when hee (thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee. footnotes: [ ] from the portrait at knole park. [ ] _encyc. brit., sub nomine._ [ ] by cockerell, in the _variorum edition of b. and f.'s works_, vol. i, . see frontispiece to this volume. [ ] _historical portraits_, vol. ii, - , oxford, . [ ] not to the third earl, richard, as cyril brett, _drayton's minor poems_, p. xix, has it. [ ] clark's _aubrey's brief lives_, ii, , . not mary (curzon), the wife of the fourth earl, as professor elton, _drayton_ ( ), p. , has it. [ ] after the appearance of montague's edition of king james's _works_, and before the execution of raleigh. [ ] save for non-dramatic productions such as ben jonson's _epigrams_, etc. [ ] grosart, _d. n. b._, art, _sir john beaumont_, and _sir j. b.'s poems_, xxxvi. [ ] _b. and f._, vol. i, lii. [ ] revised by earle for the _commendatory verses_, folio ; but i have retained some of the readings of the copy included in beaumont's _poems_. [ ] the version given above is that of brit. mus. _ms. lansdowne_ . of other versions one is attributed to donne; but the lansdowne is the most authentic, and the evidence of authorship is all for basse, whose name follows in the lansdowne manuscript. so, miss l. t. smith in _centurie of praise_, p. . [ ] mr. bullen, _d. n. b._, under _fitzgeffrey_, queries "nathaniel hooke." i have not been able to identify hooke. [ ] _choice drollery, songs, and sonnets, , in sh. soc. pap._, iii, . [ ] _the hierarchie of the blessed angells._ [ ] through the villierses and therefore probably through the coleorton beaumonts. chapter xiv tradition, and traditional criticism what we learn from tradition, and from the criticism of the century following beaumont's death, adds little to what we already have observed concerning his life and personality. concerning his share in the joint-plays, it adds much, mostly wrong; but of that, later. mosely, in his address of _the stationer to the readers_ prefixed to the folio of , announces that knowing persons had generally assured him "that these authors were the most unquestionable wits this kingdome hath afforded. mr. beaumont was ever acknowledged a man of a most strong and searching braine; and (his yeares considered) the most judicious wit these later ages have produced. he dyed young, for (which was an invaluable losse to this nation) he left the world when hee was not full thirty yeares old. mr. fletcher survived, and lived till almost fifty; whereof the world now enjoyes the benefit." the dramatist, shirley, in his address _to the reader_ of the folio, says "it is not so remote in time, but very many gentlemen may remember these authors; and some familiar in their conversation deliver them upon every pleasant occasion so fluent, to talke a comedy. he must be a bold man," continues he, with a prophetic commonsense, "that dares undertake to write their lives. what i have to say is, we have the precious remaines; and as the wisest contemporaries acknowledge they lived a miracle, i am very confident this volume cannot die without one." shirley also reminds the reader that but to mention beaumont and fletcher "is to throw a cloude upon all former names and benight posterity." "this book being, without flattery, the greatest monument of the scene that time and humanity have produced, and must live, not only the crowne and sole reputation of our owne, but the stayne of all other nations and languages." to such a pitch had the vogue of our dramatists risen in the thirty years after beaumont's death! not only shakespeare and learnèd ben, but sophocles and euripides may vail to them. "this being,"--and here we catch a vision from life itself,--"this being the authentick witt that made blackfriars an academy, where the three howers spectacle while beaumont and fletcher were presented, were usually of more advantage to the hopefull young heire, than a costly, dangerous, forraigne travell, with the assistance of a governing mounsieur, or signior, to boote. and it cannot be denied but that the spirits of the time, whose birth and qualitie made them impatient of the sowrer ways of education, have from the attentive hearing these pieces, got ground in point of wit and carriage of the most severely employed students, while these recreations were digested into rules, and the very pleasure did edifie." so far as the plays printed in this folio are concerned, not much of this praise belongs to beaumont; for, as we now know, not more than two of them, _the coxcombe_ and the _masque of the inner temple_, bear his impress. but shirley is thinking of the reputation of the authors in general; and he writes with an eye to the sale of the book. since we shall presently find opportunity to consider the trend of opinion during the seventeenth century regarding the respective shares of the dramatists in composition, but a word need be said here upon the subject,--and that as to the origin of a tradition speedily exaggerated into error: namely, that beaumont's function in the partnership was purely of gravity and critical acumen. from the verses of john berkenhead, an oxford man, born in , a writer of some lampooning ability and, in reader in moral philosophy at the university, we learn that, he, at least, thought it impossible to separate the faculties of the two dramatists, which "as two voices in one song embrace (fletcher's keen trebble, and deep beaumont's base"); that, however, there were some in his day who held "that one [fletcher] the sock, th' other [beaumont] the buskin claim'd," that should the stage embattaile all its force, fletcher would lead the foot, beaumont the horse; and that beaumont's was "the understanding," fletcher's "the quick free will." such discrimination, as i have said, berkenhead disavows; but he is of the opinion, nevertheless, that the rules by which their art was governed came from beaumont: so beaumont dy'd; yet left in legacy his rules and standard-wit (fletcher) to thee. and still another oxford man, born four years before beaumont's death, the reverend josias howe, reasserting the essential unity of their compositions, concedes with regard to fletcher,-- perhaps his quill flew stronger, when 't was weavèd with his beaumont's pen; and might with deeper wonder hit. these and similar statements of , essentially correct, concerning the force, depth, and critical acumen of beaumont had been anticipated in the testimonials printed during his lifetime and down to , especially in those of jonson, davies, drayton, and earle. a verdict, much more dogmatic, and responsible for the erroneous tradition which long survived, proceeded from one of the "sons of ben," william cartwright, himself an author of dramas, junior proctor of the university of oxford in , and "the most florid and seraphical preacher in the university." he may have derived the germ of his information from jonson himself, but he had developed it in a one-sided manner when, writing in "upon the report of the printing of the dramaticall poems of master john fletcher," he implied that the genius of "knowing beaumont" was purely restrictive and critical,--telling us that beaumont was fain to bid fletcher "be more dull," to "write again," to "bate some of his fire"; and that even when fletcher had "blunted and allayed" his genius according to the critic's command, the critic beaumont, not yet satisfied, added his sober spunge, and did contract thy plenty to lesse wit to make 't exact. this distorted image of beaumont's artistic quality as merely critical lived, as we shall see, for many a year. we shall, also, see that it is not from any such secondary sources that supplementary information regarding the poet himself is to be derived, but from a scientific determination of his share in the dramas ordinarily and vaguely assigned to an undifferentiated beaumont and fletcher. chapter xv a few words of fletcher's later years beside the dramas which there is any meritorious reason for assigning to the joint-authorship of the two friends, some dozen plays were produced by fletcher alone, or in collaboration with others, before the practical cessation, in , or thereabout, of beaumont's dramatic activity. after that time fletcher's name was attached, either as sole author or as the associate of massinger, field, william rowley, and perhaps others, to about thirty more. from on, he was the successor of shakespeare as dramatic poet of the king's players. jonson's masques delighted the court, but no writer of tragedy or comedy,--not jonson, nor philip massinger, who was now fletcher's closest associate, nor middleton or rowley, dekker, ford, or webster,--compared with him in popularity at court and in the city. he is not merely an illustrious personality, the principal author of harrowing tragedies such as _valentinian_, the sole author of tragicomedies such as _the loyall subject_, and long-lived comedies--_the chances_, _rule a wife and have a wife_, and several more,--he is a syndicate: he stands sponsor for plays like _the queene of corinth_ and _the knight of malta_ in which others collaborated largely with him; and his name is occasionally stamped upon plays of associates, in which he had no hand whatever. "thou grew'st," says his contemporary and admirer, john harris,-- "thou grew'st to govern the whole stage alone: in which orbe thy throng'd light did make the star, thou wert th' intelligence did move that sphear." dr. harris, professor of greek at oxford in the heyday of fletcher's glory, and a most distinguished divine, writes, in , as one who had known fletcher, personally,--observes his careless ease in composing, his manner of conversation, the stage grew narrow while thou grew'st to be in thy whole life an exc'llent comedie,-- and admires his behaviour: to these a virgin-modesty which first met applause with blush and fear, as if he yet had not deserv'd; till bold with constant praise his browes admitted the unsought-for bayes. so, addressing the public, concludes this panegyrist,-- hee came to be sole monarch, and did raign in wits great empire, abs'lute soveraign. it is of these years of triumph that another of "the large train of fletcher's friends," richard brome, ben jonson's faithful servant and loving friend, and his disciple in the drama, tells us: his works (says momus) nay, his plays you'd say: thou hast said right, for that to him was play which was to others braines a toyle: with ease he playd on waves which were their troubled seas.... but to the man againe, of whom we write, the writer that made writing his delight, rather then worke. he did not pumpe, nor drudge, to beget wit, or manage it; nor trudge to wit-conventions with note-booke, to gleane or steale some jests to foist into a scene: he scorn'd those shifts. you that have known him, know the common talke that from his lips did flow, and run at waste, did savour more of wit, then any of his time, or since have writ, (but few excepted) in the stages way: his scenes were acts, and every act a play. i knew him in his strength; even then when he-- that was the master of his art and me-- most knowing johnson (proud to call him sonne) in friendly envy swore, he had out-done his very selfe. i knew him till he dyed; and at his dissolution, what a tide of sorrow overwhelm'd the stage; which gave volleys of sighes to send him to his grave; and grew distracted in most violent fits (for she had lost the best part of her wits) ... "others," concludes this old admirer unpretentiously, others may more in lofty verses move; i onely, thus, expresse my truth and love. no better testimony to the character of the man who, even though jonson was still writing, became absolute sovereign of the stage after shakespeare and beaumont had ceased, can be found than such as the preceding. to fletcher's innate modesty, other contemporaries, lowin and taylor, who acted in many of his plays, bear testimony in the _dedication_ of _the wild-goose chase_: "the play was of so generall a receiv'd acceptance, that (he himself a spectator) we have known him unconcern'd, and to have wisht it had been none of his; he, as well as the throng'd theatre (in despite of his innate modesty) applauding this rare issue of his braine." he was the idol of his actors: "and now, farewell, our glory!" continue, in , these victims of "a cruell destinie"--the closing of the theatres at the outbreak of the civil war,--"farewell, your choice delight, most noble gentlemen! farewell, the grand wheel that set us smaller motions in action!"--the wheel of shakespeare, jonson, beaumont, fletcher, massinger.--"farewell, the pride and life o' the stage! nor can we (though in our ruin) much repine that we are so little, since he that gave us being is no more." fletcher was beloved of great men, as they themselves have left their love on record, of jonson, beaumont, chapman, massinger. if shakespeare collaborated with him, that speaks for itself. he was an inspiration to young pastoralists like browne, and to aspiring dramatists like field. he was a writer of sparkling genius and phenomenal facility. he was careless of myopic criticism, conscious of his dignity,--but unaffectedly simple,--averse to flattering his public or his patron for bread, or for acquaintance, or for the admiration of the indolent, or for "itch of greater fame."[ ] if we may take him at his word, and estimate him by the noblest lines he ever wrote,--the verses affixed to _the honest man's fortune_ (acted, ),--the keynote of his character as a man among men, was independence. to those "that can look through heaven, and tell the stars," he says: man is his own star, and the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man, commands all light, all influence, all fate; nothing to him falls early, or too late. our acts our angels are, or good or ill, our fatal shadows that walk by us still; and when the stars are labouring, we believe it is not that they govern, but they grieve for stubborn ignorance. that star is in "the image of thy maker's good": he is my star, in him all truth i find, all influence, all fate; and as for poverty, it is "the light to heaven ... nor want, the cause of man, shall make me groan"; for experience teaches us "all we can: to work ourselves into a glorious man." his mistress is not some star of love, with the increase to wealth or honour she may bring, but of knowledge and fair truth: so i enjoy all beauty and all youth, and though to time her lights and laws she lends, she knows no age, that to corruption bends.... perhaps through all this, there echoes the voice of that _præsul splendidus_, his father, the bishop, the friend of sir francis drake, of burghley, and of the forceful bishop bancroft,--a father solicitous, at any rate before he fell into the hands of his fashionable second wife and lost favour with the queen, for the "chrystian and godlie education" of his children. however that may be,--whether the noble idea of this confession of faith is a projection from the discipline of youth or an induction from the experience of life, the utterance of fletcher's inmost personality is here: man is his own star, and that soul that can be honest, is the only perfect man. though, in the plays where beaumont does not control, fletcher so freely reflects the loose morals of his age, the gross conventional misapprehension of woman's worth, even the cynicism regarding her essential purity,--though fletcher reflects these conditions in his later plays as well as in his early _faithfull shepheardesse_,[ ] and though he, for dramatic ends, accepts the material vulgarity of the lower classes and the perverted and decadent heroics of the upper, there still are "passages in his works where he recurs to a conception which undoubtedly had a very vital significance for him--that of a gentleman,"--to the "merit, manners, and inborn virtue" of the gentleman not conventional but genuine.[ ] in beaumont, that "man of a most strong and searching braine" whose writings and whose record speak the gentleman, he had had the example beside him in the flesh. what that meant is manifest in the encomium of francis palmer, written in from christ church, oxford, all commendations end in saying only: thou wert beaumont's friend. the engraving of fletcher in the folio was "cut by severall originall pieces," says mosely "which his friends lent me, but withall they tell me that his unimitable soule did shine through his countenance in such _ayre_ and _spirit_, that the painters confessed it was not easie to expresse him: as much as could be, you have here, and the graver hath done his part." the edition of is the first to publish "effigies" of both poets, "the head of mr. beaumont, and that of mr. fletcher, through the favour of the present earl of dorset [the seventh earl], being taken from originals in the noble collection his lordship has at knowles." the engravings in the theobald, seward and sympson edition of - are by g. vertue. the engravings in colman's edition of , are the same, debased. those in weber's edition of , are done afresh,--of beaumont by evans, of fletcher by blood--apparently from the knole originals. they are an improvement upon those of earlier editions. in dyce's edition of - , h. robinson's engraving of beaumont has nobility; his attempt at fletcher does not improve upon blood's. all these are in the reverse. the variorum edition of - gives the beautiful photogravure of beaumont of which i have already spoken, by walker and cockerell, from the original at knole park; and an equally soft and expressive photogravure of fletcher, by emery walker, from the painting in the national portrait gallery. for the first time the dramatists face as in the originals: beaumont, toward your left, fletcher, toward your right. fletcher's portrait in the national portrait gallery reveals a highbred, thoughtful countenance, large eyes unafraid, wide-awake and keen, the nose aquiline and sensitive, wavily curling hair, hastily combed back, or through which he has run his fingers, a careless, half-buttoned jerkin from which the shirt peeps forth,--all in all a man of more vivacious temper, ready and practical quality than beaumont. the authorities of the gallery, especially through the kindness of mr. j. d. milner, who has been good enough to look up various particulars for me, inform me that this portrait of john fletcher, no. , was purchased by the trustees in march , its previous history being unknown. the painting is by a contemporary but unknown artist, and is similar to the portrait at knole park. it was engraved in the reverse by g. vertue in . they also inform me that another portrait of a different type belongs to the earl of clarendon. this, i conjecture, must be that which john evelyn, in a letter to samuel pepys, august, , says he has seen in the first earl of clarendon's collection--"most of which [portraits], if not all, are at the present at cornebery in oxfordshire." but evelyn adds that "beaumont and fletcher were both in one piece." yet another portrait said to be of fletcher, painted in by c. janssen, belongs to the duke of portland. this janssen is the cornelius to whom the alleged portrait of shakespeare, now at bulstrode, is attributed. cornelius did not come to england before shakespeare's death; and, consequently, not before beaumont's. fletcher died in august . according to aubrey, "in the great plague, , a knight of norfolke (or suffolke) invited him into the countrey. he stayed but to make himselfe a suite of cloathes, and while it was makeing, fell sick of the plague and dyed. this i had [ ] from his tayler, who is now [ ] a very old man, and clarke of st. mary overy's." the dramatist was buried in st. saviour's, southwark, the twenty-ninth of that month. sir aston cockayne's statement, in an epitaph on fletcher and massinger, that they lie in the same grave, is probably figurative. aubrey tells us that massinger, who died in march , and whose burial is recorded in the register of st. saviour's, was buried not in the church, but about the middle of one of its churchyards, the bullhead, next the bullhead tavern. there are memorials now to both poets in the church, as also to shakespeare, and beaumont, and to edward alleyn, the actor of the old admiral's company. it is generally supposed that fletcher was never married. the name, john fletcher, was not unusual in the parish of st. saviour's, and the records of "john fletcher" marriages may, therefore, not involve the dramatist. but two items communicated to dyce[ ] by collier, "more in jest than in earnest," from the parish-registers, are suggestive, if we reflect that, about or , the _ménage à trois_, provided it continued so long, would have lapsed at the time of beaumont's marriage; and if we can swallow the stage-fiction of fletcher's "maid joan" in _bury-fair_ (see page above), whole and as something digestible. these are collier's cullings from the registers: . nov. . john fletcher and jone herring [were married]. _reg. of st. saviour's, southwark._ john, the son of john fletcher and of joan his wife was baptized feb., . _reg. of st. bartholomew the great._ if this is our john fletcher, his marriage would have been about the same time as beaumont's, and he may have later taken up his residence in the parish of st. bartholomew the great, on the north side of the river, not far from southwark. if fletcher was married in , we may be very sure that his wife was not a person of distinction. his verses _upon an honest man's fortune_, written the next year, give us the impression either that he is not married and not likely to be, or that he has married one of low estate and breeding, has concluded that the matrimonial game is not worth the candle, and rather defiantly has turned to a better mistress than mortal, who can compensate him for that which through love he has not attained, "were i in love," he declares,-- were i in love, and could that bright star bring increase to wealth, honour, and everything: were she as perfect good, as we can aim, the first was so, and yet she lost the game. my mistriss then be knowledge and fair truth; so i enjoy all beauty and all youth. we may be sure that when fletcher wrote this poem he had known poverty, sickness, and affliction, but not a consolation in wedded happiness: love's but an exhalation to best eyes; the matter spent, and then the fool's fire dies. since many of collier's "earnests" turn out to be "jests," why not the other way round? that is my apology for according this "jest" a moment's whimsical consideration. * * * * * such is an outline in broad sweep of the activities and common relations of our castor and pollux, and a preliminary sketch of the personality of each. with regard to the latter, who is our main concern, the vital record is yet more definitely to be discovered in the dramatic output distinctively his during the years of literary partnership; and to the consideration of his share in the joint-plays we may now turn. footnotes: [ ] see his _ode to sir william skipwith_. [ ] "thou wert not meant, sure, for a woman, thou art so innocent," philosophizes the sullen shepherd concerning amoret;--and not only wanton nymphs but modest swains are of the same philosophy. [ ] ward, _e. dr. lit._, ii, ,--quoting, in the footnote, from _the nice valour_, v, . [ ] dyce, _b. and f._, i, lxxiii. part two the collaboration of beaumont and fletcher chapter xvi statement of the problem; critical apparatus much of the confusion which existed in the minds of readers and critics during the period following the restoration concerning the respective productivity of beaumont and fletcher is due to accident. the quartos (generally unauthorized) of individual plays in circulation were, as often as not, wrong in their ascriptions of authorship to one, or the other, or both of the dramatists; and the folio of , which, long after both were dead, first presented what purported to be their collected works, lacked title-pages to the individual plays, and, save in one instance, prefixed no name of author to any play. the exception is _the maske of the gentlemen of grayes-inne and the inner temple_ "written by francis beaumont, gentleman," which had been performed, feb. , - , and had appeared in quarto without date (but probably ) as "by francis beaumont, gent." in seven instances, fletcher is indicated in the folio by prologue or epilogue as author, or author revised, and in general correctly; but otherwise the thirty-four plays included (not counting the _maske_) are introduced to the public merely by a general title-page as "written by francis beaumont and john fletcher, gentlemen. never printed before, and now published by the authours originall copies." that the public should have been deceived into accepting most of them as the joint-product of the authors is not surprising. though it is not the purpose of this discussion to consider plays in which beaumont was not concerned, it may be said incidentally that of eleven of these productions fletcher was sole author; massinger of perhaps one, and with fletcher of eight, and with fletcher and others of five more; that in several plays four or five other authors had a hand, and that in at least five fletcher had no share.[ ] [illustration: john fletcher from the painting in the national portrait gallery painter unknown but contemporary] sir aston cockayne was, therefore, fully justified, when, some time between and , he thus upbraided the publishers of the folio: in the large book of playes you late did print in beaumont's and in fletcher's name, why in't did you not justice? give to each his due? for beaumont of those many writ in few, and massinger in other few; the main being sole issues of sweet fletcher's brain. but how came i (you ask) so much to know? fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so. i' the next impression therefore justice do, and print their old ones in one volume too; for beaumont's works and fletcher's should come forth, with all the right belonging to their worth. in still another poem, printed in , but written not long after , and addressed to his cousin, charles cotton, sir aston returns to the charge: i wonder, cousin, that you would permit so great an injury to fletcher's wit, your friend and old companion, that his fame should be divided to another's name. if beaumont had writ those plays, it had been against his merits a detracting sin, had they been attributed also to fletcher. they were two wits and friends, and who robs from the one to glorify the other, of these great memories is a partial lover. had beaumont liv'd when this edition came forth, and beheld his ever living name before plays that he never writ, how he had frown'd and blush'd at such impiety! his own renown no such addition needs to have a fame sprung from another's deedes: and my good friend old philip massinger with fletcher writ in some that we see there. but you may blame the printers: yet you might perhaps have won them to do fletcher right, would you have took the pains; for what a foul and unexcusable fault it is (that whole volume of plays being almost every one after the death of beaumont writ) that none would certifie them so much! i wish as free y' had told the printers this, as you did me. . . . . . . ... while they liv'd and writ together, we had plays exceeded what we hop'd to see. but they writ few; for youthful beaumont soon by death eclipsèd was at his high noon. the statements especially to be noted in these poems are, first, that fletcher is present in most of the work published in the earliest folio, that of , beaumont in but a few plays, massinger in other few. this information cockayne, who was but eight years of age when beaumont died, and seventeen at fletcher's death, had from fletcher's chief bosom-friend, and it was probably corroborated by massinger himself, with whom cockayne and his family (as we know from other evidence) had long been acquainted. second, that _almost every play_ in the folio was written after beaumont's death ( ). this information, also, cockayne had from his own cousin who was a friend and old companion of fletcher. this cousin, the chief bosom-friend, as i have shown elsewhere, was charles cotton, the elder, who died in , not the younger charles cotton (the translator of montaigne),--for he was not born till five years after fletcher died. and, third, that not only is the title of the folio "comedies and tragedies written by francis beaumont and john fletcher, gentlemen" a misnomer, but that the bulk of their joint-plays, "the old ones" (not here included) calls for a volume to itself. a very just verdict, indeed,--this of cockayne,--for (if i may again anticipate conclusions later to be reached) the only indubitable contributions from beaumont's hand to this folio are his _maske of the gentleman of grayes inne_ and a portion of _the coxcombe_. the confusion concerning authorship was redoubled by the second folio, which appeared as "_fifty comedies and tragedies_. written by francis beaumont and john fletcher, gentlemen. published by the authors original copies (_etc._)" in . there are fifty-three plays in this volume; the thirty-five of the first folio, and eighteen previously printed but not before gathered together. beside those in which beaumont had, or could have had, a hand, the eighteen include five of fletcher's authorship, five in which he collaborated with others than beaumont; and one, _the coronation_, principally, if not entirely, by shirley.[ ] as in the folio, the only indication of respective authorship is to be found in occasional dedications, prefaces, prologues and epilogues. but, while in some half-dozen instances these name fletcher correctly as author, and, in two or three, by implication correctly designate him or beaumont, in other cases the indication is wrong or misleading. where "our poets" are vaguely mentioned, or no hint whatever is given, the uncritical reader is led to ascribe the play to the joint composition of beaumont and fletcher. the lists of actors prefixed to several of the dramas afford valuable information concerning date and, sometimes, authorship to the student of stage-history; but the credulous would carry away the impression that beaumont and fletcher had collaborated equally in about forty of the fifty-three plays contained in the folio of . the uncertainty regarding the respective shares of the two authors in the production of this large number of dramas and, consequently, regarding the quality of the genius of each, commenced even during the life of fletcher who survived his friend by nine years, and it has continued in some fashion down to the present time. writing an elegy "on master beaumont, presently after his death,"[ ] that is to say, in - , john earle, a precocious youth of sixteen, at christ church, oxford, is so occupied with lament and praise for "the poet so quickly taken off" that he not only ascribes to him the whole of _philaster_ and _the maides tragedy_ (in both of which it was always known that fletcher had a share) but omits mention of fletcher altogether. so far, however, as the estimate of the peculiar genius of beaumont goes, the judgment of young earle has rarely been surpassed. oh, when i read those excellent things of thine, such strength, such sweetnesse, coucht in every line, such life of fancy, such high choise of braine,-- nought of the vulgar mint or borrow'd straine, such passion, such expressions meet my eye, such wit untainted with obscenity, and these so unaffectedly exprest, but all in a pure flowing language drest, so new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon, and all so borne within thyself, thine owne, i grieve not now that old menanders veine is ruin'd, to survive in thee againe. the succeeding exaltation of his idol above plautus and aristophanes, nay even chaucer, is of a generous extravagance, but the lad lays his finger on the real beaumont when he calls attention to "those excellent things;" and to the histrionic quality, the high seriousness, the "humours" and the perennial vitality of beaumont's contribution to dramatic poetry. a year or so later, and still during fletcher's lifetime, we find drummond of hawthornden confusing in his turn the facts of authorship; for he "reports jonson as saying that 'flesher and beaumont, ten years since, hath written _the faithfull shipheardesse_, a tragicomedie well done,'--whereas both jonson and beaumont had already addressed lines to fletcher in commendation of his pastoral."[ ] by , as miss hatcher has shown, the confusion had crystallized itself into three distinct opinions, equally false, concerning the respective contribution of the authors to the plays loosely accredited to their partnership. these opinions are represented in the commendatory verses prefixed to the first folio. one was that "they were equal geniuses fused into one by the force of perfect congeniality and not to be distinguished from each other in their work,"--thus put into epigram by sir george lisle: for still your fancies are so wov'n and knit, 't was francis fletcher or john beaumont writ; and repeated by sir john pettus: how angels (cloyster'd in our humane cells) maintaine their parley, beaumont-fletcher tels: whose strange, unimitable intercourse transcends all rules. a second, the dominant view in , was that "the plays were to be accredited to fletcher alone, since beaumont was not to be taken into serious account in explaining their production." this opinion is expressed by waller, who, referring not only to the plays of that folio (in only two of which beaumont appears) but to others like _the maides tragedy_ and _the scornful ladie_ in which, undoubtedly, beaumont coöperated, says: fletcher, to thee wee do not only owe all these good playes, but those of others, too; ... no worthies form'd by any muse but thine, could purchase robes to make themselves so fine; and by hills, who writes,--"upon the ever-to-be-admired mr. john fletcher and his playes,"-- "fletcher, the king of poets! such was he, that earn'd all tribute, claim'd all soveraignty." the third view was--still to follow miss hatcher--that "fletcher was the genius and creator in the work, and beaumont merely the judicial and regulative force." cartwright in his two poems of , as i have already pointed out, emphasizes this view: though when all fletcher writ, and the entire man was indulged unto that sacred fire, his thoughts and his thoughts dresse appeared both such that 't was his happy fault to do too much; who therefore wisely did submit each birth to knowing beaumont ere it did come forth; working againe, until he said 't was fit and made him the sobriety of his wit; though thus he call'd his judge into his fame, and for that aid allow'd him halfe the name, 't is knowne that sometimes he did stand alone, that both the spunge and pencill were his owne; that himselfe judged himselfe, could singly do, and was at last beaumont and fletcher too. a similar view is implied by dryden, when, in his _essay of dramatick poesie_, , he attributes the regularity of their joint-plots to beaumont's influence; and reports that even "ben jonson while he lived submitted all his writings to his censure, and 'tis thought used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots." this tradition of fletcher as creator and beaumont as critic continued for generations, only occasionally disturbed,[ ] in spite of the testimony of cockayne to fletcher's sole authorship of most of the plays in the first folio, to the coöperation of massinger with fletcher in some, and to the fact that there were enough plays not here included, written conjointly by beaumont and fletcher, to warrant the publication of a separate volume, properly ascribed to both. to the mistaken attributions of authorship by dryden, rymer, and others, i make reference in my forthcoming essay on _the fellows and followers of shakespeare_, part two.[ ] the succeeding history of opinion through langbaine, collier, theobald, sympson and seward, chalmers, brydges, _the biographia dramatica_, cibber, malone, darley, dyce, and the purely literary critics from lamb to swinburne, has been admirably outlined by miss hatcher in the first chapter of her dissertation on the _dramatic method of john fletcher_. with fleay, in , began the scientific analysis of the problem, based upon metrical tests as derived from the investigation of the individual verse of fletcher, massinger, and beaumont. his method has been elaborated, corrected, and supplemented by additional rhetorical and literary tests, on the part of various critics, some of whom are mentioned below.[ ] the more detailed studies in metre and style are by r. boyle, g. c. macaulay, and e. h. oliphant; and the best brief comparative view of their conclusions as regards beaumont's contribution is to be found in r. m. alden's edition of _the knight of the burning pestle_ and _a king and no king_. to the chronology of the plays serviceable introductions are afforded by macaulay in the list appended to his chapter in the sixth volume of the _cambridge history of english literature_, and by a. h. thorndike in his _influence of beaumont and fletcher upon shakespeare_. concerning the authorship of the successive scenes in a few of the plays undoubtedly written in partnership by beaumont and fletcher a consensus of opinion has practically been reached. concerning others, especially those in which a third or fourth hand may be traced, the difference of opinion is still bewildering. this divergence is due, perhaps, to the proneness of the critic to emphasize one or more tests out of relation to the rest, or to forget that though individual scenes were undertaken now by one, now by the other of the colleagues, the play as a whole would be usually planned by both, but any individual scene or passage revised by either. the tests of external evidence have of course been applied by all critics, but as to events and dates there is still variety of opinion. of the internal criteria, those based upon the peculiarities of each partner in respect of versification have been so carefully studied and applied that to repeat the operation seems like threshing very ancient straw; but to accept the winnowings of others, however careful, is unsatisfactory. tests of rhetorical habit and tectonic preference have also been, in general, attempted; but not, i think, exhaustively. and, though much has been established, and availed of, in analysis, there remains yet something to desire in the application of the more subtle differentiæ yielded by such preliminary methods of investigation,--what these differentiæ teach us concerning the temperamental idiosyncrasies of each of the partners in scope and method of observation, in poetic imagery, in moral and emotional insight and elevation, intellectual outlook, philosophical and religious conviction. footnotes: [ ] see g. c. macaulay (_camb. hist. eng. lit._, vi), and other authorities as in footnote toward end of this chapter. [ ] see authorities as in footnote, below. [ ] included "thirty years" after, among the commendatory poems in the folio of ; but published earlier with _beaumont's poems_, . [ ] miss o. l. hatcher, _john fletcher_, chicago, . [ ] as by langbaine, _an account of the english dramatick poets_ ( ), who acknowledges cockayne as the only conclusive authority upon the subject. [ ] _r. e. c._, vol. iii. [ ] f. g. fleay, in _new shakespeare society transactions_, ; _shakespeare manual_, ; _englische studien_, ix ( ); _chronicle of the english drama_, . r. boyle, in _engl. stud._, v, vii, viii, ix, x, xvii, xviii, xxvi, xxxi ( - ), and in _n. shaksp. soc. trans._, . g. c. macaulay, _francis beaumont_, ; and in _cambridge history of english literature_, vi ( ). a. h. bullen, article _john fletcher_ in _dictionary of national biography_, xix ( ). e. h. oliphant, in _engl. stud._, xiv, xv, xvi ( - ). a. h. thorndike, _the influence of beaumont and fletcher on shakespeare_, ; beaumont and fletcher's _maid's tragedy_, etc. (belles lettres series), . r. m. alden, beaumont's _knight of the burning pestle_, etc. (belles lettres series), . the introductions in the _variorum edition_, , . for a general treatment of the subject see, also, a. w. ward's _history of english dramatic literature_, ii, - ( ), ii, - ( ), and f. e. schelling's _elizabethan drama_, ii, - , and for bibliography, . for general bibliography, thorndike and alden in belles lettres series, as above; and _camb. hist. eng. lit._, vi, - . chapter xvii the delimitation of the field the plays contained in the first folio of beaumont and fletcher's _comedies and tragedies_, , are _the mad lover_, _the spanish curate_, _the little french lawyer_, _the custome of the countrey_, _the noble gentleman_, _the captaine_, _the beggers bush_, _the coxcombe_, _the false one_, _the chances_, _the loyall subject_, _the lawes of candy_, _the lovers progresse_, _the island princesse_, _the humorous lieutenant_, _the nice valour_, _the maide in the mill_, _the prophetesse_, _the tragedy of bonduca_, _the sea voyage_, _the double marriage_, _the pilgrim_, _the knight of malta_, _the womans prize_ or _the tamer tamed_, _loves cure_, _the honest mans fortune_, _the queene of corinth_, _women pleas'd_, _a wife for a moneth_, _wit at severall weapons_, _the tragedy of valentinian_, _the faire maide of the inne_, _loves pilgrimage_, _the maske of the gentlemen of grayes inne, and the inner temple, at the marriage of the prince and princesse palatine of rhene_ written by francis beaumont, gentleman, _foure playes_ (or _moralle representations_) _in one_. of these thirty-five, which purport to be printed from "the authours originall copies," only one, as i have already said, _the maske_, had been published before. the second folio, entitled _fifty comedies and tragedies_, , contains, beside those above mentioned, eighteen others, one of which, _the wild-goose chase_, had been published separately and in folio, . the remaining seventeen said to be "published from the authors' original copies," are printed from the quartos. they are _the maides tragedy_, _philaster_, _a king and no king_, _the scornful ladie_, _the elder brother_, _wit without money_, _the faithfull shepheardesse_, _rule a wife and have a wife_, _monsieur thomas_, _rollo_, _the knight of the burning pestle_, _the night-walker_, _the coronation_, _cupids revenge_, _the two noble kinsmen_, _thierry and theodoret_, and _the woman-hater_. in addition to these fifty-three plays, one, _the faithful friends_, entered on the stationers' registers in , as by beaumont and fletcher, was held in manuscript until , when it was purchased by weber from "mr. john smith of furnival's inn into whose possession it came from mr. theobald, nephew to the editor of shakespeare," and published. according to the broadest possible sweep of modern opinion, the presence of beaumont cannot by any _tour de force_ be conjectured in more than twenty-three of the fifty-four productions listed above. the twenty-three are (exclusive of _the maske_) _the woman-hater_, _the knight of the burning pestle_, _cupids revenge_, _the scornful ladie_, _the maides tragedy_, _a king and no king_, _philaster_, _foure playes in one_, _loves cure_, _the coxcombe_, _the captaine_, _thierry and theodoret_, _the faithful friends_, _wit at severall weapons_, _beggers bush_, _loves pilgrimage_, _the knight of malta_, _the lawes of candy_, _the nice valour_, _the noble gentleman_, _the faire maide of the inne_, _bonduca_, and _the honest mans fortune_. with regard to the last twelve of these plays beginning with _thierry and theodoret_ there is no convincing proof that more than the first four were written before february , when after preparing the _maske_ for the lady elizabeth's marriage to the elector palatine, beaumont seems (except for his share of _the scornful ladie_ which i date about ) to have withdrawn from dramatic activity,--perhaps because of his own marriage about that time and withdrawal to the country, or because of failing health; and there is no generally accepted historical or textual evidence that beaumont had any hand even in these four. of the eight remaining at the end of the list, four may be dated before beaumont's death in : _the honest mans fortune_, which is said on manuscript evidence to have been played in the year , but probably later than august ;[ ] _bonduca_, which oliphant asserts is an alteration by fletcher of an old drama of beaumont's, but which other authorities assign to fletcher alone; and, on slighter evidence, _loves pilgrimage_, and _the nice valour_. the balance of proof with regard to the other four, _the knight of malta_, _the lawes of candy_, _the noble gentleman_, and _the faire maide of the inne_, is altogether in favour of their composition after beaumont's death. in each of these twelve plays, however, beginning with _thierry_ and ending with _the honest mans fortune_, an occasional expert thinks that he finds a speech or a scene in beaumont's style, and concludes that the play in its present form is a revision of some early effort in which that dramatist had a hand. but where one critic surmises beaumont, another detects beaumont's imitators; and where one conjectures fletcher and beaumont conjoined, half a dozen assert fletcher, assisted, or revised by anywhere from one to four contemporaries,--field or daborne or massinger, middleton or rowley, or first and second unknown. i have examined these plays and the evidence, as carefully as i have those which have more claim to consideration among the beaumont possibilities, and have applied to them all the tests which i shall presently describe; and have come to the conclusion that beaumont had nothing to do with any of the twelve. there remain, then, of the twenty-three plays enumerated above as beaumont-fletcher possibilities, only eleven of which i can, on the basis of external or internal evidence, or both, safely say that they were composed before beaumont ceased writing for the stage, and that he had, or may have had, a hand in writing some of them. these are, in the order of their first appearance in print: _the woman-hater_, published without name of author in ; _the knight of the burning pestle_, also anonymous, published in ; _cupids revenge_, published as fletcher's in ; _the scornful ladie_, published in , as beaumont and fletcher's, just after the death of the former; _the maides tragedy_, published, without names of authors, in ; _a king and no king_, published as beaumont and fletcher's in ; _philaster_, published as beaumont and fletcher's in ; and _foure playes in one_, _loves cure_, _the coxcombe_, and _the captaine_, first published in the folio, without ascription of authorship on the title-page, but as of the "comedies and tragedies written by beaumont and fletcher," in general. in the case of _loves cure_ the epilogue mentions "our author"; the prologue, spoken "at the reviving of this play," attributes it to beaumont and fletcher. as for _the coxcombe_, the prologue for a revival speaks of "the makers that confest it for their own." it is worthy of notice that three only of these eleven possible "beaumont-fletcher" plays were printed during beaumont's lifetime,--_the woman-hater_, _the knight of the burning pestle_ and _cupids revenge_, and that on none of them does beaumont's name appear as author. the last indeed was ascribed, wrongly, as i shall later show, to fletcher alone. it should also be noted that four other of the plays, beginning with _the scornful ladie_ and ending with _philaster_, were published before the death of fletcher in ; and that while three of them have title-page ascriptions to both authors, one, _the maides tragedy_, is anonymous. to these eleven plays as a residuum i have given the preference in the application of tests deemed most likely to reveal the relative contribution and genius of the authors in partnership. beside the seven published as stated above during fletcher's life, two others appeared which i do not include in this residuum,--_the faithfull shepheardesse_ and _thierry and theodoret_. the former, printed between december , and july , , is of fletcher's sole authorship, and will be employed as one of the clues to his early characteristics. the latter, attributed by some critics to both authors was published without ascription of authorship in a quarto of . it does not appear in the folio of , but was printed in second quarto as "by john fletcher" in , and again as "by f. beaumont and j. fletcher" in ; and was finally gathered up with the _comedies and tragedies_ which compose the folio of . oliphant and thorndike are of opinion that the play is a revision by massinger of an original by beaumont and fletcher, but i cannot discover in the text evidence sufficient to warrant its inclusion in the list of plays worthy to be investigated as the possible product of the partnership. the eleven beaumont-fletcher plays to which the criteria of internal evidence may be applied with some assurance of success, comprise in their number, fortunately for us, three of which we are informed by external evidence,--the contemporary testimony of john earle, dated - ,--that beaumont was concerned in their composition. these three, _philaster_, _the maides tragedy_, and _a king and no king_, are a positive residuum to which as a model of the joint-work of our authors we may first, in the effort to discriminate their respective functions when working in partnership, apply the tests of style derived from a study of the plays and poems which each wrote alone. with this delimitation of the field of inquiry, we are now ready for the consideration of the criteria by which the presence of either author may be detected. the criteria are primarily of versification; then, successively and cumulatively, of diction and mental habit. ultimately, and by induction, they are of dramatic technique and creative genius. footnotes: [ ] see fleay, _chron. eng. dram._, i, ; and w. w. greg, _henslowe papers_, . chapter xviii the versification of fletcher and of beaumont i. in plays individually composed. the studies of the most experienced critics into the peculiarities of fletcher's blank verse as displayed in productions of the popular dramatic kind, indubitably written by him alone,[ ] such as _monsieur thomas_ of the earlier period, ending , _the chances_, _the loyall subject_, and _the humorous lieutenant_ of the middle period, ending , and _rule a wife and have a wife_ of his latest period, indicate that he indulges in an excessive use of double endings, sometimes as many as seventy in every hundred lines, even in triple and quadruple endings; in an abundance of trisyllabic feet; and in a peculiar retention of the old end-stopped line, or final pause,--occasionally in as many as ninety out of a hundred lines. attention has been directed also to the emphasis which he deliberately places upon the extra syllable of the blank verse, making it a substantive rather than a negligible factor: as in the "brains" and "too" of the following: or wander after that they know not where to find? or, if found how to enjoy? are men's brains made nowadays of malt, that their affections are never sober, but, like drunken people founder at every new fame? i do believe, too, that men in love are ever drunk, as drunken men are ever loving,--[ ] and to his fondness for appending words such as "first," "then," "there," "still," "sir," and even "lady" and "gentlemen" to lines which already possess their five feet. it has also been remarked that he makes but infrequent employment of rhyme. of this metrical style examples will be found on pages in chapter xix, section , below; or on any page of fletcher's _rule a wife and have a wife_, as for instance the following from act iii, scene , - : _altea._ my life|, an in|nocent|! _marg._ that's it | i aim | at, that's it | i hope | too; ¦ then ¦ i am sure | i rule | him; for in|nocents | are like | obe|dient chil|dren brought up | under a hard | [+!] moth|er-in-law|, a cru|el, who be|ing not us'd | to break|fasts and | colla|tions, [+!] when | they have coarse | bread of|fer'd 'em | are thank|full, and take | it for | a fa|vour too|. are the rooms | made read|y to en|tertain | my friends|? i long | to dance now, [+!] and | to be wan|ton. ¦ let | me have | a song. is the great | couch up | the duke | of medi|na sent? [illustration: john earle, bishop of worcester and salisbury from the portrait in the national portrait gallery] here the first half of v. is also the last of the preceding line; seven out of ten verses have double endings; one has a triple ending. one, v. , has a quadruple ending; unless we rearrange by adding "made ready" to v. , so as to scan: and take 't | for a fa|vour too|. are the rooms | made read|y to en|tertain | my friends|? i long | to dance | now.-- trisyllabic feet occur in nine; final pauses in nine; stress-syllable openings and compensating anapæsts in two; the feminine cæsura (phrasal pause within the foot) in two. the pause in v. , after two strong monosyllables of which the first is stressed, produces a jolt, typically fletcherian. now, these peculiarities of versification are not a habit acquired by fletcher after beaumont ceased to write with him. they are rife not only in the plays of his middle and later periods, but in those of the earlier period while beaumont was still at his side. as for instance in _monsieur thomas_, entirely fletcher's of , or at the latest . the reader may be interested to verify for himself by scanning the following passage from act iv, at which i open at random: launcelot is speaking: but to the silent streets we turn'd our furies: a sleeping watchman here we stole the shooes from, there made a noise, at which he wakes, and follows: the streets are durty, takes a queen-hithe cold, hard cheese, and that choaks him o' munday next: windows and signs we sent to erebus; a crew of bawling curs we entertain'd last, when having let the pigs loose in out parishes, o, the brave cry we made as high as algate! down comes a constable, and the sow his sister most traiterously tramples upon authority: there a whole stand of rug gowns rowted mainly, and the king's peace put to flight, a purblind pig here runs me his head into the admirable lanthorn,-- out goes the light and all turns to confusion. no one, once acquainted with this style of blank verse, with its end-stopped lines, double endings, stress-syllable openings, feminine cæsuræ, trisyllabic feet, jolts, and heavy extra syllables, can ever turn it to confusion with the verse of any poet before browning--certainly not with that of beaumont. our materials for a study of beaumont's individual characteristics in the composition of dramatic blank verse appear at the first sight to be very scanty; for the only example of which we have positive external evidence that it was written by beaumont alone, is _the maske of the gentlemen of grayes inne and the inner temple_, and unfortunately some critics have excluded it from consideration because of its exceptionally formal and spectacular character and slight dramatic purpose. written, however, at the beginning of , when the author's metrical manner was a definitely confirmed habit, it affords, in my opinion, the best as well as the most natural approach to the investigation of beaumont's versification. the following lines may be regarded as typical: is great jove jealous that i am imploy'd on her love-errands? ¦ she did never yet claspe weak mortality in her white arms, as he hath often done: i only come to celebrate the long-wish'd nuptials [+!] here | in olym|pia, ¦ which | are now | perform'd. betwixt two goodly rivers, ¦ that have mixt their gentle, rising waves, and are to grow [+!] in | to a thou|sand streams | [+!] great | as themselves. in these nine verses there are no fletcherian jolts, no double endings. in only two lines trisyllabic feet occur; in only two, final pauses. there are stress-syllable openings in two, with the compensating anapæsts; feminine cæsuræ, in three (dotted); and a stress-syllable opening for the verse-section after the cæsura occurs in but one, whereas there are at least three such in the passage from _monsieur thomas_, quoted above. nothing could be more pronounced than the difference between the metrical style of fletcher's _monsieur thomas_ and _rule a wife_ and that of beaumont's _maske_, as illustrated here. fletcher abounds in double endings, trisyllabic feet, and end-stopped lines, and such conversational or lyrical cadences; beaumont uses them much more sparingly. but while the difference between the genuinely dramatic blank verse of fletcher and that of beaumont is sometimes as pronounced as this, it would be unscientific to base the criterion upon comparison of a mature, conversationally dramatic, composition of the former with a stiffly rhetorical declamatory composition of the latter. for a more suitable comparison we must set beaumont's _maske_ side by side with something of fletcher's written in similar formal and declamatory style,--_the faithfull shepheardesse_, for instance, a youthful production in the pastoral spirit and form. of this a small part, but sufficient for our purpose, is composed in blank verse; and i have cited in the next chapter with another end in view, the opening soliloquy,--to which the reader may turn. but as exemplifying certain of fletcher's metrical peculiarities, in a style of verse suitable to be compared with beaumont's in _the maske_, the following lines from act i, , are perhaps even more distinctive. "what greatness," says the shepherdesse,-- what greatness, ¦ or what private hidden power, [+!] is | there in me, | to draw submission from this rude man and beast? sure i am mortal, the daughter of a shepherd; ¦ he was mortal, and she that bore me mortal: ¦ prick my hand, and it will bleed; a feaver shakes me, and the self-same wind that makes the young lambs shrink makes me | a-cold; | my fear says i am mortal. [+!] yet have i heard | (my mother told it me, and now i do believe it), ¦ if i keep my virgin flower uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair, no goblin, ¦ wood-god, fairy, elf, or fiend, [+!] sa|tyr, or oth|er power that haunts the groves, shall hurt my body, ¦ or by vain illusion [+!] draw | me to wan|der ¦ after idle fires. we have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings, nine final pauses (end-stopped verses), four stress-syllable openings with compensating anapæsts, and seven feminine cæsuræ. in every way this sample even of fletcher's more formal style displays, in its salient characteristics, a much closer resemblance in kind to the sample of his later blank verse quoted from _rule a wife_, above, than to that quoted from beaumont's _maske_. when we pass from samples to larger sections, and compare percentages in the one hundred and thirty-one blank verses of _the maske_ and the first one hundred and sixty-three of _the shepheardesse_, we find that in respect of final pauses there is no great difference. there are, in the former, more than is usual with beaumont--sixty per cent; in the latter, less than is usual with fletcher--fifty per cent. but in other respects beaumont's _maske_ reveals peculiarities of verse altogether different from those of fletcher, even when he is writing in the declamatory pastoral vein. in the one hundred and thirty-one lines of the _maske_ we find but one double ending; whereas in the first one hundred and sixty-three blank verses of _the shepheardesse_ we count as many as fourteen. in these productions the proportion of feminine cæsuræ is practically uniform--about forty per cent. but when we come to examine the more subtle movement of the rhythm, we find that in _the maske_ not more than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-syllable, while in the blank verse of the _shepheardesse_ fully thirty-five out of every hundred lines have that opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical cadence which pervades much of fletcher's metrical composition. in the matter of anapæstic substitutions, and of stress-syllable openings for the verse-section after the cæsura, beaumont is similarly inelastic; while the fletcher of the _shepheardesse_ displays a marvellous freedom. it follows that in the _maske_ we encounter but rarely the rhetorical pause, within the verse, compensating for an absent thesis or arsis; while in the pastoral verse of fletcher we find frequent instances of this delicate dramatic as well as metrical device, and an occasional jolting cæsura. we are not limited, however, to the material afforded by the _maske_ in our attempt to discover beaumont's metrical characteristics when writing alone. _the woman-hater_, included among the plays of beaumont and fletcher in the folio of , and ascribed to both on the title-page of a quarto of , is assigned by the prologue of the first quarto, , to a single author--"he that made this play." and, though there is no attribution of authorship on the title-page of the quarto, we know from the application of verse-tests and tests of diction that, in all but three scenes which have evidently been revised,[ ] the author was certainly not fletcher. an examination of the inner structure of the verse of _the woman-hater_, reveals, except in those scenes, precisely the peculiarities that distinguish beaumont's _maske_: the same infrequency of stress-syllable openings, and of anapæstic substitutions and of suppressed syllables in metrical scheme. in respect of the more evident device of the run-on line _the woman-hater_ reaches a percentage twice as high as that employed in fletcher's unassisted popular dramas; and in respect of the double ending it has a percentage only one-quarter as high. we notice also in this play a much more frequent employment of rhyme than in any of fletcher's stage plays, and a much larger proportion of prose both for dialogue and soliloquy. we should have further basis for conclusion concerning beaumont's metrical style in independent composition, if we could accept the general assumption that he was the author of the _induction_ to the _foure playes in one_, and of the first two plays, _the triumph of honour_ and _the triumph of love_. but for reasons, later to be stated, i agree with oliphant that the _induction_ and _honour_ are not by beaumont; and i hold that he can not be traced with certainty even in the two or three scenes of _love_ that seem to be marked by some of his characteristics. the hand of a third writer, field, is manifest in the non-fletcherian plays of the series. but though we can not draw for our purpose upon other plays as his unassisted work, we may derive help from the consideration of two at least of beaumont's poems,--poems that have something of a dramatic flavour. though they are in rhyming couplets, they display many of the characteristics of the author's blank verse. in the _letter to ben jonson_, which is conversational, i count of run-on lines, thirty-eight in eighty, almost fifty per cent, as compared with fletcher's sometimes ten or twenty per cent, in spite of the superior elasticity of blank verse; and of stress-syllable openings in the same letter twenty-four per cent as compared with the thirty-five per cent of fletcher's more highly cadenced rhythm in the _shepheardesse_. in beaumont's _elegy on the countess of rutland_, the last forty-four lines afford a fine example of dramatic fervour--the indictment of the physicians. here the run-on lines again abound, almost fifty per cent; while the stress-syllable openings are but sixteen per cent--much lower than one may find in many rhymed portions of the _shepheardesse_. with regard to all other tests except that of double ending (which does not apply in this kind of heroic couplet), we find that these poems of beaumont are of a metrical style distinguished by the same characteristics as his blank verse.[ ] . in certain joint-plays. if we turn now to a second class of material available,--the three plays indubitably produced in partnership,--and eliminate the portions written in the metrical style of fletcher, as already ascertained, we may safely attribute the remainder to the junior member of the firm; and so arrive at a final determination of his manner in verse composition. the three plays, as i have said before, are _philaster_, _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_. a passage, which in the opinion of nearly all critics[ ] is by all tests distinctively fletcherian, may be cited from the first of these as an example of that which we eliminate when we look for beaumont. it is from the beginning of act v, , where the captain enters: "philaster, brave philaster!" let philas|ter be deeper in request, my ding [a] dongs, my paires of deere indentures, ¦ kings of clubs, [+!] than | your cold wa|ter-cham|blets ¦ or | your paint|ings [+!] spit|ted with cop|per, ¦ let | not your has|ty silkes, [+!] or | your branch'd cloth | of bod|kin, ¦ or | your ti|shues,-- [+!] deare|ly belov'd | of spi|cèd cake | and cus|tards,-- your rob|in-hoods, |[+!] scar|lets and johns, |[+!] tye | your affec|tions in darknesse to your shops. no, dainty duc|kers, [+!] up | with your three|-piled spi|rits, ¦ your | wrought va|lors. and let | your un|cut col|lers ¦ make | the king feele the measure of your mightinesse, philas|ter![ ] note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the stress-syllable openings, the anapæsts, the feminine cæsuræ (dotted), the two omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause and the following accent at the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of line . of the non-fletcherian part of _philaster_, a typical example is the following from act i, scene , where philaster replies to arethusa's request that he look away from her: i can indure it: turne away my face? i never yet saw enemy that lookt so dreadfully but that i thought my selfe as great a basiliske as he; or spake so horrible but that i thought my tongue bore thunder underneath, as much as his, nor beast that i could turne from: shall i then beginne to feare sweete sounds? a ladies voyce, whom i doe love? say, you would have my life; why, i will give it you; for it is of me a thing so loath'd, and unto you that aske of so poore use, that i shall make no price. if you intreate, i will unmov'dly heare. or the famous description of bellario, beginning: i have a boy, sent by the gods, i hope to this intent, not yet seen in the court-- from the same scene. or the king's soliloquy in act ii, scene , containing the lines: you gods, i see that who unrighteously holds wealth or state from others shall be curst in that which meaner men are blest withall: ages to come shall know no male of him left to inherit, and his name shall be blotted from earth. the reader will at once be impressed with the regularity of the masculine ending. beaumont does not, of course, eschew the double ending; but, as boyle has computed, the percentage in this play is but fifteen in the non-fletcherian passages, whereas the percentage in fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. the prevalence of run-on lines is also noteworthy; and the infrequency of the stress-syllable openings, anapæsts, and feminine cæsuræ by which fletcher achieves now conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt. in _the maides tragedy_, such soliloquies as that of aspatia in act v, scene , with its mixture of blank verse and rhyme: this is my fatal hour; heaven may forgive my rash attempt, that causelessly hath laid griefs on me that will never let me rest, and put a woman's heart into my brest. it is more honour for you that i die; for she that can endure the misery that i have on me, and be patient too, may live, and laugh at all that you can do-- are marked by characteristics utterly unlike those of fletcher's dramatic verse. also unlike fletcher are the scenes which abound in lines of weak and light ending, and lines where the lighter syllables of every word must be counted to make full measure. fletcher did not write: alas, amintor, thinkst thou i forbear to sleep with thee because i have put on a maidens strictness; or as mine own conscience too sensible;-- i must live scorned, or be a murderer;-- that trust out all our reputation. nor did fletcher write, with any frequency, improper run-on lines, such as iii, , (one of his collaborator's scenes): speak yet again, before mine anger grow up beyond throwing down. in this play the percentage of run-on lines in fletcher's scenes is about nineteen; in the scenes not written by him, almost twenty-seven. fletcher's double endings are over forty per cent; his collaborator's barely ten. in _a king and no king_ similar beaumontesque characteristics distinguish the major portion of the play from the few scenes generally acknowledged to be written by fletcher. in fletcher's scenes[ ] one notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings, and, consequently, of anapæstic substitutions, the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the beginning of the verse-section. while sometimes these characteristics appear in the other parts of the play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature of the non-fletcherian rhythm. a comparison of the verse of fletcher's act iv, scene , with that of his collaborator in act i, scene , well illustrates this difference. the recurrence of the feminine cæsura measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers. it regulates two-thirds of fletcher's lines; but of his collaborator's not quite one half. fletcher, for instance, wrote the speech of tigranes, beginning the second scene of act iv: [+!] fool | that i am, | i have | undone | myself, [+!] and | with mine own | hand ¦ turn'd | my for|tune round, that was | a fair | one: ¦ i have child|ishly [+!] plaid | with my hope | so long, till i have broke | it, and now too late i mourn for 't, ¦ o | spaco|nia, thou hast found | an e|ven way | to thy | revenge | now! [+!] why | didst thou fol|low me, |[+!] like | a faint shad|ow, to wither my desires? but, wretched fool, [+!] why | did i plant | thee ¦ 'twixt | the sun | and me, to make | me freeze | thus? ¦ why | did i | prefer | her [+!] to | the fair prin|cess? ¦ o | thou fool, | thou fool, thou family of fools, |[+!] live | like a slave | still and in | thee bear | thine own |[+!] hell | and thy tor|ment,-- where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped lines, already emphasized in preceding examples, we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-syllable openings with their anapæstic sequences, three omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause with the consequent accent at the beginning of the verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine cæsuræ (or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three at least (vv. , , ) are exaggerated jolts. beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for instance, arbaces' speech beginning act i, , , of lines rippling with as many feminine cæsuræ. but, utterly unlike fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only two stress-syllable openings, only four anapæsts, one omitted thesis after the cæsural pause, four end-stopped lines. he is more frequently capable, as in the passage beginning l. , of a sequence without a single feminine cæsura, but with several feminine (or double) endings: _tigranes._ is it the course of iberia, to use their prisoners thus? had fortune throwne my name above arbaces, i should not thus have talkt; for in armenia we hold it base. you should have kept your temper, till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashion perhaps to brag. _arbaces._ bee you my witness, earth, need i to brag? doth not this captive prince speake me sufficiently, and all the acts that i have wrought upon his suffering land? should i then boast? where lies that foot of ground within | his whole | realme ¦ that | i have | not past fighting and conquering?[ ] up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the cæsuræ are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly at the end of the second and third feet. in respect of the internal structure of the verse the tests for beaumont are, then, as i have stated them above; in respect of double endings, boyle and oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. since the metrical characteristics of those parts of _philaster_, _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_ which do not bear the impress of fletcher's versification, are well defined and practically uniform; since they are of a piece with the metrical manner of _the woman-hater_, which is originally, and in general, the work of one author--beaumont; and since they are also of a piece with the versification of the _maske_, which is certainly by beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems,--at least one criterion has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors. fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. they consequently have ascribed to beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. but, because in his later development fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with beaumont he never wrote prose. we find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. the prose of mardonius in act iv, scene of _a king and no king_, and the prose of act v, scenes and , which by metrical tests are fletcher's, are precisely the prose of fletcher's dion in act ii, scene and act v, scene of _philaster_, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of fletcher's verse in the same scenes. footnotes: [ ] some sixteen plays in all. [ ] _the chances_, i, , p. (dyce); but as a rule i use in this chapter the text of the _cambridge english classics_. [ ] for these scenes, and the reasons for asserting that fletcher revised them, see chapter xxiv below. [ ] the reader may judge for himself by referring to the citation from the _letter_ and the poems to the countess in chapters vii and xi, above. [ ] fleay, boyle, oliphant, alden. and even g. c. macaulay, who once claimed the whole play for beaumont, says now "perhaps fletcher's." [ ] q , slightly modernized. [ ] iv, , , ; v, , . [ ] quarto of as given by alden. chapter xix fletcher's diction the verse criterion is, however, not of itself a reagent sufficient to precipitate fully the beaumont of the joint-plays. for there still exists the certainty that in plotting plays together, each of the collaborators was influenced by the opinion of the other; and the probability that, though one may have undertaken sundry scenes or divers characters in a play, the other would, in the course of general correction, insert lines in the parts written by his collaborator, and would convey to his own scenes the distinguishing rhythm, "humour," or diction of a definite character, created, or elaborated, by his colleague. it, therefore, follows that the assignment of a whole scene to either author on the basis alone of some recurring metrical peculiarity is not convincing. in the same section, even in the same speech, we may encounter insertions which bear the stamp of the revising colleague. for instance, the opening of _philaster_ is generally assigned to beaumont: it has the characteristics of his prose. but with the entry of the king (line ) we are launched upon a subscene in verse which, on the one hand, has a higher percentage of double endings (_viz._ ) than beaumont ever used, but does not fully come up to fletcher's usage; while on the other hand, it has a higher percentage of run-on lines[ ] (_viz._ ) than fletcher ever used. the other verse tests leave us similarly in doubt. to any one, however, familiar with the diction and characterization of the two authors the suspicion occurs that the scene was written by beaumont in the first instance; and then worked over and considerably enlarged by his associate. in the first hundred lines of act ii, scene , similar insertions by fletcher occur, and in act iii, .[ ] such being the case we may expect that an inquiry into the rhetorical peculiarities and mental habit, first of fletcher, then of beaumont, will furnish tests corrective of the criterion based upon versification. . fletcher's diction in _the faithfull shepheardesse_. though rather poetic than dramatic, and composed only partly in blank verse, _the faithfull shepheardesse_ affords the best approach to a study of fletcher's rhetoric; for, written about and by fletcher alone, it illustrates his youthful style in the period probably shortly before he collaborated with beaumont in the composition of _philaster_. the soliloquy of clorin, with which _the faithfull shepheardesse_ opens, runs as follows: hail, holy earth, whose cold arms do imbrace the truest man that ever fed his flocks by the fat plains of fruitful thessaly! thus i salute thy grave; thus do i pay my early vows and tribute of mine eyes to thy still-loved ashes; thus i free myself from all insuing heats and fires of love; all sports, delights, and [jolly] games, that shepherds hold full dear, thus put i off: now no more shall these smooth brows be [be] girt with youthful coronals, and lead the dance; no more the company of fresh fair maids and wanton shepherds be to me delightful, nor the shrill pleasing sound of merry pipes under some shady dell, when the cool wind plays on the leaves; all be far away, since thou art far away, by whose dear side how often have i sat crowned with fresh flowers for summers queen, whilst every shepherds boy puts on his lusty green, with gaudy hook and hanging scrip of finest cordovan. but thou art gone, and these are gone with thee and all are dead but thy dear memorie; that shall out-live thee, and shall ever spring, whilst there are pipes or jolly shepherds sing. and here will i, in honour of thy love, dwell by thy grave, forgetting all those joys, that former times made precious to mine eyes; only remembring what my youth did gain in the dark, hidden vertuous use of herbs: that will i practise, and as freely give all my endeavours as i gained them free. of all green wounds i know the remedies in men or cattel, be they stung with snakes, or charmed with powerful words of wicked art, or be they love-sick, or through too much heat grown wild or lunatic, their eyes or ears thickened with misty filme of dulling rheum; these i can cure, such secret vertue lies in herbs applyèd by a virgins hand. my meat shall be what these wild woods afford, berries and chestnuts, plantanes, on whose cheeks the sun sits smiling.[ ] this passage, as we have observed in the preceding section, does not display in full proportion or untrammeled variety the metrical peculiarities of fletcher's popular dramatic blank verse. the verse is lyric and declamatory: his purely dramatic verse whether in the _monsieur thomas_ of his earlier period, _the chances_ of the middle period, or _a wife for a month_ and _rule a wife_ of his later years, has the feminine endings, redundant syllables, anapæstic substitutions, the end-stopped and sometimes fragmentary lines, the hurried and spasmodic utterance of conversational speech. but, from the rhetorical point of view, this soliloquy--in fact, the whole _faithfull shepheardesse_--affords a basis for further discrimination between fletcher and beaumont in the joint-plays; for it displays idiosyncrasies of tone-quality and diction which persist, after beaumont's death, in fletcher's dramas of to as they were in - : sometimes slightly modified, more often exaggerated, but in essence the same. in clorin's soliloquy, the reader cannot but notice, first, a tendency toward alliteration, the _fed_ and _flocks_, _fat_ and _fruitful_, _fresh_ and _fair_, _pleasing_ and _pipes_,--alliteration palpable and somewhat crude, but not yet excessive; second, a balanced iteration of words,--"be far away, since thou art far away" (ll. - ), and, five lines further down, "but thou art gone and these are gone with thee," and in lines and "as freely give ... as i gained them free"; and an iteration of phrases, rhetorical asseverations, negatives, alternatives, questions,--"thus i salute thy grave; thus do i pay," "thus i free," "thus put i off" (lines , , ); third, a preference for iteration in triplets,--"no more shall these smooth brows," "no more the company," "nor the shrill ... sound" (lines - ), "or charmed," "or love-sick," "or through too much heat" (lines and ); fourth, a fondness for certain sonorous words,--"all ensuing heats ... all sports" (lines - ), "all my endeavours ... all green wounds" (lines - ), and the "alls" of lines and ; fifth, a plethora of adjectives,--"holy earth," "cold arms," "truest man," "fat plains"--many of them pleonastic--"misty film," "dulling rheum"--some forty nouns buttressed by epithets to twenty standing in their own strength; and a plethora of nouns in apposition (preferably triplets),--"all sports, delights, and jolly games" (line ), "berries and chestnuts, plantanes" (line ); sixth, an indulgence in conversational tautology: for fletcher is rarely content with a simple statement,--he must be forever spinning out the categories of a concept; expounding his idea by what the rhetoricians call division; enumerating the attributes and species painstakingly lest any escape, or verbosely as a padding for verse or speech. of this mannerism the _faithfull shepheardesse_ affords many instances more typical than those contained in these forty-three lines; but even here clorin salutes the grave of her lover in a dozen different periphrastic ways. to say that "all are dead but thy dear memorie" is not enough; she must specify "_that_ shall outlive thee." to assert that she knows the remedies of "all green wounds" does not suffice: she must proceed to the enumeration of the wounds; nor to tell us that her meat shall be found in the woods: she must rehearse the varieties of meat. her soliloquy in the last thirty lines of the scene, not here quoted, is of the same quality: it reminds one of a henslowe list of stage properties, or of the auctioneer's catalogue that sprawls down walt whitman's pages. and, last, we notice what has been emphasized by g. c. macaulay and others, that much of this enumeration by division is by way of "parentheses hastily thrown in, or afterthoughts as they occur to the mind."[ ] even in the formal _shepheardesse_ this characteristic lends a quality of naturalness and conversational spontaneity to the speech. . in the later plays. if now we turn to one of fletcher's plays written after beaumont's death, and without the assistance of massinger or any other,--say, _the humorous lieutenant_ of about the year ,--we find on every page and passages like the following.[ ]--the king antigonus upon the entry of his son, demetrius, addresses the ambassadors of threatening powers: do you see this gent(leman), you that bring thunders in your mouths, and earthquakes, to shake and totter my designs? can you imagine (you men of poor and common apprehensions) while i admit this man, my son, this nature that in one look carries more fire, and fierceness, than all your masters lives[ ]; dare i admit him, admit him thus, even to my side, my bosom, when he is fit to rule, when all men cry him, and all hopes hang about his head; thus place him, his weapon hatched in bloud; all these attending when he shall make their fortunes, all as sudden, in any expedition he shall point 'em, as arrows from a tartar's bow, and speeding, dare i do this, and fear an enemy? fear your great master? yours? or yours? here we have blank verse, distinctively fletcherian with its feminine endings and its end-stopped lines. but, widely as this differs from the earlier rhythm of _the faithfull shepheardesse_ and its more lyric precipitancy, the qualities of tone and diction are in the later play as in the earlier. the alliterations may not be so numerous, and are in general more cunningly concealed and interwoven, as in lines to ; but the cruder kind still appears as a mannerism, the "fire and fierceness," "hopes," "hang," and "head." the iterations of word, phrase, and rhetorical question, and of the resonant "all," the redundant nouns in apposition, the tautological enumeration of categories, proclaim the unaltered fletcher. the adjectives are in this spot pruned, but they are luxuriant elsewhere in the play. the triplets,--"this man, my son, this nature,"--"admit," "admit," "admit," find compeers on nearly every page: shew where to lead, to lodge, to charge with safetie,--[ ] here's a strange fellow now, and a brave fellow, if we may say so of a pocky fellow.--[ ] and now, 't is ev'n too true, i feel a pricking, a pricking, a strange pricking.--[ ] with such a sadness on his face, as sorrow, sorrow herself, but poorly imitates. sorrow of sorrows on that heart that caus'd it![ ] in the passages cited above there happen to be, also, a few examples of the elocutionary afterthought: you come with thunders in your mouth _and earthquakes_,-- as arrows from a tartar's bow, _and speeding_.-- to this device, and to the intensive use of the pronominal "one" fletcher is as closely wedded as to the repetition of "all,"-- they have a hand upon us, a heavy and a hard one.[ ] to wear this jewel near thee; he is a tried one and one that ... will yet stand by thee.[ ] other plays conceded by the critics to fletcher alone, and written in his distinctive blank verse, display the same characteristics of style: _the chances_ of about , _the loyall subject_ of (like _the humorous lieutenant_ of the middle period), and _rule a wife and have a wife_ of the last period, . i quote at random for him who would apply the tests,--first from _the chances_,[ ] the following of the repeating revolver style: art thou not an ass? and modest as her blushes! what a blockhead would e're have popt out such a dry apologie for this dear friend? and to a gentlewoman, a woman of her youth and delicacy? they are arguments to draw them to abhor us. an honest moral man? 't is for a constable: a handsome man, a wholesome man, a tough man, a liberal man, a likely man, a man made up by hercules, unslaked with service: the same to night, to morrow night, the next night, and so to perpetuity of pleasures. now, from _the loyall subject_[ ]--the farewell of _archas_ to his arms and colours. i wish i could quote it all as an example of noble noise, enumerative and penny-a-line rhetoric: farewell, my eagle! when thou flew'st, whole armies have stoopt below thee: at passage i have seen thee ruffle the tartars, as they fled thy furie, and bang 'em up together, as a tassel, upon the streach, a flock of fearfull pigeons. i yet remember when the volga curl'd, the agèd volga, when he heav'd his head up, and rais'd his waters high, to see the ruins, the ruines our swords made, the bloudy ruins; then flew this bird of honour bravely, gentlemen; but these must be forgotten: so must these too, and all that tend to arms, by me for ever. and from act ii, scene , pages - , for triplets: fight hard, lye hard, feed hard, when they come home, sir.... to be respected, reckon'd well, and honour'd.... where be the shouts, the bells rung out, the people?... and, for "alls," and triplets: and whose are all these glories? why their princes, their countries and their friends. alas, of all these, and all the happy ends they bring, the blessings, they only share the labours! finally, from _rule a wife_, a few instances of the iterations, three-fold or multiple, and redundant expositions. in the first scene[ ] juan describes leon: ask him a question, he blushes like a girl, and answers little, to the point less; he wears a sword, a good one, and good cloaths too; he is whole-skin'd, has no hurt yet, good promising hopes; and perez describes the rest of the regiment, that swear as valiantly as heart can wish, their mouths charg'd with six oaths at once, and whole ones, that make the drunken dutch creep into mole-hills; ... and he proceeds to donna margarita: she is fair, and young, and wealthy, infinite wealthy, _etc._ and then to estefania who has tautologized of her chastity, he tautologizes of his harmlessness:[ ] i am no blaster of a lady's beauty, nor bold intruder on her special favours; i know how tender reputation is, and with what guards it ought to be preserv'd, lady. as a fair example of this method of filling a page, i recommend the first scene of the third act; and of eloquence by rhetorical 'division,' perez's description of his room in the next scene: all in terms of three times three. if now the reader will turn, by way of confirmation, to _the triumph of time_ and _the triumph of death_ of which the metrical characteristics are admittedly fletcher's, he will find that there, fletcher, before beaumont's retirement from the partnership, is already using in purely dramatic composition the rhetorical mannerisms which mark both the lyrically designed _shepheardesse_ of his early years and the genuine dramas of the later. . stock words, phrases, and figures. beside the rhetorical mannerisms classified in the preceding paragraphs i might rehearse a long list of fletcher's favourite expressions and figures of speech. of the former mr. oliphant[ ] has mentioned 'plaguily,' 'claw'd,' 'slubber'd,' 'too,' 'shrewdly,' 'stuck with,' 'it shews,' 'dwell round about ye,' 'for ever,' 'no way,' (for 'not at all'). in addition i have noted the reiterated 'thus,' 'miracle,' 'prodigious' (in the sense of 'ominous')--'prodigious star,' 'prodigious meteor'--'bugs,' 'monsters,' and 'scorpions'; 'torments,' 'diseases,' 'imposthumes,' 'canker,' 'mischiefs,' 'ruins,' 'blasted,' 'rotten'; 'myrmidons'; 'monuments' (for 'tombs'), 'marble'; 'lustre,' 'crystal,' 'jewels,' 'picture,' 'painting,' 'counterfeit in arras'; 'blushes,' 'palates,' 'illusion,' 'abused' (for 'deceived'), 'blessed,' 'flung off,' 'cloister'd up,' 'fat earth,' 'turtle,' 'passion,' 'paradise.' oliphant assigns to fletcher 'pulled on,' but i find that almost as frequently in beaumont. 'poison,' 'contagious' and 'loaden,' also abound in fletcher, but are sometimes used by beaumont. fletcher affects alliterative epithets: 'prince of popinjays,' 'pernicious petticoat prince,' 'pretty prince of puppets,'--and antitheses such as 'prince of wax,' 'pelting prattling peace.' his characters talk much of 'silks' and 'satins,' 'branched velvets' and 'scarlet' clothes. they are said to speak in 'riddles'; they are threatened with 'ribald rhymes'; they shall be 'bawled in ballads,' or 'chronicled,' 'cut and chronicled.' another characteristic of fletcher's diction is his preference for the pronoun _ye_ instead of _you_. this was pointed out by mr. r. b. mckerrow, who in his edition of _the spanish curate_[ ] notes that in the scenes generally attributed, in accordance with other tests, to fletcher, _ye_ occurs times, while in the scenes attributed to massinger it occurs but four. that is to say, for every _ye_ in fletcher's part there are but . _you's_; for every _ye_ in massinger's part, _you's_. mr. w. w. greg, applying the test in his edition of _the elder brother_,[ ] and counting the _y'are's_ as instances of _ye_, finds that the percentage of _ye's_ to _you's_ in fletcher's part is almost three times as high as in massinger's. in a recent article in _the nation_[ ] mr. paul elmer more communicates his independent observation of the same mannerism in fletcher. though he has been anticipated in part, his study adds to mckerrow's the valuable information that fletcher uses the _ye_ for _you_ in "both numbers and cases, and in both serious and comic scenes." mr. more's statistics favour the conclusion that the test distinguishes fletcher not only from massinger, but from other collaborators: middleton, rowley, field, jonson, tourneur. they do not carry conviction regarding shakespeare, whose habit as greg and others had already announced varies in a perplexing manner. nor does mr. more arrive at any definite result concerning the test "when applied to the mixed work of beaumont and fletcher." for though the high percentage of _ye's_ in the third and fourth of the _foure playes_ confirms the general attribution of those 'triumphs' to fletcher, the low percentage in the first two 'triumphs' does not justify "the common opinion which attributes them to beaumont." their author, as i have elsewhere stated, was probably field. "in the plays which are units," continues mr. more, "such as _the maid's tragedy_, _philaster_, _a king and no king_, _the knight of the burning pestle_, and _the coxcomb_, this mark of fletcher does not occur at all. it should seem that the writing here, at least in its final form, was almost entirely beaumont's." i have gone through all the plays which have been ordinarily regarded as joint-productions of beaumont and fletcher, and find that in this surmise mr. more is right. _the knight_, to be sure, is beaumont's alone; but with regard to the other four plays mentioned above, in which they undoubtedly coöperated, the suggestion that the writing, at least in its final form, was almost entirely beaumont's, because of the practically complete absence of _ye's_, is justified by the facts. it is, also, helpful in the examination of plays not mentioned in this list. it has, in connection with other considerations, assisted me to the conclusion that fletcher went over two or three scenes of _the woman-hater_, stamping them with his _ye's_ after beaumont had finished it as a whole; and it has confirmed me in the belief that _the scornful ladie_ was one of the latest joint-plays, only partly revised by beaumont,--and that, not long before his death. fletcher's preference for _ye_ is a distinctive mannerism. his usage varies from the employment of one-third as many _ye's_ to that of twice as many _ye's_ as _you's_; whereas beaumont rarely uses a _ye_. even more distinctive is fletcher's use of _y'are_, and of _ye_ in the objective case. the latter, beaumont does not tolerate. for figurative purposes fletcher finds material most frequently in the phenomena of winter and storm: 'frosts,' 'nipping frosts,' 'nipping winds,' 'hail,' 'cakes of ice,' 'icicles,' 'thaw,' 'tempests,' 'thunders,' 'billows,' 'mariners' and 'storm-tossed barks,' 'wild overflows' of waters in stream or torrent; in the phenomena of heat and light: 'suns,' the 'icy moon,' the 'dog-star' or the 'dog,' the 'sirian star,' the 'cold bear' and 'raging lion,' 'aetna,' 'fire and flames'; of trees: root and branch, foliage and fruit; of the oak and clinging vine; of the rose or blossom and the 'destroying canker'; of fever and ague; of youth and desire, and of death 'beating larums to the blood,' of our days that are 'marches to the grave,' and of our lives 'tedious tales soon forgotten.' i have elsewhere called attention to the numerous variations which he plays upon the 'story of a woman.' his 'monuments' are in frequent requisition and, by preference, they 'sweat'; men pursued by widows fear to be 'buried alive in another man's cold monument.' other common images are 'rock him to another world,' 'bestride a billow,' 'plough up the sea.' he indulges in extended mythological tropes as of the 'carthage queen' and ariadne; is especially attracted by adonis, hylas (whom he may have got either from theocritus or the marquis d'urfé's astræan character), and hercules; and, in general, he levies more freely than beaumont on commonplace classical material. in his unassisted dramas his fondness for personification seems to grow: many pages are thick with capitalized abstractions; and the poetry, then, is usually limited to the capitalization. the curious reader will find most of fletcher's predilections in image-making clustered in three or four typical passages of the later and unassisted plays, such as alphonso's raving in _a wife for a month_, iv, ; and in passages, undoubtedly of his verse and diction, in plays written conjointly with beaumont, such as that of spaconia's outburst in _king and no king_, iv, , - . fletcher abounds in optatives: 'would gods thou hadst been so blest!' 'would there were any safety in thy sex!' and the like. he is also given to rhetorical interrogations and elaborate exclamations; more so than beaumont. he affects the lighter kind of oath, the appeal to something sacred, in attestation--'witness heaven!' in entreaty--'high heaven, defend us!' or in mere ejaculation--'equal heavens!' he varies his asseverations so that they appear less bluntly profane: 'by my life!' 'by those lights, i vow!'--or more appropriate to the emergency: 'by all holy in heaven and earth!' he swears occasionally 'by the gods,' but not so frequently as beaumont, for there was a puritanical reaction after beaumont's death. in the early joint-plays he affects particularly 'all the gods,' 'by _all_ those gods, you swore by!' 'by more than all the gods!' in his imprecations he is even more sulphurous than beaumont: 'hell bless you for it!' 'hell take me then!' 'thou all-sin, all-hell, and last all-devils!' in summary let us say of fletcher's diction, that its vocabulary is repetitious; its sentence-structure, loose, cumulative, trailing: that its larger movement is, in general, dramatic, conversational, abrupt, rather than lyrical, declamatory, reflective. he writes for the plot--forward: not from the character--outward. when he bestows a lyrical or descriptive touch upon the narrative it is always incidental to conversation or stage business. when he indulges in a classical reminiscence he permits himself to embroider and bedizen; but usually his ribbons (from a scantly furnished, much-rummaged wardrobe) are carelessly pinned on. while capable, especially in tragedy, of occasional long speeches, he prefers the brief interchange of utterance, the rapid fire and spasm of dialogue. footnotes: [ ] in the king's speech, - . [ ] for particulars, see chapter xxv, § , below. [ ] as given in the _camb. engl. classics_. [ ] g. c. macaulay, _francis beaumont_, p. . [ ] act i, sc. , _camb. engl. classics_, ii, p. . [ ] crane _ms._ ( ). [ ] _cambridge_, ii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _loyall subject_, iii, , end. [ ] _hum. lieut., cambridge_, ii, p. . [ ] john in ii, , _camb._, iv, p. . [ ] i, , _camb._, iii, p. . [ ] _camb._, iii, p. . [ ] _ibid._, p. . [ ] _engl. studien_, xiv, . [ ] _variorum, b. and f._, vol. ii, . [ ] _variorum, b. and f._, vol. ii, . [ ] new york, nov. , . chapter xx fletcher's mental habit from the study of fletcher's unaided plays we arrive at a still further criterion for the determination of his share in the joint-plays,--his stock of ideas concerning life, his view of the spectacle, and his emotional attitude. his early pastoral comedy _the faithfull shepheardesse_ might be dismissed from consideration as a conventionalized literary treatment of conditions remote from actual experience, were it not that other dramatic exponents of shepherds and shepherdesses--jonson, for instance, and milton--have succeeded in imbuing the pastoral species with qualities distinctly vital; the former, with rustic reality and genuine tenderness; the latter, with profound moral significance. _the faithfull shepheardesse_, on the other hand, with all its beauty of artistic form is devoid of reality, pathos, and sublimity. the author has no ideas worthy of the name and, in spite of his singing praises of chastity, he has his hand to his mouth where between fyttes there blossoms a superb smile. he has in art no depth of conviction; consequently, no philosophy of life to offer. _the faithfull shepheardesse_ strikes the intellectual keynote of all fletcher's unaided work. he is a playwright of marvellous skill, a lyrist of facile verse and fancy, but a poet of indifference--of no ethical insight or outlook when he is purveying for the public. his tragedies, for instance _valentinian_ and _bonduca_ (the two scenes of the latter that may not be his are negligible), abound in sudden fatal passions and noble diction. they involve moral conduct, to be sure, patriotism, loyalty, chivalry, military prowess, insane lust and vengeance, but they lack deep-seated and deliberate motive of action, and they fail of that inevitability of spiritual conflict which is requisite to a tragic effect. the heroes of these, and of his tragicomedies and romantic dramas, such as _a wife for a month_, _the loyall subject_, _the humorous lieutenant_, _the pilgrim_, _the island princesse_, may be fearless and blameless, but their courage and virtue are of habit rather than of moral exigency. their loyalty is frequently unreasonable and absurdly exaggerated. one or two of his virtuous heroines are at once charming and real; but as a rule with fletcher--the more virtuous, the more nebulous. his villains have no redeeming touch of humanity: their doom moves us not; nor does their sleight-of-hand repentance convince us. the atmosphere is histrionic. there is scorn of fate and fortune, much talk of death and the grave: and we "go out like tedious tales forgotten"; or we don't,--just as may suit the stage hangings, the brilliance of the footlights, and the sentimental uptake. there is, in short, in his unassisted serious dramas little real pathos; little of the grandeur and sudden imaginative splendour which, we shall see, characterized beaumont; none of beaumont's earnestness and philosophical spontaneity and profundity. like the tragicomic plays, fletcher's lighter comedies _the chances_, _the mad lover_, _the wild-goose chase_, _women pleased_, escape a moral catastrophe by walking round the issue. the heroes are amorous gallants, irresponsible adventurers, adroit scapegraces, devil-may-care rapier-tongued egoists and opportunists. the heroines are "not made for cloisters"; when they are not already as conscienceless as the heroes in performance or desire, they are airy lasses, resourceful in love, seeming-virtuous but suspiciously well-informed of the tarnished side of the shield,--always witty. fletcher _can_ portray the innocence and constancy of woman; but he rarely takes the pains. "to be as many creatures as a woman" is for him a comfortable jibe. the charm of romantic character and subtly thickening complication did not much attract him. he sets over in contrast the violent, insane, tragic, or pathetic with the ludicrous or grotesque; he indulges a careless, loose-jointed, adventitious humour. that he could, on occasion, avail himself of the laughter of burlesque is abundantly proved by the utterances of his valentine in _wit without money_, the devices of the inimitable maria in _the tamer tamed_, and of the _humorous lieutenant_. but for that comic irony of issues by which the wilful or pretentious or deluded,--foes or fools of convention and born prey of ridicule,--are satisfactorily readjusted to society, he prefers to substitute hilarity, ribaldry, the clash of wits, the battledore and shuttlecock of trick, intrigue, of shifting group and kaleidoscopic situation. the idiosyncrasies of the crowd delight him; but the more actual, the more boisterous and bestial. his populace feeds upon "opinions, errors, dreams." his facile verse and limpid dialogue flash with fancy. the gaiety of gilded youth ripples down the page; but the more clever, the more irrelevant the swirling jest,--and, to say the least, the more indelicate. life is a bagatelle; its most strenuous interest--love; and love is volatile as it is sudden. the attitude of sex toward sex is as obvious to the level-headed animal, who is cynic in brain and hedonist in blood, as its significance is supreme: it is that of the man-or-woman hunt; the outcome, a jocosity, more or less,--whether of fornication or cuckoldry, or of tame, old-fashioned, matrimonial monochrome. these characteristics of the fletcherian habit mark all the author's independent plays from _the faithfull shepheardesse_ of or to _rule a wife_ of . the man himself, i think, was better than the dramaturgic artist catering to the public market. for his personal, nay noble, ideals, let the reader turn to the poem appended to _the honest mans fortune_, and judge. the characteristics sketched above are of the maker of a mimic world. since i have elsewhere discussed them in full,[ ] and the marvellous success that the dramaturge achieved in shakespeare's globe, this brief enumeration must suffice. fletcher's mental habit affords an additional criterion for the determination of authorship in the unquestioned beaumont-fletcher plays, and in the analysis of plays in which the collaboration of the poets has been conjectured but not so fully attested. footnotes: [ ] _the fellows and followers of shakespeare_ (part two) in _representative english comedies_, vol. iii. chapter xxi beaumont's diction from a consideration of beaumont's work in his poems, in his _maske_ and _woman-hater_, and such portions of the three unquestioned beaumont-fletcher plays as are marked by his idiosyncrasies of versification, we may arrive at conclusions concerning his diction, rhetorical and poetic. . rhetorical peculiarities in general. beaumont's frequent use in prose of the enclitics 'do' and 'did' has been observed by students of his style. the same peculiarity marks his verse, and occasionally enables the reader to determine the authorship of passages where the metrical tests are inconclusive. his rhetoric is sometimes of the repetitive order, but, as oliphant has indicated, rather for ends of word-play and irony than for mere expansion as with fletcher. such, for instance, is the ironical repetition of a speaker's words by his interlocutor. i note also a tendency to purely dramatic quotation, not common in fletcher's writing,--_e. g._, in _the woman-hater_: "lisping cry 'good sir!' and he's thine own"; or "every one that does not know, cries 'what nobleman is that?'"--and in _a king and no king_ "that hand was never wont to draw a sword, but it cried 'dead' to something." this test alone, if we had not others of rhetoric and metre, would go far to deciding the respective contributions of our authors to the personality of captain bessus in the latter play. the bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly beaumont's, is resonant with such cries and conversational citations; the bessus of the last two, in a rôle almost as extensive, uses the device but once. beaumont sometimes indulges in enumerative sentences; but the enumerations are generally in prose and (it will be recalled that he was a member of the inner temple) of a mock-legal character, not mere redundancies of detail such as we find in fletcher. among other peculiarities of expression is his frequent employment of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection. . stock words, phrases, and figures. beaumont is especially fond of the following words and phrasal variations:--the 'basilisk' with his 'deaddoing eye,' 'venom,' 'infect,' 'infection' and 'infectious,' 'corrupt,' 'leprosy,' 'vild,' 'crosses' (for 'misfortunes'), 'crossed' and 'crossly matched,' 'perplex,' 'distracted,' 'starts' (for 'surprises' and 'fitful changes'), 'miseries,' 'griefs,' 'garlands,' 'cut,' 'shoot,' 'dissemble,' 'loathed,' 'salve' (as noun and verb), 'acquaint' and 'acquaintance,' to 'article,' 'pull,' 'piece,' 'frail' and 'frailty,' 'mortal' and 'mortality,' 'fate' and 'destiny,' to 'blot' from earth or memory, 'after-ages,' 'instruments' (for 'servants'). of his repeated use of 'hills,' 'caves,' 'mines,' 'seas,' 'thunder,' 'beast,' 'bull,' we shall have further exemplification when we consider his figures of speech. he is forever playing phrasal variations upon the words 'piece,' and 'little.' the former is a mannerism of the day, already availed of by shakespeare in _lear_, 'o ruined piece of nature,' and frequently in _antony and cleopatra_, and later repeated in the _tempest_ and _winter's tale_. so with beaumont, arethusa is a 'poor piece of earth'; 'every maid in love will have a piece' of philaster; oriana is a 'precious piece of sly damnation,' 'that pleasing piece of frailty we call woman.' or the word is used literally for 'limb':--'i'll love those pieces you have cut away.'--beaumont, i may say in passing, delights in cutting bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the land.'--'little' he affects, making it pathetic and even more diminutive in conjunction with 'that': euphrasia would 'keep that little piece i hold of life.' 'it is my fate,' proclaims amintor, to bear and bow beneath a thousand griefs to keep that little credit with the world; and so, 'that little passion,' 'that little training,' 'these little wounds,' _ad libitum_. somewhat akin is the poet's use of 'kind': 'a kind of love in her to me'; 'a kind of healthful joy.' his heroines good and bad are given to introspection: they have 'acquaintance' with themselves. 'after you were gone,' says bellario, 'i grew acquainted with my heart'; and bacha in _cupid's revenge_ in a scene undoubtedly of beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'become another woman; one, methinks, with whom i want acquaintance.' while beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his figures of poetry, or tropes, are generally of the more creative kind,--metaphor, personification, metonymy,--and these are very often heightened into that figure of logical artifice known as hyperbole. his comparisons deal in a striking degree with elemental phenomena: hills, caves, stones, rocks, seas, winds, flames, thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are reminiscential of country life. in each play some hero declaims of 'the only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason'; and inevitably enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined' of beasts, and illustrates by custom and passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull--especially bull. when the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull of phalaris charges in. but beaumont prefers nature: his images are sweet with april and violets and dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn 'moved with a stiff gale'--their heads bowing 'all one way.' from the manufacture of books he borrows two metaphors, 'printing' and 'blotting,' and plies them with effective variety: philaster 'prints' wounds upon bellario; bellario 'printed' her 'thoughts in lawn'; amintor will 'print a thousand wounds' upon evadne's flesh; and nature wronged panthea 'to print continual conquest on her cheeks and make no man worthy for her to take.' with similar frequency recur 'blotted from earth,' 'blotted from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.' the younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently as fletcher, but in a more poetic way. he vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with figurative verbs--'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'i feel a grief shoot suddenly through all my veins' cries amintor; and again 'thine eyes shoot guilt into me.' 'i feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders arbaces. philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it springs'; amintor welcomes the hand that should 'cut' him from his sorrows; and evadne confesses that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of time can cut from man's remembrance.' similar metaphorical constructions abound, such as 'pluck me back from my entrance into mirth,' in one of leucippus' speeches in beaumont's part of _cupid's revenge_; and in a speech of melantius 'i did a deed that plucked five years from time' in _the maides tragedy_. personified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural with beaumont:--'nothing but a multitude of walking griefs.' it is a mistake to suppose, as some do, that passages written in beaumont's metrical style are not by him if they abound in personification. hunger, black despair, pride, wantonness, figure in his verse in _the woman-hater_; chance, death, and fortune in _the knight_; death, victory, and friendship, in _the maides tragedy_; destiny, falsehood, mortality, nature in _philaster_; and so on. no dramatist since the day of kyd and marlowe has more frequent or violent resort to hyperbole. his heroes call on 'seas to quench the fires' they 'feel,' and 'snows to quench their rising flames'; they will 'drink off seas' and 'yet have unquenched fires left' in their breasts; they 'wade through seas of sins'; they 'set hills on hills' and 'scale them all, and from the utmost top fall' on the necks of foes, 'like thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the underworld the worth' of those they love. 'from his iron den' they'll 'waken death, and hurl him' on lascivious kings. arethusa's heart is 'mines of adamant to all the world beside,' but to her lover 'a lasting mine of joy'; her breath 'sweet as arabian winds when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two liquid ivory balls.' evadne will sooner 'find out the beds of snakes,' and 'with her youthful blood warm their cold flesh 'than accede to amintor's desires. 'the least word' that panthea speaks 'is worth a life.' 'the child, this present hour brought forth to see the world, has not a soul more pure' than oriana's. in one of beaumont's verse-scenes of _the coxcombe_, ricardo, reinstated in his viola's esteem, would have some woman 'take an everlasting pen' into her hand, 'and grave in paper more lasting than the marble monuments' the matchless virtues of women to posterities. and as for bellario's worth to philaster,-- 't is not the treasure of all kings in one, the wealth of tagus, nor the rocks of pearl that pave the court of neptune, can weigh down that virtue. echoes not of kyd and marlowe only, but of shakespeare from _romeo_ to _hamlet_ and _macbeth_, reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of beaumont. beaumont has more ejaculations than fletcher, but fewer optatives. he is chary of rhetorical questions, and his exclamations run by preference into some figured hyperbole. he appeals less frequently than fletcher to 'all the gods,' but very often to 'the gods,' 'good gods,' 'ye gods,' 'some god.' he refers, in conformity with his deterministic view of life, with particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers that must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better powers,' 'heaven and the powers divine,' 'you heavenly powers,' the 'powers that rule us'; and all these he uses in attestation. an oath distinctive of him is 'by my vexed soul!' in his hyperboles, hell and devils play their part; but not in oath so frequently as with fletcher. . lines of inevitable poetry. similarly noticeable is beaumont's faculty for 'simple poetic phrasing.' the elevated passion, the sudden glory,--and the large utterance of brief sentence and single verse, have been remarked by critics from his contemporary, john earle, who wrote in commendation: such strength, such sweetness couched in every line, such life of fancy, such high choice of brain, down to g. c. macaulay, herford, and alden of the present day. no reader, even the most cursory, can fail to be impressed by the completeness of that one line (in his lament for elizabeth sidney), sorrow can make a verse without a muse,-- by the 'unassuming beauty' of viola's loneliness (in his subplot of _the coxcombe_), all things have cast me from 'em but the earth. the evening comes, and every little flower droops now as well as i;-- by the sublimity of those few words to the repentant lover, all the forgiveness i can make you is to love you;-- by the superb simplicity of bellario's scorn of life, in _philaster_, 't is but a piece of childhood thrown away, and the finality of her definition of death (which, as if in premonition of his too sudden fate, is characteristic of beaumont),-- 't is less than to be born; a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jealousy, a thing we all pursue; i know, besides, it is but giving over of a game that must be lost;-- by the pathetic irony of aspatia's farewell to love in _the maides tragedy_, so with my prayers i leave you, and must try some yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die; and the heroism (in _cupid's revenge_, the final scene, undoubtedly of beaumont's verse) of urania's confession to leucippus, i would not let you know till i was dying; for you could not love me, my mother was so naught; by panthea's cry of horror, in _a king and no king_, i feel a sin growing upon my blood; and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify the gloom of _the maides tragedy_: amintor's those have most power to hurt us, that we love; we lay our sleeping lives within their arms; and after evadne's death, my soul grows weary of her house, and i all over am a trouble to myself;-- by the wounded aspatia's i shall sure live, amintor, i am well; a kind of healthful joy wanders within me; and her parting whisper, give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down, and cannot find thee. this is nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned poetry of the human heartbreak. where other than in shakespeare do we find among the jacobean poets such verse? that a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm is not surprising. instances rare in wisdom and phrasal conciseness are to be encountered on every other page of beaumont. it may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical and poetic diction, that, while the vocabulary may not be more varied, it is more intimate, musical, and reverberant than fletcher's; that the periods, though sometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically broken, as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical and descriptive passages, both complex and balanced of structure,--pregnant of ideas labouring for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution, crowding of illustration and fresh insistent thought, in a degree utterly foreign to the rhetoric of fletcher; and that his brief sentences are marked by a direct and final resplendence and simplicity. in the larger movements of composition the purely poetic quality predominates over the narrative, dramatic or conversational. this characteristic is especially noticeable in declamatory speeches and soliloquies; sometimes idyllic as in philaster's description of bellario,--"i found him sitting by a fountain's side,"--or in the well-known "oh that i had been nourished in these woods with milk of goats and acorns"; often operatic, as in aspatia's farewells to amintor and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively surcharged. beaumont's figures of rhetoric when not hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his poetic tropes are creative, vitalizing. his speakers are self-revelatory: expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection. their utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely loitering, rather than, by way of dialogue, framed to further the action alone. and yet, when they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary, and abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation; not simply, as with fletcher, by giving opportunity for stage-business, but by differencing the motive that underlies the action. chapter xxii beaumont's mental habit from passages in the indubitable metrical manner and rhetorical style of beaumont we pass to a still further test by which to determine his share in doubtful passages--i mean his stock of ideas. critics have long been familiar with the determinism of his philosophy of life. his arethusa in _philaster_ expresses it in a nutshell: if destiny (to whom we dare not say, why didst thou this?) have not decreed it so, in lasting leaves (whose smallest characters was never altered yet), this match shall break.-- we are ignorant of the 'crosses of our births.' nature 'loves not to be questioned, why she did this or that, but has her ends, and knows she does well.' "but thou," cries the poet,-- but thou hadst, ere thou knew'st the use of tears, sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years. 'tis the gods, 'the gods, that make us so.' they would not have their 'dooms withstood, whose holy wisdoms make our passions the way unto their justice.' and 'out of justice we must challenge nothing.' the gods reward, the gods punish: 'i am a man and dare not quarrel with divinity ... and you shall see me bear my crosses like a man.' it is the 'will of heaven'; 'a decreed instant cuts off every life, for which to mourn is to repine.'[ ] similarly familiar is beaumont's recurrent doctrine of the divinity of kings. "in that sacred word," says his amintor of _the maides tragedy_,-- in that sacred word 'the king,' there lies a terror: what frail man dares lift his hand against it? let the gods speak to him when they please; till when let us suffer and wait. and again, to the monarch who has wronged him, there is divinity about you, that strikes dead my rising passions; as you are my king i fall before you, and present my sword to cut mine own flesh, if it be your will. of 'the breath of kings' beaumont's fancy constructs ever new terrors: it is 'like the breath of gods'; it may blow men 'about the world.' but when a king is guilty, though he may boast that his breath 'can still the winds, uncloud the sun, charm down the swelling floods, and stop the floods of heaven,' some honest man is always to be found to say 'no; nor' can thy 'breath smell sweet itself if once the lungs be but corrupted.' though the gods place kings 'above the rest, to be served, flattered, and adored,' kings may not 'article with the gods'-- on lustful kings unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent; but curs'd is he that is their instrument. of 'this most perfect creature, this image of his maker, well-squared man' beaumont philosophizes much. again and again he reminds us that 'the only difference betwixt man and beast is reason.' in the moment of guilty passion his arbaces of _a king and no king_ cries: "accursèd man! thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate, for thou hast all thy actions bounded in with curious rules, when every beast is free." and, in the moment of jealousy, philaster laments, oh, that, like beasts, we could not grieve ourselves with that we see not! beaumont knows of no natural felicity or liberty more to be envied than that of the beast; and of no opprobrium more vile than that which likens man to lustful beast, or 'worse than savage beast.' he is impressed with the frailty of mankind and the brevity of life: 'frail man' and 'transitory man' fell readily from his lips who was to die so young. he emphasizes the objective quality of evil: "good gods, tempt not a frail man!" prays philaster; and arbaces struggling against temptation: "what art thou, that dost creep into my breast; and dar'st not see my face?" once temptation has taken root, it grows insidiously: panthea "feels a sin growing upon her blood"; and arbaces moralizes there is a method in man's wickedness it grows up by degrees. it is natural, therefore, that beaumont should frequently fall back upon 'conscience' and its 'sensibility.' and upon the efficacy of repentance. so leucippus in beaumont's portion of _cupid's revenge_, prays the gods to hold him back,--"lest i add sins to sins, till no repentance will cure me." arbaces finds repentance. evadne knows that it is 'the best sacrifice.' from this consciousness of uneasy greatness and frail mortality the poet seeks refuge in descriptions of pastoral life. his pictures of idyllic beauty and simplicity are too well-known to warrant repetition here: bellario weaving garlands by the fountain's side; philaster's rhapsody in the woods; valerio's "come, pretty soul, we now are near our home" to viola in the _coxcombe_, and viola's "what true contented happiness dwells here, more than in cities!" the same conception marks as beaumont's the shrewdly humorous conversation in prose between the citizens' wives in _a king and no king_, beginning-- lord, how fine the fields be! what sweet living 'tis in the country!-- ay, poor souls, god help 'em, they live as contentedly as one of us. through the fourth act of _philaster_, and wherever else beaumont portrays the countryside or country men and women, there blows the fresh breeze of the charnwood forest in his native leicestershire. but his most poetic themes are of the friendship of man for man, and of the 'whiteness' of women's innocence, the unselfishness of their love, their forgivingness, and the reverence due from men who so little understand them. "and were you not my king," protests the blunt mardonius to his hasty lord, "i should have chose you out to love above the rest." "i have not one friend in the court but thou," says prince leucippus; and his devoted follower can only stammer "you know i love you but too well." in that fine summing up of melantius to amintor, one seems to hear beaumont himself: the name of friend is more than family or all the world besides. with woman's purity his darkest pages are starred. she is 'innocent as morning light,' 'more innocent than sleep,' 'as white as innocence herself.' 'armed with innocence' a tender spotless maid 'may walk safe among beasts.' her 'prayers are pure,' and she is 'fair and virtuous still to ages.'[ ] his fairest heroines are philosophers of 'the truth of maids and perjuries of men.' "all the men i meet are harsh and rude," says aspatia, and have a subtilty in everything which love could never know; but we fond women harbour the easiest and the smoothest thoughts, and think all shall go so. it is unjust that men and women should be match'd together. his viola of the _coxcombe_ continues the contention: woman, they say, was only made of man methinks 'tis strange they should be so unlike; it may be, all the best was cut away to make the woman, and the naught was left behind with him. and the philosophy of beaumont's love-lorn maidens she sums up in her conclusion: scholars affirm the world's upheld by love; but i believe women maintain all this, for there's no love in men. deserted by her lover, she finds 'how valiant and how 'fraid at once, love makes a virgin'; and, sought again by him repentant, she epitomizes the hearts of all bellarios, arethusas, pantheas, uranias: i will set no penance to gain the great forgiveness you desire, but to come hither, and take me and it ... for god's sake, urge your faults no more, but mend! all the forgiveness i can make you, is to love you: which i will do, and desire nothing but love again; which if i have not, yet i will love you still. all man can do in return for such long-suffering mercy is to revere: "how rude are all men that take the name of civil to ourselves" murmurs the reformed ricardo; and then-- i do kneel because it is an action very fit and reverent, in presence of so pure a creature. so kneels arbaces; and so, in spirit, philaster and amintor. prayer is for beaumont a very present aid. of his women especially the 'vows' and 'oblations' are a poetic incense continually ascending. and closely akin to the prayerful innocence of tender maids is the pathos of their 'childhood thrown away.' even his whimsical oriana of _the woman-hater_ can aver: the child this present hour brought forth to see the world has not a soul more pure, more white, more virgin that i have. the bitterest experiences of humanity are sprung from misapprehension,--"they have most power to hurt us that we love,"--or from jealousy, slander, unwarranted violence, unmerited pain. and for these the only solace is in death. about this truth beaumont weaves a shroud of unsullied beauty, a poetry that has rarely been surpassed. in nearly all that he has left us the thought recurs; but nowhere better expressed than in those lines, already quoted in full from _philaster_, where bellario "knows what 'tis to die ... a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jealousy." his arethusa repeats the theme; but with a wistful incertitude: i shall have peace in death yet tell me this: there will be no slanders, no jealousy in the other world; no ill there? "no," replies her unjustly suspicious lover.--and she:--"show me, then, the way!" no kinder mercy to the tempted, misconceived heir of mortality has been vouchsafed than to 'suffer him to find his quiet grave in peace.' so think panthea and arbaces; and so his urania and leucippus find. and so the poet closes that rare elegy to his belovèd countess of rutland: i will not hurt the peace which she should have, by longer looking in her quiet grave. but still more powerful in its blessing than 'sleep' and the 'peace' of the 'quiet grave,' and more fearful in its bane than the penalties of hell,--one reality persists--the award of 'after-ages.' bellario would not reveal what she has learned, to make her life 'last ages.' philaster's highest praise for arethusa is "thou art fair and virtuous still to ages." "kill me," says amintor to evadne,-- kill me; all true lovers, that shall live in after-ages crossed in their desires, shall bless thy memory. ricardo of the _coxcombe_ would have some woman 'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to posterities.' even the mock-romantic jasper in the _knight_ (which i am sure is all beaumont) will try his sweetheart's love 'that the world and memory may sing to after-times her constancy.' as to evil, it meets its punishment both in heredity and in the verdict of generations yet to come. "i see," soliloquizes the usurping king in a passage already quoted from _philaster_: you gods, i see that who unrighteously holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed in that which meaner men are blest withal: ages to come shall know no male of him left to inherit, and his name shall be blotted from earth; if he have any child it shall be crossly matched. "show me the way," cries arbaces to his supposed mother, and thinking of heredity, "to the inheritance i have by thee, which is a spacious world of impious acts." and amintor warns evadne: "let it not rise up for thy shame and mine to after-ages.... we will adopt us sons; the virtue shall inherit and not blood." "may all ages," prays the lascivious bacha in _cupid's revenge_, "may all ages,"-- that shall succeed curse you as i do! and if it be possible, i ask it, heaven, that your base issues may be ever monstrous, that must for shame of nature and succession, be drowned like dogs! so, _passim_, in beaumont--'lasting to ages in the memory of this damnèd act'; 'a great example of their justice to all ensuing ages.' footnotes: [ ] elegy on the countess of rutland. [ ] i cannot understand how so careful a scholar as professor schelling (_engl. lit. during lifetime of shakesp._, ) can attribute to him, from the hopelessly uncritical collection of blaiklock, the poem entitled _the indifferent_, and argue therefrom his "cynicism" concerning the constancy of woman. chapter xxiii the authorship of three disputed plays with the tests which have thus been described we are equipped for an examination of the plays written before , which have, in these latter days, been with some show of evidence regarded as the joint-production of the "two wits and friends."[ ] while attempting to separate the composition of one author from that of the other, we may determine the dramatic peculiarities of each during the course of the partnership, and obtain a fairly definite basis for an historical and literary appreciation of the plays, individually considered. .--of the _foure playes, or morall representations, in one_ (first published as by beaumont and fletcher in the folio of , but without indication of first performance or of acting company), the last two, _the triumph of death_ and _the triumph of time_, are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedly fletcher's and have been assigned to him by all critics. _the triumph of death_ is studded with alliterations and with repetitions of the effective word: oh i could curse and crucify myself for childish doting upon a face that feeds not with fresh figures every fresh hour; and with triplets: what new body and new face must i make me, with new manners; and with the resonant "all": make her all thy heaven, and all thy joy, for she is all thy happiness; and with fletcher's favourite words and his nouns in apposition, rhetorical questions, afterthoughts, verbal enumerations, and turgid exposition. the same may be said of _the triumph of time_. as there is less of the redundant epithet than in _the faithfull shepheardesse_ ( ), but more than in _philaster_ (before july , ), i am of the opinion that fletcher's contribution to the _triumphs_ falls chronologically between those plays. as fletcher matures he prunes his adjectives. the rest of these _morall representations_ display neither the verse nor the rhetoric of fletcher. on the basis of verse-tests boyle assigns them to beaumont. macaulay says, "probably,"--and adds the _induction_. but oliphant, taking into consideration also the rhetorical and dramatic qualities, gives the _induction_ and _the triumph of honour_ to a third author, nathaniel field, and only _the triumph of love_ to beaumont. as to the _induction_ and _the triumph of honour_ i agree with oliphant. they are full of polysyllabic latinisms such as field uses in his _woman is a weather-cocke_ (entered for publication november , ) and beaumont never uses: 'to participate affairs,' 'torturous engine,' etc.; and they are marked by simpler fieldian expressions 'wale,' 'gyv'd,' 'blown man,' 'miskill,' 'vane,' 'lubbers,' 'urned,' and a score of others not found anywhere in beaumont's undoubted writings. a few words, like 'basilisk' and 'loathed' suggest beaumont, as does the verse; but this may be explained by vogue or imitation. field was two or three years younger than beaumont, and had played as a boy actor in one or more of the early beaumont and fletcher productions. his _woman is a weather-cocke_ and his _amends for ladies_ indicate the influence of beaumont in matters of comic invention, poetic hyperbole, burlesque and pathos, as well as in metrical style. the _honour_ is a somewhat bombastic, puerile, magic-show written in manifest imitation of beaumont's verse and rhetoric. as to _the triumph of love_, i go further than oliphant. i assign at least half of it, viz., scenes , , and , on the basis of diction, to field. in scenes , , and , i find some trace of beaumont's favourite expressions, of his thoughts of destiny and death and woman's tenderness, his poetic spontaneity, his sensational dramatic surprises; but i think these are an echo. the rural scene lacks his exquisite simplicity; and some of the words are not of his vocabulary. one is sorry to strike from the list of beaumont's creations the pathetic and almost impressive figure of violante. if it was originally beaumont's, it is of his earlier work revamped by field; if it is field's, it is an echo simulating the voice, but missing the reality, of beaumont's aspatia, bellario, urania. this criticism holds true of both the triumphs, _love_ and _honour_. the commonly accepted date, , for the composition of the _foure playes in one_ is derived from fleay, who mistakenly quotes a reference in the quarto of _the yorkshire tragedy_ to the _foure playes_ as if it were of the quarto where the reference does not appear.[ ] while fletcher may have written the first draft of his contribution before the middle of , it is evident from field's address _to the reader_ in the first quarto of the _woman is a weather-cocke_ (entered s. r., november , ), that field's contribution was made after november , . in that address he makes it plain that this is his first dramatic effort: "i have been vexed with vile plays myself a great while, hearing many; now i thought to be even with some, and they should hear mine too." we have already noticed[ ] that field had not written even his _weather-cocke_, still less anything in collaboration with fletcher, at the time of the publication of _the faithfull shepheardesse_ (between january and july, ); for in his complimentary poem for the quarto of that "pastorall," field acknowledges his unknown name and his muse in swaddling clouts, and timidly confesses his ambition to write something like _the shepheardesse_, "including a morallitie, sweete and profitable." that field's contribution to the _foure playes_ was not made before the date of the first performance of _the weather-cocke_ by the revels' children at whitefriars, _i. e._, january , to christmas - (when its presentation before the king at whitehall probably took place), further appears from his dedication _to any woman that hath been no weather-cocke_ (quarto, ) in which he alludes not to _the triumph of honour_, or of _love_, but to _amends for ladies_, as his "next play," then on the stocks, and, he thought, soon to be printed.[ ] the evidence, external and internal, amply presented by oliphant, thorndike, and others, but with a view to conclusions different from mine as to date and authorship, confirms me in the belief that fletcher's _time_ and _death_, though written at least two years earlier, were not gathered up with field's _induction_, _honour_, and _love_, into the _foure playes in one_ until about ; and that the series was performed at whitefriars by field's company of the queen's revels' children, shortly after they had first acted _cupid's revenge_ at the same theatre. .--of the remaining ten plays in which, according to the historical evidence adduced by various critics, beaumont could have collaborated, at least two furnish no material that can be of service for the estimation of his qualities. if _love's cure_ was written as early as the date of certain references in the story, viz., - , it is so overlaid by later alteration that whether, as the textual experts guess, it be beaumont's revised by massinger, or fletcher's revised by massinger and others, or massinger and middleton's, or beaumont's with the assistance of fletcher and revised by massinger, beaumont for us is indeterminate. fleay, oliphant, and others trace him in a few prose scenes, and in two or three of verse.[ ] but where the rhetorical and dramatic manner occasionally suggest him, or the metre has somewhat of his stamp, words abound that i find in no work of his undisputed composition. the servant, lazarillo, like him of beaumont's _woman-hater_, is a glutton, but he does not speak beaumont's language. the scenes ascribed to beaumont reek with an excremental and sexual vulgarity to which beaumont never condescended, unless for brief space, and when absolutely necessary for characterization. and there is little, indeed, that bespeaks fletcher. _love's cure_ was first attributed to beaumont and fletcher at a "reviving of the play" after they were both dead; and it was not printed till . it is not unlikely, as g. c. macaulay holds, that the play was written by massinger, in or after . .--as to that comedy of prostitution, with occasional essays on the special charms of cuckoldry, _the captaine_ (acted in , maybe as early as , and by the king's company) there is no convincing external proof of beaumont's authorship. it is, on the contrary, assigned to fletcher by one of his younger contemporaries, hills, whose attributions of such authorship are frequently correct; and its accent throughout is more clearly that of fletcher than of any other dramatist. the critics are agreed that it is not wholly his, however; and g. c. macaulay in especial conjectures the presence of massinger. the verse and prose of a few scenes[ ] do not preclude the possibility of beaumont's coöperation; but i find in them no vestige of his faith in sweet innocence; and in only one,--the awful episode (iv, ), in which the father seeks his wanton daughter in a house of shame and would kill her,--his imaginative elevation or his dramatic creativity. footnotes: [ ] to employ in this process of separation the characteristics of fletcher's later dramatic technique as a criterion does not appear to me permissible. for these, however, the reader may consult miss hatcher's _john fletcher, a study on dramatic method_, and sections and of my essay on _the fellows and followers of shakespeare_, part two, _rep. eng. com._, vol. iii, now in press. the technique is more likely to change than the versification, the style, the mental habit. its later characteristics may, some of them, have been derived from the association with beaumont; or they may be of fletcher's maturer development under different influences and conditions. it is fair to cite them as corroborative evidence in the process of separation, only when they are in continuance of fletcher's earlier idiosyncrasy. i have, also, refrained from complicating the present discussion by analysis of the style of massinger, for which see fleay, _n. s. s. trans._, , _shakesp. manual_, , _engl. studien_, - , and _chron. eng. dram._, ; boyle, _engl. studien_, - , and _n. s. s. trans._, ; macaulay, _francis beaumont_, ; oliphant, _engl. studien_, - ; thorndike, _infl. of b. and f._, ; and section of my essay mentioned above. there is no proof of massinger's dramatic activity before july , nor of his coöperation with fletcher until after that date, _i. e._, after beaumont's virtual cessation. he may have revised some of beaumont's lines and scenes; but beaumont's style is too well defined to be confused with that of massinger or of any other reviser; or of an imitator, such as field. [ ] see thorndike, _infl. of b. and f._, p. , for discussion and authorities. [ ] chapter vi. [ ] it was not printed till ; but had been acted long before. [ ] ii, , ; iii, , , ; v, . [ ] iv, ; v, , , . chapter xxiv "the woman-hater," and "the knight" four.--_the woman-hater_ was entered in the stationers' registers, may , , and published in quarto (twice, with but slight variation) the same year "as lately acted by the children of paules." of the date of composition, probably the spring of , i have written in chapter vi, above. there is no indication of authorship in either quarto; but the prologue assigns it to a single author--"he that made this play." the quarto of prints it as "by j. fletcher gent."; that of , as by beaumont and fletcher. the prologue of , however, written by d'avenant for an undated revival of the play and addressed to the ladies, definitely ascribes the authorship to one "poet," who "to the stars your sex did raise; for which, full twenty years he wore the bays." the "twenty years" can apply only to fletcher. in the lines which follow, d'avenant has been supposed to credit the same author with the whole of _the maides tragedy_, _philaster_, and _a king and no king_ as well: 't was he reduc'd evadne from her scorn, and taught the sad aspatia how to mourn; gave arethusa's love a glad relief; and made panthea elegant in grief. we now know, from the application of metrical and rhetorical tests, that but a small part of each of the plays here alluded to was written by fletcher. if d'avenant has attributed to fletcher in these cases plays of which the larger part was written by beaumont, he was but consistent in error when he ascribed to fletcher _the woman-hater_, in which there is very little that betrays resemblance to fletcher's style. if, on the other hand, d'avenant in the verses quoted above intended to attribute to fletcher merely individual scenes of _the maides tragedy_, etc., he must have had a knowledge of the respective authorship of the dramatists hardly to be reconciled with the palpable mistake of assigning _the woman-hater_ to fletcher. for, by an odd coincidence, he has indicated in the first and second verses two[ ] of the five scenes of _the maides tragedy_, and in the third, two[ ] of the five scenes of _philaster_ which our modern criticism has proved to be fletcher's. the reference in the fourth line is more vague; but it has the merit of indicating the only scene of _a king and no king_[ ] in which, according to our critical tests, fletcher has contributed to the characterization of panthea. with regard to _the woman-hater_, it would appear that d'avenant was carelessly following the mistaken ascription of authorship on the title-page of the quarto of . fleay, boyle, macaulay, and ward, with but slight hesitation, pronounce _the woman-hater_ to be an independent production of beaumont, written while he was under the influence of ben jonson; but as i shall presently show, fletcher has revised a few scenes. oliphant feels inclined to join the critics mentioned above, but cannot blind himself "to the presence of fletcher in a couple of scenes." one of these is iii, .[ ] in the quartos this scene is divided into two. by the _ye_ test the first half-scene, running to _enter duke, etc._, in which oriana tempts gondarino, would be fletcher's ( _ye's_ to _you's_); but the percentage of double endings is too low, and that of run-on lines too high for him. i think that he is revising beaumont's original sketch. the second half-scene and the rest of the act are, by the _ye_ test and all other criteria, beaumont's. the metrical style of the act as a whole is beaumont's; so also the enclitic 'do's' and 'did's,' the beaumontesque 'basilisk,' 'dissemble,' the mock-heroic prayers, and mock-legal nicety of enumeration, the racy ironic prose, and the burlesque shakespearian echoes--"that pleasing piece of frailty that we call woman," etc. the other passage doubtfully assigned to fletcher, by oliphant--forty lines following _enter ladies_ in v, (dyce)--more closely resembles his manner of verse, but is not markedly of his rhetorical stamp. but by the _ye_ test ( _ye's_ to _you's_) the whole of that scene, opening _enter arigo and oriana_ is fletcher's, or fletcher's revision of beaumont. so, also, by the _ye_ test is another scene not before ascribed to fletcher, iv, ( _ye's_ to _you's_), as far as _enter oriana and her waiting-woman_. in this and the other _ye_ scenes, the _ye_ frequently occurs in the objective,--which is absolute fletcher. the rest of this scene, constituting two in the quartos, is pure beaumont.--the play is, so far as we can determine, beaumont's earliest attempt at dramatic production. fletcher touched it up, and his revision shows in the scenes mentioned above; that is to say, in about sixteen out of the seventy pages as printed in the _cambridge english classics_. the manifestly exaggerated torments of gondarino "who will be a scourge to all females in his life," the amorous affectation of oriana, the "stratagems and ambuscadoes" of the hungry courtier in his pursuit of "the chaste virgin-head" of a fish, the zealous stupidity of the intelligencers are, as we have already noted, of the humours school; and the work is that of a beginner. but the "humours" are flavoured with beaumont's humanity; the mirth is his, genuine and rollicking. the satire is concrete; and the play as a whole, a promising precursor of the purple-flowered prickly pear, next to be considered,--also undoubtedly beaumont's. .--evidence, both external and internal, points to the production of _the knight of the burning pestle_ between july , and some time in march . since the first quarto ( ) is anonymous, our earliest indication of authorship is that of the title-pages of the second and third ( ), which ascribe the play to beaumont and fletcher; and our next, the cockpit list of where it is included in a sequence of five plays in which one or both had a hand. the dedication of the first quarto speaks in one place of the "parents" of the play, and in others of its "father"; and the address prefixed to the second quarto speaks of the "author." critics when relying upon verse-tests think that they trace the hand of fletcher in several scenes.[ ] but in those scenes, even when the double-endings might indicate fletcher, the frequency of rhymes, masculine and feminine, is altogether above his usage; the number of end-stopped lines is ordinarily below it; and the diction, save in one or two brief passages,[ ] is his neither in vocabulary nor rhetorical device. the verse is singularly free from alliteration; and the prose, in which over a third of the play is written, displays that characteristic of fletcher in only one speech,[ ] and, there, with ludicrous intent. though, on the other hand, the verse is in many respects different from that which beaumont employed in his more stereotyped drama, it displays in several passages his acknowledged peculiarity in conjunction with a diction and manner of thought undoubtedly his. the prose is generally of a piece with that of his other comic writing, as in _the woman-hater_ more especially; and the scenes of low life and the conversation are coloured by his rhetoric as we know them in _philaster_, _a king and no king_, and _the coxcombe_. of the portrayal of humours, mock-heroic and burlesque, the same statements hold true. the verse of jasper's soliloquy:[ ] now, fortune, if thou beest not onely ill, shew me thy better face, and bring about my desperate wheele, that i may clime at length and stand,-- is in the usual manner of beaumont. luce's lament, beginning:[ ] thou that art the end of all, and the sweete rest of all come, come, ô, death! bring me to thy peace, and blot out all the memory i nourish both of my father and my cruell friend,-- and ending: how happy had i bene, if, being borne, my grave had bene my cradle! has both the diction and the point of view of beaumont; and its verse has not more of the double-endings than he sometimes uses. the subject and the mock-heroic purpose do not call for his usual dramatic vocabulary: but we recognize his 'dissemble,' his 'carduus' and 'phlebotomy' (compare _philaster_), his 'eyes shoot me through,' his 'do's.' we recognize him in the frequent appeals to chance and fortune, in the sensational determination of jasper to test luce's devotion at the point of the sword, and in the series of sensational complications and dénouements which conclude the romantic plot. in short, i agree with the critics[ ] who attribute the play, wholly or chiefly, to beaumont. fletcher may have inserted a few verses here and there; but there is nothing in sentiment, phrase, or artifice, to prove that he did. the diversity of metrical forms is but an evidence of the ingenuity of beaumont. he has used blank verse with frequent double-endings to distinguish the romantic characters and plot: as in the scenes between venturewell and jasper, jasper and luce. he has used the heroic couplet with rhymes, single and double, to distinguish the mock-romantic of venturewell and humphrey, humphrey and luce. for the mock-heroic of ralph he has used the swelling ten-syllabled blank verse of marlowe and kyd, or the prose of _amadis_ and _palmerin_; for his burlesque of the maylord he has used the senarii of the antiquated interlude. for the conversation of the merrythoughts and of the citizen-critics he has used plain prose; and for the tuneful ecstasies of merrythought senior, a sheaf of ballads. this consideration alone,--that the metrical and prose forms are chosen with a view to the various purposes of the play,--should convince the reader of the vanity of assigning to fletcher verse which evidently had its origin not in any of his proclivities, but in the temper of beaumont's venturewell, jasper, and luce. _the knight of the burning pestle_ was written and first acted between june , and april , . the upper limit is fixed, as boyle has indicated,[ ] by the mention, in act iv, , , of an incident in _the travails of three english brothers_, "let the sophy of persia come and christen him a childe," concerning which the 'boy' remarks, i, - , "that will not do so well; 'tis stale; it has been had before at the red bull." the red bull, clerkenwell, had been occupied by queen anne's men (whose plays beaumont is especially ridiculing), since .[ ] _the travails_ was written hurriedly by day, rowley, and wilkins after the appearance, june , , of a tract by nixon, on the adventures of the three shirleys, and was performed june , by the queen's men.[ ] _the travails_ dealt with a matter of ephemeral interest, and would not long have held the public. it is, therefore, likely that the allusion to it in _the knight of the burning pestle_ was written shortly after june . since the play, according to its first publisher, took eight days to write, we cannot assign any date earlier than, say, july , , for its first performance. the lower limit is determined by the certainty that _the knight_ was played by the queen's revels' children at blackfriars; and that they ceased to act there as an independent company some time in march . the play belonged in to beeston's boys, who had it with four others of beaumont and fletcher from queen henrietta's men. none of these five plays had ever been played by the king's company; it is likely that they had come to the queen henrietta's from the lady elizabeth's men with whom the queen's revels' children had been amalgamated in .[ ] one of these plays, _cupid's revenge_, had certainly come down from the queen's revels' boys in that way. that the original performance was by a company of children appears from numerous passages in the text; and the only other children's company available for consideration between and , when the manuscript fell into the publisher's hands, is that of the paul's boys. that the paul's boys were not the company performing is shown, however, by a passage in the _induction_, where the citizen-critic, interrupting the prologue of the "good-man boy," says: "this seven yeares [that] there hath beene playes at this house, i have observed it, you have still girds at citizens." now, at no date between the summer of and could it have been said of the children of paul's that they had been acting seven years continuously at any one "house." the career of the paul's boys as actors at their cathedral school had ended in the summer of , when robert keysar, rossiter, and others interested in the rival company of the queen's revels' children had subsidized edward pierce, the manager of the paul's boys, to cease plays at st. paul's.[ ] if between that date and they acted, it was elsewhere, at whitefriars perhaps, and temporarily (not after ), and as the i king's revels' children.[ ] the citizen-critic, therefore, if speaking after the summer of , could not have referred to paul's boys. if speaking of paul's boys between and , the only "house" that he can have had in mind would be their school of st. paul's cathedral; and to say that there had been plays there for _seven_ years would have been utterly pointless, for the paul's boys had been acting in their school, or in its courtyard, for twenty, one might say fifty years, more or less continuously. fleay conjectures wildly that they had occupied whitefriars between and , but that does not explain the "seven yeares at this house"; to say nothing of the fact that such occupancy is unproved. an old whitefriars inn-yard playhouse had been "pulled down" in - . no other whitefriars theatre existed till , when a new whitefriars "was occupied by six equal sharers with original title from lord buckhurst."[ ] the company was not that of st. paul's; and the "house" was not a school-house, but a regularly constituted theatre. now, the only theatre, public or private, that, at any rate between and , had been occupied by a boys' company for "this seven yeares" was blackfriars; and of blackfriars the statement could be made only at a date preceding january , , and with reference to the queen's revels' children. on that date, as reorganized under rossiter, keysar, and others, they received a patent authorizing them to open at whitefriars, "or in any other convenient place." for about a month before, they had filled an engagement at blackfriars, the lease of which had reverted on august , to burbadge and shakespeare's company of the king's players. they had ceased playing at blackfriars as an independent company in march ; the theatre had been tenantless after that for six months and then had been closed until december , , because of the prevalence of the plague. the citizen's complaint that the boys have been girding at citizens "this seven yeares there hath been playes at this house" would lose all cogency if spoken of the queen's revels' children when they were acting during the month following december , , both because plays had been then intermitted for the twenty months preceding, and because in it was not seven but twelve years since the boys had begun their occupancy of "this house." it could not apply to the seven years between , when they first occupied blackfriars, and , because _the knight of the burning pestle_ was not written till after the _travails of three english brothers_ appeared, june , . but it does apply, with all requisite dramatic and chronological accuracy, to the seven years preceding the last date,--or the date in march , when, because of their scandalous representation of the king of france and his mistress in chapman's _tragedie of charles, duke of byron_, and because of plays caricaturing and vilifying king james, the queen's revels' children were prohibited from playing, their principal actors thrown into prison, and blackfriars suppressed. on september , , richard burbadge had let blackfriars on a twenty-one-year lease to henry evans, the manager of the queen's revels' children, and under the organization of that date they had by - been giving plays exactly "this seven yeares at this house." we are, as i have said, informed by the publisher of _the knight_ that the play was written in eight days. it might have been staged in two or three. if the plague regulations were enforced during - , as i have no doubt they were, _the knight_ was acted between july and , , or between december , and the biron day in march . the internal evidence is all confirmatory of this period of composition. the queen anne's men of the "red bull" mentioned in the play obtained their title to the red bull from aaron holland about . the songs in the play were common property between and ; none of the romances ridiculed is of a later date than ; and of the eight plays mentioned or alluded to, all had been acted before june but _the travails_; and that was played for the first time june of that year. the allusions to external history such as that in act iv, ii, , to the prince of moldavia--who left london in november --and the humorous jibe at the pretty paul's boys of mr. mulcaster, who ceased teaching them in , are all for - .[ ] fleay marshals an applausive gallery of conjectures for his conjecture of , but none of them appears to me to have any substance; and in view of what has been said, and of what will follow, i may dispense with their consideration. the history of the manuscript is, as has not been noted before, also confirmatory of the - date. the robert keysar who rescued the play from "perpetuall oblivion" after its failure upon the stage (as burre says in the dedication of the first quarto) and who "afterwards" (in - ) turned it over, "yet an infant" (_i. e._ unpublished) and "somewhat ragged," to burre for publication, is the same "mr. keysar" who in february , with "mr. kendall," also of the blackfriars' management, had been paid for "apparrell" furnished for a performance given by the children of westminster school.[ ] he at no period had any connection with the paul's boys. he was, as professor wallace informs us, a london goldsmith who "about this time ( - ) acquired an interest in the shifting fortunes of blackfriars, and became the financial backer of the queen's revels' children. he had cause to dislike king james for oppression in wresting money from the goldsmiths."[ ] hence probably the attacks of the queen's revels' children upon the king, which helped to bring about their suppression at blackfriars in . keysar would inevitably know all about the plays performed by his children, _the knight of the burning pestle_ among the rest, during the last year of their occupancy of blackfriars. and since, according to burre, he appreciated the merits of _the knight_ it was but natural that he, and not some person unconnected with the company, should have preserved the manuscript,--perhaps with a view to having the children try the play again after they should re-open at whitefriars. with rossiter, soon after march , he was making preparations for such a reorganization. when finally they did re-open at their new theatre, in january , they evidently did not take up the play. somewhat later, say , keysar sent the manuscript to burre for publication. burre "fostred it privately in his bosome these two yeares" and brought it out in . the conclusion of burre's dedicatory address to keysar in the first quarto, of , has unnecessarily complicated both the question of the date of composition and that of the source of _the knight of the burning pestle_. "perhaps," says he, "it [_the knight_] will be thought to bee of the race of don quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his elder above a yeare; and therefore may (by vertue of his birth-right) challenge the wall of him. i doubt not but they will meet in their adventures, and i hope the breaking of one staffe will make them friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travell through the world to seeke their adventures." this denial of indebtedness to cervantes has been generally taken to refer to shelton's english translation of don quixote, entered s. r. january , - , and printed ; and it has, therefore, been supposed by many that _the knight_ was written and first acted in or . but if burre was dating _the knight_ as of or , he was ignorant of the fact, as established above, that the play was the elder of shelton's printed _don quixote_, not merely "above a yeare," but above four years. there are only two other constructions to be placed upon burre's statement: either that the play was the elder above a year of the first part of _don quixote_, issued in the spanish by cervantes in ,[ ] or that it was the elder above a year of shelton's translation as circulated among his friends in manuscript, at any rate as early as . if burre was dating the play, according to the former interpretation, as of , he was ignorant of the fact that it could not have been written till after the appearance of _the travails of three english brothers_, june , . the latter interpretation would, if we could adopt it as his understanding of the matter, not only comport with the date of the production of _the knight_ in - , but also, somewhat roughly, with his own statement that he had had the manuscript already in a battered condition in his "bosome" since or . if burre, who was not a litterateur, did not know that shelton's translation of _don quixote_ had been going the rounds for years before it was printed in , everybody else did. shelton had announced as much in his _epistle dedicatorie_ to theophilus, lord howard of walden, prefixed to the first quarto of . he translated the book, as he says, "some five or six yeares agoe"--that would be in , for he used the brussels reprint of that year as his text,--"out of the spanish tongue into the english in the space of forty daies: being thereunto more than half enforced through the importunitie of a very deere friende, that was desirous to understand the subject. after i had given him once a view thereof, i cast it aside, where it lay long time neglected in a corner, and so little regarded by me as i never once set hand to review or correct the same. since when, at the entreatie of others my friends, i was content to let it come to light, conditionally that some one or other would peruse and amend the errours escaped"--because he had not time to revise it himself. in other words, shelton had shown the manuscript translation of _don quixote_ to but one friend in ; and it was not till "long time" had elapsed that he began to circulate it among his other friends on condition that they should correct its errors. the date of circulation was, probably, about , for in that year we have our earliest mention of the reading of _don quixote_ by an englishman,--by a dramatic character, to be sure, but a character created by ben jonson. in his _epicoene_, acted in , and written the year preceding, that dramatist makes truewit advise the young sir dauphine to cease living in his chamber "a month together upon _amadis de gaule_, or _don quixote_, as you are wont." there is no ascription of spanish to dauphine, who is a typical london gallant. he would read _amadis_ in the french, or the english translation; and the only translation of _don quixote_ accessible to him in would be shelton's manuscript of part one.[ ] jonson may himself have been one of the friends to whom shelton submitted the translation. there is no reason to believe that jonson had read cervantes in the original; for, as professor rudolph schevill has conclusively demonstrated,[ ] his knowledge of spanish was extremely limited. "the spanish phrases pronounced by the improvised 'hidalgo' in the _alchemist_ (of ) prove nothing." they were caught, as professor schevill says, from the london vogue or may have been supplied by some spanish acquaintance. indeed, one may even doubt whether if he read shelton's manuscript jonson did so with any care, for not only in _the alchemist_ but elsewhere he uniformly couples don quixote as if a character of chivalric romance with amadis, of whom and his congeners don quixote is a burlesque. as to burre, however, i do not think that he had been informed by keysar of the exact provenience of the manuscript of _the knight_, or of the date of first acting. i incline to believe that he had the _epistle dedicatorie_ of the newly printed shelton before him when, in , he wrote his dedication of _the knight_ to robert keysar; for he runs the figure of the book as a "child" and of its "father" and "step-father" through his screed as shelton had run it in ; and he hits upon a similar diction of "bosome" and "oblivion." but, though he may have been gratuitously challenging the wall of shelton's newly printed _don quixote_ in favour of _the knight_ as in existence by or , the only interpretation of his "elder above a yeare" that would fit the fact is afforded by the composition of the play, as already demonstrated, in - , more than a year before shelton began to circulate his manuscript. in spite of burre's assertion of the priority of _the knight of the burning pestle_, nearly every editor or historian who has touched upon _the knight_ informs us that it is "undoubtedly derived from _don quixote_." if (as i am sure was not the case) the play was written after , beaumont, or beaumont and fletcher, could have derived suggestions for it from shelton's manuscript, first circulated in . that beaumont, at any rate, was acquainted with the spanish hero by , appears from his familiarity with the _epicoene_ in which as we have observed, don quixote is mentioned; for he wrote commendatory verses for the quarto of that play, entered s. r. september of that year. if, on the other hand, _the knight_, as i hold, was written in or , the author or authors, provided they read spanish, could have derived suggestions from cervantes' original of ; or if they did not read spanish, from hearsay. the latter source of information would be the more likely, for although sixteen of the ignorantly so-called "beaumont and fletcher" plays have been traced to plots in spanish originals, there is not one of those plots which either of the poets might not have derived from english or french translation; and in none of the sixteen plays is there any evidence that either of the dramatists had a reading knowledge of spanish.[ ] as to the possibility of information by hearsay, other dramatists allude to _don quixote_ as early as - ;[ ] and, indeed, it would be virtually impossible that any literary londoner could have escaped the oral tradition of so popular and impressive a masterpiece two years after its publication. all this supposition of derivation from _don quixote_ is, however, so far as verbal indebtedness goes, or indebtedness for _motifs_, episodes, incidents and their sequence, characters, machinery, dramatic construction, manners, sentiments, and methods of satire, a phantom caught out of the clear sky. so far as the satire upon the contemporary literature of chivalry is concerned, when the ridicule is not of english stuff unknown to cervantes it is of spanish material translated into english and already satirized by englishmen before cervantes wrote his _don quixote_. an examination of _the knight_ and of the _don_ in any version, and of contemporary english literature, reveals incontestibly not only that the material satirized, the phrases and ideas, come from works in english, but that even the method of the satire is derived from that of preceding english dramatic burlesque rather than from that of cervantes. the title of the play was suggested by _the knight of the burning sword_, an english translation, current long before , of the spanish _amadis of greece, prince and knight of the burning sword_. ten full years before falstaff had dubbed his red-nosed bardolph "knight of the burning lamp." the farcical, but eminently sane, grocer's apprentice, turned knight for fun, grows out of heywood's _foure prentises_, and day and wilkins's _travails_, and the english _palmerins_, etc. he has absolutely nothing in common with the glorious but pathetically unbalanced _don_ of cervantes. nor is there any resemblance between ralph's palmerin-born squire and dwarf--and that embodiment of commonsense, sancho panza.[ ] the specific conception of _the knight of the burning pestle_, a satire upon the craze of london tradesmen for romances of chivalry, for "bunches of ballads and songs, all ancient," for the bombast and sensationalism of kyd's _spanish tragedy_, marlowe's _true tragedy of richard, duke of york_, even of shakespeare's hotspur, and of dramas of bourgeois knight-errantry,--a burlesque of the civic domestic virtues and military prowess of prentices and shop-keepers,--is much more applicable to the conditions and aspirations of contemporary bow-bells and the affectations of the contemporary stage than to those which begot and nourished the madness of the knight of la mancha. beaumont may have received from the success of the _don quixote_ of some impulse provocative to the writing of _the knight_, but a dramatic satire, such as _the knight_, might have occurred to him if _don quixote_ had never been written; just as that other dramatic satire upon the dramas of folk-lore romance, _the old wives tale_, had occurred to peele some fifteen years before _don quixote_ appeared; and as it had occurred to the author of _thersites_ to ridicule, upon the stage, greek tales of heroism and british worthies of knighthood and the greenwood still fifty-five years earlier. the puritan and the ritualist, the country justice and the squire, the schoolmaster and the scribbling pedant, the purveyor of marvels of forest and marsh, the knight-adventurer of ancient lore or of modern creation, the damsel distressed or enamoured of visionary castles, had, one and all, awakened laughter upon the tudor stage. the leisure wasted, and the emotion misspent, over the _morte d'arthur_ and the histories of huon of bordeaux, guy of warwick, bevis of hamptoun, or of robin hood and clim of the clough, had been deplored by many an anxious educator and essayist of the day. why was it not time and the fit occasion, in a period when city grocers and their wives would tolerate no kind of play but such as revamped the more modern tales of chivalry, or tricked tradesmen out in the factitious glory of quite recent heroes of romance,--why was it not time for an attack upon the vogue of anthony munday's translations of the now offending cycles, _amadis of gaul_, _palmerin de oliva_, _palmerin of england_, and upon the vogue of the english versions of _the mirror of knighthood_ with its culminating bathos of the _knight of the sunne and his brother rosicleer_? these had, in various instalments, befuddled the popular mind for thirty years. ben jonson already, in his _every man out of his humour_ ( ), had satirized the common affectation under the similitude of a country knight, puntarvolo, who, if not crazed, was at any rate "wholly consecrated to singularity" by reason of undue absorption of romances of chivalry, a singularity of "fashion, phrase, and gesture" of the anthony munday type and the type glassed in the _mirror of knighthood_. sir puntarvolo, who "sits a great horse" and "courts his own lady, as she were a stranger never encountered before,"--who feigns that his own house is a castle, who summons with trumpet-blast the waiting-woman to the window, and, saluting her "after some little flexure of the knee," asks for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties" of the "lady" may shine on this side of the building,--who "planet struck" by the "heavenly pulchritude" of his long-suffering and much bewildered poor old wife, conveys to her the information that he is a poor knight-errant pursuing through the forest a hart "escaped by enchantment," and that, wearied, he and his servant make "suit to enter" her fair abode,--sir puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fantastic homage, what is he but a predecessor of don quixote and ralph alike, fashioned out of the materials of decadent chivalric fiction common to both? in , robert anton had burlesqued in prose and rhyme the romantic ballads of the day in his ludicrous _heroical adventures of the knight of the sea_, where "the queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into a knight-errant to do her business in the world."[ ] and in , also before the appearance of cervantes' burlesque, chapman, with the collaboration of jonson and marston, had, in _eastward hoe_, satirized that other kind of knight, him of the city and by purchase, in the character of sir petronel flash; and, with him, the aspirations of romance-fed merchants' daughters who would wed knights and dwell in country-castles wrested from giants. nor had these authors failed to specify the sources of delusion, the _mirror of knighthood_, the _palmerin of england_, etc. that both beaumont and fletcher were alive, without prompting from cervantes, to the mania of chivalric emulation which obsessed the train-bands of london is attested by the bombastic talk of "rosicleer" which fletcher puts into the mouth of the city captain in _philaster_, a play that was written about two years later than _the knight_, in or . there had been musters of the city companies at mile end as early as , and again under elizabeth in , and , and , when as many as , citizens were trained there. but the muster in which ralph had been chosen "citty captaine" was evidently that of , a general muster under james i. why, then, should we suppose that it was beyond the genius of a beaumont to conceive, as peele, jonson, chapman, marston, and others had conceived, a drama which should burlesque the devotees of such romances as were the fad of the day? and to conceive it without the remotest suggestion from _don quixote_? whether beaumont read spanish or not, and there is no proof that he did read it; whether he had heard of _don quixote_ or not, and there is little doubt that he had, there is nothing in _the knight of the burning pestle_ that in any way presupposes either verbal acquaintance with, or constructive dependence upon, the burlesque of cervantes.[ ] in short, professor schevill, in the article cited above, and following him dr. murch, in an admirable introduction to his edition of _the knight_, have shown that beaumont's conception of the hero, ralph, not only is not of a piece with, but is fundamentally different from, cervantes' conception of don quixote; and they have demonstrated with a minuteness of chapter and verse that need not be recapitulated here that the motives, machinery and characters, ideas and phrases are, in so far as they have relation to romances of chivalry, drawn out of, or suggested by, the english translations already enumerated. this demonstration applies to the adoption of the squire, the rescue of mrs. merrythought, the incident of the casket, the liberation of the barber's patients, the mock-heroic love-affair, as well as to the often adduced barber's basin and the scene of the inn. of the situations, there is none that is not a logical issue of the local conditions or the presuppositions of an original plot; whereas there are, on the other hand, numerous situations in _don quixote_, capable of dramatic treatment, that the elizabethan playwright of - could hardly have refrained from annexing if he had used that story as a source. the setting or background of _the knight_, as professor schevill has said, in no way recalls that of the _don_, "and it is difficult to see how any inspiration got from cervantes should have failed to include at least a slight shadow of something which implies an acquaintance with rocinante and sancho panza." beaumont, in addition, not only satirizes, as i have said, the chivalric and bourgeois dramas of heywood, _if you know not me, you know nobody_, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel like _mucedorus_ and the _travails_, and parodies with rare humour the rant of senecan tragedy; he not only ridicules the military ardour and pomp of the london citizens, and pokes fun at their unsophisticated assumption of dramatic insight and critical instinct,--with all this satire of the main plot and of the spectator-gods in the machinery, he has combined a romantic plot of common life--jasper, luce, and humphrey,--and a comic plot of humours in which jasper's father, mother, and brother live as merrythoughts should. he has produced a whole that in drama was an innovation and in burlesque a triumph. _the knight_ was still an acting play in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. during the past thirteen years it has been acted by academic amateurs five times in america. footnotes: [ ] iv, ; and ii, . [ ] v, , . [ ] iv, . [ ] between _oriana sits down_ and _exit oriana_, as in dyce, vol. i, pp. - . [ ] i, ; i, ; ii, ; ii, ; iii, ; iv, . [ ] _e. g._, the "lets" and the "alls" of iv, , - , as numbered in alden's edition. the play is devoid of fletcherian jolts. [ ] v, , , _et seq._ [ ] ii, , . [ ] iv, , . [ ] macaulay, oliphant, bullen, and alden. [ ] _engl. studien_, ix. [ ] wallace, _shakspere's money interest in the globe, cent. maga._, aug., , p. . [ ] fleay, _chr. eng. dr._, ii, . [ ] fleay, _h. s._, p. . [ ] wallace, _shakspere and the blackfriars, century maga._, sept., , p. . [ ] murray, _eng. dram. comp._, i, , who cites nichols, _progresses_, iv, ; but whitefriars had been destined by keysar and others for the queen's revels' children since . [ ] rawlidge, _a monster lately found out_, etc., , as quoted by fleay, _h. s._, ; wallace, _cent. maga._, aug., ; and thorndike, _infl. of b. and f._, p. . [ ] see the impressive array of evidence, internal and external, presented by thorndike, _infl. of b. and f._, pp. - ; and by alden, _k. b. p._, pp. - (belles lettres series). [ ] accounts in _athenaeum_, , , . [ ] wallace, _cent. maga._, _sept._ , p. . see also greenstreet papers in fleay, _h. st._, . [ ] for this argument see _engl. studien_, xii, . [ ] baudouin's french version of is merely of the episodic narrative of _the curious impertinent_. [ ] _on the influence of spanish literature upon english_ (_romanische forschungen_, xx, - , _et seq._). [ ] of this i am assured by my colleague, professor rudolph schevill, who has made a special study of the plays and their sources, and has published some of his conclusions in the article in _romanische forschungen_, already cited; others, communicated by him to dr. h. s. murch, appear in _yale studies in english_, xxxiii, _the k. b. p._, introduction. dr. a. s. w. rosenbach's unpublished conclusions, as cited by miss hatcher, _john fletcher_, etc., , p. , are to the same effect. [ ] wilkins, _miseries of enforced marriage_, iii; middleton, _your five gallants_, iv, ; cited by schevill, _ut supra_. [ ] see schevill, _u. s._ [ ] h. v. routh, in _c. h. l._, iv, . [ ] the lines, who like don quixote do advance against a windmill our vaine lance, occur in a copy of verses _to the mutable faire_ included among _the poems of francis beaumont_ in the edition of . but the volume includes numerous poems not written by beaumont, and is one of the most uncritical collections that ever was printed. this poem is by waller. chapter xxv the five central plays six.--_the coxcombe_ was first printed in the folio of . our earliest record of its acting is of a performance at court by the children of the queen's revels in .[ ] the day was between october and . a list of the principal actors, all queen's children, preserved in the folio of , indicates, however, that this was not the first performance; for three of the actors listed had left that company by august , ; one of them (joseph taylor) perhaps before march , . the list was evidently contemporary with the first performance. the absolute upper limit of the composition was , for one of the characters speaks of the taking of ostend. if the play, as we are dogmatically informed by a credulous sequence of critics who take statements at second-hand, principally from german doctors' theses, were derived from cervantes' story, _el curioso impertinente_, which appeared in the first part of _don quixote_, printed , or (since we have no evidence that our dramatists read spanish), from baudouin's french translation which was licensed april , [ ] and may have reached england about june,--we might have a definite earlier limit of later date. but there is no resemblance between the _motif_ of cervantes' story, in which a husband out of curiosity and an impudent desire to heighten the treasure of his love would try his wife's fidelity, and that of beaumont and fletcher's play, where there is no question of a trial of honour. in beaumont and fletcher, we have a revelation of lust at first sight on the part of the husband's friend, mercury, of unnatural friendly pandering on the part of that 'natural fool' the husband, antonio, and of easy acquiescence on the part of maria, the wife, in the cuckolding of her idiotic coxcomb, who with the wool pulled over his eyes takes her back believing that she is innocent. in cervantes, the husband, sure of his wife and adoring her, urges his friend to make trial of her honour; the friend, outraged at first by the suggestion, refuses, but finally succumbs to passion and wins the wife, likewise, at first, above suspicion; and all die tragically. there is no resemblance in treatment, atmosphere, incidents, or dialogue. the only community of conception is that of a husband playing with fire--risking cuckoldom. but cervantes' character of the husband is sentimentally deluded; beaumont and fletcher's is a contemptible and willing wittol. if beaumont and fletcher derived their plot from cervantes, all that can be said is that they have mutilated and vulgarized the original out of all possibility of recognition.[ ] other english dramatists dealing with the theme of _the curious impertinent_ between and followed cervantes more or less closely in the main _motif_, in incident, and in dialogue: the author of _the second maiden's tragedy_, for instance, who made use of baudouin's translation; and nathaniel field, who used either baudouin or shelton's publication of in his _amends for ladies_. but beaumont and fletcher in their tale of a husband cuckolded and pommeled were drawing upon another source, one of the many variants of _le mari coccu, battu et content_, to be found in boccaccio and before him in old french poems, and french and italian _nouvelles_. if they derived anything from cervantes, whose theme is lifted from the _orlando furioso_, it was merely the suggestion for a fresh drama of cuckoldry. that their play was regarded by others as thus inspired appears, i think, from a passage in ben jonson's _alchemist_, iv, vii, - , where, after kastril has said to surly, "you are a pimpe, and a trig, and an amadis de gaule, or a don quixote," drugger adds, "or a knight o' the curious cox-combe, doe you see?" field and the rest, writing in or after , had uniformly referred to cervantes' cuckold as the curious impertinent. jonson wrote his _alchemist_ between july and october , , and up to that time the cuckold had been dramatized as coxcomb only by beaumont and fletcher. the prefix 'curious' indicates that in jonson's mind his friend's play is associated with cervantes' novel; and the further prefix of 'the knight' looks very much like a reminiscence of "the knight of the burning pestle," which had been played some two years before. this argument from contemporaneity of inspiration and allusion inclines me to date the upper limit of _the coxcombe_ about , after baudouin's translation _le curieux impertinent_ had reached england, and shelton's manuscript had been put in circulation. if to this conjecture we could add a precise determination of the period of joseph taylor's connection with the queen's revels' children, we should have a definite lower limit for the performance of _the coxcombe_ in which he took part. but i find it impossible to decide whether taylor had been with the queen's revels up to about march , , upon which day his name appears among the duke of york's players who were recently reorganized and had just obtained a new patent; or had been up to that time with the predecessors of the duke of york's (prince charles's) company, and had left them shortly after march for the queen's revels' children. in favour of the former alternative are ( ) that in the list of the queen's revels' actors in _the coxcombe_ he appears second to field only, as if a player of long standing with them and high in the company's esteem at the time of the performance; ( ) that he does not appear among the actors in the list for _epicoene_ which was presented first by the queen's revels' children between january and march , : field is still first, barkstead, who had been eighth on the _coxcombe_ list, appears now second, as if promoted to taylor's place, and giles carey is third in both lists; ( ) that in the march patent to the duke of york's players his name ranks only fifth, as if that of a recent acquisition. on this basis the lower limit would be march , . in favour of the latter alternative, viz., that taylor joined the queen's children from the duke of york's, at a date later than march , , are the considerations: ( ) that when the new princess elizabeth's company, formed april , , gives a bond to henslowe on august of that year, taylor's name appears with two of the queen's revels' children of march , as if all three had left the queen's revels for the new company at the same time; and ( ) that their names appear close together after that of the principal organizer as if not only actors of repute in the company which they had left but prime movers in the new organization. on this basis the lower limit for the performance of _the coxcombe_, at a time when all three were yet queen's revels' children, would be august , . consulting the restrictions necessitated by the plague rate, we have, then, an option for the date of acting: either between december , and july , , when jonson had begun his _alchemist_, or between november , and july . in the latter case ben jonson's "knight o' the curious coxcombe" would precede the performance of beaumont and fletcher's play and could not be an allusion. in the former, it would immediately follow the acting of _the coxcombe_, and would manifestly be suggested by that play. i prefer the former option; and date the acting,--on the assumption that taylor left the queen's revels by march , ,--before that date.[ ] since fletcher's contribution to the play has been mangled by a reviser it is impossible to draw conclusions as to the date of composition from the evidence of his literary style. but the characteristics of beaumont in the minor plot are those of the period in which the _letter to ben jonson_ and _philaster_ were written. the play as first performed was condemned for its length by "the ignorant multitude."[ ] i believe that it was one of the two or three unsuccessful comedies which preceded _philaster_; and, as i have said above, that it is the play referred to in the _letter to ben jonson_, toward the end of .[ ] if the date of acting was before january , , the theatre was blackfriars; if after, whitefriars. the prologue in the first folio speaks of a revision. but though the hand of one, and perhaps of another, reviser is unmistakably present, the play is properly included among beaumont and fletcher's works. in the commendatory verses of , hills and gardiner speak of the play as fletcher's, but all tests show that beaumont wrote a significant division of it,--the natural, vigorous, tender, and poetic subplot of ricardo's desertion of viola and his ultimate reclamation,--with the exception of three scenes and parts of two or three more. the exceptions are the first thirty-five lines of act i, which have been supplied by some reviser; i, , in which also the reviser appears; i, , the drinking-bout in the tavern, where some of the words (_e. g._ "claw'd") indicate fletcher,--and the gratuitous obscenity, fletcher or his reviser; and act ii, , where viola is bound by the tinkers and rescued by valerio.[ ] perhaps, also, the last thirty-six lines of act iii, , where fletcher is discernible in the afterthoughts "a likely wench, and a good wench," "a very good woman, and a gentlewoman," and the hand of a reviser in the mutilation of the verse; and certainly act iv, , where fletcher appears at his best in this play. the romantic little comedy of _ricardo and viola_ is so loosely joined with the foul portrayal of the coxcomb who succeeds in prostituting his wife to his friend, that it might be published separately and profitably as the work of beaumont.[ ] it is well constructed; and it conveys a noble tribute to the purity and constancy of woman, her grace of forgiveness, and her influence over erring man. when viola speaks she is a living person, instinct with recklessness, sweetness, and pathos. few heroines of elizabethan comedy have compressed so much reality and poetry into so narrow a compass. "might not," she whispers when stealing forth at night to meet ricardo:--[ ] might not god have made a time for envious prying folk to sleep whilst lovers met, and yet the sun have shone? and then: alas, how valiant and how fraid at once love makes a virgin! when she comes upon her lover staggering outside the tavern with his sodden comrades,[ ] with what simplicity she shudders: i never saw a drunken man before; but these i think are so.... my state is such, i know not how to think a prayer fit for me; only i could move that never maiden more might be in love! when, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds that her rescuer is even more a peril,[ ] with what childlike trust she appeals: pray you, leave me here just as you found me, a poor innocent, and heaven will bless you for it! when again deserted, with what pathos she sighs: "i'll sit me down and weep; all things have cast me from 'em but the earth. the evening comes, and every little flower droops now, as well as i!" and, finally, when she has rediscovered ricardo, and conquered his self-reproach by her forgiveness, which is "to love you," with what admirable touch of nature and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude to her story and herself:[ ] methinks i would not now, for any thing, but you _had_ mist me: i have made a story will serve to waste many a winter's fire, when we are old. i'll tell my daughters then the miseries their mother had in love, and say, "my girls, be wiser"; yet i would not have had more wit myself. ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development of personality; and the rural scenes and characters are convincing. in the main plot beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. the rest is fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. oliphant thinks that here and there massinger may be traced;[ ] and here and there, rowley.[ ] i should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. i think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. but of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is fletcher's--in dramatizing that story at all. to make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance. but a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. and that the wittol, his adulterous wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. no amount of technical ingenuity on fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism. though _the coxcombe_ was not successful in its first production before the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well received and favoured." we have seen that it was played at court in in the festivities for the elector palatine's approaching marriage with the princess elizabeth. it was revived for charles i and queen henrietta in ; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the city theatres after the restoration, and before . in the revivals beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy called _the fugitives_, constructed by richardson and acted by the drury lane company in . with palmer in the part of young manly (the ricardo of the original), and mrs. jordan as julia (alias beaumont's viola), the adaptation ran for a dozen nights or more. .--_philaster_ or _love lies a-bleeding_ was "divers times acted at the globe, and blacke-friers by his majesties servants." under the second title in the _scourge of folly_, entered for publication october , , davies of hereford appears to mention it; and i have already stated my reasons as based upon the history of the theatres[ ] for believing that its first performance took place between december , and july , . we might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping of epigrams in davies of hereford's _scourge of folly_, if we could affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. for just before the epigram on _love lies a-bleeding_, which, i think, without doubt, applies to _philaster_, appears one _to the roscius of these times, mr. w. ostler_, saluting him as "sole king of actors." now osteler, ostler, or osler, had been one of the queen's revels' children,--most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the time,--in when jonson's _poetaster_ was acted. he could not have been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the queen's children in ; and he would certainly not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that age. according to the supplication of cuthbert burbadge and others in the well-known suit of concerning the shares in the blackfriars theatre,[ ] before evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in , some of the queen's revels' children "growing up to bee men, which were underwood, field, ostler, were taken to strengthen the king's service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves [the king's company], and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from evans with our money, and placed men players, which were hemings, condell, shakespeare, etc." on the face of it this deposition places the transference of underwood, field, and ostler to the king's company between the beginning of april when the revels' children were temporarily suppressed and august of that year when the burbadges, shakespeare, hemings, and others took over evans's unexpired lease of blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. but the deposition of cuthbert burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence of events. the boys may have acted temporarily with, or under the supervision of, the king's company at blackfriars between december , and january , ; but one of them, field, is at the head of the new queen's revels at whitefriars by march , , and does not appear in the lists of the king's men till ; and there is no record of underwood and ostler as members of the latter company before the end of , when they acted in jonson's _alchemist_ (after october ). since underwood and ostler were not with the new queen's revels after january of that year, it is probable that davies's epigram to the latter as "the roscius of these times" in the _scourge of folly_, entered for publication on october , , was written after ostler had attained distinction in shakespeare's company, the company of the leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to ostler with that of the epigram to fletcher on _philaster_ presented by that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the epigrams,--that is to say, between january and october, . since, however, the epigrams in _the scourge of folly_, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind. of much greater weight as confirming the date of _philaster_, as conjectured above, is its resemblance to shakespeare's _cymbeline_ not only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific detail. i shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there is nothing in the _philaster_ or the _cymbeline_ to indicate the priority of the former. but i must at the risk of anticipating indicate in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.[ ] for the _cymbeline_, i accept the date assigned by the majority of critics, . shakespeare had had the character of imogen (or innogen) in mind since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage in _much ado about nothing_ (the quarto of ). in execution the play is, with _the winter's tale_ and the _tempest_, the dramatic sequel of that first of his "dramatic romances,"--of which the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a wife or child,--the _pericles_ written in or . and since already in _pericles_, shakespeare had blazed this new path, i cannot for a moment accept the hypothesis that he is in his _cymbeline_ borrowing profusely from _philaster_, a work of comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been admitted to authorship for the company of which shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. it is much more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since about the beginning of associated with the king's company and its enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of construction to the somewhat novel--to them entirely novel--method of the seasoned playwright of the king's servants, as tried and approved in _pericles_ and _cymbeline_. and still the more so when one reflects that, in _pericles_ and _cymbeline_, aside from the leading conception, everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from _the two gentlemen of verona_ to _as you like it_ and _twelfth night_; and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic construction in _philaster_, otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of those earlier comedies and of the _pericles_ and _cymbeline_ would not suggest. i, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that _philaster_ was first acted by the king's company, soon after beaumont and fletcher began to write for it, say between december and july . the play was first published in a quarto of which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto of , to beaumont and fletcher. in his epigram, addressed somewhat before october , to "the well-deserving mr. john fletcher," john davies appears to give that author credit for practically the whole work,--"thou ... raign'st in arte, judgement, and invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as faire as faithfull sheepheardesse." herrick, writing for the folio of , mentions _love lies a-bleeding_ among fletcher's "incomparable plays"; and thomas stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene "when first bellario bled." john earle, however, writing "on master beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he says: alas, what flegme are they [plautus and aristophanes], compared to thee, in thy _philaster_ and _maids tragedy_! where's such an humour as thy bessus? pray ... for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few insertions or revisions by fletcher, _philaster_ is beaumont's (and practically the same holds true of _the maides tragedy_, and the bessus play--_a king and no king_). in _philaster_ fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are i, {^_b_} (from the king's entry, line --line ,[ ]--a revision and enlargement of beaumont's original sketch), ii, {^_b_} (from _enter megra_), ii, {^_b_} (from _megra above_), v, and v, . the first part of act ii, was written by beaumont; but fletcher has inserted lines to (from _enter arethusa and bellario_ to "how brave she keeps him"). similarly, the first draught of act iii, was beaumont's; certainly lines - (exit king), - (the opening of philaster's long tirade) and - (from philaster's exit to end). but beginning with arethusa's soliloquy, line , we find insertions marked by fletcher's metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas, tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." the last three lines of that soliloquy are his: soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat and the cold marble melt;[ ] and he has overlaid (in lines - ) with his rhetorical triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of philaster's accusation of arethusa. "the _story_ of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten,--"these sad texts"[ ] fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating. it will be observed that, in general, fletcher's scenes are elaborative, bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally easy, at times bustling, at times spectacular, but not vitally contributory to the business of the play. they comprise the longest speeches of the king, pharamond, philaster, megra, and bellario. some of these, such as the king's denunciation of megra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar rhetoric. the bawdy half-scene with its maid of easy honour is his; the discovery of the low intrigue, the simulated masque and the mob-scene are his. they may display, but they do not develop, characters. they are sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully poetic as in v, , - , where his "all your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble" anticipates keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic; but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation of beaumont. the play, in fact, is not only preponderatingly but primarily beaumont's, from the excellent exposition in the first act to the series of sensational surprises which precede the dénouement in the fifth. the conception of the characters and the complication are distinctive of that writer's plots: the impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence toward the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and his unwarranted suspicion of the honour of his mistress. the subtle revelations of personality are beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric pathos and beauty of bellario, the nobler aspects of dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet bewilderments and unmerited tribulations of arethusa, the combination of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization, the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical insights, and the memorable lines. his, too, the humour of the rural sketches--the country fellow who has "seen something yet," the occasional frank animality, as well as the tender beauty of innocence. not only are the virtues of the play beaumont's but some of its faults of conception and construction; and those faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortuitous succession of the crises, and the subordination of bellario in the dénouement. the popularity of _philaster_ as an acting play, not only at court but in the city, is attested by contemporary record. it was played after the restoration with success; and between and it enjoyed thirteen revivals,--the last at bath on december of the latter year, with ward in the title-rôle and miss jarmin as bellario.[ ] .--_the maides tragedy_, acted by the king's men during the festivities at court, october to march , was known to sir george buc when, october , , he licensed an anonymous play as "this second maiden's tragedy." it was acted by the king's also at blackfriars; and since it is in every way a more mature production than _philaster_, i think that it followed that play, toward the end of or in . it was first published in , in quarto and anonymously. the quarto of is also anonymous; that of gives the names of beaumont and fletcher as authors. in the commendatory verses to the folio of , henry howard ascribes the scene of amintor's suicide to fletcher; waller assigns to him "brave melantius in his gallantry" and "aspatia weeping in her gown"; stanley, too, gives him the weeping aspatia; and herrick, "evadne swelling with brave rage." these descriptions are as misleading as blind. d'avenant comes nearer the mark in his prologue to _the woman-hater_, already quoted, where he indicates correctly an evadne scene and an aspatia scene as of fletcher's composition. metrical tests, corrected by the rhetorical, show that fletcher's contributions are limited to three scenes and two half-scenes. the list opens with those to which d'avenant alludes: ii, , in which fletcher "taught the sad aspatia how to mourn," and iv, (as far as line , "prithee, do not mock me"), in which he "reduced evadne from her scorn"; and it includes, also, the ten lines of v, , the larger part of v, (to _exit evadne_), and the perfunctory v, . as to fletcher's authorship of ii, no doubt can be entertained. it is an admirable example of his double endings (almost per cent), his end-stopped lines ( per cent), anapæstic rhythms and jolts, as well as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his incremental second thoughts. i fail to see how any critic can assign it to beaumont.[ ] as frequently with fletcher, aspatia's mourning, though beautiful, is a falsetto from the classics; more like one of rossetti's or leigh hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than a first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. there is likewise no doubt concerning the authorship of the first part of act iv, (lines - ), in which melantius convinces evadne of sin and drives her to vengeance upon the king. the latter part of the scene, also, appears to have been written by fletcher in the first instance, and to have consisted of the first six speeches after the entrance of amintor (lines - ), evadne's "i have done nothing good to win belief" ( - , - ), and the conclusion ( - ). but between amintor's supplication "prithee do not mock me" (line ) and evadne's assertion of sincerity "i have done nothing good to win belief" (line [ ]), beaumont has inserted four speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy otherwise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest passages of the play. in evadne's "my whole life is so leprous it infects all my repentance"--"that slight contrition"--"give me your griefs; you are an innocent, a soul as white as heaven"--"shoot your light into me"--"dissembling with my tears"--"cut from man's remembrance," we hear the words, phrases, and figures of beaumont; and we trace him in the repeated use of "do." we find him in amintor's "seed of virtue left to shoot up"--"put a thousand sorrows off"--"that dull calamity"--"that strange misbelief"--and in mock not _the powers above_ that can and dare give thee a great example of their justice to all ensuing ages.[ ] and in five verses of evadne's succeeding asseveration of sincere reform ( - ), we are thrilled by his sudden magic and his poetic finality: _those short days i shall number to my rest_ (as many must not see me) shall, though too late, though in my evening, yet perceive a will,-- since i can do no good, because a woman,-- _reach constantly at something that is near it_. the ground-work of this latter portion, from amintor's entrance, where evadne cries "oh, my lord," "my much abused lord," and he, "i may leap, like a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines - ); and the last three speeches in general with amintor's "my frozen soul melts," and "my honour falls no farther: i am well, then"; and with evadne's "tales" that "go to dust forgotten,"--the niobe weeping till she is water,--the "wash her stains away," and all the creatures made for heaven's honours, have their ends, _and good ones_,-- all but the cozening crocodiles, false women-- they reign here like those plagues, those killing sores, men pray against; ... this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction, to the scene as fletcher originally wrote it. when to these two scenes we add the first and third of act v, which are of no particular significance, and the second (to the death of the king), we have fletcher's whole written contribution to this wonderful tragedy. in the murder of the king he displays dramatic mastery of the grisly and shuddering; but though the scene is characterized by the same rapidity of conversational thrust and parry as the fletcherian dialogue between melantius and evadne, it is, like it, marred in effect by violence physical rather than spiritual, by brutality of vituperation and stage realism with but scant relief of subtlety. fletcher's tragic scenes excel not in portrayal of personality but in business; his contribution to aspatia is not pathos but the embroidery of grief. the volume and essential vitality are beaumont's: the cruel desertion of aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation of evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery, her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her, its gradual recognition of the inevitable,--that unchastity cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor cleansed by blood,--and its true birth through love desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author of his wrongs,--yet idealized by virgin and wanton alike; the spiritual elevation of melantius, and the conflict between honour and friendship, pride and sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that blunt soldier with the deluded amintor; the pestilent king; and calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and hopeless. these are beaumont's; and his, too, the wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive, and the psychic revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays--in fact, all that is not palpable violence. his, the breathless suspense and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the poetic finality. in his _tragedies of the last age_, licensed in , rymer attacked _the maides tragedy_ violently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. perhaps, as rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better have been called _amintor_, or the _lustful king_, or _the concubine_. but _the maides tragedy_ is a more attractive name, and it may be justified. for i do not find that the action is double-centred. it springs entirely out of amintor's desertion of the maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the king. the pathetic devotion of aspatia is essential to our understanding of amintor's tragic weakness, his _hamartia_. his failure to act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him the respect of evadne, nay extinguishes that first flicker of love which then was but desire. vile as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. the nemesis, too, of amintor is not evadne nor the king, but aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten: i did that lady wrong. methinks i feel a griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins,--[ ] ... the faithless sin i made to faire aspatia is not yet revenged; it follows me.--[ ] his nemesis is aspatia, constant unto death,--and in her death, awakening such remorse that he must die to be with her: "aspatia!" he cries-- the soule is fled forever, and i wrong myselfe so long to lose her company, must i talke now? heres to be with thee, love![ ] rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,[ ] of "the irrelevance of the motives that beaumont employs" in the characterization and conduct of evadne have logicality of appearance, but are based upon incorrect premises. the facts, as beaumont gives them, are that evadne was "once fair" and "chastely sweet,"--before she met the king; that she was already corrupt when she took amintor as her husband; that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in presence of her ladies of the bedchamber, is an assumed delicacy; that she loves the king "with ambition not with her eyes" (iii, ); that she "would bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has accepted amintor as a screen, but speedily lusts for him, and is willing to give herself to him if he will forthright kill the king (ii, , ): wilt thou kill this man? sweare, my amintor, and i'le kisse the sin off from thy lips. but amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious, not the kind of man to satisfy her new desire, and ambition too. he could never win her by winning the throne,--too lily-livered: "i wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, "till i do know the cause";-- then she, with passion "i wood thou wouldst."--but she is a woman whose first behest is scorned; and with sudden revulsion of contempt for this poltroon, as she now conceives him-- why, it is _thou_ that wrongst me; i hate thee; thou shouldst have kild thy selfe. amintor has lost his evil chance. she despises him and yet, in her better moments, with a kind of pity. it follows that her prompt avowal of her liaison, and her return to the king and insulting treatment of amintor are of a piece with the corrupted nature of the woman,--a nature that she displays up to the moment of her awakening and imagined repentance. the facts are, too, that she does not, immediately after she has sworn to her brother to let the foul soul of the king out, develop (iv, ), as mr. more thinks, a "mood of sudden and overwhelming love for amintor." she merely asks his pardon: i doe appeare the same, the same evadne, drest in the shames i liv'd in, the same monster, but these are names of honour to what i _am_ ... i am hell till you, my deare lord, shoot your light into me, _the beames of your forgivenesse_. the days that she shall number to her rest are short; but she vainly imagines that, though but "one minute" remains, she may "reach constantly at something that is neare" the good. she is awakened to her husband's whiteness of soul; but she makes no profession of love, though love, this time not merely lust, be stirred in her heart. she would not "let her sins perish his noble youth." at last, in the moment of mad exaltation after the murder of the king, when she thinks that she has washed her soul clean in that blood, the poor, misguided creature struggling toward the light, but still, and consistently, enveloped in the murk of her past, comes imploring the love of the husband whom in the earlier days she had scorned. she is still the passionate evadne, who "was too foule within to looke faire then," and "was not free till now." repulsed by amintor, she dreams the one sane madness of her career,--to win his love by taking leave of life,--and kills herself. i perceive no irrelevance of motive in the conduct of evadne; even in the scenes which are not beaumont's--namely, the expostulation of her brother, and the murder of the king. nor do i find in the play as a whole what mr. more calls an "incomprehensible tangle of the passions." the defect in the construction of the _maides tragedy_, if there is one, lies in the failure of the maid and her deserter to meet between the first scene of the second act and the third of the fifth. that is not unmotived, however; it is of aspatia's own choosing and of amintor's _hamartia_. aspatia kisses him farewell, forgiving him, and saying that she "must trie some yet unpractis'd way to grieve and die." he is, forthwith, entangled in the web of his wife's adultery, his own shame and more shameful delusion of allegiance. the girl whom he has so deeply wronged passes from his distracted consciousness, save for the sense that these troubles are his punishment. and when, toward the end of the play, the maid comes in again, saying "this is my fatall houre," even we start at the remembrance that she had threatened to kill herself. and, because the scene in which she forces a duel upon amintor is spirited and pathetic, his contrition poignant, and the joy of their reunion in the moment of death deeply tragic, we feel that we have been unduly cheated of the company of this innocent and resolute and surpassingly pathetic girl. the play, with burbadge in the rôle of melantius, was popular during the lives of the authors. it was acted before the king and queen in and it held the stage until the closing of the theatres. it was revived in and . pepys saw it at least five times before the middle of may , and found it "too sad and melancholy" but still "a good play." it was popular when dryden in his _essay on dramatick poesy_, , praised its "labyrinth of design." for a time during the reign of charles ii it was proscribed, possibly because the moral was too readily applicable to the conduct of the "merry monarch"; but the play in its original form was on the stage again by . before waller made at least two attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy by writing a new fifth act in which evadne was bloodlessly eliminated. in one of these sentimental absurdities the king alone survived; in another the king, preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving amintor and aspatia from suicide and joined them in marriage: but neither attempt, though made "to please the court," was crowned with success. the play enjoyed several other revivals in the first half of the eighteenth century with high popularity, notably at the haymarket in when melantius was played by betterton, evadne by mrs. barry, and aspatia by mrs. bracegirdle; and again in just before betterton's death. in theobald writes, that the famous controversy between melantius and amintor is always "received with vehement applause." in the play was acted by macready at the haymarket, with alterations by himself and three original scenes by sheridan knowles, under the name of _the bridal_, and, as dyce tells us, was very favourably received by the public.[ ] .--though the tragedy of _cupid's revenge_ was printed in as the work of fletcher alone, the publication was unauthorized, and the attribution is by a printer who acknowledges that he was not acquainted with the author. the quarto of assigns it correctly to beaumont and fletcher. the play is known to have been acted at court by her majesty's children of whitefriars, the first sunday in january ; and as usual it must have been tested by public presentation before that date. the fact that the authors were, between and , writing for the king's men does not preclude their composing a play for the queen's children. it is not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier than . though the critics disagree concerning the precise division of authorship in nearly every scene, finding traces of alteration by field, massinger, and others, they discern a definite substratum of both fletcher and beaumont. it is unnecessary to specify the minor scenes in which beaumont coöperated. the five which transfer the action from an atmosphere of supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion are by him.[ ] in these his sententious sunbursts, his verse, diction, hyperbole, portrayal by passive implication, are indubitable. the infatuation of the princess for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim humility and cackling mirth of the latter. the lust of leucippus is transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to oaths "bestowed on lies," by his horror of the discovered baseness of his paramour, and the piety with which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's honour: i desire you to lay what trains you will for my wish'd death, but suffer him to find his quiet grave in peace. the treacherous greed and malice of bacha are tempered by half-lights and shifting hues that make her less a vampire when beaumont depicts her. and the final scene of tragedy in the forest is shot with pathos by the "harmless innocence" of beaumont's urania following leucippus to save him for love:-- i would not let you know till i was dying; for you could not love me, my mother was so naught. but the play as a whole lacks logical and natural motive, moral vigor and vitality; and its history upon the stage is negligible. .--of the dates of _a king and no king_ there is no doubt. it was licensed in , acted at court december of the same year, and first published in quarto in as by beaumont and fletcher. in the commendatory verses of , henry howard gives arbaces to fletcher; jasper mayne gives him bessus; herrick goes further: "that high design of _king and no king_, and the rare plot thine." earle, on the other hand, gives bessus to beaumont; and lisle gives him mardonius. of the attributions to fletcher, herrick's alone has plausibility, since, like _philaster_ and _the maides tragedy_, the play is derived from no known source.[ ] still he was probably wrong. it is not impossible that one of the dramatists contrived the plot; but, considering that three-quarters of the play was written by beaumont, and that fletcher's quarter contains but one scene at once of high design and vital to the story, it is not very likely that the contriving was by fletcher unaided. modern critics display singular unanimity in their discrimination of the respective shares of the composers. with only one or two dissenting voices they attribute to beaumont the first three acts, the fourth scene of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the fifth. to fletcher they assign the first three scenes of the fourth act, and scenes one and three of the fifth. the tests which i have already described lead me to the same conclusion. beaumont's contribution is distinguished by a largeness of utterance and a poetic inevitability, a diversity and mastery of characterization, a philosophical reach, a realism both humorous and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativity and tension, equal to, if not surpassing, any parallel elements or qualities to be found in the joint-plays. arbaces, in apparent design, is of a marlowan temper, moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brooking no rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and a tyrant, he is brave in fact, and in heart deluded by the assumption that he is also modest. the combination is beaumontesque. that dramatist rarely creates fixed or transparent character. arbaces assumes that he is single of nature and aim: an irresistible, passionless, and patient soldier; but his failure to fathom himself as his friend mardonius fathoms him, is part of his complexity. his headlong love for the woman whom he believes to be his sister and the resulting horror of apprehension and conflict of desire reveal him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding revolutions of personality. "what are thou," he asks of this devilish unexpected lust-- what are thou, that dost creep into my breast; and dar'st not see my face? when he will decree that panthea be regarded as no more his sister, and she remonstrates,--he thunders "i will hear no more"; but to himself:-- why should there be such music in a voice, and sin for me to hear it? when tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister in marriage, presumes to address her, with what majestic inconsistency the king rebukes him: the least word that she speaks is worth a life. rule your disorder'd tongue or i will temper it! and so, now struggling, now wading on in sin, till that heart-rending crisis is reached in which he confesses the incestuous love to his friend and faithful general, mardonius; nay, even tries to win the friend's support in his lustful suit, and is gloriously defeated. then follow the easy compliance of bessus with his wish, and, with equal precipitancy, the revulsion of a kingly sense of rectitude against the willing pander: thou art too wicked for my company, though i have hell within me, and mayst yet corrupt me further, the climax in which arbaces can no longer refrain is of beaumont's best: nay, you shall hear the cause in short, panthea; and when thou hear'st it, thou will blush for me and hang thy head down like a violet full of the morning's dew. and she, recoiling, "heaven forbid" and "i would rather ... in a grave sleep with my innocence," still kisses him; and then in a panic, nobler than self-suppression, cries: if you have any mercy, let me go to prison, to my death, to anything: i feel a sin growing upon my blood worse than all these! by a series of sensational _bouleversements_, and in a dramatic agony of suspense, we are keyed to the scene in which relief is granted: the princess who now is queen is no sister to the king, who is now no king. with the exception of a half-scene (act iv, {^_b_}) of somewhat bustling mechanism and rant by fletcher, the whole of the king's portrayal is beaumont's; and with the exception of eighty lines written by fletcher (act iv, ) of dramatic dialogue containing information necessary to the minor love-affair, the story of the birdlike quivering, fond panthea is, also, entirely beaumont's. the mardonius of beaumont, in the first three acts and the fifth, is a fine, honest, blunt, soldierly companion and adviser to the king; but when fletcher takes him in hand (act iv, {^_b_}), he declines to a stock character wordy with alliteration and commonplace. the bessus of beaumont whose "reputation came principally by thinking to run away" is, in acts i-iii, falstaffian or zagloban; the bessus of fletcher, in iv, and v, and , is a figure of low comedy, amusing to be sure, and reminiscent of bobadill, but a purveyor of sophomoric quips and a tool for horse-play. the rural scene with its graphic humours of the soil is beaumont's. fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to the plot, and farce unrelated to it. his scenes display no spiritual insight; supply no development of character; administer no dramatic fillip to the action and no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers, tigranes and spaconia, they are devoid of poetry. to beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in the creation of _a king and no king_ one of the most intensely powerful dramas of the jacobean period, one of the most popular in the age of dryden, and one of the most influential in the development of the heroic play of the restoration. that it did not survive the eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as dryden says "end with a prosperous event." the conflict of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed the limits of artistic mediation. the play would better have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering--that highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable. but though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy. that error arises from a careless reading of the text. from the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists are not brother and sister. and as for the protagonists themselves,--when the king is suddenly smitten by love (iii, , - ) and rebels against its power, he does not even know that the object of his devotion is his supposed sister. when he is informed that the conquering beauty is panthea, he revolts, crying "'t is false as hell!" and when the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility of self-denial. in his struggle against what seems to him incestuous love, though the king does not conquer, he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of what is right. his deepest despair is that he is "not come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb to worse temptation; and his last word before the tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think on." and when panthea feeling the "sin growing upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that cries to him whom she thinks her brother, "fly, sir, for god's sake!" _a king and no king_ evidently won favour at court, for, as we have noticed, it was acted there both in and in - . it was presented to their majesties at hampton court in . in pepys saw it twice. before nell gwynn had made panthea one of her principal rôles. in betterton played arbaces to mrs. barry's panthea. it was revived again in , , and . davies in his _dramatic miscellany_ tells us that garrick intended to revive it, taking the part of arbaces himself and giving bessus to woodward, "but it was observed that at every reading of it in the green-room garrick's pleasure suffered a visible diminution--at length he fairly gave up his design." mr. bond, in the _variorum_ edition, mentions a german adaptation of , called _ethelwolf, oder der könig kein könig_. footnotes: [ ] cited by oldys (ms. note in langbaine's _account of engl. dram. poets_, p. )--dyce. [ ] for this information i am indebted to my colleague, professor schevill. [ ] i know but two sane accounts of this matter: a. s. w. rosenbach's in _mod. lang. notes_, , column ( ); and wolfgang von wurzbach's, in _romanische forschungen_, xx, pp. - ( ). [ ] oliphant, _engl. stud._, xv, . macaulay, 'probably .' [ ] _prologue_ in the first folio. [ ] chapter vii. [ ] even here, as oliphant has said, viola's first speech "is pure beaumont." [ ] his scenes are i, , ; ii, ; iii, (to "where i may find service"); iv, , , ; v, , and the last twenty-seven lines of v, . [ ] i, . scenes as arranged in dyce, vol. iii. [ ] i, . [ ] iii, . [ ] v, . [ ] i, , {^_a_} (to antonio's entry), iii, {^_a_} (to servant's entry). [ ] iii, ; iv, ; v, , . [ ] chapter vii, above. [ ] halliwell-phillipps, _outlines of the life of shakespeare_, i, . [ ] chapter xxviii, _did the beaumont 'romance' influence shakespeare?_ [ ] lines are numbered as in the _variorum_ edition. [ ] fletcher affects this figure, _cf._ _a wife for a month_, act ii, , lines - . [ ] _cf._ his lines in _maides tragedy_, iv, , - ; in _king and no king_, iv, , - ; _philaster_, v, , ; _hum. lieut._, iv, , ; _mad lover_, iii, , ; _loyall subject_, iii, , ; iv, , ; _wife for a month_, iv, , , . [ ] the best editions of _philaster_ since the time of dyce are those of f. s. boas, in the _temple dramatists_ ( ), p. a. daniel, in the _variorum_ ( ), glover and waller, in the _camb. engl. classics_ ( ), and a. h. thorndike in _belles lettres_ ( ). [ ] thorndike, for instance,--who selects lines - as an instance of beaumont's skill in imitating natural conversation. _influence of b. and f. on shakespeare_, p. . [ ] numbering of the _variorum_. [ ] q "eies." [ ] ii, , . [ ] iii, , . [ ] v, , . [ ] p. e. more, _the nation_, n. y., april , . [ ] the best editions of _m. t._, since the time of dyce, are those of p. a. daniel, in the _variorum_ ( ), glover and waller, in the _cambridge english classics_ ( ), and a. h. thorndike, in the _belles lettres_ ( ). [ ] i, ; ii, ; iii, ; iv, ; v, . [ ] for conjectural sources see chapter vii, above. the best editions to-day are the _variorum_ and alden's (_belles lettres_). chapter xxvi the last play eleven.--the first quarto of _the scornful ladie_, entered s. r., march , , assigns the play to beaumont and fletcher, and says that it "was acted with great applause by the children of her maiesties revels in the blacke fryers." the references in act v, , , to the cleve wars show that it could not have been written before march , . the sentence, "marry some cast cleve captain," is taken by some to indicate a date as early as the spring of that year, when james i "promised to send an english force to aid the protestant party,"[ ] and when, undoubtedly, "cast" captains of the english army were clamouring for foreign service. in that case, the play was acted before january , , for by that date the children of the queen's revels had ceased playing at blackfriars. since the plague regulations closed the theatres between march and december , , save for a week in july, these arguments would fix the performance in the christmas month, december to january , . to this supposition a reference in act i, to binding the apocrypha by itself, lends plausibility, if, as fleay thinks, the sentence points to the discussion during - concerning the inclusion of the apocrypha in the douay version of the bible and its exclusion from the authorized version--both in progress at the time, and both completed in .[ ] but the apocrypha controversy was continued long after . a later date of composition than january , , is, however, indicated if a line, iii, , , to which attention has not previously been directed, in which the elder loveless says of abigail, who is acting the termagant, "tie your she-otter up, good lady folly, she stinks worse than a bear-baiting," was suggested by the termagant mrs. otter and her husband of the bear-garden, in jonson's _epicoene_, acted between january and march , . and the two sentences in which cleve is mentioned, "there will be no more talk of the cleve wars while this lasts" (v, ), and "marry some _cast cleve_ captain [so italicized in the quarto], and sell bottle-ale" (v, ), point to a date later than july , when actual fighting in cleves-juliers had barely begun. the captains are not english soldiers seeking service in a foreign army not yet mobilized, but englishmen who have been captains in cleves, have seen service, and been 'cast,' any time between july and the beginning of , when, according to the quarto, the play had assuredly been performed. these considerations make it probable that _the scornful ladie_ in its original form was presented first at whitefriars while the queen's children were acting there, between and march , or that it was one of the plays, old or new, presented by the queen's children (reorganized in ) when they opened at rossiter's new blackfriars in - . since active hostilities in cleves were temporarily suspended in - during the negotiations which led to the treaty of xanten in november of the latter year, and since there would not only be much "talk" rather than fighting at the time, but also many captains 'cast' from their regiments, the conviction grows that the play was written between and the end of . if _the scornful ladie_ had been written before march , it would undoubtedly have shared with _the coxcombe_ and _cupid's revenge_ of the same authors, then in the flush of popularity at court, the honour of presentation by the queen's revels' children during the festivities attending the marriage of the princess elizabeth; for it was always a good acting play, and it has far greater merit than _cupid's revenge_ which the children performed three times before royalty in the four months preceding the marriage. other evidence, not hitherto noticed, still further confirms the conclusion that this was one of beaumont and fletcher's later joint-productions, perhaps the last of them. the conversational style is altogether more mature than in the remaining output of their partnership. it is the first work published under both of their names, and it was licensed for publication within two weeks after beaumont's death, as one might expect of a play with which he was associated recently in the public mind. it is the only one of the joint-plays which he did not himself copy out, or thoroughly revise in manuscript, eliminating all or nearly all of fletcher's distinctive _ye's_ and _y'are's_, and reducing to uniformity the nomenclature of the _dramatis personae_. of this, later. there is also a sentence in act iii, , which points definitely to a date of composition, to . the captain speaking to morecraft, the usurer, says, "i will stile thee noble, nay don diego, i'le woo thy infanta for thee" (punctuation of the quarto). 'diego' had, of course, been for years a generic nickname for spaniards; but morecraft is neither a spaniard nor in any way associated with spaniards. there had been a don diego of malodorous memory, who had offensively "perfumed" st. paul's and on whose achievement the elizabethans never wearied ringing the changes.[ ] but that don diego was of the years before when there was, of course, no talk of wooing an infanta; and the captain here who comes to borrow money of the usurer had no intention of insulting him by likening him to the disgusting spaniard of st. paul's. the only provocation for styling morecraft's 'widow' an infanta in this scene of _the scornful ladie_ is that there was much interest in london at the time in a proposed marriage between charles, prince of wales, and the second daughter of philip iii of spain, the infanta maria. and the conjunction of the "infanta" with a "don diego" has reference to the activities of the astute don diego sarmiento de acuña who had arrived as spanish ambassador, in , "with the express object of winning james over from his alliance with france and the protestant powers."[ ] during queen anne was favouring the spanish marriage. in february , don diego sarmiento was sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of the king's powerful minion, the earl of somerset; and in may he was writing home of his success. in the latter month, the lord privy seal, northampton, was urging the marriage upon the king; and the king soon after had signified to sarmiento his willingness to accept the hand of the infanta for charles, provided philip of spain should withdraw his demand for the conversion of the young prince to catholicism. in june sarmiento was advising philip to close with james's offer. and a month or so later the spanish council of state had voted in favour of the match. negotiations, broken off for a time, were resumed a few weeks after the treaty of xanten was signed; and with varying success don diego was still pursuing his object in december . the reference in _the scornful ladie_ cannot possibly be to negotiations for the marriage of prince charles's elder brother, henry, who died in , with one or the other of king philip's daughters;[ ] as for instance in or , for the cleves wars had not then begun; or in and , for no don diego had yet arrived in england. the upper limit of the reference to don diego sarmiento's negotiations is may , . gardiner tells us, moreover, that "for some time" before diego was created count gondomar in "he had been pertinaciously begging for a title that would satisfy the world that his labours had been graciously accepted by his master." this desire to be "stiled noble" was undoubtedly known to many about the court. if beaumont and fletcher did not hear of it by common talk, they might readily have derived their information from don diego's acquaintance and beaumont's friend, sir francis bacon, attorney-general at the time, or from a devoted companion of john selden of the inner temple, sir robert cotton, the antiquary, who in april , was king james's intermediary with sarmiento. taking, accordingly, all these considerations into account in conjunction with the fact that no cleves captains had yet been 'cast' from their commands abroad before the queen's revels' children ceased playing at the old blackfriars in january , i have come to the definite conclusion that the play was written between may , and the beginning of , and first acted after the children reopened at the new blackfriars in - . the probabilities are that it was written after may or june, , perhaps, as late as april , when public attention had been startlingly awakened to don diego's personal and ambitious activity in furthering the spanish alliance by a royal marriage; and that beaumont's absence from london, probably at his wife's place in kent, or the failing condition of his health, accounts for his subordinate share in the authorship, as well as for the incomplete revision of the text--a task evidently assumed by him in the preparation of the other plays planned and produced in partnership with fletcher. [illustration: by permission of methuen & co., ltd. don diego sarmiento, count gondomar from the portrait by g. p. harding] the commendatory verses of stanley and waller in the folio give the play to fletcher; and the greater part of it is fletcher's. beaumont has contributed the vivid exposition of act i, ; act i, , with its legal phraseology and racy realism; and the jovial posset-scene of act ii, , where sir roger's kindly pedantry is developed and the minor love-affair of welford and martha is introduced.[ ] act ii, , has been given by most critics to fletcher because of the feminine endings of its occasional verse; but beaumont could use feminine endings for humorous effect, and the diction and metal habit are distinctly his. he contributed also act v, ,[ ] where the hero finally tricks his scornful mistress into submission. the _ye_ test, which i have said does not yield results in the case of other plays written by the two dramatists in collaboration, is of positive value here as confirming beaumont's authorship of act i, and and act ii, , and v, , for but a single _ye_ (ii, , l. ) is to be found in those scenes. the results are negative in act ii, and --no _ye's_--but the diction and verse are fletcher's. it is not unlikely that beaumont revised the play up to the end of act ii. with act iii, the _ye's_ are in evidence and continue to the end of the play, except in beaumont's v, . in act iii, , there are but four; but two of them are in the objective case, a mark of fletcher, not of beaumont. on the other hand though the diction and verse somewhat resemble fletcher's, the infrequency of the _ye's_ heightens the suspicion that unless the scene is fletcher's, revised imperfectly by beaumont, it is the work of some third author--perhaps, as r. w. bond,[ ] has suggested, massinger. act iii, , on the other hand, not only has several _ye's_ in the objective, but in proportion to the _you's_ twenty-five per cent of _ye's_ and _y'are's_, which approaches the distinctive habit of fletcher; and the verse, rhetorical triplets, and afterthoughts are his. in all scenes of acts iv and v, except the second of the latter, fletcher's _ye's_ occur, not in great number, but often enough in the objective case to corroborate the other, metrical and stylistic, indications of his authorship. i have said that no _ye's_ occur in acts i and ii, and act v, , the parts in which beaumont's hand as author or reviser appears. another very interesting confirmation of his authorship of act i, , act ii, , and act v, , is afforded by the double nomenclature of one of the characters, the amorous spinster who serves as waiting-woman to the scornful lady. according to the first three quartos ( , , ), and the folio ( ) which follows the text of these, whenever she appears in stage-direction or text before the beginning of act iii (viz., in beaumont's scenes), she is called mistress younglove or younglove, but in acts iii, iv, v, she is uniformly called abigal, except in beaumont's v, , where in the text and stage-direction (line ) she is again younglove. in the speech-headings, she is abig. or abi., all through the last three acts, for fletcher has noticed that the abbreviation young, for her, occurring by the side of young lo. for another character, young loveless, is confusing. but beaumont, who revised the first two acts, has been less careful than his wont, for he occasionally retains the young., which stood for the name by which he always thought of the waiting-woman. beaumont's mistress younglove of the earlier scenes is vividly vulgar and amorous. fletcher takes her up and turns her into a commonplace stage lecher in petticoats; but beaumont, in the fifth act, restores her to womanhood by giving her something of a heart. the scornful lady of beaumont's scenes is self-possessed and many-sided, introspective and capable of affection. in fletcher's hands she is shrewd and witty but evidently constructed for the furtherance of dramatic business. the steward, savil, of beaumont's act i, appears not only to be honest but to be designed with a view to a leading part in the complication; in act ii, , fletcher reduces him to drunkenness and servility, with slight regard to the possibilities of character and plot. the brisk but mechanical movement of the action and the stagey characterization and more animated scenes are fletcher's; also the manoeuvers directed against the lady's attitude of scorn, except that by which she is overcome. thorndike calls this comedy "perhaps the best representation of the collaboration" of these dramatists in that kind. if this is the best of which they were capable in that kind, it is as well that they did not produce more. this was written after beaumont had retired to sundridge place, and was giving very little attention to play-writing. it was, however, a very popular play; frequently acted before suppression of the theatres, and in the decade succeeding the restoration when it was several times witnessed by pepys. later, it was acted by mrs. oldfield; and, as _the capricious lady_ (an alteration by w. cooke), with mrs. abington in the heroine's part, it held the stage as late as --some six revivals in all. but, as sir adolphus ward says, it is "coarse both in design and texture, and seems hardly entitled to rank high among english comedies." it undoubtedly suggested ideas for massinger's tragicomedy, _a very woman_, licensed , but in which fletcher may have had a share; and for sir aston cockayne's _the obstinate lady_ of .[ ] footnotes: [ ] murray, _eng. dram. comp._, i, ; warwick bond, _variorum ed. of b. and f._, i, . [ ] _chr. eng. dr._, i, . [ ] see bond, _variorum, b. and f._, i, ; and references as given there, and by dyce, to _the famous history of sir thomas wyatt, the captain_, and other plays. [ ] see s. r. gardiner, _history of england_, vol. ii ( - ), pp. , , , , , , , , , , for this and the following concerning sarmiento. [ ] gardiner, _prince charles and the spanish marriage_, pp. , , . [ ] all critics agree in assigning i, , to beaumont. they differ concerning the rest of i and ii. [ ] so, also, fleay, g. c. macaulay, and oliphant; boyle, _n. s. s. trans._, xxvi ( ), and bond, _u. s._, p. . [ ] _variorum_, i, . [ ] the best editions of _the scornful ladie_ since dyce's time are that of r. warwick bond, in the _variorum_, and of glover and waller in the _camb. engl. classics_. chapter xxvii the dramatic art, principally of beaumont of the eleven plays, then, from which one may try to draw conclusions concerning the respective dramatic qualities of beaumont and fletcher during the period of their collaboration, we have found that two, _loves cure_ and _the captaine_, do not definitely show the hand of beaumont, and one, _the foure playes_, but the suspicion of a finger. two, _the woman-hater_ and _the knight of the burning pestle_, are wholly or essentially of his unaided authorship. the remaining six, _the coxcombe_, _philaster_, _the maides tragedy_, _cupids revenge_, _a king and no king_, _the scornful ladie_, are the beaumont-fletcher plays. others in which some critics think that they have found traces of beaumont, assuming that in their present form they are revisions of earlier work, are _thierry and theodoret_, _the faithful friends_, _wit at severall weapons_, _beggers bush_, _loves pilgrimage_, _the knight of malta_, _the lawes of candy_, _the honest man's fortune_, _bonduca_, _nice valour_, _the noble gentleman_, _the faire maide of the inne_. these i have carefully examined, and can conscientiously state that in no instance is there for me satisfactory evidence of the qualities which mark his verse and style. when in any of the suspected passages the verse recalls beaumont, the style is not his: i find none of his favourite words, phrases, figures, ideas. when in any such passage a beaumontesque hyperbole appears, or an occasional word from his vocabulary, or a line of haunting beauty such as he might have written, his metre or rhythm is absent. on the other hand, such passages display traits never found in him but often found in some other collaborator with fletcher, or in some reviser of fletcher's plays, sometimes massinger but more frequently field. the latter dramatist modeled himself upon beaumont, but though he caught, on occasion, something of the master's trick, no one steeped in the style of beaumont can for a moment mistake for his even the most dramatic or poetic composition of field. as to the scenes in prose supposed by some to have been written by beaumont, there is not one that bears his distinctive impress, nor one that might not have been written by daborne, field, or massinger, or by any of the half-dozen experts whose industry swelled the output of the fletcherian syndicate. there being no evidence of beaumont in any of these plays, it is unnecessary to investigate, here, the vexed question of the original date of each. suffice it to repeat that concerning none is there definite or generally accepted information that it was written before beaumont's retirement from dramatic activity. passing in review, the qualities of beaumont as a dramatist we find that in characterization he is, when at his best, true to nature, gradual in his processes, and discriminating in delineation. he is melodramatic at times in sudden shifts of crisis; but he is uniformly sensitive to innocence, beauty, and pathos,--contemptuous of cowardice, braggadocio, and insincerity,--appreciative of fidelity, friendship, noble affection, womanly devotion, self-sacrifice, and mercy, of romantic enterprise, and of the virile defiance of calumny, evil soliciting, and tyranny. in the delineation of lust he is frankly elizabethan rather than insidiously jacobean. he portrays with special tenderness the maiden of pure heart whose love is unfortunately placed too high, a bellario, euphrasia, or urania,--or crossed by circumstance, a viola, arethusa, aspatia, panthea. he distinctively appropriates shakespeare's girl-page; under his touch her grace suffers but slight diminution, and that by excess of sentimentality rather than by lack of individual endowment. his love-lorn lasses are integral personalities. no one, not maintaining a thesis, could mistake viola with her shrewd inventiveness and sense of humour for arethusa, or arethusa with her swift despairs for bellario, or bellario with her fearlessness and noble mendacity for the countrified urania, or any of them for the lachrymose aspatia, or the full-pulsed panthea. i find them as different each from the other as all from the tormenting oriana or that seventeenth century lydia languish, jasper's mock-romantic luce. his most virile characters are not the tragic or romantic heroes of the plays, but the blunt soldier-friends. it has been said, to be sure, that "there is scarcely an individual peculiarity among them."[ ] but mardonius never deserts his king, melantius does. and neither the mardonius nor the melantius of beaumont has the waggish humour of beaumont's dion. his romantic heroes, on the other hand, are not so distinct in their several characteristics; amintor, philaster, leucippus are generous, impulsive, poetic, readily deluded, undecided, and in action indecisive. the differentiation between them lies in the dramatic motive. of amintor the mainspring is the doctrine of the divinity of kings; he cannot be disloyal even to the king who has duped him and made of him a "fence" for his wife's adultery. of leucippus the mainspring is filial piety--disloyalty would mean surrendering his father to an incestuous and vengeful woman. of philaster the mainspring is the duty of revolt for the recovery of his ancestral throne. in _philaster_ and _cupid's revenge_ beaumont's tyrants are sonorific yet shadowy forms; but the king of the _maides tragedy_ is a thoroughly visualized monster, and arbaces in _a king and no king_ stands as an epitome of progressively developed, concrete personality, absolutely distinct from any other figure on beaumont's stage. in the construction of evadne and bacha a similar skill in evolution and individualization is displayed. the latter is an abnormality grown from lust to overweening ambition; the former never loses our sympathy: in her depravity there is the seed of conscience; through shame and love she wins a soul; the crime by which at last she would redeem herself leaves her no longer futile but half-way heroic; and her pleading for amintor's love, her self-murder, fix her in memory among those squandered souls that have known no happiness--whose misery or whose shame is merged and made beautiful in the pity of it all. of his braggarts and poltroons beaumont is profuse: the best are bessus and calianax, so far as they have not been reduced to horse-play by another hand. for pharamond we are indebted as much to fletcher as to beaumont. the jonsonian humours of beaumont's braggarts, excellent as they may be, are not more clearly marked nor better drawn than those of many of his other characters, the misogynist, the retributive oriana, and the gourmand-parasite, in his youthful comedy of _the woman-hater_, or the devil-may-care merrythought, luce, the grocer and his wife, and in fact every convulsing caricature in his matchless _knight of the burning pestle_. of beaumont's effectiveness in satire and burlesque, enough has already been said. his laughter is genial but not uproarious: he chuckles; he lifts the eyebrow, but seldom sneers. with the gascon he vapours; with the love-lorn languishing, simpers; with the heroic captain of mile end, whiffles and--tongue in cheek--struts and throws a turkey-step; with the jovial roisterer he hiccoughs and wipes his mouth. homely wit, bathos, and the grotesque he fixes as on a film, and makes no comment; fustian he parodies; affectation he feeds with banter. for the inflated he cherishes a noiseless, most exiguous bodkin. as to the matter of technique we have observed that the clear and comprehensive expositions of the joint-plays are generally beaumont's,--for instance, those of _the maides tragedy_, _philaster_, _king and no king_, and _the scornful ladie_; that in the tragedies and tragicomedies the sensational reversals of fortune, as well as the cumulative suspenses and reliefs of the closing scenes, are in nearly all cases his; and that in the tragicomedies the shifting of interest from the strictly tragic and universal to the more individual--pathetic, romantic, and comic--emotions, is also his. the conviction of evadne by her brother is an exception: that is the work of fletcher; but her contrition in the presence of amintor is again beaumont's. what he was capable of in romantic comedy is shown by his '_ricardo and viola_' episode. he cared much more for romance than for intrigue; and he found his romance in persons of common life as readily as among those of elevated station. in his share of the comedies of intrigue he shows, as elsewhere, that he was capable of elizabethan bubukles, but ludicrous not lecherous. above all, he delighted in interweaving with the romantic and sentimental that which partook of the pastoral, the pathetic, and the heroic. and we have noticed that, through the heroic and melodramatic, his more serious plays pass into the atmosphere of court life and spectacular display. as for fletcher's share in the dramas written in partnership with beaumont, little need be said by way of summary. he bulks large in the comedies of intrigue, _the scornful ladie_ and _the coxcombe_; and especially in the sections of plot that are carnal, trivial, or unnatural. he is in them just what he is in his own _monsieur thomas_ and his pornographic _captaine_--in the latter of which, if beaumont had any share at all it is unconvincing to me, save possibly as regards the one appalling scene of which i have spoken some five chapters back. to the tragedies and "dramatic romances" or tragicomedies fletcher did not contribute one-third as much as his co-worker. as in the murder-scene of _the maides tragedy_ he displays the dramaturgy of spectacular violence, so in the scene between melantius and evadne, the power of dramatic invective. but his aim is not the furtherance of interest by the dynamic unfolding of personality, or by the propulsion of plot through interplay of complicated motives or emotions, it is the immediate captivation of the spectator by rapidity and variety: by brisk, lucid, and witty dialogue, by bustle of action and multiplicity of conventional device, as in _cupids revenge_. few of his scenes are vital; most are clever histrionic inlays, subsidiary to the main action, or complementary and explanatory, as in _philaster_ and _a king and no king_. his characters move with all the ease of perfect mechanism; but they are made, not born. it follows that, in the more serious of the joint-dramas, the principal personages are much less indebted to his invention than has ordinarily been supposed. in the comedies of intrigue, on the other hand, conventional types of the stage or of the theatre-going london world, especially the fashionable and the bohemian provinces thereof, owe their existence chiefly to him. blackguards, wittols, colourless tricksters, roaring captains, gallants, debauchees, lechers, bawds, libidinous wives, sophisticated maidens who preen themselves with meticulous virtue but not with virtuous thoughts, all these people the scenes which fletcher contributed to the joint-comedies. and some of them thrust their faces into the romantic plays and tragedies as well. fletcher's most important contribution to the drama, his masterly and vital contribution, is to be found in his later work; and of that i have elsewhere treated,[ ] and shall have yet a word to say here. of the beaumont-fletcher plays the distinctive dramaturgy as well as the essential poetry are beaumont's, and these are worthy of the praise bestowed by his youthful contemporary, john earle: so new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon, and all so born within thyself, thine own. _the maske_, _the woman-hater_, and _the knight of the burning pestle_ should appear in a volume bearing beaumont's name. and for the partnership of beaumont and fletcher, perhaps, some day, some publisher will further justice do and print their _six_ plays in one volume too. footnotes: [ ] thorndike, _influence of b. and f._, p. . [ ] _the fellows and followers of shakespeare_, part two, in _representative english comedies_, vol. iii, now in press. chapter xxviii did the beaumont 'romance' influence shakespeare? richard flecknoe, in his _discourse of the english stage_, , thinking rather of the romantic and ornamented quality of beaumont and fletcher's plays, "full of fine flowers," than of any anticipation in them of the love and honour of plays of the restoration, says that they were the first to write "in the heroick way." symonds calls them the "inventors of the heroical romance." and lately professor thorndike[ ] and others have conjectured that the shakespeare of _cymbeline_, _winter's tale_, and _the tempest_ was following the lead of the two younger dramatists in what is attributed to them as a new style of 'dramatic romance' in his dramas. the argument is that _philaster_ (acted before october , ) preceded _cymbeline_ (acted between april , and may , ), and suggested to shakespeare a radical change of dramatic method, first manifest in _cymbeline_. and that five other "romances by beaumont and fletcher," _foure playes in one_, _thierry and theodoret_, _the maides tragedy_, _cupid's revenge_ and _a king and no king_, constituting with _philaster_ a distinctly new type of drama, were in all probability acted before the close of , and similarly influenced the method of _the winter's tale_ and _the tempest_, also of . before discussing the theory of shakespeare's indebtedness to _philaster_ and its "beaumont-fletcher" successors, i should like to file a two-fold protest; first, against the use of the word 'romance' for any kind of dramatic production, whatever. 'romance' applies to narrative of heroic, marvellous, and imaginative content, not to drama. _the maides tragedy_ and _cupid's revenge_ are not romances; they are romantic tragedies. _philaster_, _a king and no king_, and _cymbeline_ are, of course, romantic; but specifically they are melodramatic tragicomedies of heroic cast. _pericles_, _the winter's tale_, and _the tempest_ are romantic comedies of marvel or adventure. nothing is gained in criticism by giving them a name which applies, in english, strictly to narrative, or by regarding them as of a different dramatic species from the romantic dramas of greene and shakespeare that preceded them. i object, in the second place, to the grouping of the six plays said to constitute "a distinctly new type of drama" under the denomination "dramatic romances of beaumont _and_ fletcher"; for in some of them beaumont had no hand, and in others, the most important, fletcher's contribution of romantic novelty is altogether secondary, mostly immaterial. with _thierry and theodoret_, for instance, thus loosely called a "beaumont-fletcher romance," it is not proved that beaumont had anything to do. the drama displays nothing of his vocabulary, rhetoric or poetry. it is a later production by fletcher, massinger, and probably one other; and is the only play of this tragic-idyllic-romantic type attempted by fletcher after beaumont had ceased writing. in three of the _foure playes in one_, beaumont does not appear. he may possibly be traced in three scenes of _the triumph of love_; but with no certainty. fletcher, on the other hand, had very little to do with the three great dramas of sensational romance which form the core of the group in question, _philaster_, _the maides tragedy_, and _a king and no king_. as i have shown, he contributed not more than four scenes to _philaster_, four to _the maides tragedy_, and five to _a king and no king_. and, with the exception of two spectacularly violent scenes in _the maides tragedy_, his contribution, so far as writing goes, is supplementary dialogue and histrionic by-play. whatever is essentially novel, vital, and distinctive is by beaumont. to _cupid's revenge_ beaumont's contribution was slighter in volume, but without it the play would lack its distinctive quality. if we must cling to the misnomer 'romance' for any group of plays which may have influenced shakespeare's later comedies, let us limit the group to its beaumont core, and speak of the 'beaumont romance.' the express novelty in technique of the six arbitrarily selected, so-called 'beaumont-fletcher romances' is supposed to lie in the dramatic adaptation of certain sensational properties more suitable to narrative fiction; especially in the attempt to heighten interest by adding to the legitimate portrayal of character under stress and strain (as in tragedy), or of character in amusing maladjustment with social convention (as in comedy), the portrayal of vicissitudes of fortune; and in the attempt to enhance the thrills appropriate to tragic and comic appeal by such an amalgamation of the two as shall cause the spectator to run up and down the whole gamut of emotional sensibility. in the realm of tragedy the accentuation of the possibilities of suspense, whether by beaumont or any other, would be a novelty merely of degree. _cupid's revenge_, and _the triumph of death_ (in the _foure playes in one_) could hardly have impressed the author of _romeo and juliet_ and _hamlet_ as in this respect astounding innovations; and _the maides tragedy_ does not, so far as i can determine, sacrifice the unities of interest and effect for enhancement and variety of emotional thrill. in any case, it would be necessary to date _timon_, _antony_, and _coriolanus_, two or three years later than the fact, if one desired to prove that any shakespearian tragedy was influenced by a beaumont-fletcher exaggeration of suspense. whatever exaggeration may exist had already been practised by shakespeare himself. if a beaumont-fletcher novelty influenced shakespeare, that novelty must have lain in the transference of tragic suspense to the realm of romantic comedy with all its minor aesthetic appeals, and it would consequently be limited to their tragicomedies, _philaster_ and _a king and no king_. the tragicomic masques in the _foure playes in one_, that of _honour_ and that of _death_, are too insignificant to warrant consideration; and beaumont had nothing to do with them. in determining the indebtedness, if any, of _cymbeline_ to _philaster_ we lack the assistance of authentic dates of composition. the plays were acted about the same time,--_philaster_ certainly, _cymbeline_ perhaps, before october , . beaumont and fletcher's play may have been written as early as ; shakespeare's also as early as or : in fact, there are critics who assign parts of it to . with regard to the relative priority of _cymbeline_ and _a king and no king_, we are more fortunate in our knowledge. the former had certainly been acted by may , ; the latter was not even licensed until that year, and was not performed at court till december . the probabilities are altogether in favour of a date of composition later than that of _cymbeline_. but that shakespeare's _cymbeline_ and his later romantic dramas betray any consciousness of the existence of _philaster_ and its succeeding _king and no king_ has not been proved. save for the more emphatic employment of the masque and its accessories of dress and scenic display, of the combination of idyllic, romantic, and sensational elements of material, and the heightened uncertainty of dénouement, all naturally suggested by the demands of jacobean taste, no variation is discoverable in the course of shakespeare's dramatic art. and in these respects i find no extrinsic novelty, no momentous change--nothing in _philaster_ and _a king and no king_ that had not been anticipated by shakespeare. _cymbeline_, _the winter's tale_, and _the tempest_ are but the flowering of potentialities latent in the _two gentlemen of verona_ and _as you like it_, _much ado about nothing_ and _twelfth night_, _all's well that ends well_ and _measure for measure_--latent in the story of apollonius of tyre, and unavoidable in its dramatization as _pericles_, a play that was certainly not influenced by the methods of _philaster_. if in his later romantic dramas shakespeare borrowed any hint of technique from the beaumont contribution to the 'romances,' he was but borrowing back what beaumont had borrowed from him or from sources with which shakespeare was familiar when beaumont was still playing nursery miracles of the passion with his brothers in the gethsemane garden at grace-dieu. shakespeare's later comedies are a legitimate development of his peculiar dramatic art. beaumont's tragicomedies, with all their poetic and idyllic beauty and dramatic individuality, are novel, so far as construction goes, only in their emphasized employment of the sensational properties and methods mentioned above. their characteristic, when compared with that of shakespeare's last group of comedies, is melodramatic rather than romantic. they set, in fine, as did chapman's _gentleman usher_, and shakespeare's _measure for measure_ and _all's well that ends well_, an example which, abused, led to the decadence of elizabethan romantic comedy. the resemblance between _philaster_ and _cymbeline_, such as it is, is closer than that between _philaster_ and the shakespearian successors of _cymbeline_,--_the winter's tale_ and _the tempest_. but the common features of all these plays, the juxtaposition of idyllic scenes and interest with those of royalty, the combination of sentimental, tragic, and comic incentives to emotion, the false accusations of unchastity and the resulting jealousy, intrigue, and crime, the wanderings of an innocent and distressed woman in boy's clothing, the romantic localization, did not appear first in either _philaster_ or _cymbeline_. _philaster_ and _cymbeline_ follow numerous clues in the idyllic-comic of _love's labour's lost_ and _midsummer-night's dream_; in the idyllic-romantic-pathetic of _two gentlemen of verona_, _as you like it_, and _twelfth night_; and for that matter in the materials furnished by greene, lodge, sidney, sannazzaro, montemayor, bandello, cinthio and boccaccio; and in the romantic and tragicomic fusion already attempted in _much ado_, _all's well_, and _measure for measure_. for the character and the trials of imogen, shakespeare did not require the inspiration of a beaumont. he had been busied with the figure of innogen (as he then called her) as early as ; for in the quarto of _much ado_ she appears by sheer accident in a stage direction as the wife of the leonato of that play. he had been using the sources from which _cymbeline_ is drawn,--holinshed and boccaccio, and that early romantic drama, _fidele and fortunio_,--before _philaster_ was written. and it is much more likely that the belarius of shakespeare and the bellario of beaumont were both suggested by the bellaria of greene's _pandosto_, than that shakespeare borrowed from beaumont. nor is shakespeare likely to have been indebted to beaumont's example for the sensational manner of the dénouement in _cymbeline_--the succession of fresh complications and false starts by which suspense is sustained. these are precisely the features that distinguish those scenes of _pericles_ which by the consensus of critics are assigned to shakespeare; and _pericles_ was written by , at least as early as _philaster_, and in all probability earlier. in his story of marina, shakespeare is merely pursuing the sensational methods of _measure for measure_ and anticipating those of _the winter's tale_. in general, the plot lies half-way between the tragicomic possibilities of the _comedy of errors_, _twelfth night_, _all's well_, and _measure for measure_, and the romantic manipulation of _cymbeline_ and the later plays. in fine, there is closer resemblance between _cymbeline_ and half a dozen of shakespeare's earlier comedies, than between _cymbeline_ and _philaster_; and it might more readily be shown that the author of _philaster_ was indebted to those half-dozen plays, than shakespeare to _philaster_. the differences between the beaumont 'romances' and shakespeare's later romantic comedies are in fact more vital than the similarities. in _philaster_, _the maides tragedy_, and _a king and no king_ the central idea is of contrast between sentimental love and unbridled lust, and this gives rise to misunderstanding, intrigue, and violence. in shakespeare's later comedies the central motive is altogether different: it is of disappearance and discovery. the disappearance is occasioned by false accusation or conspiracy. in _pericles_, _cymbeline_, and _the winter's tale_, the dramatic interest revolves about the pursuit of a lost wife or child, the wanderings and trials of the heroine, and her recovery;[ ] in _the tempest_, about the disappearance and discovery of the ousted duke and his daughter. there is no resemblance between beaumont's love-lorn maidens in page's garb pursuing the unconscious objects of their affection and shakespeare's joyous girls and traduced wives. nor is there in shakespeare's later comedies any analogue to the sensual passion of the 'beaumont and fletcher romances,' to their bachas, megras, and evadnes, their ultra-sentimental philasters, their blunt soldier-counselors and boastful poltroons. pisanio and cloten have respectively no kinship with dion and pharamond. what appears to be novel in _pericles_ and its shakespearian successors, the somewhat melodramatic dénouement, is, as i have said, but the modification of the playwright's well-known methods in conformity with the contemporary demand for more highly seasoned fare. but, in essence, the dramatic careers of imogen and hermione, are no more sensational than those of their older sisters, hero, helena, and isabella. and what is most evidently not novel with shakespeare in his later romantic comedies,--the consistent dramatic interaction between crisis and character,--is precisely what the 'beaumont-fletcher romances' do not always possess. beaumont's characterization at its best, with all its naturalness, compelling pathos, poignancy, and abandon is lyrical or idyllic rather than dramatic; fletcher's is expository and histrionic--of manners rather than the man. beaumont did not influence shakespeare. and if not beaumont, then certainly not fletcher; for in the actual composition of the core of the so-called 'beaumont-fletcher romances' fletcher's share was altogether subordinate; and since after the dissolution of the partnership he attempted but one romantic tragic drama of that particular kind, _thierry and theodoret_,--and that a clumsy failure,--it must be concluded that in the designing of those 'romances' his share was even less significant. but to appreciate the contribution of beaumont to elizabethan drama, and his place in literary history, it is fortunately not necessary to assume that he diverted from its natural course the dramatic technique of a master, twenty years his senior and for twenty years before beaumont began to write, intimately acquainted with the conditions of the stage,--the acknowledged playwright of the most successful of theatrical companies and, in spite of changing fashions, the most steadily progressive and popular dramatic artist of the early jacobean period. with regard to beaumont it is marvel sufficient, that between his twenty-fifth and his twenty-eighth year of age he should have elaborated in dramatic art, even with the help of fletcher, so striking a combination of preceding models, and have infused into the resulting heroic-romantic type such fresh poetic vigour and verve of movement. footnotes: [ ] _the influence of beaumont and fletcher on shakespeare_, . see m. w. sampson's critique in _j. ger. phil._, ii, . [ ] see morton luce, _hand book to shakespeare's works_, p. . chapter xxix conclusion beaumont's poetic virtues are his peculiar treasure; but the dramatic method of his heroic-romantic plays lent itself lightly to imitation and debasement. not so much _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_, which respect the unities of interest and effect, as _philaster_, _the coxcombe_, and _cupid's revenge_, to which fletcher's contribution of captivating theatrical 'business' and device was more considerable. some of these plays, and some of shakespeare's, too, and of marston's, and chapman's, and webster's, paved the way for the heroic play of the restoration--a melodramatic development of tragicomedy and sentimental tragedy, in which philandering sentiment, strained and histrionic passion, took the place of romantic love and virile conflict,--a drama in which an affected view of life tinged crisis and character alike, an unreasoning devotion to royalty or some other chivalric ideal obscured personal dignity and moral responsibility, and the thrill of surprise dissipated the catharsis, proper to art, whether tragic or comic. upon the future of the comedy of intrigue and manners, beaumont exercised no distinctive influence. in plays like _the coxcombe_ and _the scornful ladie_, the genius of fletcher dominated the scenes of lighter dialogue and comic complication. and it is through comedies of intrigue and manners written by fletcher alone or in company with others, especially massinger, that fletcher's individual genius exercised most influence on the subsequent history of the drama. the characteristics which won theatrical preëminence for his romantic comedies, heroic tragicomedies and tragedies, written after the cessation of beaumont's activity, were a fletcherian vivacity of dialogue, a fletcherian perfection of 'business,' and a fletcherian exaggeration of the tragicomic spirit and technique of which, in the days of the beaumont-fletcher partnership, beaumont had availed himself but which he, still, by virtue of his critical faculty, had held somewhat in restraint. from the time of prynne's _histriomastix_, , there have been critics who have pointed to the gradual deterioration of the stage which, beginning, say some, with plays of shakespeare himself, continued through beaumont and fletcher to the drama of the restoration. flecknoe, rymer, coleridge, lamb, swinburne, ward, have commented upon phases of the phenomenon. and, recently, one of our most judicious contemporary essayists has in a series of articles developed the theme.[ ] i heartily concur with the scholarly and well-languaged editor of _the nation_, in many of his conclusions concerning the general history of this decline; and i have already in this book availed myself with profit of some of his suggestions. i agree with him that the downfall of tragedy began when "the theme was altered from a single master passion to a number of loosely coördinated passions, thus relaxing the rigidity of tragic structure and permitting the fancy to play more intimately through all the emotions"; that this degeneration may be traced to the time "when ecclesiastical authority was broken by scepticism and knowledge, and the soul was left with all its riches of imagination and emotion, but with the principle of individual responsibility discredited and the fibre of self-government relaxed"; that "the consequences may be seen in the italy of the sixteenth century"; and that "the result is that drama of the court which, besides its frequent actual indecency, is at heart so often non-moral and in the higher artistic sense incomprehensible." but when he ascribes this alteration of the theme of tragedy from a single master passion to a number of "loosely coördinated passions" to our "twin dramatists," and cites as his example _the maides tragedy_ in which, as he sees it, we have "but a succession of womanly passions, each indeed cunningly conceived and expressed, but giving us in the end nothing we can grasp as a whole and comprehend";--and says that evadne is "no woman at all, unless mere random passionateness can be accounted such," i shake my head in sad demurrer. first, because, as i have tried to show above, evadne is anything but an incomprehensible embodiment of unmotived passions, and _the maides tragedy_ anything but a "loosely coördinated" concern, and secondly, because i disfavour this attribution of the decadence of tragedy, or of comedy, for that matter, to our _twin_ dramatists. to substantiate such a charge it would be incumbent upon the critic to prove not only that the decadence is indubitably visible in the joint-work of beaumont and fletcher, but that it is specifically visible in beaumont's, as in fletcher's, contribution to that work, and also, that it was not already patent in the dramatic productions of their seniors; that it was not patent in heywood's _royall king and loyall subject_, for instance; in the "glaring colours" of chapman's _bussy d'ambois_, and in his _gentleman usher_ with its artificial atmosphere of courtly romance, its melodramatic reverses and surprises, its huddling up of poetic justice; in the sensational devices, passionate unrealities and sepulchral action of marston's _malcontent_, the sophistical theme and callous pornography of his _dutch courtezan_, and in the inhuman imaginings of his _insatiate countess_; that it was not patent in the heartless irresponsibility and indecency of middleton, and in the inartistic warping of tragic situations to comic solutions that characterize his early romantic plays; that it was not patent in the poisonous exhalations, the wildering of sympathy, and the disproportioned art that characterize the _white devil_ of their immediate contemporary, john webster. the decadence was hastened by fletcher; but not in any distinctive degree by beaumont. i second mr. more's commendation of prynne's "philosophic criticism of that 'men in theatres are so far from sinne-lamenting sorrow, that they even delight themselves with the representations of those wickednesses,'" but i deplore the application of that criticism to _beaumont_ and fletcher, as that "_they_ loosed the bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere bundle of irresponsibilities." many of fletcher's excesses and defects not only in the plays written with beaumont, but in plays written after his death, have been conferred from the day of flecknoe to the present upon beaumont. there is very little "sinne-lamenting sorrow" in the _valentinian_ of fletcher, or of fletcher and massinger, and very little in fletcher's _wife for a month_; but in many of beaumont's scenes in _the maides tragedy_, and _a king and no king_, and _the coxcombe_ the genuine accents of "sinne-lamenting sorrow" are heard. fletcher certainly "loosed the bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere bundle of irresponsibilities," but not beaumont. let the reader turn to that poet's scenes in the joint-plays (two-thirds of the great ones) as i have indicated them, or to what i have unrolled of beaumont's mental habit, and judge for himself.[ ] the concession of the essayist from whom, as a representative of enlightened modern opinion upon the subject, i have been quoting,--that "as fletcher's work stands, he may appear utterly devoid of conscience, a man to whom our human destinies were mere toys," i hail with delight, although i think that fletcher the man had more honest ideals than fletcher the dramatist. but, as a critic, i resent the surmise that fletcher "was by nature of a manlier, sounder fibre than beaumont." in the heroic-romantic comedy, _the humorous lieutenant_, fletcher displays, indeed, as mr. more says, "a strain almost like that of shakespeare, upon whom he manifestly modelled himself in everything except shakespeare's serious insight into human motives." but does that play reveal anything of manlier, sounder fibre than beaumont's _a king and no king_? written in _the humorous lieutenant_ has enduring vitality, though not because of its tragicomic presupposition; for the wars and rumours of war are rhetorical or humorous, the devilish design of the king upon the chastity of the heroine is predestined to failure,--and the announcement of her death, but a dramatic device which may impose upon the credulity of her noble lover but not upon the audience. in the ms. of it is styled "a pleasant comedie"; and such it is, of 'humour' and romantic love, upon a background of the heroic. it is fletcher's best comedy of the kind; one of the best of the later shakespearian age. the conception of the lieutenant, whose humour is to fight when he is plagued by loathsome disease and to wench when he is well, is not original, nor is the character of the hero demetrius; but in the elaboration fletcher has created these characters anew, has surrounded them with half a dozen other figures no less life-like, and has set them in a plot, cunningly welded of comic, sentimental, and martial elements, and captivatingly original. though the interest is partly in a wanton intrigue, and the mirth grossly carnal even when not bawdy, i think that the objectionable qualities are, for almost the only time in fletcher's career in comedy, not ineradicable. the wondrous charm, "matchless spirit," vivacity, and constancy of celia render the machinations of the procuress, leucippe, and her "office of concealments" futile,--so much dramatic realism to be accentuated or mitigated at the will of the stage manager;--and the alluring offers of the king are but so many weapons for his own defeat. if the lieutenant were not an indissoluble compound of hero, swashbuckler, shirker, and "stinkard," i fear, indeed, that he would lose his savour. but the love of rabelaisian humour is, after all, ingrained in the male of the species, and if the license be not nauseating it is not necessarily damnable. this boisterous, pocky rascal who "never had but two hours yet of happiness," and who courts the battlefield to save him "from the surgeon's miseries," held the stage from the time of condel, taylor, and lowin, to that of macready and liston, and there is no reason why his vitality should not be perennial. there are few more laughable scenes in farcical literature than those in which, having drained a philtre intended to make celia dote upon the king, the lieutenant imagines himself to be a handsome wench of fifteen, wooes the king most fatuously, even kisses the royal horses as they pass by. the meeting and the parting, the trials and the reunion, of celia and demetrius constitute the most convincing and attractive romantic-pathetic love-affairs in jacobean drama since shakespeare had ceased to write. indeed, this "perilous crafty," spirited, "angel-eyed" girl "too honest for them all" who so ingeniously and modestly shames the lustful monarch and wins her affianced prince is not unworthy of the master. nor is demetrius. the play contains many genuinely poetic passages, and some of those lines of meteoric beauty--"our lives are but our marches to the grave"--in which beaumont abounded, and that fletcher too rarely coined. with all the rankness of its humour, the play has such literary and dramatic excellence that one cannot but regret the infrequency with which fletcher produced that of which he was capable. but even this best of fletcher's heroic-dramatic plays contains, as mr. more has observed, "one of those sudden conversions which make us wonder whether in his heart he felt any difference between a satyr-like lust and a chaste love--the conversion of the lecherous old king." i grant fletcher's surpassing excellence in comedy, especially the comedy of manners and intrigue as, for instance, _the chances_ and the _rule a wife and have a wife_, and i have elsewhere acknowledged his supremacy after shakespeare in that realm. but we are now considering not that kind of composition or its technique, but the fibre which might be expected to show itself in compositions involving the element of seriousness. _the humorous lieutenant_ is of that kind,--it is called a tragicomedy by some. has it one tithe of the serious insight into human life of any of beaumont's plays involving ethical conflict? inquiring further into the fibre of fletcher, let us pass in brief review another play, a genuine tragicomedy this time, _a wife for a month_, written the year before he died, of whose heroine mr. more says that "from every point of view, ethical and artistic, she is one of the most finely drawn and truest women in the whole range of english drama." the complication, here, assuredly affords opportunity for the display of sound and manly fibre; and the tragicomedy is instructive in more ways than one: it illustrates fletcher's skill in construction and his disregard of probability; his sense of moral conflict and his insensibility to moral beauty; his power to conceive characteristic situations and his impotence to construct natural characters; his capability of noble sentiment and poetic expression and his beastly perverseness of fancy, his prostitution of art to sordid sensationalism. the story of the cumulative torments to which a lustful usurper subjects the maiden, evanthe, whom he desires, and valerio whom she loves, is graphically estimated by one of the _dramatis personae_,--"this tyranny could never be invented but in the school of hell: earth is too innocent." beside it zola's _l'assommoir_ smells sweet, and a nightmare lacks nothing of probability. ugly, however, as the fundamental assumption is: namely, that the tyrant should permit a wedding on condition that at the end of a month the husband shall suffer death,--and with provision that meanwhile the honeymoon shall be surrounded with restriction more intolerable than death itself; and incredible as is the contrivance of the sequel,--kept a-going by the suppression of instinct and commonsense on the part of the hero, and withheld from its proper tragic conclusion by miraculous cure, an impossible conversion, and an unnatural clemency,--the plot is after all deftly knit, and the interest sustained with baleful fascination. but it would be difficult to instance in jacobean drama a more incongruous juxtaposition of complication morally conceived, and execution callously vulgarized, than that offered by the scene between valerio and evanthe on their wedding-night. in the corresponding scene of _the maides tragedy_ (ii, ), beaumont had created a model: amintor bears himself with dignity toward his shameless and contemptuous bride. but in fletcher's play it is this "most finely drawn and truest woman" that makes the advances; and she makes them not only without dignity, but with an unmaidenly persistence and persuasiveness of which any abandoned 'baggage' or russian actress of to-day might be ashamed. and, still, the dramatist is never weary of assuring us that she is the soul of "honour mingled with noble chastity," and clad in "all the graces" that nature can give. in the various other trying situations in which evanthe is placed it is requisite to our conviction of reality that she be the "virtuous bud of beauty": but the tongue of this "bud" blossoms into billingsgate, she swears "something awful," and she displays an acquaintance with sexual pathology that would delight the heart even of the most rabid twentieth-century advocate of sex-hygiene for boys and girls in coëducational public schools. two or three of the characters are nobly conceived and, on occasion, contrive to utter themselves with nobility. valerio achieves a poetry infrequent in fletcher's plays when he says of the shortness of his prospective joys: "a paradise, as thou art, my evanthe, is only made to wonder at a little, enough for human eyes, and then to wander from,"-- and when he describes the graces of spiritual love. and the queen's thoughts upon death, though melodramatic, have something of the dignity of beaumont's style. but the minds of the principal personages reflect not only the flashing current but the turbid estuaries of fletcher's thought. the passion, save for valerio's, is lurid, and the humour latrinal. to sketch the bestial even in narrative, however fleeting, is inartistic; to fix it on canvas is offensive; to posture it upon the stage is unpardonable. the last is practically what fletcher has done here; and the wonder is that he appears to think that he is justifying virtue. no; fletcher had not the fibre of beaumont even when he was writing with him; and he did not achieve "a manlier, sounder fibre," after beaumont had ceased, and he had swung into the brilliant orbit which he rounded as sole luminary of the stage. i object again,--and the reader who has followed the exposition of the preceding pages will, i hope, object with me,--to the dictum of a german writer of this latter day, that the reason of the degeneracy of _beaumont_ and fletcher, ethically, "seems to lie in the narrowing of the drama from a national interest to the flattery of a courtly caste." mr. more opines that such an explanation should not be pressed too far; and he suggests that one reason why "we are unable to comprehend many of the persons upon the stage of beaumont and fletcher" is that we are similarly unable to comprehend "the more typical men and women who were playing the actual drama of the age." so far as fletcher's _dramatis personae_ are concerned, there is truth in this; but why couple beaumont with him? if you omit a character or two in _the woman-hater_, which was a youthful _jeu d'esprit_, you shall find very few incomprehensible figures among those of beaumont's creation. and as to the german mentioned above, dr. aronstein, what "flattery of a courtly caste" can he possibly detect in beaumont's satire upon favourites in _the woman-hater_; in that burlesque of bourgeois affectations, _the knight of the burning pestle_ (the court, too, was still reading the literature there satirized); or in his philaster, who was a rebel; or in his amintor of _the maides tragedy_, whose fate hinged upon his shuffling subservience to a king, or in the king himself on whom god sends "unlookt-for sudden death," because of his lust; or in his king arbaces, whose general has "not patience to looke on whilst you runne these forbidden courses"; or in his scenes of _cupid's revenge_, which scourge the vices of the court; or in his sir roger and mistress abigail and her scornful lady,--or in his ricardo and viola, who are just a lover and his lass, and have never dreamed of court or king at all? i wonder whether it may not be possible for us henceforth to give to fletcher, and the whole fletcherian syndicate,--the massingers, fields, middletons and rowleys, dabornes, and the rest,--the praise and the blame for what they produced, but eliminate beaumont from the award. one grows weary of the attribution to him of moral irresponsibilities and extravagances in art of which he was, in all that we have learned of his breeding, life, and mental habit the implicit opponent--very much like his brother sir john,--and of the opposite of which he was in his poetic and dramatic output, as i have minutely demonstrated, the professed exponent. in the broad daylight of philological science and modern historical criticism we should no longer regard beaumont-and-fletcher as an indivisible pair of siamese twins, constructing with all four hands at once the fabric of fifty-three plays, or even of ten, and tongue-and-grooving the boards with such diabolic deftness that each artisan shall for ever be credited with the merits and defects of both. it is, at any rate, time that the world of scholars,--and then the world of readers may follow,--render unto cæsar the things that are cæsar's. as for cæsar, we concede to him, john fletcher, once for all, as he may be read in his independent work, by one even running, artistic virtues numerous and brilliant:[ ] gaiety, wit, sprightly dialogue; mastery of stage-craft,--of all the devices of captivating plot and rattling 'business,' and all the conventions and theatrically legitimate clap-trap of dramatic types and humours, hallowed by success, adored by the actor, and darling to the public. we concede skill in the weaving of romantic complications, captivatingly cunning, and in the construction of situations irresistibly ludicrous; remarkable inventiveness of sensational adventure and spectacular scene and attractive setting; realism at every turn, and an ability to portray manners, varied and minute. above all, we admire, and thankfully rejoice in, his smoothness of mechanism, his lightness of touch, his contrivance and manipulation of pure comedy--whether of manners or intrigue,--and in his world of characters, not only laughter-compelling, but endowed with humour themselves and sworn to the enthronement of the spirit of mirth. on the other hand we read on every page of fletcher's independent contribution to english drama what, perhaps, was not the man himself, but his dramaturgic pose--still for the world the essence of the fletcher who ruled it from the stage:[ ] we read his "shallowness of moral nature," his acquiescence in the ethical apathy and cynicism of the time; his indelicacy; his indifference to, if not irreverence for, the dramatic proprieties,--his subservience to popular taste and favour in an age when "the theatre had ceased to be the expression of patriotism and of the national life and had become the amusement of the idle gentleman and of such members of the lower classes as were not kept away by the puritan disapproval of the stage." we witness with amusement but with self-reproach his presentation of characters superficial, and superficially refracting the evanescent vanities and heartless vices of jacobean london, as if representative of actual and general life; his play of emotions feigned or sentimental; his violent contrasts, unnatural conversions, impossible revolutions of fortune; we discern the absence of subtle intuition, the failure to effect profound and lasting impression, the "lack of seriousness and of spiritual poise." we note, in the heroic-romantic dramas, improbability and extravagance; and, in the tragedies, such as _valentinian_, a total disregard of the unity of interest,--just that muddling of motives of which the editor of _the nation_ has written,--and therefore the failure to realize unity of effect. there has been no moral sequence: the suspense has been distracted by the variety of emotions stirred. after the hours of strain to which the spectator has imaginatively subjected himself, the relief--what aristotle calls the catharsis--is not forthcoming: because the intellect has not been clarified but fuddled; the will has not been braced; the feelings appropriate to tragedy--of pity and of fear--have not enjoyed an unthwarted, undiverted outflow. the faculties have been tantalized by manifold, deceptive, agonies of thirst. they should have been centred in one yearning, conducted to one clear spring of medicament, and purged by waters of truth, justice, and sympathy. from fletcher's _valentinian_ and _bonduca_ despite the poetry and the onrush of the dramatic action there proceeds no calm, "all passion spent"; no beauty that is peace. and of the tragicomedies, _the loyall subject_ and _a wife for a month_, this verdict may be even more readily pronounced. such are the excellences and defects of fletcher. let us give him all the glory of the former: but stay from burdening beaumont, who had faults of his own, with responsibility for the latter,--with the unmorality or immorality or extravagant artistry of fletcher when not associated with beaumont. with the vices and virtues of fletcher's rocket, bursting in stellar polychrome, beaumont had nothing to do. to him justice can be accorded only if he, after these three centuries, be considered alone,--not for ever coupled with fletcher, but spoken and thought of, and known, as dramatist, poet, man of far sounder fibre, and more virile marrow,--of superior insight, imagination, and art. next to shakespeare, the most essentially poetic dramatist of the early jacobean period was francis beaumont. he had not the learning of jonson, nor the long career, nor the dictatorial position; nor did he attempt to rival him in comedy, or criticism. but his great poem, _the maides tragedy_ is a thousand times more enthralling and poetic than _sejanus_ or _catiline_. shakespeare always excepted, the only author of tragedy in that day whose intuitions and lines of astounding splendour at all compete with, sometimes surpass, beaumont's is webster; but the fascination of his _duchess of malfy_ is lurid, miasmatic, stupefying; that of _the maides tragedy_, breathless and heart-breaking. in the drama of mingled motive, jonson produced but one masterpiece that in poetry, valiancy of design, and portrayal of the ridiculous, equals beaumont's _a king and no king_,--the _volpone_; but that is not tragicomedy, and it drips venom. all that stands between _a king and no king_ and artistic perfection is the dénouement. if the lovers had died, their struggle against temptation still continuing, their passion unfulfilled,--if in the moment of death, they had discovered that their union were no incest after all, beaumont would have left behind him another consummate tragedy. as it is, to find a parallel in jacobean literature, outside of shakespeare, one must turn to ford's _'tis a pity, she's a whore_. there again with poetic effulgence the problem of incest is dramatized; but how half-hearted the struggle, insincere the moral,--the poetry, purple and unconvincing! in romantic comedy, between and , others have produced plays which from the dramatic point of view equal _philaster_,--dekker, heywood, marston, chapman, middleton, and rowley. not all even of shakespeare's romantic comedies come up to _philaster_ in literary or dramatic excellence; but only shakespeare has written what surpasses it. in the comedy that delineates humours, _the woman-hater_, as regards both poetry and technique, falls below several plays of dekker, chapman, marston, middleton, and jonson, and below the earlier efforts of shakespeare; but in characterization it is as good as some of shakespeare's. there is no comic figure in _love's labour's lost_, the _two gentlemen of verona_, or the _comedy of errors_, that surpasses beaumont's hungry courtier; and the humorous dialogue and the prose as a whole of _the woman-hater_ are more natural, and more intelligible to the modern ear. with shakespeare's later comedies that in any degree avail themselves of the 'humours' element, or with jonson's masterpieces in this kind, _the woman-hater_, of course, can not be placed in comparison. but if for the nonce, we consider beaumont's _knight of the burning pestle_, merely in its 'humours' aspect, we must acknowledge that its characters are as clear-cut, as typical of the time and as provocative of laughter as those of _every man in his humour_, which for all its historic significance most people nowadays read, or might read, with a yawn; and that it is less artificial in construction, more human in motive and character, more modern in mirth than _the silent woman_,--even though the object of its ridicule be now _caviare_ to the general. to set beaumont's burlesque as a comedy of manners beside any of shakespeare's comedies from down, would be futile, but of the early shakespearian plays mentioned above none shakes more with fun than _the knight of the burning pestle_, and not one gives us the flavour of london,--its citizens, their affectations and ideals, their reading, habits and life,--or of england, that the _knight_ affords in every scene. if shakespeare instead of writing, say, the _comedy of errors_ had written _the knight of the burning pestle_, scholars would now be flooding us with _variorum_ editions of it, women's literary clubs would be likening him with fervour to cervantes, and the public might be so well educated to its allusions and ideas that our hebrew emperors of the theatrical world and arbiters of dramatic vogue would be "starring" it through the country to the delight of audiences that wisely make a show of understanding and enjoying everything that shakespeare wrote. to what unrealized extent the fate of plays hangs upon the tradition of the green-room, the actor's whim, the manager's enterprise or ignorance, and luck, is material for an essay in itself. i am not asserting that _the knight of the burning pestle_ pretends to poetry, as do all of shakespeare's plays; but that for chuckling and side-long mirth, and for manners and insight into the life of a rarely interesting period, it is fine comedy, while as burlesque it is equalled by few of the kind in our language and excelled by none. it may be true that burlesques lose their flavour with the passing of their victims. but that does not hold true of the drama of problems perennially recurring and of emotions common to men of every age and clime. of such drama are _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_. they are not antiquated. and i doubt whether they are stronger meat than some of shakespeare's plays, all of which are more or less 'arranged' before they are placed upon the modern stage. as to strong meat, the difference between the elizabethan taste and the present georgian is more a matter of variety than of flavour. our forefathers liked their venison in gobbets, for three hours at a stretch, and washed it down with a tun or two of sack. the theatre-going public to-day likes its game just as high, but it varies the meal with other dishes as highly seasoned,--and washes it down with a foreign-labeled little bottle of champagne. our ancestors called a depraved woman by a brief bad name, and put it into poetry. we denominate her, if at all, by some euphemistic circumlocution, in prose; but we none the less throng the theatre to see dalilah play, and we follow with apparent gusto her sinuous enticements upon the stage. we rejoice in problem-plays more erotic, and far more subtly perilous, than those which shakespeare and beaumont beheld. we are of an age of uplift, and meticulous reform. we would eliminate fornication and adultery; but not from our plays. they teem with--suggestion. there is nothing neurotic, nothing insidious in _the maides tragedy_ and _a king and no king_. the grave of sin is wide open; and the spade that digged it stands in plain view, and is called a spade. on the whole i had rather have the anglo-saxon bluntness and gleaming poetry of the beaumont than the whitewashed epigram and miching-mallecho of the twentieth-century play i saw last night. there is no reason why, properly cut and staged, beaumont's greatest plays should not yield delight to-day. and as for the reader why should he not turn back to "the inexhaustible treasures" of entertainment offered by these plays. "they were," as says mr. paul elmer more, "they were to the elizabethan age what the novel is to ours, and i wonder how many readers three centuries from now will go back to our fiction for amusement as we to-day can go back to beaumont and fletcher." i began this book by quoting from an historian of the drama of marked repute: "in the argo of the elizabethan drama--as it presents itself to the imagination of our own latter days--shakespeare's is and must remain the commanding figure. next to him sit the twin literary heroes, beaumont and fletcher--more or less vaguely supposed to be inseparable from one another in their works." and also from the last great poet of the victorian age: "if a distinction must be made between the dioscuri of english poetry, we must admit that beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. only as pollux was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than castor can it be said that on any side beaumont was a poet of higher and purer genius than fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a difference." if i have succeeded in showing that in the fabric of their common work the distinction between beaumont and fletcher is measured by a wide and clearly visible difference, i shall be happy. others, to whom i have repeatedly expressed my indebtedness even when disagreeing with particulars of their criticism, have cleared the way. if in this book anything has been added to their services that may help the world to distinguish these two dramatists not only hand from hand but mind from mind, and to see beaumont plain, as i see him in the long gallery of his contemporaries, i shall be happier still; but most amply rewarded if, for the future, it may be fittingly recognized not only that beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth--the pollux, but why he was. then, perhaps, the world of sagacious readers may turn from talking always of beaumont-and-fletcher, and protest occasionally and with well-informed reason in the name of francis beaumont alone. footnotes: [ ] mr. paul elmer more, _the nation_, n. y., nov. , , april , , may , . [ ] chapters xxii and xxv, above. [ ] they are well presented by miss hatcher in her _john fletcher_; and they are again discussed in my forthcoming third volume of _representative english comedies_. [ ] see again miss hatcher's work, and g. c. macaulay, _francis beaumont, a critical study_, especially pp. - ; and my essay on _the fellows and followers of shakespeare_ (part two) in the volume mentioned above. appendix genealogical tables table a. plantagenet, comyn, beaumont, and villiers. the earls of buchan | henry iii agnes, heiress de | of england, beaumont in maine, | b. ; d. m. louis de brienne alexander | | comyn | henry, baron de | henry, beaumont, == alice comyn earl of lancaster fl. ; d. | | alianor == john, baron de beaumont, d. | henry, baron de beaumont, fl. ; d. | john, baron de beaumont, fl. ; d. thomas, | ld. bardolph +------+--------------+ | | | | henry, baron de sir thomas joan, beaumont, beaumont, m. sir wm. philip d. m. ( ) philippe | | maureward | | of coleorton | | | elizabeth == john, baron, | and viscount | beaumont, | d. | | +-----------+--------------+ | | sir john | | john villiers, son | beaumont, d. (henry beaumont, +--------------------+ d. | d. towton, ?) | | | | | | | | william son | | | villiers, (john, fl. ?) william, joan, | d. . | visc. and m. john, | | john beaumont lord bardolph, lord lovel | | of grace-dieu, d. , s. p. | | | fl. - ; m. | | | =elizabeth= +----------------+ | | =hastings= | | | | | francis, joan, | | | viscount m. sir bryan | | francis, d. lovel, d. stapleton | | | : | | +---+---+----+ : | | | | | | present barons | | henry | | elizabeth de beaumont | | | | | | john | | | | +-----------------------------+ | =francis= | | | =beaumont= richard b. george b. | - d. | | | william | nicholas | | beaumont anthony | | of glenfield | +---------------+ | | | | | | sir henry, sir thomas, | | d. of stoughton, | | | d. maria, m. | sir. thomas, : sir gen. villiers , : | viscount present | beaumont, baronets george, of swords of coleorton duke of hall =buckingham= - table b nevil, hastings, beaumont, talbot richard nevil, earl of salisbury | +------------+-------+ | | richard, =catherine nevil= == sir. william, earl of warwick baron hastings, | executed +--+-------------+ | | | | isabel, anne, | m. geo. duke m. richard iii | of clarence, +--------------------------+-+-----------+ bro. of edw. iv | | | | edward, sir william, anne, m. margaret, baron hastings hastings =geo. talbot=, countess of d. fl. earl of salisbury, | | shrewsbury m. richard de +---------------+ | | la pole | | | anne, m. | =george=, anne, m. thos. | =geo. talbot=, | earl of stanley, | earl of | huntingdon, earl derby | shrewsbury | c. - , | | | m. anne, | francis, henry de dau. of henry | earl of la pole stafford, | shrewsbury | duke of buckingham | | | | | george, katherine pole == francis, earl | earl of of huntingdon, | shrewsbury - | d. | | | +-------------+----+----------+---------+ | gilbert, | | | | | earl of henry, earl george, walter, m. lady | shrewsbury, of huntingdon earl, joyce roper mary | m. mary - d. (aunt of mrs. hastings | cavendish, | elizab. vaux) | sister-in-law | | | of anne | sir henry hastings | pierrepoint | m. elizab. dau. of thos. | beaumont francis visc. beaumont | | hastings, of swords | +----+--+---+ d. | | | | | | | george, | | | +----------+-------+-------------+ | | | | | | | | john, | | henry, earl, catherine, edward, | | | - , m. m. philip captain | mary, | elizab. dau. of stanhope, under sir | | ferdinando stanley, earl of walter | alethea earl of derby chesterfield raleigh, | | | =elizabeth hastings=, m. c. =john beaumont=, of grace-dieu, (master of the rolls, , d. ) | +----------------+-----------+ | | | francis, henry, elizabeth, c. - d. s. p. m. william the justice ld. vaux m. =anne pierrepoint= of harrowden | | | +------------+-----+--------+ | | | | | henry vaux, eleanor anne vaux | d. c. brookesby (_alias_ | (_alias_ mrs. perkins) | mrs. jennings) fl. | +----------+---+----------------------+-----------------+ | | | | sir henry, sir john, =francis=, elizabeth, m. d. - - , m. thomas seyliard, | ursula isley of kent | | +-----------+---------+ +---+-----+ | | | | | sir john, francis sir thomas elizabeth frances d. (a jesuit) table c. beaumont. pierrepoint. cavendish, talbot. sir william cavendish, sir george m. , elizabeth hardwick pierrepoint, (afterwards wife of george talbot, d. earl of shrewsbury) | | +------+-------+ +------+------+----+----+----+ | | | | | | | | =anne= sir henry | | | | | | =pierrepoint,= pierrepoint, == =frances= | | | | | b. c. ; - | =cavendish= | | | | | widow of thos. | | | | | | thorold of marston; robert elizabeth, | | | | m. ( ) =francis= pierrepoint, m. charles | | | | =beaumont=, - , stuart, | | | | the justice, earl of earl of | | | | d. kingston, lenox, bro. | | | | | m. gertrude, of henry | | | | +----+----+-----+ g-dau. of geo. darnley | | | | | | | | talbot, earl of | | | | | henry | | | shrewsbury | | | | | b. | | | | lady =arabella= | | | | | | | | =stuart= | | | | john | | | cousin of | | | | b. | | | james i. | | | | | | | henry, | | | =francis= | | m. grace | | | b. | | talbot, dau | | | | | of geo. . | | | elizabeth | earl of | | | b. | shrewsbury | | | | | | | +----------------------+ william, | | | | earl of | | henry pierepoint, william pierrepoint devonshire, | | - - in | | earl of kingston, | | | | marq. dorchester | william, | | robert, earl of kingston; - , | | m. elizab., dau. of sir earl of | | john evelyn devonshire; | | | m. christiana | | +-----------------------+ bruce of | | | | kinloss; | | william, earl of evelyn, earl of ancestor | | kingston kingston, of the present | | marq. dorchester; dukes of | | duke of kingston, devonshire | | | | | +---------------------+------+ charles, | | | of welbeck, | mary (lady mary wortley william, d. | montagu) - viscount newark | | | sir wm. | frances, cavendish, | m. philip meadows - . in | | , duke | charles, of newcastle | earl manvers, | of holme-pierrepoint mary, m. =gilbert= =talbot=, earl of shrewsbury (d. ) | +---------------+---+ | | mary, alethea, m. m. wm. herbert, thos. howard, earl earl pembroke of arundel : : present dks of norfolk table d beaumont, vaux, tresham, catesby john beaumont, grace-dieu, sir thomas m. elizabeth nicholas, tresham, hastings lord vaux grand prior, | of harrowden order of | ( ) st. john, +------+ | d. | | thomas, | anthony | | the poet, | catesby francis | lord vaux, john | beaumont, | b. tresham == eleanor d. | | | | | | +------+ | | =william=, | | | =elizabeth= == = lord vaux= == ( ) =mary= | sir robert | =beaumont= | d. | =tresham= | throckmorton | | | | | +-----+ +---+-+----+ | sir thomas +---+ john, | henry | | | tresham == dau. | - | | | | d. | | | | | | | dau. francis | | | +--------+----+ m. sir wm. - | | | =frances= | | catesby | | | =tresham=, | | | eleanor, | | the | | | m. edward | | conspirator, | | | brookesby; | | d. | | | fl. | | | | | | | elizabeth | | =anne vaux= | m. ld. | | (_alias_ mrs. | monteagle, | | perkins), | bro. of | | fl. | mrs. abington | | | | | +--------------------------------+ frances, | | | m. ld | | john, ld. ambrose stourton | | teynham | | | =robert= | +------------+ =catesby= george vaux, | | the conspirator d. , m. =elizabeth roper= | d. . the mrs. (elizabeth) vaux of | the gunpowder plot. | | joyce, +-------+----+ m. walter | | | hastings edward, | | | ld. vaux | | sir henry c. - | | hastings, | | m. elizabeth katherine, | beaumont m. henry | of coleorton nevill, ld. | abergavenny | | mary, ancestress of the present lord vaux table e fletcher, baker, sackville richard fletcher, vicar of sir john baker, cranbrooke, of sissinghurst, fl. - c. - | | +------+-----+ john giffard, of | | | weston-under-edge | dr. giles, richard, | +-----------+--------+ the diplomat; bp. of | | | | c. - london, m. ( ) =maria=, | cicely | | d. ; m. ( ) widow of | m. richard | +---+--+ elizabeth | sir =richard= sackville, | | | holland | =baker= ld. buckhurst, | phineas, | | no children d. earl of | - | | | dorset; | | =john fletcher=, | ( - ) | | the dramatist, | | | | - | robert | giles, | sackville | c. - | earl of | | dorset, | +-------------+------------+ d. | | | | | mary, m. grisogone sir richard cicely | john tufton, m. c. , baker (blunt) | of hothfield, sir henry | | who d. lennard (in sir henry +--------------+ | , lord | | | dacre, of richard edward | chevening earl of earl of | and knole) dorset, dorset, | c. - d. | | sir john tufton, bart., d. | +------------------+ | | anne tufton nicholas m. =francis= earl of =tresham=, thanet, who d. in index index (_the page-numbers refer to the foot-notes as well as to the main body of the text._) abington, mrs., the actress, abington (habington), mrs., sister of lord monteagle, _abuses stript and whipt_, actors, lists preceding plays, _ad comitissam rutlundiae_, addison, joseph, aeschylus, afterthought-parentheses, , _alchemist, the_, , , , , alden, r. m., editions of _the knight_ and _a king and no king_, , , , , , , , , , , alliteration, _all's well that ends well_, , , , , , _amadis de gaule_, , , _amends for ladies_, , , _anatomy of melancholy, the_, anton, robert, _antony and cleopatra_, , , , , _apocrypha, the_, apothegms, _arcadia_, , , , , , ariosto, aristophanes, , aronstein, p., ascham, roger, ashby-de-la-zouch, , , _et passim_ aston, sir walter, , _astrée_, d'urfé, - , 'astrophel,' _as you like it_, , , , aubrey, john, _brief lives_, ed., a. clark, , , , , bacon, sir francis, , , , f., , , _et passim_ bacon, sir nicholas, and anthony, , , baker, sir john of sissinghurst, kent, , ff.; cicely, countess of dorset, , , ; cicely, lady blunt, , ; grisogone, lady dacre, , , baker family, , baker, sir richard, , baker, richard, the historian, , bancroft, bishop, , bancroft, thomas, _two bookes of epigrammes and epitaphs, _, bandello, thomas, banke-side, - , , barkstead, william, _barrons wars, the_, basse, william, , , , _battle of bosworth field, the_, , ( ) baudouin, _le curieux impertinent_, beau manor, ; "beaumanoir," beaumont and fletcher, portraits of, - , - ; collaboration of (in general), - , - ; the problem, - ; critical apparatus, - ; folios, - , - ; quartos, - , and under individual plays; editions, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; delimitation of the field, - ; versification, - ; diction of fletcher, - , of beaumont, - ; mental habit of fletcher, - , of beaumont, - ; authorship of _foure playes_, _love's cure_, _the captaine_, - ; of the _woman-hater_, , ; of _the knight of the burning pestle_, , ; of _the coxcombe_, ; of _philaster_, ; of _the maides tragedy_, ; of _cupid's revenge_, ; of _a king and no king_, ; of the _scornful ladie_, ; influence upon shakespeare (?) , upon the drama, ; beaumont and fletcher compared, - beaumont, anthony, beaumont, barons and viscounts de, - beaumont's diction, ff. beaumont, elizabeth, lady vaux, , beaumont, elizabeth, sister of the dramatist, mrs. seyliard, , , , , , , beaumont, elizabeth, daughter of the dramatist, , beaumont, frances, posthumous daughter of the dramatist, ff. beaumont, francis, the dramatist: his family, early years in grace-dieu, oxford, ff.; at the inns of court, earliest poems, etc., ff.; the vaux cousins and the gunpowder plot, ff.; some early plays of, ff.; period of partnership with fletcher, ff.; relations with shakespeare, jonson, and others in the theatrical world, ff., ff., ff.; _the masque of the inner temple_, - ; the pastoralists, and other contemporaries at the inns of court, - ; an intersecting circle of jovial sort, - ; the countess of rutland (elizabeth sidney), ff.; his marriage, death, surviving family, ff.; personality and contemporary reputation, portraits, ff.; versification, ff., ff.; stock words, phrases, and figures, ff.; lines of inevitable poetry, ; his mental habit, ff.; his dramatic art, adaptation, etc., ff.; did the beaumont "romance" influence shakespeare? ff.; not a leader in decadence, - ; beaumont compared with fletcher, - ; and with other dramatists, - beaumont, francis, his _poems_, , , ff., - , , , , , , , beaumont, francis, the justice, father of the dramatist, - , , , beaumont, sir henry, brother of the dramatist, , , , , , beaumont, sir henry, of coleorton, , beaumont, sir john, brother of the dramatist, , , , , , , , - , - , - , , , , , , , - , , , , - , beaumont, john, master of the rolls, - , - beaumont, maria, lady villiers, countess of buckingham, , - beaumont, sir thomas, , beaumont's versification, ff. beeston's players, _beggers bush, the_, , , , bell, h. n., _bellman of london, the_, belvoir castle, berkenhead, john, betterton, thomas, _biographia dramatica, the_, birch, _mem. of q. elizabeth_, blackfriars theatre, the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , blackwell's _treatise on equivocation_, blaiklock, lawrence, , , , , blue boar inn, boas, f. s., ed. of _philaster_, boccaccio, , , bolton, edmund, , bond, r. warwick, , , , ; ed. of _the scornful ladie_, _bonduca_, , , , , bosworth, battle of, , ( ) _bouleversements_, boyle, r., , , , , , , bread-street, , , brett, cyril, _drayton's minor poems_, _bridal, the_, _britain's ida_, phineas fletcher, _britannia's pastorals_, - broadgates, brome, richard, , , , brooke, christopher, , , , , - brookesby, bartholomew, , ; edward, browne, william, , , - , , , browning, robert, , brydges, egerton, buc, sir george, buckingham, george villiers, duke of, , , - , bullen, a. h., art. _john fletcher_ (d. n. b); gen. editor, _variorum beaumont and fletcher_, , , , , , _et passim_ burbadge, cuthbert, , , burbadge, richard, , , , , , , , , , burre, walter, , , , , burton, william, , _bury-fair_, , _bussy d'ambois_, butler, james, duke of ormonde, cadences, conversational and lyrical, caesurae, ff. _cambridge english classics_, edition of _beaumont and fletcher_, , - , _et passim_ camden, william, , , , _camden miscellany, the_, campion, father, _capricious lady, the_, _captaine, the_, , , , , , , , _cardenio_ or _cardenna_, , carey, giles, , , carleton, mistris, carr (ker) robert, earl of somerset, , , , cartwright, william, , casaubon, isaac, catesby, robert, , - , , catholics, and the "catholic cousins" of beaumont, ff., _catiline_, , , cavendish, henry, , cavendishes, the, , , , cavendish, sir william, first duke of newcastle, _centurie of praise_, cervantes, see _don quixote_ challoner, _missionary priests_, chalmers, a., , chamberlain, john, , , f. chancery, inns of, , , _et passim_; and see _inns of court_ _chances, the_, , , , , , , , , , , chapel players, the, chapman, george, , , , , , , , , , ff., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , charles i, , _et passim_ charles ii, _charles, duke of byron, the tragedie of_, charles, prince of wales, , charnwood forest, , , , , , , , chaucer, geoffrey, _chaucer_, speght's, , cheapside, , , _et passim_ child, h. h., _"chorizontes," the_, _christ's victorie_, giles fletcher, cicely tufton, see rutland cinthio, clarendon, lord, clark, andrew, , , cleves wars, the, - , , clifford, anne, countess of dorset, of pembroke and montgomery, clifford's inn, clifton, sir gervase, clifton, lady penelope, f., , cockayne, sir aston, , , , , , coke, sir edward, , , , coleorton, , , , , _et passim_ coleridge, s. t., , collier, j. p., , , collins, _peerage of england_, , , , _et passim_ _comedy of errors, a_, , , , _commendatory verses_, , , , , _et passim_ _concerning the true forms of english poetry_, condell, henry, , , , , congreve, william, _convivium philosophicum_, - , conyoke or connock, cook, alexander, cooke, w., coke, sir edward, , corbet, bishop, , _coriolanus_, _coronation, the_, , coryate, tom, , cotton, charles, the elder, , - , - couplet, 'heroic,' cowley, abraham, _coxcombe, the_, , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , cranefield, arthur, critics of beaumont and fletcher, croke, sir john, charles, and unton, cromwell, oliver, , , _crowne of thornes, the_, cunliffe, j. w., , _cupid's revenge_, , - , , , , , , , , , , , , ff., , , , , , , , , , _curious impertinent, the_, _el curioso impertinente_, _le curieux impertinent_, , , _custome of the countrey, the_, _cymbeline_, , , - _cynthia's revels_, , _cyropædeia_, daborne, robert, , , , _damon and pythias_, daniel, joseph, daniel, p. a., , daniel, samuel, , darley, g., _works of beaumont and fletcher_, , , d'avenant, william, , , , davies, john, of hereford, , , , , , , , , , day, john, , , , , dekker, john, , , , , denham, sir john, _description of elizium_, drayton, devereux, lady penelope, diction, ff., f., ff., and see beaumont and fletcher diego sarmiento, don, count gondomar, ff. digby, sir everard, , , , , _discourse of the english stage_, disputed plays, ff. _distrest mother, the_, _divine poems_, drayton, dolce, ludovico, _giocasta_, don diego, see sarmiento de acuña donne, john, , , , , , _don quixote_, relation to _the knight of the burning pestle_, esp. - ; also , , , f., 'doridon,' ff. douay, douthwaite, w. r., _gray's inn, etc._, ff. _double marriage, the_, , drake, sir francis, , , , _dramatic miscellany_, davies, drayton, michael, , , , , , , , , , , , , ff., , , , , , , , , , , , drummond, william, of hawthornden, , , , , , , dryden, john, , , , , , , _duchess of malfi, the_, dugdale, g., duke, h. e., _gray's inn_, ff. _duke of milan, the_, duke of york, the, (prince charles's) players, , d'urfé, marquis, - , _dutch courtezan, the_, dyce, alexander, _works of beaumont and fletcher_, , , , , , _et passim_ earle, john, bishop, , - , , , , , _eastward hoe_, , , editions, also folios and quartos, see beaumont and fletcher edwardes, richard, edwards, jonathan, _eglogs_, a revision of _idea, the shepheard's garland_, drayton, , ekesildena, catherine, _elder brother, the_, , _elegies_, brooke, _(certayn) elegies--with satyres and epigrames_, fitzgeffrey, _elegy on the death of the virtuous lady elizabeth, countess of rutland_, , _elements of armories_, bolton, elizabeth beaumont seyliard, see beaumont, elizabeth elizabeth, countess of rutland, see sidney, elizabeth elizabeth, princess, , , , , , elizabeth, queen, elton, oliver, _michael drayton_, , , _endimion and phoebe_, end-stopped lines, ff. _english palmerin_, see _palmerin_ _epicoene_, , , , , , , _epigrams_, jonson, , , _epistle dedicatorie_, shelton, , _epistle to henery reynolds_, drayton, _epithalamium_, wither, _equivocation_, blackwell's treatise, _essay of dramatick poesie_, dryden, , _ethelwolf, oder der könig kein könig_, euripides, , , evans, henry, , , , evelyn, john, letter to pepys, _every man in his humour_, , _every man out of his humour_, , _examination of his mistris' perfections_, - extra syllables, _faire maide of the inne, the_, , , _faithful friends, the_, , _faithfull shepheardesse, the_, , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _false one, the_, _(of the) famous voyage_, farquhar, george, fauchet, _thierry_, fawkes, guy, , , feet, trisyllabic, _fellows and followers of shakespeare, the_, gayley, , _et passim_; see gayley fenner, sir john, ferrar, william, _fidele and fortunio_, field, nathaniel, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _fifty comedies and tragedies_, fitzgeffrey, henry, _elegies, satires, and epigrams_, fleay, f. g., _hist. stage, chron. engl. drama, etc._, , , , , , , , , , , , , , _et passim_ flecknoe, richard, , fletcher, john, ("i. f.") , ; his family, his youth, ff.; some early plays of, ff.; period of partnership with beaumont, ff.; relations with shakespeare, jonson, etc., ff., ff., ff.; later years, portraits, ff.; his versification, ff.; his diction, ff.; stock words, phrases, and figures, ff.; his mental habit, ff.; the fletcher of the joint-plays, ff.; his dramatic art, - , - fletcher, criteria, ff.; ff.; see beaumont and fletcher, diction, verse, ye-test, etc. fletcher, richard, bishop, - fletcher, dr. giles, , ; giles, the younger, fletcher, phineas, 'fletcherian syndicate, the,' , _flowers, the_, , folio, first, beaumont and fletcher's _comedies and tragedies_, , ( plays), folio, second, _fifty comedies and tragedies_, ( plays), ford, john, , _forrest, the_, jonson, fortescue, george, _foure playes, or morall representations, in one_, (see also _triumphs_), , , , , , - , , , , _foure prentises, the_, , frederick, the elector palatine, , , , fuller, thomas, _worthies_, , gardiner, robert, gardiner, s. r. _hist. engl._, and _prince charles_, , , , ff., _et passim_ gardiner, thomas, garnet, father henry, , - , - garrick, david, gascoigne, george, _supposes_, , , gayley, c. m., _the fellows and followers of shakespeare_, part two, in _rep. eng. com._, vol. iii, now in press, , , , , , _et passim_ _gentleman usher, the_, , gerard, father john, - , _ghost of richard iii_, brooke, giffard, maria, lady baker, mrs. fletcher, lady thornhurst, - gilbert, adrian, _giocasta_, ludovico dolce, _gismond of salerne_, globe theatre, the, , , , , , , , , , , glover, a, and waller, a. r., editors of _camb. engl. class., beaumont and fletcher_, , - , _et passim_ _golden remains, the_, goodere, sir henry, , ; francis, anne, goodwin, gordon, , _gorboduc_, , grace-dieu, , , , , , , , , , , , , , _et passim_ gray's inn, , , , , , , f. greene, robert, _menaphon and pandosto_, , , , _greenstreet papers, the_, , , , greg, w. w., , , , grey friars, at leicester, grey, lady jane, , , grosart, a. b., art. in _d. n. b., sir john beaumont's poems_, , , , , _et passim_ gunpowder plot, the, - , , , gurlin, nat., guskar, h., gwynn, nell, hakluyt, richard, halliwell-phillipps, j. o., _hamartia_, , _hamlet_, , , , , harcourt, the rt. hon. lewis, harleian ms. of fletcher, harington, sir john, , harris, john, hasted, _hist. kent_, , , , , _et passim_ hastings, edward, second lord, ; elizabeth (grandmother of the dramatist), , ; sir henry, , ; lady mary, ; william, first lord, , ; sir william, hastings, earls of huntingdon: george, first earl, , ; francis, second earl, - , , , ; henry, third earl, , ; george, fourth earl, ; henry, fifth earl, , , hatcher, o. l., _john fletcher, a study in dramatic method_, , , , , , , _et passim_; in _anglia_, hawkins, sir thomas, , hele, lewis, heming, john, , , , , , hemings, john, see heming _henry iv_, , _henry viii_, , herbert, mary, countess of pembroke, herbert, william, third earl of pembroke, , herford, c. h., herodotus, _heroical adventures of the knight of the sea_, herrick, robert, , , , herring, joan, _hesperides_, herrick, , heyward, edward, heywood, thomas, , , , , , _hierarchie of the blessed angells, the_, hill, h. w., hill, nicholas, hills, g., _histoire de celidée, thamyre, et calidon_, historical portraits (oxford), , ff. _histriomastix_, _history of cardenio_, by fletcher and shakespeare, hodgets, john, holinshed, holland, aaron, holland, elizabeth, , holland, hugh, , , holme-pierrepoint, , _(upon an) honest man's fortune_, , , , , , , , , hoskins, john, his _convivium philosophicum_, ff., , howard, henry, , howard of walden, lord, howe, josias, hughes, thomas, _misfortunes of arthur_, _humorous lieutenant, the_, , , , , , , - huntingdon, see hastings hyperbole, _hypercritica_, bolton, _idea, the shepheard's garland, eglogs_, drayton, _if you know not me, you know nobody_, _ile of guls_, imogen, innogen, inderwick, f. a., _calendar of inner temple records_, , , _et passim_ _in laudem authoris_, , inner temple, , , , , , ff., , , , , , _inner temple records_, - , , , _et passim_ inns of court and chancery, , , , , , , _et passim_ _insatiate countess, the_, _island princesse, the_, , isley, ursula, wife of the dramatist, - , , isleys, the, - , iteration, james i, progress of , , , , , , , , , , joint-plays, ff., ff., etc. jones, inigo, , , , jonson, ben, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ff., , , ff., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , jovius, paulus, juby, edward, _julius caesar_, , ker (carr) robert, earl of somerset, , , , keysar, robert, , , , , , kinwelmersh, francis, king, edward, milton's 'lycidas,' _king and no king, a_, , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , - , , , , , _king lear_, , king's players, the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , king's bench, kirkham, edward, , _knight of malta, the_, , , , , _knight of the burning pestle, the_, , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , _knight of the burning sword, the_, _knight of the sunne and his brother rosicleer, the_, knole park, kent, , , _et passim_ knowles, sheridan, koeppel, e., kyd, thomas, , , , , , lady elizabeth's players, lamb, charles, , langbaine, g., , lansdowne ms., _lawes of candy, the_, , , leland, john, _itinerary_, , , , , _et passim_ lennard, sir henry, twelfth lord dacre, , , leonhardt, b., _letter to ben jonson_, - , , , lincoln's inn, , f., , , , lisle, sir george, , , _little french lawyer, the_, lodge, thomas, , _love lies a-bleeding_, , etc., see _philaster_ lovell, john, lord, , _lovers progresse, the_, _loves cure_, , , , _love's labour's lost_, , _loves pilgrimage_, , , , lowin, john, , , _loyall subject, the_, , , , , , luce, morton, lyly, john, , macaulay, g. c., _francis beaumont, a critical study_; _beaumont and fletcher_ in _camb. hist. eng. lit._, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _macbeth_, macready, w. c., _mad lover, the_, , _maide in the mill, the_, _maides tragedy, the_, , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , - , , , , , , , _malcontent, the_, malone, edmund, manners, lady katharine (villiers), duchess of buckingham, , , manners, roger, see rutland manningham, john, manverses, the, - manwood, thomas, _mari coccu, battu et content, le_, markham, lady, marlowe, christopher, , , , , , , , , , marston, john, , , , , , , , , martin, richard, , mary, queen of scots, , , _masque of the inner temple, the_, , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , _masque of flowers_, see _flowers_ _masque of ulysses and circe, the_, massinger, philip, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; authorities upon his style, mayne, jasper, mckerrow, r. b., , _measure for measure_, , , _menaechmus_, _menaphon_, merchant taylors' school, mermaid tavern, the, - , , , , , , _merry wives, the_, _metamorphosis of tobacco_, _microcosmographie_, middle temple, the, , f., middleton, thomas, , , , , , , , , , , _midsummer-night's dream, a_, milner, j. d., _mirror for magistrates, the_, _mirror of knighthood, the_, , 'mirtilla', , , _miseries of enforced marriage, the_, _misfortunes of arthur, the_, mitre inn, the, , , _monsieur thomas_, , , - , , , , , , , montaigne, montagu, lady mary wortley, monteagle, lord, , , montemayor, moore, sir thomas, more, paul elmer, f., f., ff., morris, john, _life of father gerard_, - _et passim_ mosely, humphrey, _the stationer to the readers_, , , , _morte d'arthur_, mountjoy, christopher, , _moyses in a map of his miracles_, _mucedorus_, _much ado about nothing_, , , , mulcaster, richard, , munday, anthony, murch, h. s., ed. of _the knight_, , murray, j. t., _eng. dram. comp._, , , , _muses elizium_, , , _narrative_ of father gerard, , nashe, thomas, , nevill, sir henry, the elder, - , ; the younger, , _nice valour, the_, , , , , , nichols, j., _collections_, _hist. leicestershire_, _progresses of queen elizabeth_, _progresses of james i_, , , , , , , _et passim_ _nimphalls_, drayton, , _night walker, the_, _noble gentleman, the_, , , northumbrian ms. of _bacon_, norton, thomas, _gorboduc_, oaths, , _oath of allegiance, the_, , _obstinate lady, the_, _ode to sir william skipworth_, oldfield, mrs., _old wives tale, the_, oliphant, e. h., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _on the tombs in westminster_, optatives, , _orlando furioso_, ostler (osteler, ostler, osler), wm., , , _othello_, , overbury, sir thomas, , , ovid, , , _palamon and arcite_, 'palmeo', , _palmerin de oliva, palmerin of england_, , , , _pandosto_, , _parisitaster_, pastoralists, the, , - , _pastorals_, ambrose philips, paul's players, the, , , , , , peele, george, , pepys, samuel, , , percy, thomas, - _pericles_, , , , , , , , persons, father, , pettus, sir john, _philaster_, , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , - , , _et passim_. philip iii of spain, , philips, sir ambrose, phillipps de lisles, the present, phillipps, j. o. halliwell, phillips, sir robert, _philosophia epicurea democritiana_, pierce, edward, pierrepoint, anne, mother of the dramatist, - , pierrepoint, sir henry, , , pierrepoint, robert, first earl of kingston, , , , , _pilgrim, the_, , plautus, , , _plutus_, _poems, the_, of beaumont, see beaumont, francis, _the poems_ _poems lyrick and pastoral_, drayton, _poetaster, the_, , poets' corner, ff., , , pole, katherine, portraits of beaumont, nuneham, , , ; robinson's engraving of , , ; knole, , , ; g. vertue, ; evans, ; walker and cockerell, portraits of fletcher, knole: blood, ; g. vertue, ; evans, ; robinson, ; walker, ; earl of clarendon's, ; janssen, 'prince of misrule', 'prince of portpoole', prince's players, the, _praise of hemp-seed, the_, princess elizabeth's players, _prophetesse, the_, prose-test, the, prynne, william, , _purple island, the_, phineas fletcher, queen anne's players, , _queene of corinth, the_, , queen henrietta's players, queen's revels' children, the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , - , raleigh, sir walter, , , , , , , randolph, thomas, red bull theatre, the, , 'remond' and 'doridon,' query, fletcher and beaumont, - _revesby sword-play_, reynolds, henry, , reynolds, john, rhyme, '_ricardo and viola_,' , richard iii, , rigg, j. m., ff., _rollo_, 'romance,' , , _et passim_ _romeo and juliet_, , _rosalynde_, rosenbach, a. s. w., rossiter, philip, , , , , routh, h. v., rowley, william, , , , , , _royall king and loyall subject_, _rule a wife and have a wife_, , , , , , , , , , run-on lines, , , , ff., ff. rutland, roger manners, fifth earl, , - ; francis, sixth earl, , ; elizabeth, countess of, see sidney, elizabeth; cicely (tufton), countess of, rymer, thomas, , , , sackville, edward, fourth earl of dorset, sackville, lionel, seventh earl of dorset, , sackville, richard, third earl of dorset, , , , sackville, thomas, first earl of dorset, , - _salmacis and hermaphroditus_, , , , , , sampson, m. w., sannazarro, sarmiento de acuña, don diego, count gondomar, - schelling, f. e., , schevill, rudolph, f., , , _scornful ladie, the_, , , - , , , , , , , , , - , , , _scourge of folly, the_, , , , _sea voyage, the_, '_second maiden's tragedy_,' _sejanus_, , selden, john, , , , , semphill, sir james, - seneca, _session of the poets, the_, suckling, seyliard, mrs., see elizabeth beaumont seyliard, thomas, , , , ; see also beaumont, elizabeth shadwell, thomas, shakespeare, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ff., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ff., ff., , , , ff. shakespeare, and beaumont, - shakespeare, and his company of players, - , - , , shakespeare, was he influenced by beaumont and fletcher? - shaw, _knights of england_, , , _et passim_ shelton, thomas, transl. of _don quixote_, , - , _shepheard's calendar_, _shepherdesse, the_, john beaumont, , _shepherd's hunting, the_, _shepherd's pipe, the_, , , shirley, james, , , , _sicelides_, phineas fletcher, sidney, elizabeth manners, countess of rutland, , , - , , - , , sidney, sir philip, , , , , , , , ff., , , , , , sidney, mary herbert, countess of pembroke, , , _silent woman, the_, , , see _epicoene_ skipwith, sir william, , , _spanish curate, the_, , slye, christopher, smith, l. t., , southampton, see wriothesley spedding, james, speght's _chaucer_, , spenser, edmund, , , , , , stanhope, philip, earl of chesterfield, stanley, thomas, second earl of derby, stanley, thomas, , stapleton, miles thomas, _state papers domestic, calendar of_, , - , , , , , , , , _et passim_ _stationers' registers_, , , , _et passim_ _stationer to the readers, the_, mosely, 'stella', stephens, john, stiefel, a. l., stourton, lord, stratford upon avon, stuart, lady arabella, , suckling, sir john, sullivan, mary, , sundridge, - , , _et passim_ _supposes, the_, ariosto--george gascoigne, , suspense, symonds, j. a., swinburne, algernon, , , , , , sympson and seward, talbots, the, earls of shrewsbury, , _tamer tamed, the_, , , , _et passim_, _the woman's prize_ _taming of the shrew, the_, , tasso, _aminta_, taylor, john, taylor, joseph, , , , ff., _tempest, the_, , , , , , , , tennyson, alfred, theobald, lewis, , _thersites_, _thierry and theodoret_, , , , , , , , , thorndike, a. h., _influence of beaumont and fletcher on shakespeare_, editions of _maides tragedy_ and _philaster_, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , f. thornhurst, sir stephen, 'thyrsis,' , _time poets, the_, _timon_, _'tis a pity, she's a whore_, _titles of honour_, _tombs in westminster, on the_, _to the apparition of his mistresse calling him to elizium_, _to the honour'd countess of ----_, _to the memory of my beloved, the author, mr. william shakespeare, and what he hath left us_, tourneur, cyril, townshend, sir robert, _tragedies of the last age, the_, _tragedy of bonduca, the_, see _bonduca_ _travails of three english brothers, the_, , , , , , , , tresham, francis, , , , , tresham, mary, tresham, sir thomas, triplet, the, _triumph of death, the_, , - , _triumph of honour, the_, , - , _triumph of love, the_, , , - , _triumph of time, the_, , - _true tragedy of richard, duke of york, the_, _(on the) true forms of english poetry_, _twelfth night_, , , , , , _two gentlemen of verona, the_, , , , _two noble kinsmen, the_, , , underwood, john, , upham, a. h., _upon an honest man's fortune_, see _honest man's fortune_ _upon the lines and life of shakespeare_, hugh holland, _(tragedy of) valentinian, the_, , , , , , , vanbrugh, sir john, _variorum edition of beaumont and fletcher_, , , , , , , , _et passim_ vaux, anne, _alias_ mrs. perkins, - , _passim_, vaux, eleanor, _alias_ mrs. jennings, , , vaux, mrs., elizabeth roper, - , , vauxes, the, cousins of the dramatist, and the gunpowder plot, - , f. verse-endings, double, triple, etc., verse-tests, ff., ff. versification of fletcher and of beaumont, - _very woman, a_, villiers, christopher, , villiers, george, duke of buckingham, , , , - , villiers, john, - , _volpone_, , , , von wurzbach, wolfgang, walker, henry, walkley, thomas, wallace, c. w., _shakspere's money interest in the globe_, etc., _century maga._, , , , , , waller, a. r., and glover, a., editors of _camb. eng. class., beaumont and fletcher_, , _et passim_; waller, ed. of _the scornful ladie_, waller, edmund, , , , , , walpole, henry, , ward, sir adolphus william, _hist. eng. dram. lit._, , , , , , , warwick, richard, earl of, webster, john, , , , , , wenman, sir richard, , wenman, thomas, , , west, john, _white devil, the_, , whitefriars theatre, the, f., f., , , , , , , whitehall, f. white webbs, , _wife for a month, a_, , , , , , - , _wild-goose chase, the_, _dedication_, , , wilkins, george, , , wills, james, wilson, arthur, winter, henry and thomas, - , _winter's tale, the_, , , , , , , , , _wit at severall weapons_, , , wither, george, f., , _wit without money_, , _woman-hater, the_, , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , _woman is a weather-cocke_, , - _woman's prize, the_, or _the tamer tamed_, , , _(to any) woman that hath been no weather-cocke_, _women pleas'd_, , wood, anthony, wordsworth, w., , , wright, christopher and john, - wright, thomas, wriothesley, henry, third earl of southampton, , wyatt, sir thomas, xenophon's _cyropædeia_, ye-test, the - , , , - _yorkshire tragedy, the_, _your five gallants_, zola, * * * * * transcriber's note: minor punctuation and capitalization inconsistencies have been corrected without comment and include adding missing opening or closing quotes, closing parenthesis, and sentence closing periods. tables of family trees on pages - have been formatted to fit into the page margins. images falling within an unbroken paragraph have been relocated to either the top or bottom of said paragraph. word spelling, hyphenation, abbreviation, capitalization, apostrophization, diacritical accents and other variations or inconsistencies occur throughout the authors text, footnotes, index, noted verse(s) and quoted materials. all have been retained as printed unless specifically noted. examples are provided below. typographical corrections: p. , "holme-pierpoint" to "holme-pierrepoint" ( ) (holme-pierrepoint is seventeen) p. , "huntington" to "huntingdon" ( ) (francis of huntingdon) p. , "clerygyman" to "clergyman" (had been a clergyman) p. , "worldy" to "worldly" (bishop's worldly estate) p. , "aven" to "avon" ( ) (stratford upon avon) p. , "beaument" to "beaumont" ( ) (john beaumont never recalls) p. , "gentleman" to "gentlemen" (the two gentlemen of verona) p. , " " to " " ("woman is a weather-cocke," , - ) p. , "kinsman" to "kinsmen" (two noble kinsmen, the) p. , "cycropædeia" to "cyropædeia" (xenophon's cyropædeia) possible typographical errors retained in text; falling within quoted material: p. , "lived in her highnes," (highness) p. , "it was no ofspring" (offspring) p. , "drammatick and scenical king" (dramatick) p. , "... excellent maister beamont" (beaumont) p. , "... francis beamont" (beaumont) p. , "flesher and beaumont" (fletcher) p. , "the faithfull shipheardesse" (shepheardesse) p. , "abigal," (abigail) p. , "cavendishes" (cavendishs') (in index) several instances of "middle english spellings" used are: "maiesties" (middle english) and "majesties," and "doe, se, yt, yn, y'll" and "do, see, it, in, i'll" play title variations, each of which appears several times: "aeschylus" and "Æschylus" "amadis de gaule" and "amadis de gaul" "beggars' bush" and "beggars bush" "... curious coxcombe" and "... curious cox-combe" "duchess of malfi" and "duchess of malfy" "julius ceasar" and "julius cæsar" "maid's tragedy", "maids tragedy", "maides tragedy" "maske of the gentleman of grayes inne" and "maske of the gentlemen of grayes inne". "morall representations" and "moralle representations" "parisitaster" and "parasitaster" "essay of dramatick poesie" and "essay on dramatick poesy" "the scornful lady" and "the scornful ladie" "the shepheardesse" and "the shepheardess" "the coxcomb" and "the coxcombe" "weather-cocke" and "weather-cocke" "women pleas'd" and "women pleased" other word variations: "zouch" and "zouche" (ashby-de-la-----) "bedchamber" and "bed-chamber" "birthright" and "birth-right" "cal, s. p.," "cal. st. pa., dom.," "calendar of state papers (domestic)" (see footnotes) "condel" and "condell" (henry ----) "countryside" and "country-side" "d'urfey" and d'urfé (marquis ----) "hoskyns" and "hoskins" (serjeant ----) "milkmaid" and "milk-maid" (both occur on p. ) "northwest" and "north-west" "pierepoint" and "pierrepoint" "sannazzaro" and "sannazarro" "shepherdesse" and "shepheardesse" "sempill" and "semphill" (sir james ----) "southeast" and "south-east" "white-hall" and "whitehall" words using the [oe] ligature which has been changed to "oe" in this e-text: manoeuvere, manoeuvered, manoeuvers. transcriber's notes: variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. ellipses match the original. a few typographical errors have been corrected. a complete list follows the text. the "how to" series how to write a novel +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | the "how to" series | | | | | | i. how to deal with | | your banker | | | | by henry warren | | | | author of "banks and their customers" | | | | _third edition._ | | | | _crown vo, cloth, s. d._ | | | | | | ii. where and how to | | dine in paris | | | | by rowland strong | | | | _fcap. vo, cloth, cover designed, s. d._ | | | | | | iii. how to write for | | the magazines | | | | by "£ a year from it" | | | | _crown vo, cloth, s. d._ | | | | | | iv. how to choose your | | banker | | | | by henry warren | | | | _crown vo, cloth, s. d._ | | | | | | v. how to write a novel: | | | | a practical guide to the art | | of fiction. | | | | _crown vo, cloth, s. d._ | | | | | | vi. how to invest and | | how to speculate | | | | by c. h. thorpe | | | | _crown vo, cloth, s._ | | | | | | london: grant richards | | henrietta street, w.c. | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ the "how to" series how to write a novel a practical guide to the art of fiction london grant richards henrietta street, covent garden, w.c. preface this little book is one which so well explains itself that no introductory word is needed; and i only venture to intrude a sentence or two here with a view to explain the style in which i have conveyed my ideas. i desired to be plain and practical, and therefore chose the direct and epistolary form as being most suitable for the purpose in hand. contents chapter i the object in view page an inevitable comparison a model lesson in novel-writing the teachable and the unteachable chapter ii a good story to tell where do novelists get their stories from? is there a deeper question? what about the newspapers? chapter iii how to begin formation of the plot the agonies and joys of "plot-construction" care in the use of actual events the natural history of a plot sir walter besant on the evolution of a plot plot-formation in earnest characters first: plot afterwards the natural background chapter iv characters and characterisation the chief character how to portray character methods of characterisation the trick of "idiosyncrasies" chapter v studies in literary technique narrative art movement aids to description: the point of view selecting the main features description by suggestion facts to remember chapter vi studies in literary technique--continued colour: local and otherwise what about dialect? on dialogue points in conversation "atmosphere" chapter vii pitfalls items of general knowledge specific subjects topography and geography scientific facts grammar chapter viii the secret of style communicable elements incommunicable elements chapter ix how authors work quick and slow how many words a day? charles reade and anthony trollope the mission of fancy fancies of another type some of our younger writers: mr zangwill, mr coulson kernahan, mr robert barr, mr h. g. wells curious methods chapter x is the subject-matter of novels exhausted? the question stated "change" not "exhaustion" why we talk about exhaustion chapter xi the novel _v._ the short story practise the short story short story writers on their art chapter xii success: and some of its minor conditions the truth about success minor conditions of success appendix i the philosophy of composition. by edgar allan poe appendix ii books worth reading appendix iii magazine article on writing fiction how to write a novel chapter i the object in view i am setting myself a task which some people would call very ambitious; others would call it by a name not quite so polite; and a considerable number would say it was positively absurd, accompanying their criticism with derisive laughter. having discussed the possibility of teaching the art of writing fiction with a good many different kinds of people, i know quite intimately the opinions which are likely to be expressed about this little book; and although i do not intend to burden the reader with an account of their respective merits, i do intend to make my own position as clear as possible. first of all, i will examine the results of a recent symposium on the general question.[ :a] when asked as to the practicability of a school of fiction, messrs robert barr, g. manville fenn, m. betham edwards, arthur morrison, g. b. burgin, c. j. c. hyne, and "mr" john oliver hobbes declared against it; miss mary l. pendered and miss clementina black--with certain reservations--spoke in favour of such an institution. true, these names do not include all representatives of the high places in fiction, but they are quite respectable enough for my purpose. it will be seen that the vote is adverse to the object i have in view. why? well, here are a few reasons. mr morrison affirms that writing as a trade is far too pleasant an idea; john oliver hobbes is of opinion that it is impossible to teach anyone how to produce a work of imagination; and mr g. b. burgin asserts that genius is its own teacher--a remark characterised by unwitting modesty. now, with the spirit of these convictions i am not disposed to quarrel. this is an age which imagines that everything can be crammed into the limits of an academical curriculum; and there are actually some people who would not hesitate to endow a chair of "ideas and imagination." we need to be reminded occasionally that there are incommunicable elements in all art. an inevitable comparison but the question arises: if there be an art of literature, why cannot its principles be taught and practised as well as those of any other art? we have schools of painting, sculpture, and music--why not a school of fiction? let it be supposed that a would-be artist has conceived a brilliant idea which he is anxious to embody in literature or put on a canvas. in order to do so, he must observe certain well-established rules which we may call the grammar of art: for just as in literature a man may express beautiful ideas in ungrammatical language, and without any sense of relationship or development, so may the same ideas be put in a picture, and yet the art be of the crudest. now, in what way will our would-be artist become acquainted with those rules? the answer is simple. if his genius had been of the first order he would have known them intuitively: the society of men and women, of great books and fine pictures, would have provided sufficient stimuli to bring forth the best productions of his mind. thus shakespeare was never taught the principles of dramatic art; bach had an instinctive appreciation of the laws of harmony; and turner had the same insight into laws of painting. these were artists of the front rank: they simply looked--and understood. but if his powers belonged to the order which is called _talent_, he would have to do one of two things: either stumble upon these rules one by one and learn them by experience--or be taught them in their true order by others, in which case an institute of literary art would already exist in an embryonic stage. why should it not be developed into a matured school? is it that the dignity of genius forbids it, or that pupilage is half a disgrace? true genius never shuns the marks of the learner. even shakespeare grew in the understanding of art and in his power of handling its elements. professor dowden says: "in the 'two gentlemen of verona,' porteus, the fickle, is set over against valentine the faithful; sylvia, the bright and intellectual, is set over against julia, the ardent and tender; launce, the humorist, is set over against speed, the wit. this indicates a certain want of confidence on the part of the poet; he fears the weight of too much liberty. he cannot yet feel that his structure is secure without a mechanism to support the structure. he endeavours to attain unity of effect less by the inspiration of a common life than by the disposition of parts. in the early plays structure determines function; in the later plays organisation is preceded by life."[ :a] a model lesson in novel-writing when certain grumpy folk ask: "how do you propose to draw up your lessons on 'the way to find local colour'; 'plotting'; 'how to manage a love-scene,' and so forth?" it is expected that a writer like myself will be greatly disconcerted. not at all. it so happens that a distinguished critic, now deceased, once delivered himself on the possibility of teaching literary art, and i propose to quote a paragraph or two from his article. "the morning finds the master in his working arm-chair; and seated about the room which is generally the study, but is now the studio, are some half-dozen pupils. the subject for the hour is narrative-construction, and the master holds in his hand a small ms. which, as he slowly reads it aloud, proves to be a somewhat elaborate synopsis of the story of one of his own published or projected novels. the reading over, students are free to state objections, or to ask questions. one remarks that the _dénouement_ is brought about by a mere accident, and therefore seems to lack the inevitableness which, the master has always taught, is essential to organic unity. the criticism is recognised as intelligent, but the master shows that the accident has not the purely fortuitous character which renders it obnoxious to the general objection. while it is technically an accident, it is in reality hardly accidental, but an occurrence which fits naturally into an opening provided by a given set of circumstances, the circumstances having been brought about by a course of action which is vitally characteristic of the person whose fate is involved. then the master himself will ask a question. 'the students,' he says, 'will have noticed that a character who takes no important part in the action until the story is more than half told, makes an insignificant and unnoticeable appearance in a very early chapter, where he seems a purposeless and irrelevant intrusion.' they have paper before them, and he gives them twenty minutes in which to state their opinion as to whether this premature appearance is, or is not, justified by the canons of narrative art, giving, of course, the reasons upon which that opinion has been formed. the papers are handed in to be reported upon next morning, and the lesson is at an end."[ :a] this is james ashcroft noble's idea of handling a theme in fiction; one of a large and varied number. to me it is a feasible plan emanating from a man who was the sanest of literary advisers. if it be objected that mr noble was only a critic and not a novelist, perhaps a word from sir walter besant may add the needful element of authority. "i can conceive of a lecturer dissecting a work, or a series of works, showing how the thing sprang first from a central figure in a central group; how there arose about this group, scenery, the setting of the fable; how the atmosphere became presently charged with the presence of mankind, other characters attaching themselves to the group; how situations, scenes, conversations, led up little by little to the full development of this central idea. i can also conceive of a school of fiction in which the students should be made to practise observation, description, dialogue, and dramatic effects. the student, in fact, would be taught how to use his tools." a reading-class for the artistic study of great writers could not be other than helpful. one lesson might be devoted to the way in which the best authors foreshadowed crises and important turns in events. an example may be found in "julius cæsar," where, in the second scene, the soothsayer says: "beware the ides of march!" --a solitary voice in strange contrast with those by whom he is surrounded, and preparing us for the dark deed upon which the play is based. or the text-book might be a modern novel--hardy's "well-beloved" for instance--a work full of delicate literary craftsmanship. the storm which overtook pierston and miss bencomb is prepared for--first by the conversation of two men who pass them on the road, and one of whom casually remarks that the weather seems likely to change; then pierston himself observes "the evening--louring"; finally, and most suddenly, the rain descends in perfect fury. the teachable and the unteachable i hope my position is now beginning to be tolerably clear to the reader. i address myself to the man or woman of talent--those people who have writing ability, but who need instruction in the manipulation of characters, the formation of plots, and a host of other points with which i shall deal hereafter. as to what is teachable, and not teachable, in writing novels, perhaps i may be permitted to use a close analogy. style, _per se_, is absolutely unteachable simply because it is the man himself; you cannot teach _personality_. can dickens, thackeray, and george meredith be reduced to an academic schedule? never. every soul of man is an individual entity and cannot be reproduced. but although style is incommunicable, the writing of easy, graceful english can be taught in any class-room--that is to say, the structure of sentences and paragraphs, the logical sequence of thought, and the secret of forceful expression are capable of exact scientific treatment. in like manner, although no school could turn out novelists to order--a supply of stevensons annually, and a brace of hardys every two years--there is yet enough common material in all art-work to be mapped out in a course of lessons. i shall show that the two great requisites of novel-writing are ( ) a good story to tell, and ( ) ability to tell it effectively. briefly stated, my position is this: no teaching can produce "good stories to tell," but it can increase the power of "the telling," and change it from crude and ineffective methods to those which reach the apex of developed art. of course there are dangers to be avoided, and the chief of them is that mechanical correctness, "so praiseworthy and so intolerable," as lowell says in his essay on lessing. but this need not be an insurmountable difficulty. a truly educated man never labours to speak correctly; being educated, grammatical language follows as a necessary consequence. the same is true of the artist: when he has learned the secrets of literature, he puts away all thoughts of rule and law--nay, in time, his very ideas assume artistic form. footnotes: [ :a] _the new century review_, vol. i. [ :a] "shakespeare: his mind and art," p. . [ :a] article in _the new age_. chapter ii a good story to tell where do novelists get their stories from? i said a moment ago that no teaching could impart a story. if you cannot invent one for yourself, by observation of life and sympathetic insight into human nature, you may depend upon it that you are not called to be a writer of novels. then where, it may be asked, do novelists get their stories? well, they hardly know themselves; they say the ideas "come." for instance, here is the way mr baring gould describes the advent of "mehalah." "one day in essex, a friend, a captain in the coastguard, invited me to accompany him on a cruise among the creeks in the estuary of the maldon river--the blackwater. i went out, and we spent the day running among mud flats and low holms, covered with coarse grass and wild lavender, and startling wild-fowl. we stopped at a ruined farm built on arches above this marsh to eat some lunch; no glass was in the windows, and the raw wind howled in and swept around us. that night i was laid up with a heavy cold. i tossed in bed and was in the marshes in imagination, listening to the wind and the lap of the tide; and 'mehalah' naturally rose out of it all, a tragic gloomy tale."[ :a] exactly. "mehalah" _rose_; that is enough! if ideas, plots of stories, and new groupings of character do not "rise" in _your_ mind, it is simply because you lack the power to originate them spontaneously. take the somewhat fabulous story of newton and the apple. many a man before sir isaac had seen an apple fall, but not one of them used that observation as he did. in the same way there are scores of men who have the same experiences and live the same kind of life, but it occurs to only one among their number to gather up these experiences into an interesting narrative. why should it "occur" to one and not the others? because the one has literary gifts and literary impetus, and the others--haven't. is there a deeper question? having dealt with that side of the subject, i should like to say that all novelists have their own methods of obtaining raw material for stories. by raw material i mean those facts of life which give birth to narrative ideas. it is said of thomas hardy that he never rides in an omnibus or railway carriage without mentally inventing the history of every traveller. one has to beware of fables in writing of such men, but i have no reason to doubt the statement just made. i do not make it with the intention of advocating anybody to go and do likewise, but as illustrating one way of studying human nature and developing the imaginative faculty. it will be necessary to speak of _observation_ a good many times in the course of these remarks, and one might as well say what the word really means. does it mean "seeing things"? a great deal more than that. it is very easy to "see things" and yet not observe at all. if you want ideas for stories, or characters with which to form a longer narrative, you must not only use your _eyes_ but your _mind_. what is wanted is _observation_ with _inference_; or, to be more correct, with _imagination_. make sure that you know the traits of character that are typically human; those which are the same in a boer, a hindu, or a chinaman. it is not difficult to mark the special points of each of these as distinct from the englishman; but your first duty is to know human nature _per se_. how is that knowledge to be obtained? do you say! well, begin with yourself; there is ample scope in that direction. and when you are tired of looking within--look without. enter a tram-car and listen to the people talking. who talks the loudest? what kind of woman is it who always gives the conductor most trouble? the man who sits at the far end of the car in a shabby coat, and who is regarding his boots with a fixed, anxious stare--what is he thinking about? and what is his history? then a baby begins to yell, and its mother cannot soothe it. one old man smiles benignly on the struggling infant, but the old man next to him looks "daggers." and why? to see character in action there is no finer vantage-point than the top of a london omnibus. watch the way in which people walk; notice their forms of salutation when they meet; and study the expressions on their faces. tragedy and comedy are everywhere, and you have not to go beneath the surface of life in order to find them. it sounds prosaic enough to speak of studying human nature at a railway station, but such places are brimful of event. i know more than one novelist who has found his "motif" by quietly watching the crowd on a platform from behind a waiting-room window. wherever humanity congregates there should the student be. not that he should restrict his observations to men and women in groups or masses--he must cover all the ground by including individuals who are to be specially considered. the logician's terms come in handy at this point: _extensive_ and _intensive_--such must be the methods of a beginner's analysis of his fellow-creatures. what about the newspapers? the daily press is the great mirror of human events. when we open the paper at our breakfast table we find a literal record of the previous day's joy and sorrow--marriages and murders, failures and successes, news from afar and news from the next street--they all find a place. the would-be novel writer should be a diligent student of the newspaper. in no other sphere will he discover such a plenitude of raw material. some of the cases tried at the courts contain elements of dramatic quality far beyond those he has ever imagined; and here and there may be found in miniature the outlines of a splendid plot. of course everything depends on the reader's mind. if you cannot read between the lines--that is the end of the matter, and your novel will remain unwritten; but if you can--some day you may expect to succeed. i once came across a practical illustration of the manner in which a newspaper paragraph was treated imaginatively. the result is rather crude and unfinished, but most likely it was never intended to stand as a finished production, occurring as it does, in an american book on american journalism.[ :a] here is the paragraph: "john simpson and michael flannagan, two railroad labourers, quarrelled yesterday morning, and flannagan killed simpson with a coupling-pin. the murderer is in jail. he says simpson provoked him and dared him to strike." now the question arises: what was the quarrel about? we don't know; so an originating cause must be invented. the inventor whose illustration i am about to give conceived the story thus: "'taint none o' yer business how often i go to see the girl." "ef oi ketch yez around my nora's house agin, oi'll break a hole in yer shneakin' head, d'ye moind thot!" "you braggin' irish coward, you haint got sand enough in you to come down off'n that car and say that to my face." it was john simpson, a yard switchman who spoke this taunt to a section hand. a moment more and michael flannagan stood on the ground beside him. there was a murderous fire in the irishman's eyes, and in his hand he held a heavy coupling-pin. "tut! tut! mike. throw away the iron and play fair. you can wallup him!" cried the rest of the gang. "he's a coward; he dassn't hit me," came the wasp-like taunt of the switchman. "let him alone, fellers; his girl's give him the shake, and----" those were the last words simpson spoke. the murderous coupling-pin had descended like a scimitar and crushed his skull. an awed silence fell upon the little group as they raised the fallen man and saw that he was dead. "ye'll be hangin' fur this, mikey, me bye," whispered one of his horrified companions as the police dragged off the unresisting murderer. "oi don't care," came the sullen reply, with a dry sob that belied it. then, with a look of unutterable hatred, and a nod towards the white, upturned face of his enemy, he added under his breath, "he'll niver git her now." this is enough to give the beginner an idea of the way in which stories and plots sometimes "occur" to writers of fiction. it is, however, only one of a thousand ways, and my advice to the novice is this: keep your eyes and ears open; observe and inquire, read and reflect; look at life and the things of life from your own point of view; and just as a financier manipulates events for the sake of money, so ought you to turn all your experiences into the mould of fiction. if, after this, you don't succeed, it is evident you have made a mistake. be courageous enough to acknowledge the fact, and leave the writing of novels to others. footnotes: [ :a] "the art of writing fiction," p. . [ :a] shuman, "steps into journalism," p. . chapter iii how to begin you have now obtained your story--in its bare outlines, at least. the next question is, how are you to make a start? well, that is an important question, and it cannot be evaded. clarence rook, in a waggish moment, said two things were necessary in order to write a novel: ( ) _writing materials_, ( ) _a month_; but he seems to have thought that the month should be a month's imprisonment for attempting such an indiscretion. in these pages, however, we are serious folk, and having thanked mr rook for his pleasantry, we return to the point before us. first of all, what kind of a novel is yours to be? historical? if so, have you read all the authorities? do you feel the throb of the life of that period about which you are going to write? are its chief personages living beings in your imagination? and have you learned all the details respecting customs, manners, language, and dress? if not, you are very far from being ready to make a start, even though the "story" itself is quite clear to you. our great historical novelists devour libraries before they sit down to write. one would like to know how many books dr conan doyle digested before he published "the refugees," and stanley weyman before he brought out his "a gentleman of france." do not be carried away with the alluring idea that it is easy to take up historical subjects because the characters are there to hand, and the "story" practically "made." directly you make the attempt, you will find out your mistake. write about the life you know best--the life of the present day. you will then avoid the necessity of keeping everything in chronological perspective--a necessity which an open-air preacher, whom i heard last week, quite forgot when he said that the sailors shouted down the hatchway to the sleeping prophet of nineveh: "jonah! we're sinking! come and help us with the pumps!" no; before you begin, have a clear idea of what you are going to do. the type of your story will in many cases decide the kind of treatment required; but it may be well, nevertheless, to say a few words about the various kinds of novels that are written nowadays, and the differences that separate them one from another. there is the _realistic_ novel, of which mr maugham's "liza of lambeth" and mr morrison's "a child of the jago" may be taken as recent examples. these authors attempt to picture life as it is; they sink their own personalities, and endeavour to write a literal account of the "personalities" of other people. very often they succeed, but absolute realism is impossible unless a man has no objection to appearing in a police court. in this type of fiction, plot, action, and inter-play of characters are not important: the main purpose is a sort of literary biograph; life in action, without comment or underlying philosophy, and minus the pre-eminent factor of art. then there is the novel of _manners_. the customs of life, the social peculiarities of certain groups of men and women, the humours and moral qualities of life--these are the chief features in the novel of manners. as a form of fiction it is earlier than the realistic novel, but both are alike in having little or no concern with plot and character development. next comes the novel of _incident_. here the stress is placed upon particular events--what led up to them and the consequences that followed--hence the structure of the narrative, and the powers of movement and suspense are important factors in achieving success. a _romance_ is in a very important sense a novel of incident, but the "incident" is specialised in character, and usually deals with the passionate and fundamental powers of man--hate, jealousy, revenge, and scenes of violence. or it may be "incident" which has to do with life in other worlds as imagined by the writer, and occasionally takes on the style of the supernatural. lastly, there is the _dramatic_ novel, where the chief feature is the influence of event on character, and of characters on each other. now, to which class is your projected novel to belong? in fiction you must walk by sight and not by faith. never sit down to write believing that although you can't see the finish of your story, it will come out all right "in the end." it won't. you should know at the outset to which type of fiction you are to devote your energies; how, otherwise, can you observe the laws of art which govern its ideal being? formation of the plot in one sense your plot is formed already--that is to say, the very idea of your story involves a plot more or less distinct. as yet, however, you do not see clearly how things are going to work out, and it is now your business to settle the matter so far as it lies in your power to do so. now, a plot is not _made_; it is _a structural growth_. suppose you wish to present a domestic scene in which the folly of high temper is to be proved. is not the plot concealed in the idea? certainly. hence you perhaps place a man and his wife at breakfast. they begin to talk amiably, then become quarrelsome, and finally fall into loving agreement. or you light upon a more original plan of bringing out your point; but in any case, the plot evolves itself step by step. wilkie collins has left some interesting gossip behind him with reference to "the woman in white": "my first proceeding is to get my central idea--the pivot on which the story turns. the central idea in 'the woman in white' is the idea of a conspiracy in private life, in which circumstances are so handled as to rob a woman of her identity, by confounding her with another woman sufficiently like her in personal appearance to answer the wicked purpose. the destruction of her identity represents a first division of her story; the recovery of her identity marks a second division. my central idea next suggests some of my chief characters. "a clever devil must conduct the conspiracy. male devil or female devil? the sort of wickedness wanted seems to be a man's wickedness. perhaps a foreign man. count fosco faintly shows himself to me before i know his name. i let him wait, and begin to think about the two women. they must be both innocent, and both interesting. lady glyde dawns on me as one of the innocent victims. i try to discover the other--and fail. i try what a walk will do for me--and fail. i devote the evening to a new effort--and fail. experience tells me to take no more trouble about it, and leave that other woman to come of her own accord. the next morning before i have been awake in my bed for more than ten minutes, my perverse brains set to work without consulting me. poor anne catherick comes into the room, and says 'try me.' "i have now got an idea, and three of my characters. what is there to do now? my next proceeding is to begin building up the story. here my favourite three efforts must be encountered. first effort: to begin at the beginning. second effort: to keep the story always advancing, without paying the smallest attention to the serial division in parts, or to the book publications in volumes. third effort: to decide on the end. all this is done as my father used to paint his skies in his famous sea-pictures--at one heat. as yet i do not enter into details; i merely set up my landmarks. in doing this, the main situations of the story present themselves in all sorts of new aspects. these discoveries lead me nearer and nearer to finding the right end. the end being decided on, i go back again to the beginning, and look at it with a new eye, and fail to be satisfied with it." the agonies and joys of "plot-construction" "i have yielded to the worst temptation that besets a novelist--the temptation to begin with a striking incident without counting the cost in the shape of explanations that must and will follow. these pests of fiction, to reader and writer alike, can only be eradicated in one way. i have already mentioned the way--to begin at the beginning. in the case of 'the woman in white,' i get back, as i vainly believe, to the true starting-point of the story. i am now at liberty to set the new novel going, having, let me repeat, no more than an outline of story and characters before me, and leaving the details in each case to the spur of the moment. for a week, as well as i can remember, i work for the best part of every day, but not as happily as usual. an unpleasant sense of something wrong worries me. at the beginning of the second week a disheartening discovery reveals itself. i have not found the right beginning of 'the woman in white' yet. the scene of my opening chapters is in cumberland. miss fairlie (afterwards lady glyde); mr fairlie, with his irritable nerves and his art treasures; miss halcombe (discovered suddenly, like anne catherick), are all waiting the arrival of the young drawing-master, walter hartwright. no; this won't do. the person to be first introduced is anne catherick. she must already be a familiar figure to the reader when the reader accompanies me to cumberland. this is what must be done, but i don't see how to do it; no new idea comes to me; i and my ms. have quarrelled, and don't speak to each other. one evening i happen to read of a lunatic who has escaped from an asylum--a paragraph of a few lines only in a newspaper. instantly the idea comes to me of walter hartwright's midnight meeting with anne catherick escaped from the asylum. 'the woman in white' begins again, and nobody will ever be half as much interested in it now as i am. from that moment i have done with my miseries. for the next six months the pen goes on. it is work, hard work; but the harder the better, for this excellent reason: the work is its own exceeding great reward. as an example of the gradual manner in which i reached the development of character, i may return for a moment to fosco. the making him fat was an afterthought; his canaries and his white mice were found next; and, the most valuable discovery of all, his admiration of miss halcombe, took its rise in a conviction that he would not be true to nature unless there was some weak point somewhere in his character." care in the use of actual events i do not apologise for the lengthiness of this quotation--it is so much to the point, and is replete with instructive ideas. the beginner must beware of following actual events too closely. there is a danger of accepting actuality instead of literary possibility as the measure of value. _picturesque_ means fit to be put in a picture, and _literatesque_ means fit to be put in a book. in making your plot, therefore, be quite sure you have a subject with these said possibilities in it, and that in developing them by an ordered and cumulative series of events, you are following the wise rule laid down by aristotle: "prefer an impossibility which seems probable, to a probability which seems impossible." remember always that truth is stranger than fiction. let facts, newspaper items, things seen and heard, suggest as much as you please, but never follow literally the literal event. then your plot must be original. i was amused some time ago by reading the editorial notice to correspondents in an american paper. that editor meant to save the time of his contributors as well as his own, and he gave a list of the plots he did not want. the paper was one which catered for young people. here is a selection from the list: . a lost purse where the finder is tempted to keep it, but finally rises to the emergency and returns it. . heaping coals of fire(!) . saving one's enemy from drowning. . stories of cruel step-mothers. . children praying, and having their prayers answered through being overheard, etc., etc. mr clarence rook, to whom i have previously referred, says: "there are several plots, four or five, at least. here are some of the recipes for them. you may rely on them to give thorough satisfaction. thousands use them daily, and having tried them once, use no other. take a heroine. the age of heroes is past, and this is the age of heroines. she must be noble, high-souled. (souls have been worn very high for the past few seasons.) her soul is too high for conventional morality. mix her up with some disgraceful situations, taking care to add the purest of motives. let her poison her mother and run away with a thoughtful scavenger. when you are tired of her you can pitch her over waterloo bridge."[ :a] over against this style of criticism i should like to place another which comes from an academical source. speaking of the plots of hall caine's novels, professor saintsbury says that, "with the exception of 'the scapegoat,' there is an extraordinary and almost heroic monotony of plot. one might almost throw mr caine's plots into the form which is used by comparative students of folk-lore to tabulate the various versions of the same legends. two close relations (if not brothers, at least cousins) the relationship being sometimes legal, sometimes only natural, fall in love with the same girl ('shadow,' 'hagar,' 'bondman,' 'manxman'); in 'the deemster' the situation is slightly but not really very different, the brother being jealous of the cousin's affection. in almost all cases there is renunciation by one; in all, including 'the deemster,' one has, if both have not, to pay more or less heavy penalties for the intended or unintended rivalry. sometimes, as in 'the shadow of a crime,' 'a son of hagar,' and 'the bondman,' filial relations are brought in to augment the strife of sentiment in the individual. sometimes ('shadow,' 'bondman,' and to some extent 'manxman') the worsted and renouncing party is self-sacrificing more or less all through; sometimes ('hagar,' 'deemster,') he is violent for a time, and only at last repents. in two cases ('deemster,' 'manxman,') the injured one, or the one who thinks he is injured, has a rival at his mercy in sleep or disease, is tempted to take his life and forbears. this might be worked out still further."[ :a] no; you must be original or nothing at all. of course your originality may not be striking, but, at any rate, make your own plot, and let others judge it. it is far better to do that than to copy others weakly. originality and sincerity are pretty much the same thing, as carlyle observed; and if you want a stimulating essay on the subject, read lewes' "principles of success in literature," a book, by the way, which you ought to master thoroughly. the natural history of a plot i have quoted already from wilkie collins as to the growth of plot from its embryo stages, but that need not deter us from taking an imaginary example. let us suppose that you have been possessed for some time with the idea of treating the great facts of race and religion as a theme for a novel. after casting about for a suitable illustration, you finally decide that a jewish girl, with strictly orthodox parentage, shall fall in love with a youth of gentile blood, and roman catholic in religion. that is the bare idea. you can see at once how many dramatic possibilities it presents; for the passion of love in each case is pitted against the forces of religious prejudice; and all the powers of racial exclusiveness are brought into full play. now, what is the first thing to do? well, for you as a beginner, it is to decide _how the story shall end_. why? because everything depends on that. if you intend them to have a short flirtation, your course of procedure will be very different to that which must inevitably follow if you intend to make them marry. in the first case, you will have to provide for the stern and unalterable facts of race and religion; in the second, for the possibility of their being overcome. to illustrate further, let me suppose that the jewess and the gentile youth are ultimately to marry. how will this affect your choice of characters? it will compel you to choose a jewess who, although brought up in the orthodox fashion, has enough ability and education to appreciate life and thought outside her own immediate circle, and you must invent facts to account for these things, even though she still worships at the synagogue. on the other hand, the gentile catholic must be a man of liberal tendencies, or he would never think twice about the jewess with the possibility of marrying her. he may persuade himself that he is a good catholic, but you are bound to prepare your readers for actions which, to say the least, are not normal in men of such religious profession. the choice of your secondary characters is also determined by the end in view. because your story has to do with jews and catholics, that is no reason why your pages should be full of jews and priests. you want just as many other people, in addition to your hero and heroine, as are necessary to bring about the _dénouement_: not one more, not one less. now, the end in view is to make these young people triumph over their race and their religion; and over and above the difficulties they have between themselves, there are difficulties placed by other people. by whom? here is a chance for your inventiveness. i would suggest as a beginning that you create parents for the girl and for the man--orthodox in each case, and unyielding to the last degree. give them a name, and put them down on your list. money is likely to figure in a narrative of this kind, and you might arrange for the opportune entrance of an uncle on the girl's side, who threatens to alter his will (at present made in her interest) if she encourages the advances of her gentile lover. on the man's side, the priest, of course, will have something to say, and you will be compelled to make a place for him. in this way your characters will grow to their complete number, and i should advise you to draw up a list of them, and opposite each one write a few notes describing the part they will have to play. one word on nomenclature. there is a mystic suitability--at any rate in novels--between a name and a character. to call your marvellous heroine "annie" is to hoist a signal of distress, unless you have a unique power of characterisation; and to speak of your hero as "william" is to handicap his movements from the start. i am not pleading for fancy names, but just for that distinctiveness in choice which the artistic sense decides is fitting. to return. the end in view will also shape the course of _events_. instead of arranging that these are to be a series of psychological skirmishes between two people the poles asunder (as would be the case if their relations were superficial), you have to arrange for events where the characters are in dead earnest. then, too, in order to relieve the tense nature of the narrative, it will be necessary to provide for happenings which, though not exactly humorous, are still light enough to distract the attention from the severer aspects of the story. further, the natural background should be selected with an eye to the main issue, and each event should have that cumulative effect which ultimately leads the reader on to the climax. of course, it is possible to take a quite different _dénouement_ to the one here considered. you might make the pair desperately in love, but foiled by some disaster near the end. in this case, as in the other, the narrative will, or ought to, change its perspective accordingly. sir walter besant on the evolution of a plot in order to illustrate the subject still further, i quote the following:-- "consider--say, a diamond robbery. very well: then, first of all, it must be a robbery committed under exceptional and mysterious conditions, otherwise there would be no interest in it. also, you will perceive that the robbery must be a big and important thing--no little shoplifting business. next, the person robbed must not be a mere diamond merchant, but a person whose loss will interest the reader, say, one to whom the robbery is all-important. she shall be, say, a vulgar woman with an overweening pride in her jewels, and, of course, without the money to replace them if they are lost. they must be so valuable as to be worn only on extraordinary occasions, and too valuable to be kept at home. they must be consigned to the care of a jeweller who has strong rooms. you observe that the story is now growing. you have got the preliminary germ. how can the strong room be entered and robbed? well, it cannot. that expedient will not do. can the diamonds be taken from the lady while she is wearing them? that would have done in the days of the gallant claude duval, but it will not do now. might the house be broken into by a burglar on a night when a lady had worn them and returned? but she would not rest with such a great property in the house unprotected. they must be taken back to their guardian the same night. thus the only vulnerable point in the care of the diamonds seems their carriage to and from their guardian. they must be stolen between the jeweller's and the owner's house. then by whom? the robbery must somehow be connected with the hero of the love story--that is indispensable; he must be innocent of all complicity in it--that is equally indispensable; he must preserve our respect; he will have to be somehow a victim: how is that to be managed? "the story is getting on in earnest. . . . the only way--or the best way--seems, on consideration, to make the lover be the person who is entrusted with the carriage of this precious package of jewels to and from their owner's house. this, however, is not a very distinguished _rôle_ to play; it wants a very skilled hand to interest us in a jeweller's assistant. . . . we must therefore give this young man an exceptional position. force of circumstances, perhaps, has compelled him to accept the situation which he holds. he need not, again, be a shopman; he may be a confidential _employé_, holding a position of great trust; and he may be a young man with ambitions outside the narrow circle of his work. "the girl to whom he is engaged must be lovable to begin with; she must be of the same station in life as her lover--that is to say, of the middle class, and preferably of the professional class. as to her home circle, that must be distinctive and interesting."[ :a] i need not quote any further for my present purpose, which is to show mental procedure in plot-formation; but the whole article is full of sound teaching on this and other points. plot-formation in earnest you have now obtained your characters, and a general outline of the events their actions will compass. what comes next? a carefully written-out statement of the story from the beginning to the end; that is the next step. this story should contain just as much as you would give in outlining the plot to a friend in the course of conversation. it would briefly detail the characters and circumstances of the hero and heroine, and the events which led to their first meeting each other. you would then describe the ripening of their friendship, and the gradual growth of social hostility to the idea of a projected union. the psychological transformations, the domestic infelicities, the racial animosities--these will find suitable expression in word and action. at last the season of cruel suspense is over, and the pair have arrived at their great decision. elaborate preventive plans are arranged to frustrate their purpose, and there is much excitement lest they should succeed; but when all have done their best, the two are happily wedded and the story is ended. the exercise of writing out a plain, unvarnished statement of what you are going to do is one that will enable you to see whether your story has balance or not, and it will most certainly test its power to interest; for if in its bald form there is real _story_ in it, you may well believe that when properly written it will possess the true fascination of fiction. now, a plot is much like a drama, and should have a beginning, a middle, and an end; answering roughly to premiss, argument, and conclusion. there is no better training in plot-study than the reading of such a book as professor moulton's "shakespeare as a dramatic artist," in which the author, with rare critical skill, exhibits the construction of plots that are an object of never-ceasing wonder. i will dare to reiterate what i have said before. take your stand at the end of the story, and work it out backwards. for an excellent illustration see edgar allan poe's account of how he came to write "the raven" (appendix i.). perhaps you object to this kind of literary dissection? you think it spoils the effect of a work of art to be too familiar with its physiology? i do not grant these points; but even if they are true, that is no reason why you yourself should be offended by the sight of ropes and pulleys behind the scenes. no; work out the details from the end, and not from the beginning. no character and no action should find a place if it contributes nothing towards the _dénouement_. characters first: plot afterwards it must not be supposed that a plot _always_ comes first in the constructing of a novel. very often the characters suggest themselves long before the story is even vaguely outlined. nor is there any reason why such a story should be any worse because it did not originate in the usual way. in fact, the probabilities are that it will be all the better, on account of its stress upon character, and the reaction of various characters on each other. i imagine "jude the obscure" grew in this fashion. there is no very striking plot in the book; at any rate not the plot we have in mind when we think of "the moonstone." but if plot means the inevitable evolution of certain men and women in given circumstances, then there is plot of a high order. in the usual acceptation of the term, however, "jude the obscure" is a novel of character; and most probably jude existed as a creature of imagination months before it was ever thought he would go to oxford, or have an adventure with sue. to many men, doubtless, there is far more fascination in conceiving a group of characters in which there are two or three supreme figures, and then setting to work to discover a narrative which will give them the freest action, than in toiling over the bare idea, the subsequent plot, followed by a series of actors and actresses who work out the _dénouement_. should you belong to this number, do not hesitate to act accordingly. nothing wooden in style or method finds a place in these pages, and since some of the finest creations have arisen in the order indicated at the head of this section, perhaps you are to be congratulated that the work before you will be a living growth rather than a mechanical contrivance. the natural background since your story will presumably be located somewhere on this planet, the next thing to do is to obtain a thorough knowledge of the places where your characters will display themselves. if the scenes are laid in a district which you know by heart, you are not likely to go astray; but more often than not, the scenes are largely imaginative, especially in reference to smaller items such as roads, rivers, trees, and woods. the best plan is to follow the example of thomas hardy, and draw a map--both geographical and topographical--of the country and the towns in which your hero and heroine, and subordinate characters, will appear for the interest of the reader. that individual does not care to be puzzled with semi-miraculous transmittances through space. i read a novel some time ago, where on one page the heroine was busy shopping in london, and on the next page was--an hour afterwards--quietly having tea with her beloved somewhere in the midlands. but the drawing of a map, and using it closely, will not merely render such negative assistance as to avoid mistakes of this kind, it will act positively as a stimulus to creative suggestion. you can follow the lover's jealous rival along the road that leads to the meeting-place with increased imaginative power. that measure of realism which makes the ideal both possible and interesting will come all the more easily, because the map aids you in following the movements of your characters; in fact, if you take this second step with serious resolution, it will go far to add that piquant something which renders your story a series of life-like happenings. the result will be equally beneficial to the reader. it may be a moot question as to how far the map in stevenson's "treasure island" deepens the interest of those who read this exciting story, but in my humble opinion it adds an actuality to the events which is most convincing. mr maurice hewlett has followed suit in his "forest lovers." i do not say _publish_ your map, but _draw_ one and use it. a poor story accompanied by a good map would be too ridiculous; so you had better give all your attention to the narrative, and leave the publication of maps until later days. footnotes: [ :a] "hints to novelists," in _to-day_, may , . [ :a] _fortnightly review_, vol. lvii. n.s. p. . [ :a] besant, "on the writing of novels," _atalanta_, vol i. p. . chapter iv characters and characterisation the chief character in the plot previously outlined, which figure is supreme? it depends. in some senses the supremacy is not a matter of choice, but is decided by the nature of the story. if the man is making the greater sacrifice, it means that, whether you like it or not, his is the struggle that calls for a larger measure of sympathy; and you must assign him the chief place. still, there are circumstances which would justify a departure from this law--something after the fashion of respecting the rights of a minority. but in our projected narrative, the woman is undoubtedly the supreme character; for the man's battle is mainly one of religious scruple, and only secondarily a question of race; whereas, the jewess has a vigorous conflict with both race and religion. well, what do you know about women? anything? do you know how their minds work? how they talk? what they wear? and the thousand and one trivialities that go to make up character portrayal? if you do not know these things, it is a poor look-out for the success of your novel, and you might as well start another story at once. it may be a disputed question as to whether women understand women better than men: the point is, do _you_ understand them? perhaps you know enough for the purposes of a secondary character, but this jewess is to be supreme; you must know enough to meet the highest demands. where to obtain this knowledge? ah! where! only by studying human lives, human manners, human weaknesses--everything human. the life of the world must become your text-book; as for temperaments, you should know them by heart; social influences in their effect on action and outlook, ought to be within easy comprehension; and even then, you will still cry "mystery!" how to portray character the first thing is to _realise_ your characters--_i.e._ make them real persons to yourself, and then you will be more likely to persuade the reader that they are real people. unless this is done, your hero and heroine will be described as "puppets" or "abstractions." i am not saying the task is easy--in fact, it is one of the most difficult that the novelist has to face. but there is no profit in shirking it, and the sooner it is dealt with the better. the history of character representation in drama is full of luminous teaching, and a study of it cannot be other than highly instructive. in the early _mystery_ and _morality_ plays, virtues and vices were each apportioned their respective actors--that is to say, one man set forth good counsel, another repentance, another gluttony, and another pride. even so late as philip massinger's "a new way to pay old debts," we have wellborn, justice, greedy, tapwell, froth, and furnace. now this seems very elementary to us, but it has one great merit: the audience knew what each character stood for, and could form an intelligent idea of his place in the piece. in these days we have become more subtle--necessarily so. following the lead of the shakespearean dramatists, we have not described our characters by giving them names--virtuous or otherwise--we let them describe themselves by their speech and action. the essential thing is that we should know our characters intimately, so intimately that, although they exist in imagination alone, they are as real to us as the members of our own family. falstaff never had flesh and blood, but as shakespeare portrayed him, you feel that you have only to prick him and he will bleed. the historical hamlet is a mist; the hamlet of the play is a reality. this power of realisation depends on two things: _observation with insight, and sympathy with imagination_. observation is a most valuable gift, but without insight it is likely to work mischief by creating a tendency to write down just what you see and hear. zola's novels too often suggest the note-book. avoid photographing life as you would avoid a dangerous foe. the newspaper reporter can "beat you hollow," for that is his special subject: life as it is. observe what goes on around you, but get behind the scenes; study selfishness and "otherness," and the inter-play of motives, the conflict of interests which causes this tangle of human affairs--in other words, obtain an insight into them by asking the "why" and "wherefore." above all, learn to see with other people's eyes, and to feel with other people's hearts. for instance, you may find it needful to attend synagogue-worship in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of the religion of your jewish heroine. when you see the men in silk hats, and praying-shawls over their shoulders, you may be tempted to despise judaism; the result being that you determine not to cumber your novel with a description of such "nonsense." well, you will lose one of the most picturesque features of your story; you will fail to see the part which the synagogue plays in your heroine's mental struggle, and the portrayal of her character will be sadly defective in consequence. no; a novelist, as such, should have no religion, no politics, no social creed; whatever he believes as a private individual should not interfere with the outgoing of sympathy in constructing the characters he intends to set forth. human nature is a compound of the virtuous and the vicious, or, to change the figure, a perpetual oscillation between flesh and spirit. life is half tragedy and half comedy: men and women are sometimes wise and often foolish. from this maze of mystery you are to develop new creations, and actual people are your _starting-point_, never your _models_. methods of characterisation by characterisation is meant the power to make your ideal persons appear real. it is one thing to make them real to yourself, and quite another thing to make them real to other people. characterisation needs a union of imaginative and artistic gifts. in this respect, as in all others, shakespeare is pre-eminent. his characters are alike clear in conception and expression, and their human quality is just as wonderful as the large scale on which they move, covering, as they do, the entire field of human nature. there are certain well-known methods of characterisation, and to these i propose to devote the remainder of this chapter. the first and most obvious is for the author to describe the character. this is generally recognised as bad art. to say "she was a very wicked woman," is like the boy who drew a four-legged animal and wrote underneath, "this is a cow." if that boy had succeeded in drawing a cow there would have been no need to label it; and, in the same way, if you succeed in realising and drawing your characters there will be no need to talk about them. the best characterisation never _says_ what a person is; it shows what he or she is by what they do and say. i do not mean that you must say nothing at all about your creations; the novels of hardy and meredith contain a good deal of indirect comment of this kind; but it is a notable fact that hardy's weakest work, "a laodicean," contains more comment than any of the others he has written. stevenson aptly said, "readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from her like the robes of cinderella, and she stands before us as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman." there is another point to be remembered. if you label a character at the outset as a very humorous person, the reader prepares himself for a good laugh now and then, and if you disappoint him--well, you have lost a reader and gained an adverse critic. to announce beforehand what you are going to do, and then fail, is to put a weapon into the hands of those who honour you with a reading. "often a single significant detail will throw more light on a character than pages of comment. an example in perfection is the phrase in which thackeray tells how becky crawley, amid all her guilt and terror, when her husband had lord steyne by the throat, felt a sudden thrill of admiration for rawdon's splendid strength. it is like a flash of lightning which shows the deeps of the selfish, sensual woman's nature. it is no wonder that thackeray threw down his pen, as he confessed that he did, and cried, 'that is a stroke of genius.'" the lesson is plain. don't say what your hero and heroine _are_: make them tell their own characters by words and deeds. the trick of "idiosyncrasies" young writers, who fail to mark off the individuality of one character from another, by the strong lines of difference which are found in real life, endeavour to atone for their incompetency by emphasising physical and mental oddities. this is a mere literary "trick." to invest your hero with a squint, or an irritating habit of blowing his nose continually; or to make your heroine guilty of using a few funny phrases every time she speaks, is certainly to distinguish them from the other characters in the book who cannot boast of such excellences, but it must not be called characterisation. it is a bastard attempt to economise the labour that is necessary to discover individuality of soul and to bring it out in skilful dialogues and carefully chosen situations. another form of the trick of idiosyncrasy is the bald realism of the sensationalist. he persuades himself that he is character-drawing. he is doing nothing of the kind. he takes snap-shots with a literary camera and reproduces direct from the negative. the art of re-touching nature so that it becomes ideal, is not in his line at all: the commercial instinct in him is stronger than the artistic, and he sees more business in realism than in idealism. and what is more, there is less labour--characters exist ready for use. it is easy to listen to a lively altercation between cabbies in a london street, when language passes that makes one hesitate to strike a match, and then go home and draw a city driver. you have no need to search for contrasts, for colour, for sound, for passion: you saw and heard everything at once. but the truth still remains--the seeing of things, and the hearing of things, are but the raw material: where are your new creations? the trick of selecting oddities as a method of characterisation is superficial, simply because oddities lie upon the surface. you can, without much difficulty, construct a dialogue between a blacksmith and a student, showing how the unlettered man exhibits his ignorance and the scholar his taste. but such a distinction is quite external; at heart the men may be very much alike. it is one thing to paint the type, and another to paint the individual. take sir willoughby patterne. he is a man who belongs to the type "selfish"; but he is much more than a typically selfish man; he is an _individual_. there is a turn in his remarks, a way of speaking in dialogue, and a style of doing things which show him to be self-centred, not in a general way, but in the particular way of sir willoughby patterne. there is one fact in characterisation for which a due margin should always be made. wilkie collins, you will remember, says of his fosco: "the making him fat was an afterthought; his canaries and his white mice were found next; and the most valuable discovery of all, his admiration of miss halcombe, took its rise in a conviction that he would not be true to nature unless there was some weak point somewhere in his character." you must provide for these "afterthoughts" by not being too ready to cast your characters in the final mould. let every personality be in a state of _becoming_ until he has actually _come_--in all the completeness of appearance, manner, speech, and action. your first conception of the jewess may be that of one who possesses the usual physique of her class--short and stout; but afterwards it may suit your purpose better to make her fairer, taller, and slighter, than the rest of her race. if so, do not hesitate to undo the work of laborious hours by effecting such an improvement. it will go against the grain, no doubt; but novel-writing is a serious business, and much depends on trifles in accomplishing success; so do not begrudge the extra toil involved. * * * * * characterisation is the finest feature of the novelist's art. here you will have your greatest difficulties, but, if you overcome them, you will have your greatest triumphs. here, too, the crying need is a knowledge of human nature. acquire a mastership of this subtle quantity, and then you may hope for genuine results. of course, knowledge is not _all_; it is in artistic appreciation that true character-drawing consists. chapter v studies in literary technique narrative art david pryde has summed up the whole matter in a few well-chosen sentences: "keeping the beginning and the end in view, we set out from the right starting-place, and go straight towards the destination; we introduce no event that does not spring from the first cause and tend to the great effect; we make each detail a link joined to the one going before and the one coming after; we make, in fact, all the details into one entire chain, which we can take up as a whole, carry about with us, and retain as long as we please."[ :a] how many elements are here referred to? there are plot, movement, unity, proportion, purpose, and climax. i have already dealt with some of these, and now propose to devote a few paragraphs to the rest. unity means unity of effect, and is first a matter of literary architecture--afterwards a matter of impression. it has been said of macbeth that "the play moves forward with an absolute regularity; it is almost architectural in its rise and fall, in the balance of its parts. the plot is a complex one; it has an ebb and flow, a complication and a resolution, to use technical terms. that is to say, the fortunes of macbeth swoop up to a crisis or turning-point, and thence down again to a catastrophe. the catastrophe, of course, closes the play; the crisis, as so often with shakespeare, comes in its exact centre, in the middle of the middle act, with the escape of fleance. hitherto macbeth's path has been gilded with success; now the epoch of failure begins. and the parallelisms and correspondences throughout are remarkable. each act has a definite subject: the temptation; the first, second, and third crimes; the retribution. three accidents, if we may so call them, help macbeth in the first part of the play: the visit of duncan to inverness, his own impulsive murder of the grooms, the flight of malcolm and donalbain. and in the second half three accidents help to bring about his ruin: the escape of fleance, the false prophecy of the witches, the escape of macduff. malcolm and macduff at the end answer to duncan and banquo at the beginning. a meeting with the witches heralds both rise and fall. finally, each of the crimes is represented in the retribution. malcolm, the son of duncan, and macduff, whose wife and child he slew, conquer macbeth; fleance begets a race that shall reign in his stead."[ :a] from a construction point of view, a novel and a play have many points in common; and although the parallelism of events and characters is not necessary for either, the account of macbeth just given is a good illustration of unity of effect and impression. stevenson's "kidnapped" and "david balfour" are good examples of unity of structure. movement how many times have you put a novel away with the remark: "it _drags_ awfully!" the narrative that drags is not worthy of the name. there are a few writers who can go into byways and take the reader with them--mr le gallienne, for instance--but, as a rule, the digressive novelist is the one whose book is thrown on to the table with the remark just quoted. a story should be _progressive_, not _digressive_ and episodical. hence the importance of movement and suspense. keep your narrative in motion, and do not let it sleep for a while unless it is of deliberate intention. there is a definite law to be observed--namely, that as feeling rises higher, sentences become crisp and shorter; witness acts i. and ii. in _macbeth_. suspense, too, is an agent in accelerating the forward march of a story. there is no music in a pause, but it renders great service in giving proper emphasis to music that goes before and comes after it. notice how stevenson employs suspense and contrast in "kidnapped." "the sea had gone down, and the wind was steady and kept the sails quiet, so that there was a great stillness in the ship, in which i made sure i heard the sound of muttering voices. a little after, and there came a clash of steel upon the deck, by which i knew they were dealing out the cutlasses, and one had been let fall; and after that silence again." these little touches are capable of affecting the entire interest of the whole story, and should receive careful attention. aids to description the point of view so much has been said in praise of descriptive power, that it will not be amiss if i repeat one or two opinions which, seemingly, point the other way. gray, in a letter to west, speaks of describing as "an ill habit that will wear off"; and disraeli said description was "always a bore both to the describer and the describee." to some, these authorities may not be of sufficient weight. will they listen to robert louis stevenson? he says that "no human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes one suspect we hear too much of it in literature." these remarks will save us from that description-worship which is a sort of literary influenza. the first thing to be determined in descriptive art is _the point of view_. suppose you are standing on an eminence commanding a wide stretch of plain with a river winding through it. what does the river look like? a silver thread; and so you would describe it. but if you stood close to the brink and looked back to the eminence on which you stood previously, you would no longer speak of a silver thread, simply because now your point of view is changed. the principle is elementary enough, and there is no need to dwell upon it further, except to quote an illustration from blackmore: "for she stood at the head of a deep green valley, carved from out the mountains in a perfect oval, with a fence of sheer rock standing round it, eighty feet or a hundred high, from whose brink black wooded hills swept up to the skyline. by her side a little river glided out from underground with a soft, dark babble, unawares of daylight; then growing brighter, lapsed away, and fell into the valley. then, as it ran down the meadow, alders stood on either marge, and grass was blading out of it, and yellow tufts of rushes gathered, looking at the hurry. but further down, on either bank, were covered houses built of stone, square, and roughly covered, set as if the brook were meant to be the street between them. only one room high they were, and not placed opposite each other, but in and out as skittles are; only that the first of all, which proved to be the captain's was a sort of double house, or rather two houses joined together by a plank-bridge over the river."[ :a] selecting the main features the fundamental principle of all art is selection, and nowhere is it seen to better advantage than in description. a battle, a landscape, or a mental agony, can only be described artistically, in so far as the writer chooses the most characteristic features for presentation. in the following passage george eliot states the law and keeps it. "she had time to remark that he was a peculiar-looking person, but not insignificant, which was the quality that most hopelessly consigned a man to perdition. he was massively built. the striking points in his face were large, clear, grey eyes, and full lips." suppose for a moment that the reader were told about the pattern and "hang" of the hero's trousers, his waistcoat and his coat, and that information was given respecting the number of links in his watch-chain, and the exact depth of his double chin--what would have been the effect from an artistic point of view? failure--for instead of getting a description alive with interest, we should get a catalogue wearisome in its multiplicity of detail. a certain author once thought homer was niggardly in describing helen's charms, so he endeavoured to atone for the great poet's shortcomings in the following manner:--"she was a woman right beautiful, with fine eyebrows, of clearest complexion, beautiful cheeks; comely, with large, full eyes, with snow-white skin, quick glancing, graceful; a grove filled with graces, fair-armed, voluptuous, breathing beauty undisguised. the complexion fair, the cheek rosy, the countenance pleasing, the eye blooming, a beauty unartificial, untinted, of its natural colour, adding brightness to the brightest cherry, as if one should dye ivory with resplendent purple. her neck long, of dazzling whiteness, whence she was called the swan-born, beautiful helen." after reading this can you form a distinct idea of helen's beauty? we think not. the details are too many, the language too exuberant, and the whole too much in the form of a catalogue. it would have been better to select a few of what george eliot calls the "striking points," and present them with taste and skill. as it is, the attempt to improve on homer has resulted in a description which, for detail and minuteness, is like the enumeration of the parts of a new motor-car--indeed, that is the true sphere of description by detail, where, as in all matters mechanical, fulness and accuracy are demanded. in "mariana," tennyson refers to no more facts than are necessary to emphasise her great loneliness: "with blackest moss the flower-pots were thickly crusted, one and all; the rusted nails fell from the knots that held the pear to the gable wall. the broken sheds looked sad and strange: unlifted was the clinking latch; weeded and worn the ancient thatch upon the lonely moated grange." in ordering such details as may be chosen to represent an event, idea, or person, it is the rule to proceed from "the near to the remote, and from the obvious to the obscure." homer thus describes a shield as smooth, beautiful, brazen, and well-hammered--that is, he gives the particulars in the order in which they would naturally be observed. homer's method is also one of epithet: "the far-darting apollo," "swift-footed achilles," "wide-ruling agamemnon," "white-armed hera," and "bright-eyed athene." now it is but a step from this giving of epithets to what is called description by suggestion when hawthorne speaks of the "black, moody brow of septimus felton," it is really suggestion by the use of epithet. dickens took the trouble to enumerate the characteristics of mrs gamp one by one; but he succeeded in presenting mrs fezziwig by simply saying, "in came mrs fezziwig, one vast substantial smile." this latter method differs from the former in almost every possible way. the enumeration of details becomes wearisome unless very cleverly handled, whereas the suggestive method unifies the writer's impressions, thereby saving the reader's mental exertions and heightening his pleasures. he tells us how things and persons impress him, and prefers to _indicate_ rather than describe. thus dickens refers to "a full-sized, sleek, well-conditioned gentleman in a blue coat with bright buttons, and a white cravat. this gentleman had a very red face, as if an undue proportion of the blood in his body had been squeezed into his head; which perhaps accounted for his having also the appearance of being rather cold about the heart." lowell says of chaucer, "sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the friar, before sitting himself down, drives away the cat. we know without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner." notice how succinctly blackmore delineates a natural fact, "and so in a sorry plight i came to an opening in the bushes where a great black pool lay in front of me, whitened with snow (as i thought) at the sides, till i saw it was only foam-froth, . . . and the look of this black pit was enough to stop one from diving into it, even on a hot summer's day, with sunshine on the water; i mean if the sun ever shone there. as it was, i shuddered and drew back; not alone at the pool itself, and the black air there was about it, but also at the whirling manner, and wisping of white threads upon it in stripy circles round and round; and the centre still as jet."[ :a] hardy's description of egdon heath is too well known to need remark; it is a classic of its kind. robert louis stevenson possessed the power of suggestion to a high degree. "an ivory-faced and silver-haired old woman opened the door. she had an evil face, smoothed with hypocrisy, but her manners were excellent." to advise a young writer to imitate stevenson would be absurd, but perhaps i may be permitted to say: study stevenson's method, from the blind man in "treasure island," to kirstie in "the weir of hermiston." facts to remember "it is a peculiarity of walter scott," says goethe, "that his great talent in representing details often leads him into faults. thus in 'ivanhoe' there is a scene where they are seated at a table in a castle-hall, at night, and a stranger enters. now he is quite right in describing the stranger's appearance and dress, but it is a fault that he goes to the length of describing his feet, shoes and stockings. when we sit down in the evening and someone comes in, we notice only the upper part of his body. if i describe the feet, daylight enters at once and the scene loses its nocturnal character." and yet scott in some respects was a master of description--witness his picture of norham castle and of the ravine of greeta between rokeby and mortham. but goethe's criticism is justified notwithstanding. never write more than can be said of a man or a scene when regarded from the surrounding circumstances of light and being. ruskin is never tired of saying, "draw what you see." in the "fighting téméraire," turner paints the old warship as if it had no rigging. it was there in its proper place, but the artist could not see it, and he refused to put it in his picture if, at the distance, it was not visible. "when you see birds fly, you do not see any _feathers_," says mr w. m. hunt. "you are not to draw _reality_, but reality as it _appears_ to you." avoid the _pathetic fallacy_. kingsley, in "alton locke," says: "they rowed her in across the rolling foam-- the cruel crawling foam," on which ruskin remarks, "the foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. the state of mind which attributes to it these characteristics of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. all violent feelings have the same effect. they produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things." * * * * * perhaps the secret of all accurate description is a trained eye. do you know how a cab-driver mounts on to the box, or the shape of a coal-heaver's mouth when he cries "coal!"? do you know how a wood looks in early spring as distinct from its precise appearance in summer, or how a man uses his eyes when concealing feelings of jealousy? or a woman when hiding feelings of love? observation with insight, and imagination with sympathy; these are the great necessities in every department of novel-writing. footnotes: [ :a] "studies in composition," p. . [ :a] e. k. chambers' _macbeth_, pp. , . "the warwick shakespeare." [ :a] "lorna doone." [ :a] "lorna doone." chapter vi studies in literary technique colour: local and otherwise one morning you opened your paper and found that mr simon st clair had gone into wales in search of local colour. what does local colour mean? the appearance of the country, the dress and language of the people, all that distinguishes the particular locality from others near and remote--is local colour. take kipling's "mandalay" as an illustration. he speaks of the ringing temple bell, of the garlic smells, and the dawn that comes up like thunder; there are elephants piling teak, and all the special details of the particular locality find a characteristic expression. for what reason? well, local colour renders two services to literature; it makes very often a pleasing or a striking picture in itself; and it is used by the author to bring out special features in his story. kipling's underlying idea comes to the surface when he says that a man who has lived in the east always hears the east "a-callin'" him back again. there is deep pathos in the idea alone; but when it is set in the external characteristics of eastern life, one locality chosen to set forth the rest, and stated in language that few can equal, the entire effect is very striking. whenever local colour is of picturesque quality there is a temptation to substitute "word-painting" for the story. the desire for novelty is at the bottom of a good deal of modern extravagance in this direction, but the truth still remains that local colour has an important function to discharge--namely, to increase the artistic value of good narrative by suggesting the environment of the _dramatis personæ_. you must have noticed the opening chapters of "the scarlet letter." why all this careful detailing of the customs house, the manners and the talk of the people? for no other reason than that just given. but there is another use of colour in literary composition. perhaps i can best illustrate my purpose by quoting from an interview with james lane allen, who certainly ought to know what he is talking about. the author of "the choir invisible," and "summer in arcady," occupies a position in fiction which makes his words worth considering. said mr allen to the interviewer:[ :a] "a friend of mine--a painter--had just finished reading some little thing that i had succeeded in having published in the _century_. 'what do you think of it?' i asked him. 'tell me frankly what you like and what you don't like.' "'it's interestingly told, dramatic, polished, and all that, allen,' was his reply, 'but why in the world did you neglect such an opportunity to drop in some colour here, and at this point, and there?' "it came over me like that," said the kentuckian, snapping his fingers, "that words indicating colours can be manipulated by the writer just as pigments are by the painter. i never forgot the lesson. and now when i describe a landscape, or a house, or a costume, i try to put it into such words that an artist can paint the scene from my words." evidently mr allen learned his lesson long ago, but it is one every writer should study carefully. mr baring gould also gives his experience. "in one of my stories i sketched a girl in a white frock leaning against a sunny garden wall, tossing guelder-roses. i had some burnished gold-green flies on the old wall, preening in the sun; so, to complete the scene, i put her on gold-green leather shoes, and made the girl's eyes of much the same hue. thus we had a picture where the colour was carried through, and, if painted, would have been artistic and satisfying. a red sash would have spoiled all, so i gave her one that was green. so we had the white dress, the guelder-rose-balls greeny-white, and through the ranges of green-gold were led up to her hair, which was red-gold. i lay some stress on this formation of picture in tones of colour, because it pleases myself when writing--it satisfies my artistic sense. a thousand readers may not observe it; but those who have any art in them will at once receive therefrom a pleasing impression."[ :a] these two testimonies make the matter very plain. if anything is needed it is a more practical illustration taken direct from a book. for this purpose i have chosen a choice piece from george du maurier's "peter ibbetson," a book that was half-killed by the trilby boom. "before us lies a sea of fern, gone a russet-brown from decay, in which are isles of dark green gorse, and little trees with scarlet and orange and lemon-coloured leaflets fluttering down, and running after each other on the bright grass, under the brisk west wind which makes the willows rustle, and turn up the whites of their leaves in pious resignation to the coming change. "harrow-on-the-hill, with its pointed spire, rises blue in the distance; and distant ridges, like the receding waves, rise into blueness, one after the other, out of the low-lying mist; the last ridge bluely melting into space. in the midst of it all, gleams the welsh harp lake, like a piece of sky that has become unstuck and tumbled into the landscape with its shiny side up." what about dialect? dialect is local colour individualised. ian maclaren, in "the bonnie brier bush," following in the wake of crockett and barrie, has given us the dialect of scotland: baring gould and a host of others have provided us with dialect stories of english counties; jane barlow and several irish writers deal with the sister island; wales has not been forgotten; and the american novelists have their big territory mapped out into convenient sections. soon the acreage of locality literature will have been completely "written up"; i do not say its yielding powers will have been exhausted, for, as with other species of local colour, dialect has had to suffer at the hands of the imitator who dragged dialect into his paltry narrative for its own sake, and to give him the opportunity of providing the reader with a glossary. the reason why dialect-stories were so popular some time ago is twofold. first, dialect imparts a flavour to a narrative, especially when it is in contrast to educated utterances on the part of other characters. but the chief reason is that dialect people have more character than other people--as a rule. they afford greater scope for literary artistry than can be found in life a stage or two higher, with its correctness and artificiality. st beuve said, "all peasants have style." yes; that is the truth exactly. there is an individuality about the peasant that is absent from the town-dweller, and this fact explains the piquancy of many novels that owe their popularity to the representations of the rustic population. the dialect story, or novel, cannot hope for permanency unless it contains elements of universal interest. the emphasis laid on a certain type of speech stamps such a literary production with the brand of narrowness. i understand that ian maclaren has been translated into french. can you imagine drumsheugh in gallic? or jamie soutar? never. only that which is literature in the highest sense can be translated into another language; hence the life of corners in scotland, or elsewhere, has no special interest for the world in general. the rule as to dealing with dialect is quite simple. never use the letters of the alphabet to reproduce the sound of such language in a literal manner. _suggest dialect_; that is all. have nothing to do with glossaries. people hate dictionaries, however brief, when they read fiction. george eliot and thomas hardy are good models of the wise use of county speech. on dialogue in making your characters talk, it should be your aim not to _reproduce_ their conversation, but to _indicate_ it. here, as elsewhere, the first principle of all art is selection, and from the many words which you have heard your characters use, you must choose those that are typical in view of the purpose you have in hand. i once had a letter from a youthful novelist, in which he said: "it's splendid to write a story. i make my characters say what i like--swear, if necessary--and all that." now you can't make your characters say what you like; you are obliged to make them say what is in keeping with their known dispositions, and with the circumstances in which they are placed at the time of speaking. if you know your characters intimately, you will not put wise words into the mouth of a clown, unless you have suitably provided for such a surprise; neither will you write long speeches for the sullen villain who is to be the human devil of the narrative. remember, therefore, that the key to propriety and effectiveness in writing is the knowledge of those ideal people whom you are going to use in your pages. "windiness" and irrelevancy are the twin evils of conversations in fiction. trollope says, "it is so easy to make two persons talk on any casual subject with which the writer presumes himself to be conversant! literature, philosophy, politics, or sport may be handled in a loosely discursive style; and the writer, while indulging himself, is apt to think he is pleasing the reader. i think he can make no greater mistake. the dialogue is generally the most agreeable part of a novel; but it is only so as long as it tends in some way to the telling of the main story. it need not be confined to this, but it should always have a tendency in that direction. the unconscious critical acumen of a reader is both just and severe. when a long dialogue on extraneous matter reaches his mind, he at once feels that he is being cheated into taking something that he did not bargain to accept when he took up the novel. he does not at that moment require politics or philosophy, but he wants a story. he will not, perhaps, be able to say in so many words that at some point the dialogue has deviated from the story; but when it does, he will feel it."[ :a] a word or two as to what kind of dialogue assists in telling the main story may not be amiss. return to the suggested plot of the jewess and the roman catholic. what are they to talk about? anything that will assist their growing intimacy, that will bring out the peculiar personalities of both, and contribute to the development of the narrative. in a previous section i said that the _dénouement_ decided the selection of your characters; in some respects it will also decide the topics of their conversation. certain events have to be provided for, in order that they may be both natural and inevitable, and it becomes your duty to create incidents and introduce dialogue which will lead up to these events. with reference to models for study, advice is difficult to give. quite a gallery of masters would be needed for the purpose, as there are so many points in one which are lacking in another. besides, a great novelist may have eccentricities in dialogue, and be quite normal in other respects. george meredith is as artificial in dialogue as he is in the use of phrases pure and simple, and yet he succeeds, _in spite of_ defects, not _by_ them. here is a sample from "the egoist": "have you walked far to-day?" "nine and a half hours. my flibbertigibbet is too much for me at times, and i had to walk off my temper." "all those hours were required?" "not quite so long." "you are training for your alpine tour?" "it's doubtful whether i shall get to the alps this year. i leave the hall, and shall probably be in london with a pen to sell." "willoughby knows that you leave him?" "as much as mont blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a party below. he sees a speck or two in the valley." "he has spoken of it." "he would attribute it to changes." i need not discuss how far this advances the novelist's narrative, but it is plain that it is not a model for the beginner. for smartness and "point" nothing could be better than anthony hope's "dolly dialogues," although the style is not necessarily that of a novel. points in conversation never allow the reader to be in doubt as to who is speaking. when he has to turn back to discover the speaker's identity, you may be sure there is something wrong with your construction. you need not quote the speaker's name in order to make it plain that he is speaking: all that is needed is a little attention to the "said james" and "replied susan" of your dialogues. when once these two have commenced to talk, they can go on in catechism form for a considerable period. but if a third party chimes in, a more careful disposition of names is called for. beginners very often have a good deal of trouble with their "saids," "replieds," and "answereds." here, again, a little skilful manoevring will obviate the difficulty. this is a specimen of third-class style. "i'm off on monday," _said_ he. "not really," _said_ she. "yes, i have only come to say goodbye," _said_ he. "shall you be gone long?" _asked_ she. "that depends," _said_ he. "i should like to know what takes you away," _said_ she. "i daresay," _said_ he, smiling. "i shouldn't wonder if i know," _said_ she. "i daresay you might guess," _said_ he. could anything be more wooden than this perpetual "said he, said she," which i have accentuated by putting into italics? now, observe the difference when you read the following:-- _observed_ silver. _cried_ the cook. _returned_ morgan. _said_ another. _agreed_ silver. _said_ the fellow with the bandage. there is no lack of suitable verbs for dialogue purposes--remarked, retorted, inquired, demanded, murmured, grumbled, growled, sneered, explained, and a host more. without a ready command of such a vocabulary you cannot hope to give variety to your character-conversations, and, what is of graver importance, you will not be able to bring out the essential qualities of such remarks as you introduce. for instance, to put a sarcastic utterance into a man's mouth, and then to write down that he "replied" with those words is not half so effective as to say he "sneered" them.[ :a] probably you will be tempted to comment on your dialogue as you write by insinuating remarks as to actions, looks, gestures, and the like. this is a good temptation, so far, but it has its dangers. the ancient hebrew writer, in telling the story of hezekiah, said that isaiah went to the king with these words: "set thine house in order: for thou shalt die and not live." _and hezekiah turned his face to the wall--and prayed._ if you can make a comment as dramatic and forceful as that, _make it_. but avoid useless and uncalled-for remarks, and remember that you really want nothing, not even a fine epigram, which fails to contribute to the main purpose. "atmosphere" it will not be inappropriate to close this chapter with a few words on what is called "atmosphere." the word is often met with in the vocabulary of the reviewer; he is marvellously keen in scenting atmospheres. perhaps an illustration may be the best means of exposition. the reviewer is speaking of maeterlinck's "alladine and palomides," "interior," and "the death of tintagiles." he says, "we find in them the same strange atmosphere to which we had grown accustomed in 'pelleas' and 'l'intruse.' we are in a region of no fixed plane--a region that this world never saw. it is a region such as arnold böcklin, perhaps, might paint, and many a child describe. a castle stands upon a cliff. endless galleries and corridors and winding stairs run through it. beneath lie vast grottoes where subterranean waters throw up unearthly light from depths where seaweed grows." this is very true, and put into bald language it means that maeterlinck has succeeded in creating an artistic environment for his weird characters; it is the _setting_ in which he has placed them. in the first scene of _hamlet_, shakespeare creates the necessary atmosphere to introduce the events that are to follow. the soldiers on guard are concerned and afraid; the reader is thereby prepared, step by step, for the reception of the whole situation; everything that will strengthen the impression of a coming fatality is seized by a master hand, and made to do service in creating an atmosphere of such expectant quality. an artist by nature will select intuitively the persons and facts he needs; but there is no reason why a study of these necessities, a slow and careful pondering, should not at last succeed in alighting upon the precise and inevitable details which delicately and subtly produce the desired result. in this sense the matter can hardly be called a minor detail, but the expression has been sufficiently guarded. footnotes: [ :a] shuman, "steps into journalism," p. . [ :a] "the art of writing fiction," p. . [ :a] "autobiography," vol. ii. p. . [ :a] see bates' "talks on writing english." an excellent manual, to which i am indebted for ideas and suggestions. chapter vii pitfalls items of general knowledge i propose to show in this chapter that a literary artist can never afford to despise details. he may have genius enough to write a first-rate novel, and sell it rapidly in spite of real blemishes, but if a work of art is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well. no writer is any the better for slovenly inaccuracy. take the details of everyday life. do you suppose you are infallible in these commonplace things? if so, be undeceived at once. it is simply marvellous with what ease a mistake will creep into your narrative. even mr zangwill once made a hansom cab door to open with a handle from the inside, and the mistake appeared in six editions, escaping the reviewers, and was quietly altered by the author in the seventh. there is nothing particularly serious about an error of this kind; but at the same time, where truth to fact is so simple a matter, why not give the fact as it is? trivialities may not interfere with the power of the story, but they often attach an ugliness, or a smack of the ridiculous, which cannot but hinder, to some extent, the beauty of otherwise good work. mistakes such as that just referred to, arise, in most instances, out of the passion and feeling in which the novelist advances his narrative. the detail connected with the opening of the hansom door (doors) was nothing to mr zangwill, compared to the person who opened it. i should advise you, therefore, to master all the necessary _minutiae_ of travelling, if your hero and heroine are going abroad; of city life if you take them to the theatre for amusement--in fact, of every environment in which imagination may place them. then, when all your work is done, read what has been written with the microscopic eyes of a flaubert. specific subjects for instance, the plot suggested in the previous chapters deals with judaism. now, if you don't know jewish life through and through, it is the height of foolishness to attempt to write a novel about it. (the same remark applies to roman catholicism.) you will find it necessary to study the bible and hebrew history; and when you have mastered the literature of the subject and caught its spirit, you will turn your attention to the sacred people as they exist to-day--their isolation, their wealth, their synagogues, and their psychological peculiarities. does this seem to be too big a programme? well, if you are to present a living and truthful picture of the jewess and her surroundings, you can only succeed by going through such a programme; whereas, if you skip the hard preparatory work you will bungle in the use of hebrew terms, and when you make the rabbi drop the scroll through absent-mindedness, you will very likely say that "the congregation looked on half-amused and half-wondering." just visit a synagogue when the rabbi happens to drop the scroll. the congregation would be "horribly shocked." the same law applies whatever be your subject. if you intend to follow a prevailing fashion and depict slum life, you will have to spend a good deal of time in those unpleasant regions, not only to know them in their outward aspects, but to know them in their inward and human features. even then something important may escape you, with the result that you fall into error, and the expert enjoys a quiet giggle at your expense; but you will have some consolation in the thought that you spared no pains in the diligent work of preparation. perhaps your novel will take the reader into aristocratic circles. pray do not make the attempt if you are not thoroughly acquainted with the manners and customs of such circles. ignorance will surely betray you, and in describing a dinner, or an "at home," you will raise derisive laughter by suggesting the details of a most impossible meal, or spoil your heroine by making her guilty of atrocious etiquette. the remedy is close at hand: _know your subject_. topography and geography watch your topography and geography. have you never read novels where the characters are made to walk miles of country in as many minutes? in fairy tales we rather like these extraordinary creatures--their startling performances have a charm we should be sorry to part with. but in the higher world of fiction, where ideal things should appear as real as possible, we decidedly object to miraculous journeys, especially, as in most instances, it is plainly a mistake in calculation on the part of the writer. of course the writer is occasionally placed in an awkward position. a dramatic episode is about to take place, or, more correctly, the author wishes it to take place, but the characters have been dispersed about the map, and time and distance conspire against the author's purpose. it is madness to "blur" the positions and "risk" the reader's acuteness, but it is almost equally unfortunate to fail in observing the difficulty, and write on in blissful ignorance of the fact that nature's laws have been set at defiance. the drawing of a map, as before suggested, will obviate all these troubles. should you depict a lover's scene in india, take care not to describe it as occurring in "beautiful twilight." it is quite possible to know that darkness follows sunset, and yet to forget it in the moment of writing; but a good writer is never caught "napping" in these matters. if you don't know india, choose cairo, about which, after half-a-dozen lengthened visits, you can speak with certainty. scientific facts what a nuisance the weather is to many novelists. some triumph over their difficulties; a few contribute to our amusement. the meteorology of fiction would be a fascinating study. in second-rate productions, it is astonishing to witness the ease with which the weather is ordered about. the writer makes it rain when he thinks the incidents of a downpour will enliven the narrative, forgetting that the movement of the story, as previously stated, requires a blue sky and a shining sun; or he contrives to have the wind blowing in two or three directions at once. the sun and the moon require careful manipulation. at the beginning of a novel, the room of an invalid is said to have a window looking directly towards the east; but at the end of the book when the invalid dies, the author, wishing to make him depart this life in a flood of glory, suffuses this eastern-windowed room with "the red glare of the setting sun." the detail may appear unimportant, but it is not so, and a few hours devoted to notes on these minor points would save all the unpleasantness and ridicule which such mistakes too frequently bring. the reviewer loves to descant on the "peculiar cosmology and physical science of the volume before us." the moon is most unfortunate. mrs humphry ward confesses that she never knows when to make the moon rise, and obtains miss ward's assistance in all astronomical references. this is, of course, a pleasant exaggeration, but it shows that no venture should be made in science without being perfectly sure of your ground. grammar grammar is the most dangerous of all pitfalls. suppose you read your novel through, and check each sentence. after weary toil you are ready to offer a prize of one guinea to the man who can show you a mistake. when the full list of errors is drawn up by an expert grammarian, you are glad that offer was not made, for your guineas would have been going too quickly. in everyday conversation you speak as other people do--having a special hatred of painful accuracy, otherwise called pedantry; and as you frequently hear the phrase: "those sort of people are never nice," it does not strike you as being incorrect when you read it in your proof-sheets. or somebody refers to a theatrical performance, and regretting his inability to be present, says, "i should like to have gone, but could not." so often is the phrase used in daily speech, that its sound (when you read your book aloud) does not suggest anything erroneous. and yet if you wish your reader to know that you are a good grammarian, you will not be ashamed to revise your grammar and say, "i should have liked to go, but could not." these are simple instances: there are hundreds more. reviewing all that has been said in this chapter, the one conclusion is that the novelist must be a man of knowledge; he must know the english language from base to summit; and whatever references he makes to science, art, history, theology, or any other subject, he should have what is expected of writers in these specific departments--accuracy. chapter viii the secret of style communicable elements one can readily sympathise with the melancholy of a man who, after reading de quincey, macaulay, addison, lamb, pater, and stevenson, found that literary style was still a mystery to him. he was obliged to confess that the secret of style is with them that have it. his main difficulty, however, was to reconcile this conviction with the advice of a learned friend who urged him to study the best models if he would attain a good style. was style communicable? or was it not? now of all questions relating to this subject, this is the most pertinent, and, if i may say so, the only real question. it is the easiest thing in the world to tell a student about flaubert and guy de maupassant, about tolstoi and turgenieff, but no quantity of advice as to reading is of much avail unless the preliminary question just referred to is intelligently answered. the so-called stylists of all ages may be carefully read from beginning to end, and yet style will not disclose its secret. such a course of reading could not but be beneficial; to live among the lovely things of literature would develop the taste and educate appreciation; the reader would be quick to discern beauty when he saw it, but the art of producing it other than by deliberate imitation of known models would be still a mystery. _is_ style communicable? the answer is _yes_ and _no_; in some senses it is, in others it is not. let us deal with the affirmative side first. this concerns all points of grammar and composition without which the story would not be clear and forcible. no writer can make a "corner" in the facts of grammar and composition; it is impossible to appropriate them individually to the exclusion of everybody else; and since style depends to some extent on a knowledge of those rules which govern the use of language, it follows that there are certain elements which are open to all who are willing to learn them. for instance, there is the study of words. how often do we hear it said of a certain novelist that he uses the right word with unerring accuracy. and this is regarded as an important feature in his style; therefore words and their uses should have a prominent place in your programme. in "the silverado squatters," stevenson represents himself as carrying a pail of water up a hill: "the water _lipping_ over the side, and a _quivering_ sunbeam in the midst." the words in italics are the exact words wanted; no others could possibly set forth the facts with greater accuracy. stevenson was a diligent word-student, and had a certain knowledge of their dynamic and suggestive qualities. the right word! how shall we find it? sometimes it will come with the thought; more often we must seek it. landor says: "i hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness those that fit the thing." what could be stronger than the language of guy de maupassant? "whatever the thing we wish to say there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it. we must seek till we find this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never allow ourselves to play tricks, even happy ones, or have recourse to sleights of language to avoid a difficulty. the subtlest things may be rendered and suggested by applying the hint conveyed in boileau's line, 'he taught the power of a word in the right place.'" in similar vein, professor raleigh remarks, "let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and the same statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words." the number of words used is another consideration. when phil may has drawn a picture he proceeds to make erasures here and there with a view to retaining wholeness of effect by the least possible number of lines. there is a similar excellence in literature, the literature where "there is not a superfluous word." oh, the "gasiness" of many a modern novel--pages and pages of so-called "style," "word-painting," and "description." the conclusion of the matter is this: the right number of words, and each word in its place. frederic schlegel used to say that in good prose every word should be underlined; as if he had said that the interpretation of a sentence should not depend on the manner in which it is read. it is also highly necessary that the would-be stylist should be a student of sentences and paragraphs. surprising as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that many aspirants after literary success never give these matters a thought; they expect that proficiency will "come." proficiency is not an angel who visits us unsolicited; it is a power that must be paid for with a price, and the price is laborious study of such practical technique as the following:--"in a series of sentences the stress should be varied continually so as to come in the beginning of some sentences, and at the end of others, regard being had for the two considerations, variation of rhythm, and grouping of similar ideas together." and this, "every paragraph is subject to the general laws of unity, selection, proportion, sequence, and variety which govern all good composition." the observance of these rules (and they are specimens of hundreds more) and the discovery of apt illustrations in literature are matters of time and labour. but the time and labour are well spent--nay, they are absolutely necessary if the literary man would know his craft thoroughly. for the ordinary man, something equivalent to a text-book course in rhetoric is indispensable. true, many writers have learned insensibly from other writers, but too severe a devotion to the masterpieces of literature may beget the master's weaknesses without imparting his strength. incommunicable elements the incommunicable element in style is that personal impress which a writer sets upon his work. what is a personal impress? i am asked. can it be defined? scarcely. personality itself is a mysterious thing. we know what it means when it is used to distinguish a remarkable man from those who are not remarkable. "he has a unique personality," we say. now that personality--if the man be a writer--will show itself in his literary offspring. it will be in evidence over and above rule, regulation, canons of art, and the like. if there be such a thing as a mystic presence, then style is that mystic presence of the writer's personality which permeates the ideas and language in such a way as to give them a distinction and individuality all their own. i will employ comparison as a means of illustration by supposing that the three following passages appeared in the same book in separate paragraphs and without the authors' names:-- "each material thing has its celestial side, has its translation into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other, and to these ends all things continually ascend. the gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant and grows; arrives at the quadruped and walks; arrives at the man and thinks." * * * * * "he [daniel webster] is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, 'this is your yankee englishman; such limbs we make in yankeeland! the tanned complexion; the amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth, accurately closed:--i have not traced so much silent bersekir rage that i remember of in any man.'" * * * * * "in the edifices of man there should be found reverent worship and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the form of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue,--which gives veining to the leaf and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organisation--but of that also which reproves the pillars of the earth and builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky." now, an experienced writer, or reader, would identify these quotations at once; in some measure from a knowledge of the books from which they are taken, but mostly from a recognition of style pure and simple. the merest tyro can see that the passages are not the work of one author; there is, apart from subject-matter, a subtle something that lies hidden beneath the language, informing each paragraph with a style peculiar to itself. what is it? ah! _the style is the man._ it is composition charged with personality. emerson, carlyle, and ruskin used the english language with due regard for the rules of grammar, and such principles of literary art as they felt to be necessary. and yet when emerson philosophises he does it in a way quite different to everybody else; when carlyle analyses a character, you know without the sage's signature that the work is his; and when ruskin describes natural beauties by speaking of "shadowy cones of mountain purple" being lifted "into the pale arch of the sky"--well, that is ruskin--it could be no other. in each case language is made the bearer of the writer's personality. style in literature is the breathing forth of soul and spirit; as is the soul, and as is the spirit in depth, sympathy, and power, so will the style be rich, distinctive, and memorable. professor raleigh says that "all style is gesture--the gesture of the mind and of the soul. mind we have in common, inasmuch as the laws of right reason are not different for different minds. therefore clearness and arrangement can be taught, sheer incompetence in the art of expression can be partly remedied. but who shall impose laws on the soul? . . . write, and after you have attained to some control over the instrument, you write yourself down whether you will or no. there is no vice, however unconscious, no virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or of generosity in your character that will not pass on to paper." hence the oft-repeated call for sincerity on the part of writers. if you try to imitate hardy it is a literary hypocrisy, and your sin will find you out. if you are meredith-minded, and play the sedulous ape to him, you must expect a similar catastrophe. _if the style is the man, how can you hope to equal that style if you can never come near the man?_ be true to all you know, and see, and feel; live with the masters, and catch their spirit. you will then get your own style--it may not be as good as those you have so long admired, but it will be _yours_; and, truth to tell, that is all you can hope for. chapter ix how authors work quick and slow the public has shown a deep interest in all details respecting the way in which writers produce their books; the food they eat, the clothes they wear, their weaknesses and their hobbies, what pens they use, and whether they prefer the typewriter or not--all these are items which a greedy public expects to know. so much is this the case to-day that an acrid critic recently offered the tart suggestion that a novelist was a man who wrote a great book, and spent the rest of his time--very profitably--in telling the world how he came to write it. i do not intend to pander to the literary news-monger in these pages, but to reproduce as much as i know of the way in which novelists work, in order to throw out hints as to how a beginner may perchance better his own methods. a word of warning, however, is necessary. do not, for heaven's sake, _ape_ anybody. because zola darkens his rooms when he writes, that is no reason why you should go and do likewise; and if john fiske likes to sit in a draught, pray save yourself the expense of a doctor's bill by imitating him. an author's methods are only of service to a novice when they enable him to improve his own; and it is with this object in view that i reproduce the following personal notes. the relative speeds of the writing fraternity are little short of amazing. hawthorne was slow in composing. sometimes he wrote only what amounted to half-a-dozen pages a week, often only a few lines in the same space of time, and, alas! he frequently went to his chamber and took up his pen only to find himself wholly unable to perform any literary work. bret harte has been known to pass days and weeks on a short story or poem before he was ready to deliver it into the hands of the printer. thomas hardy is said to have spent seven years in writing "jude the obscure." on the other hand, victor hugo wrote his "cromwell" in three months, and his "notre dame de paris" in four months and a half. wilkie collins, prince among the plotters, was accustomed to compose at white heat. speaking of "heart and science," he says: "rest was impossible. i made a desperate effort, rushed to the sea, went sailing and fishing, and was writing my book all the time 'in my head,' as the children say. the one wise course to take was to go back to my desk and empty my head, and then rest. my nerves are too much shaken for travelling. an arm-chair and a cigar, and a hundred and fiftieth reading of the glorious walter scott--king, emperor, and president of novelists--there is the regimen that is doing me good." an enterprising editor, not very long ago, sent out circulars to prominent authors asking them how much they can do in a day. the reply in most cases was that the rate of production varied; sometimes the pen or the typewriter could not keep pace with thought; at other times it was just the opposite. it is very necessary at this point to draw a distinction between the execution of a work, and its development in the mind from birth to full perfection. when we read that mr crockett, or somebody else, produced so many books in so many years, it does not always mean--if ever--that the idea and its expression have been a matter of weeks or months. to _write_ a novel in six weeks is not an impossibility--even a passable novel; but to sit down and think out a plot, with all its details of character and event, and to write it out so that in six weeks, or two or three months, the ms. is on the publisher's desk--well, don't believe it. no novel worthy of the name was ever produced at that rate. how many words a day? in nothing do authors differ so much as on the eternal problem of whether it is right to produce a certain quantity of matter every day--inspiration or no inspiration. thomas hardy has no definite hours for working, and, although he often uses the night-time for this purpose, he has a preference for the day-time. charlotte brontë had to choose favourable seasons for literary work--"weeks, sometimes months, elapsed before she felt that she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written; then some morning she would wake up and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her in distinct vision, and she set to work to write out what was more present to her mind at such times than actual life was."[ :a] when writing "jane eyre," and little jane had been brought to thornfield, the author's enthusiasm had grown so great that she could not stop. she went on incessantly for weeks. miss jane barlow confesses that she is "a very slow worker; indeed, when i consider the amount of work which the majority of writers turn out in a year, i feel that i must be dreadfully lazy. even in my quiet life here i find it difficult to get a long, clear space of time for my work, and the slightest interruption will upset me for hours. it is difficult to make people understand that it is not so much the time they take up, as causing me to break the line of thought. it may be that somebody only comes into the study to speak to me for a minute, but it is quite enough. i suppose it is very silly to be so sensitive to interruptions, but i cannot help it. i sometimes say it is as though a box of beads had been upset, and i had to gather them together again; that is just the effect of anyone speaking to me when i am at work. i write everything by hand, and it takes a long time. i am sure i could not use a typewriter, or dictate; indeed, i never let anybody see what i have written until it is in print. sometimes i write a passage over a dozen times before it comes right, and i always make a second copy of everything, but the corrections are not very numerous." mr william black was also a slow producer: "i am building up a book months before i write the first chapter; before i can put pen to paper i have to realise all the chief incidents and characters. i have to live with my characters, so to speak; otherwise, i am afraid they would never appear living people to my readers. this is my work during the summer; the only time i am free from the novel that-is-to-be is when i am grouse-shooting or salmon-fishing. at other times i am haunted by the characters and the scenes in which they take part, so that, for the sake of his peace of mind, my method is not to be recommended to the young novelist. when i come to the writing, i have to immure myself in perfect quietude; my study is at the top of the house, and on the two or three days a week i am writing, mrs black guards me from interruption. . . . of course, now and again, i have had to read a good deal preparatory to writing. before beginning 'sunrise,' for instance, i went through the history of secret societies in europe." charles reade and anthony trollope "charles reade's habit of working was unique. when he had decided on a new work, he plotted out the scheme, situations, facts, and characters on three large sheets of pasteboard. then he set to work, using very large foolscap to write on, working rapidly, but with frequent references to his storehouse of facts in the scrap-books which were ready at his hand. the genial novelist was a great reader of newspapers. anything that struck him as interesting, or any fact which tended to support one of his humanitarian theories, was cut out, pasted in a large folio scrap-book, and carefully indexed. facts of any sort were his hobby. from the scrap-books thus collected with great care, he used to 'elaborate' the questions treated of in his novels." anthony trollope is one of the few men who have taken their readers into their full confidence about book production. the quotation i am about to make is rather long, but it is too detailed to be shortened: "when i have commenced a new book i have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which i have allowed myself for the completion of the work. in this i have entered day by day the number of pages i have written, so that if at any time i have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied. according to the circumstances of the time, whether any other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which i was writing was, or was not, wanted with speed, i have allotted myself so many pages a week. the average number has been about forty. it has been placed as low as twenty, and has risen to one hundred and twelve. and as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain two hundred and fifty words, and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, i have had every word counted as i went."[ :a] under the title of "a walk in the wood," trollope thus describes his method of plot-making, and the difficulty the novelist experiences in making the "tricksy ariel" of the imagination do his bidding. "i have to confess that my incidents are fabricated to fit my story as it goes on, and not my story to fit my incidents. i wrote a novel once in which a lady forged a will, but i had not myself decided that she had forged it till the chapter before that in which she confesses her guilt. in another, a lady is made to steal her own diamonds, a grand _tour de force_, as i thought, but the brilliant idea struck me only when i was writing the page in which the theft is described. i once heard an unknown critic abuse my workmanship because a certain lady had been made to appear too frequently in my pages. i went home and killed her immediately. i say this to show that the process of thinking to which i am alluding has not generally been applied to any great effort of construction. it has expended itself on the minute ramifications of tale-telling: how this young lady should be made to behave herself with that young gentleman; how this mother or that father would be affected by the ill conduct or the good of a son or a daughter; how these words or those other would be most appropriate or true to nature if used on some special occasion. such plottings as these with a fabricator of fiction are infinite in number, but not one of them can be done fitly without thinking. my little effort will miss its wished-for result unless i be true to nature; and to be true to nature, i must think what nature would produce. where shall i go to find my thoughts with the greatest ease and most perfect freedom? "i have found that i can best command my thoughts on foot, and can do so with the most perfect mastery when wandering through a wood. to be alone is, of course, essential. companionship requires conversation, for which, indeed, the spot is most fit; but conversation is not now the object in view. i have found it best even to reject the society of a dog, who, if he be a dog of manners, will make some attempt at talking; and, though he should be silent, the sight of him provokes words and caresses and sport. it is best to be away from cottages, away from children, away as far as may be from chance wanderers. so much easier is it to speak than to think, that any slightest temptation suffices to carry away the idler from the harder to the lighter work. an old woman with a bundle of sticks becomes an agreeable companion, or a little girl picking wild fruit. even when quite alone, when all the surroundings seem to be fitted for thought, the thinker will still find a difficulty in thinking. it is easy to lose an hour in maundering over the past, and to waste the good things which have been provided, in remembering instead of creating!" the mission of fancy "it is not for rules of construction that the writer is seeking, as he roams listlessly or walks rapidly through the trees. these have come to him from much observation, from the writings of others, from that which we call study, in which imagination has but little immediate concern. it is the fitting of the rules to the characters which he has created, the filling in with living touches and true colours those daubs and blotches on his canvas which have been easily scribbled with a rough hand, that the true work consists. it is here that he requires that his fancy should be undisturbed, that the trees should overshadow him, that the birds should comfort him, that the green and yellow mosses should be in unison with him, that the very air should be good to him. the rules are there fixed--fixed as far as his judgment can fix them--and are no longer a difficulty to him. the first coarse outlines of his story he has found to be a matter almost indifferent to him. it is with these little plottings that he has to contend. it is for them that he must catch his ariel and bind him fast, and yet so bind him that not a thread shall touch the easy action of his wings. every little scene must be arranged so that--if it may be possible--the proper words may be spoken, and the fitting effect produced." fancies of another type most authors indulge in little eccentricities when working, and, if the time should ever come that your name is brought before the public notice, it would be advisable to develop some whimsical habit so as to be prepared for the interviewer, who is sure to ask whether you have one. to push your pen through your hair during creative moments would be a good plan; it would reveal a line of baldness where you had furrowed the hair off, and afford ocular proof to all and sundry that you possessed a genuine eccentricity. or if you prefer a habit still more _bizarre_, you might put a hammock in a tree, and always write your most exciting scenes during a rain-storm, and under the shelter of a dripping umbrella. the fact is, every penman has his little peculiarities when at work, but they should be kept as private property. of course, there are authors who revel in publicity, and others again have intimate details wormed out of them. the fact remains, however, that these details are interesting, because they are personal; and they are occasionally helpful, because they enable one writer to compare notes with others. we have all heard of the methodical habits of kant. when thinking out his deep thoughts, he always placed himself so that his eyes might fall on a certain old tower. this old tower became so necessary to his thoughts, that when some poplar trees grew up and hid it from his sight, he found himself unable to think at all, until, at his earnest request, the trees were cropped and the tower was brought into sight again. george eliot was very susceptible as to her surroundings. when about to write, she dressed herself with great care, and arranged her harmoniously-furnished room in perfect order.[ :a] hawthorne had a habit of cutting some article while composing. he is said to have taken a garment from his wife's sewing-basket, and cut it into pieces without being conscious of the act. thus an entire table and the arms of a rocking-chair were whittled away in this manner. upon ibsen's writing-table is a small tray containing a number of grotesque figures--a wooden bear, a tiny devil, two or three cats (one of them playing a fiddle), and some rabbits. ibsen has said: "i never write a single line of any of my dramas without having that tray and its occupants before me on my table. i could not write without them. but why i use them is my own secret." ouida writes in the early morning. she gets up at five o'clock, and before she begins, works herself up into a sort of literary trance. maurice jokai always uses violet ink, to which he is so accustomed that he becomes perplexed when compelled, outside of his own house, to resort to ink of another colour. he claims that thoughts are not forthcoming when he writes with any other ink. one of the corners of his writing-desk holds a miniature library, consisting of neatly-bound note-books which contain the outline of his novels as they originated in his mind. when he has once begun a romance, he keeps right on until it is completed. some of our younger writers mr zangwill has no particular method of working; he works in spasms. regular hours, he says, may be possible to a writer of pure romance, but if you are writing of the life about you, such regularity is impossible.[ :a] coulson kernahan works in the morning and in the evening, but never in the afternoon. he always reserves the afternoon for walking, cycling, and exercise generally. he is unable to work regularly; some days indeed pass without doing a stroke.[ :b] anthony hope is found at his desk every morning, but if the inspiration does not come, he never forces himself to write. sometimes it will come after waiting several hours, and sometimes it will seem to have come when it hasn't, which means that next morning he has to tear up what was written the day before and start afresh.[ :a] before robert barr publishes a novel he spends years in thinking the thing out. in this way ten years were spent over "the mutable many," and two more years in writing it.[ :b] when max pemberton has a book in the making he just sits down and writes away at it when in the mood. "i find," he says, "that i can always work best in the morning. one's brain is fresher and one's ideas come more readily. if i work at night i find that i have to undo a great deal of it in the morning. in working late at night i have done so under the impression that i have accomplished some really fine work, only to rise in the morning and, after looking at it, feel that one ought to shed tears over such stuff."[ :c] h. g. wells, as might be expected, has a way of his own. "in the morning i merely revise proofs and type-written copy, and write letters, and, in fact, any work that does not require the exercise of much imagination. if it is fine, i either have a walk or a ride on the cycle. we also have a tandem, and sometimes my wife and i take the double machine out; and then after lunch we have tea about half-past three in the afternoon. it is after this cup of tea that i do my work. the afternoon is the best time of the day for me, and i nearly always work on until eight o'clock, when we have dinner. if i am working at something in which i feel keenly interested, i work on from nine o'clock until after midnight, but it is on the afternoon work that my output mainly depends."[ :a] curious methods in another interview mr wells said, "i write and re-write. if you want to get an effect, it seems to me that the first thing you have to do is to write the thing down as it comes into your mind" ("slush," mr wells calls it), "and so get some idea of the shape of it. in this preliminary process, no doubt, one can write a good many thousand words a day, perhaps seven or eight thousand. but when all that is finished, it will take you seven or eight solid days to pick it to pieces again, and knock it straight. "the 'slush' effort of 'the invisible man' came to more than , words; the final outcome of it amounts to , . my first tendency was to make it much shorter still. "i used to feel a great deal ashamed of this method. i thought it simply showed incapacity, and inability to hit the right nail on the head. the process is like this: "( ) worry and confusion. "( ) testing the idea, and trying to settle the question. is the idea any good? "( ) throwing the idea away; getting another; finally returning, perhaps, to the first. "( ) the next thing is possibly a bad start. "( ) grappling with the idea with the feeling that it has to be done. "( ) then the slush work, which i've already described. "( ) reading this over, and taking out what you think is essential, and re-writing the essential part of it. "( ) after it has been type-written, you cut it about, so that it has to be re-typed. "( ) the result of your labour finds its way into print, and you take hold of the first opportunity to go over the whole thing again."[ :a] contrasted with the pleasant humour of the above is the gravity of ian maclaren. "although the stories i have written may seem very simple, they are very laboriously done. this kind of short story cannot be done quickly. there is no plot, no incident, and one has to depend entirely upon character and slight touches, curiously arranged and bound together, to produce the effect. . . . each of the 'bonnie brier bush' stories went through these processes:--( ) slowly drafted arrangement; ( ) draft revised before writing; ( ) written; ( ) manuscript revised; ( ) first proof corrected; ( ) revise corrected; ( ) having been published in a periodical, revised for book; ( ) first proof corrected; ( ) second proof corrected."[ :a] * * * * * enough. these personal notes will teach the novice that every man must make and follow his own plan of work. experience is the best guide and the wisest teacher. footnotes: [ :a] erichsen: "methods of authors." [ :a] "autobiography," vol. ii. [ :a] erichsen: "methods of authors." [ :a] interview in _the young man_, by percy l. parker. [ :b] interview in _the young man_, by a. h. lawrence. [ :a] interview in _the young man_, by sarah a. tooley. [ :b] _ibid._ [ :c] interview in _the young man_, by a. h. lawrence. [ :a] interview in _the young man_, by a. h. lawrence. [ :a] interview in _to-day_, for september th, , by a. h. lawrence. [ :a] interview in _the christian commonwealth_ for september th, . chapter x is the subject-matter of novels exhausted? the question stated this is the way in which the question is most often stated, but the real question is more intelligently expressed by asking: has the novel, as a form of literature, become obsolete? or is it likely to be obsolete in the near future? to many people the matter is dismissed with a contemptuous _pshaw!_; others think it worthy of serious inquiry, and a few with practical minds say they don't care whether it is or not. seven years ago mr frederic harrison delivered himself of very pessimistic views as to the present position and prospects of the novelist, and not long ago mr a. j. balfour asserted that in his opinion the art of fiction had reached its zenith, and was now in its decline. these critics may be prejudiced in their views, but it is worth while considering the remarks of the one who has the greater claim to respect for literary judgment. after exclaiming that we have now no novelist of the first rank, and substantiating this statement to the best of his ability, mr harrison goes on to inquire into the causes of this decay. in the first place, we have too high a standard of taste and criticism. "a highly organised code of culture may give us good manners, but it is the death of genius." we have lost the true sense of the romantic, and if "jane eyre" were produced to-day it "would not rise above a common shocker." secondly, we are too disturbed in political affairs to allow for the rest that is necessary for literary productiveness. thirdly, life is not so dramatic as it was--character is being driven inwards, and we have lost the picturesque qualities of earlier days. i am not at present concerned with the truth or error of these arguments; my object just now is to state the case, and before proceeding to an examination of its merits i wish to take the testimony of another writer and thinker, one who is a philosopher quite as much as the author of "the foundations of belief" or the author of "the meaning of history," and who has a claim upon our attention as an investigator of moving causes. mr c. h. pearson, in his notable book, "national life and character," has made some confident statements on the subject of the exhaustion of literary products. he is of opinion that "a change in social relations has made the drama impossible by dwarfing the immediate agency of the individual," and that "a change in manners has robbed the drama of a great deal of effect." he goes on to say that "human nature, various as it is, is only capable after all of a certain number of emotions and acts, and these as the topics of an incessant literature are bound after a time to be exhausted. we may say with absolute certainty that certain subjects are never to be taken again. the tale of troy, the wanderings of odysseus, the vision of heaven and hell as dante saw it, the theme of 'paradise lost,' and the story of faust are familiar instances. . . . effective adaptations of an old subject may still be possible; but it is not writers of the highest capacity who will attempt them, and the reading world, which remembers what has been done before, will never accord more than a secondary recognition to the adaptation" (p. ). there is a curious atmosphere of logical conclusiveness about these arguments. they carry with them, apparently, an air of certainty which it is useless to question. we know that the novelist has already exploited politics, socialism, history, theology, marriage, education, and a host of other subjects; indeed, a perusal of dixon's "index to fiction" is calculated to provoke the inquiry: "is there anything left to write about?" we know that everywhere is springing up the "literature of locality," and it would seem as if the resources of this world's experience had been exhausted when writers like mr h. g. wells and the late george du maurier invade the planet mars for fresh material. the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth have all been "written up." is there anything new? "change" not "exhaustion" there can be no doubt that fiction has undergone great changes during recent years. these changes are the result of deeper changes in our common life. consider for a moment the position of the drama. what is the significance of the problem play on the one hand, and the cry for a "static theatre" on the other hand? it means that life has changed, and is still changing; that the national character is not so emphatically external or spontaneous as in those days when ben jonson killed two men, and marlowe himself was killed in a brawl. we have lost the passion, the force, and the brutality of those times, and have become more contemplative and analytical. the simple law is this: that literature and the drama are a reflex of life; hence, when character has a tendency to be driven inwards, as is the case to-day, maeterlinck pleads on behalf of a drama without action; and paul bourget in france and henry james in england embody the spirit of the age in the fiction of psychological minutiæ. now there may be symptoms of decay in these manifestations of literary impulse, but the impulse is part of that new experience which the facts of an increasingly complex civilisation foist upon us. and, further, _change_ is not necessarily _exhaustion_; in fact, it is more than surprising that anyone can believe all the stories possible have been told already, or have been told in the most interesting way. it is a very ancient cry--this cry about exhaustion. the old hebrew writer wailed something about wanting to meet with a man who could show him a new thing. a new thing? "there is no new thing under the sun." but we have found a few since those days, and the future will give birth to as many more. men and women have written about love from time immemorial, but have we finished with the theme? is it exhausted? did homer satisfy our love of recorded adventure once and for all? there is only one answer--namely, that human experience is infinite in its possibilities and its capacity for renewal. if human experience--these vague and subtle emotions, these violently real but inscrutable feelings, these tremulous questionings of existence encompassed with mystery--if human experience were no more than a hard and dry scientific fact, well, our novelists would have a poor time of it. but life knows no finality; its stream flows on in perennial flood. human nature is said to be much the same the world over, and yet every personality is absolutely a new thing. goethe might attempt a rough classification by saying we are either platonists or aristotelians, but actually a great many of us are neither one nor the other, and there are infinities of degrees amongst us even then. new character is a necessary outcome of the advancing centuries, and new personalities are being born every day. no; the world still loves a story, and there are stories which have never been told. it is, perhaps, true, that the story-tellers have not found them yet. why? why we talk about exhaustion the answer is: we are becoming too artificial; we are losing spontaneity, and are getting too far away from the soil. have we not noticed over and over again that the first book of a novelist is his best? those which followed are called "good," but they sell because the author is the author of the first book which created a sensation. speaking of the first work of a young writer, anthony trollope says: "he sits down and tells his story because he has a story to tell; as you, my friend, when you have heard something which has at once tickled your fancy or moved your pathos, will hurry to tell it to the first person you meet. but when that first novel has been received graciously by the public, and has made for itself a success, then the writer, naturally feeling that the writing of novels is within his grasp, looks about for something to tell in another. he cudgels his brains, not always successfully, and sits down to write, not because he has something which he burns to tell, but because he feels it to be incumbent on him to be telling something. . . . so it has been with many novelists, who, after some good work, perhaps after much good work, have distressed their audience because they have gone on with their work till their work has become simply a trade with them."[ :a] there is often a good reason for such a change. the first book was written in a place near to nature's heart; the writer was free from the obligations of society as found in city life; he was thrown back on his own resources, and fortunately could not spoil his individual view of things by multitudinous references to books and authorities. do we not selfishly wish that miss olive schreiner had never left the veldt, in the loneliness of which she produced "the story of an african farm"? nearer contact with civilisation has failed to induce an impulse the result of which is at all comparable with this genuine story. it may or may not be of significance that mr wells, the creator of a distinct type of romance, dislikes what is called "society," but i fancy that a few of those who lament too frequently that "everything has been said" spend more time in "society" and clubs than is possible for good work. mr c. h. pearson, in a notable chapter on "dangers of political development," says: "the world at large is just as reverent of greatness, as observant of a browning, a newman, or a mill, as it ever was; but the world of society prefers the small change of available and ephemeral talent to the wealth of great thoughts, which must always be kept more or less in reserve. the result seems to be that men, anxious to do great work, find city life less congenial than they did, and either live away from the metropolis, as darwin and newman did, or restrict their intercourse, as carlyle and george eliot practically did, to a circle of chosen friends." in further confirmation of the position i have taken up, let me quote the testimony of thomas hardy as given in an interview. said the interviewer--"in reading 'a group of noble dames,' i was struck with the waste of good material." "yes," replied mr hardy, "i suppose i was wasteful. but, there! it doesn't matter, for i have far more material now than i shall ever be able to use." "in your note-books?" "yes, and in my head. i don't believe in that idea of man's imaginative powers becoming naturally exhausted; i believe that, if he liked, a man could go on writing till his physical strength gave out. most men exhaust themselves prematurely by something artificial--their manner of living--scott and dickens for example. victor hugo, on the other hand, who was so long in exile, and who necessarily lived a very simple life during much of his time, was writing as well as ever when he died at a good old age. so, too, was carlyle, if we except his philosophy, the least interesting part of him. the great secret is perhaps for the writer to be content with the life he was living when he made his first success. i can do more work here [in dorsetshire] in six months than in twelve months in london."[ :a] these are the convictions of a strong man, one who stands at the head of english writers of fiction, and therefore one to whom the beginner especially should listen with respect. a reader of mss. told me quite recently that there was a pitiable narrowness of experience in the productions which were handed to him for valuation; nearly all were cast in the "city" mould, and showed signs of having been written to say something rather than because the writers had something to say. mr hardy has put his finger on the weak spot: more stories "come" in the country stillness than in the city's bustle. of course, a man can be as much of a hermit in the heart of london as in the heart of a forest, but how few can resist the attractions of society and the temptation to multiply literary friendships! besides, it is always a risk to make a permanent change in that environment which assisted in producing the first success. follow mr hardy's advice and stay where you are. stories will then not be slow to "come" and ideas to "occur"; and the pessimists will be less ready to utter their laments over the decadence of fiction and philosophers to argue that the novel will soon become extinct. i cannot do better than close with the following tempered statement from mr edmund gosse: "a question which constantly recurs to my mind is this: having secured the practical monopoly of literature, what do the novelists propose to do next? to what use will they put the unprecedented opportunity thrown in their way? it is quite plain that to a certain extent the material out of which the english novel has been constructed is in danger of becoming exhausted. why do the american novelists inveigh against plots? not, we may be sure, through any inherent tenderness of conscience, as they would have us believe; but because their eminently sane and somewhat timid natures revolt against the effort of inventing what is extravagant. but all the obvious plots, all the stories that are not in some degree extravagant, seem to have been told already, and for a writer of the temperament of mr howells, there is nothing left but the portraiture of a small portion of the limitless field of ordinary humdrum existence. so long as this is fresh, this also may amuse and please; to the practitioners of this kind of work it seems as though the infinite prairie of life might be surveyed thus for centuries acre by acre. but that is not possible. a very little while suffices to show that in this direction also the material is promptly exhausted. novelty, freshness, and excitement are to be sought for at all hazards, and where can they be found? the novelists hope many things from that happy system of nature which supplies them year by year with fresh generations of the ingenuous young." in this, however, mr gosse is very doubtful of good results: the fact is, he is too pessimistic. but in making suggestions as to what kind of novels might be written he almost gives the lie to his previous opinions. he asks for novels addressed especially to middle-aged persons, and not to the ingenuous young, ever interested in love. "it is supposed that to describe one of the positive employments of life--a business or a profession for example--would alienate the tender reader, and check that circulation about which novelists talk as if they were delicate invalids. but what evidence is there to show that an attention to real things does frighten away the novel reader. the experiments which have been made in this country to widen the field of fiction in one direction, that of religious and moral speculation, have not proved unfortunate. what was the source of the great popular success of 'john inglesant,' and then of 'robert elsmere,' if not the intense delight of readers in being admitted, in a story, to a wider analysis of the interior workings of the mind than is compatible with the mere record of billing and cooing of the callow young? . . . all i ask for is a larger study of life. have the stress and turmoil of a political career no charm? why, if novels of the shop and counting-house be considered sordid, can our novels not describe the life of a sailor, of a game-keeper, of a railway porter, of a civil engineer? what capital central figures for a story would be the whip of a leading hunt, the foreman of a colliery, the master of a fishing-smack, or a speculator on the stock exchange?"[ :a] since these words were written, the novel of politics, for example, has come to the fore; but does that mean that the subject is exhausted? it has only been touched upon as yet. there were plenty of dramas before shakespeare but there were no shakespeares; and to-day there are thousands of novels but how many real novelists? once again let it be said that "exhausted subject-matter" is a misnomer; what we wait for is creative genius. footnotes: [ :a] "autobiography," vol. ii. pp. - . there is no harm in telling stories as a trade provided the stories are good. [ :a] interview in _the young man_. [ :a] "questions at issue," _the tyranny of the novel_. chapter xi the novel _v._ the short story practise the short story the beginner in fiction often asks: is it not best to prepare for novel-writing by writing short stories? the question is much to the point, and merits a careful answer. first of all, what is the difference between a novel and a short story? the difference lies in the point of view. the short story generally deals with one event in one particular life; the novel deals with many events in several lives, where both characters and action are dominated by one progressive purpose. to put it another way: the short story is like a miniature in painting, whilst the novel demands a much larger canvas. a suggestive paragraph from a review sets forth clearly the difference referred to: "the smaller your object of artistry, the nicer should be your touch, the more careful your attention to minutiæ. that, surely, would seem an axiom. you don't paint a miniature in the broad strokes that answer for a drop curtain, nor does the weaver of a pocket-handkerchief give to that fabric the texture of a carpet. but the usual writer of fiction, when it occurs to him to utilise one of his second best ideas in the manufacture of a short story, will commonly bring to his undertaking exactly the same slap-dash methods which he has found to serve in the construction of his novels. . . . where he should have brought a finer method, he has brought a coarser; where he should have worked goldsmithwise, with tiny chisel, finishing exquisitely, he has worked blacksmithwise, with sledge hammer and anvil; where, because the thing is little, every detail counts, he has been slovenly in detail."[ :a] it has been said that the novel deals with life from the inside, and short stories with life from the outside; but this is not so. guy de maupassant's "the necklace" opens out to us a state of soul just as much as "tess" does, even though it may be but a glimpse as compared with the prolonged exhibition of mr hardy's "pure woman." returning to the question previously referred to, one may well hesitate to advise a novice to commence writing short stories which demand such infinite care in conception and execution. the tendency of young writers is to verbosity--longwindedness in dialogues, in descriptions, and in delineations of character,--whereas the chief excellence of the story is the extent and depth of its suggestions as compared with its brevity in words. should not a man perfect himself in the less minute and less delicate methods of the novel before he attempts the finer art of the short story? there is a sound of good logic about all this, but it is not conclusive. some men have a natural predilection for the larger canvas and some for the smaller, so that the final decision cannot be forced upon anyone on purely abstract grounds; we must first know a writer's native capacity before advising him what to do. if you feel that literary art on a minute scale is your _forte_, then follow it enthusiastically, and work hard; if otherwise, act accordingly. but, after all, there are certain abstract considerations which lead me to say that the short story should be practised before the novel. take the very material fact of _size_. have those who object to this recommendation ever thought of what practising novel-writing means? how long does it take to make a couple of experiments of , words each? a good deal, no doubt, depends on the man himself, but a quick writer would not do much to satisfy others at the rate of , words in twelve months. no, time is too precious for practising works of such length as these, and since the general principles of fiction apply to both novel and short story alike, the student cannot do better than practise his art in the briefer form. moreover, if he is wise, he will seek the advice of experts, and (a further base consideration) it will be cheaper to have words criticised than a ms. containing , . further, the foundation principles of the art of fiction cannot be learned more effectively, even for the purpose of writing novels, than in practising short stories. all the points brought forward in the preceding pages relating to plot, dialogue, proportion, climax, and so forth, are elements of the latter as well as of the former. if, as has been said, "windiness" is the chief fault of the beginner, where can he learn to correct that error more quickly? the art of knowing what to leave out is important to a novelist; it is more important to the short story writer; hence, if it be studied on the smaller canvas, it will be of excellent service when attempting the larger. "the attention to detail, the obliteration of the unessential, the concentration in expression, which the form of the short story demands, tends to a beneficent influence on the style of fiction. no one doubts that many of the great novelists of the past are somewhat tedious and prolix. the style of richardson, scott, dumas, balzac, and dickens, when they are not at their strongest and highest, is often slipshod and slovenly; and such carelessly-worded passages as are everywhere in their works will scarcely be found in the novels of the future. the writers of short stories have made clear that the highest literary art knows neither synonyms, episodes, nor parentheses."[ :a] short story writers on their art i cannot pretend to give more than a few hints as to the best way of following out the advice laid down in the foregoing paragraphs, and prefer to let some writers speak for themselves. of course, it does not follow that mr wedmore can instruct a novice in literary art, simply because he can write exquisite short stories himself; indeed, it often happens that such men do not really know how they produce their work; but mr wedmore's article on _the short story_ in his volume called "books and arts" is most profitable reading. some time ago a symposium appeared in a popular journal,[ :a] on the subject _how to write a short story_. mr robert barr could be no other than pithy in his recipe. he says: "it seems to me that a short story writer should act, metaphorically, like this--he should put his idea for a story into one cup of a pair of balances, then into the other he should deal out words--five hundred, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, as the case may be--and when the number of words thus paid in causes the beam to rise on which his idea hangs, then his story is finished. if he puts a word more or less he is doing false work. . . . my model is euclid, whose justly celebrated book of short stories entitled 'the elements of geometry' will live when most of us who are scribbling to-day are forgotten. euclid lays down his plot, sets instantly to work at its development, letting no incident creep in that does not bear relation to the climax, using no unnecessary word, always keeping his one end in view, and the moment he reaches the culmination he stops." mr walter raymond is apologetic. he fences a good deal, and pleads that the mention of "short story" is dangerous to his mental sequence, so much and so painfully has he tried to solve the problem of how one is written. finally, however, he delivers himself of these pregnant sentences: "show us the psychological moment; give us a sniff of the earth below; a glimpse of the sky above; and you will have produced a fine story. it need not exceed two thousand words." the author of "tales of mean streets" says: "the command of form is the first thing to be cultivated. let the pupil take a story by a writer distinguished by the perfection of his workmanship--none could be better than guy de maupassant--and let him consider that story apart from the book as something happening before his eyes. let him review mentally _everything_ that happens--the things that are not written in the story as well as those that are--and let him review them, not necessarily in the order in which the story presents them, but in that in which they would come before an observer in real life. in short, from the fiction let him construct ordinary, natural, detailed, unselected, unarranged fact, making notes, if necessary, as he goes. then let him compare his raw fact with the words of the master. he will see where the unessential is rejected; he will see how everything is given its just proportion in the design; he will perceive that every incident, every sentence, and every word has its value, its meaning, and its part in the whole." mr morrison's ideas are endorsed by miss jane barlow, mr g. b. burgin, mr g. m. fenn, and mrs l. t. meade. mr joseph hocking does not seem to care for the brevity of short story methods. he cites eight lines which he heard some children sing: "little boy, pair of skates, broken ice, heaven's gates. little girl stole a plum, cholera bad, kingdom come," and remarks: "many of our short stories are constructed on the principle of these verses. so few words are used, that the reader does not feel he is reading a story, but an outline." mr hocking has the british public on his side, no doubt, but the great british public is not always right, as he appears to believe. i think if the reader will study the short stories of guy de maupassant and mr frederic wedmore, and digest the advice given above, he will know enough to begin his work. each experiment will enlarge his vision and discipline his pen, so that when he has accomplished something like tolerable success, he may safely attempt the larger canvas on the lines laid down in the preceding chapters. footnotes: [ :a] _daily chronicle_, june , . [ :a] _the international monthly_, vol. i. [ :a] _the young man._ chapter xii success: and some of its minor conditions the truth about success there are two kinds of success in fiction--commercial and literary; and sometimes a writer is able to combine the two. thomas hardy is an example of the writer who produces literature and has large sales. on the other hand, there are many writers who succeed in one direction, but not in the other. the works of marie corelli have an amazing circulation, but they are not regarded as literature; whereas such genuine work as that of mr quiller couch has to be content with sales far less extensive. now thomas hardy, marie corelli, and quiller couch have all succeeded, but in different ways. no doubt the reader would prefer to succeed in the manner of hardy, but if he can't do it, he must be content to succeed in the best way he can. it is easy to talk about miss corelli's "rot" and "bosh" and "high falutin," but long columns of figures in a publisher's ledger mean something after all. they do not necessarily mean literary merit, delicate insight, or beautiful characterisation; they probably mean a keen sense of what the public likes, and a power to tickle its palate in an agreeable manner. still, not every man or woman is able to do this, and although such a success may not rank as one of the first order, it _is_ a success which nobody can gainsay. literary journals have been instituting "inquiries" into the cases of men like mr silas hocking and the rev. e. p. roe: why have they a circulation numbered by the million? no "inquiry" is needed. they are literary merchantmen who have studied the book-market thoroughly, and as a result they know what is wanted and supply it. let them have their reward without mean and angry demur. however one may try to explain the fact, it is none the less true that genuine literature often fails to pay the expenses of publication; at any rate, if it accomplishes more than that, it is infinitesimal as compared with the huge sales of inferior work. i do not know the circulation of mr henry harland's "comedies and errors"--possibly it has been moderate--but i would rather be the author of this volume of beautiful workmanship than of all the works of marie corelli--the bags of gold notwithstanding. of course, this is merely a personal preference with which the reader may have no sympathy; but the fact remains that, if a writer produces real literature and it does not sell, he has not therefore failed in his purpose; he may not receive many cheques from his publisher, but it is real compensation to have an audience, "fit though few." on the general question of literary success, george henry lewes says: "we may lay it down, as a rule, that no work ever succeeded, even for a day, but it deserved that success; no work ever failed but under conditions which made failure inevitable. this will seem hard to men who feel that, in their case, neglect arises from prejudice or stupidity. yet it is true even in extreme cases; true even when the work once neglected has since been acknowledged superior to the works which for a time eclipsed it. success, temporary or enduring, is the measure of the relation, temporary or enduring, which exists between a work and the public mind."[ :a] failure has a still more fruitful cause--namely, the misdirection of talent. "men are constantly attempting, without special aptitude, work for which special aptitude is indispensable. 'on peut être honnête homme et faire mal des vers.' a man may be variously accomplished and yet be a feeble poet. he may be a real poet, yet a feeble dramatist. he may have dramatic faculty, yet be a feeble novelist. he may be a good story-teller, yet a shallow thinker and a slip-shod writer. for success in any special kind of work, it is obvious that a special talent is requisite; but obvious as this seems, when stated as a general proposition, it rarely serves to check a mistaken presumption. there are many writers endowed with a certain susceptibility to the graces and refinements of literature, which has been fostered by culture till they have mistaken it for native power; and these men being destitute of native power are forced to imitate what others have created. they can understand how a man may have musical sensibility, and yet not be a good singer; but they fail to understand, at least in their own case, how a man may have literary sensibility, yet not be a good story-teller or an effective dramatist."[ :a] the conclusion of the whole matter is this: determine what your projected work is to do; if you are going to offer it in a popular market, give the public plenty for its money, and spice it well; if you are going to offer a sacrifice to the goddess of art, be content if you receive no more applause than that which comes from the few worshippers who surround the sacred shrine. footnotes: [ :a] "the principles of success in literature," p. . [ :a] "the principles of success in literature," p. . success minor conditions of success . good literature has the same value in manuscript as in typescript, but from the standpoint of author and publisher, it can hardly be said to have the same chances. penmanship does not tend to improve, and some of the scrawly mss. sent in to publishers are enough to create dismay in the stoutest heart. it is pure affectation to pretend to be above such small matters. just as a dinner is all the more appetising because it is neatly and daintily served, so a _ms._ has better chances of being read and appreciated when set out in type-written characters. . be sure that you are sending your _ms._ to the right publisher. novels with a strongly developed moral purpose are not exactly the kind of thing wanted by mr heinemann; and if you have anything like "the woman who did," don't send it to a sunday school publishing company. these suppositions are no doubt absurd in the extreme, but they will serve my purpose in pointing out the careless way in which many beginners dispose of their wares. nearly all publishers specialise in some kind of literature, and it is the novelist's duty to study these types from publishers' catalogues, providing, of course, he does not know them already. the commercial instinct is proverbially lacking in authors; if it were not we should witness less frequently the spectacle of portly mss. being sent out haphazard to publisher after publisher. . perhaps my third point ought to have come first. it relates to the obtaining of an expert's views on the matter and form of your story. this will cost you a guinea, perhaps more, but it will save your time and hasten the possibilities of success. you can easily spend a guinea in postage and two or three more in having the ms. re-typed,--and yet the tale be ever the same--"declined with thanks." spare yourself many disappointments by putting your literary efforts before a competent critic, and let him point out the crudities, the digressions, and those weaknesses which betray the 'prentice hand. it will not be pleasant to see a pen line through your "glorious" passages, or two blue pencil marks across a favourite piece of dialogue, but it is better to know your defects at once than to discover them by painful and constant rejections. . be willing to learn; have no fear of hard work; do the best, and write the best that is in you; and never ape anybody, but be yourself. appendices appendix i the philosophy of composition[ : ] by edgar allan poe charles dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination i once made of the mechanism of "barnaby rudge," says--"by the way, are you aware that godwin wrote his 'caleb williams' backwards? he first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done." i cannot think this the _precise_ mode of procedure on the part of godwin--and indeed what he himself acknowledges, is not altogether in accordance with mr. dickens' idea--but the author of "caleb williams" was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar process. nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its _dénouement_ before anything be attempted with the pen. it is only with the _dénouement_ constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention. there is a radical error, i think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. either history affords a thesis--or one is suggested by an incident of the day--or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative--designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or authorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent. i prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect_. keeping originality _always_ in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest--i say to myself, in the first place, "of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall i, on the present occasion, select?" having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, i consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect. i have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would--that is to say, who could--detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. why such a paper has never been given to the world, i am much at a loss to say--but, perhaps, the authorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions--the tackle for scene-shifting--the stepladders, and demon-traps--the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary _histrio_. i am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common, in which an author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been attained. in general, suggestions, having arisen pell-mell, are pursued and forgotten in a similar manner. for my own part, i have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and, since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as i have considered a _desideratum_, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analysed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the _modus operandi_ by which some one of my own works was put together. i select "the raven" as most generally known. it is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition--that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, _per se_, the circumstance--or say the necessity--which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing _a_ poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste. we commence, then, with this intention. the initial consideration was that of extent. if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression--for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. but since, _cæteris paribus_, no poet can afford to dispense with _anything_ that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. here i say no, at once. what we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones--that is to say, of brief poetical effects. it is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. for this reason, at least one half of the "paradise lost" is essentially prose--a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, _inevitably_, with corresponding depressions--the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect. it appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art--the limit of a single sitting--and that, although in certain classes of prose composition, such as "robinson crusoe" (demanding no unity), this limit may be advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a poem. within this limit, the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit--in other words, to the excitement or elevation--again, in other words, to the degree of the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect:--this, with one proviso--that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all. holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which i deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical, taste, i reached at once what i conceived the proper _length_ for my intended poem--a length of about one hundred lines. it is, in fact, a hundred and eight. my next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed; and here i may as well observe that, throughout the construction i kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work _universally_ appreciable. i should be carried too far out of my immediate topic were i to demonstrate a point upon which i have repeatedly insisted, and which, with the poetical, stands not in the slightest need of demonstration--the point, i mean, that beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. a few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. that pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, i believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. when, indeed, men speak of beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect--they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of _soul_--_not_ of intellect, or of heart--upon which i have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating "the beautiful." now i designate beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes--that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment--no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to, is _most readily_ attained in the poem. now the object truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. truth, in fact, demands a precision, and passion a _homeliness_ (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that beauty which, i maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. it by no means follows from anything here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem--for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast--but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim; and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem. regarding, then, beauty as my province, my next question referred to the _tone_ of its highest manifestation--and all experience has shown that this tone is one of _sadness_. beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. the length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, i betook myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy which might serve me as a key-note in the construction of the poem--some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn. in carefully thinking over all the usual artistic effects--or more properly _points_, in the theatrical sense--i did not fail to perceive immediately that no one had been so universally employed as that of the _refrain_. the universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. i considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. as commonly used, the _refrain_, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone--both in sound and thought. the pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity--of repetition. i resolved to diversify, and so heighten, the effect, by adhering, in general, to the monotone of sound, while i continually varied that of thought: that is to say, i determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation _of the application_ of the _refrain_--the _refrain_ itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried. these points being settled, i next bethought me of the _nature_ of my _refrain_. since its application was to be repeatedly varied, it was clear that the _refrain_ itself must be brief, for there would have been an insurmountable difficulty in frequent variations of application in any sentence of length. in proportion to the brevity of the sentence, would, of course, be the facility of the variation. this led me at once to a single word as the best _refrain_. the question now arose as to the _character_ of the word. having made up my mind to a _refrain_, the division of the poem into stanzas was, of course, a corollary: the _refrain_ forming the close to each stanza. that such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt: and these considerations inevitably led me to the long _o_ as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with _r_ as the most producible consonant. the sound of the _refrain_ being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which i had pre-determined as the tone of the poem. in such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word "nevermore." in fact, it was the very first which presented itself. the next _desideratum_ was a pretext for the continuous use of the one word "nevermore." in observing the difficulty which i at once found in inventing a sufficiently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, i did not fail to perceive that this difficulty arose solely from the pre-assumption that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by _a human_ being--i did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word. here, then, immediately arose the idea of a _non_-reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended _tone_. i had now gone so far as the conception of a raven--the bird of ill omen--monotonously repeating the one word, "nevermore," at the conclusion of each stanza, in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. now, never losing sight of the object _supremeness_, or perfection, at all points, i asked myself--"of all melancholy topics, what, according to the _universal_ understanding of mankind, is the _most_ melancholy?" death--was the obvious reply. "and when," i said, "is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?" from what i have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious--"when it most closely allies itself to _beauty_: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world--and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." i had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a raven continuously repeating the word "nevermore."--i had to combine these, bearing in mind my design of varying, at every turn, the _application_ of the word repeated; but the only intelligible mode of such combination is that of imagining the raven employing the word in answer to the queries of the lover. and here it was that i saw at once the opportunity afforded for the effect on which i had been depending--that is to say, the effect of the _variation of application_. i saw that i could make the first query propounded by the lover--the first query to which the raven should reply "nevermore"--that i could make this first query a commonplace one--the second less so--the third still less, and so on--until at length the lover, startled from his original _nonchalance_ by the melancholy character of the word itself--by its frequent repetition--and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the fowl that uttered it--is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character--queries whose solution he has passionately at heart--propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture--propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling his question as to receive from the _expected_ "nevermore" the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me--or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in the progress of the construction--i first established in mind the climax, or concluding query--that query to which "nevermore" should be in the last place an answer--that query in reply to which this word "nevermore" should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair. here then the poem may be said to have its beginning--at the end, where all works of art should begin--for it was here, at this point of my pre-considerations, that i first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza: "'prophet!' said i, 'thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil! by that heaven that bends above us--by that god we both adore, tell this soul with sorrow laden, if, within the distant aidenn, it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name lenore-- clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name lenore?' quoth the raven, 'nevermore.'" i composed this stanza, at this point, first that, by establishing the climax, i might the better vary and graduate, as regards seriousness and importance, the preceding queries of the lover--and, secondly, that i might definitely settle the rhythm, the metre, and the length and general arrangement of the stanza--as well as graduate the stanzas which were to precede, so that none of them might surpass this in rhythmical effect. had i been able, in the subsequent composition, to construct more vigorous stanzas, i should, without scruple, have purposely enfeebled them, so as not to interfere with the climacteric effect. and here i may as well say a few words of the versification. my first object (as usual) was originality. the extent to which this has been neglected, in versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. admitting that there is little possibility of variety in mere _rhythm_, it is still clear that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite--and yet, _for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing_. the fact is, that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. in general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation. of course, i pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the "raven." the former is trochaic--the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the _refrain_ of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. less pedantically--the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet--the second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds)--the third of eight--the fourth of seven and a half--the fifth the same--the sixth three and a half. now, each of these lines, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the "raven" has, is in their _combination into stanza_; nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted. the effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual, and some altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration. the next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the lover and the raven--and the first branch of this consideration was the _locale_. for this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields--but it has always appeared to me that a close _circumscription of space_ is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:--it has the force of a frame to a picture. it has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place. i determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber--in a chamber rendered sacred to him by memories of her who had frequented it. the room is represented as richly furnished--this in mere pursuance of the ideas i have already explained on the subject of beauty, as the sole true poetical thesis. the _locale_ being thus determined, i had now to introduce the bird--and the thought of introducing him through the window, was inevitable. the idea of making the lover suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the shutter, is a "tapping" at the door, originated in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader's curiosity, and in a desire to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover's throwing open the door, finding all dark, and thence adopting the half-fancy that it was the spirit of his mistress that knocked. i made the night tempestuous, first, to account for the raven's seeking admission, and secondly, for the effect of contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber. i made the bird alight on the bust of pallas, also for the effect of contrast between the marble and the plumage--it being understood that the bust was absolutely _suggested_ by the bird--the bust of _pallas_ being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, pallas, itself. about the middle of the poem, also, i have availed myself of the force of contrast, with a view of deepening the ultimate impression. for example, an air of the fantastic--approaching as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible--is given to the raven's entrance. he comes in "with many a flirt and flutter." "not the _least obeisance made he_--not a moment stopped or stayed he, _but, with mien of lord or lady_, perched above my chamber door." in the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously carried out:-- "then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling by the _grace and stern decorum of the countenance it wore_, 'though thy _crest be shorn and shaven_, thou,' i said, 'art sure no craven, ghastly, grim, and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore-- tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's plutonian shore?' quoth the raven, 'nevermore.' much i marvelled _this ungainly fowl_ to hear discourse so plainly, though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore; for we cannot help agreeing that no living human being _ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door-- bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door_, with such name as 'nevermore.'" the effect of the _dénouement_ being thus provided for, i immediately drop the fantastic for a tone of the most profound seriousness:--this tone commencing in the stanza directly following the one last quoted, with the line, "but the raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only," etc. from this epoch the lover no longer jests--no longer sees any thing even of the fantastic in the raven's demeanour. he speaks of him as a "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore," and feels the "fiery eyes" burning into his "bosom's core." this revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader--to bring the mind into a proper frame for the _dénouement_--which is now brought about as rapidly and as _directly_ as possible. with the _dénouement_ proper--with the raven's reply, "nevermore," to the lover's final demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world--the poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple narrative, may be said to have its completion. so far, every thing is within the limits of the accountable--of the real. a raven, having learned by rote the single word "nevermore," and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams--the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. the casement being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird's wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, amused by the incident and the oddity of the visitor's demeanour, demands of it, in jest, and without looking for a reply, its name. the raven addressed, answers with its customary word, "nevermore"--a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl's repetition of "nevermore." the student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as i have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer "nevermore." with the indulgence, to the extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what i have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real. but in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. two things are invariably required--first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness--some under-current, however indefinite, of meaning. it is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that _richness_ (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with _the ideal_. it is the _excess_ of the suggested meaning--it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of the theme--which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists. holding these opinions, i added the two concluding stanzas of the poem--their suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all the narrative which has preceded them. the under-current of meaning is rendered first apparent in the lines-- "'take thy beak from out _my heart_, and take thy form from off my door!' quoth the raven, 'nevermore!'" it will be observed that the words, "from out my heart," involve the first metaphorical expression in the poem. they, with the answer "nevermore," dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated. the reader begins now to regard the raven as emblematical--but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza, that the intention of making him emblematical of _mournful and never-ending remembrance_ is permitted distinctly to be seen:-- "and the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, on the pallid bust of pallas, just above my chamber door; and his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, and the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; and my soul _from out that shadow_ that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted--nevermore!" footnotes: [ : ] i do not hold myself responsible for poe's literary judgments: my purpose in reproducing this essay is to reveal poe's _methods_. appendix ii books worth reading . "the art of fiction." by sir walter besant. lecture delivered at the royal institution, april th, . . "le roman naturaliste." by f. brunetiére. paris, . . "the novel: what it is." by f. marion crawford. new york, . . "the development of the english novel." by w. l. cross. london, . . "style." by t. de quincey. "works." edinburgh, . . "the limits of realism in fiction," and "the tyranny of the novel" (in "questions at issue"). by edmund gosse. . "the house of seven gables." by n. hawthorne. see preface. . "confessions and criticisms." by julian hawthorne. . "criticism and fiction." by w. d. howells. new york, . . "the art of fiction" (in "partial portraits"). by henry james. london, . . "the art of thomas hardy." by lionel johnson. . "the principles of success in literature." by g. h. lewes. london, . . "the english novel and the principles of its development." new york, . . "the philosophy of the short story" (in _pen and ink_). by brander matthews. new york, . . "pierre and jean." by guy de maupassant. see preface. . "four years of novel reading." by professor moulton. london, . . "the british novelists and their styles." by david masson. london, . . "appreciations, with an essay on style." by walter pater. london, . . "the english novel." by walter raleigh. london, . . "style." by walter raleigh. london, . . "the logic of style." by w. renton. london, . . "the philosophy of fiction." by d. g. thompson. new york, . . "a humble remonstrance," and "a gossip on romance" (in "memories and portraits"). by r. l. stevenson. . "the present state of the english novel" (in "miscellaneous essays"). by george saintsbury. london, . . "notes on style" (in "essays: speculative and suggestive"). by j. a. symonds. london, . . "the philosophy of style." by herbert spencer. london, . . "introduction to the study of english fiction." by w. e. simonds. boston, u.s.a., . . "le roman experimental." paris, . . "how to write fiction." published by george redway. . "the art of writing fiction." published by wells gardner. . "on novels and the art of writing them." by anthony trollope. in his "autobiography," vol. ii. appendix iii magazine articles on writing fiction "one way to write a novel." by julian hawthorne. _cosmopolitan_, vol. ii p. . "names in novels." _blackwood_, vol cl. p. . "naming of novels." _macmillan_, vol. lxi. p. . "fiction as a literary form." by h. w. mabie. _scribner's magazine_, vol. v. p. . "candour in english fiction." by w. besant, mrs lynn linton, and thomas hardy. _new review_, vol. ii. p. . "the future of fiction." by james sully. _forum_, vol. ix. p. . "names in fiction." by g. saintsbury. _macmillan_, vol. lix. p. . "real people in fiction." by w. s. walsh. _lippincott_, vol. xlviii. p. . "the relation of art to truth." by w. h. mallock. _forum_, vol. ix p. . "success in fiction." by m. o. w. oliphant. _forum_, vol vii. p. . "great writers and their art." _chambers's journal_, vol. lxv. p. . "the jews in english fiction." _london quarterly review_, vol. xxviii. . "heroines in modern fiction." _national review_, vol. xxix. . "a claim for the art of fiction." by e. g. wheelwright. _westminster review_, vol. cxlvi. . "the speculations of a story-teller." by g. w. cable. _atlantic monthly_, vol. lxxviii. . "a novelist's views of novel writing." by e. s. phelps. _m'clure's magazine_, vol. viii. . "hints to young authors of fiction." by grant allen. _great thoughts_, vol. vii. . "novels without a purpose." _north american review_, vol. clxiii. . "the fiction of the future." symposium. _ludgate monthly_, vol. ii. . "the place of realism in fiction." _humanitarian_, vol. vii. . by dr w. barry, a. daudet, miss e. dixon, sir g. douglas, g. gissing, w. h. mallock, richard pryce, miss a. sergeant, f. wedmore, and w. h. wilkins. "the influence of idealism in fiction." by ingrad harting. _humanitarian_, vol. vi. . "novelists on their works." _ludgate monthly_, vol. i. . "novel writing and novel reading." interview with baring gould. _cassell's family magazine_, vol. xxii. . "the women characters of fiction." by h. schutz wilson. _gentleman's magazine_, vol. cclxxvii. . "school of fiction series." in _atalanta_, vol. vii. : . "the picturesque novel, as represented by r. d. blackmore." by k. macquoid. . "the autobiographical novel, as represented by c. brontë." by dr a. h. japp. . "the historical novel, as represented by sir walter scott." by e. l. arnold. . "the ethical novel, as represented by george eliot." by j. a. noble. . "the satirical novel, as represented by w. m. thackeray." by h. a. page. . "the human novel, as represented by mrs gaskell." by maxwell gray. . "the sensational novel, as represented by mrs henry wood." by e. c. grey. . "the humorous novel, as represented by oliver goldsmith." by dr a. h. japp. "the shudder in literature." by jules claretie. _north american review_, vol. clv. . "the profitable reading of fiction." by thomas hardy. _forum_, vol. v. p. . "the picturesque in novels." _chambers's journal_, vol. lxii. . "realism in fiction." by e. f. benson. _nineteenth century_, vol. xxxiv. . "great characters in novels." _spectator_, vol. lxxi. . "the modern novel." by a. e. barr. _north american review_, vol. clix. . "the novels of adventure and manners." _quarterly review_, vol. clxxix. . "the women of fiction." by h. s. wilson. _gentleman's magazine_, new series, vol. liii. . "why do certain works of fiction succeed?" by m. wilcox. _new scientific review_, vol. i. . "magazine fiction, and how not to write it." by f. m. bird. _lippincott's magazine_, vol. liv. . "the picaresque novel." by j. f. kelly. _new review_, vol. xiii. p. . "the irresponsible novelist." _macmillan's magazine_, vol. lxxii. p. . "great realists and empty story tellers." by h. h. boyesen. _forum_, vol. xviii. p. . "motion and emotion in fiction." by r. m. doggett. _overland monthly_, new series, vol. xxvi. p. . "'tendencies' in fiction." by a. lang. _north american review_, vol. clxi. p. . "the two eternal types in fiction." by h. w. mabie. _forum_, vol. xix. p. . "the problem of the novel." by a. n. meyer. _arena_, vol xvii. . "my favourite novel and novelist." _the munsey magazine_, vols. xvii.-xviii. . by w. d. howells, b. matthews, f. b. stockton, mrs b. harrison, s. r. crockett, p. bourget, w. c. russell, and a. hope hawkins. "hard times among the heroines of novels." by e. a. madden. _lippincott's magazine_, vol. lxix. . "on the theory and practice of local colour." by w. p. james. _macmillan's magazine_, vol. lxxvi. . "the writing of fiction." by f. m. bird. _lippincott's magazine_, vol. lx. . "novelists' estimates of their own work." _national magazine_ (boston, u.s.a.), vol. x. . "fundamentals of fiction." by b. burton. _forum_, vol. xxviii. . "on the future of novel writing." by sir walter besant. _the idler_, vol. xiii. . "the short story." by f. wedmore. _nineteenth century_, vol. xliii. . "the complete novelist." by james payn. _strand_, vol. xiv. . "what is a realist?" by a. morrison. _new review_, vol. xvi. . "the historical novel." by b. matthews. _forum_, vol. xxiv. . "the limits of realism in fiction." by paul bourget. _new review_, vol. viii. p. . "new watchwords in fiction." by hall caine. _contemporary review_, vol. lvii. p. . "the science of fiction." by paul bourget, walter besant, and thomas hardy. _new review_, vol. iv. p. . "the dangers of the analytic spirit in fiction." by paul bourget. _new review_, vol. vi. p. . "cervantes, zola, kipling, and coy." by brander matthews. _cosmopolitan_, vol. xiv. p. . "on style in literature." by r. l. stevenson. _contemporary review_, vol. xlvii. p. . "the apotheosis of the novel." by herbert paul. _contemporary review_, vol. xli. . "vacant places in literature." by w. robertson nicoll. _british weekly_, march , . "what makes a novel successful?" by w. robertson nicoll. _british weekly_, june , . "the use of dialect in fiction." by f. h. french. _atalanta_, vol. viii. p. . the riverside press limited, edinburgh transcriber's notes the word "manoevring" has an oe ligature in the original. the following corrections have been made to the text: page : says mr w. m. hunt.[original has comma] page : if you know your characters[original has chararacters] page : and "risk" the reader's acuteness,[original has cuteness] page : in a way quite different to[illegible in the original] everybody else page : for which, indeed, the spot[illegible in the original--confirmed in other sources] is most fit page : . "criticism and fiction."[quotation mark missing in original] by w. d. howells. [ :a] erichsen: "methods of authors.[period missing in original]" what do you read? _by boyd ellanby_ _illustrated by malcolm smith_ [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from other worlds march . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s.copyright on this publication was renewed.] writers have long dreamed of a plot machine, but the machines in script-lab did much more than plot the story--they wrote it. why bother with human writers when the machines did the job so much faster and better? herbert would have preferred the seclusion of a coptor-taxi, but he knew he could not afford it. the bureau paid its writers adequately, but not enough to make them comfortable in taxis. in front of his apartment house, he took the escalator to the airway. it must have been pleasant, he thought as he stepped onto the moving sidewalk, to be a writer in the days when they were permitted to receive royalties and, presumably, to afford taxi fare. on the rare occasions when he was forced to travel in the city, he usually tried to insulate himself from the airway crowds by trying to construct new plots for his fiction. in his younger days, of course, he had occupied the time in reading the classics, but lately, so great was the confusion of the city, he preferred to close his eyes, and try to devise a reverse twist for one of his old stories. today, he found it harder than usual to concentrate. the airway was crowded, and he had never heard the people so noisy. up ahead half a block, there was a sharp scream. herbert opened his eyes and peered ahead to see what had happened. someone had been pushed through the railing of the airway, and as his section rolled on and passed, he could see lying on the pavement below the body of a young cripple, his hands still holding a broken crutch. herbert shuddered. he felt sick, and closed his eyes again. "wonder how that happened?" said the man in front of him. "he probably got in the way," said a girl, callously. the man ahead made no comment, and herbert dismissed his own puzzlement. could he make a plot out of this incident of the crippled boy? he wondered. he shifted to the slower track, descended the escalator, and stepped onto the street across from the bureau of public entertainment. he had to wait a moment, for an ambulance was clanging down the street; then he crossed to the stone-faced building. as he rode up the elevator, he wondered again why john had ordered him to come to lunch. he realized that he was no longer a young man, but he certainly did not feel ready to be pensioned. and in the last year he had actually written more fiction than in any other year of his life. very little of it had been used, for some reason, but story for story he thought it matched any of his previous output. ludwig received him with little ceremony. "sit down, herbert. it was good of you to come. miss dodson," he called through the intercom, "this is strictly off the air. nothing is to be recorded. is that clear?" "well, john," said carre. "you're looking harassed, if i may say so. are they working you too hard? or are you just faced with the unpleasant job of firing an old friend? i realize, of course, that afe aren't using much of my stuff just now." ludwig smiled unhappily and shook his head. "i'm not planning to fire you, herbert. but you know, of course, that you're in the same boat with the other writers, and that boat is in choppy waters. frankly, i'm not very happy about the situation. the five-year experimental period is coming to an end. this bureau has the job of providing entertainment, and that includes, among many other categories, literature. books, articles, and stories. and i'm faced with a difficult decision: shall we employ writers, or use script-lab? you are only one of the many people we support, of course, and both you and script-lab furnish material to adult fiction, earth, who distribute it as they see fit." herbert carre nibbled at his graying moustache. "i know. and for the last year, for some reason, afe has not seen fit to use much of my stuff. and yet it's no different. i write just the same sort of thing i always did." "tastes change, herbert. script-lab reports that the public seem to prefer the machine-made stories. i have a week to make a definite decision, and i'm particularly anxious to finish the job because i've been asked to transfer, at the earliest possible moment, to the bureau of public safety. the committee are inclined, on the whole, to favor the enlarging of script-lab, and transferring all the writers to some other department." "great gamma! you mean _all_ literature will be machine-made from now on?" "don't get excited, herb! that's what i've got to decide. but if they can really write it just as well, why not? you remember hartridge, don't you? class behind me at college, majored in electronics? he's in charge of the machine experiment and he's about convinced us that his machines can turn out manuscripts at lower cost, more rapidly and of better quality than you writers can. and he says the public like his product better. have you seen any of it?" "no," said carre, "i don't know that i have. you know i never read anything but the classics, for pleasure; nothing later than thackeray, or, at the latest, james joyce. what principle do they work on?" "i'm not an electronics man. hartridge tells me they are specially sensitive blocks of tubes, and that memory, including all the basic plots of fiction, and all the basic varieties of dialog have been built into them." carre shuddered. "i will never believe, in the face of any evidence, that machines can take the place of human writers. what machine could have written 'alice'?" "calm down, herbert. i want your help. i haven't followed developments since the days of the early electronic computers, and i haven't time for studying them now. and, unfortunately, i never read modern fiction any more--no time for anything but official reports. now i've always respected your judgment. i want your opinion of the adequacy of the material put out by script-lab." "have you forgotten," said carre, "that i am a writer? aren't you afraid of a biased report?" "not from you. i need a competent judge. and if you are forced to bring in a favorable report, you know i'd find you a place in some other field. i might even get you a pension." "i hope not. not yet." "go over and see hartridge, look over his machines, and bring me a critical estimate of the quality of their work--not just literary quality, of course; we're interested also in entertainment value. don't be prejudiced. i imagine you'd be the last to deny that writing can be damned hard work." "you're right," said carre. "i would be the last person to deny it. somehow, i've always liked the work, but if the machines can really take our place, i will try to bow out gracefully." * * * * * once again carre took the escalator to the airway and moved across the city. he tried to think of fiction plots, but he could not control his mind. he was worried. the people standing near him were quarreling, their shrill voices hurt his ears, and the crowd was so dense that he could not move away. age, he feared, was making him irritable. as he approached his station, he pushed towards the escalator. he brushed against a woman who was reading a plastibacked book. she looked up, frowned, and then stamped viciously on his extended foot. half-stunned with pain and amazement, herbert managed to get to the escalator, went down, and limped slowly through the doorway of computer house. what had possessed the woman? he wondered. he'd barely brushed her sleeve, in passing. he stood before the door labelled "manuscript laboratory: dr. philip hartridge," and pushed the button. the door opened, but two husky guards with pistols in hand blocked his entrance. "your name, please, and your business?" herbert fought a tendency to stammer. his foot still hurt him, he had developed a headache, and he felt bewildered. "i just want--my name is herbert carre and i want to see dr. hartridge. why, we've known each other for years!" "identification, please?" they examined his identity card and his bureau papers, and nodded. then one returned his pistol to its holster and approached him. "just as a formality, if you please. dr. hartridge apologizes for this." he ran his hands over herbert's shabby blouse and trousers, then stepped back. "that's all, mr. carre," he said. "you can go in." they preceded him into the reception room, advanced to the rear wall and pushed a series of buttons in a complex pattern. a double door, made of metal instead of the innocent oak it had seemed to be, slowly swung open. philip hartridge rose from his desk and extended his hand. "awfully good to see you, carre," he said. "it must have been nearly ten years. sorry you've never come over to see us sooner. we're very proud of script-lab. how are things?" "not bad," said herbert. "i'm still feeling overwhelmed by the elaborate protective system you have here. what explains the body-guards? i didn't suppose this laboratory was classified." hartridge leaned back in his chair. "it's not classified. those men are here to protect me from possible violence." "violence? great gamma, do you mean personal threats?" "yes. only last week, my 'coptor exploded a few minutes after i started the motor. by a lucky chance, i had gone back to the house to get my brief-case. but someone had certainly tried to kill me." "why on earth, hartridge, should some one--" "it might be one of several people," he said. "but i think it's my brother ben. he would, of course, like to have my share of the money our father left us. but i'll take care he doesn't get it." he grinned, and patted his hip. "it's rather more likely to be the other way around. but we won't waste time in trivialities, carre. ludwig called me. i know you want to see our set-up here. come in and see the machines." they walked through another set of double doors and into the laboratory. the noise was deafening. twenty enormous machines sat in the room. each was contained in a dull plastic case, and the control panels were a maze of dials, buttons, and red and green indicator lights. an electric typewriter was connected to and operated by each machine, and through each typewriter ran an endless roll of paper, which emerged to be cut off into eleven-inch lengths by automatic knives. "how do you stand the noise?" asked carre. "why don't you use silent typers?" "oh, the machines don't mind the noise. silent typers would be an unnecessary expense, and as a matter of fact, i've come to like the sound. it's soothing, after a time." carre strolled slowly, rather mournfully, from one monster to another, glancing at the emerging manuscripts. "the rate of output," said hartridge, "is not less than a hundred words a minute, and they never have to stop to look up their facts, or to struggle with a balky plot. can you do as well?" "i wish i could," said carre. "i know so little about electronics. do the machines use much current?" "no, that's another of their virtues, they're very economical. the tubes are so efficient that all twenty machines are run from this one source, right here--don't touch it! it's not ordinary house current, you know. we start with eight thousand volts,--it saves on metal and transformers." herbert found it hard to think against the clatter of the typewriters. "i'm ashamed to admit," he said, "that i feel a kind of envy, they seem to compose with such ease." hartridge laughed. "no trouble at all! i tell you, my pretty typewriters are going to put you out of business. you can see for yourself, carre, that there's no need for you human writers. we are doing a perfect job here, and we could supply all the material--novels, stories, fact articles, biographies--that the country could read. afe has been using more and more of our scripts, as you probably know." "i know." "i can't say exactly why it is, but we do seem to be able to hit the public taste better than you writers." he reached over and patted one of the plastic cases, as though it had been an affectionate dog. "do your machines do nothing but write new material?" asked carre, as he strolled on. "that depends on the demand. sometimes we have a call for some out-of-print item, or some work which is so hard to get hold of that we simply have the machines re-do it. after number twelve, here, produced the entire english translation of 'war and peace' without a single semantic error, we were not afraid to trust them with anything. as a matter of fact, we've got number eight re-writing some nineteenth-century items that have not been available for years--things that were destroyed or banned during the atomic wars, but which the present government finds acceptable. would you like to see?" carre stood in front of number eight in fascination as the metal arms hammered out the words and lines. after a moment, he frowned. "i seem to remember this! i must have read it in my early boyhood. it seems so long ago. joan of arc! but i don't remember its happening just this way." "just goes to show you can't trust your memory, carre. you know the machines are perfectly logical, and they can't make a mistake." "no, of course not. odd, though." he brushed his hand over a forehead grown wet. the knife flashed down, cut the paper, and the page fell into its basket. hartridge picked it up. "would you like this sheet, as a memento? number eight can easily re-do it." "thank you." "and is there anything else i can show you? i don't mind admitting i'm very proud of my machines." "well," said carre, "perhaps you might let me have some of your current manuscripts, just for tonight? i can make a comparative study, for ludwig, and return them sometime tomorrow." "nothing easier." he assembled a bundle of stapled sheets and put them in a box, and then rang for the guards, to show him out. "take care of yourself, carre. see you tomorrow." * * * * * herbert sat, that evening, in his book-lined room, reading manuscripts. he looked more and more puzzled, and ill at ease. he got up, after a time, to pace the room, and on a sudden impulse he left the apartment and hurried up the street. it had grown dark outside, and he hurried. he could not stand the thought of the airway, so he walked. he had covered nearly half a mile when, at the corner ahead, two street-taxis approached each other at right angles. the drivers glared at each other. neither slowed to let the other pass; they crashed, and began to burn. carre hurried on, trying not to hear the screams of the people or the siren of the approaching ambulance. no wonder, he thought, that they need ludwig in the bureau of public safety; people were behaving so irrationally! he climbed the steps of the city library, and advanced to the desk. "i should like to see files of the magazines published by adult fiction, earth, if you please." "but which magazine, sir? they publish hundreds." "well, as a start, let me see those which publish light fiction." for two hours he sat in the scholar's room, skimming the pages of the magazines--_sagebrush westerns_, _romance and marriage_, _pinkerton's own_, _harper's_, and a dozen others. he read with concentration, and made few notes. on his way home he stopped at a news-machine and selected an armful of the current issues to take home with him. he read in his room until nearly dawn, and when he did lie down he could not sleep, or rest. "i don't believe it," he whispered to himself. "it can't be true." and, half an hour later, "how did it happen?" * * * * * at nine next morning he was sitting in the reception room of the bureau of public entertainment, with brief-case on his knees, waiting for ludwig. it was nearly noon before ludwig himself arrived, and summoned his visitor. he sat at his desk, his white hair rumpled, and nervously fingered his watch chain as carre took the chair opposite. "sorry to keep you waiting, herbert. the commissioners over in safety have a bad situation to handle, and i've been trying to advise them. i'll be glad when this writing business is straightened out, and i can give full attention to safety. what did you think of script-lab?" "well, it's very efficient." "i knew that," said ludwig. "machines are built to be efficient. but what do you think of their output? how does it compare with the work of the writers?" carre cleared his throat. "john, don't you read the magazines any more?" "no. no time. do you?" "i haven't, until yesterday. i read them, all night. i hardly know how to express myself. john, something is wrong with the machines." "nonsense! there can't be anything wrong with them. they're fed the plots, fed the variations, and then with perfect logic they create their stories. you're not an electronics expert, you know." carre stared at the floor. ludwig sighed. "i'm sorry, herbert. i'm just too tired to be decently courteous. but what i wanted from you, after all, was a literary evaluation and not a scientific one." "i express myself so badly. there's something wrong, something i can't exactly define, with what they write." ludwig looked exasperated. "but _what_, man? be concrete." "i'll try. here's a short story that was made yesterday. glance over it, please, and tell me how it strikes you." ludwig read through the manuscript with his accustomed rapidity. "i don't see anything particularly wrong about it," he said. "murder mysteries have never been to my taste, and i don't know that i exactly approve of the hero's killing his benefactress with an undetectable poison, and then inheriting her fortune and marrying her niece. undetectable poisons are all nonsense, anyway." "the story doesn't seem to you--unhealthy?" "i don't know what you're getting at! it's on the grim side, i suppose, but isn't most modern fiction a little grim? how about your own stuff?" "i think there's a difference. i know i've written a few mysteries, and even some tragic stories, but i don't believe i've ever written anything exactly like this. and this is typical. they're doing reprints, too, of books that were destroyed or lost during the atomic wars. do you remember joan of arc? mark twain's version? here is a page from script-lab's manuscript." ludwig took the sheet and read aloud: "by-and-by a frantic man in priest's garb came wailing and lamenting and tore through the crowd and the barrier of soldiers and flung himself on his knees by joan's cart and put up his hands in supplication, crying out-- '"o, forgive, forgive!" 'it was loyseleur! 'and joan's heart knew nothing of forgiveness, nothing of compassion, nothing of pity for all that suffer and have been offensive--'" ludwig looked up with a frown. "that's odd. it's been so long since i saw that book--i was only a boy--but that isn't just the way i remember it." "that's what script-lab is writing." "but the machines, don't--" "i know. they don't make mistakes." the buzz of the visi-sonor interrupted them, and the commissioner of public safety spoke from the screen. "for heaven's sake, ludwig, shelve the book-business and get over here. we've had a rash of robberies with violence, a dozen bad street accidents, and two suspicious deaths of diabetics in coma. we need help." ludwig was already reaching for his brief case. "right away," he said, and flicked the switch. "john!" carre begged, "this book matter is serious. you can't just drop it! come with me to hartridge's lab and see for yourself!" "i can't. no time. you heard the commissioner." "tomorrow morning?" "can't make it. have to go to a funeral. a niece of mine who died suddenly of cancer. poor girl. we thought she was doing so well, too, with the hormone injections. not that her husband will break his heart, from what i know of the scoundrel." carre followed him towards the door. "then make it tomorrow afternoon! it's vital!" ludwig pulled out his watch, and thought for a second. "all right. meet you there tomorrow at three." the door slammed behind him. * * * * * they followed the guards through the chrome steel doors into the room with the machines. all twenty typewriters were hammering out their hundred words a minute. "it is an honor to have a visit from you, commissioner ludwig," said hartridge. "we're very proud of script-lab. you'll agree, i know, that the experiment has been eminently successful. tough on you, of course, carre. but you writers can always land on your feet." "the decision has not yet been made," said ludwig. "now to business." he pulled a chair up to the desk, opened his brief case, and took out some papers. "before i examine the machines, i'd like to check with you the facts and figures that carre has compiled for me. in , the first year of the experiment, only ten per cent of script-lab's output of stories, books, and articles was accepted by adult fiction, earth. right?" "right," said hartridge. "but that was our worst year. since then--" ludwig held up his hand. "in the second year, you supplied thirty-five per cent of the needs of afe. check?" "check." "in the two years following you supplied seventy-five per cent, and in , this year you are supplying about ninety per cent of all published matter, with the writers supplying only ten per cent. correct?" "correct. a wonderful record, commissioner." ludwig turned to another sheet of data. "as i understand it, you feed into the machine's memories, basic plots, factual data, conversational variants, and they do the rest?" "that's right. we give them the material, and they create with perfect rationality. i myself read nearly everything they make, and even i am amazed at their craftsmanship. and they are so efficient, and write so swiftly!" "speed is no doubt a desirable feature," said ludwig. "but not the only one!" said carre. hartridge smiled. "professional jealously is warping your judgment, old man. it may be hard to take, but you writers have nothing to give the world, anymore, that machines can't." ludwig turned his back and surveyed the room. "i would like to see, now, some of your productions." hartridge beamed. "as a matter of fact, i have something that ought to interest you, particularly. just follow me, gentlemen. here, by the way, is our power source. note how simple and efficient the circuit design is. ah, here we are. knowing that you were making us a visit today, i gave to number seven, here, the necessary data for creating your own monologue on 'our duties to the aged.' that was your doctoral thesis, i believe?" "but that's out of print! i haven't seen a copy myself in years!" "to script-lab, that is unimportant. feed it the data, the basic premises, and it will do the rest. would you like to see?" the three men crowded around number seven, and watched the emergence of paper from the typewriter as the keys tapped the words into lines, and the carriage shifted. ludwig, at first, showed only the pleasure which any writer feels on re-reading a good piece of work. gradually, his face changed. he looked puzzled, uncertain, and then his skin reddened with anger. [illustration: "_he looked puzzled, uncertain, and then his skin reddened with anger._"] the automatic knife chopped down and severed the completed page. ludwig scooped it up from the basket and read the page a second time. he raised his eyes to meet the tense gaze of carre. "is this what you were trying to tell me, herbert?" "that sort of thing. yes." "is something wrong, commissioner?" said hartridge. "i thought you'd be pleased." "pleased? but this is something i never wrote!" "but you _must_ have written it," said hartridge. "or are you just trying to sabotage my project with a deliberate misstatement?" "read it!" said ludwig. "read that paragraph out loud." "'our duties to the aged,'" read hartridge, "'are closely bound to our duties to ourselves. when the old become infirm, they should be quietly helped out of a contented existence. after all, the only measure of the value of aged men and women should be their present usefulness to society.' he looked up from the page. "i don't see why you're so unwilling to admit your authorship, commissioner. there's nothing wrong with this." "only," ludwig said softly, "i didn't write it. what the monologue actually said was something like this: 'our duties to the aged are closely bound to our duties to ourselves. when the old become infirm, they should be quietly helped to a contented existence. after all, the only measure of the value of aged men and women should be their past usefulness to our society.' "you've made your point, carre," he went on. "if this sort of perverted advice has been fed to our people the last few years, it's no wonder we're having a wave of crimes. be selfish! it pays. an eye for an eye! poison the old man! nobody will ever know and you'll get his money!" hartridge was still studying the typescript, and he spoke with defiance. "number seven's excerpt from your monologue seems perfectly sensible to me," he said. "for some reason of your own you must be lying about it. why, the version you say you remember is utterly illogical!" "of course it's illogical!" said carre. "don't you see--" "of course it's illogical!" shouted ludwig. "it was illogical for joan to forgive her tormentor. it's illogical to take care of invalids. it's illogical to forget an injury. but it's human! how on earth is society to exist if it feels only the rational emotions? you, yourself, hartridge, have been corrupted by reading the work of script-lab, and you no longer have any sense of human charity. these monsters have been undermining our whole life, because the only motivation they were provided was the most dangerous and ugly thing possible in the world of human beings--pure logic!" as he shouted, he fumbled at his watch, unhooked the long gold chain, and with a sudden lunge, flung it across the bus bars which supplied the current to the machines. there was a blinding flash, a hiss, and the eternal clacking of the typewriters was replaced by silence.